Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (49 page)

When she had finished, Berenice said:

"Frankie, I honestly believe you have turned crazy on us. Walking around all over town and telling total strangers this big tale. You know in your soul this mania of yours is pure foolishness."

"You wait and see," F. Jasmine said. "They will take me."

"And if they don't?"

F. Jasmine picked up the shoe box with the silver slippers and the wrapped box with the wedding dress. "These are my wedding clothes. I'll show them to you later."

"And if they don't?"

F. Jasmine had already started up the stairs, but she stopped and turned back toward the kitchen. The room was silent.

"If they don't, I will kill myself," she said. "But they will."

"Kill yourself how?" asked Berenice.

"I will shoot myself in the side of the head with a pistol."

"Which pistol?"

"The pistol that Papa keeps under his handkerchiefs along with Mother's picture in the right-hand bureau drawer."

Berenice did not answer for a minute and her face was a puzzle. "You heard what Mr. Addams told you about playing with that pistol. Go on upstairs now. Dinner will be ready in a little while."

It was a late dinner, this last meal that the three of them would ever eat together at the kitchen table. On Saturdays they were not regular about the times of meals, and they began the dinner at four o'clock, when already the August sun was slanting long and stale across the yard. It was the time of afternoon when the bars of sunlight crossed the back yard like the bars of a bright strange jail. The two fig trees were green and flat, the arbor sun-crossed and casting solid shade. The sun in the afternoon did not slant through the back windows of the house, so that the kitchen was gray. The three of them began their dinner at four o'clock, and the dinner lasted until twilight. There was hopping-john cooked with the ham bone, and as they ate they began to talk of love. It was a subject F. Jasmine had never talked about in all her life. In the first place, she had never believed in love and had never put any of it in her shows. But this afternoon when Berenice began this conversation, F. Jasmine did not stop up both her ears, but as she quietly ate the peas and rice and pot-liquor she listened.

"I have heard of many a queer thing," said Berenice. "I have knew mens to fall in love with girls so ugly that you wonder if their eyes is straight. I have seen some of the most peculiar weddings anybody could conjecture. Once I knew a boy with his whole face burned off so that—"

"Who?" asked John Henry.

Berenice swallowed a piece of cornbread and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "I have knew womens to love veritable Satans and thank Jesus when they put their split hooves over the threshold. I have knew boys to take it into their heads to fall in love with other boys. You know Lily Mae Jenkins?"

F. Jasmine thought a minute, and then answered: "I'm not sure."

"Well, you either know him or you don't know him. He prisses around with a pink satin blouse and one arm akimbo. Now this Lily Mae fell in love with a man name Juney Jones. A man, mind you. And Lily Mae turned into a girl. He changed his nature and his sex and turned into a girl."

"Honest?" F. Jasmine asked. "Did he really?"

"He did," said Berenice. "To all intents and purposes."

F. Jasmine scratched behind her ear and said: "It's funny I can't think who you are talking about. I used to think I knew so many people."

"Well, you don't need to know Lily Mae Jenkins. You can live without knowing him."

"Anyway, I don't believe you," F. Jasmine said.

"Well, I ain't arguring with you," said Berenice. "What was it we was speaking about?"

"About peculiar things."

"Oh, yes."

They stopped off a few minutes to get on with the dinner. F. Jasmine ate with her elbows on the table and her bare heels hooked on the rungs of the chair. She and Berenice sat opposite each other, and John Henry faced the window. Now hopping-john was F. Jasmine's very favorite food. She had always warned them to wave a plate of rice and peas before her nose when she was in her coffin, to make certain there was no mistake; for if a breath of life was left in her, she would sit up and eat, but if she smelled the hopping-john, and did not stir, then they could just nail down the coffin and be certain she was truly dead. Now Berenice had chosen for her deathtest a piece of fried fresh-water trout, and for John Henry it was divinity fudge. But though F. Jasmine loved the hopping-john the very best, the others also liked it well enough, and all three of them enjoyed the dinner that day: the ham knuckle, the hopping-john, cornbread, hot baked sweet potatoes, and the buttermilk. And as they ate, they carried on the conversation.

"Yes, as I was just now telling you," said Berenice. "I have seen many a peculiar thing in my day. But one thing I never knew and never heard tell about. No siree, I never did."

