Now the pick-up has its lights on, including the reverse whites, and is backing out of the yard, and drives away. I approach the house. “You’d better stay away from those cats,” I caution my dog. He sits beside the road, casting nervous glances around the yard.
I am carrying two lanterns, one to return to the old woman, one to find my way home again. I knock. She opens. And smiles, as if pleased to see me, or at least relieved of her doubts that she might ever see her lantern or me again. I hold the lantern out to her, and she takes it. “Thank you very much,” I say. She draws back slightly, wrinkling her nose. I suddenly realize I must smell very boozy. Should have brushed my teeth, at least. But possibly she is only surprised to see me neat and dressed nicely.
“Come in,” she says. “You’re just in time for supper.”
I go in. The table is freshly set for two, with candlelight even, and flowers in a vase. There is no sign of the previous visitor’s dirty dishes. “Didn’t you just have supper with your guest?” I ask.
“Guest?” she says. “That wasn’t any guest. That was my grandson. And I never can get that boy to stay and eat with me.” She gestures at one of the bookcases. “He just brought me another load of books to read, and took away the ones I’d finished. He’s a regular lending library. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen his house. Probably you never will, even if you went out looking for it. You wouldn’t believe it if you saw it. I wouldn’t even call it a house. A pair of bubbles is what it is, looks from a distance like a couple of giant puffballs, except you can’t get a distance from it, it’s all swallowed up in timber. That boy’s an oddling, but he knows near about everything, and what he doesn’t know he’s finding out pretty fast. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he found a cure for cancer. He’s working on it, him and his friend. But he’ll never find a cure for the mortal sickness of this hopeless old town. It’s tottered past saving. Wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. I am slightly disturbed to hear this courtly woman, whom I have taken to be demure and quiet, running on so garrulously. “But why prolong its terminal illness? You’ve heard of ‘dying with dignity’ and of the ‘living will’?”
“My husband and I both made living wills some years back. That’s why I wouldn’t let them keep him hooked up to those machines in the hospital. And when my time comes, I know somebody will keep the machines away from me. Maybe my grandson.” She smiles. “Or maybe you, or somebody.” I do not comment. She begins setting platters on the table: pork chops, potatoes, green peas. “Would you do that?” she persists.
“In all likelihood, you’ll still be around years after I’m gone,” I declare.
“Oh, why?” Those dark eyebrows crowd up and define the wrinkles of her forehead. “Do you have some disease?”
“I have recurrent pangs, strange twinges and gnawing stitches, here and there all over my abdomen. Probably my liver is shot, my stomach is gangrenous, my gallbladder is atrophied, my pancreas necrotic, and my colon collapsed.”
“My heavens me,” she says. “Is that what your ‘mistress’ has done to you?”
“Not necessarily. Did you know, dear lady, that the heart is not the seat of love? For centuries man has made the heart the literal or symbolic center of the highest emotions, and has idealized it into a valentine. But the true seat of love is the gastrointestinal system, although I find it hard to visualize a representation of the entrails as idealized as a valentine.”
She is laughing. “I’ll have to tell that to my grandson, and ask him if he ever thought of that.”
“You say he’s doing cancer research? Ask him if he doesn’t see some direct connection between cancer of the stomach, bowels, kidney, bladder, et cetera, and the victim’s sense of not loving or not being loved, much more than, say, cancer of the lung, which is simply an attempt to stop the breath of life, or cancer of the brain, which is an attempt to stop consciousness and painful thought. The heart, so far as I know, does not itself get cancer. It goes on dutifully pumping blood although it may seem to flutter in moments of romantic rapture, but it is not the seat of love or any other emotion. Unromantic as it may seem, the guts are the seat not of bravery—another idealized misconception—but of passion and caring and desire and yearning and frustration, all those things associated with love. Why else do people passionately in love lose their appetites for food? Why are the over-eaters so unromantic? Why indeed has civilization laid so much stress upon eating together, communal eating, and has made the lone eater to feel loveless? Surely more ulcers have come from worry over love than over money. Men get more ulcers than women, not because money is more important to them but because they have been conditioned to be the active seekers for the love of the passive woman, and hence are more likely to feel spurned or frustrated in their attempts. Why does the lonely little appendix become aware of its seeming uselessness and grow inflamed in order to have itself removed? Why, pardon me, does constipation follow periods of a sense of loss of love or a wish to retain a fleeing love?”
