J. Powers - The Stories of J.F. Powers

“Father”—he was resting in an orange-and-green deck chair—“I wonder if you could come and look at our stove.”

Father pried his legs sideways, sat up, and rubbed his eyes. “Today? Now? ”

She nodded dumbly and forced herself to go through with it. “It’s smoking so we can’t use it at all.” She was ready, if necessary, to mention the old sisters who were used to hot tea.

Father massaged his bald head to rouse himself. He wrinkled the mottled scalp between his hands and it seemed to make a nasty face at her. “Let’s go,” he said. Evidently he had decided to be peppy — an example to her in time of adversity. He scooped his collar off the radio and let it snap to around his neck. He left it that way, unfastened.

“Father is going to look at the stove,” she told them in the dining room. They murmured with pleasure.

Father went first, a little unsteady on stiff legs, not waiting for them. He passed the stumps in the yard with satisfaction, she thought. “Whyn’t you ask John to look at it yesterday?” he demanded over his shoulder.

She tried to gain a step on him, but he was going too fast, wobbling in a straight line like a runaway trolley. “I thought you’d know more about it, Father,” she lied, ashamed that the others could hear. John, looking at it, had shaken his head.

“Do we need a new one, John?”

“If you need a stove, Sister, you need a new one.”

Father broke into their kitchen as into a roomful of assassins, and confronted the glowering hulk of iron that was their stove. “Is it dirty or does it just look that way?”

She swallowed her temper, but with such bad grace there was no merit in it, only design. She gave the others such a terrible frown they all disappeared, even Sister Antonia.

Father squinted to read the name on the stove. “That stove cost a lot of money,” he said. “They don’t make them like that anymore.” He slapped the pipe going up and through the side of the wall. He gave the draft regulator a twist.

He went to the window and peered out. When he turned around he had the print of the screen on his nose. She would not say anything to distract him. He seemed to be thinking. Then he considered the stove again and appeared to have his mind made up. He faced her.

“The stove’s all right, Sister. It won’t draw properly, is all.”

“I know, Father, but—”

“That tree,” he said, pointing through the wall at the small tree which had been spared, “is blocking the draft. If you want your stove to work properly, it’ll have to come down. That’s all I got to say.”

He squinted to read the name on the stove again.

She felt the blood assembling in patches on her cheeks. “Thank you, Father,” she said, and went quickly out of the kitchen, only wanting to get upstairs and wash the money off her hands.

WE WATCHED AT the window all that afternoon. Old Gramma came out of her room and said, “Now you kids get away from there this minute.” And we would until she went back to her room. We could hear her old rocking chair creak when she got up or sat down, and so we always ran away from the window before she came into the room to see if we were minding her good or looking out. Except once she went back to her room and didn’t sit down, or maybe she did and got up easy so the chair didn’t creak, or maybe we got our signals mixed, because she caught us all there and shooed us away and pulled down the green shade. The next time we were real sure she wasn’t foxing us before we went to the window and lifted the shade just enough to peek out.

It was like waiting for rats as big as cats to run out from under a tenement so you could pick them off with a.22. Rats are about the biggest live game you can find in ordinary times and you see more of them than white folks in our neighborhood — in ordinary times. But the rats we waited for today were white ones, and they were doing most of the shooting themselves. Sometimes some coloreds would come by with guns, but not often; they mostly had clubs. This morning we’d seen the whites catch up with a shot-in-the-leg colored and throw bricks and stones at his black head till it got all red and he was dead. I could still see the wet places in the alley. That’s why we kept looking out the window. We wanted to see some whites get killed for a change, but we didn’t much think we would, and I guess what we really expected to see was nothing, or maybe them killing another colored.

There was a rumpus downstairs in front, and I could hear a mess of people tramping up the stairs. They kept on coming after the second floor and my sister Carrie, my twin, said maybe they were whites come to get us because we saw what they did to the shot-in-the-leg colored in the alley. I was scared for a minute, I admit, but when I heard their voices plainer I knew they were coloreds and it was all right, only I didn’t see why there were so many of them.

Then I got scared again, only different now, empty scared all over, when they came down the hall on our floor, not stopping at anybody else’s door. And then there they were, banging on our door, of all the doors in the building. They tried to come right on in, but the door was locked.

Old Gramma was the one locked it and she said she’d clean house if one of us kids so much as looked at the knob even, and she threw the key down her neck somewhere. I went and told her that was our door the people were pounding on and where was the key. She reached down her neck and there was the key all right. But she didn’t act much like she intended to open the door. She just stood there staring at it like it was somebody alive, saying the litany to the Blessed Virgin: Mère du Christ, priez pour nous, Secours des chrétiens, priez … Then all of a sudden she was crying; tears were blurry in her old yellow eyes, and she put the key in the lock, her veiny hands shaking, and unlocked the door.

They had Mama in their arms. I forgot all about Old Gramma, but I guess she passed out. Anyway, she was on the floor and a couple of men were picking her up and a couple of women were saying, “Put her here, put her there.” I wasn’t worried as much about Old Gramma as I was about Mama.

A bone — God, it made me sick — had poked through the flesh of Mama’s arm, all bloody like a sharp stick, and something terrible was wrong with her chest. I couldn’t look anymore and Carrie was screaming. That started me crying. Tears got in the way, but still I could see the baby, one and a half, and brother George, four and a half, and they had their eyes wide-open at what they saw and weren’t crying a bit, too young to know what the hell.

They put Old Gramma in her room on the cot and closed the door on her and some old woman friend of hers that kept dipping a handkerchief in cold water and laying it on Old Gramma’s head. They put Mama on the bed in the room where everybody was standing around and talking lower and lower until pretty soon they were just whispering.

Somebody came in with a doctor, a colored one, and he had a little black bag like they have in the movies. I don’t think our family ever had a doctor come to see us before. Maybe before I was born Mama and Daddy did. I heard the doctor tell Mr Purvine, that works in the same mill Daddy does, only the night shift, that he ought to set the bone, but honest to God he thought he might as well wait, as he didn’t want to hurt Mama if it wasn’t going to make any difference.

He wasn’t nearly as brisk now with his little black bag as he had been when he came in. He touched Mama’s forehead a couple of times and it didn’t feel good to him, I guess, because he looked tired after he did it. He held his hand on the wrist of her good arm, but I couldn’t tell what this meant from his face. It mustn’t have been any worse than the forehead, or maybe his face had nothing to do with what he thought, and I was imagining all this from seeing the shape Mama was in. Finally he said, “I’ll try,” and he began calling for hot water and other things, and pretty soon Mama was all bandaged up white.