I told myself, Falls has spent its best efforts getting you hitched. If you now try retreating into some little private home, if you ever try and go and live alone or even move in with your aunts, this whole village will fight to keep you from staying separate. With any town this small, you got to either live smack-dab in the thick of others, or else you’d best go pack.
Maybe the Atlanta trip had cost me more than one little coin of membrane from a certain central location? Maybe I’d also been robbed of what we all need, child. A urgent feeling: “Me? why, I’m right unique—certainly in my pleasures but even in my pain, maybe especially in my pain.” That, honey, a body’s got to hold on to at any cost. “I deserve saving”: That should be forever tattooed across your heart in prize-taking Palmer script.
“Gateway To The Breadbasket Of The Peanut Belt!” I’d onct held that boosters’ sign to be so proudly serious I’d of pledged allegiance to it. Now, less … But what new reverence might replace it? I needed a fast Belief substitute. China painting? Love? What?
I NOTICED Cap had turned his rig a block out of our way, bound over to check on Winona Smythe. Being as I was in his buggy, I tended to go right along. No lights, her yard won’t just a tangle now, more a private pie of woods. Evening felt cooler, I bundled arms around myself. Now coming up, four homes beyond Winona’s, the big white frame place where I’d been raised. A house like other houses, really.
Except that my folks’ two downstairs lamps still glowed at 9:15 p.m. One’d be set on Momma’s polished grand piano, making ebony gleam like some fine boat made totally of ambitious crude oil congealed on tiptoe. Another lamp glorified Poppa’s tobacco-brown easy chair, the lead-front bookcase housing his Compleat Wild West Adventures. On its bottom shelf, I lovingly recall each of Momma’s outsized art books: Pompeii, Architectural Treasures of France, Every American Child’s Sistine, Guido Reni Saints, Holbein’s Portraits of English Royals and Notables. (“Lucille, don’t you even consider touching these folios with those filthy farm paws. Go wash.”)
I now expected that my recent husband, heavy-bodied and silent beside me, would rein horses to a halt. He’d toss a rose-patterned carpetsack onto sidewalk before my homeplace. Maybe he would let me take along tomatoes as my consolation prize.
His tired rich voice would announce, “No hard feelings, Lucille. Sometimes these things work out, occasionally not. In your case, young lady, I fear—not. We will surely be seeing each other around town. We will most certainly say only the most discreet and positive things about each other, will we not? And there’s nothing personal in any of it. It’s actually been quite real in certain ways. Nobody’s fault. Many thanks for your efforts and so forth …”
Then I would climb down—feeling as glad as troubled—I would be slow-moving owing to strained muscles at the inner bases of my upper legs. I would gently hoist my satchel full of souvenir soaps and kiddie poems—I’d be careful with the gift tomatoes. I’d walk on mossy bricks betwixt our boxwoods forever trimmed sleek as store-bought cheeses. Up wood steps I’d go into my folks’ bright home—without even using the knocker, without even needing to wave back at a man whose buggy’d already creaked off into the dark toward a home legally his. For life I’d live deeply alone as “Jake” “Riceyman” Chow.
But no, Cap kept clucking hired animals directly past. Wait. So. Well. Okay. But, oh dear. Still … What’d you expect? But, well—bye-bye, everything usual and smooth!
Child, I fought down wildest feelings. Entire fits got swallowed. A beaver’s twiggy dam was spinning in me. Only by force of great will did your Lucy stifle another mudball urge to scream, wake everybody, throw stuff, tantrum-hard. Somewhere beneath my upper ribs, one small green bud of Rage come peeping out, said, “Jump down now. Run, fool. If he tries and stop you, hurt the villain. He’s already really wounded you. It’d be self-defense, ain’t nobody’s fault.”
Instead, dignity. Instead, we are definitely moving towards his place. I beg myself to be Reasonable, I nag me in the voice of my own mother. I cannot let no grown man (with actual claims on me) see my head fling back to study the parents’ glowing lamps. No way will I jerk around for a last view of our yard, our wide porch, its twelve mismatched rockers. I don’t want to seem to notice a upstairs window now dark, a lacy private only child’s bedroom that will now stay forever unlit. Vacancy.
