by Bellow, Saul
She saw his animals in the distance, feeding. Unsaddled, the mares appeared undressed; they reminded her of naked women walking with their glossy flanks in the sego lilies which curled on the ground. The flowers were yellowish, like winter wool, but fragrant; the mares, naked and gentle, walked through them. Their strolling, their perfect beauty, the sound of their hoofs on stone touched a deep place in Hattie’s nature. Her love for horses, birds, and dogs was well known. Dogs led the list. And now a piece cut from a green blanket reminded Hattie of her dog Richie. The blanket was one he had torn, and she had cut it into strips and placed them under the doors to keep out the drafts. In the house she found more traces of him: hair he had shed on the furniture. Hattie was going to borrow Helen’s vacuum cleaner, but there wasn’t really enough current to make it pull as it should. On the doorknob of India’s room hung the dog collar.
Hattie had decided that she would have herself moved into India’s bed when it was time to die. Why should there be two deathbeds? A perilous look came into her eyes, her lips were pressed together forbiddingly. I follow,_ she said, speaking to India with an inner voice, so never mind._ Presently—before long—she would have to leave the yellow house in her turn. And as she went into the parlor, thinking of the will, she sighed. Pretty soon she would have to attend to it. India’s lawyer, Claiborne, helped her with such things. She had phoned him in town, while she was staying with Marian, and talked matters over with him. He had promised to try to sell the house for her. Fifteen thousand was her bottom price, she said. If he couldn’t find a buyer, perhaps he could find a tenant. Two hundred dollars a month was the rental she set. Rolfe laughed. Hattie turned toward him one of those proud, dulled looks she always took on when he angered her. Haughtily she said, “For summer on Sego Lake? That’s reasonable.”
“You’re competing with Pace’s ranch.”
“Why, the food is stinking down there. And he cheats the dudes,” said Hat-tie. “He really cheats them at cards. You’ll never catch me playing blackjack with him again.”
And what would she do, thought Hattie, if Claiborne could neither rent nor sell the house? This question she shook off as regularly as it returned. / don’t have to be a burden on anybody,_ thought Hattie. It’s looked bad many a time before, but when push came to shove, I made it. Somehow I got by._ But she argued with herself: How many times? How long, O God_—_an old thing, feeble, no use to anyone?__ Who said she had any right to own property?
She was sitting on her sofa, which was very old—India’s sofa—eight feet long, kidney-shaped, puffy, and bald. An underlying pink shone through the green; the upholstered tufts were like the pads of dogs’ paws; between them rose bunches of hair. Here Hattie slouched, resting, with knees wide apart and a cigarette in her mouth, eyes half shut but farseeing. The mountains seemed not fifteen miles but fifteen hundred feet away, the lake a blue band; the tealike odor of the roses, though they were still unopened, was already in the air, for Sam was watering them in the heat. Gratefully Hattie yelled, “Sam!”
Sam was very old, and all shanks. His feet looked big. His old railroad jacket was made tight across the back by his stoop. A crooked finger with its great broad nail over the mouth of the hose made the water spray and sparkle. Happy to see Hattie, he turned his long jaw, empty of teeth, and his long blue eyes, which seemed to bend back to penetrate into his temples (it was his face that turned, not his body), and he said, “Oh, there, Hattie. You’ve made it home today? Welcome, Hattie.”
“Have a beer, Sam. Come around the kitchen door and I’ll give you a beer.” She never had Sam in the house, owing to his skin disease. There were raw patches on his chin and behind his ears. Hattie feared infection from his touch, having decided that he had impetigo. She gave him the beer can, never a glass, and she put on gloves before she used the garden tools. Since he would take no money from her—Wanda Gingham charged a dollar a day—she got Marian to find old clothes for him in town and she left food for him at the door of the damp-wood-smelling boxcar where he lived. “How’s the old wing, Hat?” he said.
“It’s coming. I’ll be driving the car again before you know it,” she told him. “By the first of May I’ll be driving again.” Every week she moved the date forward. “By Decoration Day I expect to be on my own again,” she said.
