Dark Don't Catch Me Page 9

  He leaves the kitchen and starts up the spiral staircase, portraits of his grandfather, great-grandfather, and their wives, staring at him from the wall, along with the framed letters from John Howard Paine and John Paul Jones. Outside the door of his and Ada’s bedroom, he waits a moment to still his anger. He realizes he is really angry over what he anticipates, and not simply over the fact of the lights being on all over the house and Cindy’s vague responses. Once inside the room, he sees he is justified in his anger — what he anticipated is so.

  • • •

  Ada sits at her vanity in her slip, before the large leather-framed photograph of Dix, by the mirror. She has a glass in her hand but quickly pushes it under the green taffeta skirt of the dressing table when she sees him come in. She gets up unsteadily, trying to mask her consternation in a sudden vivaciousness.

  “Oh, are you home, Pirk? I just got in and I was going to dress and — ” She sways toward him, and Colonel, conscious of her breath, draws away with an almost unintentional gesture of distaste.

  “What’s come over you, Pirk? You’d think something was wrong with me, the way you’re acting.”

  “Ada, you know I try to understand but I can’t see why you have to — ”

  Ada looks at him with that specious expression, lips pursed slightly, eyebrow raised, eyes falsely surprised, and her choked voice reflects injured dignity. “Well, really, Pirk, are you accusing me of drinking? You know I hardly ever touch liquor. But tonight I thought I’d just have a glass of wine — I was so tired today that I thought it would help me relax. And it did.”

  “Ada …”

  She turns back to the vanity, lifts the top of the powder box and begins to powder her nose with exaggerated care. She hiccups loudly and clamps her hand over her mouth.

  “I ate asparagus this noon for lunch,” she laughs. “Sparrow grass, as Cindy always says. It never agrees with me. I was just going down to feed Dickie. Dix has been gone the whole afternoon. I wonder where he is.” She stands up cautiously. “I hope he’ll come along to the barbecue. Vivie wants him to real bad. She asked special that he come.”

  “Dickie’s being fed, Ada. You stay up here. I’ll bathe him.”

  “That’s my job. He’s my grandson, after all.”

  “He’s ours. I’ll bathe him tonight.”

  “Ours, ours, ours,” she says in a sing-song tone. “No, really, Pirk, you will make a scene if you can, won’t you? Now I’m just going right on down and — ”

  “Please,” Colonel says.

  “Leave me alone. I’m very relaxed. I was just going down to feed Dickie.” “Listen to me.”

  She stumbles toward the door, but Colonel catches her by the arm. “I don’t want Cindy to see you like this. Be reasonable, Ada. Do you want it all over town?”

  “What do you mean by that?” Ada maneuvers out of his grasp, her voice becoming louder and tinged with hysteria. “Because I have one glass of wine or maybe two you’re implying that I’m drunk. Me, drunk! I don’t drink bourbon. You know as well as I do that you’re the one who drinks bourbon in this family. I had two glasses of wine and I don’t see anything wrong in that.”

  Colonel frowns; then his voice softens. He runs his hand along her bare arm. “Look, Ada, you get some rest, hmm? You’ve had a busy day. Now you rest yourself up and we’ll see about whether we want to go to the barbecue or not, hmm?”

  “Dix is invited. Vivie wants him to come real bad. She asked special.” Ada sits down on the bed where Colonel steers her. “I worry about Dix and where he goes nights. If Suzie were only alive, I wouldn’t have to worry. I worry about Dix.”

  “That’s a good girl,” Colonel says. “You get some rest.”

  “Suzie used to try and boss Dix like she was his mother or something instead of me, but I worry about Dix now. He alienates himself, doesn’t he?”

  “You get some rest, Ada, honey, there’s a good girl.” Gently Colonel pushes her head back on the pillow of the twin bed, pulls her feet out straight, and covers her with the comforter at the foot of the bed. “I’ll be back up soon, Ada, honey. You rest.”

  When she shuts her eyes he knows she will sleep, and quickly, so as not to disturb her, he slips out the door.

