It hadn’t been long after his father came home from the hospital, on a Friday afternoon, when the boy noticed that the dog didn’t come back from the post office. He took it for a sign and kept quiet about it. Around suppertime the clerk from the post office came and brought the mail to the house. His father limped out on the front step and took it from him.
“Thanks for the special delivery,” his father said. “Did you see my little old dog today?”
“No, sir,” the clerk said. “It’s the first time I can remember that dog didn’t show up.”
“That’s a remarkable thing,” his father said. “How would you account for it?”
The boy stood inside the door, his face pressed against the screen, watching. He could see that the clerk was embarrassed. He wanted to do right but he was scared. And the boy could also tell that his father knew this and he would get the truth out of the man easy. He would have the truth even if the man went down on his knees and begged not to tell.
“I don’t know, sir. I don’t have any idea. Maybe he just run off.”
“Ha! Ha!” his father laughed like a big wind in the man’s face. “Oh! Ho! That’s funny. After five years all of sudden the dog gets sick and tired and runs off.”
“Well,” the man said, “it could have happened.”
The boy watched the bulked muscles in his father’s body tighten under his shirt and saw him jut his neck forward, thrust his bald, battered head so close to the man’s face they could have kissed. When he spoke now, the boy knew, he would be staring into the depths of the man’s eyes, so deep the man would feel naked, and when he spoke it would be hardly more than a whisper, but with the tone of a growl in it, like a dog guarding a bone.
“Now you listen to me,” his father said. “I know what happened. They killed him. I know that much. Now what I want out of you is the truth. That’s what I’m going to get. I’ll have the truth from you if I have to gut you like a catfish from your jaw to your crotch. You understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” the man said. “They killed him. Chief of Police shot him right outside the post office.”
“They had a big laugh? That produced a great big laugh?”
“Yes, sir. Chief of Police said he don’t allow no mad dogs running loose in this town.…”
“He’s a real good shot? He can shoot that pistol like a marksman?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Will they give him the distinguished dog-killing medal? Will he cut a big notch in that .38 and strut his fat ass up and down the sidewalk like a bad man?”
“I don’t know, sir. I really don’t know what he’s going to do.”
All of a sudden his father broke into a wide bright smile and slapped the clerk on the back. The clerk jumped as if he thought he was going to be struck down, but when he felt the hand soft on his back and the arm around his shoulders he relaxed. He leaned back on that arm and let it hold him up, like a girl in a man’s arm.
“Well,” his father said, “you done right to come here and tell me. It took some doing what with people waving pistols around and shooting dogs and things. Come on in and have a cup of coffee. You want a cup of coffee, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” the clerk said. “That would be very nice.”
In the morning, Saturday morning, his father was up early, singing in the bathroom while he shaved. It had been a long time since he had been singing in the morning. The boy went into the bathroom and stood beside his naked father watching him shave. Keeping his eyes on the mirror, his father popped a white-lather beard on the boy’s chin with the shaving brush. His father laughed while the boy wiped his chin with the back of his hand.
“You better watch. You better study,” his father said. “One of these days you’ll have a beard to shave. You want to know how to do it right.”
“How come you still got hair growing on your face and none on the top of your head?”
“That, boy, is a mystery,” his father said, tipping himself a wink in the mirror. “If I knew the answer to that question I’d be a millionaire.”
“Would you like to be a millionaire?”
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t have any idea what it’s like to be a millionaire. You might just as well ask me if I’d like to be a jaybird.”
“I know what it’s like to be a jaybird.”
“You do?”
“You got to be mean to be a jaybird.”
“But maybe the jaybird don’t think he’s mean. Maybe he don’t know what mean is.”
“I never thought of that,” the boy said. “A jaybird is smart, though.”
“Oh, you can be smart, real smart, and you still can’t tell how you’re doing something. You can tell most of the time what you’re doing, but you can’t always tell how you’re doing it or why.”
“I always know why I’m doing something.”
“You’re lucky,” his father said.
“It’s not so lucky,” the boy said. “Sometimes it worries me so much I don’t feel like doing anything.”
His father laughed and splashed himself with water, rubbed his face hard with a towel until it flushed pink, and then patted some sweet-smelling lotion on his cheeks.
“Looka there, boy,” his father said. “I’m as pink as a baby.”
The boy went with him into the bedroom to watch his father dress. He dressed as if he were going to the courthouse or the church, the Episcopal church of his mother where people dressed better and walked more softly than the Baptist church where his father’s family had always gone. His father put on a dark suit and a white shirt with a gleaming starched collar and a necktie. He wore his best shoes, black ones shined up like patent leather. When he had finished and inspected himself in the mirror, the two of them went downstairs to breakfast.
“Where in the world are you going?” the boy’s mother said.
“I thought the boy and I would take a stroll down to the post office and pick up the mail. It comes in the morning on Saturday.”
His mother stood by the table like a statue of a woman with a coffeepot in her hand.