In mid-June, however, she was still unable to drive. Helen Rolfe said to her, “Hattie, Jerry and I are due in Seattle the first week of July.”
“Why, you never told me that,” said Hattie.
“You don’t mean to tell me this is the first you heard ol it,” said Helen. “You’ve known about it from the first—since Christmas.”
It wasn’t easy for Hattie to meet her eyes. She presently put her head down. Her face became very dry, especially the lips. “Well, don’t you worry about me. I’ll be all right here,” she said.
“Who’s going to look after you?” said Jerry. He evaded nothing himself and tolerated no evasion in others. Except that, as Hattie knew, he made every possible allowance for her. But who would help her? She couldn’t count on her friend Half Pint, she couldn’t really count on Marian either. She had had only the Rolfes to turn to. Helen, trying to be steady, gazed at her and made sad, involuntary movements with her head, sometimes nodding, sometimes seeming as if she disagreed. Hattie, with her inner voice, swore at her: Bitch-eyes. I can’t make it the way she does because I’m old. Is that fair?_ And yet she admired Helen’s eyes. Even the skin about them, slightly wrinkled, heavy underneath, was touching, beautiful. There was a heaviness in her bust that went, as if by attachment, with the heaviness of her eyes. Her head, her hands and feet should have taken a more slender body. Helen, said Hattie, was the nearest thing she had on earth to a sister. But there was no reason to go to Seattle—no genuine business. Why the hell Seattle? It was only idleness, only a holiday. The only reason was Hattie herself; this was their way of telling her that there was a limit to what she could expect them to do for her. Helen’s nervous head wavered, but her thoughts were steady. She knew what was passing through Hattie’s mind. Like Hattie, she was an idle woman. Why was her right to idleness better?
Because of money? thought Hattie. Because of age? Because she has a husband? Because she had a daughter in Swarthmore College? But an interesting thing occurred to her. Helen disliked being idle, whereas Hattie herself had never made any bones about it: an idle life was all she was good for. But for her it had been uphill all the way, because when Waggoner divorced her she didn’t have a cent. She even had to support Wicks for seven or eight years. Except with horses, Wicks had no sense. And then she had had to take tons of dirt from India. I am the one,_ Hattie asserted to herself. / would know what to do with Helen’s advantages. She only sujfers from them. And if she wants to stop being an idle woman why can’t she start with me, her neighbor?_ Hattie’s skin, for all its puffiness, burned with anger. She said to Rolfe and Helen, “Don’t worry. I’ll make out. But if I have to leave the lake you’ll be ten times more lonely than before. Nowl ‘m going back to my house.”
She lifted up her broad old face, and her lips were childlike with suffering. She would never take back what she had said.
But the trouble was no ordinary trouble. Hattie was herself aware that she rambled, forgot names, and answered when no one spoke.
“We can’t just take charge of her,” Rolfe said. “What’s more, she ought to be near a doctor. She keeps her shotgun loaded so she can fire it if anything happens to her in the house. But who knows what she’ll shoot? I don’t believe it was Jacamares who killed that Doberman of hers.”
Rolfe drove into the yard the day after she moved back to the yellow house and said, “I’m going into town. I can bring you some chow if you like.”
She couldn’t afford to refuse his offer, angry though she was, and she said, “Yes, bring me some stuff from the Mountain Street Market. Charge it.” She had only some frozen shrimp and a few cans of beer in the icebox. When Rolfe had gone she put out the package of shrimp to thaw.
People really used to stick by one another in the West. Hattie now saw herself as one of the pioneers. The modern breed had come later. After all, she had lived on the range like an old-timer. Wicks had had to shoot their Christmas dinner and she had cooked it—venison. He killed it on the reservation, and if the Indians had caught them, there would have been hell to pay.
