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

something?”
    “God help,” said Josie.
    “What is this dream you keep having?” asked Brownfield. “You gets just as stiff and hard as a dead person. Except you sweat. You kind of vibrates too, like there’s a motor on right there where people say the heart is.”
    For a year Brownfield had been asking about the dream. Josie never talked. They lay in bed between crisp white sheets. On Josie’s side the crispness had become moist and limp with sweat. Brownfield lit the lamp and placed it on the table near her head. He stood, naked and concerned, gazing down on her face. Josie’s face was heavy and doughy, lumpy and creased from sleep, wet from her dream. She had the stolid, anonymous face of a cook in a big house, the face of a tired waitress. The face of a woman too fat, too greedy, too unrelentless to be loved. She could grin with her face or laugh out of it or leer through it, but she had forgotten the simple subtle mechanics of the smile. Her eyes never lost their bold rapacious look, even when she woke from sleep terrified, as she was now.
    Josie, Brownfield was sure, had never been young, had never smelled of milk or of flowers, but only of a sweet decay that one might root out only if one took the trouble to expose inch after inch of her to the bright consuming fire of blind adoration and love. Then she might be made clean. But Brownfield did not love Josie. He did not really wonder, therefore, that she told him almost nothing about herself, although she constantly pumped him for details of his own life. To shock him once she had told him a strange tale about how his father had stopped at the Dew Drop Inn on his way North, and stayed with her, and loved her. Brownfield had laughed.
    “If he love you so much why ain’t he here with you right now?”
    Josie had retreated in tears, and the next day pretended she’d made her story up.
    “Thank God I ain’t poor,” Josie murmured from the bed. “And thank the good Lord I takes care of myself without the help of strangers, which, in a matter of plain speaking, ain’t got a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of.” She took the liberty occasionally of reminding Brownfield of his penury. Now she took his pillow from his side of the bed and cradled it in her arms like a lover.
    “Listen,” she said, “my side of the bed’s wet.”
    Brownfield stumbled next door without a word, into Lorene’s room and, not caring to sleep on the floor, he climbed unhesitatingly into Lorene’s bed.

10
    T HE FIRST TIME Brownfield saw Mem, Josie’s “adopted” daughter, he had been balling Josie and Lorene for over two years. Mem had been away at school in Atlanta, an errant father paying her bills. She was Josie’s sister’s child. Her mother was dead.
    “She died and left me the sweetest li’l burden,” Josie occasionally allowed as how to impressionable friends.
    “That girl have to buy books that cost as much as a many of us pays for dresses!” Josie would smile proudly and with malicious aforethought at some of her less well-off acquaintances. For her “business” in the lounge paid off, and she didn’t mind letting people think she was putting Mem through high school.
    Mem’s father, Brownfield learned, was a big Northern preacher with a large legitimate family. He had met Josie’s sister one summer when he came South to preach revival services in Josie’s father’s church. They had fallen in love and Mem was conceived. The preacher went back North to his family and Mem’s mother was put out of her father’s house.
    Josie took her in until Mem was born, and shortly afterward she died.
    “Of course, my sister sort of snatch that preacher from me on the rebound, you understand.” Josie smiled coyly, insistently, at Brownfield. “But it were really me he actually love.”
    According to Josie, the only reason Lorene didn’t go to school (“of course, I were anxious and well off enough to send her”) was because she was too stubborn to go.