by Jeffrey Lent
Foster put his hands in his pockets. “When she came down here in 1890 she didn’t stay very long. Went right back home—where she wouldn’t talk about what happened, what she learned. But it was something bad. Because they heard her talking to herself about it. When she thought there wasn’t anybody around. Then one day in November of that year she hanged herself.”
For the first time Alexander Mebane looked away from him. Down through the porch railings into the long shade of afternoon over the ruined gardens, his eyes glazing there as if seeking something, his thin lips working, silent. His hand wrapped around the cane handle. He lifted the cane and thumped the tip hard twice against the porch boards. Then he looked back at Foster.
“Tell me one thing about yourself, Foster Pelham.”
“What’s that?”
“As a man, are you practical? Or romantic? By nature.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what difference you’d make between them.”
“Well now. A practical man would be thinking he might get something out of all this. Might find a way to turn it to his advantage. A romantic man, on the other hand, he wouldn’t care. He’d already know what he wanted out of it. His blood would be up. He’d already have featured it all out and would go along so it fit his plans. Some kind of revenge, some kind of reckoning.”
“I don’t think I’m either one.”
“What is it then you want?”
Now Foster looked away. At the hot car where his dogs waited. Back at the old fierce man with the cane. “I just want to know what happened is all. That’s all I’m after.”
“I see. A poet.”
“No sir. I’m just after the truth.”
Alexander Mebane smiled at him then. He twisted the cane handle in his hand and the cane rose up in an elaborate loop, then back down. Foster did not smile back; there was a tremble in him that he was breathing over. Mebane lost his smile and ran his eyes up and down over Foster. The way a woman would. Or someone seeking some own lost self. Then he kicked the screen door back and stepped out to hold it open. He said, “Pawn captures bishop. I can’t stand like this. Come inside.”
Foster behind him, Alexander Mebane turned off the hall into what had once been a dining room, the table still there and the sideboards and the chairs lined against the wall but also bookcases built in between the sideboards and a pair of castered spring-backed captain’s chairs pulled up to the table which was covered but for a small bare space with stacks of books and magazines and newspapers; also a green blotter on a leather pad and a stack of ledgers. The bare space held a linen place mat and a blackened silver napkin ring with a piece of dirty fabric stuffed through it. The mat and the smudged surface of the table littered with crumbs of food.
Mebane said, “There’s no peace in this life is what it is. It’s why we stretch out our hands toward heaven. But all the same, a man can’t stop. Well now that’s not right—plenty do. But it’s not those ones we’re concerned with here, is it Foster Pelham? It’s the rest of you, that keep always hauling your way ahead, thinking if you get one more thing, one more bit of understanding, one more question answered, one more confusion cleared up, then maybe you’ll get it here on earth—that peace, I mean.”
And he turned sudden, quick, spinning the cane tip before him. Foster was close behind him to follow what he was saying. He stopped short, stepping back. Mebane smiled again at him, used the cane tip to prod back one of the rolling chairs and sank into it. He pointed the cane at the other chair. “Sit,” he said.
The walls an ancient faded mustard with the teardrops of waterstains. A persian carpet worn down to a heavy corduroy crisscross of threads lay over wide heart-pine plank flooring. Thick drapes the color of moss pulled partway back to let in some light of the afternoon, the windows behind them shut tight, the glass discolored. A crane-necked electric lamp was lit on the table. The air in the room unmoving, smothered with so many layers of odor over so many years that it had become its own thing—soft not sour, near fragrant.
As if seeing the room as Foster would Alexander Mebane said, “For years and years I had a woman in every day but Sunday to cook and clean. Then one evening I was eating the dinner she’d laid out for me and her in the kitchen waiting for me to finish so she could clean up after me and I stopped eating, put my fork right down and got up and went into the kitchen and I asked her, ‘Millie do you need this job?’ She looked right at me and told me someone had to look after me. I told her it wasn’t so. That I wasn’t about to starve to death and the rest of it could fall down around me for all I cared but it seemed ignorant to be sitting in there at more dinner than I’d eat in three days while a woman ten years older than I sat waiting in the kitchen. She sat there looking at me while I said all that, not agreeing but not looking away either. So I asked her again if she needed the job. If she needed the money. And she told me she didn’t. Since then I’ve done on my own, looked after myself. It may look poor and sad to you as it does to some others but I’m happy with it.”
“Wouldn’t she already have quit,” Foster said, “if she didn’t need the job?”
“The money you mean.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No, I don’t believe so. Some people would have. But with her it was something else also. More than habit or pride too. Some part of her had come to know herself as the woman who worked for me. Of course she took the money home with her, spent some part of it too I’d guess. Most everybody needs more money than what they have. But that wasn’t the point that night in the kitchen and she knew it too. All I was asking was did she want her time all for herself. And she did. I sent an envelope of cash over there every year at Christmas until she died three years ago but that isn’t the point. It wasn’t for me and it wasn’t for her. And we both knew that.”
