A Long and Happy Life Read online

  It was the one thing left of Mildred (once they lidded that box again)—her child that had lived God only knew how, dark and hard in the orange crate they lined with white and laid him in, his back curved inwards and his spidery arms and legs twisting inwards to his navel as if something was winding him up with a key or as if he didn’t know he was already born and had killed his mother and that there was nothing to call him but Doctor Sledge as no father came forward to tell what his real name was—hard dry little fellow with nothing to go on but half his mother’s blood and maybe her looks and the way she used to talk held inside him in case he lived, waiting.

  The preacher was waiting too now they had got Mary and Estelle away from Mildred and set them down again. He had intended to have the testifying next, but he could see Rosacoke was studying something besides the funeral so he went ahead and gave his remarks that were supposed to be the last thing before they shut the box—about all of us being raised from the grave including Mildred, but not a word about that live baby no more than if Mildred had died of sore throat. He watched Rosacoke the whole time to see when she would look round and be ready, but she looked on out the window through every word, even the prayer, and when he came to the end of all he could do, he had to say quietly to the back row, “Miss Rosacoke, we all know Mildred thought a heap of you, and it seem like you thought a heap of her”—a lot of people said “Amen”—“and I wonder is there any testifying you could do for her now?” His voice carried and Rosacoke looked round slow and blank as if he had called her from the edge of sleep. To help her out he went on, “If you can find anything in your heart to say, we would be mighty glad.” Everybody was watching her. She nodded her head. She had meant to think out in advance what was best to say, but nothing about this afternoon had gone as she intended. She bit at her upper lip because of the heat and stood up and said, “I hadn’t seen much of Mildred lately, but we always observed each other’s birthday, her and me, and the other evening I thought to myself, ‘It is nearly Mildred’s twenty-first birthday’ so I walked down to her place after supper, and nobody was there except the turkey. I didn’t know till the next afternoon they had carried her away. There I was just wanting to give her a pair of stockings and wish her a long and happy life and she was already gone.”

  That was what she could find in her heart. She wondered if there ought not to be more, but if there was, it was covered now by other things. She sat down and before anybody could thank her, she thought what seemed to be the truth right then—“Everybody I know is gone.” In the stifling air she went as cold all over as a pane of glass and took up her pocketbook and pressed her hat safe on her head and walked straight out of church—not from grief, not shedding a tear—but stopping the funeral dead while everybody watched her out of sight and Mrs. Ransom said “She is overcome” and punched Sammy her son at the end of her row and told him, “Sammy, go see what ails that child.”

  Sammy went and there was Rosacoke on the middle step, hanging onto her hat as if a storm was due, the sun laying her shadow backwards to the door and her just staring down the road. Not wanting to scare her by speaking, Sammy struck a match on his shoe and lit a cigarette. She looked around—just her dry eyes—and said, “Sammy, aren’t you burning up in all that wool?” (He was in dark blue—the one man she had seen all day dressed like he knew what a funeral was.)

  “If you needing to go somewhere, Miss Rosacoke, Sammy can take you.” He said it as gentle as if it was the hospital she might need.

  She hesitated as if she was thinking of a map and was on the verge of saying something distant such as—“Buffalo.”

  “I don’t reckon so, Sammy. I may have to go home and I can walk that.”

  “In this heat?”

  “I have played baseball in worse than this and so have you,” she said. Then thinking what she had done by walking out on the testifying, she said, “I don’t intend to ruin Mildred’s funeral any further by taking you away. Go on back in and tell Mary I’m sorry I can’t stay, but I got to locate Wesley.”

  “No telling where he, Miss Rosacoke, with that machine between his legs.”

  “No. But I’ll be saying goodbye to you, Sammy.”

