The Wintering

by Joan Williams

  Part of the plan, Amy thought, turning away, had been for her not to hear the news from a stranger.

  First, she saw willows, topping the hillsides the cemetery covered. On its far side, it slanted toward a muddy yellowish pond. There in the cautious twilight, people were fishing. Having trailed between gates and now following a walkway, Amy pretended not to see the plot, while going directly toward it, knowing the spot from Jessie’s directions; past the World War I monument, a carefully tended rose garden, a grove of cedars. As a cry went up collectively from those at the pond, she saw a large Negro woman hold up a fish on the end of a bamboo pole. Afterward, in the quietness, she heard the soughing of the cedars. Their bark peeled, leaving them, whitely, with a look of being frail. They might yet totter and bend with the wind, like bamboo. Yet, if trees could, she felt they had a look of wisdom, being so old. How much they had seen; how many people had come here and gone. People were sorrowful here, or secretly in their hearts glad, lovers hid in the grove. Inside there, Amy sat with her chin to her knees, her hands plying dry auburn needles. On some of the graves were wax or paper flowers, impermanent and fading and shredding. Other places, ivy fled along the ground, its tendrils as stong as cord. Lichen clung to old headstones. At the pond, everyone now was industriously and silently fishing. Bobwhites, in weeds along the road, called to each other by similar name. Amy wondered if ordinariness and everydayness would have destroyed what she and Jeff had; those things, she suspected, were death on marriages and might ruin less binding relationships. Nothing she and Billy Walter shared would have held up under them.

  A caretaker, wandering about, made it obvious he wanted to lock the gates for the night. Women and children at the pond suddenly squealed, for rain had begun there. Amy could see it pockmarking the muddy water and that it came toward her, with colors of the rainbow misting. With saw-toothed edges, lightning broke across the sky.

  She had come out of the grove of cedars but did not shy at either the thunder or the lightning. “Better hurry somewhere,” said the caretaker, locking the gates behind her.

  “Yes, I will,” she said, darting across the road and toward the sidewalk back to town. Another thunderhead burst, its roll afterward like a drum’s. Either that noise or being intent on her thoughts kept her from hearing the noise of Vern’s old coupe, idling alongside her. He leaned across the front seat to the open window opposite him and said, “Want a ride?”

  She had reached a sheltered spot along the walk, where enormous oaks provided a dry area. She looked at him in surprise. “Sure,” she said, and came down a slick-wet incline and got in the car.

  He drove on. “You afraid to ride all the way into town with me? I can drop you off a piece of the way?”

  “I’m not afraid,” she said. “How did you happen to come get me?”

  “I knew it was time you’d have to leave, and then when the rain come up, I just thought you’d get soaked. I was just, you know, driving around. So, I come to get you. If you want to know, because you were friendly to me. Not like most white girls.”

  “I see. But you live here. You’re the one who might get in trouble if we go riding through town together.”

  “Well,” he said. “Who going to see us in the dark?”

  “We are brave,” she said, smiling back.

  “I don’t want trouble. There is hardly anybody would believe that. I just want, I don’t know, you know, something.” Amy longed at the sadness in his voice to touch him, and dared not. He gripped the steering wheel as if to quiet desperation.

  She settled more closely to the door. “I would like to do this, though,” she said. “I don’t care if someone sees us, if you don’t. But I’d like to drive by and look at the house a minute.”

  He turned away from the station. They saw lights burning in town, fuzzily through the rain. Chester’s awning was only a dark oblong, the station seemed tinier. Vern said, starting away from a stop sign that lost them sight of town, “One thing I would like to be able to do is go in back yonder, in the drugstore, and get me a soda.”

  She shook her head. “It seems amazing you can’t. What would happen if you went in to order one?”

  “They close the counter down.” He gave a laugh, short and a little bitter.

  “Well, I certainly think you ought to be able to, my lord.”

  He said, in a slow way, “Well … thanks.”