She laughs again, and observes, “You seem to be eating well. Have another pork chop.”
“Thank you. I haven’t eaten since the last time you fed me.”
“Applesauce?”
“Thank you. Yes, I have no doubt about it, but can you imagine a new direction in popular songs, with titles like ‘My Tum Belongs to You,’ or ‘I’ll Hold You in My Paunch Forever,’ or ‘You Broke My Gut When You Went Away’?”
When she stops laughing, she says, “You ought to meet my grandson. You both have such strange ideas. But you haven’t told me anything about yourself.”
“I’ve told you I have gastrointestinal distress, and may perish of it. Make of that what you will.” I am being deliberately secretive, hoping she will draw me out with questions. I will truthfully answer anything she asks me, but she must ask me. I won’t volunteer information. But neither, apparently, will she seek it. A silence ensues, which I take advantage of, to finish the contents of my plate. For dessert she serves cherry pie, remarking that the cherries are from her grandson’s orchard. “What does your grandson do?” I ask, “…apart from curing cancer?”
“Haven’t you seen all the pigs all over the place?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“But you haven’t seen that new metal building down below the swinging bridge?”
“I haven’t seen any swinging bridge.”
“You have to take the road that goes down to what used to be the cannin factory, and then go downstream from there. Or you could just cut across the field where my garden patch used to be when I had the store and P.O. Either way, you’d come upon the swinging footbridge that was built so folks could get across the creek when the water was too high for wagons or cars. Way off in the field below the swinging bridge is a big new metal building—well, it’s not all that new, my grandson had it built five or six years ago. That’s where he processes all those hogs. They’re all his, every one of them, and he makes the finest ham you ever ate. Those pork chops you just ate were his. Weren’t they good? Let’s throw the bones out to your dog. Or does he care for pork?”
She stands, I stand, and we carry the bones out to my dog, who develops a sudden liking for pork. Many cats have followed us, however, and there are sibilations from them and snarls from him, until the woman swishes her arms at them and says, “Scat, y’all, and leave this dog be!” The cats retreat toward the cabin.
“You have a great number of felines on the premises,” I observe.
“And I haven’t seen a mouse or rat since I was ten years younger than you,” she says.
It is my turn to laugh. When was the last time I did? It is rusty, sounds like gagging. “How do you know how old I am?” When I once asked my young moonshiner to guess my age, he took note of my grizzled beard and graying hair and replied, Oh I reckon fifty or thereabouts. I don’t think he believed me when I insisted that he had missed by a decade. But that is what excessive worry and your gastrointestinal system will do to yo
u.
“Just guessing,” she says. “I don’t think you’re as old as you look. For one thing you don’t have a wrinkle on your face. Not even smile lines.”
“I haven’t smiled much.”
We are sitting now in the breezeway, the woman in her rocking chair, with the largest of her cats asleep in her lap. She rests one of her delicate hands lightly on the back of the cat’s thick neck. “Because of guilt?” she asks. “Or worry? Which are just the same thing, but in opposite directions: one toward the past, the other toward the future.”
“I’m no longer worried about anything,” I declare, “and I believe I’ve buried all my guilt.”
“That’s amazing. Then maybe you just have no sense of humor. Or else it pleasures you to feel you’ve been done wrong.”
“‘Pleasures’ me?”
“Sure. What’s the way they put it? ‘Injustice collector.’ Is that it?”
I scowl. “For six years now I haven’t had anyone to collect injustices from.”
“No, but you have plenty of time to dwell on all the ones you’ve already collected.”
