The Third Life of Grange Copeland

  Huddled there under the bed they heard the birds begin chirping at dawn. They fell asleep dreaming in chilly exactness of killing that would set them free.

  Brownfield did not dream. He just dropped out of his mind, and the late Sunday morning sun stabbed at his eyelids as if it were a gangman's pickax. Stretching his body, he felt he had been undressed. He spread his body leisurely over the bed and reached out a hand to grab his woman for the morning.

  "Open your eyes!" Mem's voice was as even as a dammed-up river. Slowly he stopped turning and opened his eyes, squinting them stickily to keep out the light. Mem was propped up against the wall on her side of the bed, holding a shotgun. At first he saw only the handle, smooth and black and big, close to his head like that. One of Mem's long wrinkled fingers pressed against the trigger. He made a jump, half toward her, half away from her. He felt a sharp jab on his body down below the covers, the shooting pain caused him to wince and thrash on the bed.

  "Don't you move a inch," Mem said lazily, controlling the cool hard gun barrel down between his thighs. He broke out in a quick cold sweat, and his eyes rambled frantically and dizzyingly over the room.

  "What's the matter with you, Mem?" he asked hoarsely, his mouth tasting like somebody'd died up in it. Weeks ago. "What in the Lawd's name is troubling you this Sunday morning?" He looked around the room. "Where is the children, Woman?" he asked, expecting to see them. "Ain't you got no sense of what's decent?" Mem began to chuckle low in her throat. Oh, my Lawd, Brownfield thought, and began to tremble underneath the sheet, that kick in the head I give her last night done run her crazy! Mem gave a light jab at him with the gun, her whole hand wrapped around the stock. Brownfield cried out in pain and moved his big thick hands slowly downward.

  "You move one more one hundred per cent of a half of a half inch," Mem said, putting her other hand lower down on the gun, "you move just a teeny weeny little bit more Mr. Brownfield, and you ain't going to have nary a ball left to play catch with."

  "Aw, Mem." He began to whine. "Honey, you ain't got no cause ..."

  "Shet up," Mem said, staring at him with purple-circled eyes. "The children is out to church for the day. They grandpa came by and I even let him take the baby. Ain't nobody here but us chickens. Ain't nobody round to know or care whether one of us gits fried."

  "Oh, Lawd," Brownfield began to moan in prayer.

  "Call on the one you serves, boy!" Mem said, chuckling dryly at his terror. "Call on the one you serves."

  Brownfield thought irresistibly of Captain Davis; the tall old cracker just popped into his mind like he was God or somebody.

  "Captain Davis won't let you git away with nothing." He began to babble and to throw up.

  "Don't you let none of that mess drop on this bed!" Mem said when she saw his hand going to his mouth. He leaned his head over the side of the bed and let it all out on the floor. He was a long time vomiting the dead-smelling stuff and fell back worn out and weak. He almost forgot Mem and the gun, his head was spinning so.

  "Now you can just git on down there with it," Mem said, wrinkling her nose from the smell. "I don't want you laying up here with me! Go on, git down there!" she said, jabbing him again with the gun. Brownfield slid down onto the floor, slipping on the rotten vomit and falling wetly on his naked behind on the outskirts of the stagnant yellow pool. He'd never felt this sick in his life. Mem watched him from the bed with a cold and level eye. She uncovered the full length of the big gun and pointed it where she had before. Brownfield lay back for a moment, then quickly crouched over his groin, shielding himself from her. She was grinning mirthlessly. Like a skinny balding gorilla, he thought.

  "To think I put myself to the trouble of wanting to git married to you," she said. "And to think that I put myself to the trouble of having all these babies for you and you didn't even go out but once to git the midwife, you was too drunk or the weather was too cold!" Her left hand stroked the long barrel of the gun.

