Stories of Erskine Caldwell Read online

  Gus didn’t go home to his wife that night, because he was in the back room of the barbershop pulling on two or three new bottles at three o’clock when the rest of the crowd decided it was time to call it a night and to go home and get some sleep. They locked Gus in the back room to sleep it off.

  Early the next morning, Clyde Young, the barber, went down and shaved Gus and patched up his clothes a little; and at about eleven-fifty, ten or fifteen minutes before the sermon at the church was due to end, Gus walked in and sat down in a rear pew.

  Gus was supposed to be there, all right, because he was a deacon then, and it was his duty to help take up the morning offering. But Gus was not supposed to be there in the shape he was in, all liquored up again fresh that morning in the barbershop. Clyde Young had brought Gus an eye opener when he went down to shave him and to get him ready to take up collection at the church.

  Nobody paid much attention to Gus when he walked into the church and took a seat in the back. The minister saw Gus, and likewise a dozen or more of the congregation who turned around to see who was coming to church so late. But nobody knew the condition Gus was in. He did not show it any more than he ever did. He looked to be as sober as the minister himself.

  Gus sat still and quiet in the back of the church until the sermon was over. It was then time to take up the morning offering. It was customary for the deacons to walk down to the front of the pulpit, pick up the collection baskets, take up the money, and then to march back down the aisles while one of the women in the choir sang a solo.

  Gus went down and got his basket all right, and took up all the money on his side of the aisle without missing a dime. Then, when all the deacons had got to the rear of the church, they began marching in step, slowly, down the aisles towards the pulpit where the minister was waiting to say a prayer over the money and to pronounce the benediction. The girl singing the solo was supposed to time herself so she would get to the end of the piece just as the deacons laid the collection baskets on the table in front of the pulpit.

  Everything worked smoothly enough, until just about the time that the rest of the deacons got about halfway down the aisles on their way back to the pulpit. The soloist was standing up in the choir singing her piece, the organist was playing the accompaniment, when Gus stopped dead in his tracks, playing havoc with all the ritual.

  The elders and the minister should have had better sense than to have made Gus Streetman a deacon, to begin with; but Gus had carried them off their feet, just as he did the voters when he was canvassing for re-election for county tax assessor. It wasn’t Gus’s fault any more than it was the fault of the people who made him a deacon; they were the ones upon whom most of the blame should be put. And on the other hand, even if he was to be a deacon, somebody connected with the church should have hunted up Gus that morning before preaching started and made sure that he was in condition to enter a house of worship. But things were never done that way. People liked Gus, and they let him do as he pleased. When Gus came stomping down the aisle that morning, rattling the collection basket as though he were warming up a crap game, he was as drunk as a horse trader on court day. But it was the people’s fault; they should never have made Gus a deacon to begin with, unless some arrangement to keep him sober on Sunday was agreed upon.

  Gus was standing there in the aisle by himself. The other deacons had marched down to the table in front of the pulpit, glancing back over their shoulders to see what the matter was with Gus, but scared to go back and get him. They didn’t know what he might say or do if they tried to make him follow them.

  By that time, the church was rank with the smell of Gus’s liquor, and all the people were sniffing the air, and turning around in their pews to look at him. Gus was staring at the girl singing the solo in the choir, and shaking the dimes and quarters in the collection basket as if it had been a kitty pot in a Saturday night crap game in the barbershop.

  Then, suddenly, Gus shouted. He must have been heard all the way across town in the Baptist church, disrupting their service, too.

  “Shake it up!” Gus yelled at the girl singing the solo.

  The church was buzzing like a beehive in no time. The congregation was standing up, sniffing Gus’s whisky-smell; the organist stopped playing the accompaniment for the solo, the girl stopped singing, and everybody, including the minister, was staring openmouthed at Gus Streetman. During all that time, Gus was standing there in the aisle rattling the money and looking at the soloist. It was a strange thing to happen, but she did look a lot like the hoochie-coochie dancer with the carnival.

  When everybody was hoping that the worst was over, Gus shouted again.

  “Shake it up!” he yelled at the girl. “Shake it up, baby!”

  Nearly everyone in the church knew what Gus was talking about, because most of the men had been to the show grounds the week before, and either had seen, or had been told about the little brown-skinned hoochie-coochie dancer in the tent for men only, and all the women, of course, had heard about her.

  Gus was getting ready to yell again, and maybe do something shocking, but before he could do it, a bunch of the elders and deacons jumped on him and hustled him out of the church in a hurry.

  The minister pronounced a hurried and short benediction, and ran out the back door and around to the street to see what was happening to Gus in front of the church.

  The elders and deacons hustled Gus into an automobile and drove off with him at fifty miles an hour. The minister and the rest of the congregation came running down the street behind the car.

  When they reached the jail, nearly everybody in town was down there by that time to see Gus Streetman get locked up. The Baptist church had turned out, and all the Baptists were there on their way home to see what was taking place. There was a delay of ten or fifteen minutes while somebody was going for Fred Jones, the marshal; Fred wasn’t a member of any church, and he was always at home Sunday morning reading the Sunday Journal and the Atlanta Constitution. The marshal had the only key to the jail there was, and Gus couldn’t be put inside until he came and unlocked the doors.

