“I don’t think Cheat is going to be in town this weekend,” Miss Kirby said, not in the least understanding that this was a joke, and the child was convulsed afresh, threw herself backward in her chair, fell out of it, rolled on the floor and lay there heaving. Her mother told her if she didn’t stop this foolishness she would have to leave the table.
Yesterday her mother had arranged with Alonzo Myers to drive them the forty-five miles to Mayville, where the convent was, to get the girls for the weekend and Sunday afternoon he was hired to drive them back again. He was an eighteen-year-old boy who weighed two hundred and fifty pounds and worked for the taxi company and he was all you could get to drive you anywhere. He smoked or rather chewed a short black cigar and he had a round sweaty chest that showed through the yellow nylon shirt he wore. When he drove all the windows of the car had to be open.
“Well there’s Alonzo!” the child roared from the floor. “Get Alonzo to show em around! Get Alonzo!”
The two girls, who had seen Alonzo, began to scream their indignation.
Her mother thought this was funny too but she said, “That’ll be about enough out of you,” and changed the subject. She asked them why they called each other Temple One and Temple Two and this sent them off into gales of giggles. Finally they managed to explain. Sister Perpetua, the oldest nun at the Sisters of Mercy in Mayville, had given them a lecture on what to do if a young man should—here they laughed so hard they were not able to go on without going back to the beginning—on what to do if a young man should—they put their heads in their laps—on what to do if—they finally managed to shout it out—if he should “behave in an ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile.” Sister Perpetua said they were to say, “Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!” and that would put an end to it. The child sat up off the floor with a blank face. She didn’t see anything so funny in this. What was really funny was the idea of Mr. Cheatam or Alonzo Myers beauing them around. That killed her.
Her mother didn’t laugh at what they had said. “I think you girls are pretty silly,” she said. “After all, that’s what you are—Temples of the Holy Ghost.”
The two of them looked up at her, politely concealing their giggles, but with astonished faces as if they were beginning to realize that she was made of the same stuff as Sister Perpetua.
Miss Kirby preserved her set expression and the child thought, it’s all over her head anyhow. I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost, she said to herself, and was pleased with the phrase. It made her feel as if somebody had given her a present.
After dinner, her mother collapsed on the bed and said, “Those girls are going to drive me crazy if I don’t get some entertainment for them. They’re awful.”
“I bet I know who you could get,” the child started.
“Now listen. I don’t want to hear any more about Mr. Cheatam,” her mother said. “You embarrass Miss Kirby. He’s her only friend. Oh my Lord,” and she sat up and looked mournfully out the window, “that poor soul is so lonesome she’ll even ride in that car that smells like the last circle in hell.”
And she’s a Temple of the Holy Ghost too, the child reflected. “I wasn’t thinking of him,” she said. “I was thinking of those two Wilkinses, Wendell and Cory, that visit old lady Buchell out on her farm. They’re her grandsons. They work for her.”
“Now that’s an idea,” her mother murmured and gave her an appreciative look. But then she slumped again. “They’re only farm boys. These girls would turn up their noses at them.”
“Huh,” the child said. “They wear pants. They’re sixteen and they got a car. Somebody said they were both going to be Church of God preachers because you don’t have to know nothing to be one.”
“They would be perfectly safe with those boys all right,” her mother said and in a minute she got up and called their grandmother on the telephone and after she had talked to the old woman a half an hour, it was arranged that Wendell and Cory would come to supper and afterwards take the girls to the fair.
Susan and Joanne were so pleased that they washed their hair and rolled it up on aluminum curlers. Hah, thought the child, sitting cross-legged on the bed to watch them undo the curlers, wait’ll you get a load of Wendell and Cory! “You’ll like these boys,” she said. “Wendell is six feet tall ands got red hair. Cory is six feet six inches talls got black hair and wears a sport jacket and they gottem this car with a squirrel tail on the front.”
“How does a child like you know so much about these men?” Susan asked and pushed her face up close to the mirror to watch the pupils in her eyes dilate.
The child lay back on the bed and began to count the narrow boards in the ceiling until she lost her place. I know them all right, she said to someone. We fought in the world war together. They were under me and I saved them five times from Japanese suicide divers and Wendell said I am going to marry that kid and the other said oh no you ain’t I am and I said neither one of you is because I will court marshall you all before you can bat an eye. “I’ve seen them around is all,” she said.
When they came the girls stared at them a second and then began to giggle and talk to each other about the convent. They sat in the swing together and Wendell and Cory sat on the banisters together. They sat like monkeys, their knees on a level with their shoulders and their arms hanging down between. They were short thin boys with red faces and high cheekbones and pale seed-like eyes. They had brought a harmonica and a guitar. One of them began to blow softly on the mouth organ, watching the girls over it, and the other started strumming the guitar and then began to sing, not watching them but keeping his head tilted upward as if he were only interested in hearing himself. He was singing a hillbilly song that sounded half like a love song and half like a hymn.
