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

by Katherine Anne Porter

  She bedded him down in Kevin’s room, and kept Dennis awake all hours telling him about the ghosts she’d seen in Sligo. The trip to Boston seemed to have gone out of her mind entirely.

  In the morning, the boy’s starveling black dog rose up at the opened kitchen door and stared sorrowfully at his master. The cats streamed out in a body, and silently, intently they chased him far up the road. The boy stood on the doorstep and began to tremble again. “The old woman told me to git back fer supper,” he said blankly. “Howma ever gointa git back fer supper now? The ole man’ll skin me alive.”

  Rosaleen wrapped her green wool shawl around her head and shoulders. “I’ll go along with ye and tell what happened,” she said. “They’ll never harm ye when they know the straight of it.” For he was shaking with fright until his knees buckled under him. “He’s away in his mind,” she thought, with pity. “Why can’t they see it and let him be in peace?”

  The steady slope of the lane ran on for nearly a mile, then turned into a bumpy trail leading to a forlorn house with broken-down steps and a litter of rubbish around them. The boy hung back more and more, and stopped short when the haggard, long-toothed woman in the gray dress came out carrying a stick of stove wood. The woman stopped short too when she recognized Rosaleen, and a sly cold look came on her face.

  “Good day,” said Rosaleen. “Your boy saw a ghost last night, and I didn’t have the heart to send him out in the darkness. He slept safe in my house.”

  The woman gave a sharp dry bark, like a fox. “Ghosts!” she said. “From all I hear, there’s more than ghosts around your house nights, Missis O’Toole.” She wagged her head and her faded tan hair flew in strings. “A pretty specimen you are, Missis O’Toole, with your old husband and the young boys in your house and the traveling salesmen and the drunkards lolling on your doorstep all hours—”

  “Hold your tongue before your lad here,” said Rosaleen, the back of her neck beginning to crinkle. She was so taken by surprise she couldn’t find a ready answer, but stood in her tracks listening.

  “A pretty sight you are, Missis O’Toole,” said the woman, raising her thin voice somewhat, but speaking with deadly cold slowness. “With your trips away from your husband and your loud-colored dresses and your dyed hair—”

  “May God strike you dead,” said Rosaleen, raising her own voice suddenly, “if you say that of my hair! And for the rest may your evil tongue rot in your head with your teeth! I’ll not waste words on ye! Here’s your poor lad and may God pity him in your house, a blight on it! And if my own house is burnt over my head I’ll know who did it!” She turned away and whirled back to call out, “May ye be ten years dying!”

  “You can curse and swear, Missis O’Toole, but the whole countryside knows about you!” cried the other, brandishing her stick like a spear.

  “Much good they’ll get of it!” shouted Rosaleen, striding away in a roaring fury. “Dyed, is it?” She raised her clenched fist and shook it at the world. “Oh, the liar!” and her rage was like a drum beating time for her marching legs. What was happening these days that everybody she met had dirty minds and dirty tongues in their heads? Oh, why wasn’t she strong enough to strangle them all at once? Her eyes were so hot she couldn’t close her lids over them. She went on staring and walking, until almost before she knew it she came in sight of her own house, sitting like a hen quietly in a nest of snow. She slowed down, her thumping heart eased a little, and she sat on a stone by the roadside to catch her breath and gather her wits before she must see Dennis. As she sat, it came to her that the Evil walking the roads at night in this place was the bitter lies people had been telling about her, who had been a good woman all this time when many another would have gone astray. It was no comfort now to remember all the times she might have done wrong and hadn’t. What was the good if she was being scandalized all the same? That lad in Boston now—the little whelp. She spat on the frozen earth and wiped her mouth. Then she put her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, and thought, “So that’s the way it is here, is it? That’s what my life has come to, I’m a woman of bad fame with the neighbors.”

  Dwelling on this strange thought, little by little she began to feel better. Jealousy, of course, that was it. “Ah, what wouldn’t that poor thing give to have my hair?” and she patted it tenderly. From the beginning it had been so, the women were jealous, because the men were everywhere after her, as if it was her fault! Well, let them talk. Let them. She knew in her heart what she was, and Dennis knew, and that was enough.

