The Member of the Wedding (14 page)

The old Frankie had never admitted love. Yet here F. Jasmine was sitting at the table with her knees crossed, and now and then she patted her bare foot on the floor in an accustomed way, and nodded at what Berenice was saying. Furthermore, when she reached out quietly toward the Chesterfield package beside the saucer of melted butter, Berenice did not slap her hand away, and F. Jasmine took herself a cigarette. She and Berenice were two grown people smoking at the dinner table. And John Henry West had his big child head hunched close to his shoulder, watching and listening to all that went on.

"Now I will tell you a story," said Berenice. "And it is to be a warning to you. You hear me, John Henry? You hear me, Frankie?"

"Yes," John Henry whispered. He pointed with his gray little forefinger. "Frankie is smoking"

Berenice sat up straight, her shoulders square, and her dark twisted hands folded before her on the table. She raised her chin and drew in her breath in the way of a singer who is beginning a song. The piano tuned and insisted, but when Berenice began to speak, her dark gold voice rang in the kitchen and they did not listen to the piano notes. But to start this warning Berenice began with the old same story that they had heard many times before. The story of her and Ludie Freeman. A long time ago.

"Now I am here to tell you I was happy. There was no human woman in all the world more happy than I was in them days," she said. "And that includes everybody. You listening to me, John Henry? It includes all queens and millionaires and first ladies of the land. And I mean it includes people of all color. You hear me, Frankie? No human woman in all the world was happier than Berenice Sadie Brown."

She had started with the old story of Ludie. And it began an afternoon in late October almost twenty years ago. The story started at the place where first they met each other, in front of Camp Campbell's Filling Station outside of the city limits of the town. It was the time of the year when the leaves were turning and the countryside was smoky and autumn gray and gold. And the story went on from that first meeting to the wedding at the Welcome Ascension Church in Sugarville. And then on through the years with the two of them together. The house with the brick front steps and the glass windows on the corner of Barrow Street. The Christmas of the fox fur, and the June of the fish fry thrown for twenty-eight invited relatives and guests. The years with Berenice cooking dinner and sewing Ludie's suits and shirts on the machine and the two of them always having a good time. And the nine months they lived up North, in the city of Cincinnati, where there was snow. Then Sugarville again, and days merging one into another, and the weeks, the months, the years together. And the pair of them always had a good time, yet it was not so
much the happenings she mentioned as the way she told about these happenings that made F. Jasmine understand.

Berenice spoke in an unwinding kind of voice, and she had said that she was happier than a queen. As she told the story, it seemed to F. Jasmine that Berenice resembled a strange queen, if a queen can be colored and sitting at a kitchen table. She unwound the story of her and Ludie like a colored queen unwinding a bolt of cloth of gold — and at the end, when the story was over, her expression was always the same: the dark eye staring straight ahead, her flat nose widened and trembling, her mouth finished and sad and quiet. As a rule, when the story was over, they would sit for a moment and then suddenly get busy doing something in a hurry: start a hand of cards, or make milk-shakes, or just stir around the kitchen with no particular purpose. But this afternoon they did not move or speak for a long time after Berenice had finished, until finally F. Jasmine asked:

"What exactly did Ludie die of?"

"It was something similar to pneumonia," said Berenice. "November the year 1931."

"The very year and the very month I was born," F. Jasmine said.

"The coldest November I ever seen. Every morning there was frost and puddles were crusted with ice. The sunshine was pale yellow like it is in wintertime. Sounds carried far away, and I remember a hound dog that used to howl toward sundown. I kept a fire in the hearth going day and night, and in the evening when I walk around the room there was this shaking shadow following alongside of me on the wall. And everything I seen come to me as a kind of sign."

"I think it is a kind of sign I was born the same year and the same month he died," F. Jasmine said. "Only the dates are different."

"And then it was a Thursday toward six o'clock in the afternoon. About this time of day. Only November. I remember I went to the passage and opened the front door. We were living that year at 233 Prince Street. Dark was coming on, the old hound was howling
far away. And I go back in the room and lay down on Ludie's bed. I lay myself down over Ludie with my arms spread out and my face on his face. And I pray that the Lord would contage my strenth to him. And I ask the Lord let it be anybody, but not let it be Ludie. And I lay there and pray for a long time. Until night"

"How?" John Henry asked. It was a question that did not mean anything, but he repeated it in a higher, wailing voice: "How, Berenice?"

