Mr. Sender

Moira Crone

Obituaries, Fayton Sun, May 5, 1963
Hamilton Sender, Prominent Insurance Broker
Mr. Hamilton Sender, founder and owner of Sender Insurance of Fayton, died Saturday of a gun accident at his home. He was forty-two. Mr. Sender was born in Fayton and was a lifelong resident of this city. He attended East Atlantic University in Keaneville and served for four years in the navy in the Pacific Theater, reaching the rank of second lieutenant.... Survivors include his wife, Mrs. Olive May Sender, née Olive Carter, a daughter, Cheryl Ann....

Lily

If you wear a mohair sweater with just about nothing underneath, your daddy will come out on the porch cocking a shotgun. This proves he cares about you. I am eleven years old and I know this for a fact.

Mr. Sender is out there, next door. But Cheryl Ann keeps walking no matter. It’s her reputation that concerns him, I am sure. She goes to her fellow, who is leaning on an Impala at the curb, his arms folded. It is December. Mr. Sender says, “Come back here.” I hear him from my bedroom. The fellow holds out a cigarette he’s already half-smoked. When Cheryl Ann gets to him, she takes it between two fingers and pulls on it hard, like it will take her to heaven. I wonder will it.

They drive away. I feel sorry for Mr. Sender, how Cheryl Ann defied him when he was right.

I tell Pauline about this, and her friend Sidney who is the Senders’ new maid. It’s when they come back to work after the holidays. “Cheryl should have worn a blouse,” I say. “People can see through the holes in mohair sweaters,” I say.

“Men, you mean,” Sidney says. “Not people. Well what was she wearing under?”

“A slip,” I say. I saw it in the porch light through that loose knit. The color was nude. I know a good girl would never do that.

Pauline who has raised me says I shouldn’t say that word nude. Even worse than naked.

“Maybe she should have worn a blouse,” Sidney says. “Washed all her white ones when she came home for winter vacation. Then we wouldn’t have had this trouble.”

“You probably got that right,” Pauline says, but Pauline sounds to me like she doubts it.


Mr. Sender is spending all his time in his tiny den, Sidney tells Pauline. Sidney’s not that used to him. She’s only been working over there ten months. She says she told him that Cheryl’s off at the college, that she’s grown. She says he walked right out not touching his eggs in a fury over that.

“I thought you didn’t care about them,” Pauline says to Sidney.

“I’m just saying,” Sidney says. “What’s he doing all day in that den? He writes insurance. His secretary covers the work, but he got to go in once and a while. It don’t look right.” Sidney has worked for doctors, school principals, bankers. She knows their hours, what little work they can get away with. She’s always talking about what goes on in white people’s houses. She likes to say, I mean I could tell you a few things, uh-hun.

I can hardly imagine a white man who stays at home. My daddy owns a drugstore and my mamma keeps the books. I am mostly with Pauline. My daddy doesn’t see me even if I am standing right in front of him in the middle of the room. Or if he does see me sometimes when he’s riled, I wish he hadn’t. Mamma thinks I get away with too much. She is certain I am fat. I am ashamed of weighing ninety-seven. Pauline says it’s okay if I eat something she makes, her collards with ham hocks, her shelled peas stuck up inside the refrigerator in jars only we know about. Her late lunch, what she shares with Sidney and with me. I know I shouldn’t eat the food, but I can’t help it. We all sit around and talk while they are waiting for their ride home. I am big for my age, thick on my thighs, and I am starting to need a training bra, but my mamma won’t get it. She says I need to live on hard eggs and boiled chicken. I try, but Pauline tells me the opposite, that men love big thighs and I’m going to have me some hams. She
pinches me and tells Sidney don’t I have a pretty leg, won’t I be something. When she says it I smile and think maybe one day I will go somewhere this is true, that men like big legs. Surely they don’t in Fayton. I know this for a fact.

Here white men like tiny feet and tiny hands, and the limbs to go with them. The only thing that can be big is bosoms, and girls have to look like Cheryl Ann but not dress like a you-know-what. She used to dress nice, Cheryl Ann. I used to think she was the finest girl there was. I have watched the junior high girls and the high school girls and Cheryl Ann herself grow up. She was so beautiful in high school she wouldn’t have anybody. The man she found in college who came in December in the Impala is the first date she’s ever had. He is handsome as all get out.

