A somewhat blousy girl on the bandstand sang “true lovvve” as Amy’s hand touched the door to the ladies’ room, in relief. Inside was solitude, silence. She only avoided mirrors, which reflected green shaded lights. At last, in a booth, she was sick. When she had washed her face, she stood in the dressing room, looking into those mirrors, and put on lipstick. She took off a shade from one of the lamps, to stare at herself, thinking how her mother said her friends loved to make up their faces in this powder room, because it was so dark, you couldn’t see anything. Close to the bulb, Amy held her purse, searching for a dime.
Outside the room, a telephone booth had been artfully covered with flowers, and she headed toward it. She glanced once toward the main room, discovering that though the music was equally loud, though the singer with her full figure was still gyrating, the watching crowd had thinned. Curiously, she peered a little further into the room, wondering what other diversion there was. At her own table, she saw a group of people standing. Something hilarious, she thought, would be going on, of which Billy Walter would be the center, or likely the cause. That thought gave her a dragged-out feeling. She would have continued toward the phone, but saw that as Cindy and her husband came away from the table, Cindy was crying. Others, at the table, were picking up purses and leaving. Billy Walter, looking around for her, was holding her coat. He came toward her, indicating she must stand there, wait. Her coat hung limply over his arm, until, silently commanded, she put it on. People formed a line, moving like a sad pilgrimage. Filing out, Billy Walter pressed arms about her and said close to her ear, “There’s been an accident. Quill’s been shot.”
Shot! Amy covered her mouth with both hands. Images from that word had no association with Quill, who was meticulous and no outdoorsman. “Where?” She thought of burglars in his house, or muggers in the street.
“In the stomach,” Billy Walter said. Almost missing a step, going out of the club to the street, she repeated, “Stomach?” causing a friend, passing, to say, “That boy’s liable to have done himself in.”
Billy Walter held her close saying, “He shot himself with that shotgun of his daddy’s, that was hanging in their den.”
Quill was not dead; the word went quickly around. Though he would live, would he recover? A stomach wound could harm so much that was vital. The only thing to do was to go home, the hour was late, and people were yawning. Amy stared away from them, her throat deliberately tightened. Yawning can be a chain reaction, and be as contagious as a disease.
Why had Quill done it? everyone asked. Billy Walter looked at Amy quizzically, sensing she would know. She and Quill had had a lot in common. “Why,” he said, “would Quill risk mutilating himself for life?”
In Billy Walter’s car, Amy leaned her chin to one hand and mumbled that she had no idea.…
“It’s me,” she said, softly, knowing she need not give her name. She knew every inflection in Jeff’s voice, as he knew hers.
“It is,” he said. “Amy.”
“Are you all right? You sound faint.”
“Now, I’m stronger.” He moved closer to the receiver.
She said, “I’m in a phone booth, and I don’t have any more change.”
“I was resting,” he said. “I’m sorry to have taken so long to get to the phone.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I was going to call last night, but something happened. I needed very much to talk to you.”
“I’m glad of that. Having been the cat who walked by himself, and finding eventually it was a mistake, I had wanted you to try a different way. I only hope to know if it works.”
“You will,” she said. “I should have called person-to-person. The operator won’t just cut us off, will she?”
“No, there’ll be signals.”
“Not more than one?”
“Many,” he said.
“You’re not talking about the operator,” she said sensitively.
“No. Life.”
“But how will I know them?”
“You will, now.”
“Why? Because I’m grown?”
“Well, apparently,” he said, “or why are you calling?”
“I think I have grown up,” she said. “Operator!”
“I’ll take care of everything,” Jeff said. He had the charges reversed to his phone. “I’ve waited a long time for this, Amy. I thought, once, I could get over you. I know now, if I lived till I were ninety, I couldn’t.”
“That’s good,” she said. “Because will you still marry me?”
He said, “When you get here, you can make plans about the rest of your life. You’ll know better what to do. Come with just what you need.”
“My toothbrush?” she said, laughing.
