The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics), Page 2

  “Shall we do what we did last week?” asked Sister Florence. She looked hopefully at Sister Antonia.

  “Cubs and White Sox?” said Sister Antonia. “O.K., if it’ll make you happy.” Sister Antonia dumped out the other sack. The winner would be the one counting the most money. They chose up sides and changed seats accordingly, leaving Sister Antonia and herself to do the envelopes.

  Sister Louise and Sister Paula, who could remember several regimes before hers and might have been mothers superior themselves, constituted a resistance movement, each in her fashion. Sister Louise went to sleep in a nice, unobtrusive way, chin in wimple. But Sister Paula—Sister Cigar Box to the children, with whom she was not a great favorite—stayed awake to grumble and would touch only the coins that appeared old, foreign, or very new to her. She stared long and hard at them while Sister Louise dozed with a handful of sweaty nickels.

  It was their way of informing everyone of their disapproval, of letting her know it had not been like this in former times, that Sunday had been a day of rest under other leadership. They were right, she knew too well, and was ashamed that she could not bring herself to make a stand against Father. Fortunately, the two old sisters could not carry the resistance beyond themselves. She left them to Sister Antonia. The others, to make the contest even, divided the dead weight between them. The Cubs got Sister Louise and Sister Paula went with the White Sox.

  A horn tooted out in front of the rectory, and from his room upstairs young Father shouted, “Cominnggg! Tell him I’m coming!” The shout sailed down the stairway and out to Father on the porch.

  “He’s coming,” Father called to the car. “How’s your health?”

  She could not catch the reply for the noise young Father made running around upstairs. He had on his shower clogs and was such a heavy man.

  Finally the ceiling settled, and young Father came clattering down the front stairs, dragging his golf clubs behind him. He spoke to Father on the porch.

  “Want me home for Devotions, Father?”

  “Oh hell, Bill, have a good time. Won’t anybody come in weather like this but the nuns. I’ll handle it.”

  “Well—thanks, Boss.”

  “Look out for that nineteenth hole; that’s all I got to say. Have a good time.”

  “You talked me into it.”

  Sister Cigar Box dropped a half dollar from an unnecessary height and listened to the ring. “Lead! And I suppose that was that Father O’Mammon in his new machine out waking the dead! I’m on to him. I had him in school.”

  “O’Hannon, Sister,” corrected Sister Antonia.

  “Of St Judas’s parish. I know.”

  “Of St Jude’s, Sister.”

  “Crazy!”

  Father’s radio woke up with a roar.

  “The symphony!” breathed Sister Charlotte, who gave piano lessons to beginners six days a week.

  “It’s nice,” Sister Cigar Box rasped when Father dialed away from it. “Wasn’t it?”

  Now Father was getting the news and disputing with the commentator. “Like hell you say!” Father had the last word and strode into the dining room with his collar off, bristling.

  “Good afternoon, Father!” they all sang out.

  “We’ll have to fight Russia,” he said, plunging into the kitchen. She heard him in the refrigerator and could tell that, rather than move things, he squeezed them out. He passed through the dining room, carrying a bottle of beer and a glass.

  “Hot,” he said to nobody.

  The radio came on again. Father listened to an inning of the ball game. “Cubs are still in second place!” he shouted back to them.

  “Thank you, Father,” said Sister Florence involuntarily.

  Sister Cigar Box said, “Humph!”

  Now she could tell from the scraping noises that Father was playing himself a game of checkers. Periodically the moves became more rapid, frenzied, then triumphant. He was winning every game.

  She asked Sister Eleanor how the map was coming.

  “All in except Rhode Island and Tennessee. I don’t know what’s keeping them.” They all knew Sister Eleanor was putting together a map from free road maps she got from the oil companies. She had been unable to get an appropriation from Father for a new one. He said they had a map already and that he had seen it a few years back. She had tried to tell him it was too old and blurry, that Arizona and Oklahoma, for instance, had now been admitted to the Union. Who cares about them? said Father. Give the kids a general idea—that’s all you can do in the grades. Same as you give them catechism. You’d have them all studying Saint Thomas in the Latin.

