It was pleasant not to have to stamp the snow off my boots, and the fire was speaking pleasantly and the kettle was sounding softly. There was no need for me to grieve. I had been the brave one and now I was free. The snow would keep me. I would bury pa and the Pedersens and Hans and even ma if I wanted to bother. I hadn’t wanted to come but now I didn’t mind. The kid and me, we’d done brave things well worth remembering. The way that fellow had come so mysteriously through the snow and done us such a glorious turn—well it made me think how I was told to feel in church. The winter time had finally got them all, and I really did hope that the kid was as warm as I was now, warm inside and out, burning up, inside and out, with joy.
MRS. MEAN
1
I call her Mrs. Mean. I see her, as I see her husband and each of her four children, from my porch, or sometimes when I look up from my puttering, or part my upstairs window curtains. I can only surmise what her life is like inside her little house; but on humid Sunday afternoons, while I try my porch for breeze, I see her hobbling on her careful lawn in the hot sun, stick in hand to beat her scattered children, and I wonder a lot about it.
I don’t know her name. The one I’ve made to mark her and her doings in my head is far too abstract. It suggests the glassy essence, the grotesquerie of Type; yet it’s honestly come by, and in a way it’s flattering to her, as if she belonged on Congreve’s stage. She could be mean there without the least particularity, with the formality and grandeur of Being, while still protected from the sour and acrid community of her effect, from the full sound and common feel of life; all of which retain her, for me, on her burning lawn, as palpable and loud and bitter as her stinging switch.
I may have once said something to her—a triviality—and perhaps once more than that, while strolling, I may have nodded to her or I may have smiled . . . though not together. I have forgotten.
When I bought my house I wished, more than anything, to be idle, idle in the supremely idle way of nature; for I felt then that nature produced without effort, in the manner of digestion and breathing. The street is quiet. My house is high and old, as most of the others are, and spreading trees shade my lawn and arch the pavement. Darkness is early here at any time of year. The old are living their old age out, shawled in shadows, cold before fires. A block away they are building stores. One feels the warmth that is the movement of decay. I see the commercial agent. He wears gold rings. His hand partitions. Lamps will grow in these unlucky windows. Wash will hang from new external stairs. No one has his home here but myself; for I have chosen to be idle, as I said, to surround myself with scenes and pictures; to conjecture, to rest my life upon a web of theory—as ready as the spider is to mend or suck dry intruders. While the street is quiet, the houses whole, their windows shaded; while the aged sit their porches and swap descriptions of their health; the Means, upon the opportunity of death, have seized the one small house the neighborhood affords. Treeless and meager, it stands in the summer in a pool of sun and in the winter in a blast of air.
My house has porches fore and aft and holds a corner. I spy with care and patience on my neighbors but I seldom speak. They watch me too, of course, and so I count our evils even, though I guard my conscience with a claim to scientific coldness they cannot possess. For them no idleness is real. They see it, certainly. I sit with my feet on the rail. My wife rocks by me. The hours pass. We talk. I dream. I sail my boats on their seas. I rest my stories on their backs. They cannot feel them. Phantoms of idleness never burden. If I were old or sick or idiotic, if I shook in my chair or withered in a southern window, they would understand my inactivity, and approve; but even the wobblers make their faithful rounds. They rake their leaves. They mow and shovel. They clip their unkempt hedges and their flowers. Their lives are filled by this. I do no more.
Mrs. Mean, for instance: what could she think? She is never idle. She crowds each moment with endeavor.
