White People (20 page)

“Oh,” she says.

Nodding, she feels limber now, sure as any girl of twenty. Admiring her unspeckled hands, she helps him rise. Wings serve as handles. Kneeling on damp ground, she watches him go staggering toward her barbecue pit. Awkward for an athlete, really awkward for an angel, the poor thing climbs up there, wobbly. Standing, he is handsome, but as a vase is handsome. When he turns this way, she sees
his eyes. They’re silver, each reflects her: a speck, pink, on green green grass.

She now fears he plans to take her up, as thanks. She presses both palms flat to dirt, says, “The house is finally paid off.—Not just yet,” and smiles.

Suddenly he’s infinitely infinitely more so. Silvery. Raw. Gleaming like a sunny monument, a clock. Each wing puffs, independent. Feathers sort and shuffle like three hundred packs of playing cards. Out flings either arm; knees dip low. Then up and off he shoves, one solemn grunt. Machete swipes cross her backyard, breezes cool her upturned face. Six feet overhead, he falters, whips in makeshift circles, manages to hold aloft, then go shrub-high, gutter-high. He avoids a messy tangle of phone lines now rocking from the wind of him. “Go, go,” the widow, grinning, points the way. “Do. Yeah, good.” He signals back at her, open-mouthed and left down here. First a glinting man-shaped kite, next an oblong of aluminum in sun. Now a new moon shrunk to decent star, one fleck, fleck’s memory: usual Tuesday sky.

She kneels, panting, happier and frisky. She is hungry but must first rush over and tell Lydia next door. Then she pictures Lydia’s worry lines bunching. Lydia will maybe phone the missing sons: “Come right home. Your Mom’s inventing … company.”

Maybe other angels have dropped into other Elm Street backyards? Behind fences, did neighbors help earlier hurt ones? Folks keep so much of the best stuff quiet, don’t they.

Palms on knees, she stands, wirier. This retired saleswoman was the formal-gowns adviser to ten mayors’ wives. She spent sixty years of nine-to-five on her feet. Scuffing indoors, now staring down at terry slippers, she decides, “Got to wash these next week.” Can a person who’s just sighted her first angel already be mulling about laundry? Yes. The world is like that.

From her sink, she sees her own blue willow mug out there in the grass. It rests in muddy ruts where the falling body struck so hard. A neighbor’s collie keeps barking. (It saw!) Okay. This happened. “So,” she says.

And plunges hands into dishwater, still warm. Heat usually helps
her achy joints feel agile. But fingers don’t even hurt now. Her bad hip doesn’t pinch one bit. And yet, sad, they all will. By suppertime, they will again remind her what usual suffering means. To her nimble underwater hands, the widow, staring straight ahead, announces, “I helped. He flew off stronger. I really egged him on. Like
anybody
would’ve, really. Still, it was me. I’m not just somebody in a house. I’m not just somebody alone in a house. I’m not just somebody else alone in a house.”

Feeling more herself, she finishes the breakfast dishes. In time for lunch. This old woman should be famous for all she has been through—today’s angel, her years in sales, the sons and friends—she should be famous for her life. She knows things, she has seen so much. She’s not famous.

Still, the lady keeps gazing past her kitchen café curtains, she keeps studying her own small tidy yard. An anchor fence, the picnic table, a barbecue pit, new Bermuda grass. Hands braced on her sink’s cool edge, she tips nearer a bright window.

She seems to be expecting something, expecting something decent. Her kitchen clock is ticking. That dog still barks to calm itself. And she keeps staring out: nowhere, everywhere. Spots on her hands are darkening again. And yet, she whispers, “I’m right here, ready. Ready for more.”

Can you guess why this old woman’s chin is lifted? Why does she breathe as if to show exactly how it’s done? Why should both her shoulders, usually quite bent, brace so square just now?

S
HE
is guarding the world.

Only, nobody knows.

1985

Language, like love, starts local
.

My grandfather called me deep into the big house. We hid. While powdered aunts and freckled cousins yammered on his front porch, one old farmer scolded me. I was scared but liked it.

“Willy? Just heard you lipping-off to your mother—close to tantrum, you were. Keep doing that, you got no future. I won’t have a grandson of mine carrying on like Lancaster’s mule.”

“Like
who?”

This antique stared at me. (I might’ve asked if Jesus was the Father, Son, or Holy Ghost—if South Carolina didn’t outrank our native North Carolina.)