Instead to just gaze forward—chin held high, reminding myself what Adult Strength might be going to eventually cost a girl for good.
We approach ex-bachelor Marsden’s place. I know it by sight … yard joylessly maintained by one helper (alternate Tuesdays). No flowers or shrubs. Front porch without one stick of easy furniture on it. But as we draw near porch light, a odd thing happens. When his house appears ahead and to our left, soon as I understand how somebody’s taken care and time (a woman’s touch?) to set one candle in each window (tying back drapes so as not to start no fire), once I see magnolia boughs all banked just so around his broad front door, I change.
You do.
Sometimes.
That quick.
Tonight as always, it registers in the body—that’s how a person knows it’s happening right deep. Some large inward locket swings wide open behind my sternum. “Come in.” Air feels cooler in my nostrils. How much older I have grown during ten hard days! Odd that it should make me feel so much more tender towards all the saddening local stuff I see. I do, though. (Child, I now believe that this here tenderness should have been instantly awarded to my own self. But—typical of me, of us gals back then—I instantly turned such benefits right back over to the male-owned world. Like a dowry passing out of my open palm. “Here,” I said that night.)
HORSES do a U-turn before Cap’s lighted house. I climb on down, slow-moving as somebody lots older than fifteen, but somebody determined. In Atlanta, I’d failed to keep my self from harm. Now I just wanted to guard somebody or something else.
Falls seemed a candidate.
I now saw clear through its sham, its pitiful and stupid sweetness. The narrow comfy too opinionated streets. Even its cruelties, snobbery—the works. And right away, I chose to offer it the pity I needed. (Giving myself full credit and sympathy would’ve shamed me or, worse, it might have driven me mad. It’s always been a risk with me. I’ve fought it steady. When Zondro come in here lately with the poems of a girl, a mother, who stuck her head in the oven and done away with herself before she reached age thirty-two, I shut the book, I told my candy-striper, “This girl’s got nothing to teach me. I despise a quitter, especially one with kids sleeping a few rooms off, why, she might’ve gassed them.”) No, that first night back, allowed to feel the least bit sorry for myself, I might’ve flown apart like most anybody weak. I’d soon have been just so much goose down blowing off in ragtag hunks downhill, rolling past Baby Africa’s porches, drifting into peanut and tobacco fields, snagging across dead stubble.
I figured: I will stay on here in town a while. I’ll try and shield it. And without its even knowing or noticing. I’d do this just to save something. Fresh back, I required a mission. My husband would now manage livestock and his holdings. I’d assign myself this task. I now hobble towards a porch, my satchel and tomatoes pulled against me like parts of a baby sleeping, pitied in my arms. “There, there,” I half whispered to bruised tomatoes.
Falls still believes itself to be remarkable, a tad more perfect than any other town this size on earth! (Till right up recent, I’d considered my own self just that secretly remarkable. Silly maybe, but right understandable.) And yet this first night back, I love Falls the way you love a child who’s flawed with flaws you know were your flaws first. You figure, something must be spared. If nothing more than the good story of how it all got lost.
Falls holds itself to be, minimum, a masterpiece of world painting.
(—Darling? you know what? At the very best, it’s just one right nice place mat.)
But I would never snitch.
And so, if, in telling you the rest of my life spent
mostly here, if I sometimes seem to overenjoy our particular little town’s littleness—it ain’t that I don’t know no better. Hey, I mean, I could’ve traveled more farther distances than I did. I could’ve gone more to the north than Norfolk, more southerly than Laurinburg, North Carolina (besides Atlanta twice, so far, and in a real aeroplane last time). Why, even later when I ran away from Captain—I dearly hated leaving it. If I could’ve taken this whole place along inside my carpetbag, I would’ve.
Honeymoon ending, I decide: I will do my level best on the local level—I’ll aid the Gateway To The Breadbasket Of et cetera. I will try hiding a rude newfound fact. Finding: You know Falls proper? my home turf and best sidekick? Lucy’s lifelong contract and her single decent subject?—why, sugar, Falls won’t even worth writing home about.
LOOK, don’t tell.
