On our return from the last of all those trips I sat down with a sigh in the recliner, more than ever the dominant piece in that now bare little room. The place smelled of disinfectant. The time seemed to me momentous, the turning point in poor Ernest’s life. The past was past, the future had arrived.
Ernest, too, sat down with a sigh. Looking about him at his altered arrangements, he, too, was evidently conscious that the moment marked a milestone. “Well,” he said, “it come awful close to backfiring on me but I seen my chance and I took it. Lord knows it was long enough in coming!”
It took me some while to grasp what I was being told—after all, it isn’t every day that somebody lets you in on his having murdered his mother. So long, in fact, did it take me that I detected in Ernest some confusion, some regret for having misgauged my acuity. It now appeared that mine was the same incorrigibly sentimental view of him as the one the villagers all had. From them he knew he had nothing to fear; he might have shot his mother dead at high noon on the main street and they would have sworn to a man that the killer had been somebody else. Me he credited with more imagination, or maybe with less imagination and more common sense, more knowledge of life as it is, and I had disappointed him.
I nodded, and with my gesture regained Ernest’s confidence.
Nobody could have looked more impenitent. He positively radiated the certainty that he had done what anybody else would have done in his place. While hoping to succeed in his desperate gamble, he was quite prepared to fail, to go out with the old lady rather than go on with her any longer. To be sure of her not recovering he had waited until the last possible moment before calling for help, risking his life and coming within an inch of losing it.
He had come through. Ernest van Voorhees was free, his own man, at long last. Not much time was left him, perhaps, but that made it all the more precious, was all the more reason to seize it. A family of his own he would never have, no wife, no children, no grandchildren, but at least he would have himself to himself for however long he lasted.
I thought of Oedipus the King, of his horrendous self-punishment for his awful crimes, of Prince Orestes and the bloodthirsty Furies that pursued him. Or, rather, I tried to think of them but in their larger than life size, their exalted station, their superhuman suffering, those legendary figures eluded me. Unlike those of Oedipus, Ernest’s bright blue eyes, still in their sockets, shone with the innocence of a child. Sister-sufferers though they were, I could not, here in this tiny tin trailer with its color TV and its La-Z-Boy recliner, equate Clytemnestra and old lady van Voorhees. The high-flown word parricide that had entered so clamorously through the front door of my mind, finding itself woefully out of place, slunk quietly out the back. My brain spun but not with horror and shock, rather because it all seemed so simple, so down to earth.
The Ernest who comes now to work on our grounds is a new man and it shows in his new, sprightlier pace. He has not had to tell Mother half a dozen times on the way over where she is nor listen yet again to the tale of the man on the roof of the Bohnsack farmhouse. She is not dozing in the cab of the truck as he works. He will not have to spoon-feed her this evening nor go to the Laundromat tomorrow morning with the bedsheets she has soiled in the night.
Meanwhile both his fortitude and his weakness equally excite the admiration of the villagers. To the one they ascribe his reappearance at the Grange Hall, where one night recently he won the door prize, and to the other his frequenting the local bar, breaking a lifetime’s abstinence, in an effort to drown his sorrow. Typical is our Giuseppina, who, pausing in her work and looking out the window and catching sight of Ernest, fetches a sign and says, “He may not be quite all there, as they say, but he has feelings the same as anybody else and he’s a brave soul to carry on as he does all alone in this terrible cruel world with nothing left to live for.”
A Fresh Snow
IT WAS silly and a waste of time. School was not even out yet. She could not expect him for half an hour at least. Still she sat at the window watching the corner of the block.
Snow, dingy with soot, lay thick upon the window ledge. The street ran with slush and through the gray light hovering in the street the mass of buildings opposite looked black and close.
As she watched, a few large flakes began to fall. They lighted on the window ledge, and bending forward to look at them, her breath condensing on the glass, she thought of the thrilling, rare snows of her childhood.
