The Complete Stories

  “Don’t forget his mamma,” Mrs. Connin called. “He wants you to pray for his mamma. She’s sick.”

  “Lord,” the preacher said, “we pray for somebody in affiiction who isn’t here to testify. Is your mother sick in the hospital?” he asked. “Is she in pain?”

  The child stared at him. “She hasn’t got up yet,” he said in a high dazed voice. “She has a hangover.” The air was so quiet he could hear the broken pieces of the sun knocking the water.

  The preacher looked angry and startled. The red drained out of his face and the sky appeared to darken in his eyes. There was a loud guffaw from the bank and Mr. Paradise shouted, “Haw! Cure the afflicted woman with the hangover!” and began to beat his knee with his fist.

  “He’s had a long day,” Mrs. Connin said, standing with him in the door of the apartment and looking sharply into the room where the party was going on. “I reckon it’s past his regular bedtime.” One of Bevel’s eyes was closed and the other half closed; his nose was running and he kept his mouth open and breathed through it. The damp plain coat dragged down on one side.

  That would be her, Mrs. Connin decided, in the black britches—long black satin britches and barefoot sandals and red toenails. She was lying on half the sofa, with her knees crossed in the air and her head propped on the arm. She didn’t get up.

  “Hello Harry,” she said. “Did you have a big day?” She had a long pale face, smooth and blank, and straight sweet-patata-colored hair, pulled back.

  The father went off to get the money. There were two other couples. One of the men, blond with little violet-blue eyes, leaned out of his chair and said, “Well Harry, old man, have a big day?”

  “His name ain’t Harry. It’s Bevel,” Mrs. Connin said.

  “His name is Harry,” she said from the sofa. “Whoever heard of anybody named Bevel?”

  The little boy had seemed to be going to sleep on his feet, his head drooping farther and farther forward; he pulled it back suddenly and opened one eye; the other was stuck.

  “He told me this morning his name was Bevel,” Mrs. Connin said in a shocked voice. “The same as our preacher. We been all day at a preaching and healing at the river. He said his name was Bevel, the same as the preacher’s. That’s what he told me.”

  “Bevel!” his mother said. “My God! what a name.”

  “This preacher is name Bevel and there’s no better preacher around,” Mrs. Cannin said. “And furthermore,” she added in a defiant tone, “he Baptized this child this morning!”

  His mother sat straight up. “Well the nerve!” she muttered.

  “Furthermore,” Mrs. Connin said, “he’s a healer and he prayed for you to be healed.”

  “Healed!” she almost shouted. “Healed of what for Christ’s sake?”

  “Of your affliction,” Mrs. Connin said icily.

  The father had returned with the money and was standing near Mrs. Cannin waiting to give it to her. His eyes were lined with red threads. “Go on, go on,” he said, “I want to hear more about her affliction. The exact nature of it has escaped…” He waved the bill and his voice trailed off. “Healing by prayer is mighty inexpensive,” he murmured.

  Mrs. Connin stood a second, staring into the room, with a skeleton’s appearance of seeing everything. Then, without taking the money, she turned and shut the door behind her. The father swung around, smiling vaguely, and shrugged. The rest of them were looking at Harry. The little boy began to shamble toward the bedroom.

  “Come here, Harry,” his mother said. He automatically shifted his direction toward her without opening his eyes any farther. “Tell me what happened today,” she said when he reached her. She began to pull off his coat.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered.

  “Yes you do know,” she said, feeling the coat heavier on one side.

  She unzipped the innerlining and caught the book and a dirty handkerchief as they fell out. “Where did you get these?”

  “I don’t know,” he said and grabbed for them. “They’re mine. She gave them to me.”

  She threw the handkerchief down and held the book too high for him to reach and began to read it, her face after a second assuming an exaggerated comical expression. The others moved around and looked at it over her shoulder. “My God,” somebody said.

