Proud Flesh by William Humphrey Read Free Book Online Page B

moment. He opened the kicked-in screen door and stepped inside. Occupied but four weeks of the year, standing vacant all the rest, and ventilated the year round by cracks and broken window-panes and doors that would not shut, it smelled nonetheless of Negroes, an effluvium that worked on Clyde Renshaw like a musk, equally repugnant and exciting, a smell compounded of hair pomade and bitter, cheap roll-your-own tobacco, of corrosive, violently scented soap and coal oil and rancid lard, of singed heat-straightened hair and the sweat of labor and of love, of fatmeat and Poke salad and buttermilk and again of stale intermingled sweat, of poverty and promiscuity, of unprivacy as rampant as a beehive’s. The room he found himself in was nothing but beds, three sagging sheetless unmade iron Army cots in a row, touching, and on the floor two overlapping tattered quilt pallets. Clyde knew it well. It, or any one of the others, served out of croptime as their love-nest, his and his bittersweet-chocolate-colored, unfaithful and indiscriminate mistress’s. That musty odor smote his brain like drugged fumes, and the memory of their embraces enacted there flashed upon the screen of his mind, drawing from him a sob of mingled desire and self-disgust.
    The third in the row was one of the quonset huts. A gust of fetid air flew in his face on his opening the door. On the bed lay not she and some lover her own color but a row of half a dozen pinky-brown children, napping, covered with flies like raisin-sprinkled gingerbread men. Beside the bed in an armchair the entrails of which hung out in loops, a withered and shriveled black woman slumped asleep, her open mouth exposing one long yellow tooth in each bright pink gum. Always there was one like her, delegated to look after the infants. One eye fell open. “Looking for somebody?” she asked. “All out yonder picking yore cotton.”
    In the last shack he entered and passed through the kitchen where on the table lay the remains of breakfast—blackened banana skins and fish bones and Vienna sausage tins—and stepped into another bedroom where memories of their assignations again inflamed him. The air was unbreathable. He could hear the pickers’ dirge, recalling him to his errand. His heart choked with self-loathing and self-pity. It cried out for purity—if not for unadulterated sorrow then for pure unmixed lechery. But the loneliness of his spirit only whetted the craving of his flesh.
    Where was she? Where was that two-timing bitch? Suddenly he knew, and crazed with jealousy and longing he lunged across the room to the clothes closet. With one hand he grasped the doorknob, with the other the razor underneath his shirt. He visualized her, or rather them, crouching on the floor behind the hanging clothes, naked together and black together, black as the darkness that enveloped them, waiting for the sound of his departing footsteps. Blindly he yanked open the door. On the rod hung three bent and empty clothes hangers. Stirred by the wind they tinkled together like distant laughter. Along the floor the gray dustmice scurried toward the corners.

VII
    In their younger years the Renshaw boys had run together in a pack—on Saturday afternoon when they came swaggering into the public square five abreast taking up the entire sidewalk people had flown out of their way like chickens—and they were still close; but, left more to their own devices in growing up, the sisters were more individual, and each had been conscious at an earlier age of the instinct to leave home and set up for herself. There were greater differences among them, and more differences arose between them, differences which they learned to settle themselves without appeal to Ma, whose impartiality amounted almost to indifference. Not so with the boys. With them too her verdict was impartial; but after the dispute was settled, the private comfort she gave to the one who had been in the wrong