Two Shades of Morning (22 page)

“That you were rich.” “Yep.” He laughed. “And I bought her a big fancy diamond ring with my tobacco money to prove it. She run Lettie off soon as she got here, said she wadn’t fixing to live in no rundown dump. Lettie had a hissy fit at first, but you know Lettie.”

“I know Lettie,” I said in contribution, hearing my voice crawl on the rich-with-Sibyl air.

“Lettie gave right in, said she belonged to be close to Mama anyhow, what with me grown and all, needing my own life. If she’d just hung around, put up a fight...” He sighed and lay back on the bed with his arms over his head, staring up at the light that rendered his face like new lard. “Next thing I knew, Sibyl had ordered up a new house. I didn’t have a bit of trouble getting the money for that; it was what came with it, and then the horses and the barn and the cars got me down. I’d prettinear borried all I could get hold of before she got her last car. You ever see her satisfied?”

“No.” I lay beside him, on my back too, and we listened to the whippoorwills way off, their sonorous calls now reduced to a sort of steady, rapid snoring.

“I won’t have you thinking there’s something wrong with you because of what me and P.W. did.” I just listened. What an idiot!

“I made her jealous of us,” he said, bringing both arms down to his sides.

“Us?”

“Me and you. That night after the cookout when I walked you home, I didn’t go back to the barn right away. I let ‘em wonder where we were.”

“You mean P.W. thought...?” The name stuck in my throat like a red hot coal; I swallowed and felt it burn all the way down.

“I imagine he got pretty riled.” He laughed as though it was of little consequence, some strategy in a basketball game necessary to bring the team to victory. He rolled over and kissed me on the mouth, a sloppy soft kiss, whiskey sweet, then lifted his face as though testing for feelings. “We could still give it a try, me and you.”

My instinct was to slap him, to wipe his kiss from my lips, but reason said to let him rattle on. See where he would go from there. “Second fiddle?” I asked.

“I’ve played it.” A message salted with meaning.

“Yes,” I said, a bit insulted by the lack of interest in his dead-to-me eyes. But mostly sickened.

He rolled over again, onto his stomach, muttering, “You could have all her stuff—I mean you can have it anyway.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Reckon they’d take me in the army with a record long as my arm?”

“You don’t have one yet,” I said, thinking the kiss and the confession might not have happened—praying they hadn’t. Mentally I transferred them to the box with the frivolous pink frieze.

He laughed. “I bet I’m the only one in Little Town doesn’t mind going to the Vietnam war. Poor old P.W. Lord, she got to him! He came plum unstuck first time she got to telling him she was dying.

“You know I can’t help but wonder if everlast one of us wadn’t crazy about her cause she was dying. We hadn’t ever seen nobody young and pretty about to die. Course, there was just something about Sibyl...”

He’s talking about the others, the basketball players, I thought, them and Sibyl. My face grew hot, realizing that he was telling me things he thought I already knew, and I knew so little. Only that our lives had been splattered like rotten eggs against a wall.

“Let’s get the rest of this stuff boxed up,” I said. “I gotta get home.” I was no longer willing to listen all night. I just wanted everything boxed up and taped down. I wanted to separate myself from him, pictures and notes and past, and forget it all.

“I don’t believe in being in love,” I said in response to something he said about love, and then I raked the jewelry case from the top of Sibyl’s vanity to a box, along with her silver charm bracelet and jade earrings, her lipsticks, powder and perfumes. I was glad Mae and Punk had something, even if it was only glitter they couldn’t use. A spool of thread, the color of Sibyl’s burial dress rolled into the box too. I picked it up, disgusted with her crazy notions, that whole ivory spectrum of her dying days, and dropped it as Robert Dale said, “Then you’ve never been in love before.”

The comment came disconnected, so I let it lay with the others that hung in the air thick with her. She was Sibyl now, no longer Sibyl, she.

“She had all of us eating out of her hand before she got done.” He laughed vaingloriously, as if he was proud to have bought the act that brought the acclaim.

“Didn’t you ever mind the others?” I asked, watching him behind me in the mirror.

“Huh?”

“The others being with her, didn’t you mind?”

“At first,” he said, dumping the contents of a dresser drawer into a box, part of his answer obliterated by the drawer runners scraping onto their tracks. “...got to where it didn’t bother me.”

I felt shorn of innocence like insulating wool.

“She never went all the way, you know,” he said.

I watched my face go white in the mirror, his movements but a blur at my back. The tease. I watched the tease in Sibyl’s gilt-

framed mirror, tears trickling down my dropped face. And I thought about my Easter dress hanging so long in the closet, my stringing everybody along...worms nibbling at my vanity. Had I reached out, I could have touched Sibyl.

“There is one thing I’d like to have of hers,” I said.

