Roxanna Slade Part 18

the plunge that I secretly dreaded-- me out of my mind with blank depression.

I more or less got on with daily life. And though I've always secretly despised those women and occasional men who can never say I but must always say we, I can honestly claim that what I felt I was getting on with was truly our life --Palmer's and mine and August's with appropriate glances toward my parents, Leela and Ferny and of course Miss Olivia. The main joy was August. When his brother died he was nearly two, sweet-tempered as a pup and as fond of me as I was of him. Palmer loved him steadily too. And to everybody's silent surprise, somehow from the day she first saw him Leela loved August powerfully and without much jealousy of me or his father. By the time we moved to Betsy's house, I was privately afraid that Leela's constant love for a baby (who after all belonged to his parents for a few years anyhow) was going to truly sidetrack her plans for education and a life in school teaching.

Her whole two years away in college, every week at least she'd mail August some attractive present--a small piece of clothing, a book, a set of colored pencils. However small, they were all chosen with care and arrived in time with the rate of his growth. On her home vacations she watched him almost as closely as I. And anytime I felt the need for a peaceful hour or the slightest help, there was Leela volunteering to serve if she was in geographical reach.

One afternoon when I'd seen her lay August down for his nap with a look that was plainly as loving as any human can manage, I waited till Leela came out to the kitchen for a gla.s.s of tea. Then I said the main thing I regret from those calm years. I said "Palmer and I are eternally grateful that you care for August as deeply as you do. But both of us feel a little concerned that our boy may stand in the way of your having a child of your own when the time comes for that." Once the words were out and I'd actually heard them, I thought Oh Lord, she'll burst into tears and flee forever.

But she didn't blink once. She drank a long swallow of her tea and then said, innocent as any day-old bird, "Anna, I thought the existence of babies called for the mother to have a

husband or a man whose waterworks function anyhow." You could tell she'd been to college. They had more plumbing there than any other place she'd seen.

I allowed she was right.

So Leela gave a good laugh, no sign of pain. "You got a candidate for the job?"

I had to say I didn't, and then I had to backtrack and say that of course I didn't think men were the be all and end all of anything but their own swollen pride.

"Easy for you to say," Leela said.

And since I wasn't about to allude to mine and Palmer's past, I let the matter slide back into silence. And that was it for many more years till a decent man found and asked for Leela and she agreed.

Things didn't go so well for Ferny, and our older brother and his hag wife grew further and further away from us all till they were seldom mentioned as living, and we scarcely knew their raucous children. In those days even a fifty-mile distance between two families could be as wide as the whole Pacific if you chose not to cross it. That was regrettable with my older brother, but Ferny was gradually more than regrettable.

He was drifting toward deep sadness at least, plainer by the month. He worked on in Raleigh at his library job, and we never heard of complaints from that quarter. Apparently you can hunt and shelve books satisfactorily without the use of fully sober mental faculties. On Fern's rare visits home, it was clear to Palmer, Leela and me at least that he was doping more and more by the month, though his nature stayed as sweet as ever and his eyes stayed fine but increasingly older and truly unreachable by any of us.

I don't think any of us ever knew exactly what his poison was. By his smell we were sure it wasn't hard liquor. And of course in those days, there was nothing like the big drug cafeteria that's apparently waiting on any corner today. Occasional women did get hipped on morphine after childbirth. And while men in pain mostly dived into liquor, more than a few of them floated on paregoric (which was liquid opium, available over the counter) or the new strong sedative pills invented for veterans back from the First World War and still agonized with what

was called sh.e.l.l shock.

All I'm sure of in Fern's case is that, one dazzling bright Sunday in March, he asked to take me and August to ride. Palmer was visiting Miss Olivia so off we went. It started as a perfectly normal outing. Then once we were deep into some strange thicket up near the river, I turned to study my brother's sad profile. It was still fine as any face on a coin. And courage rushed on me suddenly--or I thought it was courage, not blatant meanness. I said "Ferny, let me help if I can."

He smiled but didn't face me. "Help what, pray tell?"

