Beautiful Dreamer (3 page)

That night, he lay in that bed, tangled and matted with blood still, and watched the shadows trembling on the walls. The lamp hissed steadily and outside was a blanket of sound: rasping, croaking, sudden cries like someone screaming far away. He had to think. The pain was still there, but steady now, steady so that you knew it would fade in time. What wouldn't fade was those in town, those scattered in cabins hidden in the woods. He had to calculate whether they would leave him be. And if they wouldn't, well, what then? He had kin of a sort a hundred miles north but they never had truck with him or he with them. Still, they were family and if need be, well, they could give him a bed until he got himself work. But this was his place. It had been his father's place, too. Neither one of them had made anything of themselves, his father coughing through the night and finally giving up on it all and being taken into town to be buried. He remembered his mother, but not as anything much more than a shadow floating above him. He had a picture once, though heaven knows how they had been able to afford it as couldn't afford shoes or much else besides, including food. He had kept it a while but it had got lost and he didn't look at it so often that he noticed. Well, it was gone now and so were they, and all he had got was this cabin and an outhouse and neighbours who maybe wanted him dead. And how was he to get work now, after this? Cutting trees, working in the field, fixing fences, all depended on someone stopping by and asking him to come on over. No one was going to stop on by now.

Then there was the boy standing there with a rabbit in his hand, holding it up as a cat will lay a mouse before your feet to show what she can do. There was a piece of line around its neck, though it didn't look like a snare. Its head flopped down and he could see where it had been hit with a rock. So, the boy had got talent, knew what moved in the woods and how to make it move in his direction.

‘You done good. Skin and cook it. There's maybe some potatoes and a carrot in a box by the door.'

Maybe there were. To tell the truth, he couldn't remember. Living on his own, he bought when he had need and not otherwise and had no memory of whether there was anything to put along with the rabbit to make a stew, assuming the boy could skin as well as catch and cook as well as skin. One thing was sure, for the moment at least it was the boy would have to do everything. Come tomorrow or the next day and he could fend for himself, but come tomorrow or the next day and there might be more to worry about than finding potatoes and carrots and cooking with a rabbit or anything else. He glanced once more at his gun, still within reach, still with the power to resolve all his problems in one way or another.

*   *   *

The boy was in the kitchen. He had done well with the rabbit, except that there was nothing but a single carrot and a sweet potato and no salt, so it had been pretty thin eating. Even so, he would never have got by without him. And him a nigger, the thing they had named him for with their tyre brace heated in the fire.

‘You. Come on in,' he cried.

A chair scraped in the other room and in he came, carrying a stub of candle that he blew out since the lamp lit the place well enough, bringing a cloud of bugs and moths banging against the screen which was rusted in places so that some of them got through and fluttered up and down the lamp, sending shadows dancing over the newsprint, making the images in the magazines appear to move and stand out.

‘Sit yourself down.'

The boy sat.

‘Not there. Bring it round where I can see you. If you can't talk, I want to know if you're telling the truth. You know what the truth is, boy?'

The boy looked straight back at him, then slowly got up and dragged the chair round closer to the bed. He sat on it and it rocked a little where the joints were giving out.

The man eased himself on to his elbow.

‘You Johnson's boy?'

At first, the boy simply stared back, the light glistening on his eyes. Then he nodded his head.

‘You know what happened got me here like this?'

The boy shook his head.

‘Foolishness,' the man said, and lay back on the pillow, tired again, suddenly drained of the strength he had thought was coming back, the strength that seemed to flow through him with the rabbit stew.

‘It were at the store,' he said, though as much to himself as to the black boy sitting in this white man's house. ‘I were in for some nails. I were looking in the barrel and sorting them out and in he comes, in comes your father, not going round back like he must have known, like he did know, he should have done. He comes in and lets the screen door bang closed. She had been in back, Miss Emily, who I'd known at school all them summers ago and who was no good then, though she was only eight or some. She come in drying her hands with a cloth and looking across to me. I don't think she even saw him at first, not expecting to and so not noticing him standing there. I didn't say nothing. It weren't my job to say nothing. They made the rules, they could see they was kept to. Then she saw him all right and dropped the cloth she was so surprised. “What the hell you doing here?” she said, in a voice could crack eggs. “I've come for some seed, I thank you, mam.”

‘I swear she started to move toward the seeds before she realized what she was doing. Then she shouted out again, calling to her husband. “Harley, come in here. There's a nigger come in the front.” Then she picked up a rake. Could have been anything, but that just came first to hand. She picked it up and she walked toward him as if she were going to sweep him out of the store, as if it were no more than a brush, though the tines on that thing could take your eyes out.

‘I don't know that she knew what she was doing, but she pushed it in his face so he had to put his hand up and when she kept on pushing he twisted it out of her hands. Perhaps it was just the shock of it that made her fall, or perhaps she was leaning forward so that taking it away left her nothing else to do but tumble down. You listening?'

The boy sat as he had before, except he leaned forward a little, focused on the man in the bed, his chest cut up, his hand drawn together.

‘Anyway, just then in he comes and sees this nigger standing over his wife, the rake in his hands. “Rape,” she said, as if she didn't know what it meant, as if she thought it was what you said when any black man, any man, perhaps, lifted a hand against you. You understand what rape is, boy? You sure better because that's what they'll get you for just like they got your daddy.

‘“No,” I said. “Your wife made a swing at him. She just fell when he took it off her.” I don't know why I said it. It were no business of mine and, besides, what was he doing there when he should have been round back, knew he should have been round back?