  One of the men peered at it sharply from behind a thick pair of glasses. “That’s valuable,” he said. “That’s a collector’s item,” and he took it away from the rest of them and retired to another chair.

  “Don’t let George go off with that,” his girl said.

  “I tell you it’s valuable,” George said. “1832.”

  Bevel shifted his direction again toward the room where he slept. He shut the door behind him and moved slowly in the darkness to the bed and sat down and took off his shoes and got under the cover. After a minute a shaft of light let in the tall silhouette of his mother. She tiptoed lightly cross the room and sat down on the edge of his bed. “What did that dolt of a preacher say about me?” she whispered. “What lies have you been telling today, honey?”

  He shut his eye and heard her voice from a long way away, as if he were under the river and she on top of it. She shook his shoulder. “Harry,” she said, leaning down and putting her mouth to his ear, “tell me what he said.” She pulled him into a sitting position and he felt as if he had been drawn up from under the river. “Tell me,” she whispered and her bitter breath covered his face.

  He saw the pale oval close to him in the dark. “He said I’m not the same now,” he muttered. “I count.”

  After a second, she lowered him by his shirt front onto the pillow. She hung over him an instant and brushed her lips against his forehead. Then she got up and moved away, swaying her hips lightly through the shaft of light.

  He didn’t wake up early but the apartment was still dark and close when he did. For a while he lay there, picking his nose and eyes. Then he sat up in bed and looked out the window. The sun came in palely, stained gray by the glass. Across the street at the Empire Hotel, a colored cleaning woman was looking down from an upper window, resting her face on her folded arms. He got up and put on his shoes and went to the bathroom and then into the front room. He ate two crackers spread with anchovy paste, that he found on the coffee table, and drank some ginger ale left in a bottle and looked around for his book but it was not there.

  The apartment was silent except for the faint humming of the refrigerator. He went into the kitchen and found some raisin bread heels and spread a half jar of peanut butter between them and climbed up on the tall kitchen stool and sat chewing the sandwich slowly, wiping his nose every now and then on his shoulder. When he finished he found some chocolate milk and drank that. He would rather have had the ginger ale he saw but they left the bottle openers where he couldn’t reach them. He studied what was left in the refrigerator for a while—some shriveled vegetables that she had forgot were there and a lot of brown oranges that she bought and didn’t squeeze; there were three or four kinds of cheese and something fishy in a paper bag; the rest was a pork bone. He left the refrigerator door open and wandered back into the dark living room and sat down on the sofa.

  He decided they would be out cold until one o’clock and that they would all have to go to a restaurant for lunch. He wasn’t high enough for the table yet and the waiter would bring a highchair and he was too big for a highchair. He sat in the middle of the sofa, kicking it with his heels. Then he got up and wandered around the room, looking into the ashtrays at the butts as if this might be a habit. In his own room he had picture books and blocks but they were for the most part torn up; he found the way to get new ones was to tear up the ones he had. There was very little to do at any time but eat; however, he was not a fat boy.

  He decided he would empty a few of the ashtrays on the floor. If he only emptied a few, she would think they had fallen. He emptied two, rubbing the ashes carefully into the rug with his finger. Then he lay on the floor for a while, studying his feet wh
ich he held up in the air. His shoes were still damp and he began to think about the river.

  Very slowly, his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing appear what he didn’t know he’d been looking for. Then all of a sudden he knew what he wanted to do.

  He got up and tiptoed into their bedroom and stood in the dim light there, looking for her pocketbook. His glance passed her long pale arm hanging off the edge of the bed down to the floor, and across the white mound his father made, and past the crowded bureau, until it rested on the pocketbook hung on the back of a chair. He took a car-token out of it and half a package of Life Savers. Then he left the apartment and caught the car at the corner. He hadn’t taken a suitcase because there was nothing from there he wanted to keep.

