Proud Flesh (16 page)

Show me the way to go home. Home to that little bungalow, his wedding present, meant as a symbol to the world of Clyde Renshaw's respectability, and which she had so transformed that all it needed now was a red light over the door to look like a cathouse. Her destruction of that place had begun the first time she ever set foot in it. That was on her wedding night, when, unearned over the threshold by her bridegroom—she all but carrying him, in fact—she had kicked in the new screen door. He had sobered and fled. Between that first night and this one, of the nights he could remember at all, he could not remember how many he had spent here in the hayloft. As many as at home, at least. Sweltering in the heat of summer nights and shivering in the cold of winter ones. He used to sleep under bridges, in storefronts and backalleys, when he was single; now that he was married and had a home of his own he slept in the barn loft. That wedding night the lights had blazed in the bungalow while the crash of objects against the walls and through the windowpanes went on into the small hours. The broken panes she stuffed with wads of newspaper. Within days the back door was in tatters, the gate of the prim white picket fence hanging loose from its upper hinge, the trim little yard littered with trash. He had tried to keep a step behind her destruction, knowing that he, old drunk and stumblebum that he had been, still was, would get the blame for its deterioration, but she wrecked it faster than he could repair it. The anger and defiance that she had no one to take out on she vented upon the unresisting house. “Get this place looking right yet!” she would say through gritted teeth as she committed her latest act of vandalism. “Get this place to looking like what it is!”

That was the home he had gone to because he was tired and wanted to go to bed. He might have known she would pick tonight to devil him. She had come in at once, as he was stretching himself out on the couch, having decided to forego the bath and shave; she was wearing nothing but a petticoat through which neither brassiere nor underpants was visible. Humming a little tuneless tune, rolling her eyes and leering at him, she began to dance, slow and suggestive, twining her arms as if they longed to be filled with a partner. He was already groping for his clothes.

“If you are bashful,” she said, “then it's up to me to help you,” and she began to wriggle out of her petticoat like a snake shedding its skin, peeling it down from the top. In his shirt now, he was struggling to draw his pants on. “Don't be scared,” she whispered. “It's only little me. I won't hurt you. It's your little wife, your own little loving wife that you never have claimed yet.”

He dared not call her to her face the name which he was shouting at her in his mind. He dared not let her know that he knew what she was. He dared not let anybody know that he knew that. Clyde Renshaw would kill the man whom he suspected of knowing what Jug knew about his, Jug's, wife. He could not talk back to her at all. The only thing he could do, perishing for sleep as he was, was to get into his clothes as quick as he could and not risk being found by Clyde Renshaw with his shirttails out alone in the house with her naked. For naked she was now, just about, and saying, sneering, “Hangs on you like an old sock, I bet, don't it? I bet it wouldn't rise and stand if you was to play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.' When was the last time you got it up? Can you remember? Who was President?” And then standing before him bare and twenty in the pool of her petticoat while he struggled with his zipper, “Why, what is that I see? Can it be? Why, I do believe you is got some jizzum left in you, after all.”

XX

The man's naked body lay on the bed where it had fallen with blood gushing from the cut and the severed windpipe wheezing. Hers too wheezed now and down over her slate-colored breasts and in the parting of her breasts her blood ran red. She could see it with her eyes shut. Next time she must keep them open until they shut by themselves. Now she could see it with them shut.

He had just left and as she stood looking down at herself, at her body, naked now as it would be on that other night, and listening to him hurry across the porch in the dark, she knew that what she had done was a mistake. Not that it mattered tonight. Tonight was not the night. But not again. Better to have him right here in the house at the time, which from now on meant all the time. Not just better but essential. The thing that had been missing up to now. The thing that at last had broken that piece of twine on which the razor hung from around Clyde Renshaw's neck. Then it was like at the picture-show being shown in the prevues of coming attractions what you would be seeing later on.

If he had been hesitating to snap that string so that what would be an instant when the time came had lengthened into weeks, it was not for lack of the will to do it. He was no coward. Her man was no coward. He was a hero. During the war, in Germany, when he was hardly more than a boy, he had killed men by the carload for no cause at all. It was not mercy that had stayed his hand on that razor up to now. Expect more mercy from a cottonmouth moccasin than from that man. It was his fear of the publicity that had had to be overcome, and an instant was all the time there was to do it in. She herself could not then say to him, “Go ahead. Remember Jug”—not even if in that instant he permitted her to say anything. How, in that split second when he was not going to be able to remember anything, not even that his name was Clyde Renshaw, to make him remember her husband? Until now the best idea she had been able to come up with had been to have a picture taken of Jug and put it near the bed somewhere so he would see it, take it in, in that instant while he was hesitating. But he was not going to be in a state to take in anything. He was going to be blind with rage. But if he himself on his way to the bedroom had just the instant before passed Jug lying on the couch dead to the world then he would not need to be reminded of him. Just one question remained—one quickly answered: would her husband's being there right in the room next to them scare away this whatshisname? Not if she saw to it that her husband was out cold, and nothing could be easier than that. She must change her ways, beginning tomorrow. Must make a happier home life for her husband and keep him in with her at night. Give him plenty of what he liked best. She would see Ed Bing tomorrow.

Meanwhile never mind. Tonight let him sleep in the barn. Clyde Renshaw had other things on his mind tonight—if Clyde Renshaw could get his mind on other things even tonight—and would have for some time to come. But once the old lady was dead and the funeral over and everybody gone home and only her own folks and Mr. Clifford were left on the place, then he would not have to care so much about appearances. Then he was going to get a lot bolder. Especially if between now and then she never let him set eyes on her. She knew her man. He was a man—man enough for two. She hoped his old mother was a long time dying—let him get his battery really charged. She hoped so anyway—long and painful. She was not dead yet. If she had died then all the lights would be on up there instead of just one.

