The Third Life of Grange Copeland (8 page)

Being forced to move from one sharecropper’s cabin to another was something she hated. She hated the arrogance of the white men who put them out, for one reason or another, without warning or explanation. She hated leaving a home she’d already made and fixed up with her own hands. She hated leaving her flowers, which she always planted whenever she got her hands on flower seeds. Each time she stepped into a new place, with its new, and usually bigger rat holes, she wept. Each time she had to clean cow manure out of a room to make it habitable for her children, she looked as if she had been dealt a death blow. Each time she was forced to live in a house that was enclosed in a pasture with cows and animals eager to eat her flowers before they were planted, she became like a woman walking through a dream, but a woman who had forgotten what it is to wake up. She slogged along, ploddingly, like a cow herself, for the sake of the children. Her mildness became stupor; then her stupor became horror, desolation and, at last, hatred.

Strangely, Brownfield could bear her hatred less than her desolation. In fact, he rather enjoyed her desolation because in it she had no hopes. She was weak, totally without view, without a sky. He was annoyed when she despised him because out of her hatred she fought back, with words, never with blows, and always for the children. But coming from her, even words disrupted the harmony of despair in which they lived.

For Brownfield, moving about at the whim of a white boss was just another example of the fact that his life, as it was destined, had “gone haywire,” and he could do nothing about it. He jumped when the crackers said jump, and left his welfare up to them. He no longer had, as his father had maintained, even the desire to run away from them. He had no faith that any other place would be better. He fitted himself to the slot in which he found himself; for fun he poured oil into streams to kill the fish and tickled his vanity by drowning cats.

E
ACH
S
ATURDAY EVENING
; Brownfield was at the Dew Drop Inn lounge. Josie welcomed him; it was like home. Having been lovers they were now much more. They were comrades. They shared confidences. Lorene had migrated North, and Josie ran the lounge alone, except for two very young and talented girls who had Lorene’s old room.

Brownfield and Josie spent a great deal of time talking. About Mem and her self-righteousness, about Brownfield’s error in marrying her, and about Josie and her fears and dreams and the cruel tricks fate had played on her. They talked of Josie’s driving will to survive and to overcome. Her need to avenge herself on those who wronged her. They talked about Brownfield, about how numb he felt when he allowed himself a fleeting remembrance of his mother. They talked about Margaret and her bastard baby, Star. They talked for hours and hours about Grange.

“Your mammy was a
fool,
boy. Thinkin’ she could keep Grange by making him jealous of other mens,” Josie’s chin shook the slightest bit.

“You tried the same thing,” said Brownfield, “in his
absence.
Or do you plan to tell me I got the job here just ’cause you liked my face?”

“Oh, but I weren’t
tryin
to make Grange
jealous,
” said Josie.

“No?”

“No.” Josie’s chin fairly quivered. “I were tryin’ to
kill
the son of a bitch!”

For some reason Brownfield laughed. “It wouldn’t have killed him, seeing you with me. He never cared no more for me than a stranger.”

“You don’t understand yet how the thing go, do you?”

“I know enough.”

“Ain’t you the lucky one, then,” said Josie. “Now set down and listen.”

Brownfield sat down in a familiar blue chair, facing Josie, who was propped up in bed.

“It was some weeks before
you
come,” said Josie, “that me and Grange made all our plans to leave Georgia. We was goin’ up to New York. To Harlem, the black folks’ city, where we owns everything! Ain’t that something? We was goin’ to go away and never come back. You may wonder what I was planning to do with Lorene,” she said, looking at Brownfield. “Well, just between you and me, I was goin’ to
dump
Lorene. She been a chain round my neck long enough. If it hadn’t been for her me and your daddy would have
been
together in the first place. Grange and me started goin’ to church them weeks he was here. And I want you to know he
promised
me he was goin’ to take me with him; and then he sneaked off and I ain’t seen him from that day to this one!”

Josie leaned her head back against the pillows, her eyes on the ceiling. In a minute, in a lower, more careless voice, she continued.

“Oh, Grange and me goes back a long ways. Since
way
before you was born. Way before he even met your mama.”

