The Magnolias

A STORY

by GUDGER BART LEIPER

HAZEL sat on the porch, absent-mindedly watching Sonny playing on the big gun. Young June shadows covered most of the packed earth of the front yard. It was bare and cold-looking, the earth a pasty lime-gray color devoid of fertility, smelling sour when dug up. There was an ugly fringe of coarse, tough grass near the unclipped privet hedge to one side; more like an imitation grass, hardly growing, without life and of a dull, dead brown hue. Some of the grass had pushed itself up through several black heaps of ashes from the stoves which some of the roomers had dumped there during the winter.

The new green of the year was weak and feeble in that yard. The spirea bushes along the edge of the front porch, and the three clumps of flowerless daffodils by the big cannon in the yard where Sonny was playing, were more black with soot than green with summer. There was a film of grime and sparrow droppings on the little metal sign the something or other Society had put up, many years before, telling about the Confederate cannon and Battery B of some regiment there on the hill whore the big house sat darkly facing Lookout Street.

Beneath the two magnolia trees, one on either side of the short brick walk, were splotches of sickly white mold and the bricks of the walk were dampbeaded where it ran in the deep shade of the interlocking magnolia branches. The trees were that old and large; and you could tell by the way the porch flooring sagged that the house was old, too; perhaps older than the magnolia trees from which Mrs. Watkins’ boardinghouse had gotten its name. The limbs had been chopped from the soot-blackened trunks a distance as high as a tall man could reach. In fact, as high up as Willard Watkins could reach, and Willard was a tall man. He chopped them off with a butcher knife from his mamma’s kitchen early one morning two years ago. It had frightened all Mrs. Watkins’ roomers. Poor little Mrs. Mallonee seemed close on to having a stroke and kept flitting from window to window upstairs in the house, her great big eyes even bigger than ever before and darting about in their sockets, and trying to tell Wilma that no true Southerner would ever do a thing like that.

Hazel heard him out in the yard, it must have been after four o’clock, the street empty and silent and before the streetcars began running on Third Street, one block down the hill from the house. And she heard the other boarders at The Magnolias slamming doors and raising windows to gel a good look at the crazy man with the butcher knife in the yard, hacking away at the lower limbs of the magnolia trees. Little Mrs. Mallonee was scurrying through the upstairs hall kind of crying, or sighing, “Oh, I declare! I declare! As Mr. Mallonee used to say—” but then in the excitement she couldn’t remember any of the things her long-dead husband used to say, and so she ended feebly: “It’s just awful! Just perfectly awful! ”

Arleen and Wilma came into Hazel’s room, excited and nervous, and told her what was happening. Hazel grabbed Sonny out ol his crib and held him, still sleeping, against her side while they watched out the front window.

“Now, son,” Mrs. Watkins said, standing in the front door, the screen half pushed open, her voice firm but a little wary, “son, you put that knife down and come on to bed.” But Willard hacked away with the tremendous knife at the trees, chopping off the limbs and throwing them across the sidewalk into the street, as if he had not heard his mother.

“Son, are you listening to me?” she asked, holding up the front of her long, flimsy cotton housecoat as she stepped off the front porch into the yard, into the gray haze of the before dawn light. The mother and the son were, in the bare yard and the indistinct light, like two ghosts trying to speak to each other but having no language. “Now ain’t you playing the wild, though, out here this time of the morning destroying your poor old mamma’s magnolia trees? Come on, Willard; come on to bed now, you hear?”

“That ain’t like Willard at all,” said Wilma, Willard’s younger sister, watching with amazement the scene in the yard.

“Looks to me like he’s dawg-drunk,” commented Arleen. She had moved in across the hall from Hazel about three months before.

“Drunk!” exclaimed Wilma. “Hunh! Not Willard. Why, that old brother of mine would die fore he touched a botlle. All the time talking about likker and the Sewer of Sin and saying the Revcrend U. D. Hopewell said this and the Reverend U. D. Hopewell said that. Ever since that Hopewell commenced that tent revival over there on Cherry Street you can’t keep Willard at home. Why, he even started fussing at me about my lipstick.”

“Mamma, you better git on back in the house!” Willard did not look at his mother when he spoke, but continued to hack off the limbs. His voice was unnaturally deep and the sound of each word was a prolonged threatening slug in the manner of revival preachers.

“Woman, you’ve sinned in the sight of the Lord God, yes, and in the sight of Jesus Christ, his Only Son who died for us all!” Willard stopped hacking the limbs of the still dark and shadowy trees. He held the butcher knife high like an orator. “Woman, you’ve wallered in the mud of Iniquity and fleshed with the Devil in the Sewers of Sin!”

