That was when Mamah stepped in. She was terrified, panicked, her every instinct to turn and run, but she took hold of the enameled edge of the wash basin and flung herself between them, raising it up like a shield. He was right there, right in her face, the smell of him as raw and unrelieved as anything she’d ever experienced, as death, as mangled flesh, rotten flesh, flesh set afire and burning up in the pan. He didn’t move, didn’t flinch or back off or acknowledge her, and for the fraction of a moment she thought he was going to come at her next, but then she saw that he was as shocked as she was, his eyes retreating from the scene as if he’d just awakened from a dream to this nightmare of abuse and outraged whiteness and the flame under the pan and the smoke rising, rising. “Don’t you dare,” she said.
He took a step back, dropped his arms to his sides.
Mamah could barely control her voice. She was shaking. “You get out of here!” she shouted. “Get out!”
And then the strangest thing happened: he grinned at her. His eyes went cold and up came that automatic grin. But he wasn’t moving. And his hands were clenched. “You speak to me like that?” he said, without a trace of emotion. “Who do you think you are? You’re nothing but a—”
“No,” Gertrude groaned, trying to get to her feet. “Julian, no—”
“Nothing but—” And then, only then, did he turn away, jerking the handle of the cast-iron pan so that it skittered away from the flame and clattered to the floor, pausing only to give it a savage kick before he made his way to the door. But he wasn’t finished, not yet. He swung back round on her. “You people,” he spat, “with your books. This woman is my wife here. My wife. Can you understand that?”
“I’m giving you your notice, right here and now, as of this minute,” she said, but the words sounded hollow in her ears, and she knew it and so did he.
He shook his head slowly, as if the motion of it pained him—“And you call us niggers,” he said — and then he was gone.
CHAPTER 7: POP-POP
He was lost and he knew it, hot blood beating in his temples with the certain knowledge of every degraded inconsolable thing to come, the hurt, the yellow-haired train, Chicago, the island, back to the island with his tail between his legs like a whipped cur, and who was to blame? Who else? Gertrude. That bitch. That cow. And how he’d ever got mixed up with a woman like that was a mystery to him — the ignorance of her and the insipidity, the barefooted low peasant drivel that came out of her mouth — but it was his fault too, he knew that, the fault of his lust that was like a dog’s lust. He saw her naked breasts in the eye of his mind, and the tight sweet insuck of her belly, the place between her legs, the way she swayed beneath the maubey pot perched up on the flat crown of her head sashaying her derriere through the marketplace in Bridgetown, and it was Maubey, maubey for sale, and you t’ink you be wantin’ somet’in’ else, little sir? she seventeen and he too weak to deny himself. That’s right. And now it was over. Now it was ruined. One slip and he had his notice and where would he go now? Women. They squeezed you, oh, they did. Squeezed you. Squeezed you. Till there was no juice left.
Only then did he realize that he was talking to himself, that he’d spoken aloud for anybody to hear, and he took a moment to lean forward and spit on the corner of the rug he’d brushed himself and brushed again till the nap stood up and laid itself down twice over. But the door. The door was right there beside him, still half-open, because he’d stalked out of that room and stopped in his traces, his back pressed to the wall, too worked up and twisted with the sick clutch of despair to make his legs work. Through the gap of the door came the smoke, black as skin, twisted like a pot of eels, eelskin, rising in a column to fan across the ceiling. He could hear her in there sobbing as if she had something to sob about — he had half a mind to go back through that door and finish what he’d started, finish both of them, both of the bitches, one black and one white. Mamah. Mamah Bouton Borthwick. Translator. Suffragist. Soul mate. He’d read in that book and it was nothing but cant and heresy. Who was she to interfere between a man and his wife? She might have been free with her love but even the whores on Baxter Road had the sense to charge for it.
His legs were moving. He was going up the hall, that was what he was doing, thinking to get into the cornfield and work the rage down out of his head and into his legs, his feet, down into the ground where he could bury it, and he was twisting his hands, one inside the clench of the other — the heel of his right hand stinging where he’d slapped her, or had he burned it when he jerked the pan from the stove? No matter. He could barely control the right one or the left either, all the fine things of the house mocking him with what they were and he wasn’t, but he fought them with all his will and then he was out the door and freed into the air he could breathe with its veritable stink of cattle and their hindquarters, the sun sudden on his face, and a flutter of movement against the sky. He saw the peacocks perched on the low line of the roof like displaced things and that was all right because they were cocks and not hens and the hens were little pecking creatures going around in the shadows because they were ashamed of themselves.
Things had been coming to a boil for the past week and more, these whites — Brodelle and the dishwater man and the rest of them, the fat-faced fools in the village, shopkeepers, horsetraders, farmers in their buggies and black Ford automobiles — giving him no more notice than they would a bug. Or less.173 At least they could see a bug, but they didn’t see him at all because they didn’t like what they saw any more than he did. Unless they wanted something. Then it was Carleton, fetch me this; Carleton, polish my boots; Carleton, the soup’s cold. And Gertrude. Gertrude gave him her look of dole day and night, fretting over him, begging him not to upset the mistress — or the children or the precious holy houseguests or the squinting idiot at the grocery, as if every one of them was a king and queen in his own right — and always it was the same low peasant talk. Biddy wisdom and platitudes. Diarrhea out the wrong end.
She’d got up that morning in the pulsing gray tumble of dawn and the first thing out of her mouth was, “Julian, Julian, I dream de sucking pig.” He ignored her. He was slapping water on his face, feeling his way with the razor because he wouldn’t look in the mirror. “Not jus’ de pig.” She came round him from behind, thrust her sorrowful face in his. Her voice had turned ominous — more of her Bajan claptrap and superstition, that was what it was, more ignorance. Tears started up in her eyes. “I dreamin’ de wedding too, don’t you see? Pork. Pork and de wedding all in one dream—”
“Oh, hush it,” he snapped and turned his back on her again, the towel rough as sandpaper against his face. “There isn’t going to be any wedding. Not here, not with these people. They’re too good for the forms and rituals of civilization. For the Bible. For anything but themselves.”
Her eyes bled out at him. She turned up her palms and she was pleading now, her voice slipped down and gone, no more than a gargle in her throat. “Don’t you know what that means?”
He knew. If you dreamed of pork and a wedding, all in one dream, it meant the cataclysm was coming, pop-pop, the bloodletting, the horror. And maybe it was, but he didn’t want to hear about it. Not now. Not at this hour of the morning, when he had to put on his service jacket and go in amongst the white people and bow and scrape like a plantation nigger, not ever. “Shut that ignorance,” he said, whirling round on her.