Home Place

by Wright Morris

  “Now who are you?” she said. “You Verne?” and rapped the point of her cane on the ground.

  “No, I’m Clyde, Mother Cropper,” I said.

  “You think you can josh me?”

  “No, Grandma.”

  “Well, you’re Verne,” she said, “and you think I’m old and feeble.”

  “I should say not—” I said.

  “Well, I am—but we don’t need to think so.”

  “Maybe you’re getting on, Grandma—” I said, but she wasn’t listening to me. She pushed off the Capper’s Weekly and peered dimly around the yard. “Where they got me now?” she said, then she seemed to get her bearings. “Humphhhh—” she said, “just as I thought.”

  Grandmother Cropper once had the notion that the world and her own kids were slipping, but that their kids were a little more what she had in mind. I could see that notion hadn’t changed. I sat down on a chair, but she made it clear, without saying anything, that if I was talking to her I could pull up close. I drew up to where her cane was bumping my knees. She sat munching her teeth, something she did even while she was talking, and it gave a castanet flare to everything she said.

  “How have you been, Grandma?” I said.

  “Sometimes I think I’ll go crazy,” she said, without hesitation, and peered at me through a cloud of cataracts. She clicked her teeth, and in a sing-song voice—“There’s no fool like an old fool, and now it turns out I’m the mother of all of ’em.” That struck her as funny, she tipped forward, her head twisted to the right, raised her left leg, and pushed it down, carefully. Her eyelids fluttered, and she made a slight noise through her nose. “I suppose you’re married?” she said.

  “Quite a while now, Grandma,” I said. “Her name is Peggy, we’ve been married twelve years.” I had the feeling none of this registered. “I’ve got two nice kids,” I said. That did.

  “Where they at?” she said, and craned her neck around, looked at the yard.

  “They’re off somewhere with Harry,” I said, and when I said Harry her teeth clamped down, she stopped listening. After some time she said—

  “You like a horehound?”

  “Sure, Grandma,” I said.

  She pushed off the cat and put the shoe box in her lap. First she had one herself, rattling it between her plates for the sugar, then she passed the bag to me. “When’d I see you last?” she said.

  “Twenty-eight, twenty-nine years ago,” I said.

  “Is that a good while ago?”

  “I was about eight years old,” I said.

  She began to rock, then she stopped and said, “There was three brothers, came from England. Settled in Johnstown, P-A. That was my Grandfather, a Quaker. Said he talked the Quaker language altogether. Came from Wales, settled in Jamestown, in a wooden boat. When they die, they roll them into the sea. He read the Bible, I guess, five or six times. Father used to say, now girls go to bed. He there. Tell stories.”

  “I remember the stories,” I said.

  “I don’t,” she said, and put the lid on the shoe box. “But there was a man in one.”

  The horehound rattled between her plates and she rocked, humming softly. “That’s Jesus Saves,” she said, “a hymn.” She stopped rocking and said, “Grandfather went up the hill, a house with three rooms and a dead cat in it. They lived there. Her and her brother played out on the hill. Said such words. Another said, ‘Where’d you hear that?’ Men said it to the horses going up the hill.” She opened the box, took out another horehound, but held it for a moment in her hand. Then she slipped it in her mouth, slyly, as if she was wiping her lips. “If I don’t talk I’m liable to forget it all,” she said.

  “I know—” I said.

  “You know no such thing,” she said, and sucked the hore-hound. “From there to Bowling Green—Montgomery County. Eighty acres, I think. Three men came to get straw. She ran off. When they went away Grandfather said which one you like the best? The great tall one. Said he’s married. Then the little one, she said. So she married him.” She crooked her head to the side, raised her left leg, pushed it down carefully. There was no sound till she leaned back, wiped the sugar from her lips. “Did I say she married him?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, she didn’t. Till he shot the dog. Indians would have killed him but he went away and stayed three years. Colfax County. She got typhoid and her hair went out and came in. White. He came back and married her.”

