T. Boyle - The Women

His legs were moving. He was going up the hall, that was what he was doing, thinking to get into the cornfield and work the rage down out of his head and into his legs, his feet, down into the ground where he could bury it, and he was twisting his hands, one inside the clench of the other — the heel of his right hand stinging where he’d slapped her, or had he burned it when he jerked the pan from the stove? No matter. He could barely control the right one or the left either, all the fine things of the house mocking him with what they were and he wasn’t, but he fought them with all his will and then he was out the door and freed into the air he could breathe with its veritable stink of cattle and their hindquarters, the sun sudden on his face, and a flutter of movement against the sky. He saw the peacocks perched on the low line of the roof like displaced things and that was all right because they were cocks and not hens and the hens were little pecking creatures going around in the shadows because they were ashamed of themselves.

Things had been coming to a boil for the past week and more, these whites — Brodelle and the dishwater man and the rest of them, the fat-faced fools in the village, shopkeepers, horsetraders, farmers in their buggies and black Ford automobiles — giving him no more notice than they would a bug. Or less. 173At least they could see a bug, but they didn’t see him at all because they didn’t like what they saw any more than he did. Unless they wanted something. Then it was Carleton, fetch me this; Carleton, polish my boots; Carleton, the soup’s cold. And Gertrude. Gertrude gave him her look of dole day and night, fretting over him, begging him not to upset the mistress — or the children or the precious holy houseguests or the squinting idiot at the grocery, as if every one of them was a king and queen in his own right — and always it was the same low peasant talk. Biddy wisdom and platitudes. Diarrhea out the wrong end.

She’d got up that morning in the pulsing gray tumble of dawn and the first thing out of her mouth was, “Julian, Julian, I dream de sucking pig.” He ignored her. He was slapping water on his face, feeling his way with the razor because he wouldn’t look in the mirror. “Not jus’ de pig.” She came round him from behind, thrust her sorrowful face in his. Her voice had turned ominous — more of her Bajan claptrap and superstition, that was what it was, more ignorance. Tears started up in her eyes. “I dreamin’ de wedding too, don’t you see? Pork. Pork and de wedding all in one dream—”

“Oh, hush it,” he snapped and turned his back on her again, the towel rough as sandpaper against his face. “There isn’t going to be any wedding. Not here, not with these people. They’re too good for the forms and rituals of civilization. For the Bible. For anything but themselves.”

Her eyes bled out at him. She turned up her palms and she was pleading now, her voice slipped down and gone, no more than a gargle in her throat. “Don’t you know what that means?”

He knew. If you dreamed of pork and a wedding, all in one dream, it meant the cataclysm was coming, pop-pop, the bloodletting, the horror. And maybe it was, but he didn’t want to hear about it. Not now. Not at this hour of the morning, when he had to put on his service jacket and go in amongst the white people and bow and scrape like a plantation nigger, not ever. “Shut that ignorance,” he said, whirling round on her.

She shrank away from him, dwindling into her bones, but she was still there. Still talking. Still pushing him. She said: “What you do wid dat hatchet? ”

“Hatchet? What hatchet? I don’t know anything about any hatchet.”

“Under de pillow. For de shingle. Dat one.”

He shrugged, caught out in a lie, and what was she now, his keeper? “I don’t care,” he said, and he was just floating the words out there. “Protection. I keep it for protection.”

“From what? Bears?” Her eyes had sharpened. She was on the offensive and he didn’t like it one whit. “De redskin Indian wid dere tomahawk? T’ieves? Or maybe Jesus. Maybe Jesus gone come for you and you gone chop ’im up in little pieces.” She backed up a step, just out of reach, in her shift still, with her eyes like two coals shining in the stove, two red-hot fiery coals that nothing in this world could extinguish. “Julian,” she whispered. “Julian.”

“What? What is it? Can’t you see I’ve got work to do—?”

“I heard you. Las’ night. Night before dat too. You was sittin’ by the window dere, talkin’ to dat hatchet you was holdin’ in your lap like a baby child, like a hex doll. Dat what it is — dat your hex doll?”

There was no answering that kind of willful stupidity and she knew it before the words were out of her mouth because he’d taught her to know it and he was going to keep on teaching her till she learned it for good and he took two quick steps forward and caught her face in his right hand, pinching it there in the hollows of her jawbone so her mouth was distorted, and then he shoved that lewd hateful cringing black fish face as hard as he could so she fell away from him like one of her rag-and-bone voodoo poppets and that put him in a mood, it surely did.

But here he was in the courtyard, striding along with his head down and the peacocks wailing and the sun beating at him like a hammer, as full of pure rage as he’d ever been. One foot in front of the other, the cornfield down there like a tall green stand of cane, the closest thing to cane, and maybe she’d relent, maybe she’d step back and keep him on if he could just get down there into that field and let it all run out of him like the poison from a snakebit wound till his heart slowed and the beating stopped in his head. He was so intent he didn’t see the figure poised there in the shadows of the stable till the figure emerged into the chop of the light in one swift motion — a giant’s step — and took hold of his arm.

Brodelle. Brodelle in jodhpurs and riding boots, narrowing his wet blue eyes and pursing his lips round whatever it was he had to say, and what was it going to be this time? Lick my boots, kiss my arse, go fuck yourself? But no. “Saddle my horse, will you?” That was what it was. Saddle my horse. “I’m in a hurry.”

He didn’t have time to be astonished, the sequence of events as swift and sure and unstoppable as a row of dominoes all falling in a line, and he jerked his arm back as if he’d been stung, squared his shoulders under that sun and stared the man in the face, the fool, the interfering white fool who couldn’t have known what he was doing. He stared. Just stared. And here came the change, because Brodelle saw him now, really saw him, one man to another, the tight-jawed look of the deliverer of commands shading to something else, something puerile and powerless, because a command presupposes a response — scrape and bow, Yassuh, Massah —and Julian was giving him nothing. “What’s the matter with you — are you deaf? I said saddle the goddamn horse.”

One more full beat, holding fast to those soft sinking useless wet eyes and not a word needed, not a word to waste, and then he turned his back on him and went down the courtyard to where the green corn sprang up even as Brodelle cursed him—“You black nigger son of a bitch!”—knowing even then that there was no help now, not in the fields or anywhere else, because there were two voices speaking in his head, the one that said maybe, maybe I will, maybe she will, maybe, and the one that said never, never again, never, never, never.

She wasn’t much use as a nurse — she didn’t have the sympathy for it or the patience either and the sight of blood made her feel faint — but she bent to Gertrude, helped her to her feet and threw a frantic glance round the kitchen, looking for a scrap of cloth, a towel, anything to use as a compress. The pan was on the floor, a blackened slab of meat hissing beside it, the smoke faltering now, bellying and receding till it began to dissolve in transparent wisps. She went to the sink, ran cold water over the washrag she found hanging on a hook there and tried to press it to Gertrude’s eye, but Gertrude shied away. Wouldn’t look at her. “No, no, ma’am,” she kept saying. “No, no, don’t you bother. I jus’ fine. Julian too. Julian fine. Please, ma’am, please don’t go blamin’ Julian, ’cause half de time he don’t know what he do.”