Tar Baby

  He spent some part of every night with her and grew to know the house well, for he sneaked out just before dawn when the kitchen came alive. And he had to admit now, standing in the sunlight, that he had liked living in the house that way. It became his, sort of. A nighttime possession complete with a beautiful sleeping woman. Little by little he learned the people. And little by little he forgot that he had not followed the women. He thought he had. Only now did he remember that it was the avocado, the thirst, the piano. And now here he was with the immediate plans of a newborn baby.

  He didn’t like to think too far in advance anyway, but he supposed he’d have to think up a story to tell them about who he was and what his name was. Oh, he had been alone so long, hiding and running so long. In eight years he’d had seven documented identities and before that a few undocumented ones, so he barely remembered his real original name himself. Actually the name most truly his wasn’t on any of the Social Security cards, union dues cards, discharge papers, and everybody who knew it or remembered it in connection with him could very well be dead. Son. It was the name that called forth the true him. The him that he never lied to, the one he tucked in at night and the one he did not want to die. The other selves were like the words he spoke—fabrications of the moment, misinformation required to protect Son from harm and to secure that one reality at least.

  THROUGH the window on the ground below he saw the back of a man stooping at some cutting or digging chore. It was the black man he had seen off and on around the grounds. He stared at his back. Yardman, she called him. That was Yardman’s back. He knew backs, studied them because backs told it all. Not eyes, not hands, not mouths either, but backs because they were simply there, all open, unprotected and unmanipulable as Yardman’s was, stretched like a smokehouse cot where hobos could spend the night. A back where the pain of every canker, every pinched neck nerve, every toothache, every missed train home, empty mailbox, closed bus depot, do-not-disturb and this-seat-taken sign since God made water came to rest. He watched the angle of the old man’s spine and for no reason that he could think of tears stung his eyes. It astonished him, those unshed tears, for he knew well the area into which his heart was careening—an area as familiar as the knuckle of his thumb. Not the street of yellow houses with white doors, but the wide lawn places where little boys in Easter white shorts played tennis under their very own sun. A sun whose sole purpose was to light their way, golden their hair and reflect the perfection of their Easter white shorts. He had fingered that image hundreds of times before and it had never produced tears. But now watching Yardman—he was kneeling, chopping at the trunk of a small tree—while he himself was so spanking clean, clean from the roots of his hair to the crevices between his toes, having watched his personal dirt swirl down a drain, while he himself stood wrapped waist-to-thigh in an Easter white towel—now he was as near to crying as he’d been since he’d fled from home. You would have thought something was leaving him and all he could see was its back.

  Slowly Yardman stood. He turned around toward the house and for less than a pulse beat glanced at the trees that grew at the edge of the courtyard. Then he lifted his cap, scratched his head with his ring and little finger, and pulled the cap back on. “Thanks,” whispered Son. “One more second of your smokehouse cot might have brought me there at last.”

  WHILE MARGARET had been lying in her sculptured bedroom, fighting hunger, anger and fear, Valerian was in his greenhouse staring out of the one glass window imagining what was not so: that the woman in the washhouse was bending over a scrub board rubbing pillow slips with a bar of orange Octagon soap. He knew perfectly well that a washer and dryer were installed there (he couldn’t hear the hum, for the music and the drone of the air conditioner in the greenhouse obliterated it, but he could see the steam puffing from the exhaust pipe) but the scrub board, the pillow slips and the orange soap were major parts of what he wished to see: the back yard of the house of his childhood in Philadelphia; the hydrangea, fat and brown in the September heat. His father, knocked down by a horse-drawn milk truck, lay in bed, the house already funereal. Valerian went out back to the shed where a washerwoman did the family’s laundry. She was thin, toothless and looked like a bird. Valerian sometimes visited her, or rather hung around her shed, asking questions and chattering. She was like a pet who would listen agreeably to him and not judge or give orders. The first time he came, she had said, by way of polite conversation—the pointless conversation of an adult without stature to a child who had some—“What your daddy doin today?” And he had answered that his daddy was away on a sales trip to Atlantic City. From then on she greeted him that way. He would wander to the shed door and she would ask, “What your daddy doin today?” and he would tell her, as a preliminary to the conversation, “He’s at the factory today” or “He’s in New York today.” It was a delightful opener to him because she and his father had never laid eyes on each other. A sort of grown-up conversation followed the question that they both took seriously. On one of the Wednesdays she came to work, his father died without regaining consciousness. Valerian was fussed over by his mother and relatives and then left alone while they busied themselves with death arrangements. He wandered out to the washhouse that afternoon and when the woman said, “Hi. What your daddy doin today?” Valerian answered, “He’s dead today,” as though tomorrow he would be something else. The woman looked up at him and paused for an awkward silence in which he suddenly understood the awfulness of what had happened and that his father would also be dead the next day and the day after that as well. In that instant, while the birdlike colored woman looked at him, he knew limitlessness. The infinity of days in which the answer to her question would be the same. “He’s dead today.” And each day it would be so. It was too big, too deep, a bottomless bucket of time into which his little boy legs were sinking and his little boy hands were floundering.

