by Shelby Foote
One was covered past the shoulders with a sheet. The other, a man sprawled on his back, was uncovered. He wore only a pair of knee-length drawers, candy-striped and wrong-side-out. They had been improperly buttoned, apparently by other hands and obviously in a hurry. Air from the machine — Hector recognized it as a pulmotor now, though he had never seen one before — was being forced into, then drawn out of the man’s lungs. It went in with a thin, reedy sigh and came out with a quavery moan choked off at the end by a sob of final exertion, as if he were lifting weights beyond his strength. Each breath made the man’s chest expand almost to bursting, and with each expansion and contraction the blond hairs at the top of his chest glinted like scraps of copper wire under the glare of the chandelier directly above the bed. Presently the fireman moved aside for a moment and Hector saw what he had known he would see.
The face beneath the other mask was Ella’s. They had spread her hair fanwise over her head; it was dark and there was even more of it than he remembered. Her breaths were drawn almost an octave higher than the man’s, so that the two of them, lying side by side on the rumpled bed, their four legs dangling in that profound and ultimate relaxation of death, were chanting the not-human duet which Hector had heard from the lobby.
This continued for two more hours, the firemen alternating at the crank. But it did no good. Whenever the masks were removed the breathing stopped; their hearts never beat.
Hector and the constable waited, sometimes in the hall and sometimes in the room itself, though there it was difficult to keep out of the way of the firemen who clumped about in their gum boots and shirt-sleeves and suspenders. The guests had deserted their vigil by now. From time to time, however, one of them would return to his door, peep out, and then go back to bed. During this period of waiting the constable told Hector what had happened. Speaking with the tuneless Liebestod for background music, he told it in a halting, embarrassed manner. It was true that he had killed five men, four of them more or less in the line of duty, but nothing in his life had prepared him for imparting this kind of news; he kept imagining himself in the listener’s place, with his wife where the listener’s wife was, and that made it difficult. Besides, the version he gave Hector was considerably reduced from the one the night clerk had given, earlier in the evening.
According to the night clerk — in the unabridged version, that is — the dead man (he came through Bristol twice a year, representing a Massachusetts shoe firm) had called for ice water and towels at ten oclock. The Negro bellboy who took them to him was the last person to see him alive, and he saw only a naked arm extended around the partly opened door, a muscular arm with a fell of reddish blond hair glinting coppery in the dim light of the corridor. No one had known the lady was with him until the bellboy saw the way he took the ice water and towels, and even then the bellboy did not mention it to the night clerk.
“She must have snuck in the back way,” the night clerk said. “She sure didnt come past the desk; I’d have seen her. This may not be exactly the cushiest house in the country, no Waldorf-Astoria by a long shot, but at least it’s respectable. Or anyhow it tries to be till something like this hooraw comes along.”
“I hear you,” the constable said. They were in the lobby. He had just gotten there; he had taken one look into the room and now he was waiting to learn the particulars before driving out to the Sturgis house for Hector. “Get on with it,” he said.
A little after midnight the bellboy reported a smell of gas. When the night clerk went down the hall to investigate, there was a reek of it coming around the door. He knocked but no one answered. Then he used his pass key, and there they were. He had one quick look at them before the gas blinded him with tears.
“That room was full of gas as a balloon. The two of them were on the bed, mother nekkid, huddled up together like a pair of drownded people that got run over by a steamboat. It was something to see, all right.”
“Never mind the trimmings,” the constable said. “Just get on with it. What then?”
The night clerk stumbled around the room, his eyes streaming tears. Blinded, he had to feel his way, and this was particularly harrowing because he had a dread of touching the people on the bed. “Dont anybody strike a match!” he kept shouting, though there was no one to hear him; maybe he was shouting to himself. The window was stuck. He had a hard time raising it, getting angrier and more frightened every second. Finally, though, he got it up. It yielded all of a sudden, as if some force outside himself had jerked it, and he fell forward against the rotted screen, breathing night air through the dust and the rust. When the window and the door had been open long enough to clear the air in the room he found the trouble.
