He looked down at the luminous, withered hand in his lap as if he had never seen it before. Neither Sam nor Mike replied. It was not to them that he spoke.
As Sam rolled him through the house and toward the ramp at the back door, he indicated a small, shedlike room off the porch, no more than a closet, really. In Mike’s time it had been used to store garden tools. Sam Canaday wheeled him to the mouth of the room. There was no door.
“This was my bedroom,” John Winship said. “This was where I slept for eighteen years of my life. It was real snug in here. Ceiling snugged right down over me, and there were no windows, so it was like being in a cave. Way back here at the back of the house, where nobody came unless they had a special reason. Used to feel like I could hide from the world back here and nobody would ever find me; nobody would even know I was in the house. Like Tom Sawyer in that cave. I used to lie here and pretend I was Tom Sawyer. I could hear the train whistles coming up and down the tracks for miles and miles before they got here and I’d pretend it was the Mississippi River out there, and they were riverboats. I’d sleep real good in this little old room, summer and winter, with feather mattresses and Mama’s quilts piled over me. Felt as safe as a bear in a honey tree. Haven’t slept like that since I was eighteen years old. Kid nowadays wouldn’t be caught dead in a little old closet like this, but I thought it was the finest room in the world.”
He gestured at Sam to take him out of the room and down the ramp to the path to the car, but then signaled him to stop.
“What’s that over there, in the corner?” he said. “Looks like some kind of china, vase or something.”
Mike reached over and picked the object up. It was a shard of a pottery pitcher, with the curved handle still attached, glazed blue and white in a pattern of stripes and whorls. It was incredibly filthy. She picked it up with one finger through the handle and brought it over and laid it in his lap.
“Why,” John Winship said, “it’s the Yankee pitcher. I haven’t seen it since I was a boy. I didn’t even know it was still in the house. Looked all over for it. Look here, Sam and Mike, this pitcher is way over a hundred years old, and some son of a bitch has found it and broke it and just thrown it in a corner. By God, if I had a gun …”
“Why is it called the Yankee pitcher, Colonel?” Sam broke in hastily.
Her father was diverted. “When my greatgrandfather Worthy … your great-great-grandfather, Mike … was off fighting in Virginia, there was only my great-grandmother and a couple of nigger tenants left on the place. She was just a little thing, not shoulder-high to a man, with dark red hair down to her waist, about nineteen, I think. One summer day a troop of Sherman’s boys came through on the way down to Lovejoy and the lieutenant rode up and saw her on the porch and asked her if she had anything to drink, and she brought him out this pitcher full of cold buttermilk. It was the last she had, but I guess she figured she’d better be nice to him since she sure couldn’t fight him. She had a cow and a couple of calves and a mule down in the swamp bottom; used to go down there at night and tie up their muzzles with strips off her petticoat to keep ’em from making any noise when there was Yankees in the neighborhood, or so my mama always told me. Anyway, he took the pitcher off without thanking her, and she just figured she’d never see it again, but at least he didn’t burn the place. The next day one of the niggers found it resting under that big pine that leans out over the dirt road, on a nest of moss, all washed out. We always called it the Yankee pitcher after that.”
He looked at the broken china in his hand, and then out the door of the house and off across the field to the woods, where night was settling down like a cast net.
“He walked home from Appomattox,” he said. “Took him four months. She never knew when to look for him or even if he was coming home. One day, at twilight, she was sitting out on this porch and he just came walking up that cedar avenue and sat down on the porch and leaned against the house and said, ‘What we got left?’ God knows, they didn’t have much, but they had enough to start over again.”
He tossed the scrap of pottery back into the corner, where it rolled crookedly and came to rest against the baseboard.
“They don’t leave you much,” he said.
