by Jack Cady
“No,” she said. “That way is the door to the attic.” There was some quality of determination in her voice. She took his hand and led him down a hall to the front bedroom. The room was very dark until she pulled the shades at the front window. Tall trees stood bare before the house, partially obstructing a streetlight. The snowfall was getting heavier. It was still being pushed by the wind.
“Please stand here,” she said and squeezed his hand. He stood, watching through the window and listening to her movement about the room.
When she spoke her voice was faint. “You used to like to watch me but I was shy. I still am but not so much.”
He stood watching the snow. The onetime familiar feeling of excitement filled him as the snow swirled about the streetlight. When she stepped beside him she was naked to the waist.
“I love you,” she said, “I was so stupid to doubt.” Her breasts were lighted by the faintness of the snow-shrouded streetlight. They were shadowed underneath. The light fell across her face and hair so that he saw that she was beautiful with the prettiness. Her face seemed even more sensitive than before. Then across her face there seemed a small realization of fear.
“We stood this way once,” she murmured.
He nodded, saying nothing, but knowing that with the fear and the pretense he could not make love to her.
“Would you like to sleep now?” he asked.
“Yes.” She smiled. The fear vanished as she saw his understanding. “But, first. Hold me, please.” He put his arm about her waist then moved to touch her.
“Thank you,” he said, and he did not know why.
“Come.” She led him to the bed which was on a darkened side of the room. She lay down and he removed his shoes then lay beside her. He did not touch her. They were quiet. He listened to her breathing. It seemed to him that the darkened room was filled with questions and the questions were mostly about himself.
“Norma?”
“Yes.”
“Are you still pretending?”
“I’m not sure. In parts, I think.”
He paused. “I always blamed myself, you know. Never figured anyone was wrong but me.”
He touched her hand. It was relaxed and did not respond. Her breathing was quiet. For a moment he felt badly. “Maybe I was right,” he said. “Nobody does care. Maybe nobody cares for anybody.”
“Don’t,” she said. “You’re feeling wrong. Not for you they don’t care that way. Maybe they don’t care. Not for me. But each cares that no one cares for the other.”
“That isn’t enough, is it?”
“No. That isn’t enough. But it’s enough to keep yourself from dying. And, thank you.”
“My mind gets so full of the other . . . .” He realized what she had said. He tried to draw back a small feeling of pride.
“And mine,” she told him. “But can you pretend a thing until it’s real?”
“I think it’s what we haven’t learned.” He touched her hand again. This time she held his. “In the morning when we get up I’ll say hello to you. I’ll say, ‘I love you, Norma’ and you’ll say . . . ”
“I’ll say, ‘I love you, Johnnie.’”
“And I’ll go to work.”
“If the streets aren’t impossible I’ll drive you. Then I’ll go back to work. And when work is over . . . .” She stopped. He wanted badly to tell her that at least he was really wondering about tomorrow.
“You don’t know,” he told her instead.
“That’s the truth. Yes. That’s the truth. I don’t. Maybe it’s how hard you pretend, Johnnie.” She turned to him and whispered her shyness. “Before we sleep, will you pretend something if it doesn’t hurt? Will you kiss me and say good night and call me Catherine? Not Cathy, but Catherine. Then I’ll pretend for you and call you . . . .”
He held her and kissed her. He was surprised at her response in the short kiss. Her body against his seemed in some way familiar. He did not know if it was the familiarity of the form of Norma who was not there or the familiarity of the stranger who was. There was a rush of pressure in his mind. He had lived with it for so long. Now he fought it back.
“Thank you, Catherine,” he told her. “And, something that just occurred. Maybe you have to love yourself a little first, Catherine.”
She touched his hair. His hand felt necessary to him against her back. He wondered what his hand meant to her.
“Pretend, Catherine,” he whispered gently. “Good night, Catherine,” he said.
Fog
The moving finger having writ moves on
Nor all your piety and wit
Will call it back to cancel half a line
I
These mists only happen in the river-south where fogs hang thick as soiled fleece; and where, in that nigh-solid cloak, the dead are not exactly dead; the alive not quite alive. All an outsider can say is that movement trudges, dashes, or slides like luminescent streamers through the fog.
