“Was that something? Wow! She’s two inches taller than he is, and she’s talking about weak.”
“We are weak.”
“Compared to what? A B-52?”
“Every woman’s not as strong as she is.”
“I hope not. Half as strong is too much.”
“Well, muscle strength is one thing. I meant women are weak in other ways.”
“Name some. I want you to name some for me. Where are you weak?”
“I don’t mean me. I mean other women.”
“You don’t have any weakness?”
“I haven’t found any.”
“I suppose you think you can whip me.” It was the seventeen-year-old’s constant preoccupation—who could whip him.
“Probably,” said Hagar.
“Ha! Well, I guess I better not try to prove you wrong. Pilate might be back with her knife.”
“Pilate scare you?”
“Yeah. Don’t she scare you?”
“No. Nobody scares me.”
“Yeah You tough. I now you tough.”
“Not tough. I just don’t let people tell me what to do. I do what I want.”
“Pilate tells you what to do.”
“But I don’t have to do it, if I don’t want to.”
“Wish I could say the same for my mother.”
“Your mother boss you?”
“Well … not boss exactly.” Milkman floundered for a word to describe the nagging he thought he was a victim of.
“How old are you now?” asked Hagar. She lifted her eyebrows like a woman mildly interested in the age of a small child.
“Seventeen.”
“You old enough to be married.” Hagar said it with the strong implication that he should not allow his mother to have any say about what he did.
“I’m waiting for you,” he said, trying to regain (or acquire) some masculine flippancy.
“Be a long wait.”
“Why?”
Hagar sighed as if her patience was being tried. “I’d like to be in love with the man I marry.”
“Try me. You could learn if you’d try.”
“You’re too young for me.”
“State of mind,” he said.
“Uh huh. My mind.”
“You’re like all women. Waiting for Prince Charming to come trotting down the street and pull up in front of your door. Then you’ll sweep down the steps and powie! Your eyes meet and he’ll yank you up on his horse and the two of you ride off into the wind. Violins playing and ‘courtesy of MGM’ stamped on the horse’s butt. Right?”
“Right,” she said.
“What you going to do in the meantime?”
“Watch the lump grow in a little boy’s pants.”
Milkman smiled, but he was not amused. Hagar laughed. He jumped up to grab her, but she ran into the bedroom and shut the door. He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand and looked at the door. Then he shrugged and picked up the two bottles of wine.
“Milkman?” Hagar stuck her head out the door. “Come in here.”
He turned around and put the bottles down on the table. The door was open, but he couldn’t see her, could only hear her laughing, a low private laugh as though she had won a bet. He moved so quickly he forgot to duck the green sack hanging from the ceiling. A hickey was forming on his forehead by the time he got to her. “What you all got in there?” he asked her.
“That’s Pilate’s stuff. She calls it her inheritance.” Hagar was unbuttoning her blouse.
“What’d she inherit? Bricks?” Then he saw her breasts.
“This is what I do in the meantime,” she said.
Their tossing and giggling had been free and open then and they began to spend as much time in Guitar’s room when he was at work as Guitar himself did when he was home. She became a quasi-secret but permanent fixture in his life. Very much a tease, sometimes accommodating his appetites, sometimes refusing. He never knew when or why she would do either. He assumed Reba and Pilate knew, but they never made any reference to the change in his relationship to Hagar. While he had lost some of his twelve-year-old’s adoration of her, he was delighted to be sleeping with her and she was odd, funny, quirky company, spoiled, but artlessly so and therefore more refreshing than most of the girls his own age. There were months when Hagar would not see him, and then he’d appear one day and she was all smiles and welcome.
After about three years or so of Hagar’s on-again-off-again passion, her refusals dwindled until finally, by the time he’d hit his father, they were nonexistent. Furthermore, she began to wait for him, and the more involved he got with the other part of his social life, the more reliable she became. She began to pout, sulk, and accuse him of not loving her or wanting to see her anymore. And though he seldom thought about his age, she was very aware of hers. Milkman had stretched his carefree boyhood out for thirty-one years. Hagar was thirty-six—and nervous. She placed duty squarely in the middle of their relationship; he tried to think of a way out.
