Wolf Whistle

by Lewis Nordan

  Uncle pulled on his brogans. He said, “I’ll walk to the telephone at Sims and Hill, call the High Sheriff.”

  Auntee said, “Won’t do no good.”

  Uncle said, “I know.”

  Auntee said, “What’s the High Sheriff gone do?”

  Uncle said, “I know.”

  Auntee said, “Get you lynched, is all.”

  Uncle said, “I know, Auntee.”

  Auntee said, “Don’t go, Uncle. I need you here.”

  Uncle said, “The world’s done changed, Auntee. Ours has. I got to call the High Sheriff, even if it kills me.”

  Auntee said, “It will. It’s near-bout five miles.”

  Uncle said, “Five miles never kilt nobody.”

  Auntee said, “Don’t go, Uncle.”

  Uncle said, “Well, I got to.”

  Auntee said, “You an old man, it’s raining so hard.”

  Uncle said, “I love you, Miss Auntee.”

  Some time passed. Uncle was gone. Auntee undressed for bed again, put on the cotton-sack nightdress again.

  She didn’t think she could possibly go to sleep, not until Uncle got back, anyway. But she did, she drifted off.

  Then, after a while, she woke up. She thought, “Now what was the name of the horror that I went to sleep upon?”

  A long time later, after they had moved away from the Delta and were sleeping in a bed in Chicago, Auntee would say,

  “Uncle.”

  Uncle said, “Whut.”

  Auntee said, “You know that thing you said?”

  Uncle said, “Whut thing?”

  Auntee said, “That thing you said about you would be satisfied if somebody would just whup him?”

  Uncle said, “Aw, Auntee, don’t, now. That was just a way of talking to whitefolks, you know.”

  Auntee said, “No, I agree. I do. You said the Lawd’s truth. Somebody ought to been whupped that child in a inch of his life for pulling this selfish stunt.”

  Uncle said, “Don’t say nothing you gone be sorry about. Let the boy rest.”

  Auntee said, “I mean it, Uncle. I’m mad at that child. Don’t nobody deserve to be murdered, don’t even deserve to be whipped for what he done. Whistling at somebody’s wife, course not. Plenty men whistle at somebody’s wife, don’t nothing happen, black or white. But that don’t keep me from being mad, don’t mean I ain’t so mad at him I could about die, I could just about die, what he done, what he done done to all of us.”

  That would happen a lot later. Now, Auntee was alone in the Delta darkness, with rain on the tin roof.

  She slept again, and then, around dawn but not yet light, something outside of her pain woke Auntee up.

  It was Uncle’s voice—old man voice, low, morning music. Uncle was lying beside her in bed, singing.

  She only heard a few lines, before he stopped.

  He sang, I don’t want you to cook my bread.

  He sang, I don’t want you to make my bed.

  He sang, I don’t want you cause I’m sad and blue.

  He sang, I just want to make love to you.

  She said, “I love you, Uncle.”

  Uncle said, “I love you, Miss Auntee. We done done all that we can do.”

  7

  THE MISSISSIPPI Delta is not always dark with rain. Some autumn mornings, the sun rises over Moon Lake, or Eagle, or Choctaw, or Blue, or Roebuck, all the wide, deep waters of the state, and when it does, its dawn is as rosy with promise and hope as any other.

  In autumn, the cornfields have not been plowed under yet, and the old stalks, standing ten feet tall, have turned from green to brown, and in the morning sun they look like solid gold.

  Ears of the unharvested crop become full ripe and the husks break open as if a hand, invisible, had shucked them free, and kernels fall loose like coins from a treasure chest, and mourning doves whistle and coo and leave the forest trees and telephone lines and follow the pot of gold at the end of the constant rainbow and become fat on the feast.

  And the rice fields, too. What about the rice fields in the beautiful Delta? The mallards approach in their chevron, heads like emerald in the new sun, and the egg-brown dear little hens.

  They circle, they drop down, one and then another, they set their wings, which creak and click in the hollow bones against the resisting air, they touch down in the water, they feed, they sleep, they dream.

  Begin again, the mallards say, Begin, the rice fields whisper, even in drought time from the voices of the pumps, those solitary, electrical songs sucking sweetness from springs and slow streams.

