but you to let me in. Because little Morris, little Morris-help me, I loved
him, I did. Not in a womanly way; it was, oh I admit it, that we were
kindred spirits. We looked each other in the eye, we saw the same devil, we
weren't afraid; it was-merry. But he outsmarted me; I'd known he could, and
hoped he wouldn't, and he did, and now: it's too long to be alone, a
lifetime. I walk through the house, nothing is mine: your pink room, your
kitchen, the house is yours, and Catherine's too, I think. Only don't leave
me, let me live with you. I'm feeling old, I want my sister."
The rain, adding its voice to Verena's, was between them, Dolly and the
Judge, a transparent wall through which he could watch her losing substance,
recede before him as earlier she had seemed to recede before me. More than
that, it was as if the tree-house were dissolving. Lunging wind cast
overboard the soggy wreckage of our Rook cards, our wrapping papers; animal
crackers crumbled, the rain-filled mason jars spilled over like fountains;
and Catherine's beautiful scrapquilt was ruined, a puddle. It was going:
like the doomed houses rivers in flood float away; and it was as though the
Judge were trapped there-waving to us as we, the survivors, stood ashore.
For Dolly had said, "Forgive me; I want my sister, too," and the Judge could
not reach her, not with his arms, not with his heart: Verena's claim was too
final.
Somewhere near midnight the rain slackened, halted; wind barreled about
wringing out the trees. Singly, like delayed guests arriving at a dance,
appearing stars pierced the sky. It was time to leave. We took nothing with
us: left the quilt to rot, spoons to rust; and the tree-house, the woods we
left to winter.
For quite a while it was Catherine's custom to date events as having
occurred before or after her incarceration. "Prior," she would begin, "to
the time That One made a jailbird of me." As for the rest of us, we could
have divided history along similar lines; that is, in terms of before and
after the tree-house. Those few autumn days were a monument and a signpost.
Except to collect his belongings, the Judge never again entered the
house he'd shared with his sons and their wives, a circumstance that must
have suited them, at least they made no protest when he took a room at Miss
Bell's boarding house. This was a brown solemn establishment which lately
has been turned into a funeral home by an undertaker who saw that to effect
the correct atmosphere a minimum of renovation would be necessary. I
disliked going past it, for Miss Bell's guests, ladies thorny as the
blighted rosebushes littering the yard, occupied the porch in a dawn-to-dark
marathon of vigilance. One of them, the twice-widowed Mamie Canfield,
specialized in spotting pregnancies (some legendary fellow is supposed to
have told his wife Why waste money on a doctor? just trot yourself past Miss
Bell's: Mamie Canfield, shell let the world know soon enough whether you is
or ain't). Until the Judge moved there, Amos Legrand was the only man in
residence at Miss Bell's. He was a godsend to the other tenants: the moments
most sacred to them were when, after supper, Amos swung in the seat-swing
with his little legs not touching the floor and his tongue trilling like an
alarm-clock. They vied with each other in knitting him socks and sweaters,
tending to his diet: at table all the best things were saved for his plate-
Miss Bell had trouble keeping a cook because the ladies were forever poking
around in the kitchen wanting to make a delicacy that would tempt their pet.
Probably they would have done the same for the Judge, but he had no use for
them, never, so they complained, stopped to pass the time of day.
The last drenching night in the tree-house had left me with a bad cold,
Verena with a worse one; and we had a sneezing nurse. Dolly. Catherine
wouldn't help: "Dollyheart, you can do like you please-tote That One's
slopjar till you drop in your tracks. Only don't count on me to lift a
finger. I've put down the load."
Rising at all hours of the night. Dolly brought the syrups that eased
our throats, stoked the fires that kept us warm. Verena did not, as in other
days, accept such attention simply as her due. "In the spring," she promised
Dolly, "we'll make a trip together. We might go to the Grand Canyon and call
on Maudie Laura. Or Florida: you've never seen the ocean." But Dolly was
where she wanted to be, she had no wish to travel: "I wouldn't enjoy it,
seeing the things I've known shamed by nobler sights."
Doctor Carter called regularly to see us, and one morning Dolly asked
would he mind taking her temperature; she felt so flushed and weak in the
legs. He put her straight to bed, and she thought it was very humorous when
he told her she had walking pneumonia. "Walking pneumonia," she said to the
Judge, who had come to visit her, "it must be something new, I've never
heard of it. But I do feel as though I were skylarking along on a pair of
stilts. Lovely," she said and fell asleep.
For three, nearly four days she never really woke up. Catherine stayed
with her, dozing upright in a wicker chair and growling low whenever Verena
or I tiptoed into the room. She persisted in fanning Dolly with a picture of
Jesus, as though it were summertime; and it was a disgrace how she ignored
Doctor Carter's instructions: "I wouldn't feed that to a hog," she'd
declare, pointing to some medicine he'd sent around. Finally Doctor Carter
said he wouldn't be responsible unless the patient were removed to a
hospital. The nearest hospital was in Brewton, sixty miles away. Verena sent
over there for an ambulance. She could have saved herself the expense,
because Catherine locked Dolly's door from the inside and said the first one
to rattle the knob would need an ambulance themselves. Dolly did not know
where they wanted to take her; wherever it was, she begged not to go: "Don't
wake me," she said, "I don't want to see the ocean."
Toward the end of the week she could sit up in bed; a few days later
she was strong enough to resume correspondence with her dropsy-cure
customers. She was worried by the unfilled orders that had piled up; but
Catherine, who took the credit for Dolly's improvement, said, "Shoot, it's
no time we'll be out there boiling a brew."
Every afternoon, promptly at four, the Judge presented himself at the
garden gate and whistled for me to let him in; by using the garden gate,
rather than the front door, he lessened the chance of encountering
Verena-not that she objected to his coming: indeed, she wisely supplied for
his visits a bottle of sherry and a box of cigars. Usually he brought Dolly
a gift, cakes from the Katydid Bakery or flowers, bronze bal-loonlike
chrysanthemums which Catherine swiftly confiscated on the theory that they
ate up all the nourishment in the air. Catherine never learned he had
proposed to Dolly; still, intuiting a situation not quite to her liking, she
sharply chaperoned the Judge's visits and, while swigging at the sherry that
had been put out for him, did most of the talking as well. But I suspect
that neither he nor Dolly had much to say of a private nature; they accepted
each other without excitement, as people do who are settled in their
affections. If in other ways he was a disappointed man, it was not because
of Dolly, for I believe she became what he'd wanted, the one person in the
world-to whom, as he'd described it, everything can be said. But when
everything can be said perhaps there is nothing more to say. He sat beside
her bed, content to be there and not expecting to be entertained. Often,
drowsy with fever, she went to sleep, and if, while she slept, she whimpered
or frowned, he wakened her, welcoming her back with a daylight smile.
In the past Verena had not allowed us to have a radio; cheap melodies,
she contended, disordered the mind; moreover, there was the expense to
consider. It was Doctor Carter who persuaded her that Dolly should have a
radio; he thought it would help reconcile her to what he foresaw as a long
convalescence. Verena bought one, and paid a good price, I don't doubt; but
it was an ugly hood-shaped box crudely varnished. I took it out in the yard
and painted it pink. Even so Dolly wasn't certain she wanted it in her room;
later on, you couldn't have pried it away from her. That radio was always
hot enough to hatch a chicken, she and Catherine played it so much. They
favored broadcasts of football games. "Please don't," Dolly admonished the
Judge when he attempted to explain the rules of this game. "I like a
mystery. Everybody shouting, having such a fine time: it might not sound so
large and happy if I knew why." Primarily the Judge was peeved because he
couldn't get Dolly to root for any one team. She thought both sides should
win: "They're all nice boys, I'm sure."
