The Living is Easy Read online

  When Bart reached home, he got his banana out of the kitchen safe and carried it to the table, where Mary sat rocking and resting and humming a paean to Jesus. Carefully he peeled the fruit, watching the petals fall away, revealing the delicate filament of their undersides. Mary bent forward to stare at the slender, golden-white spear. It was small and uncultivated, but firm-fleshed, and its heavy exotic odor struck some dormant stream of atavistic longing for the breast of jungle earth.

  “Take a big bite, Mam,” Bart said generously, and held the fruit to her dreaming mouth.

  She bit into it and chomped with delight. Bart’s square white teeth cut out a cylinder, and the taste ran down his throat like milk and melted butter and honey.

  “Mam,” he said reverently, “I reckon this tastes like manna mus’ taste in heaven.”

  All night he dreamed on his narrow bed of bananas and Boston and ships setting sail from Jamaica.

  Now, staring out across Boston Harbor, he was troubled by his dream of the night before. He had dreamed that the Lucy Evelyn had foundered, and her cargo of thirty thousand stems had washed out of the hold and plunged heavily to the bottom of the sea. He had waked in a cold sweat, with the cries of drowning men in his ears, and his eyes still seeing the helpless ship and her sunken cargo.

  He believed in his dreams. To him they were visions, and were the Lord’s way of making revelations. Still, the Lucy Evelyn was a stout ship, as were all the big banana boats that plied between the West Indies and Boston and Central America and New York and New Orleans under the charter of the Consolidated Fruit Company, bringing a prize crop of highly cultivated fruit from the banana plantations of the leveled jungles to the tables of North America all the seasons of the year.

  The weather this morning was sunny and clear. There had been no reports of a storm sweeping up the Atlantic to force the Lucy Evelyn off her course. Her run was seven days or eight, and this was the morning of the eighth day. She had until sundown to keep within running time.

  But on his way to the dock, Bart had detoured to the office of the Consolidated Fruit Company. He had barged in on their busy representatives, who had assured him that they had had no unfavorable word from the Lucy Evelyn, who would make port sometime that day as she had been doing, fair weather or foul, for ten years. Bart had not been reassured. The premonition was too strong in him. God was too surely signifying.

  He believed in God. He believed in himself and he believed in God. There was constant communion between them, and he never doubted for a moment that God spent a lot of His time looking out for his interests. His conversion had come when he was seventeen, and his faith had deepened with the years of his prosperity. He rarely went to the South End church of his faith because Cleo would never go with him. The congregation was largely composed of transplanted Southerners, hard-working simple worshipers, who broadly hinted, to Bart’s embarrassment, that his wife considered herself too good for them. He was a shouting Baptist, and Cleo thoroughly disapproved. She had never felt the spirit, and he supposed she never would. Her Episcopalian friends were persuading her to their wishy-washy way of worship. They really believed you could get to heaven without any shouting.

  He remembered how his mother had worried until he wrestled with the Devil. Their blessings had increased beyond her greatest expectations. They owned a home and a horse and buggy. Their restaurant employed five in help. Fried chicken was their specialty, and they catered to supper parties. Mary’s mattress was lined with money. She spent most of her free time on her knees, thanking God for His generosity.

  She did not think Bart gave God enough credit. Bart couldn’t see where God figured in. Their success was their own doing. But Mary was afraid that Bart might be tempted by the Devil to throw his money away in riotous living if he did not walk with God by his side. They went to church, and the spirit did not move him. He sat in sinners’ row with the other unsaved souls, and none of the singing and shouting sent him to his knees.

  One Sabbath dawn Mary shook him awake. He opened his eyes and stared sleepily at her transfigured face.

  “Bart,” she commanded, “kneel and pray.”

  He blinked in bewilderment and burrowed deeper into his pillow.

  She went on in a breathless singsong, “De Lawd, He come in a vision, and I see His eyes running over with tears of blood, and I hear His voice like a mournful pleading, ‘Mary, Mary, wake your child and teach him to pray.’ ”

  He peeped at her over the edge of the sheet. She began to moan, strangely and beautifully. Her small spare body rocked back and forth. Her tears were streaming.

