Maya Angelou (13 page)

CHAPTER 22

The
wind blew over the roof and ruffled the shingles. It whistled sharp under the closed door. The chimney made fearful sounds of protest as it was invaded by the urgent gusts.

A mile away ole Kansas City Kate (the train much admired but too important to stop in Stamps) crashed through the middle of town, blew its
wooo-wee
warnings, and continued to an unknown glamorous destination without looking back.

There was going to be a storm and it was a perfect night for rereading
Jane Eyre.
Bailey had finished his chores and was already behind the stove with Mark Twain. It was my turn to close the Store, and my book, half read, lay on the candy counter. Since the weather was going to be bad I was sure Uncle Willie would agree, in fact, encourage me to close early (save electricity) and join the family in Momma's bedroom, which functioned as our sitting room. Few people would be out in weather that threatened a tornado (for though the wind blew, the sky was as clear and still as a summer morning). Momma agreed that I might as well close, and I went out on the porch, closed the shutters, slipped the wooden bar over the door and turned off the light.

Pots rattled in the kitchen where Momma was frying corn cakes to go with vegetable soup for supper, and the homey sounds and scents cushioned me as I read of Jane Eyre in the cold English mansion of a colder English gentleman. Uncle Willie was engrossed in the
Almanac,
his nightly reading, and my brother was far away on a raft on the Mississippi.

I was the first to hear the rattle on the back door. A rattle and knock, a knock and rattle. But suspecting that it might have been the mad wife in the tower, I didn't credit it. Then Uncle Willie heard it and summoned Bailey back from Huck Finn to unlatch the bolt.

Through the open door the moonshine fell into the room in a cold radiance to rival our meager lamplight. We all waited—I with a dread expectancy—for no human being was there. The wind alone came in, struggling with the weak flame in the coal-oil lamp. Pushing and bunting about the family warmth of our pot-bellied stove. Uncle Willie thought it must have been the storm and told Bailey to close the door. But just before he secured the raw wooden slab a voice drifted through the crack; it wheezed, "Sister Henderson? Brother Willie?"

Bailey nearly closed the door again, but Uncle Willie asked, "Who is it?" and Mr. George Taylor's pinched brown face swam out of the gray and into view. He assured himself that we hadn't gone to bed, and was welcomed in. When Momma saw him she invited him to stay for supper and told me to stick some sweet potatoes in the ashes to stretch the evening meal. Poor Brother Taylor had been taking meals all over town, ever since he buried his wife in the summer. Maybe due to the fact that I was in my romanticist period, or because children have a built-in survival apparatus, I feared he was interested in marrying Momma and moving in with us.

Uncle Willie cradled
the Almanac
in his divided lap. "You welcome here anytime, Brother Taylor, anytime, but this is a bad night. It say right here"—with his crippled hand he rapped the
Almanac
—"that November twelfth, a storm going to be moving over Stamps out of the east. A rough night." Mr. Taylor remained exactly in the same position he had taken when he arrived, like a person too cold to readjust his body even to get closer to the fire. His neck was bent and the red light played over the polished skin of his hairless head. But his eyes bound me with a unique attraction. They sat deep in his little face and completely dominated the other features with a roundness which seemed to be outlined in dark pencil, giving him an owlish appearance. And when he sensed my regarding him so steadily his head hardly moved but his eyes swirled and landed on me. If his look had contained contempt or patronage, or any of the vulgar emotions revealed by adults in confrontation with children, I would have easily gone back to my book, but his eyes gave off a watery nothing—-a nothingness which was completely unbearable. I saw a glassiness, observed before only in new marbles or a bottle top embedded in a block of ice. His glance moved so swiftly from me it was nearly possible to imagine that I had in fact imagined the interchange.

