The first of the girls to arrive now was Hazel.
Admiring liberality and despising thrift as they did, the Renshaws found the sight of their sister Hazel—leaner, shabbier, more packrat-looking each time—always an embarrassment. Despite her upbringing in that prodigal family, Hazel was a miser, a true miser, and proud of it. Not just proud of her wealth, the size of which she alone (and least of all her husband, Troy) knew, nor just of her acumen in amassing it, but proud like a fanatic, a member of a cult, despising all those who do not know the truth. She relished the contradiction between the way she lived and looked and the way she might have lived and looked if she had wanted to. Hazel knew that people despised her for her stinginess. She relished that, too. She enjoyed being despised. It added to her sense of superiority.
Hazel loved money. Loved crisp crinkly new green bills, thick silver dollars with their milled and serrated edges that fell together with a ripe and solid clunk; her love of property took a mannish turn. Like her father before her (like her mother, too; for her mother too had the Southern country man’s attitude in this) property meant to Hazel real property: houses, land. She had begun buying years ago: ramshackle rental bungalows, dilapidated duplexes in run-down neighborhoods, Negro shanties. She sold a few, traded a few, always turning a profit, and bought more. Meanwhile she grew leaner, shabbier, more secretive and apart, mistrustful, sly. She declined invitations so as not to have to return them. She scrimped her family, serving them stale and sometimes moldy bread bought in large lots from the back doors of bakeries; for meat served them the cheap inner organs, the lights of animals: the lungs, hearts, heads—after a while ceased serving them meat altogether. At thirteen, to teach them the value of money, her sons began paying for their keep; as their earnings rose so did their room and board. The house had the atmosphere of the meanest boardinghouse. A light left burning in an empty room or a faucet found dripping, a bar of soap left to melt on a wet dish could curdle the family atmosphere for an entire day.
Hazel had made herself the family’s unfavorite. Her first spoken sentence had been a complaint. She was like a music box: the same tune every time she opened up. She did not quarrel, did not stand up for her rights, as members of a large family all must, and after a while she learned not even to assert them; she just looked done out of them, put-upon, orphaned. And she had a genius for contriving to be left out. It was she for whom at the last minute there was no room in the car. If at dinner there was one gristly or overdone or underdone portion of the meat Hazel got it, and declined all offers to exchange. The worm in the salad, the pebble in the peas, Hazel bit on them. In everything she made herself her sisters’ unwanted drudge and second-fiddle. If originally this Cinderella manner of hers had been meant, consciously or unconsciously, to win affection and concessions, it had long ago become an end in itself. She found more enjoyment in being wronged than she found in having her wrongs righted. As her mother once said, to err is human, to be forgiven by Hazel is divine.
They came now in their ancient Dodge, she at the wheel, sacrificing the dilapidated old conveyance in her double haste—anxious for her mother but with her nose in the wind, scenting her mother’s will. Leaving her husband outside with the men, she hurried into the house. And her brothers turned back to face their neighbors expressionless. They stuck together. She was one of theirs. And theirs was a clannishness remarkable even in a place noted for clannishness.
Next came Lois, alone, in the brave, too brave, desperately gay weeds of her grass-widowhood, a fluffy little meringue of a hat, and in that new red convertible bought to celebrate her divorce decree which made of her a show like a float in a parade or like the entire navy of, say, Bolivia, and she its sole admiral. Lois asked the same questions everyone asked, as to what had been done for Ma, contriving somehow to suggest that nothing could have been done right in her absence. A chronic nag with a small insistent voice like a mosquito’s, tricked by life and unforgiving, she lived in a state of unflagging resentment which even her divorce, that condition for which she had lived as a life-term prisoner lives for a parole, had failed to assuage.