“Thighs are the whole story, you get right down to it,” Sidney says, and I say, “Story of what?” Sidney tells Pauline to tell me, but Pauline says she can’t.

All this time, this spring, Mr. Sender is inside his den with his rifles for hunting and his pipes and his duck decoys. He never goes out, doesn’t shave for a week at a time. Sidney has kept saying, “It’s Cheryl. He’s pining. He writes out long letters to her he doesn’t send.”

“He have to let her go,” Pauline says.

I have trouble imagining it. A man who loves his daughter and misses her when she is gone.

So Palm Sunday is coming on. Everything is early this year. I am standing in the doorway at the Senders’ house with a tray of leftover cupcakes from the sixth grade Easter party. On top of each one is a marshmallow chickadee. I might have eaten them all in a single afternoon in front of the TV, but instead I bring them to Mr. Sender, for he needs some cheering up. I know this is Christian of me.

Sidney stands in the Senders’ back hall and tells me I am sweet, but she is under instructions from Mrs. Olive not to let people bother Mr. Sender. But then he comes out of his den. He is smiling a little, and wearing a robe and pants, and he says, “What is it, Sidney?” And he grabs a cake off the tray.

“Delicious, devil’s food,” he says with his mouth full. It is a big mouth, I notice. So is his Adam’s apple, and his neck is long. “You the little Stark girl?”

I think of course he must know about me, since I know so much about him. I live right next door. But I say, “Yes, sir,” because you never tell a man what you think. I know this the same way I know about mohair sweaters and reputations, and the shame of showing slips and wearing dark hose before high school. You tell men what they want to hear. You need to learn that if you are going to get one. I know I have to practice.

The next week Sidney comes over to my house with a present. A stuffed animal for me—it says my name, Lily Stark, on the card. It’s from Mr. Sender. It’s a green duck with small black eyes.

“Looks to me like a duck he might hunt,” Pauline says.

I know why Pauline would say that: she doesn’t like Mr. Sender. I am thrilled no matter. I go upstairs and put a big lilac bow around its neck. One of my own, for my ponytail. Next day I go over there to thank him. This time Mrs. Sender asks me what I want. When I say, she says, “My husband is indisposed. You know what that is?”

Of course I know what indisposed is. I have a good vocabulary.

Mr. Sender comes out then and tells his wife to shut her mouth, and he brings me back into his den. Then he shows me a thing I don’t know: what pipe cleaners are for. For going down inside the shaft of a pipe, not just for crafts at school. He shows me about packing the bowl, and puffing on the pipe to get it going.

When I tell Pauline about this time I spent with Mr. Sender, she doesn’t see what a nice man he is. She says, “He got guns in there, don’t he?”

“He’s so lonely,” I say. “He misses Cheryl Ann. It is going to be Easter. He gave me a present for Easter. Easter is about loving people and rising from the dead.”

“Well why don’t you stay over here in the afternoons for now?” Pauline says. “You do that for me?”

I know this isn’t Pauline’s business. I say to her, “I don’t have to listen to you.” When I see what comes over Pauline, how her eyes float and fill, I cry. I won’t say I’m sorry. I know I don’t have to. I am growing up, and I don’t have to. I don’t even have to mind her. She works for us.

When I run upstairs I hear Sidney going at Pauline for being partial to me. Sidney doesn’t believe in taking up for white people, or spoiling their children, at least to hear her talk. Sidney says I am spoiled and I hear her. Spoiled sounds to me like something that’s turned like milk, and then you throw it out. I hate that word. There is no coming back from spoiled.

This is the routine on Saturdays since I turned eleven: my parents go to the store at seven-thirty to open up, while I am still in bed. Pauline goes shopping and then comes home in a cab with the groceries. She gets to the house about the time I wake up to watch cartoons, sometimes about an hour later. She makes me breakfast.

This Saturday the phone rings before Pauline gets there. It wakes me up, and Mr. Sender says on the phone, “So, do I have the little Stark?” I have dreamed of this call. I have hoped all along he was going to call me. “You want me to show you a trick?” he asks.

I get up and put on my shorts and a sleeveless top—a pretty set, with ruffles— and I run over there in my flip-flops.