Brownfield was not surprised. He had waited to know this part of his father’s life.

“Where you keep yourself all that time?” he asked. “I never heard nobody at home talk about no Josie.”

“You remember tellin’ me ’bout that fat yellow
bitch
your mammy use to mention?”

“You don’t
mean
…” said Brownfield, still not very surprised.

“Nobody else but.” Josie wore a red silk kimono with blue and purple dragons on the sleeves. She ran a pudgy hand down into the cleavage of her dress.

“Lemme tell you,” she said, “Grange never would have married Margaret if he hadn’t been pushed into it by his damn ‘respectable’ family. His African Methodist Episcopal brothers and they mealy-bosomed wives couldn’t stand the thoughts of having me in the family; I weren’t
good
enough for him. Never mind I built up a establishment with my own hands and figured out how to git rich with my own brain. I still wasn’t good enough. Nothing would do the family but that your daddy marry Margaret. The only thing she had that I didn’t have was a unused pussy. But it didn’t stop me and Grange from being together. He didn’t have the heart to leave your mammy outright. But every Saturday evening, by the
dock,
you could find Grange Copeland right where you is now.”

“So he come here, and you took …
care
of him?” The chair he was sitting in felt uncomfortable. Brownfield got up and paced.

“Yes,” said Josie, proudly. “I took care of him, ’cause he was
mine.
I didn’t pity your mammy
one
bit.”

“Mama was okay,” said Brownfield. “At least she put herself out of the way. I wondered why she done it like that. Looked like to me at the time she knowed something I didn’t.”

“She knowed plenty,” Josie sneered. “Knowed she wouldn’t do for your daddy what Fat Josie would do. You think she could come up with any idees of how to git Grange out of debt? And with half the men in the county after her tail? The
thought
never crossed her mind! Then, when it
did
strike her,
she forgot to charge!
Shit.”

“Well,” said Brownfield, embarrassed, “it been ten years almost since he left here. Long enough for me to done run up
on
you, run away
from
you, and run back
to
you.” He turned to face her, seeing the new gray hair she had not had time to blacken, seeing the deepened wrinkles everywhere.

“You might as well stop sleepin’ with me,” he said softly, feeling so grown up and knowledgeable he could hardly bear it. “Grange ain’t coming back. If you still want to give him a little shock you got to go all the way up Norse to do it. I ain’t no good to you.”

Josie read the sickness in his eyes.

“But,
lover’
—she smiled maternally, loosening her robe and coming to hold him—”ain’t you found out
yet
that I also likes you for
yourself
?”

A
S THE YEARS PASSED
, Brownfield got in the habit of thinking of Grange as someone he had never closely known. He didn’t refer to him as Father, but as Grange. This made Josie seem not such a burden and lessened the feeling Brownfield often had that Josie had made a fool of him, pretending she cared for him, a boy whose manhood meant only one thing and went easily to his head, when all the time she was eating her heart out for Grange.

He would never forget Josie’s face the night Grange returned to Baker County. How fear, self-condemnation, guilt and
joy
flushed through her as she hastily pushed Brownfield away; pushed him away as if he were as odious as a toad, as inconsequential as some kind of harmless lizard. For all her boasting that she wanted to “kill” Grange, she would have spared him that moment if it cost her her life. Brownfield wanted one day to see her damned for that stricken and guilty look on her face.

They had been lolling on the bed, rubbing and feeling each other, Josie in her slip. They were speaking of their insatiable passion for each other, a subject they brought up whenever he became impotent with her. He was often unable, after Mem, to make love to Josie; the thought of Mem and her perpetual tired grayness shriveled him up. He and Josie talked about their passion, about the old days, and Josie made up lies to tell him about Mem. And sometimes, by pretending to believe something nasty about his wife, something lowdown enough to go home and beat her about, he could succeed in making love to Josie. Josie didn’t care how she got his passion up, she just wanted it up. With him covering her she released her mind from its memories of betrayals; she forgot the terrors of her recurring dream, and she entered a world of gentleness and contentment. Her face became that of a pure and guileless fat girl; she was innocent, uncomplaining, real.