  On his way back down the stairs, Colonel wondered again how this problem had come upon his house. During the war years when Ada and he, and Dix, who was no more than a boy then, were traveling from one base to the next, both Colonel and Ada had downed more liquor than was their custom. Restored to civilian life, things quieted down and became as they were before in Paradise when he and Ada drank at parties. Sometimes, at a barbecue or on a special occasion they might even drink too much. But so did most people. It was only after Dix married Suzie that Colonel noticed Ada was getting high more and more often.

  For a short while after Suzie’s death, she stopped abruptly; and seemed her old self again, but just as abruptly some six or seven months back, she resumed the habit.

  She had had a brief lapse one afternoon when she had driven to Manteo with the Hoopers for the flower show. She had arrived home fairly drunk, but eager to snap herself out of it, and intent upon bathing little Dickie. There was an accident. Dix had come home to discover Dickie had been dropped from the bed, and he had said something to his mother about “being at it again”; while she had wept bitterly and sworn she was only trying to help. That was the point, Colonel guessed roughly, when she had returned to the bottle.

  Colonel once again tries to understand the problem. Where did it start? And why? Somehow it was rooted in her relationship with Dix, he realizes, and in a certain insidious way it had developed into resentment over the fact of Colonel’s closeness to his son and of Dix’s tendency to take after his father. Still, neither Dix nor Colonel had ever excluded Ada from their lives until she had begun her drinking. Only now and then were there clues that she felt deserted by them — and by Suzie too.

  There was that embarrassing time at the Legion picnic just after Dix’s marriage, when Ada, dead sober in that moment when Storey Bailey walked up to Dix and Suzie and Colonel and Ada, sitting there on the blanket at the fairground, had blurted out: “Dix isn’t at all like his father!” after Storey had said, “I swear, Dix, you sure favor your old man in every way.”

  And to make it worse, Ada had added: “Or he never would have married Suzie.”

  All of them had laughed it off bravely; but afterwards when Colonel and Ada were driving home alone — Suzie hadn’t wanted to leave with them; so Dix had stayed on — Colonel had asked Ada: “What’d you ever mean saying a thing like that?”

  And Ada had said, “It just popped out. I don’t know why I said it.”

  “You’re not jealous because my own son takes after me, honey?” Colonel had teased. “Hardly,” she’d answered.

  “That was pretty mean to say about Suzie. I think they should have waited too — but it wasn’t nice, Ada. Suzie was hurt.”

  “I meant it another way,” was all Ada said. Then tiredly, she added, “Let’s change the subject, Pirk. I’m sorry for it. I can’t worry it any more than that.”

  • • •

  Once she started drinking in earnest, Colonel began to notice things that undermined his previous conceptions of his wife. Of course, she had always been whimsical and compulsive; even in the way she married him, after going with him less than two months; begging him to elope with her the Saturday after Thanksgiving, telling him then it was “now or never.” And she had always been brighter than he was; quicker to criticize things, and hungrier for voiced affection. But the drinking had created in her times of unexplainable malevolence, times when the alcoholic fuse caused an explosion of unseemly anger.

  “Don’t you care about anything but crass politics?” she would accuse him suddenly when he would be simply discussing with Dix a bill before Congress or a local legal problem. “Don’t you ever read literature?”

  Or, “Sure, you were in the war,” she would intrude on a conversation about veterans�
� rights, “right behind a desk, in Topeka, Grand Rapids, Washington, and all those other bloody battlegrounds!”

  And how often would she say: “Pirk, you just roll over and grab a hold of them like they were cows teats. Can’t you ever say anything nice?”

  “I love you, honey,” he’d tell her. “I tell you all the time I do.”

  “I like to know what you love about me,” she’d say; and then anger him by adding, “and I’m afraid I do.” He was never quite sure what she meant by that remark, but he knew she meant somehow to suggest a crudeness in him, a clumsiness, or an animal quality to his love for her. He resented that more than anything else; for often during those drunken interludes in their life, he had reached out for her more dutifully than desirefully; the reek of her stale liquor repulsed him as he tried to recapture what had been lost between them, with the one remaining consolation he knew he could give to her — his manhood, if he imagined some other faceless woman skillfully enough to enable him to have the body of the woman under him.

