The Wedding (13 page)

He survived. He did not succumb to pellagra, or coughing sickness, or any of the other crippling afflictions that spread through the region as food got harder and harder to come by. When he ailed, he holed up like a hurt dog, sometimes going two or three days without food, without water, lashed by diarrhea and nausea, sometimes wandering in his head. There was no hand anywhere to help him, but somehow he always came back to his senses, finding a stream to wash away his stink. He would cup the healing water in his cleansed hands, drinking it slowly like wine. The wine gave him strength to seek bread, and the bread and the wine restored his wholeness. He had the will to stay alive. He knew he got the will from God; all the singing and praying he had ever listened to gave God the power of life over death in him.

One place Preacher worked was a small, shabby parsonage, whose parson had the look of a man to whom every penny counted. Preacher asked for his pay in a Bible book. The parson wasn’t much for giving niggers books, but it suited his pocketbook better than wages. There were three or four old Bibles in the attic, worn, torn, and past pulpit use. He would fetch the one with pictures, for it would teach this ex-slave better than words could that God and everybody else with a soul were white.

When he was twenty or thereabout, Preacher found his promised land and a strong-built woman who owned a piece of it. She made her living by taking in washing, but her land had been pastureland, rich with sheep droppings. It could permit a man with a mind and a back to work it. The woman owned it legally, a legacy from her mother, who had received it from Old Sir when emancipation freed him to prove his spoken word by written deed.

The woman was Old Sir’s daughter, born in his later life, when the children of his marriage were grown, their mother gone, and his grieving over. Though his big house was empty without a second wife, no willing woman of his own kind persuaded his eye like the slave girl he bought in a bundle of field blacks, testing her arm for its soundness and being himself enslaved by its softness.

There was no hiding his infatuation. He gave her no work but to wait for his coming, and she kept to her cabin in the quarters. The bucks knew better than to go near her, and the women slaves shunned her because her seduction did not shame her, nor did the bright-skinned baby at her breast. At war’s end, freedom enabled Old Sir to openly keep his concubine
in a style beyond anything she had been accustomed to. Even though his own life was in shambles, and his fortune in shreds, he had a house built for her before he even counted the cost of putting his own house together again for the son who was heir to it.

The woman, the ebony woman, was as pleased as if she had moved into the house of her dreams, for she had never dreamed of dwelling in marble halls. The house had three rooms, one for sleeping, with a closet, bless God, and a chest of drawers; another room for cooking, with a stove and a sink and a pump in the sink that could fill a bucket as many times as one was set under it. Hanging from a nail on the outside kitchen wall was a big round tub that could with some contortion hold a body for an all-over wash. The third room was a parlor just for sitting, with easy chairs to do the sitting in and a fireplace to make the winter bearable. The outhouse was built from new, sweet-smelling wood, and a bag of lime with a scoop beside it was there to keep it that way.

No carriage wheels raised the dust outside this idyllic void that Old Sir had created. This quiet ebony woman, her features as chiseled as a queen’s face on a coin, holding their butternut child who would contentedly suck the candy sticks he brought her, was every man’s dream of a woman. Without books to put visions into their heads, without learning to discontent their minds, without the carping rights of a wedded wife and her legitimate child, they were near perfect for Old Sir, and he for them.

But a finger was jabbed into the still waters of their serenity, and it was the pointing finger of God. It followed
the ebony woman everywhere, and there was no ignoring what it meant: repent. The ebony woman went down on her knees and prayed for mercy on her soul. She spent the night in a pool of tears. By dawn her prayers reached heaven’s heights, and the pointing finger disappeared. She rose up, shouting, “I been redeemed. By the blood of the Lawd, I been redeemed.” From that day forth, she sinned no more. From that day forth her thighs were sealed.

