The Wintering

by Joan Williams

  A long time, a water tower had been ahead as if suspended in the sky. They passed beneath it now, circling through the square of a small town. “Halfway there,” Amy said, letting out a relieved breath. Even Quill might be bored by her long silences, but the landscape was conducive to dreaming, and she kept staring out silently. Here was a tangled world of greenery. Even telephone poles to their topmost were covered thickly with tangled kudzu vine, which covered road banks and filled ditches. Brightly colored birds darting in and out of it fostered, too, a feeling of jungle. Having seen Quill glance in distaste at her shoes, Amy saw in horror that she had left, as a country child might, long yellowish streaks of dried mud on the carpeted floorboard. She had to think of the practical, as usual, and tried surreptitiously to brush them away.

  “Leave them,” Quill said. “The car needs vacuuming anyway.”

  Blushing, Amy wished momentarily to be someplace else. But someplace else could be worse. Her debutante friends soon would be selecting from orderly closets dresses appropriate for the luncheon. She said, her voice faint, “Did Mrs. Decker say anything else?”

  “That Almoner drinks.”

  “Well, so does she.” Amy turned angrily. “She’s always crocked at the club.”

  “That when he’s drunk, he runs around his yard, naked, reciting poetry.” Quill bent over to beat the wheel rapturously, laughing. Sinking against the seat in laughter, too, Amy said, “I’m afraid though, it’s not true.”

  Under no circumstance, her aunt Dea had told her mother, should she let Amy go out there to meet Almoner. And then, after hanging up, and knowing she could not stop her, Edith had made great shaking fists crying, “Oh, why can’t you be like the other girls?” At noon, those girls would be eating chicken à la king out of crispless patty shells. Though she had made her decision, as so often happened, Amy had a conflicting second thought: Should she be at the party, about to sip sherry? She gave directions down her aunt’s familiar washed-out driveway, and promised not only Quill, but herself, that they would not stay long.

  Uncle Joe appeared on the porch, which was laden with ferns. From his receptive face, Amy could tell he had been watching for the car. Was he shorter than she remembered or was the effect caused by his wide-legged baggy pants? He seemed the same width as height. Then no longer did she consider his appearance, not even that he had come out in run-over tan bedroom shoes, for the moment he saw her, he cried, “Sugar!” and patted her repeatedly. Did he remember the time when she was little, and he had swatted her playfully on the rear and burst a boil? They went into the house laughing, where abruptly Amy halted to think, This is my uncle and this is his house. She found a similarity to her learning to ice skate at school; then she had gone wobbling across a slick pond, which had seemed ever widening, and finally had reached the opposite bank where she had grabbed onto a tree for safety. The secure feeling of the tree came to Amy now, as she stood thinking, This is my uncle and this is his house. He called her always Sugar when her father never had. “Son,” Uncle Joe had said, meeting Quill.

  Uncle Joe padded across the room to pick up his pipe, filling the room, once again, with the aroma of honeyed smoke Amy remembered. She stared from one to another. She hoped they realized she could not assume the responsibility of a conversation, though it might be hers since they were strangers. At Joe’s suggestion, she and Quill sat on a brown horsehair sofa with spots worn amber, a place to nap when she was small. Waking, she would have cheeks as bristling and red as when her father, teasingly, rubbed whiskers against her before shaving. Summer with its distinct smells came now through the open windows, past the ferns in their old green pots. From them rose the smell of enriched earth and dampened peat moss. She thought of woods that had been behind the house and of gardens and earthworms turned up after rain and of her cousins chasing her, dangling them. “How are Josie and Bubba?” she said.

  “Fine and hope to see you,” Joe said. “But we couldn’t tell them to come over because we didn’t know what time you’d be getting here.”

  Always suspecting adverse criticism, Amy began to defend herself. “I didn’t know what time, either,” she said. “Quill was a little uncertain. Then there was traffic and the rain. I was afraid they’d be sitting around waiting if I wrote them.” Uncle Joe’s calm face said he had not meant anything, she did not have to defend herself against him. And realizing that, Amy had sense enough to hush.

  Joe said, “Sometime, you got to come just to see us. You didn’t today, did you?” and he gave Quill a wink.

