Chaneysville Incident Read online

  We went silently through deserted streets, my hand on her arm, squeezing, holding her so tightly it would have hurt her had it not been for the thickness of her coat. She stumbled a little from time to time, but I kept her moving. We crossed more streetcar tracks, breasted the wind that whistled up along the wall of the old cemetery on Woodland Avenue. I turned her into my dark street, pulling her along, up the steps of my building. She waited silently, shivering a little, as I fumbled with the keys, then followed me inside and climbed the stairs unaided. Our footfalls sounded in the dark stairwell, sounded but did not echo; the soft, rotting wood of the stairs absorbed the vibrations and hushed them. At the end of the stairway, five flights up, I fumbled with the keys again, and opened my door. I stepped inside and went to the center of my room, my hand reaching up to find the chain. My hand brushed the naked light bulb; I remember thinking how cold it was.

  By the time the light was on she was inside, leaning against the wall beside the door, her arms again crossed before her. I went and closed the door, locked the locks. She didn’t move. She had stopped crying.

  I went to the sink, put water in the kettle, set it on the hot plate. I got down cups and put instant coffee into one, bourbon and sugar into the other. I heard her moving behind me; slow footsteps as she walked across the floor to the middle and stood beneath the light, scrapings as she turned, looking around at the books. I stood there, waiting for the water to boil. It took forever.

  I heard a small clink of metal on glass and the light went out. It was not dark; the moonlight came in through the dormer. I heard her moving again, towards the window. The kettle whistled and I poured the water by the glow of the burner. When I turned she was standing looking out at the cemetery. The waving branches of the tree outside the window cast weird shadows across her face. I held the cup out to her and she took it without looking at me. I sipped the toddy, warming myself with it. She held her cup in both hands, then raised it and drank the coffee down in slow, steady gulps, not lowering the cup until she was done.

  I started to speak to her, but I didn’t know what to say. She looked at me then, for a moment, then turned away and went to sit on the cot. I heard the metal frame creak, then the rasp of leather as she slipped out of her coat. I stood for a moment sipping the toddy, then turned to look at her. She was sitting on the edge of the cot, her hands beside her. Her face was pale and white in the moonlight. I swallowed the last of the toddy.

  “You want more coffee?” I said.

  She shook her head. I went to the hot plate and made another toddy. I made it strong and I made it large. I carried it back and sat beside her, drinking.

  “I shouldn’t have done that to you,” she said, “and I shouldn’t be doing it. I should take you or let you go, but I shouldn’t threaten you with it.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s all right. Because that’s what you expected. You didn’t trust me, and I just finished proving you were right not to.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What I want to know,” she said, “is why you don’t trust me.”

  “I trust you,” I said. “I trust you as much as I’ve ever trusted anybody.”

  “As much,” she repeated. “Damn it, John, what are you afraid of?”

  I tried to think of something to tell her. There wasn’t anything she would understand.

  “Oh,” she said suddenly. “Am I dumb,” she said. “Stupid. I was thinking all the time there was something wrong with you. But it’s me, isn’t it? I’ve got this horrible skin disease. I’m white.” She shook her head and gave a short laugh. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s it exactly. Only you don’t understand what it means.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Try,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  She moved then, slipping closer to me, reaching out and taking the cup from my hand. She unbuttoned my coat, lowered her head and rested it against my chest. And then I felt her hand moving at the buckle of my belt. I found I could move then, and I tried to stop her, but she slapped my hand away impatiently, then slipped her hand inside my waistband and let it rest there, cupping my belly. Her fingers moved gently, in slow circles.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  And then I knew what I would have to tell her. “I want to tell you,” I said, “what I did when my brother died.” I stopped, took a deep breath. “I got the news on the telephone. My mother called. She said, ‘Your brother got himself killed over there. The funeral’s tomorrow.’ Then she hung up.”

  Her hand stopped moving. “Just like that?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just like that.”

  “But…isn’t that a little quick? I mean, they’d have to fly the body…”

  “Oh, she’d known about it for days. She didn’t call until the body was back, until all the arrangements were made.”

  Her hand moved again, softly, encouragingly.

  “I went in and took a shower.”

  She didn’t say anything, but her hand kept moving, slowly, gently. But I felt no warmer.

  “I had a date, you see. A special date, with a very special girl. It had taken me months to work up to asking her out, and I was scared to death of her, and I was scared of going out with her.