Because of the radio Catherine and I had words one afternoon. It was
the afternoon Maude Riordan was playing in a broadcast of the state musical
competition. Naturally I wanted to hear her, Catherine knew that, but she
was tuned in on a Tulane-Georgia Tech game and wouldn't let me near the
radio. I said, "What's come over you, Catherine? Selfish, dissatisfied,
always got to have your own way, why you're worse than Verena ever was." It
was as though, in lieu of prestige lost through her encounter with the law,
she'd had to double her power in the Talbo house: we at least would have to
respect her Indian blood, accept her tyranny. Dolly was willing; in the
matter of Maude Riordan, however, she sided with me: "Let Collin find his
station. It wouldn't be Christian not to listen to Maude. She's a friend of
ours."
Everyone who heard Maude agreed that she should've won first prize. She
placed second, which pleased her family, for it meant a half-scholarship in
music at the University. Still it wasn't fair, because she performed
beautifully, much better than the boy who won the larger prize. She played
her father's serenade, and it seemed to me as pretty as it had that day in
the woods. Since that day I'd wasted hours scribbling her name, describing
in my head her charms, her hair the color of vanilla ice cream. The Judge
arrived in time to hear the broadcast, and I know Dolly was glad because it
was as if we were reunited again in the leaves with music like butterflies
flying.
Some days afterwards I met Elizabeth Henderson on the street. She'd
been at the beauty parlor, for her hair was finger-waved, her nails tinted,
she did look grown-up and I complimented her. "It's for the party. I hope
your costume is ready." Then I remembered: the Halloween party to which she
and Maude had asked me to contribute my services as a fortuneteller. "You
can't have forgotten? Oh, Collin," she said, "we've worked like dogs! Mrs.
Riordan is making a wine punch. I shouldn't be surprised if there's
drunkenness and everything. And after all it's a celebration for Maude,
because she won the prize, and because," Elizabeth glanced along the street,
a glum perspective of silent houses and telephone poles, "she'll be going
away-to the University, you know." A loneliness fell around us, we did not
want to go our separate ways: I offered to walk her home.
On our way we stopped by the Katydid where Elizabeth placed an order
for a Halloween cake, and Mrs. C. C. County, her apron glittering with sugar
crystals, appeared from the oven room to inquire after Dolly's condition.
"Doing well as can be expected I suppose," she lamented. "Imagine it,
walking pneumonia. My sister, now she had the ordinary lying-down kind.
Well, we can be thankful Dolly's in her own bed; it eases my mind to know
you people are home again. Ha ha, guess we can laugh about all that
foolishness now. Look here, I've Just pulled out a pan of doughnuts; you
take them to Dolly with my blessings." Elizabeth and I ate most of those
doughnuts before we reached her house. She invited me in to have a glass of
milk and finish them off.
Today there is a filling station where the Henderson house used to be.
It was some fifteen draughty rooms casually nailed together, a place stray
animals would have claimed if Riley had not been a gifted carpenter. He had
an outdoor shed, a combination of workshop and sanctuary, where he spent his
mornings sawing lumber, shaving shingles. Its wall-shelves sagged with the
relics of outgrown bobbies: snakes, bees, spiders preserved in alcohol, a
bat decaying in a bottle; ship models. A boyhood enthusiasm for taxidermy
had resulted in a pitiful zoo of nasty-odored beasts: an eyeless rabbit with
maggot-green fur and ears that drooped like a bloodhound's -objects better
off buried, I'd been lately to see Riley several times; Big Eddie Stover's
bullet had shattered his shoulder, and the curse of it was he had to wear an
itching plaster cast which weighed, he said, a hundred pounds. Since he
couldn't drive his car, or hammer a proper nail, there wasn't much for him
to do except loaf around and brood.
"If you want to see Riley," said Elizabeth, "you'll find him out in the
shed. I expect Maude's with him."
"Maude Riordan?" I had reason to be surprised, because on the occasions
I'd visited Riley he'd made a point of our sitting in the shed; the girls
wouldn't bother us there, for it was, he'd boasted, one threshold no female
was permitted to cross.
"Reading to him. Poetry, plays. Maude's been absolutely adorable. And
it's not as though my brother had ever treated her with common human
decency. But she's let bygones be bygones. I guess coming so near to being
killed the way he was, I guess that would change a person-make them more
receptive to the finer things. He lets her read to him by the hour."
The shed, shaded by fig trees, was in the back yard. Matronly Plymouth
hens waddled about its doorstep picking at the seeds of last summer's fallen
sunflowers. On the door a childhood word in faded whitewash feebly warned
Bewarel It aroused a shyness in me. Beyond the door I could hear Maude's
voice-her poetry voice, a swooning chant certain louts in school had dearly
loved to mimic. Anyone who'd been told Riley Henderson had come to this,
they'd have said that fall from the sycamore had affected his head. Stealing
over to the shed's window, I got a look at him: he was absorbed in sorting
the insides of a clock and, to judge from his face, might have been
listening to nothing more uplifting than the hum of a fly; he jiggled a
finger in his ear, as though to relieve an irritation. Then, at the moment
I'd decided to startle them by rapping on the window, he put aside his
clockworks and, coming round behind Maude, reached down and shut the book
from which she was reading. With a grin he gathered in his hand twists of
her hair-she rose like a kitten lifted by the nape of its neck. It was as
though they were edged with light, some brilliance that smarted my eyes. You
could see it wasn't the first time they'd kissed.
Not one week before, because of his experience in such matters, I'd
taken Riley into my confidence, confessed to him my feelings for Maude:
please look. I wished I were a giant so that I could grab hold of that shed
and shake it to a splinter; knock down the door and denounce them both.
Yet-of what could I accuse Maude? Regardless of how bad she'd talked about
him I'd always known she was heartset on Riley. It wasn't as if there had
ever been an understanding between the two of us; at the most we'd been good
friends: for the last few years, not even that. As I walked back through the
yard the pompous Plymouth hens cackled after me tauntingly.
Elizabeth said, "You didn't stay long. Or weren't they there?"
I told her it hadn't seemed right to interrupt. "They were getting on
so well with the finer things."
But sarcasm never touched Elizabeth: she was, despite the subtleties
her soulful appearance promised, too literal a person. "Wonderful, isn't
it?"
"Wonderful."
"Collin-for heaven's sake: what are you sniveling about?"
"Nothing. I mean, I've got & cold."
"Well I hope it doesn't keep you away from the party. Only you must
have a costume. Riley's coming as the devil."
"That's appropriate."
"Of course we want you in a skeleton suit. I know there's only a day
left..."
I had no intention of going to the party. As soon as I got home I sat
down to write Riley a letter. Dear Riley... Dear Henderson. I crossed out
the dear; plain Henderson would do. Henderson, your treachery has not gone
unobserved. Pages were filled with recording the origins of our friendship,
its honorable history; and gradually a feeling grew that there must be a
mistake: such a splendid friend would not have wronged me. Until, toward the
end, I found myself deliriously telling him he was my best friend, my
brother. So I threw these ravings in a fireplace and five minutes later was
in Dolly's room asking what were the chances of my having a skeleton suit
made by the following night.
