And at that Lucy began to cry and carry on in a much more dramatic manner. But nevertheless, somehow, Katie managed to get a story out of her. It seemed that someone—and it had to be, could only be a ghost—was sharing her bed nightly with her. Touching her, holding her close and tight in a way that she had strictly intended never to happen for as long as she lived and breathed. At first she had thought that she must be dreaming it all: the cold hands, cold kisses, the cold invisible body next to hers. Maybe the heat of midsummer had gone to her head. Maybe she had a touch of fever or the vapors. To stop her dreams, or whatever it was, she prayed, she went on a meatless diet, she wore a rough and scratchy woolen nightgown, even at this time of year. But it did not stop. And gradually she realized it was a ghost, a ghost who would not be discouraged, no matter what. Night after night—and now she would lay awake all night to be sure she wasn’t dreaming—a ghostly lover came to her bed, and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. I mean, where can you run and hide from a ghost? If she called for help, who would believe her? Who would ever understand?
“Have you been to see that nice little Dr. Ehrenpreis, the psychiatrist?” Katie asked. “He’s Jewish, of course, but he seems kind of sweet-natured.”
“I don’t want to end up at the Funny Farm in Chattahoochie. Not that!” Lucy bawled.
“Can’t say as I blame you,” Katie answered. “You know, when I first began to make contact with the spirit world and all, I thought maybe I was losing my mind. And I hadn’t had a real vacation or a change of scene in a long time. So I got some people to commit me and went up there to lay around and take a load off my feet. Only they just don’t leave you alone to pull yourself together and work things out. Those people have gone modern, and they fill you full of shots and pills. They shock you with electricity and they make you take all kinds of silly tests, like you was back in kindergarten, and they keep you busy weaving baskets and finger painting and all that. Worst goddamn vacation I ever had, I’m here to tell you! I had this roommate and she was a sweet thing, but she had gotten the idea somewhere that she was a poached egg and if she didn’t find a piece of toast to sit on she was liable to break and run all over.…”
“Miss Katie, I am not joking,” Lucy said primly.
“Well, I’m not joshing either,” Katie said. “But you’ve got to admit, honey, you’re in a mighty unusual situation.”
Lucy Birdsong shook her head and wept some more.
“Who do you think it could be?” Katie asked finally.
“How should I know?”
“Don’t you even have the slightest idea?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Come on now, girl,” Katie said. “If anybody wants to get in the bed with you that much, dead or alive, you damnwell know who it is. And don’t you try and pretend otherwise.”
Lucy blew her nose and hung her head. Katie lifted her chin and looked her in the eyes.
“All right, Miss Kate. You win. I am almost positive that it is the ghost of Adam Peterkin.”
“My goodness, he’s come a long way if it is Adam.”
“He is the only one who would do a thing like that.”
Kate opened herself a fresh can of beer and took a few swallows, thinking about it. She took off her sneakers and propped her bare feet on the table in the path of the fan, and she wiggled her toes so she could think better.
“What do you want me to do?” she said at last.
“You tell Adam Peterkin that if he loves me, if he ever did love me, then please, please quit what he’s doing before I lose my mind.”
“This sure is an interesting case,” Katie said cheerfully. “I’ll see what I can do for you.”
Adam Peterkin was quite a good while answering Katie’s most effective, most urgent summons. But, at last, everything worked and he appeared before her in a filmy vision, sullen and angry, yet withal still as handsome as ever in his dripping-wet sailor suit. He was, of course, thoroughly drowned.
“Don’t you look nice all dressed up like a sailor!” Katie exclaimed. “It sure does become you.”
“I am sick and tired of it,” Adam said. “These pants don’t even have pockets. I wish I had died wearing something else.”
“No pockets?” Katie clucked. “That’s a shame. How come they don’t have no pockets?”
“Miss Katie, what do you want me for? You’ve been calling and calling.…”
“It’s a good thing you reported in of your own free will,” Katie said. “I was just about ready to call on some of my old-time spirit friends to persuade you.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, Miss Katie,” Adam said, more politely. “You are the first living soul I’ve had a chance to talk to since I got drownded. I mean, somebody to really talk to. A Chinese medium in Shanghai summoned me up one time, but it must have been some kind of a mistake or an accident. Anyway, we couldn’t understand each other for beans.”
“Shanghai, China!” Katie said. “My, but you must have been some interesting places.”
“Well, when I was living, I got around to practically everywhere you can think of. Except the Caspian Sea. I never made it there.”
“Do tell.”
“Miss Katie, you get to see all them places, and it’s all right. It’s an experience and I’m not complaining. But after a while it gets just like everything else. You feel like if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”
“That’s not how I feel about it.”
“Miss Katie, I never should have left Paradise Springs in the first place. It’s just as easy to die here.”
“I’ve never been anywhere much besides this little old town,” Katie said. “I guess the only real traveling I’ve ever done is in my rocking chair. I’ll bet you I’ve rocked my way thousands of miles in that old chair.”
“If it suits you, don’t complain.”
