by John Yount
“Do you want me to leave you alone so you can sleep?” James said.
“Nawh,” Lester said. “Can’t sleep noway. Feels like a mule is standing on my chest.”
Someone stepped up on the dogtrot and helloed, and not much more than a moment later the doctor came through the door with his satchel and Effie on his heels with an oil lamp. Behind Effie, James glimpsed his father, who with a single motion of his head told him to come out and give the doctor some room.
James sat on the steps up to the dogtrot and scratched Lester’s little fice behind the ears, while Edward Tally and Roy Buck found things to talk about that somehow acknowledged the doctor’s visit and the friendship of their sons without speaking of either. It seemed a long time until the doctor came out of Lester’s room with Effie on his heels as mute as a shadow.
“Well,” the doctor said with a wry grin, “the lumps and bruises sure are colorful, but they don’t worry me much.”
He was a young man, the doctor. James thought he looked too young to be an actual doctor, at least until he began to shake his head and rub the back of his neck and sigh.
“I just didn’t find any evidence of asthma. His lungs sound open and clear. No coughing or wheezing or any of that. But I’m afraid he needs to be in the hospital,” the doctor said and gave Roy and Effie a long, serious look. “I’ve got two more calls to make down the road, and I can take him on my way back, but I’d feel better if you’d let me call the ambulance from Cedar Hill to come and fetch him.”
“Lordamercy,” Effie said.
“Now, Momma,” Roy said.
“What is it, doctor?” Effie said. “What’s wrong with my baby?”
“Mrs.,” the doctor said and stroked his jaw, “it would be foolish of me to say a whole lot without us getting him to the hospital where we can have a better look at him.”
“Lordamercy,” Effie said.
“How about taking him in my car?” Edward asked.
The doctor gave James’s father and the Packard a glance and then looked at Roy and Effie where they were standing together. “It would be lots quicker than waiting on me,” he said. “And cheaper than an ambulance. And since they have got to come all the way from Cedar Hill and find this place before they can start back … I think I’d like that best. I’ll call the hospital first thing down the road and tell them Lester’s coming.”
“I’d be obliged,” Roy said to James’s father, but Edward Tally had already waved the remark away and started toward the car. He moved his belongings from the rear seat to the trunk and backed the car closer to the house while Roy and the doctor carried Lester out between them as though he were sitting in a chair. Effie disappeared from the dogtrot, but no more than a moment after Roy and the doctor had gotten Lester into the backseat, she was back in a dark dress and with combs holding up her hair. She was also carrying a suit coat for Roy, who was otherwise wearing overalls.
“Don’t jostle him any more than you can help getting down to the road,” the doctor told James’s father and hurried off toward the highway and his car.
When they were all in the Packard, Effie and Roy on either side of Lester in back, and he and his father in front, his father began to ease down the wagon road as though the automobile were made of glass. “Everybody all right?” Edward Tally asked when they reached the blacktop.
“Absolutely,” Roy said.
But somehow, after that, conversation didn’t seem possible, as if the suspense over Lester and the strangeness of the five of them being in a car together were too much to overcome, as if there were no good way to talk about those things and no way to ignore them enough to talk about anything else.
It wasn’t until they got into Cedar Hill that Roy Buck said, “We surely do appreciate you carrying us to town. I hate aputtin you to the trouble.”
“No trouble to it,” James’s father said. He took James by the neck and shook him fondly and said, “I don’t know if this boy here can get a stream from a cow or not, or if I can do much better, but if milking times come and you don’t want to leave the hospital, one of us will look after the milking. I know we can’t do enough damage to make a cow go dry in just one evening.”
“I never give the milking a thought,” Roy Buck said. “Forgot about it altogether.”
“Well you don’t have any business thinking about it,” James’s father said. “Anyhow,” he said, “who’s to say they won’t let us take Lester on back home once they get a better look at him.”
