XVII

A Long Row to Hoe

Nine months is a long pregnancy in the best of conditions. Given the inside-out adaptation to the tenuous new world of our making, the seconds ticked off one at a time. But then nine months would soon enough prove incidental to the years remaining. Nothing would change for the better after the birth; our days and nights would thicken with sleep deprivation, baby shit, bawling and the end of romance, as it were. Surely to follow would be the end of all else between us.

That’s how it was, peaches and cream one sunny day to cold porridge that night. I knew the score, that Aníse was practically a generation my junior, and though she could rouse a head of steam I’d thought long gone, I knew what her skills would come to. Wadmalaw women were fat, some of them waddling fat, and they bore none of the salacious charm I’d been drawn to. What could a woman her age do to get her shape back after a pregnancy?

Well, Aníse was different, drawn from a gene pool with a French undercurrent. She’d held up physically into her forty-second year, so maybe her charms would hold to the future too. I considered asking if she had a picture of her mother. But you can’t do that, because they know and cry their eyes out, so I asked if either her grandmother or her mother had enjoyed an active life. She said no, her grandmother Rochelle couldn’t, after she got too fat. And her mother Julia blew up like a house even younger, she was so depressed when Aníse left for Wadmalaw.

I said it was good that we ate sensibly and maybe ought to hold off with the lard, bacon, fatback, pork butt, ham and chops every damn day, maybe ease off the grits and cancel the hushpuppies. She cried and called me a cold-hearted man.

Judging a woman by physical standards is harsh and reflects a failure to evolve with the beauty within. I was guilty in part; I loved her within, but the social challenge would be tough enough without Aníse going native. Then again, I had the cash to set her up comfortable in a home of her own, and like Isaac Mikell, her great-great-grandfather as the story was told, I too could more easily tolerate a yard child on the creek banks. We’d still have our private times. So what difference could it make?

We know now that most things do make a difference right up to the last gasp. Isaac Mikell came to rue his bit of heaven on earth, as told by Jim Cohen. But that story had no bearing a hundred twenty years later, nor did Jim Cohen intend it as a warning. Isaac Mikell got his come-uppance in syphilis and a lost war. I’d accepted the loss, had never considered sexual intercourse with animals, and I’d walked away from my empire. But the biggest difference between Isaac Mikell and me was in our hearts and minds. He wasn’t mean to his slaves but viewed them as less than human, at least with regard to his own convenience. I didn’t want to hurt Aníse or Jim Cohen in any way. I wanted to help them. And that’s where the dilemma came up, since I didn’t want to hurt myself either. I felt exposed to ruination. I felt that bearing up to the responsibilities of fatherhood until after the birth would ease things to the point where money would clear me. I wasn’t the first to think of this solution; Aníse suggested it in the same minute she informed me of her condition, our condition.

But no matter how clearly a story unfolds, every good plot thickens. Of course Aníse gained weight; she was preggers after all. The average baby runs what, six to eight pounds at birth, and then you have all that other stuff adding up quick, especially if the woman is prone to swelling. Aníse got big in the legs and arms; mostly water weight was what the midwife said. It jiggled but didn’t look all that bad in the dark. Her breasts got stupendous, and the stretch marks broke through her perfect blackness. Near midterm she lactated, changing the nature of our intimacy with breast milk freely flowing. She made a joke one time, squirting me across the room; like I say, she made that joke one time. I’d left the prudish, humorless side of life behind, but that was disgusting. Moreover, I felt more like Isaac Mikell and every other satyr as reality gained voltage with the added pounds, the hormonally charged emotions and the spurious intimacy, degenerating to compulsive sexual service.

Aníse was afraid to hurt the baby, afraid I’d hurt the baby, yet a man needs relief—her words, her sentiment. I assured her I’d gone long periods abstemiously prior to our acquaintance, but she’d have none of that. I thought yet again of calling Eudora, but that would have been foolish. Still, I stored this exchange for future use as necessary. Then I couldn’t be certain whether Aníse’s sense of service was French or a deterrent to my straying. Did she think I was thirty years younger? Most men would call the situation happy, and I did too, till things seemed wrong and felt good and wrong again when self-loathing mixed liberally into the surge. No gossip in town could capture the damnable scene playing out at the Wadmalaw Hunt Club.

