“I guess you understand my meaning, boy.” He looked at me and I looked back at him, deciding that he was a pretty nice guy. He clucked his tongue again. “Reckon you could do with a bath and a change of clothes,” he said. “Or with running what clothes you got through the washing machine. The wife can do that while you’re in the tub.” I almost said I didn’t have a wife. Then I realized we were talking about his wife, and his washing machine, and his tub.
“Like to had me wondering when you pulled those drawers out of your pocket last night. I sat up wondering what kind of damned fool pervert carries his underwear in his pocket. Guess they must of been chafing you some on that bus ride. How long were you on that bus?”
“On to forty hours.”
He clucked again. “And eating in those greasy diners, were you? Fifty cents for a hamburger sandwich and you have to hunt for the meat, and fifteen cents for coffee. That’s not but brown water. Never had a real Southern breakfast up there, did you?”
“No.”
“Grits and eggs and fries and sausage and coffee that the spoon stands up in? I guess they don’t know how to eat up there. What’s that Northern food like?”
I didn’t mention brown rice. “Like a machine made it,” I said.
“You come on now,” he said, beaming. He led me out of the cell. “I’ll just get you set with a sheriff’s card, and then we’ll take a run over to my home and see if you got the kind of appetite that would have made your mother proud. Look at the way those pants are falling off of you. I swear the wife’s gone take one look at you and run straight for the kitchen. Nothing brings out her cooking like someone who looks like he could profit from it.” He patted his belly, of which there was quite a lot. “She feels guilty, feeding me. But you’ll be a real challenge to her.”
I said, “This is awfully nice of you,” or something like that.
“Oh, just put it down to Southern hospitality,” he said, grinning. “We don’t cotton to everybody. But we take care of our own kind, boy.”
Five
By the end of the week i had a Sheriff’s ID Card, a social security card, and a South Carolina driver’s license. I also had two jobs, one of which paid me fifteen dollars a week and my lunches, and the other of which brought in five dollars a week, breakfasts, dinners, and a room of my own. Sheriff Tyles fixed me up with the license and one of the jobs, and his wife Minnie got me the other one.
(I had to take a road test for the license. I had never done much in the way of driving, and I don’t know that I had any natural talent for it, but the test was no great problem. When you take the test in the official sheriff’s car, there aren’t a hell of a lot of inspectors who are likely to fail you. I didn’t hit anybody, so I passed.)
Minnie Tyles took to me right off. I hadn’t been that confident she would be thrilled when her husband brought me home. Forty hours on a bus and a night in a jail cell hadn’t improved my appearance that much. But when we walked in the door he boomed out, “Minnie, this here boy hasn’t had a decent meal in three days and his mother was a Charleston Ryder.” I don’t know which part of the sentence went over the heaviest. I was a little lost myself, and for a minute there I thought he was saying that my mother was a member of some South Carolina version of the Hell’s Angels.
I had about four meals, and I had them all at once. And then I had a bath while my clothes washed and dried, and then I had a big piece of pie and another couple of cups of coffee. The more I ate the happier that woman got. It was really something to watch.
“Of course he’ll sleep here until he finds some place,” she told the Sheriff. “Won’t be any trouble to fix up the spare room for him.” I said something about not wanting to impose, and they both acted as though they hadn’t heard me, which was fine with me.
The job situation didn’t look very promising. There wasn’t much available, and most of the high school kids left town when they graduated, unless their fathers had businesses for them to go into. I spent a couple of days looking for work and couldn’t get anywhere. “I couldn’t ask you to work for what-all I can afford to pay you,” one shopkeeper said. “Easier to hire a nigger for fifty cents an hour, and I wouldn’t let you work for that kind of wages even if you said you would. And with business the way it is I couldn’t pay you more.”
Then Minnie came up with something. “Now I’ll tell you right off it isn’t so much of a job,” she said. “But Reverend Lathrop has been poorly lately that’s at the church we go to, and with his wife gone two years in May it’s all he can do to look after himself. Lucille that’s his daughter cooks his meals for him and does the cleaning, what she can keep up with; some of the women from the church do his ironing and all, but if there was someone who would come in a few hours a day, because with it being an old house and all and things always breaking down, and the yard to keep up and the trash to be taken out, and what with one thing or another, and him getting along in years, he was twenty years older than Helen that was his wife, and her dying first, and Lucille still in school so that she has to run home and cook his dinner for him and then back to school again—”
It wasn’t very much work. The main reason that Rev. Lathrop was poorly was that he did in a quart of corn whiskey every day. This tended to limit his movements, and he spent most of his time sitting in the back parlor with a bottle and a glass listening to the radio. I did things like shoveling ashes out of the coal furnace and taking out the trash (and burying the empty liquor bottles under the rest of the garbage). I would get there around ten in the morning, by which time Lucille was off at school and her father was already at work on the daily bottle. She came home at noon and fixed dinner for us, and then I did things like trimming shrubbery and replacing frayed lamp cords and repainting the upstairs bathroom, sort of doing all the repairs and maintenance work that tends to get neglected when you knock off a quart a day. How late I stayed depended on whether or not Lucille came straight home from school. She was a cheerleader, and if there was a basketball game or a practice session scheduled she wouldn’t get home until five or six. No one ever exactly spelled it out, but the idea was that Rev. Lathrop shouldn’t be left alone if there was a way to avoid it. I don’t know what they were worried about. I never saw him get off that chair. Lucille used to bring his dinner to him, and he ate between drinks. He had a pretty good appetite for someone who drank that much, but he never really paid attention to his food, just ate it because it was there. I had the feeling that if she skipped his dinner he wouldn’t notice it.
He didn’t bother me, though. He would look at me if I was in the room, and now and then he would quote scripture, but if I spoke he never gave any sign that he had heard, so before long I got out of the habit of talking to him. Once I had an insane urge to polish his bald head along with the furniture, just to see what would happen. Of course I didn’t, but I’m not sure he would have noticed.
One Sunday I let Minnie take me to hear him preach a sermon. The Sheriff never went to church, but Minnie went religiously. She introduced me to all her friends, which took in most of the congregation, and told everybody my mother was a Charleston Ryder. (Actually my mother’s maiden name was Leigh, which was where my first name came from, but that sounded too Southern to be true. And she was from Lawrence, Kansas, and I think her grandparents ran a way station of the Underground Railway for runaway slaves headed north. I don’t think that would have gone over as well with this crowd.)
The one time I heard him preach, I had trouble believing it was the same vegetable who spent the other six days of the week in the back parlor. He stood straight and tall and had a great deal of presence. The sermon itself wasn’t designed to make you think a whole hell of a lot. He came out against sin, creeping socialism, federal intervention, drinking, gambling, and sins of the flesh, without getting too specific on any of these points. I won’t say I enjoyed it, but I was really proud of him the way he stayed on top of things. I was sure he would fall over or forget what he was talking about, but he never once dropped the ball. He was pretty impressive.