And I should have called out then—All is disgrace! Human beings' cries could swell if locusts' could, in the last of evening like this, and cross the grass in a backyard, if only they enough of them cried. At our feet the shadows faded out light into no shadows left and the locusts sang in long waves, O-E, O-E, and the gin ran on. Our grass in August is like the floor of the sea, and we walk on it slowly playing, and the sky turns green before dark, Father, as you know. The sweat ran over my back and down my arms and legs, branching, like an upside-down tree.
Then, "You all come in!" They were calling from the porch—the well-known lamps suddenly all went on. They called us in their calling women's voices, of disguise, all but Jinny. "Fools, you're playing in the dark!" she said. "Supper's ready, if anybody cares."
The bright porch across the dark was like a boat on the river to me; an excursion boat I wasn't going on. I was going to Miss Francine Murphy's, as everybody knew.
Each evening to avoid Miss Francine and the three school teachers, I ran through the porch and hall both like a man through a burning building. In the backyard, with fig trees black, otherwise moonlit, Bella opened her eyes and looked at me. Her eyes both showed the moon. If she drank water, she vomited it up—yet she went with effort to her pan and drank again, for me. I held her. Poor Bella. I thought she suffered from a tumor, and stayed with her most of the night.
Mother said, Son, I was glad to see you but I noticed that old pistol of your father's in your nice coat pocket, what do you want with that? Your father never cared for it, went off and left it. Not any robbers coming to the Morgana bank that I know of. Son, if you'd just saved your money you could take a little trip to the coast. I'd go with you. They always have a breeze at Gulf port, nearly always.
Where the driveway ends at Jinny's, there are Spanish daggers and the bare front yard with the forked tree with the seat around it—like some old playground of a consolidated school, with the school back out of sight. Just the sharp, overgrown Spanish daggers, and the spider-webs draped over them like clothes-rags. You can go under trees to the house by going all around the yard and opening the old gate by the summerhouse. Somewhere back in the shade there's a statue from Morgan days, of a dancing girl with her finger to her chin, all pockmarked, with some initials on her legs.
Maideen liked the statue but she said, "Are you taking me back in? I thought maybe now you weren't going to."
I saw my hand on the gate and said, "Now you wait. I've lost a button." I held out my sleeve to Maideen. All at once I felt so unlike myself I was ready to shed tears.
"A button? Why, I'll sew you one on, if you come on and take me home," Maideen said. That's what I wanted her to say, but she touched my sleeve. A chameleon ran up a leaf, and held there panting. "Then Mama can meet you. She'd be glad to have you stay to supper."
I unlatched the little old gate. I caught a whiff of the sour pears on the ground, the smell of August. I'd never told Maideen I was coming to supper, at any time, or would see her mama, of course; but also I kept forgetting about the old ways, the eternal politeness of the people you hope not to know.
"Oh, Jinny can sew it on now," I said.
"Oh, I can?" Jinny said. She'd of course been listening all the time from the summerhouse. She came out, alone, with the old broken wicker basket full of speckled pears. She didn't say go back and shut the gate.
I carried the rolling basket for her and we went ahead of Maideen but I knew she was coming behind; she wouldn't know very well how not to. There in the flower beds walked the same robins. The sprinkler dripped now. Once again we went into the house by the back door. Our hands touched. We had stepped on Tellies patch of mint. The yellow cat was waiting to go in with us, the door handle was as hot as the hand, and on the step, getting under the feet of two people who went in together, the Mason jars with the busy cuttings in water—"Watch out for Mama's—!" A thousand times we'd gone in like that. As a thousand bees had droned and burrowed in the pears that lay on the ground.
Miss Lizzie shrank with a cry and started abruptly up the bade stairs—bosom lifted—her shadow trotted up the boarding beside her like a bear with a nose. But she couldn't get to the top; she turned. She came down, carefully, and held up a finger at me. She needed to be careful. That stairs was the one Mr. Comus Stark fell down and broke his neck on one night, going up the back way drunk. Did I call it to attention?—Jinny got away.