  And, in the Delta, in autumn, what do the cottonfields say, when the harvest is done, and the pickers have gone, the mechanical ones, and the human, too? What do the cotton fields say, in the absence of the pilot and his plane, the cropdusters like snake doctors?

  What do the cotton fields say when the green leaves are gone, and the square and the blossom and the boll? What do they say, when only the stalks remain, like skinny black girls in ragged dresses of white?

  Do they say, Shouldn’t our ancient suffering be more fruitful by now?

  This is what Runt Conroy said to Fortunata on the telephone that night, when the rain was still falling. This is what long memory of the Delta’s beauty taught Runt to say to his wife, though the memory was dim and the clouds were still low, and the rain still fell, and Runt still carried an odor of farms and lofts and of the denizens of the earth and air, domestic and wild.

  The pay telephone was not in a booth, and it was not indoors, where a black man might mistake an invitation to make a call on it as an invitation to perform some other, more threatening act of equality; it was stuck on a wall, outside Red’s place, not even up under the porch, out in the weather. Runt had a pocketful of quarters. Fortunata was in Kosiesko, he knew where to find her, he didn’t ask no questions.

  He said, “I miss you. I need you. Come home.”

  Fortunata was there, he could hear her breathing, but she did not speak.

  He said, “I mean, you know that tree, out on the Indian mound, out past Lem Mahoney’s place?”

  Fortunata said, “Well, yeah—”

  He said, “I don’t know. Something about that tree, the roots. All those dead Indians and pottery, arrows.”

  Fortunata revealed no trace of irritation, or even hopelessness, but she did not speak, either.

  He said, “I got a bad feeling, honey. I don’t know why.”

  Runt really meant to say that beauty was everything, unless it was only nothing, only the start of the terror that we can probably not bear, or can’t imagine bearing, anyway.

  Runt said, “It’s just so personal, baby. I just never knew how personal the world was, life and all.”

  Fortunata said, “Cyrus, you’re drinking yourself to death. I can’t watch it no more.”

  Cyrus. Nobody had called Runt by his real name in twenty years, thirty maybe. The sound of his own name, like a stranger, like an old book he started reading, once upon a time, and liked it, too, but somehow never got around to finishing.

  What was the name of that book? Or maybe it was a poem, something Miss Alberta, his second-grade teacher, read to him one time, long time ago, in another Delta rainstorm, seated with other children on an oiled floor at the schoolhouse, with the steam radiator singing, “Let me call you sweetheart,” or some other sentimental tune.

  Maybe it was “Hiawatha.” By the shining deep sea waters stood the wigwam of Nacoma, daughter of the moon, Nacoma.

  He said, “That tree is like a habit, you know? The tree on the Indian mound. It’s like the rain tonight, it’s like the wind. Is it raining in Kosiesko?”

  Fortunata said, “I been asleep for hours, Cyrus. I don’t know if it’s raining or not. What time is it?”

  He said, “It’s like there’s an emptiness inside me.”

  She said, “Well, I’m not likely to be the one to fill it up. I tried that.”

  He said, “It’s been raining all day and all night. The
wind is gnawing at my face.”

  She said, “Cyrus, you are the only man I ever really loved, but I cain’t live with you no more. I’m all give out.”

  He said, “I don’t want to fill up that empty hole no more. I’m through trying.”

  She said, “Well, you done proved they ain’t enough whiskey in the world, or enough Fortunata neither, to fill it up.”

  He said, “Understand me, baby, listen to me tonight.” But he couldn’t find the words. He meant to say that he wanted to throw the emptiness inside him out into space. He wanted to say, I want my emptiness outside of me, for once in my life, out in the air we breathe. I want it to fill up the spaces above the cornfields and the rice fields and the cotton fields. I want the mallards to feel it around them when they’re flying, I want it to thin out the air they’re sailing through, and the doves. I want the engine on the cropduster to stall for a second, my emptiness takes up so much space. He said, “Just come back home. I need you. The kids need you.”

  She wanted to say, You were always distracted by hope, by romance. She said, “Oh, Cyrus, I don’t know, I don’t know. I just don’t trust you.”

