Proud Flesh (8 page)

Watching himself constantly as he had to do for fear of giving himself away, he was all the more alarmed whenever others noticed something about him that he himself had not noticed. Thus when somebody remarked recently that he had lost weight, was looking thin, only then did he realize that he had had no appetite for weeks. Anybody who didn't know the facts of the case would have thought he was lovesick. How else could a man diagnose those symptoms when, being a man, he had suffered through them dozens of times in life, beginning when he was only a boy? That heaviness of breath, that pressure on the heart, that listlessness, that loss of interest in things, that ceaseless ache of body and mind, that longing. And how could a man in those periods of self-absorption and absentmindedness hope to disguise the symptoms of his sickness? He remembered how his mother, and even more his sisters, had always known what was ailing him, had sometimes known even before he knew himself. “What's her name, Clyde?” they would ask. And although he denied everything, they had a way of guessing the girl's name and soon were teasing him with it mercilessly. Could they still smell out his condition? Could they still guess the woman's name? Or was it that the yearning to speak the name, to shape his lips around it, taste it on his tongue, had betrayed him into forming it with his lips unconsciously, divulging it to them, as he felt the compulsion to do now? As he wanted now to tell everybody he met about Shug and him? To utter her name, and link it publicly with his own.

Shee-it. What his sisters saw was what anybody could see, what showed, then as now. They knew where to look for it. That was what they had nudged one another and giggled together over.

Love: that was the one really dirty four-letter word. He could speak the other ones with no shame, that was the one that stuck in his craw. Love was the word the whole world used for a fig leaf. You could love your mother and your father, your brothers and sisters. A man could love another man and a woman another woman. But let sex come into it and love flew out the window. People spoke of loving couples. He had never seen one, and he had been around. He had seen couples not long married who were still hot for each other: that was called love. When that was gone what remained was mutual relief: that too was called love. He knew what he felt for his woman. He had only to look down to see. Just one thing bothered him. If that was all she was to him, wasn't he paying too high a price for it? Three billion people on the face of the earth, more than half of them women: was hers the only one he could find?

“Cotton's fine if you can just get you somebody to pick it.”

“Clyde, he gets them.”

Yeah, he got them. How? By making an annual midwinter pilgrimage to Louisiana, sometimes two, to court the gang boss, a bull of a man named Cheney, the color of cast-iron, taking him to New Orleans and there for up to a week wining and dining and wenching him and putting up with his independence and his sass and pleading with him to come back again next year, bringing with him that ex-schoolbus-load of young black bucks in rut.

“Seen one of them mechanical cottonpickers at work one day last week over near Winnsboro.”

“Did you, Leonard. What did it look like?”

“About like a cross between a Hoover vacuum cleaner and a hook-and-ladder firetruck. But I'll say this for it, it out-picked any ten pickers I ever seen. Takes four rows at a time, and that thang went across that field plucking the bolls and spitting out the hulls like a dog shitting peach seeds.”

They were the coming thing, Clyde knew. Already common in Mississippi and Alabama, and now beginning to reach east Texas. His own pickers told of being turned away at farms where they had worked for years, the planter having rented or bought himself a machine.

“You got any idea what one of them thangs cost? And they tell me you have to practically keep a fulltime mechanic to tend to it.”

“Yes, but you can make it pay for itself by renting it out. Anythang'll do the work of that many hands you can charge a good rental on it.”

They did cost a lot of money and the upkeep on them was high. But that would sure fix her wagon. She would find it hard to two-time him with something that looked like a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a firetruck.

“Left about half of the cotton in the field.”

“Hah.”

“Ah, well, we've seen some changes in our time, you and me, eh, Clar'nce? Seen mules go, and now the nigger'll go the way of the mule. It's just a matter of time.”

X

The shadow of the pear tree contracted like a drying water stain until by noon it lay round and hard-edged directly underneath the branches, and there it stayed, as if seeking shade itself, until well past three o'clock. Then it began venturing slowly away from the trunk on the other side. The fallen and fermenting pears simmered in the sun.

