Walking Across Egypt Read online

  “The dog?”

  “Oh, that’s right, you didn’t know about the dog.”

  “How long were you in the chair?” asked Robert.

  “A few hours.” Nobody had to know about “All My Children.”

  No one spoke.

  “Well, Robert, how’s your work going?” Alora asked. She was sitting across from him.

  “What kind of dog?” Elaine asked her mother in the kitchen.

  “Fine,” said Robert. “Been a little slow lately.”

  “A little fice,” said Mattie.

  “You didn’t call the SPCA?”

  Mattie thought about Wesley. “Where they keep the juvenile delinquents?”

  “No, that’s the YMRC. The SPCA is the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.”

  “I wadn’t being cruel to him. I just needed the dogcatcher. I can’t keep up this place and a dog, too. You know that. I’m surprised I kept him as long as I did.”

  “Mother, they would have tried to save the dog’s life.”

  “Here, take this Coke over to Robert and Finner and pour some peanuts out of that jar into this bowl.”

  “Did you hear what I said, Mother? The dog will be put to sleep now if nobody picks him up within thirty days.”

  “Why don’t you go get him, take him home. You could use a dog. Here, the coffee’s ready. Get those peanuts over there, would you? Pour them in here.” The whole family hadn’t been together with neighbors since Paul died, thought Mattie, and Elaine wants to talk about a dog. Mattie carried a cup of coffee to Alora.

  Alora was talking to Robert about the dogcatcher. “Well, Finner would’ve shot him sure as the world. We keep a loaded pistol under Finner’s pillow. You figure it’ll be night if you ever need one. And I take it with me when I go on my walk if Fred’s not at home down there at the end of the road. I ain’t going to have nobody jump out of them woods and get me. Wrap a Kleenex around it so nobody’ll notice. Little . . . what is it Finner, a .22?”

  “Yep, .22.”

  My God, thought Elaine. Why would anybody jump on you?

  “Okay now,” said Mattie, returning to the kitchen, “who wants cake, who wants apple pie, who wants ice cream, or a little ice cream along with one of the others?”

  “I pass,” said Elaine.

  “Pass!” said Alora. “Good gracious, girl.”

  “Cake and ice cream,” said Finner. “Your mama makes the best pound cake I ever eat,” Finner said to Robert.

  Alora, with her coffee cup to her lip, eyed Finner.

  “Alora, what do you want?” asked Mattie.

  “Well, I don’t need anything, Lord knows,” said Alora, “but I’ll take a little pie . . . with a tiny scoop of ice cream.”

  “You want pie and ice cream, don’t you, Robert?” said Mattie.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Alora looked at Robert and Elaine. “Well, well,” she said. They were all sitting in the den except Mattie who was fixing the dessert in the kitchen. “This is the first time I known y’all to be here together since I don’t know when. Since Paul died I guess.”

  “When did y’all move here anyway?” asked Finner.

  “’58,” said Robert.

  Elaine picked up a Biblical Recorder to see what the Baptists were up to. She turned on the lamp beside her. She had wandered spiritually since her sophomore year in college—not going to church at all until she met, at a cocktail party a few years ago, a Unitarian minister with whom she agreed on every topic she could think of. She went to his church in Raleigh at least six or eight times a year.

  Mattie came into the den with a tray holding the desserts. “Now the pie ain’t hot,” she said, “but it’s good cold . . . We don’t need that light,” she said to Elaine.

  “I’m trying to read.”

  “If you cooked it, it’s good,” said Finner.

  They all heard sounds of Lamar walking across the roof toward the ladder.

  “Lord, I forgot the dogcatcher,” said Mattie.

  “Whose piece of cake is that?” asked Elaine.

  “It’s mine,” said Mattie.

  “Mother, the doctor told you not to eat any sweets.”

  “I know it. But I hadn’t had enough to hurt anything and if he finds sugar when I go back I’ll cut them out altogether. But what if I cut them out altogether and went back and didn’t have no blood in my sugar then how—”

  “Sugar in your blood,” said Elaine.

