Proud Flesh

by William Humphrey

  The door of the barnloft had been taken off for ventilation so that in curing, the hay would not set itself on fire. It was hot in the loft from the heat of the curing hay. From his place in the hay he saw the last light go out in the big house. Instantly inside his head a neon light flashed on saying, OPEN ALL NIGHT! Steel balls bounced off the walls of his skull, dropped into holes, tapped out scores while colored lights popped. A warped record on a nickelodeon played at top volume a medley of comic drunkard’s songs. Show me the way to go home I’m tired and I want to go to bed I had a little drink about an hour ago and it went right to my head how dry I am how dry I am nobody knows how dry I am yo ho ho you and me little brown jug how I love thee hand me down my bottle of corn and I’ll get drunk as sure as you’re born for all my sins are taken away taken away …

  A little drink was all he had had, and it was more than an hour ago. What he had had to drink was just enough to raise a thirst. All he had drunk was a pint of Bing’s Tea, as it was known among the colored population of the county: a mixture of equal parts of caramel-flavored California sherry and sulphur-flavored water from Ed Bing the bootlegger’s artesian well. It was Jug’s fate to be a drunkard in a dry county. Ed Bing: that had ceased to be a man’s name and became a trademark, so that it was all right for Jug to think of him that way, and even to call him that to his face, omitting the “Mister.” Mr. Joe Bailey had administered that pint of watered wine to him in homeopathic doses, trying to prime the pump of his memory. It had worked sometimes. Total amnesia would blanket his brain like dust, obliterating all his recent footprints, but a sprinkling of Ed Bing’s adulterated sherry falling upon it would reveal them and he could retrace his steps to the very spot where he had hidden that money three, four or five days earlier. It had not worked today, and Mr. Joe Bailey was running out of patience, and credit. He had hot been paid his bill in a month.

  “And suppose I was to? Then where would you be? Who would you get to take my place?” he asked Mr. Clyde, who had said, “Instead of hiding half of your money and then not being able to find it again, why don’t you drink it all up and get it over with once and for all instead of this slow drowning in the stuff?” “Nobody. That’s who. If you don’t know it then let me tell you. Not another man would put up with what I do. Is it any wonder if I take a little drink from time to time?”

  “I must have been. I must have been otherwise I wouldn’t have,” he said. This was in response to Mr. Clyde’s saying, “You had been drinking for twenty-five years when you came here. You were drunk when you agreed to it.” “I must have been,” he said. Below him the cows snuffled and blew snorts and rattled the bars of their stanchions. He heard from time to time the plop of their dung on the barn floor.

  “No, I can’t. Not any more. And you know it. It was a time when I could have. But now I got too much money on this place to leave. Until I find it.”

  He had led Mr. Joe Bailey around today making a show of looking for the money in order to get that watered wine, and vaguely hoping, as he always did, to stumble upon the hiding place, or if not it, then one from some other of the many weeks when he had been unable to find it afterward. He had tried to shame Mr. Joe Bailey, saying this was no time to come dunning him when there was sickness on the place. But this, the third straight week that he had been unable to find his money, was the fourth straight week that his bill at Bailey’s Gen’l Store had gone unpaid. Jug’s one creditor (Ed Bing, whose second best customer Jug was, only Ross Renshaw being a better one, would not have let him have a drop on credit if he were in the throes of delirium tremens), Mr. Joe Bailey said of Jug, “He ain’t a bad nigger. Drinks, yes, but knows his weakness and makes provision accordingly. He’ll pay me what he owes me as soon as he finds where he’s put his money.” This did not keep Mr. Joe Bailey from cursing Jug to his face; it was how he explained to others his willingness to lend credit to somebody to whom nobody else would. Sometimes it might take Jug a little longer than at other times, but sooner or later he always did find or suddenly remember where he had hidden that half of his weekly pay from himself so that when he woke up thirsty he would not be able to go on drinking.

  “My daddy kept his in a saving account once. 1932. And I had a friend once that kept his in a bank that the president embezzled everything in it.”

  But with the passage of time Jug had used up a great many hiding places. It got harder and harder for him to outsmart himself. For also with the passage of time his thirst grew, making him more desperate, more determined, and thus more clever at finding his money when he came to, mouth parched, head splitting, stomach heaving, on Monday morning. Also he had to change his hiding place often to keep others from finding his money. Sometimes he did find it while drunk and then he was drunk all week long. This affected his memory. For these reasons now about every other week Jug was unable to find where he had hidden that seventeen dollars and fifty cents. Once or twice while looking for what he had hidden the Friday before, Jug found money he had hidden weeks, even months before. Generally, however, if not found the following week the money was never found.

  “They after it, all right. Ain’t I been up now all night for three nights chasing them off? All day long trying to find it my own self, then up all night trying to keep them cottonpicking thieves from finding it. Yeah, they looking for it.”

