Little Sister Death

by William Gay

  In the morning there was more food, grits and greasy eggs fried hard and rubbery, their edges seared to frail black lace. He spoke to the woman but he might have been talking to the wall for the response he got. Later the man with the muttonchop whiskers and his black interpreter came. The man wanted something done for his mouth.

  Mayfield had his bag, but there was nothing in it for such as this. Worse yet, there was nothing in Mayfield’s knowledge or experience for it. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t even suspect what it was, so he did what doctors have done since time immemorial when they don’t know what else to do: he put on a confident manner and he swabbed the man’s mouth with antiseptic and hoped for the best.

  All right, he said to himself when they had gone, I am stuck here at his beck and call. I am the house doctor, and they will keep me here feeding me grits and eggs you could half sole shoes with. Either that or whatever it is gets well on its own or eats the son of a bitch’s whole head the rest of the way off, either of which ought to result in them turning me loose.

  He could find sense in this, of a sort. There was logic here, the reasoning of a functioning mind. Anything was better than yesterday. Yesterday had been random, senseless, as uncontrollable as the spill of dice from a cup. He had known in his heart they had been riding him to his death, though why they had blindfolded him was just another piece he could not explain.

  He doctored the man’s mouth three more days, keeping track of the passage of time by the trips the woman made bringing meals and by the difference in the sounds he heard, then on the fourth they came for him in the middle of the night.

  It was cold and spitting snow, he could see its slow slant by the lantern light. They passed between the cribs of slavequarters, the trunks of enormous live oaks pale and transparent-looking in the rolling fog. They went toward a house built on an elevation and silhouetted black against the slightly paler sky so it looked depthless, a false front with rectangular knockouts through which dim yellow light flared.

  A story-and-a-half log house with a dogtrot between two sections of rooms. He was led up a dark stairwell to an attic bedroom, ushered through the door. It was warm and comfortable in the room, the first time Mayfield had been warm in four days. An enormous fire crackled in the fireplace and fire logs were ricked in against a stone woodbox.

  There was a brass bed in one corner of the room, on which a young girl lay partially covered with a blue sheet. Her long hair was the color of cornsilk. She seemed to be very young. She was watching Mayfield with wide blue eyes, a look congested with a mixture of fear and horror. Through the sheet he could see that she was grotesquely pregnant, and he divined at last the true reason for his presence, though not the methods that had ensured it. He set the bag down at the foot of the bed.

  You men get out of here, he said, feeling better and more confident, at last in a situation he felt master of. A set of circumstances experience and training had made him familiar with.

  The black man turned and went out and closed the door behind him. The white man said something. The malady that had affected him seemed to be dissipating. His face was not nearly as swollen, and Mayfield was able to understand a few words he told the black woman. Nonetheless the woman turned to him.

  Old Marster say he ain’t trustin this gal to no nigger midwife. Says it’s a life for a life. He say tell you if she dies you die too.

  The whiskered man said something else.

  The heavyset black woman sat by the bedside, her face a gargoyle of sorrow, statuary carved with infinite care from black ebony. Mayfield turned the sheet back, and she fought him weakly so that he thought to himself, well, little lady, if you’d fought over the cover that hard nine months ago, me and you wouldn’t be doing it now. He uncurled the girl’s fingers from it, her eyes blank and then altering to a kind of bitter spitefulness. As if it was all his doing, as if she blamed him for planting the seed that he had been kidnapped and bounced blindfolded in a wagon a hard day’s ride to harvest. He watched her eyes, then abruptly a whine of pain assaulted her so that she clenched them tight, made a soft mewing sound like a cat. He shoved the gown up till it swaddled about her hips. Her water had broken and the bedclothes were stained a pale rose pink.

  The man sat on the hearth, and with a hawkbilled knife he cut himself a childsized sliver of chewing tobacco and inserted it in his rosebud mouth, worried it about irritably as if it brought him small satisfaction.

