Old Powder Man (6 page)

On the way, Son and Deal passed Mr. De Witt. For the hundredth time, Son listened to Deal say the reason Mr. De Witt rode that big white horse was because of old Mister Jeff riding Dixie Belle. They went on through Niggertown, between the rows of little houses that were all the same, with a privy in the back. Son, still restless, did not want to hear about Dixie Belle again. But Deal told again how when the horse died, he and Mister Jeff had eased her way on out, how she had shuddered her way out of life as she shuddered when she had eaten her full of oats. Son only half-listened and Deal told how that was the first time he had ever seen a white man cry, how he and Mister Jeff had spent the night, let dawn find them there, crying and talking about the horse, times they remembered this with Dixie Belle and that. Mister Jeff had said it was his time next and Deal had said, When the roll is called, ain't you afred to go? Mister Jeff had said, No. For, then I will know what's on the other side.

As Son and Deal reached the house, Pearl came to the door. She had been straightening her hair and it glistened as if full of raindrops, just new. Inside, her jar of pomade was the brightest thing in the room: Miss Peacock: on the label was a tailspread bird, gaudy blue green gold. Excited, Pearl made Deal go right to bed. But before Son could leave, Deal had looked up from his pillow to continue his story: Mister Jeff had stood up on his old man's thin shaky legs. A rooster crowed and dawn had come. There was a musky, dark smell in the barn; the horse lay on her great side as they had never seen her, still, and flies had already begun to gather. The other horses stood silent in their stalls, their heads hung, as if mourning too. Then Deal had found courage to ask the question always on his mind: Mister Jeff, when I get to heaven, will I be white?

Son had moved toward the door; but he asked, as always, “What'd the old man say then?”

“If I wanted to be,” Deal said.

The knowledge had comforted Deal through life; he was not afraid to die. Son knew the old man wanted to teach him not to fear the hereafter either; but Son never thought about dying. In this room, caught up with old gone sorry things, he felt more than ever his life was just beginning. He said, “Well, take care, old man. I got to hep Poppa.”

Pearl opened the door and shooed away a porchful of chickens. “We both too old to be fooling with chickens,” she said. “How else you going to eat? Mister De Witt has things higher at that comm'ssary than they are in Marystown.”

Son shrugged and was sorry, knowing she was right; but he wanted to get away from people being poor: something he was always surrounded by. He said, “I'll be seeing you.”

Pearl said, “Tell Old Miss and Miss Lillian hello.”

Son went away, neither answering nor looking back. All the way down the hill, passing again between the identical little houses, he remembered the dark eyes watching him. Callous and young and knowing he was too, he put them from his mind. Ever since he had been in Mill's Landing he had heard about Old Deal's life. Now, he wanted to concentrate on his own.

When steam obscured the train's window and Son and Lillian could not see Cally, she could still see them. Their images remained in her mind all the way to Delton. She was glad a nice girl had married Son; there was a roughness about him Cally did not understand at all. But she had not wanted him to marry so young. Why did he keep making her mistakes when she had tried so hard to keep him from making just those mistakes? It was the curse of motherhood, she believed; it was what kept the tight hard lines she knew perfectly well were there about her mouth, made the wrinkles in her forehead, kept her awake at night. Thinking of insomnia, Cally added to her shopping list a large supply of aspirin.

In Delton, she hurried through the station smelling in its various dark corners like urine, and took a street car to the doctor's. She told how she felt, dizzy upon arising, better after hot water and lemon juice, was going full strength by noon but had a decided letdown after that. The gall bladder draining was postponed, new medicine prescribed, more visits appointed, and Cally left happy. She rode another street car through weed-filled countryside to the end of the line and got off. All around as far as she could see, land was divided by strings and stobs into squares; in their midst was a wooden hut out of which smoke came. She went toward it on narrow planks, balancing one foot before the other. A man, coming out to meet her, said, “Good afternoon, Missus.”

“Afternoon. Mr. Bianco?”

“That's right. Careful.” With a strong square hand, he caught her elbow as she stumbled. Cally held toward him a newspaper taken from her shopping bag. “I saw your ad about the houses you're building for only a small down payment.”

