by Howard Fast
“Yes,” she said to them, “the proper time to die is when the sun sets. But it is the first improper thing I have ever done, and there’s no gainsaying but there’s a pleasure to it. Not the dying, though. I’m afraid I shan’t enjoy that, yet one can never tell—” As her voice wavered away, she glanced out of the window almost smiling.
“Look at the Steer’s Head. One can see it now. At the traditional sunset time it is just a black blur. I haven’t climbed the Steer’s Head of late, not for years, I should say—so I have forgotten most of its magic, as an old woman forgets. Oh, yes, there is magic to the Steer’s Head.…
“But enough of that. Inez, stay here until the end, for it really won’t be long. You see, I told the minister not to dare set foot over the doorstep while you were here. He preaches, and that is an unforgivable fault in any minister. But I have never had the courage to say so until now. I am a wicked old woman—and loquacious. Look at me, John Preswick. Otherwise I shall tell you to go, and have them bring the portrait here instead. You have changed, John Preswick. It is hardly five years since you came, and yet one could no longer take you for the boy. Nor yet for the man. But in time, John Preswick, I dare say the other will come. I am almost glad that I shall not be here. John Preswick, who are you?—and from where? I shall never quite know that, though sometimes I imagine I do. Inez does, but she will never admit so much to you. She is a witch, Inez, though a rather pretty one. But perhaps I do know, even now—
“No, I am an old woman, talking her last nonsense. My tale was over, John Preswick, long, long ago, while men in gray and in blue were still killing each other in this part of the country. Why I have lingered on for so long I do not rightly know….”
She closed her eyes and did not open them again. In a little while she was dead. They would not have realized it, but John Preswick took a small mirror, held it before her mouth, and then nodded at Inez, who was sitting very straight in a chair.
He stood up; he went to the window, and there was the Steer’s Head, bright and green with the sun. There was no wind, so he knew the branches of the oak on top would be still. When he turned to Inez, he found she had been looking at him.
“I guess we had better tell them now,” he said, going to the old-fashioned bed and drawing the curtains.
Rising, she walked toward the door. He followed after her, noticing how slowly she moved, being heavy with child, and how great the burden was for her, how slim she was, how small. He reached past her shoulder and opened the door; together they went out of the room.
12
THE burying place was on the other side of the apple trees, between the orchard and the strip of woods. There were many graves, the inscriptions upon some being so old as to defy deciphering. Some of the tombstones had been broken off; others were simply crumbling with the weather. The very old ones, Inez said, dated to a time before her family lived in the house, but of that she was not entirely sure, so long had this been their place of residence. Yet there were so many of them that, servants included, and slaves previous to that, there were still graves to be accounted for. Some of the vague relations in the north had been notified, and they came down just in time for the obsequies. They stood in an uncertain, silent circle about the open grave.
They buried her next to her husband, who was directly beside Inez’s father and mother. Her husband, a good deal older than she, had been with Jeb Stuart. Inez whispered that to John Preswick as Frank was dropping in the dirt. “She was terribly proud of it,” Inez said.
A buffet lunch, cold, was served for the guests, and then they got into their cars and drove away—as always. There was something about them to impress John Preswick with their transcience, although they belied that in a very material manner. At first he had not existed for them; now they were forced to half accept him. None of it struck John Preswick as unusual, for he knew of the house.
When they were gone, it was almost evening. John Preswick and Inez went into the garden with the minister, who lived a ways down the road. His name was Mr. Couvey, and it had been said that a daughter of his owned Wilfred James, an orchard man, for a sire, but of that no one was sure, though there was the child, the image of her suspected father, for proof. Without knowing just why, Inez related the entire half-humorous, half-sordid tale to John Preswick as they stood at the gate and saw the figure of the minister dwindle to his rocking stride. When he made a turn with the road and disappeared from sight, they went back to the garden and sat down upon one of the concrete-cast benches. Already the Steer’s Head was in silhouette.
“She told me,” Inez reflected, “that I should not take on after her death, because there was the child to consider. She made me promise to keep on drinking cream, too, though I do detest it.”
John Preswick said: “The pinks are full. I shall tell Frank to cut most of them tomorrow and put them on the grave. He’ll see to the planting of it himself.”
“Yes,” agreed Inez, “that will be nice.” She loved an old grave full of and sinking into the earth.
“And there is the check for the doctor. But he will expect to wait for a week or two. We’ll have to take her room, for she wanted that; but we’ll wait until the end of the month. She said her portrait is in the attic. If that is so, we ought to have it down and framed.”
Inez nodded. The sun was quick to set when once it had passed the Steer’s Head; in a few minutes it would be twilight. Even from where she sat, she could scent the darting fragrance of the pinks.
13
A WEEK after that, the doctor came again, examined her, and ordered her to bed. The doctor, Paul Harthes, was an old man, watery blue eyes peering forth from beneath two heavy white brows. He had a long mustache that drooped to beneath his chin, and when he smiled, there were four yellow teeth to be seen. He still clung to his carriage and his two bay horses, and, making a call, the slow, even clipclop of his horses’ hooves could always be heard far in advance. He drove up, closeted himself with her, tweaked her chin, accused her of avoiding cream and vegetables, and then made his way out into the garden where John Preswick was standing alone.
