Proud Flesh (34 page)

“You see that crowd?” the Sheriff had said to Mr. Tom Gibbs, who was pressing him to go in shooting if necessary and evict the Renshaws from his cold storage vault. “Every one of them has got, or had, a mother.”

“Every one of them's got a vote, too, haven't they?” said Mr. Gibbs.

“They got that too,” the Sheriff cheerfully conceded.

The generating plant which supplied the power, a complex of turbines and louvered cooling towers, stood detached from the ice house, enclosed by a high cyclone fence with a padlocked gate to which Mr. Gibbs had the key. No knowing how long ago he had pulled the switch. The vault was steadily defrosting. It was still cold in there but not as cold as it had been.

In this TV reporter, the Devil had an advocate. A town man, he was embarrassed by the hillbilly holy-roller mentality here on display. That psychiatrist would have found an ally in him. Upon a number of members of the audience, especially those who had come from afar to get here, he had tried out his line that the woman in the storm cellar was simply sick. It was well known that she had done what she claimed to have done. She was sick.

Well, yes, uh-huh, they had heard something like that said. And they tried to see around him to the cellar mound.

Now he was beginning to lose patience and to show his annoyance with them for not giving him any argument. “Don't you believe that if she was guilty of killing her own mother the authorities would come and take her out of there and prefer charges against her?”

“You would surely think they would do that, wouldn't you? Yes, sir, you would surely think they would.”

Now he had stopped the man who had just come down off the mound. This was the second one of those whom he had tried to interview. The first one he had approached as he reached the ground and, holding out his microphone, had chased him clear to the edge of the crowd. The man was not refusing to be interviewed; he did not know that anybody was trying to interview him. He was in a trance. So was this one now: in a trance, a transport, exalted by the experience of having disburdened his conscience down that culvert pipe. Which so exasperated the reporter that he said, “Listen here. That woman in there is sick. Mentally sick. She no more killed her mother than you did.” The camera was on him. And what the viewer saw was the face of a man who might have just been talking to a man who had killed his mother.

It was not that any of the family expected Ballard and Lester to succeed in their quest. Even Clifford knew the world better than that. They would have been insulted by the suggestion that they were so backward as to believe their brothers were going to accomplish their impossible mission. Except that anybody who made such a suggestion would deserve rather to be pitied for his own backwardness. And for having so entirely missed the point. Ballard and Lester were not there to succeed but just to do their best. And yet the others, all but him, did at least half believe they might succeed, and such devices as the sky-writing raised their hopes. Although Lester admitted their having gotten the idea from an ad for Life Savers, it was smart of them to adopt it, and their having chosen the lunch hour, when workers were out of their offices and on the streets, showed that while they might be two country boys in the big city for the first time, they had observed its ways pretty closely. It was attention-getting—it had even gotten a write-up in the next morning's
New York Times
—Lester had sent them a clipping—and where could you buy more advertising space than the skies of New York City? For over two hours, according to Lester, it had hung there, growing bigger all the while as the letters lengthened. But although it may have sent others with the same Christian name hurrying home, to Kyle Renshaw, if he was there, and if he had been out on the street that day at lunchtime, and if he had looked up to see what everybody was looking at, the message
KYLE COME HOME MA IS DYING
was not a call but a warning. Clyde alone could have told them all this but he could not tell them because he would have had to tell them how he knew.

He had traveled. He had seen the world. He had seen just enough of Cardiff and London, Casablanca, Algiers, Palermo, Naples, Rome, Paris and Berlin to dislike them one and all. In none of these, though, had he felt more out of place, and of none did the memory tease and torment him more than New York City, where he went on a three-day pass just before being shipped overseas.

So of all the Renshaws none was more ashamed than he of his baby brother's leaving home. To the feeling that Kyle was an unnatural son and brother they had all superadded the belief that he was a traitor to his birthplace, which they would not have felt if he had left home for New Orleans or Memphis or even San Francisco. An odor of implication clung to the entire family which had a member “up North.” None, though, was as scandalized by Kyle's choice of his place of expatriation as Clyde. For, remembering the things he himself had done during his three days there—or able, that is to say, to remember some of them and from these to guess at the rest—Clyde knew as none of the others could know what their brother was up to, what had ensnared him and kept him from ever returning home or communicating with the family again. Some of the others, who disapproved of New York City no less for this, thought of it as a place where their brother might have risen to a station in life from which he could look down upon them. Clyde knew it as a place where a man might sink completely out of sight.

Clyde knew that Ballard and Lester were never going to find their brother, and he dared not tell the rest why. He could not tell the others because against that suspicion they would have defended even Kyle, and from the person who had voiced the suspicion, even their own brother, they would have recoiled in disgust. Acting upon the same prejudice, Ballard and Lester were going to look everywhere except the one section where Kyle might be found, and this section they were specifically going to rule out of consideration. Whatever else he might be—undutiful son, renegade brother, traitor—Kyle Renshaw was still a white man and a Southerner.

Clyde had penetrated regions where neither Ballard nor Lester nor any other Renshaw had entered. Among the sons of—and with one dusky daughter of—Africa, Clyde had explored the jungle in the depths of his own soul. And he envisaged in darkest Harlem a vast preserve where a man might raven unrestrained. Lost in there and gone native, probably under an assumed name, was Kyle Renshaw.… Those thick lips, pouting with passion, those heavy-lidded liquid eyes, the white shading off into ivory, those broad nostrils dilated with desire, firm bodies smooth as onyx, redolent either of provocative perfume or the quick musk of their responsive glands—white women, after a man had known the other, were as dry and insipid as the white meat of chicken compared with the dark juiciness of the thigh.

