Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “Who are you, old fellow?” she asked when he shuffled past her into the room. “Who are you?” As though who he was were not the thing Emmaline knew best in the world at this moment. As though guessing who the old fellow was hadn’t been what gave her, a few minutes before, the full, true picture of what was now happening and what had been happening for several months past. Ever since the baby came, and before too, she had been trying to guess how the Tollivers felt about her and Bert’s living here on the place with a baby. Did they want them to get rooms somewhere else? Did they want her to take the baby down to her mama’s, in Tennessee, and leave her there? She had talked to Miss Amy about the first plan and then the second, hoping thus to find out just what the Tollivers thought. But Miss Amy had always put her off. “We’ll talk about it later, Emmaline, after Mr. James decides what he thinks is best,” she would say, or, “I’ll have to discuss it with Mr. James some more.” Day after day Emmaline had wondered how much talk there had already been about it and what had been said. For some reason it had all seemed to depend on Mr. James.

  And now she knew why. Mr. James had been waiting to spring this on them. It would be all right about the baby if she and Bert would take on this old granddaddy to look after for as long as they lived. Ah, she and Bert hadn’t thought of that! They had known about the old fellow ever since Mr. James first found him, and Bert had seen him a good many times, had even talked to him on various occasions at Mr. James’s office. But he was such a dirty, ignorant old fellow that Bert had sheered away from much conversation or friendliness with him. Both Bert and Emmaline had even sheered away from any talk with Mr. James about him. They didn’t like to have Mr. James connecting them in his mind with such a dirty old ignoramus just because they happened to be colored people.

  But here the dirty, ignorant old fellow was, standing in the very room that Emmaline had come to think of as her baby’s future nursery. Here he had come—himself to be nursed and someday, no doubt, to die on her hands. She studied the room for a moment, mocking her earlier appraisals of it as a possible nursery. What mere trash all her thoughts had been. When she had not even known that she could keep the two rooms she had, she had been counting on a third. She had been going to make the room that the baby slept in now into a sort of living room. Oh, the window-shopping she had already done for living-room furniture! For some reason, the piece she had set her heart on pictured the baby’s room, as it would have been—painted the same pink as the old nursery in the ­Tollivers’ house!

  Emmaline looked at the room more realistically now than she ever had done before. There was no door connecting it with her and Bert’s room, as there was between their room and the baby’s. There was but the one door and one small window, and it really wasn’t finished nearly so well as the two other servant’s rooms. The walls were of rough sheathing, not plaster, and it would be harder to heat. In the neighborhood, there was a German washwoman who had been washing for people hereabouts since long before the Tollivers bought their place, and she had told Emmaline how the coachman used to sleep in this room and how the very finest carriage harness had always hung on the walls there under his protection. The massive hooks, which evidently had held the harness, were still on the walls and they caught Emmaline’s eye momentarily. They were the hardware of a barn.

  She and Bert were still living, after all, in a barn. And yet she had named this room a nursery. It was the plaster on the walls of her own two rooms that had deceived her. She realized that now, and realized that those rooms might never look the same to her again, just as her life here with Bert and the baby would hardly be the same while this old Tennessee hobo was present to be a part of it—to eat with them in the house (it was bad enough eating with the grouchy, complaining, overpaid cook, Nora Belle) and to share their bathroom (he would have to pass through her very own bedroom to reach the bathroom; she resolved that instant to make him use a chamber and to permit him to empty it only once a day). The ill-furnished bedroom and the old man standing in the center of it, now dropping his bundle on the lumpy mattress, brought back to her all the poverty and nigger life she had known as a girl in Tennessee, before the Tollivers had sent back for her. And this unwashed and ragged old man was like the old uncles and cousins whom she had been taught to respect as a little girl but whom she had learned to despise before she ever left home. While she stared at him, the old man replaced and then removed his hat at least three or four times. Finally, he hung the hat over one of the big harness hooks.

