Two Shades of Morning (6 page)

Aunt Birdie wagged her head and folded a white handkerchief in a neat square. “She said ‘I forgive you.’ Just like that.” At that point, I got caught up in how my telling was like the cloud that would have to rain itself out. “And then she had to get home because a man, as she put it, was coming over to put down floors.” I skipped the part about Sibyl praying for Aunt Birdie so I wouldn’t be a peace-breaker. “When she started out the door, she went, ‘Oh, I thought this trailer-thing was gone tip over.’“ I really beared down with Sibyl’s mocking tone on the last part and waited for Aunt Birdie to speak.

She just sat there, puzzled-looking, while the rain wafted east to west, west to east, misting us and pattering on the tin. Then her face cleared, her lips curled, and she spat out into a clean dimpling puddle. “It’s hard to believe somebody’d wear a old frock on Easter just to get attention. Harder to believe that somebody couldn’t see theirself getting back good as they give.” Her eyes locked with mine till I broke the spell and got up to leave.

“Wait a minute,” she said, rising with her knurly hands on her knees. “I got you some eggs and a piece of pound cake.” She passed through the screen door decorated with a tuft of cotton to ward off houseflies. In a few minutes, she was back, handing me a brown paper sack of eggs and warm cake.

“Thank you,” I said, going down the doorsteps in the slackened rain. The sun was already shining around the shrinking cloud.

“Look out for snakes,” she called, “they’re crawling.”

Barely clear of her yard, I called back, “Aunt Birdie, I know you and it won’t work, not this time. You’re always turning things around.”

#

By Friday morning I was so worked up by imagined debates with Aunt Birdie, I’d almost forgotten about Sibyl. I mean, I drove right past her house, with Mama and Aunt Birdie in Daddy’s big Buick, and hardly thought about her!

In Tallahassee, I shook the two of them loose at the string of what Mama called Jew Stores on the south end of town and sneaked off, two blocks north and a street over, to Miss Crawford’s Dress Shop. I don’t know how I ended up there instead of one of the cheaper shops across the street, like Smart & Thrifty or Mangles. I couldn’t afford to buy from Crawford’s. The cheapest thing there was fifty dollars. And that’s what I paid for the pale green batiste dress with the ecru lace insert from bust to waist and the too-scooped neck. The kind of dress you can wear once and look good in, then have to hang in your closet because it’s so recognizable.

The dress was soft. I charged it. Ten dollars down and ten a month, for four months, out of my grocery money. We couldn’t afford it. I couldn’t tell P.W. and I thought we might starve. All for Sibyl. I was glad Mrs. Crawford didn’t sell houses. That sweet old lady, all gussied up and with a proper southern accent. She knew of Daddy and Mama, asked about them and everybody else in Little Town, and practically made me take the dress. “On approval,” she said. Same thing as charge. I was beautiful in it, so rich, rich for a day.

#

Sunday morning, I had no trouble—knew I wouldn’t—convincing P.W. that I’d had that old thing a long time. I couldn’t stand to look at myself in the mirror behind our bedroom door: I looked good and knew I could never afford to look that good again. Going into church, my face felt hot and the nerves in my kneecaps were jumping. Competing in a beauty contest and going up to get crowned was nothing compared to parading into church on After-Easter Sunday in a brand new dress.

I sat in my usual place and turned to stare Aunt Birdie down across the aisle, and there in her place sat Sibyl in pink silk and pearls. Pale pink silk is lovely, especially with pearls. My dress was wrong for church. I had to hold my hands over the neckline to lean across the pew for a hymn book. I thought it may have worked for a country club tea—I didn’t know. The material was practical, but the design was pure Marilyn Monroe. I couldn’t wait to hang it in my closet. I’d have to leave town to wear it again.

Sibyl’s dress was classic. She’d out-silked and out-pearled me—the preacher was preaching about casting pearls before swine, and I knew what he meant.

I looked around again. If Aunt Birdie was there, I didn’t see her. I looked at Mama, who sat behind Sibyl, and Sibyl caught my eye and smiled. I didn’t care; I was through with her. I smiled sweetly and hoped nobody noticed that I’d bought a new dress. And particularly that nobody noticed we’d both bought new dresses.

I’d do without shampoo, use Ivory dish-washing detergent on my hair; cut out buying coffee, now that it was getting hot; buy dark meat of chicken instead of white—P.W. would think I was saving like his mama. The sermon ended before I could get my budget all worked out, but I knew it would take some doing and some doing without to pay off the debt. I’d never owed a dime in my life.

After we’d sang the final hymn and were dismissed with prayer, I started up the aisle to get out first. Sibyl caught my elbow, halting everybody behind me.