  When I looked at her, her head drooped. I thought she was asleep. Over the paper covering her head I could see the old man crossing the yard, leading a plow horse with my two kids on his back. The horse had a good nose and four white feet, but his rear was so stiff he seemed to wobble. I could hear his hooves chump in the soft, pitted yard.

  “Now I’m going to tell you,” she said, and raised her hand. “I don’t know how many girls it was. Couples. Had to cross the Stillwater, after dark, get in again. Dave Addington said, ‘I’m going to kiss all the girls.’ Had my hair shingled, but he didn’t get to kiss me. Then we went home. To Dr. Hunkle’s. He asked to come and I said yes. From then on we went together, seven years, married the day before Christmas,” she opened her eves and said, “eighteen seventy-four.”

  “How old were you, Grandma?” I said, but I never learned as the screen door slammed and Viola was coming toward me with a pan of hot bread. She stopped in front of Grandma, opened her hand, and gave her a piece of raw dough.”

  “Sugar cookies,” she said. “Grandma likes it raw.”

  I remembered Viola as a husky girl with dark eyes, long black hair, and a rather silent way of standing off and looking at you. She had been a little slow, for me and Ivy, and I think she spent a good deal of her time trying to figure out what we were up to. That was still the same. She stepped back, as if she held a camera, to focus on me. Viola is what I would call a handsome woman, a little heavy, perhaps, but solid, and with this penetrating way of listening to you. She had married some boy in the Cropper tradition, a mail clerk on the Missouri-Pacific, but her own feet were still planted on the farm. “She’s got six acres of garden,” Clara had said, “and four hundred laying liens.” She didn’t feel it necessary to add that she had five grown kids.

  “You was such a little tyke,” Viola said, “it’s hard for me to place you.” That made it clear what all the talk in the kitchen had been. All of the Cropper males were pretty big boys. If I had given too much thought to that I would never have shown up on the farm, as their idea of a man is not very complicated. “Anyhow, you’ve grown some,” she added, which I could see gave her a good deal of relief. She had probably been worried as to how to deal with a little man.

  “How is Roy?” I said.

  “Now you would have to come right when Roy’s at his mother’s, with the kids. He gets passes,” she said, “so he takes them to his folks in his two weeks off.”

  “Did Clara tell you,” I said, “we plan to be around for a little while?”

  “Why, no—”

  I was afraid of that. Viola is a Muncy, rather than a Cropper, with the old man’s heavy hands and spread-legged stance, but she has an independence that Clara has never trifled with.

  “We’re going to put up in Ed’s place,” I said, “as soon as we know how Ed is doing.”

  “I thought Ivy was doing that?”

  “Ivy’s been good enough to let us have it first,” I said. I could see that she didn’t care for that. She liked me well enough, but she didn’t think much of that.

  “I suppose you know it’s a farm?” she said, and turned to look at the road. “Why it’s a hundred twenty acres.”

  “We’ve gone over all of that,” I said, “and Ivy said he might farm it for us.”

  “If he can farm for the Bowersox,” said the old lady, “he can farm for Verne here, his own kin.” She pushed out her teeth, glowered at Viola, then crooked a finger to the cookie dough stuck to her lower plate.

  “Ivy’s sixty miles away,” Viola said. “He�
��d spend half a day a-comin’ an’ a-goin’.”

  “All I know is,” I said, “Ivy and Jenny said we could move in.” If we’re going to be frank, why then let’s be frank about it. After all, I’m an obstinate Muncy myself. “I’ve got a wife and two kids,” I said, “and no place to put them. It might be you people don’t know what that can be like.”

  “I’m just thinkin’ of the farm,” said Viola. “I’m not thinkin’ of you or of the house.”

  “Well—” I said, “I’m not thinking of the farm. I’m thinking of my kids.” I looked across the yard, between the barn and the cob shed, where the old mare stood. The old man was letting the kids slide off her rear. He stood there, waiting to catch them, and the sight of Peggie’s drawers suddenly made me think of her dolls, in particular a pair of dolly pants. I had picked up a pair for a handkerchief and whipped them out later, at a cocktail party, to wipe some mayonnaise off my tic. “I’m thinking of the kids,” I repeated, and wondered how it was, in a matter like this, I had hardly given them a thought. That was Peg’s business. What had I been thinking of?

