Poindexter said, “Let's see the picture in your pocket, boy. Let's see that white girl you say is such a good piece of tail.”
Solon started up the car and pulled away from Uncle and Auntee's shack.
Poindexter said, “Let's see it. Let's see the picture of the white girl you fucked.”
Solon stopped the car on the slick road and left the engine running and switched on the overhead light.
Solon said, “Whoo-ee. They got some good-looking stuff in Chi-car-go, now don't they, Dexter.”
Poindexter took the wallet and looked carefully at the photo. He looked at Solon. He said, “Do you know who this is?”
Solon said, “She favors somebody I know, seem like.”
Poindexter said, “You goddamn idiot, this is Hedy Lamarr.”
Solon took the wallet and looked carefully at the photograph.
Hedy Lamarr. Solon thought he had heard the name.
Poindexter said, “You fucking white-trash fool. You led me to believe that this was a picture of my wife.”
Solon said, “Watch who you calling a fool, Dexter.”
Poindexter said, “You fucking idiot! That's Hedy Lamarr. Do you even know who Hedy Lamarr is?”
Solon took the German Luger out of his jacket pocket. He held the barrel in Poindexter's face.
He said, “Get out.”
Poindexter said, “You deliberately led me to believe that this was a photograph of Sally Anne.”
Solon said, “And it wont. It was some other slut instead. Get out, asshole. This is your only invitation.”
Poindexter watched his El Camino disappear through the rain. He stood in the drenching rain and wanted to die. He started walking back towards his unhappy home, ten miles through the darkness, across the bridge.
B
ACK AT
the cabin, Auntee picked up the nightshirt Bobo had taken off. She shook the wrinkles out of it and looked at it real hard, critical. There was blood on it, from the first time the pistol butt had cracked down on the boy's head. She folded it and pulled out a basket of dirty clothes and put it on top.
Uncle pulled on his brogans. He said, “I'll walk to the telephone at Sims and Hill, call the High Sheriff.”
Auntee said, “Won't do no good.”
Uncle said, “I know.”
Auntee said, “What's the High Sheriff gone do?”
Uncle said, “I know.”
Auntee said, “Get you lynched, is all.”
Uncle said, “I know, Auntee.”
Auntee said, “Don't go, Uncle. I need you here.”
Uncle said, “The world's done changed, Auntee. Ours has. I got to call the High Sheriff, even if it kills me.”
Auntee said, “It will. It's near-bout five miles.”
Uncle said, “Five miles never kilt nobody.”
Auntee said, “Don't go, Uncle.”
Uncle said, “Well, I got to.”
Auntee said, “You an old man, it's raining so hard.”
Uncle said, “I love you, Miss Auntee.”
Some time passed. Uncle was gone. Auntee undressed for bed again, put on the cotton-sack nightdress again.
She didn't think she could possibly go to sleep, not until Uncle got back, anyway. But she did, she drifted off.
Then, after a while, she woke up. She thought, “Now what was the name of the horror that I went to sleep upon?”
A long time later, after they had moved away from the Delta and were sleeping in a bed in Chicago, Auntee would say,
“Uncle.”
Uncle said, “Whut.”
Auntee said, “You know that thing you said?”
Uncle said, “Whut thing?”
Auntee said, “That thing you said about you would be satisfied if somebody would just whup him?”
Uncle said, “Aw, Auntee, don't, now. That was just a way of talking to whitefolks, you know.”
Auntee said, “No, I agree. I do. You said the Lawd's truth. Somebody ought to been whupped that child in a inch of his life for pulling this selfish stunt.”
Uncle said, “Don't say nothing you gone be sorry about. Let the boy rest.”
Auntee said, “I mean it, Uncle. I'm mad at that child. Don't nobody deserve to be murdered, don't even deserve to be whipped for what he done. Whistling at somebody's wife, course not. Plenty men whistle at somebody's wife, don't nothing happen, black or white. But that don't keep
me from being mad, don't mean I ain't so mad at him I could about die, I could just about die, what he done, what he done done to all of us.”
That would happen a lot later. Now, Auntee was alone in the Delta darkness, with rain on the tin roof.
