Gone Fishin' (8 page)

‘Dom
axed me t’ax you t’keep Easy here for a night ‘cause
Easy’s sick. Come on up here, Ease, an’ let Miss Dixon
see ya.’

I moved up
to his side, looking as hard at that little old woman as she was at
me.

‘Anyway,’
Mouse continued, ‘Dom has got business down in Jenkins an’
he wanted Easy someplace where he’d be warm. You know he’s
got the grippe an’ that can come to pneumonia in a second.’

‘Don’t
I know it,’ she said.

‘Dom
said that he gonna come get Easy tomorrah if he can please stay in
some ole corner t’night.’

‘Domaque asked you this?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And how am I to know that Domaque asked you this?’

‘Well you know ma’am that Dom an’ me is the best of
friends…’

‘I
know,’ she interrupted, ‘that you are a sinner, Raymond
Alexander, and a bad influence on the ground you trod. I was hoping
that you were gone forever and that that sweet poor chile Domaque was
free of your evil ways.’

‘I’m
just visitin’, ma’am.’

She looked
at him and then at me. ‘Why, this boy could be as bad as you.
How’m I to know?’

She moved
to dose the door but Mouse spoke up again. ‘Ma’am, I’m
not lyin’ to ya. Dom wants Easy t’stay wichyou ‘cause
Easy got the grippe, an’ if you don’t believe me then you
feel his head an’ see if I’m lyin’.’

She looked
suspicious for a minute but then she pushed open the screen door and
came toward me. I moved back a halfstep, out of reflex I guess, but
Mouse grabbed me and made me stand still.

Miss Dixon
was a small white woman with pale hair that was pulled straight back
against her head. She wore a floor-length flat green dress that had
long sleeves and a neckline at the throat. She was very thin but not
brittle-looking like many old white women; she could’ve been
made from solid bone from the way her hard hand felt against my
forehead.

‘Lord, he’s burnin’ up!’

‘I tole you,’ Mouse said.

‘You a friend to Domaque, son?’ she asked me.

The porch beams started shaking gently before my eyes, like leaves on
a breeze.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said.

‘Dom
come over by noon, ma’am,’ Mouse said. He already had a
foot down the stairs.

‘You
tell him to bring Mr. Dickens’ book, Raymond,’ she said
to him. Then to me, ‘Come on inside.’

I turned
to say something to Mouse, but he was going down the stairs with his
back to me. He was whistling and moving fast. I almost called to him
but then a feeling came over me: I wanted Mouse to be far away and I
didn’t care what happened to him or his family; I didn’t
care about weddings or a good time anymore. I just wanted to sleep.

‘What’s your full name, son?’

‘Ezekiel Rawlins, ma’am.’

‘Well come on in ‘fore you burn a hole in my porch.’

The
entrance to her house had three coat racks, six umbrella stands, and
more mirrors and knickknacks on the wall than I could count. There
was a darkwood chair of a different make against each wall and on
either side of the door. It was a small entrance room and so crowded
with furniture that we two could barely fit in it at the same time.

She led me
quickly through to the parlour.

This was a
large room with blue velvet wallpaper from the ivory-carpeted floor
to the cream-colored ceiling. There was a blue sofa, with a matching
chair, and a red love seat with two matching chairs. There was a
yellow couch and a brown one too. Each of them had matching chairs.
The sofas and chairs were so dose together that you couldn’t
sit on them.

There were
the coffee tables: maple, cherry, pine, and mahogany; all of them
stacked with every different kind of tea setting and little china
sculpture that you can imagine. She had bureaus and cabinets, one
behind the other; some of them had glass doors and you could make out
the piles of plates and stacks of teacups.

I looked
at that old woman again - she must’ve been in her late
seventies.

I’d
seen it happen before. The oldest member of the family outlives all
of her husbands and siblings, and even her children sometimes, and
all the belongings of all the families come to her in a big lonely
house. She lives with five houses’ worth of furniture and
dishes, old clothes, and knickknacks.

‘Come
on, Ezekiel, you’re in my charge now.’

