The Third Life of Grange Copeland (10 page)

BOOK: The Third Life of Grange Copeland
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“’Course you won’t be living as easy as you do here,” Captain Davis said as his eyes came down to the level of Brownfield’s and Brownfield dropped his own, being careful to maintain a smile that was both alert and respectful.

“You interested in this, Brown?” the old man asked, clearing his throat and spitting between them, not bothering to turn his head. “I already told Mr. J. L. you was.”

“Yassur!” Brownfield said, taking out a large print handkerchief and wiping his hands. Paying special attention to between the fingers. He thought about what Mr. J. L. was like; stingy and mean, not to be trusted around black womenfolk, and shuddered. He did not want to work for him. He remembered how he and Mem had come to work for Captain Davis. Captain Davis’s brother had sent them after he had finished with Brownfield and his wife had died and there was no further need for Mem. In return Captain Davis had let his tractor go for a season. The swap had been made exactly as if he and his family were a string of workhorses.

“I be much obliged to you for putting in a word for me.” Brownfield nodded up and down still smiling but with his eyes carefully averted. He thought about turning down the offer but when the words of refusal came to his lips he found they would not come out. He cleared his throat and prodded the ground in front of him with his foot as if he would speak, but no words came out, only a hesitant grunt that sounded like further strangled acceptance.

“What you say, Brown?” Captain Davis asked in impatiently severe tones. He turned his tall frame in the doorway so that the sun made a halo of his thin ring of white hair. Looking for a brief second into his light blue eyes Brownfield stood speechless.

“Yassur,” he said finally, hypnotized by the old man standing in the sun.

Captain Davis shrugged his gaunt white shoulders and walked away toward his white house with the bright red chimneys.

Pity how you got to look after ’em, he thought, as he wrapped his good hand round his stub.

21

H
E WAS LATE
and had not told her he would be; still they had not dared to begin supper without him. Daphne was looking at a page full of bathroom fixtures, staring nearly cross-eyed in the light of the kerosene lamp that hung from a cord over the table.

“Is this the kinder toilet we going to have, Ma?” Ornette asked, looking dazzled over Daphne’s sharp elbow at all the sparkling fixtures.

“Look at them shiny
toilets
!” she whispered urgently, her spread fingers touching four commodes, excitement making her voice rough and burpy. Daphne nudged her playfully with the elbow she kept between the Sears, Roebuck catalogue and her sister.

“Why don’t you get on out the way, girl!” she said, and tried to hog the book, but Ornette clamped a grubby fist on a corner of the book, covering, except for a bright corner, a deep white bathtub filled with greenish blue water like that in the white swimming pool in town.

Mem, her knees spread under the table and her battered hungry face cracking every once in a while in a grin, supervised the turning of the pages.

“Wait a minute, Daphne, I ain’t through looking at these sinks and dishracks!” she said sharply, when Daphne wanted to race on ahead to the warming glowing pictures of multicolored light bulbs and fancy lamps.

“Is us going to have ’lectric lights in our new house?” Ornette asked breathlessly, caressing the slick pages of the catalogue. The yellow glow of the lamp encircled Mem and her homely children in soft kindly light, making them look good to one another. The baby, Ruth, too small to be interested in home furnishings, gurgled and cooed in her box by the stove. In vain did she compete for her mother’s attention.

“I ain’t promising nothing,” Mem said, laughing at Ornette’s big serious eyes and running one rough hand over her head. “I ain’t saying what’s going to be,” she continued, “but the Lord
wills
we going to have ’em!” She said the last flatly, almost to herself, hearing the back door open and shut and feeling the draft caused by Brownfield s entry and seeing the lamp flicker and almost go out.

“Why ain’t supper on the table?” Brownfield demanded as soon as he walked in.

“We didn’t know
when
you was coming, Brownfield,” Mem said softly, pulling herself out of her chair so fast she scraped her bony knees. Meekly she hovered over the stove stirring and taking up peas and ham hocks. She placed a heaping plate in front of Brownfield and backed into the stove, getting food for herself and the children. Brownfield saw she had burned herself turning around clumsily, and he smiled as he plowed into his peas, sending them scattering across the table, down his shirt front, and down his throat.