  With a sound of hushing, the road’s wet gravel accepted their tires as they neared the house, which seemed asleep, its curtains drawn. Vern stopped short of the cattle gap, and once in the silence, they heard cows bellow. Both stared toward the house, without speaking, not moving. When finally Amy unfolded her hands, shifted herself in the seat, and made known that she was ready to go, Vern said, “We shan’t pass this way but once. That’s why, well, I, my friends, we want the best of everything.” He backed the car swiftly and headed it on the road again toward town. His words “the best of everything” went on and on through Amy’s mind. He spoke of the moment of realization in his life that he was different, that he could not shop in stores, do the things that white people could. When they got to the station Amy put out her hand, which he shook. Distantly, they heard the train; its headlight swept the darkness, an all-seeing eye. “Things are changing, aren’t they?” she said, opening the car door.

  “Yes,” he said. “I would have to say that they are better.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “So long.”

  When the train went on, it broke the town into various lit pieces. Amy braced her head against the coach window, and cried then. She had, too long, run away from everything, and alienation of the spirit was bad. She had to have the courage to be, which meant not to fear emotions. She wanted to take hold of life and shake it as a terrier shakes a rat; everything, everything, she thought, must be gotten out of it.

  Sometime later, she put these thoughts down in her notebook. She felt surprised at how dog-eared the book had become, at how much of it was filled. Diligence meant accomplishment, as Jeff had always said. Later, when she read them, the pages she had filled immediately after he died were scrawled over with an urgent and frantic writing.

  Did he know that I would grieve so? First, I hid knowing him and now I have to hide grieving over him. The grief is like a heavy object that I carry around with me, and I can’t find a place to put it down. I can’t find anything to do with it.

  It’s been three weeks and things are no better. Whenever I am somewhere, I have to excuse myself and find someplace, usually the bathroom, to cry. When everything comes over me, I cannot control myself. I know that what I’m to know of greatness in my lifetime, I’ve known. It makes me feel old; I have a past. Every afternoon I’ve been taking very long baths, to be alone and to cry. Now, Mother thinks I need glasses. Why are my eyes always red? Why do I stay alone so much? To satisfy her, I went to the doctor. He put that enormous silver eye of his close to mine and said, “I can’t find any reason for the headaches, or the red eyes your mother is so worried about, young lady. Maybe, you need to eat more.” Then Mother decided I had to go to a diagnostician. She says, I look like I have a fever, even though one never registers. It doesn’t matter to me. I had just as soon go to doctors. There have been several and I lie on their tables and think, This will pass—what does it matter. I have memories to hold fast to.

  Persistent and mystified, the diagnostician kept probing. His head wore a halo from a strong white hot peering light behind him. Every doctor has given me a prescription. Don’t they know pills can’t cure deepdown astonishing depression? They ask me, “What do you think is the matter with your?” I smile and say, “I don’t know. Nothing maybe.” But I want so much to ask if they’ve never seen grief before. “It’s grief,” I want to say, “and nothing else.” Haven’t they ever diagnosed grief before?

  Soon after the train no longer stopped in his town, the station-master died. Untended, the annuals even disappeared from the garden. The station building grew shabbier, until the Women�
��s Club adopted it for a beautifying project. No one wanted a visible blight on the town. However, the station never regained its air of self-respect, since it had no purpose.

  In Delton, a superstructure was built around town, which diverted traffic from Quill Boulevard, and that looked outdated and purely commercial. The enormous complex new highway stretched connectingly out and drew in toward the city nearby small towns. Dea often said, there was soon going to be no countryside left. Having had to give up her own flowers, she had elected to keep watered petunias in the window boxes attached by the ladies to the station. This summer, a dry one, she had come often and, this afternoon, stood almost mesmerized performing her duty. She did not hear anyone behind her, until Amelia spoke.

  “Wonder how long it’ll be before they tear this old thing down?” Amelia had spotted Dea while shopping, and crossed the street to her.

  “You scared me. I declare to my soul,” Dea said, whirling around, the watering can spout ahead of her.

