The Third Life of Grange Copeland

  Josie, who had lived so long in the hope of his love, was persuaded, out of her own love for him, to sell her cherished livelihood, the Dew Drop Inn. With his money and hers he bought a farm. A farm far from town, off the main road, deep behind pines and oaks. He raised his own bread, fermented his own wine, cured his own meat. At last, he was free.

  But his freedom had cost him. There was Josie, learning each day that once again she had been used by a man and discarded when his satisfaction was secured. He had done her wrong, and the thought nagged at him and had finally begun to make him appreciate her for the first time. She was big-hearted, generous; she could love in spite of all that had gone wrong in her life. But then there had been Ruth, breaking in on his growing love for Josie, his acceptance of her genuine goodness and adoration. Ruth, who needed him and who was completely fresh and irresistibly innocent, as alas, Josie was not. He had felt himself divided, wanting to comfort the old but feeling responsible for the new. And then there had been Brownfield, again. And though he had forgiven Josie once (true, not out of love but greed and expediency) for her attachment to his son, he did not know if he could forgive her a second time. Josie and Brownfield sought to retaliate against his indifference to them; but even for this was he not to blame?

  "You are not selfish," Ruth was saying as she bent over to lift a small rabbit from a trap. "You would never steal. Even your cussing is harmless." She laughed as her grandfather took the rabbit from her, felt its smallness and let it go. "I know you don't like killing things, even things to eat."

  "It ought never to be necessary to kill nobody to assert nothing," he said. "But some mens, in order to live, can't be innocent."

  Ruth was still laughing. "You so tall and rough-looking with your big boots and your long gun." Impulsively she hugged his arm. "But we know you got a heart, don't we?"

  And Grange knew he would never tell her of his past, of the pregnant woman and his lectures of hate; he would never tell her that he'd mugged old women and weak-limbed students to buy his food. He would never tell her that he was guilty of every sin, including selfishness, or that Josie's heart was purer than his had ever been. He would never tell her that the land she stood on, which would be hers someday, was bought with blood and tears. He would never tell her because she might believe him, and because with Ruth he had learned an invaluable lesson about hate; he could only teach hate by inspiring it. And how could he spoil her innocence, kill the freshness of her look, becloud the brightness of her too inquisitive eyes?

  At least love was something that left a man proud that he had loved. Hate left a man shamed, as he was now, before the trust and faith of the young.

  "The mean things I've done," he began. "Think of me, when I'm gone, as a big, rough-looking coward. Who learned to love hisself only after thirty-odd years. And then overdone it."

  She was not to know until another time, that her grandfather, as she knew him, was a reborn man. She did not know fully, even after he was dead, what cruelties and blood fostered his tolerance and his strength. And his love.

  Part VIII

  38

  AFTER MEM'S FUNERAL, to which he was allowed to go, though chained to a red-faced warden in dirty boots, Brownfield had thought uncomfortably but not regretfully of what he had done. But he had never been able to think himself very far. He liked plump women. That was the end-all of his moral debates. Ergo, he had murdered his wife because she had become skinny and had not, with much irritation to him, reverted, even when well-fed, to her former plumpness. He was not a fool to ask himself whether there was logic in his nerves. He knew what he liked.

  The days of her plumpness haunted him as blackberry pie had done when he was a growing boy and pies of any kind were few and far between. He longed for a now over-and-done with lushness. His time of plenty, when he could provide.

  Plumpness and freedom from the land, from cows and skinniness, went all together in his mind, and her face as it had been when he first knew her at the Dew Drop Inn took on for him the same one-dimensional quality as his memory of pies and a whiskey bottle. He could forget her basic reality, convert it into comparisons. She had been like good pie, or good whiskey, but there had never been a self to her because one no longer existed in him. Dead, Mem became a myth of herself, a beautiful plump girl with whom he had fallen in love, but who had changed before his eyes into an ugly hag, screeching at him and making him feel small.

