The Paper Dragon (12 page)

"Because you're not giving me the assurance I need."

"False assurance is a beggar's—"

"Don't try to get literary," Ebie said.

"Was I getting literary?"

"You were trying to, there's a difference. I can't stand it when you try to sound like a goddamn novelist."

"Have no fear. I am not a goddamn novelist."

"What are you then?"

"A Vermont farmer."

"You were a novelist before you were a farmer."

"I have never been a novelist," he said.

"No? What do you call
The Paper Dragon
?"

"Luck," he said, and closed his eyes.

The room was silent. From the street below, she could hear someone shouting directions to a truck driver at the
Times
depot. In the distance, Sardi's neon sign stained the dusk a luminous green, and the surrounding gray and shadowy buildings began to show lights in isolated window slits. She stared at him without speaking, and then pressed her face to the glass and watched the truck as it backed into the depot. How simple it is, she thought. How simple they make everything. When she turned to him again, her voice was very low. "They can take it all away from us," she said. "We can lose everything, Dris."

"We lost everything a long time ago," he answered. His eyes were sill closed.

"No."

"Ebie. We lost everything."

"Thank you," she said, and sighed. "That's the reassurance I wanted, thank you." She glanced through the window. "That's the encouraging word I wanted, all right," she said, and pressed her forehead to the glass.

At home they called her Edna Belle, and they called her brother George Benjamin, always using their full Christian names. In the center of the town, there was an enormous statue of Andrew Jackson, said to have been razed by the Yankees during the War between the States and left there as a grim reminder to the people of the South, never repaired or rebuilt, standing in ruinous splendor. She and George Benjamin would go down to the monument and play at its base with the other children. Once she cut herself falling on a piece of broken glass there she still had a crescent-shaped scar on her thigh as a reminder of the accident. Sometimes she would wander down to the center of town alone, and she would sit and sketch the monument in charcoal, the way the general's broken sword ended abruptly against the sky, with the bell tower of the church beyond, and down the street the white clapboard courthouse. She loved to work in charcoal, smearing the black onto the page with her index and middle fingers, rubbing it, shading it, smoothing it into the paper. It was very hard to draw niggers, even in charcoal.

She found the bird one day at the base of the monument, a sparrow who had broken his leg, probably by flying into the general's broad bronzed back or the shell-torn rim of his campaign hat. The bird lay on his back with his beak open, his throat pulsing, no sound coming from him, but his tongue or whatever it was leaping into his throat, beating there, as though he were mutely begging for assistance. She reached down for the bird, and he tried to regain his feet, the broken leg hanging crookedly and, still dazed, flopped over onto his side. No eyes were showing, his eyes were rolled back into his head, only an opaque white showed. She cradled him in her hands, and then couldn't pick up her sketching pad or her box of charcoals, so she left them at the base of the monument and walked slowly home holding the bird gently in her hands, his throat working. She was terrified lest he try again to fly away and fall from her hands to the pavement — she knew that would kill him. They all said the bird would die, anyway, even George Benjamin said so. But she took care of him until he got better, just as she knew he would, and one day he flew off before she had a chance to take him back to the monument where she had found him. She used to look for him at the monument after that, thinking he would maybe come back, like in picture books, but he never did.

Her father owned the dairy in town, the name of it was Clover Crest Farms, which she had helped him pick. He had wanted to call it
Dearborn
Farms, but even George Benjamin thought
that
was pretty corny, and a bit egotistical, naming the thing after yourself. Her father was a very tall man, with blond hair like her own. Her mother had blond hair, too, well everybody in the family did, except George Benjamin. His was a sort of reddish color, like Aunt Serena's and Grandmother Winkler's. Edna Belle looked a lot like her mother, leastwise that's what everybody was always telling her, and she was proud to believe it because her mother was a very beautiful and elegant woman. They had two niggers working for them, Lucy who was the kitchen help, and Aurora who did the cleaning, and who was always pregnant. They both adored Mother, you could just see they thought she was beautiful and very elegant, which she was. But it was surprising the two niggers thought, so, there never was no love lost in that town.