“All over here, there,” Mr. Bianco said, taking a cigar from his mouth. He pointed and the lit end glowed and darkened, circumscribing air. “You pick which lot you want. I build the house. The road will run along here.” Having stepped off the planks, they walked along a swath cut through the field and stood where Mr. Bianco said a sidewalk would be, looking up and down at two rows of foundations. Mr. Bianco told which plots, all one-fourth of an acre, were already sold and which of those left he thought most desirable. If you were going to use the street car line, why build at the other end of the block?

Cally saw the logic in that. She did not want Henry walking any farther than necessary, having noticed a certain slowing down in him. Yet you did not want to be too close, she said, to hear the noise, or have folks taking a short cut over your property.

Mr. Bianco saw the sense in that and sized Cally up as a practical woman, with a level head.

She asked about the occupants of the houses he had sold. Not having small children, she did not want to plop herself in the midst of too many.

Mr. Bianco took out a list on yellow paper and with a contractor's loving eyes looked up and down the street, describing the people. In one house was a Baptist minister and his wife, older, quiet people. The ends of Mr. Bianco's heavy, muddy boots turned straight up into the air; Cally wondered if his toes went with them. Perhaps his stomach balanced him, sitting over his toes, his belt beneath. Under his coat he wore only a thin undershirt; his stomach and chest were covered with hair. When he spoke, a dark gold tooth caught the sun and gleamed.

“What about just this side of the pastor's?” she said.

“Perfect!” He threw out his hands lavishly, delighted.

“We're Methodists but they ought to be nice people. And it's not too far from the street car.”

“Lady, I wish all my customers could know their mind like you. Two or three bedrooms?”

“Two.”

“Brick? A nice red brick. I got a whole car load of new brick.”

“Stucco.”

“Stucco.” He threw his hands higher. It made no difference.

“Yellow,” Cally sighed. “It's going to be the first house we've ever owned. I've always wanted a yellow stucco house. With brown trim.”

“Brown trim.” Mr. Bianco seemed to be making a mental note.

Cally was smiling. “Oh, I can see it. I want a screen porch across the back. Awnings on the windows where the sun comes in. And lots of shrubbery.” Her mind held all together, separate and distinct, in one flash, every house they had ever lived in. They had come along rent free like the one they lived in now, or at a nominal rent because they went with the business. There had been rooms over stores, or houses they rented only because they were nearby. Never had there been money to buy a house they wanted, and she was determined not to die in a rented house. “Well, I'm ready to put down a down payment.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five dollars.”

“Twenty-five dollars!” Mr. Bianco's gold tooth glinted dully a long time before he closed his mouth.

“It's all the money I've got. I've saved it. It's all the money I've got,” Cally said.

“But, lady, how do I know you'll ever get the rest? Where are you going to get the rest?”

“I'll get it. If I miss one payment, you can take the house back. You can put it in the contract. I'll never miss a payment. I'm a cateress and I can work even harder. I plan to take in a boarder too.”

Mr. Bianco threw his cigar to the ground and spit after it, shook his head from side to side a long time, as if the wrath of the Bianco clan, all connected with him in business, had already descended on him, then looked her straight in the eye. “Lady, if you got the nerve to come here with twenty-five dollars and ast me to build you a house, I got the nerve to do it.”

He stuck out his hand, and Cally, having reached into her bag, put the twenty-five dollars, neatly folded, into it.

They returned across the grassy field and signed the necessary papers. Cally went alone over the plank walk to the street car fine, hearing the street car in the distance, whining along the tracks a long way off, a thin, high sound. All around above the vacant fields, the sky seemed far away. The sun, not yet down, glowed behind a bank of clouds, turning them yellow-pink; the glow fell on the earth, touched the ugly empty fields, lit the windows of the little houses in the distance, fell full on her face, and gave her a sense of peace: God was in heaven, it seemed to say, and with a full heart, Cally thanked Him for the house they would have at last.

