IX
Side Two of Mr. Murphy’s tape—before it was erased—began, as did Side One, with talk of Amy Renshaw, but with a difference. With the other side of the tape came another side of Amy, one hitherto unexplored, unseen, like the dark side of the moon.
The tape had reached the end of Side One and must be rewound and turned over. A rest for Doc, a chance for the Sheriff to step outside and take the temperature of the crowd. Please God it had not kept up with the heat of the day! On coming out of the air-conditioned house the Sheriff popped out with sweat like a cold can of beer. The tarred street had come to a slow boil. Shoe soles, whenever a man shifted his stance after a while, pulled away with a sound from it. The Sheriff circulated among the men spreading assurance that Doc was going to be all right. He was telling everything and it was all being taken down. As to whether he had named names, all that the Sheriff could tell them for the time being was, the mystery was being cleared up.
Then the Sheriff heard—he had grown supersensitive to it—had developed an allergic reaction to it—the name he had been hearing all morning long—the one he was keeping to himself right that moment. It was not what he feared. They did not know what he knew. The crowd had been joined only a short while before by the contingent from out the Renshaws’ way. A thing of interest and concern to equal the vigil for Doc Metcalf had detained them. Stopping by, as they did every morning, to ask after Mrs. Edwina, they had witnessed the latest misfortune to befall that troubled family. Overnight Edwina Renshaw had died and Amy had had the nervous breakdown Doc had feared. She had locked herself in the storm cellar declaring that she had “killed” her mother, and vowing never again to see the light of day. The Renshaws’ neighbors, even the earliest ones upon the scene, had found the house deserted, the door ajar, the family, still in their nightclothes, weeping and wailing around the cellar like a tribe of Indians around their ancestral burial mound.
With so many of their relatives so long in the house even the Renshaws’ big kitchen garden had been stripped bare, and Eulalie, pulling her coaster wagon, had gone out to the storm cellar in hopes of finding on its shelves some jars of something left over from last year’s canning. She found herself unable to lift the heavy cellar door. She brought her boy Archie down to lift it for her. Archie could not lift it either. He was trying to when Eulalie stopped him. Then Archie heard it, too. Somebody was in there. The door was bolted on the inside and somebody was in there. Not the drunken Jug, as was their first thought, but a woman, and making sounds as though she were unconscious and groaning in pain.
The storm cellar—in fall and winter, after harvest and the canning season, the root cellar—was located fifty yards behind the house—about the limit for safety, as tornadoes, or “twisters,” often sprang up with scant forewarning. The Renshaws’ was big for a storm cellar, having been dug for a big family: a mound twenty feet in diameter and rising to a height of twelve feet, shaped like an igloo. The mound was solid earth; the cellar itself lay entirely underground. At the base of the side nearest the house, slanted so slightly as to lie nearly level, was the door to the steps by which the cellar was reached. It was of thick hand-hewn oak petrified by sun and wind, and hung on heavy hand-forged hinges. With that door lowered and bolted behind them, and covered by that mound of earth, the Renshaws were safe from the fiercest cyclone’s wrath. A three-foot-wide culvert pipe of corrugated sheet-iron rising from the center of the mound supplied air.
To talk to Amy in the cellar it was necessary to climb the mound and speak down the pipe, on the knees, as the pipe rose only a foot and a half. Ira had gone first.
“Amy? Are you listening? It’s me. Ira. Your husband.” Ira had spoken low but inside the pipe his voice boomed. But in the vault below it was instantly muffled. He might have spoken into his pillow.
“What does she say, Ira?” Gladys called up to him. “What does our poor dear sister say?”
Ira shook his head. He seemed unable or unwilling to believe that his wife was there in the ground beneath him. Sticking his head inside the pipe (the wire screen that covered it to keep out animals had been removed) he said, “Amy? Amy? Amy? Can you hear me? It’s me. Ira. Speak to me, Amy.”
