Two Shades of Morning (7 page)

I dressed and ate some smelly leftover broccoli. I ate it, hating it, but knowing it was good for me and tasted nothing. Then I scribbled a note to P.W. telling him where I would be, but realized he’d probably see me at the barn when he came by. So I scratched it and simply wrote “I love you,” because I needed to make the words. It was good to write something I knew, something that wouldn’t fly at me in the face of unreality. And yet I couldn’t touch love anymore than death, those two intangibles so powerful and dim.

The cuckoo clock ticked, the foolish bird poked his head through the miniature brown door with a vibrating call, and popped back inside.

Maybe this time I’ll be through with her, I thought, walking along the road in a flurry of red-winged maple seeds. She might die this very evening and free me. I wished I could turn around and go to Mama’s and Aunt Birdie’s to eat with them and let my shoulders drop. But already I could feel myself pulling away from that phase and pressing on toward Sibyl in her shell house—same as the cuckoo bird.

* * * * *

Chapter 6

But the house didn’t feel like a shell anymore; Sibyl was warm, and I could feel my hiked shoulders drop. Maybe she had change. I started to recognize the scope of her imagination and appreciate it, pushing back bad thoughts to the walls now papered in overlaid blue-and-beige plaid. As I followed behind, she told me that the blue picking up on beige throughout the house was called Windsor. The floors, stripped of white carpets, were heartpine planks, laid with wooden pegs, or what looked like wooden pegs. Mae told me on the sly that “they’s nailed down just like any other floor.” She said it as if she took great pride in at least knowing that wooden pegs concealed the nails. “I knows a heap they don’t think I knows,” she added, glancing around at Sibyl who was answering a phone call in the kitchen.

The contemporary furniture had been replaced with antiques of oak and pine, primitive and quaint, knick-knacks and all, like turning a page in a decorator’s magazine. Beanpot lamps and hook rugs warmed the spots once held by cut-glass lamps and white carets; paintings and tables and chairs, all bought for the right blend of old-but-new. Kerosene lamps, fruit jars, and wire baskets heaped with fake eggs were arranged inconspicuously to be conspicuous. I wondered how many like relics had been bulldozed to Bony Branchwith the farmhouse. Even a screened pie safe, like Miss Lettie’s, but with a copper-screen countenance, now cater-cornered a nook of the dining room. Delicate china and stainless steel cookware, all gone, and in their places were earthen crockery and polished copper. Anything lending to the look of elegant living had been thrown out like yesterday’s greens. A new world for starting over, I decided, refreshed and appreciative of the old. How much can old cost? I’d always thought of old as something that came about with time.

The brass beds upstairs had gone out like lights and in their spaces, scrolled oak headboards stood along the walls papered with pastoral motifs. (Sibyl seldom bought one of anything; if she liked something a lot she bought lots.) A clean cedar scent spiced the house, and there was a faint fragrance of baked apples and cinnamon, though nothing was baking. Wicker baskets of catalogues and magazines and odd-fashioned cushions—one in the shape of a heart—were scattered about on the living room floor.

I sat in a padded rocker before the picture window, framed in white country curtains, and watched the moss in the oaks stir lazy patterns on the raked dirt. I was lulled by her natural manner and the cozy house into almost believing, almost caught up in her spell, as the afternoon ticked down to the tune of a grandfather clock.

“No,” she said, when I tried to help her get ready for the party. “You’re company. You don’t have to do a thing but just sit and look pretty.”

“But...”

“Me and Mae’s got everything together,” she interrupted, placing a hand on my arm and showering me with her golden haze. I followed her out the back door anyway, pausing to straighten a welcome mat she’d flipped with her boot toe, and stood inhaling the honeysuckle and the summery air. Gazing off at my own yard, I could see P.W.’s cream-colored Ford flashing the afternoon sun back at the tin sky. Finally he had repainted it, and luster restored, the old car promised to take on its original allure. One step at a time, crop to crop. Maybe next year he could replace the rotten tires and sport around in it for a while before selling it.

A rhythmic clank of rake tines on dirt carried on the air with the whirring of locusts, and I spied Punk raking between a group of oaks on the front yard. Feeling good now—all bad feelings behind me—I decided to come right out and talk to him.

“Hey, Punk,” I called, lagging behind Sibyl, who was hiking on toward the barn.

“Miss Earlene,” he said, walking away as he raked.

“Are you still upset, Punk?” I followed him.

“Nome.” “She’s just highstrung, Punk.”

“Yas ‘um, she be that awright.”

“What’d Robert Dale have to say about the horse?”

