The Collected Stories of William Humphrey

by William Humphrey

  “The Great Grippo,” replied the man in a husky voice, and to the ah-hahs of the one party and the ughs of the other three, strode to the east face of our courthouse, which was the first one he came to, and without wasting a second in studying the building but as if he had been born and raised in its shadow, proceeded to climb it. Those who had been waiting for him on the other sides hastened around to the chosen one, and the crowd thereupon became so dense that people standing close to one another had to take turns drawing breath. Small children and many not so small were hoisted to their fathers’ and even to their mothers’ shoulders.

  “No! No!” a woman screamed. “I don’t want to see it! Take me home!” A large woman she was, and when she fainted five men were needed to carry her off.

  Grippo began by leaping from the ground and grasping a window ledge and hauling himself up to it. From there he stretched across to the next window and the next, going towards the door. He let himself down onto the porch and opened one half of the door back to the porch rail. He climbed the rail and straddled the door and shinnied up its edge like a monkey up a pole to the top of it. From there with the greatest of ease he hoisted himself to the roof.

  Pausing only to fetch his breath, Grippo assaulted the second story. This he elected to scale by way of the drainpipe affixed to its southeast corner. It took him just five minutes by the clock overhead, but it seemed to all below much longer. Twice he lost his grasp and slipped downwards. This was no doubt a part of his act, but the crowd let out a gasp and on both occasions another woman passed out and had to be removed. The scariest moment came when, hauling himself over the edge of the roof, he slipped and hung dangling from the gutter in midair, the snap of his chin strap popping open and the flaps hanging loose. Then in a piercing voice a woman screeched, “Get that man down from there! Get him down, I say, before he falls and kills hisself before our very eyes!”

  When Grippo had gained the second-story roof he stood up and gave himself a shake and rested for some moments to catch his breath, panting deeply. Among the crowd down on the ground, meanwhile, breathing went suspended. Their gaze now elevated several notches, they studied the lofty tower, all asking themselves how Grippo meant to meet its daunting challenge. Now came the day’s real trial. The building he could not climb might not have been built, but how did Grippo mean to scale those nearly one hundred feet of perpendicularity, its blank surface unbroken but for the courses of gargoyles spaced at intervals of some twelve or fifteen feet?

  Grippo took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers and began walking up the wall like a fly. A gasp of amazement ran through the crowd.

  “It’s not true!” a woman shouted. “I don’t believe it! I’m going home!”

  How? How was Grippo doing it? He was doing it, the realization dawned, relying on those Swiss-cheese-like fossil holes in the stone for finger- and toeholds!

  “Yawl can stay and watch if you want to but I’m going home!” the same woman as before shouted.

  Grippo did not go straight up. Searching ahead for holes big enough to hook a finger or a toe in, he was often forced to veer from his path to one side or the other, even to descend and strike out on a fresh route, so that he crisscrossed the entire face of the structure—very much the way a fly climbs. Thus he was twenty minutes in gaining the relative safety of the first gargoyle, upon whose neck he sat for a well-earned five-minute rest. Then could be seen the toll his climb was taking. The knees of his trousers were torn open and his knees scraped raw and red. Hanging as he did sometimes by a mere two fingertips in those jagged and sharp-edged holes, the punishment to them could be imagined.

  “I can’t stand it anymore! I’m going home where I belong!” that same woman yelled.

  After his rest Grippo’s rate of climb was slower, and by the time he reached his second gargoyle it was almost nine by the clock. His rest at that station was a long one. It was a stone goat upon whose neck he sat this time, and it seemed to be bucking and trying to throw him off, so deep was his breathing. To the watchers on the ground the tower appeared to have grown in height and people were saying now that Grippo would never make it to the top.

  At last he rose and faced the wall again and resumed his climb. One foot higher he lost his grip and fell. The crowd’s cry died away on a vast sigh of relief as he caught the gargoyle in his descent. The jolt of his fall and its sudden arrest popped his helmet off and with it his goggles and sent them flying through the air. It was then in the general hush, broken only by the hysterical sobs of various women, that Mrs. Ernestine Reynolds, pear-shaped with her third child, cried out, “My Lord it’s Stan!”

