He believed in it as if it were a religion.
For what was it but a mass of land, itself, an aspect of the imagination, really—for it stretched upon a piece of paper between here and there, and he said, “Evidently, all of it must belong to the person who sees that cohesion, who sees that it lies between two oceans. And the person seeing that should own it, and that person is me.”
What did it mean, to own it—to possess or to belong to a country?
He often thought of his house. And he delighted in his philosophical disquisitions on the nature of possession, and thought, “This is wealth. If I am unafraid to question my right in my home, then, surely, some merit should accrue to me, or, if not to me, to the act, an act of bravery. How far would I permit the inquiry to go? I do not know. But how many would have even dared raise the question?”
He rocked in his favorite chair, on the screened porch, as he looked out at the lawn, where Ruthie was picking some sort of grass or flower.
He’d had a mock fight with his wife: “We can never keep the girl out of the garden,” he said; and she’d said, “Well, let her go.”
He’d said, “She’s a house servant, and what the hell is she doing out there when she should be working?”—both happy in the banter of no consequence about a minor foible of a family member.
One had to be the Chief to have the Chief’s dilemma.
And it felt good to him. It felt good to smoke his cigar, and let the breeze take it out, through the screen porch. “The good ones,” he thought. “When you stopped, you could hardly tell that there’d been smoking.” They were his well-made, good Havanas. And why not? Did he not deserve them?
“Yes and no,” he thought.
There were poor people in the world. There were those in pain and oppressed. And, yes, he had worked for the house, and still worked twelve hours a day, in a falling market; and who could say, God forbid, that the factory would not fold, or burn, or some …
“You see,” he thought, “this is the point of it: There is no certainty. None at all. None. We clothe ourselves in rectitude to hide our shame. Our shame of our lack of worth. It’s all chance. All of it.”
He faced the woman in the garden.
“That grass is clean,” he thought. “And it’s dry, and I’m sure she’s not staining her dress. Lord. Look at her fat black ass.”
He cleared his throat, and rearranged himself on the rocker.
He tipped the cigar ash into the smoking stand.
“You do not want to fidget with it, or tap it too often, as the ash cools the smoke—supposing always that you have a good cigar. But, on the other hand, why make a fetish of it?
“… as some do,” another part of this dialogue ran, a small, interior portion of his mind speaking up. He chided it, gently, but with an authority. For was it not speaking to assess his response?
Could he not as easily respond, “You’re damn right, and it’s affectation”? Yes, he could, and then the interlocutor would have got his instruction: “Yes. Yes. That is how we act, and that is the opinion we take. Of men who act that way.” But he did not so respond. He chided that voice, saying, “Well, I’m sure each acts as he thinks fit”; and another voice, a supportive judge, so to speak, added, “If they paid for the cigar, what business is it of anyone in the world how they smoke it?”
But, in his colloquy, he silenced that voice, too, with an understanding but gently dismissive nod, saying, “I know that you do not take my part to curry favor; and, in fact, I may share your distaste. But it is to me to dispense reprimands.” He smiled to that voice, as if to say, “As if any were needed between us.” He paused. “And I will not,” he thought, “censure the other remark; I will not. For it is not mine to censure; but, as it may appear needful, only to ‘correct,’ which can only be done with kindness.”
But, saying it all, he hated the men with their too-long cigar ash, for it invariably ended on their vest, or on the rug. There was a certain masculinity to it, but, given the eventual untidiness, he had to see it as a discourteous affectation.
And he hated the fact of the Big Cigar being identified with The Jew. If ever there were an instance of unfairness, he thought, that must be it. And were there not two sides to every issue?
He saw Ruthie begin to straighten up, one palm flat on the ground, as she pushed herself up from her knees, panting. “It must be difficult to carry that weight in this heat,” he thought, and was pleased that he found no admixture of superiority in the thought.
“For, after all, I did not make myself thin. God made me thin,” he thought. And, “What is better than this breeze?” as the breeze wrapped her cotton dress around the front of her thighs. “Black Nubian columns,” he thought, “rounder than worked marble. Like stones washed in a tide pool.”
She turned, carrying the little flowers, dwarfed in her left hand, and the breeze tricked the bottom of her hem into a peak.
She started up the stairs.
“I … I know, Mist’ Frank, I know …,” she said, and smiled.
She opened the screen door and came onto the porch. She walked slowly past him, toward the door to the kitchen. “… I know,” she said.
He felt that she felt his smile of indulgence, though he was not certain that it had broken through on his face. But he felt she knew it was there. He saw it in the quality or in the rhythm of her walk, in the timing of her opening of the door, in the way that she let it close. In a moment he would hear her in there, starting supper.