A Tidewater Morning (7 page)

“How come you want to see the millpond?” Trixie said gently.

Shadrach offered no explanation, merely said again: “I wants to see de millpond.”

And so, in obedience to a wish whose reason we were unable to plumb but could not help honoring, we took Shadrach to see the millpond. It lay in the woods several hundred yards to the east of the house—an ageless murky dammed-up pool bordered on one side by a glade of moss and fern, spectacularly green, and surrounded on all its other sides by towering oaks and elms. Fed by springs and by the same swiftly rushing stream in which the other children had gone fishing, its water mirrored the overhanging trees and the changing sky and was a pleasurable ordeal to swim in, possessing the icy cold that shocks a body to its bones. For a while we could not figure out how to transport Shadrach down to the place; it plainly would not do to let him try to hobble that long distance, propelled, with our clumsy help, on his nearly strengthless legs in their dangling gait. Finally someone thought of the wheelbarrow, which Mr. Dabney used to haul corn to the still. It was fetched from its shed, and we quickly made of it a not unhandsome and passably comfortable sort of a wheeled litter, filling it with hay and placing a blanket on top.

On this mound Shadrach rested easily, with a look of composure, as we moved him gently rocking down the path. I watched him on the way: in my memory he still appears to be a half-blind but self-possessed and serene African potentate being borne in the fullness of his many years to some longed-for, inevitable reward.

We set the wheelbarrow down on the mossy bank, and there for a long time Shadrach gazed at the millpond, alive with its skating waterbugs and trembling beneath a copper-colored haze of sunlight where small dragonflies swooped in nervous filmy iridescence. Standing next to the wheelbarrow, out of which the shanks of Shadrach’s skinny legs protruded like fragile black reeds, I turned and stared into the ancient face, trying to determine what it was he beheld now that created such a look of wistfulness and repose. His eyes began to follow the Dabney children, who had stripped to their underdrawers and had plunged into the water. That seemed to be an answer, and in a bright gleam I was certain that Shadrach had once swum here too, during some unimaginable August nearly a hundred years before.

I had no way of knowing that if his long and solitary journey from the Deep South had been a quest to find this millpond and for a recaptured glimpse of childhood, it might just as readily have been a final turning of his back on a life of suffering. Even now I cannot say for certain, but I have always had to assume that the still-young Shadrach who was emancipated in Alabama those many years ago was set loose, like most of his brothers and sisters, into another slavery perhaps more excruciating than the sanctioned bondage. The chronicle has already been a thousand times told of those people liberated into their new and incomprehensible nightmare: of their poverty and hunger and humiliation, of the crosses burning in the night, the random butchery, and, above all, the unending dread. None of that madness and mayhem belongs in this story, but without at least a reminder of these things I would not be faithful to Shadrach. Despite the immense cheerfulness with which he had spoken to us of being “dibested of mah plenty,” he must have endured unutterable adversity. Yet his return to Virginia, I can now see, was out of no longing for the former bondage, but to find an earlier innocence. And as a small boy at the edge of the millpond I saw Shadrach not as one who had fled darkness, but as one who had searched for light refracted within a flashing moment of remembered childhood. As Shadrach’s old clouded eyes gazed at the millpond with its plunging and calling children, his face was suffused with an immeasurable calm and sweetness, and I sensed that he had recaptured perhaps the one pure, untroubled moment in his life. “Shad, did you go swimming here too?” I said. But there was no answer. And it was not long before he was drowsing again; his head fell to the side and we rolled him back to the house in the wheelbarrow.

On Saturday nights in the country the Dabneys usually went to bed as late as ten o’clock. That evening Mr. Dabney returned at suppertime, still sullen and fretful but saying little, still plainly distraught and sick over the sheriff’s mandate. He did not himself even pick up a fork. But the supper was one of those ample and blessed meals of Trixie’s I recall so well. Only the bounty of a place like the Tidewater backcountry could provide such a feast for poor people in those hardpressed years: ham with red-eye gravy, grits, collard greens, okra, sweet corn, huge red tomatoes oozing juice in a salad with onions and herbs and vinegar. For dessert there was a delectable bread pudding drowned in fresh cream. Afterward, a farmer and bootlegging colleague from down the road named Mr. Seddon R. Washington arrived in a broken-down pickup truck to join with Mr. Dabney at the only pastime I ever saw him engage in—a game of dominoes. Twilight fell and the oil lanterns were lit. Little Mole and I went back like dull slugs to our obsessive sport, scratching a large circle in the dust beside the porch and crouching down with our crystals and agates in a moth-crazed oblong of lantern light, tiger-yellow and flickering. A full moon rose slowly out of the edge of the woods like an immense, bright, faintly smudged balloon. The clicking of our marbles alternated with the click-click of the dominoes on the porch bench.

