Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

Oh, you don’t have to worry, they won’t bother you. They can’t even get in here—this is a locked floor. Some say they trust you more if you don’t lock them out, but I believe they might as well taste authority. I mean, there are locked doors in the real world, aren’t there? You just can’t see most of them. I wouldn’t want these folks to get the idea they can ramble all over, without any kind of barriers. That’s the problem with most of them, anyway, I think. They just don’t know what’s normal, and they can’t remember when you tell them, so they don’t know how to behave. They test you all the time, Lord, yes; just like children.

  Used to be they all had the same disease, and all got the shock treatment, no matter what they come in for; but now things are more sophisticated. The doctors have split up that one disease about ten different ways, and invented some new ones besides. I don’t bother to keep track of the labels they use. Doesn’t help, anyway, they’ll have new ones before the year is out. My job is more day-to-day, if you know what I mean. Keeping them comfortable, making this a home. Because it is their home; I mean, most of them never go anywhere else, even if they get some better here. Their families don’t want ’em. This here’s the end of the line.

  What Beth would say if she could see me now. She never could abide sickness or smells. If you were sick she’d stay that far away from you, so she wouldn’t catch it. She wasn’t ever sick, never even had a cold, when I knew her. So I guess it worked.

  We never talked much about what we were going to do when we got older. The time we lived in was fast, fast, all the boys going overseas and dying, and at home the football games still going on. Even football got colored by the war: the better an athlete you were, the better a soldier you’d be. That’s what Beth’s sweetheart told her; that was the kind of thing everybody said then. We weren’t thinking about living, although we knew we would, being girls and all. We knew we’d live, but we didn’t have the normal dreams girls had before us, home and babies. Who knew if there’d be any boys left to marry, or what kind of babies we’d have?

  Everything had something to do with the war. You couldn’t get away from it, and at first Beth and I talked about it a lot. We followed the news as closely as anyone; we were proud like we’d made up the whole thing ourselves. It seemed so faraway and dramatic: surely no one had ever lived through a war like ours. After the U.S. got in, I swear Beth and I would have gone to fight ourselves, if we’d been allowed.

  But then after a while it stopped being so new, and there was more and more bad news, and it started looking like it would last forever, and we didn’t talk about it at all. We spent a lot of our time on things that began and ended in a day, like combing our hair a certain way, or trying a new lipstick. It was a kind of hiding we were doing, in a silly, girlish way, and it didn’t do much to take our minds off it. You couldn’t help but feel the war all around you. It took the food out of your house, and the sugar out of your coffee, and the gasoline out of your car. In school, it was all they talked about, and even at the movies.

  We did our part for the Effort, of course. Saturday mornings, Beth and I went with her ma to another lady’s house, where we were all knitting for the soldiers or putting shirts together. Seems like I had a sore place on this finger for two years, from pushing the needle through that hard cloth. It was heavy, like canvas. We had to use big thick needles, and our stitches were all raggedy. Beth got mixed up once, and put an extra sleeve on. She had to spend a whole morning picking it out, cussing under her breath so her ma wouldn’t hear. I don’t know how anybody wore the things we made, but I guess it was all they had, and they were glad of them.

  The ladies had a time of it, those Saturdays; they brought lunch and gossiped the hours away, but Beth and I were just young girls, and woman’s talk held nothing of interest to us. We sewed like demons, sticking ourselves, bleeding into the stitches, and when lunch was over and Beth and I were free we’d run away—literally run away from the hill, where the house was, and down the street, all the way into town. Running like mad things. I never knew why we did it, but we always did. I guess it made us feel alive.

