Читать книгу The Living is Easy - Dorothy West - Страница 8

CHAPTER 2

HER EYES FLEW OPEN. The birds were waking in the Carolina woods. Cleo always got up with them. There were never enough hours in a summer day to extract the full joy of being alive. She tumbled out of the big old-fashioned bed. Small Serena stirred, then lay still again on her share of the pillow. At the foot of the bed, Lily and Charity nestled together.

She stared at her three younger sisters, seeing the defenselessness of their innocent sleep. The bubbling mischief in her made her take one of Lily’s long braids and double knot it with one of Charity’s. She looked back at Serena, who tried so hard to be a big girl and never let anyone help her dress. She picked up Serena’s little drawers and turned one leg inside out.

She was almost sorry she would be far away when the fun began. She could picture Lily and Charity leaping to the floor from opposite sides of the bed, and their heads snapping back, and banging together. As for Serena, surprise would spread all over her solemn face when she stepped into one leg of her drawers and found the other leg closed to her. She would start all over again, trying her other foot this time, only to find she had stepped into the same kettle of hot water. She would wrassle for fifteen minutes, getting madder and madder. Cleo had to clap her hand to her mouth to hush her giggles.

She would get a whipping for it. Mama would never see the joke. Mama would say it was mean to tease your sisters. You had to walk a chalkline to please her.

Sometimes Cleo tried to walk a chalkline, but after a little while, keeping to the strait and narrow made her too nervous. At home, there was nothing to do except stay around. Away from home, there were trees to climb, and boys to fight, and hell to raise with Josie Beauchamp.

She climbed out of the open window and dropped to the ground at the moment that Josie Beauchamp was quietly creeping down the stairs of her magnificent house. Some day Cleo was going to live in a fine house, too. And maybe some day Josie was going to be as poor as church mice.

They met by their tree, at the foot of which they had buried their symbols of friendship. Josie had buried her gold ring because she loved it best of everything, and Cleo best of everybody. Cleo had buried Lily’s doll, mostly because it tickled her to tell her timid sister that she had seen a big rat dragging it under the house. Lily had taken a long stick and poked around. But every time it touched something, Lily had jumped a mile.

Cleo and Josie wandered over the Beauchamp place, their bare feet drinking in the dew, their faces lifted to feel the morning. Only the birds were abroad, their vivid splashes of color, the brilliant outpouring of their waking songs filling the eye and ear with summer’s intoxication.

They did not talk. They had no words to express their aliveness. They wanted none. Their bodies were their eloquence. Clasping hands, they began to skip, too impatient of meeting the morning to walk toward it any longer. Suddenly Cleo pulled her hand away and tapped Josie on the shoulder. They should have chosen who was to be “It.” But Cleo had no time for counting out. The wildness was in her, the unrestrained joy, the desire to run to the edge of the world and fling her arms around the sun, and rise with it, through time and space, to the center of everywhere.

She was swift as a deer, as mercury, with Josie running after her, falling back, and back, until Josie broke the magic of the morning with her exhausted cry, “Cleo, I can’t catch you.”

“Nobody can’t never catch me,” Cleo exulted. But she spun around to wait for Josie. The little sob in Josie’s throat touched the tenderness she always felt toward those who had let her show herself the stronger.

They wandered back toward Josie’s house, for now the busyness of the birds had quieted to let the human toilers take over the morning. Muted against the white folks’ sleeping, the Negro voices made velvet sounds. The field hands and the house servants diverged toward their separate spheres, the house servants settling their masks in place, the field hands waiting for the overseer’s eye before they stooped to servility.

Cleo and Josie dawdled before the stables. The riding horses whinnied softly, thrusting their noses to the day. Josie’s pony nuzzled her hand, wanting to hear his name dripping in honey. And Cleo moved away. Anybody could ride an old pony. She wanted to ride General Beauchamp’s roan stallion, who shied at any touch but his master’s.

She marched back to Josie. “Dare me to ride the red horse,” she challenged. Her eyes were green as they bored into Josie’s, the gray gone under in her passion.

“No,” said Josie, desperately trying not to flounder in the green sea. “He’d throw you and trample you. He’d kill you dead.”

“He can’t tromp me! I ain’t ascairt of nothing alive. I dare you to dare me. I double dare you!”

“I won’t, I won’t! I’m bad, but I’m not wicked.”

“I’m not wicked neither! I just ain’t a coward.”

