The Long Home

by William Gay

  “Well, go on and open them if you can. Mama’s waitin on me.”

  He unscrewed the ring and handed her the jar. “You’re very strong,” she said, an ironic edge to her voice. She took the jar but made no move to leave. “What are you starin at? Is my face on crooked?”

  “I just thought you had the prettiest eyes.”

  Her hair smelled like soap and he could see the clean line of her scalp where her hair was parted. The sun bright off the whitewashed wall fell on her face and in its light her eyes looked almost drowsy. He could see the dark down along her jawline, the pale, soft fuzz on her upper lip. The lips looked hot and swollen.

  “Well, you can talk. I didn’t know if you could or not. You ought to try it more often.”

  “I might if I had someone to talk to,” he said. “No need in telling myself things I already know.” Above the ringing in his ears all his words sounded dull and clumsy.

  “Next time I need a can of peaches opened I reckon you can talk to me,” she said. When she smiled her teeth were white and straight. He watched her back through the sun to the house.

  In midafternoon she brought out a jar of icewater and then just before quitting time she came out again and set a jar of peaches besides his lunchbox.

  “Here,” she said. “Don’t say I never give you nothin.”

  Sam Long watched him come up the street from the railroad tracks, a tall young man who seemed heavier through the chest and shoulders every time Long saw him. He passed the window of the grocery store without looking in and went on, a purposeful air of tautness about him as if he were searching for something and knew just where it was hidden. Long went back behind the cash register and took out a ticketbook and studied it and finally laid it aside in a wooden drawer. He lit a short length of cigar stub and waited. A family came in and began to slowly wander the aisles gathering up provisions but Long seemed bemused and abstracted and this time when Winer came by Long went out and stopped him.

  Winer waited, a look of friendly curiosity on his face.

  “I ain’t seen you in the last few weeks. Got to wonderin about you.”

  “Well, I haven’t been getting into town much. I’m working over at Hardin’s and staying pretty busy.”

  “That’s what I heard. Hardin payin off by the week, is he?”

  “He’s paying me well enough. What was it you wanted anyway?”

  “I was wonderin when you could do somethin about what you owe me. Your grocer ticket.”

  “What needs to be done? I’ve been sending the money in to you on Saturday just like always.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Winer didn’t reply immediately and Long said, “Come on in here a minute and I’ll show you the tickets.”

  “I wouldn’t know any more if I looked than I do now. Somethin’s not right here. I’ve been sendin the money in here every week.”

  “Well, for a long time you did. Ever since you was workin for Weiss. You or your mama’d come in and settle up and get your grocers. You always paid off like a clock tickin. Then about a month or so ago your mama started comin here with that Huggins feller sells them pots and pans. She quit payin but she kept on buyin. I didn’t think nothin about it for a while cause you always been good for it.”

  Winer didn’t say anything for a while. When he did speak he said, “All right. How much is it?”

  “A little over a hundred dollars.”

  “How little over?”

  “A hundred twenty-three is what it is.”

  “Well, you’ll get it, but from now on nobody buys so much as a Co-Cola on my ticket unless I say so. All right?”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  Huggins was there the following Friday evening rocking gently in the porch swing, a proprietary air about him, claiming squatter’s rights. Winer went on into the house and collected his mirror and razor and soap. He went out the back door and down the path to the spring. He had already bathed and was shaving, kneeling on the bank, when the voice came. He nicked his face with the straight razor when Huggins spoke.

  Huggins had made no sound approaching, easing through the brush with a kind of covert stealth, paused standing behind him, framed in the mirror behind Winer’s face. Winer watched a scarlet bead of blood well on his jaw, trickle down his face. He wiped it away and lowered the mirror.

  “What do you know, good buddy?”

  Winer turned. Huggins stood waiting, arms depending at his sides as if Winer had summoned him and he was waiting patiently to see what was required of him. He stood stooped as if he were composed of some strange material slowly turning liquid, a pear-shaped lump of loathsome jelly gravity was slowly drawing misshapen to each, barely contained by the mismatched clothing he wore, clothing he seemed to have stolen under cover of darkness from random clotheslines.