  “What’d I say?”

  “You said blood in your sugar.”

  “That’s probably what it amounts to,” said Robert.

  Lamar knocked on the back door.

  “Anyway,” said Mattie, going toward the door, stopping to finish. “If they don’t find no sugar this next time then I’ll know that eating a little bit along ain’t going to hurt anything, whereas if I’d cut it out altogether, then I wouldn’t know whether I could eat just a little bit and still get along okay.” She opened the back screen. “Come on in. Y’all, this is Lamar. I forgot your last name.”

  “Benfield.” Lamar looked around—saw apple pie. Hot damn, he thought.

  “Don’t you want a little dessert?” asked Mattie.

  “You might force a little on me,” said Lamar. “How y’all doing?”

  “You like to been dead a while ago,” said Finner.

  “You sure did,” said Alora.

  “Well, I’m glad I’m still alive.”

  “Did you want pie?” Mattie asked Lamar from the kitchen.

  “Yeah.”

  “How about a little ice cream?”

  “I could handle that. You hurt yourself?” Lamar said to Robert.

  “No, I don’t think so, but I’ll be a little sore probably.”

  “You were sore the other morning, won’t you, Mrs. Rigsbee,” said Lamar.

  “I sure was.”

  There was a quiet spell. Mattie couldn’t think of anything to say from the kitchen. She brought Lamar his food and drink and then went back and got a board for the rocker seat, put it across the seat, and sat down. Robert and Elaine were sitting on the couch and the rest sat in chairs and held their plates, eating dessert.

  “You’re eating ice cream, too?” said Elaine to Mattie.

  “This was all that was left—not enough to sneeze at. It’s not hardly a spoonful.”

  “I don’t know about that sugar in the blood either,” said Alora. “Dr. Harmon told my mama she had sugar in the blood and I don’t know if she did or not. He got her started on insular and she died seven years later when she was sixty-four, which is right young. I wondered a lot of times if she’d lived longer if she hadn’t a got started on that stuff. I don’t think he ever checked her but once. Right at the beginning.”

  “Insular?” said Robert.

  “Yeah. Insular.”

  Elaine looked upward.

  “I got to go watch the ball game,” said Finner, standing. “You coming?” he asked Alora.

  “Go ahead, I’ll be on.”

  “You can turn it on here,” said Mattie. “Are the Braves playing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I like the Braves. Turn it on, Robert.”

  “I declare they got so many niggers playing these days,” said Alora. “There was a team on the other day, I forgot who it was, they had a nigger playing every position but third base.”

  “You don’t see many nigger third basemen,” said Finner. “Third base is the hot corner.”

  “Excuse me,” said Elaine. She stood, walked down the hall and to the bathroom, closed the door, pulled down her slacks and panties, sat down on the commode, put her elbows on her knees, her palms on her chin. I’ll wait them out, she thought. She stared at the little space heater. Her mother used no central heat or air conditioning until the outside temperature was down in the forties or up in the nineties. Elaine often tried to explain to her mother how she was saving very little money if any in the long run.

  Ten minutes later when Elaine heard
the back screen close, she stood, pulled up her panties and slacks, flushed the commode and went back to the den. The ball game was playing loudly.

  “Well, I’ve got to be going,” said Elaine. “I’m supposed to be at a meeting in Chapel Hill at four.”

  “Nice to have met you,” said Lamar, holding a piece of fudge in his mouth.

  Elaine walked over to Mattie in the kitchen. “I’ll see you soon, Mama. Take care of yourself, don’t eat so many sweets, and don’t fall through another chair.”

  “I don’t know what my weight’ll do without my sweets,” said Mattie. “I’ve fell off I don’t know how much.”

  “Well, you do what the doctor says. He knows better than you.”

  Robert stood. “I got to get going, too.”

  “Thanks for cleaning out my gutters,” said Mattie, and laughed.

  “You’re welcome. I’d like to know why we kept that ladder around here.”