At first the sound was like the hum a highwire makes when you lay your ear to the pole. The conversation sputtered and died as one by one, like grazing sheep, the men lifted their heads and listened toward the west. It was a car on the county road. They could place it, could clock it by ear. Within moments the volume had swelled to a loud buzz, causing one of the listeners to expel his breath in a low, unformed, dry-lipped whistle. Soon it attained the high fierce snarl of an outboard motor, the lead one in a boat race, and the men beneath the pear tree began unconsciously to lean forward, rising slightly on the balls of their feet. By the time the car neared the corner a mile away where the dirt road to the Renshaw place made a right angle junction with the paved road, the engine had the desperate pitch of a chain saw ripping through a knot. They waited, wincing. It went into the turn with a screech of tires that affected the hearers like a dentist's drill striking a nerve. Then followed a moment's silence …

By tradition, and by law, the right of way on Texas roads belongs at all times to livestock. The driver of a car coming upon a sow and her farrow wallowing in a mudhole or a hen and her brood taking a dustbath is expected to stop and get out and request them to yield. If he should happen to kill one, the Lord help him—the law won't. No kind of dressed meat comes as high-priced as that slaughtered on a radiator grill. To follow along for two or three miles behind a drove of hogs or a herd of plodding cattle down a dusty shadeless road on a Texas August afternoon can be trying; but the right of way is theirs, and even honking the horn can be risky: they might take fright and stampede and hurt themselves, or at the very least, in that melting heat, run a lot of actionable weight off their valuable carcasses.

Along the Renshaw road the pace of traffic was often set by a brindled milch cow called Trixie belonging to a widow woman by the name of Shumlin. Since her husband's death some years back, Mrs. Shumlin, in order to make ends meet, had been obliged to sell off the farmstead piece by piece—it was not very big to start with—until now all she had left was the plot on which her cottage stood and a small kitchen garden, and another plot across the road on which her cowshed stood, or rather leaned. Her land all gone, Mrs. Shumlin had the problem of where to pasture her cow. She solved the problem by staking her out along the roadside to graze the narrow margins owned by the county highway department. These uncultivated roadbanks were capable, however, of producing but one thin crop of grass per year, so that as the season wore on, Trixie ate her way farther and farther from home, by late summer was grazing at a good two miles' distance. Through July, August and September Mrs. Shumlin had to get up earlier each morning to take Trixie to pasture, and had to set off earlier each afternoon to fetch her home for milking. She had to tote along two heavy pails of water for Trixie to drink when she got thirsty. And often when Mrs. Shumlin had walked the two miles to get her in the hot afternoon she found that Trixie had pulled up her stob and wandered another mile or more down the road—she always wandered away from home, ever in search of greener pastures and knowing that she had already eaten everything behind her. These inconveniences Mrs. Shumlin put up with not so much out of love for Trixie as for the sake of a dab of butter for her bread, or more probably for the sake of what the butter symbolized. Between buttered bread and dry bread lay the gulf separating respectability from penury.

Mrs. Shumlin called her a Jersey, and in part she was; but there was also a wide streak of Brahman, or Bramer as it is called, in Trixie. She had a lump on her shoulder like a Bramer, and down-turned ears and a large loose multifold dewlap, and her proprietary attitude toward the roadbed went beyond what even a Texas cow, conscious of her rights in law, might have been expected to show; in Trixie's serene, deaf, unhurried, unswerving appropriation of the exact crown and middle of the road was the sacred Hindu cow's consciousness of divine prerogative. Seen from the rear—and many a motorist had spent long sessions studying Trixie's rear—she resembled a four-footed washpot swinging between a pair of andirons. Having pulled up her stob and set off down the road, she never turned aside. Ruminating upon her bitter cud of dandelions, dock, plantain, chickory and Johnson grass, and seeing nothing alongside the road but more of the same, she moseyed on. So she was doing now, the rope trailing from around her neck, the stob tumbling end over end in the dirt. Meanwhile fate was closing in on Trixie from behind and before.

Behind her a truck loaded with cotton was chugging near. It ought not to have been there, it really ought to have been much farther down the road, for Hugo Mattox, the driver, and the owner of the cotton but not of the truck, had set off from home for town and the gin early that morning. He had been delayed by a series of mishaps.

