by Lynn Hall
Ward took the lead, casually but surely. They went to the deserted side of the bar, across from the euchre game, and hoisted themselves onto the high, comfortable stools. The room was dark and quiet, the edge of the bar was leather-padded for leaning into, and Tom was filled with an almost giddy sense of well-being. In spite of the probable half-dozen years’ difference in their ages and experiences, in spite of the fact that he had to order pop instead of beer, Tom felt absolutely equal. He felt appreciated. He felt the communion of another mind that worked the way his did.
Oddly, they didn’t exchange information about themselves. Because a full moon hung just outside the window opposite them, they talked about the way the phases of the moon seemed to affect human nature; they talked about whether there was any scientific basis for astrology, and discovered that they were both Scorpios. The conversation got around to war, not to what was going on now, but to whether it was part of man’s basic nature to fight for his territory, and therefore inevitable that there would always be war.
Only once was Tom’s enjoyment flawed. He looked toward the door on his way to the rest room, and his eyes met Floyd’s across the dimness of the room. Floyd was standing near the door, and Tom had the feeling he had been standing in that spot for some time, watching Tom and Ward at the bar. Even in the dark Tom could feel the hurt in Floyd’s eyes as they followed him.
Tom looked away. You’d think I’d kicked him in the stomach, he thought. So I closed the shop early and came over here with another guy instead of going to his house. What does that make me, the villain, for heaven’s sake?
When he came out of the rest room, Floyd was gone, and in a few minutes Tom had forgotten about him.
6
Floyd came out the side door of the high school building and stood for a moment while his eyes watered in the intense sunlight. The interview with Mr. McNamar was behind him. In his shirt pocket was a card listing the classes in his fall schedule. Freshman classes except for shop and P.E. The card made itself felt, humiliatingly, against the skin of his chest. He wanted to tear it up and litter the school yard with it, but he was afraid of forgetting the schedule and getting into the wrong classrooms on the first day of school.
He walked for two blocks through a maple-shaded tunnel of green toward the downtown area. The car will most likely be in front of the IGA store or the Post Office, he thought. He was in no hurry to find it. The afternoon was yellow-hot and the sweat ran down him in trickles, but he felt reluctant to go home just yet.
After last night Floyd knew Buck Creek held no friends for him. Until then it hadn’t been too hard for him to believe Tom when he said “Sorry, but I have to work” or “I’d like to stop and talk to you, Floyd, but these deliveries have to get out. Mom promised.” And even when Tom said it last night, he had told himself it might be true. It might not mean that Tom didn’t like him anymore.
But seeing Tom in the bar with Ward Alexander, just an hour after he’d been too busy to talk to Floyd, that was proof. Cruel proof. Bitterness flooded him now as he went over it again and again. He shuffled along the sidewalk with his head down so that he wouldn’t have to interrupt his misery for an exchange of greetings.
Lying in bed last night, he had thought about killing himself, but he could think of no way of getting the job done without pain. And after playing with the idea for a while, he realized that if he were dead he would get very little benefit from Tom’s remorse. Still, it was pleasant to imagine Tom at the funeral, wishing he had valued the friendship Floyd had offered, instead of turning it away with lies and meanness.
By this morning the part of him that used to swell with wistful admiration at the thought of Tom Naylor had become heavy and hard. He didn’t need Tom, he didn’t like Tom, he didn’t care enough about Tom Naylor to bother hating him. And if there was ever any way of getting back at the son of a bitch, he was sure going to do it.
“Floyd! Where you going?”
His mother’s voice brought him up short; he had just walked past their parked car. His mother slid across the front seat, relinquishing the wheel to him as was the custom now while he had his learner’s permit. Mike and Butch were fighting in the back seat, and Teddy, the seven-year-old baby of the family, sat on the far side of the cotton-print bulk of Mrs. Schleffe.