  If she had been able to maintain her dominance over him perhaps she would not stand now so finished, a miniature statue, in his mind, but her inherent weakness, covered over momentarily by the wretched muscular hag, had made her ashamed of her own seeming strength. And without this strength, the strength to kill his ass, to make him wallow continually in his own puke, she was lost. Her weakness was forgiveness, a stupid belief that kindness can convert the enemy. The logical next step from hitting him so magnificently over the head with the gun was for one of them to use it. That was where her staunch ten-point resolution had failed her. And he, without resolutions, but with the memory of his humiliation, could, and did, at last regain what she had stolen that Sunday morning when he lay in vomit at her feet. The punishment he had devised for her "come down" had not been enough. She had thought she could best him again by leaving him. And he had warned her, if she tried, what he would do. A man of his word, as he thought of himself, he had kept his word. His word had even become his duty.

  But she was not a plump woman and he did not like them skinny. When they were like that something was wrong, and you weren't doing them right. And he did not want to know about it.

  39

  JOSIE TOLD HIM that Ruth now lived, and happily, with Grange. It maddened Brownfield that his father should presume to try to raise his child. Ornette and Daphne, taken up North by Mem's father, did not concern Brownfield as much as Ruth, because when they went North he relinquished claim to them, knowing quite well he would never go North after them. In prison, condemned for ten years to cut lawns and plant trees for jailers, judges, and prominent citizens of Baker County (though he was to be paroled after seven years), he realized an extraordinary emotion. He loved the South. And he knew he loved it because he had never seriously considered leaving it. He felt he had a real understanding of it. Its ways did not mystify him in the least. It was a sweet, violent, peculiarly accommodating land. It bent itself to fit its own laws. One's life, underneath the rigidity of caste, was essentially one of invisibility and luck. One did not feel alone in one's guilt. Guilt dripped and moved all over and around and about one like the moss that clung to the trees. A man's punishment was never written up somewhere in a book before his crime was committed--it was not even the same as someone else's punishment for the same crime. The punishment was made to fit the man and not the crime. It was individual punishment. One felt unique in one's punishment if not in one's crime. This appealed to Brownfield. It meant to him that one could punish one's own enemies with a torture of one's own choosing. One could make up the punishment and no one had the right to interfere.

  In the prison with Brownfield were murderers, pimps, car thieves, drunkards and innocents, and their sentences bore no set relation to their crimes. A young boy of seventeen was in for stealing hubcaps and his sentence was five years. A hatchet murderer whom Brownfield came to know quite well, who had dispatched not only his wife but his wife's mother and aunt, was paroled after three years. Before he was paroled he was a trustee. Before that he had been able to go out of the prison to attend church every Sunday and to spend a few minutes with his woman whenever the desire arose. He had played poker on weekends with the jailers. There was no order about this, which was why it appealed to Brownfield.

  Brownfield brooded, while he worked--setting out dogwoods, magnolias and mimosas on spacious well-tended lawns--on his father's audacity at taking his daughter. He brooded on Grange's serenity and on his prosperity. Although he did not love Grange, he was very often depressed by the thought that his father had never really loved him.

&
nbsp; Brownfield learned to read and write rather well while in prison. One day he was looking through the account, on the colored page, of Mem's murder, and he saw his own name. Without knowing what was happening he read the whole article and went on to read other articles. The hatchet murderer, who became his friend, told him that the same thing had happened to him. On the day he was brought to trial, he said, his woman had thrust some newspapers into his hands. Look, she had said, there's your picture! She wanted to cheer him up because she was afraid he was going to be electrocuted. The jailers had taken the papers away before he had a chance to examine them, but later, in jail, his woman brought him some more, to celebrate, she had said, his light sentence. They were both very pleased that there was a picture of him in the paper! He had sat a long time marveling at his big ugly picture in the paper, he said, and then, interested in what the paper might say about him, he began to read it. He could not recall where he learned the ABC's; when he was a child he had owned a tiny children's prayer book, from which his mother had read to him over and over. That had been his entire education, as far as he knew.

