Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Which Mr. Hannah, who favors Jinx Fairchild, doesn't exactly hear.

  Everywhere he goes, through every hour and day, he's carrying these hands of his... there's a shyness in the glance he gives them, like he's in the presence of something with its own thoughts and its own unknowable consciousness of him.

  Jinx Fairchild's hands. That have administered Death.

  Long skinny fingers he'd thought he knew and owned. Like his penis that isn't always his exactly... charged with blood, flexing like a fist... and that blood too not his. The most important part of that blood not his.

  I have dealt Death. With these hands.

  In school, at work, riding the city bus, drifting off to be by himself, Jinx Fairchild steals these quick shy glances at his hands.

  It's as if he has never really looked at them before. The dark brown skin with its faint oily-red sheen, the pinkish palms, light nails.

  Such moments, he's fascinated to realize that being brown-skinned is an ambiguous thing, as if his skin's color could fade or wear out.

  He's a long way from black.

  Jinx Fairchild's finger span is such that from the tip of the smallest finger to the reach of the thumb he can grip a basketball in his right hand; can't quite manage it with the left. Ten fingers holding a ball as it flies from him, chest level, seemingly without effort, all nerve endings, quick as a cat's eye. Since sixth or seventh grade Jinx has had a strange fantasy of being on the basketball court blind, stone blind, but outplaying the other boys, his fast hands and fast feet doing it all for him. And the bleachers erupting in cheers, the gym a solid vibrating wall of applause.

  This past season, when he'd played so well, much of the cheering in fact for him, it hadn't seemed altogether real. Not heart-pumping real like the fantasy. There Jinx Fairchild is standing tall and loose-muscled and relaxed-seeming behind the foul line in his sweat-soaked green and white Hammond T-shirt and shorts, and his eyes are on the basket and the ball's moving in his hands like a dreamy spinning globe while the pretty white girls in their cheerleaders' jumpers toss themselves crazy Gimme a/ Gimme an I!

  GimP te an !"I£' Gimnie an X£' __and a part of his mind detaches itself from him, taking up residence with certain of the older black boys leaning against the wall, boys who aren't at Hammond any longer, never did graduate, it's clear from that angle of vision that if Jinx Fairchild sinks the foul shot the crowd's going to love him and if he misses they're going to see him for what he is: just another nigger-boy.

  Most of the time, Jinx Fairchild doesn't miss.

  And every basket he sinks, all the points he racks up for the team, the sensation gets stronger... everything more unreal.

  All he's doing is forestalling the time when the cheering stops and they see him harsh and clear as he sees himself.

  Yes, it's true: Jinx Fairchild's brain didn't know what his hands intended.

  Picking up a piece of concreteor was it a rock, twice the size of his fist bringing it down against the other's head... not once, to stun him, but again, again, again... to kill.

  Sure, Jinx Fairchild knows the brittle softness of the human skull, like a sheet of ice that feels hard but, once it shatters, shatters.

  Yet somehow he'd been a party to smashing it. Administering Death in one! two! three! four! five! frenzied hammer blows.

  After that, he doesn't remember.

  Remembers the girl. The white girl. That floating white-petal face.

  Remembers the weight, the heft, of the body... remembers the water slapping against the shore.

  Remembers, much later, burning his bloodstained sweatshirt in the dump off Peach Tree Street, trying to wash the stains out of his jeans and off his hands.

  These things he remembers like flashes of dream that don't connect, but he doesn't remember the person who links them, can't call back any continuous Jinx Fairchild except to know it's him and was him all along. Run on home, he'd told the girl, get on out of here, and she'd hesitated stunned and blank-faced as if Jinx Fairchild had struck her too; she was about to speak and he advanced upon her grinning wild like a Halloween pumpkin the little kids have carved out but carved out crooked: Go on, run! Get thefuck away! You got no business here, bitch."

