With peaceful absorption Biff settled down to the details of the newspaper before him. He read steadily and with concentration, but from habit some secondary part of him was alert to everything around him. Jake Blount was still talking, and often he would hit his fist on the table. The mute sipped beer. Mick walked restlessly around the radio and stared at the customers. Biff read every word in the first paper and made a few notes on the margins.
Then suddenly he looked up with a surprised expression. His mouth had been open for a yawn and he snapped it shut. The radio swung into an old song that dated back to the time when he and Alice were engaged. ‘Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight.’
They had taken the streetcar one Sunday to Old Sardis Lake and had rented a rowboat. At sunset he played on the mandolin while she sang. She had on a sailor hat, and when he put his arm around her waist she--Alice--a dragnet for lost feelings. Biff folded the newspapers and put them back under the counter. He stood on one foot and then the other. Finally he called across the room to Mick.
‘You’re not listening, are you?’
Mick turned off the radio. ‘No. Nothing on tonight.’ All of that he would keep out of his mind, and concentrate on something else. He leaned over the counter and watched one customer after another. Then at last his attention rested on the mute at the middle table. He saw Mick edge gradually up to him and at his invitation sit down. Singer pointed to something on the menu and the waitress brought a Coca-Cola for her. Nobody but a freak like a deaf-mute, cut off from other people, would ask a right young girl to sit down to the table where he was drinking with another man. Blount and Mick both kept their eyes on Singer. They talked, and the mute’s expression changed as he watched them. It was a funny thing. The reason --was it in them or in him? He sat very still with his hands in his pockets, and because he did not speak it made him seem superior. What did that fellow think and realize? What did he know? Twice during the evening Biff started to go over to the middle table, but each time he checked himself. After they were gone he still wondered what it was about this mute--and in the early dawn when he lay in bed he turned over questions and solutions in his mind without satisfaction. The puzzle had taken root in him. It worried him in the back of his mind and left him uneasy. There was something wrong.
3
MANY times Doctor Copeland talked to Mr. Singer. Truly he was not like other white men. He was a wise man, and he understood the strong, true purpose in a way that other white men could not. He listened, and in his face there was something gentle and Jewish, the knowledge of one who belongs to a race that is oppressed. On one occasion he took Mr. Singer with him on his rounds. He led him through cold and narrow passages smelling of dirt and sickness and fried fatback. He showed him a successful skin graft made on the face of a woman patient who had been severely burned. He treated a syphilitic child and pointed out to Mr. Singer the scaling eruption on the palms of the hand, the dull, opaque surface of the eye, the sloping upper front incisors. They visited two-room shacks that housed as many as twelve or fourteen persons. In a room where the fire burned low and orange on the hearth they were helpless while an old man strangled with pneumonia. Mr. Singer walked behind him and watched and understood. He gave nickels to the children, and because of his quietness and decorum he did not disturb the patients as would have another visitor. The days were chilly and treacherous. In the town there was an outbreak of influenza so that Dr. Copeland was busy most of the hours of the day and night. He drove through the Negro sections of the town in the high Dodge automobile he had used for the past nine years. He kept the isinglass curtains snapped to the windows to cut off the draughts, and tight around his neck he wore his gray wool shawl. During this time he did not see Portia or William or Highboy, but often he thought of them. Once when he was away Portia came to see him and left a note and borrowed half a sack of meal. There came a night when he was so exhausted that, although there were other calls to make, he drank hot milk and went to bed. He was cold and feverish so that at first he could not rest. Then it seemed that he had only begun to sleep when a voice called him. He got up wearily and, still in his long flannel nightshirt, he opened the front door. It was Portia. ‘The Lord Jesus help us, Father,’ she said. Doctor Copeland stood shivering with his nightshirt drawn close around his waist. He held his hand to his throat and looked at her and waited. ‘It about our Willie. He been a bad boy and done got hisself in mighty bad trouble. And us got to do something.’ Doctor Copeland walked from the hall with rigid steps. He stopped in the bedroom for his bathrobe, shawl, and slippers and went back to the kitchen. Portia was waiting for him there. The kitchen was lifeless and cold. ‘All right. What has he done? What is it?’
‘Just wait a minute. Just let me find brain room so I can study it all out and tell it to you plain.’ He crushed some sheets of newspaper lying on the hearth and picked up a few sticks of kindling.
‘Let me make the fire,’ Portia said. ‘You just sit down at the table, and soon as this here stove is hot us going to have a cup of coffee. Then maybe it all won’t seem so bad.’
‘There is not any coffee. I used the last of it yesterday.’
When he said this Portia began to cry. Savagely she stuffed paper and wood into the stove and lighted it with a trembling hand. ‘This here the way it is,’ she said. ‘Willie and Highboy were messing around tonight at a place where they got no business being. You know how I feels like I always got to keep my Willie and my Highboy close to me? Well, if I’d been there none of this trouble would of come about. But I were at the Ladies’ Meeting at the church and them boys got restless.
They went down to Madame Reba’s Palace of Sweet Pleasure.
And Father, this is sure one bad, wicked place. They got a man sells tickets on the bug--but they also got these strutting, bad-blood, tail-shaking nigger gals and these here red satin curtains and--’
‘Daughter,’ said Doctor Copeland irritably. He pressed his hands to the side of his head. ‘I know the place. Get to the point.’
‘Love Jones were there--and she is one bad colored gal.
Willie he drunk liquor and shimmied around with her until first thing you know he were in a fight. He were in a fight with this boy named Junebug--over Love. And for a while they fights there with their hands and then this Junebug got out his knife. Our Willie didn’t have no knife, so he commenced to bellow and run around the parlor. Then finally Highboy found Willie a razor and he backed up and nearbout cut this Junebug’s head off.’
Doctor Copeland drew his shawl closer around him. ‘Is he dead?’
‘That boy too mean to die. He in the hospital, but he going to be out and making trouble again before long.’
‘And William?’
‘The police come in and taken him to the jail in the Black Maria. He still locked up.’
‘And he did not get hurt?’
‘Oh, he got a busted eye and a little chunk cut out his behind.
But it won’t bother him none. What I can’t understand is how come he would be messing around with that Love. She at least ten shades blacker than I is and she the ugliest nigger I ever seen. She walk like she have a egg between her legs and don’t want to break it. She ain’t even clean. And here Willie done cut the buck like this over her.’
Doctor Copeland leaned closer to the stove and groaned. He coughed and his face stiffened. He held his paper handkerchief to his mouth and it became spotted with blood.
The dark skin of his face took on a greenish pallor.