Wolf Whistle (2 page)

Mr. Archer warned all children, grades K through Six, against improper activities in the restrooms, including cussing, smoking, loitering, writing cocksucker on the walls, and standing behind stall doors with a friend.

He led the Pledge of Allegiance, announced the annual airplane turkey drop, gave the date of the next P.T.A. meeting, and said that teachers would be sending home
reminders to parents of the Rainbow Tea scheduled for later in the year and that he hoped many would volunteer to help out.

Finally it was time to leave. The weather was not perfect, but it was not terrible yet, either. A strong wind had come up and there were low clouds and a threat of rain. The trees were as bare as skeletons, a little unearthly for so early in the Mississippi autumn.

Fifteen children, little white boys and white girls, followed Alice in a single, wavery line, out the big front doors and down the front sidewalk and across Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, in the direction of Balance Due, where their friend was consumed by fire.

Alice made a game of their walking. “We are a snake,” she said, and the children weaved down the walk and caused their single-file line to wriggle like a snake.

They cut down an alley and took a shortcut behind McNeer's Grocery, where Mrs. McNeer, who had once owned a gorilla, kept a big cage with iron bars.

Alice raised her right arm as she walked, and fifteen children's right arms lifted up as well. Dogs barked from behind fences as they passed.

Alice raised her left arm, then, and fifteen left arms raised up. Her arms swayed, and their arms swayed like slender trees. They danced this silent dance along the wide sidewalks.

They passed Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro., which was a bootleg whiskey store that sometimes kept a loaf of bread and a can of Vienna sausages on the shelves, and Alice looked inside and saw her Uncle Runt there, through the screened door, drinking from a pint of Old Crow. Blues singers were tuning up on the front porch to sing Robert Johnson tunes.

Alice and the children kept on, down the graveled streets, into Balance Due.

A skinny yellow dog dragged a saddlebag full of harmonicas down the street in its teeth.

At the front stoop of the Greggs' house, the line of children broke up, and they moved uncertainly about for a moment, and then they stood clumped together, shy and embarrassed. Alice yanked open the dreadful screened door and knocked with her knuckles against the wood.

Mrs. Gregg opened the door, a tiny, dark little person with a pointy nose and pointy chin. She might have been made of pipe cleaners, she was so thin.

When she spoke, there was a tinny nasality, but, surprisingly, no trace of a stammer. The absence of a stammer was the first thing Alice noticed. Mrs. Gregg said, “Here is the fourth grade! Here is the fourth grade! Right at our front door!”

Mrs. Gregg called back into the house for her own children.
“Dougie and Wanda, and all you children, Wayne and Gresham, too!”

They were all ages, the Greggs, when they emerged from the tiny, dumpy recesses of the little house, which smelled suspiciously of petroleum. Wanda, the only girl among them, was fifteen. She was beautiful. Her breasts were full. There was a small scar on her upper lip. Alice wondered why she was not in school.

The others were much younger. Gresham was still in diapers. Dougie and Wayne were not old enough for kindergarten. All of them were pretty, with dark, bright eyes and sidelong grins.

The oddest thing was, Mrs. Gregg was talking. Not just talking, she was yakking up a storm.

She talked about the weather. She talked about the local arrow-catching team, its prospects for the playoffs. She said that she had a black cat that was too shy to come out to meet strangers. She apologized for the meagerness of her home. She hoped the children were not frightened by the condition of the neighborhood, the rubbish and ruined lives.

She asked each of the children to tell her their names, and she made much of each, as if each were especially pretty or interesting. She commented on the children's heights and smiles and clothes. She asked them which subjects they liked best in school and whether they kept pets or had hobbies.

She spoke of more astonishing things, of the difficulty of having a physical handicap, the stammer that she had so recently been silenced by, the loneliness, alienation, the shock of being so afflicted in adulthood.

Then, if that were not amazing enough, she told of marrying young, of her disappointment in marriage, of never having danced with her husband, or any man. She told of her failed dreams of romance and the joyless mechanics of sex.

The fourth graders fell in love with Mrs. Gregg. Alice did, as well.

