The Morning and the Evening (3 page)

It was early morning. There would be no strangers on the place at this hour. To whoever had closed the door, this was home.

“Jud!” she called loudly to her oldest son.

It seemed she heard heavy breathing on the other side of the door. But she could not be sure and told herself afterward it was only imagination.

She drifted into semisleep, and heard the stealthy unsliding of the bolt. Half asleep, half awake, she argued with herself over whether she had heard it or dreamed it, and suddenly she was wide awake knowing she had heard it. She pushed violently with all her weight against the door; unnecessarily, for it came easily open.

Dazed and blinking, she came into the bright sunlight. For a moment she stared about foolishly at the familiar and spring-filled countryside with a feeling that she should not have recognized it.

On the back steps Jake sat in the sun, alternately patting the heads of Jud's two hounds. So Jud is back from hunting, she thought.

She went slowly toward Jake, watching as the hounds, their whole behinds wagging, pushed their noses against his hands. When her shadow overcame him, he looked up. Warmth and recognition came into his eyes. She leaned close and smoothed back his hair. “You can feed them,” she said softly,, and made appropriate gestures so that he understood her. He came alive and went up the back steps for the coarse white cornmeal bread she baked weekly for the dogs; it was kept in a blue enamel pan on the back porch. He broke off large pie-shaped wedges and came back and fed the dogs out of his hands.

She had followed him up the steps. Jud was whistling inside his room, and she went down the hall to it. His boots were on the front porch beside the door; the door was slightly ajar, as if he had just come in that way, from the road and the town. He stood before the mirror of his highboy removing the clothes he had been out in all night.

“Did you get anything?” she said.

He drew his shirt over his head and then from his arms. “Those damn dogs,” he said. “Ran a fox all night as close as from here to the porch and never did catch up to him.”

“Jake's feeding them now,” she said.

“Oh sh——,” he said, the sound in his throat afterward one of disgust.

Anger, cold as a chill, ran through her. But she would not say anything. She was afraid to. She stared, newly aware of his strong arms and the muscles like taut cords across his chest and stomach. The thought of this enormous strength and what he could do with it made her feel sick. It was with wonder she thought back to the time when she had carried him inside her. It seemed impossible that anything as large as he could have ever been a baby. She remembered that the first time she held him, a great bunch of pink roses had been beside the bed. A petal had fallen from one onto the table. Picking it up, she had wrapped his tiny fist completely inside it. She had thought, I always want to remember this, that his fist fit inside a rose petal.

She said, “Will you go to the cellar for potatoes? I thought I saw a snake in it and run back up. I just want about five. Just enough for potato salad at noon.”

Watching his face, she thought it remained as coldly expressionless as always, except, perhaps, for a slight shifting of his eyes away from her.

“Yeah,” he said. “I'll go.” And he made a great show of taking the poker in case he saw the snake.

Before he went under the house he hesitated, and she wondered if he was considering that she might, in turn, lock him up. Would he open both sides of the door, or dare risk leaving one side locked? Curious as she was, she was afraid to go outside and look. Suppose he turned on her out of fear? His fear would be more dangerous than the hate she believed caused the other incident. How many times had he told her, I hate this town, and this place, and Jake!

She did not believe he truly hated her. But she was the reason he had to stay at home. It was as if he had wanted her to know just how much he meant it when he said he hated those things; as if he had had to get back at something, she thought.

She did not remember much more, in detail, of that afternoon almost thirty years ago, except that much later she had had to go onto the porch and tell Jake to leave the dogs and come inside. It had begun to lighten and to drizzle rain.

