It wouldn’t set right on my conscience.”
Cleo said quietly, “I’d have banked my life on your saying that.” For a moment tenderness flooded her. But the emotion embarrassed her. She said briskly: “You remind me of Pa. One of us had a sore tooth, Mama would tell us to go to sleep and forget it. But Pa would nurse us half the night, keeping us awake with kindness.”
He accepted the dubious compliment with a modest smile. Then the smile froze into a grimace of pain. He had been hurt in his pocketbook.
“It’ll take a pretty penny to furnish all those extra bedrooms. We don’t want to bite off more than we can chew. Don’t know but what unfurnished flats would be better, after all. We could pick settled people without any children to make me chicken-hearted.”
She stared at him like an animal at bay. Little specks of green began to glow in her gray eyes, and her lips pulled away from her even teeth. Bart started back in bewilderment.
“You call yourself a businessman,” she said passionately. “You run a big store. You take in a lot of money. But whenever I corner you for a dime, it’s like pulling teeth to get it out of you. You always have the same excuse. You need every dollar to buy bananas. And when I say, What’s the sense of being in business if you can’t enjoy your cash, you always say, In business you have to spend money to make money. Now when I try to advise you to buy a few measly sticks of bedroom furniture, a man who spends thousands of dollars on fruit, you balk like a mule at a racetrack.”
He rubbed his mustache with his forefinger. “I see what you mean,” he conceded. “I try to keep my store filled with fruit. I can’t bear to see an empty storeroom. I guess you got a right to feel the same way about a house. In the long run it’s better to be able to call every stick your own than have half your rooms dependent on some outsider’s furniture.”
She expelled a long breath. “That’s settled then.”
He thought it prudent to warn her. “We’ll have to economize to the bone while we’re furnishing that house.”
She rolled her eyes upward. “Well even eat bones if you say so.”
He answered quietly: “You and the child will never eat less than the best as long as I live. And all my planning is to see to it that you’ll never know want when I’m gone. No one on earth will ever say that I wasn’t a good provider. That’s my pride, Cleo. Don’t hurt it when you don’t have to.”
“Well, I guess you’re not the worst husband in the world,” she acknowledged softly, and added slowly, “And I guess I’m the kind of wife God made me.” But she did not like the echo of that in her ears. She said quickly, “And you can like it or lump it.”
Bart took out an impressive roll of bills, peeled off a few of the lesser ones, and laid them on the table. The sight of the bank roll made Cleo sick with envy. There were so many things she could do with it. All Mr. Judson would do with it was buy more bananas.
She sighed and counted her modest pile. There were only forty-five dollars.
“It’s five dollars short,” she said frigidly.
“Yep,” he said complacently. “I figure if this Jack the Ripper wants fifty dollars he’ll take forty-five if he knows he’ll get it every month on the dot. And if he ever goes up five dollars on the rent, we still won’t be paying him any more than he asked for in the first place. In business, Cleo, I’ve learned to stay on my toes. You’ve got to get up with the early birds to get ahead of me.”
HER EYES FLEW OPEN. The birds were waking in the Carolina woods. Cleo always got up with them. There were never enough hours in a summer day to extract the full joy of being alive. She tumbled out of the big old-fashioned bed. Small Serena stirred, then lay still again on her share of the pillow. At the foot of the bed, Lily and Charity nestled together.
She stared at her three younger sisters, seeing the defenselessness of their innocent sleep. The bubbling mischief in her made her take one of Lily’s long braids and double knot it with one of Charity’s. She looked back at Serena, who tried so hard to be a big girl and never let anyone help her dress. She picked up Serena’s little drawers and turned one leg inside out.
She was almost sorry she would be far away when the fun began. She could picture Lily and Charity leaping to the floor from opposite sides of the bed, and their heads snapping back, and banging together. As for Serena, surprise would spread all over her solemn face when she stepped into one leg of her drawers and found the other leg closed to her. She would start all over again, trying her other foot this time, only to find she had stepped into the same kettle of hot water. She would wrassle for fifteen minutes, getting madder and madder. Cleo had to clap her hand to her mouth to hush her giggles.
She would get a whipping for it. Mama would never see the joke. Mama would say it was mean to tease your sisters. You had to walk a chalkline to please her.
Sometimes Cleo tried to walk a chalkline, but after a little while, keeping to the strait and narrow made her too nervous. At home, there was nothing to do except stay around. Away from home, there were trees to climb, and boys to fight, and hell to raise with Josie Beauchamp.
She climbed out of the open window and dropped to the ground at the moment that Josie Beauchamp was quietly creeping down the stairs of her magnificent house. Some day Cleo was going to live in a fine house, too. And maybe some day Josie was going to be as poor as church mice.
They met by their tree, at the foot of which they had buried their symbols of friendship. Josie had buried her gold ring because she loved it best of everything, and Cleo best of everybody. Cleo had buried Lily’s doll, mostly because it tickled her to tell her timid sister that she had seen a big rat dragging it under the house. Lily had taken a long stick and poked around. But every time it touched something, Lily had jumped a mile.
Cleo and Josie wandered over the Beauchamp place, their bare feet drinking in the dew, their faces lifted to feel the morning. Only the birds were abroad, their vivid splashes of color, the brilliant outpouring of their waking songs filling the eye and ear with summer’s intoxication.
They did not talk. They had no words to express their aliveness. They wanted none. Their bodies were their eloquence. Clasping hands, they began to skip, too impatient of meeting the morning to walk toward it any longer. Suddenly Cleo pulled her hand away and tapped Josie on the shoulder. They should have chosen who was to be “It.” But Cleo had no time for counting out. The wildness was in her, the unrestrained joy, the desire to run to the edge of the world and fling her arms around the sun, and rise with it, through time and space, to the center of everywhere.
She was swift as a deer, as mercury, with Josie running after her, falling back, and back, until Josie broke the magic of the morning with her exhausted cry, “Cleo, I can’t catch you.”
“Nobody can’t never catch me,” Cleo exulted. But she spun around to wait for Josie. The little sob in Josie’s throat touched the tenderness she always felt toward those who had let her show herself the stronger.
They wandered back toward Josie’s house, for now the busyness of the birds had quieted to let the human toilers take over the morning. Muted against the white folks’ sleeping, the Negro voices made velvet sounds. The field hands and the house servants diverged toward their separate spheres, the house servants settling their masks in place, the field hands waiting for the overseer’s eye before they stooped to servility.