When I had my cottage I used to see, on Sabbaths, a wire-haired lady drive her family to the beach. She rented everything. Her family dressed in the car, the windows draped with blankets, while the lady in her jacket rapped on the hood for speed, then rushed them to the surf. She always gestured grandly at the sea and swung a watch by its strap. “So much money, so much time, let us amuse,” she always said, and sat on a piece of driftwood and shelled peas. The children dabbled at the water with their fingers. Her husband, a shriveled, mournful soul, hung at the water’s edge and slowly patted his wrists with ocean. Inertia enraged her. She thrust her pods away, pouring her lap in a jar. “Begin, begin,” she would shout then, jumping up, displaying the watch. The children would squat in the sand until foam marked their bottoms, staring in their pails. Papa would drip water to his elbows and upper arm while Mama receded to her log. The children fought then. It began invisibly. It continued silently, without emotion. They kicked and bit and stabbed with their shovels. When she found them fighting she would empty her lap and start up, shaking the watch and shouting, but the children fought on bitterly, each one alone, throwing sand and swinging their pails, rolling over and over on the beach and in and out of the moving ocean. She ran toward them but the sea slid up the sand and drove her off, squealing on tiptoe, scuffing and denting the smooth sand. The children plunged into the surf and broke apart. “Don’t lose your shovels!” The waves washed the children in. They huddled on dark patches of beach. At last their mother would run among them, quickly, between breaths of ocean, and with her hands on her hips, her legs apart, she would throw her head back in the mimic of gargantuan guffaws, soundless and shaking. “Laugh,” she would say then, “there is only an hour.”
The people by me primitively guess that I am enemy and hate me: not alone for being different, or disdaining work, or worse, not doing any; but for something that would seem, if spoken for them, words of magic; for I take their souls away—I know it—and I play with them; I puppet them up to something; I march them through strange crowds and passions; I snuffle at their roots.
From the first they saw me watching. I can’t disguise my interest. They expected, I suppose, that I would soon be round with stories. I would tell Miss Matthew of Mr. Wallace, and Mr. Wallace of Mrs. Turk, and Miss Matthew and Mr. Wallace and Mrs. Turk would take the opportunity to tell me all they knew of one another, all they knew about diseases, all they thought worthy of themselves and could remember of their relatives, and the complete details of their many associations with violent forms of death. But when I communicated nothing to them; when I had nothing, in confidence, to say to anyone; then they began to treat my eyes like marbles and to parade their lives indifferently before me, as if I were, upon my porch, a motionless, graven idol, not of their religion, in my niche; yet I somehow retained my mystery, my potency, so that the indifference was finally superficial and I fancy they felt a compulsion to be observed—watched in all they did. I should say they dread me as they dread the supernatural. How Mr. Wallace dreads it, dead as he nearly is, twisted on his cane. Every morning, when he can, he comes down the block past my porch, his left arm hung like a shawl from his shoulder, shuffling his numb feet, poking cracks. “I’ll have to go back.” His voice is hoarse and loud. “I used to walk to the end of the street.” He mops his face and dries his running eyes. “Hot,” he shouts, propped against his cane. “Last summer I went to the end.” The cane comes out of his belly. He sways. Will he die like this? palsy seize him? sweat break before that final clip of pain and his surprise? The cane will gouge cement. His hat will float into my privet hedge and the walk drive blood from his nose.
He turns at last and I relax. His eyes are anxious for a friend to cry at, to bellow to a stop. He squints up the street, and if, by any chance, someone appears, Mr. Wallace grins and howls hello. He inches forward, pounds the walk, roars reports of weather for the middle of the night. “Know what it was at one? Eighty-seven. June, not hell we’re in, but eighty-seven. I ain’t even eighty-seven. There was a cloud across the moon at two. It rained alongside five but nothing
cooled.” And the dawn was gray as soapy water. Fog lay between garages. A star, almost hidden by the morning light, fell past the Atlas stack and died near Gemini. The friend is fixed and Mr. Wallace closes, his face inflamed, his eyeballs rolling. He describes the contours of his aches, the duration, strength, and quality of every twinge, the subtle nuances of vague internal hurts. He distinguishes blunt pains from sharp, pale ones from bright, wiry from watery, morning, night. His brown teeth grin. Is it better, he discourses, to suffer when it’s hot or when it’s cold, while standing or sitting, reading or walking, young or old?
“I say it’s better to be cold. You’ll say not. I know what you’ll say. You’ll say, ‘The knuckle, now, if rapped when cold, will ring.’ I know. A cold shin on the sharp, hard edge of something—that’s a real one. I know. Never mind. Hurts are all fires. Keep you warm. Know those fellows like that fellow in a book I read about? His name was Scott. You know him? Froze. Scott. If I’d been with him, freezing, I’d of pounded on me some great sore so when I hit it I would burn all over. Keep you warm. Say, they didn’t think of that, did they? Froze. I read about it. I read a lot, except for seeing, or I would. Half an hour. I used to, all the time. My eyes burn though. Your eyes burn sometimes? Scott. Froze. Hey, you know freezing’s quiet. Ha! You know—it’s warm!”
