Rosacoke kept looking at the picture. “Did you know Daddy then?”
Mama said, “Good as I ever did” and sat on the bed. “I don’t mean to say we passed any time together—we was nothing but babies—but I used to see him sometime at church, and at Sunday school picnics he generally wound up eating on us. He never did like Miss Pauline’s cooking, and chicken pies was all she brought to picnics.” She held out her hand for the picture. “The funny thing though is, this is how I always recall him (whenever I recall)—looking like this, I mean. So young and serious—not like he got to be. If he would have stayed this way, he’d be here right this minute. But Rosa, he changed. Folks all have to change, I know, but he didn’t have no more will power than a flying squirrel. He didn’t have nothing but the way he looked, and I never asked for nothing else, not in 1930 nohow. Then when the money got scarce as hens’ back teeth and his drunks commenced coming so close they were one long drunk and he was sleeping nights wherever he dropped in fields or by the road—I took all that like a bluefaced fool. I never asked him once to change a thing till it was too late and he had filled me up with four big babies and himself to the brim with bootleg liquor and then walked into a pickup truck.” She rubbed the picture on her dress for dust. “But like I said, I don’t recall him that last way and I’m thankful.”
Rosacoke said, “Who is the other boy?” (not bringing up her only recollection which was of that last way).
“I’ve been wondering too but I can’t see his face. Maybe it was some little fellow they met that day and never saw again. Looks like he’s hollering something, don’t it?”
“Yes’m,” she said. “Wonder what it was?”
But Mama was through with the picture. She thought it had served the purpose she meant it for, and she went to the mantel and propped it by the one of Wesley in uniform. “I’ll leave it here for awhile so you can see it good. It’ll be yours someday anyhow. None of the others wouldn’t want it. That’s why I didn’t show it when I found it.” Then she turned and said what she came to say. “Rosa, he ain’t coming so why don’t you get some good fresh air?”
Rosacoke faced the wall. “He ain’t what I’m waiting for.”
“Don’t lie to me. What else is there but Judgment Day?”
“A heap of things, Mama.” But she didn’t name one. She lay in misery, wishing the Lord would strike her mother dumb, and far off a drone began and bore down nearer like some motorcycle leaning round curves to get to what it wants or like an arrow for her heart. She jumped off the bed and threw up the window and strained to see the road, but Baby Sister was dancing in the yard, pointing to the sky and screaming before the noise completely drowned her, “It’s Willie, Rosacoke—make haste, it’s Willie in the air!” And the shadow of Willie’s fellow’s plane, little as it was, swept over the yard and stirred the biggest oaks before it vanished north. When the drone passed over, Baby Sister was crying, “There’s three folks in that plane!” And Mama said “There they go.”
Rosacoke looked back to the mantel and the pictures and the mirror. “And here goes Rosacoke,” she said. She put on a green winter dress and old easy shoes and didn’t comb her hair that was tangled from misery. Her black Kodak was beside the photograph of her father with half a roll of summer pictures in it. She took it up and said, “I’m going to walk to Mary’s. I told her I would take a picture of Mildred’s baby to send to his aunts and uncles.” Mama went over and spread up the bed and Rosacoke opened the door.
“You’ll freeze like that,” Mama said. So Rosacoke took her raincoat and a scarf like silk, and Mama said, “Walk easy down them steps. Milo and Sissie said they needed naps. You know what their naps are like—and Sissie big as a fifty-cent balloon.”
