’Malia looked at me a long time after she had said this. I could see she was worried and scared.
“Soldiers, ’Malia?” I said. “His soldiers?”
“Something disturbing Copper, Felix,” she said. “When he talk he don’t look right. He looking at you, but he ain’t seeing you. This morning we was talking at the table, but he wasn’t hearing me. He was just sitting there, looking out that door, looking far ’way.”
“This part about the soldiers,” I said; “you sure he said soldiers?”
“He said soldiers,” she said.
Then she started crying. I held the file and the plowshare in one hand, and I put my other arm round her shoulders. “Here,” I said. “Here, now.”
“I don’t know what’s the matter,” she said. “God knows, I did all I could.”
“Why’d he come back here, ’Malia?” I asked, after she stopped crying.
She wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand and shook her head.
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No,” she said. “He just talk.”
“About what, ’Malia?”
“The earth for everybody. Just like the sun for everybody. Just like the stars for everybody.”
“You think he got anything in mind?”
“Don’t talk like that, Felix.”
“They doing that everywhere else, ’Malia. Everywhere else but here.”
“That’s not it,” she said. “That can’t be it. God knows, I don’t hope to see that day.” She looked toward the house again. “I better get on up there,” she said. “Feel like I just want drop. I just want lay down and rest.”
“Why don’t you go back home, ’Malia? I’ll take word you don’t feel good.”
“No, I’ll make it,” she said. “It won’t be too much longer.”
I watched her go toward the house. She was walking slow, with her head down. After she went in the little yard, I couldn’t see her again till she went up the back stairs. It took her so long to go up the stairs, I thought she had sat down to rest. Then I saw her pulling open the screen door and going in. I went back to the shop and filed on my plowshare. Nobody told me to do things like that, but since I lived on the man’s place and didn’t have to pay rent, and since I didn’t have nothing else to do but lay round the house if I stayed home, I came up there every day and worked to keep myself busy. While I was in the shop, I thought about that boy in the quarters. I thought about his mon and his paw, Walter Laurent. That was one, that Walter. A black woman, no matter who she was, didn’t have a chance if he wanted her. He didn’t care if it was in the field, in the quarters, the store or that house; when he got his dick up, he hopped on any of them. But them days are gone now, just like he’s gone. That black stallion saw to that.
2: After I finished my plowshare, I hung it against the wall with all the other things. I had a little bit of everything there—cane knives, axes, shovels, hoes, scy’ blades, yo-yo blades, clod-chopper discs—anything you cared to name, I had it. Every time I found something kind of rusty and needed working over, I brought it to the shop and cleaned it up. Once, there, this was my special job. From Monday morning till Saturday night, my job was to keep everything in good shape to work in the field. Ah, but that was long, long ago. Now all the old ones are dying, and the young ones are leaving—and the Cajuns are taking over a little more every year. So I came up to the yard now just to keep the old hands busy. Because once the hands had stopped, the man wasn’t no more.
I hadn’t been in the shop more than half an hour when I heard that yellow gal, Dee-Dee, calling me out there in the yard. I went to the door to see what she wanted.
“He want you in there,” she said, pointing toward the house.
“Who want me where?” I said. “Mr. Frank,” she said, pointing.
I went back in the shop to put up the hammer I had been working with, then I came back out there where she was. She was standing in a clump of bull grass waiting for me. That little white dress she wore wasn’t just short, it was so thin you could see drawers and everything else under it.
“What’s he want in there?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just say come out here and find you.”
“Ain’t Stateman in there?”
“He in there begging with his clean-head self,” she said.
“You ought to give Stateman what he want,” I said. “Make yourself a nice little piece of change.”
“Huh,” she said. “Bet he die ’fore I let him crawl on top of me.”
We went through the little gate and up the back stairs. Dee-Dee stopped in the kitchen and told me to go on to the dining room. Frank Laurent was sitting at the table eating breakfast when I came in there. He was dressed in his purple silk robe. He looked awful sick and weak that morning.
Frank was in his late sixties. He had suffered a heart attack about five years ago, and the doctor told him he had to hire a’ overseer or give this place over to his niece to operate. He hired the overseer like the doctor said, but a few months later he fired him. He tried to manage the place by himself again and suffered another attack. The doctor told him the next one could kill him. So he hired another overseer, and this one was still there. The trouble was, though, the overseer had little to do with running the place outside of keeping a’ eye on the Cajuns to make sure they didn’t cheat Frank out of everything. He didn’t have any say-so over the colored people in the quarters (since they wasn’t sharecropping), and the only time he ever came up to the house was when Frank sent for him, and Frank sent for him least as he could.
Frank was the last of the old Laurents. When he died, the place was going to fall to his niece there in Bayonne. Besides the overseer and the doctor, his niece was the only other white person to come to the house. Every time she came there she told Frank he ought to go to the hospital where the doctors could give him the kind of treatment he needed. But Frank and all of us knowed that all she wanted was to get him out of that house so she could take over. After she did that, that was going to be the end of us. We was going to have to pay rent or we was going to have to leave. I doubt if half of the people on the place could do either one.