Of course the Bucks didn’t have a way home, any more than they’d had a way into Cedar Hill. James looked at his father’s calm, mild face in profile and realized that his father understood Roy and Effie Buck absolutely. Neither of them would have asked for anything further, no matter how badly they might have needed it. They would not presume. Roy Buck would walk home to do his milking before he would ask Edward Tally to make a special trip; either that, or he’d let the cow go untended, streaming milk from her full udders, if Lester were too sick to leave.
Somehow his father had managed to make the whole situation lighter, so that James felt comfortable enough to turn around in his seat and ask Lester how he was feeling.
“Not too bad,” Lester said, and for all his damaged face, he did look a little better and more like himself. And Roy and Effie looked somehow more at ease too, or anyway as much as they could with Roy wearing a suit coat and having the top of his work shirt buttoned in severe, tieless dignity about his neck, and Effie with her hair up in combs and wearing a dress that seemed a little too tight and maybe wanted to be black but had gone greenish like a dragonfly’s wings.
For a moment James felt almost unbearably proud of all of them, his father and himself included; but a few blocks later they passed Green’s Department Store, and he spied his mother’s gray Ford coupe, and an entirely different mood began to come over him. Although he couldn’t have said why, by the time they reached the huge granite-and-brick hospital, the five of them seemed flawed and lost and silly, as though nothing but sorrow would ever find them.
His father pulled around to the emergency entrance and stopped. “You boys sit tight while we find out what’s next,” he said, and with a kind of threadbare dignity, Roy and Effie entered the hospital with Edward Tally, while James looked at Lester and fretted.
“Don’t worry,” James said.
“I ain’t,” Lester said; “I’m mostly embarrassed. But it’s kindly interesting too. Ain’t never been in a hospital before.”
“You were when you were born,” James said.
“I was born at home,” Lester said, but he was moving his head slowly, aiming the puffed slits of his eyes around the car. “This is some automobile,” he said. “How long you got to go to school to do what your daddy does?”
“He never finished high school,” James said. “He took a ninety-day course someplace to learn about electricity. I forget where.”
Lester nodded carefully just as a black man in a white uniform came up pushing a wheelchair, a nurse and Effie close behind him. Although Lester claimed he could walk, it didn’t do him any good, and he was lifted into the wheelchair as though he were all but paralyzed. The nurse even covered him with a blanket, although it wasn’t really very cold, and whisked him off into the bowels of the hospital where they couldn’t follow.
Inside, however, a cheerful lady sitting behind a long white counter told them where to wait. There would be a doctor in to talk to them, she said, just as soon as they got Lester examined and properly settled.
“Folks,” James’s father said and blushed as though suddenly embarrassed, “I’ve got to run an errand or two, but I’ll be back as quick as I can.” He reached for Roy Buck’s hand and gave it a single pump as though to seal a bargain. “If you can think of anything you need,” Edward Tally said, “I’ll bring it back in a jiffy.”
“We don’t need a single thing,” Roy Buck said, “but we sure are obliged.”
“Well,” Edward Tally said, looking at James, “I
expect the shoe’s on the other foot. I wouldn’t worry though,” he said, taking in Effie as well as Roy, “it looks like Lester is in real good hands, and I expect they’ll have him fixed up pretty quick.
“Son?” Edward Tally said to James and nodded toward the exit.
James followed him outside without having the least notion of what he might want.
“Squirt,” his father said, “I’m going to have to find me a place to spend the night. That shouldn’t take long, but I haven’t had a whole lot of rest lately, and I’m just about to go under. I need about an hour or so of sleep, and then, hell, I’ll be as good as new.”
“Okay,” James said.
“You can come with me or you can stay here,” his father said. “You’re welcome to do either, but my ass is dragging out my tracks and I’ve got to lie down for a little bit.”
“I’ll stay,” James said. “Thank you,” he said, “for bringing Lester and Roy and Effie to the hospital.”
