There was silence between us. Even if I had reached out and tried to touch his hand and keep it from trembling while he picked up the spoon and tried to eat the soup, he wouldn’t have felt me touching him. Sam was gone.
He spilled a little of the soup onto the front of his shirt because his hand trembled so much that he couldn’t guide it, and his eyes glazed over with a wetness that would not fall and would not dry. He put his head in his hands and would not look at me. I got up. Even Toulouse was quiet, so tired from his day out in the world that he had nothing to say but “Ah,” when I set him down on the back of a chair. I walked around the table. I picked up silverware. I turned on the water full force and began washing dishes. I ran my hand up and down my hair, and locked my knees and unlocked them a million times, waiting for Gill to leave the room. When he finally picked up a stack of books by the back door and headed out to the Land Rover with them, it didn’t take me longer than a second to grab Sam from the back, and put my arms around his shoulders and yell out: “What is it? I know it’s me. I know it’s my fault. But just tell me. What is it about me that ruins things?” My voice sounded crazy, jerking and half-sobbing. And Sam turned around and got up and looked down at me as though he didn’t know who I was. “I love you,” I screamed. “I love you. But I’ve done something to lose you. Tell me! Please tell me!”
He quickly touched my cheek and covered it with the whole length of his warm palm and left it there. He didn’t really seem to see me or understand any of my words. His eyes were glazed over with dullness. I had butted my head against a barrier I could not see but that was definitely there. It was like thick glass, hard, cold, invisible. Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out a dollar bill and placed it in my hand. “Go have a good time,” he said.
When he turned around I saw Gill standing in the kitchen doorway behind him, watching us.
Gill walked to Sam and put his arm on his shoulder. “Come on, champ,” he said. “I want you to sit a minute out on the porch. I got a little bit more business to see about, and then we’ll head off.”
Going out the kitchen door Gill leaned back and looked at me. “Stay there.”
He must have read my mind. I had no intention of standing in that sour, dead kitchen, smelling warmed-up soup and remembering my own screaming voice that had hit dead air and now lay in my head like a sick echo. In two seconds I was out the kitchen door and running down to the Mill Pond, heading for the exact spot where months before I’d fallen in. I had in mind just to run out my anger, to let fly at the bank of the stream until my feet, sucking in and out of the muck, would finally give out and I’d be done. Or the mother cow would gore me for good this time. Or I’d just slap jump in the damn water, get bit by a moccasin, and end it all. Anything was possible; I didn’t have any definite plan.
I ran up one side of the bank, then splashed through the shallow part to head up the other side. I ran through a bunch of those dumb cows huddled up under a tree together and got them so riled they bellowed and loped off in all directions like a marble shot into the main bunch in a drawn circle. I climbed up the train trestle, walked over the pond on it and came down on the other side. And when I was coming back-ass-ward off the incline, holding onto bitterweed so as not to slip, someone grabbed me at the waist and made me stand still. “Whoa, Cisco. You’re going to burn dern holes in your shoes.”
Gill put a hand on my shoulder and kept it there while we walked to the patio on the lawn, where he’d set a pitcher of iced tea. Half a glass was already gone. He must have been sitting in that chair, watching me run like a bee-stung mule all over the damn place. He poured me some tea in a glass and told me to sit down.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t want anything. I got to go home.”
“Okay.” He sat down and looked at me. “Sam and me got to hit the road anyway. But if you want to hear what I got to say about what I heard in there, it’ll take about as long as somebody like you can drink a glass of tea.” He pushed the glass toward me. “Anyway, you done forgot that poor bird. He’s still setting in there in the kitchen wondering if he’s been left for good.”
“Lord,” I said. “Toulouse.”
“You’re just such a rotten, awful person. Here you’ve done left your bird, and you think you sent Sam into a tailspin and got him drinking so much he’s close to bottom.”
He was looking at me with a hint of teasing, but serious in the slight smile and steady way that he was keeping his eyes on my face. I was still standing up. He sat back and propped one leg on the edge of another chair. “I’ll tell you a little secret. Sam makes everybody feel like that.”
The sun was overhead, crossing over the railroad track and there was a breeze; the long fringed leaves of a willow tree blew like unkempt hair. Gill looked away from me and stared across the pasture where the cows were grazing calmly again. “I been watching Sam for years now. Every time he gets on one of these binges, it seems it’s because of something I’ve done. I rack my mind, wondering. But the dern truth of the matter is, he heads off because of something in him. He can blame it on any number of things. I could, too. But the simple reason is, nothing in the whole world causes it. What does is inside him.”
My voice came out like someone else spoke it. “It’s not me?”
“No.” Gill squinted, looking into the sun behind me. He threaded his fingers together. “And it’s not me, either. And it’s not Ellen, or Julie, or B.J., or anybody in the whole dern United States. Sometimes we might get to feeling so guilty that we make it worse. But it’s never outright just one person, or thing.”
He handed me a lemon. “You want a squirt?”
“No.”
“Well, if you ain’t going to drink that tea, I am.”
