Time Will Darken It (35 page)

“I can’t guess,” Martha said. “Who was it?”

“Thelma.”

“What did you say to her?”

“What could I say to her,” Lucy said, “except that if she came any more, I’d be forced to tell her mother about it.”

This version was heavily censored. What actually happened was that Lucy walked in, the fire was crackling in the stove, and Thelma was sitting at one of the long kindergarten tables with crayons and paper spread around her, at work on a detail of the grand fresco that would some day, like the Boro-Budur, depict every human emotion, a design made up entirely of gestures. Suddenly she looked over her shoulder, her eyes large with fright.

“Have you been coming here every morning, Thelma?”

“Yes, Miss Lucy.” Thelma looked down at the small black hands that had at last got her into serious trouble.

“You know that you shouldn’t have used the crayons and paper without asking?”

“Yes’m.”

“And that I’ll have to tell your mother on you?”

“Yes’m.”

With a long pole Lucy opened one of the windows at the top and let out some of the hot dry air in the room. When she had put the pole in the corner, she turned and said, “What will your mother do when I tell her?”

“Whip me.”

“And do you want her to do that?”

“No, Miss Lucy.”

Her eyes downcast, her hands shaking, Thelma put on her coat and started to leave. So contagious is remorse that Lucy said, “You can take this with you if you like,” and presented Thelma with her own half-finished drawing of a woman in a garden, with shears and a basket full of flowers—poppies or anemones or possibly some flower that existed only in Thelma’s mind. Shortly afterward, the children arrived, as noisy and active as birds, and took possession of the kingdom that was reserved for them.

Some dissatisfaction with her part in this scene or with the circumstances which had obliged her to act as she did kept Lucy from going into the particular details, which could have no interest, she felt, for Martha King. She turned her head so as not to miss what Austin was saying.

“… so Father called old Mr. Seacord into his office and said, ‘George, I want you to go down to the bank in Kaiserville and tell Fred Bremmer to look around and see if he can find that will anywhere. If an offer of two hundred acres of land will help him find it, you can make the offer in my name, and I don’t care how you split the land between you.’ The will was in Father’s office by nine o’clock the next morning.”

“How amazing,” Nora said, and felt the world moving off on an entirely new orbit from which it would very likely never
return to pursue its usual path. She had had a vision during the past half-hour, and the way was now open to her. She would read, she would study, she would pass the bar examination with flying colours. She saw herself defending the innocent (who would otherwise be convicted of crimes they had no knowledge of), astounding old and learned judges with her irrefutable logic, the foremost woman lawyer in the State of Illinois, a partner in the firm of King and Potter.

Lucy looked down at her gold watch and exclaimed, “Why, we must go home! We’ve stayed much later than we should have.… Nora, I hate to talk about going, when everybody is having such a good time, but we really must.”

In the front hall, while Austin was helping Nora on with her coat, she said, “It’s all so fascinating. I won’t be able to sleep for thinking of the things you’ve told me.” And Lucy said to Martha King, “It’s so nice of you to ask us. As soon as Mother is over her little upset, you must come and have dinner with us. Then Alice can be in on it, too.”

She carried her expectant look with her out into the November night.

16

The night of Martha King’s dinner party, a traveller returned—a Negro with no last name. He came on a slow freight from Indianapolis. Riding in the same boxcar with him, since noon, were an old man and a fifteen-year-old boy and neither of them ever wanted to see him again. His eyes were bloodshot, his face and hands were gritty, his hair was matted with cinders. His huge, pink-palmed hands hung down out of the sleeves of a corduroy mackinaw that was too small for him and filthy and torn. He had thrown away his only pair of socks two days before. There was a hole in the sole of his right
shoe, his belly was empty, and the police were on the lookout for him in St. Louis and Cincinnati.

The shadow that the Negro met under the arc light at every cross street did not surprise him. He had seen it in too many back alleys where it is better to have no shadow at all, and he was a man who lived by surprising other people. When he came to Rachel’s shack he stopped and looked up and down the street. Then he moved quietly up to the window and looked in. He stood there motionless for some time before he turned towards the door.

“Where’s your Ma?”

The five frightened faces might just as well have been one. There was no variation in the degree or quality of terror.

“I asked you a question.”

“She ain’t home, Andy,” Everitt said.

“That’s mighty strange. I thought she’d be here tonight,” he said, and closed the door. “She ain’t expecting me?”