  At the time, I thought it was a race we were having, and I treated it that way, laughing and sneaking glances at Beth running beside me. If I’d looked back on it from a dozen years, I might have said it was the war we were running from, and the gloomy old house with the piles of scratchy needlework, and the tedious chatter about sickness and weddings. But if you asked me now, I’d say different. For me it might have been just that, the war and the sewing, but not Beth. I remember the way she looked. I was clowning and puffing, but she was dead serious, running as though her life depended on it, not even looking at me. She was a pretty girl, but with her eyes squinched up and her face all red and the hair flying behind—not so pretty when she ran. She looked straight ahead, but not like she was seeing anything in front of her. She was only running. I thought we were racing each other, but Beth was racing something I couldn’t see. She was daring it to hurt her, or trip her, daring it to do anything to her at all.

  I’ve seen that same look since then, on the faces of some of the folks here. I’m older now, and I’ve seen some, and I guess I understand it now, what I didn’t before. Crazy people are as various as the rest of us—some are mean, some are simple. A lot of them are afraid, even the mean ones. Like other mean people the world calls normal. They’re afraid of something they can’t see; they mumble to it, and the brave ones dare it to come closer, come closer so they can kill it. They know they can’t kill it, but they don’t know what else to do.

  Beth told me once that she’d rather be dead than insane, and I agreed with her then. But I don’t anymore. I’ve seen the way they are, and some of them are unhappy, but some of them aren’t. You couldn’t tell the two apart just looking; even their happiness is different from how we normally think of it. But there are some I wouldn’t trade places with for anything—the ones that are running even while they’re standing still, running away from whatever pit of fire is in them that they don’t understand, making it run, too, daring it to catch up. They’re happy when they’re running; it’s when they stop and it catches up to them, they’re sad.

  Listen to them out there. Most of them couldn’t read a clock to save their lives, but they always know when my break’s over, and start in like that. I guess they’re trying to remind me to come back. They do it at the end of the day, too—invent problems right before I leave. Poor things, day after day I’m here, and they can’t trust that they’ll see me tomorrow. I better go out there again. You can go out that way; don’t forget to hand in your visitor’s tag, and pull the door shut behind you.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Solomon’s Baby

  I GOT EVERYTHING here. Furniture, books, housewares, ladies’ clothing, men’s clothing, clothing for the kiddies. Even rare items, like antique medical tools and old firearms. Course, I can’t sell those without you got a permit. The Smithsonian was here last year, bought up some old dentist’s office I got hold of, didn’t pay much for it neither. I hear from a cousin that those things are sitting in the museum now, people coming from all over just to look at ’em. It ain’t junk I sell, nossir, it’s art.

  There ain’t no such thing as Naples without Shade’s Trades. I been here so long my own great-grandmother bought from me. I sell to young brides, everything they need for their happy homes. Furniture, household appliances, dishware. I got so many sets of dishware I can’t display ’em all. There’s crates just waiting in the back. Yessir, I got four floors of life’s necessities, right here, at bargain prices.

  I got wedding dresses. You ever seen anything pretty as this? Worn once, just like new. Why pay boutique prices when you can get it here for cheap? I got sweaters and overalls, good durable stuff, last forever. I got shoes. See these, button-up kind, you don’t see those much anymore. Five dollars, and I’ll even throw in the buttonhook. Here’s bowling shoes, now, from that alley down the road that went out of business. Ladies’ pumps. You ever seen a prettier sha
de of red? I called ’em Dorothy’s slippers for a while, thinking they might move that way, but wouldn’t nobody buy ’em. Folks don’t want to know who’s had the stuff before. So I took the tag off this morning. Watch ’em go now.

  The bottom floor is furniture, cause it’s the heaviest. I got some beauties down there, a stereo console like you’d see in a store for six hundred dollars new. I’m only asking two. Now, I won’t lie to you. The console I got is used, and there’s a few scratches on the top, and one ring where somebody put a cold drink, but you can’t see that unless you look. You’re saying to yourself I’m crazy, telling you all about them flaws up front, but I say what can I lose? You think four hundred dollar scratches is a good deal, that’s your business. And I don’t make a sale that’s gonna come right back in my door. Most of the televisions in Naples been through here at least once; some, I get to see three or four times. It’s a hoot, what people try to sell me. One fellow brought in his old longjohns, wanted two dollars for ’em. “They kept me warm for ten year,” he said. I had to say nossir to that deal, but I bought his sister’s parasol. Her husband brought it back from the war, and looked like she’d never opened it. Made of paper, no good for the rain, but that very same day a woman from over in Nelson County bought it to keep the sun off her at her son’s ball games. There’s a use for everything.

