It was after noon when the man fell. His lunch pail sat at the base of the pole. Beside it and his fallen hat lay the book, a thick volume entitled Torts, which he had read while eating. A few grasshoppers clicked in the air. A terrapin, having struggled across the road only to come up against the wheel of the telephone company truck, turned and dragged itself back again. The man’s face drained a shade paler and his jaw sagged, causing his mouth to gape.
The shadow of the pole lengthened and slowly semicircled, a sundial needle, throughout the long afternoon. Occasionally the man’s throat commenced to work, trying to swallow. His eyelids opened, fluttered, then swooned shut again. His chest expanded, he gasped, and from his depths came a thick-tongued groan, a sound palateless and glottal such as deaf-mutes make.
From time to time the two-way radio in the truck crackled to life and squawked, “Jeff Duncan. Come in. Where are you, Jeff Duncan?”
After nightfall the holiday fireworks in the town erupted. Several times the injured man regained consciousness, only to lose it again shortly, which was merciful. For, as he would later tell his rescuers, it seemed to him that the explosions and the bursts of light were inside his head.
Cliff and Beth Etheridge took a proprietary interest in the young man whom they had found so badly injured, whose life they may have saved, all the more so when they learned that he was alone in the world, orphaned in his infancy. Having lost her mother just three years earlier, Beth marveled at anyone’s courage and resourcefulness in bringing himself up without one. No breast to nurse at, none to cry upon! Their day’s work done, father and daughter drove every evening to the hospital, their patient’s only visitors.
The broken leg—broken in three places—remained in splints and a cast; it would forevermore be shorter than its mate. But the bandages had been removed from his head, and his hair, shorn for surgery, was an inch long, his beard twice that length, when the doctor said, “He could go home now, if he had a home to go to. He can’t look after himself, but he doesn’t have to stay here. And his workman’s compensation is soon coming to an end.” Cliff Etheridge had no need to confer with his daughter. “He’s got a home with us,” said Cliff.
The discharged patient was taken by ambulance to the farm, there carried inside on a stretcher. The Etheridges led the way in the pickup, bringing with them a wheelchair and crutches lent by the hospital. A bouquet awaited their guest and the television set had been moved into his room. Such kindness—not just from strangers, for everybody was a stranger to Jeff Duncan—left him tongue-tied. He was like a stray cat, grateful but mistrustful on being taken in, housed and petted.
The door to his room was left open for Beth to hear his call. At first, still on painkillers, he slept much of the day. She went about her housework noiselessly, peeking in on her patient from time to time, never without a pang of pity, sometimes a tear, for his injuries and for his lifelong loneliness, and a feeling of gratitude for being able to nurse him. Her father’s unhesitating hospitality, though it was just what was to be expected of him, also produced an occasional tear, as did his certainty that she would concur. Later, when her patient was more alert, she felt called upon to sit with him, though she worried over what she might say that would interest a person so serious-minded and so well educated. Daytime television did not.
She was his only company, for at this season her father was in the fields from dawn to dusk. She wanted her patient to feel at home, welcome, not beholden. She wanted to make up for all the neglect he had endured. She looked in on him every few minutes, for he was so undemanding she had to thrust her attentions upon him. She had all but to woo him. Having been made to sit up and beg for every scrap of kindness, he did not bite the hand that fed him, but neither did he lick it.
“You’ve been to college,” she said admiringly.
“You have to in order to get into law school,” he said.
“I’ve never known anybody who’s been to college,” she said.
“You have if you’ve ever gone to a doctor or a lawyer,” he said.
“We had the doctors with my poor mother,” she said sadly. “But—knock wood—we’ve never had to have a lawyer, thank goodness. Oh! I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.” And she blushed.
“I hope you never have need of one. But if you ever do, call on me. Just manage to keep out of trouble for another few years. Then I’ll get you out of any scrape.”
“I suppose you speak French,” she said.
“I studied it in school,” he said somewhat warily. “Why?”
“To me being able to speak another language is like being given an extra life. I’ve heard it said that every educated person speaks French.”
“I have never had much use for mine. But then, I never expected to.” It was an admission that caused him some embarrassment.
“Oh,” she said impatiently, “does everything have to be useful? Can’t some things just be beautiful? I was planning to take it in my junior year but when Mom died I had to drop out of school to look after Dad. I wouldn’t have had anybody to speak it with, but that, if you can believe it, was one of my reasons for wanting to know it. It would have been something all my own. I might have written my diary in it. I expect you think that’s silly.”
He looked at her so closely and for so long that she said, “What is the matter?”
“What you just said,” he said. “You might have been speaking for me.”
Studying French had been his one deviation from the straight and narrow path he plodded down—or rather up. He ought instead to have elected Spanish. He might in time have some Spanish-speaking clients. But he wanted to know a language unknown to anybody around him, to belong to a select, almost a secret society. Institutionalized all his life, he had never known privacy. His very name seemed something conferred upon him for the convenience of his keepers. “I suppose you think that’s silly,” he said.
