The Third Life of Grange Copeland

  In the wintertime, a few days before each Christmas Eve, Grange began his preparations for making ambrosia. He was an uneducated man, but he still remembered that somebody, some old white lady's daughter no doubt, had once told him that ambrosia was what all the gods used to eat before there just came to be one God, which they had now, that never did eat anything. "That's 'cause He done got stocked up while He was creating Hisself," was Grange's short explanation.

  To make ambrosia you needed fresh, hand-shredded coconut and pineapples and oranges. Probably something else went in, a shot of whiskey or wine, but Ruth remembered mostly the oranges and coconuts. Grange's sister, who lived in Florida, would send these in one large and one small crate, along with so many grapefruits the whole house looked like a fruit stand. Grange liked to put out every piece of fruit on a "high place," like the mantel or the tops of dressers and chifforobes, and when children came to visit--and they were allowed to come only at Christmas--he had a generous way of reaching behind him or over his head and producing a bright orange or grapefruit. Then he would grin at the small bewildered visitor and say, as if he had forgotten the words at the beginning, "Hocus-pocus on you, boy!"

  The next thing you needed to make ambrosia was a big churn. Grange had two, one milk-white with a lovely faded drawing of a blue bull near the top, and a brown earthen one. They had belonged to Josie's mother, and Grange said that she had liked to use the white one during the week and the brown one on Sunday. In remembrance of her--her wide-eyed picture was among those in the front room--they used the brown churn for the Christmas ambrosia.

  Grange and Ruth and Josie would sit around peeling oranges and shredding coconut until two o'clock in the morning. Of course, the whole business could have been finished in an hour, but Grange would stop ten or fifteen times during the process to tell a story, or the truth about something or somebody. He knew all the Uncle Remus stories by heart, although he could make up better ones about a smart plantation man named John. John became Ruth's hero because he could talk himself out of any situation and reminded her of Grange.

  Grange thought that Uncle Remus was a fool, because if he was so smart that he could make animals smart too, then why the hell, asked Grange, didn't he dump the little white boy (or tie him up and hold him for ransom) and go to Congress and see what he could do about smartening up the country, which, in Grange's view, was passing dumb. "Instead of making the white folks let go of the stuff that's rightfully ours, he setting around on his big flat black ass explaining to some stupid white feller how too much butter in the diet make you run off at the be-hind! We needs us a goddam statesman and all he can do is act like some old shag-assed minstrel!"

  He would reminisce about his boyhood, which was filled with all sorts of encounters with dead folks and spirits and occasionally the Holy Ghost, which he said was the same thing as a sort of chill, and which, if you didn't watch out, could turn into the soul's pneumonia.

  He told stories about two-heads and conjurers; strange men and women more sensitive than the average spook. He said they could give you something to wear under your hat that'd make your wife come back (if she ran away), or make her run away if you were sick of her. He told about how one old juju man who, people claimed, could turn into a bat, had actually cured him of a bad case of piles by giving him a little bag of powder to dust down in the stool. "What's piles?" Ruth asked. "A serious grown-up disease," he answered.

  He said there was a two-headed lady in town named Sister Madelaine. She had changed herself from a white colored woman to a gypsy fortuneteller. "Why she do that?" asked Ruth. "'Cause she didn't want to be nodody's cook," said Grange. She was a powerful woman, according to Grange, but not as good as the two-heads he had known when he was a boy. Two-heading was dying out, he lamented. "Folks what can look at things in more than one way is done got rare."

  Ruth's favorite story was about how he came to join the church.

