The Complete Stories

  “Where’s your daddy?” she asked.

  After a while, one of the boys said, “He ain’t hyar neither.”

  “Ahhhh,” Mrs. May said as if something had been proven. “Where’s the colored man?”

  She waited and decided no one was going to answer. “The cat has six little tongues,” she said. “How would you like to come home with me and let me teach you how to talk?” She laughed and her laugh died on the silent air. She felt as if she were on trial for her life, facing a jury of Greenleafs. “I’ll go down and see if I can find the colored man,” she said.

  “You can go if you want to,” one of the boys said.

  “Well, thank you,” she murmured and drove off.

  The barn was down the lane from the house. She had not seen it before but Mr. Greenleaf had described it in detail for it had been built according to the latest specifications. It was a milking parlor arrangement where the cows are milked from below. The milk ran in pipes from the machines to the milk house and was never carried in no bucket, Mr. Greenleaf said, by no human hand. “When you gonter get you one?” he had asked.

  “Mr. Greenleaf,” she had said, “I have to do for myself. I am not assisted hand and foot by the government. It would cost me $20,000 to install a milking parlor. I barely make ends meet as it is.”

  “My boys done it,” Mr. Greenleaf had murmured, and then—”but all boys ain’t alike.”

  “No indeed!” she had said. “I thank God for that!”

  “I thank Gawd for ever-thang,” Mr. Greenleaf had drawled.

  You might as well, she had thought in the fierce silence that followed; you’ve never done anything for yourself.

  She stopped by the side of the barn and honked but no one appeared. For several minutes she sat in the car, observing the various machines parked around, wondering how many of them were paid for. They had a forage harvester and a rotary hay baler. She had those too. She decided that since no one was here, she would get out and have a look at the milking parlor and see if they kept it clean.

  She opened the milking room door and stuck her head in and for the first second she felt as if she were going to lose her breath. The spotless white concrete room was filled with sunlight that came from a row of windows head-high along both walls. The metal stanchions gleamed ferociously and she had to squint to be able to look at all. She drew her head out the room quickly and closed the door and leaned against it, frowning. The light outside was not so bright but she was conscious that the sun was directly on top of her head, like a silver bullet ready to drop into her brain.

  A Negro carrying a yellow calf-feed bucket appeared from around the corner of the machine shed and came toward her. He was a light yellow boy dressed in the cast-off army clothes of the Greenleaf twins. He stopped at a respectable distance and set the bucket on the ground.

  “Where’s Mr. O. T. and Mr. E. T.?” she asked.

  “Mist O. T. he in town, Mist E. T. he off yonder in the field,” the Negro said, pointing first to the left and then to the right as if he were naming the position of two planets.

  “Can you remember a message?” she asked, looking as if she thought this doubtful.

  “I’ll remember it if I don’t forget it,” he said with a touch of sullenness.

  “Well, I’ll write it down then,” she said. She got in her car and took a stub of pencil from her pocket book and began to write on the back of an empty envelope. The Negro came and stood at the window. “I’m Mrs. May,” she said as she wrote. “Their bull is on my place and I want him off today. You can tell them I’m furious about it.”

  “That bull lef here Sareday,” the Negro said, “and none of us ain’t seen him since. We ain’t knowed where he was.”

  “Well, you know now,” she said, “and you can tell Mr. O. T. and Mr. E. T. that if they don’t come get him today, I’m going to have their daddy shoot him the first thing in the morning. I can’t have that bull ruining my herd.” She handed him the note.

  “If I knows Mist O. T. and Mist E. T.,” he said, taking it, “they goin to say you go ahead on and shoot him. He done busted up one of our trucks already and we be glad to see the last of him.”

  She pulled her head back and gave him a look from slightly bleared eyes. “Do they expect me to take my time and my worker to shoot their bull?” she asked. “They don’t want him so they just let him loose and expect somebody else to kill him? He’s eating my oats and ruining my herd and I’m expected to shoot him too?”

