Proud Flesh (3 page)

Whether they actually laid hands on Malcolm Beatty to avenge their cousin Claude (who certainly started the trouble that led to that bloody Saturday afternoon on the town's public square) was never known. It was generally accepted that Beatty had meant as part of his plan from the start to leap those four stories to his death. Be that as it may, he must certainly have been strengthened in his desperate resolve by the noise of those five lawless Renshaw brothers pounding on his office door.

Cousin Claude Renshaw, like all farmboys, was a shadetree mechanic, only Claude was better than most, a mechanical wizard, and left the farm on the strength of it, within a year was foreman of a garage in town and within another year owned it, within two more had bought out his nearest competitor, taken over the local Ford distributorship, then hired town people to do all the paper-work out front while he went back to what he loved: greasemonkeying. He had been seen once to lift an old roadster with one hand and slip the already jacked-up jack under the axle all for the admiration of one passing nameless wide-eyed little boy. A philanderer, he would have been astonished to hear a word of reproach from his wife, almost as astonished as she would have been at herself.

That Saturday afternoon—it was during another September, ginning season, and about a month since Malcolm Beatty had served public warning on him to stay away from Mrs. Beatty—Claude Renshaw came into the crowded square lying along the hood of a slowly moving car listening to the engine as a doctor listens to a sick man's heart. He would raise one black grimy hand and slow the driver, the owner of the car, to a walk, ignoring the gabble of horns—like a file of impatient geese—of the cars in the rear, then signal again to accelerate just a bit, directing with the finesse of an orchestra conductor. In this way, sounding like a wedding cortege, the file of cars progressed down the west side of the square headed south and came to the corner where along the curbstone the usual Saturday group of men squatted talking. The noise caused them all to look up, and the sight of Claude Renshaw lying along the hood prompted one of them to remark, as was later remembered, “I didn't know the season was open yet.”

At the corner the car turned and started up along the south side, enabling the traffic trailing behind to exit from the square, which it did with a parting angry hooting of horns. In the ensuing silence a sound broke overhead, lightninglike, crackling: a shot, a rifle shot, the sharp thin bark—unmistakable to all those vets, gun cranks, hunters, many of whom had themselves brought one back from the Pacific—of a Japanese Arisaka, oriental as a brass gong or the twang of a zither string. Down on the street an engine roared as if in pain. The car on the hood of which Claude Renshaw lay, shot forward, swerved, leaped the curb, flinging Claude into the air, hurtled across the sidewalk and through the throng of pedestrians and charged head on through the plate glass window of the Piggly-Wiggly. Emerging from the spray of glass, the car hit the checkout counter, queues of shoppers falling over one another like bowling pins. It bounced hard and rocked back, then the horn began to moan as the driver slumped over the wheel. The air went out of the two front tires and the front end sank as a dying animal sinks to its knees. The horn trailed off in hoarse diminuendo, died. Then it was seen that in the hood of the car was a blood-ringed bullethole. The hush strained and broke and the wounded and the shocked inside the store and outside on the walk groaned and wailed in chorus. So many people were bleeding from cuts about the head and arms, face and legs, that they appeared to have been caught in a sprinkle of bright red rain. The only person apparently unhurt was the driver of the car. They pulled him out, whimpering. Then it was recalled that as the car struck the curb the man riding on the hood, Claude Renshaw, had been thrown off. But Claude had not felt his fall. Entering behind the ear, the bullet had passed through his head and through the hood of the car, and the almost faceless thing that lay in the gutter amid the peanut hulls and the hot tamale shucks and tobacco juice was no longer Claude Renshaw, hardly seemed ever to have been.

Already one of Ma's boys, Ross, was on the scene. After one horrified look the crowd had sucked back with a gasp, and the corpse now lay in a pool of sunlight. Ross Renshaw crossed this space and stood looking down at the body of his kinsman. There he was joined by his brothers Ballard and Clyde. The fire siren could be heard starting to unwind in the distance, while from the nickelodeon in the deserted confectionery down the block came the whine of a balladier and the whang of a steel guitar. Shrieks and sobs rent the air as the injured were coaxed and led away. Now the crowd surged in once more, those in front clawing back but pushed forward despite themselves by those behind, the late arrivals who had yet to get their look.