“See!” whispered Wilma to Arleen up by the windows in Hazel’s bedroom. “What did I tell ya?”

“But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth and Paul said to Timothy that all women orta learn in silence with all subjection and not let no woman teach to them or hold it over them and wear the britches, nor to usurpt authority over the man, but to be in silence and keep their mouth shut and just keep right quiet like and not greedy of no filthy luke-er . . .” And Willard ranted on in the yard in a strange and tortured voice.

He accused his mother of “wallerin in the Filthy and Iniquitous sheets of a Couch of Sin — you’re sleepin with the Devil, O sinful Woman!” Willard meant that Mr. J. Carter Pope who traveled in Checkerboard Feeds and who stayed at Mrs. Watkins’ whenever he had to do business in Chattanooga. He had been stopping over at The Magnolias for fifteen years. Hazel knew that some of the roomers talked about something going on between Mrs. Watkins and “that brooder house man” (Mr. J. Carter Pope also traveled for a firm in Knoxville that made sheet-metal brooder houses: NoHen Brooder Lamps. “We Can’t Lay Them, But We Sure Can Raise Them” was on t he bot tom of his business card). But she didn’t know what to think.

Willard had just gone off his nut that night and no more ever came of it. After the bright lights and sawdust of Reverend U. D. Hopewell’s tent revival moved from the vacant corner on Cherry Street he didn’t seem to think much about his mother and Mr. J. Carter Pope. He didn’t even notice how much thicker and redder Wilma’s lipstick had gotten. Before long he had begun to bum around the country and then took a job in a brickyard over about Blue Ridge, Georgia. And from there. Mrs. Watkins told her, he enlisted in the Army at Fort Jackson. He hadn’t been back to Chattanooga that Hazel knew of. Nor did she or anyone else at The Magnolias ever know for sure why Willard had hacked his mamma’s magnolia trees the way he did that night.

2

Now Hazel, moving idly on the porch swing and feeling the still cool breezes of the June morning brush her face and hair, looked at the odd-shaped magnolia trees. She could see one or two blooms on each tree, high up in the tops where a little sun occasionally filtered through. The giant white blossoms looked cool and clean and fresh set among the crisp curled leaves.

Hazel stared vacantly at one of the blossoms on the branch hanging nearest the cave of the porch. Vaguely she wanted it, and though she did not put it into words — or even conscious thought — still she felt somehow the magnificent bloom could give to its owner some of the cool grace and great loveliness. Then the thought became less abstract. Hazel held an imaginary blossom in her hand. She felt with a tingling, incongruously like her arm going to sleep, the flower’s beauty entering her body and blood. Before the hall mirror she arranged the flower in her hair. But it was too large. She tried ii three or four ways, once even redid her hair another way, and still the great white blossom looked awkward and out of kilter. Nervously, she tried pinning the flower to her dress; first as a corsage, but that didn’t work either. The flower dominated and made her look even more flat-chested than she actually was. Damn little things, she muttered between her teeth. Even having Sonny hadn’t helped her there and that was one thing she had hoped for back then when she was carrying him. And she knew what Frank had felt about them. Next she tried the magnolia blossom at her waist, but that was no good, somehow. The goddamn thing’s just too big! And she hurled the bloom out across . . .

“Sonny! Now you just git yoursef down from there and don’t be long about it either, Mr. Smarty. You hear me? Git down! Right now.” Sonny had left the Confederate cannon and was now playing with the youngest Burlingame boy from next door under one of the magnolia trees and Hazel had been watching them out of the corner of her eye from the front porch swing. Her mind was Hooded with sights and sounds and memories vague and tenuous as cigarette smoke. And now Sonny was climbing up the magnolia, making use of the hacked-off snags of limbs. With the exertion of the climbing he thrust his small tongue out one side of his mouth and held it strained and tense against his cheek. The habit angered Hazel. That was the way Frank had done every time he had had her. It had become a symbol to her of all the things in her husband she hated. Even now, this long after Frank had told her, “By God, you’re my wife and you’re either goin to sleep in my bed or get the hell out,” even now when she looked at her six-year-old son with his tongue held that way it brought back all the tenseness and sickness and she could hear Frank’s heavy, strained breathing. Hazel did not realize that she was whipping Sonny for the resemblance he bore to his father — for the memories of sounds, rumbling and magnified into an awful thunder in her ears.

“Sonny!” she screamed again with far too much anger. Sonny had stopped climbing, but remained about three feet up the magnolia trunk.