  “Life is a dream,” she said aloud, in a soft easy melancholy. “It’s a mere dream.” The thought and the words pleased her, and she gazed with pleasure at the loosened stones of the wall across the road, dark brown, with the thin shining coat of ice on them, in a comfortable daze until her feet began to feel chilled.

  “Let me not sit here and take my death at my early time of life,” she cautioned herself, getting up and wrapping her shawl carefully around her. She was thinking how this sad countryside needed some young hearts in it, and how she wished Kevin would come back to laugh with her at that woman up the hill; with him, she could just laugh in their faces! That dream about Honora now, it hadn’t come true at all. Maybe the dream about Kevin wasn’t true either. If one dream failed on you it would be foolish to think another mightn’t fail you too: wouldn’t it, wouldn’t it? She smiled at Dennis sitting by the stove.

  “What did the native people have to say this morning?” he asked, trying to pretend it was nothing much to him what they said.

  “Oh, we exchanged the compliments of the season,” said Rosaleen. “There was no call for more.” She went about singing; her heart felt light as a leaf and she couldn’t have told why if she died for it. But she was a good woman and she’d show them she was going to be one to her last day. Ah, she’d show them, the low-minded things.

  In the evening they settled down by the stove, Dennis cleaning and greasing his boots, Rosaleen with the long tablecloth she’d been working on for fifteen years. Dennis kept wondering what had happened in Boston, or where ever she had been. He knew he would never hear the straight of it, but he wanted Rosaleen’s story about it. And there she sat mum, putting a lot of useless stitches in something she would never use, even if she ever finished it, which she would not.

  “Dennis,” she said after a while, “I don’t put the respect on dreams I once did.”

  “That’s maybe a good thing,” said Dennis, cautiously. “And why don’t you?”

  “All day long I’ve been thinking Kevin isn’t dead at all, and we shall see him in this very house before long.”

  Dennis growled in his throat a little. “That’s no sign at all,” he said. And to show that he had a grudge against her he laid down his meerschaum pipe, stuffed his old briar and lit it instead. Rosaleen took no notice at all. Her embroidery had fallen on her knees and she was listening to the rattle and clatter of a buggy coming down the road, with Richards’s voice roaring a song, “I’ve been working on the railroad, ALL the live-long day!” She stood up, taking hairpins out and putting them back, her hands trembling. Then she ran to the looking-glass and saw her face there, leaping into shapes fit to scare you. “Oh, Dennis,” she cried out as if it was that thought had driven her out of her chair. “I forgot to buy a looking-glass, I forgot it altogether!”

  “It’s a good enough glass,” repeated Dennis.

  The buggy clattered at the gate, the song halted. Ah, he was coming in, surely! It flashed through her mind a woman would have a ruined life with such a man, it was courting death and danger to let him set foot over the threshold.

  She stopped herself from running to the door, hand on the knob even before his knock should sound. Then the wheels creaked and ground again, the song started up; if he thought of stopping he changed his mind and went on, off on his career to the Saturday night dance in Winston, with his rapscallion cronies.

  Rosaleen didn’t know what to expect, then, and then: surely he couldn’t
be stopping? Ah, surely he couldn’t be going on? She sat down again with her heart just nowhere, and took up the tablecloth, but for a long time she couldn’t see the stitches. She was wondering what had become of her life; every day she had thought something great was going to happen, and it was all just straying from one terrible disappointment to another. Here in the lamplight sat Dennis and the cats, beyond in the darkness and snow lay Winston and New York and Boston, and beyond that were far off places full of life and gayety she’d never seen nor even heard of, and beyond everything like a green field with morning sun on it lay youth and Ireland as if they were something she had dreamed, or made up in a story. Ah, what was there to remember, or to look forward to now? Without thinking at all, she leaned over and put her head on Dennis’s knee. “Whyever,” she asked him, in an ordinary voice, “did ye marry a woman like me?”

  “Mind you don’t tip over in that chair now,” said Dennis. “I knew well I could never do better.” His bosom began to thaw and simmer. It was going to be all right with everything, he could see that.

  She sat up and felt his sleeves carefully. “I want you to wrap up warm this bitter weather, Dennis,” she told him. “With two pairs of socks and the chest protector, for if anything happened to you, whatever would become of me in this world?”

  “Let’s not think of it,” said Dennis, shuffling his feet.

  “Let’s not, then,” said Rosaleen. “For I could cry if you crooked a finger at me.”

