by Jeffrey Lent
Foster shrugged. “It’s not anything to me. I told you my father worked those White Mountain resorts. Saw every kind and stripe. Warned me of it too.”
“There is plenty think I’m queer. But not the way you mean. A bale shy of a load is what they mean. But no, to answer your question. My own needs are unfulfilled and will always be that way. They are beyond the reach of life is what they are.”
His arm was what Foster thought he was speaking of. Foster pushed back his chair and stood, taking up his empty plate. He said, “I’m going to get a little more of this food. Can I bring you something?”
“Eat it all. I believe I’ve had enough of it.” He pushed his plate, still with dots of food, away from him. “What you can do is carry this into the kitchen for me. So I don’t have to sit looking at it.”
“I can do that.” Foster lifted up the other plate.
“What else you can do you’re out there in the kitchen? I could use a little drink. If I recall, down in the cabinet under the sink, back behind the bottles of soap and disinfectant and all that mess I don’t bother with anymore, back of all that I think you’ll find a fruit jar with a little corn liquor in it. You could bring that in to me along with a glass. Two, if you want some. I know you’re no stranger to it.”
Foster carried the plates through that silent door that each time he passed through left him feeling he’d moved some great distance he could only guess at. He set both plates down in the sink and then stood over the sink and with his hands ate three more pieces of the beef, the gravy thick on his hands, all of it ripe with seasoning. Then ate a biscuit and rinsed his hands. Looked out the window set in over the sink into the reflection of himself in the dark glass. Wondered how many times his grandmother had done the same thing. And her mother. And what they had seen looking back at them. He dried his hands on the old piece of sacking Mebane had used to wipe the plates. Took up the tin of leftover meat and gravy and stepped with it outside and stood silent a moment before his dogs came up out of the dusk. Then set the tin on the ground, pausing bent as they began to eat to run his hands over their backs. Unmindful of him, the dogs gulping at the food, swallowing pieces of beef whole without chewing, each wanting to get someway ahead of the other. Dogs knowing no one would wait for them to catch up, mother-daughter or not.
He went out across the yard and through the gate into the alley where the Chrysler was parked. He lifted out the backseat and opened the crate of liquor and brought out a bottle of his father’s hoarded scotch. Set that in the sand at his feet. Then opened the wood case holding the L. C. Smith and took it out and used the oiled rag laid flat in the bottom of the case to run over the gun. Then broke it open and reached again down into the backseat and rummaged for his vest and pulled free a pair of shells. No. 6 birdloads. It was what he had. He slid them into the gun and snapped it shut. With the shotgun in one hand he bent and carried the bottle of scotch with him back into the yard. At the slave cabin he went in and laid the shotgun upright in the corner by the head of the bed. Once the gun was laid up he slid his hand down to make sure the safety was off. His hands running over the gun in the dark an old familiar thing. Something known top to bottom. He could not say for sure why he wanted it there but knew he did. Something simple. The way you checked to make sure your shirt was tucked in before going in someplace. Then he took the bottle of whiskey and went back to the house. Passing Glow down on her stomach, her front paws pinning down the empty tin, her head up inside it. Her teeth scraping against the folds of soldered tin. Eating nothing but flavor. The scent of something.
There were jelly glasses on the drainboard but he left them there and went to the china safe and opened the wide double doors and peered in at the neat dust-ribboned stacks. Found a set of short squat tumblers and lifted down two in one hand. Light as holding a pair of postcards. He took them to the sink and rinsed and dried them, running the sacking rag over them until they shone bright in the light. And carried it all into the dining room. Again through that silent door.
He set the glasses on the table and made no show with the bottle but twisted off the seal and poured both glasses half full and set the bottle on the table and sat down. His chair now pushed a little back and to one side from Mebane. Without waiting he said, “My dad had a couple crates of this buried out back of the house. When he was killed I dug one up and brought it with me.”
Mebane leaned to peer at the bottle, took up the glass and sniffed at it, then sipped. “That’s the real thing, ain’t it.”
