“You leave me alone, do you hear? Go on away,” Jennie said.
“And I’ll tell you this,” he said, bending close to her and lifting his finger. “If you were to die at this moment and I were asked to give you absolution I doubt if my conscience would permit me to do it. Now for God’s sake, woman, straighten up. Go to church. Go this night to confession and ask God to forgive you. Promise me you’ll go to confession. At one time you must have been a decent Catholic woman. Promise me.”
“You can’t force me to do anything I don’t want to do. I know. It was that Mrs. Turner that sent you here. I’ll fix her. And don’t you butt in either,” Jennie said.
The big priest nodded his head with a kind of final and savage warning, and went out without saying another word.
As a defiant gesture Jennie drained the last inch of whiskey from the bottle and muttered: “Trying to drive me to confession, eh?” She decided to go to Jerry Mallory’s bar at once.
The drink of whiskey made Jennie tipsy. The old priest had said she would go to hell when she died, and she felt like crying. With a serious expression on her face she walked along the lighted street, a stout woman in a short skirt leaning forward a bit, her wide velvet hat too far back on her head. She tried to remember the faces of her two children, a boy and a girl. The priest had aroused in her an uneasy longing for a time she was hardly able to recall, a time when she had gone to church, and gone to confession too, when she was a much younger woman.
Approaching the bar, whose drawn blinds concealed the light inside, she wondered what she might say to Mallory. The doorman, who let her in, nodded familiarly without speaking, and she went through to the lighted barroom. No one paid any attention to her. Men and women were standing at the bar, sitting at the tables by the door, or at the small tables opposite the bar. Jennie sat down by herself. She could see Jerry, clean-shaven and neat in his blue suit, smiling affably at everybody and sometimes helping the busy young man, Henry, to pass drinks across the bar.
Finally Henry, looking competent with his sleeves rolled up and his bow tie, came over to Jennie and said: “Hello, Jennie, what’ll it be tonight?”
“I’d like a little gin, to take out with me,” she said soothingly. “And tell Jerry I’ll fix it up with him next week. How are you, Henry?” She hoped he could see how nicely she was smiling.
“I don’t know, Jennie,” he said doubtfully.
“Look here, you know I’ll pay at the end of the month.”
“It’s like this,” Henry said. “I’d do it. You know that. But the boss won’t let me.”
“Then let me speak to Jerry,” she said brusquely.
In a moment Henry returned and said: “Jerry’s awfully busy right now, Jennie. Maybe some other time. . .”
“I’ll sit here and wait,” Jennie said, folding her arms. “I’ll sit right here till doomsday and wait.”
“All right. But he’s awfully busy. He may not come.”
Jennie waited and nobody paid any attention to her. She felt tired. As she crossed her legs at the ankles and put her head back against the wall, she felt drowsy and dizzy. “I oughtn’t to have taken that last drink before coming here,” she thought. She tried to keep awake, muttering, “That old priest couldn’t scare me,” having the most disconnected thoughts about Eastertime and choir music. Soon she fell sound asleep.
She began to breathe so heavily that customers at the bar, turning, snickered. Looking over at her, Jerry Mallory frowned. She was an old, though difficult, customer, so he went over to her and shook her shoulder lightly. She stirred, waking. It had been very strong in her thoughts that the old priest had wanted her to go to confession and now, only half-awake, she mumbled uneasily: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“Hey, Jennie, where do you think you are? Bless you, old girl,” he said, starting to laugh.
“Oh, it’s you, Jerry. I forgot where I was.”
She was wide awake, so sober he thought she might have been deliberately kidding him. He laughed loudly. “You’re a card, Jennie!” he said. “You’re a grand old gal. And I’ll get you a little gin for old times’ sake.”
He turned and said to the three men at the bar who were nearest to him: “Did you hear what Jennie just pulled on me?”
