The Morning and the Evening (20 page)

But they wanted to see him. And some, without knowing it, had arrived expecting to see more than they saw: Wilroy and Mary Margaret driving through town with Jake sitting upright in the back seat. They had come with the same feeling of expectancy with which they drove to Memphis twice a year, in May to the Cotton Carnival parade and again in December to the Christmas parade.

“Is that him!” a little girl cried, and it could have been Santa Claus in the final float of the latter parade, only her mother said, “Hush.”

“Evenin',” several people said, with sheepish grins, when Wilroy drew alongside them to turn off the main road.

The car windows were closed, and Mary Margaret turned a deaf ear and kept her grim face straight ahead. She peeped sideways at Wilroy and saw his mouth corners turned down; his nose had the blanched, tweaked look it always had when he was angry.

Now the road plunged downward so steeply as to make Mary Margaret gasp; then they were out of sight of town, and only the dark tops of trees with a swath between told the townspeople where the car had gone.

They all turned and looked at one another after the car disappeared. Not knowing exactly what they had expected, they did not know whether they had seen it or not. They did not know whether they were disappointed or not.

“Well, what'd you think?”

“How'd you think he looked?”

They turned to one another, questioning. Some said they hadn't seen him well enough; others said he looked exactly the same, and those right next to them said, No, he looked different; he was older-looking, or something. Then there seemed no more to say, and they began to disperse. All they could have agreed on, if anyone had mentioned it, was the silence that had prevailed as he was driven through town. In it they had heard only the church bell, which had been tolling for some time in vain. Now, hearing it again, those who had parked their cars along the road to wait started up their motors and drove off to worship, quite late.

When Wilroy stopped the car before Jake's house, he and Mary Margaret did not have to tell him to get out. He was already trying the door handle when Mary Margaret turned and reached over the back seat and opened the door for him. She would have followed, but Wilroy put out a restraining hand. “Let him go by hisself,” he said. She patted Wilroy's arm, thinking she should have thought of that.

He went at an unaccustomed fast pace and stopped only once to watch a blackbird fly overhead.
Caw caw
it cried while he watched, and he almost put out his hand, but then he did not. He hunched his shoulders and lowered them and went on. His house had never been locked; there was no key. Opening the door, he went inside and closed the door behind him. Mary Margaret and Wilroy sat on until full dark came and a candle was lit indoors. Then they went inside, too.

He was sitting at the table, the candle before him, eating. He was in the act of spreading butter on his bread; his mouth was full and chewing; it ceased, his hands, holding the knife and bread before him, stilled, and his eyes opened in total surprise.

Mary Margaret and Wilroy stood with their rolled-up nightclothes, their toothbrushes inside, feeling as foolish as if they had walked into any stranger's suppertime without knocking. At Mary Margaret's side her handbag hung heavy, full of little glass jars wrapped in tissue paper to protect them and also because they were irrevocably greasy. They contained her going-to-bed creams. Immediately she saw herself choosing them, wrapping them, drying her toothbrush, and she had to laugh, though she did not think the moment warranted it. Beside her she felt Wilroy let go like a punctured balloon, and he laughed too.

Jake, having begun to chew again, looked as if he knew that whatever the moment had been, it had passed. He grinned too, rocking back and forth in his chair in time to his chewing.

Wilroy drew his hand across his mouth and said, “Well, boy, it looks to me like you weren't expectin' no company tonight. What say, Miz Sheaffer?”

“Well, I reckon you're right,” Mary Margaret said; but she felt sad, like a mother unneeded. She glanced around the room at what he had been doing while they were outside. Yesterday she had brought in food and cleaned and arranged the house, and knew everything's place. He had sat on every chair and on the bed; the imprint of his bottom was on the cushions and on the bedspread. He had looked into all the cabinets; the doors stood slightly open. He had gone to the back windows and looked out; she had left the shades half drawn, now they were all the way up. He had put away the few belongings he had; the box in which he had brought them home was empty on the floor beside him.