She streaked to the stall and flung open the barrier. The wild horse smelled her wildness. Her green eyes locked with his red-flecked glare. Their wills met, clashed, and would not yield. The roan made a savage sound in his throat, his nostrils flared, his great sides rippled. He lowered his head to lunge. But Cleo was quicker than he was. She grasped his mane, leaped on his broad neck, slid down his back, and dug her heels in his flanks.

“Giddap, red horse!” she cried.

He flung back his head, reared, and crashed out of the stall, with Josie screeching and sobbing and sidestepping just in time.

Cleo hung on for ten minutes, ten minutes of dazzling flight to the sun. She felt no fear, feeling only the power beneath her and the power inside her, and the rush of wind on which she and the roan were riding. When she was finally thrown, she landed unhurt in a clover field. It never occurred to her to feel for broken bones. She never doubted that she had a charmed life. Her sole mishap was a minor one. She had split the seat of her drawers.

She got up and brushed off her pinafore, in a fever now to get home and brag to her sisters. She knew that she ought to let Josie see that she was still alive. The riderless horse would return, and Josie would never tell who had ridden him off. But she would be tormented by fear for as long as Cleo stayed away.

Josie would not want to eat, no matter what fancy things the white folks had for breakfast. She would not want to ride in her pony cart, no matter how pretty a picture she made. She would not want to go calling with her stylish mother, not even if she was let to wear the dress that came all the way from Paris. On this bright day the sun had darkened for Josie, and nobody but Cleo could make it shine again.

The four sisters sat around the kitchen table, eating their salt pork and biscuit and hominy, shipping down their buttermilk. Charity was nine, two years younger than Cleo, Lily was eight, Serena four. Their faces were tear-streaked. Cleo’s was not, though she was the one who had got the whipping. Mama couldn’t keep track of the times she had tanned Cleo’s hide, trying to bring her up a Christian. But the Devil was trying just as hard in the other direction.

There Cleo was this morning, looking square in Mama’s eye, telling her she must have been sleepwalking again. Couldn’t remember getting dressed or tying her sisters’ braids together. Just remembered coming awake in a clover field. Mama had tried to beat the truth out of her, but Cleo wouldn’t budge from her lie. Worst of all, she wouldn’t cry and show remorse. Finally Mama had to put away the strap because her other children looked as if they would die if she didn’t.

They couldn’t bear to see Cleo beaten. She was their oldest sister, their protector. She wasn’t afraid of the biggest boy or the fiercest dog, or the meanest teacher. She could sass back. She could do anything. They accepted her teasing and tormenting as they accepted the terrors of night. Night was always followed by day, and made day seem more wonderful.

Mama stood by the hearth, feeling helpless in her mind. Cleo was getting too big to beat, but she wasn’t a child that would listen to reason. Whatever she didn’t want to hear went in one ear and out the other. She was old enough to be setting an example for her sisters. And all they saw her do was devilment.

With a long blackened fireplace stick Mama carefully tilted the lid of the three-legged skillet to see if her corn bread was done. The rest of Pa’s noon dinner — the greens, the rice, the hunk of fresh pork — was waiting in his bucket. Gently she let the lid drop, and began to work the skillet out of its covering of coals that had been charred down from the oak wood. As the skillet moved forward, the top coals dislodged. Their little plunking sounds were like the tears plopping in Mama’s heart.

Sulkily Cleo spooned the hominy she hated because she mustn’t make Mama madder by leaving it. Mama bleached her corn in lye water made from fireplace ashes. Pa spit tobacco juice in those ashes. He spit to the side, and Mama took her ashes from the center, but that didn’t make them seem any cleaner. Mama thought everything about Pa was wonderful, even his spit.

Cleo made a face at Mama’s back, and then her face had to smile a little bit as she watched the dimples going in and out of Mama’s round arms. You could almost touch their softness with your eyes. A flush lay just under the surface, giving them a look of tender warmth. For all the loving in Mama’s arms, she had no time for it all day. Only at night, when her work was done, and her children in bed, you knew by Mama’s silver laughter that she was finding time for Pa.

Mama loved Pa better than anyone. And what was left over from loving him was divided among her daughters. Divided even, Mama said whenever Cleo asked her. Never once would Mama say she loved one child the most.

On their straggling way to the mill with Pa’s dinner, Cleo told her sisters about her wild ride. They were bewitched by her fanciful telling. Timid Lily forgot to watch where she was walking. Her toes uncurled. She snatched up a stick and got astride it.