She let Old Sir be her boarder. It was not a fair exchange, but it was better than banishment. They sat at the table together, an act more equalizing than any they had ever performed in bed. He came twice a day for his meals, and she fed him so well that he wanted to sleep more than anything else. He took to nodding in his chair, his hands clasping his contented paunch. Whenever he opened his eyes, she was there, moving quietly, humming softly, that classic face floating above him like an ebony carving. She had been his since she was fifteen. She had given him the last child of his loins. She had loved him, and now she cherished him. Who was to say one was less than the other? Her sweetness strengthened Old Sir. When he fell sick, she put him into her bed and tended him until he felt well, and she and the butternut child made do on a quilt by the fireplace, her hand hauling back to smack the girl if she complained that the floor was too hard.

As Old Sir grew older and his empty jaws grew tired of trying to chew, she cooked everything to swallowing softness, and again her hand hauled back if the girl’s lips pouted over her plate. As Old Sir grew careless about his clothes, she gave the butternut girl the care of them, and her hand was
quick to let the girl know how good she learned to iron them. There were more of Old Sir’s clothes in his woman’s house than in his own, and he was cleaner when he left her house than when he came.

Then one long stretch of rainy weather, with all his going back and forth, Old Sir came down with a powerful cold in his chest. The ebony woman put him to bed and bedded down on the floor beside him. She would have been warmer by the fireplace, but Old Sir was burning up with fever and tossing off the bedclothes, and she wanted to stay close by to keep him covered.

The cold she caught from him was worse than the one she cured him of (and the cold she caught from the bedroom floor would have been bad enough by itself). And forcing herself to stay on her feet was more than one pair of lungs could bear. She died spitting blood. Old Sir had a box made, and he and the butternut girl, now grown to a near woman, put a couple of shovels in a wagon and carted her off to the place in colored town where the colored folks dug holes for their dead. Old Sir read a few words out from the family Bible: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.”

The butternut girl went home to clean up and air out like her mother did after sickness. In a way, doing so was a memorial to her mother. But Old Sir had nowhere he
wanted to go, not to the big house with one old broken-down servant boy as doddery as himself, and not back to the little house where what had once been would never be again.

So he laid himself down on his ebony woman’s grave. And no one said yea, and no one said nay, because colored folks know better than to tell white folks what to do and what not to do. He lay there three days and three nights. The morning of the first night he was too sick with double pneumonia to move if he had wanted to. By the second night he was no longer really conscious of his suffering. On the third day he was in a coma, and sometime during the third night he died.

The colored folks went and told Young Sir like it was something they had just discovered, like they didn’t know how Old Sir got there, or what he was doing lying cold dead on a colored grave. They acted like they didn’t know nothing, because they knew that Old Sir’s son didn’t want to know anything either.

The butternut girl made her living by taking in washing. At first she felt shy going to where the white folks lived and tumbling around to find their back doors and inquiring of some looming shape if she had a wash for her to take home. She brought along one of Old Sir’s shirts beautifully folded in the basket on her arm to show the quality of her work, and her own persuasive appearance underscored her excellence. In not too long a time she was earning enough from her several families to keep herself and her house on their accustomed course.

She missed her mother and Old Sir, but she didn’t know
any better than to stay to herself. She accepted the loneliness that plagued her at day’s end as her daily portion of bitter blood. She had never had a child to play with or to grow up with, and there was no remembered joy to turn her empty heart toward someone her own age. The young colored people kept their distance. Like mother, like daughter, was what they thought. They didn’t want to be shot in their britches by some white man who had seen her first.

Preacher’s arrival was pure providence. What he didn’t know didn’t scare his behind. He was just passing through town, looking for a colored face to charm with his own, when he saw the butternut woman walking straight and tall. She was on her way home from her white folks, with her big laundry basket riding on her head in perfect balance. She looked so clean and starched and she smelled so good of soap that it was a pleasure for Preacher to hitch along and smell her. There weren’t any little ones peeping around her skirts, so he spoke up boldly to ask if she had a husband heading home from work. When she told him that she lived alone, he took her basket and tucked it under one great arm and asked if there were some wood he could chop or some fixin’ she could find him to do in return for his supper and a beddown in the shed.

