The Living is Easy Read online

  Cleo and Josie dawdled before the stables. The riding horses whinnied softly, thrusting their noses to the day. Josie’s pony nuzzled her hand, wanting to hear his name dripping in honey. And Cleo moved away. Anybody could ride an old pony. She wanted to ride General Beauchamp’s roan stallion, who shied at any touch but his master’s.

  She marched back to Josie. “Dare me to ride the red horse,” she challenged. Her eyes were green as they bored into Josie’s, the gray gone under in her passion.

  “No,” said Josie, desperately trying not to flounder in the green sea. “He’d throw you and trample you. He’d kill you dead.”

  “He can’t tromp me! I ain’t ascairt of nothing alive. I dare you to dare me. I double dare you!”

  “I won’t, I won’t! I’m bad, but I’m not wicked.”

  “I’m not wicked neither! I just ain’t a coward.”

  She streaked to the stall and flung open the barrier. The wild horse smelled her wildness. Her green eyes locked with his red-flecked glare. Their wills met, clashed, and would not yield. The roan made a savage sound in his throat, his nostrils flared, his great sides rippled. He lowered his head to lunge. But Cleo was quicker than he was. She grasped his mane, leaped on his broad neck, slid down his back, and dug her heels in his flanks.

  “Giddap, red horse!” she cried.

  He flung back his head, reared, and crashed out of the stall, with Josie screeching and sobbing and sidestepping just in time.

  Cleo hung on for ten minutes, ten minutes of dazzling flight to the sun. She felt no fear, feeling only the power beneath her and the power inside her, and the rush of wind on which she and the roan were riding. When she was finally thrown, she landed unhurt in a clover field. It never occurred to her to feel for broken bones. She never doubted that she had a charmed life. Her sole mishap was a minor one. She had split the seat of her drawers.

  She got up and brushed off her pinafore, in a fever now to get home and brag to her sisters. She knew that she ought to let Josie see that she was still alive. The riderless horse would return, and Josie would never tell who had ridden him off. But she would be tormented by fear for as long as Cleo stayed away.

  Josie would not want to eat, no matter what fancy things the white folks had for breakfast. She would not want to ride in her pony cart, no matter how pretty a picture she made. She would not want to go calling with her stylish mother, not even if she was let to wear the dress that came all the way from Paris. On this bright day the sun had darkened for Josie, and nobody but Cleo could make it shine again.

  The four sisters sat around the kitchen table, eating their salt pork and biscuit and hominy, shipping down their buttermilk. Charity was nine, two years younger than Cleo, Lily was eight, Serena four. Their faces were tear-streaked. Cleo’s was not, though she was the one who had got the whipping. Mama couldn’t keep track of the times she had tanned Cleo’s hide, trying to bring her up a Christian. But the Devil was trying just as hard in the other direction.

  There Cleo was this morning, looking square in Mama’s eye, telling her she must have been sleepwalking again. Couldn’t remember getting dressed or tying her sisters’ braids together. Just remembered coming awake in a clover field. Mama had tried to beat the truth out of her, but Cleo wouldn’t budge from her lie. Worst of all, she wouldn’t cry and show remorse. Finally Mama had to put away the strap because her other children looked as if they would die if she didn’t.

  They couldn’t bear to see Cleo beaten. She was their oldest sister, their protector. She wasn’t afraid of the biggest boy or the fiercest dog, or the meanest teacher. She could sass back. She could do anything. They accepted her teasing and tormenting as they accepted the terrors of night. Night was always followed by day, and made day seem more wonderful.

  Mama stood by the hearth, feeling helpless in her mind. Cleo was getting too big to beat, but she wasn’t a child that would listen to reason. Whatever she didn’t want to hear went in one ear and out the other. She was old enough to be setting an example for her sisters. And all they saw her do was devilment.

  With a long blackened fireplace stick Mama carefully tilted the lid of the three-legged skillet to see if her corn bread was done. The rest of Pa’s noon dinner — the greens, the rice, the hunk of fresh pork — was waiting in his bucket. Gently she let the lid drop, and began to work the skillet out of its covering of coals that had been charred down from the oak wood. As the skillet moved forward, the top coals dislodged. Their little plunking sounds were like the tears plopping in Mama’s heart.

