The Third Life of Grange Copeland (26 page)

“What do you want?” she asked, feeling fear and anger and hope all at once. She could not understand the hope. Surely there had never been any reason for it that her father had provided. There is something about my father that makes me pity him today, she thought, and knew a momentary wariness and more surprise. Brownfield wet his lips with his tongue. So wet with whiskey he was usually, so dry he seemed today!

“You—” he began, and faltered, “you looks just like your mama.”

“Yes?” Ruth said sharply, “but what do you
want
?”

“I wants to see you, if you don’t mind,” he said humbly, and slowly, as if afraid of her.

In the silence, punctuated only by the birds and the distant ringing of the school bell, Brownfield kept his daughter before him and looked and looked at her. It was disconcerting and almost eerie. She felt he had never looked at her before.

“I have to go now,” she said faintly, after a few minutes of his greedy staring, for if she had been an oasis in the desert he could not have gazed more longingly at her. “I’m already late for school,” she murmured further, feeling hot and cold. But he said, “Wait!” and though he did not touch her or stand in her way she could not move. His close scrutiny of her continued. On the ground near his feet was a gaily wrapped package that looked as if it might be candy. She did not allow herself more than a glance at it for she wanted no part of him, but he noticed her glance and said, she thought, slyly, “A present for you. They tells me you pretty big on reading books.”

Slowly Ruth recovered the indignation that came to her whenever she thought of him. After all these years of nothing he had the nerve to think he could get her to like him by offering her one lousy book!

“What is it?” she asked coolly, though a great scathing heat had started behind her eyes.

“Why, er, well, I don’t recall the name, but Josie thought you might like it.”

“Well, you just tell Josie I
don’t
like it and I wouldn’t like it as long as either of you had anything to do with it!” As she spoke she rudely kicked a film of dust over it. After she did it she became afraid but Brownfield barely noticed it. He continued to stare and almost to marvel at the size of her, the sound of her, the whole reality of her.

“Oh, shit,” she muttered under her breath. What is he looking at? Is he trying to decide whether I’m worth the fuss he wants to make to get me? she wondered. And then she thought, Good God, don’t let him touch me with those hands that still and always will look like weapons! Her strong indignation began to lose its heat, and she started again to tremble and to press her forehead and her cheeks. She felt all red and sweaty, as if the dust of the ground were sticking to her.

“You don’t even remember your mama, do you? Brownfield asked after a while, accusingly, his eyes full of a sudden remembrance and a fiery reclaimed jealousy.

“She … she
died
before I was very old,” said Ruth. “But—” and she looked him in the eye—“I remember her. You don’t forget your mama, or anybody that you’ve loved.”

“But you forgets your daddy?” he asked in a gruff, argumentative tone. But then, “You don’t act like you remember me. A child what’s got respect for her daddy’d run up and give him a hug!” His voice, a moment ago so charged with scorn, was empty of it now. It was old and lonely and pleading. For a moment Ruth could see how much he resembled Grange. She thought of what Grange had told her about people being capable of changing, although lately he’d changed his views about that. But she did not want to hear about the change Brownfield was undergoing, for she could never believe it.

“You never cared for us,” said Ruth. “You never cared for mama or Daphne or Ornette, or for me.” I don’t want any of your damn changes now, she thought, and hated and liked herself for this lack of charity. She glimpsed for the first time what Grange had known, the nature of unforgiveness and the finality of a misdeed done. She saw herself as one both with her father and with Grange, with Josie thrown in to boot.

Her father turned away from her for some private reflections of his own. His hands plucked nervously at a chipped button on his big shirt.

“Daphne’s in—I wanted to get them back, and be their daddy—but Daphne’s in a crazy house up North. And Ornette”—his mouth, usually so vile and slack with whiskey or foul words, was tight and grieving—“Ornette’s a—
a lady of pleasure
!” He remembered that phrase from the letter from the old guy, the preacher, Mem’s father. Brownfield had written for word of Daphne and Ornette, planning somewhere in the back of his head to entice them home again. How Josie had cackled with delight to see his sickness at what had become of his daughters! The news of their downfall, especially of Ornette’s, had made her jolly throughout one entire day! Though later he had surprised her weeping into her soapsuds, squeezing his overalls and singing about feeling like a motherless child. It had unnerved him to see her so maudlin, but when he had moved to touch her, thinking they might comfort each other, she had turned away, shutting him out, forcing him back into his role of instrument and tormentor.

