Jordan County

by Shelby Foote

  Once past the invocation, however, he struck an impasse. All his sources of information were blocked. He could not go to the various men she had known, especially not to those who could tell him most, for even if he could learn their names and locate them — which was highly improbable, scattered all over the country as they were, drumming up trade for their products — they would mock him with their eyes and tell him nothing. “It’s the husband,” they would say, like the nightshirted people lining the hotel corridor that night. Nor could the women help him; all they knew was gossip, and he had ruled out hearsay evidence. Then, to his dismay, the one source on which he counted most was cut off from him. Three days after the funeral Mrs Lowry died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  She had continued her tirade after being carried into the house by the two workers. She sat in her castered chair, flailing her arms and shouting at the boarders and neighbors who gathered in her room. Her excitement mounted. Then suddenly she halted in midsentence, mouth open, one arm raised; a surprised expression came onto her face; she fainted, then passed into a coma. She lay unconscious Saturday and Sunday, filling the house with the uproar of her breathing. The doctor called it brain fever — the same doctor who had diagnosed her swollen legs as dropsy. Monday she died and Wednesday they buried her. Mrs Simmons took the shingle off the pillar and rented the two rooms to a foreman from the oil mill, a man with seven children.

  So now there was only himself, and in time he learned to believe that it was better this way. He kept a ten-cent copybook locked in a drawer of the night table beside his bed. On the first page he printed in block capitals: ELLA LOWRY STURGIS, and centered beneath it in smaller letters: WIFE OF HECTOR WINGATE STURGIS. At the foot of the title page he wrote: B May 80: M Dec 98: D Aug 10 — These are Facts. The second page was blank. The third page was about half filled:

  Her Mother said (Mrs Elizabeth Lowry, seamstress):

  (1) Worked pedal as girl to save paralyzed legs. And was comfort to her in misery.

  (2) Dressed better than other girls.

  (3) Had developed legs & breasts at 16, which classify under Biological, future page.

  (4) No Four, only gossip which omit.

  NOTE — These are Opinions save perhaps pedal. Source (Mother) died same month. Biassed but cannot check.

  And that was all. The remaining half of the page was blank, as was the rest of the book. He had intended to make it a solid fund of fact. In time, for all he knew, the drawer might overflow with copybooks, each bursting at the seam with information on which to draw for the projected Life of Ella Sturgis. Then, perhaps, he would turn to his own life, recording it in this same fashion, with scrupulous exactitude and honesty, and later maybe the two could be combined, in literature as in life, to constitute a whole called Hectorella.

  He had written rapidly through the first three notes, had set down the Four in parentheses, and then had paused, chewing on the penstaff. There was no Four; there never would be, now that Mrs Lowry was dead. Looking at the scant half-page of notes, he realized the hopelessness of his task. Half a page in a dime copybook held all he would ever know about her from any source outside himself, and even that had to be qualified: “Biassed but cannot check.”

  All that was left was what was in his head, a hopeless clutter of half-remembered scenes, conversations about nothing definite, dresses she had worn on forgotten occasions, her way of pronouncing certain words; ‘Yes,’ for instance, had always had two syllables. It was little enough to work on. He wished now that he had thought to keep a diary, noting what she had said and done on particular days, the songs she hummed, the color of her eyes and hair——

  He stopped, astounded. Her eyes were green, her hair brown; yes. But what shade of green, what shade of brown? He did not know. Already she was escaping him, just as she had done in life, and there was no way to call her back.

  Suddenly he remembered the sound of her laughter, the peculiar ringing quality it had, pitched on a rising note. He was filled with wonder at why this memory of her laughter should come to him now that he saw how much else he had forgotten. Then he realized, with considerable shock, that memory had nothing to do with it. He was not remembering her laughter: he was hearing it. It was here in the bedroom with him, not loud but quite clear — so clear, indeed, that he could place it exactly. She was in the far corner, laughing at him; she had escaped him, gone the other side of death, and now she had returned to mock him. Invisible in that far corner, she was laughing at him, or her ghost was.

  It was shortly after this that the servants began to avoid his room. The upstairs maid, a cocoa-colored, high-strung girl, keeping an eye on the door for fear it might blow shut (or something) while she was in there, never stayed any longer than was required to make up the bed and flick at the furniture with the dust cloth on her way out. In mid-October, when at last Hector denied admission even to her, the other servants began to say the thing that had frightened the maid from the beginning. He was carrying on with a ghost, they said. Their eyes rolled balefully, displaying a good deal of the whites. They said they heard his voice starting and stopping irregularly beyond the locked door, the intervals filled with something profounder than silence, and they went past on tiptoe, in a hurry.

  “He’s got him a spook in there,” they said.

  By then the house had been prepared for winter. The curtains in his room were now of velvet, full length, with heavy silken tie-ropes. During the daylight hours he kept them closed. At night, however, when he drew them apart, people passing along the street or the sidewalk would look up at the tall windows and into the room where the bedside candle twinkled and guttered like a lamp in a shrine. It gave them at once a feeling of awe and pity and excitement.