He paid the clerk for the presents he had chosen and left the drugstore, having made up his mind to call it off.
I’ll remind her that we are cousins, he thought. He would not buy her a present at all; instead he would give her a nice piece of money. Explain that he wanted her to get something really nice for herself, but that his gift-giving was compromising her. That he was not what she needed. She needed a steady man who could marry her. He was standing in her way. And since they were related and all, she should start looking for someone else. It hurt him, he would say, deeply hurt him, after all these years, but if you loved somebody as he did her, you had to think of them first. You couldn’t be selfish with somebody you loved.
Having thought so carefully of what he would say to her, he felt as though he had already had the conversation and had settled everything. He went back to his father’s office, got some cash out of the safe, and wrote Hagar a nice letter which ended: “Also, I want to thank you. Thank you for all you have meant to me. For making me happy all these years. I am signing this letter with love, of course, but more than that, with gratitude.” And he did sign it with love, but it was the word “gratitude” and the flat-out coldness of “thank you” that sent Hagar spinning into a bright blue place where the air was thin and it was silent all the time, and where people spoke in whispers or did not make sounds at all, and where everything was frozen except for an occasional burst of fire inside her chest that crackled away until she ran out into the streets to find Milkman Dead.
Long after he’d folded the money and the letter into an envelope, Milkman sat on at his father’s desk. He added and re-added columns of figures, always eighty cents too little or eighty cents too much. He was still distracted and edgy, and all of it was not because of the problem of Hagar. He’d had a conversation with Guitar some time ago about the dragnet. A young boy, about sixteen years old, on his way home from school, had been strangled with what was believed to be a rope, and his head was bashed in. The state troopers cooperating with the local police said the way in which the boy had been killed was similar to the way another boy had been killed on New Year’s Eve in 1953, and the way four grown men had been killed in 1955—the strangulation, the smashing of the face. In the poolrooms and in Tommy’s Barbershop, the word was that Winnie Ruth Judd had struck again. The men laughed about it and repeated for the benefit of newcomers the story of how, in 1932, Winnie Ruth, a convicted murderer, who axed and dismembered her victims and stuffed them in trunks, was committed to a state asylum for the criminally insane, and escaped two or three times each year.
Once she had walked two hundred miles through two states before they caught her. Because there was a brutal killing in the city in December of that year, during the time Winnie Ruth was at large, Southside people were convinced that she had done it. From then on when some particularly nasty murder was reported, the Negroes said it was Winnie Ruth. They said that because Winnie Ruth was white and so were the victims. It was their way of explaining
what they believed was white madness—crimes planned and executed in a truly lunatic manner against total strangers. Such murders could only be committed by a fellow lunatic of the race and Winnie Ruth Judd fit the description. They believed firmly that members of their own race killed one another for good reasons: violation of another’s turf (a man is found with somebody else’s wife); refusal to observe the laws of hospitality (a man reaches into his friend’s pot of mustards and snatches out the meat); or verbal insults impugning their virility, honesty, humanity, and mental health. More important, they believed the crimes they committed were legitimate because they were committed in the heat of passion: anger, jealousy, loss of face, and so on. Bizarre killings amused them, unless of course the victim was one of their own.
They speculated about Winnie Ruth’s motives for this recent murder. Somebody said she was raunchy from being cooped up and went looking for a lay. But she knew better than to expect a grown man to want her, so she went for a schoolboy. Another said she probably didn’t like saddle shoes and when she got out of the loony bin and walked four hundred miles to safety, the first thing she saw was a kid wearing saddle shoes and she couldn’t take it—ran amok.
Amid the jokes, however, was a streak of unspoken terror. The police said there had been a witness who thought he saw a “bushy-haired Negro” running from the schoolyard where the body was found.
