by David Rhodes
July nodded. “Who lives across the street?”
“Well, I guess he does,” spoke up one of the men in overalls, happy to have a part in the conversation. “Perry Frunt . . . and the missus. Lived there for years.”
“Well, good,” said July. “I was afraid there might be someone I didn’t know,” and turning toward Mal, added, “See, I told you everything’d be all right. Say, can we get some pop out of the machine?”
“Sure,” said Glen, still holding the brazing iron; and, managing to get July a little away from the rest while making change for a dollar, said in nearly a whisper, “Say, you know Frunt sold all this to me, and a dear price he had’ave too. I tole ’im it wasn’t worth it all quite—that ‘e had my back up agin the wall what with my shop in Kalona being closed down and out a work. On good faith ‘e sold to me. I got the receipt in the house if you ever—”
July shook his head. He’d come back to regain himself, not to repossess. “I’m glad someone I know lives in the house. I was afraid there might be strangers there.”
The man took the hood from his head and nudged him with it in a gesture of extended friendship and said in a between-you-and -me tone of voice: “I’d say you might be better off if it was strangers. If it wasn’t for the nature of your aunt, that house’d be viewed sourly by everyone who goes past it. You’ll not be expectin’ to get much out a that fellow.”
July moved with the two root beers over to rescue Mal from the unrelenting eyes of the farmers.
“Do you suppose my uncle’s home now?” he asked.
“What’s that? What did he say?”
“He wondered if his uncle would be home now!”
“Wondered if he’d be home! I’d say he gets more use out a that house than any man alive. Never comes outside a it even to mow the lawn. Sets his wife to doin’ that along with workin’ for ’im. No, if he ain’t in there and most likely swillin’ from a quart bottle of beer, he’s out to the tavern in Hills, lookin’ for someone’d buy that old Ford a your dad’s offen him—thinkin’ it’d be worth twice what it is.”
“Well, we better be getting over there,” July said to Mal. “Can we bring these bottles back later?”
“Sure,” said Glen.
The two crossed the road. Back at the garage, July heard the old man cackle. “Ain’t quite as big as ’is pa, is he? But golly, wouldn’t it be right for old Wilson to be here—he’d know what to make of ’im. He’d always judge a fella right down where they was from. A person’d wonder how anybody’d get along livin’ on his own, I mean that young, without, well . . . you know.”
“They’re hateful,” said Mal.
“No they’re not. There used to be a bird feeder right here”—he pointed to a place in the lawn—“on a thin metal pole the squirrels couldn’t climb up.” They looked into the unpainted shed where the old Ford stood outfitted with twelve years of cobwebs and rust.
“Do we have to go here?” she asked, looking toward the house.
“This is where I used to live,” said July, a little in wonder that Mal would think they might just go away. They went up, rapped on the door, waited and rapped again. It opened an inch and a little more until the chain caught it. A piercing gray eye peered around into the crack.
“Hello,” July began.
“Get away from here,” snapped a voice behind the eye. “Go beg somewhere else.” The door slammed shut.
“Let’s leave,” said Mal. “Think of Butch all cooped up in that little place.”
“Nonsense.” He pounded again, and called out, “Uncle Perry! Hey, Uncle Perry!” Across the street everyone from the garage was outside watching them. “Let me in.”
The door cracked open a second time.
“What’s this? Who are you? Go away.”
“I’m July Montgomery. Open up.”
A smell of cigarette smoke and old beer came from inside. He watched his uncle’s hand go to the wall to steady himself. The eye came back just above the chain latch.
“July Montgomery’s dead. Get on away from here.”
“Look at me.”
“He didn’t look anything like you. His hair was much lighter. He wasn’t nearly so tall . . . very short, in fact.” The eye kept up its constant assessment of him. Behind the yellow flesh in his cheek, July could see the muscles trembling. “Now, beat it before I have the law down on you. Go on, git!”
