3 Day Terror Read online

  “Haw, gaw, dat all you know. You dumb if you think it! Mister Jack and Mister Jud and Mister Troy going to escort any colored, goin’ to school, personal!”

  “You making it all up, Ginny Lee. A-yeah, you just tell big old stories all the time to try and scare Duboe.”

  Ginny Lee Polk Ann Towers strutted over to the car with her hands on her hips. “That’s all you know you so stupid and dumb,” she began, “because I heard everything said at that meetin’ — ”

  • • •

  “I wish you’d think things through and not always act on impulse!” Troy Porter said.

  He set his drink down on the end table with a bang and got up, paced back and forth across the front room.

  “I did think it through!”

  “Well, while you were thinking, Miss Einstein, did it ever occur to you that I’m a politician! I’m not trying to sell newspapers, same as Jack, and I’m not trying to sell God, same as Jud, I’m trying to sell myself to my constituents, every single living one of whom lives in Alabama — not just in Bastrop, but in the state of Alabama! In the South, Poppy!”

  Poppy said, “I don’t see how I hurt anything, Troy.”

  “I know you don’t,” he thundered, “and that’s what makes me all the damn madder! Poppy, do you know that the Birmingham Post-Herald had a picture of what went on at the Wheel in their late edition?”

  “Well, what does that matter?”

  “Now you just think about this for a minute,” he said, reaching for his drink and pointing it at her. “You just think how it’d look if I’d been down there on the courthouse lawn yipping hooray with the rest of the crackers. You thinking about that, Poppy?”

  “It’d look awful. I think it’d look horrible.”

  “But I’m telling you the facts of life, Poppy. A picture of me down there yipping hooray this afternoon on the courthouse lawn, as horrible as it might seem to you or me, wouldn’t lose me enough votes in the state of Alabama to even put a dent in my winning ones. It wouldn’t do me no good, maybe, but it’d sure not hurt me the way a picture of me leading niggers to school would! Did you ever think about that when you were promising me away to good causes? Did you ever think how a picture of me leading niggers to school would look to the people who’re going to elect me, pray God, elect me, to the senate of the State of Alabama? Huh? Did you?”

  There was the sound of ice cubes swimming in the bourbon as he raised the glass to his lips and swallowed. Then silence and the moon for a spotlight on Poppy’s chair.

  • • •

  “For one thing,” Jack Chadwick said, sitting on the bed, slamming the shoe he unlaced to the floor. “You’re jealous! Jealous of everyone and everything! Talking to Poppy that way — Gawd, Cass! There’s something wrong with you! And for another thing — ” throwing the other shoe — ”you’re a Beggsom!”

  “What does that mean, Jack?”

  He said, “That means what it says. You know your old man is in with Suggs and Chandler and the whole lot of them.” As he said it, he had the satisfaction of knowing that this, more than anything else, would goad her, and he realized he wanted to shame her in some way, for her conduct that evening. She had behaved like a shrew, lambasting everyone in that way of hers, that simply chucked reason, discretion and logic out the window, and employed a more personal attack. Sentences would begin: “Well, Jud, I know you once were a family man, but now — ” and end “… because I wonder, Poppy, if you’re more interested in the publicity than in the welfare of the Nigra children.”

  Jack remembered the stories that had circulated about Cassie’s mother. “Beggie” they’d called her in Bastrop; said she was a little “teched;” used to boil up scalding water when she was mad at old John, and go after him with it, chasing him down the hill in their old Ford, and running on foot when he broke from the road, dragging the pail and cursing at him. Cassie never knew her, but old John talked “Beggie” all the time when Cass was a child. Said: “Beggie wouldn’t take no guff!”

  “Beggie put her own over God!” and “Beggie worked hard, loved hard, lived hard, laughed hard, and died doin’ somethin’ about the population. Fought her way in, out, and all through life, an’ don’t, shame her purpose.”

  Jack watched his wife slip off the linen dress and reach for the hanger in her closet; thought: She come a long way from Beggie and Old John, mostly on her own, come; and suddenly he was tired of the petty picking at one another. He began to say, “It’s pretty silly to fight this way,” but got only to pretty before Cass said: “Daddy isn’t mixed up in this. I know that for a fact … But Delia Benjamin is.”