"That night he died," she said. She spoke in a sharp tone, as though they had disputed with her. "I tell you he died. Ludie! Ludie Freeman! Ludie Maxwell Freeman died!"

She was finished, and they sat there at the table. Nobody moved. John Henry stared at Berenice, and the fly that had been hovering above him lighted on the left rim of his glasses; the fly walked slowly across the left lens, and over the nosepiece, and across the right lens. It was only when the fly had flown away that John Henry blinked and waved his hand.

"One thing," F. Jasmine said finally. "There is Uncle Charles laying there dead right now. Yet somehow I can't cry. I know I ought to feel sad. Yet I feel sadder about Ludie than I do about Uncle Charles. Although I never laid eyes on Ludie. And I knew Uncle Charles all my life and he was blood kin to blood kin of mine. Maybe it's because I was born so soon after Ludie died."

"Maybe so," said Berenice.

It seemed to F. Jasmine that they might just sit there the rest of the afternoon, without moving or speaking, when suddenly she remembered something.

"You were starting out to tell a different story," she said. "It was some kind of warning."

Berenice looked puzzled for a moment, then she jerked her head up and said: "Oh, yes! I was going to tell you how this thing we was talking about applies to me. And what happened with them other husbands. Now you perk your ears."

But the story of the other three husbands was an old story also. As Berenice began to talk, F. Jasmine went to the refrigerator and
brought back to the table some sweetened condensed milk to pour on crackers as a dessert. At first she did not listen very carefully.

"It was the April of the following year that I went one Sunday to the Fork Falls Church. And you ask what I was doing out there and I tell you. I was visiting that Jackson branch of my foster cousins who live out there and we had gone to their church. So there I was praying in this church where the congregation was strangers to me. I had my forehead down on the top of the pew in front of me, and my eyes were open—not gazing around in secret, mind you, but just open. When suddenly this shiver run all the way through me. I had caught sight of something from the corner of my eye. And I looked slowly to the left. And guess what I seen there? There on the pew, just six inches from my eye, was this
thumb
."

"What thumb?" F. Jasmine asked.

"Now I'm telling you," said Berenice. "To understand this, you have to know that there was only one little portion of Ludie Freeman which was not pretty. Every other part about him was handsome and pretty as anyone would ever wish. All except his right thumb, which had been mashed in a hinge. This one thumb had a mashed chewed appearance that was not pretty. You understand?"

"You mean you suddenly saw Ludie's thumb when you were praying?"

"I mean I seen
this
thumb. And as I kneel there a shiver run from my head to my heels. I just kneel there staring at this thumb, and before I looked any further, to find out whose thumb it might be, I begun to pray in earnest. I prayed out loud: Lord, manifest! Lord, manifest!"

"And did He?" F. Jasmine asked. "Manifest?"

Berenice turned aside and made a sound like spitting. "Manifest, my foot!" she said. "You know who that thumb belonged to?"

"Who?"

"Why Jamie Beale," said Berenice. "That big old no-good Jamie Beale. It was the first time I ever laid eyes on him."

"Is that why you married him?" F. Jasmine asked, for Jamie Beale was the name of the sorry old liquor-drinker, who was the second husband. "Because he had a mashed thumb like Ludie's?"

"Jesus knows," said Berenice. "I don't. I felt drawn to him on account of the thumb. And then one thing led to another. First thing I knew I had married him."

"Well, I think that was silly," F. Jasmine said. "To marry him just because of that thumb."

"Me too," said Berenice. "I'm not trying to dispute with you. I'm just telling you what happened. And the very same thing occurred in the case of Henry Johnson."

Henry Johnson was the third husband, the one who had gone crazy on Berenice. He was all right for three weeks after they had married, but then he went crazy, and he behaved in such a crazy way that finally she had to quit him.

"You mean to sit there and tell me Henry Johnson had one of those mashed thumbs too?"

