by John Weston
He walked resolutely to the front of the church. He set his school items on the front pew. He lifted the lid of the piano bench and took out his three books of piano music, which he stacked on the music holder of the black, square grand piano that squatted there in its ebony glory, a gift from someone long forgotten, someone, like the piano, from the nineteenth century. Its rheumatic legs bowed down into lion’s claws, each of which held a glass ball as tenaciously as if they were jungle delicacies newly captured.
Usually when he played the church piano he played quietly so that no passing pillar would hear him and enter to investigate. This day it did not matter. He started at the beginning of his books of Chopin nocturnes and played them in succession with little attempt at accuracy. They were too difficult for him at best, and he played too loudly and, he knew, badly. His left hand was cramped from carrying the school books, and the accompaniments that Chopin had doubtless intended to be winsome only thumped, disjointed and irregular, against the right hand melodies.
He had played for perhaps a half hour, taking greater pleasure from crashing the chords as they came, seeing nothing either in his mind or out of it—except the heavily blacked filigree of the pages—when he felt the hand placed lightly on his shoulder. Even before his eyes focused on the hand directly—a strong hand with long blunt fingers, pale-skinned against which the hair lay thick and black—he knew whose it was.
Jolly lifted his foot from the pedal and the discordant notes died, except for their faint echo on the stone walls of the church. “Hello, Jamie.”
The hand tightened on his shoulder, then relaxed. “Sounds like Chopin and that man-woman—what’s her name—had another fight.”
Jolly turned sideways on the bench. “George Sand,” he said. “I know. I never could play his stuff. Or anything else for that matter.”
“What are you doing here beating that piano to death?”
“I just don’t feel so hot, I guess.” Jolly struck a chord with his left hand. “How’d you find me here?”
“I saw you come in and followed you.” That was not the exact truth, but it was truthful enough. Actually, he had been sitting astride the chair facing the back, his chin on his folded arms, staring out the window into the bright bleakness of the street when he saw Jolly pass beside the church and around the corner to the front. A few minutes later he had heard faintly the sound of the piano. He was alone in the apartment, except for the child, who slept deeply and sprawled in his crib, because Mandy had already gone to work. What his thoughts were when Jolly intercepted his line of vision probably not even he knew. Possibly he wondered why he stayed here in this loud and dottering town with its four-square streets bordered by mongrel façades of glass brick and neon and yellow tile standing in haphazard discipline before the buildings that had once shaded the red carriage of the Territorial Governor on his way from his afternoon game at The Tree Frog to his split-log mansion.
“Oh,” said Jolly. He faced the piano again. His fingers dawdled.
Jamie paced the width of the church and back to the center. His glance scanned the single circular window above the baptistry whose magenta and blue and gold glass cast foreshortened fragments of color across the carpeted floor and purled the edge of the single step down from the pulpit.
“This where you and Mom go?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Jamie sat on the first bench behind Jolly, his hands jammed into his front pockets, his legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles.
“What do you come here for? I mean, now—like this.”
“No reason. The piano, I guess.”
He watched the back of Jolly’s head for a moment, then let his own back against the edge of the bench. He stared at the high raftered ceiling from which hung the church lights on long brass chains.
“What’s eatin’ you, anyway.”
“Nothing.”
“You sure are friendly. What happened to all the talk?”
Jolly flipped a page of the book. He leaned his left elbow on the top edge of the piano and began to pick out the melody. He did not answer.
“Well, Jesus Christ!” Jamie flung himself up from the bench. He sat down again, abruptly. He propped his chin in his hands and eyed the round window as if it might explode daggers of glass for his insurrection.
“You moping about the same girl? Or another one,” he said.
Jolly laughed, once, in spite of himself. “Another one, I guess.”
Jamie waited. “Well? Go ahead.”
“No.” Jolly turned. “Only—one thing—you’re right.”
“What does that mean?” Jamie shifted his position on the bench. “I don’t suppose I can smoke in here, can I?”
“No.”
“No. Well, what do you mean?”
“You were right. Take any one of them whenever you can and get it before somebody else does.”
“You still talking about girls?”
“Yes.”
“I never said anything like that.” Jamie’s voice lost its flippant hem. Then he smiled. “You’re out of your mind. I always thought so.”
Jolly babbled the topmost keys of the piano. “Maybe,” he said.
“ Joll, you know I’m kidding.”
“I know.”
“You’re wrong. I didn’t say anything like that.”
“No, you didn’t say it. But you—you lived it. You know damn well you did. You always have. Traipsing all over the damn country years on end. And I know. Getting it wherever you could from anybody you could, and did you ever think that—”
“Knock it off, Jolly.”
“—that maybe I—maybe somebody around here might want—Forget it. You’re right. I said you were right.”
Jamie was standing beside him. “Listen, you moron, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” He clenched Jolly’s shoulder with one hand. “Do you hear? You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Ouch!”
Jamie jerked back his hand and jammed it into his pocket again. He paced across the front of the room to where the stained glass laced a gilt edge on the floor.
