A Piece of My Heart

by Richard Ford

  He lay listening to drops pilch outside the shed. In a little while the other jeep went banging around the house, the old man yelling something at Landrieu which Landrieu didn’t answer back. When the jeep got even with the shed the old man pulled up and sat a time in silence then finally fumed, “Goddamn it, get your fat ass out of the bed before I start Landrieu digging a grave for you.” Mr. Lamb fired the jeep and barged off toward the lake. And he lay in bed staring up in the metallic light, thinking about Robard and about nothing. In a while he heard Robard drive slowly back through the yard and go off in the other direction, the jeep hitting every third stroke. Elinor came to the door and stopped and looked in and sniffed, then passed by. And he lay silently, satisfied to collaborate with everything by sounds, lying bare in the cool without gawking into Mr. Lamb’s blistered old eye sockets, justifying himself a mile a minute.

  Robard had caked his blankets back on his cot as carefully as if he thought he was something else besides cash help, and the idea that Robard miscalculated his circumstances pestered him and made him think that locked up behind Robard’s stingy mouth was a little fugitive terror that wanted everything just so and couldn’t keep still till he had it that way. And he couldn’t stop himself from thinking Robard was going to let him down sometime on account of it, on account, he thought, of just being fastidious. Though he admired him for that very thing, for keeping a kind of life apart and private, something he himself had never been lucky enough to cultivate, so that everything he thought he ended up having to say out loud.

  Landrieu suddenly appeared in the doorway and batted the tin with his spatula, squinting to see inside without actually opening the door. “You better get up,” he shouted, twisting his face into a scowl. He had on his chintz chef’s hat.

  “Who says?” He stayed out on the sheet just to antagonize Landrieu.

  “She in there waitin,” Landrieu said, and disappeared. He could hear Landrieu pounding back up the steps.

  He felt gratified at the prospect of sitting down to eat without the old man there to fence at him. He got off the bed onto the scaly concrete and stood looking out toward the trees where the morning light was waxy through the trees. He wondered about just how it would be when Robard let him down, and whether it would ever make any difference to either of them, in any way whatsoever.

  He got dressed and hopped across the wet yard and up the steps into the house. Landrieu was in the kitchen overseeing four strips of bacon in an enormous skillet of grease, and refused to look up.

  Mrs. Lamb was installed at the low end of the table wearing a man’s red plaid shirt that disagreed with the red in her hair. She glanced up at him and took off a pair of half bifocals fastened to a piece of string around her neck. She was reading a Farmer’s Almanac, her back to the kitchen.

  “Predicts rain today,” she said smugly, as though she had found an amusing flaw in the book’s accuracy. She gave off a fresh lilac scent and had an old brown sachet sack stuffed down the front of her hunting shirt.

  “Can’t fault it too much,” he said, smiling and trying to appear amiable.

  Landrieu entered with a tulip glass of orange juice, set it in front of him and left.

  “It also remarks,” she said, redeploying her glasses over her nose, “that it rained this day one hundred years ago, and that the rain caused a sinister flooding to occur in Mississippi—where this island is located—and that two hundred croppers washed out of their houses.” She pushed her glasses higher up onto her nose and peered at him over the rims, as if there were a gravity involved in what she’d said that anyone in a hundred miles should be able to grasp.

  Mrs. Lamb’s right eye, though the same yellowish hazel color as the left, was not, he could see, a working eye in the ordinary sense, and owned a slightly mesmerized cast.

  “Do you suppose history runs to cycles?” she said, observing him with the same interest he’d seen Mr. Lamb bestow on the infected well

  “No.”

  “Neither do I,” she said imperiously. “Gone is gone to me. Mark Lamb has a difficult time believing it.”

  “Anything you’re attached to is hard to give up,” he said.

  Mrs. Lamb frowned at the almanac again as if it were the bearer of faulty information.

  “Where’s Mr. Lamb gone?” he said.

  “He’s taken his Willys and gone across,” she said, her large rouged mouth turning down as though the remotest thought of Gaspareau had just awakened in her mind. “People were supposed to come this morning to hunt turkeys, but no one’s arrived. Mark thinks they aren’t coming. He thinks it’s terribly hard to find the island,” she said gravely, setting her almanac down. “He worries when people don’t come when they’re supposed to, so he’s over there calling Oxford, afraid they’ve all gotten lost. He conceives of Arkansas as another country where people need his special guidance to find their way.”

  “I didn’t think he wanted people to find it,” he said.

  “No,” she said deliberately. Landrieu installed a plate of scrambled eggs and two biscuits in front of her and an oval platter containing the bacon in the center of the table. “Mark doesn’t want the wrong people to find it. He does want Coach Wright to find it, and he does want Julius Henley, your friend Beebe’s uncle, to find it. He has it in his mind because it doesn’t appear on the Corps of Engineers’ map, it has ceased to exist for the rest of the world.”

