The balcony rail gave way beneath my grip, splintered, and, balusters and all, crashed down to the main floor below. I nearly followed, falling, but my companion seized the back of my breechclout and with a mighty yank hauled me back from the brink.
“WOPE easy thar now keerful!” he cried in his falsetto. “Iffen ye don’t feel yore way round, this whole pile will fall to pieces on our haids, and won’t nobody find us till after the next flood.” He peered over the edge at the floor below, and his eyes bulged in dismay. “Now we done did it! That thar rail has fell on the ole man’s case and busted it clean open!” He headed for the stairs, and I followed.
The glass showcase was shattered; shards of glass covered its contents. He began picking away the glass fragments piece by piece, gingerly, but despite his care he cut one finger badly. The finger named Every Clever was nearly severed. I moved in to help, and suddenly, as if a stage technician had thrown a switch, a shaft of sunlight came through a high rear window and spotlighted the ghostly figure of my friend, weird enough to begin with but now covered with cobwebs and dust, pulling away glass with a bleeding hand. Motes of dust filled the sunbeam; other motes filled my nose, and I sneezed. He stepped aside to nurse his hand, stuffing cobwebs into the wound. I carefully lifted a slab of broken glass and discovered beneath it a human face.
It was attached to a body filling the length of the busted showcase, a human body or at least a wax figure worthy of Madame Tussauds—or a stuffed figure worthy of my doll wife’s “upholsterer”—the gnarled, incredibly wrinkled hands clasped and folded upon a silk vest, the face, the face: more corrugated and engraved than the topography of this mountainous county, the sparse hair white as spent ashes, the closed eyelids sunken and gray and creased. My injured companion was peering over my shoulder. “Wal now!” he exclaimed. “I reckon he aint hurt after all.”
Indeed, none of the broken glass had marred the figure. “Hurt?” I said. “He’s dead.” My friend was holding a compress of cobwebs against his injured hand, and blood was trickling down his arm and dripping off his elbow. “But you’re hurt!” I declared.
“It’ll stanch, give it time,” he said, then asked, “Did you ever in yore life see the like of this feller?”
I shook my head and asked, “Is it real?”
“‘Real’?” he said. “Wal, I reckon he don’t aim to git up and have supper with us, nor even say ‘howdy,’ but he’s shore flesh and bones if he aint flesh and blood. No blood a-tall, course. They drawed it all outen him and shot ’im full of ’balmin juice.”
“They? They who?”
“Why, whoever it was, way back afore my day and time, who prepared the remains.”
“Who is this man?”
He answered, with an almost civic pride or local ballyhoo, “This here is the World’s Oldest Man. Or leastways he used to be, when he died, and he aint got no younger since, and aint nobody else got any older since, so I reckon he still is. If he had lived till now, he’d still be more older and deader than everyone else in the world.”
I tried to make some logic out of this last statement. “What’s he doing in this store?” I asked. “Why wasn’t he buried?”
“That’s kinder a story as long-drawn-out as ye could wedge betweenst the beginning and the end. And lak I say, I aint but about seventeen year old, after all, and it happened way before my time. Anyhow, he was a furriner and a single man and a peddler and never had no kinfolks that anybody ever heared tell of or could scare up. Some folks said he was never buried on account of he wasn’t a residenter, and the cemetery up the road is only fer residenters. Other folks said that anybody who had managed to stay above ground as long as he had—and nobody knew how long that was, maybe a hunderd and twenty, thirty year—had the right to stay above ground forevermore.
“Farther along you’ll know all about him. He must of come to this town at least wunst a year from back when the town was a baby, and he was always sellin somethin, but somethin different ever time. There was a few mean-spirited folks who said the things he sold in this town was what caused the town to die, and so hit’s right and proper that he’s the only residenter of the town today, dead though he be, dead though the town be. Am I makin any sense to ye?”
“Some,” I allowed. “This is only a town of memories, right? Our unhappy memories we bury in graves. Our happy memories we embalm like the body of Lenin, to keep in our view.”
He puzzled over this. “Who’s this Lenin?”
“Just another body under glass.”