  The hat hanging on the wall there seemed an all too familiar sight to Emmaline, and the uncovered head and the whole figure of the man seemed just as infuriatingly familiar. Perhaps she had thought she would never set eyes again on such a shiftless and lousy-looking creature. Certainly she had thought she would never again have to associate such a one with herself and with the place she lived in. His uncut and unkempt white hair was precisely like a filthy dust mop that ought to be thrown out. Even the whites of his eyes looked soiled. His skin was neither brown nor black but, rather (in this light, at least), the same worn-out gray as his overcoat. Though the evening was one in early autumn, and warm for the season, the old fellow wore a heavy overcoat that reached almost to his ankles. One of the coat’s patch pockets was gone; the other was torn but was held in place with safety pins and was crammed full of something—probably his spare socks, and maybe his razor wrapped in a newspaper, or a piece of a filthy old towel. God knew what all. The coat was buttonless and hung open, showing the even more disreputable rags he wore underneath. For a moment Emmaline wondered if it was really likely that Mr. James had let the old fellow hang around his office for two or three years looking like that. And then she reflected that it was a fact, and characteristic of Mr. James.

  But now the old Negro was hers, hers and Bert’s. Miss Amy wouldn’t so much as know he was on the place. It was Miss Amy’s policy not to know janitors and yardmen existed. And Mr. James—he, too, was out of it now. The final sound of Mr. James’s footsteps on the stairs seemed to echo in her ears. The old fellow was nobody’s but hers and Bert’s.

  The baby continued to wail monotonously, and rather dispassionately now, as though only to exercise her lungs. Suddenly, Emmaline said to the old man, “That’s my baby you hear crying in there.” The old man still had not spoken a word. Emmaline turned away from him abruptly. She went first to the door of the room where she and Bert slept, and then to that of the baby’s room. She opened each door slightly, fumblingly took the key from the inside, and then closed and locked the door from the loft side. When she had locked both doors and tried them noisily and removed the keys, and while the baby cried on, Emmaline took her leave. She went down the steps, through the garage, and across the yard toward the house. Just before she reached the back porch, she began hurrying her steps. Bert would be wondering what had kept her so long, and she could hardly wait to tell him.

  It was nine o’clock. Emmaline had made a half-dozen trips back to see about the baby. At seven-thirty she had offered her breast, and the baby had fed eagerly for several minutes and then dozed off. It was not unusual that Emmaline should make so many trips when the baby was fretful, except that she could usually persuade Bert to go for her at least once or twice to the foot of the steps and listen. Tonight, however, Bert had seemed incapable of even listening to her reports on how the baby was crying—whether “whining sort of puppy-like” or “bawling its lungs out.” When she first came in from the garage, he had asked her in his usual carefree, good-natured way if “that little old sweet baby was cutting up.” But when she told him about the old fellow’s being out there, all the good cheer and animation habitual to Bert seemed to go out of him for a while. In the dining room, he was as lively and foolish-talking as ever when one of the boys said something to him, but in the pantry he listened only absent-mindedly to what she said about the old fellow and not at all to her reports on the baby. Then, as soon as dinner was over and the dishes were brought out, he took off his white coat and, without stop
ping to eat any supper, lit into the washing of the table dishes in the pantry sink.

  At nine o’clock, the two of them went up the steps into the loft room. There was no sound from the baby. They crossed in the darkness to the door of the room where they slept. Emmaline was turning the key in the lock when the door to the old man’s room opened. In his undershirt and galluses, and barefoot, he showed himself in the doorway. Presently, he made a noise like “psst” and beckoned with one hand. Bert went over to him. There was a brief, whispered exchange between them, and Bert returned to where Emmaline was waiting. He told her that the old fellow wanted to use the toilet. Emmaline stepped inside the room and switched on the light. With her finger still on the switch she looked searchingly into Bert’s eyes. But his eyes told her nothing. She would have to wait a little longer to learn exactly what was going on in his head.

  Then, upon hearing the old man’s bare feet padding over the floor of the loft, Emmaline stepped to the door that joined her room to the baby’s room, opened it softly, and went in there and waited in the dark, listening to the baby’s breathing. She did this not out of any delicacy of feeling but because she felt she could not bear another sight of the dirty old man tonight. When he had been to the toilet and she had heard him go away again, Emmaline went back into their bedroom. She found Bert seated on the bed with one shoe already removed and his fingers casually unlacing the string of the other.

