A Gathering of Old Men (22 page)

He stopped again, looking across the room at the people.

“Clatoo is right, I want y’all to go home.” His voice was getting hoarse again, and he had to stop and clear his throat. His lips moved, but nothing came out till he cleared his throat again. “Go home, Johnny Paul,” he said. He looked at Johnny Paul a good two or three seconds; then he looked at somebody else. He would call that person’s name, look at him awhile, then turn to somebody else. “Go home, Dirty Red. Aunt Jude and Unc François happy tonight.” Then to somebody else for two or three seconds. “Go home, Rufe. Go home, Yank, Jacob, Mat, Clabber—y’all go home. You Bing and Ding, go back to that bayou.”

After looking across the room at everybody, he turned back to Clatoo standing at the other end of the firehalf.

“Do what you can with all this old junk around here,” he said. “If the people want it, give it to them. If they don’t,
throw it away. I’m tired, like all y’all must be tired. And the law done waited long enough.”

We all looked at him, but nobody moved.

Then Charlie spoke from back in the kitchen. “You don’t have to go nowhere, Parrain.”

We all turned. Charlie had been standing back there in the dark. Then he came to the front. He was so big, so tall, he had to duck his head to come through that middle door. He was taller than any man in that room and bigger than any man in that room, and we all had to look up to him. He had on blue denims, the shirt hanging out his pants. He had been running, and he had laid down on the ground. I could smell the sweat, the field, the swamps in his clothes.

He sat down on the bed.

“One of y’all standing round ain’t doing nothing, go find the law,” he said.

It was dark now
. She sat on the passenger side, and I was in the other seat beside her. I had tried several times to speak to her, but she refused to answer. Mapes came out of the yard and went by the car without saying anything to us. I watched him go farther down the quarters until he had crossed the railroad tracks; then I couldn’t see him anymore.

I looked at Candy sitting over in the other seat.

“Maybe you don’t know it,” I told her. “But after tonight there’s going to be a big change in your life. That old man is free of you now. When he pulled your hands off his arm and went into that room, he was setting both of you free. Do you know what I’m saying? He doesn’t need you to protect him anymore, Candy. He’s an old man, and what little time he’s got left he wants to live it his own way.”

She just sat there all tight-lipped, staring out into the darkness.

“Before I leave here tonight, I want a yes or no to where our relationship is going. If I don’t get any answer at all, I won’t be coming back here anymore.”

She looked at me now.

“You bastard,” she said. “You bastard.”

“That’s possible,” I said. “I wasn’t there. But after tonight …”

She slapped me. It came without warning. I had noticed her face trembling, but I hadn’t expected her to hit me. I raised my hand quickly, but I stopped it in midair. And instead of hitting her back, I rubbed the side of my face.

“Thank you, Ma’am,” I told her. “But I will stick around until Mapes takes him into Bayonne. That’s all I’ll need to end my story.”

Just about then one of the old men from inside the house came out onto the porch and asked for the sheriff. I heard Aunt Glo saying that the sheriff had gone down the quarters. The old man was standing in the light from inside the room. The light threw his shadow across the porch and out into the yard. Everyone else was in darkness.

“Y’all still have a couple more minutes,” I heard Griffin saying. “In case y’all wanta sing, or pray, or something.”

“We’re ready now,” the old man said. It was Gable. I could tell by his quiet, even voice.

“Well, you go’n have to wait awhile,” Griffin said. “Don’t worry. He won’t keep you waiting long.”

Gable came down the steps. He had his gun with him.

“Where you think you going?” Griffin asked him.

Gable didn’t answer him. He came out to the car where Candy and I were sitting.

“Y’all seen which way the sheriff went?” he asked.

“Down there,” I said, nodding toward the field. “Wait, I’ll get him for you.”

While I blinked the lights a couple of times, Candy tried to get some information from Gable about what had gone on inside the house. He shook his head and told her that he was supposed to talk only to the sheriff. After blinking the lights again, I saw Mapes walking back. Gable went toward him, and they stood a moment talking, then came back together.

“Come on inside,” Mapes said to me. “You might as well come along, too,” he said to Candy. “Seems like you did all that work for nothing.”

“What happened?” I asked, getting out of the car.

“Let her tell you,” Mapes said, jerking his head toward Candy.

“I did it,” Candy said. She had gotten out on the other side. “I’ll swear to it in court.”

“And Charlie?” Mapes asked her.

“Charlie?” I said. “Big Charlie?”

“That’s right,” Mapes said. “Big Charlie.”

We went into the yard. Mapes told the women and children they could come inside, too. He went into the room first, then Candy, then me, and the rest followed. The place was stuffy and crowded. Everything about the place said the occupant was an old man, without a woman.