  Finally she blinked and pointed to a shelf behind him. “Hand me that soap,” she said. And he did. “Now unwrap it and stand right over here. Up close. Closer.” He did that too and she made him rub soap on the wet pillowcase that clung to the washboard. He scrubbed his heart out, crying all the while, pillowcase after pillowcase, rubbed and rubbed until his knuckles were cherry red and his arms limp with fatigue. And when he could not do another, she patted him on the head and said she would hire him any day. Later George, the butler they had before Sydney, found out about it (he had wondered about those cherry-red knuckles) and told him to stay out of there because that woman drank like a fish and he mustn’t let her use him to do her work. Valerian told him to mind his own “beeswax,” but they let the woman go and Valerian never again had to say, “He’s dead today,” but he said it anyway to himself until his little boy legs were strong enough to tread the black water in the bucket that had no bottom. So, inconvenient as it was, he had insisted on a separate washhouse when he built L’Arbe de la Croix, less for an island touch than for the remembrance of having once done something difficult and important while the world was zooming away from him. Now another washerwoman came. It wasn’t quite the same. No Octagon soap, no wavy gleaming washboard, but he liked looking at it through his greenhouse window knowing there was a woman in there doing something difficult but useful in peace. A soothing thought to concentrate on while his own house was prickly with tension and unanswered questions.

  He had rattled last night to Jade. And why he had ascribed his exile to the Caribbean to the relationship between Margaret and Michael, he couldn’t imagine. The fact was he’d become a stranger in his own city and chose not to spend his retirement there at exactly sixty-five (or close to) in order to avoid watching it grow away from him. Sidewalks and thoroughfares were populated by people he did not know; shops were run by keepers who did not know him; familiar houses were bought by bright couples who either updated them or returned them to some era that existed only in their minds. They tore out unfashionable shrubbery for decks and patios; they closed in the wide-open porches and enlarged windows th
at had been tiny, private and sweet. These new people privatized their houses by turning them backward away from the street, but publicized their lives and talked about wine as though it were a theology instead of a drink. The unending problem of growing old was not how he changed, but how things did. A condition bearable only so long as there were others like him to share that knowledge. But his wife, twenty-two years younger and from another place, did not remember, and his friends were dead and dying. In his heart he was still the thirty-nine-year-old Temple alumnus working in the candy factory about to assume from his uncles control of the company, and who had married a high school beauty queen he was determined to love in order to prove he was capable of it to his first wife—that unlovable shrew who was unlovable to this very day. She had died a year before his retirement in South Carolina, where she had gone to live with her sister. When he heard about it, she was already in the ground. He began to miss her at precisely that point—terribly—and when he settled in the Caribbean she must have missed him too for she started visiting him in the greenhouse with the regularity of a passionate mistress. Funny. He couldn’t remember her eyes, but when she came, flitting around his chair and gliding over his seed flats, he recognized her at once. In nine years of marriage she had had two abortions and all she wanted to talk about during these visits was how relieved she was that she’d had at least that foresight. He wished she felt something else. You’d think in death, in the Beyond, she would have felt something else. Or nothing at all.

  He was not alarmed by her visits; he knew he conjured them up himself, just as he conjured up old friends and childhood playmates who were clearer to him now than the last thirty years were, and nicer. But he was astonished to see—unconjured—his only living son in the dining room last night. Probably the consequence of describing the sink business to Jade. Michael seemed to be smiling at him last night but not the smile of derision he usually had in the flesh; this was a smile of reconciliation. And Valerian believed that was part of the reason he invited the black man to have a seat, the forepresence of Michael in the dining room. His face smiling at him from the bowl of peaches was both the winsome two-year-old under the sink and the thirty-year-old Socialist. The face in the peaches compelled him to dismiss Margaret’s screaming entrance as the tantrum of a spoiled child, the deliberate creation of a scene, which both father and son understood as feminine dementia. Michael had been on his heart if not in his mind since Margaret had announced the certainty of his visit. He could not say to her that he hoped far more than she did that Michael would come. That maybe this time there would be that feeling of rescue between them as it had been when he had taken him from underneath the sink. Thus when the black man appeared, Valerian was already in complicity with an overripe peach, and took on its implicit dare. And he invited the intruder to have a drink. The Michael of the reservation and the Michael of the sink was both surprised and pleased.

  It was easy not to believe in Margaret’s hysteria; he had seen examples of it many times before and thought she was up to her old combo of masochism plus narcissism that he believed common to exceptionally beautiful women. But when, in a flash too speedy for reflex, he saw his entire household standing there, and in each of their faces disgust and horror, and all together triumphant, and all together anticipating his command, already acting on it in fact, just waiting for the signal from him to call the harbor police and thereby make him acknowledge his mistake in not taking Margaret seriously, having to admit that he was not capable of judgment in a crisis, that he was wrong, that she was right, that his house had been violated and he neither knew it or believed it when it was discovered and it had been Sydney who had the foresight to have a gun and the legs to ferret out the intruder, when he saw Margaret’s triumphant face, Jade’s frightened one, and Sydney and Ondine looking at the prisoner with faces as black as his but smug, their manner struck him as what Michael meant when he said “bourgeois” in that tone that Valerian always thought meant unexciting, but now he thought meant false, but last night he thought meant Uncle Tom-ish. He had defended his servants vigorously to Michael then, with aphorisms about loyalty and decency and with shouts that the press was ruining with typical carelessness the concept of honor for a people who had a hard enough time achieving any. What he had said to Jade, he believed: that Michael was a purveyor of exotics, a typical anthropologist, a cultural orphan who sought other cultures he could love without risk or pain. Valerian hated them, not from any hatred of the minority or alien culture, but because of what he saw to be the falseness and fraudulence of the anthropological position. The Indian problem, he told Michael, was between Indians, their conscience and their own derring-do. And all of his loving treks from ghetto to reservation to barrio to migrant farm were searches for people in whose company the Michaels could enjoy the sorrow they were embarrassed to feel for themselves. And yet, in the space of that flash he felt not only as Michael must have when he urged Jade to do something for her people (no matter how silly his instruction), but something more. Disappointment nudging contempt for the outrage Jade and Sydney and Ondine exhibited in defending property and personnel that did not belong to them from a black man who was one of their own. As the evening progressed, Valerian thoroughly enjoyed the disarray that his invitation had thrown them into. Margaret ran from the room—foiled. Jade was at least sophisticated about it, but Sydney and Ondine were wrecked while the intruder himself didn’t even look “caught.” He walked in with his hands raised and clasped behind his head and looked neither right nor left—not at Jade or Ondine or Margaret, but straight at Valerian and in his eyes was neither a question nor a plea. And no threat whatsoever. Valerian was not afraid then and he was not afraid at noon the next day, when Sydney tapped quietly on his door and brought his mail and his baked potato. Valerian could sense the small waiting in Sydney, some expectation or hope that his employer would give him a hint of what had been in his head last night. Valerian felt a twinge of compassion for him, but since he could not tell him about faces that looked up out of peaches, he said nothing at all.

  Actually he had no plans. He was curious about the man, but not all that much. He assumed he was what he’d said he was: a crewman jumping ship, and his roaming about the house and grounds, hiding in Margaret’s closet, was more outrageous than threatening. He had looked into the man’s eyes and had no fear.

  Digesting his potato and sipping wine, he was rewarded for his serenity by an expansive “Howdy” followed by the entrance of the stranger wrapped in a woman’s kimono, barefoot with gleaming wrought-iron hair.

  Valerian let his eyes travel cautiously down from the hair to the robe to the naked feet. The man smiled broadly. He looked down at himself, back at Valerian and said, “But I don’t do no windows.”

  Valerian laughed, shortly.

  “Good morning, Mr. Sheek,” said the man.

  “Street. Valerian Street,” said Valerian. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Green. William Green.”

  “Well, good morning, Willie. Sleep well?”

  “Yes, sir. Best sleep I ever had. Your name really Valerian?”

  “Yes.” Valerian shrugged helplessly and smiled.

  “I used to eat a candy called Valerians.”

  “Ours,” said Valerian. “Our candy company made them.”

  “No kiddin? You named after a candy?”

  “The candy was named after me. I was named after an emperor.”

  “Oh,” said the man looking around the greenhouse. Its sudden coldness was delicious after the heat outside. Shady and cool with plants shooting from pots and boxes everywhere. “It’s sho pretty in here,” he said, still smiling.

  “Tell me the truth,” said Valerian, “before you get confused by what you see. What were you really doing in my wife’s bedroom?”

  The man stopped smiling. “The truth?” He looked down at the brick walk in some embarrassment. “The truth is I made a mistake. I thought it was the other one.”

  “What other o
ne?”

  “The other bedroom.”

  “Jade’s?”

  “Yes, sir. I uh thought I smelled oyster stew out back yesterday. And it got dark early, the fog I mean. They done left the kitchen and I thought I’d try to get me some, but before I knew it I heard them coming back. I couldn’t run out the back door so I run through another one. It was a dinin room. I ran upstairs into the first room I seen. When I got in I seen it was a bedroom but thought it belonged to the one y’all call Jade. I aimed to hide there till I could get out, but then I heard somebody comin and I ducked into the closet. I was just as scared as your wife was when she opened that door and turned that light on me.”

  “You’ve been skulking around here for days. Why didn’t you ask at the kitchen for something to eat?”

  “Scared. I ain’t got a passport, I told you. You going to turn me over to the police?”