The Difference Between Women and Men

by Bret Lott

  And she had the Negro as well keep her larder full, her pantry filled so that she might eat, and eat, both to hide and to nourish, his trips in with the market basket those days daily pilgrimages, so that even he would not know.

  The Negro, she had seen in his eyes when he’d deduced the truth of what had occurred that singular night that would and had and did become every night of her life, was without duty to any but her and her father. A boy born to know his own caste, she knew, born like herself into the life before the War that ended the old life and its way of settling with only the bloodshed of birth who you were on the face of the earth. The Negro was a boy she could—and this was the horrible miracle, after an entire life lived here in this town rent not with the emancipation of the Negro but a town rent, irreparably torn asunder, by the emancipation of the Cracker to become the rulers of this hamlet, the aldermen and mayors and exactors of tax of a generation that did not know its place, that had forgotten the precious gift of a time when order had reigned as it ought to reign, in observance of lineage and standing—the horrible miracle was that now and all these many years it had been only the Negro, unblinking servile Tobe, she could trust.

  He had seen things, she knew, and had been trustworthy, had been a good Negro who knew not to let eyes meet and who knew not to question purchases made at the druggist’s and who knew not to question as well the smell that had blossomed days after a night that would be the night of all nights in her life.

  All nights, save for one. A night even the Negro did not know of, a night beyond reckoning of any sort.

  Let the town tell its stories. She had stories of her own.

  III

  Of the night four weeks and five days after the purchase of the arsenic from the druggist, writ across the package beneath the skull and crossbones the words For rats in the druggist’s own hand. By then the smell from her bedroom was blossoming horrid and full and genuine, Miss Emily seated on the cracked leather of the parlor’s furniture mornings and evenings and afternoons while she ate, and while she stared at the crayon portrait of her father upon its tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace, her father with his iron-gray hair, his mouth closed tight, eyes bright with bearing.

  The eyes of a vigorous man. The eyes of a man of will and power.

  The eyes of a man who had driven away any suitor who might have delivered her from his eyes, and hence the eyes of a man who kept from her the love she so desired. Until the man in the bedroom upstairs had arrived upon her front porch a year after her father’s death.

  While the smell blossomed from the room upstairs—could it have been this afternoon? A lifetime ago?—she spent those days in the parlor bearing the stench in the same way she had borne the temper of her father, who had threatened the horsewhip to men who, of a Sunday evening, had made their intentions evident with their appearance at the door of this house, this same squarish house with its balconies and cupolas and spires, still elegant despite the loss of its white paint in blisters popped and peeling back as the man’s flesh blistered and popped, left to rot. But the street that had once been the most select of the entire town had grown indigent with itself for all the bearing these new low-slung spireless sheds could hold, sheds that had crept up on her own poised home like the men who had crept up that midnight four weeks and five days after the purchase of the arsenic from the druggist.

  She’d spied the men from her window in this room, where she repaired once the day had been spent before her father’s portrait, the lamp no longer lit for the dark in which she wanted to sit with her love growing, the man only newly dead then, the smell inside this room a rank blossom too huge and significant and powerless to keep her from staying here in this dark.

  Four weeks and five days after the arsenic purchase, the town believing, she knew, the poison was meant for her, her own suicide a kind of expected gift these dullards wanted as a means to give themselves the self-assured nod, to say among themselves, We knew it. We knew she was crazy after having been jilted by the man.

  But neither had she been jilted, nor was she crazy. She knew, of course, he’d meant to jilt her, but she’d allowed instead the arsenic for him, spooned that afternoon into the bottom of the lead crystal glass in which she poured out bourbon for him once their consecration had been made that night. She hadn’t even risen from their bed, only leaned to the small table beside her, where she had put the glass and decanter in which her father had kept the bourbon all these years, then watched the man smile at her in the kind of smile that betrayed a man’s lust sated and his escape begun.

  Then his smile twisted into itself, the arsenic quick and swift and blind in its affections, and she had reached to him, taken the glass from him before he might drop it and spoil these sheets, desecrate them with alcohol when they had been so blessed with the beginning of love only moments before, the two still beneath these sheets as all who have loved with a love as deep as she had begun to know ought still to be. Then his eyes cinched shut with the force and grandeur of a poison meting out its purpose, whether for rats or for lovers, and his hands went to his throat, his mouth an O of lovely pain, beautiful and thrilling and exquisite pain, his mouth the same mouth only minutes before she had met with her own lips.

  She had watched him die, then brushed her hair.

  She watched the men down in her yard that night four weeks and five days after the purchase, watched men look furtively to left and right, each slung over his shoulder a sack as if of seed, each man reaching into the bag like a sower and throwing handfuls to the ground beside her house, at the foundation.

  Lime. It was lime they were spreading in the ridiculous belief, she imagined, that somewhere on the premises a rat or dog or some such had died, herself too much the crazy woman to know or care to dispose of the dead animal and its offenses.

  Here was a story she could tell of them: They were fools, all of them. The smell had come from here, where she sat watching them work as though they might not be detected. She had seen them here, where love had begun, while they tried as best they could and stupidly to break down love’s fiber and being with a handful of lime thrown along the foundation of this house. As if that might kill love.

