Homeplace (26 page)

“Looks like you’re settling in pretty good,” he said to her once, as she sang to herself putting away the supper dishes. “Looking less like a plucked canary that lit on a live wire.”

“I take it that’s a compliment,” Mike said.

Her father made the cracked sound that might mean mirth or annoyance and commented no more on her manner or appearance. But she knew that she had, somehow, pleased him a trifle.

Well, she thought, why not? Nothing wrong with a little of this whatever it is spilling over on him. It’s certainly not like he was going to get attached to me. And I can’t just pretend nothing has changed. It has. I think I may actually be happy.

She was, or as near it as she could remember being. She sang in the honeysuckle-freighted mornings and laughed at DeeDee’s scandalized face when her free breasts under the soft T-shirts and blouses drew stares in the A&P, that last bastion of Lycra and underwiring in Lytton. Since resuming her affair with Bayard Sewell, she had given up wearing underwear entirely, loving the feeling of her clothing rubbing her sensitized skin, imagining, with slightly caught breath, how the places that they brushed would feel when his hands touched them again. She did not care who noticed that she was naked under her clothes.

Mike had observed early on that there was a strict social striation in the grocery shopping habits of Lytton. The industrious mornings were the province of pant-suited, boned, stockinged, and permanented middle-aged women with four-door family sedans and proper lists, while in the hot, indolent afternoons battalions of younger women in shorts and slacks and rubber flip-flops and plastic curlers boiled into the stores, towing shoals of piping, grasping children. Nighttime was when the blacks came. She saw few people she had known before. Once the phenomenon would have engaged
her journalist’s sensibilities like an anthropological study. Now it merely amused her, especially when she noticed that several of the morning women seemed to be whispering together about her as she passed with DeeDee.

“This is where old panty girdles and dress shields go to die,” she teased her sister. “Relax, Dee. I could go into purdah and it wouldn’t change anything; they’re going to talk about me anyway. Better my underwear—or lack thereof—today than my wild indiscretion of yesteryear. I think I’ll ask that lady with the face like a boiled egg where they keep the condoms. They’ll think I’m getting it on with J.W. and that should keep them happy all summer.”

“That sorry business back then has almost died down now,” DeeDee snapped. “Why on earth you have to parade half-naked all over town and stir it up again I don’t know.”

“Lytton has other things to do besides talk about you, Mike,” Priss Comfort told her when Mike recounted the mornings at the A&P with glee. “Half the town is newcomers these days, or kids too young to remember you. They don’t see Mike Winship, free spirit, up to her old tricks. They see a skinny middle-aged lady with hair like a gone-to-seed dandelion in the grocery store, with her tits bouncing. Sorry to disappoint you. And it’s not as if you needed a bra, anyhow. Couple of Band-Aids would do just as well.”

“I love you, Priss,” Mike gasped through helpless laughter. “You never once let me get away with anything, not even when I was eight years old.”

“Which is exactly how you’re acting now,” Priss said. “For God’s sake, put on some underwear so poor DeeDee can hold her head up in the produce department.”

In the morning kitchen, now, she looked at Sam Canaday with sharpened attention.

“What are you doing here in the middle of the day?” she said. “I’ve hardly ever seen you in the daylight.”

“I’m going to take your dad to the doctor in East Point,” he said, “Didn’t Lavinia tell you?”

“I haven’t seen Lavinia this morning. She’d left for an appointment at her son’s school when I got downstairs. What’s the matter with my father?”

“He’s been having some pain, Mrs. Lester says. Keeping him up nights. I’ve been wondering when it would start. His doctor said he might get lucky and miss the pain, but that’s bullshit; did you ever know a cancer that didn’t hurt sooner or later? It’s probably been hurting him a good bit longer than he’ll admit, and God knows how bad it really is. His regular doctor’s appointment is next week anyway, so I thought this time I’d take him and talk to the doctor myself. J.W. usually drives him, and the doctor won’t tell him anything.”

“Why on earth didn’t he tell
me
if he needed to go to the doctor?” Mike said. “Or why didn’t Mrs. Lester? It’s my place to take him; it’s one of the reasons I came down here. I can’t let it take your time like this …”

“No problem,” Sam Canaday said easily. “He wouldn’t let Lavinia tell you, so don’t jump on her about it. He said he didn’t want to disturb you. He says you’re doing some writing in your room, and he doesn’t want to bother the genius at work. I take that to mean that he’s very proud of you. I didn’t know you were working on anything—that’s good news.”

