The Morning and the Evening (13 page)

All he was interested in was the spinning lure. He had seen it first two months ago, end of July, through the grayish glass of Miss Loma's showcase. Bright copper, it was splayed like an unloosed pinwheel, so that at the first moment of his seeing it he had seen it also in his imagination twirling and shining through the opaque muddy waters of Arkabutla Creek. Rising slowly, it skirted the water's surface with a hop, skip, jump, so brightly flashing, so irresistible that Bessie, wherever she hid in that sluggish backwater, would be taken by surprise and wait and wait again for its reappearance, unable to resist the lure.

Ha!

He had reeled her in there in Miss Loma's on that hot July afternoon. She had tugged violently, head and tail alternating in breaking water, glimmering darkly silver and then green against the astonishing blue of the summer sky. Mouth agape, neatly hooked through her bottom lip, she had walled toward him one terrified black, yellow-ringed eye. “No use, Cat,” he said. “I got you now.” He flopped her onto the bank where she lay apprehensively, her gills reddening, opening uselessly. She had eluded him three years, and he figured now, by this spring, she would be maybe ten pounds, worth waiting for.

He stepped close to Miss Loma's showcase and said almost in a whisper, “Miss Loma, how much that lure?”

“Boy, you can't afford that lure,” Miss Loma said. She moved over to the case and slid it open, took out the cardboard and handed it to him. He put out a cautious finger and unhooked the lure. Beneath it he saw the price and whistled. “Seventy-five cents for one lure!” he said. It was not a question, but a concurrence: the lure was worth it. He knew right away he could catch the cat with it, and Miss Loma knew it too. “Little T., you're liable to catch that cat with that lure,” she said.

Everybody knew of his persistence in trying to catch the cat. Others had tried, too, when she first appeared in these parts. There was something special about the way she chased bait and broke water with her head just as you reeled it in. Then she stared at you as if to say, I knew it. I was right not to take that.

She did this two or three times every season. Enough to let you know she was still there, enough to keep you fishing, and damned to catch her. In the early days she had been hooked two or three times and that was how she came to be known. But she always got off. No one ever landed her. No one doubted it was the same cat. There was to her whiskers a distinctive lilt and length, and she was unusually large, and eventually there were scars where the hooks caught her. But mostly her air of wisdom set her apart. Whoever sighted her first each year sang out loud along the bank for everybody to hear, “Heah Bessie back!”

Then little children hopped up and down, did dances like Indians and whooped and hollered. It got so all they wanted to be when they were grown was the one who caught Bessie.

Catching her was the only thing Little T. had ever wanted to do in his life. Everything else he had ever done, he had done because he had had to: finish out the sixth grade, work and go into the Army. After he finished school, he worked at Mister Jordan Moody's where his mother was the cook. He had worn a little white jacket and helped to serve at the table. All the women guests would exclaim, “Now, if that's not
the
cu-test thing!” And he had felt like some kind of pissant.

Finally one of the men guests told him if they were him they'd go up to the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and get a job; they had boys no older than him waiting on tables, making good money. So he did, though his mother said all the time it was a mistake, and he was hired right away. He was told that if anyone asked him how old he was to say he was sixteen. He wondered who would believe it when he wasn't even formed as a man. Again, he found himself in a white jacket, but this time he was supposed to be going to make all this money. He made some, but it was all used up in living. Some of it went to a cousin as rent and there was carfare, clothes, picture shows, just things to do in Memphis. When he went into the Army, he had no more money than when he had started work. And he was back to doing things he didn't want to do. He certain to God did not want to go into the Army.

Right off, they asked him what his name was, what Little T. stood for. He had never wondered before. His daddy simply had been Big T. always, and he had been Little. He wrote his mother and asked, and she wrote back, Tom. In the Army they called him Tom. When he returned home again, he was called Little T. Either one, it made no difference to him, like a lot of things in life.