  While everybody was standing around looking and talking, Gus climbed up on the radiator of an automobile and held out his hands for silence. People standing off at a distance pushed closer, saying, “Shhh!” in order to hear what Gus was about to say.

  “Citizens of Washington County,” Gus shouted, waving his hands and looking the crowd over just as he did when he took the stump for the county primary. “Citizens of Washington County, I’m not here today to ask you if you are satisfied with your tax assessments; I’m not here today, folks, to ask if you believe there is a better man in the county than Gus Streetman — citizens of Washington County, I’m here today, folks, to ask if you think there’s another man in the entire county who can increase the membership and attendance and double the collection in a church like the man you are now facing!”

  The marshal came running up just then and opened the doors of the lockup. He walked over to the car and jerked Gus down from the radiator and hustled him inside the little brick building. The crowd pressed around the lockup, trying to see what Gus looked like on the inside. A lot of the ones who were not engaged in pushing and shoving and elbowing towards the windows were shouting: “Hooray for Gus! Hooray for Gus! Hooray for Gus Streetman.”

  While the crowd was milling around the windows of the lockup, Gus’s face suddenly appeared behind the bars of one of them. He shouted for attention and raised his hands for silence just as if he were canvassing the county for the Democratic White Primary.

  “Go home and think it over, folks!” he yelled, “and when election day comes around, bring out the family and let’s pile up a landslide for Gus Streetman!”

  Somebody in the crowd shouted: “Hooray for Gus!”

  Gus held up his hands again, silencing the crowd outside the windows.

  “Vote for Gus Streetman, folks!” he yelled. “Everybody votes for Gus Streetman! Gus Streetman for deacon!”

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nbsp; Just then the marshal came up behind Gus and hustled him away from the window and pushed him into one of the lockup cages. After that there was nothing to stay for any longer, because Gus was locked out of sight, and the crowd turned away and started home for Sunday dinner. Everybody was hoping, though, that Gus would get bailed out of the lockup in time to take up the collection again the following week, the second Sunday in August.

  (First published in Folk-say, IV: The Land Is Ours)

  Return to Lavinia

  AT FIRST SHE DID not know what had awakened her. She was not certain whether it had been a noise somewhere about the house, or whether it was the metallike burning of her feverish skin. By the time her eyes were fully open she could hear a bedlam of crowing, the sounds coming from every direction. For an hour at midnight the roosters crowed continually; from the chicken yards in town and from the farms surrounding the town, the sounds filled the flat country with an almost unbearable din.

  Lavinia sat up in bed, wide awake after three hours of fitful sleep. She pressed the palms of her hands against her ears to shut out the crowing, but even that did not help any. She could still hear the sounds no matter what she did to stop it.

  “I’ll never be able to go to sleep again,” she said, holding her hands tight to the sides of her head. “I might as well stop trying.”

  When she looked up, there was a light shining through the rear windows and doors. The illumination spread over the back porch and cast a pale moonlike glow over the walls of her room. She sat tensely awake, holding her breath while she listened.

  Presently the screen door at the end of the hall opened, squeaked shrilly, and slammed shut. She shivered while the small electric fan on the edge of her dresser whirred with a monotonous drone. In her excitement she clutched her shoulders in her arms, still shivering while the fan blew a steady stream of sultry air against her face and neck.

  The footsteps became inaudible for a moment, then distinct. She would know them no matter where she heard them. For three years she had heard them, night and day since she was fifteen. Some footsteps changed from year to year; strides increased, strides decreased; leather-and-nail heels were changed to rubber, heel-and-toe treads became flat-footed shufflings; most footsteps changed, but his had remained the same during all that time.

  Phil Glenn crossed the porch to the kitchen, the room next to hers, and snapped on the light. She shivered convulsively in the fan draft, gasping for breath in the sultry air.

  Through the wall she could hear him open the icebox, chip off several chunks of ice, and drop them into a tumbler. When he dropped the lid of the icebox and crossed to the spigot, she could hear the flow of water until the tumbler filled and overflowed. Everything he did, every motion he made, was taking place before her eyes as plainly as if she were standing beside him while he chipped the ice and filled the tumbler to overflowing.

  When he had finished, he turned off the light and went back out on the porch. He stood there, his handkerchief in hand, wiping his face and lips spasmodically while he listened as intently as she was listening.

  There was a sound of someone else’s walking in the front of the house. It was an unfamiliar sound, a sound that both of them heard and listened to for the first time.

  When she could bear it no longer, Lavinia threw herself back upon the bed, covering her face with the pillow. No matter how hard she tried, she could not keep from sobbing into the pillow. As regularly as midnight came, she had cried like that every night since he had been away.

  The next thing she knew, he was sitting on the edge of her bed trying to say something to her. She could not understand a word he was saying. Even after she had sat up again, she still did not know what it was. Long after he had stopped speaking, she stared at his features in the pale glow of reflected light. She tried to think of something either of them would have to say.

  “We just got back,” he said.

  After he had spoken, she laughed at herself for not having known he would say exactly that.

