Two Shades of Morning (11 page)

Robert Dale dropped to his knees, molding a grave between two others, greedily raking sand with his arms from the piles each side. Somebody handed him a pair of black boots and he punched the boot tops, soles up, in the foot of the mound. Somebody else passed a tobacco pipe for Robert Dale to stab into the head of the grave. Emmett Allen’s cap, snatched from his thatch of wild hair, was placed above it. I eased forward and set a cracked vase of dead flowers before the cap.

Still kneeling, Robert Dale leveled the sand on the sidewalk at the foot of the grave, and like a child, he began writing with a stick: “1961, Emmett Allen.”

Stepping back from the dying pandemonium to look at the line of fresh graves, my eyes smarting from the smoke, I thought about what Aunt Birdie had said about death being like the sun, too strong to look at.

I was doing the impossible with Sybil.

PART THREE

* * * * *

Chapter 8

When I saw trucks with trailers pull up to the barn and the horses led out and hauled away, I didn’t think it was the end of Sibyl; I thought it was the beginning of a new phase. It was. For both of us.

Everything went that was accessory to Sharpe’s ranch, except the barn. The corral was leveled and the hoof-spade dirt sprigged with centipede, which had to be irrigated because of that dry July. From the corral, sloping to Bony Branch, a woods plot was cleared of myrtle and gallberries, leaving a few scrub-oaks and pines importantly encased in wooden frames.

Punk, who was back at work for Sibyl after a few weeks off in the gum woods, hauled off load after load of burned rubble. At first, he acted perky and interested, sorting through charred pots, blasted jars and splintered mirrors to take home with him, but as Sibyl came out to boss him, he soon took on his old cowering pose. Dressed in a white voile dress and a straw hat with a broad brim, trimmed in lavender ribbon, she looked like a model in a Victorian magazine. Four carpenters came and built a latticed gazebo on the banks of the unclogged branch, and over the stream of surly black water they put up an arched footbridge that led into the ferny woods. After painting the bridge and the gazebo white, they painted the house a wintry gray, two coats to cover the red. (Miss Louise called me and asked if I could tell from where I was if that was gray paint or shadows creeping up the sides of Sibyl’s house. I said it was paint. She said Lavenia bet her a nickel it was shadows, thanks.)

White shutters accented the windows, with a new window added, a spacious bay on the front that gave the blocky shell house more character. The barn, which I’d guessed would stay, was painted gray too, then landscaped with boxwoods. The inside of the barn, after all traces of manure and hay had been shoveled into trucks, was as empty as my imagination.

I only watched as the contents of the house were scooped out and refilled with traditional furniture and the walls washed down with tones of yellow and ivory. The carport became a sunroom with white wicker furniture, card tables and books. Lots of books, many leather bound, a bouquet of book mold replacing the odor of engine oil. Inset mahogany bookshelves lined the west wall, beyond which another carport had been built as a port for Sibyl’s new silver Thunderbird.

After she had given orders to the carpenters and the furniture companies, she went away to her mother’s in Orlando, leaving Robert Dale and Mae in charge. Mae now wore starched white uniforms—the nurse kind—which made her look stiff and formal. As the old went out and the new came in, she would stand and wag her head. Nothing surprised me.

P.W. and I started sleeping together again, but we no longer talked just to be talking. We talked about bills and crops and rushed together hungrily and came away satisfied, then went our separate ways, him to fields to gather what was left of his drought-stricken tobacco, and me to tending our tiny trailer. Sometimes I really felt that P.W. tried to love me—tried too hard. I couldn’t go back to Mama’s and Daddy’s—at least I didn’t want to—and be their little girl again, and staying with P.W., the way we were, made me miserable, like having a toothpick wedged between my teeth. I learned patience then, praying Sibyl’s grip would soon let go.

But when she got home a few weeks later, everything started again. She was predictably friendly, happy with her new Orlando wardrobe and had a fresh grasp on acting brave. She’d bought a new camera and Robert Dale used up rolls of film on her wandering the banks of Bony Branch or sitting inside the gazebo, pensively gazing off at the summer-green woods. P.W. sat with her sometimes late in the evenings before he came home, and I could see them from my window drinking from tall glasses in the shade of the gazebo, their latticed faces still and sad, like he was waiting with her for death to come galloping through the moss-swaged oaks.

Often, she strolled alone over the footbridge and into the woods in her lovely silk dresses and straw hats with matching ribbons. And sometimes the other boys, the basketball players, would walk with her too. She would take off her hat, hold it before her and turn it by the brim, the way women do in the movies. The boys, not laughing when she laughed, tipped me off to her making light of her own dying.

