Place Called Estherville (20 page)

As Kathyanne knew, it was unusual for Clyde Picquet to make a rent call on Sunday, as that was the day he usually took his wife and four children for a long automobile ride in the country, but Effie Verdery had called him on the phone just as he was sitting down to eat Sunday dinner and had told him to come to her house right away. When he got to the wide-veranda white colonial on Poinsettia Street, thinking Effie had suddenly become ill and wanted to make changes in her will, he was disappointed and angry to find out that she had called him away from his Sunday dinner because she had been upset by something the Baptist minister had said that morning in his sermon. Clyde wanted to tell her that it was a matter that could have waited until business hours Monday morning, but he could not afford to let Effie know he was angry, and he concealed his feelings the best he could by being outwardly affable and accommodating in her presence. He then had to sit and listen to a tiresome recital of the Baptist pastor’s complaints against the members of the congregation, but all the time he was secretly pleased that he was a Methodist, and that it was the Baptists who were having financial troubles. What had upset Effie was her pastor’s outspoken charge that the church-supporting members had failed to contribute enough money, as they had pledged themselves to do earlier in the year, to support the church’s mission program. Effie looked upon the Estherville Baptist church as her church, and the minister as her minister, and she had gone up to the pulpit after the services and wept in the Reverend Stovall’s arms in full view of the congregation. He took her home in his own car and comforted her and, as he was leaving, Effie tearfully promised to contribute five hundred dollars to the mission fund the next day. As soon as the Reverend Stovall was out of the house, Effie dried her tears and phoned Clyde and told him to come immediately. She had the account books spread over the parlor table when he got there and was soon pointing out instances where rents were long overdue. The page that annoyed her the most was the one that showed how far behind Aunt Hazel Teasley was with her rent. Aunt Hazel, she pointed out accusingly, was four months and three weeks in arrears. She ordered Clyde to collect it at once, every red cent of it, regardless of Aunt Hazel’s pitiful tales of hardship. He tried to tell her that as soon as either of Aunt Hazel’s grandchilden found a steady job he was planning to take a portion of their weekly pay and apply it on the unpaid rent, but that in the meantime he did not feel they would be ethically justified in evicting a bedridden woman of Aunt Hazel’s age and circumstance. Effie would not listen to him. First she wept some more over the plight of the missions, and then she dried her tears and ordered him to get the money that very day, or she herself would call the sheriff. Clyde, well aware that if she were sufficiently provoked she would not hesitate to fire him, had picked up his hat and briefcase and gone down to Gwinnett Alley.

Henry stood up as Clyde walked around the corner of the cabin. Clyde nodded to Kathyanne, and she nodded to him in return. He had been there so regularly during the past several months that he did not feel it was necessary to go through the usual routine of explaining why he was there now. He had never seen Henry before, and he looked at the boy closely. His first thought was that perhaps Aunt Hazel was taking in paying boarders, which might provide some money for the rent, and he was encouraged by the prospects.

“What’s your name?” he asked Henry.

“Henry Beck.”

He nodded to himself as he inspected Henry’s expensive-looking tweed jacket.

“Who do you work for, Henry?” he then asked.

“I’m a wage-hand out there in the country at Mr. Tyson Porcher’s place.”

“Where do you stay?”

“I stay out there at Mr. Porcher’s.”

“You get your meals at Mr. Porcher’s, too?”

“Yes, sir,” Henry replied.

Disappointed, Clyde turned his back on Henry. He walked toward the vacant rocking chair.

“Well, I’ve got business to attend to here, Henry,” he said, speaking over his shoulder in a curt manner. “Go on away for a while, and you can come back later, if you want to.” Henry, watching both Clyde and Kathyanne suspiciously, remained where he was. Clyde sat down in the rocking chair and placed his briefcase prominently on his lap. Henry still had not left, and Clyde turned and looked at him with an annoyed frown. Henry scowled back at him.

“Well?” Clyde said impatiently.

