The Third Life of Grange Copeland (6 page)

“Let ’er be,” growled her father. “I hear she can do
tricks
on her back like that.”

Such was the benediction of Josie’s father, the witch who rode her breathless in her middle age. Lorene had almost been born beneath his foot. As it was she was born into a world peopled by her grandfather’s male friends, all of whom frequented the little shack on Poontang Street where “fat Josie” (she grew large after the baby) did her job with a gusto that denied shame, and demanded her money with an authority that squelched all pity. And from these old men, her father’s friends, Josie obtained the wherewithal to dress herself well, and to eat well, and to own the Dew Drop Inn. When they became too old to “cut the mustard” any more, she treated them with jolly cruelty and a sadistic kind of concern. She often did a strip tease in the center of their eagerly constructed semicircle, bumping and grinding, moaning to herself, charging them the last pennies of their meager old-age savings to watch her, but daring them to touch.

A
WET GURGLE
came from Josie’s throat. An alien force seemed to be pressing her into the mattress. She drew her breath shudderingly, her body rigid. She was building up pressure for a scream. Brownfield poked her dutifully and after a minute she opened her eyes. She lay breathing heavily, trembling.

“You all right?” he asked. “You want some water or something?”

“God help,” said Josie.

“What
is
this dream you keep having?” asked Brownfield. “You gets just as stiff and hard as a dead person. Except you sweat. You kind of vibrates too, like there’s a motor on right there where people say the heart is.”

For a year Brownfield had been asking about the dream. Josie never talked. They lay in bed between crisp white sheets. On Josie’s side the crispness had become moist and limp with sweat. Brownfield lit the lamp and placed it on the table near her head. He stood, naked and concerned, gazing down on her face. Josie’s face was heavy and doughy, lumpy and creased from sleep, wet from her dream. She had the stolid, anonymous face of a cook in a big house, the face of a tired waitress. The face of a woman too fat, too greedy, too
unrelentless
to be loved. She could grin with her face or laugh out of it or leer through it, but she had forgotten the simple subtle mechanics of the smile. Her eyes never lost their bold rapacious look, even when she woke from sleep terrified, as she was now.

Josie, Brownfield was sure, had never been young, had never smelled of milk or of flowers, but only of a sweet decay that one might root out only if one took the trouble to expose inch after inch of her to the bright consuming fire of blind adoration and love. Then she might be made clean. But Brownfield did not love Josie. He did not really wonder, therefore, that she told him almost nothing about herself, although she constantly pumped him for details of his own life. To shock him once she had told him a strange tale about how his father had stopped at the Dew Drop Inn on his way North, and stayed with her, and loved her. Brownfield had laughed.

“If he love you so much why ain’t he here with you right now?”

Josie had retreated in tears, and the next day pretended she’d made her story up.

“Thank
God
I ain’t poor,” Josie murmured from the bed. “And thank the good Lord I takes care of myself without the help of strangers,
which,
in a matter of plain speaking, ain’t got a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of.” She took the liberty occasionally of reminding Brownfield of his penury. Now she took his pillow from his side of the bed and cradled it in her arms like a lover.

“Listen,” she said, “my side of the bed’s wet.”

Brownfield stumbled next door without a word, into Lorene’s room and, not caring to sleep on the floor, he climbed unhesitatingly into Lorene’s bed.

T
HE FIRST TIME
Brownfield saw Mem, Josie’s “adopted” daughter, he had been balling Josie and Lorene for over two years. Mem had been away at school in Atlanta, an errant father paying her bills. She was Josie’s sister’s child. Her mother was dead.

“She died and left me the
sweetest
li’l burden,” Josie occasionally allowed as how to impressionable friends.

“That girl have to buy
books
that cost as much as a many of us pays for dresses!” Josie would smile proudly and with malicious aforethought at some of her less well-off acquaintances. For her “business” in the lounge paid off, and she didn’t mind letting people think she was putting Mem through high school.