Even so, Brownfield never really shared sex with Josie, not in the complete, sustaining way he had with Mem. Josie took and he took. She was either stirred to a single-minded vileness, when she swore at him and used foul descriptive words, or she passed into a safe solitude. A solitude to which Brownfield was genuinely happy to send her, for then he thought of his screwing as an act of kindness, and he wanted to be kind. Josie’s nightmares, witnessed over the years, had moved him. The least he could do, he thought, was help her sleep.

But that night he had had no chance to help her sleep. Grange, graying, bushy-haired, and lean as a wolf, came through the bedroom door. Curses erupted from Brownfield. His first impulse was to knock his father down. But he realized immediately, and it made him sob, that he was still afraid of him. He might still have been a child from the fear he felt. So instead of fighting his father, Brownfield cursed him and cried and left one of his socks near Josie’s bed. Grange stood against the wall near the door gazing from Brownfield to Josie and finally resting his eyes on Josie.

Brownfield put his arms around Josie’s neck. His tears dripped onto her bosom. But Josie looked beyond him, over his shoulder; for the final time she pushed him away.

Forgetting about Brownfield, Grange and Josie shut him out. Josie wriggled into a somber wrapper, dabbed at her neck and throat with moist hands, and looked at Grange with eyes that said she’d die on the spot if he wanted her to. As Brownfield staggered away, angry and shaken, heading for a drunk, they hardly moved, frozen by some strange commitment to each other that Brownfield had not even been aware of. They did not fear him, for all his threats. Nor did he seem to matter to them in any way at all. In two weeks Grange and Josie were married.

V
ERY EARLY ON
the morning of Ruth’s arrival into the world, at about five o’clock in the morning on a gray drizzly Thursday in November, Mem awakened Brownfield and asked him to get the midwife, who lived some eight miles away. Brownfield was sleeping off a drunk and could not rouse himself, although he tried, before seven o’clock, and by then Ruth had popped out by herself. Brownfield woke finally, groggy, with a sense of something new having been added, to find his wife surrounding a small bundle, shivering on the bed. His own cot, nearer to the fire than Mem’s bed, blocked the little heat that came from a smoldering hickory log in the fireplace. He was apologetic and sorry for his neglect and tried to make up for it with various cooing pleasantries directed at his small daughter, but Mem was in no mood to have Ruth subjected so soon to the foul after-aromas of puke-smelling brew.

“Git out of my sight,” she whispered, turning from him to warm the baby with what heat she could call her own.

It was toward this charged atmosphere that Grange walked, laden with meat, collards, candy and oranges. Brownfield, embarrassed, uneasy and fuzzy, got up and walked out to meet him. Grange was stepping briskly down the road freshly and neatly dressed, bashfully smiling.

“Aw,
Grange,
” Brownfield stammered in greeting, as his father came up to the edge of the yard.

Brownfield was angered to see the packages in his father’s arms. This intrusion of goods—Grange never set foot in his son’s house without a load of eatables and wearables—made Brownfield wish more than ever to see him someday on the rack.

“
You
shouldn’t have did that, Grange,” he said sheepishly, smiling but gritting his teeth; hating himself for wanting to see what was inside the bundles Grange thrust into his hands. He realized self-pityingly that he was ravenous and hadn’t eaten a meal in two days.

“That’s all right,” Grange mumbled, patiently waiting for his son to lead him into the house. Brownfield sniffed at one of the bags in his hands. It contained fruit, a treat the children would love, another reason for adoring their grandfather. It was only at Christmas that Brownfield’s children got apples and oranges and grapes. As a child Brownfield had never seen a grape. He clutched the bags in a confusion of feeling. He was hungry, he was suffering from a malaise of the spirit, he was jealous of his children’s good fortune. He wished he did not have children down whose gullets the good fruit would go; he wished he were a child himself.

Brownfield was not as tall as Grange, who had to bend his head to his chest to enter the room where Mem and Brownfield slept. In winter, usually, they all slept in the same room. Brownfield, Mem, Daphne and Ornette; because it was impossible to heat two rooms in such a hole-filled house. It was impossible, really, to heat one room; but when four people slept together in one small room and kept a fire going they could manage not to freeze to death before summer.