  I get most of my stuff from estates or busted businesses. Factory seconds too, and marked that way. I ain’t out to cheat nobody. If I wasn’t an honest businessman, I wouldn’t still be in business. People learn when you cheat ’em, and they don’t like it. It pays to be straight-arrow, then they come back. There’s something of mine in every house in Naples.

  It’s a hard business, though, make no mistake about it. The worst part is the antique dealers. Just like vultures, some of ’em, the way they circle and swoop. It’s not beneath ’em to hang around the hospital, seeing who’s doing poorly, and then Johnny-on-the-spot with the family, soon as Grandma’s gone. They’re in it for the money and they’ll pay next to nothing for something that’ll bring a pretty penny. I call that crooked. I don’t mind a profit, but I don’t sell blood. Dealers hate the smell of honesty, and they generally hate me.

  But the worst time I ever had over any antique wasn’t with a dealer. It was with a little girl who took care of an old lady out in the country—all the kin were dead or busy, and this girl had been hired to do for her. The lady was an old friend of my family, and I used to ride out to her place of a Sunday and take dinner with her. She was a real lady too, real polite, and she had the finest china you ever did see, in a china hutch her granpa had made, just a beautiful piece. The wood just glowed, like it knew it was pretty, and the doors slid back on their hinges smooth as silk. That piece would fetch a good bit of money and I knew it.

  The girl knew it too; her name was Maggie, and she made it no secret how she hated me. She’d get our dinner with a frown that would scare Lucifer, and she’d slam down that plate in front of me like hammering a nail.

  The old lady and me, we took our meal in the dining room, with the girl standing by. She wouldn’t never just sit. The old lady would talk about the old days, and I’d look at the china hutch while I ate, and I got to know it like it was mine and had been in my family for generations. That girl saw me admiring it, and smart as a whip thought of a way to bother me. She took to standing right in front of it, almost crowding the old lady into her soup, and blocking my view. All the time looking at me from between her braids as if to say, “Ha.”

  In the summer, the old lady took poorly, and looked like it might be the last trump for her soon. I went to visit on the Sunday, with some flowers and an old Victrola record that had come into my hands earlier in the week. I’d saved it out to play on the old lady’s Victrola, that she kept in the parlor, all polished up and new looking, with the gilt detail on the trumpet like it was put there yesterday. A beautiful instrument, and I thought she might like to hear some old-timey music.

  The girl, Maggie, greets me at the door and says her mistress isn’t well, and shouldn’t have visitors.

  “Go away,” was what she said. Behind her, I could hear the old lady calling my name. The girl hears it too, and steps aside glaring while I hang my hat and coat on the coat tree. Deacon’s tree, I should say, and a lovely specimen, all thick dark wood, and not a knot anywhere. The pegs were rounded from the coats of a long family history, and there was a little trapdoor in the seat, below the mirror. It was a real nice piece of furniture.

  The old lady was looking real bad. It just turned my heart over to see her so weak. But she was stubborn, and come into the parlor for my visit, and I played her the record.

  “How nice to hear music from the Victrola again,” she said, with her eyes closed.

  “It’s a beautiful machine,” I told her.

  “It’s old. Everything I have is old. Older than me,” she said, and laughed, a painful, sickly sound.

  “Old is nice,” I told her, while Maggie made faces at me from behind the settee, where the old lady was sitting. She was so spiteful to have me there that her hands shook with it, and she spilled a little tea on the settee, which was upholstered in old silk and didn’t deserve such treatment. I pressed my handkerchief to the spot to soak it up, and the old lady laughed.

  “Really, how you care about these old things of mine,” she said.

  “I do,” I said. “I really do.”

