She turned and said, “What?” And then she said, “Take your jacket off, why don’t you? Make yourself comfortable.”
“See, I’m trying to be honest,” he said. “I’d like to get everything clear between us.”
The beginnings of a crease developed between her eyebrows.
“I feel bad about what you’ve been through back home,” he said. “I guess it wasn’t much fun. But when you think about it, Linnie, what have we really got to do with each other? We hardly know each other! We went out together less than a month! And I’m trying to make it on my own up here. It’s hard enough for one; it’s impossible for two. Back home, at least you’ve got family. They’d never let you starve, no matter how they feel about you. I think you ought to go home.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re mad at me,” she told him.
“What? No, I’m not—”
“You’re mad I didn’t tell you how old I was, but why didn’t you ask how old I was? Why didn’t you ask if I was in school, or whether I worked someplace, or how I spent all the time that I wasn’t with you? Why weren’t you interested in me?”
“What? I was interested, honest!”
“Oh, we both know what you were interested in!”
“Hold on,” he said. “Is that fair? Who was the first to start taking her clothes off, might I remind you? And who dragged me into that barn? Who made me put my hand on her? Were you interested in how I spent my time?”
“Yes, I was,” she said. “And I asked you. Only you never bothered answering, because you were too busy trying to get me on my back. I said, ‘Tell me about your life, Junior; come on, I want to know everything about you.’ But did you tell me? No. You’d just start unbuttoning my buttons.”
Junior felt he was losing an argument that he didn’t even care about. He had wanted to make an entirely different point. He said, “Shoot, Linnie Mae,” and jammed his fists hard in his jacket pockets, except something in his left pocket stopped him and he pulled it out and looked at it. Half a sandwich, wrapped in a handkerchief.
“What’s that?” she asked him.
“It’s a … sandwich.”
“What kind of sandwich?”
“Egg? Egg.”
“Where’d you get an egg sandwich?”
“Lady I worked for today,” he said. “Half I ate and half I brought home to give to you, but then you were all set on us going out for supper.”
“Oh, Junior,” she said. “That’s so sweet!”
“No, I was just—”
“That was so nice of you!” she said, and she took the sandwich out of his hand, handkerchief and all. Her face was pink; she suddenly looked pretty. “I love it that you brought me a sandwich,” she said. She unwrapped it, reverently, and studied it a moment and then looked up at him with her eyes brimming.
“It’s squashed, though,” he said.
“I don’t care if it’s squashed! I love it that you thought about me while you were away at work. Oh, Junior, I’ve been so lonely all these years! You don’t know how lonely I’ve been. I’ve been so all, all alone all this time!”
And she flung herself on him, still holding that sandwich, and started sobbing.
After a moment, Junior lifted his arms and hugged her back.
She didn’t find a job, of course. That part of her plan didn’t work out. But her kitchen-sharing plan did. She and Cora Lee got to be friends, and they cooked together in the kitchen while they talked about whatever women talk about, and before long it just made more sense for Junior and Linnie to eat their meals with Cora Lee and her family. Then when the weather turned warm the two women hatched a plot to buy fruits and vegetables from the farmers who rolled into Hampden on their wagons, and they’d spend all day canning, blasting the kitchen with heat; and later Linnie would be the brave one who went around hawking their products to the neighbors. They didn’t make much money, but they made some.
And Junior actually did fix up a few things around the house, just because otherwise they would never have gotten done, but he didn’t charge anything or try to get a deal on the rent.
Even after times improved and Junior and Linnie moved into the house on Cotton Street, Linnie and Cora Lee stayed friends. Well, Linnie was friends with everybody, it seemed to Junior. Sometimes he wondered if those years of being an outcast had left her with an unnatural need to socialize. He’d come in after work and find wall-to-wall women in the kitchen, and all their mingled young ones playing in the backyard. “Don’t I get supper?” he would ask, and the women would scatter, rounding up their children on the way out. But he wouldn’t say Linnie was lazy. Oh, no. She and Cora still had their little canning business, and she answered the phone for Junior and saw to the billing and such as he began to have more customers. She was better with the customers than he was, in fact, always willing to take time for a little small talk, and adept at smoothing over any problems or complaints.
By then he had his truck—used, but it was a good one—and he had a few men working for him, and he owned a fine collection of tools that he’d bought from other men here and there who were down on their luck. These were really solid tools, the old-fashioned, beautifully made kind. A saw, for instance, with an oiled wooden handle that was carved with the most delicate and precise etching of a rosemary branch. It was true that the sweat that darkened the handle had not been his forebears’ sweat, but still he felt some personal pride in it. He always took excellent care of his tools. And he always went to lumberyards where he could choose his own lumber board by board. “Now, fellows, I know anything you might take it into your heads to put over on me. Don’t give me anything with dead knots, don’t give me anything warped or moldy …”
“What if I had been married?” he thought to ask Linnie years later. “What if you’d come up north and found me with a wife and six children?”
