Lie Down in Darkness (59 page)

traficante marijuana:
I turned away, thinking of gallons of water to drink, thinking of home. So proceeding north on the Lex. Ave. Express to Woodlawn Ave., where I’d rather not go, but home: if Grandmother lived now, had not dwelt in some jasmine time of long ago. That was hard to remember, that house in Richmond: it was very old, Bunny always said. There were oaks all around it; I remembered those and the hollyhocks: thus in the sweltering summer noon I was carried upward in his arms to lie down in murmurous, strange light, on the damp, strange sheets, napping, hearing along the cobblestones the staid clipclopping of a horse, and a Negro’s voice far off—
flowahs! flowahs!
I saw him even then, when I was three or four or five: he luxuriated in my drowsing fancy, and my mind went forth, half-dreaming: I saw him below hunched behind his sleepy mare, coal-black, and with a switch for the flies, sweat pouring off his brow as he sourly frowned at the horse’s coarse, flourishing tail: behind them both begonias and lilacs and larkspur nodding beneath an umbrella, cool in pots of clotted moist earth. Then the cry again—
flowahs! flowahs!—
and the fading hooves along the cobblestones, beneath the sheltering cedars, vanishing flowahs flowahs into my dreams, in a strange bed, in a strange land. And I thought then, oh Bunny, what has happened to me that I hate myself so today: Albert Berger said that I was blocked up in my sexual area but I know something else and so, Bunny, I would tell Albert Berger a misery: behold, we have not been brought up right and my memory of flowers and summer and larkspur is conjoined equally with pain: that all my dying. That when I lay down in Richmond in Grandmother’s bed I saw her picture on the wall so benignly smiling, even on that day I heard the flower man clipclop along beneath the cedars, moved and peered at it in my slumber through half-closed eyes; a face that once brushed Longstreet’s beard preserved behind the nacreous glass, still smiling and with a bulge of snuff: and I reached out my arms, cried
mother mother mother,
to that image even then twenty years before turned to bones and dust. The train stopped at a station; this last car deserted, save for the Puerto Rican, who moved away. Then it went on rocking down the tunnel with rails, with darkness, with winking red eyes. I put my head in my hands, thinking of thirst, thinking of gallons of water to drink and cool dew somewhere, resting on a lawn beneath the mimosa shade to hear the distant trumpeting of gulls or thunder or guns. I couldn’t think; the train rocked on, bearing me north, and I prayed, though my prayer in the sweat and fever and sudden cramp, which made me almost sink to the floor, seemed addressed no longer to God but to Albert Berger, a gaseous vertebrate with eyes weeping strange red tears all over the windy universe. The train stopped at 125th Street; I got off amid a crowd of shoving Negroes. I pushed up the littered stairs, dropping my bag. “Hey, lady, you drapped yo’ bag.” I didn’t answer, climbed on, came out into the twilight, where a theater marquee blossomed capering globes of red and blue, and Van Johnson, twenty feet high, sent a smirk across the evening. And then I walked fast up the avenue, past the throng, into the shadows where there was little noise. I turned. Sooty buildings towered all around me. I turned again, facing the street: I thought I could see them still, prancing up the avenue, a whole flock of them flightless, wingless, borne floating through the aqueous twilight like feathered balloons caught upon strings. I said, “No” out loud, and an old colored woman paused at my side, with round, white, curious eyes. I turned and ran a bit but it was too hot: I began to wheeze and to sweat and the pain returned in my womb: I thought, oh Christ, have mercy on your Peyton this evening not because she hasn’t believed but because she. No one. had a chance to. ever. I stopped running then and calmed myself down: Have mercy, I said. There was a loft building here, facing an alley: the door had swung open. You had to climb three steps for the door; these I walked up gingerly, holding onto the rail, and the steps sagged and creaked, giving off an odor of dust. In one corner there was an elevator; inside and beneath a dimly glowing bulb