by Alice Walker
When he considered his wife’s poor health, which he did in some tight lonely hours, her boniness, her rotted teeth (and those knocked out by him and the two coated in gold by a dentist who assumed she wanted glittering gold), he could not face what he could remember of how she had been. Round and plump, a mouth of pure white when open—he and they had robbed her of her smile. Now, when she guffawed hoarsely at some tiny joke, corralling the slight intensity of the funny to her innermost heart, he could see himself reflected in the twin mirrors of her eyeteeth; and he wanted one dark gigantic stroke, from himself and not the sky, to blot her out.
28
WHAT A SLY and triumphant joy he felt when she could no longer keep her job. She was ill; the two pregnancies he forced on her in the new house, although they did not bear live fruit, almost completely destroyed what was left of her health. Yet, how sad he was somewhere inside that he should still be strong and free to rove about while she spent so much time nursing her feet, attending her children’s colds, trying to reassure them they would not have to move back to the country because she could still find work in town. But it was hopeless, her dream for herself and for them was slipping away. She had tried so hard, and even her husband, she thought, had started to respect her again. She didn’t ask herself if she loved him. They were at a kind of peace; in the house in town he no longer struck her. The children went to school with happy faces. The baby was trained on an indoor commode.
All of her confidence wore away with her health as Brownfield watched, gloating and waiting. She could not believe he had planned it. She thought he had behaved well, considering everything, which was what he wanted her to think, until he was ready to reveal the plot to her. And then there came the day when she could not even get out of bed to look for work.
It had been raining for several days. Mem had tried every day to find something, anything, in factory, shop or kitchen. But perhaps the employers thought she looked too thin, probably tuberculous, and would not hire her. Each day she had come home beat.
The children took their cue from her silence, and they, sooner than she, knew the danger of their father’s rising to rule them again now that their mother was sick. And sure enough, on this day, while Mem coughed and shivered, the blow fell.
“Why ain’t the heat on?” she wheezed, when Brownfield came home from work.
“’Cause ain’t nobody paid the bill.”
“Well, why ain’t you paid it?”
“’Cause it’s your house, you pay the damn bills.”
Mem groaned and turned her face to the wall. Ruth walked over to her and tried to play patti-cake with her face, but her mother pushed her away. She had turned the color of ashes, as if she’d seen a ghost.
“But you got a duty too,” she told her husband. “You can’t just let these children freeze to death.”
“The rent ain’t paid either.” He began taking all his clothes from the chifforobe behind his wife’s bed.
“How long?” All of their eyes were upon him, frightened, frozen as if he held the lungs that controlled their breathing.
“Since you bought all that medicine and spent all that money that you ought not have on you and the kids. I reckon that been two months ago.” And then he pulled his trump. From his pocket he drew an eviction notice, flung it on the bed. “You read so damn good maybe you can tell me what all this here’s about.”
His wife picked up the eviction notice and read it through, trembling. Horrified, pale, weak, she looked at her husband packing his clothes.
“What you doing?”
“Gitting ready to move out.”
“But—move! She looked around at their smart little house and the things she was buying on time. She looked at the clean blue walls, the polished wood floor, the window sills full of evergreens.
“But where can we move? We ain’t made no plans. Why didn’t you pay the rent? You make enough money.” Then, “We was sick, we all had flu; that’s how come I spent all the money last month.” She was becoming hysterical; the girls sat along the side of the bed, in a cloud of her VapoRub, but she was not mindful of them. “Where in the world do you expect us to move now?” she asked again, weakly, pathetically, trying to show strength she no longer had.
“Why,” he said, and sniggered in spite of himself, “can’t you make one of your eddicated guesses? We going to move over on Mr. J. L.’s place!”
It was like an overwhelmingly bad dream, and Mem fainted and was loaded half conscious into the cab of the truck that came to move them. She had no chance to pack, to cover her things from the weather, to say good-bye to her house. She was too weak to argue when the friends he got to help him move broke her treasured dishes, tore her curtains, dragged the girls’ dresses through the mud.
