Two Shades of Morning (20 page)

“Sho is now,” came slowly through the curtain of branches.

“That be one aggravating white woman herself, even if she do be dead...”

“Sho is now.”

I wanted to leave then, because I knew what was coming, that I was now in with Mae and Punk, parteners in the Sibyl Hate Club.

“You do be knowing about her and Mr. P.W.?” Mae whispered. I nodded.

“She be jealous as she could, Miss Earlene”—her voice rose again—”say she like to snatch yo bleach-blond hair out by the roots. I told her it ain’t bleached. Say, ‘You think I look a dab like Miss Earlene?’ Always saying trash like that: ‘Little Miss Earlene, everbody’s beauty queen!’ Crazy woman! You oughta whupped her tail for carrying on with yo man, what I say. She be crazy bout that man to spite you.”

Her mimicking mixed with her whine made my head swim. “Why don’t you and Punk sell the junk?” I said. “Is that all of it?”

“Got her watch and what-all, left in a basket on the cookstove,” said Mae. “Got a pretty diamond bracelet, ascared to wear.” “I don’t reckon y’all could sell it.” I sighed, suddenly disgusted. “Can’t eat it, can’t wear it.” “Sho can’t now,” said Punk under cover of the tree.

“You go on and tell Mr. Robert Dale about the letter and what-all, then us’s can wear it,” Mae said, stepping aside off as if that settled it. “I reckon he’d likely take your word on it.”

“He might would, but I can’t promise he’d believe that about the letter.”

“Sho nuf,” Punk said.

“Lawd, Miss Earlene, we liable to go to jail. You be our witness to the truth—we ain’t stold nothing!” She tucked the ringed hand under her armpit.

The old lady came out on the porch, gazed curiously about, then wandered inside again, shaking her head. She dropped to a chair before the blinking tv screen and began waving the bug-laden air with a cardboard handfan.

“Maybe I’d better just take it all back to Robert Dale’s house,” I said, “and make like it’s been there all along.” The tree came alive with an excited rustle of branches.

Mae circled, scuffing at a patch of gummy mud with her turtle-

head toes. She stopped and held out her hand, looking longingly at the diamond’s glitter in the dark.

“It wont make much difference,” I said. “She had so much nobody won’t miss it. Just keep away from over there.”

The umbrella tree shook, raining great drops to the dirt.

“Can’t,” Mae said, sullen and still against the tremble of branches behind. She rimmed her lips with her swollen pink tongue, eyes like tacks. “Me and Punk got to work out what we done got to owing Mr. Robert Dale.” She spat the last part like a mouth full of siphoned gas. “Cause of her.

“Y’all run up a debt with her?” I asked.

Punk’s groaning merged with the frogs’.

“Evertime we turn around, she be handing out mo’ money,” Mae said. “Kept it writ down on a tablet in a kitchen drawer.” She waited for me to say something, and when I didn’t she went on. “We be working it out till this time next year.”

“How come y’all to go and do something like that?” “You know how it is, Miss Earlene,” she whined. “First one and then the other be needing something, and next thing you know, you done run up a debt.”

I did know, and I knew Robert Dale, like P.W., was against the practice of loaning money to keep the hands obligated. Big Robert Dale, as well as half the farmers and turpentine men in the county, had always done that. But Robert Dale? Mae had said Sibyl was the one who had forked over the money, but the idea would have come from Robert Dale, or maybe the two or them were more alike than I’d thought. Maybe Robert Dale knew about the jewelery and was using it as more leverage against Mae and Punk. One more crook in that circle that never broke—needing, borrowing, grinding on like mules at a cane mill—till their disgraced deaths. Slavery upgraded.

Damn Sibyl and Robert Dale! Damn the blinding brilliance of death! I started the truck, saying, “Go ahead and wear your jewelry; just wear it at night and make sure you don’t wear it except in the quarters.”

“Yas ‘um,” Mae said, “long as you be our witness.”

Another of Sibyl’s useless gifts, and so incriminating. She must have known when she she gave the jewelery—and I believed she did give it, despite the facts riddled with lies—must have known of the power behind that gift. Maybe she had thought that I would get all tangled up in trying to defend Mae and Punk and ruin my reputation in the county. I didn’t know what kind of trap she’d laid, but I would always believe that somehow what she’d said about me and Punk in the ditch would have surfaced if I’d tried to arrange for them to wear their diamonds in the telling light. I would fix her by never telling. If I’d cornered Robert Dale, I might have convinced him to forget the jewelery and the debt, but I couldn’t risk it, knowing how he had changed. Besides, if he had taken on the habits of those swaggering big farmers and turpentine men, he would have two sides: a soft side for women and a hard side for men. He’d sweet-talk me and then get even.

