‘Sold out,’ he roared. ‘But I will get her,’ he said, ‘if I wring her bailey neck.’
After a door had crashed, and the house had shaken and settled again, they seemed to have entered a fresh phase, of peace, or inverted frenzy. In the room in which Amy Parker stood, which was the best at O’Dowds’, and for that reason never used, even the soul suspected it would never rise. Roses had been pasted in wrinkles over every possible crack of escape, with the result that life had given up and was littering the window sill with wings and shells and pale spidery legs. The intruder, already petrified, was received into the presence of the greater mummies, the sofa, with hair sprouting from the shoulders, and on the mantelpiece a long cat, that O’Dowd had stuffed for his wife, who had been fond of it.
Turning with an effort from the sad cat, Amy Parker looked through the fog of the window and saw her neighbour elongate herself catwise round the corner of a shed, the ears appearing to be flattened back, and in her glassy eyes the desperate hope of self-protection. Then the observer would have told her friend that she need no longer fear the gun, but she could not tear the window open, and as the sound of knuckles on the glass was terrible in the deathly room, all attempts to attract attention were fizzling fatefully out. So Mrs O’Dowd continued to crane and flatten, as if she were expecting death to appear from some direction she could not think of, much as she racked her brains.
As Amy Parker was struggling to break the terrible bonds of her protective room, O’Dowd came round the corner of the house, carrying the cleaver as if it were a little flag.
Then it is true, Mrs Parker could not scream against the glass.
She saw the gristle come in Mrs O’Dowd’s throat as she flattened herself still flatter against the shed. Before she ran, round the corner of the house. And O’Dowd running, carrying his little flag.
Then Amy Parker was freed. She burst out, she ran, not because she was brave, but because the thread of her life had become attached to the same spool which was winding O’Dowds round the house. So Amy Parker ran too, down the rickety step, against the fuchsia tree, that tingled as she passed. She ran, in turn, round the house, which had become the only pivot of existence; without it they were lost.
They were running and running, though sometimes also lurching, whether it was from the grog, or the slippery pineneedles on that side, or the stones and the potholes on the other, or just because somebody’s corns gave a twinge that was extra bad. But running. That was the desperate thing. And bits of the house flashed past, through windows and doors, the boxes in which they had led their stale lives – why, there was the loaf lying that the woman had cut crooked that morning, and the pair of pants the man had let fall from his thighs, and let lie, in black coils. Such glimpses flittered. And the flattened cat on her varnished stand on the mantelpiece. She had been called Tib, Amy Parker remembered, from behind her breath.
Where are we going to? she asked. At the moment death seemed terrible hard to catch. The back of O’Dowd fluctuated. At times she wondered what she would do if she could run fast enough. But the back of O’Dowd lurched round the next corner. Always.
There were moments when, through the straining air, she swore that she heard the man hack off his wife’s head with the chopper. She knew the thud, and had seen before, somewhere, the white pipe gasping words of forgiveness in the dust. We will have to do something with the body, she said, before the constable comes.
But in the meantime she was running, in the same cloud that several fowls had formed, as if disturbed by the prospect of chopping. The fowls’ long skinny necks were stretched right out. They were extended in the general motion. And a pig too. The same red sow raced in the race, her teats hitting her ribs, grunting and farting as she galloped, with every sign of mirth, or perhaps terror, it was difficult to tell. The fowls shot off at a tangent, but the sow continued, out of dedication to man.
Round and round man ran, till he had come on quite a distance into that country in which he is prepared to suffer, sometimes rolling his eyeballs, sometimes giving, in the depths of his fixed eyes, melancholy glimpses of the static world of peace that he has lost. In this way Amy Parker, when she had all but bust, saw her husband and her two children, seated at the kitchen table, drinking tea out of white cups, the crumbs of Tuesday’s cake falling yellow from the corners of their mouths. And she could have cried. She did, in fact, just begin to blubber, for herself, no longer for her friend.
