The Third Life of Grange Copeland Read Free

know, but his cousins only giggled and nudged each other gravely but in apparent delight.
    For Brownfield his cousins’ information was peculiarly ominous. He tried to remember when his father’s silence began, for surely there had been a time when his father cooed hopefully to him as he fondled him on his knee. Perhaps, he thought, his father’s silence was part of the reason his mother was always submissive to him and why his father was jealous of her and angry if she spoke, just “how’re you?” to other men. Maybe he had tried to sell her and she wouldn’t be sold—which could be why they were still poor and in debt and would die that way. And maybe his father, who surely would feel bad about trying to sell his wife, became silent and jealous of her, not because of anything she had done, but because of what he had tried to do! Maybe his mother was as scared of Grange as he was, terrified by Grange’s tense composure. Perhaps she was afraid he would sell her anyway, whether she wanted to be sold or not. That could be why she jumped to please him.
    Brownfield got a headache trying to grasp the meaning of what his cousins told him. The need to comprehend his parents’ actions seeped into him with his cousins’ laughter. The blood rushed to his head and he was sick. He thought feverishly of how their weeks were spent. Of the heat, the cold, the work, the feeling of desperation behind all the sly small smiles. The feeling of hunger in winter, of bleak unsmiling faces, of eating bark when he was left alone before his mother returned home smelling of baits and manure. Of his mother’s soft skin and clean milky breath; of his father’s brooding, and of the feeling of an onrushing inevitable knowledge, like a summer storm that comes with high wind and flash flooding, that would smash the silence finally and flatten them all mercilessly to the ground. One day he would know everything and be equal to his cousins and to his father and perhaps even to God.
    Their life followed a kind of cycle that depended almost totally on Grange’s moods. On Monday, suffering from a hangover and the aftereffects of a violent quarrel with his wife the night before, Grange was morose, sullen, reserved, deeply in pain under the hot early morning sun. Margaret was tense and hard, exceedingly nervous. Brownfield moved about the house like a mouse. On Tuesday, Grange was merely quiet. His wife and son began to relax. On Wednesday, as the day stretched out and the cotton rows stretched out even longer, Grange muttered and sighed. He sat outside in the night air longer before going to bed; he would speak of moving away, of going North. He might even try to figure out how much he owed the man who owned the fields. The man who drove the truck and who owned the shack they occupied. But these activities depressed him, and he said things on Wednesday nights that made his wife cry. By Thursday, Grange’s gloominess reached its peak and he grimaced respectfully, with veiled eyes, at the jokes told by the man who drove the truck. On Thursday nights he stalked the house from room to room and pulled himself up and swung from the rafters of the porch. Brownfield could hear his joints creaking against the sounds of the porch, for the whole porch shook when his father swung.
    By Friday Grange was so stupefied with the work and the sun he wanted nothing but rest the next two days before it started all over again.
    On Saturday afternoon Grange shaved, bathed, put on clean overalls and a shirt and took the wagon into town to buy groceries. While he was away his wife washed and straightened her hair. She dressed up and sat, all shining and pretty, in the open door, hoping anxiously for visitors who never came.
    Brownfield too was washed and cleanly dressed. He played contentedly in the silent woods and in the clearing. Late Saturday night Grange would come home lurching drunk, threatening to kill his wife and Brownfield, stumbling and shooting off his shotgun.