Ornette sat dazed, watching her father pick up his meat with his hands and tear at it, sending the juice flying over the tablecloth Mem was proud to make white. When her father was eating Ornette could not think of him as anything but a hog. She blinked her eyes as he said to her over a mouthful of peas and bread, “What you looking at me for?”

Her eyes quickly riveted to her own plate and she began slowly to eat, trying very hard not to hear the whistling noise her father made as he sucked at the meat and gobbled the peas.

Mem ate with her head down, passing the food up to her husband the moment she thought he might like some more. Daphne sat completely squelched, nervously chewing and beading her dress under the table, as close to her mother’s side as possible. She hallucinated vividly that Brownfield ate so many peas he swoll up and burst. She saw herself helping gleefully to bury him and then watched in horror as the huge twisting and congested pea vines began to come up. Aloud, she began a strange blank-eyed whimper.

“What’s the matter with
you, stup
id?” Her father’s eyes were on her, intense and hard, like the eyes of a big rat.

I wish he’d get swoll up and die! she thought behind her alerted but sad and empty face. I wish he’d just
do
that for us so we could
bury
him!

“What’s this I hear about some
new
house?” Brownfield asked, finally, chewing noisily and sweating from eating so vigorously. He grunted slyly as if choking back a laugh. “We going to move over on Mr. J. L.’s place.”

He was pleased to feel the weight of their tense and silent response.

“I ain’t,” Mem said. “I ain’t, and these children ain’t.” She stiffened her thin tough neck for his blow. But he only laughed and kept eating, stabbing at stray peas with round wads of cornbread.

“Get me some water,” he grunted to Ornette, who pretended she was fetching slop for a hog.

“Yassur,” she mumbled with her head down, going to the icebox.

“You should have got some ice from the iceman yesterday,” Mem said, smelling the reek from the box.

“You ought to have stayed at home yesterday instead of traipsing off all over creation looking for a mansion to live in. If you acted like a woman with some sense we’d a had ice.” He rolled his eyes to indicate her foolishness and coughed in her face without turning his head.

A shiver of revulsion ran through his wife. “He’s just like a old dog,” she thought, guiltily urging her nervous children to eat their fill.

He had once been a handsome man, slender and tall with narrow, beautiful hands. From trying to see in kerosene lamplight his once clear eyes were now red-veined and yellowed, with a permanent squint. From running after white folks’ cows, he never tended much to his own, when he had any, and he’d developed severe athlete’s foot that caused him to limp when the weather was hot or wet. From working in fields and with cows in all kinds of weather he developed a serious bronchitis aggravated by rashes and allergies.

He was not a healthy man. When he first started working with cows his hands broke out and the skin itched so that he almost scratched it off. It was only after years of working every day milking cows that the itch gave up, and by then his hands were like gray leather on the outside, the inside scaly and softly cracked, too deformed for any work except that done to and for animals. The harder and more unfeeling the elephant-hide skin on his hands became the more often he planted his fists against his wife’s head.

I ain’t never going to marry nobody like him, Daphne swore to herself, watching the big ugly hands that smelled always of cows and sour milk.

“It’s all settled,” said Brownfield, belching loudly and digging under the table between his legs. “We going to move over to Mr. J. L.’s come next Monday and,” he spoke menacingly to Mem, “I don’t want any lip from you!”

“I already told you,” she said, “you ain’t dragging me and these children through no more pigpens. We have put up with mud long enough. I want Daphne to be a young lady where there is other decent folks around, not out here in the sticks on some white man’s property like in slavery times. I want Ornette to have a chance at a decent school. And little baby Ruth,” she said wistfully, “I don’t even want her to
know
there’s such a thing as outdoor toilets.”

“You better git all that foolishness out your head before I knock it out!”

“I ain’t scared of you,” his wife lied.

“When the time comes, you’ll see what you do, Miss Ugly,” he said, and pinched her tense worn cheek. Even as he did it he knew dull impossible visions of a time when that cheek was warm and smoothly rounded, highlighted and sleek. It was rare now when it curved itself in a smile.

