Some Sweet Day (2 page)

I didn't go in until I heard the squirrel sizzling in the frying pan.

The morning was bright, and outside the screen Nero lapped from the bowl under the leaky faucet in the yard. She looked all right. She probably didn't even remember last night. The house was quiet. I could hear Mother moving in the kitchen, but that was all. Rick's bed was empty. My knees and elbows still felt raw, and my toe and my tailbone were sore. I knew I was going to hurt like hell when I tried to get up.

Mother came to the door. When she saw that I was awake, she held out a piece of sausage in a biscuit. She looked down at me silently for a long while, and I looked back silently.

“How you feeling?” she asked finally.

“Okay, I guess.”

“Can you sit up?”

“I don't know.”

“Here, I'll help you.”

She placed her arm behind my neck and lifted me. My tailbone hurt during the bend, but felt better after I was sitting up. She handed me the biscuit and sausage, and I ate it while she examined my knees and elbows. They weren't pretty, especially with all that Mercurochrome she put on them last night. She untied the turpentine-soaked rag and unwrapped my toe. “Not too bad,” she said, “but you split the nail. You'll be barefooted when Gran comes tonight, but I guess you would have been, anyway.”

“Where's Daddy?”

“Still asleep. He didn't get in till daylight.”

“Did him and Harley get anything?”

“One fox.”

“Where's Belinda and Rick?”

“On a pallet in the living room. They're better. Can you get all the way up?”

I got to my feet, and she pulled down my drawers and looked at my tailbone. “You've got a good one, all right. Nice and blue. Think you can walk okay?”

“I guess.”

“Well, get dressed then, and go outside. Stay away from the house for a while. When I'm ready for you to come back, I'll hang the ice blanket on the clothesline. Okay?”

“Why do you want me to do that?”

“Just hush and do what I say.”

She helped me on with my clothes, and I hobbled outside. The milk bucket still lay by the gate. The milk pen was empty, so I knew that Mother had let the cows out to pasture. The sun was bright and warm and felt good on me. I crawled through the fence behind the barn, and Nero slid under the bottom wire and tagged along with me. A turkey gobbled somewhere over to the north as I walked toward the bluff. About halfway up the side, before it really gets steep, there's a large oak with a big flat rock under it. I sat down on the rock, and Nero plopped down beside me and laid her head between her paws. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, and I ran my hand up and down her old black-and-white-spotted hide and then rubbed her behind the ears. She closed her eyes and sighed.

I could see home very well from my rock. Below me were the big old barn, and the corn crib, and the tractor shed, and the house with its rock chimney—all gray, wooden, worn-out-looking buildings that nestled close to the darker earth. They gleamed cleanly in the morning sun. For a while it looked as if nothing was moving in the whole world except my hand behind Nero's ears and those silly white chickens in the barnyard. I wondered how they felt after all their squawking and fluttering last night.

The front porch screen opened and shut. A second later, I heard the rifle-crack of its closing. Daddy sat down on the steps. He held something, and soon I knew it was his fiddle. Nero heard it, too. She opened her eyes and jerked her head up and lifted her ears. She listened a moment, then dropped her head and closed her eyes again, and I went on rubbing her.

Daddy always went out on the porch when he wanted to fiddle. He never let any of us go out with him. We could hear the music in the house, he said, and he didn't want us standing around watching him. He was playing longer than usual this morning. He played slow for a while, then fast for a while. And then he sat and looked down the lane for a long time. Then he played some more. I just sat on my rock and rubbed Nero's ears and listened. A long time later, Daddy rose and went into the house. In a little while he came back out, got into the car and drove down the lane. He slowed at the corner by the mailbox, then turned into the road to Darlington and disappeared over a hill. Just then, Mother walked into the yard with the red ice blanket and hung it on the clothesline.

He returned in time to milk looking happy. He was sitting on the steps, bouncing Rick on his knee when Gran arrived. Nero, barking and leaping, met her at the gate. Gran jumped back. “Down! Down! Get away from here!”

Daddy grinned. “Don't let the dog scare you, Gloria. She won't bite.”

“She was about to ruin my hose. Hose don't grow on trees these days, you know. Where's Lacy?”

“In the kitchen. Supper's waiting. You going to spend the night?”

“If I don't get eaten by this dog first, I am.”

