The Negro boy, Austin Calumet, ate lead pellets—small mushroom-shaped bullets, they turned out to be—and fell asleep at his feet like a faithful black puppy.
Someone told him it was “a violation” to have saved the Tabor baby. He was obliged to peer at the magnified cross section of a vein, twitching obscenely, and the speaker said crossly, “If you put your noodle in that, thee’ll put thee in jail.” It was Dolores Calf Love who told him this. She appeared in a short skirt and wearing her hair in Mary Pickford braids. She took him for a drive to show him what he had done. On a country road, in a swale between hills, she showed him a row of flat, marble tombstone faces glittering at the bottom of a muddy rut. “You’ve killed nine,” she said. “Call yourself Savior!” He understood that he was guilty of irregular birth control measures.
Leading him onto a “fair hillside” (he could see the ordinary enough landscape, but these phrases and explanations kept being supplied him so he would not have the chance to make up his own mind), Dolores changed into his Aunt Peg, but a very young Aunt Peg, not the woman he had actually known. There on the “fair hillside,” she showed him an illustrator’s sunrise beginning to mount behind some ink drawings of trees. When the sun itself scorched the horizon, Aunt Peg said, “You’ve done it again,” and he understood he had, once more, singed the feathers off Leslie’s beautiful bird. How dared he tell her now? He should have told her the first time he did it. That was clear.
From this preparatory dream he woke with an inaudible laugh. The dream was a riddle—but a riddle so easy that it seemed to have been offered purposely to make him seem brilliant in solving it.
The riddle and dream were recurrent. They were so familiar that they seemed like the structure of his mind itself. Of course they came from a very bad time in his childhood, but not so much from memories he had repressed as from some which had merely been suspended for just about twenty-one years like stinging insects preserved in a clear jelly, wicked-looking, banded and barbed, but always powerless to get at him.
It was from this dream that his superstitions about the living and the dead child had come. (And of course the dream, in this return, had come from the superstitious play of the last few weeks. Dream and wakefulness were linked, and the riddle turned like a giant wheel half in light and half in darkness.)
It seemed to him just exactly as easy (and as difficult) to remember consciously as to dream that he had murdered a playmate when he was nine. But it was easier to remember the circumstances (and apparently easier to convert them into the disguises and substitutions of the dream) than to fix once and for all that the killing had been murder.
He wasn’t sure. Nobody ever had been. A sweating, heartbroken Kansas sheriff had seen the enigma very clearly more than twenty years ago. “Lord,” he said, “you can’t call it murder when there’s just a boy done it.”
No one since then had really made much headway against that riddle of responsibility, though his Aunt Peg had tried. She went to her death assuming she knew what the answer had to be. He was innocent, Aunt Peg always said.
That verdict had stuck for everyone except, perhaps, for Ben himself. All these years he had neither discarded nor bowed before the bewildering facts. They had remained with him undigested, unresolved, and in some awful sense neutral, neither innocent nor guilty. The truth had always hovered over them elusively. It seemed waiting to be seized, spoken, repented and perhaps then remanded to the superior judgment of oblivion. He had never yet known how—or to whom—to speak them. Perhaps now that he and Leslie were settling, the time was approaching. That was his relieved response to the bad dream.
Something had happened in a Kansas July. The events had the strongest consequences in Ben’s life up to now. Whatever they had not changed radically they had tempered. In all likelihood it was just that unpunishable killing which had made him stretch his modest original talents to produce consistently admirable achievements in school and in his private life. They had made him “watch himself”—thus encouraging the foresight and control which functioned nicely in the professional man.
The killing acted like a governor for his life. On a wild boy it had held him to an uncanny counterfeit of that moderation some people have as a pure gift of nature.
He had killed—so he grew up agreeable and responsive to people, friendly, fairly popular in high school, a predictable, nice fraternity boy in college and again in med school. He always studied hard enough to make up for his lack of brilliance. He retained what he learned with a quietly desperate determination. (To let go of the task before him meant to remember abominations; to let go meant to forget. He was, by the event, simply forbidden to do either. Self-sentenced to the middle path.)
