In Tall Cotton
Page 15
“That’s the funniest scene I’ve ever witnessed,” the man gasped, half laughing and half coughing. “Alice, you really must remember our old family motto: Don’t Never Assume Nothin’.”
Mrs. Jones laughed and blushed prettily and said, “Oh, Brad, don’t embarrass me in front of these nice people …” She turned back to us with a limp wave toward the man, “this is Mr. Jones.” She smiled charmingly and leaned toward us conspiratorily. “And don’t pay any mind to anythang he says.”
“Pure comedy of errors,” the man roared. “Too funny! Just because Mrs. Woods has an accent different from yours, Alice, you figure she must be colored—or a Nigra, as you’d say—and since you have always sounded on the phone like my old black mammy, it’s no wonder that she thought you were my old black mammy.” Dad was the first of the Woods to join Mr. Jones in laughter. I was the last. People are people, Dad had said in the bathroom. Had they thought they were pursuing work for colored people? And Mrs. Jones thought we were colored? We’d come because a job was a matter of life or death, black or white. Where was the joke? Why were they all laughing at something deadly serious? Was there something hypocritical in their uneasy laughter and everybody’s obvious nervous relief?
We made the laughter last a little longer than necessary to cover another coughing fit that threatened to strangle Mr. Jones.
“You’ve simply got to quit smokin’,” Mrs. Jones said absently as though it were something she said hundreds of times a day.
“Well.” Mr. Jones had his cough under control but the laughter stayed in his eyes. “If we niggers, negroes, nigras,” he winked playfully at his wife, “coloreds or whatever we are can still talk sense, let’s get down to business.” He grinned at Mom. “I gather Mrs. Woods that if an educated nigger such as yourself would answer an ad for housekeeper for what you must have thought was rich niggers,” he nodded appreciatively at Dad’s chuckle, “Then you must be ready to work.” Mom was grinning back at him in agreement. He turned to Dad. “And a great tall handsome man like yourself is ready to spread horseshit on three acres of garden?”
“It’s still on my shoes from home,” Dad said. I’d never seen him look so pleased.
Saying horseshit made us know that there’d be no horseshit where Mr. Jones was concerned. He seemed pretty pleased with Dad, too. He looked up at him with shrewd eyes. “May I call you Woody?”
“Everybody does.”
“That’s it, then.” He clasped his hands together. “If you’ll put up with us, I know that I can’t do without you.” He looked at each of us in turn. “All of you.” He turned to his wife, “Alice, show the Woods their new house and if they don’t like our terms, make them like them.” He waved a hand up behind his head. “This zombie is our son and heir. Bradford, Junior.” He rolled his eyes. “He’s not worth a damn.” He laughed, didn’t cough, and called out to him, “Home, James!” He was slowly pulled back up the ramp and in through the swinging doors, disappearing, rather as Grandma had into the hearse. Just before the doors closed we heard him call softly, “Bless you, Woods. Welcome.”
We moved with almost unseemly haste into our new “quarters” (Mom had said that that had been the key word in her telephone conversation with Mrs. Jones—all she could think of was slave quarters) which were perfect—fully and beautifully furnished down to sheets and towels and kitchen equipment. Our one-hundred dollar a month salary on top of all this luxury made us wonder if the Joneses weren’t more than just eccentric.
Our house was behind the main house and separated from it by a huge lawn. It was designed and built as a self-contained guest house—two bedrooms, living room with fireplace (something I couldn’t imagine using until I’d spent a winter in Phoenix), beautifully installed kitchen and bath. It, like the main house and exterior walls, was built of adobe—Captain J had experimented and made his own bricks and then invented a sealer that gave the walls the unique natural pinkish beige look. On the flat roofs he’d had rigged up networks of piping under sheets of glass that heated our water by the sun. Having running hot water was novelty enough, but to have it straight from God was awe-inspiring.
