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Truman Capote. The grass harp
For miss Sook Faulk
In memory of affections deep and true
When was it that first I heard of the grass harp? Long before the
autumn we lived in the China tree; an earlier autumn then; and of course it
was Dolly who told me, no one else would have known to call it that, a grass
harp.
If on leaving town you take the church road you soon will pass a
glaring hill of bonewhite slabs and brown burnt flowers: this is the Baptist
cemetery. Our people, Talbos, Fenwicks, are buried there; my mother lies
next to my father, and the graves of kinfolk, twenty or more, are around
them like the prone roots of a stony tree. Below the hill grows a field of
high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go to see it in the
fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows
like firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves
sighing human music, a harp of voices.
Beyond the field begins the darkness of River Woods. It must have been
on one of those September days when we were there in the woods gathering
roots that Dolly said: Do you hear? that is the grass harp, always telling a
story-it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people
who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too.
After my mother died, my father, a traveling man, sent me to live with
his cousins, Verena and Dolly Talbo, two unmarried ladies who were sisters.
Before that, I'd not ever been allowed into their house. For reasons no one
ever got quite clear, Verena and my father did not speak. Probably Papa
asked Verena to lend him some money, and she refused; or perhaps she did
make the loan, and he never returned it You can be sure that the trouble was
over money, because nothing else would have mattered to them so much,
especially Verena, who was the richest person in town. The drugstore, the
drygoods store, a filling station, a grocery, an office building, all this
was hers, and the earning of it had not made her an easy woman.
Anyway, Papa said he would never set foot inside her house. He told
such terrible things about the Talbo ladies. One of the stories he spread,
that Verena was a morphodyte, has never stopped going around, and the
ridicule he heaped on Miss Dolly Talbo was too much even for my mother: she
told him he ought to be ashamed, mocking anyone so gentle and harmless.
I think they were very much in love, my mother and father. She used to
cry every time he went away to sell his frigidaires. He married her when she
was sixteen; she did not live to be thirty. The afternoon she died Papa,
calling her name, tore off all his clothes and ran out naked into the yard.
It was the day after the funeral that Verena came to the house. I
remember the terror of watching her move up the walk, a whip-thin, handsome
woman with shingled peppersalt hair, black, rather virile eyebrows and a
dainty cheekmole. She opened the front door and walked right into the house.
Since the funeral. Papa had been breaking things, not with fury, but
quietly, thoroughly: he would amble into the parlor, pick up a china figure,
muse over it a moment, then throw it against the wall. The floor and stairs
were littered with cracked glass, scattered silverware; a ripped nightgown,
one of my mother's, hung over the banister.
Verena's eyes flicked over the debris. "Eugene, I want a word with
you," she said in that hearty, coldly exalted voice, and Papa answered:
"Yes, sit down, Verena. I thought you would come."
That afternoon Dolly's friend Catherine Creek came over and packed my
clothes, and Papa drove me to the impressive, shadowy house on Talbo Lane.
As I was getting out of the car he tried to hug me, but I was scared of him
and wriggled out of his arms. I'm sorry now that we did not hug each other.
Because a few days later, on his way up to Mobile, his car skidded and fell
fifty feet into the Gulf. When I saw him again there were silver dollars
weighting down his eyes.
Except to remark that I was small for my age, a runt, no one had ever
paid any attention to me; but now people pointed me out, and said wasn't it
sad? that poor little Collin Fenwickl I tried to look pitiful because I knew
it pleased people: every man in town must have treated me to a Dixie Cup or
a box of Crackerjack, and at school I got good grades for the first time. So
it was a long while before I calmed down enough to notice Dolly Talbo.
And when I did I fell in love.
Imagine what it must have been for her when first I came to the house,
a loud and prying boy of eleven. She skittered at the sound of my footsteps
or, if there was no avoiding me, folded like the petals of shy-lady fern.
She was one of those people who can disguise themselves as an object in the
room, a shadow in the comer, whose presence is a delicate happening. She
wore the quietest shoes, plain virginal dresses with hems that touched her
ankles. Though older than her sister, she seemed someone who, like myself,
Verena had adopted. Pulled and guided by the gravity of Verena's planet, we
rotated separately in the outer spaces of the house.
In the attic, a slipshod museum spookily peopled with old display
dummies from Verena's drygoods store, there were many loose boards, and by
inching these I could look down into almost any room. Dolly's room, unlike
the rest of the house, which bulged with fat dour furniture, contained only
a bed, a bureau, a chair: a nun might have lived there, except for one fact:
the walls, everything was painted an outlandish pink, even the floor was
this color. Whenever I spied on Dolly, she usually was to be seen doing one
of two things: she was standing in front of a mirror snipping with a pair of
garden shears her yellow and white, already brief hair; either that, or she
was writing in pencil on a pad of coarse Kress paper. She kept wetting the
pencil on the tip of her tongue, and sometimes she spoke aloud a sentence as
she put it down: Do not touch sweet foods like candy and salt will kill you
for certain. Now I'll tell you, she was writing letters. But at first this
correspondence was a puzzle to me. After all, her only friend was Catherine
Creek, she saw no one else and she never left the house, except once a week
when she and Catherine went to River Woods where they gathered the
ingredients of a dropsy remedy Dolly brewed and bottled. Later I discovered
she had customers for this medicine throughout the state, and it was to them
that her many letters were addressed.
Verena's room, connecting with Dolly's by a passage, was rigged up like
an office. There was a rolltop desk, a library of ledgers, filing cabinets.
After supper, wearing a green eyeshade, she would sit at her desk totaling
figures and turning the pages of her ledgers until even the street-lamps had
gone out. Though on diplomatic, political terms with many people, Verena had
no close friends at all. Men were afraid of her, and she herself seemed to
be afraid of women. Some years before she had been greatly attached to a
blonde jolly girl called Maudie Laura Murphy, who worked for a bit in the
post office here and who finally married a liquor salesman from St. Louis.
Verena had been very bitter over this and said publicly that the man was no
account. It was therefore a surprise when, as a wedding present, she gave
the couple a honeymoon trip to the Grand Canyon. Maudie and her husband
never came back; they opened a filling station nearby Grand Canyon, and from
time to time sent Verena Kodak snapshots of themselves. These pictures were
a pleasure and a grief. There were nights when she never opened her ledgers,
but sat with her forehead leaning in her hands, and the pictures spread on
the desk. After she had put them away, she would pace around the room with
the lights turned off, and presently there would come a hurt rusty crying
sound as though she'd tripped and fallen in the dark.
That part of the attic from which I could have looked down into the
kitchen was fortified against me, for it was stacked with trunks like bales
of cotton. At that time it was the kitchen I most wanted to spy upon; this
was the real living room of the house, and Dolly spent most of the day there
chatting with her friend Catherine Creek. As a child, an orphan, Catherine
Creek had been hired out to Mr. Uriah Talbo, and they had all grown up
together, she and the Talbo sisters, there on the old farm that has since
become a railroad depot Dolly she called Dollyheart, but Verena she called
That One. She lived in the back yard in a tin-roofed silvery little house
set among sunflowers and trellises of butterbean vine. She claimed to be an
Indian, which made most people wink, for she was dark as the angels of
Africa. But for all I know it may have been true: certainly she dressed like
an Indian. That is, she had a string of turquoise beads, and wore enough
rouge to put out your eyes; it shone on her cheeks like votive taillights.
Most of her teeth were gone; she kept her jaws jacked up with cotton
wadding, and Verena would say Dammit Catherine, since you can't make a
sensible sound why in creation won't you go down to Doc Crocker and let him
put some teeth in your head? It was true that she was hard to understand:
Dolly was the only one who could fluently translate her friend's muffled,
mumbling noises. It was enough for Catherine that Dolly understood her: they
were always together and everything they had to say they said to each other:
bending my ear to an attic beam I could hear the tantalizing tremor of their
voices flowing like sapsyrup through the old wood.
To reach the attic, you climbed a ladder in the linen closet, the
ceiling of which was a trapdoor. One day, as I started up, I saw that the
trapdoor was swung open and, listening, heard above me an idle sweet
humming, like the pretty sounds small girls make when they are playing
alone. I would have turned back, but the humming stopped, and a voice said:
"Catherine?"
"Collin," I answered, showing myself.
The snowflake of Dolly's face held its shape; for once she did not
dissolve. "This is where you come-we wondered," she said, her voice frail
and crinkling as tissue paper. She had the eyes of a gifted person, kindled,
transparent eyes, luminously green as mint jelly: gazing at me through the
attic twilight they admitted, timidly, that I meant her no harm. "You play
games up here-in the attic? I told Verena you would be lonesome." Stooping,
she rooted around in the depths of a barrel. "Here now," she said, "you can
help me by looking in that other barrel. I'm hunting for a coral castle; and
a sack of pearl pebbles, all colors. I think Catherine will like that, a
bowl of goldfish, don't you? For her birthday. We used to have a bowl of
tropical fish-devils, they were: ate each other up. But I remember when we
bought them; we went all the way to Brew-ton, sixty miles. I never went
sixty miles before, and I don't know that I ever will again. Ah see, here it
is, the castle." Soon afterwards I found the pebbles; they were like kernels
of corn or candy, and: "Have a piece of candy," I said, offering the sack.
"Oh thank you," she said, "I love a piece of candy, evea when it tastes like
a pebble."
We were friends. Dolly and Catherine and me. I was eleven, then I was
sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.
