The Third Life of Grange Copeland Read online

  “Git out of my sight,” she whispered, turning from him to warm the baby with what heat she could call her own.

  It was toward this charged atmosphere that Grange walked, laden with meat, collards, candy and oranges. Brownfield, embarrassed, uneasy and fuzzy, got up and walked out to meet him. Grange was stepping briskly down the road freshly and neatly dressed, bashfully smiling.

  “Aw, Grange,” Brownfield stammered in greeting, as his father came up to the edge of the yard.

  Brownfield was angered to see the packages in his father’s arms. This intrusion of goods—Grange never set foot in his son’s house without a load of eatables and wearables—made Brownfield wish more than ever to see him someday on the rack.

  “You shouldn’t have did that, Grange,” he said sheepishly, smiling but gritting his teeth; hating himself for wanting to see what was inside the bundles Grange thrust into his hands. He realized self-pityingly that he was ravenous and hadn’t eaten a meal in two days.

  “That’s all right,” Grange mumbled, patiently waiting for his son to lead him into the house. Brownfield sniffed at one of the bags in his hands. It contained fruit, a treat the children would love, another reason for adoring their grandfather. It was only at Christmas that Brownfield’s children got apples and oranges and grapes. As a child Brownfield had never seen a grape. He clutched the bags in a confusion of feeling. He was hungry, he was suffering from a malaise of the spirit, he was jealous of his children’s good fortune. He wished he did not have children down whose gullets the good fruit would go; he wished he were a child himself.

  Brownfield was not as tall as Grange, who had to bend his head to his chest to enter the room where Mem and Brownfield slept. In winter, usually, they all slept in the same room. Brownfield, Mem, Daphne and Ornette; because it was impossible to heat two rooms in such a hole-filled house. It was impossible, really, to heat one room; but when four people slept together in one small room and kept a fire going they could manage not to freeze to death before summer.

  To see his wife and children through his father’s eyes—knowing of the farm and the snug house Grange and Josie owned—made Brownfield eager for his family to appear warm and happy and well-cared for. One look at the walls of the room they were in made it clear no one could ever be warm in it. The walls had been covered, probably neatly at one time, with paper bags. Bags cut open along one side and flattened out, sides overlapping. But the bags hung down now, here and there, in rustling flaps; the wind had pushed them loose. Where the flaps hung down from the ceiling one could look directly up into the loft and in several places straight through the loft into the sky. In the window frames without panes someone had tried to put in neat square pieces of cardboard, but the rain, coming down against these squares at a slant, made the bottom half of them wet and the same wind that pushed the flaps aside to reveal the holes in the roof forced aside these pieces of cardboard, and puddles of icy water were collected on the bare gray floor.

  Grange, as he entered, took in the sorry condition of the room in a glance and could not withhold a sigh. A sigh Brownfield heard and understood immediately as condemnation. Brownfield thought of the money his father had brought back from the North—enough to buy a farm, enough to marry Josie, enough to lend Brownfield some on the condition that he stop drinking!—and thought maybe now was his chance to get more of what his father seemed so willing to give his family. Money. Accordingly, Brownfield whined, “Just poor folks, that’s us.” He wiped the hardened matter from the corners of his eyes and bade his father sit down on the little cot which was his bed, now that Mem used all of the double one.

  Grange looked about him silently. The fire sputtered and went out. Brownfield made no move to relight it. Grange took off his coat and started to work over the fire. He was outraged to find there was no more wood.

  “How can you not have wood and your wife ‘bout to pop?” he asked.

  Brownfield looked over his shoulder at his wife’s folded pallet. Not wanting the children to see the blood she had folded it as neatly as a newspaper and had tied it with string. There was a sheet hanging before Mem’s bed. It formed a curtain which would have protected her children from the sight of childbirth. Brownfield thought what a blessing it must have been to Mem that the baby was born at night while Daphne and Ornette slept and wind and rain muffled her sounds of struggle.

  Brownfield could not, dared not, tell his father that Mem had already had the baby, and without help from him or from anybody. He only hoped his father would soon leave and not try once more to “explain,” as he so often tried to do, his reasons for deserting his own family. Grange felt guilty about his son’s condition and assuaged his guilt by giving food and money to Brownfield’s family. He never gave money directly to Brownfield, who had drunk up the first sum Grange had given him. After that there was no second chance. Grange had no faith in him, Brownfield correctly assumed. But, having laid aside his bundles, Grange was in no mood to leave. He wanted to talk to Mem, see if she needed anything for the baby, whose birth, Grange thought, was so near.

  “Why, she sleeping,” Brownfield said, hoping his father would hurry out. But Grange, looking into the fireplace, rubbing his hands, spoke of unimportant things like the weather and then of what was pressing on his heart.

  “Like I been trying to tell you, ever since I come back, there’s a lot I done I didn’t agree with. It was the times, I reckon. You could work so hard, for nothing. And as tight as times was they started tightenin’ up some more. I was worked so hard, I tell you the truth, my days had done all run together. There wa’n’t no beginning nor no end.”

  Brownfield stared bitterly at the floor.

