The Morning and the Evening (12 page)

Then she ran again toward the circle of people that was continually widening as the people stepped backward. It was as if they were going to catch hands and begin the steps of some old country folk dance they had rehearsed.

Beyond their heads she saw her mother and Billy with relief. She felt the crowd's fear now and heard again the sounds she and Frank had heard in the road. If it were a mad dog, why wasn't everyone running?

Jostling elbows, she pushed her way forward to the front of the circle and stood, seeing.

A feeling of revulsion went over her and the first faint stirrings of pity.

Behind her someone said, “I always did expect it.”

She asked herself, Had she? She could only answer herself, No.

Jake, she had thought, would always be the same as she had known him. Perhaps that accounted for the feeling of mislaid trust she felt now as she watched him running about in the middle of the road, in circles of his own, foaming at the mouth. The sounds he made were his sounds of terror, but the crowd thought only of its own.

“Did you see him?” Lulu Veazey said to Frances. Before she could answer, Lulu said, “I never in my life! He came by my house faster than a jack rabbit. And the noise! Worse, even, than he's making now.”

Somebody else said, “My dog run out after him barking his head off. As soon as I saw good I run out and got him and tied him up. I told my husband at the time, Jake's as liable to bite that dog as the other way round.”

“You mean like he was really mad?” said a thin trembly voice.

“Shoot,” said the first.

“He was at my house this very afternoon,” said Leila Brown, gaining everyone's attention. “The kids stopped him going by and commenced to joke with him, and I had him up on the porch and give him a Coke. He could have gone out of his head right there!”

“You might all be dead as doornails right now,” somebody said.

“Ohh,” everybody said.

“Think of all the times he's been around our kids,” Leila said.

“Our girl children,” said Kate French, with four hanging onto her arm, and big with a fifth child. “And clear out of his head all the time.”

Her sister, Lucille Anderson, said, “You never know. It ain't safe, I tell you. The menfolks are going to have to do something.”

“They will,” said another woman. “Don't worry about that.”

“Listen,” somebody said.

The crowd had turned toward one man: old man Hot Evans. It was the first time in two years he had been all the way to town. He stood wagging his billy goat's beard and said, “Mad. I seen 'urn like this fifteen years ago when I took Sister Annie to the 'sylum. Crazy as bedbugs some of 'em, just standing there banging their heads against stone walls till they bled, not even feeling it.”

Everyone turned back and looked at Jake and could imagine him doing it.

Only Miss Loma and Mary Margaret Sheaffer stepped forward and did not want to believe it. Frances saw Wilroy grab them both back quick, like children not understanding danger and about to cross a street. Frances saw him say something to them in quick sharp words and they looked at each other and began to cry. They're wishing Jake's momma was here, Frances thought.

She saw Cotter May standing to one side with a whitened face, pressing his chest, still holding his card hand.

It had gone clear out of her head in the excitement. But of course it had been Jake that left Ruth Edna's! But if he had gone crazy at her house, why would she have just stood on the porch and called to him? Well, taking into consideration that sometimes Ruth Edna acted crazy herself, wouldn't she at least have gone to a telephone and called somebody? It was always her phone, the nearest one, that Ruth Edna used. It was strange, but it seemed almost as if Ruth Edna didn't want anyone to know he had been there.

The crowd had begun to thin slowly, and those who had come the farthest began to go home again, leaving what would happen to Jake to those who had always cared for him.

He had wound down like a top. He had sunk to the ground and fallen over on his side. He was not making the sounds any more, but was wet with long streaks of his own saliva, like a bloodhound or a horse. He half lay, half sat, panting. Slowly he began to look around, as if surprised to find himself back here after all that running.

Tentatively her mother and Mary Margaret and Wilroy began to approach him. She saw little old Miss Hattie McGaha hovering in the background, indicating she would be willing to help if only she had the courage. Some of the men went back to the card game. She saw Cotter give his hand to one of them. He said he was too worn out, and he had a ride home. He got into Freddie Moore's silver jalopy. She wanted to run after him and cry, “Find out from Ruth Edna!”

