Proud Flesh (12 page)

Mrs. Shumlin peeked with one eye around the frame of a window. Clifford Renshaw sat as she had left him sitting, slumped on his milk stool with his forehead against the cow's flank. Mrs. Shumlin drew back, rested the back of her head against the wall, cupped one hand to her mouth and said in a voice not her own, “I am so worried about you, Son. I don't worry about the rest, only you. What will become of you when I am gone? Oh, Clifford, my poor boy, how will you manage all alone, with nobody to look after you?”

Mrs. Shumlin did not look in to see what effect she had produced. She ducked beneath the window ledge and scurried around the corner and along the wall and around the next corner to the window on the opposite side of the barn. There she crouched and peeked through a crack in the wall. Clifford Renshaw sat on his stool with his back to her looking in the direction from which she had spoken.

“I could go happy,” said Mrs. Shumlin with a sigh, “if I knew I was leaving you with somebody to take care of you.” That was all she had time to say, for Clifford spun on his stool to face her way. She saw his face darken with suspicion and his head toss and the aim of his eyes settle upon the spot where she was, and quitting that spot she scampered around to the far side of the barn. There she peeped through a crack and saw him leaning out the window where she had been and turning his head to look in both directions.

Mrs. Shumlin let go a long sigh of pain and regret that jerked him back inside and froze him with fear. “If only you had a wife. A good woman to look after you. One like that sweet little Mrs. Shumlin who lives down the road.”

Clifford came tiptoeing to the middle of the aisle that ran between the stanchions. He was darting his eyes all about in confusion, fear and mistrust. His expression was divided between disbelief, fear of being made a fool of, and shame at his disbelief. Mrs. Shumlin shifted around to the opposite side of the barn.

Releasing another pained sigh upon the air, Mrs. Shumlin said, “I don't know if she would have you but it would be nothing lost by asking. Don't give up if she says no at first. Keep after her.”

Again Clifford's brows knitted and his eyelids narrowed and he took steps her way, and again Mrs. Shumlin circled the barn.

This time when she spoke to his back he did not turn. Her voice had come to him from so many directions that now it seemed to be coming from all directions, from no direction at all, from out of the enveloping atmosphere. She said, “She is a pearl and if you could win her you would want to always let her have her own way in everything. Always take her side in any quarrel, even against your own brother. Let yourself be guided by her, for you know, Son, you haven't got much practical sense, and she has got a bushelful. I could go happy if I knew I was leaving you to her.”

She could probably have concluded her message in safety from that same spot. She had him entranced. He had given up looking for the source of the voice. He believed. But lest any last minute doubts assail him, she moved one last time. She fetched up her most heart-rending sigh yet. “That,” she said, “is your poor mother's last wish on this green earth of God's.”

His back was to her but she did not need to see his face. In the stoop of his shoulders, in the inclination of his head, in the hang of his arms, she could read unquestioning belief, unresisting submission.

Despite her efforts to get away unseen, Mrs. Shumlin was seen by Hugo Mattox on her way back from the Renshaw barn. Hugo rose from his place in the circle of men squatting beneath the pear tree and excused himself for just a minute and ran after Mrs. Shumlin.

“It wasn't a party,” said Hugo. “I guess you found that out, too. I'm sorry I said that. I wouldn't if I'd've known. Of course, I never said anything about my cotton and all that.” Hugo looked past Mrs. Shumlin to where a cow would have been if she had been leading a cow, and said, “I see you never took one of their cows like you said you was going to, either.”

Mrs. Shumlin tapped the tuft of Trixie's tail against the palm of her hand. “Hugo?” she said.

“Yes'm?”

“Hugo, I've been doing some thinking.” She gave the tuft of the cow's tail a couple of taps against her palm. “About what you told me. You say that when you seen that other car coming to wards you you winched your eyes.”

Hugo nodded, swallowed.

“And that when you opened them again you was clear across the road and everything was all over. Isn't that what you told me, Hugo?”

“Yes'm,” said Hugo.

“In short, you never seen what took place. Did you?”