The muttering army of ghosts suddenly leaped into life as if touched by the very finger of God. A sallow, filthy young soldier walked up an avenue of cedars and she could smell the sweat and dust of his journey; a worn old-young girl lifted callused, broken, sunburnt hands to him and she could taste the salt of her tears. Mike heard living laughter and weeping and the cries of children and animals and the phlegm of deaths; she smelled sweat, dirt, manure, tobacco, roses, pine fires, earth after rain, hay drying sweet in fields, frying meat, strong lye soap, the melony smell of pig slops and souring buttermilk in the cool morning pantry. The tiny cubicle was alive with people, and they were as densely fleshed and clothed with particularity as the three who had come tonight into this house. At their forefront, a small boy with thistledown hair and light-spilling gray eyes leaped forever from a barn loft into empty, sunshot air, shouting, “Look at me!”
Mike stumbled blindly down the steps of the homeplace and into the cooling air outside. Her head swam; her ears rang with the cacophony of her kinsmen. She barely heard Sam and John Winship come down the ramp behind her. When her head cleared slightly, she turned to her father. She cleared her throat.
“I’d like to help you stuff some envelopes and lick some stamps, if you’ll still have me,” she said.
“Well, I reckon I can find something for you to do,” he said, looking past her to the curve of the distant wooded hill. ‘Mout’s well earn your keep.”
“Mout’s well,” Mike said.
He still did not look at her, and he did not look at her during the long, slow, lurching progress back to the avenue of cedars in the wheelchair, but when Sam helped him from the chair and opened the door of the Cadillac, he laid his hand, as light and scratchy and dry as the talon of a long-dead hawk, on his daughter’s arm, and Mike handed him into the car and closed the door.
They were home before dark.
23
“WHAT WAS IT THAT DID THE TRICK?” SAM CANADAY asked, looking at Mike through the wire-rimmed glasses that made his face seem somehow vulnerable and oddly old-fashioned, an earnest, unworldly Victorian assistant master in a barely standard British public school. “I thought we’d get you on our side sooner or later, but I figured you’d put up a bigger fuss than you did. You fell without a shot being fired.”
He had insisted on coming before work the morning after their visit to the homeplace to tell her about the action against the Department of Transportation. She had tried to dissuade him; she still had no interest in the court action and was still reluctant to hear about it. But he had been adamant.
“If you’re going to get involved in it at all, I insist that you know what you’re fighting,” he said. “I won’t butt in after this, but it’s important to me and your dad both that you know.”
So she had agreed. They sat now, drinking coffee and waiting for the sweet rolls he had brought from the all-night Kroger to warm. Outside, early sun was touching the tops of the tallest trees. In his room at the back of the house, John Winship slept deeply. Mike had not heard him stirring in the night, as she usually did.
“I think it was the old pitcher,” she said, in answer to his question. “That and when he said, ‘They don’t leave you much.’ Somehow I only just then realized how very little he was going to have left if that old horror of a house comes down. And then, it just seemed all of a sudden that … everybody who had lived in that house was real; alive somehow, not just names I’d heard in old family stories. And I could almost see him as a little boy … Oh, I don’t know. I can’t explain it …”
“You don’t have to,” Sam said, grinning faintly. “St. Paul did it for you. Happened to him once, too, on the way to Damascus.”
“I’m really weary of all this biblical crap of yours,” Mike said peevishly.
She had not slept well; had fought dreams and shadows all night, and was tired. “I know what an epiphany is. Let’s get on with the Department of Transportation business if we’re going to.”
“Right,” he said, straightening up and pulling a small sheaf of papers toward him. “Well, it started about six months ago. Usually you hear rumors about new roads and things like this, but this time there just weren’t any that anyone around here heard. The Colonel got a letter from one Leonard Tinsley, a DOT Relocation Officer—great term, isn’t it?—saying that the department had acquired property that the homeplace is on the day before, and that all personal property had to be moved out within sixty days. As soon as it was moved, said our Mr. Tinsley, he’d come inspect the property and have your dad sign a claim form and then he’d send it in for payment of $441.84.”
“$441.84!” Mike was appalled. Surely, the lumber alone was worth that much.
