She tried to work faster on the uplifted hand, held close against the chest. Gradually the man in the wood brought some calmness to her; he was alive; the hands, the head, even the face were there; she had only to pull the curtain of wood away, and the eyes would look down at her. They would hold no quarreling, no scolding, no questions. Even long ago, when only the top of the head was out of the wood, below it had seemed a being who understood that the dancing, the never joining the church, had been less sinful than the pretending that she believed, and—She never heard the knife strike the floor, fallen from her hands; instead, she heard her moans, her words, like from another’s mouth; her tongue ashamed, too ashamed to use her own speech, but crying in the words of the alley, “I stood still fer it—I kept shut—I could ha spoke up.”
The wood was strong, holding her up, understanding, for what had Judas done but whisper a bit and keep still; no, it wasn’t Judas. She was still, wondering if she had cried, “No, no!” The silence of the wood loudened the memory of her own cry, and she peeped about her, crouching by the wood as if to hide. Had anybody heard? And what was there to hear, she asked herself, picking up the knife, smoothing the cupped overfull hand. She worked again, and a mound of chips and shavings grew about her feet.
The whole thumb of the empty hand was out, such a good thumb, and strong; and then she heard the knocking, not Sophronie’s kicking or the rough knocking of a child or peddler, but dignified and gentle: this time surely a woman with a big washing—five dollars.
She sprang up just as the door opened and Mrs. Anderson called, “Hello—I was afraid you’d moved away.” She came on in, smiled once at Gertie, but after that had eyes for nothing but the wood. “It’s magnificent,” she said, walking all around it, touching each hand with her gloved hands, pausing at last with her hand on his shoulder. “It would take a prize—and,” she looked at last at Gertie, “it’s much more effective like that without the face. It’s all so plain,” she said, and was silent, looking.
Gertie had backed against the chair in front of the door. She was a little flustered; this woman all in new clothes, her hair no longer braided but skinned back, tight as her own hair, though the knob was low, low enough to make her neck ache; and got up in gloves, lipstick, and a hat, wasn’t like Mrs. Anderson from across the alley, but somebody else from a world that didn’t know strikes or beef hearts. It seemed a long while they stood so; Mrs. Anderson looking at the wood, Gertie looking at Mrs. Anderson; finally she remembered to ask, “What’s so plain?” and then, “Set down.”
Mrs. Anderson only walked around the wood, squeezing herself between it and the sofa for a closer look. “That he won’t keep still and hold it. He’ll give it back,” she said.
“A body cain’t allus give back—things,” Gertie said, filled suddenly with a tired despair; the wood was Judas, after all.
“I’m glad it’s good, really good,” Mrs. Anderson said, sitting down, taking cigarettes from her purse. “It was my undoing.” She held the unlighted cigarette, explaining: “I remember when I first saw it at Max’s—I didn’t want to look. ‘There’s a woman,’ I thought, ‘who’s never had a lesson in art, but with five children and nothing but a block of wood and a pocket knife, look what she’s done. And look at me.’ I wish Mrs. McKeckeran could see it.”
“Mebbe she’ll come through agin sometime,” Gertie said.
“Perhaps,” Mrs. Anderson said. “Did Max come back?”
Gertie shook her head, and answered other queries about the alley, for Mrs. Anderson was hungry for talk and curious as ever. She answered so many questions that she grew absent-minded, trying to think of something she could ask that would turn Mrs. Anderson’s thoughts from her own life; she thought of old man Flint at last. Clovis had read in the paper that those who took over after his death had made some changes, and so she asked if things were any different since he died.
“Not basically,” Mrs. Anderson said, “but smoother—much smoother; no rough stuff, at least nothing the public can see. Business has gone holy, if you know what I mean. Businessmen are like saints in stone—hard, but smooth as my hair. You haven’t said a word about the way I look—the skinned-onion look. You know, an onion never stinks till you cut it. No, more like little pretty garlic cloves. Everything is like that—smooth, no smell. The big companies are so wealthy from the war they can buy lawyers, maybe judges if they need them. Congressmen, you know, for a few laws, can be had within reason. They are all so rich they can even afford religion—now.” She stopped, her glance on the down-bent covered face; shook her head. “He couldn’t though.”