  When he thought about it, he realized that before the drinking, their love-making had never been particularly inventive, prolonged, nor absorbing. Consistent, it had been, and, Colonel thought, comforting too. Perhaps that was the most appropriate adjective he could apply to Ada and him in bed together. But now even that was gone. They occupied twin beds, and neither spent any amount of time in the other’s, save for the few nights Ada would ask him to “just hold me for a while,” or those when he would go to her for relief, and she would let him.

  Sometimes when Ada was very drunk she would dwell on the day she and Hollis Jordan were discovered in the woods, way back in time — too far back for Colonel to believe that that incident had anything to do with Ada’s present condition. It was, to his mind, her way of shifting the focus off her present emotional problems to past ones. But what were the present ones? Menopause? Not yet; not nearly yet. A basic inability to fit into the idle warmth of the clubs and committees and social activities of the women of Paradise? She had never really fit in there, even though she had never known another home but Paradise. But she had compensated for it by being a superior cook, an avid reader, and a doting mother — and even though she wasn’t “one of the girls” in Paradise, Ada had been truly respected and liked before all this. She had been happy … No, it’s Dix somehow, Colonel thinks.

  • • •

  Walking into the kitchen, he stands by the table where Cindy is spooning the last of the spinach down Dickie’s throat. He makes odd noises with his lips to attract the child’s attention, and he talks to Dickie: “Hi, birdie. Oooh, git that worm down you before the other early bird comes along. Atta boy!”

  Cindy says, “His appetite’s sort of shacklin. D’you find Mrs. Pirkle, sir?”

  “Umm-hmm. She’s napping, so I won’t wake her. I’ll bathe Dickie.”

  “Well, I’m glad she’s napping anyhow,” says Cindy, not at all fooled by Colonel’s offhand tone. “She could use a nap.”

  “You remember what I told you about those lights, Cindy,” Colonel answers sharply. “When I take Dickie up for his bath, you turn them all off except in the living room and out here where you are!”

  “Wasn’t me had a mind to light up the place like a Christmas tree,” the girl murmurs. “Wasn’t me turning them lights on one right after the other.”

  “Never mind who it was.”

  “I don’t mind, Mr. Colonel, sir. I keep my mouth closed.”

  “Okay, Dickie-bird,” Colonel says. “Let’s climb the golden stairs to beddy-by.”

  “I ain’t no broadcasting station,” Cindy says.

  “C’mon, Dickie-bird. Up we go!” Colonel reaches for the child, while Cindy wipes his mouth.

  “One thing for sure,” Cindy says as Colonel walks out of the kitchen. “I don’t carry no tales back to school.”

  Colonel resists the impulse to tell her to shut up about it; then he stands still. Ada has come down the stairs, and stands there facing him at the landing; still dressed in her slip and barefoot. Walking past him as though he and the child do not exist, she goes into the kitchen, weaving.

  Cindy moans: “Oh, now, Mrs. Pirkle, what you doing sashaying round like that?”

  “Where’s Dix, Cindy?” she asks, as Colonel stands holding Dickie in the doorway.

  “I don’t know where he’s at, Mrs. Pirkle. You gonna catch your death with your feet all naked. You oughta go on back upstairs and put shoes on, ma’am, so as you can — ”

  “Oh, shut up,” Ada says, lurching into a wall. “Make me a big cup of coffee.”

  “Ada, please. Go up and get a robe, Ada. Go up and lie down.”

  “You left all the lights on, Mrs. Pirkle, and Mr. Colonel — ” “Cindy, make her the coffee,” Colonel commands. “Then go up and get her robe and slippers. I’ll be down as soon as I get Dickie off.”

  Ada hiccups, turns around — focuses her eyes on her husband and grandson; then, giggling, she starts toward them. “Dere him is! Dere am itsy snitchy Dickie, isn’t him?” She reaches out to touch the baby’s cheek, but Colonel steps away.

  “What’re you trying to do, for Christ’s sake!” Ada shouts. “He’s my son!” She lurches forward again, bumping into Colonel and the child; and the sudden movement frightens the child, so that he begins to cry.

  With drunken self-pity, Ada turns from them and starts back to the kitchen table, murmuring, “Look what he made me do. I scared the baby, Cindy. He made me scare my baby — ” She sinks onto a kitchen chair and holds her head with her hands.

  “Make her some coffee if she wants it,” Colonel says. “I’ll be down as soon as I can, Cindy.”

