Guardian (2 page)

He was taller than she was, and she didn't have to look down at him like she did Ansel. He also wore regular clothes—a shirt, pants, and shoes.

Zeph reminded her of the boys in Atlanta, where her father had had a big church, not a little country church like this one. But something had happened. She didn't know what, but the next thing she knew they were living here where the most exciting thing to happen was a bird shitting on the statue in the square.

She liked Ansel, but seeing him in his overalls and no shirt nor shoes, he was everything she hated about Davis.

What was wrong with wanting a little excitement, something to break the monotony of one hot day after another, something to disrupt the enervating
boredom of seeing the same faces day after day after day?

She sighs deeply. What has she done? Why wasn't life like a blackboard that you could write on, and if you made a mistake, you could take an eraser, wipe the mistake away, and start over?

What was going to happen now? How could she ever look at Ansel again? And Zeph.

She doesn't know what she is more afraid of now, Ansel's hurt or Zeph's anger.

Mary Susan wipes the tears from her face, gets up, and walks slowly through the trees and across the field to the back of the store.

Ansel isn't there.

4.

“Crazy bitch!” Zeph mutters to himself, tasting blood in his mouth as he comes out of the trees. He sees Ansel and the nigger boy sitting behind the store. But when they see him, they get up and hurry inside.

Zeph smiles and chuckles to himself.

He moves his tongue gingerly against the backs of his teeth. It still hurts but not as bad. Zeph continues along the dirt road at the back of the store until he comes to the street.

On the other side is the cemetery. Next to it is the church where Mary Susan's father is the preacher, then the parsonage.

Zeph had thought she would be sitting on the porch with nothing to do. That's why he walked by.

She was certainly very pretty, but he didn't know if he would have wanted her if she hadn't been the preacher's daughter. Well, that and them new titties of hers sticking out like an invitation to a party.

Wouldn't it be something if he got a piece of that!

Just thinking about it made Zeph grin.

Then he remembered what she said she would do
to him, and his lips return to their customary position of barely suppressed rage.

“Goddam bitch!” he mutters again. If he says it enough times, maybe the words will eradicate his humiliation, but he only gets more angry.

He is afraid she will tell Annie Forest, her best friend, and Annie Forest couldn't keep a secret if her life depended on it, and before he knows it, everybody in town will know.

Instead of turning right and going to the center of town, he turns in the opposite direction. A short distance beyond the church he comes to a little bridge that goes over the same creek where Ansel and Willie had been fishing.

Instead of crossing the bridge, Zeph slides down the embankment and walks under it. He takes a pocketknife from his pocket. Then he squats and waits.

He is silent and still except for the fingers of his right hand, which idly caress the folded knife.

He doesn't have to wait long before he sees what he is waiting for.

For someone else, the frog would have been hard to see against the dirt and in the deep shadows beneath
the bridge. But not for Zeph. He has been doing this as long as he can remember.

The frog hops. Then stops. It waits. Detecting no movement, it hops again. Then stops. Waits.

Like a snake, Zeph does not even blink. His fingers cease their idle stroking of the knife. He watches the frog hop closer and closer to him.

The frog is next to his right shoe, but Zeph waits. The frog waits.

The frog's next hop brings it to the space between Zeph's right and left shoes, and with a sudden swiftness that would have surprised everyone who knew him, he grabs the frog just as it is preparing to spring, having not sensed danger.

Zeph holds it so that its legs frantically move back and forth, try to leap but have nothing to push against except air.

While still holding the frog firmly in his left hand, Zeph puts the fingernail of his right thumb into the notch at the end of the knife's blade and flips it open.

He keeps the blade of his knife as sharp as hatred. You never know when you might come upon a snake, a baby bird, a kitten, or a frog.

He puts the frog on the ground, pressing hard
against its back, forcing its legs to splay outward.

With surgical precision he slices off one of the frog's hind legs, then takes away the hand that is holding it down.

Frantically, the frog moves its remaining leg back and forth, back and forth, trying to take a giant leap from a cruelty it did not know existed. Unable to leap, it nonetheless goes through its instinctive kicking motions, but to no avail.

Zeph Davis watches the frog intently, fascinated by the creature's spastic motions, by its desperate efforts to assert the life that is bleeding away.

As he watches the frog, anger starts leaving his body like the blood leaving the frog's.

He doesn't understand why, but any time an anger overtakes him, he has only to use his knife on a creature, and the anger seeps out.

It has been like that since he was little.

Not too many more moments pass before a cold calmness descends on him. The anger is gone.

