Flowering Judas and Other Stories: A Library of America eBook Classic

by Katherine Anne Porter

  “I just took off His big blanket to wash,” said Mrs. Whipple, ashamed. “I can’t stand dirt.”

  “Well, you’d better put it back on the minute it’s dry,” said the doctor, “or He’ll have pneumonia.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Whipple took a blanket off their own bed and put His cot in by the fire. “They can’t say we didn’t do everything for Him,” she said, “even to sleeping cold ourselves on His account.”

  When the winter broke He seemed to be well again, but He walked as if His feet hurt Him. He was able to run a cotton planter during the season.

  “I got it all fixed up with Jim Ferguson about breeding the cow next time,” said Mr. Whipple. “I’ll pasture the bull this summer and give Jim some fodder in the fall. That’s better than paying out money when you haven’t got it.”

  “I hope you didn’t say such a thing before Jim Ferguson,” said Mrs. Whipple. “You oughtn’t to let him know we’re so down as all that.”

  “Godamighty, that ain’t saying we’re down. A man is got to look ahead sometimes. He can lead the bull over today. I need Adna on the place.”

  At first Mrs. Whipple felt easy in her mind about sending Him for the bull. Adna was too jumpy and couldn’t be trusted. You’ve got to be steady around animals. After He was gone she started thinking, and after a while she could hardly bear it any longer. She stood in the lane and watched for Him. It was nearly three miles to go and a hot day, but He oughtn’t to be so long about it. She shaded her eyes and stared until colored bubbles floated in her eyeballs. It was just like everything else in life, she must always worry and never know a moment’s peace about anything. After a long time she saw Him turn into the side lane, limping. He came on very slowly, leading the big hulk of an animal by a ring in the nose, twirling a little stick in His hand, never looking back or sideways, but coming on like a sleepwalker with His eyes half shut.

  Mrs. Whipple was scared sick of bulls; she had heard awful stories about how they followed on quietly enough, and then suddenly pitched on with a bellow and pawed and gored a body to pieces. Any second now that black monster would come down on Him, my God, He’d never have sense enough to run.

  She mustn’t make a sound nor a move; she mustn’t get the bull started. The bull heaved his head aside and horned the air at a fly. Her voice burst out of her in a shriek, and she screamed at Him to come on, for God’s sake. He didn’t seem to hear her clamor, but kept on twirling His switch and limping on, and the bull lumbered along behind him as gently as a calf. Mrs. Whipple stopped calling and ran towards the house, praying under her breath: “Lord, don’t let anything happen to Him. Lord, you know people will say we oughtn’t to have sent Him. You know they’ll say we didn’t take care of Him. Oh, get Him home, safe home, safe home, and I’ll look out for Him better! Amen.”

  She watched from the window while He led the beast in, and tied him up in the barn. It was no use trying to keep up, Mrs. Whipple couldn’t bear another thing. She sat down and rocked and cried with her apron over her head.

  From year to year the Whipples were growing poorer and poorer. The place just seemed to run down of itself, no matter how hard they worked. “We’re losing our hold,” said Mrs. Whipple. “Why can’t we do like other people and watch for our best chances? They’ll be calling us poor white trash next.”

  “When I get to be sixteen I’m going to leave,” said Adna. “I’m going to get a job in Powell’s grocery store. There’s money in that. No more farm for me.”

  “I’m going to be a schoolteacher,” said Emly. “But I’ve got to finish the eighth grade, anyhow. Then I can live in town. I don’t see any chances here.”

  “Emly takes after my family,” said Mrs. Whipple. “Ambitious every last one of them, and they don’t take second place for anybody.”

  When fall came Emly got a chance to wait on table in the railroad eating-house in the town near by, and it seemed such a shame not to take it when the wages were good and she could get her food too, that Mrs. Whipple decided to let her take it, and not bother with school until the next session. “You’ve got plenty of time,” she said. “You’re young and smart as a whip.”

  With Adna gone too, Mr. Whipple tried to run the farm with just Him to help. He seemed to get along fine, doing His work and part of Adna’s without noticing it. They did well enough until Christmas time, when one morning He slipped on the ice coming up from the barn. Instead of getting up He thrashed round and round, and when Mr. Whipple got to Him, He was having some sort of fit.

