Two Shades of Morning Page 21

  “I been making up for lost time in the turpentine woods.”

  “Oh,” I said and listened for that old grudging tone of loss.

  Nothing.

  “Earlene, you want to come over and eat a bite. I got some hamburgers and junk.” He laughed self-consciously.

  “I guess so. When?”

  “Come when you get ready.”

  After hanging up the phone, I moved the cuckoo clock from the kitchen chair to the table and sat down, watching the fake brown house with the gaudy clock face and the tiny door from which the living-dead bird might spring out and shock me. Obviously P.W. hadn’t gone by to see Robert Dale before he had left? I’d hoped maybe they’d seen each other on the road and had stopped to talk, or at the Georgia/Florida line where they used to go for a game of pool—before Sibyl, who like the time had changed them. She’d called their game “billiards,” correcting them, and they had quit playing.

  If there had been any jealously between P.W. and Robert Dale, I think I would have sensed it, and I never did. They seemed to have simply drifted away again, just as they had out of high school, each caught up in his own troubles: P.W. kicked out by his daddy—what money and work he’d invested in the tobacco crop, gone—his lover dead and his wife as good as dead; caught by the draft like a coon in a trap. And Robert Dale... His simple world had taken on the complexion of the universe, as vast and bleeding with change as a tie-dyed sky.

  #

  “Guess you heard me and P.W. split up?”

  “Yeah, I heard,” Robert Dale said, going still with surprise anyway. “I’m sorry.” He looked down at his hamburger with its crumbly bun.

  “Did he tell you?”

  “No.” He seemed so uncomfortable that I was sorry I’d brought it up.

  “You up to going through some of Sibyl’s stuff with me?” he asked.

  I realized I’d not really seen his eyes since I’d come in; he remained looking down, which could mean he’d been drinking. We finished eating and left the dishes on the table, under a single dull bulb of the crystal chandelier, rotating with night bugs. Nothing of Sibyl remained downstairs, except an odd scatter of her furniture, now strung with Robert Dale’s dirty clothes.

  I told him to go on up, I had to go to the bathroom. I stood in the lit pink bathroom, off the living room, and waited till I heard his footsteps muted by the carpet overhead. Then I turned off the light, tiptoed out to the kitchen and began opening and closing the drawers to the left of the sink. There I learned, for one thing, that Sibyl was no less a packrat than the rest of us rats: a ball of foil, a doubled bow of cotton string, gooey rubber bands, and a scatter of red twistems from plastic bags of bread. And then I found what I was looking for, a common twenty-five cent Blue Horse writing tablet damning Punk and Mae to about a year’s worth of pay-back labor. Uh huh!

  I ripped out two pages of notes on two and five and ten-dollar loans. Folded it and slipped it into the right pocket of my faded blue jeans. Got it!

  I figured that Robert Dale no longer slept in his and Sibyl’s room, because contrasted with the rest of the house, it was too neat, too reeking of her sweet frivolous smells, crushed rose petals and spice. Spindly-legged and boyish, he looked strange standing before her open closet bursting with colors and textures—no strong colors, but textures at once coarse and fine, like silk and burlap.

  “Look at this,” he said—not really to me—and draped a dangling price tag and label across his hand. From left to right he dragged his hand, trailing tags from dresses and blouses and suits—a beautiful tweed one I’d never seen. “Never even wore ‘em,” he said. “Know anybody might could use them?”

  “Not right off,” I lied, thinking of several people around Little Town who needed them, who would never get beyond wishing for a blue silk dress or a cream crepe de chine blouse.

  He began lifting the clothes from the rack and placing them, hangers and all, in the cardboard box at his feet while I knelt beneath him, sorting through stacked shoe boxes. Dozens of them. I opened one and a pair of black patent stilettos spangled like sun on glass. After five or six boxes, I quit opening and started shaking them, losing interest—numb really—and simply stacked them against the outer wall of the closet. Shaking one box, with a pink flower border, I heard papers shuffling, corners knocking. I don’t know why but I looked back for Robert Dale, who had wandered to the bed to sort items from one cardboard box to another, before opening it.