Edna Belle especially loved the way her mother talked, she could sit and listen to her talk all day. She had a voice, well, there was just nothing like it, that was all, deep and warm, and breaking into a marvelous laugh when you least expected it. She always made Edna Belle feel very grown up, because she talked to her about real things and not the usual dopey stuff grownups say to children. Whenever they talked together, Edna Belle felt as though she were talking to an older and much smarter friend who was beautiful and wise and very elegant besides; well, she was a wonderful person, the niggers were right. And her father, he was simply the happiest person she knew, always joking, always making mother and everybody laugh. One time he filled the refrigerator with milk for her, just filled it from top to bottom with milk, and when Mother came home from marketing that afternoon and opened the refrigerator door, why there they were! maybe thirty or forty bottles of
milk
! "Oh, that nut!" she said, laughing, she used to laugh a lot, Mother.

George Benjamin was the least talented person she had ever met in her life, he couldn't even draw a straight line. He would always come up to her and say, "Edna Belle, show me how to draw a damn horse," or "Edna Belle, how do you make it look like it's getting smaller in the distance?" but he was just hopeless, no talent at all, she sometimes used to feel sorry for him. He had a chemistry set, and once he burned his hand, and she took care of him the way she had the bird. Well, not
exactly
the same because it was Aurora who changed his bandages and all, but she made sure there were always fresh-picked flowers in his room, and she would leave little drawings on his pillow for him to find when he woke up in the morning. The hand business only lasted maybe two weeks, but she took very good care of him in those weeks, she really loved him a lot, even though he begrudged Daddy a few laughs at his jokes. He kept one of her pictures, the one she made of the pond on the old Barrow place near the mill. He said he liked that one best because it reminded him of fishing there. She knew, of course, that he fished there when she'd
made
the drawing, of course, that's why she'd made it in the
first
place.

Her best friend was a girl named Cissie Butterfoster, whose name broke her up, but who was a nice girl, anyway. Cissie wore pigtails, and Daddy used to kid with her, saying, "Why do you wear your hair like the niggers, Cissie?" and Cissie always would blush. Until much later, when she was in high school, and then one day she just said to Daddy, almost making
him
blush, "You sure do take a deep concern over my hair, Mr. Dearborn," which was sort of snippy even though she
had
developed a very good pair of boobs by then, but to imply Daddy was flirting with her or something! But when they were small together, they did have some very good times together, Edna Belle and Cissie, even when they teased about her last name, Butterfoster, what a last name. Edna Belle once said to her father that they ought to start a division of the dairy called Butterfoster Farms, and that broke him up, with George Benjamin sitting there smiling and watching Daddy, and Cissie laughing, too — she was a pretty good sport. She was the first girl in the crowd to start menstruating, and she always bled a fearful lot, and had the most dire cramps. She made Edna Belle cry in pity one day, writhing the way she was on her bed and saying, "Oh, Edna Belle, you don't know how lucky you are! You don't know what it
is
to be a grown woman," which Edna Belle learned soon enough, and without half as much hysterics. But still and all she
had
felt genuine pity for Cissie that day, and she had no doubt the cramps were real. Cissie told her Tampax could break your cherry, what a lie. She also said horseback riding could break it, and doing pushups could break it. According to Cissie anything could break it, a girl had to be careful just getting out of
bed
in the morning, otherwise Goodbye, Charlie. She stopped hanging around with Cissie in their sophomore year at high school because everybody was saying things about her by then, and besides Daddy warned Edna Belle about her reputation in a small town, and about chumming with Cissie who had taken to wearing such tight sweaters. Edna Belle figured if Cissie
had
them, why not? though she never said this to anyone, least of all Daddy, and anyway her own were so small, like Mother's.

Besides, she was very much interested in art by this time, and was being encouraged to undertake all sorts of school art projects by Miss Benson, who was her teacher. It was Miss Benson who helped her to overcome her fear of working in pen and ink, which she had always had trouble with before, being left-handed and smearing the ink every time her hand moved across the page. Miss Benson also taught her there was a freedom to art, that once you knew what you were about, why then you were entitled to this freedom, but that first you had to earn the right to it by learning what you were about. That until you knew how to draw something in its right proportions, why then you had to draw it correctly and properly each and every time, and then, only then could you afford to go off and make an arm longer or a leg shorter or give a face three eyes or whatever. Well, she had Picasso in mind, you see, or someone like that, though Edna Belle never thought of herself as having
that
kind of talent, still Miss Benson was terribly encouraging.

