Roadwalkers Page 6

  World of rules and chores, of time and appointments that must be kept.…Charles forgot the farm, his dead mother and his live father, his brothers, his grandfather, the fields, the stock, the cats who lived in the barn. He started school. The weather was mild and dry; the trees were puffs of yellow leaves; bright purple dahlias bloomed by front-porch steps. For a month Mattie walked with him mornings and met him afternoons at the school gate.

  Then she said, “Go by yourself today, you know the way.”

  That very first morning, he got lost. He was watching the sky—it was a shimmering gray, color of a bream’s belly—when the biggest crow he had ever seen flew overhead. He ran after it, following as it skimmed trees and roofs and chimneys until at last it rose straight up and disappeared. Charles looked around. The tree-lined street, the houses with their low picket fences and neat gardens, were completely unfamiliar. He had never been here before.

  He began walking, curious, interested, exploring. The streets were empty, house doors closed and curtains drawn. Dogs barked at him from the yards. He stuck out his tongue and made yapping sounds back at them.

  He kept on walking, book bag slung over his shoulder. The streets grew narrower; the yards were unkempt, leaves piled against the fences. There were small white signs in front windows: ROOMS. (He had always been clever at reading.)

  He passed a livery stable where the familiar thick sweet smell of horses hung in the chill air. Four men sat outside playing cards on a box top; they did not look up. He peered into the windows of small shops: Reiss the Hat Man. Peerless Bakery. (The smell made him hungry. He took a small apple from his lunch box and ate it as he walked.) Harold’s Upholstery. Milton Cabinetmaking.

  He came to a wide avenue, brick paved; streetcars ran down the middle, bells jangling. The sidewalks were made of wooden blocks; a faint odor of creosote clung to them.

  Crossing the street, he tripped over the rise of a storm drain and fell flat. For a long moment he lay on his stomach and stared at the drain—a ring of concrete with an iron grid on top. He’d never seen one before. Then he got up, brushed off his knickers carefully, and picked up his schoolbag.

  Two men were unloading crates and barrels from a dray. Charles ducked between the horses, rubbing his hand across their steamy sides as they shifted and snorted, muscles moving under his touch. He hoisted himself to the loading platform and stared through the open door into a dark jumble of crates and sacks and barrels.

  A loud voice behind him said: “I hadn’t heard anything about today being a school holiday.”

  A hand grabbed his shoulder. He tried to shout, but only a small hissing sound came from his mouth.

  “I have caught a truant,” the voice said. “Now let me have a look at you.”

  The hand dragged him across a board sidewalk, past an expanse of window, through a door. “I am fixing to call the police to put you in jail for playing hookey.”

  “Mr. Carswell,” a woman’s voice said, “you are frightening that child.”

  The hand left his shoulder. Charles looked around. He stood at the end of a long room with display cases and counters on both sides and barrels in a line across the back: pickles and coffee and the faint dusty smell of flour.

  “Boy!” The woman was old; wrinkles ran along her cheeks and down her neck, disappearing into white lace ruffles. She was half leaning, half sitting on a stool at the counter nearest the window. “You go to school?”

  He nodded.

  “They did not teach you to take off your cap inside?”

  His voice came back. “They did, but I forgot.”

  “Where do you go to school?”

  “Grammar school.” The words were coming easier now.

  “I can see that. You look to be about six.”

  “I’m eight, going on nine.”

  “You are small. Do you have a name?”

  “Charles Tucker.”

  She turned away to study the row of cans on the shelves behind the counter. “Are you named for King Charles?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Good, you don’t look very much like a king. Mr. Carswell, the last butter you sent me was very poor. I wish you would taste what you sell. The animals must have eaten wild onions or some such thing.”

  Charles said, “My sister makes butter and it’s very good.”

  She turned, light catching the frizzled wisps of gray hair under her large hat. “Are you trying to sell me something?”

  His mouth opened and closed silently.

  “You are. And right in the middle of Mr. Carswell’s grocery store.”

  Charles looked toward the man, saw only an expanse of striped apron, black trousers, and black shoes.

