Rumpelstiltskin.
“Oh, I am sorry.” She looked at the man carefully. “Are you one of the cee-oh Coninghams?”
The man grinned broadly. “Almost. I’m one of the cee-you’s. How’d you know?”
“Family resemblance. What got you out of the woods?”
“Mamma left me some timber and I sold it. Put up this shop here.”
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Gettin’ on to four-thirty,” said Mr. Cunningham.
She rose, smiled goodbye, and said she would be coming back soon. She made her way to the sidewalk. Two solid hours and I didn’t know where I was. I am so tired.
She did not return by town. She walked the long way round, through a schoolyard, down a street lined with pecan trees, across another schoolyard, across a football field on which Jem in a daze had once tackled his own man. I am so tired.
Alexandra was standing in the doorway. She stepped aside to let Jean Louise pass. “Where have you been?” she said. “Jack called ages ago and asked after you. Have you been visiting out of the family Like That?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? Jean Louise, talk some sense and go phone your uncle.”
She went wearily to the telephone and said, “One one nine.” Dr. Finch’s voice said, “Dr. Finch.” She said softly, “I’m sorry. See you tomorrow?” Dr. Finch said, “Right.”
She was too tired to be amused at her uncle’s telephone manners: he viewed such instruments with deep anger and his conversations were monosyllabic at best.
When she turned around Alexandra said, “You look right puny. What’s the matter?”
Madam, my father has left me flopping like a flounder at low tide and you say what’s the matter. “Stomach,” she said.
“There’s a lot of that going around now. Does it hurt?”
Yes it hurts. Like hell. It hurts so much I can’t stand it. “No ma’am, just upset.”
“Then why don’t you take an Alka-Seltzer?”
Jean Louise said she would, and the day dawned for Alexandra: “Jean Louise, did you go to that meeting with all those men there?”
“Yes’m.”
“Like That?”
“Yes’m.”
“Where did you sit?”
“In the balcony. They didn’t see me. I watched from the balcony. Aunty, when Hank comes tonight tell him I’m … indisposed.”
“Indisposed?”
She could not stand there another minute. “Yes, Aunty. I’m gonna do what every Christian young white fresh Southern virgin does when she’s indisposed.”
“And what might that be?”
“I’m takin’ to my bed.”
Jean Louise went to her room, shut the door, unbuttoned her blouse, unzipped the fly of her slacks, and fell across her mother’s lacy wrought-iron bed. She groped blindly for a pillow and pushed it under her face. In one minute she was asleep.
Had she been able to think, Jean Louise might have prevented events to come by considering the day’s occurrences in terms of a recurring story as old as time: the chapter which concerned her began two hundred years ago and was played out in a proud society the bloodiest war and harshest peace in modern history could not destroy, returning, to be played out again on private ground in the twilight of a civilization no wars and no peace could save.
Had she insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective, insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself and by those closest to her: she was born color blind.
PART IV
11
THERE WAS A time, long ago, when the only peaceful moments of her existence were those from the time she opened her eyes in the morning until she attained full consciousness, a matter of seconds until when finally roused she entered the day’s wakeful nightmare.
She was in the sixth grade, a grade memorable for the things she learned in class and out. That year the small group of town children were swamped temporarily by a collection of elderly pupils shipped in from Old Sarum because somebody had set fire to the school there. The oldest boy in Miss Blunt’s sixth grade was nearly nineteen, and he had three contemporaries. There were several girls of sixteen, voluptuous, happy creatures who thought school something of a holiday from chopping cotton and feeding livestock. Miss Blunt was equal to them all: she was as tall as the tallest boy in the class and twice as wide.
Jean Louise took to the Old Sarum newcomers immediately. After holding the class’s undivided attention by deliberately introducing Gaston B. Means into a discussion on the natural resources of South Africa, and proving her accuracy with a rubberband gun during recess, she enjoyed the confidence of the Old Sarum crowd.
With rough gentleness the big boys taught her to shoot craps and chew tobacco without losing it. The big girls giggled behind their hands most of the time and whispered among themselves a great deal, but Jean Louise considered them useful when choosing sides for a volleyball match. All in all, it was turning out to be a wonderful year.
Wonderful, until she went home for dinner one day. She did not return to school that afternoon, but spent the afternoon on her bed crying with rage and trying to understand the terrible information she had received from Calpurnia.
The next day she returned to school walking with extreme dignity, not prideful, but encumbered by accoutrements hitherto unfamiliar to her. She was positive everybody knew what was the matter with her, that she was being looked at, but she was puzzled that she had never heard it spoken of before in all her years. Maybe nobody knows anything about it, she thought. If that was so, she had news, all right.