Free A Tidewater Morning by William Styron Page B

why men commit suicide! Where in the goddamned hell am I goin’ to get the money to put him in the ground? Niggers have always been the biggest problem! Goddamnit, I was brought up to have a certain respect and say ‘colored’ instead of ‘niggers’ but they are always a problem. They will always just drag you down! I ain’t got thirty-five-dollars! I ain’t got twenty-five dollars! I ain’t got five dollars!”
    “Vernon!” Trixie’s voice rose, and she entreatingly spread out her great creamy arms. “Someday you’re goin’ to get a stroke!”
    “And one other thing!” He stopped.
    Then suddenly his fury—or the harsher, wilder part of it—seemed to evaporate, sucked up into the moonlit night with its soft summery cricketing sounds and its scent of warm loam and honeysuckle. For an instant he looked shrunken, runtier than ever, so light and frail that he might blow away like a leaf, and he ran a nervous, trembling hand through his shock of tangled black hair. “I know, I know,” he said in a faint, unsteady voice edged with grief. “Poor old man, he couldn’t help it. He was a decent, pitiful old thing, probably never done anybody the slightest harm. I ain’t got a thing in the world against Shadrach. Poor old man.”
    Crouching below the porch I felt an abrupt, smothering misery. The tenderest gust of wind blew from the woods and I shivered at its touch on my cheek, mourning for Shadrach and Mr. Dabney, and slavery and destitution, and all the human discord swirling around me in a time and place I could not understand. As if to banish my fierce unease, I began to try—in a seizure of concentration—to count the fireflies sparkling in the night air. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty …
    “And anyway,” Trixie said, touching her husband’s hand, “he died on Dabney ground like he wanted to. Even if he’s got to be put away in a strange graveyard.”
    “Well, he won’t know the difference,” said Mr. Dabney. “When you’re dead nobody knows the difference. Death ain’t much.”

A TIDEWATER MORNING

    D uring the late summer of 1938, there was black news of the onrushing war. I had just turned thirteen, and I had a newspaper route that carried me on foot up and down the hot, sycamore-lined streets of our little village on the banks of the James River in Tidewater Virginia. I folded the papers into cylinders, forty-five or fifty of them, and stuffed them into a dingy white canvas bag that I lugged around with a strap that at first cut painfully into my shoulder, then eased up about a third of the way through my afternoon trek, which took about an hour and a half. The banner headlines that summer were tall and thick with harsh alarm: HITLER THREATENS. GERMAN TROOPS MASSING. CZECHOSLOVAKIA menaced. The news caused me less fear, really, than a vague, visceral excitement, distracting me from the gloom that encompassed me, from the ache that swelled in my stomach whenever I thought of my mother and her illness. And that thought always returned with a queasy jolt. I was also nagged by a worry having to do with my body: my nipples had become exquisitely tender, sensitive to the touch of the inside of my shirt and to my nervous, examining fingers, and the horrible fantasy flashed off and on in my mind that I might be turning, at least partially, into a girl. I fretted over other matters—over the length and tedium of the paper route, which I had commenced in the jazzed-up high spirits of anyone at his first paid professional employment but which had now lost most of its savor, and over my pay: $2.50 a week for nine hours, including an extra tour of duty overloaded at dawn with the fat editions of Sunday. Even during the Depression this was paltry recompense, and it was doled out dime by dime, nickel by nickel, by the only consummately mean-spirited person among the many frail and imperfect characters who floated in and out of my early youth.
    Mr. Quigley—I have forgotten or blanked out his first