  The woman was laughing, deep coughing chuckles. “Mr. Carswell, you have a competitor. An audacious young man. King Charles, what is your sister’s name?”

  For a moment he could not remember. Then with a snap and a click the confusion in his mind cleared and he said distinctly, “Mattie Varnado.”

  “Do you know her, Mr. Carswell?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, “she doesn’t come in here.”

  “It would be too expensive for her, I think,” Charles said, turning to look at the stacked shelves and the counters filled with tall glass jars.

  The woman coughed out her laugh again. “King Charles, you are absolutely right. It is too expensive in here for anyone. Homer, call for the car.”

  A small elderly black man in a tight black suit shuffled out the door. At the edge of the sidewalk he lifted one arm in a kind of Indian salute. Close by, an engine started, sputtered, died, sputtered again.

  “King Charles, I will take you to school. Have you ever ridden in a motorcar?”

  He could only shake his head. He had not even ridden on the new electric streetcars, though his sister had promised to take him one day.

  The old woman stood up, slowly, painfully, using a cane, a man’s cane with a curved silver handle. “As usual there is trouble starting that machine. It sounds like it has hiccoughs. The buggy would have been quieter and more reliable.”

  “Ma’am,” Charles said as politely as he knew, “would you like to try some of my sister’s butter? I could tell her to save some the next time she churns.”

  She nodded, abruptly, as if the movement hurt her.

  The car stopped at the curb. Homer held open the door; two clerks carried packages; Mr. Carswell bowed gravely.

  She paused, cane firmly planted. “My bones tell me we will have rain. Mr. Carswell, a bag of peppermint Zanzibars for King Charles. Run back and get them, boy, quick. You’ve missed enough school.”

  Charles scurried back, feet thudding on the boards, snatched up the small white bag. Mr. Carswell said softly but clearly, to no one in particular, “Wool hat bastard. Worse than niggers, that lot. White niggers.”

  Charles raced back to the wonderful car. The door stood open; her hand beckoned him inside; the door slammed.

  The motion made him faintly sick, and he didn’t remember the roads having so many holes and rough spots. He hung his head out the window, air rippling over his face like water, and he thought that this must be like galloping along on a fast horse, a big strong horse whose hooves tore up the miles like dust, whose shoes left a shower of sparks like stars behind.

  They stopped in front of his school, and a surge of regret like pain made him sigh. Homer opened the door for him. Carrying his lunch box and his books, he got out slowly, still feeling wind singing in his ears.

  “King Charles!”

  He stopped, dropped his lunch box, picked it up. “Yes ma’am.”

  “How am I to buy your sister’s good butter if I don’t know where she lives.”

  Another panic-filled blank, then the relief of memory. He said firmly, “You take Old County Road. All the way to the river. There’s a road going east, a wide good road. My sister lives in the last house on the river side of the road. The front gate is painted pink.”

  Her wrinkled mouth smil
ed faintly. “Homer should be able to find it. Now, another thing. You have forgotten to ask me who I am.”

  He held his breath, dismayed. He hadn’t forgotten; he hadn’t dared.

  Again the wrinkled smile. “I am Mrs. Harrison. My husband is Judge Terrence Harrison. I am also known as the crazy woman from New Orleans.” A single chuckle. “Homer, close your mouth, you look like a fish. You know perfectly well that’s what people call me behind my back.”

  “That grocery man,” Charles said, “he called me a nigger.”

  “Did he?” Her pale blue eyes opened wide. “Well, people will call names. You are not a nigger, Homer is. The Lord put many colors in the world the better to confuse us.…Here, don’t forget the Zanzibars. I liked them when I was a child. Of course they don’t come from Zanzibar. I believe they are made in St. Louis.”

  The door closed; the car moved off, springs creaking over the ruts. The neighborhood dogs barked long after it was gone.

  He pushed open the door, and the warm school air, smelling of peanuts and dirt and urine and children’s sweat, flowed out to meet him. He went to the office. The principal was there alone, a short heavy woman wearing a thick red wig over her own thinning hair. She dipped a pen in the inkwell. “Name. And excuse.”

  His throat ached with remembered excitement. “I’ve been riding with Mrs. Judge Harrison. In her car. I was helping her find some butter.”