  He got off the car at the end of the line and started down the road he and Mrs. Connin had taken the day before. He knew there wouldn’t be anybody at her house because the three boys and the girl went to school and Mrs. Conn in had told him she went out to clean. He passed her yard and walked on the way they had gone to the river. The paper brick houses were far apart and after a while the dirt place to walk on ended and he had to walk on the edge of the highway. The sun was pale yellow and high and hot.

  He passed a shack with an orange gas pump in front of it but he didn’t see the old man looking out at nothing in particular from the doorway. Mr. Paradise was having an orange drink. He finished it slowly, squinting over the bottle at the small plaid-coated figure disappearing down the road. Then he set the empty bottle on a bench and, still squinting, wiped his sleeve over his mouth. He went in the shack and picked out a peppermint stick, a foot long and two inches thick, from the candy shelf, and stuck it in his hip pocket. Then he got in his car and drove slowly down the highway after the boy.

  By the time Bevel came to the field speckled with purple weeds, he was dusty and sweating and he crossed it at a trot to get into the woods as fast as he could. Once inside, he wandered from tree to tree, trying to find the path they had taken yesterday. Finally he found a line Worn in the pine needles and followed it until he saw the steep trail twisting down through the trees.

  Mr. Paradise had left his automobile back some wayan the road and had walked to the place where he was accustomed to sit almost every day, holding an unbaited fishline in the water while he stared at the river passing in front of him. Anyone looking at him from a distance would have seen an old boulder half hidden in the bushes.

  Bevel didn’t see him at all. He only saw the river, shimmering reddish yellow, and bounded into it with his shoes and his coat on and took a gulp. He swallowed some and spit the rest out and then he stood there in water up to his chest and looked around him. The sky was a clear pale blue, all in one piece—except for the hole the sun made—and fringed around the bottom with treetops. His coat floated to the surface and surrounded him like a strange gay lily pad and he stood grinning in the sun. He intended not to fool with preachers any more but to Baptize himself and to keep on going this time until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river. He didn’t mean to waste any more time. He put his head under the water at once and pushed forward.

  In a second he began to gasp and sputter and his head reappeared on the surface; he started under again and the same thing happened. The river wouldn’t have him. He tried again and came up, choking. This was the way it had been when the preacher held him under—he had had to fight with something that pushed him back in the face. He stopped and thought suddenly: it’s another joke, it’s just another joke! He thought how far he had come for nothing and he began to hit and splash and kick the filthy river. His feet were already treading on nothing. He gave one low cry of pain and indignation. Then he heard a shout and turned his head and saw something like a giant pig bounding after him, shaking a red and white club and shouting. He plunged under once and this time, the waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and pulled him swiftly forward and down. For an instant he was overcome with surprise: then since he was moving quickly and knew that he was getting somewhere, all his fury and fear left him.

  Mr. Paradise’s head appeared from time to time on the surface of the water. Finally, far downstream, the old man rose like some ancient water monster and stood empty-handed, staring with his dull eyes as far down the river line as he could see.

  A Circle in the Fire (1954)

  SOMETIMES the last line of trees was a solid gray-blue wall a little darker than the sky but this afternoon it was almost black and behind it the sky was a livid glaring white. “You know that woman that had that baby in that iron lung?” Mrs. Pritchard said. She and the child’s mother were underneath the window the child was looking down from. Mrs. Pritchard was leaning against the chimney, her arms folded on a shelf of stomach, one foot crossed and the toe pointed into the ground. She was a large woman with a small pointed face and steady ferreting eyes. Mrs. Cope was the opposite, very small and trim, with a large round face and black eyes that seemed to be enlarging all the time behind her glasses as if she were continually being astonished. She was squatting down pulling grass out of the border beds around the house. Both women had on sunhats that had once been identical but now Mrs. Pritchard’s was faded and out of shape while Mrs. Cope’s was still stiff and bright green.

  “I read about her,” she said.

  “She was a Pritchard that married a Brookins and so’s kin to me—about my seventh or eighth cousin by marriage.”