  When the birth happened, it happened without incident, almost anticlimactic, and Mayfield felt a curious sense of disappointment, as if he had been brought this far for nothing. It was a boy, beetred and squalling and wrinkled, a full head of sandy red hair.

  Mayfield washed him with soap and water the old woman brought him, wrapped him in a clean muslin shift. The girl slept. The old woman sat holding the baby until the rawboned man got up from the hearth and strode toward her. She watched him with a growing apprehension.

  He held his arms out for the baby, but something did not look right to Mayfield. He knew intuitively the scene was darkly parodic, not what it seemed. The man said something short and guttural, a curse or an invocation. She reached the child up to— what? Mayfield wondered. Grandfather? Father? Then he dropped the pan of water he was holding and screamed, for the man had turned and thrown the baby into the fire.

  Mayfield’s scream was the inchoate, anguished scream of an animal, outraged, an appalled venting of sound bordering on madness. He crossed the room in two strides but the bearded man blocked his path. He seized the man by his face, his features going utterly vacuous with pain when Mayfield hit his cheeks, the eyes rolling upward and his breath wheezing with an audible hiss.

  Mayfield had his thumbs locked in the soft depression of the man’s throat when the door opened behind them. The black man leapt upon Mayfield, fairly swinging on the thick arms to disengage them. The man with the muttonchop whiskers stumbled backward wildeyed, arms flailing, ceased when he remembered the knife.

  He stepped forward, instinctively positioned his feet just as the gangling black’s arms encircled Mayfield’s chest. The hawkbilled knife flashed in an arc above them, hooked the point of Mayfield’s jaw, and ripped open his throat, forming there momentarily a grotesque second mouth that vanished abruptly in a gout of blood that spewed down his white shirtfront and over the black man’s arms, and when the black released him he dropped slack and resistless to the floor.

  Tennessee, 1956-1965

  The logistics of chance had always fascinated David Binder, the curious inevitability of coincidence prevailing over the odds. Jung called it synchronicity, and after Binder read Jung’s book he was wont to call it synchronicity too. He was fascinated as well by the little incidents in life that appear wearing masks, disguised as other incidents; years later their significance surfaces, and sometimes you remember, with a sense of déjà vu, the keystone event that triggered the sequence. More often you don’t.

  If you had asked David Binder to name the events that led him to the Beale farm in southwestern Tennessee in the summer of 1982 he might have named any but these:

  In 1956, when Binder was six years old, he came in from school and went into his living room and there was a strange woman in his father’s rocking chair. The woman was old, seventy-something perhaps, and it was obvious even to a six-year-old that something was amiss. Her clothing was oldfashioned, years out of date. She was a heavyset woman in a black bonnet that tied beneath her chin, a long dress of some thick dark fabric he wasn’t familiar with, and he noted dispassionately that her hightopped shoes buttoned instead of tied. All in all she looked like some old yellowed daguerreotype from the bottom of the picture box.

  It was a moment curiously electric, and he was simultaneously aware of a myriad of conflicting images. The woman’s face, unaware of him, was highly colored, almost florid, and she had rheumy blue eyes. A wisp of irongray hair peeked from beneath the bonnet. He turned. Through the open window he could see his mother in the garden, the rhythmic sw
ing of the hoe, hear its metallic chink against the earth. The old woman motionless in the motionless chair, and the hot July day itself suddenly frozen, as if time had paused a moment to catch its breath.

  When he turned from the window she was gone.

  Binder was already known as an imaginative child. Nobody believed for a moment that he had seen a woman in the living room. Nothing happened to call it to mind later: no telegram, no phone call in the night, no longdistant relative unexpectedly dead. It was random, insignificant, purposeless. In a few hours’ time his parents had forgotten it; within the week he had forgotten it himself.

