Prisoners of War (15 page)

TWENTY SEVEN

DETERMINED TO appear at work, Shirley had risen right after Dan left the house to pick up his work detail. She’d heard him come home in the middle of the night, stumbling into something, maybe the coffee table. In the kitchen, he turned on the tap, and the drain began to gurgle. After a minute or two he shut off the flow.

Floorboards sighed as he moved toward the bathroom. The hinges on the toilet seat creaked. His stream splashed into the bowl, full of beer and vigor. Then the seat crashed back down and she heard her son grunt.

“They talk to you a lot about
evacuation,
” Jimmy Del had said the night before she went to Jackson with Alvin. He’d sat there in the darkness, propped up against the headboard, smoking a cigarette while she lay with the covers pulled up to her neck. “They tell you to discharge your bowels at every opportunity. That was the first sign to me that things wasn’t what I thought. It give me a creeping feeling. I was a private, but I didn’t have no privacy. My bowels wasn’t mine—they belonged to the United States. I wasn’t no more than a sausage, and I should of known it before somebody went and told me. That’s what they’ll make of that boy in yonder, too,” he said, gesturing with the tip of his cigarette, “unless somebody does something to stop it. Me, I got a little idee.”

He never said what his little “idee” was, or, if he did, she failed to hear him. She pulled the covers up over her head, pressing the heavy quilt around her ears, doing her best to muffle the sound of his voice, which droned on until she finally fell into herself.

Dan appeared late, at a quarter till nine. Waiting on the front porch, she made no effort to conceal her annoyance. With her charred hair on display—she’d decided to forgo the plastic net—she knew she must have cut a ridiculous figure.

“One thing your grandfather always told me,” she said, “was that if I went out and got skunk-drunk, I’d better be able to live with the odor. You’ve made me late for work. Where were you? Asleep in the bushes?”

His skin looked as if it had been pasted onto his face. “I’ve been doing something for the military.”

“The military?” she said. “That’s a new one. Is the army paying boys to barf their breakfast?”

Her question infused his cheeks with much-needed color. On some level, it felt good to rouse a male to anger, since anger was a form of engagement.

“I didn’t barf my breakfast. I never ate any. And by the way, I’m not a boy.”

“Well then, that’s one thing we got in common, because I’m not a boy, either.” She held her hand out for the keys.

“The army asked me to help ’em collect some information,” he said. “One of those POWs I’m working’s got ’em suspicious he may not be what he says he is.”

“What does he say he is? Or is that a military secret?”

“He claims he’s Polish.”

“Is this a joke?” she said.

He actually stomped his foot, and he looked so much like the child he’d once been that she wanted to throw her arms around him, to protect him from himself. But the time for that had passed.

“No, it’s not a joke,” he said. “Or if it is, then I guess it’s on me.”

“Oh, Danny.” She shook her head. “Just let me have the keys.”

When he handed them to her, she walked over to the truck and climbed in. Driving off, she looked in the rearview mirror and saw him tentatively place a foot on the lowest of the front steps, as if doubtful that it could support his weight.

In the fall of ’43, she saw sex as a sentence, believing that women bore their femininity, the urge to be touched and held and talked to, like men bore arms. She watched women weep over nothing at the grocery store, saw them walking down the sidewalk late at night, glancing furtively in other people’s windows. Once, when she was just a little too slow to unplug her headset after connecting two parties, she heard Margaret Strawbridge, whose husband was on a carrier in the Pacific, talking to her sister long-distance. “Me and the kids ate us some cottage cheese and fruit last night,” she said. “Peach halves. And I looked down at one of ’em on my plate, and I thought,
That’s me,
and stupid as it was, I had a minute there where I got scared that if I didn’t scoop another one up real quick and lay it right beside the first one, I wouldn’t see Bud no more. And so I did it. There’s nothing for us to do but wait and hope for a chance to put things back together.”

Shirley often recalled that comment, and after a while she began to think of the war years in different terms. Most women, she now saw, had reacted like Margaret: having no choice in the matter, they’d waited for a chance to put things back together. They remained, more or less, in a hopeful frame of mind, and they learned to live beyond their own bodies.

If any sentence had been handed out, it was men who served it. The war had wrought destruction, of one kind or another, on almost every man she knew. Those who might have led ordinary lives, minding the counter at the hardware store or raising cotton on Choctaw Creek, came to see themselves as cowards or killers, as losers or profiteers. Some sacrificed their sons. Others sacrificed themselves.

What Miss Edna Boudreau sacrificed on Shirley’s first day back at work was harder to describe, but it was a sacrifice nonetheless, and Shirley had the good sense to recognize it as such. She’d just taken her place before the console—being careful as she put on her headset, given how tender her scalp still was—when the door to Miss Edna’s office opened and she stepped out, carrying a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of cookies, followed by Cassie Pickett, who held a tray with three glasses on it.