"Y. You're lost as any lamb in the Bible." He drove a good mile apparently calm. Then he looked round slowly and showed me a face like some war picture--not the Great War or even the bloated faces from pictures of Gettysburg but twenty years ahead when we were suddenly shown in the spring of '45 those eyes and teeth of Hitler's leavings, even young children tortured past bearing. When he'd held on me long enough to near wreck the car, Fern said "Not even you, Roxanna, could remedy this."

I knew he was right, but still I said "Let me start, dear friend--"

By then he'd turned his eyes toward the road. But he put up his right hand, raised one finger and said "Long years too late. No fault of yours." The smile he seemed to be beaming ahead toward the road and bare trees was too good to lose, but Fern refused to face me again.

Ever since, I've known he was sparing me. And that was a time when you didn't tie men down and haul them to the hospital, church or prison for being heartsick from unknown causes.

Everybody else who was anywhere near us moved along as expected with exceptions. Muddie's kidneys were still unreliable, but she and Father held their own. Miss Olivia aged too but at a slow rate, and none of their minds were deteriorating yet. They were able to live in their own homes and do their jobs pretty much as ever.

Poor Betsy Magee was a lot less fortunate. After we'd lived in her back rooms for more than two years and had just begun to think of finding our own bigger place--Palmer was having

better luck with money--Betsy began to show the first signs of an old Magee family affliction that we'd all hoped she was going to avoid especially in light of how she'd been shortchanged in her mind. But there wasn't much doubt of what she had. And when Palmer took her to the specialist in Durham, the worst was confirmed. She was already well into Huntington's disease, a ghastly kind of severe jerking palsy that soon has you entirely crippled and then strikes whatever remains of your mind.

Palmer and I talked through it every way for several nights. Ought we not to tell Betsy that we'd stay put and see her through to her natural end in her own quarters? I'll have to say that, as much as I cherished her kindness and talent, it was Palmer who took the stronger line--yes, it was our human duty. He didn't say Christian for once and I was grateful. I had grave doubts that I could deal with August, who had just turned three, plus run an entire house and tend a woman in terrible shape. For obvious, maybe unjustified reasons, I'd set my mind against hiring a black maid to help me out. I told Palmer I'd do whatever he decided but that I was scared for the first time in my life that my own body and mind were way too frail for the challenge.

He'd learned from me and others of my past tendency to bouts of blank sadness, and he seemed to understand. All the same, three evenings after he brought Betsy back from Durham, Palmer told me he had no choice but to offer her our full care for as long as she needed.

With no grudging word I told him to do what his conscience required.

He walked straight to Betsy's bedroom that instant and made her the offer.

Back in our kitchen I could hear her voice, a long high wail such as I've never heard again in this world and pray not to. Then her voice plainly said "This is my h.e.l.l, Palmer. You and Anna don't deserve it, not yet anyhow; and I'll take it on my own."

Within six weeks, not telling us her plans, she arranged to enter the State Hospital down in Raleigh and to deed us her whole house free and clear. She wouldn't be stopped, wouldn't take a penny from us. And when the day came, Palmer and I and August drove her down and bade her a bleak goodbye.

She was dead in three months.

The day we got that news by mail, Palmer waited till we were both in bed in the dark and then said "Anna, do you want to live here?"

I asked what he meant.

He said "Do you want to live on in this house with the memory of Betsy plus your husband's cheat and the knowledge that somebody shot himself right on the front porch?"

It was the first time he'd used the word cheat, and it silently stunned me. I'd never been entirely sure of what const.i.tuted adultery. But I believed Palmer had changed his life, and I never heard the word or the deed mentioned by him or anyone else ever again. Similar thoughts about the history of Betsy's house had been preying on my mind ever since she'd left. But again I told Palmer I'd follow him wherever. I thought I meant it and likely I did. That same moment was when I knew for the first time that I'd forced Palmer to live three years in a house he all but hated. I couldn't tell him how slow I'd been to feel the situation his way.

But his voice was gentle as a safe child's when he said "Then I'll try to sell this place and find us something where we can breathe."

I didn't know how relieved I'd feel till he finished those words. I said "Find something that no one we know has ever set foot in." In such a small town, that was a near impossible task. But Palmer managed to find it fast--a house that was comfortably roomier than Betsy's, though surely not grand, and that served us well for long years to come as it's serving me still.

