The Clay Hand

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  The sheriff parked the car on the embankment in front, the side drive being occupied by the Winston taxi.

  A little bell jingled on the iron gate when they pushed it open, and Phil was not likely to forget his first glimpse of the Widow O’Grady, a withered, angry face further distorted behind an imperfect windowpane. He thought from the distance that her hair was a yellowish-white wig. She knocked viciously on the glass with the knob of her cane and gestured them around to the back.

  “All right,” Fields shouted. “You don’t have to break your window.”

  The shaggy spears of dead tiger lilies caught at their pant legs along the walk. They had to go through another gate, although the fence on both sides of it was broken down. Many years ago this had been a delightful place, built to the detail of someone who had no notion of how incongruous it was in the middle of a wasteland. It was built as one might have laid out a cottage on a shore road. Whoever did it, Phil thought, was reminding himself of a homeland a far ways from Winston.

  Four blue-denim shirts hung on a line between two of the shacks, a dirty Leghorn chicken pecking at the cuff buttons. Before the men were at the back steps, Mrs. O’Grady had made the distance from her window.

  “What is it you want, Sam Fields? Stay where you are till you tell me.” Her voice was high-pitched, indelible with the Irish that had survived maybe fifty years away from its nativity.

  The sheriff did not slacken his stride. “I want a few words with you,” he said, going up the steps. “And I don’t want to shout them to the world.”

  She retreated through the back kitchen, Fields and Phil following her. A scrawny girl was working over a washtub in the unheated room, the steam from the tub and her breath mingling. “Morning, Anna,” the sheriff said. He had his hand on the knob of the kitchen door before the old woman could close it behind her.

  “I don’t want any nonsense. I’m giving you credit for being a sensible woman, Mrs. O’Grady.”

  “It’s taking advantage of my sensibilities you are,” she said. “Who’s that one?”

  “Philip McGovern,” Fields said. “He was a friend of your Mr. Coffee’s.”

  “What kind of a friend to be letting him die down here in his desolation?” she said. But she did not refuse her hand when Phil extended his. It was like the bark of a tree, but firm though not yielding in his clasp. Looking at it, he saw that it could not yield. The joints were stiff and knotted. Her face was puckered with wrinkles, but fantastically powdered and rouged. The watery eyes had been very blue once, and the nose, now the shape and near the color of a radish, would have been called pert when she was young. But that was long, long ago.

  Fields had crossed the room and sat down opposite a shaggy, red-faced man, forty maybe, though he might look the same at sixty, and not much different from when he was thirty. The spittle came away from his mouth with an old pipe when he removed it to acknowledge an introduction to Phil.

  “Jerry Whelan,” Fields said. “He’s the only taxi in town.”

  Phil stood where he was beside the widow, for she was leaning, a dead weight, on his arm. “He told me about you,” she said, looking at him sharply. She turned her back on him then, and made a tortuous way across the room to a chair. Her hair was bobbed short, and curled a bit above her scrawny neck. It showed gray near the roots, although it was plastered yellow on the top of her head. Phil watched the movement of her shoulders beneath the sweater as she thrust the weight of her body on the cane at each step. The kitchen was very hot, and smelled heavily of bread and boiling clothes.

  “Have you no home, Jerry, you sitting here the whole morning?”

  “I’m entranced with your company,” Jerry said thickly.

  “Then get untranced, and make room for the man to sit down.”

  Jerry stayed where he was. She turned around and leaned on the table. “We had grand talks, him and me, of an evening. Take your coats off, the two of yous, and don’t stand there like idjuts. Anna! Come in and pump a kettle of water!” The edge of the table beneath one hand, and her cane in the other, she lowered herself into the chair, letting her weight go the last few inches. She struck the chair with a jolt that must have wracked every bone in her body.

  The only acknowledgment of pain was a faint hissing sound between her teeth. “I’m crippled with the rheumatism and arthritis,” she explained, and Phil realized that she thought that, with the dyed hair and rouged face, she was disguising her misery in some measure from the world.