“Aw, Mamma, I’m not a-hurtin nothin,” he whined, his voice ready to break into a nagging crying. “Why can’t I go up —”

“You want a lickin, you little devil? Now git down from there right this minute, Mr. Smarty, and be quick about it.” Hazel jumped up from the swing, leaving it careening wildly on its forked chains, and broke a spray out of the top of a spirea bush growing near the porch, noting in her mind what Mrs. Watkins would say if she had seen her. She stripped the leaves and bloom clusters with two or three angry movements of her hand. Sonny dropped quickly and easily from his perch. The little Burlingame boy giggled. Then the two children ran laughing around the corner of the old house, beyond the flat brown slant of the cellar doors where the old cold moss softened the underpinning. “Orta take this limb to him good, she thought bitterly and did not know why. As Hazel returned to the swing she felt the heat of her anger radiating from her face and she blew a strand of hair off her forehead,

3

THE spring on the screen door twanged loudly and then lowered into a fading hum as the door was kicked open and let slam shut. Josephine Smathers came out on the porch. Both of her hands were filled; in her right she carried fingernail polish and remover precariously resting on a box of Kleenex. In her left she had a crumpled package of Luckies and a scarred lighter with the yellow 6th Cavalry insignia on it. In her mouth was a cigarette, a long section of gray ash showing that the cigarette hadn’t been flicked since it was lighted. Her scanty brown hair was barely visible beneath the elaborate and shiny metal curlers. She sat down awkwardly beside Hazel on the swing, putting her things on the floor. “Lord, Hazel darlin, what you a-doin out here this time the mornin?”

“Nothin much .just don’t-in them youngins. Boys, now, they’s a mess! Sonny’s so full of meanness I caint hardly do nothin with him. Full of the devil, just like his daddy.” Hazel sighed.

“That old Mrs. Mallonee been tryin to chew my ear off again this mornin already. Thought maybe I come out here I might git rid of her. But I reckon she’ll be out here too, in a little dib. I’m beginnin to git like Wilma is when she’s around me: just so nervous I caint stand it.”

“Pore old fool,” commented Hazel. “Wonder what happens to make people like that?”

“Lord, they’s no tellin!”

“I’d just like to know where she came from.”

“I just wish to hell she’d stayed there, wherever it was!” exclaimed Josephine.

“Ain’t you got to work today?”

“Naw. I don’t go on till leven this evenin,” answered Josephine. She worked now as a waitress at Jimmy’s Steak House down on Market Street across from the Bus Station.

“Oh Lord!” groaned Hazel sympathetically. “Work all night!”

“Well, I don’t mind it so much, cept that’s the hatefulest old cashier down there on the night shift. She and me’s goin to git into it and I don’t mean maybe, if she keeps on tryin to tell me what to do ever time I turn around. Just like I’d never done no wait in before. I’ll slap her cross-eyed; and I told her so, too. I said: You just better mind yore own business, Miss Knowitall, or I’ll —”

“Wait a minute,” interrupted Hazel. She walked to the end of the porch, flicking the switch spasmodically, and listened. “Sonny!” she called. “You youngins come on back round here in the front yard, you hear? Soooony. Come on now!” There was no answer. She returned to the swing. “No tellin what meanness they’re into back yonder. For a moment there was only the sound of the street in the June morning. “How about bummin one of your cigarettes? I shore-God need one.

“Hep yoursef, honey,” answered Josephine. Hazel took a cigarette and lit it with the lighter expertly, masculinely.

“Is that that lighter you got from old Punk, Punk — Oh, what the devil’s his name?”

“Punk Turbyfield. Yeah, Lord! Pore old Punk! Josephine’s voice was deep and rough; the sort of voice men always think means a woman you can tell the dirtiest jokes to and use all the words; and are usually right about it.

“Turbyfield. That’s right,” said Hazel. “Wonder what ever happened to old Punk? I allus sorta liked him.”

“Some of them said he got killed out there som’ers in the Pacific. But, Lord, I don’t know, You can hear anythin. A body don’t know what to believe.” Josephine took a last powerful drag from her cigarette, her thin eyebrows arched and the lids half closed and trembling as her head and face and throat focused and strained at the end of the cigarette.

“Seems like don’t nobody know where anybody is these days,” said Hazel, thinking of Frank, of Punk and all the others.

Airs. Alallonee came mil on the porch carrying something in a paper shopping bag, ragged and frayed; on the bag were the name and insignia of a once very fashionable store which had closed during ihe depression, sixteen years ago. She also had an old black umbrella.

“Well, well, I declare, Aliss Smalhers: we meet again, don’t we? And good morning to you, Mrs. Russell. I see you are enjoying this beautiful day. Isn’t it just simply elegant? I declare! Dear Mr. Mallonee always used to say how a beautiful day was a gift from God. Yes he did! And how true that is, don’t you think?”

