Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

“They ought to leave that young’un alone,” she muttered now, brow creased in dark wrath. “Ought to let that young’un get her rest, get over this bidness.” Hosanna referred to Elise as “that young’un,” and said it in a way that let you know she felt like a mother hen. “Some folks do and some folks don’t and some folks do sometimes and some don’t never.”

  Bright wondered what it was that some folks do. Hosanna talked in disconnected bursts of sound, like beginning a piece of music in the middle of the one just before. Slosh-scrub-splash. She dunked each dirty dish in the pan of suds, scrubbed fiercely, held it up for inspection, then doused it in another pan of rinse water, stacked it with a clatter on the drainboard next to the sink. Bright had never seen her break a dish. Hosanna seemed to know exactly how much each of them could take.

  “Can God eat toadstools?” Bright asked.

  Hosanna never missed a beat. Slosh-scrub-splash. “Course He could if He wanted to, but He don’t want to. He don’t have to. God don’t have to eat nothin’.” She snorted. “Folks think God gets up every mornin’ and puts on His hat and shoes and goes to work, just like everybody else. Folks want God to be just like them, only cuter. Folks get down on they knees and pray, ‘Oh, God, send me a mess of turnip greens!’ ” She made a wail out of it, and Bright giggled. Hosanna was getting good and warmed up now. Bright thought Hosanna could have been a great actress. “God don’t send turnip greens, he lets turnip greens grow. And before they grow, you got to hoe. God do the growin’, but you does the hoein’.”

  “You don’t have to hoe toadstools,” Bright said, clasping her arms around her knees. She knew a thing or two about toadstools. She had studied toadstools pretty closely, out in the backyard under the shade of the pecan tree. She figured she already knew about as much about toadstools as anybody could teach her in school, just from direct observation.

  “No, but you don’t eat toadstools, neither,” Hosanna said. She gave the gravy boat a vigorous scrub, dishcloth sloshing about in the water. “Ain’t no reason for toadstools except God wants ’em there. You go out yonder under the pecan tree and look down and say, ‘Hey, Mr. Toadstool, what you be about?’ And there ain’t no answer. God just took a notion once upon a time to make toadstools and let ’em grow. And that’s the be-all and end-all of toadstools. It’s just a mystery. Life’s a mystery. God’s a mystery. He’s powerful mysterious. That’s why you don’t never know how things are gonna turn out. Except”—she flung her head in the direction of the dining room, empty now—“sometimes you can see ’em comin’. God don’t keep folks from making fools of theyselves. Even smart folks. Even folks way up on the peckin’ order.”

  “What’s a peckin’ order?”

  Hosanna gave the gravy boat a dip in the rinse water and set it carefully on the drainboard with the growing pile of dishes. Then she dried her hands on her apron before she picked up another plate. “Peckin order is the way folks is arranged,” she said. “God’s at the top, then the President. After that is a bunch of folks that’s got good sense, including yore daddy most of the time. I say, most of the time.” She rolled her eyes back in her head, as if the rest of the peckin’ order were printed somewhere above her eyebrows on the inside. “Then there’s ordinary folks. And slap-dab at the bottom is Big-Ikeys.”

  “Does God make Big-Ikeys?”

  “Course He does. He make everything. Most Big-Ikeys He makes is white folks, ’cause white folks likes to pose a lot, like they having they picture took all the time, ‘fraid somebody’s gone see ’em without they hair just right and they airs in place. White folks can’t jest be, they got to pose.”

  “Why does God make Big-Ikeys?” Bright asked, making a mental note to see if Fostoria Hardwicke was posing the next time she laid eyes on her.

  Hosanna gave a great sigh. “That’s a mystery. Big-Ikeys is just like toadstools. God just lets ’em grow.” She looked over at Bright, perched on the stool. “You a figurin’ young’un,” she said. “But don’t you go around tryin’ to figure out God. He just be.”

  Bright understood a little of that. The Sunday school version was a little confusing. They told you that God was in heaven, and then they told you He was everywhere, watching everything you did. And then they told you that God was in the First Methodist Church, which was God’s house. But Bright also knew from personal experience that He was in the African Methodist Church, because she had been there and felt Him. On a Wednesday evening a month before, with Dorsey gone on a business trip and Elise abed upstairs with what Hosanna vaguely referred to as “vapors,” Hosanna had taken Bright to what she called “singing” at the small, neat frame church on the edge of the Negro section.