  When I lifted the lid, I froze. Peeking from layers of yellowing envelopes and papers was a photo of me—a wedge of my thirteen-year-old face—the one I’d given to Robert Dale when I was thirteen. I remembered having kissed connected school pictures of myself in tight blonde curls, grinning with too many teeth. Snipping one from a row of identical Earlenes, I’d scrawled “Love always to P.W.” across the back, then on the next, “Love always to Robert Dale.” Aunt Birdie had stood over me and watched as I admired Mama’s pink lipstick slanted across my pudgy neck and face in the tiny wallet-sized photos. “Don’t never put nothing down in writing to come back and haunt you,” she’d said.

  In all that time, the lipstick hadn’t smudged, just got pinker. Leaving the picture and picking through the papers, I found one of my triangular folded love notes to Robert Dale, his name penciled on the outside in silvery cobweb scrawl. I didn’t have to read it to know what it said. I’d written the same thing in all of those notes, meaningless stuff, and yet it seemed so meaningful in point of fact that Sibyl had kept it.

  There were other notes and letters I didn’t open—wouldn’t open. But like public courthouse records of crimes, they made my skin crawl with the temptation to peep, a weakness as common and necessary as doors since Eden. Somehow, I’d get rid of them all.

  One of my beauty contest pictures, an 8 X 10 from a package special, was on the bottom of the box, a black and white glossy. It was curled and streaked and showed me being crowned by some girl who the camera had severed at the arms. I couldn’t even remember her name.

  God, I couldn’t believe Sibyl had found and kept my pictures! I felt both mad and flattered that she had. I knew Robert Dale hadn’t been responsible for holding onto and stashing them away. He’d always tossed everything on the kitchen table for Miss Lettie and Miss Avie Nell to take care of or throw out.

  Reprints of my beauty contest pictures had been placed about: on the wall beside the basketball trophy case in the hall at school, alongside the former queens; on Aunt Birdie’s bedside table; on the buffet in Mama’s and Daddy’s dining room; even Miss Eular had one, a little one, she kept in a cigar box packed with other pictures.

  I looked at my picture, lining the bottom of the box, again trying to recall who was crowning me with the rhinestone tiara. I’d smiled too big and my top gums showed on the right side. But I had been pretty, still hadn’t changed that much. I was prettier than anybody in Little Town now. Rifling once again through the yellowing envelopes—one quite old—I thought how there was probably something in the shoe box for anybody who had ever come close to measuring up to Sibyl, but probably none of what the envelopes contained was important. We were all skeletons in Sibyl’s closet.

  Going back to my triangular folded love note, feeling the thick sharp corners, I hated her for having read it, love-chocked and innocent as it was. And I was glad I hadn’t gone all the way with Robert Dale. A lot of boys would lie to girls and tell them they were married in their hearts to get them to have sex. Robert Dale nor P.W. ever did that.

  After squaring the lid on the shoe box with the pink frieze, I set it in the corner again till I could figure how to get rid of it, and began sorting through more shoes, trying to concentrate—why? Such a waste, shoes by the dozens hardly worn or never worn, and such a waste of my time. But I kept at it, till finally Robert Dale spoke, and I caught the second note of disgust concerning Sibyl.

  “Listen, Earlene,” he said. “If you want any of this junk, take it.” His voice came strange after an hour of being spelled by the buzz of
night quiet.

  I wanted to say no, but was afraid it would come off ungrateful. I would have loved having some of her lovely things but nothing would fit, and besides I couldn’t afford another momento.

  “Ask me anything you want to,” he said, behind me—I was at that point digging shopping bags of unused stockings and footies and doodads from one corner of her closet. I withdrew my head and stared up at him, his brown eyes glassy with... what? discovery, resignation? He switched on the ceiling light, overpowering the brass lamps each side of the bed.

  “I know you got to be wondering about all this,” he said, hanging his hands on his low-slung waist with his hip cocked.

  I got up and sat on the edge of the bed, and he came over and sat beside me, shoving the box at his right elbow away. Still, he laced his fingers between his long scrawny legs and hung his head. “Well, to tell the truth,” he said, “I’m bad in debt for all this junk.” “Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to just...”

