by Jeffrey Lent
He was quiet a long time. Both women sat watching him. He reached up and stroked his nose with his thumb and bent back forefinger. He felt teary and would not cry and a part of him felt he was too close to tears too much of the time these days for it to be good for him. He wanted again nothing more than to be sitting in the house outside Bethlehem with his father, the two of them arguing in the amused not very serious way they always had over anything at all. He looked at the tall old beautiful-woman version of his father before him and said, “Pop was not broke. Besides the place over there he left to me, there was a pile of money. I’ve got money enough.” And because he did not want them to doubt him, he said, “It’s all rolled up in bundles in a shoebox outside right now. In the back end of the car.”
“Don’t you touch that money!” Abby’s hands working together before her, over and around themselves. “Put it in a bank! Then, four-five years from now, you finish school, know what you want from yourself, you’ll have something to start off with.” She stopped and took her bottom lip between her teeth a moment and said, “Maybe then, that money’ll do you some good. You’ll see.”
Foster felt his body swaying. He was hot by the stove but could not move. He looked down at the floor where the carpet ended and met the floorboards that ran under his feet. As if he could find purpose or reassurance there in the gap between what was covered and what lay under. Feeling the eyes behind his head blank out of the portrait. Wishing they would speak to him, those dead souls. But there was nothing but the blood booming in his own temples. Still looking down he said, “I can’t.”
There was no pause. “Can’t what?”
So he looked up at them because he had to. His voice came from him broken and sad and soft. “I won’t stay here. Not to finish school or go on to college. I guess someway I pretty much hate to tell you this but it’s not what I need to do right now.”
Prudence did not move but Abigail did. She sat back in her seat and crossed one leg up over the other, fluted fingers even as she moved plucking the fabric up and releasing it so the skirt of her dress settled over her crossed legs, all smooth. She rested her head against the back of her chair. “So just what,” she asked, “do you propose to do?”
“Well, ma’am”—and he looked from one to the other before continuing—“I’m going to North Carolina. To Sweetboro. To see what I can learn.”
Abby did not move. But Prudence leaned forward, her hands taking a hard hold of her knees. She cried out to him, “Oh, no. Why would you do that? Foster? Whatever for?”
He stood there rocking silent before them. Because there was nothing he could tell either one of them that they did not already know. And he knew they knew this.
After a time Abby stood and left the room, wordless. He stood listening to her going up the stairs to bed. When she was gone he looked at Prudence. She gazed at him until he turned to her. Then she turned her hands up on her knees and gathered her face into those hands and wept. Still he stood. Until he knew her tears were not short and were not for him alone.
It was still raining. He went to the barn and let loose his dogs and they went out together into the rain. He could not see them in the dark and could not hear them but knew they were beside him, close by. He went up the hillside in the dark to the burying ground where he stood hunched in the rain, not by any particular stone because now they were all his. He drank off the last of the whiskey from the bottle, his face upturned wet with the rain. The whiskey like nothing at all. From where he stood he could see nothing at all except from time to time the vague quick shapes of his dogs coming close. Below, a single pale lighted window. With the rain, it could have been a faint star.
Eight
“Whatever it is, I don’t want any of it!” This from behind the dull shade of the screen door, far and close at once, as if the distance was not great but the traveling of it would be. The voice sincere, mocking of its own authority, as if calling out to someone not so much known or expected but as if there were no alternative. As if there could be no strangers. And then, in the deadstill end-of-September afternoon heat came the rising scuff of feet pressed forward, hard-working, accompanied by the metronomic offbeat pock of a cane. Through the screen, down the length of hall, a figure made its way up toward the door. Tall and lean, stooped toward his left side where that hand worked the cane for support.