Lois had married latest of all the sisters, at an age when already she had been consigned to be the family’s one old maid, already an aunt many times over by then and seemingly an aunt by nature and disposition, already by that time her mother’s principal confidante and destined by general supposition to be the companion of Ma’s widowed years. She had married after two weeks’ acquaintance a good-natured, unambitious, live-and-let-live boy some years her junior with an hereditary tendency to drink and dominoes. Two weeks later she presented for her mother’s signature the bill of annulment. To her mother, whose creed was that marriage was a vow as unalterable as a nun’s. One month later she stood for the second time before the same justice of the peace with the same slightly tipsy bridegroom and went through the same spiel as before, this time making a cold furious mental reservation upon every word uttered, promising herself neither to love, honor nor obey him but to make his life a daily bed of nails, not till death did them part, but until a day (the exact date she would know some eight months hence) sometime in March of 1962, the child’s eighteenth birthday—unless she (the child, that is; for Lois was certain it would be a girl: that too would be a part of her bad luck), unless she married before that time despite all her mother could do to poison her mind against that step.
She bore the child and weaned it—or rather, her; for it was a girl—and that was one year done. And nursed her through whooping cough followed by double pneumonia, learning in the process to forgive her her existence and to live for her and her alone, waiting on her hand and foot ever afterward and spoiling her so as to make her unfit to be any man’s wife, which only made the man who married her all the more uxorious, and that was two years done. And bringing her safely through all the other childhood diseases, not one of which she was spared, and taking her to Sunday school and dancing and piano and elocution lessons and sending her off to kindergarten, and that was five years done, going on six. And found herself pregnant again by legal rape and had to start all over from scratch. This time she told him her plan, once, quietly, and endured his mumbled and confused self-apology and never mentioned it again but saw her daughter married and settled and the boy through school, or through as much of it as he could stick, then off to his military duty, and when he was discharged and immediately married, instructed the lawyer whom she had apprised of her intentions on the day of her remarriage, to proceed with her suit for divorce, looking at him as if he was crazy when he ventured to say he had forgotten about it and supposed she had too, when he said he would have thought she might have changed her mind after all these years, might have grown reconciled, might even have come to feel some attachment to the man with whom she had lived half her life.
That was three months ago and this homecoming was Lois’s first since then. She had not dared face Ma’s disapproval, and now, full of contrition, blaming herself for their mother’s illness, she could hardly face her sisters and brothers.
After Lois came Gladys, with her husband Laverne, from Nacogdoches. They were followed by Ross’s girls and their husbands and babies, having done the hundred and fifty miles from Fort Worth in not much over two hours. Calls were received from others en route, but none from Amy. But it was known in the family that Amy’s husband Ira was timid at the wheel and would not let Amy drive, complaining that she was worse than her Barney-Oldfielding brothers. And truly, to hit ninety-five or a hundred on a straightaway was nothing for white-haired Amy, the first-born child. Hazel’s girls, April, May and June, all married and living in and around Corsicana, arrived, and her boys Ben and Arthur, in business together over in Terrell. Ross’s Eugene, Harlan and Elwood came, the first two from Kerens, the other from Waco, where he was stationed. Clyde’s Bryan came from Marshall. Lois’s Gwyn arrived. Glenn and Hugh Childress came from Henderson. Uncle Fred, Aunt Inez and Uncle Seth came from Gladewater; Uncle Cameron and Aunt Beulah, Uncle Quincy, Uncle Monroe
, Uncle Leon and Aunt Velma, Aunt Belle and Aunt Flora all came over from Carthage. Uncle Ed and Aunt Lillian came from Big Sandy. Cousin Herschell Kimbrough came from Clarksville, Cousin Calvin Renshaw from Commerce. The Cartwrights came, Duane, Ella and Mae, from Conroe. From Brenham came Cousins Bessie and Meade Vance and Cousins Raymond and Peggy Allen. From Temple came old Cousin Stacey Daingerfield and Uncle Roy Tayloe, who was certainly not an uncle whatever he was, but was too old to be called anything less. Cousin Travis Ledbetter came from Mabank, bringing Aunt Lola and Uncle Dave. But only last week poor crippled old Aunt Nan had taken to her bed for good. They would all be going down to Kilgore to bid her farewell soon.
And so one by one the Renshaws all came home, all but one, and that one was not going to come.
VIII
“Junya Price,” said the owner of the name, and doubling his sack, hung it on the hook of the scale. He was bare to the waist: prompt young muscles bunching beneath a skin as glossy as an eggplant’s.