“They’re good folks, son,” his father said. “I’m proud they think so well of you.” He looked at James very seriously for a few seconds, winked, doubled up his fist, and bonked James on the head with it as though he were driving a cork in a bottle; then he turned and went off toward the Packard. “I’ll be back in two hours, squirt,” he said over his shoulder.
MADELINE TALLY
Exactly as if she’d had too much coffee, her fingers dithered over the keys of her adding machine and were cold; she couldn’t concentrate for more than a few seconds at a time, if that; and every fifteen or twenty minutes she had to go pee. Each time she returned to her desk, she had to reacquaint herself with her bookkeeping as though she’d never done it before, but the next moment would find her in a daze, having done nothing at all.
“Damn you, Edward Tally!” she’d whisper through clenched teeth, grip her hands to fists, and try to get back to work again. But the columns of debits and credits, the stacks of sales slips and order forms, would make no sense to her until she rediscovered the basic logic and principles of her job. And just as likely, at that very moment she’d spy one of the salesgirls looking up at her with curiosity, since Leslie Johnson had been calling for her at lunch and quitting time for better than a month; and today, one man, claiming to be her husband, had come in to ask for her midmorning, and Leslie had come in with a bouquet of flowers at noon, wanting to take her out to eat.
Maybe she should go to Reno and get a divorce after all. What did it matter that she would lose herself and never know who she was again? My God, hadn’t she already done so the moment she’d begun to jump in and out of Leslie’s bed? But perhaps the problem was that she’d lost herself long before. Long, long before. The moment when she’d let Edward Tally into her life.
All at once she wanted to talk to Leslie and snatched up the phone, but when she got his office, his secretary said he was with a client. “Is this Mrs. Tally?” the secretary asked. “Yes,” Madeline said. “Oh, I thought it was,” the secretary replied cheerfully; “shall I have him call when he’s free?” “No,” Madeline said on a sudden impulse, “no, don’t bother.” What did she think she was going to say to him after all? What did she expect him to do for her? She wrung her hands for a moment and then on an impulse, called home. But when her mother’s voice—perfectly familiar, country curious, drawn out—answered, “Hellloooh?” she didn’t know why she’d called her either, no matter that the impulse had been urgent. “I just wanted to know how James was doing,” she told her mother. “Madeline, is that you?” Bertha Marshall said. “Of course, Momma,” she said, a little hurt by such a question. “Well, James went off with his poppa, down to the Bucks’,” her mother said, as though it were perfectly normal for Edward to be home and James to go off with him.
Had the world turned against her? Was she being isolated, cut off, on purpose? “Momma, please …” she began, but then had no idea what she wished to say, what she meant to ask for. She gripped the phone, and her mouth and chin began to tremble. Help, of course; she needed help. It would have been at least a little comforting if her mother had recognized her voice. Leslie’s secretary had done that much. “Momma, don’t let Edward stay there. For me, don’t let him.”
“Why chile …” her mother remarked with her voice full of wonder. “Well, he hasn’t asked,” her mother said, “but, mercy, we couldn’t deny him.”
“Momma, I can’t lose what I’ve gained,” Madeline said.
“What you’ve gained?” her mother repeated. “I guess I don’t understand about that.”
Was it criticism she heard? A simple statement of honest ignorance? Sadness?
“Daughter, if you don’t want him here; then it’s you that will have to tell him, fer it will not be your poppa or me.”
“Good-bye, Momma,” Madeline said and put the phone gently back in its cradle even as she heard her mother’s voice saying good-bye, as though her mother’s voice, too, were a physical thing she could set down. For a moment she felt so anxious and frantic that the very roots of her hair tingled, and her heart seemed to flutter. She put her face in her hands, pressed her fingertips against her closed eyes, and leaned her elbows on her desk. There wasn’t anyone who could help her, she realized. In fact everyone thought she was wrong: her mother, her father, James, certainly Edward. Some part of her even suspected Leslie, as though, since she had betrayed her husband with him, he wasn’t quite so sure that someday for good and sufficient reasons known only to herself, she wouldn’t betray him as well.