  And my Lord she was right. It was. The Great Grippo was none other than our own “California” Stan Reynolds, in his desperation to escape from the home town he hated trying to climb his way out up the courthouse tower. The plump of two thousand hearts high in hopes sinking in sudden disappointment could almost be heard.

  “Grippo my foot! Don’t Grippo me!” Ernestine was shouting at her neighbors trying to persuade her and themselves that she must be mistaken. “I reckon I know my own husband when I see him—the crazy fool! Stan! Stanley Reynolds! What do you think you’re doing? Come down from there! You hear me, Stan? Get down from there before you fall and break your neck! A fine fix that would leave me in, wouldn’t it! Children, hush your crying! Stan! You—Oh! Watch out!” And she went green around the gills.

  For in struggling to haul himself onto the gargoyle Stan’s hold had slipped and he now hung only by his hands with his feet kicking free in space.

  “Run get a rope, somebody!” a man yelled.

  “A rope! A rope! Run get a rope!” cried several all at once.

  Mr. McKinney, of McKinney’s Hardware, waved his store keys above his head, croaking to get himself noticed. The keys were passed to the rear of the crowd and someone set off running for the square. By the time the man got back with the coil of rope Stan had succeeded in pulling himself up and was once again sitting astraddle of the stone goat. Now that he was about to be rescued, having spoiled the day for all, mutters were heard that it would serve Stan right if he fell and broke his neck. A party of five volunteers ran into the courthouse carrying the rope. In the empty, high-ceilinged hallways their heavy footsteps could be heard, then could be heard no more as they started up the tower.

  Stan must have heard them on the stairs inside going past the point where he sat perched. Whereupon he stood up and began again more determinedly than ever crawling up the wall. Shouts from the crowd went up of, “Sit still! Stay where you’re at! Wait a second! They’re coming with a rope!” and from Ernestine the cry, “Oh! Just wait till I get you home!” But Stan had climbed that high and could see above him the attainment of all his dreams. He was determined to go the whole way and claim his prize—which was to spit in the faces of all those below him and then never see them again. When the men of the rescue party appeared in the lookout and dropped their rope, Stan continued on his way, climbing up alongside it.

  That was around half past nine. By ten Stan had gained two more gargoyles and was a little less than halfway to the top. It was an exhibition of frantic determination and mad bravery, and throughout it the crowd’s mood had changed. At first, its hopes for a good time dashed, disgusted with being duped and boiling with indignation—a mob rather than a crowd—it was bent on having its own out of “California” Stan as soon as he was let back down to earth. But as Stan inched his way upwards, clinging for life by his fingertips, slipping and nearly falling and bringing every heart into every mouth at every moment, it began to dawn upon them that they were in fact seeing what they had come to see: a man scale the courthouse; and that if it was excitement they wanted they were getting not less but more out of watching an amateur, someone like themselves, do it, than they could have gotten out of watching a professional human fly. Nobody cheered: Stan had made himself too unpopular for that, and it could not be overlooked that that stubborn perseverance was the measure of his hatred o
f them all. Still it had to be admitted that what he was doing took nerve.

  By eleven o’clock nerve was all the man was going on, and when finally he struggled to yet another of those stone billygoats it was plain to all that he had gone as high as he was going to go. Still he would not come down. Even after it must have been clear to Stan that he could go no higher but must give up and come down, he clung to his hard-won height, stubbornly ignoring the rope that dangled by his side, his wife who pled with him, threatened him, cursed him, and cried. Goaded by that hard-dying dream of his, or by the prospect of defeat, descent, he tried again, dragged himself up the wall another foot, then clung to it, unable to go up, unwilling to come down.

  The rescue party in the lookout could be heard pleading with him. “Aw, come on, Stan, grab the rope. Please, Stan! Grab the rope, won’t you, Stan?” Down on the ground women wailed and shrieked while men called up, “We’re not mad at you, Stan, hear? Nobody’s going to hurt you when you get down. Just grab the rope. Please!”

  The clock struck twelve. Sixteen solemn chimes and then the long slow counting of the hour. The final stroke died away. A spasm of despair followed by a shudder of surrender passed over the man clutching at the wall and he beat his head against the stone. Then he turned and let go and reached for the rope. And missed it and fell sixty-six feet to the roof of the second story.