Foster sat with his hands folded together in his lap. “You’re saying she felt bound to you someway and you set her loose from that.”
“See now, you’re making a leap all the way from one end to the other. It’s true that if I hadn’t done that she’d most surely kept on working for me until she died or grew too sick to work. But all I can tell you is she realized I’d had enough. What she said that night when the dishes were done and she had on her coat and shawl for the walk home, was, ‘You get sick of it, don’t call on me.’ She’d seen the mess a man can make sinking into his own self. Which is what I wanted and intended and she knew it. So don’t confuse that with either meanness or bigheartedness on my part. It wasn’t neither one.”
“I don’t know why you’re telling me all this,” Foster said. “Unless it’s part of some complicated excuse for something else you’ve got to tell me.”
Mebane looked at him, his old-man’s mouth a dry purse. The amusement in his eyes dry also. He said, as if trying it out or as if it might even be humorous, “A man is the sum of his parts.”
“Maybe,” said Foster. “I don’t know. Seems to me though, the last one who could do that sum would be the one involved.”
“Who else? Who else would know?”
“I don’t know. The ones around you maybe.”
“No. Because every man is at least two men. One of those known only to himself.”
“Maybe.”
“Listen: The same time as Millie I had a yardboy. Great big man over six feet but he could work his way weeding through a flower bed as if he floated over it. Now, he was a young man, in his thirties. With a wife and family. So it was very much the money to him. Good lord, Fred Fox, hands on him like a set of hams and black as Piney Woods pitch. And he stood pleading with me when I let him go. But all that first season, an evening or two a week he’d come by and work on the flowers out front. Push the little lawn mower out back. Trying to keep things up, keep them right. Because he knew that was how they were supposed to be. I’d go out and tell him, ‘Fred, if you keep working here then I have to keep paying you and I don’t want to keep paying you so you have to stop working here.’ He’d tell me he didn’t want the money, just keepi
ng things up. I told him I didn’t want things kept up. Finally I warned him I’d call the police and have him picked up for a trespass. He just stood looking at me, brushed the dirt off his hands onto the front of his pants and told me have a good evening. That was the end of that.”
“So letting those people worked for you go, that was just some way of making a change for yourself. Is that it?”
“Maybe.” Alexander Mebane grinned at him, the same sly grin as earlier on the porch. “Maybe I was just running out of money.”
“I told you I wasn’t after anything like that.”
“They’s not any Mebanes left to speak of,” the old man went on as if answering a question. “Now you get down around Wilmington, below on the Cape Fear, there’s plenty of second and third cousins three and four times removed that have the name but they’re nothing to me. They’d be as much a stranger if one walked in the door as you are. I haven’t been down there since I was a boy, since before the war, and don’t expect or want to go back there, not in this lifetime. My one brother was killed at Petersburg and both my sisters are dead too; one went to Raleigh and married there and raised up a boy and three girls but not one of them’s a Mebane by name or nature and the other sister stayed right here and married a farmer called Pettigrew and there’s children from that and children of those children but except for the one crazy one I don’t see much of them either. It’s a drifting falling-apart end of the line is what it is, here. My daddy somehow picked this little plot of nowhere to hang his shingle and drag along my mother who was from Raleigh and thought she was getting better than what she got. He snuggled in tight with the government during the war and was doing fine for himself but he was a man couldn’t see around a corner that wasn’t even there. When Lee quit and then Johnston my daddy had near ever cent of his money tied up in Jeff Davis bonds that went from being a wild hope to something you could light a cigar with if you was fortunate enough to afford a cigar which he was less and less able to do. After the war, men—and men with less connections and ability than my daddy—they had to make themselves all over again. When the Yankees and coloreds was running things just after the war he threw his luck in with what was left of the old ways and it went against him and then when the Yankees pulled out and left us to sort things out ourselves he made a stab at sidling up to the Negroes but by then it had all shifted around and his old cronies were on the rise again, except they’d watched him spin and they left him right out there. Dangling. Where he’d got himself. It wasn’t anything he didn’t deserve but it was hard on my mother. There was her house in Raleigh and this place here and that was pretty much it. After she died it took everything I could do to hold on to this place, settling old debts and such. There was more than one banker who looked the other way on her account. Out of pity for her, out of contempt for my daddy. Who of course in his sensible selfish way managed to die a good ten years before her. There was still a cigarbox of those old useless bonds in his desk we found after the funeral. But that was about it.
“Not that I’ve done much better. I read a little law too and did my best, as a young man. But my heart was never in it. The law is an ideal superseded by a structure. I just have never been much of one for finding my way around a structure. No sir, I was not much of a hand at being a lawyer. I was the one always taking on the cases without a prayer or a dime, those I couldn’t win. Especially of course those are the ones can’t be won. It doesn’t matter if they should be or not. The law is not about should-be’s. I counted up my pennies and spent two years writing letters pursuing a war pension. I had the luck to have an arm gone and even more luck that there was a hospital record someone finally found in Virginia and so after those two years I got that pension. Which I can’t tell you in all honesty arm or no arm that I deserve. But money comes each month out of Washington D.C. and I take a small pleasure in that. As if it’s some balance against my dead brother. Or it could even be nothing more than plain old everyday greed. Getting what I can get. I truly don’t care, either way. But there. Just so you know. In case you were sitting up there in New Hampshire with dreams of some fine plantation, some life waiting for you. All it is, is a old bitter man in a falling-down house.”
“I told you. All I want’s to find out what happened here.”
Alexander Mebane leaned forward, the mechanism of the captain’s chair crying for oil. “What’s the matter with you,” he asked. “Don’t you have any imagination?”
“No sir. Not the way you’re thinking. All I know is, back behind my own father, and his two sisters, what happened in their lives all comes someway out of what happened to their mother. And nobody knows what that was. At least not much about it. Because it happened here. Not there.”
“What kind of man was your grandfather?”
“I did not know him. My father left there young and never went back. I don’t know if there was a problem with him and his father; I don’t think so. I think his problem was his mother hanging herself. He was just a little boy. His sisters, my aunts, they admired their father. What I can tell, he was a good man. I know he loved my grandmother something fierce.”
“Did he?”
“Yes sir, he did.”
“There you go.” Alexander Mebane paused and looked away from Foster. After a time looked back. “I remember your grandmother.”
“Yes sir.”
“Both from when she went away the first time and the time you mentioned. When she came back but did not stay.”
Foster sat quiet. Mebane studied him, the thin eyebrows almost invisible above his large eyes, eyes set out in the tight shining skin of his head. The room was grown hot as the quickened early autumn westering sun slid down the outside of the house beyond the filmed windows. Pale bars, unsteady, aqueous, slid over the threadbare carpet, a deep glow on the old heartpine planks. Foster was tired, hot, his eyes and throat sore. He watched the old man across from him as if watching some new species rise up before him. Attractive and repulsive at once, a dense and self-laid pattern of traps, some set, some perhaps already sprung. Thinking this, he took his eyes away from the old man. He wondered what was in the stack of ledgers, the pens laid out in a stand, the ink capped tight. As if they were the only valued things in the room.
Mebane gripped his cane in a sharp sudden gesture and came upright, the chair rolling back some inches as he stood. As if the man and two objects were conducting practiced ritual. “Come follow me,” he said and did not wait but crossed the room not to the hall but to a single door with no handle but a brass plate turned black against the heavy old wood. With Foster behind him Mebane turned his shoulder against the door to nudge it open and it floated back on old hinges and stuck open and Foster passed through and saw the door would open in either direction where the spring-loaded hinges would hold it open for a moment before it would slip silently shut again. They were in the kitchen. The door so people could go silent from the kitchen into the dining room and back into the kitchen again, leaving behind plates and bowls of food and then be gone.
They went through the kitchen. A big double-oven range, its cold top heavy with dust and stacked up with utensils and baskets and iron cookware and other objects. There was a square thick-planked table in the center of the room. This table was empty, discolored in places, scarred. On a counter by a sink was a small steel portable cooker with a pair of electric coils. The drainboard by the sink held a single glass, a single plate. An electric toaster was also on the counter circled by crumbs of darkened bread.
They went through an outside door and down short steps into the backyard. Ahead to the left was a square-timbered mud-chinked one-story building with a rock chimney at one end and a single window offset from the door let into the center of the building. There were no steps up but a single flat stone before the shut door. The building was raised on foundation ranks of stones at the corners. The other end of the yard stood a small two-story barn. The yard was flat here, not terraced like the front. A small garden patch with burned-out vegetables grown u
p with weeds. A rotting plank fence enclosed the yard, the fence overgrown with honeysuckle. As if the woven vines held the punked planks in place.
The sun a watery red egg huge in dull haze coming through the live oaks beyond the yard.
Mebane strode through the spindle grass, sweeping the cane before him, the stalks cracking as the cane-tip smote them. His gait rocking and steady at once. As if he moved in gravity unlike other men. Foster followed him up to the low cabin, the whitewash peeling off the timbers in curls and blisters. Mebane stopped before the door and lifted his cane and brought it down upon the door, right above where a hole was cut through the door, the hole worn into a teardrop from years of working a leather latchstring. The string was gone. Mebane prodded with the cane and the door swung in.
“Right here is where she was born: your grandmother. Right here is where she lived until she was sixteen years old. With her mother and another old colored woman. The three of them stuffed inside of here. Summer days it must’ve been a little on the close side. You think about it. My daddy coming out here time to time after his pleasure. Nights I’d guess. Summer nights. Hot and rank in these nigger cabins. It makes you think. He must’ve someway liked the smell. Can you imagine that?”
