A Turn in the South Read Free Page A

her.
    Another house, even more beautiful, was where Hetty and her husband had lived for ten years. It was a farmhouse with a big green field, with forest trees bounding the distance on every side.
    Home was not for Howard just his mother’s house, the little green house that was now closed up, or the new concrete-block house she had moved to. Home was what we had seen. And we had seen only a part: all about these country roads, within a few miles, were houses andfields connected with various members of Howard’s family. It was a richer and more complicated past than I had imagined; and physically much more beautiful. The houses I was taken to were bigger than the houses many people in Trinidad or England might have lived in.
    But, stili, in the past there was that point where darkness fell, the historical darkness, even here, which was home.
    We went to dinner at the Seafood Bar-B-Q. It was really the only place possible. It was a roadhouse, a big dimly lit room with a silent jukebox and a few dressed-up white family groups. Beer couldn’t be served. So we had the iced tea, which Howard said was very Southern. It was syrupy, the taste no doubt of the waitresses, who were white and young and friendly. One of them was very young, perhaps about twelve, and delighted to be dressed like a waitress, helping out a sister or a parent during the holiday weekend, serving goodies.
    I asked Hetty what she wanted for herself and her family. Her reply was strange and moving. For her family, she said, she wished that one of her sons had been cured of his drinking. And this was strange because it was a look backwards: the son she spoke of was dead.
    For herself, she said she would like, if it were possible, to get married. She didn’t want to get married for the sake of getting married. She was old—she knew that—but that was why she would like to get married. She spent too much time alone; she wanted the companionship. Howard understood. But both he and Hetty didn’t think it would be easy for her to find someone.
    Hetty said: “Men are scarce here. There are very few men here. Go to church and count the men. The good ones have gone away. And the ones who have stayed are no good. There may be a couple of good ones on the quiet, but …”
    What of the past, though? Had it been a reasonable sort of life? She said she had no regret for the past. Hadn’t things got better for her? Hadn’t things got better in the 1950s?
    She said, “I hardly think even about my own past.”
    And Howard said, “I can hardly remember the past.”
    The words were like the words spoken at lunchtime by Hetty’s sister.
    But then Hetty said: “I didn’t like the tobacco. It would make me sick at the end of one row, smell and all. When I was married we would get up early in the morning, when the dew was still on the tobaccoleaves, and it didn’t smell then. Even now tobacco makes me sick. When I was young I would be in a field and after two hours I would cry. That was when I was working with my father.”
    And behind that was the unmentionable past.
    O N SATURDAY Hetty had talked with holiday excitement of the Easter Sunday sunrise service at five in the morning. She had said she might go to that. But when Jimmy and I checked out of the Peters Indian motel in the morning and went to the house for breakfast, we found Hetty there. The driving around the previous afternoon had tired her; she hadn’t been able to make the sunrise service. She thought now she would go to the eleven o’clock service.
    Jimmy and I thought that we would go at eleven-thirty to hear the singing and at least the beginning of the sermon, which Hetty said would start at twelve. The problem about that was Jimmy’s clothes. In New York Howard had said that Bowen was a very country sort of place and that casual clothes and sneakers would be enough for whatever we might have to do. The only warm-weather clothes Jimmy had was a Banana Republic safari outfit. Hetty said it would be