  They brought Him inside and tried to make Him sit up, but He blubbered and rolled, so they put Him to bed and Mr. Whipple rode to town for the doctor. All the way there and back he worried about where the money was to come from: it sure did look like he had about all the troubles he could carry.

  From then on He stayed in bed. His legs swelled up double their size, and the fits kept coming back. After four months, the doctor said, “It’s no use, I think you’d better put Him in the County Home for treatment right away. I’ll see about it for you. He’ll have good care there and be off your hands.”

  “We don’t begrudge Him any care, and I won’t let Him out of my sight,” said Mrs. Whipple. “I won’t have it said I sent my sick child off among strangers.”

  “I know how you feel,” said the doctor. “You can’t tell me anything about that, Mrs. Whipple. I’ve got a boy of my own. But you’d better listen to me. I can’t do anything more for Him, that’s the truth.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Whipple talked it over a long time that night after they went to bed. “It’s just charity,” said Mrs. Whipple, “that’s what we’ve come to, charity! I certainly never looked for this.”

  “We pay taxes to help support the place just like everybody else,” said Mr. Whipple, “and I don’t call that taking charity. I think it would be fine to have Him where He’d get the best of everything. . . and besides, I can’t keep up with these doctor bills any longer.”

  “Maybe that’s why the doctor wants us to send Him—he’s scared he won’t get his money,” said Mrs. Whipple.

  “Don’t talk like that,” said Mr. Whipple, feeling pretty sick, “or we won’t be able to send Him.”

  “Oh, but we won’t keep Him there long,” said Mrs. Whipple. “Soon’s He’s better, we’ll bring Him right back home.”

  “The doctor has told you and told you time and again He can’t ever get better, and you might as well stop talking,” said Mr. Whipple.

  “Doctors don’t know everything,” said Mrs. Whipple, feeling almost happy. “But anyhow, in the summer Emly can come home for a vacation, and Adna can get down for Sundays: we’ll all work together and get on our feet again, and the children will feel they’ve got a place to come to.”

  All at once she saw it full summer again, with the garden going fine, and new white roller shades up all over the house, and Adna and Emly home, so full of life, all of them happy together. Oh, it could happen, things would ease up on them.

  They didn’t talk before Him much, but they never knew just how much He understood. Finally the doctor set the day and a neighbor who owned a double-seated carryall offered to drive them over. The hospital would have sent an ambulance, but Mrs. Whipple couldn’t stand to see Him going away looking so sick as all that. They wrapped Him in blankets, and the neighbor and Mr. Whipple lifted Him into the back seat of the carryall beside Mrs. Whipple, who had on her black shirt waist. She couldn’t stand to go looking like charity.

  “You’ll be all right, I guess I’ll stay behind,” said Mr. Whipple. “It don’t look like everybody ought to leave the place at once.”

  “Besides, it ain’t as if He was going to stay forever,” said Mrs. Whipple to the neighbor. “This is only for a little while.”

  They started away, Mrs. Whipple holding to the edges of the blankets to keep Him from sagging sideways. He sat there blinking and blinking. He worked His hands out and began rubbing His nose with His knuckles, and then with the end of the blanket. Mrs. Whipple couldn’t belie
ve what she saw; He was scrubbing away big tears that rolled out of the corners of His eyes. He sniveled and made a gulping noise. Mrs. Whipple kept saying, “Oh, honey, you don’t feel so bad, do you? You don’t feel so bad, do you?” for He seemed to be accusing her of something. Maybe He remembered that time she boxed His ears, maybe He had been scared that day with the bull, maybe He had slept cold and couldn’t tell her about it; maybe He knew they were sending Him away for good and all because they were too poor to keep Him. Whatever it was, Mrs. Whipple couldn’t bear to think of it. She began to cry, frightfully, and wrapped her arms tight around Him. His head rolled on her shoulder: she had loved Him as much as she possibly could, there were Adna and Emly who had to be thought of too, there was nothing she could do to make up to Him for His life. Oh, what a mortal pity He was ever born.

