Now Daddy, he’d talk to you. He’d come home from his cotton gin and sit down on the porch with me and run his mouth till midnight if Mother let him. I’m not saying Mother didn’t teach me a lot of the things you need to know. She kept me crisp and clean and starched and combed. I came as a surprise at a time when Mother was past longing for motherhood. She had outlived the instinct.
I believe I missed something, but I can’t deny that I’m a very strong woman. Looking at my declining years ahead, I’m thankful that I have the spine to face them. I don’t mean to sound like I have one foot on a cake of soap. I’m only fifty-three. That’s not old. But the die is cast. I’m past wondering if I’ll ever leave Dashnell or start back to school or even see Rock City. I won’t.
I wanted to fence the yard when we moved up here but Dashnell says it’s not done at the lake. He was right. People wander on and off each other’s porches all day and half the night. Dashnell thinks the world of it, but I’m not used to that. I like loneliness. I like to sit in the quiet and watch the sun on the lake and sip my iced tea and hold on to a thought till it branches out and it blooms and eventually dies away to make room for another one. I like to remember voices and faces and what was said to me and what I said back or what I heard people say to each other. I like to study back on a situation and think what I should have said. I rarely get life right the first time.
I have some peace in winter while Dashnell is at work. Most of the year there’s always Marjean or Lucille or Jarvis calling to me through my back screen door. I’m not one to sit and hen with the women. They make a fine art of filling the air with pretty words
that say less than nothing. They consider it next to sacrilege to express any idea they haven’t heard their husbands say. Mother is right when she says I’ve done an excellent job of hiding my brains from the world. I often think I was meant to be somebody else. I don’t know who she is exactly. I feel more like her when I’m alone. I’ve kept myself a secret from me all my life. I believe it’s because Mother never taught me how to live. Mother would say it’s because I’m mentally lazy. She has a reason for everything.
I put up vegetables and I sew and they all laugh at me, but my idea of a good day is to bleach and iron sheets. They’ve all gone to printed no-iron polyester blended linens. I like plain cotton. I like the smell of the starch and the scrunching sound the iron makes as it presses all of life’s wrinkles away. I like to turn down the covers at the end of a day’s work. I like the hiss of a top sheet as it sticks ever so lightly when I pull it back away from the bottom one. I have always imagined it would be that way in a good hotel.
When we buried our boy Carmen, I looked at Dashnell and I told him we had to go on. Period. I said now let’s don’t confound ourselves with the Lord’s will or time healing things. I says the hurt has made a big hole in our lives and we got to jump in that hole and learn to live in it. Period. I said, if you don’t, you’ll turn to liquor or we’ll turn on each other or away from life. I was making a brave, empty speech because Dashnell turned to liquor long ago and we both turned our backs on life the day we married each other.
What I meant by those words was I had no idea how or what to do. Carmen was my only brush with life, my only accomplishment. All my dreams were secondhand. Whatever Carmen wanted became my dreams. I suppose I was asking Dashnell to look inside himself and see if there was some courage or compassion he had overlooked. It was the only time I ever asked Dashnell for help. It might have been the only thing real that ever passed between us. All our lives together before and after that, he’s played the stronger and I’ve played the fool. It terrified him.
He sold the house in North Birmingham and got on up here with KemCo. Dashnell won’t talk about the why and how of things. They are simply the way they are. You don’t pick at them.
We had no clear call to leave North Birmingham, and as much as I despised it, it was where we had made a life. Moving back up home to Prince George County on this lake was the wrong pill. I’m not inclined to work at making Dashnell see how foolish he was, not on top of the hurt he already feels about Carmen. Dashnell has hypnotized himself into believing Carmen’s death was all to some eternal good. That’s how he bears it. I have no alternative for him. I can’t look at him and tell him at our age we’ll have another boy. I can’t turn back the years and start over. I can’t manufacture the amount of love it would take to offset his anguish. So I leave him to it.