“Well, don’t preach at me. If you can do that—if you can sleep with them all and get up and hitch up your pants and walk out, well so can I. And I will. Goddamit, I will—”
“Shut up!” Jamie’s shout reverberated against the gray stone. He came closer to Jolly. “I’m not preaching. God knows I’m not the one.” His hands went to either side of Jolly’s face and then his shoulders. “Listen, you know where I’ve been since the last time? Do you know where I’ve been? I’m going to tell you, and it’s not going to do you any good, but it’s going to maybe do me some good, and you’re going to listen and then you’re not going to say anything about it. Not to me or anybody.
“When I left here I knocked around some. Taking whatever windfalls there were. I landed in Gallup, and that’s a dirty, stinking mud-hole, and then I took a job on a ranch about thirty or forty miles south of there. It was a pretty good ranch. Or could have been. The land was OK, just that everybody on the whole goddamned place was either no good or crazy. Or both. Even old Tampkens who owned the place. He was the worst. He is—or was—a near giant in his day, I guess, only now he walks hunched on two canes and drags his feet and you couldn’t see anything of his face much. Only eyes stuck in all that filthy hair. But he could get around. He couldn’t ride a horse, or anything like that, but he could get around. And he could use those canes for something more than walking. He beat the horses with them, or the dogs, or whatever got in his way. Including his old woman, I guess. Anyway, at night sometimes we’d hear her and him up at the big house carrying on. He’d be yelling and she’d be screaming. We none of us ever knew what was going on, but the old woman never did anything in the daytime but sit out in back under a chinaberry tree and fan herself and shake her head and talk. Not to anybody. Just talking.
“It was a pretty good job. Not too much to do because, like I said, nobody worked very hard at ranch
ing, and there were lots of hands. The pay was all right and there wasn’t anything to spend it on except tail. Yeh, there’s the funny part. The real funny part. There were these two Mexican girls that cooked and cleaned and stuff, and the old man’s daughter—poor crazy thing like her mother, only an Amazon and ugly as hell—and his boy. We could have anything on the place, including the boy, I guess, if we’d wanted him. Except the old bastard’s Indian girl that he kept up at the house.
“Anyway, Tampkens would sit out on his back porch every night and wait, rocking in that infernal homemade chair of his that you could hear squeaking the whole time you were in there. He’d sit there and wait for the men to come up from the bunkhouse to the girls’ rooms there at the back of the house. And then on payday he’d keep out two bucks for every trip you made. Unless you picked the Amazon. Then it wasn’t but a dollar. But nobody picked her much, which made the old man sore, but she was crazy, like I said, and the men didn’t hanker much to her anyway, unless they knew next payday was already short, because she’d near killed a little guy a year before when she was first starting and lost her head and almost crushed him to death with her legs.
“I asked the other men some about the Indian girl. They didn’t know anything about her. Just keep away, they said, if I knew what was good for me. And so I kept away. Until I couldn’t any more.
“I’d been there four or five months before I ever really saw her up close. I was just passing one evening about sundown, back from the outhouse, and there she was throwing out feed in the chicken yard. She had the feed held up in one of those long, shiny skirts she wore, and was sort of talking, low like, to the chickens. I just stopped there by the fence and watched her. You see, the sun, slanting the way it was, made her skin like—like copper, maybe, or rose-gold like these windows, and her hair soft so you wanted to touch it. I just stood there, leaning on that chicken-wire fence till she came around by me. And then she looked up and kind of hollered. But quiet. Then she smiled. And Joll, her teeth and her eyes. You’ve never seen—you’ll never see anything like that. I hadn’t meant for anything to happen. I hadn’t, but it sure-God did anyway. Even after dark when she knew the old son-of-a-bitch would be looking for her, we stayed down there in the grass by the creek. A long time.”
Jamie’s voice stopped for a moment. The variegated stains spilled magenta and blue and gold slowly across the floor.
“We went on that way for two or three weeks, I guess, meeting down there in the long grass after she fed the chickens. Sometimes we didn’t do anything. Sometimes we just sat there and watched the sky turn colors and pale-out until dark came. We would talk, too. Or more, she listened and I talked. You know something funny? Even when I left there, even when—I still don’t know anything about her. Nothing but her name. Not where she came from, or how she came to be there. Nothing beyond those times by the creek, and then later, when we lived together.
“We lived together, the Indian girl and me, for five months. Five months. The old man let us fix up one of the sheds and live on there at the place. I should’ve known then when he let us fix up the shed and move in. I should’ve known something when I told him in the first place. He’d just laughed. Laughed like an idiot. The only time he ever laughed out loud that I know of except—except there at the end. He’d laughed and said she was going to have a baby—his—that she was three or four months already. I didn’t know that, but I said I knew that and it didn’t matter.” Jamie chuckled, once, to himself. “I must have looked like a goddamned peacock standing there on the back porch facing that old rotten bastard in his old rotten chair, saying how I knew and I didn’t care and how I wanted her anyway. And I did. God, I did. She was like nothing you’ll ever see. She was tall and light on her feet and that same copper brown all over and quiet and better to me than anybody ever was to her.
