by Bill Harris
3
The desk clerk wanted to take the telephone off the hook and watch the rising sun, in its own time, light and then enshadow the red-orange limestone of the courthouse across the road.
The clerk also wanted a drink and why not?
There was a knock at the side screen door. Sharp, but not heavy, knuckle raps.
One-two-three-four.
The clerk did not look up. It was the colored woman. The clerk was expecting her. The clerk knew she could see him through the screen, leaning on his forearms against the registry counter.
The bottle of bonded whiskey and the glass were right there within reach under the counter between the stapler, a box of cloves, the envelope, and the box of tinted picture postcards of the attractions of Ernestsville: the hotel, the square, and the factory. The dark amber was at the halfway point in the bottle. The label facing away from him, its back turned like a coy lover.
He wished the doors were shut and locked.
Have a shift as empty of guests as his glass was of the bonded.
Shut out the flow, north to south, south to north, with its predictable seasonal surges and ebbs of asphalt-blind, road-weary loners; Old Money vacationers; average Joes and Janes; the anxious and grief-gnarled rushing to or fleeing from tragedy; families, their nerves raveled after hours of confined travel, arriving isolated from each other as back road billboards; salesmen with satchels and jokes and (hated) cigar smoke, some regulars; some roving scrapers-by asking about cut rates; the pitiful parade of those on the bum looking for light work, or a handout, or a night’s flop under a roof. Sometimes, depending on the depths of their humbleness, or if they were vets and not cocky, the clerk might let them sleep in the shack out back, down where the colored woman and child had stayed the night.
What each visitor needed, in varying degrees, regardless of their circumstances, was a civil welcome, some reassurance or condolence, and rest. Like a pharmacist dispensing pills and serums, the clerk supplied information and, if pressed, recommendations. Where they could eat (next door at Hubbard’s diner—well, the clerk preferred the meat loaf, second the liver, occasionally the beef stew; or if it was fancier they wanted, a block down at Blakey’s Fine Dining); the stores (Shorter’s general store for gas and auto service, travel needs and notions; Dominic’s barbershop; Ruth Maria’s beauty parlor; the post office, and the churches by denominations; Doctor Morgan, Attorney Timmons, Sheriff Merritt, the pawn shop.
They had arrived last evening about an hour after his second shift began. A gray Ford Coupe driven by the white man with the colored boy as passenger. The second car was a new black Sixteen Madame X Cadillac Sedan driven by a colored chauffeur with the white woman and the colored woman as passengers. Both cars were dusty and bug-spattered from their time on the road. Their names and Alabama tag numbers entered by the husband into the registry ledger. Young couple. The white couple were old south money on both sides the clerk had guessed. Mister and Missus she had said, smiling, as the recent groom signed, her saying it as if she were sampling the first sip of a chardonnay.
Mr. and Mrs. Whitmore Charlton Kimbrough formerly of Acorn, Alabama, and staff.
Their coloreds, the woman and child, had stayed outside while the colored driver saw after the luggage. The woman had been just discernable in the gray, darker than ghostly gas and morning fog, beyond the glowing circles of the lights and hotel sign. The driver and the servant girl hadn’t looked to be a couple; she, even out in the dark, looked young, was good looking. He looked too old for her, but they were only domestics traveling north with their relocating employers, and they stayed in separate rooms, but you never knew.
Mr. and Mrs. Whitmore Charlton Kimbrough had reserved ahead. Or some flunky from some office in Alabama had.
W. C. Kimbrough, party of two plus colored staff and child, written in watery blue-black ink on the 3 x 5 card by Willard, in his loopy handwriting, too florid to be a man’s. But that was Willard for you. He was off to drive his uncle, Uncle Oscar, up to Eudora. That was the reason for the clerk having to do the double shift, instead of spending the late afternoon in his shades-drawn room with the redhead. In his chair his feet up, clearing his head until his usual 10 p.m. or so.
The colored woman didn’t knock again or clear her throat. She knew he had heard her, and knew better than to be too pushy.