“If you wish to know the plain and simple truth about whose fault it is,” I heard Mr. Dabney explain to Mr. Washington, “you can say it is the fault of your Franklin D-for-Disaster Roosevelt. The Dutchman millionaire. And his so-called New Deal ain’t worth diddley squat. You know how much I made last year—legal, that is?”

“How much?” said Mr. Washington.

“I can’t even tell you. It would shame me. They are colored people sellin’ deviled crabs for five cents apiece on the streets in Newport News made more than me. There is an injustice somewhere with this system.” He paused. “Eleanor’s near about as bad as he is.” Another pause. “They say she fools around with colored men and Jews. Preachers mainly.”

“Things bound to get better,” Mr. Washington said.

“They can’t get no worse,” said Mr. Dabney. “I can’t get a job anywhere. I’m unqualified. I’m only qualified for making whiskey.”

Footsteps made a soft slow padding sound across the porch and I looked up and saw Edmonia draw near her father. She parted her lips, hesitated for a moment, then said: “Daddy, I think Shadrach has passed away.”

Mr. Dabney said nothing, attending to the dominoes with his expression of pinched, absorbed desperation and muffled wrath. Edmonia put her hand lightly on his shoulder. “Daddy, did you hear what I said?”

“I heard.”

“I was sitting next to him, holding his hand, and then all of a sudden his head—it just sort of rolled over and he was still and not breathing. And his hand—it just got limp and—well, what I mean, cold.” She paused again. “He never made a sound.”

Mr. Washington rose with a cough and walked to the far edge of the porch, where he lit a pipe and gazed up at the blazing moon. When again Mr. Dabney made no response, Edmonia lightly stroked the edge of his shoulder and said gently: “Daddy, I’m afraid.”

“What’re you afraid about?” he replied.

“I don’t know,” she said with a tremor. “Dying. It scares me. I don’t know what it means—death. I never saw anyone—like that before.”

“Death ain’t nothin’ to be afraid about,” he blurted in a quick, choked voice. “It’s life that’s fearsome! Life Suddenly he arose from the bench, scattering dominoes to the floor, and when he roared
“Life!”
again, I saw Trixie emerge from the black hollow of the front door and approach with footfalls that sent a shudder through the porch timbers. “Now,
Shoog
—” she began.

“Life
is where you’ve got to be terrified!” he cried as the unplugged rage spilled forth. “Sometimes I understand why men commit suicide! Where in the goddamned hell am I goin’ to get the money to put him in the ground? Niggers have always been the biggest problem! Goddamnit, I was brought up to have a certain respect and say ‘colored’ instead of ‘niggers’ but they are always a problem. They will always just drag you down! I ain’t got thirty-five-dollars! I ain’t got
twenty-five
dollars! I ain’t got
five
dollars!”

“Vernon!”
Trixie’s voice rose, and she entreatingly spread out her great creamy arms. “Someday you’re goin’ to get a
stroke!”

“And one other thing!” He stopped.

Then suddenly his fury—or the harsher, wilder part of it—seemed to evaporate, sucked up into the moonlit night with its soft summery cricketing sounds and its scent of warm loam and honeysuckle. For an instant he looked shrunken, runtier than ever, so light and frail that he might blow away like a leaf, and he ran a nervous, trembling hand through his shock of tangled black hair. “I know, I know,” he said in a faint, unsteady voice edged with grief. “Poor old man, he couldn’t help it. He was a decent, pitiful old thing, probably never done anybody the slightest harm. I ain’t got a thing in the world against Shadrach. Poor old man.”

Crouching below the porch I felt an abrupt, smothering misery. The tenderest gust of wind blew from the woods and I shivered at its touch on my cheek, mourning for Shadrach and Mr. Dabney, and slavery and destitution, and all the human discord swirling around me in a time and place I could not understand. As if to banish my fierce unease, I began to try—in a seizure of concentration—to count the fireflies sparkling in the night air. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty …

“And anyway,” Trixie said, touching her husband’s hand, “he died on Dabney ground like he wanted to. Even if he’s got to be put away in a strange graveyard.”

“Well, he won’t know the difference,” said Mr. Dabney. “When you’re dead nobody knows the difference. Death ain’t much.”

