“Anywhere you can find a private beach and somebody to swim with you.”
“Who do you find?”
“People ain’t hard to find.”
“Women you mean?”
“Ain’t you asked your share of questions?” he said and lifted her hair and hid under it long enough to kiss her neck.
She drew back a little, finally sick from all the afternoon, and said, “Wesley, I am sorry and I know it maybe isn’t none of my business, but I have sat in Afton on my behind for the best part of three years making up questions I needed to hear you answer, and here you are answering me like I was a doll baby that didn’t need nothing but a nipple in her mouth.”
He didn’t speak and when she turned to him, he was just looking at his feet that were almost gone in the dark. For awhile the only noise was a whippoorwill starting up for the night, but Rosacoke watched Wesley through that silence, thinking if he looked up, she would know all she needed, but he didn’t look up and she said something she had practiced over and over for a time like this—“There are some people that look you in the eyes every second they are with you like you were in a building with some windows dark and some windows lit, and they had to look in every window hard to find out where you were. Wesley, I have got more from hitchhikers than I have from you—just old men with cardboard suitcases and cold tough wrists showing at the end of their sleeves, flagging down rides in the dust, shy like they didn’t have the right to ask you for air to breathe, much less a ride, and I would pass them in a bus maybe, and they would look up and maybe it wasn’t me they were looking at, but I’d think it was and I’d get more from them in three seconds than you have given me in three whole years.”
He didn’t even answer that. He hadn’t seen that every question she asked was aimed for the one she couldn’t ask, which was did he love her or didn’t he, and if he did, what about those women Milo mentioned and he didn’t deny, and if he didn’t, why had he kept her going this many years and why was he riding her up and down on a brand-new motorcycle and why did he have her under this tree, maybe miles from drinking water and the night coming down?
He didn’t answer but when she was quiet he commenced to show her why. For awhile he did what he generally did around her face and lips and her white neck. And she let him go till he took heart and moved to what was underneath, trying for what he had never tried before. Then with her hand she held him back and said, “Is that all you want out of me?”
“That’s right much,” he said. And if he had let her think a minute and look, he might have won, but he said one more thing. “If you are thinking about Mildred’s trouble, you ain’t got that to worry about. You’ll be all right. That’s why I left the funeral—to go home and get what will make it all right for me and you.”
“No, Wesley,” she said. Then she said, “It is nearly dark” and stood up and asked him to take her home.
“Rosa,” he said, “you know I am going to Norfolk again. You know that don’t you?”
“I know that,” she said. She took a step to leave.
“—And that maybe I’m riding Willie Duke up there?”
“Wesley, you can ride Willie Duke to Africa and back if she’s what you’re looking for. Just make sure she don’t have Mildred’s trouble.” So Wesley gave up and followed her out of the woods—her leading because she had on shoes and could cut the path—and when they got to the hill, it was almost night. All they could see was the mules outlined against the lake below, resting now and as close as Rosacoke guessed they would be. Wesley saw them and said “Congratulations, mules.”
At the bathhouse Rosacoke kept going to the cycle, and Wesley turned in to put on his trousers. But there were no lights in there, and Rosacoke could see up at the eaves the glow he made with a match or two before he stamped his foot and came towards the cycle with his trousers and boots in his arms. She said, “Do you mean to ride home naked?”
“Hell no,” he said, “but I ain’t hopping around another minute in yonder where it’s dark and snaky.” He switched on the headlight and stood in its narrow beam and stepped out of that red suit into his trousers with nothing but a flapping shirt tail to hide him, and Rosacoke turned her face though he didn’t ask her to.
Then not stopping once he took her home round twenty miles of deadly curves hard as he could, and she held him tight to save her life. When they were almost there she squeezed for him to slow down and said to stop on the road and not turn in as Mama might be in bed. He did that much—stopped where she said by a sycamore tree and turned off the noise and raised his goggles and waited for her to do the talking or the moving. She got down and took what was hers in the saddlebags, and seeing the house was all dark but one door light the moths beat on, she asked him to shine his light to the door so she could see her way. He did that too and she walked down the beam a yard or so before she turned and tried to say what needed saying. “Wesley—”
“What?” he said—but from behind the light where she couldn’t see.