Rosacoke heard that. She took off her shoes and shot past where Sissie and Milo were and on down the steps. In the downstairs hall she could hear Baby Sister through the porch door. That paper-doll mother was still mirating at her own flesh and blood having lice. Rosacoke smiled and thought, “That is the one funny thing since Heywood Betts and his Honolulu shirt.” But thinking of him and Willie—and whoever else flew with them back to Norfolk—put her deep again in the misery she was running from so she stepped in her shoes and ran on—out the back and almost down the steps before she knew she was thirsty. She came up again to the porch where Milo had left the well-water he drew after dinner. She took one look at the 1937 New Jersey license her father nailed over the bucket, and she drank one dipper of water so cold every muscle in her throat gripped tight to stop her swallowing. But she swallowed and the new cold inside her seemed to ease the way she felt. She said, “I will just walk peaceful to Mary’s and not think about a thing,” and she started, walking quickly down the steps again and straight on ahead through four dead acres of purple cotton stalks and into a little pine woods that had one path. She walked with her head just level, not looking up where the plane had been or at anything else that would cause her to think. But Mary’s was a mile from the Mustians’, and a mile is right far to think about nothing.
Still she walked every step of that mile, and it was nearly four o’clock when she came to the end of the pines where Mary’s was—three wood rooms and a roof, washed by the rain to no color at all, narrow and pointed sharp up from the packed white ground like a bone the sun sucked out when nothing else would grow. The only things that moved were brown smoke crawling from the chimney and a turkey that saw her at once. Rosacoke stopped and said “Mary” as the turkey was famous for temper. He gave a cocked look with his raw red head and stepped away to let her pass. Mary hadn’t answered so Rosacoke climbed the steps and said again “Mary” and opened the door. That was the big low room where Mary slept, but there was no noise, only dark and the smell of kerosene. Maybe they were all at afternoon church. Rosacoke went in, thinking she would leave a note to say she tried, but the only paper in sight was magazine pages nailed to the wall to keep out wind. Then she looked at the feather bed. In the middle of it four pillows were boxed together like a nest, and there was Mildred’s baby laid on his back on thick newspapers with fists clenched tight to his ears. His head had twisted to the left, half buried in the white pillow slip. The one cotton blanket was around his feet where he had kicked it, and his dress which was all he wore had worked up high on his chest, leaving him bare to the chill of the day. Rosacoke went over to him, thinking this meant Mary was somewhere near and she should wait. When she saw the baby was deep asleep, she bent low enough to hear him breathe. His lips were shut and he breathed from all over—from the awful top of his head where the skull left off and the dark skin throbbed at anybody’s mercy and from his arched belly and the navel knobbing out almost as far as what was underneath where the bud of him being a boy crouched on the loaded sack and rose and fell with the rest of him. He didn’t seem cold but Rosacoke thought she should cover him. She pulled at his dress to get it down and raised the blanket gently from around his feet. It was enough to jar his sleep. He grunted high in his nose with his eyes still shut and oared with his feet at the blanket and picked at his dress with one slow hand. Rosacoke stood back—to keep him from seeing her if he woke—and prayed he wouldn’t wake. His legs slowed down and the grunts, and for a minute he seemed asleep. Then he turned his head and opened his eyes on Rosacoke, and the scream he gave split out from whatever awful place he went to when he slept—describing it clear and wordless as a knife. Rosacoke thought of ways to quiet him, but they all meant picking him up—him screaming and naked again and her a stranger. He stared straight at her though, and even if he didn’t see, she couldn’t let him howl so again she pulled down his dress and reached under his head and back to lift him up, but he belched and thick yellow milk spewed down his neck into her hand. She jerked her hand as if it was scalded and flung the milk in clots on the floor and wiped her fingers quickly on Mary’s bed. The screaming went on, but choked now and full. Rosacoke looked at the child and said, “Baby, I ain’t what you need” and ran to the porch to try once more for Mary. This
time Mary answered. “Here come Mary,” she said, coming to the house from the privy, not smiling, taking her time.
Rosacoke said, “Come on then and help this baby.”
“What you done to Mildred’s baby, Miss Rosa?”
“Not a thing—but he’s sick.”
“He ain’t sick, Miss Rosa. He just passing the time of day.”
“Well, I went in to take his picture and he woke up.”
“And you picked him up, didn’t you, when I done just now fed him?” She still hadn’t smiled.
“I was trying to hush him, Mary. Don’t get mad.”