  “Well, you want to call everybody?” said Viola, and stepped forward to raise the cheese cloth. The flies hung over the table like the back of a horse. As I turned away the old lady said—

  “Now lookee here, see you give him the liver!” She leaned forward on her cane, her teeth snapping, to see that it was done.

  “You been to the peas?” the old lady said, and Clara leaned over to pass them to me. I had been to the peas. I had been to the chicken, several times, to the peas in a sauce, the potatoes in a sauce, onions in a sauce, to the coffee, and the butter-yellow ice cream. It left a waxy coating of fat on the roof of my mouth.

  In answer to my question Ivy said, “Guess I was in Paris four, five weeks. It was cold. Don’t think I liked it much.”

  In answer to that my daughter said, “Paris is where the fashions come from,” which took care of Ivy, and more or less settled the talk. Five or ten minutes later the old man stood up, filled his pipe.

  “You’re welcome to try a bowl of this,” he said, and offered me his sock, with the hole in the toe. When I declined he belched softly, went into the house. He was back with a new, crisp straw on his head. That was the third hat for the day, but it took me a moment to realize where I had seen that particular straw before. On my two kids. He had bought himself one at the same time. He stood there, lighting his pipe, until we had all made the connection, then he mosied off, his overalls whining, toward the barn. The kids put their saucers down on the buggy scat, followed him. They ran on past him, into the stable, but the old man stopped for his fork, one of two forks, leaning on the wall of the pump house.

  “Suppose you run a little water—” Clara said, “so they can wash their hands. Their hands is sticky.” He heard that all right, but he didn’t stop at the pump. We could hear the soft whine of his walk, and as he stepped into the barn we could hear the hum of the flies over the food. Near the middle of the ice cream Grandma Cropper had fallen asleep. To keep off the flies—her face was sticky—Viola had covered her with a piece of cheese cloth. There was a slight tremor, as there is in a fly net on the rump of a horse.

  In answer to what she had been thinking, Clara said, “It’s all I can do, when I get him to town, to get him home before it’s dark.” That reminded her of something. “You forget my flour?” she said.

  “We’rc going in Monday again,” I said. “We forgot the grain.”

  “If it wasn’t fastened to his shoulders,” she said, “he’d forget his own head.”

  A statement of fact. There was no malice in it. I tried to remember what there had been, if anything, thirty years ago, but I had neither heard, nor felt, malice when she complained. For sixty years he had put his dirty hats on her clean stove. There was a place for his hats—she hung them there if she got around to it—but she had never raised her voice, nor thrown them on the floor. “I suppose there’s no other place to put your hats but the stove?” she would say.

  “There’s the dipper—” he’d say, “but I see it’s not on the pail.” Then he’d take off his hat, stroke the brim, and put it on her stove.

  We watched him leave the barn with a light fork of manure, he dropped it in the corral, raking the fork over the top board of the gate, then he paused to fool with a piece of straw on one of the prongs. After some time he got it off, went back in the barn. We heard him slap the sides of the mare, talking to her, edging her over, then he was back, fork in hand, at the door. He stuck the fork in the yard, let himself down on the sill.

  “Well, that’s that,” Clara said, and on her way to the house she picked up a rag, a bandana, that he had dropped.

  “While Jenny and me take care of these dishes, why don’t you folks walk over to Ed’s place?” Clara said.

  “It’s up to Peg,” I said, “if she wants to look at it.”

  “I know it’s perfectly all right,” Peg said, “but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to walk over.”

  Clara walked into the house for the key, came out with it. “For the rear door,” she said, “I don’t think he used the front door since she died.”

  I took the key and said, “Now Clara, we’ll be back in time to dry those dishes.” Then I followed Peg down the walk to the drive, and down the hedge toward the road. The mailbox had once been on a post, near the road, but as someone had knocked it down the old man had put the mailbox, post and all, in an empty milk can. The name H. MUNCY was painted on the side of the can.

