by John Yount
He watched the old man stooping among the squash and beans and tried to weigh the purpose of all that silence and privacy, but he didn’t understand it, and there seemed no way to respond to it except with a distance and silence of his own. Still, he would have liked to do something, to help, to make a difference somehow.
In the next moment he spotted the stile his grandfather had built so the fence could go back up around the cow pasture and he and his mother could still get to the trailer. It was sitting in the lee of the barn and was very like a stepladder, only twice as wide and very heavily built, and he wondered if he could carry it out where it belonged, but he couldn’t budge it. He couldn’t even figure out a good way to take hold of it until he got a bright idea and climbed inside. Then, if he used every bit of his strength so that specks of bright light burst behind his eyes and went whizzing about, he found he could lift all four legs an inch or so off the ground and even carry the stile a few steps before he had to put it down. After he’d moved it forty feet or so and was exhausted, a quail began to call somewhere above the barn. “Bob, Bob White,” the quail said in a voice that was wonderfully clear and splendid.
Living where he’d been living, he hadn’t heard that pure, sweet sound in a long time. He knew enough to know it wasn’t the usual birdsong—which, however beautiful, is in the business of laying claim to this bush, this tree, this volume of air and space of earth—but a beckoning by which the quail gathered themselves together. It was also the call James and his father imitated when they were out together in the woods or off fishing somewhere and had lost track of each other.
He listened until, at last, it came again; and, without any words whatever, he somehow understood that he couldn’t untangle what had happened and lay out anyone’s proper share of blame. He didn’t know why such an understanding should have come just then, and if someone had been there and asked him, he could not have told them what he was thinking, since it wasn’t truly a thought but a feeling.
Still, no one is able to hold on to grace for long, and in the very next moment his acceptance and humility seemed merely a kind of desolation in which, without help from anyone, he would have to invent himself.
MADELINE TALLY
The pasture, wet with dew, was silver under the moon, and a little of the moonlight even strained through the small windows of the trailer where she lay. She needed sleep and yearned for it, but it wouldn’t come. A little while before, she’d almost dropped off, but in that very last moment she’d seen Edward Tally against a bright blue sky, his spurs dug into the telephone pole across from her momma and poppa’s house, leaning back against his safety belt. How startlingly trim and hard he’d looked in his work clothes, and his hair and eyes were black as an Indian’s. She had been working as a substitute teacher, yes, and had come out to stand beside the highway in order to catch a ride with Stanley Green, who taught math and used some sort of hair oil that smelled so close and sweet, she feared someday it would make her throw up in his automobile. Yes, and Lily was late, as usual, no doubt still fussing with her hair and clothes, and if they weren’t out by the road waiting to step into his car the moment he stopped, Stanley Green, prissy little man that he was, would go right on by without even so much as slowing down. So she had been stuck there with this strange man looking boldly down at her.
Absolutely everything about that day came back to her, the fresh green smell of the morning, the warm sun on her shoulders, the dress she was wearing, and even the faint odor of creosote from the telephone pole, which, no doubt, his spurs had released.
“So,” he’d said, “y’all decided to get modern with the rest of us then?”
His voice had been so easy, jovial, teasing; but she didn’t know him from Moody’s goat, and the question, if that’s what it was, seemed at best, familiar, and at worst, insulting. She knew she was blushing, but she meant to give him a look that would put him in his place, only he wasn’t looking at her any longer, but at his labors, fierce wires of muscle straining in his arms and knotted in his jaw. She dropped her eyes and said nothing. She fidgeted, looked up the road to see if Stanley Green was coming and over her shoulder to see if Lily was.
“Well,” he said, his voice grunting with the strain of whatever he was doing, “I expect everybody will be hooking up one of these days. Hey, there’s one or two folks on the other side of Cedar Hill that’s even put electricity in their barns. Got yourself a radio yet?”
She didn’t know why, exactly, she couldn’t bring herself to speak. Perhaps because he’d taken her by surprise, or because his hair was so black the sun made it blue, but in the next moment there was a ripping sound, almost like paper being torn, and down he came, first landing on his feet and then his rear. “Damn,” he said, and while she stood mute and shocked, Lily appeared, rushing past her and across the highway to him. “My goodness! Are you hurt?” she asked, immediately trying to help him up as if there were no such thing as sex, or proper behavior, or being introduced, or flirting men, or shyness in all the world.
“I’m okay,” he said with an embarrassed laugh, “I just wasn’t paying attention.” But if he was talking to Lily, he was grinning right over Lily’s shoulder at her.
“Well you’re certainly not okay,” Lily told him. “Look at your arms! You’ve hurt yourself terribly!” And then turning around: “Maidy, what on earth is the matter with you? Help me get him into the house.”
Of course Stanley Green’s Chevrolet would trundle into view at just that moment. “But here’s our ride,” she blurted to Lily like an idiot.
“I’ll make him wait,” Lily said. “Now you just show this poor man up to the house so Momma can take a look at him.”