“I like your dress,” she said, drawing everybody’s attention to me.

* * * * *

PART TWO

* * * * *

Chapter 5

I watched as the house next door changed faces with its mistress. Painted from the bottom, up, it grew in hues of red, like a blush. Ranch-russet, the house co-ordinated with the cypress corral where hoof prints had churned the grass to a raw earth circle. A new stable—stained neutral to speed up the aged-lumber effect—boarded horses of chestnut and bay and charmed the air with an aroma of sawdust and manure. At the start of the dirt road, a sign hung from a wagon wheel announcing SHARPE’S STABLES.

In keeping with the image of the place, Sibyl bought a whole wardrobe of western wear: pearl-buttoned shirts in a range of pastels, with hats and britches to match, accenting her oaky complexion. Even Robert Dale, who served primarily as ferrier and stable boy, dressed the part, awkward in tooled leather boots.

But Sibyl appeared to have been born on a ranch, competently trotting her bay stallion about the grounds a couple of times a week. Punk, backwoods-wily but not bright, gained the privilege of exercising the spirited stallion on Sibyl’s off days, and his shouts of “gee” and “ha” carried on the still summer air like a crazed farmer’s wrangling with a mule. The confused horse would stall, then trot on, tolerating Punk’s jockey-like stance. Punk’s wild eyes never left the point between the horse’s ears, as he clutched the reins with the mane and jostled round and round the round corral and up and down the road, fresh-graded by the county road crew at Sibyl’s command.

One evening, while I was out in my yard, he stopped on his way up the road to talk. I bragged on his riding and he shined his gold-capped teeth. “I ruther run up on a rattlesnake in the turtentine woods,” he said. “Miss Earlene, see can’t Mr. P.W. give me something to do.” The horse birred a horsefly away, whipping its sable tail to its flanks. “Whoa!” Punk said, glancing back at the barn built just over the landline between our houses. “I done wore out waiting on her. See this hoss?”

“Yeah,” I said and squinted up at his face, black and slick as a Mudcat’s.

“Well, he gone run right out from under me one of these days, and I’s gone be a dead man.”

“Naw,” I said. “Look how sweet he is.” The horse nuzzled my left hand with its rubbery black nose as I stroked its withers with the right.

“He ain’t no sweet hoss, Miss Earlene,” Punk said. “Sometimes me and him go round and round in the barn, then he ups and kicks me. I kicks him back. Now do you blame me?” He looked ready to cry, his puffed lips quivering like the suede coat of the horse. “I done told Mr. Robert Dale. I told him I ain’t no hand with hosses. He say do like Miss Sibyl say do or go on.” Absently, he pleated the reins as though crafting something.

“Law, Miss Earlene!” he said, pausing to look back at the barn again and the saddle screaked in protest. “She ain’t no normal white at all. Ask Mae. Mae say she ain’t no more a-dying than us is. Say she too lowdown mean to die!”

“Punk!” I scolded. He jerked and the horse pranced to the other side of the road.

“Ha!” he hollered.

I followed and caught the bridle, stroking the horses face between its gelled brown eyes, and it settled like sand in water.

“You seed what he done, Miss Earlene, now do I lie? I gotta get off that place before her or this hoss one kill me dead.” He hung fast to the mane and gave control of the horse over to me.

“I’ll tell P.W. soon as he gets in,” I said, knowing P.W. wouldn’t hire him away from Robert Dale. And if either of them heard Punk talking that way—black man to white woman about another white woman—I didn’t know what they might do.

“Punk!” yelled Sibyl-in-blue from the barn door. “Are you coming or going?”

“I’s coming, Miss Sibyl,” he called. “I done gone. I done rid him away down the end of the road and back, shore have.”

I hadn’t spoken to Sibyl for weeks, not since the Easter-dress episode, and my life was once again simple and contained. She was at her house and I was at mine, and separated by our landline we were getting along.

Punk cut the horse in a wide swatch on the trackless road, and the horse pranced backwards, as though gathering momentum for a wild canter to the barn. Then they were off, like a rock from a slingshot, up the road toward the highway.

“Ha!” Punk yelled.

“Punk!” Sibyl shouted, her voice traveling in two-syllable waves. “Stop running him, Punk!”

“He running his ownself,” Punk hollered, latching to the mane with his shirt flapping on his back.

Her long legs scissored across the yard as the horse thundered past the crescent of oaks and along the stretch of vine-draped gums that turned with the branch. Tailing the horse up the road, in its spun dust, she grabbed at her hat, then let go, and it scuttled like a possum to the left ditch.

I ran behind, sucking dust. My eyes felt peppered. Then in a pinkish powdery roll, I stumbled over Punk and tumbled with him to the deep carved ditch.