“You sent for me, Mr. Frank?” I said.
He didn’t even look at me. He went on eating like I wasn’t even there. ’Malia came in with a cup of coffee. She had taken off her straw hat, but she still had the white rag on her head. She put the cup of coffee in front of Frank, then she stood behind the chair looking at me and shaking her head. I could tell they had had some kind of squabble before I came in.
“Go get that boy,” Frank said, pushing his plate back and pulling the cup in.
“Sir?” I said.
He didn’t say any more. He raised the cup to his mouth. I didn’t move.
“Are you deaf, Felix?” he said.
“Mr. Frank, I done already said Copper ain’t coming through that back door,” ’Malia said.
“You shut up back there,” Frank said. “Well?” he said to me.
“ ’Malia’s right,” I said.
“What?” Frank said.
“Copper’s not coming through that back door, Mr. Frank,” I said.
He looked straight in my eyes a long time, then he said: “You getting tired of this place, Felix? Tired beating on that one piece of iron day in and day out; year in and year out?”
“No sir,” I said.
“You must be,” Frank said. “I’d say you must be awful tired, Felix.”
“Not a bit,” I said. “I just want you to know the facts about Copper.”
Frank tried to look hard, but he knowed I knowed all that hardness had gone. The plantation had taken all that hardness out of him when the others died and left it there for him to manage. It was too heavy for him. When something’s too heavy, it makes most people wild animals or it breaks them. The land had broken Frank. It had aged him too fast. It had given him two heart attacks—and the next one was going to kill him. He knowed I knowed all of this.
He knowed I knowed he wasn’t hard, he was helpless. But he was still the authority there, and when he spoke I was supposed to move.
“You better get down the quarters,” he said.
“Can I ask why, Mr. Frank?”
“Why?” he said. “Why? He’s on my place, that’s why. Any nigger on this place moves when I say move. He’s no different from any of the rest.”
“Ain’t he, Mr. Frank?”
Frank didn’t say anything. He raised the cup, and looked at me over the rim of the cup.
“I’ll tell him you sent for him,” I said. “Who I’m suppose to say?”
“You forgot my name, Felix?”
“No sir. I just thought you might want me to say his uncle, though.”
“You pushing your luck, Felix, you know that, don’t you?”
I nodded. “I reckon so.”
I looked at ’Malia standing behind the chair, and I could see she wanted to cry again. I went out in the hall; there was Stateman with his head shining and his eyes rolling. He wanted to know what was happening in the dining room. When I told him to go in there and ask Frank himself, he looked at me real hard and turned away. He was Frank’s butler, he had been there ever since Frank suffered his first heart attack; but me and ’Malia had been there almost long as Frank had been there, and he told us more than he ever told anybody else. And that’s why he never scared me. I obeyed his orders because I respected him; not because I was scared of him.
3: ’Malia’s house was the first one in the quarters, a little gray house that hadn’t been painted in ages. She had two little chinaball trees and a mulberry tree in the front yard. In the morning, the trees had shade on the gallery. In the evening, the sun was behind the house, so ’Malia still had shade on the gallery. Hot as it was now, you needed shade or you couldn’t sit outside at all.
Before I got to the house, I could see that boy standing on the gallery looking at me. When I got closer I saw he was dressed all in khakis. He even had on brown Army shoes—the shoes shining like new tin. I unhooked the gate and went in the yard—but I never got up the steps. I didn’t even make a ’tempt to go up the steps. That boy’s face stopped me: his eyes stopped me. His eyes looked hard as marble. I’m sure he knowed why I was there even before I opened my mouth.
“Mr. Frank want you to come visit him,” I said from the ground.
He didn’t say anything—just standing there in that Army uniform, looking down at me. He looked more like Walter Laurent than Walter ever looked like himself. Tall, slim, with a long face just like Walter. Only difference was, he was brown with curly black hair; his paw was white with straight brown hair.
“Go back and tell my uncle Generals don’t go through back doors,” he said.
“Tell him what?”
He didn’t say any more, he just looked at me. He looked at me the same way any the other Laurents would ’a’ looked at me. No, he looked at me the way Walter would ’a’ looked at me if he had told me to do something and I had asked him what. You didn’t ask a Laurent what; you did what the Laurent said.
“You’re his adjutant, aren’t you?” he said.
“His what?”
He gived me that Laurent look again. For a few seconds he might ’a’ been thinking about something else: I was so little in his sight.
“His runner?” he said.
“He told me to come find you, and that’s all I know.”
“No one comes for the General,” he said.
Then soon as he said it he wasn’t looking at me any more, he was looking past me, his eyes hard as marble. I didn’t know what to do after that. I didn’t know if I ought to speak to him again or turn around and go back to the house. I lowered my head a second, and when I looked up, I saw him pulling a tablet and a pencil out of his Army shirt pocket. (The uniform was starched and pressed with all the creases. I’m sure this was the first time he had put it on since he got it out the cleaners.) He started writing with his left hand fast, just like Walter. He wrote about a minute. When he got through, he folded the piece of paper and held it out toward me. He didn’t reach it out—I mean he didn’t bend over and handed it to me; he just held it out. I went up the steps to get it, and my hand was shaking.