“Homer,” she went on, as Gertie continued silent, “is happy. The company, mostly Mr. McKeckeran, wants him to finish his thesis and get his Ph.D. The thesis has given him no end of trouble. He finds all manner of prejudice, but he’ll have to make his own pattern. Not all prejudice is so honest as Mrs. Daly’s—you know, I’m beginning to admire the woman—even prejudice is smooth now—and there are so many kinds, the kind you’ve felt, and others never mentioned; but whatever kind it is, it’s always smooth. The shirt-sleeves-up-from-the-railroad-section gang is out; our leader Mr. Flint has left us, not for a ribband to stick in his coat, but for heaven with a golden crown. All his crowd are dead or old. Their granddaughters were brought up by finished mothers. They belong to junior leagues and are the alumnae of the best schools money can buy. They don’t want rough stuff; they want to be good, very, very good.”
She looked at Gertie. “We go to church—now. Homer hadn’t been to Sunday school since he rebelled in high school, but he teaches a class now—adolescent boys. Sooner or later, I suppose I will. I used to teach art, you know. I was so ignorant then about everything, especially art, real art. The real art is living so as to fool the neighbors, easily, smoothly, and never drop a hint to anyone that we’ve gone in so deeply we have to spend the salary before we get it. We had to have a house, furniture, a better car—order already placed for a new one—clothes; we hadn’t any. Anyway, the neighbors must never, never guess that in order to squeeze out the dollars for a laundress-cleaning woman two days a week, I have to have a stew or hash or something cheap like spaghetti at least three times a week. But, of course, there’s money for liquor and baseball.”
She sprang up, walked restlessly to the window. “I wish the steel-mill light would show. I liked to look at it and dream sometimes of painting it at twilight when the red was like blood on the children. Once, I drove by a few weeks back and watched a pour so long I was late. Do you know what I was late to? A baseball game. It was before the Turbis were out. He’s out, you know—cold. Homer, if he knows why, has never told me. Turbi, I think, hinted too much of the shirt sleeves they want to forget; he pulled some kind of rough stuff—I never did know what. But whatever he did it was what the company wanted; he just wasn’t smooth enough in the doing. Poor man, he must have suffered when he learned he hadn’t pleased the company.
“Anyway, I had to put in an appearance at a baseball game—it’s only those high up like Mrs. McKeckeran who can refuse the royal command to attend a baseball game. Fortunately for me it wasn’t cool enough for mink—such a pity for the others. But now at football time it is. Next week there’s an invitation to go by special train, or maybe just by private coach. Who knows? I may sit next to a bishop; it’s a Catholic university. A business couple who detested sports and drunken spectators would be held subversive—so I grin like a fool—ugh.”
She stopped long enough that Gertie, weary of her talk, could ask, “How’s the youngens?”
“They’re adjusting,” Mrs. Anderson said. “That is, to the neighbors—such nice people: among them all there isn’t one who’d let her house get mussed or her children go—well, a shade too grimy—and paint—You don’t by any chance have any pink medicine left—you remember it? I don’t need it, really, but driving in this traffic has unsettled my nerves.”
“I let most a it spill in th sink one night,” Gertie said, getting up, “but they’s a
little left.”
There was more than Gertie had remembered, but Mrs. Anderson took it all, shivering as always at the taste, then smiling, explaining: “I’ve grown accustomed to the pills—they’re easier to manage. Georgie was beginning to—What would you do if you’d learned you’d raised your children all wrong?”
Gertie fidgeted, thinking up an answer; Clovis might at any minute get back from Mrs. Daly’s, and she didn’t want the woman to see him. A faint smile suddenly brightened her troubled eyes. “I recken if somebody told me that, I’d think about my youngens like I think now—take credit to my raisen a them fer th good they’ve got, an give th devil er what was born into em credit fer the bad.”