But yet it was not quite so simple as that, nor he so callous. All these years he had been aware of something uncanny in his very normality. Every time he saw strangeness in his wife, he sensed that this strangeness was calling to its counterpart in him. There were little wisps of the uncanny like dust mice under a bed, frightening a child by meaning something worse than they were.
Leslie liked to sing, “This world is not my ho-o-o-ome. Ah’m only passin’ thro-o-o-ough.” She always laughed when she sang it. He laughed, too, for her husky wavering tone scraped him to the core. She meant what she sang. It was “their song” in ways not by any means acceptable to sober analysis. Better laugh about it.
All right. However suburban, conformist and normal they might appear to their acquaintances, the uncanny had its place in the marriage. He had been afraid it still had its place in his practice. Others went to med school to learn the art and science. Only Ben Daniels graduated as a witch doctor.
He continued sure that the uncanny had spoken to him the day he saved the Tabor baby. He would tell no one all he knew about that.
And even now in his contentment and rest he could superstitiously tell himself it was a good thing that when he threw the dice one of them hit the glass. If they had fallen nine, poor David Lloyd might be in the same boat as Austin Calumet and Billy Kirkland.
Now that was a real and recognizable dust mouse under the bed. Of course he had no power to kill Dave. But the moment of irrational hatred and jealousy had hinted some uncanny power at his disposal.
He could not help feeling that the ease with which his dream manipulated horrors tonight was a kind of permission (given by himself to himself) to tell the whole story at last to his wife.
He had had the impulse before—and had been astonished that the Dostoevskian impulse to confession always tended to mingle with eroticism. It was only when he was in love that he was sure he had a secret that demanded confession.
Before he met Leslie the closest he had ever come to telling everything was once in his med school days. He had been on a double date with a fraternity brother. Brother Carter was bullshitting his dewy-eyed Kappa friend about his earliest decision to become a healer. “Watching my father die of cancer … loved my Chemcraft set … revered kindly old Doc Murgatroyd who brought me into the world … wept uncontrollably when my goldfish developed fungus … always wanted to be the stretcher bearer in war games … promised Mother …” It was a standard line that before this had got Brother Carter into the britches of girls whose mothers favored professional men for husbands.
In that spring night at an outdoor beer garden, Ben had been moved to counter this noble hypocrisy with, for once, a spoken fragment of the truth. He was with Alice Wayne that evening, just possibly in love with her, fatigued from a hard week of study, already past the stage where he had told her some of his vital statistics in exchange for hers. Alice knew, for example, the touching facts that his parents had been missionaries in Africa. That his father had died of typhoid when he was five. That his mother had come home with him to spend the rest of her days in an asylum in Massachusetts. That his mother’s family and, subsequently, her youngest sister had raised him since Africa had its triumph.
The girl has to be uncommonly sympathetic before one confesses an insane mother. Al
ice had taken the information without gush or belittling. She was not going to let him posture like an O’Neill hero wrestling with the specter of insanity in his blood. Nor, like Brother Carter’s Kappa friend, was she going to put this information into the scales like a blind and immature justice weighing his candidacy for a romp. She saw what he was worth without greed or too much concern about his origins. She was a good girl who liked him in the measure that he liked her.
So he was moved to say to her, smiling shyly, “I think it was decided for me one day in Kansas when I saw some kids under a bridge torturing a dog.”
That was very little to say. But apparently he had not managed even this much without giving her a hint of what more there might be to come.
“Let’s go sit in the car,” she said. She wanted the rest of it. Or she wanted him to be able to give the rest of it. But by the time they got to the car he had bottled the impulse again. They both pretended they had sought solitude in order to neck. Whatever might have been said was put off because making love was easier.
