The Third Life of Grange Copeland (2 page)

Once the man touched him on the hand with the handle of his cane, not hard, and said, with a smell of mint on his breath, “You’re Grange Copeland’s boy, ain’t you?” And Brownfield had answered, “Uh huh,” chewing on his lip and recoiling from the enormous pile of gray-black hair that lay matted on the man’s upper chest and throat. While he stared at the hair one of the workers—not his father who was standing beside him as if he didn’t know he was there—said to him softly, “Say ‘Yessir’ to Mr. Shipley,” and Brownfield looked up before he said anything and scanned his father’s face. The mask was as tight and still as if his father had coated himself with wax. And Brownfield smelled for the first time an odor of sweat, fear and something indefinite. Something smothered and tense (which was of his father and of the other workers and not of mint) that came from his father’s body. His father said nothing. Brownfield, trembling, said “Yessir,” filled with terror of this man who could, by his presence alone, turn his father into something that might as well have been a pebble or a post or a piece of dirt, except for the sharp bitter odor of something whose source was forcibly contained in flesh.

One day not long afterward Grange was drinking quietly at home, stretched out on the porch. Brownfield sat on the porch steps gazing at him, mesmerized by the movement of the bottle going up and down in his father’s hand. Grange noticed him looking, and Brownfield was afraid to move away and afraid to stay. When he was drinking his father took every action as a personal affront. He looked at Brownfield and started to speak. His eyes had little yellow and red lines in them like the veins of a leaf. Brownfield leaned nearer. But all his father said was, “I ought to throw you down the goddam well.”

Brownfield drew back in alarm, though there was no anger or determination in his father’s voice; there was only a rough drunken wistfulness and a weary tremor of pity and regret.

Brownfield had told his cousins about the man, and it was then that they told him how his father was owned and of how their father escaped being owned by moving North. And now they had a nice new car every other year and beautiful plush furniture and their mother didn’t pull nasty baits but worked instead for people who owned two houses and a long black car with a man in it dressed in green with gold braid. That man being their father, who had taken them one day for a ride in the car, so they knew what they were talking about. They had played with rich children, and, talking about them to Brownfield, who lived in a house that leaked, they sounded rich as well.

Angeline, his girl cousin, who eavesdropped as a matter of habit, told Brownfield impatiently that she and her brother Lincoln had heard their mother say that Brownfield’s family would never amount to anything because they didn’t have sense enough to leave Green County, Georgia. It was Angeline who told him that her mother said that Grange was no good; that he had tried to get his wife to “sell herself” to get them out of debt. Brownfield’s mother and Angeline’s were sisters.

“He even wanted her to sell herself to the man who drives the truck,” Angeline lied.

“Or anybody else who’d buy her!” Lincoln said.

Lincoln began to dance around Brownfield. “You all are in debt twelve hundred dollars! And you’ll never pay it!”

Angeline sniffed primly with her nose in the air. “My daddy says you’ll never pay it ’cause you ain’t got no money and your daddy drinks up everything he can get his hands on.”

What did “sell” mean when it applied to his mama, Brownfield had wanted to know, but his cousins only giggled and nudged each other gravely but in apparent delight.

For Brownfield his cousins’ information was peculiarly ominous. He tried to remember when his father’s silence began, for surely there had been a time when his father cooed hopefully to him as he fondled him on his knee. Perhaps, he thought, his father’s silence was part of the reason his mother was always submissive to him and why his father was jealous of her and angry if she spoke, just “how’re you?” to other men. Maybe he had tried to sell her and she wouldn’t be sold—which could be why they were still poor and in debt and would die that way. And maybe his father, who surely would feel bad about trying to sell his wife, became silent and jealous of her, not because of anything she had done, but because of what he had tried to do! Maybe his mother was as scared of Grange as he was, terrified by Grange’s tense composure. Perhaps she was afraid he would sell her anyway, whether she wanted to be sold or not. That could be why she jumped to please him.