Folks who live here understand movement, or some parts. It happens from listening to old people tell tales:
“Yass,” they say about movement now going on in the fog, “that there tall fellow is the preacher, still a-huntin’, still callin’ for his datter, still searchin’ for a man to send to hell. Now, that preacher is blacker ‘n Old Nick’s backside.”
Or, they say, “. . . Perfesser is back, the sonovabitch. Old perfesser is payin’ his tab for sin . . . old Perfesser is gonna meet the preacher one-a these days . . . ’cause Preacher ain’t gonna be much longer fooled about the Hand . . .”and they let it go at that. They sit on porches, or around coal fires in worn parlors, or in the galleys of riverboats . . . tugs, workboats, even motor barges.
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I came to the fogs these twenty-seven years past, in days of driving truck along the Cumberland River. I flogged a 600-series Ford with an eighteen-foot van, always running like tiptoe on slickly asphalt because night roads along southern rivers are hardly ever dry. Back then, they called me Slim, or sometimes only “hey, you.”
Today they call me Joe, or sometimes Mr. Joe, and I have become “old folks.” My bald spot is surrounded by a silver circle of hair, but my eyes are clear behind thick glasses. My head bobs between rounded shoulders as I stock shelves in my small store. (I live in rooms in the back.) The store—groceries and gas and a little hardware—doesn’t make much of a living, but it’s just across the road from the river.
The river is the mother of fogs, and it is motherly to we who live along its banks. It isn’t big and show-off like the Ohio or Mississippi. It carries no floating palaces; restored steamboats, sternwheelers and sidewheelers, nor even many motor yachts. It’s a utilitarian river of workmen, work boats, tall tales, yarns, and a few stories that are way too true.
To the left of my store sits the tidy cottage where Annie lives, and beside that a shack where Pete goes to brood, or sleep, or read musty old books . . . he spends most of the time, day and night, fishing; or sitting around the store, jawing. He tells godawful tales about who, or what, walks, or storms, through the fog. We usually believe him. When the low roar of mobs pulse in the fog, we know we believe him.
To the right of my store sits concrete block apartments, rundown and housing tired wives and tired husbands; people wrenching some kind of living from the river. And, of course, there are children.
“’Tis the children, over and over. We need take best care with the children.” Annie has sometimes been beset thinking of children. She is a great favorite of kids from the apartments. She tells them stories, or plays games.
Annie used to command a sixty-four-foot oak-hulled tug, Louise (known around here as Stinky Lou because it mostly towed and carried raft-like barges of oil drums). Annie is lean as a willow leaf, tough as hawser, but now walks a little bent over with age. She has one blue eye, one gray, and she’s a little wrinkly, sometimes wise. She still wears work shirts and dungarees. In chilly afternoons she sits beside the stove in the store.
Stinky Lou lies ag
round, butted against a rotting finger pier. She looks dead, but life lingers. On nights when fogs roll thin instead of thick, small light glows in her cabin.
Sometimes, when fog is thick, I imagine the river rises and Stinky Lou goes a-traveling; looking for a tow.
Annie, who should care, claims she doesn’t. “What’s done,” says she, “is done. I put that old girl to bed with ‘airy a sob.” She’s probably lying, mostly to herself.
Pete’s story is different, and more like mine. I got sick of the road and settled. Pete got sick of lay-doctoring up-and-down river; traveling to desperate folk choking, or bleeding, or staring in disbelief at broken legs or arms. Pete is a man of nostrums: old Indian recipes, since he’s Indian himself. He can deliver a colt or calf, purge a pneumonia, or sew up wounds . . . not many lay doctors left anymore. Not since medicare happened. These days, if sick folk want help, they generally come to Pete, not Pete to them.
And so we live, living with just enough problems to keep us occupied and somewhat happy. Or rather, that’s the way it was for years, but is no more. Since the preacher returned, and the professor started his old foolishness, our lives have darkened. The story started many years ago:
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When all of us were younger, a preacher named Rev. Rufus Middling drifted this way from hill country. He wore a dandy suit and polished shoes, and his minstrel voice could wrap around your soul and make it sing.
