The huge woman turned and for a moment stood, her shoulders lifted and her face frozen with frustrated rage, and stared at Julian’s mother. Then all at once she seemed to explode like a piece of machinery that had been given one ounce of pressure too much. Julian saw the black fist swing out with the red pocketbook. He shut his eyes and cringed as he heard the woman shout, “He don’t take nobody’s pennies!” When he opened his eyes, the woman was disappearing down the street with the little boy staring wide-eyed over her shoulder. Julian’s mother was sitting on the sidewalk.
“I told you not to do that,” Julian said angrily. “I told you not to do that!”
He stood over her for a minute, gritting his teeth. Her legs were stretched out in front of her and her hat was on her lap. He squatted down and looked her in the face. It was totally expressionless. “You got exactly what you deserved,” he said. “Now get up.”
He picked up her pocketbook and put what had fallen out back in it. He picked the hat up off her lap. The penny caught his eye on the sidewalk and he picked that up and let it drop before her eyes into the purse. Then he stood up and leaned over and held his hands out to pull her up. She remained immobile. He sighed. Rising above them on either side were black apartment buildings, marked with irregular rectangles of light. At the end of the block a man came out of a door and walked off in the opposite direction. “AM right,” he said, “suppose somebody happens by and wants to know why you’re sitting on the sidewalk?”
She took the hand and, breathing hard, pulled heavily up on it and then stood for a moment, swaying slightly as if the spots of light in the darkness were circling around her. Her eyes, shadowed and confused, finally settled on his face. He did not try to conceal his irritation. “I hope this teaches you a lesson,” he said. She leaned forward and her eyes raked his face. She seemed trying to determine his identity. Then, as if she found nothing familiar about him, she started off with a headlong movement in the wrong direction.
“Aren’t you going on to the Y?” he asked.
“Home,” she muttered.
“Well, are we walking?”
For answer she kept going. Julian followed along, his hands behind him. He saw no reason to let the lesson she had had go without backing it up with an explanation of its meaning. She might as well be made to understand what had happened to her. “Don’t think that was just an uppity Negro woman,” he said. “That was the whole colored race which will no longer take your condescending pennies. That was your black double. She can wear the same hat as you, and to be sure,” he added gratuitously (because he thought it was funny), “it looked better on her than it did on you. What, all this means,” he said, “is that the old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn.” He thought bitterly of the house that had been lost for him. “You aren’t who you think you are,” he said.
She continued to plow ahead, paying no attention to him. Her hair had come undone on one side. She dropped her pocketbook and took no notice. He stooped and picked it up and handed it to her but she did not take it.
“You needn’t act as if the world had come to an end,” he said, “because it hasn’t. From now on you’ve got to live in a new world and face a few realities for a change. Buck up,” he said, “it won’t kill you.”
She was breathing fast.
“Let’s wait on the bus,” he said.
“Home,” she said thickly.
“I hate to see you behave like this,” he said. “Just like a child. I should be able to expect more of you.” He decided to stop where he was and make her stop and wait for a bus. “I’m not going any farther,” he said, stopping. “We’re going on the bus.”
She continued to go on as if she had not heard him. He took a few steps and caught her arm and stopped her. He looked into her face and caught his breath. He was looking into a face he had never seen before. “Tell Grandpa to come get me,” she said.
He stared, stricken.
“Tell Caroline to come get me,” she said.
Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again, walking as if one leg were shorter than the other. A tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him. “Mother!” he cried. “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” Crumpling, she fell to the pavement. He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying, “Mamma, Mamma!” He turned her over. Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed.
“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.
The Partridge Festival (1961)
CALHOUN parked his small pod-shaped car in the driveway to his great-aunts’ house and got out cautiously, looking to the right and left as if he expected the profusion of azalea blossoms to have a lethal effect upon him. Instead of a decent lawn, the old ladies had three terraces crammed with red and white azaleas, beginning at the sidewalk and running backwards to the very edge of their imposing unpainted house. The two of them were on the front porch, one sitting, the other standing.
“Here’s our baby;” his Aunt Bessie intoned in a voice meant to reach the other one, two feet away but deaf. It turned the head of a girl in the next yard, who sat crosslegged under a tree, reading. She raised her spectacled face, stared at Calhoun, and then returned her attention—with what he saw plainly was a smirk—to the book. Scowling, he passed stolidly on to the porch to get over the preliminaries with his aunts. They would take his voluntary presence in Partridge at Azalea Festival time to be a sign that his character was improving.
They were box-jawed old ladies who looked like George Washington with his wooden teeth in. They wore black suits with large ruffled jabots and had dead-white hair pulled back. After each had embraced him, he dropped limply into a rocker and gave them a sheepish smile. He was here only because Singleton had captured his imagination, but he had told his Aunt Bessie over the telephone that he was coming to enjoy the festival.
The deaf one, Aunt Mattie, shouted, “Your greatgrandfather would have been delighted to see you taking an interest in the festival, Calhoun. He initiated it himself, you know.”