  “Yes’m.” And she walked into the yard and towards the road in her high heels that were not meant for standing in, much less walking. Sammy finished his cigarette and saw her vanish at the first turn. He was the age of her oldest brother Milo, and this was the first day he had ever called her Miss Rosacoke—nothing else to call her, the way she looked, though they played many games of baseball together before Mr. Isaac hired him—her and Milo and Rato (and Mildred and Mildred’s sister Baby Lou at shortstop). He had driven the truck today and carried a fourth of the box, and it was generally guessed he was the one might tell the world what the rightful name of Mildred’s baby was so he went back to where they had given up waiting. Bessie Williams was singing “Come Thee Disconsolate” which by now Rosacoke couldn’t hear.

  She walked in the middle of the road, looking down. Wherever the dust was thick there would be the track of Wesley’s cycle printed like a message to her. Seeing that, she would speed up a little and sad as she felt, smile and think, “What do I think I am—an Indian nosing out a deer?” But she would come to long stretches where the dust had blown away, and there would be nothing but the baked red ground that took no more sign of Wesley than if he had flown every now and then. The smile would fade and she would walk even faster to get to the next deep dust till her legs, from the knee down nearly, were streaked with the red and her shoes were fit for nothing but burning. She could see that but she said right out to the trees around her, “I will see him if I have to walk to Norfolk.” That thought clogged through her chest and mouth till she gasped for every breath she got, and everything else was choked—Mildred, the heat, her shoes—leaving nothing but Wesley hanging up in her, not speaking a word, and her at the worst she had ever been. She couldn’t cry. She couldn’t speak. But she thought, “I have spent six years thinking of Wesley Beavers day and night, giving him things he didn’t want, writing him letters he barely answered, and now I am trailing him like a dog and him at Mason’s Lake, I know, cooling off. I will stop walking when I get home and rest in the swing, and I hope he sells motorcycles till he drops.”

  She was coming to Mr. Isaac’s woods where the deer had been so long ago for her and Mildred, and Wesley’s tracks that hadn’t showed for awhile showed again—not straight but twisting over the road from ditch to ditch. She said, “If that is his idea of fun, I’m glad I’m walking,” and she looked up at the woods and decided to step in and take their shade till she was cool again.

  Between the road and the woods was a narrow gully from the last rain. She took off her shoes and held her hat and jumped it and landed right away in deep moss that was cool with damp from God-knew-where. She took a look in both empty directions and decided to go on barefooted so she struck inwards a little from the road, and when it was nearly out of sight, she turned and walked on parallel to the narrow dust she could see through the trees. She was still in hollering distance if anybody was to pass that needed hollering at. Working indoors all summer the way she had, her feet were tender, and she yielded to them with pouts and little hunches of her shoulders when a stick cracked under her or a rock pressed up from the ground, and the sight of an old black-snake stopped her dead till he raised up as if to speak and she beat him to it—“Well, old brother, which way are you headed?” and he went looping off slow over a log and on deeper in the trees. That kept her looking at the ground from then on, but once when she stopped to breathe, there was a red cardinal staring at her from the same bent tree she and Mildred had called a horse and ridden a thousand miles. She couldn’t think how a cardinal sang, but any bird will answer you once, however you sound, so she whistled three notes, and he answered just to show her the right way. She told him “Thank you” and tried it his way, but he had given all he meant to give and sat there and swelled up. “What are you looking so biggity about?
” she asked him. “You look like every cardinal I ever saw.” He headed on too for the heart of the woods—north—and if he wanted, he could make Virginia by dark. She called after him, “You better stay in North Carolina, boy. You are the official bird here.” Then she wondered, “Why don’t I follow him and see where he leaves me?” But what reason was there to take off barefooted after a bird?—unless he was aiming for the spring. The spring would be reason enough. She looked back to the road but the dust lay still. Nobody was going anywhere or coming back so she struck deeper for the spring with that bird singing before her as if his heart would burst.