And what she couldn’t see, she wasn’t speaking to—“Have a good trip.”
“All right,” he said and she walked on to the house and at the porch, stood under the light and waved with her hat to show she was safe. For a minute there was no noise but rain frogs singing out behind the creek. Then the cycle roared and the light turned back to the road and he was gone.
Rosacoke wondered would she ever sleep.
WHEN he was gone three weeks and no word came, she sent this letter to him.
August 18
Dear Wesley,
How are the motorcycles? Cool I hope. And how are you? Sleeping better than us I hope. All the ponds around here have dried up and nobody in the house but Baby Sister has shut an eye for three nights now. We are treating each other like razor blades. If there doesn’t come a storm soon or a breeze, I will be compelled to take a bus to some cooler spot. Such as Canada. (Is that cool?) My bedroom of course is in the eaves of the house under that black tin roof that soaks up the sun all day and turns it loose at night like this was winter and it was doing me a favor. My bed feels like a steam pressing machine by the time I crawl in. Last night by 1 a.m. I was worn out from rolling around so I went downstairs and stretched out on the floor—under the kitchen table so Milo wouldn’t step on me in the dark, going for his drinks of water. The floor wasn’t any cooling board but I had managed to snooze off for a good half hour when here comes Sissie tripping down in the pitch black to get her a dish of Jello (which is what she craves). I heard her coming (I reckon they heard her for miles) and knowing how scarey she is and not wanting her to have the baby right there, I stood up to announce my presence but before I could say a word, she had the light on and her head in the ice box, spooning out Jello. Well what could I do then? I figured speaking would be the worst thing so I kept standing there by the stove, big as a road machine but trying to shrink, and Sissie was on her second dish before she turned around and saw me. That was it. She held onto the baby—don’t ask me how. Cherry Jello went everywhere. Mama was there in a flash and Milo with the gun, thinking there had been an attack. Sissie calmed down right easy—for her—but not before it was sunup and the chickens who had heard the noise were clucking around the back porch in case anybody felt like feeding them. So what point was there in going to bed? None. Mama just cooked breakfast and we sat there and stared at each other like enemies. Before we had even washed dishes, the sun was hot enough to blister paint and I had to go to Warrenton and spend the day putting through telephone calls between people who talked about how hot it was. Guess what a lovely day I had. I would never have got through it if I hadn’t plugged in by mistake to some Purvis man telling his fancy woman it was all off and her saying, “That’s what you think!”
But the heat doesn’t bother you, does it? I wonder why. Low blood, I guess. Have you ever had it tested? Being in the Navy, you must have.
I will stop now as Milo said he would walk with me to Mary Sutton’s to take some clothes for Mildred’s baby—not much I’m
afraid, with Sissie laying claim on everything here. The baby is living. I don’t know why but maybe he does. The baby, I mean. All I have talked about is me and my foolishness but nobody here has done a thing except sweat since you left. I say left—looks like you left three years ago and aren’t coming back.
Goodnight Wesley. It has just now thundered in the west. Maybe it is going to rain.
Love to you from, Rosacoke
For that, in two weeks’ time, he sent her a giant post card of a baby with a sailor hat on in a baby carriage, hugging a strip-naked celluloid doll and sucking on a rubber pacifier. The caption said, I Am A Sucker For Entertainment, and Wesley said,
Hello Rosa, I hope you have cooled off a little bit by now. From the heat I mean. Yes we are having it hot here too but it don’t keep me from sleeping when I get in the bed. That doesn’t happen regular as summer is the big season on motorcycles and when I am not closing a sale I am generally out at Ocean View where I have friends and can take me a relaxing dip. That is where I am writing you this card from. I would write you a letter but I am no author. I know Milo is having a hard time waiting out Sissie’s baby. Tell him Wesley said Ocean View is the place for Tired Rabbits.
—And it stopped there. He had crowded it exactly full of his big writing, and there was no room left to sign his name or say “Yours truly” or any other word that gives you away.