  They had begun to talk about him all over Bristol, at lotto and poker gatherings, retelling things they had heard from their servants, who in turn had heard them from the Sturgis servants at lodge meetings and religious celebrations. But the white people did not say that he was haunted; they left that kind of talk to the Negroes. The white people said he had lost his mind.

  Women in the Kandy Kitchen for sodas, or in each other’s parlors for tea, discussed it in the particular way they had. One would advance a piece of information, received perhaps from her cook that very morning; then the others would hunch forward, eyes sharpening over the glasses or cups, and pass it back and forth, with variations and embellishments.

  “They say he just sits there in the bedroom, mumbling, and wont let anyone in. Nobody at all.”

  “Talking to himself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thats bad. Oh, thats a bad sign.”

  “Yes. And wont let anyone in for anything. He just sits there, round the clock they say, mumbling. Hour after solid hour, Louella says.”

  “Did you ever. Mrs Sturgis must be worried sick.”

  “Well — you know her.”

  “Thats true; yes. But how would you feel if your only son took it into his head to—” And so forth.

  Men at the Elks Club or at their places of business used it to fill an interval while waiting for the cards to run or customers to happen in. They sought the humor in the situation. And though they were more cautious with their information, being inclined to qualify it with disclaimers, their ultimate flights of fancy soared as high.

  “You mean he just sits there?”

  “Thats right: talking to himself. So they say.”

  “Then he must not have all his marbles. Hey?”

  “Something like that I reckon; yair. But I dont know. Maybe it’s his way of grieving for his wife.”

  “Check. If I’d had that to call my own, then up and lost it overnight, I reckon I’d do some grieving, too. Tchk! I’d let them hear me the other side of the county.”

  The year declined, the first sharp cold of late October bruising the late-blooming flowers, then the flare and haze of Indian summer, the air scented with woodsmoke and red leaves piled shoetop-deep in the yards. After a shirtsleeve Christmas — “Wont
it ever get cold?” people were asking — winter came, and came with a vengeance, the bitter, icy winter of 1911. The earth was frozen iron-gray, hard enough to strike matches on, and the fields were gridded with long silver pencilings of ice in the furrows. In the leafless trees the sparrows huddled in ruffled groups along the boughs, like clusters of feathery fruit, looking out through slits of eyes. Pipes burst and sleepers woke to find the water in their bedroom basins frozen firm as marble.

  “Well,” people were saying now, shivering, shaking their heads, “we asked for it. Now we’ve got it.”

  Mrs Sturgis, who had waited before, did not change her tactics now that her adversary was what people were calling a ghost. She continued to wait, believing that Hector’s mind would clear in time and the ghost would be gone. Then she would step in and claim her own, but not before. The thing she feared most was that, by word or gesture, she might provoke him into taking a stand against her. Once he and the dead woman were joined against a common enemy — in his mind, that is — the ghost might never fade. The main thing, she decided, was to give it nothing to feed on. Her attitude in this resembled the treatment old-time physicians prescribed for tuberculosis, placing the sick man on a diet of moss and goat’s milk in the belief that the ailment, being more fragile than the body it occupied, would starve before the patient, who then would be left weak but uninfected.

  She decided, however, to speak to him about plans for a vacation the following spring, a six-week stay at Cooper’s Wells for the benefit of the waters. “Youre looking a little peak-ed,” she ventured to say. Yet she had no more than mentioned the trip when he turned on her with a peculiar expression, one she had never seen before, half blankness and half hatred; so she took it no further. He was sick in his mind and Mrs Sturgis knew it. The cure would have to come from within, not from any outside influence; she preferred no cure at all, in fact, to a cure at such a price. So she told herself, and she waited, maintaining the insularity that had given her life its meaning.

  A cold rain fell the final week in January. The wind came out of Arkansas, then veered clockwise and blew steadily from the north, out of Tennessee, driving the rain in scuds. At length the wind died, but the rain drummed on, turning at last to sleet, a constant, icy sifting mixed with flutters of snow like tiny feathers that floated about and never touched the earth. This continued through the night, and next morning the town lay blanketed with white, a wonderland. Telegraph wires were sheathed in ice. Trees wore brittle armor, the air filled with the sound of limbs breaking beneath the weight of frozen rain; they fell like cutglass chandeliers, scattering diamond-bright, prismatic fragments up and down the street. The schools declared a holiday, and boys invented sleds from scraps of lumber and rode them, whooping, down the eastern slope of the levee and the steep banks of the Indian mounds scattered about the county. Everyone else stayed indoors as much as possible, close by their stoves and firesides. Bristol lay cramped corpse-fashion under its shroud, a bit of New England translated south to Mississippi.

  Hector came to the door of his room every morning to pick up the two scuttles of coal the houseboy left in the hall for him, and usually he came downstairs for meals, sitting bemused, uncommunicative over food he often left untasted. Otherwise he kept to his room, the door bolted against intrusion. This continued until the week of the big freeze, when he began to take long walks in the woods beyond town. He would come out and lock the door behind him, putting the big old-fashioned key into an inside pocket beneath layers of coats and scarfs. Some days he would be gone for hours, without explanation. He took slices of bread and leftover biscuits with him to feed the birds. When he returned, half frozen, he would go immediately to his room and lock himself in. If anyone spoke to him, either in the house or while he was out walking, he would not answer. He would not give a sign that he had heard them or suspected in any way that they were near, not even a nod of the head or a flick of the eye; he would stride on or just stand there. Apparently his whole life was in the room, behind the bolted door. He wanted no other contact, human or otherwise.

