by James Purdy
Yes, she was sweet, yes she has luscious, yes she was so adorable, and then she was gone. I held on to the white cedar until I had a queer feeling I was part of its limbs and resin. It was more alive though than me, more knowing I do believe, and it had all its branches and sap.
Daventry spent more time with Georgina then, which was only to be expected since they were to be married, but come to think of it he didn’t spend hardly any more time with her now than he had when he was a bearer of my messages. That is, he had always spent more time with her than maybe I was aware of . . . His betrothal brought about a change of course in our household, for the main task of it had been centered around my writing the letters to the Widow and having them sent by hand. The reading to me from old tomes by Quintus and sometimes by Daventry was actually only to get me warmed up to write the love letters. Now all this had changed. I wrote no more letters to anybody, and Quintus was more and more apt to read only to himself than read to me, and what he read was deeper and deeper as time went on, and he finally read from books that don’t make any sense at all. Gradually I came to the realization that Quintus was either a whole sight smarter than me or else he was the damnedest playactor that ever drew breath and understood even less of what he read than I did hearing, but the fact is I believe he understood more of it than I did, which is not to say he got much out of it but the labor.
The real billowing tossing part of Quintus’ grief over his ma had subsided a little, but a kind of weighty eager restless something had settled over him now, his hands was too nervous to be satisfied anymore turning pages of books, his eyes didn’t look the same, and there were little wrinkles around the corner of his mouth that wasn’t there before, and his nose, which is a handsome nose stole from some English slave driver I reckon, looked thin and peaked. But I could tell even though I tried not even to say it to myself that he was going to run off and leave me too.
“Do you think, Quintus,” I said to him one day cautious-cautious even to broach such a subject, “do you think now that what he done for us stopped the sheriff?”
“Daventry?” he replied knowing damn well who else did I mean by he.
He put his book down, and I picked it up and snorted. It was a history of weather.
“He is afraid of the wind, that’s for sure.” Quintus watched me leaf through his book.
“Quintus, why do you stay with me?” I said going back to something I felt in the air too, my fear now that he would leave me likewise.
He stirred and his nose moved down toward my hands clasped over the book which I had closed.
“Don’t have nobody else to choose to stay with, guess,” he mumbled.
“You don’t feel looked down to and abused by me, like those newspapers you used to read against white people.”
“Oh, I suppose I do. I suppose you’re an enemy deep down and under, but I believe I told you the truth, there ain’t nobody else to choose . . .”
“You stay with me then because I don’t mean nothing to you one way or another.”
“You mean a thing to me or so . . .” It took him a long time to get this said.
“Well, Daventry said he loved me.” I picked my way through all this snaky labyrinth.
“I heard him.”
“Couldn’t you sort of care for me just a little?”
“I feel we are connected, Garnet. I feel we have been chose to be together for a while.”
“Do you think Daventry was chose to come here . . . ?”
“I believe everything is chosen and destiny,” he replied. He took the book out from my hands then and started off to the kitchen, his favorite site for reading.
“I’ll be awful beside myself and lonesome when he is a married man.” I raised my voice so it would reach the reader.
“You’ll get over it,” Quintus spoke through yawns. “I ain’t going to leave you anyhow. Not just yet,” he said and that not just yet went through me like a knife, it confirmed my fears, you see.
“I don’t confess my love to folks, though,” Quintus began like he was going to give a short speech, but then he stopped and said no more right then.
“Well, I care about you anyhow, Quintus . . . That’s something Daventry taught me, I guess. I don’t know what love means, but I think I am getting to have an inkling about it sometimes . . .”
Rocked in the boughs of slumber.
That is of course from one of those books Quintus, in his day, was constantly reading to me. So many phrases, parts of sentences, even paragraphs have stuck in my mind from those last days, Daventry’s last days.
I remember those final few days mostly by sounds. Everything was sound. Daventry had taught me to listen to the winds and the ocean again. I had paid them no more attention than my own beating heart and pulsing arteries. But now I listened to the ocean. I knew he was angry. I knew the winds were not ordinary winds either. They ran like spirits in search of something. And the sky looked like lemon mixed with ashes. The moon was not right either. It looked like gray foam. And the birds, Daventry had wondered at their constant comment on everything from before dawn to our swift twilight. They were mostly silent, and they had lost a lot of their nests in the gales. A sandpiper was blown all the way from the ocean to our front porch, and had hurt its wing and breast, and I nursed it a while until one day it disappeared. One morning too I saw an eagle pursuing a waterbird, and both, I swear, dipped into the ocean and did not appear again.
But Daventry said nothing about the rising winds and the tides which he had worried so much about. He studied me a lot though.
Georgina was home getting ready her wedding dress. They had invited me to the ceremony, and its not being her first marriage by any means, not much was being done to inviting other people in, considering too the bridegroom was unknown in this community.
Then Quintus came in one day and said the kids and goats had disappeared. But Daventry made no comment on that or on most other things said, and was in a brown study, and his absentmindedness left me a little more free to pay my secret calls to the dance hall, which my closeness to him of late had deprived me of.
