Miss Elouise felt that a cageful of little black ugly birds had suddenly been released and that they beat their wings against her heart. She remembered the loneliness and how the loneliness had died and been replaced with something good and clean and fine and built of every lovely dream in all the world.
She got off the bus at the next stop and went home and thought all that day and into the night. Very late into the night . . .
Then, the birds went away.
She smiled, as she had been smiling for these three years, and, when the morning came again, she made a telephone call. Retirement—for Miss Elouise? Why certainly she was due it, but—
She worked busily as a housewife, packing, moving, setting straight the vacant room, telling her goodbyes.
It took time. But not much, really, and she worked so fast and so hard she had little time to think. The days flew.
And then it was done.
And, smiling, she sat one morning in new air, on a new corner two blocks from her new home, and she waited for the bus.
And presently, as lovers will, her lover came to her.
Free Dirt
No fowl had ever looked so posthumous. Its bones lay stacked to one side of the plate like kindling: white, dry and naked in the soft light of the restaurant. Bones only, with every shard and filament of meat stripped methodically off. Otherwise, the plate was a vast glistening plain.
The other, smaller dishes and bowls were equally virginal. They shone fiercely against one another. And all a pale cream color fixed upon the snowy white of a tablecloth unstained by gravies and unspotted by coffee and free from the stigmata of breadcrumbs, cigarette ash and fingernail lint.
Only the dead fowl’s bones and the stippled traceries of hardened red gelatine clinging timidly to the bottom of a dessert cup gave evidence that these ruins had once been a dinner.
Mr. Aorta, not a small man, permitted a mild belch, folded the newspaper he had found on the chair, inspected his vest for food leavings and then made his way briskly to the cashier.
The old woman glanced at his check.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“All righty,” Mr. Aorta said and removed from his hip pocket a large black wallet. He opened it casually, whistling The Seven Joys of Mary through the space provided by his two front teeth.
The melody stopped, abruptly. Mr. Aorta looked concerned. He peered into his wallet, then began removing things; presently its entire contents were spread out.
He frowned.
“What seems to be the difficulty, sir?”
“Oh, no difficulty,” the fat man said, “exactly.” Though the wallet was manifestly empty, he flapped its sides apart, held it upside down and continued to shake it, suggesting the picture of a hydrophobic bat suddenly seized in mid-air.
Mr. Aorta smiled a weak harassed smile and proceeded to empty all of his fourteen separate pockets. In a time the counter was piled high with miscellany.
“Well!” he said impatiently. “What nonsense! What bother! Do you know what’s happened? My wife’s gone off and forgotten to leave me any change! Heigh-ho, well—my name is James Brockelhurst: I’m with the Pliofilm Corporation. I generally don’t eat out, and—here, no, I insist. This is embarrassing for you as well as for myself. I insist upon leaving my card. If you will retain it, I shall return tomorrow evening at this time and reimburse you.”
Mr. Aorta shoved the pasteboard into the cashier’s hands, shook his head, shoveled the residue back into his pockets and, plucking a toothpick from a box, left the restaurant.
He was quite pleased with himself—an invariable reaction to the acquisition of something for nothing in return. It had all gone smoothly, and what a delightful meal!
He strolled in the direction of the streetcar stop, casting occasional licentious glances at undressed mannequins in department store windows.
The prolonged fumbling for his car token worked as efficiently as ever. (Get in the middle of the crowd, look bewildered, inconspicuous, search your pockets earnestly, the while edging from the vision of the conductor—then, take a far seat and read a newspaper.) In four years’ traveling time, Mr. Aorta computed he had saved a total of $211.20.
The electric’s ancient list did not jar his warm feeling of serenity. He studied the amusements briefly, then went to work on the current puzzle, whose prize ran into the thousands. Thousands of dollars, actually for nothing. Something for nothing. Mr. Aorta loved puzzles.
But the fine print made reading impossible.
Mr. Aorta glanced at the elderly woman standing near his seat; then, because the woman’s eyes were full of tired pleading and insinuation, he refocused out the wire crosshatch windows.