Our new employer was Captain Bradford Jones, a flying hero from the Great War, totally paralyzed except from his arms up from an accident so hideous that the details were glossed over. He became a hero for Dad, too, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do for him. “Just put yourself in his place,” he’d say and shake his head sadly. They worked together planning the gardens with a mutual understanding and respect that was amazing. Captain J’s infirmity seemed to stir his imagination. He loved watching any physical activity. Dad said he thought he just made up things for him to do so they could talk and he could watch Dad dig new irrigation ditches (Junior had been right about that), transplant trees or do grafting so delicate he felt as though he’d been performing brain surgery. Captain J was constantly designing, sketching, working out new planting methods or hybrids. He’d already produced some roses that dealers were begging to put on the market.
Junior’s hair had been straightened out—if that’s the right expression. It was very short, but actually looked nice. “Like those beautiful German boys in the Olympics,” Uncle (as he was now called) Roy pointed out. I didn’t know boys could be called beautiful.
Our trunk from Galena still hadn’t arrived when school was about to start, and we needed school clothes. We’d been at the Joneses’ for a little over a week and Mom said we couldn’t possibly ask for an advance on our lavish salary, it was simply too shaming. The auction money had just arrived and been spent. All forty-eight dollars and fifty-cents of it, paying back Aunt Dell and stocking the new house with staples.
“There, you see, Tots?” Junior had said. “That’s what we were worth. Forty-eight dollars and fifty-cents.”
“What do you mean, ‘what we were worth’? People can’t be worth …”
“I mean, that all our worldly goods,” he said with a quaver in his voice, like a hammy actor, “were only worth forty-eight dollars and fifty-cents. Doesn’t that say anything to you?”
“No, not particularly. We didn’t have very much anyway.”
“Oh, God. I don’t know whether you’re dumb or just don’t care.”
I cared a lot about the pair of pants Aunt Dell bought for me from a jumble sale or second-hand store or God-knows-where. They were cream-colored cords and in very good condition and had only cost a quarter. Actually, a very good buy. The only thing wrong was that they were girls’ slacks. No fly in the front. A zipper down the side, sort of hidden by the pocket.
“But these are for girls,” I wailed.
“Just try ’em on, honey,” Aunt Dell encouraged. “Pay no attention to that. Let’s see if they fit first.” They fit perfectly. “Look at that,” she crowed. “What a eye I got! I picked ’em out of a whole pile. My hand went right to ’em. Totsy, I said to myself. Just his fit.”
“But Aunt Dell,” I repeated. “See, there’s no fly. Boys’ pants have openings in the front.”
“Ya’ kiddin’! Whatta you need a hole in front for?” She started dancing around the room, doing a comic imitation of a jitterbug. “This is Swing Time. Everybody’s swingin’ it! Why, honey, if Benny Goodman can swing it, so can you. Life don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing!” She put her hands in front of her and made a graphic gesture. “Just swing it from the middle right over there to the left side …” Everybody bust a gut laughing.
“You can all laugh just like everybody else will laugh when they see me in girls’ clothes.” I ran from the room, close to tears of shame and embarrassment. I’d have to wear the damned things. I didn’t have anything else. Just some short pants and I couldn’t wear those to school. There are times when I felt in my bones just how poor we were and that was one of them. A new school and me in girls’ pants. How’d I ever manage? I fell on our bed and wept tears of frustration and self-pity. I was ashamed of the self-pity—there were always others worse off than we, we were constantly reminded�
��but I couldn’t help it.
“If you wear,” it was Junior standing at the foot of our bed. “If you wear … hey, Tots, can you hear me? If you wear your shirt outside, maybe nobody’ll see.”
I heard the sympathy in his voice—he was putting himself in my place, knowing how much it mattered to me and would have mattered to him, too. His hair had turned out fine. Maybe if I did wear my shirt outside …
“But what’ll I do when I have to pee?” I sat up on the bed. “I don’t know,” Junior said and sat down beside me. He was in deep thought for a minute or so and then sat up very straight. “How long can you go without peeing?”
“I don’t know. How could I know, for lord’s sake. I never tried.”
