Eugene Gordon, "Alien" (1928)
By EUGENE GORDON
HAVING sensed that it was almost noon, the woman hastened preparation of her husband's dinner. ... In her native Massachusetts it would be called luncheon. This Georgia idiom irritated and perplexed her.
"Georgia barbarity! I'd never get used to it if I lived here a hundred years. There you go, Mary Spence,-Mary Spence! Mary Spence Lankster, you mean-there you go talking to yourself again. You'd better stop it, or you'll find yourself in a Georgia madhouse before long."
She had seen Georgia and her husband for the first time just a week ago. He had answered her letter in Love's Messenger, and she had succumbed to his laboriously pictured "extensive green acres," and the enchantment she would there find as his wife. Mary Spence, school teacher, of Boston, had been married to John Lankster, farmer, of Whitingsville, thirty minutes after she had descended at the Whitingsville station. Since then she had felt like an expatriate, bound to a queer foreigner in a strange land.
Going to the woodpile outside the picket fence, she gathered a basket of dry pine chips. With these she built a quick, hot fire. The resinsoaked wood burned like gasolene, and even before she could replace both lids the stove was hot.
As always since her coming here, she was beset with vague and unaccountable terrors. The midsummer heat was oppressive, and she wondered dizzily how the corn and cotton crop retained its greenness. She wondered why she had come; wished forlornly for her classroom of New England youngsters; thought uneasily of laughing, coal-black Negroes whose big feet, unshod, caressed the burning earth.
She began to whimper, casting quick, frightened glances about the barn-like kitchen. Vigorously she beat a mixture of corn meal, egg, and milk, trying to drown other and familiar noises with the clatter of spoon on tinware.
She thought again of her classroom, counting, each separate face. There is Micky, and there is Solomon, and there is Joe, the little blackeyed Italian ... and George Collins, the little colored boy. John says I musn't speak to the Negroes here. They might misunderstand.
Didn't misunderstand in Boston .... "But this is not Boston, Mary dear. . . . Oh, I've got to go for that water! Wonder if milk wouldn't do.
Don't see why it shouldn't. For heaven's sake, why isn't there a well here in the yard? More Southern efficiency." She ceased beating the mixture and fetched a pan of milk from the shelf in the corner. With the tip of her finger she touched some to her tongue. She grimaced.
"Sour! I might've known that, with no ice anywhere within a thousand miles. And I don't know anything about making sour-milk bread." To delay the inevitable trek to the spring, she began again to beat the mixture. With quick nervous quirks of the head, her eyes starting, she looked about at each unfamiliar sound. She thought of the man she had wed and gritted her teeth in sudden resentment against him.
Day after day these sounds and these thoughts had harassed and haunted her. She remembered weeks spent with other women in the Maine woods, but could not recollect one instance of fright. The noises there, she explained to herself, were intimately friendly, not hostilely sinister. Then, there were not slinking around perpetually a host of odorous, barefooted, grinning Negroes .... John had warned her not to trust any of the blacks, " 'ceptin' them as lives on th' place." Some of these darkies, he had assured her, hearing that a Northern white woman was in their midst, might try to take advantage of her ignorance of Southern custom. This custom required that the blacks stand uncovered in her presence, that they address her always in most respectful accents, and that she bear toward them a dignified and superior attitude. She wondered why the blacks of the plantation differed so radically from those of Boston's South End; she was glad John had instructed her in firing the double-barreled shot gun.
Day after day these thoughts, impressions, fears, and misgivings recurred. Day after day she was sent rushing frantically from the barnlike kitchen to the securer shelter of the sleeping quarters by a pig's squeak, or by the shrill, wailing cry of a sparrow hawk, or by the sleepy growl of the yellow hound dozing under the edge of the house, or by the flutter of frilled newspaper on the kitchen shelves when the wind blew through, or even by the crackle of fire in the kitchen stove. These unrelated, indeterminate noises drove her almost to madness. Shrieking suddenly, she would rush from the kitchen and across the twenty feet of shaded yard, dashing into the one-room sleeping quarters. Chickens fluttered cackling from her path. The dozing hound lifted his aged head and regarded her contemptuously. Inside the sleeping quarters, she would close and bar the heavy board door, then stand silently behind it, awaiting with thudding heart the Terror's approach. But nothing so far had happened. Presently she would return, her thin, pale face slightly flushed, her near-sighted gray eyes peering apprehensively through gold rimmed glasses, her long, lean fingers gripping her flat chest. She would proceed to the kitchen she had just fled and occupy her hands with repeatedly neglected chores.