What he saw caused his heart to throb. The section of town was one he passed every day, so it was a wonder he’d not noticed it before—though generally there was little provocation to sightsee on what was irreverently called “Death Row”—a dreary round of mortuaries, columbariums, crematories and the like, all crowded into a five-block area.
He yanked the stop-signal, hurried to the rear of the streetcar and depressed the exit plate. In a few moments he had walked to what he’d seen.
It was a sign, artlessly lettered though spelled correctly enough. It was not new, for the white paint had swollen and cracked and the rusted nails had dripped trails of dirty orange over the face of it.
The sign read:
FREE DIRT
Apply Within
Lilyvale Cemetery
and was posted upon the moldering green of a woodboard wall.
Now Mr. Aorta felt a familiar sensation come over him. It happened whenever he encountered the word Free—a magic word that did strange and wonderful things to his metabolism.
Free. What was the meaning, the essence of free? Why, something for nothing. And to get something for nothing was Mr. Aorta’s chiefest pleasure in this mortal life.
The fact that it was dirt which was being offered Free did not oppress him. He seldom gave more than a fleeting thought to these things; for, he reasoned, nothing is without its use.
The other, subtler circumstances surrounding the sign scarcely occurred to him: why the dirt was being offered, where free dirt from a cemetery would logically come from; et cetera. In this connection he considered only the probable richness of the soil, for reasons he did not care to speculate upon.
Mr. Aorta’s solitary hesitation encircled such problems as: Was this offer an honest one, without strings where he would have to buy something? Was there a limit on how much he could take home? If not, what would be the best method of transporting it?
Petty problems: all solvable.
Mr. Aorta did something inwardly that resembled a smile, looked about and finally located the entrance to the Lilyvale Cemetery.
These desolate grounds, which had once accommodated a twine factory, an upholstering firm and an outlet for ladies’ shoes, now lay swathed in a miasmic vapor—accreditable, in the absence of nearby bogs, to a profusion of windward smokestacks. The blistered hummocks, peaked with crosses, slabs and stones, loomed gray and sad in the gloaming: withal, a place purely delightful to describe, and a pity it cannot be—for how it looked there that evening has little to do with the fat man and what was to become of him.
Important only that it was a place full of dead people on their backs under ground, moldering and moldered.
Mr. Aorta hurried because he despised to waste, along with everything else, time. It was not long before he had encountered the proper party and had this sort of conversation:
“I understand you’re offering free dirt.”
“That’s right.”
“How much may one have?”
“Much as one wants.”
“On what days?”
“Any days; most likely there’ll always be some fresh.”
Mr. Aorta sighed in the manner of one who has just acquired a lifetime inheritance or a measured checking account. He then made an appointment for the following Saturday and went home to ruminate
agreeable ruminations.
At a quarter past nine that night he hit upon an excellent use to which the dirt might be put.
His back yard, an ochre waste, lay chunked and dry, a barren stretch repulsive to all but the grossest weeds. A tree had once flourished there, in better days, a haven for suburbanite birds, but then the birds disappeared for no good reason except that this was when Mr. Aorta moved into the house, and the tree became an ugly naked thing.
No children played in this yard.
Mr. Aorta was intrigued. Who could say? Perhaps something might be made to grow! He had long ago written an enterprising firm for free samples of seeds, and received enough to feed an army. But the first experiments had shriveled into hard useless pips and, seized by lassitude, Mr. Aorta had shelved the project. Now . . .
A neighbor named Joseph William Santucci permitted himself to be intimidated. He lent his old Reo truck, and after a few hours the first load of dirt had arrived and been shoveled into a tidy mound. It looked beautiful to Mr. Aorta, whose passion overcompensated for his weariness with the task. The second load followed, and the third, and the fourth, and it was dark as a coalbin out when the very last was dumped.
Mr. Aorta returned the truck and fell into an exhausted, though not unpleasant, sleep.
The next day was heralded by the distant clangor of church bells and the chink-chink of Mr. Aorta’s spade, leveling the displaced graveyard soil, distributing it and grinding it in with the crusty earth. It had a continental look, this new dirt: swarthy, it seemed, black and saturnine: not at all dry, though the sun was already quite hot.
Soon the greater portion of the yard was covered, and Mr. Aorta returned to his sitting room.
He turned on the radio in time to identify a popular song, marked his discovery on a post card and mailed this away, confident that he would receive either a toaster or a set of nylon hose for his trouble.
Then he wrapped four bundles containing, respectively: a can of vitamin capsules, half of them gone; a half-tin of coffee; a half-full bottle of spot remover; and a box of soap flakes with most of the soap flakes missing. These he mailed, each with a note curtly expressing his total dissatisfaction, to the companies that had offered them to him on a money-back guarantee.
Now it was dinnertime, and Mr. Aorta beamed in anticipation. He sat down to a meal of sundry delicacies such as anchovies, sardines, mushrooms, caviar, olives and pearl onions. It was not, however, that he enjoyed this type of food for any aesthetic reasons: only that it had all come in packages small enough to be slipped into one’s pocket without attracting the attention of busy grocers.
Mr. Aorta cleaned his plates so thoroughly no cat would care to lick them; the empty tins also looked new and bright: even their lids gleamed iridescently.
Mr. Aorta glanced at his checkbook balance, grinned indecently, and went to look out the back window.
The moon was cold upon the yard. Its rays passed over the high fence Mr. Aorta had constructed from free rocks, and splashed moodily onto the now black earth.
Mr. Aorta thought a bit, put away his checkbook and got out the boxes containing the garden seeds.
They were good as new.
Joseph William Santucci’s truck was in use every Saturday thereafter for five weeks. This good man watched curiously as his neighbor returned each time with more dirt and yet more, and he made several remarks to his wife about the oddness of it all, but she could not bear even to talk about Mr. Aorta.
“He’s robbed us blind,” she said. “Look! He wears your old clothes, he uses my sugar, and spices and borrows everything else he can think of! Borrows, did I say? I mean steals. For years! I have not seen the man pay for a thing yet! Where does he work he makes so little money?”
Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Santucci knew that Mr. Aorta’s daily labors involved sitting on the sidewalk downtown, with dark glasses on and a battered tin cup in front of him. They’d both passed him several times, though, and given him pennies, both unable to penetrate the clever disguise. It was all kept, the disguise, in a free locker at the railroad terminal.
“Here he comes again, that loony!” Mrs. Santucci wailed.
Soon it was time to plant the seeds, and Mr. Aorta went about this with ponderous precision, after having consulted numerous books at the library. Neat rows of summer squash were sown in the richly dark soil; and peas, corn, beans, onions, beets, rhubarb, asparagus, water cress and much more, actually. When the rows were filled and Mr. Aorta was stuck with extra packs, he smiled and dispersed strawberry seeds and watermelon seeds and seeds without clear description. Shortly the paper packages were all empty.
A few days passed and it was getting time to go to the cemetery again for a fresh load, when Mr. Aorta noticed an odd thing.
The dark ground had begun to yield to tiny eruptions. Closer inspection revealed that things had begun to grow. In the soil.
Now Mr. Aorta knew very little about gardening, when you got right down to it. He thought it strange, of course, but he was not alarmed. He saw things growing, that was the important point. Things that would become food.
Praising his fortune, he hurried to Lilyvale and there received a singular disappointment: Not many people had died lately. There was scant little dirt to be had: hardly one truckful.
Ah well, he thought, things are bound to pick up over the holidays; and he took home what there was.
Its addition marked the improvement of the garden’s growth. Shoots and buds came higher, and the expanse was far less bleak.
He could not contain himself until the next Saturday, for obviously this dirt was acting as some sort of fertilizer on his plants—the free food called out for more.
But the next Saturday came a cropper. Not even a shovel’s load. And the garden was beginning to desiccate. . . .
