Two Shades of Morning (13 page)

Aunt Birdie left the room and when she came back she was dressed for bed, carrying a long white flannel gown like the pink one she wore. Her mouth, caved in without her teeth, made her look older; her red hair, brushed straight down her back, made her look young. Without a word, she handed me the gown and toddled off toward the bed while I stripped my wet clothes and stood sniffling with my hind-side warming.

“Come to bed when you get ready,” she said, folding the cover back in two triangles and sliding in on the side by the wall. The gentle creaking of the metal bedsprings filled gaps between the ticking of the fire and the rain and the clock.

I slipped the gown over my head and sat in the rocker again, staring at the fire till I got drowsy. Then I got up and pulled the chain on the overhead bulb and as the white light extinguished, firelight danced on the walls.

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For three days I ate chicken soup in the womb of her cabin, not as a child, but as a woman, a sick woman in need of sanctuary. Aunt Birdie, laying her routine aside, sat next to me in front of a fire we didn’t need, crocheting and rocking and waiting until I was well. The windows fogged over with our breathing and the heat, as the rain pelted the panes, tapping like the outside trying to get in.

The clock ticked, unseen, only time, and time was measured by darkness and light and need. Sometimes I would cry and she wouldn’t see. Her faded red head kept twitching in a satisfied way, as if her crocheting was coming along. Now and then she spat a projectile of of snuff into the fire and the dry odor combined with the chicken soup and old magazines. A horse shoe winked from the embers, grew cold.

If P.W. ever called anybody I don’t know of it. Aunt Birdie may have called him on the sly, but I doubt it. He would know where I was. Besides, nothing bad ever happened to anybody in Little Town. “She gave me a big picture of herself,” I said, on the third day, said it as I were picking up in the middle of a conversation.

“Do you want it?” she asked, rocking without pause.

“No ma’am.”

“Don’t take it then. You don’t have to.” “I know I don’t have to. But I probably will—it’ll look good hanging over my couch.”

I laughed, she laughed. I said, “I figure somebody dumb as me needs a reminder. Some souvenir from a dark alley I’ve walked down.”

She nodded, her heavy jowls lapping on her white Peter-Pan collar. She looked up at the dimestore-framed picture of Uncle Pap on the mantel shelf. He was short and wiry, body cocked from the knees like a spring, grinning childishly, one dull shoe on the bumper of that old car now parked in my yard.

“What ever happened to Candy Block—that girl you told me about?” I asked. I tucked my legs beneath me on the rag rug and turned to look at her.

“She took a lamming dose of rat bait and got shed of herself,” Aunt Birdie said. Her mouth was parted and parched.

The rain stopped and the soft room grew sharper in the splintered sunlight. I looked down at the rag rug made of my growing-

up dresses and thought how it could lead into talking about the dress, my debt, my dissatisfaction—about Sibyl—so many things to pick up and lead off on, as I’d done with the picture. And I figured Aunt Birdie would talk about everything now and be gentle with me. But she was smart: she knew I couldn’t hear with hearing ears before the fullness of my time. She knew I couldn’t know until I did. And I was a crawling baby, pulling up on a chair and taking my first fall. She’d known when I got thick with my neighbor that it would come to no good end.

I stood and kissed her and looked at the clock, at the hands overlapped on two.

* * * * *

Chapter 9

I must have thought I could just waltz into the trailer again and pack my things and go back to Aunt Birdie’s, but it wouldn’t be that simple. Halfway there, I saw P.W.’s truck parked out front and started to turn around. No, I might as well face him and be done with it. I walked on, the sun on the rain-pocked sand a bright and drawing heat.

He was lying on the sofa with his arm over his eyes; he lifted it when I came through the door, his face shallow and wounded. “Too wet to work,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re leaving, right?” His curled fingers twitched. The fingertips were oddly pink and tender-looking.

“Yes,” I said again, sitting on the chair across from him. The cuckoo clock stroked a single gong; I kept my eyes fixed for the fake bird to spring out the shellacked door.

“I’m going in the army anyhow,” he said, sheltering his eyes.