Brownfield got a headache trying to grasp the meaning of what his cousins told him. The need to comprehend his parents’ actions seeped into him with his cousins’ laughter. The blood rushed to his head and he was sick. He thought feverishly of how their weeks were spent. Of the heat, the cold, the work, the feeling of desperation behind all the sly small smiles. The feeling of hunger in winter, of bleak unsmiling faces, of eating bark when he was left alone before his mother returned home smelling of baits and manure. Of his mother’s soft skin and clean milky breath; of his father’s brooding, and of the feeling of an onrushing inevitable knowledge, like a summer storm that comes with high wind and flash flooding, that would smash the silence finally and flatten them all mercilessly to the ground. One day he would know everything and be equal to his cousins and to his father and perhaps even to God.

Their life followed a kind of cycle that depended almost totally on Grange’s moods. On Monday, suffering from a hangover and the aftereffects of a violent quarrel with his wife the night before, Grange was morose, sullen, reserved, deeply in pain under the hot early morning sun. Margaret was tense and hard, exceedingly nervous. Brownfield moved about the house like a mouse. On Tuesday, Grange was merely quiet. His wife and son began to relax. On Wednesday, as the day stretched out and the cotton rows stretched out even longer, Grange muttered and sighed. He sat outside in the night air longer before going to bed; he would speak of moving away, of going North. He might even try to figure out how much he owed the man who owned the fields. The man who drove the truck and who owned the shack they occupied. But these activities depressed him, and he said things on Wednesday nights that made his wife cry. By Thursday, Grange’s gloominess reached its peak and he grimaced respectfully, with veiled eyes, at the jokes told by the man who drove the truck. On Thursday nights he stalked the house from room to room and pulled himself up and swung from the rafters of the porch. Brownfield could hear his joints creaking against the sounds of the porch, for the whole porch shook when his father swung.

By Friday Grange was so stupefied with the work and the sun he wanted nothing but rest the next two days before it started all over again.

On Saturday afternoon Grange shaved, bathed, put on clean overalls and a shirt and took the wagon into town to buy groceries. While he was away his wife washed and straightened her hair. She dressed up and sat, all shining and pretty, in the open door, hoping anxiously for visitors who never came.

Brownfield too was washed and cleanly dressed. He played contentedly in the silent woods and in the clearing. Late Saturday night Grange would come home lurching drunk, threatening to kill his wife and Brownfield, stumbling and shooting off his shotgun. He threatened Margaret and she ran and hid in the woods with Brownfield huddled at her feet. Then Grange would roll out the door and into the yard, crying like a child in big wrenching sobs and rubbing his whole head in the dirt. He would lie there until Sunday morning, when the chickens pecked around him, and the dog sniffed at him and neither his wife nor Brownfield went near him. Brownfield played instead on the other side of the house. Steady on his feet but still ashen by noon, Grange would make his way across the pasture and through the woods, headlong, like a blind man, to the Baptist church, where his voice above all the others was raised in song and prayer. Margaret would be there too, Brownfield asleep on the bench beside her. Back home again after church Grange and Margaret would begin a supper quarrel which launched them into another week just about like the one before.

Brownfield turned from watching the road and looked with hateful scrutiny at the house they lived in. It was a cabin of two rooms with a brick chimney at one end. The roof was of rotting gray wood shingles; the sides of the house were gray vertical slabs; the whole aspect of the house was gray. It was lower in the middle than at its ends, and resembled a sway-backed animal turned out to pasture. A stone-based well sat functionally in the middle of the yard, its mossy wooden bucket dangling above it from some rusty chain and frazzled lengths of rope. Where water was dashed behind the well, wild morning-glories bloomed, their tendrils reaching as far as the woodpile, which was a litter of tree trunks, slivers of carcass bones deposited by the dog and discarded braces and bits that had pained the jaws and teeth of many a hard-driven mule.