‘“Rape,” she cries again. Then he gets smart, except too late, I guess. He turns around and opens the door, letting it go behind him and was down the road before her husband comes out with the gun. “It were an accident,” I says to him, and he swung around and I thought for a moment he was going to let me have it right there, right in the chest. “Nigger lover,” he said, and I could see his finger tightening on the trigger. Then he swung back and was out the door, but he was too late. Your daddy had got away. Only not for long, I guess, not for long.'

He reached out for the cup of water on the orange crate and swallowed it down. Then he lay back and looked up at the ceiling again. Something slithered across it and down the wall so fast you couldn't see what it was.

‘You there when it happened?'

He looked at the boy. His eyes were full of tears. They rolled down his black cheeks, glinting in the light of the lamp as though molten metal were flowing over pitch.

‘I guess you was. They told me some about it, you can be sure. They told me about it before they got to work on me. Not everything, though, as I guess. You don't have no mother, do you?'

The boy shook his head slowly, but he wasn't looking at the man any more. He was staring into space, staring at a wall full of words and pictures. He was somewhere else.

‘Took him out back, so they said, and shot both his legs out from under him, then strung him up. Strung him up, then let him down, then strung him up again. That's what they told me. All for going in the front door and not letting a woman, a woman with no more brains than a skunk, not letting a woman jab his eyes out. I lived here all my life and kept myself to myself. I don't have nothing against niggers. They keep theirselves to theirselves, too. My daddy thought they was no better than animals, but that was because his daddy could remember when they was slaves. Not for us. We never had that kind of money. But being slaves made people think they was animals. They got their lives, is all I think. I can't say as I would care to live alongside them, but there's lots of folk I wouldn't choose to live beside.'

And so he might have gone on, since talking proved to him that he was alive and recovering, and talking to himself was the only company he had had. But then he heard a sound he had never heard before, a wail that cut deeper than the white-hot wheel brace. It was the boy. He wasn't crying. He had simply opened his mouth and this sound had come from somewhere deep inside him to fill the room. The man made to say something but then could think of nothing to say. He relaxed back in the bed. Who would have thought niggers would take things so bad, he thought, and remembered what he tried hard not to remember, the death of his wife and what it did to him looking down at her as if it were impossible she could have gone away, impossible that what lay in the bed was no longer her but just a place where she had stayed a while.

After a time, the boy stopped the noise and they both listened to crickets and frogs and invisible creatures beyond the screen living their lives as though there were no such things as men and women who lived and died and were kind or cruel. After a while, he eased himself up on his elbow again.

‘Boy, I had nothing against your father and I got nothing against him now, even though he brought me this trouble. I know who's at fault here and it weren't him, except that he should have known better than to go through the front door.' He stopped, unsure why he was saying what he was saying. Then he continued. ‘Give me the box down in the corner over yonder. Pass it over to me.'

The boy followed his gaze to a shoebox with a fine silt of dust on it. He got up slowly, as if all the strength had left him, and bent down to the box. He could see how nobody had looked at it for a long time. There were loops of spider's web attaching it to the wall. He picked it up, brushing the web with his hand, and took it across to the man before sitting again. The man swept his good hand over the top, clearing away the dust, and then opened it carefully. He looked at it as if deciding what to do and then slowly took the contents out one by one, laying them on the soiled sheet. He looked at them again for a time and then picked up a small glass jar and eased the top off.

‘Cream,' he said. ‘For the hands.' He plunged two fingers into the off-white mixture and sniffed at it. The boy could smell the perfume. It reminded him of a flower, though he couldn't remember which. The man smelt it, too, and he wasn't smelling it to see if it was still good. He was smelling the past, so that for a moment it wasn't the past any more. Then he smoothed it gently on his other hand, the hand that was still closed and tightening. It seemed to ease him somewhat because he lifted the cloth from his chest and began to smooth it over the letter burnt into his chest, the letter which was black but which now shone yellow-white in the lamplight. The letter ‘N'. The boy looked at it.

‘You know what that stand for?' asked the man. ‘That stand for you. That stand for “Nigger”. Only there was supposed to be another letter. An “L”. It was supposed to spell out “Nigger Lover”, only they never got to finish it. Not that time, at least, because someone come along and they weren't so brave that they were willing to stay around and be seen for who they were. What you think of that? You like that written on you?'

Then he paused as a thought came to him.

‘I don't suppose you need it. You already got it written on you and you can no more get it off than I can. But they no different. I guess they don't need nothing written on them for folks to know what they are. You just look at them and you know.'

He went back to putting the cream on and then eased the top back on the jar, twisting it so it would fit back again. The room smelt of flowers. He had seen his wife put the cream on to soften her hands and he figured that if it could do that for her, it could maybe soften the harsh brittleness of his scabs.

‘You best be going.'

The boy looked at him, an old man, no doubt, as it seemed to him, face scraped as though they had pulled him along the road, scabs forming down his cheeks and on his nose.

‘Get back to your kin.'

The boy did not move. They stared at one another as if they could hope to understand each other, one black, one white, one young, one who would never see fifty again, never see anything again since it was past and gone and there was little he cared to recall.

‘You can't stay here. How can you stay here? Look around. Nothing here for you.' Then remembering there was doubtless nothing elsewhere either, his father strung up in front of him and him lucky not to follow. What stopped them? They didn't usually stop, just went on killing until it was all out of them, whatever it was took them over, and wouldn't be satisfied until there were bodies swinging like Spanish moss from the trees. He shrugged. Time enough tomorrow.

‘Find yourself somewhere out back. You're not sleeping in here.'

The boy got up now, glancing back at the man in the bed as if to confirm what he had said. Then he was gone, though what he would find was beyond him since all there was was the kitchen or maybe outside on the porch where anyone passing might see him. But who would pass by here, unless those others came back? And if they did, it would be to finish their work anyway and a black boy lying on the porch would make no difference.