“Speakin of glass,” he said, “we’d best clean out that candy showcase and move him into it.”
This grisly task was not very pleasant, and he was hampered by his still bleeding finger.
In time the finger healed, but could never dance again.
Not long afterwards, in proximity, there were a couple of funerals in the cemetery, the second one my own father’s. The night of that one, I met an older woman, courtly in her speech and ways.
Duet For Harmonica and French Horn
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.
—Roethke, “The Lost Son,” 5 (It was beginning winter…)
Chapter fourteen
Half-waking, you rolled and dropped a gentle hand down on the other pillow, and woke fully to find him not there. You listened for the sound of the axe, his chopping, but heard only the piping of the pre-dawn birds and the quickening of your heart. Slowly you stroked your hand down into the basin of the impress of his body; it was cool in that pock; you rubbed your hand down one slope and up the other until the dent was warm. The sun rose but you said, “Why should I get up today?” Because, I answered, someone may need you. “Not this early,” you replied, giving your head a toss, which sent long strands of your sheet-white hair over both of the pillowcase-white pillows. You stared at that part of your hair which fell upon the other pillow. Then the pillow was clutched against your breast, but was too soft to be him; still, you could remember fifteen thousand mornings you had embraced his trunk. I asked, Wasn’t that enough? “I reckon so,” you sighed, and rose up, careful as always to touch the floor with your right foot first, not even thinking about it, that good-luck habit as old as the day you understood speech. The nightdress was lifted over your head and replaced by a daydress. Why do you never wear the satin quilted house robe your grandson gave you one Christmas? “I never know when company’s coming.” Starting a fire in the woodstove was no problem. Starting the sausage frying and the coffee a-making wasn’t either. But brushing your hair was, not because there was so much of it, but because he had always done that: brushing it as you sat in your rocker watching the sausage or bacon fry. Brushing it yourself was almost as hard as reaching the parts of the back that itched. The parts of the back that itch are usually the hardest to reach. Why do you let your mind ramble like this? “What else is there to think about?” Well, for openers, you might give some thought to the Bluff-dweller, and how you are going to save him. “Is he worth saving? He doesn’t much seem to think so.” All right, the coffee’s boiling over.
After breakfast (it was no problem, preparing and eating such a large breakfast only for yourself; there had been a period of several years, many years, before he even bothered to come back into your life again, when you had only yourself to serve at breakfast, and usually dinner and supper too, except for those summers when your daughter came to visit); you put on a sweater and went out of doors, to feed your cats and chickens. You no longer had a cow to milk; you sold her when he died, because he’d always claimed the milking was his, even when he forgot to do it, those times his mind wandered, and you had to do it for him. You no longer had pigs to slop, or rather you had too many pigs, all over the place, but they weren’t yours, and your grandson had said he didn’t mind you slopping them if you wanted to, and he was sure your slops were as good as anybody’s, but he’d just rather let them run free an
d root whatever they could find, and always come running home to the plant whenever they wanted the fancy feed that his computers measured out for them. You watched as a dozen of them went thundering down the road, raising dust, and figured that was where they were heading, home to their computer-slops. Soon the oak trees would be shedding their acorns, and the pigs would chomp all day at the mast beneath the oaks of your land and sleep the whole night there. Sometimes it made the cats nervous. A cat and a hog were so different. Somehow you felt closer to the hogs, but couldn’t imagine having one sit in your lap. “I’m becoming a silly old woman,” you reflected. Old, perhaps, I replied, but never silly. If you had to choose, of course, you’d rather be a cat. But although your cats seemed to understand just about anything you said to them, you never could understand anything they tried to say to you. Probably they never tried. It was a one-way communication. With the pigs, though, it was different. When they were feeling neighborly, which was always, you could understand just about anything they had to say, however they said it, honking or snuffling or snorting. They had impeccable manners, and always addressed you by name and inquired after your health and commented upon the weather. After the funeral a delegation of them had appeared, moving in slow consort, and had expressed their condolences, and their respect and admiration for the departed. That the departed was the grandfather of their owner, master and eventual butcherer never seemed to concern them. The departed had been a good man, a man of Kind, and had always scratched them behind the ears, where they most loved to be scratched. The world would never see his like again. He was fortunate to have lived to a ripe old age, and to have been an unusually loving husband, an expert automobile mechanic until and even after his retirement, and a onetime minister of the Gospel who had remained ready and able to officiate at occasional funerals. One young sow had told you that she’d overheard some remarks to the effect that your husband would have been happy to speak at his own funeral if they hadn’t nailed the lid shut. “I’m a crazy old woman,” you observed. Old, of course, I responded, but never crazy. Here it was already seven o’clock in the morning, and you hadn’t done anything worth doing, and had a whole day ahead of you, because even if the Bluff-dweller did show up, he probably wouldn’t come until nearly dark, as he usually did. You’d never seen him in full daylight with the sun shining. You wondered what he did with his days. “What can I do with mine?”
