A Fine Dark Line Read online

  I climbed up a couple steps. “It’s firm, Callie. I could go all the way to the top.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  “You think a tornado got the house?”

  “I don’t know. This didn’t happen a short time ago, but not a long time ago either. That big oak has been here for no telling how long, but those pines are young. The oak was probably in the side yard, but the pines, they’ve grown up since. Look.”

  Callie bent, picked up a fragment of lumber that had been partially hidden under the pine straw.

  She handed it to me. It was less than a foot of jagged, blackened board. It crumbled in my hand, leaving my fingers black.

  “A fire, Stanley. The house burned down, and pieces of the house were slowly pushed up by the trees as they grew. Isn’t it amazing?”

  “It’s creepy.”

  “It was a big house, Stanley. I bet this is the center of it. The heart of the house.”

  “You mean it was a mansion?”

  “Seems that way. If it was, could be the box wasn’t buried at all. But in the fire it dropped through the burning floorboards and in time got covered. Grass grew up around it, water washed dirt over it. Everything shifted. And there it lay until you and Nub found it.”

  Nub had fixed his mind on the squirrel again. It was running along a limb, looking down at Nub, making that peculiar chattering noise they make, slashing with its tail.

  Nub managed to run up the slight slant of the oak’s trunk, and was now perched on a low-hanging limb barking at the squirrel.

  Callie laughed, said, “Get that fool mutt down from there before he falls on his head.”

  I called Nub, but he wouldn’t come. I finally climbed up and got him, swinging by my feet from the limb and handing Nub to Callie. I squirmed back onto the limb and climbed down.

  “You’re such a bad dog,” I said, petting Nub on the head.

  As we went out of the woods, the squirrel chattered loudly, calling for me to return his playmate.

  4

  CALLIE WANTED TO EXAMINE the letters and the journal more closely, but it was almost time for supper, then it would be time to get ready for opening up the drive-in.

  Saturday was our biggest night. It was the night Daddy was the most nervous. He took to wringing his hands and drinking baking soda mixed in water for his stomach.

  If we had a big Saturday, we sometimes had our money for the week. Everything else, Monday through Friday, was just icing on the cake. But Saturday you had families and dates, the masses turned out to worship the gods on the big white screen.

  Since Rosy Mae was off Saturdays, it had become our custom to have TV dinners, or hot dogs, or fried chicken from the concession stand. But this night, perhaps because Mom didn’t want us to forget she could cook when she had to, we had a big dinner of roast ham, bacon-dripped green beans, brown gravy, and mashed potatoes so light and fluffy you could have tossed them skyward and they would have floated like a cloud. It was as if Mom were trying to compete with Rosy. And as amazing as Mama’s food was, competing against Rosy was like trying to play against a royal flush with a busted flush.

  We finished eating, and were about to go about our business, when we heard the front door open, which we seldom locked (though that would change), and we heard a voice call out, “You Mitchels in there?”

  It was Rosy Mae, calling from the front door. She was leaning in, acting as if she had never been in our house before.

  Mom called out, “Come in, Rosy Mae.”

  Rosy Mae came, stood in the doorway of the kitchen, clutching her paisley purse to her as if she were holding a kitten.

  Her head rag was gone and her woolly hair was twisted up in braids that bounced about her head like sprung bedsprings. Her black face had patches of greater darkness around the eyes and her lips were swollen and there was a cut on her lip, red as original sin. Her dress was stretched at the neck and her right shirtsleeve was torn, ripped to the shoulder.

  “My God,” Mom said. “What happened to you?”

  “I didn’t want to bother y’all none, but I jes’ didn’t know where else to go. My old man, Bubba Joe, he done beat the tar out of me, and I guess I had it comin’, sassin’ him back and all, but he done scared me this time. Pulled a knife. He tole me he gonna cut me up.”

  Mom went to the refrigerator, broke open an ice tray, poured the ice on top of a cup towel, folded it up. “We’ll see if we can bring some of that swelling down on your eye. Poor girl. Did you call the police?”