  The thousand women present let out a single scream, and still one heard the thud as the falling man struck the roof. Even those who managed to get their hands over their ears before he hit still heard inside their heads the heavy sickening thud, and felt it in every cell of their bodies.

  He ought to have been instantly killed, but as a matter of fact, he survived—helplessly crippled, to be sure, but still miraculously alive. Despite some eleven operations over the years, all paid for by the community he so despised, he remained permanently bedridden and immobilized, requiring even to be fed, a duty which his wife conscientiously fulfilled, although her patient was not noted for a cheerful disposition.

  The event has remained vivid in local memory, and often, hearing the clock strike the hour, New Jerusalemites pause at their play or at their busy chores to recollect for a moment those desperate hours it tolled that earlier day.

  In October 1945, under “Ten Years Ago This Week,” and again in October 1955, under “Twenty Years Ago This Week,” the Lariat and Northern Bee reprinted its original account of that day when, as Grippo the Human Fly, Stan attempted to scale the courthouse tower, preserving unrevised in the interest of historical accuracy its concluding observation that he was not expected to live. Stan died in the little cottage provided for him near the jailhouse and we buried him just last week—it was his obituary I have lately had to write—after thirty-three years as a ward of the town. Anyone who supposes he was grateful for our charity not only didn’t know Stan, he doesn’t know human nature.

  Some readers may, like ourself, be intrigued to know how many times the town clock chimed over that period. 10,571,358.

  The Last of the Caddoes

  I

  BY THE shores of the Red River, in Texas, lived a boy named Jimmy Hawkins, who learned one day to his surprise that he was, on his father’s side, part Indian. Until then Jimmy had always thought he was just another white boy.

  A curious reluctance had kept Jimmy’s mother from ever telling him about his Indian blood. She had felt it from the time he first began to question her about himself, about the family. She shied away from it warily, almost as though in fear. This was very silly of her, of course. Just childishness. Some old bogeyman left over from her early childhood, nothing more. She had never seen a live Indian in her life. The savages, even in Texas, had long since been pacified, not to say exterminated. Being afraid of Indians in these days and times, when the only ones left were celluloid Indians, Saturday-matinee horse-opera Indians! Ugh. How. Me big chief Squat-in-the-Mud. Heap big medicine. Ridiculous! It was quite plain that what she really felt was not fear at all, it was in fact a touch of jealousy, possessiveness. For it was not she but his father from whom the child got his Indian blood, and obviously she was jealous of that part of him, small as it was, that was alien to her. Not that this was not equally silly of her, of course. Not that the Indian in himself was not equally alien to her husband. Certainly he would never try to use this bond to draw the boy closer to himself, away from his mother. There was really no reason for it. And that was it, precisely. That explained entirely why Mrs. Hawkins, and, following her lead, Mr. Hawkins, had let their Jimmy reach the age of twelve without ever mentioning this trifle about himself: there was no reason to.

  Yet all the while Jimmy’s mother felt she really perhaps ought to just mention it. There were times, indeed, when it was as though she were being urged from all sides to tell him, reproached for her silence, even almost commanded to speak out without further delay. “But what on earth difference does it make?” she would argue. “Nowadays what difference does it make? None whatever.” Though in fact it might have made a great difference to Jimmy. The boy was simply crazy about Indians: read about nothing else, dressed himself up as one, made himself beadwork belts, sewed his own moccasins; his mother might have guessed that to be able to claim he was part Indian would have pleased him as nothing else could. “But it’s only the tiniest little fraction,” she would rejoin. “Hardly enough to count.” Or, again: “It isn’t as if I had deliberately not told him. Heavens! Why on earth would I do that? What’s it to me, one way or the other? The subject has simply never come up, that’s all. If it ever should, why then, of course …” Just who it was she was arguing with at these times she never knew.

