Journeyman (4 page)

“No, sir.”

“Then what makes you think she’s up here?”

“Mr. Clay, don’t go trying to put me off. That white man told her to come up here.”

“Did Sugar tell you he said that?”

“No, sir.”

Clay listened for a while. Once he thought he heard Semon, but he was not certain. There was so much going on inside his head it was hard to fix his mind on one thing and keep it there.

“What’re you aiming to do, Hardy?” Clay said.

“I came up here to get Sugar,” Hardy said firmly. Clay could feel the determination in his voice.

Hardy was a yellow Negro, and Clay knew he could not handle him in the same way a black Negro was handled.

“Now, Mr. Clay,” he said, “there ain’t no use in trying to put me off no longer. I don’t have no hard feelings against you, and I don’t want to have none. But I came up here to get Sugar and take her home. That’s what I’m standing here for now, Mr. Clay.”

Clay could feel Dene moving on the edge of her chair beside him. He did not have to look at her to know that she was watching Hardy.

“I scarcely know what to say to you, Hardy,” Clay began uneasily. “Semon Dye, the traveling preacher, came here to stay today, and he’s got Sugar in the house, there, now. I reckon you knew that all the time, anyway.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Clay,” Hardy said, coming up the steps. “I don’t want to make no trouble. I ain’t that kind at all.”

He stopped when he reached the top step.

“It’s white-folks’ fault,” Hardy said. “I don’t blame it on Sugar none. That white man got her to come up here, and she wouldn’t have come if he hadn’t told her to. It’s the white-folks who always make trouble for the colored.”

“What’re you aiming to do about it, Hardy?” Clay asked uneasily.

“I came to take Sugar home.”

Hardy crossed the porch to the door. Clay jumped up and beat him to the threshold.

“I wouldn’t raise no rumpus in your house, Mr. Clay,” Hardy told him.

“I’ll go tell Sugar you came to get her,” Clay said.

He left the door and walked into the dark hall without waiting to hear what Hardy said. He went to Semon’s door, turned the knob easily, and stepped inside. Not until he was already inside the room did he realize that Hardy had followed him and was standing behind him.

He crossed the room and turned up the lamp.

Semon saw only Hardy. He reached for his revolver on the table beside the bed. In a leap he was on his feet and standing in front of them cocking the pistol with his stiff thumb.

“Don’t point that thing at me, Mr. Semon,” Hardy said angrily. “I can’t stand that.”

“Shut your mouth and get out of the house,” Semon shouted at him. “I don’t take no fooling from niggers. Get out of here, coon!”

Semon was an entirely different-looking man then. When he had arrived that afternoon, wearing his black dust-stained suit and hat, and the stringy black bow tie, he looked exactly like an itinerant minister climbing out of his car to stop and rest after a long and tiresome trip across the country. Now, in the kerosene light, against the background of yellow pitch-stained pine walls, he looked like a wild man stalking an animal in the woods.

“We’d better settle this thing peacefully,” Clay said thinly, watching the gun in Semon’s hand.

He was ignored. Hardy refused to back away. He came forward a few steps, watching the lamp on the table.

“Keep back, or I’ll shoot you down to start with,” Semon threatened. “You can’t fool with me, I know how to handle yellow niggers like you.”

Clay saw what was going to happen. He leaped towards the side of the room.

Hardy plunged forward, attempting to reach either the lamp on the table or the pistol in Semon’s hands. He failed to get his hands on either one. When he was an arm’s length away, Semon fired his revolver at him. The explosion in the chamber of the short bulldog pistol shook the frail house to its foundations. Dust fell in chunks from the cracks in the ceiling, and chips and splinters rolled from the cracks in the pine-boarded walls.

Clay was trying to make up his mind whether to try to take the pistol away from Semon, or whether to stay where he was. He stood his ground.

Hardy had fallen on his hands and knees. He remained there on all fours at Semon’s feet, his head hanging downward until it almost touched the floor.

Semon was cocking the pistol again with his big stiff thumb. When the hammer was drawn back, the trigger clicked, and Semon aimed it once more at Hardy. Before he could fire it, Sugar fell across Hardy, flinging her body between them.

Semon was undecided for a minute.

