Proud Flesh Read online

  Only to endure again the pain of not finding her there, to endure again that look, or rather nonlook, of Eulalie’s and Archie’s for him, and this time on top of the rest to endure the sight of Jug, though he did not know until he saw him how much he wished not to see Jug. Never to be found when he was wanted, Jug could be counted on w show up when he was not, looking as always as though he had slept in his clothes and slept on the sidewalk or in the gutter, a mold of gray whiskers sprouting on his gray face, his bleary bloodshot eyes blinking and watering at the light of day. He sat drinking coffee at the kitchen table surrounded by the isolation in which his in-laws kept him. It angered Clyde to have to defend Jug, for he despised Jug as much as they did, but as Jug was his choice, he had to defend him in self-defense. What did they expect? Just what did they expect? Jug served the purpose for which he was meant. Served it as well as another. He preserved appearances. Just who did they expect him to find, to take the job, Harry Belafonte?

  “Either make yourself presentable,” Clyde told Jug, “or else make yourself scarce. Go straight while my mother is sick. You bring a drop onto this place, you so much as smell the cork of a bottle, and all Texas won’t be big enough for you to hide in.”

  Going down through the thicket, almost at a run despite the heat as soon as he was out of sight of the house, he took off his straw hat and passed his hand over his head, feeling the damp feverish skin of his scalp through his damp hair. I’m too old for this, he thought. On top of everything else I’m just plain too old to be carrying on like this. He came out of the thicket into the white glare of the lane, thick with dust as fine as fresh wood ashes and just as hot, spurting from under foot as the foot was set down, and he heard the moan of the cottonpickers. All morning long it had sounded inside his head, there was no escaping it. It was like the concerted groan of all the separate aches crying in his heart.

  His grief might not be pure, might be foully adulterated in that slop-pail he called his heart, but it was real, it was unfeigned. He loved his mother as much as any of them—excepting only his sister Amy, and she was not human, Amy was an angel. He loved his mother as much as any of the rest, maybe more, just because of knowing how tainted the love was that he had to offer her. And even as she lay unconscious, maybe drawing her last breath, he could carry on as he had today, as he was doing now. Like a beast. Like the beast he was. And even now, even as his heart was breaking for her, still his thoughts were straining at the leash after the other woman in his life (his wife had long ago ceased to count). He paused for breath, and wondered in impersonal perplexity how it was possible for a man to bear in his heart at one and the same time a feeling as pure as his love for Ma and along with it—

  He was being watched. He hunched himself, his neck stiffening and his senses straining alert. He located his observer directly. Perched on a limb of a tree and watching him wide-eyed as an owl was one of the children from the work camp. But for Clyde it was an imp from hell, and a great sadness came over him at the thought that his depravity had been judged to merit no bigger a devil than a mere cub like this one. And when it grinned at him, baring not fangs but rows of small white milk teeth, as much as to say, “You are not as bad as you would like to think,” Clyde’s soul shriveled inside him like the kernel of a nut gone bitter.

  The child leapt to the ground and ran away and Clyde caught his breath with a sob and gathered strength to recommence running, and he heard someone calling him. Turning, though he hardly needed to turn, for he knew who it was, who it would be, even knew, God help him, what she would say, he saw a short black figure in skirts down to the ground toddling after him along the lane, calling in a voice exactly the same as the caw of a crow, “Mista Cly! Mista Cly! Mista Cly!”

  Was it really so short a time ago that she had come to him with the tale which had destroyed forever the contentment he had not known was his until it was taken from him? Could the misery he seemed now to have lived with always really be still so fresh? She had come saying she hated to bother him with problems when he had enough on his own, but she had nobody else to turn to, and this was his problem, too, in a way. He would not want any trouble on the place if he could help it. He was the boss, and if he acted now to stop it before it went any further, before it came out in the open, he might be saving himself some unpleasantness and be saving her and them a lot of real bad trouble.

  She said she had always vowed and determined not to be the kind of old woman who meddled in her daughter’s way of raising her children. How whenever she saw anything she disapproved of, no matter how strong the temptation to interfere, she would just close her eyes, keep her mouth shut. How she had not said anything when Shug announced that she was quitting school with only one more year to go before graduating and neither Eulalie nor Archie, who ought to have taken a father’s place when a little sister without a father and too young to know what a mistake she was making, did nothing to oppose it. How even on that terrible day when she announced that she was getting married and then named her choice of a husband as if she expected them to forbid it and then to despise them when they did not, she still had just bitten her tongue and said nothing. It was not her place to speak when those who were closest to Shug did not. That wedding day had been the unhappiest day of her life—though she could never thank Mr. Clyde enough for helping them make the best of a bad situation, taking on Shug’s husband (she could never bring herself to utter his name, not to his face nor in speaking about him) to work around the place (work! hah! that worthless human wreck!) and fixing them up that nice little house all for their own—but so was it the unhappiest day in her life for poor Eulalie, and for her to have said anything would only have made it all the harder on her.

