The Dollmaker

  “Curtains,” Clytie said. “White curtains with blue bands fer our new front room, and new—”

  Her grandmother took her by the arm. “Child, you don’t need curtains, not now; not till you git to Detroit.”

  “Dee-troit?” Clytie asked, doubt in her voice.

  “Yes, Detroit. You know, honey, yer papa, he wants you with him. He cain’t make a liven no longer by haulen coal. He’s hunten you a place. You know that, a place close to a good school an—”

  “But Mom said we couldn’t go so far away, an that soon’s th war’s over—”

  Enoch was interrupting with cries of, “Goodie, goodie, we can go to school agin, a fine, big school.” His grandmother nodded, smiling. But Clytie continued for an instant troubled, glancing toward her mother, who stood motionless by the porch steps. Amos, not yet dressed, stood in the doorway, laughing, repeating, “Dee-troit, Dee-troit,” as yesterday he had repeated Santa Claus when Clytie told him of Christmas.

  His grandmother, quite recovered now, patted him on the head, then shooed him back into the house, crying: “Pore little feller, he needs somebody that’ll take care a him. Runnen around barefooted this away, he’ll be a gitten that ole croup agin.”

  “He never got up till you come,” Reuben said. His voice was hoarse now, broken by a growing doubt. He looked from his mother to his grandmother, then back to his mother. The trouble grew in his eyes, but still he waited, watching Gertie, hopeful, unwilling to believe she would not speak up for their farm. She continued silent. Gradually the hope in his eyes died. His glance, fixed on his mother’s face, was filled with the contempt of the strong for the weak.

  It seemed a long while that they looked at each other, mother and son. Gertie opened her mouth, closed it. One hand twisted, pulled the joints of the other. She started up the porch steps, but stopped when through the open door she heard her mother. She was cheerful now, chattering to Clytie about the color of the coat she must order with some of Henley’s money, the kind of little suit for Enoch. Next she was holding forth on the wonders of Detroit. They would have a nice home with the electric and running water, both hot and cold maybe. And the school—such a fine big school it would be with a basketball court in a real gymnasium, like Meg’s children had. Here her voice lifted for Reuben’s benefit; he for all his clumsiness was good at pitching goals in the outdoor court at Deer Lick School. There would be a fancy cooking place for Clytie, hot lunches for them all, and most likely a bus. But better than anything, she reminded, their father would make them a good living and they wouldn’t have to be working themselves to death in some old cornfield.

  “But ’twould ha been our own—all our own field,” Reuben cried toward the doorway, but his voice was too low and hoarse to carry past his grandmother’s chatter. He stood a moment longer on the middle step, looking dazedly about him. He saw the gray mule, and with no more words and never a look for Gertie led the gray mule barnward.

  His head was bent, and Gertie thought as he walked away he was crying. She took one step toward him, but turned back and went to the chopping block. She had already filled the woodbox with wood cut by lantern light so as to have all of today’s light for the Tipton Place, but still she chopped lengths from a hard dead hornbeam she had snaked up with Dock a few days before. Cassie alone stayed with her, silent, and with the lonesome look that came sometimes when Callie Lou ran away. Gyp stood by her, and she scratched him under one ear as she asked, after a long silence, “Mom, can Gyp go to Dee-troit, too?”

  There was such trouble in the child’s voice that Gertie dropped the ax and picked her up. “We ain’t gone yit, honey. Mebbe—mebbe it won’t be so bad. Mebbe—somehow.” Her tongue was still in the face of Cassie’s disbelieving eyes, but her mind raced on. Maybe somewhere there was something—somebody to keep her from having to go away. John? Her father? No, her father would never speak up. He wanted her close by, so that in speaking for her he would speak for himself. He would cry out no more than Job’s dead children. John had her money. Maybe he’d gone already and recorded the deed. John wouldn’t back out; he wouldn’t go back on his word. “But, Mom, can Gyp go, too?” Cassie was pulling on her chin, turning her face about so that she might bolster up her mother’s limp words with her mother’s eyes. “An can we take that woman in th woods, Miz Callie Lou?”

