The woman looked at Mrs. Turpin as if here was an idiot indeed but Mrs. Turpin was not bothered by the look, considering where it came from.
“Nooo,” she said, “they’re going to stay here where they can go to New York and marry white folks and improve their color. That’s what they all want to do, every one of them, improve their color.”
“You know what comes of that, don’t you?” Claud asked.
“No, Claud, what?” Mrs. Turpin said.
Claud’s eyes twinkled. “White-faced niggers,” he said with never a smile.
Everybody in the office laughed except the white-trash and the ugly girl. The girl gripped the book in her lap with white fingers. The trashy woman looked around her from face to face as if she thought they were all idiots. The old woman in the feed-sack dress continued to gaze expressionless across the floor at the high-top shoes of the man opposite her, the one who had been pretending to be asleep when the Turpins came in. He was laughing heartily, his hands still spread out on his knees. The child had fallen to the side and was lying now almost face down in the old woman’s lap.
While they recovered from their laughter, the nasal chorus on the radio kept the room from silence.
“You go to blank blank
And I’ll go to mine
But we’ll all blank along
To-geth-ther,
And all along the blank
We’ll hep eachother out
Smile-ling in any kind of
Weath-ther!”
Mrs. Turpin didn’t catch every word but she caught enough to agree with the spirit of the song and it turned her thoughts sober. To help anybody out that needed it was her philosophy of life. She never spared herself when she found somebody in need, whether they were white or black, trash or decent. And of all she had to be thankful for, she was most thankful that this was so. If Jesus had said, “You can be high society and have all the money you want and be thin and svelte-like, but you can’t be a good woman with it,” she would have had to say, “Well don’t make me that then. Make me a good woman and it don’t matter what else, how fat or how ugly or how poor!” Her heart rose. He had not made her a nigger or white-trash or ugly! He had made her herself and given her a little of everything. Jesus, thank you! she said. Thank you thank you thank you! Whenever she counted her blessings she felt as buoyant as if she weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds instead of one hundred and eighty.
“What’s wrong with your little boy?” the pleasant lady asked the white-trashy woman.
“He has a ulcer,” the woman said proudly. “He ain’t give me a minute’s peace since he was born. Him and her are just alike,” she said, nodding at the old woman, who was running her leathery fingers through the child’s pale hair. “Look like I can’t get nothing down them two but Co’ Cola and candy.”
That’s all you try to get down em, Mrs. Turpin said to herself. Too lazy to light the fire. There was nothing you could tell her about people like them that she didn’t know already. And it was not just that they didn’t have anything. Because if you gave them everything, in two weeks it would all be broken or filthy or they would have chopped it up for lightwood. She knew all this from her own experience. Help them you must, but help them you couldn’t.
All at once the ugly girl turned her lips inside out again. Her eyes fixed like two drills on Mrs. Turpin. This time there was no mistaking that there was something urgent behind them.
Girl, Mrs. Turpin exclaimed silently, I haven’t done a thing to you! The girl might be confusing her with somebody else. There was no need to sit by and let herself be intimidated. “You must be in college,” she said boldly, looking directly at the girl. “I see you reading a book there.”
The girl continued to stare and pointedly did not answer.
Her mother blushed at this rudeness. “The lady asked you a question, Mary Grace,” she said under her breath.
“I have ears,” Mary Grace said.
The poor mother blushed again. “Mary Grace goes to Wellesley College,” she explained. She twisted one of the buttons on her dress. “In Massachusetts,” she added with a grimace. “And in the summer she just keeps right on studying. Just reads all the time, a real bookworm. She’s done real well at Wellesley; she’s taking English and Math and History and Psychology and Social Studies,” she rattled on, “and I think it’s too much. I think she ought to get out and have fun.”
The girl looked as if she would like to hurl them all through the plate glass window.
“Way up north,” Mrs. Turpin murmured and thought, well, it hasn’t done much for her manners.
“I’d almost rather to have him sick,” the white-trash woman said, wrenching the attention back to herself. “He’s so mean when he ain’t. Look like some children just take natural to meanness. It’s some gets bad when they get sick but he was the opposite. Took sick and turned good. He don’t give me no trouble now. It’s me waitin to see the doctor,” she said.
If I was going to send anybody back to Africa, Mrs. Turpin thought, it would be your kind, woman. “Yes, indeed,” she said aloud, but looking up at the ceiling, “it’s a heap of things worse than a nigger.” And dirtier than a hog, she added to herself.
“I think people with bad dispositions are more to be pitied than anyone on earth,” the pleasant lady said in a voice that was decidedly thin.
“I thank the Lord he has blessed me with a good one,” Mrs. Turpin said. “The day has never dawned that I couldn’t find something to laugh at.”
“Not since she married me anyways,” Claud said with a comical straight face.
Everybody laughed except the girl and the white-trash.
Mrs. Turpin’s stomach shook. “He’s such a caution,” she said, “that I can’t help but laugh at him.”
The girl made a loud ugly noise through her teeth.
Her mother’s mouth grew thin and tight. “I think the worst thing in the world,” she said, “is an ungrateful person. To have everything and not appreciate it. I know a girl,” she said, “who has parents who would give her anything, a little brother who loves her dearly, who is getting a good education, who wears the best clothes, but who can never say a kind word to anyone, who never smiles, who just criticizes and complains all day long.”
“Is she too old to paddle?” Claud asked.
The girl’s face was almost purple.
“Yes,” the lady said, “I’m afraid there’s nothing to do but leave her to her folly. Someday she’ll wake up and it’ll be too late.”
“It never hurt anyone to smile,” Mrs. Turpin said. “It just makes you feel better all over.”
“Of course,” the lady said sadly, “but there are just some people you can’t tell anything to. They can’t take criticism.”
“If it’s one thing I am,” Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, “it’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’ It could have been different!” For one thing, somebody else could have got Claud. At the thought of this, she was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. “Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!” she cried aloud.
The book struck her directly over her left eye. It struck almost at the same instant that she realized the girl was about to hurl it. Before she could utter a sound, the raw face came crashing across the table toward her, howling. The girl’s fingers sank like clamps into the soft flesh of her neck. She heard the mother cry out and Claud shout, “Whoa!” There was an instant when she was certain that she was about to be in an earthquake.
All at once her vision narrowed and she saw everything as if it were happening in a small room far away, or as if she were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. Claud’s face crumpled and fell out o
f sight. The nurse ran in, then out, then in again. Then the gangling figure of the doctor rushed out of the inner door. Magazines flew this way and that as the table turned over. The girl fell with a thud and Mrs. Turpin’s vision suddenly reversed itself and she saw everything large instead of small. The eyes of the white-trashy woman were staring hugely at the floor. There the girl, held down on one side by the nurse and on the other by her mother, was wrenching and turning in their grasp. The doctor was kneeling astride her, trying to hold her arm down. He managed after a second to sink a long needle into it.
Mrs. Turpin felt entirely hollow except for her heart which swung from side to side as if it were agitated in a great empty drum of flesh.
“Somebody that’s not busy call for the ambulance,” the doctor said in the off-hand voice young doctors adopt for terrible occasions.
Mrs. Turpin could not have moved a finger. The old man who had been sitting next to her skipped nimbly into the office and made the call, for the secretary still seemed to be gone.
“Claud!” Mrs. Turpin called.
He was not in his chair. She knew she must jump up and find him but she felt like someone trying to catch a train in a dream, when everything moves in slow motion and the faster you try to run the slower you go.
“Here I am,” a suffocated voice, very unlike Claud’s, said.
He was doubled up in the corner on the floor, pale as paper, holding his leg. She wanted to get up and go to him but she could not move. Instead, her gaze was drawn slowly downward to the churning face on the floor, which she could see over the doctor’s shoulder.
The girl’s eyes stopped rolling and focused on her. They seemed a much lighter blue than before, as if a door that had been tightly closed behind them was now open to admit light and air.
Mrs. Turpin’s head cleared and her power of motion returned. She leaned forward until she was looking directly into the fierce brilliant eyes. There was no doubt in her mind that the girl did know her, knew her in some intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition. “What you got to say to me?” she asked hoarsely and held her breath, waiting, as for a revelation.
The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog,” she whispered. Her voice was low but clear. Her eyes burned for a moment as if she saw with pleasure that her message had struck its target.
Mrs. Turpin sank back in her chair.
After a moment the girl’s eyes closed and she turned her head wearily to the side.
The doctor rose and handed the nurse the empty syringe. He leaned over and put both hands for a moment on the mother’s shoulders, which were shaking. She was sitting on the floor, her lips pressed together, holding Mary Grace’s hand in her lap. The girl’s fingers were gripped like a baby’s around her thumb. “Go on to the hospital,” he said. “I’ll call and make the arrangements.”
“Now let’s see that neck,” he said in a jovial voice to Mrs. Turpin. He began to inspect her neck with his first two fingers. Two little moon-shaped lines like pink fishbones were indented over her windpipe. There was the beginning of an angry red swelling above her eye. His fingers passed over this also.
“Lea’ me be,” she said thickly and shook him off. “See about Claud. She kicked him.”
“I’ll see about him in a minute,” he said and felt her pulse. He was a thin gray-haired man, given to pleasantries. “Go home and have yourself a vacation the rest of the day,” he said and patted her on the shoulder.
Quit your pattin me, Mrs. Turpin growled to herself.
“And put an ice pack over that eye,” he said. Then he went and squatted down beside Claud and looked at his leg. After a moment he pulled him up and Claud limped after him into the office.
Until the ambulance came, the only sounds in the room were the tremulous moans of the girl’s mother, who continued to sit on the floor. The white-trash woman did not take her eyes off the girl. Mrs. Turpin looked straight ahead at nothing. Presently the ambulance drew up, a long dark shadow, behind the curtain. The attendants came in and set the stretcher down beside the girl and lifted her expertly onto it and carried her out. The nurse helped the mother gather up her things. The shadow of the ambulance moved silently away and the nurse came back in the office.