  “How big’s it now?” asked Sister Antonia.

  “Enormous. We’ll have to put it up in sections, I guess. Like the Eastern states, the Middle Atlantic, and so on.”

  “You could hang it in the gym.”

  “If Father moved out his workshop.”

  “Some of the maps don’t dovetail when they come from different companies. But you get detail you wouldn’t get in a regular map. It’s just awkward this way.”

  Father appeared in the door of the dining room. “How’s she look?”

  “More envelopes this week, Father,” said Sister Antonia.

  “Guess that last blast got them. How’s the hardware department?”

  Three sisters saw each other about to speak, gulped, and said nothing. “It’s better, isn’t it, Sister?” inquired Sister Antonia.

  “Yes, Sister.”

  Father came over to the table. “What’s this?” He picked up a Chinese coin with a hole in it that Sister Cigar Box had been glad to see earlier. “Well, we don’t get so many buttons nowadays, do we?” Father’s fingers prowled the money pile sensitively.

  “No, Father,” said Sister Florence. “One last week, one today.” She looked like a small girl who’s just spoken her piece.

  “One again, huh? Have to tell the ushers to bear down. Here, Sister, you keep this.” Father gave the Chinese coin to Sister Cigar Box. “For when you go on the missions.”

  Sister Cigar Box took the coin from him and said nothing—about the only one not smiling—and put it down a trifle hard on the table.

  Father went over to the buffet. “Like apples? Who wants an apple?” He apparently expected them to raise their hands but did not seem disappointed when no one did. He placed the bowl on the table for them. Three apples on top were real, but the ones underneath were wax and appeared more edible. No one took an apple.

  “Don’t be bashful,” Father said, straying into the kitchen.

  She heard him in the refrigerator again.

  In a moment he came out of the kitchen with a bottle of beer and a fresh glass, passed quickly through the room, and, hesitating at the door, turned toward them. “Hot weather,” he said. “Makes you sleepy. That’s all I got to say.” He left them for the porch.

  The radio went on again. He had the Catholic Hour for about a minute. “Bum speaker,” he explained while dialing. “Else I’d keep it on. I’ll try to get it for you next week. They’re starting a new series.”

  “Yes, Father,” said Sister Florence, not loud enough to be heard beyond the table.

  Sister Cigar Box said, “Humph!”

  Father could be heard pouring the beer.

  Next he got “The Adventures of Phobe Smith, the Phantom Psychiatrist.” It was better than the ball game and news.

  But Phobe, if Muller wasn’t killed in the plane crash and Mex was really working for British Intelligence, tell me how the heck could Colonel Barnett be a Jap spy and still look like—uh—the real Colonel Barnett? Plastic surgery. Plastic surgery—well, I never! Plus faricasalicasuki. Plus farica—what! Faricasalicasuki—a concentrate, something like our penicillin. And you knew all the time—! That Colonel Barnett’s wife, Darlene, was not . . . unfaithful? Yes! I’m afraid so. Whew!

  An organ intervened and Father turned off the radio.

  She recorded the last contribution on the last index card. The money was all cou
nted and wrapped in rolls for the bank. The White Sox had won. She told them to wait for her and ventured out on the porch, determined to make up for the afternoon, to show them that she knew, perhaps, what she was doing.

  “Father”—he was resting in an orange-and-green deck chair—“I wonder if you could come and look at our stove.”

  Father pried his legs sideways, sat up, and rubbed his eyes. “Today? Now?”

  She nodded dumbly and forced herself to go through with it. “It’s smoking so we can’t use it at all.” She was ready, if necessary, to mention the old sisters who were used to hot tea.

  Father massaged his bald head to rouse himself. He wrinkled the mottled scalp between his hands and it seemed to make a nasty face at her. “Let’s go,” he said. Evidently he had decided to be peppy—an example to her in time of adversity. He scooped his collar off the radio and let it snap to around his neck. He left it that way, unfastened.