Brownfield’s large shoulders sagged and his hands, hands Ruth had felt in fury against her own young ears, fumbled loosely with some bits of straw tugged up from the banks of the road. His mumbled, embarrassed, prudish “lady of pleasure,” almost made her laugh out loud, but she was too near to bursting into tears and perhaps beating her head against the closest tree.

“You were the one who
said
Ornette would
be
a woman of pleasure, a tramp! That’s all you used to call her. Just ‘tramp.’ ‘Come here, tramp,’ you used to say.
I remember that almost as well as I remember my mama.”

The past rose up between them like a movie on a screen. The last dilapidated, freezing house which he had forced on them, the sickness of Daphne, her strange fits of which Brownfield had taken no notice, the waywardness of Ornette, whose every act was done to make someone notice her. The murder of Mem.

“You think I don’t remember,” said Ruth. “The trouble is I can’t forget!”

“You don’t remember nothing,” he said. “You been
fed
on all the hatred you have for me since the time you was this high!” He turned one heavy palm down toward the ground. “You don’t know what it
like
for a man to live down here. You don’t know what I been through!”

A tremor of pity shot through her at his anguish, for it was real, although it changed nothing.

“I couldn’t ever even
express
my
love
!” he said.

Considering the past, the word was false, a bribe, meaningless. Ruth tossed her head to dismiss it. Although it made an impression on her. She had not known he even
thought
of affection, except to make fun of it.

“Don’t you
shake
your head; I loves you and you mine!”

“Yours!”

“Mine,” he said, holding her with possessive eyes.

“What do you want with me
now
?” she asked. “I don’t know you and you don’t know me!”

“An’ I know who to thank for that! Grange won’t never let you forgive me. Long as you’re with
him.
That sly old cooter! If he so damn good to you, why wasn’t he a proper daddy to
me
?”

For all she knew it was an honest enough question. “I told you, you don’t know me. If you did you’d know I’m not just a pitcher to be filled by someone else. I have a mind, I have a memory,” she said.

“I loved my childrens,” said Brownfield, sweating now. “I loved your mama.”

These tortured words, and they did sound as if they escaped from a close dungeon in his soul, hung on the air as a kind of passionate gibberish. Ruth shook her head once more to clear it; truly she could not even understand him when he spoke of loving. It was odd, and she said nothing.

“I mean to have what’s mine,” her father said, much in the way she was used to hearing him speak. He had the curt swagger and roughness of a robber.

“I’m not yours,” Ruth said humbly, for she felt, momentarily, a great dam about to fly open inside her, and when and if it broke she wanted it to be soft and gentle and not hurtful to him, although whatever she said, since she could never forgive him, or even agree with him, would have to hurt some. But suddenly he reached out for the first time to touch her. And his touch was not, as some of his words had been, either pathetic or kind. He grasped the flesh of her upper arm between thumb and forefinger and began to twist it. Her defenses went up again, higher than before, and bitter tears came to her eyes. He don’t know his own strength, she remembered Mem had said time after time, rubbing her own bruises.

“You belongs to me, just like my chickens or my hogs,” he said. “Tell that to your precious grandpa. Tell him he can’t keep you; and before I let him I’ll see you both in hell!”

“You said you loved me,” she said, crying. “If you love me,
leave me alone
!”

“No,” he said, pushing her away. “I can’t do that. I’m a
man.
And a
man’s
got to have something of his own!”

“A
man
takes care of his own when he’s got it!”

“Aw, Grange been messing with your mind. I would have took care of my own had the white folks let me!”

“
I don’t like you, I don’t like you, I don’t like you!”
she cried, stamping her foot. Her arm felt as if a plug had been pressed out of it.

“You going to like me better when I gets you in
my
house!” he said.

“You need shooting,” she said, and trembled. Making herself move very slowly she walked away from him. She held her books tightly and wondered what new thing under the sun she might learn in school that day.

