“Is that axe still on the back porch?” he said.
“Was,” Jessie said.
Jammed into an old cotton basket beside a saw, which was also rusty, the axe came out, dull-edged and with a scraping sound that set his nerves vibrating as wrongly as musical strings plucked by some untutored hand. And his nerves kept vibrating as they did at the sound of Amelia’s voice. She had followed him into every room of the house, once. He could not escape. She had stood even outside the bathroom door crying, “Everything’s falling apart, the yard’s a mess. If you’re not going to fix it up, you got to at least get some Negro to.” Flushing had barely drowned her out. He had been angered into action when the toilet would not flush immediately a second time, as she droned on. Going for his tools, he had fixed the toilet to flush when needed, and she had watched disbelievingly. In the dining room now, the sideboard’s door clicked shut. He made it almost from the kitchen before Inga came in, wearing a soft fawn-colored robe, the softness, the fawn, like her eyes, he thought. Sniffing for sherry, he smelled, so far, only the sweet scents of her bath. Her hair was damp at the base of her neck and pulled up onto the top of her head, then stuck with heavy gold pins. Artificially colored now, he supposed. But her hair had the naturally progressed look from virgin gold to her present age, and he anguished over what age could do.
“I have a headache,” Inga said. “What should I take for it?”
“Aspirin, fresh air, try those,” he said. Jessie, having gone to the back door to spit, had come back. “What us going to have for supper?” she said.
“Ask the mistress of the house,” he said. Going by Inga, and wondering why she had on silver dancing shoes, he then smelled menthol from her medicated eye pads and the bittersweet smell of her cough syrup, which was heavy with codeine. A moment, that smell seemed to take him back into his own drugged sleep, and he struggled to keep his eyes open. Inga’s voice was thick, her eyes were heavy, and the medicine was a whiff on the hand she raised in a gesture not hopeful of detaining him. In the hall, the telephone rang as he passed it. He answered only to sever himself from his previous conversation. Inga’s hand had continued upward to her forehead, and she had said, “Oh, Jessie. Is the pain never to end?”
“Hello,” he said.
A male voice young enough to quiver and quivering on a rising note rushed at him, without pause. “Mr. Almoner, sir, this is Borden Lake Decker, you went to school with my mother, Winifred Lake, Winnie they called her (Would the boy never breathe? he was wondering, smiling), and I go to Princeton (here he did breathe, waiting hopefully, Almoner thought, for at least a fraternal grunt, but he was silent), and my roommate is here, Quill Jordan, Quill Jordan, from Delton, you know (but he was not to be impressed, either), and we’re both English majors at Princeton (yes, I got that), and we admire your work so much (whispering in the background), and, oh yes, Quill’s writing a senior thesis on your work, and could we possibly come over and just meet you a moment? And, oh (more whispering), there’s a girl here who wants to be a writer, too.”
Whew, Almoner thought, though the young voice seemed not at all breathless. He said gravely that he was sorry, but he was leaving that moment on a fishing trip, not to return for several days.
“Oh,” the boy said. His voice sank deep enough to hold a more masculine hint, as if he had touched the bottom of disappointment. Still, Almoner thought, he was not going to relent. The boy said, “Thank you for this much time, I know how you guard it.”
Then why had he called? Almoner wanted to ask.
The boy cried as if he were within hailing distance. “But I want to tell you, Mr. Almoner. You’re not forgotten at Princeton!” Then the phone was clamped down, abruptly, on his own confusion.
Almoner was chuckling and almost laughing continuing down the hall, but he was touched by the sincerity. And, I’m not forgotten at Princeton, he reminded himself, thinking of the vast gap between them that the boy would think that would matter. Yet it meant something to be told he was not forgotten. He had attended the university only a year. It had receded in his mind into all the university campuses he had ever visited. He went back into the sun, realizing he was appreciative, too late, of the boy’s wanting to comfort him.