"But, as I say, you welcome. We can always make a place under this roof." Uncle Willie didn't seem to notice that Mr. Taylor was oblivious to everything he said. Momma brought the soup into the room, took the kettle off the heater and placed the steaming pot on the fire. Uncle Willie continued, "Momma, I told Brother Taylor he is welcome here anytime." Momma said, "That's right, Brother Taylor. You not supposed to sit around that lonely house feeling sorry for yourself. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away."

I'm not sure whether it was Momma's presence or the bubbling soup on the stove which influenced him, but Mr. Taylor appeared to have livened up considerably. He shook his shoulders as if shaking off a tiresome touch, and attempted a smile that failed. "Sister Henderson, I sure appreciate ... I mean, I don't know what I'd do if it wasn't for everybody ... I mean, you don't know what it's worth to me to be able to... Well, I mean I'm thankful." At each pause, he pecked his head over his chest like a turtle coming out of its shell, but his eyes didn't move.

Momma, always self-conscious at public displays of emotions not traceable to a religious source, told me to come with her and we'd bring the bread and bowls. She carried the food and I trailed after her, bringing the kerosene lamp. The new light set the room in an eerie, harsh perspective. Bailey still sat, doubled over his book, a Black hunchbacked gnome. A finger forerunning his eyes along the page. Uncle Willie and Mr. Taylor were frozen like people in a book on the history of the American Negro.

"Now, come on, Brother Taylor." Momma was pressing a bowl of soup on him. "You may not be hungry, but take this for nourishment." Her voice had the tender concern of a healthy person speaking to an invalid, and her plain statement rang thrillingly true: "I'm thankful." Bailey came out of his absorption and went to wash his hands.

"Willie, say the blessing." Momma set Bailey's bowl down and bowed her head. During grace, Bailey stood in the doorway, a figure of obedience, but I knew his mind was on Tom Sawyer and Jim as mine would have been on Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, but for the glittering eyes of wizened old Mr. Taylor.

Our guest dutifully took a few spoonfuls of soup and bit a semicircle in the bread, then put his bowl on the floor. Something in the fire held his attention as we ate noisily.

Noticing his withdrawal, Momma said, "It don't do for you to take on so, I know you all was together a long time—"

Uncle Willie said, "Forty years."

"—but it's been around six months since she's gone to her rest ... and you got to keep faith. He never gives us more than we can bear." The statement heartened Mr. Taylor. He picked up his bowl again and raked his spoon through the thick soup.

Momma saw that she had made some contact, so she went on, "You had a whole lot of good years. Got to be grateful for them. Only thing is, it's a pity you all didn't have some children."

If my head had been down I would have missed Mr. Taylor's metamorphosis. It was not a change that came by steps but rather, it seemed to me, of a sudden. His bowl was on the floor with a thud, and his body leaned toward Momma from the hips. However, his face was the most striking feature of all. The brown expanse seemed to darken with life, as if an inner agitation played under his thin skin. The mouth, opened to show the long teeth, was a dark room furnished with a few white chairs.

"Children." He gum-balled the word around in his empty mouth. "Yes, sir, children." Bailey (and I), used to be addressed so, looked at him expectantly.

"That's what she want." His eyes were vital, and straining to jump from the imprisoning sockets. "That's what she said. Children."

The air was weighted and thick. A bigger house had been set on our roof and was imperceptibly pushing us into the ground.

Momma asked, in her nice-folks voice, "What who said, Brother Taylor?" She knew the answer. We all knew the answer.

"Florida." His little wrinkled hands were making fists, then straightening, then making fists again. "She said it just last night."

Bailey and I looked at each other and I hunched my chair closer to him. "Said 'I want some children.' " When he pitched his already high voice to what he considered a feminine level, or at any rate to his wife's, Miz Florida's, level, it streaked across the room, zigzagging like lightning.

Uncle Willie had stopped eating and was regarding him with something like pity. "Maybe you was dreaming, Brother Taylor. Could have been a dream."

Momma came in placatingly. "That's right. You know, the children was reading me something th'other day. Say folks dream about whatever was on their mind when they went to sleep."