  He had been about to show his impatience with all this when he sensed that it must be leading somewhere and that it might concern him to know where. Instantly it concerned him deeply. She said she hated to meddle, to spy and tell tales, and she had held off from coming to him for just as long as she could, hoping things would work out by themselves. How long was that? he wondered, his heart racing. Long enough for what to have happened? She apologized for bothering him. She knew he had enough on his mind already without getting involved in …

  That was all right, he said patiently, stifling a scream of impatience. She had done right in coming to him. If there was anything he could do to help prevent trouble, family differences …

  That marriage had been a terrible mistake, a tragedy, she said, tears coming to her eyes. She would never understand how a young girl, nice-looking, popular, smart in school, with a good chance to be somebody in life, could throw herself away like that. But Shug had made her bed and now she must lie in it. She herself had been against that marriage with her whole heart and soul, but she was determined now to do what she could to see that it did not end in scandal. And that was what was fixing to happen unless something was done before her husband woke up to what was going on. When a young girl married an old man (Clyde winced; though a lot older than his wife, Jug was not much older than he) trouble was bound to come of it sooner or later. When it was an old man in love with the bottle, sooner than later.

  He succeeded somehow in asking what it was that she had seen to make her think …?

  Over her eyes she had drawn that film, like that membranous inner eyelid that dogs have, as though to shut out the sight, and she shook her head, as though she could not bring herself to say it, as though to deny to herself what she had seen.

  Left to imagine the details, he imagined the worst. The worst was, images, scenes of Shug doing with some other man the things he had taught her to do with him. Faceless that man was, but otherwise the details were all there, and once painted upon the surface of his mind they penetrated to its bottommost layer, like fresco on a wall.

  In the midst of the blackness that engulfed him a light sprang on. The man in the picture in his mind assumed his own features. What she had seen, what she was reporting to him without knowing it, was a meeting she had witnessed from a
far between Shug and him. In his relief, his elation, he almost told her so.

  “And when you got a bunch like them cottonpickers right on the place,” she had said, “trouble don’t got far to come.”

  Now she caught up with him, panting, old face puckered as a prune, and had this to say:

  “Mista Cly, you going down to the field? Do me a favor, would you? Shug never has come up this morning and she not in her house either. If you see her hanging around down there please tell her to come on up to the house. Don’t tell her I said so. She don’t pay me no more mind than she do her mother. You tell her to. Will you do that for me, please, Mista Cly? I be much obliged.”

  The row of workers’ shanties—rusty quonset huts and peeling sheetrock barracks bought at the disbandment of the nearby prisoner of war camp after the Italians had been repatriated—stood with their forefeet in the dusty lane and their backs in the cotton. In front of each one now stood a car, always a big model, sometimes a Cadillac, some of them not more than three or four years old. Those were what they liked, they got them cheap second- and third-hand, and in them they could transport their teeming families: Clyde had counted as many as ten come tumbling out of one. In front of the biggest building sat an ex-school bus with a Louisiana license plate. As soon now as Clyde had laid them off for the day they would pile into their cars and head for town where by midnight half a dozen of them would be in jail for drunkenness and disturbing the peace, carrying a dangerous weapon, maybe for assault with intent to kill. Clyde, a roll of bail money in his pocket, made a regular call at the jail each Monday during ginning season, looking into every cell, like a doctor going his hospital rounds.

  In front of the first shack, one of the barracks, he stood for a moment listening, watching. There was no sound save for the everlasting work chant, and the lane was as bare as a dry creek bed. He stepped quickly and noiselessly onto the sagging porch and listened to the interior for a moment. He opened the kicked-in screen door and stepped inside. Occupied but four weeks of the year, standing vacant all the rest, and ventilated the year round by cracks and broken window-panes and doors that would not shut, it smelled nonetheless of Negroes, an effluvium that worked on Clyde Renshaw like a musk, equally repugnant and exciting, a smell compounded of hair pomade and bitter, cheap roll-your-own tobacco, of corrosive, violently scented soap and coal oil and rancid lard, of singed heat-straightened hair and the sweat of labor and of love, of fatmeat and Poke salad and buttermilk and again of stale intermingled sweat, of poverty and promiscuity, of unprivacy as rampant as a beehive’s. The room he found himself in was nothing but beds, three sagging sheetless unmade iron Army cots in a row, touching, and on the floor two overlapping tattered quilt pallets. Clyde knew it well. It, or any one of the others, served out of croptime as their love-nest, his and his bittersweet-chocolate-colored, unfaithful and indiscriminate mistress’s. That musty odor smote his brain like drugged fumes, and the memory of their embraces enacted there flashed upon the screen of his mind, drawing from him a sob of mingled desire and self-disgust.