  T.V.A. entered with another plate of eggs and biscuits, put it down, and stood while Mrs. Lamb scrutinized the table for any signs of misrule, nodded, and returned him to the kitchen.

  The house was quiet, and he could hear the tinkle of Mrs. Lamb’s fork against her plate.

  “Do you approve of it down here, Mr. Newel?” she said.

  “Yes ma’am,” he said.

  She picked up a biscuit and examined its sticky interior as if she expected to dislodge something hidden. She looked up thoughtfully. “What are your plans, Mr. Newel?” she said.

  “Which plans?”

  “You’re a man with several plans, then,” she said, inclining her head gently toward him.

  He smiled, trying to guess if she was going to be sympathetic. “All divergent,” he said.

  She sighed. “Everyone’s plans are diverging now. There’s no reason yours should be different. Beebe Henley’s diverge to the slightest mention of them.” She set her biscuit back on her plate. “You’re in the law?”

  “Next month, I hope.”

  She nodded, sliced a strip of fat off the rind of bacon, and put it in her mouth. “What are your plans for Beebe Henley?” she said in the same unmolesting tone.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and wondered just what plans he did have. “There’s some chance I don’t have any.” He looked up uncomfortably.

  Mrs. Lamb began carefully aligning her clean silverware at the edge of the table, swallowed the last morsel of bacon fat, and settled her gaze on him. “What are you doing here on my island?” she said coldly.

  He remembered the old lady’s tough juridical frown freezing every available molecule between himself and Robard like they were two rarees about to sell Mr. Lamb an interest in the Helena Bridge. Mrs. Lamb’s good hazel eye grew considerably smaller and darker, and she levered her chin on the tip of her thumb and stared at him until he began to feel a flapping need of something else to attach his own eyes to. His gaze rose upward, then fell fugitively onto the two maps, showing the island from the air, and not showing it at all.

  “People come down here, customarily,” she said casually, “to hunt or to fish or to rusticate. Some come down here just to visit with the Lambs.” She paused. “Under which category ought I to entertain you?” She kept her chin balanced on the tip of her thumb, not moving a flicker.

  “It’s difficult to express,” he said, trying to separate his gaze from the maps and order it back down into the old lady’s immediate presence. “It would take a lot of patience,” he said.

  He could hear the little jeep slamming int
o the yard behind a terrible fury.

  “I have great reservoirs,” she said, looking annoyed. “When I was forty-five years old, Mark and I were living on this island, and I developed tuberculosis on account of the dampness, and had to be taken to Memphis in rather a hurry. And the way doctors treated tuberculosis at that time was to fill the afflicted lung with glass marbles and leave you stay a few months until the lung simply regenerated itself by forbearance.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said.

  “It was awkward,” she said coldly. “But I developed great patience. And I think I have adequate patience to listen to anything you could ever tell me in your entire life.” She regarded him in an unfriendly way.

  Someone’s feet began pounding the outside stairs and kicking every door on the way. Mrs. Lamb’s eyebrows rose to an aristocratic peak, and she raised her chin slightly and inclined her head in anticipation of an abrupt entry. He got his eyes solidly stationed on his plate and began eating eggs with as much application as he could rouse.

  Mr. Lamb suddenly burst through the pantry door, red as a tomato, continued through the room straight into the sitting room, and disappeared around the corner without a word. He was wearing rubber boots that came to below his knees and a long canvas coat that reached the tops of the boots, giving him the appearance of a small bell with a long clapper. “Shit!” he yelled where no one could see him. “Son-of-a-bitch.”

  Mrs. Lamb’s eyebrows re-arched themselves firmly, and she thrust her lower lip over her upper and set her hands on the table, waiting for Mr. Lamb to emerge from wherever he was fuming and cursing and banging. He felt at that moment like he would like nothing in the world as much as he would like to leave, and just hoped the old man hadn’t seen him on his way through. Mrs. Lamb, however, ruled everything with silence and with the expectation that Mr. Lamb was about to return and wouldn’t like it if anything had changed from when he’d seen it before. He set down his fork as unobtrusively as possible, drew in his legs, and let his hands come to rest in his lap.

  “Sons of bitches, sons of bitches,” Mr. Lamb gurgled, appearing starkly around the corner in his sock feet, without the coat, and wearing a pair of gallused canvas pants and the same red shirt with the mallards on the collar. He glared at both of them and took a strangle grip on the back slat of his chair, his face overcome by red.

  “What has happened, Mark?” Mrs. Lamb said patiently.

