Song of Solomon

me in the evenings.

“But it wasn’t that. I could put up with that, because I knew what I wanted, and pretty much how to get it. So I could put up with that. Did put up with it. It was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on. I tried to get him to spend some of that money out of those four banks once. Some track land was going for a lot of money— railroad money. Erie Lackawanna was buying. I had a good hunch where the track would be laid. I walked all around over there, the Shore Road, the docks, the fork in routes 6 and 2. I figured out just where the tracks would have to go. And found land I could have got cheap and sold back to the railroad agents. He wouldn’t lend me a dime. If he had, he would have died a rich man, instead of a fair-to-middling one. And I would have been way ahead. I asked your mother to talk him into it. I told her exactly where the Erie was headed. She said it had to be his decision; she couldn’t influence him. She told me, her husband, that. Then I began to wonder who she was married to—me or him.

“Well, he took sick.” Macon stopped, as though the mention of illness reminded him of his own frailty, and pulled a large white handkerchief out of his pocket. Gingerly he pressed it against the thin cut on his lip. He looked at the faint stain it made on his handkerchief. “All that ether,” he said, “must have got in his blood. They had another name for it, but I know it was that ether. He just lay down and started swelling up. His body did; his legs and arms just wasted away. He couldn’t see patients anymore, and for the first time in his life the pompous donkey found out what it was like to have to be sick and pay another donkey to make you well. One of them doctors, the one that was taking care of him—one of the same ones wouldn’t let him set foot in their hospital, and who, if he had delivered their daughter’s or wife’s baby, had even thought of it, would have run him out of here on a rail—one of them, the ones he thought worth his attention, well, he came in here with some magic potion, Radiathor, and told him it would cure him. Ruth was all excited. And for a few days he was better. Then he got sicker. Couldn’t move, holes were forming in his scalp. And he just lay there in that bed where your mother still sleeps and then he died there. Helpless, fat stomach, skinny arms and legs, looking like a white rat. He couldn’t digest his food, you know. Had to drink all his meals and swallow something after every meal. I believe to this day that was ether too.

“The night he died, I’d been over on the other side of town, fixing a porch that fell down. Mr. Bradlee’s house. Porch had been leaning for twenty years, and then just fell down, split clean away from the foundation. I got some men to help me and went over there to get it back up so the people wouldn’t have to jump to get out the house and climb up three feet to get in it. Somebody tiptoed up to me and said, ‘Doctor died.’ Ruth, they said, was upstairs with him. I figured she was upset and went up right away to comfort her. I didn’t have time to change clothes from working on the porch, but I went up anyway. She was sitting in a chair next to his bed, and the minute she saw me she jumped up and screamed at me, ‘You dare come in here like that? Clean yourself! Clean up before you come in here!’ It vexed me some, but I do respect the dead. I went and washed up. Took a bath, put on a clean shirt and collar, and went back in.” Macon paused again and touched his cut lip as though that were where the pain that showed in his eyes was coming from.

“In the bed,” he said, and stopped for so long Milkman was not sure he was going to continue. “In the bed. That’s where she was when I opened the door. Laying next to him. Naked as a yard dog, kissing him. Him dead and white and puffy and skinny, and she had his fingers in her mouth.

“Now, I want you to know I had a terrible time after that. I started thinking all sorts of things. If Lena and Corinthians were my children. I come to know pretty quick they were, cause it was clear that bastard couldn’t fuck nothing. Ether took care of whatever he had in that area long before I got there. And he wouldn’t have been so worried about what color skin they had unless they were coming from me. Then I thought about his delivering Ruth’s babies. I’m not saying that they had contact. But there’s lots of things a man can do to please a woman, even if he can’t fuck. Whether or not, the fact is she was in that bed sucking his fingers, and if she do that when he was dead, what’d she do when he was alive? Nothing to do but kill a woman like that. I swear, many’s the day I regret she talked me out of killing her. But I wasn’t looking forward to spending the rest of my days on some rock pile. But you see, Macon, sometimes I can’t catch hold of myself quick enough. It just gets out. Tonight, when she said, ‘Yes, I am my daddy’s daughter,’ and gave that little smirk…” Macon looked up at his son. The door of his face had opened; his skin looked iridescent. With only a minor break in his voice, he told him, “I am not a bad man. I want you to know that. Or believe it. No man ever took his responsibilities more seriously than I have. I’m not making claims to sainthood, but you have to know it all. I’m forty years older than you and I don’t have another forty in me. Next time you take it into your head to jump me, I want you to think about the man you think you whipping. And think about the fact that next time I might not let you. Old as I am, I might not let you.”

He stood up and pushed his handkerchief into his back pocket.

“Don’t say anything now. But think about everything I’ve said.”

Macon turned the doorknob, and without a backward glance, left the room.

Milkman sat on the edge of his bed; everything was still except for the light buzzing in his head. He felt curiously disassociated from all that he had heard. As though a stranger that he’d sat down next to on a park bench had turned to him and begun to relate some intimacy. He was entirely sympathetic to the stranger’s problems— understood perfectly his view of what had happened to him—but part of his sympathy came from the fact that he himself was not involved or in any way threatened by the stranger’s story. It was quite the opposite from the feeling he’d had an hour or less ago. The alien who had just walked out of his room was also the man he felt passionately enough about to strike with all the fervor he could summon up. Even now he could feel the tingle in his shoulder that had signaled the uncontrollable urge to smash his father’s face. On the way upstairs to his room he had felt isolated, but righteous. He was a man who saw another man hit a helpless person. And he had interfered. Wasn’t that the history of the world? Isn’t that what men did? Protected the frail and confronted the King of the Mountain? And the fact that the frail was his mother and the King of the Mountain his father made it more poignant, but did not change the essential facts. No. He would not pretend that it was love for his mother. She was too insubstantial, too shadowy for love. But it was her vaporishness that made her more needful of defense. She was not a maternal drudge, her mind pressed flat, her shoulders hunched under the burden of housework and care of others, brutalized by a bear of a man. Nor was she the acid-tongued shrew who defended herself with a vicious vocabulary and a fast lip. Ruth was a pale but complicated woman given to deviousness and ultra-fine manners. She seemed to know a lot and understand very little. It was an interesting train of thought, and new for him. Never had he thought of his mother as a person, a separate individual, with a apart from allowing or interfering with his own.

Milkman put on his jacket and left the house. It was seven-thirty in the evening and not yet dark. He wanted to walk and breathe some other air. He wouldn’t know what to feel until he knew what to think. And it was difficult thinking in that room where the silver-backed brushes with the M.D. initials shone in the light and where the chair his father had just sat in still held the imprint of his buttocks in the cushion. As the stars made themselves visible, Milkman tried to figure what was true and what part of what was true had anything to do with him. What was he supposed to do with this new information his father had dumped on him? Was it an effort to cop a plea? How was he supposed to feel about the two of them now? Was it true, first of all? Did his mother…had his mother made it with her own father? Macon had said no. That the doctor was impotent. How did he know? Well, he must have known what he was talking about, because he was much too eager for it to be true to let it go if there were any possibility it could have taken place. Still, he had admitted there were “other things” a man could do to please a woman. “Goddam,” Milkman said aloud. “What the fuck did he tell me all that shit for?” He didn’t want to know any of it. There was nothing he could do about it. The doctor was dead. You can’t do the past over.

Milkman’s confusion was rapidly turning to anger. “Strange motherfuckers,” he whispered. “Strange.” If he