  The boy who stole the hubcaps had been in high school and read well. Brownfield and the hatchet murderer took lessons from him and called him professor. One day, as Brownfield was writing his name, age and prison number on the margins of a newspaper it struck him suddenly that Mem had actually succeeded in teaching him to read and write and that somehow he had not only forgotten those days with her but had also forgotten what she'd taught him. He wondered about this, staring the while at his hands, then he burst into terrible sobs that tore his chest and brought him to the floor.

  But his tears did not soften him, did not make him analyze his life or his crime. His crying was just a part of the life that produced his crime. It only made him feel lonely. Introspection came hard to Brownfield and was therefore given up before he became interested in it. The least deep thinking and he was sure he would be lost. As it was, while in prison, he wanted Josie, he wanted his father, he even wanted his mother.

  He wanted Ruth. He had a great fear of being alone. He thought he could understand better than any of the other prisoners why God had created the universe when He found himself alone, and fixed it so man had two warm arms and a tongue.

  "My daughter," he wrote, in crude spellbound letters. And, "I wish I had got Grange too." He did not hide these words, written on candy wrappers, newspapers and bits of paper from the trash. He left them lying around, clear marks of his existence and his plan.

  Brownfield and the hatchet murderer talked sometimes about their motives in life. They watched television every Saturday evening and motives was a new word picked up from the television series, "Dragnet." The motive that got him into prison, said Brownfield, was a keen desire to see if he had any control over himself. No matter which way he wanted to go, he said, some unseen force pushed him in the opposite direction.

  "I never did want to be no sharecropper, never did want to work for nobody else, never did want to have white folks where they could poke themselves right into my life and me not have nothing to do with it."

  "Yeah, Lawd, and I know what you mean," said the hatchet murderer, who had been a minister before he married one of his converts and started a family. He had discovered too late that he couldn't feed his wife and her kin on what he made off the gospel. Marriage had stripped his nice black suit from him and in its place he had had to make do with overalls caked with sweat and dust he got in fields that would never be his. He knew what his friend was talking about because he had himself struggled against the unseen force. But he had decided the unseen force was God and so killed his wife and her kin. It was his way of leaving God's company.

  "I felt just like these words here in the newspaper must feel, all printed up. The line already decided. No moving to the left or the right, like a mule wearing blinders. These words just run one word right behind the other to the end of the page." Brownfield looked at his friend with some small exhilaration in his eyes as he continued, stabbing at the paper with his finger. "Just think how this word here'd feel if it could move right out of this line and set itself down over here!" The two men pondered the power of the mobile, self-determined word. The hatchet murderer nodded.

  "I often felt more like a shoe," he said; "a pair of farted-over brogans, just for feets to stand on. I used to put my shoes up on a shelf in the wardrobe to show how I felt. Wouldn't let my wife or her crabby snot-picking ma move 'em down on the floor."

  "Yeah," said Brownfield, "you'd think more peoples would think about how they ain't got no more say about what goes on with 'em than a pair of shoes or a little black piece of writing in a newspaper that can't move no matter what it stands for. How come we the only ones that knowed we was men?"

  Leaning heavily on his pencil Brownfield wrote m-e-n, then waited glumly for the word to rise and beat its chest.

  "Well, that was us," he said. He looked at the hatchet murderer and smiled.

  40

  IT WAS NOT difficult for Brownfield to take advantage of Josie's pain. He had been surprised the first time she visited him at the jail, but had soon become able to read her like a book. Josie had given up taking her burdens to the Lord; she no longer sought to confess her sins in church; she no longer said prayers or told her troubles to fortunetellers. But all of this she could do at the jail.