Ordinarily it didn’t annoy Floyd when his mother kept her arm around Teddy, as she was doing now. He made a pet of Teddy himself, and he surely did not want his mother hugging him, especially right here in front of the Post Office. Still, he felt a small burning of injustice as he backed the car into the street and headed it toward Buck Creek. He felt deprived of some good thing he couldn’t pin down, and he felt like hitting Teddy or his mother or the two noisy kids in the back seat.
Two miles from home a gravel road left the highway and went north toward a deep and wooded chain of valleys called Sny Magill. The road reminded Floyd of Ward Alexander. As they approached the intersection, The Cottage’s Volkswagen bus came toward Floyd’s car, then turned north on the Sny Magill road. Tom was driving, but he didn’t wave or even look toward Floyd.
I wonder where he’s going, Floyd mused. If he’s going to see Ward. I wonder … Suddenly he remembered what Orv had said last night at the bait stand about Ward Alexander. “Fruity,” he’d said. “Queer as a three dollar bill.”
An excitement that was part lewd fascination and part vengeance grew in Floyd. If Ward Alexander was a homo, and if Tom Naylor and Ward were such big buddies all of a sudden, then maybe Tom …
The possibility delighted him as much as it repulsed him. His thoughts raced. If Tom is that way, then it’s no wonder he’d rather be with Ward than me. I’m not sissy enough for him.
He smiled. The burden of his inferiority was suddenly much lighter.
As soon as the car was halted in front of the Schleffes’ footbridge and his mother and brothers had gone into the house, Floyd started down the hill at a rolling walk that was much faster than his usual pace. He was full of news, and he could hardly wait to tell someone.
The first person he met was Amber, on her way up from the hotel’s miniature grocery store. She was embracing a sack with a loaf of bread canting out over its top.
“Boy, have I got something to tell you,” he greeted her. Her expression lifted from its sagging boredom, and she set her load down on top of a retaining wall to give him her full attention.
“What, what, what?” she demanded.
“Well”—he hitched one leg up onto the wall and hunched closer to her. He hadn’t felt so exhilarated in weeks. “You remember Ward Alexander.”
She frowned and shook her head.
“Up by Sny Magill,” he said impatiently. “Jim and Jean’s brother. He was way ahead of us in school.”
“Would that be the same Alexander as Marcy?” Amber said.
“No, cousins. But that’s not the point. The point is, this Ward is a fairy. Queer as they come, always has been. He just got kicked out of the service because of it, and now he’s back home.”
Amber’s expression was dubious. Anxiously Floyd went on. He was loving the telling, and he was beginning to get a glow from Amber’s attention.
“So, the point is, who do you think I saw last night sitting in the bar with this very same fruity guy? Our old friend Tom Naylor.”
Still Amber didn’t react the way he wanted her to. She looked as though she were waiting for the punch line.
“Don’t you get it?” Floyd insisted. “Tom is one, too.”
“Oh, come on, Floyd. You’ve got a dirty mind, that’s all.” But a flicker of interest showed in her eyes.
Floyd’s mind went to work. “No now, seriously, Amber, haven’t you ever noticed anything funny about Tom? All that long-hair piano playing, for one thing. And last night I was over at his place after supper, and he was washing the dishes!” Even to Floyd’s ears this sounded a little weak, so he added, “In an apron! You should have seen him. A little frilly white apron. And he told me he was going to get a ma
nicure!”
Amber was looking a shade less dubious. “Tom?” she said, wonderingly. “It’s hard to believe. But on the other hand, him just moving here from Chicago and all, what do we know about him, really? For all we know he might have got run out of his old school for this.” She giggled, half playing games and half serious.
Fear touched Floyd. She wasn’t taking him seriously enough. If she wasn’t convinced, if she thought he was just making it all up, she would end up laughing at him instead of at Tom, he realized with a touch of panic.
He leaned closer. “Something else, too. It wouldn’t be very nice of me to tell you all the details, but you remember how Tom and I kind of ran around together for a little while when he first moved here? And then we split up, pretty soon after that? Well . . He turned to gaze up at the top of the bluffe.
“Well what?’’ Amber demanded.
