Proud Flesh

by William Humphrey

  He felt that it had been done, and he felt purged, cleansed and whole, complete unto himself, independent of women, of neither sex and thus superior to both. It would be a rebirth. He would be unique. He would be self-engendered, unreproducible, as unsusceptible to low lusts as a marble statue, as smooth and neuter, as innocent and untroubled as a doll. He would be superhuman, made of flesh but beyond the temptations of the flesh.

  He broke the string and swung open the blade and applied its edge to himself and instantly his courage deserted him, taking with it the last shred of his self-respect.

  When the door rattled again he got up off the seat and flushed the bowl. He drew his drawers and his trousers up over the obstruction, and when the person outside had withdrawn to allow him to leave, slunk with his hands in his pockets down the hall and past the door behind which his mother lay dying.

  XV

  “That’s the last one,” said Mrs. Murdoch, speaking not of the coconut custard pie she was removing from the oven of the great black baroque wood range, but of Ross Renshaw, whose arrival she had seen through the kitchen window.

  “The last one that is going to come, anyway,” said Mrs. Garrett in an undertone.

  “Ssh!”

  “Poor Edwina,” said Mrs. Bywaters. “Poor woman. Poor soul. When my time comes to go I pray the Lord that I may have all my children and all my loved ones at my side. It is the one thing I ask.”

  “Amen,” said a chorus of voices.

  Then everybody’s old Aunt Viola Mahaffey said, in that faint scratchy voice of hers like a worn-out phonograph record, “Amy.” The other women all turned deferentially to attend her. She folded down her left thumb. “Clifford.” Down went the index finger. “Clyde.” Down went the middle finger. “Hazel.” And she crumpled the withered digit which seemed to have been killed years ago, like a banded twig, by the big, loose-fitting gold ring. “Lois.” Her closed brown fist looked mummified.

  Lean women with lined faces, looking so much alike as to be taken for relatives—which in fact many of them were if the connection was traced out fine enough. Certainly all of the same original stock, into which little outside blood had been transfused for a century and a half. All with that sinewy, dry, gallinaceous look of the prairie farmwoman, all with those work-stiffened hands with swollen knuckles like the joints on bamboo cane. With empty piepans, with folded newspapers, with handkerchiefs they fanned their reddened faces, whish whish whish, a sound like panting breath. Around the range for a space of ten feet the air was untouchable. The smell of hot spices, of nutmeg and cinnamon and cloves and vanilla extract, suffused the room.

  “Ross,” said Aunt Viola, starting in now on the thumb of her right hand. “Gladys. Ballard. Lester.” Her little finger still stuck up, crooked, dry, withered. She bent it down. “And—”

  “Ssh!”

  “Ssh!”

  “Ssh!”

  “Ten of them,” said Mrs. Murdoch. “Like the fingers of the hands.”

  “And her,” said Mrs. Bywaters, “like a person with a finger missing. Trying to keep it hidden from sight. And from her own sight. Braving it out before the world. Trying not to notice the itch. They say a missing limb itches. Not the stump, the limb itself. You can feel it in its old place, they say, itching. It’s an itch that no scratching can ease.”

  “She was partial to that one. She could never hide it.”

  “She never tried to hide it.”

  “He come along after she thought she was past the age. Her Benjamin.”

  “The last boy is always the hardest child to bring up. He’s forever running after his big brothers. Trying to measure up to them. Always trying to cut loose from his mamma’s apron strings. So the bigger boys won’t call him a mamma’s boy.”

  “She brought it on herself. I say no more. It’s a judgment on the way she brought him up. I feel for her. I do. She has suffered and now she must suffer more before she is released. But she brought it on herself. She has only herself to blame.”

  “She did spoil him. Spoiled rotten. Worse than any of the others.”

  “They all spoiled him. Like it is when one comes along after a family thinks it is all finished and made. When the child has brothers and sisters old enough to be its mamma and daddy. The last born in a big family gets spoiled worse than an only child. Especially if it be a boy.”