  Mexico City–Berlin, 1931

  Hacienda

  IT was worth the price of a ticket to see Kennerly take possession of the railway train among a dark inferior people. Andreyev and I trailed without plan in the wake of his gigantic progress (he was a man of ordinary height merely, physically taller by a head, perhaps, than the nearest Indian; but his moral stature in this moment was beyond calculation) through the second-class coach into which we had climbed, in our haste, by mistake. . . . Now that the true revolution of blessed memory has come and gone in Mexico, the names of many things are changed, nearly always with the view to an appearance of heightened well-being for all creatures. So you cannot ride third-class no matter how poor or humble-spirited or miserly you may be. You may go second in cheerful disorder and sociability, or first in sober ease; or, if you like, you may at great price install yourself in the stately plush of the Pullman, isolated and envied as any successful General from the north. “Ah, it is beautiful as a pulman!” says the middle-class Mexican when he wishes truly to praise anything. . . . There was no Pullman with this train or we should most unavoidably have been in it. Kennerly traveled like that. He strode mightily through, waving his free arm, lunging his portfolio and leather bag, stiffening his nostrils as conspicuously as he could against the smell that “poured,” he said, “simply poured like mildewed pea soup!” from the teeming clutter of wet infants and draggled turkeys and indignant baby pigs and food baskets and bundles of vegetables and bales and hampers of domestic goods, each little mountain of confusion yet drawn into a unit, from the midst of which its owners glanced up casually from dark pleased faces at the passing strangers. Their pleasure had nothing to do with us. They were pleased because, sitting still, without even the effort of beating a burro, they were on the point of being carried where they wished to go, accomplishing in an hour what would otherwise have been a day’s hard journey, with all their households on their backs. . . . Almost nothing can disturb their quiet ecstasy when they are finally settled among their plunder, and the engine, mysteriously and powerfully animated, draws them lightly over the miles they have so often counted step by step. And they are not troubled by the noisy white man because, by now, they are accustomed to him. White men look all much alike to the Indians, and they had seen this maddened fellow with light eyes and leather-colored hair battling his way desperately through their coach many times before. There is always one of him on every train. They watch his performance with as much attention as they can spare from their own always absorbing business; he is a part of the scene of travel.

  He turned in the door and motioned wildly at us when we showed signs of stopping where we were. “No, no!” he bellowed. “NO! Not here. This will never do for you,” he said, giving me a great look, protecting me, a lady. I followed on, trying to reassure him by noddings and hand-wavings. Andreyev came after, stepping tenderly over large objects and small beings, exchanging quick glances with many pairs of calm, lively dark eyes.

  The first-class coach was nicely swept, there were no natives about to speak of, and most of the windows were open. Kennerly hurled bags at the racks, jerked seat-backs about rudely, and spread down topcoats and scarves until, with great clamor, he had built us a nest in which we might curl up facing each other, temporarily secure from the appalling situation of being three quite superior persons of the intellectual caste of the ruling race at large and practically defenseless in what a country! Kennerly almost choked when he tried to talk about it. It was for himself he built the nest, really: he was certain of what he was. Andreyev and I were included by courtesy: Andreyev was a Communist, and I was a writer, or so Kennerly had been told. He had never heard of me until a week before, he had never known anyone who had, and it was really up to Andreyev, who had invited me on this trip, to look out for me. But Andreyev took everything calmly, was not suspicious, never asked questions, and had no sense of social responsibility whatever—not, at least, what Kennerly would ever call by such a name; so it was hopeless to expect anything from him.

  I had already proved that I lacked something by arriving at the station first and buying my own ticket, having been warned by Kennerly to meet them at the first-class window, as they were arriving straight from another town. When he discovered this, he managed to fill me with shame and confusion. “You were to have been our guest,” he told me bitterly, taking my ticket and handing it to the conductor as if I had appropriated it to my own use from his pocket, stripping me publicly of guesthood once for all, it seemed. Andreyev also rebuked me: “We none of us should throw away our money when Kennerly is so rich and charitable.” Kennerly, tucking away his leather billfold, paused, glared blindly at Andreyev for a moment, jumped as if he had discovered that he was stabbed clean through, said, “Rich? Me, rich? What do you mean, rich?” and blustered for a moment, hoping that somehow the proper retort would emerge; but it would not. So he sulked for a moment, got up and shifted his bags, sat down, felt in all his pockets again to make certain of something, sat back and wanted to know if I had noticed that he carried his own bags. It was because he was tired of being gypped by these people. Every time he let a fellow carry his bags, he had a fight to the death in simple self-defense. Literally, in his whole life he had never run into such a set of bandits as these train porters. Besides, think of the risk of infection from their filthy paws on your luggage handles. It was just damned dangerous, if you asked him.