I never brought anyone home with me, and I never wanted to. Once I took
a girl to the picture show, and on the way home she asked couldn't she come
in for a drink of water. If I'd thought she was really thirsty I would've
said affl right; but I knew she was faking just so she could see inside the
house the way people were always wanting to, and so I told her she better
wait until she got home. She said: "All the world knows Dolly Talbo's gone,
and you're gone too." I liked that girl well enough, but I gave her a shove
anyway, and she said her brother would fix my wagon, which he did: right
here at the comer of my mouth I've still got a scar where he hit me with a
Coca-Cola bottle.
I know: Dolly, they said, was Verena's cross, and said, too, that more
went on in the house on Talbo Lane than a body cared to think about. Maybe
so. But those were the lovely years.
On winter afternoons, as soon as I came in from school, Catherine
hustled open a jar of preserves, while Dolly put a foot-high pot of coffee
on the stove and pushed a pan of bis" cuits into the oven; and the oven,
opening, would let out a hot vanilla fragrance, for Dolly, who lived off
sweet foods, was always baking a pound cake, raisin bread, some kind of
cookie or fudge: never would touch a vegetable, and the only meat she liked
was the chicken brain, a pea-sized thing gone before you've tasted it. What
with a woodstove and an open fireplace, the kitchen was warm as a cow's
tongie. The nearest winter came was to frost the windows with its zero blue
breath. If some wizard would like to make me a present, let him give me a
bottle filled with the voices of that kitchen, the ha ha ha and fire
whispering, a bottle brimming with its buttery sugary bakery smells-though
Catherine smelled like a sow in the spring. It looked more like a cozy
parlor than a kitchen; there was a hook rug on the floor, rocking chairs;
ranged along the walls were pictures of kittens, an enthusiasm of Dolly's;
there was a geranium plant that bloomed, then bloomed again all year round,
and Catherine's goldfish, in a bowl on the oilcloth-covered table, fanned
their tails through the portals of the coral castle. Sometimes we worked
jigsaw puzzles, dividing the pieces among us, and Catherine would hide
pieces if she thought you were going to finish your part of the puzzle
before she finished hers. Or they would help with my homework; that was a
mess. About all natural things Dolly was sophisticated; she had the
subterranean intelligence of a bee that knows where to find the sweetest
flower: she could tell you of a storm a day in advance, predict the fruit of
the fig tree, lead you to mushrooms and wild honey, a hidden nest of guinea
hen eggs. She looked around her, and felt what she saw. But about homework
Dolly was as ignorant as Catherine. "America must have been called America
before Columbus came. It stands to reason. Otherwise, how would he have
known it was America?" And Catherine said: "That's correct. America is an
old Indian word." Of the two, Catherine was the worst: she insisted on her
infallibility, and if you did not write down exactly what she said, she got
jumpy and spilled the coffee or something. But I never listened to her again
after what she said about Lincoln: that he was part Negro and part Indian
and only a speck white. Even I knew this was not true. But I am under
special obligation to Catherine; if it had not been for her who knows
whether I would have grown to ordinary human size? At fourteen I was not
much bigger than Biddy Skinner, and people told how he'd had offers from a
circus. Catherine said don't worry yourself honey, all you need is a little
stretching. She pulled at my arms, legs, tugged at my head as though it were
an apple latched to an unyielding bough. But it's the truth that within two
years she'd stretched me from four feet nine to five feet seven, and I can
prove it by the breadknife knotches on the pantry door, for even now when so
much has gone, when there is only wind in the stove and winter in the
kitchen, those growing-up scars are still there, a testimony.
Despite the generally beneficial effect Dolly's medicine appeared to
have on those who sent for it, letters once in a while came saying Dear Miss
Talbo we won't be needing any more dropsy cure on account of poor Cousin
Belle (or whoever) passed away last week bless her soul. Then the kitchen
was a mournful place; with folded hands and nodding heads my two friends
bleakly recalled the circumstances of the case, and well, Catherine would
say, we did the best we could Dollyheart, but the good Lord had other
notions. Verena, too, could make the kitchen sad, as she was always
introducing a new rule or enforcing an old one: do, don't, stop, start: it
was as though we were clocks she kept an eye on to see that our time jibed
with her own, and woe if we were ten minutes fast, an hour slow: Verena went
off like a cuckoo. That One! said Catherine, and Dolly would go hush now!
hush now! as though to quiet not Catherine but a mutinous inner whispering.
Verena in her heart wanted, I think, to come into the kitchen and be a part
of it; but she was too like a lone man in a house full of women and
children, and the only way she could make contact with us was through
assertive outbursts: Dolly, get rid of that kitten, you want to aggravate my
asthma? who left the water running in the bathroom? which one of you broke
my umbrella? Her ugly moods sifted through the house like a sour yellow mist
That One. Hush now, hush.
Once a week, Saturdays mostly, we went to River Woods. For these trips,
which lasted the whole day, Catherine fried a chicken and deviled a dozen
eggs, and Dolly took along a chocolate layer cake and a supply of divinity
fudge. Thus armed, and carrying three empty grain sacks, we walked out the
church road past the cemetery and through the field of Indian grass. Just
entering the woods there was a double-trunked China tree, really two trees,
but their branches were so embraced that you could step from one into the
other; in fact, they were bridged by a tree-house: spacious, sturdy, a model
of a tree-house, it was like a raft floating in the sea of leaves. The boys
who built it, provided they are still alive, must by now be very old men;
certainly the tree-house was fifteen or twenty years old when Dolly first
found it and that was a quarter of a century before she showed it to me. To
reach it was easy as climbing stairs; there were footholds of gnarled bark
and tough vines to grip; even Catherine, who was heavy around the hips and
complained of rheumatism, had no trouble. But Catherine felt no love for the
tree-house; she did not know, as Dolly knew and made me know, that it was a
ship, that to sit up there was to sail along the cloudy coastline of every
dream. Mark my word, said Catherine, them boards are too old, them nails are
slippery as worms, gonna crack in two, gonna fall and bust our heads don't I
know it.
Storing our provisions in the tree-house, we separated into the woods,
each carrying a grain sack to be filled with herbs, leaves, strange roots.
No one, not even Catherine, knew altogether what went into the medicine, for
it was a secret Dolly kept to herself, and we were never allowed to look at
the gatherings in her own sack: she held tight to it, as though inside she
had captive a blue-haired child, a bewitched prince. This was her story:
"Once, back yonder when we were children (Verena still with her babyteeth
and Catherine no higher than a fence post) there were gipsies thick as birds
in a blackberry patch-not like now, when maybe you see a few straggling
through each year. They came with spring: sudden, like the dogwood pink,
there they were-up and down the road and in the woods around. But our men
hated the sight of them, and daddy, that was your great-uncle Uriah, said he
would shoot any he caught on our place. And so I never told when I saw (he
gipsies taking water from the creek or stealing old winter pecans off the
ground. Then one evening, it was April and falling rain, I went out to the
cowshed where Fairybell had a new little calf; and there in the cowshed were
three gipsy women, two of them old and one of them young, and the young one
was lying naked and twisting on the cornshucks. When they saw that I was not
afraid, that I was not going to run and tell, one of the old women asked
would I bring a light So I went to the house for a candle, and when I came
back the woman who had sent me was holding a red hollering baby upside down
by its feet, and the other woman was milking Fairybell. I helped them wash
the baby in the warm milk and wrap it in a scarf. Then one of the old women
took my hand and said: Now I am going to give you a gift by teaching you a
rhyme. It was a rhyme about evergreen bark, dragonfly fern-and all the other
things we come here in the woods to find: Boil till dark and pure if you
want a dropsy cure. In the morning they were gone; I looked for them in the
fields and on the road; there was nothing left of them but the rhyme in my
head."
Calling to each other, hooting like owls loose in the daytime, we
worked all morning in opposite parts of the woods. Towards afternoon, our
sacks fat with skinned bark, tender, torn roots, we climbed back into the
green web of the China tree and spread the food. There was good creek water
in a mason jar, or if the weather was cold a thermos of hot coffee, and we
wadded leaves to wipe our chicken-stained, fudge-sticky fingers. Afterwards,
telling fortunes with flowers, speaking of sleepy things, it was as though
we floated through the afternoon on the raft in the tree; we belonged there,
as the sun-silvered leaves belonged, the dwelling whippoorwills.
About once a year I go over to the house on Talbo Lane, and walk around
in the yard. I was there the other day, and came across an old iron tub
lying overturned in the weeds like a black fallen meteor: Dolly-Dolly,
hovering over the tub dropping our grain-sack gatherings into boiling water
and stirring, stirring with a sawed-off broomstick the brown as tobacco spit
brew. She did the mixing of the medicine alone while Catherine and I stood
watching like apprentices to a witch. We all helped later with the bottling
of it and, because it produced a fume that exploded ordinary corks, my
particular job was to roll stoppers of toilet paper. Sales averaged around
six bottles a week, at two dollars a bottle. The money. Dolly said, belonged
to the three of us, and we spent it fast as it came in. We were always
sending away for stuff advertised in magazines: Take Up Woodcarving,
Parcheesi: the game for young and old. Anyone Can Play A Bazooka. Once we
sent away for a book of French lessons: it was my idea that if we got to
talk French we would have a secret language that Verena or nobody would
understand. Dolly was willing to try, but "Passez-moi a spoon" was the best
she ever did, and after learning "Je suis fatigue," Catherine never opened
the book again: she said that was all she needed to know.
Verena often remarked that there would be trouble if anyone ever got
poisoned, but otherwise she did not show much interest in the dropsy cure.