  If that was Jinx Fairchild speaking, Minnie Fairchild's younger boy, her heart, her hope, her light-of-my-life, it was no Jinx Fairchild anyone had ever heard before.

  In New York State it's the electric chair. Jinx has learned that electricity flows in circuits: if the circuit isn't looped electricity can t flow. When they electrocute you the circuit is looped by the human body. It's Death that flows through you.

  They say, in the electric chair, all that voltage crashing through you, you're dancing around like you're being whipped. Raw flesh is being cooked so there's that smell, and a steamy smoke rising out of your head. Jinx knows from the movies there's a hood over the condemned man's head but in his wide-eyed dreaming, these nights, he sees Jinx Fairchild in the chair with the clamps and straps and electrodes, bare head exposed.

  As Sugar Baby observed, a few months ago, when headlines were of the "rapist murderer" Tyrone Tilley who was electrocuted at Sing Sing this weak-minded Negro from only sixty miles away in Buffalo the defense attorneys claimed couldn't remember what he'd done back beyond a day or so, let alone what he hadn't done "Sure do like to fry niggers in this U.S. of A.! Hot diggety!"

  "You sick? Verlyn?"

  Minnie Fairchild is looking at her son, her sixteen-year-old, slouch-shouldered in the kitchen doorway as if he'd just wandered in from some other world. His mouth is working like he's chewing the inside of his lips, his hands are half hidden at his thighs but peeking out... and it almost seems he's peeking down through his eyelashes at them.

  Quick as the flash of Minnie Fairchild's Singer sewing machine needle comes the unwanted thought that her beloved Verlyn is going to take after his father after all, not after her: her brains, her common sense, her decency, her dignity, her ambition. But quick too as a flash the thought is gone. "Been acting so sad-hearted these past few days, Verlyn, it just don't seem like you," Minnie says, half tender and half accusing. She's easing in the direction of what her sons call Momma-talk: don't instead of doesn't, old honey inflections the woman can summon back at will like Eartha Kitt purring baby talk to seduce her man.

  Minnie Fairchild's four children know that the Momma-talk is just what comes first; if it fails to get results, and fairly immediate results, Minnie-talk will resume.

  So Jinx rouses himself, makes an effort to straighten his backbone, smiles at his mother, and tries to speak and can't think of a word.

  .

  . just stands there staring.

  Minnie is cleaning fish at the sink. Large-mouthed bass Mr. Fairchild caught that day, fishing on the Cassadaga. Chop! go the heads.

  Chop." the tails. With a rubber-gloved hand Minnie reaches in expertly to drag out the guts. The kitchen is rife with fish smells; it's the river lapping right up into the house. Jinx is maybe thinking of this or maybe he's thinking of nothing at all, stymied by his mother's energy, which almost crackles off her though she's come home late from the white doctor's far away uptown where she works and hasn't changed out of her nylon uniform and shiny-pale stockings...

  but she's taken off her white shoes with the firm Cuban-style heels and put on her old comfortable around-the-house corduroy bedroom slippers with the toes cut out. Still girdled up tight, though, tidy and seamless as a sausage. Minnie Fairchild is forty-four years old, an exact two decades younger than her husband Woodrow, short, plump, good-looking, with a rich warm brown skin of the hue and luster of horse chestnuts and fastidiously straightened hair that resembles a black-lacquered cap. She has a smallish bulldog face, a full nose, white teeth without a single flash of gold, and she wears bright maroon lipstick day and night.

  At her sink Minnie always runs the water loud and hard, so she has to raise her voice to be heard over it, as she does now. "So slowacting, I just hope you aren't comin' down with some
nasty old spring flu," she complains. It's the honey inflection. Jinx feels his heart being fingered.

  Jinx means to say, No, Momma, I'm not sick," but he hears himself say, quiet and frightened, "No, Momma, it's not the flu."