Foster drank off some of his own and immediately wished he’d brought cigarettes in with him. But went forward, where he was determined to go. He said, “I been thinking about all you had to say this afternoon. Up there in the cemetery. It was a pretty good job, seems like. I felt like I was being led around. But what I came after is why my grandmother came back down here after her mother and couldn’t find her and so went home where she was loved and needed and chose instead to walk up in the woods and kill herself. You haven’t told me one thing that gets close to explaining that. Why she did it. And what I think is if anybody knows it’s you. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that her daddy being her mother’s half brother or whatever the point of your story this afternoon was, it doesn’t make anything clearer to me.”
Mebane lifted his glass and sighted along the rim at eye level and then drank some. Put the glass down and looked at it. “In its way,” he said, “it was part of it.”
“Her part or your part?”
“Could be they’re much the same thing.”
Foster drained down his own glass and set it on the table and poured for himself from the bottle and turned to look at Mebane. “The way I heard it, when she got back home she kept talking to herself about some old man set up on a block with a rope around his neck and doused down with kerosene and set afire so he burned up until he jumped off the block to kill himself. You know what I’m talking about? Mister Mebane? Sir?”
Mebane sat silent gazing off across the table, into the piles of books and newspapers and old ledgers there as if it was a place he longed to go. He ran his one index finger around the rim of his glass without looking down at it. “I do.” His voice loose upon itself, a soft strangle. He added, “Mister Pelham. Sir.”
Foster said, “I didn’t intend to be rude.”
“A man can’t handle his whiskey hadn’t ought to drink.”
“I can handle it just fine. What’s giving me a problem is feeling like I’m in the middle of some old duck-and-dodge. I think I’m patient, otherwise.”
“But you have an end to that patience, is that what you’re telling me?”
“Everybody does, I guess.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No sir.” Then added, “Not yet.”
“Good,” said Mebane. He took up his whiskey and sipped. “Good for you Foster Pelham. You see, we’re beginning to understand each other.”
“I don’t see that.”
“Oh yes you do. It just hasn’t occurred to you that way yet.”
“Sir?”
“What there is between us is something not either one of us wants. But it’s here. It’s what we have.”
Foster was quiet.
Mebane filled up his glass and let it set on the old stained green blotter. As if he just wanted the glass full. He still had not looked at Foster. In the same quiet voice he said, “The man you’re talking about was called Peter. He was yardboy to my parents. And he took care of the driving horses and mostly except when my father got a burr under his butt did the driving for them. Now Peter was a horseman. This is something you need to know; most white people that owned Negroes would brag about them. If they wasn’t complaining. But it was all how good a cook this one was or how good with the children that one was or what a hand with the flowers or the horses.” Mebane looked then at Foster and held up his hand palm out flat. “Thing is, most of the time what we’re talking about is one people that elevated simple everyday skills to something special an
d appointed some of those other people to hold them. Not because the first people couldn’t have had those same skills, mostwise. But because it held the whole delicate balance a little more firmly. As if there were some things one set could do better than the other. What they disregarded was that it was a simple matter of what you have to do. If being treated well depends on how well you cook or fertilize a rose garden, then you’re going to do it well. And if you don’t have to do that, you can attribute some special level of skill to those who can. Most especially if you don’t have to know anything about it. If you can just set down and eat the food or walk through the garden and see how pretty it all is. You understand?”
Foster said nothing.
Mebane went on. “With that said, Peter was a horseman. Now, you have that automobile. Do you know anything of horses?”
“Not much.”
“You see? It’s a new world. All the time there are old worlds slipping away from us that we don’t even see going. What you’re here after is one old world, one thing, but there’s countless of them. Horses is one. Your children, their children certainly, will think there was never anything but motorcars. Yet they’re brand new. And behind them is ten thousand years of men and horses working together. Think about that. All going away. The horse will be a plaything in the world to come. And fewer and fewer will be the men who understand them, who know them down in their blood and sinew and sweat. I guess there will be men what know automobiles that way. I wouldn’t care to meet one. But forever, there have been horsemen. It’s not just grease and bearings and pistons and such. It’s the souls of two creatures that somehow line up. Link up. So one knows the other. The best of them, those horsemen, did not do well with people. But they could walk up to a strange horse and twist up its lower lip in one hand and lift the head to look up straight into that creature’s eye and talk to it and they would understand one another.”