  “You were better off without that one,” she said with an abruptness that startled him, “the one leaving you at the church.”

  “We hadn’t gotten quite as far as the church,” he said, after a second. Strange that Margaret had spoken of this the night before and Dick had told the old woman of it.

  She cackled at his discomfiture, and “cackling” was the only word for it. “On the way to the church or at it, what odds? You were a sight better off than him got the one standing there waiting for him.”

  Phil shrugged.

  “Not that he was one for complaining, mind you. He was the soul of good nature. Anna, come in this minute.”

  Whelan roared out at the girl, already in the doorway. “Do you hear the woman talking to you? Do as you’re bidden, girl.” To Phil he explained, as though an explanation was all it required, “That one’s my daughter.”

  “I thought you were calling your dog,” Phil said.

  “A dog’d come sooner. Did you hear the woman say to put on the kettle?—It’s a fine world we’ll have when the children of today take it over.”

  The sheriff took out a pipe and filled it. He was quite content to listen. The girl wiped the suds from her arms onto her apron, and pumped the water at the kitchen sink. She was thin and spindle-legged, her eyes and her smile as furtive as a bird at the window. An early maturity was singing from her, a music she could neither understand nor express, Phil thought. He watched her flee from the house when she had put the kettle on the range.

  Fields got up and went to the stove for a match. He lighted it with his thumb nail, and held it up to his pipe. “Mrs. O’Grady, I wonder if you’d tell McGovern here the things you told me about Coffee, about how you and him came to be friends and all?”

  “What’s the good of it?” she snapped.

  “Well,” Phil said, thinking of Margaret, “there’s some who think he might have taken his own life, and I don’t believe it.”

  “They’re filthy-tongued liars.” The spittle flew from her mouth.

  She turned on the sheriff. “I thought you were working on the husband of that one?”

  “Questioning him ain’t taking him for murder, Mrs. O’Grady. We got to try and find out first how the man died. That’s why there’s an inquest.”

  She made a noise of impatience, and cocked her head around again at Phil. “Tell me what he was like with you, Mrs. O’Grady,” he said quietly.

  “He was the soul of consideration,” she said. “And he wasn’t afraid to do an odd job around the house. I don’t know what I’ll do without him at all.”

  “Did he ever speak of when he’d be leaving Winston?”

  “I was all the time asking him that, and he’d just pat my hand and say ‘Don’t worry old lady, I’ll be around a while with you yet.’” She drew a deep quivering breath. “The curse of hell on them he took up with to be leading him to his death. They were fine days we had till he took up with them. We’d sit over a cup of tea or a drop, and talk for hours. I told him the history of Winston, inside and out, and I tell you, I’m the one who knows it, here almost sixty years of my life. Though he made me sit up and think once. He says to me, when I’m telling him about this one and that: ‘Be careful, old lady. There’s people you know for a lifetime, and never know at all.’

  “He’d go out of here in the morning after his breakfast and maybe not come home until dark. I’d ask him where he’s been, and he’d say, ‘Walking. Just walking and talking.’ Then he took up with the Clausons, as blac
k a day as ever came over me, for there was nights he never came home at all, and me sick with the worry. And there was nights he told me he was with Father Joyce.” She leaned across the table. “What kind of one spends his nights with the priest?”

  She looked from one to the other of them, getting no answer, and then put her own to it. “He wasn’t pulling the wool over my eyes with that story.”

  “The queer thing about him,” Whelan put in then, “was taking up the likes of that windmill. He was the kind of man you’d think could have any woman he’d lift his hat to.”

  Phil expected the widow to blister him for the remark. Instead, she grinned. “He was that fond of the underdog,” she said. Then she added viciously: “But it’s the underdog has the snap of a cur when you do it a kindness.”