“That ther girl is going to be a lunatic, ain’t she?” the white-trash woman asked the nurse, but the nurse kept on to the back and never answered her.
“Yes, she’s going to be a lunatic,” the white-trash woman said to the rest of them.
“Po’ critter,” the old woman murmured. The child’s face was still in her lap. His eyes looked idly out over her knees. He had not moved during the disturbance except to draw one leg up under him.
“I thank Gawd,” the white-trash woman said fervently, “I ain’t a lunatic.”
Claud came limping out and the Turpins went home.
As their pick-up truck turned into their own dirt road and made the crest of the hill, Mrs. Turpin gripped the window ledge and looked out suspiciously. The land sloped gracefully down through a field dotted with lavender weeds and at the start of the rise their small yellow frame house, with its little flower beds spread out around it like a fancy apron, sat primly in its accustomed place between two giant hickory trees. She would not have been startled to see a burnt wound between two blackened chimneys.
Neither of them felt like eating so they put on their house clothes and lowered the shade in the bedroom and lay down, Claud with his leg on a pillow and herself with a damp washcloth over her eye. The instant she was flat on her back, the image of a razor-backed hog with warts on its face and horns coming out behind its ears snorted into her head. She moaned, a low quiet moan.
“I am not,” she said tearfully, “a warthog. From hell.” But the denial had no force. The girl’s eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now. There was a woman there who was neglecting her own child but she had been overlooked. The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman. The tears dried. Her eyes began to burn instead with wrath.
She rose on her elbow and the washcloth fell into her hand. Claud was lying on his back, snoring. She wanted to tell him what the girl had said. At the same time, she did not wish to put the image of herself as a warthog from hell into his mind.
“Hey, Claud,” she muttered and pushed his shoulder.
Claud opened one pale baby blue eye.
She tooked into it warily. He did not think about anything. He just went his way.
“Wha, whasit?” he said and closed the eye again.
“Nothing,” she said. “Does your leg pain you?”
“Hurts like hell,” Claud said.
“It’ll quit terreckly,” she said and lay back down. In a moment Claud was snoring again. For the rest of the afternoon they lay there. Claud slept. She scowled at the ceiling. Occasionally she raised her fist and made a small stabbing motion over her chest as if she was defending her innocence to invisible guests who were like the comforters of Job, reasonable-seeming but wrong.
About five-thirty Claud stirred. “Got to go after those niggers,” he sighed, not moving.
She was looking straight up as if there were unintelligible handwriting on the ceiling. The protuberance over her eye had turned a greenish-blue. “Listen here,” she said.
“What?”
“Kiss me.”
Claud leaned over and kissed her loudly on the mouth. He pinched her side and their hands interlocked. Her expression of ferocious concentration did not change. Claud got up, groaning and growling, and limped off. She continued to study the ceiling.
She did not get up until she
heard the pick-up truck coming back with the Negroes. Then she rose and thrust her feet in her brown oxfords, which she did not bother to lace, and stumped out onto the back porch and got her red plastic bucket. She emptied a tray of ice cubes into it and filled it half full of water and went out into the backyard. Every afternoon after Claud brought the hands in, one of the boys helped him put out hay and the rest waited in the back of the truck until he was ready to take them home. The truck was parked in the shade under one of the hickory trees.
“Hi yawl this evening?” Mrs. Turpin asked grimly, appearing with the bucket and the dipper. There were three women and a boy in the truck.
“Us doin nicely,” the oldest woman said. “Hi you doin?” and her gaze stuck immediately on the dark lump on Mrs. Turpin’s forehead. “You done fell down, ain’t you?” she asked in a solicitous voice. The old woman was. dark and almost toothless. She had on an old felt hat of Claud’s set back on her head. The other two women were younger and lighter and they both had new bright green sunhats. One of them had hers on her head; the other had taken hers off and the boy was grinning beneath it.
Mrs. Turpin set the bucket down on the floor of the truck. “Yawl hep yourselves,” she said. She looked around to make sure Claud had gone. “No, I didn’t fall down,” she said, folding her arms. “It was something worse than that.”
“Ain’t nothing bad happen to you!” the old woman said. She said it as if they all knew that Mrs. Turpin was protected in some special way by Divine Providence. “You just had you a little fall.”
“We were in town at the doctor’s office for where the cow kicked Mr. Turpin,” Mrs. Turpin said in a flat tone that indicated they could leave off their foolishness. “And there was this girl there. A big fat girl with her face all broke out. I could look at that girl and tell she was peculiar but I couldn’t tell how. And me and her mama was just talking and going along and all of a sudden WHAM! She throws this big book she was reading at me and . . .”
“Naw!” the old woman cried out.
“And then she jumps over the table and commences to choke me.”