  “What is it? I came up here to take a bath.”

  “I know ye did. I just needed to talk to ye a minute and wanted to catch ye by yeself.”

  Have you got a couple of dollars till payday? Winer asked himself.

  “Reckon you could loan me about five till Wednesday?”

  Winer mentally chided himself for underestimating the reach of Huggin’s ambition. He washed the lather of his face and dried it on a towel. He wanted done with Huggins, wanted him gone, he felt constricted and short of breath as if Huggins somehow affected the atmosphere, sucked from it more than his due of oxygen, left it hot and lifeless and barren. He was fumbling out his wallet, thumbing through the money Hardin had paid him. “I guess I can.”

  His alacrity took Huggins by surprise. He licked his already wet lips, eyeing the money. “Just let me have ten if you can spare it, good buddy. I’ll catch ye Wednesday.”

  Winer paused. “If five’d do a minute ago how did we get up to ten?”

  “Well. Five’ll do, I reckon. I’ll get by on it, I guess.”

  Winer stood up. He reached Huggins the five-dollar bill, watched him fold it, palm it rapidly, and slide it into his watch-pocket, knew even as he watched that he would see it no more. “You’re going to have to get by on it,” he said. “I’m paying my own grocery ticket this week.”

  “Do what?”

  “I’ve been meaning all week to ask you about my grocery ticket out at Long’s. I’ve been sending money out there every week and somehow or other I seem to owe him more money all the time. Do you know how a thing like that could be?”

  “Lord, no. I guess you better ask Sam Long. His tickets must be messed up.”

  “His tickets are all right. Mines are the one messed up. What are you trying to pull on me.”

  “You need to talk to your mama.”

  “You say talk to Sam Long. Or talk to my mama. I’d about as soon talk to you as anybody I know.”

  “I ain’t no bookkeeper.”

  “No. You ain’t no bookkeeper. There’s two or three things I can think of that you are but you ain’t no bookkeeper. And I’ll tell you something. I work for my pay. And if you think I’m busting my ass every day so you can drink it up at the poolhall or pay for goddamn pots and pans then you’re living in a dreamworld.”

  “You got a good bit of a mouth on ye for a youngen, ain’t ye?”

  I’m going to hit him, Winer thought. Then he thought, no, I’d have to touch him.

  “Boy, me and you’s goin to have to get somethin straight. Now, you work with me and I’ll work with ye, you make it hard on me and I’ll hand it right back to ye. Your mama thinks a right smart of me and we gettin purty serious. We might be gettin married one of these times, we might just all pick up and go north. Me and you’ll be in the same family then and you know as well as I do that a family ain’t got but one boss.”

  “Why Goddamn you.” Winer dropped the razor and mirror, heard the clink of glass breaking on stone. He grasped the collar of Huggin’s shirt, twisted, felt the soft tug of thread breaking, the collar button pulling away. He kept the fabric between his fist and the white, hairless flesh of Huggin’s throat. “I’
ll tell you right now,” Winer said. “What you and her do is your business. But it’ll be a cold day in hell when you boss me around.”

  Huggins was walking awkwardly backward, trying to get away. He had thought Winer a boy, nothing to contend with, but he had never really looked at him. Now he was seeing the hard brown shoulders, the corded arms, and Winer watched fear rise up in Huggin’s eyes like liquid filling a glass, before it his own twinned image, the tiny faces cold and remote and malevolent, leaning into the back little eyes.

  He released his grip and Huggins staggered backward, almost fell when a stone turned beneath his foot. He winced and stood massaging his ankle. “You stuckup little prick,” he said. “You sorry shitass.” He was breathing as if he had run a long way, a harsh, sucking rasp. He buttoned the shirt with what buttons remained and ran a shaking hand through his hair and went shambling back through the brush. When he judged himself safely out of reach he said, “We do get married the first thing I’m doin is puttin your ass on the road.” He went on.

  Winer gathered up his gear again. The mirror lay in triangular shards, each reflecting its own blue sky or baring tree, a shattered glass landscape. He waited awhile until he heard the car start up and drive away before he went to the house. When he got there he saw that wherever Huggins had gone his mother had gone too.

  3

  His father had built the house, a man conscientious of the plumbness of corners, the pitch rafters. All these years had passed and the floorjoists were unsagging, the ceilings level and true. Would that other things had seen fit to endure so well. For the house smelled of waiting, of last year’s winter fires, it seemed to have been constructed solely in anticipation of some moment that had not arrived yet, or passed unnoticed long ago.

  He drank a cup of coffee on the doorstep and after a while he went back in and he was surprised that so little time had passed. He turned the radio on. “From WJJD in Chicago,” the radio said. “Here’s Randy Blake with the Suppertime Frolic.” A song began, the scraping of a fiddle. He ascended the ladder into the attic.

  When he descended with his toilet articles and a change of clothing in a brown paper bag the radio was singing, “I didn’t hear nobody pray, sweet Jesus, I didn’t hear nobody pray. Whiskey and blood run together, but I didn’t hear nobody pray.” Winer stood clutching the bag, staring about the room. He turned the radio off and went out.

  He struck out across the field, following in the wake of the sun. The western sky was mottled red as if the town he moved toward lay in flames. Behind him at the wood’s edge darkness gathered, pursued him stealthily across the field. At its edge he paused uncertainly, sat for a time on a stone. He did not know for sure where he was going or even why he was going there. He laid the bag between his feet and sat with his hands clasped across his knees, staring back the way he had come. “Hellfire,” he said. “It’s my house.” He thought for a moment he might go back but he did not arise from the stone. A dull weight of anger seemed to hold him where he sat.

  Dusk drew on, the dark stain of night seeping across the field. The sky turned a washedout lavender, darkened incrementally, a star came out. Another, pinpricks through the tapestry of night. Against the purple heavens the pinewoods turned oblique and foreign, took on the texture of flocked velvet. A chorus of whippoorwills arose, the steady onenote whirr of dryflies. The world of detail was vanishing, all the world he could see merging color and shape, changing, the horizon of trees dimensionless and dark against paler dark like pinchbeck trees stamped from tin.

  He got up. He took up the bag and skirting the field followed an old near-lost wagonpath, came out from under the stoic and eyeless gaze of a scarecrow into a cornfield, passed through the stalks with the blades making dry sibilant whispers against his clothing. Faintly beyond the twisted stalks of corn he could see the blacktop highway like a moving river of ink. His faint shadow appeared like a spectral image. He turned and the moon hung poised over the spiked treeline. It was full and clouds shuttled across its remote face. They shifted constantly in the press of some high wind and against the yellow face they were near translucent so that the moon was an amorphous world in turmoil, seas and continents in perpetual flux, forming and reforming in patters eternally random. He came through the last of the corn and down an embankment and onto the blacktop. He went on toward town in silence save the hollow slap of his shoes on the pavement.

  The wrecked Buick had been there as long as Winer could remember, a casualty of some forgotten accident. It sat below the tieyard slowly vanishing in a riotous sprouting of honeysuckle and kudzu as if the years had altered its chemistry, made it arable so that in summertime fireorange bells of cowitch bloomed from its quarter panels. He opened the front door against the gentle resistance of honeysuckle, threw the sack onto the floorboard. He closed the door soundlessly, peering across the car toward the lights of the shacks bordering the railroad tracks. Temporary looking, accidental houses hinting some connection with the traintracks, some misbegotten byproducts themselves of the trains coming and going. He walked past the dark bulks of stacked tires onto the street and went on toward town. A cur dog on a length of chain suspended from a clothesline followed him to the ends of its tether, the chain skirling on its clothesline faintly musical. When the line tautened the dog sat on its haunches and watched him go.

  In the Snowwhite Cafe he ate two grilled-cheese sandwiches and drank a large glass of milk. He paid and sat for a time listening to the jukebox and the clanging of the pinball machine, watched past his reflection in the glass the near-dark streets where Friday night’s business began to accomplish itself, strolling couples arm in arm, girls bright as justpicked flowers, halfdrunk belligerent men herded homeward by fierce women with bitter persecuted faces.

