Stranger at the Door

by Gil Meynier

  All of it an acknowledged, but distant, relative of the neat stucco town that had sprung, itself, on the outskirts of the tangle of mud alleys of the old Mexican town, another acknowledged but distant relative, a relic with a few moments of historical fame.

  Downhill, toward the river-bed, making fewer stops, the city bus speeded up, haughty and impersonal, as if on an unpleasant tour of duty. The houses were farther apart, the lots larger, slowly turning into acres of desert land. Abruptly, at a barren, uninhabited spot in the wilderness, the bus stopped, its front wheels already turned to the left for the return trip.

  Joe got off, stepping down, with a feeling of distaste, at the edge of a ditch, where a curb should have been.

  Skirt tucked up, exposing a vast, white petticoat, Mrs. Jard bumbled about the farmhouse. “Her bed goes there. That table goes here.” With competent heaves she rearranged the furnishings of the three-room house the way it ought to be to serve its new purpose. Some of it went to the shack for the tenants.

  The first night, they had managed, the three of them, herself, Dorry, Mrs. Fred, and the tenants, but now it was a matter of rearranging things. Maybe, if it looked as if there was plenty of room for her, she could talk Dorry into staying. There was no reason for her to go off, looking for a room. There was plenty of room here. There’s always plenty of room when you want to make room.

  Standing near the door to the front porch, she surveyed the new disposition of the furniture. Turning her head, she glanced toward the porch where Mrs. Fred, in her straw hat and leather jacket, was sitting, quiet and staring, in a rocking chair.

  “Your bed is over there, by the window. That’ll be nice for you.”

  She looked, to see if Mrs. Fred was going to say anything, but the old woman sat, as she had been sitting all day, staring toward the river bed.

  “Don’t you worry about anything,” said Mrs. Jard, still breathing hard from the effort of moving the bed. “Don’t you worry at all.”

  It was a good little house. The floor creaked in a sort of whisper under the linoleum, as you walked over it. The walls were thin and, wherever she was, someone would be sure to know if Mrs. Fred wanted anything.

  Without turning her head, she could hear that Mrs. Fred had started to rock herself in her chair on the porch. It was a creaky old rocker.

  The big room, as you came in, was going to be Mrs. Fred’s room. There was no sense in cooping her up in one of the small rooms. Beyond the big room there was a closed-in porch, where the kitchen was. And, to the right as you came in, there were two small rooms. One for Mrs. Jard and the other—well, the other a spare room for whoever wanted it. That’s all there was to the little farmhouse, except the bathroom over there to the right and a few closets.

  Mr. Jard had built it himself, in one short summer. She remembered his mistake. It was only because he came originally from New Jersey where they used to whitewash the inside of their farmhouses. So when this house was done, that first summer, he had whitewashed the insides of it, all the wood paneling. And it wasn’t long before they had had to do it over again with dark paint. The bright light on the desert made it unlivable, inside, with glaring white all over the walls. So they had made it dark brown, like a Mexican house, and they had never used whitewash again, not even outside. That was the only mistake.

  And there it was, a good house, with the scented desert breeze blowing through it, with shade on the porches, with the metallic rustling of the windmill that pumped up the water to the storage tank, with its original owner bumbling about the rooms, busy, capable, responsible.

  “Don’t you worry about a thing,” she called out, no longer hearing the rhythmic creaking of the rocker.

  “Them and their Old People’s Home,” she thought, “I told them off. That young fellow: ‘I’m the something attorney,’ he says. I wonder what his job is?”

  She shook her head, chuckling at the thought of her victory.

  Now, the curtains. Take them down and wash them and, ‘ maybe, send some of them over to the shack for the tenants.

  “Undress the house to dress up the shack,” she thought, “...balance things up a bit.”

  The tenant and his wife had been glad to move into the small building. They had been afraid of losing the farm anyway. This way they could stay on and later, when they had learned more about it, they could get a farm of their own again. Dorry was over there, helping the tenant’s wife with her mending.

  She tried not to think of poor Mr. Mayhew, except to think, fleetingly, that there would have been room for him, too. It seemed too bad that it took a great upheaval to make people do the things they might have done quietly and happily in the ordinary course of living. But people never seem to do things unless they are pushed into it. This was not exactly what she meant. What she meant was...oh, well, she didn’t know how to put it into words and it was easier to move furniture around than to figure out the ways of...what...fate, providence? But it was a shame.

  While she was near the window, she looked at the figure on the porch.

  “Honey,” she said, “why don’t you rock yourself some more? Do you good.”

  The old woman sat, staring at the river bed. She hadn’t said a word all day.

  A little later, from the back of the house, Mrs. Jard heard the creaking of the rocker. Rather than apply herself to solving the problem of which curtains she would put in the spare room and which she would send to the tenants, she listened to the sound of the rocking chair.

  Isn’t it strange, she thought, how chance brings people together and puts them in the same house, how thin the thread is that holds people together? And it isn’t only through the door that they can leave. Another person can be in the same room, or on the porch, or even talking to you, and when that person looks away, thinking distant thoughts, it is as if that person was gone.