“Get up and get out of here, both of you!” he said at last. “If I have to shoot again, it’ll be through both of you at the same time.”

Sugar was trying to lift Hardy. She soon saw she would not be able to carry him out, so she managed to drag him to the door. Semon watched them until they were in the darkness of the hall. They left the house by the back door, and not another sound was heard from them after that.

Clay knew he would not see Hardy again until either his wound had healed or his dead body was found. He and Sugar would go to the woods and not come back until that time.

It was all over then. Semon sat down in a chair, his hands shaking too much to hold the revolver any longer. He tossed it on the bed and looked down at the floor where Hardy had fallen.

There was a rank odor of burned powder in the room, mingling with the cloud of yellow dust that had been shaken from the walls and ceiling and had not had time to settle on the floor and furniture.

“I don’t mind seeing a dead darky once in a while,” Clay said, “but I sure do hate to see one of my hands passing away on me right at this time. It’s planting time, and no other. If Hardy was to die, I’d have to get out and do some of the work myself. I sure would hate to see him pass on.”

Dene had been standing outside the door in the dark, and she looked inside the room. Neither Clay nor Semon saw her, and she came inside and stood near the door with her back to the wall.

“What kind of treatment do you call this for a visitor in your house, Horey?” Semon said, turning his head to one side and glaring at Clay. “Looks like you would be on the lookout to take care of the people who come to stay with you.”

Dene could not keep her eyes from going back and forth to Semon. He was a strange-looking sight to see in the lamplight, sitting hunched forward in the little chair, his underwear looking as if it had shrunk a dozen sizes since he first put it on.

“He’s the queerest man,” Dene said, giggling a little.

Clay looked up at her, not knowing she had come into the room. Semon did not move.

“I don’t see why you think I was due to look out for you so much,” Clay said. “Looks like you was the one who wouldn’t ask no advice.”

“He’s one of those God-damn yellow niggers,” Semon said. “That the whole trouble. You ought to have told me he was that kind. I can handle the black ones, but it’s dangerous to get tangled up with those yellow sons of bitches. They act like they’re just as good as a white man.”

Clay moved across the room, his shadow covering Dene.

“Looks to me like a man of your sense would have known Sugar’s man was yellow like herself,” Clay said. “Yellow girls don’t do much mixing with the black ones. They nearly always pick out a man with the lightest color.”

I
T WAS LATE
when Clay got up the next morning. Usually he was out of bed by five. There was never much for him to do, except to see that the darkies got started to the fields on time. Some mornings he walked down the road as far as the bridge, and turned around and came back; by seven, at the latest, he was ready to sit on the front porch and put his feet on the railing.

This morning the sun was two hours high when he opened his eyes. He lay on his side wondering why he had slept so late. It was not long before he remembered what had happened in the next room.

Clay jumped out of bed, hurrying into his pants and shirt, and went to the kitchen. Sugar was not there, but Dene had breakfast ready. He sat down at the table and ate quickly.

When he had finished, he spoke to Dene for the first time that morning. She had already eaten, and she was clearing the table.

“Where’s Semon Dye?” he asked her, pushing back his chair. “You haven’t seen him this morning?”

Dene made a trip to the stove and back before she answered him.

“He hasn’t been out here. I suppose he’s still in bed asleep,” she said. “He’s the queerest thing.”

Clay went to the front porch, passing the closed door of Semon’s room without noticing it. At the threshold of the outside door he stopped. Semon’s old car was still there, standing in the green shade of the magnolia tree where he had left it. While he was standing there wondering, Semon’s door opened, and out he stepped, straightening his stringy black tie and flicking dust from his coat.

Clay waited for him to come to the porch.

“I didn’t know where you were,” Clay said. “I was looking everywhere for you. Somehow, I didn’t think you’d get up and fly off into the night.”

“I feel fresh as a daisy,” Semon said, beaming upon Clay. “I never felt better in my life. You take an April morning and a man like me, and the combination can’t be beat. We feel like a young rooster.”

“That’s good,” Clay nodded. “I had been thinking that maybe last night sort of did you up.”

Semon looked down-upon Clay, laughing.