The child was standing on a barrel pushed into some bushes at the side of the house, her face on a level with the porch floor. The sun was going down and the sky was turning a bruised violet color that seemed to be connected with the sweet mournful sound of the music. Wendell began to smile as he sang and to look at the girls. He looked at Susan with a dog-like loving look and sang,
“I’ve found a friend in Jesus,
He’s everything to me,
He’s the lily of the valley,
He’s the One who’s set me free!”
Then he turned the same look on Joanne and sang,
“A wall of fire about me,
I’ve nothing now to fear,
He’s the lily of the valley,
And I’ll always have Him near!”
The girls looked at each other and held their lips stiff so as not to giggle but Susan let out one anyway and clapped her hand on her mouth. The singer frowned and for a few seconds only strummed the guitar. Then he began “The Old Rugged Cross” and they listened politely but when he had finished they said, “Let us sing one!” and before he could start another, they began to sing with their convent-trained voices,
“Tantum ergo Sacramentum
Veneremur Cernui:
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui:”
The child watched the boys’ solemn faces turn with perplexed frowning stares at each other as if they were uncertain whether they were being made fun of.
“Praestet fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui.
Genitori, Genitoque
Laus et jubilatio
Salus, honor, virtus quoque...”
The boys’ faces were dark red in the gray-purple light. They looked fierce and startled.
“Sit et benedictio;
Procedenti ab utroque
Compar sit laudatio.
Amen.”
The girls dragged out the Amen and then there was a silence. “That must be Jew singing,” Wendell said and began to tune the guitar.
The girls giggled idiotically but the child stamped her foot on the barrel. “You big dumb ox!” she shouted. “You big dumb Church of God ox!” she roared and fell off the barrel and scrambled u
p and shot around the corner of the house as they jumped from the banister to see who was shouting.
Her mother had arranged for them to have supper in the back yard and she had a table laid out there under some Japanese lanterns that she pulled out for garden parties. “I ain’t eating with them,” the child said and snatched her plate off the table and carried it to the kitchen and sat down with the thin blue-gummed cook and ate her supper.
“Howcome you be so ugly sometime?” the cook asked.
“Those stupid idiots,” the child said.
The lanterns gilded the leaves of the trees orange on the level where they hung and above them was black-green and below them were different dim muted colors that made the girls sitting at the table look prettier than they were. From time to time, the child turned her head and glared out the kitchen window at the scene below.
“God could strike you deaf dumb and blind,” the cook said, “and then you wouldn’t be as smart as you is.”
“I would still be smarter than some,” the child said.
After supper they left for the fair. She wanted to go to the fair but not with them so even if they had asked her she wouldn’t have gone. She went upstairs and paced the long bedroom with her hands locked together behind her back and her head thrust forward and an expression, fierce and dreamy both, on her face. She didn’t turn on the electric light but let the darkness collect and make the room smaller and more private. At regular intervals a light crossed the open window and threw shadows on the wall. She stopped and stood looking out over the dark slopes, past where the pond glinted silver, past the wall of woods to the speckled sky where a long finger of light was revolving up and around and away, searching the air as if it were hunting for the lost sun. It was the beacon light from the fair.
She could hear the distant sound of the calliope and she saw in her head all the tents raised up in a kind of gold sawdust light and the diamond ring of the ferris wheel going around and around up in the air and down again and the screeking merry-go-round going around and around on the ground. A fair lasted five or six days and there was a special afternoon for school children and a special night for niggers. She had gone last year on the afternoon for school children and had seen the monkeys and the fat man and had ridden on the ferris wheel. Certain tents were closed then because they contained things that would be known only to grown people but she had looked with interest at the advertising on the closed tents, at the faded-looking pictures on the canvas of people in tights, with stiff stretched composed faces like the faces of the martyrs waiting to have their tongues cut out by the Roman soldier. She had imagined that what was inside these tents concerned medicine and she had made up her mind to be a doctor when she grew up.
She had since changed and decided to be an engineer but as she looked out the window and followed the revolving searchlight as it widened and shortened and wheeled in its arc, she felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint because that was the occupation that included everything you could know; and yet she knew she would never be a saint. She did not steal or murder but she was a born liar and slothful and she sassed her mother and was deliberately ugly to almost everybody. She was eaten up also with the sin of Pride, the worst one. She made fun of the Baptist preacher who came to the school at commencement to give the devotional. She would pull down her mouth and hold her forehead as if she were in agony and groan, “Fawther, we thank Thee,” exactly the way he did and she had been told many times not to do it She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.
