So he came home, heeding those streets for whose pattern he had been preparing himself all the long train ride down. The street leading to their own was dark as they approached the long line of houses, but as they turned left, a yellow neon sign, far down to the right, imprinted itself as it flared backward: the Bantam Café. Not as he had dreamed it, the return, never as one dreams it—the wild image treasured or feared. But it had come to be. He was home.
One house was widely lit—theirs. “You have awnings?” he said, incredulous, even with a jealous twinge of resentment because the house he had been so reluctant to see no longer jibed with his memory of it.
“She asked for them this spring,” muttered his uncle, then, as they drew up, gave one of the exclamations, half resigned, half impatient, with which the tenders of the sick meet the vagaries of the ill one. His mother was standing in the door. Above her the awnings, striped mascara and white, one to a window, projected the house forward with a tropic falseness; beneath them, around the door, a trellis had been erected, in the center of which his mother’s figure, tiny in its usual dark habit, one hand resting on the latticework, the vine shadows clambering over her face, seemed that of a soubrette about to sing. As he came up the steps, the porch light was on his face, the trumpet-shaped shadows quivering on hers, but one glance at her dress, upright almost of its own stiffness, told him all he needed. Plain as her clothes were, each of them had always fitted her to the quarter-inch; it was her one vanity. Now her collar, once round and tight, slumped on her breast and fell inward; the cuffs of her sleeves, doubled in circumference, enclosed wrists that dangled within them like a child’s. Glancing down without meaning to, he saw stockings hopelessly girdling legs like canes, and quickly averted his eyes. Two steps above him, she bent her head toward his, chin thrust forward, mouth turned down at the corners.
“Yes, yes,” she breathed, “yes”; as if he must mourn with her the worst—the terrible collapse of her neatness. Gazing up, he held his own breath, thinking that he must never again for one second let her see him flinch from the sight of her—the hooded eyelids swollen to casques, lips the color of veal. One step up and he had enclosed her, and circling almost nothing, still sought her. Under his nostrils he smelled an odor that no orris could cover, never met before, instantly known to the full in an animal opening of all his senses. He knew what he held—he held mortality in his arms.
There was no scene; what it came to was that, still upright, every faculty erect, she had faded too far back for one. She had no more perspective, or only one; therefore all was clear. The great fact, for her, was the general scene; she could scorn, or perhaps had even forgotten, those fragmentary intensifications of it with which others tried to thrash themselves free of the dull prospect before them. Every day, as she diminished, she knew more incontrovertibly where she was. And what dignity spread from her because of it; one could almost understand from the sight of it why a man might spend his life walking this way, that, around the question of where was he. “This was the mercy,” Pierre told himself later, “that we had read of, had heard accounts of as descending, in their last days, upon the dying, but its heights, if such they were, were too sore for us. In the aphasia of living that was our own daily mercy, we gathered dimness warmly around us, and told ourselves that she was ‘fading.’”
That evening she gave them one flash of it—one strike of the match to show them in their darkness where she was, then no more. It was after dinner, after they had eaten all they could, watching her not eat, had listened to her find questions for them when they could speak no further.
“Let’s not pretend,” she said suddenly, and put her hands forth on the white dinner cloth, then withdrew them, perhaps because of what they now were. He could have told her, had there been any way to say it, that he had already grown used to them, that because of the infinitely adjustable lens he had just discovered we all carried inside us, even the mask she now wore was once more his mother. His uncle, sitting stiffened in his chair, made him hear her words, delayed.
“Let’s not pretend,” she said. “It’s too much for us. Each of us not knowing for sure what the other knows. A waste, too.” She leaned forward. “George … you know. They told you.” She paused. His uncle sat motionless. “And he knows. I wrote him. To New York. That’s why he’s here.”
Would she never name him? But she was gesturing to herself, drawing a hand down the whole length of her from shrunken bodice to ankle, forcing them to survey her. She looked at them both with pity. “And I know,” she said.