Without emotion he plunges the knife into the frog's back, pinning it to the ground. The creature shudders and then is still.

Holding the frog to the ground with a finger of his
left hand, Zeph slowly pulls the knife from its body with his right. He goes to the creek and washes the blade in the cold water, then dries it with a few quick swipes on his jeans.

He returns to the now still body of the frog and stares down at it. Already ants are starting to swarm over the carcass.

“Don't forget to say grace.”

He lets out a long slow breath and walks away. He feels better than even after he pleasures himself.

No emotion eats at your soul like shame, that feeling of having violated yourself, of having done something so wrong you can't imagine how to go on living.

Ansel lay in bed that night unable to sleep. It was as hot inside as it was out. He could smell the smudge pots his father had put on the front and back porches in a vain attempt to keep the mosquitoes out of the house.

Neither the heat nor the mosquitoes bother him as much as the memory of Zeph's arm around Mary Susan, as his lips on hers.

Over and over Ansel asks himself: Why didn't I ask Mary Susan what she was doing with a piece of trash like Zeph? His father might own everything and everybody in town, but his son was a piece of trash.

Ansel does not understand why he had not gone to Mary Susan, taken her hand, and led her away.

But what if she wouldn't have let him? What if she had said she wanted to be with Zeph?

Ansel didn't know what he would have done.

He didn't know anything about girls, and especially a girl from someplace big like Atlanta. Other boys were intimidated around her because she was the preacher's daughter. Ansel was scared of her because she was from the big city. What could she possibly see in a short country boy like him?

Whereas Zeph was older, taller, and he had gone places with his father—Nashville, New Orleans, even Atlanta.

Ansel knows what would have happened if Mary Susan had refused to walk away with him. He would have cried.

Zeph and Mary Susan would have laughed at him and told everyone in town that he was a crybaby.

But lying there in the darkness he realized that the humiliation of her rejecting him would not have been as great as the shame he began living with that night.

He was to learn that shame is an emotion that takes up residence in your heart, and its pain does not diminish with time. It only intensifies with each passing year.

1.

Ansel is at the back of the store, filling the wagon with bags of groceries and canned goods. Willie brings the mule over from the field and hitches it to the wagon. They do not speak.

The two are almost finished loading the wagon when Ansel hears a voice from inside the store, hears a voice saying his name, a girl's voice, the voice he knows as well as his own.

He wants to see her, and yet, he never wants to see her again.

“Let's go, Willie,” he says desperately, hurrying toward the wagon seat.

“Ain't that her coming?” Willie asks.

“I don't care. Let's go!”

But he does care. That's why he doesn't want to see her.

“Ansel?” Mary Susan's voice is soft, hesitant, trembling.

Ansel turns and looks at her. She is wearing an orange sundress and, to him, she is more beautiful than he ever dreamed a girl could be. But then he sees Zeph's arm around her, and he remembers the times he tried to put his arm around her and she moved away from his touch, saying, “What kind of girl do you think I am?”

“What do you want?” he asks, his voice harsh with hurt.

“About yesterday,” she begins timidly.

“What about it?”

“It wasn't what it seemed like. I didn't know he was going to do that, put his arm around me. He did it just when he saw you through the trees. I felt bad about all the things he said.”

“What are you doing being around somebody like that?” Ansel asks angrily.

“Like what? Zeph puts on this act to shock people. He likes to pretend he's bad, but he's not.”

She knows what she is saying is not true, knows
she should not be defending Zeph, but Ansel's anger at her combined with her own anger at herself is about to annihilate her sense of her essential goodness, and she is frightened.

“You talk like you just lost your mind. All Zeph wants from you is one thing!”

“And what's that, Mr. Know-It-All?”

“You know. I don't need to say it. Can't you hear how Zeph would brag to everybody about what he did with the preacher's daughter?”

“Your mind is nasty! I wouldn't let him do that to me!”

“I didn't see you move away from him like you do me when I try to put my arm around you. I didn't see you saying no when he kissed you.”

Tears spring to Mary Susan's eyes. She wants to tell Ansel how humiliated she felt with Zeph's arms around her, how she had bit him, how she had gone home and rinsed her mouth out.

She wants to tell him how much she hated Zeph touching her, how much she wants Ansel to forgive her. But Ansel is looking at her with such anger, with such hatred.

If she tells him she is afraid, he will let her feelings
drop into the dust at his feet or swat them away as if they were mosquitoes.

So she lashes out, wanting to hurt Ansel as much as he is hurting her.

“At least Zeph knows how to have fun and make a girl laugh. You're always so serious, Ansel. I get depressed just thinking about you.”

