In the Fall

by Jeffrey Lent

  “I like her.”

  “Of course you do. I like her myself. I’ll tell you a secret.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The way you feel? Right now? About her? That’s the way you’re always going to feel about women. Now, it’ll get wrapped up and tamped down and turned around and pushed back into some little corner mostly by the actions of women theirselves as time goes on and time to time you’ll forget it and othertimes you’ll feel that way and think you shouldn’t for all sorts of reasons but there will always be that part of you. And you pay attention to it. There’s worse things a man can do.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “I wasn’t asking you to understand. I was asking you to remember is all.”

  “All right.”

  “You do that.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “That drink helping?”

  “It is. Thank you.”

  “Don’t you thank me. It’s the last one though. I’ll have to send around an order for more, you keep on nightcrawling.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “You say that now. See how you feel about it tomorrow.”

  Again Foster grinned. “Nothing says I’ll be out raising hell again.”

  “Oh she’ll be back. Don’t you worry about that.”

  “She talked about something that happened to her at college. What was that all about?”

  “What’d she tell you?”

  “Said she had a breakdown.”

  Mebane wiped his hands along the tops of his thighs, scrubbing his trousers. He said, “That’s her mama talking. There is not one thing wrong with Daphne except she’s restless in a place that makes no room for restlessness. And she hasn’t figured out what to do about that yet. If she should cave or run.”

  “So what happened?”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “No sir.”

  “Well that’s a sign of some sort. She doesn’t mind telling the tale has been my experience. They threw her out is what happened. October of her first year. That would be a year ago. Pissheads. If it’d been a boy they would’ve told him not to do that sort of stunt again and all the time all of them, him too, laughing about it, knowing it would become a little legend that would follow him around the rest of his life and that not a bad thing but something good, some signal of the sort of man he would be. But she is no boy and they did not know how to fit it in with their ideas of how things should be. So they heaved her out. And every one of those little chit-mouthed girls over there glad to see her gone only because it meant they didn’t have to provide for themselves the same way; all they had to do was sit around and talk about it, how horrible it was, how deformed she was. It is a gift of women, in case you don’t know it yet, to turn on one of their own once she steps away from what they all think is the way they should be. Women are the keepers of the pack, I tell you that. We could not do without them but they are not kind, in the end. Most likely for good reason, I give them that. What she did was like any other good boy or girl just off at school: She drank too much one night. But was not content with doing that or just screwing some fraternity boy what had been panting after her all night long like her good sisters did; no, what she had to do was hike down Franklin Street all the way into Carrboro which is its own town piled right up against Chapel Hill, where she went into a colored man’s backyard at dawn to steal his mule from the shed and then she rode that mule back up right through the middle of town wearing only a sheet she’d stole off somebody’s laundry line and singing “In My Merry Oldsmobile”. She always had a good voice in Sunday school and I’d guess she looked pretty good up on that old mule’s back but still it was not what anybody wanted to face first thing in the morning with each and every one of those people doing their best to forget what their own nights were like, what lizards lay down in their nightsouls, and the last thing they could abide was a vision of that come to life right before them. Which is what she was. Because she is a girl. I can tell you that right now. If it had been a boy, like I said, it would be laughed off and forgot for the most part except where it would be helpful to him. But they would not laugh at her and they would not forgive her. So they turned her away, back to us.”

  “What happened to her clothes?”

  “What?”

  “When she stole the sheet off the line? What happened to her clothes?”

  Mebane looked at him, his mouth clamped down tight. Then he reached over his shoulder for the cane and brought it before him and stood up out of the chair. Rocking a little before Foster. “Let’s go in the house. I’ve had enough sun. Come on. I don’t know what happened to her clothes. She’s got you good, doesn’t she?”

  In a small iron skillet varnished with ancient grease Mebane fried an egg on the electric coil and charred two thick slices of bread in the toaster and spread butter over the toast and slid the egg out onto a plate from the drainboard and set it on the counter for Foster to eat standing up. While Foster ate Mebane said, “What I hate about getting old is it gets harder and harder to get a good night’s sleep because you don’t do enough during the day to tire you out but then you can’t sleep so you feel like you don’t have the energy to get anything done. It’s a little circle that goes round and round. All it does is leave you wide awake come the middle of the night with nothing but a weary old brain and the tinkerings you make from that. I was up much of the night considering your arrival. It’s a little like the man waiting so long for some event that when it arrives he doesn’t know what to do with it. Because throughout the long waiting he’s turned into that—the man who waits. It becomes a condition of the soul. Were you raised in the church, Foster Pelham?”

  “No sir.”

  “You’ve not been baptized, christened, saved, or otherwise amended?”

  “No.”

  “Well you’re a free man then. You can come to learn God as you go along. As a student of your own life and as an experiment of whatever it is that sets us up walking and talking and breathing and thinking, whatever that mystery is, you can do your best to cipher it out on your own. Faith and grace are not empty words but you’ll have to fill them out your own self and not just accept some translation.”

