by Anne Tyler
“It’s all of them done come, man, all of them!”
“Mr. Ben Joe,” said Matilda, turning halfway to him while she seemed still to be looking toward the Chevrolet, “won’t your family planning on meeting you? Because we’n take you in the Chevy, you know. That Brandon’s brother driving.”
“Well, I reckon my family’s not even up yet,” Ben Joe said. “But the walk’ll do me good. Thanks anyway.”
“You, sir?” she said to the old man.
“Oh, I’ll be going with him. Iffen it’s not too far.” He looked up at Ben Joe, questioning him, and Ben Joe shook his head.
“Well, good to see you,” Matilda said. She turned to catch up with Brandon and her baby. Across the chilly air voices of their relatives rang cheerfully; they were grinning and standing awkwardly in a cluster now beside their open-doored car, as if they wanted to give Brandon and Matilda time to get used to them again before they descended on them all at once. And Brandon and Matilda seemed in no hurry. They walked slowly and with careful dignity, proud to have such a large turnout for them. Over Brandon’s shoulder the baby waved both fists helplessly.
“Might as well start,” said the old man.
“I guess.”
“Sure it’s not far?”
“Sure.”
The old man picked up a large, very new suitcase and Ben Joe led the way, with his own lightweight suitcase swinging easily in his hand. “Ought to be just far enough to get you hungry for breakfast,” he called back over his shoulder.
“Good to hear that. Been traveling too long for my preference.”
They cut through the station, through the large, hot waiting room with its rows and rows of naked, dark wooden benches. Ben Joe could never figure out why Sandhill had provided space for so many passengers. The waiting room was divided in two by a slender post, with half the room reserved for white people and the other half for Negroes. Since times had changed, the wooden letters saying “White” and “Colored” had been removed, but the letters had left cleaner places on the wall that spelled out the same words still. A fat, red-haired lady sat in the ticket booth between the two halves of the waiting room; she frowned at the old man and Ben Joe and tapped a pencil against her teeth.
As soon as they were outside, going up the short gravel driveway that cut through the trees onto Main Street, the old man became talkative.
“You shouldn’t of mentioned breakfast, boy,” he said. “Lord, I’m hungry. Wonder what they’ll feed me.”
“Who?” Ben Joe asked.
“Oh, them. And you know them colored folks off the same train as us? Know what they’re doing now? Setting down to the table with their relations, partaking of buckwheat cakes and hot buttered syrup and them little link sausages. Makes me hungry just thinking of it.”
His breath was squeaking more now; the nostrils of his small, bent nose widened and fluttered as he drew in bigger and bigger amounts of air.
“My son got me this suitcase special, just for the trip. It was real expensive. I said, ‘Sam,’ I said, ‘you don’t need to spend all that money on me, son,’ but Sam he said, ‘It’s the least I can do.’ ‘It’s the least I can do,’ he tells me. He wanted to come take the trip with me, but I could see he was busy and all. I wouldn’t allow it. Law, I am eighty-four years old now and capable, it’s what I keep telling him. Capable. Though I will admit the train was something bumpy, and I feared that it would jounce all my insides out of place. I got this fear, someday my intestines will get tied in a bow by accident, like shoelaces. You ever thought of that?”
“Not that I can remember,” Ben Joe said. He was getting worried now; the old man’s voice had become a mere wheezing sound, and he was so out of breath that Ben Joe’s own throat grew tight and breathless in sympathy.
