Chaneysville Incident (44 page)

“No—”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, you are. If you think that what somebody did or didn’t do to a bunch of people who died fifty years before you were born is something you ought to take personally, then when you say you hate white people I have to take it personally.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I
am
white, John. You know that? I am. I don’t think you ever have realized that. Because if you did, then you’d have to hate me—ˮ

“It’s not that way,” I said.

“Then how is it?”

I sat there for a minute, thinking, getting the words in order. “It looks that way,” I said. “I suppose that’s the basis of it all; hate, black people, white people, those simple things. But it’s so much more complicated than that. It has to do with… atmosphere. I don’t know exactly what it is. Corruption, maybe. But every place has corruption. Bigotry. Self-righteousness. All those things. So what it comes down to is atmosphere. This place stinks. It makes me choke. It’s not the people; it’s not the mountains; it’s not anything in particular. It’s just a stench, like somebody buried something, only they didn’t bury it quite deep enough, and it’s somewhere stinking up the world.”

She looked at me and shook her head. “All right,” she said. “It’s the smell you hate.”

“I don’t hate the smell, I hate…” I stopped.

“What?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m trying to say that it’s a funny kind of smell. One of those things that gets in the air and makes the lemmings run to the sea. Whatever it is that’s in the air, it makes people be just as bad to each other as they can be. It makes them treat each other like dirt.”

“That happens everywhere,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose it does.”

She shook her head. “John, what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense.”

“No,” I said. “No, I guess maybe it doesn’t make any sense. But you want me to tell you things before I understand them.” I looked at the cards, reached out and pushed them away, set my coffee down where they had been. It was rich and dark, and the aroma was sweet in my nostrils, but I knew it would taste bitter; I longed for cream. “You came in on the local, didn’t you?” I said.

“You mean the bus?” she said.

“Yes. You came in on the local and you went into the Alliquippa and got the desk clerk to phone you a taxi.”

“John,” she said, “what the hell…”

“It’s what you’d do,” I said. “And they’d know right away you were from the city, because of the way you dressed, and because they’d never seen you before, and because you’d call it a ‘cab.’ ” I looked at her. “Around here, it’s called a taxi, you see.”

She was staring at me now, as if she thought I was crazy.

“You probably didn’t bother asking directions. You just told the cabdriver that you were looking for me. And he told you where to come. Not just to the house; he knew I’d be over here. Didn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s what this town is like,” I said. “You sneeze and seven people say God bless you. And I’ll tell you what else it’s like: when you got to the foot of the Hill, the driver stopped and let you walk up the Hill. Didn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You know why he let you off there? You know why he didn’t bring you on up the Hill? I’ll tell you why. You see, the only time Jobie—that’s the driver—the only time he drives people up here is when they’re white ladies coming to talk to Aunt Dorrie about getting some sewing done. There’s not too much of that anymore; they drive themselves now, those that come. But before everybody had a car, he used to drive the white ladies right up the Hill. But he’d let the colored people walk. See, there’s no pavement on the Hill, so every time Jobie’d come up, at least in winter or spring or after a decent rain, he’d get that old Checker stuck hub-deep in mud, and he’d have to find a colored man and pay him a quarter to help push it out. It didn’t matter to the white ladies—he’d just charge them an extra fifty cents fare. But the colored folks couldn’t afford an extra fifty cents, so they’d walk up the Hill and save Jobie all the trouble and themselves two hours’ wages. Now you. If you had just got in the cab and told him to take you to the Hill, or even to Washington’s, he’d have brought you right up and charged you the fifty cents extra. But you asked for me, and I guess he figured there was something between us. So he let you off at the bottom of the Hill.” I looked at her, but she didn’t see it; there was nothing on her face but puzzlement. “It’s interesting,” I said. “Around here they have never become sophisticated enough to develop the concept of ‘nigger-lover.’ They just sort of figure it rubs off. So you walked up the Hill. Now, I don’t know what you saw, because I don’t know which way your head was turned. But I know what you smelled. You smelled the old rotting timbers in those falling-down houses, and you smelled a little sweet-sour smell from something that had died in the weeds, and you smelled pinewood smoke, and you smelled gassy smoke from coal, and you smelled fresh earth from the graveyard. And you smelled the stink from the outhouses. They still use them, you know. There’s a sewer line now; they ran it in ten or fifteen years ago, because the state government gave them a grant to pay for it. But nobody was giving any grants to pay for people hooking on, and anybody who could afford it was using the money to get off the Hill. So you smelled the outhouses. Not just the ones now; you smelled maybe a century and a halfs worth of outhouses. You smelled a hundred and fifty years’ worth of…shit.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I was lucky,” I said. “I didn’t have to worry about a sewer line, because Moses Washington had dug himself a cesspool, and I didn’t have to worry about a spring because he had dug himself a well—two wells, as a matter of fact. So I had a toilet in the house, and it was warm for me in the mornings, because I had a furnace too. And I was clean, because I had a shower on top of all that. I was better off than anybody. But I still had to breathe the air.”