“The same bushy-haired Negro they saw when Sam Sheppard axed his wife,” said Porter.
“Hammered, man,” said Guitar. “Twenty-seven hammer blows.”
“Great Jesus. Why he do twenty-seven? That’s a hard killin.”
“Every killing is a hard killing,” said Hospital Tommy. “Killing anybody is hard. You see those movies where the hero puts his hands around somebody’s neck and the victim coughs a little bit and expires? Don’t believe it, my friends. The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it’s in mortal danger.”
“You kill anybody in the war, Tommy?”
“I put my hand to a few.”
“With your hands?”
“Bayonet, friend. The men of the Ninety-second used bayonets. Belleau Wood glittered with them. Fairly glittered.”
“How’d it feel?”
“Unpleasant. Extremely unpleasant. Even when you know he’ll do the same to you, it’s still a very indelicate thing to do.”
They laughed as usual at Tommy’s proper way of speaking.
“That’s because you didn’t want to be in the army no way,” said a fat man. “What about if you was roaming the streets and met up with Orval Faubus?”
“Boy, I’d love to kill that sucker,” a heavy-set man said.
“Keep saying that. They’ll soon have your ass downtown.”
“My hair ain’t bushy.”
“They’ll make it bushy.”
“They’ll take some brass knuckles and make your head bushy and call it hair.”
Aside from Empire State’s giggle, which was wholehearted, it had seemed to Milkman then that the laughter was wan and nervous. Each man in that room knew he was subject to being picked up as he walked the street and whatever his proof of who he was and where he was at the time of the murder, he’d have a very uncomfortable time being questioned.
And there was one more thing. For some time Milkman had been picking up hints that one or more of these murders had in fact been either witnessed or committed by a Negro. Some slip, someone knowing some detail about the victim. Like whether or not Winnie Ruth couldn’t stand saddle shoes. Did the boy have on saddle shoes? Did the newspaper say so? Or was that just one of the fanciful details a good jokester would think of.
The two Tommys were cleaning up. “Closed,” they said to a man who poked his face in the door. “Shop’s closing.” The conversation died down and the men who were just hanging around seemed reluctant to go. Guitar too, but finally he slipped on his jacket, shadow-boxed with Empire State, and joined Milkman at the door. Southside shops were featuring feeble wreaths and lights, made more feeble by the tacky Yuletide streamers and bells the city had strung up on the lampposts. Only downtown were the lights large, bright, festive, and full of hope.
The two men walked down Tenth Street, headed for Guitar’s room.
“Freaky,” said Milkman. “Some freaky shit.”
“Freaky world,” said Guitar. “A freaky, fucked-up world.”
Milkman nodded. “Railroad Tommy said the boy had on saddle shoes.”
“Did he?” Guitar asked.
“Did he? You know he did. You were laughing right along with the rest of us.”
Guitar glanced at him. “What you opening your nose for?”
“I know when I’m being put off.”
“Then that’s what it is, man. Nothing else. Maybe I don’t feel like discussing it.”
“You mean you don’t feel like discussing it with me. You were full of discussion in Tommy’s.”
“Look, Milk, we’ve been tight a long time, right? But that don’t mean we’re not different people. We can’t always think the same way about things. Can’t we leave it like that? There are all kinds of people in this world. Some are curious, some ain’t; some talk, some scream; some are kickers and other people are kicked. Take your daddy, now. He’s a kicker. First time I laid eyes on him, he was kicking us out of our house. That was a difference right there between you and me, but we got to be friends anyway….”
Milkman stopped and forced Guitar to stop too and turn around. “I know you’re not going to give me a bullshit lecture.”
“No lecture, man. I’m trying to tell you something.”
“Well, tell me. Don’t give me no fuckin bullshit lecture.”
“What do you call a lecture?” asked Guitar. “When you don’t talk for two seconds? When you have to listen to somebody else instead of talk? Is that a lecture?”
“A lecture is when somebody talks to a thirty-one-year-old man like he’s a ten-year-old kid.”
