Old Dogs and Children
Page 2
The redeeming thing about a dog, Bright thinks, is that it will look you in the eye. A lot of people won’t do that. “Good morning,” Bright says. “You look in the pink of health this morning. You slept well, I take it?”
Gladys turns to her food dish. Another thing about dogs. They have no truck with nonsense.
Gladys takes her sweet time with breakfast and Bright sits quietly, letting her mind wander, as it does a great deal these days. She drifts, especially here in the warm beginning of summer where thoughts puddle like melting butter in the languid heat. She has often wondered if that is why it is so hard for new ideas to blossom in the South. When it is cold, you have to think fast. But heat is deadening, and you can take refuge in it. You can lose hours, days, even perhaps a lifetime in the heat.
This will be a hot day, the promise of it in the cloudless blue of the sky, lightening now above her as the day begins to take hold. But it is still very early and the backyard remains cool and soft under the tall oaks and maples, shaded in grays as if ghosts are about.
Ghosts. If there are any here, oozing about on the gray-green carpet of grass this early morning, there are none she knows. Certainly not the ghost of her husband, Congressman Fitzhugh Birdsong. If Fitzhugh’s ghost haunts any place, it is the sidewalk in front of the Commercial Bank and Trust where he collapsed on a February morning eight years before. Harley Gibbons, the president of the bank, had taken her hand at the hospital and said, “Bright, he didn’t suffer. He was dead before he hit the pavement.” Sweet, gentle Fitzhugh. Finally home from Congress after all those years—through Roosevelt and Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon. And dead on the sidewalk two weeks later.
There are echoes of Fitzhugh Birdsong, to be sure. The hum of the ancient Kelvinator refrigerator. The stacks of National Geographics he loved to read because he was so much a man of the world, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Papers, books, memorabilia packed away in the attic. And two children, of course. Roseann and Little Fitz, leading their own lives now, no longer Bright’s responsibility. But no ghosts. Bright has no time or patience for hauntings.
Gladys lifts her head from her dish, cocks it to one side, stares balefully out of her one good eye. Then she turns toward the opening in the bricks, stops for a moment and sniffs the patch of mint next to the back steps. She looks up at Bright again and Bright gives her a pat on the head, scratching for a while behind her ears. Gladys emits a low, grateful moan and heads back under the house. In a moment, Bright can hear her banging against the pipes, moving in fits and starts toward her cool place under Bright’s bedroom. She leaves Bright alone in the soft quiet, thinking that Gladys is just the kind of dog for a woman who has retired from responsibilities and hauntings. They both simply accommodate and have no truck with nonsense.
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Things remain tranquil for only a moment, until Bright hears the whine of machinery from the shed behind Montgomery V. Putnam’s house next door. A low, singing whine—some kind of saw, or perhaps his lathe. Buster Putnam (she can’t help but think of him as Buster) has been using his lathe a lot lately, turning spindles for a banister. The whole house is falling down around his ears, and Buster is turning spindles.
Buster Putnam is recently retired from the United States Marine Corps, where he was a lieutenant general and very nearly commandant of the entire business. Except for an incident in Korea, they said, he would have had his fourth star. But he has finished his military career with only three and come home to reclaim a family relic, the house next door to Bright that people have been calling the Putnam mansion since Buster’s grandfather, the founder of Putnam’s Mercantile, built it in the 1880s, when the town began to prosper. It has never truly been much of a mansion, but for a long time it was the closest thing to the genuine article in town. Now it is just a flaking, fading, two-story white-columned beast of a house. It was cut up into apartments back in the fifties and for the past two years it has stood empty, considered unfit even for apartment dwellers. Buster bought it from a real estate broker for next to nothing, and folks generally said that he got exactly what he paid for.
Decay has descended upon the house like a shroud. The upper story is entirely uninhabitable. Buster lives in two rooms downstairs. A man came to inspect the roof shortly after Buster took up residence, and the minute he stepped off his ladder, he fell through. Bright was standing at the kitchen sink and she heard him bellow as the rotten boards gave way and he crashed into an upstairs bedroom. When she got to her own back steps, drying her hands on a dish towel, she could see the big hole in the roof where he had gone in. The fall did him considerable damage. The Rescue Squad came wailing up in their orange and white truck, and when they carried the roofer down the stairs on a stretcher, they knocked over the banister and sent it crashing into the hallway. Since then, Buster has spent a lot of time in the workshop he has set up in the shed out back, turning new spindles for the banister on his lathe, while the hole in the roof remains covered with a sheet of black plastic, tacked down by boards. No roofer in his right mind will go near it.
Yes, it is the lathe Bright hears now. She has learned its low, singing hum and then the sharper sound as the lathe chisel bites into the wood. In a moment, if he is drunk, Buster will start singing.
“Down in the valllleeeeyyyyyy ….” he begins. Then, “Aaarrrgghhh. Aw, SHIT!”
Buster is sitting on the floor of the shed by the time she gets there, clothes and hair speckled with wood shavings, blood dripping from a gash in his left thumb, blood-stained chisel lying on the sawdust-littered floor next to him. The lathe is still humming, the spinning slab of wood a yellow blur. Bright stands in the doorway for a moment, hands on hips, surveying the mess while Buster squints bleary-eyed up at her. Then she finds the switch on the lathe and turns it off. The smell of liquor is powerful.
“Buster, don’t you know better than to mess around with machinery when you’ve been drinking whiskey?” She laces her voice with disgust, but not too much.
“Gin,” he says.
“It’s all the same. It’s all whiskey. Don’t quibble over nomenclature.”
Buster holds out his hand. “I’m bleeding to death.”
She bends, takes his left hand by the wrist, looks at the gash. “No, you’re not bleeding to death, but you’re going to need some stitches.”
She looks around for something to wrap around the thumb, but there is only a filthy rag on the workbench along one wall of the shed. “Don’t you have a first aid kit?”
Buster shakes his head. “Do you think a man who would fool with machinery while he’s drunk would have sense enough to keep a first aid kit in his workshop?”
“I suppose not.” Bright picks up a knife from the workbench, cuts a slit along the hem of her thin housedress, tears off a strip of the cloth. She wraps it around Buster’s thumb several times, then splits one end of the cloth into two strips and ties it off neatly with a little bow.
She works quietly, and as she does she is suddenly aware of the smell of wood, the rich pungent aroma of nature’s secret laid open, fresh and raw and sweet. It is powerful, a rush of remembrance. Her father’s sawmill, the smell of fresh-cut wood, the whine of machinery, her father towering far above her in his tall leather boots and khaki clothes. She remembers, as if it were yesterday, seeing a man’s arm cut off at the elbow by a huge circular saw, the agonized shriek as spinning metal tore flesh and bone, blood everywhere, her father scooping her up in his strong arms and turning her away from the sight. But not before she had seen everything. It is something long buried, along with so much else, but now suddenly sharp and alive, horrible in a strange, delicious way. She draws in a quick breath, drops her hands to her sides, stands there staring at the bandage she has made around Buster Putnam’s wound.
Buster looks up at her. “Bright, will you marry me?”
She shakes herself. “Of course not,” she says after a moment.
“Why not?”
“You’re too young fo
r me. And you’re a mess.”
Buster nods. “I suppose you’re right. I’ve always felt like a little kid around you.”
Buster is only two years younger than Bright, but she remembers him as a little boy in overalls in the long ago when they were growing up in next-door houses on the other side of town, always standing back at the edge of whatever crowd they were in, too young to be accepted by the older kids but earnestly hoping someone would notice him. Shy, too. Strange, she always thought, that he had become a Marine. And a general at that.
Buster had been quite the celebrity when he came home from his distinguished military career—tall, trim, hair just beginning to fleck gray. He was sought after. He was grand marshal of the Veterans Day parade, became a director of the Commercial Bank and Trust, even addressed a joint session of the legislature at Governor Fitz Birdsong’s urging. Widowed ladies and even some with husbands had fawned over him. But then they had seen Buster begin to unravel. The first sign was the day he spoke before the United Methodist Women on World Missions Day. He had shown up smelling strongly of bay rum oil and bourbon and proceeded to say that he had “never seen a foreign country worth pissing on, much less fighting over or saving for Jesus.” After that, people began to draw back, and Buster became an object of morbid curiosity.
This morning, he is clad in a faded plaid flannel shirt and an old pair of brown trousers, shiny with wear. He has a stubble of beard on his jowls and his eyes are glazed and bloodshot. Decay has descended on Buster Putnam the way it has descended upon his homestead. Perhaps it is the house, eating at his vitals.
“Have you been up all night?” Bright asks.
“Not only up all night, but out all night. I have drunk me some terrible gin and paid court to some homely women, and it took all night to do it.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she says.
“Probably.” He doesn’t seem very ashamed, but he does look perplexed, as if he has lost something.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asks.
He holds up his bandaged thumb. “I’m wounded.”
“No,” she says with a wave of her hand. “I mean in general.”
He ponders that for a long moment, and then he says quietly, “I’m not sure who I am anymore. They used to call me General, but I’m not a general anymore. You call me Buster, but I haven’t been Buster for years. I got over being Buster, by God. And the boys at the Spot don’t know what the hell to call me, so they just call me sir. Except for one asshole who calls me General Patton, even though I keep telling him that Patton was an Army sonofabitch.”
“You don’t have to curse, Buster,” Bright says.
“Sorry. Old habits, you know …”
“You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are, Buster.”
Buster nods. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I need somebody to tell me what to do.”
“What you need to do is get hold of yourself.”
“Ah, yes. Come to grips. That’s the way my father used to say it. Come to grips with yourself. I think he always assumed that I had come to grips with myself because I made a career as a military man. And I suppose I thought so too. But now …”
“Yes?”
Buster shrugs. “I am as you see me. I don’t have anybody to tell me what to do anymore.”
“Nobody tells generals what to do. They tell everybody else what to do.”
“Oh, no.” Buster shakes his head. Flecks of sawdust fall from his hair and cling to the flannel shirt. “Everybody has somebody telling them what to do, all the way up the line. Even the president. He has people telling him what he ought to do, which is the same thing, maybe even worse.”
