Leavings

She took a last sip of coffee and pushed the cup away. She looked at the plate in front of her and shuddered, pushing it away as well. Her eyes burned for a second and she looked beyond the room through the easternmost window. The first glow of sunrise threatened and she could see that there would be fog today. She rose and began removing dishes from the three places where she had served breakfast. Each lay untouched - a complete waste.

With a woman’s mechanical indifference, she cleared the table, leaving the dishwashing for later. Glancing through the window again, she thought the sky had lightened a bit more – slowly, almost like it was sulled up, she thought – pushing ordinary time toward the one time. The burning in her eyes returned and she paused to will it away. It required more effort this time and she felt her knees weaken. She supported herself with a hand upon a chair and stared at the patterns on the linoleum floor. Slowly, she regained the lost strength and drove the weakness out. She looked outside again. “It’s getting nearer,” she thought. She stood erect and walked toward his room.

When she neared the door she heard an odd sound – a muffled pinging beginning at a high pitch and quickly dropping to an unintelligible base. She listened intently and then knocked on the wall outside the door.

“You ready?” She spoke through the door and then heard the sound again, followed by a dull thump.

“Come on in,” a voice said. “Just about ready.”

She opened the door and entered the room. Her son sat on the bed in the dark with a large brown bag – his sea bag, he called it – in front of him. A naked light bulb hung from the ceiling but the only light came from the hallway. The piping on his dress blue uniform seemed to sparkle in the darkness. He looked so young, she thought.

He held a guitar across his lap, an old Gibson with the scars and scratches of past times etched across its body. He plucked a string and twisted the tuning peg. The string made a whining, lonesome sound as the tension left it and the sound drifted away into a flabby oblivion.

Noticing her look, he said: “Just thought it would be a good idea to unstring Mabel while I am gone,” he said, and then “It’s probably not a good idea to leave tension on it while it’s not being played for a year.”

“I think Mabel is already unstrung,” she said. “Why do you call it that?”

“Oh, I just named her after you, so all the loves of my life would have the same name. Keeps it simple, don’t you know?”

“I don’t know,” she said, taking a seat by the window.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m just having a little trouble standing up this morning.”

“It is a little early yet,” he said.

“What time is it?”

He looked at his watch. “Six-thirty. Troy should be getting here around seven.”

“I can tell it’s getting light now,” she said. “I just wish I could stop it right here – I mean so it don’t get no later.”

“Now you don’t mean that,” he said. “We would just be frozen here – like a couple of statues. You wouldn’t want that would you?”

She looked at the guitar. “Will it be okay in this back room for a year? We don’t keep it heated when you’re not here.”

“It will be just fine. Mabels are tough women, aren’t they?”

“Not this morning. This one ain’t.”
He changed the subject. “Do you remember the song you taught me to play?”

“Redwings?”

“Pretty Red Wings, that’s right”

“That was a long time ago. I learned that song when I wasn’t but just a kid.”

“Before that picture was made?” He nodded toward a photograph, framed and resting on a dresser near the foot of the bed. A sixteen year-old Mabel stared at them like a sentinel, proud and smiling with just a hint of the contemptuousness of youth hidden in the corners of her eyes. She wore a brown beret. The original black and white photograph had been hand-colored and her cheeks were reddened in subtle tones that completed a coquettish effect.

“That old thing? I was sixteen years old and the pride of the county when that was took. I sent it to your Daddy when he was in CCC camp and some boy in the camp there colored it for him. I guess it was enough to make him come back to Arkansas.”

“I suspect it was,” he said. “Where is he?”

“He left and went to the barn,” she said.
“Is he coming back?”

“Not until after you leave. I suspect he’s had a drink or two by now. He wouldn’t eat breakfast. Just stared off the way he does sometimes. Then of a sudden he said ‘goddam war, goddam Navy’ and he got up and walked out.”

The room had lightened more now and the man looked around. “Our wallpaper has faded, hasn’t it?” he noticed.