I pushed the glass over to him.
“You think just like I used to, that it was something you did that caused him to get sick like this. But you just got to know that there’s some things we can’t do nothing about. Sam’s drinking is about like your mama and daddy setting off in separate directions. It’s just one of those things we have no say over.”
I sat down and stared at him. “We don’t?”
He looked at me. For a minute he didn’t say anything. He was studying my face. I showed no more understanding of what he was saying than Sam’s face had when I had yelled at him in the kitchen. But unlike Sam I could hear and listen. The words would stay in my head. I leaned forward in the chair, as though almost daring him to say something that would make sense.
His voice was calm and low and I held on to it like it was something I could almost feel with my hands.
“Now,” he said, “I can’t tell you anything that somebody’d want to write down as the gospel. But over a good number of years I have found out some things that seem to make sense. A lot of it come to me when I was flying bombers in the war, and nothing about that was a game. For the first time, things was real—and could cost. I was just twenty-two, but the idea that come to me’s been good ever since. It seemed to me I had to divide things that happen in the world into two parts. There was the ones I could do something about—like the direction I flew in, and whether or not my plane was fit, and maybe even who was going with me to help. And then there was this other part—like the gun down in the brush on the mountain that might have got aimed in my direction just that morning, or the storm that might hit, or the fact that whoever was with me might get sick or not do his job when he should for some good reason. Those were not things I could have a say over or do anything about. And I got to admit, it was a hard idea to let inside myself. For being the hotshot that I was and thought of myself as being, it meant I had to say there was some things I just wasn’t equal to. There was some things I just didn’t have any power over.”
For a minute we sat quiet. “And you think that’s like Sam?” I said.
“Yep.”
“And my parents?”
He nodded. “But of course I can make Sam go get help. I’m good for that. And you’re good for letting
your parents know you’re still part of them. They might have trouble getting along with each other, but that don’t have nothing to do with how they get along with you.”
Gill went inside the house and brought Toulouse out, carrying him on his forearm. We sat down and let Toulouse yell out a few cuss words toward the Mill Pond. Gill told me that if I ever wanted to get rid of Toulouse, he’d be happy to buy him. We sat a few minutes, looking into the pasture on the other side of the Mill Pond, watching the cows graze. Sam dozed in a chair on the side porch beside the Land Rover.
A little later Toulouse and I stood watching as Gill walked Sam to the backseat and helped him slide in. Seeing Sam so helpless and sick like that was a sharp and terrible pain. I couldn’t stand still and watch it. But his being that way was not because of me. I saw that now. I also knew that I loved him. And I would wait for him to come back. As Sam and Gill drove off, I turned around to hurry back to my grandparents’ house. There was so much more I wanted to find out.
After supper I took Toulouse out of the bathroom and put him on the footboard of the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed. He clicked his feet against the wood like somebody tap-dancing. I pulled out the suitcase under the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed and took out all my parents’ letters. I opened them and stayed up half the night reading what my mother and father had written—covering so much time. What I knew now was as clear as the addresses on the front of the envelopes—each coming from different places but to the same place. To me. A light came on in the window of my parents’ old house and I heard Foster Collins come out the side door. I watched him walk across the yard and pick up the newspaper.
The new thought I was now sure of was steady and hard, as immovable as the earth under all that dust in Coldwater. If my parents had trouble loving each other, that didn’t also mean they had trouble loving me.
PART III
22.
The Return of the Mexicans and the Outhouse Maneuver
I spent the spring waiting. Separation was, to my mother, exciting, I think. She kept putting off making things definite. But I didn’t want to leave Coldwater until Sam came back. I didn’t plan to leave for very long, anyway. As soon as Sam was well, we’d get on with our plans to marry. I would never leave Coldwater for good.
I’d talk on the phone in the hall:
“How’s school?” My father would say.
“Fine.”
“How’s the weather?”
“Already getting hot.”
I told my mother about working at the Missionary Society’s Spring Fling:
“Was it fun?”
I said they’d made tons of money.
On the sidewalk in front of the Methodist Church I’d put a sign up saying “Tarts 25,” and dozens of people had walked down the sidewalk out of curiosity if nothing else.
Sam stayed gone that whole summer. Gill told everybody that he was developing some business interests in South America. But I also found out that several times when Gill drove down for him, Sam would ask to stop at a restaurant no more than a few miles from Lissaro’s, and then he would go in and buy beer. Gill would turn right around and take Sam back.
I walked down the Main Street of Coldwater, looking into the windows of the Mercantile, seeing the reflection of my own face, alone, thrown against the colors of prom dresses, dog-food bags, and salt licks. It was comforting, but scary—knowing that there were things about living you could do nothing about.
I threw the knife blade into the side of the hen house. People who loved each other shouldn’t go off and leave each other. They ought to do better.
Summer was like that snake that had been attracted to me in the Mill Pond. It crawled up around me, causing sweat and nightmares. The nights were sweltering all through that summer. In the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed I tossed like a load of clothes in my grandmother’s dryer.