  I was thinking that foreigners anywhere traveling were three or four kinds of phonograph records, and of them all I liked Kennerly’s kind the least. Andreyev hardly ever looked at him out of his clear, square gray eyes, in which so many different kinds of feeling against Kennerly were mingled, the total expression had become a sort of exasperated patience. Settling back, he drew out a folder of photographs, scenes from the film they had been making all over the country, balanced them on his knees and began where he left off to talk about Russia. . . . Kennerly moved into his corner away from us and turned to the window as if he wished to avoid overhearing a private conversation. The sun was shining when we left Mexico City, but mile by mile through the solemn valley of the pyramids we climbed through the maguey fields towards the thunderous blue cloud banked solidly in the east, until it dissolved and received us gently in a pallid, silent rain. We hung our heads out of the window every time the train paused, raising false hopes in the hearts of the Indian women who ran along beside us, faces thrown back and arms stretching upward even after the train was moving away.

  “Fresh pulque!” they urged mournfully,
holding up their clay jars filled with thick gray-white liquor. “Fresh maguey worms!” they cried in despair above the clamor of the turning wheels, waving like nosegays the leaf bags, slimy and lumpy with the worms they had gathered one at a time from the cactus whose heart bleeds the honey water for the pulque. They ran along still hoping, their brown fingers holding the bags lightly by the very tips, ready to toss them if the travelers should change their minds and buy, even then, until the engine outran them, their voices floated away and they were left clustered together, a little knot of faded blue skirts and shawls, in the indifferent rain.

  Kennerly opened three bottles of luke-warm bitter beer. “The water is filthy!” he said earnestly, taking a ponderous, gargling swig from his bottle. “Isn’t it horrible, the things they eat and drink?” he asked, as if, no matter what we might in our madness (for he did not trust either of us) say, he already knew the one possible answer. He shuddered and for a moment could not swallow his lump of sweet American chocolate: “I have just come back,” he told me, trying to account for his extreme sensitiveness in these matters, “from God’s country,” meaning to say California. He ripped open an orange trademarked in purple ink. “I’ll simply have to get used to all this all over again. What a relief to eat fruit that isn’t full of germs. I brought them all the way back with me.” (I could fairly see him legging across the Sonora desert with a knapsack full of oranges.) “Have one. Anyhow it’s clean.”

  Kennerly was very clean, too, a walking reproach to untidiness: washed, shaven, clipped, pressed, polished, smelling of soap, brisk and firm-looking in his hay-colored tweeds. So far as that goes, a fine figure of a man, with the proper thriftiness of a healthy animal. There was no fault to find with him in this. Some day I shall make a poem to kittens washing themselves in the mornings; to Indians scrubbing their clothes to rags and their bodies to sleekness, with great slabs of sweet-smelling strong soap and wisps of henequen fiber, in the shade of trees, along river banks at midday; to horses rolling sprawling snorting rubbing themselves against the grass to cleanse their healthy hides; to naked children shouting in pools; to hens singing in their dust baths; to sober fathers of families forgetting themselves in song under the discreet flood of tap-water; to birds on the boughs ruffling and oiling their feathers in delight; to girls and boys arranging themselves like baskets of fruit for each other: to all thriving creatures making themselves cleanly and comely to the greater glory of life. But Kennerly had gone astray somewhere: he had overdone it; he wore the harried air of a man on the edge of bankruptcy, keeping up an expensive establishment because he dared not retrench. His nerves were bundles of dried twigs, they jabbed his insides every time a thought stirred in his head, they kept his blank blue eyes fixed in a white stare. The muscles of his jaw jerked in continual helpless rage. Eight months spent as business manager for three Russian moving-picture men in Mexico had about finished him off, he told me, quite as though Andreyev, one of the three, were not present.