  He was frightened and stirred. He reached for her hand. “Mam, Mam, I can’t find Jesus. I search’ in the Bible. He warn’t there! I search’ one night in the lonesome graveyard, and I heard the ha’nts wail. But I couldn’t find Jesus. He warn’t there!”

  Mary beat upon her breasts. “Search your heart, my son!”

  His face was tortured. It was screwed up in a desperate agony of straining toward God. An icy chill rushed over him.

  Mary persisted inexorably: “Can’t you hear de rush of wings? Can’t you hear de los’ lambs bleating on de hills? Can’t you hear de Marster’s voice, ‘Come up higher. Sinner, rise! Come up higher. Sinner rise!’? Ain’t you feel de monstrous light what strike and blind? Ain’t you heart rise up in your mouth, and your conscience stab like a sword? Can’t you see de little Jesus holding out His bleeding hands, and de water and blood gushing out of His side? Rise, my son, rise!”

  He was swept out on the tide of her passion. She began again her strange sweet moaning. He found himself swaying. Music surged through him. He flung back the covers and stood erect. His face became radiant.

  Mary stared at him, still now and watchful.

  The music grew. Suddenly there emanated from his heart a voice of matchless purity singing over and over, “Kind Jesus, kind Jesus, thy servant waits on the Lord.”

  He stretched out his hands and groped toward the open window. Mary did not touch him. She would rather have seen him fling himself out than disturb the mysterious ways of God.

  In the half-light, with the little bird calling, Bart saw the vision. He saw the heavens split asunder, and God with a crown on His long white hair, and His face too powerful for the eyes of man. God in a chariot with golden wheels and golden spokes that shone like a thousand glittering suns.

  And Bart saw the Devil wrestling with a boy, and the boy was Bart. All around them the red flames leaped like horrible licking tongues. The Devil had gained the uppermost hand, for what with the fire and the face of God the boy could not see.

  The Lord said, “Satan, let my servant go!” The sound of that voice was a peal of thunder. The Devil clapped his hands to his ringing ears. His proud tail shriveled between his legs. He fell into outermost darkness without a mumbling word.

  The boy began to plead toward that blinding light for mercy on his soul. God in His chariot barred the way to the gates of gold. The boy pleaded, “Lord God, have mercy!” But God was stern.

  Then the boy saw Jesus standing in the gates with the crown of thorns on His head, the mark of the nails in His bleeding hands and His bleeding feet, and the water and blood in a sad stream down His side. The face of Jesus was the face of a little child. Bart stretched out a humble hand, and Jesus smiled. Jesus spoke in a voice like a rippling brook. Jesus said, “Father, forgive this poor sinner. For him I done suffer and die. Forgive him as I have forgive him. Bid him enter into Thy kingdom.”

  God was soothed. God said gently, “Come, my son.” The boy ran along beside that chariot into the kingdom of heaven.

  Bart cried out in a loud voice, “Hallelujah! I been redeemed! The Lord is my savior! I been redeemed!”

  The great tears sluiced down Mary’s smiling face.

  That was the hour that Bart got religion. From that day on, God walked beside him like a natural man.

  A mournful wail cut across Bart’s thinking. Who-ee, Who-ee! and the sound was a soul in torm
ent. It was the Lucy Evelyn giving up the ghost and going to meet the mermaids of the sea. For a moment Bart brooded over this poignant fancy, then he struck his fist in the palm of his hand and muttered softly, “Great Scott! I see now, Lord.”

  His suppliant attitude changed to furious energy. The Lucy Evelyn had sunk. He had no doubt of that at all now, nor any more time or pity to waste on her. The who-ee, who-ee, was the whistle of a train pulling into South Station. It was also a sign from God.

  He streaked through the crowded market. The cobbled streets and narrow sidewalks struck crashing cymbals of fierce activity against his seasoned ear. The rumble of wagon wheels was continuous, and drivers cursed each other as they tried to thread their huge loads and huge horses through the nearly impassable lanes. Pushcart peddlers were everywhere, balancing their beautiful pyramids of showy fruit and making a precarious way out of the market center to the street corners of Boston. Wagoners, bound for the alleyways of suburbs and housewives at kitchen windows, beat against the incoming traffic, and here and there a horse reared in protest.