"No," said Berenice. "It was not the thumb that time. It was the coat."

F. Jasmine and John Henry looked at each other, for what she was saying did not seem to make much sense. But Berenice's dark eye was sober and certain, and she nodded to them in a definite way.

"To understand this, you have to know what happened after Ludie died. He had a policy due to pay off two hundred and fifty dollars. I won't go into the whole business, but what happened was that I was cheated by them policy people out of fifty dollars. And in two days I had to scour around and raise the fifty dollars to make out for the funeral. Because I couldn't let Ludie be put away cheap. I pawned everything I could lay hands on. And I sold my coat and Ludie's coat. To that second-hand clothing store on Front Avenue."

"Oh!" F. Jasmine said. "Then you mean Henry Johnson bought Ludie's coat and you married him because of it."

"Not exactly," said Berenice. "I was walking down that street
alongside of the City Hall one evening when I suddenly seen this shape before me. Now the shape of this boy ahead of me was so similar to Ludie through the shoulders and the back of the head that I almost dropped dead there on the sidewalk. I followed and run behind him. It was Henry Johnson, and that was the first time I ever saw him also, since he lived in the country and didn't come much into town. But he had chanced to buy Ludie's coat and he was built on the same shape as Ludie. And from the back view it looked like he was Ludie's ghost or Ludie's twin. But how I married him I don't exactly know, for to begin with it was clear that he did not have his share of sense. But you let a boy hang around and you get fond of him. Anyway, that's how I married Henry Johnson."

"People certainy do curious things."

"You telling me," said Berenice. She glanced at F. Jasmine, who was pouring a slow ribbon of condensed milk over a soda cracker, to finish her dinner with a sweet sandwich.

"I swear, Frankie! I believe you got a tate worm. I am perfectly serious. Your father looks over them big grocery bills and he naturally suspicions that I carry things off."

"You do," F. Jasmine said. "Sometimes"

"He reads over them grocery bills and he complains to me, Berenice, what in the name of holy creation did we do with six cans of condensed milk and forty-leven dozen eggs and eight boxes of marshmallows in one week. And I have to admit to him: Frankie eat them. I have to say to him: Mr. Addams, you think you feeding something human back here in your kitchen. That's what you think. I have to say to him: Yes, you imagine it is something human."

"After today I'm not going to be greedy any more," F. Jasmine said. "But I don't understand the point of what you was telling. I don't see how that about Jamie Beale and Henry Johnson applies to me."

"It applies to everybody and it is a warning."

"But how?"

"Why, don't you see what I was doing?" asked Berenice. "I loved Ludie and he was the first man I loved. Therefore, I had to go and copy myself forever afterward. What I did was to marry off little pieces of Ludie whenever I come across them. It was just my misfortune they all turned out to be the wrong pieces. My intention was to repeat me and Ludie. Now don't you see?"

"I see what you're driving at," F. Jasmine said. "But I don't see how it is a warning applied to me."

"Then do I have to tell you?" asked Berenice.

F. Jasmine did not nod or answer, for she felt that Berenice had laid a trap for her, and was going to make remarks she did not want to hear. Berenice stopped to light herself another cigarette and two blue slow scrolls of smoke came from her nostrils and lazed above the dirty dishes on the table. Mr. Schwarzenbaum was playing an arpeggio. F. Jasmine waited and it seemed a long time.

"You and that wedding at Winter Hill," Berenice said finally. "That is what I am warning about. I can see right through them two gray eyes of yours like they was glass. And what I see is the saddest piece of foolishness I ever knew."

"Gray eyes is glass," Johny Henry whispered.

But F. Jasmine would not let herself be seen through and out-stared; she hardened and tensed her eyes and did not look away from Berenice.

"I see what you have in your mind. Don't think I don't. You see something unheard of at Winter Hill tomorrow, and you right in the center. You think you going to march down the center of the aisle right in between your brother and the bride. You think you going to break into that wedding, and then Jesus knows what else."

"No," F. Jasmine said. "I don't see myself walking down the center of the aisle between them."

"I see through them eyes," said Berenice. "Don't argue with me."