‘He gonna come down here with that shotgun but you know he gonna be stopped by this,’ Mouse said loudly, to himself.
We took so many turns and shortcuts that I was lost. I think Mouse was lost too, because when it started getting dark he said, ‘We cain’t get nowhere’s good t’night, Ease. We better find some shelter.’
Nothing could’ve sounded worse to me. When we were running I’d started coughing and it wouldn’t go away. I was feverish and dizzy and I wanted my bed and my room in Houston more than anything.
‘Ain’t they noplace?’
‘Uh-uh, Ease. Anyway, I want to go to ground. Reese is good at night.’
He left me to rest next to a dead oak and went out looking for shelter. While I sat there, beginning to fade into my fever, I saw a barn owl glide through the low branches. It moved fast and silent and it never hit a twig, it was so sure. I thought to myself that some rabbit was going to die that night, then I started to shake; whether it was from the fear of mortality or chills I didn’t know.
‘There’s a lea some hunter musta used just a ways down, Ease,’ Mouse said when he returned.
‘What if Reese use it?’
‘He ain’t likely to be in no lea t’night. If he go out huntin’ it’a be wide awake.’
We laid side by side in that flat tent of leaves and baling wire. The grippe came full on me.
‘Wh-what you kill them dogs fo’?’
Raymond put his arm around me and held on tight to keep me from shivering. He said, ‘Shhh, Easy, you sick. Git some sleep and in the mo’nin’ you be fine.’
‘I-I-I just wanna know why. Why you kill them dogs?’
I felt like a cranky baby half napping on a Sunday afternoon.
‘I was mad, that’s all, Ease,’ Mouse whispered. ‘Reese talk ‘bout my momma like that an’ I’m like to kill’im.’
‘But them dogs didn’t hurt you.’
‘Go t’sleep now, Easy. Shh.’
I never knew Mouse to be so gentle. He held me all night and kept me warm as much as he could. Who knows? Maybe I would’ve died out there in Pariah if Mouse hadn’t held me to his black heart.
Chapter Seven
When I woke up things seemed better. Dew weighed heavily on the grass and leaves around us. It was bright and early. A jay stood not five feet from us with a grasshopper crumpled in its beak. The jay looked at me and for some reason that made me happy.
I could smell Mouse’s sour breath from over my shoulder; there was a tiny wheeze coming from him. Dead dogs and crazy family were far away for the moment. I felt a cough coming on but I stifled it to stay quiet just a little longer.
‘You ‘wake, Easy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How you feel?’
I tried to say ‘fine’ but that started me coughing.
When I finally stopped Mouse crawled out of the lea and said, ‘We better get you someplace inside so you can rest. We better git you back t’Jo’s.’
‘Uh-uh. I ain’t goin’ there.’
‘Jo ain’t gonna do nuthin’ when you sick, Easy. And she’s the closest thing to a doctor for twenty miles.’
‘I ain’t goin’ t’Jo’s. No!’
‘You cain’t be comin’ wit’ me, Ease. Reese come up ‘hind me an’ I gotta move, fast.’
‘Why’ont we go on home?’
‘I ain’t finished yet. I made up my mind I’ma git what’s ines outta that man an’ that’s what I’ma do.’
‘He tole you no.’
‘That’s all right. I ain’t hesitatin’ yet. We got some more ground t’cover - me an’ daddyReese.’
‘I ain’t goin’ t’Jo’s.’
‘Okay. I take you over to Miss Dixon’s. She always willin’ t’he’p if she think you know Dom.’
‘Who is she?’ I asked, not trusting Mouse too much anymore.
He laughed a good laugh and said, ‘Don’t worry, Easy, she too old t’be thinkin’ bout love. Anyway, she’s white.’
It was a beautiful day.
We made it down to some railroad tracks and followed them for a few miles. It was one of those sultry southern mornings when all of the sounds of birds and insects are muffled by the heavy air. I was so weak that I couldn’t bring myself to worry about what Mouse was planning; all I wanted was a bed somewhere and some food.
After almost an hour we came to a large field that abutted a smooth dirt road. Across the road was a house. It was a real house with a garden and a fence and all the walls standing straight.