“He don’t say nothing. I done and knocked off fore he come in.” He stopped raking, leaned on the rake handle and tilted his keen face. “Mr. P.W. say for you to tell me something?”

“He didn’t have anything for you to do, Punk. I’m sorry. He can’t afford to hire too much help, you know.”

“Yas ‘um, I be on with my sweeping now.”

“Well, at least you got a pretty place to work.” Saying that was stupid, I knew. “Just do what you have to and stay out of her way.” Saying the last part was stupider.

“Sho will now, but she can’t go on a-beating and framming on folk just cause she can.” “No, she shouldn’t. You want me to talk to her?”

“Nome,” he said, looking at me good now with eyes quick and bright. “She done badmouthed you and me till Mr. P.W. liable to haul off and shoot me.”

“Naw,” I said, trying to sound lighter than I felt. “He wouldn’t pay any attention to something like that. I guess she just fired off before she thought.

“Yas ‘um, but she ain’t got no business...” He stopped talking and shot off raking whipstitches among the oak roots, trampling polleny honeysuckle petals like dross of sun.

I started to follow him, to tell him that Sibyl was probably moody because she was sick—she had to feel bad if she had cancer—and that she probably regretted what she’d said yesterday and didn’t know how to make up for it. Look at her today! She’d come right out and told me she was dying, which could be her way of apologizing. Saying that couldn’t have been easy. But I sucked in, leaning against an oak trunk—too many probablys in whatever I might say, and what did Sibyl intend to do with the fact of her dying? Whip me and Punk and the whole town with it? And if she’d redecorated her house because she’d figured out that the dead brilliance of contemporary didn’t fit in Monroe County, she’d been right. Sad—her trying to please us, the town, our manipulating her with our notions of what was acceptable. Already I’d heard several of our neighbors complaining about the horsey smell from her barn and the increase in houseflies—Aunt Birdie, for one. She was on a rampage against houseflies, and they weren’t even that bad yet.

I thought again about Punk saying “She ain’t no normal white,” which could mean a lot of things or nothing. “Not normal” could simply mean different, or unusual. And Sibyl was certainly that. If it meant more, he should leave and really had no business talking to me about her, or vice versa. I felt a twinge of having been in on some rotten under-dealings with Punk, after all, and it didn’t sit well with me.

Why didn’t he leave? He could work for somebody else. Was he staying out of habit, because he’d always worked for Robert Dale? Mae too—if she didn’t like it here, she could go. Both of them lived in the quarters behind the white school, where hard-talk was as common as breathing, where a punch in the gut was nothing. So why be so sensitive about Sibyl? True, we treated them a shade worse than children, and they responded with child-like dependency, but we had evolved from slavery to servitude, and we would eke out more charity in time. For Sibyl, Punk was no more than a symbol, proof of her status, like one of the stable-boy statues seen on many southern lawns.

I looked up and saw her standing in the barn door, watching me, watching Punk. I smiled, walking toward her, along the path her eyes blazed and head on. I didn’t blink.

When I got halfway there, she called, “Tell Mae to send me the clam dip and chips out of the Frigerdaire.” It came as a command, until she added, “If you don’t mind,” oozing like honey. I turned toward the house, but looked back to see if she was still watching, and she looked frail and harmless in the dark yawn of the barn.

In the kitchen, Mae stood crouched over the sink, scrubbing baking sheets. A new sink, coppertone to match the cookware, all new reproductions of old, replacing the gleaming white and chrome.

“My God!” I said, “I can’t believe she even changed appliances.” “Yas ‘um,” said Mae, “say they don’t match up and out they go. She the changiest woman I ever seed in all my born days.”

I caught myself on the verge of gossiping with Mae after I’d just sworn off gossiping with Punk. “She said for me to come get the clam dip and chips.” I opened the refrigerator door to stacks of square white containers.

“She been messing and gomming ever since her feet hit the floor this morning,” Mae said. “Mr. Robert Dale ain’t got no say over that woman! Got to where he plum don’t say nothing. She throw out more in a day than he can tote home in a week!”

“This the dip?” I asked to cut her off, taking a covered plastic container with a taped strip clearly marked “clam dip.”

“Yas’um, that be it.” She beamed, one hand braced on her broad hip, the other nudging the basket of chips to the back of the counter. “Ain’t real clam meat though.”

I tried to reach around her for the chips, but she blocked me, hissing in my face. “How come Mr. Robert Dale to up and marry that kind? She ain’t up to no good. And if she be dying, I ain’t seed ary sign of it. I oughta knows; I stays here moren anybody else do. Punk and me should oughta quit away back when she run Miss Lettie off.”