“Well, I reckon this boy's going to take care of hisself like he's always done,” Wilroy said. He was restless and ready to go since they were not going to stay. His fingers drummed on the doorframe.

“All right,” Mary Margaret said. “We're going.” She crossed the room and put her hand on Jake's shoulder. “Good night, honey. Good night.”

“You come uptown tomorrow, you hear?” Wilroy said. “Town!” His hand made a vague gesture; he could not think how to describe town with it, and Jake seemed not to understand as once he would have. His eyes remained on Wilroy, steady and expressionless. “Town!” Wilroy said. “Town!”

“Wilroy, hush,” Mary Margaret said. “Maybe he's forgotten the word, but he won't forget to come. Bye-bye, now, honey, bye-bye.” She almost bent and kissed the top of his head but did not. She crossed the room and she and Wilroy left, closing the door without looking back. They were glad not to be spending the night, though neither confessed it, even to the other.

“Well, what do you think?” Mary Margaret said when the car was started and they were again on the road. Feeling quite tired, she leaned her head back.

“About what?” Wilroy said.

“Why, about Jake. I mean, do you think he's going to be lonely?”

“Lonely? He'll be uptown tomorrow. I've never known uptown to be lonely, except on Sundays, and I'm not sure about that any more. He spends the better part of his time up there. He'll be all right.”

“Well, he's used to having folks around him all the time now, and there's nobody here to look in on him but us and Loma and Jurldeane, and Lord knows, we all got other things to do too, especially with Christmastime coming. I declare to my soul, it's a shame about Ruth Edna. She'd be the one to spend the time with him.”

Ever since the night Jake ran amuck, the mention of his name or of anything that had happened to him that night threw Ruth Edna off. She would cry and sigh and gulp and tremble. Though, Cotter said, she was nervous as a witch all the time and cried if you asked her what time it was. Did anybody realize what he was having to put up with? People certainly realized it was hard trying to carry on a conversation with her. She never finished one sentence before she started another, so that you could never be sure you were exactly sure you knew what she was talking about. All she could offer as excuse was that she was “blue,” just “blue all the time.”

Do you think it's
possible
, some of the women queried each other, that Ruth Edna's just
now
having the change?

And poor Hattie—with the loss of Ruth Edna's wits she was even more lonely. She had given up completely the idea of marrying Cotter, and that same fateful night when so much else had happened the rooster had died. In the time since, Hattie had worked it around in her mind to being the town's fault. If everyone else had not run that night to see Jake, she would not have; thus, at the crucial moment, she would have been there with a drop of whisky or to reapply his mustard plaster. She had turned to the Bible for succor and prayed alone nightly before the little fire it had taken all her strength to build. Forgive 'em, for they didn't know what they was doing. They had killed him, her only companion.

She had tried to explain it once to Mary Margaret, who had said, “Why, Hattie, I declare. It was a rooster. Only a bantam rooster.”

Passing Hattie's now, seeing her little light far back off the road, Mary Margaret thought of that time and wondered what was the matter with everybody; was everybody losing their faculties?

Why, she had almost run over that bird in the road once, a long time ago. She wondered what in the world Hattie would have thought of her then. She had looked aghast enough just because Mary Margaret said, “After all, it's not like it was a
child
.”

It seemed everybody was acting strange lately. She said as much to Wilroy, but she might as well have been talking to herself. Wilroy was hungry and he was tired of driving; he was not looking for any conversation.

Sighing, Mary Margaret thought she had even felt a lot different herself this past month. She was often depressed too, and she went around with a great feeling of disappointment. She had not been quite sure what the disappointment was about. But now, sighing even more heavily, she admitted that it was just about people, people in general.

