“There ain’t a thing you can do about it,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “What I expect is you’ll have them for a week or so until school begins. They just figure to have themselves a vacation in the country and there ain’t nothing you can do but fold your hands.”
“I do not fold my hands,” Mrs. Cope said. “Tell Mr. Pritchard to put the horses up in the stalls.”
“He’s already did that. You take a boy thirteen year old is equal in meanness to a man twict his age. It’s no telling what he’ll think up to do. You never know where he’ll strike next, This morning Hollis seen them behind the bull pen and that big one ast if it wasn’t some place they could wash at and Hollis said no it wasn’t and that you didn’t want no boys dropping cigarette butts in your woods and he said, ‘She don’t own them woods,’ and Hollis said, ‘Shes does too,’ and that there little one he said, ‘Man, Gawd owns them woods and her too,’ and that there one with the glasses said, ‘I reckon she owns the sky over this place too,’ and that there littlest one says, ‘Owns the sky and can’t no airplane go over here without she says so,’ and then the big one says, ‘I never seen a place with so many damn women on it, how do you stand it here?’ and Hollis said he had done had enough of their big talk by then and he turned and walked off without giving no reply one way or the other.”
“I’m going out there and tell those boys they can get a ride away from here on the milk truck,” Mrs. Cope said and she went out the back door, leaving Mrs. Pritchard and the child together in the kitchen.
“Listen,” the child said. “I could handle them quicker than that.”
“Yeah?” Mrs. Pritchard murmured, giving her a long leering look. “How’d you handle them?”
The child gripped both hands together and made a contorted face as if she were strangling someone.
“They’d handle you,” Mrs. Pritchard said with satisfaction.
The child retired to the upstairs window to get out of her way and looked down where her mother was walking off from the three boys who were squatting under the water tower eating something out of a cracker box. She heard her come in the kitchen door and say, “They say they’ll go on the milk truck, and no wonder they aren’t hungry—they have that suitcase half full of food.”
“Likely stole every bit of it too,” Mrs. Pritchard said.
When the milk truck came, the three boys were nowhere in sight, but as soon as it left without them their three faces appeared, looking out of the opening in the top of the calf barn. “Can you beat this?” Mrs. Cope said, standing at one of the upstairs windows with her hands at her hips. “It’s not that I wouldn’t be glad to have them—it’s their attitude.”
“You never like nobody’s attitude,” the child said. “I’ll go tell them they got five minutes to leave here in.”
“You are not to go anywhere near those boys, do you hear me?” Mrs. Cope said.
“Why?” the child asked, ‘
‘I’m going out there and give them a piece of my mind,” Mrs. Cope said.
The child took over the position in the window and in a few minutes she saw the stiff green hat catching the glint of the sun as her mother crossed the road toward the calf barn, The three faces immediately disappeared from the opening, and in a second the large boy dashed across the lot, followed in instant later by the other two. Mrs. Pritchard came out and the two women started for the grove of trees the boys had vanished into. Presently the two sunhats disappeared in the woods and the three boys came out at the left side of it and ambled across the field and into another patch of woods. By the time Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard reached the field, it was empty and there was nothing for them to do but come home again.
Mrs. Cope had not been inside long before Mrs. Pritchard came running toward the house, shouting something. “They’ve let out the bull!” she hollered. “Let out the bull!” And in a second she was followed by the bull himself, ambling, black and leisurely, with four geese hissing at his heels. He was not mean until hurried and it took Mr. Pritchard and the two Negroes a half-hour to ease him back to his pen. While the men were engaged in this, the boys let the oil out of the three tractors and then disappeared again into the woods.
Two blue veins had come out on either side of Mrs. Cope’s forehead and Mrs. Pritchard observed them with satisfaction. “Like I toljer,” she said, “there ain’t a thing you can do about it.”
Mrs. Cope ate her dinner hastily, not conscious that she had her sunhat on. Every time she heard a noise, she jumped up. Mrs. Pritchard came over immediately after dinner and said, “Well, you want to know where they are now?” and smiled in an omniscient rewarded way.
“I want to know at once,” Mrs. Cope said, coming to an almost military attention.
“Down to the road, throwing rocks at your mailbox,” Mrs. Pritchard said, leaning comfortably in the dour. “Done already about knocked it off its stand.”
“Get in the car,” Mrs. Cope said.
The child got in too and the three of them drove down the road to the gate. The boys were sitting on the embankment on the other side of the highway, aiming rocks across the road at the mailbox. Mrs. Cope stopped the car almost directly beneath them and looked up out of her window. The three of them stared at her as if they had never seen her before, the large boy with a sullen glare, the small one glint-eyed and unsmiling, and Powell with his two-sided glassed gaze hanging vacantly over the crippled destroyer on his shirt.
“Powell,” she said, “I’m sure your mother would be ashamed of you,” and she stopped and waited for this to make its effect. His face seemed to twist slightly but he continued to look through her at nothing in particular.
“Now I’ve put up with this as long as I can,” she said. “I’ve tried to be nice to you boys. Haven’t I been nice to you boys?”
They might have been three statues except that the big one, barely opening his mouth, said, “We’re not even on your side the road, lady.”
“There ain’t a thing you can do about it,” Mrs. Pritchard hissed loudly. The child was sitting on the back seat close to the side. She had a furious outraged look on her face but she kept her head drawn back from the window so that they couldn’t see her.
Mrs. Cope spoke slowly, emphasizing every word. “I think I have been very nice to you boys. I’ve fed you twice. Now I’m going into town and if you’re still here when I come back, I’ll call the sheriff,” and with this, she drove off. The child, turning quickly so that she could see out the back window, observed that they had not moved; they had not even turned their heads.
“You done angered them now,” Mrs. Pritchard said, “and it ain’t any telling what they’ll do.”
“They’ll be gone when we get back,” Mrs. Cope said.
Mrs. Pritchard could not stand an anticlimax. She required the taste of blood from time to time to keep her equilibrium. “I known a man oncet that his wife was poisoned by a child she had adopted out of pure kindness,” she said. When they returned from town, the boys were not on the embankment and she said, “I would rather to see them than not to see them. When you see them you know what they’re doing.”
“Ridiculous,” Mrs. Cope muttered. “I’ve scared them and they’ve gone and now we can forget them.”
“I ain’t forgetting them,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “I wouldn’t be none surprised if they didn’t have a gun in that there suitcase.”
Mrs. Cope prided herself on the way she handled the type of mind that Mrs. Pritchard had. When Mrs. Pritchard saw signs and omens, she exposed them calmly for the figments of imagination that they were, but this afternoon her nerves were taut and she said, “Now I’ve had about enough of this. Those boys are gone and that’s that.”
“Well, we’ll wait and see,” Mrs. Pritchard said.
Everything was quiet for the rest of the afternoon but at supper time, Mrs. Pritchard came over to say that she had heard a high vicious laugh pierce out of the bushes near the hog pen. It was an evil laugh, full of calculated meanness, and she had hear
d it come three times, herself, distinctly.
“I haven’t heard a thing,” Mrs. Cope said.
“I look for them to strike just after dark,” Mrs. Pritchard said.
That night Mrs. Cope and the child sat on the porch until nearly ten o’clock and nothing happened. The only sounds came from tree frogs and from one whippoorwill who called faster and faster from the same spot of darkness, “They’ve gone,” Mr. Cope said, “poor things,” and she began to tell the child how milch they had to be thankful for, for she said they might have had to live in a development themselves or they might have been Negroes or they might have been in iron lungs or they might have been Europeans ridden in boxcars like cattle, and she began a litany of her blessings, in a stricken voice, that the child, straining her attention for a sudden shriek in the dark, didn’t listen to.
There was no sign of them the next morning either. The fortress line of trees was a hard granite blue, the wind had risen overnight and the sun had come up a pale gold. The sea ion was changing. Even a small change in the weather made Mrs. Cope thankful, but when the seasons changed she seemed almost frightened at her good fortune in escaping whatever it was that pursued her. As she sometimes did when one thing was finished and another about to begin, she turned her attention to the child who had put on a pair of overalls over her dress and had pulled a man’s old felt hat down as far as it would go on her head and was arming herself with two pistols in a decorated holster that she had fastened around her waist. The hat was very tight and seemed to be squeezing the redness into her face. It came down almost to the tops of her glasses. Mrs. Cope watched her with a tragic look. “Why do you have to look like an idiot?” she asked. “Suppose company were to cone? When are you going to grow up? What’s going to become of you? I look at you and I want to cry! Sometimes you look like you might belong to Mrs. Pritchard!”
“Leave me be,” the child said in a high irritated voice. “Leave me be. Just leave me be. I ain’t you,” and she went into the woods as if she were stalking out an enemy, her head thrust forward and each hand gripped on a gun.
Mrs. Pritchard came over, sour-humored, because she didn’t have anything calamitous to report. “I got the misery in my face today,” she said, holding on to what she could salvage. “Theseyer teeth. They each one feel like an individual boil.”
The child crashed through the woods, making the fallen leaves sound ominous under her feet. The sun had risen a little and was only a white hole like an opening for the wind to escape through in a sky a little darker than itself, and the tops of the trees were black against the glare. “I’m going to get you one by one and beat you black and blue. Line up. LINE UP!” she said and waved one of the pistols at a cluster of long bare-trunked pines, four times her height, as she passed them. She kept moving, muttering and growling to herself and occasionally hitting out with one of the guns at a branch that got in her way. From time to time she stopped to remove the thorn vine that caught in her shirt and she would say, “Leave me be, I told you. Leave me be,” and give it a crack with the pistol and then stalk on.
Presently she sat down on a stump to cool off but she planted both feet carefully and firmly on the ground. She lifted them and put them down several times, grinding them fiercely into the dirt as if she were crushing something under her heels. Suddenly she heard a laugh.
She sat up, prickle-skinned. It came again. She heard the sound of splashing and she stood up, uncertain which way to run. She was not far from where this patch of woods ended and the back pasture began. She eased toward the pasture, careful not to make a sound, and coming suddenly to the edge of it, she saw the three boys, not twenty feet away, washing in the cow trough. Their clothes were piled against the black valise out of reach of the water that flowed over the side of the tank. The large boy was standing up and the small one was trying to climb onto his shoulders. Powell was sitting down looking straight ahead through glasses that were splashed with water. He was not paying any attention to the other two. The trees must have looked like green waterfalls through his wet glasses. The child stood partly hidden behind a pine trunk, the side of her face pressed into the bark.
“I wish I lived here!” the little boy shouted, balancing with his knees clutched around the big one’s head.
“I’m goddam glad I don’t,” the big boy panted, and jumped up to dislodge him.
Powell sat without moving, without seeming to know that the other two were behind him, and looked straight ahead like a ghost sprung upright in his coffin. “If this place was not here any more,” he said, “you would never have to think of it again.”
“Listen,” the big boy said, sitting down quietly in the water with the little one still moored to his shoulders, “it don’t belong to nobody.”
“It’s ours,” the little boy said.
The child behind the tree did not move.
Powell jumped out of the trough and began to run. He ran all the way around the field as if something were atter him and as he passed the tank again, the other two jumped out and raced with him, the sun glinting on their long wet bodies. The big one ran the fastest and was the leader. They dashed around the field twice and finally dropped down by their clothes and lay there with their ribs moving up and down. After a while, the big one said hoarsely, “Do you know what I would do with this place if I had the chance?”
“No, what?” the little boy said and sat up to give him his full attention.
“I’d build a big parking lot on it, or something,” he muttered.
They began to dress. The sun made two white spots an Powell’s glasses and blotted out his eyes. “I know what let’s do,” he said. He took something small from his pocket and showed it to them. For almost a minute they sat looking at what he had til his hand. Then without any more discussion, Powell picked up the suitcase and they got up and moved past the child and entered the woods not ten feet from where she was standing, slightly away from the tree now, with the imprint of the bark embossed red and white on the side of her face.
She watched with a dazed stare as they stopped and collected all the matches they had between them and began to, set the brush on fire. They began to whoop and holler and beat their hands over their mouths and in a few seconds there was a narrow line of fire widening between her and them. While she watched, it reached up from the brush, snatching and biting at the lowest branches of the trees. The wind carried rags of it higher and the boys disappeared shrieking behind it.
She turned and tried to run across the field but her legs were too heavy and she stood there, weighted down with some new unplaced misery that she had never felt before. But finally she began to run.
Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard were in the field behind the barn when Mrs. Cope saw smoke rising from the woods across the pasture. She shrieked and Mrs. Pritchard pointed up the road to where the child came loping heavily, screaming, “Mama, Mama, they’re going to build a parking lot here!”
Mrs. Cope began to scream for the Negroes while Mrs. Pritchard, charged now, ran down the road shouting. Mr. Pritchard came out of the open end of the barn and the two Negroes stopped filling the manure spreader in the lot and started toward Mrs. Cope with their shovels. “Hurry, hurry!” she shouted. “Start throwing dirt on it!” They passed her almost without looking at her and headed off slowly across the field toward the smoke. She ran after them a little way, shrilling, “Hurry, hurry, don’t you see it! Don’t you see it!”
“It’ll be there when we git there,” Culver said and they thrust their shoulders forward a little and went on at the same pace.
The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroes’ ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, list
ening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them.
The Displaced Person (1954)
THE PEACOCK was following Mrs. Shortley up the road to the hill where she meant to stand. Moving one behind the other, they looked like a complete procession. Her arms were folded and as she mounted the prominence, she might have been the giant wife of the countryside, come out at some sign of danger to see what the trouble was. She stood on two tremendous legs, with the grand self-confidence of a mountain, and rose, up narrowing bulges of granite, to two icy blue points of light that pierced forward, surveying everything. She ignored the white afternoon sun which was creeping behind a ragged wall of cloud as if it pretended to be an intruder and cast her gaze down the red clay road that turned off from the highway.
The peacock stopped just behind her, his tail—glittering greengold and blue in the sunlight—lifted just enough so that it would not touch the ground. It flowed out on either side like a floating train and his head on the long blue reedlike neck was drawn back as if his attention were fixed in the distance on something no one else could see.
Mrs. Shortley was watching a black car turn through the gate from the highway. Over by the toolshed, about fifteen feet away, the two Negroes, Astor and Sulk, had stopped work to watch. They were hidden by a mulberry tree but Mrs. Shortley knew they were there.
Mrs. Mcintyre was coming down the steps of her house to meet the car. She had on her largest smile but Mrs. Shortley, even from her distance, could detect a nervous slide in it. These people who were coming were only hired help, like the Shortleys themselves or the Negroes. Yet here was the owner of the place out to welcome them. Here she was, wearing her best clothes and a string of beads, and now bounding forward with her mouth stretched.
The car stopped at the walk just as she did and the priest was the first to get out. He was a long-legged black-suited old man with a white hat on and a collar that he wore backwards, which, Mrs. Shortley knew, was what priests did who wanted to be known as priests. It was this priest who had arranged for these people to come here. He opened the back door of the car and out jumped two children, a boy and a girl, and then, stepping more slowly, a woman in brown, shaped like a peanut. Then the front door opened and out stepped the man, the Displaced Person. He was short and a little swaybacked and wore gold-rimmed spectacles.