Dolly was not much of a seamstress, she had her difficulties lifting a
hemline. This was also true of Catherine; it was in Catherine's makeup,
however, to pretend professional status in all fields, particularly those in
which she was least competent. She sent me to Verena's drygoods store for
seven yards of their choicest black satin. "With seven yards there ought to
be some bits left over: me and Dolly can trim our petticoats." Then she made
a show of tape-measuring my lengths and widths, which was sound procedure
except that she had no idea of how to apply such information to scissors and
cloth. "This little piece," she said, hacking off a yard, "it'd make
somebody lovely bloomers. And this here," snip, snip, "...a black satin
collar would dress up my old print considerable." You couldn't have covered
a midget's shame with the amount of material allotted me.
"Catherine, now dear, we mustn't think of our own needs," Dolly warned
her.
They worked without recess through the afternoon. The Judge, during his
usual visit, was forced to thread needles, a job Catherine despised; "Makes
my flesh crawl, like stuffing worms on a fishhook." At suppertime she called
quits and went home to her house among the butterbean stalks.
But a desire to finish had seized Dolly; and a talkative exhilaration.
Her needle soared in and out of the satin; like the seams it made, her
sentences linked in a wiggling line. "Do you think," she said, "that Verena
would let me give a party? Now that I have so many friends? There's Riley,
there's Charlie, couldn't we ask Mrs. County, Maude and Elizabeth? In the
spring; a garden party-with a few fireworks. My father was a great hand for
sewing. A pity I didn't inherit it from him. So many men sewed in the old
days; there was one friend of Papa's that won I don't know how many prizes
for his scrap-quilts. Papa said it relaxed him after the heavy rough work
around a farm. Collin. Will you promise me something? I was against your
coming here, I've never believed it was right, raising a boy in a houseful
of women. Old women and their prejudices. But it was done; and somehow I'm
not worried about it now: you'll make your mark, you'll get on. It's this
that I want you to promise me: don't be unkind to Catherine, try not to grow
too far away from her. Some nights it keeps me wide awake to think of her
forsaken. There," she held up my suit, "let's see if it fits."
It pinched in the crotch and in the rear drooped like an old man's
B.V.D.'s; the legs were wide as sailor pants, one sleeve stopped above my
wrist, the other shot past my fingertips. It wasn't, as Dolly admitted, very
stylish. "But when we've painted on the bones..." she said. "Silver paint.
Verena bought some once to dress up a flagpole-before she took against the
government. It should be somewhere in the attic, that little can. Look under
the bed and see if you can locate my slippers."
She was forbidden to get up, not even Catherine would permit that. "It
won't be any fun if you scold," she said and found the slippers herself. The
courthouse clock had chimed eleven, which meant it was ten-thirty, a dark
hour in a town where respectable doors are locked at nine; it seemed later
still because in the next room Verena had closed her ledgers and gone to
bed. We took an oil lamp from the linen closet and by its tottering light
tiptoed up the ladder into the attic. It was cold up there; we set the lamp
on a barrel and lingered near it as though it were a hearth. Sawdust heads
that once had helped sell St. Louis hats watched while we searched; wherever
we put our hands it caused a huffy scuttling of fragile feet. Overturned, a
carton of mothballs clattered on the floor. "Oh, dear, oh, dear," cried
Dolly, giggling, "if Verena hears that she'll call the Sheriff."
We unearthed numberless brushes; the paint, discovered beneath a welter
of dried holiday wreaths, proved not to be silver but gold. "Of course
that's better, isn't it? Gold, like a king's ransom. Only do see what else
I've found." It was a shoebox secured with twine. "My valuables," she said,
opening it under the lamp. A hollowed honeycomb was demonstrated against the
light, a hornet's nest and a clove-stuck orange that age had robbed of its
aroma. She showed me a blue perfect jaybird's egg cradled in cotton.
"I was too principled. So Catherine stole the egg for me, it was her
Christmas present." She smiled; to me her face seemed a moth suspended
beside the lamp's chimney, as daring, as destructible. "Charlie said that
love is a chain of love. I hope you listened and understood him. Because
when you can love one thing," she held the blue egg as preciously as the
Judge had held a leaf, "you can love another, and that is owning, that is
something to live with. You can forgive everything. Well," she sighed,
"we're not getting you painted. I want to amaze Catherine; we'll tell her
that while we slept the little people finished your suit. She'll have a
fit."
Again the courthouse clock was floating its message, each note like a
banner stirring above the chilled and sleeping town. "I know it tickles,"
she said, drawing a branch of ribs across my chest, "but I'll make a mess if
you don't hold still." She dipped the brush and skated it along the sleeves,
the trousers, designing golden bones for my arms and legs. "You must
remember all the compliments: there should be many," she said as she
immodestly observed her work. "Oh dear, oh dear..." She hugged herself, her
laughter rollicked in the rafters. "Don't you see..."
For I was not unlike the man who painted himself into a comer. Freshly
gilded front and back, I was trapped inside the suit: a fine fix for which I
blamed her with a pointing finger.
"You have to whirl," she teased. "Whirling will dry you." She
blissfully extended her arms and turned in slow ungainly circles across the
shadows of the attic floor, her plain kimono billowing and her thin feet
wobbling in their slippers. It was as though she had collided with another
dancer: she stumbled, a hand on her forehead, a hand on her heart.
Far on the horizon of sound a train whistle howled, and it wakened me
to the bewilderment puckering her eyes, the contractions shaking her face.
With my arms around her, and the paint bleeding its pattern against her, I
called Verena; somebody help me!
Dolly whispered, "Hush now, hush."
Houses at night announce catastrophe by their sudden pitiable radiance.
Catherine dragged from room to room switching on lights unused for years.
Shivering inside my wrecked costume I sat in the glare of the entrance hall
sharing a bench with the Judge. He had come at once, wearing only a raincoat
slung over a flannel nightshirt. Whenever Verena approached he brought his
naked legs together primly, like a young girl. Neighbors, summoned by our
bright windows, came softly inquiring. Verena spoke to them on the porch:
her sister. Miss Dolly, she'd suffered a stroke. Doctor Carter would allow
none of us in her room, and we accepted this, even Catherine who, when she'd
set ablaze the last light, stood leaning her head against Dolly's door.
There was in the hall a hat-tree with many antlers and a mirror.
Dolly's velvet hat hung there, and at sunrise, as breezes trickled through
the house, the mirror reflected its quivering veil.
Then I knew as good as anything that Dolly had left us. Some moments
past she'd gone by unseen; and in my imagination I followed her. She had
crossed the square, had come to the church, now she'd reached the hill. The
Indian grass gleamed below her, she had that far to go.
It was a journey I made with Judge Cool the next September. During the
intervening months we had not often encountered each other-once we met on
the square and he said to come see him any time I felt like it. I meant to,
yet whenever I passed Miss Bell's boarding house I looked the other way.