  “We did come mainly to see Almoner,” Amy said.

  “Hep my time. That’s what your aunt said. I told the woman I finally was going to have her locked up. How come you want to see that rascal?”

  Quill dared glance at Amy, but barely. Things were so much as she had predicted them, they could not help laughing. Why they laughed escaped Joe, and he could be easily led to another topic. Amy said, “We just want to see Almoner. But where’s Aunt Dea?”

  “Ran uptown, sure did,” Joe said. “Said you’d come as soon as she left, and you did.” But were they going to leave? The boy was edging off the sofa. “She’s coming right back.”

  While Quill suggestively rattled the car keys in his pocket, something she could not define held Amy. That she had not spoken to her aunt, as her mother wanted? Feeling some bond, she said, “Well, if she’ll be right back, we can wait longer.”

  Amy gazed out at the ragged drive, refusing to look at Quill, which meant, she had not wanted to have lunch at Mrs. Decker’s, either. Standing, Quill edged about the room impatiently, and Amy thought she saw it as he did. Silence bore down heavily on the small house from all the surrounding fields. Inside was heard only the ticking of a grandfather clock, enormous in the tiny entranceway. Its slow rhythmic pendulum seemed to say not much went on around here. On either side of the mantel were shelves, without books, used as whatnot cases. They held inexpensive ornaments, like china swans with backs hollowed to hold candies and nuts, which held, instead, an accumulation of rubber bands from Sunday morning papers. Reasons for existence seemed to be the over rained fields outside, where cotton stood worrisomely low. Long after the house itself and the people in it were gone, clocks would tick and the land would exist, the silence said. But people, and particularly strangers, cannot stand too much silence. When conversation died, and since he was the host, Joe looked toward the window. “It’s fairing up,” he said.

  Making up for the impoliteness of wanting to leave, Quill agreed. “Yes sir, I believe it is.”

  “Aunt Dea’s coming.” Amy went quickly to the door, with Quill following. He was introduced and took Dea’s groceries. “We’ll put them in the kitchen,” she said.

  Coming back inside, Amy glanced up at Blue Boy, who seemed enigmatically to stare down from a wooden frame. A table beneath him held a tarnished bud vase and a single yellow paper rose, making Amy remember that in meager moonlight this house had had a kind of goldness, that after she had said goodnight, Aunt Dea’s face had declined into shadow. By the time Uncle Joe said, “Nite, Sugar,” Josie beside her would be asleep. Bubba in the next room would signal by kicking against the wall, until Uncle Joe said only, “Sonny,” then he would quit. And always the bedcovers had had a smell of oldness, as if taken from newspaper-lined trunks.

  Dea stood now in the kitchen doorway, tying on an apron, saying she was sorry they could not stay for noon dinner. Then, for the first time, Amy looked at her and thought, this was not her aunt but her father’s sister. Fleeting resemblance was in Dea’s dark eyes, with a heavy fringe of lashes, and in some stance of her feet, despite their being in wedge-heeled red shoes. What point, Amy wondered, was there to common memories from childhood if afterward people were to be so separate and different? Matching her breath to Josie’s in sleep, she had tried to draw herself closer. Amy had thought she would not be lonely if only she had a sister. One summer visit, she had slept with her hand beneath the pillow, but her tooth had been gone in the morning. A
nickel had replaced it, and she had known there was no fairy. At home, she was left quarters, but Uncle Joe had given what he could. Afterward, she overheard her mother laughing. “She wants us to give her only nickels from now on, like Joe,” Edith had said. Amy’s father had been taking up ice. “If we’d left her there long enough, she’d have been glad to come home,” he had said.

  “I’m sorry you can’t stay,” Dea said. “I’d hoped you would have forgotten all about seeing that man.”

  “Forgotten?” Amy said. She could not laugh in front of Dea. Quill took sudden interest in some farming magazines on the maple coffee table. Dea sighed decisively, then blurted out, “He hasn’t been seen in town for a week. That means one thing, he’s on a spree. Amy, you have no business going out there even if this boy goes, you hear?”

  Quill flung himself back exaggeratedly on the sofa, as if reeling from a blow. “You see him? You actually see Almoner?”

