Beetlecreek, p.8
Beetlecreek, page 8
Wilson finally left them and once again, they were alone. Edith filled his glass from a small whiskey bottle she had in her purse. “Brought it all the way from Pittsburgh,” she said proudly. Mixed with the beer, it left a strange, gluey taste in his mouth.
Once she said (she was getting a little drunk, he thought), “You remember the time you took me to the dance at State and told me you loved me? You were cute.”
She brushed her knee against his under the table and allowed it to remain.
David wanted to say something but he was all choked. He couldn’t tell whether it was the whiskey or his excitement that caused his wrists to shake so.
“Bring me another beer, Sam,” she called to Telrico. “Don’t worry,” she said to David when she caught his eye, “I’ve got money to pay for it.”
A flash of anger passed over him. He wondered if she were mocking him.
When she opened her pocketbook, she took out a black lace handkerchief with which to wipe her face. Only then, seeing her fingers crumble the brittle lace scrollwork, did he realize completely Mrs. Johnson’s death.
How could the girl be in the café drinking when her mother was dead in the parlor!
Then he became afraid of the girl as he used to be afraid of her. He realized anew the strength of her, the defiance of her. Now he understood how it was that the girl could leave the sick mother alone; and the knowledge excited him. He imagined he could feel the strength of her evil coursing through the knee contact, imagined he felt the electric sensation of her.
“It’s so damn funny to be here,” she said. “Nothing really changed. All the same people living their lives in somebody’s kitchen or hotel lobby.”
She ran her hand through her hair and blew smoke from her nostrils.
He thought she was talking too loudly and stole a look around the room to see if anyone was watching him. But, by now, Telrico’s was all noise, smoke, and drunken gaiety.
“Mrs. Johnson, she thought she was giving me everything I wanted but the only thing I ever wanted was to get away from her and this rotten town. I didn’t ask her to bring me here, I wasn’t none of hers. She didn’t care a damn about me except to show everybody what a good Christian she was and to get money from the county. She used to keep me from enjoying anything unless she was the one that invented it. She and her stinking church organizations….”
Later she asked him, “What’re you so quiet about? You sure are serious. You’re the only one in this town ever knew what a coffin this town was and you from upstate. Why didn’t you leave?”
He was afraid now. He filled his glass, swallowed it, and got up out of his seat as if to go. The mixture of beer and whiskey had gone to his head and he wanted to get away from the girl.
“You ain’t going to leave me here all by myself are you?” she asked with mock distress.
“I’ve…I’ve got to get up in the morning early,” he stammered.
“How about walking me home?” she asked coyly, catching onto the tail of his coat, running her tongue over her top lip, holding his glance.
They didn’t say a word to each other until they came to the creek road. She walked very close to him, occasionally bumping her hip against his. The sound from Telrico’s became thinner and thinner until it was drowned out by the sound of their own footsteps and the sound of the creek.
“Now that you’re all alone in the world,” he asked her, “what’ll you do?”
“Nothing. I’ve always been alone. Go back to the city.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what do you do there? You got a job?”
She laughed and laughed. They were crossing the swinging bridge and, underneath them, the creek scratched the reeds. The Streamliner roared along side the hills and screamed past the station without slowing down until it came to Munstor. The swinging bridge swung grandly back and forth, side to side.
“Do you feel bad because she’s dead?” He was sorry as soon as he asked her. He knew exactly what she would say. He held his breath waiting.
At first she didn’t answer. He couldn’t see her face, but he knew her face was lowered.
“I hated her,” she said finally.
As soon as they had crossed the bridge and were walking along side the creek in a place shielded from the moonlight by a row of bushes, she stopped and pulled his head down to hers.
He was unable to breathe. The openings of his nostrils seemed too small and his mouth squashed hers.
“I didn’t expect that,” he said, as soon as he caught his breath.
“It wasn’t all that bad, was it?”
“I don’t reckon so….”
He wanted to laugh, to shout, to run.
“What’re you laughing at?” she asked.
“Everything! Just everything!”
“You sure are funny….”
And while she kissed his ears, he thought of all those Sunday afternoons, alone in his room with his fantasies and the books, and of the sound of her laughing on the steps of the girls’ dormitory. And all the while, he could see that bare room….
* * *
—
The light was on in the bedroom. His wife was under the covers looking up at the ceiling. She didn’t turn her head when he entered.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know, must be a little after eleven o’clock.” He hoped she wasn’t going to make a scene. He was too excited, too happy….
“Mrs. Pinkerton’s giving me off for the funeral—you’re going too, aren’t you?”
My God! He had forgotten the funeral. He sat on the bed and began taking off his shoes. As if for the first time, he saw how run-down at the heels they were. He must get them repaired or, better yet, get new ones. He went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. Have I changed much, he wondered. The funeral tomorrow—he’d have to go, she would be there.
“What time is it—the funeral?” he asked her.