The owner had been an ancient bachelor hermit named Baucomb who had taught engineering in a school up north all his adult life and then retired here to his mother's birthplace to stay shut up and completely alone in ten spotless rooms for his last thirty years, seeing only mysterious gentleman guests from parts unknown, all of them well-to-do or so it appeared.

I loved it on sight. It sat close to the white sandy ground, and the one story rambled through a grove of tall sycamores and oaks with a wide creek down the backside of the little knoll we were on. The windows came right down to floor level and let in whatever light there was under so much shade.

Palmer and a black carpenter he trusted examined it meticulously, decided it needed nothing but a new tin roof, a coat of white paint and screen wire at the windows, all of which they promptly provided. The whole thing cost exactly thirty-eight dollars less than we got for selling Betsy's. The bargain would have thrilled her (she lived for bargains).

We moved over there in the early spring of 1926. Though it really was an entirely new surrounding for us--with no resident heirlooms, no left-over blood-kin ghosts to haunt us--it took us longer than we'd imagined to settle in. But we kept at it. And by the time cool weather came again, I realized that we'd turned the skin of the place into our own skin.

Palmer seemed to agree. His lifelong restlessness was gradually taming. He was twenty-seven years old after all in a time when that was middle-aged or very nearly. He shared with me most everything he did or all of his life that he felt I could handle, or I trusted he did, and he put every penny he made into one joint bank account that I solely managed. Any sc.r.a.ps of fear that I had--where he might go and who he might see when I wasn't watching--tamed down as well, and my days turned into days like most of the women's I'd known.

You got up with your husband in the dim dawn, cooked him and your child an almighty great breakfast, got your husband out the door for work, then spent however much time was required getting your child well bathed and dressed, then starting dinner and wondering what you'd cook for supper--I'm repeating myself, everybody knows the rest. All that was different for Palmer and me was that, with his kind of work, we never took a real vacation. That was no private curse. It was how our neighbors lived, and it was a lot easier than what we'd heard about the lives of our near ancestors only fifty years back, not to mention three centuries.

In our time if you got a weekend off every year or so to visit your kin or a nearby lake, you enjoyed the change, however complicated it was to pack for three people and face the dangers of unrefrigerated food on the road, the dreadful toilets and the very risky drinking water you met with in public places not to mention bedbugs and crazy landladies in the tourist homes available. In

fact most days if you had twenty minutes in mid-afternoon to lie on the sofa and shut your eyes, you felt powerfully lucky.

The only women in my field of vision who lived otherwise were either the wealthy (in very short supply) who had many servants or the spinster women who taught school most of the year, then spent the penniless summers rocking on their parents' front porch or taking cheap short trips to some sight like Blowing Rock or Pilot Mountain. So I didn't have the shining example of a Madame Curie or Helen Keller to set me thinking restlessly. I kept my chin tucked and lived my life.

And for long quiet years after we moved, the line of that life was as unremarkable as most human lives, though if you'd asked me at any point whether I enjoyed my days as they pa.s.sed, I'd have said that on the whole I did. I think I can swear that the same was true for Palmer. I might have gone further and said I considered myself a lucky human.

I certainly had no noticeable longing to write soothing hymns, design safe bridges or better wedding cakes or liberate a young man doomed to die for a crime he never planned. But then I'm fairly sure I had no gifts that might have aimed me at such worthy callings. Sometimes it's fairly slim consolation to notice how very few human beings of any s.e.x or background are called to anything grander than dinner.

Or so I've generally felt through the decades. I've even tried to see my lack as a gift of another sort, not necessarily inferior, though I'll have to confess how unenlightened I've known I was and how sorry I often am of that fact. I'm even more ashamed to admit that I've learned more since television started up forty years ago than in all my other life. I've also known for most of a century that a working and occasionally rewarding marriage, with a man as generous and even-keeled as Palmer or a woman who hugged the ground like me, is surely the greatest good on Earth at the very same instant that it's also the hardest good to capture, not to mention hold for long. No flower on the finest day of summer has a frailer odor or dies any quicker.

FIVE.