She was looking at me, and I could see she was confused.

“The smell used to be a lot stronger,” I said. “There were more people over there then. And there were a lot of dogs; just about everybody had a dog. And pigs. Floyd used to keep his pigs up behind the graveyard, and when the wind was blowing the wrong way it got pretty bad. That part of it got to the Town, and they started enforcing a state regulation that made him cook the garbage before he fed it to them. It’s really the garbage that smells, you see, not the pigs. So that got rid of some of the smell. Got rid of the pigs too, eventually, because it cost too much for Floyd to cook the garbage, he had to build an oven or something, and he couldn’t get the money from the bank, or it was too much trouble…. I don’t know. Anyway, he stopped keeping the pigs, and the smell got better. But it was still there. Because the Hill smelled. And the people smelled too.”

I stopped and looked at her, but she didn’t say anything. “I’m serious,” I said. “The people smelled. I remember back when I was in high school, they used to laugh at some of the kids from the Hill because they didn’t smell just like Barbie and Ken were supposed to. I remember one of the home ec teachers caused all kinds of trouble when she took some of the girls aside and gave them a little talk on the subject of personal hygiene and antiperspirants and soap and water. I tell you, they had a whole delegation from the church after that poor woman’s head for saying those girls smelled. It wasn’t her fault; she was trying to be nice. But nobody on the Hill understood her, and she didn’t understand the Hill. I guess maybe she could have figured out how hard it is to keep clean when you don’t just step into a shower stall and dial hot or cold, when you have to get up before sunrise and carry water two buckets at a time for a quarter of a mile, and then heat it over a stove after you chop the wood for kindling and get the fire up, and then take your bath in a tin tub and then get all sweated up hauling the water away. She was teaching home economics, but the girls she was talking to had to come home and do the laundry with a washboard. I guess somebody could have explained that to her. I guess somebody could have explained that when your life is made up of a thousand little sweaty tasks you just don’t get in the habit of confining your perspiration to one set of clothes and calling it a sweat suit. And I suspect she would have understood and felt sorry. But she still would have thought those girls smelled bad. Thing was, there wasn’t anything wrong with the way they smelled. If everybody lived the same way, nobody would have thought they smelled. Nobody would have noticed any odor at all. Or they might have liked it.

“I guess all that’s pretty normal. People live in a different way, they tend to not understand each other. But I was in the middle of it, you see. Because I had a toilet and a shower and a furnace and a wringer-washer. I was lucky. Only I didn’t understand, either. Because I’d smelled that air all my life, and I didn’t think the people or the Hill smelled any different than it should have; the Town didn’t smell the same way, but it was different, not right or wrong.”

I took a swallow from my cup and looked at her. She wasn’t looking at me; her eyes were lowered.

“Come to think of it,” I said, “I do know which way your face was turned when you came up the Hill: away.”

She looked up at me.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said. “It takes some getting used to, I guess. I don’t know. I never had to get used to it. I always saw it that way. I grew up over there, smelling the smells and looking at those houses falling apart, breathing that air. And I grew up over here. When I was at home I used a toilet, and over here I used an outhouse. So you see, what you see as being strange for me isn’t strange at all: I can’t go native; I
am
native.”

