by Packer, Vin
“That’s what Thad says. Practically everybody’s seen Sellers; shaken his hand and all.”
“That’s right. Thad’s right.”
“Yeah, Thad is … I guess always.”
“You know how I feel about Thad,” Storey says. He looks at Vivian Hooper furtively as she collects the empty pop bottles; looks at the black cotton dress, knowing the voluptuous world of flesh the cotton conceals. It’s right she’s married to Thad, he thinks; good that she is. Thinks, I ought to run down to Church Street and see if Kate’s finished. He wonders why Thad let himself take on so much weight. He’s nearly fat now, and Viv stays the same, never seems to change.
“Yes sir, I think the world and all of Thad,” Storey says, pulling himself to his feet.
“I know you do,” she tells him, thinking Storey has no right to drive out here and look me over like he does, like he doesn’t know I know he does; and then go on back to Kate. Like back from hell and the devil himself. Is that how he thinks of it?
Thad always says: “Some men, I suppose, think just because you’re built so well, you’re one of these physical kinds of women. It’s a narrow-minded conception. I know if Thel had lived she would of had to deal with that problem herself. She was well developed even at fifteen, you know, Vivie … I remember she was. Would have been beautiful … Everyone would have thought she was one of those physical kinds … She was good, though, I can tell you … Not like that at all.”
“You tell Thad I was by, hear, Vivs?”
“I’ll tell him, Storey. See you tonight.” “Colonel coming?”
“Umm-humm. Him and Ada, I expect.” “Ada too?”
“Well, that’s what Colonel said.”
“You give Thad hell for me, letting a pretty girl like you tend the station, hear?” Storey laughs, hanging on to his hips — the same way Thad does, she thinks. How he mimics Thad — ”I’ll be looking forward to tonight, Vivs.”
“Sure enough, Storey.”
“Well, bye!”
“Bye, bye!”
“See you tonight. You tell Thad I was by looking for him.” “All right, Storey. So long.”
Then she turns the volume back up on the radio; oblivious to the hillbilly music that blares out of it; and sitting, rocking, she again remembers: “Oh, Christ, didn’t I see you squirming like some bitch all hot, didn’t I?”
And: “… just because you’re built so well, you’re one of these physical kinds of women. It’s a narrow-minded — ”
And: “We married ourselves to good people, Vivs.”
Then worries: Hope Hus thinks of the okra for the stew; Hus always forgets the okra.
7
“This is Washington, D.C.,” the voice of the hostess says. “We will depart immediately upon taking aboard the new passengers. Those remaining on the flight, please keep their seats.”
The woman beside Millard Post shoves her knitting into her bag, and sighs. “That was a nice smooth landing.” “You’re getting off here, huh?”
“That’s right. Well, it’s been fun talking with you.” “Same here, ma’am”
“How far do you go before you change planes?”
“I think to Charlotte.”
“Well — have a nice trip, Millard”
“Same here, ma’am”
“Bye.”
“So long,” says Millard.
He leans forward and looks out the window of the plane at the Washington airport. There is a clock inside and he can just make out the time through the glass window. Two o’clock. At North Trades High the cafeteria would be emptying; the Panthers would be heading with their trays back from the table on the left, which was their special spot. Some of them would cut this afternoon and head off to the poolroom to hear the Series play-off. A lot of them were for the Dodgers because of Willie Mays, but Millard had his dollar on the Yankees, because they could play better ball sitting on their hands. There’d be a lot of excitement at the poolroom. What the hell!
Millard sees the woman who had been sitting beside him go through Gate 7 up the stairs, out of sight. For the first time this afternoon, he realizes a slight pang of loneliness. He reaches forward in the pocket of the seat in front of him for the cellophane-wrapped folder with the words: “Your Souvenir of This Trip” printed upon it in black letters. Rifling through it he takes out the stickers, looks at them, imagines how they’ll look stuck to his cardboard suitcase, and places them carefully on the inside of his suit pocket. Then he searches through his trousers for a pencil to write on the postcards.