So far, today, she had not run. She had vowed yesterday that she would never again be so foolish .... Breaking another egg into the pan, she stirred with all the energy of her thin arms.
She beat upon the side of the pan with the spoon, purposely raising as loud a din as possible. Now she paused, exhausted, and listened.
Hens were singing in the cotton. An auto horn sounded from the highway a quarter of a mile distant. A heavy, persistent drone of summer insects wove a background for all other noises. The kitchen fire had ceased crackling, and the woman removed the lids and laid on more chips. The fire roared.
II
She went and looked into the wooden waterbucket on the shelf outside the kitchen door.
Even as she had feared, it was all but empty.
Some dead flies floated in the warm water which remained.
Descending the steps, she hastened across the white, shaded yard to the door of the sleeping quarters. She mounted the steps and peered at the mantel clock above the fireplace, then gasped, surprised at the lateness. She ran back to the kitchen, muttering: "I must get over this foolishness. What's the matter with me, anyway?" Her voice rising to a plaintive wail, she said: "Oh, why did I ever do such a crazy thing? A man I'd never set eyes on. . . . Why didn't I stay up there in Boston?" She removed the water-bucket from the shelf, hung the tin dipper on a nail nearby, and, with a long, outward sweep of her thin arms, emptied the water into the yard. It showered in a semicircular fringe upon an old hen and her brood, and the chicks fluttered their downy, featherless wings, cheeping loudly. The woman stood watching them for a long time, disquietude for the moment forgotten.
Now she started toward the gate in the side of the fence--the one which lay nearest the corn patch and the woods--with the bucket in her hand. She paused and stared about, her heart leaping painfully at the unexpected squawk of a jaybird in the oak overhead. Her eyes were large with apprehension as she stared toward the grove where lay the only water supply. She hung the bucket on a picket of the fence and ran into the house. Presently she returned, balancing a double-barreled breach-loader in her right hand. Removing the bucket from the fence, she started toward the gate.
Bringing herself to an abrupt halt, she gazed fearfully at the firearm; she laughed jerkily, cutting off her voice sharply, as though startled at its sound. Then she began to whimper, turning round and round as though expecting attack from every side. She stared at the open door of the sleeping quarters as if in anticipation of someone's springing out, then turned to scrutinize the door of the kitchen. Stooping, she searched the far reaches beneath the house. A short distance toward the front, and somewhat to the right, of the house huddled a miscellany of outhouses-barn, corral, cotton house, and corn crib. She stood wondering whether some day someone would conceal himself in one of these buildings and watch her, possibly slink out and assault her.
She thought again of "Fried Face," the Negro whose face had been turned into a hideous scar when, in a fight a few years before, he was knocked into a ketttle of boiling lard. She recalled that it was principally of him, whom she had not yet seen, that her husband had warned her.
"He's th' trickiest nigger you ever clap your eyes on, Mary, an' you got to be keerful. Ef you ever git caught away from th' house, an' you have yore gun, an' he meets you an' looks like he wants to be too friendly, why, just don't wonder what to do. Shoot quick 'n hell, 'cause ef you don't 't'll be too late." "But how shall I know him?" Mary had asked, deeply concerned.
He spat a brown rivulet. "Oh, you'll know him, all right 'nough. Ugliest black devil you ever clap your eyes on. An' always grinnin', which makes 'im look uglier 'n hell." It must be a hundred in the shade, she thought, plucking from her body the sticky clothing. Heat waves wriggled in broken horizontal and perpendicular lines across the top of the corn. The air was tuneful with droning, lazy summer sounds. Above, so high as to resemble swallows, two turkey buzzards circled and swirled. The sun, shining upon them, turned the repulsive scavengers into birds of glittering silver; the rusty black feathers, naked necks and heads wattled with red and black warts, the disgusting odor of carrion which was a part of them-these characteristics of the creatures she could not know.
She wished she could reach such heights, above the feather-duster tops of the pines, above the sinister influences that hedged her. She thought of the buzzards as aviators flying across country. She wished this were so, and that, losing their bearings, the flyers had to descend in the cotton patch to seek information about reaching Boston. She stood gazing upward, her mouth open.
A red-headed woodpecker on the roof of the corn crib beat a ruffle, as on a drum. With a breathless shriek the woman raised the gun, her starting eyes appraising this new terror. She lowered the weapon, resting its butt beside her foot on the ground.