“Where’s Aunt Becky? I hope she’s back soon,” he said, perfectly at ease. “I hope you’ve kept the rooms as they used to be. I don’t suppose the old furnace Dad took out is still down in the basement, or the boat he was building.”
“Anyone can look through a basement window. Take that little hussy and get away from here. July Montgomery’s dead. He drowned himself in the river.”
“No I didn’t. I’ve been living in Philadelphia. And I noticed you took down the bird feeders and the cottonwoods. Oh yes, here, look at this.” And he drew out one of his photographs and handed it through the narrow opening into a yellow hand. The door closed, but no sounds came to indicate that the lock might be being dismantled. Obviously he was standing, looking at the pictures and thinking. “Oh, by the way, Uncle, you can keep that one—I’ve got a whole lot more.” The silence continued. July looked toward the garage, where the figure of the stooping old man waved to him from the crowd of onlookers.
Realizing that there was no way out of it, Perry Frunt opened the door. “Come in, come in. It’s so good to see you. Why, we’d surely given you up for lost, son. Your poor Aunt Becky nearly died a thousand times since you first was gone and we found your little bed empty in the morning. Come in, come in. Wait till your aunt gets home. What a blessing. How did you ever manage to ...” and as he continued July and Mal came inside, Mal wishing the door could be left open for air. Newspapers and magazines with black and white naked women on the covers littered the floor and couch, a half-drunk quart bottle of beer sat wedged between two cushions. The television was on and turned down low, the fuzzy picture barely bright enough to see. Wallpaper torn and peeling from the ceiling. The curtains were drawn and as the door shut she noticed that all the lights were burning. An ashtray was spilling cigar and cigarette butts onto the table. She felt sorry for July and turned, expecting to see him saddened by the spectacle, but he seemed oblivious to it as he stood and stared at the woodwork. He saw the thermostat control on the wall and ran over to it, from that to the knob of the front door, examining it in rapture, extracting from it every second of past it held silently within it.
“That’s the old television!” he exclaimed. “And the table!”
“We’ve tried to keep them,” said Perry, “just in the least hope that you’d come back.”
“Can we go upstairs?”
“Sure, sure, July. This way.”
“I know the way!” he exclaimed and, dragging Mal by the hand, ran upstairs and flung open the door to his room. It was filled with boxes, old clothes, old farm implements from his grandfather’s barn—things Perry had thought would someday be worth something as antiques and had been afraid someone’d steal if he left them in the barn. But in the closet he found some of his things—his red shirt and in the bureau drawer underneath a loose stack of magazines was his junk box.
What had been his parents’ room was locked. The guest bedroom was obviously what Frunt and his wife used now; one single bed pushed up against the window with a little picture of Christ above it was made and clean, but the rest of the room was in complete disarray and smelled like wet rags.
“Let’s get out of here,” whispered Mal, hearing Frunt’s soft, slow footsteps coming up the stairs. In the back of her mind was the rising dread that any minute Mrs. Frunt would come home, and a woman who lived in the kind of house they were in was someone she didn’t want to meet, and would be a little frightened to. Three large rust spots in the hall ceiling marked where water had leaked down from the roof.
“You see, we kept most of your things. Your poor aunt was told by all her f
riends, ‘Just throw ’em out. There’s no chance of him ever comin’ back.’ But just in the case—” He seemed nearly exhausted after the climb, and stood for a moment panting. “You’ll have to excuse this up here, its not being real tidy, but with poor Becky working her fingers nearly to the bone ten, twelve hours a day, and with losing our only daughter to what I’d have to call a no-good, though I usually don’t hold by any name-calling, and me in the physical shape I am, well, there’s hardly wonder we get by as well as we do.”
Then they went downstairs so July could look at the kitchen and Mal saw how Mrs. Frunt lived there. She’d built her world in the kitchen. Not one thing was out of place. The floor was spotlessly clean and shining, a special bracket for each set of utensils hanging on the wall, a dark walnut shelf reserved for cookbooks, braided hot pads, a neat row of little spice jars, the stove and oven immaculate and gleaming. The light blue curtains were pulled back and tied with a delicate white cord. Plants bloomed on the sill, carefully pruned and dusted. There was one wet spot on the countertop where Perry had opened a quart from the refrigerator, but generally, as you could tell, he respected this refuge—and she held to it with the passion of a saint. He’d put the opener away.