The town's day constable arrived and made everybody stand back. Thus, luckily, no one was in the way when the second victim of the afternoon fell from the skies and broke on the paving stones six feet from the original corpse. Heads snapped up in outraged disbelief, and people saw hanging out the fourth floor windows across the panes of which was lettered in gold
MALCOLM O
.
BEATTY
,
GEN
'
L INSURANCE
, and peering impassively down upon the scene below, the faces of Clyde, Ross, Ballard, Clifford and Lester Renshaw.

III

MA IN CRITICAL CONDITION FOLLOWING HEART ATTACK HURRY HOME

Ernest Bates, the Western Union operator, read the message back across the counter in his toneless official voice. Then overhearing himself he looked over his glasses and said, “Oh! Ballard! I'm awful sorry, Son!”

Ballard Renshaw nodded briefly, scowling. “Here,” he said. “Here's the list of names to send it to,” laying down another sheet of paper and shooting a glare at old Will Mahaffey, busy composing a message at the far end of the counter.

Ernest read the list back to Ballard:

“Mrs. Ira Renshaw Parker, 4722 Eisenhower Drive, Waxahachie

Mrs. Laverne A. Goodman, 103 Harmony Lane, Nacogdoches

Mrs. B. T. Rideout, Mineola

Mrs. Lois Renshaw Baker, 227 John Birch Boulevard, Dallas

Mr. Ross Renshaw, % Tower Hotel, Mineral Wells

Mr. Lester Renshaw, % Blankenship, Grand Saline.”

Ernest looked up, and before he knew it, asked, “Is that all?”

“And was that all?” Will Mahaffey was asked.

Will nodded. “Ne'er a one of them wires,” he said, “went outside of the state of Texas.”

“How long is it since that one left home?”

“It's ten years.”

“Naw, it ain't. It's more like five.”

“It's more than five.”

“And he's never come back in all that while? Not even on Christmas?”

“Maybe he died.”

“They never have give it out that he did.”

“Maybe he died in some way they would sooner wasn't known.”

“He's not dead.”

“How do you know he's not?”

“You can tell.”

“How can you tell?”

“Tell by looking. You ever asked any of them how he's making out? The look they give you? He's alive, all right.”

“Maybe he is in the penitentiary. That would explain why they didn't wire him to come home to his mother. And why they don't much care to be asked about him.”

“He could be. Yes, that boy might very well have wound up in the penitentiary somewhere.”

“I always thought he would make out right well. If he would ever just put his mind to it.”

“Maybe he has. Maybe that explains it. Maybe he's risen to think he's too good for his folks, for his old hometown.”

“He would think he was too good for the town whether he made out well or not. He always thought that. They all think that.”

“Well, I can't say I liked that one any more than the rest of them, but still he ought to be told now about his ma. He has a right to know. Whoever's fault it was that he left home, that he's stayed away all these years, he's still a son, and even the worst son ought to be told when his ma is sick and like to die. Not to let him know is a sin and a shame. I would say the same to them, mean a bunch as they are. I would.”

“I would wait till they asked me if I was you.”

“Umh, and not hold my breath while I waited.”

So by the time Ballard and Derwent got back from town, neighbors and old friends of the family, some of whom had been among the men in town with cotton at the gins, others summoned no one knew how save through that instinct of country people for impending death, had begun to arrive. The men, in clean overalls and khakis, fresh, faded blue workshirts spotting darkly with sweat, squatted in the shade of the pear tree like frogs around a pond. Grave and decorous, they got slowly to their feet at the approach of the men of the family. Will Mahaffey was there and Will's boy Brother and Brother's twin boys Billybob and Billyjim. Prentiss Partloe was there; he doted on Mrs. Edwina, though she had decided once and for all thirty and more years ago, on the basis probably of a single harebrained boyhood prank, that Prentiss was not quite all there (his two terms' service in the State Legislature down in Austin was not calculated to alter her judgment), and had treated him accordingly ever since. Curtis Roberts, too, had come over, and even as they stood to greet the Renshaw men, another truck and another passenger sedan were heard rattling to a stop down the road. Tall, lean men, all of them, with brick-colored necks and faces, with pale, sun-bleached lashes and brows.

Ballard Renshaw greeted the men with a scowl and a wordless nod.