Jennie was ashamed. She stood up, in her skirt that was too short, with her black velvet hat too far back on her head. The men started to laugh. Then they started to laugh louder and louder. The sound of their laughter at first made Jennie angry, with something of a fine woman’s disgust, and then, with humility, she felt herself reaching out toward a faintly remembered dignity. Erect, she walked out.
In His Own Country
1
For an hour after lunch Bill lay on the sofa, his hands linked behind his head. His mother rocked back and forth in her chair and talked to his wife.
Flora sat on a chair by the hall door, only half listening to Bill’s mother, glancing occasionally along the hall to the front screen door. It was hot in the house; a puff of cool air came along the hall. Tilting to one side in her chair, Flora looked through the screen door, beyond the iron gate at the sidewalk, at the gray dust road and at the field on the other side. Wagon tracks had worn the road down and small stones jutted up. She felt moisture on her forehead and wished the old lady would finish her story, for Bill had promised to go swimming down at the blue drop. She looked at him anxiously, afraid that he might change his mind. He needed a long sleep. Though he had shaved in the morning, the hair was dark on his face, and black hair grew on the back of his hands to his knuckles. His long legs were crossed at the ankles.
The old lady rocked steadily. Many times she had heard Bill’s mother telling the story of her grandmother. Outside, down the street, probably at McGuin’s, someone began to cut the grass on the front lawn, the mower grinding and squeaking, needing oiling. Slowly they were coming to the end of the story: how Bill’s great-grandmother, nervous and bewildered, had got off the boat just before it left the old land, and her husband hadn’t missed her until they were a long way out. The poor woman had been terrified at the thought of going to a strange land, and so her husband had never heard of her again.
Flora, smiling, got up, leaning against the chair. She heard a horse trotting on the road. The buggy passed the door, swaying, the wheels grinding against the small stones on the road. Bill’s mother said: “Your people were a bad lot, Bill, and there’s no getting over it.”
“Cheer up, Bill,” Flora said. “Let’s go for a swim.”
“There’s no getting over it, and Bill’s the last.”
“What’s that you’re saying, ma?” he said.
Without waiting for her to answer he got up and went into the kitchen to get the bathing suits. His mother said she would stay there awhile and rest before going home. Bill put the bathing suits over his left shoulder, opened the front door, and whistled as they walked along the street. He walked with a long, easy stride and she had to take his arm to keep up with him. The leaves on the maple trees alongside the road were covered with gray dust. On Saturday afternoon the streets were quiet; everybody up at the park watching the lacrosse game. They walked south past the old quarry and beyond the sawmill at the end of the road to the wire fence near Smiley’s orchard, heading for the blockhouse. Every year, going swimming, they went this way. It wasn’t really a blockhouse, but was made of brick, and there were no windows, just a few air-holes facing the bay, though everybody liked to pretend it had been used years ago for Indian fighting. When they were kids Bill had found out that it had actually been used for storing dynamite, but when they climbed upstairs and looked through the square holes out over the bay, they felt it ought to have been a blockhouse because the Indians could come over the bay from the reservation on the island.
Close to the shore the water was sand-colored, and small rocks and pebbles hurt the feet, but twenty feet farther out was the blue line and the drop. Always she limped hurriedly over the pebbles, and stood on the flat, smooth rock
just before the drop. Bill was swimming easily ten feet ahead of her. Flora leaned forward to the water and, swimming, made a circle over the blue and came in as far as she could till her toes and knees touched bottom; then she paddled with her feet and crawled in on her hands.
She lay on the sand and called, “Bill,” and put her hands over her eyes, shielding them from the strong sun. She heard Bill splashing the water. He sat down beside her shivering. His lips were blue. “It gets colder every year,” he said. But the sun was good and they lay on their backs. Her eyes open, she saw beyond the tips of her toes to the blue bay and the outline of the island. Straining her eyes, she saw, to the left, a small sailboat — opposite the summer cottages, she thought.
“I did some good thinking out there in the cold water.” He jerked himself up suddenly and rubbed the hair on his chin with the palm of his hand.
“Why does the water get colder every year, Bill?”
