The Third Life of Grange Copeland (3 page)

“The baby all right?” she asked quickly, her knuckles sharp against her shoes.

“He all right,” said Brownfield. He followed her into the house and watched as she stood over his little half-brother. The baby was sleeping peacefully, his tiny behind stuck up in the air. The baby was a product of his mother’s new personality and went with her new painted good looks and new fragrance of beds, of store-bought perfume and of gin.

“Your daddy and me had another fight,” she said, sinking down on the bed. “Oh, we had us a rip-rowing, knock-down, drag-out fight. With that fat yellow bitch of his calling the punches.” She was very matter of fact. They had been fighting this way for years. Gone were the times she waited alone on Saturday afternoons for people who never came. Now when her husband left her at home and went into town she followed. At first she had determinedly walked the distance, or hitchhiked. Lately she had switched to riding, often in the big gray truck.

“I see he ain’t back yet,” she said.

Brownfield lounged in the doorway, hoping his job as babysitter was over.

“Said he wouldn’t be back no more,” his mother said, pulling her dress over her head and shaking it out. She chuckled spitefully. “How many times we done heard
that.
You’d think he’d be satisfied, me feeding him and her fucking him!”

Brownfield carefully closed his ears when his mother cursed. He knew his father was seeing another woman, and had been seeing one, or several, for a long time. It did not affect him the way it did his mother. He watched her roll down her slip and did not think to look away when it touched the floor. She turned to face him, eyes weary but defiant.

“What the hell you staring at?” she asked.

“Nothing,” said Brownfield, and turned away.

His mother located the cross at the end of its chain around her neck and fingered it solemnly.

“I was just thinkin’ about Uncle Silas and Aunt Marilyn,” he said with his back to her.

“What you thinkin’ about them for? I ain’t heard from Marilyn since Silas was killed. Just think, tryin’ to rob a liquor store in broad daylight! Marilyn always had a lot to say about her new icebox and clothes and her children’s fancy learnin’, but never did she breathe one word about Silas being on dope. All the time coming down here in they fancy cars and makin’ out like
we
so out of fashion—I bet the Norse is just as much a mess as down here.” She knelt by the side of the bed. “Give the baby a bottle of milk when he wakes up,” she said from the floor. Within minutes after saying her prayers she was sound asleep.

Brownfield looked at the baby with disgust. Always it was his duty to look after the baby. It made him feel like a sissy. Fortunately the baby was sleeping deeply, for if he had awakened then Brownfield would have felt like giving him a pinch that would bring his mother flying from her bed, her curses and blows falling first on his, then on the baby’s, head.

He was too big to play in the clearing, so instead he went to his box at the foot of his bed and brought out his new shoes, bought with money earned from spare-time work at the bait factory, and carried them outside. He sat on the porch steps polishing them with a piece of one of his father’s old shirts.

As he stroked his shoes caressingly with the rag, Brownfield sank into a favorite daydream. He saw himself grownup, twenty-one or so, arriving home at sunset in the snow. In his daydream there was always snow. He had seen snow only once, when he was seven and there had been a small flurry at Christmas, and it had made a cold, sharp impression on him. In his daydream snow fell to the earth like chicken feathers dumped out of a tick, and gave the feeling of walking through a quiet wall of weightless and suspended raindrops, clear and cold on the eyelids and nose. In his daydream he pulled up to his house, a stately mansion with cherry-red brick chimneys and matching brick porch and steps, in a long chauffeur-driven car. The chauffeur glided out of the car first and opened the back door, where Brownfield sat puffing on a cigar. Then the chauffeur vanished around the back of the house, where his wife waited for him on the kitchen steps. She was the beloved and very respected cook and had been with the house and the chauffeur and Brownfield’s family for many years. Brownfield’s wife and children—two children, a girl and a boy—waited anxiously for him just inside the door in the foyer. They jumped all over him, showering him with kisses. While he told his wife of the big deals he’d pushed through that day she fixed him a mint julep. After a splendid dinner, presided over by the cook, dressed in black uniform and white starched cap, he and his wife, their arms around each other, tucked the children in bed and spent the rest of the evening discussing her day (which she had spent walking in her garden), and making love.