‘That’s Miss Dixon’s place,’ Mouse said. ‘Now you let me do the talkin’, all right?’
‘Uh-huh. But I ain’t gonna stay there if I don’t like it.’ ‘Don’t you worry, even a white man’d like this.’ There was a swing chair out front. The porch was dosed by a lattice covered with forsythia. When we walked up the front stairs Mouse took the lead, but before he could knock on the screen door the inner door opened.
‘Raymond Alexander.’ It was a statement. ‘What you want here?’
Mouse doffed a make-believe hat and said, ‘Miss Dixon, I come out here on a piece of business for Domaque.’
‘I didn’t know you were back in Pariah, Raymond. Why is that?’
Whether she was asking why she wasn’t told about Raymond’s return or she just wanted to know why he had come back I couldn’t tell, but Mouse didn’t even try to figure it out.
‘Dom axed me t’ax you t’keep Easy here for a night ‘cause Easy’s sick. Come on up here, Ease, an’ let Miss Dixon see ya.’
I moved up to his side, looking as hard at that little old woman as she was at me.
‘Anyway,’ Mouse continued, ‘Dom has got business down in Jenkins an’ he wanted Easy someplace where he’d be warm. You know he’s got the grippe an’ that can come to pneumonia in a second.’
‘Don’t I know it,’ she said.
‘Dom said that he gonna come get Easy tomorrah if he can please stay in some ole corner t’night.’
‘Domaque asked you this?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘And how am I to know that Domaque asked you this?’
‘Well you know ma’am that Dom an’ me is the best of friends...’
‘I know,’ she interrupted, ‘that you are a sinner, Raymond Alexander, and a bad influence on the ground you trod. I was hoping that you were gone forever and that that sweet poor chile Domaque was free of your evil ways.’
‘I’m just visitin’, ma’am.’
She looked at him and then at me. ‘Why, this boy could be as bad as you. How’m I to know?’
She moved to dose the door but Mouse spoke up again. ‘Ma’am, I’m not lyin’ to ya. Dom wants Easy t’stay wichyou ‘cause Easy got the grippe, an’ if you don’t believe me then you feel his head an’ see if I’m lyin’.’
She looked suspicious for a minute but then she pushed open the screen door and came toward me. I moved back a halfstep, out of reflex I guess, but Mouse grabbed me and made me stand still.
Miss Dixon was a small white woman with pale hair that was pulled straight back against her head. She wore a floor-length flat green dress that had long sleeves and a neckline at the throat. She was very thin but not brittle-looking like many old white women; she could’ve been made from solid bone from the way her hard hand felt against my forehead.
‘Lord, he’s burnin’ up!’
‘I tole you,’ Mouse said.
‘You a friend to Domaque, son?’ she asked me.
The porch beams started shaking gently before my eyes, like leaves on a breeze.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said.
‘Dom come over by noon, ma’am,’ Mouse said. He already had a foot down the stairs.
‘You tell him to bring Mr. Dickens’ book, Raymond,’ she said to him. Then to me, ‘Come on inside.’
I turned to say something to Mouse, but he was going down the stairs with his back to me. He was whistling and moving fast. I almost called to him but then a feeling came over me: I wanted Mouse to
be far away and I didn’t care what happened to him or his family; I didn’t care about weddings or a good time anymore. I just wanted to sleep.
‘What’s your full name, son?’
‘Ezekiel Rawlins, ma’am.’
‘Well come on in ‘fore you burn a hole in my porch.’
The entrance to her house had three coat racks, six umbrella stands, and more mirrors and knickknacks on the wall than I could count. There was a darkwood chair of a different make against each wall and on either side of the door. It was a small entrance room and so crowded with furniture that we two could barely fit in it at the same time.
She led me quickly through to the parlour.
This was a large room with blue velvet wallpaper from the ivory-carpeted floor to the cream-colored ceiling. There was a blue sofa, with a matching chair, and a red love seat with two matching chairs. There was a yellow couch and a brown one too. Each of them had matching chairs. The sofas and chairs were so dose together that you couldn’t sit on them.