  “I haven’t thought about it too much. Sometimes. Thinking about my parents, my little sister.”

  “Of course you haven’t. Unless there is something wrong with you it’s not a young man’s sport. What I was thinking was, we’d take a little road trip in your automobile. Nothing far but just a bit of history that isn’t quite dead yet. And perhaps you’ll begin to learn what you’re after.”

  They drove the main highway back north and west out of town, the road Foster had come in on. It was hot and the dogs sat up on the backseat, a pair of wind-twisted gargoyles splayed out the open windows, their tongues spread wide with the wind of the moving car. Mebane had pumped them a bucket of water and Foster knew they were hungry but they would have to wait. It felt like they were all on slender rations. For himself, he thought that was good; he felt alert and liked it. The dogs would just have to partner along with him.

  Mebane talked as they drove. “Used to be I’d come up here a couple times a month, at least once a month with the winter weather. But that was when G T Kress was alive. He did the driving. I’m talking a pair of horses here and a ragged old ruint covered buggy. After he died there was no one to do it with regular and I hate to ask someone to do what they’re not at least a little interested in. Still I used to get up here a couple times a year. But with G T it was regular. Every second Tuesday evening unless the weather was bad and then we’d just wait until the next. That little buggy of his was in bad shape but his horses was always fine. I never kept horses. A one-armed man would be a idiot to mess with horses.”

  “How’d you get around otherwise?”

  “Briefly I owned a bicycle. But my balance is not good and I lacked the courage to make a spectacle of myself for however long it would’ve taken to get the hang of it. Befo
re that, in my short undistinguished career at the bar the boy who kept the yard also tended a driving team and would take me where I needed to go. This was not the one I was speaking of yesterday—Fred—but one before him.”

  Foster thought of the story told him by his aunts of the colored man Peter who was burned and hanged for helping his grandmother. And wondered if Mebane guessed that Foster knew that story and wondered if he was being baited here or not. He said nothing. They were up on a rolling plain of land, big pastures of cattle broken by woodlots and fields, mostly of tobacco. It was a fine bright hot day with much wagon traffic and the air sweet from the tobacco flues.

  Mebane went on. “Now G T was a younger man although he’s dead now. Killed by one of these automobiles after he sold off his horses, which is a cautionary tale itself right there but not the one we’re after today. See, he wasn’t even alive when the war ended. Born most near ten years after that, I’d make it. One of his uncles was killed at Fort Fisher and another shot up bad in The Wilderness but his own daddy did not fight a lick although I don’t know how not. Kresses was not the sort of folk to’ve found an easy out. Country people, poor farmers, I don’t think at the time they owned but two three coloreds anyhow. And that was before his time. G T’s I mean. Now hold on, slow down here. Pull in up there. No, there.”

  They went onto a narrow dirt half circle of drive with patchy grass growing up through it before a long three-story stone building with a sagging porch the length of the front and many of the windows missing glass, the rows of windows so many blank eyes onto the day. Very large old red oaks grew to shade the building and the drive was covered over with green acorns that broke with a harsh wet sound under the tires as Foster came to a stop in the shade. The blocks of stone rough-faced and dark gray, as if they still held some moisture from the earth they’d been quarried from, as if the endless heat and even neglect could not dry them.

  “It was a little military academy for boys run by a veteran of the war with Mexico right up until ‘sixty-one when it emptied out so all those boys could go off and get shot up. The colonel too, which I guess if they’d known it not many of them boys would’ve grieved over. It sat empty not very long and then was turned into a hospital.” Mebane turned in his seat, hitching his upper body around to glare at Foster. “Not the one I ended up in. That was nothing but a pitched row of rotten tents up in southern Virginia.” He looked back at the building and went on. “After the war it was a home for survivors. Men worse off than me. Men without legs or both arms gone or men torn up in the body or mind so awful they could not tend to themselves. There was a subscription taken up to keep it going and I guess some money came down from the government too. It was closed up six—eight years ago when it came down to just a handful of old men what they moved down to Raleigh to another home. Before that G T and I used to come up here and visit with those old men. G T liked to get them talking, hear their stories. There was some anxious to tell it all over again. Me, I’d rather sit and read or write letters for them unable to do it for themselves. In a way it all came down to the same thing—he heard the same stories over and over and I wrote the same letters. But it was what we could do. What someway suited each of us. G T was after something he’d just missed, what he felt someway cheated out of. The way a man will when he makes most of something out of his head rather than having lived it. Me, I’d like to say all I was up to was trying to help those poor old creatures what way I could but, truth is, more like I was chasing after something too, something closer to home. Maybe my dead brother, maybe my own dead boyhood, maybe something part of each. That’s not why we’re here. Not really. That’s just the cartoon and newsreel, we still got the feature picture ahead of us. Do you go to the pictures?”

