Authors: Toni Morrison
Macon stepped back, one hand outstretched behind him, thinking all the while of how his father’s body had twitched and danced for whole minutes in the dirt. He touched the cave’s wall and a piece of it gave way in his hand. Closing his fingers around it, he threw it at the grinning man’s head, hitting him just above the eye. Blood spurted out and knocked the smile off the pale face, but did not stop the man from coming and coming, all the time wiping blood from his face and smearing it on his shirt. Macon got hold of another rock, but missed that time. The man kept coming.
The scream that boomed down the cave tunnel and woke the bats came just when Macon thought he had taken his last living breath. The bleeding man turned toward the direction of the scream and looked at the colored girl long enough for Macon to pull out his knife and bring it down on the old man’s back. He crashed forward, then turned his head to look up at them. His mouth moved and he mumbled something that sounded like “What for?” Macon stabbed him again and again until he stopped moving his mouth, stopped trying to talk, and stopped jumping and twitching on the ground.
Panting with the exertion of slashing through an old man’s rib cage, Macon ran back to get the blanket the man had been sleeping on. He wanted the dead man to disappear, to be covered, hidden, to be gone. When he snatched the blanket, a large tarpaulin came with it and he saw three boards positioned across what looked like a shallow pit. He paused and then kicked the boards aside. Underneath were little gray bags, their necks tied with wire, arranged like nest eggs. Macon picked one of them up and was amazed at its weight.
“Pilate,” he called. “Pilate.”
But she was growing roots where she stood, and staring open-mouthed at the dead man. Macon had to pull her by the arm over to the hole where the bags lay. After some difficulty with the wire (he ended up having to use his teeth), he got one open and shook the gold nuggets it held out into the leaves and twigs that lay on the floor of the cave.
“Gold,” he whispered, and immediately, like a burglar out on his first job, stood up to pee.
Life, safety, and luxury fanned out before him like the tail-spread of a peacock, and as he stood there trying to distinguish each delicious color, he saw the dusty boots of his father standing just on the other side of the shallow pit.
“It
is
Papa!” said Pilate. And as if in answer to her recognition, he took a deep breath, rolled his eyes back, and whispered, “Sing. Sing,” in a hollow voice before he melted away again.
Pilate darted around the cave calling him, looking for him, while Macon piled the sacks of gold into the tarpaulin.
“Let’s go, Pilate. Let’s get out of here.”
“We can’t take that.” She pointed a finger at his bundle.
“What? Not take it? You lost your mind?”
“That’s stealing. We killed a man. They’ll be after us, all over. If we take his money, then they’ll think that’s why we did it. We got to leave it, Macon. We can’t get caught with no bags of money.”
“This ain’t money; it’s gold. It’ll keep us for life, Pilate. We can get us another farm. We can–”
“Leave it, Macon! Leave it! Let them find it just where it was!” Then she began to shout, “Papa! Papa!”
Macon slapped her and the little brass box dangled on her ear. She cupped it in her hands for a moment and then leaped on her brother like an antelope. They fought right there in front of the dead man’s staring eyes. Pilate was almost as strong as Macon, but no real match for him, and he probably would have beaten her unconscious had she not got his knife, not yet dry from the old man’s blood, and held it ready for his heart.
Macon stood very still and watched her eyes. He began calling her ugly names, but she didn’t answer. He backed out of the cave and walked a little distance away.
All day he waited for her to come out. All day she stayed there. When night came he just sat, at the foot of a tree, unafraid of all the night things that had terrified him before, eyes wide open, waiting for her to stick her woolly head out of the cave. There was no sound from her direction and he waited the whole night. At dawn he crept forward a foot at a time, hoping he would catch her asleep. Just then he heard some dogs and knew hunters were walking nearby. He ran as fast as he could through the woods until he couldn’t hear the dogs anymore.
Another day and a night he spent trying to work his way back to the cave and avoid the hunters if they were still about. Finally he got there, three days and two nights later. Inside the cave the dead man was still looking placidly up at him, but the tarpaulin and the gold were gone.
The secretaries went away. So did the children and the dogs. Only the pigeons, the drunks, and the trees were left in the little park.
Milkman had eaten almost none of his barbecue. He was watching his father’s face, shining with perspiration and the emotions of memory.
“She took it, Macon. After all that, she took the gold.”
