Lady (12 page)

As photographers, Ag and I seemed without peer, for the shots projected clear and large on the sheet, give or take a wrinkle or two in the fabric. There was old Mr. Lyman, our local Civil War relic, waving in the parade. There, on horseback, was Eamon Harmon, in tricorne and wig, playing the treacherous Stamp Agent for the Crown, Jared Ingersoll, who'd been stopped by the angry revolutionaries and forced to resign. There was the Pequot Massacre, with me riding full tilt onto the Green. There were all the guests at the tea in Lady's gardens; there we were on the terrace wall watching the boat flotilla down in the Cove; there was Blue Ferguson, repeating his role in his war bonnet, hoisting Mabel Talcott over his shoulder as I'd snapped the picture, and the crowd laughed. . . .

I had my head down, trying to adjust the focus slightly, when I heard the sound of a chair overturning. Lady had sprung to her feet, her hand to her mouth, staring at the picture on the sheet. Then, shaking her head, she hurried out the side door. The garage darkened again, and while everyone made astonished talk I stared down the beam of light to the picture on the sheet, seeing what I had failed to notice before, and which, enlarged, became immediately apparent. There, at the front of the group around Blue and Mabel Talcott, a little to one side, observing with thin amusement, the tight mouth twisted askew, was the blurred but clearly recognizable image of the red-haired man.

New Songs

So it was that Lady "retired" and we lost her for some time to come. For endless weeks no one saw her, and all you needed was to hear Ruthie Sparrow over the fence to know that the bedroom blinds were down. Everyone was at a loss to understand what had frightened her, and I for once withheld what little I knew, revealing nothing of the existence of the red-haired man. Secretly, I studied the snapshot under my magnifying glass, perusing the fuzzy features and wondering what his sinister power was over our friend, and how he came by it.

But, as we were to learn, even without Lady life continued however it might, and while she retreated into some unfathomable fear and hid behind drawn shades, and as July came on, we were now left to our own devices.

Those acquainted with the tedium of summertime in a small town are those who have lived through it, year after year. School vacation may have its charms, that infinite and airless vacuum of unvarying temperature looming up before the boy who in May anticipates the end of classes and who in September laggardly returns with some small sense of regret for time lost, but who by mid-July wonders if the days will ever pass, pondering on how to fill those monotonous hours of what-to-do-now.

Such times become a test of both ingenuity and will; the attempts to discover something new and diverting prove more taxing in that steamy season when those who can afford it have gone to camp, others to their lake or seashore cottages. These are the days of listless inaction and infernal boredom when the green leaves are already shriveled, the lawns burnt off in sorry patches, the flower beds too soon tired and gone to stalks. The businessmen come off the 5:10 in shirt sleeves, carrying their coats, with ties yanked, while at high noon people look for their reflection, children for mirages, in the baking tar of the streets.

One Saturday in canning season, Ma sent me over to Elthea to borrow some rubber jar rings. Elthea was ironing in the kitchen, shirts and a stack of Jesse's collars, dazzling white, one for each day in the week, and with enough starch in them to stiff a corpse. But no, she said, they were out of jar rings.

I asked for a cruller from the breadbox, but she said crullers were singing the Doxology. I knew Lady hadn't been baking. Elthea cut me a piece of her own banana spice cake, and gave me a glass of ginger ale, which I drank in morose silence.

"What's the matter, hon?" Elthea looked at me as her iron zipped around the buttons on a shirt.

"Nothing."

"Come on now, you look dark as thunder. Is it Missus? Don't you fret. Missus is all right, I just gave her a fine lunch and she ate it all. That's always a good sign." While I finished my cake, she told me about the show she and Jesse had seen Thursday night. Elthea loved going to the movies, or to the State Theatre where they had vaudeville and she could hear Cab Galloway sing "Minnie the Moocher."

Just then a truck pulled in the drive and backfired as it came past the window.

"Hol-
ee
, that'll wake the dead, or Missus, if she's napping. Blue Ferguson, whyn't you get yourself a new truck, sound like guns going off out there."

Blue came through the doorway with a market basket which he put on the table. Elthea pulled her cord plug and began taking the things out. "Here now, you call this veal?" she asked, slipping me a wink as she inspected a parcel.