“You know,” he said to him, “she is going to have a mighty hard time of it.”
“They all did, didn’t they?” John Preswick remarked.
“Her mother died of it. It was a question of saving either the mother or the child, and since her mother was the most miserable heart-sick woman I ever knew—why, I did as my conscience directed. Her father had been killed perhaps a month before that, and she narrowly escaped miscarriage.”
“And you think that she will die?” John Preswick asked steadily.
“Frankly, I don’t,” the doctor declared. “She’s a good little lass, and solid.”
John Preswick walked over to the gate and held it open; and he remained there until the sound of hooves had died in the distance. Then he began to pace back and forth across the garden, his single hand hooked into his belt. Before he went into the house, he picked a few roses.
“They are for you,” he smiled, bending over her bed. Very small she looked, and wan, and thin. Her dark brows stood out like pencil lines against the white of her skin, and her eyes were deep and entirely shadowed. Picking up her hand, he held it in his, studying it, thinking that it was almost transparent. Fingers and all, it was scarcely larger than the space of his palm.
“Do you know, John Preswick,” she said whimsically, “that this time it shall be a boy? Girls—oh, there have been so many. But now the name is ours again, John Preswick, and it shall be a boy.”
He nodded. He was moving her fingers back and forth in his. A lock of hair had fallen across her face, and now he took it and laid it upon the pillow. For a while he let his hand lie there in the mass of her hair. A little later she closed her eyes, and thinking she slept, he left her.
She did not go from her bed again, and at the end of the month the baby was born. Dr. Harthes came in the early afternoon. Perhaps three in the morning, his sleeves rolled high, his eyes incredibly ti
red, his face older than ever, he emerged from the room and went down the stairs to the parlor, where John Preswick was sitting. As he entered, John Preswick rose slowly to his feet.
“Let me have a drink first,” the doctor said. And he added: “One simply does not get used to those things. Now in a hospital—it would have been different. But I’ve been doctor to this house for thirty years, and in that time no one of it has ever been to a hospital. Not, mind you, that I wouldn’t have taken her to Charleston had I thought the thing needed it. But it all went splendidly.” He drained his glass. “A boy. A brute of a thing. Seven pounds if an ounce. She is resting easily now, and, if I were you, I shouldn’t disturb her until the morning. There’s her nurse, and the one I brought along. Now, if you will give me a bed—”
And in the morning, when John Preswick came in to see her, she looked at him, smiled, and bent back the covers in the best traditional manner. But he had known from the first that this would be the way of it, that she would not die, that the boy would not. Flocking in through the window, the sun’s light sprawled across the coverlet, making her smile alive and electric. The child was a wrinkled, reddish old man.
“I suppose,” he ventured, thinking somehow that he had said all of this before, “we will call him John Preswick.”
She nodded.
“Proud of him?”
“So much.”
He sat by her side, allowing his hand to reach out until it rested upon her hair. From the covers, the sunlight leaped across and over him. She thought that he was handsome—in a lean, dark sort of way. She was not sorry now that she had done this thing for him, in spite of all the pain.
And when he went out, and she was alone, she lay there, staring up at the ceiling, wondering, the name John Preswick coursing uneasily through her mind.
Soon she was strong enough to walk a bit, to sit in the garden. If anything, she was thinner, and more frail; and as a distinct shock it came to John Preswick that she was no longer beautiful. With the child, her beauty had gone; but there were times, when the evening shadow crept over the place, when she sat silent and staring off to something he did not and could not see, that she mocked at beauty. For then her face would be a pale, violet-white thing, framed in the dark of her hair, and her eyes would bite out, like bits of cool, sea-blue fire. But that was another thing. Her beauty was gone.
And what did it matter? Had he not seen himself in the mirror—yellowed, lean and shambling, one arm hanging grotesquely—?
In the manner of old, days began to slide by, and it seemed no time at all until the child was balancing himself and attempting to walk. He was rather good-looking, John Preswick thought, dark of skin, dark of hair and dark of eye, solid, with good lips and a good straight nose. And his growth was outrageously quick.
How many years had it been? When the child was five, John Preswick looked back, wondering whether it was not an illusion, whether he had not been here through all time. When the child was five, they went to Europe, leaving him with a governess. And when again they returned, John Preswick knew that it was the last, and that now the place was claiming them permanently.
The years crept by; like the slow, eternal ticking of a clock, the years crept by, scarcely noticed, scarcely regretted. There were things to be done, things they did; but these were so few. They knew people, the very right sort of people; but they did not entertain frequently. Somehow, the very right sort of people could not approve John Preswick; and so their isolation increased and intensified itself. And the bluff pride of the house seemed to grow with that.
He took to gardening, and Inez to sewing, to embroidery. He worked most of the time with Frank, seeing to the blooms in the garden, watching them grow and finding a strangely complete pleasure in it. It was as though he were old, far older than he actually was; and it’ was as though he had forgotten. There was a comfort in Frank. Frank was of the earth, definitely and openly of the earth, and the earth was the one thing he could understand.
