The Third Life of Grange Copeland (11 page)

“If you had any sense you’d know it don’t look right,” said Brownfield, raising himself up on an elbow. “Here we is moving off to Mr. J. L.’s place next Monday and you goes out and strips the fields on Thursday.” He turned his gaze on her callused feet. “My ma always told me not to git myself mixed up with no ugly colored woman that ain’t got no sense of propridy.”

“I reckon if your ma was black, Brownfield,” Mem said, putting a hand on her hip, “she found out a long
time
ago that you can’t
eat
none of that.”

“You don’t surely think that I intends to move to town,” Brownfield said slowly, turning his back as if he were about to fall off to sleep. He smiled at the wall. “I’m a
man,
and I don’t intend working in
no
body’s damn factory.”

Daphne and Ornette looked at their parents through a sudden darkening blur. They came and stood in the kitchen door behind their mother, silently watching.

“You hear that, Woman!” Brownfield swung up and placed his feet with a stamp on the floor. “We moving exactly when and where I say we moving. Long as I’m supporting this fucking family we go where I says go.” He bullied his thin wife murderously with his muddy eyes. “I may not be able to read and write but I’m still the man that wears the pants in this outfit!” He towered over her in a rage, his spittle spraying her forehead.

I don’t have to stand here and let this nigger spit in my face, she thought more or less calmly, and for the first time very seriously. Who the hell he think he is, the President or somethin’.

“You do what you want to, Brownfield,” she said, swiftly stepping out of range of his fist. “You do exactly what you want and go precisely where you please. But me and these children going to live in that house I leased. We ain’t living in no more dog patches; we going to have toilets and baths and ’lectric lights like other people!”

“I reckon you think you ain’t going to need somebody to
pay
for all them toilets and baths and ’lectric lights, you chewed-up-looking bitch!” Brownfield broke past his defensive children and grabbed Mem by the shoulder, spinning her round.

“Let me tell you something, man,” Mem said evenly, though breathing hard, “I have worked hard all my life, first trying to be something and then just trying to be. It’s over for me now, but if you think I won’t work harder than ever before to support these children you ain’t only mean and evil and lazy as the devil, but you’re a fool!”

“Who the hell you think’d hire a snaggle-toothed old
plow
mule like you?” He was sweating and felt his hands beginning to itch. “You ought to look in the glass sometime,” he said, clenching his fists. “You ain’t just ugly and beat-up looking, you’s old!”

I ain’t thirty, she wanted to say, but instead she said, “I know what I look like and I know how old I am.” It seemed impossible that she could face him and not weep. “And neither one of them knowledges is going to keep me from getting me a job so we can move on in that house Monday morning.”

“I’d like to see you
try,
Bitch,” he cried on his way out, shoving her and pushing against his daughters. Ruth woke from her nap with a yowl from the noise. Mem dried her and lifted her high along her shoulder.

“And this one is going to grow
up
in ’lectricity and gas heat!” she said tremblingly, giving her baby small tearful kisses all around her fuzzy head.

“H
OW’S
M
EM?”
Captain Davis asked pleasantly Friday noon when Brownfield was on his way home for lunch. “How she feel about moving over to Mr. J. L.’s? I told J. L.’s wife about her shortbread. Ummm Um,” he said magnanimously, “she sure can cook!”

“Oh, she fine!” Brownfield said with enthusiasm. “She fine, and she all ready for the big move over to Mr. J. L.’s.” He could not breathe normally and felt black and greasy under the man’s cool gaze.

Ought to pick up a rock and beat it into his old bald head that hell naw me and Mem don’t want to go work for his crazy motherfucking son! What the hell he think, we both of us crazy or somethin’! He smiled broadly at Captain Davis and clasped his hands together behind his back. His knees under his overalls leaned shakily against each other.

“We both right sure it going to work out fine,” he said hopelessly, making his face as pleasant as possible and bland, “just fine.”

“See you do your work good,” the old man said sharply, clearing his throat and turning in the direction of his house. “You and Mem ain’t bad hands,” he said almost as an afterthought. “Glad to be keeping you in the family!”

But this is 1944! Brownfield wanted to scream; instead he said “Yassur,” and waited until Captain Davis was three yards away before he moved. “I ought to stick my feed knife up in him to the gizzard!” he whispered, nervous sweat running down his sides. He walked home slowly, kicking rocks and bushes.

