As a child, Luce was running to the store to get a small can of oil, for
it was growing dark and she had the lamp to fill. Across the street the
lamp-lighter was lifting a burning swab of waste to the street-lamp, a
gasoline lamp on the top of a high post. The lamp-lighter stood on a
ladder to lift the brand, and when the lamp was lit he would take the
ladder on his shoulder and walk away at an even step, the same yesterday
and the same tomorrow. When he had new shoes the step was marked with
crying leather. She ran past the lamp-lighter hardly giving a moment
to look at him, for she knew all his ways and all his motions, all the
rhythms of his feet. The street-lamp made a thin, feeble light when there
was any day left in the air, but the lighter had to start on his rounds
early to have all the lamps ready by the time the dark came to the last
one at the end of Hill Street. The lamp flickered dimly in the light
of day that was left in the air, but after a little a passer would be
glad for the glow; it showed the way to the pump and helped one over the
well-curb and over the stones at the crossing. On dark nights when there
was a wind the mules in the livery stable cried out with great cries.
There would be a wind that night making little wells of feeling pool up
in one’s chest, and a thought of Mome, the city, came to her mind.
There, in Mome, all the lights were electric, and there was one great
light over all the place, a high great light like a sun. It shone down
on the streets and on the tall house where Mr. Preston, the richest man
in the world, kept his money—the money house—and on the fountains in the
square. It made a great sheet of light that spread over Mome as a sunset
would spread over a hill. But there were dark alleyways for all that, and
dark doorways, and at the thought deep wells of feeling would pool up in
one’s chest, dark roadways and deep doorways and dark lanes where wheels
had cut deep tracks. There would be houses standing high above lanes and
late wagons going down into the dark. There would be a little light at
the corner, electric but very little, blinking in the fog. A thief would
be slipping down a dark lane with—what? one could never think what—in his
hand.
In the store the boy with thin arms took her oil can and said, “A dime’s
worth?” and set the can aside to wait until the man came with the key
to the oil house. She stood beside the old black man who was buying a
nickel’s worth of meal and a dime’s worth of bacon, her eyes on the
hurrying clerk whose arms reached here and there above the barrels and
weighed the sugar as it poured in a stream into a sack. She enjoyed
the crowding of the store and the pageant of buying. A heroic freedom
surrounded the man, old Anthony Bell, who bought lavishly, never asking
the price, calling over the heads of the others, “A hundred pounds of
sugar. Send it up tomorrow.” He had stepped lightly in at the doorway, a
lifted head, the large gesture of shouting and the lifted cane, “Send it
up tomorrow,” and then his exit while the piece went forward, the play
enhanced.
Moll Peters, the negress, came heavily in at the door and stood beyond
Luce, waiting her turn. She was large and fat and the belt of her apron
sank into the rolls of her body and was lost from sight. She would buy
freely as long as her money lasted, buying for her children on Hill
Street; she cooked at the hotel and had no need to buy food for herself.
“Ol’ Hog Mouth, what-all you a-buyen?” she said to a tall man who stood
beyond her, a tall yellow man whose clothes were white with plaster.
“You ain’t treated Moll this whole enduren year.” Her voice came from
her mouth with a clatter of low half-musical squawks and softly blurred
vowels delicately stressed.
“Aw, go on,” the man said. He kept in a good humor.
“It’s a God’s truth, now. Whenever did you-all ever treat Moll? Pocket
full o’ money. Ol’ Stingy! Buy Moll some candy.”
“Aw go on. Buy your own candy.”
“It’s a God’s own truth, now. Whenever did you ever buy Moll any candy?
Go and buy me some candy.”
“I ain’t got no money. I swear I’m got to ask credit till Sat’day for a
little meal and lard. I swear.”
“Aw, buy me some candy.”
Moll was trying to make up with the yellow man. The grocer’s clerk
came back with the can of oil and Luce dumped the money, a nickel and
five coppers, into his large hand and turned quickly toward the door,
remembering now that she must fill the lamp. She ran home through
the twilight. The lamp-lighter had gone from the street now and all
the lights glimmered faintly, broadly, because they had not yet been
concentrated into points by the dark. They marched unevenly up the
street, far past the Baptist Church, past the Seminary gate.
