Two Shades of Morning Read online

  Sitting at the dining table, I took the rubber band from the notes and thumbed through the stack. Most of the flowers had been sent by businesses in Tallahassee where Sibyl had shopped. A few were from people in Little Town who could afford to send flowers. Most considered sending flowers a waste and gave money to the family instead. I thought of the flowers banked around the mausoleum, now beaten by the rain, and of the empty candle mount brimming and spilling to the dirt to create a gully to the river where if would run to the sea, evaporate and form a cloud and rain down again. My contribution.

  Robert Dale came in, bringing with him the damp green scent of rain. He shed his cap and jacket on a stool beside the door and cut his eyes at each of us, shy as a boy who knows he’s the center of attention.

  “Reckon it’s gone be fairing off this evening?” Aunt Birdie asked.

  “Don’t look like it. Does it?” While talking to her, he watched me rewinding the rubber band on the stack of cards. Then he reached for his jacket and pulled a twist of mail from the pocket and tossed it to the table, where it fanned. I couldn’t help noticing that many of the return addresses on the letters were the same as the addresses on the thank-you notes. “Bills,” he said between gritted teeth, as if there was no use hiding anything now. He crossed the kitchen to help Miss Lettie find just the right “waiter” for her biscuits. Sifting flour furiously into a bowl in the sink, her rangy body quivered head to foot, hurrying as if somebody was starving and her biscuits might same them. He pilfered noisily in the cabinet, around her knees, withdrawing a shiny cookie sheet and holding it up to make a point of her having overlooked it. He smirked at her, then grinned at me, picked up his dripping jacket and traipsed through the kitchen to the living room.

  I’d thought with Sibyl in her grave I was done with contradictions; but here Robert Dale puts on a great show of disgust over the same bills he must have seen month-in and month-out since Sibyl.

  #

  After dinner, I rode with him to mail the notes, not wanting to stay at Sibyl’s, not wanting to go home, not wanting to go with him either. He was dull-eyed and bland, staring through the windshield at the rain spanking the hood of the truck. At the post office, he bought stamps for the cards and I picked up my mail while Miss Nona talked with her lips tucked. Then, to please her, we glanced through the special rack of southern books on one of the dove plaster walls of the tomblike room. The fluorescent lighting was headachy bright in contrast to the gray outside.

  I’d never liked the new post office, all chrome and sterile efficiency, smart black boxes welded together to wall off the postmistress from the public. Miss Nona treated the wall of boxes like any other wall, ignoring it and sliding the mail across the counter designed for special mailing. I’d never even learned the combination to my box.

  In the old steep, gingerbread-house post office, transferred for a tobacco pack house to the vacant lot across from the church, the boxy slots had been a game. No one ever closed the flimsy tin doors of their boxes, and a jumble of crates and string-tied brown paper packages could be seen stacked against the seasoned rear wall, a pattern of squares to be put together like a puzzle. The reddish-grained wainscoting in the front section had been plastered with black and white wanted posters, exhibiting easily identifiable criminals: a scar, hard eyes, mean expressions. Now a neat Rollerdex, set to one side of a dove Formica table, offered an array of dubious criminals, no more suspicious looking than my own mug shot on my driver’s license.

  Robert Dale yawned, sliding a book by Flannery O’Connor back into its space on the shelf, while Miss Nona talked about everything but Sibyl, whose donated books were displayed by the door. No sign—nothing—giving credit to Sibyl for what I figured was her sole separation with what had set her up as separate.

  “We can sure use the rain,” said Miss Nona, “but I reckon it’s bad on people trying to get their hay in.” She laced her boneless white hands on the counter (those magnolia hands had won the prize at an Avon party for bringing up the most dirt when rubbed with a special lotion). “What was that book you were looking at, Little Robert Dale?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, staring at the row of identical green bindings. Despite the harsh smell of new in the square room, there was a warm feel of aged books.

  “Y’all need to check out something,” she said, pushing her glasses up on the bridge of her pinched nose. “Neither one of you didn’t join the Summer Reading Program.”

  “I been way too busy, Miss Nona,” said Robert Dale.