I watched news on the TV with my grandfather. That summer we began to hear: K-E-Double-N-E-D-Y, Jack’s the Nation’s Favorite Guy, and Come and Click with Dick, the One that None Can Lick. Four colored kids went into a dime store in North Carolina and sat down at the lunch counter. They called it a sit-in and started trying it out all over town. The store managers raised their coffee prices to a dollar a cup and unscrewed the seats. Mrs. Barber worried about the stools in the Rexall’s.
Then in late August the migrant workers came. I stood on the sidewalk, watching them being driven down Main Street in the backs of trucks. Most of the Mexicans went to Hersham’s Farm. Again the sidewalks of Coldwater were crowded. The Missionary Society talked about what a problem it was—the cotton pickers’ unsanitary habits. Since the Society had been so successful with the Spring Fling, they felt powerful. They decided that before they tackled the Mexicans, they would first tackle Halloween. They would cure the town of hanging underwear all over the place.
And so, in the autumn of that year, exactly thirteen months after my return to Coldwater, the days were much the same, yet with almost everything changed. In a few weeks I would turn fifteen. I felt old. The season was dry; dust hung on like veils. I’d heard people in Coldwater say they’d seen Sam in Little Rock, doing business. When I asked Gill, he said that Sam was indeed doing fine. He would be home soon.
I would go down to the woods by the Mill Pond and meet Joel. Of course, I was practicing kissing him to be ready for Sam. This was a secret from Joel, but he didn’t seem to mind.
Joel looked at me; then he glanced down at the mud: “Wanna do that contest bit?”
I pulled my knife blade out of the ground. It was the Missionary Society’s plan he was talking about. I didn’t want to take too long to answer Joel, but I couldn’t lead him on, either; I was Sam’s.
I looked out into the pasture and cleaned off my knife blade with my finger. Joel was asking me to be in the Missionary Society’s king and queen contest. Anyone in the whole town could enter, as long as they were male and female. The winner was to be the couple who got the most votes, and votes were to be pennies. It was supposed to be a sweet reverse on trick-or-treat. You could knock on doors, offer some sort of sweet for sale, and ask for a vote. At midnight Miss Pankhurst would crown the Coldwater King and Queen of October at a townwide dance. The whole business was supposed to keep everybody so busy that the idea of doing a crude prank wouldn’t cross anyone’s mind.
I thought about being in the contest with Joel and threw my head back and flipped my switchblade to land a good two feet from his shoe. He couldn’t stretch much after that. “I don’t know why not,” I said. “I mean, it’s all the same to me.”
But it wasn’t to my grandmother.
I was sitting in the sun porch peeling eggs for some exotic aspic that would be served at my grandmother’s annual Missionary Society luncheon. She had gotten her hands on a fancy recipe which would harden eggs and tomatoes together in a jell. And we were trying it out, two weeks before the meeting—which Louella and I called the Aspic Rehearsal. Never again during modern times would the Missionary Society be so feted. And as I dug my fingers into the eggshells, my grandmother leaned over me, asking if I couldn’t peel faster. She had no idea of the agony of the thing. Eggshells under fingernails are akin to Chinese water torture.
“I don’t mean to rush you, dear,” she said. “But we have to help Louella with all those baked goods—the things for you and that Weiss boy.”
I didn’t peel any faster and I didn’t even consider peeling faster.
“Why, if I had only known that you were interested in being the October Queen—I could have arranged it with someone like … Mrs. Ramsey’s son.”
I held up an egg. I told her I thought that one was rotten.
“Oh, good heavens!” She took a whiff.
There was a knock at the door and Louella let Ezekiel in. A few days before, my grandmother had called Mr. Rankin because once again the outhouse was on her mind. She was determined to have it moved and had written letters to the editor all winter and spring about how it was compromising Coldwater’s entrance into the
modern age. But Mr. Rankin had made no moves to move it. He had other things on his mind. In his office, he hung up pictures of Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln and martyred newspaper editors who’d fought duels with their readers. He wrote editorials saying that he himself had always believed that the Negro in the South was entitled to the same opportunities that a white man was entitled to. It was time, he said, for Coldwater and the rest of the South to join with people like him. He told my grandfather he expected his house would be bombed. He propped a rifle in the back of his office beside the printing press.
The whole Missionary Society would have canceled their subscriptions to the Coldwater Gazette, except that no one wanted to miss out on the local news. So when my grandmother called Mr. Rankin, she swallowed her pride and suggested they reverse the arrangements of the year before: she would have the outhouse moved, and he could fill in the hole underneath. Otherwise the agreement was the same: Mr. Rankin wanted the outhouse burned, and my grandmother wanted it taken care of before the Missionary Society meeting. So again Ezekiel was hired.
He stood before my egg-peeling table looking at my grandmother. “Miz Maulden?” His voice was soft. “There’s trouble on the outhouse.”
My grandmother was still looking for bad eggs, rolling them over and sniffing the area. “What do you mean, Ezekiel?”
Queen of October Page 22
