The Puzzleheaded Girl

by Christina Stead

  Cheerfully, jolly Mid-Western Sam Parsons declared: “They’ve gone away, my friend. I’m sorry you had the trouble. Sorry to put you out. They’ve been gone two days. Went to stay with Ruth’s people, in Springfield, Ohio. Where are you from, my friend?”

  “Took a goddamn taxi all the way from New York,” answered the drunk sulkily.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” cried Sam affectionately.

  “What did they go for? Why the hell didn’t they stay? Who are you anyway?” said the crestfallen merrymaker. Sam kept up his out-of-date jolly style, while one drunk argued with the other and with the taxi-driver, who said he was going to turn around and get back home.

  “Well,” said the drunk, “have you got a drink anyway?”

  “I’m sorry, my friend, I never touch liquor.”

  “What the hell sort of a dump,” muttered the drunk to himself; but he was so fuddled that he allowed himself to be taken by the sleeve and headed back to the taxi. A cheerful drunk shouted, “Where can we get a drink round here anyway?”

  “Wait till I get the lamp,” shouted Parsons with overwhelming good nature, “watch out or you’ll be in the creek.”

  “This damn creek is everywhere,” said one.

  Taking the storm lantern, Parsons now hurried after them, apologizing comfortably and he reached the car, where the rest of the crew, all drunk, were pushing each other into the seats. “Go to Lambertville, go to Trenton, plenty of drinks there,” cried Parsons cheerfully. “Go to New Hope, lots of friends of yours there, I expect.” The car began backing and filling, the taxi-driver began grumbling and cursing, doors slammed and the car hobbled towards the bridge, Sam stood gaily waving the lantern and shouting, “Good-bye, boys, good-bye: better luck next time. Mind the turn, mind the creek.” They got away. This time the little red lamp went faster and winked engagingly in and out of the greenery. Parsons took his lantern, went in and locked all the doors. What luck that they had been so drunk! What luck that not one knew the house. They could have taken it by storm. What luck that his breezy, plainsman manner had thrown them off. He went up the wooden stair into the second storey and found the mother, father and child sitting hand in hand on the iron bedstead in Laban’s workroom, silent, their thin stomachs tucked in, their thin forms only visible by the pale light from the summer fields.

  “We did not move the whole time,” said Ruth. The child was silent. They went down, ate a few scraps of food, Laban drank only one cup of coffee and for once they went to bed early and almost in silence. Saying good-night, Ruth wrung Sam’s hand and kissed him on both cheeks. “My brother!” She turned in the dark doorway, on the step to the stone house, and said, “You saved our family tonight.”

  “They would have taken me away by force,” said Laban, pallid behind her and standing in the dark; “I’m strong but there were how many of them?—five or six?”

  The next afternoon he walked with Sam and talked. “Have you had any more nightmares?”

  “Oh, that phase is ended. Seeing the gang last night brought it home to me.”

  In the morning of the following Saturday, that is, two days later, Laban came downstairs new-washed, shaved, in his best tailormade light grey suit, his shoes polished, his hat on and his satchel in his hand. The hat was pulled down to partly hide his scar and he had a smooth superior smile. He said he was taking the ten-thirty bus to Trenton to catch the New York train. He had to see his agent. They were not to worry. He would be back not later than six or seven. Ruth, wiping her hands on her sacking apron, looked with worry at her husband, now an attractive New Yorker. Had he money, this and that, she asked.

  Ruth was quiet all day, prepared a good evening meal; and Laban did not return that night. They locked the doors, but left the blinds up, with both kitchen lights on. Next day, from Newbold’s, they telephoned the New York agent. He had not seen Laban. They waited while he telephoned others: no one had seen him. “I cannot telephone that crowd,” said Ruth, “and let them know he’s away. He may have stopped over somewhere and be back this morning.” All day, as they waited, she talked about those men who had come in the taxi; and past events. “I met Laban at his own engagement party. As soon as he saw me, he knew the other affair was off; but he used to see that girl and I didn’t feel I could stop him. I had taken him away from her.” She showed Sam a letter she had got in Paris, when Laban was wandering around the countryside, lost, memoryless, brainless, a dreadful raving thing, eating nothing and craving any kind of alcohol, an obscene insulting letter signed by Laban and his friends. “Why did you keep it?” “He came back from there. That was our low point.” Some of the names were those of well-known New York writers, some talented men. “But they’re unable to quit because they’re empty and cynical and they can’t let anyone else get out. They love to see Laban changing from a man to an animal and from an animal to a log. They can talk about it for months.”