There was no question that most of the two hundred students who attended the high school liked to hear Miss Benson's stories about Rembrandt (Charles Laughton) and Gauguin (George Sanders). Miss Benson made these men come to life somehow, as though she were adding personal information even Hollywood had missed. Besides, for students like George Benjamin
anything
was better than having to draw. True, it got to be something of a drag when Miss Benson went on and on about sculpture in Mesopotamia during the fourth and third millennia before the Christian era (like, man, who
gave
a damn?) or when she showed slides of all those broken Greek statues, but for the most part, the kids thought she was less painful than many of the biddies around. None of them, however, thought quite as highly of her as did Edna Belle.

She was, Clotilde Benson, a fluttery old woman who indeed spoke of Van Gogh as if she had personally been the recipient of his severed ear, an uncompromising, old-fashioned instructor who insisted on certain artistic verities and some artistic conceits, an unkempt and sometimes slovenly person who habitually wore a loose paint-smeared smock and who stuck colored pencils haphazardly into her gray and frizzled hair, a vain and foolish woman whose students laughed behind her back each time she sneaked a look at herself in the reflecting windows of the supply cabinet, an inadequately trained art teacher working in a scholastically poor high school in a town that had gone dead a hundred years ago. It was rumored, too, and this only by Cissie Butterfoster who was given to lurid sexual fantasies, that Clotilde Benson had once conducted a scandalous love affair with a nigger lawyer in Atlanta. The romance had supposedly begun when she was twenty years old and going to art school there, and it had ended when six righteous Georgians rode the attorney off the highway one night and proceeded to educate him (they were all carrying knives) as to why it was highly improper for a colored man to pluck a Southern flower, you dig, boy? They then casually dropped in on Clotilde that same night at about three a.m., and while she stood shivering in a flannel robe over girlish cotton pajamas with delicate primrose pattern, told her she had better get the hell out of Atlanta before somebody cut her similar to how they had cut that nigger lawyer, or hadn't she heard about that yet? Clotilde admitted as to how she hadn't heard a word, trembling in the night and holding her flannel robe closed at the neck over her primrose-patterned girlish cotton pajamas. The six gentlemen all took off their hats and murmured good night to her in the dark, and she heard one of them laugh softly as they went out of the driveway and into the waiting car and — according to Cissie — that very same morning Miss Benson caught an early train out of Atlanta and back home, apparently having decided she'd had enough of all this Gauguin-type reveling, and convinced that such living only led to shame and degradation. That was Cissie's story, and it sounded good, and there were plenty of kids who were willing to believe it, although none of them ever had the courage to repeat it. The only one who neither repeated it nor believed it was Edna Belle. Oh yes, she believed that
maybe
Miss Benson might have
possibly
been in love with a nigger (although the idea was pretty repulsive) but she would never in a million years believe Miss Benson had turned tail and run like that, even if the man
had've
been a nigger like Cissie said, though Cissie was a big liar, anyway.

One afternoon — autumn came late to Edna Belle's town that year, the leaves were just beginning to fall, they trickled past the long high school windows in the waning afternoon light — Edna Belle stayed behind to work with Miss Benson on the layout for the school magazine which was called
Whispers
, and which Edna Belle hoped to serve as art editor next term. The art editor this term was a senior named Phillip Armstrong Tillis, who was very talented and who had drawn both the cover of the magazine as well as the end papers, and who Edna Belle had dated once or twice and who, frankly, she was really crazy about. He was not a very good-looking boy, his nose was too large for his face, and he wore eyeglasses, but he had a wonderful sense of humor and a crazy way of looking at things, very offbeat and cool ("I used to have this little turned-up button nose," he once said, "but I had an operation done to make it long and ugly") and she loved being with him because he was always thinking up nutty things to do, like pulling into Mr. Overmeyer's driveway to neck one night, instead of going over to the hill near the old burned Baptist church that had been struck by lightning. When Mr. Overmeyer came out to see what was going on, Phillip Armstrong got out of the car and bowed from the waist and said, "Good evening, sir, we were wondering if we might park here for a few moments to discuss a matter that's of great importance."