Proud Flesh

by William Humphrey

  Amy did not mechanically copy her wrong answer onto the board that day. Beginning at the beginning, she worked the problem one last time in front of the class. Her answer that time was the same as all the times before.

  “That is not the answer in the back of the book,” Miss Allison said.

  Amy hung her head. “No, Ma’am,” she said.

  The class was hushed. It was the first time that Amy Renshaw had ever been humiliated at the blackboard.

  “Who got that problem right?” Miss Allison asked the class. No hand was raised. Not even Joan Harvey’s. But knowing that she was merely no worse than the rest gave Amy no comfort; on the contrary, by lowering her to the general level it deepened her shame.

  “Do you want to try again, Amy?” Miss Allison asked. The offer was unprecedented, and made Amy feel more unworthy than ever.

  Amy, choking back tears, shook her head. “No, Ma’am, thank you anyway, Miss Allison,” she said. “It wouldn’t be any use. It always comes out the same, though I did it a hundred times.”

  “Mmh, and always will, though you were to do it a thousand,” said Miss Allison. “Your answer is correct, Amy. The one in the back of the book is wrong.”

  The class gave a gasp of amazement, then burst into gleeful laughter. The surprise was to find that schoolbooks could be wrong, that the world of teachers was not infallible. The laughter was triumph and self-delight. A world of their own had opened up to them and the pupils gazed at one another in a daze of self-discovery. The laughter swelled, passed out of control, became seditious. In it could be heard the rejoicing of a mob delivered from superstition and subjection.

  But as for little Amy Renshaw, when the altars of discredited authority came crashing down she lacked agility, she could not jump aside in time, she was caught beneath, and crushed. Her answer was correct, her paper perfect. But Amy remembered her long lonely anxious hours in the night. She had trusted in the book, and her trust had been misplaced. If she could not believe in the answer in the back of the book, what was there for her to believe in?

  “There is a lesson for you in this, Amy,” Miss Allison said. “A lesson,” she said to the class, “for all of you. The lesson is, it is not enough to be right; you must know that you are.”

  As one, the class nodded to show that they had learned this lesson. Amy dutifully nodded, too. But she felt as though she had been set adrift upon the ocean of life in a boat without any rudder.

  Adrift now upon this deep dream of that childhood tragedy, she could see the shore where duty stood calling to her, but she was swept with the tide out to a sea of sleep.

  XXII

  Long after the lights in the house had gone out, three sat on beneath the pear tree: Derwent, ghostly in the moonlight in his white sailor suit, Ballard and Lester. Twice Ballard’s wife had come out in her nightgown to plead with him to come to bed. The second time he had not even answered her. None of the three had said anything. Yet in the air about them something almost crackled with imminence. Ballard himself seemed surrounded by a vacuum, as though he had sucked in all the air around him and was holding it in. So that on turning to leave, his wife had said, “Ballard? Ballard, don’t youall do anything, hear? What are youall thinking of doing? Whatever it is don’t do it. Hear?” Still she got no answer.

  When she was gone, out of the darkness came Lester’s voice:

  “You don’t suppose …”

  “Forget it.” That was Derwent.

  “Hmm?” said Ballard.

  “Forget it.”

  Silence fell. Then in a voice strained through clenched teeth, Ballard said, “Son of a—!

  “Bast—!

  “God damn the English language! Ain’t there no way to cuss your brother without dragging your mother into it?”

  TWO

  I

  Old Dr. Metcalf had brought into the world half the people in the county. He had nursed them and their children through the whooping cough and the measles and the mumps, and he was starting in now on their children’s children. The men he had certified fit and sent off for duty in three wars. He had stitched them back together following disputes and set their broken bones following accidents. To Doc was owing the continued functioning of many a faulty organ, the continued pleasure in the company of many an aged parent, and to Doc was also owing, in many cases, his fee: he had carried half his patients on his books for years. Old as he was getting to be, Doc would still come out on call at any hour of the night and in all kinds of weather, though it meant getting over washed-out roads, getting mired in the mud and having to find and rouse from sleep some farmer with a tractor or a team to pull him out, often having to do the last mile or more on foot or on the back of the family mule behind the eldest boy sent down to meet him where the road gave out. All this to save the child of, or present with yet another, or, by the light of a coal-oil lamp, to remove the ruptured and gangrened appendix of some man who along next fall would come into the office and discharge his obligation with a mess of squirrels or a towsackful of hardshell pecans or maybe a pale, salty, undercured razorback ham. It was from just some such call that Doc had failed to return. He had disappeared, in circumstances suggesting foul play. It was a matter of concern and conjecture for the whole county.