Rosacoke waited awhile, wondering if she had the right, and then said,
September 15
Dear Wesley,
It doesn’t seem like a fair exchange—me writing letters and you writing cards—but here I am anyhow because it is Sunday and I can’t think of anything else to do. I can’t think of anything else but you. (You are no author but I am a poet.) Seriously Wesley, there are alot of questions playing on my mind. They have been playing there six years nearly and tonight I feel like asking them.
Wesley, I want to know are we in love? And if we are, how come you to act the way you do—tearing off to Norfolk after a motorcycle job when you could have stayed back here with your own folks, including me? And not even trying to answer me when I write but telling me about relaxing with your friends at Ocean View and not saying who—just leaving me to wonder if it’s Willie Duke Aycock you’re riding around or some other body I’ve never seen. Wesley, that is no way to treat even a dog—well it’s one way but it don’t make the dog too happy.
I think I have held up my end pretty well and I am wondering if it isn’t time you took up your share of the load or else told me to lay mine down and get on home to Mama. So I am asking you what do you want me to do? All I am asking you to do is say. What have I ever refused you but that one thing you asked me to do last time you were here—when I was nearly wild with thinking about poor Mildred and the way I ran out on her funeral to hunt you down—and what right did you have to ask for that when you never moved your mouth one time to say “I love you” or make the smallest promise?
I know this isn’t no letter for a girl to write but when you have sat in silence six whole years waiting for somebody you love to speak—and you don’t know why you love them or even what you want them to say, just so it’s soothing—then it comes a time when you have to speak yourself to prove you are there. I just spoke. And I’m right here.
Goodnight to you Wesley, from Rosacoke
His answer to that was,
September 25
Dear Rosa,
You are getting out of my depth now. We can talk about it when I come home. I hope that will be real soon as the rush season here is petering out.
I haven’t got any news fit to tell.
Good luck until I see you again, Wesley
So she waited, not writing to Wesley again (not putting thoughts to paper anyhow) and not having word from him—but working her way through six days every week and staying home evenings to watch Milo’s Sissie swell tighter and to hear Mama read out Rato’s cards from Oklahoma (saying he had visited one more Indian village and had his picture made with another full-dressed Chief) and sitting through church on the first Sunday morning and not telling anybody what she was waiting for. (Nobody asked. Everybody knew.) And along with the motorcycle season, the hot days petered out, and the nights came sooner like threats and struck colder and lasted longer till soon she was rising up for work in half-dark nearly (and stepping to the window in her shimmy for one long look through the yard, thinking some new sight might have sprung up in her sleep to cheer her through the day, but all that was ever there was a little broomstraw and the empty road and dogwood trees that were giving up summer day by day, crouched in the dawn with leaves already black and red like fires that were smothering slow). And the first Saturday evening in November when she was rocking easy in the front-porch swing, Milo came home and said to her, “Rosacoke, all your cares are ended. Willie Duke Aycock has got a rich boy friend, and she don’t know who Wesley Beavers is.”
Rosacoke kept rocking but she said, “What do you mean?”
“I mean it ain’t been an hour since Willie Duke landed unexpected in her Daddy’s pasture in a private airplane owned and piloted by a Norfolk fellow who’s compelled to be in love—nothing but love could make a airplane land in Aycock’s pasture!”
Rosacoke laughed. “How long did it take to dream that up?”
“Honest to God, Rosa, it’s so. I won’t a witness but I just seen her Mama at the store buying canned oysters for a big fry, and she said the family ain’t calmed down yet, much less the cow. She said when that plane touched ground, every tit on the cow stood out like pot legs and gave.”
But once Rosacoke believed him she didn’t smile the way he hoped. She stood up and said, “I better go set the table” and walked towards the house.
Milo stopped her. “What ails you, Rosa? You got the world’s most worried-looking mind. Willie ain’t dropped no atom bombs. You ought to be grinning wide.”
“How come?”
“Don’t this mean Wesley is your private property now?”
“Ask Wesley that.”
“You ask him. Wesley come home in that little airplane too.” He beamed to be telling her that at last.
