by Thomas Tryon
“Jack?”
Again there was movement, and I reached to turn down the blanket. The hand reappeared, fiercely gripping a corner.
“Hey, old-timer, it’s me, Ned Constantine.”
The whimpering sound continued, and I bent closer. “Hey, Jack—what’s the matter?” As I pulled the blanket back, the peddler seemed literally to be shaking with fright. Cowering he threw his head to one side and covered it with his arm. His skin felt hot and feverish, and the effort to restrain his tremors brought on greater ones, the shudders racking his frame.
I drew the blanket down farther, and knelt. He kept his head turned away, and it was only by my gentle insistence that he eventually turned it toward me, sliding the tattered sleeve of his shirt over the lower half of his face and gazing at me with red-rimmed eyes. The stubble on his face was shorter than usual, no more than a night’s growth.
“Are you sick?” I asked. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Did you just get back? You’ve been gone a long time.” He nodded wearily. As I was used to doing with Kate, I reached for his wrist to feel his pulse. Instinctively he snatched his arm away, revealing his face.
“Oh, no. Oh, no.” I stared in horror. “Jesus, Jack, what’s happened to you?” Even in the dim light, I saw the pitiful wound that passed for a mouth, the scabbed-over scars not fully healed. He huddled against the wall in fear, and I reassured him that I wasn’t going to harm him. Little by little, his hand slid down to the blanket, his fingers plucking at the worn fabric. I patted the hand, bending forward trying to see in the dim light.
“Nobody’s going to hurt you, Jack.” Clearly, he was terrified of something. I carefully took the face between my hands and stared at the scars. They were set half an inch apart, top and bottom, with more random ones at the corners. As though in protest against my seeing such obscene work, he made a gurgling noise in his throat. He tried to stop it, couldn’t, coughed, choked; the mouth open and I stared into the dark maw. My stomach heaved at what I saw and I released the pained face.
I leaned across him and held him by both shoulders, shaking him slightly. “Jack? Jack, listen to me. I’m going to get a doctor. Can you hear me? I’m going to get help.”
I heard a step behind me, then a voice. “Leave him be—he’s been molested enough.”
The Widow came in, set her valise on the table, and came to the cot. I looked from her to the huddled shape under the blanket, then back to her again. She took a flashlight from her valise and pulled a chair close to the cot.
“What’s happened to him?” I asked.
Paying no attention to me, she switched on the light and held the lens against her skirt as she put her hand on his brow and felt it.
“Well, Jack, how is it this evening? Better?” The head turned slightly, nodded. As I had, she took his wrist and felt his pulse, then laid it back across his chest. “Yes, better, I’d say. Comin’ along nicely.” Then to me, “Wants a cup of tea, I expect. Maybe you’ll put the kettle on?”
I started the gas burner, filled the kettle under the tap, and put it on the fire. When I came back, the Widow was holding the flashlight over his mouth and gently urging him to open it. “Come now—you devil, you—don’t be coy with an old lady. Open up and let me see how things are.” At last he opened his mouth and permitted the examination. She looked for a moment or two, moving the beam around inside, then nodded for me to bring her valise.
I fetched it, and she gave me the light to hold while she took a bottle and dipped a cotton swab in it, then inserted the swab and ran it carefully around inside.
“There, now, that’s good. Close now, Jack.” She returned the bottle to the valise and took out a tin of ointment, which she applied to the scars around the lips. “Last time I used this was when they took to you with their fists. But they had worse than fists about them, didn’t they?”
I stared at her. “The Soakeses?”
“Hush,” she told me. “Now then, Jack, what you want is some tea, en’t that it?”
He nodded; she gave his hand a pat and rose. I followed her back into the kitchen, where she took a box from the shelf and a teapot which she rinsed at the sink. I sagged against the doorway and must have made some sort of sound, for she spoke impatiently. “None o’ that, now. There’s trouble enough around here.”
“They cut off his tongue?”