Mr. Aorta’s startling decision came as a result of trying all kinds of new dirt and fertilizers of every imaginable description (all charged under the name of Uriah Gringsby). Nothing worked. His garden, which had promised a full bounty of edibles, had sunk to new lows: it was almost back to its original state. And this Mr. Aorta could not abide, for he had put in considerable labor on the project and this labor must not be wasted. It had deeply affected his other enterprises.
So—with the caution born of desperateness, he entered the gray quiet place with the tombstones one night, located freshly dug but unoccupied graves and added to their six-foot depth yet another foot. It was not noticeable to anyone who was not looking for such a discrepancy.
No need to mention the many trips involved: it is enough to say that in time Mr. Santucci’s truck, parked a block away, was a quarter filled.
The following morning saw a rebirth in the garden.
And so it went. When dirt was to be had, Mr. Aorta was obliged; when it was not—well, it wasn’t missed. And the garden kept growing and growing, until—
As if overnight, everything opened up! Where so short a time past had been a parched little prairie, was now a multifloral, multivegetable paradise. Corn bulged yellow from its spiny green husks; peas were brilliant green in their half-split pods, and all the other wonderful foodstuffs glowed full rich with life and showcase vigor. Rows and rows of them, and cross rows!
Mr. Aorta was almost felled by enthusiasm.
A liver for the moment and an idiot in the art of canning, he knew what he had to do.
It took a while to systematically gather up the morsels, but with patience, he at last had the garden stripped clean of all but weeds and leaves and other unedibles.
He cleaned. He peeled. He stringed. He cooked. He boiled. He took all the good free food and piled it geometrically on tables and chairs and continued with this until it was all ready to be eaten.
Then he began. Starting with the asparagus—he decided to do it in alphabetical order—he ate and ate clear through beets and celery and parsley and rhubarb, paused there for a drink of water, and went on eating, being careful not to waste a jot, until he came to water cress. By this time hi
s stomach was twisting painfully, but it was a sweet pain, so he took a deep breath and, by chewing slowly, did away with the final vestigial bit of food.
The plates sparkled white, like a series of bloated snowflakes. It was all gone.
Mr. Aorta felt an almost sexual satisfaction—by which is meant, he had had enough . . . for now. He couldn’t even belch.
Happy thoughts assailed his mind, as follows: His two greatest passions had been fulfilled; life’s meaning acted out symbolically, like a condensed Everyman. These two things only are what this man thought of.
He chanced to look out the window.
What he saw was a bright speck in the middle of blackness. Small, somewhere at the end of the garden—faint yet distinct.
With the effort of a brontosaurus emerging from a tar pit Mr. Aorta rose from his chair, walked to the door and went out into his emasculated garden. He lumbered past dangling grotesqueries formed by shucks and husks and vines.
The speck seemed to have disappeared, and he looked carefully in all directions, slitting his eyes, trying to get accustomed to the moonlight.
Then he saw it. A white fronded thing, a plant, perhaps only a flower; but there, certainly, and all that was left.
Mr. Aorta was surprised to see that it was located at the bottom of a shallow declivity in the ground, very near the dead tree. He couldn’t remember how a hole could have got dug in his garden, but there were always neighborhood kids and their pranks. A lucky thing he’d grabbed the food when he did!
Mr. Aorta leaned over the edge of the small pit and reached down his hand toward the shining plant. It resisted his touch, somehow. He leaned farther over and still a little farther, and still he couldn’t lay fingers on the thing.
Mr. Aorta was not an agile man. However, with the intensity of a painter trying to cover one last tiny spot awkwardly placed, he leaned just a mite farther and plosh! he’d toppled over the edge and landed with a peculiarly wet thud. A ridiculous damned bother, too: now he’d have to make a fool of himself, clambering out again. But, the plant: He searched the floor of the pit, and searched it, and no plant could be found. Then he looked up and was appalled by two things: Number One, the pit had been deeper than he’d thought; Number Two, the plant was wavering in the wind above him, on the rim he had so recently occupied.
The Hunger and Other Stories Page 7