  Mattie stood on the back steps as Robert and Elaine walked across the back lawn to their cars. “Come back when you can stay awhile,” she said.

  “How you like your MG?” Robert asked Elaine when they reached her car.

  “I like it okay. It’s fun to drive.” Elaine watched Mattie go back inside. “She doesn’t look good to me, Robert.”

  “Seemed all right to me.”

  “She just didn’t look good. She has fallen off some.”

  “You stop eating a pound of candy a day and you’d fall off too.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “Well, she seemed all right to me. I got to get going; good to see you,” said Robert. “She’ll be all right.”

  “Good to see you, Robert.” Elaine got into her car, cranked up, backed out of the drive, and drove away.

  Robert stood in the backyard. He looked at the aluminum ladder. Somebody needed to carry it back to Finner’s garage out there, and clean up what was left of the old wooden one. He walked over, grabbed the aluminum ladder, lifted it. It was surprisingly light.

  He held it horizontally in one hand as he walked out to Finner’s garage. The garage door was open now. He went inside and hung the ladder in its place along the wall. It was cool and damp in the garage. His shoulders felt very weak from hanging so long. Thank goodness his mother had put the mattress and cushions and pillows under him. “Need a plumb line from your foot.” She could always come up with something funny in tense times. He couldn’t. Not like she could.

  There was a table of jars there in the back of the garage. The floor was hard packed dirt. It was so cool. Yeah, he hadn’t inherited that sense of humor of hers. He’d try little jokes at the cash register at the CFM—with customers—and it never worked. They’d look at him like he was crazy. He couldn’t cook like her, or tend to things. If he could tend to the Convenient Food Mart the way she’d tended to him when he was growing up, then he’d be moving on up the ladder of success. He guessed he was a little more like his daddy than he was like her.

  “What you want?” said Finner, standing behind him.

  Robert jumped; a spasm caught him. “Yeow.” He arched back his shoulders, thrusting out his chest.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Just a catch,” he grunted.

  “That like to been one dead dogcatcher. He better fix back that windowpane, too.”

  “I think he said he was,” grunted Robert, bending over crossing his arms.

  “Good thing Mattie put all them cushions down.”

  “It sure is. You know what she said when she was putting them under there?” Robert stood back up straight.

  “What?”

  “Said she needed a plumb line from my foot so she’d know where to put them.”

  “Is that right? A plumb line.”

  “It was a joke.”

  “Oh. Yeah, well, I hope I can get around like she does when I’m however old she is.”

  “Yeah, me too. Seventy-eight. She’s seventy-eight.”

  In Mattie’s backyard, Robert picked up the pieces of the broken ladder. He put the smaller pieces in the garbage can by the garage and leaned the larger pieces beside it. He glanced at the back of the house. It was a wonder his mother hadn’t come out. She was watching the ballgame with that dogcatcher. Well, good. He walked to his car, got in, backed down the driveway, and drove away.

  “I need to pay you for my chair,” Mattie said to Lamar. “I hadn’t even had a chance to look at it good. Let me see it.” She examined the chair.

  “Won’t nothing to it. Just glue and a brace. I had everything in my shop. I got a little shop behind my house. It’ll be, oh, a couple of dollars.”

  “Just two dollars. You sure? Things are mighty high these days.”

  “That’ll cover it.”

  Mattie got her billfold from her purse, pulled out two dollars and handed them to Lamar. “How about for cleaning out my gutters?”

  “Well, that’s, ah, that’s on the house. Ha!”

  Mattie puzzled, looked at him. “Well, that’s mighty nice, but you don’t have to . . . Oh, on the house. I get it.” She laughed. “Like the gutters. On the house. Well, I appreciate your kindness.”

  “That dinner yesterday was worth a hundred dollars.”

  “Well, it won’t that much. Anyway, you could charge the regular fee and buy a little something for your nephew out at the RC. It must be pretty awful him being out there at that place.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  “Well, thanks for everything you’ve done.”

  “Let me know when there’s something else.”