Embarrassed, although not nearly as much as he should have been and not as much as she was, he unsnapped the safety belt, which seemed to have done him no good at all, and allowed himself to be escorted into their kitchen where Bertha Marshall would later remove splinters and paint him from the inside of his wrists to the inside of his elbows with iodine. Still, on the way up the driveway, he kept up his easy conversation, the bold grin never leaving his face. A few of the light poles in the valley were hard as iron, he told her, and a man had to watch himself if his climbers weren’t going to strip out and make him fall. She sensed his implication and resented both the flattery and the blame. He asked her where she worked—one question she managed to answer—and he told her that some members of her family were maybe just a teeny bit more friendly than others.
All day at school she couldn’t get him out of her mind. She and Lily had both been thrilled about their poppa’s decision to lumber off the ridge behind the barn and use the money to wire the house. There was a light fixture in the ceiling and two receptacles in the walls of every room in their home, and she and Lily had each bought a pretty lamp for their bedrooms; and, without their parents’ knowledge, they had, indeed, put a radio on layaway. Theirs was just about the last house in the valley to be without electricity, and it was all very exciting to be getting it, but somehow she couldn’t even savor it any longer without Edward Tally—he had introduced himself in the kitchen, but as with Lily, he had looked at her rather than at her mother—stealing center stage. Also, when she got to school, she noticed he’d left a single spot of blood on her dress just above her knee, and off and on all day she caught herself staring at it as though it were a ruby.
It seemed all too painfully appropriate that such a vivid memory should reach her just when she was dropping off to sleep and yank her wide awake. Here she was again, a little over fourteen years later, right back home where she had first seen him, and he was just as impertinent, rude, and incapable of being ignored in her memory as he had been on that morning in 1934.
Not that she hadn’t had boyfriends before he showed up; she’d been twenty-two, after all. One or two of them she’d even thought she might like, but her father had been so strict that merely the notion of his disapproval had kept her distant and cool around them, and finally, he scared most of
them so badly she couldn’t help finding them dull and uninteresting. She and Lily had been the last two at home, all three brothers having gone off on their own, and already she and Lily were hearing jokes about being old maids. And so Lily was. But that hadn’t been it at all. There had simply been something about Edward Tally. He just wouldn’t be denied. And by the end of the next day, when he and his partner had finished putting in the service and the meter, he somehow thought he had a right to come and court her. He’d even charmed and buffaloed her mother and father, so that they smiled to themselves when he came in his old open flivver and took her off on picnics, drives, and dates, even as far away as Bristol, Tennessee, and didn’t get her back until midnight, when she’d always had to be in by ten. Ha, she thought bitterly, if they’d only known. If her father had only seen that he was just exactly the sort of man he’d meant to protect her from.
She couldn’t help being furious and stared up at the ceiling of the trailer, fuming that she was thirty-six and not twenty-two; that she had a thirteen-year-old son to look after; that she was living in a cow pasture with not only no electricity, but no water either; that she had very little money and no prospects; that she was, in every conceivable way, worse off for having met Edward Tally.
And how disinherited and sad it made her feel that her family was keeping something back that she’d counted on. There was a strange reserve in them that went beyond anything they might say or do. She was sure they didn’t mean to show it—Clara and Virginia aside, who were young and in a snotty stage—but it told her they really did have their own lives to lead, lives they had been leading in her absence for a long, long time. It was just that she hadn’t known you could lose your place with family. No one, she thought, meant for it to happen. But if you went away, they had to get on with their lives without you and maybe couldn’t quite admit you again because you’d lost your place with them. How were they supposed to know how unhappy you’d been, or that you’d counted on them and dreamed of them constantly?
Oh stop it, she thought. It was insane to think such thoughts when she was so tired and needed to sleep.
She turned and fluffed her pillow. If absence had cost her her place at the center of their hearts, then who was to say that being among them again couldn’t earn it back, even if it had to come a little at a time? And who was to say she had no prospects? Her life wasn’t over. In a few days, when she got herself together, she’d begin to look for a job, and she had enough money to buy some sort of a car; anything that would get her to work and back would do. And was she living in some dreary trailer park? No she wasn’t. And was she going to be yanked about from one dirty, indifferent city to another? Or be abandoned in one strange place while Edward Tally moved on to the next without her? Absolutely not.
Don’t think, she told herself. Think tomorrow. Her legs ached with tension and fatigue as if she were coming down with flu, and she stretched them and pointed her toes in order to force the ache out. In the faint, silver moonlight entering the small window of the trailer, she turned on her side, acknowledged the sound of crickets, and closed her eyes. They felt full of sand.
Oh but it was a wonder to her that she hadn’t seen through Edward Tally at once. It astonished her that she’d thought him the boldest and most exciting man she’d ever met, when, in fact, he was only unsympathetic, headstrong, and selfish. Jesus, she thought, but she’d been dumb. Love. Ha. Maybe someday they’d prove that being in love was a form of insanity, but she didn’t need to wait; God knows, in her own case, she’d proved it out already. “Hey, sugar,” he might say when they were courting, a big, delighted smile on his face, “I’ve come to take you to the movies.” And she’d be happy to go. “Put on your prettiest dress, sweetness, we’re going to a dance over to Blowing Rock.”