Everything had gone all right until they (for Mrs. Mattox and the children were along) got to Canaan Corners. None of the breakdowns had occurred which the anxious owner of the truck, the neighbor from whom Hugo had borrowed it for the day, his own being laid up, had warned against, nor any of the equally large number which Hugo feared on his own. The radiator had not boiled, the fuel pump had not failed, the timer was working, the frayed fan belt had not broken, the springs appeared to be holding up under the load, she was burning no more oil than was to be expected. At Canaan Corners Hugo stopped and fed her another quart and went inside and bought himself a can of Prince Albert and a book of Riz la + papers—if only he had bought a can of tire patch instead! Why he hadn't he didn't know. Because even just sitting there, that left rear tire, the one with the boot, already looked like a flat. A retread, it was down to the cords for the second time. Hugo could hear it each time it turned over: it came down with a flat slap like a bare foot on a linoleum floor. He certainly ought to have bought a can of Monkey Grip. Because he knew that if that tire should go he would have to use the spare. As for it, well, he had, or his wife did, out in the front yard, flowerbeds growing in at least three better tires than that spare.

Worried about that left rear tire, Hugo drove so slowly that the engine began to overheat and the radiator to boil. About three miles beyond Canaan Corners he had to stop and dip some water from the ditch. Just as he was climbing back up the bank carrying the can, all of a sudden the left front tire heaved a sigh and went flat as a fallen cake. The truck bed tilted and cotton sloshed over the sideboards. Two extra-large bolls that seemed about to come spilling down appeared over the edge. These were the heads of Hugo's two boys.

Mistrust of that spare tire made Hugo bring the boys down to ride in the cab, and it was a good thing he did; for just as he feared, despite the fact that now he drove even slower, so slow he had to stop twice more and let the engine cool down, they had not gone five miles more when they had a blowout. Surprisingly enough, it was not the spare, nor even the left rear, but the right rear—probably the best tire he had. Then how Hugo wished for a patch kit! Not for that tire; for by the time he fought the truck to a stop the rim had chewed that tire to a rag; but for the first flat. So now he was worse off than ever. Now he would have to take the original flat and flag a ride into town and have it fixed and flag a ride back, and then he would still be riding, now without any spare, on the tire he had mistrusted from the start, plus the original spare, which if it had been his he would not have trusted for a swing to hang from a limb for his boys to swing in. Naturally there were no tire tools, so he had to carry rim, casing and all. Leaving his wife and kids Hugo set off down the road lugging the tire. It was then going on 8 a.m.

Hugo had gotten about two miles down the road when along came a car. It was Mrs. Sibley, who sold cosmetics door-to-door to the farmwives of the district. She stopped and offered Hugo a lift, saying after he had put his tire in the trunk and gotten in, that she supposed he wouldn't mind if she made a few calls along the way. They made ten or a dozen stops, at each of which Mrs. Sibley brought out her entire line of samples and gossiped with the customer and booked orders. While sitting in the car waiting for her, Hugo saw half a dozen cars go past headed for town, and he just wished he knew of some polite way of getting out of this ride Mrs. Sibley was giving him.

Around ten o'clock they were lurching along when all of a sudden there was a loud clatter and the motor gagged.

“Good night! What on earth was that?” Mrs. Sibley gasped. They bucked to a stop. “Did you ever hear anything like that before?”

“Yes'm,” said Hugo in a weak voice. “'Fraid I have.”

“Have?”

“Yes'm.”

“You believe you know what's the matter?”

Hugo nodded. “Yes'm,” he said, swallowing. “'Fraid I do.”

“Well! Wasn't it a lucky thing I just happened to pick you up!” said Mrs. Sibley.

“Yes'm,” said Hugo.

Having nothing to drain the crankcase into, he had to take off the pan with the oil in it and not spill any in doing it. In it he found pieces of metal, as he had known he would. So he came out from underneath and raised the hood and went to work. He disconnected the distributor wires and took out the spark plugs. He disconnected the radiator hose. He took off the cylinder head and the cylinder head gasket. He took out the valves and, without the aid of a valve spring compressor, the valve spring rockers. Then he crawled underneath again and turned the crankshaft until he located the broken connecting rod and then turned it until the piston was in firing position. Then, black as a coal miner, he came up and drew out the piston and took off the rod. It was going on twelve noon.