Passengers start pouring down the aisle, and Millard cannot concentrate on the message to his friend, Toe-in Funk, chief of the Panthers. So far he has written only Toe-In’s address and the words: “Hey, Square, how’s it hanging?” …
He leans back and looks up at the people going by him. Soon everyone seems to be seated but one gross man carrying a briefcase and a gray fedora. Millard hears the door of the plane slam shut. The man stands looking around him, then at the empty seat beside Millard. He frowns, throws his fedora up in the rack; then slumps his heavy body down into the seat, sighing, and fastening his belt, not looking at Millard.
The smoking sign blinks on; as the plane’s engines roar.
“Hello, sir,” the hostess says to the fat man. “Have you eaten?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Millard notices how tense his voice sounds, sees his fingers drum the leather arm rest.
“I’ll serve you as soon as we’re aloft, sir,” the hostess says.
The man does not answer, grunts, and still frowns.
As the plane taxies out on the field, Millard thinks of the way he had felt at Newark that morning and compares his own nervousness then with the man’s actions now. He pities the guy; weeping Jesus, poor sucker.
Millard says, “Is this your first flight?”
The man does not answer; perhaps does not hear Millard above the engine’s noise.
Louder, leaning closer to the man, Millard says, “Once we get up you’ll feel better.”
Then the man glares at Millard, his eyes narrowed.
“No kidding,” Millard tries again. “As soon as we get up you’ll feel better … I know how you feel … I felt the same way myself.”
Millard hears him cuss as he looks away.
Weeping Jesus, the goddam bastard’s got the shit scared outa him!
Millard smiles to himself and feels good; flying in a goddam DC-6 is Endsville. Who’s scared, f’Chrissake. Not Millard Post.
But the man beside him looks like he’ll bust a gut over something.
8
REVEREND Joh Greene says, “Dixer, you’re a fine boy, Dix. You got a good head on those shoulders.”
In the background the ball game goes on; Yankees and Dodgers tied. Dix Pirkle crosses his legs, lifts the glass of beer and sips it, wondering what the Reverend’s building up to; thinking, no it’s impossible. Not that, not yet. Eventually, though, he supposes. Like she said: “We won’t be able to keep it a secret, Dix. You know that.”
Christ, the sweetness of it, the great big sweetness of it; and the thought that when they do find out — those in Paradise — what will they make then of the gentleness and sweetness between him and her now?
Dix sinks his lanky body further into the worn leather armchair in the vestry. He thinks, He can’t know about it — not so soon.
Dix is husky; with thick black hair and blue eyes; a slender nineteen-year-old who looks too young to have a son over one — when he had started to mention Dickie to her last night, she’d said, “No, Dix, that part of your life I can’t share, like so many other parts. No, Dix.” — who acts too mature for his age. “Bright kid,” Colonel’s folks in Paradise say. “Writes editorials just like he’d gone off to college the way he should have.”
“Yes sir, Dixer, you take after your father.”
Dix nods. “I hope so, sir,” knowing the intonation in his voice makes it definite between the Reverend and him how he feels about hi
s mother. Christ, how did Colonel take it! How did anyone in the house; how did he, Dix?
With horror he remembers coming home from the paper a month or so back to see his mother, hysterical, sitting on the floor clutching Dickie in her lap. The infant had fallen from the bed while her back was turned, and Ada, sobbing, hunched over the baby clumsily trying to soothe away its fright. Dix, examining the child, carefully, feeling the delicate infant’s bones, remembers feeling at that moment a terrible resentment of the past which had killed Dickie’s mother with cancer and left Dix’s own mother alive.
“I wanted only to help, Dix!” Ada Pirkle had sobbed hysterically. “Just help! Dix, you’ve got to let me help!”
• • •
Joh Greene leans forward, stretching his hands out across the desk blotters; his fingers rubbing page edges of Time. “Dix, we get mixed up sometimes. All mixed up.”
“I know.”
“It’s our apples, Dix. Our apples. The devil knows how to make them grow bigger than we realize before it’s too late.” “Yes, sir.”
“Dix, I want to ask you something. Dix, do you know how big your own apple is?”
“Reverend, sir — I don’t exactly know what you’re trying to say to me.”
“How long’s Suzie been dead, Dix?” Reverend Joh Greene asks.