“Appears they did.” She spooned some leaves into the pot, wet her finger, and touched the outside of the kettle. “Another moment.” While the water continued to boil, she removed the linen napkin from the top of her splint basket and began laying out things on the table—several foil-wrapped packets, and the thermos jug. “Didn’t know you was feedin’ the unfortunate, did you?”
She had been taking the food from our house not for herself, as I had thought, but for Jack.
She filled the teapot from the kettle, then took up a rolled parcel from a chair and unwrapped it. It contained some shirts and a pair of pajamas, freshly washed and ironed.
“How?” I asked.
“Simple. They caught him. They hid in the woods—their woods, damn their eyes—and they caught him. They caught him and they savaged him. Old Man Soakes and his boys. A nice, well-mannered bunch. I always said Jack’s nose would get him in trouble one day.”
Unconsciously I touched the end of my tongue, thinking how close I had come to a similar fate. Old Man Soakes with his sharp knife, the boys with their—
“Canvas needles.” I voiced my thought.
“Aye, canvas needles. They cut and stitched him up for fair.”
“How did he keep from bleeding to death?”
“We stopped him.” She took a cup and a saucer from the shelf and set it on the table. I recognized the box of One-B Weber’s tea.
“It’s steamin’, Jack,” she called to him, “so we’ll let it cool a bit before you try it.” In the other room, she resumed her chair and held the cup and saucer on her lap, testing the rising vapors with the palm of her hand.
“But almost bled to death he did, didn’t you, Jack? Here, try a sip.” She held the cup up, waiting for him to drink.
“Now, then, no recalcitrance today,” she told him. “One-B Weber’s is a restorative, if ever there was. And when you’re done I’ve got soup and some good roast meat, courtesy of our friend here.” Though he did not seem to want the tea, she waited, cup poised, until he sipped. She watched him carefully, her eye never wavering as she made him drink, and while he drank she related what she knew of the tragedy.
She and Asia Minerva, along with Mrs. Zalmon and Mrs. Green, and Tamar Penrose as well, had been quilting at Irene Tatum’s house on the Sunday evening, when they heard a ruckus across the road in Soakes’s Lonesome. There were gunshots and they had trooped out on the porch to investigate. Then out of the woods Jack had appeared, crazed with pain and hardly knowing who he was or where he was going. He saw the light and came to them, blood pouring through his sewn-up lips. They had cut the stitches and discovered the severed tongue. The Widow herself had put the poker in the stove and cauterized the wound; then they had laid him on the davenport in the living room and kept watch until he came out of shock.
“Ashes there were everywhere, en’t that so, Jack?” she continued. The peddler nodded dazed agreement.
“Ashes?” I asked.
“Ashes. When they’d done with their fishing knife and canvas needles, they dunked him in water, then poured ashes from their still over him. En’t that so, Jack?”
I saw him nod. Ashes. White ashes. Then it dawned on me. The phantom in the windstorm. Not the Ghost of Soakes’s Lonesome, but the mutilated Jack Stump, his mouth stitched up into the grim red smile, the face ash-smeared. I remembered seeing the Soakeses as I was driving to Saxony to visit Mrs. O’Byrne, recalled the decoy-making implements, saw again the skiff on the water.
Patiently the Widow waited until the cup was empty, and when he wiped his mouth she gently took Jack’s hand away. “Don’t do that; you’re wipin’ off all the s
alve. Now you just content yourself until I get you shaved; then I’ll fix your supper.” Motioning me to lead the way with the lamp, she brought the cup and saucer into the kitchen and set it on the table.
“Only way to do is to joke with him, else he’ll sink into a fit o’ apathy and he won’t recover. If we don’t make too much of a thing of it, he’ll be back on his tin-pan contraption come spring. Won’t you, Jack?”—raising her voice again—“I say, Jack’ll be back on his contraption, pedalin’ up to my door fit as a fiddle come spring.”
“What’s being done about them?” I said.
“The Soakeses? Faugh, what’s to be done? The Constable knows, but there en’t a witness. Poor Jack can’t speak for himself. Can’t even write the tale.”
I shook my head. “Jesus, to go through life like that.”