She had been five years old when she was wakened in the night to see her first snow. Wrapped in quilts, she and her brother had stood at the window wiping away the steam of their breaths and peering into the blackness, while their father told of the snows he had seen. Two inches fell that night, a good fall, and in the morning the grown-ups were gay and happy for the children’s sake. After breakfast everyone went out with soup bowls. Each looked for a drifted spot to fill his bowl; even so, they had to scrape lightly to keep from picking up dirt. They ate it sprinkled with sugar and flavored with vanilla extract. Her brother came home in midmorning, for school had been let out to celebrate, and through the afternoon they watched the snow disappear. By night it was gone. She was eight before she saw her next.
Otherwise the winters there were fitful times, days of pale sun followed by days of slashing rain. How often she had sat looking out at the dripping trees and the colorless, sodden fields. Seven years before she had sat all day for weeks at the parlor window in her brother Leon’s house. Then she was waiting for Donald to be born. Leon had taken her in when she grew too big to work in the confectionery or climb the three flights of the boardinghouse in town. She had had to stay behind when George was transferred from the camp. There was no housing in California and George was expecting to go overseas any day. Donald was three years old before his father saw him.
She had met George in the confectionery where she was the cashier. The soldiers from the camp were mostly Northern boys and the town mistrusted girls who went out with them. She always rang up their bills and counted out their change with a quickness which discouraged conversation. But George never tried to say more than “thank you.” Perhaps it piqued her that her distance suited him that well. In time he grew friendly and she did not remember his former silence against him. One thing right off stood in his favor: he was not an officer. She mistrusted even Southerners who were officers. And once you got to know him George turned out to be a regular tease. She had always enjoyed being gently teased, and when George mimicked her accent, saying, “Yawl fetch it an Ah hep ye tote it,” she felt she was being appreciated in a pleasant new way. He teased her also with outlandish tales about the North, but she was more impressed when he told her the truth, such as when he described the bolt factory where he worked, which employed more men on each shift than there were in her county seat. She began to compare him to the local boys whom she knew she might at times have had, and she was glad she had done nothing hasty. To have been forced to settle down with never a glimpse of the world beyond came to seem a dreary life.
What foolish notions she had formed then, and how long ago it seemed. Now she was a regular city dweller. If her kinfolks could see her would they think she was much changed?
A sudden darkening of the light made her turn to the window. The snow was thickening. Down in the street an old bent man was groping along. He was pulling a child’s sled on which rode a small carton of groceries. His rapid breath condensed in feeble whiffs and he swayed a little from side to side.
Cities, as she had thought so many times, were no place for old folks. No one had time to help or notice them. Whenever she saw an old man waiting helplessly on a street corner or risking the traffic she was thankful that her poor father had lived and died down South. She was glad she had been with him that last year, glad that he had lived to see Donald and glad she had let him believe that when George came back they were going to settle on the old homeplace. He had liked George. He liked a man, no matter where he was from, who looked you square in the eye, who put som
ething into his handshake, who was not a damned smart aleck. Of course he had felt bound to say something about the Civil War. She remembered well his surprise and her own when George said he did not know whether any of his ancestors had fought in it.
She closed her eyes and saw her father’s grave lying under a steady gray rain. She could see the whole family plot and she named them off in order in her mind, with their dates and epitaphs. Another month and it would be graveyard-cleaning time. Surely that old custom had not died out since she went away. It had been such a good time for all, a little melancholy, but not solemn, as you might think. Everyone came early bringing garden rakes and worn-down brooms. It would be the first nice day in spring, still cool enough to work comfortably and make it pleasant to smell the fires of rotted leaves. The children ran and played, being careful not to tread on any graves, of course. It was not thought good taste to clean the graves of your own kin. You cleaned other people’s plots and trusted them to clean yours. The children’s special chore was to clean and decorate the graves of little children. Each brought a “pretty”—something weatherproof—a china doll or a glass doorknob or a colored bottle, and with these they decorated the graves while they told again the sweetly sad story of each dead child. Then came dinner on the ground. Each woman brought the dish she was famous for and everybody knew without asking whom to compliment on each dish. Her mother always brought pecan pie. It was a time known for forming friendships among the children and courtships among the young. By night the graves had been raked and swept and the headstones straightened, and by then all the men had gone a few times out to the woods where a bottle was kept, so everyone went home feeling tired and happy, pleasantly melancholy, and good friends with the whole community. It seemed you were born knowing the names of every member of every family and when they were born and died, and after a while it came to seem that you had known them all personally all your life and their loss was a personal loss to you.