I've read that past and future are a spiral, one coil containing the
next and predicting its theme. Perhaps this is so; but my own life has
seemed to me more a series of closed circles, rings that do not evolve with
the freedom of a spiral: for me to get from one to the other has meant a
leap, not a glide. What weakens me is the lull between, the wait before I
know where to jump. After Dolly died I was a long while dangling.
My own idea was to have a good time.
I hung around Phil's Cafe winning free beers on the pin-ball machine;
it was illegal to serve me beer, but Phil had it on his mind that someday I
would inherit Verena's money and maybe set him up in the hotel business. I
slicked my hair with brilliantine and chased off to dances in other towns,
shined flashlights and threw pebbles at girls' windows late at night I knew
a Negro in the country who sold a brand of gin called Yellow Devil. I
courted anyone who owned a car.
Because I didn't want to spend a waking moment in the Talbo house. It
was too thick with air that didn't move. Some stranger occupied the kitchen,
a pigeon-toed colored girl who sang all day, the wavery singing of a child
bolstering its spirit in an ominous place. She was a sorry cook. She let the
kitchen's geranium plant perish. I had approved of Verena hiring her. I
thought it would bring Catherine back to work.
On the contrary, Catherine showed no interest in routing the new girl.
For she'd retired to her house in the vegetable garden. She had taken the
radio with her and was very comfortable. "I've put down the load, and it's
down to stay. I'm after my leisure," she said. Leisure fattened her, her
feet swelled, she had to cut slits in her shoes. She developed exaggerated
versions of Dolly's habits, such as a craving for sweet foods; she had her
suppers delivered from the drugstore, two quarts of ice cream. Candy
wrappers rustled in her lap. Until she became too gross, she contrived to
squeeze herself into clothes that had belonged to Dolly; it was as though,
in this way, she kept her friend with her.
Our visits together were an ordeal, and I made them grudgingly,
resenting it that she depended on me for company. I let a day slip by
without seeing her, then three, a whole week once. When I returned after an
absence I imagined the silences in which we sat, her offhand manner, were
meant reproachfully; I was too conscience-ridden to realize the truth, which
was that she didn't care whether or not I came. One afternoon she proved it.
Simply, she removed the cotton wads that jacked up her jaws. Without the
cotton her speech was as unintelligible to me as it ordinarily was to
others. It happened while I was making an excuse to shorten my call. She
lifted the lid of a pot-bellied stove and spit the cotton into the fire; and
her cheeks caved in, she looked starved. I think now this was not a vengeful
gesture: it was intended to let me know that I was under no obligation: the
future was something she preferred not to share.
Occasionally Riley rode me around-but I couldn't count on him or his
car; neither were much available since he'd become a man of affairs. He had
a team of tractors clearing ninety acres of land he'd bought on the
outskirts of town; he planned to build houses there. Several locally
important persons were impressed by another scheme of his: he thought the
town should put up a silkmill in which every citizen would be a stockholder;
aside from the possible profits, having an industry would increase our
population. There was an enthusiastic editorial in the paper about this
proposal; it went on to say that the town should be proud of having produced
a man of young Henderson's enterprise. He grew a mustache; he rented an
office and his sister Elizabeth worked as his secretary. Maude Riordan was
installed at the State University, and almost every week-end he drove his
sisters over there; it was supposed to be because the girls were so lonesome
for Maude. The engagement of Miss Maude Riordan to Mr. Riley Henderson was
announced in the Courier on April Fool's Day.
They were married the middle of June in a double-ring ceremony. I acted
as an usher, and the Judge was Riley's best man. Except for the Henderson
sisters, all the bridesmaids were society girls Maude had known at the
University; the Courier called them beautiful debutantes, a chivalrous
description. The bride carried a bouquet of jasmine and lilac; the groom
wore spats and stroked his mustache. They received a sumptuous table-load of
gifts. I gave them six cakes of scented soap and an ashtray.
After the wedding I walked home with Verena under the shade of her
black umbrella. It was a blistering day, heatwaves jiggled like a
sound-graph of the celebrating Baptist bells, and the rest of summer, a
vista rigid as the noon street, lengthened before me. Summer, another
autumn, winter again: not a spiral, but a circle confined as the umbrella's
shadow. If I ever were to make the leap-with a heartskip, I made it.
"Verena, I want to go away."
We were at the garden gate; "I know. I do myself," she said, closing
her umbrella. "I'd hoped to make a trip with Dolly. I wanted to show her the
ocean." Verena had seemed a tall woman because of her authoritative
carriage; now she stooped slightly, her head nodded. I wondered that I ever
could have been so afraid of her, for she'd grown feminine, fearful, she
spoke of prowlers, she burdened the doors with bolts and spiked the roof
with lightning rods. It had been her custom the first of every month to
stalk around collecting in person the various rents owed her; when she
stopped doing this it caused an uneasiness in the town, people felt wrong
without their rainy day. The women said she's got no family, she's lost
without her sister; their husbands blamed Dr. Morris Rite: he knocked the
gumption out of her, they said; and, much as they had quarreled with Verena,
held it against him. Three years ago, when I returned to this town, my first
task was to sort the papers of the Talbo estate, and among Verena's private
possessions, her keys, her pictures of Maudie Laura Murphy, I found a
postcard. It was dated two months after Dolly died, at Christmas, and it was
from Paraguay: As we say down here, Feliz Navidad. Do you miss me? Morris.
And I thought, reading it, of how her eyes had come permanently to have an
uneven cast, an inward and agonized gaze, and I remembered how her eyes,
watering in the brassy sunshine of Riley's wedding day, had straightened
with momentary hope: "It could be a long trip. I've considered selling a
few-a few properties. We might take a boat; you've never seen the ocean." I
picked a sprig of honeysuckle from the vine flowering on the garden fence,
and she watched me shred it as if I were pulling apart her vision, the
voyage she saw for us. "Oh," she brushed at the mole that spotted her cheek
like a tear, "well," she said in a practical voice, "what are your
ambitions?"
So it was not until September that I called upon the Judge, and then it
was to tell him good-bye. The suitcases were packed, Amos Legrand had cut my
hair ("Honey, don't you come back here baldheaded. What I mean is, they'll
try to scalp you up there, cheat you every way they can."); I had a new suit
and new shoes, gray fedora ("Aren't you the cafs pajamas, Mr. Collin
Fenwick?" Mrs. County exclaimed. "A lawyer you're going to be? And already
dressed like one. No, child, I won't kiss you. I'd be mortified to dirty
your finery with my bakery mess. You write us, hear?"): that very evening a
train would rock me northward, parade me through the land to a city where in
my honor pennants flurried.
At Miss Bell's they told me the Judge had gone out I found him on the
square, and it gave me a twinge to see him, a spruce sturdy figure with a
Cherokee rose sprouting in his buttonhole, encamped among the old men who
talk and spit and wait. He took my arm and led me away from them; and while
he amiably advised me of his own days as a law student, we strolled past the
church and out along the River Woods road. This road or this tree; I closed
my eyes to fix their image, for I did not believe I would return, did not
foresee that I would travel the road and dream the tree until they had drawn
me back.