  “Yore daddy built this church,” she told Bright as they walked down the rutted clay street to where a crowd was gathering at the door. “He said to me ten years ago, ‘Hosanna, I’m going to build two churches in this town. And they’re both going to be Methodist churches.’ So yore daddy gave the lumber, and the men that worked in his lumberyard put up this church, and yore daddy came to the first service and when we sang the first hymn, Dorsey Bascombe stood up at the front of the church smiling the biggest smile God ever put on a man, and tears rollin’ down his cheeks like cat’s-eye marbles, they was so big. Pride tears. Mr. Dorsey was proud that day.”

  Inside the church, surrounded by the broad smiles of the congregation, Dorsey Bascombe’s little girl, she stood on the pew beside Hosanna as the singing began, and she felt it grow and grow, the powerful ring of their magnificent voices all joined together as if they were holding hands without touching, and it warmed her like the warmth of the new sun. Midway through the first long resounding hymn, the beautiful golden voice of a young woman broke through the rest and soared up in the rafters of the church while the congregation swayed below. Bright reached over and tugged on Hosanna’s sleeve and whispered loudly in her ear, “Is that God?” And Hosanna gave her a long, penetrating look, her face all soft in a way that Bright had never seen it. “Yes, honey,” she said, “that’s God.”

  She pondered God for a moment now in the kitchen, perched on the stool, while Hosanna splashed noisily in the sink beside her. She pondered God and toadstools and music and the baby business and her mother upstairs and the Study Club and Big-Ikeys and the posing of white folks and the mysterious wisdom of colored folks. And she decided after a while that God had an awful lot of things He could be bothered with if He allowed himself to, and that was probably why He just let lots of things be.

  Then she looked up and saw the black girl at the back door, her face pressed hard against the screen. “Hosanna?” the girl said.

  Hosanna turned, glowering, flinging soapsuds across the floor. “MIZ HOSANNA TO YOU,” she thundered. She gave the girl a good once-over. She was holding a book, a slim volume with a brown binding. “You come from Borneo?”

  The girl gave a flounce of her head. “Naw. I come from Miz Fostoria Hardwicke’s,” she said.

  “Same thing.” Hosanna walked over to the door, drying her hands on her apron. The girl stepped back and Hosanna opened the door and took the book, then closed the door again, leaving the girl on the steps, looking at them through the screen. She opened the book and thumbed through several pages. “My, my,” she said, “they shore is some right interesting things goin’ on in Borneo these days. They is powerful stuff goin’ on in Borneo. Have to be, or high-fashion ladies wouldn’t be messin’ with Borneo, I tell you that. It says right here that folks in Borneo grows precious jewels in they gardens, right alongside the turnip greens and rutabagas.” She looked up at the girl, then flipped a few more pages. “And it says here”—she tapped the page with a finger—“that they sacrifices virgins in a pot of boiling blood.” The girl’s mouth dropped open, and so did Bright’s. Hosanna closed the book with a smack. “You tell Miz Fostoria Hardwicke we is mortified to get all this stuff on Borneo.”

  The girl backed down the steps into the yard, wide-eyed. “Yes’m, I’ll tell her. Miz Hardwicke be glad to hear that. Mi
ghty glad.” And she disappeared.

  Hosanna held the book up in the light from the open door. “Borneo,” she muttered softly. “My ass.”

  6

  Wednesday morning was gray outside, the tree just beyond the open kitchen window rustling with the first stirrings of birds anticipating daybreak. Bright sat, fully dressed, a huge glass of milk untouched on the table before her. The kitchen seemed an alien place now, cold and harsh in the bright light from the overhead bulb, not the warm sanctuary to which she was accustomed. She was still fuzzy from sleep and she held her head very still to keep the starch in the lace collar of her Sunday dress from scratching her neck. Her mother stood at the sink, fumbling noisily with the coffeepot. There was a trail of brown coffee beans across the counter to the sink. Bright watched, fascinated, wondering what would happen when and if Elise finally got the coffeepot organized, then discovered that you had to start a fire in the stove to get anything hot. She could not ever remember her mother being in the kitchen before.

  The door from the dining room swung open, creaking on its springed hinges, and Dorsey stood there, wearing khaki pants and an undershirt and bedroom slippers, eyes bleary. His gaze swept the kitchen and he ran his fingers through his thick gray-speckled hair. Elise turned and looked at him, then went back to her work, trying to fit parts of the coffeepot together.

  “Well, ahem,” Dorsey began, then he reached into the watch pocket of his khaki pants and drew out his watch, snapped open the cover, squinted at it. “It’s not quite five o’clock,” he said, a bit of wonder in his voice.

