She stared.
“Maybe some other time,” he heard himself say.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sure. Some other time.”
“Listen,” he went on, feeling the pressure to keep her there. “Would you like to see me do some juggling? I do it all the time. It keeps me sane.”
“Maybe another time for that, too,” she said.
He had reached for the angel, the cat, and he held them, standing there under her flat, impassive gaze. “It’s really a lot of fun,” he said.
“Yeah. I don’t want to see it, though. I don’t really like juggling. It makes me nervous.”
He put the figurines down too quickly, and almost dropped one. “I like you,” he got out.
She looked down. “Um—do you think you could give me a small advance—say, the next couple of weeks’ worth?”
He kept the smile on his face, where the blood coursed, and wrote another check. Two hundred dollars. He tore it out and handed it to her. He was determined, as always, to be kind.
She looked at it, then at him. “Hey, man—really.”
He waited for her to say more. She was not looking at his face, but at the amount, and the date, and his signature. She put the check in her blouse pocket.
“Stop by,” he got out. “If you feel like it—if you need anything, or you’re—you’re in the neighborhood—” He breathed, swallowed, then breathed again, and she had started to turn from him. “Next week, then?” He was suddenly conscious of the idiotic smile on his face. He wiped his hand across his lips.
“Sure.”
“I don’t know when my mother will be coming back. My father left her. She’s had a hard time of it. I’d never—I’d never do that to my wife.”
“Your wife.” Her voice was toneless, only vaguely interested.
“Oh, I’ve never been married. But if I was—I’d never treat her that way.”
“Well,” she said, going out the door. “Thanks again, man. Really.”
“Very good,” he said. “Good work, Lynn.”
Had she hesitated at the sound of her name? He couldn’t be certain. He watched her go down the sidewalk and put her things in the van, and he stood in the open door waving as she pulled away. The faintest air of puzzlement played across her features as she looked back at him; he was not so obtuse as to have missed it; and she had not indicated that she would stop by. He had to admit all of that to himself. As he had also to admit that he would probably never see her again, that she would cash the check he had made out to her and use it to go far, far away. But a person had a right to hope, even to make plans. He turned back into the house, and had the thought, before he caught himself, that next week, if she did come back, he would be more careful of her feelings; he would try to get her talking more about herself.
THE WEIGHT
This is a story I would have told grandchildren—and great grandchildren—if I’d had any. I had three wives, but no children. That’s a mystery, I suppose. As it’s a mystery that I’ve been around for more than a century and am still blessed with reasonably fair health. I also remember what I had for breakfast this morning and who I talked with. You might have to remind me who you are if you come back, but that was always true. They say the far past becomes clearer as you get older and the near past gets dim. Well, I remember some things clearer than others and there doesn’t seem to be a pattern I can figure. More than ninety years ago, when I was almost twelve years old, something happened that I knew nothing would ever erase from my memory.
When I tell you about it, you won’t ever forget it either.
In the summer of 1903—that’s right, just after the turn of the last century—we lived in a little three-bedroom house on the outskirts of Baltimore. My mother and father, my older sister, Livvie, and me. In mid-June, Father came down with a bad fever. He was delirious for three days, and for a while everybody thought he was going to die. He was a young man, only thirty-four, but he got very dehydrated, and his fever kept getting higher. Then Mother came down with it as well, and Livvie and I were shuffled off to our neighbor’s house.
That was where we got sick.
