A raucous gang of sparrows with voices bigger than themselves flicker their wings, spin and dart in a burst and frenzy of high-heartedness, and I follow after them in envy and admiration. My steps are sedate, but only out of necessity. They pause and whirl and settle, and I see what they’re up to. A rusty and dinted bucket beside a shed has gathered the rain water for them. And for me. I’ve always liked the sparrows. And now they’ve led me here, and here’s my well in the wilderness, plain as you please.
Politely as I can, I flap my arms and shoo the birds away, and they scold me from a distance. The water is murky and tastes of soil and fallen leaves and rust, but I can’t complain. Ignoring the reproachful sparrows, I take the battered pail and set it inside the doorway of my mansion. Too bad to deprive them, but if a person doesn’t look after herself in this world, no one else is likely to.
I make my way down the path to the sea. The air is salted, sturdy with the scent of fish. The shore is cobbled with white sea-washed stones that clatter and slide under my unsure feet. Great logs, broken away from booms and drifted ashore, lie along the beach like natural benches. The sea is green and clear. In the shallows I can see to the bottom, down where the stones which are actually dun and dull olive and slate have been changed underwater and shimmer wetly as though they were garnets and opals and slabs of jade. A dark bulb of kelp floats languidly like a mermaid, trailing its strands and frilled leaves of brownish yellow hair. A few cast-off clam shells, gutted by gulls, perhaps, jut from the watery sand like discarded saucers in a sea midden. A crab walks delicately on its pincered claws.
A short distance along the beach two children are playing. At first it startles me to see them, and I half turn, intending to blunder off into the bushes, but then I see how ludicrous it is to fear them, so I sit down on a log and watch. They’ve not seen me. They’re absorbed, deeply concentrating. A boy and girl, both around six, I’d say. The boy has straight black hair. The girl’s hair is light brown and long, bunched into an elastic at the back of her head. They’re playing house—that much is obvious. The boy is searching for clam shells. He trots along the sand, head down, peering, stooping to pick one up here and there. He rinses them in the water, paddling in a short way in his bare feet, and then returns.
“Here,” he says. “These can be bowls.”
“No,” she says. “They’re plates. We’ve got enough bowls. Look, I’ve got them all fixed up, and here’s our food.”
Everything has grown tidy and organized under her hands. A row of clam shells and platters of bark have been set along a log and filled with delicacies—bits of moss, pebbles, fern for salad greens, a flower or two for dessert.
“This is the cupboard,” he says. “Let’s say we keep the plates here, in a pile.”
“No, it’s not the cupboard, Kennie,” she says. “It’s the dinner table, and we’ve got to put the plates all around, one for each. Here—gimme.”
Stupid girl. She knows nothing. Why won’t she praise him a little? She’s so sharp with him. Hell become fed up in a minute. I long to warn her—watch out, watch out, you’ll lose him.
The branches will wither, the roots they will die,
You’ll all be forsaken and you’ll never know why.
Take warning, my girl. You’ll be sorry.
“See,” she says smugly. “They go like this.”
How neatly she’s set her table. He kicks at the log and the dinner service jitters and jumps. A platter falls, scattering its prime roast of moss.
“Oh, you’ve wrecked it!” she shrieks. “Stupid! You’re a stupid bloody bum!”
I’d wash your mouth out with soap for that, young lady, if you were mine.
“Who cares?” Kennie says sullenly. “All you ever want to play is house. That’s no fun.”
Then—I can’t help myself—I yield to the terrible temptation to straighten their situation.
“Hello,” I call out, quietly, so as not to startle them. “I’ve got some real food here. Would you like some for your house?”
They leap and draw together, wide-eyed, and stare at me. I smile pleasantly and indicate my shopping bag. They’re shy. Perhaps I ought not to have mentioned food. Their mother’s told them, more than likely, not to take food from strangers.
The boy takes her by the hand.
“C’mon,” he says gruffly. “We gotta go home now.”
She holds tightly to his hand and patters beside him soundlessly as he strides. But when they reach the bushes I can hear them running, running, as though their lives depended on it. I’m left gaping after them, thinking for some reason that I’ve underestimated that girl. Or perhaps it was the boy I underestimated.