“What did you come here to see her about?” Henry said surlily. He was not in the habit of talking to white men in such a manner, and in fact it was the first time in his life that he had ever used such a tone of voice in speaking to anyone outside his own race, but he had become angry as well as suspicious. Kathyanne, afraid that he might forget himself and say something even worse, was silently pleading with him to go away. When he still did not leave, she began urging him to go with an excited motion of her hand. Henry was still glaring at Clyde. “You’d better leave her alone now,” he muttered in a threatening manner. “I don’t like it about all this good-timing that folks talk about going on. She’s got so she won’t have nothing to do with me, and that’s the cause of it. You white folks ought to stick to your own color and leave us alone. She hasn’t got no business studying about white men. I don’t want her to go passing, neither. That’s what.”

Neither was Clyde accustomed to hearing a Negro talk to him like that and he did not know whether to be angry or afraid. He wondered if he would be able to protect himself against anyone as strong-looking and as muscular as Henry Beck.

“Henry,” Kathyanne begged, “please go away now. It’s all right. Don’t make trouble.”

He stood there in the yard undecidedly for several moments before walking away. He went as far as the gate at first, and then, after watching Clyde and Kathyanne for a while, walked slowly out of sight down the alley.

Clyde was relieved to see Henry go. He leaned back in the chair for the first time.

“That’s a mighty biggety boy to be so black,” he commented with a shaking of his head. “He’s going to get in bad trouble one of these days if he don’t watch his talk. You’d better speak to him about it, Kathyanne. There’re white men around town who wouldn’t stand for the way he acted just now. They’d get rid of him in no time. You’d better have a good talk with him.”

“Henry forgot himself, Mr. Clyde,” she said nervously. “He’s worried about something, and he didn’t mean all the things he said. He’s a good boy, and I’m going to help him get along in life. Everything’s going to work out all right. Please don’t say anything about it to anybody. I’ll see to it that he doesn’t forget himself like that again. Henry’s a good boy.”

“What’s he worried about, to make him act like that?”

“Just something he heard, Mr. Clyde. He’ll get over that soon, though.”

“Just the same, I don’t like the way he talks now,” Clyde told her. He recrossed his legs and patted the briefcase on his lap. “Well, I reckon you know what I’m doing here, don’t you, Kathyanne? Well, something’s got to be done. That’s all there is to it. How’s Aunt Hazel today? Is she any better?”

“She’s just about the same as usual, Mr. Clyde.”

“You mean she’s still’ in bed?”

“She’s been in bed all the past year.”

“What’d you say was wrong with her?”

“Dr. Plowden says it’s bad rheumatism. He says it’s so bad she’ll never walk any more.”

“That is bad,” he remarked sympathetically. He rubbed the leather briefcase with his thumb. “I hate to see anybody in a fix like that, white or colored.” He studied the grain of the leather glistening in the sun. “But I reckon there’s always been and always will be a lot of sickness in the world. It’s liable to strike any of us, just like it did Aunt Hazel.”

Kathyanne, knowing that he would soon be talking about the rent, began sewing again. She noticed that he glanced over his shoulder in the direction Henry had gone as though he thought Henry was still somewhere in the neighborhood watching him.

“You haven’t found a steady job yet, have you, Kathyanne?” His head began moving from side to side even before she could have had an opportunity to answer him. “How about your brother? Has he found steady work yet?” This time he did not look as if he expected an answer. He took a pencil and an envelope from his coat pocket and began figuring on the paper. “We might as well call it five months now,” he said as though he were talking to himself. “There’s only one more week left in this month, anyway. That makes five months, all told. Fifteen dollars a month times five is five times five and that makes twenty-five and one to carry, and five times one is five and add two makes seventy-five. That’s what it comes to. Seventy-five dollars. It sure adds up fast when you let yourself get behind like this. And every month makes it bigger, too. Now, how much can you pay on it today, Kathyanne?”

She glanced up at him, solemnly shaking her head.

“You mean you can’t pay anything at all?”

“Mr. Clyde, we don’t have any money. That’s the truth. Even before you raised the rent, it was just as hard to pay it. It’s hard enough just to get enough together to buy something to eat now and then. If the kind neighbors hadn’t helped a lot, we wouldn’t have had much of that.”

“I know, Kathyanne, but Mrs. Effie Verdery wants her rent money. She’s downright hard-headed about it, and there’s nothing I can do to make her wait any longer. You see, I only work for her. I have no say-so about it, personally. She might take it into her head to send the sheriff down here. What do you and your brother think you can do about it? I’d hate to see the sheriff come down here and carry Aunt Hazel out to the street and put her down out there. That’s an awful thing to happen to any human being. But, it’s the law, and there’s no getting around the law, you know. That’s how things are in this world.”

