JUST BEFORE SUNSET, STELLA’S AUNT PRATT WANTED HER steel fingernail file, and she knew exactly where it was (she knew where all her things were) in the shallow drawer of her dresser hopelessly across the room. She’d have to wait till somebody who could walk well came into the room. She’d already taken off her leg brace. Then she’d ask, very courteously, if that able person would please look in the top, flat, handkerchief drawer and get her steel fingernail file.
She’d just picture something else instead of her steel file: the little wooden carved rose embalmed in a clear plastic bar. The tiny rose pin was in a box on the bedside cart; Pratt could reach her jewelry if she wanted to. Stella had liked to pin the red rose on the hem of her short skirt when she was a little girl, so she could see it better than if it was up on her shoulder. With her small thumb, Stella—poor little orphan—would rub the plastic over the rose again and again, but the delicate rose was safe inside the plastic.
These days, when Stella came into the room, she surprised Pratt—Why, who was this grown girl? Hair flipped up so even all around from shoulder to shoulder. Pratt often forgot now that time was passing. It had been the 1940s and now it was almost the mid-1960s, and what had happened to the 1950s? What was she herself doing all that time while Stella was getting bigger? And why was it that she was worried about Stella?
Stella had graduated, but she was always going to school, still. To teach, she said. She had decided to teach black children, like a missionary. Was that what integration was? Stella seemed strained and thin, but Krit never noticed. Maybe Pratt imagined it. She spent her nights imagining now, and watching her stories on TV in the day.
The mirror over the old dresser was mottled and cast a darkness over anyone who looked in it. But a mirror could be resilvered, Pratt knew that. Someday, she’d have the big mirror brightened up and then it would flash, over there in the corner, like sunlight off the pond. Down at Helicon.
That day when Barney Chesser went mad from dog bite. The pond had flashed brightly that day. She’d noticed the brightness of the pond just before somebody—well, she knew who—had dashed in and said, Barney’s gone mad. He said for his sister to put down her iron—there in the front bedroom—to put down her iron and to pick up the twin babies and get out of there. Barney said he felt funny. He said Sis must lock the door.
The doctor had his lariat, and he had been west once and knew how to throw a lasso. They broke out the window and lassoed Barney and threw loops around the bed and tied him to the bed, all the time his head slinging back and forth, trying to bite, the foam flying. If the foam landed on an open sore, you were as good as bitten, and no hope for you.
And what could they do for Barney Chesser, bit by a mad dog?
He’ll bite off his tongue! one said. To prevent that, the doctor took his pearl-handled knife and stuck it between Barney’s teeth. And Barney bit the pearl handle in two.
By nightfall, he was dead. And Pratt, in her house across the street, folded her hands on the windowsill and watched them douse the house with kerosene. Except for what was in the mad room, they carried out all the furniture. Pratt watched the men hold their torches to the corners of the house. She stood there, her arms folded across the windowsill, with little Son beside her till Gene, her husband, came back, and they all three stood together to watch the house burn.
Before she left this afternoon, Stella had stood in front of the mirror primping, but what was that place she had mentioned going to? If y’all needed to find me, Cat Cartwright and I are working out at Miles College. I’d rather you not tell Aunt Krit, though.
Pratt remembered Barney’s sister Bernice, her only nineteen, snatching up her twin babies, hurrying, setting a baby on the floor once she was outside the front bedroom so she could lock the door. It would have been the big twin she sat down; she always carried him on the right, where she was stronger.
Sometimes Pratt felt the world was like Barney Chesser’s bedroom. Somebody was going to go mad. Like Hitler did. Pratt wished, if she could, that she’d be able to pick up what was most precious and get out of there, if that happened in Alabama. Watch the whole South burn up, from a safe distance.
Stella ought not be out late after dark with colored people, but Pratt would bite off her tongue before she’d say anything to Stella, or Krit, about it. “Mind your own business,” her mama had said, “if you want to get along with people.” Men had been killed over in Mississippi: two Yankees and a darkie. “Civil rights workers,” the TV had said.
Pratt ran her thumb over the top of the nail on her first finger. It had a split there; she could feel it. She wished she had her steel fingernail file.