“How do you know? You didn’t see her take it,” said Milkman.
“The tarpaulin was green.” Macon Dead rubbed his hands together. “Pilate came to this city in 1930. Two years later they call back all the gold. I figured she spent it all in the twenty or so years since I’d seen her, since she was living like poor trash when she got here. It was natural for me to believe she’d got rid of it all. Now you tell me she got a green sack full of something hard enough to give you a hickey on your head when you bumped into it. That’s the gold, boy. That’s it!”
He turned to his son full face and licked his lips. “Macon, get it and you can have half of it; go wherever you want. Get it. For both of us. Please get it, son. Get the gold.”
Chapter 8
Every night now Guitar was seeing little scraps of Sunday dresses—white and purple, powder blue, pink and white, lace and voile, velvet and silk, cotton and satin, eyelet and grosgrain. The scraps stayed with him all night and he remembered Magdalene called Lena and Corinthians bending in the wind to catch the heart-red pieces of velvet that had floated under the gaze of Mr. Robert Smith. Only Guitar’s scraps were different. The bits of Sunday dresses that he saw did not fly; they hung in the air quietly, like the whole notes in the last measure of an Easter hymn.
Four little colored girls had been blown out of a church, and his mission was to approximate as best he could a similar death of four little white girls some Sunday, since he was the Sunday man. He couldn’t do it with a piece of wire, or a switchblade. For this he needed explosives, or guns, or hand grenades. And that would take money. He knew that the assignments of the Days would more and more be the killing of white people in groups, since more and more Negroes were being killed in groups. The single, solitary death was going rapidly out of fashion, and the Days might as well prepare themselves for it.
So when Milkman came to him with a proposal to steal and share a cache of gold, Guitar smiled. “Gold?” He could hardly believe it.
“Gold.”
“Nobody got gold, Milkman.”
“Pilate does.”
“It’s against the law to have gold.”
“That’s why she got it. She can’t use it, and she can’t report its being stolen since she wasn’t supposed to have it in the first place.”
“How do we get rid of it—get greenbacks for it?”
“Leave that to my father. He knows bank people who know other bank people. They’ll give him legal tender for it.”
“Legal tender.” Guitar laughed softly. “How much legal tender will it bring?”
“That’s what we have to find out.”
“What’s the split?”
“Three ways.”
“Your papa know that?”
“Not yet. He thinks it’s two ways.”
“When you gonna tell him?”
“Afterwards.”
“Will he go for it?”
“How can he
not
go for it?”
“When do we get it?”
“Whenever we want to.”
Guitar spread his palm. “My man.” Milkman slapped his hand. “Legal tender. Legal tender. I love it. Sounds like a virgin bride.” Guitar rubbed the back of his neck and lifted his face to the sun in a gesture of expansiveness and luxury.
“Now we have to come up with something. A way to get it,” said Milkman.
“Be a breeze. A cool cool breeze,” Guitar continued, smiling at the sun, his eyes closed as though to ready himself for the gold by trying out a little bit of the sun’s.
“A breeze?” Now that Guitar was completely enthusiastic, Milkman’s own excitement was blunted. Something perverse made him not want to hand the whole score to his friend on a platter. There should be some difficulty, some complication in this adventure. “We just walk over there and snatch it off the wall, right? And if Pilate or Reba say anything, we just knock them out the way. That what you have in mind?” He summoned as much irony as he could into his voice.
“Defeatism. That’s what you got. Defeatism.”
“Common sense is what I got.”
“Come on, old dude. Your pappy give you a good thing and you want to fight it.”
“I’m not fighting. I just want to get out alive and breathing so what I snatch does me some good. I don’t want to have to give it to a brain surgeon to pull an ice pick out the back of my head.”
“Can’t no ice pick get through the back of your head, nigger”
“Can get through my heart.”
“What you doin with a heart anyway?”
“Pumping blood. And I’d like to keep on pumping it.”
“Okay. We got us a problem. A little bitty problem: how can two big men get a fifty-pound sack out of a house with three women in it—women who all together don’t weigh three hundred pounds.”
“What you have to weigh to pull a trigger?”
“What trigger? Nobody in that house got a gun.”
“You don’t know what Hagar’s got.”
“Look, Milk. She’s been trying to kill you for almost a year. Used everything she could get her hands on and never once did she use a gun.”