He looked back down at her, gently. “It wouldn’t be very nice of me to tell. All I can say is I wouldn’t have a thing to do with Tom after— what happened.”
Amber gasped, and with a surge of elation he knew she was hooked. They could have talked on and on, but Peggy came down the hill to see what was delaying the supper groceries, and Floyd broke away to drift on down toward the river. He thought Orv might be alone in the bait house, in need of company.
His steps bounced. He felt taller, even slimmer, and definitely happier. He could look at The Cottage and not feel humbled by Tom’s superiority. There are worse things than being fat and dumb, he thought. Much worse things.
7
It was an impulse that made Tom turn off of the highway onto the Sny Magill road. He was on his way into Great River to pick up a carton of collectors’ plates from Norway, which had arrived by bus that morning, but no other errands awaited him back at The Cottage, so there was no hurry about getting home.
I’ll drive by, just to see if the Alexander place is the one I’m thinking of. I won’t stop, he thought. The Sny Magill road was one of his favorite drives anyway, and he could get to town by the cutoff up north of Alexanders’. The bus rattled down around a mile’s worth of curves, into the jungle of the valley floor. It was cooler here, but the air was still and humid on his arm. Up again, into the high, dry open on the far side of the Sny, he saw the mailbox that said Alexander on its aluminum flank.
Without conscious thought on Tom’s part, the bus slowed to a stop. A brown-limbed girl of ten or so was coming down the driveway, riding bare-back on a black-and-white pony, her legs rimmed with brown sweat stains and horsehairs.
“Hi,” she called as she rode around the bus toward Tom’s side.
“That’s quite a beast you’ve got there.’’ Tom looked into the smiling brown face and liked her.
“Old Queeney,” the girl said, slapping the pony’s neck and rearranging a shock of mane. “She ain’t much good anymore. She used to buck every time I stuck my feet in her flanks, but she’s getting so fat and lazy she won’t even do that now.’’ Tom clucked with sympathy. Since he could think of nothing else to say, he motioned with his head toward the house and asked, “Is Ward around?’’
The girl began maneuvering herself into a standing position on the pony’s wide back. When she was fully erect with her arms out like a tightrope walker’s, she answered. “He’s down at his place. The old school.’’
“Where’s that?’’
She glanced at him with a haughty kind of curiosity, then went back to staring at the pony’s ears. “If you want to drive back there, I better show you the way. You’d get lost.’’
Before Tom had time to decide whether he really wanted to drop in uninvited on someone he’d known only for a few hours last night, Queeney and her rider were already jogging down the road toward the rim of the valley. Tom got the bus turned around and followed them.
About halfway down the hill the girl stopped and waited in the ditch until Tom pulled up.
“Right up that road,’’ she said. “You can’t miss it.” With a barrage of flailing heels and slapping reins she got the pony into a gallop and disappeared up the hill.
The road she had pointed out was so overgrown that he had not even seen it before. It was barely one car wide, although it appeared to have been of full two-lane width at one time. Some of the gravel still showed through the grass and flowering weeds.
“I hope that kid wasn’t playing games with me,” he muttered as he started up the road. He almost wished he hadn’t come, but now, bumping around curve after curve of this isolated woods road, he grew curious about what Ward was doing back here. And he was anxious to see Ward again, to reassure himself that the quickening kinship he had felt last night for the squarefaced tan young man was not just in his own mind.
He rounded another curve and saw the Jeep. The woods opened just enough to let a tunnel of sunlight come down into the clearing. A ghost of the road continued into the woods beyond, but it was waist high with grass and saplings. On Tom’s right he could see a flash of river slightly downhill and screened by a stand of young birch trees. On his left the land rose with its junglelike woods dense and solid. A stone building squatted in the clearing, on the uphill side of the road where the Jeep was parked.
Tom coasted into the clearing and killed the motor. His senses were so pleasantly surprised in so many ways that he hardly knew what to savor first. The stillness of the clearing was not stillness at all; it was an orchestration of whistling, warbling, chattering bird voices, with the heavy sibilance of the river in the background.