“I’s dead, I’s dead,” he moaned. His sharp kneecaps were poking in my back, and as I turned to get up, I fell on top of him, one palm grafted on his squirming face. I straddled him to get up and noticed he was clutching his left shoulder, so I felt along the knob of his fleshless bone for a break. His face was a solid grimace, his teeth glinting, his lids squinched.

“Punk,” I said, shaking him, “you’re ok.”

He took it as a question. “Nome, I’s a dead man. That hoss done kill me.” He opened his eyes and, shocked as by light, he closed them again, moaning and cowering beneath his cocked arm. I looked back and saw Sibyl trotting toward us, leading the stallion. “Sibyl’s got him, Punk,” I said, as you would to a child to comfort and dismiss him. I brushed the caked clay from Punk’s clothes and stood up.

Sibyl stopped before the ditch, with the horse stamping to a stand-still, her hair wild and her face the honest grayish cast of a sick person. She slapped the reins from her right to left hand, landed in the ditch and brought her right hand back, zinging through the air, across Punk’s face. He fell the short distance he had risen and began crying, hideous choking sobs. A child’s cry through a man’s mouth.

“Crazy good-for-nothing!” she screamed down at him. “What if my horse had been hit by a car? Huh? You got ten-thousand dollars to pay for a horse with?”

“Nome,” he whimpered. He peeped at me with a look of I-told-you-so, and Sibyl seemed to see me for the first time.

She turned and stroked the horse, walking around its blown-up belly to examine its muscled flanks. “It’s a wonder he didn’t break a leg, poor thing.”

Punk scampered along the ditch, carved sharp as stone, picked up her hat, crawled out and handed it to her.

She flapped it on her sleek britches. “I’m gone see to it that you pay for this when Robert Dale gets in,” she said and set the hat on her head.

Punk stepped back. “I ain’t got but the ten dollars Mr. Robert Dale give me day before yesterday.” She glared at him, clapping her hands to her waist.

“She’s not talking about money, Punk,” I spoke up, “not this time.” Blood charged in my ears like the hiss of locusts in the bullous vines.

“If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face,” she said in a voice rimed with contempt, still looking at Punk.

“I ain’t say no more,” said Punk, mesmerized by the reins she held like a whip.

“I don’t see Robert Dale Sharpe beating on nobody,” I said.

“If I was you I’d tend to my own business.” She turned to face me.

“I was trying to catch your horse.” “Well, looked to me like you were rubbing all over Punk.” She said it in such crosstones of calm and fire that I thought I might have misunderstood, then smiling, she flipped the reins from hand to hand. And anybody passing would have thought we were having a neighborly chat, there in the middle of the road, except that her eyes were wild. I could feel mine wild too.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” I said, matching her calm. But deep-down we both knew what was meant and felt and apt to be said and we’d either have to drop it or part, and we couldn’t do that either: we were bound by time and geography, by unseen things that link, by death. After all, she’d come here to die.

While we stood, anchored in our tracks, Punk mumbled and skirted the blameless stallion, and wagged his head. Still, Sibyl and I locked gazes, hearing him in concert with the tree frogs cheeping at Bony Branch. Finally I broke free, pinpointing the horse, Punk, a tree, for balance, like a spinning ballerina who otherwise would fall. “I’ve got to fix supper,” I said, and then I moved and my equilibrium went.

We were into hard stuff now and the Easter-dress fuss was nothing.

#

I cooked supper early because I’d said I would. All those saving mundanes I’d thought kept me sane made my nerves slide. I couldn’t carry a bowl from the table to the sink. I broke one into a million pieces, and P.W., waiting at the kitchen table, eyed me curiously. I told him I might be coming down with flu, but I didn’t tell him what had happened: if he hadn’t caught on about the Easter dress, he probably wouldn’t understand this. No, that wasn’t right. Sibyl’s remark about me and Punk was in an altogether different category. It made me crazy it was so dangerous. And what if I’d taken her wrong? All through supper, I’d thought about it and after supper I thought about it some more. Punk was right, she was crazy, but it was a foxy kind of crazy that set you off-course, and I had no natural bent or practice for countering her wiles. And Punk? Poor Punk!

“Punk Seymore rode up on Robert Dale’s horse today and told me to ask you for a job,” I said—pure reaction. I couldn’t even say Sibyl’s horse.

“Thought he’d been promoted to yardboy over yonder.” P.W. chewed on a toothpick while he worked on the carburetor from his forty-eight Ford. The car part, steel-gray and reeking of gasoline, was scattered on newspapers on our kitchen table. “Well, between me and you and the gatepost, I ain’t got nothing for him to do,” he said, probing with a screwdriver into the heart of the dead steel. “Hand me that phillipshead, sweetie.”