“Maybe if you start now … I mean if you practiced … If you could hold it for four hours, say …”
“But I still have to take the …” If Junior could use Dad’s word, so could I. “… the fucking things practically off.” I stood up and demonstrated. “See? I have to unbutton up here, unzip this … and this fucking thing sticks … oh, my God. Why do we let Aunt Dell do these things to us? OK. Now they have to come down over my hips and then … well, you see, the fucking things are hanging around under my ass, for lord’s sake …”
He couldn’t hold it any longer, he burst out laughing and I joined in finally realizing how ridiculous it was. “At least,” he said, with his arm around me, rocking us from side to side, “you won’t have to worry about leaving your fly open.”
Our laughter brought Mom to the door. “What in the world are you two up to in there?”
“Cutting a pee-hole in Totsy’s new pants,” Junior yelled back and we fell back on the bed and rolled around in hysterics.
Our school was grand in every sense of the word. It was brand new—only open for a couple of years before we came there (I guess a WPA project like all the others) and filled with children from the grand houses on the upper north side of town. It took Junior no time at all to establish himself in sports and I relied on some innate sense of self-preservation that enabled me to pick out the right friends and ingratiate myself to my teachers. “I swear,” Junior said at one point, “if somebody called you a shit-head you’d smile and say ‘thank you.’ ” Whatever methods we used, we survived and if not exactly triumphed, we were absorbed, integrated, incorporated or whatever it is that every transplanted mid-westerner dreamed of—consciously or unconsciously—in the depressed thirties. We younger ones made it with only small scars that would disappear as we got older while some of the older ones simply couldn’t find a slot that fitted them. I don’t think Dad has ever been completely comfortable out here. Except perhaps while we were at the Joneses’. But that was because of Captain J.
In no time, our Model-A was up on blocks in the back of the big garage and Dad was in charge of the most beautiful vehicle I’d ever seen. It was the newest—not even unveiled yet in Detroit, Dad said—Chevrolet innovation, the 1938 Stationwagon. The body was fitted hardwood, in sections like the parquet floors of palaces in Europe, and varnished and waxed like a yacht. There were four doors—plus the two that opened up the back—and Captain J had redesigned the interior to take his little low bed which he’d designed also. He removed the back seat altogether and placed three small single seats along the left side behind the driver, leaving space on the right to hold his bed. There were little clamps that held the tubular legs in place and an ingenious fold-up ramp that fitted under the bed when not hooked over the rear end for the bed to be wheeled up or out. Dad was not only gardener, he was a very proud chauffeur and according to Captain J, the best driver he’d ever known. Except himself, of course, when he could drive.
We walked home from school along Missouri Avenue which seemed to be the boundary of Phoenix proper—the south side of the Avenue was built up with houses on large plots like the Joneses’, while the north side was groves of citrus trees. The old irrigation ditches still existed and worked, because Captain J and Dad had tapped into them at the northeast corner of the property and the ditches Dad dug watered the whole three acres. The main ditches in the groves not only worked, they were almost irresistible on hot afternoons but we were warned that the water was dirty and swimming strictly forbidden. It didn’t seem forbidden to some children and was most definitely not irresistible to a group of Mexican kids that we saw and envied practically every day cavorting in the muddy water.
They’d yelled taunts at us often as we walked by, sweating and trying not to look at the cool fun they were having. I suppose they mistook our envy as stuck-uppishness. In response to their yells one particularly hot day, Junior whispered to me, “Yell bese ma coula at them.”
An order being an order, I yelled at the top of my lungs, “BESA MA COULA!”
I didn’t know such havoc could be created with just three words. Bodies scrambled out of the water with alarming speed. Two were naked and if not considerably older than we, considerably more physically mature. I didn’t have time to investigate, we were running full out, as fast as we could. Fortunately a car coming down the avenue stopped the two naked ones by forcing them back in the water for decency’s sake but flying glances over my shoulder told me others were still hot on our trail. We dashed to the corner of the property where the canal attached to the Joneses’ smaller ditches and where there was a gate for trucks delivering manure or plants. We were half way up that when I felt a stinging pain on my right shoulder and then heard stone hitting the gate as we clambered over it. Once inside we were fairly safe, but we kept on running until we were hidden by a tamarisk hedge.