Mr. Wallace wavers on his stick and spits. The whole street echoes with him. His friend dwindles.
Portents are next. They follow pain as pain the weather. Anyone is a friend of Mr. Wallace who will stay.
The starfall past the Atlas stack—a cruel sign. They are all bad, the signs are. Evil is above us. “Evil’s in the air we breathe or we would live forever.” Mr. Wallace draws the great word out as he’s doubtless heard his preacher. The cane rises with difficulty. The tip waves above the treetops. “There,” bellows Mr. Wallace, his jowls shaking. “There!” And he hurls the cane like a spear. “Smoke, sonny, comes out and hides the sky and poisons everything. I’ve got a cough.” His hand is tender on his chest. He taps with it. He hacks, and stumbles. Spit bubbles on the walk and spreads. The friend or friendly stranger bobs and smiles and flees while Mr. Wallace waits, expecting the return of his cane. “I can’t bend,” he almost whispers, peering at the disappearing back. His smile stays, but the corners of his mouth twitch. Wearily his eyes cross.
“Cane cane cane,” Mr. Wallace calls. His wife hurries. “Cane cane,” Mr. Wallace calls. She waves her hanky. “Cane,” he continues until it’s handed back. “Hot.” Mrs. Wallace nods and mops his brow. She settles his hat and smooths his sleeve. “You threw your cane again,” she says. Mr. Wallace grows solemn. “I tried to kill a squirrel, pumpkin.” Mrs. Wallace leads him home, her face in tears.
What a noise he makes! I thought I couldn’t stand it when I came. His puffed face frightened me. His eyes were holes I fell in. I dodged his shadow lest it cover me, and felt a fool. He’s not so old, sixty perhaps; but his eyes run, his ears ring, his teeth rot. His nose clogs. His lips pale and bleed. His knees, his hips, his neck and arms, are stiff. His feet are sore, the ankles swollen. His back, head and legs ache. His throat is raw, his chest constricted, and all his inner organs—heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, and bowels—are weak. Hands shake. His hair is falling. His flesh lies slack. His cock I vision shriveled to a string, and each breath of life he draws dies as it enters his nose and crosses his tongue. But Mr. Wallace has a strong belly. It is taut and smooth and round, like a baby’s, and anything that Mr. Wallace chooses to put into it mashes up speedily, for Mr. Wallace, although he seeps and oozes and excretes, has never thrown up in his life.
I could hear him walking. That was worst. When I raked the yard I faced in his direction and went in when I saw him coming. With all my precautions his voice would sometimes boom behind me and I would jump, afraid and furious. His moist mouth gaped. His tongue curled over his bent brown teeth. I knew what Jonah felt before the whale’s jaws latched. Mr. Wallace has no notion of the feelings he creates. I swear he stinks of fish on such occasions. I feel the oil. It’s a tactile nightmare, an olfactory dream—as if my smell and touch divided from my hearing, taste, and vision, and while I watched his mouth and listened to its greeting, fell before whales in Galilee, brine stung and bruised while the fish smell grew as it must grow in the mouth of a whale, and the heat of an exceptionally hardy belly rose around.
More and more I knew my budding world was ruined if he were free in it. As a specimen Mr. Wallace might be my pride. Glory to him in a jar. But free! Better to release the sweet moving tiger or the delicate snake, the monumental elephant. I was just a castaway to be devoured. It was bad luck and I rocked and I cursed it. Mr. Wallace spouted and I paced the porch with Ahab’s anger and his hate. Mrs. Mean wanted my attention. She passed across my vision, brilliant with energy, like the glow of a beacon. Each time my stomach churned. Her children tumbled like balls on the street, like balls escaping gloves and bats; and on the day the boy Toll raced in front of Mr. Wallace like a bolting cat and swung around a sapling like a rock at the end of a string, deadly as little David, then I saw how. Well, that’s all over now. Mr. Wallace dreads me as the others do. He inches by. He looks away. He mumbles and searches the earth with his cane. When Mr. Wallace completes his death they will wind crape around his cane and stick it in his grave. Mrs. Wallace will stand by to screech and I shall send—what shall I send?—I shall send begonias with my card. I say Good Morning, Mr. Wallace, how did you pass the night? and Mr. Wallace’s throat puffs with silence. I cannot estimate how much this pleases me. I feel I have succeeded to the idleness of God.