“Take whatever you want.”

I took the shoe box with the pink frieze and left him worrying with ghosts, living and dead.

* * * * *

Chapter 15

I set out along the moonlit stretch to Aunt Birdie’s. The sandy road ahead, the grassed shoulders, fields and trees, as far as I could see, were skinned over with a mother-of-pearl luminescence, the same kind of light that forms in the east to make a dawn. Out in the open and free, I took off my shoes, squishing the cool sand between my toes, and walking backwards, watched my foot prints meet. It was over.

That deadness inside me was shedding and newness was hatching under the eggshell skin made of moon. Turning again, slowly so as not to disturb the distillation of sound and light, I could see the moon glinting on Aunt Birdie’s tin roof and spilling over the sides of her house to the yard and road, a pool of moonspun sand, to the cedar thicket in Mama’s and Daddy’s yard where dark started. The bearing-down song of crickets seemed textured of moonlight and flushed the shrillness of the world behind me.

I’d always loved moonlight, and I knew that probably made me a romantic, and probably being a romantic was what had made me so vulnerable, what had been at the root of my undoing. But, say what you will, moonlight has a way of bringing out things usually skipped by daylight: the silvery mortar rim of Aunt Birdie’s brick well, in feral shadow now; the hoop of white hot fire, those moon-torched electric glass insulators, bordering her phlox bed (Aunt Birdie must have screwed those glass domes into the dirt in anticipation of moonlight—she had that kind of vison, moonlight vision in balance with day); the chinaberry tree loomed solid—alive with roosting chickens now—leaves tucked by the moonspray and in their stead, feathers sifting down; the house looked whole, no warped boards or sagging porch, no leaning chimney, one oblique shadow penciled in on the dirt; and the clothesline shadow, a line drawn across the east side of the yard to keep snakes from crawling past and burrowing in the unstirred dust under the house.

Mama and Daddy would be fast asleep in their room that smelled of cold soot and cedar, as smothering as their love at times. Poor Daddy, who had taken such a risk and lost, and Mama, who thought evil was a woman giggling. Aunt Birdie knew what real evil was, and I would bet a nickel she’d not given a nickel to Robert Dale’s cause.

Drawing nearer to the end of the road, I could see a yellow light in her front window giving off a glow like a kerosene lamp. She loved those bug-repellent bulbs, maybe because they discouraged night bugs, or maybe because their soft surlur flare tempered her harsh, realistic view of things.

I dropped my shoes on the porch floor, testing the cool smooth planks with my bare soles, and she opened the door and stood staring at me in the shifting moonlight; she made no pretense of guessing who’d come up, didn’t feign surprise, nor try to hide that she’d been expecting me.

“I figgered you’d be on,” she said, “so I waited up.” Her straight-forwardness scratched across the moonlight lull like nails on tin. She pushed open the dragging screen door for me to pass through. “P.W. get off awright?” she asked, glancing down at the box under my arm.

I wasn’t quite ready to talk about the box—what was in it—and might never be. “I took him to the bus station this morning,” I said. In the front room, I stood facing the square kitchen table where a row of sugar-dulled jars of cucumber pickles set tarnishing like a miser’s coins. The warm air was sticky with cloves, tumeric and sweetened vinegar. “I see you been putting up pickles,” I said.

“Put up twelve quarts thi’sevening,” she said, “with the help of your mama and daddy.”

“They’re pretty,” I said, weaving among the close-set chairs and tables and baskets, a catercornered pie safe, a bed, and two rockers set before a low-burning fire on the hearth. “Aren’t you hot, Aunt Birdie?”

“Reckon it is a little warm in here.” She wiped her hands on her stained white apron, untied and draped it over a chair with a cowhide bottom.

“Feels good outside,” I said. “Starting to cool off some.”

She hobbled to one of two windows set each side of the mantelpiece and lifted up, mullioned panes birring, and propped it with a sawed-off tobacco stick.

“Pull up a chair and set down,” she said.

“I went over and helped Robert Dale pack up some stuff,” I said, avoiding the name “Sibyl” in Aunt Birdie’s house.

She scuffed to the hearth in her blue terry slides and poked at the two logs melting into each other, then settled into her shabily padded rocker next to mine. “What’d he have to say?” She watched the fire as though charmed by the row of flames blooming like lilies along the logs.

“Nothing much,” I said, then added, “just that Sibyl had married him so she could die respectable.” Because I might as well get on with telling what I’d end up telling anyway.

“Is that what he had to say?”

“He made out like he was rich.” I placed the box on the floor between us. “Threw away his tobacco money on a big diamond ring for her.” “Umm,” she said, her leathern forehead curling up as she glanced down at the box.