Jud, she thought, had been such a handsome boy! At the window she watched Jake again. He had stopped the bleeding of his chin against his shirt sleeve. Now he was headed toward the pasture. She would let him go. She was too tired to bring him in and clean him up. Walking away from her, he was thin and slight and angular, where Jud had been massive. She had never seen any resemblance between the two of them until a few nights ago when Jake came home from the picture show. When she got into bed, she had glanced at the window just as he looked in. His face framed by the night behind him had been lit in the center by the lamp indoors. His eyes usually were squinted, their color impossible to see; but staring, they had widened, and she had seen as if for the first time that they were the same clear white-blue color as Jud's. His nose, caught in shadows, had had something to its bridge that reminded her of Jud's handsome aquiline one. Though Jake's looked as if it had been broken, she thought, or pushed aside. It just missed being, not perfect, but all right. Like him, she thought, near tears, like most everything about him.

She wanted to go to the door and call him back from the pasture. Repeatedly she dreamed, until it had become almost real, that Sarah Jane had turned into an enormous pawing bull, with great horns and flame-filled nostrils. And Jake was walking toward her, his hands outstretched to scratch between her ears. When she woke, her nightclothes would always be as wet as if drenched by rain. The feeling would hang on that something dreadful had happened to Jake. And unaccountably she had had the feeling the night he looked in on her after the picture show. She had gotten out of bed and walked to the door and called him. But he had gone. She went back to bed and lay awake, fearful and waiting. Then long afterward she heard in town the starting up of many motors and knew the show had just let out. Why had Jake come home so early? All that time she had been lying awake waiting to find out, without knowing it. She waited the night through for a knock at the door and someone to tell her, but no one ever came. And no one had told her at any time afterward. She comforted herself with the thought that whatever it was, it was not as bad as it could have been.

It was her belief that Jake was as he was as punishment for the one infidelity of her life. It had happened several years before he was born, in the summertime, with the leader of a revival meeting that had come to town for two weeks. She had been drawn to the man from her first sight of him. And the second week of the revival she had realized that just as she had stared at him longingly, distantly, so now night after night he stared at her. The Sunday afternoon before the final meeting that night, she had come to the church as if by prearrangement, though she had no recollection of ever having spoken to him alone. He had been there. Everything was over very quickly. But it had been the surprise and delight of her life to find herself the woman she had been in that instant. She would never be the same again; she knew that. She had walked out of the church that afternoon with a great burden of guilt upon her, but not regret; she had learned too much. She had wanted to turn around and nod to him as he stood at the window watching her; but she had thought, If I do, I'll see he's just a man. And the memory was as if she had been in touch with God Himself, or been brushed with gold by angel's wings.

When Jake was born some years later, it was out of this greater measure of love that she bore him for her husband, Cecil, and out of it that she loved them both. But before Jake was a year old, Cecil died; he came from a line of people who did not live past sixty, and she had not expected him to. Still, it was a great shock the day he walked through the front gate and dropped dead just short of his fiftieth birthday. Afterward when she thought of their life together, she thought it had been all right. Their marriage had fallen early into a pattern from which it seldom deviated. When it was daylight, they had gotten up; when it was dark, they had gone to bed. The hours between, they worked the farm. Their lives had been exactly like those of the whole community except for slight variations: people were born, died, took sick and got married at different times. A few met unexpected accidents. One young couple even got a divorce, and once Miss Alma, Miss Rubye Brown, Selma Murphy and some others had taken a bus tour to Williamsburg and New York City; they said another summer they would go out West, to San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Seattle and Lake Louise, but they never did. Sometimes she felt only her own life was any different, and it was Jake that made it so.

After Cecil's death, she did the farm work with only Jud's help; he was then eleven, ten years older than Jake. At first she put down to this difference in age Jud's behavior to Jake. She thought it was normal that he be jealous and resentful, but what was not normal was his scornful laughter. Whatever Jake did, Jud laughed.

Jake had walked late and was slow about everything, but she excused away even his not learning to talk. The one thing finally she could not excuse away was what she had seen this morning: his imperviousness to hurt. If he fell, he did not cry. Whatever his cut, scratch, bruise, however much blood he shed, he seemed unaware of it. Eventually, when it was confirmed that something was wrong with him, she believed Jud had known it all along, that he had some instinct peculiar to animals and children alike, sensed what was weaker, imperfect, unable to escape him and was, therefore, his prey. She believed also that Jake's inability to feel hurt was God's compensation for what else He had done.