He’s taken up with the men who live around here. They run around like they all did back in high school. They all drink too much and they gamble too much and to my way of thinking they don’t have much tolerance for anything or anybody including each other. They’re the kind who bear watching. Dashnell once planned to take an early retirement so we could travel. He wanted to go out west. He used to talk about San Diego, California, which he visited on a 4-H trip in the eighth grade. I spent a lot of years reading everything I could find about San Diego. I used to doodle a house plan. It was a little two story place built into the side of a hill. It was all screen porch across the front. That was so we could sit out there and watch the sun on the Pacific Ocean. The downstairs was all one room, a big dormitory for Carmen’s children when they came for long summer visits. Carmen took one of my doodles to an architect and had it drawn up proper. He gave it to me the Christmas before he died.
Of course I don’t hear a word about San Diego, California, anymore. Dashnell’s major preoccupation is sitting around drinking beer with the men talking
nigger
this and
nigger
that and what all they’d like to do to the
niggers
. It’s all for the want of sense, especially since there are no black people here in Prince George County and there haven’t been since my ninety-six-year-old mother was a child.
I garden. I bake. I put up fruits and vegetables. I sip tea and visit with the women on the porches. I read books from that box I keep
hid because they was Carmen’s books and Dashnell doesn’t want any reminders. My figure is not what it was, but I still rinse my hair brown and I pull a comb through it before I go to the grocery store. I own several tubes of lipstick. But I’m no fool neither. I know when the butcher teases me about running off to Vegas, I know he’s teasing. It doesn’t set my heart fluttering. I don’t keep silly romance books hid in my dresser drawer. I don’t invent a better tomorrow. I can always find something to do and I do a lot of things well.
Mother called Dashnell and his bunch Neanderthals when they were teenagers raising dust in their daddies’ pickup trucks on the road past our house. She said she harked back to a day when Prince George County had young men of good sense. She said the decent people either moved or died off. Dashnell’s crowd was all there was left. I thought Mother was just one more older person saying the youth had gone to the devil. But they aren’t young now and they’re still raising dust. I tried looking the other way as long as I could. You’re going to hear things up here around this lake whether you want to or not. I’ve heard plenty to tell me those men are up to more than talking and drinking. They’re organized and they’re itching for trouble.
Now, I try going along, keeping shut, cleaning my oven and taking my walks around the lake in the late afternoon. I try to hold my place with the other women up here. I try to be tolerant, to take the long view and above all else to embrace the fact that everything always changes.
It may be vanity or pride, but I always suspected that there was a decided difference between me and the rest of the crowd living around this lake. Now an evil business has come to pass. Now my suspicions are confirmed.
It was supposed to be Marjean’s all-day birthday party. The men came around eleven in the morning and they were drunk all over the backyard by two in the afternoon. The women laid out lunch, but none of them went near it. By suppertime, they were sitting in my kitchen with glassy eyes. Their loud talk had gotten low. There were eight or nine of them. Every few minutes one of them would rush off for another case of beer. It was just a matter of how much
beer it would take to shut off the remaining decency in all of them. Men like that regard decency as an encumbrance.
Several of the women including Marjean stood back a little, goading them on. I’m talking about small minded, tight jawed women who pinch their lips and roll their eyes and say “
nigger”
with enough venom to kill every fish in the lake. There wasn’t a soul in my kitchen who didn’t know that something was fixing to happen.
I had food here. I had a honey-baked ham and grilled chicken and potato salad and Waldorf salad and pies. I had cold cuts and relishes and deviled eggs and baked beans and cheese corn casserole. I could see by the way the men just picked at it, that they didn’t want it to get in their way. They were fueling their rage with alcohol. They wanted their insides to burn until the vapors from those fires rose over them, creating demons for them to conquer.
I tried three times to pull Dashnell out of the room and talk some sense into him. He wouldn’t so much as look me in the eye. He’d just grunt the way men around here do at their women when other men are around. Then Jake says, “Let’s go up to the house to play cards.” We’ve all been with our men and their tomfoolery enough to know that Jake runs the show. Jake was giving them the high sign. Dashnell grabbed a fresh gallon of Jim Beam bourbon from over the stove and they were gone. No one thanked me for the meal they hadn’t consumed or explained why not. I was given to understand they were mobilizing on official business.