Berenice stopped talking and sat there shaking her head, waiting for them to question her. But F. Jasmine would not speak. And it was John Henry who raised his curious face from his plate and asked: "What, Berenice?"

"No," said Berenice. "I never before in all my days heard of anybody falling in love with a wedding. I have knew many peculiar things, but I never heard of that before."

F. Jasmine grumbled something.

"So I have been thinking it over and have come to a conclusion."

"How?" John Henry suddenly asked. "How did that boy change into a girl?"

Berenice glanced at him and straightened the napkin tied around his neck. "It was just one of them things, Candy Lamb. I don't know."

"Don't listen at her," F. Jasmine said.

"So I have been thinking it over in my mind and come to this conclusion. What you ought to begin thinking about is a beau."

"What?" F. Jasmine asked.

"You heard me," said Berenice. "A beau. A nice little white boy beau."

F. Jasmine put down her fork and sat with her head turned to one side. "I don't want any beau. What would I do with one?"

"Do, Foolish?" asked Berenice. "Why, make him treat you to the picture show. For one thing."

F. Jasmine pulled the bangs of her hair down over her forehead and slid her feet across the rung of the chair.

"Now you belong to change from being so rough and greedy and big," said Berenice. "You ought to fix yourself up nice in your dresses. And speak sweedy and act sly."

F. Jasmine said in a low voice: "I'm not rough and greedy any more. I already changed that way."

"Well, excellent," said Berenice. "Now catch you a beau."

F. Jasmine wanted to tell Berenice about the soldier, the hotel, and the invitation for the evening date. But something checked her, and she hinted around the edges of the subject: "What kind of a beau? Do you mean something like—" F. Jasmine paused, for at home in the kitchen that last afternoon, the soldier seemed unreal.

"Now that I cannot advise," said Berenice. "You got to decide for yourself."

"Something like a soldier who would maybe take me dancing at the Idle Hour?" She did not look at Berenice.

"Who is talking about soldiers and dancing? I'm talking about a nice little white boy beau your own age. How about that little old Barney?"

"Barney MacKean?"

"Why, certainy. He would do very well to begin with. You could make out with him until somebody else comes along. He would do."

"That mean nasty Barney!" The garage had been dark, with thin needling sunlight coming through the cracks of the closed door, and with the smell of dust. But she did not let herself remember the unknown sin that he had showed her, that later made her want to throw a knife between his eyes. Instead, she shook herself hard and began mashing peas and rice together on her plate. "You are the biggest crazy in this town."

"The crazy calls the sane the crazy."

So they began to eat again, all except John Henry. F. Jasmine was busy slicing open cornbread and spreading it with butter and mashing her hopping-john and drinking milk. Berenice ate more slowly, peeling off bits of ham from the knuckle in a dainty way. John Henry looked from one of them to the other, and after listening to their talk he had stopped eating to think for a little while. Then after a minute he asked:

"How many of them did you catch? Them beaus."

"How many?" said Berenice. "Lamb, how many hairs is in these plaits? You talking to Berenice Sadie Brown."

So Berenice was started, and her voice went on and on. And when she had begun this way, on a long and serious subject, the words flowed one into the other and her voice began to sing. In the gray of the kitchen on summer afternoons the tone of her voice was golden and quiet, and you could listen to the color and the singing of her voice and not follow the words. F. Jasmine let the long tones linger and spin inside her ears, but her mind did not stamp the voice with sense or sentences. She sat there listening at the table, and now and then she thought of a fact that all her life had seemed to her most curious: Berenice always spoke of herself as though she was somebody very beautiful. Almost on this one subject, Berenice was really not in her right mind. F. Jasmine listened to the voice and stared at Berenice across the table: the dark face with the wild blue eye, the eleven greased plaits that fitted her head like a skull-cap, the wide flat nose that quivered as she spoke. And whatever else Berenice might be, she was not beautiful. It seemed to her she ought to give Berenice advice. So she said at the next pause:

"I think you ought to quit worrying about beaus and be content with T.T. I bet you are forty years old. It is time for you to settle down."

Berenice bunched up her lips and stared at F. Jasmine with the dark live eye. "Wisemouth," she said. "How do you know so much? I got as much right as anybody else to continue to have a good time so long as I can. And as far as that goes, I'm not so old as some peoples would try and make out. I can still ministrate. And I got many a long year ahead of me before I resign myself to a corner."