I am not certain that I want this old lady to become my shrink. How does she surmise these insights? Or in her ancient wisdom can she read faces, although she can’t see mine in the dark, nor I hers, just the silhouette of her figure in the pale light coming from within the cabin. But if she’s going to pursue this line of analysis, she ought to dispense with the generalities and get down to specifics.
“I don’t brood a lot on any wrongs done to me,” I assert with a firmness that may be faked to conceal the truth. “I feel pretty good most of the time.”
“Yes, your obsession is to make yourself feel good, no matter how much you have to suffer for it.”
I try to see her eyes in the dark, but cannot. Is she roasting me? “Okay, O Oracle. Or Oracless. Do you have any ultimate words of wisdom for me?”
“Just remember,” she says, “that nothing is as bad as you would like for it to be.”
Chapter thirteen
Thirteen. “And how are all thirteen of you these days?” I greeted the young moonshiner as our paths converged in the forest going downhill one afternoon in the spring. It was the first time I had seen him without his shotgun.
He did not ask me, “Which thirteen?” He seemed to know. “Wal now, Ursulie’s jist about full-growed,” he announced, “but she don’t know it, and is gittin kinder hard to manage. It aint a fair match when her and Robber git to fightin.” He held up his ten fingers and let them sway a bit. “They’re all fine, ’cept Jeleny Wieny’s kinder blue.
And me, I’m to’bble as ever, I reckon. How ’bout you?”
“No change.” This might have sounded negative, but no more so than his customary noncommittal “tolerable.”
“Whar you off to?” he asked.
“Nowhere. Just looking for my dog. Where are you off to?”
“Headin down to the store to git me a new pair a pant.”
“The store?”
“The big store. Little store’s plumb empty.”
“I know. But the big store’s not occupied either.”
“Not occupied, naw, but it shore aint empty. You never been inside thet store?”
“It’s all boarded up and the doors are locked.”
“The doors, yeah, but aint you noticed ’round backside how they’s a winder board or two loose?”
“May I come too?”
“Why, shore. But I reckon they don’t carry nothing a ‘injun’ would want to buy.”
“They? They who?”
He laughed. We went together down into the ruined village. He had a story to tell about everything we passed. Using the forefinger known as “Day Digit,” he pointed here and there: in a thicket of brambles was a rectangle of stones, the foundation, he said, of one of the first log cabins built in the 1830s; down the road from it, a small pile of boards, all that remained of the town’s third general store; and then the staunchly erect but vacant house that had been both the second (or “little”) store and the post office; next to it a large maple tree at least fifty years old which grew out of the site of what had been a tavern, dance hall and occasional “opry” house; across the road, what looked like a rude stone wall, rare for this country, but was, he said, the remains of the stone bank and trust company, stacked as an embankment against the rising waters of the creek; the house and clinic of a doctor; the house and clinic of a dentist; the house and clinic of another doctor (where I had spent my first night in town); other abandoned houses, then, across from the big general store, the largest and finest house in town, which had once been a hotel.
Behind the big general store he pointed out the foundation of what had been the town’s “skyscraper”: the gristmill, which was washed away in a flood “before my day and time,” he said. Then we waded through the branches of overgrown gooseberry bushes to reach a rear window of the big general store. The panes were gone from the window, and he boosted me through, warning, “Now watch keerful whar ye step, or you’ll go ass-deep thoo the floor.”
He followed me in. Cobwebs grabbed and clung to me from every direction and small spiders scrambled to and fro, at me and away from me. We were in a back room of the store, apparently what had been the office. The only illumination came from the window we had entered, whose boards had been loosened; all the other windows remained boarded up. The center of the floor had caved in and on the edge of the cavity a heavy iron safe, rusted, its door sprung open, its combination dial indecipherable, listed toward the pit so sharply that one gentle shove would have sent it crashing through.
