The Third Life of Grange Copeland (15 page)

Ruth looked at him carefully and long. His eyes were moist and his cheeks quivered.

“Don’t look at me,” he said sourly. “I don’t know no more about
any
of it”—throwing his arm up indicating everything in the world—“then you!” And she was never to hear him seriously claim, even in a boast, that he did.

G
RANGE WAS A
tall, gaunt man with a thick forest of iron-gray hair that whitened shade by shade over the next few years until it was completely white, completely pure, like snow. His mouth was unusually clean-looking, although he chewed tobacco, smoked, used snuff, drank anything strong, and rarely brushed his teeth. Sometimes he would go after them with the end of his nightshirt, but Ruth could never see how that could keep them so sound and white. For the longest time after she saw them grinning at her from a jar on the back porch, bubbling, she thought he just took them all out once in a while for a boiling. She knew her own cavity-weakened baby teeth only came out one at a time.

He was immensely sick at times. There were days of depression when he spoke of doing away with himself. There were times when she could tell he needed her to tell him to pull himself together. He would lie immobile on the floor, dead, and she would be drawn to him to try the magic of her hugs and kisses. She soon learned to overlook the differences between them. They got along well for grandfather and child and trivial complications in their relationship did not develop. Grange never spanked her and would probably have beaten up anyone who tried to do so. Even Josie was not allowed to touch her. Poor Josie, she was never even allowed to scold.

“You don’t know nothing about raising no child,” Grange said when Josie tried to make her do anything. “Look what a mess you did on your own young ’un!” Josie would sulk, but Grange’s was the final word.

At the beginning Ruth was jealous of Josie, for she thought maybe Grange found her pretty. But Grange also thought his wife was not very nice, and he said so, often and loudly. He said she lived like a cat, stayed away from home too much. Josie was one of those fat yellow women with freckles and light-colored eyes, and most people would have said she was good-looking,
handsome,
without even looking closely. But Ruth looked closely indeed, and what she saw was a fat yellow woman with sour breath, too much purple lipstick, and a voice that was wheedling and complaining; the voice of a spoiled little fat girl who always wanted to pee after the car got moving.

Ruth sensed that Josie was none too happy to have her with them. “What do I know about plaiting hair on a eight-year-old kid?” Josie had asked Grange one day when Grange wanted her to wash and braid Ruth’s hair. “I notice you cut Lorene’s hair rather than take up time over it,” Grange had replied, “but this my
grand
girl, you do hers up or I pulls yours off.” Ruth had snickered that day while Josie, fuming, braided her hair. She and Josie were not to be friends, it seemed.

Before she moved in with them, Grange had spent his days fishing, sunning, whittling. After she came he began to grow cotton. Ruth could play in the fields beside him all day during the summer, though she was not allowed to pick the cotton. She wanted to, because it was so soft and light and looked so pretty early in the morning with the dew glistening on it. Why Grange forbade her she could not understand. Josie, who was asked to pick, said she would not if Ruth did not. “You may have talked me into helping you buy this damn
farm,”
Josie sneered, “but if I ever picks another boll of cotton I hope somebody rush up and have me committed.” With one long sack and his own two hands Grange was left to manage his cotton. Ruth was allowed to ride on the back of the truck when the cotton was taken to the gin. That is, she was allowed to ride on the back of the truck while they were on the dirt road which led to the highway. Each time, as they approached the highway, Grange stopped the truck and either sent her back home or put her inside on the seat next to him.

“You not some kind of field hand!” he muttered sharply when she said she’d love to ride on top of the cotton all the way to town.

“But Grange, my goodness, can’t I ride as far as the
bridge
?” she asked the first time. He seemed too annoyed at the thought to answer her. She began to get the feeling she was very special. At school she avoided the children whose parents let them ride on the back of trucks—“Grinning niggers for the white folks to laugh at!” she scoffed. And the children in turn quickly learned what hurt her most. They called her “Miss Stuck-up” and when that produced no effect,
“Mrs.
Grange.”

