“AS LESS AND LESS MONEY CAME INTO OUR COMmunity, the more it seemed that men felt the desire to be perfectly wild with women. Every week it seemed that we heard a new tale of a man putting his foot wrong. I even still tend to associate unfaithfulness with desperation, each urge attached to the other like moss on bark.
The Crash daily drilled the idea into some people’s heads that they were destined never to have anything. Automobiles, food, housing, and children’s shoes cost more money than many men on Milk Farm Road simply had, but Willifordtown mill tarts presented themselves for so little that they may as well have been free. All a community needed was one tart to make men feel like they’d survived the Crash with a measure of looks and attraction, which wasn’t the same as cash solvency but gave the same sort of thrill as unbridled spending.
Sade Duplin, who had never hurt anybody, had to contend with a tart. She was already on the verge of losing the farm her father had passed to her, and then she was handed the task of putting her roving husband back in order. One morning she became overwrought in our home and thus ignored my youthful presence in telling her very chilling affairs to my mother.
She said, Since nature left me Roy has lost interest.
Sade had taken a hysterectomy early and had thus been thrown into the change, and Roy apparently viewed her as suddenly old. My mother said this was ridiculous, and then she asked Sade what she planned to do about this girl, as if Sade had commented on fleas or ants or spider mites, and my mother was curious as to Sade’s preference of straight boric acid or mint jellied arsenic. Have you ever had this problem before? What do you think will work best on it?
Sade told her that there wasn’t anything she could do, that she didn’t have what it took to throw Roy back in line. By the time Roy dragged home off a date past midnight, Sade’s hard day had long sucked and drained her of the energy it would take to deal with him. My mother, however, abounded in energy, and though she said nothing to Sade, I could see that she intended to do something large to rectify the situation.
The only thing cheaper than a next-to-free tart was talk, so my mother decided Sade’s interests could best be served by passing about a very nasty story of this Willifordtown girl’s negative Wassermann reaction. And in two nights Roy was home before dark, no doubt tortured over the prospects of his own health, probably scouring the insides of his cheeks for white patches and making up reasons why Sade shouldn’t sleep next to him, which she must have lost her taste for doing the minute he put his foot wrong.
Soon he eased back into his work. My mother didn’t mention the problem specifically again to Sade and certainly not her solution. She merely let nature take its course. And when she one day asked Sade very casually how things were at home, she answered, Fine. Although Roy still stood at the front of the store and boomed, Come on! and yanked Sade away from rummy, we all simply took this as a sign that their lives were moving back to normal.
But then the next year Roy was murdered, and while dead is dead and crisis enough, murder always seems worse. My mother had commented to me several times that Roy was more or less a lightning rod for tragedy. Besides taking company with another woman and treating his wife so nastily in public, he also had a reputation for whipping his work animals without mercy, and we had always heard that a man who imposes on animals will soon be imposed upon himself. As well, he robbed his tenants blind and had absolutely no race manners. All in all, he was more or less an unsavory person.
Everything happened on a Friday evening. My mother and I were at a hundred-year-old lady’s birthday dinner, when John Carroll, who served as a part-time deputy sheriff, came in the house and asked to borrow my mother from the party. I remember him being very serious in fending off everyone’s cake offers. He talked in my mother’s ear, and I can still see all those women, including myself and the hundred-year-old lady, staring, trying to make out his lips.
Everybody went to the coat closet with my mother and took a hand in slipping on her jacket. She whispered to us that the trouble was at Sade Duplin’s house. Sade sent word for John to bring me when he goes to the house. It appears that Roy has just been shot and killed. We all thought, Oooo! though we tried to hide it.
My mother made me wait, oh, years, for all the details of exactly how Roy was imposed upon. And then after she finally told me everything, she made me swear not to tell, which was like asking me to carry a bomb in my mouth. As much as we both enjoyed talk, this is one thing that simply couldn’t be told with Sade alive and perfectly a sitting duck for justice, but now I can be free to tell.
My mother said that she and John Carroll got to the Duplin house about eight-thirty and found Roy Duplin simply shot to pieces in the yard. Sade was drooped all over the kitchen table, crying, with both hands in front of her on the table, turning them over and under, over and under, watching them through her crying as if she expected a surprise to appear the next turn. She appeared very glad to see my mother and soon calmed her flipping hands. John left the two women inside and then he went about outside looking for his clues. But while he was in the yard crouched over with a lantern, searching for bullet casings and footprints and all the other kinds of things a man would naturally look for, my mother was inside fixing Sade chamomile tea and getting ideas.
She noticed right away that Sade’s plate was dirty and Roy’s plate was clean. The solitary pot on the stove was covered, but she smelled a nice beef stew. There was a pie on the counter and only one piece had been cut out, not a man’s serving but the size of piece a woman will have when she just wants a little sliver. And it had been removed neatly, which made it a woman’s slice all the more.
