Then that great voice said behind me: “You’re in the parlor?” He wasn’t exactly outraged by it, just dumfounded.
“I didn’t break nothing,” says I.
I hadn’t turned till then. When I did, expecting to see his hulk directly behind me, he was actually farther away than I thought. With that voice of his, he could be a hundred yards distant and still sound on your neck.
But now, between him and me, was a woman with dark-blonde hair drawn across either side of her face and into a bun at the back. She had blue eyes and pale skin, though not the dead white of his, and wore a blue dress. I reckoned she was about twenty years of age while Pendrake was fifty, so believed her his daughter.
She was smiling at me and had teeth smaller than average over a full underlip. She kept looking at me but talked to Pendrake.
“I don’t think he’s ever seen a parlor before,” she said velvety soft. “Would you like to sit down, Jack? Right here,” pointing out a kind of bench covered in green plush. “That’s called a loveseat.”
Pendrake sort of growled deep in his windpipe, not in rage but rather a sort of stupor.
I said: “No thank you, ma’am.”
And then she asked if I wanted a glass of milk and a piece of cake.
There wasn’t nothing I wanted less than milk, for which if I’d ever had a taste I had long lost it, but thought I’d better play along with this girl if I was going to have a friend in that house, so followed on to the kitchen and by so doing got out of Pendrake’s way for a while at least, for he went to a room off the parlor where he wrote his sermons and sometimes spoke them aloud; you could hear him rumbling through the woodwork and the glassware would tinkle all through the place.
In the kitchen I met another individual who was friendly right off. She didn’t have no other choice, being colored. Though freed, she wasn’t acting cocky about it, I can tell you, for it was within the law in Missouri of that day to keep slaves. I guess once you’ve been one, you always figure you can be made into one again. She got on my nerves slightly, however, with her everlasting good humor, which I suspect was partly fake, and I’d have had more in common with her great-grandpa who carried a spear in Africa. This cook’s name was Lucy and she was married to a fellow who worked around the place outside, cutting grass and all, another freedman by the name of Lavender. They lived in a little cottage out beyond the stable, and I could sometimes hear them arguing out there in the middle of the night.
That white woman which I took for Pendrake’s daughter was actually his wife. She was older by five or six years than I had first thought, just as he was some younger. Still, there was quite a range between them and I already wondered that first afternoon what she saw in him. And I might as well say now I never found out, either. I reckon it was one of them marriages arranged by the parents, for her Pa had been a judge and such a fellow wouldn’t want a saloonkeeper for a son-in-law.
Mrs. P. now sat across the table while I drunk the milk, and impressed me by the interest she took in my early life, or seemed to. Here was the first soul who ever asked about my adventures, which surprised me in a refined white woman in the Missouri settlements, whereas that colored Lucy, though laughing incessantly and saying “Lordy,” couldn’t have cared less and I knew figured me for a mighty liar.
I saw I had a good thing in my stories, so didn’t exhaust them all at once. I also tried to mind the eating manners showed me by that chaplain’s wife, where the first time I set down to table I picked the meat off the plate with my hands. I knowed better now and cut that cake Mrs. Pendrake give me bit by bit and daintily inserted it into my mouth on the point of a knife.
When I was done, she said: “You don’t know how glad we are to have you with us, Jack. There aren’t any other young people in this house. Your coming has let the sun in.” I thought it was a pretty thing to say.
Next thing she did was take me shopping for some new clothes. She got her bonnet and parasol, and her and me walked into the commercial part of town, for it was not far and the day was fine weather in early October as I recall. We come across a number of people that Mrs. Pendrake knowed and they gawked at me and sometimes talked with her as to my identity. The women generally made a clucking noise and sort of simpered, though I drew a belligerent look from certain of them who were old maids, schoolteachers, librarians, and such, for I hadn’t got a proper haircut in five years and probably had a nasty expression in spite of my efforts to look decent.
As to the men we encountered, I don’t believe a one of them could have told you later whether I was tall or short, for they kept their eyes fixed on Mrs. P. She had quite an effect on them. I don’t believe I done her justice in the description, which I have tried to tell from my point of view that first day. As I had spent my formative years among the Indians, my basic taste in women was for black hair and dark eyes. She was also supposed to be my adopted Ma, so I was restrained somewhat from looking at her purely as a woman. But it’s only fair to say that with white men I reckon Mrs. Pendrake was thought to be indeed a beauty, and most of them we met that afternoon acted like they’d have got down on their knees and hung out their tongues if she’d of asked them to.
CHAPTER 9 Sin
OF COURSE I HAD to go to school there in that town, and it may surprise you to hear I didn’t mind it much. Sitting on a hard seat for long hours was the worst part, and I wasn’t thrilled none by the sour old spinster who taught us, and it was also embarrassing to be put with the tiny children, for I never had much learning up to that point. I could read a little before I went with the Indians, and I could count, and I understood that George Washington had been President though I couldn’t have said when.
Let me just say I labored diligently at my studies, and Mrs. Pendrake tutored me at home, and by spring I had advanced in reading to where I could do the work of twelve- or thirteen-year-olds and in composition right well though spelling was never my strong point, but in arithmetic I stayed virtually a baby. But that was ever so many year ago and I didn’t go to school long, so if the man who is listening to this story of mine copies it down the way I am saying it, you will read the memoirs of a uncultivated person, that’s for sure.
The Pendrakes must have talked some to each other in my presence, but I swear I can’t remember any such occasion. As I see them back over the years, we’re sitting to supper in the dining room, the Reverend at the head of the table, Mrs. at the foot, me along the side, Lucy putting down bowl after bowl of steaming food. After grace, Pendrake’s voice not loud but so penetrating that I reckon it could soften tough meat, he’d dig into his chuck. He was a prodigious eater, outdoing even a Cheyenne in that respect, for while an Indian will stuff himself most wonderful there is much of the time that he has to go hungry; it evens out over the course of a month, say, to somewhat less than the average intake of a white man who never misses his three square.
But Pendrake laid into it day in and day out, and I’m going to tell you what he’d eat on any one of them, for you won’t have an idea of that man without knowledge of his appetite.
For breakfast Lucy would fry him six eggs, a great mass of potatoes, and a steak about the size of his two giant hands put together. By the time that was chawed up and had been washed down to his belly with a couple quarts of coffee, she’d deliver the griddle cakes, ten or twelve surmounted by a hunk of butter big as an apple and dripping with molasses. For lunch he’d eat two entire chickens with stuffing, potatoes, couple vegetables, five pieces of bread, and half a pie swimming in cream. In the afternoon he’d make calls on sick parishioners, and they wouldn’t never be so under the weather that they couldn’t see to it he got an enormous hunk of cake or a dozen cookies along with coffee or tea.