Mem’s father, Brownfield learned, was a big Northern preacher with a large legitimate family. He had met Josie’s sister one summer when he came South to preach revival services in Josie’s father’s church. They had fallen in love and Mem was conceived. The preacher went back North to his family and Mem’s mother was put out of her father’s house.

Josie took her in until Mem was born, and shortly afterward she died.

“Of course, my sister sort of snatch that preacher from me on the rebound, you understand.” Josie smiled coyly, insistently, at Brownfield. “But it were really
me
he actually love.”

According to Josie, the only reason Lorene didn’t go to school (“of course, I were anxious and well off enough to send her”) was because she was too stubborn to go. However, by the time she was fifteen Lorene was the mother of two baby boys. Living in the lounge with her mother’s boy friends always after her, she was tripped up from the start by the men underfoot, and was the fastest thing going, next to her mother, in town. It had not taken Brownfield long to see that Lorene had her kind of crush on him (anything her mother tried appealed to her), and that Josie more than liked him. At seventeen he was well set up between the two of them and the lounge was as much his as theirs. Or so they were quick to assure him.

He got along well with them both and turned his back when they fought over him. Lorene, a smoke-cured slattern who doused herself with cheap perfume and wore her hair a bright new penny red, was as flattering a lay as her mother. For although she looked more like somebody’s brother than anybody’s girl, she had a reputation for toughness that earned her an abundance of respect from youngsters who hoped to grow up to be like her. She was noted for her expert use of the razor, and it was said that she had once cut up a customer’s wife and then run the customer out of the room while his wife almost bled to death. Brownfield enjoyed her also for her language, as when she said of the customer and his bleeding wife, “I was just tryin’ to
catch
that nigger and tell him to get that bleeding brood sow off my floor. I ain’t gonna kill
my
ass mopping up after these nasty folks.” Brownfield was happy until he got his first look at Mem.

Mem was cherry brown, not yellow like Josie or dark and hairy like Lorene. She was plump and quiet, with demure slant eyes. When she came home from school she was barely noticed. She stayed upstairs when the lounge was rocking, and when she did come down she kept right on out of the house and out walking, just walking, in the woods. Brownfield tried to talk to her but she answered him shyly, her eyes on the ground, without interest, it seemed to him, and went her way, with him more and more turning to look after her. He had never known anybody to go walking, “just walking,” in the woods, unless they expected to walk up on a good stick.

“Who the hell she think she is?” he asked Josie, frowning at what he couldn’t understand. “I can’t stand for women to go away for two weeks and come back talking proper!”

Part of what he meant was “walking proper,” for Mem certainly had a proper walk. For a while her walk alone mystified him, intrigued him, and in every way set his inquisitive itch on edge. He was not averse to making his person available to all members of the family.

“Aw, quit your going on and get on in this bed,” Josie purred, looking more like a fat caterpillar every day. “Ain’t no need for you looking at
that
one, she ain’t got no real itch in her pussy. She can’t do for you what I can do.”

Brownfield responded to her soft, sinful old hands by taking her to bed.

“When’s you and me going to get married, lover?” Josie asked, while Brownfield realized that Mem’s bed was just on the other side of the wall, about a foot from her benevolent “mothers.”

In moments of spitefulness, Lorene tried to tell Brownfield that what Josie had said about Grange and her was true. It didn’t make any sense to Brownfield that his father and Josie might have been lovers. Besides, what did he care if he now plowed a furrow his father had laid? Josie’s old field had never lain fallow. And after Mem came, what Lorene or Josie told him about anything didn’t matter. He was interested only in Mem. How to penetrate her quiet strangeness occupied his whole mind.

W
HAT HE FELT
always when he thought of Mem was guilt. Shame that he was no better than he was. Grime. Dirt. He thought of her as of another mother, the kind his own had not been. Someone to be loved and spoken to softly, someone never to frighten with his rough, coarse ways. But he could never successfully communicate his feelings to her; he did not know the words she knew, and even if he could learn them he had no faith that they would fit the emotions he had. She could read magazines and books, and he could only look at the pictures in them and hazard a guess at what the print meant. Often, when they were thrown together in the house and she walked outside on the porch to keep from being inside alone with him, he followed and tried to talk to her. She would smile and speak a few words, never harsh, about his carryings on with Josie and Lorene. He expressed an interest in wanting to read and write, and she offered to teach him. He caught on quickly to small things, and they spent many afternoons, before the Dew Drop Inn opened, on the steps outside with her old school books. When she began teaching grade school in the fall she took him along with her class. Or tried.