His mother had died and his daddy did nothing but fish. Little T., having no other ambitions, joined him. It was his daddy who first caught Bessie, and it was he who came the closest to ever landing her. It was he who named her. He caught her the first time bucking like a bronco on the end of the line, and he pulled her in gentle and easy saying, “Whoa there now, Bessie. Come ahead, girl.” But she had slipped off sly as you please just as he drew her out of the water. It was as if she had been holding the hook in her mouth all the time, to let it go when she wanted. With a flip of her tail she flopped back into the water and was gone before either he or his daddy could say a word. Then they stood on the bank, slapping each other on the back, saying, “Man oh, man!”

Now his daddy was dead. He found him one evening, a year ago this summer, with his pole in the water, his legs stretched out in front of him and his chin on his chest. He was leaning up against the side of the bank, the life just gone out of him. Little T. couldn't think of a better way in the world to go.

Little T. got fifteen dollars a month from the government and would for the rest of his life. It would have been enough for just him, but he had supported his daddy. Now he was so far in debt he knew he would never get out again. He was granted the money because of an accident in the Army. He was helping to load crates on a truck when suddenly the driver drove off, unexpectedly and with a jerk. Several of the crates toppled off onto Little T. It banged up his face, was all it did. But he lay in the hospital a month, tubes sticking out of his nose, down his throat, out of his head, anywhere they could stick any. He felt bad for a long time. Then he was well, and all he could think of was getting even with the driver, Duke Williams; he never would forget his name. He believed Duke had done it on purpose. They had, some time before, had a little argument over poker.

But Duke had been transferred while Little T. was in the hospital. He never saw him again. For a long time he would sometimes stop, a chill running through him, thinking he saw a familiar figure on the street. He would wait till the figure passed and peer close to make certain it was not Duke. It was one of the few times in his life Little T. had ever been possessed by a craze to do something; perhaps that was why the craze was so great. Now his desire for the lure was the same.

The Army doctors had done plastic surgery on his face. His nose was wider and flatter than it had been before and much less prominent. In winter he had trouble with his sinuses; his nose was still a little crooked and didn't drain just right. But he said, who cared? Shoot, for fifteen dollars a month and a rating of permanent disability, who minded losing a few teeth and not looking as pretty as some gal might like? He had a slight scar across his nose, and several people had asked if he were ever a boxer. That had pleased him. They would think probably that he had been a welterweight, possibly even a Golden Gloves champion.

After his daddy died, he lived on in the little place they had had. It was one room with a double bed, a couple of wicker chairs and a small wood stove. He cooked on the stove in the dead of winter, but he cooked outdoors when he could, on a little iron grill he had fashioned for his yard. Actually his yard was the whole bottomland, for he was the only person who lived in it. Others came only to fish and hunt. When he fished, Little T. carried with him a small black iron skillet, held to himself by a rope belt. He intended whenever he caught Bessie to sit right down and eat her. He even carried a small packet of seasoned corn meal to roll her in. And he had his own way of fashioning a little cookstove out of rocks and twigs. He would catch her. He was sure of it. And this coming spring, if he had that lure.

He was the only person fishing the bottomland who had a casting rod. Everyone else had a bamboo pole and used bait: shrimp, worms, bread, bugs, anything they could think of. Old Bald Dave was quite successful with potato chips.

Old Bald Dave was the only completely bald-headed Negro anybody in these parts had ever seen. He had lost his hair from a disease that had cleared up and left him with his shining head. Little T., joking, called him Eight Ball. Sometimes Bald Dave added more salt to the chips; other times he left them alone. Whatever, he always came up with a fish. He had told Little T., “You and your fancy pole. I'm going to catch that cat yet, with a old wore-out potato chip.” But he never had, much to Little T.'s relief.

You could say one thing, though. Crappie sure went for potato chips. There was a big one on the line every time Bald Dave threw it in. He went all over town collecting left-over broken potato chips from picnics, church affairs, any kind of social. People saved them for him in greasy bags. It had made him a kind of character in the town, and once Little T. had heard two white men talking about it. “You ever seen the bald-headed nigger that comes around collecting old potato chips?” the first man asked.

“I hear he fishes with them,” the second man said.

“Oh, you go on,” the first man said, and they fell onto each other laughing.

When Little T. told Bald Dave, he said, “Son, it don't hurt to be a character. It don't hurt a little bit.”