“Good,” he said, also laughing. “You’ve learned your lessons well.”
“I get an A?”
“Yes, and a star.”
“I can’t help worrying.”
“Choices cost.”
“That’s a hard thing to accept. But, I will.”
“I’m going to rest easy.”
“Do. When should I come?”
“As soon as possible. Tomorrow. On that first train past noon. You can be easiest met then. Will you?”
“Risk it, of course. I’ll dance a jig smack-dab in the middle of town. In broad daylight, too. I can hardly wait, can you?”
“I was beginning to wonder how long I could wait, Amy,” he said.
Seeing her mother growing older, Amy was glad to have learned not to count on anything. Anything might end, as nothing happened of itself. This morning, Edith’s sleep-swollen eyes grew doleful. Undefiantly, in a calm voice, Amy had said, “Last night I broke my engagement.”
“But why?” Edith said. “For what reason? Billy Walter’s such a sweet boy.”
“I don’t love him.” Amy then headed Edith off. “I’m not talking about being ‘in love’ with him.”
But, “Love,” Edith had said automatically, impatiently looking out at redbud opening rapidly into pink bloom. The hot burst of spring was on them, though in the earliest part of the morning she found herself shivering and thought it was because the ground was still dank. However, she was hopeful, for jonquils were up. Directly down between where two peaks of the roof formed a right angle, breaking here and there the silvery dimness of her room, the sun came in. Clusters of yellow flowers were everywhere along the ground. On a bush, wind spun small white blossoms like pinwheels. “Marriage,” Edith began, watching the flowers, her bottom lip bitten. But she remained silent, and her lips settled into place, for she had nothing after all to say about marriage, having never understood her own.
“I believe in love,” Amy said firmly, seeing her mother was going to say no more. Edith got up and went into her bathroom. Bending over the basin to splash water, she looked up, with a slightly different face, then Amy noticed that her mother was growing older. The water seemed to have added weight, like worry, to Edith’s face, and lines drew it down. She hung up her towel, but leaned upon the rack a moment, dependently. Having peered at Amy, seeing how strong her face looked, Edith relaxed. She let her chin sag, remembering being told from the time she first held Amy that she would be amazed how soon the shoe would be on the other foot, and Amy would be taking care of her. Spring, Edith thought, staring out again at the flowers, was as unbelievable as time’s passing. And looking back, she agreed, to Amy’s surprise. “Yes,” Edith said. “Love is necessary.”
Amy knew her decision would not have changed without her mother’s unknowing blessing. But she was glad to have it.
As the train arrived, she saw an old man in a black suit, standing in a garden which was not fully planted. The garden mainly was mulched with pecan hulls, their brownness slick and shiny as mink. When she got off the train, the conductor reached up and helped her down the steps. “I see the old man’s letting his garden go to seed,” he said conversationally.
“But why?” Amy said, pausing.
“Passenger trains bei
ng discontinued. The mail’s all going by truck. Might be a freight’ll stop occasionally.”
“That’s too bad,” Amy said. Picking up his conductor’s steps and getting on board, he said, “Progress, you know. It don’t take human beings into consideration.” He faded with the train, tucking his brass watch into its vest slit.
Amy went along a path through the remaining flowers and spoke to the old man. His head shook back and forth involuntarily; his look said that was the way things happened to him. He looked at the garden as he had looked at the train, sorrowfully. Around them in a netlike haze, the afternoon had begun to dissolve. The trees seemed bent, but the leaves had a stilled quality, awaiting a presence, twilight. Without the accumulative dust of summer, the town had a more sparkling quality than Amy remembered. In the lighter air, people went by at a brisker pace, noticing the stranger. Like some unwanted appendage, Amy felt her pocketbook dangling by her side. She felt superfluous, wandering about the station. For Jeff to be late was unlike him.