They arrived at the house he had reserved for her “come down” in the middle of the night, and even his skin prickled at the sight of it. Mr. J. L. had promised that someone would Clean it out, but it was still half full of wet hay. There were no panes in the windows, only wooden shutters. Rain poured into all three of the small rooms, and there was no real floor, only tin, like old roofing, spread out to keep the bottom of the hay bales from getting soggy.
“Git out, git out, this is your new home!” Brownfield shouted. They acted afraid to touch the ground. The house was not far from the highway, but there was a darkness about it, a crippled abandoned look.
“No—I can’t.” Mem drew back from his hands but fainted again. When she awoke she found herself stretched out between her girls on the hay, with all her newly acquired furniture stacked haphazardly around her. Brownfield had gone back to town with his friends and the girls said they had had to struggle hard to make the friends give them all the furniture. Brownfield had been intent on giving it away, they said.
29
“I DONE WAITED a long time for you to come down, Missy,” he said when he came home, reeking of alcohol for the first time in almost three years. “This is what I can afford and this is what you going to have to make do with. See how you like me holding the upper hand!” He was enjoying himself in a sort of lunatic way.
“You was going to have your house, straight and narrow and painted and scrubbed, like white folks. You was going to do this, you was going to do that. Shit,” he said, “you thought I fucked you ’cause I wanted it? Josie better than you ever been. Your trouble is you just never learned how not to git pregnant. How long did you think you could keep going with your belly full of childrens?” He stood glowering down at her. There was no electricity in the house, but it was nearly morning and they could see enough of each other to know that Brownfield’s mask was decidedly off.
“Miss high-’n-mighty, you come down off your high horse now,” he could not help giggling, she was so incapable of doing anything.
“You come down off your high horse now,” he said laughing out loud, thinking how she looked like she was going to die.
“Brownfteld, I’m sick,” said Mem, “but I ain’t going to ask you for mercy and I ain’t going to die and leave my children. Even in this weather you brought me out in I ain’t going to catch pneumonia. I’m going to git well again, and git work again, and when I do I’m going to leave you.”
“Ain’t no stopping you, is it? You a real red-hot ball of fire, ain’t you!” He continued to laugh. “You skeleton,” he said, stopping in the middle of a laugh and gazing at her from under his hat, “you can’t do nothing but lay up there and moan. And if you could get your ugly ass up I wouldn’t let you go nowhere, make a fool out of me, have people laughing at me!”
“You really think you can stop me?” she asked, knowing her children trembled at her saying anything that might provoke him.
“I’ll stop you,” he said, looking over at something that was covered in plastic.
“You can’t stop much with a gun.”
“I can stop everything for you, Bitch. I can stop you!”
Daphne whimpered, Ornette cried, Ruth alone merely looked on with all the bewilderme
nt and disgust of a small child. The three girls did not know their father. They too thought him capable of change. They thought he had changed. They thought it had been a matter of less work, fewer worries, gas heat and electric lighting. They had misjudged him because they were so young and because they knew nothing of most of his persistent memories. They saw now only that they had made a mistake; and knew their father was not so much changed as changeable. He could put on a front to fool the trusting.
“You know what,” piped Ruth seriously from behind her blanket-covered bale of hay. Her father turned away from them; Daphne tried to shush her. “Hey, I say do you know what,” she said again loudly, in her best fearless voice, though the pit of her stomach quivered. Her father turned toward her. She was his youngest, barely four. “You nothing but a sonnabit,” she said, and quickly covered herself with her blanket so she wouldn’t feel the first really hard blows Brownfield ever gave her.
30
AT THIS HOUSE, the only one of her father’s choices she would ever recall with any degree of clarity, Ruth saw the comings and goings of her fourth and fifth and sixth birthdays. When she was five she began school, tagging along each morning with Daphne and Ornette. J. L.’s house—her mother always said to friends who had never visited them at their new location, “We haves that old house of Mr. J. L.’s”—was a place of icy kitchen water buckets in winter, and in summer flashing rainstorms uncovered sharp bits of colored glass in the back yard along with pieces of rusty tin and fragments of scarred linoleum. In the summer the house gave off a quiet hot musty smell and hum, like droning flies, and the air around it was full of motes thrown up from the trampled dust of dung and rotting hay.