  She relit the rose-shaded lamp then, and seated herself before the window to signal those who would look up at her that she knew who they were, knew why they were here, knew their place. She knew.

  One of the elect down there, his hand inside his bag of lime for another handful of lies to spread, turned slowly to her at this window, in this rose-hued light, and then another man came to the first and just as slowly looked up at her in this light as well. The men then moved away from the house, disappeared into the shadows of the locusts that lined the street, the town’s elect vanquished as simply and easily as making her presence known, the smell that had drawn them here in the belief they might end it, that sad gift from the man no longer a man but a vessel, a vessel only for love, still just as horrid and full and powerless as it would ever be.

  She had sent the signal: I know who you are, and you know who I am.

  And you cannot kill the love I know.

  IV

  She could tell the story of her courtship, so very misunderstood by all, a courtship begun with the negation of all possibility of courtship and hence love, driven away by dint and force of fatherhood.

  So that when the contract for the paving of the town’s sidewalks was let a year after the death of her father, and the Yankee foreman had knocked on her door of an afternoon to ask smiling after a glass of lemonade, she knew she’d found the sound and shroudless agency of the love she sought. Though he wore a waistcoat and collar and tie, cuffed starched sleeves and herringbone trousers, a straw boater atop his head—every indication of his affluence and enterprise—still his face and hands were tanned from the overseeing of the Negroes hard at work with pick and shovel on the street beyond the shadow of the locusts, the color of his skin betraying the quality of sun-drenched toil his job entailed; the solid line of his shoulders and
the way that line traced its own vigor gave her to believe he might be enough to hold on to in order to find what she needed; and the color of his eyes, a green so very near and yet so very distant from the green of her father’s—gilt green, mordant green—gave her no choice but to see her father, with his horsewhip and temper, there in this Yankee’s eyes.

  It was then the man winked at her, in that most impudent and improvident blink of an eye something passing from him into her, a cutting shard of possibility, a dagger of prospect, the notion already taking shape in her mind of the agency of love he was to become.

  A Yankee. A glorified day laborer. A man so shameless, so arrant as to seek refreshment from a single woman of her bearing—and to wink. Her father would have already made good on his threats with the horsewhip at so vulgar a gesture.

  And her father was dead.

  There followed the evening visits after his hours in the sun, his arrival at her front door for all this base and common town to see, fodder for more and more stories that would give these dullards life with the telling of them. Sunday afternoons the two rode drenched in the same broad daylight that had perverted his skin to the brown it had become, rode in his yellow-wheeled buggy led by twin bays through the streets of town, her chin high, eyes lighting on no one as they circled the streets, the man’s black cigar burning in the glorious and putrid way her own father’s had evenings at the dining room table, her food when a child the drenched black and acrid taste of the air as she ate it, a little girl growing and growing toward a resolve to find love that would discover its reward in the man she rode beside, a man with skin too tanned and eyes too near her father’s green, that resolve to find love eclipsing the impropriety of their affair, and the impropriety of the man himself.

  There followed too his proposal, in secret yet there in the parlor in full view of the portrait of her father on its gilt-easel tarnishing even then, a proposal not for marriage but for fornication, though he’d used the word love upon her, his hands touching her in what she knew was a feigned passion places she had allowed only her own hands to touch.

  He did not know what love was; she’d known then and knew it now and knew it all along, his impassioned passionless touch proof enough of his ordination as the one by whom she would find love. He touched her, and though she’d allowed herself small protests at his touching there, and there, and there, she’d found in herself no rising passion at all. Only that resolve: to find love.

  Then, as she had known they would, like flitting moths drawn to a flame that would in a moment’s touch burn them to ash and air, the town revealed its own ill-bred blood in the impropriety of its admonishment, the town’s elect, she had no doubts, sending the Baptist preacher to her door.

  The preacher—a dull man, a simple man—let himself in past the Negro one afternoon near a year after she and the Yankee had first been seen together, dispatched no doubt to warn her of indiscretions known to all. She found him seated in the dull afternoon light of the parlor, saw him stand dully as she entered, saw him hold his black hat in both dull hands, his dull eyes daring to meet her own and hold hers, as though the cloth of his vocation were enough to have earned the right to let eyes meet.

  She’d held her head high, listened what seemed a lifetime to empty nothings spewed from his mouth like the stagnant decay of evenings in which stories were to be told of her and had been told. She stared at him, head held high, until finally the dull man looked down, his eyes broken by her own.

  That was when she turned to the door, drew it open, and made threat to him, on her lips a newfound power, a prayer as old and dangerous and full of horrible promise as the oaths she had heard her father make all her years of possible courtship, oath drawn from the Word and in full ordination of the Christ who oversaw them all—And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, she heard herself say, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables—and felt the instantaneous black joy of such words and knowledge and being, a joy she knew her father himself must have known with each driving of a suitor from their door of a Sunday evening.

