Billy was bent over one of the statues and he stood up now and gave an elaborate rolling shrug. “Sure, whatever you say, Mr. Wright. An evening at home? Well, I guess that’ll just about hit the spot, then.” He was grinning too now. “And Mother”—why did married men of a certain age insist on calling their wives Mother? — “I don’t suppose she’ll mind seeing me around. Or not too much, anyway.”
“All right, then. Good,” Frank said. “Careful with that, careful!”
It wasn’t until they were in the car and he had the machine in gear and started hurtling up the street with a great tromboning blast of the exhaust that he returned to the subject at hand. “You remember John Vogelsang, the caterer down there at Midway?”
She did. Vaguely.
“Big fellow. Heavy build. Blond hair, cropped close?”
She made a noise of assent, but it didn’t really matter. He could have been talking about the emperor of China and it was the surest thing in the world that he would fill in the details, all the details, without stint.
“Well”—his hand at the shift, the wind beating like a hurricane and she holding on to her hat for dear life—“I told him about your little problem, our problem, that is, and he recommended a couple to me, good workers, husband and wife. She cooks and he serves at table and does repairs and what have you. A kind of handyman/butler all in one.”
“They’re in Chicago?”
“Yes. They’re Negroes. From somewhere in the Caribbean, he says. One of the islands.”
“And they’re willing to come up here and”—she let out a laugh—“cultivate the Emersonian virtues of country living?”
The roar of the engine, the startled looks on the faces of the cows, the clouds shredding overhead. He shrugged. “Apparently. But they’re educated people — at least he is. Very well-spoken for a Negro. Name’s Julius, I think it was. Or no, no: Julian. Julian something.”
CHAPTER 6: ENTER CARLETON
The man who met them at the station, all elbows and knees and dressed in denim trousers and an open-collared shirt, wore a mask for a face. No smile, no frown, no expression of any kind. He had dishwater eyes, and that was no surprise — all of them had that washed-out look to them up here in the country, like so many duppies, as if the gloomy dead ashpit of the sky had sucked all the life out of them, and this one hid his behind a pair of wire-rim spectacles. He wore a little sand-colored mustache under the jut of his nose and short-clipped hair the same color and all Julian could think of was river sand, dirty with the rains. At least it wasn’t yellow. Yellow hair was an aberration on a human being and he swore he’d never seen so much yellow hair in his life all the way up on the train and everybody staring at him as if he was the freak and he never raised his eyes once except to look out on the unbroken scroll of green, too much green, green enough to bury anybody — they should have called this place Greenland and not that Eskimo island in Canada. But here he was, the dishwater man. He didn’t say hello or welcome or anything at all civil or even human other than “You must be the new help” and “I’ve come to fetch you up to Taliesin,” and he stood apart from them at the station, as if he was afraid the color of their skin would rub off on him.
In the rain that seemed to have started up the minute the train left them on the platform in a volcano of smoke and cinders, Julian struggled with the weight of the steamer trunk and Gertrude’s overstuffed suitcase and when she went to help him, with that struck-dumb frog-eyed look of sympathy and hopefulness on her face, that look he hated because it demeaned him, made him into a puny slack little boy all over again, he shrugged her off. “I can handle it myself, woman. I don’t need a bit of your help. Now you just stand over there at the wagon and then you climb in and see if you can’t open that umbrella.” That was what he heard himself say, simple instructions, but his voice was choked with a kind of awakening rage she recognized in the space of one second and she stepped lively and that was that.
And what had this dishwater man come to fetch them in when any fool could see it was going to rain like the deluge itself? An open wagon pulled by a little sorrel team that looked as spoiled as household pets — a wagon, as if this was the nineteenth century still, and here he’d been telling Gertrude how they were improving themselves by going to work for a rich man in the country. He’d had enough of Chicago, where the black people acted just like they were slaves still and the whites were as ignorant and tightfisted and blunted as the Hunkies and Polacks and dumb doughy Irish Micks they were. The country. That was what he’d yearned for, thinking of the island, where at least you could get away into a field of sugarcane and talk to the sky when you had to.
But this country was different, he could see that already, see it before he climbed down off the train and hauled the trunk and suitcase to the wagon and settled in beside the dishwater man and watched the horses grind their pretty flanks. This country was desperate. Wild. They’d tried to break it with their mules and plows and axes, but it was a very hell pit of trees and bristling hilltops that ran all the way back as far as you could see, a place where bears roamed and wolves howled and the spirits of the red Indians murmured through the ghost hours of the night. And where the only black face he’d see besides Gertrude’s was when he looked into the mirror and he never looked into the mirror because he didn’t particularly like what he saw there.
So they went up the road past the blood-colored barns and planted fields in the rain that chopped and drove and hissed against the inadequacy of the umbrella, across a bridge with the river spread out under it like a mother’s lap and right into the reek of hogs. He saw the place before she did, a collection of stained sheds and a little clapboard house, a man out there in the downpour with his shovel trying to open up a ditch so the discolored waste of the animals could flow out of the pen, and he felt his heart sink when the dishwater man tugged at the reins and they started through the yard. “Is this the place?” he heard himself say, and he wouldn’t turn his head to the dishwater man but just let the words tumble out of his mouth like something he was afraid of losing.
Here were the hogs poking their mud-crusted snouts through the slats of the fence, the stink cataclysmic, Gertrude looking woebegone and trying to keep herself from taking in a single breath, and the dishwater man let out a laugh. A laugh. As if any of this was comical. “No,” the man said. “No, this is Reider’s place.” And he pointed on up the hill through the web of the trees and there it was, the biggest house in the world creeping out of the hillside like a wounded beast, like the tail of a big golden dragon, and then they rocked through the ruts and the house came at them and Julian stepped out into the mud boiling up round the flagstones of the courtyard and ruined the shine of his new leather shoes even as his best suit of clothes drank in the wet and clung to his flanks and lay bloated and heavy across his shoulders.
“Hey, Billy!” A voice stabbed at them out of the shadows of an open stall and he saw the man whose voice it was and the motorcar at the same time, a fine expensive machine pulled up safe from the rain and painted just exactly the color of a boatload of bananas. The man was tall, with broad shoulders and a waist narrow as a girl’s, with the swollen lips and wet eyes of a sensualist. Maybe he was thirty, maybe that, no more. “Mrs. Borthwick told me to tell you to take them to their quarters to get settled and then have them come into the house so she can show them what needs to be done.”