“So you’d better talk to her, Harry.”
“Talk to who?”
“To Ruth!” Her voice hit a shrill note. “I want to know what’s happening to the salami and chicken and all the other food that’s been disappearing around here lately.”
“Well, how do you know she’s taking it home? I don’t know what you’re talking about. But she’ll be coming any minute now, and if you want to fire her it’s fine with me. Something about that woman I never liked.”
I didn’t want to speak to them, but I didn’t want them to suspect either. I yelled out, “I’m sorry about the salami ’cause I ate most of it myself. And about the leftover chicken, Sharon and Sue Ellen ate the last of it.”
“Now you see that!” he told her. “Don’t ever talk to me again about missing food.”
I’ll have to say this for him, he’s always generous about food, even when we eat in restaurants. Like that Sunday in Memphis not too long ago when we ate at Britlings’ and I ordered the chopped sirloin steak and he said, “That’s nothing but a hamburger. Wouldn’t you like to have a real steak?” My mother didn’t like the idea of ordering “an expensive steak that will just go to waste.” But my father told her to mind her own business, and that as long as he lived I could eat anything I wanted.
The phrase, “as long as he lived” sounded like a vague prophecy, and I became sorrowful that he might die now that he was being good to me. I became so sorrowful, in fact, that it was Mother’s prediction that was soon fulfilled. An expensive steak went to waste.
The familiar sounds of a spiritual—Ruth was passing below my window on her way to the back door. “Morning, folks,” she called. “Well, I heard the weatherman say we’re gonna get us a little rain by afternoon, enough to cool things off.” My mother agreed that a little shower would be very nice. “Is that piece of toast all you’ve had to eat?” asked Ruth. “That’s no kinda breakfast, Miz Bergen. I could make you some hurry-up griddle cakes.”
“Griddle cakes are fattening. Besides I have to leave now.”
A couple of minutes later the car backed out of the garage, the motor gunned for the two-block trip, and they were gone.
Ruth came into my room, bent over and picked up the flowery chenille bedspread that had fallen to the floor, and asked, “Are you feeling all right?”
I remembered who had brought me the ice bag and aspirins for my head and the ointment for my legs. “I don’t know. I guess I am.”
From the other twin bed came a long, low, early morning sound as Sharon flopped over to a better dreaming position.
“Come on into the kitchen,” whispered Ruth as she tiptoed out of the room.
The marshmallow slowly began to bleed its whiteness over the steaming cup of chocolate. On the shelf of the breakfast room’s built-in cabinet our one surviving goldfish, Goldilocks, began her vigorous after-breakfast swim.
“How come that fish got sense enough to eat her breakfast and you don’t?” asked Ruth as she sat down at the table.
I ignored the buttered toast and scrambled egg, but took a long drink of the now lukewarm chocolate. “Don’t know except maybe Goldilocks has a better cook than I do.”
“Must be the truth,” Ruth smiled, showing her left-of-center, solid-gold tooth. “You know what you needs, Honey? One of them fancy Frenchmen who cooks up a fine dinner and jest ’fore serving it, he sets it all afire.”
We sat for a while in silence, Ruth taking small now-and-then sips of coffee while I sat stirring my chocolate and watching Goldilocks. Ruth’s spoon made an attention getting noise and I saw that those brown eyes were upon me.
“I want you to tell Ruth the truth about something. You hear me talking, girl?” I nodded Yes.
“You tell me who is the man.”
“Man?”
“Honey Babe, you can tell Ruth. The man that ran out from the garage. The man that wanted to save you from your daddy.”
“That man—the man—the—” My voice was still in some kind of working order even if my brain did just up and die.
How can those eyes that rest so lightly see so deeply? And from them there is nothing in this world to fear. “The man is my friend,” I said at last.
“You got him hid up in them rooms over the garage?”
“Yes.”
Ruth sighed like she sometimes does before tackling a really big job. “He’s not the one the law’s after? Not the one from the prison camp?”
“Yes.”
Her forehead crinkled up like a washboard. “You telling me, Yes, he’s not the one?”