Foster waited in the deep shade of the porch, sweating where he stood, the sleeves of his open-necked shirt rolled over his elbows. The car parked on the street under the live oaks, the small oval leaves dulled with a weight of rust-red dust. The car windows down for the dogs sleeping in the heat on the backseat. Three levels of ruined flower beds and rose arbors fell from the porch steps to the sidewalk. Even the cobbles of the brick walk were twisted up and uneven from the unchecked growth. Long spears of roses gone wild climbed above the clotted honeysuckle spread over the gardens. Here and there the dead spike of some flower or the rough foliage of a tuberous plant lifted out of the honeysuckle canopy in the way some memory of life otherwise gone remains more vivid than the present. Persistent in lone shorn beauty.
It had taken near two weeks to reach this place. In truth he was not sure of the day of the week. He had bought a paraffin-treated canvas pitchtent before leaving Randolph and from there had traveled west in New York State before turning south and so had driven down through the country inland from the seaboard and the cities there but had stayed out in the sparse broken-up land of small farms and woods along the eastern foothills of the eastern mountains, camping overnight and sometimes more than one night where he could find a place to, where the farmers did not care but to warn him of fire, or in the broad upsweeping reaches of woods where there were no farmers or anyone else to ask permission for the land. In the middle of Virginia he’d turned east, away from the mountains and fall and back into summer.
The night before, after a long day on roads that were broader than the mountain roads but also ankle deep in red dust that boiled around the car as he went, on either side of the road long fields stretched out either side and he saw crews of people working in those fields, bent among crops he did not know—the soft dull droop of midday tobacco and the green stippled heavy-as-if-with-snow spread of cotton—at the end of that day he’d stopped in the town of South Hill and rented a room in the railroad hotel and ate a hot meal in the dining room and bathed in a rusted tub. And was up before dawn to walk his dogs in the moist shrouded light that even at that hour was mild, not even cool. And without food from the hotel he drove on. Crossing into North Carolina as the sun hefted itself beyond his left shoulder, a red ball huge in the pale mist that hung between earth and air as if it were a final hope of the night. Then he went down a long gentle swoop of road and up again and the sun was out, no red ball but a blaze of heat coming through his open window. And he could smell the earth then, hot and sweet and fetid. He passed wagons piled with long burlap sacks stuffed full. Other wagons with the tender cradled layers of leaf tobacco. The wagons drawn by mules. Sorrel mules. Some the color of burnt wet wood. He’d never seen a mule before. All driven by Negro men in rough clothes who would not look at him as he drove around them. After he passed each load he’d lift his left hand up above the roof of the Chrysler in greeting and then watch his rearview but no man responded and after a time he just drove. He was hot. He could hear the dogs panting in the backseat even with the windows all the way down. That air churned, gritted with dust. Fouling his mouth and nose. He considered New Hampshire. A man at work there roadside would not pause to greet some passing stranger. So it was. Still, in the gangs working the fields there were children as well as men and women and some of those children close by the road would raise faces in fast dark flashes to stare at the car and he wondered what they saw passing them by, if he was some dream or some other vision altogether unobtainable.
He crossed over a river and then some miles later crossed it again, still driving south and east. The river a deep low dark sullen thing, with none of the bright flash a
nd quick sparkle of the rivers he knew; this one cased between banks of low-hanging trees, its color not out of the air or reflected sky but as if sprung up from the earth, moistened by the wealth of foliage overhanging it. The water oily, without obvious movement. A deceptive stillness.
Tracts of pine woods. Small rises of land capped with hardwoods. Crabbed patches of cotton broken out between the woods. Other fields, larger and more level, of tobacco. Cattle pastures with burned-yellow grass, the cattle bunched up in the shade of a single huge-spread red oak. No barns that he could see but sheds of weathered wood everywhere, high and square and small on rough raised stone foundations. Some just standing on piled stones under each of the four corners. Some chinked tight with the gauzy air of heat over them and the faint tang of woodsmoke where tobacco cured. These sheds always with a colored man close by, lounging on a chunk of firewood or bent down some feet from the building, tending a low fire.