It was as though neither of us had known where we were headed. Quietly
astonished, we surveyed the view from the cemetery hill, and arm in arm
descended to the summer-burned, September-burnished field. A waterfall of
color flowed across the dry and strumming leaves; and I wanted then for the
Judge to hear what Dolly had told me: that it was a grass harp, gathering,
telling, a harp of voices remembering a story. We listened.
him, I did. Not in a womanly way; it was, oh I admit it, that we were
kindred spirits. We looked each other in the eye, we saw the same devil, we
weren't afraid; it was-merry. But he outsmarted me; I'd known he could, and
hoped he wouldn't, and he did, and now: it's too long to be alone, a
lifetime. I walk through the house, nothing is mine: your pink room, your
kitchen, the house is yours, and Catherine's too, I think. Only don't leave
me, let me live with you. I'm feeling old, I want my sister."
The rain, adding its voice to Verena's, was between them, Dolly and the
Judge, a transparent wall through which he could watch her losing substance,
recede before him as earlier she had seemed to recede before me. More than
that, it was as if the tree-house were dissolving. Lunging wind cast
overboard the soggy wreckage of our Rook cards, our wrapping papers; animal
crackers crumbled, the rain-filled mason jars spilled over like fountains;
and Catherine's beautiful scrapquilt was ruined, a puddle. It was going:
like the doomed houses rivers in flood float away; and it was as though the
Judge were trapped there-waving to us as we, the survivors, stood ashore.
For Dolly had said, "Forgive me; I want my sister, too," and the Judge could
not reach her, not with his arms, not with his heart: Verena's claim was too
final.
Somewhere near midnight the rain slackened, halted; wind barreled about
wringing out the trees. Singly, like delayed guests arriving at a dance,
appearing stars pierced the sky. It was time to leave. We took nothing with
us: left the quilt to rot, spoons to rust; and the tree-house, the woods we
left to winter.
For quite a while it was Catherine's custom to date events as having
occurred before or after her incarceration. "Prior," she would begin, "to
the time That One made a jailbird of me." As for the rest of us, we could
have divided history along similar lines; that is, in terms of before and
after the tree-house. Those few autumn days were a monument and a signpost.
Except to collect his belongings, the Judge never again entered the
house he'd shared with his sons and their wives, a circumstance that must
have suited them, at least they made no protest when he took a room at Miss
Bell's boarding house. This was a brown solemn establishment which lately
has been turned into a funeral home by an undertaker who saw that to effect
the correct atmosphere a minimum of renovation would be necessary. I
disliked going past it, for Miss Bell's guests, ladies thorny as the
blighted rosebushes littering the yard, occupied the porch in a dawn-to-dark
marathon of vigilance. One of them, the twice-widowed Mamie Canfield,
specialized in spotting pregnancies (some legendary fellow is supposed to
have told his wife Why waste money on a doctor? just trot yourself past Miss
Bell's: Mamie Canfield, shell let the world know soon enough whether you is
or ain't). Until the Judge moved there, Amos Legrand was the only man in
residence at Miss Bell's. He was a godsend to the other tenants: the moments
most sacred to them were when, after supper, Amos swung in the seat-swing
with his little legs not touching the floor and his tongue trilling like an
alarm-clock. They vied with each other in knitting him socks and sweaters,
tending to his diet: at table all the best things were saved for his plate-
Miss Bell had trouble keeping a cook because the ladies were forever poking
around in the kitchen wanting to make a delicacy that would tempt their pet.
Probably they would have done the same for the Judge, but he had no use for
them, never, so they complained, stopped to pass the time of day.
The last drenching night in the tree-house had left me with a bad cold,
Verena with a worse one; and we had a sneezing nurse. Dolly. Catherine
wouldn't help: "Dollyheart, you can do like you please-tote That One's
slopjar till you drop in your tracks. Only don't count on me to lift a
finger. I've put down the load."
Rising at all hours of the night. Dolly brought the syrups that eased
our throats, stoked the fires that kept us warm. Verena did not, as in other
days, accept such attention simply as her due. "In the spring," she promised
Dolly, "we'll make a trip together. We might go to the Grand Canyon and call
on Maudie Laura. Or Florida: you've never seen the ocean." But Dolly was
where she wanted to be, she had no wish to travel: "I wouldn't enjoy it,
seeing the things I've known shamed by nobler sights."
Doctor Carter called regularly to see us, and one morning Dolly asked
would he mind taking her temperature; she felt so flushed and weak in the
legs. He put her straight to bed, and she thought it was very humorous when
he told her she had walking pneumonia. "Walking pneumonia," she said to the
Judge, who had come to visit her, "it must be something new, I've never
heard of it. But I do feel as though I were skylarking along on a pair of
stilts. Lovely," she said and fell asleep.
For three, nearly four days she never really woke up. Catherine stayed
with her, dozing upright in a wicker chair and growling low whenever Verena
or I tiptoed into the room. She persisted in fanning Dolly with a picture of
Jesus, as though it were summertime; and it was a disgrace how she ignored
Doctor Carter's instructions: "I wouldn't feed that to a hog," she'd
declare, pointing to some medicine he'd sent around. Finally Doctor Carter
said he wouldn't be responsible unless the patient were removed to a
hospital. The nearest hospital was in Brewton, sixty miles away. Verena sent
over there for an ambulance. She could have saved herself the expense,
because Catherine locked Dolly's door from the inside and said the first one
to rattle the knob would need an ambulance themselves. Dolly did not know
where they wanted to take her; wherever it was, she begged not to go: "Don't
wake me," she said, "I don't want to see the ocean."
Toward the end of the week she could sit up in bed; a few days later
she was strong enough to resume correspondence with her dropsy-cure
customers. She was worried by the unfilled orders that had piled up; but
Catherine, who took the credit for Dolly's improvement, said, "Shoot, it's
no time we'll be out there boiling a brew."
Every afternoon, promptly at four, the Judge presented himself at the
garden gate and whistled for me to let him in; by using the garden gate,
rather than the front door, he lessened the chance of encountering
Verena-not that she objected to his coming: indeed, she wisely supplied for
his visits a bottle of sherry and a box of cigars. Usually he brought Dolly
a gift, cakes from the Katydid Bakery or flowers, bronze bal-loonlike
chrysanthemums which Catherine swiftly confiscated on the theory that they
ate up all the nourishment in the air. Catherine never learned he had
proposed to Dolly; still, intuiting a situation not quite to her liking, she
sharply chaperoned the Judge's visits and, while swigging at the sherry that
had been put out for him, did most of the talking as well. But I suspect
that neither he nor Dolly had much to say of a private nature; they accepted
each other without excitement, as people do who are settled in their
affections. If in other ways he was a disappointed man, it was not because
of Dolly, for I believe she became what he'd wanted, the one person in the
world-to whom, as he'd described it, everything can be said. But when
everything can be said perhaps there is nothing more to say. He sat beside
her bed, content to be there and not expecting to be entertained. Often,
drowsy with fever, she went to sleep, and if, while she slept, she whimpered
or frowned, he wakened her, welcoming her back with a daylight smile.
In the past Verena had not allowed us to have a radio; cheap melodies,
she contended, disordered the mind; moreover, there was the expense to
consider. It was Doctor Carter who persuaded her that Dolly should have a
radio; he thought it would help reconcile her to what he foresaw as a long
convalescence. Verena bought one, and paid a good price, I don't doubt; but
it was an ugly hood-shaped box crudely varnished. I took it out in the yard
and painted it pink. Even so Dolly wasn't certain she wanted it in her room;
later on, you couldn't have pried it away from her. That radio was always
hot enough to hatch a chicken, she and Catherine played it so much. They
favored broadcasts of football games. "Please don't," Dolly admonished the
Judge when he attempted to explain the rules of this game. "I like a
mystery. Everybody shouting, having such a fine time: it might not sound so
large and happy if I knew why." Primarily the Judge was peeved because he
couldn't get Dolly to root for any one team. She thought both sides should
win: "They're all nice boys, I'm sure."