  She had come to him readily enough that first time, unbidden, when she mocked him with her laughter, but it was weeks before she spoke to him. They had all their old troubles, holding off from one another. And when she finally did speak to him, one night late as he was falling asleep, her voice was so weak he could hardly believe it was Ella who had spoken.

  “You dont sound like yourself,” he said.

  — It’s mee, all right.

  Her voice was reedy, worn, like a voice over a long-distance telephone line with a faulty connection. Some of the words were lost entirely; others had a false, drawn-out emphasis, usually misplaced so that the effect confused her meaning. This angered him, for he thought at first that she was speaking thus on purpose, to mystify him with the mumbo-jumbo spiritualists were supposed to practice on their clients in the belief that it lent verisimilitude; which perhaps it did when the seance was false, but which in this case merely made him angry. She explained it to him, however. It was caused by the deterioration of her vocal organ. She seemed embarrassed at having to speak of this, like a person obliged to mention a distasteful subject.

  “Will that keep on?” he asked, frightened at the thought of someday losing her voice completely. “Will it keep on getting worse?”

  — Yess.

  The word died away with a hissing sound, as if her tongue would not fit properly against her teeth.

  First he felt revulsion; then he was angry. The two emotions held; then anger won. She might have known this would happen, he told himself. He had so much to ask, a thousand things, not only about her life but also about his own, and yet she had waited. What was worse, however, was that even now, with no telling how little time left, she would not answer his questions, except those to which he already knew the answers. Otherwise she ignored them.

  She was intent on something else, a subject Hector did not want to talk about: the ax.

  — Youd never have used it.

  “I would.”

  — You thought you would but you wouldnt.

  “I would. I would.”

  — N-no, Hector. Never in all this world.

  “I would!”

  He sat bolt-upright, angry and ready to defy her, no matter at what cost.

  — No, you wouldnt. Not when it came right down to doing it. You know how you are; I dont believe you even thought you would. Not really.

  “I would! I would!”

  He was shouting now, but he knew it was no use. She was no longer there to hear him.

  That was the beginning. She came to him from time to time in this manner, always at will and seldom at his bidding. He learned never to cross her, for as soon as he began to disagree with her, her voice would diminish; it would grow weaker and weaker, and finally he would be left addressing the empty air. That was her advantage, and she had always been one to press advantages, as he well knew. But he had certain advantages, too. Realizing that he had been almost childish that first time, shouting and clenching his fists as he had done, he learned now to be sly in their relationship. Sometimes he could even outwit her. Originally he had feared that she possessed extraordinary powers — the ability to read his mind, for instance — but this was not true, even though at times it seemed to be.

  He discovered also that she was governed by some sort of regulations, a list of do’s and donts, for when he tried to steer the conversation into certain channels she would cut him off. It’s not allowed, she would murmur. He had to learn to curb his curiosity, for if he persisted she would leave him. If he became violently insistent, as he had done the first time, she would not return sometimes for days on end.

  For one thing, though it was the very purpose for which he thought of himself as having called her up, she would tell him nothing about her past life. It’s not allowed, she would say with a note of warning in her voice, and that would end it. For another, she would not appear to him: not because it was against the regulations (at an
y rate she never said it was) but rather on her own account. She had always been vain, and now she seemed ashamed of her appearance. He did not yet know why, though he suspected.

  In the course of time he became reconciled to not collecting facts for the notebook. Besides, now that she was with him again, he no longer felt the need to reconstruct her life. Even the talking, which was quite trivial in the main and might have passed between any two people seated by any fireside, served for little more than to assure him that she was there. Except for needing this assurance — Ella being invisible — he would have been content to sit quietly, saying nothing. But from week to week her voice faded more and more. He could see that a time was coming when she would no longer be with him. When that time came, as it surely would, he would want to return to the biographical project.

  So he would slip in an occasional question, trying to catch her off guard, to trick her into giving him forbidden information. They would be talking about some commonplace thing and he would ask her, without any change of tone, without any note of urgency in his voice: “That drummer at the hotel: where did you meet him, Ella?”

  — Well, I was downtown that morning, shopping, and.…

  But he never really fooled her. She always caught herself before she told him anything vital.

  — I’ve told you time and again, it’s not allowed.

  Another time, under pressure of a jealousy he had never felt before, he asked her if she still saw the dead drummer, off in that other world.

  — Mm: I see him sometimes.

  — Ah. And do you …?

  — No, no. There’s nothing like that. He’s just like you, now, Hector. There’s no blood, you see.

  But then she stopped again and would go no further. He never really fooled her. So finally he explained it to her, told her his predicament. “Youll go and I’ll be left alone. I’ll turn back to that notebook no better off than I was before. I’ll have it all to go through again, from back where I started months ago. Why, why wont you help me, Ella? It’s for your sake, after all.”