Often she had wondered where the city dead were buried and how they were looked after, but a feeling of propriety came over her and she hesitated to ask. Surely they could not be as forgotten as they seemed to be. In George’s family they never mentioned their dead. You would think they had no kin beyond the living ones.
She saw in her mind the unfinished stone beside her father’s grave. It could not be long before her mother would lie there. Would she see her again before that time? What would the date read on that stone? Donald seemed to be losing his memory of his grandmother. Would he see her once more so he could have a memory of her? George would have let her have her mother with her, but her mother would not come. It was just as well, she supposed. It pained her to think how helpless and out of place and lonely her mother would feel, cut off from her old ways, her relatives and old friends. She would feel so lost and frightened, caught in the shrill, jostling store crowds. She would have sorrowed all day to have been yelled at by the butcher in the chain store.
“Mek up yer mind, lady, mek up yer mind!”
Would her mother find her much changed? She had tried to be a good wife to George. She had believed she ought to try to forget the ways she had been brought up to when they were different from her husband’s ways. But there were things she felt she would never get used to. She remembered George’s mother asking her right off what nationality she was. If you asked anybody that question back home then you were already sure he was some kind of foreigner, and beneath taking exception.
She looked out for some sight of Donald, but the street was empty. She lay back in her chair and saw herself and him stepping out of the bus in the depot back home. Should she let them know she was coming, or surprise them? If she wrote ahead they would go to a lot of trouble, but, she must admit, that would not have displeased her. They would exclaim over Donald and disagree about which person in the family he looked most like. Strange to realize that many things, so familiar to her, would have to be explained to Donald. In the afternoon they would have people over, relatives and old friends, to sit on the porch and talk. They would tell of births and deaths and talk of the weather and crops, of the things they had always talked about, of life and the afterlife, and stretched out in the porch swing she would feel herself soothed by the warm breeze and by the slow warm liquid flow of Southern voices.
She was startled from her thoughts by the sound of running on the stairs. She had forgotten what she was waiting for and for a moment the sight of the boy in the door awoke no memory in her. She looked at him without recognition. He wore thick snow pants and a padded jacket, heavy rubber boots and a fur cap with large muffs from which his face peeped out red with cold. He was covered with snow. He had dashed in so quickly from outside that flakes still clung to his cheeks and in his brows and lashes.
He closed the door and stamped in, shaking himself like a dog and giving off the smell of cold wool and cold rubber. When he neared her she felt the cold which surrounded him and it seemed to penetrate to her heart. She stood up in an impulse of fear.
“I gotta get my sled. Me and a gang of boys are going to the park,” he said. “They’re meeting me on the corner in five minutes.”
Even his voice seemed stiff with cold. What kind of talk was that, so sharp and nasal? That was not the voice she had given him! She heard the voice of her kin reproach her for bringing up her son in forgetfulness of them.
“No,” she cried. “You can’t go. Stay with me.”
Her strangeness frightened him. He said weakly, “But I told them I would. They’ve all gone to get their sleds.”
But she would not let him go. She made him take off his things. She put cocoa on the range to heat and when it was done she sat him on her lap and rocked him softly, his head against her breast, while she told him all about the South, where he was born.
