Tammy out of Time

by Cid Ricketts Sumner

  “‘Tain’t fur, ma’am.”

  “Three-four mile, maybe.”

  “It’s a right smart of a way.”

  “Mought be six mile or more, I dunno.”

  They passed out of hearing and the stillness seemed greater now, the small cabins set back from the road more than ever withdrawn into sleep and secrecy. Tammy wavered to and fro across the road with weariness and the knowledge that it might be six miles more she had to go. She didn’t know how she would make it, for there beyond the shadowy hollow ahead was another slope rising to a yet higher hill. It was these ups and downs that made the aching in her legs. The moon was blinding in her face as she went down into the hollow. She could just make out two men loitering there as if they didn’t know which way to go. She could hear their voices, arguing.

  “You dassent.”

  “I dass anything.”

  “You’s drunk, man. Come on.”

  “Lemme alone, you.”

  All of a sudden Nan took a crazy streak, bucking and pulling on the rope, trying to run. Tammy had just got her straightened out when they came on the men in the hollow. “Good evening,” Tammy said as she had said before.

  One man mumbled something, the other came closer to her. “You a white lady?”

  “I’m white, all right. But I’m no lady like a lady that lives in a house, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What is you?”

  “Oh.” Tammy laughed, because she was silly-tired and she didn’t rightly know what she was. “I’m a free spirit roaming the earth, that’s what I am.”

  “Oh, Lordy Lord!” the other man said. “‘Tain’t no human.” But the man close by her, walking beside her, said breathless and quick, “You got money?”

  “Sure I got money.”

  “Gimme it. Hear me? Gimme.” He pressed closer to her so she would have been edged off the side of the road but for Nan pulling hard on the rope.

  “I got need of it myself,” Tammy said with indignation. “If you want money, go work for it. That’s what man’s had to do ever since he got turned out of the garden of Eden. You got to make money in the sweat of your face, so get along with you.”

  Nan gave a jump as lights came over the hill, and when Tammy looked round, the men were ducking into the bushes by the side of the road. The car slowed a little, then shot on up the slope and away. “Goshamighty,” Tammy said, “I like to have fell among thieves!”

  She had topped the hill and headed down the other long slope when a car came up behind her. It slowed and stopped and she heard a woman saying, “I told you she was white.”

  A man put his head out the window. “Are you all right?” There was uneasiness in his tone.

  “I’m all right,” Tammy said with wonder. “Just about walked my legs off, that’s all.”

  “They didn’t bother you, those Negroes back there?” He had an urgency in his tone, and the woman said, quick and sharp, “Did they lay hands on you?”

  “No,” Tammy said. “Just wanting money. But I wouldn’t give it up. They got no right to it.”

  The man and the woman spoke together in low tones. “Where you going this time of night, all alone on the road?”

  “I’m going to the Brent place, Mr. Peter Brent’s house named Brenton Hall, and I’m not alone. I got my little goat here.”

  “Better take her in,” the woman said.

  The man got out and opened the back door of the car. “Do you have to take that goat along?”

  “Yes, I got to,” Tammy said.

  “Then get it in and get yourself in.”

  “I’d sure be obliged.” Tammy sank back on the cushioned seat, feeling it springy and fine beneath her. Nan leaned against her knee, trembling with the swift motion of the car. It didn’t seem like a minute till the headlights lighted up a white gate with a beech tree standing tall each side of it. “Yonder must be it,” Tammy cried, remembering Pete’s words.

  The car headed into the drive and stopped. Tammy got out, and pulled Nan after her and thanked them kindly. The woman sounded cross when she spoke. “You ought not to be out so late on the road, you just make trouble.”

  Tammy shut the door. “I didn’t aim to be a trouble to anybody. It was you all asked me to ride. I told you I was much obliged.”

  “That’s not the sort of trouble she means, little girl.” The man’s tone was kinder. “But just the same, you better stay home nights after this.” He backed the car out and it went off down the road again.