“It’s faded but it ain’t never cracked,” she said. “Remember he said it was just cheap wallpaper and that you and me put it up too tight and it would crack when the wind blew or the ground shifted? But it ain’t never cracked a bit and it was just cheap old stuff – I saved my money and bought it to cover them boards when you was eleven or twelve years old. Sometimes cheap stuff is stronger than people think. You and me had a time puttin’ it up.”

“I remember,” he said. He released the tension on another guitar string. The sound of its unwinding filled the room and seemed to drift away, lingering in the room, seeming almost to cling to the faint light.

He looked at the picture again. In the gathering light she looked older than sixteen. “That was just before you married, wasn’t it?” He nodded toward the dresser.

“Less than a year. He come back from Illinois that winter and I quit school and we got married. It was 1936, right in the middle of the depression. We were a couple of dumb kids sharecropping wherever we could without a pot or a window and all the time thinking we owned the world. It was four years later we come here and bought this store. So I was still just a kid, really. It was the first month in 1941. Course I’d had your sister by then – but still just a kid. Mrs. Shannon said me and your Daddy was so dumb when we moved here that it taken both of us to drink a cokola.”

“She never was very nice to you, was she?”

“I think it made us work even harder. Just to show her. The only one around here who was ever nice to me was the old Isely woman who lived over across the road.” She turned her head and looked through the window and he saw her soften as she stared through it and then through time itself.

“Everybody called her ‘Aunt Sarah’ and I don’t know why she taken to me so - just a skinny little white girl with a husband and baby to take care of. I would put Robbie to bed in the afternoon and go over and sit with her under a big oak tree that stood in front of her house. The tornado took it later on. I still see it there when I think about it, though. Sometimes I can see it so plain in my mind that I’m sure it’s still there for a minute or so.” She paused and kept looking through the window. “It ain’t really though, is it?”

“No, it’s been gone for years. The tornado was in forty-seven wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but there ain’t no tornado that can blow that tree out of my mind – or that old woman sittin’ there, either.”

“I barely remember her.”

“Oh, she was way up in her nineties when we came here. But she was always doing something; shelling peas, churning buttermilk, just something to keep busy.” She stopped and settled into the chair. Her son plucked, then twisted, another string and the sound lingered even longer than before, it seemed.

“I remember one time,” she began softly. “One time I was sittin’ with her and I broke down and started crying. She asked me what was wrong and I told her I still got homesick and that I hadn’t seen my Momma in over two weeks.

“I never will forget what she said. She reached and put her hand over on mine and I thought for sure she would pet and humor me. But she just said: ‘Now Miss George you hush that foolishness and be thankful for what you has, cause if you don’t, the Lord’s gonna quit blessin’ you white people!”

“Good advice, don’t you reckon?” he said. He twisted another key and the dropping sound seemed to echo in the room like an affirmation.

She didn’t speak for what seemed like a long time in the darkened room. Another string went slack. The sound seemed to rouse her and she looked at him with her head cocked slightly. The room was still lighter. Familiar shapes came clearer, clearer into focus as he loosened the last string. Finally she asked him “Will you be able to write?”

“Why sure I will,” he said. He reached and patted her hand and gave it a slight squeeze.

“What’s the name of that place where you’ll be?”

“It’s Da Nang, Mother. It’s up close to the border with North Viet Nam.”

“If you’re in the Navy, you ought to be on a ship, shouldn’t you?” She looked almost as if she were pleading.

“No, my orders say I am to be in some sort of security detachment. That’s why they are sending me to San Diego for six weeks before I go overseas. They’re going to teach us how to kill people. Guns and hand grenades and such.”

“I don’t like that. You ought to be on a ship if you’re in the Navy. Don’t they know that?”

“All they know is that they have me for four years and they can do anything they want with me. I sort of thought they would put me on a ship too - when I joined – but things just didn’t work out that way.”

“That’s what gets to your Daddy so bad. He didn’t want you to join any sort of service, much less for four years. His family never was much for minding other peoples’ business.”

“I know,” he said.

“You remember that Powers man - the one that delivers bread to the store?”
“Sam? What about him?”