  “So I took a shower and got dressed and went and picked her up. We went downtown for dinner. A place on Sansom Street, called 1907. That was the address. We sat in the first booth on the left. We had drinks. She drank Manhattans. I drank Scotch then, Ambassador Deluxe. She had two, I had four. We talked about politics. She was still upset because McCarthy had folded. We had dinner. Broiled lobster, baked potato, salad. She had bleu cheese, I had oil and vinegar. Then we had dessert: cheesecake and coffee. We talked about her family. Then we had more drinks. She had a Rusty Nail. I had another Scotch. We talked about relationships. I paid the bill; it was fifty dollars, I left a ten-dollar tip. After that I had fifty cents, which was exactly what we needed for the bus.

  “We went back to her place. She made coffee, put on a record, Simon and Garfunkel. ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters.’ We talked some more, and then we started to make out. It got heavy. Then she said she really liked me and she wanted to see me again, but it was too soon for her. So I went home and took a shower and then hitched home to my brother’s funeral.

  “It was a great funeral. The mayor was there. The town council. The lieutenant governor. All the boys who had played on the football team with him were there, arguing about who were going to be pallbearers. The TV people came from everywhere. Newspapers. They had speeches and then they made more speeches. They had ten different eulogies. And then they left. We got to bury him in private. You see”—I looked at her—“in my home town, white people and black people aren’t buried together. It isn’t anything official, like down South. It’s just the way things are done. I expect that if somebody black wanted to be put away in a white cemetery, nobody would say a thing. But the practice is we have our place and they have their places. And our place is a little shabby. No gardener, no graveled walks. And none of those big people wanted to go over to Mount Ross and get their shoes muddy. So we got to bury him in private. After that I borrowed some money and caught a bus back. I went to see the girl. And I raped her.” I lay there then, in the darkness, listening to her breathing. It was ragged. “You’re probably wondering why I wanted to tell you all that,” I said finally.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It was because of the girl,” I said. “Something about her. She was white.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “It was wrong, what I did,” I said. “I don’t know how badly I hurt her; I don’t mean physically. I still feel guilty about it. But deep down inside I understand what happened; I looked at her and saw white….”

  “I think that’s sick,” she said.

  “I don’t care what you think,�
� I said.

  “And you think it makes sense to blame white people, just because they’re white….”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do. Things have happened and it’s somebody’s fault, and it sure as hell wasn’t ours.” I had waited for her to move, to get up and leave, or at least to say something, but she had not. She had just stayed like that, holding me.

  Night was falling with the snow, and a cold, wet wind came whipping out of the south. I could not see the snow very well in the growing darkness, but I could hear it crunch beneath my feet when I moved. In an hour, perhaps two, the path up the slope would be a sheet of cold, gritty snow. The tree branches beside it would be coated with slick. I might be able to make the climb. He would not. And I would not be able to make it with him. There was a way to keep the path open; each winter—until this one—he had strung ropes along the path at the spots where the incline became too precipitous for easy passage. I could go up and do that now, and perhaps then we could make it out if we had to; if I could find the eyebolts in the darkness, if the snow did not get too deep, if the air did not get so cold that it would sear his wounded lungs beyond bearing. Or I could prepare for a siege: chop more wood, fill the buckets, wet down the dirt floor around the stove, close the damper, and pray that the night would not get as cold as I feared, that the fire would not burn through the aged grate, and most fervently of all, that he would not get worse. Logic gave a clear answer—go up at once—and a sensible alternative—rope the path and try again to convince him. But logic had nothing to do with it. And so I went back inside and got the buckets and filled them; got the sledge and the wedges and split logs and carried the wood inside and stacked it carefully along the wall, hoping that would keep the wind out; opened the last jars of venison and built another stew and set it to simmer. When I was finished I put the kettle on and mixed two more toddies. He watched me, his eyes steady and unblinking. He said nothing; the only sounds he made came from the wheezing in his lungs. I took him his toddy. “You rope the path?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  He nodded, accepted the cup, settled back. “You don’t understand, do you?”

  “I understand,” I said.