The time she did manage to spend atop the truck was supremely happy. From that high perch she could see, it seemed to her, miles and miles across fields and forests and on into the sky. A sky which was benign and cloudless in those days. More often than not she and Grange left Josie at home. Ruth rarely thought about Brownfield; when she did, Grange was quick to assure her that Georgia jails were among the best.

Grange also raised vegetables in his garden in front of the house. You could sit on the front porch and watch the tomatoes grow. He would cut big coarse cabbages at the stem with a flat dull knife and balance one like a crown on her head. He raised carrots and tomatoes and peas, and in fall, after the peas had dried in the sun, they sat up late at night gossiping and shelling them. Josie, who hated all kinds of work, farm or otherwise, would get up reluctantly from telling long tales about the “olden days” or her younger days and wash fruit jars so that in the morning Grange could help her can, “put up” the peas.

It was at times of such domesticity that Ruth felt keenly Josie’s objection to her and mourned the loss of her mother. Memories that might have been tossed aside by a child more innocently brought into a new home with new sources of play, came rushing back at odd moments of wakefulness, more usually in dreams. The long fall days, languid and slow and heavy, of gathering in, and then of putting up, brought to mind the good memories she had of her mother, when they had seemed to prosper in the hot summers, canning and making potato hills, and winter held no fear for them.

Other grownups she saw never mentioned her parents. They acted as if they did not, or had not, existed. Josie was a clam when she was asked a simple question about them, or asked simply to remember. But Grange was drawn to discuss them. He said they should not be forgotten, especially Mem, who was a saint. He liked to use some reference to Mem’s thriftiness or her hard-working goodness as a beginning to a list of comparisons he made between her and Josie. He would be carried away by his vivid recollections of Mem and reproach his wife viciously because she was not the kind of woman his son’s wife had been. Josie would begin to cry, or pretend to suffer.

“You lazy yaller heifer!” he would start out, “and don’t you come saying nothing defending to me. You no-good slanderous trollop, you near-white strumpet out of tallment, you motherless child, you pig, you bloated and painted cow! Look to your flopping udders hanging out in mass offense! You lustful she-goat! Close up your spreaded knees before this innocent child and my gray head!” But he became unsure of himself when she began to cry. “Shit,” he would mutter, finally. “What you standing over there with your damn mouth hanging open for anyway. Come here and set on my goddam
knee
when I’m talking to you!” At first such scenes of forgiveness were frequent and at times they were very happy. Josie would come placidly over to him, chewing her gum, wetting her purple lipstick with her sly little tongue, her tears vanished. And Grange would mumble from deep in her dress front, “Ah, me oh my, here I is.
Lost
again.”

Ruth did not always sleep with them. Grange was gentle but firm.

“It ain’t healthy for a heap of peoples to sleep in the same bed, don’t you know. Anyways, it all right for just two. If they be grown.”

Shut away from them, turning restlessly on her bed, Ruth tried to fathom the mystery of her grandfather’s contempt for and inevitable capitulation to Josie. When she could not fall asleep Mem came back to confront her; Mem, whose hands were callused and warm, whose lips were chapped and soft, and whose eyes were restored to their look of tough, gentle sadness and pain.

G
RADUALLY, SULKILY,
J
OSIE
faded into the background, and Ruth and her grandfather became inseparable. They did not plan it this way; but always they were together; where Grange went, Ruth went, what he did, Ruth did. Josie, having sold her lounge to help Grange pay for the farm, had no place to go and none of her old friends came to see her. Ruth and Grange halfheartedly tried to interest her in their pursuits, but the farm held no attractions for Josie; she thought of herself as a city woman. She brushed them off, and they were happy to be brushed off. They left her muttering and pacing the floor, filing her purple nails.

In the wintertime, a few days before each Christmas Eve, Grange began his preparations for making ambrosia. He was an uneducated man, but he still remembered that somebody, some old white lady’s daughter no doubt, had once told him that ambrosia was what all the gods used to eat before there just came to be one God, which they had now, that never did eat anything. “That’s ’cause He done got stocked up while He was creating Hisself,” was Grange’s short explanation.

