Milo said, “Go get her, son,” and Wesley went out to meet her with a silly grin that Willie Duke matched as if it was their secret. And she stood right there facing the whole group and whispered to him with her tiny mouth. Her wet hair was plaited so tight it stretched her eyebrows up in surprise, and her high nose bone came beaking white through the red skin, and she had on the kind of doll-baby dress she would wear to a funeral (if it was hot enough)—the short sleeves puffing high on her strong arms and the hem striking her just above the wrinkled knees.
Rosacoke didn’t speak a word. She swallowed once or twice more and then set down her supper, not wanting another bite. All she had eaten hung in her stomach like a fist. Milo said “Sick her, Rosa!”
“Shut up,” she said and he did.
When Willie Duke stopped whispering and went to the truck and Wesley came grinning back to take up his eating, Rosacoke couldn’t look at him, but she frowned to silence Milo who was swelling with curiosity before her eyes. Wesley ate on, not alluding once to Willie Duke’s brazen visit, and everybody else was looking at the ground, picking at little roots and straws. Finally Milo had to speak—“How many more you got, Wesley?”
“More what?” Wesley said, knowing very well what.
“Women trailing you? I bet they’re strung up the road from here to Norfolk right now, waiting for you to pass.”
Sissie said, “Milo just wishes he had a few, Wesley,” but Wesley didn’t say “Yes” or “No.” And Rosacoke didn’t make a sound. The trouble with Wesley was, he never denied anything.
Milo said, “How do you know I ain’t got a whole stable full?”
“Well, if you have, Sissie’s got the key to the stable now, big boy,” Sissie said and patted her belly that was the key.
Mama said they all ought to be struck dumb, talking that way around Baby Sister—around anybody.
“We are just joking, Mama, and nobody asked you to tune in,” Milo said.
“I’m not tuned in, thank you, sir. I was thinking about your brother and how he would have enjoyed this day.” It was the first thought of Rato anybody had had for several weeks and they paused for it.
Milo said, “He’s happy as a baby right where he is and getting all he can eat.” (Rato had been in the Army four months, as a messenger boy. He had got tired of working for Milo—taking his orders in the field—so early in April he hitched down to Raleigh and found the place and said he had come to join. They asked him what branch did he want to be in and he said “Calvary.” They said there hadn’t been any cavalry for ten years and how about the Infantry? He asked if that was a walking-soldier, and they said “Yes” but if he didn’t mind carrying messages, he could so he said “All right.”)
“I wasn’t worried about him eating,” Mama said. “I was just regretting he missed the funeral—off there in Oklahoma carrying messages on a Sunday hot as this. Rato knew Mildred good as you all did, and I reckon her funeral was big as any he will ever get the chance to see.”
“Why didn’t you go then and write him a description?” Rosacoke said, seeing only that Mama was hoping to hear about the funeral now, not seeing that Mama was thinking of Rato too.
“Because my duty was with my own.”
“Deviling eggs for Milo to choke over? Is that what you call your own? And fanning the flies off Sissie Abbott’s belly? And keeping Baby Sister out of deep water? I’m glad you are sure of what’s yours and what ain’t.” That came out of Rosacoke in a high, breaking voice she seldom used—that always scared her when it came. The skin of her face stretched back towards her ears and all the color left. And Milo winked at Wesley.
Mama said the natural thing. “I don’t know what you are acting so grand about. You said yourself you didn’t stay to the end.”
“No, I did not and do you want to know why? Because Wesley wouldn’t sit with me but stayed outside polishing his machine and in the midst of everything, cranked up and went for a ride. I thought he had left me for good and I ran out.”
Milo said, “Rosa, you can’t get upset everytime Wesley leaves for a minute. All us tomcats got to make our rounds.”
Wesley smiled a little but Rosacoke said, “Milo, you have turned out to be one of the sorriest people I know.”
“Thank you, ma’m. What about your friend Wesley here?”