“No, Ruth, I’m telling you Yes. Yes, he’s the one.”
Ruth’s head moved back and forth in a No direction. “Oh, Lord, why are you sending us more, Lord? Don’t this child and me have burden enough?”
I stood up and felt this sensation of lightness, near weightlessness, like somebody had just bent down, picked up, and carried away all my trouble. My arm fell across Ruth’s shoulder. “Everything’ll be all right, honest it will.” Beneath my arm, there was no movement, no feeling of life. I squeezed Ruth’s shoulder and a hearable breath rushed through her nostrils. “You know how you’re all the time helping me because you’re my friend? Well, Anton’s my friend and I have to help him, you know? Don’t you know?”
“I don’t know what it is I know,” she said in a weighted voice.
In the pantry there was plenty of peanut butter, but the jar of strawberry jam was only fingernail high. I turned on the gas burner under the aluminum percolator. I began to worry that maybe prison camp food was better than this, but at least the loaf of white bread was yesterday fresh.
Ruth followed me into the kitchen. “Honey, them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches ain’t no kinda breakfast for no kinda man.” She looked up at the kitchen clock. “After I bring Sharon down to Sue Ellen’s I’ll fix up some hot griddle cakes with maple syrup and a fresh pot of coffee.”
I threw my arms as far around Ruth’s waist as they would go and tried to lift her up by the pure strength of my will.
“Oh, Ruth, you’re good, good, good!”
“Now, girl, don’t go ’specting no amount of praise to turn my mind about ’cause my mind ain’t come to no clear thought yet. All I knows for sure is that I’m gonna fix up a proper breakfast for you and the man.”
“O.K., thanks, but would you mind not calling him the man, ’cause he’s my friend, Anton. Mr. Frederick Anton Reiker. You may not know this, but you and Anton are all the friends I’ve got.”
Ruth nodded slowly. “I understands that, Honey.”
That understanding made me want to tell her everything all at once. “Ruth, he talks to me and he tells me things because I’m his friend. Ruth, he likes me. He really and truly likes me.”
“I knows that too.”
My heart swelled up for if Ruth knows it, it must be the truth. “How do you know that? Tell me how you know!”
She gave my arm a couple of short pats before finding my eyes. “That man come a-rushing out from the safety of his hiding ’cause he couldn’t stand your pain and anguish no better’n me. That man listens to the love in his heart. Like the Bible tells us, when a man will lay down his life for a friend, well, then there ain’t no greater love in this here world than that.”
Before I reached the landing I heard his footsteps, and then the door opened. I felt certain he was smiling a welcome, although I was looking past him into the familiar interior of the room much as I would look past the brilliance of the sun.
“How are you?” he asked, making it sound more like an inquiry than a greeting.
“Fine.” Cowardliness kept me from looking at him. “Did you sleep O.K.? Were you too hot?” I asked.
“No.”
The shortness of his answer frightened me. Maybe it’s disgust for what he saw yesterday. My eyes shut in a feeble try at pushing away the memories.
“Sure you’re all right?” His eyes were on the red raw stripes that crisscrossed my legs.
I moved quickly to the opposite side of the desk. “Oh, yes, thanks.”
“About yesterday—”
“It’s O.K.”
“No,” he said with a force I had never heard him use before. “It’s not O.K.! Listen to me, P.B. What happened yesterday bothers me. Tell me if I was in any way responsible.” Between his eyebrows there was a deep crease, a mark of concern—for me.
All that painful dabbing of layer after layer of face powder that I subjected my legs to may have been a mistake. Concern might be a little like love.
“It wasn’t you,” I said. “You weren’t responsible.”
“Then what? Please tell me what you did to deserve such a beating?”
How could I say in words what I couldn’t really understand myself? Sometimes I think it’s because I’m bad that my father wants to do the right thing by beating it out of me. And at other times I think he’s beating out from my body all his own bad. My head began its confused revolutions.