“So? Maybe she’s thinking. Wait till next month.”
“Next month she’ll be too late, won’t she?” Guitar leaned his head over to the side and smiled at Milkman, an engaging boyish smile. Milkman hadn’t seen him this relaxed and cordial in a long long time. He wondered if that’s why he had let him in on it. Obviously he could pull it off alone, but maybe he wanted to see Guitar warm and joking again, his face open and smiling instead of with that grim reaper look.
They met again on Sunday on route 6 away from the colored part of town. A road consisting of used-car lots, Dairy Queens, and White Castle hamburger places. It was empty of shoppers that morning—nothing but the occasional sound of automobiles breaking the graveyard silence of the cars in the lots, lined up like tombstones.
Since that last conversation—the important one in which Guitar explained his work, not the brief chancy talks they’d had afterward—Milkman wished he had the nerve to ask Guitar the question that was bothering him. “Has he?” He could hardly phrase the question in his own mind, and certainly could never say it aloud. Guitar had impressed him with the seriousness and the dread of the work of the Days, and the danger. He had said that the Days never even talked about the details among themselves, so Milkman was sure any inquiry from him would only make Guitar sullen again. And cold. But the question was there. “Has he done it? Has he really killed somebody?” Like the old men on Tenth Street, now he bought the morning and evening papers, and once every two weeks the black newspaper, and read nervously, looking for reports of murders that appeared suspicious, pointless. When he found one, he followed the news stories until a suspect was found. Then he had to see if there were any black people murdered by someone other than their own.
“Did you do it yet?” He was like a teen-age girl wondering about the virginity of her friend, the friend who has a look, a manner newly minted—different, separate, focused somehow. “Did you do it yet? Do you know something both exotic and ordinary that I have not felt? Do you now know what it’s like to risk your one and only self? How did it feel? Were you afraid? Did it change you? And if I do it, will it change me too?”
Maybe he could ask him one day, but not this day when it was so much like old times. Taking risks together the way they did when Milkman was twelve and Guitar was a teen-ager and they swaggered, haunched, leaned, straddled, ran all over town trying to pick fights or at least scare somebody: other boys, girls, dogs, pigeons, old women, school principals, drunks, ice cream vendors, and the horses of junkyard men. When they succeeded they rode the wind and covered their mouths to aggravate their laughter. And when they didn’t, when somebody out-insulted them, or ignored them, or sent them running, they wisecracked and name-called until the sweat of embarrassment evaporated from the palms of their hands. Now they were men, and the terror they needed to provoke in others, if for no other reason than to feel it themselves, was rarer but not lighter. Dominion won by fear and secured by fear was still sweeter than any that could be got another way. (Except for women, whom they liked to win with charm but keep with indifference.)
It was like that again now, and Milkman didn’t want to lose it.
There was something else too. Guitar had placed himself willingly and eagerly in a life cause that would always provide him with a proximity to knife-cold terror. Milkman knew his own needs were milder, for he could thrive in the presence of someone who inspired fear. His father, Pilate, Guitar. He gravitated toward each one, envious of their fearlessness now, even Hagar’s, in spite of the fact that she was no longer a threat, but a fool who wanted not his death so much as his attention. Guitar could still create the sense of danger and life lived on the cutting edge. So Milkman had brought him into this scheme only partially for his help. Mostly because this escapade cried out for a cutting edge to go with its larklike quality. With Guitar as his co-conspirator, Milkman could look forward to both fun and fear.
They sauntered on down route 6, stopping frequently to examine the cars, gesticulating, bantering each other about the best way to burglarize a shack that, as Guitar said, “didn’t have a door or window with a lock.”
“But it’s got people,” Milkman insisted. “Three. All crazy.”
“Women.”
“Crazy women.”
“Women.”
“You’re forgetting, Guitar, how Pilate got the gold in the first place. She waited in a cave with a dead man for three days to haul it out, and that was when she was twelve. If she did that at twelve to get it, what you think she’ll do now when she’s almost seventy to keep it?”
“We don’t have to be rough. Cunning is all we need to be.”
“Okay. Tell me how you gonna cunning them out of the house.”