“How are things in town?”

Gran glared at him through her steel-rimmed glasses. “I thought you'd know. I heard you were there today.” She stamped into the house and slammed the screen. Daddy got up, swinging Rick out and above his head.

The plates and the oilcloth shone in the light of the lamp, surrounded by chicken and dumplings and green beans and biscuits. Belinda and Rick argued, as they always did, over who would sit by Gran, and Daddy settled it, as he always did, putting one on each side of her. Everybody was hungry, and we ate quietly, Mother smiling at our appetites and our compliments.

Gran usually led the supper conversation when she drove from Darlington to visit us. In the fall, she talked of school and how her fifth-graders were doing. In the spring and summer, she talked of revivals and baptisms. And always of what was going on in town—who was home on furlough, who had been killed, what the Fort Worth
Star-Telegram
said about the Japs and the Germans, Roosevelt and Churchill. But tonight she was silent, and Daddy was aware of her gaze from across the table. Mother saw it, too, and was fidgety.

Finally, Gran asked, “Has Will told you about his trip to town, Lacy?”

“A little,” she replied. “I don't guess there's much to tell.”

“I understand he had a lot of business to conduct at the drugstore. Or was it upstairs
over
the drugstore, Will?”

Mother's chair scraped the floor. “I'd better start washing these,” she said. “Ricky, Gate, Belinda, get out of here. You've dawdled with your food long enough.”

Everybody except Daddy got up, and Mother started talking to Gran about a dress she was making. She rattled the dishes into the sink. I asked her to punch some holes in the lid of a fruit jar for me, and Belinda, Rick and I went out by the windmill to catch lightning bugs. Daddy was still sitting at the table, smoking a cigarette, saying nothing.

The breeze was up, and we could hear the windmill whirring slowly in the gloom above us. We stood still and watched. Soon Belinda said, “Look! There's one!” I handed her the jar and told her to take the lid off. I sneaked up on the little light that was blinking under the windmill. It flitted lazily here and there, and I followed it, my hands cupped, ready. Then I reached, clapped my hands together, and felt the tickle inside.

“I got it! Bring the jar!”

Belinda was there, and quickly clapped the lid on when I dropped the bug in. “Look, Rick,” she said, holding it out for him to see. The bug was crawling around the bottom, blinking his tail on and off.

“Ooooh! Pretty!” Rick exclaimed. He laughed and jumped up and down.

I caught more, and Belinda added them to our collection, Rick laughing and squealing after each new capture. After a while, I got tired of running after the things, and we sat down under the windmill to watch the ones we'd got and wonder what made them blink like that. Belinda and Rick seemed small and warm, and I reached out and put a hand on each head and messed up their soft hair. We all giggled. Then we heard the sink water splattering on the ground under the house, and knew that Mother and Gran had finished the dishes. Mother came to the door.

“Rick, Belinda, come in now. Time for bed.”

“Aw, Mother,” Belinda whined.

“You've been sick and need your rest. Come on, now.”

They wandered slowly up the steps. I sat a while longer, watching the bugs in the jar and the still-uncaptured ones blinking here and there around the windmill. I wondered if my prisoners were signaling to their comrades, urging rescue. Then I heard Mother tell Rick to potty, and I knew he was ready for bed. I picked up the jar and went in too, and sat on the edge of his bed. We watched the bugs blink off and on, off and on. Mother and Gran were in the living room. Gran spoke in low tones about the drugstore and “Laverne Thomas, that hussy.” Mother spoke sometimes, too, but so quietly I couldn't make out her words. Finally, I got up and handed the jar to Rick. He shoved it under the sheet and pulled the sheet over his head. I could see the little lights blinking through the cloth. I smiled and walked into the kitchen.

Daddy startled me. I didn't expect to see him there, still sitting at the table, still smoking a cigarette. He watched me cross the room.

Mother knelt on the living room floor, pinning a pattern to a piece of cloth. Gran was sitting, rocking, watching her. They stopped talking when I came in. I stood and watched Mother for a while, not knowing what else to do. Mother's red hair shone in the light of the lamp she had placed on the floor beside her. She was pretty, bending there. A snip of her scissors now and then and the creak of Gran's rocker in the half-darkness were the only sounds in the house.

“Gran?” I spoke softly and didn't even know why.

