3 Day Terror (14 page)

“… sick in bed about it,” Flo Benjamin was saying at nine-ten, “because he seemed right nice, Gay. I was even going to offer to have him spend the night down in the guest room and all … Huh? … Well, law now, Gay, wha’m I going to
do?
Law, we didn’t have no way of knowing all that! He no more seemed like the type to stir up vi-o-lence than the man in the moon! Law, Gay, wha’m I going to
do?
She went off with him, and I got my hair all up and all, I’m jest sick in bed about it!”

• • •

“… but first, we going to pray,” Deacon Phillips said down at Bastrop Baptist Union in the Nelly, “and first, we going to sing!”

“And then, we going to organize!” Turner Towers said from the front row, “because how long we going to pray!”

The deacon was firm. “We going to pray first!”

“How long? Deacon, how long?”

“Until we’re through, Brother Towers,” the deacon said.

“We going to pray crow and eat crow, Deacon!”

“Oh, Lord — ”

“I mean it, Deacon! We’ve got to organize!”

From a back row, old black Tappie Towers said, “The deacon say ‘Oh Lord,’ big mouth!”

“I said, Oh, Lord,” the deacon said.

“Oh, Lord,” the congregation said.

“Oh, Lord, let our words fall gently — ”

“Let our words fall gently — ” the congregation said —
on the white woman, Rastus, don’t fall on the white woman.
… “And oh, Lord, and oh my God,” the deacon said — at nine-ten.

… “is exactly what I
won’t
do,” Flo Benjamin said aloud, driving down State 1 at ten that night, curlers poking out from under the green and yellow bandanna she had wrapped around her head. Don’t know why all this has to start right at a time so important. Gay Porter been trying to even things off ever since I was made Terpsichore, and tonight she got her chance. Dee out parking with someone violent and the whole town talking. Didn’t seem violent. Knew to take the right fork at dinner and all, but Maur was the same way. No way on earth of telling he was Jewish. Smart New Yorker. Calling Delia up when he was divorced to her and all. Probably drunk. Saying: “Hello, Mrs. Benjamin,” just as bold as you please. “Is Dee home?”

Told
him. “My daughter is out at a party, Mr. Granger. She will not be in at an early hour this evening.”

Felt safer now that the dial phones were in. Operators didn’t listen in. ‘Course, the long-distance ones did. There wasn’t any protection there. But Gay’s call wouldn’t be all over town.’ Then facing that filthy John Beggsom in curlers. Gaw, that girl don’t care how she humiliates me; never did! And him saying: “I reckon they went off to spark somewhere, Mrs. Benjamin!”

Flo Benjamin slowed her car down as she approached the Dip. The moon was bright.

• • •

It was so bright that Duboe could see her plain as anything when she started down Love Lucy.

“Hey!” he said, “you snubbing me.” He grinned at her from his car. “Hey you, Ginny Lee.”

She stopped and squinted at him. “Duboe, that you?”

“C’mere,” he said. “I know some dirt on Mr. Jack. He had a visitor today.”

“That’s dumb old stupid dirt,” she said. “I knowed that two clock s’afternoon, from de same source you knowed it. He called up to de house and tole Miss Cass.”

“C’mere just the same,” he said. “C’mon, gal. You don’t have to go to the meeting. They only singing down there. A-yeah, they singing all about hallelujah, the blood done signed my name. That’s what — just singing.”

“I’m glad you remind me the fact,” she said, “‘cause it remind me other facts, troublemaker!”

He giggled. “You like my troublemaking! You know it!”

“Not the kind you making with Crabb Suggs and yo’ daddy and dat stranger from up North. No one like dat kind, troublemaker!”

“Mister Jack didn’t have no meeting about it, though. Mister Jack don’t have the sense to have a meeting.”

“Not a little meeting, no! A big one! And you all ain’t going to get nowhere come Monday, troublemaker!”

Duboe said, “Mister Jack’s too dumb to figure out anything to stop us.”

“Haw, gaw, dat all you know. You dumb if you think it! Mister Jack and Mister Jud and Mister Troy going to
escort
any colored, goin’ to school, personal!”

“You making it all up, Ginny Lee. A-yeah, you just tell big old stories all the time to try and scare Duboe.”

Ginny Lee Polk Ann Towers strutted over to the car with her hands on her hips. “That’s all you know you so stupid and dumb,” she began, “because I heard everything said at that meetin’ — ”

• • •

“I wish you’d think things through and not always act on impulse!” Troy Porter said.

He set his drink down on the end table with a bang and got up, paced back and forth across the front room.

“I did think it through!”

“Well, while you were thinking, Miss Einstein, did it ever occur to you that I’m a politician! I’m not trying to sell newspapers, same as Jack, and I’m not trying to sell God, same as Jud, I’m trying to sell myself to my constituents, every single living one of whom lives in Alabama — not just in Bastrop, but in the state of Alabama! In the South, Poppy!”