“Come on now, Flora, girl; don’t try and sidetrack me. Aren’t you interested?”
“Honest to heaven above, I’m interested, only I know pretty well what you were thinking.”
Though she knew he was offended, she had grown tired of listening to him. It was interesting, but at the moment too complicated for her. The sailboat was out of sight beyond the bend. Behind them she heard shouting, kids playing in the bushes.
“I’ve been thinking it over,” he was saying. “I ought to go down to the city to a place something like Saint Michael’s College, and have a real talk about Saint Thomas Aquinas. Just to see if it’s a bright idea. Of course I know it’s a good one.”
It sounded impressive for him to be thinking of going down to the city to one of the colleges. She reached for his hand and listened attentively. All last evening he had talked about Saint Thomas Aquinas and she had been unable to get to sleep. He had come home from the office with a clipping from the paper and had been so excited he had hardly eaten at all because the idea had come to him suddenly.
“Have you sorta cut out the pattern in your own head?” she asked.
“I‘m glad you’re still interested, Flora. How does it sound to you?” Sand clinging to his wet bathing suit fell slowly as he talked.
“You go on and tell it. I’ll just rest here with my eyes closed.”
He talked slowly and at first she didn’t listen attentively, for she knew the first part of the story. He had been working in the office of the town paper, reading a great many Sunday supplements to find one or two good feature stories they could reprint. He was alone in the office with old Johnny Williams, who owned the paper. Bill did most of the work. Johnny had often declared that when he died Bill would practically own the paper because he had no kids of his own or any other relatives. Bill read a story in a Sunday supplement about Saint Thomas Aquinas, a theologian and philosopher of the Middle Ages who had taken the Aristotelian philosophy and the learning of his time and rearranged it till it was acceptable to the Church and a basis for a new Christian culture. Theology and philosophy became parts of the one system. The professor who had written the article had been enthusiastic. The story for her had been uninteresting till he developed an idea that had occurred to him after reading the article the second time. A man like himself, willing to work hard, might become the Saint Thomas of today, though of course he wouldn’t need to bother with philosophy, since the present conflict was between science and religion. All he had to do was make a plan of different fields of science and show definitely that it could become one fine system in accordance with a religious scheme.
“It’s too bad I’m not religious,” he said, “but it’s too bad I’m not scientific, though I might acquire a scientific mind, don’t you think?”
Her eyes were closed and she heard someone calling in a high voice back near the stream. “Here, chook, chook, chook!” Mrs. Simpkins, from the stone cottage near the stream, was feeding her chickens. Often the chickens walked across a narrow plank spanning the stream and scratched in the field opposite the house. Two weeks ago someone hiding in the trees had stolen three of the hens. Bill was saying quietly and slowly: “If a fellow would be willing to work, it oughtn’t to be too tough a job.”
A breeze from the bay made her shiver. She sat up and said sincerely: “Are you going to do it, Bill?”
“Going to do what?”
“Be something like this man. Saint Thomas, I mean.”
“I guess so, but I don’t know exactly,” he laughed happily. “I’ve just been doing a little thinking. You know what it’s like with me. I always like to work a thing out from all angles.”
“Of course you wouldn’t make a barrel of money, but I mean could we get along at all on the idea?”
“No, it mightn’t mean much that way, but . . .”
She put her head on his shoulder. They followed with their eyes a wave line on the bay. “Billy, you do have fine thoughts,” she said.
“Lord, no, Flora!” He was embarrassed and reached for a pebble. “See if I can hit the wave line before it breaks.”
“No. Listen: I’ll bet a dollar you’ll get your name in the papers and the town’ll do something about it later on.”
She drew closer to him so he could understand that she belonged to him entirely and believed in his importance. He put his arm, dried from the sun, on her back, but her bathing suit, where she had been lying on it, was still wet, so he withdrew his arm. “Sure bet your boots that I’ll kill dead things and you can’t go wrong,” he said genially. Without knowing why, they both started to laugh and, standing up, they linked arms to walk along the beach to the blockhouse.