  They acted as if they had something on their minds, Tammy thought, watching the taillights go twinkling down the road. They acted as if they thought those men might have kilt her. And so they might, for a fact. She’d have been afeard herself it she hadn’t been so mad at the idea of anybody’s taking Grandpa’s good money.

  Then turning, she forgot all about it, seeing the long tree-black lane winding in from the gate, seeing the lights of a house set far back from the road. The sight of it heartened her mightily, and excitement wiped out everything else from her mind. She got in back of some bushes and peeled off her travel-soiled dress, shivering a little as she opened her bag and felt for the slick feel of satin. It was elegant under her fingers and she drew it on with pride. One of the buttons came off in her hands—oh, but she was lucky it didn’t fall in the grass and be lost. She dropped it in her sack and found her brush and the little jar of face paint. It was a pity she didn’t have a looking glass to put it on by, but she did the best she could by feel. When it came to putting on her shoes, she had no luck at all. Her feet were swollen and sore and wouldn’t go in. “Hell’s bells,” she said and stuffed them back into the sack. Maybe folks wouldn’t notice in the night-time, and there was her new dress to take their eyes off her feet and Pete’s cedar chain to be observed as well. She took up Nan’s rope and shouldered her bundle and started up the long, curving drive.

  7

  THERE was music coming from the house. It had a hard, dry beat, overlaid with trumpet wailings that shrilled out, crying in a disorderly kind of order. The sounds streamed forth with light from open door and long window, going farther than the light, leaping amid the shadows like something savage escaping into the night, baying the lopsided moon and dying in the far fields across the road. If it was a party Pete was having, what manner of dancing would be danced to such music as this? It was the kind of music that anybody named Barbara would like, Tammy thought, and felt her high excitement curdle.

  She moved slowly to the curve of the drive and saw the shape of the house, how the roof came down low, holding in the porch, and how the trees stood away from it. Two chimneys went up, black and threatening, into the moon-bright sky. It was a big house. Too big. There were two rooms and a hallway on the front. The porch ran around the corner and extended along the side. She had a feeling of other rooms behind those that were visible. There was no telling how far the house went away at the back. Tammy stopped where the drive divided, one part going on to the side and the shapes of parked cars, while the other swept past the front steps to circle a flower bed and return. Red roses were blooming in the flower bed where the hall light fell.

  The look of the place overwhelmed her; she felt small and alien. Pete hadn’t said it was all so...so elegant. How could she walk right up the front steps and across the gallery and go in by the bright door and speak out into strange faces that would be like the faces of the people on the packet boat long ago? She was too weary to stand up under cold eyes that would fasten on her there in the doorway, dumb and lonely. She felt homesickness gnawing at her innards, and the strangeness of sight and sound was near to turning her stomach.

  Holding Nan close to her side, taking some small comfort from her warm familiar flank, Tammy went round to the side porch that was darker because that door was closed. She could see chairs there and potted plants on a stand. A tub of ferns was at each side of the steps. The feathery leaves rose up tall and dripped down in a fountain of fronds to the floor. Tammy slid her sack from her aching shoulder
to the bottom step. She tied Nan’s rope to the neck of the sack so that she could not follow. Now, if she looked through the window for a little, the strangeness might wear off and it might be that Pete would pass near. She could call to him so he would come out and welcome her and tell her where she might lie down and sleep, for truly she had need of it such as she had never felt in her life before.

  Her ears ached with the music as she tiptoed across the porch. It came through the open window, harsh and loud so that she almost had to press against its pushing. It was not welcoming music. She passed between the back of the flower stand and the wall and came on the window from the side. She bent with care and looked in through delicate, gauzy curtains. They put a mist over the scene, setting it away, back of a cloud, out of the world. Tammy’s eyes, blinking at the brightness, went searching for Pete among the moving figures. He was not there, though it could be that he was in the hallway, where some were dancing. “O God, please let him be there!” she whispered and pressed closer.