So Alice drifted out of his life, unenlightened, cheerful, wishing him well with … whatever it was that he carried like a fox under his cloak. Maybe it was a real fox, well eaten in. She had no way of knowing.
So he had kept the fundamental knowledge secret as a treasure, and in fact it seemed to him occasionally, for all its thorns and stench, to have been ironically valuable in his life.
He had been a good student and was a good doctor—better than the record showed. Better than the suburban mothers of his patients knew. He was a good man. Better than anyone knew except himself—though he hoped, rather oddly, that Dolores Calfert knew.
He had been greatly bucked up when she guessed how much he had done for Leslie. No one else seemed to think Leslie required much. But more than that, he thought that Dolores had seen how well matched he and Leslie were. Really they were matched like a tent and tent pole. He knew how to hold Leslie up; she knew how to spread and shelter. Thus male and female created He them. And for some reason. He had great confidence in their ability to breed and shelter children. Only, Nature was taking its time, for its own good reasons.
Ben Daniels was a happy man, with his burdens, anxieties, fears, superstitions, and his literally monstrous secret. He had faith in what was to come. Canny and uncanny voices promised something less than perpetual glamour and bliss, but they firmly promised that what he really wanted from his marriage was ripening and ready to be taken.
He was going to Venezuela at the end of the month. When he came back he would tell his wife about murdering that boy. Then they would have a baby.…
It amused him to see a causal connection between withholding his bad secret and withholding from her womb the vital spark. He saw it, dismissed it, and slept all the better for the fancy.
Ah, the comfortable, comforting, sleepy-making superstitions of a man so bitterly squeezed by life that for his years he had become wise.
chapter 7
THESE WERE THE FACTS. Once seven children were together under a bridge. The muddy Kaw swirled from left to right through the damp, hot shadow area under the steel arches. The mud shoal under their feet had already begun to open in wide cracks, but here and there it yielded beneath their weight as if they were walking on an unbaked loaf of bread. There were two girls and five boys. They had left the picnic grounds where their elders were pitching horseshoes, lying on comforts in the shade, digesting an enormous meal of fried chicken, salads, pie and cake.
Ben was trying to catch up with the others, showing his pride by holding back behind them, fighting some obscure fear that made this descent to the river a return to Africa. He had been here before long ago. Where? On the muddy shore of a river where his father held him in his arms and said, “All right, Ben, don’t cry.”
The floor of the bridge above them sounded a tinny thunder as a car went over. Billy Kirkland and Ben’s cousin Alberta led the others to an unpainted boat tied half awash to a stake in the mud. Billy splashed out to the rear end of it, stood rocking and waving his arms to keep his balance. He’d better be more careful or he’ll go into the crocodile water, Ben thought.
Fat Alberta took off her shoes and started to wade through the hull of the boat to where Billy rocked. She showed her teeth in triumph when she stood up directly behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. Billy turned and grabbed her around the waist. He wrestled her, pretending he was going to dump her into the river.
“You stop that,” Ben called. He was still lurking thirty feet back from the group at the boat. “She’s got on her Sunday dress.”
His cousin George, Alberta’s brother, explained disgustedly, “He’s not hurting her, sap.” To his other sister, two brothers and Roland Swavil he said, “That sap Ben will tell whatever we do. He’ll tell Momma or Aunt Peg.”
“Ucky-fay Bertala-ay,” Roland sang. He made a sudden darting rush at Ben, as if he were trying to scare a hog through a gate. Ben threw a mud clod at him, and though it missed, Roland fell down pretending he had been struck by a bullet. He raised himself on an elbow and shouted, “Go home, dumbbell! Go pitch horseshoes!”
Ben circled them, climbing to where the mud deposit touched the concrete pier of the bridge, and sat down. “I’m going wherever you go,” he said. He could be hurt, but not beyond response, by comments on his intelligence. On the one hand he felt dumb. He had been living out here in Kansas with his mother’s family for a little more than a year and he still hadn’t caught on to all the things expected of a boy his age. On the other hand, he was absolutely and totally the teacher’s pet at school. He could read high-school stuff and do high-school mathematics. Sometimes this seemed to be an advantage, sometimes a shame.