* * * * *

Chapter 14

Atumn was now nudging summer aside and a cool wind blew through the facing windows of the trailer, airing out the mustiness of rain and of us. This was the morning P.W. would leave for the army, so I was packing his clothes for him.

Oh yeah, I wanted to tell him to pack for himself, but I would have ended up having to point out items he missed—I would have had to talk to him—and I didn’t want a single thing left that belonged to him.

While fishing his tennis shoes from beneath the couch, I gazed at Sibyl’s sun-blared portrait on the other wall. Could I leave her there when I sold the trailer? Let whoever ended up with it put up with her. It would be so easy, and who would care? She’d probably wind up like her phony ancestors, passed from shops to houses, all over the country that P.W. was going to fight for. And she’d look good, would fit in most anywhere. When I looked at her a certain way, she did favor one of those stiff aristocrats who could stay on the circuit forever.

The world out there suddenly felt false to me, and I was tempted to stay, donkey-like, on the floor, clutching those shoes in the shape of my leaving-husband’s feet, leather pouched where his big toes went. No. I’d lug the portrait every step I took, to remind me, to prevent waste, but not to prevent guilt or insult Sibyl’s dead gesture. The trailer seemed empty with the stark sun spread across the muddy-brown carpet of the living room. The wind whipped the gold brocade drapes on the east jalousies and the plastic knobs of the draw cords knocked against the wall. Like a spotlight, the sun picked up every hair, every grain of sand on the kitchen tiles—

Daddy’s tracks with a lacework of sandy shoe treads left from the day before.

Finally, he had come over and, just as I’d expected, didn’t say much, but he brought P.W. a string of fresh flapping perch he’d caught at the river that morning. He didn’t look friendly, and he didn’t act friendly either. He just brought the fish and left. But him giving them and P.W. taking them said more than words, more than friendly looks.

I’d have to talk to Daddy soon, now that his moods were neutralizing. With every family disaster, as far back as I could recall—and there weren’t that many in our family—Daddy always took a while to work things through in the woods behind the house. When I was a little girl and he would wander off, I’d picture him wrestling with himself, like Jacob with the angel in my Sunday School book—all bright primary colors—and nothing bad could last with God on his side. “That’s just your Daddy and his way of doing things,” Aunt Birdie would say, and Mama would be wringing her hands. I’m a cross between them, but a lot of Aunt Birdie rubbed off on me too.

Stuffing a tennis shoe each side of the folded clothes in P.W.’s suitcase, I pondered whether I should live with Aunt Birdie or go home, whether I should ask Daddy for the money he’d saved for me to go to college, or make my own way. If I took the money, I’d have to move home—at least I would feel that I should—and, face it, home at Aunt Birdie’s was the same as home at Mama’s and Daddy’s.

P.W. came in and sat on the couch next to the suitcase, crossed his legs and stared at the wall with Sibyl’s picture. Then he cut his eyes at me, watching as I placed his plaid flannel shirt in the suitcase and folded the soft sleeves with exaggerated care. It smelled like fried fish from hanging on the back of the kitchen door.

“You go on and keep the money coming from the trailer,” he said.

“I’ll send your half.” “You don’t have to.”

“It’s yours.”

“Yours, too.”

“I’ll get by.”

“You going out to work?”

“Probably.” I waited for him to say what he’d always said, A woman ain’t got no business out working.

“What you reckon you could do?” he asked, surprising me by moving a little out of himself, king and conqueror.

“Anything I have to,” I said. “I took typing in school, remember?”

“You might could get a secretary job.” His interest dwindled then; he yawned. He looked at the sun-flooded wall, at the portrait dominating it, and tossed a throw pillow from hand to hand.

“I might go to college,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said indifferently.

I shrugged and closed the suitcase. “I might go to work at Miss Crawford’s dress shop.” A joke and a test. I watched him for a response, got none. The pck-pck-pck of the blowing drape pulls was driving me crazy.

“What was that, sug?”