“Be two years, soon.”
“She was a good wife too, I don’t have to tell you that. When Colonel first came to ask my advice about you marrying so young, I remember I told him, ‘Dix might wait, but maybe his apple won’t … I’m in favor of getting that apple under control, Colonel.’ You remember, Dix, you were a wild kid.”
“Yeah. Yes, sir.”
“And then the Lord took Suzie home, may her soul rest.”
“Reverend,” Dix Pirkle says, a strain of impatience in his tone. “What are you trying to say? That I should remarry?”
Reverend Joh Greene gets to his feet. He snaps the radio off, walks around his desk to Dix Pirkle’s chair, and stands with one hand sunk into his black trousers, one hand on Dix Pirkle’s shoulder.
“Dix,” he says softly, “I know you miss Suzie. I’m a man of God, but I’m a man too. I know a man needs a woman, a good woman, Dix. Maybe I am saying you should remarry.” He pauses, his face thoughtful. And Dix sits feeling relief flood through him, glad it wasn’t what he feared, glad for only a moment before Joh Greene speaks again. “But I’m here to tell you, Dix Pirkle, once you start up with a colored girl, no white girl’s ever going to satisfy you again.”
A sudden heavy silence hangs over the room as the blood rushes upward in Dix Pirkle’s, filling his face with red warmth; his knuckles tighten to white as he makes his hands fists. He sits there, aware now that the ball game has been turned off, and aware of the loud-sounding tick of the vestry clock and the reverend’s hand on his shoulder.
He says finally: “How — how did you know, sir?”
“That’s something I can’t say, Dix.”
“Does — Dad know?”
“No, Dixer, he does not. I figured you and me could talk about this without anyone knowing.” “Someone must.”
“No one that cares to tell your dad, Dix, or anyone else. God’s work is done in mysterious ways. You’d be amazed, I think, to know who came on God’s mission to me to give me this information.”
“Not the doctor!” Dix exclaims. Lord, he shouldn’t have let her walk home; why had he?
She’d insisted: “Sometimes I think I know Paradise better than you do, Dix, though I’ve lived here less time. You can’t drive me home I want to walk anyway, Dix. I want to walk in this night.”
“No. No. Son, what does it matter who knows? What matters is to end it! To end it, son. To end it before it’s too late.” Joh Greene steps away from Dix; leans back against his desk.
“Reverend, listen,” Dix protests; remembering the shame — not anger or resentment or even reproachfulness — he had seen in her eyes the day she had taken him through the colored school; the shame there, as though she were apologizing for something white folks did; or for what she was — for being colored. And the way she had said last night: “I wish I could help being black; wish we all could; so we wouldn’t have to live with an I-can’t-help-it philosophy. It’s no good, Dix …” And he remembers her tears dropping on his shirt last night: “No, Dix, I’m not crying. Why should I? What’s there to cry over?” Dix Pirkle says, “Reverend Greene, listen, she’s a fine girl. There’s nothing about the devil in her, Reverend.”
“Did I say she wasn’t a fine girl, Dix?”
“No, sir. I just want you to know that I respect Barbara.”
“Is your way of respecting her shown by lying on the ground of Dark Woods with her, Dix?”
Christ, how did he know all that!
“Dix,” Reverend Greene says, “in order to respect anyone you have to first respect yourself. Can you respect yourself after lying on the ground with a nigger girl?”
Dix jumps to his feet, his young eyes ablaze. “Christ, what the hell kind of minister are you! Call a human being a nigger! Christ, what the hell kind of Christianity is that!”
“I was making a point, Dix, that’s all. I was trying in my own way to make a point. A man that turns a colored girl, a decent, intelligent, fine colored girl into the object of his lust, turns that lovely girl, whose color is not his, into a nigger, in the eyes of all the world. Do you see what I mean, Dix?”
Dix whirls around and faces Joh Greene. “I don’t want Barbara just for that! Is that what you think!”
“Just for that?”
“I wouldn’t even care if that wasn’t — I wouldn’t care if — ” Dix stumbles over his words, sighs, shakes his head. “You don’t understand, Reverend. I think of Barbara James the same way I’d think of — well, Suzie …”
“God help you for making that comparison, Dix. God forgive you for it.”
