The Third Life of Grange Copeland (20 page)

In the prison with Brownfield were murderers, pimps, car thieves, drunkards and innocents, and their sentences bore no set relation to their crimes. A young boy of seventeen was in for stealing hubcaps and his sentence was five years. A hatchet murderer whom Brownfield came to know quite well, who had dispatched not only his wife but his wife’s mother and aunt, was paroled after three years. Before he was paroled he was a trustee. Before that he had been able to go out of the prison to attend church every Sunday and to spend a few minutes with his woman whenever the desire arose. He had played poker on weekends with the jailers. There was no order about this, which was why it appealed to Brownfield.

Brownfield brooded, while he worked—setting out dogwoods, magnolias and mimosas on spacious well-tended lawns—on his father’s audacity at taking his daughter. He brooded on Grange’s serenity and on his prosperity. Although he did not love Grange, he was very often depressed by the thought that his father had never really loved him.

Brownfield learned to read and write rather well while in prison. One day he was looking through the account, on the colored page, of Mem’s murder, and he saw his own name. Without knowing what was happening he read the whole article and went on to read other articles. The hatchet murderer, who became his friend, told him that the same thing had happened to him. On the day he was brought to trial, he said, his woman had thrust some newspapers into his hands. Look, she had said, there’s your picture! She wanted to cheer him up because she was afraid he was going to be electrocuted. The jailers had taken the papers away before he had a chance to examine them, but later, in jail, his woman brought him some more, to celebrate, she had said, his light sentence. They were both very pleased that there was a picture of him in the paper! He had sat a long time marveling at his big ugly picture in the paper, he said, and then, interested in what the paper might say about him, he began to read it. He could not recall where he learned the ABC’s; when he was a child he had owned a tiny children’s prayer book, from which his mother had read to him over and over. That had been his entire education, as far as he knew.

The boy who stole the hubcaps had been in high school and read well. Brownfield and the hatchet murderer took lessons from him and called him professor. One day, as Brownfield was writing his name, age and prison number on the margins of a newspaper it struck him suddenly that Mem had actually succeeded in teaching him to read and write and that somehow he had not only forgotten those days with her but had also forgotten what she’d taught him. He wondered about this, staring the while at his hands, then he burst into terrible sobs that tore his chest and brought him to the floor.

But his tears did not soften him, did not make him analyze his life or his crime. His crying was just a part of the life that produced his crime. It only made him feel lonely. Introspection came hard to Brownfield and was therefore given up before he became interested in it. The least deep thinking and he was sure he would be lost. As it was, while in prison, he wanted Josie, he wanted his father, he even wanted his mother.

He wanted Ruth. He had a great fear of being alone. He thought he could understand better than any of the other prisoners why God had created the universe when He found himself alone, and fixed it so man had two warm arms and a tongue.

“My daughter,” he wrote, in crude spellbound letters. And, “I wish I had got Grange too.” He did not hide these words, written on candy wrappers, newspapers and bits of paper from the trash. He left them lying around, clear marks of his existence and his plan.

Brownfield and the hatchet murderer talked sometimes about their motives in life. They watched television every Saturday evening and motives was a new word picked up from the television series, “Dragnet.” The motive that got him into prison, said Brownfield, was a keen desire to see if he had any control over himself. No matter which way he wanted to go, he said, some unseen force pushed him in the opposite direction.

“I never did want to be no sharecropper, never did want to work for nobody else, never did want to have white folks where they could poke themselves right into my life and me not have nothing to do with it.”

“Yeah, Lawd, and I know what you mean,” said the hatchet murderer, who had been a minister before he married one of his converts and started a family. He had discovered too late that he couldn’t feed his wife and her kin on what he made off the gospel. Marriage had stripped his nice black suit from him and in its place he had had to make do with overalls caked with sweat and dust he got in fields that would never be his. He knew what his friend was talking about because he had himself struggled against the unseen force. But he had decided the unseen force was God and so killed his wife and her kin. It was his way of leaving God’s company.