“Ucky-fay, Rene-I-ay,” Roland gibbered. “Let’s throw Ben in the river if he won’t go home.”
The boys and girls huddled at the end of the boat whispering. They seemed to be arguing, and the argument gathered vehemence like the sudden whisper of a whirlwind gathering straw in the middle of a stubble field. It crescendoed with Alberta’s shriek. “You said that bad thing again and I’m not going to do it. Come on, Irene.” Eleven-year-old Alberta took the hand of seven-year-old Irene and led her away from the other boys, over to where Ben sat. The girls took their seats on either side of him, Alberta self-righteous in her offense, Irene just bewildered as to what would be required of her next, still agreeable for anything.
“You dirty-mouth boys can just go on. Irene and me are going to play with Ben,” Alberta shouted.
“Ucky-fay, Enny-bay,” Roland yelled. Then all the other boys began yelling it and throwing sticks and dirt at Ben and the two girls.
“Put your fingers in your ears,” Alberta commanded smugly.
Ben giggled and did as he was told. For whatever reason Alberta had chosen his companionship, he felt it served the other boys right.
He was still feeling very proud of his election when the boys down by the boat found the fishing pole with the cord wound around it holding the bobber and still-baited hook. They unwound the line, tossed bait and bobber into the current of the river.
Four boys and one fishing line are a poor combination on a hot day when the boys have come to the river expecting something more exciting. They couldn’t settle down to it.
So, when a half-grown dog came moseying around the corner of the bridge pier, some devil of the heat and mud—some African spirit of malice wandered far from home to inhabit this mid-American river—prompted Billy Kirkland to fish for the dog.
There was still a good lump of bait on the hook, probably crawfish, smelling strongly, strongly tempting to a hungry pup. But the animal was still suspicious. When Billy cast the line up among the weeds growing from the mud, the bait fell three feet from the dog’s muzzle, but he would not take it immediately. He got the smell. He wanted it. He flattened himself on his belly and rolled his stupid, yellowish eyes to show how much he wanted it and probably deserved it. He began to edge toward it, belly down, whining a little.
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br /> Ben watched the dog. He understood exactly how the dog was feeling. It had been his own divided feeling when he followed the other kids down here, wanting something, wanting to be taken wherever they would go, wanting not to want it. For a second in the intoxicating heat the ugly dog was himself and he prayed, Take it, doggy. Aloud, he shouted to Billy, “Don’t do that, you big fool.”
Billy whipped the pole back over his shoulder and the bait flew away from the dog, swift as a bullet and black in its trajectory against the incandescence of the sky.
“Haw, haw, didn’t catch nothing,” Roland mocked, dancing like a mindless savage. “Gimme the pole. Gimme the pole, dumby.”
Billy cast again and this time the dog—not to be cheated twice—caught the bait in his mouth before it had stopped bouncing on the mud. Mongrel fashion, he tried to run with it.
With his first stricken shriek of a yelp, everyone went crazy. Ben tried to race to the dog. His hands spread and groped while he tried to reach for the bleeding jaws, and he got close enough to see the hook tug out some tissue of the purple throat so it bulged like a wave toward him. Then fat Alberta had knocked him down by lunging her weight against him, was yelping in his ear, “He’ll bite you. He’ll bite you!” The dog skittered left on the taut radius of the line.
Billy roared with monstrous laughter and held onto his catch. The pole in his hands bent and whipped. He danced in silhouette against the sun, singing or shouting hysterically.
They simply could not stand the punishment of witnessing what they had done; in natural reaction they began to beat the dog. They beat it with weeds and chunks of hardened mud, with sticks and shoes, unable to reverse what they had begun. They closed around the dog, stomping and screaming as if they had to kill it quickly.
Pretty Leslie Page 9