Josephine whispered. “Damn it, here we go again!” under her breath and Hazel’s reply was merely an abrupt “Mornin.” She was in no mood to put up with the little old lady and all her talk talk talk and those nervous darting eyes. All the time going on about something nobody gave a good goddamn about. Like all that fretting and worrying about Willard cutting those two magnolias that morning. Be better to cut them down and get rid of them, thought Hazel, and let a little sun in. But it seemed like Mrs. Mallonee would never stop talking about them.

4

MRS. MALLONEE was a very tiny old woman who had a little pothelly proportioned perfectly to the minute dimensions of her frail body. Her eyes were large and contrasted with the fragility of her little body; they seemed like caged, frantic white birds with little blue wings, beating their bodies and wings against their cages. The eyes, always moving, darting to this side and that, seemed trying to flee, to escape from what they saw, or as if they knew somewhere else there was a better view.

No one at Mrs. Watkins’ house was quite sure where Mrs. Mallonee came from, though she often mentioned Louisiana and sometimes Mississippi. And she did talk different from the rest of them therein the old house. Even Mrs. Watkins was no longer certain how many years the “pore old soul" had been with her at The Magnolias: twenty-five, maybe thirty years. Nor did anyone know much about Mr. Mallonee except that he had died many years ago, that he was a heavy-set man with a bushy red mustache and beard and a hard, boss-man look about his eyes and the set of his mouth. Most of this Mrs. Watkins gathered from the oval picture on Mrs. Mallonee’s washstand upstairs in her little room.

There were many stories in the house about the old woman’s past, most of them mere guesses on the part of this or that roomer, which during the years grew more detailed and complicated and romantic.

They were always offered without hesitancy as facts to any newcomer to The Magnolias. No one ever really bothered to ask Mrs. Mallonee about herself. Maybe it was because they would rather make up their own stories. Mrs. Mallonee was the character who provided, when life grew boring and the weather had already been discussed, a subject for them to lalk about, idly and haphazardly. The story of Mrs. Mallonee was for them like an ice cube you eat on a hot July afternoon trying to get cool when it’s so hot nothing can cool you off.

Most of the roomers more or less agreed with Wilma’s flat and final judgment on Amy Curtis Mallonee (as she always called herself): “LordGod, that woman’s bats — crazy as a bedbug!” Most of the men at the house were uneasy and nervous in her presence and pretended a need of cigarettes or razor blades from the Lookout Café down on the corner when they found themselves alone with old Mrs. Mallonee on the front porch after supper. Hazel knew that Sonny and the children in that block were afraid of her and ran and hid in the spirea bushes when they saw her coming along the root-buckled hexagonals of the sidewalk.

They used “Mrs. Mallonee” for the Buggerman: “Yes, and you tell Mamma on me and I’ll tell Mrs. Mallonee about what you done, too!”

But Hazel didn’t know what to think. She hadn’t made up her mind. Sometimes it seemed to her that Mrs. Mallonee was the happiest and most contented person at The Magnolias. Other times she halfway agreed with Wilma and joined in with Josephine, who found in Mrs. Mallonee a butt for laughter and jokes. They laughed at almost everything Mrs. Mallonee said or did. They laughed at her old, ridiculously out of style clothes. As far as Hazel knew, the old lady didn’t have more than three dresses to her name. The material in them must have been good, but they were as old as the hills the way they looked so funny and shabby now, and sometimes buttoned or snapped wrong and gaping open. Almost wilhout fail Mrs. Mallonee’s slip would be showing way more than an inch, sometimes two.

They laughed about her hair. She had an abundance of gray hair — a wan and dirty gray, rather than a soft, pure while, which Hazel regretted: she wished Mrs. Mallonee had the beautiful oldness and the pure white hair of the old ladies in the advertisements getting roses by telegraph on Mother’s Day or sitting so pretty and nice and comfortable in a bus which she wore in little strands twisted and pinned into countless little knots all over the top and sides of her head. It gave her head the appearance of a quilted pincushion covered with large rosettes. Usually one or two of the knots had come loose and the straying hair wandered in complete confusion. Often a strand or two would fall and catch in the corner of her mouth.

Standing now halfway down the steps in the shade-splotched sunlight she fumbled at the snaps on her coat and dropped her umbrella. Apparently this morning Mrs. Mallonee wasn’t going to linger and plague them, for after her first words of greeting she had started down the steps. She was halfway down before she had paused.