  “Lord, Lord,” Cindy moans, as Ada sobs at the kitchen table, her face buried in the crook of her arm. “Working this house gonna turn me inta a nervous wretch. Lord, Lord.”

  Upstairs, Colonel undresses his grandson and soaps the child’s body. He loves to bathe Dickie, the same as he had loved bathing Dix, when Dix was that age. With care he runs the cloth along the little dime-sized red birthmark beneath the baby’s stomach, with wonder again at its perfect roundness, like a cherry embedded under the skin — a birthmark exactly like the one Dix has there. If only Ada could realize this feeling, he thinks, this fabulous feeling for her own blood, she would have less reason to ask questions of the bottom of a bottle.

  From the hallway, Colonel can hear Cindy’s voice drifting in, as she shuffles down to the bedroom to get Ada’s robe and slippers, talking to herself the way she does when she’s excited about something, going along talking to herself: “Lord, oh, Lord, dat woman sure done filled up on giggle soup today; down there shooting her mouf off, trying the worst way to git that coffee cup past them teeth. Lord, she sure walking out in high cotton this night …”

  “Cindy!” Colonel calls out from the bathroom, “never mind the commentary, just do what you have to.”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Colonel sir, I’m studying it fast as I can … Lord, Lord, dat woman sure am feeling her oats; dat licker sure talk mighty loud when it get loose from de jug. Lord, Lord, Lord, this house gonna turn me inta a nervous wretch….”

  12

  BRYAN POST sits at the tin table in the combination kitchen-bedroom of the Post shack, listening to his wife Bissy carry on while she fixes the hush-puppies; drinking his corn and thinking as how corn and only corn can get the threads and bobbins out of his head. Corn can make the mill seem far away as Egypt, and the hundreds and millions of empty bobbins it is his job as a doffer to cart from the spinning-room seem in his mind like stars, or drops of water in a river, or grains of sand in a field.

  Bissy drops the patties into the smoking deep fat in which a catfish is frying, and talks more about how she had called up Daddy Tap Wood, the radio preacher from over in Manteo. She had called to request a hymn, as he allowed listeners to do, and he had promised to play “Lord On The Weeping Cross” for her; and he had thanked her. The call had taken two minutes and cost a quarter, and Bissy had had to walk clear do
wn the road two miles to the Sinclair station to make it, but Bissy would have paid half a dollar and walked five to hear her tell it. “He just say, ‘Why thank you, Bissy,’ just as nice. He say, ‘Why thank you, Bissy. I’m glad you done called, Bissy.’ “

  Bryan grunts, “Few minutes ago you tole it he just say, why thank you. Now you say he say the other too.”

  “Well he did say the other.”

  “Funny you just think to mention it.”

  “Corn’s fried your brains you can’t recall,” Bissy says, “and you better had pour yourself back in that jug, nigger, if you spects to pick up our nephew from up North t’night.”

  “I don’t see why you gotta spend hard-earned money calling up the preacher on the radio, if you ask me.”

  “I spend what I earn where I spend it,” Bissy says sullenly, “just same as you, nigger … Now, g’wan and call in Claus and Marilyn Monroe. These hush-puppies gettin’ brown as your behind.”

  Slowly, Bryan gets up, scratches his arm and raises it to gulp his corn. “You sure didnt’ earn nothin’ today,” he says, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

  “Somebody had to tote Marilyn to Doc James.”

  “Coulda picked in the afternoon, if you ask me.”

  “I pick soon as I can spell able … Call ‘em now. We gone eat.”

  “Reason you can’t spell able is you gotta be big shot callin’ up on the telephone to the preacher.”

  “Call went right through in no time,” Bissy Post says in a wistful tone, looking down at the hush-puppies, browning like winter oak leaves. “He just say, ‘Why thank you, Bissy. Why thank you, Bissy,’ just as nice. He say, ‘Why thank you, Bissy. I’m glad you done called, Bissy. I hope you are well,’ he say.”

  Bryan Post giggles and swats his wife’s behind with his palm, as he passes her on his way out the door of the shack. “You sure do enlarge the facts of a matter,” he says. “You sure do know how to relate and relate.”

  “Git on there!” Bissy snaps, “I’m not studying sass t’night.”