“I felt just like these words here in the newspaper must feel, all printed up. The line already decided. No moving to the left or the right, like a mule wearing blinders. These words just run one word right behind the other to the end of the page.” Brownfield looked at his friend with some small exhilaration in his eyes as he continued, stabbing at the paper with his finger. “Just think how this word here’d feel if it could move right out of this line and set itself down over here!” The two men pondered the power of the mobile, self-determined word. The hatchet murderer nodded.

“I often felt more like a shoe,” he said; “a pair of farted-over brogans, just for feets to stand on. I used to put my shoes up on a shelf in the wardrobe to show how I felt. Wouldn’t let my wife or her crabby snot-picking ma move ’em down on the floor.”

“Yeah,” said Brownfield, “you’d think more peoples would think about how they ain’t got no more say about what goes on with ’em than a pair of shoes or a little black piece of writing in a newspaper that can’t move no matter what it stands for. How come we the only ones that knowed we was men?”

Leaning heavily on his pencil Brownfield wrote m-e-n, then waited glumly for the word to rise and beat its chest.

“Well, that was us,” he said. He looked at the hatchet murderer and smiled.

I
T WAS NOT
difficult for Brownfield to take advantage of Josie’s pain. He had been surprised the first time she visited him at the jail, but had soon become able to read her like a book. Josie had given up taking her burdens to the Lord; she no longer sought to confess her sins in church; she no longer said prayers or told her troubles to fortunetellers. But all of this she could do at the jail.

She would come on Sunday afternoons when the prisoners were allowed out under the trees. She would sit on one side of a small table, Brownfield on the other. Over the months and years she poured out the anguish of her heart for Brownfield to hear. And he listened sympathetically, craftily, with a priest’s show of concern.

He listened to her complaints of his fathers indifference, Grange’s total infatuation with the idea of preserving innocence, his blind acceptance of Ruth as something of a miracle, something of immense value to him, to his pride, to his will to live, to his soul.

“He don’t even know I’m
alive,”
said Josie, wringing her hands. “All day long the two of ’em is together. I just set round, praying for a
word
from him… .”

Brownfield listened with a pitying expression on his face. He took one of her hands in his.

“When I get out of here I’ll take her off your hands,” he promised. But Josie sat up, startled.

“If you took that gal away from him it’d be the same as if you took the air. He wouldn’t live out the week! I tell you he
love
her!”

“Josie,” he said, “you recognize that you
a fool
for giving a shit whether he live or die?”

“Don’t you say that!” she said, drawing her hand from his.

“All right, okay,” he said, “don’t git your back up.” But he was thinking of his father’s attachment to Ruth and of how perfect a revenge it would be if he could break it.

Josie was looking at him cautiously. “If you going to talk about your daddy in any mean way, I ain’t coming here no more. He
love
me, your daddy do, I
know
he do. This thing with Ruth is something he can’t help. But one day he coming to his senses and when he do I’m going to be right there waiting. It ain’t like it was
impossible
for him to love us both!”

“’Spose he don’t never come to his senses?” asked Brownfield.
“Then
where will you be?”

Josie looked bleakly out across the yard. “He got to come to me,” she said. “He
got
to come.”

The months went by. One day Brownfield asked about her love life. Josie, sixtyish, had always felt there would be no end to it. She began to cry.

“Which mean he don’t come
near
you no more, even for that?”

Josie nodded.

“You mean to tell me,” said Brownfield, “that after all you have did for him he don’t show
no
kind of ’preshation?”

He began to smile. A flush came to Josie’s cheeks. Before she rushed out of the room she slapped him.

After that it was easy.

“After all I done for him!” Josie began to fume when she talked with him. “He don’t pay me the mind you’d pay a
dog.
”

“And you sold everything you owned and worked so
hard
for to buy him his precious
farm
! Uh, uh, uh,” said Brownfield. “Some peoples are just not grateful. Now, if
I
had had a woman like that to do all you done for him, I wouldn’t be here today.” He was elated when Josie, forgetful of everything but her anger, agreed with him. Soon he had brought her back to his original idea.