There was one thing that was odd about the daydream. The face of Brownfield’s wife and that of the cook constantly interchanged. So that his wife was first black and glistening from cooking and then white and powdery to his touch; his dreaming self could not make up its mind. His children’s faces were never in focus. He recognized them by their angelic presence alone, two bright spots of warmth; they hovered about calling him “Daddy” endearingly, while he stroked the empty air, assuming it to be their heads.

Brownfield had first had this daydream the week after his cousins told him about the North. Each year it had grown longer and more intensely real; at times it possessed him. While he dreamed of the life he would live as a man no other considerations entered his head. He dreamed alone and was quiet; which was why his mother thought baby-sitting an ideal occupation for him. But with the baby near, capable of shattering the quiet at any moment, Brownfield was cut off from deep involvement in the snow, in the cozy comfort of his luxuriously warm limousine, and in the faithful ministrations of his loving imaginary wife. He harbored a deep resentment against his mother for making it so hard for him to dream.

He finished his shoes. Piercing the silence now was the cry of his baby brother. Without hurrying, partially in his dreams afterglow, he stood, his hands holding the shoes carefully, palms up, so as not to smudge the shiny leather, and walked toward the box by his bed. It was a cardboard box and, like a small trunk, complete with cardboard shelves. He lifted the flap that was its top and placed his shoes with care a distance from his other possessions. There were a pair of new denim pants, a new green shirt with birds and Indians and deer on it, and a soft yellow neckerchief made of satin. He had bought the neckerchief from the rolling-store man. It cost a quarter and he was very proud of it.

The baby was still crying. Brownfield looked for a moment at his mother in the bed, who had pulled the quilt over her head. The wall around her bed was aflutter with funeral-home calendars, magazine pictures and bits of newsprint which she had cut out of the 1st Colored Baptist Christian Crusade. The baby looked hopefully toward the bed and then pathetically at Brownfield. With a harsh push of his fingers Brownfield thrust the bottle into the baby’s mouth. The baby lay on its side, intently sucking, and looked at his big brother with swollen distrustful eyes. The baby was almost two years old but refused to learn to walk. Instead it allowed itself to be dragged about, propped up and ignored, until something caused it to scream. The baby’s name was Star, but it was never called anything. It was treated indifferently most of the time and seemed resigned to not belonging. It had grayish eyes and reddish hair and was shadowed pale gold and chocolate like a little animal. From its odd coloration its father might have been every one of its mother’s many lovers.

Margaret had not been impressed, ever, by her sister’s Northern existence, or so she had repeatedly said to Brownfield. But she had grown restless about her own life, a life that was as predictably unexciting as last year’s cotton field. Somewhere along the line she had changed. Slowly, imperceptibly. Until it was too late for Brownfield to recall exactly how she had been when he had loved her. It seemed to Brownfield that one day she was as he had always known her; kind, submissive, smelling faintly of milk; and the next day she was a wild woman looking for frivolous things, her heart’s good times, in the transient embraces of strangers.

Brownfield blamed his father for his mother’s change. For it was Grange she followed at first. It was Grange who led her to the rituals of song and dance and drink, which he had always rushed to at the end of the week, every Saturday night. It was Grange who had first turned to someone else. On some Saturday nights Grange and Margaret left home excitedly together, looking for Brownfield knew not what, except that it must be something strong and powerful and something they had thought lost. For they grew frenzied in pursuit of whatever it was. Often they came home together, still bright, flushed from fighting or from good times, but with the glow gradually dying out of their eyes as they faced the creaking floorboards of their unpainted house. Depression always gave way to fighting, as if fighting preserved some part of the feeling of being alive. It was confusing to realize but not hard to know that they loved each other. And even when Margaret found relief from her cares in the arms of her fellow bait-pullers and church members, or with the man who drove the truck and who turned her husband to stone, there was a deference in her eyes that spoke of her love for Grange. On weekdays when, sober and wifely, she struggled to make food out of plants that grew wild and game caught solely in traps, she was submissive still. It was on weekends only that she became a huntress of soft touches, gentle voices and sex without the arguments over the constant and compelling pressures of everyday life. She had sincerely regretted the baby. And now, humbly respecting her husband’s feelings, she ignored it.

