The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories

by H. E. Bates

  It was more than thirty years since the Johnsons, realizing that he was not quite like others, had taken Benjy to a doctor. This doctor had persuaded them that he needed interests that would strengthen his mind. It would be good if they gave him something to do, some occupation, which would help his development. It would help a great deal if they gave him a special interest, to feed his sense of responsibility. ‘You are people on the land,’ the doctor said, ‘let him keep hens.’

  So for many years Benjy had kept hens, and what the earth was to his mother and father the hens were to Benjy: they were almost all he had. When he came from school, cut off by his simplicity from other children, Benjy went straight home to his hens, which he kept in a wire coop that his father had made at the back of the house. At first he kept ten or a dozen hens, all colours and breeds, brown and speckled and black and white, and the coop was small. He fed the hens simply, on scraps from the table, seeded cabbages strung from the wire, a little maize, on corn-ears which he gleaned in the late summer from his father’s acre of stubble. It is possible that a hen, being a simple creature, thrives best on simple treatment. Benjy understood the first and last thing about a hen: that it exists for the purpose of laying eggs. In those days this simple process had not become scientific; nor had it become highly complicated and commercialized. Eggs were cheap; hens mysteriously pecked nourishment off the bare earth. They sat in a home-made nesting-box, on straw, and laid the eggs expected of them.

  Benjy understood another thing about the business of hens, and that was that eggs could be sold for money. At the very beginning Benjy’s eggs were sold to callers at the back door of the house, in scores and half-scores and fives, and the money from these eggs was put carefully, almost religiously, into a large white basin that stood on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard. The basin was beyond Benjy’s reach. ‘But one day,’ his mother would tell him, ‘the money will be yours. You understand? Your father and me are going to save the money. When there’s enough we shall put it in the bank. The bank will give interest on it and then one day, when you’re twenty-one, it will be yours by rights. It’ll be all yours and you can do what you like with it. Do you understand?’ And Benjy would smile simply at his mother and say yes, he understood.

  As time went on Benjy began to keep many more hens. Soon there were more eggs than could be sold at the back door, and by the time Benjy left school at fourteen, he had forty or fifty hens and about as many laying pullets and these were producing an average of two hundred eggs a week. Soon he would set off three times a week with a large basket of eggs on a wheel-truck, and hawk them in Castor, the nearest town. By this time the money no longer went into the basin, but straight into the bank. Benjy could read, and a year or two afterwards he read in a paper that it was better to segregate breeds of hens, keeping White Leghorns’ separate from Rhode Islands, and young from old. This meant new coops, and at the same time Benjy read that hens needed air and exercise and dry hygienic places to sleep. Benjy was very strong and understood a simple thing like nailing wire-netting to wood and began himself to build new houses and coops for the new, segregated breeds of hens. For all this he needed space, and so his father and mother gave him a strip of land running from the back of the house halfway across the field. In this way they gave him something more precious than they had ever given before. For the first time, without fully realizing it, they gave him a piece of the earth.

  All this time they themselves had struggled hard and almost vainly with the earth. At the back of their minds lay a precious belief that Benjy would one day grow out of his simplicity. In the same way they cherished a silent belief that the earth would one day outgrow its poverty. The earth had yielded stubbornly for them, and the reason, like Benjy, was simple. The reason was not in the earth, but in themselves. For most of their lives they had put rather more value on faith than sweat.

  For many years Benjy’s father had been a local preacher, a man with quite a gift of talking. He liked not only to talk on Sundays, to village congregations in small still chapels far out in the countryside, but he liked to talk at the back-door, over the field gate, on the road outside the house. He talked so much that he must have had an idea that the earth, designed, created, and nourished by God, would take care of itself. While he talked thistles seeded and choked his wheat, rabbits broke in and gnawed his cabbages, storms smashed his standing corn. He struggled on like a man chained by bad luck, and while he knew that his land was poor and that Benjy was a simple man, no one had ever had the need or courage to tell him that he himself was a lazy man with too large a trust in Providence.

  And while his father talked Benjy went on steadfastly with the simple business of making hens lay eggs. Part of the field at the back of his father’s house began to resemble a quivering chequerboard of black and brown and white feathers. For a long time now the eggs had been too many for the wheel-truck, and Benjy at regular intervals borrowed his father’s horse and cart, taking the eggs not only down into the town but also into market. All the time Benjy wore the simple smile of a simple-hearted man on his face, and all the time the money went religiously into the bank in his name.

  When Benjy was twenty-one his mother and father planned and carried out a little ceremony. They got his pass-book from the bank and at supper his father made a sort of speech, almost in the tone of a public address, in which he talked as if he had been a diligent man all his life, setting an example of thrift and industry and that this, the pass-book, was Benjy’s natural reward for following it. He talked as if he were talking to a child who still does not know one from two, and at last he gave Benjy the pass-book. ‘This is your money, Benjy,’ he said. ‘Now you’re twenty-one this is your money. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ Benjy said and he took the pass-book. He opened it and looked at it, and saw in it an amount of more than two hundred and thirty pounds. Then he shut up the pass-book and put it into his pocket.