  “Who’s talking about her?”

  “I am!” she answered emphatically. She was bending down to pick up slippers. “I’ve never brought her name up unfairly. I’ve never done that, Jack, you’ve got to admit I haven’t. Never tried to bring her name up or imply anything about her. Have I? You’ll admit that, won’t you?”

  Jack knew a hundred ways this was preposterous, untrue and beside the point. He said, “I can’t see how Benny enters into this discussion one whit.”

  “Benny! The special little white bah lamb with the special little blah-bah name!” Cass Chad wick said, snatching her robe from the closet, “And this is not a discussion! This is a fight! A low-down, below-the-belt, name-calling blowup! But if we’re going to discuss anything, let’s begin with why Delia Benjamin went to see you this afternoon, and let’s continue with why you didn’t bother to bring it up this evening!”

  “Stop yelling,” he said. “you’re going to wake Johnny-Bob up.” He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. God, would Benny’s name ever just leave him blank? Would a time come like that? “This narrow-minded, ninny little town,” he said, “I’m fed up! I hate it!”

  He probably loved Bastrop better than anyone living there, and he knew it. The same way the “real” New Yorkers, the bona-fide Manhattan romanticizers were uprooted from places like Ida Grove, Iowa; White River Junction, Vermont; Naples, Italy — a generation back, or Geneva, New York; Newark, Ohio — adopting New York; becoming its adopted son. As he was here in Bastrop, after years of youth spent wandering in cities; then as a young man finding the small town he’d known existed from reading Sinclair Lewis novels, and the “home,” the “girl next door.” Not quite, Benny; but oh, we were “it” just the same! Me and Benny.

  Cass said, “That’s a good answer. It’s the town’s fault.” She walked over and sat down at her dressing-table mirror.

  “If the town would only leave you and Delia Benjamin to yourselves, everything would just be ducky, wouldn’t it?”

  “All right,” he said, “she came to see me.” I’m back, Chad, that fear-filled time that ached with the insufficiency of any drama, and too much beauty-pain, and memory.

  “I know that.”

  “Look, Cass, she lost something, see? She lost a letter and she came to see me,” he said; from across years through doubt and impotent wonder, stepping into today more suddenly than the shock of seeing her last night, to say, “I lost a letter.”

  “Because you’re the Lost and Found Department. Well, that makes some sense. Umm-hmmm. What else?”

  “If you’d stop rubbing grease all over your face, I’d tell you what else! She came about a letter she lost! Pure and simple. She said she didn’t know who else to go to! I didn’t ask her to come!”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was going to.” Maybe I was, he thought.

  He got up from the bed and went across to her in his stocking feet, kneeling by her vanity chair. “This is silly, Cass. This is silly. She doesn’t mean anything to me. I knew you’d be upset if I told you she’d visited me?’

  “Oh, you did, ah? Why did you think that?”

  He saw the stubborn dent in her chin. There would be no use to explain, he knew; and that was all right too. He would have trouble explaining himself if Cass were listening to him in a reasonable frame of mind.

  “Never mind,”
he said, “we won’t discuss it.”

  She said, “I’m not going to be made a laughingstock all over town.”

  “What? Cass, what are you talking about? She just came to see me!”

  “You know the Nigras learn things first,” she said; “they always do. Well — ” she screwed the jar of cold cream tightly with a quick jerk to her arm — ”tonight Ginny made the bed up in Johnny-Bob’s room before she left!”

  “She’s just crazy!” Jack said. “She probably heard us arguing and took a notion to do it.”

  Cass said, “She never did it before!”

  Then she kicked back the vanity chair and aimed the cold cream jar at the three-winged dressing-table mirror. “Benny!” she said above the noise of shattering glass. “Damn her guts!”

  Out on the front porch of the Benjamins’, Dee sat beside him in the glider, the big red moon giving light to them — their drinks on the round tin table, his long legs stretched out in front of him, shoes kicked off; and her own heels set side by side near the wicker chair, her legs drawn up under her. He had managed to get very drunk.