an old Negro dozed on a stool: moths fluttered around his head. I tiptoed past him toward the stairs. Then I climbed and while I climbed I thought that only guilt could deliver me into this ultimate paradox: that all souls must go down before ascending upward; only we most egregious sinners, to shed our sin in self-destruction, must go upward before the last descent. I climbed seven flights and rested, propped up against a wall fanning myself with my hand: the hall smelled of some fabric, a cutting room where Negroes worked: everything was deserted, and over the darkness and the desertion hung that odor of lint and dust and the strong sour odor of sweat. I stood erect: Did I have a companion? I felt that someone was watching me, myself perhaps; at least I knew I was not alone. The birds had vanished for a moment, and around me hung that idea of someone watching me in the darkness: friend or enemy from another time, male, female, it made no difference, even perhaps a dog—some presence huddled in a corner of the cutting room, among the presses and frames silhouetted against the city lights, looking at me with mourning eyes. I turned and walked up again, past walls peeling plaster, crayon marks and water stains, upward and upward through the pervasive sour smell—like a pantry I knew once where La Ruth used to change, an odor of pickles there, and lemons, resting mingled and palpable on the heat, yet through it all this smell, of a land lost from me, unvisited, irretrievable. Bulbs hung at every landing and around them, as if borne back ceaselessly to the light of their beginning, fluttered a cloud of moths: more than I had ever seen before, rich and plump from the woolen lint and scraps of cuttings, beating at my face upon each landing like a bleached storm of windblown petals. I reached the top. “Finish,” I said out loud. Oh, let me die. I walked down a long corridor, in the darkness stumbling over piles of jackets: I could feel the touch of woolen arms, knew the smell again—of blankets and lint and wool, enfolding me forever. Then I came to a door. There was enough light to see: it said
WOMEN
. I threw open the door and went in, touching a row of tiles. A toilet gurgled somewhere in the darkness and I groped toward the window. I sat down on the radiator beneath it, looking out on the starless sky fired red as an oven from the city. Then I stood up, heard far below one furious, continual honk of a car horn; some mortal insanely attuned to noise: it blatted on. Now all this blessed relief, taking off my clothes; my dress first: I carried it out to the loft where I’d seen an ashcan, ripped the silk up so that it looked like so much scrap and shoved it down into the can beneath a pile of cuttings. Then I walked back into the washroom. I went to the window again, took off my other things and threw them on the floor. Afterwards, I kicked off my shoes and stockings and stuffed them beneath the radiator, stood up: I was naked, clean if sweating, just as I had come. Something seemed to hurry me through space, I heard that thunder again, on the remotest horizon, guns perhaps, something: above Java or palms on the Lacca-dives, in the profoundest sunlit seas. Something hurries me through memory, too, but I can’t pause to remember, for a guilt past memory or dreaming, much darker, impels me on. I pray but my prayer climbs up like a broken wisp of smoke:
oh my Lord, I am dying,
is all I know, and
oh my father, oh my darling,
longingly, lonesomely, I fly into your arms!
Peyton you must be proper nice girls don’t. Peyton.
Me? Myself all shattered, this lovely shell? Perhaps I shall rise at another time, though I lie down in darkness and have my light in ashes. I turn in the room, see them come across the tiles, dimly prancing, fluffing up their wings, I think: my poor flightless birds, have you suffered without soaring on this earth? Come then and fly. And they move on past me through the darkening sands, awkward and gentle, rustling their feathers: come then and fly. And so it happens: treading past to touch my boiling skin—one whisper of feathers is all—and so I see them go—oh my Christ!—one by one ascending my flightless birds through the suffocating night, toward paradise. I am dying, Bunny, dying.
But you must be proper.
I say, oh pooh. Oh pooh. Most be proper. Oh most proper. Powerful.