  “No sir. Not much.”

  “Well I enjoy them. Perhaps only because I can walk downtown easy on my own of an evening. Perhaps because I can leave myself alone for the time I sit there in the dark. Well, get out of the car. Let’s walk around. Your dogs’ll like this.”

  They walked out, not up to the building, which had a pair of planks nailed crosswise to bar the door and trash, bottles and such on the wide rotting steps of the porch, but out through the tall brittle-stemmed grass beyond the oaks, the dogs crashing ahead, grasshoppers flinging themselves off in reckless short bursts with each step. Out of the shade it was bright and the sun was not a point in the sky but a spread of white haze that blended without clear ending into the pale blue. There was a cemetery beyond the building, a long rectangle enclosed by a spiked-tipped iron fence with an iron gate turned back, and they went in. It was not like any cemetery Foster had seen. There was a single peastone path straight down the middle and out at the far end a single shadetree oak with an iron bench under it and otherwise just the flanks of graves, each stone alike, a squat thick white marble slab laid into the ground equidistant from the next, uniform in size and height. The names and dates chiseled almost invisible in the white marble. Before each stone a small iron circular marker held a small rebel flag. Silent and solemn, without the distractions of monuments and stone angels, without variety of any sort. What death, Foster realized, might be like: small white spaces in endless files and ranks, all manner of identity pared and paled to be unseen.

  The cemetery grass was well-mown. “The Daughters pay a man to keep it up,” Mebane said. “I find it peaceful out here. It’s a colored man that does the work, I’ve seen him at it. He does a good job. I wonder though what he thinks. Getting paid to tend after these old Confederate boys.”

  “Well, they’re dead,” Foster said. “Probably he’s just glad to have the job, make the money.”

  “Could be, could be. Could be he feels he can’t get free of those sonsabitches no matter what. I wouldn’t know. Tell you what we’re going to do: we’re going to sit on that bench there and talk about the nature of evil. Except I doubt a young man like you is much interested in that, has much faith in that sort of talk. So what I’ll do is tell you a story, a true story.” Mebane reached the bench, his cane striking hard to not slide among the peastone, and anchored the cane and pivoted around and settled himself. The shade seemed dusty, the leaves of the oak also dusty as if they were tired of living. Foster did not want to sit beside him and so squatted in the gravel before the bench, a little to one side of Mebane. His dogs off nosing among the stones. He kept his head tilted to keep them in his sight—all they’d need would be a breath of scent and they’d slip through the iron fencing and be off.

  “What it is,” Mebane said, “is some family history for you.”

  “I already told you. I’m not after anything like that.” Foster went on, not knowing he would say this until he did. “I’ve got all the family I want. There’s Pelhams been on the same Vermont farm since just before the Revolution and my mother’s family is up in French Canada, probably been there a hundred years longer than those Pelhams in Vermont.”

  “It’s blood we’re talking about here,” Mebane said. “It’s not some single isolated event you’re looking to learn about. There’s swampwater and rice in your veins too and it don’t matter if you like it or not, it’s a fact.”

  Foster rocked back on his heels, craned around to seek his dogs, spotted them and followed them a time with his eyes. Then looked back at Mebane and waited.

  “My father was Caswell Mebane and he had one brother older by eight years named Buchanan. My grandfather, Coleman Mebane, was the youngest of three brothers and so what came down to him was whittled away at pretty good—it was right much by any terms I could imagine but for him in that time and place he was bound to feel thwarted by fate as his two older brothers got the pie and he got the crust or so he always felt. But this isn’t so much about him. Although he did what you would expect in a man feeling that his place in line had determined his lot in life; he favored his older son and not the younger. You might squat there and think it would be the other way around but that’s not human nature. And to forgive him what I can, perhaps he felt it just was the way thi
ngs were done. Perhaps he believed he had no choice. Perhaps his nature was such that he saw no choice. Every man is a curious thing—each one of us thinks we are nothing so much as our ownselves even as we fume about what has been done to us by others but we almost never see how we pass those wrongs along; we have our reasons for doing what we do and believe them not only to be right but the way things are, the way they have to be. If each man could see truly how they are and the way they fit some pattern laid down and could see it fair and true then likely they would all quit, the way I have, and we wouldn’t get anywhere. We’d die out. Which might not be such a bad thing. But is not likely to happen.

  “What happened was there was these two brothers far apart in age who hated each other. The way I think only brothers can. Because one brother knows someway the secret workings of the other and each knows the other knows it. And they either make peace with that and are friends rare and precious or they don’t and so are bitter with hatred. Because they know there is that one man who can undo them in any number of ways at any time he chooses. It doesn’t even have to happen in public; it could just be between the two of them and one of them would be destroyed. Maybe able to carry on outside but flanked and pinned and bereft inside, always after. And that is what happened.