From the depths below had arisen a long-drawn hollow groan which drew from the women an echoing chorus of wails. Ira jerked his head out of the hole and gripped the pipe. Her voice, though unnaturally deep, was clear, and while it came out fairly loud, all sensed that she had actually spoken low. Indeed, that she had barely spoken aloud, that she had spoken not to Ira but to herself. It was the effect of that close and all but sealed-up subterranean vault: as if her inner thoughts were audible in that silence, amplified by those narrow walls and channeled up the pipe on that still air. Putting down a visible urge to rise and run, Ira again stuck his head inside the pipe. “Amy,” he pleaded. “Amy, don’t torment yourself this way. Your mother wouldn’t want you to carry on like this. Be sensible, Amy. This is not going to help anything.”
Gladys had been for forcing the door, breaking it in if necessary, and carrying their sister out. “I don’t know what we’re waiting for,” she declared. “She’s had a breakdown, a nervous breakdown. Gone out of her mind with exhaustion and grief. This had been too much for her. We’ve got to get her out of there. Get her to a doctor. To a hospital. Nurse her back to her right mind.”
Hazel had disagreed. Amy had not gone crazy. They all knew how she felt about Ma. They might have expected something like this. Leave her alone and after a while she would calm down and come up on her own. For the time being she was where she wanted to be and until she worked off some of her feelings that was the best place for her.
Lois had sided with Hazel, though for reasons of her own. She feared Amy might do something desperate if they tried force. None of them knew but what she might have something with her down there, a gun or a rope or a bottle of poison. While they were trying to batter down that thick door …
“I know just how you feel, Amy, hon,” said Lois in a tearful voice, and at the groan that arose from the pipe she nodded her head. “I know. I know. Without Ma life just doesn’t seem worth living. I know. But at a time like this we ought to be all together. Come on out now, Amy, dear, and let us all be together.”
Stout Gladys, when with the aid of a boost from her sisters she had gained the top of the mound and lowered herself to her knees, tried a different tack, saying, “You know how we all depend on you. Sister. You’ve been a second mother to us all. We need you more than ever now.”
Hollow groans, strangled cries, hoarse guttural growls as though she were gagging on self-disgust, whimpers and grunts as of a wounded animal in its lair biting itself to allay a greater pain: these were all they could get out of her. Every effort they made to soothe her seemed only to worsen her self-torment. So they redoubled their efforts. Worn out by all they had been through, and now distraught at this latest turn of events, the Renshaw women wailed and shrieked around the mound, wept on one another’s bosoms and tore their hair, while the Renshaw men stood around helpless and sullen, embarrassed at having this latest misfortune to befall them witnessed by the neighbors.
Frightened by Lois’s fears, the Renshaws had decided not to force the cellar door. For the time being Archie and Jug were posted on the mound, instructed to keep both ears to the pipe and at the least suspicious sound below to ring the cowbell left with them along with axes and a crowbar for use in case of dire emergency.
It was when this had been reported to him that Doc produced the image of that other Amy. It was a reverse image, but perhaps it was the one from which the first had come—as in photography the print comes from the negative. It was an Amy the opposite of that one he himself had depicted on the other side of the same tape as a model—almost a monster—of daughterly devotion. Well, he had said he was no psychiatrist and no detective; but this Amy was different from the one the whole world knew. She had fooled everybody, beginning with herself. Everybody but one. The one the world had thought was so cruel
ly mistaken about her all along.
The rest of them she had fooled so completely that now when she wanted to unfool them they themselves would not believe her. Poor Amy! There really was a curse upon that woman. A worse one than this would be hard to imagine. It was as bad as being falsely accused and finding nobody to believe in your innocence. She might be able to convince them that she was guilty of some other crime—any other crime—but that. Never. She could say it till her tongue lolled out and they would think it meant the same as when one of them said it. “Killed my mother”—why, they all said that. It was their way of saying how much they had loved her. Their way of saying that, much as it was, they had not loved her nearly enough. Amy had done her work too well. Talk about chickens coming home to roost! A lifetime Amy had spent trying to prove her love to her doubting and distrustful mother, and all the world had felt for her. Now her mother had proved right and shown Amy’s real self to her at last. And now she was the only one who could see her real self while the rest held up to her gaze the mocking image of that old false self of hers. Photography? More like an X-ray. “See? Here are my insides, and here is the diseased part. See?” “But here is your photograph and you look just the same as ever.” What a fate! To be falsely accused of a crime and unjustly punished must be one of the bitterest things in life, but to be falsely forgiven, to want to confess and to find no one among those you have wronged who will listen, that must be a torment even worse. “I killed our mother.” “Yes, dear, we know.” If she wasn’t crazy when she went into that storm cellar, much more of that and she would be!