Mrs. Anderson shook her head to that, and rushed into another shower of words. “Mrs. McKeckeran suggested this pediatrician. He’s very busy, but his office is shabby, and I wonder about him. There was a Negro woman with a baby in his office. It was the first time I’ve seen a Negro in a doctor’s office in Detroit. He was almost hateful. ‘Your children,’ and he had really given them a going over ‘are healthy and normal’—Homer had thought perhaps Georgie should be taken to a child psychiatrist, and I tried discussing the matter with this doctor, and he was quite rude. ‘Try for a change,’ he said, ‘to think of them as human beings instead of problems. Let the boy eat when and what he wants.’ And he didn’t even give me a diet sheet for Georgie. Homer is terribly worried because we’ll have to keep him; Mrs. McKeckeran recommended him—they’re friends and I have a suspicion he’s—”
The door opened. Gertie looked up anxiously, and Mrs. Anderson turned and smiled at Clovis as if glad to see him. He smiled in return, then his hand lifted, but stopped with a jerk halfway to his face, then rose more slowly and he stood, covering the dark spot on his jaw with his hand moving as if he only rubbed his face. Mrs. Anderson, still smiling, looked hard at him. “You’ve been sick? You look pale.” She moved closer, “Or was it an accident—your head’s scarred.”
Gertie spoke quickly, for Clovis seemed tongue-tied. “A little a both,” she said.
And Clovis asked, “How’re you liken your new place?”
“Fine, just fine,” Mrs. Anderson said, still scrutinizing Clovis. She turned abruptly again to Gertie, then looked down at the litter of chips and shavings on the floor. “I’ll bet you want to get on with your work,” she said.
Then, with her eyes too bright, and her ever widening smile threatening at times to burst into giggles, she told quickly, as if in a hurry to be gone, why she had come. It was about the Christmas bazaar she was helping plan for the church. Homer had decided they should select the church of her maternal grandparents, a splendid old faith he had said. She had agreed that it was perhaps better than either of their childhood churches—of course, the fact that Mr. McKeckeran was a deacon in the church hadn’t a thing to do with it.
Anyway, Mrs. McKeckeran and others of the leading women in the church had decided that this year the Christmas bazaar should put less emphasis on baked goods and ordinary bits of sewing, and more on other handmade things of a more artistic nature. Mrs. Anderson was contributing a good many hand-done Christmas cards; another woman was making place cards—“flowers done with tweezers and glue and tiny shells—ugh.” She hurried on; others were contributing all manner of dolls, and stuff from their looms and pottery kilns. Everything was to be artistic, even the crocheted pot holders. They would in addition have things made by the blind and the mentally deranged, and Mrs. McKeckeran had thought—“She looked at me, smooth as butter, and wondered if any of us knew where we could get some wood carvings. She thought we should be able to sell three or four dozen smallish carvings of animals or figures or birds, real handmade things of good wood what could be bought for around $4.25 and sold for $5.00 each.
“I nodded, of course—she knows now that never, never will I speak out of turn or even hint about her other half—and I said I knew a woman who might take such an order; and she said, was it the one who made her little hill woman, not batting an eye, and I said, ‘Oh, yes,’ not batting an eye; and she said, ‘How lovely.’ I was forthwith appointed a committee of one to negotiate the deal; but the bazaar is close—and can you make anything like three or four dozen in that time? Such a deal of work.”
Gertie nodded. She leaned forward, watching, as Mrs. Anderson opened her handbag, and continued: “She must have good wood—everything about this church is good and sound. She must have walnut or cherry or dogwood or holly.”
Gertie’s brows drew together in a troubled frown. “Wood like that’s kind a hard tu find. Mebbe none at all in th scrap-wood lot, an if they was he’d make it high.”
“Oh, Mrs. McKeckeran thought of that, trust her.” Mrs. Anderson’s eyes were even brighter now and gigglesome she was, as she kept fumbling in her purse. She brought out first a slip of paper, then began to pull out bills. “She commanded me to give you fifty in advance for the buying of the wood. Here’s the address of a picture-framing place downtown that also keeps wood for art classes and such,” and she held out the slip of paper and three bills, clean and crisp with the pretty, useless look of new money.
Gertie started at the money, but swallowed and backed away. “What if I didn’t git them dolls finished in time, an …”
“You can certainly finish fifty dollars’ worth; that’s only about a dozen, fast as you work. And—oh, yes; if you have time you might make a few crucifixes; not big expensive ones like you made for Victor; but we might sell three or four ten-dollar ones—less commission, of course.”
She was holding out the money, but looking at the block of wood, her eyes too bright, her mouth twisting in the giggly smile. She turned away and shoved the money into Gertie’s hand. “Oh, I’m glad, so glad, that somebody …” She looked once more at the wood, and was gone, calling but not looking back, “I’ll be back soon to see how you’re making out,” and Gertie, looking after her, wondered if she laughed or cried.
Gertie was still by the wood, staring down at the bright greenness in her hand, when Clovis came out of the bedroom. “I heared her,” he said, and he sounded like a man from whom a great burden has been lifted. “A hundred—even fifty dollars ud mean a lot to us right now.” He came and looked at the money, touched it as he said, “Recken it’ll take all that fer enough wood tu make what she wants. Whyn’t you,” he went on with more enthusiasm than she had seen for days, “git ready an let me take you right now to that place an see about th wood; they might hafta order it.”
Gertie pondered, looking at the money, and then at Clovis, his eyes so pleased and shiny. He’d been worried, bad worried. “Shorely,” she said, “it won’t take all this.”
“Good clean walnut with no sap wood’ull come ungodly high. I don’t guess a body can buy cherry, that is, seasoned an ready to use. I’ve got gas enough to git there an back.” He touched his forehead, not noticing. “I could go into th place with ye; they never ask no questions when they’re sellen you somethen. Jist when you’re asken for work—er credit.”
“She noticed,” Gertie said.
“She was allus nosey,” he said, and was silent, glancing once at the wood, then turning away to look through the door, his glance for the outdoors wistful, she thought, and troubled.
“This order fer th dolls is a piece a luck,” he said, turning back to her. “You make up—well, say about six differ’nt patterns. Wouldn’t that be enough? An I’ll cut em when we git th wood—about eight uv each, I’d say. She’d want um kind a chunky, nothen cheap fer her. But I could cut em two ways on th jig, take pains, an then on th little sander I can do a sight.” The motor-listening look was on his face. “Supposen it’s a pig—you make real good pigs—mark out th bottom a each foot, an I’ll grind right up between em an in a minute you’ve got legs. Nothen to do but finish it; but it’ll take good hard seasoned wood that won’t splinter.”
“Yes,” she said, and went for her coat. “I think I’ll go look around th scrapwood lot; they might have somethen. An mebbe on t
h way I can sell a doll.”
She met Mrs. Daly hunting children through the alleys, and eager to tell Gertie to tell Clovis the washing machine ran like a dream now, and to tell her that a letter had just come from Maggie, and Maggie had got the chickadee and had it by St. Francis and liked it a lot. Maggie had thanked her and asked how was the Virgin Mary coming out of the wood.
“Fine,” Gertie said; it wasn’t the mother Mary, but if Maggie wanted it that way she might as well have it. “Go in an look at her,” she suggested, “then you can write her exactly how she is. Tell her Miz Anderson asked about her,” and she hurried on through the nearby alleys that made her world and that of her children. Past these the people were mostly strange to her, and here she went more slowly; the basket, with a doll propped up against the handle, on one arm; another, the brightest of all, red and yellow and orange, jumping from its string in her other hand.
She knocked on two doors: at the first a woman opened it a crack, whispering, “Mu man’s asleep.” At the other, the woman wearily shook her head, “Dolls? But I’m laid off an he’s ona pickut line.”
Gertie, feeling a kinship, tired, wanting to linger, and wishing the woman would ask her to sit down, said, “My man’s picket turn ain’t come up yit.”
But the woman, there were three little ones squalling around her, only looked at her with envious eyes and said, “S’good you’ve got a way a picken up a little money—s’more’n I’ve got.”
And Gertie went on. Once, she tried calling, “Dolls, dolls, pretty jumping-jack dolls, hand-carved,” but her voice sounded strange and squeaky to her ears, and no one came to her calling. She tried again, saying only, “Dolls, dolls.” On the first call her voice boomed so it startled her; the second “doll” was low and hoarse like a croak. A child on a tricycle stopped to stare and then to giggle, the only thing in the alley that gave any notice of her calling.