Then one year we totaled up and found we'd earned enough to have to pay an
income tax. Whereupon Verena began asking questions: money was like a
wildcat whose trail she stalked with a trained hunter's muffled step and an
eye for every broken twig. What, she wanted to know, went into the medicine?
and Dolly, flattered, almost giggling, nonetheless waved her hands and said
Well this and that, nothing special.
Verena seemed to let the matter die; yet very often, sitting at the
supper table, her eyes paused ponderingly on Dolly, and once, when we were
gathered in the yard around the boiling tub, I looked up and saw Verena in a
window watching us with uninterrupted fixity: by then, I suppose, her plan
had taken shape, but she did not make her first move until summer.
Twice a year, in January and again in August, Verena went on buying
trips to St. Louis or Chicago. That summer, the summer I reached sixteen,
she went to Chicago and after two weeks returned accompanied by a man called
Dr. Morris Ritz. Naturally everyone wondered who was Dr. Morris Ritz? He
wore bow ties and sharp jazzy suits; his lips were blue and he had gaudy
small swerving eyes; altogether, he looked like a mean mouse. We heard that
he lived in the best room at the Lola Hotel and ate steak dinners at Phil's
Cafe. On the streets he strutted along bobbing his shiny head at every
passerby; he made no friends, however, and was not seen in the company of
anyone except Verena, who never brought him to the house and never mentioned
his name until one day Catherine had the gall to say, "Miss Verena, just who
is this funny looking little Dr. Morris Ritz?" and Verena, getting white
around the mouth, replied: "Well now, he's not half so funny looking as some
I could name."
Scandalous, people said, the way Verena was carrying on with that
little Jew from Chicago: and him twenty years younger. The story that got
around was that they were up to something out in the old canning factory the
other side of town. As it developed, they were; but not what the gang at the
pool-hall thought Most any afternoon you could see Verena and Dr. Morris
Ritz walking out toward the canning factory, an abandoned blasted brick ruin
with jagged windows and sagging doors. For a generation no one had been near
it except school-kids who went there to smoke cigarettes and get naked
together. Then early in September, by way of a notice in the Courier, we
learned for the first time that Verena had bought the old canning factory;
but there was no mention as to what use she was planning to make of it.
Shortly after this, Verena told Catherine to kill two chickens as Dr. Morris
Ritz was coming to Sunday dinner.
During the years that I lived there. Dr. Morris Ritz was the only
person ever invited to dine at the house on Talbo Lane. So for many reasons
it was an occasion. Catherine and Dolly did a spring cleaning: they beat
rugs, brought china from the attic, had every room smelling of floorwax and
lemon polish. There was to be fried chicken and ham, English peas, sweet
potatoes, rolls, banana pudding, two kinds of cake and tutti-frutti ice
cream from the drugstore. Sunday noon Verena came in to look at the table:
with its sprawling centerpiece of peach-colored roses and dense fancy
stretches of silverware, it seemed set for a party of twenty; actually,
there were only two places. Verena went ahead and set two more, and Dolly,
seeing this, said weakly Well, it was all right if Collin wanted to eat at
the table, but that she was going to stay in the kitchen with Catherine.
Verena put her foot down: "Don't fool with me. Dolly. This is important.
Morris is coming here expressly to meet you. And what-is more, I'd
appreciate it if you'd hold up your head: it makes me dizzy, hanging like
that."
Dolly was scared to death: she hid in her room, and long after our
guest had arrived I had to be sent to fetch her. She was lying in the pink
bed with a wet washrag on her forehead, and Catherine was sitting beside
her. Catherine was all sleeked up, rouge on her cheeks like lollipops and
her jaws Jammed with more cotton than ever; she said, "Honey, you ought to
get up from there-you're going to ruin that pretty dress." It was a calico
dress Verena had brought from Chicago; Dolly sat up and smoothed it, then
immediately lay down again: "If Verena knew how sorry I am," she said
helplessly, and so I went and told Verena that Dolly was sick. Verena said
she'd see about that, and marched off leaving me alone in the hall with Dr.
Morris Ritz.
Oh he was a hateful thing. "So you're sixteen," he said, winking first
one, then the other of his sassy eyes. "And throwing it around, huh? Make
the old lady take you next time she goes to Chicago. Plenty of good stuff
there to throw it at." He snapped his fingers and jiggled his razde-dazzle,
dagger-sharp shoes as though keeping time to some vaudeville tune: he might
have been a tapdancer or a soda-jerk, except that he was carrying a brief
case, which suggested a more serious occupation. I wondered what kind of
doctor he was supposed to be; indeed, was on the point of asking when Verena
returned steering Dolly by the elbow.
The shadows of the hall, the tapestried furniture failed to absorb her;
without raising her eyes she lifted her hand, and Dr. Ritz gripped it so
ruggedly, pumped it so hard she went nearly off balance. "Gee, Miss Talbo;
am I honored to meet you!" he said, and cranked his bow tie.
We sat down to dinner, and Catherine came around with the chicken. She
served Verena, then Dolly, and when the doctor's turn came he said, 'Tell
you the truth, the only piece of chicken I care about is the brain: don't
suppose you'd have that back in the kitchen, mammy?"
Catherine looked so far down her nose she got almost cross" eyed; and
with her tongue all mixed up in the cotton wadding she told him that,
"Dolly's took those brains on her plate."
"These southern accents, Jesus," he said, genuinely dismayed.
"She says I have the brains on my plate," said Dolly, her cheeks red as
Catherine's rouge. "But please let me pass them to you."
"If you're sure you don't mind..."
"She doesn't mind a bit," said Verena. "She only eats sweet things
anyway. Here, Dolly: have some banana pudding."
Presently Dr. Ritz commenced a fit of sneezing. "The flowers, those
roses, old allergy..."
"Oh dear," said Dolly who, seeing an opportunity to escape into the
kitchen, seized the bowl of roses: it slipped, crystal crashed, roses landed
in gravy and gravy landed on us all. "You see," she said, speaking to
herself and with tears teetering in her eyes, "you see, it's hopeless."
"Nothing is hopeless. Dolly; sit down and finish your pudding," Verena
advised in a substantial, chin-up voice. "Besides, we have a nice little
surprise for you. Morris, show Dolly those lovely labels."
Murmuring "No harm done," Dr. Ritz stopped rubbing gravy splotches off
his sleeve, and went into the hall, returning with his brief case. His
fingers buzzed through a sheaf of papers, then lighted on a large envelope
which he passed down to Dolly.
There were gum-stickers in the envelope, triangular labels with orange
lettering: Gipsy Queen Dropsy Cure: and a fuzzy picture of a woman wearing a
bandana and gold earloops. "First class, huh?" said Dr. Ritz. "Made in
Chicago. A friend of mine drew the picture: real artist, that guy," Dolly
shuffled the labels with a puzzled, apprehensive expression until Verena
asked: "Aren't you pleased?"
The labels twitched in Dolly's hands. "I'm not sure I understand."
"Of course you do," said Verena, smiling thinly. "It's obvious enough.
I told Morris that old story of yours and he thought of this wonderful
name."
"Gipsy Queen Dropsy Cure: very catchy, that," said the doctor. "Look
great in ads."
"My medicine?" said Dolly, her eyes still lowered. "But I don't need
any labels, Verena. I write my own."
Dr. Ritz snapped his fingers. "Say, that's good! We can have labels
printed like her own handwriting: personal, see?"
"We've spent enough money already," Verena told him briskly; and,
turning to Dolly, said: "Morris and I are going up to Washington this week
to get a copyright on these labels and register a patent for the
medicine-naming you as the inventor, naturally. Now the point is. Dolly, you
must sit down and write out a complete formula for us."
Dolly's face loosened; and the labels scattered on the floor, skimmed.
Leaning her hands on the table she pushed herself upward; slowly her
features came together again, she lifted her head and looked blinkingly at
Dr. Ritz, at Verena. "It won't do," she said quietly. She moved to the door,
put a hand on its handle. "It won't do: because you haven't any right,
Verena. Nor you, sir."
I helped Catherine clear the table: the ruined roses, the uncut cakes,
the vegetables no one had touched. Verena and her guest had left the house
together; from the kitchen window we watched them as they went toward town
nodding and shaking their heads. Then we sliced the devil's-food cake and
took it into Dolly's room.
Hush now! hush now! she said when Catherine began light' ing into That
One. But it was as though the rebellious inner whispering had become a
raucous voice, an opponent she must outshout: Hush now! hush nowl until
Catherine had to put her arms around Dolly and say hush, too.
We got out a deck of Rook cards and spread them on the bed. Naturally
Catherine had to go and remember it was Sunday; she said maybe we could risk
another black mark in the Judgment Book, but there were too many beside her
name already. After thinking it over, we told fortunes instead. Sometime
around dusk Verena came home. We heard her footsteps in the hall; she opened
the door without knocking, and Dolly, who was in the middle of my fortune,
tightened her hold on my hand. Verena said: "Collin, Catherine, we will
excuse you."
Catherine wanted to follow me up the ladder into the attic, except she
had on her fine clothes. So I went alone. There was a good knothole that
looked straight down into the pink room; but Verena was standing directly
under it, and all I could see was her hat, for she was still wearing the hat
she'd put on when she left the house. It was a straw skimmer decorated with
a cluster of celluloid fruit. "Those are facts," she was saying, and the
fruit shivered, shimmered in the blue dimness. "Two thousand for the old
factory. Bill Tatum and four carpenters working out there at eighty cents an
hour, seven thousand dollars worth of machinery already ordered, not to
mention what a specialist like Morris Ritz is costing. And why? All for
youl"
"All for me?" and Dolly sounded sad and failing as the dusk. I saw her
shadow as she moved from one part of the room to another. "You are my own
flesh, and I love you tenderly; in my heart I love you. I could prove it now
by giving you the only thing that has ever been mine: then you would have it
all. Please, Verena," she said, faltering, "let this one thing belong to
me."
