Two Shades of Morning Page 11

  Sibyl seemed oddly more subdued after she got home from the hospital than when she was there, sick or whatever. Less animated; she was almost lovely, wan and toned-down, inconspicuously steadying herself against a wall until her very silence drew our attention. Robert Dale would jump up and lead her to a chair and she’d push him away. She would shake her head bravely, then end up leaning into him after all.

  One night, after we’d finished eating, she got up from the table, enviably thinner, and left the room.

  Robert Dale watched her go, gazing where she’d walked across the floor as though she’d left muddy tracks. “She doesn’t have long,” he said and bowed his head. His cowlick, whorled on the crown, made him look pathetic.

  “Ain’t no law says they can’t be wrong.” P.W.’s jaw twitched, his eyes fixed on a congealing scrap of fat pared from his steak.

  “I don’t look for it,” said Robert Dale, listening to the hollow tread of her steps on the second floor.

  I knew they expected me to follow, to check on her, but I sat and watched each of their faces grow stale with her absence and relished not having been swayed into my usual spring-board compassion. I smiled sweetly. Truth was, I could have killed her if she hadn’t been already dying.

  “You reckon there’s any truth to Emmet Allen running for sheriff again next term?” P.W. was picking his teeth.

  Robert Dale laughed. “I wouldn’t figger him for that big a fool.”

  P.W. jabbed his toothpick into the crescent of fat. “You never can tell,” he said. “Sheriff Walker has been in just about long enough to run up enough enemies to turn the table.”

  In 1961, I’d gone with Robert Dale to the courthouse in Little Town to help bury the defeated politicians to make up for having gone with P.W. to the Future Farmers banquet the Friday night before. Paybacks that cost.

  The rain had relaxed to a drizzle that March Monday night, having all day soused the heads of voters scurrying in and out of the new courthouse to cast ballots for the county commissioners, the board of education and the sheriff.

  Robert Dale had been excited that night, his usually pale face brightened by the pine torches he’d passed out to the crowd from the stack on back of his pickup. Handing one to me, he’d stepped into the mob of rowdy men, women and children, relighting dampened torches from his own. Everything took on a reddish cast: the rain-glazed leaves of the live oaks, the white clapboard front of Moore’s store across the road. The darkness itself, wreathed in smoke, deflected the flares, and the heavy odor of burning pine tar pressed down on the muggy air. At the crossing, the single traffic light mirrored on the wet streets like glass. The torches hissed and flared in the drizzle against a background of jeering, moiling strangers whose sane faces I saw everyday. The mock burials, though in jest, never failed to seem sadistic. I’d heard so many stories of cross-burnings by the Ku Klux Klan on the courthouse square, a decade before, that somehow I’d begun to link them with the burials. Those savage nights in a patch of firelight where familiar faces became those of strangers.

  As the torches flared along the sidewalk, creating rickrack borders of red, Mr. Sam, our neighbor, jaunted out through the breezeway of the flat modern courthouse with his florid face lit by flames. Crossing the square of lawn to the pine platform, he struggled up with one hand on his knee while the crowd shouted for the election results.

  Robert Dale laced his fingers with mine and squeezed; I returned the squeeze and wondered what kind of signal I’d sent. Neither of us had taken much interest in the election: Chester Hughes would serve as effectively as Spike Thomas for county commissioner. Emmett Allen would enforce our diluted laws as well as Sheriff Walker. Who cared? But shy as Robert Dale was, he loved a crowd, maybe because he could blend.

  “Y’all hush up now, so I can give you what you come for,” hooted Mr. Sam through a megaphone of hands. His green plaid shirt took on a purplish tint in the reddish light. “Lemme see,” he said, squinting at the sheet of paper in his hand, then holding it up to a torch lifted to the edge of the platform. “Well, folks, looks like Sheriff Walker’ll be going back in.”

  “Somebody put our some money!” a man behind me hooted.

  The crowd clapped, a couple of them booing.

  “Y’all reckon y’all can put up with old Spike a while longer?” Mr. Sam hollered above the racket, lifting both arms.

  They clapped again, some of the torches floated off and back. A few disappointed sighs.