Ansel turns away. “Let's go, Willie.”

Mary Susan watches Ansel climb up to the seat, Willie following reluctantly. She knows she should not have said what she just did, but she doesn't know how to make the words go away.

Willie climbs up and takes the reins, pops them against the mule's rump, and the wagon starts to move.

“Ansel! I'm sorry!” Mary Susan calls out. “I didn't mean what I said. I'm sorry!”

Ansel hears her. He wants to tell Willie to stop the wagon.

“Don't you hear Miss Mary calling you?” Willie asks.

“Mind your own damn business, nig…,” and he stops.

Willie knows what Ansel was going to call him.
He is hurt. He knew better than to let himself start to trust.

Neither boy is old enough to understand that Ansel's stopping himself from uttering the word is more important than the fact that he almost said it.

2.

Esther Davis is a tall, thin, and not very attractive woman, a fact she has no illusions about. Her hair is a dull brown that she put into a bun when she was sixteen and hasn't changed since. Her nose is long and sharp, and her lips are so thin that if a male had ever tried to kiss her, he would not have known where.

She lives in the large house her father built on the town side of the railroad tracks, the house in which she was born.

Her parents sent her to prep school in Massachusetts when she was twelve, and neither they nor she had expected or wanted her to come back. An ugly girl with a sharp mind might have a better chance of finding a career for herself up north. As for a husband, well, no man wanted an ugly wife, especially if she was smarter than he was.

But her father had a stroke the year after she finished Radcliffe and had started teaching French at Boston Latin. Her mother needed her to help care for him.

The stroke had left him paralyzed and unable to speak, which she took as God's punishment of a
man who treated his hunting dogs better than the Negroes whose work had made his father and him wealthy. Given a choice between shooting a deer or a Negro, her father would have been hard-pressed to choose.

She had thought she would stay a year. But near the end of that year, her mother died.

It took him ten miserable years to die, also a sign of God's punishment, but it became hers, too. She had been away from teaching too long. And the colored children on the plantation needed her.

Her brother, Zeph Jr., the new “Cap'n Davis,” didn't want her teaching “my niggers how to write and do figures.” He wanted her out of Davis.

But her father's will left her the house and money enough to live comfortably the rest of her life.

So she stayed to do penance for the deeds of her father, brother, and nephew.

Of the three, Zeph the Third was the worst, and that was saying a lot. She went to the cabins after his “visits,” bringing cotton and salve to help tend the girl he had violated.

She hated her brother and nephew, not only because they were evil but also because their evil was
nonchalant and devoid of passion. A cold evil was a frightening thing.

She did what she could, taking care of the old ones who couldn't tend cotton anymore. The groceries and supplies from Anderson's each week were almost exclusively for the Negroes.

But it was past time for her to go back where she belonged. She missed walking around Harvard Square with her choice of bookstores to enter, missed being able to see the latest movies, go to restaurants, or even something as simple as turning on the radio and being able to find classical music.

But there was one thing she had to do before she left. If she succeeded, she would not go back alone.

3.

Willie pulls the wagon up to the back of the Davis mansion. The back door opens and a young black woman comes out. She is as pretty as Esther Davis is ugly. This is Amanda, Willie's mother.

After helping Willie and Ansel unload the wagon, she asks the boys, “Do you have to hurry back to the store?”

“No, ma'am,” Ansel answers. He knows that he isn't supposed to say “ma'am” to a colored lady, but this is Willie's mother. Willie says “ma'am” to Ansel's mother. Why shouldn't he say “ma'am” to Willie's?

“Miz Davis would like to talk to the two of you.”

Ansel and Willie exchange worried glances. What could she want to talk to them about? What had they done wrong?

Amanda leads them from the kitchen, through the dining room, and to the parlor in the front of the house. The two boys sit on a settee covered in a deep red, brocaded velvet. Neither has ever sat on something so fancy, and they perch themselves on the very edge.

Amanda returns from the kitchen carrying a tray
with glasses of milk, plates with large slices of pound cake, forks, and napkins. She sets everything on a coffee table in front of the settee. “Help yourselves,” she says. “I'm going to go tell Miz Davis you're here.”

Ansel and Willie look around the room. Sunlight streams through the lacy curtains and reflects off the glass-enclosed cases of books. Neither boy has ever seen so many books in one place.

“What do you think Miz Davis wants with us?” Ansel whispers to Willie.

“I don't know. We haven't done anything. Have we?”

“Not that I can remember.”