  “Father is going to look at the stove,” she told them in the dining room. They murmured with pleasure.

  Father went first, a little unsteady on stiff legs, not waiting for them. He passed the stumps in the yard with satisfaction, she thought. “Whyn’t you ask John to look at it yesterday?” he demanded over his shoulder.

  She tried to gain a step on him, but he was going too fast, wobbling in a straight line like a runaway trolley. “I thought you’d know more about it, Father,” she lied, ashamed that the others could hear. John, looking at it, had shaken his head.

  “Do we need a new one, John?”

  “If you need a stove, Sister, you need a new one.”

  Father broke into their kitchen as into a roomful of assassins, and confronted the glowering hulk of iron that was their stove. “Is it dirty or does it just look that way?”

  She swallowed her temper, but with such bad grace there was no merit in it, only design. She gave the others such a terrible frown they all disappeared, even Sister Antonia.

  Father squinted to read the name on the stove. “That stove cost a lot of money,” he said. “They don’t make them like that anymore.” He slapped the pipe going up and through the side of the wall. He gave the draft regulator a twist.

  He went to the window and peered out. When he turned around he had the print of the screen on his nose. She would not say anything to distract him. He seemed to be thinking. Then he considered the stove again and appeared to have his mind made up. He faced her.

  “The stove’s all right, Sister. It won’t draw properly, is all.”

  “I know, Father, but—”

  “That tree,” he said, pointing through the wall at the small tree which had been spared, “is blocking the draft. If you want your stove to work properly, it’ll have to come down. That’s all I got to say.”

  He squinted to read the name on the stove again.

  She felt the blood assembling in patches on her cheeks. “Thank you, Father,” she said, and went quickly out of the kitchen, only wanting to get upstairs and wash the money off her hands.

  THE TROUBLE

  Neither the slavers’ whip nor the lynchers’ rope nor the bayonet could kill our black belief.

  —MARGARET WALKER, FOR MY PEOPLE

  WE WATCHED AT the window all that afternoon. Old Gramma came out of her room and said, “Now you kids get away from there this minute.” And we would until she went back to her room. We could hear her old rocking chair creak when she got up or sat down, and so we always ran away from the window before she came into the room to see if we were minding her good or looking out. Except once she went back to her room and didn’t sit down, or maybe she did and got up easy so the chair didn’t creak, or maybe we got our signals mixed, because she caught us all there and shooed us away and pulled down the green shade. The next time we were real sure she wasn’t foxing us before we went to the window and lifted the shade just enough to peek out.

  It was like waiting for rats as big as cats to run out from under a tenement so you could pick them off with a .22. Rats are about the biggest live game you can find in ordinary times and you see more of them than white folks in our neighborhood—in ordinary times. But the rats we waited for today were white ones, and they were doing most of the shooting themselves. Sometimes some coloreds would come by with guns, but not often; they mostly had clubs. This morning we’d seen the whites catch up with a shot-in-the-leg colored and throw bricks and stones at his black head till it got all red and he was dead. I could still see the wet places in the alley. That’s why we kept looking out the window. We wanted to see some whites get killed for a change, but we didn’t much think we would, and I guess what we really expected to see was nothing, or maybe them killing another colored.

  There was a rumpus downstairs in front, and I could hear a mess of people tramping up the stairs. They kept on coming after the second floor and my sister Carrie, my twin, said maybe they were whites come to get us because we saw what they did to the shot-in-the-leg colored in the alley. I was scared for a minute, I admit, but when I heard their voices plainer I knew they were coloreds and it was all right, only I didn’t see why there were so many of them.

  Then I got scared again, only different now, empty scared all over, when they came down the hall on our floor, not stopping at anybody else’s door. And then there they were, banging on our door, of all the doors in the building. They tried to come right on in, but the door was locked.