  197903042100 (Sunday)

  LATER THAT NIGHT, WHEN the fire was roaring in the chimney and the cold came slicing through the cabin’s walls, Old Jack taught me another lesson: if you would bend a man, abandon all the usual means. Do not bother with psychology or diplomacy or even war; if you would bend a man, not just influence him or sway him or even convince him but bend him, do it with ritual. For even if he claims to have no belief, no religion, no adherence to any formal or informal order of service, there is, somewhere within him, a hidden agenda. And he will respond to it without hesitation, without thought, almost without knowledge, certainly without will. All you need to do is to guess the beginning of it. With me, Old Jack did not even have to guess—he knew. He had created it.

  And so, when the meal was finished and the dishes washed, when the fire was stoked and the mugs of warmed and sweetened whiskey were in our hands, he did not hesitate; he did not even ask. He just said: “You want a story.”

  No, I did not want a story. I wanted to sit and drink hot whiskey and pray that we would make it through the night, and later fall into a drugged and dreamless sleep. And so I did not give him the response he wanted; I did not give him a response at all.

  But he spoke as though I had: “Then fetch the candle.”

  I didn’t move. I just sat there with the cup held tight against my belly, trying to keep the cold at bay. For a while we struggled, and then I knew that I would win, even if he was a weak old man. I must have relaxed a little then, and he must have sensed it. Because he said:

  “Bring the matches too. Can’t have light without strikin’ fire.” And I found myself moving, getting up and going to the shelf, taking down the candle and the matches, the motions so familiar they were almost painful. But when I came back to the table it changed. Because he was lying on his cot, not sitting in his chair. And so it was not precisely the same as it had been, not precisely as he would have had it. Now it was I who struck the match and lit the wick and set the candle in a pool of wax, a prisoner of its own substance, I who blew the lamp out. And so it might have been all right. But then he said:

  “Put the matches back.” He did not need to say the rest of it.

  “Time was,” he said, “when folks figured I was one a the orneriest bastards alive. An’ they figgered Josh was another. Tell the truth, I suspect as how we was; we was pert near as ornery as Mose.

  “Now, could be you don’t know what I’m sayin’ when I say we was ornery. You probly think bein’ ornery is jest like bein’ mean, or stubborn, an’ that’s on account a you found out about it from lookin’ in some damn book. Well, bein’ ornery is bein’ stubborn, an’ it is bein’ mean, but that ain’t the best part of it. What ornery comes down to is how you act ’roun’ white folks. Now, I recall old Charlie DeCharmes, don’t know if you recollect him, but if Charlie wasn’t mean an’ stubborn, I don’t know who was. Nasty too. You coulda said to him, Charlie, we got us a barrel a whiskey an’ a pot a venison stew, come on an’ help us do it in, an’ you had a good chance a comin’ away without him. But if you was to say to him, Charlie, we’re goin’ down here to the field an’ beat the livin’ daylights outa each other with two-by-fours jest for the pure pain of it, why, you’d be lucky if he didn’t get there ahead a you an’ start in an’ beat hell outa his ownself. He was married to a girl from down McConnellsburg way, an’ folks down there couldn’t understand why didn’t nobody up here try to stop him from beatin’ on her all the time, but the way we figured it, she musta knowed what she was gettin’ into when she married him, on accounta the night she met him he was poundin’ the hell outa three fellas down to Hawley’s. She knowed Charlie was mean; everybody knowed Charlie was mean. But every mornin’ ’cept Sunday he went to work down to Heckerman’s, an’ he always got there on time. When he went to town he always put on a necktie, an’ he always called the white folks mister an’ ma’am. He was meanern a snake an’ nastiern garlicky milk, but he weren’t ornery.

  “Me and Josh, we didn’t beat on nobody much; there was more times than not that we’d go outa our way to steer clear of a fight, lessen there was whiskey or money in question. But we was ornery. Me, why, I’d been knowed to make fun a white folks right to their faces, which was ornery. I’d been knowed to come right out an’ tell ’em to buy their butt a ticket on the express train to hell, which was surely ornery. An’ Josh? He went so far beyond that… Well, lemme tell you, what he done ain’t the kinda thing folks is gonna quit talkin’ about, an’ it ain’t the kinda thing folks is gonna still be talkin’ about, neither; it’s the kinda thing they won’t ever talk about at all.