  “Goddamn if it ain’t old Winer,” a jovial voice said. Winer turned to see a broad red face grinning down at him, a face he remembered from school. Chessor’s name was Wendall but no one remembered it anymore. His father nicknamed him Buttcut because he was the first son and his father had said he was as tough as the butt cut off a whiteoak log and the name had stuck. Buttcut had conscientiously lived up to his name. He had been a tackle on the football team and though he had been out of school for two years he still wore the black-and-gold school jacket and seemed to be making a career out of being a former athlete.

  “Hey, Buttcut. Sit down.”

  Chessor seated himself in the booth across the red formica table. “Boy, where you been keepin yourself? We figured you was dead or off to the wars one.”

  “Naw, I’m still around. I’ve been carpentering down at Mormon Springs. Building Hardin’s honkytonk or whatever.”

  Chessor turned toward the general area of the counter. “Hey, bring us a Co-Cola,” he called. He turned back to Winer. “You seen old Shoemaker?” When Winer shook his head Chessor said, “I heard he was lookin for you. Tryin to fix up some way for you to graduate or somethin. He had somethin or another lined up for you and then you didn’t come back in the fall. And say you ain’t seen him? I heard he went out and talked to your mama.”

  “I don’t know. If he did she never said so.”

  “Maybe not then. You ought to be there this year though. They’re drivin old Toby crazy, the seniors is. Just like we done when I was here. Carryin on the old tradition. Nobody even crackin a book, just fuckin off is all.”

  A girl in a white lisle uniform set two glasses of Coke and cracked ice on a table. She laid a ticket upside down beside them. “Watch your mouth or you’ll be drinkin these on the sidewalks,” she said. “It’s ladies in here if you didn’t but know it.”

  “If you see one holler at me and I’ll tone it down,” Chessor told her.

  The girl turned and went toward the front of the restaurant, her left leg bent slightly outward at the knee and the tennis shoe she wore on her left foot hissing softly against the slick waxed tile.

  “That gimplegged slut,” Buttcut said. “Im goin to have to straighten her ass out.” His face cleared, the old
jovial look returned. “Old Toby won’t never make it till graduation time. That son of a bitch’ll be in a asylum long before then. I seen him in the drugstore, you can see it in his eyes. I member when I was in school he had this gray hat he was real proud of. He’d ordered it from somewhere. I got it and cut it up on the bandsaw in woodworkin class, it made the purtiest little gray strips. I took em and hid em in his desk drawer and when he found em he cried like a baby. I swear. I think he’s about three-quarters queer anyway.”

  Buttcut looked all about, leaned farther still toward Winer, and lowered his voice. “This year Ann Barnett, she put a rubber on his desk. Put lotion or somethin in it so it looked like a used one. Old Toby come in and started French class and seen it and turned white as a bedsheet. Set there lookin at it with his nose flared out. You know how scared of germs the son of a bitch is, always scared he’s goin to catch somethin. Well. Anyway Ann said everbody was just fallin out of their seats. Toby finally took out his handkerchief and spread it over his hand and picked up his pencil by the point and worried that rubber around till he got the pencil stuck up in it. Then he picked it up and run across the room holdin it way out in front of him and a little off to the side like germs was blowin off of it. He throwed it in the wastebasket and then the pencil and then he throwed in the handkerchief. Never said word one. Went back and set down and went to conjugating French verbs like nothin ever happened.”

  Winer sat smiling distractedly and listening, occasionally sipping his Coke. Behind the mask of his eyes he was trying to get a fix on Ann Barnett’s face, to single hers from the throng of faces swarming in his mind, but he could not. All he could recall was blond hair and iriscolored eyes. He could see Toby Witherspoon’s gentle, beleaguered face but all these things Buttcut was telling him sounded strange and foreign, the obscure rites of some race he’d barely heard of or one he’d forsaken long ago. He felt a cold remove from them, set apart, like a spectator never asked to participate, a face pressed against a window of frozen glass.