  What a sight it was, this dancing! Some leaped and whirled and shook, some just clung together, scarce astir at all. The room itself was fine and big, with all its elegant furnishings pushed back against the walls to make room for the frolic. There were delicate, carved chairs, too slim to sit on, surely. The sofas were covered with velvety stuff, and there were shelves cleverly contrived, one above the other. They held rare objects—colored glass and small figures. There were pictures on the walls, gold-framed. Tammy had never so much as heard tell of such a room as this.

  But it was the people she came back to with most amazement, especially the girls. The men were properly clad, with coats and fried shirts with collars and ties, as was fitting for a dance, the girls were not dressed up at all. Most of them were barelegged. One wore short white pants, no more than drawers, really, piped in blue at the seams, and a little blue jacket so short it left her plumb naked in a circle round her waist. Goshamighty, you’d think she’d be ashamed to show her skin like that! Her yellow hair was in two tight plaits that stood off stiffly. Her round dreaming face was snuggled into her partner’s shoulder.

  Another girl had on a two-piece dress with real pretty red braid on it, but what was it made of—could it be pillow ticking? Pillow ticking! Now that was something to put on your back! One girl wore a man’s shirt with the shirttail out. You’d think somebody would tell her her shirttail was out. She had on blue jeans rolled halfway to her knees. Another swished around in full, flowered skirt that might have been made from a scrap of window curtaining. She had a white blouse to top it, so thin that you could make out her underbody plain as anything. What’s more, she was barefoot and her toenails were painted red as blood. But maybe going half naked was like what Grandpa said about sin—it all depended on the spirit what you went and did it in. Eve. Take Eve, now. She went without so much as a fig leaf, and that was all right, so long as her mind was innocent.

  Beyond this room and the hallway there was another wide opening to another room. It was all in darkness except for one lamp on a table, sending down a tent of light on a gray-haired man with spectacles in dark rims. Tammy could see him when the dancers in the hall moved out of the way. He was sprawled in a big chair, taking his ease, reading a book. The light shut him away from the crowd and the noise. He could have been all alone, the way he kept his nose in the book. He had a look of Pete in his length and the bony look of his hands and in the long shape of his head. Must be it was Pete’s father.

  All of a sudden the music stopped in the middle of a measure. The silence was sweet and easing as a poultice on a sore spot. Tammy could hear Nan munching contentedly behind her and she heard a rooster crow ‘way out back somewhere. Then the dancers cried out, complaining.

  “Do we have to, Mrs. Brent?”

  “We’ve practiced enough!”

  “That old thing again!”

  “I bet the other groups aren’t half as good as we are.”

  Then a high, commanding voice put them to silence. “Please, now, just once more and I’ll be satisfied. I mean this to be the best dancing they’ve had at any Rebel Ball since the Natchez Pilgrimage began. Peter, put on the record, will you?”

  Peter was there, then, Tammy thought, relief sweeping through her, and that was maybe his mother telling them all what to do. Peter had said she kept herself busy running things. That was all he had said about her. Tammy leaned forward, peering through the window. There she was, quick-moving, like her speech, with dainty, small features and hair that was red-brown, like her eyes. It was set in waves all over so that it seemed to have no ends. She had on a brown dress with white buttons down the front, and underneath, her shape had a solid look as if it might feel hard to the touch. With her small, neat head and her trim, quick body, she put Tammy in mind of a bird. A little brown bossy wren, she thought.

  The girl with the bare waist wailed, “Oh, Mrs. Brent, Ernie hasn’t come yet. I haven’t any partner.”

  “Professor Brent will take Ernie’s place. Come, Joel, be Tina’s partner.” Her voice penetrated the older man’s bright cone of silence and brought him slowly to his feet. He came in, book in hand. His spectacles hung by one hook from his ear, dangling across the leathery folds of his jaw. “Right over there, dear,” Mrs. Brent said. “Lay your book down, put your glasses where they won’t get broken.”