Then I’m struck with how much I must have frightened them. Oh, stupid, stupid—how could I have been so dull in the wits? They’ve seen only a fat old woman, a crumpled sleazy dress, a black hat topped (how oddly, for this place) with blue and bobbing artificial flowers, a beckoning leer, a greasy paper bag. Now they fancy they’re Hansel and Gretel, rushing headlong through the woods, wondering how to avoid the oven. Why did I speak? I can never leave well enough alone. Their scampering departure make me sigh and sigh. If they’d waited only a moment, I could have explained I meant no harm. But they’d not have believed me. Better to let them go. Yet how I wish that I might have watched them longer, seen their quick certain movements, their liveliness, the way their limbs caught the sun, making the slight hairs shine. I was too far away to see that, actually, or to smell the dusty summer on them, the sun-drawn sweat and sweet grass smell that children have in the warm weather. I’m only remembering those things from years ago.
I’ve eaten nothing today. I’d forgotten. I rummage in my bag and take out the soda biscuits and two triangles of Swiss cheese. I peel the silver paper away with my fingernails and put it back in my bag, for I can’t bear people who litter beaches. The biscuits are dry and overly salty, and the cheese tastes the way one imagines laundry soap would taste. I haven’t had these little cheeses for a long time. They used to be a higher quality, it seems to me. They used to be delicious. Everything’s so poorly made these days, trashy ingredients, not worth the money. I swallow the cheese for nourishment, but there’s no pleasure in it. That bitter bile taste is coming into my mouth again.
My bowels haven’t moved today. That’s likely why I’m getting this nausea. I feel a twinge in my intestines, so I pick up my bag and make my way back, past the silent buildings and into the forest that spreads all the way up the hill. I won’t climb far. Only enough to give me shelter. Walking is difficult. I skid and slide on brown pine needles that he thickly over the ground. Crashing, I stumble through ferns and rotten boughs that he scattered like old bones. Cedars lash my face, and my legs are lacerated with brambles. I’m afraid of stepping in some deep hollow, heavy with decayed wood and leaf mold, and losing my footing.
And then I do fall. My feet slip, both together, on a clump of wet moss, and I’m down. My elbows are skinned on rough bark, and blood seeps onto my snagged stockings from the scratches on my legs. Under my ribs the pain drums and I can hear the uneven accompaniment of my heart.
I can’t move. I can’t rise. I’m stuck here like an overturned ladybug, frantically waving to summon help that won’t come. There’s no help for it, and I’m alone. I hear my gulping noisy breath and realize I’m crying, more in chagrin than pain. I hurt all over, but the worst is that I’m helpless.
I grow enraged. I curse like Bram, summoning every blasphemy I can lay my hands on, screeching them into the quiet forest. Perhaps the anger gives me strength, for I clutch at a bough, not caring if it’s covered with pins and needles or not, and yank myself upright. There. There. I knew I could get up alone. I’ve done it. Proud as Napoleon or Lucifer, I stand and survey the wasteland I’ve conquered.
My bowels knot, and I’m reminded of why I came here. I squat and strain. Nothing. I never thought to bring a laxative with me, fool that I was. Now I’m locked like a bank vault with no key. Later, perhaps. I won’t upset myself.
I’ll ignore it, as it deserves to be. I won’t be dominated by this ignominy. But when you’re swollen with discomfort, when you sweat and tremble with the effort of unsuccessful straining, it’s very hard to think of anything else. That’s the indignity of it. At least no one else is here to see, and that’s something.
I gather my garments around me and sit down on a toppled tree trunk. I’ll rest awhile. I’m in no hurry now. I like this green blue-ceilinged place, warm and cool with sun and shade, where I’m not fussed at. Perhaps I’ve come here not to hide but to seek. If I sit quietly, willing my heart to cross over, will it obey?
But I can’t sit quietly for more than two seconds together. I never could. Although the place is right, the time may not be, and I can see as though in a mirror of never-ending depth that I’d not willingly hasten the moment by as much as the span of a breath.