A TIDEWATER MORNING

D
uring the late summer of 1938, there was black news of the onrushing war. I had just turned thirteen, and I had a newspaper route that carried me on foot up and down the hot, sycamore-lined streets of our little village on the banks of the James River in Tidewater Virginia. I folded the papers into cylinders, forty-five or fifty of them, and stuffed them into a dingy white canvas bag that I lugged around with a strap that at first cut painfully into my shoulder, then eased up about a third of the way through my afternoon trek, which took about an hour and a half. The banner headlines that summer were tall and thick with harsh alarm: HITLER THREATENS. GERMAN TROOPS MASSING. CZECHOSLOVAKIA menaced. The news caused me less fear, really, than a vague, visceral excitement, distracting me from the gloom that encompassed me, from the ache that swelled in my stomach whenever I thought of my mother and her illness. And that thought always returned with a queasy jolt. I was also nagged by a worry having to do with my body: my nipples had become exquisitely tender, sensitive to the touch of the inside of my shirt and to my nervous, examining fingers, and the horrible fantasy flashed off and on in my mind that I might be turning, at least partially, into a girl. I fretted over other matters—over the length and tedium of the paper route, which I had commenced in the jazzed-up high spirits of anyone at his first paid professional employment but which had now lost most of its savor, and over my pay: $2.50 a week for nine hours, including an extra tour of duty overloaded at dawn with the fat editions of Sunday. Even during the Depression this was paltry recompense, and it was doled out dime by dime, nickel by nickel, by the only consummately mean-spirited person among the many frail and imperfect characters who floated in and out of my early youth.

Mr. Quigley—I have forgotten or blanked out his first name—was the proprietor of Quigley’s Store, an all-purpose emporium that stood on a barren tract of land just east of the village. It was a squat, nondescript place made of brick painted a bleached blue with a squeaking screen door and two windows nearly opaque with dust where one neon sign, reading pabst blue ribbon, pulsed spiritlessly, and the other, reading schlitz, was permanently dark. I imagine that if one could smell a Hogarth drawing, it would smell of gin; the interior of Quigley’s Store, Hogarthian in its dim clutter and squalor, smelled of spilled beer, cigarette smoke, and unwashed floors. After four o'clock a flock of shipyard workers gathered there every weekday afternoon to knock down bottles of beer at the round metal-topped tables in the rear of the store; they were a sullen lot, mostly displaced North Carolinians who had come to the area to make a few desperately needed shipyard dollars, and they lolled around in near-silence in the murk, chewing on pickled pigs' feet from a rotund two-gallon jar and munching on pretzels. Up front was a magazine stand with its ranks of comic books,
True Detectives,
and
Police Gazettes.
Next to this sat a grimy soda fountain, seldom used, and a display case of candy bars where I could always see the halfdozen resident flies making their perpendicular strolls on the glass inside. There were two pinball machines whose
bunk bong ding, ding bunk bong
was a constant background monotone. After the five miles of my paper route I was invariably sweat-soaked and nearly faint with thirst. So, together with the two or three other boys straggling in, I would head straight for the red enamel storage chest where, alongside the beer, the Coca-Colas were kept, and the Nehi and the Orange Crush and the Hires root beer. No stately automated dispensers in those days, no color-coordinated sevenfoot-tall designer model popping out its temperature-regulated frosted can into the dry and welcoming palm. One went instead to the case where the bottles stood in water cooled by ice, withdrew a Coca-Cola or a Dr Pepper refreshingly damp between one’s fingers. In all civilized establishments the water was changed regularly; at Quigley’s the water stagnated week in and week out, and the malodorous bottle, withdrawn, was slimy to the touch. Whenever I would hurry to the case and open the top, Mr. Quigley would be waiting with his smudged and tattered notebook, pencil poised.

“What are you having, Whitehurst?” he would ask. In those stuffier times businessmen were often on a last-name basis with their employees, but though I was a boy, it would have taken someone less rigidly uncharitable than Mr. Quigley to call me Paul. I hated the stingy bastard.

“I’m having a root beer,” I would reply.