  “Mrs. Rainey, hon, would you mind just stepping outside there and telling one of them niggerboys to go chunk that turtledove away. I can’t stand that sorrowful sound at a time like this. It goes through me like a knife.”

  “And then of course the others all married off, went to the war, and he was all she had left at home and so she clung to him all the tighter.”

  “It’s hard on a family that’s always been so close.”

  “And so stiff-necked proud!”

  “Ssh!”

  “Ssh!”

  A sound outside the door caused a rolling of eyes, a quickening of the swish of fans.

  “Ah, here is Mrs. Herndon. Give Mrs. Herndon a glass of that ice-tea, somebody. Well, how is she?”

  “No change. Ross come in.”

  “Poor Ross. He takes everthang so hard. That boy is all heart.”

  “Was it his heart he was off in Mineral Wells for?”

  “Ssh!”

  “Ssh!”

  “Well, whatever it was it don’t seem to have done him much good.” Mrs. Herndon wrinkled her nose and fanned her face vigorously. “That was not mineral water,” she said, “that I smelt on his breath.”

  “Ssssssssssh!”

  “He was doing just fine until this,” Avis, Ross’s wife, told her sisters-in-law. “They don’t fool around with you out there, you know. Or maybe you don’t know but I can tell you. You don’t taper off. You quit. Cold turkey. And this time around, Ross really did aim to quit. The AA man had given him a lot of support, so had Reverend Burnett. During the five weeks we were out there (he would have been sent home as cured just next Thursday), he never touched a drop. If you know Ross that’s hard to believe, I grant, but it’s true: not one drop—not so much as a glass of beer. Then Ballard’s wire came and he just went to pieces. I said, ‘Ross, hon, this is it. Five weeks now you have gone without. You’ve got it licked if you’ll just be firm. Slip again and it’s for good.’ It was just too much for him to handle. I myself went out and bought him a fifth—that’s the easiest town on earth to find a bootlegger in. So it was all for nothing and now what’s to become of him, and me, the Lord only knows.”

  The meal that had begun in the early morning with Edwina’s going down to the garden was ready at long last to be served. That day-long, murmurous beelike bustle out in the kitchen had produced a banquet. On the dining table rested a baked ham glazed with syrup, circled with brown pineapple rings, sprigged with sticks of clove. There was a roasted haunch of beef and a leg of mutton. There were potatoes of every variety: creamed, baked and buttered, boiled in their jackets, potatoes julienne, potatoes au gratin. There were black-eyed peas, English peas, field peas in pot liquor. On the buffet stood coconut pie, lemon meringue pie, apple pie, devil’s food cake, angel food cake, baked apples Stuffed with pecan meats. Each woman had fashioned her proudest dish. Now they looked forward with advance approval to seeing it go uneaten. Ranged in the kitchen doorway, with long faces and sorrowful eyes, they watched the family file to the table.

  Big as the table was, four seatings were required to feed all the Renshaws that evening. First came the elderly aunts and toothless uncles and fragile great-aunts and delicate, decrepit cousins, helped to their places and served by the young women of the clan. Spoon-eaters, collar-bibbed, more than one of them belonging to that passing school of Southern country men whose way with their food was to stir together everything on their plates, then over the slop pour sorghum syrup, with the explanation that it all got mixed together anyway a little further down. Having buried many, and nearing the end themselves, they had license to gum their victuals with appetites unreserved in
the presence of death.

  Meanwhile out in the kitchen there was a great boiling of bottles and mixing of formulas and a din even more deafening than that caused by hardness of hearing around the dining table, as the infants and weanlings were fed.