  “Well, well,” Mrs. Cope muttered and threw a large clump of nut grass behind her. She worked at the weeds and nut grass as if they were an evil sent directly by the devil to destroy the place.

  “Beinst she was kin to us, we gone to see the body,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “Seen the little baby too.”

  Mrs. Cope didn’t say anything. She was used to these calamitous stories; she said they wore her to a frazzle. Mrs. Pritchard would go thirty miles for the satisfaction of seeing anybody laid away. Mrs. Cope always changed the subject to something cheerful but the child had observed that this only put Mrs. Pritchard in a bad humor.

  The child thought the blank sky looked as if it were pushing against the fortress wall, trying to break through. The trees across the near field were a patchwork of gray and yellow greens. Mrs. Cope was always worrying about fires in her woods. When the nights were very windy, she would say to the child, “Oh Lord, do pray there won’t be any fires, it’s so windy,” and the child would grunt from behind her book or not answer at all because she heard it so often. In the evenings in the summer when they sat on the porch, Mrs. Cope would say to the child who was reading fast to catch the last light, “Get up and look at the sunset, it’s gorgeous. You ought to get up and look at it,” and the child would scowl and not answer or glare up once across the lawn and two front pastures to the gray-blue sentinel line of trees and then begin to read again with no change of expression, sometimes muttering for meanness, “It looks like a fire. You better get up and smell around and see if the woods ain’t on fire.”

  “She had her arm around it in the coffin,” Mrs. Pritchard went on, but her voice was drowned out by the sound of the tractor that the Negro, Culver, was driving up the road from the barn. The wagon was attached and another Negro was sitting in the back, bouncing, his feet jogging about a foot from the ground. The one on the tractor drove it past the gate that led into the field on the left.

  Mrs. Cope turned her head and saw that he had not gone through the gate because he was too lazy to get off and open it. He was going the long way around at her expense. “Tell him to stop and come here!” she shouted.

  Mrs. Pritchard heaved herself from the chimney and waved her arm in a fierce circle but he pretended not to hear. She stalked to the edge of the lawn and screamed, “Get off, I toljer! She wants you!”

  He got off and started toward the chimney, pushing his head and shoulders forward at each step to give the appearance of hurrying. His head was thrust up to the top in a white cloth hat streaked with different shades of sweat. The brim was down and hid all bu
t the lower parts of his reddish eyes.

  Mrs. Cope was on her knees, pointing the trowel into the ground. “Why aren’t you going through the gate there?” she asked and waited, her eyes shut and her mouth stretched flat as if she were prepared for any ridiculous answer.

  “Got to raise the blade on the mower if we do,” he said and his gaze bore just to the left of her. Her Negroes were as destructive and impersonal as the nut grass.

  Her eyes, as she opened them, looked as if they would keep on enlarging until they turned her wrongsideout. “Raise it,” she said and pointed across the road with the trowel.

  He moved off.

  “It’s nothing to them,” she said. “They don’t have the responsibility. I thank the Lord all these things don’t come at once. They’d destroy me.”

  “Yeah, they would,” Mrs. Pritchard shouted against the sound of the tractor. He opened the gate and raised the blade and drove through and down into the field; the noise diminished as the wagon disappeared. “I don’t see myself how she had it in it,” she went on in her normal voice.

  Mrs. Cope was bent over, digging fiercely at the nut grass again. “We have a lot to be thankful for,” she said. “Every day you should say a prayer of thanksgiving. Do you do that?”

  “Yes’m,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “See she was in ill four months before she even got thataway. Look like to me if I was in one of them, I would leave off… how you reckun they…?”

  “Every day I say a prayer of thanksgiving,” Mrs. Cope said. “Think of all we have. Lord.” she said and sighed, “we have everything,” and she looked around at her rich pastures and hills heavy with timber and shook her head as if it might all he a burden she was trying to shake off her back.

  Mrs. Pritchard studied the woods. “All I got is four abscess teeth,” she remarked.