When he moved it was a step backward to leave, and Rosacoke hoped he would step on her hat—then she could speak—but he missed the hat and turned to the road. She took the last chance and stepped out and said, “Wesley, what do you know about this spring?”
He reached with both hands for his black belt as if guns were hanging there for such emergencies and hitched up his trousers—“I know somebody has stirred Hell out of it.”
“That was me,” she said. “I was just rinsing off my feet when I heard you coming—except I didn’t know it was you. I figured you was picnicking by now.”
He smiled and took another look at the spring and frowned. She walked towards him, holding her shoes. “I don’t stir it up every day, Wesley. I don’t strike out home in the dust every day either.” She bent down for her hat—he never moved his foot an inch. “I was watching you from behind that cedar, wondering when you would notice my hat.”
“I didn’t know it was yours,” he said.
“Good thing it wasn’t a rabbit trap or you’d have lost a leg.” She set it on her tangled hair. “I’ll have my name painted on it real big so you won’t fail to know me next time.” Then she dried her feet with the palm of her hand and put on her shoes.
“You ready for this picnic?” he said.
She looked to see where the sun had got to. It was well past three o’clock. “I had given up on the picnic, Wesley. Anyhow, by the time we got there everybody would be gone.”
“Suits me,” he said. “There’ll just be that much more water to swim in. But Milo will be there, you know, and your Mama said she would save me some chicken.”
“Well, I can’t go looking like the Tarbaby. You will have to stop at home and let me change my clothes.”
“No need,” he said. “Everybody will look like Tarbabies by the time we get there,” and he took her hand and started for the road. They were nearly at the cycle, and Rosacoke had stood it long as she could—“You haven’t said a word about where you tore off to or what I was doing at the spring.”
“I went home to get something I forgot, and you said you was cooling off.”
“I don’t normally walk a mile on a July day to soak my feet.”
“If you will hush up, we can ride twenty miles, and you can soak everything you’ve got.”
“I have soaked sufficient, thank you. I have also changed clothes three times today—going on four—and I wouldn’t peel off again to bathe in the River Jordan.”
“Well, it’s nothing but Mason’s Lake we’re going to, and you can sit on the bank and watch me execute a few Navy dives.”
He was already on the cycle and waiting for her, but there was one more thing to ask. “Wesley, how did you know about Mr. Isaac’s spring?”
“Somebody showed it to me a long time ago.”
“Who?”
“One of my old girl friends.” He laughed as if it wasn’t so but it was—and laughed on in Rosacoke’s head above the roar while she climbed on and laughed still when she laid against his back like sleep, wondering only who that old girl was till they were halfway to the lake and she changed to remembering Mildred. “They are burying Mildred Sutton now. If I had not forgot, I would be there where my duty lies—not here anyhow, hanging onto somebody I don’t know, streaking off towards a good time, straddling all the horse-power Wesley Beavers owns.”
Milo sighted them first of anybody from where he stood at the top of the tin sliding board, slicking back his hair and detaining behind him a whole line of children while he decided whether he would try it headfirst (and risk rupturing a thing or two) or just his normal way. From the top he could see where the highway bent by the lake, and when Wesley and Rosacoke made the turn and were near enough to notice him, his problem was solved—he flipped belly-down on the wet slide and hollered “Here come Rosa” and waved with one hand and held his nose with the other and shot head to toe out of sight in the muddy lake. A cannon sound rose up behind him. (He was twenty-four years old, and Sissie his wife was as pregnant as women ever got.)
Wesley had seen Milo and stopped by the water. He laughed again with his goggles turned to the spot where Milo sank and said, “I bet there ain’t a scrap of skin left on either side of Milo,” but behind the goggles he was skimming the whole lake to see who was floating, even while he helped Rosacoke down. She was looking too. They were looking for the same floater, and Willie Duke Aycock was nowhere in sight.
Milo surfaced and stood up in the shallow end near them, every hair on him (the color of broomstraw) curling downward to the lake like streams. He grabbed his groin and moaned, laughing, “Good thing Sissie is already served. I’m finished.” Then he rearranged everything inside his trunks and said, “Wesleyson, I don’t advise you to try no belly-sliding, else you might deprive Rosa of a lovely future.”