“Me and these children got a
right
to live in a house where it don’t rain and there’s no holes in the floor,” she said, snatching her cheek away. From long wrestles in the night he knew she despised his hands. He held one gigantic hand in front of her eyes so she could see it and smell it, then rammed it clawingly down her dress front.

If I was a man, she thought, frowning later, scrubbing the dishes, if I was a man I’d give every man in sight and that I ever met up with a beating, maybe even chop up a few with my knife, they so pig-headed and mean.

22

“’E
VENING,
B
ROWN,”
she said solemnly the following afternoon, Wednesday.

“’Evening, Ugly,” Brownfield said, crossing the porch and eying her with suspicion. He detected a sad meager smile beginning to work itself across her broad lips. The sun across her hair made him notice how nearly gray it was. She was hanging there in the doorway, her ugly face straining between deep solemnity and sudden merriment. It had been years since he’d seen her look anything near this excited.

“What you turning that idiot look on me for?” he asked, facing her, his hand on the screen door. He had never despised her as much. Was she looking like she was going to be this ugly when I married her? he asked himself, as the face in front of him spread itself out in a funny-shaped pie and Mem laughed soft and deep, as she used to laugh when they were first married and not one day passed without some word of deepest love.

“We got us a new house,” she said, as if she were dropping something precious that would send up delightful bright explosions. “We got us a new house in
town
!” she whispered joyously.

He looked around to see the children also with wide spreading mouths, looking just like their mother.

“I know we got a new house,” he said patiently, “but it’s going to be over on Mr. J. L.’s place, and nowhere else!”

“Oh, nooo,” she said gaily, still laughing in her rough, unused-to-laughing way. “This house has got sinks and a toilet inside the house and it’s got ’lectric lights and even garden space for flowers and greens. You told me yourself,” she said, laughing harder than ever, “that old man J. L.’s place done fell down on one side and is anyhow all full of hay.” Talking about the house seemed to make her dizzy. She fell into a chair, placing her hands to her eyes as if to clear her head. “Besides,” she said, suddenly sobered, “it don’t cost but twenty dollars a month to rent and you can make enough at a factory in town to pay that much: factory work’ll keep you out of the
rain.
A school is close by for the children and the neighbors look like nice people. And on top of that …” She started to list assets of the house again. Her eyes lit up, then went dull and tired. She had spent all day looking for the house. “Besides all them things,” she said tonelessly, and resigned as she stood up, “I told the man we’d be there to start living in that house Monday morning. I signed the lease.”

“You
signed
the lease?” He was furious. He could not, even after she’d tried to teach him, read or write. It had gone in with the courting and out with the marriage. “I ought to chop your goddam fingers off!”

“I’m real sorry about it, Brownfield,” said Mem, whose decision to let him be man of the house for nine years had cost her and him nine years of unrelenting misery. He had never admitted to her that he couldn’t read well enough to sign a lease and she had been content to let him keep that small grain of pride. But now he was old and sick beyond his years and she had grown old and evil, wishing every day he’d just fall down and die. Her generosity had shackled them both.

“Somebody had to sign the lease, Brownfield,” she said gently, looking up into his angry eyes. “I just done got sick and tired of being dragged around from dump to dump, traded off by white folks like I’m a piece of machinery.” She straightened her shoulders and drew her children to her side, the baby, Ruth, in her arms. “You just tell that old white bastard—Stop up Your Ears, Children!—that we can make our own arrangements. We might be poor and black, but we ain’t dumb.” There was a pause. “At least
I
ain’t,” she said cruelly, burying her face in her baby’s hair.

“I guess you know that up there in town you wouldn’t be able to just go out in the field when you’re hungry and full up a sack with stuff to eat. I hope you know what you doing too, going out there pulling up all the greens and things just when we leaving the place.”

“They sell food in the grocery stores there in town,” said Mem, not slackening her work. “And I planted these greens myself and worked them myself, and I be damn if I’m going to let some sad-headed old cracker that don’t care if I starve scare me out of taking them!”

BOOK: The Third Life of Grange Copeland
3.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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