  The last person to see him was his wife. She reported that on Wednesday around five o’clock in the morning they had been awakened by the screech of car brakes in the street, followed instantly by a violent knocking on their door. Both had started downstairs, she in the effort to get there ahead of him, for she tried, without much success, to intercept these middle-of-the-night summonses—most of which, as it turned out, might just as well have kept until regular office hours—and especially ever since his last cardiogram some weeks earlier. As usual, however, he was quicker than she, and while the pounding on the door rose still louder and more peremptory, he went down to answer it, calling, “All right. AH right! I hear you. I’m coming!” The murmur of voices had reached her, men’s voices, though whether apart from her husband’s there had been just one or more than one she could not say for certain. The doctor had then come back upstairs and dressed, saying that he had to go out into the country and for her to go back to sleep and not to wait up for him. To express her disapproval she had pointedly asked for no details, and sensing her disapproval he had volunteered none. She heard the front door slam, then heard a car shoot away and down the street and off into the night with a whine like a ricocheting bullet.

  Mrs. Metcalf did not fret when at breakfast that morning her husband was still not back. He was often kept out all night, sometimes by a stubborn delivery, sometimes by an easy one when the anxious young husband had sent to fetch him at the very first sign of the wife’s labor pains. Nor was she disturbed that no call had come; the nearest telephone was often miles away. She worried only about that recent cardiogram, and hoped he had found time during the night’s vigil to snatch a wink of sleep.

  At ten that morning the waiting room began to fill with patients and the telephone to ring. Mrs. Metcalf took the calls, made appointments, explained that Doctor was out on an emergency, that she expected him back any time now, promised to have him call as soon as possible. There came a call from the hospital, which was in the neighboring county, to say that one of Doc’s cases appeared to be taking a turn for the worse. He had not made his customary morning rounds, nor had he put in any call there. The morning passed and the waiting patients all had to be sent home unattended. Mrs. Metcalf ate her lunch alone and afterward lay down for the nap she always took during the heat of the day, but that day she could not sleep. The afternoon passed with still no word. Patients began to come for the evening office hours and had to be turned away, some of them in pain. She knew the doctor would be provoked if she did anything foolish; but at half-past six, when a car which had seemed about to stop sped up and drove on past instead, she had picked up the phone and rung Sheriff Faye Benningfield.

  Doc had not taken his car but had gone with his caller, or cal
lers, in theirs. That they might have gotten lost was impossible. For even if the driver had been a passing stranger, Doc could have been set down blindfolded on any stretch of road or on any cowpath in the county and have found his way home again. Considering the speed at which, according to Mrs. Metcalf’s account, the car was being driven, they might have had an accident. None had been reported, however; nor was any wreck ever found during the succeeding days. Theirs may have been the car which was going too fast to slow down for the pile of loose cotton lying strewn across the highway out near the Renshaws’ that night, and which, plowing right through, set the cotton on fire by knocking over the kerosene flare put there to warn approaching drivers. But there was no way of knowing who had done that; for unfortunately the man who owned the cotton, Hugo Mattox, although he was lying in the field alongside, and although the skid marks left by the tires on the road measured fifty yards long, had slept right through the whole commotion, waking only hours later to find his cotton charred and smoldering.

  It was certainly to be feared that Doc had met with foul play. Suspicion fell naturally upon the migrant workers with whom, it being ginning season, the countryside was filled just then. As yet there were no clues. But Doc was a much-loved figure, and feelings ran high, and busy as the season was, there was a kind of floating posse, men in town with cotton at the compress, always on hand in the square.

  That Friday morning a plume of smoke seen rising deep inside North Woods drew a search party in there. They found a moonshiner’s pot-still, or rather, found the smoking remains of one, the explosion of whose boiler had caused its owner to decamp in haste. There were stories of certain quart Mason jars of white-mule whiskey, but no evidence of the missing Dr. Metcalf or of his abductors. Meanwhile that day passed and so did the next one without bringing the ransom note expected by many. The finding on Saturday of a Panama hat caught in the overhanging alders at a point a mile downstream from the town started a movement for having the river dredged. For the time being nothing came of it. One minute Mrs. Metcalf would declare it was her husband’s hat, the next minute deny that she ever saw it before. By then she was in no state to identify anything.

  There were other doctors in the town, but Metcalf’s practice was the biggest by far, and at once, in addition to the concern all felt for his safety, his patients and their families began to suffer great inconvenience and hardship through his continued absence. There were women about due to give birth, and who would have no one for it but Doc—as women are about the doctor who has delivered their previous children. There were those under his care for chronic illnesses and for injuries and for postoperative treatment (few of these, for a main source of Doc’s popularity had been his slowness to draw the scalpel), and in the meantime somebody else came down daily with something new, people who had doctored with Metcalf for so long they hardly knew where else to turn, like Edwina Renshaw, for example, who, as luck would have it, had been stricken on the very eve of Doc’s disappearance.

  Days passed and not a trace was found, not a clue. Mrs. Metcalf had taken to bed and was being attended by young Dr. Weinberg. Sheriff Benningfield would race through the square and out of town in one direction or another carrying a carload of armed deputies, and sometimes a brace of bloodhounds in the bird-dog cage in the trunk. On coming in later he would shake his head and say to those on the corner of the square awaiting their turn at the suction pipe of the gin, “Nothing definite yet, boys. We’re working on it.” And the Sheriff would want to know from any who lived out the Renshaws’ way the latest news of that other search for a missing man which all were also following by then.