The pleasure that the forest sounds brought to Tom’s ears, the little building in front of him brought to his eyes. Unwittingly he was seeing with the eyes of an artist, reveling in the correctness of the pale sand color of the stone building, with its silver-gray shake-shingled roof, against the too-brilliant jade and brown-black of the woods behind it.
He got out of the bus and stood for a moment leaning against the hot metal door while he studied the building. It was a schoolhouse, not too different from others he’d seen on his explorations of country roads around Buck Creek. But this one somehow seemed more square and true and cared-for than the others. It was a simple rectangle. Its narrow end, toward the road, had no windows, just a broad double door with a stone slab for a porch, and a small belfry above the door. The side walls were almost solid windows, small-paned, broad, and tall, set deep in the stone walls. On the grassy apron near the front door a few uprooted school desks stood in a random pattern, their ink-and-knife-scarred tops exposed to more sunlight than they were used to.
Finally, feeling almost shy, Tom crossed the clearing and stepped up into the school. He was in a little hall about six feet square and lined with low-hung coat hooks. Beyond, more double doors stood open to reveal the main room.
At first the room looked deserted; then Tom heard a voice mutter, “Summer ditch!” and he saw a movement down among the desks in the far corner.
“Anybody home?” he called.
Ward’s head appeared just above desktop level. He looked not especially surprised to see Tom, but definitely pleased. “Come right in. Welcome to Sweet Ridge. Pull up a screwdriver and make yourself at home.”
Tom felt relieved at the welcome, as he went over to where Ward was working. “I wasn’t too sure you wanted company,” he found himself saying. “This looks like a hermit’s hideout if I ever saw one.”
Ward shifted to a more comfortable seat on the floor and gestured with his screwdriver. Today he wore only plaid denim shorts and rough sandals.
“I’ll tell you the house rules right now,” he said. “No visitors in the mornings or early afternoons. Any other time, my latchstring is out for you. And I don’t say that to very many people. How did you find me?”
“I stopped at the house. Girl on a pony showed me the road.”
“That was Jean, my youngest sister.”
So many questions filled Tom’s mind that he didn’t know what to ask first. He simply said, “What is all this, anyhow?”
Ward was fi
shing through a tin toolbox, muttering and rattling. Finally he produced another screwdriver and handed it to Tom. Wordlessly Tom lowered himself to the floor of the next aisle over from Ward, and began working at the screws that held the ornate iron desk legs to the floor. Ward resumed work, too, on his side of the same desk.
“ ‘All this’ is home. This old schoolhouse and its acre are my share of the family farm. Be it ever so humble.” Tom didn’t speak, so he went on. “See, when they first built all these country schools, one acre was set aside out of every township for the school, with the understanding that when the school was no longer needed, it and the acre would revert to the farm it came from. Sweet Ridge was closed, oh, probably fifteen or twenty years ago. It’s on my dad’s land. We used to play back here all the time when we were kids.” He was silent, remembering.
Tom said, “Did this road once go on somewhere?”
‘‘Sure. At one time there was a town at the end of it. Just a little river settlement a few miles on beyond here. Sweet Ridge. But it mostly died when the railroads replaced river traffic a long time ago. And then the riverbed shifted and covered the place where the town used to be. Part of it’s on an island now, and sometimes when the river is low, you can walk over to it. But it’s not worth the trouble. The county maintained the road as far as the school for a while, but when the school closed, the utility company took out the electric lines, and the road was abandoned.”
They worked in silence for a long, thoughtful time; then Tom said, ‘‘What are you going to do back here?”
‘‘Live.”
“Oh.”
‘‘Here, let’s get this thing outside.” They stood, stiffly, and carried the desk out into the sun with the others. Before they went back inside, they strolled around the building. In a flat open area on the far side of the school, Ward said, “This will be garden, over here. I plan to raise as much of my own food as I can. And some flowers.”
He flashed a guarded glance at Tom.
Tom was staring thoughtfully at the future garden. “Daisies would be nice here,” he said.