  The letter said:

  “Dear Ruth, As Laban says, Ruth my truth, you should have been with us last night though no one missed you, least of all your dearly beloved Laban. He was hugging Jenny tight but as usual paying even more attention to the bottle. As for the bottle, he had it bad. When he was going to drink out of the bottle he groaned out that it was blood and when he spilled it he tried to drink the blood off the counter, my blood, Ruth, my truth’s blood, he said. How’s that for a beginning? He groaned, I’m drinking blood! Oh, boy. We all had a time. Don’t be counting the minutes baby: he’s going to be good this time—”

  and more.

  Pinned to this faded letter was a note from Laban written in pencil:

  “Oh, Ruth, borrow the money and come over and save me. I love only you and Francis but I am on a spree and cannot stop. I am sober now, but it is not over and I need you. You are my angel, oh, thousands of angels say your name around me; but save me. I don’t know where I was last night. My father came through the ceiling and walked slowly past me, looking at me with disgust and irony. He went on moving and moved past me. I heard sobbing and I don’t know if it was I. Perhaps it was you. There was a vague face in front of me and I heard voices of all kinds. You see what has happened to me because I am alone. Take no notice of what you hear. Remember I love you and Francis.”

  Ruth looked on with dry eyes as Sam read these documents and she remarked, “You see, I know he loves me; and so do they. And it’s inhuman joy to them to take him away from us and to kill him with drink. They know he’ll die of it some day. They want to be there when Laban Davies dies.”

  They waited, in all, ten days. There was no news from any quarter. “Let me go to New York and look for him.” “Don’t leave me, Sam. There’s something peculiar about this place. Do you know I have an obsession that there’s someone in the attic, a huge hairy man.”

  “No one could live in that attic,” said Sam laughing.

  “It’s big enough: there’s a huge room up there,” she said. “There’s no one there!”

  “When you go out for walks on the track, Sam, in the morning especially, I feel sure he’s there. I feel sure I’ll hear him coming down the stairs.” For the enclosed staircase in the stone house, which opened by glazed doors into the first and second stories, went on up to a clean and roomy attic, a well-lighted attic. “It’s foolish of me to have such fancies; I’m not the type of woman.”

  In ten days Ruth did not weep and Frankie, though subdued, asked no questions. She encouraged her son to go out each day with the boys. The lights in the farm-kitchen blazed all night. They sat up late, with the blinds undrawn, talking. Ruth explained that they had never seen the owner, Mr. Dilley, a man about sixty-eight, a baker in Jersey City. He had put two thousand dollars’ savings into the farm and borrowed the rest from a bank; total price four thousand dollars. It had come cheap because it had been run as a berry farm for a year or two by a brother and sister and had failed. She did not know who the original farmers were who had bought the creek and the fringe of Sobieski’s land and built the double house on
two acres. The Davies wanted to buy the place but had not yet the money. They paid the rent to Thornton, who knew Dilley, and now considered himself the estate manager. “He’s always snooping around. He takes the rent but I’m not sure he gives an account of it to poor old Mr. Dilley.”

  “Is he poor?”

  Ruth was puzzled. “I don’t really know. Someone was ill, the wife I think. They don’t want the place, but they hang on to it. It’s hard to give up something you’ve acquired with your life savings.”

  “Thornton’s pleasant to talk to, he’s a shrewd modern man. He was telling me about his ten sons, all farmers.”

  “Oh, yes, he’s very hail-fellow-well-met,” said Ruth furiously; “but he always has an object.”

  Sam laughed.

  Ruth snapped, “There’s a lofty attitude in his friendly smile. You don’t know how the yokel, the clod looks at city intellectuals.”

  “All I know is, he’s very pleasant to me.”

  “Besides Laban, you’re the only angel I know among men,” said Ruth, and suddenly began to cry.