And I’d watch him as he’d scratch my name in his notebook, or indite some intricate cross-reference or computation, and dock me five cents. Mr. Quigley’s ethnicity was somewhat odd for a native Virginian; it was said that his mother was Greek. He was a swarthy, pinched-face little man with a pronounced curvature of the spine that twisted him slightly sideways and gave him a limp. Was it this handicap, producing some inner misery of spirit—I occasionally wondered later (having become less uncharitable myself)—that disposed him to his lack of generosity? I was not so impractical or dumb about finance, especially at that time, when a dollar was worth a dollar, to begrudge Mr. Quigley his concern about the attrition that many unaccounted-for Coca-Colas or Hershey bars would produce against his profits. I did resent, though, the absence in him of any hint of humor or benevolence—for I was still enough of a child to expect the preferential decency, at least, that a child is
supposed
to receive—and I resented most of all that never once (
never once, never once,
I would mutter to myself as I slogged across the lawns deep in garden-hose damp and dog shit) did he offer me a small treat, gratis. Not a candy bar, not a bag of potato chips, nor even the pack of peanut butter crackers (“Nibble a NAB for a Nickel”) I would snatch off its filthy shelf when, some Friday evening, my stomach growled with unpropitiated hunger. He would be waiting. Down would go Mr. Quigley’s pencil in his notebook, marking my tiny debit, and as I glanced up at the pinched, small, satisfied face I made a rapid calculation and realized that on this payday I’d take home less than half my salary, or around $1.15.

There were a couple of Quigley offspring, a boy and a girl, but I had never seen them; they were considerably older than I and had already dropped out of high school. But nearly always present was Mrs. Quigley, a tough old graying slattern who chain-smoked corktipped Raleigh cigarettes and slapped around in bedroom slippers with red feather pompons as she served beer and pigs’ feet and tried to cheer up the disconsolate rednecks. Sometimes she wore hair curlers all day long. Her jokes were dirty and they made me cringe a little, while I listened with one ear and folded my newspapers. I wasn’t really a prude, since I had recently passed from the relative purity of grammar school into high school, where the common lingo swarmed with obscenities. Yet Mrs. Quigley was almost the first adult and certainly the only woman I knew out of whose mouth flowed, with the liquid ease of ordinary discourse, a stream of four-letter words. “Hey, Brighteyes,” she’d say to one of the sadder beer guzzlers, “let go of your dick and have another Schlitz.” I was torn between shock and enchantment, but often my giggles prevailed, since her slovenly good cheer was an antidote to her husband’s ill nature; more than once she slipped me a Mounds bar or a tepid ginger ale. In the end she was the only colorful spot in these dismal afternoons and Sunday mornings, and I may even have developed, before my labors ended, a distant crush, finding irresistible the way she belched, loud and with blowsy relish, or the moment when she raised her rayon shift and displayed to the gaping Carolinians a heavy blue-veined thigh tattooed with a fading red poinsettia.

Then there was Ralph, the store drudge. He pushed boxes around and did the heavy lifting in the back room and cleaned up the tables after the customers left. Ralph worked long hours, but I figured he was paid not much more than our newsboys’ coolie wages. Whatever he was paid, Mr. Quigley prized him for the sport he provided, this dim-witted Negro, ginger-colored and freckled, pear-shaped with a slue-footed waddle and a high, fluting voice like a castrato’s . His trouble was, I suspect, glandular, but Mr. Quigley exploited it as a sideshow attraction for the group gathered around the steel-topped tables; Ralph complied, in fact cooperated, as many a black man—some much brighter than Ralph—did in that era, when it was smarter to be Stepin Fetchit or Rochester than a smartass. “Ralph,” he would say, “did you know that you are about the weirdest-goddamned-sounding Knee-grow there is?” “Yassah,” Ralph would pipe. Then, hurt: “Nawsuh.”

Then “Yassah” again, with a grin frozen in a desire to please. “You sound like a goddamned dickeybird.” “Yassah.” “Or a tree toad.” “Yassah.” I lived in a racist society and had been inoculated so early against the idea of equality that a part of me supinely went along with the prevailing view that Negroes were a lesser breed of human being. But parental enlightenment and my own conscience—I would like to think it was no more complicated than Huck Finn’s—caused me to know otherwise. My skin crawled at Mr. Quigley’s loutish treatment of Ralph; it troubled me only slightly more than Ralph’s tame, grinning submission. “Ralph,” he would announce in an aside to the customers, “is the world’s goosiest burrhead.” A low hum from the group, and a single cackle. “I'm gone show you all something truly amazing.” The routine was set up, craftily prepared, Ralph feigning unconcern as he swabbed at a table, the fat behind in baggy trousers presenting itself amid the smoke, swaying. Mr. Quigley (this
grown man,
I would think while I watched) would sneak up on Ralph through the crowd, his pinched dark face creased with delight, anticipating. And then the sudden pounce, the goose in the rear, and Ralph, floundering upward with clumsy, exaggerated panic, arms flailing, the voice a falsetto wail. “Oh, Lawd, Lawd, ooooeeee!” Howls from the crowd, thumping bottles, general pleasure and gratitude. And Ralph would waddle around a bit, beaming in the shower of applause, and lick his lips in absurd self-approval. After these performances, sometimes Mr.