That until recently was how Clyde had explained his brother Kyle's long absence from home. Now he had another explanation, similar but different. You could enjoy all that up there and, by detouring around your conscience, still come back home. You could stay at home and do it. He had. There was no place of exile from which there was no way back home—if you were alone. Even to himself Clyde had to say this in a whisper: Kyle had married one. Maybe was raising a family.

“Naw, sir, excuse me, not meaning to give you a short answer, but no, I won't tell you my name nor where I come from nor just what I said to that little lady down there in that cellar.” At last the TV reporter had managed to stop one of the mound-mounters as he reached ground. One he could not get the mike away from. “But I will say this. I am a man that did wrong. I give myself up and was tried and found guilty and sentenced to life. After making license plates for twenty-one years the new governor pardoned me. I had paid off my debt to society. Trouble was, I couldn't pardon myself. I still didn't feel purged. I joined one congregation after another. Watchtower, Churchachrist, Pentacostals: I tried them all. Whenever I heard of some new preacher I'd throw up my work and go a hundred miles. What I could never find was one I could say to myself, he knows what I'm talking about because he's been through it. Ask God's forgiveness, that's all any of them had to say to me. He will forgive you. And that's a fact, He will. It's about like pleading guilty by mail to a parking fine. Today's preachers have gentled God down to where He's about on a par with Santa Claus. To get you into church these days they're ready to give you Green Stamps at the door. What I would like to say to all the folks watching out there on their TV sets, if you have gone from denomination to denomination and preacher to preacher and had them all put you off with words like they done me, then here is the place for you. I got more relief from telling about myself to that little lady down there all alone in the ground than I ever got from all them preachers put together. What did she say to me that give me such comfort? Nothing. Not a word. Not one word. What a comfort there is in silence! Not one lying cheerful word come up that drainpipe. Just a kind of steady low moan. More understanding in that moan, Mister, than in a month of Sunday sermons! Jesus wept, but that was a long time ago. We need somebody to weep for us now. All of us, I ain't the only one. Mister, if poor suffering sinful humankind is ever to learn to live on this earth it'll be when a living saint comes among us that instead of suffering for us or because of us, suffers with us. I say we have got just such a saint among us right now. I say she's sitting right this minute down there alone in her living tomb.”

That would do it. That would draw them. That was all that was needed. Billy Graham might as well go back to peddling Fuller brushes. He could see them already, coming up the road like a line of ants: every faith-faddist, every chronic cultist, every spiritual hypochondriac—every
body!
—in the land. It was what the world was waiting for—a faith for the times—and here was its Jerusalem. A faith for our times: confession without absolution. Group guilt. Nobody believed in absolution any more but everybody had more of an urge to confess than ever—maybe that was the reason. Everybody was simply busting with things to confess. Ride on an airplane to anywhere and you were barely off the ground before the person seated next to you was confiding everything you hadn't asked about himself. First class or economy—made no difference. And never make the mistake of trying to cheer one up by making light of his self-indictment. Nothing offends a man more—though your aim was to help ease his conscience—than to have his sins belittled. Of nothing is a man more vain than of a bad conscience—so long as he has got nothing really bad on it. Their sins were the only thing that made them interesting to themselves. Absolve them and they would have nothing left.

Not hope, but release from the fretfulness of hope: that was what people came here seeking. A strange new kind of cult, this that had sprung up around his deified sister. One that worshiped a god who instead of rising preferred the tomb. Who instead of offering her followers hope and life offered them despair and death. It must suit the longing of the times: in this short while they had multiplied like a mold around that mound. The hordes of the hopeless, that was what they could look forward to having descend upon them.

Shug's face appeared on the screen and just as quickly was gone.

It was as if he had never seen her before. Was that just the surprise and the novelty of seeing her on the television screen? Was it because she was unconscious of being seen? Or was it her expression that made the sight of her so poignant, an expression of sorrow which he had never seen on her face before and which he could still see in his mind? Perhaps it was all these things. In any case, it was as if he were seeing her for the first time.

Had none of the others, not even watchful Wanda, heard his gasp? His panting, the hammering of his heart—how could they sit there watching television and not rush to his aid? Surely he was dying. No, he was not dying, though he might be better off dead. He was not dying. Just that when a man rounds a corner and collides with himself going full tilt in the opposite direction, he does get the wind knocked out of him.

He felt like crying, “Foul!” Only where would he find a referee who would rule that a foul blow was one above the belt, a blow to the heart?

In that instant his doubts about whether Shug was deceiving him were resolved. She was. You learn that you want something when you learn that you cannot have it. She was not his; the breaking of his heart told him so. He put his hand upon it, and he felt the grim reassurance of his razor.

He saw then what was so engrossing to the others that they had not heard even his stricken groan. They were watching as he, on the screen, got up from his place in the crowd and made his way down to the mound. Not “years hence.” Not “hence” at all. Not even now as he watched, but already—yesterday, when this was filmed. Just as he had always feared, always known he would, he had done it without knowing it.

He watched himself mount the steps of the mound, as in a trance, and sink to his knees before the culvert pipe. Useless to hold his hands over his ears. Had he had as many hands as a Hindu statue they would not have been enough to keep him from hearing himself say down that pipe that he loved a nigger. No getting off light; he must confess it all. “Don't think I mean just—” And for a moment he had not known how to put it, he who had never been at a loss for a word for that before. “Just that I go to bed with her,” he said, his head bowed with shame. It took all his breath to say it, but he said it. “I love her.” Horrified silence came up the pipe from below, and he nodded in assent. “The joke's on me, Amy,” he said. “A little black slut that I took without so much as a by your leave, who isn't even faithful to me but deceives me with one of my own fieldhands, and I have to go and fall in love with her.” Before rising to go he said, “I know I don't deserve any pity. I don't ask for any. I don't want any. I'm here to confess, not to complain. But, Sister, isn't it a rotten piece of luck!”