“When I gets out I can take Ruth off your hands,” he said. “An’ then, just think, you and Grange’ll be alone just like you was before she come. Things’ll be
just
the same.” Josie nodded eagerly. “I won’t even let them
near
one ’nother.”

“But how can you ’complish that?” she asked. “Grange’d shoot to kill if you laid a hand on Ruth.”

“Grange may think he above all the rest of the white folks,” said Brownfield, “but he ain’t above the white folks’ law. Maybe the law will be on our side for a change. Anyhow, you let
me
worry ’bout that.”

“So glad to!” said Josie, smiling happily. Planning as she’d done for years just how to win for good the man she loved.

“G
OOD FENCES DON’T
make neighbors,” said Grange. “Which is why we’s putting this here one up.”

Ruth stood beside him holding the hammer. She was barefoot and wearing a pink dress with ruffles at the hem. As Grange stretched the top strand of barbed wire from one post to the next and secured it with a nail, she tiptoed behind him with round watchful eyes befuddled by his activity. She had never seen anyone put up a fence before.

“You finds your stakes—they marks your propity—and going by the deed, you puts your fence square on the line. Then you tightens all your wires,” he said, tightening the top wire, “and you be sure all your bobs is good and sharp.”

She pricked one finger on a small barb of wire, then gazed intently while the blood welled up. Quickly she stuck the drop of blood against her new dress and her eyes sobered to an expression of remembrance, horror and pain. They appeared to darken, much as the sky, which is open enough until a single cloud puts out the sun.

Grange stopped his work abruptly, not noticing the girl, one might have thought, and placed his own callused finger against a barb, pressing the wire until his finger bled.

“I never did git round to tellin’ you ’bout how the Injuns got to be blood brothers with us black peoples,” he said, reaching casually for her finger (at which she stared in panic), and which she gave him after first looking to see if she had wiped all the blood away. It was no longer there on her finger tip, but when her grandfather squeezed her finger the dot of blood came back. He drew her down beside him on the grass and stuck their two bleeding fingers together.

“But, Grange,” she said scornfully for so young a girl, “they didn’t stick
fingers
together. It was
arms,
right here”—she pointed—“they stuck this part of the
arm.
” She placed her tenderer forearm next to his darker, more sinewy one.

“Of course,” said Grange,
“that
was the way they become blood brothers with the white folks. But see, they didn’t
mean
that. Next thing them white brothers knowed they was scalped—which give ’em some of they own medicine. Now, take with us, they was more authentic. That’s on account of us all gitting put in such a pass by the white folks. But with one another and with black folks they only press fingers, not arms, and not no lying wrists never!”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Or are you lying to me?”

“Don’t say words like ‘lie’ to me in company,” Grange said pleasantly. “Folks might think you ain’t being raised good.”

“Well, nobody’s here but me and you. Besides, I don’t care what folks think. Anyhow, I don’t embarrass you nearly as much ‘in company’ as you embarrass me with your drinking and gambling away all our money all the time.”

“Urn, yes,” said Grange. “Like I was saying. The Injuns is ever to be your friend. We has just performed the ceremony… .”

“But we aren’t Injuns, we …”

“No, indeed. No matter what anybody tells you ‘bout the Injuns—I mean I don’t care if it is a Injun hisself—don’t you believe nothing but that they’s friendly Injuns. Even if they don’t act friendly. Them that don’t act friendly just don’t know no better. You can sort of keep your gun trained on them while you explain all this I’m telling you to ‘em.”

“I don’t want to get scalped.” She giggled.

“Just remember neither does they. Besides, this here is serious.” The old man frowned. “The black man must be friends to every other of the downtrod, especially if he’s a man of color.”

“There’s those poor folks down the road and you putting up a fence to keep them away. Ain’t they downtrod? They eat dirt,” she said, grimacing. “They ought to be. I don’t see what their white has to do with it.”