  “Of course,” Dea said. “He lives here. Why wouldn’t we?” And Joe looked curiously at the boy, waiting to hear. “Only a million trillion people would like to see him,” Quill said, managing to sit up straight. Joe began to study his pipe, which was not drawing right. He said offhandedly, “Shoot, don’t anybody around here think anything about seeing him. Most probably hope they don’t. Right, Mother?” He and Dea nodded, backing each other up. Smiling a little to himself, Joe said, “When he’s not on a spree, he’s fishing. I’d like to know when he writes all those books he’s supposed to write. They say he’s got some influence up yonder in New York, though. And a group of us here, farmers and merchants, want to build up tourist trade and turn our hot springs into as important a place as the one over yonder in Arkansas. There was a great big ho-tel here once that burned. We need some backing to build another. We thought Almoner might interest some folks up North. But a group went out there and he wouldn’t even see them.”

  “Honey, wouldn’t even see them!” Dea said, explosively.

  “I tried to get him on the phone, and this nigger woman, been with them a long time, said he wasn’t home. But I know good and well he was. How come I know is the vet was out there seeing about one of his cows sick and phoned and told me I could catch him. Then she says he wasn’t to home.”

  “Any of them will say anything they want to, I believe,” Dea said. “Except that little wife of his. I feel right sorry for her sometimes. She seems lonely. I think it’s been hard on her having two other women in the house who were there first.”

  “Well, she’s a foreigner,” Joe said. “Maybe she didn’t know anything about running a house.”

  “Lord help us. I imagine running a house in a foreign country is the same as running one here. Same old sixes and sevens,” Dea said, wondering at the look of surprise Amy turned on her. She had been sitting like a correct little girl, her knees pressed together so hard they showed white places, though chewing on a fingernail. Then she jerked up her head in such surprise her hair flew away from her shoulders. Did Amy think because she was a housewife, she never got tired of it? Dea wondered. Edith had said Amy had some crazy, idealistic picture of life, that you shouldn’t have to do things you didn’t want to. Amy would grow up, Dea supposed. She hoped she would get over being so quiet and thoughtful. Why had this boy come along on this wild-goose chase today? Smitten with Amy was the only reason Dea could guess.

  What would Aunt Dea do if she didn’t do housework? Amy had wondered. Having bitten the cuticle, she now had a sore-looking red place. Damn it. Why couldn’t she have pretty long nails like her mother’s. Tucking fingertips toward her palms, she decided she had misunderstood Dea’s tone; probably, she had been just tired. The cross look on her face had gone already. Sighing, Amy thought that nobody had problems like her own.

  “He never has done a lick of work I could see,” Joe was saying.

  Politely, Amy said, “Who?”

  “Almoner,” Joe said. “Ain’t that who we been talking about?” He gave her a kidding look, thinking she must have had her mind on this boy. Immediately, they had looked at one another, though not exactly as if they had been bitten by the love bug. A moment later, they were leaving.

  Amy trailed her hands through ferns on the porch, pulling them until leaves came loose, then pulverizing them between her fingers into a remembered fuzzy mixture. She hoped they had not left rudely, unsure what she had said. With some appropriate saying, she had maneuvered them outside. Pressed hard against Dea a moment, she felt a child again, remembered hiding behind the fern tubs in hide-’n’-seek. It was difficult to realize once she had been so small, the ferns had been taller than her head. Pressed now equally hard against Joe, she wanted to sink against him and confide and sob. “Come back, Sugar,” he said, and his voice seemed to tremble as if there were things he understood. But suddenly fearing he was going to see right inside her, Amy drew back with her heart full of love, her eyes unrevealing. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

  “Don’t you get mixed up with any Yankee boys now, hear.” When he cautioned her, he winked at Quill. The remark seemed the result of narrow-mindedness and stupidity to Amy. Perhaps she was right to keep, tightly, everything to herself. As they stood together, Dea and Joe seemed safe against the world, she thought, lonesomely. Everyone waved. As they drove off, she remembered from childhood that Joe’s favorite expression had always been, “Depression years, a nickel was hard to come by.” And thinking of the one he had spared beneath her pillow, she looked back and again wanted to cry.