  “Nawsum. Ain’t no use in that. I done tole the po-leece before. They say it’s a personal matter, and a nigger want to beat his woman, that ain’t none of their business. Besides, we ain’t married.”

  “Then you don’t even have a license to fight,” Daddy said.

  “No suh, we don’t.”

  “That’s not funny, Stanley,” Mom said.

  Mom led Rosy Mae to a chair at the table, pressed the towel full of ice to the left side of her face, which was the side most swollen. At that angle, her hair looked like knotty snakes; she could have been Medusa.

  “This is the worst spot,” Mom said.

  “Yessum, he hits me mostly with the right, so it’s the worst. He hits pretty good with the left too. But he likes to hits me mostly with the right. And he got a ring on that hand.”

  “What in heaven’s sake could this have been over?” Daddy said.

  “I sassed him.”

  “About what?” Daddy said.

  “What?” Mom said. “Like it matters what. You ought to be able to sass a man and not expect a whipping.”

  “Well, some women don’t know their place,” Daddy said.

  “Stanley Senior,” Mom said. “I’ll tell you now, my place is pretty much where I put it. You hear?”

  Daddy didn’t answer, but it was plain from the color of his face that he was embarrassed, and it was plain from the slump of his shoulders he knew it was time to shut up on the matter. It was he who knew his place.

  “A man ever hit me,” Mom said, “he better never go to sleep.”

  She looked at Dad as if he might be considering such a thing. He looked back, shocked.

  “Yessum,” Rosy Mae said. “That’s what I was thinkin’. I get him when he sleeps. I gots me an ole chicken axe out back under a bucket. I use it to kill my fryers, but I could kill him like a chicken if he was asleep. He have to be asleep. He a big man. I thought too I could throw lye in his mean ole face. Lots of niggers I know throw lye, and it sure work good. Put your eyes out, cut the color on a nigger’s face . . . But I ain’t got no heart to do neither . . . I don’t know why I come here, Miss Mitchel. I jes’ didn’t know no other place for me to go. He prob’ly won’t bother me at a white person’s house. That’s what I’m thinkin’, see.”

  “You just sit there until you feel better,” Mom said. “And let me fix you a plate.”

  “That’s mighty nice of you, ma’am, but I don’t know I ought to be sittin’ here at y’alls dinner table and you fixin’ me no plate.”

  “That’s another thing,” Mom said. “You work for us, you sit at the table from now on and take your meals with us.”

  I saw Daddy give Mom a look, but Mom gave him one back that could have sheared the horns off a bull.

  “Callie, you get Rosy Mae a fork, knife, plate and napkin. Fix her a good plate. Stanley Junior, you get her ice tea.”

  Callie and I got the stuff and brought it over. When Callie set the plate in front of Rosy Mae, she patted her on the shoulder.

  “Now, what did he hit you about?” Mom said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Daddy said. “You said so yourself. Just some sassin’.”

  “No matter what, he didn’t have call for this,” Mom said. “But why he hit her matters to me. If, of course, you want to talk about it, Rosy.”

  “He hit me ’cause I ain’t been givin’ him all the money I make here. He wants it all, but he jes’ gambles and drinks it. He been wantin’ me to go out and do another l
ittle work, but I ain’t doin’ it.”

  “What little work?” Mom asked.

  “Well now, Miss Mitchel, I can’t talk on that with the chil’ren here.”

  Mom’s eyes widened.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Yesum, that’s the work. And I ain’t gonna do it. He done run him some womens like that befoe, but I’m a good decent woman, and I ain’t gonna do none of that. Not for no one. Even if’n they beat me. He gonna kill me fo’ I do that.”

  “He beat you because you told him no?”

  “I sorta made it a little too clear, sassy-like. He didn’t ’preciate that none. He’ll cool down, though. He always does. When he gets off the drinkin’ a day or two and sobers up. Then he’ll be pretty good for a time. It’s ’round Fridays, when my payday come, that’s when he gets all swirly-wigged. By Monday, Tuesday, he doin’ better.”