The next
room was the music room. There were three upright pianos and
different leather bags in the shapes of guitars, fiddles, and even a
tuba.

‘Go
on, take your clothes off and get in that tub.’ She opened a
door that led to a small washroom. I hesitated a minute but she just
shook her hand back and forth to show how impatient she was and I
went in.

‘You’re
lucky I take my bath on Wednesdays; I just filled the tub,’ she
said, leaving me to my toilet. ‘And I have clothes from my
uncle you can wear, he was ‘bout your size.’

The
washroom smelled of soap. There was a brass sink and a commode and a
large washtub on lion feet. Next to the sink was a table with a giant
clamshell on it. The clamshell was filled with hundreds of little
flowers made from soap. Red, green, and yellow soap, and violet and
blue too. Each one hinted of a different spice but mostly they
smelled like soap.

I took off
my clothes and realised how bad I smelled after the last two days. I
tried to pile them in a corner where the smell wouldn’t be too
offensive in that sweet-smelling room, and then I jumped into the
tub.

‘Ow!
Oh!’ The water was so hot that I nearly jumped up. I thought
she was trying to kill me.

‘Nice
an’ hot, huh, Ezekiel? Secret to a long life is a hot bath
twice a week and no liquor,’ she called through the closed
door.

I got used
to the water after a bit. The heat along with fever made me even more
light-headed and tired. The sun was shining in through the lace
curtains on the window. Miss Dixon - I found out later that Abigail
was her first name - turned on a radio somewhere in the house and it
was playing big-band music. The house was filled with the sound of
scratchy clarinets and pianos. That was the finest living that I had
ever experienced up to that time.

I’d
wake up now and then and look at how my fingers and toes wrinkled in
the water. Finally the water turned cold and I started shivering. So
I got out and put on the green suit Miss Dixon had hung outside the
door.

‘Welllll…
don’t we look so much better,’ she said when I came into
the kitchen. ‘Clean and scrubbed is halfway back to health.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘You hungry, Ezekiel?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Well you just sit down and I’ll give you some stew.’

There was
already a plate on one of the three tables she had in the dinette. I
went to a chair next to that setting but she yelled, ‘Not
there! Sit at one of the other tables.’

I didn’t
know what she meant but I went to the pine table near the back door
and sat down.

‘You
know I cain’t sit at the same table with you, Ezekiel,’
she said as she put a bowl of beef stew in front of me. ‘You
know it’s not proper for white and colored to sit together. I
mean it’d be as much an insult to your people as mine if we
were to forget our place.’

I watched
her go to her separate seat and I thought to myself that she was
crazy but I couldn’t keep my mind on I it because that was the
first food I’d had in almost a whole day. It was good stew too.
I can still remember how it tasted of black pepper and wine.

‘How
do you know Domaque, Ezekiel?’

‘Well,
uh, well I wanted t’learn t’read bettah, an’ Mouse,
I mean Raymond, tole me ‘bout him.’ I was lying but I
wasn’t, not really.

‘Do
you read?’

‘A
little, ma’am. I can sign my name and make the sounds of
letters… I know that a “p” and a “h”
together sound like a “f.” ‘ I thought about
Domaque quoting the Bible and about my father then. My father always
told me that I should learn to read. Maybe it was because I was so
weak but I felt about ready to cry.

‘Reading
is one of the few things that separates us from the animals, Ezekiel.
You’d know all about the man they named you for if you could
read.’

‘Yes,
ma’am.’

‘And
all you have to do is to keep on reading those sounds and asking
Domaque and others about how you read. Maybe you can have someone
read to you. Then you read it to yourself…’ she said and then
she drifted off into a daydream.

We
finished eating and she told me to go find a couch in the parlour to
sleep on and that she’d come out there later to see how I was.
But first she put a brown powder in some tea and gave it to me.

‘Josephine
Marker makes this out to the swamps. She’s a real wonder at flu
powders and the like.’

I was
nervous about drinking any tea that Jo had a hand in making, but I
took it to be polite.

After that
all I remember is laying down on the yellow couch. When I opened my
eyes again it was night.