Curtis Roberts, speaking for all, said, “Boys, we are just as sorry as we can be to hear this terrible news. Youall know how we feel about Mrs. Edwina.” From the others came a murmur of agreement.

Ballard said, “Haven't youall got cotton to pick?”

“Never mind about our cotton,” said Prentiss. “It'll get picked when it gets picked. What does the doctor say, Bal?”

By way of answer Ballard turned his back and struck across the yard to the house. Derwent followed him, his white suit unendurably bright in the glare.

The men settled down to their vigil. More came. John Bywaters, Clifton Terry joined the group. John's wife went up the driveway toward the kitchen door carrying a roasting pan from under the cover of which, as it bounced to her step, a roll of steam escaped.

“Yes, yes,” sighed Calvin Sykes. “When their time comes the women have to go, same as the rest of us.”

The party line would be busy by now. The neighbor women came bringing the suppers they had been preparing for their own families when they heard the news. For it was their place to provide the evening's meal for their troubled neighbors, whether they liked them or not, as someday others would do for them. From the kitchen came no sound, yet on that very silence was borne the sense of solemn bustle, of a sorority of kindly, capable witches stirring pots, performing their traditional rites. Outside the kitchen door, around the chinaberry tree, the neighborhood Negroes, backdoor beneficiaries of all that food that went out of the kitchen, had begun to gather.

“The Lord is no gentleman, that's a fact,” said old man Tom Westfall, just arrived. “He cracks His whip over one and all alike, irregardless of sex.”

“In my opinion,” said Will Mahaffey, “the women do it better than us men. I have buried three, and I don't expect to go as graceful as e'er one of them when my turn comes, old as I am and living on borrowed time.”

“Edwina Renshaw won't go ladylike. She'll go, I reckon, if she just has to, but she won't like it.”

“Like it or lump it,” said old man Westfall, lowering himself creakily to his hunkers, “when your time is up you've got to go. Youth nor beauty nor tears nor all the money in the world nor five times five fighting sons can't buy nor bully nor wheedle you one minute more than your allotted span. Keep your satchel packed at all times and ready for the call. For the great day of reckoning will surely come, and then the Lord God Almighty will hold us each and every one up to the strong light and cull the bad from the good like candling eggs. He takes grannies and blushing brides, boys in first reader and young men at the plow, them still at the breast, them with their full set of teeth and them left to gum it as best they can. He can call you on Sunday or any day of the week, so be ready at all times. Be packed and ready to go. Be sure of today and you're sure of eternity, for none of us can be sure of tomorrow.”

“Amen.”

“Amen.”

“Amen.”

IV

By August the cottonfields have whitened as if the sun has reduced the earth to ashes. In September come the migrant workers and settle on them in a swarm. Bent black figures in clothes darkened and colorless with sweat, dragging their long bolster-shaped sacks behind them, they eat their way across the fields, white ahead of them, stripped bare and brown in their wake, like some plague of great white-bodied, black-headed caterpillars. Even the little children pick, emptying their towsacks and patched pillowcases into their mothers' and fathers' sacks at the end of the row, at the weighing-up.

They pick from dawn to dark, and while they pick they chant. It is like a broken record left to spin in the same worn groove. When finally a voice is raised in a new tune it is like when the phonograph needle is lifted and advanced beyond the break. After a while another break is reached. They inch along the rows more and more slowly as their sacks swell. Bit by bit black hands and arms, sticky with sweat, turn white from the lint that fills the air, clogs the nostrils, chokes the breath, sprouts white moustaches on sweaty lips, turns hair and eyebrows grizzled; and soon all of them, bent as they are, look hoary and stooped with age.

Trucks or trailers sit in the field, with extra-tall sideboards or with sides of stretched hogwire, and near each one stands a tripod of poles from which hangs the scale. There the sacks are dragged, doubled and hung by the ends to be weighed, the boss entering the figure in his daybook alongside the picker's name, and the picker himself, or herself, entering the figure in his sweat-dampened daybook—one of those given away to advertise snuff or farina or patent medicines. On Saturday afternoon after the final weighing-up they are paid their week's wages. Only on Sunday—and sometimes not then—does that lament of theirs cease, and then stillness settles upon the empty, glaring fields.