The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Two

by Morley Callaghan

  Alfred politely asked how Mrs. Brophy was doing. Then he asked about Mr. Brownson.

  “Oh, he’s fine,” Brophy said. He wanted to close the window but it would have been necessary to move Alfred so he sat huddled in the corner, shivering.

  Alfred asked suddenly if funerals didn’t leave a bad taste in the mouth and Brophy, surprised, started talking absently about that golden temple of the Sikhs in India. Alfred appeared interested until they got to the cemetery. He said suddenly he would have to take a look at the temple one fine day.

  They buried Harry Bowles in a grave in the paupers’ section on a slippery slope of the hill. The earth was hard and chunky and it thumped down on the coffin case. It snowed a little near the end.

  On the way along the narrow, slippery footpath up the hill Alfred thanked Brophy for being thoughtful enough to come to the funeral. There was little to say. They shook hands and went different ways.

  After a day or two Alfred again appeared in the press room. He watched the checker game, congratulated the winner and then wrote home. The men were sympathetic and said it was too bad about his brother. He smiled cheerfully and said they were good fellows. In a little while he seemed to have convinced them that nothing important had really happened.

  His last cent must have gone to the undertaker, for he was particular about paying bills, but he seemed to get along all right. Occasionally he did a little work for the paper, a story from a night assignment when the editor thought the staff was being overworked.

  One afternoon at two-thirty in the press gallery Brophy saw the last of Alfred, who was sucking his pipe, his feet up on a desk, wanting to be amused. Brophy asked if anything had turned up. In a playful, resigned tone, his eye on the big clock, Alfred said he had until three to join the Air Force. They wouldn’t take him, he said, unless he let them know by three.

  Brophy said, “How will you like that?”

  “I don’t fancy it.”

  “But you’re going through.”

  “Well, I’m not sure. Something else may come along.”

  No one saw him after that, but he didn’t join the Air Force. Someone in the gallery said that wherever he went he probably wrote home as soon as he got there.

  Guilty Woman

  Mary Slater was a slim-bodied, dark-haired, nervous girl, with big brown eyes, who dressed very plainly because she felt men in the neighborhood were no longer interested in her.

  She was accustomed to doing the housework for her father, talking in the afternoon with the women on the street who had been married a long time and waiting on her young sister, Peg, and on Peg’s sweetheart, Stevenson, whenever he came to the house. He came almost every night to the old house on Grove Street and sat in the front room with the plump, rosy-cheeked Peg; and Mary passed back and forth from the front room to the kitchen carrying coffee and sandwiches. Most of the evening Mary remained in the kitchen, talking with her father, a devout, hard-working man in the trucking business. It never occurred to Mary that Stevenson ever noticed her.

  For months Stevenson had thought of Mary just as Peg’s older sister, till one night when he glanced at her timidly with his soft blue eyes. Sometimes, after that, he was embarrassed by her presence when he wanted to be alone with Peg, so she went back to the kitchen.

  When Mary was carrying a tray with coffee and sandwiches one night, Peg left the room for a moment. Stevenson and Mary were alone. As she passed him he reached out and took hold of her hand while he looked at her helplessly. He wanted to say something quickly; instead, he looked down at her slender white hand, coarsened from doing nearly all the housework, raised his eyes fearfully, then dropped her hand abruptly as if he had become suddenly bewildered. When Peg returned, he was silent and almost afraid. He seemed to have been thinking about Mary for so long that it had been necessary finally to reach out his hand and touch her.

  All that night the warmth of his hand was on Mary’s hand and she could not sleep. The simple peacefulness of her life had been upset; she wondered if she ought to tell her sister. As she lay awake, she felt like crying because it seemed that her faith in people had been disturbed, and then she thought gropingly that if the strong feeling had been in Stevenson for a long time, everything was spoilt for her sister anyway.