The Sender house is all open doors. I find him in his den. He’s unshaven. His shirt is old and worn, and his head looks too long and seems too pale, but I know I must overlook all that. He looks right at me like he can see me, all of me. He says, “Did you ever get that duck?”

I think it is odd he’s forgotten I’d thanked him, but of course I lie. He is a man. “Oh yes, I never told you. I am so sorry. I gave him a bow.”

The door to his den swings closed. I see he has one of his shotguns on the leather-top desk. It’s not too long. Its handle is wooden. Same one he took out on the porch that night.

He says, “Come here.”

And I go.

And then he says, “Watch me,” and he takes up his pipe. He draws a mound of smoke into his pipe with that mouth of his, and he blows out a ring after a minute. Then he blows out another ring, inside of the first. And the two rings float there as if they are doing a dance. This is magic to me. He hands me the pipe. A pipe, and I have never smoked. Cheryl Ann took her fellow’s cigarette, I know. So I take it.

He says I should take my tongue and put it at the top of my mouth. Then when the time comes, I do it, with the smoke hovering there at the roof of my mouth. Just when he says to, I let it go out from the perfect circle I have made with my lips like he told me to do. First try, there it is. “Beginner’s luck,” he says.

And he has seen how I can be wonderful, and no one else except Pauline has ever seen that. But I am mad at Pauline. Then he touches my cheek, and he says, “Come here.” While I watch the ring, I come there, to him. And I see how the smoke is floating in the air, catching light like dust, for it is dust, dirt, and it makes me cough, but I tell myself it is nothing, and I tell myself to look at it. In this light it is beautiful and bluish. I know sometimes you have to ignore things, just look at the bright side. Ladies do that all the time, I know this. Being a lady is all about ignoring things.

And then when I am in his lap, he puts his hand on my waist, and then he puts his hand down under the elastic, and down, way down there. I know he has made a mistake; his hand has gone down inside my shorts, not outside. So I buck my hips up, because this will make his hand slide out without embarrassing him. I know that’s the right thing to do, not embarrass him for his mistake. I think I hear someone outside, someone calling me. I buck up my hips, but when I do this, he puts his hand right back. I squirm over a little, and then I look into his face, because I will have to explain to him. I will have to say it sweetly, in a whisper, I know this, that his hand is in the wrong place. I shouldn’t seem mad. And when I am about to look in his face, I think, maybe he will say my name and give me a kiss, when he takes his hand out. But when I look up he hasn’t got a kiss, just licking. He should know my name. He calls me the wrong name. He calls me Cheryl.

“Be still,” he says. “Don’t you know what you came for? What is the matter with you? Don’t you know? Don’t you know? Don’t you know?”

Pauline

Everything happens at once, but you have to look at it one thing at a time.

That is being alive and it is a shame sometimes. There are several mysteries in this story, if you go through it from one end to the other, event by event. But there is a place you can reach where the mysteries disappear.

After Christmas that year, it bothers me Lily has gossip. She says Mr. Sender next door was chasing after his daughter Cheryl. Cheryl’s eighteen, in college. She can date, but her daddy has never liked it. The child says it was how Cheryl was dressed that he didn’t like, and I say, “Uh-hun, I see,” like that was it. But that is how you have to raise them so they don’t know anything.

My friend Sidney Byrd is at the table listening. She works for the Senders, but she was off Christmas week too, and didn’t see this fight. She thinks the Senders are one family don’t have enough to say to each other, so she is surprised there was carrying on over there. Husband and wife never speak, never argue. Sidney doesn’t know Cheryl Ann, because she’s been away at the woman’s college. I have seen her grow up. Mrs. Olive don’t think much of her daughter. This has been true for years and years, I’d say since the child was ten. Sidney has noticed it the short time she’s been there.

Of Lily’s gossip, Sidney says, “I think Cheryl seems all right, but some will surprise you. No telling what hell the girl might raise.”

“Sidney,” I say, to tell her not to say hell, for the child, Lily, is just eleven. Her mother don’t want her to curse, and I don’t believe in it. I have been watching Lily since she was born—took her home from the hospital cause her mamma wanted to sleep off the labor in the quiet.

Sidney tries to fix it. She says to Lily, “I’m not talking about preacher hell.” There, that word again. Sidney Byrd has been getting in trouble for what she says long as I have known her.