“Make yourselves to home,” said Perry. “If there’s something in the refrigerator that strikes you, just go ahead and take it. We don’t have much, what with the little Becky can make and what I scrape together God knows how, and the price of even the most meager foods—though I suppose we wouldn’t know what to do if we had better. When you have so little esteem for yourself I guess it doesn’t really matter; bread and coffee are good enough for the likes of me. But if you can find anything, you’re welcome to what we have.”
July was staring out the kitchen window. “See what’s in there,” he said to Mal.
She came over to him and whispered: “You see what’s in there. I’ll have a sandwich and potato salad if you can find it.”
“That would be good,” whispered July and they gave a short muffled laugh.
Perry smiled, though nothing in his face, even his eyes, showed good will. They sat at the chrome-and-formica table with their half-drunk root beers and waited for Becky to come home. Perry pulled up a chair beside them and lit a cigar he’d taken from the pocket of his pants which he’d already been chewing on earlier that day. The television was still playing in the other room.
“Things haven’t been easy,” whined Perry. “I guess it’s no use my telling you, for maybe you’ve been in a position to know yourself. Why, trying to get someone to run that nice little place of your grandfolks—not more’n thirty acres it is, and what these cheatin’ farmers have to have to plant a few seeds once a year’s enough to scare a person. Why, the taxes alone, not to mention the upkeep. Have you got any idea what the taxes were on this place when you left?” and he pressed his insistent gray eyes toward July and Mal (who was exactly across from him—as far away as she could be).
July shook his head.
“Well, I’d wondered. When you run off I wondered. Your poor aunt and I nearly died from worry. Why, she even called the police! But I wondered when I learned that the burden was likely to fall on me to try and take care of this place—there bein’ no more responsibility in this world than you can shake a stick at, it came upon me to look into what the taxes were and I had a thought then that maybe you’d run away to get out from under this terrible burden of the taxes. Oh, they were terrific. Higher’n I’d ever seen before. But I took it on me that we’d stay and try to hold on to the place. And do you know, them blasted crooks at the tax bureau has more’n doubled the taxes—doubled ’em! Why, it’s unbelievable. So while you was off carryin’ on in—where’d you say?—Philadelphia, one of the finer cities in the East, and maybe you had a rough lot of it and maybe you didn’t, that ain’t for me to know; it was my lot to be here, scratchin’ and savin’ and trying to keep the place from going back to the state. Do you know how much we’ve paid?” He did some invisible calculations on the top of the table, moving the end of his finger around like a pencil stub. “It comes to a little over, for the two places, a little over fifteen thousand, closer to sixteen thousand.”
“That seems like quite a bit,” said July.
“Well, I would hope to shout it does. Course I’ve got to admit I had my hopes—foolish things, ain’t they, hopes?” He addressed this to Mal, pointing the mouth end of his cigar, and she curled up inside herself with a little external shiver. “Your aunt and I, heart-sick and poor as we are, we always hoped against hope, you might say, that someday you’d be back safe and sound and in good health, which I can see you are. Ah! To be young again. An’ though I’d tell her that it wasn’t to no end, frettin’ and carryin’ on, her comfortin’ me and me comfortin’ her, takin’ turns, so to say, still she thought that maybe, even above all else, that maybe if and when that great day were to come, and thank God that it has, that there might be some small reward for the caretakers . . . a reimbursement, so to say . . . what was rightfully owed to us.” And with that he turned one of his piercing eyes on July, who, though he had followed most of what he’d been saying, had some time back been distracted by the view out the back door toward the horizon.
Finding Perry had stopped talking and was looking intently at him as though he should respond, he said, “Well, good, good,” and looked uncomfortably at his folded hands in his lap.