The rough winds and the brine from the ocean had done their recent work on the entrance to my dance hall. More of the windows was busted. The roof looked like a tent that had billowed and sunk, and lots of big water birds of all kind were circling over the whole edifice. The pines and firs were moving all the time like the winds were inside them, and so many flowers and tufts of grass uprooted by the winds of the past days strewed the ground wherever one stepped. I saw the moon in the sky by daylight, horned and angry and discolored.
But a new strange pith was circulating in my body, a new strength, and looking down at my arms, which had never lost their sinews in all my trouble and absence, I came to with a start. They looked paler, as if the arteries and veins which had moved from within out were deciding to sink back down into my anatomy.
Inside the dance hall nothing had changed however. And one could not hear the winds from within or see the unnatural moon.
I looked through all the victrola records and put on the selection Daventry had played on his harmonica, “On the Alamo.”
I was aware night was descending and gradually purpling the ocean, but I felt so strong I danced and danced under the revolving polka-dot ballroom light. I was sick unto death, but there is nothing like dancing to keep one holding to some thread with this world.
I heard the big main entrance door open then, but I did not look round, the record player needed winding, it was ancient, that’s why I call it a victrola, it is a victrola. I put on “My Blue Heaven” and danced some more.
I looked up and saw Daventry.
The expression on his face dumbfounded me. I have never seen such a countenance. Oh, if only as they say, one had the power of words, or was a painter, if only—no, no photographer could have caught it either, for the eye sees so many movements and flashes and colors no photo can ever bring—his face, well I knew then he was not human, but a mess
enger, even his missing teeth was right for his face, which in all the gloom and wind and bad moon shone like spun gold.
I saw the knife in his hand, gleaming, and didn’t care, wasn’t worried.
“Shan’t we die, Garnet, and be rid of this hell, shan’t we . . . ?”
“If you say so,” I answered him, but a sob escaped me.
“Oh, Garnet,” he sighed, “you do so cling to life, poor kid.”
He had put the knife to my throat with such force I felt I had already begun to bleed under its cold fine edge.
“We will both die together, in any case, Garnet,” he whispered. But as he spoke, I slipped involuntarily from his grasp, so that he had to bring me up again to him and the blade. How odd, I who had lived only with death these four, five years at least, when death was rapping on the portals of my heart, I closed them fast and held to life.
“Whatever you say, Garnet, whatever you wish,” I heard him speak, his voice already distant as the storm outside. I heard the knife fall to the bare wood floor.
Then after that terrible embrace, before either of us knew what was happening we were dancing under the shifting many-colored ball that had seen at least a million young girls and boys hold one another as they moved and shifted across the polished floors. Here was a couple the moon had not seen before. I think we were dancers in the grave, or had crossed the great river and left the ferryman and the three-headed Dog far behind. But I was happy again, though it was all so strange, and I wanted to whisper now in his ear to ask him who he was, but what did it matter, someone was holding me again when even the docs had retched and puked at the sight of me, somebody was holding me tight the night before he was to marry my girl.
“You won’t leave me now, will you, Daventry?”
He did not answer.
“You mean to leave me.” I disengaged myself from him. “You mean to leave me after all that wait and vigil I’ve had for you.”
“That’s not so and you know it,” he began to reply. “But even should I be called away,” and he looked at me in my eyes, which alone now are unharmed by all that happened to me in war, are as bright as anybody’s, the whites clear and pure, the blue deep, the pupil inky black and movable as the sun’s disc. “Hear me, Garnet,” he was going on, looking at me like he was in search of my soul, “I will never leave you even though the firmament part, because we are one, one soul in two tormented halves . . .”
Then he put the pressure of his mouth like a brand on my eyes and lips as if I was soon never to know his presence or touch again . . .
I walked out to the ocean’s shore. The sea looked very peculiar, I had never seen it or any other body of water such a color, the height of the waves was tremendous, and the beach was covered with masses of foamy seaweed, dead starfish, rays, and a dead young tern. The sun looked like a cracked brooch such as Mrs. Gondess might wear as a heir loom. From every point of the compass came the cries of warning, from lighthouses, from foghorns, from God knows where: Go home, go hide, go away, don’t linger, clear the beach, run!
“Oh, Daventry,” was all I could say. I knew I had gone mad. I knew I loved him, and not the Widow anymore. And how did I love him? I didn’t know because I had never loved a man. I loved him like a mad child loves flame and fire. I wanted to be immolated in his conflagrant blaze.
“Come home, why don’t you you, making a fool of yourself!”
“All right for you, Quintus,” I answered my reader back. He stood there holding a coat for me to put on.
“Are you comin’, Garnet, or am I goin’ to have to drag you . . . ?”
My mouth worked to say something, but only spittle came out, which was good because usually even my spit glands don’t work. Maybe the coming hurricane was curing them.
“You can thank God I didn’t kill your master.” Quintus reported Daventry as having made this statement as the sheep rancher’s son was packing to leave.
