by Richard Ford
And his father looked at him as if somehow he were part of the cat they were both wondering about, and stuffed his handkerchief in his pocket and went back inside.
He watched the house take better shape in the night and felt satisfied with his old man’s memory, since his father was a planner and a conniver and thought the way he set the world up was the way it should go, even though it was wrong. The porch light was still off, and the night was sweet then and like velvet. He felt in his pocket and took out the card he’d bought in the afternoon and tried to make it out in the skimpy moon’s light and couldn’t and went back inside the Gin Den to sleep.
Part VI
Sam Newel
1
Mr. Lamb sat reconnoitering the sea of bottles as if he had come on them unexpectedly and was perplexed as to how to get to the other side. He elevated the Hadacol so he could read the label against the light, and grunted when he had digested what the bottle had to say, and set it down and reappraised the remainders. He suddenly snaked out his arm, plucked up the box of d-Con, and brought it straight up into his skinny field of vision. He pondered the label, turned the box over, and squinted at the tiny red printing until he slowly began to frown and his entire face contracted into a scowl of grave condemnation.
“What the shit is this here?” the old man said. At that Mrs. Lamb sat back in her chair, bent her chin around to look at Mr. Lamb, and returned to her radio, the PBX wires swooping out her ear directly into the dark back panel of the box. “Somebody’s trying to assassinate me,” Mr. Lamb bellowed. He shoved the box of d-Con out away from his face as if it were a hateful mirror. “What the hell does that say?” the old man said brashly, thrusting the box at him with the crucial panel already rotated. Mr. Lamb’s pink mouth opened as if he planned to receive the important information orally.
He studied the box, then began to read it out loud. “Warning: Do not swallow. May be fatal if taken internally. Keep out of the reach of children. Call a physician at once if ingested.’”
“That’s enough,” the old man said peremptorily, whacking his knuckles on the table so that all the bottles moved a little sideways and the vial of liver pills rollicked and rolled off the edge. “Landroo!” he shouted.
Landrieu hooked his head around the jamb and looked in suspiciously.
Mr. Lamb’s fierceness altered instantly to a tone of obsequious affability. “Are you trying to kill me, son?” He motioned to the box congenially with his thumb.
“No suh,” Landrieu said, as if it were an idea he’d simply never thought of, and disappeared out of the doorframe, his voice trailing off into the kitchen, where he seemed to be assiduously stirring something in a pan. “I ain’t tried to kill you today,” he said.
Mr. Lamb kept talking to the doorway as if Landrieu’s head were still in it. “Well, somebody put this roach powder amongst my nostrums,” he said thoughtfully, eying the box back and forth.
“I don’t know nothin about d-Con,” Landrieu said, invisible to everyone.
Mr. Lamb sighed and carefully reorbited his thumbs, working them slowly until he got the proper cadence, then spinning them at a vigorous pace. “Well, it says there not to in-gest none of it, and somebody musta had a notion I was planning to in-gest one of these cures when he brought them out here to me.”
Landrieu declined an answer.
Mrs. Lamb sat forward, unjacked the headset, and let the radio lash forth a fierce voice speaking Spanish at a terrible rate. She regarded them both boldly as though to indicate she was understanding it as well as any Mexican. The man kept yelling, “E-u-ro-pa in-cre-i’ble! E-u-ro-pa in-cre-í-ble!” and Mrs. Lamb continued promoting it all with a triumphant smile.
“I didn’t ask you to bring me no roach poison,” Mr. Lamb mumbled underneath the sound of the radio, his thumbs filing past each other at a faster and faster pace.
“I just brung what you said,” Landrieu said irritably through the open door. “Whatever’s laying on the window ledge’s what you said. That’s what I brung. I didn’t pay no attention to no roach medicine.”
“That’s two people tried to murder me inside of five minutes,” Mr. Lamb said dolefully.
“I ain’t tried to murder nobody,” Landrieu mumbled.
Mrs. Lamb’s radio began to sound brittle, filling every squinch in the house. The old man suddenly wheeled in his chair and fired a half-vengeful, half-supplicating look at Mrs. Lamb, who was enjoying having everyone listen at top volume. He wondered furtively if Mrs. Lamb might not be of Catalonian lineage.