She was interesting to watch then, and I wondered what kind of impression she would have made on me if I’d never met her. I seldom went over there anymore, but I didn’t like her any better from a distance. I was still stinging from the last time. I gained strength though from that new perspective, looking out at her in her fantasy world, but it shocked me to realize that the one thing that kept me put was believing she would soon be gone. Finally, I knew she would die; she was too pale to last, too extinguished and feeble, her feebleness disguised as an attitude of leisure. A look that worked well for her.

She said she wanted Miss Nona to have her books when she was gone—Miss Nona was the one who had given Sibyl a list of what to buy. She wouldn’t leave them to the library of course, because the State might not respond with proper personal and prompt thanks and salve her ego. I doubted whether she had ever even read a book, except maybe some condensed version on antiques. She didn’t need books for adventure or escape.

For some reason the books caused me to wonder about Sibyl’s past. She made frequent trips to Orlando, always had when life lulled at home, so I supposed she was close to her family. But when old portraits of ancestors began facing each other across her living room, I didn’t believe they were kin. I figured she’d picked them up in art galleries or bought them from estate sales, which she went to all over Georgia and Florida. The portraits were too grand, the faces too aristocratic. They didn’t mesh with Sibyl’s showy manners and blunt speech. Those ancestors were of a class who would have choked before they’d have spoken without considering what they said. Sibyl simply lacked their aristocratic bearing: the tilt of her chin was too practiced; theirs was as natural as their fine, tipped noses. There was no resemblance to this father and mother and grandparents, two whole sets, all watching Sibyl’s daily whims from their vantage points on the ivory walls.

Where did her money come from? I no longer worried that Robert Dale was living above his means, getting loans and such. I began to suspect that Sibyl was a crook. She was always so public and yet so private about those out-of-town trips.

During that phase, she seemed to be trying to lure me back, and although I went by once in a while, I never really encouraged her. I didn’t know why she wanted me there, because I was barely civil when I went and never bragged on any her new things.

Then she gave me a gift, the most useless and spiteful gift that can be given by someone you hate.

P.W. and I had again been summoned (the word invited won’t do) to go out to dinner. Mae came and told me and I told her to tell Miss Sibyl that I said no, but thanks. Mae brightened, waiting at the door. “Yas ‘um, sho will.” And off she trotted to tell, glad to be of service. I didn’t trust her either.

The phone rang, just as I’d expected, and I waited for it to stop. I’d folded up bed sheets before they were good dry and a line of tiny black ants were trailing along the folds. The phone still rang shrilly. Glancing at it, I brushed at the ants and slung my hand. What really burned me up was not knowing ants would do that and, as with over-shooting a guess on how many cups of rice would yield enough for two, I’d had to ask Mama what went wrong. The phone was still ringing, even the silence between rings irritating. I had to answer it or leave, so I dropped the sheet and snatched the receiver up to my ear.

“Erlie? What’s wrong?” Sibyl said, her voice as shrill as the ringing still in my head. “What’s right?” I said.

She laughed. “Listen, Mae said you won’t be able to go out to eat with us tonight.”

“Truth is, I have better things to do.”

“Like what?”

“File my nails, watch TV, visit my mother-in-law...”

“Well, that’s funny,” she said. “P.W. said y’all can go. We’re all going to the show to see ‘Gone with the Wind.’“ She waited.

“He must have forgotten about my nails.”

“Listen, I really hope you’ll go. I’ve got something special I want to show you. Well, really, it’s something I bought to leave to you after I’m gone.”

That took the starch out of me. I couldn’t imagine anything she would give me. With all the furnishings and knick-knacks I figured she’d had hauled off to the dump, she’d never offered me a thing. I was curious. I told her we’d go, not because I wanted something from her, but because I wanted to see what she would choose to leave me, and maybe if I got lucky it might help explain what had made me so cold and suspecting. It might explain Sibyl.

#

She insisted that I drive that night and wouldn’t have it any other way. I just had to drive a T-bird, just once, she said.

I drove because P.W. said I couldn’t, that I’d never driven anything but Daddy’s old Buick and his truck. They all laughed, so I took them on the fastest ride I could manage in the rain—the first we’d seen in six weeks.

“You’re gonna get us killed,” Sibyl chortled from the rear seat, as if that would be a lark.

“Slow down, dammit!” P.W. shouted. I was driving ninety, smack-dab into starbursts of rain.