  When Dea whirled around, her immediate thought was that Amelia had either gone grey or stopped dying her hair. Thinking, She’s aged, she saw that exact thought reflected in Amelia’s eyes, and Dea said quickly, “I’m surprised you even knew me, I’ve gotten so mud-fat and white-headed.”

  “I’ve seen you passing through town with your daughter, but never close enough to speak,” Amelia said. “How long’s it been? Nobody stays home, do they? Everybody’s always in the road.”

  “Not me,” Dea said. “I’m living out back of my daughter’s in a guest cabin, and I don’t go anywhere but in the back door to baby-sit.”

  “I was sorry about your husband dying and read in the paper you’d sold your house.”

  “I didn’t want to stay out there by myself, near that Negro church and all. Things get worse all the time, don’t they?”

  “Latham says they’ll get worse before they get better.” Amelia saved Dea’s asking. “He suffers terribly. Rheumatoid arthritis. So crippled up he can’t bathe himself. I manage only because of Marguerite, but I never get out of the house except to go to Inga’s or pick up medicine at Chester’s.”

  Dea went with her there now, past Negro teen-agers crowding the soda fountain.

  “They take over everything, don’t they?” Amelia whispered.

  But the presence of the Negroes receded in their minds, and they decided to take the two empty seats at one end of the counter and have a quick Coke. They wanted to be gone before school let out, though already one class was coming down the front steps, in shifting groups of twos or threes, the Negro students, Amelia noted, sticking to themselves.

  “Jessie,” she said, “suddenly announced she was tired of living in other people’s houses. White people’s, I guess she meant. I just couldn’t imagine. Instead, she’s living out in you-know-what-town in one side of a little old house, with her sister and her boy in the other side. He brings her to work and takes her home. He’s working in one of the new factories out on the super. I forget which one. She’s hardly able to work. I think mostly she and Inga sit all day and talk. I know Inga fixes Jessie’s lunch.”

  “If it weren’t for factories coming into this part of the country, my husband once said, there wouldn’t be enough folks left in this part of the country to stir up a stink. It is certainly emptying,” Dea said, noting at the same time the absence of shaved ice in her Coke. “All we’ve ever known seems to be changing.”

  Amelia did not want to tell that Inga was planning to work at a school which had nothing but little Negro kids, and that she would not change her mind. When had Inga gotten so stubborn? she wondered. “How are your folks?”

  “She—you mean my niece, I imagine—” Dea said, knowing Amelia had no interest in anyone else in her family, “for a long time has been writing a book. It was all against my better judgment, but then so were a lot of things. Her mother tells me she sent it to a man in New York, a friend of your brother’s, I think. He thinks well of it and wants to see it when it’s finished. So, I don’t know. I could certainly be wrong.” And Dea felt better to admit it. Climbing from their stools, they glanced understandingly at one another.

  Before turning to the medicine counter, Amelia said, “We could have saved ourselves a lot of worrying.”

  “It probably didn’t hurt us,” Dea said.

  Heading out, she felt the need to hurry, for doors at the schoolhouse had opened and soon the whole town, the whole world it would seem, would be overrun by teen-agers. Her car and Amelia’s had been, without their knowledge, parked side by side. And that, Dea thought, was how lives came into touch, by accident. Living here all of her life, she had never expected to know anything going on inside the Almoner family. Her smile and Amelia’s, when they parted, had been kinder, she thought.

  Sometimes, and particularly on bright hot days, I am certain Jeff is coming back. The feeling, of course, goes.

  Amy sat close to the window to write, therefore to the warming spring sun. Often, she felt cold but would gradually lose that sensation. As a good-luck piece, she wore the bell, writing. The chain made a warm moist ring about her neck. In spring’s leafage, its vividness, was a hint of the summer to come, with enervating heat and dryness. She daydreamed of the cedar grove, where always there was a breeze. In the winter, once, she had put violets on Jeff’s grave but never again took flowers, as they did not last. Whenever she went back, she thought of the final time she had seen the house. That night, when the rain had quit, and she had rolled down the car window, she had been aware of a fantastically sweet scent. Only now, when she was here writing, did Amy realize it had been the forsythia bushes, past budding, in bloom.