  The ten nights passed and no figure came along the track. The thicketed meadow in which they lived led a simple life of its own without terrors. It was a hot fertile summer. The fire flies walked up all the windowpanes putting their lamps on and off; and with their sparks outlined the branches. One day Parsons went to New York and returned, without having found a trace of Davies. Ruth stayed there because at any time Laban might return and she was his truth. The boy, at first oppressed, soon began to treat Parsons as a father. They walked out, hand in hand, talking eagerly. They sat up late every night; till dawn the lights streamed out to leafy creek and track.

  On the morning of the eleventh day, young Newbold the mailman blew his horn. Riding with him was a boy from the bus company. A man had been riding back and forth between Trenton and Lambertville for the last ten days, sometimes getting off at Trenton, sometimes coming straight back. He had slept a few times in the Lambertville bus-barn. He kept saying, at first, that he had to get home. He had been seen yesterday morning last. The boy went down with Ruth and Sam in Jeroboam; but when they reached the big bus-garage they found only a bus-conductor. He said the man in question, who did not know his name, was dressed in a cotton shirt and grey trousers, bareheaded and barefooted now, had gone off yesterday to see old Doctor Young, “the old doc who drinks.” When they called upon Dr. Young at eleven this morning, the door was opened by a strong thick-set man, amiably drunk.

  Dr. Young said,

  “You see I am fond of liquor myself and I recognized how ill your husband was. He told me the sidewalk was—” He checked himself and continued, “I knew he needed a little rest; and I gave him a sedative. But his spree was not over. If I’d locked him in, you see, he might have gone out of his mind. He would have been locked in with his hallucinations. I had to go to my patients and when I came back he was gone.”

  The next morning Ruth left with her boy for New York. After she had left Frankie with a friend, she borrowed money and set out on her search for Laban, who might be anywhere in the States or might even have left the country. Sober, he would not borrow money; drunk, he was very ingenious.

  Sam Parsons closed the farmhouse and gave the keys to Farmer Thornton. On his way, he looked back at the place through the first trees. Set back beyond the great pin-oak, the grasses, the round meadows, with old trees beyond, and by the potato patch, with weeds and native flowers grown shoulder high, and flocks of birds, gold, blue, red, feeding there, folded in by green hill, deep summer trees and dripping creek, Sam thought,

  “I must remember how pretty it is; it’s really enchanted; it smiles: it’s a dream cottage. Clare would love it.”

  He went along the track and into the sunny stretch beside the blackberry bushes where there were this morning seven cottontails. They waited for him to come right up to them before they scattered. He passed Thornton’s heavy-headed fields along and up the hill.

  The next summer Sam and Clare Parsons took the cottage from the Davies who were now living in California. Mr. Dilley offered the cottage to them for a year for $150 and this they accepted. On a sunny June morning Mr. Thornton met them in front of Dilley’s farmhouse with the keys and went around the place showing them with pride how clean it was. He had gone to the expense of putting new paper shades on all the windows. He soon left, saying he had ploughing to do, but they could call on him for everything—and, if they wanted it, he had milk for them at fourteen cents. “You will find it every morning and cream, too, in the springhouse,” and he showed them his duckpond, his springhouse, his chicken run. The springhouse was a fresh little cave with ferns in it. A long letter was waiting for them from Ruth Davies, asking them to take Frankie for the summer, for Laban was working on his book. They had had a very difficult winter; the boy was pale and over-excited. The next year he would go to a camp “reserved for children of leaders” but this year he was too keen on politics, he couldn’t sleep for thinking of politics; and they wanted him to roam the country with the Tanner and Sobieski boys again. “Let him be a barefoot boy with face of tan.” Ruth enjoined them not to have any dealings with Thornton, but to get their dairy produce and chickens from Mrs. Sobieski, who was so cheap. She had, indeed, already written to Mrs. Sobieski about it.

  They went up the hill to visit Mrs. Sobieski, a young good-humoured gold-haired plump slattern; and said they would take poultry and eggs but no milk. She was sitting in her kitchen, a wooden lean-to, peeling potatoes for her boys, and the farm-lad. She remarked joyously, “Don’t worry about it. Sit down, have some lemon tea. I had a letter from Ruth, but don’t think about it. Take the things from Thornton: he’s not so bad; he’ll like it better. Ruth always wanted to help me because I’m a widow with so many boys; but I’m a happy woman with all my boys. No hard feelings with anyone. I can sell all I grow; I sell it round. You don’t have to buy my chickens; perhaps you don’t like chickens.” They parted on excellent terms. “We’ll visit you—become friends,” cried Sam Parsons. “Eh! You mustn’t visit me, I’m too busy,” she cried standing at last in the shaky doorway and waving her hand. “If you want to see me, drop in, but I can’t visit.” Off they went.