"Mary," she scolded, "you've got to get over your silly fright. Shame on you! You're worse than a child, you are." She seemed suddenly aware of the breech-loader beside her. "Take that gun right back where it belongs." Setting the bucket on the ground, she obeyed, returning empty handed. Pausing midway the yard, she gazed slowly about her. She felt fairly secure within the enclosure of the yard, buttressed as she was by the kitchen and the sleeping quarters. But before her, across acres of corn drooping in the heat, lay that asylum of horrors, the dense wood of oak, pine, and sweetgum trees, all intertwined with a rank growth of vines sheathed in impassable undergrowth.
The memory of eerie jungle sounds arising thence day and night drove her to the verge of frenzy whenever the time came to go for water.
She would ask her husband today to have a well dug in the yard.
Her roving eyes alighted on the yellow hound under the edge of the house, and she whistled to him. He opened the bleary eye nearer her and observed her gloomily.
"Come, doggie, come!" She stooped and snapped her fingers, and emitted the thin imitation of a whistle. "Come on-like a nice doggie. Come!" But the dog stretched his yellow, bony hide and, with a long groan of comfort, turned over, resuming his interrupted siesta.
Stung with rage, the woman began with her eyes a search of the sand-swept yard. She grabbed up a stone about the size of an egg, and, drawing her skinny arm far back, heaved the missile with all her strength. It struck the house, but, with a yelp of mingled fright and indignation, the hound scrambled up and loped across the yard, his tail between his legs. She saw him circling crazily in the shade of a cotton stalk, and, after a moment, saw him lie down.
She was contrite. "What's the matter with me?" she whimpered. "I never used to be like this. Even the dogs hate me. I must be going crazy." She looked into the clear, cloudless sky where the sun blazed a disc of greenish red. Far to the north, so distant as to resemble butterflies, circled and swirled a flock of turkey buzzards.
They were surfaced with glittering silver sheen.
She thought of lost aviators .... The clock struck once.
Panic assailed her anew. That must be twelve-thirty; yet, to save her, she could not recollect having heard twelve. The bread was not yet made, nor the bacon fried. Potatoes had not been washed. The table was still to be set.
"Here I am failing as a housewife already. That'll never do, as much as I hate everything." She went hurriedly and peered at the clock; then, returning, she groaned.
"The bell should've been rung a half hour ago. What is the matter with me?" The bell was affixed to the end of a wooden "arm" fastened to the farther side of the kitchen.
Her emotions a strange mixture of self-reproach, self-pity, bewilderment, anger, and unaccountable fear, she hastened now through the kitchen and out the rear door. Grasping the worn rope in both hands, she swayed the bell to and fro. . . . School bells in Boston; carillon in the tower of the Christian Science temple; noonday services at King's Chapel; the sonorous peals of theatre organs. She rang on, enthralled by the memories aroused in the tones of the bell. The old hound slunk around the corner of the house and, lifting its mangy yellow head, howled in her face. She ceased in consternation.
"Dear me! I must have rung that bell ten minutes. Takes me right back to Boston. What will John think?" She laughed pointlessl then recalled uneasily what her husband had said just this morning: "Try to ring th' bell right on time; I don't want no trouble with any of these niggers."
"Fried Face," he explained, was doing a little hoeing for him this week; the other darkies were all right, but this one . . . "Don't fergit th' bell, Mary." She wandered into the kitchen, and stood gazing bewilderedly at the cooling stove. She sat on an upturned box and tried to marshal her distracted wits into some sort of orderly array.
Her head had begun to ache about the eyes ....
Bread to be made, meat to be fried, potatoes to be washed and peeled, blackberries to be picked over, water to be brought from the spring .... No, not fried meat and potatoes today.
"I forgot!" She clasped her head and rocked from side to side on the box. "I forgot all about it! John wanted cabbage and boiled potatoes.... What is wrong with me?" She rose wearily and went into the sleeping quarters. When she emerged she again had the gun. Walking rapidly, as if her mind was definitely settled, she crossed the yard, picked up the bucket from the ground, and plunged into the simmering oven of the corn.
III
As she drew nearer the spring, the house she had left seemed to recede into unfathomable distance. She remembered without effort dreams in which similar phenomena had predominated: her starting from a certain spot and her subsequent vain effort to return. Gradually a deadening fatalism gripped her. She felt that she would never go back, for her strength would leave her.
She thought of the present as a horribly torturing nightmare. She longed to awaken in bed in her room at the Franklin Square House.
She began to slacken her pace and to place each foot ahead of the other on the clearest and softest spots. She picked out tufts of grass to step upon, because these gave back no crunching sound. The rattle of the staves in the waterbucket, made loose by standing in the sun, was as the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun to her taut nerves. She stopped, knelt, and set the bucket beside her. Then, lifting the butt of the shotgun to her stomach, she pressed back both triggers. Rising, she picked up the bucket and continued toward the spring. She craved a backward glance, just as she had craved it yesterday and the day before, but, as on previous days, she felt that if she so much as turned her face, a long black arm would stretch from the tangled and sinister wilderness and draw her in. She must look this unseen Terror in the eyes.