She lowered her head again. I took another sip from my cup.

“No,” she said softly. She brought her head up again and looked at me. “No. It’s not good enough. You’re getting closer to it, but you aren’t making sense yet. Oh, it’s a reason for what you feel, but it’s not the reason you feel it. It’s something you can use to explain it and justify it without telling me why you feel what you feel. It’s just a symbol.”

“It sounds corny to say this,” I said, “but these are my people.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It sounds corny. It is corny. It might be true. But I know you better; you’re no font of brotherhood. You don’t like anybody that much.”

I set the coffee down. “All right,” I said. “All right, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you how they killed my brother.”

“No,” she said. “You’ve used that one. I fell for that one already.”

“No,” I said. “I never told you this. I never told you how they murdered him.” I waited a minute, but she didn’t say anything. “It goes back a long way. Most murders do. And it was slow. So slow you wouldn’t have thought they were killing him at all. It looked like they were doing fine by him; he was a high school hero, and they gave him block letters for his sweater, and they actually made him the King of the Pigskin Hop and the Winter Sports Dance. They wrote him up in the newspaper. You really would have thought they liked him. They probably
did
like him then. Because it didn’t matter; he was already dead by that time, living on borrowed time. And this is how they killed him. When he was fourteen years old he was supposed to take algebra. He wasn’t stupid, but he wasn’t much interested in studying, either. He flunked the first quiz. He flunked the second. He flunked the first test. He flunked the second. He was going to get an F on his report card. But it was football season, and he was the starting halfback on the junior high school team. An F would have made him ineligible. So the coach talked to the teacher. Bill promised to get help. They gave him a C. I tried to help him; it wasn’t any use. Oh, he did a little better, passed a quiz or two, but he flunked the exams. Only when the second marking period rolled around, it was still football season. So they gave him another C. Then it was too late. I kept on trying, but even if he had wanted to catch up, he couldn’t; by then he didn’t even know what they were talking about. He couldn’t have passed a test for love or money. And he didn’t think he needed to. He figured so long as he could play, they’d pass him. And he was right. Because by the time the third marking period rolled around it was wrestling season. Wrestling is a very big thing in western Pennsylvania, and they let ninth-graders try for the Varsity. He tried. He made it. So it didn’t make a bit of difference that he didn’t know an exponent from a subscript; he got his C. And they gave him his C the last marking period because that was what determined eligibility to play in the fall. The next year they gave him Algebra Two. And they gave him C’s. The next year it was geometry. And chemistry. That was his junior year. He set the state rushing record that year. He went to the State Wrestling Tournament that year. He won it. They thought he could do it the next year. They gave him C’s. The trouble showed up when he took the College Boards. Oh, he did okay on the aptitude tests, but he did so badly on the achievement tests in math and science, he would have been better off just flipping a coin; he knew just enough to pick out the wrong answers. Well, that didn’t matter; he could take the tests again, and stay away from the math and science. All he had to do was be good enough at football. So they gave him C’s in trig. They even let him take physics. And they passed him. Right through football season. And they had the first undefeated year in about twenty. They passed him through wrestling season, and he won the States for them again. He was twelve weeks away from graduation. He was ignorant as sin, but his grades weren’t bad. Syracuse and Michigan and Ohio State wanted him. They would have gotten around the Boards; they do that all the time. But Bill had already delivered everything he could for the local people. So they flunked him. And there wasn’t any way the scouts or whoever could get around the fact that he hadn’t graduated from high school. And so he went to work on a loading dock to try and build himself up to try out with the pros. He lifted weights and ran the hills and threw boxes around. He talked about how Big Daddy Lipscomb never went to college, either. He worked for a year, almost. He might have made it. But he was born in the wrong month; he turned nineteen before the tryouts. Instead of getting drafted by the NFL he got drafted by Uncle Sam. You know the rest of it. But what it all comes down to is they killed him so they could have a better chance of winning a couple of junior high school football games.”