Oh most Powerful

Oh must

It was as if all the air had become an ocean. It was not rain, but solid water, which came down over the cemetery and Carey’s last glimpse of the place before he darted back into the doorway was of flooded tombstones, grass plastered down by the torrent, and finally, in the limousine, of Dolly, sealed with round, frightened eyes behind the streaming windows like a guppy in a fish bowl. There was a crackle of thunder; lightning struck nearby in the woods. Carey thought he heard the crash of a falling tree. He turned. There was a short corridor here, smelling of damp concrete, a depressing place, ill-lit and lined with empty niches. At the end of the corridor Mr. Casper and Barclay had taken refuge, along with Ella Swan, who stood against the door leading into the chapel proper, and wept desperately and audibly into her handkerchief. A chill had arisen with the rain, and Mr. Casper turned up the collar of his coat; now and then he rubbed his hands together and looked up piously toward the thunder.

Loftis had dragged Helen into a little anteroom nearby. This had happened when the storm broke. Carey had seen it all: the compliant look on her face, her smile. She had even put an arm around Loftis’ waist as he drew her along with him. But when, closing the door, he had gazed back at Carey for one confused moment, his face wore the same look of agony. A minute had passed, certainly not much more. Carey heard Loftis’ voice, high, hysterical, tormented, muffled by the walls. He couldn’t hear Helen’s at all. Then the door broke open, and Helen came out, followed by Loftis with outstretched arms and bright, glazed eyes.

“Why have I wanted you?” he shouted. “Because you’re the only thing left! That’s why! My God, don’t you see? We’re both sick, we need to make each other——”

She rustled up and took Carey’s arm. “Can’t we go now, Carey? Milton,” she said over her shoulder, “don’t make a scene. Please don’t make a scene.”

Loftis approached them wildly, his hair flying, and clutched her by the arm. Carey felt his bowels give way somewhat, in fear and in horror: the place seemed touched with a violence greater, even, than the storm. A spray of water swept beneath the door.

“Scene! Scene!” Loftis shouted. “Why, God damn you, don’t you see what you’re doing! With nothing left! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!”

“Would she want it that way?”

“She?”

“Yes,” Helen said.

“She? Who? She?” he cried.

She removed his hand from her arm. “Yes,” she said softly, “I imagine she would.”

“She would?” he yelled.

“Milton, I’ve told you that anything you need or want from me you can have. Except—” she paused, still smiling—“except—— Well, we’ve been through it all, haven’t we? One has pride——”

Then Carey saw something take place which he could never have predicted—much less, he later said to Adrienne, thought ever could happen at all, among civilized people of a certain maturity. Whenever he told Adrienne, usually with a pipe, usually with something to drink, sherry perhaps, or a drop of bourbon, he told it with sorrow, slowly and thoughtfully, and with a sort of grave wonder. Yet secure in the rectory, though he tried, he could never retrieve—in a vicarious, not really too worthy attempt at excitement—the same horror, which had made his guts moist and his limbs paralyzed and futile, and which had caused something in his brain to say, at the moment it happened, “Oh, my Lord, You shall never reveal Yourself!”

Loftis pulled Helen about so that she faced him and began to choke her. “God damn you!” he yelled, “If I can’t have … then you … nothing!”

“People!” Carey cried. “People! People!” He couldn’t move.

“Die, damn you, die!”

It was over as quickly as it had begun, one red flash of violence spread out like momentary lightning against the storm. Loftis relaxed his grip on her neck, stood trembling and weeping in the hallway with its fading, ugly light, its smell of dampness and rain and death. Helen slumped against Carey, heavily, without a sound, and distantly within the chapel, where Peyton’s body lay, something stirred, moved, a piece of falling slate perhaps, a rain-blown gutter pipe—who knows? Carey said later, with his pipe and bourbon, except that the noise seemed ghostly then, somehow fatal, and altogether quite shattering to his mind, fevered as it was with such hot wild winds of ruin and godlessness. But it was over. Loftis lifted his hands to his face—a sudden, angry, almost childish gesture, as if he were striking himself in the eyes with his fists. Then he turned and ran out into the rain. He didn’t pause at the limousine. He did give Dolly, it seemed to Carey, a brief glance as he hurried past the car—but here Carey might have been mistaken. The last he saw of him was his retreating back, amid all the wind and rain, as he hustled on, bounding past wreaths and boxwood and over tombstones, toward the highway.

Then Helen steadied herself against Carey, and she pressed her head next to the wall. “Peyton,” she said, “oh, God, Peyton. My child. Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!”

