Proud Flesh (11 page)

Yes'm, Hugo said.

Stand right up to him, Mrs. Shumlin said. Not back down an inch. Stick up for his rights. Hear?

Yes'm, Hugo said.

XIII

“Member the time, Lester, Mrs. Edwina made you whup my little brother Mitchie?”

The other men attend, and Prentiss Partloe, with a reminiscent chuckle followed by a sorrowful sigh, clears his throat and says, “We was staying down the hill here on the old Kirby place at the time. My brother Mitchie, as most of you may know, was the last of us—about six years old at the time I'm telling about. Lester was then the youngest of the Renshaw boys, for that was before Ky—I mean, Lester was about the same age.

“Us older Partloe boys wouldn't have nothing to do with our little baby brother, of course, and the older Renshaw boys was always running off and leaving little Lester behind, so the two of them played with one another. It was always Lester that come down to our place, for Mitchie was scared to death of Mrs. Edwina, and with good reason. Them two little devils, they didn't neither of them have no other playmates, and yet all they ever did was to fight. They couldn't be together for five minutes without a scrap, and it was always Mitchie got the best of it, for he was a strapping youngster, big for his age, while Lester—you wouldn't think it now—couldn't hardly look into a standing rubber boot. Mitchie whupped poor little Lester so regular that Mrs. Edwina forbid him ever to come down to our place. That never stopped him for one minute, of course. Every day right after breakfast he would sneak off and come running down, and ten minutes later he would be running back home again, with a black eye or a bloody nose or a lip that looked like a bee had stung it. Halfway up the hill Mrs. Edwina would be waiting for him, and switch him all the rest of the way home.

“Well, on the day I'm telling about, Lester run off and come down, and sure enough, in less time than it takes to tell it, him and Mitchie was at it hammer and tongs. 'Fore long Lester had his tail tucked 'tween his legs and was going up the hill for home. There was Mrs. Edwina about halfway up just waiting for him, and that day it was no switch she had in her hand but Mr. Renshaw's old leather razorstrop. She grabs Lester by the ear and instead of whupping him home she marches him straight back down to our place.

“When Mitchie sees her coming with that strop swinging in her hand and not whupping Lester with it, he scampers into the house howling that Mrs. Renshaw was coming to kill him—as he felt he deserved. Then out of the house comes my mama, hissing like a gander. ‘I hope you ain't aiming to take that strop to e'er child of mine, Edwina Renshaw,' she says. For although she was scared of Mrs. Edwina herself, Mitchie was Mama's favorite of us all—poor boy, dead at twenty-two and far from home in a foreign land, God rest his soul. ‘My Mitchie never starts it,' Mama cries, and in that she was right. For although you got the worst of it, it was you that generally started it, if you remember, Lester. ‘It ain't his fault if my boy always whups him,' cries Mama. ‘If you don't like it then why don't you keep him at home where he belongs? We don't invite him to come down here and get his nose bloody.'

“Mrs. Edwina listens to all this, screwing up a little tighter on Lester's ear all the while, like winding a clock, so that he was bending with it, and standing on one foot, and practically turning a flip, but never letting out a whimper. ‘You hear that?' she says to him. ‘You hear it, sir? Now then ain't you ashamed of yourself?' And she tightens up another turn on that ear. ‘Now then, Mrs. Partloe,' she says, ‘you'll oblige me by bringing out that young world champion of yours. My little man here challenges him. And this time it's going to be different. This time he is going to pin your boy's ears back. Ain't you?' she says, looking down at Lester. ‘Cause if you don't, Mister,' she says, giving her own leg a cut with that strop, ‘then I am going to flay the hide right off of you.'

“‘Pin my Mitchie's ears back?' yelps Mama. ‘That little sugartit?' And she slams into the house and yanks Mitchie out by his ear. ‘Mrs. Renshaw here would like to see how you whup the snot out of her boy all the time,' she says. ‘Show her.' And she gives his ear a twist, and Mrs. Renshaw comes back at her with another twist on Lester's ear, and the two of them stand there like two kids winding up their toys for a race.