  The immediate family sat at the second table. Past the neighbor women they slunk in shame, each feeling himself personally to blame for the absence of the one now missing from their ranks. It devolved upon Clyde to say grace, as did so many social duties which ought by seniority to have fallen to the incompetent Clifford. Bowing his head and closing his eyes, Clyde mumbled, “Oh, Lord, we thank Thee for these and all Thy bless …” A catch in his voice, he broke off. No one lifted his head. From among the neighbor women in the doorway was heard a sniffle. Clearing his throat, Clyde said, “For these and all Thy …” Again he choked up, and raising his stricken face and pushing back his chair from the table, he got up and fled from the room, holding his napkin in front of him to hide the state he was in. Derwent left just behind him. From underneath their brows the family exchanged stricken looks. At Ross, whose turn it now was, they all tried not to look. Wreathed in alcoholic vapors, Ross sat blinking and swallowing down a recurrent hiccup, meanwhile nodding in self-agreement as he scored points in the argument in which, alone, against odds, he held the dissenting view.

  Some moments passed in awkward silence. Then Ballard said through gritted teeth, “Oh, Lord, we—” At that moment Ross emerged from his stupor momentarily to utter a loud, “Amen!” whereupon the long-suppressed hiccup seized its chance and erupted. At this Ballard came towering up, groaning and gnashing his teeth, pushed back his chair and stalked out of the room. Shaking his head, Clifford next got up and lumbered out. Then Ross, thinking that everybody was leaving, and deducing from his empty plate (though it was still bottom side up, like everybody else’s) that he had had his supper, got unsteadily to his feet, knocked over his chair, wove to the door, fell through it, and could be heard careening from wall to wall as he made his way down the corridor.

  That left Lester. But Lester was already getting up to flee, and when he was gone there was another period of silence during which the sisters sat bowed in shame.

  “Oh, Lord, we thank Thee for these and all Thy blessings, which we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen,” said Amy. And folding her napkin upon her plate, she rose and left the room, followed in turn by her three sisters.

  From the neighbor women in the kitchen came a collective sigh of satisfaction.

  XVI

  Pallets had been made down on the floors of various rooms for the children, and throughout the house the lights blazed as they were put to bed. Then one by one the lights went out until all that was left burning was the hall light, visible through the fan window over the front door, and upstairs the traditional blue sick-light.

  Out in the yard, beneath the pear tree, cigarette ends flickered like fireflies. Above the glow, as he drew on it, the smoker’s face would materialize, gleam demonically, fade, then fall back into darkness. Conversation had died.

  At just past ten o’clock a whisper, like rain sweeping over the roof, ran through the house, and the men in the yard saw the sick-light upstairs flare into sudden white. A moment later the lights came on downstairs, the front door flew open and a bolt of light flashed across the porch and over the lawn, throwing into skeletal shadows the craned and twisted faces of the squatting men. There was noise from the house now, the typewriterlike clatter of women’s high heels on the stairs and words in urgent, loud women’s whispers, and across the open doorway bent, skirted silhouettes, intent and harried, scurried like actresses hastening to take their places seen through a slit in the curtain. The wail of a wakened child started up, then in mid-cry broke off. Together the men of the family strode rapidly up the path of light, their shadows lengthening behind them. Bit by bit the door swung shut, closing down the beam like the segments of a fan being closed, and in the darkness, in silence, the neighbor men settled back on their haunches.

  Inside the house people were running on tiptoes down hallways and up and down stairs from all directions toward the sickroom. Ross’s girl Beth, half unbuttoned, her hair in curlers, shepherding her four children, the twin girls clasping hands, wide-eyed with curiosity and fright. Her sister Thelma, whose children, too young to understand and merely cross with sleepiness, dragged their feet and whined. Hazel’s boy Arthur carrying their baby, his little wife Anita looking unhappy and lonely without kinfolks of her own. Old Aunt Lillian feeling her way along the wall with fluttering hand, clutching with the other one at all who passed her and croaking, “Tell Edwiner I’m coming. Tell her to hold on, I’m coming just as fast as I can come.” Derwent wild with grief. Ballard grim, scowling. Lois vague, distraught. Ross reeling off the walls, his eyes blurred with drunken tears.

  Inside the sickroom, with its stuffy smell, the in-laws flattened their backs against the walls and pressed their wives and husbands to the fore, around the bed.

