There is Brody, his nose suggesting a broken nose, his slightly wet eyes, looking mystified by nothing in particular, looking up the road at someone (me) coming, taking a deep breath to step out into view to discover if it is someone who will help or hinder him run away, to discover it is me and that he will need to compound the crime of escaping with that of lying. Yes’m, he says, almost before I ask, Ceece knows I’m going. Of course she knows.
Well, I guess she would, I say, smiling, touching his knee, which he has pressed hard into his suitcase, as though he would if he could compress the thing into nothing so that no more suspicion might be raised. This was the moment I first knew I was going to die. I do not mean to sound so melodramatic — I was to live yet for years.
I mean to say that when I saw Brody running, and when I saw myself aiding and abetting, I saw myself fully defined as the black sheep I was, and for once I was legitimate (I had company—with Brody there we were a conspiracy of two black-wool fools), and in a complex surge of emotion I loved little Brody, loved him much more than any queer aunt could confess, and I saw at the same time, as one truly does very few times in a normal life, that I was actually going to die someday, go to a funeral as the lead, and I considered seducing Brody and dismissed seducing Brody. He would hoot to hear that today, but that day he would not have chuckled, and I could have had my way with him, if a queer forty-year-old librarian popping out of a girdle did not scare the priapic wits out of him, which I presumed at the time not unlikely. And so I put Brody out on a corner in Lumberton, helped him become in his attempted escape the only other member of this clan to attend college (one of several accidents that befell him), and stand accused of — not merely accused, am held responsible for — his low living today, the very thing his escape was to have been from, and I the only one who helped him go.
Brody has come to ignore the church, crime one, and make money without holding a job, crime two. At this minute he is talking to a man he cannot understand in Taiwan who wants ten grown bulldogs. The Oriental cannot understand Brody either, because the English he knows is not the English Brody practices. And Brody is not altogether fluent in some Charlie Chan English that seems to parody the r/l problem.
Brody says: Imone sin you tin young dawgs.
Mr. Ho says: They rast rong time, we purchase rots burrdog to you, Mista Blode.
Brody: No sir, iss not the wrong time. I just caint keep puppies till they grown dawgs.
Ho: Rots.
Brody: Rots?
Ho: Yes!
Brody: What do you mean?
Ho: Satisfactly.
Brody: What is?
Ho: You, Mista Blode.
Brody: Send me a check for five thousand dollars.
Ho: Thank you.
How did Brody’s escape fail? Or did it fail? Perhaps it did not. He came back with full intention of becoming a dogfighter. He fell, or stopped, short. He decided to make the dogs but not make them fight. Which is an inaccurately cute way of putting it: one doesn’t need to make these dogs fight. They volunteer.
I couldn, you know, stand to knock so many dawgs in the head. That’s what you have to do. He is talking about culling, culling the cowards and the inept from the brave and the strong, which in practice means shooting beautiful year-old dogs because they do not measure up. It is a point of pride with a dogfighter to allow a dog to live on his yard. This blood courage in dogs (parlance; I mean in dogfighting, but one commonly says in dogs) is an outrigger courage, a pontoon of vicarious guts running beside your own tipsy, slender, sinkable soul, your soul which accepts bad teeth, bad jobs, bad diet, which purports to refuse all injustice done you since and because of the Civil War, purports to accept no slight or slander and yet must take all and every, and so locates one accidental day, or night, a dog, two dogs with jaw muscles like golf balls addressing each other like men—not taking no for an answer. Your trod-down my-daddy’s-daddy’s-daddy-was-whipped-and-lost-his-cotton soul, now eating Cheetos instead of smothered quail and oysters hauled up from Charleston, standing there in blue jeans with a pistol in your armpit, sees an answer to all the daily failures of a failing late-trailer-payment life, and a dogfighter is born.
The real item: I tookeem home and tiedeem up in a inner tube and hungeem and beateem with a hammer. I coottn killeem acause he was swingin and bouncin like iss, springy — the rubber, you know, leteem git away. But I gotteem, the quittin bastard, quit on me like that, I never been so embairsed in my life.
— If a dog fight for me an hour good as that—
— And you a fool, too.
— Well, tell you what, Jackie. Meet me ahine my house with your tube and your hammer, and I get me a rig, and we get up in a tree and go at it. I want to see you go an hour.
— You don’t have the least notion what a good dog is.
— Yes I do. You had one.
— That’s fuckin right. I had one. And I git rid of the next one I git like it the damned straight same way.
Alive, I never went to a dogfight, but I have been since. I did also go one night looking for Brody in his kennel, the first time I went there, and found myself suddenly ringed by what seemed large big cats axled to the ground on chains begging me with body wags to pet them.
His old man: If his Aunt Humpy had known what she was setting in motion that morning she’d of killed herself, I hope. We are not fancy people, airs and all, but we are not common. She might have even knowed he was lying, that Cecelia would of never let him go to Lumberton or anywhere else during cotton. But even so she could not have knowed that that little lift would have created our largest disgrace. It defies my logic. It defies my logic.
Brody: She wouldn’t let it wait to dry out, and when you pull, you know, on the bolls, when they wet, they pool back, and you get this — it hurts.
My fine living relatives say that, in general, my problem was reading too many books. What they cannot guess is that when I saw Brody step out of the briers on the Lumberton road I thought, There’s Brody, making his move, as wild and plenary as a character in a book. I knew Ceece wasn’t letting him go anywhere. He had on these huge, hard shoes and brilliant white socks, and he was pigeon-toed. His suitcase had straw on it. He even tried while standing to hide the suitcase between his legs, which made him more pigeon-toed.
I bought a beanfield, if fifty acres can be called a field, and Land Banked it, let it fallow, and took to walking the regenerating scrub in my after-work dress: pantsuit and parasol. For the first years I could be seen, of course, so the people were able to graft on one more badge of idiosyncrasy to the already highly decorated spinster librarian. The parasol contributed more to this, I think, than simply walking one’s field (indeed, walking banked land out here is regarded a normal if unfortunate substitute for farming it), the parasol that carried with it — last seen bobbing over the tops of three-year pines — a suggestion of spinsterism that I believe included in local mythos not only elements Southern but New England as well. I was a kind of Scarlett-Emily, witch and Poppins, gathering beggar weeds. The truth was, I carried the umbrella less from a concern with image or sun than from a concern with lizards, of which I had an inordinate fear and an equally misinformed notion of parrying the assaults of with said rapier.