  Her bug eyes shifted to me, and I picked a random stack of books, then waited for her to clank the stamp from pad to pockets, the clanking remarkable under the shower of even flouresence and the lonesome rain falling outside. Mourning veils of gray over our eyes.

  #

  It seems significant now that Robert Dale drove past his house to mine, letting me out and driving that hop-and-a-skip back. Not the distance seems significant, but the sudden detachment, after my having strained against the leash of his gaze for two days. Then, it was a relief, maybe assurance that he was getting strong again or cleaning up the shards of glass from the shattered windows of his privacy.

  Alone in the trailer—except for Sibyl’s portrait above the TV—

  I shuffled through my and P.W.’s mail. Communal mail. Our final electricity bill, significantly thirty dollars even. A bill from Miss Crawford, thanking me in blue ink for my last ten dollars and asking for ten more—the last of the ten-dollars-a-month, thank God! But she sent me a color brochure with pictures of more dresses, her fall line, one of them a plain two-piece pink suit for $99.95: ten dollars down and ten a month for the rest of my life—no, thanks!

  But I can’t say I wasn’t tempted, and I can’t say I didn’t picture myself in that suit, ten pounds thinner. But where would I wear it? A shock ran through me, realizing I didn’t even know where I might be in a week, in a month, this time next year—certainly not here, and I didn’t know where. I couldn’t imagine going back home and picking up where I’d left off: a virgin in mint condition, dewy fresh and chaste.

  A hot salty fluid rushed to my face and seeped through my eyes—more of my not-crying, as at the funeral the day before. I swallowed and shook my head, sorting through the rest of the mail. A letter from a high school friend—insignificant: she hadn’t been in on Sibyl’s drama.

  I flipped the light switch beside the table, flushing the early dusk from the room and sharpening the pencil scrawl on a small bulging envelope. My name in sloping cursive—”miss earlene”—small letters all, no address, no return address, no postage. Something about the scrawl and the handle “miss” seemed typical, and the fact that there was no postmark seemed typically Mae. Only Mae could have wheedled Miss Nona out of free postage. That Mae had that power seemed significant, but I didn’t want to think about that. I tore open the envelope, stuffed with a crumpled sheet of lined notebook paper. Why would Mae write to me when she could walk over on the trail tramped through the woods from the quarters to Sibyl’s house?

  Stalling, I looked through the window at the clotted rain dripping from the eaves of the trailer, then down at the paper. One sentence set in the middle of the page—“come to the house soon as you can mae m”—as if she were whispering behind her hand.

  “Yeah, she wants money,” I said and decided to forget it, but I took the note with me to the refrigerator, holding it cold in my hand while considering a bowl of congealed brown field peas. I’d skip supper. At the table again, I read it again and felt colder.

  P.W. was gone in the truck, so I had no way to go to Mae’s; but even if he’d been there, I would have had to explain why I was going to the quarters alone at night, and he probably would have said no. It didn’t occur to me at first that I could have told him to go to hell, or that I could have lied and said I was going to the store for milk until I told the same lie to borrow Robert Dale’s truck. And still I wasn’t taking the letter seriously. Going was just something to do to while away time be
tween voids. Going was telling P.W. to go to hell.

  Robert Dale was asleep, but Miss Lettie said for me to take his truck anyway, then took forever to scrap up enough change for a half-carton of eggs. By the time I got away, it was almost dark, rain ticking drowsily from the oaks onto the truck cab—the sound meaningful only if you counted the ticks, the intervals between, full of cricket song, voids only if you forgot them.

  The quarters started where the school yard stopped, and one more broad-bursting oak to shower the truck with ticking, then I could see the naked lights through doors of the row shanties as I mentally ducked under the old smoking tree. Rolling fires in crumbling fireplaces, hot to the eye and symbolic of skewed compliance with seasons, with white people’s ways; runners of soot along the slumped brick chimneys, evidence that fires, symbolic or not, did burn wild at night in the quarters. Children and dogs roiling in the run-on yards, around wash pots black as their hides and the gathering night. Chickens fluttering to roost in the thriving chinaberries and stunted persimmons. The round dark face of a tiny girl loomed from the light of a yardfire, shadows licking the sheen of barren earth. One braid, standing on her crown, was wound with a glittery elastic band that I recognized as Sibyl’s. The little girl spirited into a ghostly spiral of smoke, then skipped with it across the road ahead of the truck.

