A young Negro came for the oxygen tank; Laurel had seen him when he came to refill it. Carrying it crosswise, he stopped at the door. “Where Mr. Wynn at?” he said.
She stuttered to begin and said, “He passed away.”
Abruptly, he went down the long hall and out the front door, fast. Laurel followed wondering why she had said, “passed away,” an expression she had never used before in her life, wanted to correct herself, to say, I mean, he died. He turned not to see her, storing the tank. She had made a mistake but there was no way to turn back. He got into the truck, his eyes sliding past her. She said, “Were you the one who always came?”
“Yes.” He started the motor, not wanting to talk. “Mr. Wynn sho was a nice man,” he said, and backed out before she could reply.
She had wanted him to say it had not been the way she knew it was: his bringing the tank the most important interruption in a day of silence. She had wanted to hear every detail of the times he had come but could not have asked. She would never forget the look on the young Negro’s face, wondered how long he would remember. She felt separate from everything, turned back to the house, lonely, remembered he had always tipped the boy a quarter, wished she had.
They should not have gone out to dinner but Kate would not let her refuse. Offered cocktails, surely she would refuse; but she did not. By the following evening, Sarah said, “There’s one hid in the lettuce leaves.”
Laurel wondered who she was hiding it from. On Sunday, Kate woke and there was no more in the house. In the middle of the morning, she called. She sat in bed in disarray, one hand to her throat. Laurel came in and she said, “You’ll have to do something. I’m sick. I’m so sick.”
“What’s the matter?” Laurel said.
“I drank my perfume,” Kate said.
Laurel felt as dispassionate as if it were happening to someone else. As if panicked, she moved; but she was not. Beneath the surface of things she did, telephone, pour out the news, she felt only outrage at being in such a position, brought to this. Dr. Phillips said to take her to the emergency room and Laurel said, “Get dressed.”
Kate said, “I’m so sick.”
“Get dressed,” Laurel said. She put on her coat knowing she was past guilt, not responsible if Kate ruined the rest of her life. She was no longer the girl who had shilly-shallied from one thing to another: could set a course and follow it: had been able to from the moment she determined Kate was not going to the funeral if she had been drinking. “Get dressed,” she said.
In the emergency room where he had been declared dead she said, “This lady drank perfume.”
The nurse, taking information, said, “Why did you do that?”
A summoned intern having come said, “It’s alcohol, isn’t it?”
None of it touched Kate who only sat, looking sick. The intern said there was nothing to do, take her home, and went away. Laurel stared furiously at his retreating back, wanted to tell the nurse she was a fool for having had to ask. She was outraged that she had to pay five dollars for having entered the room, only to be insulted. Twice she had to tell Kate to come on, who seemed not to understand nothing was going to happen. Walking out, Laurel understood why he had come so close to defeat. Going along the corridor, past the lounging intern who gave them a knowing smile, she drew on a strength she knew she had inherited. Tough, she thought. Hell, you had to be.
In the parking lot, she sat holding the wheel, not looking at Kate. Instead she stared ahead at an old man in blue-striped pajamas looking out of the hospital window and said, “Mother, I’m going to have another baby.”
Kate had sat in this same parking lot with Dr. Phillips trying to comfort her. For the first time since, she cried.
Laurel said, “I was going to stay through Christmas and George was going to come here. Now I don’t know what to do.”
Dr. Phillips said, “She won’t be all right by Christmas. No sense having yours ruined. Why don’t you go home?”
Her mind leapt ahead to all she had to do, at home. “What about her?” she said.
“She asked to go to the sanatarium. I asked her to promise to stay until your baby was born and then to come out to you. She said you had asked her.”
“Will she be all right?” Laurel said.
Kate said she would be; this time she said, “Don’t worry.” They were in her room and Laurel was helping her to pack. Her clothes, her room smelled of the scent that made Laurel always think of her as young. The suitcase was closed and they went down the long hall; Dr. Phillips was waiting. Kate said again, “Don’t worry,” kissing Laurel, the baby, Sarah. Then she was gone abruptly, not to cry.
It was the last afternoon and she and Sarah went to the cemetery. She said, “What are you going to do now, Sarah?” Sarah said she was going to take a rest. “Miss Laurel, I’m fifty-five years old and I been doing housework since I was twelve. The first family I worked for went to Paris, France, for a year and wanted me to go and nurse the baby. But I was afraid to cross all that water. I wish I had that chance now.”
“I’ve learned a lot too late too,” Laurel said, thinking no one was without regrets.
They left the car and walked between mimosas, down a slope of dry, winter-short grass, the only immediate sound the snapping of acorns beneath their feet. Beyond guarding hedges in the distance, traffic was an intermittent sound; an airplane went overhead and a young dog barked and hushed. They stood looking at three small headstones. Cally, Laurel read, and Henry. She wondered what her grandparents had been like. Beyond his grave were the boundaries for two more. Forcefully, she knew she never wanted to be buried in California as long as she lived there. Someday her children would stand here in this exact spot and look down at five headstones in a row, as he had planned. Pleased, he had told her once, I paid a hundred dollars a piece for those plots when the cemetery opened and now they’re worth almost a thousand!
Around an oak a bench was built. She and Sarah sat down; holding on, the baby stood. Sarah said, “Mr. Buzz’s wife ask me to work for her, anytime. But if Mrs. Wynn wants me when she comes back, I’ll stay with her. She was always good to me, Miss Laurel, even when she was not at herself. And she never did go to do the way she did.”
“No, she never did,” Laurel said, anymore than I ever meant to be settled away from home. How did life happen? Things she had been going to listen to, she would never hear; things that had been going to happen, never would.
“There’s an old dynamite box in the basement. Could I have that?” Sarah said.
“Of course,” Laurel said. “But don’t you want something else from the house?”
“No’m,” Sarah said. “That’s the most thing like him. I can use it as a stool.”
Then it was the morning the taxi was waiting. Laurel watched the driver store her suitcases. She had already kissed Sarah and started away, then ran back up the front steps. “Sarah, I’ll be coming back as long as mother is here. But even if she moves to California, I’ll always come back. I don’t know how or even where I would stay. But I know I’ll always come.”
“Yes ’urn,” Sarah said. “I’ll sho always be glad to see you.”
Then she was in the taxi staring in a different way at streets she had always known and at strangers from the plane’s window. But she was learning to accept differences. He was gone and she had moved up a generation. Instead of being taken care of, she took care of others, tightly held the baby as the plane began to move. It lifted over wide flat fields. Distantly she saw the river in careful curves, the levees beyond. He had always said he came along at the right time in the right place, seen the business there when he was. Beyond fame, the mark he had left on the countryside would last. So would his mark on her, she thought. Directions her life would take would be because of him. She had even begun to believe she would find out some of the things he never could. She would not make exactly his mistakes. In turn her children would know more than she. It made everything all right. She wished she could tell him.
Joan Williams (1928–2004) was an acclaimed author of short stories and novels, including The Morning and the Evening, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Wintering, a roman à clef based on her relationship with William Faulkner. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at Bard College in upstate New York, Williams was greatly influenced by the legacy of her mother’s rural Mississippi upbringing and set much of her fiction in that state. Her numerous honors included the John P. Marquand First Novel Award, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1966 by Joan Williams
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9465-1
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Old Powder Man Page 35