“Of course, it was a ridiculous price,” Sam Canaday said, “and they probably knew it was. You’d be surprised how often that first offer gets accepted, though. Officialese scares a lot of folks. Well, anyway, he called the number this Tinsley gave him, and Tinsley told him that the state planned to put in an access highway from Carrollton, over at the river in the west, to 1-85 over east yonder. When John said there was already an access not five miles down toward Newman, Tinsley said all he knew was that now there was going to be another one. So the Colonel came to see me, and I contacted Tinsley and objected on the grounds that the offer was not acceptable. And I filed for a writ of injunction and for consequent damages in Superior Court because, of course, without that strip of highway frontage that the house sits on, John couldn’t sell the land for ten cents, or even develop it, if he ever wanted to, or his heirs did. It was all I could do, Mike. There wasn’t anything I could do about the house; there never has been. That was gone the minute he got the letter from Tinsley. But I knew we could delay for quite a while negotiating the price and filing for consequential damages. Of course, the DOT maintained that the so-called improvements—the demolition of the house—would offset any consequential damages that might exist.
“So what I’ve done so far is simply refuse any offer they make on the house, and refuse to name a firm price. I can’t string it out forever, but I figure I can delay it a while yet. Sooner or later, though, they’re going to get tired of it all and move on it.”
“And then what?”
“Then they’ll file condemnation proceedings and get it condemned, file a declaration of taking, get a court decree and take title, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“You mean …”
“I mean they’ll let out bids to subcontractors and the dozers will come on in. They surveyed and took test borings and drove the stakes back in the winter. It’s all in place.”
“My God, Sam! This what-you-macallit … this declaration of taking … they can just do it whenever they want to, whether or not you’re even satisfied with their price? That’s wrong, that’s criminal …”
“No, that’s legal. And they sure can do it, and they do, and will, in this case. Up until World War II they couldn’t take title or take a hoe to dirt or anything until there was a final property settlement, which of course could take years. But in wartime you just can’t wait, sometimes, for roads and munitions plants and such. You can sort of see their side, Mike … without a tool like the declaration of taking, there probably wouldn’t be any freeway system, for instance. But now that they can do it anytime and anyplace they want to, of course it’s often misused, like every other law. I frankly don’t know why they’ve let me drag this on as long as I have, except that I’ve pleaded illness and family distress, which, God knows, is true enough. But it rarely stops the DOT.”
“Maybe Bay has been able to influence them,” Mike said. “I know he’s trying.”
“Oh, yes,” Sam Canaday said. “I’m sure he’s had considerable influence. Well, that’s it, essentially and in a nutshell. I wanted you to know what you were getting into. I wanted to be sure you understand that we’re not going to win it. Only delay it.”
“Does he … does Daddy understand that? He doesn’t seem to; that painting he’s having done, and the way he talks about it …”
“The Colonel understands it,” Sam said. “He’s a lawyer, after all. Whether or not he acknowledges it is another matter. But I’m sure he understands it.”
“Sam … is it right, after all? This delay; it can only put off something that will hurt him badly in the end. And he’s not going to get stronger, you know, only weaker …”
“It’s right,” Sam Canaday said, taking off the glasses and rubbing his eyes. There were dark smears of fatigue under them, and the strong tan of his face had faded until, in the dawn-lit kitchen, he looked almost as mustardy as J.W. “You know why I’m delaying; we talked about it. It’s keeping him going. And it’s buying him time to try and get you back.”
“He’s got me now; I’m in the fire right along with the rest of you,” Mike said. “I told him we’d start with the letters this morning. I’m going over and get Priss’s typewriter …”
“No,” Sam Canaday said. “He’s got your participation. He hasn’t got your love.”
“Ah, God …” Mike cried, pushing back her chair and whirling around to stare sightlessly out the windows over the sink at the brightening day. “You ask too much! Both of you, all of you … you just plain ask too damned much!”
“You’re right,” he said, gathering up the papers and stuffing them back into his shabby old briefcase. “We ask everything.”
Mike was not prepared for the reaction her participation in John Winship’s media-blitzing campaign engendered in her sister and Bayard Sewell. She had not expected DeeDee to be pleased, since she was more or less forsworn to try and discourage her father in his fight against the Department of Transportation. But she had not expected rage and fear.