“Well, I got to get to the church early, about nine-thirty, but it don’t start until ten.”
He went back to the bathroom to wash his teeth, lingering a long time before the mirror to examine himself. He decided that his teeth were getting bad and that his hair was getting thin. He rubbed his cheeks vigorously to bring color to them, but in the harsh greenish light, the flesh seemed even more greasy and unhealthy. He remembered how he used to get up early in the morning to run around the campus to keep himself in trim. Strange to see how age gets hold of the flesh.
She was still awake when he came back to the room.
“That Edith Johnson’s back, ain’t she? Leastways Helen Perkins said she come back.”
He sat on the side of the bed with his back toward her. His heart was pounding. “Yeah, she’s back. I saw her in Telrico’s.”
“That’s one rotten girl, her mother laid out dead and she galavantin around beer gardens.”
David cringed. He snapped off the light, then rolled into bed, lying on the very edge on his side so he could drag his hand on the floor.
“You used to be sweet on her, didn’t you,” she said, laughing a low-breathed laugh. “Never would give you a tumble though, would she? But you just go up there to the city and see her on the streets….”
Rage swelled up within, but he controlled his breathing so she couldn’t feel his anger.
Of course the girl had changed, he thought, yet there was about her all that he had liked before: the smile that no longer immobilized him, the loose way she had of standing with her hips off balance, and the way she had of staring straight into his eyes with her lips slightly parted. But most of all he liked the daredevil in her.
His wife was asleep. He could hear her heavy, asthmatic breathing. Without looking, he knew she lay, as always, with her head turned to one side, her mouth open and gasping for air, one arm stretched back of her toward the wall.
The beer and whiskey began to wear off and his head ached. One day several years before, he was sitting on the porch with his wife, when the ice-cream man passed. He bought two ice-cream sticks and while he was carrying them back, he dropped one of them. His wife cried and cried and there was nothing he could do to console her. He thought of the day he bought a new slip for his wife; she accepted the gift without thanking him, but continued wearing the torn, gray stained one for weeks after. Edith’s things were big-city silk. He tried not to think of what he had done with the girl. Tomorrow would be the funeral and he would have to go. He would have to look at the dead mother and the daughter, knowing how the girl had talked about the mother, realizing that all knew how he felt about the girl. He remembered how quiet Telrico’s became that night he entered holding on to Bill Trapp’s arm—how they moved aside and stared. And he remembered how, all the time they were in there, Telrico’s stayed subdued and quiet.
But maybe that was the reason for bringing Bill Trapp to the village, to prove to them that the old man wasn’t the strange, mysterious inhabitant of the old May Farm.
Or maybe, and he decided this was the most likely, he just liked to talk to the old man. There was in the old man, the quality of listening and understanding that he hadn’t found in anyone before. In their talk that first afternoon, when he had gone to get Johnny, he had discovered that the old man understood what he thought, could help him interpret for himself the jumble of ideas he had accumulated during all these years.
Then too, he could tell that the old man was lonely. And this moved him. This, at least, he could understand.
Maybe, now, things would be different with Bill Trapp. They were saying at the barbershop that the old man must be all right to make a donation like that to the church.
After the funeral, he would go to visit the old man and tell him what people were saying about the pumpkins.
Chapter Two
The funeral was over and David stood with his back to the gay whispering. They still hadn’t brought the casket out and people had already lined the walk waiting for the procession. Mary had wanted him to volunteer as a pallbearer but he had refused, saying that his dark suit was too raggedy. But that had been only partly true. The real reason, he knew, was that he was afraid to come too close to the coffin. Once his mother had made him kiss a dying aunt who suffered from a disease that prevented her from being washed. And it was that smell he smelled in the church.
He puffed and puffed on the cigarette, blowing great clouds of smoke. Three white taxi drivers were sitting on the curbstone beside their cabs, waiting for the people to come out. Baily Brothers’ hearse was there surrounded by a group of admiring children.
Over the hill, beyond the curve of the creek, it was already raining, but over the church, the sky was clear gray.
He had entered the church late and had had to sit in the front row where the seats made an arc around the altar. For a long time he kept his eyes to the floor refusing to look at anyone, imagining all the while that they watched him, watched him to see if he would look at the girl seated just off the center aisle in the front row.
During a long prayer, while the congregation stood with bowed heads, he looked at her. For just a moment she returned his look, and then she winked. Immediately he turned to look at his wife to see if she had seen, but her eyes were closed tight—she was listening to the prayer. When, with the rest of the congregation, he filed past the coffin to have a last look at the remains, Edith kicked him gently.
They brought the coffin out and shoved it into Baily Brothers’ hearse. David stood aside and turned his head so that he wouldn’t have to look at her as she walked behind the short procession. Once he was tempted to turn around to see if she were crying, but he knew she would be walking just as she walked the first time she came in Telrico’s, aloof, graceful, disdainful of the whole show.