  “The bastards ain’t coming,” the old man seethed. “I called both of them. And both of them said they weren’t coming. Said they was too goddamned tied up working or some stupid business like that. Julius said he had to be in court and Lonnie Wright said he had to fly to Pennsylvania to pay some nigger to play at Ole Miss. If that don’t beat anything I ever heard of. Neither one of them said a thing beforehand. Sons of bitches didn’t even intend to call me.” His face blackened.

  “Did they say they were coming?” Mrs. Lamb said.

  “Hell, yes. They come every year, don’t they?” Mr. Lamb glared at her as if he’d sensed betrayal. “They don’t have to say they’re comin, they just damn well are. Except the bastards ain’t, goddamn it.” The old man’s eyes snapped at him unexpectedly as if he were unquestionably to blame for everything, but was simply too despicable to look at for more than an instant at a time.

  “Well, Mark, sit down,” Mrs. Lamb said softly.

  “What the hell for?” the old man snarled. “Where has common decency gone to? I’d like to know that.” He glowered around the room as if decency were there someplace but wouldn’t let itself be seen. “What the hell business has work got coming into strife with turkey season? I’d like to know that, too.” Two tiny wads of white spit sproated in the crannies of Mr. Lamb’s mouth, threatening to rupture.

  “Wipe your mouth, Mark,” Mrs. Lamb said.

  The old man sawed his shirt sleeve across his mouth and plunked himself at the head of the table and eyed the two of them accusingly. His hair was tufted into two unruly swipes that gave him a wild look, lowering at the end of the table like a thwarted demon.

  The room got very quiet suddenly, and he thought maybe this was the time. But the old man was holding everybody captive and was not about to commute a sentence without having a terrible penalty first.

  Mrs. Lamb sighed and looked sympathetically at her husband, while Mr. Lamb gradually sank into a profounder gloom. The old man bit off a sizable chunk of his thumbnail and crunched it between his teeth.

  “Mark,” Mrs. Lamb said, “you ought not gnaw your nails. All those little nails collect in your appendix and then you have to have it removed. When they took mine out it was chock full of little crescent slivers, and I haven’t bitten mine since.”

  “I don’t know why,” he growled. “You ain’t got no appendix to worry about, you might as well gnaw what you please.”

  She looked at Mr. Lamb casually and the old man seemed to take a certain pleasure in mocking her, though it quickly vanished and he sank back into his evil. Landrieu, who was sitting in the kitchen slicing boiled eggs, made a firm entry into the wall of an egg and plopped the white and the yolk into two crockery bowls.

  “I just don’t know,” the old man said, jamming his little hands together and starting one thumb into orbit around the other, becoming momentarily engrossed as though it was no small task to keep them both going at once. “First my well goes queer, which it had never been known to do in fifty years. Then the turkey season fouls up, then the goddamn lease is coming up.” The old man squinted at him as if he were considering including him as a fourth calamity. “There’s something’s wrong, ain’t it, Newel?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, hoping he wouldn’t have to say it again.

  “Well, I know,” Mr. Lamb fumed. “Cept I don’t know what the hell it is wrong. Things have just gone sour as hell.”

  The old man sank lower into his chair until his face was six inches above the top of the table, and the entire house was still, except the eaves dripping and Landrieu’s chair squeezing as he crept closer to his bowls. The air was warm and weighted and pressed on everything with a powerful force.

  Mrs. Lamb got up, switched off the overhead, and strolled into the sitting room, leaving them in a gray light. She moved her chair beside the radio and began fanning herself with a cardboard church fan decorated with a sepia picture of Niagara Falls. He felt a hot drop of sweat on his temple, while the old man stared morosely into space.

  “I didn’t know you leased it,” he said, unable to stay quiet.

  “I ought not,” Mr. Lamb lamented. Mrs. Lamb fanned herself, smoothing the flecks of hair away from her forehead. “I ought to own the goddamned place,” he said. “I’ve had it fifty years this August. I give it to Mrs. Lamb”—he sprung his thumb back at her—“for her birthday and a wedding present both. I didn’t think I’d live fifty years, nor her either one.”

  “Who owns it?”

  The old man pinched his mouth with his fingers and let his eyes almost close. “Chicago Pulp and Paper owns the deed,” he said quickly.

  “But won’t they renew?”

  “I suppose they will,” the old man said sternly.

  “So they’re not going to make you leave.”

  “I suppose not.” Mr. Lamb sat staring abstractedly at the open kitchen door. Landrieu seemed to feel himself being watched and backed his chair out of sight.

  “So it’s not so bad,” he said.

