A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  “So who says he wouldn’t? Only he ain’t out in the woods, by God!” Atmon said, grinning. “He ain’t out in the woods.”

  “Why’d he have to come to town, anyway?” Mr Hummington asked plaintively.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Mr. Brown said. “Because so many brave hunters were out with jack lights last night. I never heard so many shots in the middle of a night. It’s a wonder everybody in this town hasn’t got his deer all tagged and hung up already. Somebody stampeded this buck. It’s not his fault he ran into town.”

  “So whose fault is it? It ain’t mine, but I got to get him out of here,” Atmon said.

  “How about the game warden?” Mr. Hummington asked hopefully.

  “He’s out with his thermometer testing to find them deer was jacked last night,” Atmon said. “Who could find him?”

  Chief Atmon had been edging inpatiently toward the basement stairs; Mr. Hummington, who wanted a promise of no bloodshed, was backing away in front. Mr. Brown walked back to his shoe department, turned and stood motionless, watching.

  And at that moment, without having to look behind him, Mr. Hummington knew. With barely a creak of stairs the buck appeared, whole and majestic. Quick as a squirrel on a tree, Mr. Hummington scrambled around in back of the Chief of Police. Tall and proud, the buck stood over us all, his head high, the magnificent rack of antlers gleaming. He looked from one side of the store to the other, seeming to calculate a mighty leap that would easily clear our heads. His muzzle was dark, yet a silvery fringe of white hairs showed his age. His neck was as thick as a man’s waist—a trunk of rigid muscle to carry the great antlers. He held our eyes again—held them absolutely—an invincible magnetism in that wild beauty.

  Atmon himself was struck silent for a long time. Then he had his Colt in his hand, and we all heard three cold clicks as he pulled back the long hammer.

  “MURDERER!”

  For a moment I thought this tearing sound was the expected shot, and then in the shocked silence after this astounding word we saw the tailor on the balcony, his squat legs spread, his stubby hands gripping the rail. His face was black with blood, his eyes burned down upon the startled Chief of Police.

  “MURDERER! MURDERER! Mr. Brown! Do you see what he is doing? What are you doing about it?”

  Like the buck itself, Mr. Brown did not move during this outburst. He stood quietly by his wall of shoe boxes, his eyes curiously still, as if he were blind, or in hiding.

  The tailor watched him for a second, and then began to stamp his feet, to shriek in German, the words torn by great sobs and sneezes as he hit his disintegrated face with his fists.

  The deer took this moment to make his try for freedom, catching us all with our eyes upon the bawling tailor. Chief Atmon’s reaction was swift, and had been predicted. He fired, stunning us all, breaking the buck’s long back in mid-air as he made his first arcing leap toward the front of the store. He came down upon rigid forelegs, his hindquarters useless, and slid to the feet of Mr. Brown.

  “Got him!” Chief Atmon yelled triumphantly. It had been a tremendous, a classic shot from a handgun, yet we were silent, still. The buck still lived. Propped upon his forelegs, his rack still held high, he looked straight at Chief Atmon, waiting. Mr. Brown watched too. “I got him! I got him! I got him!”

  “Not quite in the boiler room,” Mr. Brown said quietly.

  “God damn you! I got him, so shut your lousy mouth!”

  Chief Atmon screamed. A long sigh from the rest of us, and Chief Atmon whirled around. He seemed to look right at me. This is what I am good at, his eyes implored. And wasn’t that a beautiful shot?

  The deer’s calm eyes were black and deep. His nostrils flared at each even breath. His rump lay broken behind him, the long, silky-haired legs splayed across the shiny plastic squares. Atmon came up, his revolver cocked.

  “Get the hell out of the way. I’m going to finish him off.” Mr. Brown moved away, carefully, quietly. The deer glanced at him once and then turned to watch Chief Atmon and the black gun that was pointed at his neck. He didn’t try to move, but held his head as high as the good forelegs could hold it, waiting, breathing steadily, his ears erect and still as if he meant to hear, as well as see, the final explosion…Which came. Chief Atmon was right: there was very little blood from either wound. The big slug broke the buck’s neck and killed him. With a little sigh he dropped his head. An antler rang against the wall and he was very little quieter than he had been alive. His eyes were open, still luminous—but not so deep: those dark wells had silted up.

