Brownfield got a headache trying to grasp the meaning of what his cousins told him. The need to comprehend his parents' actions seeped into him with his cousins' laughter. The blood rushed to his head and he was sick. He thought feverishly of how their weeks were spent. Of the heat, the cold, the work, the feeling of desperation behind all the sly small smiles. The feeling of hunger in winter, of bleak unsmiling faces, of eating bark when he was left alone before his mother returned home smelling of baits and manure. Of his mother's soft skin and clean milky breath; of his father's brooding, and of the feeling of an onrushing inevitable knowledge, like a summer storm that comes with high wind and flash flooding, that would smash the silence finally and flatten them all mercilessly to the ground. One day he would know everything and be equal to his cousins and to his father and perhaps even to God.
Their life followed a kind of cycle that depended almost totally on Grange's moods. On Monday, suffering from a hangover and the aftereffects of a violent quarrel with his wife the night before, Grange was morose, sullen, reserved, deeply in pain under the hot early morning sun. Margaret was tense and hard, exceedingly nervous. Brownfield moved about the house like a mouse. On Tuesday, Grange was merely quiet. His wife and son began to relax. On Wednesday, as the day stretched out and the cotton rows stretched out even longer, Grange muttered and sighed. He sat outside in the night air longer before going to bed; he would speak of moving away, of going North. He might even try to figure out how much he owed the man who owned the fields. The man who drove the truck and who owned the shack they occupied. But these activities depressed him, and he said things on Wednesday nights that made his wife cry. By Thursday, Grange's gloominess reached its peak and he grimaced respectfully, with veiled eyes, at the jokes told by the man who drove the truck. On Thursday nights he stalked the house from room to room and pulled himself up and swung from the rafters of the porch. Brownfield could hear his joints creaking against the sounds of the porch, for the whole porch shook when his father swung.
By Friday Grange was so stupefied with the work and the sun he wanted nothing but rest the next two days before it started all over again.
On Saturday afternoon Grange shaved, bathed, put on clean overalls and a shirt and took the wagon into town to buy groceries. While he was away his wife washed and straightened her hair. She dressed up and sat, all shining and pretty, in the open door, hoping anxiously for visitors who never came.
Brownfield too was washed and cleanly dressed. He played contentedly in the silent woods and in the clearing. Late Saturday night Grange would come home lurching drunk, threatening to kill his wife and Brownfield, stumbling and shooting off his shotgun. He threatened Margaret and she ran and hid in the woods with Brownfield huddled at her feet. Then Grange would roll out the door and into the yard, crying like a child in big wrenching sobs and rubbing his whole head in the dirt. He would lie there until Sunday morning, when the chickens pecked around him, and the dog sniffed at him and neither his wife nor Brownfield went near him. Brownfield played instead on the other side of the house. Steady on his feet but still ashen by noon, Grange would make his way across the pasture and through the woods, headlong, like a blind man, to the Baptist church, where his voice above all the others was raised in song and prayer. Margaret would be there too, Brownfield asleep on the bench beside her. Back home again after church Grange and Margaret would begin a supper quarrel which launched them into another week just about like the one before.
Brownfield turned from watching the road and looked with hateful scrutiny at the house they lived in. It was a cabin of two rooms with a brick chimney at one end. The roof was of rotting gray wood shingles; the sides of the house were gray vertical slabs; the whole aspect of the house was gray. It was lower in the middle than at its ends, and resembled a sway-backed animal turned out to pasture. A stone-based well sat functionally in the middle of the yard, its mossy wooden bucket dangling above it from some rusty chain and frazzled lengths of rope. Where water was dashed behind the well, wild morning-glories bloomed, their tendrils reaching as far as the woodpile, which was a litter of tree trunks, slivers of carcass bones deposited by the dog and discarded braces and bits that had pained the jaws and teeth of many a hard-driven mule.