Serena clung to Charity’s hand to keep herself from flying. Cleo was carrying her away, and she wanted to feel the ground again. She wanted to take Pa his dinner, and go back home and play house.

Charity saw a shining prince on a snow-white charger. The prince rode toward her, dazzling her eyes with light, coming nearer and nearer, leaning to swoop her up in his arms. And Cleo, looking at Charity’s parted lips and the glowing eyes, thought that Charity was seeing her riding the red horse into the sun.

Her triumphant tale, in which she did not fall, but grandly dismounted to General Beauchamp’s applause, came to its thrilling conclusion. She turned and looked at Lily scornfully, because a stick was not a horse. Lily felt foolish, and let the stick fall, and stepped squish on an old fat worm. Serena freed her hand. Released from Cleo’s spell, she felt independent again. Charity’s shining prince vanished, and there was only Cleo, walking ahead as usual, forgetting to take back the bucket she had passed to Charity.

Pa was waiting in the shade, letting the toil pour off him in perspiration. His tired face lightened with love when they reached him. He opened his dinner bucket and gave them each a taste. Nothing ever melted so good in their mouths as a bite of Pa’s victuals.

He gave them each a copper, too, though he could hardly spare it, what with four of them to feed and Mama wanting yard goods and buttons and ribbons to keep herself feeling proud of the way she kept her children. Time was, he gave them kisses for toting his bucket. But the day Cleo brazenly said, I don’t want a kiss, I want a copper, the rest of them shamefacedly said it after her. Most times Pa had a struggle to dig down so deep. Four coppers a day, six days a week, was half a day’s pay gone up in smoke for candy.

Pa couldn’t bring himself to tell Mama. She would have wrung out of him that Cleo had been the one started it. And Cleo was his eldest. A man who loved his wife couldn’t help loving his first-born best, the child of his fiercest passion. When that first-born was a girl, she could trample on his heart, and he would swear on a stack of Bibles that it didn’t hurt.

The sisters put their coppers in their pinafore pockets and skipped back through the woods.

Midway Cleo stopped and pointed to a towering oak. “You all want to bet me a copper I can’t swing by my feet from up in that tree?”

Lily clapped her hands to her eyes. “I doesn’t want to bet you,” she implored. “I ain’t fixing to see you fall.”

Serena said severely, “You bust your neck, you see if Mama don’t bust it again.”

Charity said tremulously, “Cleo, what would us do if our sister was dead?”

Cleo saw herself dressed up fine as Josie Beauchamp, stretched out in a coffin with her sisters sobbing beside it, and Pa with his Sunday handkerchief holding his tears, and Mama crying, I loved you best, Cleo. I never said it when you were alive. And I’m sorry, sorry, I waited to say it after you were gone.

“You hold my copper, Charity. And if I die, you can have it.”

Lily opened two of her fingers and peeped through the crack. “Cleo, I’ll give you mine if you don’t make me see you hanging upside down.” It was one thing to hear Cleo tell about herself. It was another thing to see her fixing to kill herself.

“Me, too,” said Serena, with a little sob, more for the copper than for Cleo, whom she briefly hated for compelling unnecessary sacrifice.

“You can have mine,” said Charity harshly. Her sweet tooth ached for a peppermint stick, and she almost wished that Cleo was dead.

Cleo flashed them all an exultant smile. She had won their money without trying. She had been willing to risk her neck to buy rich Josie Beauchamp some penny candy. Now that it was too late to retrieve Josie Beauchamp’s lost hours of anxiety, Cleo wanted to carry her a bag of candy, so that when Josie got through with being glad, and got mad, she wouldn’t stay mad too long.

She held out her hand. Each tight fist poised over her palm, desperately clung aloft, then slowly opened to release the bright coin that was to have added a special sweetness to the summer day.

Cleo couldn’t bear to see their woe-begone faces. She felt frightened, trapped by their wounded eyes. She had to do something to change their expressions.

“I’ll do a stunt for you,” she said feverishly. “I’ll swing by my hands. It ain’t nothing to be ascairt to see. You watch.”

Quickly, agilely she climbed the tree and hung by her hands. Wildly, wildly she swung, to make them forget she had taken their money, to let them see how wonderful she was.

Then a boy came by, just an ordinary knotted-headed, knobby-kneed boy. He looked at her and laughed, because to him a girl carrying on so crazy cut a funny figure. She wanted to kill him. He made her feel silly. She climbed down, and she knew he was watching her, watching the split in her drawers.