  Without a word, Professor Brent crossed the room to lay his book, open, face down, on the table beside the window, glasses on top of it. Tammy was looking through the window trying to read the title—East...West...what was it?—when the music began and everything was changed as if by magic.

  It was slow music, dainty and high-stepping, tinkling like bells. It suited the room. It wrought a change on the dancers so that now they moved with grace, making small curtsies and pauses, moving with decorum in all they did. Those who were in the hall came into view, and Pete was among them. Tammy put one hand over her lips to keep from crying out to him in the midst of the dance. She put the other hand over her heart lest its pounding be heard above the sound of the music.

  Pete was tall and strange in a dark coat. He was smiling a little as if he took pleasure in this dance out of another age. He smiled down at his partner, and Tammy’s lips drew as if she’d bit into a green persimmon. She was more shut out and alone than ever, for that must be Barbara with him, her dark eyes flashing as she advanced to meet him again in the change of the measure. Her face had a peeled look, perhaps because her brows were so thin and fine and curved. Her skin was almost too perfect, bloodless as a white eggshell. The only color she had was in her full red lips and the tips of her fingernails. She was long-limbed, silken-legged, shapely all over. Tammy drew a long breath. No wonder Peter had laughed at the idea of her being a barbarian. She had a polished look. She was shining and civilized, and her hair was smooth as brown metal.

  Mrs. Brent kept calling out directions: “Faster there, Ted!” and “Make your curtsy deeper, Roberta!” and “Watch that turn, Deedy!” and “Spin her around, Jack!” She had her bright brown eyes on everyone all at the same time.

  The warm air of the room came out through the window and, as Barbara passed close by, Tammy got a whiff of the perfumery she wore. It was stronger-smelling than any flower; it was like...like laburnum and myrrh, that were meant to be holy, and whoever went smelling of them would be cut off from his people. On a human it was a wicked smell. Pete—for a moment he was near, and Tammy put out one hand, reaching for his coattail.

  Then she drew back, pinned against the wall by light that shot across the porch and swept over the cars parked at the side. Tammy stood pressed against the wall, watching through the potted plants while the car came quickly in by the drive to stop with a grinding, sudden sound. A man leaped out, flinging the car door shut behind him. He jumped clean over a bush that got in his way and ran toward the steps of the side porch. Tammy stood motionless, hoping he would not see her, wishing now that she had called to Pete when he came past the window. She did not want to be caught like
a thief.

  Just as the man reached the steps, Nan rose up, planting her forefeet on the step. He swerved aside and took the steps two at a time. On the porch he stopped and lifted both hands to his head. He gave it a shake, saying, “Jeepers, I’m seeing things again.” Then he went in by the door, pulling it shut quickly as if to shut out the sight of Nan.

  Tammy drew a deep breath and peered back into the room where everyone was shouting, “Hi, Ernie!” and “Here’s old Ernie at last!” The blonde girl with the pigtails rushed up to him and flung her arms around his neck. “Darling Ernie, where have you been?”

  Ernie took her by the bare waist, lifted her up and set her aside without so much as looking at her, the way one would set a frolic-some puppy out of the way. This place is full of goats,” he said with solemnity, nodding his head toward the porch. Jam-packed full of them, all over the yard and the steps.”

  Everyone laughed. “Pink goats, Ernie?”

  Professor Brent’s bony hand reached across the table and took up his book. He eased himself through the crowd and went back to his chair in the far room. Mrs. Brent cried, “Music, please! Just this once more. Positions, now!”

  Tammy leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. Sleepiness came on her without warning, dulling all her senses. She’d go to sleep standing there if she didn’t look out. She moved along the wall and stood for a minute facing the closed door. It was a wide door with a doorknob. She lifted one hand to knock but drew it back. Mrs. Brent might be mad if she broke in on the dancing practice. She moved to the steps, sat down there, leaning against the post, feeling the fern fronds tickle the side of her neck. She was lifting one hand up to scratch, when her body drooped and sleep came over her, deep and dark.