Nothing, beloved, except be. Which you are very good at. Unless I miss my guess badly, you have never been bored, more than I could say for a lot of people, including myself. Dear heart, you are in a dance with time, from get-up to lie-down, and even those hours in the rocker, even when it isn’t rocking, you never run out of yourself. But there were the breakfast dishes to wash, and first the water to draw from the well and heat. Your grandson had urged you to let him install a pump, and pipe the water from the well into the cabin’s kitchen, but all your life you had drawn water from the depths of a well and you saw no reason for allowing PROG RESS to keep you from carrying the bucket to the well empty and carrying it back near-full. “I might be old, but I’m not the least bit feeble.” Right, my lady, you don’t even walk slowly, and I would hate to have to keep pace with you. Now the dishes were done, you walked down the road into the dead village to check the only thing that still “worked” therein: your mailbox, a loaf of aluminum nailed atop a rail holding eight similar but not identical mailboxes, mounted on a post at the fork where your road met the main road, a stone’s throw from where your post office used to be. A traveler passing through (or rather coming to a stop here, because the main road didn’t go much farther along), would look at this row of mailboxes and wonder, since the town was empty, where the owners of the mailboxes lived. The traveler would look around, but see nothing inhabited, and unless he happened to catch you at the moment you came to inspect your box, or catch any one of the thirty-odd people who used the other eight boxes, he wouldn’t see anyone either. Why didn’t the Bluff-dweller ever think to add a box for himself to this collection, so he wouldn’t have to walk into the county seat twice a year to get his mail? Probably because, abstracted as he often was, he never even noticed this row of mailboxes, and it never occurred to him that the U.S. Post Office Department had a system known as Rural Free Delivery, or in this case, Star Route, and that a Jeep came out each morning from the closest village that still had a post office, and kept this empty place still de facto alive by stuffing the boxes with gimmickry solicitations from Reader’s Digest, Publishers Clearing House, Salvation Army, and an occasional postcard, sometimes even a letter.
Today there were two letters in your box, one from your granddaughter on the West Coast, the other from a stranger-woman in a nearby state, but you stuffed them into your apron and waited until you got back home to open them; that takes a certain willpower, but you have never lacked for willpower. Your granddaughter (the oldest of five you had, scattered all over, whereas only your lone grandson remained here) enclosed recent photographs of her share of your thirteen great-grandchildren. The oldest boy, she said, would be starting college in the autumn. She hoped you were well. How was everybody else? Please remind her kid brother to write to her sometime; he hardly ever did. Did you know, by the way, that so-and-so had left that no-good so-and-so and had taken up with you-know-who, and they took off like a pair of bats out of you-know-where? Please take care of yourself, Gran. We all miss you, and wish you could get out this way sometime to visit. Much love.