“Well, I have. Often I have. I don’t know if you ever knew my son Sam. He’s a businessman, like on Wall Street, except that he happens to be in Connecticut instead. Got a real nice family, too. Course I think he could of made a better choice in wives, but then Sally’s right pretty and I reckon I can see his point in picking her. Just a mite bossy, in all. And then her family’s Jehovah’s Witnesses. Now, I got no quarrel to pick with any religion, excepting maybe a few, but I heard somewheres that Jehovah’s Witnesses they turn off all the lights and get under the chairs and tables and look for God. They do. Ain’t found Him yet, neither. Course Sally she’s reformed now, but still and all, still and all …”
On Main Street he became suddenly silent. He walked along almost on tiptoe, looking around him with a white, astonished face. Sometimes he would whisper, “Oh, my, look at that!” and purse his mouth and widen his eyes at some ordinary little store front. Ben Joe couldn’t understand him. What was so odd about Sandhill? Main Street was wide and white and almost bare of cars; a few shopkeepers whistled cheerfully as they swept in front of their stores, and a pretty girl Ben Joe had never seen before passed by, smiling. Except for the new hotel, there wasn’t a single building over three stories high in the whole town. Above the squat little shops the owners’ families lived, and their flowered curtains hung cozily behind narrow dark windows.
At the third block they turned left and started uphill on a small, well-shaded street. Main Street was the only commercial district in the town; as soon as they turned off it they were among large family houses with enormous old pecan trees towering over them. The old man had stopped exclaiming now, but he was still tiptoeing and wide-eyed. Although his baggy coat seemed paper thin and the morning was very cool, the surface of his face was shiny with perspiration. With a small grunt he switched his suitcase to his other hand and it banged against the side of his knee.
“I’ll trade you suitcases for a while,” Ben Joe said.
“No no. No no. You know, when I was a boy we’d of been plumb through town by now.”
“Sir?”
“Town’s grown some, I said.”
“Oh. You mean you’ve been here before?”
“Born here, I was. But I ain’t seen it since I was eighteen years old and that’s a fact. Went off to help my uncle make bed linens in Connecticut. Though at the time I never wanted to. I wanted to go to Africa.”
“Africa?”
“Africa.” He stopped and set down his suitcase in order to wipe his forehead with a carefully folded handkerchief from his breast pocket. “Wadn’t but two streets that was paved then,” he said. “Main and Dower. Dower’s my name. It was named after my daddy, who moved out west soon after I went north on account of the humidity here being bad for my mother’s ankle bones. But there wadn’t no street called Setdown then. Got no idea where that is.”
“Well, it’s not far,” Ben Joe said. “You got relatives living there?”
“Nope. Nope.”
“Where you going?”
“Home for the aged.”
“Oh.”
Ben Joe stood in silence for a minute, not knowing what to say next. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “Well, that’s where it is, all right.”
“Course it is. Going to die there.”
“Well. Well, um, I trust that’ll be a long time from now.”
“Don’t trust too hard,” the old man said. He seemed irritated by Ben Joe’s embarrassment; he picked up his suitcase with a jerk and they continued on up the hill. As they walked, Ben Joe kept looking over at him sideways.
“Don’t you corner your eyes like that,” Mr. Dower said. “Not at me you don’t.”
“Well, I was just thinking.”
“Don’t have to corner your eyes just to be thinking, do you?”
“I’ve been away some time myself,” Ben Joe said. “Some time for me, anyway. Going on four months. It seemed longer, though, and I sort of left planning not to return.”
“Then what you here for?” Mr. Dower snapped.
“Well, I don’t know,” Ben Joe said. “I just can’t seem to get anywhere. Nowhere pe
rmanent.”
“I can. Can and did. Went away permanent and now I’ve come back to die permanent.”
“How can you have gone away permanent if you’ve come back?” Ben Joe asked.
“Because what I left ain’t here to come back to, that’s why. Therefore my going away can be counted as permanent.”
“That’s what they all say,” said Ben Joe. “But they’re fooling themselves.”
“Well.” Mr. Dower stopped again to wipe his forehead. “How much farther, boy?”
“Not far. Right at the end of this block.”
“Long blocks you’ve got. Long blocks. This here,” the old man said, pointing to an old stone house, “is where Jonah Barnlott lived, that married my sister. Like to broke my family’s heart doing it, too. He was a no-count boy, that Jonah. Became a doctor, finally, down in Georgia, but never had any patients to speak of. Was inflicted with athlete’s foot, he was, and decided shoes were what gave it to him, so he loafed about his office playing patience in a white uniform and pure-T bare feet, which scared all his patients away. My sister left him, finally, and got remarried to a lawyer. Lawyers’re better. Not so concerned with bodily matters. So now it’s Saul Bowen lives in that house. I reckon you know him.”
