I cooked supper early because I’d said I would. All those saving mundanes I’d thought kept me sane made my nerves slide. I couldn’t carry a bowl from the table to the sink. I broke one into a million pieces, and P.W., waiting at the kitchen table, eyed me curiously. I told him I might be coming down with flu, but I didn’t tell him what had happened: if he hadn’t caught on about the Easter dress, he probably wouldn’t understand this. No, that wasn’t right. Sibyl’s remark about me and Punk was in an altogether different category. It made me crazy it was so dangerous. And what if I’d taken her wrong? All through supper, I’d thought about it and after supper I thought about it some more. Punk was right, she was crazy, but it was a foxy kind of crazy that set you off-course, and I had no natural bent or practice for countering her wiles. And Punk? Poor Punk!
“Punk Seymore rode up on Robert Dale’s horse today and told me to ask you for a job,” I said—pure reaction. I couldn’t even say Sibyl’s horse.
“Thought he’d been promoted to yardboy over yonder.” P.W. chewed on a toothpick while he worked on the carburetor from his forty-eight Ford. The car part, steel-gray and reeking of gasoline, was scattered on newspapers on our kitchen table. “Well, between me and you and the gatepost, I ain’t got nothing for him to do,” he said, probing with a screwdriver into the heart of the dead steel. “Hand me that phillipshead, sweetie.”
I passed him a screwdriver from the confusion of tools and sat beside him.
Katydids shrieked outside the window, and what Sibyl had said about me rubbing all over Punk strained with the sounds into my head. I felt cut off from P.W. by my secret. Why would she dare say something like that? Was she ignorant to what it meant? Did she think I’d forget it? No. She’d said it expecting me to overlook it because she was dying.
Rubbing all over somebody was a common enough accusation among white trash. Rubbing all over a man, a woman got raped. Rubbing all over a black man, she got run out of town and he got hung from the nearest oak.
Rubbing all over Punk: I can’t say that thought didn’t cross my mind, how bad it felt, how wrong, what it looked like. It did. I thought about it, just as Sibyl had, and I felt sick. But at the time I’d felt for broken bones and brushed dirt from his clothes without thinking—it was the human thing to do. I could still feel his skin, feverishly dry and impure, and I shuddered like I would if I’d touched a snake.
#
Sibyl’s next move came swiftly. As my cuckoo clock stroked off ten mechanical bleeps the next morning, she knocked on my door.
P.W. had left me asleep, and I woke up addled by the mix of birdcalls and rapping. Something behind all the fuss lay heavy, like a wet quilt up to my eyes. Sunlight spread across my bed, with dust squiggles sifting from the shadowy white ceiling. Nothing had changed and yet everything had. I waited for the racket to stop, for good old common sense to take hold.
P.W. had given me the cuckoo clock for a wedding present and I took turns hating and loving the dummy bird with its fake feathered head. It now burped a final dead cuckoo! as if it had given up trying to wake lazy me, but the rapping on the door still vibrated the whole house. You could walk across the floor and the windows shook.
The haze in my head cleared, and images of yesterday zoomed into focus, every word Sibyl had said was like the tinkling of a bell. The whole scene with the horse played out in my head on my way to the door. I was new again, glowing with the fresh outlook mornings always brought. No flu, no wooliness. Punk was in his place, I was in mine. Safe in the afterjar of danger.
“Just a minute!” I called, going back for one of P.W.’s shirts to slip over my nightie. I opened the door and stuck my head out to find Sibyl standing on the doorsteps, competing with the sun in a peach-colored outfit.
“I thought I’d never wake you up,” she drawled, laughing and rubbing her knuckles. The veins on her hands were strutted and bluish.
I clutched the door, started to slam it, but didn’t. What was left to say?
“Listen,” she bagan, sliding her fingers into the pockets of her skinny peach pants. “I’m giving a little cookout for the young people from church tonight. What’cha call it...the BTU? And I need you to help out. I told Brother Travis we’d do it together. Seems like there’s nothing for young people to do around here but get in trouble, hanging around the cafe.”