The land was not flat but seemed so. The sun high and spread overhead, the horizons far off. But as the road turned and moved over the land the land also moved, revealing itself to be pockets and small open spreads of space. Briefly it would flatten and the fields would grow larger but there was always a backing flank of woodlot, a stretch of pines, something to crease or fold the land. As he drove on he realized what that thing was: the river, which all the land aimed toward.
He dropped down and followed the river itself for some miles, passing under a railroad trestle, a tower of creosote-blackened crisscrossed matchsticks high over him, and then the road graded up and he passed a metal sign, black letters on white for the Sweetboro city limits, and went on some distance and then came into the town itself. Along a residential street he dropped down in second gear and traveled slowly, the houses set back from the road, smaller than he’d expected but surrounded by land and flanked by trees he did not know. Then into the three-block downtown, mostly brick but some wooden buildings, three and four stories tall. It was very quiet, very small.
He parked in thin shade and found a lunch counter in a drugstore and drank a bottle of soda pop and ate a grilled cheese sandwich and drank another bottle of the pop. Only one other man seated at the counter, reading a newspaper, glanced at Foster once with frank open curiosity and then went back to his paper. The counterman a lank man with a purple birthmark over one side of his face like a burn. Foster paid his bill and left a dime on the counter and stepped into the telephone booth at the far end of the counter and folded shut the door after him and sat with the phone book. It was easier than he thought. Only one Mebane. Alexander: 61 North Main. Telephone 8459. He shut the book and put it back on the shelf.
He drove back out of town the way he had come in and spotted the house and kept on going. He drove as far as the railroad trestle and pulled off underneath where the ground was packed dark and bare. There was a ring of fire-blackened stones and bits of trash: empty soda bottles and pieces of cork painted red for fishing bobbers and tangles of fishing line and several flat-sided pint liquor bottles. He let the dogs out and they went down to the river and drank, wading in up to their bellies. He called Glow back when she started to swim out. He did not like water he couldn’t see into. When the dogs had cooled themselves he put them in the car and without letting himself think about it turned around and drove back into town and parked under shade just down from the house he’d spied out.
“Someone has misled you. You have the wrong house.” The old man stood with his bad arm leaning against the screen door to open it partway. His cane-tip poked out through the opening as a weapon. With his stoop as tall as Foster, in tan trousers and a white shirt, the sleeve of his missing arm folded up square and pinned under the elbow. The pin a little crooked as if done quickly, with long practice. Thin hair ragged over the dome of his skull. He added, “I can’t help you. I don’t know any woman name of Lee. There’s no Lees around here that I know of. No family, that is. Now, there’s plenty of boys called Lee. I wouldn’t know them all. And there might even be a girl called that. It’s a popular name. But I don’t know of any. I can tell you this though. Whatever girl you’re chasing is not here, not at this house. Someone has misled you.”
Foster studied him. The old man was dry and cool in the heat of the day. The hand gripping the cane handle shook slightly with the effort of keeping the tip free for any sudden use. His eyes were wide with a taint of wildness to them, square upon Foster. Those eyes someway at odds with the speech just delivered. His lips were dry, cracked open over broad age-stained teeth. The teeth with gaps between them where the gums had shrunk back.
Foster looked down at the warped porch boards, then back to the old man. He said, “She thought you were dead. She thought she killed you. Brained you with a flatiron, was what she did. I’d guess that little ridge up over your ear there is what’s left of that try. Her name was Leah. Not Lee.”
The man said nothing. Rocking back and forth slightly. Then settled the cane tip and stepped squarely into the door. Not out of the house but with the door pushed open so he stood in it. Resting the cane before him with his one palm flat on the curved handle. Fresh-shaved, the scent of bay rum.
“Tell me your name again.”
“Foster Pelham, sir.”
“How old are you Foster Pelham?”
“I’m sixteen.”
“And where is it you’re from?”
“New Hampshire. Is where I grew up. But I just came down from Vermont.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, how come, Foster Pelham? Leaving aside the question of this woman you’re looking for, asking after, how come now? You, sixteen years old, chasing off across the country. How’d you get here?”