* * * * *
In the lecture room of the church Miss Charlotte Bell played the march
for the children. There was to be a pageant. The girls walked to the time
of the music, spreading over the platform and returning, opening the
lines and making fans or closing together into a design. Theodosia Bell,
Miss Charlotte’s daughter, walked first, leading, and the music of the
piano said the words of the song as Miss Charlotte drummed the keys with
her fingers. Miss Charlotte hardly looked at the piano as she played. She
looked at the girls who were walking up and down, her head turned about,
her lips bending into smiles or her head nodding. Miss Patty Thomas ran
up and down before the platform telling how the march should be done.
“Now, all together. Up front, Theodosia. Now down center back.” Her
tongue clicked over the words and she was important beating her hands.
Theodosia walked tossing her body with the up-and-down toss of the music,
to the words which the girls would sing after a little, “To the tap of
the drum here we come come come.” There was a stop to rearrange some of
the girls.
“Whose little girl is this? What’s her name?”
“Luce. She’s Luce Jarvis.”
“She lives down the street a way.”
It was Miss Charlotte who had answered the last. Luce walked near the
end of the line and they were off again to the tap of the music, some of
them lilting to the time, some heavily laboring, unaware of the beat.
If Miss Charlotte nodded her head to the patter of feet she smiled the
next instant, but when the song was done, while Miss Patty talked to the
children about what they should do, Miss Charlotte sat as if she did
not hear, and then her lips were without life and a darkness seemed to
have come over her. She looked then at the piano keys, her hands in her
lap, or her younger child, Annie, would creep up beside her and push her
little face into her broad shoulder.
A boy was taken to the platform to say a piece, Miss Patty showing him
how, and the other children went to the seats or they spread about on
the floor. “To the tap of the drum here we come come come” had been set
aside now, and a girl said, “I like that song.” “It’s a Faust march,”
Miss Charlotte said. The word “Faust” fitted to Miss Charlotte’s mouth
after it had been said and remained hers entirely, whatever it meant.
The Bells lived a little way up the street past the well from which Luce
drank, past the street-light, the house standing under a great tree and
near two other trees. Looking at Miss Charlotte after she had grown
dark, the music ended, her face heavy, Luce thought of the word Anthony,
Anthony Bell, the old man, father to Horace Bell who was Miss Charlotte’s
husband. Anthony Bell, as words, made a sort of singing in her thought
if they came forward as tone, or if they lay quiet they were reminiscent
of the faint kindness offered by drama, by enriched being. He was an
old man and a scholar, as was said. Luce remembered their house with
Miss Charlotte walking on the lower gallery and saw the planes of her
pale dress as she stood a moment before one of the large square pillars.
Anthony Bell came and went behind her, stepping along the gallery in his
easy slippers, taking a morning walk. Now the voice of the boy tattled
endlessly over the piece he was learning to say and the little girls
lolled together, teasing one another slyly. Luce went into Miss Patty’s
feet as they twinkled about and she felt the flutter of the skirt as it
swept her ankles, and she knew what it was to be two slim little shoes
buckled over two insteps that rested on pointed toes and hour-glass
heels, and to walk in harmony with someone’s thinking, up and down,
objecting, agreeing, complaining, repeating. Near at hand the piano was
a large black box holding an infinity of tunes somehow in its sides.
She looked at Charlotte Bell where she sat waiting. The eyes were dark,
averted, and the mouth had no smile. Her large shoulders were erect and
her rich dress crumpled about her feet.
Charlotte Bell’s hands could fly easily over the piano if she were minded
to make a tune. Sometimes in the evening old Anthony played his fiddle
standing beside her as she played. Her rich white dress had many yards of
small lace sewed into it in designs and her hat was off. Her dark hair
was laid softly over her head and knotted at the back in a large coil.
Luce looked at her and felt her presence reach past the white dress as if
there were some large thing inside. Then she laid her bare. She tore away
the clothes from around her shoulders and opened her body. She emptied
the heart out of it and flung out the entrails, for she had seen men
butcher a hog. She went searching down through blood and veins, liver and
lights, smelt and kidney. Out came the fat, the guts, the ribs. She was
looking for something. Then on beyond, past the flesh, to the bone, she
was searching. Past the brains, past the skull bone. She flung everything
aside as she took it out and went deeper, eager to find. Past the bones
she came to the skin again, on the other side, and finally to the red
of the yarn carpet, everything rejected, nothing found, nothing left.
Quickly she reassembled Miss Charlotte. She brought back the bone, the
flesh, the organs. She hooked the right arm onto its shoulder and hooked
on the left. She set her head on her shoulders and fitted her back into
her dress. Put together again, Miss Charlotte suggested something within,
hinted of it with her turning mouth and with the slight movement of her
limbs under the pretty dress, gave a brief warning of it in the way the
lace was sewed into the dress and the way the two large pins were placed
to hold up her hair.
All the while the red of the carpet and the smell of the carpet gave
a flavor of Sunday and the catechism. There was a question then, she
thought, for every answer. The little girls were weary of the boy’s
speech and his dull gestures and weary of Miss Patty’s efforts to arouse
his voice to eloquence. Luce looked from one to another, letting her
self enter the arrogance of one, the humility of one, the stupidity of
one. She saw what it would be not to know a rhythm, to march as Esther
marched, on dull feet. The tone of the Sunday questioning pervaded the
place, question and answer, final and done, well said. All that was asked
had a reply, curt and certain. She looked at Miss Charlotte where she sat
behind the piano, her eyes on the keys, and the questions took possession
of the event.
Who made you, Miss Charlotte?
God.
Why did God make Miss Charlotte?
For His own glory.
Old Mr. Bell had a collection of Indian arrow-points and stone hatchets
mounted and displayed in cabinets that were strung through the halls and
passages of the house. Luce had once stood wondering at the door of a
hallway while Theodosia called to her to come and play. “Oh, come on,
come on,” she had called. “Leave those old rubbishes. What’s any good
beside a game? You’re It. Come on.” But a child had told of a wonder.
Old Mr. Bell had once opened the cabinet of Indian relics and had shown
the children the arrow-flints, had let them take some of them into their
hands. They were hard stone weapons from the stone age of the country
before the time of the white men. Luce had not been present and the
cabinets had never been opened for her. Miss Charlotte sat now turning
the pages of a music book, her eyes busy with the songs in the book.
Once, in a game, when she was not It, and when she was so well hidden
that no one could find her, so well that she was forgotten, Luce had
slipped into the hallway of the largest of the cabinets, a rear enclosed
gallery, and had looked her fill at the wonders inside. She knew that
these wonders had been picked up from an old Indian battlefield not far
from the town. Horace Bell was a tall man, standing above most of the
people of the street. He had a great voice that sometimes burst from the
court-room when he made a speech there. He had a pride in his voice and
he liked to roll out long sayings that gave it a chance to flow and turn
and recede. One day he had boomed at some pigeons that took flight and
swept across the street by the pump with a low thunder of wings, and he
had made a saying quickly to run with them in their going, his eyes full
of his laughter. He had then run his hand through his upstanding yellow
hair with a great gesture and had taken a remembered delight in the
pigeons and his voice that could match their rumble of wings. Miss Tennie
Burden, Tennessee, lived out another street. The Sunday questioning
passed into the region of Miss Charlotte’s darkly averted, sad face.
How can I glorify God?
By loving Him and doing His holy will.
Can you see God?
No, but He can always see me.
Does Charlotte Bell know about Tennie Burden?
She knows.
Does she care because Horace Bell goes to sit in Miss Tennie’s
doorway?
Ask somebody else.
Why would she care?
A big girl said she would care. A big girl knew why.
What do Horace Bell and Miss Tennie talk about?
About old times.
Who is Miss Tennie’s husband?
Mr. Joe Burden.
How many children has Miss Tennie got?
Two. Joyce and Evaline.
Any boys?
No boys.
How do you know that you have a soul?
Because I can think about God and the world to come.