“I don’t know about my friend Wesley. I don’t know what he is planning from one minute to the next. I don’t even know my place in that line of women you say is strung from here to Norfolk.”
Milo turned to Wesley—Wesley was lying on his back looking at the tree—“Wesley, what is Rosacoke’s place in your string of ladies? As I am her oldest brother, I have the right to ask.” Wesley lay on as if he hadn’t heard. Then he rolled over suddenly, flinging sand from the back of his head, and looked hard at Rosacoke’s chest, not smiling but as if there was a number on her somewhere that would tell her place in line. It took him awhile, looking at all of her except her eyes, and when he opened his mouth to speak, Rosacoke jumped up and ran for the lake in her bare feet.
Mama said, “What have you done to her, Wesley?”
“Not a thing, Mrs. Mustian. I ain’t said a word. She’s been acting funny all day.”
“It’s her battery,” Milo said. “Her battery needs charging. You know how to charge up an old battery, don’t you, Wesley?”
Mama ignored him and said, “That child has had a sadder day than any of you know.”
“Sad over what?” Milo said.
“That funeral.”
Sissie said she hadn’t noticed Mama pouring soothing oil on anybody, and Milo said, “No use being sad about that funeral. I knew Mildred just as long as Rosa, and she didn’t get nothing but what she asked for, messing around. Nothing happens to people that they don’t ask for.”
Mama said, “Well, I am asking you to take me home—that is the sorriest thing you have said all day, and the sun is going down. That child won’t but twenty years old and she died suffering.” She took the box of supper right out of Milo’s lap and shut it and said, “Baby Sister, help me fold up this blanket.” There was nothing for Sissie and Milo and Wesley to do but get off the blanket and think of heading home.
Rosacoke had taken her seat on a bench by the bathhouse with her back turned, and Wesley went down that way, not saying if he meant to speak to Rosa—maybe just to change his clothes. When he had gone a little way, Mama called to him, “Wesley, are you going to ease that child?”
“Yes’m,” he said. “I’ll try.”
“Will you bring her home then and not go scaring her with your machine?”
“Yes’m,” he said. “I will.” And Mama and them left without Milo even putting his trousers on—Sissie carried them over her arm—and whatever last words he wanted to yell at Wesley got stopped by the look in Mama’s eye.
All Rosacoke was seeing from the bench was pine trees across the lake on a low hill and two mules eating through clover with short slow steps towards each other. Somewhere on top of the hurting, she thought up a rule. “Give two mules a hill to stand on and time to rest and like as not by dark they will end up side by side, maybe eight inches apart from head to tail, facing different ways.” It wasn’t always true but thinking it filled the time till Wesley came from the shade and stood behind her and put one thick hand over her eyes and thinking he had come like a panther, asked her who it was.
“You are Wesley,” she said, “but that don’t tell me why you act the way you do.”
“Because I am Wesley,” he said and sat beside her, still in his bathing suit.
The sun was behind the pines and the mules now, shining through their trunks and legs to lay the last red light flat on the empty lake. The light would last another hour, but the heat was lifting already, and Rosacoke saw a breeze beginning in the tails of those two mules. “Here comes a breeze,” she said and they both watched it. It worked across the lake—too feeble to mark the water—and played out by ruffling the hem of her dress and parting the curled
hair of Wesley’s legs. They were the only people left at the lake except Mr. Mason who owned it. He was on guard in the cool-drink stand as hard as if it was noon and the lake was thick with screaming people.
Wesley laid his hand above her knee. “Let’s go swimming before it’s night.”
“What am I going to swim in?—my skin? This dirty dress is all I’ve got.”
“You could rent one over there at the drink stand.”
“I wouldn’t put on a public bathing suit if I never touched water again. Anyway, why are you so anxious about me swimming? I thought you got a bellyful of underwater sports with Willie Duke.”
“No I didn’t,” he said and laughed.
“Didn’t what?”