Then my mother left Sade at the table sipping on her tea and strolled about the house. She looked into the back bedroom and noticed a half-finished quilt on the loom and naturally had to examine it. Sade had been describing her new Dutch doll variation for weeks and everyone’s curiosity was up. So my mother naturally started looking at it and admiring it, and then she saw that the last twenty or thirty stitches were very wild and uneven and made no sense at all. She thought, A woman would have to be extremely disturbed to sew that raggedly, and she would have to be sheerly distracted out of her mind to leave this slipshod stitching in. Then she sat down on a stool and pulled out the ugly stitches and fixed them right, listening all the time to Sade wailing in the kitchen.
My mother had been to her share of funerals and knew the varying pitches of wives’ wails, the sounds made for husbands corrupted with cancer, knocked down by strokes and heart attacks, bitten by water moccasins, or gored by crazy bulls. In our community, these were the ways men had died. There wasn’t a great deal of variety in the way people lived or died, either one. When she heard Sade’s very peculiar cry, she said to herself, This is neither the cry of a woman startled by death or relieved that it has finally come.
Then she imagined how she would sound if she’d just murdered my father, which may or may not have taken a great deal of imagination, and this is what she heard coming from the kitchen. She heard a woman being afraid, in the main, of being caught. Then she knew exactly what had happened. She said she could see everything that had taken place.
Sade had waited for Roy to come in on time for supper and finally she gave up and ate alone. She waited some more and then went ahead and had dessert. By the time a woman eats pie alone she has long been pushed past her point. Sade cooked lavish pies. Pies and cakes take a great deal of trouble and historically have never been viewed as something merely to eat. Forced to eat by herself, this was exactly the nonchalant way Sade was being asked to view her craft.
So there she sat alone, thinking about the insult of Roy not coming to the house for supper, in light of the fact that for years he had rudely jerked her away from her friends in the prime of her Saturday afternoons. And she probably thought about him with his Willifordtown girl and wondered if she was why he was late, as she had been many, many times before. And she had to, I’m sure, think about how Roy had run her two oldest children away from home. She probably sat and picked at her nice pie and went over every other humiliation and embarrassment, both public and private, though most likely dwelling on the public times.
And then when Roy still didn’t come in, she got up and went to work on her quilt while she still had a little bit of light. The room with the quilt had a nice west window. Sitting there at her loom, Sade got madder and madder about the supper and the day and her general life with Roy and without her children. And seeing him walk down the path towards the house, her stitches veered and jerked about on her pattern chalk line. Roy probably saw her too, and he probably yelled something at her in his throaty raspy voice.
Then the thought more than likely dawned on Sade of how easy it would be to kill him and be rid of him. And then she took the shotgun out from under the bed and propped the gun on the windowsill and shot Roy a few times, probably in the midst of his yapping at her. Then she collected the casings and moved them where she saw fit, cleaned and reloaded the gun and put it back under the bed, and waited for it to cool down before she sent for help.
When John Carroll asked her what she knew about Roy’s death, she reported that she had stepped down through the wheat field to the pond to sit after supper, and then when she got back to the house she found Roy. My mother said she glanced down at Sade’s cotton stockings but saw no picks nor burrs nor dandelion seedwings. Sade also reported about a rover her husband had run off from prowling about that morning, and in describing the man she was careful to describe a thousand men on the tramp. Men on the tramp weren’t uncommon, and sharing everyone’s view of rovers, John Carroll remarked, The fellow must have gotten a gun and come back mad.
He didn’t know to examine cotton stockings for briar picks, and he didn’t know how to see and judge clean and dirty plates, slivers of cut pie, wild stitches, and wailing. This had more to do with the fact that he was full-time male than it did with the fact that he was merely part-time deputy and neither bright nor curious. Details escaped him.
He put together a shoddy search for the rover, which was stopped soon after it started when my father and other men said getting their crops in the house was more urgent than looking for an unknown who was surely already up as far as Baltimore. And their unspoken attitude was also: And besides, Roy was such a sonofabitch.
After Roy was buried, several of us went and helped Sade dole out his clothes to some colored men, and what they didn’t want she pressed them to take anyway. She cleaned out his belongings very quickly. Then we all had pie, and at the time I didn’t think about it, but now I know why my mother was making overmuch of the crust.
Neighborhood women took turns staying with Sade for weeks and weeks after Roy died. She was afraid to stay in the house alone, which with hindsight isn’t surprising. We had all heard, Mean in life, meaner in death. Some nights Sade’s companions had to dose her up with double and triple doses of paregoric to get her to sleep. Fear of seeing Roy Duplin or John Carroll either one at her window was more than enough to make Sade lose her reason, but she didn’t.
After a while she regained her bearings. She got clearer and clearer-eyed and more and more calm, and if I had only met her for the first time I wouldn’t have believed a word of her secret. In fact, I’m sure people actually meeting her anew put her in the category of women who chose a single life, who live in the same house with a cat or a bird or the like all their lives and seem to be so content with everything so still. And later, once word spread that Roy was gone, Sade’s oldest children came back and visited and kept coming back visiting, bringing boxes of stockings and sea foam taffy and a damask bed jacket and all sorts of other wonderful things.
As months passed, Sade used all the money she discovered hoarded and made Roy’s room over into a pretty little parlor. Living, he’d never let her have a smidgen of fluff. She put the quilt on a daybed in this room, and although my mother was in this room and touched this quilt maybe five hundred times, she and Sade never said a word to each other about the fixed reckless stitching.