"Elthea, that veal came off the fatted calf, believe it." Blue knew she was joshing him; Elthea loved to joke with all the delivery people and, like everyone else, she appreciated Blue. She sat him down and gave him a piece of cake, too.

"Say, that's good cake, Elthea," Blue said around a mouthful. "If you didn't have a husband, I'd marry you myself."

Elthea stifled her laughter and gave him a playful swat. "You better not let Jesse hear you talk that way, Blue Ferguson." Still, I could tell she was flattered. o

"How do you get around on those high heels, Elthea?" She gave him a sassy look and did a little sashay as she replugged her iron.

"Same way you get around on those flat ones. And if Missus doesn't eat her dinner tonight because the veal's tough, I'm coming after you all the way to Main Street. With this." She shook a rolling pin at him.

"Lord, that one," she said, giggling, when he'd gone, "he's True Blue, all right." When I asked where Jesse was, she said he'd taken his pole to the Cove and was probably fishing. I ran to the back of Lady's yard and looked down to the river: there was Jesse in his little skiff, edging along among the willows near the bank as he trolled.

I went down and stood waving until I attracted his attention. "How's about a ride?"

He nodded, I kicked off my sneakers, waded out, and clambered over the stern of the skiff. "How's fishing?"

"Fishing's fishing. Few perch, is all."

"You like fishing, huh?"

"I like it."

That was Jesse; you could hardly get more than a sentence out of him at one time. Being the sort who seldom talked, he gave you the feeling he didn't enjoy talking, but was full of all sorts of thoughts, and that if you could only discover them you'd be better off. He was a wise old bird; that is to say, he was wiser than some, which made him wiser than most.

I have called him a wise "old" bird. Maybe he was old, maybe he wasn't. He never seemed to age much, and Mrs. Sparrow said that in earlier days he was as hale a fellow as one could hope to see. He must have made quite an impression; there were not many Negroes living in Pequot Landing, just Andy Cleves, who ran the Noble Patriot tavern, some families at the end of Knobb Street, and a scattering of housemaids around town.

Jesse rowed a little, fished a little, was silent I said, "How's Lady -- Mrs. Harleigh?"

"Fine."

Silence.

"Jesse?"

"Um?"

"Don'tcha think Colonel Blatchley'd make a good husband for her?"

"Um."

"He likes her a lot."

"Missus tell you she wants to get married again?"

"Nope."

"Colonel Blatchley?"

"Nope."

"Then what?"

"Just seemed like a good idea."

"Maybe, maybe not."

For all his uncommunicativeness, Jesse Griffin was hardly a man to be taken for granted. During the time we had become friends with Lady and been given the key to the house, so to speak, he was to us as much a fixture of the place as the walls or the roof, and if it was Elthea who fed us and looked after us, Jesse's quiet presence was nonetheless affirmed in a hundred small things. And as we grew older and he came more to trust us, in some strange, unspoken way he took the place of the father we had lost.

To me he had the look of a corsair, a strong, hawklike face, with prominent nose and cheekbones, the lips chiseled, almost etched, with an outline around them. When he smiled, which was rarely, his evenly set teeth flashed white, though there was little of this color in his eyes whose dark centers were surrounded with whites that were more often than not reddish, or even yellow. His short-cropped hair (Elthea used hand clippers on it on the back porch; Mr. Pellegrino at the barbershop would never cut a black person's hair) was like a woolly cap, and we wondered what it was like to touch it.

His hands were long and beautifully articulated, all the tendons and veins showing beneath the dark skin, with lighter palms, as if he'd scrubbed them too hard, and fingernails of a perfect shape, blunt at the ends, plum-colored, with paler, perfect moons, and always well looked after, like a doctor's.

He never did care much for our New England winters. He was always bundled up in sweaters and scarves and caps, but in the warm seasons his blood seemed to thin out and rise like sap in a tree. He was the hardest worker.