  It came out unexpectedly one day when they were having one of their rows. Lately it had gotten so all they ever did, it seemed, was fuss and quarrel. Jimmy was passing through a difficult phase. Going on thirteen now, and feeling new powers stirring within him, he was forever testing his strength, trying his mother, seeing just how far he could go, how much he could get away with. This one was their third fight in two days. Jimmy had done something he knew not to do, had been scolded and punished, and had turned sullen and defiant. His punishment would end, he was told, when he confessed he had been bad and said he was sorry; the set of his jaw proclaimed that he had vowed he would sooner die. He could be very stubborn. He was getting to be more than a match for his mother, as he well knew: too big for her to switch anymore—the very threat had begun to sound absurd—almost too big for his father to correct; and he soon reduced her to that frazzled state where, as she would say, she didn’t know what to do. He grew bolder and more impudent until at last he said something so sassy she slapped his face. This made dart from Jimmy’s black eyes two poisoned arrows of hatred. “Oh!” cried his mother, pierced by his look, “I don’t know what gets into you at times like this!” Then before she knew it: “It must be the Indian in you coming out.”

  Jimmy instantly forgot his burning cheek. The Indian in him! Did she mean it? Real Indian? Which tribe? What part Indian was he? How long had this been known? Why had she never told him before?

  But his mother had already told him more than she ever meant to. “You get it,” she said dryly, “from your father, not me.” To her surprise, and her chagrin, she found herself trembling, positively seething with anger. She felt somehow as though she had been tricked into letting it out. What was most exasperating was to find herself so vexed over a mere trifle. But what she felt was not altogether anger, and she knew it. One of her heartstrings had just been tied tight in a hard little knot of fear.

  Jimmy’s antics, meanwhile, did nothing to soothe her temper. His disobedience, his mother’s displeasure, the sentence of punishment he was still under all forgotten, he was circling round and around her doing an Indian war dance. Brandishing an invisible tomahawk, he stamped his feet, ducked his head, then flung it back, all the while patting his mouth as he whooped, “Wah wah wah wah wah wah—” Until, shaking with rage, she hissed at him, “Little savage! Treat your mother with n
o more consideration than a wild savage! Well, that’s just what you are! So act like one, that’s right! Be proud of yourself for it!” Then she broke down in tears and ran sobbing from the room.

  Thus, not until he was twelve, almost thirteen, and then only by accident (or so it seemed at the time), did Jimmy Hawkins learn that he was part Indian. And that that was the part his mother blamed for all she disliked in him.

  II

  How big a part? Which tribe? These questions, and others, Jimmy did not again put to his mother, eager as he was for an answer to them—not after her angry outburst. His hurt pride would not let him.

  She had said he got it from his father, so Jimmy went to him. But he checked himself long before he got there. Not much pondering upon the matter was needed to make Jimmy even less willing to question his father than he was to question his mother. More Indian by half than he, his father had connived at, or at the very least had acquiesced in, keeping from his son the knowledge of his Indian ancestry. There was a name for men like his father, and a punishment decreed for them. His father was a renegade, and so without further ado Jimmy drummed him out of their tribe—whichever that might prove to be.

  To be an Indian, even if only in part, was to Jimmy so glorious a fate it was impossible for him to imagine anyone feeling differently. But any lingering doubts he may have had about how differently his mother felt were soon dispelled. For although she had meant never to mention it—unless, that is to say, it just came up by itself, of course—once it was out and there was no taking it back, she found herself saying again and again, whenever he goaded her to it, which was often enough as the warfare between them went on, “That’s the Indian in you coming out, that’s what that bit of deviltry is. Little savage!” Though each time she said it it seemed to draw tighter that hard little knot in her heart.

  And it was no sooner said than something awful began to happen. Something truly sinister. Something quite uncanny and even unbelievable, and yet precisely the sort of thing that might have been expected. Indeed, it now seemed to have been a premonition of this very thing that had kept her from ever speaking out before. Overnight Jimmy began to look like an Indian. He really did. What made this sudden transformation the more uncanny was that, strictly speaking, he looked no more like an Indian than he ever had, or ever would for that matter, with his corn-silk hair and pale, almost white eyebrows and lashes, his fair, not to say pallid, skin. His only feature that might have been Indian was his glittering black eyes—brown, actually, but a brown so dark, especially being set in that pale face, as to be really black. Yet all the same he really did begin to look like an Indian—more so every day—more so each time he was reproached with being one. More sullen and sly: more Indian.