“Their best horse general. If you never get the notes to them, just remember: Stuart is dead.”
False Corn stared into the purpled white eyes of Edison. One of the dogs, ashamed, licked Edison’s toes. It began raining feebly. False Corn removed his overcoat.
“All my notes are in the right pocket. Can you remember the thing I told you, even if you lose the notes?”
“Stuart is dead. He down,” said Edison.
Passersby thought it an act of charity. False Corn placed the coat on Edison’s shoulders. What an incident of noblesse oblige, they thought. These hard times and look at this.
False Corn shivered as the mist came in under the gables. He chewed the cigar. Edison rushed away from him up the street, scattering the dogs and pigeons. Do get there, fool, the Indian thought.
False Corn’s shirt was light yellow and soiled at the cuffs. On his wrist he wore a light sterling bracelet. It was his wife’s and it brought her close to him when he shook it on his arm and felt its tender weight. He plunged into the sweet gloom of his absence from her, and her knees appeared to his mind as precious, his palms on them.
In the front room of the hotel a number of soldiers were sitting on the floor, saying nothing. Some of them were cracking pecans and eating them quickly. There was no heat in the building, but it was warmer and out of the mist.
His eye itched. He asked where there might be water. A corporal pointed. He found a bucket in the kitchen. The water was sour. When he finished the cup, he found a man standing on his blind side. The man held a folded paper in his game hand. His other arm was missing. The brim of his hat was drawn down.
“Mister False Corn?” the man said.
He shouldn’t have known the name. No one else in Richmond was supposed to know his true name. False Corn was swept by a chill. He wished for his pistol, but it was in the chest in his garret, back in the boardinghouse. He took the note.
It read: “Not only is Gen. Stuart dead. The nigger is dead too.” It was in a feminine script and it was signed “Mrs. O’Neal.”
When he looked up, the one-armed man was gone. False Corn pondered whether to leave the kitchen. Since there was nothing else to do, he did. Nobody was looking at him as he made his way out of the lobby. He had determined on the idea of a woman between two mean male faces, the trio advancing before he opened the door.
But he was on the street now.
Nothing is happening to me, he thought. There’s no shot, no harsh shout.
It will be in my room, decided False Corn, opening the door of the garret. Yes, there. There it sits. Where’s the woman?
A bearded man was sitting on the narrow bed, holding a stiff brown hat between his legs. False Corn’s pistol was lying on the blanket beside the man’s thigh. The man was thin. His clothes were sizes large on him. But his voice was soft and mellow, reminiscent.
“Shut the door. I’ve known you since Baltimore, my friend.”
“Who are you?” False Corn said.
“An observer. Mrs. O’Neal. Your career is over.”
This voice, thought False Corn. He stood carefully, a weary statue with severely combed black hair to his nape, center-parted. This man is little, he thought. I can murder him with my hands if he drops his guard, thought False Corn.
“You have a funny name, a big pistol, and you’ve been quite a spy. We know all the women you’ve been with.”
“Then you know nothing. I’ve been with no women.”
“Why not? A man gets lonely.”
“I’ve been more hungry than lustful in these parts. I have a wife, a child.”
I can kill him if he gets too easy, thought False Corn.
“I think I’ll end you with your own pistol. Close your eyes and dream, Isaacs. I’ll finish it off for you.”
“All right,” False Corn said. “The rain has made me sleepy. Allow me to get my robe.”
He picked his robe off the hook without being shot. The robe was rotten at the elbows and smelled of wet dog. But it was familiar to him.
“What a wretched robe,” said the man in that reminiscent voice.
False Corn took a match off his dresser. Isn’t this just to light my cigar? There was a flat piece of dynamite in the collar of the robe. He bent to the side, cupping his hands, and lit the fuse. The fuse was only an inch long. He removed the robe.
“You’ve caught your shoulder on fire, you pig,” cried the man. But it wasn’t a man’s voice now.
False Corn threw the robe toward the voice and fell to the door. No shot rang out. He fumbled at the latch. He saw the robe covering the man’s face. The man was tearing the robe away. His beard dropped, burning, to the floor. False Corn shut the door and lay on the planks of the upper hallway.
There was a shudder and an utterance of rolling light that half split the door. False Corn’s face was pierced by splinters. His good eye hardly worked for the blood rushing out of his eyebrow.
The thing was still alive. It was staggering in the doorway. Its limbs were naked and blackened. Its breasts were scorched black. It was a woman, hair burned away. False Corn kicked the thing in the thigh. It collapsed, face to the floor.
It was Tess, his wife. She looked at him, her mouth and eyes alive.
“I was your wife, Isaacs, but I was Southern,” she said.
By that time a crowd of the sorrowful and the inept had gathered.
Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt
MOTHER ROONEY OF TITPEA STREET, THAT LITTLE FIFTY YARDS OF dead-end crimped macadam east off North State, crept home from the Jitney Jungle in the falling afternoon of October 1965. She had on her high-laced leather sneakers and her dress of blue teacup roses; she had a brooch the size of an Easter egg pinned on at her booby crease; she clutched a wrapped-up lemon fish filet, fresh from Biloxi, under her armpit.
Mother Rooney had been served at the Jitney by Mimsie Grogan, an ancient girl who had converted back in the thirties to Baptist. Mimsie would hiss at her about this silly disgusting ritual of Fridays as she wrapped the fish. Mother Rooney was Catholic. She was old, she had been being Mother Rooney so long. In the little first-story bathroom of her great weird house no spray she bought could defeat the odor of reptile corpses stewed in mud. Her boarder boys, all gone now for a month, would sometimes come in late and use her bathroom to vomit in, not being able to climb the stairs and use their own. And sometimes they were not able to use even hers well. There would be whiskey and beer gravy waiting for her on the linoleum. Just unspeakable. Yet the natural smell of her toilet would be overcoming the other vileness, she could not deny it. A couple of the young men smarties would openly confess, in the way of complaining about the unbearably reeking conditions among which they were forced to puke last night, that they were the ones. One of them even arranged his own horrid bountiful vomit into a face with a smile, such as a child might draw, and this she had to confront one morning at six o’clock as she came to the chilly tiles to relieve herself. Nobody confessed to that. But she caught on when she heard all the giggling up in the wings, at this hour in the morning. She wasn’t deaf, and she wasn’t so slow. The boys were sick and tired of her flushing the toilet and waking them all up every morning. Her toilet sounded like a volcano. Yes, Mr. Monroe had voiced that complaint before. He said it sounded as if this old house’s back was breaking at last, it couldn’t stand the tilt anymore. It woke them all up, it made them all goggle-eyed, everybody stayed stiff for two hours in their beds. Nobody wanted to be the one to make the move that finally broke it in two and sent them all collapsing down the hill into the Mississippi State Fairgrounds. What a way to wake up, Mr. Monroe complained. The situation here is uninhabitable. I don’t know a man upstairs who isn’t planning to move out of here as soon as he sees an equal rent in the paper.