  “Just cause I feel I owe you something for bringing Sibyl here to bust you and P.W. up?”

  “She didn’t.” I tossed a plastic bag of outdated costume jewlery from the bed to the box between us, resting my hand on the edge. I wouldn’t be caught dead in costume jewlery, she’d said somewhere in the valley of her ruse.

  “If I can’t talk to you, I can’t talk to nobody,” he said, squeezing my hand on the box brimming with Sibyl. A dress pattern with a Kress Dimestore stamp and a square of folded red taffeta shimmered in the light. She had never sewed.

  “You can talk to me all night,” I said and swallowed and watched the slump of his shoulders beneath his green-plaid shirt. I felt I should hug him, let him cry on my shoulder, but his weak-coffee eyes were clear, his face only faintly strained. A small scar above his tight upper lip gleamed with sweat. I tried to recall how he’d gotten the scar and couldn’t and was reminded there was a side of him I didn’t know.

  “I’m not fixing to try to tell you how come I got myself in such a mess,” he said. “I did it to my ownself, as they say, and I swear I believe I’d do it again.”

  I caught my breath; he thumbed the pages of a new magazine on top of a stack at his right elbow. The magazine was Golf Digest, and I knew—finally knew something—that neither of them had played golf.

  Despite my shock, coming in waves, my mind kept flitting to the shoe box with the pink frieze, more important in light of his telling. My ears rang in harmony with the katydids outside. I could smell bugs hot against the overhead bulb, could hear a persistent ping ping of their husk bodies batting the window screens.

  “I married Sibyl because she was so dang beautiful and exciting,” he announced. “I reckon it could of been cause she was different too.”

  I felt ugly and chastened myself by pricking my finger on a beaded broach left on the down comforter.

  “She never was sweet like you, Erlie. Never. She was just different. I bet you’re wondering how come her to marry a nobody like me, huh?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean you’re not a nobody.”

  He laughed bitterly. “I never knew I wasn’t either till I met her.”

  “She never measured up to you,” I said, watching the light bounce from her gilt-framed mirror.

  He laughed and leaned back, propped on his hands, forgetting me, it seemed. “Well, Sibyl Sapp married me so she could die respectable. And that’s the Lord’s truth.” “Die respectable,” I repeated, dismissing my theory about the catchy double-S on the mausoleum and recalling Aunt Birdie’s theory about Sibyl’s short-cut to building character, her being thought well off instead of thought well of.

  “To die respectable,” he said again, and he might have been talking to himself. “Found out the hard way, after a long time of trying to give her enough. Finally, when the banks wouldn’t loan me any more money, I got into bootlegging.”

  “Robert Dale!” I gasped.

  “Yeah,” he said, his eyes going hard, “and it’s gonna be a long time before I can get out. Figgered I might sell off what I can and divide it amongst everybody she left owing, but I still can’t quit for a while.”

  “Just quit,” I said. “Quit right now!”

  “I can’t, sugar,” he said, going soft—soft all over. “Lord, I wish I could!”

  Until then, I thought, you’ll keep on bootlegging whiskey and using Mae and Punk and everybody... All for Sibyl.

  He got up and wandered between the rhomboid of boxes, then came back and sat in the same spot with his head bowed. “I can loan you my half of what I get from the trailer,” I said, touching his arm.

  “No,” he said, placing his hand on mine. “That’s sweet of you, honey, after all you been through. But it wouldn’t amount to a drop in the bucket, probably wouldn’t pay for half of this junk here.” “Well, you could sell your house...” He cut me off. “Ain’t mine, belongs to the bank.”

  “I hate her.”

  “I could of stopped her.”

  “No, you would of lost her.”

  “I doubt it. She never did love me, didn’t make any bones about it, but I don’t think she was going anywhere in her shape.”

  “You could go to Daddy or Aunt Birdie for money. Mr. Lyde’ll go on a loan for you.”

