The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics) (3 page)

“Father”—he was resting in an orange-and-green deck chair—“I wonder if you could come and look at our stove.”

Father pried his legs sideways, sat up, and rubbed his eyes. “Today?
Now?
”

She nodded dumbly and forced herself to go through with it. “It’s smoking so we can’t use it at all.” She was ready, if necessary, to mention the old sisters who were used to hot tea.

Father massaged his bald head to rouse himself. He wrinkled the mottled scalp between his hands and it seemed to make a nasty face at her. “Let’s go,” he said. Evidently he had decided to be peppy—an example to her in time of adversity. He scooped his collar off the radio and let it snap to around his neck. He left it that way, unfastened.

“Father is going to look at the stove,” she told them in the dining room. They murmured with pleasure.

Father went first, a little unsteady on stiff legs, not waiting for them. He passed the stumps in the yard with satisfaction, she thought. “Whyn’t you ask John to look at it yesterday?” he demanded over his shoulder.

She tried to gain a step on him, but he was going too fast, wobbling in a straight line like a runaway trolley. “I thought you’d know more about it, Father,” she lied, ashamed that the others could hear. John, looking at it, had shaken his head.

“Do we need a new one, John?”

“If you need a stove, Sister, you need a new one.”

Father broke into their kitchen as into a roomful of assassins, and confronted the glowering hulk of iron that was their stove. “Is it dirty or does it just look that way?”

She swallowed her temper, but with such bad grace there was no merit in it, only design. She gave the others such a terrible frown they all disappeared, even Sister Antonia.

Father squinted to read the name on the stove. “That stove cost a lot of money,” he said. “They don’t make them like that anymore.” He slapped the pipe going up and through the side of the wall. He gave the draft regulator a twist.

He went to the window and peered out. When he turned around he had the print of the screen on his nose. She would not say anything to distract him. He seemed to be thinking. Then he considered the stove again and appeared to have his mind made up. He faced her.

“The stove’s all right, Sister. It won’t draw properly, is all.”

“I know, Father, but—”

“That tree,” he said, pointing through the wall at the small tree which had been spared, “is blocking the draft. If you want your stove to work properly, it’ll have to come down. That’s all I got to say.”

He squinted to read the name on the stove again.

She felt the blood assembling in patches on her cheeks. “Thank you, Father,” she said, and went quickly out of the kitchen, only wanting to get upstairs and wash the money off her hands.

WE WATCHED AT the window all that afternoon. Old Gramma came out of her room and said, “Now you kids get away from there this minute.” And we would until she went back to her room. We could hear her old rocking chair creak when she got up or sat down, and so we always ran away from the window before she came into the room to see if we were minding her good or looking out. Except once she went back to her room and didn’t sit down, or maybe she did and got up easy so the chair didn’t creak, or maybe we got our signals mixed, because she caught us all there and shooed us away and pulled down the green shade. The next time we were real sure she wasn’t foxing us before we went to the window and lifted the shade just enough to peek out.

It was like waiting for rats as big as cats to run out from under a tenement so you could pick them off with a .22. Rats are about the biggest live game you can find in ordinary times and you see more of them than white folks in our neighborhood—in ordinary times. But the rats we waited for today were white ones, and they were doing most of the shooting themselves. Sometimes some coloreds would come by with guns, but not often; they mostly had clubs. This morning we’d seen the whites catch up with a shot-in-the-leg colored and throw bricks and stones at his black head till it got all red and he was dead. I could still see the wet places in the alley. That’s why we kept looking out the window. We wanted to see some whites get killed for a change, but we didn’t much think we would, and I guess what we really expected to see was nothing, or maybe them killing another colored.

There was a rumpus downstairs in front, and I could hear a mess of people tramping up the stairs. They kept on coming after the second floor and my sister Carrie, my twin, said maybe they were whites come to get
us
because we saw what they did to the shot-in-the-leg colored in the alley. I was scared for a minute, I admit, but when I heard their voices plainer I knew they were coloreds and it was all right, only I didn’t see why there were so many of them.