Even white folk started church, even white riverfolk; even rivermen, although that voice mostly drew the ladies. Reverend Rufus caused dismay to a stump Baptist preacher, Millard Dee Grubbs. Millard Dee figured coins were dropping in the wrong collection plate.
Looking backward, I thought Rufus Middling honest, but short of judgment. In a day when being black could get a man killed in these parts, Rufus forgot where he was. Or, maybe he’d been too long missionarying in coal camps, where black men were scarce as walnuts on a plum tree. Men in coal camps didn’t kill over color back then, but over slights, or when drunk, or when sick with work weeks of twelve-hour days, underground and between rocks.
The long and short of it: one day Rufus showed up with a baby, and that baby was cream-color. In that musical voice he claimed it an orphan, left at his door. Hellfire lighted slowly from Millard Dee’s pulpit, and from a man called “the professor.” A whispering campaign started.
Whispers said Rev. Rufus Middling had planted his seed where it did not belong. The baby, a girl, Sally, could not possibly have a black or Indian mama. The kid’s mama had to have been white.
Whispers grew to shouts because Millard Dee kept nagging the professor. The professor began talking rope. A manifestation started drifting in the fog. For want of a better name we called it Hand, and some people claimed it was real. Talk of a rope would have died if not for the manifestation (some claimed it nothing but swirling fog writing messages to itself. Others whispered “Ku Klux”).
Professor was a scraggly-haired piece of white trash who taught one-room school in coal camps, put there by the coal company because no one else would go. He left the camps when beat to an inch of his life, because he whipped a child and broke its arm. The professor got off easy, because he did not die. The kid’s daddy took an axe handle and broke both of Professor’s arms. Professor came down to the river, mad and hurting.
When Millard Dee Grubbs started running his mouth, Professor found a place to put his hate. He was seen in the mist, following the manifestation as it seemed talking to itself; drifting along the riverbank, or crossing the road. Whatever the thing was, it seemed to us ugly as the wants of Satan, awful as the hard thoughts of God.
It drifted like black mist that had been wrapped in a white mist—a robe—or burial shroud—a ghostly gown to carry foul visions. Riverfolk shivered and wondered and talked together. Riverfolk may be clannish, but they move up and down the river. Because they get around, and see other sights, they do not incline to get picky over who beds who.
Any hell that breaks loose will come from country folk who claim to know everything, while not going anywhere. And, of course, hell comes from preachers like Millard Dee who could do without God, but not without the Devil.
Folks met the apparition only in the fog, and met it at random. It drifted here, there, everywhere; hovering at the end of piers, like a half-formed thought throwing dark charms at the waters. It emerged from fogs to stand along the roadside where headlights appeared as mist-smoking discs, and where drivers crept at low speed fearing to move ahead, fearing to pull over and stop. It floated, a mystery in mist.
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The sum of it was that talk prompted fear, and fear prompted more talk. Then the talk turned to yells. Millard Dee preached that the hand of Satan had pushed Rev. Middling among us. The professor cursed, and nursed his arms which were healing crooked. He drank red whiskey when he could get it.
On an extra-drunken Saturday night he finally hollered up a mob and there was a lynching. Torches flamed in the fog as a gang of hard-yelling drunks (and some not so drunk) pulled Middling from his storefront church. A few rivermen tried to stop it and got beat into the ground for their pains. Yells, hollers, laughter echoed in the fog as Middling, strung up, hung gap-mouthed and silent. The mob poured whiskey on the corpse, but could not get it to burn. While the mob danced and went crazy before the corpse, a riverman sneaked in and saved the baby. He took it down river and gave it to a family of Indians.
Professor went crazy at the loss of the child. Millard Dee Grubbs hollered that the seed of Satan was loose in the world. They called for finding the baby. Then Millard Dee’s church burned; fire set by the less-than-loving hand of a riverman. Then another riverman obliged Professor by once more breaking both of Professor’s arms. Lots of hate flowing in every direction.