  She was upset all next morning, especially when she looked at her plump, self-reliant sister, who was mending a dress on the sewing machine. Mary felt like a guilty woman.

  On Friday night Mary’s father was jovial with Stevenson. Timid now, Mary stood by the door and listened as her father asked Stevenson if he would mind his taking Peg to visit her uncle in the country. Stevenson said no.

  Mr. Slater went back to the kitchen, and Peg followed him. Stevenson congratulated Mary on the lemonade, and then whispered uneasily, “Tomorrow evening. I will come here.”

  Mary hurried out to the kitchen and sat down with her elbows on the table. Then she sat up very straight in the chair, listening for every small sound from the other room. When she heard Peg’s light careless laughter, she felt dreadfully ashamed, and full of love for her younger sister.

  Before Peg could speak to her, Mary went upstairs to bed to try to sleep. As she buried her thin face in the pillow, she couldn’t help thinking with fierce eagerness that she really had a lover.

  Next afternoon she stood on the stoop watching her father and Peg going along the street together. She thought her father was getting older; he was leaning forward, his hat on the back of his head.

  The afternoon passed slowly. In the early evening, just before it got dark, she dressed carefully and went over to the avenue to do the shopping for Sunday, a graceful, slender, timid woman, with moistened lips and alert eyes, wearing a light print dress.

  On the way home a neighbor, Mrs. Johnston, asked her to sit down for a while, and Mary was glad because she felt she had an excuse for not going home till late. Mrs. Johnson rocked back and forth. In the dark she couldn’t see the warm flush on Mary’s face. Mary was feeling a strange new tenderness for Stevenson and an intimation of a curious happiness. She left Mrs. Johnston and walked home.

  She went up to her room and lay down with the light lit. “I’d love him, far more than Peg would, and if he really and truly loves me, that’s the main thing.” When she heard someone knocking on the front door she closed her eyes and did not move. She heard the door open and someone moving downstairs.

  From the hall Stevenson called softly, “Mary, Mary, where are you?”

  “You’d better go,” she said weakly.

  He came up and stood by her door, blinking his blue eyes in the light. He was excited and a little bewildered as he fumbled for words. Mary sat on the edge of her bed, staring at him with her dark, earnest eyes.

  When he saw that she was really glad to see him he sat down beside her and said, “Nobody saw me come in. I had to come. I just kept on looking at you. I didn’t know what to do about it. I don’t know what we can do.” She shook her head as if she didn’t want him to talk at all.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said simply. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Then he put his arms around her, and as she stroked his fair hair with her long slender hand, it seemed to her that she would never again have as much delight and contentment as she had at that moment, running her fingers through his damp, curly hair. Like a boy he held his head down to her breast.

  She was kissing him for the first time when she heard an automobile stopping outside. She didn’t pay much attention till she heard laughing, and Peg’s voice, and then her father’s voice calling, “Good night, Mr. Redmond, thanks for the ride. We got home in no time at all.”

  Abruptly, Mary said to Stevenson, who was shaking his head, “Please go.” He was staring helplessly, with a frightened expression on his face. She was hoping he would not go. But she said, “Hurry, hurry.”

  “What will I do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, hearing her father’s footsteps in the hall.

  As her father
began to come upstairs young Stevenson listened, then went to the window; the roof of the back porch was only a few feet below. He opened the window and said desperately, his eyes wide, “Please don’t tell him. You won’t tell, will you?”

  “No, I won’t,” she said.

  Her father, calling, “Who’s there, Mary?” came into the room just as he heard Stevenson dropping to the porch roof, sliding on the shingles, and running.

  Mr. Slater’s face was red and swollen with anger. “Who was it?” he said, moving closer to her. “ I heard a man talking. You tell me.”

  “No,” she said, feeling like a completely abandoned woman.

  Her father swung his palm at her face. Screaming, as he hit her, she darted past him to run downstairs. He followed and at the bottom step caught hold of her dress. She slipped and lay still.