Clyde found the name in his daybook. Was Junior Price the one? Junior, the record showed, had picked a lot of Clyde’s cotton. What else of Clyde’s, after hours, was Junior picking? Given the day off with pay in observance of Ma’s condition, with money of Clyde’s in the pockets of his impudent skin-tight jeans while he, Clyde, sat tied to his own shadow beneath the pear tree—where, how, with whom would Junior spend his day?
“Fifty-four pounds,” Junior called out. One of the new breed coming up, Junior did not wait to be told by the boss what the scale registered. At his waist Junior wore a pin which proclaimed, “Black is beautiful.” Oh, how Clyde agreed!
Or was Joe Franklin the one? Would Joe—picking grapes later on this fall in California, or up a ladder in an apple tree in New York’s Hudson Valley—say, “Talk about poontang, mmmmmmmmmmm, I know a little black gal down in east Texas …” And would his partner in the next row or on another ladder around on the other side of the tree say, “Yeah, what’s her name?” “Nemmind that, but they call her Sugar—Shug for short—cause she’s just as sweet as—” “Shug? Stays down on that big old cotton farm belonging to them Renshaws? Well, welcome to the club, friend!”
Why did he torment himself like this?
And if he knew? If he knew it was Junior Price, Joe Franklin? Knew it. Beyond doubt. Beyond hope of doubt. If he caught them at it? What would he do? Kill them. Slit their throats with the razor he could feel dangling against his chest. Hers, anyhow.
Yeah. He could see it now, the headline in the county weekly: LOCAL LANDOWNER KILLS NEGRO MISTRESS IN LOVE TRIANGLE. Fine reading that would make, wouldn’t it? Be only one thing to do after that. With the same razor slit his own throat.
IX
Doves when they are flushed utter a squeak of complaint and tumble noisily out of the branches and, as though still gathering up their things, flounce away in awkward, off-balance flight. Alvah Tarrant, returning to his spot in the circle of men and squatting once again, dusts his hands from the clod he had thrown into the tree, and resumes:
“Talking to me the other day my boy says, Pa, it’s time we thought of giving up cotton, planting soyabeans, kudzu. Plant them, says I, hell, I can’t even pronounce them. Is that what they teach you down there at A & M? Soyabeans. I ask you. What kind of a bean is it that a man can’t eat and a hog won’t? Chinamen eat them, you may say, but you can’t tell me even them commonists wouldn’t sooner have black-eyed peas. What are they good for? What are they good for? good for durn near anything you can think of, says my boy to me. They make housepaint out of them and oleomargarine, and the Lord knows what all. Well, when folks leave off wearing clothes and take to painting theirselves instead, and when cows start giving grape juice, why then maybe I’ll switch to soyabeans; meanwhile I’ll stick with cotton, thank you. It was good enough for my old daddy and for his old daddy before him. Course didn’t neither of them go off to college to learn how to farm. But cotton was good enough for them, and I reckon that’s good enough for me.”
The men have shifted, following the shade, but not Clifford. He sits out in the sunshine like a large, hollow-eyed terracotta idol set there to harden, staring at the house, hearing nothing, numb with grief, a dead smile baked on his lips. But Ballard hears everything, and he thinks, you like cotton so much why don’t you go home and pick yours: you’re not wanted here. Go home, all of you, and take your stinking pity with you, it and your stinking curiosity, your filthy nosiness. Ballard sits inside the shade but his face is flushed as dark as Clifford’s. He hardly sweats, so tightly is he holding himself in, as if his very pores had closed in obedience to his will, his determination to reveal no emotion, no feeling, no sentience even, to give none of them that satisfaction. If Clifford’s face is like baked clay, Ballard’s is like cast bronze. He sits as still as his brother; meanwhile his mind ticks toward an explosion as steadily as the clockworks of a bomb. Whenever a new man begins to speak Ballard swivels on his heels and levels at the speaker eyes as cold and menacing as the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun. What he sees with them is a ring of buzzards squatting round about him (and indeed, squatting in their baggy overalls, stoop-shouldered, stringy wrinkled leathery red necks protruding from their collars, they do resemble turkey buzzards, some of them), lifting their eyes at each fresh arrival, not to see who it is but to signify that they have remarked who it is not, which one it is who still remains absent as the family circle fills up, then blandly, innocently scanning the brothers’ faces for signs of embarrassment, disappointment, apology. As more come in and take their places it is like turkey buzzards gathering for a feast. They have scented, or think they have, the death of a proud family’s pride—long dead, long since putrefied, but until now kept hidden from exposure. They are thinking, what will you do now, you Renshaws? It will have to come out now, won’t it? You’ve all carried your heads so high, scorned to render account of yourselves, but now you won’t be able to say any more, “Oh, yes, we heard from him just the other day. He’s making out just fine, thank you for asking.” Now, if ever, you have to produce him. Produce him or else admit that one of yours is missing, has strayed beyond your ken, and that even now he can’t or won’t or doesn’t even know to come home. Just hold your breath until I do, thinks Ballard. Just hold your breath until I do.