  "You reckon Captain Davis really would give a good goddam if I shot you, Brownfield?" she asked. "What you reckon he'd say?. Now Mem, I bet he would say, whoever heard of anybody going around shooting somebody else's balls off? Why, you colored people--you never heard tell of any white people going around shooting each other's balls off. Shame! Shame! He'd be thinking, I always said niggers is crazy! And this here Mem Copeland proves me right, going around shooting her husband's balls off, for Lawd's sake. 'Course, he'd go on, spitting on the ground like he created the dirt himself, far as I'm concerned with that Brownfield Copeland, I never knowed he had any!" Mem carried on her talk with her eyes opening and almost shutting like she'd seen Captain Davis do when he didn't want to look at her or Brownfield. Which was every time he had to talk to them.

  "Nobody ever give a shit about you but me, you mean old fool! Don't you know that yet!"

  "You ugly black hound!" Brownfield whispered weakly, trying to pull himself back in control. Mem swung the stock of the gun with both hands and laid a gash an inch wide right across his forehead. Dark red blood began dripping down over Brownfield's naked stomach, trickling down on the floor, making the weathered floorboards deep red and yellow. He began to cry.

  "Long as you live--and that won't be long the rate you going--don't never call me 'out my name!" Mem sat calmly, watching the blood drip. "To think I let you drag me round from one corncrib to another just cause I didn't want to hurt your feelings," she said softly, almost in amazement. "And just think of how many times I done got my head beat by you just so you could feel a little bit like a man, Brownfield Copeland." She squinted her eyes almost shut staring at him.

  "And just think how much like an old no-count dog you done treated me for nine years." She tightened her grip on the gun. Brownfield's body began to tremble in deep convulsive shudders. "Woman ugly as you ought to call a man Mister, you been telling me since you beat the ugly into me!" his wife said, and moaned.

  "Mem," he whined, assuming weakness from her altered face, "you know how hard it is to be a black man down here." Tears and blood and vomit ran together down his shaking legs. "You knows I never wanted to be nothing but a man! Mem, baby, the white folks just don't let nobody feel like doing right."

  "You can't stand up to them is what you mean, ain't it?" asked Mem, regaining her composure and propping up her chin with her right palm, holding the gun in her left hand. "Look at you now, crying like a little baby that's going to be whipped for peeing in his pants."

  "Lawd, Mem, you knows how hard I try to do the right thing. I don't make much money, you knows that. And the white folks don't give us no decent houses to live in, you knows that. What can a man do?" he asked, holding his head up like a whipped hound. "What can a man do!"--planning to reach up and snatch the gun. Mem put both hands back on the gunstock and crossed her bony knees.

  "He can quit wailing like a old seedy jackass!" she said, hitting him over the head with the gun. Brownfield skidded in the mess on the floor and lay too weak to move.

  "The thing I done noticed about you a long time ago is that you acts like you is right where you belongs. All the time!" She climbed from the bed and stood on the floor at his feet.

  "Now I'm going to say this one more time: I realize at last that you is just a weezy little bit hard at understanding anything. But you best to git this straight. Me and my children is moving to town to the house I signed that lease on. We is moving in with you or without you." She kicked a clean spot on his limp left leg. "You hear me, boy?" Brownfield groaned and nodded his head.

  Serves me right for gitting mixed up with a crazy woman! he thought weakly, feeling pain shoot through the calf of his leg.

  "If you intend to come along I done made out me some rules for you, for make no mistake it's going to be my house and in my house what the white man expects us to act like ain't going to git no consideration! Now, first off you going to call me Mem, Mrs. Copeland, or Mrs. Mem R. Copeland. Take your pick. And second, you is going to call our children Daphne, Ornette and baby Ruth. Although yo
u can call any one of them 'honey' if you got a mind to. Third, if you ever lays a hand on me again I'm going to blow your goddam brains out--after I shoots off your balls, which is all the manhood you act like you sure you got. Fourth, you tetch a hair on one of my children's heads and I'm going to crucify you--stick a blade in you, just like they did the Lawd; if it was good enough for him it's good enough for you. Fifth, you going to learn to eat your meals like a gentleman, you ain't going to eat like no pig at my table. You going to use spoons and knifes and forks like everybody else that got some sense. Sixth, I don't care about your whoring round town, but don't you never wake me up on Sunday morning grabbing on me when you been out all Saturday night swinging your dick. Seventh, if you ever use a cuss word in my new house I'm going to cut out your goddam tongue. Eighth, you going to take the blame for every wrong thing you do and stop blaming it on me and Captain Davis and Daphne and Ornette and Ruth and everybody else for fifty miles around. Ninth, you going to respect my house by never coming in it drunk. And tenth, you ain't never going to call me ugly or black or nigger or bitch again, 'cause you done seen just what this black ugly nigger bitch can do when she gits mad!" Mem backed off a step. "Now git your ass up," she growled, "and wash yourself off!"