Rosacoke said “Milo behave!” But she smiled and Baby Sister came out to meet them, trailing a string of little wet girls—mostly Guptons.
“You just missed the baptizing,” Baby Sister said. “I have baptized every one of these children today—some of them more than once.”
“I’m glad you got them before they passed on,” Wesley said, walking already towards the bathhouse, taking off his shirt as he went. “They look like cholera chickens right now.” The Guptons just eyed him, not understanding—yellow and nosy and slick as peeled squirrels with hard round stomachs poking through their bathing suits and tan hair roping round their eyes raw and wide from so much dipping.
“You two don’t look so good yourselves,” Baby Sister said and huffed off towards what was left of the Pepsi-Colas, leaving the Guptons hanging in blistering sun.
Rosacoke called after her “Where is Mama?”
“Nursing Sissie over yonder in the shade.”
The shade was behind the bathhouse under a close knot of pines that was all Mr. Mason had left, bulldozing his lake, and the remainder of Delight Church’s picnic was mostly spread out there—on Rosacoke’s right nearest the water, Mr. Isaac Alston in the black leather chair he went everywhere in (that he had barely left since his last stroke), staring at the swimmers and waiting for Sammy to come back with the truck. His collar was undone and there was that line drawn straight through the middle of him—one side moving and one side still—and beyond him was Rosacoke’s Mama on a wool blanket, fanning Milo’s Sissie who was leaning back, white as fat meat, on a pine with her eyes shut and her hands folded on her belly, not expecting to live, and a little way out of the trees in a pack of their own, a number of Guptons in chalk blue, all exactly alike, set up in the sand straight from the waist as hinges, shoving gnats off their bony legs and lean as if they had never eaten all they could hold (though they had just eaten half a picnic).
Rosacoke was not swimming and Mama had already seen her so she knew there was nothing to do but head for the shade and on her way, speak greetings to Mr. Isaac. That was her duty, as he had been good to them. But bad as she felt, she couldn’t face telling him who she was—whose daughter (he never knew lately until you explained and then seldom showed any thanks for your effort). She lowered her head not to see him and bore to the left and circled towards Mama, dusty as she was and blown (with the feel of wind from the ride still working in the roots of her hair), but Mama called to her from ten yards away, “How was the funeral?” so she detoured a little to speak to Marise Gupton who was Willie Duke Aycock’s sister and had been in grammar school with her but looked a hundred years older from giving Macey Gupton the children Baby Sister had dipped. When she got to Marise, Marise looked up with no more pleasure or recognition than Mr. Isaac would have showed and let her begin the talking. All she could think to say was, “Marise, have you been swimming yet?”
“I ain’t swam once since my first baby,” she said, and her fourth baby who was her first boy and three months old, named Frederick, cried from a wad of blankets on the ground behind her. (Macey her husband was sleeping beside him. He was Milo’s age and he couldn’t swim.) Marise frowned up to Rosacoke at
the noise, but she reached back and took him and laid him on one shoulder. He was hid in a heavy knit suit and a cap that covered his ears (all blue to match his family), and crying so hard, he looked like a fired cookstove.
Rosacoke said, “Don’t you reckon he’s frying, Marise?”
Marise said “No” and that seemed the end of what they could say as Marise was opening her dress with her left hand. Before she was open completely, Frederick rolled down his head and his jaws commenced working. His wet mouth was seeking her breast through blue cotton cloth. “Just wait,” she said, a little harsh—to him, not Rosacoke. But Rosacoke waited too, not speaking, and Frederick found what he needed. Marise didn’t talk either but watched her baby—number four—pulling hard at her life. In a little, still sucking with his eyes shut tight, he halfway smiled, and Marise gave him a quick little smile in return—her first of the day. Rosacoke might just as well have been in Egypt (and very nearly felt she was) so she looked on ahead and went towards Mama.
Mama said, “How come you didn’t speak to Mr. Isaac?” and before she could answer, “You look like you rode in on a circular saw” and kept on fanning Sissie.
Rosacoke said, “If that’s what you call a motorcycle, I did.”