“He’s some kin to Dr. Robinette. Second cousin by marriage or something like that. Anyway, they helped Sam’s boy.”

“What did Dr. Robinette have to do with Sam’s boy?”

“He was on the Draft Board and he kept the boy out until they got him a place in the National Guard. Sam just laughs when we talk about where you’re goin’”

“Why do you talk to him about it?” He laid the guitar on the bed and began checking his sea bag.

“We don’t bring it up. He does. You know what your Uncle Harold did when they drafted him don’t you?”

“I can imagine.”

“He bawled and cried and they couldn’t do a thing with him. Then he started pissing in his bunk every night until they let him come home. He laughs about it too.”

She began breathing heavier now. Short breaths – she seemed to struggle with each successive one. “It ain’t fair, she said. “It just ain’t fair.”

He felt she was about to scream. He sat still as he could and waited for her to regain her breath. He looked directly at her then hesitated momentarily for emphasis. The room was clearly lighted now and he could tell her eyes were misty. “Now I want you to tell me the truth. You wouldn’t want me to do either one of those things, would you?”

“It’s just that some of them boys that come back after World War Two never was quite the same as when they left. I don’t want you bein’ not the same.”

“I want the truth,” he insisted.
She tried to avoid his eyes but her body seemed frozen and she couldn’t turn away. Then she looked directly back at him and spoke so that he could barely hear her. The words were faint, but firm.

“No, no I wouldn’t. But don’t ever tell your Daddy that I said that.”

“Our secret,” he promised. “Is he just going to stay in the barn?” he asked.

“I’m sure he will ‘til you are gone. I’ll go ahead and open the store after you leave. He’ll be alright. I’ve taken care of him for thirty years; I can manage another day”

He picked up the guitar to put it in its case but she reached with both hands. “Can I hold it until you leave?”

“Why sure,” he said, handing it gently to her.

“I’m glad you named it Mabel,” she said softly, bringing to her chest.

“I am too,” he said. “I can trust you to take care of it until I get back, can’t I?”

“I’ll see that’s it’s here when you come home,” she said.

He felt, more that heard the car approaching. There wasn’t much traffic on the highway this early and a person could sense the approach before hearing it. Soon he recognized the sound for certain and he heard the car slowing to turn into the drive.

“It’s Troy,” he said. “I guess it’s time.”

“It was nice of him to take you to Little Rock,” she said. “I just don’t think your Daddy could have done it. And he wouldn’t let me.”

“You have enough on your mind,” he said, placing his hat squarely on his head.

“I think I’ll let you go from here,” she said. She pulled the guitar more tightly against her chest and stared with a firm face, looking through the window, past the window and across the road to where the oak tree had stood and where the old woman had sat with her and talked – to where she had been young. “You go on ahead,” she said.

He knew she wouldn’t look at him. He swung his sea bag over his shoulder and started slowly for the door. When he reached it, he stopped.

“I’ll write when I get there,” he said, turning to her once more.

She didn’t look at him. Speaking more to the silent room than to him she said: “Son you be careful.” He heard a wheezing sound as she took a breath. “You’ll be just like that old tree to me. Nothing can make you go away, really. Not the goddam war. Not the goddam Navy. Nothin’, not nothin’.” Then she began to cry.

He turned and left. He reached the back door and didn’t look back. The fog had moved in. Off to the west he heard a faint roll of thunder and thought. “Nothing said in the forecast about thunder, just fog in the early hours.” He hoped the plane wouldn’t be delayed. It was time to be gone. It was time to leave. He had somewhere to be.

His cousin had turned the car around and had stopped at the far end of the drive so as not to intrude on the leaving. The man hitched his sea bag more firmly on his shoulder; then he cocked his hat at an angle. He couldn’t have seen through the fog to the back porch - couldn’t have seen through the porch screen at any rate. But he knew, as a son knows, that she was standing at the back door, still cradling his guitar and watching him fade into the fog. He moved more quickly – at march-step now – toward the car.

“Goddam war,” he said to himself. “Goddam Navy.”