Kathyanne nodded almost imperceptibly as she threaded the needle.

“How did you ever get in this fix, anyway, Kathyanne?” he asked seriously, frowning with deep concern. “Didn’t you used to have a good job with Mrs. Swayne when you first moved to town, and after that at Mrs. Pugh’s? Why did you quit working for them?”

“Maybe it was because I didn’t know how to get along with white people, Mr. Clyde.” She looked straight at him in a thoughtful manner. “Maybe it was because I was raised in the country and didn’t know any white people until I moved to town and started to work for them. Before that, I didn’t know I’d have to do what white people told me, no matter what it was. I found that out, though, when I worked for Mrs. Swayne and Mrs. Pugh. But I still didn’t want to have to do some of the things they told me to do, and that’s why I quit working for them. After that I found out that I’d still have to do what they said, if I wanted a steady job. And then, there’s this thing about the white men—”

“What do you mean—what white men?”

“All of them, Mr. Clyde.”

Clyde, embarrassed, looked down at his briefcase. “Well,” he said, clearing his throat, “maybe you did think you were doing the right thing at the time, but it’s probably true that colored people don’t have much say-so these days. They have to do pretty much what they’re told, if they want to get along with white people in Estherville. I don’t know what anybody can do about it, but it won’t be like it is always, though. Things change.”

He looked over his shoulder at the low sun. It was getting late in the afternoon and it was not so warm as it had been when he first walked into the yard.

“Now, look here, Kathyanne,” he said resolutely, trying to put everything else out of mind. “It’s up to you from now on. Some things can’t be put off time after time, and rent’s one of them. What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Clyde.”

He got up and walked to the fence and back. He had come there with only one purpose in mind, which was to collect the rent, all or in part, but he was becoming confused by other thoughts that refused to be driven away. Kathyanne had provoked him, and yet at the same time he felt sorry for her. He had conditioned himself against permitting himself to feel any compassion whatsoever for tenants who could not or would not meet their rents, because he had learned that otherwise he was emotionally unsuited to the task of getting rent money from those persons who were capable of devising the most heart-rending excuses. But while sitting there alone with Kathyanne in the warm sun, and hearing her speak of her helplessness in the presence of white men, an unfamiliar yet exceedingly pleasant sensation had come over him. Her predicament gave him a compelling desire to help her and, at the same time, to take advantage of her. She looked more attractive to him at that moment than anyone he had ever seen before. Recalling what Henry had said about her and white men, he wondered why it was that he had never allowed himself to think of her in that way until now. He had just about given up hope of getting seventy-five dollars, or any part of it, to be handed over to Effie Verdery, and yet he knew he could not go back and admit to Effie that he had failed to collect it. He would be out of a job before he could get out of Effie’s parlor. There was a little money in the savings bank, not much, but enough. He could draw it out the first thing Monday morning and take it to Effie and she would never know the difference. With that problem out of the way, he stopped his calculations abruptly and stared adventurously at Kathyanne. She looked beautiful and increasingly attractive there before him; she was becoming more desirable with each jolting throb of his heartbeat. Things like this happened to men all the time, he told himself with assurance; it was the way things were in the world. Life had a way of taking a man along a planned course, if he had the courage to follow; existence was not necessarily haphazard. His wife would never know the money was missing from the savings account He would attend to that. Kathyanne had long straight blue-black hair, large dark brown eyes, and softly tinted skin; there were not many women in the world who could compare favorably with her. He had been attending strictly to business since he married and had allowed nothing of a personal nature to interfere with rent collections for Effie Verdery. When it was all over and he had more time to apply his mind to it, he could undoubtedly find a way to post the account books in such a way that the seventy-five dollars was charged off to Effie herself as an expense of some kind, and he could then redeposit the withdrawal from his savings account. His mind worked rapidly. He might never have another opportunity like this as long as he lived. She was the most exciting mulatto girl he had ever seen in all his life. Fumbling in his pocket, he found the receipt pad and hurriedly scribbled on the form.