Except in the case of Mrs. Mean. I am no representative of preternatural power. I am no image, on my porch—no symbol. I don’t exist. However I try, I cannot, like the earth, throw out invisible lines to trap her instincts; turn her north or south; fertilize or not her busy womb; cause her to exhibit the tenderness, even, of ruthless wild things for her wild and ruthless brood. And so she burns and burns before me. She revolves her backside carefully against a tree.
2
Mrs. Mean is hearty. She works outside a good bit, as she is doing now. Her pace is furious, and the heat does not deter her. She weeds and clips her immaculate yard, waging endless war against the heels and tricycles of her children. She rolls and rakes. She plants and feeds. Does she ever fall inside her house, a sprung hulk, and lap at the dark? The supposition is absurd. Observation mocks the thought. But how I’d enjoy to dream it.
I’d dream a day both warm and humid, though not alarming. Leaves would be brisk about and the puff clouds quick. This, to disarm her. She’d be clipping the hedge; firmly bent, sturdily moving, executing stems; and then the pressure of her blood would mount, mount slowly as each twig fell; and a cramp would grow as softly as a bud in the blood of her back, in the bend of her legs, the crooksnap of her arms, tightening and winding about her back and legs and arms like a wet towel that knots when wrung.
Now the blood lies slack in her but the pressure mounts, mounts slowly. The shears snip and smack. She straightens like a wire. She strides on the house, tossing her lank hair high from her face. She will fetch a rake; perhaps a glass of water. Strange. She feels a dryness. She sniffs the air and eyes a sailing cloud. In the first shadow of the door she’s stunned and staggered. There’s a blaze like the blaze of God in her eye, and the world is round. Scald air catches in her throat and her belly convulses to throw it out. There’s a bend to her knee. The sky is black and comets burst ahead of her. Her hands thrust ahead, hard in the sill of the door. Cramp grasp her. Shrivel like a rubber motor in a balsa toy her veins. Does her husband waddle toward her, awag from stern to stem with consternation? Oh if the force of ancient malediction could be mine, I’d strike him too!
. . . the vainest dream, for Mrs. Mean is hearty, and Mr. Mean is unpuncturable jelly.
Mr. Wallace can bellow and Mrs. Wallace can screech, but Mrs. Mean can be an alarm of fire and war, falling on every ear like an aching wind.
Among the many periodic
als to which I subscribe is the very amusing Digest of the Soviet Press and I remember an article there which described the unhappiness of one neighborhood in a provincial Russian city over the frightfully lewd, blasphemous, and scatological shouts a young woman named Tanya was fond of emitting. She would lean from the second-story window of her apartment, the report said, and curse the countryside. Nothing moved her. No one approached without blushing to the ears. Her neighbors threatened her with the city officials. The city officials came—were roundly damned. They accused her of drunkenness, flushed, and threatened her with the party officials. The party officials came—were thoroughly execrated. They said she was a dirty woman, a disgrace to Russia—an abomination in the sight of the Lord, they would have said, I’m sure, if the name of the Lord had been available to them. Unfortunately it was available only to Tanya, who made use of it. The party officials advised the city officials and the city officials put Tanya in jail. Useless. She cursed between bars and disturbed the sleep of prisoners. Nor was it well for prisoners to hear, continually, such things. They transferred her to another district. She cursed from a different window. They put her in the street, but this was recognized at once as a terrible error and her room was restored. The report breathed outrage and bafflement. What to do with this monster? In their confusion they failed to isolate her. They couldn’t think to shoot her. They might have torn out her tongue. Abstractly, I’d favor that. All the vast resources of civilization lay unused, I gathered, while Tanya leaned obscenely from her sill, verbally shitting on the world.
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country Page 11