“Whenever I saw Tampkens after that, which wasn’t any oftener than I could help, he’d just laugh, only not out loud. You couldn’t hear anything, but you could see his eyes wrinkle up and his shoulders would shake. I hated him then. I hated him so much I could have killed him, but I’m glad I didn’t. I’m glad, because he’s worse off alive. And I hope he lives a hundred years until the flesh drops off his rotten bones while he can’t do anything but sit there in his chair and watch it drop.”
Jolly watched him pace back into the light that emblazoned his legs with gorgeous colors.
“She swelled up big, of course. And I knew what I’d gotten, but I hated to see her swell up like that and it not mine. But I’d made my bargain, and I guessed I could stick to it. Only I didn’t know and she didn’t know. And the old man laughing to himself.
“Maybe if she’d been a white woman I’d have known she was sick as she was. She was always quiet anyway, and I never heard her complain about the housework, if you could call that a house, or the work she went on doing around the place, feeding the chickens and things, though she didn’t have to. Her face was more beautiful, if that’s possible, as her time came on.
“It wasn’t until two or three weeks before the baby—before it came, that I found her one evening when I came in from work, lying on the bed and she couldn’t get up. And she never did get up after, that except when I helped her, when I nearly carried her a few steps around the shack every day. I should have gone into Gallup and got a doctor anyway. But she didn’t want one. She said she’d be all right. She said she knew how to take care of things, and the Mexican girls came down every day and helped some and they said they knew all about babies being born, and that she’d be OK. Only they didn’t know. But the old man knew.
“It was born one afternoon late, just after we’d come in from work and the men had gone to the well to wash up. When I walked in the shack I knew it was coming. She hadn’t yelled out or anything—she didn’t the whole time until the end—but her legs were twisting on the bed, and her lip was bleeding where she’d bitten it, and her face and hair were wet on the pillow. I don’t remember what I did really, but the next thing, the Mexican girls were down there in the shack gibbering and crossing themselves and running back to the big house for water and rags and scissors and stuff. It was coming wrong, they said, and god, god, it must have hurt her. Sometimes she passed out and I wished she’d never come to so it wouldn’t hurt her.
“Finally it began to come out, and I couldn’t stand her eyes on me like that, and her sweating and bleeding at the mouth, and I reached in with my hands and pulled it out. Then she screamed once.
“It was in my hands.
“God, not in the worst nightmare did I ever know anything like that could come from a human being and that person still be alive. It was a baby, all right, I guess, but it was all blood and open sores and you couldn’t see its face except a mouth, for the one pus-like mess that mashed its face all together into something like—like I don’t know what. You couldn’t tell was it a boy or girl because that part and all down its legs was eaten away too, and bloody, and you could see the bare white muscles in its legs move where the meat was gone, when it kicked.
“I laid it down on the bed there while I cut the cord. And then I slapped one of the Mexicans and left a bloody streak across her face to get her to stop praying long enough to work on the woman.
“I put it on the table and poured alcohol on a rag to hold over its face. It didn’t take but a few seconds for it to stop kicking. It wouldn’t have lived anyway, but it might have.”
Jamie’s voice dropped almost too low to hear. “And that would have been unspeakable beyond the telling of it.
“Then I took it in my hands out of the shack without looking back, and walked with it up to the big house just as the sky was coloring beyond the creek bank, up to the back porch where the old man sat rocking and watching me come. I put it down on his lap and I said, ‘There’s your baby,’ and I walked away. I could hear him laughing and that goddamned chair squeaking even clear down at the corral.
“I rode away from there that night. I don’t know much else that happened, ot
her than the car, and California, and the doctors. They say I’ll be OK,” Jamie laughed. “They say I’ll probably be just fine. Lucky, they say.”
Jolly watched the pale hands approach his face.
“Don’t jump,” Jamie said. “They’re clean. The doctors said they’re clean.” He drew Jolly up from the bench until their faces nearly touched. “Understand, Jolly. It wasn’t what the old man had known and done anyway that matters. It wasn’t what I had to do to—to the baby that matters. But I didn’t even go back in there. She loved me, I know it, and I didn’t even go back. I could have done that. She must have waked up sometime and wondered why I wasn’t there. I could have done that much, for the two hours or the two days or the two weeks she would have lived. That’s what matters. I loved her and she was dying and I ran.”
Jamie’s fingers relaxed. He fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and then put it back.
“I guess there’s nothing—no moral or anything like that—in this, and I told you there wasn’t. But when you start talking about what I’ve been up to, and the other night, when you were talking about that girl and about visiting the old place—well, I needed to tell, Joll. I’ve been back to the old place, too. I’ve seen it like it is now, only mostly I’ve seen it like it was. I’ve seen it days and nights all over this country.
“That used to be the past, the good past, and it was there to remember whenever you needed it. That and the good things you did—or you thought they were good—with the guys you ran with and the girls. Only, when something big happens, something big and maybe awful like what happened over there, then that’s the past. The good past is like it’s been wiped away like you clean off a blackboard, and you take your chances, will the new be beautiful like the old, or rotten. You’ve got to do it. Nobody can stop it. But you take your chances.”