Verena switched on a light. "You speak of giving," and her voice was
hard as the sudden bitter glare. "All these years that I've worked like a
fieldhand; what haven't I given you? This house, that..."
"You've given everything to me," Dolly interrupted softly. "And to
Catherine and to Collin. Except, we've earned our way a bit: we've kept a
nice home for you, haven't we?"
"Oh a fine home," said Verena, whipping off her hat Her face was full
of blood. "You and that gurgling fool. Has it not struck you that I never
ask anyone into this house? And for a very simple reason: I'm ashamed to.
Look what happened today."
I could hear the breath go out of Dolly. "I'm sorry," she said faintly.
"I am truly. I'd always thought there was a place for us here, that you
needed us somehow. But it's going to be all right now, Verena. We'll go
away."
Verena sighed. "Poor Dolly. Poor poor thing. Wherever would you go?"
The answer, a little while in coming, was fragile as the flight of a
moth; "I know a place."
Later, I waited in bed for Dolly to come and kiss me goodnight. My
room, beyond the parlor in a faraway comer of the house, was the room where
their father, Mr. Uriah Talbo, had lived. In his mad old age, Verena had
brought him here from the farm, and here he'd died, not knowing where he
was. Though dead ten, fifteen years, the pee and tobacco old-man smell of
him still saturated the mattress, the closet, and on a shelf in the closet
was the one possession he'd carried away with him from the farm, a small
yellow drum: as a lad my own age he'd marched in a Dixie regiment rattling
this little yellow drum, and singing. Dolly said that when she was a girl
she'd liked to wake up winter mornings and hear her father singing as he
went about the house building fires; after he was old, after he'd died, she
sometimes heard his songs in the field of Indian grass. Wind, Catherine
said; and Dolly told her: But the wind is us-it gathers and remembers all
our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the
fields -I've heard Papa clear as day.
On such a night, now that it was September, the autumn winds would be
curving through the taut red grass, releasing all the gone voices, and I
wondered if he was singing among them, the old man in whose bed I lay
falling asleep.
Then I thought Dolly at last had come to kiss me goodnight, for I woke
up sensing her near me in the room; but it was almost morning, beginning
light was like a flowering foliage at the windows, and roosters ranted in
distant yards. "Shhh, Collin," Dolly whispered, bending over me. She was
wearing a woolen winter suit and a hat with a traveling veil that misted her
face. "I only wanted you to know where we are going."
"To the tree-house?" I said, and thought I was talking in my sleep.
Dolly nodded. "Just for now. Until we know better what our plans will
be." She could see that I was frightened, and put her hand on my forehead.
"You and Catherine: but not me?" and I was jerking with a chill. "You
can't leave without me."
The town clock was tolling; she seemed to be waiting for it to finish
before making up her mind. It struck five, and by the time the note had died
away I had climbed out of bed and rushed into my clothes. There was nothing
for Dolly to say except: '"Don't forget your comb."
Catherine met us in the yard; she was crooked over with the weight of a
brimming oilcloth satchel; her eyes were swollen, she had been crying, and
Dolly, oddly calm and certain of what she was doing, said it doesn't matter,
Catherine-we can send for your goldfish once we find a place. Verena's
closed quiet windows loomed above us; we moved cautiously past them and
silently out the gate. A fox terrier barked at us; but there was no one on
the street, and no one saw us pass through the town except a sleepless
prisoner gazing from the jail. We reached the field of Indian grass at the
same moment as the sun. Dolly's veil flared in the morning breeze, and a
pair of pheasants, nesting in our path, swept before us, their metal wings
swiping the cockscomb-scarlet grass. The China tree was a September bowl of
green and greenish gold: Gonna fall, gonna bust our heads, Catherine said,
as all around us the leaves shook down their dew.
If it hadn't been for Riley Henderson, I doubt anyone would have known,
or at least known so soon, that we were in the tree.
Catherine had loaded her oilcloth satchel with the leftovers from
Sunday dinner, and we were enjoying a breakfast of cake and chicken when
gunfire slapped through the woods. We sat there with cake going dry in our
mouths. Below, a sleek bird dog cantered into view, followed by Riley
Henderson; he was shouldering a shotgun and around his neck there hung a
garland of bleeding squirrels whose tails were tied together. Dolly lowered
her veil, as though to camouflage herself among the leaves.
He paused not far away, and his wary, tanned young face tightened;
propping his gun into position he took a roaming aim, as if waiting for a
target to present itself. The suspense was too much for Catherine, who
shouted: "Riley Henderson, don't you dare shoot us!"
His gun wavered, and he spun around, the squirrels swinging like a
loose necklace. Then he saw us in the tree, and after a moment said, "Hello
there, Catherine Creek; hello. Miss Talbo. What are you folks doing up
there? Wildcat chase you?"
"Just sitting," said Dolly promptly, as though she were afraid for
either Catherine or I to answer. "That's a fine mess of squirrels you've
got."
'Take a couple," he said, detaching two. "We had some for supper last
night and they were real tender. Wait a minute, I'll bring them up to you."
"You don't have to do that; just leave them on the ground." But he said
ants would get at them, and hauled himself into the-tree. His blue shirt was
spotted with squirrel blood, and flecks of blood glittered in his rough
leather-colored hair; he smelted of gunpowder, and his homely well-made face
was brown as cinnamon. "I'll be damned, it's a tree-house," he said,
pounding his foot as though to test the strength of the boards. Catherine
warned him that maybe it was a tree-house now, but it wouldn't be for long
if he didn't stop that stamping. He said, "You build it, Collin?" and it was
with a happy shock that I realized he'd called my name: I hadn't thought
Riley Henderson knew me from dust. But I knew him, all right."
No one in our town ever had themselves so much talked about as Riley
Henderson. Older people spoke of him with sighing voices, and those nearer
his own age, like myself, were glad to call him mean and hard: that was
because he would only let us envy him, would not let us love him, be his
friend.
Anyone could have told you the facts.
He was bom in China, where his father, a missionary, had been killed in
an uprising. His mother was from this town, and her name was Rose; though I
never saw her myself, people say she was a beautiful woman until she started
wearing glasses; she was rich too, having received a large inheritance from
her grandfather. When she came back from China she brought Riley, then five,
and two younger children, both girls; they lived with her unmarried brother.
Justice of the Peace Horace Holton, a meaty spinsterish man with skin yellow
as quince. In the following years Rose Henderson grew strange in her ways:
she threatened to sue Verena for selling her a dress that shrank in the
wash; to punish Riley, she made him hop on one leg around the yard reciting
the multiplication table; otherwise, she let him run wild, and when the
Presbyterian minister spoke to her about it she told him she hated her
children and wished they were dead. And she must have meant it, for one
Christmas morning she locked the bathroom door and tried to drown her two
little girls in the tub: it was said that Riley broke the door down with a
hatchet, which seems a tall order for a boy of nine or ten, whatever he was.
Afterwards, Rose was sent off to a place on the Gulf Coast, an institution,
and she may still be living there, at least I've never heard that she died.
Now Riley and his uncle Horace Holton couldn't get on. One night he stole
Horace's Oldsmobile and drove out to the Dance-N-Dine with Mamie Curtiss:
she was fast as lightning, and maybe five years older than Riley, who was
not more than fifteen at the time. Well, Horace heard they were at the
Dance-N-Dine and got the Sheriff to drive him out there: he said he was
going to teach Riley a lesson and have him arrested. But Riley said Sheriff,
you're after the wrong party. Right there in front of a crowd he accused his
uncle of stealing money that belonged to Rose and that was meant for him and
his sisters. He offered to fight it out on the spot; and when Horace held
back, he just walked over and socked him in the eye. The Sheriff put Riley
in jail. But Judge Cool, an old friend of Rose's, began to investigate, and
sure enough it turned out Horace had been draining Rose's money into his own
account. So Horace simply packed his things and took the train to New
Orleans where, a few months, later, we heard that, billed as the Minister of
Romance, he had a job marrying couples on an excursion steamer that made
moonlight cruises up the Mississippi. From then on, Riley was his own boss.
With money borrowed against the inheritance he was coming into, he bought a
red racy car and went skidding round the countryside with every floozy in
town; the only nice girls you ever saw in that car were his sisters-he took
them for a drive Sunday afternoons, a slow respectable circling of the
square. They were pretty girls, his sisters, but they didn't have much fun,
for he kept a strict watch, and boys were afraid to come near them. A
reliable colored woman did their housework, otherwise they lived alone. One
of his sisters, Elizabeth, was in my class at school, and she got the best
grades, straight A's. Riley himself had quit school; but he was not one of
the pool-hall loafs, nor did he mix with them; he fished in the daytime, or
went hunting; around the old Holton house he made many improvements, as he
was a good carpenter; and a good mechanic, too: for instance, he built a
special car hom, it wailed like a train-whistle, and in the evening you
could hear it howling as he roared down the road on his way to a dance in
another town. How I longed for him to be my friendl and it seemed possible,
he was just two years older. But I could remember the only time he ever
spoke to me. Spruce in a pair of white flannels, he was off to a dance at
the clubhouse, and he came into Verena's drugstore, where I sometimes helped
out on Saturday nights. What he wanted was a package of Shadows, but I
For miss Sook Faulk
In memory of affections deep and true
When was it that first I heard of the grass harp? Long before the
autumn we lived in the China tree; an earlier autumn then; and of course it
was Dolly who told me, no one else would have known to call it that, a grass
harp.