He took Little T. inside his cabin and showed him the material things he had gained from being a character. For anything that people didn't want, they decided Bald Dave might and saved it for him. He had gained a very good alarm clock that way that no one but him had been able to fix; his wife had a whole lot of pretty things on the mantel, vases and carnival dolls and such; he had a slop jar under his bed and a stack of Sears catalogues in his outhouse. He had something everywhere you looked that he wouldn't have had if he had gone around acting as if he were in his right head, he said.

Still, Little T. thought, he had lost something else.

The casting rod had come to Little T. as a hand-me-down. First it had been Mister Jordan Moody's, then Big T.'s. There were few white people even, in these parts, who had a casting rod. And no one had one as fine as this one once had been. While Little T. still worked at the Moodys', Mister Jordan had ordered it from a New York store. It had had many special features, but now the reel leaked grease and creaked as if there were sand in it, despite the many times Little T. had taken it apart and found none. The free spool often did not work right and unwound unexpectedly. Then with the butt of the rod pushed half through his belly, Little T. had to try, all at once, to untangle the line, get it reeled in, keep it from tangling more and keep the lure unsnagged, which was impossible. In the midst of everything the reel invariably slipped off the rod. Then he had the devil's own time juggling the two pieces, still trying to do everything else. At these times, he secretly shot envious glances toward everyone else sitting along the bank, their lines tossed peacefully into the water, their poles limp in their hands. He usually had to wade into the water to unsnag his lure; often he had to dive to do so. Then people along the bank called out, “Hey, Little T. going to catch that cat one way or another!”

Some people said he would not catch the cat at all with anything artificial, that he needed a good bait to drag deep along the bottom of the creek. But, Little T. said, who had caught her with a good piece of bait yet? And then what could they say? This was no ordinary cat, he said. It needed something special.

Little T. and his daddy had seldom supplemented the fifteen dollars a month by taking odd jobs, and now Little T. owed money everywhere. His check was already promised each month before he got it. The day he had first seen the lure he had ten cents in his pocket, and even if he had taken that out and said, “Miss Loma, will you credit this toward the lure?” she would have said, “Little T., I'm crediting this toward your grocery bill.” He knew Miss Loma. So all he could do that afternoon was stand there and long. After he had spoken about it, every man in the store that afternoon had crowded up to look at the lure. Sooner or later somebody was going to buy it: his lure. Regretfully he had watched Miss Loma return it to the case. The other things there that had once seemed so desirable no longer did. The other lures, the flies, the shiny line, the reels, the corks all looked old and dusty, as if Miss Loma had had them for two thousand years.

By the time Little T. reached the bottomland his breath came cool. He could almost see it before him. His mission accomplished, he was no longer afraid. He told himself, and believed it, that the lure was going to be his. If no one hounded him for money in the next few weeks, he might save two or three cents out of the quarter he had made tonight. There was only one drugstore in Senatobia, and he could not risk buying the medicine there too many times.

But he had it in his mind now to work on some way to get to Memphis. However, he was not sure how many bottles of medicine Miss Ruth Edna could buy at once. He had the impression she did not have money any more readily than he did. That was one reason he would not have tried to cheat her, though he knew she did not want anyone to know about their transactions. And the main reason was, take any given situation, and the cards were already stacked against him: she was a woman, and she was white.

Little T.'s motto was, Keep your nose in your own business, keep your mouth shut and keep out of trouble. He intended doing those three things about the two things he had seen tonight.

Chapter Seven

Before the roosters were up next morning, Kate French's brother-in-law, Red Anderson, with Buck French, Homer Brown and Hoyt Springfield, drove off to Whitehill. It was Red's car and he drove. When they got into the car the men closed the doors as softly as possible, not wanting people to hear a car at that hour and slide from bed to peer out. Even so, driving out of town, the two in the back seat watched out the back window for any shades raised out of curiosity. Then they turned and settled down to be borne over the twisted, dipping country road at the abandoned rate of speed of all country drivers. The semidarkness of the early morning lent itself to the exhilarated feeling of conspiracy the secret meeting had already given them. They did not feel like grown men doing a civic duty, but laughed and joked like boys set free from school. After a long stretch of hot weather that dated back to March, the chill of the early fall morning had caught them by surprise. None of them had dressed warmly enough, and they shivered, believing it was from excitement.