“We’re glad you’re back,” Miss Edna said. “I’ve been filling in for you, and that stool of yours is so high, it gave me acrophobia.” She set the lemonade and cookies on a table, then reached over and gently pulled the earphones away from Shirley’s ears and lifted off the headset. After laying it aside, she scrutinized her head, assessing the damage. “I burned my hair once, too,” she said.

“How?”

“Stuck a match to it.”

“Why?”

“Just decided I didn’t like it. I was only seven or eight years old. I would’ve burned my whole self up if I could’ve. My daddy poured a bucket of cold water over my head.”

“There’s been days I
felt
like setting myself on fire,” Cassie said, placing the tray on the table. “I ain’t never done it, though.”

“Well, Cassie,” Miss Edna said, “you’re still young. You’ve got time to do it yet. But I don’t recommend it.”

“Nor do I,” Shirley said.

Miss Edna dragged a ladder-back chair out of her office and sat down, and Cassie perched on her stool, and the three of them ate cookies and drank lemonade. Once or twice, a button started blinking on one of the consoles, but Miss Edna waved her hand and said whoever it was could wait.

She held forth for a while on a subject that interested her a lot more than it interested them: the future of the local telephone company. She said that when the war ended, they’d get a new building, right down the street from the library. Plans had already been drawn up. The building would be completely modern, with offices for Fred Harney and her, assuming she hadn’t decided to retire. The older consoles would be replaced with the most up-to-date equipment. It wouldn’t be long, she said, before everybody in town had a phone, and if either of the younger women had been around back in the early days, they would know just how unthinkable that had once seemed.

“The day we opened up, on the second floor of that little building where Hanson’s Gift Shop is now, there were exactly twenty-four telephones in the entire town. I took the first call at nine a. m., on October third, 1901. Mayor A. L. Gunnels phoned Leighton Payne at the
Weekly News
to complain that his views on the subject of whether or not to outlaw the hitching of animals to porch railings had been misrepresented. Of course, he wasn’t really mad, it was just for show. Because everybody was so proud to have phone service, he had a photographer at the courthouse ready to take his picture, and another one was at the newspaper to photograph Mr. Payne. Nobody took my picture, but then, I wouldn’t have taken it, either.”

“I saw your picture in the school yearbook,” Cassie said. “You had a pretty face.”

“Cassie Pickett, if you went looking for my picture in an old yearbook, it’s because you hoped I was just as big back then as I am now, and you know it.” The girl’s mousy features tensed, but Miss Edna chuckled. “I was every bit as big back then as I am now, but I’ll tell you something, Cassie. It would be a mistake to think I never had any fun in my life. I did. It was about thirty-five years ago, and it was over in just a few minutes, but I had it. And there’s another thing I’ve learned, Cassie, which you might do well to learn, too, and so might you, Shirley, if you don’t know it already. Would you two young ladies like to hear what that was?”

Both of them nodded.

“Some minutes,” Miss Edna said, “last longer than others.” Then she laughed so hard her hips shook.

TWENTY EIGHT

ROSETTA STEVENS was not a Stevens, but nobody knew it except Mr. Alvin and Miss Shirley, and neither of them would tell. Some might say that they didn’t tell because they couldn’t afford to, what with her knowing so much, deep down, about them. But what she did or didn’t know had very little to do with it. They didn’t tell because it never mattered what you put them on the inside of, they would find a way to become outsiders fast, and they recognized the outsider in her. She was outside whiteness because she was black, and she was outside blackness because she was herself.

She was thinking about outsidedness that morning right before Frank Holder and the other man came in. How folks love to draw lines and make boxes. You’re inside this one, outside that one. You’re this kind, that kind. The previous Sunday, Reverend Selmon had preached a sermon called “Dogs in the Church.” According to him, the brethren could be divided on the basis of their resemblance to one kind of dog or another.

“Got the hunting dogs,” he said, his jaw aglow. “Hunting dog’s always sniffing around, and when he finds something that smells like game, everybody watch out!” He threw his head back and bayed. “Yes, Jesus,” folks hollered. “Amen.” Reverend Selmon pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Yes indeed—Jesus, amen, that’s right.” He folded the handkerchief and put it away. “Now the hunting dog makes noise,” he said, “and that can’t be denied. And after a while, all that noise gets old. Bay, bay, bay, all night and all day. How in the world is anybody supposed to rest? But at least with the hunting dog, you know where you stand, because you know what the hunting dog’s after. Hunting dog wants to hunt. Hunting dog says what’s what.