In the silence that followed, a great embarrassment stretched between them, as if the three of them were a childish gang caught out by authority in a joint misdeed. Then his uncle, that strange man of actions so few, reached out for her hands and put them back on the table. They lay there like the purest drawings, anatomized by life. The very cloth whitened beneath them, as if it had a piece of truth lying upon it. Then he covered them with his own. “When did you know?” he said.
She smiled, grinned rather, for in the way of people who die of attrition, the contracting flesh of her upper jaw was daily starving the skull into sight. Looking at that impish, still delicate protrusion, all their triangular pretense, every pretense could fall away, even into a kind of rest, as if health were only a long lapse of memory, now repaired, behind which she was showing them the one certainty that gave life—even joy—its character. “When I asked for the awnings,” she said. “They had them in France, when I was a girl. In hot summer, there’s nothing makes one feel so cool, so rich. I always wanted them. So, when I asked them at the hospital how much time I had, and they told me, I thought—‘I’ll have the awnings.’”
And in the weeks after, it seemed to Pierre that it was objects she clung to, not in the way of a person who could not bear to leave her hoard behind, but as if their positive presence were a help in delaying hers. The house had never been so polished, so serene, so stopped in every crevice. The servant Lucine, a quiet yellow woman with convent manners, came daily, and between them they restocked the household linen, rivers of it flowing beneath their hands, as if his mother meant to leave behind her a trousseau of all the things men would never think of, enough to last them forever. In the evenings after dinner, Pierre sometimes caught her scrutinizing the room, almost chairbound as she now was, in the thoughtful way that women did in the springtime, and one of those evenings, his uncle being absent at the “pub,” kept to that habit at her insistence, she made Pierre rearrange all the furniture in the parlor, saying exhaustedly when it was over, “There. That will be a better light for your uncle. Yes. There.”
Otherwise, except for what could not be helped, everything was encouraged to remain the same; it sometimes seemed to Pierre that his mother was passionately trying to teach them how to live in the present. Never a gossip, always formal, even in private, with the facts of other people’s lives, now she was energized by every account of the daily scene that his uncle could bring her as evidence that the warm, quotidian current of living still lapped their beleaguered household round. Of Pierre’s doings in the years of his absence she never asked, if only because this would have admitted the possibility of his return to them, and the future was the inadmissible danger now. He had no stories that could beguile her in the way she wished to be, that were safe. Meanwhile few people came to the house, few had ever done, and the weight of any fresh, real contact was more than she could sustain. Even the phone, across which one or two correspondents sent what communiqués they could, was literally too heavy for her. Interest, daily more disembodied, was all she had. And the burden of feeding it fell therefore, with heaviest irony, on the one who would be assumed to be the most unsuited to the task—his uncle—a man who all his life long had breasted conversation, tempered judgment, with a cough.
What he did with that task was a marvel, equal, Pierre thought as he was forced to watch it each evening, to the feat of a man with some hidden ear for music perhaps but no performance, who, required by the og
re to sit down night after night at the stiff instrument of his own imagination, finds that for the sake of another, if in this way the castle door can be opened to her, he can. It was the worst of summer heat now, and only his mother throve on it, muffling herself in scarves the color of the dead air and the moths that flitted it, waiting on the porch that Pierre carried her to each dusk at this hour, raising her skeletal head as a blind person might, minutes before he himself heard his uncle’s reviving step.