Chapter Twelve

It did not snow the following day, and Jake did not come to town. He did not come that whole first week while Jurldeane was there, though she tried to persuade him. He stayed in the house mostly, finally ventured to the porch and then went to the yard and began to feed the chickens, which Wilroy had kept while he was gone and now returned. People said they bet he would come once he was by himself again, but when he had not appeared by Wednesday of the following week, they began going to see him. They took jars full of homemade chicken-and-rice soup and coconut cake, as if they expected to find him in bed, sick. But there he was, up and around, the same as always, except he seemed withdrawn and older and paler. But he'd put a little meat on his bones, hadn't he? they consoled themselves.

Gradually they stopped going, thinking still that he would come to town. But when he did not, they said it was probably just as well. They would have forgotten him really, except that Wilroy and Mary Margaret and Miss Loma did not let them. One of the two women was always approaching another woman to say, Why don't you fix up a little cake or a pot of stew for me to take to Jake? Or Wilroy would point out to a man that something or other he had on was looking a little worn; why didn't he give it to Jake?

With these constant reminders, they would have to remember and would have to ask themselves again, Did we do right? Then, for fear that they had not, they would give Wilroy the shirt off their back, or go home and put the stew meat on to simmer.

Of all the people around, Little T. was probably the only one unaware of Jake's return. He never went to town on Sunday and when cold weather came on seldom left the bottomland at all. He knew what happened to Jake the night after he saw him in the road, and surely as a trap springing, his mind closed over the fact that Ruth Edna had something to do with it. When he returned the following Thursday with the medicine, he had been more sure of it than ever. The woman who came to the screen and took the medicine was not the woman who had given him the money the week before. He would have sworn on his momma's and daddy's graves, both, that her hair had turned white in a week. Before, it had been a gray-and-brown mixture, but that night it stood up around her face wild-looking and white. Perhaps it was a reflection of her face, for that was as white as if she had painted it to be a clown. Her lips were a dark, cold purple, as if stained with Grape-ade, and were narrower and thinner-looking. He handed her the paper sack wordlessly, stepped back and would have made tracks for home, but she said, “Little T., come back soon as you can.”

“Yes 'um,” he said. “Yes 'um.” And he knew if he had met a ghost in the graveyard he would not have been any more miserable than he was confronting Miss Ruth Edna that night.

He had been holed up in the bottomland since then, happy to be alone, happy not to have to tramp to town in the cold and happy not to have had any truck with Miss Ruth Edna since then. But how was he going to get the lure? He was sitting on his porch this early December day, huddled into his old Army jacket, trying to think of a better, also quicker, way. He felt sorry for himself. Didn't a man deserve a little seventy-five-cents' worth of something at Christmastime? There was nobody who was going to give it to him, no Santa Claus in his life. The only person who was going to look after Little T. was Little T.

He was surprised himself at the way his thoughts had persisted all these months, until it seemed now he had to have the lure, no matter what. Even, he had decided, if he had to take the money off somebody. Shoot, to some folks seventy-five cents was nothing. Yet you could not go up and ask them for the money. That was the system, screwy as it was. Life. Phew.

He had been thinking of people he could take the money from, who wouldn't miss it: Miss Loma, Mister Wilroy, anybody who owned a store, and preachers. He believed firmly that all preachers kept their hand in the till. But there was a very good reason he could not rob any of these people: he was scared to.

He had a piece of kindling wood in his hand and he began to whittle. He whittled all morning, and it was long about noon he realized that what he had been whittling was a small gun. He looked at it lying in the flat of his hand. Then he thrust it into his coat pocket and went inside. Standing before the broken piece of glass over his washstand, he said, “Put 'em up. Hand over seventy-five cents.”

He said it over and over in various imitative ways, using voices he had heard on the radio and in the movies. He was firm in his decision not to steal more than he needed for the lure. It made him feel not so guilty. He said it so many times that finally he could hear himself off from himself and he told himself the truth. The whole thing was too silly to think about. Nobody was going to hold up somebody for that little. But just suppose he did. Then, the next thing, he walks into Miss Loma's and plops down that amount for the lure. Everyone would know it was him had done it.