  They came in sight of the hospital, with the neighbor driving very fast, not daring to look behind him.

  Theft

  SHE had the purse in her hand when she came in. Standing in the middle of the floor, holding her bathrobe around her and trailing a damp towel in one hand, she surveyed the immediate past and remembered everything clearly. Yes, she had opened the flap and spread it out on the bench after she had dried the purse with her handkerchief.

  She had intended to take the Elevated, and naturally she looked in her purse to make certain she had the fare, and was pleased to find forty cents in the coin envelope. She was going to pay her own fare, too, even if Camilo did have the habit of seeing her up the steps and dropping a nickel in the machine before he gave the turnstile a little push and sent her through it with a bow. Camilo by a series of compromises had managed to make effective a fairly complete set of smaller courtesies, ignoring the larger and more troublesome ones. She had walked with him to the station in a pouring rain, because she knew he was almost as poor as she was, and when he insisted on a taxi, she was firm and said, “You know it simply will not do.” He was wearing a new hat of a pretty biscuit shade, for it never occurred to him to buy anything of a practical color; he had put it on for the first time and the rain was spoiling it. She kept thinking, “But this is dreadful, where will he get another?” She compared it with Eddie’s hats that always seemed to be precisely seven years old and as if they had been quite purposely left out in the rain, and yet they sat with a careless and incidental rightness on Eddie. But Camilo was far different; if he wore a shabby hat it would be merely shabby on him, and he would lose his spirits over it. If she had not feared Camilo would take it badly, for he insisted on the practice of his little ceremonies up to the point he had fixed for them, she would have said to him as they left Thora’s house, “Do go home. I can surely reach the station by myself.”

  “It is written that we must be rained upon tonight,” said Camilo, “so let it be together.”

  At the foot of the platform stairway she staggered slightly—they were both nicely set up on Thora’s cocktails—and said: “At least, Camilo, do me the favor not to climb these stairs in your present state, since for you it is only a matter of coming down again at once, and you’ll certainly break your neck.”

  He made three quick bows, he was Spanish, and leaped off through the rainy darkness. She stood watching him, for he was a very graceful young man, thinking that tomorrow morning he would gaze soberly at his spoiled hat and soggy shoes and possibly associate her with his misery. As she watched, he stopped at the far corner and took off his hat and hid it under his overcoat. She felt she had betrayed him by seeing, because he would have been humiliated if he thought she even suspected him of trying to save his hat.

  Roger’s voice sounded over her shoulder above the clang of the rain falling on the stairway shed, wanting to know what she was doing out in the rain at this time of night, and did she take herself for a duck? His long, imperturbable face was streaming with water, and he tapped a bulging spot on the breast of his buttoned-up overcoat: “Hat,” he said. “Come on, let’s take a taxi.”

  She settled back against Roger’s arm which he laid around her shoulders, and with the gesture they exchanged a glance full of long amiable associations, then she looked through the window at the rain changing the shapes of everything, and the colors. The taxi dodged in and out between the pillars of the Elevated, skidding slightly on every curve, and she said: “The more it skids the calmer I feel, so I really must be drunk.”

  “You must be,” said Roger. “This bird is a homicidal maniac, and I could do with a cocktail myself this minute.”

  They waited on the traffic at Fortieth Street and Sixth Avenue, and three boys walked before the nose of the taxi. Under the globes of light they were cheerful scarecrows, all very thin and all wearing very seedy snappy-cut suits and gay neckties. They were not very sober either, and they stood for a moment wobbling in front of the car, and there was an argument going on among them. They leaned toward each other as if they were getting ready to sing, and the first one said: “When I get married it won’t be jus’ for getting married, I’m gonna marry for love, see?” and the second one said, “Aw, gwan and tell that stuff to her, why n’t yuh?” and the third one gave a kind of hoot, and said, “Hell, dis guy? Wot the hell’s he got?” and the first one said: “Aaah, shurrup yuh mush, I got plenty.” Then they all squealed and scrambled across the street beating the first one on the back and pushing him around.

  “Nuts,” commented Roger, “pure nuts.”