"Randall. I can't help but tell you about a hand I held yesterday. My partner was Mamie Carmichael and you know she always plays her own hand with no more regard for her partner than you have. Well, she opened with a spade and Etta Loomis doubled. I held: a singleton spade, five clubs to the king-queen, five hearts to the king, and two little diamonds. I said two clubs. Parnell Moody said two diamonds, Mamie two spades, all passed. And when I laid down my hand Mamie said, Oh, partner! Why didn't you bid your hearts! I said, Hardly. At the level of three with the opponents doubling for a takeout. It developed of course she was two-suited—six spades to the ace-jack and four hearts to the ace-jack-ten, also my ace of clubs. Now, Randall. It would have been just as easy for Mamie to bid three hearts on that second go-round. But no! She could see only her own hand and took us down two, and we could have made five hearts. Now do you say I should have bid three hearts?"
I said, "You were justified not to, Miss Lizzie."
She began to cry on the stairs. Tears stood on her powdered face. "You men. You got us beat in the end. Maybe I'm getting old. Oh no, that's not it. Because I can tell you where you got us beat. We'd know you through and through except we never know what ails you. Don't you look at me like that. Of course I see what Jinny's doing, the fool, but you ailed first. You just got her answer to it, Ran." Then she glared again, turned, and went back upstairs.
And what ails me I don't know, Father, unless maybe you know. All through what she had to say I stood holding the cooking-pears. Then I set the basket on the table.
Jinny was in the little back study, "Mama's office," with the landscape wallpaper and Mr. Comus's old desk full-up with U.D.C. correspondence and plat maps that cracked like thunder when the fan blew them. She was yelling at Tellie. Tellie came in with the workbasket and then just waited, eyeing her.
"Put it down, Tellie, I'll use it when I get ready. Now you go on. Pull your mouth in, you hear?"
Tellie put down the basket and Jinny flicked it open and fished in it. The stork scissors fell out. She found a button that belonged to me, and waited on Tellie.
"I hear you's a mess." Tellie went out.
Jinny looked at me and didn't mind. I minded. I fired point-blank at Jinny—more than once. It was close range—there was barely room between us suddenly for the pistol to come up. And she only stood frowning at the needle I had forgotten the reason for. Her hand never deviated, never shook from the noise. The dim clock on the mantel was striking—the pistol hadn't drowned that out. I was watching Jinny and I saw her pouting childish breasts, excuses for breasts, sprung full of bright holes where my bullets had gone. But Jinny didn't feel it. She threaded her needle. She made her little face of success. Her thread always went straight in the eye.
"Will you hold still."
She far from acknowledged pain—anything but sorrow and pain. When I couldn't give her something she wanted she would hum a little tune. In our room, her voice would go low and soft to complete disparagement. Then I loved her a lot. The little cheat. I waited on, while she darted the needle and pulled at my sleeve, the sleeve to my helpless hand. It was like counting my breaths. I let out my fury and breathed the pure disappointment in: that she was not dead on earth. She bit the thread—magnificently. When she took her mouth away I nearly fell. The cheat.
I didn't dare say good-bye to Jinny any more. "All right, now you're ready for croquet," she told me. She went upstairs too.
Old' Tellie spat a drop of nothing into the stove and clanged the lid down as I went out through the kitchen. Maideen was out in the swing, sitting. I told her to come on down to
the croquet yard, where we all played Jinny's game, without Jinny.
Going to my room, I saw Miss Billy Texas Spights outdoors in her wrapper, whipping the flowers to make them bloom.
Father! Dear God wipe it clean. Wipe it clean, wipe it out. Don't let it be.
At last Miss Francine caught hold of me in the hall. "Do me a favor, Ran. Do me a favor and put Bella out of her misery. None of these school teachers any better at it than I'd be. And my friend coming to supper too tenderhearted. You do it. Just do it and don't tell us about it, hear?"