Hardly blind to a man’s restlessness, Aníse strove to keep the days fresh by moving the furnishings or trying new recipes or planning outings, which she most often cancelled because of fatigue and the unbearable heat.

Beany Seabrook came around to Jim Cohen’s one day to see if anyone wanted a bushel of beans. It was late summer, harvest time, when all the green bean growers for miles around would haul their harvests to the bean auction out on Savannah Highway. Beany was a buyer for a supermarket chain across the southeast and a bunch of smaller stores in the region as well. Beany knew beans and could judge a crop in three steps, the approach or visual assessment of color and complexion, the snap, to measure the bean’s crisp break, and the taste. He could pick up a bushel for two dollars wholesale then, once the auction ended, and he offered to drop one or two off on his way home.

Aníse suggested that we go along. I felt like Eudora facing a hazardous bowl of soup. But what could I do, beg off? So it was the four of us, one of whom was female and one white, heading up the road in silence, pondering the world beyond beans.

Childlike in her wonder among the growers and truckers, Aníse browsed the samples, walking the rows of crops and trucks, picking her favorites for character in a bean farmer or a truck. The auctioneer and buyers moved down the rows too while the farmers watched their season’s fate from the back. Aníse followed to see how her favorites fared. Still a sparkler, albeit roundly preggers and significantly slowed, she baffled a few farmers and truckers with her flair and accent as foreign to Savannah Highway as shrimp’n grits would be to Paris.

The evening was uneventful, except for its challenge. We hadn’t discussed marriage or continuing cohabitation or terms and conditions or anything, so the topic loomed, unresolved. For my part, no discussion was necessary. I did love her, and even if our love was largely private, I wanted her around. A case could be made for commitment, with my feelings for her so much greater than what I’d felt for my ex-wife—or so much more positive at any rate. Aníse understood my reluctance, or at least accepted it or tolerated it. If she’d asked for my true feelings, I’d have told her that I tried marriage and hated every minute of it, even those few when the she-devil lay back to endure my gross need. Maybe I was rendered deficient; be that as it may, I would decline another go. She may have suspected simple avoidance, as most women suspect of most men. Nothing I could do about that. But she didn’t ask. She rather put something in the air, a question pursuant to our common liberation from social formality. I.e., could we not at least display our love in public? She held back in deference to my cultural heritage of appropriate behavior, leaving it to me, the white fellow, to simply lay an arm over her shoulder. I felt her glance, her uncertainty and that of her uncle. A man of few words, Jim Cohen nonetheless conveyed his own puzzlement. Now that I knew the ineffable quality of the local tang, how could I fail to care for it in the easiest way?

So I sought a proper opening, nothing obsequious but with the right touch of natural affection like that passing between, say, a man and his truck, or his dog, which sounds unkind, but I needed to test the dosage. Some truckers draped an arm over a side-view mirror or scratched their dogs’ heads. But she had no mirrors, and I couldn’t scratch her head, though she grew impatient. Our hour in the beans wore on without a touch to show folks how it was. She glanced often, fleeting and anxious. When Beany signaled us over, after successfully bidding on the beans he needed, he told us he’d be another while and pointed out the three bushels we’d carry home. I stepped forward, offering to put the beans in the car, an amusing twist on the evening, I thought. Jim Cohen went with Beany. Aníse drifted.

I finished loading in a moderate huff with dirt and stray leaves on me like the next farmer or trucker. I brushed off, liking the feel of it as I drifted, seeking Aníse, so we could go. She pondered trucks, holding her chin. I came up behind and put an arm around her; what the hell. She looked up, still tentative, anxious and uncertain. I pulled her near and I kissed her on the forehead, the face, the lips, which sounds simple, but felt monumental and world wide. A hundred eyes seared us, imagining our conjugation, and so did I. Hot and flushed, we pressed till steam wafted wistfully up. I looked up and around and met those eyes on us with a smile. A few smiled back, perhaps at a man who works the dirt and his woman. It felt as good as the leaves and debris, and I longed for a dog and a truck. Or maybe they only imagined her spicy sweetness.