“So them two little banty roosters were set on one another. Gentlemen, two boys with their daubers down you never seen the like! If they could just have called off that match they wouldn't ever have had another cross word between them. They circled one another like a pair of gears that won't mesh, and the one looked at his mama and the other looked at his, both pawing the ground and praying not to land a blow nor get one and bawling and whimpering, till at last Mrs. Edwina says, ‘Enough of this Alphonsing and Gastoning. I'm here to see some fight,' and she gives Lester a cut across the calfs of his legs with that strop that raised a welt like a branding iron.

“Well, after that, Mitchie was no match for that boy. Bawling and crying, Lester was on to him like they was two Lesters.

“‘Sick him, Mitch! Sick him!' my mama yells. But poor Mitchie couldn't even find him.

“In short, Lester like to have killed that poor boy that day. It got to be a regular slaughter at the end, but every rime Lester would try to let up and stop the fight Mrs. Edwina would cut him again with that razorstrop, until finally his legs was raw as butcher's meat. But though he could scarcely walk, you never seen such a little pouter pigeon as Lester Renshaw strutting back up that old hill for home. Mitchie come to be a great favorite of your Ma's after that, didn't he, Les? Nobody daren't say a word against Mrs. Edwina whenever Mitchie was around. Not that anybody ever did, you understand. That is just a manner of speaking.”

Now the shadow of the pear tree lies on the far side of the lawn, tied to the base of the tree, like a balloon on a string. Overhead chimneysweeps and barn swallows and scissortailed swifts and one lone bullbat glide and swoop, squeaking like mice. The cows have come up the path, Belle in the lead, shaking her head, tossing the yoke she wears to keep her from jumping fences, and now the six of them stand in the barnlot, lowing softly.

One of the men—it is Odell Grissom—gets to his feet, then others like Odell with no sons left at home to do the evening chores, follow, leaving gaps in the circle, and soon is heard a grinding of starters and the catching of motors and the rattle of springs and truckbeds in both directions along the road.

Clifford gets to his feet—asleep both of them, numb—like a squatting idol come to life. Someone says, “Want me to do it for you? I can do it.” Clifford stares at the man. “You want me to milk? I'll milk for you if you want me to.”

It is his brother Lester. But to Clifford, his mind still half submerged, it is his father as he looked thirty and more years ago when one day down behind the schoolhouse privies he, Clifford, had fought in his father's defense the last fight of his childhood and the first one of his manhood, his faith in his father gone even as he fought to defend him against an accusation which the other boy did not even know he had made. He was twelve, the boy he fought two years older and a head taller; but before they could pry Clifford loose he had knocked out two of his adversary's teeth, and had they been much longer subduing him he would have realized his intention to gouge both the boy's eyes from their sockets. He had lost nonetheless, was losing all the time he was winning, knowing which was why he had fought so furiously. They held him—it took five to do it—while he gasped, “Take it back. Make him take it back or else I'll kill him.”

“He's gone crazy!” the other boy screamed. Blood bubbled from his mouth and trickled down his chin. The teacher was there now and the boy screamed at him, “He's gone out of his mind! He's crazy as a bedbug! Keep him away from me!”

He was beaten like the grown man he had just become—or as near to one as this day was ever to let him become—by the teacher, who laid it on all the harder because of his stubborn refusal to divulge what the other boy had said to provoke him, using a belt as thick as a harness strap, the holes for the buckle tongue raising blisters on his flesh as if he had been peppered with shot, then sent home bearing a note saying he was expelled from school for the remainder of the term. But it was long past midnight and nearly twenty miles away before the search party found him and brought him home. By that time he knew not only that he had fought for a foredoomed cause but that he had been a fool. He was ashamed now of not having known what he had fought to prove untrue. He was a farmboy. He had seen the bull mount the cows, the dogs stuck together for days, and had long known the difference between himself and his sisters; but he had made no connections. By the time they caught him on the road that night he knew—he had known it even as he fought—that his father was guilty of doing as the other boy had unwittingly charged, and that he would never in his life forgive him for doing that to his mother. And when they got home and his father garaged the truck and he stood waiting, not to take the beating he knew was coming but to fight him now with the same heedless fury as he had fought for him when he was a child a lifetime and ten hours ago, and the beating never came, he took this for an admission of guilt. Afterward, for three months, until they dismissed him as unteachable, he would sit beside his father on the truck seat each morning and afternoon going the six miles to and from school in the neighboring settlement, pretending to be somewhere else, speaking if spoken to, in monosyllables. He knew all there was to know then, so he thought. He had not noticed what must have been evident to everyone else until his mother told him to expect a new little brother or sister. He had hated that child—Gladys it was—for years. Within two years he had proved to himself for the first of many times the bestiality of his own sex and the woman's lack of enjoyment in the act. When, years later, his mother gave birth to his youngest brother, he had not once taken his eyes off his father as they sat beneath the pear tree all the long while that she was in labor. It was a long and difficult delivery and through it all Clifford had not eaten, he had not stirred, he had not opened his mouth. When it was over and word came down from the house that Ma was out of danger Clifford said to his father, “If she had died I would have killed you. Now leave her alone. Don't ever go near her again. She's taken all of that off of you she should have to.”