If on leaving town you take the church road you soon will pass a
glaring hill of bonewhite slabs and brown burnt flowers: this is the Baptist
cemetery. Our people, Talbos, Fenwicks, are buried there; my mother lies
next to my father, and the graves of kinfolk, twenty or more, are around
them like the prone roots of a stony tree. Below the hill grows a field of
high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go to see it in the
fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows
like firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves
sighing human music, a harp of voices.
Beyond the field begins the darkness of River Woods. It must have been
on one of those September days when we were there in the woods gathering
roots that Dolly said: Do you hear? that is the grass harp, always telling a
story-it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people
who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too.
After my mother died, my father, a traveling man, sent me to live with
his cousins, Verena and Dolly Talbo, two unmarried ladies who were sisters.
Before that, I'd not ever been allowed into their house. For reasons no one
ever got quite clear, Verena and my father did not speak. Probably Papa
asked Verena to lend him some money, and she refused; or perhaps she did
make the loan, and he never returned it You can be sure that the trouble was
over money, because nothing else would have mattered to them so much,
especially Verena, who was the richest person in town. The drugstore, the
drygoods store, a filling station, a grocery, an office building, all this
was hers, and the earning of it had not made her an easy woman.
Anyway, Papa said he would never set foot inside her house. He told
such terrible things about the Talbo ladies. One of the stories he spread,
that Verena was a morphodyte, has never stopped going around, and the
ridicule he heaped on Miss Dolly Talbo was too much even for my mother: she
told him he ought to be ashamed, mocking anyone so gentle and harmless.
I think they were very much in love, my mother and father. She used to
cry every time he went away to sell his frigidaires. He married her when she
was sixteen; she did not live to be thirty. The afternoon she died Papa,
calling her name, tore off all his clothes and ran out naked into the yard.
It was the day after the funeral that Verena came to the house. I
remember the terror of watching her move up the walk, a whip-thin, handsome
woman with shingled peppersalt hair, black, rather virile eyebrows and a
dainty cheekmole. She opened the front door and walked right into the house.
Since the funeral. Papa had been breaking things, not with fury, but
quietly, thoroughly: he would amble into the parlor, pick up a china figure,
muse over it a moment, then throw it against the wall. The floor and stairs
were littered with cracked glass, scattered silverware; a ripped nightgown,
one of my mother's, hung over the banister.
Verena's eyes flicked over the debris. "Eugene, I want a word with
you," she said in that hearty, coldly exalted voice, and Papa answered:
"Yes, sit down, Verena. I thought you would come."
That afternoon Dolly's friend Catherine Creek came over and packed my
clothes, and Papa drove me to the impressive, shadowy house on Talbo Lane.
As I was getting out of the car he tried to hug me, but I was scared of him
and wriggled out of his arms. I'm sorry now that we did not hug each other.
Because a few days later, on his way up to Mobile, his car skidded and fell
fifty feet into the Gulf. When I saw him again there were silver dollars
weighting down his eyes.
Except to remark that I was small for my age, a runt, no one had ever
paid any attention to me; but now people pointed me out, and said wasn't it
sad? that poor little Collin Fenwickl I tried to look pitiful because I knew
it pleased people: every man in town must have treated me to a Dixie Cup or
a box of Crackerjack, and at school I got good grades for the first time. So
it was a long while before I calmed down enough to notice Dolly Talbo.
And when I did I fell in love.
Imagine what it must have been for her when first I came to the house,
a loud and prying boy of eleven. She skittered at the sound of my footsteps
or, if there was no avoiding me, folded like the petals of shy-lady fern.
She was one of those people who can disguise themselves as an object in the
room, a shadow in the comer, whose presence is a delicate happening. She
wore the quietest shoes, plain virginal dresses with hems that touched her
ankles. Though older than her sister, she seemed someone who, like myself,
Verena had adopted. Pulled and guided by the gravity of Verena's planet, we
rotated separately in the outer spaces of the house.
In the attic, a slipshod museum spookily peopled with old display
dummies from Verena's drygoods store, there were many loose boards, and by
inching these I could look down into almost any room. Dolly's room, unlike
the rest of the house, which bulged with fat dour furniture, contained only
a bed, a bureau, a chair: a nun might have lived there, except for one fact:
the walls, everything was painted an outlandish pink, even the floor was
this color. Whenever I spied on Dolly, she usually was to be seen doing one
of two things: she was standing in front of a mirror snipping with a pair of
garden shears her yellow and white, already brief hair; either that, or she
was writing in pencil on a pad of coarse Kress paper. She kept wetting the
pencil on the tip of her tongue, and sometimes she spoke aloud a sentence as
she put it down: Do not touch sweet foods like candy and salt will kill you
for certain. Now I'll tell you, she was writing letters. But at first this
correspondence was a puzzle to me. After all, her only friend was Catherine
Creek, she saw no one else and she never left the house, except once a week
when she and Catherine went to River Woods where they gathered the
ingredients of a dropsy remedy Dolly brewed and bottled. Later I discovered
she had customers for this medicine throughout the state, and it was to them
that her many letters were addressed.
Verena's room, connecting with Dolly's by a passage, was rigged up like
an office. There was a rolltop desk, a library of ledgers, filing cabinets.
After supper, wearing a green eyeshade, she would sit at her desk totaling
figures and turning the pages of her ledgers until even the street-lamps had
gone out. Though on diplomatic, political terms with many people, Verena had
no close friends at all. Men were afraid of her, and she herself seemed to
be afraid of women. Some years before she had been greatly attached to a
blonde jolly girl called Maudie Laura Murphy, who worked for a bit in the
post office here and who finally married a liquor salesman from St. Louis.
Verena had been very bitter over this and said publicly that the man was no
account. It was therefore a surprise when, as a wedding present, she gave
the couple a honeymoon trip to the Grand Canyon. Maudie and her husband
never came back; they opened a filling station nearby Grand Canyon, and from
time to time sent Verena Kodak snapshots of themselves. These pictures were
a pleasure and a grief. There were nights when she never opened her ledgers,
but sat with her forehead leaning in her hands, and the pictures spread on
the desk. After she had put them away, she would pace around the room with
the lights turned off, and presently there would come a hurt rusty crying
sound as though she'd tripped and fallen in the dark.
That part of the attic from which I could have looked down into the
kitchen was fortified against me, for it was stacked with trunks like bales
of cotton. At that time it was the kitchen I most wanted to spy upon; this
was the real living room of the house, and Dolly spent most of the day there
chatting with her friend Catherine Creek. As a child, an orphan, Catherine
Creek had been hired out to Mr. Uriah Talbo, and they had all grown up
together, she and the Talbo sisters, there on the old farm that has since
become a railroad depot Dolly she called Dollyheart, but Verena she called
That One. She lived in the back yard in a tin-roofed silvery little house
set among sunflowers and trellises of butterbean vine. She claimed to be an
Indian, which made most people wink, for she was dark as the angels of
Africa. But for all I know it may have been true: certainly she dressed like
an Indian. That is, she had a string of turquoise beads, and wore enough
rouge to put out your eyes; it shone on her cheeks like votive taillights.
Most of her teeth were gone; she kept her jaws jacked up with cotton
wadding, and Verena would say Dammit Catherine, since you can't make a
sensible sound why in creation won't you go down to Doc Crocker and let him
put some teeth in your head? It was true that she was hard to understand:
Dolly was the only one who could fluently translate her friend's muffled,
mumbling noises. It was enough for Catherine that Dolly understood her: they
were always together and everything they had to say they said to each other:
bending my ear to an attic beam I could hear the tantalizing tremor of their
voices flowing like sapsyrup through the old wood.
To reach the attic, you climbed a ladder in the linen closet, the
ceiling of which was a trapdoor. One day, as I started up, I saw that the
trapdoor was swung open and, listening, heard above me an idle sweet
humming, like the pretty sounds small girls make when they are playing
alone. I would have turned back, but the humming stopped, and a voice said:
"Catherine?"
"Collin," I answered, showing myself.
The snowflake of Dolly's face held its shape; for once she did not
dissolve. "This is where you come-we wondered," she said, her voice frail
and crinkling as tissue paper. She had the eyes of a gifted person, kindled,
transparent eyes, luminously green as mint jelly: gazing at me through the
attic twilight they admitted, timidly, that I meant her no harm. "You play
games up here-in the attic? I told Verena you would be lonesome." Stooping,
she rooted around in the depths of a barrel. "Here now," she said, "you can
help me by looking in that other barrel. I'm hunting for a coral castle; and
a sack of pearl pebbles, all colors. I think Catherine will like that, a
bowl of goldfish, don't you? For her birthday. We used to have a bowl of
tropical fish-devils, they were: ate each other up. But I remember when we
bought them; we went all the way to Brew-ton, sixty miles. I never went
sixty miles before, and I don't know that I ever will again. Ah see, here it
is, the castle." Soon afterwards I found the pebbles; they were like kernels
of corn or candy, and: "Have a piece of candy," I said, offering the sack.
"Oh thank you," she said, "I love a piece of candy, evea when it tastes like
a pebble."
We were friends. Dolly and Catherine and me. I was eleven, then I was
sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.