  “I speck you is,” he said softly. “He done busted up…”

  She gave him a very sharp look and said, “Well, I’m not surprised. That’s just the way some people are,” and after a second she asked, “Which is boss, Mr. O. T. or Mr. E. T.?” She had always suspected that they fought between themselves secretly.

  “They never quarls,” the boy said. “They like one man in two skins.”

  “Hmp. I expect you just never heard them quarrel.”

  “Nor nobody else heard them neither,” he said, looking away as if this insolence were addressed to some one else.

  “Well,” she said, “I haven’t put up with their father for fifteen years not to know a few things about Greenleafs.”

  The Negro looked at her suddenly with a gleam of recognition. “Is you my policy man’s mother?” he asked.

  “I don’t know who your policy man is,” she said sharply. “You give them that note and tell them if they don’t come for that bull today, they’ll be making their father shoot it tomorrow,” and she drove off.

  She stayed at home all afternoon waiting for the Greenleaf twins to come for the bull. They did not come. I might as well be working for them, she thought furiously. They are simply going to use me to the limit. At the supper table, she went over it again for the boys’ benefit because she wanted them to see exactly what O. T. and E. T. would do. “They don’t want that bull,” she said,”—pass the butter—so they simply turn him loose and let somebody else worry about getting rid of him for them. How do you like that? I’m the victim. I’ve always been the victim.”

  “Pass the butter to the victim,” Wesley said. He was in a worse humor than usual because he had had a flat tire on the way home from the university.

  Scofield handed her the butter and said, “Why Mamma, ain’t you ashamed to shoot an old bull that ain’t done nothing but give you a little scrub strain in your herd? I declare,” he said, “with the Mamma I got it’s a wonder I turned out to be such a nice boy!”

  “You ain’t her boy, Son,” Wesley said.

  She eased back in her chair, her fingertips on the edge of the table.

  “All I know is,” Scofield said, “I done mighty well to be as nice as I am seeing what I come from.”

  When they teased her they spoke Greenleaf English but Wesley made his own particular tone come through it like a knife edge. “Well lemme tell you one thang, Brother,” he said, leaning over the table, “that if you had half a mind you would already know.”

  “What’s that, Brother?” Scofield asked, his broad face grinning into the constricted one across from him.

  “That is,” Wesley said, “that neither you nor me is her boy…” but he stopped abruptly as she gave a kind of hoarse wheeze like an old horse lashed unexpectedly. She reared up and ran from the room.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Wesley growled, “What did you start her off for?”

  “I never started her off,” Scofield said. “You started her off.”

  “Hah.”

  “She’s not as young as she used to be and she can’t take it.”

  “She can only give it out,” Wesley said. “I’m the one that takes it.”

  His brother’s pleasant face had changed so that an ugly family resemblance showed between them. “Nobody feels sorry for a lousy bastard like you,” he said and grabbed across the table for the other’s shirtfront.

  From her room she heard a crash of dishes and she rushed back through the kitchen into the dining room. The hall door
was open and Scofield was going out of it. Wesley was lying like a large bug on his back with the edge of the overturned table cutting him across the middle and broken dishes scattered on top of him. She pulled the table off him and caught his arm to help him rise but he scrambled up and pushed her off with a furious charge of energy and flung himself out of the door after his brother.

  She would have collapsed but a knock on the back door stiffened her and she swung around. Across the kitchen and back porch, she could see Mr. Greenleaf peering eagerly through the screen wire. All her resources returned in full strength as if she had only needed to be challenged by the devil himself to regain them. “I heard a thump,” he called, “and I thought the plastering might have fell on you.”

  If he had been wanted someone would have had to go on a horse to find him. She crossed the kitchen and the porch and stood inside the screen and s. iid, “No, nothing happened but the table turned over. One of the legs was weak,” and without pausing, “the boys didn’t come for the bull so tomorrow, you’ll have to shoot him.”