  In the terrible vacuum of Chief Atmon’s victory we watched Mr. Brown pace down the squares toward the cloak rack. Each foot precise upon a square, he hit no cracks. His handsome face was as unchangeable as if it were made of wax—the stern, expressionless mourning of waxwork nobility upon a tumbrel. He would look at none of us: whether it was disdain, or the wily ploy of a camouflaged animal who knows his eyes will shine, I didn’t know. At the cloak rack he unhurriedly put on his coat and hat, then as proudly, or as carefully casual in the face of danger, he turned around and walked out.

  The tailor’s long wail of mourning grew above us, its waves and intensifications strangely formal and rhythmical, as if it were a rite of sorrow perfected by legions of the bereaved; as if no one death but the deaths of generations must have called forth such terrible music from the ugly man’s throat.

  And Bessie, too, her heavy face no longer under the protection of her habit of determination, made the answer to that high litany. She stood at the rail and wept.

  Later in the morning, when Mr. Hummington’s energy had restored the order of our existence, I found myself with a pair of pants in my hand, making the usual climb to the tailor’s shop.

  The bursts of his sewing machine were as abrupt as always, and this time he heard my step upon the stairs and turned toward me, dropping a stiff lapel upon his table.

  “He is gone?” he asked, gray eyes popping miserably from the brown lids. And without waiting for my reply he asked again, “He is gone?”

  “He didn’t even say good-by,” I said, echoing in the words of Mr. Hummington a disapproval I didn’t feel.

  “Good-by?” the tailor yelled, bringing his fist down upon the rubber bulb of his chalk marker, “Good-by?”

  A cloud of blue dust rose above the scarred table. Blue chalk hung between us like a mist, and the tailor’s eyes began to fill with rage and tears. I backed toward the stairs, feeling for the carved railing, a solid thing to follow back.

  “Did you want him to say good-by? Are you still foolish? Do you cry because of this?” the tailor demanded, bringing his fist down on the table so hard the lapel jumped.

  I hadn’t cried. In spite of the tears I’d seen, I hadn’t caught them, and I considered this a terrible insult—an unforgivable insult; considered this and suddenly burst out bawling, enraged by the underhanded trick.

  “God damn you son of a bitch!” I yelled.

  “Ah! That’s better,” the tailor said calmly, as if my tears had released and strengthened him. “Do you think I don’t know you, my funny little one? It is his nature to try to escape. He does not know how we survive, eh? Never mind! We are the slobs who make the world.” He motioned with his hand. “Now give me the pants you got in your hand and go back to work. Go on!”

  I left him, seeing that shrewd and twisted smile as I fled to my hiding place behind the overcoats, to my private ceremony; the tearful funeral of that thin-lipped version of myself as Tabber, as a Yankee boy of ice and few swift words. I heard again the tailor’s long wail as it had grown over the deer’s death and Mr. Brown’s escape, and now I found the doleful music apt, as if it were part of a ritual some memory of my flesh found anything but alien and strange.

  …Not so long ago, though Trotevale’s and the things of Trotevale’s are scattered to the rag bags and the antique shops of Leah.

  My son fixes me to here and now, the only place and time there is: he has cornered his apple
by the stairs, and found that he can break the skin by smashing it against the edge of the bottom step. He sits quietly, his little tongue busy on the split, his eyes darkly watchful. He reminds me of an animal—a young raccoon in some quiet corner of the deep woods—self-sufficient, aware. “You little bastard,” I say admiringly, with perhaps too much affection in my voice, those easy tears precariously dammed behind my eyes. “You little bastard…” Gently, because he is soft and young. And with fear, for I do not really know what I should hope for him.

  The Hand that Rocked the Cradle Has Kicked the Bucket

  Banning Hall was an old dormitory of red brick and towers, and because it was so near the new Student Union the groundskeepers let its maples and elms and thick pines grow as if to hide it. Room 103 was way down in back, and looked out upon a smoothly bulldozed bank that rose up steeply toward the glassed and cantilevered Student Union. Standing in the door, all you saw was green from the sill to the top of the high old window, and on the light green were newly planted pines that looked like crouching people, and young hemlocks with their upper branches delicately cocked like the hands of dancers. Even on the brightest day the world outside was a damp and shady green, so soft and cool the desk lamps were like warm orange fires.