Sissie barely opened her eyes and said, “I wish somebody had took me motorcycle riding on a rocky road five months ago, and I wouldn’t be this sick today.”
“What’s wrong with Sissie?”
“Not a thing,” Mama said, “except she had already eat her Brunswick stew when Milo announced about old Mr. Gupton losing his teeth. But there was no way on earth to have told her any sooner. Mr. Gupton was the last man to stir the stew before they served it up, and he had been carrying his teeth in his shirt pocket to rest his gums. Well, everybody had commenced eating their portion except Mr. Gupton, and Milo noticed him frowning hard and feeling his pockets and looking on the ground all round the pot so Milo went over and asked him was anything wrong, and he said, ‘I have mislaid my teeth.’ Mislaid! There he had been leaning over twenty gallons of delicious stew for a solid hour, and where were his teeth bound to be? Well, not in the stew it turned out, but nobody knew that till some time later when one of the children found them, unbroken, over by the woodpile where he had dropped them, picking up wood. But as I say, Sissie had eat hers and collapsed at the false news long before the teeth appeared, and here she’s laid ever since, me fanning her like a fool.” Then Mama thought again of what she had waited all afternoon to hear—“How was the funeral?”
“Mama, it wasn’t a picture show.”
“I know that. I just thought somebody might have shouted.”
“Maybe they did. I didn’t stay to the end.”
“Why not?” But Mama broke off—“Look at Wesley.”
Wesley had run from the bathhouse and taken the high-dive steps three at a time and up-ended down through the air like a mistake at first, rowing with his legs and calling “Milo” as he went (for Milo to laugh), but then his legs rose back in a pause and his arms cut down before him till he was a bare white tree (the air was that clear) long enough for Rosacoke to draw one breath while he went under slow—not a sound, not a drop and what began as a joke for Milo’s sake didn’t end as a joke.
“He can dive all right,” Mama said. “Reckon he has touched bottom by now,” and at that Wesley shot up, holding a handful of bottom overhead as proof, the black mud streaming down his arm.
“If he’s been on the bottom, he’s eat-up with leeches,” Sissie said. “I told Milo if he got a leech on him, he wasn’t coming near me.”
“Wesley is too speedy for any leech to take hold of,” Mama said.
Rosacoke said “Amen” to that.
“I can’t speak for the leeches,” Sissie said, “but Willie Duke Aycock has took hold already.” (Willie Duke had had her eyes on Wesley since the seventh grade when she grew up overnight several months before anybody else, and there she was paddling out to him and Milo now, moving into the deepest part with no more swimming ability than a window weight, so low in the water nobody could tell if she had on a stitch of clothes and churning hard to stay on top.)
“She can’t keep it up long,” Rosacoke said.
“Honey, she’s got God’s own water wings inside her brassiere,” Sissie said. (And Sissie was right. Willie Duke had won a Dairy Queen Contest the summer before, and the public remarks on her victory were embarrassing to all.)
“Well, I don’t notice Milo swimming away from her,” Rosacoke said, at which Milo and Wesley grabbed Willie Duke and sank without a trace.
People in the lake began circling the spot where the three went down, and Rosacoke stood up where she was, shading her eyes in hopes of a sign. Mama said, “They have been under long enough,” and Baby Sister was running for the lifeguard when they appeared at the shallow end, carrying Willie Duke like a sack of meal to dry land and laying her down. Then they charged back and swam the whole lake twice, length and breadth—Milo thrashing like a hay baler—before they raced up to the shade and shook water on everybody’s clothes and lit the two cigars Milo had in Sissie’s bag.
There was a leech, yellow and slick, sucked to Wesley’s leg. Nobody saw it till Sissie yelled. It was the last blow of the day for Sissie. She just folded up like a flower and lay back, swallowing loud. Mama stopped her fanning to look, and Milo of course made the first comment—“That leech is having him a picnic now”—and Wesley showed he wasn’t too happy by stamping his foot. But Rosacoke sat up on her knees, and the leech, being almost on Wesley’s hip, was level with her eyes, about the size of her little finger, holding on with both its ends and pulling hard at Wesley’s life. She touched the end that was the mouth and it crouched deeper inward.