And so the years passed, and the other John Preswick was seven, and eight, and then ten: a large, sturdy boy with dark, flashing eyes, with a narrow, sloping face, and flat cheeks. And the older John Preswick looked at him and found himself bewildered, for do what he might, the boy was always a stranger. The boy took over the place, dashed about it, plagued his governess, and wondered, sometimes, who those two people were, so old and so curiously connected to him.
And then John Preswick thought he had the answer. He had been walking towards the Steer’s Head when he noticed the boy ahead of him, already beginning to climb the hill. Stopping, he watched him. Now he would be in sight, and now, again, he would disappear. The trail wound up and around. At last he stood at the top, a small, slim figure under the oak. A moment he paused there, and the man below could almost feel the taut strain of his body; then he turned and began the descent. A spasm of pain crossed the man’s face; he seemed very tired as he walked back.
So still it was as he came toward the house! The wind, blowing to him, brought with it the fragrance of flowers: heavy, sweet, sticky. There was a hum of insects, faint but penetrating. Before he entered, he paused in the garden.
Then he went in, went to the room with the portraits, and sat there. The portieres were drawn, and it was quite dark, but he did not mind that. In the darkness he sat, and he thought—perhaps he dreamed a bit. He was saying to himself:
“Now it is fifteen years.”
Rising, he walked over to the windows and drew back the drapes. The soft, filling light of the afternoon sun flooded in. He went over, and he sat in the little Chippendalish sofa before the mantelpiece. There were three portraits now, for they had hung hers between the other two.
As he looked at them, he considered that she appeared very much as Inez had—once. She was slim, dark of hair, with the same blue eyes. And she had, about her lips, the faintest flicker of a smile. It might have meant anything.
From her his eyes turned to the man—the tired man in the Continental uniform, his sleeve pinned up to his shoulder. Lifting his hand, he passed it over his face. He knew how much he resembled him. She had known it, too, for she had told him before she died. But there was much she had not known.
Rising, he went out of the room. He sent the butler to find Inez, and when she appeared from upstairs, he said: “Come out to the garden, Inez. I want to speak with you.”
Following after her, he motioned to one of the concretecast benches, waiting until she had seated herself, and then sitting by her side.
“Inez—” he said, trying to speak as evenly as he might—“Inez, to-morrow I am going.”
“Where are you going?” she asked of him. As she turned, the side of her face caught the sun, filling the hollows of her skin with faint pink fire.
“I am going away, Inez. I must go. I must go back. I thought I never would.”
But she did not seem either surprised or disturbed. She said, smiling so that the pink fire flowed over her small white teeth: “I thought you would, Johnny. It is so long—that sometimes I wonder why it had not come sooner. But I knew you would.”
“You knew?” Not only doubtful, he began to appear definitely ill at ease. “You could not have known, though, for it has just come to me.” (What was it the old lady had said about her being a witch?)
“I knew that too, Johnny.”
“But you do not understand. I am not jesting. I must go away.”
“For always, Johnny?”
“I do not know. I think that I will return—”
“If you go, Johnny, you will never return.”
Yes, that was true; if he went, then he would never return. She knew. Even of Lucille Croyden, of his mother. But how did she know? And why should she know? He found himself looking sidewise at her profile, but she was not aware of that. She was gazing away to the Steer’s Head, bluff and rounded. Her chin was tilted; her thin face seemed almost to quiver; her eyes were wide. He glanced down to her neck, to the small bend of her body, to her hardly perceptible
breasts. How old she was—and how young! How worn, and how small!
“You do not care, Inez?” he asked her.
“If you must go, Johnny—then you must.”
“You do not understand.”
“And yet I think that I do, Johnny.”
“I would stay”—he was musing, almost to himself—“but I cannot stay. I must go. It did not happen now, Inez, but many years ago when I stood with you upon the Steer’s Head and saw the sea. And all these years—I will tell you. There is that picture of the Continental officer; there is the look in his eyes. He sees something, Inez, and today I saw what he sees, and I knew that I must go. I have been here for fifteen years, Inez, and your husband for more than ten of them, but that does not matter. Now I must go.”
(How she loved the fool, Inez thought!)
“Yes,” she agreed, “now you must go.”
She asked of him: “To-morrow?” and he nodded. Then she shrugged her shoulders, almost imperceptibly, fixing her eyes again upon the Steer’s Head. Apropos of nothing, she remarked: “You know, this place was once an inn. They called it the Steer’s Horn.”
“I did know,” he replied; but how he had come by the knowledge, he did not say.
“After Granny died,” she went on, “I looked through all the records and papers. The name of the innkeeper was John Preswick. Is that not strange?”
“It is strange,” he answered without interest. “But why do you speak of it?” He resented the fact of her taking the announcement of his impending departure with such calmness and utter unconcern. He resented the manner in which she kept her gaze from him. She should, rightly, have wept; she should have questioned him and desired all sorts of explanations. She should have spoken of the child and reminded him of his obligations. But nothing of that she did.