  She shook her head and looked at the curtains again.

  Or else people build little walls around themselves. They’re there—the presence, the little smiles, the little exchanges of things you do for each other tell you that they’re there, but there will be thoughts they have behind the walls they build around themselves and again it is as if they were gone.

  She looked toward the shack and the back acres of the small farm. Nothing but open space and, beyond the tilled acres, nothing but desert and river bed and mountains and bright light and white clouds.

  No little wall around me, she thought. No little wall at all. I like it that way. She nodded.

  She wondered if anybody in the whole world ever wondered whatever had happened to her. A silly thing to wonder, she thought, but sometimes you can’t help wondering, can you?

  Having reached a decision about the curtains, she returned to the front of the house. She had put off thinking about the professor and she thought she might as well settle that, too. It didn’t take very much thinking really, just enough to see herself leaving the farm early enough to catch the first bus, and to decide that that was what she was going to do, every morning, until the professor did not need her any more. That’s all there was to it.

  “Are you all right, honey?” she called as she stepped onto the porch.

  And because there are empty spaces that must be filled with conversation, she sat on the steps, her back against the pillar, and said:

  “All done.”

  Mrs. Fred sat quietly, her hands on the arms of the rocking chair, and it was a little while before Mrs. Jard realized that she was probably asleep.

  “Do her good, poor thing,” she thought, and she rested her arms on her knees and her head on her arms and closed her eyes.

  Many things had happened lately.

  As soon as she put her head down, the rhythmic creaking of the rocker started again. Turning her head in the crook of her elbow, she looked at the old girl. Maybe she would talk now. “D’you remember the...what’s their name...who used to live up the road?” she said hopefully.

  But there was no answer. The old woman kept on rocking herself
, her eyes on the horizon.

  “They moved away,” said Mrs. Jard.

  She doubted if Mrs. Fred remembered them, but if she did, she would like to know what had happened to them.

  “Tomorrow, when I come back from town,” she said, “I’m going to bring back some of your chickens. You’ll like that. We can put them over there. We could put them in with the ones that belong to the tenant, but you’ll probably like it better if we keep them by themselves.”

  Mrs. Jard knew that the old hens were not very good producers. But maybe the change, of living in the country, would improve them.

  “They might take a new interest, don’t you think?” she said.

  It seemed to Mrs. Jard that the old woman had suddenly started to rock a little faster. Maybe it meant that she agreed. If she stopped rocking, in answer to a question, it could mean: No. Faster: Yes. It could be very simple.

  She wondered what she could ask.

  “Do you want to go inside?”

  She watched the motion of the rocker and listened to its sound. There was no change at all. The old woman was just going back and forth, a wisp of hair gently brushing her neck as she rocked in the warm air.

  Mrs. Jard pushed herself up from the steps and went into the house. While she was inside the rocking stopped.

  When she came out again and sat down on the steps, with carrots and potatoes to prepare, the old woman was rocking again.

  15

  NOW called the shack, the building in which Dorry was sitting was the first adobe house erected on the farm acreage. Its windows were too small and set in not quite straight. The unfinished wood of the shelves and window-sills and doors showed its roughness through many coats of paint. The floor, of wide planks of often-washed pine, was uneven. The bed, tables and protruding clothes-closets took up most of the space of the single room. The rough stone sink and the kitchen stove were in a lean-to at the back of the shack.

  The inside surface of the adobe walls of the miniature house had never been plastered. The exposed edges of the adobe bricks had once been oiled; one upon the other, in slightly irregular rows, some askew in the stiffened ridges of moistened earth that had cemented them together, they were of the color of dark wood. Outside, in the air and light, the same rows of adobes were of a graying tan, eroded and weather-beaten. In rains, the earth that joined the adobes had run in spots, streaking the wall from eave to ground, receding from the edge of the long bricks, leaving them, in sunshine, rounded and worn, enduring as stone, brittle as bone, jutting from deep, shadowy grooves.

  A warm, pleasant, peaceful sort of wall to look at, thought Dorry.

  A house like this, not quite perfect, but whose imperfections came from hands that were only slightly less capable than they wanted to be, hands that were patient, yet impatient, a house like this would be a wonderful way to start out, she thought.

  It was not a wonderful way for the tenants, but only because they were starting out in something they did not know very much about. For her and Walter, a house like this, not on a farm, of course, but somewhere, anywhere in this valley, within sight of these mountains, would be wonderful.

  It is the sort of house, hand-made, within reach, that gives you the confidence to start out, to be away from others, by yourselves. The sort of house that makes you free, that frees you from everything so that you can attach yourself deeply and start growing on your own.

  Dorry frowned. Was this what she meant? If it was, why * were her thoughts so different than they had been a few days ago? She was still the girl with the suitcase, who was running away, telling those lies. Nothing had changed, except that she was now looking at an adobe wall, and it was soothing and comforting and made everything simple.

  She liked it best when the tenant’s wife was out. She had gone to the store, a long way down the road. Her husband, thin and worried, was doing a day’s work on another farm, pretending that he was only helping out.