When Brownfield returned to the small linoleum-and-tin-patched house he shared with Josie, he found Josie up to her elbows in soapsuds, muttering against him. Her existence with him since she left Grange, always so fraught with trials, had now reached its nadir with Brownfield’s crazy desire to capture one of his family to live with him. He did not want them out of love, Josie knew; he wanted them (or at least
one
of them) because having his family with him was a man’s prerogative. Josie called distrustfully on God to deliver her from evil, as she heard Brownfield walking up behind her. Two neighboring women stood by sympathetically. They took up their patent-leather pocketbooks as Brownfield came in. They never stayed in his house after he got there. Brownfield heard the thin pursy-mouthed one say to Josie that her husband didn’t like her to be around so notorious a man, and laughed to think she imagined he could be attracted to her, a woman so thin and juiceless she made a papery rattle when she walked. As he approached her she lowered her grayish head in a vain nod of virginal piety. Her fatter, bolder friend, whom Brownfield had occasionally and casually screwed, and who was never seen without her fan, vigorously fanned herself past him as if his presence in the room had upped the temperature a hundred degrees.

“Bye,
Baby! Bye, Honey! Bye,
Sweet
ess!” Brownfield said merrily as they left, switching their cheaply dressed rumps down the road, hoping he’d be interested. He knew women! A swine of a man was more interesting to them and far more intriguing than a gentleman and a prince. Pigs, he thought, liars and hypocrites!

“Say, Josie, you ever sleep with Judge Harry?”

“Naw,” said Josie, with the unquestioning honesty of a woman whose self-respect has ceased to be a matter of moment to anyone, including herself.

“I thought you might have, when you was young. When me and Judge Harry was boys—actually when I were at the lounge with you and Lorene—I used to get him a little bit of pussy now and then. Guess I never ask you. ’Course I don’t mean if he’d slept with you lately. Ain’t nobody that hard up no more. When I was up before him and he give me ten years I spent four of the seven I did as his gardener. I didn’t know nothing ’bout no damn garden, and I told him so, but he just sort of winked at me and said, ‘Boy, you always did know more about gardening than anybody I ever met!’ The old son of a gun, he hadn’t changed a bit! And you would have thought he would, him being the judge and all. But he used to say all the time when folks came to the house and ask him why he have a prisoner hanging round, ‘Brownfield and me grew up together, we understands one ’nother.’ He, he, he.”

Josie said nothing. Her face was puffy and sad. Her dress was ripped along the seams under the arms and her yellow flesh poked out wet and slack. She was very fat and tired.

“You know, I
bet
Judge Harry’d make Grange give me back my child!” said Brownfield, still chuckling.

Josie laid down her washing and looked at him. “I really would do anything to keep you from doing this dirt to my husband,” she said grimly. Her smallish eyes were red-rimmed and bleak, inexpressibly hopeless and dull. All the impudence of self-determination was gone. She washed clothes for white and black to buy their bread.

“Would you kill me?” asked Brownfield recklessly, as his old lumpy woman began to cry.

Brownfield took out his pocket knife and picked up a branch and began to cut small twigs from it. He began to chuckle.

“Josie, Josie,” he said, “what the matter is with you is that you so easy to take in, you so easy to feel sorry for folks; no matter if they deserves it or no. Just like, supposing you
could
sneak back into Grange’s house and git back on the good side of him. And suppose he started to plot somethin’ against me.” Brownfield’s chuckle was becoming a laugh. “Do you know what you’d do?” he asked. “You’d feel sorry for
me,
an’ you’d probably hightail it over here to
warn
me that somethin’ was afoot! You never growed up, Josie, you never learned to pick one side an’ stay on it. You’re a fat, stupid whore, Josie, and never learned to think with your head instead of your tail.”

“What you going to do?” she asked. “You don’t want Ruth back! I know you don’t!”

Brownfield looked at her with a subtle half-smile. “I don’t know quite yet
what
I’ll do. Maybe I’ll just keep the waters stirred. You told me once that the ol’ man had a bad heart … well, maybe we ought to sorta
worry
him now ’n then, a little bit. I bet we could even bring the old sinner to God,” said Brownfield, and doubled over laughing.