  It happened one spring when he was seven or eight years old. And it was during a revival. He had already begun getting into fights with the white children who lived down the road, usually "beating the stuffing out of them" to let him tell it. His mother, a pious and diligent house servant for most of her life, never seriously attempted to make him stop fighting (she would say gently that she didn't want to break his spirit), but instead urged him more and more toward the "bosom" of the church. Grange could never say bosom without looking down the front of Josie's dress. Anyway, he had resisted with everything in him, for he hated revivals, hated church, and most of all hated preachers. His mother, gently persuasive and getting nowhere with him, was trying to convince him to join the church one night when her brother, Grange's Uncle Buster, came to visit. He was built like a keg around the chest, and mean. Grange didn't like him because he had seen him knock his wife, Grange's aunt, through a plate-glass window. Hearing his sister's mild, obviously ineffectual pleadings, the uncle grabbed Grange roughly by the shoulder and gave him a long lecture on receiving the Holy Ghost, and about how good it was to be saved and how if he would just open up his heart the "pue" light would just come aflying and aflooding in. In short, he said that if Grange didn't get religion that same night he would get a horsewhipping when he got home.

  Grange punctuated his tales with mirthful explosive laughs, which startled them, though they were expected. He was very good at these stories and liked to watch their eyes fasten on him, lit to glowing points of light from the crackling fire, which from time to time he spat into with unusual delicacy and accuracy. Ruth even liked the spitting, the pursing of the slick, finely molded dark brown lips against, for a minute, the clean white of his teeth, then the stinging buzz of the irons in the fire as they were hit, the momentary halting of the fire, the sound of steam rising quickly, and the sputtering consummation of the spit by the flames, for which they all waited, staring into the fire without letting out their breaths.

  Grange had been placed harshly, or as he put it, "sheved down," on the mourner's bench. All around him the revival spirit was evident. In the first place, around the "brothers"--every one of them saved--there hung the heady aroma of spirits; mostly corn liquor or home-made wine. At the beginning of the service all these brothers were sitting as stiff as ramrods, and that evening all of them, in order to keep from falling off their benches, fastened their eyes on Grange, who was sitting dejectedly on the hard wooden bench. His Uncle Buster was one of them, and Grange fancied he could smell his breath of peach-peel brandy clear across the church.

  The sisters were all got up in their best. "They wore these long-tailed dresses then," said Grange. "In them days you could break your neck trying to see a little leg." They wore lots of red and yellow and green, and their hair was straightened to a "fare-thee-well." Grange grinned. "If a lizard had fell on one of them heads he was bound to slip off and break a claw!" Before the preacher started to preach they sat around gossiping like so many peacocks. "Lawd, how you, Sister So-an'-so! Chile, you shore does look good enough to eat!" Or, "You hush your mouth, girl, you ain't got no 'leven chilren. You looks jest like a sprang chicken!" They'd be spitting out of windows and into the stove, each one trying to show some ankle under her dress tail. But as soon as the preacher got up in the pulpit they started right in with "O Sinner!" which they did mournful things to, all the while looking at Grange and looking sad.

  At the end of the sermon the preacher started calling for converts. ("Calling for what, convicts?" quizzed Ruth. "Same thing," Grange said, without stopping his story.) Two or three formerly unsaved and happy teenagers filed up front with their heads bowed. They'd probably stole something the night before, Grange said. The church began to rock with song, the sisters were shouting and the preacher stood in the pulpit dripping with sweat. Every once in a while he swiped at the top of his bald head with his handkerchief. The same handkerchief, Grange had noticed, that he was spitting into all during the service. He could feel his mother looking piteously at him, for he knew she wanted him safely enchurched more than she wanted anyth
ing in the world. He wanted to get the Holy Ghost too, for he was deathly afraid of the whipping Uncle Buster had promised him.

  Looking at his mother, he thought about his uncle, and looked over in the amen corner for him. He was still there, but while the church throbbed with life and the spirit of the Lord had everybody else almost climbing the walls, Uncle Buster was fast asleep. Well! There he snored, with a long sliver of saliva collecting on his vest pocket. Grange looked, enthralled; for intently digging around in the trash that had collected around Uncle Buster's mouth was a huge fat housefly. The kerosene lights made the fly's wings shine like amber gems. His busy activity around Uncle Buster's mouth was like that of a housewife sweeping out a corner, or of a greedy little boy eating stolen pie. It was then that Grange made his bargain with the God of the AME church.