  “Maggie loves them too, don’t you, Maggie?” said the old lady. “She goes on and on about the china hutch in the dining room.”

  “That’s my particular favorite,” I told the old lady, giving Maggie a mean look.

  “Hers too,” said the lady. “How funny. If Grandad had known how people would take to his ‘plate-keeper,’ as he called it.”

  “Your grandad was an artist,” I told her.

  “That’s what Maggie says,” said the old lady, and closed her eyes.

  I thought it was the end, and I guess Maggie did too, because she went to the old lady at a run.

  “I get so tired,” said the old lady, opening her eyes.

  We helped her back to her bedroom, set at the back of the house; when we got there I almost stopped right in my tracks, just to look. From the hall, I had just hardly been able to see the tall carved bedframe and the old bureau next to it with the brass drawer-pulls. That house was just crammed full of wonderful stuff, everywhere you looked.

  I left Maggie to put the old lady to bed, and waited awhile in the hall, till she come out again. Then I sorta came to, and went to get my hat. Halfway there, she caught me.

  “I know what you’re after,” she hissed, “and you better just forget it.”

  “You,” I said. “You don’t know anything at all.”

  “Ha! Don’t I?” she said, and her eyes all sparkly like they’d spit at me if they could. “She’s just a sick old lady, too nice to know what kind you are, lets you come around here and drool all over her stuff. I bet you got the price tags all made out already.”

  “That ain’t so,” I told her. I was hurt. “The old girl and me go way back. I can’t help looking around, is all. Admiring.”

  “Admiring,” said the girl, her cherry-red mouth twisting. “Coveting, more like.”

  Now I don’t know much, but I know coveting’s a sin. I puffed right up when she said that.

  “You’re the one to talk,” I said. “Angling after that china hutch like you do.”

  “Me!” she said, pretending surprise. “Me!”

  “I bet you whisper in that pore lady’s ear while she’s sleeping, all about how much you want her old plate-keeper.”

  “Get out,” she said, really angry. Her hair come loose from her braids some while we was talking, like it was angry too and wanted to whip at me. Little snakes of hair curled across her forehead, and her cheeks were all flushed. If she hadn’t been so despicable, I’da thought she was pretty.

  “I’ll go,” I said, “But only because she’s tired, not cause you tell me t
o. And I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “See if the door opens to you,” she shot back.

  It opened all right, but only as wide as that Maggie’s shoulders, which wasn’t very wide. She stood guarding the way like a Gorgon.

  “What do you want?” she said, like she’d never seen me before but hated me anyway.

  “You don’t like me much,” I said.

  “You got that right,” she answered.

  “And I don’t like you,” I said. “But that old girl, she likes my visits. Looking out for me maybe keeps her mind offa her troubles some, her daughter who never visits, and like that. It makes a change for her. She had many other visitors lately?” I asked.

  Maggie’s face turned color, and after a minute she opened the door a little wider, so I could squeeze through.

  The old lady was worse that day; she didn’t even get up from her bed, but she woke up when I was tiptoeing back out of the room. Even though it was a mighty hot day, she had a quilt pulled over her, an early American design I’d never seen.

  “My granny made it,” she told me.

  “It’s in beautiful condition,” I said.

  “It used to be snow white,” she said, and then fell asleep so quickly that at first I thought she’d gone. I got up and stood over her till I seen she was breathing. The girl came in the room then, and made me jump.

  “What you want, leaning over her like some old crow?” she asked.

  “I thought—” I said. “She went off in the middle of a sentence.”

  The girl came over, worried, and leaned over the old lady too.

  “She’s awful pale,” I said.

  “It’s the heat,” said the girl. “Sometimes she can’t figure out if she’s warm or cold.” She pulled at the quilt, then looked up at me. “You’re awful pale yourself,” she said. “Will you take a glass of lemonade?”

  “Thank you,” I said, surprised. These were the first civil words I’d heard out of the girl’s head. So maybe her tongue wasn’t all poison.