But how could she explain how she had known? Why would she have been out on that deserted road at night alone, the children left behind? She never had gone out walking by herself a time in her life. Suppose everybody else believed it? Billy wouldn't.

Across the cleared place around Jake she saw Frank. In the act of looking away from Jake he saw her.

She had to talk to him. Because it was implicit in the way that people were turning away and walking off, as if it were all decided, that something was going to happen to Jake.

She made her way around the circle and stood close to him and said, “That was Jake coming out of Ruth Edna's. Something must have happened to him there. We ought to tell somebody.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” he said. “Otherwise, why wouldn't she have come to town? She couldn't have helped but hear all these cars. And people have been shouting up and down the road. It's like a circus.”

“I saw Darby Metcalf,” Frances said. “If he heard, she's bound to have.”

“Jesus,” he said. “There's nothing we can say.”

“Nothing?” she said.

They were separated by a little group tripping over one another as they got close to Hot, who was walking away telling something: something the old people seemed to know. It was evident in her mother's sorrowing face. Frances could tell she and Mary Margaret and Wilroy were discussing what to do with Jake tonight—before tomorrow? Tomorrow, she thought, afraid. It was going to sound funny if she and Frank waited until tomorrow to tell. He's the one ought to do it, she thought. Men could get away with things like that better than a woman. There were a thousand things a man could say: that he was worried about money or crops and had gone off into the dark to think things out; that he had been feeling run-down and had drunk more beer than he had meant to and felt woozy and gone out for air. Or, if worse came to worst, just let people guess what he had been doing. People didn't think anything about a man; it was practically expected. The others would begin to put together all the Thursday nights and know it was not a sudden, urgent one-time thing, that he was carrying on an honest-to-goodness affair; but who would care besides Eleanora? And she could not leave him. No forty-year-old woman with the amount of money they had and four children was going to leave her husband for no more reason than that. And he could reason with her. He could say all the things that men said: that it had nothing to do with her, that a woman couldn't understand, it was just something that was in a man; that he was sorry and wouldn't do it again. She would forgive him. She might even forget. He could even say it was a Negro—one over in the cabins near the Metcalfs', and that would account for the way he had taken. Eleanora wouldn't care nearly so much if it was a Negro; she'd know it wasn't somebody he was in love with. She'd probably think she had failed him in some way, and she would try harder, and in the long run he'd benefit.

Men could never think up verbal deceits. She was going to have to tell him reasons. Wasn't Brother Patrick ever going away? “Good evening,” she said. He had seen her staring at him.

“Good evening, Frances,” he said. “Isn't this something?” He shook his head sadly. In the moment that he looked at Jake, Frances looked at Frank. He looked back at her with the same look of straining she had on her face. He's trying to give me a reason, she thought. She said, “There's nothing I can say.”

He said, “Why not? Your mother's a friend of Ruth Edna and Jake too.”

“But what difference does that make?” she said. “She doesn't know anything's wrong between me and Billy. I wouldn't even know where to begin trying to say something.”

“I don't know anything to say either,” he said. “And maybe all this would've happened no matter where he was.”

“Maybe,” she said, bitterly. “It's easier to think so.”

He turned deliberately away. Furious, she went back around the circle and stared as if she could force him into action. He looked back at her with a look that said plainly, It's kind of disagreeable, isn't it, to think of that room back there and that messed-up bed?

Pale, wan as a moon against the dark night, his face stood out; she looked at it and thought all that she had taken for gentleness in him had been in reality wishywashiness. He really was too short for her—or for anybody but that little squat wife of his.

Every time he looked at her he would think she was having an affair with someone else. She hated him for it already.

The night seemed so long it should be dawn. Instead it was only ten fifteen. There was a whole evening still to be got through. Billy was coming home now; she had seen him coming out of the store, putting on his sweater. There was nothing to do but meet him and go home with him. I've come back to you, Billy, she thought, even if you didn't know I'd ever been gone.

Tomorrow's breakfast coffee would be as bitter as the air between them, boiled because she would have been with the baby, who always made a mess in her pants at the wrong time. And she would not have a Thursday to look forward to, so that it wouldn't matter. Everything now would matter.