“No need to take the name in vain. And no help for what can’t be helped. Jack don’t need syrup; he needs vinegar, or he’ll never get up.” All was being done that could be managed, she said. The village ladies were taking turns nursing him, and he was never alone for long. The mouth would heal; the main thing was to keep his spirits up. “There’s a lot worse ways to go through life. Plenty of people who can’t talk or hear, both. Some who can’t talk, hear, or see. Look at Robert Dodd. A sorely afflicted man, but he’s made a life, him and Maggie. Thing is to survive. You, now, you’re a painter, you don’t need to talk nor hear, but you got to see—ain’t that so? But if you couldn’t you’d survive, now, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t let a pack o’ Soakeses put you under.”
She rinsed out the cup and set it in its place on the shelf. I marveled at her. She not only ministered to the sufferings of the body, but she dealt with the psychology of the matter, refusing to let the bodily ailment fall prey to the sickness of the mind. She had no time for feeling sorry, or for despair, or for weakness.
“Life at its worst is better than no life at all, en’t that so?” Briskly she whipped up a lather in Clem Fortune’s shaving mug, took the ivory-handled razor, and went in to shave Jack.
20
BETH WENT TO NEW York overnight, driving the car filled with village handicrafts for Mary Abbott. That night, after Kate had gone to sleep, I brought the little wooden cask down from the cupboard shelf and, sitting in the bacchante room, drank from it again. I went out and stood staring at the empty cornfield. There was no music; no figures appeared. I put the cask away and went to bed.
Sleeping, this is the kind of darkness I saw: a visible, tangible thing; a fathoms-deep ocean, with a thousand improbable shapes colliding, merging, separating; bright sea anemones folding and unfolding; and more intricate organisms, each geometrically perfect, blossoming scarlet, orange, turquoise, gold. It was as though I could reach out and dip my hand into the dark sea they swam. The dark had texture—soft, pliant, furry—like the pelt of an animal; it had dimension, seeming so high and so wide and so much across; immersed in it, my body displaced its own volume. Its flesh yielded, was weighted, ballasted. A breathing dark. A living thing, pulsing like a heart, throbbing with secret incomprehensible emanations, contracting, expanding.
And hidden in the dark, the eyes; the eyes of Missy Penrose. In dream blackness they stared at me. I leaned to the right, they followed; to the left, they followed still. The dark orb, oval, curved, unblinking. Upon its gelid surface I saw my own reflection, Bluebeard distorted. The eye became a solid sphere, an onyx globe, whose depths foretold events unborn, whose mysteries remained obscure. Saw in the eye great black birds hovering; saw cornfields in ruin; a scarecrow figure. The birds were crows, became harpies with human heads and women’s breasts, and in hideous chorus they railed at me. And their eyes again became the child’s eyes, and the eyes pursued me and I was running—and I was not running from, but to, for I had found the answer. In my dream I knew, the secret lay bared, and with the answer came realization, came—
Daylight, and I sat in our church pew, feeling the sweat running from my armpits down my sides, soaking my shirt. Surreptitiously I loosened my tie, felt in my pocket for a handkerchief, blotted my brow.
The windows of the church were open, bringing the outdoors in, and the breeze, and the beautiful fall. Outside I could see the knoll with its tombstones beneath the spreading branches of the red-gold trees. Gazing out, I was only half hearing Mr. Buxley’s sermon, the text of which this morning was taken from the Book of Ruth: “…whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”
Ruth, who had left her own land to follow Naomi into hers, where she had gleaned the fields of Boaz. Ruth in tears amid the alien corn.
Turning my head to the gallery where the girls sat, I saw the child, neither listening to the minister nor looking at him, her blank half-wit look instead directed toward me. I had the feeling that she had not taken her eyes off me since the beginning of the service.
As I had done each day, again I worked the riddle over in my mind. Beware the night. Which? The all-prevailing night. How would it come? When?