I have known her since I was sleeping three to the bed with my sisters in my daddy’s house when he was a sharecropper down at the south of the county. We put up tobacco when we were girls and should have been going to the school. She likes to speak her mind, but I love her.

Since she has been working at the Senders, every weekday afternoon I call for her when I am finished with cleaning and supper, and ready to go home. I use a field-hand whoop that slides from low up to high. For town it sounds a little wild and we both know it, but we like it.

I have a late meal with her—piece of pork with greens, maybe corn bread, food I don’t make for Lily’s parents. We have our time out together, waiting for our ride. The man I used to be married to, Miller Jones, is our ride. He has a big red Pontiac with a turquoise interior. He has been coming around lately.

The Starks are the only white family I ever worked for. Sidney has been working in town much longer. She has lost more than one job for gossip, some because her bosses are crazy. White people don’t know how to act, is what she always says. She has studied it. They are Baptists and they have fine things and ought to know something, but they do not. We have an excuse, she says, we have white people, but white people don’t have one. In the houses she has worked in—not trash, the good families—mostly the white women are crazy the way they run from the men. They can’t breathe hardly in their girdles, much less make any headway. Like they like to get caught. She’s seen rich women be tackled by their husbands and their clothes torn, tumbling like football boys, and smile during it. The men can do anything they want, anything, she says. And sometimes the women. Whichever it is, one day you get caught in the middle.

I say it is not true, for it has never happened to me. I have never been caught in the middle. But it is getting ready to happen.

“You ever notice a white man won’t take up with a woman who has any normal idea what is going on?” she asks me that night, after we hear the gossip from Lily. We are riding in Miller’s car.

I say, “White women can’t think too good, because none of them eat enough. They wouldn’t know a meal if you put it right under their chins.” I start to laugh, and I turn to Sidney who is in the back. Sidney won’t sit up front with me and Miller even though he has the room.

“I mean it, why you cut them slack?” Sidney asks.

I don’t answer. I don’t know. I was born a peaceful person, want everybody to get along. Which is what makes all this hard to explain, if you look at it as it goes along, not all at once.

We get to her place, a tiny pink house with a porch coming off and trumpet vines all over, not blooming, but full and still green, which seems a miracle this late in the winter. She lives with her mamma since her boyfriend Raoul was shot at the Golden Parrot. He was with another woman at the time. She has not gotten over it. I say good night to her. And all Sidney says to Miller is, “You go in to work after this, don’t you?” Not even a thank you for the ride. Miller mumbles at her. He has a mustache these days, and as always, the big head. He is after me to marry him again, and he knows how Sidney feels. She believes he will run all over me if I let him back into my life. The way he did before. I tell Sidney he has half an hour before he has to leave for his shift. And she says to me, “You can get into something in half a hour, Pauline. You watch it.” She slams that Pontiac door. I have always let Sidney tell me what to do, some. She has always had more opinions than I have.

I have been with Miller two different times: once when I was sixteen for two years, and again when I was twenty-five, for three and a half. Now we are in our thirties, and he says he has changed. In some ways he has.

The first time I ran off with him to get away from my daddy’s house—I was the second oldest girl and my mamma was almost blind. We married quick in South Carolina where you didn’t have to be but sixteen, lived in colored enlisted housing at Fort Bragg down in Fayetteville. The apartment was cinderblock, which was the most solid house I had lived in up to then. We had good times. But Miller made me sick and I didn’t know. By the time I saw the army doctor he just went in without asking and took my nature. After that I was nearly too sad to breathe. I wouldn’t go when Miller got transferred to California, even after my daddy told me I was his wife and I should follow. I didn’t want nothing to do with him, when I learned what he had done, how he got what he gave me.

So I left and decided to see my oldest sister Rose who lived in Philadelphia on welfare for four daughters and worked besides. She had a huge apartment, nice, warm, with big windows, but there were too many streets in Philadelphia and too many strangers. I worked in a factory sewing life preservers and had to ride a whole lot of busses to work before the sun rose, and I never knew for sure the bus drivers would take me where they said they were taking me. I just didn’t trust them, don’t know why. Besides my sister Rose had men friends and one of them liked me, and I was done with men then, so I left. Went home and found work with the Starks.