“Well,” the boy yelled back, “what about the little extra excitement you’ve had this time?”
Ten days before the festival began, a man named Singleton had been tried by a mock court on the courthouse lawn for not buying an Azalea Festival Badge. During the trial he had been imprisoned in a pair of stocks and when convicted, he had been locked in the “jail” together with a goat that had been tried and convicted previously for the same offense. The “jail” was an outdoor privy borrowed for the occasion by the Jaycees. Ten days later, Singleton had appeared in a side door on the courthouse porch and with a silent automatic pistol, had shot five of the dignitaries seated there and by mistake one person in the crowd. The innocent man received the bullet intended for the mayor who at that moment had reached down to pull up the tongue of his shoe.
“An unfortunate incident,” his Aunt Mattie said. “It mars the festive spirit.”
He heard the girl on the other lawn slam her book. The top of her rose into view above the hedge—a sloping-forward neck and a small face with a fierce expression, which she trained briefly on them before she disappeared. “It doesn’t seem to have marred anything,” he said. “As I passed through town I saw more people than ever before and all the flags were up. Partridge,” he shouted, “will bury its dead but will not lose a nickel.” The girl’s front door slammed in the middle of the sentence.
His Aunt Bessie had gone into the house and come out again with a small leather
box. “You look very like Father,” she said and pulled up her chair beside him.
Without enthusiasm Calhoun opened the box, which shed a rustcolored dust over his knees, and removed the miniature of his greatgrandfather. He was shown this every time he came. The old man—round-faced, bald, altogether unremarkable-looking—sat with his hands knotted on the head of a black stick. His expression was all innocence and determination. The master merchant, the boy thought, and flinched. “And what would this stalwart worthy think of Partridge today,” he asked wryly, “with its festival in full swing after six citizens have been shot?”
“Father was progressive,” his Aunt Bessie said,”—the most forward-looking merchant Partridge ever had. He would either have been one of the prominent men shot or he would have been the one to subdue the maniac.”
The boy did not know how much of this he could stand. In the paper there had been pictures of the six “victims” and one of Singleton. Singleton’s was the only distinctive face in the lot. It was broad but bony and bleak. One eye was more nearly round than the other and in the more nearly round one Calhoun had recognized the composure of the man who knows he will and who is willing to suffer for the right to be himself. A calculating contempt lurked in the regular eye but in the general expression there was the tortured look of the man who becomes maddened finally by the madness around him. The other six faces were of the same general stamp as his greatgrandfather’s.
“As you get older, you’ll look more and more like Father,” his Aunt Mattie prophesied. “You have his ruddy complexion and much the same expression.”
“I’m a different type entirely,” he said stiffly.
“Peaches and cream,” his Aunt Bessie guffawed. “You’re getting a little pot-tummy too,” she said and took a lunge at his middle with her fist. “How old is our baby now?”
“Twenty-three,” he muttered, thinking that it could not go on like this for the whole visit, that once they had roughed him up a bit, they would leave off.
“And do you have a girl?” his Aunt Mattie asked.
“No,” he said wearily. “I take it,” he went on, “that around here Singleton is considered nothing but a mental case?”
“Yes,” his Aunt Bessie said,”—peculiar. He never conformed. He was not like the rest of us here.”
“A terrible drawback,” the boy said. Though his eyes were not mismatched, the shape of his face was broad like Singleton’s; but the real likeness between them was interior.
“Since he is insane, he is not responsible,” his Aunt Bessie said. The boy’s eyes brightened. He sat forward and fixed the old lady with a narrow gaze. “And where then,” he asked, “does the real guilt lie?”
“Father’s head was as smooth as an infant’s by the time he was thirty,” she said. “You had better hurry and get you a girl. Ha ha, What are you going to do with yourself now;”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew Ls pipe and a sack of tobacco. You could not ask them questions in depth. They were both good low-church Episcopalians but they had amoral imaginations. “I think I shall write,” he said and began to load the bowl.
“Well,” his Aunt Bessie said, “that’s fine. Maybe you’ll be another Margaret MitchelL”
“I hope you’ll do us justice,” his Aunt Mattie shouted. “Few do.”
“I’ll do you justice all right,” he said grimly. “I’m writing an expos…” He stopped and put the pipe in his mouth and sat back. It would be ridiculous to tell them. He removed the pipe and said, “Well, that’s too much to go into. It wouldn’t interest you ladies.”
His Aunt Bessie inclined her head significantly. “Calhoun,” she said, “we wouldn’t want to be disappointed in you.” They eyed him as if it had just occurred to them that the pet snake they had been fondling might after all be poisonous.
“Know the truth,” the boy said with his fiercest look, “and the truth shall make you free.”
They appeared reassured at his quoting Scripture. “Isn’t he sweet,” his Aunt Mattie asked, “with his little pipe?”
“Better get you a girl, boy,” his Aunt Bessie said.