Each chirp and lilt of bird was as devilish music to enchant and befuddle her; each rustle of grass was a crawling, slinking Negro with lust in bloodshot eyes; each chirp of cricket, each whirr of grasshopper, each crack of twig, each sough of breeze in the foliage, each bay of distant hound; the drone of insects; the dance of heat waves before her eyes-each, all were flails to a harassed spirit.
Finally the spring lay before her. It bubbled silently straight up from a rock-encircled hollow. Rising like a verdant wall; towered the tangled underbush, vines and trees. Long, green grass spread along the woodside. A tall pine, killed by lightning, probably, stood some distance from the woods. A red-headed woodpecker was beating a ruffle on the hollow trunk. She laid the gun in the grass beside her and dipped the bucket deep into the clear water. Water splashed over her broad-toed tan shoes when she withdrew the vessel. Water poured through the cracks made by the shrinkage of the staves.
With a despairing moan she sat down. In a moment the bucket was empty.
More nightmare stuff, like escaping the clutches of a pursuing enemy, only to find the door too small to close him out. Yet, so far, nothing had happened to her. Nor had anything happened yesterday or the day previous. But something must happen; something had to happen, else she would become a shrieking maniac.
Once it happened, the spell would be broken, and she would be her old self.
She pushed the bucket with her foot, and it sank into the water. Now, out of the medley of mid-summer sounds, there arose another, unlike any of the rest. It was the sound of a man's snoring. She could not see him; she could only judge by the direction from which the sound came where the sleeper lay. She thought of "Fried Face," and, with a quick movement, she rose, jerking the gun from the ground. Somehow she knew that it was "Fried Face." She was sure it could be nobody else. Wild, maddening desire to fly, to soar above the corn tops, wakened her. To escape before he awoke! ...
She stood fast, listening. The snoring had ceased. The medley of sounds was unbroken save by the persistent barking of distant dogs.
She turned swiftly, but a low chuckle arrested her. Jerking herself about, she saw him. He was bareheaded, and, save where the burn on the right cheek had left a reddened mass, coal black. The scar was like pounded beefsteak, rare. He was sitting in the grass, half reclining on his left elbow, appraising her. He stared at the gun, and she thought his eyes narrowed; he ran his sullen gaze over her from head to foot.
Then he grinned, and his mouth was a twisted, toothless cavity.
"You Mr. Lankster's wife, Ah guess, ain't you?" She resented his lazy familiarity, but nodded in spite of this. She was thinking: He knows I'm scared stiff; that's why he treats me like this . . . not even standing. Bet he wouldn't act like that if I was a Southern woman. Not much like the good old plantation darkies I've heard of. That repulsive face! ...
"Ah thought so." He chuckled, nodding. He rose. "You f'm up North, ain't you?" He had made an almost imperceptible movement forward.
She thought of the protection of the gun, and resentment shot hot blood to her cheeks. She resolved to use such tactics as she was sure he was accustomed to.
"What's that to you, you filthy nigger?" As she noted the rapid change of expression in his face, she added grimly: "I suppose you'll have to be taught your place." She thought: He's afraid. He's afraid. I've got him cowered. . . . Lord, if I can only keep him so.
The man stared, round-eyed; shifted from one foot to the other.
"But, lady, Ah wa'nt doin' nothin' to nobody. Ah jest ast you ef you was Miz Lankster. Ah don't never bother nobody 'ceptin' dey bothers me fus'. Ah'm a peace-lovin' man, das whut Ah is, an' Ah don't bother ... " Reasured now, she felt all fears leaving her.
She felt cool; the vast woods were merely woods, no more formidable in their mysteries than the shrubbery of Boston's parks. She experienced difficulty in restraining a shriek of laughter.
How John would stare when she told him! But she did not even smile. She held the shotgun steadily, balanced in her right hand, both its triggers cocked, looking the image of undefeated ruthlessness.
"And let me tell you another thing, Fried Face, or whatever your name is. I've heard you're a holy terror around here. Well, I'm known as just that myself, where I come from. If you behave yourself and stay in your place, you needn't fear me; but if you don't ... "
A daring suggestion almost startled her. She went on recklessly: "Ask my husband if I wasn't the champion woman sharpshooter of Boston. As I said, if you behave yourself, you needn't fear any harm; but if you don't-well, I've warned you .... You may go, now."