“Then you got the lapdogs. What does the lapdog do? Why, the lapdog sits in your lap and licks your face. Yes indeed. Lapdog will lick you till he puts you to sleep, and the second you drop off, what happens? Why, the lapdog grabs your sandwich and runs. The lapdog laps, then leaves. He’s a stealthy and dissembling type of creature. See any lapdogs, brothers and sisters, in the church here today?”

“Yes, Jesus! Sho’ do!”

“Yes, brothers and sisters, and I do, too! But the lapdog’s not the most bothersome cur in the church. Oh no. That honor is accorded the feist. For the feist is always
nipping
at your heels!”

If Frank Holder had belonged to the dog world, he would have been a mastiff, and Rosetta preferred the feist any day of the week. When Holder came through the door, stomping the mud off his work shoes, the floorboards creaked and canned goods rattled. The other man, in his late twenties, had no mud on his shoes, a pair of swanky wing tips. He wore a seersucker suit and a white straw boater and carried a leather satchel. He looked around the store as though he’d never seen anything quite like it. If Rosetta had held with wagering, her money would have gone on Jackson as his likely point of origin, though she supposed Memphis or Little Rock were possibilities, too.

Frank Holder never even looked at her. “Mr. Alvin around?”

“No sir.”

“Say he ain’t?”

“No sir.”

“Where’s he at?”

He’d gone over to Greenville again to see somebody about a big shipment of lard, but it was doubtful he’d want Frank Holder to know that. “He ain’t said.”

“He ain’t said. Well hell, why would he? If I was him, I wouldn’t say, neither.” Frank Holder waved his hand around the room: at the shelves packed with canned goods, sugar, coffee and tea; at the refrigerator case, which was full of fresh meat and cheese; at the big stack of first-grade tires in the corner. “Ain’t much you can’t get here, Mr. Johnson,” he said. “If you know what I mean.”

“Yes sir,” Johnson said. “I can see that.”

“You want you a cold drink, maybe?”

“Well, I believe I could probably stand one.”

Frank Holder walked over to the box and slid the lid open. He peered into the icy water. “Look like we got some Orange Crush in here and some RC colas, Barq’s chocolate, strawberry and root beer. Any of them strike your fancy?”

“I’ll take an Orange Crush.”

Holder pulled the drink out, popped the top off in the opener and handed the bottle to Johnson. Then he got a root beer for himself. He walked over to the counter and threw a dime down. And he still didn’t look at her.

Tucking the satchel under his arm, Johnson moved around the store, examining items, occasionally sipping Orange Crush. “Got a nice selection of goods here,” he said. “There’s enough sugar on these shelves to keep every whiskey still in Mississippi bubbling for a month. I bet a lot of merchants around the state would love to know who his suppliers are. Not to mention Senator Truman’s preparedness committee.”

“Yes sir,” Holder said. “I reckon they would. Old Alvin would make a devil of a quartermaster, wouldn’t he?”

The younger man laughed.

Holder laughed, too. To nobody in particular, he said, “That boy that drives the rolling store around?”

“Which boy?” Rosetta said. “Colored or white?”

Then he did look at her, and instantly she wished he hadn’t.

“
Boy
means colored,” he said. “If I’d been talking about Danny Timms, I would’ve said so. So I’m gone ask you again, is that
boy
that drives the rolling store around?”

“No sir,” she said.

“No sir,” he said. “All right. Where you reckon we could find him?”

“He’s on his route, I imagine.”

“I imagine so, too. One more time now. One, two, three. Reckon whereabouts on his route that
boy
’d be?”

She could tell the most elaborate lies to a white man without prior preparation. In this instance, nothing fancy was called for. “He probably be somewhere up close to the Fairway Crossroads about now. I believe he run from there to Forty-seven and head on back.”

“You hear that, Mr. Johnson?” Frank Holder said. “He run from there to Forty-seven. And then he head on back.”

Johnson laughed again. He finished his drink, placed the bottle on the counter and looked around the store once more, as if to memorize every detail. Then he glanced at Holder, who said, “Ready to go?”

“I believe so,” Johnson said.

Holder turned his root beer up and drained it, then stood it next to the other empty on the counter. “When Mr. Alvin gets back,” he said, “tell him Mr. Frank Holder dropped by with a friend of his from Senator Bilbo’s office. The senator just wanted to make sure the store was secure, since there’s enough supplies in here to feed the U. S. Army.”

She made no move to pick their bottles up until she heard Holder pull into the road; then she rose and grabbed them. She meant to stand the bottles in the wooden drink crates, nice and neat as always, but the sight of the little square holes, twenty-four per crate, each hole the same size, all of them there for the purpose of containing a single bottle, keeping that bottle separate from all the others, got the best of her, and the bottles dropped out of her hands, clattering against the worn floorboards.