“Things like that never upset me, Horey,” he explained, rubbing his hands together. “I’ve never let little things like that set me bottom side up. I’ve got accustomed to knocking about from pillar to post. For the past twenty years I’ve been first here, next there, and then someplace else.”

“Things like shooting darkies never upset you none?”

Semon shook his head firmly.

“You’re used to winging them?” Clay said.

“Yes and no,” he said; “I am and I ain’t.”

“Now look here,” Clay said, squinting up at the tall man. “If I was to ask you if you was Semon Dye, would you say that, too?”

“Coz, don’t let anybody tell you different. I am Semon Dye. And don’t you forget it.”

“I don’t reckon I’ll be apt to forget it,” Clay said. “I’ve always heard there was such a creature as Semon Dye, but I never looked for him down here in Rocky Comfort.”

Semon sniffed the air in the hall. He turned and looked through the house to the back porch.

“I always like to eat a little something in the morning,” Semon said. “Reckon you could fix me up?”

“Doggone my hide,” Clay said, “I forgot all about you eating. Here, just walk out to the kitchen and Dene will set you a plate. I’ve done had mine.”

Semon walked down the hall, shaking the timbers of the frail house with his long heavy strides. Just as he was about to step out on the back porch, he stopped and whispered back to Clay:

“Sugar’s not cooking this morning, is she?”

“No,” Clay said. “I ain’t seen Sugar all morning. Nor Hardy, either. Dene’s cooking now. I don’t know when Sugar will show up again.”

Semon nodded and went out on the porch and looked into the kitchen. Clay could see him standing there, sticking his head through the door. He waited until Semon had gone inside, and then he found his chair on the front porch and sat down with his feet on the railing to smoke his pipe.

Up the road he could see Vearl and three or four Negro children playing with an old automobile tire in front of the cabins. They were rolling it as if it were a hoop, and it was so large and so heavy that it took two or three of them to move it. He watched Vearl playing in the sand and dust. Vearl’s clothes were a little ragged, he noticed, but they were clean enough. Susan washed them every day. The three youngest pickaninnies were naked. They did not wear clothes at all from April to September. They were about three or four years old, and coal-black. They looked, surrounding Vearl, like crows hopping around a basket of cotton.

Susan took care of Vearl. He ate at her house, he slept there, he played in the yard and in the road all day long with the other children, and his clothes were washed in the big black iron pot with all the others. There were days when neither Clay nor Dene saw him at all; when they did see him, he was usually playing in the road with the other children. Occasionally he came to the house on an errand for Susan or George, when she needed some soap, or when George wished tobacco; and if Clay happened to be at home at the time, he always tried to catch Vearl and talk to him.

Clay had not succeeded in catching Vearl for nearly a year. Vearl knew that Dene was not his mother, and he was not certain that Clay was his father. His mother had dark hair, and she had always worn a ribbon of some kind around her hair. Dene’s hair was almost yellow, and Vearl had never seen it hanging down her back as his mother had worn hers most of the time.

Clay shifted his feet on the railing and contemplated Vearl. It was the first time he had taken any notice of the boy in several days.

“That boy,” he said to himself.

Vearl had been left in Clay’s care when Lorene went to Jacksonville. She had said she would not be able to take care of him for a while.

That was the same time she had made him promise to take Vearl to the doctor in McGuffin and have him treated until he was well. The boy had contracted syphilis when he was three or four years old, and nothing had been done for him. The disease had run on and on for the past year and a half. Clay still intended taking Vearl to town to see the doctor, but he had postponed it so long that it had become a habit. He did buy a bottle of medicine in McGuffin for Vearl one Saturday; the bottle stood on the kitchen shelf, where it had been ever since the day he brought it home. He had never been able to catch Vearl to give him the medicine.

“That boy, Vearl,” he said again, watching him dart in and out of the group of Negro children.

The boy was six years old then, going on seven, and Susan had told him several times lately that Vearl ought to be treated. Susan hated to see him in such a condition, and she was afraid her own four children would catch syphilis. She had begged Clay to take Vearl to the doctor in McGuffin; she had even started out walking with him herself one day. She would have got there, but before they had gone a mile, Vearl had broken loose from her and run across the creek where she could not catch him.