  “You, you, you, and in my house. So that’s what’s been going on, eh?”

  He was so angry, he didn’t know what to do. Grabbing an umbrella from the hall rack, he began to beat her. He hit her on the back and the hips. She crawled along the hall, without crying out. He hit her again as she pushed open the back door and reached the steps. She tripped and sprawled on the cement.

  Mr. Slater looked down at her, then he looked at the umbrella and tossed it away.

  “I never knew she was that kind of a woman,” he muttered.

  Peg, who came out crying quietly, said, “Please, Papa, don’t touch her any more, take her in.”

  Mr. Slater stared down at Mary. He lifted her and carried her upstairs and left her in her room.

  She lay in the darkness, moaning softly, for her hip was badly hurt. She heard Peg come into the room and sit down.

  “You must have been crazy,” Peg said, stroking her sister’s head, “I can’t imagine who it was.”

  “I was crazy, I guess, but don’t ask me who it was, Peg.”

  In the morning, when Mary woke up, she heard her father and her sister going out to church. She knew that Peg was to meet Stevenson at church.

  “He may tell them that he really loves me,” she whispered. She could hardly move her hip.

  But when they came home from church and she heard Peg laughing and talking cheerfully, she knew that Stevenson hadn’t mentioned her at all. She wondered why he was so sure she wouldn’t tell, and then she felt sorry for him, for he seemed so young, and he didn’t know how to have her when he really wanted her. As she began to think of the few moments she had had with him, his smooth face and his damp curly hair pressed down against her breast, she said softly, “Maybe he didn’t know the way it was with me,” and part of a world that nobody else could ever touch seemed to belong to her alone.

  The Little Businessman

  That summer when twelve-year-old Luke Baldwin came to live with his Uncle Henry in the house on the stream by the sawmill, he did not forget that he had promised his dying father he would try to learn things from his uncle; so he used to watch him very carefully.

  Uncle Henry, who was the manager of the sawmill, was a big, burly man weighing more than two hundred and thirty pounds, and he had a rough-skinned, brick-colored face. He looked like a powerful man, but his health was not good. He had aches and pains in his back and shoulders, which puzzled the doctor. The first thing Luke learned about Uncle Henry was that everybody had great respect for him. The four men he employed in the sawmill were always polite and attentive when he spoke to them. His wife, Luke’s Aunt Helen, a kindly, plump, straightforward woman, never argued with him. “You should try and be like your Uncle Henry,” she would say to Luke. “He’s so wonderfully practical. He takes care of everything in a sensible, easy way.”

  Luke used to trail around the sawmill after Uncle Henry not only because he liked the fresh clean smell of the newly cut wood and the big piles of sawdust, but because he was impressed by his uncle’s precise, firm tone when he spoke to the men.

  Sometimes Uncle Henry would stop and explain to Luke something about a piece of timber. “Always try and learn the essential facts, son,” he would say. “If you’ve got the facts, you know what’s useful and what isn’t useful, and no one can fool you.

  He showed Luke that nothing of value was ever wasted around the mill. Luke used to listen, and wonder if there was another man in the world who knew so well what was needed and what ought to be thrown away. Uncle Henry had known at once that Luke needed a bicycle to ride to his school, which was two miles away in town, and he bought him a good one. He knew that Luke needed good, serviceable clothes. He also knew exactly how much Aunt Helen needed to run the house, the price of everything, and how much a woman should be paid for doing the family washing. In the evenings Luke used to sit in the living room watching his uncle making notations in a black notebook which he always carried in his vest pocket, and he knew that he was assessing the value of the smallest transaction that had taken place during the day.