  She liked it best when she was alone in the small, imperfect adobe house, imagining that pretty soon Walter would appear in the doorway. Perhaps, to start out with, they both would have jobs, then, later, only Walter. He was a good draftsman, and a town is always glad to get a good draftsman. She would sit in a little house, like this, doing the mending, like this.

  Usually she would have thought that thinking thoughts like these would be forcing her luck. But she wasn’t afraid of it any more. And it was not because anything had changed. Everything was the same. But it was as if a whole layer of troubles had been peeled away and she was feeling all new. Like an onion. Peel away the layer of old dead skin and there it is, all new and shiny.

  She smiled at the idea of the onion. That was what she had thought of. She couldn’t help it.

  It seemed incredible that her feeling this way had begun a few hours ago, when she was lying on the grass near the pool, the warm sun on her body. She could still feel her body tingling from the sunburn, and the cotton dress she wore was dry and rough against her back and her thighs.

  It had begun then, and what had happened since then, in Mrs. Fred’s ruined house, had been like something extraordinary and swift and brutal, something that you couldn’t describe fully by saying: “That poor man was killed by a falling timber during the storm.”

  Her hand stopped, the needle pulling on a taut thread, and she stared at the corner of the room, thinking about poor Mr. Mayhew and how suddenly he had stopped being a person, stopped existing. There were so many things she did not know...she did not know how to think about death, about such a death. Older people have learned things to say when people die. She couldn’t say anything; she could only sit and stare and feel as if something brutal and swift and awfully unfair had happened.

  Stringer had said:

  “Poor guy.”

  Mrs. Jard had cried and had said many things, some of them over and over again, like:

  “Oh, why did it have to happen!”

  She couldn’t say anything; she could only keep her arms around Mrs. Jard until her sobbing stopped, and think, with Stringer: Poor guy. Which, of course, wasn’t enough.

  She was the same girl in spite of all that had happened ever—love, death, running away, and the lies. But what had been swift and brutal and unfair for one person had been, in a strange way, kind and generous to her. A short while ago she had been lonely, tired, looking, searching for a place to stay, and now, needle pulling on a taut thread, thinking of how Mr. Mayhew had died, she was also thinking of what had happened to her.

  Mrs. Jard, that first morning, coming in, out of the kindness of her old heart, bringing her a cup of coffee. She couldn’t imagine her own mother doing the same thing for a strange girl under the same circumstances. Of course, the same circumstances would never exist...one strange girl, Dorry, had been enough for her mother. One strange girl, Dorry, strange because she had always been a disappointment, loving the wrong people, sad or gay at the wrong events, growing into the girl who had finally run away, growing, perhaps she should say, until she had grown herself right out the door.

  If only Walter were here, she thought. And she thought of him and of his tenderness in the ways of their love. She thought of him first as someone who needed all her love and all her thoughts. Then she thought of him by saying: “That man.” Because she wanted to think of him as the man whose love she needed, the man who could build a house, like this. If only that man were here, she thought. And she loved thinking it.

  She looked at her mending and took another stitch.

  Her father, in a way, was like Stringer. Only Stringer, to put it in a funny way, talked less and said more. No, it wasn’t right to make fun of her father. She felt sorry for him, sorry because, in a way, it was her mother who was the stranger. That time, in the woods, when her father had taken her in swimming with him—ten or eleven she was—in the wide part of the cool stream, they were goose-pimples all over; you would have thought, the way her mother acted, that they were all strangers.

  Funny she should think of
that again. There had been many other things. Poor dad. Poor guy. He was also, in a way, a little like Mr. Mayhew.

  Yesterday she had found a job. The first store she went to needed help. She was to start three days from now.

  She wanted very much to stay here. Mrs. Jard had said she could, but she wasn’t sure...she wasn’t sure that the kind old woman hadn’t offered more than she could take on.

  That was one of the things she wanted to think about while she did the mending. You want to think about something and other thoughts are always crowding in. The thought of the job kept coming up, nuzzling like a puppy, to be patted. So you think about it for a second and dismiss it because it is not very important, or if it is important you can’t get excited about it, because it is only something to help while you are waiting. And, instead, you think about the little farm, and your being there.

  It is just off the River road, between the winding road and the river bed. There is a picket fence along the road and a mailbox, a small mail-box on a post, a rickety post that leans way over, a rickety post with the bark still on it.

  You can see the red roof from the road. And when you get to the house you find that it wasn’t expecting you. Its back to the road, it faces the other way, looking over the slope that eases down to the river bed.

  The river bed is wide and dry, except when it runs full, after a rain. When it runs full it sometimes floods the slopes. After a few hours the water runs off and it is dry again, for months at a time, and a little outfit starts hauling sand and gravel again for the people in town who want sand and gravel.

  There are flowers around the farmhouse and cactus where the ragged driveway loops in front of the house. From the loop of the driveway a path leads to the shack. On either side of the path farm implements are hiding in the weeds. Some of them, old and rusted, look as if they hadn’t been used for a long time.