At home in bed we touched the length of our bodies. Eudora and I never had. My ex-wife confused modesty with frigidity. My current mate approached everything with zest, demonstrating the value of a bright disposition, so I step up and wrap my arm around her shoulder again and again in my mind, recalling it to rehearse it, so I’ll get it right next time.

We stopped French service because of the one-sided nature of the thing, except for birthdays and holidays. She didn’t ask that I try the watermelon, though her rapture begged the question when I did. It’s like all the rest; no racial difference about it, from what I remember of my old watermelon days, though they were decades prior and a young man can’t savor like a man of seasoning and taste. A few more weeks into pregnancy all that watermelon playfulness fell by the wayside, giving way to the ominously focused event shaping up by the hour. We stayed busy as we could. I repressed the pros and cons of true love and fatherhood, of misogyny and social strife. I pictured a blue gum baby. Could I be so shallow? Was she not a blue gum who stole my heart and mind? I was and she did, and that’s how it sat.

Jim Cohen embarrassed me one day with a bottle of Teacher’s, spending what he’d never spend on himself, assuring me of his great taste fuh dem white teachuh scots. He sought to comfort an aging attorney from town, out here in a bind. Aníse made it worse, insisting with shrill good cheer that we have some scotch right now. She too wanted Arthur to come home.

I begged off, no more needing a bender than a yard child, and a blue gum demented yard child seemed too perfectly suited to Eudora’s sense of justice or humor. We didn’t know as much about alcoholic fetal syndrome then, but we knew enough. Jim Cohen took his scotch home, presumably to drink among easier company. Aníse and I settled back in to ostensible reading as the tick tock clock tolled our life.

We got by, Aníse and I, on cordiality, peace and a cooperative effort to help each other through this strange and vigorous passage. That may sound clinical, but two people helping each other through difficulty can strengthen a bond.

In the ninth month came neighbors and friends with gifts, mostly pickles and relishes put up the prior year, though some brought packets of spider silk, or spiders for installation on the eaves. One brought a slice of moldy bread, assuring an effective strain of ergot and advising caution on the dosage. I was amused but then relieved when our midwife assured me that spider silk had saved more than one baby at birth. She visited regularly, moving in with folks down the road a few days before the blessed event. I was amazed at her casual approach.

I arranged with Hedley Rice for standby medical service and reserved a hospital bed in town, though that was thirty minutes away. Aníse seemed in good health despite her frequent flashes and faint spells. Hedley said not to worry but keep an eye open. She was healthy, but at forty-two you can’t tell what might go squirrelly on you. I hated this dialogue with Hedley, though his pond showed no ripples. Call me stuck in the same mud Jim Cohen had helped me out of, but I felt hip deep in dissatisfaction with what I headed into: concerned husband and soon-to-be father, if viewed objectively. Or sire of a mixed-race bastard child, if you relished a subjective dose of reality.

I wanted my exodus from town to culminate in a crowning difference between what I’d been and what I’d become. And to a point I felt different, until social dread rose like a tide, leaving little room to breathe. Sinking to the depths of blueblood, I simply wanted out no matter how muddy my clothing might get in the crawl to firmer footing. Finding balance between anxiety and calmness I wanted merely a fresh start at my fresh start. I mean, what would we name him? Or her. Arthur Covingdale, Jr.? Queen Elizabeth III Cohen Covingdale?

Aníse sat near me one evening as I struggled onward in Ulysses, perhaps naturally attracted to the tangled tome because of its equally elusive comprehension. Here too I persevered, telling myself I had no choice and sensing self-improvement as compensation for what I’d so thoroughly botched. Joyce’s flagellation distracted my mind and salted my wound. I’d read the last page a hundred times, though I slogged through the first two hundred pages only once, leaving four hundred pages and the rest of my life to get through. At any rate, she sat near me, uncomfortably self-conscious of the load between us. She smiled rather sweetly but more in courtesy than affection, assuring me softly that she would never ask anything of me that I didn’t want for myself. I briefly thought she wanted the watermelon eaten one more time, as if a round of hotdogs and watermelon could distract us from the discomfort upon us.