I passed him a screwdriver from the confusion of tools and sat beside him.

Katydids shrieked outside the window, and what Sibyl had said about me rubbing all over Punk strained with the sounds into my head. I felt cut off from P.W. by my secret. Why would she dare say something like that? Was she ignorant to what it meant? Did she think I’d forget it? No. She’d said it expecting me to overlook it because she was dying.

Rubbing all over somebody was a common enough accusation among white trash. Rubbing all over a man, a woman got raped. Rubbing all over a black man, she got run out of town and he got hung from the nearest oak.

Rubbing all over Punk: I can’t say that thought didn’t cross my mind, how bad it felt, how wrong, what it looked like. It did. I thought about it, just as Sibyl had, and I felt sick. But at the time I’d felt for broken bones and brushed dirt from his clothes without thinking—it was the human thing to do. I could still feel his skin, feverishly dry and impure, and I shuddered like I would if I’d touched a snake.

#

Sibyl’s next move came swiftly. As my cuckoo clock stroked off ten mechanical bleeps the next morning, she knocked on my door.

P.W. had left me asleep, and I woke up addled by the mix of birdcalls and rapping. Something behind all the fuss lay heavy, like a wet quilt up to my eyes. Sunlight spread across my bed, with dust squiggles sifting from the shadowy white ceiling. Nothing had changed and yet everything had. I waited for the racket to stop, for good old common sense to take hold.

P.W. had given me the cuckoo clock for a wedding present and I took turns hating and loving the dummy bird with its fake feathered head. It now burped a final dead cuckoo! as if it had given up trying to wake lazy me, but the rapping on the door still vibrated the whole house. You could walk across the floor and the windows shook.

The haze in my head cleared, and images of yesterday zoomed into focus, every word Sibyl had said was like the tinkling of a bell. The whole scene with the horse played out in my head on my way to the door. I was new again, glowing with the fresh outlook mornings always brought. No flu, no wooliness. Punk was in his place, I was in mine. Safe in the afterjar of danger.

“Just a minute!” I called, going back for one of P.W.’s shirts to slip over my nightie. I opened the door and stuck my head out to find Sibyl standing on the doorsteps, competing with the sun in a peach-colored outfit.

“I thought I’d never wake you up,” she drawled, laughing and rubbing her knuckles. The veins on her hands were strutted and bluish.

I clutched the door, started to slam it, but didn’t. What was left to say?

“Listen,” she bagan, sliding her fingers into the pockets of her skinny peach pants. “I’m giving a little cookout for the young people from church tonight. What’cha call it...the BTU? And I need you to help out. I told Brother Travis we’d do it together. Seems like there’s nothing for young people to do around here but get in trouble, hanging around the cafe.”

I could feel my face slide from sleep-fresh to fuzzy as she went on about what we had to do that day. So far, I could still credit myself with not having given in to her—I hadn’t said a word yet. But as she droned on, shifting on her spotless boots, I knew I was lost. She was as pure as the murmur of morning. It was like beholding a holy radiance and thinking of turning away when she said, “I don’t know if anybody told you yet, but I don’t have long to live.”

She said it to explain, I supposed, as if dying was the most reasonable reason for anybody’s bad behavior. No apologies. She stood there in the promise of death, beautiful and sure, with those hunched shoulders her only flaw, her only clue to being as vulnerable as anybody else. “What time?” I asked, thinking of Easter because I’d just spied the first jonquil that had resurrected during the night.

“We need to get started early. About two,” she said, her voice taking on that quality of authority which was strongest in her palette of shades.

I closed the door and dashed P.W.’s shirt to a chair. “My God! What am I doing?” I picked up the shirt again and took it to the kitchen, drew a sink full of water and dunked it.

P.W.’s good white shirt, his only white shirt. I’d used too much Clorox and failed to rinse it out, then ironed it. A scorched brand of the iron showed below the back yoke: proof of my general slack. I hoped his mama never saw it. Now, when he went to church and funerals he had to keep on his wool suit coat—his only suit—hot or not. My face flamed thinking about the dress in our closet, in plain view because I’d said it was old, the price tag buried in the last of our coffee grounds at the bottom of the garbage. If I’d only left the price tag on and tucked it down the sleeve to wear the dress to church, I could have taken it back—the approval plan—and wouldn’t have had to pay for it, and I could have bought P.W. a new shirt, maybe even a suit, for what the dress had cost. But I couldn’t have claimed I’d never worn the dress with a straight face. Why did I always have to do what was right, not what was sensible? I scrubbed at the scorched place and it looked darker wet.