Mr. Taylor jerked himself up. "It wasn't not no dream. I was as wide awake as I am this very minute." He was angry and the tension increased his little mask of strength.

"I'll tell you what happened."

Oh, Lord, a ghost story. I hated and dreaded the long winter nights when late customers came to the Store to sit around the heater roasting peanuts and trying to best each other in telling lurid tales of ghosts and hants, banshees and juju, voodoo and other anti-life stories. But a real one, that happened to a real person, and last night. It was going to be intolerable. I got up and walked to the window.

*
*
*

Mrs
. Florida Taylor's funeral in June came on the heels of our final exams. Bailey and Louise and I had done very well and were pleased with ourselves and each other. The summer stretched golden in front of us with promises of picnics and fish frys, blackberry hunts and croquet games till dark. It would have taken a personal loss to penetrate my sense of well-being. I had met and loved the Bronte sisters, and had replaced Kipling's "If with "Invictus." My friendship with Louise was solidified over jacks, hopscotch and confessions, deep and dark, exchanged often after many a "Cross your heart you won't tell?" I never talked about St. Louis to her, and had generally come to believe that the nightmare with its attendant guilt and fear hadn't really happened to me. It happened to a nasty little girl, years and years before, who had no chain on me at all.

At first the news that Mrs. Taylor was dead did not strike me as a particularly newsy bit of information. As children do, I thought that since she was very old she had only one thing to do, and that was to die. She was a pleasant enough woman, with her steps made mincing by age and her little hands like gentle claws that liked to touch young skin. Each time she came to the Store, I was forced to go up to her, while she raked her yellow nails down my cheeks. "You sure got a pretty complexion." It was a rare compliment in a world of very few such words of praise, so it balanced being touched by the dry fingers.

"You going to the funeral, Sister." Momma wasn't asking a question.

Momma said, "You going 'cause Sister Taylor thought so much of you she left you her yellow brooch." (She wouldn't say "gold," because it wasn't.) "She told Brother Taylor, 'I want Sis Henderson's grandbaby to have my gold brooch.' So you'll have to go."

I had followed a few coffins up the hill from the church to the cemetery, but because Momma said I was tender-hearted I had never been forced to sit through a funeral service. At eleven years old, death is more unreal than frightening. It seemed a waste of a good afternoon to sit in church for a silly old brooch, which was not only not gold but was too old for me to wear. But if Momma said I had to go it was certain that I would be there.

The mourners on the front benches sat in a blue-serge, black-crepe-dress gloom. A funeral hymn made its way around the church tediously but successfully. It eased into the heart of every gay thought, into the care of each happy memory. Shattering the light and hopeful: "On the other side of Jordan, there is a peace for the weary, there is a peace for me." The inevitable destination of all living things seemed but a short step away. I had never considered before that dying, death, dead, passed away, were words and phrases that might be even faintly connected with me.

But on that onerous day, oppressed beyond relief, my own mortality was borne in upon me on sluggish tides of doom.

No sooner had the mournful song run its course than the minister took to the altar and delivered a sermon that in my state gave little comfort. Its subject was, "Thou art my good and faithful servant with whom I am well pleased." His voice enweaved itself through the somber vapors left by the dirge. In a monotonous tone he warned the listeners that "this day might be your last," and the best insurance against dying a sinner was to "make yourself right with God" so that on the fateful day He would say, "Thou art my good and faithful servant with whom I am well pleased."

After he had put the fear of the cold grave under our skins, he began to speak of Mrs. Taylor, "A godly woman, who gave to the poor, visited the sick, tithed to the church and in general lived a life of goodliness." At this point he began to talk directly to the coffin, which I had noticed upon my arrival and had studiously avoided thereafter.

"I hungered and you gave me to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me to drink. I was sick and you visited me. In prison, and you left me not. Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of one of these, you have done it unto Me." He bounded off the dais and approached the velvet gray box. With an imperious gesture, he snatched the gray cloth off the open flap and gazed downward into the mystery.