Poppy said, “I don’t see how I hurt anything, Troy.”

“I know you don’t,” he thundered, “and that’s what makes me all the damn madder! Poppy, do you know that the Birmingham
Post-Herald
had a picture of what went on at the Wheel in their late edition?”

“Well, what does that matter?”

“Now you just think about this for a minute,” he said, reaching for his drink and pointing it at her. “You just think how it’d look if I’d been down there on the courthouse lawn yipping hooray with the rest of the crackers. You thinking about that, Poppy?”

“It’d look awful. I think it’d look horrible.”

“But I’m telling you the facts of life, Poppy. A picture of me down there yipping hooray this afternoon on the courthouse lawn, as horrible as it might seem to you or me, wouldn’t lose me enough votes in the state of Alabama to even put a dent in my winning ones. It wouldn’t do me no good, maybe, but it’d sure not hurt me the way a picture of me leading niggers to school would! Did you ever think about that when you were promising me away to good causes? Did you ever think how a picture of me leading niggers to school would look to the people who’re going to elect me, pray God, elect me, to the senate of the State of Alabama? Huh? Did you?”

There was the sound of ice cubes swimming in the bourbon as he raised the glass to his lips and swallowed. Then silence and the moon for a spotlight on Poppy’s chair.

• • •

“For one thing,” Jack Chadwick said, sitting on the bed, slamming the shoe he unlaced to the floor. “You’re jealous! Jealous of everyone and everything! Talking to Poppy that way — Gawd, Cass! There’s something wrong with you! And for another thing — ” throwing the other shoe — ”you’re a Beggsom!”

“What does that mean, Jack?”

He said, “That means what it says. You know your old man is in with Suggs and Chandler and the whole lot of them.” As he said it, he had the satisfaction of knowing that this, more than anything else, would goad her, and he realized he wanted to shame her in some way, for her conduct that evening. She had behaved like a shrew, lambasting everyone in that way of hers, that simply chucked reason, discretion and logic out the window, and employed a more personal attack. Sentences would begin: “Well, Jud, I know you
once
were a family man, but now — ” and end “… because I wonder, Poppy, if you’re more interested in the publicity than in the welfare of the Nigra children.”

Jack remembered the stories that had circulated about Cassie’s mother. “Beggie” they’d called her in Bastrop; said she was a little “teched;” used to boil up scalding water when she was mad at old John, and go after him with it, chasing him down the hill in their old Ford, and running on foot when he broke from the road, dragging the pail and cursing at him. Cassie never knew her, but old John talked “Beggie” all the time when Cass was a child. Said: “Beggie wouldn’t take no guff!”

“Beggie put her own over God!” and “Beggie worked hard, loved hard, lived hard, laughed hard, and died doin’ somethin’ about the population. Fought her way in, out, and all through life, an’ don’t, shame her purpose.”

Jack watched his wife slip off the linen dress and reach for the hanger in her closet; thought: She come a long way from Beggie and Old John, mostly on her own, come; and suddenly he was tired of the petty picking at one another. He began to say, “It’s pretty silly to fight this way,” but got only to pretty before Cass said: “Daddy isn’t mixed up in this. I know that for a fact … But Delia Benjamin is.”

“Who’s talking about her?”

“I am!” she answered emphatically. She was bending down to pick up slippers. “I’ve never brought her name up unfairly. I’ve never done that, Jack, you’ve got to admit I haven’t. Never tried to bring her name up or imply anything about her. Have I? You’ll admit that, won’t you?”

Jack knew a hundred ways this was preposterous, untrue and beside the point. He said, “I can’t see how Benny enters into this discussion one whit.”

“Benny! The special little white bah lamb with the special little blah-bah name!” Cass Chad wick said, snatching her robe from the closet, “And this is not a discussion! This is a fight! A low-down, below-the-belt, name-calling blowup! But if we’re going to discuss anything, let’s begin with why Delia Benjamin went to see you this afternoon, and let’s continue with why you didn’t bother to bring it up this evening!”

“Stop yelling,” he said. “you’re going to wake Johnny-Bob up.” He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. God, would Benny’s name ever just leave him blank? Would a time come like that? “This narrow-minded, ninny little town,” he said, “I’m fed up! I hate it!”

He probably loved Bastrop better than anyone living there, and he knew it. The same way the “real” New Yorkers, the bona-fide Manhattan romanticizers were uprooted from places like Ida Grove, Iowa; White River Junction, Vermont; Naples, Italy — a generation back, or Geneva, New York; Newark, Ohio — adopting New York; becoming its adopted son. As he was here in Bastrop, after years of youth spent wandering in cities; then as a young man finding the small town he’d known existed from reading Sinclair Lewis novels, and the “home,” the “girl next door.” Not quite, Benny; but oh, we were “it” just the same! Me and Benny.

