Of Love and Dust (2 page)

“Like tonight?” I said.

“You’ll never know, whitemouth,” he said.

“Well, let me and you get one thing straight right now,” I said. “I’m nobody’s whitemouth. And another thing: if you want to run tonight I’ll stop the truck right now and let you go. Did you hear me?”

He was quiet, still holding that handkerchief against his forehead.

“All right,” I said. “We got that settled.”

“Shit,” he said, and laid back in the seat.

2
 

A half hour later I was crossing the Mississippi River into Baton Rouge. I could smell the strong odor from the cement plant down below the bridge. Sometimes the odor was so strong it nearly made you sick. Farther to the right were the chemical plants and oil companies. I could see hundreds and hundreds of electric lights over there. High above all the lights and buildings and oil tanks was a big blaze of fire. The fire came from a flamestack burning off wasted gas.

I woke up the boy and asked him where he lived. He told me to go to South Baton Rouge. I asked him where at in South Baton Rouge and he told me Louise Street. When I came to Louise Street I had to wake him up again. This time he sat up in the seat and nodded for me to go on. After I had gone about two blocks he pointed to a house on the right. I drove the truck to the side and parked before a little white cottage house. The front door was open and there was a light on inside.

“What all you have to get?” I asked the boy.

He didn’t answer; he just got out and started toward the house. I got out of the truck and followed him. I wasn’t doing it to keep an eye on him—that was his business if he wanted to run; I was going with him to help him bring the things back outside.

“Marcus,” a woman said, soon as he walked into the room. “Mama, Marcus here.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” another person said. This was an old lady’s voice. “Didn’t I tell you?” she said again.

I came in the room and stood by the door. Everybody was so busy looking at Marcus, they didn’t see me or hear me come in. An old lady who must have been eighty or ninety was patting Marcus on the face. Marcus didn’t like it, but the old lady was so happy to see him she couldn’t stop. Another, younger woman and a man were standing to the side. The young woman looked happy, but the man just looked disgusted. A little boy and a little girl stood on the other side of the man, looking at Marcus, too. Both of them acted like they were a little afraid of him. The little boy was the first to notice that somebody else had come in the room. After he had looked at me a second, everybody else did, too.

“You come for his clothes?” the old lady asked me.

“Yes ma’am; a bed too if you got one.”

She nodded.

“I’m Miss Julie Rand,” she said. “I christened Marcus.”

“I’m James Kelly,” I said, going up to her.

I shook hands with all of them. The man was called George and he was Miss Julie Rand’s son. The young woman, Clorestine, was George’s wife. Clorestine acted just the opposite from her husband. He was disgusted and ashamed of Marcus; she was happy to see Marcus was out of jail.

“I don’t remember you,” Miss Julie Rand said to me. “How long you live at Hebert?”

“The last three years.”

“No, I had left by then,” she said.

“Long before then, Mama,” Clorestine said.

“Yes,” the old lady said. She looked at Marcus again. “Hungry?” she asked him.

“Starving,” he said. He didn’t use any kind of kindness or respect in his voice. I could see George looking at him from the side. He hated Marcus for what he had done, and he was ashamed because I knew about it.

“Care to have supper with us, Mr. Kelly?” Miss Julie asked me. Miss Julie had a little, high-pitched voice just fitting for somebody about her size and age.

“No ma’am, I haven’t so long ate.”

“Well, there’s some ice cream and pie there,” she said. “You might have little dessert with us.”

“I’m taking a bath,” Marcus said. “Eat when I come out.”

Everybody watched him leave the room. He started pulling the shirttail out of his pants before he reached the other door. The back of the shirt was smeared with dirt and there was a tear on the right sleeve. For about a minute after he left the room, nobody said a thing. Then the old lady looked up at me. I’m about six-feet-one and she was about four-eight or -nine, so she had to hold her head ’way back to look me in the face.

“He’s a good boy,” she said.

“Sure,” I thought; “and handy with a knife, too.” Because now I had figured out who he was. A colored boy had killed another colored boy at one of the honky-tonks over the weekend. What I couldn’t figure out was where did Marshall Hebert fit into this.

“Come to my room with me, Mr. Kelly, will you, please?” Miss Julie said in that little, high-pitched voice that was so fitting for her.

I followed her into a small, ill-smelling room that had too much furniture. All old people who move from the country to the city live in rooms like these. They try to bring everything they had in the country and cram it into a little room
that can’t hold half of what they own. Miss Julie had an old sofa chair against the wall and another little rocker by the bed. There was an old trunk by the window with a pile of quilts and blankets stacked on top of it. Against the other wall was an old armoire leaning to one side. There must have been a half dozen paste-board boxes stacked on top of the armoire. In the corner by the armoire were several paper bags packed full of clothes. The mantelpiece was cluttered with all kinds of nick-nacks, and there was an old coal oil lamp there, too, just in case the electric lights went out. No matter what wall you faced, you saw pictures of Jesus Christ. These pictures were on old calendars that Miss Julie Rand had never thrown away. They dated from the late thirties up to this year—forty-eight. Above the mantelpiece, stuck inside an old black wooden frame, was a picture of a man and a woman. The man was sitting; the woman was standing beside him. I figured that this was Miss Julie and her husband when she was much, much younger.

“Please, sit down, Mr. Kelly,” she said.

So I sat in the sofa chair while she sat in her little rocker looking at me. She was a very small old lady, and now, sitting there with her feet hardly touching the floor, she looked even smaller. Her head was tied in an old pink rag, and her gray dress nearly touched the floor. The old brown slippers on her feet looked pretty near old as she did.

But the thing that hit me most about the room was the odor in there. It was the odor of old people, old clothes, old liniment bottles.