“Reverend, listen to me. Back six months ago, when I got on the committee for the new Negro school — I met Barbara then. Reverend, she’s — good and decent and — ”
“Did I ever say she wasn’t, Dix?”
“Well, what are you saying? Are you saying that she’s a devil? That she’s dirt, or something less than that! Are you trying to tell me my mother’s white; or that the white girls in this town, the stupid, dull — ”
Joh Greene puts his palm up. “Stop right there, Dix.”
“Well, what are you trying to tell me that I don’t know! That I was with her last night! That you don’t approve! That nobody in Paradise would approve! That she’s Negro and I’m white!”
“Simply this,” Joh Greene says. “You’re taking a Nigraw woman and making her into a nigger, Dix. And you’re making yourself into a sick, nigger-chasing white man. I know what happens to white men that hanker after dark skin. I know from experience as a minister in Christ, from seeing it happen, from remembering the way it happened time and time again to such white men; sick men! Their strength was all sapped out of them, Dix. White men and dark women aren’t made to know one another in a carnal way, or they’d be the same color. They aren’t made to, and the white man isn’t up to the dark woman: even though he may think he is, he isn’t. And he gets sick from it, from lusting for it, and he gets the disease of it and he lusts for it and loses his strength to it; and he can’t look on his own color any more, because after a dark woman no white woman can satisfy a man. No good white woman — good in her heart and mind as in her body — would be expected to satisfy a man in the way of the dark race; and so it’s a poison, Dix. I’m here to say that I see the poison being injected into your veins, and I know the antidote, and I — as well as any man — want to help my brother, want to say I know the antidote for the poison you’ve taken into your body, and the antidote’s name is never again see her; and its name is to kill the apple before it kills you; and its name is hallowed be the memory of Suzie; and its name is Dickie my son, save me from spoiling our name; and its name is Barbara James, Nigraw woman, fine and
good — not nigger! and its name is pray for us sinners. And I call it Christ Jesus!”
Dix Pirkle stands stunned, angry, silent. For a slow moment the Reverend Joh Greene’s eyes needle him. He turns his head from the minister, looks down at the worn oriental carpet; numbed — not with fear or regret or humiliation, but with furious resentment. No good white woman would be expected to satisfy a man in the way of the dark race. With the aura of impotence that overcomes him so he can find no words to answer Joh Greene, and fumbling futilely for them, he knows the stubborn imperviousness of the minister’s mind.
Dix Pirkle stands silent.
Slowly Joh Greene walks back behind his desk, pulling a large white handkerchief from his pocket and mopping his brow carefully. Then, shoving the handkerchief back into his trousers, straightening his shoulders, his face more placid now, the reverend says very softly: “That’s all, Dix. That’s all I wanted to say to you.”
With a quick flip of his wrist, he snaps the radio back on.
Then, grinning suddenly, he says, “We got to see how them Yankees are making out, ah? Hey, Dixer, get to work on that beer!”
9
ON HIS WAY back from the grave, in the small rear-view mirror of the car, Thad Hooper can see the top of his daughter’s head, as she bobs about — the hair neatly parted in the middle and braided at the sides. The pigtails frame her face in an austere plainness that to Thad’s mind greatly enhances her looks. Like Vivie, she is raven-haired; but most of her features are similar to those which run in his family, almost identical to his twin sister’s, in fact; but her character and temperament are those of Vivie’s. Beneath the Hooper features, it seems, even at the age of five, lay her mother’s faint restlessness, with its need for gentle bridling, her vivaciousness, and that intriguing ability to charm everyone.
Jumping up and down, singing gaily to herself, and hanging her small hands out the window, Emily Hooper is in sharp contrast to little Thad, age nine, seated complacently beside his father in the front seat. Thad glances at his son, and smiles to himself. To his way of thinking he has everything to make him happy. He loves Vivie and his children dearly — Emily, particularly, gives him most joy, increasingly so as she grows older, so reminiscent of Thel at that age — and Paradise is his home and has always been his home; it’s where his friends are — Storey and the others — and his roots.