  Robert Dale squeezed my hand again, and I looked at his radiant face, thinking how he didn’t really care, how he loved a winner, how I loved him. I wished he was my brother.

  The crowd got restless during the announcement of the same old slate of names for board of education.

  “Now, y’all have at ‘em!” Mr. Sam crept down from the platform with his shoulders scrunched as though to duck a hail of gravel.

  Robert Dale dropped to his knees, molding a grave between two others, greedily raking sand with his arms from the piles each side. Somebody handed him a pair of black boots and he punched the boot tops, soles up, in the foot of the mound. Somebody else passed a tobacco pipe for Robert Dale to stab into the head of the grave. Emmett Allen’s cap, snatched from his thatch of wild hair, was placed above it. I eased forward and set a cracked vase of dead flowers before the cap.

  Still kneeling, Robert Dale leveled the sand on the sidewalk at the foot of the grave, and like a child, he began writing with a stick: “1961, Emmett Allen.”

  Stepping back from the dying pandemonium to look at the line of fresh graves, my eyes smarting from the smoke, I thought about what Aunt Birdie had said about death being like the sun, too strong to look at.

  I was doing the impossible with Sybil.

  * * * * *

  PART THREE

  * * * * *

  Chapter 8

  When I saw trucks with trailers pull up to the barn and the horses led out and hauled away, I didn’t think it was the end of Sibyl; I thought it was the beginning of a new phase. It was. For both of us.

  Everything went that was accessory to Sharpe’s ranch, except the barn. The corral was leveled and the hoof-spade dirt sprigged with centipede, which had to be irrigated because of that dry July. From the corral, sloping to Bony Branch, a woods plot was cleared of myrtle and gallberries, leaving a few scrub-oaks and pines importantly encased in wooden frames.

  Punk, who was back at work for Sibyl after a few weeks off in the gum woods, hauled off load after load of burned rubble. At first, he acted perky and interested, sorting through charred pots, blasted jars and splintered mirrors to take home with him, but as Sibyl came out to boss him, he soon took on his old cowering pose. Dressed in a white voile dress and a straw hat with a broad brim, trimmed in lavender ribbon, she looked like a model in a Victorian magazine. Four carpenters came and built a latticed gazebo on the banks of the unclogged branch, and over the stream of surly black water they put up an arched footbridge that led into the ferny woods. After painting the bridge and the gazebo white, they painted the house a wintry gray, two coats to cover the red. (Miss Louise called me and asked if I could tell from where I was if that was gray paint or shadows creeping up the sides of Sibyl’s house. I said it was paint. She said Lavenia bet her a nickel it was shadows, thanks.)

  White shutters accented the windows, with a new window added, a spacious bay on the front that gave the blocky shell house more character. The barn, which I’d guessed would stay, was painted gray too, then landscaped with boxwoods. The inside of the barn, after all traces of manure and hay had been shoveled into trucks, was as empty as my imagination.

  I only watched as the contents of the house were scooped out and refilled with traditional furniture and the walls washed down with tones of yellow and ivory. The carport became a sunroom with white wicker furniture, card tables and books. Lots of books, many leather bound, a bouquet of book mold replacing the odor of engine oil. Inset mahogany bookshelves lined the west wall, beyond which another carport had bee
n built as a port for Sibyl’s new silver Thunderbird.

  After she had given orders to the carpenters and the furniture companies, she went away to her mother’s in Orlando, leaving Robert Dale and Mae in charge. Mae now wore starched white uniforms—the nurse kind—which made her look stiff and formal. As the old went out and the new came in, she would stand and wag her head. Nothing surprised me.

  P.W. and I started sleeping together again, but we no longer talked just to be talking. We talked about bills and crops and rushed together hungrily and came away satisfied, then went our separate ways, him to fields to gather what was left of his drought-stricken tobacco, and me to tending our tiny trailer. Sometimes I really felt that P.W. tried to love me—tried too hard. I couldn’t go back to Mama’s and Daddy’s—at least I didn’t want to—and be their little girl again, and staying with P.W., the way we were, made me miserable, like having a toothpick wedged between my teeth. I learned patience then, praying Sibyl’s grip would soon let go.