“That fellow must have accidentally kicked the lever on the heater alongside the bed. Youd think they would have heard the hissing, though; when I come in it sounded like a whole pit full of snakes. It’s a good thing nobody struck a match. Lord God. Theyd have heard the boom in Bannard; we’d have all been blown to glory.” He grinned. “What do you reckon that fellow was doing, to kick that heater on like that and never know he’d done it?” This was rhetorical; he broadened his grin, then continued. “They didnt hear it or smell it either, except maybe after it was too late, and maybe not even then. They sure must have been keeping occupied; you have to hand him that. Yair. I heard once of a fellow took a girl off into a canebrake. It was over in Arkansas, the way I heard it. He took her out for a buggy ride, and while they were back in the canebrake on the laprobe, along came a moccasin and bit her in the act. They—”
“In the what?”
“The act,” the night clerk said. “It’s a manner of speaking. And they come back out and got in the buggy and started back for town. They were about halfway home before she begun to feeling peaky. That was the first she knew of being bit. Fact is, she didnt even know it then. She like to died, and they still didnt know what it was until the doctor got to looking round (all in the line of duty, you understand) and found the tooth marks, the punctures where the cottonmouth had struck her. Yair; I always had a respect for that fellow … But this one tonight has got him beat a mile.” He sighed. “You saw her, Pete. Tchk! All he had to do was measure up to what luck brought his way; thats all. Even dead she looked plenty good to me.”
He paused. His face was suddenly serious. He was quiet for a time, brooding upon mortality, and a little V appeared between his eyebrows.
“I heard she was running round, though I never got in on it myself; she favored out-of-towners, traveling men. It was a kind of quirk with her. Everybody was talking about her, saying she was hell-born, things like that. Well, I never blamed her, considering what she married. Ive known him all his life — him and his highflown ways. Bristol schools werent good enough. He never even dressed like us, the others with him in school I mean. You could tell just by the look on his face how much better he thought he was than anyone else. Let me tell you, Pete, if thats blue-blood I’m glad I didnt have any to pass on to my kids. Come to think of it, maybe thats why that baby swole up and turned purple and finally died. Too much blue-blood. If it was his to begin with, I mean.”
He leaned forward and tapped the constable on the forearm, nodding earnestly as he spoke.
“I remember he went to public school for a while at the beginning. You should have seen him, the way he dressed, like every day was Sunday and school was an ice cream party. He thought all us others ought to kowtow to him. Once he tried to give something out of his lunch box to my kid brother, the way youd feed a monkey at the zoo. He came to me about it, crying; my brother I mean; his feelings were hurt. So I went up to the little overdressed dude — he was sitting on the side steps with that fancy lunch box on his knees. So I went up to him, as I said, there on the steps, and told him to keep his elegant grub to himself or I’d bounce one off his nose. ‘Get up from there and I’ll bounce one off your nose.’ Thats what I told him, the identical words, and he just sat there and took it; he didnt budge. (He remembers it still — I can tell.
He cant look me in the eyes to this good day, not even in passing.) And from then on, all the boys were onto him. We guyed and ragged him till his mama came and yanked him out of school.”
He took out a pocket comb and ran it through his hair. It made a whispering sound, like a spoon stirring butter. The constable watched him without really listening; he was trying to decide how to go about breaking the news when he reached the Sturgis house. Down the corridor the firemen had gone to work with the pulmotor. The night clerk returned the comb to his breast pocket, and now he rubbed his palms together to wear off the brilliantine.