“B
ROWNFIELD,
I
GOT
me a job in town,” Mem said, sitting herself down on the porch railing and dangling her hard skinny legs. Brownfield sat in silence; behind his head he could feel the two children standing there hiding big grins behind their eager apish faces.

“I got me a job in town that pays twelve dollars a week!” Mem spoke softly but with excitement in her voice. She said it like a bird might talk about first flying.

He continued to say nothing, but his hands gripped the bottom of his chair so hard his fingers ached.

“Twelve dollars a week is more than
you
makes, ain’t it, Brownfield?” asked Mem, who had never been told her husband’s wages. Her ugly mouth crinkled happily at the corners. Slowly she let the crinkling go and watched him silently for a while. Her children came to stand beside her, all of them looking at Brownfield.

“You coming with us or no?” she asked, without much caring in her voice. “If you is,” she went on, “you got to get a job and pull your weight. If you ain’t, we going on ahead anyhow.”

They left him sitting there with his feet up on the railing, looking every one of his relatively few sick old years, with another dozen added on.

S
ATURDAY NIGHT FOUND
Brownfield, as usual, liberally prepared for his weekly fight with Mem. He stumbled home full of whiskey, cursing at the top of his voice. Mem lay with her face to the wall pretending to be asleep.

“You think you better than me,” he cried. “Don’t you? don’t you! You ugly pig!” He reached beneath the bedclothes to grab her stiffly resistant shoulder.

“You wake up and
look
at me when I talk to you!” he said, slurring the words, bending close enough to kiss her with his foul whiskey-soaked mouth.

“You and them goddam sad-looking high and mighty brats of yours, that you done turned against me!” He said the last with an angry sob in his throat. As if he cared. Mem said nothing, lay so silent it was as if she were not breathing or thinking or even being, but her tired eyes rested directly on him with the tense heated waiting that many years of Saturday-night beatings had brought.

“I’m sick and tired of this mess,” she said, rising abruptly, waiting for the first blow to head or side or breasts. “Shit!” she said, flinging the covers back, looking frail as a wire in her shabby nightgown. “I’m sick of you!”

No sooner had the words fallen out in a little explosive heap than Brownfield’s big elephant-hide fist hit her square in the mouth.

“Don’t you interrupt me when I’m doing the talking, Bitch!” he said, shaking her until blood dribbled from her stinging lips. The one blow had reduced her to nothing; she just hung there from his hands until he finished giving her half-a-dozen slaps, then she just fell down limp like she always did.

“You going to move where I says move, you
hear
me?” Brownfield yelled at her, giving her a kick in the side with his foot. “We going to move to Mr. J. L.’s place or we ain’t going nowhere at all!” He was hysterical. Mem lay with her eyes closed.

“You listening to me, Bitch!” Mem opened her eyes like someone opening up the lid of a coffin. “I ain’t
going
to Mr. J. L.’s place,” she said quietly. “I done told you that, Brownfield.” Hesitantly she moved her hand up to wipe blood from her chin. “I have just about let you play man long enough to find out you ain’t one,” she said slowly and more quietly still. “You can beat me to death and I still ain’t going to say I’m going with you!”

“You goddam wrankly faced black nigger slut!” Brown-field said, beside himself. “You say one more word, just one more little goddam
peep
and I’ll cut your goddam throat!” He fumbled in his pocket for his knife and reached down and grabbed Mem in a loose drunken hug. Mem closed her eyes as he dropped her abruptly against the bedpost and gave her a resounding kick in the side of the head. She saw a number of blurred pale stars, then nothing else.

In the next room, with tears trickling so slowly they made them want to sneeze, Daphne and Ornette held their trembling skinny arms around each other and licked their warm red tongues over each other’s salty homely eyes and wished nothing so hard as that their father would trip over his own stumbling feet, fall on his open knife and manage somehow to jab his heart out.

There was a restless whimper from Ruth. “You reckon he going to come in here?” Ornette asked her sister, thinking of ways to run and also of ways to be a man and protect her.

“He come in here,” Daphne whispered with a grown-up coldness in her voice, “he come in here, you let him grab you for a minute while I run in the kitchen and get the butcher knife.” She ran her tongue carefully down her sister’s cheeks tracing her tears. “If by time I get back he done hit you just one time—I’m going to cut his stanking
guts
out!”

Huddled there under the bed they heard the birds begin chirping at dawn. They fell asleep dreaming in chilly exactness of killing that would set them free.

