The Fathers, page 22
It was so quiet I thought I heard water running over rocks, and I said: I must be getting sleepy after all. I pulled my jeans off over my boots, and started to unlace my boots but for some reason left them on. I walked on my toes to the bureau and taking the candle brought it over to the bed and put it on the floor, and dropped a few matches by it on the bare floor. Then I lay down on the counterpane, still hearing the running water after I closed my eyes.
Sometimes when you think you are sleepy and are not, time races through you, and years that have never happened perform a whole cycle of events more complete and satisfying than a lifetime of our beginnings that have no end. The water kept running and at last I saw it through the scrub pines down back of the farm where the lane from old Mr Woodyard’s blacksmith shop drops sheer to the ford. Wolf Run! Now that I could see the water I saw myself gazing at the riffle in late evening, as I squatted on a rock with my gun across my knees.
It was one of those scenes without purpose that come to you complete: you do not know how you got there on the rock or where you are going, and then it is dark. Doubtless there is a little conscious direction in these reveries because you always want something to happen, you always want to be doing something, but I doubt if you ever want to hear anything. But that is what I did — I heard something, sitting there on the big rock, my gun, loaded, across my knees, and the clear, black water swirling round a log and falling on a shelf of rock a foot below. This, I said, with that double awareness that we sustain in reverie, is only a way of hearing the night, far off, a cry that the darkness makes, and I thought for an instant that it was only the water getting louder, or the water changing its tone, as if a flute had altered its timbre from lucid trickle to the whine of the hautboy. I saw myself looking up the opposite bank through the trees for the panther whose scream now came with the rhythm of breath, low on the intake but rising to a high wail with the heave of the expulsion.
I touched my face and I was lying on the bed: my forehead was wet and I heard a door slam like a gunshot as I slid from the bed to the floor, fumbling for the matches that I could not find. I grabbed my jeans from the footboard, drew them on, and getting from the top bureau drawer a navy revolver, I went out into the hall to the head of the stairs. It was dark and silent. I was about to go back to my room when there was a step in the hall below, and I said, ‘What’s that?’ There was no answer. I listened. I could just distinguish the susurration of hard breathing, and I went rapidly down the dark, familiar stairs with the revolver held before me. In the hall, between the doors into Aunt Jane Anne’s and Aunt Milly’s rooms, I bumped against the small table. Reaching with my left hand for a match I lit the candle, and as the pale light filled the hall I saw crouching, at the head of the stairs, a man, his head lowered upon his crossed arms as if he were shielding himself from an expected blow.
‘Get up,’ I said pointing the revolver at him.
The man, his arms still over his face, pushed his back against the wall and slowly gained his feet. He dropped his hands to his sides and with a startled expression stared, not at me or at the pistol, but at the burning candle. I dropped the pistol to my side and took a step forward.
‘Yellow Jim!’ It was a whisper.
His muddy eyes bulged and with effort he moved them to my face, but it was only a glance; his head drooped and he began rubbing his leg nervously.
‘Put your face against the wall,’ I said. ‘Hold your hands over your head.’ He did it, and I looked up and down the hall. In the back hall the door into Jane’s room was ajar; all the others were closed; the silence was perfect for even Yellow Jim was no longer breathing hard. ‘Stay where you are,’ I said. I kept looking at Jane’s door and decided that she must be with sister; so I turned to look up the front hall, and turning again to keep my eye on Yellow Jim I backed towards sister’s door, and still facing Yellow Jim I tapped on her door, and waited. Yellow Jim had not moved: he might have been a dead man propped against the wall. As I waited, hearing no sound in sister’s room, I gazed at the negro, thinking perhaps he had been sent for. But why had I found him crouching? Why had he not answered me? Then I shivered a little. Where had sister been, where was she when whoever it was screamed? And where were they all now? I began to shake all over and I tapped again on the door but before I finished it Aunt Jane Anne’s door opened and sister came out into the hall.
She stopped short, and frowning looked at the candle burning on the table. Then she saw Yellow Jim, but she seemed not in the least astonished; she only looked at him curiously as if the anomaly of his presence lay solely in his being propped to the wall.