  The hand holding the pen stopped in midair. “Yes, I did hear that noisy car. Now, your name. And it is not polite to say Mrs. Judge Harrison. It is simply Mrs. Harrison.”

  Flooded with new confidence, he nodded. He would have to remember things like that.

  He was in the hall again, staring into classrooms, all alike. Desks in rows, dark blotches of ink on their surface and on the floor beneath. Crossed flags beneath pictures of George Washington. Tall windows with tattered shades carefully and precisely aligned. All the familiar things. But different now.

  He thought fuzzily: I have travelled a long way and seen something different, something important. I have been called a nigger when I am white. I have flown like the wind down long streets, I have ridden with a lady in a rustling silk dress.

  For a few days after that, all things were very special to him.

  He was careful to set his feet just so against the ground. Sometimes he walked holding the back of his thighs so he could feel the muscles that moved him across earth’s surface. At curbs and ditches he took long soaring leaps, floating through space. He stared at a single dry leaf on a winter-bared tree and willed it to fall. He waited with a stalking cat in the shelter of a privet hedge. He lifted his lips in imitation of a dog’s growl. All around him the air was un-breathed, unused, new. He was the first and only person in the world. In his blood, oxygen sparkled like shiny pennies as his heart tumbled them through his veins.

  The shell of excitement faded so gently he was not exactly sure when it was gone, or what it had been.

  Later that month—a cloudy afternoon with the feel of winter wrapped over the town like a fog—he came home from school, took off his muddy shoes, as he always did, and opened the kitchen door. The gathering dusk wedged into the room with him, chill hard at his heels.

  “Close the door quick,” his sister said. As she always did.

  He put his books and lunch box on the cupboard in the corner, as he always did.

  She sat at the table, watching him and smiling broadly. “I been hearing about you.”

  I’ve never seen her smile like that, he thought. And I’ve never seen her sit and do nothing either.

  “I hear tell you’ve been playing the salesman.”

  “Been doing what?”

  “You don’t remember? You told Mrs. Harrison about my butter.”

  In a flash it all was back, the sense of importance and excitement. The wind and the movement and the freedom. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, though he never called his sister ma’am.

  “Oh, Charles, you should have seen them. A little black monkey, whose name was Homer, and a tall thin woman, a Redbone if ever I saw one, Sophie the cook she said she was.” Mattie leaned her elbows on the table. “They drove up in the prettiest little cart and a real nice-looking roan pony.”

  He nodded.

  “I guess they were supposed to see if the house was clean, and that sort of thing, so I showed them the barn and the cooler.”

  “She’s got a car, too,” Charles said wonderingly.

  “She’s got lots of things,” Mattie said. “She’s rich. Everybody in town knows they got railroad money.”

  He blinked.

  “I read about them in the paper.”

  His sense of wonder grew and grew, until it seemed to him that he was again rushing through space, winds blowing past his ears, stars singing.

  “They bought it all”—Mattie rocked back and forth in her chair—“except for the little I kept for Mr. Varnado’s supper. And you know what? I was just turning out a batch of that soft cheese Ma used to make, so the cook Sophie tasted it and asked if she couldn’t take a sample back to the lady of the house. That’s what she called her: the lady of the house. Are you listening?”

  Charles nodded.

  “I sent along the last of my white bread, too. We’ll have to eat biscuits for our supper.” She giggled, a high-pitched little-girl sound. “What do you think of that, little brother?”

  “I think it is very nice,” Charles said carefully, solemnly. “The extra money will be good to have.”

  His sister kissed him.

  AFTER that the sky turned a pale winter blue and the air grew colder. The kitchen garden was empty, the last apples picked from the neat row of trees in the backyard. “Now we go looking in the other places,” Mattie said.

  They crossed the bridge at Silver Creek and walked out into the old farmstead country. Always rushed by the early dark, the three of them prowled along roads, across fields, searching. In weed-choked orchards near the burned-out chimneys of old houses they picked hundreds of small candy-striped red-and-white apples. They filled croaker sacks with hard green preserving pears and baskets with ripe yellow quinces from gnarled trees whose branches sagged with fruit. Mattie knew all the places where the best hickory and pecan trees grew. Her favorite was the Confederate graveyard; the ground was thick with nuts. “No one ever comes here,” she said, “except me, and I come every year.”