She lifted the gun meaningly, saying to herself: "Georgia isn't so bad, after all. I'm going to like it."
"But, Missie, Ah-" "You may go now, I said!" He gulped, hitched up first one then the other of the straps of blue denim overalls, and shuffled his feet. She again noticed that, with barely perceptible movements, he was approaching her.
She was panicky. Suddenly the man leaped, or stumbled, toward her. In moments of calm, later, she was as much baffled as now in her effort to determine what he had clone; whether his motion toward her had been intentional or accidental. At any rate, she knew that the gun was at her shoulder, that it boomed twice in lightning-like succession, and that the man, first falling, rose, turned, and screaming, fled.
She saw a shower of blood raining about his shoulders; then saw him stagger, fall, and lie motionless in the long grass beneath the dead pine. Sunshine and flies enveloped him.
IV
Her heart pounded against her hard chest, and horror crept up through her. Still, she was calmer and less afraid than at any time since her coming South. She kept thinking of herself as a murderer, then renouncing the idea. She drew out the bucket, filled and dripping. It was no longer leaking. Balancing the gun in her left hand, she hastened to the house. "It was self-defense ... purely self-defense.
He was trying to attack me. I'm not a murderer. If I hadn't killed him, he'd have killed me. It was self-defense ... purely selfde- ... " She set the bucket on the shelf, put the gun in its accustomed place, and remade the kitchen fire. She was somewhat amazed that her husband had not yet come, but did not think long on the matter. She completed the bread-makmg, prepared and cooked the cabbage and potatoes, and then made some crust for the blackberry pie.
"It was certainly self-defense, if there ever was such a thing. A woman has a right to defend her . . . her honor!" She stopped sweeping the floor, and fanned at a persistent fly, stunned by the significance of her discovery. Her honor I She sat down heavily on a chair beside the table, as though the weight of this idea were too great to bear standing.
"I hadn't thought of that. In the South no white woman is convicted for defending her honor even if she kills a white man. How in the world could they think of convicting her for killing ... " She sprang up, trembling. She had been def ending her honor, that was it. She had be_en defending her honor .... Bees droned and flies buzzed through the hot, humid air; a bluejay cried from the branches of the tree in the yard; a woodpecker beat a ruffle on the dead pine at the edge of the woods. She was indifferent. Her heart still pounding, she walked several times from the kitchen to the sleeping quarters, to the outhouses, and around the fence outside the yard. Once she walked as far as the highway.
She stood for a while gazing toward the spot where she knew the body lay. She was all this time wondering at her calm detachment, amazed that she was neither remorseful nor afraid.
"I'm a good Georgian at last. ... How John will laugh! I've even acquired the Georgian psychology." She laughed loudly.
The clock struck five just as she seated herself in a rocker on the front piazza. It occurred to her all at once that John was five hours late.
She rose, and, going to the rear of the kitchen, looked down the long grass-grown roadway which separated the corn patch from the cotton field.
Her husband had gone down that way ....
There were voices toward the front. The hound was barking spasmodically. Trembling with an incomprehensible fear, she hastened through the yard and around the kitchen and the sleeping quarters to the front piazza. A group of men, none of whom she had ever seen before, in their shirts and with sleeves rolled to their elbows, were in the act of coming from the house. They carried rifles in their hands, and revolvers bulged from their hip pockets.
Long-eared dogs panted in the heat. One man, squat, red-faced, with a soiled white handkerchief round his neck, held a coil of rope. They looked at her queerly, she thought, and she wondered incoherently what had become of boasted Georgia chivalry.
"You Miz Lankster? "asked the man with the rope.
"Ye-yes ... I-" "Mighty sorry to have to do it, Miz Lankster, but-" The men exchanged quick glances, then looked at her. A fleeting shadow crossed the piazza, swept across the yard toward the corn, and on toward the woods. A big black turkey buzzard, following the shadow, thrust out its ugly talons and perched, rocking clumsily, on a branch of the dead pine. The woman, watching, screamed, clapped her hand over her mouth, and waited for the man to continue.
"We jus' fetched th' body in, an' it's in there -your husband's, I mean. Got in 'n argument with a nigger 'bout what time to stop for dinner, an' th' nigger cut 'is throat. We're lookin' fer 'im now. You ain't set eyes on 'im, I guess, have you? Name's Cruthers, but they call 'im 'Fried Face,' 'cause he's-" They were staring open-mouthed at the woman for, instead of listening, she was shrieking with laughter.
Published in Saturday Evening Quill, 1928