“I’m not bitching, boy,” Miss Katie said. “When you get to know me better, you’ll find out that complaining isn’t a big part of my disposition.”
“I didn’t mean …”
“It’s just that I’m interested,” Katie continued. “Curious, don’t you know? I’ll bet you that the least little old thing you could remember about some strange place like Shanghai, China, would give me more than enough to think about and ponder on for a week.”
“That’s not exactly why you summoned me up tonight, though, is it?”
“Not exactly.”
“What is it all about?”
“I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“What became of your manners? Did you lose them in the Indian Ocean?”
“Excuse me, Miss Katie. I beg your pardon. What do you want to tell me?”
“I think you’ve already got an idea or you wouldn’t have been so rude.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Never mind about that,” Katie said. “What I want to know is aren’t you ashamed of yourself for what you’re doing?”
“No, ma’am, I’m not,” he said. “I’m not a bit ashamed of myself now. What I’m ashamed of, what embarrasses me to even think about, is how I was before. Carrying on like a lovesick puppy. Moaning and groaning and gnashing my teeth over one silly girl. And then running away and getting myself drowned in the ocean. If I had’ve done what I’m doing in the first place, none of this would ever have happened.”
“Oh, that’s an old, old story,” Katie said. “That’s what they all say.”
“I ain’t studying about the rest of them. I’m speaking for my ownself—me, myself, and I. I was nothing but a fool the whole time I was alive.”
“You’re acting like a fool now too.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s one thing to carry on a little communication with the living, messages and warnings and blessings and the like. But I can’t see any excuse for what you’re up to. What do you want from the poor girl?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I don’t want a thin
g she’s got to offer.”
“What will it take to get you to leave her alone?”
“Don’t you worry about that, Miss Katie. I’m done with her. I’ll never bother her again.”
“Lord, Lord, Lord …”
Katie sighed her sigh and shook her jowly, full-moon face right at him.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Sonny boy, you don’t know the first thing about women.”
“I know all I want to about her, if that’s what you mean.”
“I am speaking to you of the character and the ways of woman in general. Which naturally even has to include Lucy Birdsong. You don’t know nothing about women and you never did.”
“I’m always willing to listen and learn,” Adam said.
“Just about the worst possible, the meanest thing you could do right now is to leave her without even any explanation.”
“What do I care?”
“It would drive her out of her wits for pure shame.”
“She drove me out of mine.”
“She’ll get even with you some way, in this world or the next. Any woman would and you better believe it.”
“Miss Katie, I just don’t care about her anymore.”
“Adam, you are good and dead. Lucy’s got long years of living ahead of her. The worst that can happen to you has already happened. Show her a little charity at least.”
“All right, Miss Katie. You’ve gone and persuaded me,” he said. “What must I do now?”
And so it was agreed that Katie would deliver the message. Katie would tell her that what Adam Peterkin was really after, all he really wanted, was a grave of his very own in Paradise Springs, along with a proper headstone and somebody to kind of look after it and maybe put some flowers on it now and again. Which, as you can guess, was a solution which saved Lucy’s natural modesty and preserved her natural feminine vanity at one and the same time. Lucy was very pleased. She bought a nice shady plot for him in the cemetery. She ordered a fine marble headstone, specially made, with an appropriate quotation from the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson carved on it. And ever afterwards she put fresh flowers on the grave at regular intervals.
And that, anyway, is Katie Freeman’s version, her explanation of the undeniable fact that Lucy Birdsong did get to looking pretty puny and distracted during that long summer and that she did, indeed, buy a grave and a headstone for the late Adam Peterkin, and that shortly thereafter she regained her old composure, her straitlaced serenity, her old self.
You can take it for what it’s worth and what you may want to, considering the source.
—What about Adam Peterkin? somebody is sure to ask. What became of him?
Go ahead and ask. Katie Freeman won’t say where he may be now or what he’s up to, waiting, biding his time until that final shiny trumpet call summons us all. She says that is privileged information and nobody else’s business. So she will merely smile and shrug her shoulders if you ask her.
Some of the gossip, people who will speculate and gossip about anything under the sun, and take a dim view of it and put the bad mouth on it, some of these have some pretty outlandish theories on the subject.
But even in the face of that, you have to admit that Katie Freeman has the last word.
“Let them think and say what they please,” she says. “There’s not a whole lot of good in any of them.”
SWEETER THAN THE FLESH OF BIRDS
“AFTER ALL,” Jane said, “it is my own money. It isn’t as if I were taking anything away from you or the children.”
Her husband sighed and shrugged, wounded by misapprehension and misunderstanding. They were having breakfast in the kitchen, a white, bright, tidy, pleasant place in the morning sunlight. She was sitting at the table, still wearing her wrapper, but her hair was neatly brushed in place and her face was made up for the day. She was a woman who found neatness and control easy. She would not lose her outward composure, her quiet and tested certitude, if at that precise moment a loud bugle at the end of the block had proclaimed it was the Judgment Day.