Bright looks him over, wondering what his wife was like, if she told him what to do. They divorced several years ago, childless. Buster should be enjoying his retirement now, at ease with a wife in a nice house, perhaps a condominium at Hilton Head within walking distance of a marina or a golf course. Instead…. Yes, what he needs to do is get a grip on himself.
“Well, what you need to do now,” she says, “is get some stitches in your thumb. Can you drive?” He looks up, gives her a crooked grin. “No, of course you can’t drive. You’re drunk and wounded.”
So Bright quickly changes into a cotton dress, fetches her purse and her old Plymouth, and takes Buster Putnam to the hospital. There is only a nurse on duty in the emergency room, but she finds a doctor making his early morning rounds. Buster is perched on an examining table, holding his injured hand in the other, when the doctor comes in. He is an earnest-looking young man carrying a clipboard and a Styrofoam cup of coffee, wearing a loose white jacket over an open-necked madras shirt, khaki pants, no socks. A stethoscope hangs out of a jacket pocket. He looks vaguely familiar, but Bright can’t place him. “Morning,” he says. “Got a little problem here?”
“Wounded in action.” Buster holds up the bandaged thumb.
The young doctor lays the clipboard and coffee cup aside and pulls up a stool, wrinkling his nose a bit at the gamy smell of dissipation that rises from Buster’s body and clothing. He unwraps Bright’s homemade bandage from around Buster’s thumb and the wound opens and blood flows again, dripping on the green tile floor of the emergency room until the doctor dabs at it with a piece of gauze. Everything is shades of green and stainless steel here. Things hiss and burble, little green machines on stainless steel tables, everything on rollers. Nothing is permanent in an emergency room. You could clear the place and have a volleyball game in two minutes. Standing here, smelling the antiseptic smell and seeing the impermanence of it, she is glad that Fitzhugh Birdsong died on the sidewalk in front of the Commercial Bank and Trust, not in a hissing green emergency room.
“Well, it’s not life-threatening,” the doctor says. “A few stitches ought to take care of it. How did you do it?”
“Operating a wood lathe while intoxicated,” Buster says matter-of-factly.
“Well, that was pretty dumb,” the doctor says mildly.
“Just fix the goddamn thing!” Buster booms, drawing himself up, eyes steely, back and shoulders straight. “Excuse me, Bright.”
The doctor gives him a close look. “You’re General Putnam, aren’t you?”
“Yes. And I don’t need any advice, Bubba.”
The doctor shrugs. “This is an emergency room, not a counseling center.” He peers at the wound for a moment. “I’ll put a little shot of novocaine in it, then sew you up.”
“Don’t bother with the novocaine,” Buster orders.
Another shrug. “Suit yourself.” He puts a metal tray under Buster’s hand and bathes the open wound with antiseptic. Bright starts to turn away, finds that she cannot, that she is gripped by the sight, the thin trickle of blood oozing from the wound, and—for the second time in less than an hour—by a powerful remembrance of her father. A look of utter surprise on Dorsey Bascombe’s face, a summer morning exploding, blood everywhere, a scream from somewhere so deep inside her it has no sound. She feels a wave of weakness wash over her and she puts her hand quickly to her temple.
The doctor glances up, concerned. “Miz Birdsong, are you all right? Maybe you better go outside and sit down.” And that is when she recognizes him or, more accurately, recognizes the family resemblance. He is a Tillman, she thinks, a grandson or perhaps a grandnephew of Finus Tillman, the doctor of her childhood. She feels and smells the house of Dorsey Bascombe’s wounded agony as if it were here now, here instead of this green hissing antiseptic room.
She shakes her head, startled and unnerved by the memory. “No!” The doctor starts to rise, but she waves him back, fighting to calm herself. “No. I’ll be all right.” She looks around, spies another stool. “I’ll just sit right over here. I’m fine. Really. You go right ahead.”
“Okay. But don’t pass out on me, now.”
He is a nice young man, she thinks. Tillmans make good doctors. They comfort well. Bright sits on the stool, folds her hands in her lap, gives him a faint smile.
Bright stares, horrified by what she sees, forgetting her own discomfort. Sweat pops out on Buster’s upper lip and his jaw muscles twitch. He looks over at her for a quick moment and she sees the pain and panic, raw in his eyes. Clearly, Buster now wishes he had opted for the novocaine. But it is too late. He has committed himself and he is unable to draw back because he is a man and a Marine and a fool, unyielding in his cussedness the way a man will be when trapped between the folly of a bad decision and the rock wall of his own pride. Stupid! Bullheaded, stupid, self-centered man! she thinks, the anger rising in her. She wants to scream at him, but she holds it in. Let him suffer! He asked for it!
There are eight stitches in all, each one an exquisite violation of flesh. The doctor looks up at Buster once in midoperation, grunts and continues. And finally he is finished, dropping the needle and scissors with a clatter into the metal pan. “Okay?” he asks Buster simply.
Buster nods weakly, relief flooding his face. The stubble of his beard stands out starkly against his pale skin and now there is sweat all along his forehead, a tiny trickle of it just next to his right ear.