  The only path to the spring was two tracks the width apart of Mr. Isaac’s truck wheels, left from the days when nobody but he and a few wild children knew it was there. She followed on, picking her way through glossy poison oak, and when she came to the spring (the bird wasn’t there, he was halfway to Virginia), it was only a wet circle in the leaves, choked with whatever had fallen from the trees since Mr. Isaac’s last stroke. (It had been his private spring that he kept clean long as he could, not for drinking purposes but to cool his feet.) Rosacoke laid down her shoes and hat and bent over and put her hands in where the leaves were wettest—slowly, hoping there wasn’t a lizard around—and lifted them out till there was a basin of brown water the size of the evening sun and cold as winter ever got. Looking in it, trying to see her face, she thought of the evening they found this spring—her and her brothers and maybe five Negroes. They had chased all the way from home, hollering some game back and forth till Milo who was leading stopped and raised up his hand like an Indian brave. They halted in a ragged line behind him, and before they could speak, they saw what he had seen—Mr. Isaac there through the darkening leaves, his trousers rolled high and pure cold water ringing round his little bird ankles and him not noticing the children at all or where the sun had got to but staring ahead, thinking. He looked up once in their direction—maybe he couldn’t see—but he never spoke a word, not to say “Go on” or “Come here,” and directly they all whirled round and started home, circling him wide, leaving him to whatever it was made him look like that. Afterwards, some scorching days they would come and look at the spring and think how cool it was, but seeing Mr. Isaac that once was all they needed. Not a one of them would have waded in if they had been blazing bright from the waist down. Rosacoke had drunk from it though on the day they saw the deer (she had remembered the deer), checking first to see had Mr. Isaac waded lately, then bending over and touching the water with nothing but her lips. She had told Mildred, “Come on. He ain’t been here today and it’s run clean,” but Mildred said, “I don’t care if he ain’t been here in a month. I can wait. That ain’t mouth water no more.”

  It would be mouth water now—rising up clean for nobody but Rosacoke. Everybody else had forgotten or was long past needing cool feet and drinks of water. She took her seat in the shade on ground that sun hadn’t touched since the trees were bare, and she thought of washing her dusty feet. The broiling day was above her, but her feet were deep in moss, and damp was creeping through her dress. “Let the spring run clean,” she thought. “I am cool enough the way I am. It will take time but time is the one thing left of this day, and when it is clean I can drink. Maybe some water is all I need.”

  And maybe while the spring ran clean, she could find the broomstraw field. Surely the deer was there and even if she failed to see him, wouldn’t he still see her?—peeping through the cluttered woods with his black eyes, watching every step she took, twitching his tail in fright, and not remembering that other summer day, not connecting this changed tall girl with the other one he had seen, not wondering where the black girl was, not caring, not needing—only water, grass, the moss to lie in and the strength of his four legs to save his life. But wasn’t it far to walk? Hadn’t it taken them an hour to get there, and even if the deer was to kneel and eat from her hand, who would there be to cry “Great God A-mighty” the way Mildred had?—to show it was the one wonderful thing she ever saw, the one surprise. Her baby was no surprise. Rosacoke had met her in the frozen road last February when they were both working and hadn’t met for some time. They agreed on how cold it was and wouldn’t they be glad to see summer. That seemed all they had to say till Mildred moved to go, and her old black coat swung open—there was her chest flat under a shrunk-up pink sweater that hugged tight to the hard new belly stuck in her skirt like a coconut shell. Rosacoke asked her, “Mildred, what in the world is that?”

  “Nothing but a baby,” she said and smiled and shut her coat.

  “Whose baby?”

  “Well, several have asked me not to say.”

  “Is it somebody from around here?”

  “Bound to be.”

  “And you haven’t tried to throw it?”

  “What I want to throw him for, Rosacoke?”

  “Won’t nobody marry you?”

  “Some of them say they studying about it. Ain’t no hurry. Just so he come with a name.”

  “Why on earth did you do it, Mildred?”

  “I don’t hardly know.”

  “Well, are you glad?”