She and John Winship were just finishing the last of the morning’s letters—these to the editors of the small dailies and weeklies in the surrounding communities—and Mike was stamping them while Lavinia Lester prepared lunch and her father settled into his chair to watch Tic-Tac-Dough when DeeDee came into the kitchen of the Pomeroy Street house. She was hot and flushed in a pink-striped cotton tent of astounding proportions, and she carried a foil-covered pie pan in one hand.
“Peach pie from the first of our peaches,” she said, kissing her father and peering around the cool, bright kitchen. “What on earth are you all doing? Planning a party?”
“I’m helping Daddy with his correspondence,” Mike said brightly, hoping to divert her sister. But DeeDee would not be distracted.
“What kind of correspondence?” she said. “Who on earth does Daddy know that he has to send so many letters …” She picked up a couple of envelopes from the pile Mike had stamped and stacked neatly at the edge of the kitchen table, and actually turned pale under her habitual high flush.
“You’re helping him with these crazy, awful, horrible letters,” she squealed. “Mike, you promised, you said you thought this DOT stuff was as crazy as we did …” Her breath gave out and she stood glaring at Mike, great shelf of chest heaving, breath bubbling in her small pink piglet’s nose.
“Well, I changed my mind,” Mike said equably. What was that strange, shrill note in DeeDee’s voice? Why on earth was she so agitated? If DeeDee considered the letters foolish and futile, what did it matter to her who typed them and sent them out?
“What’s your problem, Daisy?” John Winship said, his voice strong and sharp as DeeDee’s own. He had been animated and almost ebullient all morning, dictating clearly and decisively, cackling appreciatively at his own prose occasionally, seeming almost to shimmer with a faint, strange light of his own that Mike had seen only once or twice in her life and barely remembered. She had caught the mood herself, and had found her fingers flying over the keys of Priss’s old manual typewriter and her veins humming with more energy than she had felt since the fi
rst slumberous coupling with Bayard Sewell. She turned now to her father, and saw that his cheeks were so flushed they were almost vermilion, and his eyes had sunk back into the flesh around them and acquired a feverish glitter.
Apparently DeeDee saw, too, because she wrenched her little pink mouth into a smile and said, “No problem, Daddy. I just don’t want you to get overtired. Mike means well, but she hasn’t been here since the beginning, and I’m afraid she doesn’t know yet what’s good for you and what isn’t.”
“Micah knows what’s good for me better than anybody else in this house except Sam Canaday,” her father rasped. Mike saw his frail chest beginning to labor, and so she said, “Daddy, you promised you’d take a nap before lunch when we finished,” and the old man looked from one of his daughters to the other, flashed them his swift, grotesque half-grin, and said, “So I did.” DeeDee did not speak again until Lavinia Lester had wheeled him into his room, and then she turned on Mike.
“You’re going to kill him. Do you know that? What you’re doing is going to kill my daddy, and I hope you’re happy when he’s lying dead! It’s cruel, what you’re doing, and it’s dangerous, and it’s awful …”
“DeeDee, I am not hurting him!” Mike said. “Look at him! His color is good, and he’s lively, and he’s eating well and sleeping, and he hasn’t had one of those attacks of pain in several days … he’s come out of that awful lethargy he was in; you just haven’t seen it, you haven’t been around lately. He’s much better, much stronger …”
“It’s the last of his strength! He’ll have another stroke; he’ll collapse …” DeeDee’s eyes were unfocused with what could only be terror, and tears tracked her cheeks and chins.
Mike’s heart turned over. Her sister was obviously in anguish. No matter how nattering and unfounded her concern, it was still causing her pain. She did not look well, either; the thin, stretched skin around her blue eyes was violet and crosshatched with tiny fatigue lines, and her blue-black hair straggled, lusterless, on her neck and down her back. It looked heavy and flat and rusty, like the wings of a dead and rain-soaked crow, and Mike saw for the first time that DeeDee had been dyeing it. She thought of the terrible little ersatz bunkhouse on the edge of the mobile home park, and the cawing, slavering old woman so irrevocably and eternally there in it, and of Duck Wingo.
Homeplace Page 24