  When the car was out of sight, Dea turned to confront other plants on the porch, feeling angry that they looked puny after all her care. She could pitch them all over the back fence with easy grace. She unpacked groceries, while Joe settled before television, though there was nothing on now but reruns. Inattentive to it, he called, “Amy seems younger for her age than most girls.” But he wondered why she looked so unhappy when she had everything in the world. Some look in her face kept returning, and he said, “On the other hand, she seems older in some ways.” He had not meant to start a long conversation, but Dea appeared in the doorway saying, “Seen too much at home, I imagine.” Why had he started talking if he wanted to watch television? A sports program was coming on, and he looked glued to it. She returned to the kitchen thinking of her brother, Mallory. Fancy doodle, she called him, seeing him crying “Teatime!” at four in the afternoon when he was mixing up martinis. Amy probably even knew about that place called The Cotton Stalk out on the highway, where all those River Street businessmen went to drink beer and meet women and God knew what else. Only she did know, Dea thought, because there was a motel right next door.

  Truthfully, she did not like being a farmer’s wife and never had. She felt resentful, too, that Mallory had made money and Joe had not. Her hand strayed uncertainly over shelves, as she thought of Amy hellbent on finding the life she wanted.

  “Hon, what’s for dinner?” Joe called.

  Dea felt that moment like crying and could not answer.

  “HON, what are we eating?”

  Thinking of what was in the icebox, Dea said, “Ham.”

  And Joe murmured, “Again,” but meant to be heard. He strolled to the kitchen because there was a commercial on television. He saw by Dea’s face that she did not want ham, either. He thought of things he ought to tell her, that he knew he had not come up to her expectations, for one thing. Almoner, now, might be able to put those things into words, and for that, he could envy the man. Inadequately, he tried to tell her everything by saying, “I love you. I sure do.”

  “I know it,” Dea said, patting his hand. And she was grateful he meant she would never grow too old for him. Yet she was glad to be able to draw his attention to the window, having seen that Old Bess’s calf had escaped into the road again. She watched Joe cross the yard to head the calf back to the side lot, admitting she felt envious of Amy and her young friend. Suddenly, she had a premonition of Joe’s early death. She would live then in long loneliness, regretting even the pas
sing of these days, Dea thought.

  The town, Amy had thought, would have some look comparable to Almoner’s greatness. She stared about it in disappointment. All the little stores, with flat roofs, seemed squashed together and faced a railroad station in the center of town. The tracks, from a distance, seemed to end at a crumbly red brick Court House with white pillars. In reality, they curved on beyond it and stretched across the flat Delta, following briefly a willow-banked, somnambulant and yellowish river. In all directions, parked cars fanned out from the station. Negroes, who congregated about it on benches, liked the might and windiness of passing trains. Few stopped. For the most part, they were expresses rushing on toward New Orleans. The silence which descended after a train had gone lay vastly heavy over the countryside. People pausing to watch the train had loose clothing blown about in its breeze and seemed to stand in frozen wonderment at the thought of other places. Now, at standstills and as if mesmerized, people who had watched the train pass remained. Even Quill’s car, halted in its presence, seemed to quiver. The train sent back thin whistling cries as lonesome as the bearable loneliness of the countryside itself. And in its aftermath, pursuits resumed by those who had watched seemed negligible. An old man in a stationmaster’s black suit came out, totteringly, to inspect flowers in a garden along the tracks, which was surrounded by a little white wire fence, like intertwined croquet wickets, of that height. His flowers grew voluptuously, though some straggled in a dark red line along the ground as if something wounded had gone by. Others were yellow blossoms on thin stalks as if the sun had graciously scattered pieces. It was high now and bright.

  Unevenly along the end of one block were Negro stores with bluish-looking screen doors. Quill drove across the tracks. Amy could smell popcorn from a movie where already children had formed a Saturday-afternoon line. Some store windows held bent faded placards and tricolored bunting, heralding politicians, left over from the Fourth of July. A man, cutting diagonally across the street, seemed an artistic person, wearing a slouch hat and smoking a pipe. “That might be Almoner!” Amy cried. Neither of them knew what he really looked like for he had refused pictures for many years, even for book jackets. Immediately, Quill had clapped his foot to the brake, causing a number of car horns to blow behind them. “Oh no,” Amy said. “Go on. It’s not.”