But more than Pearl Harbor and Manila has happened since then, and Pete don’t make one to listen to it. Nor do I: it’s like, since nobody can tell us exactly where he was when he stopped being is, instead of just becoming was at some single spot on the earth where the people who loved him could weight him down with a stone, Pete still is everywhere about the earth, one among all the fighters forever, was or is either.
So Mother and Father and I don’t need a little wooden box to catch the voices of them that saw the courage and the sacrifice. Then Mother called me back to the kitchen. The water smoked a little in the washtub, beside the soap dish and my clean nightshirt and the towel Mother made out of our worn-out cotton sacks, and I bathe and empty the tub and leave it ready for her, and we lie down.
Then morning, and we rose. Mother was up first, as always. My clean white Sunday shirt and pants were waiting, along with the shoes and stockings I hadn’t even seen since frost was out of the ground. But in yesterday’s overalls still I carried the shoes back to the kitchen where Mother stood in yesterday’s dress at the stove where not only our breakfast was cooking but Father’s dinner too, and set the shoes beside her Sunday ones against the wall and went to the barn, and Father and I fed and milked and came back and sat down and ate while Mother moved back and forth between the table and the stove till we were done, and she herself sat down.
Then I got out the blacking-box, until Father came and took it away from me — the polish and rag and brush and the four shoes in succession. “De Spain is rich,” he said. “With a monkey nigger in a white coat to hold the jar up each time he wants to spit. You shine all shoes like you aimed yourself to wear them: just the parts that you can see yourself by looking down.”
Then we dressed. I put on my Sunday shirt and the pants so stiff with starch that they would stand alone, and carried my stockings back to the kitchen just as Mother entered, carrying hers, and dressed too, even her hat, and took my stockings from me and put them with hers on the table beside the shined shoes, and lifted the satchel down from the cupboard shelf.
It was still in the cardboard box it came in, with the colored label of the San Francisco drugstore where Pete bought it — a round, square-ended, water-proof satchel with a handle for carrying, so that as soon as Pete saw it in the store he must have known too that it had been almost exactly made for exactly what we would use it for, with a zipper opening that Mother had never seen before nor Father either.
That is, we had all three been in the drugstore and the ten-cent-store in Jefferson but I was the only one who had been curious enough to find out how one worked, even though even I never dreamed we would ever own one. So it was me that zipped it open, with a pipe and a can of tobacco in it for Father and a hunting cap with a carbide headlight for me and for Mother the satchel itself, and she zipped it shut and then open and then Father tried it, running the slide up and down the little clicking track until Mother made him stop before he wore it out; and she put the satchel, still open, back into the box and I fetched in from the barn the empty quart bottle of cattle-dip and she scalded the bottle and cork and put them and the clean folded towel into the satchel and set the box onto the cupboard shelf, the zipper still open because when we came to need it we would have to open it first and so we would save that much wear on the zipper too.
She took the satchel from the box and the bottle from the satchel and filled the bottle with clean water and corked it and put it back into the satchel with the clean towel and put our shoes and stockings in and zipped the satchel shut, and we walked to the road and stood in the bright hot morning beside the mailbox until the bus came up and stopped.
It was the school bus, the one I rode back and forth to Frenchman’s Bend to school in last winter, and that Pete rode in every morning and evening until he graduated, but going in the opposite direction now, in to Jefferson, and only on Saturday, seen for a long time down the long straight stretch of Valley road while other people waiting beside other mailboxes got into it. Then it was our turn.
Mother handed the two quarters to Solon Quick, who built it and owned it and drove it, and we got in too and it went on, and soon there was no more room for the ones that stood beside the mailboxes and signalled and then it went fast, twenty miles then ten then five then one, and up the last hill to where the concrete streets began, and we got out and sat on the curb and Mother opened the satchel and took our shoes and the bottle of water and the towel and we washed our feet and put on our shoes and stockings and Mother put the bottle and towel back and shut the bag.
And we walked beside the iron picket fence long enough to front a cotton patch; we turned into the yard which was bigger than farms I had seen and followed the gravel drive wider and smoother than roads in Frenchman’s Bend, on to the house that to me anyway looked bigger than the courthouse, and mounted the steps between the stone columns and crossed the portico that would have held our whole house, galleries and all, and knocked at the door. And then it never mattered whether our shoes were shined at all or not: the whites of the monkey nigger’s eyes for just a second when he opened the door for us, the white of his coat for just a second at the end of the hall before it was gone too, his feet not making any more noise than a cat’s leaving us to find the right door by ourselves, if we could.
And we did — the rich man’s parlor that any woman in Frenchman’s Bend and I reckon in the rest of the county too could have described to the inch but which not even the men who would come to Major de Spain after bank-hours or on Sunday to ask to have a note extended, had ever seen, with a light hanging in the middle of the ceiling the size of our whole washtub full of chopped-up ice and a gold-colored harp that would have blocked our barn door and a mirror that a man on a mule could have seen himself and the mule both in, and a table shaped like a coffin in the middle of the floor with the Confederate flag spread over it and the photograph of Major de Spain’s son and the open box with the medal in it and a big blue automatic pistol weighting down the flag, and Major de Spain standing at the end of the table with his hat on until after a while he seemed to hear and recognize the name which Mother spoke; — not a real major but just called that because his father had been a real one in the old Confederate war, but a banker powerful in money and politics both, that Father said had made governors and senators too in Mississippi; — an old man, too old you would have said to have had a son just twenty-three; too old anyway to have had that look on his face.
“Ha,” he said. “I remember now. You too were advised that your son poured out his blood on the altar of unpreparedness and inefficiency. What do you want?”
“Nothing,” Mother said. She didn’t even pause at the door. She went on toward the table. “We had nothing to bring you. And I don’t think I see anything here we would want to take away.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “You have a son left. Take what they have been advising to me: go back home and pray. Not for the dead one: for the one they have so far left you, that something somewhere, somehow will save him!” She wasn’t even looking at him. She never had looked at him again.
She just went on across that barn-sized room exactly as I have watched her set mine and Father’s lunch pail into the fence corner when there wasn’t time to stop the plows to eat, and turn back toward the house.
“I can tell you something simpler than that,” she said. “Weep.” Then she reached the table. But it was only her body that stopped, her hand going out so smooth and quick that his hand only caught her wrist, the two hands locked together on the big blue pistol, between the photograph and the little hunk of iron medal on its colored ribbon, against that old flag that a heap
