by Peter Taylor
Early in the evening most of the party was gathered in the parlor and much of the conversation referred to things that had been said and done last night. Harry Buchanan urged Ann to express her views on something, but Ann declined. Several times Son was asking Ann what she thought about this or that, and always it seemed that Ann spoke two or three monosyllables which were followed by silence. Conversation between Son and the young professor did not materialize, and the girls did not try to draw him out as Harriet had expected. Ann and the professor were once heard talking about the “fragrance” of the wisteria. Helena took her tall, stooped young man to sit on the screened porch. Kate took hers to the chairs on the lawn. Now and then the two beaux appeared in the house on their way to the pantry with tall, empty glasses. Nothing could stir Harriet from her torpor, not even the information that in the middle of the evening B.T. had put on his hat and gone off to the settlement or to Nashville.
When she realized that the guests were beginning to go, she placed her hand on Sweetheart’s knee and said, “People are leaving, Sweetheart.” He followed her into the hall and the two of them stood smiling and nodding and shaking hands of guests amid the hubbub of giddy and even drunken talk about Son’s going into the Army. As the last of the automobiles pulled away, backing and turning in the gravel before the garage with its headlamps flashing on B.T.’s shack and on the house and then on the trees and the white gravel of the driveway, someone called back, “Good-bye, Private Wilson!”
Harriet stood on the screened porch after the headlamps had gone round the house leaving the yard in darkness. While she was there she saw the light go off in the kitchen. The backdoor closed, and presently Mattie’s dark figure moved sluggishly across the yard to the shack. There was no window on the near side of the little cabin, but when Mattie had put on the light inside, Harriet could see a square of light which a small window threw on a thick, green mint bed over by the fence. “She’s going to wait up for B.T.,” Harriet said. And now she went through the house and into the warm kitchen to see in what state Mattie had left things.
The dishes were not washed but they were stacked neatly on the table and in the sink. The backdoor was locked, and Harriet unlocked it so that Mattie could come in that way to go to her bed in the attic room above the kitchen. “Poor thing is so distracted she locked herself out,” she said. She stood with her hand on the knob for a minute, for she wanted to go out and see Mattie. She could not bring herself to go.
When she came into the parlor she found that Ann had changed to her traveling dress. Helena and Kate were sprawled in two of the large chairs. Sweetheart was standing by the fireplace talking about train schedules to Little Rock. Ann was seated on the piano bench with her feet close together and her small delicate hands folded in her lap. Harriet had crossed the room and was taking her seat beside Ann when Son entered with the luggage.
“It’s not quite time to go,” Son said. He set the two bags by the hall door and drew up an odd chair. Harriet had taken one of Ann’s hands between her own and was about to make a little farewell speech when Ann spoke.
She was looking into Harriet’s face but as she spoke she turned her eyes to Son. “He thinks I have not behaved well tonight.”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Ann,” Son said, turning in his chair and crossing his legs. Kate and Helena visibly collected their sprawled persons and looked attentively from Ann to Son.
“He does, indeed,” said Ann. She stood up and walked to the mantel and stood at the other end from Sweetheart. “Very badly. He always thinks a person behaves badly who doesn’t amuse him. He cares nothing for anything I say except when I’m talking theory of some kind. He was very willing to bring me here before your friends to express all manner of opinion which they and you find disagreeable while he behaves with conventional good taste. He even discouraged me bringing the proper clothes to make any sort of agreeable appearance. Yet see how smartly he’s turned out.”
Son had now ceased to show any discomfort. He was watching Ann with the same interest that the girls showed. He was smiling when he interrupted her, “You are really drunk, Ann. But go on. You’re priceless. You’re rich. What else about me?”
“Nothing else about you,” she said, undismayed. “But about me, now . . . We have had a very beautiful and very Platonic friendship. He has shown a marvelous respect for my intelligence and my virtue. And I, alas, have been so vulgar as to fall in love with him.” She turned to Sweetheart who stood with his hands hanging limp at his sides and his mouth literally wide open. “It’s a sad story, is it not, Doctor?” The doctor tried to smile.