  Cliff Huntley’s desk was nearest the window, and he sat in his little space of light staring at his mimeographed booklet of football plays. He’d worried one side of a staple up with his fingernail, and now without thinking cleaned all the fingernails of his left hand on the dangerous little point. He knew all the plays by heart: the number that designated off-tackle, the alternate, meaningless numbers meant to deceive the opposite defense captain, and others that meant real alternations of the basic play. The meaningless numbers were so completely blank in his mind that even after a hard tackle they couldn’t disturb him by seeming to have some significance. The diagrams with the eleven X’s and eleven O’s were clearly translated in his mind into lines of lime and men and patches of hard dirt where, around the edges, roots of the cropped grass had been half pulled out, and were yellow as macaroni. Cliff was a guard, and spent a lot of time close to the ground.

  What he should have been doing at that moment was reading his English, because he was a junior still trying to pass freshman English, and if he weren’t passing he wouldn’t be playing football. The Dean had sadly made that clear to him. Everybody was sad about it—even his English prof—because everybody liked him; but he still had to pass.

  It seemed too bad to him that he couldn’t translate his perception of the plays and shocks of football into English 1. He could read, he could handle books; he had a 2.0 average without English, and he made contributions in class that seemed pretty good. The prof would stop any sentence to recognize his hand, and everybody in class would be very quiet and still as he spoke. Then, when he was through, the class would go right on and Cliff would try to think over what he’d said—but the words and ideas just faded back inside somewhere. He never said anything that was really wrong, but sometimes he thought what he’d done was to say over again what had been said before, maybe better, by someone else.

  One time he did remember what he’d said, and it bothered him so much that he’d talked it over with Jim Geohegan, his roommate. The prof had written “bazooka” on the blackboard and asked the class where that came from. Cliff had a sudden, wonderful feeling that maybe everything was related; he knew what a bazooka was from R.O.T.C., and in his mind came the wonderful idea that maybe each course wasn’t completely unrelated to every other one, that maybe English wasn’t as foreign as it seemed. He raised his hand and said, “Rocket Launcher,” which it was, but then he realized that everybody knew that already, and there was nothing he could do about it because he’d been so eager and happy the way he’d said it, as though he’d been so proud to know what everybody else knew already. What the prof wanted was not what a bazooka was, but where the word came from. He just never seemed to get up over that ledge to where the class was, and when the prof said kindly, yes, it was a rocket launcher, sure, Cliff knew everybody knew what a booboo he’d made. What the prof wanted was for somebody to say that the word came from a funny musical instrument played by a comedian on the radio a long time ago. Nobody’d ever heard of him—Bob Burns or something like that. Then he’d had a funny, opening-up feeling again because that name was familiar to him. Sometimes he couldn’t remember anything that happened to him before he was nine years old, but suddenly he did get a flash of memory, and it was his mother reading to him, clear and big as a movie, about a sweet, loving man talking to a mouse: Wee sleekit, cowerin’ timorous beastie! Oh, what a panic’s in thy breastie! But now no joy came with his being able to remember this, only sadness and doubt, and he said nothing.

  But they liked him. He knew they did. He could go anywhere and they would like him to be there.

  The brothers wanted him to live in the house, too, but he just wouldn’t talk about that. He didn’t want to move. They offered him any room he wanted, and he didn’t know what to say to them. When they came to the room, two and three of them at a time, Jimjo would leave. He called them “frat rats,” and they said Jimjo was bitter because he couldn’t get into a fraternity. Cliff knew, though, that Jimjo had never tried.

  He wished Jimjo would come back. When Jimjo studied he really studied, he never just sat diddling around. Maybe he couldn’t have made any house; he was pretty different. For one thing his pantslegs were too big at the cuff, and sometimes he wore pale-blue socks with a white clock with dark-brown slacks. He had red hair and his skin was almost all one freckle—it looked like orange velvet—and his eyes were pale, pale blue with white whites and then blue again—blue-white, really, because all around his eyes he had no freckles, just whitish skin. He weighed maybe 120 pounds and his head weighed twenty of that. And he wasn’t scared of man, beast, God or anything. Not scared physically and not ever scared in any way.