Miss Dixon
was standing at the open door in a long white dress, and the moon was
shining in on her. There were so many chairs and tables around that
it was like being in an auditorium after a big function when all the
chairs and whatnot are stacked for storage.

‘You
still got a fever, Ezekiel,’ she said out of the open door.
‘But I’ll get some more tea and all you got to do is to
go back to sleep and you’ll be fine.’

‘Thank
you, ma’am, I mean fo’ the sleep, I mean.’ I was
very uncomfortable. I wasn’t used to spending much time with
white people and I knew that colored people are always in danger of
doing the wrong thing when they have to deal with whites. It was fine
in Fifth Ward down in Houston, or in little colored towns like
Pariah, usually, because there weren’t any white people around
for the most part. The only time I had ever spent around white people
was when I was working, and then how I was to act was clear because
whites were always the boss. That was easy because all I ever said
was ‘yes’ and ‘no;’ but mainly Yes.’

‘That’s
all right, Ezekiel.’ She turned from the door and came back to
the brown chair, about three pieces of furniture away from me. The
room was dark except for the moonlight. ‘You know I’m a
good woman if they let me be.’

‘I’m
sure you are, ma’am. You sure been good t’me.’

‘You
think so because you’re not from around here, but if you lived
here you’d be like all the rest of them.’

‘Dom
speaks mighty well on you, ma’am.’ I was wishing that I
could be away from there. Why did she have to talk to me? One wrong
word and I could be in jail or worse.

‘Domaque
and his momma live in the swamp, so they’re different,’
she said.

‘They
sure are diffrent but they still like you.’

Miss Dixon
laughed. It was a nice laugh and she almost seemed like a normal
person to me.

She said,
‘You don’t see, Ezekiel. What I mean is that Domaque and
Josephine don’t mind me because I don’t own the bayou
lands.’

‘Ma’am?’

‘I
own just about everything else. My family owned it at first. The
Dixons, the MacDoughs, and the Lambert family owned all of this way
back. But they married each other and they died or they moved away
and I’m the only one left. Our families had sharecropping and
plantations down this way for more’n a hundred years… Now
it’s all back to the tenants. I don’t even collect rent
but they know that the land is mine.’ She looked over at the
window as if all the people of Pariah were there, looking in. ‘They
know that one day I’m going to die and some strangers are going
to come down and reclaim my property.’

‘Why
cain’t they just buy the land from you?’ I really wanted
to know.

‘The
country people are poor, Ezekiel, they couldn’t get the cash to
buy. But even if they could — this is my land,’ her voice
became hard, ‘for me and mine. I can’t just hand it over
to strangers.’

She was
quiet for a while and I didn’t dare to speak.

Then she
said, ‘I’ll get you some covers and that tea.’

When she’d
given me the blankets and medicine she said good night and went up to
bed.

I was
feeling tired but better and I could think for a while before going
to sleep. I thought about that grasshopper crushed in that jay’s
beak and about Miss Dixon; how she was like a bird too.

A lot of
people might not like how I acted with that white woman. They might
ask: Why didn’t he get mad? or Why would Mouse be breaking his
butt to get money out of a poor farmer when this rich white lady
would be so much of a better target?

Mouse was
just doing what came natural to him. But there’s a reason I
wasn’t angry then, why I’m still not angry and why the
people of Pariah didn’t rise up and kill that woman: It’s
what I call the ‘Sacred Cow Thinking.’

Miss Dixon
lived alone out in a colored community that hated her because she
owned everything, even the roads they walked on. But Miss Dixon, and
every other white person, was, to that colored community, like the
cow is to those Hindus over in India. They’d all starve to
death, let their children starve, before they’d slaughter a
sacred cow. Miss Dixon was our sacred cow. She had money and land and
she could read and go to fine events at the governor’s house.
But most of all she was white and being white was like another step
to heaven…

Killing
her would have been worse than killing our own children; killing her,
or even thinking of it, would be like killing the only dream we had.

The next
morning we had breakfast but I pretended to be sicker than I felt and
lay back down on the yellow couch after we ate.

It was
nice that she took me in but it was strange too. I felt in danger
whenever she looked at me.