She turned full to the house and said, “Is that the truth?”
“It’s what Mrs. Aycock said.”
She didn’t look at him again. She went in and set the table but didn’t sit down to supper, saying she wasn’t hungry but meaning she didn’t want to hear them laugh at Willie Duke’s flight and tell her to dress up quick before Wesley came. She did change clothes—but nothing fancy, nothing but the pale blue dress and the sweater she wore any evening when she had worked all day—and she sat back out in the swing and rocked a little with both heels dug in the white ground to keep her rocking so slow she could always see the road. What light there was came slant and low in the rising cool and touched a power line of new copper wire in separate places, making it seem to float between the poles towards both ends of the road. A dead maple leaf curled down to her lap. She ground it in her hand and wondered where it fell from (the tree she swung in being oak), and a spider lowered to her by one strand of silk, trying again to fill the air with unbroken thread, and beyond the road two crows called out unseen from the white sycamore that was bare already and straight as Wesley’s diving. A distant rifle cracked and the crows shut up. “Mighty late to be hunting,” she thought and counted to twelve, and one crow signaled to start again. Then the dark came in. A light went on in the house, and there was Mama at the dining-room window, ironing. (She would stand there till bedtime. Then Milo would tell her, “All right, pack up or you’ll have the Ku Klux on me for working my Mama so late.”) But the road stayed black and nothing came or went, not even lightning bugs. (Every lightning bug was dead. There had been the first real frost the night before.)
And it frosted Saturday night. Rosacoke knew because she didn’t sleep but stared out her window every hour or so to the road till finally by the moon she could see frost creeping towards her—gathering first on weeds low down near th
e road, locking them white till morning and pausing awhile but starting again and pulling on slow up the yard like hands, gripping its way from one patch of grass to the next and (nearer the house, when the grass gave out) from rocks to dead roots to the roof of Milo’s car. Then it silvered that and reached for the house, and Rosacoke fell back and slept.
TWO
BUT Sunday was bright again and the frost was dew when she woke up, and the road was full of black children creeping towards Mount Moriah, trying their white breaths on the morning air, and carloads of white folks she knew but couldn’t see, bound for Delight. Her clock said half-past ten and the house was quiet. They had gone on and left her. But when she tore downstairs to the kitchen, there was Milo dressed to the neck, eating syrup. “Oh,” she said, “I thought I would have to walk this morning.”
Milo tested her face to see what he should say. “Mama went on with Baby Sister. She said to let you sleep if that was how you felt.”
Rosacoke looked in his shaving mirror over the stove. “I may look dead but I’m not.”
“Well, Sissie ain’t feeling good either. She’s laid out upstairs so you can set with her.”
“Milo, I’m going. Sissie will be all right and if she commences having babies, Delight Church will hear it. Just cool me some coffee and I’ll get dressed right now.”
So she dressed the best she could on such short notice and took a deep breath, and they headed off in a hurry (but not fast enough to ease her mind). When they flew past Mr. Isaac’s, Rosacoke looked up through the thinning pecan grove to the house and—to break the quiet, to calm herself—said the first thing she thought, “Mr. Isaac’s truck is still there. Reckon he’s too sick for church?”
“Not if he’s live,” Milo said, and they went on by the pond and skidded the final curve, and there was Delight stood up in the morning sun with little fellows weaving round it in games and little clumps of men on this side near the graves, making clouds as they smoked through the last few minutes of air. From the curve Rosacoke looked towards the men, knowing she was safe and couldn’t see a face from so far off, but after they pulled in the yard and every man turned to watch and one little boy screamed “Rosey-Coke!” (which was what boys called her), she couldn’t look again. She looked to the graves where her father was sinking steady. But she didn’t notice that. She could only see Milo searching with his eyes for anybody special in the crowd. She trembled to think what he might say any moment, and she said in the voice that scared her, “Don’t tell me what you see.” Then she got out alone and walked on straight to the church past all those men, seeing nothing but white sand under her feet. And nobody called her name. She went in just that fast and took her place four pews from the front on Mama’s left.
A Long and Happy Life Page 6