  “Don’t look like glad got nothing to do with it. He coming whether I glad or not”—and said goodbye and walked away home. Rosacoke had stood in the road, shivering, to watch her out of sight. She went with her thin wrists held to her sides, not swinging, and her fine hands clenched, and when she was gone round the first bend (not looking back once), she was gone for good. Rosacoke never saw her again—not alive, not her face. Mama had said, “I don’t want you going to Mildred’s another time till they get a Daddy for that baby. The way she’s been messing around, they’re going to have trouble finding one, and there’s liable to be some cutting before they do.” Rosacoke had stayed away, not because of what Mama said but because that one cold afternoon was the end of whatever Mildred she had known before. Now Mildred knew things Rosacoke didn’t know, things she had learned just lying still in the dark, taking her child from somebody she couldn’t see, and what could you say to that new Mildred, her load growing in her every second without a name, sucking blind at her life till his time came and he tore out and killed her and left himself with nothing on earth but a black mouth to feed and the hot air to howl in?

  “And here I have walked out on her burying because of Wesley Beavers and his popping machine,” she said and stood up at the sound of his name. It was her first thought of Wesley since seeing that bird and it startled her. She said it again—just the name—to test herself. But the name came easy now, not with so much rising in her chest. This was the way she worked—let Wesley pull one of his tricks or go back to Norfolk from a leave and she would nearly die with grief or anger till she could think of something big enough to take her mind off how he looked, not smiling, not answering when she called. Not everything was big enough, only things that had no connection with Wesley such as people telling sad stories or going to walk where Wesley had never been. Sometimes nothing big enough would come, and then there was nothing to do but hope each night the next day would be better, and usually it would (though she had to keep her eyes off pecan trees and not hear rain frogs beyond the creek at night or harmonica music). She would go on that way and finally be all right and free and bothered by nothing but, sometimes, the thought, “How can I say I love somebody who can leave and not worry me no more than this?”—till he came home again, bringing his face like a chain to loop around her neck.

  Now with Mildred on her mind, she was free, and from sitting awhile she was cooler. She looked into the spring. It was working but it wouldn’t be clear before night. “I will just rinse off my feet,” she thought, “and go home and stir up some Kool-Ade and set in the swing and think of what to do for that baby to make up for how I acted today.”

  She pulled her dress high above her knees and sat again by the edge of the spring and not being able to see the bottom, stuck in her red feet slowly, saying, “If there’s water moccasins down there, they are welcome to these feet.
” But her feet sank into cold mud, and brown clouds wreathed the shank of each white leg. She pulled her dress even higher and showed—to herself, to any passing bird—the tender blue inside her thighs that had barely seen the light all summer. Seemed a pity—even to her—having that firmness and keeping it hid (unless she went to Ocean View and showed it to every sailor on the sand). “Well, you’re saving it, honey, till the right time comes,” she said, breaking the silence above her where the birds had quieted—she wondered when, not noticing them so long. Then she saw the mess she was making of the spring and thought, “I’d be ashamed if I didn’t know it would purify a thousand times before anybody needs it again.”

  But she was wrong. A dim rustling broke the quiet between her and the road, and gradually it turned to somebody’s footsteps bearing down on the cracking sticks towards her. “Everybody I know is picnicking or burying,” she thought, “and no stranger is catching me like this.” She grabbed up her shoes and ran twenty yards to hide behind a cedar. The steps came on and she peeped out. Whoever it was hadn’t appeared but there lay her hat by the spring big as a road sign and no hope of getting it now because it was a man that was coming—his shape moved on through the leaves but not his face, not yet.

  It was Wesley who broke into sight, stroking through the branches like a swimmer with his head held down and his ankle boots turning in the soft ground till he was beside the spring and shaking his head to see how muddy it was. Rosacoke strained to see on him some sign of where he had been and why he was here, but all she could tell was that, wherever he had gone, he had combed his hair—a fresh part marched across his head like a chalk line—and that he was almost standing on her hat, and what would he do when he saw it? But he looked down for a long time, working his tongue in his mouth as if the next thing to do was spit in the spring and complete the mess, and Rosacoke’s hat might as well have been air.