“Well, let’s see now.” Guitar stopped to scratch his back on a telephone pole. He closed his eyes, in either the ecstasy of relief or the rigors of concentration. Milkman stared off into the sky for inspiration, and while glancing toward the rooftops of the used-car places, he saw a white peacock poised on the roof of a long low building that served as headquarters for Nelson Buick. He was about to accept the presence of the bird as one of those waking dreams he was subject to whenever indecisiveness was confronted with reality, when Guitar opened his eyes and said, “Goddam! Where’d that come from?”
Milkman was relieved. “Must of come from the zoo.”
“That raggedy-ass zoo? Ain’t nothing in there but two tired monkeys and some snakes.”
“Well, where then?”
“Beats me.”
“Look—she’s flying down.” Milkman felt again his unrestrained joy at anything that could fly. “Some jive flying, but look at her strut.”
“He.”
“Huh?”
“He. That’s a he. The male is the only one got that tail full of jewelry. Son of a bitch. Look at that.” The peacock opened its tail wide. “Let’s catch it. Come on, Milk,” and Guitar started to run toward the fence.
“What for?” asked Milkman, running behind him. “What we gonna do if we catch him?”
“Eat him!” Guitar shouted. He swung easily over the double pipes that bordered the lot and began to circle the bird at a distance, holding his head a little to the side to fool the peacock, which was strutting around a powder-blue Buick. It closed its tail and let the tips trail in the gravel. The two men stood still, watching.
“How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?” Milkman asked.
“Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
The peacock jumped onto the hood of the Buick and once more spread its tail, sending the flashy Buick into oblivion.
“Faggot.” Guitar laughed softly. “White faggot.”
Milkman laughed too, and they watched a while more before leaving the used cars and the pure white peacock.
But the bird had set them up. Instead of continuing the argument about how they would cop, they began to fantasize about what the gold could buy when it became legal tender. Guitar, eschewing his recent asceticism, allowed himself the pleasure of waking up old dreams: what he would buy for his grandmother and her brother, Uncle Billy, the one who had come up from Florida to help raise them all after his father died; the marker he would buy for his father’s grave, “pink with lilies carved on it”; then stuff for his brother and sisters, and his sisters’ children. Milkman fantasized too, but not for the stationary things Guitar described. Milkman wanted boats, cars, airplanes, and the command of a large crew. He would be whimsical, generous, mysterious with his money. But all the time he was laughing and going on about what he would do and how he planned to live, he was aware of a falseness in his voice. He wanted the money—desperately, he believed—but other than making tracks out of the city, far away from Not Doctor Street, and Sonny’s Shop, and Mary’s Place, and Hagar, he could not visualize a life that much different from the one he had. New people. New places. Command. That was what he wanted in his life. And he couldn’t get deep into Guitar’s talk of elegant clothes for himself and his brother, sumptuous meals for Uncle Billy, and week-long card games in which the stakes would be a yard and a half and then a deuce and a quarter. He screamed and shouted “Wooeeeee!” at Guitar’s list, but because his life was not unpleasant and even had a certain amount of luxury in addition to its comfort, he felt off center. He just wanted to beat a path away from his parents’ past, which was also their present and which was threatening to become his present as well. He hated the acridness in his mother’s and father’s relationship, the conviction of righteousness they each held on to with both hands. And his efforts to ignore it, transcend it, seemed to work only when he spent his days looking for whatever was light-hearted and without grave consequences. He avoided commitment and strong feelings, and shied away from decisions. He wanted to know as little as possible, to feel only enough to get through the day amiably and to be interesting enough to warrant the curiosity of other people—but not their all-consuming devotion. Hagar had given him this last and more drama than he could ever want again. He’d always believed his childhood was sterile, but the knowledge Macon and Ruth had given him wrapped his memory of it in septic sheets, heavy with the odor of illness, misery, and unforgiving hearts. His rebellions, minor as they were, had all been in the company of, or shared with, Guitar. And this latest Jack and the Beanstalk bid for freedom, even though it had been handed to him by his father—assigned almost—stood some chance of success.
He had half expected his friend to laugh at him, to refuse with some biting comment that would remind Milkman that Guitar was a mystery man now, a man with blood-deep responsibilities. But when he watched Guitar’s face as he described what could be had almost for the asking, he knew right away he hadn’t guessed wrong. Maybe the professional assassin had had enough, or had changed his mind. Had he…? “Did you…?” As he listened to him go over each detail of meals, clothes, tombstones, he wondered if Guitar simply could not resist the lure of something he had never had—money.