To make ambrosia you needed fresh, hand-shredded coconut and pineapples and oranges. Probably something else went in, a shot of whiskey or wine, but Ruth remembered mostly the oranges and coconuts. Grange’s sister, who lived in Florida, would send these in one large and one small crate, along with so many grapefruits the whole house looked like a fruit stand. Grange liked to put out every piece of fruit on a “high place,” like the mantel or the tops of dressers and chifforobes, and when children came to visit—and they were allowed to come only at Christmas—he had a generous way of reaching behind him or over his head and producing a bright orange or grapefruit. Then he would grin at the small bewildered visitor and say, as if he had forgotten the words at the beginning, “Hocus-pocus on
you,
boy!”

The next thing you needed to make ambrosia was a big churn. Grange had two, one milk-white with a lovely faded drawing of a blue bull near the top, and a brown earthen one. They had belonged to Josie’s mother, and Grange said that she had liked to use the white one during the week and the brown one on Sunday. In remembrance of her—her wide-eyed picture was among those in the front room—they used the brown churn for the Christmas ambrosia.

Grange and Ruth and Josie would sit around peeling oranges and shredding coconut until two o’clock in the morning. Of course, the whole business could have been finished in an hour, but Grange would stop ten or fifteen times during the process to tell a story, or the truth about something or somebody. He knew all the Uncle Remus stories by heart, although he could make up better ones about a smart plantation man named John. John became Ruth’s hero because he could talk himself out of any situation and reminded her of Grange.

Grange thought that Uncle Remus was a fool, because if he was so smart that he could make animals smart too, then why the hell, asked Grange, didn’t he dump the little white boy (or tie him up and hold him for ransom) and go to Congress and see what he could do about smartening up the country, which, in Grange’s view, was passing dumb. “Instead of making the white folks let go of the stuff that’s rightfully ours, he setting around on his big flat black ass explaining to some stupid white feller how too much butter in the diet make you run off at the be-hind! We needs us a goddam statesman and all he can do is act like some old shag-assed minstrel!”

He would reminisce about his boyhood, which was filled with all sorts of encounters with dead folks and spirits and occasionally the Holy Ghost, which he said was the same thing as a sort of chill, and which, if you didn’t watch out, could turn into the soul’s pneumonia.

He told stories about two-heads and conjurers; strange men and women more sensitive than the average spook. He said they could give you something to wear under your hat that’d make your wife come back (if she ran away), or make her run away if you were sick of her. He told about how one old juju man who, people claimed, could turn into a bat, had actually cured him of a bad case of piles by giving him a little bag of powder to dust down in the stool. “What’s piles?” Ruth asked. “A serious grown-up disease,” he answered.

He said there was a two-headed lady in town named Sister Madelaine. She had changed herself from a white colored woman to a gypsy fortuneteller. “Why she do that?” asked Ruth. “‘Cause she didn’t want to be nodody’s cook,” said Grange. She was a powerful woman, according to Grange, but not as good as the two-heads he had known when he was a boy. Two-heading was dying out, he lamented. “Folks what can look at things in more than one way is done got rare.”

Ruth’s favorite story was about how he came to join the church.

It happened one spring when he was seven or eight years old. And it was during a revival. He had already begun getting into fights with the white children who lived down the road, usually “beating the stuffing out of them” to let him tell it. His mother, a pious and diligent house servant for most of her life, never seriously attempted to make him stop fighting (she would say gently that she didn’t want to break his spirit), but instead urged him more and more toward the “bosom” of the church. Grange could never say bosom without looking down the front of Josie’s dress. Anyway, he had resisted with everything in him, for he hated revivals, hated church, and most of all hated preachers. His mother, gently persuasive and getting nowhere with him, was trying to convince him to join the church one night when her brother, Grange’s Uncle Buster, came to visit. He was built like a keg around the chest, and mean. Grange didn’t like him because he had seen him knock his wife, Grange’s aunt, through a plate-glass window. Hearing his sister’s mild, obviously ineffectual pleadings, the uncle grabbed Grange roughly by the shoulder and gave him a long lecture on receiving the Holy Ghost, and about how good it was to be saved and how if he would just open up his heart the “pue” light would just come aflying and aflooding in. In short, he said that if Grange didn’t get religion that same night he would get a horsewhipping when he got home.