  She would come on Sunday afternoons when the prisoners were allowed out under the trees. She would sit on one side of a small table, Brownfield on the other. Over the months and years she poured out the anguish of her heart for Brownfield to hear. And he listened sympathetically, craftily, with a priest's show of concern.

  He listened to her complaints of his fathers indifference, Grange's total infatuation with the idea of preserving innocence, his blind acceptance of Ruth as something of a miracle, something of immense value to him, to his pride, to his will to live, to his soul.

  "He don't even know I'm alive," said Josie, wringing her hands. "All day long the two of 'em is together. I just set round, praying for a word from him... ."

  Brownfield listened with a pitying expression on his face. He took one of her hands in his.

  "When I get out of here I'll take her off your hands," he promised. But Josie sat up, startled.

  "If you took that gal away from him it'd be the same as if you took the air. He wouldn't live out the week! I tell you he love her!"

  "Josie," he said, "you recognize that you a fool for giving a shit whether he live or die?"

  "Don't you say that!" she said, drawing her hand from his.

  "All right, okay," he said, "don't git your back up." But he was thinking of his father's attachment to Ruth and of how perfect a revenge it would be if he could break it.

  Josie was looking at him cautiously. "If you going to talk about your daddy in any mean way, I ain't coming here no more. He love me, your daddy do, I know he do. This thing with Ruth is something he can't help. But one day he coming to his senses and when he do I'm going to be right there waiting. It ain't like it was impossible for him to love us both!"

  "'Spose he don't never come to his senses?" asked Brownfield. "Then where will you be?"

  Josie looked bleakly out across the yard. "He got to come to me," she said. "He got to come."

  The months went by. One day Brownfield asked about her love life. Josie, sixtyish, had always felt there would be no end to it. She began to cry.

  "Which mean he don't come near you no more, even for that?"

  Josie nodded.

  "You mean to tell me," said Brownfield, "that after all you have did for him he don't show no kind of 'preshation?"

  He began to smile. A flush came to Josie's cheeks. Before she rushed out of the room she slapped him.

  After that it was easy.

  "After all I done for him!" Josie began to fume when she talked with him. "He don't pay me the mind you'd pay a dog."

  "And you sold everything you owned and worked so hard for to buy him his precious farm! Uh, uh, uh,
" said Brownfield. "Some peoples are just not grateful. Now, if I had had a woman like that to do all you done for him, I wouldn't be here today." He was elated when Josie, forgetful of everything but her anger, agreed with him. Soon he had brought her back to his original idea.

  "When I gets out I can take Ruth off your hands," he said. "An' then, just think, you and Grange'll be alone just like you was before she come. Things'll be just the same." Josie nodded eagerly. "I won't even let them near one 'nother."

  "But how can you 'complish that?" she asked. "Grange'd shoot to kill if you laid a hand on Ruth."

  "Grange may think he above all the rest of the white folks," said Brownfield, "but he ain't above the white folks' law. Maybe the law will be on our side for a change. Anyhow, you let me worry 'bout that."

  "So glad to!" said Josie, smiling happily. Planning as she'd done for years just how to win for good the man she loved.

  Part IX

  41

  "GOOD FENCES DON'T make neighbors," said Grange. "Which is why we's putting this here one up."

  Ruth stood beside him holding the hammer. She was barefoot and wearing a pink dress with ruffles at the hem. As Grange stretched the top strand of barbed wire from one post to the next and secured it with a nail, she tiptoed behind him with round watchful eyes befuddled by his activity. She had never seen anyone put up a fence before.

  "You finds your stakes--they marks your propity--and going by the deed, you puts your fence square on the line. Then you tightens all your wires," he said, tightening the top wire, "and you be sure all your bobs is good and sharp."

  She pricked one finger on a small barb of wire, then gazed intently while the blood welled up. Quickly she stuck the drop of blood against her new dress and her eyes sobered to an expression of remembrance, horror and pain. They appeared to darken, much as the sky, which is open enough until a single cloud puts out the sun.