“Like Lancaster’s mule.”
First Grand doubted my hearing. When I still shrugged, he closed both eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and, sighing hard, motioned me up into his lap. The sigh smelled of medicine, baking soda, and leaf mold, of bread and years.

“Since wireless came in, seems like nothing on this earth is
grounded
. My own flesh and blood especially. You sure don’t know much. Where you
been
, boy?”

“I guess I’m young yet.” This got me one respectful frown.

“Seems Lancaster dealt livestock. Boo-coo hogs and horses—that
being French for ‘heaps of.’ (With you, son, I’m taking nothing for granted.) A jumbo size of a man, this Lancaster, all jaw was he, hair parted in the middle, the very middle. Animals were gods to us in the eighteen and nineties—and Buck, he
sold
them. Now, Willy, this I’m trying and tell you, it came previous to autocars, tractors, exhaust, all such mess. Maybe you think you’re lucky being born so recent? Ha. Ha
ha
. More the fool you. You believe sputniks are worth writing home about?
Ha
ha. People wanted to get around the country in my time, people either bought something four-legged or else used good old shoe leather. Ever heard of it, you-in-all-the-car-pools? A person needed their field plowed, person either borrowed a hand hoe or got a good mule, one. As for Lancaster, his morals might’ve been the short end of nothing, but the man knew every confidence trick going, was just his nature to.

“Buck’s been dead since ’31. They all are. Most everybody’s gone except your grandmother, wonderful woman, testy as she sometimes acts toward me. Last person alive knows to call me Little Bobby Grafton. Nowdays in this town, I’m held to be Mr. Grafton or Old-timer or Pops Grafton. But a body needs a few souls who remember he was Little Bobby Grafton. ‘Ears,’ the boy that lived in trouble. But wait, I’m wandering. One evening, closing time at Buck’s stockyard, here comes a young hayseed. One born every minute—plenty to keep Buck busy and his daughters between satin sheets. ‘You’re seeking, don’t tell me’—Lancaster touches one temple—’an exceptional … mule.’ The mouth-breathing farmer blinks, asks how Buck knew. ‘Simple, son,’ Buck says, ‘little something we call genius. Ever hear of it? Follow me.’ Which ends this part.”

My teller paused, his shoulders jiggling, readied. He talked the way binge drinkers, finally on vacation, drink. Bobby was considered tight-lipped. He saved his lurid best for me. I sat staring at the man.

Us grandkids called him Grand for short. He was semifamous, the county white man with the record-largest ears. We are talking giant here. In those times in North Carolina, ears grew bigger. Especially farmers’. I studied cartilage sturdy as roofing shingles: Hinge-long, rust-colored—any hound could envy his. And I’d inherited the things. My mother wept about this. Literally wept. You can see how—
all these years later—I’ve resisted having mine surgically subdued, a tribute.

“Buck did not know fear. Buck loved money the most. Buck was not exactly ugly—you can’t call a bag of cement ugly—just there. Flashy dresser he was, though his linen pant cuffs tended to stay the color that a-man-who-owns-a-stockyard-and-wades-everywhere’s pant cuffs will.”

“Brown?”

“Now, as a mule salesman, Lancaster was known to fudge a bit. A bit! Did I say a bit?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t correct me here, Will. Because I won’t sanction insolence. Not even from my best-looking grandchild. Boo-coo questions cannot be answered. Mine especially. Lancaster didn’t fudge just some, oh no. He was a horse trader. You expected those to try and bilk you. Means ‘cheat,’ Willy. You went ready. I’ve always had a soft spot for the fellows can’t resist but to drive a deal. I’m not so hot at it myself, pushover. Ask your grandmother, Ruth reminds me often enough. But Lancaster? Give such a gent fifteen hundred pounds of surplus steel wool, he’ll knit you a hotel stove. Then he’ll try and
sell
it to you. And, son, know what?”

“You’ll buy it?” Grand squinted down at me, impressed with my quickness, bored by my character. “Willy? What’d I just tell you?
Just?”

“Quiet?”

“Quiet. No wonder you know jack-nothing—way you keep busting in on a person. Look, do you want this or not? Ask me for it.”

“I do.”

“Do what?”

“Want. I’ll keep still. I promise. It’s just … I …”

“You’re goddamn right you will. Should’ve seen
me
back then. One thing sure, could’ve beat
you
up, both hands tied behind me. Scrappy. We had to be.”

“But, Grand, know what? I bet I’m probably smarter.” Inner corners of forty wrinkles tightened, that ashamed: a boy had admitted that another boy might trounce him.