  The old man batted his eyes hotly. “I’m the one says what’s bad and what ain’t. I don’t like them greasy dagos coming down here in their sorry-ass airplane, making me haul them around like I was a bus driver. It’s demeaning.” His eyes flamed again. “They come flying down here every five years, pissin around, messing in my business, marking my trees like I hadn’t been here fifty years. Not one of them was there when I took the land out, they’re all new. And I’ve got just about a good mind to plow up that airstrip they built and let them land their plane in the woods and be rid of them.” The old man ground hi
s hands together as if they were two warty slabs of bark.

  “It seems more important, though, that you keep it,” he said, trying to seem reasonable. “You could get a lawyer and have him show it to them, and you and Mrs. Lamb wouldn’t have to even be here.”

  “A lawyer,” he said indignantly. “I said I done made my will. You’re trying to drum you up a little advance, are you, Newel?”

  “I’m not a lawyer,” he said.

  “The hell you’re not,” the old man said, and gaveled the table with his fist, his voice elevating with each succeeding word, so that the spider veins in his face thickened and turned blue. “But I’ll tell you this much. I’ll be there when them dagos step out of that airplane, and I won’t need a paid-to-talk mouth to cloud up my issues, either.”

  “That’s fine,” he said, standing and starting toward the kitchen.

  Mr. Lamb leered at him. “You don’t understand that, do you, Newel?” he said. “Why I don’t like them wops coming in here in their airplane piss-nosing around on my land, even if it’s them that owns it?”

  “I think I do,” he said, stopping in the pantry door.

  “No, you don’t!” the old man shouted. “It’s an in-dignity to suffer their presence on this island, like this was some part of De-troit or one of them other hellish places. It’s an in-dignity to stand it. That’s something they don’t teach you anymore. You don’t know nothing about dignity. I’m just afraid you don’t.”

  “I was just trying to talk about priorities,” he said quietly. “But maybe you’re right.”

  “Priorities be goddamned,” Mr. Lamb shouted, slamming both his fists on the oilcloth and glaring out of an enraged fury. “Piss on priorities and all that other horse shit. We’re talking about dignity and about Mrs. Lamb’s wedding present, by holy God.”

  “I misunderstood,” he said, and disappeared out the door.

  “I guess you did,” the old man shouted. “I guess you did, too.”

  2

  When he was twelve he had gone with his father and his mother to Biloxi, and they had stayed on the beach at a large white hotel called the Buena Vista that had deep shady verandas and rows of white cottages in the back under the banana trees. His father went away in the day and came back in the evening, until Saturday when they went to visit a man his father had known in New Orleans, named Peewee McMorris, who had worked on oil derricks until another man had dropped an orange on his head accidentally from the top of the derrick, and after that he never worked again and was permanently stiff in his left leg and stayed in bed in his shabby pink cottage in the palmettos behind Keesler Air Force Base near the VA. His wife’s name was Josephine, and when they arrived she made them all take tall drinks and took them out to visit Peewee, who was sitting on a nylon chaise in the back yard, putting down sprigs of St Augustine grass from his chair, out of a peach basket he had beside him. Peewee was a small knuckly man with a long Italian jaw and was very glad to have a drink in the hot afternoon. When he had taken his first long sip of whiskey, he smiled at him and asked him if he wanted to see a trick. When he said yes, he would, Peewee jimmied himself off the chaise longue and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and walked stiff-legged to the corner of the house to where Josephine had planted azaleas and hydrangeas to hide the water meter. Inside the largest azalea bush, which was blooming with violent pink petals, Peewee found a large wasp nest and pointed for him to see. He was afraid of wasps and did not like it, if that was to be the trick, and stood back Peewee laughed, and when the last wasp had landed on the broad crusty hive and none were left flying around that he could see, he carefully put his hand into the nest and let the wasps light on him and walk around on his knuckly skin and try their stingers on his flesh, until it seemed they would reach the bone. Peewee, without shaking, began to laugh and laugh, and said that since the man had dropped the orange on his head he had not been able to feel pain in many parts of his body, and that his hand was one of the parts, and that a wasp could sting him until he was blue in the face and that it would not hurt. He drew back his hand with one wasp still clinging to his middle finger, his stinger sunk in Peewee’s flesh. And Peewee laughed and flicked the wasp away like he would a match and left the stinger in place inside his hand. When he had looked at Peewee’s hand for a long time, dangling beside his highball glass on the thick mat of St. Augustine, he told his mother he would like to go for a swim in the gulf before he went to bed. And when he had stood in the brown brackish gulf water for a long time and looked out along the hotel’s whitewashed pier at the old men dipping crab nets down toward the shallow water, he could see the blue man of wars floating in on the tide, riding the lazy surf toward the beach, and he wondered if they would sting him if he mingled his legs among their straggling tentacles.