Dark Don't Catch Me (14 page)

W
ALKING
away from the circle made by his guests around the fire, below the brow of Linoleum Hill, Thad Hooper sets off for the top of the hill where the stew and barbecue are cooking. It irritates him that the evening has started off badly, first with the petty incident between little Thad and the nigger kid, which had incited old Hussie's anger, as well as Major's, Thad guesses; and then with the inevitable scene between himself and Vivian, both before and after their love-making. Finally, Vivian had deliberately, Thad decides, put on that flimsy blue cotton for the party, put it on knowing full well how it shows her in the front, when she bends to talk to someone or serve someone or stand beside Major at the plank table, his tallness looking down on her, as if to flaunt the very thing Thad had criticized her for after they had risen from their bed late that afternoon and talked while they dressed.

“Can't see what you're getting at, Thad,” she had complained. “Isn't it normal to feel like making love?”

“I'm not referring to that now. I'm talking about self-control in everything. The way you dress and take naps and — ”

“But you were talking about
that.
You were trying to make me seem like some kind of loathsome — ”

“Vivian, please! Don't try to begin an argument.”

“No, now let me talk. Let me say what's on my mind. You used the word
wiggle,
Thad. You said you didn't like it when I got to wiggling like a bitch in heat. What did that mean? I don't know what that meant.”

“I didn't say that. You're twisting what I said.”

“You said
wiggle.
You said I
wiggle.
What does it mean?”

“God damn it, Vivian, you
know,
honey! I just mean people have to — people can't go around without any self-control! You're a grown lady!”

“And grown ladies don't wiggle in their husband's embrace, ah?”

“Vivie, honey, now,
damn!
I just mean you have this little thing about you that is — well, sometimes it's right vulgar.”

“Oh, that's good!” She had laughed sardonically. “That one's rich! You stand there and tell me that, and I like to died laughing. You stand there and say a thing like that to me, when you just get through ordering me on to the bed like some tart up in Mary Jane Frances Alexander's cat house! That's good! That's typical! If it's your idea to go to bed, everything's right fine. But if it's mine you manage to make me ashamed for getting the idea in the first place, and then when you've managed to do that and I'm out of the mood, you order me onto my back!”

“Vivian!”

“Well, isn't that true?”

“Vivian, I just — I get sick — sick inside when you speak that way. Use words like that. I don't know what comes over you sometimes. Sometimes I can't believe my ears, or my eyes. Vivian, I seriously mean it. There's something in you that's got to be bridled. Some kind of little worm that's — ”

“Wiggling?”
she'd interrupted him, laughing bitterly.

“All right. All right. Please. Please, not today. Today of all days.”

And then she had said the cruelest thing of all. “Oh, yes, lest we forget that paragon of virtue, Thelma Ann Hooper!”

• • •

That had hurt. It still hurt. To bring his sister into filthy talk in the bedroom. To mention her name and call up to Thad's screen of memory the vision of the sweetness of the child, his twin, his sister in the womb, and the agony her loss had caused, the recurrent agony pricked by nostalgia for the time when they were young together, growing up as one, remembering only last Sunday in church the robbed and forsaken feeling that had crept through him as Joh read from Solomon's Songs:
How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!

It was not anything Vivian could comprehend. It was something, Thad believes, few could appreciate — to lose half of yourself, to have what was joined to you sliced and stolen as though you had done something to deserve it, as though it were a punishment for something you had done. And to ask why all your life and never find an answer. But Thel dead, her body rotten under clay, the young body of a girl given to the dirt while you stand helpless. Why?

In the darkness Thad Hooper frowns, chasing away these thoughts, forcing himself to concentrate on the business at hand — right now, on Hus, how he must handle her and cope with her stubborn wrath. Hooper contends there's no harmony in a house in which the servants are disgruntled; an ornery nigger can create chaos, and while Major is easily enough threatened back into toeing the mark, Hussie isn't. If she's mad enough, the stew kettle will fall to the ground accidentally, the contents spilled and wasted; the pig will slip off the spit into the dust at its side; or some other damage will happen “by mistake” in the preparations for the evening.