He pictured himself reaching for and setting the glass on the counter, then reaching for the bottle of bonded, uncorking it, pouring a hair-of-the-dog drink. Drinking it. Instead he said, “Yeah?”
She asked if she could come in.
Fallen arches had kept otherwise able Willard out of the war, that and his uncle Oscar, three-time mayor of Ernestsville, and manager of the factory, who kept Willard sheltered from the French trenches and gas and smoke and memories of it.
He signaled.
“You coming in or you staying outside?” she asked back through the screen door after she entered.
There was no answer but the screen door opened and the boy stepped inside.
Be-Jesus.
The boy was thin as a reed, probably tall for his age, knees knobby in his short pants. He was going to grow to his feet. And his face—black around the eyes. It was like they had been seared shut by a hot poker. The boy was blind. There was no attempt to hide it. No smoked glasses or cap pulled low. And he carried no cane to tap along in front of him. His steps were measured but sure. He moved forward without swinging his arm back and forth in front of him the way he would do if he were in the dark in an unfamiliar place or—. He moved about sort of sensing things without touching or rubbing up against them. Like a cat, was the closest the clerk could come to thinking of it in words.
The clerk turned his attention back to the colored woman, the mother. They were both fresh clean and looked like they were used to it, rather than like two creatures that had wandered in out of some back woods. The boy was moving silently around the brightening lobby.
The clerk said, “If you’re looking for the people brought you in they’re gone.” He had been thinking of different ways to say it.
There was a pause.
She didn’t react the way a woman should—a white woman, even the redhead, was prone to be hysterical or dumbstruck. A white woman would get a worried look and before long the teary question would come up of what was somebody going to do to help her? Your average colored woman would first pray for mercy—then do something to make you feel sorry for her. Not this one.
She turned to the boy standing by the purple chair, stroking its arm like it was a cat. He turned to her.
“You were right,” she said to the boy.
“They left early,” the clerk told her. “About an hour or so ago—little after 5 o’clock. It was still dark.”
“You don’t know,” the child said, “who you’ll see again when you think they’re gone.”
“Anyway,” she said, almost as if it was a joke, “they brought us farther than we could’ve walked in the same time.”
She turned away from the boy and was looking at the clerk, her head slightly lowered, sizing him up. Her manner was steely as a Kraut bayonet. She was judging whether or not he could be trusted, if so when and/or how much.
“They left something for you,” the clerk said. “She did,” he corrected himself. “The husband was against it, but he let her. The young woman asked if I had stationary and an envelope. She sat at that desk there while he, her husband, drummed his fingers and tapped his foot. She brought it back sealed—with a name on it.” He fetched the envelope and held it, the edge of his hand resting on the counter.
The boy moved next to the desk. Stood.
“Pearl Moon,” the young colored woman said, almost smiling. “I’m she.”
The clerk had held it up to the light after they drove away. It was money. The clerk was sure of that, but no more than four or five bills. The clerk hadn’t been able to make out the denominations of them.
He held the envelope out to her. She stepped f
orward and thanked him as she took it. The clerk could have demanded identification if he’d wanted to.
“Work for them long?”
“Looks like it was long enough to suit them,” she said. The clerk wasn’t sure if she meant it as a joke. You couldn’t always tell with them.
“That’s a more reasonable reaction than I’d have had they left me stranded without prospects,” the clerk said.
“Mister,” she said, “our noses have been deeper in the mud, and our behinds higher in the sunshine.” She tore about a quarter of an inch off the end of the envelope, held it edgewise, blew it open, and eyed inside. “And being a woman alone with a child,” she continued, “I’ve learned to anticipate what people might do, and to position myself accordingly.”
A tone to it but polite, still there was something about it he didn’t like.
Seeming satisfied about something the boy moved to stand in the sunshine again.
“I’ve had guests leave a pet dog and drive off, but never people, colored or white,” an edge to his tone.