  Two girls went skittering by in short transparent raincoats, one green, one red, their heads tucked against the drive of the rain. One of them was saying to the other, “Yes, I know all about that. But what about me? You’re always so sorry for him. . .” and they ran on with their little pelican legs flashing back and forth.

  The taxi backed up suddenly and leaped forward again, and after a while Roger said: “I had a letter from Stella today, and she’ll be home on the twenty-sixth, so I suppose she’s made up her mind and it’s all settled.”

  “I had a sort of letter today too,” she said, “making up my mind for me. I think it is time for you and Stella to do something definite.”

  When the taxi stopped on the corner of West Fifty-third Street, Roger said, “I’ve just enough if you’ll add ten cents,” so she opened her purse and gave him a dime, and he said, “That’s beautiful, that purse.”

  “It’s a birthday present,” she told him, “and I like it. How’s your show coming?”

  “Oh, still hanging on, I guess. I don’t go near the place. Nothing sold yet. I mean to keep right on the way I’m going and they can take it or leave it. I’m through with the argument.”

  “It’s absolutely a matter of holding out, isn’t it?”

  “Holding out’s the tough part.”

  “Good night, Roger.”

  “Good night, you should take aspirin and push yourself into a tub of hot water, you look as though you’re catching cold.”

  “I will.”

  With the purse under her arm she went upstairs, and on the first landing Bill heard her step and poked his head out with his hair tumbled and his eyes red, and he said: “For Christ’s sake, come in and have a drink with me. I’ve had some bad news.”

  “You’re perfectly sopping,” said Bill, looking at her drenched feet. They had two drinks, while Bill told how the director had thrown his play out after the cast had been picked over twice, and had gone through three rehearsals. “I said to him, ‘I didn’t say it was a masterpiece, I said it would make a good show.’ And he said, ‘It just doesn’t play, do you see? It needs a doctor.’ So I’m stuck, absolutely stuck,” said Bill, on the edge of weeping again. “I’ve been crying,” he told her, “in my cups.” And he went on to ask her if she realized his wife was ruining him with her extravagance. “I send her ten dollars every week of my unhappy life, and I don’t really have to. She threatens to jail me if I don’t, but she can’t do it. God, let her try it after the way she treated me! She’s no right to alimony and she knows it. She keeps on saying she’s got to have it for the baby and I keep on
sending it because I can’t bear to see anybody suffer. So I’m way behind on the piano and the victrola, both—”

  “Well, this is a pretty rug, anyhow,” she said.

  Bill stared at it and blew his nose. “I got it at Ricci’s for ninety-five dollars,” he said. “Ricci told me it once belonged to Marie Dressler, and cost fifteen hundred dollars, but there’s a burnt place on it, under the divan. Can you beat that?”

  “No,” she said. She was thinking about her empty purse and that she could not possibly expect a check for her latest review for another three days, and her arrangement with the basement restaurant could not last much longer if she did not pay something on account. “It’s no time to speak of it,” she said, “but I’ve been hoping you would have by now that fifty dollars you promised for my scene in the third act. Even if it doesn’t play. You were to pay me for the work anyhow out of your advance.”

  “Weeping Jesus,” said Bill, “you, too?” He gave a loud sob, or hiccough, in his moist handkerchief. “Your stuff was no better than mine, after all. Think of that.”

  “But you got something for it,” she said. “Seven hundred dollars.”

  Bill said, “Do me a favor, will you? Have another drink and forget about it. I can’t, you know I can’t, I would if I could, but you know the fix I’m in.”

  “Let it go, then,” she found herself saying almost in spite of herself. She had meant to be quite firm about it. They drank again without speaking, and she went to her apartment on the floor above.

  There, she now remembered distinctly, she had taken the letter out of the purse before she spread the purse out to dry.

  She had sat down and read the letter over again: but there were phrases that insisted on being read many times, they had a life of their own separate from the others, and when she tried to read past and around them, they moved with the movement of her eyes, and she could not escape them. . . “thinking about you more than I mean to. . . yes, I even talk about you. . . why were you so anxious to destroy. . . even if I could see you now I would not. . . not worth all this abominable. . . the end. . .”