At the top of the hill, Hooper mops his brow with the sleeve of his blue wool sweater; then strolls toward the fire and the pit where Hussie stands stirring the stew.

He calls, “Hi, Hus, how you?”

Hus doesn't answer him; puffs of white smoke start from her corncob and spiral up into the night air. She stirs more vigorously, a squat little black woman with wild white woolly hair cropped short and close like a man's. She is black and gnarled and sassy, an “independent Nigra” those in Paradise describe her, and smile tolerantly at that fact, for Hussie Post is very old, born, as she recalls, on the first clear Sunday after General Lee surrendered.

Thad Hooper grins as he comes closer to her; grins and stands arms akimbo as he stares down into the big iron kettle where the Brunswick stew is cooking; and in the pit beside it, the pig roasting over the embers. He and Hussie Post are the only two in sight; the guests are all down below the brow of the hill, and Major too, capturing water from the spring for them to use to chase the bourbon, and helping set up the plank table for eating.

“Hey now, Hus — you mad at me? Huh?” Thad asks as he watches her manipulate the long-handled ladle.

Hus shrugs; she won't answer him.

“Now, didn't you and me always get along, Hussie Post? Didn't we, hmm? ‘Member last week when you was ailing and Bissy mentioned to me ‘bout that leak in you-all's roof? Didn't I see it got fixed so the rain isn't going to leak in there any more?”

The old woman looks up from the stew to Hooper, takes her pipe out of her mouth, and spits over her shoulder. “Dat roof didn't leak in dere, Mr. Thad,” she says. “When it rained it rained in dere, and it leaked outside.”

“Well, I got it fixed, didn't I?” Thad Hooper answers, guffawing, always breaking up over Hussie's wry humor. “Now didn't I, Hus?”

“I spect you did, Mr. Thad.”

“You and me always got along, Hus, didn't we? Now what'd I do to make you mad at me, hmm?”

“If you knock de nose, Mr. Thad, the eye cry.”

The Negro proverb is well known to Hooper. Hurt one in the family, hurt all. He sticks his large hands down into the pockets of his khaki and rocks back and forth gently on his heels, watching the moon off in the sky gilding the cotton fields and outlining the willowy branches of the black pines and dogwoods.

“I spoke to little Thad, Hus,” he says, “but now you know kids. They get at that age. An' if a little girl tease ‘em, they going to do as they please with her.”

“White kids do as they please; colored do as they can.”

“Hussie, I'm surprised at you talking that way! You lived in Paradise all your life, now haven't you? You know this is a right friendly town to all folks. We always looked out for you and your family, now, you
know
that. Why, kids get into all sorts of things, Hus, but it don't stop folks from getting along.”

“Little girl had to go to the doctor,” Hus grumbles.

Thad smiles. “Oh? Well, now why didn't you say so in the first place, Hus?”

“I tole Miz Hooper all ‘bout it, Mr. Thad.”

“Well, Mrs. Hooper should have told you we'll pay Doc James whatever he charged you, Hus. Don't be worrying about that, for heaven's sake. We'll pay that bill, Hus. Even though little Thad was only
half
to blame. But you got to tell the little girl not to be asking for trouble. Hear?”

Hussy answers, “Doc James didn't charge nothin'.”

“Well, then, why are we carrying on so about it, hmmm? Tell you what, Hus. I'm going to see you get a dollar for your trouble tonight. Mrs. Hooper and I appreciate your coming up here to do this for us when you been so sick and all, Hus.”

“Got no choice ‘bout earnin' a livin' if I ain't studying dyin', Mr. Thad,” Hus says.

Thad Hooper chuckles. “Yeah, you're right there, all right, Hussie. There's none of us that has.”

He stands quietly beside the old woman, watching the ladle turn up chicken and corn and squirrel, and smelling the pungent aroma of the mustard and vinegar and sugar; red pepper and celery, all intermingling with the good odor of the pig nearby in the pit.

“Sure smells good,” he says.