She slept again, and then, around dawn but not yet light, something outside of her pain woke Auntee up.
It was Uncle's voiceâold man voice, low, morning music. Uncle was lying beside her in bed, singing.
She only heard a few lines, before he stopped.
He sang,
I don't want you to cook my bread.
He sang,
I don't want you to make my bed.
He sang,
I don't want you cause I'm sad and blue.
He sang,
I just want to make love to you.
She said, “I love you, Uncle.”
Uncle said, “I love you, Miss Auntee. We done done all that we can do.”
T
HE
M
ISSISSIPPI
Delta is not always dark with rain. Some autumn mornings, the sun rises over Moon Lake, or Eagle, or Choctaw, or Blue, or Roebuck, all the wide, deep waters of the state, and when it does, its dawn is as rosy with promise and hope as any other.
In autumn, the cornfields have not been plowed under yet, and the old stalks, standing ten feet tall, have turned from green to brown, and in the morning sun they look like solid gold.
Ears of the unharvested crop become full ripe and the husks break open as if a hand, invisible, had shucked them free, and kernels fall loose like coins from a treasure chest, and mourning doves whistle and coo and leave the forest trees and telephone lines and follow the pot of gold at the end of the constant rainbow and become fat on the feast.
And the rice fields, too. What about the rice fields in the beautiful Delta? The mallards approach in their chevron, heads like emerald in the new sun, and the egg-brown dear little hens.
They circle, they drop down, one and then another, they set their wings, which creak and click in the hollow bones
against the resisting air, they touch down in the water, they feed, they sleep, they dream.
Begin again,
the mallards say,
Begin,
the rice fields whisper, even in drought time from the voices of the pumps, those solitary, electrical songs sucking sweetness from springs and slow streams.
And, in the Delta, in autumn, what do the cottonfields say, when the harvest is done, and the pickers have gone, the mechanical ones, and the human, too? What do the cotton fields say, in the absence of the pilot and his plane, the cropdusters like snake doctors?
What do the cotton fields say when the green leaves are gone, and the square and the blossom and the boll? What do they say, when only the stalks remain, like skinny black girls in ragged dresses of white?
Do they say,
Shouldn't our ancient suffering be more fruitful by now?
This is what Runt Conroy said to Fortunata on the telephone that night, when the rain was still falling. This is what long memory of the Delta's beauty taught Runt to say to his wife, though the memory was dim and the clouds were still low, and the rain still fell, and Runt still carried an odor of farms and lofts and of the denizens of the earth and air, domestic and wild.
The pay telephone was not in a booth, and it was not
indoors, where a black man might mistake an invitation to make a call on it as an invitation to perform some other, more threatening act of equality; it was stuck on a wall, outside Red's place, not even up under the porch, out in the weather. Runt had a pocketful of quarters. Fortunata was in Kosiesko, he knew where to find her, he didn't ask no questions.
He said, “I miss you. I need you. Come home.”
Fortunata was there, he could hear her breathing, but she did not speak.
He said, “I mean, you know that tree, out on the Indian mound, out past Lem Mahoney's place?”
Fortunata said, “Well, yeahâ”
He said, “I don't know. Something about that tree, the roots. All those dead Indians and pottery, arrows.”
Fortunata revealed no trace of irritation, or even hopelessness, but she did not speak, either.
He said, “I got a bad feeling, honey. I don't know why.”
Runt really meant to say that beauty was everything, unless it was only nothing, only the start of the terror that we can probably not bear, or can't imagine bearing, anyway.
Runt said, “It's just so personal, baby. I just never knew how personal the world was, life and all.”
Fortunata said, “Cyrus, you're drinking yourself to death. I can't watch it no more.”
Cyrus. Nobody had called Runt by his real name in twenty years, thirty maybe. The sound of his own name, like a stranger, like an old book he started reading, once upon a time, and liked it, too, but somehow never got around to finishing.
What was the name of that book? Or maybe it was a poem, something Miss Alberta, his second-grade teacher, read to him one time, long time ago, in another Delta rainstorm, seated with other children on an oiled floor at the schoolhouse, with the steam radiator singing, “Let me call you sweetheart,” or some other sentimental tune.