“There’s men like that with dogs.”
“Ah yes, you’re the boy with the dogs. And some way you’re right. But allow this: Horses and dogs are different animals. It is the nature of a dog to bend to a man. It is not that way with a horse. A horse is a fragment more wild than a dog. There is always something in a horse’s eye we cannot see. Some place they look beyond us.”
“Dogs can be the same way. Good ones.”
“It’s the rare dog can kill you if you misstep.”
“All right.”
Mebane took up his whiskey and without pause drank it down. He said, “What happened to Peter was nothing of my doing. I didn’t even know about it until afterward. I was in bed at the time, insensible. I don’t remember any of it. All I know is what I learned later. But I will not lie to you. When I was awake enough to hear of it I was not unhappy. Not then. At that time it felt right to me. But I was not there. It was not me who called out for it, not me who stood by and watched. If I’d been able, would I have watched? Yes, I believe I would have. But it was not Peter I would have been watching. It was everything else. Things I would not have even known I was seeing then, the same as the men who did it. Most of them I guess. But I was not there. I was laid up in the bed.”
“Because she brained you with a flatiron is what I heard.”
Mebane lifted up the bottle and drank straight from it. He did not look at Foster. He tipped his head, the bad flowered ear toward Foster. His eyes still out in the dim reach of the room. The place, Foster guessed, where his eyes rested most of the time. “I was a boy. Younger than you. With my arm gone just three-four months. She stove in my head. And me already wounded. There was no one to look after me. No one that would tend to me. I was left to myself. I was alone. I still have dreams that soak the sheets and I wake from in a panic, right back there.”
“So who was it killed that old man Peter. And why him?”
“It was some few around. I was not among them.”
Foster nodded. “All right. But why?”
“Because it was him that helped her get away after she attacked me.”
Foster drank a little of his whiskey. Feeling now that he was firm-footed, following a way laid before him. He said, “How did they know that? That he helped her?”
Mebane looked down at the blotter before him. “When word got out what happened to me the men come up here and talked to Peter. I was not there. It was a wild hard time. These men come to talk to Peter, thinking he must know something of where she went, how she got away. A sixteen-year-old girl never been five miles from home before does not just pick up and disappear, not in the middle of everything coming apart. She had to have help, they knew that. But what happened, what I heard, was, instead of being a dumb nigger or a scared one or any kind they expected, not even a wild angry one, instead of any of that what I heard was old Peter stood out there in the yard, at the door of his little quarters up against the barn and in a voice so soft each and every one of those white men had to lean close to hear it, in that voice he told them they were evil, that the retribution of the Lord was loose upon the land and it would all end in blood and fire and sorrow for them and each one of them would walk the stones of eternity with the cup of their sorrows empty in their parched hands, their souls bound in the chains of their sins, the sins of their commission and the sins of their omission. It was quite a little speech and I guess those boys did not take well to it.”
“For somebody not there you seem to know it pretty good.”
“It got repeated to me. There was more I guess but that’s what I recall. And likely I’ve not even got that right. But the heart of it—that’s stayed with me.”
Foster did not ask who repeated Peter’s words. Instead he said, “If all she wanted was to run away why did she try to brain you with that flatiron?”
Mebane looked at him, looked away. Looked off. Then back at Foster, his face grim and tight, some old anger betraying the set of his face. Like his mouth was putrid he said, “You know why she did that.”
Foster sat silent. Like a trigger-line between his crotch and brain flared a sudden burst of images: Daphne first and rolled right over her was the idea of some other, some girl always there who could not say no. Whose no did not matter. As if some boil in him was lanced and spread through him. And understood the taint upon him and recalled also his father speaking to him once of women, bidding him to recall always that he once had a sister. And so because it was all he could say, all the authority he could claim, very softly said, “She was your sister.”
