Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “Look here,” Bert was saying. “We going to get shed of that old man. You know that, don’t you?”

  “What you mean get shed of him?” she asked. There was contention in her voice, but already her eyes showed her satisfaction with what he said.

  “I mean he can’t stay here with us.”

  “Who says he can’t, Bert?”

  “You and me won’t let him.”

  “What we got to do with it, Bert? All I know is we ain’t going to stay if he does. Is that what you mean?”

  “No!” Bert exclaimed—so loud that the baby stirred in her bed in the next room. “That ain’t what I mean. You think we going to vacate here for him? Quit the best me or you either has ever had or is like to have?”

  Emmaline said, “There’s other people in this here very block we could work for—mighty good places, Bert.”

  “And bring Baby with us?” Because they had not given the baby a name, Bert used “Baby” as a name. “And you know it wouldn’t be like working with folks from Thornton.”

  Emmaline’s eyes seemed to swell again. She asked, almost begged, him to tell her. “What we going to do, Bert? He’s nasty and ignorant, and living so close. I tell you this—just as sure as Mr. James is a Thornton white man, that old fellow is a Thornton sort of nigger. Maybe where one is there’s got to be the other.”

  “We going to run him off!” Bert said. He had released her arm, but he took it again, and at the same time he began grinning at her. “We going to run him off.” He said it with a carefree kind of enthusiasm, as though he were playing a game, said it in a loud voice, as though he were trying to make the old man hear. “Why, we going to run him off just by telling him we don’t want him. He’ll know what we mean. He’ll think we mean worser than we do, and he’ll git. And nobody will care.”

  “Mr. James will care,” Emmaline warned.

  “Nobody will care enough to stop us. I studied it out while I was washing dishes,” he said. “Mr. James has done done all he’s about to do for that old man. He allows he’s fixed things so we’ll be afraid not to look after the old man and keep him. But Mr. James’s not going to do no more than that. I can tell by the way you said he walked off across the floor of the loft room. Mr. James is through and done with the old fellow. He can say to himself now that he done what he could. But both him and Miss Amy thinks heaps more of us and having us wait on them than to be letting us go because we run off such as him. Oh, Lord, we’ll run him off all right.”

  Emmaline felt fully reassured, and her eyes seemed to have sunk back into their sockets. But she asked quietly, “How?” She could hear the old man snoring in his room and she could hear the baby beginning to whimper. But before she got up to go to the baby, she repeated, “How?”

  Bert laughed under his breath. “We’ll just tell him to git, and he’ll git.”

  “When, Bert?”

  “Well, tomorrow,” Bert said thoughtfully. “And not the day after, either. We’ll scare him off while we’re new to him, and he’ll think we’re worser than we know how to be. He’s lived hard, and with harder folks than you and me, Emmaline.”

  When Emmaline brought the baby in on her shoulder a few minutes later, her features were composed again, and Bert was humming softly to himself. He had removed his white coat and his shirt and had hung them on hangers in the big wardrobe beside the bed. At the sight of the baby, he commenced talking a baby talk that was incomprehensible even to Emmaline. But Emmaline beamed and let him snatch the baby from her in mock roughness. Uttering a steady stream of almost ­consonantless baby talk, he first threw the baby a few inches in the air, and then danced about the room with her—in his sock feet, whipcord trousers, and gleaming-white undershirt. Finally, the baby’s dark, screwed-up little face relaxed into the sweetest of smiles.

  “Don’t wake her up no more than need be, Bert,” Emmaline protested feebly. “She ain’t slept half her due all day.”

  Bert let himself fall across the bed on his back, holding the baby at arm’s length above him. Now with his muscular brown arms he was bringing the baby down to his face and then raising her again like a weight. Each time her laughing little face touched his own, Bert would say, “Timmy-wye-ea! Timmy-wye-ea!” And the meaning of this Emmaline, for sufficient reason, did understand. It was Bert’s baby talk for “Kiss me right here.”

