The Dog of the South

  “I don’t have a wife. Marvel gave me the gate thirty-five years ago, Speed. She said she’d had enough. She said she would shave her head and become a nun in the Catholic church before she would ever get married again. She cleaned me out good. She got my house and she got a lot of Mama’s furniture and she even had my medical equipment attached.”

  “Well, there you are. Your mother is afraid she will get the island too.”

  “Get it how? Not through me.”

  He searched through the box and brought out an old photograph showing a thin girl in a dotted dress. She was sitting in a playground swing and she was holding a squinting child on her knees. This was the doctor’s former wife, Marvel Clark Symes, and their infant son Ivo. Dr. Symes with a wife! I couldn’t believe it. She was a pretty girl too, and not a floozie at all. And baby Ivo! Of course the boy was grown now; that picture must have been forty years old.

  Ivo was a roofing contractor in Alexandria, Louisiana, the doctor told me, where Marvel Clark now made her home as well. He said he had not communicated in any way with her for more than twenty years. I gathered that he was also estranged from his son, calling him as he did, “a roofing thug,” and saying that he hoped God would let him, the doctor, live long enough to see Ivo in the penitentiary at Angola.

  “I don’t know what Mama can be thinking about,” he said. “There is no possible way Marvel could get the land through me. She has no more legal claim on me than does any strange woman passing by on the street.”

  “I’m just telling you what she said.”

  “The divorce was final. That bond has been severed and forever set at naught. Those are the very words on the decree. That’s as final as you can get. How much more do you want?”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “You’re mighty right you don’t. Go look it up at the courthouse in Vidalia and then you might know something about it.”

  I went to the window and watched the street below for Webster Spooner. I looked across the rusty tin roofs of Belize. I couldn’t see the ocean but I knew it was out there where the roofs stopped. Dr. Symes asked if I would get him some medicine and some shaving gear. I said I would and he began to write prescriptions on scraps of paper. Downstairs I could hear some bouncy 1937 clarinet tootling.

  “What is that?”

  “What?”

  “That music.”

  “That’s Felix the Cat. Mama loves a picture show. I brought her some cartoons and shorts when I was down here with Sybil. Felix the Cat and Edgar Kennedy and Ted Fiorito with his dance band. I brought Melba a thousand-piece puzzle. Mama loves a picture show better than anybody I know except for Leon Vurro. Listen to this, Speed. Here’s what I had to put up with. I would be in that hot cabin in south Houston trying to flatten out those photographs with brickbats and Leon would be off downtown in some cool picture show watching Honky-Tonk Women or Women in Prison. A grown man. Can you beat it? I’ve never wasted my time on shows. Don’t you know they’ve got those stories all figured out before you even get to the show? Leon would sit there in the dark like a sap for two or three hours watching those stories and then he would come out on the street just as wild as a crib rat, blinking his eyes and looking around for women to squeeze. Not Bella but strange women. Oh, yes, I used to do it myself. There is very little folly I have missed out on in my life. I never wasted my time on shows but I was a bigger hog for women than Leon ever was. Talk about your prisoners of love. Talk about your boar minks. There was a time when I was out almost every night squeezing women but I stopped that foolishness years ago. A big waste of time and money if you want my opinion, not to mention the toll on your health.”

  Melba was sitting in her chair in the next room, the central room, and when the cartoon was over she went downstairs to play the piano. The children sang, their devotions passing up through this bedroom and on through the tin roof to the skies. Dr. Symes hummed along with them and sang bits of the hymn.

  “This is not a feasible program,” he said, indicating the business downstairs. “I think the world of Mama but this is just not a feasible setup. Fooling around with a handful of kids. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out with your top educators and your top communicators. What you want is a broad base. This is a narrow base. What you want is a healing service under a tent, and then when things go slack you can knock the poles down and fold that booger up and move on. Or a radio ministry. A telephone ministry would beat this. You’ll never prosper on a deal like this. It doesn’t make any sense. This is like old man Becker in Ferriday. Let me tell you what he would do. He would be in the back of his hardware store weighing out turnip seed at eight cents a pound, just busting his ass with that little metal scoop, the sweat just rolling off him, while people were standing in line up front trying to buy five-thousand-dollar tractors.”

  He gave me some money and I left to get the medicine. There were amber nose deposits on the prescriptions. The old man left a mucous track behind him like a snail. I bought a razor at Mr. Wu’s grocery but I couldn’t find a drugstore that was open so I walked across town to the hospital, another white building. The nurse who ran the dispensary was an Englishwoman. She didn’t believe those prescriptions for a minute but she sold me the stuff anyway, some heart medicine called Lanoxin, and some Demerol, which I knew to be dope, and some other things in evil little bottles that I suspected of being dope. It was all for a “Mr. Ralph Moore” and the doctor had signed his own name as the prescribing physician. I explained that he was the son of Mrs. Symes at the Unity church. He had also asked me to get him a dozen syringes but the woman wouldn’t sell me any. I didn’t press the matter. Babies were crying and I wanted to get out of that place.

  Near the hospital there was a city park, a long green field with a statue at one end that looked new and not very important. There was a steel flagpole with no flag. The brass swivel snaps on the rope were jingling against the pole. A woman was sitting tailor-fashion on the grass with a sketch pad. I recognized her as the American girl who had been in the Fort George dining room. The small boy was asleep on a beach towel beside her. I waved. She didn’t want to raise her busy hand from the pad but she did nod.

  The service was over when I got back to the tabernacle. Mrs. Symes and Melba and a chubby Negro girl in a green dress were in the doctor’s room drinking iced tea. The girl was helping Mrs. Symes stick paper stars in an attendance ledger. There was a Scrabble board on the bed and the doctor and Melba were playing this word game. He said, “The millionaires in Palm Beach, Florida, are not having any more fun than we are, Melba.” I gave him the sack of drugs and shaving supplies and he left at once for the bathroom. Mrs. Symes asked where I had attended church.

  “Actually I haven’t been yet.”

  “Did you sleep late?”

  “I’ve been pretty busy.”

  “Our lesson here today was on effectual calling.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you indeed? Do you even know what effectual calling is?”

  “I can’t say I do, no, ma’am. I suppose it must be some special religious term. I’m not familiar with it.”

  “Elizabeth, can you tell Mr. Midge about effectual calling?”

  The plump girl said, “Effectual calling. Effectual calling is the work of God’s spirit, whereby, convincing us of our sin and misery, enlightening our minds in the knowledge of Christ, and renewing our wills, He doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ freely offered to us in the gospel.”

  “That’s very good, but what about the benefits? That’s what we want to know. What benefits do they that are effectually called partake of in this life?”

  The girl had a ready answer for that too. “They that are effectually called,” she said, “do in this life partake of justification, adoption, sanctification, and the several benefits which, in this life, do either accompany or flow from them. We gain assurance of God’s love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Ghost, increase of Grace, and perseverance therein t
o the end.”

  “That’s very good, Elizabeth. There are not twenty-five Americans who could answer that question, and we call ourselves a Christian people. Or don’t you agree, Mr. Midge?”

  “It was a hard question.”

  “Mr. Midge here goes to college and he has a good opinion of himself but he may not be quite as clever as he thinks. It may even be, Elizabeth, that we can teach him a thing or two.”

  The girl was pleased with her performance. She had finished her tea and now had her hands arranged in a prim manner on her knees, her small pink fingernails glowing against the green dress.

  There was no sign of Webster Spooner. Mrs. Symes had not seen him. She said Webster was a good reader and a good speller and a good singer but he wouldn’t stay in his seat. The girl Elizabeth said he was a bad boy who always answered “Yo” instead of “Present” when the roll was called.

  “I don’t think we can call Webster a bad boy, can we?” said Mrs. Symes. “He’s not a bad boy like Dwight.”

  The girl said, “No, but Dwight is a very bad boy.”

  Mrs. Symes asked me what the doctor had been talking about and I said very honestly that we had been discussing her missionary work. I felt like a spy or a talebearer, reporting back and forth on these conversations. She said she knew what Reo thought of her program but what did I think? I said I thought it was a good program.

  She said one couldn’t judge these things by the conventional standards of worldly success. Noah preached for six hundred years and converted no one outside his immediate household. And Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, he too was widely regarded as a failure. All you could do was your best, according to your lights. She told me that there was no one named Raymond in the Bible and that drunkenness was the big social problem in this country.

  Then she talked to me at length about Father Jackie, the Episcopal missionary. He had the only Tarzan film in the country, she said, and he had finally agreed to let her have it for one showing. Father Jackie had a prankish nature that was very tiresome, and the negotiations for the film had been maddening and exhausting—but well worth the effort. The word on Tarzan would spread fast! Father Jackie was busy these days drafting a new catechism for the modern world, and he was composing some new Christmas carols too, and so he had decided to cut back on his movies and his preaching and teaching duties in order to complete these tasks. He was an odd bird, she said, but he had a good heart. His mother was now visiting him here in Belize.

  Melba said, “His mother? I didn’t know that. His mother is here?”

  “I told you about meeting her in the swap shop.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You didn’t tell me any such thing.”

  “You never listen to me when I have some piece of news like that.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “I don’t know what she looks like, Melba. She just looks like all the rest of us.”

  “The reason I ask is that I had a vision of an older woman with a white parasol. She was holding it on her shoulder and buying something at the market. Eggs, I think. I saw her just as clearly as I see you now.”

  “This woman didn’t have a parasol. She wasn’t even wearing a hat.”

  “Was she a kind of yellowish woman?”

  “She was yellow, yes.”

  “Yellow eyes?”

  “I didn’t notice her eyes so much but her face was certainly yellow.”

  “A yellow face.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “That’s what I said too.”

  “You said yellow eyes.”

  “At first I just said yellow.”

  That ended that. I played Scrabble with Melba. Mrs. Symes hugged and kissed the girl Elizabeth, calling her “baby,” or rather, “bebby,” and the girl went away. I could hear Dr. Symes in the bathroom singing a song called “My Carolina Sunshine Girl.” He was shaving too, among other things, and he looked much better when he came back. He stood beside his mother for a moment and put his arm around her shoulder.

  “How are you feeling this morning, Mama?”

  “I never felt better in my life, Reo. Stop asking me that.”

  A small framed picture on the wall caught his attention and he went over to examine it. It was a picture of something brown.

  “What is this?” he said. “Is this the Mount of Olives?”

  “I don’t know what that is,” she said. “It’s been up there for years. We never use this room any more since Melba has been staying in her chair.”

  “Who painted this picture? Where did you get it, Mama? I’d like to know how I could get a copy of it.”

  “You can have that one if you want it.”

  He crawled back into bed and resumed the Scrabble game. “Where is your puzzle, Melba?” he said. “Where is that jumbo puzzle I brought you the last time? Did you ever finish it?”

  “No, I never did start it, Reo. It looked so hard. I gave it to one of the children.”

  “It was a funny picture of dogs wearing suits.”

  “Yes, dogs of different breeds smoking pipes and playing some card game.”

  “Mama, why don’t you show Speed here your hurricane poem. He’s a college professor and he knows all about poetry.”

  “No, I don’t want to get that stuff out right now. I’ve got it all locked up.”

  “What about your stories, Melba? Why don’t you show Speed some of your stories?”

  “He doesn’t want to see those things.”

  “Yes, he does too. Don’t you, Speed?”

  I explained that I was very far from being a college professor and that I never read poems or fictional stories and knew nothing about them. But the doctor kept on with this and Melba brought me her stories. They were in airmail tablets, written in a round script on both sides of the thin paper.