  “And then there were nights toward the end,” she went on, “when he’d come roaring drunk from McNamara’s, and the jackass not the sense to refuse him the drink. He’d come into my room there under the stair, and press on me a drop he’d brought me in the medicine bottle—It eases the pain, you know. He’d lean in the doorway and look at me, and he’d look out at the picture of my Tim hanging there in the living room, and he’d say: ‘So you were faithful to him all of your life, old lady? And do you think he’d thank you for it?’ It was to make me mad, he said it. And then he’d roar with laughing.”

  Dear Lord, Phil thought, what crazy story was this? The weariness of a sleepless night was befuddling him, and her high rough voice was coming to him as through an echo chamber. There were touches of Dick in the person she described, but it was like seeing him through a distorted glass.

  Fields got up. “I wonder if I could gather his things up while I’m here, Mrs. O’Grady?”

  “Go up and gather them. You know the room. ʼTwas you put the lock on it.”

  “I had to do that, ma’am. It’s the law.”

  “It’s the law,” she mimicked.

  As Fields went through the house, she turned to Phil. “Where are you staying?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Phil said. “I was going to ask you if you have a room.”

  “You don’t now, do you?” Whelan put in to the widow.

  “What do you know whether I do or no? There’s the one now vacant, isn’t there? And I’ve my traveling men’s room. I’m not expecting them for awhile.”

  “All right, do as you will. You’re moaning to me all morning with the trouble you had taking him in, and now you’re taking another.”

  “Get the hell out of my kitchen, Jerry Whelan. Sitting here as though you’re its lord and master. Scat.”

  She lifted her cane at him, and Jerry lumbered to his feet. “Aren’t you offering me a cup of tea itself, and the kettle on?”

  “I’ll scald you with the kettle if you don’t get out.”

  “Then hire yourself a delivery man after this,” Whelan said. The dishes rattled as he pounded out of the house and slammed the door behind him.

  “You can have the room he left behind him if you’re not over-sensitive.”

  “I’ll take it,” Phil said.

  “Bring us the teapot there from the cupboard, and I’ll wet us a sup.”

  Phil obeyed her directions, and presently found himself making the tea, and laying the table for it. He wondered how many times Dick had done this very thing. He was aware of the widow’s taking his measure. “You’re a fine size of a man,” she said. “And you’ve a good mouth. A bit soft maybe, but it’ll toughen up. I can always tell a man and a horse by its mouth.”

  He looked at her and grinned a little.

  “You’re about thirty,” she said.

  “Did you tell that by my teeth? I’m thirty-three.”

  “Then you’re an only child and your mother still thinks you’re an infant.”

  “I’m one of four children. All of the others grown and married.”

  “Then you live alone with your old ma?”

  “I do.”

  “Ha,” she said. “Tell me I don’t know human nature. Where’s your things?”

  “In my car down in the town.”

  “Oh, you’ve a car,” she said. “He used to borrow the priest’s and take me out for a spin. It’s a wonderful thing—I’m stiff as an old stone hedge on the ground. But the minute a car motor starts and me in it, I’ve the full power of my limbs.”

  The day she would have full power of them, Phil thought, would be the day of the great miracle. “We shall have a drive then,” he said.

  “As long as you’re up, pour us the tea there.”

  He poured three cups and sat down at the table opposite her.

  “The wife’s here, isn’t she?” The manner of her words was meant to ingratiate.

  “Yes. I brought her down from Chicago,” he said with matter-of-factness.

  “What’s she like?”

  His eyes must have conveyed his thought, for he was thinking: Don’t try your wiles on me, old lady.

  “You needn’t trouble yourself over it,” she said then. “I listened to him often enough, keening over her beauty. ‘The stars for eyes—a mouth that would make you blush, looking at it—teeth of morning dew and hair the color of summer wheat.’” The widow’s mouth curled with scorn. She spat, and then sipped her tea with a great show of elegance as she lifted the cup with her twisted fingers.

  Fields came down the stairs, and laid Dick’s one suitcase near the door—all he had taken from Chicago when he left it almost two months before.

  “Take the tea he’s poured for you there, Sam,” the widow commanded.