“Didn’t get a bellyful.”
That made her thigh tighten under his hand, and she looked away to keep from answering. So Wesley stood up and waded out to where the water was deep enough to lie down and then swam backwards to the diving board with his head out just enough to keep his eyes on her. It was his finest stroke and she wasn’t seeing a bit of it, but when he twisted round and rose and grabbed the ladder to the board—she saw that, him rising up by the strength of his right hand, not using his feet at all and hitching his red trunks that the water pulled at. (Even the skin below his waist was brown.)
Then he dived one lovely dive after another—not joking now for Milo’s sake but serious and careful as if there was a prize to win at sunset—and she watched him (not knowing if that was what he wanted, not being able to help herself). Once she narrowed her eyes to see only him, and once while he rested a minute, she focused on the hill beyond and those two mules that only had a short green space between them now. Then Wesley split down through the green with his red suit, blurred and silent and too quick to catch.
Before he surfaced, somebody spoke to Rosacoke. “Young lady, what kin is that boy to you?” It was Mr. Mason who owned the lake. He had shut up the cool-drink stand and was there by the bench with his felt hat on, hot as it was.
“No kin,” Rosacoke said. “I just came with him. We are the left-overs of Delight Church picnic.” She looked back to Wesley who was pretending not to notice Mr. Mason. “He has just got out of the Navy—that boy—and looks like he’s trying to recall every dive he ever learned.”
“Yes ma’m, it do,” Mr. Mason said, “but I wish he won’t doing it on my time. I mean, I’m a preacher and I got to go home, and the law says he can’t be diving when I ain’t watching. He can swim a heap better than me I know—I ain’t been under since I was baptized—but you all’s church has paid me to lifeguard every one of you, and long as he dives, I got to guard. And I didn’t charge but nineteen cents a head for all you Delight folks.”
Maybe Wesley was hearing every word—he wasn’t that far away—but just then he strolled off the end of the board and cut a string of flips in the air as if to show Mr. Mason one somebody was getting his nineteen cents’ worth. That time he stayed under extra long, and when he came up way over on the mule side, Rosacoke said, “Wesley, Mr. Mason has got to go home.” Wesley pinched his nostrils and waved Mr. Mason goodbye.
That seemed to please Mr. Mason. He laughed and told Rosacoke, “Lady, I’m going to leave him alone and deputize you a lifeguard. He is your personal responsibility from now on.” He took off his hat and took out his watch and said, “It is six-thirty and I am preaching in a hour. What must I preach on, lady?”
“Well, if you don’t know by now,” she said, “I’m glad I haven’t got to listen.” But she smiled a little.
And he wasn’t offended—“What I mean to say is, you give me your favorite text, and that’s what I’ll preach on.”
Rosacoke said, “‘Then Jesus asked him what is thy name and he said Legion.’”
“Yes ma’m,” he said, “that is a humdinger” (which wasn’t the same as committing himself to use it). Then he said he felt sure they had enjoyed their day and to come back any time it was hot and he left.
So Rosacoke and Wesley were there alone with nothing else breathing even but those two mules and what few birds were hidden on the hill that sang again in the cool and whatever it was that sent up those few bubbles from the deepest bottom of the lake. There was an acre or more of water between them (Wesley was still on the mule side, up to his waist), but they saw each other clear. They had had little separate seeings all day—his sight of her at the church that threw his mind to all those Norfolk women and her seeing him out the window, rubbing his machine or stroking through bushes to the spring or vanishing under the lake with Willie Duke Aycock in his hands—but this was the first time they had both looked, together. Wesley had his own reasons and she had hers and both of them wondered was there a reason to move on now past looking, to something else.
Wesley found a reason first. “Rosa,” he called and the name spread flat on the lake and came to her loud, “have you got anything I can drink?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I am thirsty.”
“Well, you are standing in several thousand gallons of spring water.”