  The sky was crossed with thin red and purple bars and behind them the sun was moving down slowly as if it were descending a ladder. Mr. Greenleaf squatted down on the step, his back to her, the top of his hat on a level with her feet. “Tomorrow I’ll drive him home for you,” he said.

  “Oh no, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said in a mocking voice, “you drive him home tomorrow and next week he’ll be back here. I know better than that.” Then in a mournful tone, she said, “I’m surprised at O. T. and E. T. to treat me this way. I thought they’d have more gratitude. Those boys spent some mighty happy days on this place, didn’t they, Mr. Greenleaf?”

  Mr. Greenleaf didn’t say anything.

  “I think they did,” she said. “I think thev did. But they’ve forgotten all the nice little things I did for them now. If I recall, they wore my boys’ old clothes and played with my boys’ old toys and hunted with my boys’ old guns. They swam in my pond and shot my birds and fished in my stream and I never forgot their birthday and Christmas seemed to roll around very often if I remember it right. And do they think of any of those things now?” she asked.

  “Nooooo,” she said.

  For a few seconds she looked at the disappearing sun and Mr. Greenleaf examined the palms of his hands. Presently as if it had just occurred to her, she asked, “Do you know the real reason they didn’t come for that bull?”

  “Naw I don’t,” Mr. Greenleaf said in a surly voice.

  “They didn’t come because I’m a woman,” she said. “You can get away with anything when you’re dealing with a woman. If there were a man running this place…”

  Quick as a snake striking Mr. Greenleaf said, “You got two boys. They know you got two men on the place.”

  The sun had disappeared behind the tree line. She looked down at the dark crafty face, upturned now, and at he wary eyes, bright under the shadow of the hatbrim. She waited long enough for him to see that she was hurt and then she said, “Some people learn gratitude too late, Mr. Greenleaf, and some never learn it at all,” and she turned and left him sitting on the steps.

  Half the night in her sleep she heard a sound as if some large stone were grinding a hole on the outside wall of her brain. She was walking on the inside, over a succession of beautiful rolling hills, planting her stick in front of each step. She became aware after a time that the noise was the sun trying to burn through the tree line and she stopped to watch, sate in the knowledge that it couldn’t, that it had to sink the why it always did outside of her property. When she first stopped it was a swollen red ball, but as she stood watching it began to narrow and pale until it looked like a bullet. Then suddenly it burst through the tree line and raced down the hill toward her. She woke up with her hand over her mouth and the same noise, diminished but distant, in her ear. It was the bull munching under her window. Mr. Greenleaf had let him out.

  She got up and made her way to the window in the dark and looked out through the slit blind, but the bull had moved away from the hedge and at first she didn’t see him. Then she saw a heavy form some distance away, paused as if observing her. This is the last night I am going to put up with this, she said, and watched until the iron shadow moved away in the darkness.

  The next morning she waited until exactly eleven o’clock. Then she got in her car and drove to the barn. Mr. Greenleaf was cleaning milk cans. He had seven of them standing up outside the milk room to get the sun. She had been telling him to do this for weeks. “All right, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said, “go get your gun. We’re going to shoot that bull.”

  “I thought you wanted theseyer cans…”

  “Go get your gun, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said. Her voice and face were expressionless.

  “That gentleman torn out of there last night,” he murmured in a tone of regret and bent again to the can he had his arm in.

  “Go get your gun, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said in the same triumphant toneless voice. “The bull is in the pasture with the dry cows. I saw him from my upstairs window. I’m going to drive you up to the field and you can run him into the empty pasture and shoot him there.”

  He detached himself from the can slowly. “Ain’t nobody ever ast me to shoot my boys’ own bull!” he said in a high rasping voice. He removed a rag from his back pocket and began to wipe his hands violently, then his nose.

  She turned as if she had not heard this and said, “I’ll wait for you in the car. Go get your gun.”