Frunt murmured something and went off into the living room.
“He said he wants you to pay him sixteen thousand dollars,” whispered Mal.
“No he doesn’t. You must have misunderstood him.”
“He does. He thinks you owe it to him, for the taxes.”
“Surely not. Besides, I don’t have anywhere near that.”
“I think what he’s trying to say is that if you want to take the house back, then you’ll have to pay it. He doesn’t want us here, July.”
“Sure he does. He just seems a little gruff. It’s his way. . . . This kitchen’s a lot different, but somehow the character’s still the same. Oh, Mal, I’m so glad to be back. I’m so sorry I wasn’t more charitable toward your relationship with your folks.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” she said. A car pulled into the driveway. “Let’s get out of here, July. We’re not welcome.”
“No, no, I heard a car pull in. It must be Aunt Becky.”
The front door opened and Perry’s voice began in quick, slurred words, indistinguishable from the kitchen, followed by the cry “Praise be to heaven!” “Now wait,” said Perry, raising his voice, “there’s a way if we play it right—” “Out of my way, you old fool. Out of my way.” Something crashed and Aunt Becky ran into the kitchen, tears flowing unchecked down her large, round face. She looked at him, and when he lifted his eyes she let out a wail that filled the whole house, ran over and put her arms around his neck, fairly pulling him up out of his chair. “July, July,” she said as she cried. “In my lifetime if I see no more miracles than this, it’s enough. Give praise to the Lord. You’ve got the look of your father in you. Oh, July, July!” And she abandoned herself to deep sobbing, standing by the table, holding her face in her hands, her large breasts shaking.
“Don’t cry,” said July.
“I ain’t only crying for myself,” she sobbed. “I’m cryin’ for your folks. I’m cryin’ for your grandfolks. I’m cryin’ for the last twelve years come autumn.” And as soon as the sponge inside her dried up, she rushed to Mal and took both of her hands up in her own. “Forgive me, dear. I’m carrying on like an old fool and you must think I didn’t even notice you here. But aren’t you pretty, though. Are you a friend of July’s?”
“Yes, I guess I am,” and she laughed.
“Then you’re as welcome here as Santa Claus himself. And no doubt it’s partially because of you that July came back—for having someone to care for a person makes things work out where normally they’d just be giving up. God bless you.” She gave her hands an extra hard squeeze and gently let them go,
stood up and looked at July again, drinking him into her, holding both the image of him and her memory’s picture, not caring for the moment to learn any of the details, only to be overjoyed.
“Now you must be fairly starved. Let me get you something to eat. I’m a little hungry myself. And over dinner we can talk about what you’ve been doing these years.” She flew to the refrigerator and began hauling out dishes and putting them on the counter.
“He’s been in Philadelphia,” said Perry from the doorway.
“Go back in and watch television,” Becky snapped without looking at him. “We have things to talk over here. Don’t worry, you’ll be called for dinner.” And being so dismissed, Perry receded. Becky set two large dishes of strawberries before them. “Eat this now. It might be some time before we can get along to the regular meal. So have this and perhaps a glass of milk, and begin with the evening when you disappeared and tell it all up to here without leaving anything important out.”
So July told her nearly everything he could remember, and she listened intently while paring the potatos and throwing together a salad, sifting flour over the biscuit batter, lifting pans from the wall, adjusting the four flames on the stove, peeking through the small window in the oven, chopping up green onions, pounding meat, breaking eggs into a round silver pan and doing dishes whenever she had a spare moment. July came to the part where he’d decided to come back—how he’d felt only half a person, and how he’d gotten on the train alone, but Mal had come—when she turned from the sink with the flour sifter in her hand.
“ You’ll be wanting this house,” she announced. “ You can stay up in your room until we’ve got all our things out of here.”
“We have no intention of putting you out, Aunt Becky. I was just curious to see the place. I hope I can come back sometimes.”
Perry Frunt had returned to the doorway.