From the corner of his eye Brownfield noticed that his father was also surveying the house. Grange stood with an arm across the small of his back, soldier fashion, and with the other hand made gestures toward this and that of the house, as if pointing out necessary repairs. There were very many. He was a tall, thin, brooding man, slightly stooped from plowing, with skin the deep glossy brown of pecans. He was thirty-five but seemed much older. His face and eyes had a dispassionate vacancy and sadness, as if a great fire had been extinguished within him and was just recently missed. He seemed devoid of any emotion, while Brownfield watched him, except that of bewilderment. A bewilderment so complete he did not really appear to know what he saw, although his hand continued to gesture, more or less aimlessly, and his lips moved, shaping unintelligible words. While his son watched, Grange lifted his shoulders and let them fall. Brownfield knew this movement well; it was the fatal shrug. It meant that his father saw nothing about the house that he could change and would therefore give up gesturing about it and he would never again think of repairing it.
When Brownfield's mother had wanted him to go to school Grange had assessed the possibility with the same inaudible gesticulation accorded the house. Knowing nothing of schools, but knowing he was broke, he had shrugged; the shrug being the end of that particular dream. It was the same when Margaret needed a dress and there was no way Grange could afford to buy it. He merely shrugged, never saying a word about it again. After each shrug he was more silent than before, as if each of these shrugs cut him off from one more topic of conversation.
Brownfield turned from looking at his father and the house to see his mother brush a hand across her eyes. He sat glumly, full of a newly discovered discontent. He was sad for her and felt bitterly small. How could he ever bear to lose her, to his father or to death or to age? How would he ever survive without her pliant strength and the floating fragrance of her body which was sweet and inviting and delicate, yet full of the concretely comforting odors of cooking and soap and milk.
"You could've gone," said Grange softly, to his wife.
"I don't know nothing about up Norse."
"You could learn."
"Naw, I don't believe I could." There was a sigh in her voice.
Brownfield came alive. So his cousins had been right; there had been talk about him and his mother going back with them to Philadelphia. Why hadn't they gone? He felt peeved and in the dark.
"I didn't know nobody asked us to go. I want to go up Norse." His cousins said only the greenest hicks from Georgia said "Norse" like that.
His mother smiled at him. "And wear your hair pressed down like a woman's? Get away from here, boy!"
Brownfield, an admirer of Uncle Silas, was not dissuaded. "I just wouldn't wear the headrag at night," he said.
"My poor sister Marilyn," his mother muttered sadly, "all bleached up like a streetwalker. The Lawd keep me from ever wanting to brush another woman's hair out of my face. To tell you the truth," she continued to Grange over Brownfield's head, "I don't even think it was real hair. I felt it when she took it off for me to try on. Just like the hair on the end of a cow's tail, and when you pulled a strand it stretched."
"I like it 'cause it swooshes," said Brownfield rhapsodically.
"That's 'cause you ain't got no sense," said Grange.
2
FIVE YEARS AFTER his cousins' visit, Brownfield stood on the same spot in the yard watching the approach of another vehicle. This time it was a big, gray high-bodied truck that he knew well. It rolled heavily over the road, blasting the misty quiet of the Sunday morning. The man driving the truck was not the one who usually drove it. As it came nearer Brownfield saw a brown arm dangling from the window. It was Johnny Johnson, a man who worked for Mr. Shipley. Th
e truck stopped at the edge of the clearing and Brownfield's mother descended. She stood for a moment talking to the driver, then turned and came slowly and quietly toward the house. The truck made a noisy turnabout and disappeared back up the road. His mother took off her shoes and carried them in her hand. She walked gingerly and reluctantly over the dew. So intently was she peering at the ground she did not see Brownfield until she nearly bumped against him. He was taller than she, and bigger, and when she noticed him she jumped.
"'Morning," he said coolly.
His mother carried her shoes guiltily to her bosom, clutching them with both hands. Her beautiful rough hair was loose about her shoulders like a wayward thundercloud, with here and there a crinkly and shiny silver thread. Her dress was mussed, and the golden cross that usually nestled inside her dress lay jutting up atop her collar. Her eyes were haggard and blinked foggily at her son. She gave off a stale smoky odor. With nervous fingers she sought to thrust rumpled stockings farther inside her shoes.
"Oh," she said, looking toward the house, "I didn't see you standing there."
Brownfield stood aside, saying nothing.