Then I got scared again, only different now, empty scared all over, when they came down the hall on our floor, not stopping at anybody else’s door. And then there they were, banging on our door, of all the doors in the building. They tried to come right on in, but the door was locked.

Old Gramma was the one locked it and she said she’d clean house if one of us kids so much as looked at the knob even, and she threw the key down her neck somewhere. I went and told her that was our door the people were pounding on and where was the key. She reached down her neck and there was the key all right. But she didn’t act much like she intended to open the door. She just stood there staring at it like it was somebody alive, saying the litany to the Blessed Virgin:
Mère du Christ, priez pour nous, Secours des chrétiens, priez
. . . Then all of a sudden she was crying; tears were blurry in her old yellow eyes, and she put the key in the lock, her veiny hands shaking, and unlocked the door.

They had Mama in their arms. I forgot all about Old Gramma, but I guess she passed out. Anyway, she was on the floor and a couple of men were picking her up and a couple of women were saying, “Put her here, put her there.” I wasn’t worried as much about Old Gramma as I was about Mama.

A bone—God, it made me sick—had poked through the flesh of Mama’s arm, all bloody like a sharp stick, and something terrible was wrong with her chest. I couldn’t look anymore and Carrie was screaming. That started me crying. Tears got in the way, but still I could see the baby, one and a half, and brother George, four and a half, and they had their eyes wide-open at what they saw and weren’t crying a bit, too young to know what the hell.

They put Old Gramma in her room on the cot and closed the door on her and some old woman friend of hers that kept dipping a handkerchief in cold water and laying it on Old Gramma’s head. They put Mama on the bed in the room where everybody was standing around and talking lower and lower until pretty soon they were just whispering.

Somebody came in with a doctor, a colored one, and he had a little black bag like they have in the movies. I don’t think our family ever had a doctor come to see us before. Maybe before I was born Mama and Daddy did. I heard the doctor tell Mr Purvine, that works in the same mill Daddy does, only the night shift, that he ought to set the bone, but honest to God he thought he might as well wait, as he didn’t want to hurt Mama if it wasn’t going to make any difference.

He wasn’t nearly as brisk now with his little black bag as he had been when he came in. He touched Mama’s forehead a couple of times and it didn’t feel good to him, I guess, because he looked tired after he did it. He held his hand on the wrist of her good arm, but I couldn’t tell what this meant from his face. It mustn’t have been any worse than the forehead, or maybe his face had nothing to do with what he thought, and I was imagining all this from seeing the shape Mama was in. Finally he said, “I’ll try,” and he began calling for hot water and other things, and pretty soon Mama was all bandaged up white.

The doctor stepped away from Mama and over to some men and women, six or seven of them now—a lot more had gone—and asked them what had happened. He didn’t ask all the questions I wanted to ask—I guess he already knew some of the answers—but I did find out Mama was on a streetcar coming home from the plant—Mama works now and we’re saving for a cranberry farm—when the riot broke out in that section. Mr Purvine said he called the mill and told Daddy to come home. But Mr Purvine said he wasn’t going to work tonight himself, the way the riot was spreading and the way the coloreds were getting the worst of it.

“As usual,” said a man with glasses on. “The Negroes ought to organize and fight the thing to a finish.” The doctor frowned at that. Mr Purvine said he didn’t know. But one woman and another man said that was the right idea.

“If we must die,” said the man with glasses on, “let it not be like hogs hunted and penned in an inglorious spot!”

The doctor said, “Yes, we all know that.”

But the man with glasses on went on, because the others were listening to him, and I was glad he did, because I was listening to him too. “We must meet the common foe; though far outnumbered, let us still be brave, and for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What, though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, pressed to the wall, dying, but—fighting back!”