  “… when it came the day to auction my folks’ house up,” he said, “I fixed myself some dinner in the kitchen. There was only some old dehydrated soup there, and I boiled it up for dinner. I remember when I poured it out into the bowl, there were bugs swimming in it. Must have come from the soup that was years old, and only the maids ate anyway. I ate the soup anyway, I remember. I kidded about it. Better get used to bugs in the soup, boy, I kidded myself, and bugs in the beds, cause the money’s all gone. Pffttt!”

  He took a swallow of the Scotch, and leaned back against the glider. “We were rich once, Dee. R-i-c-h!” Another swallow, finishing what was in his glass. “Are you drunk?” he asked.

  She said, “No.”

  “I’m not either,” he said.

  She got up, “I’ll make us another. Don’t know where Mama could be. Never known her to go out and leave the lights burning before.” She passed in front of him, “I won’t be a minute.”

  Now she thought: how can I get rid of him? She felt tired and longed to be free to run a hot bath to soak in before bed. Buddy’s speech was getting thick, and he had already become fixed in that aura of utter self-absorption which Maur used to call the: “I never knew why nurse took teddybear away” mood — ”until one day.”

  God, she missed Maur!

  “I’ll come too,” she heard behind her. “I’ll help you.”

  He walked somewhat unsteadily, leaning into a table as he passed.

  “Okay?” she said. She waited while he came to the kitchen door.

  He stopped and looked at her, looked fully at her, slowly.

  She was caught between being amused by him, or annoyed with him. He was handsome and ingenuous and incredibly obvious.

  “Why didn’t you want to go out to the Dip?” he said.

  “I told you. It would be pointless. If I couldn’t find the letter by day, I certainly couldn’t find it by night.”

  “Are you drunk yet?” he said.

  “No, but you are, Richard. I think we better call it a night, all right?”

  “So you’re a nigger-lover,” he said. “Well, well, well … A rich nigger-lover.”

  His eyes were narrowing in a peculiarly vicious way which gave his whole face a new cast. Dee was fascinated with the change. He seemed to have disintegrated suddenly, like a Dorian Gray, and now he seemed no longer young or good-looking or naive, but like some seedy teen-ager who looked too old for his age, too nasty and clever in an ugly sense.

  “I’m going to kick you out now, Mr. Buddy,” she said. “The bar is closing.”

  “We’re beginning to catch on to each other, aren’t we?” he said. “Finally!”

  “Maybe we are,” she said. “Give me your glass.” She reached for it. “I’m going to rinse them out and go to bed. The party’s over.”

  “Why don’t you scald mine. Might have germs.”

  “Oh, come on, Mr. Buddy,” she said. “Richard, boy, give me the glass and let’s not play gangbusters any longer. I’m tired.”

  He reached across and caught her arm, yanking her away from the kitchen door so that it swung shut behind her. They were in the hallway, an he pushed her away from the living room in the direction of the unlighted dining room. In her other hand she was carrying her glass, and she threw the melting ice from it toward him.

  Instantly he slapped the glass out of her hand.

  “Who do you think you are?” he said. He took hold of her shoulders. “Who in hell do you think you are?”

  She looked at his face. He was perspiring and his eyes were bright and narrowed and angry. She didn’t answer him.

  “Who in hell do you think you are?” he said “You tell me that?”

  She said nothing still.

  Again he shook her shoulders against the wall. The china in the dining room bureau rattled. She heard him hoik and felt the wet spittle on her cheek.

  “That’ll show you,” he said.

  “Show me what?” She hadn’t meant to speak.

  “I can spit on your kind,” he said. “Nouveau riche! Is this barn here your ancestral manor! Is it? I can spit on it — ” again he spat — ”I ought to teach you a lesson.”

  “You’re hurting my arm, damn you — ”

  “Who do you think you are to look down on me; Who? You’re sick, did you know that? You think that sick Plaza Hotel is important, don’t you? It’s a sick, sick place, and it’s dull and stupid and vulgar! It’s vulgar!”