  Luke promised himself that when he grew up he, too, would be admired for his good, sound judgment. But, of course, he couldn’t always be watching and learning from his Uncle Henry, for too often when he watched him he thought of his own father; then he was lonely. So he began to build up another secret life for himself around the sawmill, and his companion was the eleven-year-old collie, Dan, a dog blind in one eye and with a slight limp in his left hind leg. Dan was a fat slow-moving old dog. He was very affectionate and his eye was the color of amber. His fur was amber too. When Luke left for school in the morning, the old dog followed him for half a mile down the road, and when he returned in the afternoon, there was Dan waiting at the gate.

  Sometimes they would play around the millpond or by the dam, or go down the stream to the lake. Luke was never lonely when the dog was with him. There was an old rowboat that they used as a pirate ship in the stream, and they would be pirates together, with Luke shouting instructions to Captain Dan and with the dog seeming to understand and wagging his tail enthusiastically. His amber eye was alert, intelligent, and approving. Then they would plunge into the brush on the other side of the stream, pretending they were hunting tigers. Of course, the old dog was no longer much good for hunting; he was too slow and too lazy. Uncle Henry no longer used him for hunting rabbits or anything else.

  When they came out of the brush, they would lie together on the cool, grassy bank being affectionate with each other, with Luke talking earnestly, while the collie, as Luke believed, smiled with the good eye. Lying in the grass, Luke would say things to Dan he could not say to his uncle or his aunt. Not that what he said was important; it was just stuff about himself that he might have told to his own father or mother if they had been alive. Then they would go back to the house for dinner, and after dinner Dan would follow him down the road to Mr. Kemp’s house, where they would ask old Mr. Kemp if they could go with him to round up his four cows. The old man was always glad to see them. He seemed to like watching Luke and the collie running around the cows, pretending they were riding on a vast range in the foothills of the Rockies.

  Uncle Henry no longer paid much attention to the collie, though once when he tripped over him on the veranda, he shook his head and said thoughtfully, “Poor fellow, he’s through. Can’t use him for anything. He just eats and sleeps and gets in the way.”

  One Sunday during Luke’s summer holidays, when they had returned from church and had had their lunch, they all moved out to the veranda where the collie was sleeping. Luke sat down on the steps, his back against the veranda post, Uncle Henry took the rocking chair, and Aunt Helen stretched herself out in the hammock, sighing contentedly. Then Luke, eyeing the collie, tapped the step with the palm of his hand, giving three little taps like a signal, and the collie, lifting his head, got up stiffly with a slow wagging of the tail as an acknowledgement that the signal had been heard, and began to cross the veranda to Luke. But the dog was sleepy; his bad eye was turned to the rocking chair; in passing, his left front paw went under the rocker. With a frantic yelp, the dog went bounding down the steps and hobbled around the corner o
f the house, where he stopped, hearing Luke coming after him. All he needed was the touch of Luke’s hand. Then he began to lick the hand methodically, as if apologizing.

  “Luke,” Uncle Henry called sharply, “bring that dog here.”

  When Luke led the collie back to the veranda, Uncle Henry nodded and said, “Thanks, Luke.” Then he took out a cigar, lit it, put his big hands on his knees, and began to rock in the chair, while he frowned and eyed the dog steadily. Obviously he was making some kind of an important decision about the collie.

  “What’s the matter, Uncle Henry?” Luke asked nerv-

  ously.

  “That dog can’t see any more,” Uncle Henry said.

  “Oh, yes, he can,” Luke said quickly. “His bad eye got turned to the chair, that’s all Uncle Henry.”

  “And his teeth are gone, too.” Uncle Henry went on, paying no attention to what Luke had said. Turning to the hammock, he called, “Helen, sit up a minute, will you?”

  When she got up and stood beside him, he went on, “I was thinking about this old dog the other day, Helen. It’s not only that he’s just about blind, but did you notice that when we drove up after church he didn’t even bark?”

  “It’s a fact he didn’t, Henry.”

  “No, not much good even as a watchdog now.”

  “Poor old fellow. It’s a pity, isn’t it?”

  “And no good for hunting either. And he eats a lot, I suppose.”

  “About as much as he ever did, Henry.”