One day after she had been sick for a long time, Jake's inabilities were definitely established. A Negro, Lou, had been living in to do the work. She had not said a word about Jake, but the mother had seen her watching him and the words right ready on Lou's lips to confirm any suspicions the mother might voice. Then it was her first day out of bed. Impatient with her long idleness, she had been in the kitchen rolling out dough for the noon biscuits when she heard Lou come in behind her and stand. Without turning, she said, “You want something, Lou?”

“He fallen off the bed again. Bad, this time,” Lou said, softly.

After a moment, she said, “Did he cry?”

“No'm,” Lou said.

She had dampened the dough and rolled it over the pin again securely before she left it. Afterward, wondering why she had taken that time, she thought it was that she had wanted so much for something to go right.

She found him lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, blood gushing like a small fountain out of his head where he had struck the iron bed post in falling. They had had to carry him to the doctor that time; then there was no more room for doubt.

The sins of the parents
. The words haunted her over and over in the car going home. When she was alone she cried, But why not me? why wasn't I crippled or maimed or made to lose my senses?

She considered saying it was the blow on the head that made him the way he was. But she remembered Lou's knowing and compassionate looks and knew that she could not. She remembered the looks of others that she would not acknowledge before and now had to, and knew that she could not. “Just don't let 'em pity me,” she said.

“Jesus H. God!” Jud had said. “First, I got to be born in this little town, to this stinking farm, and now this!”

He had pointed to the hurt child huddled like a heap of old rags, bandaged now and unmoving, lying on the farthest reaches of the bed, against the wall.

Looking at Jud's face, she had thought, It ain't just that he's a grown man at fourteen. It's that he's a bitter old one.

But she said only, “Don't use His name that way.”

To her annoyance she found that now she spied on Jud. She watched to see how he treated the littlest chicks in the brood and the runt of his bitch's litter. He showed no distaste, however, even for a rooster that developed a gigantic and unsightly goiter. She saw him once step over a bug crossing the road. He drowned a kitten born with only two feet, but that was merciful, she thought.

She did her best about Jake: kept him clean, trained him as much as he could be trained and taught him as much as he could learn. When he was older, she let him go about as freely as she would have any child.

One day Jud came home from town, embarrassed, yelling, “Keep that bastard home!”

“He ain't no bastard,” she said.

“All right—idiot!” he said: a word that hurt her worse, and she knew he knew it.

Afterward whenever he spoke of Jake he would say, “That blithering, slobbering …”

And before he could finish, she would cry, “Hush! Oh my God, hush!”

“Well, keep him home then,” he would say.

“But why?” she said finally. “Why? He ain't some dumb animal to be penned up.”

“Oh?” he had said. “Ain't he?”

That time she said, “What is it you want, Jud?”

“To go,” he said, simply. “Just to go. To get as far as I can away from here and this little town and him. Woman, I want to see something.”

Cecil would have told him not to holler at his momma, she thought. Aloud, she had said, “Well, go.”

“Oh, Ma,” he had said. “I ain't just plumb rotten. How can I just go off and leave you with nobody?”

“I got somebody,” she said.

“Oh sh——,” he said.

She did not want him to go. At night she lay awake asking herself, How can I keep him here? How much longer is he going to stay?

In the room next to hers she would sometimes hear a whimper in sleep from the mute child. In winter she would lie awake listening to his troubled adenoidal breathing; he always had a cold. She would strain toward any noise in the other part of the house, always imagining Jud creeping from one of the low windows of the house with all his possessions. If an acorn or a pecan fell with a crack to the ground she was sure it was his heavy feet treading it. Winter wind rattling the panes sent her bolt upright in bed listening for the stealthy opening of the window afterward. Mornings when she woke and heard Jud coughing or spitting or sometimes whistling in his room, she was glad.