Now I perceive that the forest is not still at all, but crammed with creatures scurrying here and there on multitudinous and mysterious errands. A line of ants crosses the tree trunk where I’m sitting. Solemn and in single file they march toward some miniature battle or carrion feast. A giant slug oozes across my path, flowing with infinite slowness like a stagnant creek. My log is covered with moss—I pluck at it, and an enormous piece comes away in my hand. It’s long and curly as hair, a green wig suitable for some judicial owl holding court over the thievish jays or scavenging beetles. Beside me grows a shelf of fungus, the velvety underside a mushroom color, and when I touch it, it takes and retains my fingerprint. From the ground nearby sprouts a scarlet-tipped Indian paintbrush—that’s for the scribe. Now we need only summon the sparrows as jurors, but they’d condemn me quick as a wink, no doubt.
I weary of the game. I’m like the children, playing house. I’ve nothing better to do. And now I remember some other children, once, playing at house, but in a somewhat different manner.
I wired Mr. Oatley after Bram’s death and told him my brother had died. I couldn’t very well say husband, as he was meant to have died years ago. Mr. Oatley agreed to my taking a few weeks more, although he said in his letter he didn’t greatly care for the temporary housekeeper and not to stay too long. I wouldn’t have stayed at all, but I felt I didn’t want to leave John alone yet.
The days dribbled on so slowly, and the evenings, like sand through an egg-timer. John was away such a lot. I worried and scolded him, but he only said there wasn’t anything to do around our place. Alone in the house, I would have gone demented if I hadn’t found something to do. I cleaned the place from stem to gudgeon, and God knows it certainly needed it. The attic hadn’t been touched in years. Among the old newspapers and broken rocking chairs I found a polished walnut box with a mother-of-pearl inlay upon which had been scratched Clara Shipley. Inside was a bookmark, the kind that people used to put in Bibles, a wide blue ribbon with a piece of petit-point stuck onto it, a small square bearing an embroidered legend.
No Cross No Crown.
I wondered if Clara had made it, as a girl, perhaps, but I couldn’t imagine her sausage fingers wielding the thin needle, although I could believe well enough that she might gain support and justification from the morbid motto. The box held one more trophy—a little gold ring set around with seed pearls, and in the center, covered with a speck of glass, a miniature wreath of the sort that used to be woven from the hair of the dead. The hair had once been fair, but now had turned to dull fawn, and I wondered whose it had been. Then I recalled Bram’s telling me one time that his firstborn had been a boy who died. I held the ring in my hand and I wondered how Clara must have felt about that boy, to fashion such a patient wreath and keep it hidden away here.
I took the box and its contents downstairs. I wouldn’t have bothered to take it to Jess right then, but I was sick of being alone in the house and felt I couldn’t bear to be there another instant. John had the car-buggy away, and I couldn’t drive the truck, but there was still an ancient wagon in the barn. All of Bram’s good horses were gone by that time, of course, died or sold to get cash when the truck and tractor were bought. Apart from the horse John had out, there was only an aged mare who limped, one of her forelegs having been broken and now being shorter than the other. I hitched her up, feeling the same apprehension as I always did with horses, although the stumble-legged mare couldn’t have balked to save her life.
Jess’s place was three miles away, and I was hot and dusty by the time I got there. When I drew into the yard I saw something that surprised me greatly. John’s car-buggy was there. I looped the reins around a fence post and walked over to the door, holding the walnut box out in front of me, like an offering, as though I’d been one of the Magi, I felt like a fool and wished I hadn’t come. What was John, of all people, doing here? I hesitated before I passed the window, and heard their voices. They hadn’t seen me. Only John and Jess were in the kitchen.
“There’s Calvin back,” I heard Jess say.
She thought the wagon had been her husband returning, and that he’d gone to the barn, probably. I suppose I should have walked in then, but I couldn’t bring myself to miss the opportunity.
“Yeh,” John said, without interest. Then, as though picking up the conversation where they had dropped it, “So you can see it wasn’t any sudden thing, Jess. That last sickness of his must’ve started more than a year ago.”
“I went to see him as often as I could,” Jess said. “It’s not so easy, now that Calvin’s getting on. Vern and me are running the place by ourselves, that’s what it amounts to.”