Howard stood next to the stove, sipping coffee that was too hot to drink in a hurry. But, of course, he was in a hurry, and it showed all over him from the little stains of dried mud (from yesterday’s rainstorm) on the tips of his shoes to the tiny fleck of shaving soap just below his left ear. She could see it all at a glance and she knew that he could feel, as always, her calm, objective scrutiny of him. Naked or clothed, drunk or sober, he wasn’t likely to cause her to raise her eyebrows. Not that she was judging him. She made no evaluation. She simply looked and saw him exactly as he was this morning and would be on so many others yet to come.
Around them swirled the relentless noisy action of the two children getting ready for school, bolting breakfast, looking for their books and mittens. But this was habitual as well. The truth is that Jane and Howard might just as well have been on a desert island a little larger than the stove, alone with a single stylized palm tree and their thoughts.
They always moved into this kind of intense and bitter vacuum when they had to deal with the problem of John.
“It’s your money all right,” Howard said. “And you’re free as a bird to spend it any way you want to. That’s not the point.”
“If it isn’t the money, what is the point?”
“I don’t really care about the money,” he said. “I wouldn’t care even if it had to come out of our own savings or household money or what-have-you. It’s the idea of the thing that worries me.”
At this she smiled. It was a pleasant, knowing smile that wouldn’t be named a sign of sarcasm by a stranger.
“I suppose,” she said, “you see it as a matter of principle.”
He had finished his coffee now and had his back to her as he bent over the sink to rinse out the cup.
“No, I don’t quite mean that. What kind of an argument could I come up with against charity in principle?”
“It isn’t charity. It isn’t as if John were a beggar with his palm stuck out.”
“I think beggar would be a charitable word for it. Maybe you’d prefer parasite or confidence man? Personally, I’m inclined to favor bum.”
Howard always looked more attractive to her, at once more manly and forceful, when he had been needled into fighting back on her own terms. Another time except breakfast and they might have gone on, beginning to quarrel mildly enough as now, but moving on through a kind of intricate, emotional disrobing into an open rage that might end anywhere, as likely as not in some act or office of love. But it was the morning. The children had to get off to school and he had to go to work.
“That’s the trouble with you,” she said. “You just don’t understand how it is with a close family.”
“Oh, I had a perfectly normal family,” he said. “It was a mere and fortunate geographical accident that it didn’t turn out to be a Southern family.”
“More’s the pity.”
Then they both laughed because this little turn in the argument, though as real and thorny a boundary between them as a strand of barbwire, signified, by the accumulated rules and precedents of the game, that the discussion was over.
So they laughed at each other, reserving judgment for another time, and then in a breathless moment they were all going. Howard kissed her and ran out of the back door toward the garage, hat on the back of his head, buttoning his overcoat as he went. The children clattered once more around the kitchen in a jerky dance and galloped off like a pair of heavy ponies, slamming the front door with window-shaking finality behind them. She was left alone with a second cup of coffee and time to think ahead with pleasure and some amusement about what her brother John would be needing the money for this time, and how he would go about wheedling it out of her.
John was ten years older. If he had bumbled through three marriages in less time than it had taken most men to discover the woe of one, if he had already failed in more schemes, projects, businesses, and ordinary jobs than were worth counting,
it had not always been so. Far from it. In the beginning he had seemed blessed with the pure shine of luck, bound for success. Her most vivid memory of him this morning was almost chivalric in its persistent and abstract beauty. She was only a girl then and John was away at the State University. They had all driven over to see him play in the homecoming game. She drank coffee in a paper cup that morning, her first coffee, because there was nothing else, and then with the strange warm feeling inside her and the sweet taste on her tongue, she sat in the stadium and saw him make three spectacular touchdowns against Georgia Tech, a lean, small, whirling dervish in the gaudy orange and blue uniform of the University, dainty-footed, agile, dancing across the clipped green field with its freshly chalked yard lines, a field so green and flat it might have held the armored knights of Sir Walter Scott. Later, in college herself, she would read The Faerie Queene and incongruously picture all those allegorical adventures taking place on just such a field.
She had been an awkward, plain, growing girl then, and he had been the laughing, dauntless, magical, imperious emblem of all possible fulfillment, all pride and honor.
They waited in the long shadows by the field house after the game. When he came out he was in the midst of a laughing, back-slapping broil of the other players and the heavy, jowly alumni with their hats and cigars. But he broke free of them, too, and sprinted over, took her up in his hands, and tossed her high and light as a doll for one dizzying instant in the air, caught her and set her down as lightly as a leaf falling.
“How’s my baby girl? How did you like that, Janey girl?”
For that moment and some others like it she would never cease to be grateful. Nor would she ever quite be able to forgive him now. She would not let anything change it for her, though, not even when he was expelled from the University only a few months later for cheating—that caused some gnashing of teeth at home—not even when, over the years, he seemed determined to follow his newfound vocation as a swaggering, arrogant, foolish, and weak buffoon. Not even now, when she was a grown woman with children of her own. It gave a kind of bitter sweetness to all her old memories now that the world was so new and changed.
Evening Performance Page 39