He took that as a joke and lay down and swam straight towards her over the lake that had been brown in the sun but was green with the sun gone down—the water flat green and pieces of bright plant the swimmers stirred up ragged on the surface and Wesley’s arms pale green when they cut the water and his whole body for a moment green when he walked up the narrow sand and stood by the bench and looked again. She smiled, not knowing why, and turned away. Her hair had darkened like the water, and turning, it fell across her shoulder in slow water curves down the skin of her white neck to the groove along her back that was damp. He saw that. She said, “The drink stand is closed.” He nodded and walked off to the bathhouse, and she figured they were going home now so she walked back to the pine shade and got her shoes that Mama had brushed and left there and went down to the motorcycle and stood. Wesley came out with nothing on but his shirt over his red trunks and no sign of trousers anywhere.
“Who stole your trousers?” she said.
He didn’t answer that. He just said “Come here” and waved her to him. There was nothing to do but go, and when she got there he took her hand and started off round the lake away from the motorcycle.
“Aren’t we going home?” she said. “I mean, Mr. Mason has shut it up and all—maybe we ought to go.”
“Maybe I can find some drinking water up in them trees,” he said.
“Wesley, there is plenty of drinking water at every service station between here and home. Why have we got to go tearing through some strange somebody’s bushes? I have had a plenty of that already today.”
“Hush up, Rosa,” he said. She hushed and he held up the barbed wire, and she crawled under onto the hill with the mules. One yellow hair of hers caught in the wire, and Wesley took it and wrapped it round and round his finger.
“Is that mine?” she asked, stroking her head.
“It’s mine now.”
“Well, you can have it. The sun has bleached me out till I look like a hussy.”
“What do you know about a hussy?”
“I know you don’t have to go to Norfolk, Virginia to find one.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know who I mean.”
“If it’s Willie Duke Aycock you mean—she will be in Norfolk tomorrow along with them other hussies you mentioned.”
That was like a glass of ice water thrown on her, but she held back and only said, “What is she going up there for?”—thinking it was just a shopping trip to buy some of those clothes nobody but Willie Duke wore.
“She’s got a job.”
“Doing what?”
“Curling hair.”
“What does she know about curling hair with that mess she’s got?”
“I don’t know but she’s moving up, bag and baggage.”
“What was she asking you about then?”
“She wanted to know would I ride her up.”
Rosacoke took her ha
nd out of his. “On that motorcycle?”
“Yes.”
“Then she is crazier than I thought she was”—they were climbing the hill all this time, looking ahead to where the trees began—“Are you taking her?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“When will you know?”
“By the time I’m home tonight.” He took her hand again to show that was all he was saying about Willie Duke and to lead her into the trees.
They walked through briars and switches of trees and poison oak (and Wesley bare to every danger from the hip down) with their eyes to the ground as if a deep well of water might open at their feet any minute. But when the trees were thick enough to make it dark and when, looking back, she couldn’t see the mules, Rosacoke said, “Wesley, you and me both are going to catch poison oak which Milo would never stop laughing at, and you aren’t going to find any water before night.”
“Maybe it ain’t water I’m looking for,” he said.
“I don’t notice any gold dust lying around—what are you hunting?”
There was an oak tree on Wesley’s right that was bare around the roots. He took her there and sat in a little low grass. She clung to his hand but stayed on her feet and said, “Night will come and catch us here, and we will get scratched to pieces stumbling out.” But the light that filtered through the trees fell on Wesley’s face, and when she studied him again—him looking up at her serious as if he was George Washington and had never smiled—and when he pulled once more on her hand, she sat down with him. A piece of her white dress settled over his brown legs and covered the pouting little mouth where the leech had been, and she asked him something she had wondered all afternoon—“How come you are so brown even under the belt of your bathing suit?”
He folded his suit back to the danger point and said “From skinny-dipping.”
“You never told me what that is.”
“It’s swimming naked.”
“Where?”
A Long and Happy Life Page 5