I waited, leisurely lifting my knees and latching my hands around them to stop their trembling. “Well, sugar,” Aunt Birdie said, rocking with her feet paddling on the rag rug, “ain’t much point in holding nothing back now. You come here to tell me what you know on Sibyl and to find out what I know. What you asked before and I weren’t of a mind to tell. Not while she was living.”

“I’m not sure I do know anything, Aunt Birdie. I mean, nothing that would do to tell.”

She nodded, satisfied she knew the feeling, but had somehow overed it. “Just between you and me and the gatepost, Sibyl Sharpe knowed us a long time before we got to knowing her.”

A lid on a jar of pickles sealed with a pop. I flinched.

She leaned forward and spat a cud of snuff into her coffee-can spittoon, as if she had a lot to say and her snuff was in the way of her tongue. Then she sat back and sighed, eyes on the fire, and drew her handkerchief across her mouth. All in her own good time.

I didn’t know how and I didn’t know what, but I knew that I was on the verge of knowing, really knowing Sibyl, knowing death and being able to see it closing the calendar on finished days. And if you could die from holding your breath, I would have died then. Whatever she would tell about Sibyl—and it had to be something about her past—would change my thinking on life and death and her, would no longer leave me free to shuffle through mundane days but would plummet me toward a meaningful end. I thought I saw Aunt Birdie’s hands shake, but it was my eyes, my very nerves set to quivering over dread of the unknown. It wasn’t over.

“This all took place around 1950, when me and Pap was living on Emmet Walter’s old homeplace, bout halfway here to the Georgia line.” She paused, waiting for the tale to rise like smoke over green fire wood. “That was just before we moved here to farm your daddy’s place, a year or so, I’d say, and Emmet had just bought that cloth-top car setting in your yard now. A sight of his’try in that old car. I done told you how him and Pap’d go out gallivanting in it, them and that Candy Block, so I won’t backtrack over all that now.” She sucked in and let go, rocking to the rhythm of the crackling fire.

“Anyhow, it was on a hot summer evening, late that August, just about the time pears was coming in, and Emmet put in for me to mind his store in Little Town for him and Pap to cruise some timber over round Monticello. I was a good hand to figger then, and ever so often, I’d make a little change on the side by helping out at the store; besides, looked like a chance for Pap to get in some line of business sides farming. Back then, you could be fattening right along on homegrown corn and taters and still be suffering from what you took in from crops.

“Well, I put down what I was doing and went on, half-figgering them two would get off and get to drinking, but they was liable to do that anyhow. Nobody much didn’t come by the store that evening—the depression hadn’t let up for most folks around here. One or two dropped by to jaw, a couple of colored pulpwood hands come in for sodie crackers and cold drinks on a credit. Emmet would work it out of them or have their hides. He was the mister come up with the idear to start a Klu Klux Klan in these parts; had to get dog-drunk to put a bedsheet over his head.” She was talking in the backed-up voice of her youth, spry, strong and clear.

“Long about sundown that evening, Emmet comes driving up on the dirt yard in front of the store, him and Pap, and I could tell they was drinking by the way they had their necks scrunched, both of ‘em all drawed up and beaming. They parked before the door and got out, staggering and sniggering, Emmet’s head hanging to one side, like it’d do. Him tall and blocky-shouldered, and Pap, pint-sized and wiry, all ears.” She clenched her teeth. “Made me mad as fire! I met ‘em at the door with my fly flappet—you know a man ain’t nothing but a baby, don’t matter how old he gets to be. Anyhow, I went to laying down the law, told ‘em to set on the bench out front till they could sober up and act like somebody, then went on inside. I could see their keen red necks through the window, them staring off at the courthouse across the new hardroad where the liveoaks was just coming alive with katydids. A car or two passed, somebody’s old truck, but most everbody in Little Town was done setting down to supper. We was going through a bad hot spell, and looked like just before dark, the sun got hotter, bearing down before it let up. Had a lil’ ole fan in the store didn’t do nothing but stir the heat.

“I went on about my business, mopped up a puddle of water from the ice box, got me a cold drink, and pulled up a chair to the front door so I could mind out for them and the store. Me knowing they was just waiting for the chance to strike out in that dad-bum car again. Ever once in awhile, Emmet, setting on the end of bench by the door, would peep around and see me watching, and he’d mumble to Pap, and Pap’d cuss and stand up, hiesting his britches, and make like he was leaving in spite of me. I’d let him get about halfway to the car, then holler out, and he’d stuff his hands in his pockets and straggle back to set with Emmet.” She got still, as though searching for the right words to give voice to the heart of the story, the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece laying claim to all sound, what had been there all along, and marking time-past and time-present, a sliver of now, and time-to-come, a rapid passing. A moth came anyway and flitted around the yellow bulb in the front window.