We got through it, though with looks of shame. We partly got through because Pete managed to disappear for a while into the hills, so as not to treat Professor. Professor was all crooked-armed by the time he died of gangrene. Pete came back after the burying.
I now know the name of the mama. It is Annie, and I know why she clings to the river, and why light sometimes shows aboard Stinky Lou. Annie goes to meet Rufus Middling.
I’m not the only one who knows, because Pete is no fool. Maybe others know, but it’s history. Rufus Middling and Professor are long dead. Riverfolk attended a closed-casket burying of Rufus, and also lots of farm-folk attended; satisfied smirks as preachers hovered on the sidelines. Rufus drew a better crowd than showed up for Professor’s burying, which no riverfolk attended. Riverfolk didn’t give a rap.
Millard Dee is still alive and causing grief. That’s part of our problem, but only part. “The child is out there,” Pete tells me. “Sally wanders her way home, but growed up now.”
Pete told me, and, as it turns out, told Annie. He did it on a fog-ridden night when the river had yielded only two small channel cat, and a couple of throw-back trash-fish. Pete slumped on a stool beside the iron stove where an oak fire glimmered behind an isinglass window. Oak makes a good-smelling fire, and it mixed with store smells of leaf tobacco, smoked hams hanging, and the worked leather of tool belts.
Pete once stood over six foot and muscular. Today he’s more like five-nine and ropy. He still has a hook nose that’s either Creek or Choctaw. He was about to be called away to treat a wound, but neither of us knew that.
“. . . she’s a daisy,” Pete said, talking of Sally. “Tall like her daddy, and sings quiet as the night-river running. Looking for her daddy, I expect. She never knew her ma . . .” and then Pete was interrupted as a scared dockhand came to my door to say that a cable had snapped off a winch. The cable had caught a man across the face: Pete called on to save the eye, which, of course, he did.
I sat in the store when he left, restless, not wanting to work, yet not wanting to close.
Sure as the world, if I closed, someone would call me forth again because of needs for beer or bread.
Pete had been about to tell something more, or suggest s
omething. The more I thought, the more I understood.
Annie could not have kept Sally. A white woman with a black baby might not have been killed back in those days, but the baby would.
At best, it would have been taken to an orphanage, whether orphan or not. It came to me that Rufus Middling had been courageous. He had to know that he walked a thin and dangerous line. What finally killed him was the sin of pride; the pride of the professor, or maybe the presence of the cloak; not the ego of Rufus.
Annie came in just after Pete left, and as nighttime fogs rolled off the river, causing a heavy sheen of moisture on trees, road, and worn cars parked before the apartments. Annie sort of nestled. She hugged up to the wood stove, looking into the isinglass like it was a crystal ball telling futures. Orange fire cut with streaks of blue lighted the front of the stove.
Her eyes, one blue, one gray, seemed even brighter than usual; tears withheld, perhaps.
“Let’s go a-walkin’,” she said. “I have fears.” For the moment she seemed helpless, withdrawn, smaller than her usual small self. It was the first time I had ever seen her that way.
“. . . I don’t feel needy about walking in the fog,” I told her. It was true. When fog hangs this thick, people live close to hearth and home. Too many apparitions appear; folks who have run their calendars and are dead. Living men, who have buried their fathers, sometimes meet those fathers. Anything can walk toward you from the fog.
“You have fears?”
“My girl is out there somewhere. Pete says . . .” Annie generally keeps her feelings to herself. Now she did not. “I fear for her. I long to meet her.”
We have been friends for many years. As friends, we have become old together. One may deny oneself at this age, but one cannot deny a friend. “I’ll get my slicker,” I told her, “and bank the fire.”
Walking in the fog is not like walking under water. It’s more like movement through showers of wet and muffled sounds. Six paces into the fog, lights from my store disappeared. From the river a boat’s whistle sounded a thin, muted line, barely heard; and the river not fifty yards away. Fog ran off the sleeves of our slickers; and though it sounds silly (but is not) I touched my face to make sure it was still there. Nothing much is certain in the fog.