Son rose from his chair saying, “Now it is time we go.” And he and Ann left the room in such a hurry that Harriet was still seated when she heard them step out onto the porch. Then she jumped from her place on the piano bench and began to follow them.
But she had only reached the doorway to the hall when one of the girls said, “Mother, can’t you see how drunk that gal really is?” As she stopped there in the hall her eyes fell on the mahogany umbrella rack where Sweetheart kept his seven walking sticks. She counted the sticks and it seemed that there were only six of them. Then she counted them again and found that all seven were in their places. She counted them several times over, and each time there were still seven sticks in the rack.
Harriet was on her knees at her bedside. She had already repeated the Lord’s Prayer twice but still was unable to think of the meaning of the words as she began it the third time. Her elbows were pressing into the soft mattress, and though the room was in darkness her eyes were closed. She was repeating the prayer slowly, moving her lips as she pronounced each word, when the fierce shout of a Negro woman seemed to break not only the silence but even the darkness. Sweetheart had sprung from the bed and put on the light. Harriet remained on her knees and watched him go to the closet shelf to get his pistol. “It’s Mattie,” she said. “It’s Mattie screaming!”
“No, it’s not Mattie,” she said. “I don’t think it was a scream either.” Sweetheart turned his eyes to her with a suddenness that struck her dumb for a moment. When she was able to speak she said, “It’s one of those women B.T. has.” But the doctor had understood her before she spoke again and in his white pajamas had already disappeared into the darkness of the hallway.
His hearing had been keen enough to detect that it was a Negro’s voice. But his ear was not so sensitive as Harriet’s. She was the only one in the house who knew that Mattie was waiting in the shack, and the shout came distinctly from that quarter; but her ear was not deceived for an instant. She raised herself from her knees and faced her two daughters who had come to her door. She knew as well now as they would know when they were told a few minutes later what scene was taking place in the low doorway of that cabin. In her mind she saw the very shadows that were then being thrown on the green mint bed.
The first shout was followed by other distinct oaths. Now Mattie’s and B.T.’s voices could be heard mixing with that of the third Negro. So Harriet knew too that there had not yet been a cutting. “Hurry, Sweetheart,” she called in a voice that hardly seemed her own. The girls stood watching her, and she stood motionless listening for every sound. Presently there came amid the voices the crunching sound of gravel under the wheels of her own coupe. Son was returning home from the depot. She pushed herself between the girls and went to the window in their room. From there she could see that the incident was over. Sweetheart and Son stood in the bright light from the headlamps of the automobile. They stood talking there for several minutes, and then Son came toward the house and Sweetheart went into the shack.
Son came into her room where she and the girls were waiting. His face was pale, but he was smiling. “It’s not really anything,” he said. “B.T. had brought one of his lady friends home, and his auntie would not receive her. I think his auntie even struck her. The lights of the car scared her off into the woods, and B.T. followed. Dad’s bringing Mattie into the house.”
Harriet put on her robe an
d went through the house to the kitchen. She waited there a long while watching the light in the shack. Finally Sweetheart appeared on the stoop. He stood there in his white pajamas for an endless time speaking into the doorway in such a quiet voice that she could not hear him. When he did turn and see her at the kitchen he left the shack and came to her at once.
“You’ll have to talk to Mattie,” he said. “She doesn’t want to come in the house, but of course she’ll have to. That pair just might come back tonight.”
Harriet gazed at him blankly for a moment and then closed her eyes. “I can’t go,” she said.
“Harriet? You’ll have to go, love. I’ll go with you and wait at the door. The poor creature needs you.”
“Did she ask for me?”
“No. She didn’t think to. She’s in a terrible state. She doesn’t talk.”
“Did you tell her I was coming?”
“Yes,” he said, “and that’s the only thing that made her even look at me.”