“Huh?”

“Will you read me a story?”

“Okay. Get your book.”

“No stories.” Daddy's voice drifted in from the kitchen.

“What?” Gran asked.

“No stories, I said.”

“Why not, Will?”

“Because I said so. This is
my
house. If I say no stories under this roof tonight, there won't be any.”

Mother had stopped pinning. Her eyes were closed. Gran raised her eyebrows and rocked faster. I heard Daddy get up and walk across the sleeping porch and slam the screen. I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall. Mother started pinning again, and Gran rocked faster. It was so quiet I could hear the faucet dripping in the kitchen. After a while, Gran got up and said, “Come on, Gate.”

She grabbed a couple of matches from the kitchen matchbox and stalked to the sleeping porch. Rick was asleep. She reached under his sheet and got the lightning-bug jar and put it on the floor. It was still blinking. Then she slid the cardboard box that I kept my books in out from under my bed, grabbed the top book, and slid the box back. She grabbed the lantern off the hook by the door, motioned for me to come, and marched out the door, down the steps, around the house, through the front gate, out to the tractor shed. She struck a match, lit the lantern, hung it on a nail, and handed me the book.

“Pick a story,” she said.

I flipped through the book until I got to “The Wolf and the Fox” and handed it back. I climbed into the tractor seat. She sat down on a big can that Daddy kept old baling wire in and started reading.

“A wolf and a fox once lived together. The fox, who was the weaker of the two, had to do all the hard work, which made him anxious to leave his companion.” She read fast and loud, like she was bawling out one of her pupils. “One day, passing through a wood, the wolf said, ‘Red-fox, get me something to eat, or I shall eat you.'” She read on and on, never stopping to look at me, never making faces like the fox and the wolf or trying to talk like they would talk, as she usually did. I sat there on the tractor, moving the steering wheel back and forth, not liking the story very much, and wishing I was somewhere else.

Finally, she looked up at me, and I saw tears in her eyes behind her glasses. She wiped her eyes and kind of laughed. “I'm not reading this very well, am I?” she said.

“Not like you usually do. Why are you crying?”

“Nothing you should worry about, little one. Don't try to understand why grownups act the way they do. It'll just make you sad.” She raised the book again.

“You don't have to finish it if you don't want to.”

She smiled. “You know how it ends, don't you?”

“Yeah. The farmer beats the wolf to death.”

She nodded. “And the fox?”

“He gets away.”

“And lives happily ever after?”

We heard the gravel crunch and looked up, and Daddy stepped into the light. He stood there, looking at us, and we looked at him. Gran sighed and lifted her glasses and wiped her eyes again. Daddy walked over and took the book out of her lap and looked at it.

“I thought I said no stories.”

“We're not in the house. Will.”

He slammed her in the face with the book. The can rocked back, and Gran fell onto the gravel. Her glasses dropped off her nose, and she just lay there on the ground, sobbing. I started crying, too. I felt like something had busted inside of me, and the tears kept coming, and I thought I'd never be able to stop them. Finally, Gran got up and put her glasses on. One lens was cracked. She limped out of the shed into the darkness. I sat there on the tractor, bawling, and Daddy just stood there, holding the book. Then I heard Gran's car engine start, and I jumped down and ran past Daddy. The car was turning around, and the lights were on. She was leaving. I ran to catch her. She rolled the window down.

“Go back, Gate,” she said. “You can't come.”

“Stop! Please stop, Gran!”

“I've got to go. Gate! Go to your mother!” The car moved slowly down the lane. I ran along beside it, crying, and Gran kept telling me to go back.

“I won't go back, Gran! I won't go!” The car picked up speed, little by little. I fell behind. Gran still talked to me through the window, but I couldn't hear what she was saying. Then she rolled up the window and drove away. I ran as fast as I could, but the red tail-lights got smaller and smaller until they turned into the road and disappeared. I ran clear to the mailbox at the end of the lane, but I didn't see them again. I flopped down by the mailbox and leaned against the post and puked between my knees. I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. I didn't hear Daddy come, and I didn't see the lantern, but suddenly he was there, and I couldn't move. He stooped and wiped the vomit off of my face and clothes with his handkerchief. He set the lantern on the ground and picked me up and settled me against his chest like a little baby and picked up the lantern again.