Maybe it was “Hiawatha.”
By the shining deep sea waters stood the wigwam of Nacoma, daughter of the moon, Nacoma.
He said, “That tree is like a habit, you know? The tree on the Indian mound. It's like the rain tonight, it's like the wind. Is it raining in Kosiesko?”
Fortunata said, “I been asleep for hours, Cyrus. I don't know if it's raining or not. What time is it?”
He said, “It's like there's an emptiness inside me.”
She said, “Well, I'm not likely to be the one to fill it up. I tried that.”
He said, “It's been raining all day and all night. The wind is gnawing at my face.”
She said, “Cyrus, you are the only man I ever really loved, but I cain't live with you no more. I'm all give out.”
He said, “I don't want to fill up that empty hole no more. I'm through trying.”
She said, “Well, you done proved they ain't enough whiskey in the world, or enough Fortunata neither, to fill it up.”
He said, “Understand me, baby, listen to me tonight.” But he couldn't find the words. He meant to say that he wanted to throw the emptiness inside him out into space. He wanted to say, I want my emptiness outside of me, for once in my life, out in the air we breathe. I want it to fill up the spaces above the cornfields and the rice fields and the cotton fields. I want the mallards to feel it around them when they're flying, I want it to thin out the air they're sailing through, and the doves. I want the engine on the cropduster to stall for a second, my emptiness takes up so much space. He said, “Just come back home. I need you. The kids need you.”
She wanted to say, You were always distracted by hope, by romance. She said, “Oh, Cyrus, I don't know, I don't know. I just don't trust you.”
He said, “I don't know what I'm going to do, Fortunata. This ain't a plan of action that I'm telling you about, it's a change in the heart, in the soul.”
She said, “Well, what then? What am I supposed to think, what am I supposed to do?”
He said, “Ain't our suffering done got old enough? Hadn't it ought to start bearing some decent berries for a durn change?”
W
HEN
A
LICE
Conroy was a girl, she didn't believe in magic. She didn't give it a thought. If Alice believed in anything, it was in light and air.
Alice believed in girl-stuff. She liked pink. She liked taffeta and crinoline. She liked petticoats. She told her daddy that “petty,” like in “petticoats,” meant “little” in the French language. Her daddy said, “Well, parly voo, and pardon yore Franch.” Her daddy loved her, but he was hard to get close to.
Alice liked ribbons for her hair. She liked mirrors and brushes and fingernail polish, and even before her mama thought she was old enough for makeup, she bought some makeup anyway, at Wool worth's, and a little glass bottle of Wool worth perfume, too, and her daddy laughed so hard at the way it smelled on her that her mama went on and let her spend her money, which she earned clerking at Mr. Shanker's drug store, on some real, sure enough makeup and a little bottle of real perfume called Evening in Paris. Her daddy said it smelled like an afternoon in Cruger. Her daddy was all time making a joke. She didn't care. She loved her daddy.
Alice had a barrette collection, too. Plastic mostly, but also one made of bone, and one of wood, and another one made out of gen-u-ine mother-of-pearl, which her daddy told her wont nothing but a fancy name for oyster shells. She would just as soon he didn't tell her that.
Also a horse collection, figurines, you know, made out of glass, or plastic, or carved out of wood. When she was a little girl, she would lie in bed at night and dream about having her own pony. She pretended like she woke up one Christmas morning and her daddy had bought her a Pinto pony, sweet-faced, big-eared little tame thing, white with big brown spots, and a leather saddle that creaked.
In the pretend-like daydream she was having, her daddy brought the pony right in the house to surprise her, and was standing in the living room beside the Christmas tree, holding it with a blue bridle when she came in, all sleepy in her nightgown, one Christmas morning, the Christmas-tree lights shining, red and green and white, and an angel up on top of the tree. Well, maybe she did believe in magic, a little bit.
She liked buckle-up shoes, and saddle oxfords, and penny loafers. She liked pink pedal pushers, although she admitted that her daddy was right, they did make her butt look big.