I never brought anyone home with me, and I never wanted to. Once I took
a girl to the picture show, and on the way home she asked couldn't she come
in for a drink of water. If I'd thought she was really thirsty I would've
said affl right; but I knew she was faking just so she could see inside the
house the way people were always wanting to, and so I told her she better
wait until she got home. She said: "All the world knows Dolly Talbo's gone,
and you're gone too." I liked that girl well enough, but I gave her a shove
anyway, and she said her brother would fix my wagon, which he did: right
here at the comer of my mouth I've still got a scar where he hit me with a
Coca-Cola bottle.
I know: Dolly, they said, was Verena's cross, and said, too, that more
went on in the house on Talbo Lane than a body cared to think about. Maybe
so. But those were the lovely years.
On winter afternoons, as soon as I came in from school, Catherine
hustled open a jar of preserves, while Dolly put a foot-high pot of coffee
on the stove and pushed a pan of bis" cuits into the oven; and the oven,
opening, would let out a hot vanilla fragrance, for Dolly, who lived off
sweet foods, was always baking a pound cake, raisin bread, some kind of
cookie or fudge: never would touch a vegetable, and the only meat she liked
was the chicken brain, a pea-sized thing gone before you've tasted it. What
with a woodstove and an open fireplace, the kitchen was warm as a cow's
tongie. The nearest winter came was to frost the windows with its zero blue
breath. If some wizard would like to make me a present, let him give me a
bottle filled with the voices of that kitchen, the ha ha ha and fire
whispering, a bottle brimming with its buttery sugary bakery smells-though
Catherine smelled like a sow in the spring. It looked more like a cozy
parlor than a kitchen; there was a hook rug on the floor, rocking chairs;
ranged along the walls were pictures of kittens, an enthusiasm of Dolly's;
there was a geranium plant that bloomed, then bloomed again all year round,
and Catherine's goldfish, in a bowl on the oilcloth-covered table, fanned
their tails through the portals of the coral castle. Sometimes we worked
jigsaw puzzles, dividing the pieces among us, and Catherine would hide
pieces if she thought you were going to finish your part of the puzzle
before she finished hers. Or they would help with my homework; that was a
mess. About all natural things Dolly was sophisticated; she had the
subterranean intelligence of a bee that knows where to find the sweetest
flower: she could tell you of a storm a day in advance, predict the fruit of
the fig tree, lead you to mushrooms and wild honey, a hidden nest of guinea
hen eggs. She looked around her, and felt what she saw. But about homework
Dolly was as ignorant as Catherine. "America must have been called America
before Columbus came. It stands to reason. Otherwise, how would he have
known it was America?" And Catherine said: "That's correct. America is an
old Indian word." Of the two, Catherine was the worst: she insisted on her
infallibility, and if you did not write down exactly what she said, she got
jumpy and spilled the coffee or something. But I never listened to her again
after what she said about Lincoln: that he was part Negro and part Indian
and only a speck white. Even I knew this was not true. But I am under
special obligation to Catherine; if it had not been for her who knows
whether I would have grown to ordinary human size? At fourteen I was not
much bigger than Biddy Skinner, and people told how he'd had offers from a
circus. Catherine said don't worry yourself honey, all you need is a little
stretching. She pulled at my arms, legs, tugged at my head as though it were
an apple latched to an unyielding bough. But it's the truth that within two
years she'd stretched me from four feet nine to five feet seven, and I can
prove it by the breadknife knotches on the pantry door, for even now when so
much has gone, when there is only wind in the stove and winter in the
kitchen, those growing-up scars are still there, a testimony.
Despite the generally beneficial effect Dolly's medicine appeared to
have on those who sent for it, letters once in a while came saying Dear Miss
Talbo we won't be needing any more dropsy cure on account of poor Cousin
Belle (or whoever) passed away last week bless her soul. Then the kitchen
was a mournful place; with folded hands and nodding heads my two friends
bleakly recalled the circumstances of the case, and well, Catherine would
say, we did the best we could Dollyheart, but the good Lord had other
notions. Verena, too, could make the kitchen sad, as she was always
introducing a new rule or enforcing an old one: do, don't, stop, start: it
was as though we were clocks she kept an eye on to see that our time jibed
with her own, and woe if we were ten minutes fast, an hour slow: Verena went
off like a cuckoo. That One! said Catherine, and Dolly would go hush now!
hush now! as though to quiet not Catherine but a mutinous inner whispering.
Verena in her heart wanted, I think, to come into the kitchen and be a part
of it; but she was too like a lone man in a house full of women and
children, and the only way she could make contact with us was through
assertive outbursts: Dolly, get rid of that kitten, you want to aggravate my
asthma? who left the water running in the bathroom? which one of you broke
my umbrella? Her ugly moods sifted through the house like a sour yellow mist
That One. Hush now, hush.
Once a week, Saturdays mostly, we went to River Woods. For these trips,
which lasted the whole day, Catherine fried a chicken and deviled a dozen
eggs, and Dolly took along a chocolate layer cake and a supply of divinity
fudge. Thus armed, and carrying three empty grain sacks, we walked out the
church road past the cemetery and through the field of Indian grass. Just
entering the woods there was a double-trunked China tree, really two trees,
but their branches were so embraced that you could step from one into the
other; in fact, they were bridged by a tree-house: spacious, sturdy, a model
of a tree-house, it was like a raft floating in the sea of leaves. The boys
who built it, provided they are still alive, must by now be very old men;
certainly the tree-house was fifteen or twenty years old when Dolly first
found it and that was a quarter of a century before she showed it to me. To
reach it was easy as climbing stairs; there were footholds of gnarled bark
and tough vines to grip; even Catherine, who was heavy around the hips and
complained of rheumatism, had no trouble. But Catherine felt no love for the
tree-house; she did not know, as Dolly knew and made me know, that it was a
ship, that to sit up there was to sail along the cloudy coastline of every
dream. Mark my word, said Catherine, them boards are too old, them nails are
slippery as worms, gonna crack in two, gonna fall and bust our heads don't I
know it.
Storing our provisions in the tree-house, we separated into the woods,
each carrying a grain sack to be filled with herbs, leaves, strange roots.
No one, not even Catherine, knew altogether what went into the medicine, for
it was a secret Dolly kept to herself, and we were never allowed to look at
the gatherings in her own sack: she held tight to it, as though inside she
had captive a blue-haired child, a bewitched prince. This was her story:
"Once, back yonder when we were children (Verena still with her babyteeth
and Catherine no higher than a fence post) there were gipsies thick as birds
in a blackberry patch-not like now, when maybe you see a few straggling
through each year. They came with spring: sudden, like the dogwood pink,
there they were-up and down the road and in the woods around. But our men
hated the sight of them, and daddy, that was your great-uncle Uriah, said he
would shoot any he caught on our place. And so I never told when I saw (he
gipsies taking water from the creek or stealing old winter pecans off the
ground. Then one evening, it was April and falling rain, I went out to the
cowshed where Fairybell had a new little calf; and there in the cowshed were
three gipsy women, two of them old and one of them young, and the young one
was lying naked and twisting on the cornshucks. When they saw that I was not
afraid, that I was not going to run and tell, one of the old women asked
would I bring a light So I went to the house for a candle, and when I came
back the woman who had sent me was holding a red hollering baby upside down
by its feet, and the other woman was milking Fairybell. I helped them wash
the baby in the warm milk and wrap it in a scarf. Then one of the old women
took my hand and said: Now I am going to give you a gift by teaching you a
rhyme. It was a rhyme about evergreen bark, dragonfly fern-and all the other
things we come here in the woods to find: Boil till dark and pure if you
want a dropsy cure. In the morning they were gone; I looked for them in the
fields and on the road; there was nothing left of them but the rhyme in my
head."
Calling to each other, hooting like owls loose in the daytime, we
worked all morning in opposite parts of the woods. Towards afternoon, our
sacks fat with skinned bark, tender, torn roots, we climbed back into the
green web of the China tree and spread the food. There was good creek water
in a mason jar, or if the weather was cold a thermos of hot coffee, and we
wadded leaves to wipe our chicken-stained, fudge-sticky fingers. Afterwards,
telling fortunes with flowers, speaking of sleepy things, it was as though
we floated through the afternoon on the raft in the tree; we belonged there,
as the sun-silvered leaves belonged, the dwelling whippoorwills.
About once a year I go over to the house on Talbo Lane, and walk around
in the yard. I was there the other day, and came across an old iron tub
lying overturned in the weeds like a black fallen meteor: Dolly-Dolly,
hovering over the tub dropping our grain-sack gatherings into boiling water
and stirring, stirring with a sawed-off broomstick the brown as tobacco spit
brew. She did the mixing of the medicine alone while Catherine and I stood
watching like apprentices to a witch. We all helped later with the bottling
of it and, because it produced a fume that exploded ordinary corks, my
particular job was to roll stoppers of toilet paper. Sales averaged around
six bottles a week, at two dollars a bottle. The money. Dolly said, belonged
to the three of us, and we spent it fast as it came in. We were always
sending away for stuff advertised in magazines: Take Up Woodcarving,
Parcheesi: the game for young and old. Anyone Can Play A Bazooka. Once we
sent away for a book of French lessons: it was my idea that if we got to
talk French we would have a secret language that Verena or nobody would
understand. Dolly was willing to try, but "Passez-moi a spoon" was the best
she ever did, and after learning "Je suis fatigue," Catherine never opened
the book again: she said that was all she needed to know.
Verena often remarked that there would be trouble if anyone ever got
poisoned, but otherwise she did not show much interest in the dropsy cure.