He glances at the old woman, whose expression is stony, her eyes fixed steadily on the stew's liquid, the pipe puffing in short quick clouds of white smoke, her wizened brow wrinkled in one long frown. Reaching into his back pocket, Thad Hooper feels for his wallet, pulls it out with a flourish, holding it up to the fire's light and picking out a dollar. With a quick movement of his long arm, he shoves the money into the pocket of Hussie's patched black apron. Hussie ignores the gesture, bland and indifferent as before.

“Yes sir, Hussie!” Hooper says putting the wallet back. “It sure smells good.” He stands there a moment longer. “You sure fix the best stew around here, Hus,” he says. “Yeah, you
do!”

Then finally he turns away from the pot and the pit and the old Negro woman, and ambles back down the hill to the spring, whistling a little and snapping his fingers.

When he is out of sight, Hussie Post hawks again, aiming the spittle so it lands inside the kettle; puts her pipe back between her gums, and wields the ladle in the blending of the stew.

• • •

Besides the Hoopers that night at the barbecue, there are Joh and Guessie Greene, Bill and Marianne Ficklin, Storey and Kate Bailey, and Colonel Pirkle, who came without Ada. All of them, except Vivian, sit in the circle with its campfire center, swirl whisky and talk. Over at the plank table, Vivian helps Major Post set out the paper plates and silverware, napkins, and salt and peppers. They stand beside one another near the queen-of-China trees, two candles giving them light; and the moon off in the west helping.

“You seem solemn, Major,” she says, handing him a stack of plates. “I'm sorry. Sorry you're solemn, and sorry you have a reason to be.”

“I always thought well of
you,
Miz Hooper.”

“We've always gotten along, haven't we, Major?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Major, you have a good mind, don't you? What I mean is, you're more intelligent than most nig — nigra people, aren't you?”

“I don't know that's smart to own up to, Miz Hooper.”

“Well,
do
you know what I mean when I say that I don't condone little Thad's behavior?” She hesitates; wondering if she should have brought up the subject to this boy, no more than a boy, really; still, with his grown-up ways, more like a white man than a colored boy, but nigger-like in his sullen, close-mouthed resenting. “By condone, I mean — ”

Major interrupts. “I know the meaning of
condone,
ma'am. You don't have to explain.”

“Major, I didn't question that.” She is irritated for even having broached the subject now; smarting at his defensive hint of belligerence and his glum tone. “You make it hard for anyone to talk with you.”

“I'm sorry, Miz Hooper. I know that. And I know you mean well — you more than anyone around here. I didn't mean to sound like I did. I just get the anger all boiled up in me sometimes. When my grandmother told me about my sister, I just saw red, ma'am, and I still see it.”

“Of course, I'm not saying little Thad was all to blame,” Vivian Hooper says, “but no matter who had what share in the blame, I regret the incident.”

Major says nothing to that and she thinks she detects some stiffening in his attitude again, a sudden withdrawal which is difficult for her to appreciate. This spasmodic hostility which lately seems almost a trait of Major's irks Vivian Hooper. It's just as though Major were totally unwilling to be accepted as an above-average colored person, wanting, instead, acceptance as a white. Perhaps Thad is right in his theory that regardless of the Negro's brain power, and despite the fact a few seem to possess uncommon intelligence, a white's never got to let them think they're anything but black; particularly in places like Paradise where the niggers outnumber the whites four to one. A white's got to treat a nigger like a nigger, or the nigger will lose respect for the white and start to take advantage of the white, drop the “sir” and “ma'am” and show his shoulder to the white, and sass him. And if enough of them got away with it, if enough whites dropped their guards, the niggers could just
take over.

But Vivian Hooper likes Major and wants to treat him right; yet he has an annoying effect on her which seems to result in her feeling somehow obliged to apologize to him for any little thing that goes wrong — like last week, going out of her way to explain to Major why the roofer hadn't been able to get to their shack on Monday; had to postpone patching their roof until Wednesday, and Major answering bluntly: “Well, Miz Hooper, I'm sorrier than you, cause Hus is getting rained on. Could just as well find a roofer who could come on time if we had the money!” knowing Thad had chosen Ed Blake to do the job because Ed owed Thad a favor and wouldn't charge him. Major's reactions to her attempts to placate him — and why did he somehow make her feel she had to! — inevitably make her regret she puts herself in the position of patronizing this nigger.