  Chopping fish heads and tails, brisk, no-nonsense, squinching up her face as if she hates the smell but showing by her posture and the pistonlike motions of her chopping arm, that, yes, there's a pleasure in this, chop! chop! chop! against the old weathered bloodstained breadboard, Minnie doesn't quite hear. She says two things so rapid-fire Jinx might almost not know which comes first: "Well, it better not be," and, "Make yourself useful, boy, get some newspaper and wrap up this offal and haul it out back; if there's one thing I can't stand more'n the stink of fish and scales all over everything it's the fish-eye starin' up at me like I'm the one to blame."

  Minnie's high delighted laughter crackles like twigs burning.

  So Jinx Fairchild, prodded into action, does exactly as he's told.

  Grateful for something to do with his big skinny bonyknuckled murderer's hands.

  At such times Minnie Fairchild bustles around her kitchen making slamming, thudding, scraping noises... tsking at the time, which is always later than she'd like. You'd think, hearing her, the woman resents preparing meals, preparing these good nutritious vitamin-rich meals-her idle old husband Woodrow at the bottom of the garden playing checkers with himself won't come for supper till somebody yells for him and then he's ponderous-slow, deaf in one ear and can't hear in the other, as Minnie complains with her high harsh laugh but in fact Minnie loves this hour of the day.

  She loves working in this kitchen (four-burner gas stove and oven, full-sized Kelvinator refrigerator, decent sink, faucets) because she recalls with painful vividness the first kitchens of her married life, let alone the kitchens in which her mother prepared meals for her entire life; she loves her house, which is one of the three or four nicest houses at this end of East Avenue-a wood-frame bungalow, painted brown, with five rooms, an attic beneath the roof's peak, a front porch, a half-acre lot so that, in summer, she can have a garden though in truth Woodrow is the one who plants and tends the garden; he's got the time for it, and the slow patience and faith.

  Minnie Fairchild's pleasure in her property is a fierce matter her children have learned to respect, if not share, not even Verlyn, who's the most sensitive, not even Bea, who's old enough (Bea is twenty-five) to remember how things were back in Pittsburgh and to recall the fresh tales of how things were in South Carolina where Woodrow Fairchild was born.

  You have to know where you've come from to know how far you've come, Minnie says.

  And Minnie says, You don't get a house like this by sitting on your rear.

  And Minnie says, You don't keep a house like this by sitting on your rear.

  And Minnie says, Coloreds crybabyin' about they skin don't get no sympathy from me... mock-drawling to make sure the import of her message is clear.

  For the past eleven years Minnie Fairchild has had steady, good-paying employment with Dr. M. R. O'Shaughnessy, a general practitioner of some reputation in Hammond, who has his office in his home in the shabby-genteel neighborhood of Franklin Square.

  Two city buses are required to get Minnie to work and home again.

  At first Minnie did ordinary housework and cooked occasional meals; then, following the death of Dr. O'Shaughnessy's wife, there came a period of what the doctor called "retrenchment," and Minnie was assigned more and more household responsibilities and even, in time, replaced Dr. O'Shaughnessy's office nurse... though Minnie is untrained as a nurse, or even as a nurse's aide. (" Nothing to it, Minnie boasts to her friends. The main thing is the uniform: you look the part, folks think that's what you are. For years Minnie has been bringing home all sorts of things for her family given to her by doctor O'Shaughnessy or appropriated from his office: samples from pharmaceutical companies of mouthwash, deodorants, muscle relaxants pills to aid digestion, pills to combat constipation, pills to combat diarrhea, headache pills, sleeping pills, stay awake pills.

  tins of Band Aids, sanitary napkins, cotton batting. bottles of eyewash and dandruff shampoo. bars of complexion soap made with an oatmeal base. The drawers of the house are chock full of such things, and the medicine cabinet in the bathroom is a true cornucopia. Momma, what's these? Bea would cry, snatching up the latest item. If it wasn't the case that the Fairchild children were the healthiest in the neighborhood, they were at least the best equipped for sickness.