“Come over to the window,” I said finally, pointing toward the tracks. “See over there? The shack with the tin roof? There’s a boy who lives there who my father told me I’m not to have anything to do with. Yesterday he saw Freddy sitting next to me on our front steps.” I told Anton about sleepy Freddy who cuts grass in his spare time so he can make enough money to sleep during the Saturday matinee. Scholarly Freddy who has been in Miss Bailey’s fourth grade for two years because he’s finally found, “The one teacher I likes.” Fearless Freddy, brave hunter of crawdads. And generous Freddy who once bought me the gift of not quite half of a melted mess of a Hershey bar.
“He sounds perfectly delightful,” said Anton with a smile. “But why is your father so opposed to him?”
“Maybe it’s because he’s so poor, but I’m not sure.”
He looked a little perplexed. “Why don’t you inquire?”
“I can’t inquire.” My words had a harshness that I didn’t intend. “In my father’s vocabulary to ask why is to contradict him.”
“I don’t like him!” The words seemed to dash out. Then Anton caught my eyes as though asking permission.
“Oh, that’s O.K.,” I said pleased that Anton was taking my side. “I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone before. If he weren’t my father, I wouldn’t even like him.”
“But because he is, you do?”
“Oh, well, I guess I—” Then the image came. The image of his thin, rabid face. “I guess I don’t too much. No, I don’t like him.” That was the first time I had even thought anything like that myself. Funny, but Edna Louise once told me, “Your daddy is so sweet.” Probably because every time he sees her he says, “Edna Louise, you sure do look pretty today.” To Edna Louise he has to say nice things as if she weren’t conceited enough.
“Do you have any idea where your father went—what he did immediately following the beating he gave you?”
“Not exactly, I could guess. He probably went into the house, smoked a Lucky Strike cigarette, washed his hands, and ate a perfectly enormous supper while he listened to the evening news.”
“Not true. He stood watching the housekeeper help you into the house. Then he came into the garage and talked to himself. Over and over he kept repeating, ‘Nobody loves me. In my whole life nobody has ever loved me.’”
“Anton, it must have been somebody else. That doesn’t sound like my father.”
“It was your father.”
“I don’t understand. Why? How could he be so mean and then worry that he isn’t loved? It doesn’t make sense.”
Anton shook his head. “I met your father once; I interpreted for some of the prisoners who came into the store.”
“I remember! You said the prisoners needed hats to protect themselves from our formidable Arkansas sun.”
Anton smiled, and the smile made him look very young, more like a boy my age than a man. “How could you possibly remember that?”
“Easy. Nobody from around here says things like that. I also remember that he didn’t think your remark was very amusing.”
“I can believe that because—” Anton paused like he was trying to put some new thoughts into good running order before continuing—“because it seems to me that a man who is incapable of humor is capable of cruelty. If Hitler, for example, had had the ability—the detachment—to observe the absurdity of his own behavior he would have laughed, and today there might not be a madman named Adolph Hitler.”
Was he making a comparison between Hitler and my father? “Do you think my father is like that? Like Hitler?”
Anton looked thoughtful. “Cruelty is after all cruelty, and the difference between the two men may have more to do with their degrees of power than their degrees of cruelty. One man is able to affect millions and the other only a few. Would your father’s cruelty cause him to crush weak neighboring states? Or would the Führer’s cruelty cause him to beat his own daughter? Doesn’t it seem to you that they both need to inflict pain?”
“I don’t know.”
Anton smiled. “I don’t know either. But you see, the only questions I like to raise are those that are unanswerable. Trying to calculate the different degrees of cruelty is a lot like trying to calculate the different degrees of death.”
I laughed, but I knew that tonight while our house slept I would stay awake trying to understand his words. “I’m so glad you’re talking to me, teaching me.” I heard my enthusiasm running over. “I want you to teach me everything you’ve learned.”
Anton stood, executing a princely bow. “I’m at your service.”
“I think I want to be intelligent even more than I want to be pretty.”
“You’re already intelligent and pretty.”
“Me?”
“You. I come from a line of men who have a sure instinct for a woman’s beauty. So, P.B., I speak as an expert when I tell you you’re going to have it all.”
“Well, why hasn’t anyone else seen it? That I’m going to have—what you say?”