  The preacher, dull eyes open wide, bovine in his look of genuine low birth for its surprise and awe and terror all at once, was at once gone, stumbling down the stairs off the front porch of the house that was now hers, and not her father’s. Yet still the town would not recognize its place: Next came her cousins from Arkansas, dispatched, she would learn, by the wife of the preacher to spend with her days and nights filled with these harpies’ presence speaking to her of Grierson lineage and birth and bearing, when only she knew how close she was to finding love, to knowing it, to letting it grow into itself as she had dreamed it might from the moment the idea of love had been given her, and given only once, words ever in her ear and heart and mind, words drenched with the black acrid air of his cigars, drenched in the threat of the horsewhip, drenched in the eyes of power and vigor staring down to her from his portrait across the vast abyss of empty days between her father’s death and the appearance of the Yankee: Your mother passed in childbirth, came her father’s words across the broad expanse of all her days until then, giving me you.

  The cousins had only left once she’d agreed to end the indiscretion of seeing the Yankee.

  She could tell the dullards of this town the story of the courtship that had landed her where she had wanted to be, in the arms of a man as near to her father and as distant as the farthest star. But they would not understand, neither the courtship nor the truth behind fact.

  They could not understand the depth of her love.

  A courtship none of them would understand, ending as arranged with the appearance of the Yankee at her kitchen door three days after the cousins had left, the Negro admitting the Yankee and then disappearing, leaving the man to find her in the parlor, where she awaited, dressed in an evening gown of pure pure white.

  Thus began the night that was to be all the nights of her life.

  All nights, save for one.

  V

  She finished now as she did each night with the brush, and turned it over in her hand, scrutinized with her ancient eyes the sterling silver back for the monogram, the tarnish there a kind of black map to the depth of love she had wanted to begin through him, and had begun.

  There was the Yankee’s monogram, thin lines curled upon themselves like her own ancient fingers curled upon themselves: HB.

  Homer Barron, his name had been, Homer Barron, she recalled, and smiled at a name lost each day to the memory of her own life’s passing only to be found each night in these same and serpentine black lines in black silver and in the fusion of flesh and bedclothes and nightclothes in the bed behind her, this skeleton and its fleshless grin drawn tight in a new and perfect fleshless smile the same each night, every night.

  She stood from the chair, placed his brush upon the dresser, and turned, smiled down in answer to the man, this Yankee, whose name even as she turned was already leaving her, as vague as the outline of her head on the pillow beside his own, so ravaged and peaceful with his accomplished decay.

  Once she was dead, she knew, there would be stories, even more, and they would make of the outline, and perhaps the iron-gray strands of her hair she knew must lie there upon the pillow something larger than it was. Let them, she thought. Let their belief of this man and his wiles and her love scorned be the lie they would tell to each other once she was gone. Let them believe she was crazy.

  Because there was another story. There was the truth.

  She dimmed the rose-shaded lamp as she did each night, and pulled the bedroom door closed behind her, locked it as she did each night with the key she kept on the white ribbon round her neck, then placed a hand to the dark wood of the hall, the feel of the cold walls as close to the feel of a tomb as she might imagine, and then she was at the stairs, descending them one at a time for the age upon her, and for the love she had borne with such regal ease all these years.

  The entire wor
ld was of empty blood, she knew; only she of legitimate.

  Then she was downstairs, and in the hall, all by no more light than a midnight might allow, and now she was at the door to her room, the one in which she slept. The one in which her mother had birthed her and had passed.

  Her own room now.

  She turned the knob, admitted herself to the room, and saw in the darkness the white of her bed, the black of the dresser, and the round shape above it that was her lamp, this one rose as well but glass, and she struck a match from the holder beside the lamp, lit it, let the room grow with this rose hue, this warm and reckoning light, then knelt to the bed that had been her father’s, the bed in which her mother had birthed her, and in which her mother had died.

  A bed of love, she believed, not because of what her father and mother had made here, but because of what her mother had given here, the perfect love she herself had joined her mother in knowing now all these years, the perfect gift she had received upon execution of the covenant she had made with herself, a covenant to find love.

  Kneeling, she reached as she did each night beneath the bed, reached and reached, reached as if the loosed board beneath the bed might have of its own accord mended itself, might have made itself whole in a kind of horrible miracle she could not predict but believed might have happened each night she reached for it and could not find it, and then she felt the board’s edge, the gap between it and the next, and with one curled finger levered the single board up, all this without seeing it for the rote pilgrimage the search had become all these years. She lifted the board, reached beneath it to touch the corner of the cardboard box, then inched her finger along its side to find the ribbon with which the box had been tied a night so very long ago, a night just last night, a night now upon her.

  Her fingers took hold the ribbon and box, slipped it up between the boards, and she pulled it to her until here it was, the square dress box at her knees as mottled and decayed with age as her own hands, the white ribbon the color of parchment, passion finally upon her and rising as new and as ancient as the gift inside she had given herself: love. Here was the only passion worth finding, the only passion worth touching. No other passion existed, save for that rising in her as it rose every night since she had placed the gift here, in the mottled and decayed and beribboned dress box she held.