I was close enough to count the knotty braids sectioned into rows on her head. “Mae, that’s gossip,” I said, fishing the basket from around her stout body. I noticed that the window shades over the sink had been covered with the same paper as the kitchen walls, a blue and beige repeating-spice pattern. “She’s a smart woman.”

“Foot! I does what get done around here,” Mae said, turning to scrub another cookie sheet.

I realized, going out the door, that I didn’t want to know what Mae and Punk knew, what kept them there. It wasn’t solely that I didn’t trust what they said, though I knew they’d grumbled about unfair pay and working conditions when they’d worked for Robert Dale and P.W. But any truth gleaned from what they might say wouldn’t change much: I’d still have to put up with Sibyl, day by day, till she died. One word to Mae and I could have had a clue to what made the clock tick, but it would still tick and time would still bind us. Did I want Sibyl to die? No—if she died now I would feel too guilty.

#

Red and black streamers, our school colors, swagged from the cypress rafters of the barn. The scent of cypress mellowed the odors of sawdust and manure, and although all the horses had been turned out to pasture for the party, their warm salty odors still clung to the raw walls. Smoke from the pit barbecue outside wafted through the double doors, end to end. The barn was only a square, four-stall building, but its height lent to its grandness, and frames of twilight entered through skylights in the roof. The stalls took up each corner, as in justification of the barn. The center, a spacious clearing, was dotted with redwood tables on fresh sawdust, which reminded me of a circus ring.

When I was eight, a traveling circus had stopped over in Little Town, at the vacant lot facing the Baptist church. Penned horses had been loosed on the ring, but tethered by the command of a seedy, middle-aged woman in a sky-blue costume. Rhinestones from her tutu kept throwing prisms of light on the khaki tent walls as she popped her whip again and again until the horses clopped in a uniform circle. She lunged onto the last one, vulgar but sure, her strutted legs scrambling astride, and snugged her rump into the pit of the horse’s back, as if she’d hollowed it with her crotch over years of contact. Her eyes snapped about the gaping audience for her earned praise, and we, obeying the eyes, not all that overwhelmed by the spectacle, clapped dutifully, as if the shame would be ours not to give her her due, even though we’d seen better. It was the commanding gleam of the eyes and not the feat that had prompted us to clap. Spurred on by our adulation, she smiled with gold-starred teeth and aligned the horse alongside another, stood, and deftly placed a yellow-soled foot on the back of the other horse while sustaining a canter in time with the herd. The two horses separated and she drew them together with the grip of her toes and balanced with out-stretched arms as she shot that look again, daring us not to clap. It came like a swarm of locusts, fragile and thin and filling, and her penetrating eyes impaled us. They were glittery blue, all that was left of the unusual about her. She was suddenly shaky and wasted, scrambling again to the seat her calloused crotch had molded with a relieved and fractured gaze, wishing for a greater trick with which to wow us. But she was spent, keeping to her circle that went on and on. Finally, she bounced to the sawdust on uncertain feet, opening her arms and bowing, her eyes rending with a mendicant plea. We applauded and forgot her before the next act came.

#

Sibyl had gone inside the house to change when the first pickup truck of boys arrived. Mostly they were basketball players, friends of P.W.’s and Robert Dale’s, who were still part of the team. Basketball was the only sport at Monroe County High and everybody loved it. Graduated heroes were never forgotten and played against the high school team each spring and fall, bringing all the surrounding communities to the old gym.

That evening, P.W. and Robert Dale were almost as close as they used to be, like magnets back to back. Standing before the barbecue pit, they roasted wieners while the younger boys watched. They were sarcastic with each other, often cutting, but familiar, cautiously feeling their way into a corner of friendship.

Robert Dale, in a green apron with a C&S bank logo, turned a row of pink plumping wieners on the grate, to expose brown marks on the undersides. P.W. held a long pan and shoved it playfully at Robert Dale. “You boys might not know it,” Robert Dale said to the fellows standing around, “but y’all are lucky. Old P.W. here like to never got out of school—he could still be there playing guard for y’all.”

“Yeah,” said P.W., “and look who couldn’t hit the wall, much less a basket.”

The boys scattered out, laughing at the older boys—still boys in basketball lingo—whose names were engraved on at least half the trophies in the school case.

Another truck load of boys came up, pulling off the drive to the cluster of oaks by the barn. They got out, casual, straggling and proud, and strolled over to the barbecue and spoke to P.W. and Robert Dale, to each other—never “Hey, how are you?” but slapping shoulders and delivering stiff punches in the stomach and snide remarks that unraveled into basketball talk. Still, the best dern team in the district!