Each day he came earlier. As he came up the steps, his face, lifted toward them in the peculiar, refulgent light, showed the black-ash daubs under the eyes like a child’s play of spectacles, and although he came quietly, putting down the paper with the air of a man who has done this a thousand times and expects to go on so for a thousand more, he always seemed like a man who had been running. And once Lucine had left them with the tea, his uncle began, opening his day to them like a pedlar’s pack from which he drew one item after the other, watching her face the meanwhile, as if he had done nothing at the mill, the cafe, the street corner, other than buttonhole people for something to add to his stock for home. As perhaps he had, for what he accumulated each day was almost a columnist’s lore. But the lore with which he fitted each item to its saga and kept a dozen such going, the power with which he brought her into places where she had never been or would never be again—from pub to church meeting, to the new golf club at Denoyeville and the shower talk of the red-faced men there—must have been served by a lifetime of behind-the-scenes silence, of that deep, judging flow of comment which his cough must always have forestalled. It was the way a stutterer might have spoken, finding himself suddenly, for a great stake, able to spill. And his reward was to see her face, that had faded so far back, slowly transfuse forward again, as if he had brought it blood.
Tea would decline toward supper; the awnings were drawn up against the dew, and the three of them came inside, his uncle carrying her now. Inside, the three of them sat in their old triangle, but Lucine now moved softly behind them, and the windows had long since opened and closed to the rhythm of a real, not a remembered weather. The years had melded his mother and uncle with the town, and even he, brought here by the gloved hand that arrested all knife-play, had been returned to the trinity. Any envious passer-by, croucher at sills, would have thought them a true family. His mother, if she knew the limits of her triumph, gave no sign of it, as, her face almost a face again, turned toward his uncle, she warmed to the business of interpreting what he had brought her.
“They’ll send the Denny girl to Martindale, you’ll see,” she would say. “Poor thing.”
His uncle would nod, his eyes on the lips that said “poor thing.”
She would go on, briskly. “Mrs. Emerson, the one who used to keep boarders on F Street, she’d have let her stay there. But I expect she’s moved on across the hill.” This was Tuscana’s euphemism for the dam site. “She’d no scruples about getting on in the world, but she was kind.”
Martindale was the girls’ reformatory, and Mrs. Emerson, a former client, was a woman in the full-blown tradition of those whose male boarders often went beyond that status, but his mother’s interest ranged wide, and was never scabrous, foraging equally between happiness and its crops, tragedy and its portents, probing restlessly beneath even the mere drama of what happened to people, to the continuity that lay below. It was this continuity, blind as it was, that reassured her. And no one could have understood this better than his uncle, sitting there white-knuckled, spending all his breath to keep her where she was.
“That Mrs. Emerson, you know,” he would be sure to say, putting down his paper the next day, or the next. “She’s taken over the old Davis place in Charlotte. And you were right about the Denny girl—they’ve sent her to Martindale.” Nothing ever foundered in his memory these days; Pierre, listening, reminded of that bedside litany of his the day she was brought home, sometimes wondered now if anything ever had.
Meanwhile for Pierre the town was being repeopled, all the old names and characters coming out of lodging again, not on the scrawny scale of childhood revisited—for staying so close to home, he encountered none of them—but with all their legendary thickness retained. In a way this was better so; the work of the past three years was not to be undone then, only suspended. So things went on for two weeks, three, and he was beginning to believe that, with luck, painful as that luck would be, the two halves of his life would remain unjoined. And so they might have done, had his uncle’s name not been drawn, just at that time, for the grand jury.
All three of them were grave at the prospect. The real history of the world is made by the snailed-in, private lives of millions, a current occasionally muddied by the supposed plenipotentiaries at the top. Historians, biographers tying the world’s way to Alexander’s crupper or Hitler’s, know this and ignore it, for they too must work. But the dullest private citizen knows enough to equate any public action required of him with disaster, rightly measuring it by the immemorial occasions when he has been most forced to it, in time of war, of political storm, of plague. Thus, even the most minor prod from the public weal—a notice to register, a tax bill—can make him uneasy out of all proportion to its weight, if proud.
“I’ll beg off, of course,” said, his uncle, then coughed—not quickly enough to hide that unguarded “of course.”