  “Is that all you care?” she said belligerently. He seemed to be preparing for bed as though nothing extraordinary had happened.

  “Just what you mean ‘care’?” Bert answered in a whisper.

  Emmaline’s eyes widened. When Bert whispered, it wasn’t for the baby’s sake or for anybody else’s but because he was resenting something some white person had said or done. It was a satisfaction to her to know he was mad, yet at the same time it always roiled her that he whispered at times when her impulse would be to shout. Bert would whisper even if the nearest white person was ten blocks away, and in his mind he always set about trying to weasel out of being mad. She regarded him thoughtfully for a moment. Then she pretended to shift the subject. “Didn’t the old fellow ask you for nothing to eat?” she asked. “I thought he would be looking for you to bring him something.” She had made herself sound quite casual. Now she moved to the door to the loft room, opened it, took the key from outside, and fitted it into the lock from the inside.

  “No use locking that door,” Bert said, still in a whisper. “The old fellow says he’s got to go to the toilet two or three times before morning, and he don’t have any chamber.”

  Emmaline turned around slowly. “You sound right mad about things, Bert,” she said with affected calm.

  “What you mean ‘mad’?” Bert said, clearing his throat.

  He began to smile, but well before he smiled, Emmaline could see that he was no longer mad, that he really hadn’t been mad since before they left the house, that his whispering was only a sort of leftover frog in his throat from his having been mad when she first told him.

  He proceeded now to pull off his other shoe. He arranged the two highly polished black shoes side by side and then, with the heel of his right foot, pushed them carefully under the bed. And now, since Bert was pigeon-toed, he sat there with the heels of his sock feet nearly a foot apart and his big toes almost touching. Before leaving the house, he had slipped on his white coat again, as protection against the mildly cool night air, because Bert was ever mindful of dangers to his health from the cold. He was perhaps even more mindful of dangers from uncleanliness. The socks on his feet, the sharply creased whipcord trousers, the starched shirt underneath the white coat, all bespoke a personal cleanliness that the symbolic whiteness of the butler’s coat could never suggest. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said presently, in his naturally loud and cheerful voice. “I was mad about it, Emmaline, but I’m not no more.”

  “Was mad about it?” she said, taking a step toward him. The emphasis of his “no more” was somehow irksome to her. “I tell you I am mad about it,” she said. “And I aim to stay mad about it, Bert. I’m not going to have it.”

  “Why, no use being mad about it,” Bert said. He dropped his eyes to his feet and then looked up again. “No use my being mad about it and no use your getting that crazy-woman look in your eyes about it. Ever since you came over in the house for supper, Emmaline, you been acting your crazy-woman worst.” He began laughing deep in his throat. Then he got up from the bed. “Like this,” he said. He trotted clownishly about the room, bent forward at the waist, with his eyes sort of popped out. “You been walking around like this.” He could nearly always make Emmaline laugh by mimicking her and saying she was a crazy woman. “You been walking around like ’Stracted Mag.”

  But Emmaline refused to laugh. “It’s not so, Bert,” she said. “You know it ain’t.” She didn’t want to give in to his resolute cheerfulness. At a time like this, she found his cheerfulness a trial to her soul.

  “Why, you been your ’Stracted Mag worst tonight,” he said. He went up to her and pretended to jabber wildly in her face. The ’Stracted Mag to whom he referred had been a poor, demented old Negro woman wandering the streets of their hometown when Bert and Emmaline were children, jabbering to everyone, understood by no one, but credited by all with a fierce hatred of the white race.

  “Not me,” Emmaline said very seriously, backing away from him. “You’re the ’Stracted Mag here.” It seemed downright perverse of him to be making jokes at such a time, but it was like him. Whenever he was put out of humor, whenever he quarreled with her—usually about the occasional failure to keep their rooms in order, or to keep his clothes in order and clean—or when he complained about some particularly dirty piece of work Miss Amy had set him to, he was always bound and compelled to get around at last to some happy, self-mollifying view of the matter. He could no more tolerate protracted gloom on any subject, from himself or from anyone else, than he could go for more than an hour without washing his hands. Not, that is, except when he was awakened in the middle of the night. Then Bert wasn’t himself. Right now, Emmaline could tell from the way he was acting that he either considered the situation too hopeless to be taken seriously or had already decided what was to be done. Anyhow, he had cooked up some way of looking at it cheerfully.