I liked Mrs. Stark at the start. She was dark-haired and from the North, that is, Big Washington, and she said she would teach me what I didn’t know about cooking for white people and keeping a house. And she did. Then she got pregnant with Lily and handed the child over—like I was the one knew everything about a baby—because I was colored I would know. So I learned. Lily was a fat one with long arms, a girl with sweet breath. I couldn’t stand it almost, how pretty she was when she came out.

About that time I was set up at the Starks, Miller showed in his Pontiac. Drove it home from California. He had money for a house from the Veterans and he said he would be true. So I went and lived with him in a house with shingles and brick. But then he was gambling and drinking and we lost it all, including the furniture I had bought on time with Mr. Stark’s name on the notes. I had to divorce him good that time, to leave his debts. Mr. Stark told me. I made Miller go to the courthouse and we both signed the paper.


And now, years have passed, and Miller has sobered up and paid back everybody, including Mr. Stark, and got a good job—shift cook at the hospital— and the Pontiac engine rebuilt, and seats recovered. And he has started showing up every day to give me a ride home from the Starks. And I have been bringing Sidney along so he doesn’t try anything. He knows Sidney doesn’t like him, but he drives her to keep me happy.

Sidney wants me to hate him. It has always been hard for me to hate people up until this.

February and March, Mr. Sender is Sidney’s only subject besides Miller. I wish she wouldn’t keep on it, for Lily hears everything. So I say to mock her, “Sounds like you care for him.”

“I am just saying,” she says. “I don’t care. You the one who cares.”

I think, it is not a sin to care for a person. Even if they are white. But Sidney is stronger than I am, so I have always believed, and I don’t cross her.

“What do the preacher say?” Sidney says, to apologize. “I have been to that well many times, and I know now by heart it is dry.” She means white people will always let you down and down and down no matter how they may seem. I am not ready to believe this about all of them, and she knows it.

“Something wrong with him,” she says. “Like he’s sick or dying. He don’t leave the house. I’m just wondering what it is.” I see Lily wondering about Mr. Sender. Lily has sympathy for people. In this she takes after me.

But Lily is white with brown hair, nothing like me at all. She has glasses, and her mouth is crooked, and she thinks her daddy won’t look at her because she is ugly, and her mother says she shouldn’t eat so much. Yet I do feed Lily like a human being: I won’t starve her. Every way else, I raise her like they want me to. I don’t tell her what men do, or what her period is going to be, because her mother don’t want me to. Mrs. Stark is a businesslike woman, works all the day long, but she thinks Lily should be spared, should grow up and marry rich, never cry. To do this you have to stay ignorant, she believes.


Palm Sunday coming on, Lily starts going over there to see Mr. Sender. I don’t like it. He’s not doing well, not going to work.

Right before Easter he sends over a big ugly fluffy stuffed duck with Sidney. I think she is getting pretty old for a stuffed toy, but she thinks it is great, and she runs upstairs and gives it a ribbon of her own for round its neck. So I am alone at the table with Sidney, who has been riding me all afternoon about Miller. I don’t like looking at everything the way Sidney does. It makes me distrustful, and agitated.

Then Miller comes.

“Ready to go?” he asks at the back screen door, same as he always asks. He’s on time, four-thirty. He’s been on time for six months.

And something gets into me. I say to him, “Will you wait till I am done cooking? The corn pudding has not set.”

He stands there a minute with his hat in his hand. He is balding some and his eyes are dark and large. He says, “If you say.” And he sits on the back stoop and waits for us, like that.

When I have closed the back door on him, Sidney says, “Well, I didn’t think I would live to see that.”

I say, “See? He’s changed, like he says he has.” I am more amazed than Sidney. And I don’t even feel terrible about it. I feel pretty good. This is the first mystery in this story.

“Just wait,” Sidney says.


When I get home that night my sister Rose calls long distance from Philadelphia to tell me she is having another baby and she don’t want it and she has prayed on it. She wants to go to a man in Allentown to get rid of it. She might die if she goes to Allentown, but she wants to do it. Her boyfriend doesn’t know, and he wants to live with her, and four children is enough. If he lives with her she won’t get as big a check, but he is a mason and he has work. So what should she do?

“Well, tell him, and ask him is he a man,” I say to her.

She says would I say that. I say maybe, and this seems true, although I never asked it of Miller. I think now I might.

“You, Pauline?” she says. “You?”