“No, sir.”
“Not know Saul Bowen? Fat old guy who goes around town all day eating pudding from a dish?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, no,” Mr. Dower said after a minute. “I guess not. I guess not.”
They were silent for the rest of the block. The old man’s shoes made a shuffling, scratchy noise on the sidewalk and the mewing of his breath was loud and unsteady, so that Ben Joe became frightened.
“Sir,” he said at the corner, “it’s just one block down from here, on the left. But I’d be happy to walk you the rest of the way.”
“I can make it. I can make it.”
“Well, it’s a big yellow house with a sign in front. You sure you’re all right?”
“I am dying,” said the old man. “But otherwise I’m fine and I’d appreciate to walk by myself for a spell.”
“Well. Good-by, Mr. Dower.”
“Bye, boy.”
The old man started down Setdown Street, his suitcase banging his knees at every step. For a minute Ben Joe watched after him, but the shabby little figure was pushing doggedly on with no help from him and there was nothing more he could do. Finally he turned and started walking again, on toward his own home.
The houses in this area were big and comfortable, although most of them were poorly cared-for. On some of the lawns the trees were so old and thick that there was a little whitening of frost on the grass beneath their limbs, even now that most of their leaves were gone. Ben Joe began shivering. He walked more quickly, past the wide, deserted porches and down the echoing sidewalk. Then he was on the corner, and across the street was his own house.
A long, low wire gate stood in front of it, although the fence that went with it had been torn down years ago when the last of the children had left the toddler stage. The lawn behind it had been allowed to grow wild and weedy, half as high as a wheat field and dotted here and there with little wiry shrubs and seedy, late-fall flowers. And the sidewalk from the gate to the front porch was cracked and broken; little clumps of grass grew in it. Towering above such an unkempt expanse of grass, the house took on a half-deserted look in spite of the lace curtains that hung primly in all the windows. It was an enormous white frame house, in need of a little touch-up with a paint brush, and it could easily be the ugliest house in town. Round stained-glass windows popped up in unexpected places; the front bay window was too tall and narrow, and the little turret, with its ridiculously curlicued weather vane, looked as if it must be stuffed with bats and cobwebs. People said—although Ben Joe never believed them—that the first time his mother had seen the house she had laughed so hard that she got hiccups and a neighbor had had to bring her a glass of peppermint water. And all the while that Ben Joe was growing up, little boys used to ask him jealously if his room was in the turret. He always said yes, although the truth was that nobody lived there; it was just a huge hollow space above the stairwell. The only thing that saved the house from looking haunted was the front porch, big and square and friendly. A shiny green metal glider sat there, and in the summertime the whole porch railing was littered with bathing suits and Coke bottles and the lounging figures of whatever boys his sisters were dating at the time. In front of the door, Ben Joe could just make out a rolled-up newspaper. That brought him to life again; he crossed the yard cheerfully, stopped on the porch to pick up the paper, and opened the front door.
Inside, there was the mossy brown smell that he had been raised with, that seemed to be part and parcel of the house and was a wonderful smell if you were glad to be home and an unbearable smell if you were not. And mingled with it were the more temporary, tangible smells—bacon, coffee, hot radiators, newly ironed dresses, bath powder. He was standing in the narrow hallway and looking into the living room, which was stuffed with durable old ugly furniture that had stood the growing up of seven children. On the walls hung staid oil paintings of ships at sea and summer landscapes. The coffee tables were littered with things that had been there as long as Ben Joe could remember-little china figurines, enameled flower pots, conch shells. Periodically his mother tried to move them, but Gram always put them back again. On the floor was an interrupted Monopoly game, a pair of fluffy slippers, a beer can, and a pink baby sweater that reminded him of Tessie. It must belong to Joanne’s baby now. He set down the suitcase and the newspaper and crossed into the living room to pick the sweater up between two fingers. It seemed to him that every girl in the family had worn that. But had it really been that tiny?