  Benjy’s mother and father did not speak. A strange tremor of a peculiar emotion went through them both: a mixture of disappointment, fear, pride and pain. The amount in Benjy’s pass-book was more than they themselves had ever amassed from the earth in their lives. They did not hope and did not mean that Benjy should give it back to them, but there was something about the silent, simple finality of his putting the pass-book into his pocket that struck them like a blow in the face. They had expected something else: a word of thanks, perhaps a concession, a willingness that they should share the money they had helped to save. It hurt them momentarily that Benjy should appear so completely indifferent to them and to all they felt. Then they remembered why it was. It was because Benjy was still simple. There were shades of feeling and conduct that were beyond his understanding. They were touched with pity for him, and understood.

  ‘What are you going to do with the money?’ they said.

  ‘I’m going to buy a piece of land,’ Benjy said.

  ‘Land?’ they said. ‘What land? Where?’

  ‘Mr. Whitmore wants to sell the four acres next to us,’ Benjy said.

  ‘But, Benjy,’ they said, ‘how did you know? How did you find out?’

  Benjy had a very simple answer.

  ‘I asked Mr. Whitmore,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ they said, ‘that is a very good idea. A wonderful good idea. You couldn’t do anything better.’

  As time went on, and Benjy acquired the land, his father and mother not only felt that it was a good idea but they felt very proud of him. They had the kind of pride in him that parents have in a child that says its first word or takes its first step. Benjy, a simple-minded man, had taken his first step in normal, adult things. It was wonderful, too, that he had taken this step without help, without force or prompting. All his life they had treated him as a child that will not grow up and now, suddenly, he had grown up. Though they could scarcely realize it, Benjy was a man of property.

  For the next four or five years Benjy went on creating more houses for more hens, and then selling mo
re eggs and making more money. He was still a simple man. He could not have made a pair of boots; he knew nothing about the stock-markets. But he knew everything about a hen. His hens were still to him what the earth was to his parents: all he had, and all he understood.

  There was only one difference between Benjy’s hens and his parents’ land. The hens belonged to Benjy. The land had never belonged to his parents, who had rented it now for forty years, on a yearly tenancy, from a man named Sanders. They had often spoken of buying the land, but somehow the scheme never came to anything. It was easier for Benjy’s father to stand at the door and talk, or to talk in the pulpit and trust in God, than to make a business proposition. And now, at sixty-five, they were too old to think of buying land, even if there had been any money for buying land.

  And suddenly the land was for sale: their land, their earth, which was all they had. The town was spreading, the man named Sanders said, and everywhere people wanted land for building. Either he must sell the land for building, or he must sell the land to them.

  They felt lost and distracted. They had lived a vague, trusting life without system, with a simple-minded son to rear, with an infinite faith in God but with little or no faith in fertilizers. As a result they had nothing. Even the earth, which they had regarded as inviolate, was not theirs and was about to be taken away from them.

  Deeply and painfully upset, they went to the man named Sanders, and told him how it was.

  ‘I don’t see no way of gitting the money,’ Benjy’s father said. ‘So we must git out at Michaelmas. That’s all.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ Sanders said. ‘Don’t surprise me you can’t see your way to do it. But I can tell you this, if you can’t buy it, somebody not far away will.’

  ‘Who’ll buy it?’ they said.

  ‘Benjy,’ he said.

  They went home feeling that this was the supremely important moment in their lives. It seemed like the moment of reward. If their faith had been shaken, it was now completely whole again. They saw that there could be joy and satisfaction and ultimate good even in the raising of a simple-minded son.

  ‘We never knew, Benjy. We never even suspected,’ they said. ‘What made you do it? What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to put up more incubator houses,’ Benjy said.

  Again, as when they had given Benjy the pass-book, they did not speak. They had expected something else, without quite knowing what: a word, a small concession perhaps, an assurance that things would go on as before. But there was nothing, only the same simple finality as when Benjy had taken possession of the passbook. They were momentarily pained. Then they knew, again, why it was. There are some things which are forgivable to a simple-minded man. The simple-minded, as they knew quite well, do not always understand.

  By this time Benjy was almost forty, and it was only to them that he remained a simple-minded man. As his new hygienic chicken houses began to cover first one strip of his father’s former land and then another, with the grey patches of hen-dung eating their way into the brown tilled earth, he began to be the largest poultry farmer on that side of the town. In appearance he had changed too. Always big-limbed, he had now become rather fat. His eyes were still a simple blue, and soft fair hair still grew thickly on his face, but now, set in fat flesh, the eyes seemed much smaller. They were no longer the eyes of a simple-minded man. They were the eyes of a man who, in a simple way, is quite cunning.

  No one but Benjy, at this time, knew how many hens and chickens he possessed. No one knew how many eggs the collective-system lorries fetched from him every week; no one knew the amount in his passbook. It was possible to gauge his progress only by the new chicken houses covering his father’s former land, and by the fact that he now employed people to help him.