How everything that happened now seemed to fit into its place! This sickness of the old lady's: she had not expected that, yet now it seemed as if she had known to count on it. There was no longer any backing out, if there ever had been. It was going forward on its own momentum now. The neatness with which the pieces fit together, the logic with which one step led to the next, made it inevitable, irreversible.

Meanwhile knowing that the last piece of the puzzle had been found she could wait for it to happen with all the patience it might take. If not tonight, another night. If not with this one tonight then with one of the others, if she had to take them on one at a time until she had worked her way through the whole cottonpicking crew. If not this fall then next spring, if not next spring then next fall. The seed had been sown; now time would ripen it. Not even she could prevent it now, not even if she had wanted to. Past the time when it might have been aborted, it must grow in her now until it came to term. If she had conceived a monster, who was the father of it? For the act of love he might see to it that she took the pill, but against lovelessness there was no contraceptive.

Now knowing that it was all perfected she felt detached from it all, and a sort of cool excitement, like what she imagined must be the pleasure in playing chess, came to her in deciding the lives of the people in her life. In knowing that it would be she who was moving them on the board even after she was no longer here. It was a sense of power, and that was new to her—the first time she had ever felt a sense of power over the life of another person—the first time since Clyde Renshaw came into it that she had felt a sense of power over her own life.

Contrary to appearances, she was actually providing for her husband. Actually securing his future. Once the trial was over and Jug acquitted, Clyde Renshaw would have him attached to him for life like a ball and chain. If only Jug would have the sense to plead guilty. Never mind: his lawyer would enter a plea of guilty. Ironical to think that the only way for Jug to escape punishment for the crime which he was the last man on earth with any motive to commit was to stand up in court and declare that not only had he done it, he would do it again. She would have liked to be there to see that. What was more, Clyde was going to have Jug tied to him for longer than he might otherwise have had, for although he would go on trial for his life, Jug's life expectancy was actually going to be lengthened by his experience. Jug was going to take the cure, thanks to her, going to get dried out, whether he wanted to or not. Because it was going to take a while to find twelve men who had not already decided the case in Jug's favor, who, black or white, would not have done what Jug had done, or at least want the world to think they would have, and because (amazing how she could see it all, down to the last detail!) because in jail was where Jug was going to have to spend his time while waiting to come to trial, not out on bail. The only man who might have gone his bail, Clyde Renshaw, was not going to. He would not dare.

She knew this was not the night but just another night, yet she wished that fool would come on now and get it over with for tonight. It was getting late. In the big house the last light had gone out.

Would the moonlight shine on the bed like this that night? Shine on her body like this and on the unlucky fieldhand's who had been drawn into this net, as they stiffened there in their blood through the night while the drunken man with the blood on his hands slept on the couch in the next room and outside the white man kept watch, waiting for morning to come, making sure no one entered the house before him and discovered the crime and raised the cry? Would he be drawn in to look at the bodies once more? And would he know then that he had condemned himself to live until he died? That no matter how terrible his need he could never do as she had done. That even thirty years later, even following public disgrace and the loss of all hope, or suffering from some incurable disease, he still could not do it. There would still be people to remember and say that this proved those old whispers about that dead colored girl and the man she was found with in that cottage there on his place all those years ago.

It was as if she were standing now over the bloody bed and looking down at the mangled bodies and she pitied them both and wished she might have done something to save them. It was too late. It had always been too late, right from the start.

There was a schoolbus, but there had been incidents aboard it and while waiting for it, some name-calling, some rock-throwing, threats from the white upperclassmen, big football-squad farmboys, of worse things to come, so, in the pickup, Archie drove her to school in town each morning and came to get her each afternoon. She was waiting for him that day sitting on the schoolhouse steps with a group of boys her own color when Mr. Clyde drove up in his car. He said Archie was busy doing something that had to be finished before nightfall. He would drive her home today.

She got into the car and put her hand out the window to wave goodbye to the boys, and suddenly she knew that something was fixing to happen—fixing to happen to her. She saw it in those boys' faces and in the way they did not wave back to her. She did not know yet what it was but she knew it was already on its way toward her—like when a bird flies toward the shot already fired which the hunter has timed to meet it at a certain point in its path of flight. Something was fixing to happen to her, had already begun to happen. She did not just think so later on because of what had happened that day. She had seen something in those boys' faces that told her so, that made her stop eating the apple she was eating, saved from her lunch. The instant before she had been going along living the same life she had always lived; in those boys' faces she saw something that changed everything, that scared her and filled her with a feeling of … Homesickness. That was the only thing she could think to call it: homesickness. Looking back at them standing on the schoolhouse steps not waving to her as the car pulled away she felt like she imagined a person must feel on leaving home and being taken to another country where the people were of a different race and spoke a different language and looking back at her own people for the last time. She knew what those boys knew: that they were seeing her for the last time. She knew she had just spent her last day in school. She knew what was fixing to happen to her.

It was as if she had been given second sight. She saw it so clearly it was as if it had already happened. She was already changed by it. Nothing had happened, nothing had even been said, yet already she was a changed person, a stranger to her friends, to her family, to her people, a stranger to herself. And yet although it was as if it had already happened and she was now looking back on it, at the same time her mind was racing ahead trying to find some way to keep it from happening. I'll fight, she thought. I'll kick. I'll bite. I'll scream for help. I'll call Archie. Help, Archie!