Over the post office, the flag occasionally flew and subsided, in bright-dark ripples. There, a little boy held up a frantically wiggling puppy to drink from the bronze rim of the water fountain. Amy supposed this a foreign country and that she were here alone, with little money and in possession of little besides her toothbrush. She perched on the edge of a bench to watch pigeons, imagining herself in that lone situation, knowing she would then have to have help from others. She began to glance more directly at the Negroes and whites who had watched her promenade. They spoke or nodded in return; several people offered comments on the weather, to which she replied. Idle conversation was, after all, perhaps not so idle. “Warming for sho,” said an old man, who had dropped his cane. Amy retrieved it and, after speaking further of the day, she felt less a stranger. In a foreign country and without knowing the language, she would have to make contact with smiles, gestures, small attempts. She might be sending out some secret code. Sitting on the bench, she beat a little rhythm on the pocketbook in her lap. She gazed around, not realizing she was smiling. An older couple stopped and offered help. Both sundrawn faces stared at her with interest, kindly. After shaking her head, Amy watched them with equal interest, as they went on.
In the late spring evening, the sky gave to stalwart and gigantic old trees the appearance of being one-dimensional. Everything had a metallic look, the grey fuzzy appearance of an empty movie screen, and figures seemed superimposed on the day. After wandering to a rusty penny-gum machine, Amy looked toward the station, gum in her mouth, and felt the scene had been transfixed while her back was turned. The boy held up the puppy for a second drink at the fountain, the old man dug with his retrieved cane into dirt, and the old couple were climbing into their pickup truck. She walked eagerly back to the activity around the station and that look on her face again drew attention.
Suppertime was nearing. Storekeepers made preparations for closing. At the hardware store a man brought inside galvanized tubs which had been on display. Letters on the sagging marquee at the movie were being changed for the evening performance. Amy had been warmish in her spring jacket. Now there was prelude to a shower, and a breeze began. A crowd of Negro and white teen-agers clustered about a brand-new Mustang, just drawn up to the curb. Amy went near a short while and noted that other cars, pulling away, had on parking lights. She had to make some plan of her own, and went inside the station to inquire about returning trains.
There was no printed schedule, and only one train tonight, which would pass through in several hours. As once she would have, she did not feel terror or panic. Coming from the station, trailing momentarily through the disappearing garden, she did not fear desertion. Why Jeff had not come was disturbing, frightening—the chance being that something had happened to him. Otherwise, she felt quite settled in her mind.
She had stopped paying attention to traffic, in congestion around town at this hour. Farmers headed home. In stores which stayed open late, lights had come on. Activity had begun in the town’s one restaurant. Sitting down again, she became engrossed in watching sparrows in a tizzy over popcorn dropped by the bench’s previous occupant. He had, at the moment Amy went by him toward the gum machine, held out the bag toward her, and she had declined fearing popcorn would make her thirsty. A shuddering green coupe stopped nearby, and she noticed the car’s occupants when they were getting out. The Negro boy, who had been driving, headed toward the red Mustang, but she was unsuccessful in reading the yellow lettering on the back of his jacket. Her attention went to the woman with him, having difficulty struggling from the running board to the ground. As the woman started toward her, careful of stiff joints, Amy knew certainly who it was. She got up, meeting her halfway. “Jessie.”
“Yes ’um.” The whole of Jessie’s hazel eyes appeared covered with a milky haze; that registered something besides recognition and greeting. Deeper than she yet knew it, Amy recognized sorrow. “Bad news,” Jessie said.
“He can’t come?”
“He’s gone.” Jessie’s voice broke. “Went this morning. But—have told me, no matter what—be here this time.”
Amy’s lips formed the word, Where? She knew better than to ask, Gone where? She merely watched Jessie cry. She cried without sound, her shoulders heaving. Amy’s lips had set so tightly, they caused her face to turn whiter. She and Jessie went together to a bench and sat down.
The station and the stores surrounding it now looked entirely different, the silvery stillness dissolving, clouds gathering. Beyond the post office, where the flag alternately dropped and flew, where surrounding fields began, Amy supposed rain had already begun.
“That’s impossible.” She had spoken finally, with difficulty.