Nobody knew quite what to do with us. The neighbor, Mrs. Lessing, was afraid to move us, or be near us, either. For all anyone knew, our parents were dying, we were all dying. She got so frightened that she went over to the post office and sent a telegram to her cousin, out in Frederick, and he came in with his wagon and mules and took her away. She left her maid, Anna Scott, to nurse us. Anna was a black woman of about thirty. I was nearly blind with fever and she seemed too large for the room—not heavy, but big-boned and tall, with thick features and long-fingered, smooth hands. At least the backs of them were smooth. The palms made a pleasant scratching when they moved across your face, or rested on your forehead. When the fever would let up a little during the days, she told us about the heavy mists in London, and how she had seen the terrible Tower, where people were kept for years, some waiting to have their heads cut off. She knew all the names of the kings and queens of England—Plantagenets and Stuarts and Tudors—and in the brief respite from sickness there was something wonderful about imagining palace intrigue in a faraway place. Livvie wanted more about the executions. Anna would demur for a time, denying that she knew anything so gruesome; then she would go on and say there is nothing more gruesome than the truth, and she would tell us in that soft drawl about Henry VIII’s unfortunate wives, or Mary, Queen of Scots.
I liked her, liked listening to her soft, contralto voice. She described for us the frightful conditions on the ship she came to America on as a little girl, the deaths at sea, and how they slipped the bodies over the side off a long wooden board. Her ancestors were free blacks who lived in Wales. She had stories about her father, who had trained in medicine down in Alabama, where she grew up, and had taught her some of what he knew. When she spoke of the mistress of the house, her eyes said more than her words. She had a low opinion of old Mrs. Lessing, who was as silly as she was cowardly.
“Y’all understand,” she’d say quietly. “This world is, um, upside down.”
Before it was over, she got sick, too. Her coal-colored skin gleamed with sweat, and when she sat down on the bed to put a cool rag on my head, it was as if she had collapsed there. “Lord,” she said. “I feel low down.”
But she never stopped tending to us. She told us of growing up in Alabama, and coming north on the train, and meeting Thaddeus Marcus Adams, of Pratt Street in the city of Baltimore. She liked to use the phrase. “Listen to it, darlings,” she said, running a cold rag over Livvie’s cheeks. “Thaddeus Marcus Adams of Pratt Street in the city of Baltimore.” Sometimes she sang it, lifting my shirt from my back and washing me, her hands burning with fever. At night we waited for her, and the sound of her in the house kept me awake. She moved through my dreams, and Thaddeus Marcus Adams got mixed up in it, too. I dreamed he spoke to me, and washed my forehead. I had a memory, which I am now fairly certain was not the product of delirium, of wandering out of the room and seeing a tall, powerful-looking brown man in the upper hallway of the house. He wore a white long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbow, and I saw the thick veins standing out on his arms.
I tried to ask Anna if this was Thaddeus. She was singing low, still feverish, spooning broth into my mouth. “Hush,” she said. “Hush, child. You been dreaming.”
“Is it Thaddeus?” I said. “Tell me.”
“Thaddeus is away,” she said. “You mustn’t speak of him in this house. You must’ve dreamed it, child.” But then she put her head down and rocked slow, as if she might slump over. “My head.”
“Here,” I said. And I took the rag from her hand, and put it on her forehead. She raised her head slightly, and breathed. It was only a moment. She straightened, and took my wrist. “I’m just tired, child.”
Anna, I tried to say. I only wanted to say her name. But I couldn’t get it out. I nodded, and felt that there must be something between us, a secret. When Livvie and
I had first come to the house we didn’t even know her. She was just the next door lady’s person—kitchen help. I don’t think we had even known her name until that week.
Mother was next door, dangerously close to dying. Father’s fever had broken, but he was still very weak, and other neighbors were with them. For that strange week we were a sundered family, being cared for in separate houses. I seldom thought of my family. I spent dream hours, awake and asleep, with Anna Scott.
The worst night of my fever I thought I looked out the window of the bedroom where I lay and saw my father in his coffin in a flickering yellow light in the next house, hands crossed over his chest. No one standing near. I felt as though I had abandoned him to that fate. I lay crying and muttering that I was sorry. I’m sure now that I dreamed this, since I know the room that I was in faced away from our house and the view out that window was of the fairgrounds, where the circus came every summer.