  “That gives you maybe two good days a week,” Mom said. “Rosy Mae, you don’t need to go back to him tonight. You eat your dinner, then you’re gonna sleep in the living room. I don’t want you around that man.”

  Daddy was sitting with his mouth open, not knowing exactly what to say. Mom removed the iced towel from Rosy Mae’s face, said, “Now, you go on and eat. We’ll eat too.”

  Rosy Mae was tentative at first, but pretty soon hunger overtook her.

  “How is it?” Mom asked.

  “It really good, Miss Mitchel. Needs a little salt in them green beans, but it’s real good and I thank you.”

  “Salt?” Mom asked.

  “Yesum. Jes’ a little, though.”

  When we were finished, Mom said, “Rosy Mae, you want, you go lay down in there on the couch. We got to open up the drive-in.”

  “Miss Mitchel,” Rosy Mae said. “You gonna feed me and let me spend the night. I be glad to help you in the kitchen with the fried chicken. Anything you doin’.”

  “Well, there’s no real cooking except the chicken,” Mom said. “But sure. You can do that. But you get to feelin’ tired or in pain, you come in and lay down on the couch.”

  “Thank you, kindly, ma’am.”

  “You’re more than welcome, Rosy Mae.”

  Rosy Mae finished eating, went out to the concession’s kitchen to help Mama fry chicken. I knew that was going to be the best fried chicken anyone ever had at the drive-in, or maybe anywhere else, and it would have just the right amount of salt.

  Daddy sat at the kitchen table, looking in the direction of their retreat, an expression on his face like he had just awakened to find his old life was a dream and that his left foot was actually a cured ham.

  Me and Callie finished eating, asked to be excused, told Daddy we’d be back in plenty of time to start helping with the drive-in work, went back to my room where we dragged out the box and Callie started reading from the letters.

  “It’s all from M to J. Were any real names mentioned?”

  “I don’t think so . . . I don’t know. I haven’t read all of that stuff.”

  “These last pages, they’re out of a journal, or a diary . . . Well, this is odd.”

  “What’s odd?”

  “They’re from a diary, but the diary seems to be the girl’s diary. It reads in the same way as the letters. With it bound up and in a padlocked box, you get the idea it’s something someone treasured, but wanted to keep secret. That makes me think it all belongs to one person, this J. I guess it could belong to the girl who wrote the letters and the journal, and she never sent the letters. You know. Wishful thinking . . . Or maybe J gave them back. That happens sometimes when people break up. Back then, during the war, letters were prized more highly than now, Stanley.”

  “How come there’s just pages torn from the diary? Where’s the rest of it?”

  “That is odd, isn’t it?”

  Callie examined the journal closely. “Here’s something interesting, though you may be too young to hear it.”

  “I’ve heard more lately than I knew there was,” I said. “I don’t believe a little more information will kill me.”

  “She’s talking about sexual activity in the journal. She says . . . I don’t know if I should read this to you. Maybe you should look at it.”

  She gave it to me. I read it. I said, “What’s fingering?”

  Callie turned red. “That’s why I had you read it, silly. I didn’t want to say it or explain it.”

  “Well, I read it, but now you explain it.”

  She did.

  I said, “Oh,” and gave it back to her.

  “She’s talking about what she and this boy, J, did. She says they did it out back in the woods, on a blanket. She doesn’t say anymore in detail, just that they made each other happy. That means they did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Stanley, you are dense. Remember about the dogs?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  I felt worse than when I discovered there was no Santa Claus. Here was something that was going on that everyone seemed to know about but me.

  “You said they did it in the woods. You mean the woods where the old house was?”

  “I don’t know. I think the house would have been there when these letters were written. So probably not. I think M tore these pages out of her diary and gave them to J as a kind of memento. I think that’s it, and that’s why J has M’s pages.

  “I think maybe you’ve had enough of this for now. I don’t want you blowing out a fuse. You’re going to need a better hiding place for this than under the bed. Mom or Rosy Mae are eventually going to come across it . . . I’ll be.”

  Callie was reading from the pages. I said, “What?”