“In the first place,” she would begin, in an intense prim way Lorene and Josie scoffed at, “if you have two or three words to say and don’t know which word means two or more, it is better to just not use ‘s’ on the end of any of the words. This is so because the verb takes on the same number as the subject. You understand? Well, all I’m saying is ‘I
have
some cake,’
sounds
better than ‘I
haves
some cake.’ Or, ‘We have a friendship,’ is better than ‘We
haves
a friendship.’ Now is that clear?” And she would look at him, properly doubtful, wrinkling her brow. And he would nod, yes, and say over and over happily in his mind, We haves a friendship!
We,
Mem and me, haves us a friendship! and he would smile so that she would stop her frowning and smile too.

She was a good teacher. He had never had one. He learned to write his own name, to recite the ABC’s, and to write his name and her name linked together, all in a flourish, without lifting his hand from the paper. When she began to teach at school he sometimes sat on the porch by the open door and listened to her clear voice directing the small children, and he concentrated on what she said, as much for the subject matter (which taught him how to spell chicken, goat, cow, hog) as for the pleasure of hearing her speak. She did not sound at all like Josie and Lorene, who talked like toothless old women from plain indifference. Mem put some attention to what she was saying in it, and some warmth from her own self, and so much concern for the person she was speaking to that it made Brownfield want to cry.

In his own mind he considered himself perfect for Mem, if only because he loved her. But much of the town saw things differently, including Josie and Lorene, who were so jealous of their Cinderella that Brownfield became afraid for her (although he was hardly royalty, unless they considered him Prince Stud). Besides, Mem had never told him she cared for him.

But what really began to bother Brownfield was that since he became the man of the establishment, he had not felt it necessary to draw a salary. He was constantly dependent on Josie or Lorene for money, which they gave him readily enough, but with the understanding that he must work for his living and in exactly the ways they specified. And so he stood it around the house as long as he could, screwing Josie and Lorene like the animal he felt himself to be, especially when he stood next day in the same room with Mem, whose heart, pained, was becoming readable in her eyes. There was no longer any joy in his conquest of the two women, for he had long since realized that
he
wasn’t using them,
they
were using him. He was a pawn in a game that Josie and Lorene enjoyed. Sometimes he felt he was the link they used to prove themselves mother and daughter. Otherwise they might have been strangers. They existed for the simple pleasure of flirting with each other’s men, and then of fighting it out in the street in front of the lounge, where every man in the district soon learned that if you wanted a piece of pussy you had only to make up to one of them to have the other one fall in your lap.

For a while it was grand being prize pawn; for both women, fast breaking from the strain of liquor, whoredom, moneymaking and battle, thought they truly loved him—but as a clean young animal they had not finished soiling. Their lives infinitely lacked freshness. They were as stale as the two-dollar rooms upstairs. Innocence continued to exist in him for them, since they were not able to see anything wrong in what they did with him. He enjoyed it and after all he was nobody’s husband.

And if guilt feeling did exist, as perhaps it did on Sunday mornings in the Baptist church, when they outdressed all the women in town and outshouted half of them, it was a minimal and momentary uneasiness, fanned into a pleasurable passion of repentance by inflamed readings from the Scripture. They shouted out their sins in paroxysms of enjoyable grief. The righteous cleanliness of their souls hardly outlasted the service.

M
ATTERS CAME TO
a head for Brownfield when he saw Mem walking for the first time with a man, a teacher like herself. Suddenly he felt he might be passing up a great chance. He felt injured by her choice. Had Mem bypassed him because he was not a well-taught man? His pride was hurt. Gloomily he thought of his poverty and his dependence on Josie and Lorene. All he owned were the clothes on his back and they were none too new.