Crossing the porch, going into and out of the speckling shade of the muscadine, he was aware again, with a seasick feeling, of the light and dark of sun and shadow on the grey porch. He descended two steps down from it and crossed the sunlit yard toward the pine copse where it was hot and airless. Lifting the axe with effort, he was grateful for the shade and hacked at heavy tenacious kudzu vine grown in from the road and choking young trees. Old rain loosened, and drops glanced away like flint sparks from the gum-scented trees, while the afternoon grew muggier.
The work should have been done earlier, before the sun was out or after it had gone down. But it was a kind of punishment to lose through perspiration both liquor and medicine. He felt himself like a candle melting, perspiration flying from his elbows as he swung the axe above his head. He smelled on himself the stale smell of his obliterated days and nights. Beyond the copse, he faced gigantic and now flowerless forsythia bushes guarding the house. They swam before his eyes. Wiping perspiration, he drew an arm across his face and thought, Damn, did he have the d.t.’s? when a maroon Chevrolet appeared. However, it ground real gears beyond his cattle gap after slowing for it, then travelled toward the house with its wheels bearing, Ferris-wheel-fashion, wet leaves. He watched it curiously as if it had nothing to do with him; people in his house seldom had visitors. His brain was still dulled and received slowly a second image: that it was Roy Scarbrook who had just passed.
Starting toward the house, Almoner set the axe against a tree. He thought of Roy and his ever-wide, proprietary grin as he had seen him last, among his counters with their overhead labelling signs slightly wavering, Men’s, Women’s, Children’s Wear, titillated into motion by an old, revolving-bladed fan fixed to the ceiling. It must have been last summer, Almoner thought, when he had done his most recent shopping for himself and had purchased the khaki pants he wore now. Shaking hands with Roy Scarbrook, presently, would seem a continuation of that day, the year having evolved with his having almost no memory of it.
Roy, in a shiny plaid suit and with a pink cornflower in his buttonhole, was almost to the front door before Almoner realized the grin seemed recent because of a newspaper picture when Roy was elected Rotary president. It’s going to be some other damn thing about promoting the town as a spa and needing me to help, he thought. He considered going back to the pine copse, but Roy, at the door, stuck his head forward and back, like an apprehensive but curious bird, apparently having been asked to enter and obviously reluctant to do it. Almoner would laugh, later, thinking what was strong enough to propel Roy forward eventually was ingrained, old-fashioned middle-class manners.
He gained the steps as Roy relinquished the door, having held it to the last possible moment, his hand remaining now behind him and in touch with the screen. Through it, having reached the porch, Almoner saw a face come forward as pale as death and looking disembodied. Thinking back to his dream, he almost instinctively called “Ma!” before seeing it was Inga encased in an invisible-looking dress. It was less than smoke-colored and drifting and its fragility was due mainly to age; the bodice once had been covered with iridescent sequins; now failing, they clung like fish-scale remnants on some half-cleaned fish. She came totteringly on the weak heels of the aged silver dancing shoes.
God, Almoner thought, she had done it all in exact sequence, the sweetly seductive bath, then her hair and her make-up and a nap in her robe; her dress had been donned a moment before the beau’s arrival. Now, she held out a hand. For the corsage? Almoner anguished over life itself as much as over what it had done to Inga.
“Roy,” she said. “I thought if we had a little talk, we could—” but Roy was backing out of the screen door he had never made a step beyond. He stepped aside to avoid colliding with Almoner.
Roy sai
d, “We pressed your wife a little about her bill, but forget it! She can have all the time in the world to pay.” His words floated back on the departing car’s exhaust, while Jessie was still coming to answer the doorbell’s summons.
Wide-eyed, she said, “Miss Inga, honey, you come lie down. I’ll fix you some nice eye pads and your head won’t hurt.”
Amelia was a sliver of face at her own door. “I’ve never been so embarrassed,” she said, shutting it again.