She did not even bother to answer. They understood each other, the only ones who could. French was a folly they shared.
“Speak some to me,” she said.
He hesitated for a moment, then he intoned:
“Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.”
The singsong cadence, the rhymes, the pitch of it brought to her mind the melancholy call of the mourning dove.
When the recitation ended, the words—if words they were and not musical notes—lingered on in a withdrawing echo. Wrapped in revery, she could say nothing for a while. Then she said, “Beautiful. That is beautiful. To think there is a country where people sound like that! Tell me now, what does it mean?”
He translated.
Again she was silent for a while before saying, “How sad. How beautiful.”
She had him recite it so many times over the next weeks that she learned it by heart.
He was impatient to get on with his studies. He had no time to lose. He would soon be going back to school. He could not just lie idle.
But, “I don’t understand what I’m reading,” he said.
She took the book from him and scanned a page.
“Who could?” she said.
Then she regretted her flippancy. His expression was one of despair.
“When I fell off that pole I fell a long way,” he said. “I was reaching for the stars.”
She was the first person to whom he had ever confided his aspirations, and he could do so now only because they had been dashed. He had kept them to himself for fear that in him they would be thought presumptuous, preposterous. He was ashamed of being an orphan and beholden to all the world. She was flattered to be singled out as his confidant.
As a boy he had delivered groceries after school and on Saturdays. He had mowed lawns in summer, raked leaves in the fall. He ran errands for shut-ins. All that he earned he saved. He had neither time nor money for amusements. He came to be well known and he made
himself well liked. Dependent upon charity, he learned early in life the worth of a smile. “That young fellow will go far,” he overheard said of him.
He had a long way to go to reach the goal he had set for himself. But he believed then that nothing could stop him.
She listened to the story of his poor and joyless life, his lack of affection, of any true childhood, of a home, even a room of his own, and though she was years younger than he it appealed to her motherly feelings. She could see before her the earnest, unsmiling boy dressed in ill-fitting castoff orphanage clothes.
By dint of hard work he stood near the head of his class, and when he graduated this earned him a scholarship to college. He supported himself by working nights as a janitor, during the summer vacation as a telephone linesman. He had fixed his sights on a distant target, and he never lifted his eyes from it. Law school, the bar exam, legal practice, then …
He blushed for his immodesty. “Would you believe, I had dreams of someday being governor.”
“You will! You will!” she said fervently.
“I will never climb another telephone pole. I can’t work as a janitor anymore.”
“You’ll get a desk job.”
“Not if my brain has been damaged, I won’t.”
He told of that last moment of consciousness before his fall when light was dark and dark was light, and it seemed to him that his world, once so sharp and clear, was that way now. He had lost his bearings.
“The head will clear up,” said the doctor. He warned of atrophy of the muscles of the legs through disuse. As instructed, Beth suspended bags of sugar from her patient’s ankles and he lifted and lowered them. He clenched his teeth in pain and the sweat stood out on his brow. He shook his head in discouragement.
“Five minutes more,” she said. “You can do it.”
When the time for it came she trained him to walk again without crutches. She exercised him like a drill sergeant making a raw recruit shape up.
“Come to me. Come to me,” she coaxed, backing away and beckoning as he advanced.
Each step toward her was a step away from her. She likened herself to a bird teaching its young to fly, knowing all the while that it would fly the nest first thing.
Probably he was as near to loving her as anybody in his loveless life. That he was fond of her she could see. That he was not shy of showing it made plain how far it was from being anything more. They were friends, and there was no greater bar to love than friendship.
Yet she wondered whether his feeling for her ran deeper than he would allow himself to declare or even acknowledge. Obliged to work his way through school and attend classes part-time, he had years yet to go. Then he could not expect to attract clients at once. Perhaps he was shy of asking her to wait for him, thinking that it would be unfair to her, that some good man might propose to her and, bound by her promise, she lose out on him.
Their time together was drawing to a close. Soon would sound les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne. Harvest time had come. She was busy in the kitchen putting up the garden produce. He was helping. While she sterilized jars and skinned tomatoes he sat at the table snapping beans. What neither was doing demanded concentration but they worked in silence. The snapping of each bean sounded like somebody cracking his knuckles.
Several times he rested from his labors and she observed him gazing out the window. He seemed to be rehearsing a speech and refining it.
“What did you say?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, and went back to snapping beans.
But something, she felt, was simmering in him like the pot on the range. Again the snapping stopped and he cleared his throat.
“Yes?” she said eagerly.
He said, “I’ve been trying to find words—”
“Yes? Yes?”
“—to thank you for all you’ve done for me. You and your father.”
“You don’t need to,” she said, and turned away to hide her tears of disappointment.