He escaped them in a few minutes and took his bag upstairs and then came down again, ready to go out and immerse himself in his material. His intention was to spend the afternoon interviewing people about Singleton. He expected to write something that would vindicate the madman and he expected the writing of it to mitigate his own guilt, for his doubleness, his shadow, was cast before him more darkly than usual in the light of Singleton’s purity.
For the three summer months of the year, he lived with his parents and sold air-conditioners, boats, and refrigerators so that for the other nine months he could afford to meet life naturally and bring his real self—the rebel-artist-mystic-to birth. During these other months he lived on the opposite side of the city in an unheated walk-up with two other boys who also did nothing. But guilt for the summer pursued him into the winter; the fact was, he could have fared without the orgy of selling he cast himself into in the summer.
When he had explained to them that he despised their values, his parents had looked at each other with a gleam of recognition as if this were what they had been expecting from what they had read, and his father had offered to give him a small allowance to finance the flat. He had refused it for the sake of his independence, but in the depths of himself, he knew it was not for his independence but because he enjoyed selling. In the face of a customer, he was carried outside himself; his face began to beam and sweat and all complexity left him; he was in the grip of a drive as strong as the drive of some men for liquor or a woman; and he was horribly good at it. He was so good at it that the company had given him an achievement scroll. He had put quotation marks around the word achievement and he and his friends used the scroll as a target for darts.
As soon as he had seen Singleton’s picture in the paper, the face began to burn in his imagination like a dark reproachful liberating star. The next morning he had telephoned his aunts to expect him and he had driven the hundred and fifty miles to Partridge in a little short of four hours.
On his way out of the house, his Aunt Bessie halted him and said, “Be back by six, Baby Lamb, and we’ll have a sweet surprise for you.”
“Rice pudding?” he asked. They were terrible cooks.
“Sweeter by far!” the old lady said and rolled her eyes. He hastened away.
The girl next door had returned with her book to the lawn. He suspected that he might be supposed to know her. When he came for visits as a child, his aunts had always produced one of the neighbor’s freak children to play with him—once a fat moron in a Girl Scout suit, another time a near-sighted boy who recited Bible verses, and another an almost square girl who had blackened his eye and left. He thanked God he was now grown and they would no longer dare to fill his time for him. The girl did not look up as he passed and he did not speak.
Once on the sidewalk, he was affected by the profusion of azaleas. They seemed to wash in tides of color across the lawns until they surged against the white house-fronts, crests of pink and crimson, crests of white and a mysterious shade that was not yet lavender, wild crests of yellow-red. The profusion of color almost stopped his breath with insidious pleasure. Moss hung from the old trees. The houses were the most picturesque types of rundown ante-bellum. The taint of the place was expressed in his greatgrandfather’s words which had survived as the town’s motto: Beauty is Our Money Crop.
His aunts lived five blocks from the business section. He walked them quickly and came after a few minutes to the edge of the bare commercial scene, which had the ramshackle courthouse for its center. The sun beat down fiercely on the tops of cars parked in every available space. Flags, national, state and confederate, flapped on every corner street light. People milled about. On the quiet shaded street where his aunts lived and the azaleas were best, he had not passed three people, but here they all were, staring avidly at the pathetic store displays and moving with languid reverence past the
courthouse porch, the spot where blood had been spilled. He wondered if any of them might think he was here for the same reason they were. He would have liked to start, in Socratic fashion, a street discussion about where the real guilt for the six deaths lay, but as he surveyed the scene, he saw no one who looked capable of any genuine interest in meaning. Without set purpose, he entered a drugstore. The place was dark and smelled of sour vanilla.
He sat down on the high stool at the counter and ordered a limeade. The boy preparing the drink had elaborate red sideburns and wore on his shirtfront an Azalea Festival Badge—the emblem which Singleton had refused to buy. Calhoun’s eye fell on it at once. “I see you’ve paid your tribute to the god,” he said.
The boy did not seem to get the significance of this.
“The badge,” Calhoun said, “the badge.”
The boy looked down at it and then back at Calhoun. He put the drink on the counter and continued to look at him as if he were serving someone with an interesting deformity.
“Are you enjoying the festive spirit?” Calhoun asked.
“All these doings?” the boy said.
“These grand events,” Calhoun said, “commencing with, I believe, six deaths.”
“Yessir,” the boy said, “six in cold blood. And I knew four of them myself.”
“You too have had your share of the glory then,” Calhoun said. He felt suddenly a distinct hush fall on the street outside. He turned his eyes to the door just in time to see a hearse pass, followed by a line of slowly moving cars.
“That’s the man that’s having his funeral to himself,” the boy said reverently. “The five that were supposed to get shot had theirs yesterday. One big one. But he didn’t die in time for it.”
“They have innocent as well as guilty blood on their hands,”
Calhoun said and glared at the boy.
“It wasn’t no they,” the boy said. “One man done it all. A man named Singleton. He was bats.”
The Complete Stories Page 47