  “It first come out one Saturday night, when we was all settin’ around to Hawley’s, which me an’ Josh an’ Mose done jest for the company, seein’ as what we was drinkin’ was Mose’s whiskey marked up to make a profit for Hawley. Only Josh wasn’t there that night, which wasn’t hardly usual; only time Josh missed a Saturday night at Hawley’s was when we was all three off somewheres. So as you might expect, somebody sooner or later wanted to know where he was, an’ somebody else said they seen him ridin’ down the Springs Road, an’ swore he was wearin’ a suit. Now, everybody knowed better. I questioned the fella perty close—I forget now who it was ’xactly, but I made him get mighty particular ’bout what he seen, an’ what he only thought he seen, an’ what he only wisht he seen. An’ what it come down to was, he seen somebody looked like Josh ridin’ hard down the Springs Road. An’ soon as I got him to stop bein’ so sure, I was perty certain it wasn’t Josh, an’ I said so. Mose, he shook his head. ‘Jack,’ he says, ‘you shoulda been a white man. Fella come along an’ says he seen somethin’ an’ you hound him till he admits it might not a been that he saw, only somethin’ that looks jest like it, an’ from there you say he couldn’ta seen what he said he seen.’

>   “ ‘Well, damn,’ I says. ‘There’s a big diff—’ But ’fore I could say much, in through the door comes Josh hisself, and he was dressed in overhauls jest like always. ‘There,’ I says, ‘ya see?’ ‘See what?’ Mose says. He looks at Josh an’ says to him, ‘What the hell was you doin’ on the Springs Road in a suit?’ ‘Who, me?’ Josh says. ‘I wasn’t on no Springs Road, an’ I don’t have no suit.’ Mose looks at him real close, an’ he wrinkles his nose up a couple a times. ‘You lyin’,’ he says. ‘I ain’t,’ says Josh. ‘You is,’ says Mose. ‘You callin’ me a liar?’ Josh says. Well, the whole place got real quiet; folks was figurin’ out how to get a bet down an’ get out the way at the same time. Woulda been a fair fight—Mose had the muscle, but Josh was fastern a blue racer—but it never come off, on accounta Mose says, ‘No, I ain’t callin’ you a liar. Way I figure it,’ he says, ‘you jest forgot all ’bout buyin’ a suit an’ borrowin’ a horse an’ ridin’ down to wherever. Ain’t your fault; fellas forgets all the time, ’specially when they been sniffin’ bay rum. You know what I mean?’ Well, I started sniffin’ too, like I shoulda been all along, an’ I was startin’ to see what Mose meant when I seen that Josh knowed what he meant. You could tell sure, ’cause Josh, bein’ so damn white an’ all, Josh could blush. An’ he was blushin’ then. Looked like a cross ’tween a raspberry an’ a Mcintosh.

  “ ‘Goddamn!’ I says. ‘This nigger’s in love.’ Mose looks at me an’ grins. ‘Damn, Jack,’ he says, ‘you ain’t so dumb after all.’ But Josh wasn’t havin’ none a that. ‘Naw,’ he says, ‘naw, he ain’t dumb. He’s jest a damn fool that don’t know his butt from a bung hole.’ But I knowed I was on the right track, an’ Mose did too. ‘I don’t know, Josh,’ Mose says. ‘Jack seems to be perty sure you been out cattin’ around’ ‘Nawsir,’ I says. ‘He ain’t been cattin’ no place. We ain’t talkin’ ’bout pussy-snatchin’. This here is love we’re talkin’ about.’ Mose shook his head—Josh was jest too busy splutterin’ an’ blushin’ to say anythin’—an’ he says, ‘Now, how you know all that, Jack? I can’t see it.’ Well, he was lyin’; half the time Mose acted dumb, but you didn’t need to know him too well to know he was always one step ahead a you, sometimes two, an’ half the time he was leadin’ you by the nose. But he liked to let things come out their own way. So I went straight on. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘he done shaved on Saturday afternoon, an’ that means women is in there somewheres.’ Mose nods. ‘An’,’ I says, ‘he was wearin’ a suit….’ ‘Hold up there,’ Mose says. ‘I thought you didn’t believe that.’ ‘I didn’t,’ I says. ‘Reason I didn’t was that it woulda been mighty strange. But when you got a woman stuck in the middle of somethin’, actin’ mighty strange is reglar.’ Mose considers that for a minute, an’ then he says, ‘Good point. Continue, sir, if you please.’ Sounded jest like a white man. Jest ’bout everybody there started grinnin’, ’cause they seen Mose’s ‘white man’ act before. As for me, I knowed how to play too.