When she reached the ground, she whirled to face him, and found his feet waving in front of her. He was walking on his hands. And her sisters were squealing with delight. They had seen her walk on her hands a thousand times. What was there so wonderful about watching a boy?

She flung herself upon him, and they fought like dogs, the coppers lost irrecoverably. Her sisters circled them, crying and wringing their hands. She had to win, no matter how. She bent her head and butted him in the groin, where the weakness of boys was — the contradictory delicacy.

The fight was knocked out of him. He lay very still, his hands shielding his innocent maleness from further assault, and the blood on his lips where his anguished teeth had sunk in.

Her sisters fluttered around him. They felt no pride for her victory. Instead they pitied him. She watched them with wonder. What was there to being a boy? What was there to being a man? Men just worked. That was easier than what women did. It was women who did the lying awake, the planning, the sorrowing, the scheming to stretch a dollar. That was the hard part, the head part. A woman had to think all the time. A woman had to be smart.

Her sisters weren’t smart. They thought Pa was the head of the house. They didn’t know the house was run by the beat of Mama’s heart. There was an awful lonesomeness in Cleo when Mama went across the river to Grandma’s. She did not want to be bad then. She wanted to be good so God would send Mama back safe. But she was wildly bad again the moment Mama returned. She could not bear the way she felt inside, like laughing and crying and kissing Mama’s face.

She never kissed Mama. Kisses were silly. Pa kissed Mama when he came home from work. There was sweat on him from his labor, but Mama lifted her mouth to his. His mustache prickled against her lips, but Mama did not pull away.

Looking at her sisters, standing above the suffering boy, she saw in each some likeness of Mama — in Charity the softness and roundness, the flush just under the thin skin, the silver laughter; in Lily the doe eyes, liquid and vulnerable, the plaited hair that kept escaping in curls; in small Serena the cherry-red mouth, the dimpled cheeks. She knew that she looked like Pa. Everyone said so. Everyone said she was a beauty. What was wrong with their seeing? How could looking like Pa, with his sweat and his stained mustache, make anybody a beauty? Sometimes she would stare at herself in Mama’s mirror and stick out her tongue.

Now, seeing her sisters, with their tender faces turned toward the boy, a terrible sorrow assailed her. Some day they would all grow up. They would all get married and go away. They would never live together again, nor share the long bright busy days. Mama, too, would go. Mama would die. Didn’t she always say that her side of the family were not long livers? They were dead before they were fifty. Dead with their loveliness alive in their still, smooth faces. When Mama was gone in a last luminous moment, there would be the look of her and the silver laughter in the children she had blessed with her resemblance.

So long as her sisters were within sight and sound, they were the mirrors in which she would see Mama. They would be her remembering of her happy, happy childhood.

She flung herself down on the ground, and her torture was worse than the boy’s. For hers was spiritual suffering and immeasurable frustration. All her terror of the future, all her despair at knowing that nothing lasts — that sisters turn into wives, that men take their women and ride away, that childhood is no longer than a summer day — were in her great dry sobs.

The boy staggered to his feet in complete alarm. He thought he had hurt her in some dreadful way mysterious to girls, her breast, her belly where the babies grew. Her father would skin him alive. He made a limping dash across the road and the trees closed in.

Then her sisters knelt beside her, letting their soothing fingers caress her face. Her sobbing quieted. She jumped up and began to turn cartwheels. A wildness was in her. She was going to turn cartwheels all the way home, heretofore an impossible feat.

Mama was in the doorway, watching her hurtle down a dusty road, seeing a girl eleven years old turning upside down, showing her drawers. Mama got the strap again and laid it on hard and heavy. Cleo just grinned, and wouldn’t wipe the grin off, even with the whole of her on fire and hurting. Mama couldn’t bear such impudence from her own flesh and blood. She let the strap fall and sat down and cried.

Mama didn’t know what made Cleo so wild. Cleo got more of her attention than all of her other children put together. God help her when she grew up. God help the man who married her. God help her sisters not to follow in her footsteps. Better for her sisters if Cleo had never been born.

Somewhere in Springfield, Massachusetts, at that moment, Bart Judson, a grown man, a businessman, too interested in the Almighty Dollar to give any thought to a wife, was certainly giving no thought to an eleven-year-old hell-raiser way down South. But for Bart, whose inescapable destiny this unknown hoyden was to be, it might have been better if her sisters had never been born.