Mama said, “Don’t pull it off, Rosa, or Wesley will bleed to death.”
And Milo said, “If we just leave him alone, he can get enough to last till the next church outing, and Wesley will never miss it.”
Wesley said, “Milo, if you are so interested in feeding animals, I’ll turn him over to you just as soon as I get him off,” and he took the cigar and tried to burn the leech’s head, but his hand shook and he burnt his leg. “Rosa, you do it,” he said and handed the cigar to her. She blew off the ashes and touched the mouth. It flapped loose and dangled a second before the tail let go, and when it hit the sand, it hunched off, not waiting, in three measuring steps towards the water before Mama got it with her shoe and buried it deep till there was no sign left but Wesley’s blood still streaming. Rosacoke gave him a handkerchief to hold on the bite, and he wore it round his leg like a garter.
Then everybody could calm back down, talking a little about nothing till the talking died and Baby Sister wandered back and said she was tired and flopped in the sand and sang the Doxology (her favorite song), and when they felt the low late sun pressing so heavy through the pines, sleep seemed the next natural thing. Milo and Wesley stretched out in their bathing suits—hair and all laid right in the sand—and Rosacoke propped against the other side of Sissie’s tree, and they slept off and on (except Mama who could never bat an eye till the sun went down) until Macey Gupton yelled his three girls in, and the yell woke up Baby Sister who was hungry and said so (who was also twelve years old, with every crumb she ate turning to arms and legs). Mama tried to hush her but she woke up Wesley who was hungry too and who shook Milo’s foot and said, “Milo, why don’t you ask that question you was talking about in the lake?”
Milo came to and asked it. “Mama, what have you got in the way of something to eat?”
“Enough for us six,” she said, “and we’ll eat it when the five thousand leave.” (She meant the Guptons. She couldn’t fill them up.)
But it was already past five. The lake had emptied of everything but one old man (not on the picnic) asleep in his inner tube, rocking with the water while it slowed down and woke him up, and the only clue to this being a pleasure lake was the high dive quivering and the temporary-looking slide, and up in the shade the picnic was drifting
away. The signal for leaving was when Mr. Isaac’s Sammy came back from the funeral with his blue suit still on and drove the truck right to Mr. Isaac’s feet and buttoned his collar and lifted him in and loaded on the chair and nodded his head towards Rosacoke. She nodded back and Sammy drove off, and Milo said, “That is the nigger killed Mildred Sutton.”
Rosacoke said, “You can’t prove that.”
Milo said, “No’m, and your friend Mildred couldn’t neither. If you back up into a circular saw, you can’t name what tooth cuts you first.”
Rosacoke swallowed hard but she didn’t answer that. Nobody did. They looked off towards the Guptons for relief. The Guptons were all lying down except Marise, but they swatted gnats to show they were not asleep. What they were really doing was lingering to find out the Mustians’ plans—every few minutes a head would rise up and peep around in case an invitation was on the way. That got Milo’s goat and when Frederick cried again, Milo said loud enough for Marise to hear, “What that baby needs is a bust in the mouth!”
Wesley said, “That’s what they all need.”
Mama said “Hush!”
And Sissie said, “He’s had it twice already since noon. Don’t make her pull it out again.”
So finally with nobody saying a word about free supper, the Guptons had to leave. Macey stood and said “Let’s go eat” and waved silly to Milo and led off towards the truck. The others straggled on and when they were loaded in, Baby Sister said “O.K. Mama.” Mama looked round. The Gupton truck hadn’t moved but she guessed it was safe, and she pulled out the stew and chicken and a whole box of eggs (deviled before breakfast) that nobody but Milo would touch.
The Guptons still didn’t move—maybe their engine was flooded—but the Mustians were deep in eating (even Sissie) when Mama looked up and said “Oh Lord.” Willie Duke Aycock had appeared from the bathhouse door and was heading their way. (The Guptons of course were riding her home. Her family hadn’t come.) She stopped at a little distance and spoke nice to Mama and called Rosacoke’s name like an item in a sick list and asked if she could speak to Wesley a minute.
A Long and Happy Life Page 4