Jessie waited and then followed the sad drooping hem over its owner’s doorsill and shut that door. Almoner made no sound laughing; again, dappled by leaf and shadow and sun as he crossed the porch, he felt confused. Though he was full of sorrow, he could not stop laughing. Moving from the muscadine’s shelter and retracing his way across the yard, he retrieved the axe and re-entered the pine copse, where the shade had deepened. Mosquitoes thrust themselves against his ears. Pine needles, except on the bottommost layer of their mat, were dried and warm. What had she been going to do? he wondered, laughing. His mood changed when he thought that she could not have carried anything off and that was sad. And now added to the weight of his afternoon’s work and to the weight of his life was knowledge of this new bill. How many times had he come up and gone down those porch steps, he wondered. Leaning on the axe handle, he went back again in memory to the morning when he had come home at the urging of the woman, Sugar, and found his parents dead. Gone: he hesitated over that word even now.
It had been a summer of drought. The pine copse had been scorched and browned. Having been told as little as possible, he had gone to see for himself the thin tire tracks crisscrossing, as if made by an erratic plow, the crumbly dry furrows of cotton land. An old Negro sharecropper living on the edge of the field had told him about the little car coming along travelling too fast. He had said that inside there had been a white man and a white lady, settin’ forward like she could make the car go faster, and time they passed a cotton wagon, the car swang out of control and went off acrost a field. Sont ahead two tires, the old man had said, turnt over and burned. He had shaken his head sadly saying, “Another nigger got the tires.”
He had gone back across the field at a walk, not running as he had come, like a boy. The sounds in his brain now as he worked his axe were the old echoes, Ma! Poppa! Jessie had explained how they had covered the countryside, once they discovered he was missing, and had found the farmer who had left him at the highway. They had been on their way to Delton when the accident happened, at that moment of dawn when he had been staring out over the river, solitary and lonesome.
To care for him and for Amelia there had been Jessie, who moved into the house, and old relatives. One by one, the latter had been buried from the house. The grey pall had seemed never to be lifted from the front windows. In despair, he had one summer gone to Europe on a walking trip and stayed long beyond his intended time. Then when he had come back there had been in the house only the three of them, he and Jessie and Amelia, but not the same two he had left. For Amelia had seemed a child then, as frail and crushable as a kitten. But she emerged from puberty an old maid. Male callers, after rising to greet her, were asked to fluff out the pillows again. Continually his comings and goings had been questioned, until he had thought of marriage as an escape, though wide-eyed Southern girls had seemed as empty as Kewpie dolls.
Switzerland had touched him deeply, and there he had spent his longest time at a small pension where cows had been bedded behind the thin walls of his room, their sounds and smells reminiscent of home. (Companionably at sunset, he and Poppa had always driven in their own cows for milking; he had heard again the sounds of Poppa urging them on and of the dull clanking of their bells.) He had seen in the Swiss mountains far-reaching sunsets similar to his own countryside’s, and tiny wild flowers, like fallen stars in stubby pasture grass. Soft evenings there had been full of the same enormous country stillness; his past at home had fused with his present there. His time had been spent with the household’s youngest daughter, who had chosen his souvenirs, and on whom he had lavished chocolates and lavender sachets. He had written her from home. Yes, she had written back, she remembered him good. He had felt endeared to her not only because she remembered him but because of her misspelled and scrabbled English. Returning to visit, he had brought her back his bride. Now, she was calling at the front window: “Jessie! The shade won’t come down!”
Hidden from the road, he watched the descent of the tasselled shade as Jessie darkened the front room. The loneliness of the countryside was all around him and near only grazing cattle. A mourning dove called but another did not answer. He resumed hacking at the vines, his mind wandering, still drowsy and not himself. But would he ever be again? he wondered. This present sensation of order would be temporary: the axe, his upraised hand, the tangled vine at his feet. Soon he was thinking of the drugged man in the hammock and of the young bridegroom with aspirations. “Not,” he had cried repeatedly, “to be a Bürgermeister!” But Inga always had had deaf ears. Almoner thought of himself, at the axe’s next descent, as a monk locked up to copy laboriously for years, who at last had finished the work, but himself had been broken and done in. But even to his own satisfaction, the work was done; that was worth a lifetime, wasn’t it? Envisioning manuscript stacked up behind him, he heard imaginary applause, and from the house he heard Amelia and Inga shouting to one another, irritably.