  At first Charles was afraid and walked sidling across the grass.

  “Don’t be a baby.” Mattie’s windburned face flushed redder with anger. “These people didn’t know you when they were alive and they don’t care about you now.”

  As they left, heavy sacks slung over their shoulders, she noticed a single large crab-apple tree by the gate. “Look there.” And Charles scrambled along the sloping twisted limbs, dropping the small apples into her waiting hands.

  “We can’t carry any more,” Mattie said, regret in her voice. “And it’s getting late.” A cold mist had gathered, waist high on the lower slopes. “Let’s us walk fast and get warm.”

  But they couldn’t. The baskets and sacks were heavy, their arms ached, and their hands were stiff with cold. Nancy whimpered, clutching Mattie’s coat.

  “I got to carry her.” Mattie sighed with annoyance. “Charles, you take the sacks. One over each shoulder and you can hook a basket on each arm.”

  Silently Charles obeyed. He fixed his eyes on the hem of her skirt, on her black button shoes, and he followed. His teeth were chattering by the time they unlocked their kitchen door.

  Nancy sat on the floor and cried softly with relief.

  Mattie lit the small lamp that stood just inside the entry. “Shake up the fire, Charles.” She pulled off Nancy’s coat and hat and scarf and hung them, with her own, on the pegs by the door. “We stayed too long, for sure, but look at what we got.” Mattie pointed chapped fingers to the baskets and sacks. “Charles, you carry everything to the pantry. Be sure you close the door tight. I’ll put supper on to warm.”
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br />   He remembered that evening. Of the thousands of evenings during the years he lived in that house, he remembered that one best. He remembered the pattern of the oilcloth on the table—red and white with black diamonds. In the center was the covered glass sugar bowl on its tall pedestal and next to it a Ball jar of forks and spoons, bunched like flowers. He remembered the blue-and-white-striped apron Mattie wore; it had a large frayed hole in the center. The big black range sent floods of heat into the room. The steamy air moved across his face, soothing the winterburned skin. Mr. Varnado was away on the Chicago run, so there were only the three of them. They ate chicken stew, thick with yellow grease—Mattie was reducing the size of her flock for the winter—and biscuits left from breakfast.

  When they finished, when night made mirrors of the windows, his sister pulled the curtains closed, cleared away the dishes, and lit the big reading lamp. A whiff of kerosene drifted across the room; the mantle clouded, then cleared. “The wick wants trimming,” his sister said, “but it will do for now.” She set the lamp in the center of the table, got the pen and the bottle of ink from the cupboard. “Charles, do two pages before bed.” She set great store on penmanship and had him practice every night, in addition to his regular homework. Running Commercial Hand, the cover or his copybook said.

  Usually he was eager to work; he liked the feel of the pen in his fingers. But this one evening he sat still, eyes staring into the dull polish of the lamp’s brass base, feeling a smug proud satisfaction. He’d carried the baskets and the sacks, heavy as they were. He could look into the pantry and say: I gathered that, that is mine. He slumped in his chair until his chin rested on the oilcloth. He breathed slowly, tasting the chicken on his breath. Humming a little, Mattie put the white enamel dishpan in the sink, poured in a kettle of boiling water, pumped in some cold, and began to wash up. Head down on the table, Nancy slept, snoring lightly.

  He was conscious of the house around him, of the sturdy walls and the roof. He could feel the sun pull away to the other half of the globe, he could feel the steady shrinking of the days, the steadily lengthening nights.

  And he thought about things still outside. All the dead: those people in the Confederate cemetery; his mother in her grave in Clark County. (For an instant he saw her—sitting on the porch, shelling field peas; her hands didn’t stop their work as she smiled at him, a small smile that lifted one corner of her mouth.) Of course she wasn’t really in the ground, he knew that, she was in heaven, she had gone to glory with the saints. The dead were not troubled by weather or anything else; they were saved or damned and that was all there was to it.