  The third in the row was one of the quonset huts. A gust of fetid air flew in his face on his opening the door. On the bed lay not she and some lover her own color but a row of half a dozen pinky-brown children, napping, covered with flies like raisin-sprinkled gingerbread men. Beside the bed in an armchair the entrails of which hung out in loops, a withered and shriveled black woman slumped asleep, her open mouth exposing one long yellow tooth in each bright pink gum. Always there was one like her, delegated to look after the infants. One eye fell open. “Looking for somebody?” she asked. “All out yonder picking yore cotton.”

  In the last shack he entered and passed through the kitchen where on the table lay the remains of breakfast—blackened banana skins and fish bones and Vienna sausage tins—and stepped into another bedroom where memories of their assignations again inflamed him. The air was unbreathable. He could hear the pickers’ dirge, recalling him to his errand. His heart choked with self-loathing and self-pity. It cried out for purity—if not for unadulterated sorrow then for pure unmixed lechery. But the loneliness of his spirit only whetted the craving of his flesh.

  Where was she? Where was that two-timing bitch? Suddenly he knew, and crazed with jealousy and longing he lunged across the room to the clothes closet. With one hand he grasped the doorknob, with the other the razor underneath his shirt. He visualized her, or rather them, crouching on the floor behind the hanging clothes, naked together and black together, black as the darkness that enveloped them, waiting for the sound of his departing footsteps. Blindly he yanked open the door. On the rod hung three bent and empty clothes hangers. Stirred by the wind they tinkled together like distant laughter. Along the floor the gray dustmice scurried toward the corners.

  VII

  In their younger years the Renshaw boys had run together in a pack—on Saturday afternoon when they came swaggering into the public square five abreast taking up the entire sidewalk people had flown out of their way like chickens—and they were still close; but, left more to their own devices in growing up, the sisters were more individual, and each had been conscious at an earlier age of the instinct to leave home and set up for herself. There were greater differences among them, and more differences arose between them, differences which they learned to settle themselves without appeal to Ma, whose impartiality amounted almost to indifference. Not so with the boys. With them too her verdict was impartial; but after the dispute was settled, the private comfort she gave to the one who had been in the wrong amounted almost to preference. When it came to boys, Ma was apt to equate being in the wrong with being the underdog.

  On one thing, though, in opposition to their brothers, the Renshaw girls were united, or had been until all were married and gone from home. This was precisely the question of their getting married, and accounted for their being so widely scattered now, compared to the boys. The Renshaw boys had positively Sicilian notions about a brother’s duty to his sisters’ reputations, and were all the more vigilant after the death of their father. Local boys had been rather unforward in coming to court any of the girls, and as the girls said in complaining to Ma, you could hardly blame the fellows. A fellow does not want to be made to feel obligated to propose after taking a girl out a time or two, nor to be bullied by a gang of her brothers, maybe marched to the altar with a shotgun at his back, on bringing her home past midnight once. After calling and being watched, slit-eyed, by two or three, sometimes all five of the Renshaw boys, most suitors failed to call again. For unfortunately, though they were all what is called nice-looking girls, none of the sisters was quite handsome enough to inspire any local boy to run that gauntlet a second time. The girls charged that their brothers’ concern for their reputations was incidental to the fun they got from scaring hell out of the various bouquet and bon-bon laden youths bold enough to come sniffing around their warren. There was ugly talk once, never fully substantiated, as the only witness was the alleged victim, of a premature kiss, a midnight ride, a beating. It began to look as if the girls might all be left to wither on the vine. All had ended by marrying beyond the adjacent counties, beyond the range of their brothers’ notoriety, and in each case Ma’s connivance had been needed in arranging clandestine meetings enough to bring the suitor to the desired point. In the case of one, namely Gladys, the young man had been backward, and him Ma brought round by disclosing to the boys that he was seeing their sister.