He showed her his Bible book, not to pretend he was a reading man but to show his good intent and his claim to a calling. He said he had come across seven counties, looking for the land that would speak his name. He said this land had a sweetness to it. He could feel a lingering in his feet. He asked if she knew where a clear river ran, for tomorrow he
was going to tell it through colored land that Sunday was singing and shouting day. Let the burdened bring their weary loads to the riverside and comfort the fevers and frets of their souls with the blessed balm of being baptized.

They reached the road and the house came in sight, a complete house, with real clapboards instead of any old wood, a slanting roof to nuzzle off the rain, a door that wasn’t hanging loose for field mice, a porch that wasn’t just a step up and a stoop, not a window with a pane busted out, and curtains at each one as starched and pretty as Sunday dresses.

Preacher picked up his feet and led the way. Without a moment’s hesitation he entered the place and the moment in time that would mark the beginning of the Coles family line. They were a strange mix, maybe, one a self-appointed preacher and the other a washerwoman, one with a father he barely knew, the other with a father she called Old Sir. Both were illiterate and uninformed, their intelligence never having been tested, but the woman was the man’s inspiration because of her cleanliness, and the man was the woman’s inspiration because of his godliness. Between them, then, there was a mutual respect that gave them the right to self-respect.

The butternut woman had no shed, so she let Preacher sleep on the floor by the fireplace, though at first it seemed strange that a man should take the lowlier bed while she took the better. At the end of a week of studying each other, Preacher got out his Bible, placed the woman’s hand on top of it, and laid his own on top of hers. He prayed aloud,
committing their souls to God’s eternal care. Then they bowed their heads in silent prayer, and when they raised them, they were man and wife.

Her time came upon her, and the butternut woman bore a son called Isaac, who survived a difficult birth and grew in rosy health and strength. After that, Preacher did not touch her in the times when she was fertile. He knew it would take everything in his power to treasure one child, to feed him, to clothe him, and somehow to school him. The butternut woman knew better than to protest. Her mother had taught her what to expect when she sulked. Besides, she was too busy cooking and cleaning and washing and ironing and keeping up with an active baby to feel anything but exhaustion by the time night came to quiet day. When her head touched the pillow, she wanted sleep more than she wanted foolishness.

The land bore crop after crop. Preacher sold his produce in the open market, selling more than all the other sellers because his voice hypnotized the buyers. He bought a pair of new shoes for the first time in his life and was delighted to find that shoes you were sized for wouldn’t pinch your feet or shift around when you walked the way other people’s castoffs did. He had Old Sir’s shirts to wear for dress-up. They were many years old and many times mended, but they were Sunday white and suited Preacher fine. And when he stood by the riverside with his splendid hair set ablaze by the sun and his skin all aglow with it too, the white shirt made a striking contrast.

When winter came, the time of spring planting, Preacher got to wanting a mule so bad he could almost feel
that mule pulling the plow. Preacher heard a tale of an ornery mule that was owned by an ornery man, who couldn’t cuss that mule to move no matter how many licks he laid on his back. Preacher went to see that man, and while he was talking with a sweeting tongue his eye latched onto a boar and a sow and a milk cow. His other bulging eye counted critters aplenty all over the place, enough to fill every hook in a smokehouse and every cooling stone in a well and still leave more animals for mating than were hanging head down. This Mr. White Trash could eat high on the hog from now until a lifetime from now and never feel the lack of one boar, one sow, one milk cow.

Meat took the misery out of winter. When there was meat, a man and his wife and his child emerged into spring with flesh on their bones instead of folds of skin. One time, back when he was a boy, Preacher saw a squirrel emerging into spring. Preacher had never seen a living thing so starving thin. That squirrel was too sorry to raise a stick to. He looked like something a hundred years old. Every rib showed as plain as if he had been skinned, his fur was as meager as a moth-eaten mat, and there wasn’t nothing uglier than that puny face, all drawn back like a grinning dead cat. That dumbheaded squirrel hadn’t stored enough nut meat to carry him through the winter. Or maybe the crop had been poor pickings. The squirrel’s last little bit of life was hanging by such a frazzled thread that one more week of hibernation would have killed him in his nest within reach of spring’s salvation.