Because of the radio Catherine and I had words one afternoon. It was
the afternoon Maude Riordan was playing in a broadcast of the state musical
competition. Naturally I wanted to hear her, Catherine knew that, but she
was tuned in on a Tulane-Georgia Tech game and wouldn't let me near the
radio. I said, "What's come over you, Catherine? Selfish, dissatisfied,
always got to have your own way, why you're worse than Verena ever was." It
was as though, in lieu of prestige lost through her encounter with the law,
she'd had to double her power in the Talbo house: we at least would have to
respect her Indian blood, accept her tyranny. Dolly was willing; in the
matter of Maude Riordan, however, she sided with me: "Let Collin find his
station. It wouldn't be Christian not to listen to Maude. She's a friend of
ours."
Everyone who heard Maude agreed that she should've won first prize. She
placed second, which pleased her family, for it meant a half-scholarship in
music at the University. Still it wasn't fair, because she performed
beautifully, much better than the boy who won the larger prize. She played
her father's serenade, and it seemed to me as pretty as it had that day in
the woods. Since that day I'd wasted hours scribbling her name, describing
in my head her charms, her hair the color of vanilla ice cream. The Judge
arrived in time to hear the broadcast, and I know Dolly was glad because it
was as if we were reunited again in the leaves with music like butterflies
flying.
Some days afterwards I met Elizabeth Henderson on the street. She'd
been at the beauty parlor, for her hair was finger-waved, her nails tinted,
she did look grown-up and I complimented her. "It's for the party. I hope
your costume is ready." Then I remembered: the Halloween party to which she
and Maude had asked me to contribute my services as a fortuneteller. "You
can't have forgotten? Oh, Collin," she said, "we've worked like dogs! Mrs.
Riordan is making a wine punch. I shouldn't be surprised if there's
drunkenness and everything. And after all it's a celebration for Maude,
because she won the prize, and because," Elizabeth glanced along the street,
a glum perspective of silent houses and telephone poles, "she'll be going
away-to the University, you know." A loneliness fell around us, we did not
want to go our separate ways: I offered to walk her home.
On our way we stopped by the Katydid where Elizabeth placed an order
for a Halloween cake, and Mrs. C. C. County, her apron glittering with sugar
crystals, appeared from the oven room to inquire after Dolly's condition.
"Doing well as can be expected I suppose," she lamented. "Imagine it,
walking pneumonia. My sister, now she had the ordinary lying-down kind.
Well, we can be thankful Dolly's in her own bed; it eases my mind to know
you people are home again. Ha ha, guess we can laugh about all that
foolishness now. Look here, I've Just pulled out a pan of doughnuts; you
take them to Dolly with my blessings." Elizabeth and I ate most of those
doughnuts before we reached her house. She invited me in to have a glass of
milk and finish them off.
Today there is a filling station where the Henderson house used to be.
It was some fifteen draughty rooms casually nailed together, a place stray
animals would have claimed if Riley had not been a gifted carpenter. He had
an outdoor shed, a combination of workshop and sanctuary, where he spent his
mornings sawing lumber, shaving shingles. Its wall-shelves sagged with the
relics of outgrown bobbies: snakes, bees, spiders preserved in alcohol, a
bat decaying in a bottle; ship models. A boyhood enthusiasm for taxidermy
had resulted in a pitiful zoo of nasty-odored beasts: an eyeless rabbit with
maggot-green fur and ears that drooped like a bloodhound's -objects better
off buried, I'd been lately to see Riley several times; Big Eddie Stover's
bullet had shattered his shoulder, and the curse of it was he had to wear an
itching plaster cast which weighed, he said, a hundred pounds. Since he
couldn't drive his car, or hammer a proper nail, there wasn't much for him
to do except loaf around and brood.
"If you want to see Riley," said Elizabeth, "you'll find him out in the
shed. I expect Maude's with him."
"Maude Riordan?" I had reason to be surprised, because on the occasions
I'd visited Riley he'd made a point of our sitting in the shed; the girls
wouldn't bother us there, for it was, he'd boasted, one threshold no female
was permitted to cross.
"Reading to him. Poetry, plays. Maude's been absolutely adorable. And
it's not as though my brother had ever treated her with common human
decency. But she's let bygones be bygones. I guess coming so near to being
killed the way he was, I guess that would change a person-make them more
receptive to the finer things. He lets her read to him by the hour."
The shed, shaded by fig trees, was in the back yard. Matronly Plymouth
hens waddled about its doorstep picking at the seeds of last summer's fallen
sunflowers. On the door a childhood word in faded whitewash feebly warned
Bewarel It aroused a shyness in me. Beyond the door I could hear Maude's
voice-her poetry voice, a swooning chant certain louts in school had dearly
loved to mimic. Anyone who'd been told Riley Henderson had come to this,
they'd have said that fall from the sycamore had affected his head. Stealing
over to the shed's window, I got a look at him: he was absorbed in sorting
the insides of a clock and, to judge from his face, might have been
listening to nothing more uplifting than the hum of a fly; he jiggled a
finger in his ear, as though to relieve an irritation. Then, at the moment
I'd decided to startle them by rapping on the window, he put aside his
clockworks and, coming round behind Maude, reached down and shut the book
from which she was reading. With a grin he gathered in his hand twists of
her hair-she rose like a kitten lifted by the nape of its neck. It was as
though they were edged with light, some brilliance that smarted my eyes. You
could see it wasn't the first time they'd kissed.
Not one week before, because of his experience in such matters, I'd
taken Riley into my confidence, confessed to him my feelings for Maude:
please look. I wished I were a giant so that I could grab hold of that shed
and shake it to a splinter; knock down the door and denounce them both.
Yet-of what could I accuse Maude? Regardless of how bad she'd talked about
him I'd always known she was heartset on Riley. It wasn't as if there had
ever been an understanding between the two of us; at the most we'd been good
friends: for the last few years, not even that. As I walked back through the
yard the pompous Plymouth hens cackled after me tauntingly.
Elizabeth said, "You didn't stay long. Or weren't they there?"
I told her it hadn't seemed right to interrupt. "They were getting on
so well with the finer things."
But sarcasm never touched Elizabeth: she was, despite the subtleties
her soulful appearance promised, too literal a person. "Wonderful, isn't
it?"
"Wonderful."
"Collin-for heaven's sake: what are you sniveling about?"
"Nothing. I mean, I've got & cold."
"Well I hope it doesn't keep you away from the party. Only you must
have a costume. Riley's coming as the devil."
"That's appropriate."
"Of course we want you in a skeleton suit. I know there's only a day
left..."
I had no intention of going to the party. As soon as I got home I sat
down to write Riley a letter. Dear Riley... Dear Henderson. I crossed out
the dear; plain Henderson would do. Henderson, your treachery has not gone
unobserved. Pages were filled with recording the origins of our friendship,
its honorable history; and gradually a feeling grew that there must be a
mistake: such a splendid friend would not have wronged me. Until, toward the
end, I found myself deliriously telling him he was my best friend, my
brother. So I threw these ravings in a fireplace and five minutes later was
in Dolly's room asking what were the chances of my having a skeleton suit
made by the following night.