  Curving left along the crescent of houses, facing the school softball field, I wondered if I’d know which shanty belonged to Mae. But in the raw light spilling onto one of the porches, I spied a section of Sibyl’s white curved sofa. I pulled over and parked in the yard beside an umbrella chinaberry seeping raindrops to the leached wet sand. In the next yard, two children stared shock-eyed at the truck. One of them, an adolescent girl with new perked breasts, snapped her fingers and bopped away, a sudden song fleeting into the woods where dark started. A truck innertube quit rumbling and died in another yard, and a ring of rubber-black children materialized. They hopped off and skirled away, peering back at the truck.

  A round, brown woman in a white apron ambled out on the porch ahead with her hands on her hips and yelled through the open door for Mae. Two small children, with like stained skin, scamped down the doorsteps, trailing a gaggle of dogs. The little boy and girl stopped just short of the truck bumper, faces wiped clean of expression, while the dogs thronged to my door, raised muzzles swallowing their barks. The runty boy wore a pair of shorts, ballooned at the knees, fashioned from Sibyl’s blue chambry western shirt. Hands clasped behind and swaying, he eyed me, his tiny belly popped over the elastic waist like a tit. His nose ran two live yellow streams of snot, which he lapped at with his pink tongue, shaking his head as if disagreeing with himself.

  The other children had gathered, tucked into shadows of trees and junked cars and roving grownups, and for every child there was a scattered pop bottle, for every bottle a child, foil candy wrappers salient on the slick black dirt. And above all the fervor, the gutteral talk and laughter floated like confetti over the woods that separated them from Little Town like a seive. The smell of fying bacon drifted from the shanties and clashed with the wet green of trees and vines and the sour mud in gullies, sliding to the swamp where frogs formed a thick and langourous swell, like castanets. Neon coals of cigarettes, brothers to the lightening bugs, darted through the grainy dark. And behind all the flurry and fusion, the sounds of babies’ crying pealed on the quarters’ night like sirens at a distance.

  While waiting, I watched the blue-white candescence of television lights, flickering from doorways. Sounds of sitcom laughter harmonious, house to house, and converging.

  “Mae,” the old lady on the porch called again, “somebody out here to see you!” She moped into the front room where Sibyl’s white porcelain ballerina posed on top of the television set.

  Mae finally lumbered to the door, self-consciously pigeon-tied, and leaned on a porch post, peering out. She still wore the same white uniform, quite dirty now, and it glowed like a ghost. Sidestepping the scrabbling children and dogs, she swung from the broken steps, grumbling at the dogs and/ or children, who’d been deafened to any sound short of a dynamite blast.

  The little boy in shorts tipped on spindly legs behind her. She stopped quick and thrust her hands to her waist, hollering, “Get yo’self back to the house fore you catch yo death, hear me?” She stamped her bare foot on the receptive dirt, and he scuttled off to the eaveshadows of the porch.

  Chortling, speaking to the truck now, she said, “Mr...uh,” then recognizing me, laughed, her puffed-up body going slack. “Lawd, Miss Earlene,” she said, holding her stomach, laughing and lumbering on. “I sho thought you was Mr. Robert Dale, I natural did. Like to scared the living daylights out of me.” She leaned in the truck window, fanning her face with her hand.

  “I got your letter, Mae,” I said.

  “I like to died when I seen you driv up.” Her laughter claimed the dog’s yapping and the trill of frogs closing in from the woods. Then she turned to the boy, switching to mean. “I say get yo’self to the house!” she hollered, seriously, in the thick of it, and all the children backed, but the dogs, multiplying by the dozens, congregated and circled the truck. Dogs the color of sulphur and burnt motor oil, whose hides stretched over jutting ribs like sucked rubber.

  I crossed my arms on the steering wheel and waited for her sniggering face to lift from the open window, for the little boy to do what she’d said. He wandered to the canopy of the chinaberry and stood bowing his belly. “What did you want with me, Mae?” “I tell you what, Miss Earlene,” she started, propping her chin with her fist. “Me and Punk done bit off more’n we can chew.” She nodded toward the dark circle of the tree where I could now see a cigarette glowing.