“Would you turn that down, Fidelia,” Mr. Lamb said patiently, audible to no one but himself. Nevertheless, Mrs. Lamb shoved the jack back in the terminal and the sound disappeared like an invisible curtain snapped across the room, leaving a discomforting quiet. Landrieu was cooking ham in the frying pan, and the hot ham scent tainted the room with a queer nauseating sensation.
Mr. Lamb abstractedly appraised the army of bottles and tablet vials.
“Are you sick?” he said to the old man, wanting to quell the sick feeling in his own stomach.
Mr. Lamb looked up at him queerly and stuffed his hands together so that his thumbs had to stop rotating. “The golden age is gone,” he said morosely, and squeezed his knuckles in a tiny gesture of frustration.
“Maybe you just didn’t sleep well?” he said, smiling and hoping the old man was not about to make him the culprit of another plot.
“There’s never rest for the wicked, Newel,” the old man said, a vague larcenous flame in his eye.
“Why don’t you see a doctor?”
The old man cocked his head to get his ear back into alignment with the sound. “What’s that?” he said.
“See a doctor?” he said, feeling less confident.
Mr. Lamb stared at him keenly as though he’d just received an insult he didn’t intend to ignore. “Because I goddamn don’t want to, that’s why,” he said, his eyes tightening into hard little twigs. “Bastards swarm you like ants on a cupcake,” he said indignantly. “When they’re done sticking and cutting there ain’t nothin left to carry home. That’s why, by God.” The old man clenched his teeth and pressed his fists against the table as if he were intending to levitate himself.
“I agree,” he said.
“What’s that?” Mr. Lamb gave his defective ear a good whack with the heel of his hand.
He shook his head. “I don’t like doctors either.” His stomach felt somewhat better.
The old man glared at him as if he suspected a plot were knitting and he was the intended victim. “You don’t?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you?” The old man inclined his head toward his shoulder at a severe angle as if he thought he could hear a lot better that way.
“All they get to see is disease,” he said, “so that’s all they recognize.” He brought his hands out of his lap and laid them on the table in a way that modeled the old man’s. “When they don’t see it at first, they keep looking. They’re not trained to see health, and I don’t like them.”
The old man’s teeth dangled slightly in his mouth and he slapped them up with his tongue. “Is that right?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Lamb let his eyes drift slowly down onto the army of bottles as if he expected them to say something, and when they didn’t, pushed them all off the table straight onto the floor in one careless sweep of his arm. And the clatter was immense. Landrieu sprang into the room, and Mr. Lamb gave him a victimized look.
“What’d you do that for?” Landrieu shouted.
“What?”
“Push them off and scare me like that?” Landrieu made a jerky motion with the back of his hand to indicate all the bottles and vials newly arrived to the floor.
Mr. Lamb’s innocent expression transformed into a pale malevolence which signified Landrieu had just improvidently overdrawn his account. He swiveled slowly in his chair and let his gaze settle on Mrs. Lamb, who had not responded to the clatter at all. She was seated with
her back to everyone, gazing out the window into the dark, still listening, he supposed, to more Mexican travel advertisements.
Mr. Lamb turned his gaze back around as if he had just spoken with Mrs. Lamb and heard Landrieu implicated in a scurrilous falsehood. “She ain’t heard nothin,” he announced scornfully. “I ain’t. This fella here ain’t.” He batted his eyes hotly. “You the only one heard anything.”
Landrieu’s face got significantly harder. “I ain’t pickin up what nobody ain’t heard,” he said, and was gone.
The old man fingered his napkin, twisted one of the corners up into a firm projectile, and rammed it in his good ear, giving the ear a generous reaming. He turned one corner of his mouth up into an idiotic smile and forgot all about Landrieu. “You don’t like them gut plumbers, huh?” he said, twisting vigorously and hoisting his lip higher as if he were trying to hear through the reaming sounds going on inside his head.
“No sir,” he said, feeling vaguely guilty about Landrieu.
“Me neither,” the old man said, withdrawing the napkin and the waxy prong as if it were a nugget. “I feel worse every time I get close to one.”