  “Margaret’s days all run together too, after you left.” He said his mother’s name thickly, with abundant emotion, though he disliked the memory of her last days as much as ever. Brownfield felt he had been abandoned by Grange’s desertion to whatever wolves would take him; not at the time of his leaving, nor while Brownfield was living at the Dew Drop Inn, but in married retrospect, seen through Brownfield’s own miserableness in the life he convinced himself he was courageous enough to accept. He did not really care what his mother had felt at all.

  Grange looked at Brownfield, Brownfield looked at him. Josie’s shadow came between them. She kept them from becoming what they had never really been anyhow, father and son. That was her revenge.

  “That’ll have to be a strong chile to be born in here. And it’ll have to be kin to the Eskimos or it’ll freeze to death. Well,” Grange said, rising finally, “when Mem wake up tell her I’ll send Josie over to help out, or maybe I might just come back myself.” Grange stood, looking toward the bed. “Lawd knows the whole business is somethin’ of a miraculous event. Out of all kinds of shit comes something clean, soft and sweet smellin’.”

  “If you think it so sweet smellin, you take it,” said Brownfield, seeing his baby with entirely different, unenchanted and closely economic eyes.

  Behind the muslin sheet Mem lay, huddled against her baby. The baby, unwashed, was moist and sticky against the soft cloth that was wrapped around her. Mem had been drying the film of wetness from her when Grange came in. Fearing the sharpness of the cold she stopped, and now, instead, rubbed the baby softly up and down its hardly moving body. The window near her bed let in sporadic bursts of damp air. In the middle of the night she had asked Brownfield to cover it with a quilt, but the only quilt he could use, he said, was the one on his bed, or the one on hers.

  The wind came through the window, moving the newspapers under the bed. Weakly Mem called out to her husband.

  “What you say you want, honey?” he asked, coming to peer at her from around the curtain. Grange also came. Mem heard the intake of Grange’s breath as he stood beside Brownfield, looking down on her, seeing the bundle, rooted in disbelief.

  “You no-good, sorry, good-for-nothing tramp,” he said, pushing Brownfield aside and impatiently bending to move Mem’s bed closer to the fire.

  “I
t won’t move,” said Mem, glancing fearfully at her husband. “It just set up on some blocks.”

  Her eyes were sunken and hazy from her long night. Meekly her eyes pleaded with Grange to go away, to leave them alone. She watched him anxiously as he moved about the room, burning the pallet, which, made of newspapers and old clean rags, burned well, despite its spots of slimed wet, and then taking out the slop jar that was so filled with the proof of how her night was spent.

  Grange took down the makeshift curtain, ordered Brownfield to make up his bed and go out for wood, and prepared the baby for the eyes of her two sisters.

  “I’m all right, I’m just fine,” Mem said, when Grange reached for the thin quilted covers of her bed.

  With a great show of control, Grange took the wood Brownfield brought in and put it on the fire. Thankfully he watched it begin to burn.

  “At least you got sense enough to know wet wood won’t burn,” he said. Brownfield stood at his elbow with an amused and belligerent smirk.

  “Got it off the barn,” he said.

  “Brownfield, git me a little warm water to drink or maybe a little coffee,” said Mem. Grange had raised her head and placed his own coat across her shoulders.

  Grange had always liked Mem. He had known her when she was a child, playing behind the lounge. Lorene was always making her cry and run and hide in the woods. Grange had been glad when Josie told him that Brownfield had married her. He thought a good wife would mellow Brownfield, even if she was kin to Josie. Though Mem had none of Josie’s hardness.

  On the night he had returned to the Dew Drop Inn and found Josie with Brownfield he discovered the bitterness his son felt toward him, the resentment, the hate; but he had hoped Brownfield’s own experience as a family man and sharecropper would change that. But now, looking at Mem after eight years with Brownfield was like seeing some old mangy aunt of the girl Brownfield had married. Mem’s hair, which had been so thick and black, now pressed against her pillow gray as charcoal. Much of it had fallen out. Grange felt, among all the other reasons for her being laid so low, his own guilt. That was why he spent so much time with her and his grandchildren, and brought them meat and vegetables, and gave them money on the sly, and reaped in full the anger of his wife and the unflagging bitterness of his son.

  Brownfield was handing Mem a cup of barely warm coffee.

  “I know that’s what she asked for,” said Grange, “but surely there’s somethin’ to eat in this house. I mean like some soup or something.”

  Brownfield walked calmly to the door, his face set, and tossed the coffee out into the yard.

  “I give her what she ask for, what more you want?” He sat down solidly in front of the fire, not willing now to give her anything. His face was as sulky as a child’s.

  From the provisions he’d brought Grange made a stew. When Daphne and Ornette crawled out of their damp covers in the next room it was to the hot spicy smell of the stew and to the warming leaps of a good fire. At first Brownfield would not touch the stew. He grudgingly watched his children fall all over their grandfather. Soon, though, he began to eat, his hunger caring nothing for his pride.

  “My trouble is,” he told his father, “I always could do without childrens.” He watched Daphne and Ornette take turns examining the baby’s tiny fists. “I didn’t like having to baby-sit that brat you all dumped on me.” Brownfield looked his father in the eye.