What Brownfield could not forgive was that in the drama of their lives his father and mother forgot they were not alone.

When Brownfield woke in the night his mother was gone. From his bed in the kitchen he could see his father sitting on the bed, cradling something in his arms. It was long and dark, like a steel rod, and glinted in the light from the kerosene lamp. Grange’s face was impassive, its lines brooding. Placing the rifle on the bed he picked up his dusty black-green hat. He stood looking at the floor, his shoulders slumped, motionless. He looked very old. Ploddingly he moved about the room. He waited indecisively for his wife to return. He gazed at the baby asleep in its makeshift crib, a crate that had once been filled with oranges. He shrugged. Then he lifted his eyes toward where Brownfield s bed was, at one side of the kitchen, between the table and the stove. Slowly he walked into the kitchen, which was chilly and smelled of old biscuits, and which changed to a new rhythm of night with his entrance into it. The air was gently agitated by his movements. The sounds of the floor shifted with each step he took.

Brownfield pretended to be asleep, though his heart was pounding so loudly he was sure his father would hear it. He saw Grange bend over him to inspect his head and face. He saw him reach down to touch him. He saw his hand stop, just before it reached his cheek. Brownfield was crying silently and wanted his father to touch the tears. He moved toward his father’s hand, as if moving unconsciously in his sleep. He saw his father’s hand draw back, without touching him. He saw him turn sharply and leave the room. He heard him leave the house. And he knew, even before he realized his father would never be back, that he hated him for everything and always would. And he most hated him because even in private and in the dark and with Brownfield presumably asleep, Grange could not bear to touch his son with his hand.

“Well. He’s gone,” his mother said without anger at the end of the third week. But the following week she and her poisoned baby went out into the dark of the clearing and in the morning Brownfield found them there. She was curled up in a lonely sort of way, away from her child, as if she had spent the last moments on her knees.

3

“Y
OU CAN GET
yourself a wife,” said Shipley confidentially, “and settle down here in the same house. It might need a little fixing up, but I could lend you enough for that, and with a few licks here and there it ought to be good as new.”

Shipley’s hair was still like that of a sleek greasy animal, but now it was dingy white and thin. He looked at Brownfield from under brows that had faded from blond to yellowish-gray. His pale blue eyes struggled to convey kindness and largesse. Brownfield slid down from the truck knowing his face was the mask his father’s had been. Because this frightened him and because he did not know why he should have inherited this fear, he studiedly brushed imaginary dust from the shoulders of a worn black suit Shipley had given him.

He had been shocked to see Shipley at the funeral, but soon guessed he had come hoping to catch Grange. Shipley did not take kindly to people running off owing him money, no matter that they had paid off whatever debts they might have owed many times over. Nobody had whispered a word against him while he stood looking down on the bloatedly sleeping mother and child. To most of the people at the funeral Shipley’s presence was a status symbol and an insult, though they were not used to thinking in those terms and would not have expressed such a mixed feeling. Shipley squeezed out a tear for the benefit of the other mourners, and Brownfield had chuckled bitterly to himself. The tear wasn’t necessary: pity was scarce at his mother’s funeral; most of the people there thought she had got what she deserved. Shipley’s crocodile tear was the only one shed.

Brownfield himself had sat, limp and clammy, wishing he were a million miles away. His mother as she was in the last years got none of his love, none of his sympathy and hardly any of his thoughts. The idea that he might continue to live in her house aroused nothing but revulsion. He knew too that the minute he accepted money from Shipley he was done for. If he borrowed from Shipley, Shipley would make sure he never finished paying it back.

“Don’t know but what we might can build you a new house,” said Shipley, thinking that with Brownfield’s muscles he could do a grown man’s work. Shipley believed with a mixture of awe and contempt that blacks developed earlier than whites, especially in the biceps. He thought too that as long as he had Brownfield there was a chance of getting Grange. Believing that Brownfield was choked up from grief and from his generous offer Shipley continued speaking to him on an encouraging plane.