But no, she did not refer to our short-term needs but rather the future of the child, who would gladly bear the Cohen name, unless I wished otherwise, meaning Covingdale. She may not have realized the legality at play here, though I think she did. The child would bear her name, unless we married, or I officially adopted it. Oh, she could have the birth certificate written with my last name, but that could be contested. In any event, she nailed me down neat, sooner rather than later, as if asking: Does your mother know you’re queer? Of course, Mother didn’t know. Don’t you see? I had no reasonable response. I couldn’t win, since I still viewed the situation as a win/loss, either or. But I avoided pointing out the dilemma she put me in, because stridency is best kept to the realm of distraction and out of dialogue.

“Would you mind terribly if I give this some thought?”

“Oh, no! You must think about it. Take your time! What is it you are thinking?”

“I uh … I want to research a few things.”

“What thing do you want to research?”

“I want to see if, uh, you know, if a name like Covingdale would be tantamount to adoption.”

“Adoption?” She laughed bemusedly, then harshly, giving vent to the frustration running both ways, verging on mockery. “You do not need adoption for anyone. Maybe you could have adopt me. But that would make you illegal, you know, having the relation sexual with your daughter, and now, well, as you see, you will be the pere of the baby. So what is for adoption?”

“No, I mean, with the uh, name.”

“I understand. You must think about having a baby with skin like me and a name such as you.”

She concisely summarized for the jury, whose lips sealed in a slow nod; yes, that was precisely what warranted some careful thought.

“Would you like for me to eat you again?”

“That’s ugly.”

“Do you think so? Why you say it is ugly? You did not think it ugly before. You say, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Bay! Be!”

“That’s ugly too.”

“I want to make you happy.”

“I want you to be happy too.”

“So?”

“So. I think we can have a right nasty argument here if you want to. Or you can give me some breathing space so we can see how this thing is going to play out.”

She eased back into the sofa, giving in to the burdens and likely relaxing with the idea that the deal on the impending Covingdale baby was secure, just as I’d known the house deal was done when Peter Maxwell said, “Well …”

So we let it rest, sitting there as if content, as if all our evenings would pass in similar peace and resolve, with young Rufus or Rastus or whatever we’d call him on his way to Harvard, which appeared to be receptive to that sort of thing. I continued reading my book, though it could have been upside down. My eyes scanned the same line twelve or twenty times before sliding down to the next line like hot grease. Nothing stuck. I glanced over to see her eyes closed and the fatigue delineating her puffy face, and there, as if between the lines to be read by the astute observer, was pain. I took it for emotional and mental pain, since the task upon us was bound to give her a headache too.

I was quite fond of her—no; I loved her and felt grateful as any man would for her generous spirit and penchant for good times. I loved her company and didn’t care a hoot if she was black or green or purple, because we lived in nature, free of social constraint. Yet I understood the demands of the situation; nothing is as simple as it seems. I wondered if the problem was that I didn’t want a baby, not a black or a white one.

I saw things to come, short and long term. In ten years I’d be pushing seventy. She’d be nigh on to fifty-two as junior would first ponder the thrill of grand theft auto, teen pregnancy and drug abuse. Surely, I exaggerate; let’s say junior is a normal child who merely needs braces, private tutoring, psychiatric counseling and barbiturates to take the edge off, new clothes and regular checkups. What was wrong with that picture? Nothing, if parenting happened to be the chosen field for your golden years. Any picture changes value depending on the skew. I did not see peace, contentment or an apprentice in the seafood-gathering trade.

I saw decrepitude encroaching with a potentially obese wife and a dark child calling me daddy, a child who would be heir apparent to centuries of family history and stability—scratch that; call it wealth, including real estate, heirlooms, the works. Those things meant nothing to me, but the ghosts of Covingdales past raised a hue and cry in my mind. But then, where else would the assets go? To a foundation of course, the Covingdale Trust, for the betterment of something or other, perhaps the preservation of Ledinwah with a lovely obelisk at the confluence, admirable at low tide.

Patterns emerged all right, aligning me with my mentor of decades ago and slinging mud in the eye of the town we called home. The difference was, he had a vendetta based on negative reaction, and I didn’t. He chased some game leg and left his wife of thirty years, who couldn’t fend for herself at that point in life.

