— Ain’t nobody run me off. Not yet anyway. I’m on see if Mr. Urquhart won’t give me some work.
She looked back toward her little kitchen for moment, nothing but a corner where the cold iron stove sat like a big iron toad frog staring at her, wanting to croak.
— You can use the door next time you come in, unless you just like coming in people houses through the window.
She looked back but he was gone, out the door this time, his bare feet making no more sound than a breeze tippling through last fall’s leaves dry on the ground.
Which he would show up raking later that afternoon.
She watched him out the Urquhart’s kitchen window and whenever he would glance up she would turn quickly away, her face burning. She went out back to rinse some old rags in a washtub. She heard Miss Birdie holler at him from where she was in the kitchen, You there, what are you doing? And he says, Yes ma’am I’m raking the yard. Creasie was listening without looking up from the washtub. Miss Birdie says, Well I see you are raking, who are you? Name Frank, ma’am. Well you talk to my husband about getting paid, I don’t have any money for you. Yes, ma’am, he said, I will. And he did. Mr. Earl, home that afternoon, just looked at him for a long time, his short moustache twitching every now and then and his eyes kind of squinted, then he lights a cigarette and gives one to Frank, goes away. Next day, same thing, Frank weeding the beds, Mr. Earl coming home and standing there looking at him, gives him a cigarette, goes on in the house. Finally he comes out a little later and says to him, — You staying with Creasie now on my property?
— Yes, sir, Frank says.
— No sir! Creasie hollers from the breezeway between the kitchen and garage. -He ain’t staying with me. I’m not like that!
— Well, he says, ignoring her and just looking at him a while longer, I don’t care where you stay, but if you’re going to hang around here you might as well do some work I need done, and jangles his keys and change just like his old papa. And so Frank was on the payroll, such as it was, a dollar a week and sharing the leftovers with Creasie, who always had too much anyway and ended up throwing it out. It was enough for the time being. You couldn’t expect a whole lot more. It was just work and what little bit of pleasure you could find at the end of a day. If Creasie was working late with cooking for the next day, pies or baking a ham, Frank might come over to the Urquhart house and knock on the kitchen door and ask if there was anything he could do, or come fall and winter make sure the fire in the sunporch fireplace was going good, getting the coals so hot he could roll a big round log in there and it’d burn all night, Mr. Earl asleep in a chair across from it after his evening coffee. Then he’d lurk like a ghost in Creasie’s pantry till she was done and walk her back to the cabin.
Even as lonely as she was, it took her a while to find pleasure with a stranger. He was fairly tall, and with a head like a brick, hair kind of squared off on top, and a sleepy, wise look on his face. Not kind eyes but not hard, either, just eyes that would look at her without saying anything, and then turn to the peas and the greens, the pot roast or pork chops, the cold cornbread she brought back from the house. The Urquharts ate well, and so did they on seconds.
— If we they dogs, Frank said one evening, dogs eat well.
— Well Mr. Earl or Miss Birdie neither one much like dogs. Mr. Earl had him a hunting dog but he give it away to somebody. Miss Birdie hates dogs for they smell.
— Reckon that’s why they like the niggers around, he said.
She came to like him. A long and knobby man, knees and elbows as dry as dust and gray as ash, voice like the sleeping grumble of some panther beast.
— Only part of you still wood, she said to him that evening, giving him a squeeze.
He didn’t know what she was talking about and just mumbled, — What you talking about wood, and not much else as he wasn’t a talker.
She said, — Wooden man can’t make no babies.
He looked at her like he might say something sharp then, so she shut up.
Miss Birdie says the next day, — I don’t want you living in sin back there. If that man’s going to stay with you, you ought to get married. It ain’t right.
— Ye’m, we married, she said.
— I mean in a church, Miss Birdie said. And later she heard her saying to Mr. Earl, — Well where’d he come from?
He says, — I don’t know.
— He might be a thief.
— I think he’s just one of them turpentine niggers, come up from Florida to work the trees.
Mmm hmmm, Creasie thought, back in the kitchen scrubbing the stove. A tree spirit, come out of the tree when somebody carves themself a wooden dummy, been cooped up in a little shed and now out and resting free for a while with Creasie. She laughed to herself. She looked out the window and he was out in the yard, standing by a rake and staring back through the window at her. A little chill ran in her. She went back to the stove and when she looked up again he was gone and the pile of leaves he’d raked lying on the ground. She slipped out the kitchen door and ran around the corner and didn’t see him and kept on running, all the way around the house, Miss Birdie’s head popping out a window she just passed and calling, — Creasie! Where are you running to?
— Ye’m, (she would explain after she had stopped, seen him raking way out in the front yard by the magnolia tree, big dry leaves clacking at the rake, and sneaked back into the kitchen, out of breath), I was just chasing an old stray cat out of this kitchen.
— A cat? she says. -What kind of cat?
— Ye’m, I on know, some stray. Some old orange thing, ears nubbed off.
— Orange! Miss Birdie says. -Now I saw an old gray cat slinking around here a while back. What’s all these strays!
— Ye’m, he kind of gray.
Miss Birdie stops and gives her that look.
— Well now was it orange or was it gray? I declare, Creasie, sometimes I think you just make things up whole cloth.
— Ye’m, well I try to tell the truth, but you know them stray cats move pretty quick, like my colors blurs. I think maybe the lectric done messed with my visions.
The look on Miss Birdie’s face then, just mystified, which was just as well, was what you ought to want in white folks, being colored.
Woodpile
EARL LOVED TO get into the Chrysler and head for the coast, Pascagoula, Maurier’s fish camp on the river, take his boat out into the Sound and go for redfish and trout. Fishing was one thing he loved to do to relax. Take Frank along, nigger riding in the boat on the trailer behind the Chrysler. Quick son of a bitch got to where he could catch a Camel butt when Earl flicked it out the window and it zipped back in the slipstream. Frank’d catch it in one big palm and calm as you please take it and get almost half a smoke out of what was left, taking it between two fingers and smiling at him as he smoked it, looking at him as he watched in the rearview mirror as if to say, All right white man, it’s your game but I can play it better than you, up yo ass, all right. So he got to where he would take him out on the boat too, in the mornings, Frank hung over from wherever he wandered off to the night before, some kind of coastal whore, probably white, the son of a bitch. He was a strange and sly one.
Junius said, — Why you want to hire that nigger to work around your place when I had provided a perfectly good electric nigger to do for you? Laughing.
— I wish you hadn’t sold that thing, Papa.
— You couldn’t rig it to rake leaves and mow the grass, I reckon. Wasn’t doing nothing here but sitting in that shed. I’m disappointed in you.
— I’m not a mechanic. You want to give me an electric yard nigger, give me an electric yard nigger, not one rigged up to cut boards in half.