When Mrs. Gregg spoke, winter scenes, unlike anything Alice had ever actually observed in tropical Mississippi, appeared before Alice's mind's eye. Snow fell through forest trees. One-horse open sleighs jingled along country roads. Chestnuts roasted on open fires. City sidewalks were dressed in holiday decorations. Little hooves clattered upon rooftops. Corncob pipes and button noses would not be suppressed. Toyland Towns rose up around the base of conifers.

On and on Mrs. Gregg talked, and as she did Alice found herself irresistibly drawn to burst into holiday song.

Mrs. Gregg told of the progressive tyranny of her husband, the sarcasm and mockery and intrusions into her smallest privacies. Whenever she spoke on the phone with a
friend, Mr. Gregg interrupted to ask who she was speaking to. Finally she had no friends.

He mocked her hill accent, and the color and texture of her hair, her thinness, her height and small breasts, the poor clothes she wore.

And then one day she realized that she was having difficulty speaking. It was a funny thing at first. Even Mrs. Gregg thought so.

She began to speak in clichés. Scarcely a sentence came out of her mouth that was not a cliché. “A penny saved is a penny earned,” she found herself saying, often without relevance. “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” She seemed to have no thought that was her own.

Who could fail to listen? Not Alice. No one at all, not the wiggliest rascal-child gathered in this poor shack took an eye off of Mrs. Gregg. Some of the children reverted to thumbsucking and hair-twisting and speaking in baby-talk. One cried, one wet his pants. But not one child lost interest. They were fascinated. A low, quiet music of humming could be heard, a sentimental silence of carols and holiday tunes.

Mrs. Gregg continued her strange story. The clichés multiplied, she said. She found herself speaking a dead language, she said.

And then something else happened.

The clichés began to overlap. “Don't cross your bridges before they hatch,” she said one day. “A bird in the hand gathers no moss.”

When this began to happen, she said, Mr. Gregg's rage at her increased. He threatened her; he called her a bitch, a slut, a whore, a cunt.

The children's eyes were enormous. They trembled in fear. They broke into sudden, spontaneous choruses of “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!”

She became a hostage, she said. Every mixed cliché endangered her life, and yet she could not stop. “I'm smiling from end to ear.” “The worm is on the other foot.” “It's so quiet you could hear a mouse drop.”

Mr. Gregg began now in earnest to beat her, she said. He bruised her arms, he pushed her down, he knocked out her front teeth with his fist.

It was then, she said, that she lost the power of speech altogether.

Alice said, “But you have it now! You have such beautiful speech!”

Mrs. Gregg said, “Santa Claus comes tonight.”

Alice said, “Mrs. Gregg, please!”

What happened next explained many things to Alice, though when it was over even she had a hard time believing it had really occurred. In fact, later in life, Alice often doubted her memory of even the most important details
of her own existence, history, and experience, especially her heart filled with hope when she left the Normal, in love with Dr. Dust, let alone this small interim in another family's home.

Much later, when Alice was an old woman, she thought back on this year when she lived with Uncle Runt and Aunt Fortunata, and of the dance she danced with a group of children in a snaky line through snaky lands, of her young love of her professor at the Normal, and the dream that she and Mrs. Dust might somehow, someday, trade places and then be friends, and of the rain-swept Delta, of the poor tarpaper shack and the newspaper-covered walls of her Uncle Runt and Aunt Fortunata, the speechless parrot that lived in a cage in her uncle's house, her year as a schoolteacher, the Get Well Cards Project, the holiday music, the injured child. Even to herself, the memory was improbable.

When she told these tales as an old woman, no one believed her, not even the description of the stammering and stuttering of a pipe-cleaner woman, the impoverishment and pain of so many. “Oh, Alice, you exaggerate everything!” her friends said, these years later, her family, even the children, now all grown up, who had danced behind her in a line. “Oh, Alice, you are just the funniest thing!”

And yet Alice was sure of what Mrs. Gregg told her. She thought if Dr. Dust would just leave his wife, or at least
answer his phone, then he would believe her, too. She said
I love you I love you I love you
into her pillow at night for many years, and into the chests of many naked men as well, and always it was only Dr. Dust.