  Cliff weighed 196 that afternoon with no fat on him anywhere, and was six feet even; Jimjo was about five-six and had a little pot. Of course Jimjo was twenty-three and a senior. An English Ed. major. Sometimes he wore ties that were a good three inches wide at the bottom, so wide they looked like scarves. He said they were good ties and had belonged to his father, who died in 1953. He rolled his own cigarettes out of Prince Albert tobacco and Zig-Zag cigarette papers, too, so there was always tobacco and little burn holes about as big as a pinhead all over the front of him. He never stood his books on end, but piled them on their sides all around his desk on the floor and on his desk until there was barely room on it to write. Not that he was basically sloppy—he was just different. He was going to teach in high school. Murder. But maybe not; Jimjo was so full of all that power. There was his blood running around all over his skin, and he absolutely never gave one thought to being scared of anything. Once Lance Vandenbree and Jud Brown and Joe d’Agostini—big boys, all of them—came into the room and Jimjo said, “Greetings, gentlemen of the Jock! Have you come to woo away my roommate? To pat him too lovingly upon his muscled fanny? To call him ‘baby’? To flit him off to Never-Never Land?”

  And they all saw that Jimjo was calling them queer, which they weren’t, but they didn’t do anything about it, maybe because it was so preposterous.

  Bill Trippi, the floor proctor, said the only reason Jimjo was in school was he had good marks. He was always getting in trouble one way or another. Last semester he was caught helping his girl, Doll Flannery, down her dorm’s fire escape. She was only a freshman, and this year they were both on disciplinary pro. The last thing was when he said dirty words into Ma Bates’ intercom out in the hall, only she happened to be listening in her office and recognized his voice. She hated him, and so did Bill Trippi. Jimjo called him and the other proctors “Mummy’s Grenadiers.” Right now he was seeing the Dean about the dirty words, and it didn’t look too good for him. Jimjo had a dirty mouth when he got mad.

  Nobody could understand why Cliff stayed Jimjo’s roommate, and neither could he.
He never went anywhere with him. Hardly ever had coffee at the Union, never went to the Ginmill together, never to the movies. You might say they weren’t friends except in their room. But Jimjo helped him a lot. He really did help him in English, and spent a lot of time on him.

  But sometimes he was afraid he would get mad at Jimjo; that was one of the things that scared him sometimes. Like one time Jimjo was trying to help him understand something in the Freshman Rhetoric, and they came to the sentence, “The hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket.” Jimjo laughed at it right away.

  “What’s so funny about it?” Cliff asked. He’d laughed too, but even though he saw that a hand doesn’t kick—“A foot has to kick,” he said proudly—the real funniness of it hadn’t hit him. It was wrong, he saw, but this was somebody’s mother that died, and was that funny?

  “So my mother died, too,” Jimjo said. “Everybody’s mother dies. But it’s still funny.”

  “But why, Jimjo?”

  And Jimjo said that “The hand that rocked the cradle” was a sentimental cliché, and when people got that fake and sentimental they were asses, and when they went and mixed a metaphor like that we took advantage and laughed at them.

  “Take advantage?” Cliff said, and Jimjo got a little impatient.

  “Look, Jock,” Jimjo said, “if you’re so goddam stupid, how do you keep your 1.8?”

  “I got a 2.0 last semester,” Cliff said. Sometimes he did wonder, but anyway he knew he was dumb and Jimjo could kid him about that anytime and he wouldn’t get mad. “I study hard, and you help me a lot.”

  “You can’t be as dumb as you’d like to think you are, even in this mothering institution, and get a 2.0,” Jimjo said.

  “I study hard.”

  “Sure, and Ma Bates gives you Cocoa-Marsh and cookies, and Coach Kennick calls you ‘baby,’ and Ben Gué the trainer rubs you all over with oil, but you don’t get your C’s from them.”