Then one year we totaled up and found we'd earned enough to have to pay an
income tax. Whereupon Verena began asking questions: money was like a
wildcat whose trail she stalked with a trained hunter's muffled step and an
eye for every broken twig. What, she wanted to know, went into the medicine?
and Dolly, flattered, almost giggling, nonetheless waved her hands and said
Well this and that, nothing special.
Verena seemed to let the matter die; yet very often, sitting at the
supper table, her eyes paused ponderingly on Dolly, and once, when we were
gathered in the yard around the boiling tub, I looked up and saw Verena in a
window watching us with uninterrupted fixity: by then, I suppose, her plan
had taken shape, but she did not make her first move until summer.
Twice a year, in January and again in August, Verena went on buying
trips to St. Louis or Chicago. That summer, the summer I reached sixteen,
she went to Chicago and after two weeks returned accompanied by a man called
Dr. Morris Ritz. Naturally everyone wondered who was Dr. Morris Ritz? He
wore bow ties and sharp jazzy suits; his lips were blue and he had gaudy
small swerving eyes; altogether, he looked like a mean mouse. We heard that
he lived in the best room at the Lola Hotel and ate steak dinners at Phil's
Cafe. On the streets he strutted along bobbing his shiny head at every
passerby; he made no friends, however, and was not seen in the company of
anyone except Verena, who never brought him to the house and never mentioned
his name until one day Catherine had the gall to say, "Miss Verena, just who
is this funny looking little Dr. Morris Ritz?" and Verena, getting white
around the mouth, replied: "Well now, he's not half so funny looking as some
I could name."
Scandalous, people said, the way Verena was carrying on with that
little Jew from Chicago: and him twenty years younger. The story that got
around was that they were up to something out in the old canning factory the
other side of town. As it developed, they were; but not what the gang at the
pool-hall thought Most any afternoon you could see Verena and Dr. Morris
Ritz walking out toward the canning factory, an abandoned blasted brick ruin
with jagged windows and sagging doors. For a generation no one had been near
it except school-kids who went there to smoke cigarettes and get naked
together. Then early in September, by way of a notice in the Courier, we
learned for the first time that Verena had bought the old canning factory;
but there was no mention as to what use she was planning to make of it.
Shortly after this, Verena told Catherine to kill two chickens as Dr. Morris
Ritz was coming to Sunday dinner.
During the years that I lived there. Dr. Morris Ritz was the only
person ever invited to dine at the house on Talbo Lane. So for many reasons
it was an occasion. Catherine and Dolly did a spring cleaning: they beat
rugs, brought china from the attic, had every room smelling of floorwax and
lemon polish. There was to be fried chicken and ham, English peas, sweet
potatoes, rolls, banana pudding, two kinds of cake and tutti-frutti ice
cream from the drugstore. Sunday noon Verena came in to look at the table:
with its sprawling centerpiece of peach-colored roses and dense fancy
stretches of silverware, it seemed set for a party of twenty; actually,
there were only two places. Verena went ahead and set two more, and Dolly,
seeing this, said weakly Well, it was all right if Collin wanted to eat at
the table, but that she was going to stay in the kitchen with Catherine.
Verena put her foot down: "Don't fool with me. Dolly. This is important.
Morris is coming here expressly to meet you. And what-is more, I'd
appreciate it if you'd hold up your head: it makes me dizzy, hanging like
that."
Dolly was scared to death: she hid in her room, and long after our
guest had arrived I had to be sent to fetch her. She was lying in the pink
bed with a wet washrag on her forehead, and Catherine was sitting beside
her. Catherine was all sleeked up, rouge on her cheeks like lollipops and
her jaws Jammed with more cotton than ever; she said, "Honey, you ought to
get up from there-you're going to ruin that pretty dress." It was a calico
dress Verena had brought from Chicago; Dolly sat up and smoothed it, then
immediately lay down again: "If Verena knew how sorry I am," she said
helplessly, and so I went and told Verena that Dolly was sick. Verena said
she'd see about that, and marched off leaving me alone in the hall with Dr.
Morris Ritz.
Oh he was a hateful thing. "So you're sixteen," he said, winking first
one, then the other of his sassy eyes. "And throwing it around, huh? Make
the old lady take you next time she goes to Chicago. Plenty of good stuff
there to throw it at." He snapped his fingers and jiggled his razde-dazzle,
dagger-sharp shoes as though keeping time to some vaudeville tune: he might
have been a tapdancer or a soda-jerk, except that he was carrying a brief
case, which suggested a more serious occupation. I wondered what kind of
doctor he was supposed to be; indeed, was on the point of asking when Verena
returned steering Dolly by the elbow.
The shadows of the hall, the tapestried furniture failed to absorb her;
without raising her eyes she lifted her hand, and Dr. Ritz gripped it so
ruggedly, pumped it so hard she went nearly off balance. "Gee, Miss Talbo;
am I honored to meet you!" he said, and cranked his bow tie.
We sat down to dinner, and Catherine came around with the chicken. She
served Verena, then Dolly, and when the doctor's turn came he said, 'Tell
you the truth, the only piece of chicken I care about is the brain: don't
suppose you'd have that back in the kitchen, mammy?"
Catherine looked so far down her nose she got almost cross" eyed; and
with her tongue all mixed up in the cotton wadding she told him that,
"Dolly's took those brains on her plate."
"These southern accents, Jesus," he said, genuinely dismayed.
"She says I have the brains on my plate," said Dolly, her cheeks red as
Catherine's rouge. "But please let me pass them to you."
"If you're sure you don't mind..."
"She doesn't mind a bit," said Verena. "She only eats sweet things
anyway. Here, Dolly: have some banana pudding."
Presently Dr. Ritz commenced a fit of sneezing. "The flowers, those
roses, old allergy..."
"Oh dear," said Dolly who, seeing an opportunity to escape into the
kitchen, seized the bowl of roses: it slipped, crystal crashed, roses landed
in gravy and gravy landed on us all. "You see," she said, speaking to
herself and with tears teetering in her eyes, "you see, it's hopeless."
"Nothing is hopeless. Dolly; sit down and finish your pudding," Verena
advised in a substantial, chin-up voice. "Besides, we have a nice little
surprise for you. Morris, show Dolly those lovely labels."
Murmuring "No harm done," Dr. Ritz stopped rubbing gravy splotches off
his sleeve, and went into the hall, returning with his brief case. His
fingers buzzed through a sheaf of papers, then lighted on a large envelope
which he passed down to Dolly.
There were gum-stickers in the envelope, triangular labels with orange
lettering: Gipsy Queen Dropsy Cure: and a fuzzy picture of a woman wearing a
bandana and gold earloops. "First class, huh?" said Dr. Ritz. "Made in
Chicago. A friend of mine drew the picture: real artist, that guy," Dolly
shuffled the labels with a puzzled, apprehensive expression until Verena
asked: "Aren't you pleased?"
The labels twitched in Dolly's hands. "I'm not sure I understand."
"Of course you do," said Verena, smiling thinly. "It's obvious enough.
I told Morris that old story of yours and he thought of this wonderful
name."
"Gipsy Queen Dropsy Cure: very catchy, that," said the doctor. "Look
great in ads."
"My medicine?" said Dolly, her eyes still lowered. "But I don't need
any labels, Verena. I write my own."
Dr. Ritz snapped his fingers. "Say, that's good! We can have labels
printed like her own handwriting: personal, see?"
"We've spent enough money already," Verena told him briskly; and,
turning to Dolly, said: "Morris and I are going up to Washington this week
to get a copyright on these labels and register a patent for the
medicine-naming you as the inventor, naturally. Now the point is. Dolly, you
must sit down and write out a complete formula for us."
Dolly's face loosened; and the labels scattered on the floor, skimmed.
Leaning her hands on the table she pushed herself upward; slowly her
features came together again, she lifted her head and looked blinkingly at
Dr. Ritz, at Verena. "It won't do," she said quietly. She moved to the door,
put a hand on its handle. "It won't do: because you haven't any right,
Verena. Nor you, sir."
I helped Catherine clear the table: the ruined roses, the uncut cakes,
the vegetables no one had touched. Verena and her guest had left the house
together; from the kitchen window we watched them as they went toward town
nodding and shaking their heads. Then we sliced the devil's-food cake and
took it into Dolly's room.
Hush now! hush now! she said when Catherine began light' ing into That
One. But it was as though the rebellious inner whispering had become a
raucous voice, an opponent she must outshout: Hush now! hush nowl until
Catherine had to put her arms around Dolly and say hush, too.
We got out a deck of Rook cards and spread them on the bed. Naturally
Catherine had to go and remember it was Sunday; she said maybe we could risk
another black mark in the Judgment Book, but there were too many beside her
name already. After thinking it over, we told fortunes instead. Sometime
around dusk Verena came home. We heard her footsteps in the hall; she opened
the door without knocking, and Dolly, who was in the middle of my fortune,
tightened her hold on my hand. Verena said: "Collin, Catherine, we will
excuse you."
Catherine wanted to follow me up the ladder into the attic, except she
had on her fine clothes. So I went alone. There was a good knothole that
looked straight down into the pink room; but Verena was standing directly
under it, and all I could see was her hat, for she was still wearing the hat
she'd put on when she left the house. It was a straw skimmer decorated with
a cluster of celluloid fruit. "Those are facts," she was saying, and the
fruit shivered, shimmered in the blue dimness. "Two thousand for the old
factory. Bill Tatum and four carpenters working out there at eighty cents an
hour, seven thousand dollars worth of machinery already ordered, not to
mention what a specialist like Morris Ritz is costing. And why? All for
youl"
"All for me?" and Dolly sounded sad and failing as the dusk. I saw her
shadow as she moved from one part of the room to another. "You are my own
flesh, and I love you tenderly; in my heart I love you. I could prove it now
by giving you the only thing that has ever been mine: then you would have it
all. Please, Verena," she said, faltering, "let this one thing belong to
me."