Quigley would give Ralph a soft drink or a candy bar, which, I always reflected, was more than he ever gave me. I'd hoist my bag to my shoulder and head out into the clammy heat, thinking,
The dumb black son of a bitch, how can he take that?
Then the fact of the misfortune of his color would crowd in on me, and my contempt for Ralph would be replaced by my loathing for Mr. Quigley and his grossness, his niggardly heart.

In the early morning hours of a September Sunday, I lay in bed listening to the sounds of my mother’s suffering. It was a few days before her fifty-first birthday. For the eight years she had endured the cancer the pain had sometimes been severe, but it had usually been of the sort that with immense struggle she could bear; now in these final weeks her strength had drained away. Creeping through her bones, the pain had become insistent, nearly without letup. I awoke at about one, aroused by her quavering cry in the front room. Then the tiptoeing feet of the nurse, Miss Slocum, followed by the heavier footsteps of my father. In my mother’s room Miss Slocum made soft, sibilant sounds, indistinct; my father’s voice, a tone louder, began to come intermittently in words that were distraught and tortured. That evening an announcement on the radio downstairs had spoken of a heat wave, a record for the season; I lay soaked in sweat beneath a black electric fan, which in each halfcircle of its rotation allowed the heat to engulf me, then cooled me with a puny puff of air. From the dense darkness outside my window, where, I knew, fireflies winked among my mother’s two small flower beds, I inhaled a sugary odor of late-blooming clematis. Other Septembers the white cascading vine had smelled delicious; now in the night it made me feel a little sick. Again I heard Miss Slocum’s whispery syllables of comfort, touched with strain.

Suddenly my mother screamed—a scream, long and hopeless, containing a note of anguish like nothing I had ever heard before. It was a shriek that swept up and down my naked body like a flame. It was an alien sound, which is to say unexpectedly beyond my sense of logic and my experience, so that for the barest instant it had the effect of something histrionic, out of the movies, a Frankenstein-Dracula film in which a bad actress emoted implausible terror. But it was real, and I plunged my face into my pillow, wrapping it about my head like a humid caul. I tried to shut out the scream. Deaf, in darkness, I sought to think of anything but that scream. I thought of Miss Slocum, who was a buxom woman of about thirty with an open, dimpled, heartlike face scrubbed mirror-bright; she resembled a fattened earthbound Sonja Henie and possessed an arresting defect: vestigial thumbs that were attached to the outside of her normal thumbs. This is a grotesquerie that I almost wish I didn’t have to record. But it is an actual part of a complex remembrance. There had been a touch of dark mirth in my mother’s desire, six months before, to fire Miss Slocum as soon as she had been hired, when the extra thumbs were suddenly perceived; becoming daily more helpless, my mother required bathing and massage, and she had professed abhorrence at the idea of twelve digits stroking her flesh. Why, in God’s name, she asked my father, hadn’t she had them removed? She was especially repelled when she noticed that Miss Slocum kept the little thumbs manicured, but I heard my father explain that this was not unreasonable, really; wouldn’t neglected thumbs be more attention-getting, and so forth. Anyway, the matter was resolved—besides, the nurse was a treasure, utterly patient and gentle. When I unwrapped my head from the pillow, the screaming had stopped.

“Miss Slocum, you
must
give her more morphine,” I heard my father’s voice, hoarse, nearer, outside my door.

“I cain’t, Mr. Whitehurst, I just cain’t,” came the reply. She spoke in the accents of the Virginia hill country, a throaty, soft treble from the steep slopes and hollow, which, although I never really knew or asked about her upbringing, always made me think of an amiably disheveled
Li’l Abner
family—half a dozen towheaded brothers and sisters, a moonshiner father, a mother whose lip bulged with a tuck of snuff. I had become fond of her simple, countrified tenderness, the artless compassion that she lavished on my mother day after hot summer day, bathing her, changing her, trying to soothe her remediless misery. “I just cain’t give her any more morphine. Dr. Beecroft won’t allow it. He gave me instructions. I cain’t give her any more just now.”