“You must excuse this impoliteness of running off so quickly and not chatting a lit lie while—Mr. Mallonee used to say that impoliteness was just” (she fumbled with the snaps and the torn, shredded lining of her coat and she sucked at the hairs in the corner of her mouth) “just — well, inexcusable and I thought so too. But she’s indisposed, Yes she is. Poor Mrs. Poindexter is indisposed and needs some friend to sit with her. It’s so hard being confined to one’s room. Mr. Mallonee was always fond of saving that a sickroom was like a faded rose, once so pretty and now so worn. And that’s so true, don t you think? And then Mrs. Poindexter — Mrs. J. W. Poindexter, her husband was for a long lime one of the directors of the Citizens’ National — has got those two pitiful little squirrels” (she pronounced it squlls) “to think about. They fell down the chimney and Mrs. Poindexter told me she just simply didn’t have the heart to have Ben take them away. She’s so kind, you know, and wouldn’t harm a flea, not a flea. And I said, But my dear, are you sure you want to keep those two little squlls? “They’ll be such a lot of trouble. Afterwards I was so ashamed of myself . . .”

She started down the walk, but stopped by the magnolias and turned, the while band of her slip showing. “Oh! I declare, every lime I think of it! That wicked boy harming these beautiful Southern trees like that! I sometimes think that’s why Mrs. Poindexter took to her bed: the news was just too much for her. She wrote a perfectly beautiful poem about them for the Flower and Feather Magazine, how two gracious Southern ladies had been dishonored by a drunken Yankee. Perfectly beautiful. Then she continued to the sidewalk, but bad not finished. “And you know, they are both little gurl squlls! Wouldn’t you just know it! Mrs. Poindexter named them Melaney and Pittypat and I think that’s awfully sweet. She said she did that purposely, leaving out that terrible Scarlett, to honor the two real Southern ladies in Miss Mitchell’s marvelous book. And I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if someday right soon the Flower and Feather doesn’t have a poem about Melaney and Pittypat. I declare, Mrs. Poindexter is so talented! But I really must hurry on now.”

5

LORD, Lord, Lord!” groaned Josephine, as Mrs. Mallonee disappeared down Lookout Street. The screen door spring twanged and Wilma Watkins stuck her head out. “Has that damned old fool gone yet?”

“Yeah, Lord. Finally.”

Wilma came on out to the porch steps and sat down in the small spot of sun. She, had on a yellow sun suit and was drinking a Coca-Cola.

“I’m tellin you,” said Josephine, starting on her nails, “that old woman makes me so nervous ever time she gits around me I cainl hardly stand it. If it ain’t them eyes a-jumpin and jerkin back and forth that a way, it’s a headful of hair hangin in the corner of her mouth and her not a-doin nothin bout it cept sort of swattin out with her hand like a fly’s a-pesterin her. Now whataboul a person that don’t know enough to git her hair out of her mouth!”

“Poor old thing,” said Hazel, feeling pity, wonder, for the moment.

“Poor old thing hell!” echoed Wilma from her position on the fop step. “I’m just like Josephine about her. Lord, yesterday evenin she cornered me up over there next to the swing and got off on what Willard done to them damned old magnolia trees out there in the yard and how they’s so beautiful and precious and how real Southerners orta preserve them and all that crap she’s always aspoutin about the Old South. I wish to hell-Willard had had enough of the Spiril that night to cut the damn things down. Maybe that would have been enough to kill the old biddy!”

Wilma, lit a cigarette and then began to smooth the skin on her arms and legs. She was olive brown from main afternoons of sunning at the municipal pool at Warner Park. She was proud of her body; and a little surprised at the sudden ripeness which had come over her. When she sal in the sun she ran her hand over her arms and legs and sometimes peered down into the loose halter or began to pick and worry a small blemish on her thigh—all with a kind of thrill and astonishment that this, this was Wilma Watkins of 328 Lookout Street, Chattanooga, Tennessee! Now, while talking lo Hazel and Josephine, she placed a thumb over the lop of the Coca-Cola bottle and shook it to make it fizz more.

“I just want to sav, Now hold still, you old fool, and pull them hairs out of her mouth and pull them pore old twisted, wrinkled hose up. That s what makes me so nervous, I reckon. Lord, it beats me how some people live,” continued Wilma, popping her gum with precision and adroitness. A good, clean loud pop, usually four in succession before she chewed softly a while. “I don’t know why Mamma don’t git rid of her. Don’t pay nothin much.”

A voice from the kitchen, way back at the other end of the still cool, dark hall, called: “Wilma!”

“My God,” exclaimed Wilma, “if it’s not one damn thing it’s another!” She got up angrily, knocking the empty Coca-Cola bottle oil in the yard, and went into the house. Since Wilma had quitl the tenth grade she was supposed to help her mother and Violet in the kitchen.