  Curb salesmen shouted their wares, their piled-up produce blocking the sidewalks along with retail buyers inspecting the open crates. Wholesalers stood in their doorways watching the truckers unload their freight. Faneuil Hall was a droning hive in and out of which darted agile jobbers to inform the busy sellers, at their rented stalls, of merchandise en route by train or boat from every corner of the country and the farthest reaches of the earth.

  The scent of fruit and vegetables struck the morning freshness from the air and substituted the headiness of summer produce. Color overwhelmed the eye, glowing apples, golden apricots, oranges, lemons, green avocados, cream-yellow cantaloupes, purple plums, buttery pears, prickletop pineapples, wine-red cherries, blush peaches, sweet Georgia melons, dust-brown figs, the dark oblong of dates, and the last of the season’s strawberries.

  Out of crates and barrels and bags and boxes poured summer squash, asparagus, broccoli, beets, artichokes, onions, lettuce, peas, cucumbers, peppers, potatoes, corn, string beans, spinach, tomatoes, and limas in the more modest livery of vegetables.

  Italian faces, Greek faces, Jewish faces, and Yankee faces swirled past Bart as he ducked a box of apples and slid around a side of beef. He was in frantic search of his broker. He was going to tell Pennywell to wire every jobber in New York and Philadelphia until he got enough favorable answers for two carlots of bananas. There would be a banana shortage in Boston. He believed this with everything in him. He would corner the market and make a killing while his competitors were feverishly canvassing the concerns that had already sent him their limit.

  CHAPTER 7

  CLEO AND JUDY came out of the subway at Scollay Square and turned toward the market center. Cleo felt a sharp distaste at the surge and clangor around her that made her pause at every store front where a man might come charging out of a doorway to brush aside any women or children who stood in the path of commerce.

  Here in the market was all the maleness of men. This was their world in which they moved without the command of women. The air hung heavy with their male smell and the pungent odor of their sweat. Their rolled-up sleeves showed the ripple of their hard muscles. Their thin, wet shirts outlined their iron backs. Curses ran lightly over their lips, wonderful expressive words that Cleo stored in the back of her head. As she neared them, their eyes approved and dismissed her, because they were too busy for long appraisal of anything that could not be bought and sold in the Boston Market.

  Cleo, walking carefully over the cobblestones that tortured her toes in her stylish shoes, was jealous of all the free-striding life around her. She had nothing with which to match it but her wits. Her despotic nature found Mr. Judson a rival. He ruled a store and all the people in it. Her sphere was one untroublesome child, who gave insufficient scope for her tremendous vitality. She would show Mr. Judson that she could take a house and be its heart. She would show him that she could bend a houseful of human souls to her will. It had never occurred to her in the ten years of her marriage that she might be his helpmate. She thought that was the same thing as being a man’s slave.

  She had told Mr. Judson on the night of their marriage that she wasn’t born to lick the boots of anybody living. It was dawn before she got through telling him what she would and wouldn’t do, and by then it was time for him to get up and go downtown to regulate the heat in his banana rooms.

  It was not a long walk to Scollay Square down Cornhill to Market Street, through an area which at some point or other touched the tortuous streets and squares which had rung to the heels of disembarked British soldiers, and had heard John Hancock read aloud to a listening world the articles of independence.

  Bart’s basement store was on the south side of Market Street, directly across from Faneuil Hall, in the busiest trading section of the district. Cleo looked exasperatedly at the flight of unswept stairs down which she must descend, seeing the slippery trail of peels and pulps of the morning’s fast and furious unloading. She remembered the elegance of the ice-cream parlor in Springfield and the polished fruit behind plate glass. She saw herself sweeping through the high arch with a reverent friend at heel, whom she had favored with a ribbon-tied basket of beautiful fruit, and whom she now led to a center table, as a black boy dashed forward to pull out their chairs and fashionable white folks whispered across their silver dishes that the best-dressed one was the owner’s wife.