  But when she got home a few weeks later, everything started again. She was predictably friendly, happy with her new Orlando wardrobe and had a fresh grasp on acting brave. She’d bought a new camera and Robert Dale used up rolls of film on her wandering the banks of Bony Branch or sitting inside the gazebo, pensively gazing off at the summer-green woods. P.W. sat with her sometimes late in the evenings before he came home, and I could see them from my window drinking from tall glasses in the shade of the gazebo, their latticed faces still and sad, like he was waiting with her for death to come galloping through the moss-swaged oaks.

  Often, she strolled alone over the footbridge and into the woods in her lovely silk dresses and straw hats with matching ribbons. And sometimes the other boys, the basketball players, would walk with her too. She would take off her hat, hold it before her and turn it by the brim, the way women do in the movies. The boys, not laughing when she laughed, tipped me off to her making light of her own dying.

  She was interesting to watch then, and I wondered what kind of impression she would have made on me if I’d never met her. I seldom went over there anymore, but I didn’t like her any better from a distance. I was still stinging from the last time. I gained strength though from that new perspective, looking out at her in her fantasy world, but it shocked me to realize that the one thing that kept me put was believing she would soon be gone. Finally, I knew she would die; she was too pale to last, too extinguished and feeble, her feebleness disguised as an attitude of leisure. A look that worked well for her.

  She said she wanted Miss Nona to have her books when she was gone—Miss Nona was the one who had given Sibyl a list of what to buy. She wouldn’t leave them to the library of course, because the State might not respond with proper personal and prompt thanks and salve her ego. I doubted whether she had ever even read a book, except maybe some condensed version on antiques. She didn’t need books for adventure or escape.

  For some reason the books caused me to wonder about Sibyl’s past. She made frequent trips to Orlando, always had when life lulled at home, so I supposed she was close to her family. But when old portraits of ancestors began facing each other across her living room, I didn’t believe they were kin. I figured she’d picked them up in art galleries or bought them from estate sales, which she went to all over Georgia and Florida. The portraits were too grand, the faces too aristocratic. They didn’t mesh with Sibyl’s showy manners and blunt speech. Those ancestors were of a class who would have choked before they’d have spoken without considering what they said. Sibyl simply lacked their aristocratic bearing: the tilt of her chin was too practiced; theirs was as natural as their fine, tipped noses. There was no resemblance to this father and mother and grandparents, two whole sets, all watching Sibyl’s daily whims from their vantage points on the ivory walls.

  Where did her money come from? I no longer worried that Robert Dale was living above his means, getting loans and such. I began to suspect that Sibyl was a crook. She was always so public and yet so private about those out-of-town trips.

  During that phase, she seemed to be trying to lure me back, and although I went by once in a while, I never really encouraged her. I didn’t know why she wanted me there, because I was barely civil when I went and never bragged on any her new things.

  Then she gave me a gift, the most useless and spiteful gift that can be given by someone you hate.

  #

  P.W. and I had again been summoned (the word invited won’t do) to go out to dinner. Mae came and told me and I told her to tell Miss Sibyl that I said no, but thanks. Mae brightened, waiting at the door. “Yas ‘um, sho will.” And off she trotted to tell, glad to be of service. I didn’t trust her either.

  The phone rang, just as I’d expected, and I waited for it to stop. I’d folded up bed sheets before they were good dry and a line of tiny black ants were trailing along the folds. The phone still rang shrilly. Glancing at it, I brushed at the ants and slung my hand. What really burned me up was not knowing ants would do that and, as with over-shooting a guess on how many cups of rice would yield enough for two, I’d had to ask Mama what went wrong. The phone was still ringing, even the silence between rings irritating. I had to answer it or leave, so I dropped the sheet and snatched the receiver up to my ear.

  “Erlie? What’s wrong?” Sibyl said, her voice as shrill as the ringing still in my head. “What’s right?” I said.

  She laughed. “Listen, Mae said you won’t be able to go out to eat with us tonight.”

  “Truth is, I have better things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “File my nails, watch TV, visit my mother-in-law...”

