The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

Christianity, the same that he preached to them, to help him forgive. Not only Josie, but them.
    For themselves, those who had fucked his daughter, they had paid when possible and felt only a very limited twinge of conscience when they knew she used that money to try to buy back her father’s love. And he took the new pipe, the slippers, the big brass watch, and they watched him wear them, and listened to his thoughts on crops and the weather, and saw the amused yet baffled horror in his eyes.
    At the party they sat in a semicircle around him and watched him ignore her.
    “You want some of this, Pa?” “You want some of that?” And the big questioning eyes over the big thrusting stomach that none of them owned. Josie took more of the liquor for herself and moved out from them on its floating haze, and when she fell clumsily on her back within the curve of the all-male semicircle (the wives of the men had, of course, not come) it was then and only then that her father rose from his chair, from the garish cushion of war, with birds and cannon and horses and red roses, that she had bought him with the money, that he rose and, standing over her, forbade anyone to pick her up.
    Her mother stood outside the ringed pack of men, how many of them knowledgeable of her daughter’s swollen body she did not know, crying. The tears and the moans of the continually repentant were hers, as if she had caused the first love-making between her daughter and her daughter’s teenage beau, and the scarcely disguised rape of her child that followed from everyone else. Such were her cries that the men, as if caught standing naked, were embarrassed and they stooped, still in the ring of the pack, to lift up the frightened girl, whose whiskied mind had cleared and who now lay like an exhausted, overturned pregnant turtle underneath her father’s foot. He pressed his foot into her shoulder and dared them to touch her. It seemed to them that Josie’s stomach moved and they were afraid of their guilt suddenly falling on the floor before them wailing out their names. But it was only that she was heaving and vomiting and choking on her own puke.
    “Please, sir,” someone said from the intimate circle, “let her up. She in a bad way.”
    They saw that Josie had seemed to faint, her dark dress pulled up above her knees. Knees turned out. Arms outstretched. She was like a spider, deformed and grotesque beneath the panicked stares of the gathered men. Stares that were only collectively horrified and singly aroused. They had seen her so stretched out before.
    “Let ’er be,” growled her father. “I hear she can do tricks on her back like that.”
    Such was the benediction of Josie’s father, the witch who rode her breathless in her middle age. Lorene had almost been born beneath his foot. As it was she was born into a world peopled by her grandfather’s male friends, all of whom frequented the little shack on Poontang Street where “fat Josie” (she grew large after the baby) did her job with a gusto that denied shame, and demanded her money with an authority that squelched all pity. And from these old men, her father’s friends, Josie obtained the wherewithal to dress herself well, and to eat well, and to own the Dew Drop Inn. When they became too old to “cut the mustard” any more, she treated them with jolly cruelty and a sadistic kind of concern. She often did a strip tease in the center of their eagerly constructed semicircle, bumping and grinding, moaning to herself, charging them the last pennies of their meager old-age savings to watch her, but daring them to touch.

9
    A WET GURGLE came from Josie’s throat. An alien force seemed to be pressing her into the mattress. She drew her breath shudderingly, her body rigid. She was building up pressure for a scream. Brownfield poked her dutifully and after a minute she opened her eyes. She lay breathing heavily, trembling.
    “You all right?” he asked. “You want some water or