  One of these people was a girl named Florence. She had thick heavy legs and loose lips and unreflective grey eyes that matched Benjy’s in their apparent simplicity. When Florence bent down to clean the chicken houses, which were raised up off the ground, Benjy could see a gap of bare flesh above her grey lisle stockings or the shadows of deep breasts beneath her smock. In a little while Benjy was catching Florence about the waist in the warm dark incubator houses, and for the first time in his life he had some other interest besides hens.

  It became clear to him that his father and mother did not like Florence, this simple, undistinguished girl with ugly legs and a mouth that would not keep shut. But Benjy did not need a distinguished, intelligent girl, even if one would have looked at him. He needed a woman to help with the hens, and soon he was saying that he and Florence would be married.

  As with the pass-book and the land, his father and mother were not prepared for that.

  ‘Married? Aren’t you all right as you are? Don’t you want time to consider it? Where are you going to live?’

  ‘Here,’ Benjy said.

  And that autumn, at the end of his fortieth year, Benjy moved into the house with Florence as his wife.

  ‘We’ll want the front bedroom,’ Benjy said.

  All their lives his father and mother had slept in the front bedroom. Now they vacated it and moved into the back. This removal hurt them deeply. But because it was now Benjy’s house, because Benjy asked it, they moved without protest, adding a little more to the long chronicle of sacrifice, forgiving Benjy because the simple-minded cannot be expected to understand.

  But the problem of the girl was different. It seemed to them that the girl was about to take Benjy away from them. The air in the house became charged deeply with antagonism, the house itself invisibly but clearly divided. And then presently it became divided in actuality. Up to that time the four people had eaten together. Suddenly Benjy’s mother did not like the way Florence scoured the saucepans. ‘I always scour ’em with soda. Soda’s always been good enough for me and always will.’

  When Benjy heard of the quarrel he had a very simple solution. ‘That settles it,’ he said. ‘Now you eat in the kitchen, and we’ll eat in the other room.’

  And throughout that winter Benjy and his wife lived in one part of the house, and his father and mother in the other. To the old people the days began now to seem very long, and as they looked out on the land they could see the reason. Where there had once been brown bare earth, rows of winter beans, patches of wheat, there were now only Benjy’s chicken houses. The earth was still there, but the purpose of it no longer concerned them. The plough, the mare, the cart and their few tools stood about in the yard, but now it was truer than ever that without the earth they were useless.

  As the winter went on, and the four people were more and more confined indoors, the division in the house became an enormous gap. The two women passed each other on the stairs with glances of antagonism, not speaking. When Benjy’s father walked out to preach on Sundays he walked slowly and brokenly, with the steps of an old man. Only Benjy appeared not to be upset. Preoccupied with his hens, it was as if the emotions of normal people never penetrated beyond his plump hairy face and the eyes that looked so harmless and simple still.

  But in the end it was Benjy who made the decision.

  ‘Mum and Dad,’ he said, ‘it would be a lot better if you went somewheres else to live.’

  ‘Benjy,’ they said.

  ‘A lot better,’ he said. ‘This is our house now. We want it. I bought the house and I want it now.’

  ‘Benjy.’

  ‘I bought it and I want it,’ Benjy said again. ‘I want you to go.’

  ‘Benjy, we can’t go,’ his mother said. ‘We got nowhere to go. We got nowhere.’

  ‘You got to get out!’ Benjy shouted.

  As he shouted they realized, more fully than at any time in their lives, that Benjy was really not right in his head. His simple blue eyes were shot suddenly with a wild expression of insane anger. They not only knew that Benjy was a simple-minded man who was not fully responsible for his actions, but for the first time, struck by this wild-eyed burst of anger, they were frightened of Benjy too.
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br />   ‘All right,’ they said, ‘we’ll find some way to go.’

  It was little more than a week later when Benjy drove his mother and father down into the town. He now had a small Ford van and as he drove the van, with his mother and father on the driving seat, he showed no sign of normal emotion. It was clear that he did not understand the meaning of affection, or of bewilderment, or despair. He felt and spoke and thought only in the simplest terms, with the cruel simplicity of a child.

  ‘You’ll be better by yourselves in lodgings,’ he said. ‘You’ll be better by yourselves.’

  They did not answer. They sat with faces made completely immobile by a kind of stupefied resignation very near to grief. They listened silently and, because for forty years they had believed Benjy to be not right in his head, they made allowances for the last time.

  Down in the town the car stopped in a street filled entirely with houses. Benjy did not get out of the van. His father’s and mother’s belongings had already gone on and now they alighted empty-handed. As they stood on the pavement Benjy spoke a few words to them, looked at them with unmoved simple eyes and then drove away.

  When the van had gone they stood alone on the pavement, looking at the ground. They stood as if they had alighted in a strange place, were not sure of themselves, and did not know what to do.

  Once they had had the earth. Now it was not possible to tell, from their downcast and silent faces, whether they altogether realized that it, too, had gone.