  He shoved her against the wall again. “I’ll fix you,” he said, “I’m going to fix you — ”

  He put his hands on her at the exact moment Flo Benjamin burst through the kitchen door brandishing an egg-beater.

  Then later, after he had run to his car, his shoes thrown at him by Dee’s mother, as she berated him in a squeaky high voice which was shaking with the tumultuous indignation of outraged Southern womanhood, Dee realized something that sent sudden fear through her.

  She had never mentioned the Plaza to him. She had never told him that that was where Maur was living now.

  18.

  MORNING CAME EARLY down at Suggs’s store; twenty after seven, in the back room, the sun kept from entering by the crust of filth on the windows, and Duboe laughing: “Hell, I’d ever seen this here supply room, Crabb, I’d buy my stuff over to Towers nigger heaven myself. Whew-wee, this shore is a seedy hole, man!”

  “Sure,” Suggs said, “ ‘cause I lost my best business since the nigger opened his nigger store. Can’t even afford help!”

  Gus Chandler hated being up at this hour; on a Sunday looked forward to going back and getting more sleep. “We all know what we’re supposed to do,” he said. “I can see my names from the county s’afternoon. They’ll all show up on Monday.”

  Duboe said, “Even in in-season, Pa?”

  “Hell, enough’ll show to scare the niggers. What the hell we need?”

  “I ain’t worried about enough to scare the niggers,” Duboe said. “I’m worried about them dad-dum state troopers — somethin’ like that. The guard or somethin’. What if they get called in?”

  “They won’t,” Gus answered, tapping the dottle out of his pipe. “They won’t because they don’t think them that was in at the Wheel on Sunday will be around on Monday. They figure it’ll be just a dozen or so of us kicking up.”

  Suggs said, “At the most, maybe they’ll swear in Chadwick or Troy Porter, or some others as deputies. Nothin’ bigger than that.”

  “Where’s Buddy, anyhow?” Gus Chandler said.

  “Sleeping off last night,” John Beggsom laughed. “They was out to my place earlier in the evenin’ — him and Easy-Dee.”

  “Lord, I just hope he got her drunk ‘fore she got him drunk,” Duboe said. “She can drink Texas.”

  At seven twenty-three in the morning prayer ended. Jud sank back in the throne chair on the altar while the choir sang:

  My father, for
another night

  Of quiet sleep and rest,

  for all the joy of morning —

  and he saw her then.

  An usher escorted her to a pew near the front; and he saw her face, under the immense black picture hat, look up at him — look straight into his own with the same serious eyes he used to see everywhere when he shut his and let the darkness make dreams, and then he saw her head bow, and the white gloves touch the pew’s back in front of her as she knelt:

  Now with the newborn day I give

  Myself anew to thee,

  and he thought, welcome back, Delia. But then someone had joined her.

  Jud recognized the stranger. He could feel the familiar murmur and rustle of the congregation that came whenever something was wrong; and he saw heads turn, heard the coughing. Always there was the coughing at a time like this, at ten-fifty in the “Morning” he said to her, kneeling beside her.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “From your house. I followed you. I want to talk to you.”

  She said, “You know I want it back, and I intend to get it back.”

  “Shhh,” he said, “the lady with the yellow eyes two seats over is about to lose them out of her head. I like you because you’re smart, Dee,” he whispered. “How’d you know?”

  She sat back in the pew, her program covering her mouth. “The Plaza,” she said. “You mentioned it and I never had. But the letter was addressed there. Where is it?”

  “I mailed it,” he smiled.

  “You’re a damn liar,” she said.

  “Shhhhh, Delia,” Richard Buddy whispered. “I’m sick in bed about the language you use in church.”

  of quiet sleep and rest,

  for all the joy of —

  “Morning,” Flo Benjamin said to Senior and Gay out front of Second Methodist Church. “Isn’t it a lovely Sunday morning?”

  “We thought Dee might come along with you this morning,” Gay said, “I was saying to Senior only just a minute ago, wonder why Delia didn’t join her mama for service?”

  “Oh, the young folks are partial to Jud, now, and you know that s’well as I do, Gay. Law, Dee got herself up with the birds to get all dollied up for the Episcopalians.”