Brownfield did not dream. He just dropped out of his mind, and the late Sunday morning sun stabbed at his eyelids as if it were a gangman’s pickax. Stretching his body, he felt he had been undressed. He spread his body leisurely over the bed and reached out a hand to grab his woman for the morning.

“Open your eyes!”
Mem’s voice was as even as a dammed-up river. Slowly he stopped turning and opened his eyes, squinting them stickily to keep out the light. Mem was propped up against the wall on her side of the bed, holding a shotgun. At first he saw only the handle, smooth and black and big, close to his head like that. One of Mem’s long wrinkled fingers pressed against the trigger. He made a jump, half toward her, half away from her. He felt a sharp jab on his body down below the covers, the shooting pain caused him to wince and thrash on the bed.

“Don’t you move a inch,” Mem said lazily, controlling the cool hard gun barrel down between his thighs. He broke out in a quick cold sweat, and his eyes rambled frantically and dizzyingly over the room.

“What’s the matter with you, Mem?”
he asked hoarsely, his mouth tasting like somebody’d died up in it. Weeks ago. “What in the Lawd’s name is troubling you this Sunday morning?” He looked around the room. “Where is the children, Woman?” he asked, expecting to see them. “Ain’t you got no sense of what’s decent?” Mem began to chuckle low in her throat. Oh, my Lawd, Brownfield thought, and began to tremble underneath the sheet, that kick in the head I give her last night done run her crazy! Mem gave a light jab at him with the gun, her whole hand wrapped around the stock. Brownfield cried out in pain and moved his big thick hands slowly downward.

“You move one more one hundred per cent of a half of a
half
inch,” Mem said, putting her other hand lower down on the gun, “you move just a teeny weeny little bit more
Mr.
Brownfield, and you ain’t going to have nary a ball left to play catch with.”

“Aw, Mem.” He began to whine. “Honey, you ain’t got no cause …”

“Shet up,” Mem said, staring at him with purple-circled eyes. “The children is out to church for the day. They grandpa came by and I even let him take the baby. Ain’t nobody here but us chickens. Ain’t nobody round to know or care whether one of us gits fried.”

“Oh, Lawd,” Brownfield began to moan in prayer.

“Call on the one you serves, boy!” Mem said, chuckling dryly at his terror. “Call on the one you serves.”

Brownfield thought irresistibly of Captain Davis; the tall old cracker just popped into his mind like he was God or somebody.

“Captain Davis won’t let you git away with nothing.” He began to babble and to throw up.

“Don’t you let none of that mess drop on this bed!” Mem said when she saw his hand going to his mouth. He leaned his head over the side of the bed and let it all out on the floor. He was a long time vomiting the dead-smelling stuff and fell back worn out and weak. He almost forgot Mem and the gun, his head was spinning so.

“Now you can just git on down there with it,” Mem said, wrinkling her nose from the smell. “I don’t want you laying up here with me! Go on, git down there!” she said, jabbing him again with the gun. Brownfield slid down onto the floor, slipping on the rotten vomit and falling wetly on his naked behind on the outskirts of the stagnant yellow pool. He’d never felt this sick in his life. Mem watched him from the bed with a cold and level eye. She uncovered the full length of the big gun and pointed it where she had before. Brownfield lay back for a moment, then quickly crouched over his groin, shielding himself from her. She was grinning mirthlessly. Like a skinny balding gorilla, he thought.

“To think I put myself to the trouble of wanting to git married to you,” she said. “And to think that I put myself to the trouble of having all these babies for you and you didn’t even go out but once to git the midwife,
you was too drunk
or the weather was too cold!” Her left hand stroked the long barrel of the gun.

“You reckon Captain Davis really would give a good goddam if I shot you, Brownfield?” she asked. “What you reckon he’d
say
?. Now Mem, I bet he would say, whoever heard of anybody going around shooting somebody else’s
balls
off? Why, you
colored
people—you never heard tell of any
white
people going around shooting each other’s balls off. Shame! Shame! He’d be thinking,
I always said niggers is crazy!
And this here Mem Copeland proves me right, going around shooting her husband’s balls off, for Lawd’s sake. ’Course, he’d go on, spitting on the ground like he created the dirt himself, far as I’m concerned with that Brownfield Copeland, I never knowed he
had
any!” Mem carried on her talk with her eyes opening and almost shutting like she’d seen Captain Davis do when he didn’t want to look at her or Brownfield. Which was every time he had to talk to them.