  Elise dropped part of the metal coffeepot into the sink with a clatter. Her hand went to her mouth. “Damn,” she said. Then she set the rest of the pot on the counter and turned again to Dorsey, the color high in her cheekbones. She wore a loose-fitting beige lace dress with a low waist and long narrow skirt, and she looked, Bright thought, as if she could step away from the sink and out the front door at any moment, gathering her hat and gloves from the table in the front hall as she went. “Where the devil is Hosanna?” Her voice was high and tight, stretched like a piano string.

  Dorsey glanced at his watch again. “Isn’t it a bit early, hon?”

  “Early? What’s early when you haven’t slept a wink all night?”

  Dorsey closed the watch gently and slipped it back into his pocket, then gave Bright a long look. “And what in heaven’s name are you doing up at this hour, young lady?”

  “She’s going with me,” Elise answered for her.

  “I really don’t think—“

  “She’ll be fine! Just fine!” Bright thought her mother looked like a piece of china, that kind of statue you would find on a parlor whatnot shelf, very fragile. She had been pacing the upstairs bedroom for two days now, Bright hunkered outside the closed door listening as Elise recited fact and figure about Borneo, her voice rising and falling in a singsong cadence, the words coming faster and faster until finally she would collapse into a chair and there would be a long exhausted silence. Then the rustling of papers, and the pacing and reciting would begin again. Bright could feel panic oozing out from under the door and it terrified her. She wanted to fling open the door and rush in and wrap her arms around her mother. But she sat quietly, trembling, afraid that Elise might shatter if touched.

  Dorsey crossed the kitchen to the sink now and stood before Elise, placed his hands on her shoulders. She stood rigid for a moment, but she yielded, let him guide her gently to a chair at the table. Then he bent to her, looked straight into her eyes. “Elise, hon, don’t get all wrought up about this. Look, let’s just tell them you’re not feeling well, that you’ll do it another time.”

  “No!” she flashed. “I’ve got to do it TODAY! I can’t wait. I said I’d do it, and I will.” Her hands fluttered to her face, but then she caught herself, lowered her hands to her lap, stared at them until they finally became still. Bright could see the very great effort it took, the force of will. Mama is stronger than I thought. Maybe stronger than Hosanna thinks she is.

  Elise finally looked up again at Dorsey. “I’m fine,” she whispered, “just fine.”

  He searched her face for a moment longer. “All right,” he said, then stood. “Well, let’s have some breakfast, what do you say. How about some scrambled eggs and fried ham with redeye gravy and some grits. I’ll get things started, and then Hosanna will be here in a bit and she can do the biscuits. I’ll catch the devil for being in her kitchen, but I won’t go so far as to try to make biscuits. She’d stuff me in the oven for that.” His voice bounced hollowly off the walls of the kitchen and out through the window by the sink, where the birds were beginning to chatter in earnest now. Bright looked at the window and she could see a hint of gray-blue peeking through the branches of the pecan tree.

  “I think,” she said solemnly, then paused for a long moment. Her parents looked at her curiously. “I think,” she said again, “that I don’t much like milk this early in the morning.” Then she laid her head down on the kitchen table and went back to sleep.

  Shortly before ten, they walked the few blocks to Fostoria Hardwicke’s house. Bright barely remembered being carried up to bed in her father’s strong arms, and being reawakened an hour ago by her mother, redressed, led downstairs, where Hosanna was bustling about in a dark funk, muttering about menfolks dirtying up her kitchen. “Looks like a lumberyard in here,” she said, holding up a black cast-iron skillet that had the yellowed remains of scrambled egg in the bottom, dousing it with a splash into a sinkful of dishwater. Elise left Bright to be fed, but she picked idly at her food, her mind swirling with the anticipation of the Study Club. Finally, they set off in the warming day while Elise chattered in a determined singsong. “Borneo is the third-largest island in the world. Borneo was settled by European explorers in the 1500s. Borneo has about a million people, called Dyaks, who follow a heathen tribal religion. Borneo makes teakwood and diamonds.” She walked fast, the heels of her shoes clicking along the sidewalk, the ostrich plume on her wide-brimmed hat bouncing like a horse’s tail. She gripped Bright with a gloved hand, a little too tightly, and Bright’s feet fairly flew over the pavement as she tried to keep up. “Borneo has four territories, ruled by Great Britain and Holland. The equator runs through Borneo …” Bright wondered when she would get to the part about precious gems growing alongside the turnips and virgins being boiled in blood.