The door had been torn away and he stood outside and threw stones at the water until she got dressed. Older people usually bathed on the beach in front of the summer resort, but Bill had been coming down to the blue drop for years. When they got dressed they squeezed and twisted the bathing suits and he hung them over his shoulder. Crossing the stream they stepped from one dry rock to another. He held down the top strand of the wire fence for her. On the dusty road they walked more rapidly. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was very bright. Few houses were at this end of the road. Over the tops of the houses, beyond the town and curving westward was the line of the blue mountains. Cultivated fields, pale yellow in sunlight, were on the slopes of blue hills. Flora’s father had a farm on a gentle slope of the hills, eight miles northwest of the town.
On the boardwalk, opposite Tanner’s new three-storey brick house, Bill noticed that one of the bathing suits was drying, and, taking it off his shoulder, he flicked it at tall weeds alongside the walk. The weeds close to the road were dust-covered and had no color. He kept on flicking the weeds mechanically.
“Take that frown off your face,” she said.
“I’m not frowning.”
“Brighten up,” she said, but knew that he was having fine thoughts, and watching the shifting expressions on his face fascinated her. Two or three playful words came easily to her lips but she remained serious and attempted to follow his thoughts in her own head. At the point where she had left off, at the beach, she started again, though it was involved and she felt that she had lost track of it. Instead, she took Bill’s arm and, passing Samson’s cottage, noticed that they had a new shade and curtains on the front window.
The cinder path on their street looked much cooler than the boardwalk. The two-storied cement house was fourth from the red rough-cast one on the corner; then there was Fulton’s cottage and McGuin’s frame house.
Bill said solemnly before going into the house that it was funny no one in the whole world had ever had an idea like his. “Of course it must be remembered that this Saint Thomas had it soft in some ways. The world was nothing to write home about in those days, and it’s some world now. I’d like to talk it over, but few people would take it all in.”
“It’s such a splendid notion,” she said, “though it seems so far away.”
“It is far away, but, honestly, it don’t sound nutty, does it?”
Through the open door Mike, the fox terrier, jumped at Bill and he kept slapping it on the belly, rolling it on the floor, while Flora went along the hall to the kitchen. The dog barked while she worked in the kitchen slicing tomatoes for an early supper, then she heard Bill running around the side of the house, the dog squealing eagerly. The tomatoes were sliced, so she leaned on the table and knew Bill was hiding, for there was no sound. Then his feet thudded on the sod, the dog growled and barked, and she smiled. Later on, just before she called him to supper, the dog kept on barking noisily in the backyard, and, sure that Bill was teasing him, she rapped on the windowpane authoritatively for fear he might annoy the neighbors.
After supper he lay on the sofa and played his mouth-organ. Some of the tunes she liked and kept time, moving the dish towel in a circle on a plate, but newer tunes were raucous and she called: “For heaven’s sake, Bill, keep to the ones you know.” The dishes were dried and the table cleared, and he had played most of his tunes. It was too early to go down street to the movies. They sat on the front veranda watching groups of boys coming down the road, more people than had been on the street all afternoon.
“I wonder who won the lacrosse game,” Bill said.
“Here comes Joe Boyle on his bike. Ask him.”
Joe Boyle, pedaling easily, was opposite the house and Bill yelled: “Hey, Joe! Tell us who won the game.”
Joe stopped pedaling but didn’t get off his bike. “Meaford,” he yelled, and kept on going.
2
Not since the time the doctor thought his mother had cancer had Bill taken anything so seriously. The new thoughts and intentions that he suggested Flora couldn’t understand, and one night, by comparison, estimated their importance to him. She knew nearly everything that had happened to him in the last twelve years, since they had met at high school. Her father drove her in from the farm and Bill had always lived in town. They kept company for ten years, and married when Bill got enough money to build a house, ten minutes’ walk from Main Street.
The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Two Page 18