The two women sat silently on the porch for a short while. Hazel heard Sonny shouting and laughing and shooting with the Burlingame boy in the back yard so she knew he was all right. They both lit another cigarette and sal staring out into the street where the traffic of the day was heavier with bread and laundry trucks and dripping ice wagons. The hot sun had begun to make the tar run in little streams and puff up in black blisters. They bubbled and popped when a tire hit them, but not so nice a pop as Wilma made with her gum.

“Aw, Punk was aw right, I reckon,” recommenced Josephine. She had the ability to retain unfinished conversation in her mind through all kinds of detours and interruptions, suddenly coming back to where she had left off an hour, two hours, sometimes a whole day later. “Just got dawg-drunk loo damn quick all the time. Messy drunk. But now, they shore was a bunch of real men in that Ga/vary! Cute, Lord I’d reckon!” Working her nails, she fitted her words to her labor, talking or suddenly stopping according to the easiness or difficulty of the work. “That Calvary beat any outfit I ever seen. I was workin down there at the B & B Café when they was stationed out at the Fort. Lord, we had more parlies and fun than anybody. And when I say parties, darlin, I mean parties!” Then her voice trailed off toward silence and her thoughts to a hangnail.

“I know, I know,” half whispered Ilazel in a different tone of voice. The parties didn’t seem so wonderful to her now; there wasn’t much from all of them t hat you could remember; sort of empty. Across the yard to the left came the sound of a radio suddenly blaring very loudly a late breakfast club program, its announcer talking back to the recorded vocalist, first imitating a duck and then a pig. Someone slammed a back door across the street. The ice truck dripped on down the block.

“You were here, weren’t you. Hazel darlin, before they moved out?”

“Just a little while. Frank and I come hack from Detroit about two months before. Leastways, I knowed old Punk.”

“Oh, Lordy! We’ll never see days like that again,” sighed Josephine. “Don’t reckon we could stand it, but, boys-howdy, I’d shore like to try!” She laughed, a kind of cackle, low and hoarse with the intimated bawdiness. “These men here at the bouse make me sick. Think they’re so all-fired smart !” Her mouth formed the sickness as well as said it, the corners pulled down tightly. “Boyshowdy, if they knew half as much as . . .” Again her voice trailed away from its thought. Then, suddenly, holding up five freshly painted nails to dry: “Honey, light me a not her cigarette, will you?” While Hazel was lighting the cigarel to she thought again of all the days and nights during the war, the cigarettes, the lighters held waveringly up to cigarettes, the beer and whiskey, floor shows and soldiers and dance joints from Detroit to Antioch, California, and back to Chattanooga, Tennessee. With a small twitch her mind realized how cloudy and gone were all those hours, those years she thought at the time were brim-filled.

“It’s goin to be another scorcher. Not yet ten o’clock and already I’m sweatin!” Hazel handed her the cigarette. “Thank you, darlin,” Josephine replied.

Hazel noticed with a touch of disgust the way Josephine had lately taken to calling her “darlin”; that was something new; one more in the long list of things Josephine had picked up for her “personality” as she called it. Like “J.” for a first name, instead of Josephine or Jossie, or even Jay. Josephine Smathere hadn’t been out of Sale Creek much more than six months when she got a room at Mrs. Watkins’ rooming house on Lookout Street. From the first she had been right friendly with Hazel, making a big fuss over Sonny and carrying on about Hazel’s smool h complexion and hair. She wanted to know if Hazel used the Max Factor Hollywood Kit, her complexion was so beautiful. They became, on the surface at least, good friends. But before long Hazel realized Josephine could be dangerous. Any woman who was out to get all that lit tie red-lipped, plucked-eyebrow hillbilly thought she was going to get was dangerous. Not only knock a feller down, hut stomp his guts and use his body for a stepladder.

6

HONEY, you may think it downright awful of me to be talkin like this,” Josephine had declared one evening to Hazel when they were alone on the front porch, and down the street at the Lookout Cafe (whereall the men had gone after supper) the sickly red color of a faulty neon sign fretted its way around a Bed Top Beer label, giving that end of the street an unreal light, “hut I know where I’m going and just how to git there purtnear fiver step of the way. It was near the end of the month and both Hazel and Josephine were almost broke. Hazel hardly had lunch money left in her purse. Neither had been able to get a date for that Saturday night. Clyde Givens, a quiet, not handsome roomer at Mrs. Watkins’, had asked Josephine to go to the Gene Autry picture at the Dixie Theater, but she turned him down, feigning some excuse about not runnin round ever Saturday nigbt just like a mill hick from Lupton City!”