“Yes’m. He throwed up his dinner, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
Mary bent down for a leaf that lay on the spotless ground and studied it in her hand long enough for the turkey to creep up behind her, but she heard him and ran in his face—“Go on, sir!”—and he hobbled off. The screaming went on inside, a little tired now but steady, and Rosacoke frowned. Mary came slow up the steps, holding her straight back and said, “He throws up regular. I don’t know if he can grow, not keeping hold of his nourishment no better.”
“Go stop his crying, Mary.”
“What you so scared of crying for? He come here crying and he be crying when I ain’t here to hush him. He got his right to cry, Miss Rosa, and why ain’t you used to babies by now?” Then she smiled and went in the door and said, “Come in, Miss Rosa. I’ll get him clean and you take his picture.”
But Rosacoke couldn’t go back. She looked at the drained evening sky. “It’s too dark now, I think. I better come back next Sunday.”
Mary stopped in her tracks—“Yes’m, if that’s what you think”—and Rosacoke went towards the pines. On the edge Mary called her back and gave her the Kodak she had left. Mary said, “They tell me Mr. Wesley got him a airplane.”
“Who is they, Mary?”
“Estelle saw Mr. Wesley in the road last night, and he say he got him a eight-cylinder airplane to come home in and he was taking it to Norfolk this evening and to watch out for him in the sky.”
“That won’t Wesley’s airplane, Mary. He just hitched a ride in it, and they have already gone back.”
“Yes’m. How is he coming on, Miss Rosa?”
“I reckon he’s fine. I ain’t laid eyes on him since the funeral.”
“Yes’m,” Mary said, seeing how Rosacoke looked (though she held back half the misery from her face), seeing that was all she ought to say and watching Rosacoke head home again and stop and take another look at the sky.
“I’m going to see his Mama, Mary. Reckon she can tell me what I’ve done wrong?”
All Mary said was, “Step along fast, Miss Rosa, else night will catch you”—which the night was bound to do as the Beavers lived a good two miles further on, facing the road with their back to the woods that started at Mary’s. She could walk home first and take the car and go by the road (it was three miles by the road), but that would mean explaining a lot to Mama and talking her way out of supper. If she walked on now through the woods, she could get to the Beavers’ as they finished eating and do her talking and call for Milo to carry her home. So she crossed Mary’s yard the other way, not seeing Mary still in the door, and passed into trees that gradually shielded out the baby’s crying.
She had gone more than halfway before she was no longer running from Mildred’s baby, and the trees had thinned to the place where a fire had been in the early spring, charring the sparse pines and opening the ground to the sky. She stopped there and wondered what she was running to—as if Wesley’s mother knew how Wesley felt—and she thought of turning back. What could she say that the Beavers would understand? But turning back would put her in pitch dark in a little so she said to herself, “I will just walk on and ask the Beavers real nonchalant to let me use their phone and call Milo to pick me up. If they want to talk to me then, let them decide what to say.” She took her breath to go, and a light wind in her face brought two things out to meet her—low on the trees a hawk with his tan wings locked to ride the air for hours (if the air would hold and the ground offer things to hunt) and his black eyes surely on her where she stood and clear against the sky, his iron beak, parting and meeting as he wheeled but giving no hawk sound—only shivering pieces of what seemed music riding under him that came and went with the breeze as if it was meant for nothing but the hawk to hear, as if it was made by the day for the hawk to travel with and help his hunting—yet frail and high for a killing bird and so faint and fleeting that Rosacoke strained on her toes to hear it better and cupped her ear, but the hawk saw that and his fine-boned wings met under him in a thrust so long and slow that Rosacoke wondered if they wouldn’t touch her—his wings—and her lips fell open to greet him, but he was leaving, taking the music with him and the wind. She turned to watch him go and wanted to speak to call him back, but her lips moved silent as his beak. You could joke with a cardinal all day long, but what did you say to something like a hawk?—nothing that a hawk would answer so she just went on, helped by the breeze that pushed from behind her now, not practicing things she could say to the Beavers nor the way she would try to look, but searching her mind to name what pieces of music the hawk carried with him and wondering what had made them. But the memory was fainter already than the music, and it hung in her mind, unfinished and alone, spreading its curious sadness over whatever troubles she had, burying them deeper than feeling and frowning, leaving her free for this short space in evening air that was warm for early November with the last light clung to the slope of her cheek where colorless down, too soft to see in the day, swirled up to her temple and the coarse yellow hair laid back on the flickering wind and her legs pumped on through weeds that were dead already from the frosts but still were green and straight—free to go on or back while she took the last few steps that put her nearly in sight of the Beavers’. Then the wind turned round once more, and the music was on it, close and whole. Now there was no going back because it was Wesley, sure as war would come, playing his Navy harmonica when she had counted on him being in Norfolk or at least headed north in Willie Duke’s plane.