I gasped. “You got drafted!”

“Drafted to Vietnam, I imagine.”

“When?”

“September.”

“September,” I repeated, thinking of the month as when I would leave. “And this is the last of July, first of August.”

“First of August.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

I’m sorry about us, about the war, about Sibyl. Just sorry and there is no way to say it all. “Let’s get something to eat. I’m starving,” I said, which meant we would eat here and sleep here till September.

“Yeah,” he said and didn’t move.

I opened two cans of chicken noodle soup—a cheap brand—and dumped them down the kitchen drain, turning to the refrigerator for bacon and eggs. “Bacon and eggs okay?”

“Fine.”

I thought I heard him crying. About us or the war or Sibyl? Did it matter? We were all warring. Battle to the death, and there will be wars and rumors of wars.

My daddy had fought in World War II, but that was different. No cause to fight for now. From the loins of the World-War veterans had sprung troops of draft-dodgers. Elect Sims used to wear his daddy’s Purple Heart medallion to school, and now he hid out in the flatwoods, bootlegging and dodging the draft. Sallas Altman had moved back in with his folks and set them in rockers before the fire to prove they were old and would perish without him. Sally and Hub had babies, three last count, to keep him home. No one from Little Town joined the throng of formal protesters though. Nobody fled to Canada. If they got caught, they went. Our cemetery near the river sagged with the burden of its World-War dead, boasting epitaphs of honor. There was no honor in Vietnam, only luck.

To keep from looking at one another while we ate at the table, we stared at rectangles of sun making on the floor. Then together, we washed the dishes and picked up our clothes, arranging the cold, closed trailer we would share like roommates.

Later, we got in the truck and passed Sibyl’s house without looking. Strangely, she seemed beside the point now, somebody I’d met in that dark alley before I reached the light. We rode over miles of dirt roads with ditches of gumbo mud. And we talked—not about Sibyl and Robert Dale or the war, but about things we could trust not to move, such as trees and earth, whether slash grew off better than white pines, whether tobacco or corn would grow best in certain types of soil, whether bass or bream might be biting at the Withlacoochee today. And of course we talked about the weather.

Fleecy clouds were driving east like a flock of sheep, gathering in huddles in the west. The kind of evening when you know you have been there before and nothing important has happened: you are waiting and hoping and knowing that whatever comes next will be better or worse, more monumental. Like standing on a cliff and waiting for the wind to blow you over or onto safe ground. And the world is still, in limbo around you, the sun neither setting nor going back to noon. But you are moving at a rabbit’s pace, your mind is, while your spirit droops—can’t catch up with your mind as it chases with the clouds across the sky.

What to say? What to say when it has all been said and it was nothing? Promises broken in the first year. Sibyl dying and me feeling glad that she’d soon be gone. The war beckoning: follow the sun, that bloody blob peeking over the west ridge of trees and water-coloring the woolly clouds. Yes. And it’s just as well. Better than Elect Sims hiding out in the flatwoods. But what if I’d had a baby? When the babies start coming, you’ll be changing diapers, stead of fixing that face, Daddy had said. Who’d also said, You’re nothing but a baby your ownself. Still wet behind the ears.

I brushed the droplets from my temple as I ducked under a rain-

wet maple behind P.W., climbing the river bank. He stopped, looking down at the flowing black water. “Good to see something that’ll run by itself,” he said.

I laughed. “You mean something you don’t have to work on for a change, right?”

“Hell, yeah. That damned bunch of junk we trying to gather tobacco with.”

I started to tell him that maybe his daddy would agree to buy a new tractor next year, but remembered P.W. would be gone. How long? Nobody had told me how long—I had no idea.

“When I was a boy,” he said, “and got hold of some gold paint, I believed anything I painted would turn to real gold.” He laughed, tromping cat-claw briars for me to step over. “Reckon everything was so gray and drab around the old place, I thought a little gold’d make it shine.”

He walked on, parting bushes ahead of me. “Yep, thought I’d be well on my way to being a rich man by now.”