“Did you know Gabriel, Mister?” The boy asked.
“What’d he say?”
“Gabriel,” the boy repeated. “He was in the army, too.”
“How’d he know I—?”
“The 369th colored troops,” the boy said.
“Does he think I’m—?” Enunciating, “No. I was in the 38th Infantry. What does he know about me being in the army?”
She smiled. “He’s special, Mister. He knows things sometimes. Don’t ask me how. He doesn’t think he’s ever met a stranger.” There was pride in her voice. “You have children, Mister?”
Before the clerk could answer her to say, bring them into this world? the boy said, “No.” Meaning he didn’t. He didn’t.
“He’s truly a gift,” the mother said, the envelope nowhere in sight. “He’s going to do great things one day, Mister”
“Gabriel told me about the 369th.”
“There was a war vet where we used to be,” the colored woman said.
“He was overseas fighting the Germans,” the boy said.
“Gabriel saw a bad time,” the colored woman continued, “shell-shocked, maybe. He fared hard—”
The boy disagreed, saying, “Gabriel was okay. He understood what he had to do.”
Looking away from the boy she said, “Gabriel wasn’t his real name; it was the name we called him because he had an old cornet that he could blow it so it sounded like he was talking through it.”
The boy hummed a few bars of some tune. The clerk’d heard it before but couldn’t remember where.
“Gabriel told war stories about fighting in France and being in the band,” the boy said.
The clerk said, “I was in France—but there were no colored troops.” He looked to the young woman.
“He listens, figures things out,” the colored woman said with a shrug, “Little pitchers have big ears.”
The boy laughed at that.
“I was in the 93d Division,” saying it quickly to get back to some point he thought had been lost.
“The 369th was in the battle of Rheims,” the boy said. “You didn’t know Gabriel, did you, Mister?”
“You’ve got it mixed up,” the clerk said. “I was with a fighting unit. East of the Rheims. The 369th—the colored unit—I never heard of them.”
“They had their own regiment,” the boy said.
“Must’ve been stevedores, digging our trenches, building roads for us . . .”
“They were fighting men,” the boy said as if stating a fact. “They fought with the French because the French let them be soldiers. But fighting the Germans, just like you. They captured the village of Sechault, Gabriel said. Never lost a foot of ground to the enemy. And Gabriel was in the band too. They were led by Lieutenant James Reese Europe. They were called the Hell Fighters from Harlem,” the boy said in one breath. “The Black Rattlers.”
They quit talking and stood facing him. For a moment the clerk wished he smoked. It would have given him a minute to get the pack from his pocket, shake one loose, find his matches, light it, inhale, hold it, while he had a chance to think. But smoke reminded him too much of the conditions back in the trench in the French woods that night and that morning.
“That’s what Gabriel said, didn’t he mama?”
“You know what he said. You don’t have to ask me.”
Smoke and mustard gas, dense as darkness—that finally lifted to the spectacle of sprawled corpses: doughboys and Huns and horses, mangled, strewn like garbage in a field of blood and mud.
The clerk didn’t smoke, but he did drink, and he wanted one. He said, “We’d billeted down in the Lorraine but moved up to Rheims.”
The little mockingbird boy didn’t argue. He waited, his head cocked, listening as if to check the clerk’s facts.
The bottle was sitting right there under the counter. Its back to him.
“Our unit, 38th Infantry regiment, was part of the regular army, 3d Division. We advanced into the Rheims-Soisoons-Chateau-Thierry pie wedge, northeast of Paris by 120 Ks. Was Death’s triangle, as it turned out.”
Why was he telling them? “It was no farther than it is from here to Miller.”
Realizing only after he said it they weren’t familiar with the local layout. At least the clerk didn’t think they were. There was no telling what the little burnt-faced one knew. Was no telling either why he continued telling them his war story.
“Men and boys, we were part of an American force quarter of a million strong. The Rainbow Troops they called us. And there’s no black in a rainbow.” The clerk half smiled.