  “The only other thing I can think of is I need a new top for my well house. That thing is so old, and it leaks. So if you’re looking for something to do, for some work, I’d pay you.”

  “Okay, maybe I can fix you up. I’ll let you know. Maybe I can pick it up one afternoon, fix it at home.”

  Lamar and Mattie walked out into the backyard. Mattie thought about that Wesley boy and how she used to visit Paul’s cousin’s husband in jail. Jesus said to do that. It was clear, in the Scriptures. And that kind of visiting made sense for some balance in the world, some balance against all those people with so much money who all the time buy buy buy. Greed greed greed. Never doing anything for anybody. “You think you’ll be visiting your nephew?” she said. “Wesley?”

  “Wesley. Yeah, I’ll probably go see him sometime,” said Lamar. “Take him some cigarettes.”

  “Well, when you go see him, stop by and I’ll send him a little something to eat.” That scripture, Jesus talking about visiting prisoners and all, was “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me.”

  Lamar drove away and Mattie went back in the house. She walked over to the rocker and pushed it to be sure it rocked evenly. She studied the brace and the way it had been put in. Right nice work. What was that? . . . Stove eye. Red hot! From making the coffee. She hurried over and turned it off. She was going to burn the house down if she wasn’t careful. I declare, she thought. I’m slowing down, that’s all there is to it. I could be like Aunt Alba; she just all of a sudden started slowing down fast. Or a stroke, like Turnie. That could happen to me. It could happen any time. But I think I got a few good years left. Of course there’s Mrs. Bledsoe who slowed down real slow and nobody thought she would ever wear out and Frances came to live with her which is something I don’t know about. I don’t think I’d want Robert or Elaine here. They wouldn’t be happy. They need a chance to have families of their own. Besides, I don’t think I want to live with anybody. I’ve lived with somebody all my life and took care and took care and took care and I’ve done a good job of it: clothed and fed and cared for a husband and two children for all my life and now I’m enjoying sitting at night and reading my Bible and I don’t want somebody moving in. But look at Mary Belle there in a rest home, and Phoebe Sue and Dorcus and they just sit there and I can see Phoebe Sue and Dorcus as clear as if it was yesterday riding in that mule race, their faces red an
d them laughing up a storm, bouncing up and down on them mules and now there they sit every day that goes by, there they sit. Of course some of those places are right nice I suppose.

  Mattie went into the living room and sat at the piano and played “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” She looked at the pictures on the piano.

  Well, after all was said and done, after all was said and done, she had Jesus. She would always have Jesus. But. But it wadn’t his way to come in and keep you company. You couldn’t cook for him.

  IV

  On Sunday morning Mattie woke early and couldn’t go back to sleep. She was thinking of that boy. Wesley. She pictured him sitting at a picnic table in the prison yard looking through that tall fence with the barbed wire along the top. She saw Lamar—with his hat on—walking up to Wesley and placing a paper sack with a piece of her apple pie in it on the table in front of him. He’d open it and look at it and maybe not even be interested. What an awful way to live even if you are young. But he might deserve prison: stealing a car, taking something that didn’t belong to him. She bet the food he got wasn’t very good.

  It was still dark outside, but she couldn’t sleep. She stretched to see how sore she was. The soreness from falling through the chair was almost gone. It had been almost a week. Of course they would all know about it in Sunday school this morning. They would all be asking her about it and she’d have to tell them all. Then there would be those in other classes who’d need to hear before church, and then those who still hadn’t heard first-hand would need to hear after church. She’d tell them all she was slowing down and didn’t quite have the memory she used to have. She could say all that without complaining really. She didn’t intend to start complaining. Not like Sarah Mae and that new woman who talked about her fingers. Mattie had more finger problems than that woman ever did. Mattie’s thumb and index finger on her right hand wouldn’t come together with any strength at all. But she didn’t complain, except to Robert and Elaine, occasionally. She reserved the right to complain to her own family.

  She stretched again. She would fix a slow breakfast, scramble her eggs for a change and fix some grits. Maybe she should start eating grits every morning—to keep from falling off so fast.