Verena switched on a light. "You speak of giving," and her voice was
hard as the sudden bitter glare. "All these years that I've worked like a
fieldhand; what haven't I given you? This house, that..."
"You've given everything to me," Dolly interrupted softly. "And to
Catherine and to Collin. Except, we've earned our way a bit: we've kept a
nice home for you, haven't we?"
"Oh a fine home," said Verena, whipping off her hat Her face was full
of blood. "You and that gurgling fool. Has it not struck you that I never
ask anyone into this house? And for a very simple reason: I'm ashamed to.
Look what happened today."
I could hear the breath go out of Dolly. "I'm sorry," she said faintly.
"I am truly. I'd always thought there was a place for us here, that you
needed us somehow. But it's going to be all right now, Verena. We'll go
away."
Verena sighed. "Poor Dolly. Poor poor thing. Wherever would you go?"
The answer, a little while in coming, was fragile as the flight of a
moth; "I know a place."
Later, I waited in bed for Dolly to come and kiss me goodnight. My
room, beyond the parlor in a faraway comer of the house, was the room where
their father, Mr. Uriah Talbo, had lived. In his mad old age, Verena had
brought him here from the farm, and here he'd died, not knowing where he
was. Though dead ten, fifteen years, the pee and tobacco old-man smell of
him still saturated the mattress, the closet, and on a shelf in the closet
was the one possession he'd carried away with him from the farm, a small
yellow drum: as a lad my own age he'd marched in a Dixie regiment rattling
this little yellow drum, and singing. Dolly said that when she was a girl
she'd liked to wake up winter mornings and hear her father singing as he
went about the house building fires; after he was old, after he'd died, she
sometimes heard his songs in the field of Indian grass. Wind, Catherine
said; and Dolly told her: But the wind is us-it gathers and remembers all
our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the
fields -I've heard Papa clear as day.
On such a night, now that it was September, the autumn winds would be
curving through the taut red grass, releasing all the gone voices, and I
wondered if he was singing among them, the old man in whose bed I lay
falling asleep.
Then I thought Dolly at last had come to kiss me goodnight, for I woke
up sensing her near me in the room; but it was almost morning, beginning
light was like a flowering foliage at the windows, and roosters ranted in
distant yards. "Shhh, Collin," Dolly whispered, bending over me. She was
wearing a woolen winter suit and a hat with a traveling veil that misted her
face. "I only wanted you to know where we are going."
"To the tree-house?" I said, and thought I was talking in my sleep.
Dolly nodded. "Just for now. Until we know better what our plans will
be." She could see that I was frightened, and put her hand on my forehead.
"You and Catherine: but not me?" and I was jerking with a chill. "You
can't leave without me."
The town clock was tolling; she seemed to be waiting for it to finish
before making up her mind. It struck five, and by the time the note had died
away I had climbed out of bed and rushed into my clothes. There was nothing
for Dolly to say except: '"Don't forget your comb."
Catherine met us in the yard; she was crooked over with the weight of a
brimming oilcloth satchel; her eyes were swollen, she had been crying, and
Dolly, oddly calm and certain of what she was doing, said it doesn't matter,
Catherine-we can send for your goldfish once we find a place. Verena's
closed quiet windows loomed above us; we moved cautiously past them and
silently out the gate. A fox terrier barked at us; but there was no one on
the street, and no one saw us pass through the town except a sleepless
prisoner gazing from the jail. We reached the field of Indian grass at the
same moment as the sun. Dolly's veil flared in the morning breeze, and a
pair of pheasants, nesting in our path, swept before us, their metal wings
swiping the cockscomb-scarlet grass. The China tree was a September bowl of
green and greenish gold: Gonna fall, gonna bust our heads, Catherine said,
as all around us the leaves shook down their dew.
If it hadn't been for Riley Henderson, I doubt anyone would have known,
or at least known so soon, that we were in the tree.
Catherine had loaded her oilcloth satchel with the leftovers from
Sunday dinner, and we were enjoying a breakfast of cake and chicken when
gunfire slapped through the woods. We sat there with cake going dry in our
mouths. Below, a sleek bird dog cantered into view, followed by Riley
Henderson; he was shouldering a shotgun and around his neck there hung a
garland of bleeding squirrels whose tails were tied together. Dolly lowered
her veil, as though to camouflage herself among the leaves.
He paused not far away, and his wary, tanned young face tightened;
propping his gun into position he took a roaming aim, as if waiting for a
target to present itself. The suspense was too much for Catherine, who
shouted: "Riley Henderson, don't you dare shoot us!"
His gun wavered, and he spun around, the squirrels swinging like a
loose necklace. Then he saw us in the tree, and after a moment said, "Hello
there, Catherine Creek; hello. Miss Talbo. What are you folks doing up
there? Wildcat chase you?"
"Just sitting," said Dolly promptly, as though she were afraid for
either Catherine or I to answer. "That's a fine mess of squirrels you've
got."
'Take a couple," he said, detaching two. "We had some for supper last
night and they were real tender. Wait a minute, I'll bring them up to you."
"You don't have to do that; just leave them on the ground." But he said
ants would get at them, and hauled himself into the-tree. His blue shirt was
spotted with squirrel blood, and flecks of blood glittered in his rough
leather-colored hair; he smelted of gunpowder, and his homely well-made face
was brown as cinnamon. "I'll be damned, it's a tree-house," he said,
pounding his foot as though to test the strength of the boards. Catherine
warned him that maybe it was a tree-house now, but it wouldn't be for long
if he didn't stop that stamping. He said, "You build it, Collin?" and it was
with a happy shock that I realized he'd called my name: I hadn't thought
Riley Henderson knew me from dust. But I knew him, all right."
No one in our town ever had themselves so much talked about as Riley
Henderson. Older people spoke of him with sighing voices, and those nearer
his own age, like myself, were glad to call him mean and hard: that was
because he would only let us envy him, would not let us love him, be his
friend.
Anyone could have told you the facts.
He was bom in China, where his father, a missionary, had been killed in
an uprising. His mother was from this town, and her name was Rose; though I
never saw her myself, people say she was a beautiful woman until she started
wearing glasses; she was rich too, having received a large inheritance from
her grandfather. When she came back from China she brought Riley, then five,
and two younger children, both girls; they lived with her unmarried brother.
Justice of the Peace Horace Holton, a meaty spinsterish man with skin yellow
as quince. In the following years Rose Henderson grew strange in her ways:
she threatened to sue Verena for selling her a dress that shrank in the
wash; to punish Riley, she made him hop on one leg around the yard reciting
the multiplication table; otherwise, she let him run wild, and when the
Presbyterian minister spoke to her about it she told him she hated her
children and wished they were dead. And she must have meant it, for one
Christmas morning she locked the bathroom door and tried to drown her two
little girls in the tub: it was said that Riley broke the door down with a
hatchet, which seems a tall order for a boy of nine or ten, whatever he was.
Afterwards, Rose was sent off to a place on the Gulf Coast, an institution,
and she may still be living there, at least I've never heard that she died.
Now Riley and his uncle Horace Holton couldn't get on. One night he stole
Horace's Oldsmobile and drove out to the Dance-N-Dine with Mamie Curtiss:
she was fast as lightning, and maybe five years older than Riley, who was
not more than fifteen at the time. Well, Horace heard they were at the
Dance-N-Dine and got the Sheriff to drive him out there: he said he was
going to teach Riley a lesson and have him arrested. But Riley said Sheriff,
you're after the wrong party. Right there in front of a crowd he accused his
uncle of stealing money that belonged to Rose and that was meant for him and
his sisters. He offered to fight it out on the spot; and when Horace held
back, he just walked over and socked him in the eye. The Sheriff put Riley
in jail. But Judge Cool, an old friend of Rose's, began to investigate, and
sure enough it turned out Horace had been draining Rose's money into his own
account. So Horace simply packed his things and took the train to New
Orleans where, a few months, later, we heard that, billed as the Minister of
Romance, he had a job marrying couples on an excursion steamer that made
moonlight cruises up the Mississippi. From then on, Riley was his own boss.
With money borrowed against the inheritance he was coming into, he bought a
red racy car and went skidding round the countryside with every floozy in
town; the only nice girls you ever saw in that car were his sisters-he took
them for a drive Sunday afternoons, a slow respectable circling of the
square. They were pretty girls, his sisters, but they didn't have much fun,
for he kept a strict watch, and boys were afraid to come near them. A
reliable colored woman did their housework, otherwise they lived alone. One
of his sisters, Elizabeth, was in my class at school, and she got the best
grades, straight A's. Riley himself had quit school; but he was not one of
the pool-hall loafs, nor did he mix with them; he fished in the daytime, or
went hunting; around the old Holton house he made many improvements, as he
was a good carpenter; and a good mechanic, too: for instance, he built a
special car hom, it wailed like a train-whistle, and in the evening you
could hear it howling as he roared down the road on his way to a dance in
another town. How I longed for him to be my friendl and it seemed possible,
he was just two years older. But I could remember the only time he ever
spoke to me. Spruce in a pair of white flannels, he was off to a dance at
the clubhouse, and he came into Verena's drugstore, where I sometimes helped
out on Saturday nights. What he wanted was a package of Shadows, but I