I flicked my eye up to her, once, twice, again. I tried to analyze my feelings about her, and I could not. Except the realization that I felt, in some mysterious way, akin to her. She confused me, and my dreams. I had told myself she was only a thirteen-year-old child. She was playing some sort of game with me, a child’s game, nothing more; she was nothing but the village idiot.
Wasn’t she?
Yet her staring eyes filled me with a feeling of dread, as though they foretold a terrible event yet to come.
Portent. Omen. Missy Penrose.
Tamar Penrose.
The mother sat below, listening attentively to Mr. Buxley, and I felt, or perhaps imagined, that she was aware I might be looking at her, might be giving thought to her. As the daughter confused me, the mother angered me. There was something about her that seemed not merely predatory but demanding. Hers were not just the requirements of the town doxy from the local turnip-heads behind a haystack. There was something else in her, a deeply ingrained sense of something primitive, of the Woman Eternal, who demanded to be served—not just between the legs but to make man utterly subservient. Tamar the castrator. Moth to flame, I had come close and had my wings singed if not burned. I would not hover near again. I would avoid her as I would contagion. There would be no more episodes in that lady’s kitchen, no matter how the invitation was delivered.
And, torn shirt aside, how had Beth known I had been at Tamar’s house rather than at the Rocking Horse, or at the covered bridge, or any other place I might have been? Though I told myself women know these things by instinct, still I did not entirely believe it.
From the pulpit, Mr. Buxley droned on interminably, as was his habit. I looked around once more and realized that Worthy Pettinger had changed his mind. He had not come to church, as he had promised the Widow. His seat in the boys’ gallery was occupied by another, and there seemed no need for Amys Penrose’s rod, though I thought the bell ringer looked unusually attentive as he lounged against the rear wall.
Mr. Buxley concluded his sermon with a stentorian list of begats, ending with Ruth’s conceiving Obed, who became the father of Jesse, who became the father of David. He adjusted his glasses, coughed once, and left the pulpit to sit in a chair behind it. Now, from the pews, the village elders arose to station themselves behind a long harvest table below the pulpit. Mr. Deming nodded, and Justin Hooke stood up from his cushioned pew. He smiled as he put out his hand and drew Sophie to her feet; heads nodded and murmurs of approval were heard. Long after, I remembered the picture they made that day, Justin and Sophie, as they paused in their places. The sun streaming through the window caught their hair, turning it golden, surrounding it with a shining aureole. They looked at each other with tenderness and feeling, and I thought how blessed they were. Each bringing an ear of corn, they approached the harvest table below the pulpit, renewing the ancient and respected custom of the corn tithes.
When their symbolic gifts had been off
ered, the rest of the congregation rose to do likewise. I watched the faces of the farmers, their wives, and children as they filed past, tendering their corn ears to Mr. Deming, who then laid them on the harvest table. I saw the Widow’s white cap and black dress as she joined the line, and when she came opposite Mr. Deming, she handed him not one but two ears. He took her hands and pressed them, then leaned to kiss her cheek as he thanked her.
She was the great lady of the town, and there was not a villager who didn’t know it. She was equal to the respect and duty paid her, and I thought how much they owed her, and how much I owed her, including the life of my only child. As she paid over her corn tribute to the church, I silently paid her my own tribute.
Constable Zalmon and his wife, at the head of their pew, joined the line as it wound ceremoniously down to the pulpit. Apart from the antiquated badge of office pinned to his weekday vest, Mr. Zalmon had never looked to me much like a constable, and I supposed very little had occurred during his tenure to occasion his use of force or imprisonment. An ancient village law of durance vile, which could be at any time invoked to restrain drunks or disturbers of the peace, provided that—since the stocks had been dismantled from the Common—the alleged guilty party should be incarcerated in the back room at the post office until a town meeting determined innocence or guilt, and the penalty to accompany the latter. This was called being given a “ticket-of-leave,” and the prisoner a “ticket-of-leaver.”
Though the villagers had by a concerted effort kept the attack on Jack Stump private, it was generally concluded that it remained for Mr. Zalmon to press charges against the Soakes family, and he spent much of his time outside the post office, keeping a sharp lookout for the pink Oldsmobile.