Mrs. Gregg said, “Glenn poured gasoline, Glenn poured gasoline, right on his daddy's bed; he was trying to burn up his daddy, when he burned up hisself instead.”

Now Alice understood. By thinking of the tune “Here Comes Santa Claus” Mrs. Gregg could speak without stammering. With that tune in her head, she could say anything. Santa Claus had broken her chains and set her free.

Alice was born again. She saw the ancient star rise over Bethlehem. She saw shepherds abiding, flocks and myrrh and miracles in the dunes. She saw what was unimaginable, classrooms in the swamp with black faces and white faces together, singing, “Jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton.” She saw children holding hands with grownups, black and white, singing “We Shall Overcome” in long lines and in churches. She saw a church bombed in Montgomery, dead children, marchers in Selma, freedom riders in Jackson. She saw bombs flying over the miraculous desert, Baghdad burning, Emmett Till dead, Medgar Evers dead, Martin King, the little blue figure of her own stillborn child, years hence, herself an abandoned child as well, names, faces, geographies not yet known to her, for in the
extremity of her pain and need, linear time disappeared and became meaningless, blood running alongside lost hope in the streets of many nations.

Alice suddenly knew she would never see Dr. Dust again, or only once more, to prove something, to prove that love is a cruel dream, and not worth the pain and that we are, all of us, alone.

Alice said, “Oh God. Oh my God.”

I
N THE
next room, little Glenn Gregg was lying in an iron bed with a thin mattress. The room had been painted since the fire, but black traces of it still streaked the ceiling, and all these months later the room still smelled like a furnace.

The bed was the only piece of furniture. An electric cord with an exposed light bulb at the end of it hung from the center of the ceiling. The burned child would never recover, this much was clear immediately, and for the first time. Glenn Gregg would soon be dead if he was lucky.

Alice and the children followed Mrs. Gregg into Glenn's bedroom. The bandages were gone. Glenn's face and arms and bare little chest were visible above the crisp sheets. He was unrecognizable as himself, or even as a child. His scars were like taut ropes. His hair was gone, everything. His eyes were wide open because the lids had been burned away. His teeth were white and prominent as a skeleton's, because he had no lips.

Mrs. Gregg touched a white cotton handkerchief to the mucousy hole that had been his nose. She took a bottle of eye wash from her pocket and applied a few drops to each eye.

There was nothing to say. Alice and the class stood for a while in silence.

All around the little bedroom, Scotch-taped to the walls, were the Get Well cards that the children had made. The sunny colors, bright fires, the kind sentiments, the bees that sang “buzz buzz” from the yellow petals of crayon flowers.
Get Well Soon, Glenn Gregg.

After this, everyone moved out of the room, silent, shuffling. No one spoke.

Then Wanda Gregg, the fifteen-year-old sister, said to Alice, “I'm getting married.”

They were standing in the bare, poor living room now. Glenn's breathing was ragged behind them.

What could anyone say?

Alice said, “Well, that's fine. That's just fine, Wanda.”

Wanda said, “He advertised for a wife in the personals in the
Memphis Press-Scimitar.”

Alice said, “Is he—is he older than you?”

Wanda said, “He's forty-something. He has a cattle ranch in Missouri. That's what he says, anyway.”

Alice said, “These things work out, Wanda. He will love you.”

Wanda said, “I'd have to go in any case.”

Alice said, “Oh, Wanda.”

Wanda said, “Well, thank you for coming to see Glenn. It was nice meeting you.”

The Greggs stood on the porch and waved.

The schoolchildren formed their single line behind Alice. They wound through the gravel streets of Balance Due. The bottle trees, the woodsmoke, the boy with a pistol and an apple and the crying girl, the Nazi voodoo woman, Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro., and all the rest.

They did not speak. They did not dance. They made their way back towards Arrow Catcher Elementary School, where they would move through the hours together in safety, in silence, before it was time to go back to their homes.

It was still early in the day, not quite noon. The rain had started now. Alice thought of Wanda Gregg and the rancher in Missouri who was waiting for her, forty-something. She saw pastures filled with horses, salt licks on fence posts, troughs of water, mangers of dusty oats. A child tied to a dying farmer.