Was he saying then—?
Accidentally? One of those near-accidents of hers that he had been telling them about? One of her oversights—a moment’s dereliction of duty—which he had managed up to then to catch in the nick of time and prevent—one of those had finally slipped by him and had caused—hastened—her mother’s death?
Nothing had slipped by him. He was there right through it all. When, at the kitchen door that night, he had learned that things were not as he thought but even worse, from that time on he had not left Edwina Renshaw’s side while Amy was there. Nothing had slipped by him. However, you might put it that way: “hastened.” If she had been murdered then that would certainly have hastened her death.
Oh, it was not a case for the Sheriff. He was a witness—the only one. He had seen it all—all that there was to see. In the time his back was turned you could not have counted to three. And when he turned back Amy had not moved from her spot. She had not blinked an eye. She was paralyzed. Paralyzed by—whatever was passing through her mind at that moment. Besides, she was unarmed. No, the Sheriff would not have to swear out a warrant, go arrest her, gather evidence. There was no evidence to gather. No jury would convict her, no grand jury would indict her. An autopsy on the dead woman would show no violence. If this was murder it was an unusual case—without precedence—unique: one without a weapon. They had heard the expression “if looks could kill.” He had always wondered at that. The most killing thing in the world sometimes was a look. Hearts could be broken forever, lives could be wrecked by a look. Some he had gotten in his time had made him just wish he was dead! If looks could kill? They could—deadlier than bullets, more painful than poison. He had seen one do it.
But—not to dispute his word—but if Edwina Renshaw had died just last night, and he had been asleep since—
“Last night? Who says she died last night?” Doc demanded. He grew alarmingly agitated. “That’s a lie! Listen, I know when somebody has died—though you didn’t need to be a doctor to know that she was dead, even to see that she was dying. The look on her face would have told anybody that. But in Edwina’s case I ought to know! You can be sure I wanted to make absolutely certain. I examined her thoroughly. I examined her when all I needed was my nose to tell me. And even after that I examined her again. Then I really examined her! But that was only because I was beginning to be as crazy as a Renshaw myself. I hadn’t really seen anything to make me doubt my judgment. I only imagined I had. She was dead. I defy anybody to say otherwise. When a Renshaw dies she’s dead, the same as you and me. Last night! Last night? Wait! You mean to tell me—? Wait. What day did you say this was? Saturday? And do you mean to tell me they still haven’t buried her? When she’s been dead now—and in this heat!—for five days!”
X
From that moment on, late that night or early that morning when he had eavesdropped on the three sisters in the kitchen, Doc had not let Edwina Renshaw out of his sight. If he had been conscientious before, if he had been constant, careful, if he had been terrified of making a mistake before, what was he after that!
He had said that after what he had just overheard it was all he could do to keep from screaming. To himself he was screaming as, holding his breath, he stole away from that kitchen door. He not only dared not protest against what he had just learned, he dared not let it be known that he knew it. He realized that they had suspected him of knowing it right along. This explained how it was that no amount of diligence on his part could ever allay the mistrust he saw in their eyes—perhaps even deepened their mistrust. They had known from the outset what he knew only now: that he was to be detained not to keep their mother alive for as long as the search for Kyle continued, but rather that the search—that futile, that impossible search—would continue for as long as he kept her alive. They supposed that he had guessed as much himself—and knowing that bunch as he did, he ought to have. In other words, they suspected him of knowing that by prolonging their mother’s life he was prolonging his own captivity. From there to the next step would be natural for the Renshaws: to suspect him of trying to shorten his captivity by shortening her life.