“I … well, just fiddling around a little,” Mike mumbled, embarrassed and annoyed at her father, Lavinia Lester, and Sam Canaday. She did not like lying and did it poorly. “Who on earth told him that, anyway?”

“I gather Sewell did, or intimated as much, I didn’t hear him. I rarely have the pleasure of Mr. South Fulton’s company these days; he’s out and gone like a
scalded tomcat by the time I get here in the evenings. One would almost think he was avoiding me if one didn’t know better. Or that the Colonel was trying to keep us apart. I used to run into him some, but he’s apparently changed his visiting hours.”

Mike glared at him. “I doubt if he cares a tinker’s damn whether he sees you or not,” she said. “He’s got a new project going, and he’s had to change his routine a little. But he still sees Daddy when he can. He’s been very faithful.”

“He has that,” Sam said. “Faithful is just the word for Bayard Everett Sewell. Well, if he has what it takes to get you writing again, more power to him. Let him come at noon and stay till dinnertime. May one ask what it is you’re working on?”

“One may not,” Mike said, feeling the traitorous heat rising in her chest and neck. “It’s absolutely nothing; and it probably won’t ever turn into anything. Bay shouldn’t have … mentioned it.”

“Maybe not.” He looked at her keenly. “Well, I won’t press you about it. I’m glad to hear it, though, Mike. I mean that. And your dad is truly proud, even though you must know he’ll never tell you so. I’ll be eager to read the finished product.”

“Mmmm,” Mike said uncomfortably. She felt, for some reason, small and very guilty, for the first time in this house. Under the guilt she felt a crawling unease. She had been very careless; she had not known that her father was not feeling well, and she had not known that someone came into the house at least once a month to take him to the doctor. She should have made it her business to know those things.

“Will you be coming straight back after his appointment?” she asked briskly.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It depends on how he feels. He wants to go down and take a look at the homeplace, and I see no reason not to take him, if he
seems up to it. We can’t keep him away from it forever.”

“You know that’s just going to stir him up all over again,” Mike objected.

“For God’s sake, Mike, it’s his house,” Sam Canaday said. “Who has more right to go and see it when he wants to? Besides, what do
you
care? You said right off you don’t care what we did about it as long as you didn’t have to hear about it. I don’t imagine you’ve changed your mind.”

“You’re right, I haven’t,” she said, turning to leave the kitchen in irritation. There had been real warmth and approval in his voice and eyes when he was talking about her writing, but apparently warmth and approval were two things he could not long sustain, at least not with her. Now she would have to call Bayard Sewell at his office and stop him from coming to the house that afternoon; they could not risk an encounter with Sam Canaday. With her father out of the house, there was no reason for Bayard to be in it. She did not like calling his office, and he did not like her to do it. She was in her room with the door closed when she heard them leave the house, and shortly after that she heard the Toyota start up. She waited five more minutes and then called and left a message with Bayard Sewell’s secretary that Mr. Winship was not feeling well and could not have visitors that day. It was the emergency signal they had agreed upon.

“Never ask for me unless it’s a dire necessity,” he had cautioned her. “Old Dorothy Blair is the self-appointed stringer for all three major news networks.”

“Oh, that’s too bad, honey,” the redoubtable Miss Blair said to Mike when she phoned. “You tell your daddy we all hope he feels better real soon. And you come to see us, hear? I hear you’ve turned into a mighty pretty girl, but it looks like I’ll never get the chance to see for myself.”

“I will, thanks, Miss Blair,” Mike said, making a hideous grimace at the old woman over the telephone. “And I’ll tell Daddy you asked after him.”

“Old trout,” she said under her breath, sitting on the edge of her bed and staring out at the thick gray day. Then she shook her head. There had, after all, been nothing in Dorothy Blair’s voice but interest and kindness. The air was as sullen and freighted with unshed rain as a swollen cow’s udder, and the dropping barometric pressure combined with disappointment at not seeing Bayard Sewell that afternoon and unaccustomed shame at the lie she had told Sam Canaday about her writing to make her feel nervy and prowling with undischarged emotion. Why in God’s name had Bayard had to say she was writing? He could have said anything else; he could, preferably, have said nothing at all.