  “He already has. And your daddy’s loaned me all he can lay hands on, even borrowed against his place. Even P.W. let me have what little bit he could rake and scrape; just about everybody in Little Town’s lent me money. God, Earlene, you can’t imagine how bad I felt having everybody watch us riding around in a new T-bird they bought. And poor old Miss Lavenia and them wearing the same old frocks to church they had on for twenty years with Sibyl all gussied-

  up in her fancy dresses. Every time I’d bring it up, she’d make light of it. She’d laugh and say, ‘Why, they know you’ll pay them back.’ And the truth is, she didn’t care if she disfurnished them.”

  He was waiting for me to add something, searching my face, and I kept what I hoped was a hard-glazed look and thought about how I’d been robbed of what I stood to inherit, our three-generational home place. Daddy’s savings, my college money, gone. I could have killed P.W. for giving Robert Dale money for Sibyl to spend after he’d been so stingy with me.

  “I feel like the devil taking P.W.’s truck,” said Robert Dale. “He did tell you we traded on it, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I lied, because I couldn’t handle saying no and changing courses—what I might find if we got turned around.

  He went on spilling words on the air, like the closet had spilled on the floor, the remains caught in the cardboard box overflow. “When I met her, she had nothing but the shoes on her feet—a pair of waitressing shoes—but I swear to God she was the prettiest thing I ever laid eyes on. It wadn’t just that she was beautiful, she was pitiful too. Her mama and daddy died when she was just a youngun. You know the first thing she told me when we got to knowing one another?”

  I shook my head. What an idiot!

  “Told me, flat out, she was fixing to die. I nearly bout went crazy, seeing how beautiful and young she was and her dying. I asked her to marry me a couple of days later, and in all fairness, she told me she hadn’t ever figgered on marrying somebody who wadn’t rich. You know what I said?”

  “That you were rich.” “Yep.” He laughed. “And I bought her a big fancy diamond ring with my tobacco money to prove it. She run Lettie off soon as she got here, said she wadn’t fixing to live in no rundown dump. Lettie had a hissy fit at first, but you know Lettie.”

  “I know Lettie,” I said in contribution, hearing my voice crawl on the rich-with-Sibyl air.

  “Lettie gave right in, said she belonged to be close to Mama anyhow, what with me grown and all, needing my own life. If she’d just hung around, put up a fight...” He sighed and lay back on the bed with his arms over his head, staring up at the light that rendered his face like new lard. “Next thing I knew, Sibyl had ordered up a new house. I didn’t have a bit of trouble getting the money for that; it was
what came with it, and then the horses and the barn and the cars got me down. I’d prettinear borried all I could get hold of before she got her last car. You ever see her satisfied?”

  “No.” I lay beside him, on my back too, and we listened to the whippoorwills way off, their sonorous calls now reduced to a sort of steady, rapid snoring.

  “I won’t have you thinking there’s something wrong with you because of what me and P.W. did.” I just listened. What an idiot!

  “I made her jealous of us,” he said, bringing both arms down to his sides.

  “Us?”

  “Me and you. That night after the cookout when I walked you home, I didn’t go back to the barn right away. I let ‘em wonder where we were.”

  “You mean P.W. thought...?” The name stuck in my throat like a red hot coal; I swallowed and felt it burn all the way down.

  “I imagine he got pretty riled.” He laughed as though it was of little consequence, some strategy in a basketball game necessary to bring the team to victory. He rolled over and kissed me on the mouth, a sloppy soft kiss, whiskey sweet, then lifted his face as though testing for feelings. “We could still give it a try, me and you.”

  My instinct was to slap him, to wipe his kiss from my lips, but reason said to let him rattle on. See where he would go from there. “Second fiddle?” I asked.

  “I’ve played it.” A message salted with meaning.

  “Yes,” I said, a bit insulted by the lack of interest in his dead-to-me eyes. But mostly sickened.

  He rolled over again, onto his stomach, muttering, “You could have all her stuff—I mean you can have it anyway.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Reckon they’d take me in the army with a record long as my arm?”

  “You don’t have one yet,” I said, thinking the kiss and the confession might not have happened—praying they hadn’t. Mentally I transferred them to the box with the frivolous pink frieze.

  He laughed. “I bet I’m the only one in Little Town doesn’t mind going to the Vietnam war. Poor old P.W. Lord, she got to him! He came plum unstuck first time she got to telling him she was dying.