There was a spring down the hill behind the house where they got their water; a little beyond it was a pigpen. The wild grass grew high beside the woodpile, near which leaned an ancient corncrib gray with weather and full of old plowshares and funnels and dried horse liniment in motley green bottles with tattered rag stoppers. Dozens of sharecropping families had lived in the house and had left their various odors of sweat, hogslop and discomfort deep in its rotting wood.
Daphne and Ornette found J. L.’s house unbearable and complained all the time with their eyes. It was a great fall for them, after the house in town, to have to tote water up to the house from the spring and suffer through muddy trips to the odorous outhouse when it rained. They had thought such days gone forever. Being little more than a baby, Ruth was less stricken by the move, although she knew it made her mother unhappy and therefore hated it. But there was much in the straw field behind the house to occupy her. And she enjoyed the cool greenness of the ferns and water lilies that grew beside the crayfish-inhabited spring.
Daphne was nine when they moved into J. L.’s house and Ornette was eight. The big gap between Ornette’s age and Ruth’s was because of the babies that had died. When Ruth was four Mem became pregnant again, and for a brief time afterward there was a baby in the house. Daphne and Ornette liked to hold him in their arms for Ruth to see. Daphne, always the inventive one, made up stories about the baby’s future. He would be a doctor, she said, and run a big hospital in town, and marry one, maybe two (if the first one didn’t work out) of his nurses. He was small and still and gray. Ruth thought he looked more like a possum than a child. He curled himself in sleep and, with his grayish red-rimmed eyes and the yellowish fuzz of his hair, which was more white than yellowish, he seemed a phantom baby, not the real thing. Ruth could never imagine him becoming anything. She could not even imagine that he would eventually grow on the food he was fed, much as she herself had grown. His cry was a thin pitiful thing. Nevertheless, in moments of small loneliness, when Daphne and Ornette claimed she was too much a baby to play with them, Ruth contemplated having a tough bouncy little brother to play with and perhaps to boss around. In the main, though, it was hard to tell he was in the house he was so quiet. He slept a great deal. They did not miss him very much when he died. Daphne and Ornette cried and whispered between themselves that somehow the baby had frozen to death because when they saw him lying dead he was all blue. But with school and play and the routine of living in J. L.’s house, the pale little brother was rapidly forgotten.
After his death Mem took a job that kept her away from home all day. She became a maid in a house in town. Ruth could not really understand why her mother left her again. When they had lived in town she had had her fill of being left with strange women, big snuff users with dusty bosoms and thin nervous girls with no prospects who were short with her. Daphne told her that Mem worked so that one day they would be able to leave the county, leave Georgia and leave Brownfield. Ruth did not know about the first two, but the idea of leaving her father pleased her.
Daphne knew more than Ornette. She called herself the Copeland Family Secret Keeper. What this meant was that at every opportunity she talked about how Brownfield had played with her when she was little. How he had bought her candy. How he had swung her up in his arms. How he had sung and danced for her. Ornette and Ruth were jealous of her memories and appropriated them for themselves. Daphne s memories of Brownfield as doting father became theirs, although the Brownfield they pretended to remember had no relation (except for Daphne) to the one they knew. To “remember” Daddy when he was good became their favorite game. When Brownfield overheard Ornette babbling to Ruth about some extraordinary kindness he had done her (“he bought me a dress” or “he fixed my dolly”) he did not think anything of it except that Ornette was going to turn out to be an incorrigible liar. They knew he did not understand their game and that made it all the more fun; their “good” daddy would have understood, they said, which proved Brownfield was nothing compared with him.