Harriet turned away and moved toward the dining room. When he called to her she was at the swinging door and she said, “I’m going to dress.”
“You’ve no need to dress,” he said. He came round the kitchen table and stopped a few feet from her. She had never known him to speak to her in private from such a distance. “Harriet, why should this be so hard for you?”
There was no sympathy in the question, and actually he did not seem to want an answer to this precise question. He seemed to be making a larger and more general inquiry into her character than he had ever done before. She dropped her eyes to the floor and walked hurriedly by him to the backdoor. She paused there and said, “Wait here.”
Mattie was seated on a squat, ladder-back chair whose short legs had the look of being worn away through long usage. Her brown hands were resting on the black dress over each knee. A dim bulb hung on a cord almost at waist level, and the gray moths that flitted around it were lighting on Mattie’s head. Harriet came in and stood directly before her. When she first tried to speak she felt that she was going to be nauseated by the awful smell of B.T., a stench that seemed to be compounded of the smell of soiled and moldy clothing and the smell of condensed and concentrated human sweat. She even glanced about the room half expecting to find B.T. standing in one of the dark corners. “Mattie,” she said at last, “I was unkind to you Saturday. You must not hold it against me.”
Mattie raised her eyes to her mistress, and there was neither forgiveness nor resentment in them. In her protruding lower lip and in her wide nostrils there was defiance, but it was a defiance of the general nature of this world where she must pass her days, not of Harriet in particular. In her eyes there was grief and there was something beyond grief. After a moment she did speak, and she told Harriet that she was going to sit there all night and that they had all better go on to bed in the house. Later when Harriet tried to recall the exact tone and words Mattie had used—as her acute ear would normally have allowed her to do—she could not reconstruct the speech at all. It seemed as though Mattie had used a special language common to both of them but one they had never before discovered and could now never recover. Afterward they faced each other in uncommunicative silence for an indefinite time. Finally Harriet moved to the door again, but she looked back once more and she saw that besides the grief and hostility in Mattie’s eyes there was an unspeakable loneliness for which she could offer no consolation.
When she told Sweetheart that Mattie still refused to leave the shack he sat down on the porch steps and said that he was going to keep watch for a while. She didn’t try to dissuade him, and he said nothing more to her as she put her robe about her shoulders and went inside.
In her room she tried to resume her broken prayers. Then she lay on the bed with the light still burning and she longed to weep as she had done when she first saw Son in the doorway. Not a tear would come to her eyes. She thought of all the talking that Son and the girls had done and she felt that she was even beginning to understand what it had meant. But she sadly reflected that her children believed neither what Ann Prewitt nor what the professors at the University were offering them. To Harriet it seemed that her children no longer existed; it was as though they had all died in childhood as people’s children used to do. All the while she kept remembering that Mattie was sitting out in that shack for the sole purpose of inhaling the odor in the stifling air of B.T.’s room.
When Sweetheart finally came she was on her knees again at her bedside. She heard him put out the light and let himself down easily on the other side of the bed. When she opened her eyes it was dark and there was the chill of autumn night about the room.
Porte Cochere
CLIFFORD AND Ben Jr. always came for Old Ben’s birthday. Clifford came all the way from Dallas. Ben Jr. came only from Cincinnati. They usually stayed in Nashville through the following weekend, or came the weekend before and stayed through the birthday. Old Ben, who was seventy-six and nearly blind—the cataracts had been removed twice since he was seventy—could hear them now on the side porch, their voices louder than the others’, Clifford’s the loudest and strongest of all. “Clifford’s the real man amongst them,” he said to himself, hating to say it but needing to say it. There was no knowing what went on in the heads of the other children, but there were certain things Clifford did know and understand. Clifford, being a lawyer, knew something about history—about Tennessee history he knew, for instance, the difference between Chucky Jack Sevier and Judge John Overton and could debate with you the question of whether or not Andy Jackson had played the part of the coward when he and Chucky Jack met in the wilderness that time. Old Ben kept listening for Cliff’s voice above the others. All of his grown-up children were down on the octagonal side porch, which was beyond the porte cochere and which, under its red tile roof, looked like a pagoda stuck out there on the side lawn. Old Ben was in his study.