  As she gathered up her skirts to show her disdain of the dirty steps and guided Judy down them with exaggerated care, Cleo felt distinctly peevish. There wasn’t a decent chair to sit on in the sunless rooms below, and all that fruit piled everywhere you looked made you sick of the sight of it.

  The bookkeeper’s small, gaslit office was just to the left of the entrance. Through the narrow glass window with its small slot for the intake of money, Cleo saw Bart talking excitedly to Miss Muldoon and Christian Christianson, his manager. They were looking rapt while he told a long-winded tale. Cleo could not bear to see him being indulged by their undivided attention.

  “Mr. Judson,” she called imperiously.

  He jerked around, then his whole face splintered into smiles. He opened the office door and rushed forward, holding out his arms to Judy.

  She flung herself into them, and he swung her up. His mustache tickled as he planted a large wet kiss on her cheek. She hugged him hard and uttered little sighs of adoration.

  “Put her down,” said Cleo jealously.

  He set her down quickly and stretched out his hand to smooth her mussed frock. He saw his grimy palm. Judy seized his hand before he could conceal it and cuddled her cheek against his arm. He looked at Cleo guiltily, then he said gently to Judy, “Let go papa’s hand. Papa’s not clean enough to touch you. If I’d known my best girl was coming, I’d have washed up.”

  She did not release him. “You’re my papa,” she said loyally. “I don’t care if you’re dirty. I like the way you smell.”

  Bart squeezed his armpits against his side, and his eyes appealed to Cleo. She saw how alike he and Judy were, and this likeness, which might denote a similarity in their souls, irritated her so much that she jerked Judy to her and smoothed her so hard that it was like spanking.

  “A little Boston lady doesn’t discuss the way people smell,” she scolded, and she glared at Mr. Judson, thinking angrily that he stank like a ram.

  “Come speak to Miss Muldoon and Chris,” Bart said quickly. “They see you so seldom.” He lowered his voice and said urgently to Cleo, “Act nice.”

  He led the way into the office. Chris shooed Jinks, the rat-catcher, off a rickety chair. Bart took a fruit-stained handkerchief out of his pocket and dusted it. Presently Cleo was gingerly seated on its edge, with Judy leaning hard against her knee because Jinks was a large and formidable cat.

  “It’s nice to see you again, Mrs. Judson,” Chris said delightedly. He was Swedish, and he felt no embarrassment in the presence of a beautiful Negro woman. He did not know that
she was not his equal, and he was charmed to see a striking face so early in the day.

  “It’s nice to see you,” said Cleo, giving him a brilliant smile. She thought his blond good looks were wasted on anything as lowly as a man. But she could not resist feeling flattered by his obvious pleasure at seeing her.

  “How are you, Mrs. Judson?” Miss Muldoon said warily from her perch beside the money till. She had been Bart’s bookkeeper for fifteen years. She had been middle-aged when she met him and now she was nearly old. It had never occurred to her in her wildest dreams to want to be the wife of a colored man, but she had had a vague resentment when Bart married Cleo Jericho. She had felt that any woman so young and pretty was hardly the right sort of wife for a hard-working, sober-minded man. She preferred to picture Negro women as fat, black, and plain-faced. It upset her when Mrs. Judson condescended to put in her brief and radiant appearances. At such times she felt unhappy that she helped to gild the lily.

  “I’m very well, thank you,” Cleo said sweetly. “I’ve thought about you all summer, and hoped you were standing the heat.”

  She thought about Miss Muldoon summer and winter, and never with concern about her constitution. She was certain that Miss Muldoon was stealing Mr. Judson’s money. She could not imagine that Miss Muldoon might not be tempted. Often it preyed on Cleo’s mind that Miss Muldoon had access to that money till, and she had not.

  “Hasn’t my little girl grown, Miss Muldoon?” Bart asked proudly.

  “She’s a walking doll,” said Miss Muldoon warmly, for it always pleased her to see that Judy was not a beauty like her mother.

  “She’s you all over, Bart,” Chris said happily. Bart was the first black man he had known in his life. After five years he was still enchanted with him.

  “We’re going to live in a great big house,” said Judy, excited by all the eyes upon her, and eager to say something important.

  “You got it all right?” Bart asked Cleo. “No trouble about the rent?”