  Watching Uncle Buster's wide-open mouth, around which the big fly played, he said to himself that if the fly got inside Uncle Buster's mouth, and if Uncle Bister swallowed it, he would jump right up, claim he had found the Holy Ghost and join the church. He had decided the Holy Ghost was never coming on its own. As soon as he had done this, said Grange, the fly very cautiously sneaked into Uncle Buster's mouth, and Uncle Buster, waking to find everybody in the church gazing in his direction, or so it must have seemed to him, snapped together his ponderous whiskered jaws, and in a pious self-righteous gulp, downed the fly! He immediately began to heave and turn a sickly color; and when Grange, at that moment, rose and started up to shake the preacher's hand, Uncle Buster passed him with one hand clapped most firmly over his mouth. Grange said his mother had cried and shouted and was in general happy from then on.

  And that was how come, Grange said, he was a member of the church but did not believe in God. For how could any God with self-respect, he wanted to know, bargain with a boy of seven or eight, who proposed such a nasty deal and meal.

  During the latter part of the story Ruth bounced in her chair with laughter. And when she and Grange sat in church together they quite often giggled like silly girls over their own conventional absurdities, one of which was going to church. To preachers and church-going dandies alike, they were the dreaded incarnation of blasphemy. But it was funny, what they witnessed every Sunday--the placid, Christ-deferential self-righteousness of men who tortured their children and on Saturday nights beat their wives.

  34

  JOSIE SAW THEM dancing together once, in the small log cabin Grange had built Ruth as a playhouse. It was on Ruth's tenth birthday and she was dressed from head to toe in brand-new clothes. Josie was furious. Grange had not bought clothes for her since they'd been married. And he had never, after Ruth came to stay with them, taken the trouble to dance with her.

  "It ain't decent!" she cried, while Grange and Ruth danced breathlessly all around her. "And with your heart already full of holes!" They continued to dance, the music coming bluesy and hoarse from Grange's straining throat. When he sang he seemed to be in pain. But Ruth knew nothing of the physical condition of his heart. She knew she was in it, and that seemed enough.

  "What's she talking about your heart?" she asked. But Grange was caught up in his lament. Ruth thought her grandfather a very sexy sort of old guy. He was tall and lean and had a jutting hip. When he danced you couldn't tell if his day had been bad or good. He closed his eyes and grunted music. His songs were always his own; she never heard them sung over the radio. His songs moved her; watching him dance made her feel kin to something very old. Grange danced like he walked, with a sort of spring in his knees. When he was drinking his dance paced a thin line between hilarity and vulgarity. He had a good time. His heart, to Ruth, was not an organ in his body, it was the tremor in his voice when he sang. They danced best when they danced alone. And dancing taught Ruth she had a body. And she could see that her grandfather had one too and she could respect what he was able to do with it. Grange taught her untaught history through his dance; she glimpsed a homeland she had never known and felt the pattering of the drums. Dancing was a warm electricity that stretched, connecting them with other dancers moving across the seas. Through her grandfather's old and beautifully supple limbs she learned how marvelous was the grace with which she moved.

  Josie began to leave them every Sunday. She went into town to visit the jail where Brownfield was kept. Grange did nothing to detain her, or if he did Ruth knew nothing of it. Ruth, however, was startled by this turn in events. She could not imagine anyone being fearless enough to see her father. Josie had brought them word that Brownfield had changed since he was in prison, and that they would hardly believe it was him when they saw him. Ruth had assumed she would never see him again; she had even hoped he would be done away with. Josie made her afraid that her father would be out of prison very soon. However, as week followed week and Josie's visits became less extraordinary to her, Ruth began to relax and to enjoy her grandfather, who, now that Josie spent her time cooking chickens and baking pies for Brownfield, was all her own.

  "Do you ever think how selfish and spoiled you is?" Josie asked her one day, her face oddly contorted.