The Beavers’ house sat back from the road at a slant and in a white dirt clearing but with trees reaching round on three sides like arms to the road. When Rosacoke came to the end of the trees, she could have seen the side of the house, but she circled just out of sight till she was almost at the road. Then she turned and there was the porch, fifty yards away, and the three steps and on the top step, Wesley’s youngest brother Claude, sitting on his hands, looking to where Wesley was, hearing the music.
Wesley was on his feet at the corner of the porch nearest Rosacoke, leaning one shoulder on the last post, facing the road but looking down. From the trees Rosacoke could see three-fourths of him—the dark blue trousers he had worn all summer, the loose white shirt, his hair lighter from the sun at Ocean View—all but his face. He covered most of that with his hands that quivered tight on the harmonica till the music stopped for awhile. Then one hand opened and it started again—not songs or tunes and like nothing she had known since she was a girl and heard old Negroes blowing harps as if they remembered Africa and had been grand kings or like Milo that summer he grew up (when his beard arrived, the color of broomstraw) and went past telling her his business and every evening sat in the dusk after supper before he would leave the house, whistling out his secrets in tunes she never understood and planning back of his eyes what he would do with the night when it fell altogether (which would be to walk three miles to see an Abbott girl who was older than him—and an orphan that lived with her uncle—and was taking him in dark tobacco barns, teaching him things too early that some folks never learn). Anyhow, it was nothing she had ever sung to him—something else he learned away from home, maybe in the Navy. (“But if the Navy is sad as that,” she thought, “why do folks join it of their own free will?”)
In all she could see—the yard, the house, his brother, him, the trees beyond—his hands were the only moving things. Th
e wind had died completely, his brother watched him as still as she did, and Wesley himself was still as a blind man when his guide suddenly leaves him, embedded upright in the gray air like a fish in winter, frozen in the graceful act, locked in the ice and staring up with flat bitter eyes—far out as anything can be and come back. But his hands did move—them and the music—to show he could leave any minute if leaving was what he wanted. (How could she know what he wanted?) And his brother spoke—or moved his mouth. Like that boy in the picture with her father (him on the left, holding up like a lily the American flag, speaking silence to the wind), she couldn’t make out the sound but Wesley could. He took down his hands and looked at his brother and laughed and said “No” to whatever the question was, and they talked on awhile, too quiet for her to hear but with enough laughing to make Wesley roll his head so she could see. “He just don’t know,” she thought. “He don’t know how he looks.” Then the talking stopped and Claude went in the house. Wesley hesitated a minute, knocking the harmonica on his hand and looking to the road as if Rosacoke, unseen, had made him think of leaving. “There ought to be a way,” she thought. “There ought to be some way you could hold him there. Anybody who looks like that—you ought to give them anything you have. Anything you have and they want bad enough.” So she went on towards him and thought of nothing but that.
And from the moment she broke through the trees, he watched her come, stepping long as she always did, not showing a thing he hadn’t seen a thousand times before. She was watching the ground which meant she was deciding the first word to say, and that meant Wesley didn’t have any cause for worry. Not meaning to play but for something to do, he raised the harmonica again, and when she got to the steps and looked up at him, he smiled from behind his hands.
A Long and Happy Life Page 8