Mr. Lamb rebalanced himself in his chair, leaned forward, and drew right up in his face. The old man’s feet accidentally disturbed some of the bottles and sent them rolling over the floorboards, and he quickly drew his mouth down into a dark conspiratorial frown, so that his eyebrows hung heavily over his little burnt-out eyes. “I’ll tell you something,” Mr. Lamb said, grabbing his wrist tightly. He could smell a brash antiseptic odor coming from the old man’s mouth. “I wouldn’t want to be a doctor on account of all the death,” he whispered, as if he’d broached an unspeakable subject. “I think when they get old, all the death comes back on ’em, and they can’t think of nothing but dying and bodies rotting and breaking apart the way they’ve seen people do all their lives.” He smiled craftily.
“Yes sir,” he said, wishing he could rescue his wrist. Mr. Lamb’s skull was visible beneath the jointure of two jaws, and from that advantage he looked like an animated skeleton.
“Mrs. Lamb’s nephew, little Ber-trand,” Mr. Lamb said privately, angling so he could eye his wife before going on, “he had him a job in Washington, D.C., examining titties and nothing else, as far as I can make out.” The old man’s eyes got hot, and he drew himself up so as to exhale more antiseptic breath directly in his face. “He worked for the government in the physicals department. Now, that’s a doctorin job I’d take to. Haw haw haw haw.” Mr. Lamb’s face became radish red and the veins in his temples fattened up like roots.
Landrieu paraded into the room, arms paved with dishes, wearing his apron and chef’s hat, but with eyes broadcasting indignation at everything in sight.
Mrs. Lamb spied him, switched off her radio, and made a way in through the bottles just as Landrieu was deploying the entrées out over the table. He swept back to the kitchen, returned with the tea pitcher, stood back reproachfully while Mrs. Lamb certified the table and nodded, then disappeared, letting the pantry door swing closed behind him.
“Me and Newel’s going fishing tomorrow,” Mr. Lamb announced, shoveling cream corn into his mouth as fast as he could work the spoon.
Mrs. Lamb regarded him sternly, as though to mark the fact that something had finally been uncovered for him to do.
“Ain’t that right, Newel?” the old man said, chewing furiously,
“Sounds wonderful,” he said, since it seemed superior to fighting all morning, then spending the rest of the day sulking in the Gin Den out of sight.
“Good,” Mr. Lamb reveled, paring off a piece of ham and dropping it directly into the corn. Mrs. Lamb was having one biscuit with drippings and another one with molasses poured in a big puddle on her plate mixed with butter so the mixture became a thick yellow paste. Mr. Lamb retrieved his ham, and went on smothering whatever was not already covered with cream corn.
“Mrs. Lamb’s a light eater,” the old man said, chewing. “Soon as it gets light, she starts eatin.”
Mrs. Lamb bent one elbow on the table and watched the old man while she chewed, as if he were an old clown that no longer amused her. Which caused the old man to waltz around in his chair and roam his eyes all over the walls.
He thought he might just change subjects and give the old man a relief. “What caused that burnt spot out behind the house?” He peered at them both at once.
“Haw!” the old man brayed, and looked supremely pleased to hear this particular subject brought up.
Mrs. Lamb gave her husband a poisonous look and rared forward over her plate as if he were about to utter a perfidy she was deadly set on suppressing.
He thought right away of renouncing the subject and going on to something less controversial, except he had somehow lost control of everything and simply had to sit while whoever did have control decided how to exercise it. There was something queer, he saw, about the old man whinnying the very moment the burnt patch was mentioned, as if the subject were a scandal to Mrs. Lamb and therefore absolutely risible to him.
Mr. Lamb squeezed tightly back in his chair, scuttled his shoes noisily against the table feet, and stiffed his arms on the apron of the table as if he meant to catapult himself onto the tabletop by means of an invisible spring attached to his seat. “That burnt spot,” he snorted, “was a house.” He eyed Mrs. Lamb cagily, his eyes sharpened. He relaxed his arms and sank back in his seat.
“My cousin used to live there,” Mrs. Lamb said loftily, as though she’d been bullied into the admission. She very carefully set down her fork, situated both hands behind her plate, and regarded Mr. Lamb coldly.
“Her cousin, John,” Mr. Lamb announced, smiling villainously, “was a comical old prune, to say the least.” He snuffed his nose like a man trying to work back a sneeze. “He had some queer habits.”
He wished someone would bring out another subject.
Mrs. Lamb was in the process of staring a hole in Mr. Lamb’s forehead, but the old man seemed to be steadily freeing himself of all outside influences, and smiling and working his teeth up and down against his gums.