In reality she was doing her best to get one ot the new roomers to ask her for a date. His name was Byron Littleton — Josephine liked the sound of that name, “just like a movie star,” she told Hazel — and he had arrived at Mrs. Watkins’ two days before. There was something about him that was different from most of the men staying at The Magnolias. Hazel thought he looked like a lifeguard, he was so smoothly tanned and his blond hair so bleached by a lot of sun. He was only nineteen, but he dressed and lit his cigarettes like he was twentyfive or more, and Wilma, who went out with him that night, couldn’t sit still from the moment he walked in the front door. The first evening, he had stopped Hazel in the hall and asked her if she wanted to have a “highball” with him in his room. “Seagram’s Five Star. The real McCoy, baby. You bring the ice.” He had lit a cigarette then, cupping the match as if it were dangerous to show a light there. “How bout it, baby?” he had continued, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and moving with his words. Hazel had told him no. Mrs. Watkins didn’t allow any whiskey-drinking in her place. Besides, she knew damn well what the score was. How many times had this happened, the same words, the same smart smile, the same dangling cigarette, in Detroit? She might not ever rivet bombers again, but she could sure tell a slickey a mile off. That’s one thing she’d learned at Willow Run.

But Wilma and Josephine were interested in him (one sure thing: he wouldn’t have to dangle that cigarette long before Wilma the way she had commenced to feist around). Josephine bad the rumor that he was a gambler from Miami and had been running one of the roulette tables up at an expensive night club on Signal Mountain and that added to his differentness; just like the way he didn’t say “Goddammit!” like all the others, but said “Jesus Che-rist!” Josephine had been talking to Hazel about him that evening, with Josephine doing most of the talking, when she had confided her goals and ambitions.

“If you do, honey,” Josephine had continued, “ 1 just caint hep it. You know as well’s I do a girl these days can go purty far if she just keeps her eyes open and makes the right moves. I’m not so bad lookin — if I do say so mysef— and they’s been others said more than that; but what I mean is: I just git plumb sick all over when I think of some of my girl friends up there at home that could have done real well by themselves, you know what I mean. But Lord no! Upt and married the first little old boy that got it, and now they’s alius got a youngin in the belly and splittin kindlin and totin water while their jake-leg husbands run off down here to Chattanoogy of an evenin and git their real fun, you know what I mean and all. Now, boyshowdy, you’d never ketch me a-doin that. Last thing I told Roseen fore I left home — me and Roseen all the time run round together up there at home fore she played the wild and went and married that old Jim Thrasher — I said, Roseen, yore just about the biggest damn fool in Tennessee! And that’s the truth, too. I said, Roseen, you take my advice and leave that Thrasher boy while the gittin’s good. Roseen, I said, and I told her this straight to her face, too, I said, Roseen, that boy’s not no good. Ever Sat urday night for t he past three months I know of and the Lord Hissef knows how long fore that, he’s been takin off to Chattanoogy with a bunch of old boys and lie’s been boozin beer and runnin round with a little old blond waitress that works down there at the Silver Dollar—and you know it well’s I do. I said, Roseen, honey, don’t bury yourself back up here m a red clay hole with a passel of youngins and a set-tin of dominecker eggs and a man that’ll not never git you nothin else but a February grave and not even no rocks to go on it, if the truth were known! And you know what that little fool went and did? I’m tellin you what’s the honest to goodness truth, Hazel darlin: she picked up a stick of stove wood and thowed it at me — just a-screamin at me and a-cryin and a-carryin on like the Devil had a-holt of her. And you know what I done? Just as sure as I’m sett in here, if I didn’t just turn around to her as calmly as you please, and I said, Well, good-bye, Roseen, you damned old brood sow — that’s what I told her — you damned old brood sow, you! I’ll be seein you. And then when I got to the door, I said, And you might pick up yore pore old mamma’s picture off the floor. She knocked it off the wall with that stick of stove wood she thowed at me. And I just walked off and left her cryin. I’m tellin you, Hazel darlin, what’s the honest truth; that’s just what I done.”

But in Josephine’s eyes, when she had finished telling about her fight with Roseen, there was a look of incomplete triumph and her eyes searched Hazel’s face for some expression, for some reassurance. She seemed to be waiting for Hazel to say something that would complete the victory. Hazel didn’t say anything.