“We were commanded by Black Jack Pershing, though,” amused at that fact for the first time.
“Listen to the man,” the boy’s mother told him. She said to the clerk, “He’ll argue with you if I let him, and he won’t back down.”
The clerk didn’t care about that. “Our tactic was we would take their blow, let them think we were falling back, then when we’re back to our line of resistance take our stand and give them all we had.”
They stood listening, waiting as if they didn’t have anything to do or worry about after being abandoned by the people that had left them there.
All the clerk could think of to say was, “The Huns ordered a push— If the 38th, our unit, doesn’t stop them, the next thing you know Krauts are planting the Kaiser’s flag on top the Eiffel Tower.
“Their strategy was to slaughter us. We meant not to be slaughtered.”
During that night there was a light-show barrage of heavy artillery, and the flash and whiz and bark of machine gun fire. He’d felt others around him, some, sweating in the canvas and glass confines of their gas masks, hysterical, giving up, preparing to die. Some were so dumbstruck with dread they felt relieved that they would soon get theirs, and it would all be over.
Sometimes when he was in his room he would look up and the redhead would just be watching him and would accuse him of being asleep with his eyes open.
“Beginning about 3 a. m. It was toe-to-toe,” the clerk said.
“Us, raw as a rutabaga, bone cold, muddy, sore, mangy, and hungry, us against the Prussian Guard, Kaiser Bill’s favorites. It was an eye for an eye against the best of their best.”
He paused. They waited, ahead of him. The only sound was of an automobile—mercifully not stopping, heading in the direction of the factory.
He’d tell the redhead no; he hadn’t been asleep—just—daydreaming.
If the clerk’s nerves had been like hers, like the colored woman’s—steely as a bayonet—in the French trench when the fog lifted that morning and they clambered over the top, he’d’ve . . .
It was becoming close in the lobby.
The boy whistling the same tune before he said, “‘Cake Walkin’ Baby from Home.’ When Gabriel blew it on his horn we could tell—”
“Tell what?” the clerk asked.
“Who was trouble and who wasn’t. We watched the ones
who didn’t hum or pat their feet. You—”
Enough! The clerk stood, pushing the stool back with his foot. It banged against the front of the service wall behind him. “Outside,” the clerk said.
The boy did not flinch but stood as still as a cigar store Indian. “You—” the boy was about to say something.
“Outside!” the clerk repeated, as the colored woman was saying, “He’s fixing to tell you something.”
The clerk said, “Guest’ll be stirring directly.”
“Mark what he says,” the woman said, as the clerk continued.
“I could get in trouble for letting you wait in here.” The clerk didn’t want them to talk anymore, or for the blind boy to tell him anything. Not even where he might’ve heard that tune.
The son and then the mother exited in step through the screen door. They had told him enough about Black Rattlers and Gabriel blowing his horn. The clerk glanced down at the bonded whisky bottle and turned away from it, following them.
“Those white people had responsibility for you but they left you.”
He too was outside in the unpaved passageway between the hotel and the restaurant.
“If I’m seen carrying on a conversation in there with you, I could be out of a job,” the clerk said. He stood with his back against the screen door. His face felt red.
The boy and his young mama stood, side by side, as if in formation near the wall of Hubbard’s diner, watching him. They were patient as posts.
They had to listen.
He smelt the frying bacon and the coffee from Hubbard’s.
To their far right at the front corner of the frame building was a red and white COCA-COLA sign. It was as faded as the paint on the wall it was nailed to.
The clerk never ate breakfast. Mornings his stomach would not even let him entertain the notion of it, but the smells from the cafe made hunger rise in him like the sun warming its way along the flat of the wall, white as the redhead’s shoulders as he, in his stale room, slouched, his drink balanced on the arm of the worn, once plush chair, and she, stolid, sitting on the bed, knees up, her slip rucked around her hips, drinking too, or standing, or leaning on the sill, her broad back to him, stared across the tracks as night fell on the factory’s rear wall.