A few days later Lily says Mr. Sender had her over to see him again, and I tell her right out she had better not go over there. He has guns in his den and he is out of his head, can’t even get washed and dressed and go to work. And Lily for the first time gets that look other older white people get, and she says, “I don’t have to listen to you.”

There is no way around what she means.

Then she runs upstairs and she’s crying.

Sidney says, “See? She just like the rest. Why you spoil her? See? Look at it Pauline. And why can’t she give her own self a ponytail, you still combing out her hair? And why can’t she clean her room, or put her clothes in the hamper, or run her own bath?”

It breaks my heart how Lily spoke to me. And then I think, it’s not right, the way she can say anything she wants.

A few days after, I am out in the garden hanging wash. I come in the house to see her, but the child doesn’t answer. I remember that Sidney has left early for a funeral. I go over to the Senders and stand on the back porch. There is a door split in the middle, and window on top. I can see in—the back hall that goes to his den, unlit. Mrs. Olive’s car is not in the driveway. I wonder if Sidney has locked up. I reach for the doorknob, then catch myself. My heart hurts in my chest. Then I see Lily turn in the drive on her bicycle, so I settle down. She’s sweet to me. She’s sorry what she said the other day. I don’t believe she is a bad child. I still don’t believe that. But she is not my child.

That Friday Sidney tells me Mr. Sender is not even coming out to eat anymore. She says she doesn’t think he wants to live.

That next Saturday in the A&P, I feel as if I’ve left the Starks’ house with a pot going. I haven’t even been to there that day. I go shopping for the Starks before I go to work. I have the manager call for me, and I am waiting outside for one of the four cabs in Fayton what will haul colored people. I have hoped to get Sol Bascomb, who is one of my favorite white men. He has helped me from time to time with my sweet potato pie business at Christmas, delivering. It is Abel Odom who finally shows. A good old boy, the worst. I ask him can we hurry. He says he will see about that. There is something wrong with the latch on the trunk in his nasty cab, so he puts the Starks’ groceries in the back. There is no room on the seat for me when he is through. I am too wide. I hesitate.

“What?” he says.

Sol and the other taxi drivers let me sit in front. I reach for the front door handle. “What makes you think you can ride there?” he says.

So I get in the back, squeezed against seven brown bags of groceries. He slams the door before I’m all the way in, so my face jams up against the celery stalk poking out of one. The door handle is pressing in my back. He is going slow as he can down Sycamore Street. I am not going to be provoked, I tell myself. I am not, and on an ordinary day, I wouldn’t be, but today I can hardly bear it. I am burning. I stare out the opposite window, over the seven standing bags of food. I see the white bungalows with waxy-leaved bushes in the yards, look like they never grow or change. These neighborhoods are hunched under the gray clouds.

A house is never a color in this part of town, just brick or ghostly. The whole town of Fayton seems like it is hunkered down. Finally, we pull into the Starks’ drive. Closer I get to the kitchen door, the worse I feel. Inside, I say, “Lily? You up?” Odom is bringing in the bags because he knows I will tell Mrs. Stark if he doesn’t. When he’s finished I leave the tip on the table and go into Lily’s bedroom. Nobody in the bed, nobody in the yard when I look out her window.

Soon as he’s gone I run out of the Starks’ house, across the side yard, and through the Senders’ back gate.

I get to their back stoop. Dutch door is closed. I take the knob this time. Then I am standing in the back hall calling Lily’s name. I see Mr. Sender’s den door is closed.

I am strong in my body at this point in my life. I have put up tobacco and slaughtered stock from the time I was eight until I left home with Miller. But this is he second mystery here, how I push in Mr. Sender’s door, don’t think about it. He stands and Lily rolls out of his lap. Her shorts down around her little thighs, she tumbles to the floor.

I look at him straight in the face. I have never done this with a white man. This is the third: I see something gleamy-glinting dart behind his eyes, trying one eye and then the other, as if his eyes are lookouts, and if it is quick enough, I won’t be able to look in. I am held there in a stare. Lily is struggling with her pants. They are little cotton pique I put in bleach-water and washed the day before. I yell at her to get out, but she can’t walk yet. Her legs are bound by the elastic.

That’s when Mr. Sender reaches down for his long gun. Old, like the one my daddy borrowed once for close range, not for hunting, to kill a pig who had eaten what they had put in the barn for the rats. He wants to know what I think I’m doing in his house.