  Fostoria Hardwicke’s house was big and green, trimmed in white, with a wide, banistered porch across the low sweep of its front and lush, bright green ferns drooping like eyelids from baskets that hung above the banisters. As they climbed the steps, Bright could hear the faint mutter of voices through the screen door, deep inside the green cave of the house. “Borneo’s coastline is mostly swampland …”

  Bright was quite out of breath. Elise paused for a moment at the door, dropping Bright’s hand to give a tug on her gloves and smooth the front of her dress. Then she knocked, and Fostoria Hardwicke appeared in the doorway. “Oh, good morning!” she chimed, “so glad to see …” Then she looked down and saw Bright. “Oh,” she said. Then, after a moment, “Well, Xuripha is in her room. I suppose you …”

  Bright sensed that she was her mother’s ally here. She reached up and took Elise’s hand. “I came to hear about Borneo,” she said firmly, giving the large mole on Fostoria Hardwicke’s chin a good, hard look. Did it have two black hairs, or three? Could it have grown another in the space of a week?

  “Well, we don’t—“

  “She’ll be just fine,“ Elise said. Bright looked up at her mother, saw the wide-eyed look of desperation.

  Fostoria Hardwicke must have seen it too. She opened the door. “Of course,” she said gently, taking Elise’s arm, guiding her into the dim interior of the house. “We’re just so glad you came, dear. Really, we are. I hope we haven’t asked too much.” Elise stared at her dumbly.

  There was a great deal of furniture in the parlor and all of it was filled with ladies, a dozen or so, a garden of crino
line and lace, chiffon and brocade, stirred by the soft whoosh of the ceiling fan. Conversation ceased as they appeared in the doorway and Bright felt her mother’s hand tremble. Fostoria Hardwicke led them around the room through a puddle of pleasantries. You remember … of course, my dear … how very nice … All of the women were older than Elise, a couple of them fairly ancient. They were soft ladies, pastel and flower-scented. Mrs. Artesia Gibbons had a little silk handkerchief stuffed into her glove, just the corner peeking out, and after Elise pressed her hand lightly, Mrs. Gibbons withdrew the handkerchief and dabbed at the corner of her mouth. Mrs. June Deloach (how nice, Bright thought, to be named for a lovely month, or perhaps for a june bug) had a trace of dark hair above her upper lip, so small and delicate you would not think to call it a moustache. When she spoke, she sounded wispy and out of breath, as if she had teeny-tiny lungs. In fact, Bright observed, she didn’t have much of a bosom. On the other hand, Miss Eugenia Putnam (Bright noticed how Fostoria Hardwicke put the emphasis on the Miss) had an ample bosom and a big strong voice, even though she was frightfully old and had dark liver spots on her arms. She was slightly hard of hearing. She bent forward in her chair with her left hand cupped behind her ear, and spoke rather loudly. “Eh? Dorsey Bascombe’s wife? Didn’t know Dorsey Bascombe had a wife. Is she from around here?” as if Elise were not even there. Bright took it that Miss Eugenia Putnam was given to saying whatever came to mind, which Bright thought was rather fun.

  The ladies of the Study Club eyed Bright curiously and Bright gave each of them a little smile and curtsy, as Elise had drilled her to do, and then they sat down, Elise in a huge flowered-print chair next to the arched entrance to the room, Bright on an ottoman beside her. Elise looked small and lost in the great expanse of the chair, as if she had fallen backward into a pansy patch and couldn’t get out. Conversation bubbled up around them and Bright watched as her mother sat primly, gloved hands in her lap, feet barely touching the floor, a stricken smile on her face. She’s afraid, Bright thought. Bright could never remember being afraid of anything herself. With Dorsey Bascombe towering above her in his rich brown leather boots and Hosanna filling the kitchen with dead-certain wisdom and God whispering outside her window at night, what was there to be afraid of? Whatever happened, Dorsey would come home and take care of everything. She could almost feel him here now, watching, nodding. The ladies of the Study Club seemed perfectly harmless, as he had said. But there her mother sat, lost and afraid and fragile, nodding mindlessly as Fostoria Hardwicke at her left chattered and the conversation bubbled up around them like a lilac-scented fountain … the most delicious chicken … looked so natural lying there in the coffin, like she might reach up … Nigra asked for a book at the library, can you believe … his sermon, you know … all the way to Philadelphia to buy a motorcar … allow dogs in the house …