Dolly was not much of a seamstress, she had her difficulties lifting a
hemline. This was also true of Catherine; it was in Catherine's makeup,
however, to pretend professional status in all fields, particularly those in
which she was least competent. She sent me to Verena's drygoods store for
seven yards of their choicest black satin. "With seven yards there ought to
be some bits left over: me and Dolly can trim our petticoats." Then she made
a show of tape-measuring my lengths and widths, which was sound procedure
except that she had no idea of how to apply such information to scissors and
cloth. "This little piece," she said, hacking off a yard, "it'd make
somebody lovely bloomers. And this here," snip, snip, "...a black satin
collar would dress up my old print considerable." You couldn't have covered
a midget's shame with the amount of material allotted me.
"Catherine, now dear, we mustn't think of our own needs," Dolly warned
her.
They worked without recess through the afternoon. The Judge, during his
usual visit, was forced to thread needles, a job Catherine despised; "Makes
my flesh crawl, like stuffing worms on a fishhook." At suppertime she called
quits and went home to her house among the butterbean stalks.
But a desire to finish had seized Dolly; and a talkative exhilaration.
Her needle soared in and out of the satin; like the seams it made, her
sentences linked in a wiggling line. "Do you think," she said, "that Verena
would let me give a party? Now that I have so many friends? There's Riley,
there's Charlie, couldn't we ask Mrs. County, Maude and Elizabeth? In the
spring; a garden party-with a few fireworks. My father was a great hand for
sewing. A pity I didn't inherit it from him. So many men sewed in the old
days; there was one friend of Papa's that won I don't know how many prizes
for his scrap-quilts. Papa said it relaxed him after the heavy rough work
around a farm. Collin. Will you promise me something? I was against your
coming here, I've never believed it was right, raising a boy in a houseful
of women. Old women and their prejudices. But it was done; and somehow I'm
not worried about it now: you'll make your mark, you'll get on. It's this
that I want you to promise me: don't be unkind to Catherine, try not to grow
too far away from her. Some nights it keeps me wide awake to think of her
forsaken. There," she held up my suit, "let's see if it fits."
It pinched in the crotch and in the rear drooped like an old man's
B.V.D.'s; the legs were wide as sailor pants, one sleeve stopped above my
wrist, the other shot past my fingertips. It wasn't, as Dolly admitted, very
stylish. "But when we've painted on the bones..." she said. "Silver paint.
Verena bought some once to dress up a flagpole-before she took against the
government. It should be somewhere in the attic, that little can. Look under
the bed and see if you can locate my slippers."
She was forbidden to get up, not even Catherine would permit that. "It
won't be any fun if you scold," she said and found the slippers herself. The
courthouse clock had chimed eleven, which meant it was ten-thirty, a dark
hour in a town where respectable doors are locked at nine; it seemed later
still because in the next room Verena had closed her ledgers and gone to
bed. We took an oil lamp from the linen closet and by its tottering light
tiptoed up the ladder into the attic. It was cold up there; we set the lamp
on a barrel and lingered near it as though it were a hearth. Sawdust heads
that once had helped sell St. Louis hats watched while we searched; wherever
we put our hands it caused a huffy scuttling of fragile feet. Overturned, a
carton of mothballs clattered on the floor. "Oh, dear, oh, dear," cried
Dolly, giggling, "if Verena hears that she'll call the Sheriff."
We unearthed numberless brushes; the paint, discovered beneath a welter
of dried holiday wreaths, proved not to be silver but gold. "Of course
that's better, isn't it? Gold, like a king's ransom. Only do see what else
I've found." It was a shoebox secured with twine. "My valuables," she said,
opening it under the lamp. A hollowed honeycomb was demonstrated against the
light, a hornet's nest and a clove-stuck orange that age had robbed of its
aroma. She showed me a blue perfect jaybird's egg cradled in cotton.
"I was too principled. So Catherine stole the egg for me, it was her
Christmas present." She smiled; to me her face seemed a moth suspended
beside the lamp's chimney, as daring, as destructible. "Charlie said that
love is a chain of love. I hope you listened and understood him. Because
when you can love one thing," she held the blue egg as preciously as the
Judge had held a leaf, "you can love another, and that is owning, that is
something to live with. You can forgive everything. Well," she sighed,
"we're not getting you painted. I want to amaze Catherine; we'll tell her
that while we slept the little people finished your suit. She'll have a
fit."
Again the courthouse clock was floating its message, each note like a
banner stirring above the chilled and sleeping town. "I know it tickles,"
she said, drawing a branch of ribs across my chest, "but I'll make a mess if
you don't hold still." She dipped the brush and skated it along the sleeves,
the trousers, designing golden bones for my arms and legs. "You must
remember all the compliments: there should be many," she said as she
immodestly observed her work. "Oh dear, oh dear..." She hugged herself, her
laughter rollicked in the rafters. "Don't you see..."
For I was not unlike the man who painted himself into a comer. Freshly
gilded front and back, I was trapped inside the suit: a fine fix for which I
blamed her with a pointing finger.
"You have to whirl," she teased. "Whirling will dry you." She
blissfully extended her arms and turned in slow ungainly circles across the
shadows of the attic floor, her plain kimono billowing and her thin feet
wobbling in their slippers. It was as though she had collided with another
dancer: she stumbled, a hand on her forehead, a hand on her heart.
Far on the horizon of sound a train whistle howled, and it wakened me
to the bewilderment puckering her eyes, the contractions shaking her face.
With my arms around her, and the paint bleeding its pattern against her, I
called Verena; somebody help me!
Dolly whispered, "Hush now, hush."
Houses at night announce catastrophe by their sudden pitiable radiance.
Catherine dragged from room to room switching on lights unused for years.
Shivering inside my wrecked costume I sat in the glare of the entrance hall
sharing a bench with the Judge. He had come at once, wearing only a raincoat
slung over a flannel nightshirt. Whenever Verena approached he brought his
naked legs together primly, like a young girl. Neighbors, summoned by our
bright windows, came softly inquiring. Verena spoke to them on the porch:
her sister. Miss Dolly, she'd suffered a stroke. Doctor Carter would allow
none of us in her room, and we accepted this, even Catherine who, when she'd
set ablaze the last light, stood leaning her head against Dolly's door.
There was in the hall a hat-tree with many antlers and a mirror.
Dolly's velvet hat hung there, and at sunrise, as breezes trickled through
the house, the mirror reflected its quivering veil.
Then I knew as good as anything that Dolly had left us. Some moments
past she'd gone by unseen; and in my imagination I followed her. She had
crossed the square, had come to the church, now she'd reached the hill. The
Indian grass gleamed below her, she had that far to go.
It was a journey I made with Judge Cool the next September. During the
intervening months we had not often encountered each other-once we met on
the square and he said to come see him any time I felt like it. I meant to,
yet whenever I passed Miss Bell's boarding house I looked the other way.
I've read that past and future are a spiral, one coil containing the
next and predicting its theme. Perhaps this is so; but my own life has
seemed to me more a series of closed circles, rings that do not evolve with
the freedom of a spiral: for me to get from one to the other has meant a
leap, not a glide. What weakens me is the lull between, the wait before I
know where to jump. After Dolly died I was a long while dangling.