In the kitchen a voice said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what, Jane. Every time I even pick up a glass of frozen orange juice, it makes me think of vitamin pills. Does it you?”
Someone answered. It could have been any one of them; they all had that low, clear voice of their mother’s. And then the first voice again: “I’d rather squeeze oranges in my bare hands than drink my orange juice frozen.”
Ben Joe smiled and headed through the hallway toward the voices, with the sweater still in one hand. At the open doorway to the kitchen he stopped and looked in at the five girls sitting around the table. “Anybody home?” he asked.
They all turned at the same moment to look at him, and then their chairs were scraped back and five cheeks were pressed briefly to his and questions hurled around his head.
“What you doing here, Ben Joe?”
“What you think Mama’s going to say?”
“How’d you get in, is what I want to know.”
“Sure, a burglar could’ve walked in. We’d never even heard him.”
“Would anyone be a burglar before breakfast? And what’s to steal?”
“Where’s your luggage, Ben Joe?”
He stood smiling, unable to get a word in edgewise. They were circled around him, looking soft and happy in their pastel bathrobes, and if they had been still a minute he would have said he was glad to see them, even if it would embarrass them, but they didn’t give him a chance. Lisa reached for the baby sweater in his hand and held it up above her head for the others to see and laugh at.
“Why, Ben Joe, you bring us a sweater? Isn’t that nice, except I don’t reckon it’ll fit us too well.”
“He’s been away so long, forgotten how big we’d have grown.”
“Aren’t you exhausted?”
“I am at that,” said Ben Joe. “Feels like my head’s come unscrewed at the neck.”
“I’ll get you some coffee,” Jenny said. She was the next-to-youngest—it was only last spring that she’d graduated from high school—but, of all of them, she was the most down-to-earth. She went to the cupboard and took down the huge earthenware mug that Ben Joe always used. “Mama didn’t know if you meant it about
coming home,” she said, “and says she hopes you didn’t, but she changed your bed, anyway.”
“I’m going to it, too, soon as I’ve had my breakfast. Hello there, Tessie. You’re so little still I damn near overlooked you. Maybe it’s you this sweater’s for.”
“Not me it’s not,” said Tessie. “It’s too little for Carol, even.”
“Who’s Carol?”
“Carol’s our niece.”
“Oh. Where’s Joanne?”
“In bed. So’s Carol.”
“I forgot about her being named Carol,” Ben Joe said. “One more girl to remember. Hoo boy.” He took off his jacket and turned to hang it on the back of his chair. “Ma gone to work already?”
“Yup. This man’s bringing a truckload of books real early.”
The mug was set before him, full of steaming coffee. Tessie passed him a plate of cinnamon buns and said, “You notice anything different about me?”
“Well …” Ben Joe said. He frowned at her, and she frowned steadily back. Of all the Hawkes children, she and Ben Joe were the only blond ones. The others had dark hair, which they wore short and curly, and their eyes were so black it was hard to tell where they were looking. They were almost round-eyed, too, whereas Ben Joe and Tessie had their father’s too-narrow eyes. And there was something tricky about their coloring. At one moment they could seem very pale and at the next their skin would be almost olive-toned. But all of the girls, even Tessie, had little pointed faces and small, careful features, a little too sharp; all of them wore quick, watchful expressions and their oval-nailed hands were thin and restless. People said they were the prettiest girls in town, and the ficklest. Thinking of that, Ben Joe smiled at them, and Tessie tugged at his arm impatiently and said, “Not them, me.”
“You.” He turned back to her. “You’ve gone and gotten married on us.”
“Oh, Ben Joe.” Her giggle was like Joanne’s, light and chuckly. “I’m only ten years old,” she said. “Don’t you see anything different?”
“Nope.”
“I’ve had my ears pierced!”