I, on the other hand, merely retired to the country and consented to the leg with no chase, repeatedly and without prophylactic protection perhaps, just as men and women and microbes have engaged since time began. My legal instinct forewarned the case to be made for patrimony, alimony and child support. I doubted anyone in town would take the case, but the times they were a changin’. You had a passel of hungry young’uns stepping up to the firing line then, and the Covingdale target was about as fat and juicy as a bull’s eye could get.

But I doubted she’d pursue legal action. She seemed focused on security, which I could provide, not monthly but in a settlement, say twenty thousand, which was significant in those days. Hell, Jim Cohen didn’t make but eighty, ninety dollars a week, and he lived fine, happy as a lark or a man could be. I would take care of her.

On a brighter note, I felt absolved. I would be remembered both in and out of town, but it’s a different stroke of the tar brush for a yard child than it is for a cross burning. One results from an act of love and the other is hateful. If I failed to prevent impregnation, at least the act proved my feeling for a woman of color. That was a switch.

She eased back an inch and gently snored. I covered her with a quilt and watched her sleep. I felt the distance gain ghastly momentum between us, taking me equidistant from libidinous inclination. I would come to realize a few months later that nature controls motivation no less than a puppeteer pulls strings. It’s all a ruse designed to facilitate nature’s continuation; a patch of hair with a slit and a thumping stick of engorgement; it’s comical when taken at face value, free of estrus and testosterone. She looked so tired, distraught, puffy and pregnant, serving out the sentence of the highest court.

I’d considered Jim Cohen to be nature’s metaphor, rhythmic as the seasons and tides. Aníse carried his offspring too, and I laughed, recalling my dubious sincerity toward him. It didn’t matter any more; he was my uncle, or good as.

I sensed the years remaining, fifteen or twenty-five. I could do that, given the easy days and beauty abounding, the oysters, crabs, shrimp and fish, throw in some beans, cukes and relish, some good books and conversation making up in candor, color and wit what the life in the boonies might lack in formal erudition. With any luck Aníse’s beauty would be restored. That’s how it went in my mind; hot and cold, yes and no, lucky me and horrors.

A faint tap on the window was speak-of-the-devil himself, catching my eye and half nodding to open the door. He shushed me when I opened it, as if to warn against waking the baby. I nodded back as he huffed and waddled in with a burlap bag of oysters scrubbed clean, a half dozen crabs, a couple spottails and a whiting, all three fish scaled, headed, gutted and dressed out. And the same bottle of Teacher’s as yet unopened.

I shushed him back as he clattered things onto the table, as Aníse eased down to the sofa, going sideways and pulling her knees up slightly under the quilt to join her bunkmate in a fetal position for the rest of her nap. Jim took a seat and nodded up that I could go ahead and prepare dinner. I didn’t mind and in fact enjoyed the culinary pursuit as an easier distraction than Ulysses, especially with fresh fish. The scents soon steaming changed the atmosphere yet again. So, it was yes again.

You lay the fish in a dinged baking pan along with onions, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, lemon, basil, garlic and a little cayenne; hell, I added a dash of anything in reach that seemed reasonable. Bake at 350° for an hour or so, and there it was, the chef’s special in the oven in ten minutes. Jim nodded up to the tumblers and opened the bottle. He didn’t ask for two tumblers but maybe sensed a struggle going on at the Hunt Club. Close as we’d been over the months, we’d mostly talked history as a means of sorting and seeing how two roads converged in the woods. He’d manipulated Aníse and me, played us like a cheap fiddle with what he knew about the quality of the tang and a man’s drive, any man. Now he was worried, like me, kind of. I thought he came to help things along with a dialogue as yet sparse between us, our common ground to date feeling like a sandy shoal at ebb tide, and here comes the flood. I thought he aimed to talk to set things right, or at least to sort things out.

He poured an inch in each tumbler and sipped half his and said, “Mmm … Mm.” He sat back and waited. I followed suit. Then we waited for dinner and Aníse. And that was Jim’s objective, to improve the situation by simply being. Dinner in the oven and a good bottle of scotch did facilitate, and soon the place felt right damn cozy, making me wonder if a man ever really knows what he’s up to or up against or nestled in the center of.

At any rate he was good at it, capping off the exercise, if you could call it that, with, “Mmm … Mm. Dem good.”