Like Robert Dale, I thought, mad with P.W. because if he could see what was behind the gold paint, he could see how ridiculous it was to expect he’d strike it rich by twenty-one. Mad with Robert Dale for showing him the real gold.

“Listen!” He stopped, holding his breath, and listened with his scrubbed face drawn. On the cusp of manhood.

I thought he was listening to the lazy drone of an airplane trailing the purling black water, but he tilted his head and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Hoo, hoo, hoo!” Mocking an owl in a pine across the river. It called back and he answered, cupping his mouth, then his ear, while the hooting boomeranged. Hoo, hoo, hoo. I cupped my ear to catch the echo. “Will Robert Dale have to go to Vietnam?” I asked as the echo went.

“Ain’t been called yet, best of my knowledge. Cause of his wife’s condition, I imagine.” He walked on around a curlicue of slews.

I wished I were dying, but I didn’t have a pain, except guilt, a twinge in my heart that soon passed. “He’ll have to go later, I guess.”

“His ma and Miss Lettie could move back home, I reckon.” He tromped through palmettos with rustly fans like the dry rattle of diamondbacks.

They won’t. Their house is gone, bulldozed to Bony Branch, I thought, but said, “Probably.”

“Looks like if you got enough pull in the county,” he said, “they let you slide.”

“Don’t know if pull’s what it takes,” I said. “Well,” he said, holding to a gum branch, “ain’t nobody letting me off and me a only youngun on a farm going to hell from this drought.” The burble of a stream trenching rainwater from the high-ground to the river seemed a contradiction.

“It’ll be here when you get back.” I wanted to say, I’ll be here when you get back, but knew I was no longer what mattered, and I wouldn’t be still be here even if I were.

“Can’t never tell,” he said. “Can’t never tell.” He looked off at the sun that wouldn’t set with eyes too wise for twenty-one.

“You told your mama yet?”

“Nope,” he said, flip to keep from crying. “Been putting it off till you got home.”

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He drove west, us no longer discussing weather or war, into the sun that wouldn’t set. Over the clacking river bridge and along the highway flanked by pines that mirrored on brimming ditches of rainwater. Left at the fork from the road into Tallahassee, we passed fields of rippling bitter weed, like tilled clay, where sulfur butterflies flowed south on their terminal journeys. Some tangling like miniature kites on strings. Fields of wilted corn were trying to make a come-back following the useless rain.

As we turned down the lane to the farm, the smell of cured tobacco, cooked and dusty, filled the truck. Two tobacco barns squared off each side of the straight drive through the live oaks, their black tarpaper glistening like pitch on the foreground of parched tobacco patches. Drought-wrung and worm-riddled leaves fanned like wings of buzzards on half-cropped stalks.

The bulky old farmhouse looked empty, a tunnel of hazy sun welling through the open hall to the front. Tobacco strings trellised Morning Glory vines from the edge of the porch to the ceiling, lush green against the papersack-brown of cornstalks in the garden. Tubs of overflowing houseplants linked hand-adzed posts: Hen and Biddies, Wandering Jew, Mother-in-law Tongue. Sagged rockers and a wooden settee faced the dirt yard, where clumped red Calla lilies thrived in a gully of dishwater scum.

P.W. had managed to paint the front and right sides of the house before we got married, and now the white paint puckered like the fungus on the oaks which rendered an odd damp smell to the toasted weeds skirting woods.

Our truck doors slamming—bap bap—annulled the agreement of silence.

“Y’all come on in,” Miss Eular said, stepping light along the hall to the porch. Her coarse gray hair was wound on a rat tail, like a link of sausage, her face withered and grained with more than age and less than time. A pair of black-framed glasses rested on her pinched nose. Dropping her fly flappet to her bony hip, she said, “Umm umm,” as she kissed P.W., and again as she hugged me.

“Rain kept you out the fields today, huh?” she said to him.

“Yes ‘um,” he said, dragging a rocker to a porch post. He sat and propped his crossed feet, rearing back. “Ain’t much use in gathering the rest of that trash.” He stared out at the wet-snuff patch of tobacco. He was always miserable when he went there, but he worked at it.