After the fever passed, Mrs. Lessing returned from the country, and a day or so later, we went back over to our house. At almost twelve and fourteen, we were not quite old enough yet to understand the particulars of the social setup in 1903. Obviously it was the air we lived in, but we had no conscious sense of that. We saw Mrs. Lessing ordering Anna Scott around, making her clean the surfaces of the bedroom with strong lye soap. And the old lady shooed Livvie and me away whenever we came near. We represented disease to her. That was what Father said when we went home. He was going to work again in the mornings. He had recently been made head teller at the Union Trust bank in town. Mother was still recovering, and the heat and humidity were no help. She lay on her bed in her long nightgown, gleaming not so much with fever, though a mild one did persist through the hot days, but with the windless summer heat. Women from other houses stopped by now and then to look in on her, and to bring her iced tea and books to read. People expected Livvie and me to keep out of the way, not to trouble Mother.
We sought chances to talk to Anna Scott. She would be out in back, hanging wash.
“What do you children want with me?” she’d say, half smiling. “You’re gonna get me into trouble, sure enough.”
“In France,” Livvie said to her, “they have a thing called a gillo-teen.”
Anna corrected her. “You pronounce it ‘ghee-yo-teen.’ It’s a terrible thing.”
“It cuts off people’s heads,” Livvie said avidly. “And sometimes the eyes still look around after the head’s rolling around on the ground.”
“Who told you that?”
“I heard it,” Livvie said. “I swear.”
“The head falls into a basket,” Anna said.
I felt light-headed. I turned to Livvie. “Is that all you can talk about?”
“Tell us how it works,” Livvie said to Anna Scott.
“I don’t have any idea how it works, child.”
“Why did they only use it in France, Anna?”
“I’ve never been to France.”
“Would you like to go?” I asked, and felt as if I’d proposed that we go together.
She gave me a long look that seemed to reach down into my chest. I couldn’t breathe. “Why, John, are you toying with my affections?”
I didn’t know how to answer the question.
But then she was concentrating on her work. “Don’t you children have anything better to do than pester me? You know Miz Lessing is gonna give me grief if she sees us.”
“We don’t have anywhere else to go,” Livvie said.
This was true. The only other child our age who lived at that end of Market Street was Dewey Dumfreys, and she could not be depended on for entertainment. Dewey was an albino but we didn’t know this. I mean no one had said anything to us about it. We just knew she couldn’t be out in the sun very much, that her skin was pale as paste, her hair a startling white, whiter than we could believe anyone’s ever was, even when we were looking at it, and her eyes were a strange looking pink the color of a rabbit’s nose. She spent a lot of time writing in a journal. She seemed never to want to do anything else. She seldom left her front porch. But when she wanted company, she would call to us when we came out of the house. It depended on her mood, of course, and she was rather inclined to fits of unsociability.
The particular afternoon I’m remembering, we were fresh from fever, Livvie and me. That’s how it seems to me anyway, recalling it—a hot, humid cloudless day with a stillness about it, as if the earth had stopped spinning on its axis and was fixed in a searing pool of sun. Things seemed bright with an unnatural brightness, a feverish glare, perhaps because we had been ill, and were now better. Mother had told us to go outside, and to stay in the yard. We were on the porch. Anna Scott was beating the dust out of a rug in Mrs. Lessing’s side yard. The day was on fire, too hot for work. I held on to the porch post. Lines of heat rose in the air. Anna Scott turned and looked at us, her face gleaming, her eyes wide and white. In the window of the Lessing house, Mrs. Lessing stood watching her like a hawk. When Anna glanced our way, Mrs. Lessing said something we couldn’t hear, and Anna said something back that ended in “ma’am.” She waved at us, going back in the house.
“I’m tired,” Livvie said to me.