  Sulkily Cleo spooned the hominy she hated because she mustn’t make Mama madder by leaving it. Mama bleached her corn in lye water made from fireplace ashes. Pa spit tobacco juice in those ashes. He spit to the side, and Mama took her ashes from the center, but that didn’t make them seem any cleaner. Mama thought everything about Pa was wonderful, even his spit.

  Cleo made a face at Mama’s back, and then her face had to smile a little bit as she watched the dimples going in and out of Mama’s round arms. You could almost touch their softness with your eyes. A flush lay just under the surface, giving them a look of tender warmth. For all the loving in Mama’s arms, she had no time for it all day. Only at night, when her work was done, and her children in bed, you knew by Mama’s silver laughter that she was finding time for Pa.

  Mama loved Pa better than anyone. And what was left over from loving him was divided among her daughters. Divided even, Mama said whenever Cleo asked her. Never once would Mama say she loved one child the most.

  On their straggling way to the mill with Pa’s dinner, Cleo told her sisters about her wild ride. They were bewitched by her fanciful telling. Timid Lily forgot to watch where she was walking. Her toes uncurled. She snatched up a stick and got astride it.

  Serena clung to Charity’s hand to keep herself from flying. Cleo was carrying her away, and she wanted to feel the ground again. She wanted to take Pa his dinner, and go back home and play house.

  Charity saw a shining prince on a snow-white charger. The prince rode toward her, dazzling her eyes with light, coming nearer and nearer, leaning to swoop her up in his arms. And Cleo, looking at Charity’s parted lips and the glowing eyes, thought that Charity was seeing her riding the red horse into the sun.

  Her triumphant tale, in which she did not fall, but grandly dismounted to General Beauchamp’s applause, came to its thrilling conclusion. She turned and looked at Lily scornfully, because a stick was not a horse. Lily felt foolish, and let the stick fall, and stepped squish on an old fat worm. Serena freed her hand. Released from Cleo’s spell, she felt independent again. Charity’s shining prince vanished, and there was only Cleo, walking ahead as usual, forgetting to take back the bucket she had passed to Charity.

  Pa was waiting in the shade, letting the toil pour off him in perspiration. His tired face lightened with love when they reached him. He opened his dinner bucket and gave them each a taste. Nothing ever melted so good in their mouths as a bite of Pa’s victuals.

  He gave them each a copper, too, though he could hardly spare it, what with four of them to feed and Mama wanting yard goods and buttons and ribbons to keep herself feeling proud of the way she kept her children. Time was, he gave them kisses for toting his bucket. But the day Cleo brazenly said, I don’t want a kiss, I want a copper, the rest of them shamefacedly said it after her. Most times Pa had a struggle to dig down so deep. Four coppers a day, six days a week, was half a day’s pay gone up in smoke for candy.

  Pa couldn’t bring himself to tell Mama. She would have wrung out of him that Cleo had been the one started it. And Cleo was his eldest. A man who loved his wife couldn’t help loving his first-born best, the child of his fiercest passion. When that first-born was a girl, she could trample on his heart, and he would swear on a stack of Bibles that it didn’t hurt.

  The sisters put their coppers in their pinafore pockets and skipped back through the woods.

  Midway Cleo stopped and pointed to a towering oak. “You all wa
nt to bet me a copper I can’t swing by my feet from up in that tree?”

  Lily clapped her hands to her eyes. “I doesn’t want to bet you,” she implored. “I ain’t fixing to see you fall.”

  Serena said severely, “You bust your neck, you see if Mama don’t bust it again.”

  Charity said tremulously, “Cleo, what would us do if our sister was dead?”

  Cleo saw herself dressed up fine as Josie Beauchamp, stretched out in a coffin with her sisters sobbing beside it, and Pa with his Sunday handkerchief holding his tears, and Mama crying, I loved you best, Cleo. I never said it when you were alive. And I’m sorry, sorry, I waited to say it after you were gone.

  “You hold my copper, Charity. And if I die, you can have it.”