Toward the end of the day, when it was nearly dusk, Ella, La Ruth and Stonewall stood on a corner in North Port Warwick, waiting for the bus. The sky had cleared, the storm had passed, rumbling far off eastward; near them the trees dripped water, roses on a trellis bore round white pearls of dew. It was cool and quiet on the highway. The evening star had risen in the west, one ornament in a blue, cloudless sky—this and the pale rind of a tilted new moon. Ella and La Ruth both had on their white baptismal robes, and white turbans wrapped around their hair. Stonewall was dressed identically, and in miniature, except for the turban: he wore none, which allowed him, from time to time, to reach up and scratch his sparse, kinky hair. There were no tears now, no grief or lamentation, at least outwardly exposed; Ella’s face wore the passive look of one who has seen all, borne all, known all and expects little more, of either joy or suffering: she was too old, and if occasionally the wrinkled serenity of her face became a touch grim, it was because her outlook on life was basically tragic, and not because of any passing anger or bitterness. La Ruth’s face was formed in one huge pout: she had missed out on Peyton’s funeral, and this had left her with a vague, empty feeling, of a grief that had been stifled, that had not—since no one had let her go to the ceremony—reached a proper climax in her heart; and there were a number of other lacks and disappointments stirring about inside her, none of which she could define or very well understand. Now and then she began to moan, to press Stonewall against her belly, and to rock backward and forward in a lumpy expression of anonymous, uncomprehending woe, but Ella would always touch her on the arm and tell her to stop. Stonewall was lost in dreams. “Mama,” he said, “Christine say she want to frig wid me. Do dat mean——”

La Ruth gave him a crack on the head. “You hush yo’ nasty face,” she said. “You gonna need mo’ dan baptism to save yo’ dev’lish soul.” She began to moan again, rocking back and forth in the twilight, and pressed Stonewall against her: “De Lawd he’p us, Mama, Satan is fo’ sho’ stalkin’ around de proppity dis day. Seem like de Lawd jes shet de door on His people——”

“Quit moanin’,” Ella said, grabbing her arm, “trust in Him.”

The bus, marked “Special,” came clattering over the hill; they got on. They dropped two nickels in the box.

“How old is that child?” the driver said, turning cold blue eyes on La Ruth.

Three steps down the aisle La Ruth turned. “He’s five years and ‘leven months old, six come September.”

“Are you sure?” the driver said.

“Yes, suh, ’deed I is. Mama she said always tell de troof when de man asks. Dat child ain’t but——”

“O.K., O.K.,” the driver said.

The bus pulled away from the curb; the three of them moved to the rear, joining a group of Negroes on the back seat.

“How do, Sister Ella? You do look fine,” said a small plump woman with tan skin. Her robe had arms of lace, with beads; these she rattled noisily and obviously, tucking the hair beneath her turban. “I do hear, though,” she said solemnly, “from Sister Moreen. She said you had sorrow in yo’ fambly today.”

“ ’Deed we did,” Ella sighed, “de Lawd plucked off de prettiest creature in dis world.”

“When de Lawd plucks, he
plucks
.” A thin little man had spoken; he was very old, with a mangy gray mustache, but spry. When he spoke he clapped both feet on the floor, for emphasis. He fanned himself with a bandanna.

“ ’Deed he does, Brother Andrew,” Ella said mildly. “De Lawd plucks fo’ sho’. When he plucks.”

“Ain’t you grievin’?” said the other woman.

“Done grieved all I can,” said Ella. “Can’t grieve no mo’, Sister ’Delphia, can’t grieve no mo’.”

“Dat’s right,” said Sister Adelphia. “Daddy Faith, he say grief is a wellspring and a fount, dat when it run dry den it’s time to lift up yo’ heart and praise Him fo’ His blessin’s, dat it’s time fo’ thanks-givin’——”

“And de blood offerin’!” Brother Andrew put in, snapping his heels.

“And de blood offerin’!” said Sister Adelphia.

“Amen,” said Ella.

They rode on through the twilight, past fields and woods and dirt roads. At each road the bus stopped to take on more people, until finally it was crowded with passengers, all Negroes except for one white man, a railroad worker, who stood up in front and seemed nervously out of place. The air generally was that of expectancy and hope and jubilation; they jostled one another, stepped on one another’s toes, sang hymns. One old woman near the back door became prematurely hysterical, began to wail and to clutch rapturously at the walls, until the driver slowed down and, standing up, told her to quit it, because she was ringing the bell. Soon they were in Niggertown, on Jefferson Avenue; the street outside became a parade, filled with robed and turbaned figures streaming eastward toward the water. Some blew horns; a band could be heard somewhere in the distance, brassy and loud, with celebrant trumpets, xylophones, and a thunder of drums. The bus halted in the jam, waited, lurched on. La Ruth began to moan again. “God he’p us,” she said. “Dem po’ people! What dey gonna do? Po’ Peyton. Oh, Lawd, Lawd, Lawd …”

Ella rubbed her hand gently across La Ruth’s knuckles. “You hush now,” she murmured. “It’s all done and finished with. God will provide in heaven.”