By God! This time the car was yellow. He stopped, his hatchet midair, as much surprised as before, knowing this one could not be wiped away along with perspiration, either. He stood motionless, like a wild animal trying to hide. The cattle gap had caught the driver unaware, and he had stopped the car, straddling it. Almoner knew they had to be strangers, for any car as long as a city block, in this town, would be familiar. It was being driven backward between the forsythias. He swore at the eyesight of the young. The boy, driving, had glimpsed him and was getting out, his head seeming on fire, his bright orange hair singed by evening sunlight. He kept still, though the situation was hopeless, while the boy came on, smiling fearfully. Even before hearing his rather high voice, Almoner knew it was the one who had telephoned. What had he said: that he knew his mother? If so, the name was lost. But he had fobbed him off, obviously enough, with a lie, and that he had come anyway was too blatant, like his hair. With a quick mental image of himself trapped there, Almoner thought, there was no way out. But, thrusting aside pines, the boy offered him one.
Her room was cast in summer darkness, which could only mean rain. And, not opening her eyes, she felt an imagined sense of the ocean’s bottom; though, unintentionally, she was thinking of the ultra-green underwater of chlorine-filled swimming pools with which she was familiar. The wallpaper in her bedroom was blue and green and in an adjoining bathroom the paper had a pattern of shells. Truant ivy across her windows cut light, its shadows flickering in independent spots on the ceiling. She imagined with her eyes still closed that flickering to be exotic and wildly patterned fish. The roof of tiles was slanting and there a pale pigeon had managed to secure itself and was cooing. Any coolness in summer was a relief. She drew up a sheet which had a feel of dampness like fog and rubbed her feet against towels now rough and dried. The night before her mother had laid them across the bed wet for the attic fan to blow over them. Remembering that coolness now, and suddenly that it was the morning she was going, Amy opened her eyes. Her mother came that moment on silent bare feet across the hall to stand in the doorway, looking older. Her voice dryly held sleep as if not to relinquish night, with nothing ahead in her day. “What time are you going?” Edith said.
“At nine,” Amy said. She shut her mind abruptly against criticism from her mother, and wished she had lied. For Edith immediately was breathless. “Why didn’t you get up earlier then? You won’t be ready! You’ll go out again looking like a tack,” she said. Sighing and assuming the burden unasked, Edith went to the kitchen and began slamming about pots and pans, the noise meaning if Amy did not have sense enough to hurry, s
he did.
Listening as water rushed into the sink to grow hot, for the coffee to make sooner, Amy removed her pajamas and left them in a dispirited heap on the floor, where they had slipped from a hook. She stared into the disordered closet where there was almost nothing to choose from and nothing appropriate to wear. Her father’s frequent and disgruntled appraisal came to mind: “With all the money she can spend on her clothes!” At breakfast, her mother would say the same. Amy picked out a dress at random, feeling all of them were wrong. As consciously as putting stoppers in her ears, she told herself not to mind what her mother said; and she would not mind really being told what was wrong, if only someone would tell her what was right! Her white slip looked grey. Feeling inert and withdrawn, she came into the kitchen where her mother stood cooking. And, turning her head, Edith’s look said plainly, Why couldn’t Amy ever look as nice as the other girls?
Made to feel self-conscious, she swung her legs, childlike, beneath the table but then saw her sandals had muddy heels. Why hadn’t she noticed when she put them on, as other girls would have? She had seen only, dressing, that her skirt had a spot, and she had tried to press a pleat carefully over it. Before, her mother had said that the sandals might be right for walking about a muddy campus, but they were wrong for Delton where people dressed when they went out. As Edith poured coffee now, her eyes roamed. “Are you going out with something all over the front of your dress?” she said.
“It’s not all over, it’s only a spot,” Amy said. However, since she had come downstairs, it seemed to have grown larger. She longed to put down her head and cry about its being there at all.
The Wintering Page 2