“You want me to talk or not?”
“Go ahead. Talk. Just don’t talk to me in that funny tone. Like you a teacher and I’m some snot-nosed kid.”
“That’s the problem, Milkman. You’re more interested in my tone than in what I’m saying. I’m trying to say that we don’t have to agree on everything; that you and me are different; that—”
“You mean you got some secret shit you don’t want me to know about.”
“I mean there are things that interest me that don’t interest you.”
“How you know they don’t interest me?”
“I know you. Been knowing you. You got your high-tone friends and your picnics on Honoré Island and you can afford to spend fifty percent of your brainpower thinking about a piece of ass. You got that red-headed bitch and you got a Southside bitch and no telling what in between.”
“I don’t believe it. After all these years you putting me down because of where I live?”
“Not where you live—where you hang out. You don’t live nowhere. Not Not Doctor Street or Southside.”
“You begrudge me—”
“I don’t begrudge you a thing.”
“You’re welcome everywhere I go. I’ve tried to get you to come to Honoré—”
“Fuck Honoré! You hear me? The only way I’ll go to that nigger heaven is with a case of dynamite and a book of matches.”
“You used to like it.”
“I never liked it! I went with you, but I never liked it. Never.”
“What’s wrong with Negroes owning beach houses? What do you want, Guitar? You mad at every Negro who ain’t scrubbing floors and picking cotton. This ain’t Montgomery, Alabama.”
Guitar looked at him, first in rage, and then he began to laugh. “You’re right, Milkman. You have never in your life said a truer word. This definitely is not Montgomery, Alabama. Tell me. What would you do if it was? If this turned out to be another Montgomery?”
“Buy a plane ticket.”
“Exactly. Now you know something about yourself you d
idn’t know before: who you are and what you are.”
“Yeah. A man that refuses to live in Montgomery, Alabama.”
“No. A man that can’t live there. If things ever got tough, you’d melt. You’re not a serious person, Milkman.”
“Serious is just another word for miserable. I know all about serious. My old man is serious. My sisters are serious. And nobody is more serious than my mother. She’s so serious, she wasting away. I was looking at her in the backyard the other day. It was as cold as a witch’s tit out there, but she had to get some bulbs in the ground before the fifteenth of December, she said. So there she was on her knees, digging holes in the ground.”
“So? I miss the point.”
“The point is that she wanted to put those bulbs in. She didn’t have to. She likes to plant flowers. She really likes it. But you should have seen her face. She looked like the unhappiest woman in the world. The most miserable. So where’s the fun? I’ve never in my whole life heard my mother laugh. She smiles sometimes, even makes a little sound. But I don’t believe she has ever laughed out loud.”
Without the least transition and without knowing he was going to, he began to describe to Guitar a dream he had had about his mother. He called it a dream because he didn’t want to tell him it had really happened, that he had really seen it.
He was standing at the kitchen sink pouring the rest of his coffee down the drain when he looked through the window and saw Ruth digging in the garden. She made little holes and tucked something that looked like a small onion in them. As he stood there, mindlessly watching her, tulips began to grow out of the holes she had dug. First a solitary thin tube of green, then two leaves opened up from the stem—one on each side. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. Now several stalks were coming out of the ground behind her. Either they were bulbs she had already planted or they had been in the sack so long they had germinated. The tubes were getting taller and taller and soon there were so many of them they were pressing up against each other and up against his mother’s dress. And still she didn’t notice them or turn around. She just kept digging. Some of the stems began to sprout heads, bloody red heads that bobbed over and touched her back. Finally she noticed them, growing and nodding and touching her. Milkman thought she would jump up in fear—at least surprise. But she didn’t. She leaned back from them, even hit out at them, but playfully, mischievously. The flowers grew and grew, until he could see only her shoulders above them and her flailing arms high above those bobbing, snapping heads. They were smothering her, taking away her breath with their soft jagged lips. And she merely smiled and fought them off as though they were harmless butterflies.