T. Boyle - The Women

She thanked him. Told him he was very kind. And thanked him too for acting as go-between for her and the cook — she wasn’t feeling very well and her work had reached a critical stage. .

He nodded. He was standing at the door, looking only to escape.

“Oh, by the way,” she added, “I think we can expect Mr. Wright back this evening.” She picked up her pen, idly tracing over a notation in the margin of the page. “I just thought you and Emil might want to know.”

Then it was lunch. She’d steeled herself — the thought of seeing Carleton, let alone have him there serving at table, made her stomach turn, but she had to appear as if everything was normal. For everyone’s sake. There was no point in upsetting the children — or the workmen either. Or the Carletons, for that matter. She’d had enough upset for one day and she was determined to get through with the meal without exacerbating the situation.

She led John and Martha out onto the porch—“I want to eat with Ernest,” John kept whining. “Why can’t I eat with Ernest?”—seated them at the table and then took her own place. “Not today,” was all she said in response, and she didn’t mean to be curt but she saw no need to involve the children in this — she wanted them with her, she needed them there, and that was enough — and so she turned to Martha and said, “You know, Martha, that truly is a pretty dress. And so lightweight too, perfect for this weather. Aren’t you glad now that we picked it out together?”

And then Carleton was there with his face of iron and his inflexible posture and his gaze on the furniture, the floor, the tray he set down with the faintest mockery of his usual flourish, never daring to lift his eyes to hers or the children’s or to utter one single word. There was soup to start, a vegetable broth into which Gertrude had diced red peppers from the garden, along with paper-thin slices of pork she’d rubbed with sage and then marinated in vinegar and lime oil. It was delicious. But John, always a choosy eater, turned up his nose at it. “Mama,” he said, pinching his voice, “do I have to eat this?” 175

Well, corn wasn’t cane and this place was no island you could walk across in a day from shore to shore but a glowering dark limitless prison he wanted no part of, not anymore, and he came up out of that cornfield where he could smell the hot reek of the earth that was nothing but spilled blood and shit and the bone meal of all the men and animals that had ever lived atop it and went into the house and washed his hands and slipped into his white service jacket as if he’d been born to it. Service. He’d show them service. The kind they never expected. Because they didn’t know a thing about him and they didn’t know how he’d squatted over his heels and smelled the raw earth while the cornstalks stabbed all around him like ten thousand spears and he learned and studied and talked to the sky and the voice in his head until he had no choice.

The first thing was the windows to the courtyard where the men would be.

Fifteen minutes to twelve noon and he ghosted round outside, nobody in sight, and nailed those windows to the sills with a fistful of two-penny nails and the mallet end of the hatchet he’d found on a shelf in the automobile stall where the roofers had left it behind for him. He recognized it as something he required as soon as he saw it lying there in a whole farrago of forgotten things, a ball of twine, half a dozen rusted cans full of nails and bolts and woodscrews, a dried-up tin of shoe polish and a jar with the talons of a hawk preserved in it and the whole business sprinkled over with bits of straw and a black rice of rat turds. Or mouse. He’d brushed it off with a flick of his hand and then tried it for balance and it was just right, the closest thing to a tomahawk he could find. Brodelle. He thought of Brodelle with the blade of it cleaving his head just the way the naked Indians would have given it to him when they were in possession of the land and whole boatloads of Brodelles came with their whey-faced women to take it away from them and build their big yellow houses and drive down everything and everybody till there was nothing left but hate and want and sickness. It was his. And he kept it under his pillow. For a time like this.

Next was the kitchen and Gertrude with her puffed-up eye and crusted-over lip giving him a wary look and telling him de mistress and her chillun gone take dey refreshment down de screen porch and she already ladling out the soup and the aroma of it rising to his nostrils so that he had to swallow down the saliva, thinking how right they were to separate themselves like that. “Be quick about it, woman,” he said, and then the three white china bowls were balanced on the silver tray and he was elevating the tray on the platform of his spread black fingers, all the while imagining the three white faces — the woman movement herself and her pale little grubs — bent over their good Bajan soup. Slurping. Commenting on the weather. The books they were reading. Dolls and horses and the geese by the lake and the peacocks caught on the eaves like individual bursts of God-given flame. And the boy like a grub. And the girl. And her. Get out! she’d screamed. You get out! I’m giving you your notice.

He steeled himself because he had to be hard and this was the hardest part of it, going in there on that screened porch and facing her after what she’d said to him, what she’d done, interfering, meddling, thrusting in her cheap whorish opinions when they weren’t wanted or needed or called for in any way save the devil’s way, but he balanced the tray on one hand all down the corridor and out across the paving stones and pulled open the door with the other and set down the white ceramic bowls without drawing a spare breath and then he went back to the kitchen and balanced six more bowls on the tray and went into the close little twelve-foot-square dining room with its big wooden table and lobster-trap chairs and that was hard too. Because Brodelle was there. Brodelle, who’d called him a black nigger son of a bitch to his face and who was ready to laugh at him, who was laughing at him even as he set down the bowls and never looked a one of them in the eye and backed out the door to go see to the mistress for the last and final time.

He wouldn’t be needing the serving tray, not this time, and he let it fall to the flagstones of the loggia with a clapclatter of silver metal and took up the only tool he’d ever need again. Were his thoughts racing? Yes, sure they were, but not in the way of a thinker or mathematician or an architect in the helter-skelter of conception or even a rabbit with the fox at its throat, but in the detached way of a soldier under fire. He saw every detail as if it had been segregated just for him. He saw the cracks between the stones and the weeds struggling there, saw the yellow stucco like the stippled skin of the beast that was the house, saw the screened porch at the end of the passage and the three figures held in abeyance there behind the dark grid of the screen even as a hand rose like a dream hand or a head bobbed on the verge of invisibility. He heard their voices, her voice: “There,” she was saying, “that wasn’t so awful, was it?” And his: “Was so.” And her: “You liked it, John. Admit it—”

And then he came through the door, moving so swiftly he surprised himself, and she looked up this time, this time she saw him, this time her eyes locked on his at the very moment the hatchet came in one savage furious stroke that went in at the hairline and let loose all the red grease of her brains, gray grease and pink grease, and it was on his bleached white jacket like a kind of devil’s rain. The boy was next. Before he could react, before the knowledge of what was happening there in front of him could settle into his eyes, the hatchet came down again, twice, and he was dead and twitching even as the girl jumped up and ran till he hit her just behind the right ear, one time, two, three, until she was down on the stone crawling like a grub and her face turned to him now, grub-pale, with her eyes open so that he had to hit there again with the flat of it to crush the cheekbone and shut them for good.