She couldn’t deny him anything, anything at all. It was as though she had no will of her own. Only she did. It might have been down too deep to recognize, but it was there, making her moody and distracted, making her snap at her pupils in school and at Lily, and oddly, making her miss him outrageously when they weren’t together, although she could see now what she truly missed and would always miss was the ability to make some mark on him, the ability to make him acknowledge her in a way he was incapable of doing. She’d known she wanted something more from him, but she hadn’t herself known precisely what, and when he’d asked her to marry him, she’d thought she’d gotten what she was after at last.
How bitter it was to be so wrong. Why, he hadn’t even asked her to marry him at all; he’d merely said he thought it was time they did. She remembered precisely the way he’d spoken, laying it out like some expensive dress he’d bought without bothering to find out if she liked the style or color or fabric or anything. And she’d said yes. Yes. But she’d mistaken one thing for another, mistaken his motives and her own.
And even after they’d gotten married and she was able, however feebly at first, to say she wanted this rather than that, wished to do this rather than that, he couldn’t learn to take her into consideration. He could only be surprised. He could only figure he’d made a mistake in a few specific cases, or that she was in one of her moods. But the specifics never added up to a general understanding, except that he began to figure he couldn’t please her no matter what he did. But he could never learn to take her into account.
One Saturday he’d driven her out to see a house in Cedar Hill, and when she’d said she liked it, he’d flashed her his big, boyish, disarming grin and told her he’d signed papers on it and made a down payment, no matter that she’d thought they couldn’t begin to pay for it. And they wouldn’t have been able to if she hadn’t gotten busy and found herself a job and got a colored woman to come in and do a bit of cleaning and look after James. Still, those had been their best years, even though she was always tired, and they had begun to fight—or she had, since he would never fight—and there was a basic unhappiness underneath everything they did. She could make some sort of impression on the house, choose paint and wallpaper, plant flowers, arrange and rearrange the little furniture they owned, and when their meager finances allowed, even add something here and there. And of course she had James, who was so small and sweet and pliable. But then Edward Tally walked in one fine day and announced that he’d quit his job with Watauga Light and Power Company and taken a job on construction in Morganton seventy-five miles away, so he saw them only on weekends, and not all of those by far, since he started working six days a week. And sure, the overtime meant she could give up her own job if she wanted, but she didn’t want. But it also meant that if he wished to see his family, he’d have to spend nearly three hours Sunday morning driving up the twisting mountain roads to Cedar Hill and the same amount of time going back Sunday night, and so, start work on Monday exhausted. When he left that job for another in Tullahoma, Tennessee, they did not see each other for months at a time.
Of course she hadn’t felt she was very important to him. Who could blame her? And of course she’d complained. Who wouldn’t? People married because they wanted and needed to live together. If you loved someone, you wanted to be with them; it was as plain as day to her, and she told him so. But who would have expected him to show up with an ugly purple house trailer, as though that would solve everything? As though that didn’t involve leaving her home, her friends, and everyone she’d ever known. As though it didn’t involve taking James out of school and away from everything he loved. Edward Tally was an inconsiderate man to the marrow of his bones, and you could teach a cat to sing quicker than you could show him that and make him see it.
She hated living in a trailer. Hated having to put on a house-coat and slippers and sometimes a raincoat to walk to the bath-house in the middle of the night to use the toilet, or to go all that way to take a shower or wash her hair or do the laundry. The trailer wasn’t the least bit snug, as he often claimed with a twinkle in his eye and a grin on his face when the rain was lashing it with a sound like gravel being thrown against its side and the wind was fairly ma
king it rock. And who could make love with any joy and peace when James was only a few feet away and nothing but a thin plywood partition like the bellows of a concertina between them? Oh, but she’d been unhappy. And unhappier still when he’d finally had his way and sold their home in Cedar Hill, which they’d been renting out and which he’d allowed them to believe they’d return to. And he hadn’t put the money back toward the better house they’d buy someday, as he’d promised, but had bought himself a fancy 1941 Packard—and would have bought a new one, no doubt, if there had been any new cars to buy. And he’d taken to coming home one or two nights a week definitely tipsy, with no regard for her and the dinner she’d made. And he could see no harm in it, as though it were only a boyish prank or a working man’s innocent due. What did he care that she’d been worried out of her mind that he was dead on the highway or that the supper she’d cooked him had been kept warm until it wasn’t anything more than a drab mess in her pots and pans? Earlier in their marriage he’d only rarely done that sort of thing, but toward the end she never knew when to count on him. And likely as not he’d try to tell her he’d only just had a couple of beers and the time had just slipped past him. As if she hadn’t lived with him long enough to know how much alcohol it took to put that glazed look in his eye.
And there were nights when he didn’t come home at all. At midnight or maybe one or two in the morning she’d get a call from one of his construction buddies she’d hardly met or never met, and this strange voice would tell her he’d had a little too much to drive, but they’d see to it that he got to work the next day, and he’d be just fine. Sure, she’d see him the next afternoon shuffling up with his hat in his hand, they would say, as though they, too, were telling her about a schoolboy prank, as though it were funny and innocent or even, somehow, endearing.