  Old Gramma was the one locked it and she said she’d clean house if one of us kids so much as looked at the knob even, and she threw the key down her neck somewhere. I went and told her that was our door the people were pounding on and where was the key. She reached down her neck and there was the key all right. But she didn’t act much like she intended to open the door. She just stood there staring at it like it was somebody alive, saying the litany to the Blessed Virgin: Mère du Christ, priez pour nous, Secours des chrétiens, priez . . . Then all of a sudden she was crying; tears were blurry in her old yellow eyes, and she put the key in the lock, her veiny hands shaking, and unlocked the door.

  They had Mama in their arms. I forgot all about Old Gramma, but I guess she passed out. Anyway, she was on the floor and a couple of men were picking her up and a couple of women were saying, “Put her here, put her there.” I wasn’t worried as much about Old Gramma as I was about Mama.

  A bone—God, it made me sick—had poked through the flesh of Mama’s arm, all bloody like a sharp stick, and something terrible was wrong with her chest. I couldn’t look anymore and Carrie was screaming. That started me crying. Tears got in the way, but still I could see the baby, one and a half, and brother George, four and a half, and they had their eyes wide-open at what they saw and weren’t crying a bit, too young to know what the hell.

  They put Old Gramma in her room on the cot and closed the door on her and some old woman friend of hers that kept dipping a handkerchief in cold water and laying it on Old Gramma’s head. They put Mama on the bed in the room where everybody was standing around and talking lower and lower until pretty soon they were just whispering.

  Somebody came in with a doctor, a colored one, and he had a little black bag like they have in the movies. I don’t think our family ever had a doctor come to see us before. Maybe before I was born Mama and Daddy did. I heard the doctor tell Mr Purvine, that works in the same mill Daddy does, only the night shift, that he ought to set the bone, but honest to God he thought he might as well wait, as he didn’t want to hurt Mama if it wasn’t going to make any difference.

  He wasn’t nearly as brisk now with his little black bag as he had been when he came in. He touched Mama’s forehead a couple of times and it didn’t feel good to him, I guess, because he looked tired after he did it. He held his hand on the wrist of her good arm, but I couldn’t tell what this meant from his face. It mustn’t have been any worse than the forehead, or maybe his face had nothing to do with what he thought, and I was imagining all this from seeing the shape Mama was in. Finally he said, “I’ll try,” and he began calling fo
r hot water and other things, and pretty soon Mama was all bandaged up white.

  The doctor stepped away from Mama and over to some men and women, six or seven of them now—a lot more had gone—and asked them what had happened. He didn’t ask all the questions I wanted to ask—I guess he already knew some of the answers—but I did find out Mama was on a streetcar coming home from the plant—Mama works now and we’re saving for a cranberry farm—when the riot broke out in that section. Mr Purvine said he called the mill and told Daddy to come home. But Mr Purvine said he wasn’t going to work tonight himself, the way the riot was spreading and the way the coloreds were getting the worst of it.

  “As usual,” said a man with glasses on. “The Negroes ought to organize and fight the thing to a finish.” The doctor frowned at that. Mr Purvine said he didn’t know. But one woman and another man said that was the right idea.

  “If we must die,” said the man with glasses on, “let it not be like hogs hunted and penned in an inglorious spot!”

  The doctor said, “Yes, we all know that.”

  But the man with glasses on went on, because the others were listening to him, and I was glad he did, because I was listening to him too. “We must meet the common foe; though far outnumbered, let us still be brave, and for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What, though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, pressed to the wall, dying, but—fighting back!”

  They all thought it was fine, and a woman said that it was poetry, and I thought if that is what it is I know what I want to be now—a poetryman. I asked the man with glasses on if that was his poetry, though I did not think it was for some reason, and the men and women all looked at me like they were surprised to see me there and like I ought not hear such things—except the man with glasses on, and he said, No, son, it was not his poetry; he wished it was, but it was Claude McKay’s, a Negro, and I could find it in the public library. I decided I would go to the public library when the riot was over, and it was the first time in my life I ever thought of the public library the way I did then.