"The baby all right?" she asked quickly, her knuckles sharp against her shoes.
"He all right," said Brownfield. He followed her into the house and watched as she stood over his little half-brother. The baby was sleeping peacefully, his tiny behind stuck up in the air. The baby was a product of his mother's new personality and went with her new painted good looks and new fragrance of beds, of store-bought perfume and of gin.
"Your daddy and me had another fight," she said, sinking down on the bed. "Oh, we had us a rip-rowing, knock-down, drag-out fight. With that fat yellow bitch of his calling the punches." She was very matter of fact. They had been fighting this way for years. Gone were the times she waited alone on Saturday afternoons for people who never came. Now when her husband left her at home and went into town she followed. At first she had determinedly walked the distance, or hitchhiked. Lately she had switched to riding, often in the big gray truck.
"I see he ain't back yet," she said.
Brownfield lounged in the doorway, hoping his job as babysitter was over.
"Said he wouldn't be back no more," his mother said, pulling her dress over her head and shaking it out. She chuckled spitefully. "How many times we done heard that. You'd think he'd be satisfied, me feeding him and her fucking him!"
Brownfield carefully closed his ears when his mother cursed. He knew his father was seeing another woman, and had been seeing one, or several, for a long time. It did not affect him the way it did his mother. He watched her roll down her slip and did not think to look away when it touched the floor. She turned to face him, eyes weary but defiant.
"What the hell you staring at?" she asked.
"Nothing," said Brownfield, and turned away.
His mother located the cross at the end of its chain around her neck and fingered it solemnly.
"I was just thinkin' about Uncle Silas and Aunt Marilyn," he said with his back to her.
"What you thinkin' about them for? I ain't heard from Marilyn since Silas was killed. Just think, tryin' to rob a liquor store in broad daylight! Marilyn always had a lot to say about her new icebox and clothes and her children's fancy learnin', but never did she breathe one word about Silas being on dope. All the time coming down here in they fancy cars and makin' out like we so out of fashion--I bet the Norse is just as much a mess as down here." She knelt by the side of the bed. "Give the baby a bottle of milk when he wakes up," she said from the floor. Within minutes after saying her prayers she was sound asleep.
Brownfield looked at the baby with disgust. Always it was his duty to look after the baby. It made him feel like a sissy. Fortunately the baby was sleeping deeply, for if he had awakened then Brownfield would have felt like giving him a pinch that would bring his mother flying from her bed, her curses and blows falling first on his, then on the baby's, head.
He was too big to play in the clearing, so instead he went to his box at the foot of his bed and brought out his new shoes, bought with money earned from spare-time work at the bait factory, and carried them outside. He sat on the porch steps polishing them with a piece of one of his father's old shirts.
As he stroked his shoes caressingly with the rag, Brownfield sank into a favorite daydream. He saw himself grownup, twenty-one or so, arriving home at sunset in the snow. In his daydream there was always snow. He had seen snow only once, when he was seven and there had been a small flurry at Christmas, and it had made a cold, sharp impression on him. In his daydream snow fell to the earth like chicken feathers dumped out of a tick, and gave the feeling of walking through a quiet wall of weightless and suspended raindrops, clear and cold on the eyelids and nose. In his daydream he pulled up to his house, a stately mansion with cherry-red brick chimneys and matching brick porch and steps, in a long chauffeur-driven car. The chauffeur glided out of the car first and opened the back door, where Brownfield sat puffing on a cigar. Then the chauffeur vanished around the back of the house, where his wife waited for him on the kitchen steps. She was the beloved and very respected cook and had been with the house and the chauffeur and Brownfield's family for many years. Brownfield's wife and children--two children, a girl and a boy--waited anxiously for him just inside the door in the foyer. They jumped all over him, showering him with kisses. While he told his wife of the big deals he'd pushed through that day she fixed him a mint julep. After a splendid dinner, presided over by the cook, dressed in black uniform and white starched cap, he and his wife, their arms around each other, tucked the children in bed and spent the rest of the evening discussing her day (which she had spent walking in her garden), and making love.
