But all of it died down when Junius got tired of the game and took the nigra out of hiding and showed him around before bringing him back over to their house, sat him up in one of her cane-bottom chairs out on the back sunporch, till he could figure out what to do with him. Mrs. Urquhart wouldn’t let it in her house. Birdie had to walk past this grinning abomination whenever she was coming from the back of the house, and got to where she couldn’t stand it and started going through the living room instead. When Junius got tired of her pestering him about it, he finally just took Earl aside one day and said Earl could just keep the nigra. Birdie said, — Well what in the world are you going to do with such a thing?
Earl said, — I don’t know, maybe some kind of advertising.
— But you sell women’s shoes. How is a colored dummy going to help you sell women’s shoes?
— I said I don’t know, Earl said. -Maybe stand him up in the display window, waving people on inside.
— Waving?
— He’s an electric nigra, Birdie.
— A what?
— He’s supposed to operate an electric saw, kind that you pull the saw blade across the board. So his arm moves like that.
— Like how?
He showed her.
— That doesn’t look like waving to me.
He just looked at her.
— It almost looks nasty to me, without the saw or whatever’s supposed to be in his hand.
Earl looked at her and didn’t say anything, she thought he might blow up, then he walked off. And not two days later put the electric nigra back out in the shed and there he stayed.
Creasie was spooked by it, she could tell. If she was heading to the back of the house via the sunporch she’d pull up shy of the French doors from the dining room and veer off into the living room instead, take the long way around. Birdie’d thought she’d be glad too when Earl put it up, but when she said something Creasie mumbled, — No’m, Mr. Junius likes to take us out to the shed and talk to it.
— Say what, now? You and who?
— Me and the children.
Meaning her grandchildren, Ruthie’s two and Edsel’s little boy, Robert.
— What do you mean, talk to it?
— Yes’m. He talk to that dummy like it’s real, then make like it talking back.
She told Earl about it and he said, — So what? He’s just playing a game with the children.
— Well don’t you think it’s strange to keep a wooden dummy locked up in a shed behind the house and to take little children back there and pretend it’s real and can talk to them? And then to leave and lock it up in there again, them all the time thinking he’s got a nigra man locked up in a shed behind the house, sitting up on a shelf like some boogie man?
Earl just laughed to himself. -You tell him to quit it, if you want to. I don’t see anything wrong with it.
She tried to let it go. Then Earl brings home the new vacuum cleaner that day, odd contraption like some kind of metal basketball on wheels with a hose and wire coming out of it, and Creasie doesn’t like it, of course, says, — Ye’m I’d just rather sweep, me, but Birdie says — Now they say these things will clean the rugs so you don’t have to haul them out and beat them every week, so I want you to try it. And they plug it in and Birdie pushes it around to show her how, and pretty soon Creasie, who’s standing there with this scowl on her face, big pout, takes the handle from her like to snatch it away and starts pushing it around. Then just to get her back, won’t stop vacuuming. Every day before Birdie’s even finished her coffee good, Creasie in there firing that loud, whining thing up, giving her a headache, till she hears a pop and a little scream and runs into the living room to see the wall smoking and the vacuum hose flung aside and Creasie laid out on the rug with her eyes wide open and quivering like a freezing person, can’t breathe.
Birdie jumped on her and started pushing her chest, be dog if she was going to put her mouth on a nigra to revive her. But she came to, blinked and smacked her lips a while, sat up. Birdie helped her to stand up, and got her a cup of coffee. And about halfway through the cup of coffee Creasie started cutting her evil looks. -Well I didn’t make it shock you, Birdie said, and Creasie stalked off back to the cabin and wouldn’t come back to work for two days. She told Earl, called him where he was in St. Louis on a buying trip, — I’m putting that thing out in the garage and when you get back you just don’t even stop, take it straight to the junk pile if it’s going to shock the nigra maid and make her even stranger than she already is.
— You can take that durned old nigra dummy too, while you’re at it, she says.
Which she repeated when he got home.
— It’s not out there anymore, he says, starting to eat his dinner and not looking up. -Papa took it and sold it to somebody.
— Well thank goodness for that.
— Thank goodness my foot, it wasn’t his to sell.
— I’m glad to be rid of it.
— That’s not the point. Point is he gave it to me, then turns around and sells it. He takes another bite of chicken and mashed potatoes. -I’m going to get it back. He won’t tell me where it is, said the man was just passing through. I’ll find out.
— You do no such thing. Why in the world would you bother to do that? I hate it! Why can’t you just let it go, if you know I hate it around here.
— It’s the principle of the thing, he says. -That son of a bitch never gave me anything when I was growing up, and now after all these years miracle of miracles he’s given me an electric wooden nigger and I don’t give a good goddamn if it’s a worthless piece of junk or not, he gave it to me and I’ll be goddamned if he’s going to just reach into my shed and take it back and sell it, because it’s mine.
— Well now you got a real nigra man living here, so you ought to be satisfied, she said.
The real nigra was that Frank, who’d just appeared the week before — a black ragged ghost, there in the yard raking leaves in the scant dark gray light of a late afternoon. -You there, she shouted out to him, what do you want? — Yes’m, he said, I’s just raking the leaves, something like that. She told him to talk to Earl, they couldn’t hire another nigra around the place. But Earl says, — Well I’m sure as hell not going to rake the leaves, and it’s hard enough to get someone over here to do that. Besides, he’s staying with Creasie out there, looks like, maybe she can use the company, better to help keep her around.
She’d have liked to be done with the both of them, with the lot of them, there were plenty of white people, even old people, could be got to do that work. She didn’t like them skulking around. If she hadn’t gotten to where she liked for Creasie to fetch her sassafras for tea from old Vish — it was good for her stomach trouble and other ailments, too — she might have just let her go, but then too firing one of them could be harder than hiring, so she didn’t.
Earl got to where he’d take Frank off fishing with him, down to the coast, where she knew he was seeing the woman he’d hired at the store that year and sent off to manage the new store in Tallahassee, so Frank knew that about him, about her, which was humiliating. She knew Earl was seeing her down there, but said nothing, it was out of her sight. But it made her feel all the more lost in her life, what she had become, and she would find herself sometimes on weekends when he was down there thinking she had slipped into another life where he wasn’t even alive anymore, had disappeared almost as if he’d been gone for a long time, and she wandered the grounds around the house picking leaves from the trees and bushes and memorizing their vein patterns, their shapes, and digging earthworms from the black earth at the base of the magnolia tree out by the road to take fishing by herself out at the lake. At the lake sometimes she would stay into the dark, and lie on the cot in the living room of the cabin smelling the rank smell of the bedding bream and would want to touch herself but when she did felt nothing, no desire, as if she were physically numbed as well, just made her think of her sisters and being girls together and she’d feel sad, and she would get up and drive in the darkness down the dirt road back to the highway.