After I had gone out of the yard and had hooked the gate back, I looked up at him again. He wasn’t looking at me now, he was looking down the quarters. But from the way his face was set, I doubt if he was seeing a thing.
4: When I got back to the house, I pulled the kitchen door open real quietly. There was Stateman, with his head shining, trying to feel up that yellow gal. He jumped back when he saw me and made ’tend he wasn’t doing anything.
“You want me to give Mr. Frank a message or something?” he asked.
“No, that’s all right,” I said. “Just go on and try to get what you was trying to get before I came in. Mr. Frank and ’Malia still in the dining room?” I asked Dee-Dee.
“And what I was trying to get?” Stateman said.
“They in the library,” Dee-Dee said.
“Don’t get things mixed up round here, now,” Stateman said. “If I was trying to get something you say I was trying to get, I wouldn’t need a thing like you to tell me I was trying to get it.”
I left him there and went up the hall to the library. ’Malia was sitting in one comer sewing a dress; Frank was in another corner reading a book. Both of them was sitting by a lamp. The big window between them was opened, but a tree outside the window always kept the room dark and cool. Frank looked up from his book and squinted his eyes when he didn’t see Copper standing there with me.
“He sent you this,” I said, carrying him the note.
Frank looked straight in my face all the time I was walking toward him. Even after he took the note, he still looked at me a long time before he lowered his eyes to read it. His face didn’t change once all the time he was reading. He must ’a’ read it two or three times before he looked up again.
“You wrote this, Felix?” he said.
He must ’a’ been joking. I hadn’t written a letter in my life, and he knowed that.
“Me?” I said.
“I see,” he said. “You got him to do it.”
But he didn’t believe that, either. He said it because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He said it because Copper had sent him a note instead of coming here himself.
“All I did was tell him what you said,” I said. “He did the rest.”
“Sure,” he said.
He knowed that’s what had happened, but he didn’t know Copper, and so he had to put it on me. He looked down at the note.
“ ‘My Dear Uncle.’ ” he said. He kept his eyes on the note another second, then he looked up at me. “He calls me ‘Dear Uncle.’ ”
I shifted my feet a little, but I didn’t say anything. Frank squinted up at me, with his mouth twisted a little to the side. He did this probably half a minute, then he looked down at the note again.
“ ‘My Dear Uncle,’ ” he said. He passed the tips of his finger and his thumb over the corners of his mouth, then he touched at his chest. “ ‘My Dear Uncle,’ ” he said again. “ ‘Let us speak General to General, gentleman to gentleman, Laurent to Laurent. I am sure you did not understand my position as a General, as a leader of men, when you invited me to your house through the back door. I believe you had in mind one of your slaves in the quarters, or one of your Cajun sharecroppers on the river; but not me. If I thought you meant that invitation, I would tell you, without hesitation, where to put that back door. But I am sure you did not mean it, therefore I have forgotten about it. If you wish to send me any other messages—an apology, or an invitation to speak to me as a General, as a Laurent, you can send the message to me in the quarters. I shall be there reconnoitering the area. Your respectful kin, General Christian Laurent.’ ”
Frank kept his head down another minute, like he was reading the note all over again. Then he squinted up at me and twisted his mouth slightly to the left.
/> “Is this boy crazy, or do you all think it was time you took over?”
“Took over?” I said. “I don’t know what you talking about, Mr. Frank.”
“Who sent for Copper?”
“Sent for him? Nobody sent for Copper,” I said. “Nobody knowed where that boy was since his mon died there.”
He knowed I was telling him the truth, but he wanted me to believe he thought different.
“This General—what does he mean by General? And Laurent—doesn’t he know better than to say things like that round here?”
“I just brought the note,” I said.
“And you’re innocent as a baby, huh, Felix? You want me to believe that?”
“Believe what you want, Mr. Frank,” I said. “I didn’t have nothing to do with Copper coming back here.”
“You getting smart with me, Felix?”
“No sir,” I said, and I lowered my eyes.
“And you?” I heard him asking ’Malia. Now he had to bring her in it, too. “How innocent are you?”
“Mr. Frank, till Copper showed up here yesterday, I hadn’t seen him or heard from him in ten years. Since his mon died.”
“So everybody is innocent, is that it?” he said. “That nigger comes here calling himself a Laurent, calling himself a General, walking over my place like he owns it—and everybody is innocent? I’m supposed to believe that?”
It was quiet in the room while Frank looked at me and ’Malia.
“Felix, go over to that store and get me two of the biggest niggers you can find,” he said. “Saturday, there ought to be a dozen of them over there.”
5: There wasn’t a dozen round the store, but there was seven or eight of them there. Frank, Alcie and Tom-Tom was playing cards on the end of the gallery. Pool-Doo, Crowley and Simon was drinking soda water under that big pecan tree in front of Mr. Pichot house. Joby and Little Boy was sitting on the steps talking. Mr. Pichot, the old Cajun who ran the store, sat by the door in his chair. He had the chair cocked back against the wall, and his feet wasn’t touching the floor.