16
MY HUBBY hadn’t named her street number—Black Town was innocent of curb and guttering and you described paths’ twist mostly in relation to wells or trees or river’s route. Homes here sprung up like mushrooms in chummy brown clumps, house backs often turned to the path. Unlike Summit with its white manses set even and frontal as perfect teeth.
Black people’s dogs came down off porches and barked at me and nipped my hem just the way white folks’ animals nattered maids and gardeners wandering uphill to clean white-owned rooms and lawns. “Hi, boy,” Lucy said to a particularly nasty half pit bull.
Porches seemed held up with things meant for other uses. I saw a group of broomsticks joined by wire and used to support one eave. Porches were littered with hand-crank wringers for washing clothes. White-owned clothes were stretched on lines everywhere, in rows like soldiers.
Then I saw the place Cap had described as having the two gloomy sons forever on its porch. I saw animal cages stretched around her home’s foundation. The shanty was built on six uneasy-looking mounds of bricks (some salvaged from the fiery sight of The Lilacs). The place tilted. Mink cages seemed built of newer wood, tin roofing less rusted than the home’s. These cages were covered with window screening the house lacked and I could see long scurrying forms do a quick rush down a twelve-foot straightaway. Pens were built off the ground on sawhorses—barbed wire around each support, keeping neighbor dogs away. Dogs were now only interested at me—smiling—wincing at the center of them, eager to learn more about my help.
In the whole neighborhood I’d seen no female older than twelve or younger than eighty—only men of all ages. All the able-bodied women were uphill fixing lunch for me and mine. Castalia’s eldest sons sat on the porch looking out at me. I considered waving but thought better of it. One boy had a face scar—pink and C-shaped—visible from forty feet.
The shanty sat back in a willow grove. Its rear yard sloped towards the river Tar bright to blinding at 11:30 a.m. The front porch held a jungle’s worth of houseplants grown into leggy trees and bushes. From one rusted Maxwell House can, I saw geraniums blooming on six-foot stems. Seated amongst this flowery tangle—sons sat very still, hands open on their knees. I just stood here, not waving, not turning back, ignoring the dogs still yapping nearby. Men looked past me. The house stood so far off dirt I could see the river shiny beyond and under it. The whole place soon looked resting on the water like some battered square old boat being tested. The only motors might be them two solemn not-bad-looking fellows who started rocking in their chairs as I watched—pistons charging up for Saturday night. More than onct Cap had rose at 3 a.m. to post bail for one of them.
Behind pots of flowering plants, I saw stacks of signs. Stolen road directions, advertisements. One looked like a ad for Hedgepath’s squashes. Signs were used to plug in rotted wood along the house.
As I watched—stooping to pitch a pebble toward a bulldog getting entirely too near my ankles—one son rose, flipped through stacked signs, held up one: “Caution: Men at Work.”
He showed it to his brother, whose face told nothing. Then he found another, lifted that my way. “Those Peddling and Soliciting Will Be Prosecuted to the Maximum Extent of the Law.”
I waved, smirking—as glad for a joke as the next person. I turned to leave, waving back just to show I’d come by choice and would now go only owing to my own free will. Dogs had let me get in this far but now seemed to block my path and I heard Cas’s sons laugh. I swung my handbag at arm’s length, hoping this’d seem a show of force, if pitiful. I found a stick and carried that.
When I stepped off the eroded dirt and onto wood sidewalks and found the red-brick herringboned streets that led me back to town, I felt sad at just how pleased I was to be home, white.
I dreaded going back to Cap’s huge house right yet. I’d told Castalia I’d be out all day, it’d only make her smug to see me turn up early. The novels—ones my mother had force-fed me as a child—ones I’d come to read out of boredom since married life grabbed me—now seemed dull and easy, too cheap a escape. The wit of Castalia’s big boys holding up rude signs—even the sound of dogs still yapping back downhill—those made the smoothness of this painted green world seem too simple.
Today downtown, when gents touched their hat brims, I accepted, said, “Fine morning to you, sir.” I took their homage as my mother did, my due. The Chinese tailor was out on the sidewalk showing a bolt of fabric to a customer in honest daylight and they greeted me and I loved being greeted and known and I felt safe. Only my gratefulness let me understand how scared I’d been and still was. I yet felt I had a mission.