‘Mrs Parker,’ Mrs O’Dowd was panting just then.
So that Mrs Parker, looking round, saw that Mrs O’Dowd, by exerting herself tremendously, had managed to catch up. The grey blur of her face was mostly mouth and eyes.
‘What are we to do now?’ Mrs Parker panted in return.
For they were still running and running round the house, somewhere ahead, or else at the tail of O’Dowd.
‘Pray to God,’ Mrs O’Dowd hissed.
And the two women did, after a fashion, resuming an acquaintance they had not kept up, even hinting they had been neglected. They ran and prayed.
Then at the corner by the big tank it happened quite suddenly that they met O’Dowd, who had had the brilliant notion of running in the opposite direction. He was wet, and black, with the chopper in his hand.
‘Ahhh!’ cried his wife. ‘It is you at last. I am ready for whatever it is you intend to do. It is not me that ever denied you nothun. Here l am.’
She stood still, in the last fragments of herself and her tormented hair. Out of her bosom, on to her blouse, had bumped the holy medals that she wore for safety.
‘So help me God,’ she said, ‘I was not bad, an I was not good, so chop quick, an let us have the judgement.’
Then O’Dowd, who was bigger than ever, and the drink lighting him up with intemperate fire, began to tremble, and his flag flapped, the little chopper that he carried in his hand.
‘Ah,’ he cried, ‘it is the devul that got inter me. An the eaudy Cologne.’
Till he was crying and protesting, and his lips, that had been thinned out by sun and running, were full again.
‘It is me nature, I am like this,’ he cried. ‘I am up an down. It isn’t that there is actual bad in me, if there is not actual good. I am a middlun man. It is only when the drink takes hold that I get a bit above meself, and then would do no harm, onyway, I am pretty certain not.’
‘Then we know now,’ said his wife, who had sat down where she was, in a few tufts of yellow grass and dead leaves and dust. ‘Then it is all cleared up quite convenient, an we are more alive than dead. That is the main thing. It is obligun of you, my dear, to explain the situation.’
‘Yes,’ he said, wiping his nose, that was getting out of hand, ‘it is all over now. An I will take a little nap, Mrs Parker, if you don’t mind. It will be good for me. Just now I am not meself.’
Mrs O’Dowd sat shredding grass, and her friend, who was above her, had become a monument. As O’Dowd began to move his body with some care across the yard, stepping so as to avoid the dead emotions, and carrying his little implement as if it were a piece of paper, that he would roll up, now that it was no more use, and put away. Then he went into the house, after bashing his forehead on the lintel, and crying out because he did not deserve it.
Mrs O’Dowd began to hum. She shredded grass. She was making a comb-and-paper noise. And her hair was hanging down.
‘Will you leave him?’ Mrs Parker asked.
But Mrs O’Dowd hummed.
‘I would not stand for any such nonsense, not from any man, not from a husband,’ said Mrs Parker, shifting her stone limbs.
‘But I like him,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, throwing aside the dead grass. ‘We are suited to each other,’ she said.
And she began to manipulate her legs, that were under her, and that had begun to set into a permanent shape from being poured there molten.
‘Aoh,’ she said. ‘I could’uv killed him, notwithstandun, if it had been my hand had held the little axe, an us runnun round the house
for fun.’
Now Amy Parker had gone to release the wheel of the buggy, in the shafts of which the old horse stood looking, and her friend had turned and gone back into the house, putting up her hair through the long trance that life can become.
‘Oh, an Mrs Parker,’ she said, putting her head out through a window, ‘I had forgot. Would you like a nice piece of cheese, that was made by me own hand? It is mature an nice.’
But Amy Parker shook her head, and the old horse pulled. They were going. Through a trance of trees and all that had not happened.
Chapter 11
STAN PARKER would sometimes fail to recognize his wife. He would see her for the first time. He would look at her and feel. This is a different one, as if she had been several. She was, of course, according to which dream rose to the surface. Sometimes she was beautiful.