“From round here, Mr. Kelly?” she asked me.

“Pointe Coupee up there,” I said.

“You look like a very nice person, Mr. Kelly,” she said. Then she looked at me a long time, studying me closely. “Yes, a very nice person.”

I didn’t know if she wanted me to agree with her or not, but I know I didn’t feel comfortable with her looking at me like that. And that odor in the room wasn’t helping out matters, either.

“I want you do me a favor, Mr. Kelly,” she said.

“Yes ma’am?”

“Look after Marcus up there.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Sidney Bonbon still overseer there, I hear.”

“Yes ma’am, he’s still there.”

“Still the same?”

“Most of us get along with him,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, nodding her head. “But first he got to try you, he got to break you. I want you talk to Marcus. I want you make him understand.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said.

I could still smell that odor. It came from everywhere in the room. I wanted to hold my breath, but the old lady was looking at me all the time.

“I hate to see him come there,” she said. “But that pen can kill a man. There ain’t much left to you when they let you go.”

“That plantation can do the same to some people,” I said.

“Yes, that’s true,” she said thoughtfully. “But you got the open air, and you got people who care round you.”

“He’ll make out all right if he take orders,” I said. “But he’ll have to take orders there.”

“You can talk to him, Mr. Kelly. You look like a person he’ll listen to.”

“That one listen to anybody?” I thought. “You trying to kid me, little old lady?”

“Because he’s a good boy,” she said, looking at me like she didn’t believe what she was saying herself. “That other
boy was wrong. They forced him to fight that boy. That other boy was the first to pull his knife.”

“How do you know all this?” I was thinking. “That happened about three in the morning and you probably had been in bed eight or nine hours already. You would believe anything he said, wouldn’t you?”

“He don’t have a mama or a daddy,” she was saying. “His mama died and his daddy just ran off and left him. I did my best to raise him right, but you can see I’m old.”

I nodded. That old lady could sure talk sorrowfully when she wanted to.

“You will look after him, won’t you?” she said.

“I’ll advise him,” I said. “But I can’t make him do what he don’t want to do. I’ll do my best.”

“Yes, I appreciate that,” she said. “I would go and stay with him myself, but my children don’t want me on that plantation any more. I stay sick lately. Right now I’m very sick, Mr. Kelly.”

“You look good,” I said.

“Ahh, Mr. Kelly,” she said, smiling. I could see she didn’t have any teeth. Then she stopped smiling and just looked at me a while. “No, Mr. Kelly, it’s only a matter of time now. But I’ve made peace with my Maker.”

I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do, either. I think I made a slight nod.

“How do you get along with Mr. Marshall?” she asked me.

“We speak when we meet,” I said. “Other than that we don’t have much to do with each other.”

“Do you know Sidney Bonbon has something on him?”

“No ma’am, I didn’t know that.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “That’s why I had to leave. I had been the Hebert cook forty years. Cooked for three generations
of them. Sidney Bonbon got something on him and put Pauline there in my place.”

“What did Bonbon get on him?” I asked.

Miss Julie rocked in that little chair now nearly a minute, just studying me. She didn’t want to tell me, I could see that, and maybe she had already said too much. You see, I was only thirty-three years old, still a child, and children shouldn’t know too much about other people’s business. Especially when it was about somebody important as Marshall Hebert. But Miss Julie needed me to look after Marcus, and she knew I knew how bad she needed me.

“Two people got killed long ago. People say Bonbon did it for Mr. Marshall …”

Miss Julie didn’t stop rocking to say this. You could see how much she hated to say it or even think about it. She didn’t tell me to keep it to myself, but her eyes warned me to never repeat it again. She went on rocking in that little chair, her old brown slippers barely touching the floor.

“So that’s it,” I thought. “So that’s why Bonbon steals half of everything that grows on that plantation. Marshall can’t do a thing about it. So that’s—but wait. Wait just one minute. You know about it, too, don’t you? Is that the reason he got Marcus out of jail?” I had been trying to figure out something all the way from Hebert into Baton Rouge. “Why?” I kept on asking myself. “Why? Who is this boy and why?” I knew that white men bonded colored boys out of jail for a few hundred dollars and worked them until they had gotten all their money back two and three times over. But I was trying to figure out why Marshall Hebert would do this when he already had more people than he needed. Now I knew. This little old lady had the finger on him, too.

“No, it’s not what you thinking, Mr. Kelly,” she said.
“That white man been good to me. I went to him ’cause I didn’t have nowhere else to turn.”

I nodded, but I didn’t believe her. To me she was a little old gangster just like Bonbon was. She was even worst than Bonbon. Bonbon was white and you expect this of white people. But she was my own race—and a woman, too.

“Sidney still messing round with Pauline down the quarter?” Miss Julie asked.

“Yes ma’am,” I said, eying her just like I would any other gangster.

“How are those children?”

“Pretty big boys.”

“And his own wife up the quarter, she got any?”

“That one little girl,” I said.

She nodded. “He’s more crazy ’bout Pauline than he is his own wife,” she said.

“Pauline knows that,” I said.

“Huh,” Miss Julie said. Then she started looking at me like she knew more about life than somebody like me would ever know. “You think there will ever be a time?” she asked.

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“When him and Pauline will be able to live together like they want.”

“They live pretty good already,” I said.

“Still go and come like he want?”

“Just like he want.”

“And his wife know all about it?”

“Yes ma’am. All she got to do is come to that gate and look down the quarter. She can see that truck or that horse down there almost any time he’s not home.”

“I feel sorry for her, not for Pauline,” Miss Julie said. “Pauline go’n look after herself. That other one, I don’t think she got ’nough sense to do it.”