Where have you been, Son, it's so late.—Nowhere, Mother, nowhere.—If you were back under my roof, Mother said, if Eugene hadn't gone away too. He's gone and you won't listen to anybody.—It's too hot to sleep, Mother.—I stayed awake by the telephone. The Lord never meant us all to separate. To go and be cut off. One from the other, off in some little room.
"I remember your wedding," old Miss Jefferson Moody said at my window, nodding on the other side of the bars. "Never knew it would turn out like this, the prettiest and longest wedding I ever saw. Look! If all that money belonged to you, you could leave town."
And I was getting tired, oh so tired, of Maideen waiting on me. I felt cornered when she told me, still as kind as ever, about the Seed and Feed. Because ever since I was born, Old Man Moody lined his sidewalk with pie pans full of shelled corn and stuff like bird-shot. The window used to be so clouded up it looked like stained glass. She'd scrubbed it for him, and exposed the barrels and canisters and the sacks and bins of stuff inside, and Old Man Moody in an eyeshade sitting on a stool, making cat's-cradles; and her poking food at the bird. There were cotton blooms across the window and door, and then it would be sugarcane, and she told me she was thinking already about the Christmas tree. No telling what she was going to string on Old Man Moody's Christmas tree. And now I was told her mother's maiden name. God help me, the name Sojourner was laid on my head like the top teetering crown of a pile of things to remember. Not to forget, never to forget the name of Sojourner.
And then always having to take the little Williams girl home at night. She was the bridge player. That was a game Maideen had never learned to play. Maideen: I never kissed her.
But the Sunday came when I took her to Vicksburg.
Already on the road I began to miss my bridge. We could get our old game now, Jinny, Woody, myself, and either Nina Carmichael or Junior Nesbitt, or both and sit in. Miss Lizzie of course would walk out on us now, never be our fourth, holding no brief for what a single one of us had done; she couldn't stand the Nesbitts to begin with. I always won—Nina used to win, but anybody could see she was pressed too much about Nesbitt to play her cards, and sometimes she didn't come to play at all, or Nesbitt either, and we had to go get the little Williams girl and take her home.
Maideen never put in a word to our silence now. She sat holding some women's magazine. Every now and then she'd turn over a page, moistening her finger first, like my mother. When she lifted her eyes to me, I didn't look up. Every night I would take their money. Then at Miss Francine's I would be sick, going outdoors so the teachers wouldn't wonder.
"Now you really must get these two home. Their mothers will be wondering." Jinny's voice.
Maideen would stand up with the little Williams girl to leave, and I thought whatever I let her in for, I could trust her.
She would get stupefied for sleep. She would lean farther and farther over in the Starks' chair. She would never have a rum and coke with us, but would be simply dead for sleep. She slept sitting up in the car going home, where her mama, now large-eyed, maiden name Sojourner, sat up listening. I'd wake Maideen and tell her where we were. The little Williams girl would be chatting away in the back seat, there and as far as her house wide awake as an owl.
Vicksburg: nineteen miles over the gravel and the thirteen little bridges and the Big Black. And suddenly all sensation returned.
Morgana I had looked at too long. Till the street was a pencil mark on the sky. The street was there just the same, red-brick scallops, two steeples and the water tank and the branchy trees, but if I saw it, it was not with love, it was a pencil mark on the sky that jumped with the shaking of the gin. If some indelible red false-fronts joined one to the other like a little toy train went by, I didn't think of my childhood any more. I saw Old Man Holifield turn his back, his suspenders looked cross, very cross.
In Vicksburg, I stopped my car at the foot of the street under the wall, by the canal. There was that dazzling light, watermarked light. I woke Maideen and asked her if she was thirsty. She smoothed her dress and lifted her head at the sounds of a city, the traffic on cobblestones just behind the wall. I watched the water taxi come to get us, chopping over the canal strip, babyish as a rocking horse.
"Duck your head," I told Maideen.
"In here?"
It was sunset. The island was very near across the water—a waste of willows, yellow and green strands loosely woven together, like a basket that let the light spill out uncontrollably. We all stood up and bent our heads under the ceiling in the tiny cabin, and shaded our eyes. The Negro who ran the put-put never said a word, "Get in" or "Get out." "Where is this we're going?" Maideen said. In two minutes we were touching the barge.