Cass said, “That’s a good answer. It’s the town’s fault.” She walked over and sat down at her dressing-table mirror.

“If the town would only leave you and Delia Benjamin to yourselves, everything would just be ducky, wouldn’t it?”

“All right,” he said, “she came to see me.”
I’m back, Chad,
that fear-filled time that ached with the insufficiency of any drama, and too much beauty-pain, and memory.

“I know
that.”

“Look, Cass, she lost something, see? She lost a letter and she came to see me,” he said; from across years through doubt and impotent wonder, stepping into today more suddenly than the shock of seeing her last night, to say, “I lost a letter.”

“Because you’re the Lost and Found Department. Well, that makes some sense. Umm-hmmm. What else?”

“If you’d stop rubbing grease all over your face, I’d tell you what else! She came about a letter she lost! Pure and simple. She said she didn’t know who else to go to! I didn’t ask her to come!”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was going to.” Maybe I was, he thought.

He got up from the bed and went across to her in his stocking feet, kneeling by her vanity chair. “This is silly, Cass. This is silly. She doesn’t mean anything to me. I knew you’d be upset if I told you she’d visited me?’

“Oh, you did, ah? Why did you think that?”

He saw the stubborn dent in her chin. There would be no use to explain, he knew; and that was all right too. He would have trouble explaining himself if Cass were listening to him in a reasonable frame of mind.

“Never mind,” he said, “we won’t discuss it.”

She said, “I’m not going to be made a laughingstock all over town.”

“What? Cass, what are you talking about? She just came to see me!”

“You know the Nigras learn things first,” she said; “they always do. Well — ” she screwed the jar of cold cream tightly with a quick jerk to her arm — ”tonight Ginny made the bed up in Johnny-Bob’s room before she left!”

“She’s just crazy!” Jack said. “She probably heard us arguing and took a notion to do it.”

Cass said, “She never did it before!”

Then she kicked back the vanity chair and aimed the cold cream jar at the three-winged dressing-table mirror. “Benny!” she said above the noise of shattering glass. “Damn her guts!”

Out on the front porch of the Benjamins’, Dee sat beside him in the glider, the big red moon giving light to them — their drinks on the round tin table, his long legs stretched out in front of him, shoes kicked off; and her own heels set side by side near the wicker chair, her legs drawn up under her. He had managed to get very drunk.

“… when it came the day to auction my folks’ house up,” he said, “I fixed myself some dinner in the kitchen. There was only some old dehydrated soup there, and I boiled it up for dinner. I remember when I poured it out into the bowl, there were bugs swimming in it. Must have come from the soup that was years old, and only the maids ate anyway. I ate the soup anyway, I remember. I kidded about it. Better get used to bugs in the soup, boy, I kidded myself, and bugs in the beds, cause the money’s all gone. Pffttt!”

He took a swallow of the Scotch, and leaned back against the glider. “We were rich once, Dee. R-i-c-h!” Another swallow, finishing what was in his glass. “Are you drunk?” he asked.

She said, “No.”

“I’m not either,” he said.

She got up, “I’ll make us another. Don’t know where Mama could be. Never known her to go out and leave the lights burning before.” She passed in front of him, “I won’t be a minute.”

Now she thought: how can I get rid of him? She felt tired and longed to be free to run a hot bath to soak in before bed. Buddy’s speech was getting thick, and he had already become fixed in that aura of utter self-absorption which Maur used to call the: “I never knew why nurse took teddybear away” mood — ”until
one day.”

God, she missed Maur!

“I’ll come too,” she heard behind her. “I’ll help you.”

He walked somewhat unsteadily, leaning into a table as he passed.

“Okay?” she said. She waited while he came to the kitchen door.

He stopped and looked at her, looked fully at her, slowly.

She was caught between being amused by him, or annoyed with him. He was handsome and ingenuous and incredibly obvious.

“Why didn’t you want to go out to the Dip?” he said.

“I told you. It would be pointless. If I couldn’t find the letter by day, I certainly couldn’t find it by night.”

“Are you drunk yet?” he said.

“No, but
you
are, Richard. I think we better call it a night, all right?”

“So you’re a nigger-lover,” he said. “Well, well, well … A rich nigger-lover.”

His eyes were narrowing in a peculiarly vicious way which gave his whole face a new cast. Dee was fascinated with the change. He seemed to have disintegrated suddenly, like a Dorian Gray, and now he seemed no longer young or good-looking or naive, but like some seedy teen-ager who looked too old for his age, too nasty and clever in an ugly sense.

“I’m going to kick you out now, Mr. Buddy,” she said. “The bar is closing.”