  “Punk,” I called, “is that you?”

  “You can come on out, Punk, it be Miss Earlene. Come on,” Mae coaxed, motioning with one hand.

  The cigarette glow floated to the fringe of the dainy-leafed branches that bordered darkness from dusk and stayed.

  “He be like that,” she said to me. “Plum scared to death.”

  “Sho is now,” he said, a bodiless voice.

  “What of?” I asked.

  “Lawd, it be a mess! That how come me to write you in a letter to come to the house.” Mae ducked to the window again, snorting.

  “Well,” I said, “what is it?” Several children slipped to the shelter of the tree, death-still.

  “You be my witness, we ain’t no thefts, me nor Punk neither one. You be my witness.” She seemed to be speaking for the audience gathering under the tree. “I told Punk we could sho count on Miss Earlene. Didn’t I, Punk?”

  “Sho did now,” he said, whining down.

  “To what?”

  Mae’s large face loomed nearer. I could smell fried meat and tarry sweat.

  “You member that morning Miss Sibyl up and died?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you member telling me to stay put till everbody come with they food?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t no more stay than nothing. Know how come?”

  “How come?”

  “I had to get on to the house with this,” she said, extending a black fist with a brilliant diamond ring to my nose. “That be how come.”

  I backed and the fist followed with its illusion of double diamonds. “Whose is it?”

  “It be Miss Sibyl’s,” she said. “And that ain’t all, that ain’t all.” She cocked her head. “Show her your’n, Punk. Show Miss Earlene yo ring.”

  I heard a rustle under the tree, and a black hand shot out with a heart-shaped ring forced solid on a pinkie. Sibyl had jokingly called it her “dime-one ring” because it was more mount than diamond.

  “How’d y’all come by them?” I asked.

  “She left ‘em to us. Swear to God above! Next thing I know, she’d up and left ‘em to us with a letter said we could have ‘em. Not for nothing,” she added.

  The hand under the tree was gone; I wondered if Punk had gone too. “Wher
e’s the letter?” I said.

  “That bad youngun yonder et it.” She nodded toward the bow-bellied boy. “Got worms to beat all. “Soon as me and Punk got over being shook up and all, I says we best see can we save that letter for in case nobody don’t b’lieve us. Next thing I know...” She shook her head.

  I watched the little boy, still and waiting for what would drop next.

  “Ain’t the skeeters bad for this time of year, Miss Earlene? Aggravating things!” Mae slapped one on her forearm, watching the one-carat diamond nab the light from the porch. “Miss Earlene, you know what folk’s gone think when they finds out. Shore as I be breathing, they gone say me and Punk stold this stuff. Pro’bly done already have. You heared Mr. Robert Dale say anything?”

  “Not a word,” I said. “Did she give you her couch yonder, too?”

  “Who? Her!” Mae snorted, slinging her big head. “She ain’t never give me nothing but a hard time. Soon as I figgered out she was hauling her stuff off to the dump, I go get it. Picked up two pretty good settees. She ain’t never give nobody nothing, best of my beknowest, but that picture she got tooken of herself. Wouldn’t nobody be blaming you if you throwed it out, even if she do be dead. Me and Punk both ain’t never been nothing but sorry for you since the day that woman come. Is we Punk?”

  “Sho is now,” came slowly through the curtain of branches.

  “That be one aggravating white woman herself, even if she do be dead...”

  “Sho is now.”

  I wanted to leave then, because I knew what was coming, that I was now in with Mae and Punk, parteners in the Sibyl Hate Club.

  “You do be knowing about her and Mr. P.W.?” Mae whispered. I nodded.

  “She be jealous as she could, Miss Earlene”—her voice rose again—”say she like to snatch yo bleach-blond hair out by the roots. I told her it ain’t bleached. Say, ‘You think I look a dab like Miss Earlene?’ Always saying trash like that: ‘Little Miss Earlene, everbody’s beauty queen!’ Crazy woman! You oughta whupped her tail for carrying on with yo man, what I say. She be crazy bout that man to spite you.”