“Come dust-dark, me getting ready to close up the store, I seen a stocky, black-headed man and a young girl with gold hair come rambling up from Walton Creek way. Not nobody from around Monroe County, I could tell, even if they hadn’t been wearing packs on their backs. A look about them that told they was from sommers else; the way the old man was carrying hisself, for one thing, loose-jointed and quick, slinging his arms with his head high. Prouder than most tramps—they was a sight of tramps come by in them days. The lil ole gal, maybe twelve or thirteen—hard to tell and her with all that makeup and built like she was—wore shorts up to her crotch, and weren’t a woman in the county would dress like that along then.”

I placed my feet flat on the floor and pressed my itchy back to the slat back of the rocker, death-still and waiting.

She went on: “‘Howdy-do,’ said the man to Emmet and Pap, like a policy man come to collect on their insurance. He stopped before them, wiping his forehead with his dingy white shirt sleeve. ‘Reckon we could bother you for a drink of water?’ he said.

“‘Help yourself,’ Emmet said and pointed to the spigot at the end of the bench where Pap was dozing to the hum of locusts in the dog fennels between the old Masonic Lodge and the store.

“The fellow cupped his hands and swigged till he got full, stepped to the side and waited for the girl to drink. Her slinging her back pack to the ground, then holding her long gold hair from her sunned face and sucking from the spigot. “‘That your car?’ asked the man, wandering off across the yard to the car, checking it out.

“‘Mine,’ said Emmet, him and Pap both at attention now. Suspicioning, I expect, cause weren’t that many tramps had the gall to walk up slick and set in questioning.

“‘Well,’ said the man, ‘I be goddamned!’ Or the gall to use the Lord’s name in vain in Little Town. What we lacked in businesses, we made up for in churches: look left, and you could see the Methodist church; look right, and you could see the Baptist church; and if you could of looked over the top of the two-story courthouse, you could see the Church of God, and behind it the Church of Christ and the Colored church in the quarters, behind the schoolhouse.

“The girl roamed around the side of the building, then come back and propped up on the cooterhull of the car, gazing off at two younguns let loose after supper to play in the courtyard. Them gold eyes taking in everthing—Pap and Emmet and the man in the moon sunk in the haze over the tin top of the courthouse. “Her old man—I done figgered him for the daddy cause he looked to be close to forty—was kicking the tires, peeping inside the car. Whistling like he would at a woman. ‘Don’t reckon you’d figger trading on this car?’ he said.

“‘No sir,’ said Emmet, ‘I wouldn’t.’

“The fella stood tall, staring over the car, his greasy face catching the glare of sun as it dropped. Then he strolled around the back, locking eyes with the girl, then Emmet. ‘This here’s my girl,’ he said, ‘been walking the road with me since we left Alabamie. Going to South Florida to pick oranges for the winter.’

“‘Don’t say,’ said Emmet.

“‘Yessir,’ said the man and propped on the cooter hull next to the girl fanning with her hand. ‘I’m gone make you a deal you can’t refuse,’ he said. Them hard dark eyes cut around at the crossing, then at Emmet again. ‘How bout swapping me this car here for this lil ole gal here.’ “I come to my feet then.

“‘What the...?’ said the girl and whirled round to stand between her old man and Emmet. ‘You sunstruck or something, Harp?’

“Harp. She called him Harp.

“‘Hush up,’ he said and stepped around her. ‘Time you got off the road.’

“‘But you gone be on it—right?—and in that car—right?’

“He never looked at her, just at Emmet. And Emmet ain’t said nothing; he just set there gnawing at his black moustache and nussing his hands on his lap with his ankles crossed. I figgered he might be fixing to make the trade; not that he would of sober, mind you, but you never could tell and him drunk. Had a lot of business about him, but he was a weak man with a drink in him. After a minute or two, looked like he come to his senses, maybe thought about Miss Lily waiting supper at the house. He stood up, sucking in his gut, and Pap stood up too, and Emmet went to rearing and cussing at the man, Pap joining in like a fice dog yipping in the background. Then both of ‘em tore out after that fella, like dogs in a pack. Him taking off around the store and up the alley of dog fennels, bypassing the girl and dodging around the front of the car, eyeing Pap and Emmet now scooping up gravel from the side of the road and chunking it over the car at the tramp. Screen doors went to slamming from all four corners of Little Town, people idling out on their porches. And that gal just stood there with her hands hanging, same old spot by the cooterhull. Face calm as could be. All of a sudden, the man, ducking up and down behind the car, went to cackling and hollering out that he was just cutting up—’wouldn’t take nothing for that girl.’ And still she stood there, maybe pondering her possibilities, and still you couldn’t tell by her face what she was thinking. You never could.