They all thought it was fine, and a woman said that it was poetry, and I thought if that is what it is I know what I want to be now—a poetryman. I asked the man with glasses on if that was his poetry, though I did not think it was for some reason, and the men and women all looked at me like they were surprised to see me there and like I ought not hear such things—except the man with glasses on, and he said, No, son, it was not his poetry; he wished it was, but it was Claude McKay’s, a Negro, and I could find it in the public library. I decided I would go to the public library when the riot was over, and it was the first time in my life I ever thought of the public library the way I did then.

They all left about this time, except the doctor and the old woman friend of Old Gramma’s. She came out of Old Gramma’s room, and when the door opened I saw Old Gramma lying on the cot with her eyes closed. The old woman asked me if I could work a can opener, and I said, “Yes, I can,” and she handed me a can of vegetable soup from the shelf. She got a meal together and us kids sat down to eat. Not Carrie, though. She sat in our good chair with her legs under her and her eyes closed. Mama was sleeping and the doctor rolled up the shade at the window and looked out while we ate. I mean brother George and the baby. I couldn’t eat. I just drank my glass of water. The old woman said, Here, here, I hadn’t ought to let good food go to waste and was that any way to act at the table and I wasn’t the first boy in the world to lose his mother.

I wondered was she crazy and I yelled I wasn’t going to lose my mother and I looked to see and I was right. Mama was just sleeping and the doctor was there in case she needed him and everything was taken care of and . . . everything. The doctor didn’t even turn away from the window when I yelled at the old woman, and I thought at least he’d say I’d wake my mother up shouting that way, or maybe that I was right and the old woman was wrong. I got up from the table and stood by the doctor at the window. He only stayed there a minute more then and went over to feel Mama’s wrist again. He did not touch her forehead this time.

Old Gramma came out of her room and said to me, “Was that you raising so much cain in here, boy?”

I said, “Yes, it was,” and just when I was going to tell her what the old woman said about losing Mama I couldn’t. I didn’t want to hear it out loud again. I didn’t even want to think it in my mind.

Old Gramma went over and gazed down at Mama. She turned away quickly and told the old woman, “Please, I’ll just have a cup of hot water, that’s all, I’m so upset.” Then she went over to the doctor by the window and whispered something to him and he whispered something back and it must’ve been only one or two words, because he was looking out the window the next moment.

Old Gramma said she’d be back in a minute and went out the door, slipslapping down the hall. I went to the window, the evening sun was going down, and I saw Old Gramma come out the back entrance of our building. She crossed the alley and went in the back door of the grocery store.

A lot of racket cut loose about a block up the alley. It was still empty, though. Old Gramma came out of the grocery store with something in a brown bag. She stopped in the middle of the alley and seemed to be watching the orange evening sun going down behind the buildings. The sun got in her hair and somehow under her skin, kind of, and it did a wonderful thing to her. She looked so young for a moment that I saw Mama in her, both of them beautiful New Orleans ladies.

The racket cut loose again, nearer now, and a pack of men came running down the alley, about three dozen whites chasing two coloreds. One of the whites was blowing a bugle—
tan tivvy, tan tivvy, tan tivvy
—like the white folks do when they go fox hunting in the movies or Virginia. I looked down, quick, to see if Old Gramma had enough sense to come inside, and I guess she did because she wasn’t there. The two coloreds ran between two buildings, the whites ran after them, and then the alley was quiet again. Old Gramma stepped out, and I watched her stoop and pick up the brown bag that she had dropped before.

Another big noise made her drop it again. A whole smear of men swarmed out of the used-car lot and came galloping down the alley like wild buffaloes. Old Gramma scooted inside our building and the brown bag stayed there in the alley. This time I couldn’t believe my eyes; I saw what I thought I’d never see; I saw what us kids had been waiting to see ever since the riot broke out—a white man that was fixing to get himself nice and killed. A white man running—running, God Almighty, from about a million coloreds. And he was the one with the tan-tivvy bugle, too. I hoped the coloreds would do the job up right.