  Among the local Negroes and among the annual migrant workers estimates of the amount of Jug’s money buried like a dog’s meatbones around the Renshaw place ran into the thousands of dollars. It was universally held that as its original owner had had his chance and failed to find it, this money now belonged to whomsoever did. Time had reclaimed this wealth and made it into a natural deposit, the prize of him who was smart enough, and hard-working enough, to find it.

  Show me the way to go home … He had been hoping without much hope that tonight she would take pity on him. She could when it suited her. Though she knew how to make being kind to him more bitter than when she was out to devil him. She could be as cruel as a cat and drive him out of the house and when he came home drunk he might wake to find that she had undressed him and put him to bed and bandaged a cut he had gotten somehow and that she had done him that kindness than which to a drunk there is none greater: left him a shot by the side of the bed for when he came to with the shakes. Then when he tried to thank her she would laugh a laugh that split his head and say she knew nothing about how he had gotten to bed, that in his drunkenness he had put himself to bed without knowing it. Before she would put him to bed he could sleep in the gutter for stray dogs to piss on him. If a car was to run over him there and kill him she would dance at his funeral.

  It was not just for his drinking that Shug was punishing him when she drove him out of the house. It was not just for his part in their three-way arrangement. It was for knowing what he knew about her. Not his knowing about her carrying-on. That in his up-all-night out-all-day patrol of the property to find or to protect his hidden money he had seen things, things he alone had seen. She was not afraid of his telling Mr. Clyde what he knew. She knew he never would tell, but that was because he was afraid of Mr. Clyde; she would not have cared if he had. She was not afraid of that straight razor Mr. Clyde wore on a string around his neck, and which she must have seen every time he took his shirt off. She probably lusted to have him cut a man over her. There were women like that and she was one of them if ever there was one. No, what Shug could not forgive him for was knowing her secret, although she herself had revealed it to him, had, in fact, forced it on him against his will. He had troubles enough of his own. He wanted only a quiet life and money enough to get soused on weekends, not choosey even about his poison, grateful for the rawest rotgut. He did not want to know anybody’s secrets. Especially not a woman’s. Especially not anything involving a woman and white folks. Especially when the white folks involved was the man on whom he was dependent for that quiet life, that weekly souse. Certainly he could not be of any help to her with her problem. But nobody could be of any help to h
er, and there he was, in the house, available, a man old enough to be the father she did not have to turn to, legally, if only legally, her husband. To whom else could she lay bare her heart? To whom else try to explain what she could not explain to herself: that she loved the man who had raped her? At least, rape was what it was called when it happened to a white girl—what to call it in her case she did not know. That she loved him because of what he had done to her. Not just because he had forever in his keeping the trophy of her maidenhead, but because in cutting her off from her family, from her people, from the children she might have had, he had left her with no one but him to love.

  He was tired and he wanted to go to bed. Tonight he had reached the point where he did not care if somebody else found and stole his money and he was hoping she would take pity on him, that is, ignore him. She could see by looking, anybody could, what state he was in. He was filthy, he stank. Lack of sleep and the need of a drink made his eyes smart and water continually and his hands to shake uncontrollably. He was hoping for a bath and a shave and a night’s sleep in bed. Or rather, on the living room couch which was his bed. He had never needed to be told that the double bed in the bedroom was as much off-limits to him as was the downstairs at the picture-show even though the Colored sign had been taken down from over the door leading to the balcony. He had not even needed to tell Mr. Clyde that he understood this without being told. No provision of the understanding between them had had to be spoken.

  Show me the way to go home. Home to that little bungalow, his wedding present, meant as a symbol to the world of Clyde Renshaw’s respectability, and which she had so transformed that all it needed now was a red light over the door to look like a cathouse. Her destruction of that place had begun the first time she ever set foot in it. That was on her wedding night, when, unearned over the threshold by her bridegroom—she all but carrying him, in fact—she had kicked in the new screen door. He had sobered and fled. Between that first night and this one, of the nights he could remember at all, he could not remember how many he had spent here in the hayloft. As many as at home, at least. Sweltering in the heat of summer nights and shivering in the cold of winter ones. He used to sleep under bridges, in storefronts and backalleys, when he was single; now that he was married and had a home of his own he slept in the barn loft. That wedding night the lights had blazed in the bungalow while the crash of objects against the walls and through the windowpanes went on into the small hours. The broken panes she stuffed with wads of newspaper. Within days the back door was in tatters, the gate of the prim white picket fence hanging loose from its upper hinge, the trim little yard littered with trash. He had tried to keep a step behind her destruction, knowing that he, old drunk and stumblebum that he had been, still was, would get the blame for its deterioration, but she wrecked it faster than he could repair it. The anger and defiance that she had no one to take out on she vented upon the unresisting house. “Get this place looking right yet!” she would say through gritted teeth as she committed her latest act of vandalism. “Get this place to looking like what it is!”

  That was the home he had gone to because he was tired and wanted to go to bed. He might have known she would pick tonight to devil him. She had come in at once, as he was stretching himself out on the couch, having decided to forego the bath and shave; she was wearing nothing but a petticoat through which neither brassiere nor underpants was visible. Humming a little tuneless tune, rolling her eyes and leering at him, she began to dance, slow and suggestive, twining her arms as if they longed to be filled with a partner. He was already groping for his clothes.