  For by then it was known to all—it was a scandal almost to make people forget the missing Dr. Metcalf—that the Renshaws had despatched two of their men to bring the missing Kyle home to his dying mother. Ballard and Lester. They had been seen and recognized—or rather, recognized though not seen, as they were driving at the usual Renshaw speed—on the road to Dallas. A mother lay on her deathbed, nine of her children at her side, but the tenth, her youngest and always her pet, him the family had not dared to trust to come if summoned by a wire but had had to send two of his brothers in person to fetch him home. It could happen in any family, and in any other would not have caused such a scandal; what made it such a scandal was the Renshaws’ belief that it could happen in any family but theirs. Their mother was failing fast, according to reports, and whether Ballard and Lester would make it back with their renegade brother in time for a deathbed reunion was most doubtful. “If only old Doc was here,” people sighed and said. “He’d keep her going.”

  As the days added toward a week and Doc Metcalf was given up for dead, disgust with the local officers of the law spread through the town and the surrounding countryside. News of Doc’s disappearance now penetrated into the hinterlands, into those roadless reaches where lived some of the men most beholden to him. Rough men these were, with rough notions of justice; their presence in the town was a cap to the fused and waiting charge, and a mood of lynch law hung palpably upon the sultry September atmosphere.

  It was just the worst time of the year for such a thing to happen. During that week all but the big-scale farmers finished gathering their crops. Their cotton picked and ginned and their bales either sold or put in storage, they came downtown to swell the number of idlers on the sidewalks of the square. It was the season when ordinarily the town was busiest, noisiest, gayest. Now, though crowded, the square was ominously quiet. The crowds were composed exclusively of narrow-eyed, tight-lipped men. Usually along with their last load of cotton they brought the family in to spend some of the money they had gotten either from the sale of it or borrowed against it from the bank while hopefully awaiting a rise in the market price; this year their wives and children had been left at home. The stores were empty, the merchants standing in their doorways with their hands in their pockets and the added seasonal salesclerks gazing out the show-windows. The abduction of Dr. Metcalf was hurting the town’s entire economy. Only the barbershops and the marble-machines in the cafes and the bootleggers in the backalleys were doing any trade. Eggs, and also a beefsteak, were fried on the sidewalks in idle demonstrations of the heat. The air was seasoned with the odor of raw cotton, and along the curbs and against the store fronts cotton lint lay in dirty drifts like the last snow of spring.

  As crops were gathered the migrant workers left. That Doc Metcalf’s killer, or killers, might have been among those allowed to get away was a thought to make men gnash their teeth in helpless rage. Leaving town became a suspicious thing to do as the remaining number of workers dwindled and tempers meanwhile mounted, and the wise ones, the end of their jobs in sight, began to slip away unnoticed, some without even drawing their last day’s pay.

  Strange lawmen appeared in the town, reputed—the suspected crime being a federal offense: kidnaping—to be FBI men. The river was dredged, without result. One breathless evening a mob collected in Market Square outside the jailhouse, drawn by a rumor that a suspect in the case had been brought in for questioning. This proved unfounded and the crowd dispersed, but its size was such and its mood so unmistakably combustible that on the following day the local detachment of the National Guard sweated through a display drill on the public square. An event among the men observing these maneuvers aggravated the tension. Will Mahaffey dropped dead on the street. Will was near eighty and known to have been in poor health for years, but old Doc had kept him going, and the feeling was that Doc might have kept him going still if only he had been there to do it—another score to be settled with his kidnapers, or his killers, as the case should prove.

  II

  Just then occurred a new mystery.

  Meeting his neighbor, Rex Bailey, on the square one morning just at sunup, Doak Westrup said, “Rex! You know my dog Speck. Well, somebody killed him last night!”

  “Doak,” Rex replied, “you took those words right out of my mouth. When I went outdoors this morning I found my dog Blue with his throat slit from ear to e
ar!”

  Rex and Doak were joined by a neighbor of theirs, John Joliffe. John looked bad. He said, “Did you ever in your life hear such a howling of dogs as went on all last night? I never got a wink of sleep. As soon as one stopped another one took up. Somebody must have died. Edwina Renshaw, do you suppose?”

  Rex and Doak were telling John their news when they were joined by Dean Watson. “What? Well now, what in the hell is going on around here?” said Dean. “When I stopped at the Renshaws’ this morning to ask how Mrs. Edwina was, somebody had killed two of Clifford’s coon-hounds overnight.”

  The men exchanged grim looks. In a place where to harm a man’s dog was a shooting matter, this new mystery, although it was a distraction from the affair of the missing Dr. Metcalf, instead of cooling passions further inflamed them.

  “I have turned down offers of as high as a hundred and seventy-five dollars for that dog,” said Rex. “You can believe that or not just as you choose, I’m ready to swear to it before a notary public.”

  “I believe you without that,” said Frank Lovejoy. “I’ve shot over many a dog and some thoroughbreds among them, but never a better one than old Blue. I’d have given you a hundred and seventy-five dollars for him myself.” For what it was worth, Frank, who lived in a different direction out of town from that of the men whose dogs had been killed, offered them each a pup from his bitch Jill’s next litter, provided of course that Jill whelped that many.