  One was about a red-haired beauty from New Orleans who went to New York and got a job as a secretary on the second floor of the Empire State Building. There were mysterious petty thefts in the office and the red-haired girl solved the mystery with her psychic powers. The thief turned out to be the boss himself and the girl lost her job and went back to New Orleans where she got another job that she liked better, although it didn’t pay as well.

  Melba had broken the transition problem wide open by starting almost every paragraph with “Moreover.” She freely used “the former” and “the latter” and every time I ran into one of them I had to backtrack to see whom she was talking about. She was also fond of “inasmuch” and “crestfallen.”

  I read another story, an unfinished shocker about a fatherand-son rape team who prowled the Laundromats of New Orleans. The leading character was a widow, a mature red-haired woman with nice skin. She had visions of the particular alleys and parts where the rapes were to occur but the police detectives wouldn’t listen to her. “Bunk!” they said. She called them “the local gendarmes,” and they in turn called all the girls “tomatoes.”

  A pretty good story, I thought, and I told Melba I would like to see the psychic widow show up the detectives and get them all fired or at least reduced in rank. The doctor was going back and forth to the bathroom, taking dope, I knew, and talking all the time. He wouldn’t read the stories but he wanted to discuss them with us. He advised Melba to get them copyrighted at once.

  “What if some sapsucker broke in here and snatched one of your stories, Melba, and then put his own name on it and sold it to some story magazine for ten thousand dollars? Where would you be then?”

  Melba was upset. She asked me how one went about this copyright business and I couldn’t tell her because I didn’t know. Dr. Symes said she would be wiser to keep the stories locked in her drawer instead of showing them to every strange person who came in off the street. He gave no thought to the distress he had caused the old lady and he went on to something else, telling of the many red-haired people he had known in his life. Mrs. Symes had known some of the ruddy folk herself a
nd she spoke of their hot tempers and their sensitive skin, but the doctor wasn’t interested in her experiences.

  “You’ll never find a redheaded person in a nuthouse,” he said to me. “Did you know that?”

  “I’ve never heard that.”

  “Go to the biggest nuthouse you want to and if you can find a redheaded nut I’ll give you fifty dollars. Wooten told me that years ago and he was right. Wooten was a doctor’s doctor. He was the greatest diagnostician of our time, bar none. Surgery was only his hobby. Diagnosis, that’s the high art of medicine. It’s a genetic thing, you see, with these redheads. They never go crazy. You and I may go crazy tomorrow morning, Speed, but Melba here will never go crazy.”

  Melba had been stirring her iced tea violently for about four minutes. She put her face in mine and winked and said, “I’ll bet I know what you like.” From her leering expression I thought she was going to say, “Nooky,” but she said, “I’ll bet you like cowboy stories.”

  The morning wore on and still there was no Webster. I thought of calling the hotel and the cable office but Mrs. Symes had no telephone. I kept hanging around, thinking she would surely ask me to stay for lunch. I was weak from my dairy diet. The doctor said he would like some jello and I wondered at his craving for gelatinous food. Mrs. Symes said jello was a good idea. I could smell the sea and what I wanted was a plate of fried shrimp and fried potatoes.

  But jello it was and by that time the doctor was so full of dope and so addled from the heat that I had to help him to the table. His eyelids were going up and down independently of one another and his red eye was glowing and pulsing. He talked about Louisiana, certain childhood scenes, and how he longed to go back. He said, “Mama, you’re just going to fall in love all over again with Ferriday.” Mrs. Symes didn’t argue with him, this return to the homeland being clearly out of the question. Then he wanted to move the dining table over by the window where there was more light. She said, “This table is right where I want it to be, Reo.”

  Melba and I filled up on lime jello—transparent, no bits of fruit in suspension—and peanut-butter cookies with corrugations on top where a fork had been lightly pressed into them. That was our lunch. The doctor talked on and on. He held a spoonful of jello above his bowl but thoughts kept racing into his head and he could never quite get it to his mouth.