“What … what …” I panted and gasped. “What in … the world? What did you have me say?”
Junior looked sheepish. “Kiss my ass. I mean, I think that’s what it means.”
“Kiss…my… ass!” I was stunned. And my shoulder hurt. And that gang chasing us had scared the daylights out of me. “You told me to scream kiss my ass at those kids …” I hauled off and hit him as hard as I could. “Trying to get us killed, for God’s sake?”
“I’m sorry, Tots. It was pretty stupid …”
“Stupid! Well, you can just kiss my ass. In plain old English,” I screamed and ran on home, tears running down my cheeks. Mostly of relief that we hadn’t been more damaged considering the cause. It also meant that I wouldn’t dare walk down Missouri Avenue for awhile and that meant an extra half-mile going the long way around the other end of the long long block.
Chapter Eight
BRADFORD, THE JONESES’ SON AND HEIR, fascinated Junior because he’d been to a military academy in Virginia. The best possible school, Mrs. Jones avowed, primarily because it was in Virginia, her home state. “Back home,” she’d say (at least a hundred times a day, Mom claimed), “in Virginia, that is, we did thus and so …” When they’d moved here almost ten years ago, Bradford was kept in school “back home” so that the southern tradition of family and manners and customs would be firmly instilled in him. The move to this “frontier town” was necessitated by Captain J’s condition. Lung condition. It wasn’t exactly T.B. but his doctor had recommended a dry climate for his delicate health generally and Mrs. Jones made no bones about pining for the old family plantation and “another, more gentle and genteel way of life.”
Junior’s open admiration for Bradford made them particular friends but we were both bothered by his slyness or deviousness. But the most disconcerting thing about him was a maddening inconsistency in his behavior. One day, friendly to the point of not wanting us out of his sight, other days, cold and unresponsive to the point of rudeness. One moment roaring with laughter, the next, sullen and closed-in. That glazed look that I’d noticed the first day was probably the most constant thing about him. It was always there, to a greater or lesser degree. We were all puzzled by it. So much in fact that one day Captain J slapped the side of his cot in irritation and said, “What the hell’s the matter with that boy, Woody? He’s in a fucking daze half the time. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was pissed.”
“Yes. Pissed. Swacked. Boozed up.”
Dad laughed. “God knows I know enough about that to recognize it when I see it.”
“Well, what do you think? Do you think he’s hitting the bottle?”
Dad knew that Captain J wanted the truth from him straight, no frills. “I have to say that it has occurred to me. I mean, there’s something a bit …”
“I’ll mark the bottles,” he said decisively. “Wouldn’t be at all surprised. All southerners are alcoholics. Alice’s entire family is a bunch of drunks.”
Although he was almost eighteen, Bradford wasn’t much bigger than Junior at thirteen and Captain J and Dad enjoyed watching them compete in various sports—sparring with boxing gloves, playing table tennis, badminton, foot-races down the long driveway (one of the competitions that could include me and at which I could hold my own), or wrestling. When the boxing gloves were brought out, I slipped out. I hated boxing almost as much as baseball but like baseball, when forced, I showed some aptitude. Perhaps aptitude is not right—I simply assailed my opponent with a whirlwind attack to get the encounter over with as quickly as possible. Captain J had been on the boxing team at Princeton University and coached Junior and Bradford very seriously and scientifically for some time and then encouraged a real free-for-all, becoming over-excited, calling out, “Keep your guard up, idiot,” to Bradford and “Hit him, Woody-Two, hit him hard.”
These bouts sometimes ended with bloody-noses but they always ended for the Captain in a coughing seizure so violent that Mrs. Jones would swear, “… no more! This is the last time. Y’all get too excited and besides, I think it’s barbaric.”