The Third Life of Grange Copeland Read Free Page A

He threatened Margaret and she ran and hid in the woods with Brownfield huddled at her feet. Then Grange would roll out the door and into the yard, crying like a child in big wrenching sobs and rubbing his whole head in the dirt. He would lie there until Sunday morning, when the chickens pecked around him, and the dog sniffed at him and neither his wife nor Brownfield went near him. Brownfield played instead on the other side of the house. Steady on his feet but still ashen by noon, Grange would make his way across the pasture and through the woods, headlong, like a blind man, to the Baptist church, where his voice above all the others was raised in song and prayer. Margaret would be there too, Brownfield asleep on the bench beside her. Back home again after church Grange and Margaret would begin a supper quarrel which launched them into another week just about like the one before.
    Brownfield turned from watching the road and looked with hateful scrutiny at the house they lived in. It was a cabin of two rooms with a brick chimney at one end. The roof was of rotting gray wood shingles; the sides of the house were gray vertical slabs; the whole aspect of the house was gray. It was lower in the middle than at its ends, and resembled a sway-backed animal turned out to pasture. A stone-based well sat functionally in the middle of the yard, its mossy wooden bucket dangling above it from some rusty chain and frazzled lengths of rope. Where water was dashed behind the well, wild morning-glories bloomed, their tendrils reaching as far as the woodpile, which was a litter of tree trunks, slivers of carcass bones deposited by the dog and discarded braces and bits that had pained the jaws and teeth of many a hard-driven mule.
    From the corner of his eye Brownfield noticed that his father was also surveying the house. Grange stood with an arm across the small of his back, soldier fashion, and with the other hand made gestures toward this and that of the house, as if pointing out necessary repairs. There were very many. He was a tall, thin, brooding man, slightly stooped from plowing, with skin the deep glossy brown of pecans. He was thirty-five but seemed much older. His face and eyes had a dispassionate vacancy and sadness, as if a great fire had been extinguished within him and was just recently missed. He seemed devoid of any emotion, while Brownfield watched him, except that of bewilderment. A bewilderment so complete he did not really appear to know what he saw, although his hand continued to gesture, more or less aimlessly, and his lips moved, shaping unintelligible words. While his son watched, Grange lifted his shoulders and let them fall. Brownfield knew this movement well; it was the fatal shrug. It meant that his father saw nothing about the house that he could change and would therefore give up gesturing about it and he would never again think of repairing it.
    When Brownfield’s mother had wanted him to go to school Grange had assessed the possibility with the same inaudible gesticulation accorded the house. Knowing nothing of schools, but knowing he was broke, he had shrugged; the shrug being the end of that particular dream. It was the same when Margaret needed a dress and there was no way Grange could afford to buy it. He merely shrugged, never saying a word about it again. After each shrug he was more silent than before, as if each of these shrugs cut him off from one more topic of conversation.
    Brownfield turned from looking at his father and the house to see his mother brush a hand across her eyes. He sat glumly, full of a newly discovered discontent. He was sad for her and felt bitterly small. How could he ever bear to lose her, to his father or to death or to age? How would he ever survive without her pliant strength and the floating fragrance of her body which was sweet and inviting and delicate, yet full of the concretely comforting odors of cooking and soap and milk.
    “You could’ve gone,” said Grange softly,