“I drove.”
Alexander Mebane leaned forward a little and peered out onto the street and spied the Chrysler and looked back at Foster. “That’s your automobile out there?”
“Yes sir. It was my father’s.”
“It was your father’s. He’s not with you?”
“I’m alone. My father’s dead. That’s how—I never knew his family. After he died I found two sisters over to Vermont. And it was them told me about things.”
“What things would that have been?”
“That my grandmother was a Negro woman. From here. That her name was Leah and that the people who owned her were called Mebane. That she ran away from here at the tail end of the war. And that something happened and she hurt one of them, left him hurt, her thinking that person was dead. Somebody she called Lex.”
“And you think that might be me.”
“Yes sir, I’m thinking maybe it was. Said you were a one-armed man.”
“Did they? It’s what they call a distinguishing characteristic, isn’t it? I was a boy when I lost it so I can’t hardly recall what it was like to have both. Most days I don’t even think about it. You’re not a boy that takes things for granted, though, are you, Foster Pelham?”
“No sir. I never had the chance to do that.”
“Still, you chased off halfway down the country after something what might have happened almost sixty-five years ago. Why’d you do that? What is it you think you might find? Other than a single old one-armed man?”
“She came back here. Came back down twenty-five years after she left. Came back to try and find the mother she’d left behind. Or find out what happened to her. It would’ve been September of 1890.”
“That was still a long time ago.”
“I think she saw you that time. When she came back.”
“What in the world makes you think a thing like that? You think I keep track of every vagrant Negro that passes through this town? Why boy, on any given day they come and go at numbers I couldn’t even guess at. If I wanted to. And why would I want to?”
“She was your sister. Your half sister.”
Those old eyes slid over Foster, crackling bright, sly and flared at once. “My sister. Is that right? You’re telling me that my daddy, that he laid down with a Negro w
oman? That he not only laid down with one but had get? My daddy? My old daddy dead these long years and not here to deny or laugh at such a tale. That’s what you come all this way to tell me? That a man had a colored woman in his own house and that he screwed her? Why boy, get in that car of yours and drive around. Every two-three pitchblack faces you see you’ll see at least one watered-down coffee-colored Negro. What you think made them that way? Laundry bleach? They’re not related to anyone but their ownselves, their own kind. Black has all tones, low and high, but there is only one white and make no mistake about that.”
“What about me?”
“What about you?”
“What am I?”
“A Yankee is what you sound like. Other than that, right watered down, I’d say. But listen here.”
“What?”
“Who knows where you are?”
“Nobody. My aunts, I guess. My father’s sisters.”
The old man nodded as if making a point. “And where is it you plan to stay?”
“I don’t know. There’s a hotel I guess.”
Mebane nodded. “All I have to do is step back inside and make a telephone call and you wouldn’t have a place to stay. All I’d have to say is you’re a colored trying to pass as white and you wouldn’t have a room. Or, I make one other call and there’s the law to escort you out of town while they offer up a little lecture about disturbing the peace. You following me all the way through this?”
“I guess I am.”
“It’s a problem though. If you were to go over into Fishtown where all the coloreds live, there wouldn’t be a one would want to talk to you. You wouldn’t find a place to stay over there either. In fact, you poked around enough, made enough people nervous, they’d do you as fine as our sheriff’s men would. Maybe finer. I don’t know what it is about Negroes but they like a knife. Maybe because it doesn’t make any noise. Not like a pistol which would tend to draw attention. But those people, all they’d see is a strange white boy who talks funny and is poking his nose in their business. And it wouldn’t even be you so much they fear as what you might bring with you, what might be traveling behind you, what you might not even know you’d be bringing with you. Because life over there works in different ways than you’ve ever seen life work And so you wouldn’t even know who was watching you and what they might think about you. But those people, those colored people, they’d know.”