“Sandlugs looked awright,” she said, fanning and standing over him.

“Huh,” he said, “sandlugs won’t cover a tenth of what we put out on fertilize.”

I slipped over on the settee for her to sit, but she sidled into a rocker between me and P.W., both of them slightly ahead, and picked up a satisfied rocking rhythm. The rocker sweeps squeaked in tune with the frogs in the cypress swamp north of the yard.

“Where’s Popper?” asked P.W.

“Out yonder checking the barn,” she said; “I been waiting supper on him.” She peered out at the sliding light, hieing the flappet, and paddled her terry slippers on the velvety, shuck-scrubbed planks.

“Earlene,” P.W. said, “did I ever tell you the one about me leading Popper’s old horse up there on the walk and sailing up on him from the backend?”

He had. A dozen times. I didn’t answer—this time was for Miss Eular.

“He used to come up a-hollering, ‘Mommer, come look at this,’“ she said, “and I’d come running in a cold sweat, cause you never could tell what that youngun was up to.”

“Like to have me a horse about that size,” he said, “kind of stocky, not so tall he’d be stumbly in the woods and fall on top of you.”

“Loved a horse better’n anything,” she said. “Good with ‘em too, always was.”

“Bout ruint me,” he said and laughed, his red neck holding his fair head straight, so that he was looking at neither one of us, just out, set to tell her what he’d really come to tell, not old stuff she wanted to hear. Not what he’d told me about sailing on that horse “bass-ackwards and almost busting a nut.”

“I bout as well come on out with it.” He eyed her then.

The rocker stopped. Her face blanched—she’d been expecting bad news, so said the set of her head—and the trill of frogs closed in on the porch like a presage.

“I been called to go in the army,” he said.

“Hush yo mouth!” She covered her own with her hand. Her gray lightless eyes grew horrified and fixed.

“Yes ‘um,” he said. “They ain’t no easy way to tell it.”

“Lord Jesus!” she moaned. “Sweet Jesus, what’re we gone do?”

“Ain’t nothing to do but go,” he said, tipping farther back and shimming his fingers behind his head. “Jesus!” she said. “Sweet Jesus!” She slipped an embroidered handkerchief from her bosom, lifted her glasses and dabbed at the spongy skin under her eyes. She blew her nose and was better. “Well, the Lord’ll take care. And don’t you worry about nothing. Me and your popper’ll take care of things here on the place. Course, you can depend on us to mind out for Earlene too.”

Mind out for Earlene? Never again would I sit along the wall behind their rockers. Never again would I walk two paces behind P.W. And may God strike me dead if I’d ever pick peas in Miss Eular’s patch again. “Miss Eular, if that’s an invitation,” I said, “turn around and ask me. I’m right here.”

Both of them turned with their mouths gaping.

“I can speak for myself, and the fact is I have other plans. P.W. and I...” “We’re busting up,” P.W. finished for me. Eyes on me as if I’d spat in church.

Already ash-gray, Miss Eular looked paralyzed, her glasses propped off her nose with her handkerchief. “I wouldn’t a-thought it of you,” she said to me—to me. “I had all the confidence in the world you’d make P.W. a good wife, in spite of you being so spoiled rotten and uppity.” “Mama, that’ll do,” P.W. said and slammed both feet on the floor. “Let her alone,” I said to him. Then to her, “I thank you, Miss Eular, for at last being honest with me about how you feel. I never liked you either. “ “Earlene!” P.W. rose to his feet, rubbing his neck. “Shit!” he added.

“See how my son’s started talking since he got up with you,” she said. “I won’t have it.”

“He’s said worse, Miss Eular, a lot worse.” Still, I sat there, hands in my lap like I was telling how many quarts of corn I’d put up.

“That’ll do, Earlene,” said P.W. “Get up and let’s go.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Miss Eular said and stood too. “Y’all come on and eat supper. I got a mess of greens and a hoecake of cornbread waiting.” And so she dismissed it all as she might dash a pan of dishwater on the hydrangea bush by the doorsteps to force its blooms from blue to pink.

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