  “I never liked my brother—you know that—’cause you didn’t like him neither. I seen you pinch him when you thought nobody was looking. Looks like back then the whole business just about made you puke—takin’ care of Margaret’s bastard, and me too.”

  Grange hung his head and endured in silence.

  18

  TO HIS THREE DAUGHTERS Brownfield gave the dregs of his attention only when he was half drunk. To him they were not really human children, although his heart at times broke for them. He could not see them as innocent or even as children. He scolded Ornette, who had come a year after Daphne, with the language he would use on a whore. And the baby, Ruth, he never touched.

  As they grew older, Daphne, the only one who could remember the scanty “good old days” before Brownfield began to despise them, took the baby and Ornette out under the trees and told them of how good a daddy Brownfield had once been. Brownfield overheard her whispering her stories into the baby’s ear, as if she wanted her little sister to grow up believing that the few greedily cherished good times with Brownfield had also been her own.

  Part V

  19

  BROWNFIELD DID NOT believe Mem would be able to find a house. He had not found a decent house the first and only time he had looked for one. What was more, he did not believe she had been looking for one.

  “You get through telling all them old dried-up friends of yours that I just got kicked out on my ass and you already out looking for a mansion to live in—for a change?”

  He reached out an arm and grabbed her quickly around one wrist.

  “Ow, Brownfield,” she said, dropping her shoes.

  “I ought to make you call me Mister,” he said, slowly twisting the wrist he held and bringing her to her knees beside his feet. “A woman as black and ugly as you ought to call a man Mister.”

  “I didn’t find no house today,” she whimpered dryly, because she was so tired and her feet hurt. “And I didn’t see nobody but people that was renting.”

  He shoved her and she knocked over her flower boxes, spilling flowers and dirt. She scrambled shakily to her knees, then to her blistered and callused feet, sniffling and putting a wrinkled hard hand to her head. Her daughters stood at the battered screen watching, their baby sister in their arms.

  We ought to jump on him and kill him dead, Mem thought, as she avoided her children’s eyes, took the baby, Ruth, into her arms, and went into the house.

  “Goddam rib-ridden plowhorse,” Brownfield muttered spitefully, propping his legs against the rotten railing of his sagging front porch.

  20

  AT THE END of the second feeding, when he was putting the scoops back into the feed bags, Captain Davis came in and stood in the doorway chewing and spitting, acting half-interested in what Brownfield was doing and half-interested in emphasizing that he owned the cows and the barn and everything else in sight. He just stood there, with his shirt sleeves pinned up and his bald head mottled, being boss man.

  “I told Mr. J. L. you was going to be looking for a place right soon,” he said. He turned his head down at a slant and watched Brownfield tie up the feed bags. His lips pursed tightly when a few grains of feed spilled on the concrete.

  “I told him he could probably do worse than you if he’s in the market for a field and dairyman.”

  Brownfield’s hands stopped momentarily tying the bags.

  “Yassur?”

  He made as if to straighten all the way up but managed to stand stooped a little so that he felt small and black and buglike, and Captain Davis, with his sparse white hair, seemed a white giant that could step on him.

  “Yassur?” he said again, while Captain Davis’s eyes swept the ceiling and roamed over the rumps of his cows. Slowly.

  Damned one-arm son of a bitch, Brownfield thought, as he stooped motionless, looking up at the tall white man and waiting to shift his eyes the moment the captain turned his face to him.

  Why don’t he say what he going to say, ’stead of acting like I got all goddam day to hear ’bout his slave-driving son. Let him get his own motherfucking help ’stead of trading me off! As the captain turned, Brownfield averted his eyes. A vacant obliging smile wavered on his face.

  “’Course you won’t be living as easy as you do here,” Captain Davis said as his eyes came down to the level of Brownfield’s and Brownfield dropped his own, being careful to maintain a smile that was both alert and respectful.

  “You interested in this, Brown?” the old man asked, clearing his throat and spitting between them, not bothering to turn his head. “I already told Mr. J. L. yo
u was.”

  “Yassur!” Brownfield said, taking out a large print handkerchief and wiping his hands. Paying special attention to between the fingers. He thought about what Mr. J. L. was like; stingy and mean, not to be trusted around black womenfolk, and shuddered. He did not want to work for him. He remembered how he and Mem had come to work for Captain Davis. Captain Davis’s brother had sent them after he had finished with Brownfield and his wife had died and there was no further need for Mem. In return Captain Davis had let his tractor go for a season. The swap had been made exactly as if he and his family were a string of workhorses.

  “I be much obliged to you for putting in a word for me.” Brownfield nodded up and down still smiling but with his eyes carefully averted. He thought about turning down the offer but when the words of refusal came to his lips he found they would not come out. He cleared his throat and prodded the ground in front of him with his foot as if he would speak, but no words came out, only a hesitant grunt that sounded like further strangled acceptance.

  “What you say, Brown?” Captain Davis asked in impatiently severe tones. He turned his tall frame in the doorway so that the sun made a halo of his thin ring of white hair. Looking for a brief second into his light blue eyes Brownfield stood speechless.