Mebane turned then, his mouth a pale working wretched line, his eyes a scrim of inflamed veins as he hitched his body sideways to face Foster. He said, “You’re not listening. Everything I’ve been trying to tell you is how we can find it in ourselves to let things exist or not. Of course she was my sister. And I knew that but did not admit it. The same way my father did not admit it, either about the girl that was his daughter or the girl’s mother that was his own sister. Anymore than my own mother would admit what she walked around in between each and every day. And all of that, all that just the small version under our own roof, but a piece of what all things were made up of. Can’t you understand that?”
Foster said, “Even if she hadn’t of been your sister—” And stopped.
“Don’t you rebuke me. You, out rolling around with that girl. Your own cousin. However distant you want to make it that fact remains. You see, you think it’s so far it can’t be traced, that it can’t touch you. It’s what we all do—we find a way to allow what we want but should not. It’s not so different, is it?”
Foster lifted up his glass and let whiskey onto his tongue and set it down and said, “I never asked her to do anything she didn’t want to do.”
Mebane was quiet then a time. Looked away from Foster, not off into the shadows of the room but down at the blotter before him. He closed his eyes and sat motionless. After a while Foster began to think he’d gone to sleep. He had the urge to rise and walk through the rest of the house. Through all the rooms, opening all the doors, cupboards and closets, all of it. Feeling
someway he had that right. Even feeling Mebane would maybe expect it of him. But did not move. He did not want to see the preserved unused rooms he knew lay down the hall and up the stairs. Did not want to see the rank or spare room where Mebane slept. Or the furniture, the ornaments, the pictures, the spent detritus of the lives before of this house. He wanted none of it. He felt up on tiptoes, poised, on view only to himself; he felt he was stronger for disregarding everything else and staying right where he was. He felt he could tear the house down with his bare hands and knew he would only walk away from it and leave it behind him. As a man walks, he thought.
Without stirring, somnolent, Mebane spoke. “I was a boy. Your age, a year younger I guess. But I did not know what you do. I was still wrapped up in childhood. I don’t know what it was. Perhaps it was the war. Perhaps it was just the way I was made. But for me that winter was all about what I had not done. And that had-not-done was all laid up alongside what I thought I ought to’ve done. And you see, that was all Spencer. Spencer in my mind. Dead Spencer. I could spend the night talking about the ways I tried to track after him. Because they was countless; they informed and re-formed each breath and thought and step I took. Now, is that just the younger brother or is it something else? How can you know? There is the example of my father and Uncle Buchanan. Who came to my father’s funeral and stood solemn and silent watching the earth get thrown in under a winter rain, not saying a word to me or anybody else that I could see. Him in his brushed wool overcoat with the rest of us arrayed in clothes three years outgrown. But him watching that box go down. Like maybe it was something he’d been waiting for.
“I was fifteen. My brother dead more than a year. Me alone in the house with an arm gone. And there was that girl there. Your grandmother. I can’t see her as a grandmother. All my life what I see is her long lean body and that bright sudden smile and the way she walked as if every ounce of her body walked all over an earth that was held away from me, was something I could not touch. You see? I’m not talking about a sister here. And there was this: She and Spencer adored each other. As a boy that was all I could see. It seemed he had something I did not. And, to be fair, he would not admit to me what it was between them. That took me most the rest of my life to learn. Because at the time he was a boy too. So what he told me was not the truth. It was what he wanted me to believe. No. It wasn’t even that. It was what he thought I should believe. But beyond all that there is a more simple truth. Spencer did not bother to see her but as his sister. Spencer was able to step away from all the rest of it. That’s what he would not tell me. Or anybody else. Except of course her and I guess he did not have to tell her. They both knew it. But he would talk otherwise to me. I guess he thought he was protecting her someway doing that. Keeping their tenderness hidden. He would see that as more dangerous than any empty brag he could come up with. Because when all around you is built up of lies then where do you allow the truth in? You cloak it is what you do. You hide it anyway you can. You do not think about how one lie may twist around and allow another. You have no choice. So I was an empty boy. I did not have what my brother had.”