  Later on, after the baby had fed at Emmaline’s breast and had been sung to sleep on her shoulder, she was put down in her own bed in the dark room. Then Bert and Emmaline were not long in retiring. After their light was out, they lay in bed talking for a while, though not once mentioning the old man, whose intermittent snoring they heard from the next room. As they so often did, they went to sleep debating what name they should give the baby. They could never agree (probably the baby would be called Baby all her life), but neither did they ever fully disagree about the appropriateness of the various possible names. They went off to sleep pronouncing softly to one another some of the possibilities: Amy Amelia, Shirley Elizabeth, Easter May, Rebecca Jane.

  They were awakened by a terrible shrieking—a noise wild enough to be inhuman, and yet unmistakably human. Emmaline sprang from her bed and ran through the darkness to the baby’s crib. So swift and unfaltering were her steps that as she reached her hands into the crib, she imagined that Bert mightn’t yet be fully awake. She even muttered to herself, “I pray God he ain’t.” Yet in the next awful moment, when she would have caught up the baby—except that she found no baby there—the thought that Bert might be still asleep seemed the worst, last terror her heart could ever know. Searching the empty crib with her hands, she screamed Bert’s name. Her voice came so shrill and loud it caused a painful sensation in her own ears.

  And Bert, who all the while stood in the darkness only a few inches from her, and with the baby in his arms, raged forth at her out of the darkness, “God, woman! Goddamn, woman! You want to make your baby deaf? You yell at me like that again, woman, and I’ll knock you flat on the floor.” It was Bert in his worst midnight temper.

  His own movements had been swifter than Emmaline’s. He had even had to open the door between the rooms, yet had arrived so far ahead of Emmaline that he was holding the baby in his arms by the time her hands began searching the crib. Perhaps he had awakened a moment before she had. It seemed to both of them that they were already awake when the baby cried out, and at first neither had believed it could be their baby making such a noise. The two of them had come, as on one impulse, simply to make sure about the baby. All of this, of course, they revealed to each other much later; at the moment they stood in the dark cursing each other.

  “You’ll knock who flat on the floor?” Emmaline cried in a voice only a trifle less shrill and less loud than that in which she had called Bert’s name. “Give me that baby of mine!” she demanded. She felt about for the light switch. When she found it, she was asking, “You’ll knock who flat on the floor, you bastardy, black son of Ham?” But when the light came on, her voice and her words changed, and so, no doubt, did her whole face. She saw Bert, clad in his immaculately white pajamas, holding on his shoulder the tiny, woolly-headed baby, clad in its white cotton nightgown. Beads of sweat shone on the brown skin of Bert’s forehead. His wide, brown hands held firmly to the little body that was squirming incessantly on his shoulder. And in the first moment of light, Emmaline saw Bert throwing his head back in order to look into the baby’s face.

  Emmaline moved toward Bert with outstretched arms. “Honey,” she said in a new voice, “hand me m’baby. Let me have her, Bert.”

  Bert let her take the baby from him. He, too, seemed to have been changed by the light. “Something’s wrong with her,” he said. “She ain’t made a sound since I picked her up.” His eyes were now fixed on the little face. “Look at her eyes, Emmaline!” The baby’s dark eyes were fairly bulging from her head, and she was gasping tearfully for breath. “I think your baby’s dying, Emmaline,” Bert said.

  Emmaline seized the baby and beg
an patting her gently up and down the spine. This soon restored the baby’s breath somewhat and allowed her to begin shrieking again. Emmaline walked from one room to the other, and then back again. Back and forth she walked, talking quietly to the baby, patting her between the shoulder blades or sometimes gently stroking her little body. Meanwhile, Bert followed at Emmaline’s heels, trying to peer over her shoulder into the baby’s face. At last the baby left off shrieking, and began crying in a more normal way.

  At this change, Bert went to the bathroom and washed his face and hands in cold water. When he returned, he said impatiently, “What’s got in her?”