Hugo shook his head, and swallowed.

“And the last time you seen my cow before winching your eyes her hind end was to wards you. Is that right, Hugo?”

Hugo nodded. “Yes'm,” he said.

The future Mrs. Renshaw gave the tuft of Hugo's cow's tail a final tap against her palm, then handed it to him. “I'll milk her for you this evening,” she said.

“I'll have to ask you to let me work it off in installments,” said Hugo.

“We'll work it out,” said Mrs. Shumlin.

“Thank you, Ma'am,” said Hugo. Then, “If it wouldn't be too much imposition I'd be much obliged to you if you would take in my wife and kids for the night, Mrs. Shumlin. Don't go to no trouble. Just make them down a pallet on the floor. Tell Audrey for me I'll see her and them just as soon as I can. I don't know just when to say I'll be able to get away. You see how it is. A man can't come and find folks setting up with their sick mother and not set with them, can he?” Hugo turned to look at the ring of men squatting beneath the pear tree. Permitting himself a shallow sigh, Hugo said, “Looks like this just ain't my day.”

XIV

The place he had chosen for privacy was the least private place in the house. Three times already he had been interrupted by somebody rattling the door wanting in. The room was hot and airless and stank from its last user before him.

Doing to yourself what he was doing drove you crazy, he used to be told in his high-school Physical Education class. Maybe it did in the long run; in the short run what drove you crazy was not doing it. He had learned that. Scared by what he was told, he had quit, and had fought off the temptation until he nearly went out of his mind, until he got stone-ache and swelled up and turned blue and then got sick, real belly-griping sick, throw-up sick. That was what he had been headed for today. Now he learned that in the long run the gym instructor had been right: doing this to yourself as a grown man drove you crazy. Crazy with solitude and shame.

Crazy with frustration, too. He had thought that, considering the state he was in when he finally gave in to the urge, it would be over with quickly. The remorse could come afterward, at least the operation itself would soon be over. But this sorry substitute was not what he craved. This joyless friction, far from cooling desire, only rubbed it to a heat. The real thing was what he craved. And now even in fantasy she fled from him, tantalized him, tormented him. Those images of her that had goaded him into this state flickered and faded away now that he required them to help him attain relief. Parts of her anatomy—clefts—globes dusky and smooth as the skin of plums—moved in and out of focus upon the projection screen of his mind. Upon that screen shone more vividly the image of a boy, himself—shame-ridden then, how much more so now!—seeking self-solace upon this same seat, behind the same locked door. Superimposed, like a double exposure, over this image: that of his dying mother lying unconscious now behind another door just down the hall.

He was growing more franric by the moment. Curses and pleas, desire and disgust, self-pity and self-loathing, opposites that like the polar charges which combine to make electricity, sent through him a constant current of shock, setting his every nerve jangling, every nerve-end burning with shame. Adding to his distress was the sense that what he was doing resembled in some way the real thing as he had come to know it. Even when he was with her he wanted something more than that, too, though he had that in every form it came in. She seemed never to care what he did to her in bed, certainly she never objected to anything he did, so he did everything there was to do. And even at the peak of his pleasure he wondered whether the very indifference with which she endured such treatment from him meant that she would do the same, did the same, with some other man (and him black)? This constant craving for sex, what was it but a craving for something which sex alone had not been able to gratify? He called it sex: the itch for more and more of it and in all the forbidden ways, that made his mind, that made the mind of most men his age, into a nonstop stag film; but he sensed that his frenzy and his perversities signified a longing for something more. He wanted to do things with her that degraded them both and united them in secret guilt. He wanted her to have no privacy from him, no self apart from him. What seemed to be sexual frenzy was a frantic desire to possess her very soul. He might even almost have been able to endure the thought that he shared her body with another man if he could have been sure her soul was his. He assaulted her body as though it were a fortress that he might break through to her soul in its fastness. He knew that assaulting her body, though he were to do it ten thousand times, was not the way to conquer and capture her soul. Yet he would make that futile assault ten thousand thousand times before he would acknowledge that the only possible way to gain her soul was to ask for it, offering his in return. The desires of his flesh and his heart's desire might be one and the same, but to him they were as different as black and white. Better to be a lecher than a lover if to be a lover was to be a niggerlover.