J.W. Cromie’s tall figure appeared around the corner of the garage, dragging the rotating lawn sprinkler, and on impulse Mike got up and went downstairs and wrapped the plate of fudge in plastic wrap and took it back to the back fence, where J.W. was setting up the sprinkler. She had paid as little notice to him as to anyone else except Bayard Sewell in the past weeks; could not, in fact, remember the last conversation she had had with him. The indignation she had felt at J.W.’s apparent espousal of, or at least collusion in, his own indenture to John Winship had, somehow, ceased to prickle at her. She supposed it was a part of the same overall gentling of her attitude toward Lytton and everything connected with it that the affair had precipitated. He turned at the sound of her footsteps, and she smiled and held out the platter.

“I made some fudge, and I can’t eat it all,” she said. “I thought I remembered you had an incorrigible sweet tooth.”

“Yes’m, sure do,” he said, and took the platter, looking
not quite into her face. “Appreciate it, sure do. I’ll have me a piece after I get this here sprinkler to going.”

He did not bend to set up the sprinkler, but did not say anything else, and she realized that he was waiting for her to end the encounter and go back into the house. She stood there with him in the hot, thick day, not sure what it was that she waited for, and then she took a deep breath and said, “I think I owe you an apology, J.W. That business with the sit-ins … it got you in a lot of trouble here, didn’t it? I never meant to do that.”

He sighed and put the platter down in the shade. Finally, he looked directly at her.

“No’m,” he said. “I know that. You done right by your lights. You meant to do good by me. Look like I just ain’t cut out for no liberation. Mama told me I ain’t.”

“But still—you made a start. J.W., you took the first step, you made a change in things. Why on earth did you just give up when things got a little tough in Atlanta and come back here? This is nowhere.”

“This here what I knows. This here really all I does know, Miss Mike. This suit me all right, I reckon.”

“You’re no more free right now than you were in 1964,” Mike said. “J.W., you could be
really
free by now; you could have …”

His head came up, and there was a brief flare of something savage in his opaque eyes.

“You ain’t ever thought what we s’pose to do after we free, is you? Yes’m, now I can order me anything I wants in any restaurant in the world. I just cain’t pay for it.”

“You have to
earn
it,” Mike cried. “You have to go somewhere else and
earn
it! My God, J.W., I did it. Look at … look at Charlayne Hunter Gault; she’s just our age; she got out; she earned herself a place …”

“I looks at Charlayne Hunter Gault a lot,” J.W. said fiercely and evenly. It was a tone she had never heard in his voice, not even before she had left home, twenty years before. “She had the whole movement behind her.”

“Well, it would have been behind you, too. That was the whole point of it.”

“No’m. Difference is, the movement be behind her an’ I be behind the movement. It a big difference, Miss Mike.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mike exploded. “Stop with the Miss Mike crap. I’m from this town just like you; the same folks were mad at me as were mad at you. And I don’t go around in sackcloth and ashes with my eyes on the ground, thanking them for the scraps from their tables. I give it right back to them.”

J.W. smiled. It was not a cheerful smile. It was feral, contemptuous. When he spoke, the slow, thick blackness was gone from his speech.

“Yeah, you from Lytton too. Just like me. Except you left it when it got hot, Mike. Ran right on out of here and married you a rich Yankee. Most of us, we had to stay. This was the only brier patch we had. And you don’t spray the brier patch with Agent Orange if you need it to hide in. What do you know about staying?”

She was silent. The unfairness of it smote her. She had had no choice—had she? Did he really think she had
chosen
to run? Then she said, “But why on earth did you come back to this house? To him? He was furious with you; don’t you see that this indentured servitude he’s put you in is his way of punishing you?”

He looked up at the big house, then back at her.

“He was good to Mama,” he said slowly. “To Mama and me both, when I was little. He’s still good to me lots of ways you don’t know about. I’m not going to forget that. Nothing that happened later can change that. This job he gave me, this place to stay … you
call it punishment. Looks more like … atonement to me. You can slap down a man’s punishment, and you should, but it’s a real sin to refuse his atonement. Looks to me like you doin’ a lot of slapping, Mike.”