The Ballad of Jesse Neighbours
FEW MARRIAGES were being made in Oklahoma in 1934 and Jesse Neighbours didn’t have a pot nor a window to throw it out of, but Jesse just couldn’t wait. Things might never get any better! He had to have her—Naomi Childress, that is. What were they going to live on, love? Well, they would have each other and they would scrape by somehow. Things couldn’t go on like this much longer. Meanwhile, two can live cheaper than one. And Naomi didn’t expect any diamond rings.
Jesse was just twenty, though he looked older, and Naomi just eighteen. In the road of their courtship there had been one bad bump. It was the old story: poor boy, heiress, and her father. Jesse’s people had never owned one red acre to sit back now and watch being blown away in dust. Will Neighbours had raised, rather was raising, seven children, Jesse the eldest, as a sharecropper. And so from the first Jesse had had to come to the Childresses hat in hand. For old Bull Childress had a house and clear title to twenty-seven acres of hardscrabble. The deed was unencumbered through no fault of Bull’s. He had tried, but nobody would loan him anything on that patch of Jimson weeds and cockleburs.
Bull’s consent to the marriage had been given only on condition that the bride be taken to a home of her own, and not to live with her in-laws. And indeed to have gotten another into Will’s place they would have had to hang her on a nail at night. Bull’s provision might have proved an insuperable obstacle. But fortunately Jesse was the son of a man known for hard work and honesty; and though only twenty, Jesse himself, after some ten years now, was beginning to earn a name as a steady worker. And so Mr. Buttrell, Will’s landlord, agreed to try Jesse on shares on a place that he happened to have standing vacant.
Not a very big place, and maybe not the best thirty acres left in Oklahoma, but a place of his own and land which a strong young fellow not afraid of a little work could make out on—always barring Acts of God, of course—with a two-room dog-run cabin, a well, a barn, a toolshed, and a chicken house. Jesse had a heifer due to freshen around September and Naomi was raising a dozen layers that she had incubated underneath the kitchen range. There would be a pair of shoats as a wedding present from Will. The two of them were spending every spare moment fix
ing the place up. It would have curtains made from the pretty flowered prints that chicken feed came sacked in, and all that winter a quilt on a quilting frame had hung above the dining table in the Childresses’ parlor, and the neighbor women came over every Thursday afternoon and quilted on it, and made jokes about it that made Naomi’s round and sweetly fuzzy cheeks glow like a ripe Elberta peach. And she was canning all that previous summer and fall as if she had three hands. If nothing else they would be able to live on cucumber pickles. Jesse had an old car. Something was always going wrong with it, but luckily Jesse had a second one exactly like the first, except for the lack of wheels, which squatted out in the front yard, a sort of personal parts department, very handy. He had given up smoking and instead was putting his tobacco money in a jar, and by fall he hoped to have enough to make a down payment on a mule. He was the saving kind, saved tinfoil, twine, saved rubber bands, making large balls of all three items which he stored in cigar boxes.
Naomi knew what a catch she had made. She had first taken serious notice of Jesse Neighbours one night at a country dance for which he supplied the music. He hired out around the section as a one-man band. He had a rig which he was buying on installment from the mail-order catalogue. Once in it he looked like a monkey in a cage. With his hands he played guitar while with his feet he worked two pedals on which were drumsticks that banged a pair of snare drums; one stick was bare wood, the other was covered like a swab with bright-orange lamb’s wool. A French harp was held to his mouth on a wire frame with earpieces. The boy was a musical fool. In his pockets he always carried some kind of musical instrument: a jew’s harp, a French harp, an ocarina. He played the musical saw, the washboard, water glasses, blew a jug. He could draw music out of anything. And on the guitar or the banjo or the mandolin he picked notes, not just chords but whole tunes. His singing voice was like a bee in a bottle, a melodious, slightly adenoidal whine, wavering, full of sobs and breaks, and of a pitch like a boy’s before the change of voice. That night when he laid aside the French harp and sang:
The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Page 22