  Edwina lay propped up with pillows, her eyes closed. Her hair had been arranged, her face powdered, her lips painted, but the pallor of her skin was only heightened thereby. Against the whiteness of the bedsheet the bluish swellings around the roots of her nails stood out stardingly, making it look as though her fingertips had been subjected to torture, crushed and bruised. Dr. Metcalf hovered over her, haggard, apprehensive, studiously attentive to his duties. The family crowded close around, the children clinging to their mothers and fathers in fear, or rather, in fear of their parents’ fear.

  There was a long silence in which the breathing of many open mouths could be heard.

  “Oh,” whispered Lois, “is she not going to come to?”

  “I hope and pray not!” hissed Gladys. She would rather her mother died without saying goodbye to the forty-seven descendants gathered around her deathbed than take leave of life with the thought of the forty-eighth who was not there.

  “Oh, Ma, speak to us!” cried Hazel. “Can you hear me? Speak to us, Ma, darling.”

  Her old eyelids, crinkly and thin as the skin of a bat’s wing, fluttered open. Her glance flickered over the faces ranged around her. Her eyes darkened with pain. She tried to concentrate her mind, the effort visible on her face. She tried to speak. No sound emerged. Again she searched their faces and again she tried to speak. It was only on her fourth attempt that the name she was trying to pronounce found utterance, and then in a plaintive whisper, but to her children it sounded as loud as a shout.

  “Kyle?” she said, and shook her head, closed her eyes and fell back unconscious upon her pillow.

  XVII

  Yet she had rallied somewhat, and although she did not again regain consciousness, Dr. Metcalf felt that with Amy in attendance, the most devoted nurse a patient ever had, he could safely leave her and go home, with the promise to return early the next morning.

  The neighbors all went home, taking with them as guests the most distant Renshaw kin.

  “We can sleep four, Gladys, honey,” said Mrs. McAdie.

  “We can put up three,” said Mrs. Murdoch.

  “We can take five, if one of them don’t mind the davenport,” said Mrs. Dinwiddie.

  “We thank you. You’ve all been so kind, so helpful. I don’t know what we would do without such good neighbors. We hate to impose.”

  “Impose!”

  “Awful good of you, Berenice. All right, youall take Uncle Cameron and Aunt Beulah. Edna, if you would take—”

  “No, we’re going to stay right here, Cameron and me. Make us down a pallet on the floor.”

  “Hush, Aunt Beulah. You go with Berenice. If you stay here one of the boys will have to sit up, and you know they all need their rest.”

  “Nobody’s going to have to give up their bed for us. Don’t either of us ever sleep any more anyway. We’ll sit up in a chair.”

  “Then you can just as well sit up over at the Edwardses’. Go on now. You can’t be of any use here and you’ll just wear yourself out for no good reason. We don’t
want you getting sick on us, on top of everything else.”

  “You call, Gladys, hon, if there should be any need, and Tom will run them right over in the car, no matter what time it might be.”

  “Thank you. Thank you all. Without such good neighbors I don’t know what we would do. Won’t you ladies take some of all that lovely food home with you? Well, we thank you, all of you, for everything. Now then, Ethel, if you will take Aunt Flo and Aunt—”

  “Be glad to stay, Gladys, and sit up—”

  “Thank you, Gertrude, but we can manage. Us girls will take turns, and we’ve got Amy.”

  XVIII

  They put it off as long as they could. Theirs was the last light in the house to be put out. But there was no getting out of it. They were trapped. They could not excuse themselves and go home to sleep. Close as home was, it was too far away to be now, with Ma in her condition. At any moment throughout the night another call to her bedside could come. Summoned-by telephone from home they might arrive just too late. They could not make a scene. Could not ask for separate bedrooms, even if there had been a bedroom to spare. Man and wife ask for separate bedrooms? Reveal to the entire family what the entire family knew? They could do nothing but what they had done: accept the nightclothes on loan—a pair of Clifford’s pajamas for him, one of Ma’s nightgowns for her—put out the light and change into them and then stretch out, he along one edge and she along the other. The first time in three years that Mr. and Mrs. Clyde Renshaw had lain down together in the same bed.