‘Sister!’ I said.
She was startled: she almost dropped her candlestick. As she recovered it midway to the floor, the candle went out, and the other candle threw her profile into silhouette; her mouth was compressed into a hard line. Then she turned towards me.
‘She’s dead,’ she said in a flat tone.
‘Well,’ I said, as if I had been asked to fetch a glass of water. Then it came over me. ‘Dead?’ I echoed her.
‘I said she was dead.’ Sister’s voice sounded almost legal, it was so controlled. ‘She died of fright. There’s not a bruise on her.’
Her hair flowed down her back, gathered at her neck with a ribbon; her white wadded silk gown was neatly folded about her waist. My God, what a woman! was all I could think to myself, but I said:
‘Who screamed?’ I advanced towards her and the pistol caught her eye.
‘I suppose you’ll kill him,’ she said. She looked at Jim. Then she fixed me with a purposive stare. ‘It wasn’t Aunt Milly,’ she said. ‘She’s still asleep — took her sleeping draught after the excitement of Jane’s betrothal.’ She looked down the hall at Jane’s open door. ‘It would be Jane who screamed,’ she said deductively.
I walked past her towards Jane’s door. She followed and I looked at her over my shoulder. When she came to Yellow Jim she walked round him as far as she could, holding to the banister. She’s at least still human, I thought, as we stood at the door. She held her unlit candle. I searched my pockets and found a match and lit the candle. She made a gesture with her free hand; I stepped back; she walked steadily into the room, throwing the door wide open.
As the light discovered the room I discerned a white body lying on the floor about three feet from the foot of the bed. Jane lay on her back as if she had been stretched out, as if, too, some one had carefully drawn her white nightgown down over her limbs. Sister knelt by her, placing the candle on the floor. The light suffused Jane’s face. The mouth was open. Her skin was tight and chalky, like pressed muslin. I thought it a shame that any girl should be lying there humiliated, so young.
Sister looked up at me. ‘Jane is alive,’ she said. She began to rub her cheeks and then to chafe her hands. She rose and went to the washstand and finding only a toothbrush holder of some pink flowered pattern, she filled it from the pitcher and dashed the water into Jane’s face. The supine girl did not move. ‘Come here, Lacy.’ sister said. I glanced up the hall at Yellow Jim; he had not moved either. I went in and together we lifted Jane onto the bed. She was limp as a willow and light as cork. Sister looked her over, and at the same instant we saw that the left sleeve of her nightgown was torn. Sister bent over her and turned the sleeve back, disclosing four shallow scratches about an inch apart and an inch long. She had been clawed as she had drawn away. I gazed at them with infatuated eyes, until I felt my stomach heave and I knew that I was sick.
Sister had stood back and now stared at the wounds with wide eyes, her lips closed so tight that the blood had left them.
Jane’s head moved and as if in weakness fell over towards me, away from sister. She opened her eyes but I knew she saw nothing. ‘Mama wouldn’t listen to me,’ she said in a normal voice that brought me to. ‘Mama wouldn’t listen,’ she said.
That was all I ever knew but I suppose I could have known more; I didn’t want to know any more. Didn’t I know what had happened? I thought I did, and I still think what I then thought, which was what any man would have thought. I suppose Susan’s continued stare ought to have started a little doubt in my mind, had I been able to take it in, but nobody at that time could have seen in sister more than agitation and horror, emotions that certainly dominated me out of all observation. As we continued to look at the poor girl I knew that here at last was the night that followed the brilliant day in May when the gay party rode away from Pleasant Hill for the gentlemen’s tilt in the west meadow of Henry Broadacre, Esq., that rolled away into the distance green as the sea. I saw Brother George charging down the course, his lance perfectly balanced; only I saw him sadly astride, not Queen Susie, but the man Yellow Jim whose face was as white as his master’s. And they ran over a child in white, but they left her there, but it was all over in a minute, and the tournament had been won.