The pride he took in that house, the zeal with which he looked after it! We used to say he was Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief, he did so many things -- gardening, plumbing, building, repairing. You'd see him sitting on a windowsill in one of his striped shirts (he wore violet suspenders to keep his pants up), a red bandanna wafting from his back pocket, as he Bon-Amied the panes, and always finding time when everything else had been seen to to lay out on the kitchen table and polish all Lady's good Georgian silver that was part of the Harleigh inheritance. How often I would find him down on his knees at the sideboard with his flannel rag and can of polish, and when he had waxed and buffed he ran his fingers over the worked surface of the wood as if the pale whorls of his fingertips by some tactile sense informed him of the "doneness," the same way Lady's careful poking with a broom straw into a cake layer told her when it was baked.

He was large and lean and strong, but for all his size you never heard him coming and going: as soon as he got home after driving Lady somewhere, he would remove his good shoes and put on his old ones, with X's cut in to ease his corns, or a worn pair of carpet slippers. He could tell the weather by those corns. In later years he began wearing glasses to read the newspaper or the books he was so fond of, though neither he nor Lady would ever admit to his failing eyesight.

Like Blue Ferguson, Jesse was my hero, if for different reasons. It was the simple fact of the quiet presence that bespoke an authority urging both respect and obedience. As he became more familiar to me, I saw him not simply as Lady Harleigh's Negro houseman, but as a human being, as individual and particular as any white person, even though, as we knew, it was the whites who'd inherited the earth.

And so, in those years in the house on the Green, it was the man Jesse, rather than the women Lady and Elthea, who made us all feel the most safe and self-assured, for what did women know of hunting and fishing, of the intricacies of a motor, or how to lay a brick properly? We were afforded ample opportunity to observe his dignified if somber ways, his never subservient but almost courtly demeanor, his flashes of wry humor, his intelligence, the bright look that said we had done well, the darker one that said we hadn't, or the disapproving guttural sounds he made in his throat when we were out of line.

It was just such noises as these that I encountered as I tried to make further conversation: "Jesse?"

"Grmm-hmp?"

"What happens to her?"

He gave me a look and positively growled. "What happens to her when?"

"When she's -- you know, funny. Like -- now."

He thought a moment, giving the matter consideration, as if how best to explain the matter to my young mind. At last he puffed out his lips and said, "Missus, she gets feeling breakedy sometimes. Her brains get breakedy, she has to give them a rest."

I had been thinking of Mr. Ott, and how he figured in matters, and was looking for a way to discovering if Jesse might know anything about him.

During the ensuing silence, Jesse gave me a keen, studied look. He said, "Missus, she's a fine person, and when she gets feeling trapsetty, best thing is just to let her get through it. She'll come downstairs again."

"When?"

"One of these days. It's never good to dig into God's business too much."

I nodded, deciding that maybe Mr. Ott was part of God's business, and that I'd better leave it to Him. There was a
plop
! in the water near the bank, and I looked, thinking perhaps to see a frog, but instead it was a rabbit -- Rabbit Hornaday, under the willows, shooting stones with a slingshot.

"Don't you think Rabbit's a jerk?" I asked Jesse.

"Doesn't matter what I think. Point is, do you?"

"Sort of."

"He's no humbug, that Hornaday fellow. You boys all go nugging round just with each other, but you ought to let him come and nug with you. He spends too much time by himself -- not fitting, not proper, doing a person that way. He's a handy fellow."

"No kidding?"

"No kidding."

"How?"

"That's what you ought to find out. He might have a trick or two up his sleeve you don't know about. You listen to what Jesse tells you."

"Yes, sir."

"Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"Then shake, son."

"Shake, Jesse."

We shook, initiating a formula that was to become ritual between us. Later, when he tied up his skiff, we walked back up the hill, where Elthea had his lunch waiting for him. Mine was waiting for me, as well, and Ma was hot under the collar because of my not having brought back her rubber jar rings. When lunch was over, she dispatched us to buy some, and some more Mason jars as well.

"Just go to the store, "
buy
the jars, and come right
back
; don't go anywhere else," she admonished us, giving Lew money for the purchases. "Okay," we said, and soon as she was back at the piccalilli on the stove, we sneaked around the fence into Gert Flagler's pasture and had a ride on her cow. Poor Bossy, with us seizing every opportunity to ride her, had never learned to buck us off -- our most ardent desire -- but only loped about the enclosure in dull frustration. Hearing her frantic moos, Gert came thundering off the back porch with blood in her eye, flailing the air with her great pocketbook, while we tumbled off the cow and fled from her wrath.