I could feel my face slide from sleep-fresh to fuzzy as she went on about what we had to do that day. So far, I could still credit myself with not having given in to her—I hadn’t said a word yet. But as she droned on, shifting on her spotless boots, I knew I was lost. She was as pure as the murmur of morning. It was like beholding a holy radiance and thinking of turning away when she said, “I don’t know if anybody told you yet, but I don’t have long to live.”
She said it to explain, I supposed, as if dying was the most reasonable reason for anybody’s bad behavior. No apologies. She stood there in the promise of death, beautiful and sure, with those hunched shoulders her only flaw, her only clue to being as vulnerable as anybody else. “What time?” I asked, thinking of Easter because I’d just spied the first jonquil that had resurrected during the night.
“We need to get started early. About two,” she said, her voice taking on that quality of authority which was strongest in her palette of shades.
I closed the door and dashed P.W.’s shirt to a chair. “My God! What am I doing?” I picked up the shirt again and took it to the kitchen, drew a sink full of water and dunked it.
P.W.’s good white shirt, his only white shirt. I’d used too much Clorox and failed to rinse it out, then ironed it. A scorched brand of the iron showed below the back yoke: proof of my general slack. I hoped his mama never saw it. Now, when he went to church and funerals he had to keep on his wool suit coat—his only suit—hot or not. My face flamed thinking about the dress in our closet, in plain view because I’d said it was old, the price tag buried in the last of our coffee grounds at the bottom of the garbage. If I’d only left the price tag on and tucked it down the sleeve to wear the dress to church, I could have taken it back—the approval plan—and wouldn’t have had to pay for it, and I could have bought P.W. a new shirt, maybe even a suit, for what the dress had cost. But I couldn’t have claimed I’d never worn the dress with a straight face. Why did I always have to do what was right, not what was sensible? I scrubbed at the scorched place and it looked darker wet.
I dressed and ate some smelly leftover broccoli. I ate it, hating it, but knowing it was good for me and tasted nothing. Then I scribbled a note to P.W. telling him where I would be, but realized he’d probably see me at the barn when he came by. So I scratched it and simply wrote “I love you,” because I needed to make the words. It was good to write something I knew, something that wouldn’t fly at me in the face of unreality. And yet I couldn’t touch love anymore than death, those two intangibles so powerful and dim.
The cuckoo clock ticked, the foolish bird poked his head through the miniature brown door with a vibrating call, and popped back inside.
Maybe this time I’ll be through with her, I thought, walking along the road in a flurry of red-winged maple seeds. She might die this very evening and free me. I wished I could turn around and go to Mama’s and Aunt Birdie’s to eat with them and let my shoulders drop. But already I could feel myself pulling away from that phase and pressing on toward Sibyl in her shell house—same as the cuckoo bird.
* * * * *
Chapter 6
But the house didn’t feel like a shell anymore; Sibyl was warm, and I could feel my hiked shoulders drop. Maybe she had change. I started to recognize the scope of her imagination and appreciate it, pushing back bad thoughts to the walls now papered in overlaid blue-and-beige plaid. As I followed behind, she told me that the blue picking up on beige throughout the house was called Windsor. The floors, stripped of white carpets, were heartpine planks, laid with wooden pegs, or what looked like wooden pegs. Mae told me on the sly that “they’s nailed down just like any other floor.” She said it as if s
he took great pride in at least knowing that wooden pegs concealed the nails. “I knows a heap they don’t think I knows,” she added, glancing around at Sibyl who was answering a phone call in the kitchen.
The contemporary furniture had been replaced with antiques of oak and pine, primitive and quaint, knick-knacks and all, like turning a page in a decorator’s magazine. Beanpot lamps and hook rugs warmed the spots once held by cut-glass lamps and white carets; paintings and tables and chairs, all bought for the right blend of old-but-new. Kerosene lamps, fruit jars, and wire baskets heaped with fake eggs were arranged inconspicuously to be conspicuous. I wondered how many like relics had been bulldozed to Bony Branchwith the farmhouse. Even a screened pie safe, like Miss Lettie’s, but with a copper-screen countenance, now cater-cornered a nook of the dining room. Delicate china and stainless steel cookware, all gone, and in their places were earthen crockery and polished copper. Anything lending to the look of elegant living had been thrown out like yesterday’s greens. A new world for starting over, I decided, refreshed and appreciative of the old. How much can old cost? I’d always thought of old as something that came about with time.