When the cast was removed he said, “Struck off my ball and chain.”
She wondered where a person might get splints and a cast for a broken heart.
He would be going back to the rooming house which had been his home during the school session for years. He was already late for classes. He must make applications for a new job. His being crippled would only strengthen his resolve. He was sure to succeed. She would follow his rise from afar.
In preparation for his departure he sat in the yard wrapped in a bedsheet while she clipped off his beard. Unlike Delilah, she was not unmanning her Samson, she was grooming him to take on the Philistines. Clean-shaven, he was a different person, a stranger to her, and belonged to the outer world.
On the way to the depot the three sat on the single seat of the pickup, she in the middle pressed against him. Though ordinarily her father liked to let her drive them, a little mark of his confidence in her, today he drove. She sensed that he knew she did not trust herself to do it, that she had her thoughts to think. Looking straight ahead, they rode in silence while the seams in the pavement ticked as regular as a clock.
Up to the time the train pulled into the station she kept hoping without hope that he would ask her to wait for him. She would have had to nod her answer.
He shook hands for the last time with her father and gave her a peck on the cheek. He cleared his throat, and for an instant she thought he was going to say the word. He said goodbye.
Ahead of the train a wind blew down the tracks, sweeping before it an early-fallen leaf. She recited to herself:
“Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deça, delà
Pared à la
Feuille morte.”
Like an executioner’s order to fire, the conductor’s cry rang out, “’Board!”
She watched him limp across the tracks. She longed to call, “Come back! Come to me!” Before mounting the steps he turned and waved goodbye.
No sound was so sad and lonesome as the whistle of a departing train to one left behind.
A Labor of Love
THEIR MOTHER HAD HAD A CRAVING for sour pickles all the while she was carrying Berenice: that was how Henry Howard accounted for his sister’s disposition.
It was not for sweets, that was for sure, his wife Susan, avoiding contractions for the sake of emphasis, agreed. And I do not believe Wendell’s mother ever ate anything at all while she was carrying him: that was her explanation for their brother-in-law’s disposition, or lack of any.
“Cut that man with a blade and I vow he wouldn’t bleed. If anything flowed at all it would look like skim milk,” she declared. “That woman has drained him dry of what little sap he ever had in him.” Among Susan’s many names for her sister-in-law one was the Praying Mantis.
“Wendell has never done anything but take up space,” said Henry.
“He only knows two words,” said Susan, and she quoted them, mimicking to perfection Wendell’s mousy manner: “‘Yes, Berenice.’ When what she needed all along was somebody to whale the stuffing out of her.”
Berenice now wrote that Wendell was at death’s door.
“As somebody said of Calvin Coolidge,” said Susan, “how can they tell?”
“She’ll have nowhere to go,” said Henry.
“Nowhere to go? She’s got three grown children. Though how she managed it I don’t know, except like the Virgin Mary.”
“They wouldn’t keep her in their doghouse.”
“So now at your age you’re going to build her a home.”
“I’ll get Junior to help me.”
“When? After he has already put in a day’s work at the mill? On his Sundays off? A lot his dear Aunt Berenice has ever done for Junior!”
“Between the two of us it ought to go up pretty quick. It’s not going to be any mansion. One floor. One bath. And she won’t need a guest room. She hasn’t got a friend in the world. Maybe a fireplace to s
it by in the evening. Keep her at home and away from here.”
Actually he was looking forward with some relief to coming out of retirement, if only temporarily. It had not suited him. He knew of no way to occupy himself except with work.
“You just better not skimp on it if you want to have a minute’s peace.”
“I’ll make it nice. After all, I don’t want to shame myself before the neighbors—me a builder by trade, or was—by putting my widowed sister in a shack. Do I?”
“Well, it’s going to be a labor of love. If you think you’ll ever see a red cent for all your work then, Buster, you’re a bigger chump than I take you for.”
“Well, like I say, your only sister. Or brother.”
“And just who, if I may make so bold, is going to pay for the building materials?”
“Well, I’ve got a lot of stuff out in the shop left over from my contracting days. Enough of just about everything you need to make a nice little bungalow. It’s all just sitting there. Besides, I never paid today’s prices for it.”
“No, but you could get today’s prices for it.”
“She’ll need what she’ll have to live on. Widow-woman.”
“Hah! Buy and sell you ten times over. Still got the first dollar she ever laid hands on.”
“Well, you know, your parents’ daughter.”
“Has she ever paid you her share of either of them’s funeral expenses? Been diddling you since childhood. Never played a game without cheating. Does it still with Wendell. He’s the only person who’ll play a game with her. Build her a treehouse. That’s where she belongs. In a tree.”
Henry enjoyed hearing his wife run down his sister. Berenice might think she had the world fooled but at least one person saw through her.
“Now where are you going to put this house?” “Over in the northwest corner of the property. As far away from here as possible.”
September Song Page 2