“Ol John used to have him a little wood boat out on the lee hip—The devil lived here forty-five years,” the old man interrupted himself. “And before there was all the nigger trouble, when the water got down he used to get in his boat and putt-putt over to Mississippi and go to the baseball. The niggers had ’em a sandlot over at Stovall. In fact, T.V.A. Landrieu was one of their famous stars till he got too damn old.” The old man let his eyes roam to the pantry, gave Mrs. Lamb another taunting look, and curled his upper lip a little more, his eyelashes a-flutter. “Anyway, he’d go over in the evening and sit up in the grandstand and yell the awfulest nastiest blasphemies he could think of, at anybody that was on the field. He’d just give ’em all a terrible time and be drunker’n Cooter Brown by the middle of the first inning. And every time one of them devils would go to throw the ball, he’d yell, ‘Peee-uuuuuu, you stink,’ and start fanning the air with his little umpire’s cap like there was something smelled bad where he was. And sometimes they’d just have to quit, because John was up there making such a ruckus. He had a wood leg, you see, and whenever they’d send some big powerful bluegum up there to shush him, he’d pull out his old pig bleeder and stob it right in that leg and grin like he was so unmindful of stobbing things that he’d just stob himself, and the niggers all went shy of him after that. And I can’t say as I blame them, either. They didn’t feel too good about nobody that went around stobbing theirselves. They didn’t figure that was quite natural.” Mr. Lamb beamed and right away started drumming his fingers as if he was hoping somebody would ask him another question so he could give another enthralling answer.
Mrs. Lamb rose quietly and walked back into the kitchen and began speaking mutedly to Landrieu about going to Helena the next day.
“See now, I’ll tell you,” the old man whispered, grinning at him evilly as soon as Mrs. Lamb had let the door swing to, craning over the
table in a craven conspirator’s posture and grasping at some part of his available anatomy and getting hold of a wrist before he could snake it away. “Johnny Carter was a half-wit,” Mr. Lamb said in a stage whisper he knew Mrs. Lamb could hear through twenty doors, which made him get itchy in his seat. The old man got a faster hold on his wrist. “Another one of his nitwit tricks was to walk in somebody’s store, pull a little bullfrog out of his pocket, and eat it. Right in front of ladies and little girls, just pop it in his mouth like a charm and chew it up, then bust out laughing. And of course,” the old man said, becoming magisterial, “all them women delivered their what-fors to me, cause they knew he was Fidelia’s kin and knew he lived out here, though that’s all they knew. But it wasn’t nothing I could do about, cause he wasn’t crazy enough to send to Whitfield, and I think if I’da ever tried, he would’ve killed me and everybody else he could of got his hands on, the same way he killed them Choctaws.” The old man relaxed his wrist and sank into a sober expression, as if at the bottom of all the foolery there lay still something altogether enigmatic and hard. Mr. Lamb’s mouth gapped open a quarter inch and his eyes got momentarily abstracted.
“How come he stayed so long?” he said, hoping the old man would say something about the Choctaws without his having to ask it directly.
The old man’s eyes stayed gazing at some point on the white pantry door as if he were envisioning something he absolutely could not reason with.
“Well,” the old man said lamentably. “He had him some difficulties. He married a little Choctaw gal up in Pontotoc County in 1925, and the wench died giving birth. And before he could do anything, a bunch of her people come and run off with the baby, which was healthy, and took it to where they was living in Rough Edge, Mississippi, amongst a bunch of lowlifes, and let it be said they wasn’t going to give it up, cause they didn’t care too much for John and blamed him for the gal’s dying. So he went up there to where they were, right in the town of Rough Edge, and stood on the front step, and said he’d come to get his baby, since it was his. And they said for him to go jump in the pond, that he wasn’t even going to get to see the baby. And I guess”—Mr. Lamb’s eyes seemed to be trying to see the past—“he must have just sheered a bolt, cause he went back down to Pontotoc and got his shotgun and come back and shot four of them dead as a Indian could ever expect to be, right out on the porch, took that baby and delivered it back to his daddy’s house in Pontotoc, and the next thing I knew he was out on this porch. And I just let him stay on, cause there wasn’t nothing else he could do. I figured he wasn’t too dangerous as long as he wasn’t around no Indians. And he stayed forty-five years, right there in that little house.”