  But Emmaline was not yet ready to accept a cheerful view. She pretended to resent his calling her ’Stracted Mag. “Who you to be calling anybody ’Stracted Mag. In my day she was giddy and foolish like you, not pop-eyed wild.” Emmaline was nearly six years older than Bert and actually they had known each other only slightly in Thornton, their courtship and marriage having taken place after they had come here to work for the Tollivers. “In my day,” Emmaline said, “she was simple foolish, not wile-eyed crazy.”

  “Naw! Naw!” Bert said in utter astonishment. “How can you say so?” Her contradiction of the picture he carried of that old Negro woman left Bert absurdly shaken. “How can you say so, Emmaline, when I seen her one time fighting a dog in the street?”

  “Oh, I don’t reckon you did, sure enough,” Emmaline said in a tone she would have used with a child.

  “You know I did!” Bert said. “Down on her all fours, in the horse manure, fighting and scrapping with that old spotted dog of Miss Patty Bean’s. And it was just because she hated Miss Patty and all them Beans so.”

  “Well, not in my day,” Emmaline insisted, stubbornly and purposefully. She stared straight into Bert’s eyes. “In my day, she didn’t mix with man nor dog. She muttered and mumbled and kept all to herself.” Emmaline evidently knew the exact effect her contradiction was having upon Bert. Like the names of other characters in Thornton, ’Stracted Mag’s name was on their lips almost daily and had ceased to be a mere proper noun for her and Bert. It had become a word whose meaning neither of them could have defined, though it was well established between them—a meaning that no other words in their vocabulary could express.

  Bert looked at Emmaline reproachfull
y. He could hardly believe that she would thus tamper with the meaning of a single one of their stock of Thornton words, or even pretend to do so. He felt as he would have felt if she had threatened to deprive him of his sight or hearing by some sort of magic. She could so easily snatch this word from his vocabulary and render him even less able than he was to express his feelings about things in the world. He saw that in order to stop her, he must tell her at once how easy it was going to be to get rid of the old man. Still sitting on the bed, he reached forth and took Emmaline by the arm, just above the wrist. “Come sit down on the bed,” he said urgently. “I aim to tell you about the old fellow.”

  Emmaline took two steps and sat down beside him. With his hand still on her forearm, he felt the tension of her muscles. She was her ’Stracted Mag worst tonight! He often told her in a joking way that she was like old Mag, but it was really no joke at all. He knew that many a time Emmaline would have left the Tollivers’ service or said something out of the way to one of the old aunts if it had not been for him. Emmaline was a good, hardworking, smart sort of a woman—smarter than most anyone gave her credit for, but at a moment’s notice she could get a look so bughouse-wild in her face that you felt you had to talk fast if you were going to keep her calm. Bert’s mother had been that sort of woman, too. In fact he felt that most of the women he had ever had much to do with had been that sort; he felt that he had spent no small part of his life keeping Negro women from blurting out their resentment at white people. Emmaline was more easily handled than some, but it was because, after all, she used more sense about what she expected to get out of life than most of her sort did. Like him, she had no illusions about someday leaving domestic service. She accepted as good enough for her the prospect of spending her life in the service of such a family as the Tollivers, provided she did not have to live in the leaking, lean-to-kind of shack she had been brought up in, and provided that in her comfortable quarters she might at the same time be raising a family of her own. She and Bert saw eye to eye on that. Emmaline was smart and she was not an unhandsome woman. She was tall and, though she was a little stooped, her figure was slender and well formed, and proportions of her head and her rather long neck were decidedly graceful. Yet when excited, as she had been tonight, her eyes seemed actually to swell from their sockets, her nostrils would spread until her nose seemed completely flattened, and her heavy lower lip would protrude above her upper lip; at those times her shoulders appeared more stooped than usual, her arms longer, her brown skin darker.