Charlie was sitting on the bed when we came in. Even sitting down, he was nearly as tall as some of the old men standing around him. After we came in, he stood up and pressed his shirttail inside his pants. He was about six seven, he weighed around two hundred and seventy-five pounds, he was jet black, with a round cannonball head and his hair cut to the skin; the whites of his eyes were too brown, his lips looked like pieces of liver. His arms bulged inside the sleeves of his denim shirt, and his torso was as round as a barrel. He and Mapes weighed about the same, but Mapes had twice as much belly. He was the quintessence of what you would picture as the super, big buck nigger.

“I’m a man, Sheriff,” he said. “I’m a man.”

“All right,” Mapes said. “I believe you. Now, I want some of you folks to go back into the kitchen or out on the porch so we can have some room in here.”

The people would not move until Mapes started calling their names individually. When they did step back, it was
only a couple of inches, and soon they were pressing in closer again.

“Say, sport,” Mapes said to Snookum. “How about some more of that ice water?”

“Don’t start till I get back, hear, Charlie?” Snookum said,

“I’m a man, Sheriff,” Charlie said. “I want the world to know I’m a man. I’m a man, Miss Candy. I’m a man, Mr. Lou. I want you to write in your paper I’m a man.”

“I’ll write it, Charlie,” I said, looking up at him. He was three or four inches taller than I, and outweighed me, I’m sure, by at least a hundred pounds.

“I’m a man,” he said. “I want the world to know it. I ain’t Big Charlie, nigger boy, no more, I’m a man. Y’all hear me? A man come back. Not no nigger boy. A nigger boy run and run and run. But a man come back. I’m a man.”

Snookum brought the water jug and a glass. Mapes drank two glasses of water and handed the glass back.

“Thanks, sport,” he said.

“Hand it here,” Charlie told Snookum.

He took the jug and raised it to his mouth, and he didn’t bring it down until it was empty. He handed Snookum the empty jug.

“I’m a man, Sheriff,” he said. “That’s why I come back. I’m a man. Parrain. I’m a man, Parrain.”

Mathu, standing in the corner by the fireplace, nodded his white head.

“You want to tell us about it, Charlie?” Mapes asked him.

“I’ll tell you about it, Sheriff,” Charlie said. He started, then stopped, because something else had suddenly popped in his mind. “Sheriff, I’m a man,” he said to Mapes. “And just like I call you Sheriff, I think I ought to have a handle, too—like Mister. Mr. Biggs.”

“Sure,” Mapes said, nodding. “At this point, anything you say … Mr. Biggs. That goes for the rest of y’all around here,”
Mapes said to us. He was serious, too; he wasn’t winking. He looked back at Charlie. “What about Candy?”

“I call her Miss Candy,” Charlie said. “She can say Mr. Biggs, too.”

Mapes looked back at Candy, who was standing next to Mathu. When she first came into the room, she hesitated a moment to search for him; then she pushed her way through the crowd to where he stood by the fireplace. I was too far away to hear her question, if she asked one at all; and I did not hear Mathu’s answer, if he gave one. I saw only a slight nod of his head.

“Well?” Mapes said to Candy.

She nodded. I don’t think she really understood why Mapes had spoken to her. But that did not matter. What did matter was that Mathu was free. She did not care about anything else.

Mapes turned back to Charlie.

“Tell me about it, Mr. Biggs,” he said. “Start from the beginning, back there in the field.”

“It didn’t start back there in the field, Sheriff,” Charlie said. “It started fifty years ago. No, not fifty; more like forty-four, forty-five years ago. ’cause that was about the first time I run from somebody. I’m fifty now, and I’m sure I musta run when I was no more than five, ’cause I know Parrain was beating me for running when I was six. ’Cause I can remember the first time he beat me for running. You remember the first time you beat me for running, Parrain? That time Ed-de took my ’tato on my way to school?”

Mathu was looking at him as though he was not absolutely sure he was seeing him there. He nodded his head.

“All my life, all my life,” Charlie said. Not to Mapes, not to us, but to himself. “That’s all I ever done, all my life, was run from people. From black, from white; from nigger, from Cajun, both. All my life. Made me do what they wanted me to do, and ’bused me if I did it right, and ’bused me if I did it
wrong—all my life. And I took it. I’m fifty now. Fifty years of ’busing. All my natural-born black life I took the ’busing and never hit back. You tried to make me a man, didn’t you, Parrain? Didn’t you?”

Mathu nodded his head again.