“Well,” says Ollie Butcher, “they do say cotton is hard on the soil. Soybeans, they say, sort of pay for their keep, so to speak. Puts back in nitrogen and stuff. I wouldn’t know, myself, and I haven’t got but just a few acres in them, but that’s what they tell me.”
“Peanuts: there’s a good crop now.”
“Yessir! Peanuts is a dandy little crop. Only plant I know of that works for a man with both hands, as you might say: above ground and below. You take cotton, corn: the roots are roots, nothing more. Potatoes, on the other hand: all root, the tops just weeds for all practical purposes. But peanuts: root and branch a friend to man. Get me started on peanuts I can run on all day. Talk about a plant that you can do just about anything with. Youall must have heard about that nigger inventor that come up with a hundred and fifty-odd different ways of using peanuts? Peanut soap, peanut glue, peanut axle-grease—well, you name it, that booger had it. Spent his whole life messing around with peanuts. Regular peanut fool.”
“Never was a nigger that didn’t like peanuts. Why, I’ve seen them even eat the hulls.”
Get two Yankees to talking, Clyde thinks, and it isn’t long before the conversation turns to sex. Get two Southerners to talking and before long the subject is niggers.
“Well, they can have them. Me, I’ll take cotton,” says Alvah Tarrant. “You never heard of King Goober, did you? And cotton didn’t get that name for nothing. What I like about cotton, it ain’t perishable. You don’t have to get shut of it as soon as it’s picked like you do your melons or your tomatoes. You can hold on to it and wait for a change in the price.”
“You can provided you’ve got something to eat while you’re waiting. You can’t eat cotton. At least, I can’
t—though they’ve been some years, let me tell you, when I was about ready to try.”
All this talk about other matters was meant to take his and his brothers’ minds off their situation, off Ma, with the understanding all around that not for a moment was it doing so. Certainly it was not doing so for him. His mind was not on Ma. If they and his brothers only knew where his truant mind was!
“I’ve held on to mine and waited for a change in the price. Good many times. It changed, all right. Went down. And then I’ve sold, fearing it would go down still some more, and seen it shoot right up the very next day. Seems like with cotton I’m like that nigger in the story: always zigging when I ought to have zagged and zagging when I ought to have zigged.”
“You know what I’m thinking about as I squat here unable to stand up for fear it will show?” he heard himself ask his neighbor Calvin Sykes. “The same thing I’ve been thinking about all day long. The same thing I think about all the time. Right this very minute, while my mother lies unconscious on what may be her deathbed, I am mentally in bed with that nigger wench of mine and giving it to her three ways to Sunday. You never knew before that I kept me a nigger wench right here on the place, did you? Now you know. And when I ought to be thinking of my mother, as my brothers and my boy there are all doing, she is what I am thinking about. That’s a loving son as well as a good husband and father for you, eh?”
“Why do you keep on with cotton then if that’s the way. you feel about it? Why don’t you plant them Chinese vegetables instead?”
“Cause I’m not a Chinaman, I reckon is the reason. Cotton is the only thang I know.”
“Well, I like it!”
“Like the bo’ weevils, too, do you, Alvah?”
“You can’t blame cotton for the weevils any more than you can blame a dog for its fleas.”
He had not said that to Calvin, as he had not said it to others previously when he thought he had heard himself saying it. But one day he was going to, it seemed, unless he died first of fright while waiting to learn that he had not said it. What was this mad urge to unmask himself that had come upon him? It was as if he longed to destroy himself. To confess himself an adulterer, a niggerlover and a cuckold all in one.
Proud Flesh Page 5