Daphne was more forgiving than Ornette. Her temper became murderous only when Brownfield abused Mem. When Brownfield beat Daphne she tried to endure it by keeping her mind a perfect though burning blank. She tried so hard to retain some love for him, perhaps because of her memories of an earlier time, that she became very nervous. She jumped at the slightest noise or movement. Because she was so jumpy Brownfield teased her and called her names. He told her she was stupid and crazy. He swore at her, called her Daffy instead of Daphne, and pinched her sides until they bruised. Through it all she bravely stood, seeking to hide her trembling as best she could. She despised the house because it was impossible to clean and because she, more than Ruth or Ornette, had some idea of the struggle Brownfield had forced upon Mem. She hated it because it was cold in winter and she could never get warm; she must tremble summer and winter. Somehow she kept her feeling for her father separate from her hatred of the house. How she did it Ruth and Ornette never knew. They saw Brownfield less charitably than Daphne because they saw him only as a human devil and felt wherever he placed them would naturally be hell. They were as afraid of him as Daphne was, but in a more distant, impersonal way. He was like bad weather, a toothache, daily bad news.
Ornette was jolly most of the time. A loud, boisterous girl, sassy and full of darting rebellion. She was fat and glossy. Her skin had a luscious orange smoothness and felt like a waxed fruit. Of the three children Brownfield appeared to like her least. He thought she would grow up to be a plump, easygoing tramp and was telling her so constantly by the time she was eight. Ornette learned to toss her head at him. When she was seven she refused to go to church or to say her bedtime prayers. She had a flexible sexual vocabulary at eight and a decided interest in pussies and bowwows at nine. Her opinion of the house was that it was a barn and that only the stupidest cows lived in worse. She could not be depended upon to sweep the floor or even to pull the proper kind of straw with which to make a broom. She liked to sit in the middle of the straw field and sing rhythm-and-blues tunes she’d heard on the radio. Mem, pulling straw and binding it into brooms as she moved across the field, would listen to Ornette’s songs almost dreamily. She did not scold her. Ornette was bold with her mother, thought her a hag and of little account. She thought Mem had married beneath her and should have marri
ed instead a teacher or a mason or anybody with land of his own and a fine house. She did not respect Mem. Occasionally she stole pennies from Mem’s purse.
Mem’s grief over losing the “decent house” was not a sign around her neck. She recovered from the illness that had caused her to lose it and with grim determination attended to roof leaks and rat holes in this house. She fixed sagging shutters and cleared away the rubbish that choked the weeds in the front yard. She did not do as much work on this house as she had on the ones before it. She tried to see that it was fairly clean, or as clean as she and Daphne could make it, that it did not leak overmuch, that the rats did not stay in control of it, as they had when she and her family moved in, and dispiritedly she threw a few flower seeds in the moist rich soil around the woodpile. Never again did she intend to plant flowers in boxes or beds.
Part VII
31
WHEN RUTH STRUGGLED sleepily to open her eyes the morning of her first day at Grange’s house, the big grandfather clock on the mantel made a last clinking echo across the chilly bed and sitting room. She sniffed, for her nose felt stuffy, and snuggled into the long warm back in front of her, but that back slid gradually away from her and stood stretching by the side of the bed. She heard footsteps shuffling up to the front of the room. She sighed, blinked her eyes, and turned over. The person on the other side of her was lying snoring with her face turned toward her and her breath was onions and dandelion weeds. Ruth turned over and lay drowsily in the warmth vacated by the person who had got up. She was aware of a feeling of oddness and insecurity, as if she had been on a long journey during the night; the morning air smelled different to her somehow, and when she opened her eyes to peer over the covers she could not recall having fallen asleep in this room. She looked around. There was a chifforobe in the corner, brown wood around yellow-glazed drawers, with cut-glass handles, a stuffed sofa the color of fuchsia geraniums under the window opposite the bed; and on the wall there were several old-fashioned pictures of people in top hats with waxed mustaches and kinky though slickly pomaded hair worn with a part in the middle. One of the pictures was of an ashen, sickly looking woman who might already have been dead when her picture was made. This was a tinted drawing of Ruth’s grandmother, Grange’s first wife, Margaret.