We knew that some people had died of this fever we had survived. Livvie stared at her own hands. I think we were both experiencing the sense of how different it was to be on the other side of the sickness. Mother coughed upstairs, and I had a guilty moment of wanting to get away from the sound. The stillness carried every stirring, every breath. We went out to the end of the yard and looked up and down the street. In the distance, beyond the railroad yard, you could see the big, partially collapsed red, white, and blue tent from the circus that had always come to town from mid-May to mid-July, and that a lot of people were unjustly blaming for this epidemic of fever. That was why it was closing down early.
Dewey Dumfreys strolled over to us from her porch, wearing a floppy straw hat, a long-sleeved blouse, and a skirt that covered her feet. You couldn’t see her feet. She appeared to glide like a ghost across the grass. “Know what happened?” she said. Then didn’t wait for an answer. “My uncle Harry came in from work about an hour ago and told us there’s been a terrible accident down at the rail yard. An elephant fell off the back of the train. They were coming to catch up with the circus, all the way from Scranton, and this one named Sport got playful and he backed against the door of the car and the door broke and he went flying off and landed on the track—off a moving train car. An elephant, think of it. Uncle Harry said he screamed a terrible scream. They were bringing them—two of them to the circus.”
“The circus is breaking up,” I said. “Nobody went to it because of the fever.”
“Well, they were getting two elephants and now one of them’s dead and they’re gonna have to kill the other one to put it out of its misery.”
“What happened to the other one?” I said. “Did it fall, too?”
“No, the one that fell is still alive. But he can’t move his legs, or stand up. The other one just up and died. Maybe from the shock. Maybe they love each other like people. Maybe the shock of her friend falling off the train killed her.”
“You’re making all this up,” Livvie said.
“I am not. Swear on a stack of Bibles and hope to die myself.”
Livvie saw Anna Scott come from the Lessing house, wearing a white scarf like a bandanna. We ran over to her, and Dewey repeated her story, adding the one detail that the people at the rail yard had used a big freight derrick to hoist Sport back up onto the train car. “They think his back might be broken. My uncle Harry was there and saw the whole thing.”
Anna looked up the road in the direction the rail yard, and then she looked back at us. “My friend Thaddeus works there,” she said in that voice I loved. “He’ll know what happened.”
“It’s the God’s truth,” Dewey said.
“Oh, I ain’t doubting you, honey.”
We all stood there, looking down the street. You could see some of the app
aratus of the rail yard, and there were tracks that led there across the road, beyond the houses. You walked between the houses and through a row of hedges, across a narrow field of tall grass. There was a raised bed that was visible in the winter months, and when a train came through you could see it going by in flashes between hedges and houses and trees. We never paid much attention to the trains because they had been there all our lives. Their sound, roaring along in the wake of smoke and the blaring of a whistle, was as unremarkable to us as the clop-clop of horses’ hooves in the street, the protesting of wagon wheels.
“I want to go see,” Livvie said.
Anna shook her head. “Honey, you know your mother wouldn’t want that.”
“She’ll let us if you take us,” Livvie said.
“To the rail yard? Me? Young lady, you sure you still don’t have fever?” She put her dark hand on Livvie’s brow, which was almost as pale as Dewey’s.
“Can we ask her?” I said. I was speaking with the confidence of the one who was close enough to her to know about Thaddeus Marcus Adams.
Anna frowned. “I think you best let her sleep, don’t you, John?”
My name on those lips thrilled me. I felt the blood rush to my face. “Yes,” I said, being responsible.
“Well, tell you what,” Anna said. “I’ll go on down there this afternoon and see what I can, and I’ll come back and tell y’all about it, how’d that be?”
Livvie wasn’t impressed. “It’s not the same as seeing it.”
“There’s probably nothing to see, honey. It’s over, whatever it was.”
From the Lessing house, just then, came the voice of Mrs. Lessing. “You! Anna! What’re you doing talking to those children! I asked you to go get some tonic for me.”
“Yes’m,” Anna called back.
“I don’t have all day to wait for you.”
The Stories of Richard Bausch Page 64