I might have resented my husband telling me about his frustrated “honeymoon” at age thirteen with a girl then about my own honeymooning age. But I didn’t. I liked him better for admitting it. Made me feel more grown. Made him seem a sight more worthy.
I think that sleeping with my husband had unlocked some tenderness I was not yet ready to award to him alone. So here I was running around looking for someplace to give it, like you give old clothes to the Salvation Army while bragging there’s nothing Wrong with them except you’re being bored of them.
Wasted, I was, wasted.
I STOPPED by Lucas’ and stole something. Had no idea why. The first small thing I could slip into my handbag, it slipped into my handbag. In the alley beside the store, hid behind packing crates and the chopped purple paper fruit came in by train—I checked to see what I’d grabbed. Sardines in oil. I used the can’s key, uncoiled the thing and, with my bare hands, fed myself one whole fish at a time—how delicious they were, greasy with amber oil, salty. I craved salt then. I’d been feeling queasy around ten each morning. I stood here slurping down the ill-gotten food. My face must be a slippery mess. I bent forward so as not to get none on my dress front. I wiped hands on boards of Lucas’ store siding. I kicked the can under shipping litter and stalked home the back way, sure I must look varnished from that delicious tacky lunch, sure I must look guilty for theft and my confused mission to Baby Africa.
I had told her I’d stay out, gone some place to play. Home early, I’d now wash up a bit, stay busy, silent.
She won’t in the kitchen. Bread baked and the whole house smelled yeasty, possible. How bright the day had grown and how relieved I was to find her out somewhere, probably bullying shopkeepers who always treated her like explosives experts brought a sparking black round bomb seen in the funnies constantly.
Going upstairs, feeling shaky, I unpinned my braids, dropped my handbag on the bed and opened the washing-up room door.
Castalia wheeled on me, whole and entire—stripped to the waist, her blouse tucked into skirt’s elastic. She was covered with water and soap and high gloss and it was hard to “read” where her arms stopped and neck ended and her breasts began. Prisms confused things further by throwing great tints and rainbow wens across the springy bulk of her. On the counter, violet and lilac soaps I’d saved from the hotel, these laid out like sample candies, most scrubbed down to nothing. How do I describe the great mahogany body, its curves and weights and browning counterweights—all this in a white-tile room to set it off more. For a second I
couldn’t tell what was what, which a breast, where. Everything seemed locked in spongy rings like soft targets or a Saturn ringed with human breasty flesh. Nipples gave me bearings —they were violent pink and big as drawer pulls or shot glasses, overturned. Ribs beneath looked muscled as a man’s from years of work.
All this I’ve taken time to describe was mine in a flash and we could both hear the downstairs Seth Thomas go one o’clock. Then I closed the door on her, her mouth left open, I closed the door, taking care I shouldn’t slam it, not wanting her to feel she’d been nabbed or judged. The bathroom had been sloppy with tossed water, prism reflections doubled in standing wet. I leaned back against the very door of a room with her in it. I had no breath. There’d been so much of her, seemed my wind all flew out through my eyes trying to embrace or describe. Honey, I might of been some shocked boy. You’d think I’d never laid eyes on a lady’s form before, much less been one. But in some ways I hadn’t. Seen it. Not like that, the real thing.
Our house was so quiet. I could hear her in yonder—recovered—back to ladling the soap off her. I leaned here listening to so light a sound as water dripping off those great smooth shapes.
If, before I headed down to Baby Africa this morning, somebody had said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Lucy, but we’re doing a personal survey. See, we have it from a real good source that in something like three hours you’ll walk into a room and see your archenemy Castalia without no shirt on and what do you think you’re going to do, seeing that?” Well, I’d of answered, oh, maybe, “Faint,” or “Scream,” or “Upchuck!”
I’d of been wrong. I now breathed funny, felt winded like the morning was a preparation. The beautiful four inches that showed in her face was just Coming Attractions for this bulk hid lavish under colorful wraps.
I told myself it was only the surprise element that’d got me.