  Parsons said, “So we are friends of everyone; and we will be left alone. You’ll be happy here. Last summer I was thinking all the time, Clare would like it here, this is a nature-lover’s ideal, a house sitting on the grass, completely open but inaccessible, neighbours on every hill but invisible, trees and fields all round, and as rich in birds and animals as a Breughel painting.”

  Clare laughed. “A Breughel painting! Well, not only the sleep of reason, but nature breeds horrors; and this is where you feel the multitudes, the creeping and running, the anthills and wasp nests, the earth breeding at every pore, there’s a sort of horror in fertility and rioting insanity in the hot season. I love it.”

  “Yes, it is the place for you: you will be close to nature.”

  “But you don’t like nature?”

  “Why do you say that? I’ve learned to look at things and recognize a few. I’m not the bookish man I was.”

  “What I like about the house is it’s so lowset that nature comes in on all sides, you see nothing else—the track only, but it’s like occasional people passing behind the scenes. We’re sitting on the stage and what’s happening is animal life, faint sounds, the shrieking of the birds, trees cracking; you could be thousands of miles away from people and yet fields that have been ploughed for two hundred years are a few yards off and they can hear what we say in Strassers’ springhouse.”

  The warm spring air was thick damp and breeding. There was no wind in the hollow. Sometimes it roared over them. Occasionally a car, boy or heavy animal passed over the bridge and the plank flopped. Though they were city people they had confidence in this silent sunny spot, beautiful from all angles. “It’s spellbound.” “You mean you are?” “No, it is.” “Spellbound.” “Joy and trust breathes out of it. And it’s a bird sanctuary here
, they say in town. Every bird is here that’s been chased out of ploughland and uprooted woodland.” “It’s pure happiness here.”

  In the evening they unpacked. Clare opened a drawer in the kitchen table for the tableware; but they found a large assortment of cutlery. She spread all this on the big kitchen table; many carving knives, and many unshapely, blunt, notched, tarnished, ill-assorted and meaningless blades. She rolled all the knives into an old red cloth, pushed them to the back of the big old bread oven and set in front of them two old iron casseroles. Then there were quite usual objects, an axe and a hatchet for chopping the wood, behind the stove, then an axe that no doubt Mr. Thornton had put on the porch for them with the new wood and a boy’s jack-knife thrust into a crack in the porch. She took all these to the barn and locked them in, sticking the jack-knife into a crack in a joist. Then she locked the empty barn and ran to the sitting-room of the stone house which contained very little furniture. There was an upright piano, a small table, a short wall cupboard cut into the wall and painted to resemble a curtained window. It contained part of a dinner service, and behind a large serving dish were a carving knife, fork and steel and several dinner knives. It looked as if everyone who had used the house had come fully equipped with knives. The wife was nervous and began to hurry, to get all done before Sam came in.

  He was out on the track taking his last walk of the night. He would soon be in, certainly; for the mourning dove had begun his grieving and sobbing, a desolate sound in this sunken place now quickly filling with the dark. To Sam the mourning dove was horrible. She looked everywhere now, up the chimney, in the grate, under the divan, under the piano—nothing anywhere. Sitting in the kitchen, once more, hearing how someone trod on a loose plank, hearing the mourning dove, she thought of something. She lifted the piano lid and looked in. In fact, there was a hunter’s knife in its sheath; the sheath was mouldy, the knife rusted. Clare thought it might be useful, so she put it with her own to polish it. That was all. Except that a few minutes after they went to bed, she remembered that she had not looked behind the divan or behind the piano. They had locked the doors and windows. She went down, unlocked the staircase door, went into the stone house and looked. Behind the piano she found another axe. She took it out to the barn, locked it in and came back. Out of doors she had no fears; it was a cool, slightly breathing night with many powdery stars. It was three nights later that she told Sam, as a joke. Sam was untenanted by premonitions and grisly fancies and feared them the more. But to Clare they were an unrecognized part of nature, like the faint sound of a spider scuttling under leaves, or a cat’s footfalls. Few heard them; they were there.