Was it true? Was she evil and selfish? She seemed to herself to be innocent and misjudged, but in a manner she would never be able to justify or prove. Perhaps not even to God.
She pressed her eyes with her fingertips and took slow, deep breaths until she felt calmer and her heart settled down. All right, she thought. All right then. She had work to do. If she didn’t get it done, it could quickly become as unmanageable as everything else around her, and she would be lost.
She had her job, which she’d gone out and got herself and could do. She had her little car, which she’d picked out and bought without asking anyone’s advice, and unexciting as it was, it also conveyed her wherever she wished to go. They were small things to count, but she couldn’t think of anything else right then, and they seemed to constitute some sort of beginning—she had a job and made money, and she wasn’t, well, stranded, she supposed. She wiped her eyes and set grimly to work, as though adding up her own simple account made plain, once again, for all its false complications, the accounts of Green’s Department Store.
EDWARD TALLY
After renting his room, he knew at once he was too tired to sleep and so got back in his car and drove three miles to a ramshackle bootlegger’s place he knew in Perkinsville. The bootlegger himself was serving a prison term, but his brother and nephew were doing business as before, except that they had very little bonded whiskey on hand, and what they had was cheap and vile. Edward decided to settle for a mason jar of corn liquor and took a few exploratory and fiery swallows on the way back to Cedar Hill. Propped in bed with his shoes off, he took one last drink, which seemed almost smooth. As though he were smoking a cigarette and blowing a smoke ring, he pursed his lips and let out a long sigh. “That’s better,” he said aloud, and, resolving to think of absolutely nothing, closed his weary eyes. The corn liquor, as it always seemed to do, created a pleasant warm spot at the crown of his head.
He had no idea what woke him, maybe a bad conscience; but when he jumped broad awake, it was nearly dark in his room. His shoes tied too hastily and too tight and his hair combed with his fingers, he hurried out to the car, glad to see that the sun had only just gone down and there was more daylight than he’d thought. But it had been a little more than four hours since he’d been at the hospital. What if Lester had been examined and released and the Bucks had been ready to leave no more than a few minutes after he’d left? It had been stupid not to let them know where he could be reached. They could have been waiting for hours. Or maybe they
’d had to give up and go off to hunt themselves some difficult and unlikely and inconvenient way back home.
But when he got inside the hospital and discovered the little waiting room where they were sitting, he knew at once that there was a different and bigger problem. What he saw in their faces slowed his steps and made him forget any apology he might have made. Effie and James sat in their uncomfortable-looking chairs as if they’d gone deaf and dumb, and only Roy got up to meet him. By unspoken agreement, they walked a little way down the hospital corridor together; and, noticing a side exit, they turned as though they were of one mind, passing through two doors before they found themselves outside where benches and bushes and trees still had shape but had lost all color to the dusk.
With bewilderment in his voice, after a moment Roy said: “They claim it’s his heart.”
“That can’t be right,” Edward said. “He’s just a kid.”
“They say it’s likely his teeth that caused it,” Roy said. He was looking off into the darkness and speaking as though he weren’t talking to anyone but only speaking the words aloud in an effort to understand them and believe them himself. He put one of his big square hands in his suit coat pocket, fumbled a moment, and came out with a piece of paper, which he held out to Edward. “This doctor I don’t even know wrote it down for me.”
Edward took the slip of paper and held it up to catch light from the entrance behind them. “Bac … t … er … ial En … do … car … d … i … tis.” He gave his head a shake. “Bacterial endocarditis,” he said. He’d never heard of it.
“It’s like it’s a poison that’s come from Lester’s sorry teeth that’s got around his heart some way,” Roy said. “They only just told us about it. We ain’t got to see him yet.” Roy Buck rubbed his face, spat, and ran a hand through his hair thoughtfully. “They aim to let us look in on him in a little bit, but then they expect us to go on back home.”