  “If you are bashful,” she said, “then it’s up to me to help you,” and she began to wriggle out of her petticoat like a snake shedding its skin, peeling it down from the top. In his shirt now, he was struggling to draw his pants on. “Don’t be scared,” she whispered. “It’s only little me. I won’t hurt you. It’s your little wife, your own little loving wife that you never have claimed yet.”

  He dared not call her to her face the name which he was shouting at her in his mind. He dared not let her know that he knew what she was. He dared not let anybody know that he knew that. Clyde Renshaw would kill the man whom he suspected of knowing what Jug knew about his, Jug’s, wife. He could not talk back to her at all. The only thing he could do, perishing for sleep as he was, was to get into his clothes as quick as he could and not risk being found by Clyde Renshaw with his shirttails out alone in the house with her naked. For naked she was now, just about, and saying, sneering, “Hangs on you like an old sock, I bet, don’t it? I bet it wouldn’t rise and stand if you was to play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ When was the last time you got it up? Can you remember? Who was President?” And then standing before him bare and twenty in the pool of her petticoat while he struggled with his zipper, “Why, what is that I see? Can it be? Why, I do believe you is got some jizzum left in you, after all.”

  XX

  The man’s naked body lay on the bed where it had fallen with blood gushing from the cut and the severed windpipe wheezing. Hers too wheezed now and down over her slate-colored breasts and in the parting of her breasts her blood ran red. She could see it with her eyes shut. Next time she must keep them open until they shut by themselves. Now she could see it with them shut.

  He had just left and as she stood looking down at herself, at her body, naked now as it would be on that other night, and listening to him hurry across the porch in the dark, she knew that what she had done was a mistake. Not that it mattered tonight. Tonight was not the night. But not again. Better to have him right here in the house at the time, which from now on meant all the time. Not just better but essential. The thing that had been missing up to now. The thing that at last had broken that piece of twine on which the razor hung from around Clyde Renshaw’s neck. Then it was like at the picture-show being shown in the prevues of coming attractions what you would be seeing later on.

  If he had been hesitating to snap that string so that what would be an instant when the time came had lengthened into weeks, it was not for lack of the will to do it. He was no coward. Her man was no coward. He was a hero. During the war, in Germany, when he was hardly more than a boy, he had killed men by the carload for no cause at all. It was not mercy that had stayed his hand on that razor up to now. Expect more mercy from a cottonmouth moccasin than from that man. It was his fear of the publicity that had had to be overcome, and an instant was all the time there was to do it in. She herself could not then say to him, “Go ahead. Remember Jug”—not even if in that instant he permitted her to say anything. How, in that split second when he was not going to be able to remember anything, not even that his name was Clyde Renshaw, to make him remember her husband? Until now the best idea she had been able to come up with had been to have a picture taken of Jug and put it near the bed somewhere so he would see it, take it in, in that instant while he was hesitating. But he was not going to be in a state to take in anything. He was going to be blind with rage. But if he himself on his way to the bedroom had just the instant before passed Jug lying on the couch dead to the world then he would not need to be reminded of him. Just one question remained—one quickly answered: would her husband’s being there right in the room next to them scare away this whatshisname? Not if she saw to it that her husband was out cold, and nothing could be easier than that. She must change her ways, beginning tomorrow. Must make a happier home life for her husband and keep him in with her at night. Give him plenty of what he liked best. She would see Ed Bing tomorrow.

  Meanwhile never mind. Tonight let him sleep in the barn. Clyde Renshaw had other things on his mind tonight—if Clyde Renshaw could get his mind on other things even tonight—and would have for some time to come. But once the old lady was dead and the funeral over and everybody gone home and only her own folks and Mr. Clifford were left on the place, then he would not have to care so much about appearances. Then he was going to get a lot bolder. Especially if between now and then she never let him set eyes on her. Sh
e knew her man. He was a man—man enough for two. She hoped his old mother was a long time dying—let him get his battery really charged. She hoped so anyway—long and painful. She was not dead yet. If she had died then all the lights would be on up there instead of just one.

  How everything that happened now seemed to fit into its place! This sickness of the old lady’s: she had not expected that, yet now it seemed as if she had known to count on it. There was no longer any backing out, if there ever had been. It was going forward on its own momentum now. The neatness with which the pieces fit together, the logic with which one step led to the next, made it inevitable, irreversible.

  Meanwhile knowing that the last piece of the puzzle had been found she could wait for it to happen with all the patience it might take. If not tonight, another night. If not with this one tonight then with one of the others, if she had to take them on one at a time until she had worked her way through the whole cottonpicking crew. If not this fall then next spring, if not next spring then next fall. The seed had been sown; now time would ripen it. Not even she could prevent it now, not even if she had wanted to. Past the time when it might have been aborted, it must grow in her now until it came to term. If she had conceived a monster, who was the father of it? For the act of love he might see to it that she took the pill, but against lovelessness there was no contraceptive.