  Afterword

  Twenty Will Not Come Again

  AUTHOR’S NOTE:

  Long ago a publisher came to me asking that I write a book about Faulkner. When I said I didn’t know how, he said, “Just start I met William Faulkner in——.” All that came out was “Twenty Will Not Come Again.” That seemed all I had to say. It was published in The Atlantic Monthly in May 1980. At the time I was living in Westport, Connecticut. I received a lot of mail on account of the article and remember particularly one letter from Texas. A man wrote that the short piece told him more about Faulkner than a thousand biographies could ever do. I was glad.

  In January of 1950 I stood in a freezing bus station in Memphis, Tennessee, waiting to see William Faulkner for the second time. But would I recognize him? Thirty years have passed as I write this, and I am now the age he was then. While Memphis is my home town, I had never been in one of its bus stations. I was full of awe about seeing him, and full of wonder about why he was coming seventy miles on a bus. I don’t think I stopped to wonder fully why he was coming to see me at all. But our meetings, in our part of the world, were marked from the beginning with the clandestine. the role was not easy for me. I was confused about the morality of meeting a married man and bound by the strictures of the time, and particularly of the place where I was born, at the age I was then.

  Wanting to be a writer, I was his admirer; and he was someone older to turn to. It was happenstance he was a man. I felt protective of him, though, because he was neglected as a writer and deserved better. Having read of his work only The Sound and the Fury, I was convinced he had known loneliness and unhappiness like my own. The previous August I had published a short story as winner in Mademoiselle magazine’s college fiction contest, and though I was a senior at a liberal eastern college, Bard, I was a frightened young woman waiting there and considered myself ignorant. I was full of anguish because of my past, though blessed, I think, for the same reason, with compassion beyond my years. Otherwise could the reversal of roles have happened, never dreamed of by me then? In time, Faulkner would say, I don’t know anything else to do with the rest of my life but put it into your hands.

  During the next five years, until I married, I would feel, despite varying shifts in mood common to the young, varying changes as I moved alone from Memphis and to other places, and despite his ups and
downs, that I had been appointed by something called Fate to take care of William Faulkner, and for the whole world. It was my duty. And I would come to love the man, Bill.

  Writing, he told me, was the only thing he ever found to alleviate the boredom of living. And I believe he drank to help pass time. All writers know the feeling: what to do with time left over when the day’s writing is done? The eagerness is only for tomorrow, when, they hope, it begins again. And being sensitive not only for himself but for the ills of others, he could not easily handle pressure. When enough built up, he had to escape it. He was a binge drinker and no daily tippler, and could leave alcohol alone at will, and often did. Common sense tells us no alcoholic wrote Faulkner’s body of work, though I doubt he would care whether I set the record straight. There were many binges while I knew him, and many more days of sobriety. But he took Seconal when he was drinking and not, I think, as much alcohol as is assumed. It was the combination that did him in, and once a binge was precipitated when he drank only beer. “I don’t know why I did it.”

  All along his intention was to save me, too: from the middle class to which I had been born. I would fight it for every inch of art I ever gained, he said; and I have. He contended that art is a little stronger than any human passion for thwarting it. And art took care of its own, took care of those capable of fidelity to it above everything else. He wished to be the father I had had in name only; to be more; to make me a writer: to get the good stuff out of Joan Williams; Pygmalion, not creating a cold and beautiful statue in order to fall in love with it, but taking his love and creating a poet out of her. He refused to believe he could take a young woman into his life, and spirit, and not have her make something new under the sun whether she willed it or not. It might even have been partly that belief that drew him to begin with. Or maybe it was vanity, Lucifer’s own pride.

  At twenty, I read The Sound and the Fury lying on a wicker swing on an ivy-covered screened porch off my parents’ dining room. It was in the days before the South became capsulated by air-conditioning, and overhead was an indolently revolving ceiling fan, which in Memphis’s humid summer weather eventually sent to sleep anyone lying there. It was not a time when southern girls like me got summer jobs. In that pre–Sun Belt South there seemed always to be so much time.