7

IT WAS still not quite dark, that evening on the porch, and Josephine talked on aimlessly into thenight, while Hazel half listened to her and half thought of many other things. Of Sonny upstairs m the room asleep. She had failed to give him a bath again, decided he was just too hot and tired from playing hard all day to try to bathe him. But she knew, faintly, the truth — that it was herself: that she felt too tired, too worn out from the day at the store. And then she had begun to argue wilh herself about a little dirt not hurt in nobody, leastways not for a day or two; and then she heard in the back of her head and in her ear the voice of her mamma ranting about dirt, and poor white trash living like niggers in filth. . . . Things were falling to pieces and she sensed it; felt it. Where were all the things that her life used to lean on, count on? Mamma and Papa gone and nobody left down at Trenton no more. And Frank who had told her she was his wife and she’d either sleep in his bed or get the hell out — Frank was gone and with him all those months of the war, the big pay checks and the fast life she had thought was the real thing. Then alone with Sonny after Frank left, living at The Magnolias and clerking in a dollar-down, dollar-a-week department store. At the bottom of a sump hole. If only there were some way to start over again, to get back on the right track. But the trouble was she didn’t know where she had gotten off the track in the first place. Maybe it had always been that way. Even so, where was she going, she and Sonny, Sonny upstairs in the hot room, sleeping in the dirt and grime of three days? Even lit tie old Mrs. Mallonee seemed to have some place to go and had those magnolias Millard hacked up to give her mind something to chew on. But she and Sonny? Where?

“. . . And so I asked him: Why ain’t you in Hollywood right now, if yore such a biggety-big out there?” Hazel hoard again the voice of Josephine, chewing away at the past experience, telling her little slory, weaving a little glory out of mud. “And so I acted right cold like, you know what I mean, making out I had to warsh a bunch of Co-Cola glasses and clean off the grill and that big old coffee maker. And he just kep it up, talkin about my hair and complexion and all like that. I declare, I never heard a man make so much fuss over how much I look like Ann Sheridan . . .”

She knew that Josephine was almost the spittin image of herself eight, nine — she even refused to name the correct number of years — ago. Hazel thought of the men she had known since she left Trenton and the memories led her to Frank. Then came the nightmare and the hot sheets and cheap mattress and noisy springs. Oh Lord God, she had cried out, No! No! I caint stand it! I caint. Hazel pressed her eyes and shook her head to erase all the rush of the past from her shuddering body. She tried to focus on the droning, persistent voice of Josephine going on and on like a mosquito in an August-stifled bedroom.

“. . . And that other feller that drove up with him in that big Buick — I’m tellin you what’s the honest truth, honey, that car looked long enough to stretch might-nigh all the way from Soddy to Daisy it was so big . .

Down the street there were indistinct voices and the slow, gentle sound of heels strolling on the pavement. The red neon continued to flicker spasmodically over the sidewalk by the Lookout Café. There was a scream of tires as a car rounded the corner from Third Street into Walnut. The sound soon subsided. There was only the strong thread of Josephine’s voice weaving in and out of all the short spasmodic noises.

But for some reason she hadn’t figured out that night or since then, listening to Josephine had made her sad and restless, had brought on that feeling of being afraid. Maybe it was because she knew that Josephine would never get where she thought she was going. Or maybe it was because she, Hazel, knew and Josephine didn’t; and the knowledge hung heavy on her and troublesome like that awful goose-egg wen hanging down from Uncle Thad’s jaw. She wanted to tell it to Josephine and be rid of the terrible ache it caused. Just to say: “Honey, you’re just kiddin yourself and nobody else. You know well’s I do a year or two from now you’ll probably be married to the first Byron Littleton you can catch and have a youngin or two and be livin right here at Mrs. Watkins’ or maybe in some little old room out in Alton Bark — even Lupton City with the mill hicks, as you call them — and wishin to hell you had room enough for a stack of kindlin and a set tin of eggs . . .” But you couldn’t toll her that, any more than you could tell yourself where you had gotten off the track. Maybe it was the not being able to tell, to say it, that hurt so bad and made her so sad and lonely. The same feeling she had now about the magnolia blossoms in Mrs. Watkins’ two big out-of-shape trees — so pure and so beautiful and not no flaws. But you couldn’t do a thing with them. You couldn’t get up close to them, cause then, somehow they weren’t so pretty any more and you could see the grit of coal dust. They were much too big to wear in your hair or anything. You just had to leave them in the big tree in the bare yard and just sit back on the porch and look at them.

Just look at them now in the late hot morning from the porch swing and think about how you can’t get close to them and how you can’t tell Josephine you know exactly where she’s going, only it ain’t where she thinks; about little old Mrs. Mallonee — who had asked Byron Littleton if his mother was one of the Manker Littleton girls of Milledgeville and he hadn’t even answered her: just stared with a sneer—who would soon be returning along the sidewalk from her visit with Mrs. Poindexter; about what had got into Willard that night with the butcher knife; and about how all the Byron Littletons seem to have to say: “How bout it, baby; and you bring the ice”; and about Frank and Sonny, dirty in his bed upstairs in the old house. Sitting and listening to the morning and dreading the far dark. Safe even in the twilight, but wondering and afraid of the real night.