His study was directly above the porte cochere, or what his wife, in her day, had called the porte cochere—he called it the drive-under and the children used to call it the portcullis—but the study was not a part of the second floor; it opened off the landing halfway up the stairs. Under his south window was the red roof of the porch. He sat by the open window, wearing his dark glasses, his watery old eyes focused vaguely on the peak of the roof. He had napped a little since dinner but had not removed his suit coat or even unbuttoned his linen vest. During most of the afternoon, he had been awake and had heard his five children talking down there on the porch—Cliff and Ben Jr. had arrived only that morning—talking on and on in such loud voices that his good right ear could catch individual words and sometimes whole sentences.
Midday dinner had been a considerable ordeal for Old Ben. Nell’s interminable chatter had been particularly taxing and obnoxious. Afterward, he had hurried to his study for his prescribed nap and had spent a good part of the afternoon dreading the expedition to the Country Club for supper that had been planned for that evening. Now it was almost time to begin getting ready for that expedition, and simultaneously with the thought of it and with the movement of his hand toward his watch pocket he became aware that Clifford was taking his leave of the group on the side porch. Ah yes, at dinnertime Clifford had said he had a letter to write before supper—to his wife. Yet here it was six and he had dawdled away the afternoon palavering with the others down there on the porch. Old Ben could recognize Cliff’s leave-taking and the teasing voices of the others, and then he heard Cliff’s footsteps at the bottom of the stairs. In a moment he would go sailing by Old Ben’s door, without a thought for anyone but himself. Old Ben’s lower lip trembled. Wasn’t there some business matter he could take up with Cliff? Or some personal matter? And now Cliff’s footsteps on the stairs—heavy footsteps, like his own. Suddenly, though, the footsteps halted, and Clifford went downstairs again. His father heard him go across the hall and into the living room, where the carpet silenced his footsteps; he was getting writing paper from the desk there. Old Ben hastily pulled the cord that
closed the draperies across the south window, leaving only the vague light from the east window in the room. No, sir, he would not advertise his presence when Cliff passed on the landing.
With the draperies drawn, the light in the room had a strange quality—strange because Old Ben seldom drew the draperies at night. For one moment, he felt that his eyes or his glasses were playing him some new trick. Then he dropped his head on the chairback, for the strange quality now seemed strangely familiar, and no longer strange—only familiar. It was like the light in the cellar where, long ago, he used to go fetch Mason jars for his great-aunt Nell Partee. Aunt Nell would send for him all the way across town to come fetch her Mason jars, and even when he was ten or twelve, she made him whistle the whole time he was down in the cellar, to make certain he didn’t drink her wine. Aunt Nell, dead and gone. Was this something for Clifford’s attention? Where Aunt Nell’s shacky house had been, the Trust Company now stood—a near-skyscraper. Her cellar, he supposed, had been in the space now occupied by the basement barbershop—not quite so deep or so large as the shop, its area without boundaries now, suspended in the center of the barbershop, where the ceiling fan revolved. Would this be of interest to Cliff, who would soon ascend the stairs with his own train of thoughts and would pass the open door to the study without a word or a glance? And whatever Cliff was thinking about—his law, his gold, or his wife and children—would be of no real interest to Old Ben. But did not Clifford know that merely the sound of his voice gave his father hope, that his attention gave him comfort? What would old age be without children? Desolation, desolation. But what would old age be with children who chose to ignore the small demands that he would make upon them, that he had ever made upon them? A nameless torment! And with his thoughts Old Ben Brantley’s white head rocked on his shoulders and his smoked glasses went so crooked on his nose that he had to frown them back into position.