  "I don't know what you mean," said Ruth. Grange had promised to take her to the picture show, and she was in a hurry to get dressed. She honestly did not realize that she never thought of Josie as her grandmother, and never, never thought of her as Grange's wife.

  "You didn't want to go to the show with me and Grange?" asked Ruth, flying out the door. "Did you?" she called, as they were driving off.

  35

  SUMMER AND FALL found Ruth and Grange dedicated to the earthy, good-smelling task of making wine. They could name a long list of wines they knew how to make with maximum success. There was a short list of others that always soured. During the peach season peach stones and peels were gathered and dropped into the brown churn with water and allowed to set. This would make strong peach wine by September. Or, nearing the end of summer, big Alberta clings were halved and pushed into the churn and left in water, treated occasionally, and peeked into at least once a week. Grange did the "treating"--he drank some--and at Christmas time they had brandy, with shreds of peach sticking to the sides of the glass. In summer too they made corncob wine, white and sweet and cold when they left the jars outside in the spring; and blackberry wine and muscadine and scuppernong wine and sometimes plum wine. Ruth liked wine almost as much as Grange, and once in company she got sick and threw up, and it became quite apparent to everyone that Grange wasn't the only one drunk at the gathering. By the time she was nine, even Grange was astounded by her capacity to drink wine. She would try to pretend she was unaffected by it because she liked the taste of it so much she wanted to drink it by the glassful, like milk. But he knew how, momentarily, to keep her from starting. He would move the jar from where they hid it last, and hide it somewhere else. But this precaution worked badly for him, because then he would forget where he hid it, and would have to ask her to help him find it.

  He was an unembarrassed drinker, a regular heathen. Throughout the day he nursed at a half-gallon jug, wine or corn liquor, he did not seem to care which. On weekends he doubled his usual intake and would sometimes find himself unable to come home. Twice he was lying beside the highway where their own road began, unable to make it any farther. These times when they found him he went into long exhaustive monologues on the merits of freedom.

  "Just leave me hyar to die like a goddam dog!" he bluffed. "A black man is better off dead and in hell!" They took him, Josie supporting him on one shoulder, and Ruth walking behind him with a switch, and carried him home. Each time he threatened to sink onto the road Ruth cut him across the back of his legs with her switch. She always felt older than Grange when he was feeling bad. When he sobered up she lectured him, wouldn't acknowledge his headache, made him get his tobacco for himself and in general ignored him so that by Monday night he was not only sober and ashamed but also a wreck, and scared stiff that he had at last pushed her too far. (After all, she was only a little thing, and didn't understand, and might get the wrong idea!) He tho
ught she might at last be turned against him. He would curse himself for being the father of his son and in danger of being thought just like him by his son's daughter.

  Ruth was reminded of Brownfield when Grange got drunk; it was as if the closed parts of her mind were painfully forced open, and again she saw the demon of hate and destruction in someone close to her. But she believed Grange drank because of his murderous son and because of Josie. Grange and his wife now rarely spoke to each other; the house was often miserable because of their coldness. There was always in the air something of Josie's feeling of Ruth's intrusion. Ruth also knew that Grange had had another wife, Margaret, whom he had never got over. He cried whenever he talked about her (only when he was drunk) and Ruth hated her (dead though she was and had been for many years) with all her heart.

  But Grange's crimes, she believed, were never aimed at anyone but himself, and his total triumph over his life's failures was the joy in him that drew her to him. He was a sinner, which he readily admitted, but he gave of himself. (She did not then notice that what he had to give he gave only to her.) The passion he lavished on living she could never quite condemn.

  When he was sober and feeling guilty and ashamed, and when Josie lambasted him prior to dressing up and "visiting" somebody else (usually Brownfield), and they were in the house alone, there was a pall hanging over the house, thickest around Grange's bowed gray head, which only lifted when she stationed herself close to him, or raised his head by shoving her own pigtails sharply, abruptly, sometimes even painfully, under his lowered chin. Then they embraced.