  Lily opened two of her fingers and peeped through the crack. “Cleo, I’ll give you mine if you don’t make me see you hanging upside down.” It was one thing to hear Cleo tell about herself. It was another thing to see her fixing to kill herself.

  “Me, too,” said Serena, with a little sob, more for the copper than for Cleo, whom she briefly hated for compelling unnecessary sacrifice.

  “You can have mine,” said Charity harshly. Her sweet tooth ached for a peppermint stick, and she almost wished that Cleo was dead.

  Cleo flashed them all an exultant smile. She had won their money without trying. She had been willing to risk her neck to buy rich Josie Beauchamp some penny candy. Now that it was too late to retrieve Josie Beauchamp’s lost hours of anxiety, Cleo wanted to carry her a bag of candy, so that when Josie got through with being glad, and got mad, she wouldn’t stay mad too long.

  She held out her hand. Each tight fist poised over her palm, desperately clung aloft, then slowly opened to release the bright coin that was to have added a special sweetness to the summer day.

  Cleo couldn’t bear to see their woe-begone faces. She felt frightened, trapped by their wounded eyes. She had to do something to change their expressions.

  “I’ll do a stunt for you,” she said feverishly. “I’ll swing by my hands. It ain’t nothing to be ascairt to see. You watch.”

  Quickly, agilely she climbed the tree and hung by her hands. Wildly, wildly she swung, to make them forget she had taken their money, to let them see how wonderful she was.

  Then a boy came by, just an ordinary knotted-headed, knobby-kneed boy. He looked at her and laughed, because to him a girl carrying on so crazy cut a funny figure. She wanted to kill him. He made her feel silly. She climbed down, and she knew he was watching her, watching the split in her drawers.

  When she reached the ground, she whirled to face him, and found his feet waving in front of her. He was walking on his hands. And her sisters were squealing with delight. They had seen her walk on her hands a thousand times. What was there so wonderful about watching a boy?

  She flung herself upon him, and they fought like dogs, the coppers lost irrecoverably. Her sisters circled them, crying and wringing their hands. She had to win, no matter how. She bent her head and butted him in the groin, where the weakness of boys was — the contradictory delicacy.

  The fight was knocked out of him. He lay very still, his hands shielding his innocent maleness from further assault, and the blood on his lips where his anguished teeth had sunk in.

  Her sisters fluttered around him. They felt no pride for her victory. Instead they pitied him. She watched them with wonder. What was there to being a boy? What was there to being a man? Men just worked. That was easier than what women did. It was women who did the lying awake, the planning, the sorrowing, the scheming to stretch a dollar. That was the hard part, the head part. A woman had to think all the time. A woman had to be smart.

  Her sisters weren’t smart. They thought Pa was the head of the house. They didn’t know the house was run by the beat of Mama’s heart. There was an awful lonesomeness in Cleo when Mama went across the river to Grandma’s. She did not want to be bad then. She wanted to be good so God would send Mama back safe. But she was wildly bad again the moment Mama returned. She could not bear the way she felt inside, like laughing and crying and kissing Mama’s face.

  She never kissed Mama. Kisses were silly. Pa kissed Mama when he came home from work. There was sweat on him from his labor, but Mama lifted her mouth to his. His mustache prickled against her lips, but Mama did not pull away.

  Looking at her sisters, standing above the suffering boy, she saw in each some likeness of Mama — in Charity the softness and roundness, the flush just under the thin skin, the silver laughter; in Lily the doe eyes, liquid and vulnerable, the plaited hair that kept escaping in curls; in small Serena the cherry-red mouth, the dimpled cheeks. She knew that she looked like Pa. Everyone said so. Everyone said she was a beauty. What was wrong with their seeing? How could looking like Pa, with his sweat and his stained mustache, make anybody a beauty? Sometimes she would stare at herself in Mama’s mirror and stick out her tongue.