"Well, I didn't mean go into a corner," F. Jasmine said.

"I heard what you meant," said Berenice.

John Henry had been watching and listening, and there was a little crust of pot-liquor around his mouth. A big blue lazy fly was hovering around him and trying to light on his sticky face, so that from time to time John Henry waved his hand to shoo the fly away.

"Did they all treat you to the picture show?" he asked. "All those beaus."

"To the show, or to one thing or another," she answered.

"You mean you never pay your own way?" John Henry asked.

"That's what I'm telling you," said Berenice. "Not when I go out with a beau. Now if I was to go somewhere with a crowd of womens, I would have to pay my way. But I'm not the kind of person to go around with crowds of womens."

"When you all took the trip to Fairview—" F. Jasmine said—for one Sunday that last spring there had been a colored pilot who took up colored people in his aeroplane. "Who paid the way?"

"Now let me see," said Berenice. "Honey and Clorina took care of their expense, except I loaned Honey one dollar and forty cents. Cape Clyde paid his own way. And T.T. paid for himself and for me."

"Then T.T. treated you to the aeroplane ride?"

"That's what I'm telling you. He paid the bus tickets to and from Fairview and the aeroplane ride and the refreshments. The complete trip. Why, naturally he paid the way. How else do you think I could afford to fly around in an aeroplane? Me making six dollars a week."

"I didn't realize that," F. Jasmine admitted Anally. "I wonder where T.T. got all of his money."

"Earned it," said Berenice. "John Henry, wipe off your mouth."

So they rested at the table, for the way they ate their meals, this summer, was in rounds: they would eat awhile and then let the food have a chance to spread out and settle inside their stomachs, and a little later they would start in again. F. Jasmine crossed her knife and fork on her empty plate, and began to question Berenice about a matter that had bothered her.

"Tell me. Is it just us who call this hopping-john? Or is it known by that name through all the country? It seems a strange name somehow."

"Well, I have heard it called various things," said Berenice.

"What?"

"Well, I have heard it called peas and rice. Or rice and peas and pot-liquor. Or hopping-john. You can vary and take your pick."

"But I'm not talking about this town," F. Jasmine said. "I mean in other places. I mean through all the world. I wonder what the French call it."

"Oh," said Berenice. "Well, you ask me a question I cannot answer."

"Merci a la parlez," F. Jasmine said.

They sat at the table and did not speak. F. Jasmine was tilted back in her chair, her head turned toward the window and the sun-crossed empty yard. The town was silent and the kitchen was silent except for the clock. F. Jasmine could not feel the world go round, and nothing moved.

"Now a funny thing has happened to me," F. Jasmine began. "I don't hardly know how to tell just what I mean. It was one of those strange things you can't exactly explain."

"What, Frankie?" John Henry asked.

F. Jasmine turned from the window, but before she could speak again there was the sound. In the silence of the kitchen they heard the tone shaft quietly across the room, then again the same note was repeated. A piano scale slanted across the August afternoon. A chord was struck. Then in a dreaming way a chain of chords climbed slowly upward like a flight of castle stairs: but just at the end, when the eighth chord should have sounded and the scale made complete, there was a stop. This next to the last chord was repeated. The seventh chord, which seems to echo all of the unfinished scale, struck and insisted again and again. And finally there was a silence. F. Jasmine and John Henry and Berenice looked at each other. Somewhere in the neighborhood an August piano was being tuned.

"Jesus!" said Berenice. "I seriously believe this will be the last straw."

John Henry shivered. "Me too," he said.

F. Jasmine sat perfecdy still before the table crowded with plates and dinner dishes. The gray of the kitchen was a stale gray and the room was too flat and too square. After the silence another note was sounded, and then repeated an octave higher. F. Jasmine raised her eyes each time the tone climbed higher, as though she watched the note move from one part of the kitchen to another; at the highest point her eyes had reached a ceiling corner, then, when a long scale slid downward, her head turned slowly as her eyes crossed from the ceiling corner to the floor corner at the opposite side of the room. The bottom bass note was struck six times, and F. Jasmine was left staring at an old pair of bedroom slippers and an empty beer bottle which were in that corner of the room. Finally she shut her eyes, and shook herself, and got up from the table.