“I’ll tell you, Pete,” he said. “When a man’s wife gets to running round, it stands to reason she’s out after something she’s not getting at home. Right?” The constable just looked at him, so the night clerk answered himself: “Right. And what would you expect? He grew up in satins and laces, cultivating the graces, the way the song says, and come back from college with a Yankeefied accent, wearing Yankeefied clothes. Then he up and married her and everybody says ‘Oh-oh, now we’ll see some fun’; they had known her of old, back before she married him. And sure enough he got more and more peculiar, keeping more and more to himself, till it wasnt long before she was back to her old practices. I’m telling you. Many’s the time I stood behind this desk right here in the lobby and heard the drummers pass the word, telling each other about her, talking like she was a train youd ride, calling her the best jump between Memphis and New Orleans and counting up how many times and all her little tricks. Yair. But like I say, I never blamed her. What the hell. If a man wants his wife to stay home, cleaving her only unto him the way she swore at the wedding, he by God ought to nail her down. Give her what she’s wanting, is what I say, and she wont want to roam.”
“All right,” the constable said at last, not in answer to anything the night clerk had said, merely as a sign that he was leaving. He had not decided how to break the news to Hector that his wife was dead in bed with another man, but he could not put off leaving any longer. He drove slow. Then he was there, and when Hector came downstairs with the ax, all the constable said was that he thought Ella was dead, meaning that he did not know how successful the firemen might have been with the pulmotor by then. Hector did not question him, and though the constable thought this strange he certainly did not regret it and he did not attempt any further explanation until he turned, just short of the death-room doorway, extending one hand palm-forward. Even then he did not really know what he intended to say, and this time too he was glad when Hector brushed past him, refusing to listen, determined to see for himself what he must have suspected he would see ever since he had begun to hear the chain-reaction of murmurs down the corridor: “It’s the husband. It’s the husband. It’s the husband.”
Presently, while the firemen continued to labor over the couple on the bed, Hector and the constable — who were merely in the way, particularly the former, for the firemen were distracted, sneaking sidelong glances at the husband of the woman on the bed — returned to the lobby and sat in overstuffed leather chairs with a potted plant between them in the background. “Cigar?” the constable asked. His hand moved toward his breast pocket; he wanted to offer what condolence he could. Hector shook his head. It was the only sign he gave that he had heard. “Well,” the constable said. He fell silent, too, looking uneasily about the empty lobby. Then he saw something he had not seen before. The gray-haired Negro bellboy was asleep in a straight-backed chair beside the registration desk, his chin down near his chest. “Hey — boy!” the constable cried, loud with sudden inspiration. The bellboy, startled, jerked awake, then crossed the lobby to where the constable sat with one arm already extended. “Take this and get us some coffee,” he said, and he handed the bellboy a dime.
The coffee was a failure, too, as much so as the unproduced cigar. The bellboy returned in about ten minutes with two heavy white earthenware mugs, each wearing a plume of steam. The coffee was pale yellow, the color of river water, already sugared and creamed, and very hot, as if the cook had tried to make up in heat for what it lacked in strength. The constable drank his, taking finicky sips from under the straw-colored walrus mustache, but Hector sat holding the mug with both hands between his knees, gazing down into it as if it had been as deep as a well, with the answer to all his problems at the bottom. He sat thus for a long while, not drinking. The plume of steam disappeared; the coffee cooled; finally it was all the way cold, truly like river water now, and the constable leaned forward and relieved him of it. “Here,” he said; “I’ll take that.” He set it, still full, untasted even, beside his own empty mug at the foot of the potted plant. “Well, Mr Sturgis, it’s a trial,” he said at last.
Shifting his great, sad eyes with their oversized bright red tear ducts, he avoided looking at Hector as he spoke. This was all he managed to produce out of all the words of condolence he had rehearsed in the buggy, riding to and from the Sturgis house. Hector still said nothing. He was more or less in a state of shock, and he looked it. From time to time the night clerk emerged on tiptoe, peered at them, then tiptoed back down the corridor to look once more at Ella and the drummer sprawled on the bed as if they had fallen from the ceiling. The firemen continued their work and the dead couple continued their thin, reedy imitation of breathing.