  She sat in the car and watched him stalk off toward the harness room where he kept a gun. After he had entered the room, there was a crash as if he had kicked something out of his way. Presently he emerged again with the gun, circled behind the car, opened the door violently and threw himself onto the seat beside her. He held the gun between his knees and looked straight ahead. He’d like to shoot me instead of the bull, she thought, and turned her face away so that he could not see her smile.

  The morning was dry and clear. She drove through the woods for a quarter of a mile and then out into the open where there were fields on either side of the narrow road. The exhilaration of carrying her point had sharpened her senses. Birds were screaming everywhere, the grass was almost too bright to look at, the sky was an even piercing blue. “Spring is here!” she had gaily. Mr. Greenleaf lifted one muscle somewhere near his mouth as if he found this the most asinine remark ever made. When she stopped at the second pasture gate, he flung himself out of the car door and slammed it behind him. Then he opened the gate and she drove through. He closed it and flung himself back in, silently, and she drove around the rim of the pasture until she spotted the bull, almost in the center of it, grazing peacefully among the cows.

  “The gentleman is waiting on you,” she said and gave Mr. Greenleaf’s furious profile a sly look. “Run him into that next pasture and when you get him in, I’ll drive in behind you and shut the gate myself.”

  He flung himself out again, this time deliberately leaving the car door open so that she had to lean across the seat and close it. She sat smiling as she watched him make his way across the pasture toward the opposite gate. He seemed to throw himself forward at each step and then pull back as if he were calling on some power to witness that he was being forced. “Well,” she said aloud as if he were still in the car, “it’s your own boys who are making you do this, Mr. Greenleaf. “O. T. and E. T. were probably splitting their sides laughing at him now. She could hear their identical nasal voices saying, “Made Daddy shoot our bull for us. Daddy don’t know no better than to think that’s a fine bull he’s shooting. Gonna kill Daddy to shoot that bull!”

  “If those boys cared a thing about you, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said, they would have come for that bull. I’m surprised at them.”

  He was circling around to open the gate first. The bull, dark among the spotted cows, had not moved. He kept his head down, eating constantly. Mr. Greenleaf opened the gate and then began circling back to approach him from the rear. When he was about ten feet behind him, he
flapped his arms at his sides. The bull lifted his head indolently and then lowered it again and continued to eat. Mr. Greenleaf stooped again and picked up something and threw it at him with a vicious swing. She decided it was a sharp rock for the bull leapt and then began to gallop until he disappeared over the rim of the hill. Mr. Greenleaf followed at his leisure.

  “You needn’t think you’re going to lose him!” she cried and started the car straight across the pasture. She had to drive slowly over the terraces and when she reached the gate, Mr. Greenleaf and the bull were nowhere in sight. This pasture was smaller than the last, a green arena, encircled almost entirely by woods. She got out and closed the gate and stood looking for some sign of Mr. Greenleaf but he had disappeared completely. She knew at once that his plan was to lose the bull in the woods. Eventually, she would see him emerge somewhere from the circle of trees and come limping toward her and when he finally reached her, he would say, “If you can find that gentleman in them woods, you’re better than me.”

  She was going to say, “Mr. Greenleaf, if I have to walk into those woods with you and stay all afternoon, we are going to find that bull and shoot him. You are going to shoot him if I have to pull the trigger for you.” When he saw she meant business he would return and shoot the bull quickly himself.

  She got back into the car and drove to the center of the pasture where he would not have so far to walk to reach her when he came out of the woods. At this moment she could picture him sitting on a stump, marking lines in the ground with a stick. She decided she would wait exactly ten minutes by her watch. Then she would begin to honk. She got out of the car and walked around a little and then sat down on the front bumper to wait and rest. She was very tired and she lay her head back against the hood and closed her eyes. She did not understand why she should be so tired when it was only mid-morning. Through her closed eyes, she could feel the sun, redhot overhead. She opened her eyes slightly but the white light forced her to close them again.