The brass beds upstairs had gone out like lights and in their spaces, scrolled oak headboards stood along the walls papered with pastoral motifs. (Sibyl seldom bought one of anything; if she liked something a lot she bought lots.) A clean cedar scent spiced the house, and there was a faint fragrance of baked apples and cinnamon, though nothing was baking. Wicker baskets of catalogues and magazines and odd-fashioned cushions—one in the shape of a heart—were scattered about on the living room floor.
I sat in a padded rocker before the picture window, framed in white country curtains, and watched the moss in the oaks stir lazy patterns on the raked dirt. I was lulled by her natural manner and the cozy house into almost believing, almost caught up in her spell, as the afternoon ticked down to the tune of a grandfather clock.
“No,” she said, when I tried to help her get ready for the party. “You’re company. You don’t have to do a thing but just sit and look pretty.”
“But...”
“Me and Mae’s got everything together,” she interrupted, placing a hand on my arm and showering me with her golden haze. I followed her out the back door anyway, pausing to straighten a welcome mat she’d flipped with her boot toe, and stood inhaling the honeysuckle and the summery air. Gazing off at my own yard, I could see P.W.’s cream-colored Ford flashing the afternoon sun back at the tin sky. Finally he had repainted it, and luster restored, the old car promised to take on its original allure. One step at a time, crop to crop. Maybe next year he could replace the rotten tires and sport around in it for a while before selling it.
A rhythmic clank of rake tines on dirt carried on the air with the whirring of locusts, and I spied Punk raking between a group of oaks on the front yard. Feeling good now—all bad feelings behind me—I decided to come right out and talk to him.
“Hey, Punk,” I called, lagging behind Sibyl, who was hiking on toward the barn.
“Miss Earlene,” he said, walking away as he raked.
“Are you still upset, Punk?” I followed him.
“Nome.” “She’s just highstrung, Punk.”
“Yas ‘um, she be that awright.”
“What’d Robert Dale have to say about the horse?”
“He don’t say nothing. I done and knocked off fore he come in.” He stopped raking, leaned on the rake handle and tilted his keen face. “Mr. P.W. say for you to tell me something?”
“He didn’t have anything for you to do, Punk. I’m sorry. He can’t afford to hire too much help, you know.”
“Yas ‘um, I be on with my sweeping now.”
“Well, at least you got a pretty place to work.” Saying that was stupid, I knew. “Just do what you have to and stay out of her way.” Saying the last part was stupider.
“Sho will now, but she can’t go on a-beating and framming on folk just cause she can.” “No, she shouldn’t. You want me to talk to her?”
“Nome,” he said, looking at me good now with eyes quick and bright. “She done badmouthed you and me till Mr. P.W. liable to haul off and shoot me.”
“Naw,” I said, trying to sound lighter than I felt. “He wouldn’t pay any attention to something like that. I guess she just fired off before she thought.
“Yas ‘um, but she ain’t got no business...” He stopped talking and shot off raking whipstitches among the oak roots, trampling polleny honeysuckle petals like dross of sun.
I started to follow him, to tell him that Sibyl was probably moody because she was sick—she had to feel bad if she had cancer—and that she probably regretted what she’d said yesterday and didn’t know how to make up for it. Look at her today! She’d come right out and told me she was dying, which could be her way of apologizing. Saying that couldn’t have been easy. But I sucked in, leaning against an oak trunk—too many probablys in whatever I might say, and what did Sibyl intend to do with the fact of her dying? Whip me and Punk and the whole town with it? And if she’d redecorated her house because she’d figured out that the dead brilliance of contemporary didn’t fit in Monroe County, she’d been right. Sad—her trying to please us, the town, our manipulating her with our notions of what was acceptable. Already I’d heard several of our neighbors complaining about the horsey smell from her barn and the increase in houseflies—Aunt Birdie, for one. She was on a rampage against houseflies, and they weren’t even that bad yet.