“Oh, Junior,” she said. “You would never do that.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Well, for one thing, how would you get six children inside of just five years?”
“No, but, you know what I mean.”
She just smiled.
She acted older than he was, in some ways, and yet in other ways she seemed permanently thirteen—feisty and defiant, and stubbornly opinionated. He was taken aback to see how easily she had severed all connection with her family. It implied a level of bitterness that he had not suspected her capable of. She showed no desire to shed her backwoods style of speech; she still said “holler” for “shout,” and “tuckered” for “tired,” and “treckly” for “directly.” She still insisted on calling him “Junie.” She had an irritating habit of ostentatiously chuckling to herself before she told him something funny, as if she were coaching him to chuckle. She pressed too close to him when she wanted to persuade him of something. She plucked at his sleeve with picky fingers while he was talking to other people.
Oh, the terrible, crushing, breath-stealing burden of people who think they own you!
And if Junior was the wild one, how come it was Linnie Mae who’d caused every single bit of trouble he’d found himself in since they’d met?
He was a sharp-boned, narrow-ribbed man, a man without an ounce of fat who had never had much interest in food, but sometimes when he came home from work in the late afternoon and Linnie was out back gabbing with her next-door neighbor he would stand in front of the refrigerator and eat all the leftover pork chops and then the wieners, the cold mashed potatoes, the cold peas and the boiled beets, foods he didn’t even like, as if he were starving, as if he had never gotten what he really wanted, and later Linnie would say, “Have you seen those peas I was saving? Where are those peas?” and he would stay stone silent. She had to know. What did she think: little Merrick craved cold peas? But she never said so. This made him feel both grateful and resentful. Lord it over him, would she! She must really think she had his number!
At such moments he would run his mind back through that long-ago trip to the tr
ain station, this time doing it differently. Down the dark streets, turn right past the station, turn right again onto Charles Street and drive back to the boardinghouse. Let himself into his room and lock the door behind him. Drop onto his cot. Fall asleep alone.
13
JUNIOR HAD EUGENE take the porch swing down to Tilghman Brothers, an establishment near the waterfront where Whitshank Construction sent customers’ shutters when they were so thick with paint that they resembled half-sucked toffees. Evidently the Tilghman brothers owned a giant vat of some caustic solution that stripped everything to the bare wood. “Tell them we need the swing back in exactly a week,” Junior told Eugene.
“A week from today?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Boss, those fellows can take a month with such things. They don’t like to be hurried.”
“Tell them it’s an emergency. Say we’ll pay extra, if we have to. Moving day is two Sundays from now, and I want the swing hanging by then.”
“Well, I’ll try, boss,” Eugene said.
Junior could see that Eugene was thinking this was an awful lot of fuss for a mere porch swing, but he had the good sense not to say so. Eugene was an experiment—Junior’s first colored employee, hired when the draft had claimed one of the company’s painters. He was working out okay, so far. In fact, last week Junior had hired another.
Linnie Mae had been worrying lately that Junior would be drafted himself. When he pointed out that he was forty-two years old, she said, “I don’t care; they could raise the draft age any day now. Or you might decide to enlist.”
“Enlist!” he said. “What kind of fool do you take me for?”
He had the feeling sometimes that his life was like a railroad car that had been shunted onto a side track for years—all the wasted, wild years of his youth and the years of the Depression. He was lagging behind; he was running to catch up; he was finally on the main track and he would be damned if some war in Europe was going to stop him.
When the swing came back it was virgin wood—a miracle. Not the tiniest speck of blue in the least little seam. Junior walked all around it, marveling. “Lord, I hate to think what-all they must have in that vat,” he told Eugene.
Eugene chuckled. “You want I should varnish it?” he asked.
“No,” Junior said, “I’ll do that.”
Eugene shot him a look of surprise, but he didn’t comment.
The two of them carried it out back and set it upside down on a drop cloth, so that Junior could varnish the underside first and give it time to dry before he turned it over. It was a warm May day with no rain in the forecast, so Junior figured he could safely leave it out overnight and come back the next morning to do the rest.
Like most carpenters, he had an active dislike of painting, and also he was conscious that he wasn’t very good at it. But for some reason it seemed important to accomplish this task on his own, and he worked carefully and patiently, even though this was the part of the swing that wouldn’t show. It was a pleasant occupation, really. The sunlight was filtering through the trees, and a breeze was cooling his face, and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” was playing in his mind.
You leave the Pennsylvania Station ’bout a quarter to four,
Read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore …
When he was done, he cleaned his brush and put away the varnish and the mineral spirits, and he went home for supper feeling pleased with himself.
The next morning he came back to finish the job. The swing was dry, but a fine dusting of pollen was stuck to the underside of the seat. He should have foreseen that. No wonder he hated painting! Cursing beneath his breath, he dragged the drop cloth toward the back porch with the swing along for the ride. Then he spread another drop cloth inside the enclosed end of the porch and hauled the swing in and set it right side up. This was going to be done properly, by God. He tried to forget how the lower surfaces of the armrests had rasped against his fingertips when he grabbed hold of them.
