“I’m going to the war,” he said.
Evelyn sighed. After his behavior she had been expecting worse, though when she thought about it now, there wasn’t a worse scenario she could pick out and name. No, this was as bad as she could fathom. She shook her head, wanting to bar the news from penetrating. “But that means you can’t come by? That means you forget about me?”
He sighed, a deep heavy release. “I didn’t forget about you, Evelyn. I could never forget about you. But I wanted you to forget about me. They’re starting to let more Negroes fight now. I may not come back, and if I do, who knows what shape I’ll be in? Andrew’s brother lost his legs. He ain’t no use for nobody.” He talked in a matter-of-fact manner as if he were explaining to someone how he cracked the chickens’ necks each Saturday.
“Well, can’t you tell them things changed? You’re a student now, and of medicine. I thought if you showed proof of your studies, you could—”
“Even if it did work—” he paused. “I didn’t want to worry you, but the money Andrew’s mama was giving me didn’t come through this semester, so I’m not a student. So there’s no excuse.”
Evelyn didn’t say anything for a while. What was there to say?
“I could talk to my daddy,” she started. “He’ll know his way out of this. He always has a plan. What he says is, ‘Every problem has a solution.’ He says it’s a law. By virtue of there being a problem, there has to be a way out of it. You just have to identify it.”
Renard shook his head violently. “Is you that na?ve?”
Are, she wanted to say.
He grabbed her elbow and shook her whole body. “Well, is you? You think your daddy know a way out of doing what the government tell you to do? You think your daddy know a way out of war itself? I know he over there living his life like a white man, but that don’t mean he turned into Jesus Christ overnight.” With that final display of rage, Renard seemed to come to, and his body quieted along with his voice. “I didn’t mean to say that,” he started to stammer. “I always respected your daddy.”
Evelyn might have cried over any aspect of the last few days—just the drafting and not the outburst, just the distance and not the war—but she snuffed out any urge she had to do so now, forbidding herself from breaking down in front of a man who had enough anger in him to overpower his love; if their roles had been reversed, she didn’t know if any other emotion inside her could have outshined what she had come to feel for him. She lifted her head.
“You didn’t have to say that about my daddy,” she said. “My daddy always was kind to you. He’s an honest man and works an honest living. Is that a crime all of a sudden?” She held on to the self-righteousness that was duly hers in that moment. She didn’t care so much about what Renard had said—she still hadn’t forgiven her daddy for the conversation she’d overheard—but it was his ability to distance himself that had broken her.
“No, no, it most certainly isn’t,” Renard said.
“Well, then, I didn’t think so.” She reached down for her bag, which had dropped in the uproar. “I guess I ought to be going then,” she said, willing herself now to hold back her tears. “I’m awful sorry to hear about you being drafted, and I’ll pray for you then.”
She turned and walked toward the bench where she’d left her books. She hadn’t walked far before she heard footsteps behind her. She turned. He had followed her. Her relief rose, but when she remembered his rage, it fell again.
“There’s nothing really to talk about,” she said.
“I leave in a month for basic training.”
“You and Andrew going to the same place?”
He nodded. “For training at least.”
“Well, that’s good then. You can keep each other company, watch out for each other.” Her voice cracked then under the weight of all the heavy suppression.
He pulled her to him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how to handle it. And then yo daddy, who was I to say a word against yo kind daddy, I ain’t been myself is all. I’m so scared, and you the first one I been able to say that aloud to, I’m so scared.” His words came out from all directions in sharp spurts, running into each other, stepping back, and turning in the opposite direction just to collide again.
Evelyn felt herself collapse inside. “Oh, I wish you would have said all that straight out. We could have avoided all that other—”
“I didn’t know how to say it until now. If I had known, I woulda, but I didn’t know how to say it.”
They held each other tighter.
“A month is a long time. I’ve heard of men getting less,” she said. “There’s a lot we could do in a month.”
“I could stand here just like I’m standing right now and be content.”
Evelyn looked around. The evening was just starting to come, and the street was filling up with people hustling home for dinner. “It’s so early in the night,” she said. “I got at least a few hours before my daddy starts looking.”
Over the next week, Ruby stayed in bed, and their mother catered to her, extra honey buns and jars of pig lips. While Ruby napped, Mother would sit at the table plodding through beads of the Rosary, her mouth moving in silence. While she prayed, Evelyn stood in the bathroom mirror, spraying her wrists with her sister’s perfume, reddening her cheeks with her lipstick. She even borrowed Ruby’s new clothes; her favorite was a short black slipper satin dress that reached her knees. It left her shoulders bare, so she begged Miss Georgia to spare ribbons of material she could drape over them. Then she’d stand in the mirror and just stare at her reflection. She began to understand why it took Ruby over an hour to get ready to see Andrew. For most of that time, she was already complete, but she was surveying her work, admiring it, spinning around and catching it from distinct angles. Now that Renard was leaving, Evelyn intended to spend every minute with him. She invented outright lies about where she was headed, more out of habit than out of concern for what her parents would think. Her mother barely lifted her head as Evelyn’s heels tapped against the hardwood floor, but her father burrowed into her lies, seeming more fascinated by the evidence of her new disregard than by the content itself.
That night, as she sat on the front porch waiting for Renard, her daddy walked outside to smoke a cigar.
“I’m just going off to study with some of the girls from school,” she hurried to say, to ward off any serious conversation.
Silence.
“We have a big final coming up, and I joined a study group.”
Her father sat beside her, and the swing creaked under his weight. “Don’t lie to me, Evelyn.”
“The girls came to me, I didn’t need it, but I wanted to help people who weren’t as well off as I am,” she continued.