He could not go on with what he was doing, neither could he stop doing it. He was on the edge of frenzy, breakdown, shaking all over, his breathing so labored, so deep-drawn that the swelling of his chest brought it in contact with the razor that dangled on the string from around his neck.

He looked down with hatred at himself; his glance took in the razor. In an instant, with one swift surgical stroke, he could sever that malignant growth from him and be free. Free of longing, free of guilt, free of her and all her kind. This was for him the one fitting punishment, atonement, and deliverance. Expiation for his sins as a son, a husband, a father, and a white man, and lifelong deliverance from his thralldom to that thing, that growth, which never had been anything but a running sore since it first rose on him, never any pleasure except the pleasure of momentary relief from its incurable ache.

He felt that it had been done, and he felt purged, cleansed and whole, complete unto himself, independent of women, of neither sex and thus superior to both. It would be a rebirth. He would be unique. He would be self-engendered, unreproducible, as unsusceptible to low lusts as a marble statue, as smooth and neuter, as innocent and untroubled as a doll. He would be superhuman, made of flesh but beyond the temptations of the flesh.

He broke the string and swung open the blade and applied its edge to himself and instantly his courage deserted him, taking with it the last shred of his self-respect.

When the door rattled again he got up off the seat and flushed the bowl. He drew his drawers and his trousers up over the obstruction, and when the person outside had withdrawn to allow him to leave, slunk with his hands in his pockets down the hall and past the door behind which his mother lay dying.

XV

“That's the last one,” said Mrs. Murdoch, speaking not of the coconut custard pie she was removing from the oven of the great black baroque wood range, but of Ross Renshaw, whose arrival she had seen through the kitchen window.

“The last one that is going to come, anyway,” said Mrs. Garrett in an undertone.

“Ssh!”

“Poor Edwina,” said Mrs. Bywaters. “Poor woman. Poor soul. When my time comes to go I pray the Lord that I may have all my children and all my loved ones at my side. It is the one thing I ask.”

“Amen,” said a chorus of voices.

Then everybody's old Aunt Viola Mahaffey said, in that faint scratchy voice of hers like a worn-out phonograph record, “Amy.” The other women all turned deferentially to attend her. She folded down her left thumb. “Clifford.” Down went the index finger. “Clyde.” Down went the middle finger. “Hazel.” And she crumpled the withered digit which seemed to have been killed years ago, like a banded twig, by the big, loose-fitting gold ring. “Lois.” Her closed brown fist looked mummified.

Lean women with lined faces, looking so much alike as to be taken for relatives—which in fact many of them were if the connection was traced out fine enough. Certainly all of the same original stock, into which little outside blood had been transfused for a century and a half. All with that sinewy, dry, gallinaceous look of the prairie farmwoman, all with those work-stiffened hands with swollen knuckles like the joints on bamboo cane. With empty piepans, with folded newspapers, with handkerchiefs they fanned their reddened faces,
whish whish whish
, a sound like panting breath. Around the range for a space of ten feet the air was untouchable. The smell of hot spices, of nutmeg and cinnamon and cloves and vanilla extract, suffused the room.

“Ross,” said Aunt Viola, starting in now on the thumb of her right hand. “Gladys. Ballard. Lester.” Her little finger still stuck up, crooked, dry, withered. She bent it down. “And—”

“Ssh!”

“Ssh!”

“Ssh!”

“Ten of them,” said Mrs. Murdoch. “Like the fingers of the hands.”

“And her,” said Mrs. Bywaters, “like a person with a finger missing. Trying to keep it hidden from sight. And from her own sight. Braving it out before the world. Trying not to notice the itch. They say a missing limb itches. Not the stump, the limb itself. You can feel it in its old place, they say, itching. It's an itch that no scratching can ease.”