  It was nine years before the next incident. He’d had a bitter argument with his father, both of them shouting themselves into a rage for neither the first time nor the last. All the same there was something different about it. A shower of stones fell on the roof. He could hear them striking the shingles, rattling hollowly in the gutters, and he ran outside. Staring in disbelief, he could see them forming above the roof of the house, round white stones half the size of an egg. Binder picked one out of the grass and cupped his hand about it. It was warm to the touch.

  A week later he left for baseball camp. That had, incidentally, been what the shouting match was about. The shower of stones was forgotten. He never thought of it again.

  Chicago, 1980

  They were living in an apartment on Clark Street in Chicago when Binder first began to feel he was living out the balance of someone else’s life. They had married his second year at the University of Tennessee and he immediately dropped out. He had to have more money. Two, it seemed, could not live nearly as cheaply as one, especially if that one had been accustomed to subsisting on whatever fell to hand, spending what little money he did have in secondhand bookstores. There seemed to be precious little money in Blount County that year, and none he could lay hands on.

  He went to work in Corrie’s father’s furniture store, but that hadn’t lasted long. Then he went to work for a garment factory. That lasted a little longer. All this time he was writing. He began a novel, abandoned it. Began another, wearied of it. After eighteen months the factory shut its doors and Binder was out of a job.

  For decades Chicago had been the gateway to another sort of life for the rootless of the South, and so it was for David Binder: he found a job first week there and in one month sent for Corrie.

  Binder worked days as an assembler in a plant that made gauges for aircraft. He had enrolled in night classes with some vague idea that he might become an English teacher, Corrie enrolling just to be with him. They had little time for each other, for Binder was writing another novel in his spare moments, writing it without knowing why or even believing that it would be read by eyes other than his own. While he played at writing, Corrie played at housekeeping, pregnant already and little more than a child herself, unsure and willing to settle for whatever time Binder could give her. Binder was living on the edge already and knowing it, knowing that he was spending time like money he might not be able to replace.

  In two years’ time he would have achieved enough distance to look back on it with nostalgia, to remember it as the best of times, days and nights filled with purpose and ambition, but he did not know that then. Not in the dislocated otherworldly hour of two or three o’clock in the morning when he would put away the typescript and look at the clock with a grim foreboding, a man on a losing streak sweating the last card in a hand of five-card draw. Nor would he know it the next day, listening to the jungle of machinery, hypnotized and robotlike, his hands doing the selfsame job over and over until they seemed divorced from him, appendages that could have functioned as well without him.

  When he finally stood looking down at the neat stack of typescript he had not an inkling of what to do with it, but having invested so many hours typing it and untold hours writing it and thinking about it, he knew he had to do something.

  For no other reason than that he was a devotee of Faulkner, he sent it to Random House first. He and Corrie made a small ceremony of the trek down to the post office to mail it. One of the stamps the postman affixed to it bore the likeness of Eugene O’Neill and Binder wryly took that as a good omen.

  In reality he expected to wait two or three months and get the manuscript back with a polite note of refusal; he was already trying to decide where to send it next. That was not the way it happened.

  Scarcely a month later Corrie handed him a letter from Random House. Her face was white and solemn. She had opened it. He stood in the doorway, still holding his lunchbox, looking down at the letter, and he was suddenly afraid. He was afraid they weren’t going to buy it. He was afraid they were, and he realized intuitively that his life was going to alter drastically and he didn’t know whether he wanted it to or not.

  Oh, Jesus, he said.

  Open it, she said. Oh, David, I told you so. I told you you were good.

  The letter was from an editor who had liked the book and was full of cautious enthusiasm for it, though they did not feel that the book was the sort that would be a great commercial success they were certainly impressed with his ability and they felt he had the potential to become an important writer.

  In effect they were willing to gamble a five-thousand-dollar advance on the book. If Binder was amenable, a contract would be drawn up.