“Smarter’n me? I didn’t hear that. Buck Lancaster owned a fine three-story house, had four overly average-looking daughters. Sundays you’d ride by, Buck’s girls’d be lined up along his porch, one softer than her baby sister. Did I say, ‘You’d
ride
by …’?”

(This time, a quick study, I knew to say nothing.)

“More like walk by. Our farm was five miles out, and I oftimes hiked to town wearing my one Sunday suit. Faked errands all over a neighborhood where not a soul knew me, was studying Lancaster’s beauty girls in pastel dresses. ‘Ears’ was all eyes then, boy. To and fro went Little Bobby Grafton, the boy that lived in trouble, hoping to get into a better class of Bobby trouble than Bobby’s usual. You think those girls couldn’t guess who I was staring at! Ha. I might not’ve been as quick as you in a
book
way—with Poppa snatching me out of Lower Normal every time something got ripe enough to pick or cut—but I could’ve told you to Shut Up and you would’ve.

“Lancaster’s girls had a parrot on the porch with them. A parrot in this town then, it really meant something. Showed sparrows weren’t the half of it. And not one Lancaster girl ever married is how hard a bargain Buck drove. No governor was fat, rosy, or rich enough to get in good with
Buck’s
girls.

“So anyhow, the mule of it—along around closing time, near sunset on a slow week night, barn swallows probably went skimming over tin roofs (though I couldn’t swear to it), and into Buck’s dragged that same slow-moving young farmer from out Pitt County way. (Your grandmother was a Pitt and she will tell you in a minute if you don’t stop her. Pretty much a snob, but she sometimes seems to fancy me—so I can’t find total fault with her.) Young fellow craved a serious working mule. Buck happened to have one. Office was already padlocked, but Buck could smell a pocketful of bills, damp from this plowboy’s clutching them clear to town. So Buck swings into his friendliest style, hands our dirt farmer one fine cigar—the first that boy’d ever had, I bet you. Just to get a fellow’s confidence, don’t you know. Leads our boy around back where not one street lamp burns. And here in a dark corral stands the matted-eyed knock-kneed mule, all by its lonesome and acting real homesick for
something
.

“Lancaster might have said, ‘Stranger, you are doubtless wondering—clever operator such as yourself—why I chose to separate this creature from its own born kind.’ Buck talked like that, only way worse. Trust me to talk like they talked. To try. Now we’re getting near the real part, part where I come in. Now we’re near knee-deep in it.” And gazing before him, Grand literally rubbed his leather palms together.

The rest of our family still jabbered on the bright porch. Jaw jaw jaw, gas gas gas. A waste. Out front, my grandmother’s clear tone straddled three conversations, governing them. Family talk sounded like one church organ’s many pipes and tubes—flute-to chimney-sized—all alive with a single feeding breath.

I worried: my weight might be hurting Grand’s arthritis. But in Falls, N.C., then—if you were ten years old, grandfathers invited you up onto their laps, even if it really pained them. They practically had to, some grandfatherly union regulation. Grand’s easy chair was a huge orange leatherette slab. He’d bought it at some cut-rate store; its ugliness daily grieved my grandmother. The matching footstool steadily leaked sawdust onto her inherited Aubusson carpet. “It molts,” she said.

I watched narrow lips move, silent, as Grand carpentered our next part. He studied air directly before his face. He was one of those people that, like a dog or mule, lets you stare. They hardly notice till, with you an inch away, your saying “Hey” can make them jump like something shot. This man owned four stores, ten rental homes, and the most broken-down dirt farm you ever saw. I admired how much property he’d piled up from total scratch. Little Bobby Grafton’s folks had mostly worked as sharecroppers, their lives spent improving others’ fields. As a day-labor kid, Grand got sun-cooked across his neck and over both hands’ leathery backs
(roofs
of his hands, I considered them). His skin seemed lidded like the old-timey thick-topped butterscotch pudding my grandmother served. She called this favorite dessert “commonplace but comforting.” His was the face of a small-time landowner, accustomed to squinting with slit-eyed pride at mortgaged horizons. During summer, when he gimped in from a burning day outdoors, his stately wife met him on
the porch. She held a jar of Nivea, as blue as the future. “Sun seems to consider these poor ears perfect targets.” Ruth stationed herself behind his chair; she removed her ruby ring, slathered up either hand and, focusing on the mammoth flanges, started daubing.