Suddenly I was holding the bedpost and puking on the carpet, but before it was done with I had recovered and was looking at Susan. It was too late for astonishment; so I just watched her run her hands over the now conscious but still immobile body of Jane. She ran her hand from the girl’s ankles up her legs to her thighs, and examined curiously the folds of the nightgown, till perplexity dulled her eyes, and she stood away. Then her face tightened, and she shifted her eyes in their sockets till they fixed me with a decisive glare.
‘Take him up the river,’ she said.
‘But, sister,’ I said, then stopped. She was looking at me. ‘Yes, sister,’ I said. But as I backed towards the door where a few steps would bring me to Yellow Jim I was afraid, and the fear heightened my awareness of myself until I felt a design form in my head, of great cunning I thought; so I paused. I said in a low tone: ‘I’ve got to get ready.’ I advanced to the bed, and spoke across Jane. ‘I’ll just lock him up for a while.’ Then the adventure seemed too bold. ‘Sister,’ I pleaded, ‘can’t I get help?’
‘Help?’ she said, and she actually smiled briefly before she set her lips. It was the smile she had sent me from the lower hall. I could not even think of Yellow Jim at that instant. The smile had turned the world upside down. All that had happened up to that moment, even the old lady down the hall lying in death alone, could somehow come out of the life we lived; but not that smile. There was no way to take it in, no sense in it; it was like a herd of kangaroos asking to be taken as commonplace at Pleasant Hill farm. But looking at it steadily one could easily see that the smile only signaled a sudden, remarkable purpose in Susan Posey who had undoubtedly felt for Yellow Jim something like pity as she had passed him in the hall. I suppose you’ll kill him — and it had been a little contemptuous of the usual violence of men. Now she commanded it.
‘It’ll have to be done tonight,’ she said. I turned again and I wondered if this time I should get out of that room. I did, and it was with relief that I saw Yellow Jim still standing as I had left him.
‘Come on, Jim,’ I said.
He turned around and tried to lower his arms but his face went taut with pain. An inch at a time he brought his arms down till his hands reached his shoulders, and I motioned him to the stairs. He looked bewildered, and then scared as he faced what he had to do. Still he hesitated.
‘Go on,’ I said.
He appealed to me with his eyes, and as he went before me he murmured, ‘’Scuse me, marster,’ for even at that, for him, terrible moment, the ultimate fear of any negro, he was aware that he was about to precede a white man. I took the candle from the hall table. He picked his way down the stairs as if each step might be different. We came to the main hall and he knew which way to go — down the hall to the short flight of steps leading to the wicket. When he came to the steps he turned and gave me a look of mild surprise. I was not following him. I said, ‘Wait.’ There were footsteps upstairs. Susan appeared at the upper banister and said in an ordinary tone, ‘Send Atha up.’
I nodded. I went to Yellow Jim. He led the way out through the wicket into the garden, then round the corner of the house to the door into the winter kitchen. From there through pantries and storerooms we came to the little cell surrounded by brick walls a couple of feet thick, into which the only access was a massive oaken door all studded over with spikes. In the center of the door was a small, stoutly ironed grating. It was only a little old calaboose that Mr Rozier Posey had built to put his bad negroes in. I held the candle to the door and turned the brass key. The door came open and Yellow Jim stepped over the threshold with a sort of briskness as he said:
‘Please, young marster, don’t leave Jim in de dark.’
I handed him the candle. ‘Jim,’ I said, ‘what made you do it?’
He made a motion in front of him with his hand as if he were asking for silence. ‘Young marster, hit just come to me. Hit come to me and ’fore I knowed it I was up them stairs and openin’ de door. I didn’t mean to open de old mistis’s door.’ He ran his hand through his coarse, straight hair. ‘Hit come to me,’ he said. ‘I just looked in de door, then shet it. Now de old mistis daid.’
‘It’s going to be bad for you,’ I said.
He looked at me humbly, then his eyes were wide with terror. ‘I didn’t do nothin’, I didn’t mean to tech Miss Jane either. Hit was when she hollered. That’s when I done it. Hit come over me.’ He gestured again, his palms extended as I had seen them by the roadside at the Court House. ‘I couldn’t do nothin’ lak that now, naw sir, young marster, ’fore God I couldn’t. Hit’s gone clean outen me.’ He touched his face to see, I am certain, if it was he and he was there. ‘Seem lak I couldn’t do no good after I hearn Miss Jane say she’s afeared of me.’ His tone had become manly and his posture erect. I gave him a look which he returned. I closed the cell door, turning the key and putting it in my pocket, and found my way back to the kitchen in the dark.