  Binder was more than amenable, and the next two years seemed a curious dreamlike altering of time, as if his life was a clock running a shade too fast. The book was published to a virtual world of praise. It was almost unprecedented for a first novel to be so well received. The only note of reservation came from a reviewer for the New Yorker, who, though giving the book grudging praise, thought Binder dealt with the morbid and the dark shadings of life perhaps a bit too lovingly. Binder barely noticed this sentence at the time, but two years later it would creep up from his subconscious and come back to haunt him like a curse or a Gypsy seer’s halfforgotten prophecy fulfilling itself.

  The book didn’t sell well. In fact it barely earned back the advance, but it went on to win the Faulkner Award for the best first novel of the year, and coincidentally the not inconsiderable monetary sum of ten thousand dollars.

  Binder was ten feet high, and he guessed for a Tennessee boy he was chopping in mighty tall cotton. He and Corrie had a better address now and were even thinking about moving back to Tennessee. They had more time. Binder had dropped out of night school. He had decided he didn’t want to be a schoolteacher after all, and on days when he felt he needed a little something to cheer himself up he had only to drive out to the Stewart-Warner plant in the industrial park and listen to the sound of metal perpetually flaying metal and watch the folks file in and out with their lunchboxes in their hands, and know he didn’t have to.

  He was working on his second novel, and when he finished it he boxed it up and consigned it to the US Mail. He thought it had gone pretty well and he took a few days off for a welldeserved rest and waited for the check to come rolling in.

  There was silence for a time, as if he had walked onto a pier and dropped a box into Lake Erie or dispatched it to the voids of windy space. Then finally he heard. Up there in New York they did not think the book went quite as well as he had: in short, there were faults. Structural faults, stylistic faults, the ending didn’t work. And perhaps another title?

  He sat rereading the manuscript with the cold clarity of distance and he was reading it with eyes that seemed to have the scales only recently fallen from them. What a ghastly piece of shit, he thought, possessed with a sardonic sense of amusement, as if someone else had written it. Poor, deformed thing from its mother’s womb untimely ripped. Looking at it now he realized he had written it out of the sheer necessity of stringing words together. Having written one novel he felt compelled to write another, whether he had anything to write about or not. Hadn’t the reviews called him a novelist? He began revising it, but it seemed cold and lifeless, as dead as a letter turning up with a postmark ten years gone. He sat staring at the typewriter but his mind
wouldn’t work. Someone had unplugged it, had left the switch on, and the battery had run down, he thought.

  The beginning of summer in Chicago that year was fiercely hot. You could feel the sidewalks leaking back the sun through the soles of your shoes. The Windy City lay breezeless and heatbenumbed. Binder took to sitting in a bar on Clark Street and watching the Cubs play baseball on TV and drinking ice-cold beer. The Cubs weren’t having that great a year either.

  Along the way he had acquired an agent. Her name was Pauline Siebel and she was a large, plainspoken woman whose motherly manner belied the stubbornness beneath it, like spring steel deceptively upholstered.

  Through the glass door of the telephone booth he watched the patrons of the bar going about the serious business of the day’s drinking, Pauline’s voice a reassuring buzz in his ear, businesslike. Somewhere out there in the world folks were still doing things.

  Look, she told him. If you can’t write the damned thing then you can’t write the damned thing. Put it aside, work on something else. Begin another novel.

  Binder smiled into the phone but the smile felt strange on his face. Right now I don’t know another novel, he said.

  All right. Then don’t write one. Did you save any of the money?

  Very damned little.

  Then you’ll either have to go back to work or write something saleable. You’re a writer, aren’t you? You said you were. A compulsive writer? If a compulsive carpenter couldn’t build a Moorish castle he could still build a chicken coop. Even with a chicken coop there are variations in quality.

  What do you mean?

  Write a genre novel. Write Shootout at Wild Horse Gulch or Trixie Finds Love in the Bahamas. Write something we can sell to the paperback house. Write a horror novel. The two books I’ve seen of yours have that mood, those overtones to them anyway. The softcover racks are full of horror novels.