  “We’ll have to write oftener,” my wife said.

  “Sure,” I said, before I realized that was an odd thing for her to say. “It’s hard to know what to say,” I said, but as the trail to the house was narrow and tangled with weeds, I had to go ahead and make a path. There were two scrubby firs in the yard, about thirty feet tall, and placed in front of the house as if they were potted plants. There had once been vines climbing the trellis, but at some time or other they had fallen off, and now grew in a tangled mat near the porch. I followed the trail around to the side, where the late afternoon sun was warm on the tool house, the chicken shed, and the brick-red barns.

  “Did you like Ed?” my wife said.

  “You know, I hardly remember him,” I said. “About all I remember was the Edison Gramophone.” As I opened the porch screen she said—

  “You sure there’s nobody in here?”

  “Of course,” I said, then I cleared my throat and said, “What in the world do you mean?” She stood there, snapping her knuckles, which irritates me. “I don’t know what’s got into you,” I said, and put the key in the lock, turned it, then let the door swing open into the room.

  There was a strong, stale smell, flavored with cobs. As my wife lives a good deal through her nose, I crossed the room to raise the window, but it was pegged down, with some heavy nails at the top.

  “These folks get so much fresh air,” I said, “they don’t like it inside of their houses.” I waited for her to pick that up, but she let it pass. Any other time she would have stood out in the yard till the windows were open, and then come in with a handkerchief over her face. Now she came to the center of the room, like you do in a haunted house. My own feeling is that only vacant houses are occupied, or haunted, which is a better word. “This is the kitchen,” I said, to say something, and she nodded her head, soberly, as if I had told her what she couldn’t see for herself.

  “Yes—” she said, and nodded her head up and down. It occurred to me that, right at that moment, we had some kind of understanding that we had learned, over the years, to do without. We were serious. Without being funny, that is.

  “Do we burn cobs in that?” she said.

  “Cobs or wood,” I said, “but I think you’ll find a nice bunch of cobs make the better fire.” Any other time she would have made some crack about that. I lifted the lid on the range, and she came forward to look at the kindling, with strips of corn husks, prepared for a fire. “That’s the way you start a fire,” I
said, and looked on the floor for the kerosene can. It was in the corner behind the coal oil stove. “In the winter—” I said, “you can sprinkle the cobs with a little kerosene, if what you want is a quick roaring fire.”

  “I suppose you do—too,” she said.

  “You bet you do,” I said. I put the lid back on the stove and wondered what it was, since morning, that had come over my wife. ‘T his is a nice little kitchen,” I said, “warm and sunny, room enough to eat. I think you’ll find you’ll spend quite a bit of your time out here.” I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, I meant that she would prefer the kitchen, like I did as a kid, and more or less live out there. But she didn’t pick that up cither. She was prepared to, as she had turned to see if I really meant that, or if I was just my old self, pulling her leg. Maybe I wasn’t, as she didn’t say anything. “Now the thing to remember,” I said, “is that Ed’s place has inside water. There’s an inside bathroom. This place has everything.” I left her there to think that over, and walked out of the kitchen into the room where I had played the Gramophone.

  What is it that strikes you about a vacant house? I suppose it has something to do with the fact that any house that’s been lived in, any room that’s been slept in, is not vacant any more. From that point on it’s forever occupied. With the people in the house you tend to forget that, the rooms and the chairs seem normal enough, and you’re not upset by the idea of a FOR RENT sign. But with the people gone, you know the place is inhabited. There’s something in the rooms, in the air, that raising the windows won’t let out, and something in the yard that you can’t rake out of the grass. The closets are full of clothes you can’t air out. There’s a pattern on the walls, where the calendar’s hung, and the tipped square of a missing picture is a lidded eye on something private, something better not seen. There’s a path worn into the carpet, between the bed and the door, the stove and the table, and where the heel drags, the carpet is gone, worn into the floor. The pattern doesn’t come with the house, nor the blueprints with the rug. The figure in the carpet is what you have when the people have lived there, died there, and when evicted, refused to leave the house.