  Brownfield started slowly to his feet, head hanging, body slick with sweat and blood and vomit, eyes bleary with fear. He was still crying forcefully, his nose dripping all over him. "And when you've cleaned yourself off you come back here and git up this mess. When my children come back from church with their granddaddy they going to find a model daddy, and if they don't you and me is going to know the reason why! You hear me, Brownfield?" Mem said, keeping the gun leveled at him. Brownfield's throat was too choked to speak. He stumbled toward the kitchen.

  "You hear me, I say, Boy!?" Mem ran up behind him catching him across the back of the head with the gun barrel. His knees buckled, but he caught hold of the door casing. He could not raise his bloodied eyes to her steely yellow ones.

  "Yes, ma'am," he mumbled, cowering against the door, not looking up. "Yes, ma'am," he said again, sobbing, as Mem set the gun down in a corner with a weary hand.

  Part VI

  26

  BROWNFIELD LAY IN WAIT for the return of Mem's weakness. The cycles of her months and years brought it. The first early morning heavings were a good sign. Her body would do to her what he could not, without the support of his former bravado. The swelling of the womb, again and again pushing the backbone inward, the belly outward. He surveyed with sly interest the bleaching out of every crease on her wrinkled stomach. Waiting. She could not hold out against him with nausea, aching feet and teeth, swollen legs, bursting veins and head; or the grim and dizzying reality of her trapped self and her children's despair. He could bring her back to lowness she had not even guessed at before.

  27

  IN THE CITY HOUSE, a "mansion" of four sheetrocked rooms, no holes, a grassy yard and a mailbox on the porch, he lay low in his role. He played his conversion by terror long after the terror was gone and was replaced by a great design to express his rage, his humiliation, his deep hatred.

  During the day at his job in a frozen pie factory, he was in a rage against his own contentment. It did not seem fair to him that the new work should actually be easier than dairying or raising cotton or corn. True, there was the boring placing of trays of peach pies on the assembly line, but after tramping for years after white folks' cows, the monotony soothed him. The even coolness of the building almost made him forget the stifling heat of the fields. His hands were drier now, for he could and did wear rubber gloves whenever there was wet work to do. He enjoyed pouring the mixture for the pies into the big vats, and liked regulating the hoses for water into the pressure cookers, and looked forward every day to washing up the big shiny, always new, utensils.

  At the new house too there was a feeling of progress. An indoor toilet with a white tub, a face bowl, mirror and white commode. Now he could shit, and rising, look at himself, at the way his eyes had cleared themselves of the hateful veins and yellow tigerish lines, without much odor or rain, and much like a gentleman; or, as he invariably thought of it, like a white man.

  He was cowed into wielding a paintbrush against dingy walls, planting bushes, attempting to fix the faulty wiring. For there were electric lights, and he was sometimes moved to read (look through the pictures of) the catalogues his wife got in the mail. The pictures of the new clothes and the guns and the boats and everything looked extra good in the clear light. He woke in the mornings now to the warmth of an almost noiseless gas heater; and the refrigerator, another example of Mem's earning power, although not new by some years, had nothing to do with melted ice or spoiled food.

  If he had done any of it himself, if he had insisted on the move, he might not have resisted the comfort, the feeling of doing better-ness with all his heart. As it was, he could not seem to give up his bitterness against his wife, who had proved herself smarter, more resourceful than he, and he complained about everything often and loudly, secretly savoring thoughts of how his wife would "come down" when he placed her once more in a shack.