  In addition to helping doctor O'Shaughnessy with his patients, most of whom are older women, and overseeing the household, Minnie Fairchild also does bookkeeping for the doctor, whose financial re cords are in a muddle; she pays most of the household bills and arranges for re pairs to the house. doctor O'Shaughnessy lives in a beautiful old 1890s brick house, over large for a widower whose children are all scattered and indifferent, and this house is in constant need of re pairs and renovations What would I do without you, Minnie? doctor O'Shaughnessy often asks with a sigh, and Minnie laughs modestly and says, Reckon you'd get along, doctor! though she doesn't believe this for a minute.

  O'Shaughnessy is a good hearted but vague man in his mid sixties, white haired, dignified, patrician in his manner and appearance; and, weekdays at least, never less than stone cold sober until evening.

  Minnie shares his secret: he drinks steadily from six o'clock until midnight each weekday night, and on Saturdays and Sundays the drinking hour shifts to noon; and, sometimes, on Sundays, he will inject himself with a mild shot of morphine in order to endure the sabbath. But, as Minnie says, she doesn't judge white folks: leastways not this class of white folks.

  Increasingly, these past years, doctor O'Shaughnessy has spoken of are membering Minnie in his will.

  Not that I believe it for one minute, Minnie says.

  Nothing has given Minnie quite so much pleasure in her adult life as the lung tales of doctor M. R. O'Shaughnessy to her women friends, her tone sometimes comical and derisive, sometimes defensive, more often reverential How's the doctor, Minnie? a woman friend will ask, grinning in anticipation, and Minnie will throw up her hands and say laughingly, No worse! and the friend will ask, That man still got patients, the way he behave? and Minnie will say, Got lots. These rich old white ladies, they'd never go to anyone else; they figure doctor O'Shaughnessy's seen everything they got and seen it bloat and sag and collapse and go gray, or bald, year after year. Also he takes care not to hurt them any with his instruments I got to warm themand won't ever tell them anything they'd be fearful of hearing. What better kind of M. D.

  would you want? Lord, this sad old creature that came in today, all diamonds and furs on the outside, and her swanky chocolate cream chauffeur had to help her up the steps. And Minnie makes her listener explode into peals of laughter with a graphic description of a patient whom Minnie in her nurse's function had to undress, and then dress, a nightmare of fallen flabby flesh like collapsed bread dough, hundreds of hooks and eyes to latch up in the woman's whalebone corset and brassiere. If I ever get that bad off, I pray my children will put me out of my misery! Minnie says, wiping tears of laughter from her cheeks.

  Minnie Fairchild isn't religious, or even superstitious. Not a bit.

  Not since leaving her mother's house. She has a weakness for gospel singing on the radio, Mahalia Jackson and the Caravans her favorites, but all the re st of it, Jesus Christ and that crew, it's white folks' foolishness or outright trickery. The only earth the meek ever inherited was earth nobody else gave a damn for. says Minnie.

  As a small boy, Jinx Fairchild was in the presence of his mother's legendary employer several times; once, the portly smiling white man pressed a silver dollar into the palm of Jinx's hand, and another time he stooped to confide in him, Your mother's the salt of the earth!

  Even then, Jinx took offense at the man's very praise of his mother.

  Earth, he thought, earth's dirt.

  Jinx knows there has been, for years, malicious
speculation in the neighborhood regarding the relationship between Minnie and her white employer, even scurrilous talk of Ceci being O'Shaugh nessy's child and not Woodrow Fairchild Senior's the girl has a smooth, light, buttery colored skin but beyond that he doesn't know and doesn't want to know.

  The very thought of it fills him with a choking, voiceless rage. Like Bea mooning over some lemony skinned bastard who treated her like shit.

  Or Dorothy Dandridge in the movies all the silly Negro girls would die to look like. If there's white blood in him, he thinks, it's a long way back and many times diluted.

  When Jinx comes back into the kitchen Minnie is frying fish at the stove in her heavy iron skillet and singing huskily under her breath.