“Don’t take the boy,” she said. “You don’t want to do that.”
“We’re just going to stroll downtown.”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Keep the boy out of it.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean. I just got an idea I’d like to go down and get the mail.”
“He don’t have to go along. If you have to go downtown, just looking for trouble, let him stay here.”
“Ask the boy. Ask him if he want to go or not. You want to go with me?”
He thought about it before he said yes. His mother looked angry but she must have known there was nothing to say, so she poured the coffee and sat down. When they had finished, the boy’s father rose from the table and picked up his cane.
“It might be a waste of time,” his mother said at the door. “There might not be any mail.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Saturday was the day for county people to come to town, the farmers, the ranchers, the citrus growers, the hired hands and the Negroes from the sawmills and turpentine camps. They came, clogging the highway with trucks and wagons, on foot, the women to pass their time window-shopping and gossiping, the men to lounge in knots and clusters at public places. They leaned against the walls and posts, squatted on their heels, smoked and chewed and spat and studied each other, friends and enemies. Saturday used to be a strutting day, but now there wasn’t much to buy in town and no money to buy it with anyway. His father could not have been more conspicuous that day, his shaved face shining in the light, his Sunday clothes vividly crisp. They had started to mount the stairs to the post office.
“Hey, lawyer!”
His father stopped and turned slowly, glanced along the line of farmers who were sitting on the fence by the walk until he found the face that went with the voice, a tall thin long-legged farmer, his clean khaki trousers flapping loosely above high-topped mail-order shoes, his e
yes keen and uncommitted.
“What you going to do now, lawyer?”
“Nothing,” his father said. “It’s up to them. They got to think up something else to do. They tried to kill me with their hands and they couldn’t. The best they could do was to cripple me up a little bit.”
He let his voice rise as the man swung down from his perch and came forward to the edge of the steps. Others came, one by one, from the fence and the curb and the sidewalk and grouped close to listen. The boy stood in his father’s shadow and listened, noticing as he assumed the old pattern of the country speech, the rhythm and tone of it.
“Why, a whole army of them jumped me and tried to kill me but they couldn’t. Know why? They forgot something you and I know. They forgot I was a man, a farmer’s boy raised here, a real cracker. They thought maybe reading a lawbook had changed my flesh and bones and blood to something soft. You can’t kill a man that easy. You can stomp and beat and make a cripple out of him. You can cut and shred him in little pieces and scatter the parts of him like the chaff in the wind, but when you turn your back and wipe your hands all those parts come together and he’s standing there ready for a fight.”
“Tell them about it!” somebody yelled. “Tell them about it!”
“That’s what I’m doing. I’m telling them all about it. Those boys forgot that a man in truth has got nine lives like a cat. I got eight more coming to me. Oh my! Oh my! They found out though. Oh my, didn’t they find out?”
“Didn’t they?”
“They know now I got blood like turpentine in my veins and two big fists like knotty pine, like cypress knees, and I got a head like a cannon ball. Oh, they found out. They know about it now. And what do you think they done? They was so mad I wouldn’t just lay down and curl up and die for them. They was as mad, as all around frustrated as the preacher comes for Sunday dinner and don’t get nothing on his plate but the tough old neck of the chicken. They wanted breast and soft meat.”
“Keep talking. Tell ’em about it!”
“Why, they just didn’t know what to do with theirselves. They didn’t know whether to shit or get off the pot. And then, and then, and then an idea come to one of them. They got a plan. Down come the Chief of Po-lice and hid hisself behind that oak tree over there, laying for my dog. There he is trying to hide his fat ass behind a tree and along comes my little old Boston bulldog to pick up the mail, and out pops the Chief of Po-lice. A bang! bang! Shooting at a little old dog. It made him feel good. It made him feel so much better. Oh, yes, none of them could kill a man, but they was brave enough to rise up in righteous indignation and shoot down a puppy dog. Well now, my friends, I’ll tell you the honest truth, when I got over being mad about it, I was glad they done it. It showed them up for what they are. What do you think a dog is?”
He leveled his cane and jabbed out with it at the crowd.
“Know what that dog was? He wasn’t nothing but a poor little old son of a bitch. And any man that would shoot a dog is lower than a son of a bitch. He’s lower than anything in all of God’s whole wide creation except a diamondback rattler. And I got my doubts about that. I’ll let a diamondback come a-wiggling on his belly in the dust of my backyard before I’ll let their Chief of Po-lice come a-hanging around.”
The boy stood tense beside his father, looking out into the crowd of faces. It was a big crowd now, out into the street, and his father was shouting out to them. They were bunched together and they swayed with his voice, were moved by the rhythm of his waving cane, as if they were dancing to a tune.
“Man back here says we’re blocking the street,” a voice called from the street.
“Tell the man to go and get a policeman. I’m going to stay right here. I’m disturbing the peace and I’m going to keep right on disturbing the so-called peace.”