“It didn’t do no good,” Charlie said. “It took fifty years. Half a hundred—and I said I been ’bused enough. He used to ’buse me. No matter if I did twice the work any other man could do, he ’bused me anyhow. I can pick up more than any man I ever met. Give me a good plate of food, and I can work longer than any man I ever met. Pull a saw, swing a axe, stretch wire, cut ditch bank, dig postholes better than any man I ever met. Still he ’bused me. Cussed me for no cause at all. Nigger this, nigger that, for no cause at all. Just to ’buse me. And long as I was Big Charlie, nigger boy, I took it.”

His voice had been mounting. He had been moving about the room, the people pressing back against one another as he came toward them. He took a quarter of the space with him whether he went toward the door, or the window. He was black as tar, his round head and face sweating. I saw his round black sweaty face twitching, then trembling, and he stopped pacing the floor and raised those two big tree limbs up over his head, and, like some overcome preacher behind the pulpit, he cried out: “But they comes a day! They comes a day when a man must be a man. They comes a day!” The two big tree limbs with the big fists like cannonballs shook toward the ceiling, and we watched in awe, in fear, in case he decided to whirl around, or fall. He did neither. He brought his arms down slowly, breathing heavily, while he stared over our heads toward the wall. “They comes a day,” he said to himself, not to us. “They comes a day.”

“And, Mr. Biggs?” Mapes said after a respectful moment of silence.

Charlie looked at him as if he were coming out of a trance. “You said something, Sheriff?”

“What happened out there in the field between you and Beau?” Mapes asked him.

“He cussed me,” Charlie said to Mapes. “I was doing my work good. Cussed me anyhow. I told him he didn’t need to cuss me like that. I told him I was doing my work good. He told me he wouldn’t just cuss me, but he would beat me, too. I told him no, I wasn’t go’n ’low that no more, ’cause I was fifty years old—half a hundred. He told me if I said one more word, he was go’n show me how he treated a half-a-hundred-year-old nigger.” Charlie stopped and looked at Mapes, shaking his head. Beads of sweat popped out of his skull, running in lines down the sides of his face. “You don’t talk to a man like that, Sheriff, not when he reach half a hundred.”

Mapes nodded, agreeing with him. Mapes told the people to give Charlie air. The people moved back an inch, but closed in again.

“Go on,” Mapes said. “Then what?”

“I told him I was quitting,” Charlie said. “I jumped down from the loader. I was coming home. He got down off that tractor and came at me with a stalka cane. I grabbed me one, too. I don’t know why I did it. I had never done nothing like that in my life before. But I did it today. Bent over and got me a stalka cane just like he had. That made him stop for a second, then he started grinning at me. Grinning, just grinning at me. He knowed I wasn’t go’n hit him. That’s what he thought. And he came on me. He caught me twice, once on the shoulder, once in the side. Then I swung back. I caught him side the head, and down he went. I saw his head bleeding, and I thought I had kilt him, and I started running for the quarters. I came here and told Parrain what I had done. While we was standing there talking, I heard the tractor coming up the quarters, and I knowed then I hadn’t kilt him.

But I told Parrain I was go’n run anyhow, ’cause he was go’n beat me now for sure if he caught me. Parrain told me if I run from Beau Boutan he was go’n beat me himself. He told me he was eighty-two, but he was more man than me, and if I run from Beau he was go’n beat me himself.” Charlie looked at Mathu. Mathu nodded. But he wasn’t sure that it was Charlie doing this talking. The rest of the people seemed to feel the same way. Charlie? Charlie fight back? I felt that way, too. But then I hadn’t expected to see all of them here, either. “He stopped that tractor out there and jumped down with that shotgun,” Charlie said to Mapes. “He kept that shotgun with him all the time, on that tractor, or in that pickup truck. He kept it all the time. Parrain told me he had a gun there, too, and he said he rather see me laying there dead than to run from another man when I was fifty years old. Beau was coming in the yard, putting a shell in the gun. Parrain reached and got his gun and pushed it in my hand. I didn’t want take the gun, but I could tell in Parrain’s face if I didn’t, he was go’n stop Beau himself, and then he was go’n stop me, too. I took the gun and swung round, and I told Beau to stop. I told him more than once to stop. He kept on coming toward the garry. He knowed I had never done nothing like that, never even thought about doing nothing like that. But they comes a day, Sheriff, they comes a day when a man got to stand. I don’t know how I did it. But I helt that gun steady as a rock. Not a tremble, not a move, steady as a rock. He kept coming toward the garry. Just grinning and grinning. Said: ‘Nigger, I was go’n have a little fun with you first. Was go’n hunt you like a rabbit, and shoot you when I got tired. But now look like I ain’t go’n waste my time.’ He raised his gun, and I pulled the trigger.”