My own idea was to have a good time.
I hung around Phil's Cafe winning free beers on the pin-ball machine;
it was illegal to serve me beer, but Phil had it on his mind that someday I
would inherit Verena's money and maybe set him up in the hotel business. I
slicked my hair with brilliantine and chased off to dances in other towns,
shined flashlights and threw pebbles at girls' windows late at night I knew
a Negro in the country who sold a brand of gin called Yellow Devil. I
courted anyone who owned a car.
Because I didn't want to spend a waking moment in the Talbo house. It
was too thick with air that didn't move. Some stranger occupied the kitchen,
a pigeon-toed colored girl who sang all day, the wavery singing of a child
bolstering its spirit in an ominous place. She was a sorry cook. She let the
kitchen's geranium plant perish. I had approved of Verena hiring her. I
thought it would bring Catherine back to work.
On the contrary, Catherine showed no interest in routing the new girl.
For she'd retired to her house in the vegetable garden. She had taken the
radio with her and was very comfortable. "I've put down the load, and it's
down to stay. I'm after my leisure," she said. Leisure fattened her, her
feet swelled, she had to cut slits in her shoes. She developed exaggerated
versions of Dolly's habits, such as a craving for sweet foods; she had her
suppers delivered from the drugstore, two quarts of ice cream. Candy
wrappers rustled in her lap. Until she became too gross, she contrived to
squeeze herself into clothes that had belonged to Dolly; it was as though,
in this way, she kept her friend with her.
Our visits together were an ordeal, and I made them grudgingly,
resenting it that she depended on me for company. I let a day slip by
without seeing her, then three, a whole week once. When I returned after an
absence I imagined the silences in which we sat, her offhand manner, were
meant reproachfully; I was too conscience-ridden to realize the truth, which
was that she didn't care whether or not I came. One afternoon she proved it.
Simply, she removed the cotton wads that jacked up her jaws. Without the
cotton her speech was as unintelligible to me as it ordinarily was to
others. It happened while I was making an excuse to shorten my call. She
lifted the lid of a pot-bellied stove and spit the cotton into the fire; and
her cheeks caved in, she looked starved. I think now this was not a vengeful
gesture: it was intended to let me know that I was under no obligation: the
future was something she preferred not to share.
Occasionally Riley rode me around-but I couldn't count on him or his
car; neither were much available since he'd become a man of affairs. He had
a team of tractors clearing ninety acres of land he'd bought on the
outskirts of town; he planned to build houses there. Several locally
important persons were impressed by another scheme of his: he thought the
town should put up a silkmill in which every citizen would be a stockholder;
aside from the possible profits, having an industry would increase our
population. There was an enthusiastic editorial in the paper about this
proposal; it went on to say that the town should be proud of having produced
a man of young Henderson's enterprise. He grew a mustache; he rented an
office and his sister Elizabeth worked as his secretary. Maude Riordan was
installed at the State University, and almost every week-end he drove his
sisters over there; it was supposed to be because the girls were so lonesome
for Maude. The engagement of Miss Maude Riordan to Mr. Riley Henderson was
announced in the Courier on April Fool's Day.
They were married the middle of June in a double-ring ceremony. I acted
as an usher, and the Judge was Riley's best man. Except for the Henderson
sisters, all the bridesmaids were society girls Maude had known at the
University; the Courier called them beautiful debutantes, a chivalrous
description. The bride carried a bouquet of jasmine and lilac; the groom
wore spats and stroked his mustache. They received a sumptuous table-load of
gifts. I gave them six cakes of scented soap and an ashtray.
After the wedding I walked home with Verena under the shade of her
black umbrella. It was a blistering day, heatwaves jiggled like a
sound-graph of the celebrating Baptist bells, and the rest of summer, a
vista rigid as the noon street, lengthened before me. Summer, another
autumn, winter again: not a spiral, but a circle confined as the umbrella's
shadow. If I ever were to make the leap-with a heartskip, I made it.
"Verena, I want to go away."
We were at the garden gate; "I know. I do myself," she said, closing
her umbrella. "I'd hoped to make a trip with Dolly. I wanted to show her the
ocean." Verena had seemed a tall woman because of her authoritative
carriage; now she stooped slightly, her head nodded. I wondered that I ever
could have been so afraid of her, for she'd grown feminine, fearful, she
spoke of prowlers, she burdened the doors with bolts and spiked the roof
with lightning rods. It had been her custom the first of every month to
stalk around collecting in person the various rents owed her; when she
stopped doing this it caused an uneasiness in the town, people felt wrong
without their rainy day. The women said she's got no family, she's lost
without her sister; their husbands blamed Dr. Morris Rite: he knocked the
gumption out of her, they said; and, much as they had quarreled with Verena,
held it against him. Three years ago, when I returned to this town, my first
task was to sort the papers of the Talbo estate, and among Verena's private
possessions, her keys, her pictures of Maudie Laura Murphy, I found a
postcard. It was dated two months after Dolly died, at Christmas, and it was
from Paraguay: As we say down here, Feliz Navidad. Do you miss me? Morris.
And I thought, reading it, of how her eyes had come permanently to have an
uneven cast, an inward and agonized gaze, and I remembered how her eyes,
watering in the brassy sunshine of Riley's wedding day, had straightened
with momentary hope: "It could be a long trip. I've considered selling a
few-a few properties. We might take a boat; you've never seen the ocean." I
picked a sprig of honeysuckle from the vine flowering on the garden fence,
and she watched me shred it as if I were pulling apart her vision, the
voyage she saw for us. "Oh," she brushed at the mole that spotted her cheek
like a tear, "well," she said in a practical voice, "what are your
ambitions?"
So it was not until September that I called upon the Judge, and then it
was to tell him good-bye. The suitcases were packed, Amos Legrand had cut my
hair ("Honey, don't you come back here baldheaded. What I mean is, they'll
try to scalp you up there, cheat you every way they can."); I had a new suit
and new shoes, gray fedora ("Aren't you the cafs pajamas, Mr. Collin
Fenwick?" Mrs. County exclaimed. "A lawyer you're going to be? And already
dressed like one. No, child, I won't kiss you. I'd be mortified to dirty
your finery with my bakery mess. You write us, hear?"): that very evening a
train would rock me northward, parade me through the land to a city where in
my honor pennants flurried.
At Miss Bell's they told me the Judge had gone out I found him on the
square, and it gave me a twinge to see him, a spruce sturdy figure with a
Cherokee rose sprouting in his buttonhole, encamped among the old men who
talk and spit and wait. He took my arm and led me away from them; and while
he amiably advised me of his own days as a law student, we strolled past the
church and out along the River Woods road. This road or this tree; I closed
my eyes to fix their image, for I did not believe I would return, did not
foresee that I would travel the road and dream the tree until they had drawn
me back.
It was as though neither of us had known where we were headed. Quietly
astonished, we surveyed the view from the cemetery hill, and arm in arm
descended to the summer-burned, September-burnished field. A waterfall of
color flowed across the dry and strumming leaves; and I wanted then for the
Judge to hear what Dolly had told me: that it was a grass harp, gathering,
telling, a harp of voices remembering a story. We listened.