The weather was hot, the clouds were heavy and calm in a large sky. The horizon was so huge that in it the lake must have seemed like a saucer of milk. Some milk!_ Hattie thought. Two thousand feet down in the middle, so deep no corpse could ever be recovered. A body, they said, went around with the currents. And there were rocks like eyeteeth, and hot springs, and colorless fish at the bottom which were never caught. Now that the white pelicans were nesting they patrolled the rocks for snakes and other egg thieves. They were so big and flew so slow you might imagine they were angels. Hattie no longer visited the lake shore; the walk exhausted her. She saved her strength to go to Pace’s bar in the afternoon.
She took off her shoes and stockings and walked on bare feet from one end of her house to the other. On the land side she saw Wanda Gingham sitting near the tracks while her great-grandson played in the soft red gravel. Wanda wore a large purple shawl and her black head was bare. All about her was—was nothing, Hattie thought; for she had taken a drink, breaking her rule. Nothing but mountains, thrust out like men’s bodies; the sagebrush was the hair on their chests.
The warm wind blew dust from the marl pit. This white powder made her sky less blue. On the water side were the pelicans, pure as spirits, slow as angels, blessing the air as they flew with great wings.
Should she or should she not have Sam do something about the vine on the chimney? Sparrows nested in it, and she was glad of that. But all summer long the king snakes were after them and she was afraid to walk in the garden. When the sparrows scratched the ground for seed they took a funny bound; they held their legs stiff and flung back the dust with both feet. Hattie sat down at her old Spanish monastery table, watching them in the cloudy warmth of the day, clasping her hands, chuckling and sad. The bushes were crowded with yellow roses, half of them now rotted. The lizards scrambled from shadow to shadow. The water was smooth as air, gaudy as silk. The mountains succumbed, falling asleep in the heat. Drowsy, Hattie lay down on her sofa, its pads to her always like dogs’ paws. She gave in to sleep and when she woke it was midnight; she did not want to alarm the Rolfes by putting on her lights, so she took advantage of the moon to eat a few thawed shrimps and go to the bathroom. She undressed and lifted herself into bed and lay there feeling her sore arm. Now she knew how much she missed her dog. The whole matter of the dog weighed heavily on her soul. She came close to tears, thinking about him, and she went to sleep oppressed by her secret.
suppose I had better try to pull myself together a little,_ thought Hattie nervously in the morning. can’t just sleep my way through._ She knew what her difficulty was. Before any serious question her mind gave way. It scattered or diffused. She said to herself, / can see bright, but I feel dim. I guess I’m not so lively anymore. Maybe I’m becoming a little touched in the head, as Mother was._ But she was not so old as her mother was when she did those strange things. At eighty-five, her mother had to be kept from going naked in the street. I’m not as bad as that yet. Thank God! Yes, I walked into the men’s wards, but that was when I had a fever, and my nightie was on._
She drank a cup of Nescafe and it strengthened her determination to do something for herself. In all the world she had only her brother Angus to go to. Her brother Will had led a rough life; he was an old heller, and now he drove everyone away. He was too crabby, thought Hattie. Besides he was angry because she had lived so long with Wicks. Angus would forgive her. But then he and his wife were not her kind. With them she couldn’t drink, she couldn’t smoke, she had to make herself small-mouthed, and she would have to wait while they read a chapter of the Bible before breakfast. Hattie could not bear to sit at table waiting for meals. Besides, she had a house of her own at last. Why should she have to leave it? She had never owned a thing before. And now she was not allowed to enjoy her yellow house. But I’ll keep it,_ she said to herself re -belliously. / swear to God I’ll keep it. Why, I barely just got it. I haven’t had time._ And she went out on the porch to work the pulley and do something about the adhesions in her arm. She was sure now that they were there. And what will I do?_ she cried to herself. What will I do? Why did I ever go to Rolf’s that night_—_and why did I lose control on the crossing?__ She couldn’t say, now, “I sneezed.” She couldn’t even remember what had happened, except that she saw the boulders and the twisting blue rails and Darly. It was Darly’s fault. He was sick and old himself. He_ couldn’t make it. He envied her the house, and her woman’s peaceful life. Since she returned from the hospital he hadn’t even come to visit her. He only said, “Hell, I’m sorry for her, but it was her fault.” What hurt him most was that she had said he couldn’t hold his liquor.