“Just the drape pulls hitting the wall,” I said and swung the suitcase to the floor. ###

I felt strange going around to the driver’s side of the pickup without P.W. asking, You want to drive? But it happened naturally enough, an understanding between us that I’d drive him to the bus station in Jasper, Florida. He had already sold his truck to some bootlegger, he’d said, and whoever the mystery man was would be picking it up later. Out on the highway, I didn’t feel at all edgy about driving him in his truck for the first and last time. I didn’t care if I let up on the clutch too quick, if he got jolted a bit. I kept silent for two miles of water-combed grass shoulders and slick mud ditches, but I knew I’d say something, could feel it wallowing up from that core where unfair things fester. Just as I knew, at some point, I’d say something to Robert Dale about Sibyl. I was the one who’d suffered most, so I had a right to say whatever would come out when my thoughts focused on what that something was.

“I wish everything had been different,” I said, keeping my eyes on the glinting gravel ahead where illusory snakes vanished before I could smash them.

“Me, too.”

I looked at his smooth rounded thighs, his blunt knees pressing the creases from his khaki pants, and was amazed that his body had ever seemed familiar.

His sun-pinked face was fixed on the pine woods beyond his window. “Go on and get married again. You hear?” “Thank you.”

“Oh, come on! You know you’ll get married to somebody.” He looked at me then and grinned, and it just so happened that we were passing the one-room cinderblock juke, his hangout on the Georgia/Florida line. “Pretty girl like you, course you’ll get married,” he added.

I bit my tongue and felt like slapping him. He’d mocked me by blurting whatever had surfaced in his head, hadn’t even bothered to search for something fresh. Still grinning, he reached across and chucked me under the chin. “Don’t you let none of what’s happened stand in your way,” he said. “Any man’d give a pretty to get you.”

“Shut your damn mouth!” I snapped.

“Yes ma’am.” He shrugged and stared out the window again.

A white hot implosion went off behind my eyes, and I swerved from the highway to the shoulder, jolting along until I decided to brake. My choice! My choice!

“What the hell!” yelled P.W., crooking one arm before his face as though to fend off an onrushing curve sign.

“Listen up, boy!” I shouted. “Don’t you ever talk down to me again, I’ve taken enough of your bull.”

He laughed then, threw his head back and laughed, ugly lips flared till his bottom teeth showed. I swung wide with one arm and rammed my fist into his mouth.

“Damn, Earlene!” He covered his mouth with of his wrist.

Blood trickled from two dash-line punctures on my knuckles. “Reckon they’ll take you in the army without teeth?”

“Dammit to hell, Erlie!” He froze with his wrist still over his mouth and stared at me with teary blue eyes.

“It’s okay,” I said, because it was and he could no more help blurting than I could; he could no more help being who he was than I could, or Robert Dale or Sibyl—than the year could help being 1964.

He bowed his head. “God, I loved you, Earlene.”

“Me too,” I said, easing onto the highway again. “We better get going or you’ll miss your bus.”

“Reckon we got time to stop at the fruit stand in Jasper and get a cocoaler?”

“I guess so,” I said. “What about Robert Dale?”

“You asking me did he love you, too?”

“No, I meant, what’ll come of him?”

“Aw, he’ll get over it,” he said. “He’ll sell out and move on. Uncle Sam’ll probably move him now.”

“What about Sibyl?” I needed to say the name rather than think it all the time, and I sounded crazy, as if I thought she was still alive. And she was.

“Get rid of her picture,” he said.

“Why did he marry her? Why’d you fall in love with her? Why...?”

“God, Earlene, I don’t know nothing.” He slapped the seat between us and dust squiggled up in the irritated sun. “All I know is I’m going off to a war I don’t give a flip about, and I ain’t hardly been past Florida before.”

Why did you like her better than me? I started to ask, but the question went away before it had formed, like a wave breaking offshore. I reached across and patted his knee. “Damn, you’re cute,” he said, cupping my hand with his, warm in the sun through the windshield.

P.W. had never been attracted to tall glamorous girls with strong personalities. He liked cute, short girls he could boss around. How had he been dazzled by Sibyl?

“Just so you think I’m cute,” I said. I wanted to give him something, a going-away present for his morale, so I decided not to react to insults previously taken as compliments. “Thank you.”

#

When we got to Jasper, I followed the bus route signs along the narrow shop-fronted streets. Neither of us had ever worn a watch. Now he did—a black, over-sized digital that read 11:05. The bus would be there at 11:15. We watched the numerals flip to 11:06, 11:07, 11:08, while I drove on past the fruit stand frocking one street corner with mesh bags of oranges hung from the eaves of the long open stall floored with sawdust. That place where we used to wander among hardened baby gator souvenirs and lacquered cypress knees made into lamps and swig Cokes fished from the icy water of a rusted drink chest. Now the fruit stand seemed boring and stale, just a place to buy fruit.