Or again, they would look at each other in the course of some silence, and she would wonder, she would wonder what she had been giving away. But he respected and accepted her mysteries, as she could never respect and accept his. Then she would become sour and strident, from thinking about it, and she would wring out the dishcloth tight, and slam it on the hook, and shake the water from her hands. At these moments too he saw her for the first time, and was surprised how sour and ugly she was, a greyness in her coarse face that shone with the exertion of some work. Yes, she is ugly and bitter, he said, and he could not have touched her unpleasant skin.
But walking in the garden in the evening, after the children were fed, and the milk vessels scalded, and the dishes in the rack, then she came into her own. He liked to come along the path, and find her by accident at these times, and linger with her or put his arm awk-wardly through hers, and stroll beside her, also awkwardly at first, till warmth and her acceptance made them part of each other.
So they would stroll through the rather overgrown summer garden before night fell, and the plants of the garden lifting their heads from the dust and the cicadas in full throat.
‘Ah,’ she would cry, ‘that old thing!’
And draw away from him, and stoop, to pull at a plant or weed that they called Wandering Jew. She did not believe in the efficacy of her act; it was simply a rite that had to be performed, and she would straighten up and throw away the pale stem that she had pulled, as if she had already forgotten.
So they would stroll in the dusk of the garden.
‘Peabody’, he said once, ‘is coming tomorrow to look over Nancy’s heifer. I think he’ll buy.’
‘What, that poor heifer!’ she replied. ‘I did not want to sell Nancy’s calf.’
‘We have too many,’ he said.
‘Poor Moll,’ she said, ‘she’ll fret.’
And she picked the sharp leaf from the oleander that she was passing. She was speaking for the sake of speaking, for she knew in her heart, all things happen that are intended. She threw the sharp leaf away.
‘She’ll fret,’ she said. ‘Thelma was crying tonight. She got a splinter under one of her fingernails. I took it out but she is still upset.’
She thought of her pale child, now asleep in the prevailing dusk, and for whom she could do nothing beyond take out splinters.
‘If she never gets anything worse than splinters,’ he said.
For he too was speaking for the sake of speaking. Their presences were sufficient, but some feeling of guilt made them speak in code words to hide their wealth. Her face was creamy, porous, absorbing what remained of the light. His longer, sharper one, almost a hatchet, cut the darkness. Now they were looking at each other, face on, absorbed in the mystery of the moment. But they were forced to speak. They spoke about their delicate child, Thelma, who had developed asthma, until he began to tell again about cows, how Nancy’s heifer reminded him of one he had known, that threw a bull calf with two heads.
She made a noise of protest, because she did not want the drowsy peace of that moment to be disturbed, with flowers melting in the dusk, and her husband.
‘It is all cows with you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you ever consider your children?’
‘What am I to do?’ he laughed.
But his face quickly composed itself, returning to a suspicion that it was she who had moved the children out of his reach after they had created them together. Still, it was less important now, in the disappearing garden, and the children themselves lost in sleep.
She began to move closer to him, sensing some thought of which she might not approve. The darkness was moving with them. Soft shapes of bushes brushed against them, the heads of flowers passed silkily against their legs and cheeks. He should, by rights, have been chained by her power of soft darkness. But tonight he was not. It might have been hard daylight in which they walked.
So she said, in a voice that blamed him for it, ‘I am going in, Stan. We can’t walk about like lunatics all night. There are things to do.’
But he did not detain her.
She went in and began to wind wool for clothes she would knit for the winter, fixing the skein on the backs of two chairs, since she did not enjoy the luxury of someone to help her by holding it on his hands. And as she wound she thought recklessly of the moment at the mulberry tree. She had been gathering mulberries, and was stained by them. Big glistening leaves waved upon their stalks as she worked. There was a continual opening and closing of the tree, an interplay of sky and leaves, of light and shade, so that she was mottled with it, as well as stained by the juice. Then her husband had come, and they stood together, inside the envelope of the shining tree, talking, and laughing at nothing, and gathering fruit. Then she had kissed him suddenly on his surprised mouth, with such vehemence, she remembered the impact of their teeth, destroying the soft ripeness of mulberries. And he laughed and looked almost shaken; he did not hold with kissing by daylight. So that she began again quietly to gather the fruit, ashamed of her ripeness and her purple hands.