There was one thing that was odd about the daydream. The face of Brownfield's wife and that of the cook constantly interchanged. So that his wife was first black and glistening from cooking and then white and powdery to his touch; his dreaming self could not make up its mind. His children's faces were never in focus. He recognized them by their angelic presence alone, two bright spots of warmth; they hovered about calling him "Daddy" endearingly, while he stroked the empty air, assuming it to be their heads.
Brownfield had first had this daydream the week after his cousins told him about the North. Each year it had grown longer and more intensely real; at times it possessed him. While he dreamed of the life he would live as a man no other considerations entered his head. He dreamed alone and was quiet; which was why his mother thought babysitting an ideal occupation for him. But with the baby near, capable of shattering the quiet at any moment, Brownfield was cut off from deep involvement in the snow, in the cozy comfort of his luxuriously warm limousine, and in the faithful ministrations of his loving imaginary wife. He harbored a deep resentment against his mother for making it so hard for him to dream.
He finished his shoes. Piercing the silence now was the cry of his baby brother. Without hurrying, partially in his dreams afterglow, he stood, his hands holding the shoes carefully, palms up, so as not to smudge the shiny leather, and walked toward the box by his bed. It was a cardboard box and, like a small trunk, complete with cardboard shelves. He lifted the flap that was its top and placed his shoes with care a distance from his other possessions. There were a pair of new denim pants, a new green shirt with birds and Indians and deer on it, and a soft yellow neckerchief made of satin. He had bought the neckerchief from the rolling-store man. It cost a quarter and he was very proud of it.
The baby was still crying. Brownfield looked for a moment at his mother in the bed, who had pulled the quilt over her head. The wall around her bed was aflutter with funeral-home calendars, magazine pictures and bits of newsprint which she had cut out of the 1st Colored Baptist Christian Crusade. The baby looked hopefully toward the bed and then pathetically at Brownfield. With a harsh push of his fingers Brownfield thrust the bottle into the baby's mouth. The baby lay on its side, intently sucking, and looked at his big brother with swollen distrustful eyes. The
baby was almost two years old but refused to learn to walk. Instead it allowed itself to be dragged about, propped up and ignored, until something caused it to scream. The baby's name was Star, but it was never called anything. It was treated indifferently most of the time and seemed resigned to not belonging. It had grayish eyes and reddish hair and was shadowed pale gold and chocolate like a little animal. From its odd coloration its father might have been every one of its mother's many lovers.
Margaret had not been impressed, ever, by her sister's Northern existence, or so she had repeatedly said to Brownfield. But she had grown restless about her own life, a life that was as predictably unexciting as last year's cotton field. Somewhere along the line she had changed. Slowly, imperceptibly. Until it was too late for Brownfield to recall exactly how she had been when he had loved her. It seemed to Brownfield that one day she was as he had always known her; kind, submissive, smelling faintly of milk; and the next day she was a wild woman looking for frivolous things, her heart's good times, in the transient embraces of strangers.
Brownfield blamed his father for his mother's change. For it was Grange she followed at first. It was Grange who led her to the rituals of song and dance and drink, which he had always rushed to at the end of the week, every Saturday night. It was Grange who had first turned to someone else. On some Saturday nights Grange and Margaret left home excitedly together, looking for Brownfield knew not what, except that it must be something strong and powerful and something they had thought lost. For they grew frenzied in pursuit of whatever it was. Often they came home together, still bright, flushed from fighting or from good times, but with the glow gradually dying out of their eyes as they faced the creaking floorboards of their unpainted house. Depression always gave way to fighting, as if fighting preserved some part of the feeling of being alive. It was confusing to realize but not hard to know that they loved each other. And even when Margaret found relief from her cares in the arms of her fellow bait-pullers and church members, or with the man who drove the truck and who turned her husband to stone, there was a deference in her eyes that spoke of her love for Grange. On weekdays when, sober and wifely, she struggled to make food out of plants that grew wild and game caught solely in traps, she was submissive still. It was on weekends only that she became a huntress of soft touches, gentle voices and sex without the arguments over the constant and compelling pressures of everyday life. She had sincerely regretted the baby. And now, humbly respecting her husband's feelings, she ignored it.