The Greyhound bus pulled up as we parked before the squat red brick bus station. P.W., fidgeting with his jacket slung over his shoulder, took a deep breath and got out. I went around to help take his suitcase and satchel from the back of the pickup.

Hidden from the bus by the truck, he stepped up and pulled me to him, squeezing me, breasts to chest, and buried his face in my hair, whispering, “God, I hate to go! God, I hate to leave you, Earlene.”

“Me, too,” I said, feeling his cheek slide dry against mine, our sudden tears. His face was as smooth as mine and I thought about how I used to fuss because he would wait till morning to shave, how much time I’d wasted on such tripe. “I love you,” I said, meaning exactly that and not in-love with you.

“I love you too, Earlene.” And the fact that he didn’t say “sugar” instead of “Earlene” meant he loved me the same way.

From the speakers at each end of the station came a warning that the bus bound for Orlando would be pulling out in five minutes. P.W. stepped back and smiled weakly, his freckles standing on his pale face. I longed to touch his hair, copper in the copper sun, to hold him again, if for no other reason that to halt his going, my staying, time. We might have stood there forever, rocking in the moment, while the world went on by.

Lugging his suitcase and satchel, he walked lamely toward the open bus door, stepped up and shuffled along the aisle. I watched him settle into one of the dwarfing seats, in the middle, two ahead of another man tinted purple by the tinted glass, and P.W. took on the same purplish tone, and purple became the color of solitude.

#

When I got home, I stripped the bed and crammed the washer full of his sleep-softened sheets, random towels and bath cloths. Already the trailer brimmed with sun and fresh air that carried the smell of him, of us, out the windows, curing, purging and light. On my hands and knees, I scrubbed his mud-stamped tracks from the kitchen tiles till a gray foam spread, then rinsed them, banishing his traces.

By two that afternoon, the clothesline sagged with sheets and towels, some of my clothes, none of his, the last of ours. Wind flapped the sheets with a series of full-rounded pops and wafted the smell of chlorine in the charged air. Grasshoppers clicking in the high dying grass around P.W.’s junk cars, the ringing of locusts in the dead cottonwood. Lingering sounds that merged in a triumph of oblivion, empty, scattering and rising to the drone of an airplane. The plane passed overhead, dragging the sounds, then released them.

In the rosy dusk, after the wind had died, I stood under the clothesline and folded the towels and sheets, and placed them in ordered layers in the clothes basket.

A sudden cawing of crows across the open field spoke of fall and started time again, bringing on a backlog of racket from the afternoon: mourning doves cooing, crickets chirring, the telephone ringing, wrens warbling a fake spring song—telephone still ringing—and my cuckoo clock, that verbose intruder, letting loose with seven strident koo-koos.

I ran up the back doorsteps, dropping the basket of clothes on the blotter-paper dull kitchen floor, and snatched the receiver from the hook. “Hello.”

“Earlene?”

“Oh, Robert Dale. Have you been trying to call long?”

“Off and on,” he said. “I could see you out hanging clothes and taking them in, and I kept missing you.”

“I’m sorry.” From where I was standing, at the corner of the living room and kitchen, I could see Sibyl’s portrait, her eyes humbly veiled, attenuating.

“P.W. get off okay?”

“Yes.” “Did he leave word...?” He stopped there.

“I haven’t seen you in a while.” I decided to change the subject.

“I been making up for lost time in the turpentine woods.”

“Oh,” I said and listened for that old grudging tone of loss.

Nothing.

“Earlene, you want to come over and eat a bite. I got some hamburgers and junk.” He laughed self-consciously.

“I guess so. When?”

“Come when you get ready.”

After hanging up the phone, I moved the cuckoo clock from the kitchen chair to the table and sat down, watching the fake brown house with the gaudy clock face and the tiny door from which the living-dead bird might spring out and shock me. Obviously P.W. hadn’t gone by to see Robert Dale before he had left? I’d hoped maybe they’d seen each other on the road and had stopped to talk, or at the Georgia/Florida line where they used to go for a game of pool—before Sibyl, who like the time had changed them. She’d called their game “billiards,” correcting them, and they had quit playing.