Nobody was inside but the barkeep—a silent, relegated place like a barn, old and tired. I let him bring some rum cokes out to the card table on the back where the two cane chairs were. It was open back there. The sun was going down on the island side while we sat, and making Vicksburg all picked out on the other. East and West were in our eyes.
"Don't make me drink it. I don't want to drink it," Maideen said.
"Go on and drink it."
"You drink it if you like it. Don't make me drink it."
"You drink it too."
I looked at her take some of it, and sit shading her eyes. There were wasps dipping from a nest over the old screen door and skimming her hair. There was a smell of fish and of the floating roots fringing the island, and of the oilcloth top of our table, and endless deals. A load of Negroes came over on the water taxi and stepped out sulphur-yellow all over, coated with cottonseed meal. They disappeared in the colored barge at the other end, in single file, carrying their buckets, like they were sentenced to it.
"Sure enough, I don't want to drink it."
"Look, you drink it and then tell me if it tastes bad, and I'll pour 'em both in the river."
"It will be too late."
Through the screen door I could see into the dim saloon. Two men with black cocks under their arms had come in. Without noise they each set a muddy boot on the rail and drank, the cocks absolutely still. They got off the barge on the island side and were lost in a minute in a hot blur of willow trees. They might never be seen again.
The heat shook on the water and on the other side shook along the edges of the old white buildings and the concrete slabs and the wall. From the barge Vicksburg looked like an image of itself in some old mirror—like a portrait at a sad time of life.
A short cowboy and his girl came in, walking alike. They dropped a nickel in the nickelodeon, and came together.
There weren't any waves visible, yet the water did tremble under our chairs. I was aware of it like the sound of a winter fire in the room.
"You don't ever dance, do you," Maideen said.
It was a long time before we left. A good many people had come out to the barge. There was old Gordon Nesbitt, dancing. When we left, the white barge and the nigger barge had both filled up, and it was good-dark.
The lights were far between on shore—sheds and warehouses, long walls that needed propping. High up on the ramparts of town some old iron bells were ringing.
"Are you a Catholic?" I asked her suddenly, and she shook her head.
Nobody was a Catholic but I looked at her—I made it plain she disappointed some hope of mine, and she had, standing there with a foreign bell ringing on the air.
"We're all Baptists. Why, are you a Catholic? Is that what you are?"
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Without touching her except by accident with my knee I walked her ahead of me up the steep uneven way to where my car was parked listing downhill. Inside, she couldn't shut her door. I stood outside and waited, the door hung heavily and she had drunk all I had made her drink. Now she couldn't shut her door.
"Shut it."
"I'll fall out. I'll fall in your arms. If I fall, catch me."
"No. Shut it. You have to shut it. I can't. All your might."
At last. I leaned against her shut door, and held on for a moment.
I grated up the steep hills, turned and followed the river road along the bluff, turned again off into a deep rutted dirt way under shaggy banks, Father, dark and circling and rushing down.
"Don't lean on me," I said. "Better to sit up and get air."
"Don't want to."
"Pull up your head." I could hardly understand what she said any more. "You want to lie down?"
"Don't want to lie down."
"You get some air."
"Don't want to do a thing, Ran, do we, from now and on till evermore."
We circled down. The sounds of the river tossing and teasing its great load, its load of trash, I could hear through the dark now. It made the noise of a moving wall, and up it fishes and reptiles and uprooted trees and man's throw-aways played and climbed all alike in a splashing like innocence. A great wave of smell beat at my face. The track had come down here deep as a tunnel. We were on the floor of the world. The trees met and their branches matted overhead, the cedars came together, and through them the stars of Morgana looked sifted and fine as seed, so high, so far. Away off, there was the sound of a shot.
"Yonder's the river," she said, and sat up. "I see it—the Mississippi River."
"You don't see it. You only hear it."
"I see it, I see it."