“No’m. It ain’t.”
Nothing was impossible. Those words bore home. Impossibility was as far-reaching as the horizon, as enormous as the world. She must now know as much of compassion and sorrow as there was to know; but another self stood aside, watchful and wise, to tell her there was more of everything to learn. Learning must not cease. She and Jessie had gripped hands. Amy would be able to recall instantly, forever, the feel of Jessie’s skin, recall the proximity of her body; someone, she had to find, would be an extension of her own being; that alone would be life: would be living. She and Jessie were not alone in their grief. Lights blazing in the newspaper office across the way gave its plate-glass window a look of bulging with importance. A man, in shirtsleeves, came out to stick a bulletin to the window. Darkness gathered in from the surrounding small hillsides, lavender with vetch. On the rising wind came the smell of spring land, rowed-up and waiting. Flower petals lifted in the old man’s garden, the sparrows’ feathers ruffled, the edges of Amy’s and Jessie’s skirts lifted. After that moment, Jessie said, “Seems like it would be impossible. But it ain’t. His heart been so bad, honey. Gotten worse. It ain’t all that surprise.”
“It doesn’t seem to me,” Amy said lonesomely, “it was his time to die.”
“In the kitchen the other day, he sayed, Gettin’ time for me and him to move over for the young peoples.”
The astonishing silver glow of the afternoon, relentless, would not give in. The sun even stubbornly reappeared, and strongly, as if it had not been satisfied with its finale. Amy held back tears for later. “He was out driving,” Jessie said, “and shouldn’t have been. The car left the road, went over a ditch into a field. The doctor think his heart had quit.”
“He wasn’t on the way to meet me?”
“No’m.”
“I’m glad of that.” Then Amy said, puzzled, “But he told you to meet me. Why did he say that this morning?”
Jessie might not have heard. Deep in her eyes, a shadowed look only told she understood. She gave Amy, barely, a glance sideways. “Just sayed, meet Miss Amy ’bout fo-thirty. She’ll be on her own.”
“He knew he wasn’t coming, Jessie, then—But, God!”
“Sho is the truth.”
“Does anybody else know he told you that?”
/> “What, Miss Amy?” She gave Amy a practiced dumb look, for white people.
“Nothing.” Amy took the cue. Her own face set in a closed firm look. The rain had not yet come, though a breeze smelling more strongly of it began to disrupt town. The bulletin on the newspaper window flapped insistently. Around the Mustang, the boys began to make signs of leaving. Town had begun to look empty.
“Do I have time to go out to where Jeff will be buried before the train comes?”
“Ain’t far, but it’s fixing to rain,” Jessie said. “I can get my sister’s boy to carry us.” Vern had separated himself from the car and, looking around, now came toward them. “My sister’s boy, Vern, Miss Amy.”
“Amy Howard. Vern?”
At the introduction, Vern slightly nodded. He stared a full instant before understanding that Amy was asking him a question. “Vern Dell.”
“I’m glad to meet you.”
“Glad to meet you.”
“How far is it to the cemetery from here?”
“Almost two miles. Aunt-tie and I can take you.”
“I’d rather walk. I have time.”
Beside the Mustang, a boy in a satin shirt, holding up his guitar, called to Vern about meeting later. Vern lagged behind, shouting confirmation. As Amy and Jessie went toward the car, an old man hailed Jessie, took off his hat and held it against his chest. Amy moved away while he spoke comfortingly, sadly shaking his head. All his life, she heard him say, he had known Mr. Jeff, and he looked about seeing other changes. A large blinking neon sign helped color the evening blue, and suggested EATS at the restaurant. That once had been a mansion. Vern at the Mustang joined the boy, playing the guitar, in an impromptu dance, their gyrations in pulsating beat to the on-off blinking of the blue sign. Their voices blended. Amy opened the car door and Jessie climbed inside, having hugged her.
“I’m glad to have seed you.”
“I’m glad to have seen you.”
The Wintering Page 36