  “Yes, oh, yes,” Gertie said, hugging the child, but not looking into the waiting eyes. “In Detroit,” she went on, “they’ll be people, all kinds a people, thousands an thousands a faces like we ain’t never seen, an th finest we’ll pick fer Callie Lou.”

  “But she’s got a face already, you jist ain’t—”

  Cassie, like her mother, heard the mule’s feet in the lane—a click on the rocks, a suck in the mud. Gertie never looked around. She knew it was John. She let the child slide from her arms. John would never come so early in the morning, when his legs were bad, to tell her he had recorded the deed.

  She stood there staring out across the ridge top, and saw the sun had risen. It poured red light upon the northwestern side of the ridge. The beeches lower down, and the sugar maples, were shadowed still, but higher up, toward the cove top, the trunks of the tall young poplars were pink in the rising light. It came to her that maybe she had always known those other trees would never be her own—no more than the fireplace with the great slab of stone—just as she had always known that Christ would never come out of the cherry wood. Seemed like all week he’d cried for her knife in the firelight, and now he was gone. Instead, here was John, old and troubled and tired, leaning from his mule.

  “We’ve both got to do our duty, Gertie. Yer Mom sent fer me yisterday evenen. Frum th way she talks a body ud think I was maken a mint a money out a sellen that land to you. Twict I thought she was a goen to faint dead away. I cain’t let a piece a land come atween a woman an her man an her people.”

  “I’d never thought on it,” he went on when she remained motionless, silent, staring into the valley, “but Clovis wouldn’t like it down in a holler away frum th highway. Mostly, I recken, I thought on how nice it ud be fer you an yer pop.” He reached for his leather moneybag. “A body’s got tu give in tu reason. Recollect, when we made our trade, you thought Clovis ud be in th army.” He nodded toward the house from which came her mother’s chatter, then looked down into the leather bag and sighed as he began to pull out crumpled bills. “Th right’s on her side. Yer youngens does need schools, an when Clovis is a maken you a good liven you ought to go to him if he wants it thataway.”

  TEN

  SHE’D DONE A THING she’d never done in all her life—slept till past sunrise. The sun was in her eyes, and Lizzie was bawling, but it was way past milking time. She was way late, but she couldn’t get out of bed. Her legs ached, and on one side she was cold, but on the other she was steamy hot and sweaty. She rose swiftly; she’d better milk even before she built the fire.

  Something hit her on the head. Cassie moaned and whimpered, almost skidding from her lap, but did not waken. Gertie caught her shoulder, wakened enough to realize she had hit her head on the iron baggage rack above her. Once more, as she had done for hours, she pressed her big body as far back in the seat as possible and against the window, where, in spite of two thicknesses of glass, the cold, like water trickling, seeped into her hip so that it ached from the cold as her arms ached from weariness. She had held Amos and Cassie, one on either knee, all the way from Cincinnati to make room for Enoch and Clytie, wedged into the other half of the red plush seat. She looked quickly about for Reuben, and found him only after what seemed a long search in the dim light. He was on the arm of the seat right in front of them, but across the aisle; asleep, she thought, his head bowed on his arm along the seat back, like the little sailor, not much bigger than Reuben, on the arm of their seat by Clytie. The sailor’s hat had fallen on Clytie’s lap; his head nodded, touching at times her shoulder, but sleeping or waking Gertie could not tell, for always he clasped with both hands the back of the seat.

&n
bsp; It was the new suit that had made Reuben seem a stranger. Her mother had ordered it as she had ordered the rest of their clothing, and paid for it with Henley’s money. All that seemed so long ago. But it couldn’t have been more than two weeks back, for only two days after her mother’s visit there’d come a letter from Clovis. He’d found a place and wanted them to come.

  Still, it seemed so long ago, everything so long ago and far away: the other train, this train, even the dimming of the lights when all the people—the loud-talking, laughing soldier men and sailors and soldier girls, the crying babies, the puking, whining children, the red-necked, loose-jointed older men in overall pants so new they still smelled of the dye, the women in rayon dresses and muddy shoes, almost all with children in their laps—all, both black and white, had gone to sleep.

  She nodded, her head jolting with the motion of the train. Maybe she was dreaming; in a minute she would jump out of bed and hurry to the spring, for it was moving day and she had a lot of work to do. She’d go outside and smell the good clean air; there would be a melting snow smell and a pine smell on the ridge top, and by her own house the smell of cedar through the creek fog.

  She gagged, water coming into her eyes. She shivered with the gagging until Cassie whimpered in her sleep, then was still, smiling. Gertie tried to keep herself still, and let the child have her dream and keep smiling. She struggled to hold back the stuff rising in her mouth. She tried not to breathe the air that was like a stinking rotten dough pushed up her nose and down her throat. There were bits of vomit in the air where the black babies and the white babies had puked. There was vomit from the red-faced, red-eyed soldiers, laughing—a kind of cursing, crying in their laughter—even as they puked. One had staggered laughing, then puked right in the aisle by them, so close and with such a splattering that Clytie had cried out he was ruining her new coat. There was the stink of cigarette smoke, old now, and worse than when it was new, with its blue curls forever around her head. Mixed in it were the smells of wet babies, of stale soda biscuit from Alabama, fried fresh hot meat from Georgia, all old and smelly now in the too hot car, but still less strong than the smell of too many bodies shut up together. No matter how much they’d laughed and joked and drunk, there was on them all the fear sweat smell like she’d smelled in Samuel’s store.

  She smelled it on herself, felt it on her oozy hands. She was a coward, worse than any of the others. If she could have stood up to her mother and God and Clovis and Old John, she’d have been in her own house this night. Oh, if she were back with the money in her pocket, she’d say No to them all and move to her farm, sin or no. She straightened, and sat unseeing. Her hands were fists across the bodies of her children, but they slept on, limp heads jolting as the steel wheels clicked over the steel rails.

  She got up, and with some difficulty turned herself about enough to lay the children on the seat. Then, with one long step she got into the aisle, careful not to brush against the little sailor. He looked as if the least touch would make him sprawl into Clytie’s lap. She hurried on, her big body seeming even bigger, more awkward in the narrow aisle, flung this way and that by the rushing of the train. She knocked against the sleeping feet, the nodding heads, the shoulders sagged across the arms of seats.

  The word Ladies was like a promised haven, though as she went through the first little room, the one with mirrors and chairs, she saw that even here there were women and babies sleeping. But the toilet—Clytie had told her to call it that instead of the privy house—was empty. She flung up the toilet seat, knelt, and vomited. Cold air like water bubbling up from a spring came through the open hole. She knelt a long while, savoring the rushing air. It tasted of train smoke and was burdened with sound. Still, it was better than any she had known since leaving home. All the hours they had waited in Cincinnati had been in a house-like thing, big and high above them, but smothery crowded down below, with people fighting for standing places in the lines before the gates.

  She came out at last into the little room, which after the crowded car and the train noise from the open toilet seemed still and empty, with only two women and two babies, all of whom looked to be asleep. One sat, her head nodding above a young baby, face downward across her knees. The other lay on the bench under the looking glass, one sun-browned hand clutching an imitation patent-leather purse, the other cradled about a pale-haired little girl in a blue rayon dress, its ruffles smeared with chocolate and orange drippings. The woman’s shoes, new and of the same shiny imitation patent leather as her purse, twinkled in the light, that is, all but one heel, and on that there was a smear of reddish mud. The mud was strange to Gertie, redder than any earth she could remember, and sandy, from the looks of it. She bent closer to look, and wanted very much to touch it, to know what it was and from where it came. It looked as if it would grow sweet potatoes and peanuts.

  She rubbed the heel gently with her thumb, and a tiny piece of the red gold stuff broke away and fell into her palm. She touched it with a forefinger, pleased that she had been right. Sandy and poor it was; scrub pine and saw briers would grow in it, but so would sweet potatoes.

