A Tidewater Morning by William Styron Read Free Book Online Page A

the face of which the black mitts of Mickey Mouse marked the noontime hour. Giggling now, snuggled against the ministerial breast, I inhaled the odor of great age—indefinable, not exactly unpleasant but stale, like a long-unopened cupboard—mingled with the smell of unlaundered fabric and dust. Only inches away the tongue quivered like a pink clapper in the dark gorge of a cavernous bell. “You jes a sweetie,” he crooned. “Is you a Dabney?” I replied with regret, “No,” and pointed to Little Mole. “That’s a Dabney,” I said.
    “You a sweetie, too,” he said, summoning Little Mole with the outstretched forefinger, black, palsied, wiggling. “Oh, you jes de sweetest thing!” The voice rose joyfully. Little Mole looked perplexed. I felt Shadrach’s entire body quiver; to my mystification he was overcome with emotion at beholding a flesh-and-blood Dabney, and as he reached toward the boy I heard him breathe again: “Praise de Lawd! Ise arrived in Ole Virginny!”
    Then at that instant Shadrach suffered a cataclysmic crisis—one that plainly had to do with the fearful heat. He could not, of course, grow pallid, but something enormous and vital did dissolve within the black eternity of his face; the wrinkled old skin of his cheeks sagged, his milky eyes rolled blindly upward, and uttering a soft moan, he fell back across the car’s ruptured seat with its naked springs and its holes disgorging horsehair.
    “Watah!” I heard him cry feebly, “Watah!” I slid out of his lap, watched the scrawny black legs no bigger around than pine saplings begin to shake and twitch. “Watah, please!” I heard the voice implore, but Little Mole and I needed no further urging; we were gone—racing headlong to the kitchen and the cluttered, reeking sink. “That old cullud man’s dying!” Little Mole wailed. We got a cracked jelly glass, ran water from the faucet in a panic, speculating as we did: Little Mole ventured the notion of a heat stroke; I theorized a heart attack. We screamed and babbled; we debated whether the water should be at body temperature or iced. Little Mole added half a cupful of salt, then decided that the water should be hot. Our long delay was fortunate, for several moments later, as we hurried with the terrible potion to Shadrach’s side, we found that the elder Dabney had appeared from a far corner of the yard and, taking command of the emergency, had pried Shadrach away from the seat of the Pierce-Arrow, dragged or carried him across the plot of bare earth, propped him up against a tree trunk, and now stood sluicing water from a garden hose into Shadrach’s gaping mouth. The old man gulped his fill. Then Mr. Dabney, small and fiercely intent in his baggy overalls, hunched down over the stricken patriarch, whipped out a pint bottle from his pocket, and poured a stream of crystalline whiskey down Shadrach’s gorge. While he did this he muttered to himself in tones of incredulity and inwardly tickled amazement: “Well, kiss my ass! Who are you, old uncle? Just who in the goddamned hell are you?”
    We heard Shadrach give a strangled cough; then he began to try out something resembling speech. But the word he was almost able to produce was swallowed and lost in the hollow of his throat.
    “What did he say? What did he say?” Mr. Dabney demanded impatiently.
    “He said his name is Shadrach!” I shouted, proud that I alone seemed able to fathom this obscure Negro dialect, further muddied by the crippled cadences of senility.
    “What’s he want, Paul?” Mr. Dabney said to me.
    I bent my face toward Shadrach’s , which looked contented again. His voice in my ear was at once whispery and sweet, a gargle of beatitude: “Die on Dabney ground.”
    “I think he said,” I told Mr. Dabney at last, “that he wants to die on Dabney ground.”
    “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” said Mr. Dabney.
    “Praise de Lawd!” Shadrach cried suddenly, in a voice that even Mr. Dabney could understand. “Ise