Pierre was silent, as mostly these days, under the childish superstition that the less he said or did in Tuscana, allowing the Fates the least possible thread with which to reweave him in here, the easier it would be to retain his status as a visitor from elsewhere. But his uncle’s cough had remanded him back to the old, hated evenings of their threesome, a safety for which now, looking at his mother, he found he could even sicken. He got up and turned his back, trying to deny that he was implicated in this scene, unable to deny a twinge of what life held in wait for him—that he had just been dealt one “It is so!” out of a great store of implacables against which the most arrogant “I!” might be powerless.
“That you will not!” said his mother, just as she had done when his uncle had proposed to give up the café. “I shall be wanting to hear!” Her grin, meant to be gleeful, could look only rapacious on that starveling jaw, reminding them that it was she who, lightly as she could, with the least trace of assumed heroine, now held the reins. It was she, most imminently mortal of their three, who would keep them toeing toward health, on their frail, cliff-perched status quo. Death was remaking her, at a time which all but a few early Christians—to whom neither Pierre nor the rest of his world now belonged—would deem too late. If we might all remember our own deaths, he thought, then none would be villains, and he idled for a moment—the one that sense allows the young—over a vision of such a world: wars melted, lies cleared, everyone walking abroad in that immediate element, every medley solving under that pure-struck, personal tone. Meanwhile his uncle, doing just as she bade him, was to be the unwitting means of bringing back into her eyrie the final thrust from the world as it unregenerately was.
On July eleventh, then, 1939, at the current term of the supreme court for the trial of criminal actions, a grand jury was empaneled in the county (as known here) of Banks, Alabama. It is presumed that the names of all those summoned had been drawn under the usual procedure—from the annual list of persons qualified to serve as trial jurors, as submitted by the county clerks to their respective county juries, after the removal from the list of any whose records contained convictions either for felony or misdemeanors involving moral turpitude. It is true that, as may well often happen in a small community, several of the names were of those who had reassuringly seen service before. But as afterwards recalled, the judge was not local, the district attorney only half so. Nothing had leaked to the county at large—or rather to those who considered themselves to be this—of any extraordinary matters to be proposed. It was slack midsummer, in a slack place. Like all small places threatened by growth from outside, it could remember this fact only intermittently. And
like such places everywhere—where influence has ancestry, authority is always married to somebody’s cousin—it still had its contempt for the laws that are written.
In any event, no juror, before being sworn, had been challenged on the grounds either that he was insane or that he could not act impartially and without prejudice to either party. None of the persons currently held on various charges in the county jail, for instance, would have been ignorant enough to wish to challenge a roster of such good names as Charlson Evans (minister of the First Baptist), Ian Frazer (railroad watchman, retired), Miles Blankenship (Rhine’s—retired), E. V. Semple (factor of same), Treacher Nellis (formerly of same, now member inspection crew Dam Number Three and federal employee), the Jack Lemons, father and son (horses, and allied arts), Robert Rollins (youngest son, already called “Doc,” though still a student), Hannibal Fourchette, Jr. (also of course the son and associate of justice), and others of the like—all names ringing like the alphabet on any local ear. Whether or not from the same kind of ignorance, the district attorney also acceded to all names without challenge. Perhaps he was counting on, or at least encouraged by, the presence on the panel of some dozen foreigners. These were citizens, resident within the last ten years or so, who had been brought in by the dam in various capacities, members of a group now too prominent and too pushing to be overlooked without trouble. Citizens they were of course, of the nation if not of the region, some from the East, more from the West and Far West—all, in local eyes, from the “North.” All twenty-three of the jurors were male, for although women possessed the right to be called, in this neighborhood they were both unlikely to be called and disinclined to it—often a matter for comfortable courthouse laughter. Of those special foreigners of the place who would never be called there was never any mention—this being a matter buried too deep for laughter. From this group of twenty-three, George Higby (born in Birmingham, England, grandnephew of Luddite rioter, now naturalized and presumably neutralized citizen, foreman at Rhine’s) was—by lazy analogy, compromise, or accident—appointed foreman by the court.
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