  “She’s sick somehow, Bert,” Emmaline said. Though the baby had stopped shrieking, still she was crying passionately and with no hint of abatement.

  “Maybe she’s hungry,” Bert suggested in a voice of growing impatience.

  “I just tried her while you was in the bathroom and she wouldn’t take it,” Emmaline said. Then she said, “Oh, Lord,” and by this she meant to say it was bad enough worrying over the baby without Bert’s having one of his real fits of midnight anger. She thought of stories she had heard, as a girl, of men whipping their babies when they cried at night, whipping them to death sometimes. “Let him try!” she said to herself, but it didn’t quiet her fears. Also, she now thought she heard sounds coming from the old man’s room. She had forgotten his presence there until now. What if he should take this time to go to the toilet? . . . Bert would kill him.

  All at once she knew for a certainty that the old man would come in. Oh, Bert would kill him when he came! Or there would be such an awful fight somebody would hear them in the house and Mr. James would come out and maybe shoot Bert with that little pistol he kept on his closet shelf. All she could see before her eyes was blood. And all the time she was pacing the floor, from the baby’s room, where the light was on, to her and Bert’s room, where there was no light except that which came through the open doorway.

  “Someway you’ve got to stop her,” Bert said, putting his hands over his ears. He nearly always woke when the baby cried at night, but the crying had never been like this before, had never begun so suddenly or with such piercing shrieks.

  “I is trying to stop her, Bert, but I can’t,” Emmaline said excitedly. “You go on back to bed, Bert.”

  He sat down on the side of the bed and watched Emmaline walking and listened to the baby’s crying. Once he got up and went to the dresser to peer at the face of the alarm clock. It was a quarter to one. “Aw, she’s hungry and don’t know it,” he said after a while. “You make her take something. It’s time she’s fed.”

  Emmaline sat down in the big wicker rocking chair in the baby’s room, slipped off the strap of her nightgown, and tried to settle the baby to her breast. But the baby pushed away and commenced thrashing about, throwing her head back and rolling her eyes in a frightening way. Now Emmaline began to sob. “The baby’s sick, Bert,” she said. “She’s afire with fever, she is.”

  “Let me walk her some,” Bert said, coming into the lighted room.

  “Oh, don’t hurt her, Bert,” Emmaline pleaded. “Don’t hurt her.”

  “Why, I ain’t going to hurt no little baby,” Bert said, frowning. “I ain’t going to hurt Baby. You know that, Emmaline.” As he took the baby, his wife saw the look of concern in his eyes. He was no longer in his midnight temper—not for the time being at least. Or, anyway, he was out of the depths of it.

  But Emmaline sat in the rocking chair sobbing while Bert walked with the baby from one room to the other. Finally, he stopped before her and said, “You cut out your crying—she ain’t got much fever I can feel. Something’s ailing her, and she’s sick all right, but your carrying on don’t help none.”

  In the far room Emmaline could hear the old man knocking about, as though he were in the dark. He was looking for the light, she thought. And she thought, Bert can hear him too. Suddenly she wailed, “If the baby’s sick, Bert, then why ain’t you gone to the house to get somebody to—”

  “To get somebody?” Bert shouted back at her. “What in hell do you mean?”

  “To get some of them to call a doctor, Bert.”

  “Go wake Mr. James to call a doctor?” Now the baby began shrieking as at the outset, but Bert shouted above the shrieking. “On top of him sending that old fellow—”

  “Then go out and find a doctor. Get dressed and go out and find us a doctor somewheres.” She was on her feet and wresting the baby from Bert.

  Bert stood nodding his head, almost smiling, in a sudden bewilderment. Then he went into the other room and took his shirt off the coat hanger. He was leaning over the dresser drawer to get out clean underwear when Emmaline heard the unmistakable sound of their door from the loft room opening. The sound came at a moment when the baby had completely lost her breath again. Emmaline commenced shaking the baby violently. “Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord God!” she cried out. She was standing in the doorway between the two rooms. Bert looked over his shoulder. She thought at first he was looking at her, but then she saw he was looking at the shadowy figure in the other doorway.