The other letter was from a woman who identified herself as an instructor in history at a branch of a state university in that town, some 200 miles away in the state neighboring to the north. She had learned your address from a colleague in the Political Science Department who had been in correspondence with the biographer of a nineteenth-century governor of your state who had succeeded that Reconstructionist governor of your state who had founded and lived in your town. Although she had learned that your town no longer existed, she was given to understand that the dwelling occupied by the onetime governor was still erect if not intact, and would you happen to have any photographs of it, which she would promptly return to you after copying? She would be most grateful, for she had been interested in that governor ever since her undergraduate days, when she had learned of his opposition to slavery and secession. She had mentioned him in her Ph.D. dissertation on slavery. If you did not have any photographs, or even if you did, could she arrange, now that the semester was about to end, to drive down some afternoon, for a quick look around, if it would not inconvenience you? She would be delighted to meet you, if you could draw her some crude little map showing how to find your house. She was reasonably certain that she could find the town itself, or at least make inquiries in the vicinity. Looking forward to hearing from you, and possibly meeting you, Yours Sincerely.
And you seemed to go backward, backward in time to that day several years before when your husband and you had received a visitor:
Driving a red station wagon covered with reddish road-dust, leaving his sweating wife or whoever the lady was sitting in the hot car, he had appeared in his pink leisure suit, slick-haired and thick-bespectacled, and had sat in the breezeway of the dogtrot with the two of you, your husband answering most of the questions, turning to you only when he couldn’t answer one. Had you known that the woman living with the ex-governor and his wife, presumed to be the wife’s friend and former social secretary, was in fact the ex-governor’s former and present mistress? No, you had answered, everyone had always assumed that she was simply the dear friend of the wife of the ex-governor. Your husband had pointed out that both the ex-governor and his wife had died the same year he was born, the first year of this century, the year before you were born, but that both you and he had spent your growing-up years listening to tales, true and fabulous, about the ex-governor and everything he had done, but nobody had ever even hinted that the lovely and genteel city-bred woman who had returned from the capital with them after the governor had become ex-governor was anything oth
er than the ex-social secretary to the ex-governor’s wife and was then and would remain the dear friend of the wife for the rest of her days, and then continue living alone in “the big house” (it wasn’t all that big; it was simply the largest house in the small town) for the rest of her days, which lasted for quite a number of years after the death of the ex-governor and his wife. Yes, both your husband and yourself had remembered seeing the woman on several occasions. What had she looked like? Well, she had looked pretty old, of course. Your husband had aimed his finger in your direction and had said, “She’d looked almost as old as her, and then even older, maybe, although she was a good bit shorter, and not quite as purty, although she was purty enough. Real cute, in fact. Now that you mention it, I wouldn’t be atall surprised to know that she was his mistress on the sly, but it sure must’ve been sly, because nobody never dreamed of it.” Had you known her name? “Not me,” your husband had answered, and had turned to you.
“Nor me,” you had answered, and had pointed out that she had always been referred to simply as the ex-governor’s wife’s “Friend,” and in fact that was all that had been carved on her headstone in the village cemetery.
“Would you like to know her name?” the professor or whoever he was had asked.
Your husband had shrugged his shoulders and had given his head a kind of jerk that could have meant “sure” or “what does it matter?” or “who cares?” and then had looked at you, and you, my lovely lady, had given a semblance of a nod.
“Her name was Eliza Cunningham,” the professor-man had informed you, thereby unwittingly furnishing us all, in this otherwise innominate world, with a “handle,” both in the sense of an actual name and something, anything, to hold on to.
Eliza Cunningham had been born in 1838 in a hill village, in these same hills about sixty miles south of here, but had been sent at an early age to the capital to be raised by her grandfather, who had been one of the capital’s founders, its first physician and first mayor, who had paid to give Eliza the finest education that a girl could have in the capital at that time. Possibly because of that education, and because of a deep attachment to the black woman slave who had been her nanny, she had grown up violently opposed to slavery, so that during the state Secession Convention of 1861, when only one lone rustic hillbilly delegate voted against secession, she had fallen in love with the man, although he was fifty-three, thirty years older than she, and she quickly had become his paramour, and later, when he as a Federal general had helped recapture the capital from the Confederates, she had loved him once again, several times, and still later, when he had become governor during Reconstruction and had brought his uncouth but beautiful hillbilly wife to the capital to join him, she had insinuated herself into the official family as one of the wife’s social secretaries, and had become her friend for life, and thereby the governor’s mistress for life. That was why the ex-governor, upon his return to this village, had built a house that had three front doors instead of the customary two.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 30