At Cecilia's school, she consulted the newspaper again, made a telephone call and was driven away as all brilliance left the sky. Through the grey evening, she went with Cecilia's friends along a dingy street where the shops were still open; secondhand clothes strung outside them on clothesline danced in the air like frenzied things as people stopped to stare, and pulled. At a traffic light, a vendor in a sidewalk stand tilted forward in a cane chair to say, “Fresh fruit?” Cally stared past him at a small shop on Main Street, then was driven on between closed cotton warehouses where cotton, laid out on sampling tables, looked, in its amazing whiteness, phosphorescent in the darkened rooms. The car rattled over cobblestone pavement to the crest of the natural bluff on which the city was set. Below, placid and muddy, the Mississippi stretched as far as they could see. As they descended, Cally looked at the waterfront full of colorless barges and tiny boats bobbing like toys; a paddlewheel steamer lit up, looked garish, for here at the foot of the street, beyond the river, the last of the pink and yellow sunset stretched, blindingly. They travelled a road paralleling the river, on one side the waterfront and the failing sunlight, on the other the dark high bluff where night had already come. Feeling tiny, insignificant against the sky's panorama, the great river beneath them, they crossed the bridge, feeling one moment airborne, the next, going again over flat land at the car's top speed between marshy fields that were Arkansas now. Cally looked back with a new feeling of kinship at the city.

Poppa met her at the Mill's Landing train and listened intently, walking her home. She told first news of Cecilia, then of her doctor's visit. He was relieved at first the draining had not taken place; then hearing of the planned future treatments, wished it had; the gall bladder phase might have ended.

When Cally was not home, no one remembered to turn off lights. Approaching, she said, “It looks to me like every light in the place is on.”

“Boss, don't fuss,” Poppa said. “We've got a surprise.”

“So have I,” she said.

They entered the house among a quick exchange of greetings and Poppa let the words go by; but while Cally and Lillian warmed supper, he and Son sat in the living room and the words came back ominously. Poppa wondered why he had not given them more thought. On legs slightly trembling he went to the table, lost in thought, did not even hear Son return grace, had his head still bowed, his eyes closed, until Cally said, “Henry, you can carve the ham.”

He carved, watching the opposite end of the table. “You're hacking,” Cally said.

He tried to focus but his mind dwelt on the other end of the table; at her place Cally had a small, cut-glass decanter full of her blackberry wine. Four small matching glasses beside it reflected like diamonds in the dull-orange light from the ceiling fixture. The bottle with its dark, still wine seemed foreboding, and made Poppa feel melancholy. Having poured the wine, Cally passed the glasses; they sat, their full plates before them, looking at the glasses apprehensively. She served wine only on occasions and what could this one be?

“I bought a house today,” she said.

Poppa jumped as if someone had slapped him on the back, his glass in mid-air; wine splashed out, warm and sticky, dripped over his fingers, one by one, encircling the glass, fell onto the white tablecloth which drank it like a blotter, leaving a shocking stain. Lillian, glad to escape, went to the kitchen for a wet rag and took her time coming back. She washed at the tablecloth almost viciously, until the stain was as gone as possible, and left the towel beneath like some terrible malformation. Poppa, gone white, sat and stared as if the stain were his own blood, drained away; he felt weak and helpless and wiped his fingers with a napkin, but the stickiness would not leave.

“In Delton,” Cally said. Her cheeks took on a becoming redness; even her lips were red and her eyes shone like a young woman's. The orangey light reflected smoothly on her hair, giving it its original color.

“In Delton? What the hell you going to do with a house in Delton?” Son said. The light dealt harshly with him, heightened his face with shadows out of which his eyes stared pale and furious.

“Don't curse at your Mammy,” Poppa said.

Cally said, “We're going to live in it, that's what. If Poppa and I don't get out of this little country place now, we never will. He's got to get a job some place better before he gets too old. I've answered a very fine ad in the Delton paper. The people were ready to take Poppa as soon as I told them all his experience. You don't realize, Henry, you've got a very fine experience. It's a shoe store off Main Street, one of those chain stores selling a good, low-priced shoe. You'll have a big business at that location. Colored and white. Just think, right near Main Street, downtown in Delton.” She drank wine and it seemed to flood her cheeks; they flushed and were redder. “You'll have to go for an interview.”