The presence in the kitchen now of the neighbor women disconcerted Clifford. Methodical as a clock in doing his few chores, he was thrown off by the least disarrangement in his narrow familiar world. Under their collective gaze he reddened and his tongue seemed to grow too big for his mouth. He found the milk pail and the wash pail but could not remember where he had last put the rag with which he washed the cows' udders. He filled the wash pail with hot water, then realized he had forgotten to put in the disinfectant powder. He got as far as the door, then remembered the funnel, went back for it, was almost to the door again when he had to turn back for the strainer.

In the barn the cows stood each at her stanchion, snuffling, licking their slimy muzzles, scraping up the crumbs of their morning's feed with tongues as rough as rasps. Milk dripped to the floor from their ripe expectant teats; the air was heavy with the chalky sweet smell of it. In the shafts of sunlight from the windows, dust motes filtered endlessly. When he had closed and locked the stanchions around their necks Clifford fed the cows. Each received first a scoop of crushed cottonseed hulls. On top of that a scoop each of bran. Then half a scoop each of cottonseed meal, dense, delicious-smelling, yellow as granulated gold.

From the steaming bucket Clifford took the rag and washed the first cow's udder. She, Daisy, had recently freshened, was swollen with milk. The touch of the hot water quickened the drip from her teats into the puddle on the floor beneath her. Drawing up the stool Clifford grasped her forward teats and commenced to knead. The first milk struck the bottom of the pail with a noise like a bullet. As the pail filled, the sound deepened, the twin streams, solid and uninterrupted, slicing through the foam, coming with such force as to open a hole to the bottom even when the pail was nearly full.

At the barn door Mrs. Shumlin stiffened her back and primed herself with wind, filling her lungs like a bellows, hoisted her battle ensign—the tuft of Trixie's tail—and stepped inside just in time to see Clifford Renshaw pause in his milking, slump on his stool and bury his forehead in the hollow of Daisy's flank. Daisy stopped munching and looked around and mooed inquiringly. “Ma is sick, Daisy,” said Clifford. “Real sick.” The foam on the milk in the pail made, in settling, a faint fizz. “What will become of poor me?” asked Clifford. Mrs. Shumlin hid Trixie's tail behind her and, still holding her breath, tiptoed backwards out of the barn.

When Mrs. Shumlin let go of her breath it went out of her as though she had been punctured, and left her deflated. She would get no compensation from the Renshaws for the loss of her cow. Today all roads, all lanes, belonged to them. The world would not only extenuate, it would applaud Lester Renshaw's endangering himself and everybody and everything else along the way in his haste to get home to the side of his dying mother. Trixie's owner would be expected to feel honored in having been chosen to contribute her cow for a sacrifice upon the altar of reckless Renshaw filial devotion. A longtime neighbor of the Renshaws, and a mother herself, Mrs. Shumlin would have felt that way about it too if the cow had been anybody else's. All she could do was congratulate herself on having been spared committing a breach of etiquette. Had Clifford Renshaw spoken a moment sooner she would have missed it, a moment later and she herself would have spoken.

A sly look spread over Mrs. Shumlin's face. She had thought of another way to get herself another cow: Hugo. This sly look lasted only a moment; it was overlaid, as with a second coat of paint, by a slyer look. Mrs. Shumlin had thought of a way to get herself much more than just another cow. All this took only an instant, yet in that instant Mrs. Shumlin's life changed, and she looked past her immediate surroundings like a person focusing upon a distant prospect In that instant she had foreseen and solved all the many problems to arise from the change she was about to make in her life. Mrs. Shumlin faced about and strode to the barn as if she owned it.