  Fields sat down and buttered himself a slice of the fresh bread she had bidden Phil lay out. “You’ll have to straighten your mind about what you’ll tell the coroner, Mrs. O’Grady,” the sheriff said. “I’ll be calling you maybe tomorrow, and he’ll ask straight questions of you.”

  “Straight questions be damned. I’ve nothing to say to him. I’ll not be telling things on that poor boy, and him dead.”

  “Well, think about it. When last did you see him Saturday?”

  “I gave him his dinner at one o’clock. Chicken and dumplings. Them was his favorites.”

  “And he went out after that?”

  She nodded.

  “Did he tell you where he was going?”

  “He didn’t account his every movement to me. He went out singing ‘The Minstrel Boy’—he had a grand voice—I knew as I’m sitting here he’d of been back for his supper if he was able.”

  “Did he say he’d be back?”

  “He didn’t say he wouldn’t, and he’d of told me that.”

  “And the date he first came here, Mrs. O’Grady. Do you remember that?”

  She twisted around and looked at the calendar over her shoulder. “There’s a circle round it there on the calendar. His rent started from February tenth.”

  “Did he owe you any rent, Mrs. O’Grady?” Phil began.

  He thought she was going to strike him. “There’s no one could pay me his rent.”

  “Forgive me,” Phil said, “but I think his wife will insist upon it.”

  “She’s not coming here.” Her voice rose to deafening shrillness. “I’ll see her in hell before I let her cross that threshold. Do you hear that, the both of you? I’ve a butcher knife there in the drawer, and I’ll take off her proud head if she as much as shows it around here. I’ve knocked a man down and beat him to a pulp, and you know it, Sam Fields. And you know I’ve no fear of damnation, with the hell I’m enjoying here.”

  “All right,” the sheriff said, getting up. “Rest yourself there. We’re taking his things out with us, and I see no cause for her coming here.”

  He pulled on his coat, as Phil did, and they went out together.

  Chapter 7

  “SHE’S A CONTRARY WOMAN,” Fields said as they drove down the hill. “But like all contrary women, what she says one day isn’t to be taken for gospel. She may harp on a different tune tomorrow.” He drew to a stop at Lavery’s store. “Not that I’m an
authority on women. I’m a bachelor, myself. And the more I have to do with them, the more likely I am to stay one. I’ve got to go to the school now and see the boy who found him. If you’ll come back to the parlor in an hour, I’d appreciate your going over his things with me.”

  The street running south from Lavery’s corner was the most prosperous looking he had seen in Winston. Within a block of the corner the huddled stores and frame houses ended, and on either side of the street, the respectable stone houses were leisurely spaced and well attended. There were no more than a dozen of them all together. At their end, Winston also ended. Phil walked as far as the roadside sign and read it:

  WINSTON

  UNINCORPORATED

  POPULATION 1092

  The oiled road ended as abruptly as the town, its gravel continuation running into the great hills to the south. He turned back and went into Lavery’s.

  He caught his first close glimpse of the women of Winston, for eight or ten of them were hovering about the shelves and counters. A couple of men were hugging the stove. All of them turned and gave him a cold appraisal, returning immediately to their own business. They were plain women, for the most part, with the look of middle age on all of them although there might have been a variation of twenty years between the oldest and the youngest. There was a trace of Irish on the tongues of most who traded there, an Irish mixed with the twang of the hill country that made of it a separate dialect.

  “I’m not letting my Jimmie go down now, certification or no,” he overheard. “There’s many a certification no more than a piece of paper made up over a pint of whiskey.”

  Phil slipped into the one phone booth in the store and pulled the door almost closed.

  “Mind your tongue, woman,” Lavery said. “There’s a whole new ventilation system gone into the mine.”

  “After they stayed out three weeks till it went in?” the woman said. “It’s you’d like to see them go back, safe or no, for your business.”

  “Och, that’s no way to talk to the man, Sally. He’s all the time carrying us, it seems.”