  “She thinks she might be pregnant . . . Listen to this. ‘I’m sorry about the baby. But it will be okay. Things can be done.’ She’s talking about getting rid of it before it’s born, Stanley. And here’s more. ‘Or we can learn to live with the idea. Having a baby around wouldn’t be so bad.’ ”

  “What do you mean, getting rid of it?”

  Callie spent a few minutes explaining.

  “You can do that?”

  “Some doctors will do it, but it’s against the law.”

  “So J must have lived in the house in the trees?”

  “I suppose. It wasn’t in the trees then, though.”

  “I know that.”

  “You can never be certain with you, Stanley. Thing to do, when we get time, is find out who owned the old burned-down house. That might help us decide who the box belongs to.”

  “That sounds great. Like a mystery. Like the Hardy Boys. Or Nancy Drew.”

  “It’s interesting, Stanley, but it isn’t exactly something that drives me to distraction. Understand?”

  “Sounds to me like a murder.”

  “Guess it could be that,” Callie said. “J didn’t really love her like M loved him, and when she got pregnant, he decided to get rid of her. It could have happened that way. But if he hated her, why did he keep the letters?”

  “He hid them?”

  “Why didn’t he just destroy them?”

  “See,” I said. “You are interested.”

  “I suppose. But that doesn’t mean I’m nuts to figure it out. I’m just saying, since I got nothing else to do with my summer, maybe we can take a crack at it. Maybe not. We’ll see. Come on. We got to help Mom and Daddy.”

  Callie went out. I put the box in my closet on the top shelf and put a folded shirt over it and my Davy Crockett coonskin cap on top of that.

  ———

  THE LAST SHOWING of Vertigo finished well after midnight. It was like that in the dead of summer. It got dark late, so to make two showings, you had to go into early morning.

  That night they packed the place. Everyone wanted to see the new Hitchcock film. I saw none of it, of course. I was waiting for our family get-together.

  I spent time helping out at the concession, and when we closed at eleven, Daddy took position at the exit to make sure no one was trying to sneak in for the last hour o
f the movie.

  It took about an hour to clean up, and Rosy Mae’s disposition seemed much better. She even hummed a bit while she used woolen mitts to pour the grease from the frying pot into a barrel.

  Rosy Mae washed the pot and other dishes, and when she finished, she asked if I wanted to go out front while she smoked a cigarette, as she was afraid of her man, Bubba Joe, and my mother did not allow smoking in the house by friend or relative.

  Mom overheard us, said, “I wish he wouldn’t go out front. It frightens me to think Bubba Joe might be out there. Why don’t you go on the roof and let Stanley keep you company?”

  “Yesum,” Rosy Mae said.

  We went upstairs, walked a slanted ramp that opened on to the roof by a trapdoor. We stepped out just below the giant dew drop.

  The last of the cars could be seen filing out of the drive-in, their lights coming on, poking at the night. I could see Buster leaving the concession stand, his thermos in his hand, walking toward the exit, moving slowly by the cars as they exited. I thought I heard someone yell “nigger” from one of the cars.

  Buster didn’t look up. He kept walking.

  Rosy Mae got out a can of Sir Walter Raleigh and shook some tobacco onto a rolling paper. She folded it quickly with one hand, licked, slipped it into her mouth, smooth as any cowboy.

  She removed a big kitchen match from her wild hair, cocked her hip, struck it on the side of her dress, and lit up.

  “Oooooeeee,” she said. “I needed that.”

  She began coughing almost immediately.

  “I don’t need that none. Hit me on the back, Mr. Stanley.”

  I did, sharply.

  “Thanks. It done went down the wrong pipe.”

  “You don’t need to call me Mr.,” I said. “I’m just a boy.”

  “Yessuh, but you a white boy.”

  “Call me Stanley.”

  “All right, Stanley.”

  “This man of yours . . . Is he dangerous?”

  “Scares me. I know some niggers run the other way they see him comin’. I carries me a razor.”

  Rosy Mae reached into a fold of her dress and produced it, flicked it open. The blade lapped like a tongue, cut some darkness, flicked closed, went into her dress.