Eugene had painted the back porch interior earlier in the week, and the smells of paint and varnish combined to make Junior feel slightly light-headed. He drew the brush along the wood with dreamy strokes. Wasn’t it interesting how the grain of the wood told a story, almost—how you could follow the threads and be surprised at how far they traveled, or where they unexpectedly broke off.
He wondered if someday Merrick would be proposed to in this swing, if Redcliffe’s children would swoop back and forth in it so raucously that their mother would seize the ropes to slow it down.
After Junior learned how a man could feel about his children, he had conceived a deep and permanent anger toward his father. His father had had six sons and a daughter, and he’d let them loose easier than a dog lets loose of her pups. The older Junior got, the harder he found it to understand that.
He made a quick, sharp, shaking-away motion with his head, and he dipped his brush again.
This varnish was the color of buckwheat honey. It drew out the character of the wood and added depth. No more of those eternal Swedish-blue swings of home! No more raggedy braided rugs and rusted metal gliders; no more baby-blue porch ceilings that were meant, he supposed, to suggest the sky; no more battleship-gray porch floors.
Linnie was going to start up the walk on moving day, and at the foot of the porch steps, “Oh!” she would say. She would be staring at the swing; one hand would fly to her mouth. “Oh, why—!” Or maybe not. Maybe she would conceal her surprise; she might be crafty enough. Either way, Junior himself would climb the steps without breaking stride. He wouldn’t give a sign that anything was different. “Shall we go in?” he would ask her, and he would turn to her and gesture hospitably toward the front door.
There was a satisfaction to imagining this scene, and yet he felt something was lacking. She wouldn’t fully realize all that lay behind it: his shock at what she had done and his outrage and his sense of injustice, and his hard work to repair the damage. Eugene’s trip to Tilghman Brothers, the exorbitant fee they had charged for the expedited service (exactly double their regular fee), Junior’s two separate trips to apply the varnish and the final trip he would make Friday morning to screw the eyebolts back in and reattach the ropes on their figure eights and hang the swing from the ceiling: she would have no idea of any of that. It echoed the pattern of their lives together—all the secrets he had kept from her despite his temptation to tell. She would never know how deeply he had longed to free himself all these years, how he had stayed with her only because he knew she would be lost otherwise, how onerous it had been to go on and on, day after day, setting right what he had done wrong. No, she had absolute faith that he had stayed because he loved her. And if he told her otherwise—if he somehow managed to convince her of his sacrifice—she would be crushed, and the sacrifice would have been for nothing.
He circled each spindle with his brush, smoothing varnish into each joint, tracing the crevices of the lathing with tender, caressing strokes.
Dinner in the diner,
nothing could be finer
Than to have your ham ’n’ eggs in Carolina …
On Friday when he went back to hang the swing he took along more boxes from home and a few small pieces of furniture—the play table from the children’s room and the little chairs that went with it. Might as well haul as much as possible over ahead of time. He parked in the rear and carried everything in through the kitchen and up the stairs. While he was up there, he indulged himself in a survey of his new property. He stood at the hall railing to admire the gleaming entrance hall below, and he stepped into the main bedroom to gloat over its spaciousness. His and Linnie’s beds were already in place—twin beds, like those the Brills had had, delivered last week by Shofer’s. Linnie couldn’t understand why they didn’t keep on sharing their old double, but Junior said, “It just makes more sense, when you think about it. You know how I’m always tossing and turning in the middle of the night.”
“I don’t mind you tossing and tur
ning,” Linnie said.
“Well, we’ll just try this out, why don’t we. We’re not throwing the double away, after all. If we change our minds we can always move it back in from the guest room.”
Although privately, he had no intention of moving it back. He liked the idea of twin beds—their Hollywood-style glamour. Besides, he’d spent enough of his childhood sharing a bed with various brothers.
In the far corner of the bedroom stood the Brills’ armoire, which he also considered glamorous. It made his cheeks burn, though, to remember that he had first understood it to be called a “more.” “Mrs. Brill,” he had said, “I hear you’re not taking your more to the new place. You think I could buy it off you?”
Mrs. Brill’s eyebrows had knotted. “My—?” she said.
“Your more in the bedroom. Your boy said it was too big.”
“Oh! Why, certainly. Jim? Junior was just wondering if he could buy our armoire.”
It wasn’t till then that Junior had realized his mistake. He was furious at Mrs. Brill for witnessing it, even though he had to admit that she had behaved very tactfully.
In a way, it was her tact he was furious at.
Oh, always, always it was us-and-them. Whether it was the town kids in high school or the rich people in Roland Park, always someone to point out that he wasn’t quite measuring up, he didn’t quite make the grade. And it was assumed to be his own fault, because he lived in a nation where theoretically, he could make the grade. There was nothing to hold him back. Except that there was something; he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. There was always some little tiny trick of dress or of speech that kept him on the outside looking in.