Fumbling at a shelf that I remembered in a corner, I found the stump of a candle, lit it, and went to a door leading to the other side of the basement. A narrow, smelly hall led a few steps to a door. I knocked. ‘Atha!’ I said. There was no sound, but presently I heard a bed creak and then low mutterings.- ‘Who that?’ she said.
‘Miss Susie wants you,’ I said.
There was more mumbling, then: ‘Miss Susie ain’t never sent fer me, she ain’t sent fer me sence I’s born.’ The door opened a crack. ‘G’long,’ she said.
‘I reckon your mistis will be needing you, Atha — old mistis.’ She rolled her ochreous eyeballs and said, ‘Yassir,’ but she said it insolently. I went back to the kitchen and out through the door into the court. At the corner of the house the dark figure of a man blocked my way. I stepped back and raised the pistol. The candle went out.
‘Hit’s me,’ a voice said. It was Blind Joe. But he still stood in my path.
‘Get out of my way,’ I said in a low tone.
He moved, and then there was a leer in his voice. ‘You done put him in de lockup, ain’t you, Marse Lacy?’
I was angry. ‘Go on where you belong, you black bastard.’
He said nothing for a minute but I heard a whining chuckle. ‘I belongs to go fer de doctor. I belongs to go fer de priest. Miss Susie said so.’
‘How’d you know she wanted you?’
‘Ain’t ole Marse Rozier say, “Joe ain’t wuth a continental but lak de buzzards and de flies he’s everywhar”.’
I stopped forward and whispered, ‘Joe, where’s Marse George?’
It was pitch dark but I saw his mouth stretch before I heard again his low chuckle. ‘Marse Lacy, now you talkin’, you shore talkin’ now.’ He moved so near he could have touched me. ‘I git de marster — I git him before sun tomorrow.’
‘Get him,’ I said. ‘Joe, you get him.’
There was no answer. He disappeared on noiseless feet in the direction of the carriage entrance. I went round to the wicket and into the house. In the lower hall I stopped to light the stump, and in the light I said to myself: I’ve got to have help. When I reached the foot of the stairs I paused to consider the darkness of the upper hall, and the silence that I thought should not have been there. The pistol was getting heavy in my right hand. I started to lay it on the table under old Jeremiah Gibson’s portrait but instead I stuck it under the waistband of my jeans, and went up the stairs. Out of Jane’s room appeared old Atha, a candle in one hand and a basin of water in the other; I knew she saw me but she kept her head averted. Her face looked like wet ashes and there was drool on her lips. That negro, I thought, will never be insolent again. Then, as if I had always assumed that Madagascar lies off the coast of South America, but now realized that it lies off west Africa, I remembered that Yellow Jim was Atha’s son. She went into the back hall and down the back stairs.
I got to get away from here, I said, or I’ll be seeing sister again. I went up the next flight but when I came to the door of my room I went on past it to the end of the hall where a steep flight of steps, inclosed in a narrow well, led to the fourth storey, and Mr Jarman’s apartment. The steps, so steep that my knees bumped them and I had to go up sidewise, led abruptly to a door, without a landing. I knocked gently but getting no response lifted the latch and entered a low, narrow, dark hall, the ceiling of which sloped away on my right. On my left were two doors. I knocked at the nearer one, and prepared for a long wait. Almost instantly the door opened; I was so astonished that I lost my tongue.
‘How do you do, sir,’ said Mr Jarman in the most beautiful human voice I had ever heard. He had greeted me as he would have saluted a friend at a horse race. I stared at him rudely. He backed away, opening the door for me to enter. A bright lamp was burning across the room, at his back; I could not see his face. I continued to stare at him. ‘To what unusual amenity,’ said he, ‘am I indebted for the honor of this visit?’ He made a sweeping gesture. ‘Enter, sir.’