His father flung off his hat. It sailed in a wild arc, fell in a flutter like a wounded bird into the crowd. He tore the coat off his shoulders and his white shirt shone in the sunlight when he spread his arms wide.
“I’m bigger than a dog,” he yelled. “Ask the policeman can he hit me from the street. Let them kill me now if they’re going to because if they don’t they must reckon with me. I’ll come on and I’ll be tearing flesh off of bones and I’ll be scattering brains and innards from here to kingdom come!”
“Tell ’em! Tell ’em about it!”
“Ain’t nobody going to shoot at you. Keep talking.”
“I’m going to tell you all about your Ku Klux Klan. Oh they’re a brave bunch, they are, noble shooters of dogs. They come out at night, like thieves in the night, dressed in white sheets like children on Halloween and they spend their time harassing the poor niggers and the poor folks. Poor folks … that’s all of us, ain’t it?”
“Amen. Amen.”
“Oh, they’re waxing fat and sassy on taxes and who’s paying for it? Your sweat, brothers, and mine put every hole in the Chief of Po-lice’s belt. And, brothers, that’s a mighty big piece of leather goods.”
(Laughter)
“You could rope a calf with it!”
(Laughter)
“You could hang a man with it!”
“Let him be careful he don’t trip up and hang hisself,” a voice hollered.
“Now when they go out in their costumes they burn the fiery cross. Burn it! That’s what they do with the holy cross of our Almighty Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!”
“Amen! Amen!”
“Let them take heed! Let them heed my words. We’re not going to pluck them out and run them out of town. We ain’t going to run them out of the state or the United States of America. Let them take heed lest we purge the last trace of them off the face of the earth. They can’t hurt us. We ain’t afraid. We ain’t dogs, by God!”
His father kept talking, shouting at them, and the boy saw that he was leading the crowd now like a bandmaster. When he wanted to he had them growling and snarling like animals in the zoo. His father put his arm around the boy and leaned over close to his ear.
“Let’s quiet them down a little,” he said.
Then he began to talk softly, so soft they had to strain to hear. He told them what the law was and he told them what he had been planning to say on the Fourth of July about the vote and the elections in the fall. They yelled at him to run for county judge, but he shook his head and smiled. That seemed to rile them up and they kept yelling for him to run for office until at last he held his hands wide apart and they got quiet. He told them if that’s what they wanted he guessed he would have to do it and if he lived to take office he would throw the whole bunch of public enemies in the jail and throw the key away.
“Now I’ve said my piece,” he said. “I’m going across the street and celebrate our victory, going to buy my little boy a bottle of soda pop and smoke myself a rich man’s ten-cent cigar.”
The crowd fell back in front of them, making a path. They walked all the way across the street through the dense Saturday crowd, his father dripping sweat, smiling at everyone and calling out to people he knew. Afterwards, as they strolled home, people, friends and strangers, stepped up and shook his father’s hand and looked into his eyes. And now the boy knew for the first time how close is violence to love. If you rubbed the lamp and said the right words you could call up a giant.
When they entered the house, his mother was playing the piano.
“Was there any mail?” she asked. “Did you get a letter?”
“Isn’t that remarkable?” his father said. “I got to talking to some fellows and completely forgot about the mail.”
After that the conclusion was foregone; everything was quiet. His father went back to work every day at the law office, the summer ended, and the boy started school again. It might never have happened. He might have dreamed it all in the long, breathless, heat-humming days of midsummer, except that there was a car parked right across the street from the house night and day, and always a man in it, sitting on the front seat with a high-powered deer rifle sticking out of
the window.
In November they held the elections and then one midnight the telephone rang and they woke the boy. As they walked to the courthouse the band was playing in the street and there were fireworks and men fired rifles and pistols in the air. They climbed the flight of steps in front of the courthouse and stood there while the people cheered and hollered, his father laughing, tears of joy running down his cheeks, shaking his big cane at the people while they cheered him. His mother smiled and smiled, looking right through the swirl of faces, smiling and not seeing any of them, like a queen from another country.…
I know the place and I know the time, the rich, sweaty, bootleg liquor smell of that night, the brass band sound of it, the once-in-a-blue-moon flavor of the celebration that follows the slaying of a dragon.
I could tell you the rest of the story about the man, how he became a public man, a senator, a governor. I know the anecdotes of his terrible temper and his inconsistencies. Years later I saw him beat a man to his knees with his cane for talking sassy to him on the street; yet I’ve also seen him have an Air Force officer jailed for browbeating the Negro bootblack in the barbershop. I know the rest of the story, how the boy grew up and went away to college and, as he grew and changed, came to see those days in a different and a sadder light.
“It’s a pity,” he told me once, “that it took a narrow-minded, petty demagogue with a wild desire to be a martyr to stand up for law and order at that time.”
“Somebody had to do it,” I said. “Your old families with their fine names and fine silver wouldn’t lift a finger to do it. Who was going to take responsibility if he didn’t?”
Evening Performance Page 3