You know what he calls me.

He is looking right at me, with that pistol pointing in the air, the butt of it in the crook of his elbow jammed into his side. So I can’t look down. Finally Lily crawls to my leg. I reach down one hand and yank up her shorts. I thank the Lord there is no zipper. I tell her to get out again, and she does it. I am still staring at Mr. Sender.

I see it again behind his eyes. It is trying to cram itself down into some lie. I see that.

When Lily is gone, it comes all the way out. And it is going to spit in my face and then beat me good, and say how sorry it is. It is going to grab hold of me and throw me down. I see it swirling around everywhere, not only in this time and in this room, but about Lily and me when we are alone, in the lies I have to tell her, the lies I have to go along with. And around me and Miller when he’s been cruel. I see that army doctor took what wasn’t his to take. I see Odom when he slammed that car door on me, just ten minutes before.

I see it spread out over the whole of Fayton, and the people having to crawl low down, afraid to pull up for fear of it. It is stealing everyone’s sight. It is the same as Mr. Sender’s pipe smoke but it don’t let up. It is drifting dark, making it hard to see or breathe, or to want to.

Then I see Mr. Sender there. He’s in front of these other things I see. Yet I see them all. He is the gate to them. His open mouth is the door. He’s calling me things, saying filthy things. There’s his gun, but he looks too pitiful to be able to shoot me. It is pointed up, towards himself. I reach for his fingers holding that pistol. My hand covers his hand. I cannot believe what I am about to do.

Later in the day, Sidney says she is so shocked: “I thought some were bad, but I wasn’t ready for this white man. I revise my opinion. Mr. Sender takes the prize.” Sent in there to clean up the blood, Sidney has read the notes he wrote that say, I love Cheryl more than my whole life.

“Been crawling in his daughter’s bed since she was nine,” Sidney says. “Imagine that. He confessed it on paper. I’d kill myself too if I was a wretch like that. Mrs. Sender don’t think I can read? Been mulling over it holed up in that room, brokenhearted over his baby daughter taking a new lover. Call him her new lover. Can you imagine?”

And I lie to her and I say I can’t.

For I don’t say what I have done. Or anything about Lily. After, I have picked up Lily’s flip-flops from the yard, and I have told Lily nothing happened, because that is my job and now I despise it. Lily has gone fast fast fast asleep.

By that night I know I must live another life. On that Monday I stop working for the Starks. I have been caught in the middle. I have been party to too much that is false.


Very late in my life, when I am about to die, I tell Miller the truth, because it doesn’t seem right to pass on with it, take it with me where I am going. I still doubt myself sometimes. I still wonder then. He says, “You, Pauline? You a saint. You?” He refuses to believe me.

And I still cannot explain how it happened. How I knew. How I went through those two doors without fear. How I faced him, a white man holding a real pistol mouth wide open, gaping gate to all those lies.

And I can’t explain what happens right after: it comes to me to boss my sister Rose, that very night, tell her she better have that baby, and in a few months I go to Philadelphia on a bus and am not afraid of the driver. I am there when she is born, and I name her Tamara. I bring her home from Philadelphia and I decide I will not stunt her, I will raise her right. I move in with Miller, and this time he does respect me because I make him. And we have Tamara for our child. He becomes a different man. Even Sidney admits it finally. The best part of my life happens after that day in Mr. Sender’s den.

That Saturday, though, I can’t know any of what will happen. In fact, I have no thought of the future, for if I do, I will surely run for my life. For the future I have just described cannot be imagined. I am just staring into his ugly eyes watching something I’ve never seen so clear dart from here and there, trying to hide in some claim he is about to make. It is amazing to behold, brazen, dark. I know more words and more words are going to come out of his big brown pink mouth where the barrel will fit so perfectly, I see. I know what he will say: that the whole world is his, how that will never change. But he only owns one mean little part of the world. It is his lie that the smallest part is the whole, is everything. I must already know there is more that day when I reach up toward his arm and pull down a little and squeeze his hand on the trigger, so the bullet goes through the roof of his mouth and into his brain. I just can’t stand to hear him anymore, hear him tell his small mean lies over and over and over as if that would make them true.

Visit Moira Crone as Image Artist of the Month for August '06

Issue #41• Winter '03-'04