  She was holding the mud, staring down at it, not wanting to throw it away, when she realized the other woman, the one she had hardly noticed and thought asleep too, was looking at her. She had made no sound that she had heard, and her head was still bowed above the baby on her knees, but Gertie knew she was looking, sideways of her eyes, the way Judas looked when he whispered about Jesus. And she remembered with something close to comfort that she had brought the block of wood, brought it in spite of her mother’s scorn and Clytie’s gentle objections. Only Cassie had begged for the wood, hugged it as if it had been human. The woman kept on looking, watching slant-wise out of her eyes, and Gertie felt awkward and foolish, staring at the mud in her hand, remembering the good money she had spent to bring the block of wood—Judas wood it seemed now. Jesus would never come from it. But there were faces in Detroit.

  “It looks like good dirt fer growen sweet taters,” she said at last, flushing, then looking fully at the woman, who smiled and said in a soft rich voice:

  “That Georgia mud is good fo that.”

  “I wonder,” Gertie said, speaking softly, for she had no memory of having spoken to a stranger woman except the nurse in the doctor’s office, “what th ground around Detroit is like? Will it grow sweet taters?”

  The woman’s head swung slowly, lifting fully into the light, and Gertie realized she was a Negro. She had never seen a Negro until, in Cincinnati, they had left their separate places and mingled with the whites. She’d heard Clovis say there were Negroes in Town, but she had so seldom been there she had never seen one. This woman did not look the way she had thought a Negro would—pure black with great thick lips and a mashed-down nose. Her skin was brown and full of gleams that made Gertie think of the cherry wood. Her eyes were large below a high, thin-templed forehead; and when she looked at Gertie all her face and the proudful way she held her head were somehow queenly, but bigger than anything else about her was the joy inside her that curved her lips into smiles and brightened her naturally somber eyes.

  The baby, hardly two months old, Gertie judged, wriggled, twisting its head, then at last got a fist up to its mouth. The woman’s smile widened, dancing through her eyes and across her forehead as she chucked it gently under the chin. “Don’t you go fallen off my lap, yo little ole booger, you.” She looked at Gertie, then back to the baby. “She ain’t been sleepen so good, poh thing; she’s been sleepen on mah knees thisaway since day befo yesterday.”

  “She’ll be all right,” Gertie said. “I’ll bet she misses her bed less’n you do.”

  “She misses her granma’s singen, thas what she misses away off up heah—an I ain’t so good at singen.”

  Gertie nodded. “Upon th willows in th midst thereof, we hanged our harps, and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one a th songs a Zion.’ But how shall we sing th Lord’s song in a strange land?” She fl
ushed. She hadn’t meant to say that. But it had run in her head so, since early this morning on the other train, when Cassie had wanted her to sing right before a trainful of people.

  “Them’s pretty words,” the other said, then added somewhat defiantly, “but ah don feel wasted. Detroit’s goen to be nice.” A brooding, remembering look came into her eyes, but smiles shattered it when she looked down at the baby. “She can go to a good school, an when she’s sick they’ll be hospitals for her like fo—” She had looked at Gertie and remembered. “Like fo anybody else. She’ll have a better raisen than her mammy or her pappy had,” and the joy came over her and would not let her be still, so that she seized the child, half sleeping as it was, and swung it above her head, smiling at it, shaking it playfully, begging with her eyes for it to share in her joy, and when it could not she turned again to the silently watching Gertie. “My man’s got a place fo me—rent paid fo a month. Th street’s in a place they call Paradise Valley, he wrote me. Paradise Valley,” she repeated softly to the baby.

  The baby was too little to smile back. But Gertie managed a smile for the woman, though it seemed so long ago that she had felt as the woman felt now—going to a place that would be paradise. Paradise: it was a pretty word. She’d never thought how pretty it was until now. When the woman spoke it in her soft rich voice, it made her think of peaches, pure gold on one side, red in the gold on the other, soft, juicy, warm in the August sun, warm-tasting like the smell of the muscadines above the river in October. “It’s a pretty name,” and remembering, twisting the hurt inside her, she said to the woman what she had said to herself, “This day thou shalt be with me in paradise.’”

  The woman laughed. “That’s what mah man said to me, only in different words.”