What happened, of course, was that he began to suspect himself of that. And, in consequence, to be more diligent, more conscientious, more scrupulous, and more scared, than ever. Not just scared of them but scared now of himself. What a hell of a position to put a doctor in! To make the death of a patient in his care of benefit to him! To make a doctor suspect himself of secretly desiring the death of one of his own patients! The result was to make him his own jailer. Thus once again without any embarrassment to themselves they got the most out of him. He must watch himself night and day for any … Carelessness? Inattentiveness? Oh, Lord, help him! Amy! Watchful as he had been before, henceforth he would have to be more watchful than ever over her.
So when the end came he was there. He was always there. He went without sleep, without food, he drank enough coffee to have floated a battleship, took enough nitroglycerin to have sunk one. Exhausted as he was, half-hysterical himself now, he lived in that sickroom, he was there all the time, especially any time Amy was there.
Tuesday afternoon—repeat: Tuesday afternoon—it was hot as hell. Stifling. Hard enough for a healthy person, a young person, to get his breath. Hers, Edwina’s, was coming short—a further strain on her already weak heart. To ease her they propped her up with pillows—Doc remembered the phrase “dead weight” passing ominously through his mind—and prepared her for a shot, he going to his bag—that was the moment he had spoken of before, when his back was turned—while Amy sterilized a spot on her arm with cotton and alcohol.
It was, as he had said, only an instant that his back was turned, but it had been like coming in halfway through a movie when he turned back, for in that instant much had happened. That is to say, nothing had “happened.” Neither woman had moved, neither had spoken nor even tried to speak. A look had passed between them. Or rather, in that short time already, a sequence of looks. From those on their faces at the moment he came in, Doc could reconstruct those that had gone before.
Edwina had wakened suddenly to find, for the first time since coming down sick, Amy bending over her. As always at the sight of Amy, she frowned. Being in pain, frightened, disoriented, no doubt she frowned all the deeper. This was just what poor despised Amy dreaded: her mother’s waking and finding her there, and she was frightened and flustered. As always, her mo
ther’s frown brought to Amy’s face that cowed and hangdog look she had, and set her lips to twitching with that uncertain, sickly smile. Doc had not known which of the two exasperated him the more: Edwina for her incorrigible misprizing of Amy, or Amy for her incorrigible endurance of it. To anyone else poor Amy’s expression would have been pitiable; to her mother it was guilty. Guilty as she had always suspected, without herself suspecting until now the depth of that guilt. At that same moment Edwina’s wakened body reported to her from all parts how mortally sick she was. A last illumination lit up her eyes, growing more incandescent momentarily, as a bulb flares up just before burning out. The look on her face declared more loudly than words, “You have murdered me.”
He could have murdered her himself at that moment. The care that this daughter had lavished upon her, the superhuman care, and this was her reward! He turned to comfort, to support, to sympathize with that poor misbegotten soul and saw—
Only his practice as a doctor could supply a comparison. More than once in his long career he had seen people who had lost their faces. Had them burnt off, cut away, shot away—once saw a woman who had been thrown by a trusted saddlehorse head-foremost onto a gravel riding path and had her face simply scraped off. And after surgery, when the bandages were removed, had seen the stiff new man-made substitute and had watched as the patient was handed a mirror and hesitated, afraid to look, and then the shock, the shake of the head, the rejection. Such was Amy’s face now as she looked into the mirror her mother held up to her. Raw, tender, sensitive to exposure as though freshly unbandaged—and hideously ugly. The eyes in it begged him not to look, and not to look away.
He looked away—he couldn’t help it; but not without first looking long—he couldn’t help it. Her face was a map of dismay and despair. At what? At being seen for what she had been shown to be? Or at his misjudging her now as her mother had misjudged her? Before looking away he saw her face harden, and he exulted to see it. There was a bottom at last to even her bottomless patience, and Edwina had touched it. Then his exultation changed to alarm, from alarm to fear, from fear to horror. He looked away barely in time to keep from being turned to stone by that face. The last thing she saw, it did just that to Edwina Renshaw.
Proud Flesh Page 22