The time loped on as decades do when you and your family have got through the early trials of being under one roof, and Fate has chosen not to slam in on you with his world-famed fist--Fate or G.o.d. I've never decided if they're the same thing. And despite the likable hopes young women have expressed here lately that G.o.d the Father has a full set of female parts as well, all my experience affirms that he's male as the ancient prophets and kings never doubted nor the Virgin Mary herself in the song she sang once she'd been fertilized by G.o.d alone. (see the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1bledf-ee. Of course Luke was written by a man.) As far as I can see in fact, G.o.d's maleness is His most difficult problem. He seems to have far less patience than the universe He made requires of a loving handler which He claims to be. And his taste for vengeance is certainly eager.

I've known more than one man who slammed through the wall of somebody else's life just to prove he was hurting at the moment. And I've noticed that women can wait to take their vengeance. They can bear thirty years of beatings and broken teeth and then begin to poison their husband with a.r.s.enic laced in his noon iced tea, a process that may take numerous years if you keep the a.r.s.enic doses small enough so your husband can't taste them, though his hair and nails are falling out and his nerves don't work.

No man could dream of waiting that long to do his will. He'll shoot you by sunset or bring you a dozen roses from town, then wake you up from a short deep nap that very same night and beat your head in for somehow not seeming grateful enough. Don't men inherit that impatience from G.o.d?

Anyhow Palmer and the boy and I lived on in the house we'd bought with Betsy's money. August grew straight as a poplar tree and stronger. You could spend whole hours--if he'd ever hold still--selecting the parts of his honest face which the Slade blood had formed and which came to him from my family, the Danes. He got the Dane nature, I'm glad to say--much milder than the fiery famished Slades--but while n.o.body ever claimed August was afflicted, he had a peacefully slow plain mind and has kept it till now. It hindered his school work but scarcely bothered him. He was good to his parents. He was crazy for baseball. And though he took to girls extra early at age eleven, he never burdened his father or me with problems of money or personal duty in relation to women. If he made mistakes he covered them neatly, never mentioned their names; and he went on his way.

Palmer did the jobs he'd found for himself in early manhood--locating and dealing in good standing timber--and timber supported us, not handsomely but well enough. Palmer kept his dignified looks and manners, and he stayed lean as ever in the places where most men take on flesh as soon as they're married (their waists and jowls). The only mark that time made on him was the gradual onset of deafness in both ears, a trait of the Slades unfortunately.

Palmer strained to overcome it. Until he was all but stone deaf, he tried to deny it. But by the time he was thirty-five, I could see he was slowly stepping backward from conversation and sociable laughter just because he couldn't hear the world. Women's voices were the hardest for him. I often wished I'd been a deep ba.s.s or at least an alto. I'd have kept him better company.

But the deafness and solitude seldom made him bitter. He read more books than ever before and listened to the radio endlessly with his ear cupped almost down to the speaker. All of the commentators then were male with good clear voices, and he could mostly hear them. So he haunted the war news once the Second War began. The orchards of France, the Russian snow fields, the bombed-out children of Britain were as real to Palmer as the meals I cooked and were far more important to his ongoing will to keep at work and to live on among us as some kind of partner and friend we could welcome.

I think I can say I strengthened through the time. I grew to trust our modest luck and my harmless family. Once Palmer and I had cleared the air around our duty to one another, I literally never worried again--not about my husband's faithfulness. Some gift of grace kept suspicion at a distance, and I served him every way I could think of as he did me (though he had a man's particular brand of attention; far-off things held Palmer more than close-ups).

I taught August every good truth I knew,

I kept him clean and healthy, I punished him when needed but with only light switchings--no hard hand or belt. Palmer never touched the boy in even mild anger. Once when August was mad about some ruling his father had made, the boy took a key and gouged it across the whole pa.s.senger door of Palmer's truck. When I saw the deep scratch, I told Palmer he'd have to take the boy in hand this time at least. But Palmer shook his head mildly and said "Oh Anna, it's nothing but a truck. I won't be driving it to Heaven if I go."