“They will. Because you are no common garden flower—you are unique.”
“Oh.”
“I think I’m going to enjoy being your teacher if you’ll keep in mind that life produces no maestros, only students of varying degrees of ineptitude. Wait!” said Anton. He jumped from his chair to go rummaging through a GI regulation duffel bag. “Here it is!” He waved a book with a bruised, blue cover. “I checked it out of the prison library the same day I checked myself out. R.W. Emerson. Are you familiar with his work?”
I admitted that I wasn’t while I wondered if escaping with a book could be called anything besides stealing. My father would never do anything like that.
Anton asked, “Is something wrong?”
“Uhhh, no. Well, I was wondering how you are going to return the book.”
“Oh,” he said thoughtfully. “You want to know if I am a thief?”
“Oh, no! I know you’re not!”
“In this classroom we call things by their rightful name. I became a thief when I took that book. I couldn’t very well pay for it, and I didn’t want my brain to starve if I had to go into hiding.”
I felt close to laughing. “You’re very honest. I mean you don’t lie, do you?”
Anton shook his head. “I try never to lie to myself, and I dislike lying to friends.” He took a yellow pencil from his hip pocket and made two small check marks in R.W. Emerson’s Table of Contents. “Read these essays,” he said, like he felt pleased to be making a contribution to my education. “And tomorrow we can start mining the gold.”
Then a voice from below us called up, “Come on folks! It’s ready.” Anton’s face was caught in a moment of fear.
“It’s all right,” I whispered. “That’s only Ruth, our housekeeper. She’s made griddle cakes for us.”
He looked at me. “Why did you—tell?”
He believed—he actually believed—that I would. “But I didn’t! Honest! Ruth saw you run out of the garage last night; she saw how you wanted to
protect me from my father.”
Anton’s hand rushed to his forehead. “I came running out of hiding to—My God, I did, didn’t I?” His hand dropped to his side, and I could see he was smiling his wonderful glad-to-be-living smile. “After almost two years of being as inconspicuous a coward as possible I had no idea that I would voluntarily risk my life for anyone.” He shook his head in disbelief. “But I’m glad I could. I’m glad I still could.”
12. Breakfast
A PLAYFUL BREEZE brought a scent of roses into the breakfast room where it mingled with the purely kitchen aroma of coffee perking, griddle cakes rising, and bacon frying. The table was set for two with real cotton napkins, the newest of the everyday tablecloths, and our fancy dinnertime made-in-Japan china.
Ruth pointed to the chair where my father always sits, and Anton sat down. His appetite was healthy, and while we ate I heard Ruth singing in the kitchen: “Rinso white, Rinso white, happy little washday song.”
She came into the breakfast room carrying the percolator and refilled the empty cups. Anton rose, pulling out a third chair. “Come join us.” I watched Ruth’s face for signs of embarrassment, for I was sure no white man had ever before offered her a chair. But if there was any, Ruth has better camouflage than the United States Army.
“Mr. Reiker, don’t you worry none about me. I jest enjoys cooking for folks who enjoy eating.” There it is! That’s one of the things that Ruth does that makes the white ladies say she’s uppity. All the other colored folks would have called him Mr. Anton, leaving the poor whites the privilege of calling him Mr. Reiker. But then, if Ruth played the piano I think she’d play only the cracks between the keys. She seems best suited for walking that thinnest of lines between respectfulness and subservience.
After a while Ruth brought in a cup of coffee and made herself comfortable in the chair that Anton had selected for her. Looking over at him, she chuckled. “Yes, sir, it is a pleasure to cook for folks who enjoys their food. They sure ain’t no eaters in this house. Not Sharon and not—” she threw a nod over in my direction—“this child. She’d rather be sitting with me shelling peas than eating them. Mr. Bergen, he’d rather be left alone with his cigarettes, and Miz Bergen says she’s gotta watch her girlish figure. Imagine that!” said Ruth. “A woman that bore two children wants a figure like some young girl’s. I always tells her—a fruit-bearing tree knows better’n try to look like some young sapling.”