There was no answer.

“I don’t call that much of a welcome,” he said. “Your Pappy come three hundred miles to see you, and they ain’t none of you get up off their ass to welcome me home.”

“We didn’t know you was coming,” Eugene said in a whisper. “You didn’t send no word.”

“So I got to send a notice to my own family before they condescends to receive me. I got to write them a letter say I be home on such and such a day, after I been away three whole years. Well, next time maybe I do that. And maybe I don’t. Who’s your Ma working for, these days? That same old white woman?”

“No,” Eugene said.

“Where she work?”

“She work for the Kings,” Everitt said.

“Huh? You don’t say. She getting up in the world. Fast. Mighty fine clothes you all got, for niggers. Looks to me like
you’re well fed too. Mighty sleek. Looks to me like I come to the right place.”

“I’ll go tell her you’re here,” Thelma said, glancing towards the door.

“Another country heard from.… Eugene, git up off of that couch and let your Pappy lie down. He’s come a long way and he’s tired. Your Ma fix me a little supper and then I’m going to sleep. I’m going to get in the bed arid sleep for a week. Get up, you hear? Before I make you. You think you’re grown, maybe, but you ain’t grown enough. I show you. I show you right now.”

What happened inside the shack was of no concern to the funeral basket, the two round stones, the coach lantern, and the coffeepot. They were merely the setting for a fancy-dress nightmare, not the actors. Evil moves about on two legs and has lines to speak, gestures that frighten because they are never completed. He can be blond, well bred, to all appearances gentle and kind. Or the eyes can be almond-shaped, the eyebrows plucked, the lids drooping. The hair can be kinky or curly or straight. Features and colouring are a matter of make-up to be left to the individual actor, who can, if he likes, with grease paint and eyebrow pencil create the face of a friend. If the actor wears a turban or a loincloth, the dramatic effect will be heightened, providing of course that the audience is not also wearing turbans or loincloths. What is important is that Evil be understood, otherwise the scene will not act. The audience will not be able to decide which character is evil and which is the innocent victim. It is quite simple, actually. The one comes to grief through no fault of his own, knows what is being done to him, and does not lift a hand to defend himself from the blow. If he defends himself, he is not innocent. The other has been offered a choice, and has chosen Evil. If the audience and the actors both remember this, they will have no trouble following or acting out the play, which should begin, in any case, quietly, in a low key,
suggesting an atmosphere of peace and security and love. The funeral basket, the two round stones, the rain-rotted carriage seat, the coach lantern, and the coffeepot are very good. And for a backdrop let there be a quiet street on a November night in a small midwestern town. A woman comes down the street towards an arc light at the foot of a hill. Under her arm she has a brown paper parcel containing scraps of leftover food. A coloured woman, with her head down, her shoulders hunched, indicating that it is cold. If there is a wind-machine in the wings, the effect will be more realistic. There should be lights in the houses. The trees have shed their leaves. The woman stops suddenly and conveys to the audience by a look, by the absence of all expression, that a chill has passed over her which has nothing to do with the wind from the wings. She looks back at the arc light. And then she begins to run.

17

There was no reason why the ringing of the doorbell the following night should have made the hairs rise on the back of Austin’s neck unless he expected, when he opened the front door, to see the disembodied spirit that lived in the cellar, in the butler’s pantry, and on the stairs.

“Oh,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine who it was. Come in, Nora.”

“I saw your light,” Nora said. “I won’t stay but a minute. I know you’re very busy.”

“I brought some work home from the office,” Austin said, as he closed the door. “How is Mrs. Beach?”

“She’s feeling better,” Nora said as she followed him into the study. “Cousin Austin, there’s something that I want very much to talk to you about.”

“Yes?”

“Something of the utmost importance. To me, I mean,” she added. She sat down in the chair Martha King used when she was doing her mending, and tucked her legs up under her skirt.

Austin’s eyebrows rose, conveying both a question and a slight apprehensiveness.

“I spent the afternoon in the public library,” she said, “reading Blackstone’s
Commentaries
.”

This piece of information was delivered in such a way as to suggest that Nora expected Austin to be amazed by it. If he was amazed, his face failed to show it. He said, “Is that so?”

“I read the first forty-two pages,” Nora said.

“What did you make of it?”

“There were lots of things I didn’t understand,” Nora said. “The language was new to me, but I found it very interesting.… Cousin Austin, do you think I could be a lawyer?”