  “We went down to the beach for a few days when we left here,” he finished.

  Lavinia stared at him while she wondered what he expected her to say by way of comment or reply.

  All she could do was nod her head.

  “I thought I told you where we were going, but after I left I remembered I hadn’t. If we hadn’t been halfway there, I’d have turned around and come back to tell you. I wouldn’t want you to think —”

  She laughed.

  “— I wouldn’t want you to think —” he said over again.

  Lavinia threw her head back and laughed out loud. Her voice sounded soft and deep.

  “Well, anyway,” he said, “it was a mighty short honeymoon. But it was nice on the beach.”

  She laughed again, but the sound of her laughter was all but drowned out in the drone of the electric fan.

  “It was just what you would expect,” he said casually.

  The electric fan was blowing her gown against her back with rippling motions. She moved sidewise to the fan so that nothing would prevent her from hearing every word he said. After she had settled down, he crossed his legs.

  “I guess it’s going to be all right,” he said, looking through the window and back again at her. “It’ll be all right.”

  Before he had finished, both of them turned to listen to the sound of footsteps in the front of the house. The sound echoed through the night.

  In the closeness of the room, Lavinia could feel his heavy breathing vibrate the air. She wanted to say something to him, but she was afraid. She did not know what she could say. If she said the wrong thing, it would be a lot worse than not saying anything. She held her breath in perplexity.

  He got up, went to the window, looked out into the darkness for a moment, and came back to stand beside her. She could feel him looking down at her even though she could not see him distinctly in the shadow he made when his back was to the door. She had to restrain herself from reaching out to feel if he were there beside her.

  “Hannah is quite a girl,” he said finally, laughing a little to hide his uneasiness.

  She knew he would have to say something like that sooner or later. It was the only way to get it over with. After that she waited for him to go on.

  “We’ll get along all right,” he said. “There won’t be any trouble.”

  She shook her hair in the draft of the fan. All at once the fan seemed as if it were going faster than ever. The draft became stronger, the whirring sound rose in volume to an ear-splitting pitch, and her shoulders shook involuntarily in the fan’s chill breeze.

  “I thought I would have a hard time of it,” he said, “but now that it’s over, it wasn’t half as bad as I thought it was going to be. We’ll get along all right.”

  Lavinia reached out and found his hand in the dark. He sat down on the side of the bed while she tried to think what to say.

  “What’s the matter, Lavinia?” he asked her. “What’s wrong?”

  “Let me go, Phil,” she begged, beginning to cry in her soft deep voice. “I want to go.”

  He shook his head unmistakably.

  “I couldn’t let you go now, Lavinia,” he said earnestly. “We agreed about that before this business took place the other day. You promised me. If I hadn’t believed you would keep your promise, I wouldn’t have gone ahead and done it.”

  “Please, Phil,” she begged, crying brokenly until her soft deep voice filled the room. “Please let me go.”

  He kept on shaking his head, refusing to listen to her. Suddenly, there rose once more the bedlam of crowing that lasted for an hour in intermittent bursts every midnight. Neither of them tried to say anything while the crowing was at its height.

  After several minutes the drone of the fan and the sobs in her breast drowned out the roosters’ crowing.

  “I’ve got to go, Phil,” she said, holding back her sobs while she spoke.

  “I can’t let you go,” he said. “I just can’t let you go, Lavinia.”


  She stopped crying and sat up more erectly, almost on her knees. He gazed at her wonderingly.

  “I’m a nigger, Phil,” she said slowly. “I’m a nigger — a cooking, cleaning, washing nigger.”

  “Shut up, Lavinia!” he said, shaking her until she was in pain. “Shut up, do you hear?”

  “I am, and you know I am,” she cried. “I’m a nigger — a cooking, cleaning, washing nigger — just like all the rest are.”

  She brushed the tears from her eyes and tried to look at him clearly in the half-light. She could see his deep, serious expression and she knew he meant every word he had said.

  “You’ll get over it in a few days,” he told her. “Just wait awhile and see if everything doesn’t turn out just like I say it will.”

  “You know what I am, though,” she said uncontrollably.

  “Shut up, Lavinia!” he said, shaking her some more. “You’re not! You’re a white girl with colored blood — and little of that. Any of us might be like that. I have colored blood in me, for all I know. Even she might have some.”

  He jerked his head toward the front of the house. Forgetting everything else momentarily, they both listened for a while. There was no sound whatever coming from that part of the building.

  “She’ll order me around just like she would anybody else,” Lavinia said. “She’ll treat me like the blackest washwoman you ever saw. She’ll be as mean to me as she knows how, just to keep me in my place. She’ll even call me ‘nigger’ sometimes.”

  “You’re just excited now,” he said. “It won’t be like that tomorrow. You know as well as I do that I don’t care what you are. Even if you looked like a colored girl, I wouldn’t care. But you don’t look like one — you look like a golden girl. That’s all there is to it. If she ever says anything different, just don’t pay any attention to her.”

  “She’ll keep me in my place,” Lavinia said. “I don’t mind staying in my place, but I can’t live here and have her tell me about it a dozen times a day. I want to go. I am going.”