  And when they became reconciled again in a happiness similar to but not very near in depth to what they had known as newlyweds, it was only Mem who looked forward to a less destructive and less inhuman future. He could not see beyond his emotion. He held himself back and, even when desperately--for there was a passion in them that often served as affection--still making babies, he planned ahead. Planting a seed to grow that would bring her down in weakness and dependence and to her ultimate destruction. Like the non-fighter she essentially was, Mem thought her battle soon over. She was not evil and he would profit from it.

  What replaced the desire to heal old wounds was the desire to wipe them out as if they had never been.

  When he considered his wife's poor health, which he did in some tight lonely hours, her boniness, her rotted teeth (and those knocked out by him and the two coated in gold by a dentist who assumed she wanted glittering gold), he could not face what he could remember of how she had been. Round and plump, a mouth of pure white when open--he and they had robbed her of her smile. Now, when she guffawed hoarsely at some tiny joke, corralling the slight intensity of the funny to her innermost heart, he could see himself reflected in the twin mirrors of her eyeteeth; and he wanted one dark gigantic stroke, from himself and not the sky, to blot her out.

  28

  WHAT A SLY and triumphant joy he felt when she could no longer keep her job. She was ill; the two pregnancies he forced on her in the new house, although they did not bear live fruit, almost completely destroyed what was left of her health. Yet, how sad he was somewhere inside that he should still be strong and free to rove about while she spent so much time nursing her feet, attending her children's colds, trying to reassure them they would not have to move back to the country because she could still find work in town. But it was hopeless, her dream for herself and for them was slipping away. She had tried so hard, and even her husband, she thought, had started to respect her again. She didn't ask herself if she loved him. They were at a kind of peace; in the house in town he no longer struck her. The children went to school with happy faces. The baby was trained on an indoor commode.

  All of her confidence wore away with her health as Brownfield watched, gloating and waiting. She could not believe he had planned it. She thought he had behaved well, considering everything, which was what he wanted her to think, until he was ready to reveal the plot to her. And then there came the day when she could not even get out of bed to look for work.

  It had been raining for several days. Mem had tried every day to find something, anything, in factory, shop or kitchen. But perhaps the employers thought she looked too thin, probably tuberculous, and would not hire her. Each day she had come home beat.

  The children took their cue from her silence, and they, sooner than she, knew the danger of their father's rising to rule them again now that their mother was sick. And sure enough, on this d
ay, while Mem coughed and shivered, the blow fell.

  "Why ain't the heat on?" she wheezed, when Brownfield came home from work.

  "'Cause ain't nobody paid the bill."

  "Well, why ain't you paid it?"

  "'Cause it's your house, you pay the damn bills."

  Mem groaned and turned her face to the wall. Ruth walked over to her and tried to play patti-cake with her face, but her mother pushed her away. She had turned the color of ashes, as if she'd seen a ghost.

  "But you got a duty too," she told her husband. "You can't just let these children freeze to death."

  "The rent ain't paid either." He began taking all his clothes from the chifforobe behind his wife's bed.

  "How long?" All of their eyes were upon him, frightened, frozen as if he held the lungs that controlled their breathing.

  "Since you bought all that medicine and spent all that money that you ought not have on you and the kids. I reckon that been two months ago." And then he pulled his trump. From his pocket he drew an eviction notice, flung it on the bed. "You read so damn good maybe you can tell me what all this here's about."

  His wife picked up the eviction notice and read it through, trembling. Horrified, pale, weak, she looked at her husband packing his clothes.

  "What you doing?"

  "Gitting ready to move out."

  "But--move! She looked around at their smart little house and the things she was buying on time. She looked at the clean blue walls, the polished wood floor, the window sills full of evergreens.

  "But where can we move? We ain't made no plans. Why didn't you pay the rent? You make enough money." Then, "We was sick, we all had flu; that's how come I spent all the money last month." She was becoming hysterical; the girls sat along the side of the bed, in a cloud of her VapoRub, but she was not mindful of them. "Where in the world do you expect us to move now?" she asked again, weakly, pathetically, trying to show strength she no longer had.