  Now, seeing her sisters, with their tender faces turned toward the boy, a terrible sorrow assailed her. Some day they would all grow up. They would all get married and go away. They would never live together again, nor share the long bright busy days. Mama, too, would go. Mama would die. Didn’t she always say that her side of the family were not long livers? They were dead before they were fifty. Dead with their loveliness alive in their still, smooth faces. When Mama was gone in a last luminous moment, there would be the look of her and the silver laughter in the children she had blessed with her resemblance.

  So long as her sisters were within sight and sound, they were the mirrors in which she would see Mama. They would be her remembering of her happy, happy childhood.

  She flung herself down on the ground, and her torture was worse than the boy’s. For hers was spiritual suffering and immeasurable frustration. All her terror of the future, all her despair at knowing that nothing lasts — that sisters turn into wives, that men take their women and ride away, that childhood is no longer than a summer day — were in her great dry sobs.

  The boy staggered to his feet in complete alarm. He thought he had hurt her in some dreadful way mysterious to girls, her breast, her belly where the babies grew. Her father would skin him alive. He made a limping dash across the road and the trees closed in.

  Then her sisters knelt beside her, letting their soothing fingers caress her face. Her sobbing quieted. She jumped up and began to turn cartwheels. A wildness was in her. She was going to turn cartwheels all the way home, heretofore an impossible feat.

  Mama was in the doorway, watching her hurtle down a dusty road, seeing a girl eleven years old turning upside down, showing her drawers. Mama got the strap again and laid it on hard and heavy. Cleo just grinned, and wouldn’t wipe the grin off, even with the whole of her on fire and hurting. Mama couldn’t bear such impudence from her own flesh and blood. She let the strap fall and sat down and cried.

  Mama didn’t know what made Cleo so wild. Cleo got more of her attention than all of her other children put together. God help her when she grew up. God help the man who married her. God help her sisters not to follow in her footsteps. Better for her sisters if Cleo had never been born.

  Somewhere in Springfield, Massachusetts, at that moment, Bart Judson, a grown man, a businessman, too interested in the Almighty Dollar to give any thought to a wife, was certainly giving no thought to an eleven-year-old hell-raiser way down South. But for Bart, whose inescapable destiny this unknown hoyden was to be, it might have been better if her sisters had never been born.

  CHAPTER 3

  CLEO ARRIVED in Springfield three years later. She and Josie reached their teens within a month of each other. Cleo became the Kennedy kitchen help and caught her hair up in a bright bandana to keep it out of the cooking. Josie caught her hair up, too, but with pins and combs in the fashion. She put on a long dress and learned to pour tea in the parlor. Cleo learned to call her Miss Josephine, and never said anything that was harder.

  Providence appeared as an elderly spinster, a northern lady seek
ing sun for her sciatica. Cleo’s way home lay past her boarding place. She was entranced by Cleo’s beauty as she returned from work, her hair flying free, the color still staining her cheeks from the heat of the cookstove and the fire in her heart, and her eyes sea-green from her sullen anger at working in the white folks’ kitchen.

  Miss Peterson, hating to see this sultry loveliness ripen in the amoral atmosphere of the South, urged Mama to let her take Cleo North. Mama considered it an answer to prayer. With Cleo getting so grown, Mama’s heart stayed in her mouth. She didn’t know what minute Cleo might disgrace herself. The wildness in the child might turn to wantonness in the girl. And that would kill Pa. Better for him if she sent Cleo North with this strict-looking spinster.

  Cleo considered going North an adventure. Miss Josephine, who had never been outside of Carolina, would turn green with envy. In her secret sessions with her heartsick sisters, Cleo promised to send for them as soon as she got rich. She did not know how she was going to do it, but this boastful promise was more important than the performance.

  She had thought she was going to night school when she reached the North. But her conscientious custodian, seeing that Cleo looked just as vividly alive in Springfield as she had looked in South Carolina, decided against permitting her to walk down darkened streets alone. There were too many temptations along the way in the guise of coachmen and butlers and porters.

  Cleo’s time, between her easy chores, was spent in training her tongue to a northern twist, in learning to laugh with a minimum show of teeth, and in memorizing a new word in the dictionary every day.

  The things that Cleo never had to be taught were how to hold her head high, how to scorn sin with men, and how to keep her left hand from knowing what her right hand was doing.