At last, however, the ghostly sighing stopped. It stopped quite suddenly, and somehow the silence that followed immediately upon it seemed louder than the sighing, like the vacuum at dead center of a typhoon. This was either a reprieve or a death knell, and Hector and the constable rose together. They went down the corridor toward where the night clerk stood in the doorway, leaning forward with a hand on each side of the frame. He had not heard them coming; he stood there until the constable touched his shoulder, at which he leaped as if from a bee sting or a boo. Then, looking back over his shoulder, he saw Hector. “Ex-excuse me,” he stammered. He stood aside and Hector saw that the firemen were disassembling the pulmotor to carry it out to the gig. They had given up. The dead couple now were laid lengthwise on the bed, like any two sleepers anywhere, side by side and covered with one sheet. Except for the stillness, they might indeed have been sleeping, but this was a stillness beyond the stillness of slumber. The drummer lay on the far side, rather bulky. Ella’s body, on the near side of the bed, looked very flat beneath the four-point lift of her breasts and toes, with a smooth, empty curve of sheet between the pairs of points.
“Mr Sturgis,” the constable said—
Hector turned, as if the voice were a leash that had been tugged, and followed the constable into the corridor. There they encountered Harry Barnes, the undertaker. He evidently had just gotten the news, for he wore list slippers and had his nightshirt tucked into his trousers. “Leave everything to me,” he said by way of greeting. He was always on hand for misfortune, among the first to arrive when tragedy struck, and for this reason was known as Light Hearse Harry. Sideburns framed his face, like the clamp of a vise, and his chin and upper lip were blue with stubble. His attitude was invariably sympathetic, but there was a glint of curiosity in his eyes, so long intent on watching the various reactions to death.
“Go on home and get some sleep,” he said. His voice was low and confidential; he always spoke this way. “I guarantee you, when I bring her out to the house this afternoon youll never have seen her looking prettier. Mind you, I dont make idle promises. When I say pretty I mean it, and I promise you I’ll do a careful job. Let me handle all this, Hector; I’ll take care of everything.”
Dawn was coming through when Hector and the constable left the hotel. Bristol was still asleep, profoundly relaxed behind drawn blinds, awaiting another tomorrow, another tick of the giant clock of time, but the streets looked harsh in contrast to the way they had looked three hours ago, bathed in moonlight. The year was into the dog days, the heat a steady glow. As a fire burns to embers, hotter than flames, so summer had burned to its climax. The sky was a cloudless, smooth gray dome like cast-iron perfectly joined and tinted with ro
se at its eastern rim predicting the sun. A file of men in work clothes, whites and Negroes, walked home from the oil mill, their lunch buckets under their arms. They were the night shift, coming off. Sloping their shoulders, they scuffed their shoes on a pavement still warm from yesterday’s sun, while behind them the oil mill ground its teeth, crushing the cotton seed with a hungry-making odor like broiling ham. Hector, who had never been to town at this hour before, saw them thus for the first time. They lifted their heads as he came past, the buggy intersecting their line of march, and he looked down at them. With their stubble-darkened jaws and work-splayed hands, their eyeballs etched with tiny red threads of fatigue, they might have been visitors from another planet. He looked at them and they looked at him, down and up, and he was vaguely afraid, without knowing why. He believed he saw hate in their faces.
The moon was still up in the daylight sky. As the buggy turned into the Sturgis drive the sun came up too; it broke clear of the landline with a sudden jump and quickly turned from red to fiery, blinding whoever looked eastward, throwing a yellow-pink glow over the front of the house and softening the gray planks and pillars. The first thing Hector noticed was the ax, a steely glint among the shadows of the doorway. The buggy stopped; Hector got down and went up the steps, not saying Thank You or Goodbye, not even looking back. But then, as he took up the ax and started through the doorway, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the constable watching him. He stopped. For a moment they looked at each other. The horse was already asleep in the shafts, its muzzle down near its knees, and the constable sat with the reins held loose in his hands. When Hector suddenly looked back, returning his gaze, the constable, startled thus out of contemplation, twitched the reins and made a clucking sound with his tongue (it resembled the sound the out-going drummers had used, describing Ella): “Tchk!” and the horse lurched into motion, still asleep.