They seemed to be talking to themselves, parallel lines that never met.
“I had the doctor out that time,” John said. “But all he did was to tell me it was Dad’s liver and there wasn’t much anyone could do.”
“If I’d of gone any of tener, Calvin would have raised Cain,” Jess said. “That’s what I told Glad—why don’t you go for a change, I said, Stan’s not half so particular about meals on the dot. If I’m five minutes late, Calvin creates like the dickens. He’s worse now that his arthritis has got so bad. He sits around this kitchen until I think I’ll lose my mind.”
“I used to try to get him to eat more,” John said, “but he didn’t want it. What does she think I should have done? He got what he wanted—there wasn’t anything else that would have done him any good by that time.”
“Glad said it was all very well for me to talk,” Jess went on, “but now that Chris and young Stan weren’t there, it meant twice the work for her. Well, I said to her, it’s your own father, Gladys, you got to consider that.”
John’s fist sounded on the kitchen table.
“What’s the use?” he cried suddenly. “I don’t know why, and that’s all there is to it.”
A brief silence, and then Jess’s uncertain voice.
“What’s the matter, Johnnie?”
Johnnie. As though he’d been hers. I stiffened, and the walnut box, pressed against my breasts, hurt.
“Nothing’s the matter,” John said. “Everything’s okay. Everything’s all right.”
“You shouldn’t drink so much of that stuff,” Jess said. “It’s not like boughten liquor. It makes you feel low in your mind, and I’m darn sure it won’t do your stomach no good.”
This made me rage, to hear her handing out advice to my son. But John ignored her.
“What was he like, Jess,” he asked, “a long time ago? What did he used to be like, when you were a kid?”
“Oh, he had kind of a wild temper,” Jess said reflectively, “but he was mostly pretty easy with Glad and me as youngsters. He seemed a tall man in them days, a great big man with that black beard of his that he always hung onto even when nobody was wearing beards any more. He used to be crazy about horses—you’d remember that, Johnnie. And he used to joke a lot—he was quite a man for that. He could get us all laughing. Lord, I must’ve been only a tiny kid, then, the times I’m thinking of. It’s longer ago than I care to say.”
“Oh my God,” John said in a strained voice. “Oh m
y God—”
I couldn’t stand there any longer. I walked past the window and knocked at the screen door. John was sitting at the table with his head on his outstretched arms. But at my knock he lifted his head. I stepped heavily into the kitchen. Jess was standing by the stove. She’d grown to resemble Clara more and more. She was a short woman, squat and shapeless. Her cotton dress must once have been patterned with flowers but now it was patterned only in vague pastel blobs. Her hands had the same moist look her mother’s used to have. I thrust the box at her.
“I only came to bring you this. It was your mother’s. I found it in the attic.”
“Oh—thanks.” She was abrupt with me, as we’d had such hard words over where Bram should be buried. I didn’t want her to think the box was a peace offering, either, for it was no such thing.
“I thought you or Gladys ought to have it,” I said distantly. That’s why I brought it. It’s yours by rights.”
“Much obliged,” Jess said grudgingly.
John looked at Jess. “See? I told you she’d likely come to fetch me, if she knew I was here.”
“I didn’t,” I cried. “I didn’t—”
“Say no more,” he said, waving a hand. “I’m coming.”
He followed me out with such a mock-meekness that I could hardly bear it. And Jess, holding her mother’s box, spoke to herself but audibly.
“Well, what do you make of that?”
When we were home, I turned to John half angrily, half appealingly.
“Why did you say that to her? You know I’d never go to fetch you, John. What makes you say such things?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I said it. I’m sorry.”
I never knew he had started going around with Arlene until the night she brought him home. I heard the car pull into the yard and when I looked out I saw it was Telford’s blue Nash. Arlene was driving, and John was beside her in the front seat, his head lolling back.
She lugged him out of the car, he barely able to stand, and brought him in. His black tousled hair fell over his forehead, and he wore a fool’s grin which he put on, with terrible effort, for my benefit, but which soon dissolved. He only said one thing, but he said it over and over.
The Stone Angel Page 17