  Now the baby’s gasping for breath claimed Emmaline’s attention again. But even so, the shadow of a question fell across her mind: Did Bert keep his knife in the drawer with his underwear? It was a needless question she asked herself, however.

  She could see that Bert was smiling at the old man. “Our baby’s sick.” But at the moment the words meant nothing to her. There, in her arms, the baby seemed to be gagging. And then Emmaline felt her baby being jerked away from her. It happened so quickly that she could not even try to resist. She saw Bert springing to his feet. Then she beheld the dirty old man holding the baby upside down by her feet, as he would have held a chicken. Among the shadows of the room he was somehow like another shadow. Barefoot and shirtless, he gave the effect of being totally naked except for some rather new-looking galluses that held up his dark trousers. A naked-looking, gray figure, he stood holding the baby upside down and shaking her until her nightgown fell almost over her head, exposing her white diaper and her black, heaving little stomach.

  Emmaline felt all the strength go out of her body, and it seemed to her that she was staggering blindly about, or falling. Indistinctly, as though from a great distance, she heard the voices of the two men. The old man’s voice was very deep and—she resisted such a thought—was a voice fraught with kindliness. Presently, Emmaline realized that Bert was standing by her with his arm about her waist, and the baby was crying softly in the old man’s arms.

  “But something sure must be ailing her,” Bert was saying quietly. He was talking about the baby and didn’t seem to realize that though Emmaline had remained on her feet, she had lost consciousness for a moment. “She don’t yell like that, and she woke up yelling bloody murder,” Bert said.

  The old man smiled. He was gap-toothed, and the few teeth he had were yellow-brown. “Bad dreams,” he said. “Bad dreams is all. I reckon he thought the boogeyman after him.”

  Bert laughed good-naturedly. “I reckon so,” he said, looking at Emmaline. He asked her if she was all right, and she nodded. “How come we didn’t suppose it was bad dreams?” he asked, smiling. “It just didn’t come to us, I reckon. But what could that little baby have to dream about?” He laughed again, trying to imagine what the baby could have to dream about.

  Emmaline stared at Bert. At some point, he had woken up all the way and had become himself as he was in the daytime. She had a feeling of terrible loss for a moment, and the next moment was one of fear.

  What if Bert had straightened up and turned away from the dresser drawer with his knife in his hand? Yet it wasn’t that question that frightened her. It was another. Why had she tried to start Bert on his way to get a doctor? She wasn’t sure, and she knew she would never be sure, whether it was really to get a doctor, or to get him away before the old man came into the room, or to get him to that drawer where he kept his knife before the old man came in. Now, in a trembling voice, she said
, “Let me have the baby.”

  The baby had stopped crying altogether. All signs of hysteria were gone. She sniffled now and then and caught her breath, but she had forgotten her nightmare and forgotten how frightened and quarrelsome her parents’ voices had sounded a short while before. In the half-darkness of the room, her eyes were focused on the buckle of one of the old man’s galluses.

  Emmaline came forward and took the baby, who, though she seemed sorry to leave the old man, was now in such a happy frame of mind that she made not a whimper of objection. On Emmaline’s shoulder, she even made soft little pigeonlike speeches.

  It was during this time, while the baby cooed in her mother’s arms, that Bert and Emmaline and the old man stood staring at one another in silence, all three of them plainly absorbed in thoughts of their own. It was only for a moment, for soon the old man asked to be allowed to hold the baby again. Emmaline felt that she could not refuse him. She told him that the baby was not a boy but a girl, that they had not yet named her, but that Bert usually just called her plain Baby; and then she let the baby go to the old man. Whatever other thoughts she and Bert were having, they both were so happy to have found the baby wasn’t the least bit sick, after all, that they were content to stand there awhile contemplating the good spirits the old man had put her in. The baby changed hands several times, being passed to Bert, then to Emmaline, and then back to the old man. Finally, she began to fret.