With Leela away nine months a year teaching somewhere close or farther off, I watched my parents drift into age in a house far quieter than any they'd known before. When the Depression reached eastern North Carolina in the early thirties, it may not have made as deep a gash in an eternally poor region as it did elsewhere. But it led to some hard realities. Many banks failed with a lot of people's holdings. If you had good rich cotton land, you mostly couldn't sell it for more than a quarter an acre--and I don't mean a quarter of a hundred dollars. I mean twenty-five cents, an acre of fine land for one thin quarter. And Father was excessively easy on people, white or black, who ran up credit on groceries and supplies at the store.

Before long he was what was called land poor. He owned and owed taxes on hundreds of acres of cotton fields and trees, no crop paid him much, and he couldn't sell anything but his pine trees for cut-rate prices to the paper mills. Palmer made money on him--buying cheap timber, I'm sorry to say, and holding it for years--but Father understood that as normal business. He never grudged Palmer's slim success.

If so I never heard him nor Muddie complain. What did turn sad and increasingly awful was Father's premature senility as it was called then. By the time he was sixty in 1930, he'd have occasional troubling moments.

I'd walk into his store with August in tow, August would yell out some loud greeting and Father would face us with a grin--but a baffled grin. I could tell sometimes that, for minutes on end, he wouldn't be altogether sure who we were. He'd address me as "Lady" to hide his confusion, and in fact he'd called me that in my girlhood, but he also used it for every other white woman halfway respectable.

Once August blurted out "Pa, what's my name? You ain't said it in weeks." His speech then was entirely controlled by school friends from deep in the county.

And Father just stood with big tears welling in his eyes. Then he tried to fill the gap with some joke, some comical name like "Fatty Arbuckle," though August was slender.

But the boy refused it and teasingly said "You don't love me. I'm your main grandson."

My mother had infinite patience with Father. And right to the end he never failed to recognize her even if he couldn't call her name. Oddly enough he also knew Palmer--long after Leela and I were strangers to him--and Palmer could almost always calm him when, in the early days, Father got furious at his limitations and started breaking things. I once saw him throw a huge plow point clean across the store and break a lamp just because he made short change for a colored child, and the child called him on it. He wasn't mad at the child but at his own mind.

Despite their spotty relations through the years, Father also knew Ferny most times when he saw him --Fern's rare visits home in his own last years.

One Sunday after a splendid dinner, I'd helped Muddie wash and dry every dish. And when she went to brush her hair down, I headed for the porch where Palmer, Ferny and Father were seated. As I stopped inside the screen door for an instant, I heard Father's voice as clear as an arrow shaft, aimed at Fern--"Young man, you look something like a son of mine."

Palmer didn't break his silence but left it to Fern.

And in time all Fern said was "Thank you, sir. I knew Ferny Dane way back in his prime, and I thought he was fine."

Well before that, Father had to retire and rent the store to a Jewish merchant named Pizer from Lynchburg. By the time I conceived again in 1938, Father had gone past Muddie's strength to care for him. At that point Palmer knew the right black man to help my mother with the handling (father was a tall st.u.r.dy man to the end). The helper--named Masters Carlyle--was tall as a great oak, twice as strong and at least as gentle--and he slept in the

back bedroom with Father till the slow end came.

When Father wouldn't even speak to Palmer beyond the two syllables of his first name, he'd talk to Masters in little light bird sounds that n.o.body else would claim to recognize.

But Masters would listen sometimes for whole minutes and then say calmly "I told you no indeed, Mr. Dane" or "You're likely to be right. We'll just wait and see." Whatever it meant--they had their own code--it mostly eased Father. And at the very end, the last two months, he got as peaceful as an ideal nine-year-old boy dreaming. Then he drifted off entirely.

That nearly killed Muddie. I truly wish it had. She'd spent every day of her life in the presence of Simmons Augustus Dane since she was sixteen, a youthful bride. And losing him now while she had a little strength left and the balance of her looks was like the great shutting down of a dark hand over her face. No light could reach her, no cool air to breathe. Yet she lingered expressly to help me out in my late third pregnancy.

I was two years short of forty when I conceived. In those prolific days women often had children on into their forties. But Muddie had always hinted to us that it seemed a little ordinary having babies so late like an old female dog loose in the underbrush and taking all comers. In any case she kept me company throughout those months that had more than their share of fear and worry for me. I'd lost the one child; could I have this one safely?