Eleanora had come up to Frank and put her arm through his. Now they were going home, and in passing Eleanora spoke. Frances spoke back, avoiding even looking at Frank. You should have done something, she said silently to his retreating back, her teeth ground together. Oh how lovey-dovey they were! How cute! He did love her, God damn it, even after twenty years. Oh, why doesn't someone love me? she thought. And why don't I love anybody? She had so much love to give.

Billy was helping her mother and Mary Margaret to lift Jake up; his legs kept buckling beneath him. Wilroy had gone to get the car. She approached them.

“Can you help us a minute?” her mother said.

She stood and began to cry convulsively, childishly and helplessly, letting her nose run. “I … can't …” she said finally.

“Oh, baby, it's all right,” her mother said. She looked at Mary Margaret and said, “It's time for her to have the curse.”

“Run on home, hon,” Billy said, attempting sympathy. “The kids are liable to have waked up.”

“Where are you taking him?” she said.

“To Whitehill to jail,” her mother said. “Wilroy and Billy will have to drive him.”

“What on earth are you taking him to jail for?” she said.

“Where else are we going to keep him?” Mary Margaret said. “We can't keep him our ownselves and risk being slit open in the night in our beds. Jake wouldn't go to do it, but then it would be too late to be sorry.”

“And he can't stay by himself,” her mother said. “He's liable to fall out again.”

Wilroy came up then, and the women shifted their side of Jake onto him. The car door stood open waiting, the motor running fitfully like a panting dog.

She saw him last. He sat in the front by Wilroy who was driving. And Billy sat in the back to watch him. Patient: she had seen him squatting on his haunches beside a flower in bud as if waiting for it to bloom. Kind: he never had anything that he didn't offer it to others. And no one ever took anything from him. Children were taught never to take candy from Jake; he might have slobbered on it. Once she had come upon a colored girl sitting beside the road crying, half crazy because in passing Jake some of his slobber had accidentally got on her. It was the only time in her life Frances had ever wanted to say, Nigger. Nigger, get up out of the way and let me pass.

Her heart had been broken tonight; it was never going to heal.

Her mother had said something to her, and she and Mary Margaret had faded away into the darkness to close up the store.

She was alone in the road, in the night, in the world. The same as Jake, she thought, with everything she wanted to say locked up inside her.

Chapter Six

Little T. saw two things that night. Going down the road from Ruth Edna's, he saw Jake standing some distance away, looking at the house as if trying to make up his mind about something. Little T. had been hurrying along as fast as possible, feeling the money in his hand, hard and firm, his hand already sweaty from gripping it. He did not see or hear anything until suddenly he was right on Jake. It almost scared the fire out of Little T.

“Uh!” he cried out, coming on the white face in the dark, feeling a body near.

When he saw it was Jake, he edged away and went on again at his fast quiet pace, knowing no one else would be on this road until Mr. Cotter came home from the card game. He did not think the loony man even saw him; he had only continued to look at the house and seemed to be telling himself something. Little T. had been afraid because it was the loony man. It was his first direct contact with him. Yet he knew his safety lay in that fact: the man could not tell anything.

He saw the second thing when he reached the main road. He stopped before entering it and looked up and down, making sure the road was empty. Then he darted quickly across it to the safety of a dark store porch. Only the few street lights and the lights from Miss Loma's store, at the opposite end of town, illuminated the night. He was about to leave the dark safety and enter the shadows and gain another store porch, so making his way on out of town, when the door of Miss Loma's opened. A man came out walking slowly as if he were not going anywhere, gaining speed as he came. When he passed the store where Little T. stood, Little T. ceased to breathe, then resumed after he saw Mr. Frank Patrick pass by. Mr. Frank stopped before the Morgan house, looked around casually, hunched his shoulders and then went up the walk and into the house without knocking. Little T.'s eyebrows rose and fell. He was not surprised, because not too much surprised him, and he was interested only to the extent of confirming his suspicion; he stopped outside Miss Loma's window a moment and saw that Mr. Morgan was inside playing cards. Little T. had not been much interested in Jake, either. It was only later that he wondered about that.