The woman in the kitchen wound the wool skilfully, if not fiercely, and looked over her shoulder for her husband to come. But he did not. How flat the leaves were afterwards. Some fruit had little maggoty things, but frankly, these would cook up. Her husband had continued to gather with her for a little while. He was drying up, as the result of working hard for many years in the sun. She was conscious of his face beside her as they picked. His skin was almost the skin of a sandy man, but he was not sandy, no particular colour of hair. His muscles, which had been developed by work, were beginning to look too obvious, at times even ludicrous. So they gathered fruit together, and after a while he went.
The woman winding wool held all this enclosed in her face, which had begun to look sunken. It was late, of course, late for the kind of lives they led. Sometimes the wool caught in the cracks of the woman’s coarse hands. She was without mystery now. She was moving round the winding chairs on flat feet, for she had taken off her shoes for comfort, and her breasts were rather large inside her plain blouse. Self-pity and a feeling of exhaustion made her tell herself her husband was avoiding her, whereas he was probably just waiting for a storm. This would break soon, freeing them from their bodies. But the woman did not think of this. She continued to be obsessed by the hot night, and the insects that were filling the porcelain shade of the lamp, and the eyes of her husband, that were at best kind, at worst cold, but always closed to her. If she could have held his head in her hands and looked into the skull at his secret life, whatever it was, then, she felt, she might have been placated. But as the possibility was so remote, she gave such a twist to the wool that she broke the strand.
It is time I went to bed, she said.
And she did, when she had drunk a glass of tepid water, and mastered a burst of flatulence that surged up out of her discontent. She went in her stockings, leaving the wool, which was grey in colour, and only half-wound from the two chairs. There would be all the days in her life in which to wind wool.
The husband could sense all this happening in the house as he sat outside in the darkness, agreeably, softly, lost in it. He was watchin
g for the storm. Events of immense importance would take place if only the moment of lightning could occur. But it did not yet seem that the little soft flashes playing about the mountaintops would gather themselves together to achieve supreme power. There was a sense of loitering in the warm darkness. As the man waited he lazily passed his hands over his relaxed body, of which the strength had created nothing significant. So he became restless, moving from side to side on his buttocks. His strength was powerless. He could not gather himself together. He flickered like the little bursts of lightning on the mountaintops. In his vague restlessness it would have been easy for him to go to his wife, and touch her, and fall asleep. But he did not.
Even his wife flickered mysteriously in his mind in that darkness. He remembered a morning at the mulberry tree when he had found her gathering fruit, and the goodness and familiarity of her face had pleased him so much that he had neglected what he had intended to do, to gather fruit beside her for a few minutes. Their hands glided through the leaves, sometimes touching each other, scarcely by accident, and this was good too, with the simplicity of true love. So the leaves opened and enfolded. Till they were so close he looked with surprise at her kind of burnt beauty, and she was pressing her mouth into his mouth, they were hanging on each other with sudden hooks. But the desire to grapple with the unknown woman, who was also his wife, quickly dried up. Her importance had dwindled in the brilliance of the day. Their skins passed across each other like paper across paper. For she had felt it too. She went on gathering fruit. And he, after gathering a few more handfuls, to make it appear more natural, went back up the path, wondering.
But as the man Stan Parker sat in the flickering darkness waiting for the storm, the form of his wife faded into insignificance. A great fork of blue lightning gashed the flat sky. He listened to the drums of thunder, of which the first rolls shook the silence. The still, stale air had begun to move.
The Tree of Man Page 18