We knew they weren’t about to play poker or five card draw either. Not before they’d sneaked out and done whatever evil they had planned. Suddenly we were like women in wartime, cleaning up after a rally, women wrapping the bloody deeds of absent men under Saran Wrap and stowing them out of sight. Later we felt like a coven sipping coffee at the table, and Marjean, Jake’s wife, started whimpering about how hard our men have it, how good our men are and all like that, like they were facing Hitler’s storm troops. All agreed, all nodded and pursed their lips and the air went out of the room. We talked on. We made conversation avoiding the topic at all cost. We drifted through Jeanine Thompkins’s new kitchen and
what all was said at Sunday school and tried to act like they were really up at Jake’s playing cards.
One by one we’d all say, “Marjean, we haven’t lit your cake. It’s still sitting in my deep freeze today. Every time I open that deep freeze and see that cake, oh, God.…”
See, I knew by Dashnell’s denying about Carmen, I knew he’d be the one who’d feel the most entitled. From what Marjean told me later, I about had it right. They all went back to Jake’s after they did the thing. Marjean had gone home by then. She told me later that they came in ravenous. Jake had her pulling the cupboards bare trying to fill that emptiness it left in them. Meanwhile my kitchen was groaning with a week’s worth of cooking, half of which I wound up throwing away.
Marjean said after the men gorged themselves at her house, Dashnell sat on her porch and told the men about Carmen. He must have told it right because Marjean says Dashnell went off crying by himself to the lake. She said the men let him go alone. Marjean said the men felt privileged to know all about it. She said a religious and brotherly feeling came over all of them. That went through me like a plutonium razor.
What did my only son’s senseless death have to do with the deliberate and malicious slaying of an innocent man sitting defenseless in his boat on open water in the moonlight? God help me, I pray I never make that connection!
Not that the men were talking about it outright. It was an understood thing among them that none would ever mention it. When Marjean came telling me about that night, she kept her actual words to what a good time they’d all had at my house. She pretended she wanted to know the secret to my potato salad. Anybody outside the window listening to all the things Marjean and I
didn’t
say would know right off we had the whole story.
The sheriff understood that, too, when he come asking Dashnell if he’d seen or heard anything the day they found that black man slumped over dead, a bullet through the back of his head in the boat. The sheriff danced a pretty show, flipping his pad and writing down answers to questions that any fool could see were pointing
farther and farther away from the truth. Of course he was one of them. The sheriff of these parts always is, at least in my memory. Our tall sheriff always pulls out of the group while he serves out his term of office. That’s so he can better protect them. Mother rails sometimes that she can recall a day when a different caliber ran this county. Old people talk like that. But in Mother’s case, I halfway believe her.
We have no black people around this lake, nor anyplace else in Prince George County, not in the living memory of anyone much younger than Mother. People in Prince George call that
a known thing
with such intensity you would swear, and no doubt some believe, it was once handed down from heaven on a stone tablet.
The trouble started last spring. Word got out that someone had seen a black man out there on the water fishing bass. Then it died down. We just naturally assumed it had all been a rumor. No black man who wanted to live would be that foolish. All that’s left of black people in Prince George County turned to dust decades ago in a section of one of my daddy’s fields that used to be a cemetery.
Gradually it became substantiated that this black man was out there on the lake most Saturdays fishing bass and catching bream and crappie for his trouble. Dashnell and I talked about it. I told Dashnell to get in his boat and go on out there and tell that man he was encroaching. I figured he might be from up north or someplace. It might be that he didn’t know the lay of this land.
Dashnell had heard a rumor that he was from Yellow County, and Yellow County is close enough to know. Pretty soon you’d hear little clusters of men muttering about it, and women too. Every now and again you’d hear somebody say they didn’t see the harm of one little black man fishing in an aluminum boat on a U.S. Government owned and operated reservoir. But the notion never took hold. It was drowned in a cloud of spittle about what somebody ought to do about it.