“Ain’t that a joke,” Quintus went on, “packing when he has about four articles in a paper sack, not counting his socks, and no toothbrush.”
I don’t know what outraged Quintus more, his (Daventry’s) calling me his master, D’s offering to murder me for nothing, or his having no belongings to pack, or all of them together.
“Don’t you like Daventry by now?” I said after a rest in the conversation. I was back home leafing through a book that Quintus had just finished, some old play written in poetry.
“What are you staring at?” I hear Quintus’ voice after a long silent spell rising in alarm.
I looked up from my perusing to study his troubled face.
I put that book away, but he dove for the place in it where I had studied and perused.
I do not have much memory, I can hardly recall my mother’s face now, and as I’ve said in this story of my days, even the daily events fog after an hour of their happening, but the words of that old play, the title of which of course I’ve lost in disremembrance, were engraved in my brain like electric lights over a movie house:
Behold the lively tincture of his blood!
I began to recite it then to Quintus, I think, as soon as his hand had found my place in the book:
Behold the lively tincture of his blood!
Neither the dropsy nor the jaundice in it,
But the true freshness of a sanguine red,
For all the fog of this black murderous night
Has mixed with it.
I was never sure what happened after that, and even if Quintus had stayed beside me at that climax of catastrophe, I doubt he would be able to recollect it either. I had never had a real quarrel with a black man, and I had never heard words like then come from his throat. I was blamed all upon a sudden, you might say, for all the wrongs committed by one man against another since the dawning of the world, and all this while the hurricane was arriving. He taunted me likewise again and again with having let a murderer take my girl away from me.
I was so confused by Quintus’ reproaches, and I had taken so many pills that day, gradually it seemed to me he was the master and had drove me out from my house, I was untenanted, that is, and had no land . . . But though I heard his sorry voice later calling “Come back, Garnet . . . Come back, Montrose!” I ran out into the night and into the little woods behind the house, I was on my way to the dance hall, I reckon, when I run across a group of people in outlandish get-up, chanting. I didn’t know if I imagined them or not, anyhow I never saw them again after that night, but there about ten to fifteen, all dressed in nightgowns, their heads shaved, and with white paint on their faces, most of them in beads, and yelling some words that couldn’t be English. They seized me for a while and asked if I would stay with them and worship their Lord.
I remember telling them about Daventry stealing my girl. They knew all this already, to judge by the expression on their nodding countenances, and they held me tight, which reminded me of how Daventry had danced with me under the revolving dance-hall moon. I knew I was mad then, that my brain had finally suffered the shame and ruin of my body and had likewise turned to the consistency of mulberry wine.
It was at that moment it struck. But it struck again and again, it was all strikes. The firmament parted, to judge by the sickening sound, like all God’s handiwork had been throwed down by him in disgust, and the universe smashed to little bits and pieces. I saw, if I can trust to recollection, a whole forest rise and fly into the turbulence, pieces of buildings and bird feathers, clothing and earth, and sheets of water fell and then rose like the ocean had gone up to replace the heavens. There were sounds so terrible I felt my eardrums split, and where the sky had been black as a hundred midnights rushed this new heaven that was the mountain-high sea.
I lay in some hollow where a forest had once been. I was fearful to open my eyes, and fearful not to. I felt my clothes, and for some reason they were not as wet as they should be. Then I looked upwards. There was the sky again, but of course it would never be a real sky again. Its light was coming from too far
away, I thought, and was not warmed by the sun I had known. And all around me the teeth of this great wind had left nothing untouched.
“I don’t have too long.” I remember saying that. I don’t know how long I had laid there since I escaped from the band of those shaved-head people in nightgowns. I don’t have too long now, I kept saying. I was unharmed, it was my mind didn’t seem to work now, my body was recovered. I walked straight on because the familiar trees and cliffs and gently sloping beaches had all been torn from their sites, and I was walking in a new land.
The first thing I know I was standing in front of Widow Rance’s big house. Save for the ravages about the house like lost trees and torn up earth, her home stood without a mark on it. The back screen door was unlatched. I walked up the steps, each creaking like to be heard a mile away, and I was already beginning to weep a little, it was the pills, it was Quintus’ cruelty and bitter reproaches, no, I was mad, that was what, I was mad for I had been sane too long, like the doc had said long ago, “Don’t hold it all in, Garnet, tell the world what you feel and keep locked within, let it all spill out, boy.”
Don’t you ever say boy to a Virginia white man, I had replied to the doc.
I stood now in Daventry and Georgina’s wedding room, for now it all rushed back to remembrance. I had, after all, attended the marriage ceremony at the Grace Evangelical church, and I pained Georgina, I think, by my quoting during the service in audible tones from one of those books, instead of listening to all the preacher said addressing us as “Dearly beloved,” and “I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement,” and finally “With this ring I thee wed”—well right over the voice of the minister I (I remembered now) muttered these profane but maybe older words picked up from Quintus’ voice and let them be heard in the church, this is what comes of being a slave to a nigger and hearing things without sense, for I prophesied aloud: