The Complete Stories

  “Who them children belong to, you?” he said at length.

  “I ain’t married yet,” she said. “They belong to momma.” She said it as if it were only a matter of time before she would be married.

  Who in God’s name would marry her? Parker thought.

  A large barefooted woman with a wide gap-toothed face appeared in the door behind Parker. She had apparently been there for several minutes.

  “Good evening,” Parker said.

  The woman crossed the porch and picked up what was left of the bushel of apples. “We thank you,” she said and returned with it into the house.

  “That your old woman?” Parker muttered.

  The girl nodded. Parker knew a lot of sharp things he could have said like “You got my sympathy,” but he was gloomily silent. He just sat there, looking at the view. He thought he must be coming down with something.

  “If I pick up some peaches tomorrow I’ll bring you some,” he said.

  ‘I’ll be much obliged to you,” the girl said.

  Parker had no intention of taking any basket of peaches back there but the next day he found himself doing it. He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, “I ain’t got any tattoo on my back.”

  “What you got on it?” the girl said.

  “My shirt,” Parker said. “Haw.”

  “Haw, haw,” the girl said politely.

  Parker thought he was losing his mind. He could not believe for a minute that he was attracted to a woman like this. She showed not the least interest in anything but what he brought until he appeared the third time with two cantaloups. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “O. E. Parker,” he said.

  “What does the O. E. stand for?”

  “You can just call me O. E.,” Parker said. “Or Parker. Don’t nobody call me by my name.”

  “What’s it stand for?” she persisted.

  “Never mind,” Parker said. “What’s yours?”

  “I’ll tell you when you tell me what them letters are the short of,” she said. There was just a hint of flirtatiousness in her tone and it went rapidly to Parker’s head. He had never revealed the name to any man or woman, only to the files of the navy and the government, and it was on his baptismal record which he got at the age of a month; his mother was a Methodist. When the name leaked out of the navy files, Parker narrowly missed killing the man who used it.

  “You’ll go blab it around,” he said.

  ‘I’Il swear I’ll never tell nobody,” she said. “On God’s holy word I swear it.”

  Parker sat for a few minutes in silence. Then he reached for the girl’s neck, drew her ear close to his mouth and revealed the name in a low voice.

  “Obadiah,” she whispered. Her face slowly brightened as if the name came as a sign to her. “Obadiah,” she said.

  The name still stank in Parker’s estimation.

  “Obadiah Elihue,” she said in a reverent voice.

  “If you call me that aloud, I’ll bust your head open,”

  Parker said. “What’s yours?”

  “Sarah Ruth Cates,” she said.

  “Glad to meet you, Sarah Ruth,” Parker said.

  Sarah Ruth’s father was a Straight Gospel preacher but he was away, spreading it in Florida. Her mother did not seem to mind his attention to the girl so long as he brought a basket of something with him when he came. As for Sarah Ruth herself, it was plain to Parker after he had visited three times that she was crazy about him. She liked him even though she insisted that pictures on the skin were vanity of vanities and even after hearing him curse, and even after she had asked him if he was saved and he had replied that he didn’t see it was anything in particular to save him from. After that, inspired, Parker had said, “I’d be saved enough if you was to kiss me.”

  She scowled. “That ain’t being saved,” she said.

  Not long after that she agreed to take a ride in his truck. Parker parked it on a deserted road and suggested to her that they lie down together in the back of it.

  “Not until after we’re married,” she said—just like that.

  “Oh that ain’t necessary,” Parker said and as he reached for her, she thrust him away with such force that the door of the truck came off and he found himself flat on his back on the ground. He made up his mind then and there to have nothing further to do with her.

  They were married in the County Ordinary’s office because Sarah Ruth thought churches were idolatrous. Parker had no opinion about that one way or the other. The Ordinary’s office was lined with cardboard file boxes and record books with dusty yellow slips of paper hanging on out of them. The Ordinary was an old woman with red hair who had held office for forty years and looked as dusty as her books. She married them from behind the iron-grill of a stand-up desk and when she finished, she said with a flourish, “Three dollars and fifty cents and till death do you part!” and yanked some forms out of a machine.

  Marriage did not change Sarah Ruth a jot and it made Parker gloomier than ever. Every morning he decided he had had enough and would not return that night; every night he returned. Whenever Parker couldn’t stand the way he felt, he would have another tattoo, but the only surface left on him now was his back. To see a tattoo on his own back he would have to get two mirrors and stand between them in just the correct position and this seemed to Parker a good way to make an idiot of himself. Sarah Ruth who, if she had had better sense, could have enjoyed a tattoo on his back, would not even look at the ones he had elsewhere. When he attempted to point out especial details of them, she would shut her eyes tight and tum her back as well. Except in total darkness, she preferred Parker dressed and with his sleeves rolled down.

  “At the judgement seat of God, Jesus is going to say to you, ‘What you been doing all your life besides have pictures drawn all over you?’ ” she said.

  “You don’t fool me none,” Parker said, “you’re just afraid that hefty girl I work for’ll like me so much shell say, ’Come on, Mr. Parker, let’s you and me…’”

  “You’re tempting sin,” she said, “and at the judgement seat of God you’ll have to answer for that too. You ought to go back to selling the fruits of the earth.”

  Parker did nothing much when he was at home but listen to what the judgement seat of God would be like for him if he didn’t change his ways. When he could, he broke in with tales of the hefty girl he worked for. “’Mr. Parker’”, he said she said, ” ‘I hired you for your brains.’ ” (She had added, “So why don’t you use them?”)

  “And you should have seen her face the first time she saw me without my shirt,” he said. “‘Mr. Parker,’” she said, “‘you’re a walking panner-rammer!’” This had, in fact, been her remark but it had been delivered out of one side of her mouth.

  Dissatisfaction began to grow so great in Parker that there was no containing it outside of a tattoo. It had to be his back. There was no help for it. A dim half-formed inspiration began to work in his mind. He visualized having a tattoo put there that Sarah Ruth would not be able to resista religious subject. He thought of an open book with HOLY BIBLE tattooed under it and an actual verse printed on the page. This seemed just the thing for a while; then he began to hear her say, “Ain’t I already got a real Bible? “What you think I want to read the same verse over and over for when I can read it all?” He needed something better even than the Bible! He thought about it so much that he began to lose sleep. He was already losing flesh—Sarah Ruth just threw food in the pot and let it boil. Not knowing for certain why he continued to stay with a woman who was both ugly and pregnant and no cook made him generally nervous and irritable, and he developed a little tic in the side of his face.

  Once or twice he found himself turning around abruptly as if someone were trailing him. He had had a granddaddy who had ended in the state mental hospital, although not until he was seventy-five, but as urgent as it might be for him to get a tattoo, it was just as urgent that he get exactly
the right one to bring Sarah Ruth to heel. As he continued to worry over it, his eyes took on a hollow preoccupied expression. The old woman he worked for told him that if he couldn’t keep his mind on what he was doing, she knew where she could find a fourteen-year-old colored boy who could. Parker was too preoccupied even to be offended. At any time previous, he would have left her then and there, saying drily, “Well, you go ahead on and get him then.”

  Two or three mornings later he was baling hay with the old woman’s sorry baler and her broken down tractor in a large field, cleared save for one enormous old tree standing in the middle of it. The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree. She had pointed it out to Parker as if he didn’t have eyes and told him to be careful not to hit it as the machine picked up hay near it. Parker began at the outside of the field and made circles inward toward it. He had to get off the tractor every now and then and untangle the baling cord or kick a rock out of the way. The old woman had told him to carry the rocks to the edge of the field, which he did when she was there watching. When he thought he could make it, he ran over them. As he circled the field his mind was on a suitable design for his back. The sun, the size of a golf ball, began to switch regularly from in front to behind him, but he appeared to see it both places as if he had eyes in the back of his head. All at once he saw the tree reaching out to grasp him. A ferocious thud propelled him into the air, and he heard himself yelling in an unbelievably loud voice, “GOD ABOVE!”

  He landed on his back while the tractor crashed upsidedown into the tree and burst into flame. The first thing Parker saw were his shoes, quickly being eaten by the fire; one was caught under the tractor, the other was some distance away, burning by itself. He was not in them. He could feel the hot breath of the burning tree on his face. He scrambled backwards, still sitting, his eyes cavernous, and if he had known how to cross himself he would have done it.

  His truck was on a dirt road at the edge of the field. He moved toward it, still sitting, still backwards, but faster and faster; halfway to it he got up and began a kind of forward bent run from which he collapsed on his knees twice. His legs felt like two old rusted rain gutters. He reached the truck finally and took off in it, zigzagging up the road. He drove past his house on the embankment and straight for the city, fifty miles distant.

  Parker did not allow himself to think on the way to the city. He only knew that there had been a great change in his life, a leap forward into a worse unknown, and that there was nothing he could do about it. It was for all intents accomplished.

  The artist had two large cluttered rooms over a chiropodist’s office on a back street. Parker, still barefooted, burst silently in on him at a little after three in the afternoon. The artist, who was about Parker’s own age—twenty-eight—but thin and bald, was behind a small drawing table, tracing a design in green ink. He looked up with an annoyed glance and did not seem to recognize Parker in the holloweyed creature before him.

  “Let me see the book you got with all the pictures of God in it,” Parker said breathlessly. “The religious one.”

  The artist continued to look at him with his intellectual, superior stare. “I don’t put tattoos on drunks,” he said.

  “You know me!” Parker cried indignantly. “I’m O. E. Parker! You done work for me before and I always paid!”

  The artist looked at him another moment as if he were not altogether sure. “You’ve fallen off some,” he said. “You must have been in jail.”

  “Married,” Parker said.

  “Oh,” said the artist. With the aid of mirrors the artist had tattooed on the top of his head a miniature owl, perfect in every detail. It was about the size of a half-dollar and served him as a show piece. There were cheaper artists in town but Parker had never wanted anything but the best. The artist went over to a cabinet at the back of the room and began to look over some art books. “Who are you interested in?” he said, “saints, angels, Christs or what?”

  “God,” Parker said.

  “Father, Son or Spirit?”

  “Just God,” Parker said impatiently. “Christ. I don’t care. Just so it’s God.”

  The artist returned with a book. He moved some papers off another table and put the book down on it and told Parker to sit down and see what he liked. “The up-to-date ones are in the back,” he said.

  Parker sat down with the book and wet his thumb. He began to go through it, beginning at the back where the up-to-date pictures were. Some of them he recognized—The Good Shepherd, Forbid Them Not, The Smiling Jesus, Jesus the Physician’s Friend, but he kept turning rapidly backwards and the pictures became less and less reassuring. One showed a gaunt green dead face streaked with blood. One was yellow with sagging purple eyes. Parker’s heart began to beat faster and faster until it appeared to be roaring inside him like a great generator. He flipped the pages quickly, feeling that when he reached the one ordained, a sign would come. He continued to flip through until he had almost reached the front of the book. On one of the pages a pair of eyes glanced at him swiftly. Parker sped on, then stopped. His heart too appeared to cut off; there was absolute silence. It said as plainly as if silence were a language itself, GO BACK.

  Parker returned to the picture—the haloed head of a flat stem Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes. He sat there trembling; his heart began slowly to beat again as if it were being brought to life by a subtle power.

  “You found what you want?” the artist asked.

  Parker’s throat was too dry to speak. He got up and thrust the book at the artist, opened at the picture.

  “That’ll cost you plenty,” the artist said. “You don’t want all those little blocks though, just the outline and some better features.”

  “Just like it is,” Parker said, “just like it is or nothing.”

  “It’s your funeral,” the artist said, “but I don’t do that kind of work for nothing.”

  “How much?” Parker asked.

  “It’ll take maybe two days work.”

  “How much?” Parker said.

  “On time or cash?” the artist asked. Parker’s other jobs had been on time, but he had paid.

  “Ten down and ten for every day it takes,” the artist said.

  Parker drew ten dollar bills out of his wallet; he had three left in.

  “You come back in the morning,” the artist said, putting the money in his own pocket. “First I’ll have to trace that out of the book.”

  “No no!” Parker said. “Trace it now or gimme my money back,” and his eyes blared as if he were ready for a fight.

  The artist agreed. Anyone stupid enough to want a Christ on his back, he reasoned, would be just as likely as not to change his mind the next minute, but once the work was begun he could hardly do so.

  While he worked on the tracing, he told Parker to go wash his back at the sink with the special soap he used there. Parker did it and returned to pace back and forth across the room, nervously flexing his shoulders. He wanted to go look at the picture again but at the same time he did not want to. The artist got up finally and had Parker lie down on the table. He swabbed his back with ethyl chloride and then began to outline the head on it with his iodine pencil. Another hour passed before he took up his electric instrument. Parker felt no particular pain. In Japan he had had a tattoo of the Buddha done on his upper arm with ivory needles; in Burma, a little brown root of a man had made a peacock on each of his knees using thin pointed sticks, two feet long; amateurs had worked on him with pins and soot. Parker was usually so relaxed and easy under the hand of the artist that he often went to sleep, but this time he remained awake, every muscle taut.

  At midnight the artist said he was ready to quit. He propped one mirror, four feet square, on a table by the wall and took a smaller mirror off the lavatory wall and put it in Parker’s hands. Parker stood with his back to the one on the table and moved the other until he saw a flashing burst of color reflected from his back. It was almos
t completely covered with little red and blue and ivory and saffron squares; from them he made out the lineaments of the face—a mouth, the beginning of heavy brows, a straight nose, but the face was empty; the eyes had not yet been put in. The impression for the moment was almost as if the artist had tricked him and done the Physician’s Friend.

  “It don’t have eyes,” Parker cried out.

  ‘That’ll come,” the artist said, “in due time. We have another day to go on it yet.”

  Parker spent the night on a cot at the Haven of Light Christian Mission. He found these the best places to stay in the city because they were free and included a meal of sorts. He got the last available cot and because he was still barefooted, he accepted a pair of second-hand shoes which, in his confusion, he put on to go to bed; he was still shocked from all that had happened to him. All night he lay awake in the long dormitory of cots with lumpy figures on them. The only light was from a phosphorescent cross glowing at the end of the room. The tree reached out to grasp him again, then burst into flame; the shoe burned quietly by itself; the eyes in the book said to him distinctly GO BACK and at the same time did not utter a sound. He wished that he were not in this city, not in this Haven of Light Mission, not in a bed by himself. He longed miserably for Sarah Ruth. Her sharp tongue and icepick eyes were the only comfort he could bring to mind. He decided he was losing it. Her eyes appeared soft and dilatory compared with the eyes in the book, for even though he could not summon up the exact look of those eyes, he could still feel their penetration. He felt as though, under their gaze, he was as transparent as the wing of a fly.

  The tattooist had told him not to come until ten in the morning, but when he arrived at that hour, Parker was sitting in the dark hallway on the floor, waiting for him. He had decided upon getting up that, once the tattoo was on him, he would not look at it, that all his sensations of the day and night before were those of a crazy man and that he would return to doing things according to his own sound judgement.