Just when he was about to walk away, his wife caught up to him. She carried her choir robes folded on her arm.
“What’s the matter, you not going to the cemetery?”
“I’ve got a headache,” he explained.
“You better spend some of that money you drink up at Telrico’s to go downtown and see Dr. Epstein, else you ain’t going to be long with this world.”
But he knew she thought he was lying.
* * *
—
Sitting in the corner against the white wall of the church, he thought of being trapped in the village, arrested, closed in.
Often he would sit on the railing of the swinging bridge, looking down at the creek, watching the current. He would watch floating things—boxes, tin cans, bottles. He would watch how some of these things became trapped in the reeds along side the shore. First there was a whirlpool to entice the floating object, then a slow-flowing pool, and finally, the deadly mud backwater in the reeds. In the reeds would be other objects already trapped.
This was Beetlecreek, he thought. And he knew that, like the rusty cans, he was trapped, caught, unable to move again.
This was like when he first became aware of being suffocated—the suffocation he had felt in church, the undercurrent of secret excitement he knew they felt partaking of the death ritual, the secret envy for the escape death offered, the jealousy of the escaped one; the hunger to be joined together in something, anything, even the celebration of death; the secret meanings communicated seated before the corpse; the feast; the singing; the sermon; the joviality of the handshakes on the porch steps; the admiration of Baily Brothers’ shiny new hearse; the terrible importance of Death to lives that had little importance; the justification of life in death. He too had felt all these things, knowing at the same time that his feeling for the girl had meaning only because it brought movement to his life (a life which had become static, caught in the creek reeds, turned rusty and muddy), had importance because it lifted the suffocation from him.
The minor pitched service had increased in pace. The atmosphere seemed to become more and more intense as with the common intake of breath. (He thought, It is all one big lung, one single felt fear….) Then it was that his thoughts became clear, like standing on top of a mountain and he could see way back through the years, way back through the years to a time that might have been the beginning of what he was feeling now.
Because one day the grade school teachers took him to a museum and showed him the pictures. It was the first time he had ever seen anything like it. It made him feel funny, like as if he needed something he couldn’t put his finger on, like he never felt before it made him feel. And ever after that time, he looked at all the pictures he could. Then he began drawing pictures himself. At first, when his father saw what he was doing, he didn’t say anything; but later, when he began to take drawing lessons at school, his father said he was wasting his time and that he should be taking the commercial course to prepare himself for a white collar job. So he stopped the drawing lessons. Instead, he began to print signs and this his father liked because he often earned spending money. But there was no getting away from the strange feeling of being unsatisfied, which was a true strange feeling which often kept him from eating. Especially when he looked at pictures. Sometimes he would want to cry because it wasn’t he who had painted the picture.
He would walk five miles to the county library to get books that had reproductions in them. Reading kept him from feeling as if he were tied up in a knot. For a little while he could forget that he was a Negro. When he was very young, there was no need for it. Up there in Pittsburgh it was being a kid first and it didn’t make any difference that he was a Negro. But when he went to that Negro college, he began to feel it, and along with it, the feeling of being suffocated and unable to move. This had nothing to do with his not having opportunities or “civil rights,” but it was a strange feeling, very difficult for him to explain to himself, which had to do with feeling Death, feeling frozen, suffocated, unable to breathe, knowing there was little to be done about it.
And looking at pictures or reading books, he didn’t have that feeling.
And that first year at college, he had tried to investigate all the ways there were of getting away from the death-grip feeling. So he read books, looked at pictures, and began listening to music. But in this, he was all alone because, he soon discovered, no one else at that college wanted really to escape from the death-grip feeling, even though, he knew, all of them felt it in one way or another. They were satisfied or resigned and had learned how to get pleasure from it instead of from the things which could help them escape from it.
And it wasn’t long before he discovered what these other means of escape were, and he learned about goodtiming with girls and drinking. This was the easiest way, and you could goodtime yourself out of being suffocated.
But this wasn’t at all like looking at pictures and reading books and he was afraid and unsatisfied, suddenly he realized that he was getting used to the goodtiming. More and more difficult was it becoming to find the real secret of escape. And of this, he was afraid, but he had no strength to change. The easy way kept coming back to him with ever increasing strength until there was no more looking at pictures, no more reading books, no more listening to music, only the goodtimes and the easy way to escape the feeling of the death-grip.
But sometimes, like a quick glimpse of light behind flapping curtains, it would come back. And this would be such a time as walking across the campus early in the morning when there was still mist and maybe only a lonely pigeon walking on the road. Then the meaning of it all would be clear to him. Maybe only a color or a sound would prod him, but he would know then that the way he was doing it was all wrong, and he would become sad and dissatisfied and ashamed. Times like those, he could separate himself from being Negro, times like that, he would be one size bigger than man.
But then, as soon as he saw one person, as soon as he heard one person speak, the vision would disappear, and being in the death-grip would seem the most natural and permanent thing in the world.