There were the coffee tables: maple, cherry, pine, and mahogany; all of them stacked with every different kind of tea setting and little china sculpture that you can imagine. She had bureaus and cabinets, one behind the other; some of them had glass doors and you could make out the piles of plates and stacks of teacups.
I looked at that old woman again - she must’ve been in her late seventies.
I’d seen it happen before. The oldest member of the family outlives all of her husbands and siblings, and even her children sometimes, and all the belongings of all the families come to her in a big lonely house. She lives with five houses’ worth of furniture and dishes, old clothes, and knickknacks.
‘Come on, Ezekiel, you’re in my charge now.’
The next room was the music room. There were three upright pianos and different leather bags in the shapes of guitars, fiddles, and even a tuba.
‘Go on, take your clothes off and get in that tub.’ She opened a door that led to a small washroom. I hesitated a minute but she just shook her hand back and forth to show how impatient she was and I went in.
‘You’re lucky I take my bath on Wednesdays; I just filled the tub,’ she said, leaving me to my toilet. ‘And I have clothes from my uncle you can wear, he was ‘bout your size.’
The washroom smelled of soap. There was a brass sink and a commode and a large washtub on lion feet. Next to the sink was a table with a giant clamshell on it. The clamshell was filled with hundreds of little flowers made from soap. Red, green, and yellow soap, and violet and blue too. Each one hinted of a different spice but mostly they smelled like soap.
I took off my clothes and realised how bad I smelled after the last two days. I tried to pile them in a corner where the smell wouldn’t be too offensive in that sweet-smelling room, and then I jumped into the tub.
‘Ow! Oh!’ The water was so hot that I nearly jumped up. I thought she was trying to kill me.
‘Nice an’ hot, huh, Ezekiel? Secret to a long life is a hot bath twice a week and no liquor,’ she called through the closed door.
I got used to the water after a bit. The heat along with fever made me even more light-headed and tired. The sun was shining in through the lace curtains on the window. Miss Dixon - I found out later that Abigail was her first name - turned on a radio somewhere in the house and it was playing big-band music. The house was filled with the sound of scratchy clarinets and pianos. That was the finest living that I had ever experienced up to that time.
I’d wake up now and then and look at how my fingers and toes wrinkled in the water. Finally the water turned cold and I started shivering. So I got out and put on the green suit Miss Dixon had hung outside the door.
‘Welllll... don’t we look so much better,’ she said when I came into the kitchen. ‘Clean and scrubbed is halfway back to health.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘You hungry, Ezekiel?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Well you just sit down and I’ll give you some stew.’
There was already a plate on one of the three tables she had in the dinette. I went to a chair next to that setting but she yelled, ‘Not there! Sit at one of the other tables.’
I didn’t know what she meant but I went to the pine table near the back door and sat down.
‘You know I cain’t sit at the same table with you, Ezekiel,’ she said as she put a bowl of beef stew in front of me. ‘You know it’s not proper for white and colored to sit together. I mean it’d be as much an insult to your people as mine if we were to forget our place.’
I watched her go to her separate seat and I thought to myself that she was crazy but I couldn’t keep my mind on I it because that was the first food I’d had in almost a whole day. It was good stew too. I can still remember how it tasted of black pepper and wine.
‘How do you know Domaque, Ezekiel?’
‘Well, uh, well I wanted t’learn t’read bettah, an’ Mouse, I mean Raymond, tole me ‘bout him.’ I was lying but I wasn’t, not really.
‘Do you read?’
‘A little, ma’am. I can sign my name and make the sounds of letters... I know that a “p” and a “h” together sound like a “f.” ‘ I thought about Domaque quoting the Bible and about my father then. My father always told me that I should learn to read. Maybe it was because I was so weak but I felt about ready to cry.
‘Reading is one of the few things that separates us from the animals, Ezekiel. You’d know all about the man they named you for if you could read.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘And all you have to do is to keep on reading those sounds and asking Domaque and others about how you read. Maybe you can have someone read to you. Then you read it to yourself...’ she said and then she drifted off into a daydream.