I thought again about Punk saying “She ain’t no normal white,” which could mean a lot of things or nothing. “Not normal” could simply mean different, or unusual. And Sibyl was certainly that. If it meant more, he should leave and really had no business talking to me about her, or vice versa. I felt a twinge of having been in on some rotten under-dealings with Punk, after all, and it didn’t sit well with me.
Why didn’t he leave? He could work for somebody else. Was he staying out of habit, because he’d always worked for Robert Dale? Mae too—if she didn’t like it here, she could go. Both of them lived in the quarters behind the white school, where hard-talk was as common as breathing, where a punch in the gut was nothing. So why be so sensitive about Sibyl? True, we treated them a shade worse than children, and they responded with child-like dependency, but we had evolved from slavery to servitude, and we would eke out more charity in time. For Sibyl, Punk was no more than a symbol, proof of her status, like one of the stable-boy statues seen on many southern lawns.
I looked up and saw her standing in the barn door, watching me, watching Punk. I smiled, walking toward her, along the path her eyes blazed and head on. I didn’t blink.
When I got halfway there, she called, “Tell Mae to send me the clam dip and chips out of the Frigerdaire.” It came as a command, until she added, “If you don’t mind,” oozing like honey. I turned toward the house, but looked back to see if she was still watching, and she looked frail and harmless in the dark yawn of the barn.
In the kitchen, Mae stood crouched over the sink, scrubbing baking sheets. A new sink, coppertone to match the cookware, all new reproductions of old, replacing the gleaming white and chrome.
“My God!” I said, “I can’t believe she even changed appliances.” “Yas ‘um,” said Mae, “say they don’t match up and out they go. She the changiest woman I ever seed in all my born days.”
I caught myself on the verge of gossiping with Mae after I’d just sworn off gossiping with Punk. “She said for me to come get the clam dip and chips.” I opened the refrigerator door to stacks of square white containers.
“She been messing and gomming ever since her feet hit the floor this morning,” Mae said. “Mr. Robert Dale ain’t got no say over that woman! Got to where he plum don’t say nothing. She throw out more in a day than he can tote home in a week!”
“This the dip?” I asked to cut her off, taking a covered plastic container with a taped strip clearly marked “clam dip.”
“Yas’um, that be it.” She
beamed, one hand braced on her broad hip, the other nudging the basket of chips to the back of the counter. “Ain’t real clam meat though.”
I tried to reach around her for the chips, but she blocked me, hissing in my face. “How come Mr. Robert Dale to up and marry that kind? She ain’t up to no good. And if she be dying, I ain’t seed ary sign of it. I oughta knows; I stays here moren anybody else do. Punk and me should oughta quit away back when she run Miss Lettie off.”
I was close enough to count the knotty braids sectioned into rows on her head. “Mae, that’s gossip,” I said, fishing the basket from around her stout body. I noticed that the window shades over the sink had been covered with the same paper as the kitchen walls, a blue and beige repeating-spice pattern. “She’s a smart woman.”
“Foot! I does what get done around here,” Mae said, turning to scrub another cookie sheet.
I realized, going out the door, that I didn’t want to know what Mae and Punk knew, what kept them there. It wasn’t solely that I didn’t trust what they said, though I knew they’d grumbled about unfair pay and working conditions when they’d worked for Robert Dale and P.W. But any truth gleaned from what they might say wouldn’t change much: I’d still have to put up with Sibyl, day by day, till she died. One word to Mae and I could have had a clue to what made the clock tick, but it would still tick and time would still bind us. Did I want Sibyl to die? No—if she died now I would feel too guilty.
#
Red and black streamers, our school colors, swagged from the cypress rafters of the barn. The scent of cypress mellowed the odors of sawdust and manure, and although all the horses had been turned out to pasture for the party, their warm salty odors still clung to the raw walls. Smoke from the pit barbecue outside wafted through the double doors, end to end. The barn was only a square, four-stall building, but its height lent to its grandness, and frames of twilight entered through skylights in the roof. The stalls took up each corner, as in justification of the barn. The center, a spacious clearing, was dotted with redwood tables on fresh sawdust, which reminded me of a circus ring.
Two Shades of Morning Page 7