“Earlene,” said Robert Dale in my ear, “how bout letting up on it, honey.”

I slowed to sixty and tried to hold it there, then looked over at P.W. whose eyes were fixed on the highway. “I’m sorry,” I lied. “I was just having a good time; I’ve never driven anything but Daddy’s Buick and your old truck.”

He glared at me and then gazed out at the rain that had come too late to save but maybe half his tobacco crop. Like it or not, he’d have to get a low-interest farmers’ loan to cover the cost of the fertilizer.

Sibyl tapped me on the shoulder. “All right, you two lovebirds, kiss and make up,” she said and sat back, laughing. Everything was funny to her, on the way into Tallahassee. She’d always claimed not to “believe” in wearing perfume, since her early romance with roses, but her heavy musk cologne was stifling.

I lowered the window a little, feeling the spit of rain cold on my shoulder.

Robert Dale said something to Sibyl and her laughter filled the car. They sounded like they were necking, something I’d never seen them do. A scuffle, a rustle, a giggle: Sibyl.

I clung to the trill of frogs in the woods along the highway, terrified of the T-bird. A single twitch of my toe seemed to touch it off reflexively, but I never showed I was afraid, and maybe I was more excited than scared. I held my head high and acted as if I knew my way around. But I welcomed the bright lights of Tallahassee reflected on the black satin streets and got braver when the boys cruising in the next lane starting flirting. Braking at a traffic light, I waved at a boy in a red car, and out of the corner of my eye, watched P.W. puff up, and I thought maybe he was trying too hard to act indifferent.

“Erlie!” Sibyl scolded, laughing as if she admired my spunk.

Never once during that slow, tortuous drive through double lanes of traffic up Main Street did she try to draw attention to herself, and when I realized it I felt fuzzy, swallowed up in the bucket seat. It was so like her to always draw attention to herself, but then it was also like her to be unpredictable. Maybe she thought P.W. would slap me in front of God and everybody stalled in steamy traffic—the windhield was fogging up—and that was why she let me be the star of the show for once. But he didn’t, and I did as I pleased, zipping the window down to talk to the boy in the red car, then zipping it up again just short of promising to stop at Shoney’s to meet him, then shooting off in a battle of gravel. But I wasn’t pleased. I was shaking inside, heartsick and hatesick. I’d never done a daring thing I could recall. If I’d gone anywhere before, it had been with my folks or with P.W. or Robert Dale or both. I wished I’d never met either of them and then Sibyl wouldn’t be like a pack on my back.

Of all things, I parked that silver car parallel in front of Western Sizzling, while Robert Dale and P.W. craned their necks left, right and rear and Sibyl shrieked. I parked it without a scratch, got out and stood, collecting my scattered nerves like jackstones, and set off beside them to the restaurant, a steak house chosen for me because I loved red meat, Sibyl said, even if it did make me fat.

“Thanks,” I said.

She laughed, and it sounded like were great friends, out to party. She hugged me and I tensed, but she kept her arm around my shoulders until we got inside. Then she took on her old commanding attitude, walking ahead through the serving line, ordering the best steaks in the house for all of us. Her lead made me feel awkward and determined, so as we walked toward one of the round tables in the middle of the room, I stepped aside and waited till they got seated, then said, “No, I think we’ll sit over there by the window.” I strolled away, listening to them gathering their silverware to their trays and Sibyl braying. Not mocking laughter, this time, but happy laughter—anything suited her fine, she said; she wasn’t hard to please.

“Let’s eat,” said Robert Dale, sliding into the booth and shaking his head, good-naturedly tolerating us like bad children. I hadn’t noticed until then that he had a new flat-top haircut. His head looked naked and vulnerable, the bald spot on top, almost obscene, a private part of him exposed.

P.W. ate without saying a word. He was hunkered and neckless, either fuming about his parched tobacco or put-out with my new naughtiness. So I stepped up my act, realizing that Robert Dale and Sibyl were allowing me to exercise myself. Earlene’s night, they seemed to agree. I was being allowed to be naughty and that spoiled it. “How old are you, Sibyl?” I asked.

“Why do you ask?” She daintily cut her salad to shreds.

“Just wondering,” I said to leave the subject open.

“Twenty-two.” “Oh, I thought you were older somehow.”

“Why?” She tilted her head curiously.

“You look older, around the eyes.” Another bosh shot.

She stopped cutting and braced her forearms on the table. I thought she was going to throw her fork at me. I wished she would so everything would be out in the open. But she only laughed, the laugh of a parent on the verge of sending a naughty child to bed.