Not knowing quite how to act, they remain balanced on the edge of the settee. They look hungrily at the milk and slices of cake, but they are afraid to touch either.

Esther Davis enters. She moves quickly, as if she has more energy than she can use in a day or a lifetime.

Even though Willie sees Miz Davis, both here and in the quarters, and Ansel sees her at church every Sunday and sometimes when she comes to the house
to visit with his mother, neither boy can remember ever seeing her eyes on fire like they are now.

She sits down in an armchair facing the coffee table across from the boys on the settee. Amanda sits down in the companion armchair.

“Don't be shy,” Esther says, smiling. Her voice is soft and deep. “You won't hurt that settee, and please, help yourselves to the milk and pound cake.”

The boys relax, and placing napkins over their laps, they each take a plate and a fork and start eating the cake.

“Ansel? What do you want to be when you grow up?” Esther asks abruptly.

Ansel quickly swallows the morsel of cake he is chewing and wipes his mouth with the napkin. “Ma'am?”

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Esther repeats.

Ansel looks at her, bewildered. He does not understand the question. He is going to work in the store with his father, and one day it will be his.

“Willie? What about you? What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Willie has been thinking about this for a long
time. He has never said it aloud, not even to his mother. But no one has ever asked him. Until now. He looks into Esther Davis's eyes.

“A doctor,” he says simply.

“A doctor,” his mother repeats, unable to believe what she is hearing. “Where did you get such an idea from?”

Willie looks at his mother. “Every time somebody in the quarters gets sick, and the white doctor don't come from town. I heard you say that Grandmamma wouldn't have died if the white doctor had come as soon as he was sent for.”

Amanda's eyes get large, then fill with tears as she remembers what she believes was the unnecessary death of her mother. But she cries also because her son is dreaming, because in the time and place where they live, to dream is an act of courage.

Ansel did not know Willie wanted to be a doctor, did not know there was such a thing as a colored doctor.

Willie's saying he wants to be a doctor causes Ansel to remember the books he likes to read about a lawyer named Perry Mason. Ansel thought it might be fun to be a lawyer and solve murder mysteries.

“Ansel? What about you? Have you thought of what you might like to do when you grow up?”

He shrugs. “Maybe a lawyer. But Papa wouldn't let me. I'm supposed to take over the store.”

“That's what your father wants. What do you want?”

Ansel shrugs again. “Never thought about it. My papa took over the store from his papa, and I'm supposed to take it over from my papa, and then my son will take it over from me.”

“Is that the life you want for yourself?”

He doesn't like all these questions. No one has ever asked him what he wants. What was the point in wanting to do something if you couldn't? Seemed to him it was better not to want anything if your parents didn't want it, too.

Esther sees the look of bewilderment on the boys' faces as they turn their attention back to the milk and cake.

“If the two of you stay in this town, you will die but you won't know you're dead,” she says with too much intensity. Her words come out as if she is angry with them when it is the town, the South, and life itself that make her furious.

But Willie and Ansel giggle.

“How can you be dead and not know it?” Willie asks. His question explains their giggles.

“Just look around!” Esther continues, even more animated. “Look at the people! There's not a dreamer among them. They are content with life in Davis as it is. Even your father, Ansel. I've known him all my life. I had high hopes for him. He has such a fine mind. He sat right here in this parlor, and we talked about going to school and never coming back to Davis. But his father convinced him there was nothing out there in the world, that everything he needed was right here in Davis. He was wrong, Ansel! Wrong!”

How could his father be wrong? Fathers were always right. Weren't they?

“What do
you
want for your life?” Esther continues insistently, desperately.

Ansel decides he does not like her. Who does she think she is to say his father is wrong? “What I want is not important. What Papa wants is what's important,” he says flatly, stubbornly.

“Don't let your father do that to you!” Esther exclaims heatedly. “It's your life! Yours! Do you hear me? Yours!”

She is scaring them. She can see it in how their bodies have stiffened, in how they are looking at her, fear in their eyes, in how they have moved back to the edge of the settee like tiny birds about to take flight.

“Ma'am? We have to get back to the store. We have a lot of deliveries today.”

Everyone knows Ansel is lying, and they are grateful for it.

Willie and Ansel get up, thank Esther and Amanda, and leave the house quickly.

4.

Each morning after Bert and Ansel leave for the store, Maureen stands in front of the oval mirror atop her dresser and stares. What she sees is a woman who is not as thin as she used to be, a woman whose body is becoming soft and round. Even her face is more fleshy. What has not changed are her eyes, which are so dark they seem to absorb light instead of reflect it.