  He said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Fortunata. This ain’t a plan of action that I’m telling you about, it’s a change in the heart, in the soul.”

  She said, “Well, what then? What am I supposed to think, what am I supposed to do?”

  He said, “Ain’t our suffering done got old enough? Hadn’t it ought to start bearing some decent berries for a durn change?”

  WHEN ALICE Conroy was a girl, she didn’t believe in magic. She didn’t give it a thought. If Alice believed in anything, it was in light and air.

  Alice believed in girl-stuff. She liked pink. She liked taffeta and crinoline. She liked petticoats. She told her daddy that “petty,” like in “petticoats,” meant “little” in the French language. Her daddy said, “Well, parly voo, and pardon yore Franch.” Her daddy loved her, but he was hard to get close to.

  Alice liked ribbons for her hair. She liked mirrors and brushes and fingernail polish, and even before her mama thought she was old enough for makeup, she bought some makeup anyway, at Wool worth’s, and a little glass bottle of Wool worth perfume, too, and her daddy laughed so hard at the way it smelled on her that her mama went on and let her spend her money, which she earned clerking at Mr. Shanker’s drug store, on some real, sure enough makeup and a little bottle of real perfume called Evening in Paris. Her daddy said it smelled like an afternoon in Cruger. Her daddy was all time making a joke. She didn’t care. She loved her daddy.

  Alice had a barrette collection, too. Plastic mostly, but also one made of bone, and one of wood, and another one made out of gen-u-ine mother-of-pearl, which her daddy told her wont nothing but a fancy name for oyster shells. She would just as soon he didn’t tell her that.

  Also a horse collection, figurines, you know, made out of glass, or plastic, or carved out of wood. When she was a little girl, she would lie in bed at night and dream about having her own pony. She pretended like she woke up one Christmas morning and her daddy had bought her a Pinto pony, sweet-faced, big-eared little tame thing, white with big brown spots, and a leather saddle that creaked.

  In the pretend-like daydream she was having, her daddy brought the pony right in the house to surprise her, and was standing in the living room beside the Christmas tree, holding it with a blue bridle when she came in, all sleepy in her nightgown, one Christmas morning, the Christmas-tree lights shining, red and green and white, and an angel up on top of the tree. Well, maybe she did believe in magic, a little bit.

  She liked buckle-up shoes, and saddle oxfords, and penny loafers. She liked pink pedal pushers, although she admitted that her daddy was right, they did make her butt look big.

  Alice played her share of jacks. She bounced that hard little red rubber ball. She did her onesies and her twosies, and all the rest. She jumped rope, and double-rope. She knew all the chants. Ching-chong Chinaman sitting on a fence, trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. She cut out about a million paper dolls, and dressed them up in cut-out clothes, which she was handy at folding back the little white tabs on, so they wrapped all the way around and out of sight, and so the clothes fitted snug and true, even the ones she cut out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog. She made up stories about her dolls, the boys who loved them, the fine cities they visited, or lived in.

  Alice loved Little LuLu comic books, especially Little LuLu’s private diary, which was always written on the middle two pages of the book.

  And there was other stuff she liked that wasn’t girl-stuff, not exactly. She loved the light, and the air, of the Mississippi Delta, her home, and the woods, and the fields. Partly she loved them because her daddy loved them, and they were the only things he knew how to share with her without making a joke. Swarms of bees, and honey trees, red clover to the horizon, and white clover, and honeysuckle, and yellow bitterweed, and brindle cows standing chest-deep in black water.

  Alice’s daddy was not a hunter, and not a farmer, but he took her out in the Delta wilderness to look at the things hunters looked at, and into the fields to look at the things that farmers saw, if hunters and farmers ever really saw the details of their rich lives.

  She saw turtles on a log, lazybones, sleeping in the sun, how you gonna git your day’s work done; she saw water moccasins on a low branch, all tongue and cotton mouth, wide open with interest in the sound of her voice, as if she were sister to the beauty of slime, and with no evil intent; she saw wild pigs snuffling beneath forest oaks, and their piglets, pink, hairless babydolls, feeding decently, serenely, with delicacy and good manners, on acorns fat with pulp and sweet as apples; she saw deer in the morning, with tails like big white flags and antler racks like rocking chairs for children, and she looked upon their still-warm beds, where spotted fawn had suckled the sleepy doe, and the nervous buck slept with one eye open wide; once she saw a brown bear, old man with a purple tongue, eating dewberries on the edge of the woods, careful to avoid the thorns of the wild and fragrant rose bushes entwined in the same fruit, in the same field.