Fierceness, swearing to God did no good. She was still the same procrastinating old woman. She had a letter to answer from Hotchkiss Insurance and it drifted out of sight. She was going to phone Claiborne the lawyer, but it slipped her mind. One morning she announced to Helen that she believed she would apply to an institution in Los Angeles that took over the property of old people and managed it for them. They gave you an apartment right on the ocean, and your meals and medical care. You had to sign over half of your estate. “It’s fair enough,” said Hattie. “They take a gamble. I may live to be a hundred.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Helen.
However, Hattie never got around to sending to Los Angeles for the brochure. But Jerry Rolfe took it on himself to write a letter to her brother Angus about her condition. And he drove over also to have a talk with Amy Walters, the gold miner’s widow at Fort Walters—as the ancient woman called it. The fort was an old tar-paper building over the mine. The shaft made a cesspool unnecessary. Since the death of her second husband no one had dug for gold. On a heap of stones near the road a crimson sign FORT WALTERS was placed. Behind it was a flagpole. The American flag was raised every day.
Amy was working in the garden in one of dead Bill’s shirts. Bill had brought water down from the mountains for her in a homemade aqueduct so she could raise her own peaches and vegetables.
“Amy,” Rolfe said, “Hattie’s back from the hospital and living all alone. You have no folks and neither has she. Not to beat around the bush about it, why don’t you live together?”
Amy’s face had great delicacy. Her winter baths in the lake, her vegetable soups, the waltzes she played for herself alone on the grand piano that stood beside her woodstove, the murder stories she read till darkness obliged her to close the book—this life of hers had made her remote. She looked delicate, yet there was no way to affect her composure, she couldn’t be touched. It was very strange.
“Hattie and me have different habits, Jerry,” said Amy. “And Hattie wouldn’t like my company. I can’t drink with her. I’m a teetotaler.”
“That’s true,” said Rolfe, recalling that Hattie referred to Amy as if she were a ghost. He couldn’t speak to Amy of the solitary death in store for her. There was not a cloud in the arid sky today, and there was no shadow of death on Amy. She was tranquil, she seemed to be supplied with a sort of pure fluid that would feed her life slowly for years to come.
He said, “All kinds of things could happen to a woman like Hattie in that yellow house, and nobody would know.”
“That’s a fact. She doesn’t know how to take care of herself.”
“She can’t. Her arm hasn’t healed.”
Amy didn’t say that she was sorry to hear it. In the place of those words came a silence which might have meant that. Then she said, “I might go over there a few hours a day, but she would have to pay me.”
“Now, Amy, you must know as well as I do that Hattie has no money—not much more than her pension. Just the house.�
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At once Amy said, no pause coming between his words and hers, “I would take care of her if she’d agree to leave the house to me.”
“Leave it in your hands, you mean?” said Rolfe. “To manage?”
“In her will. To belong to me.”
“Why, Amy, what would you do with Hattie’s house?” he said.
“It would be my property, that’s all. I’d have it.”
“Maybe you would leave Fort Walters to her in your will,” he said.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Why should I? I’m not asking Hattie for her help. I don’t need it. Hattie is a city woman.”
Rolfe could not carry this proposal back to Hattie. He was too wise ever to mention her will to her.
But Pace was not so careful of her feelings. By mid-June Hattie had begun to visit his bar regularly. She had so many things to think about she couldn’t stay at home. When Pace came in from the yard one day—he had been packing the wheels of his horse trailer and was wiping grease from his fingers—he said with his usual bluntness, “How would you like it if I paid you fifty bucks a month for the rest of your life, Hat?”
Hattie was holding her second old-fashioned of the day. At the bar she made it appear that she observed the limit; but she had started drinking at home. One before lunch, one during, one after lunch. She began to grin, expecting Pace to make one of his jokes. But he was wearing his scoop-shaped Western hat as level as a Quaker, and he had drawn down his chin, a sign that he was not fooling. She said, “That would be nice, but what’s the catch?”