  “Well, that’s funny,” she said. “P.W. said y’all can go. We’re all going to the show to see ‘Gone with the Wind.’“ She waited.

  “He must have forgotten about my nails.”

  “Listen, I really hope you’ll go. I’ve got something special I want to show you. Well, really, it’s something I bought to leave to you after I’m gone.”

  That took the starch out of me. I couldn’t imagine anything she would give me. With all the furnishings and knick-knacks I figured she’d had hauled off to the dump, she’d never offered me a thing. I was curious. I told her we’d go, not because I wanted something from her, but because I wanted to see what she would choose to leave me, and maybe if I got lucky it might help explain what had made me so cold and suspecting. It might explain Sibyl.

  #

  She insisted that I drive that night and wouldn’t have it any other way. I just had to drive a T-bird, just once, she said.

  I drove because P.W. said I couldn’t, that I’d never driven anything but Daddy’s old Buick and his truck. They all laughed, so I took them on the fastest ride I could manage in the rain—the first we’d seen in six weeks.

  “You’re gonna get us killed,” Sibyl chortled from the rear seat, as if that would be a lark.

  “Slow down, dammit!” P.W. shouted. I was driving ninety, smack-dab into starbursts of rain.

  “Earlene,” said Robert Dale in my ear, “how bout letting up on it, honey.”

  I slowed to sixty and tried to hold it there, then looked over at P.W. whose eyes were fixed on the highway. “I’m sorry,” I lied. “I was just having a good time; I’ve never driven anything but Daddy’s Buick and your old truck.”

  He glared at me and then gazed out at the rain that had come too late to save but maybe half his tobacco crop. Like it or not, he’d have to get a low-interest farmers’ loan to cover the cost of the fertilizer.

  Sibyl tapped me on the shoulder. “All right, you two lovebirds, kiss and make up,” she said and sat back, laughing. Everything was funny to her, on the way into Tallahassee. She’d always claimed not to “believe” in wearing perfume, since her early romance with roses, but her heavy musk cologne was stifling.

  I lowered the window a little, feeling the spit of rain cold on my shoulder.

  Robert Dale said something to Sibyl and her laughter filled the car. They s
ounded like they were necking, something I’d never seen them do. A scuffle, a rustle, a giggle: Sibyl.

  I clung to the trill of frogs in the woods along the highway, terrified of the T-bird. A single twitch of my toe seemed to touch it off reflexively, but I never showed I was afraid, and maybe I was more excited than scared. I held my head high and acted as if I knew my way around. But I welcomed the bright lights of Tallahassee reflected on the black satin streets and got braver when the boys cruising in the next lane starting flirting. Braking at a traffic light, I waved at a boy in a red car, and out of the corner of my eye, watched P.W. puff up, and I thought maybe he was trying too hard to act indifferent.

  “Erlie!” Sibyl scolded, laughing as if she admired my spunk.

  Never once during that slow, tortuous drive through double lanes of traffic up Main Street did she try to draw attention to herself, and when I realized it I felt fuzzy, swallowed up in the bucket seat. It was so like her to always draw attention to herself, but then it was also like her to be unpredictable. Maybe she thought P.W. would slap me in front of God and everybody stalled in steamy traffic—the windhield was fogging up—and that was why she let me be the star of the show for once. But he didn’t, and I did as I pleased, zipping the window down to talk to the boy in the red car, then zipping it up again just short of promising to stop at Shoney’s to meet him, then shooting off in a battle of gravel. But I wasn’t pleased. I was shaking inside, heartsick and hatesick. I’d never done a daring thing I could recall. If I’d gone anywhere before, it had been with my folks or with P.W. or Robert Dale or both. I wished I’d never met either of them and then Sibyl wouldn’t be like a pack on my back.

  Of all things, I parked that silver car parallel in front of Western Sizzling, while Robert Dale and P.W. craned their necks left, right and rear and Sibyl shrieked. I parked it without a scratch, got out and stood, collecting my scattered nerves like jackstones, and set off beside them to the restaurant, a steak house chosen for me because I loved red meat, Sibyl said, even if it did make me fat.