We finished eating and she told me to go find a couch in the parlour to sleep on and that she’d come out there later to see how I was. But first she put a brown powder in some tea and gave it to me.
‘Josephine Marker makes this out to the swamps. She’s a real wonder at flu powders and the like.’
I was nervous about drinking any tea that Jo had a hand in making, but I took it to be polite.
After that all I remember is laying down on the yellow couch. When I opened my eyes again it was night.
Miss Dixon was standing at the open door in a long white dress, and the moon was shining in on her. There were so many chairs and tables around that it was like being in an auditorium after a big function when all the chairs and whatnot are stacked for storage.
‘You still got a fever, Ezekiel,’ she said out of the open door. ‘But I’ll get some more tea and all you got to do is to go back to sleep and you’ll be fine.’
‘Thank you, ma’am, I mean fo’ the sleep, I mean.’ I was very uncomfortable. I wasn’t used to spending much time with white people and I knew that colored people are always in danger of doing the wrong thing when they have to deal with whites. It was fine in Fifth Ward down in Houston, or in little colored towns like Pariah, usually, because there weren’t any white people around for the most part. The only time I had ever spent around white people was when I was working, and then how I was to act was clear because whites were always the boss. That was easy because all I ever said was ‘yes’ and ‘no;’ but mainly Yes.’
‘That’s all right, Ezekiel.’ She turned from the door and came back to the brown chair, about three pieces of furniture away from me. The room was dark except for the moonlight. ‘You know I’m a good woman if they let me be.’
‘I’m sure you are, ma’am. You sure been good t’me.’
‘You think so because you’re not from around here, but if you lived here you’d be like all the rest of them.’
‘Dom speaks mighty well on you, ma’am.’ I was wishing that I could be away from there. Why did she have to talk to me? One wrong word and I could be in jail or worse.
‘Domaque and his momma live in the swamp, so they’re different,’ she said.
&n
bsp; ‘They sure are diffrent but they still like you.’
Miss Dixon laughed. It was a nice laugh and she almost seemed like a normal person to me.
She said, ‘You don’t see, Ezekiel. What I mean is that Domaque and Josephine don’t mind me because I don’t own the bayou lands.’
‘Ma’am?’
‘I own just about everything else. My family owned it at first. The Dixons, the MacDoughs, and the Lambert family owned all of this way back. But they married each other and they died or they moved away and I’m the only one left. Our families had sharecropping and plantations down this way for more’n a hundred years... Now it’s all back to the tenants. I don’t even collect rent but they know that the land is mine.’ She looked over at the window as if all the people of Pariah were there, looking in. ‘They know that one day I’m going to die and some strangers are going to come down and reclaim my property.’
‘Why cain’t they just buy the land from you?’ I really wanted to know.
‘The country people are poor, Ezekiel, they couldn’t get the cash to buy. But even if they could — this is my land,’ her voice became hard, ‘for me and mine. I can’t just hand it over to strangers.’
She was quiet for a while and I didn’t dare to speak.
Then she said, ‘I’ll get you some covers and that tea.’
When she’d given me the blankets and medicine she said good night and went up to bed.
I was feeling tired but better and I could think for a while before going to sleep. I thought about that grasshopper crushed in that jay’s beak and about Miss Dixon; how she was like a bird too.
A lot of people might not like how I acted with that white woman. They might ask: Why didn’t he get mad? or Why would Mouse be breaking his butt to get money out of a poor farmer when this rich white lady would be so much of a better target?
Mouse was just doing what came natural to him. But there’s a reason I wasn’t angry then, why I’m still not angry and why the people of Pariah didn’t rise up and kill that woman: It’s what I call the ‘Sacred Cow Thinking.’
Miss Dixon lived alone out in a colored community that hated her because she owned everything, even the roads they walked on. But Miss Dixon, and every other white person, was, to that colored community, like the cow is to those Hindus over in India. They’d all starve to death, let their children starve, before they’d slaughter a sacred cow. Miss Dixon was our sacred cow. She had money and land and she could read and go to fine events at the governor’s house. But most of all she was white and being white was like another step to heaven...
Gone Fishin’ er-6 Page 6
