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

arrived in Ole Virginny!”
    Mr. Dabney roared at me: “Ask him where he came from!”
    Again I inclined my face to that black shrunken visage upturned to the blazing sun; I whispered the question and the reply came back after a long silence, in fitful stammerings. At last I said to Mr. Dabney: “He says he’s from Clay County down in Alabama.”
    “Alabama! Well, kiss my ass!”
    I felt Shadrach pluck at my sleeve and once more I bent down to listen. Many seconds passed before I could discover the outlines of the words struggling for meaning on the flailing, ungovernable tongue. But finally I captured their shapes, arranged them in order.
    “What did he say now, Paul?” Mr. Dabney said.
    “He said he wants you to bury him.”
    “Bury him!” Mr. Dabney shouted. “How can I bury him? He ain’t even dead yet!”
    From Shadrach’s breast there now came a gentle keening sound which, commencing on a note of the purest grief, startled me by the way it resolved itself suddenly into a mild faraway chuckle; the moonshine was taking hold. The pink clapper of a tongue lolled in the cave of the jagged old mouth. Shadrach grinned.
    “Ask him how old he is, Paul,” came the command. I asked him. “Nimenime” was the glutinous reply.
    “He says he’s ninety-nine years old,” I reported, glancing up from the ageless abyss.
    “Ninety-nine! Well, I’ll be goddamned!”
    Now other Dabneys began to arrive, including the mother, Trixie, and the two larger Moles, along with one of the older teenage daughters, whalelike but meltingly beautiful as she floated on the crest of her pregnancy, and accompanied by her hulking, acne-cratered teenage spouse. There also came a murmuring clutch of neighbors—sun-reddened shipyard workers in cheap sport shirts, scampering towhead children, a quartet of scrawny housewives in sacklike dresses, bluish crescents of sweat beneath their arms. In my memory they make an aching tableau of those exhausted years. They jabbered and clucked in wonder at Shadrach, who, immobilized by alcohol, heat, infirmity, and his ninety-nine Augusts, beamed and raised his rheumy eyes to the sun. “Praise de Lawd!” he quavered.
    We hoisted him to his feet and supported the frail, almost weightless old frame as he limped on dancing tiptoe to the house, where we settled him down upon a rumpsprung glider that squatted on the back porch in an ambient fragrance of dog urine, tobacco smoke, and mildew. “You hungry, Shad?” Mr. Dabney bellowed. “Mama, get Shadrach something to eat!” Slumped in the glider, the ancient visitor gorged himself like one plucked from the edge of critical starvation: he devoured three cantaloupes, slurped down bowl after bowl of Rice Krispies, and gummed his way through a panful of hot cornbread smeared with lard. We watched silently, in wonderment. Before our solemnly attentive eyes he gently and carefully eased himself back on the malodorous pillows and with a soft sigh went to sleep.
    Some time after this—during the waning hours of the afternoon, when Shadrach woke up, and then on into the evening—the mystery of the old man’s appearance became gradually unlocked. One of the Dabney daughters was a fawn-faced creature of twelve named Edmonia; her fragile beauty (especially when contrasted with ill-favored brothers) and her precocious breasts and bottom had caused me—young as I was—a troubling, unresolved itch. I was awed by the ease and nonchalance with which she wiped the drool from Shadrach’s lips. Like me, she possessed some inborn gift of interpretation, and through our joint efforts there was pieced together over several hours an explanation for this old man—for his identity and his bizarre and inescapable coming.
    He stayed on the glider; we put another pillow under his head. Nourishing his dragon’s appetite with Hershey bars and, later on, with nips from Mr. Dabney’s bottle, we were able to coax from those aged lips a fragmented, abbreviated, but reasonably