“Amen!” Brother Andrew put in.

“Dis day I am with you in paradise,” said Sister Adelphia, nodding her head certainly. “De Master hisse’f said dat. Ain’t dat enough fo’ you, Sister La Ruth?” She rattled her beads; there was a trace of a sneer on her lips, one that indicated she had no use for doubters.

La Ruth hiked Stonewall up higher in her lap. “I know,” she said, “but de po’ chile, Miss Helen crazy an’ all, God knows I don’t know …” Her voice trailed off, and she gazed out the window; the river could be seen from here, a motionless silver patch at its junction with the bay: on the distant shore, behind a stretch of trees, the sun was setting, a violent half-circle of yolk-colored gold. Nearby was marshland, cattails and sawgrass standing up straight and without motion in the windless dusk. It was high tide; the smell of sea was borne through the windows, salty and faintly sulphurous from the rot of the marshes, but clean. At the railroad crossing the white man got off. The bus moved on, faster now; black hands waved wildly from the windows, toward the sky, toward nothing, in rapture; faint from across the bay there was a final groan of thunder as the storm passed out to sea. Ella sat up stiffly in her seat and rocked with the motion of the bus, her eyes glued together: it was as if she had become suddenly oblivious of the noise around her, the prayers and the laughter and the singing; it was an expression neither grieving nor devout but merely silently, profoundly aware: of time past and passing and time to come, a look both mysterious and peaceful. “Gran’ma,” said Stonewall, tugging at her robe, but she said nothing and rocked tranquilly along with the motion of the bus.

Finally the bus turned off onto a dirt side road winding through the marsh. It crossed the railroad track again. They went slowly; there were watery places traversed by corduroy logs; and the bus heaved and lurched, scraping up cattails beneath the fenders. A cloud of mosquitoes swarmed through the windows. The people slapped at them, leaving streaks of blood on brown skin. “Happy am I,” someone began to sing, “in my Redeemer,” and by the time the bus reached the beach everyone had joined in, except for Ella, who kept her eyes peacefully closed, and Stonewall, who didn’t know the words. They ground to a halt, bogged down in the sand. Then everyone piled out. La Ruth came last. Here there were scores more people standing around on the beach; some sat in the loose, dry sand near the marsh, eating watermelon and fried chicken and green sour grapes as big as plums. A railroad trestle arched over the creek nearby, and long tables had been set up in its shadow: they sagged with food, and around them the juice from discarded melon rinds ran like blood in the sand.

But most of the people looked at the raft. They stood around in clusters, watching it, discussing it. It lay anchored offshore in the shallow water, bobbing gently in the waves. On it had been erected a sort of stage, surrounded on four sides by a golden damask curtain; embroidered designs—dragons and crosses and crowns, Masonic emblems, shields, bizarre and unheard-of animals, an amalgam of myth and pagan ritual and Christian symbology—all these glowed against the curtain in green and red phosphorescent fabrics, literally hurting the eyes. At the corners of the curtain were tall golden rods, and surmounting each was a transparent globe, through which an electric bulb shone, giving outline to painted red letters, which said simply: LOVE. Three or four elders, in black robes and black monks’ skull caps, tended the raft, and the water came nearly to their waists, although they had little to do except to keep the raft from rocking in the waveless shallows, and to send occasional self-important glances toward the throng on shore. Now many of the people crowded up close to the water’s edge; at least a thousand had come: they milled about in the sand, some still with chicken in their fingers, shoving each other, trying to get a better view. Ella and her family stood with Brother Andrew and Sister Adelphia at the rim of the shore. Stonewall was wading; he was eating a deviled crab. La Ruth sucked noisily on a bottle of pop.