She could stand to be shot but not to be burned in oil. She didn’t know if she could stand to be torn to pieces by lions or not. She began to prepare her martyrdom, seeing herself in a pair of tights in a great arena, lit by the early Christians hanging in cages of fire, making a gold dusty light that fell on her and the lions. The first lion charged forward and fell at her feet, converted. A whole series of lions did the same. The lions liked her so much she even slept with them and finally the Romans were obliged to burn her but to their astonishment she would not burn down and finding she was so hard to kill, they finally cut off her head very quickly with a sword and she went immediately to heaven. She rehearsed this several times, returning each time at the entrance of Paradise to the lions.
Finally she got up from the window and got ready for bed and got in without saying her prayers. There were two heavy double beds in the room. The girls were occupying the other one and she tried to think of something cold and clammy that she could hide in their bed but her thought was fruitless. She didn’t have anything she could think of, like a chicken carcass or a piece of beef liver. The sound of the calliope coming through the window kept her awake and she remembered that she hadn’t said her prayers and got up and knelt down and began them. She took a running start and went through to the other side of the Apostle’s Creed and then hung by her chin on the side of the bed, empty-minded. Her prayers, when she remembered to say them, were usually perfunctory but sometimes when she had done something wrong or heard music or lost something, or sometimes for no reason at all, she would be moved to fervor and would think of Christ on the long journey to Calvary, crushed three times under the rough cross Her mind would stay on this a while and then get empty and when something roused her, she would find that she was thinking of a different thing entirely, of some dog or some girl or something she was going to do some day Tonight, remembering Wendell and Cory, she was filled with thanksgiving and almost weeping with delight, she said “Lord Lord thank You that I’m not in the Church of God, thank You Lord thank you!” and got back in bed and kept repeating it until she went to sleep.
The girls came in at a quarter to twelve and waked her up with their giggling. They turned on the small blue-shaded lamp to see to get undressed by and their skinny shadows climbed up the wall and broke and continued moving about softly on the ceiling. The child sat up to hear what all they had seen at the fair. Susan had a plastic pistol full of cheap candy and Joanne a pasteboard cat with red polka dots in it. “Did you see the monkeys dance?” the child asked. “Did you see that fat man and those midgets?”
“All kinds of freaks,” Joanne said. And then she said to Susan, “I enjoyed it all but the you-know-what,” and her face assumed a peculiar expression as if she had bit into something that she didn’t know if she liked or not.
The other stood still and shook her head once and nodded slightly at the child. “Little pitchers,” she said in a low voice but the child heard it and her heart began to beat very fast.
She got out of her bed and climbed onto the footboard of theirs. They turned off the light and got in but she didn’t move. She sat there, looking hard at them until their faces were well defined in the dark. “I’m not as old as you all,” she said, “but I’m about a million times smarter.”
“There are some things,” Susan said, “that a child of your age doesn’t know,” and they both began to giggle.
“Go back to your own bed,” Joanne said.
The child didn’t move. “One time,” she said, her voice hollow-sounding in the dark, “I saw this rabbit have rabbits.”
There was a silence. Then Susan said, “How?” in an indifferent tone and she knew that she had them. She said she wouldn’t tell until they told about the you-know-what. Actually she had never seen a rabbit have rabbits but she forgot this as they began to tell what they had seen in the tent.
It had been a freak with a particular name but they couldn’t remember the name. The tent where it was had been divided into two parts by a black curtain, one side for men and one for women. The freak went from one side to the other, talking first to the men and then to the women, but everyone could hear. The stage ran all the way across the front. The girls heard the freak say to the men, “I’m going to show you this and if you laugh, God may strike you the same way.” The freak had a country voice, slow and nasal and neither high nor low, just flat. “God made m
e thisaway and if you laugh He may strike you the same way. This is the way He wanted me to be and I ain’t disputing His way. I’m showing you because I got to make the best of it. I expect you to act like ladies and gentlemen. I never done it to myself nor had a thing to do with it but I’m making the best of it. I don’t dispute hit.” Then there was a long silence on the other side of the tent and finally the freak left the men and came over onto the women’s side and said the same thing.
The child felt every muscle strained as if she were hearing the answer to a riddle that was more puzzling than the riddle itself. “You mean it had two heads?” she said.
“No,” Susan said, “it was a man and woman both. It pulled up its dress and showed us. It had on a blue dress.”
The child wanted to ask how it could be a man and woman both without two heads but she did not. She wanted to get back into her own bed and think it out and she began to climb down off the footboard.
“What about the rabbit?” Joanne asked.
The child stopped and only her face appeared over the footboard, abstracted, absent. “It spit them out of its mouth,” she said, “six of them.”
She lay in bed trying to picture the tent with the freak walking from side to side but she was too sleepy to figure it out. She was better able to see the faces of the country people watching, the men more solemn than they were in church, and the women stern and polite, with painted-looking eyes, standing as if they were waiting for the first note of the piano to begin the hymn. She could hear the freak saying, “God made me thisaway and I don’t dispute hit,” and the people saying, “Amen. Amen.”
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (A Harvest/Hbj Book) Page 8