  Maybe this is the reason she fell in love with Dr. Dust, though he was twice her age and as impossible to get close to as her daddy. He looked at things in the same way as her daddy—other things, words mainly, not woods and fields, not bears, but the same, and he showed them to her, those words, poems, as if they were merely wild angels, like the ones she saw feeding quietly at the edge of the woods, in the morning sun, on dewberries, when she was a girl. He made the small world around them extravagant with the praise of words.

  The morning she saw the bear, she was with her daddy, of course. She was twelve, maybe thirteen.

  She said, “It’s like an angel.”

  They stood a while longer, with the sun rising still, rosy in the east, and they kept on watching from the place by the fence where they had been standing for a long time, by then, there in the darkness, since long before the sun showed itself at all.

  In a few moments the bear stopped feeding and stood on all fours for a minute, and then sat back on its big old butt, and scratched behind one ear with its hind foot at a flea, like a big lazy dog.

  Her daddy said, “It could kill us with scorn alone.”

  Alice was thinking these thoughts as she tried to sleep in her bed at Uncle Runt’s house. She adjusted her pillow. She gave one real big deep sigh. She lay awake long enough to hear that the rain had let up, maybe even stopped.

  She thought about Glenn Gregg in his pitiful home.

  She thought of her Uncle Runt. She understood the tragedy of his life.

  She thought about Dr. Dust. She imagined that he made vulgar jokes to her in front of his wife.

  Her bed was so comfortable, even in the horror of what

  she must have sensed, out there in the darkness, on the spillway.

  She went back to sleep. There was nothing else she could do, once she understood the futility of magic to change anything of i
mportance in the world.

  IN THE summertime, when a nuisance of pecans began to fall off the trees like hail and when pecan sap gummed up windshields and stripped paint from the Chevrolets and Mercuries and DeSotos and Kaisers, and when fig milk poured out of the stems of fallen fruit, Roy Dale was always walking behind the yellow-painted power mower, with a Briggs and Stratton engine that rattle-rattle-rattled through his hands and arms and in his head, and that he bought on time from Mr. Gibson at the Western Auto store.

  He leaned into the mower, with his arms and his back and breathed the fragrances of Bermuda and lespedeza and Johnson grass and crab and nut, cutting swaths and then turning and lapping two wheels over the last swath and cutting back down the yard in the opposite direction, of half the yards in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi.

  He was dreaming of escape.

  To Roy Dale, the lawnmower was freedom from Mississippi. It was dollars—for an illegal quart of beer, sometimes, or a pack of Camels, or an occasional rubber to blow up.

  But not just money. Not really money at all, in fact. The yellow-painted Briggs and Stratton lawnmower was a loud-noise silence from which to dream.

  Roy Dale suspected that Mississippi was beautiful. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t have anything to compare it to. He hadn’t even ever been out of the Delta.

  He had heard about red-clay banks along rivers in the hills, clay as red as blood, somebody told him, colored red with iron in the dirt.

  He had heard about deep forests of blue spruce in the hills that, when you walked through them, smelled like sweetened turpentine. Were they really blue?

  He had heard about the Gulf Coast, too—white sands, and palm trees, and coconuts, pretty girls in two-piece swimming suits, and green-felt poker tables, and slot machines, and striptease dancers, and comedians right up on a stage telling jokes to you, and wide blue water, stretching out to Ship Island, and Cuba, and Lord knows where-all.

  Roy Dale was not good with directions, but he knew north and south and east and west. He had these directions down pat. Behind his lawnmower, with its rattle-rattle-rattle and barrump-barrump-barrump, and with a fragrance of green, fresh-cut grass, and of gasoline and hot motor oil, in his nostrils, Roy Dale would think, All right, west, over there where the sun is going down—that’s Texas, that’s California.