From the corner of his eye Brownfield noticed that his father was also surveying the house. Grange stood with an arm across the small of his back, soldier fashion, and with the other hand made gestures toward this and that of the house, as if pointing out necessary repairs. There were very many. He was a tall, thin, brooding man, slightly stooped from plowing, with skin the deep glossy brown of pecans. He was thirty-five but seemed much older. His face and eyes had a dispassionate vacancy and sadness, as if a great fire had been extinguished within him and was just recently missed. He seemed devoid of any emotion, while Brownfield watched him, except that of bewilderment. A bewilderment so complete he did not really appear to know what he saw, although his hand continued to gesture, more or less aimlessly, and his lips moved, shaping unintelligible words. While his son watched, Grange lifted his shoulders and let them fall. Brownfield knew this movement well; it was the fatal shrug. It meant that his father saw nothing about the house that he could change and would therefore give up gesturing about it and he would never again think of repairing it.

When Brownfield’s mother had wanted him to go to school Grange had assessed the possibility with the same inaudible gesticulation accorded the house. Knowing nothing of schools, but knowing he was broke, he had shrugged; the shrug being the end of that particular dream. It was the same when Margaret needed a dress and there was no way Grange could afford to buy it. He merely shrugged, never saying a word about it again. After each shrug he was more silent than before, as if each of these shrugs cut him off from one more topic of conversation.

Brownfield turned from looking at his father and the house to see his mother brush a hand across her eyes. He sat glumly, full of a newly discovered discontent. He was sad for her and felt bitterly small. How could he ever bear to lose her, to his father or to death or to age? How would he ever survive without her pliant strength and the floating fragrance of her body which was sweet and inviting and delicate, yet full of the concretely comforting odors of cooking and soap and milk.

“You could’ve gone,” said Grange softly, to his wife.

“I don’t know nothing about up Norse.”

“You could learn.”

“Naw, I don’t believe I could.” There was a sigh in her voice.

Brownfield came alive. So his cousins had been right; there had been talk about him and his mother going back with them to Philadelphia. Why hadn’t they gone? He felt peeved and in the dark.

“I didn’t know nobody
asked
us to go.
I
want to go up Norse.” His cousins said only the greenest hicks from Georgia said “Norse” like that.

His mother smiled at him. “And wear your hair pressed down like a woman’s? Get away from here, boy!”

Brownfield, an admirer of Uncle Silas, was not dissuaded. “I just wouldn’t wear the headrag at night,” he said.

“My poor sister Marilyn,” his mother muttered sadly, “all bleached up like a streetwalker. The Lawd keep
me
from ever wanting to brush another woman’s hair out of
my
face. To tell you the truth,” she continued to Grange over Brownfield’s head, “I don’t even think it
was
real hair. I felt it when she took it off for me to try on. Just like the hair on the end of a cow’s tail, and when you pulled a strand it stretched.”

“I like it ’cause it swooshes,” said Brownfield rhapsodically.

“That’s ’cause you ain’t got no sense,” said Grange.

2

F
IVE YEARS AFTER
his cousins’ visit, Brownfield stood on the same spot in the yard watching the approach of another vehicle. This time it was a big, gray high-bodied truck that he knew well. It rolled heavily over the road, blasting the misty quiet of the Sunday morning. The man driving the truck was not the one who usually drove it. As it came nearer Brownfield saw a brown arm dangling from the window. It was Johnny Johnson, a man who worked for Mr. Shipley. The truck stopped at the edge of the clearing and Brownfield’s mother descended. She stood for a moment talking to the driver, then turned and came slowly and quietly toward the house. The truck made a noisy turnabout and disappeared back up the road. His mother took off her shoes and carried them in her hand. She walked gingerly and reluctantly over the dew. So intently was she peering at the ground she did not see Brownfield until she nearly bumped against him. He was taller than she, and bigger, and when she noticed him she jumped.

“’Morning,” he said coolly.

His mother carried her shoes guiltily to her bosom, clutching them with both hands. Her beautiful rough hair was loose about her shoulders like a wayward thundercloud, with here and there a crinkly and shiny silver thread. Her dress was mussed, and the golden cross that usually nestled inside her dress lay jutting up atop her collar. Her eyes were haggard and blinked foggily at her son. She gave off a stale smoky odor. With nervous fingers she sought to thrust rumpled stockings farther inside her shoes.

“Oh,” she said, looking toward the house, “I didn’t see you standing there.”

Brownfield stood aside, saying nothing.