Old calendars on the wall, one for 1927, another for 1938 overlaid by one for 1939. Pigeonhole wall shelves with dusty bills of lading rolled into them. A slant-top bookkeeping desk, quite possibly local-made, an interesting vernacular piece which I would have happily obtained for the Foundation. A nice rolltop desk, slightly warped, bought for about twenty dollars new, factory-made, around 1902–1905, now worth at least a couple of hundred. The door from the office, which my young friend rattled, joggled, shouldered and butted open, led into an aisle behind a counter with a grain-weight scale and cracked oak-stave barrels still containing some once recognizable bran or meal now overlaid with dust and mouse droppings. The interior of the store proper was cavernous and dark: rising two and a half stories to a “cathedral ceiling” where a lone window, unboarded, situated like the rose window of a gothic cathedral, let a shaft of light into the gloom. Around the conventional centerpiece, a potbellied stove with a drum barrel-chamber mounted atop it and its pipe rising straight to the ridge of the roof some thirty feet above, was a circle of chairs (some of them, apparently, local-made and therefore worthy of my close scrutiny), flanked by counters, tables, glass showcases with brittle or melted chocolate bars and other petrified candies, sundries of every sundry sort, racks of horseshoes, harnesses, horse collars, shelves above shelves of bolts and screws and files, condiments and canned goods, dyes and snuffs and chewing tobacco, mold and mildew, rust and must, all in spoilage.
“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “Why didn’t they sell all this stuff?”
“They?” he said. “They who?” and laughed at that chance to throw my words back at me. “Who’d a bought it? But it’s still for sale. You find anything you kin use, jist leave the money in here.” He showed me the wooden cash drawer, which he pulled from beneath the back of a counter: concave depressions for each size of coin, pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, halves and silver dollars, and a tray of bills. I recognized one of the crisp ten-dollar bills as having the same lady treasurer’s signature as those I had placed under the rock by the falls to buy my booze, so I assumed my moonshiner had been doing some of his business here.
It occurred to me I could use a new comb. Above, the spotlight beam of sunshine followed me, as I moved among the sundries and found the case of toiletries, where there were, sure enough, boxes of men’s combs. Celluloid combs for twenty-five cents, black hard rubber combs for four c
ents more, and, best of all, eight-inch French horn combs for thirty-five cents. I took one of each; I’d never played a French horn comb before.
Making change for myself in the cash drawer, I said, “I don’t suppose they sold toilet paper in this store.”
“Which?” he said.
I pantomimed the unrolling of tissue, one hand around the other. “You know, the kind of paper you find in bathrooms.”
“I aint never found a bathroom, let alone no paper,” he said.
Without his help, then, I searched for, and found, high on a shelf, not one but three brands of toilet paper: “Silk Velvet Brand” (12 rolls for 98¢), “White Rose Brand” (“from genuine white silk tissue,” 12 rolls for 83¢) and “Goosedown Crepe Brand” (economy: 12 rolls for 65¢). I squeezed each. They still seemed pliable. I took, and paid for, a dozen of each three, to try on my three new combs: I would greatly broaden the range and timbre of my instrumentation, I would make a new music.
“Clothes is upstairs,” he declared, and led me up a broad, noble but rickety staircase surrounded by a balcony clinging to three interior walls, upon which were racks and shelves of software: bolts of faded gingham and flannel, vermin-chewed laces, ready-to-wear (or once-upon-a-time ready, now overdue, moth-eaten and moldy) garments: Chesterfield front frocks and Prince Alberts and cheviots and cutaways, ten-gallon hats and bowlers and fedoras and homburgs, antique denims and dungarees and duckings, long-bosomed shirts without collars, boxes of collars, boxes of teck scarves, puff ties and four-in-hands, boxes of patent leather Oxfords, plow shoes, high-button bluchers, boots and nullifiers. I staggered, overwhelmed, and clung to the balcony rail, deploring this disusage and decay, reflecting that the Foundation, had we located this cornucopia before the rot got to it, would happily have spent the Costume Department’s entire budget to have acquired it.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 29