by Jeffrey Lent
“My father and his father were alike in their temperament. They were both men who, in the end, could not comprehend how to respond to the world. Both men who flailed as they grasped and so almost always came up holding the wrong stick. And they were both men of appetite, always hungry for something and unable to determine what that was so they chased after whatever might be right before them. And in between them was my uncle, Buchanan, who was steady as a pivot that could look both before and after and see what was coming and where it came from, see that and know also where it was headed, which neither of those other two could do. And so my grandfather could not stand my father who was the image of himself and loved his other son and my father could not stand his own father and loved his brother but hated him also with every pulse of his blood. And what’s important is to know that my uncle, Buchanan, knew how both the others felt about him and did not care. He did not have to care and not because he had the land and not because he had the money but because he had the other two, the elder and the younger, in thrall to him. He didn’t care if they would admit it or not. He knew. Now you see, we’re getting close on to what is evil. Not that he was evil itself. Evil is not a thing that just sums up in a man. No. It is a thread that begins to run in a small way and then falls down through the years and generations to gain weight as it goes.
“Now my father Caswell when he went off to the university he knew he was leaving the Cape Fear for good. He didn’t have to. He could’ve gone up and taken his degree and gone back to Wilmington and read law there and life would’ve been good for him where his name and people was known. Where there were plenty of other less fortunate sons in professions and trade that he would’ve done business with. But it was not his way. I can’t tell you the entire why of his wanting a fresh start in a new place but it’s something plenty of men do, have done and always will. At least some it’s safe to say was to put distance between himself and his brother and father. And so he looked around and found this place which needed a lawyer but was big enough so there was some town to it, and close enough to Raleigh so he could reach beyond Sweetboro without too great an effort. And he met my mother and took her down there to the big rice farm on the Cape Fear enough times so she thought she knew what she was getting and married him before she’d even heard of Sweetboro. And if it was not what she was expecting it was still not so shabby; it’s not always a bad thing to be exotic without having to make much effort at it. And she was not unaware that he had political intentions. Raleigh might’ve been upstart compared to Wilmington but she was a young woman and young women can point their noses into the wind better than most.
“So he built that house there in town which you would not know to look at but was a pretty nice place at the time. And they—Grandfather and Uncle Buchanan—sent up as a wedding present a pair of Negroes, an old woman to keep the house and an old man to tend the yard and horses. And my mother went right ahead and had my brother Spence and then a pair of girls, Audrey and Deborah. And somewhere along the time those girl babies were arriving my father decided more help was needed around the house, to keep up with all those babies, to help my mother. Now, he could’ve looked around the area and found some girl to suit. But he didn’t do that. Some men are unable to keep themselves out of where they shouldn’t be. What he did was, he sent down eight hundred dollars to his brother and asked for a girl to be sent up. Maybe he thought he would get a better deal that way. Eight hundred was not a lot for a strong healthy girl. And so there was Buchanan Mebane with a bank check for eight hundred dollars in his hand from his only brother.
“There’s been three hundred years of colored people owned by white people. There’s very few white boys that did not start out their manhood with a black girl. And there was some that would continue right on all their lives, without regard of their own wives and children. Some of those did it because they could. Because it was there and could not say no. Some kept on because it was a reach into some other life, something wild and unfettered missing in their own lives, regardless of how fettered it might be on the other end. And there was some, some few, who did it because they could not stop themselves, because their hearts bolted away from them. And the ones who did not, who left the colored women be after that first initiation or maybe even did not partake of that, they came down into two groups also. There was the ones who understood pure and simple that it was wrong. And there was the others who did not understand that but knew it was true. Do you understand the difference? To not do something because it’s wrong and not do the same thing because everyone else thinks it’s wrong?
“I do.” Foster, back on his heels, his legs asleep from his knees down, unable to move, his eyes on the face of the man seated above him.
Mebane said, “Coleman Mebane was one of those ones with the bolted heart. And his son, his heir, Buchanan, knew that about his father and hated him for it. I don’t have to tell you he was one who held himself above it all. Or if he had to rut on some girl you could bet it was a girl off in some corner hid well from everybody else. But there he stood. With that eight hundred dollars in his hand. And knowing his father and his brother were men from the same piece of work. With that softness of heart he so despised. You see, it was not like some men that would spread it around. Grandfather Coleman had just the one woman in her own little cabin down the end of the row of cabins and each one of those babies the same dun color as the next, not a one with a father different from the next.
“It was a good-sized place, sixteen hundred acres. And it was Buchanan’s. But that didn’t mean his father just sat off to the side of things. What that meant, for our story here, is that those dun-colored children were not just left down there at the end of the row. The boys were taught trades, smithing or wheel-wrighting, coopers, masons. The girls were all brought to the house. They did not work in the fields, those children. Well there was Uncle Buchanan, with that eight hundred dollars to commission household help for his brother. So with his genius for stabbing both ends from the middle, he picked out the middle girl, a pretty girl just fourteen years old called Helen and sent her upcountry to his brother. Half sister to the both of them and he sent her along, knowing somehow that his brother, my daddy, would not be able to refuse her and would not be able to refuse his own heart either, anymore than their own father had been able to do. Buchanan knew my father would hate that girl and love her too and hate himself for both and so poison himself. Would love her because he could not help it and hate himself for allowing what he could not help. It was poison perfect, innocent if untouched. So he sent her off. Everything his brother had asked for. And I do not fail to blame my father. As I said, some part of him must’ve known it would be that way. You do not ask the man who chopped off your foot if your hand is sound as well.”
Foster was flat down on the peastone gravel now, cross-legged, his hands loose in his lap, open. He had not seen his dogs in some time and it seemed terribly important that he locate them but he would not look away from the old man. Who sat with his palm capped over his cane-crook, looking down at him. He wrapped his tongue around the inside of his cheeks for moisture and wetted his lips and said, “So my grandmother then: she was not only half sister to you. But her own mother was half sister to her father. Is that right?”
Mebane looked away from him then. Peering off into the sky above the empty shell of hospital. Without looking back he said, “It is blood-soaked. All of it is. Already now and more in years to come what we will recall is the big event of it. What people did to other people. But it will all be turned into something abstract, removed from each of us. Both colored and white I expect. I seen it happening already with G T Kress. And what will be forgot is the small everyday things that made it real. Because each man has to contribute someway to keep such a flimsy tent aloft. But once it is down we all can step away from it and say it was the other fellow—the other fellow that pitched it in the first place and the other fellow as well that helped hold it up. And so we walk away from it, from the ruins of it. And it
will never be made right. It will never be repaired. Because some things are beyond repair. Those things that need it most, it’s beyond the scope of man to do the job. Because all we’re up to, most of the time, is trying to get a little bit back of what we think we lost. It’s human nature. We could flourish I guess. But it will not happen. Perhaps because in our hearts we don’t deserve it. Perhaps because it’s easier to lie between the legs of that dark sister than to call her by name.”
“Is that what you told her,” Foster asked, his voice rasped thick, “when she came back down looking for her mother. Is that what you told my grandmother?”
Mebane looked back at him. Foster had to look around the hand on the cane tip to see his face. As he watched, the hand clenched hard and the old man stood. Way up over him, looking down. Dry-skinned in the heat of the day, his face blotched with color, blanched and ripe at once. Then he turned away and went down the gravel path between the graves, a tall lean figure bent to one side, the sunlight soft as bathwater over him, the cane stabbing out hard and angry ahead. As he went he called back without turning his head. “No. I did not tell her that. I did not. I was a coward, what I was. I did no better than my father or any of them before him.”
He did not look back again but kept on going and Foster watched him until he reached the car and once there Mebane stood, his one hand holding on to the side of the car, his back still to Foster. Foster could see him breathing, the small hump of his shoulders rising and falling within his back. He looked away from the old man, down at the ground beneath him. He raked his fingers through the gravel, the stones smooth against his fingers. Then he stood. Once up, he rocked from side to side and stamped his feet against the earth. Ran a hand through his hair, down over his face. The muscles of his cheeks and jaw tight as drawn bolts. He looked out away from the files of headstones toward the pine-stand beyond the fence. The light there in sharp angles between the trees. He whistled for his dogs.
They rode back silent to town: the old man slumped down against the seat and doorframe, his face turned to catch the wind through the window, his pale stringy hair blown up away from the stretched-paper skin of his skull in some awful halo; Foster driving one-handed, his right arm draped across the seat down into the back where his hand rested on one of his dogs, driving through the deadstill middle of the afternoon where even the muledrawn wagons they passed seemed to swim in the dust, the mules trudging each step with a sideways yaw as if belabored more by the strike of the heat than the load behind. Foster no longer raising a hand in greeting to the black men driving the loads, no longer able to see them as other working men but recognizing that they inhabited landscape unknowable to him, one that he could not penetrate regardless of what blood he shared with any of them or not; it was not blood anymore than it was the common shares of dreams and hopes and fears that bonded them but rather the dark bay of the soul that the one race had opened unhindered upon the other. Slavery he knew then was not the whips and chains of the school history books, not the breaking apart of families or the unending driving labor but some stain far greater and deeper, something that had been unleashed and then bloomed up, between and within at once, both races, white and black, forever without surcease, tenacious, untouchable and unchangeable. And wondered how a man might know this and go on. And for the first time since driving up to the farmhouse in Vermont and seeing the face of his aunt come out the open door he thought he understood something of his father. And he thought then, That is how it’s done, how we go on; we make it personal because we can bear that. And recalled Mebane saying something like that and looked over at the old man as if to see something of himself there. But this man was a stranger to him, in a way that other old man, that faded yellow ferocious old man on the parlor wall a thousand miles away would never be. And Foster then also thought Don’t be so sure.
He parked in the alley and opened the gate in the back fence for Alex Mebane and left the old man to make his way unaided to the house while Foster opened the trunk of the Chrysler and fed the dogs tinned meat out of there, sitting on the seat with the door open and his feet out in the sand of the alley under the speckled shade of the live oaks as the dogs wolfed the gray meat from a shared tin plate. Then he let them into the yard and worked the pump to fill their bucket with fresh water. He brought in the tin water can from the car and filled that also at the pump, wanting things as much in order as he could make them. He refilled the bucket for the dogs and watched as they switched ends of the yard from earlier to lie up in the shade now against the side of the unused barn. Then he went quiet into the house.
Alex Mebane was asleep in the padded rocking chair in the dining room, his head tilted back, mouth open. Foster stepped back into the kitchen and let the quiet door swing shut. He took a tin basin down from a nail in the kitchen wall and carried that and a bar of handsoap from the sink out to the pump where he filled the basin and then on to the cabin. Where he closed the door against the bright light and stood in the dim dull heat and washed himself and then stepped back into his trousers but left his feet and chest bare and lay down on his back on the sleeping bag, sweating again where he’d just washed but thinking he might not smell as strong.
Then he stood again and went to call the dogs in and close the door. He wanted them with him. They came fast as if they’d been waiting for him. Glow circled around up on the tick and lay where his head had been. Lovey, older, wiser, went straight to the hearth and stretched out there, disregarding the snakeskin for the cool old bricks. Foster lay back down, pushing the young dog away, not wanting the heat of her against him. Both dogs speckled with the green triangular pods of beggar-lice. There was a steel-toothed comb in the Chrysler that he needed to run through them. He closed his eyes, a great stripped-down fatigue over him. He felt he should leave the place he was in. He could not get away from the sense of some unknown looming event, some disaster before him. But knew also he was not done here. He did not trust any of this but could not step away from it. It could be the heat. It could even, he thought, be everything all at once come down on him. He was lonely, with a pain that spread out from his chest throughout his body. He laid his hands open on his belly and breathed the closed dread air of the little shut-up miserable cabin, his eyes closed; the room around him burned into him as if he had spent winter nights by lantern light memorizing each split and splinter in the squared-log walls, each pouch and pout of the clay-mud daub between the logs, each smokestain on the stone chimney, each grease stain on the hearth. The air itself he sucked into his lungs, air that had been expelled by those before him: dense, wet, close, only just enough to live on.
When he woke the light through the now open door was pale, quivering with dusk, and he came up startled with her sitting there beside him on the bed watching him and as he cried out in fear he knew who she was. She did not move when he called out, did not shrink from his abrupt fear. Sitting sideways at his waist, wearing a pale green skirt with a white blouse open at her neck where a fine gold chain fell holding a slender gold cross. Glow lying alongside her thigh, the dog’s head up on top of the skirt. Two sets of eyes watching him. His first clear thought how close her sex was to his and how little there was in between and his penis moved inside his trousers and he stayed sitting up, putting his hands down in his lap. His face a foot from hers.
“You haven’t been lying here all day sleeping waiting for me.” It was not a question.
“Daphne,” he said.
“That’s better,” she said. “Just the sight of me should not make you scream.”
“I was startled was all.”
“That’s all right. I don’t mind that.”
“Oh shoot. Boy I was asleep.” He wanted to kiss her. He said, “That’s what I hear.”
“What do you hear?”
“That you don’t mind startling people.”
“That’s true enough. Up to a point. But you’re aiming at some detail. You want to fill me in?”
“I spent the day with Alex Mebane. He took me fo
r a little trip. And talked the whole time through it.”
“I see,” she said. “So, you’re learning what you came after. That’s good, isn’t it? But you’re not being straight with me, Foster. Foster? I thought maybe we understood each other.”
“Maybe we do,” he said. “But I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”
She spouted her lips and blew air at him. “What else is there? But you hold on and back up. I want to know what you heard. About me.”
“Isn’t that the way it is? We always need to know about ourselves first.”
“Well shoot boy. What’s the alternative?” And she grinned at him.
“I don’t know.”
And she heard the despair in his voice and she was quiet a long moment. She did not move away or toward him but she looked at him close. Then she said, “I don’t guess there is one.”
He said, “I heard about you over at the college. Riding that mule.”
She sighed. “I always felt bad about that mule. He didn’t want to go. I had to get off him and break a branch off a bush to whip him on with. I never thought it was because he knew it was wrong. I just figured he knew it was the wrong time of day to have to work at all. It was so early in the morning. A mule knows what time is his and what time is not.” And she grinned at him.
“Seems to me, you wearing only some kind of toga made out of a sheet, even a mule would be happy to rouse himself to carry you.”
“Is that what he told you? Well, I had a slip on. My underwear. I was not jaybird naked.”
He reached for her face. She stood up. “Are these your dogs?”
“This here is Glow and that one is Lovey. They’re English setters.”
“I know what they are. They’re pretty.”
