The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Two

by Morley Callaghan

  The days in November disturbed and saddened her, and she longed for good times and someone to make love to her. Bill was merely someone she had lived with a long time ago and had grown tired of. In the house she sat by herself, sewing, remodeling old dresses skillfully. Her father brought her a bouquet of autumn leaves in wild, rich colors and she told him that someday she would go back to town and do dressmaking for a living. October had been a fine month, and she had liked the green becoming brown, and the red leaves on the trees, but in November the red leaves were a crisp, dried-out tan that withered and were blown away. Leaves were blown across the fields and over the hills and a wind carried them away in eddies. In the evenings, lying awake in bed, she heard dead leaves rustling on the ground and was unhappy. The trees were stark naked. In the evenings her mother and father read all the magazines subscription agents had sold them during the summer.

  In the middle of the month she brought up the mail from the box at the gate on the rural route. The town paper interested her only casually and she did not read it until the evening. On the front page was a picture of Bill and a two-column story that Johnny Williams had written himself. Her father, reading over her shoulder, patted her on the back and moved the lamp closer to her. She became excited and the character in the story lost all reality for her. Two weeks ago a policeman, riding through a city park on his bicycle, noticed a man sitting on a bench. The man’s clothes were torn and dirty, and he had a beard. He had no hat. He leaned on the bench, his eyes closed. The officer got off his bike and spoke to him, but the man, opening his eyes, muttered words the officer did not understand and tried to get up and go away. Obviously he was very sick or drunk and the policeman, taking him by the arm, walked slowly to a street corner, where he phoned for an ambulance.

  At the hospital they said he evidently hadn’t eaten anything for a long time and was out of his mind, and ought to be taken to an asylum. For three days he remained in the hospital; then they removed him to the city asylum, and he became unconscious. Later on the doctors tried to feed him, but he seemed unable to move his jaws, or they were so rigid his mouth could not be opened. He was out of his mind, or was suffering from some emotional hysteria that practically paralyzed him, and when he opened his eyes he spoke to no one. The doctors fed him milk in a tube inserted through his teeth. He got weaker and they believed he was going to die.

  In his pockets they found an envelope with his name and address. They communicated with his mother and told her that her son had only two weeks at most to live and that he might just as well die at home as in the asylum. Old Mrs. Lawson, though recently infirm herself, went down to the city and had insisted that they send Bill home at once. She had him taken to his own home and moved there from her cottage to attend to him and feed him through the tube. She told Doctor Arnold, the local doctor, that he would not die, and for three days would let no one see him and was very angry with people who came to see him for the last time on earth. The local doctor said it was unbelievable, but he wouldn’t wonder if she kept him alive, though of course he was out of his mind all the time.

  Flora cried when she read the paper and knew she ought to go to him. She kept crying and pretending to herself that she was reading advertisements in the paper, till her father said that under the circumstances it would be better if she didn’t visit him at all; he was being cared for; he had left her and had gone out of his mind, and, anyway, had ill-treated her, and she had her own life to live. Her mother said that it was a fine sentimental notion, to see her husband, yet it was impracticable and the consequences couldn’t be predicted, so it would be better not to see him.

  Flora had no inclination to see Bill. Peeling potatoes in the kitchen at noontime, she closed her eyes and thought of him, his face covered with hair, his jaws locked. At night, stretched out on the bed, she felt unhappy and almost sick, hardly able to believe she had ever known such a man. Uneasily she suspected that her father and mother would declare that it was her duty to nurse him. Next morning they told her they understood some of her feelings and agreed that she should remain away from him. After that they were careful not to mention his name to her.

  She would not go into town with her mother or father and stopped going to church on Sunday. She did not come to this very positive opinion suddenly; only after she had thought of the arid days in her life with Bill before he had gone away. Her first feeling of sympathy for him she guarded cautiously, determined it should not convince her to see him and afterward regret it. She was a young woman who ought not to waste her life with an invalid, who had ill-treated her and separated himself from her. Her mother and father both believed that he would die and that it was foolish to prolong his life artificially. The talk of death shocked Flora, made her think of religion and a funeral, and vague thoughts of an afterlife she couldn’t encompass and she tried to imagine herself dead, and it seemed then that Bill would live on in her thoughts, even though he ought to die. He would die and she would go to his funeral, but in that way could not separate herself from thoughts of him.

  Haying time was over, it was getting dark early. Her mother, sitting in the parlor, was mending socks, her glasses tipped down on her nose. Flora was knitting a sweater she intended to give to her mother. Without lifting her eyes from the knitting Flora suggested that she might get a divorce and go away and live in another town. Her mother withdrew the palm of her hand from the sock and pinned the needle in the ball of yarn.

  “Who with?” she asked sharply.

  “No one. I don’t want to live with anyone.”

  “Well, you’d better not.”

  She looked steadily at Flora, went on darning, and never mentioned it again.

  Snow fell lightly early in December. They had only one hired man for the winter. Her father was planning a new silo for next spring. Though Flora had grown up on the farm, the life became so dreary that she grasped at any thought promising a break in the monotony. The landscape was dreary, especially at twilight. Bare trees and barns were outlined against an early winter sky at twilight. She took long walks by herself on the rural routes, sometimes thinking of meeting a young man and having a conversation with him, or of going into town at night and walking the side streets till she met a young man she didn’t know very well. Her father and mother would be indignant if she ever walked with Pete Hastings now that Bill was back in town. At Christmastime the snow was thick on the fields. It was a bad Christmas, though they all went over to Maloney’s and took small presents off a Christmas tree. The next morning, throwing out dish water from the back-door step, she looked westward where the line of hills curved, wondering why the blue hills had so little color in the winter.

  Her father sometimes mentioned Bill, but she imagined he was just eager to talk, passing the time in the evening, and paid no attention to him. He thought it remarkable that Bill should have lived, and had heard that he was sitting up in a chair, fed with a spoon by his mother who had to undress him.

  Katie Maloney, wearing a red toque and a green muffler, came along the road at four o’clock in the afternoon and waved to Flora. Talking rapidly and sincerely, she said that many people were going to see Bill because they were astonished that he had lived, and she asked if Flora had read the piece about him in the paper. Katie unfolded the paper and Flora read the story. Johnny Williams believed that Bill had been working too hard on some great human undertaking, and had worried himself out of his right mind and had nearly died. But he had survived because he had a great mother, and might someday recover.

  Katie Maloney said: “Do you think he’d mind if next time I was in town I went around to see him?”

  “Why should he mind if he’s out of his head?”

  “I hope he wouldn’t mind. It’d be no use seeing him if he minded.”

  Flora was angry with her father for not having shown her the paper, and he was unable to understand why she was angry with him, because she knew that he always avoided talking to her about Bill. She sat alone in her bedroom wondering why Kat
ie Maloney had been so anxious to see him, talking as if it were a distinction to see a sick man with a wind in the head.

  All week she wondered whether the Maloney girl had seen Bill. On a Thursday afternoon Katie came over to see her, eager to talk. “It was odd, so awfully odd I couldn’t say anything,” she said. “He just sat there in a chair and he had a dark-brown beard.”

  “And didn’t he speak at all?”

  “No, he didn’t speak; just sat there, staring out the window, paying no attention to me”

  “Why didn’t you speak to him?”

  “Well, I wanted to, but mainly to reach out and touch him. I heard it said last Sunday that to reach out and touch him was good luck against getting sick.”

  “Who told you such a thing, Katie?”

  “Oh, I heard it last week. They say he was having such wonderful thoughts and he went out of his mind. Nearly everybody knows it now.”

  She walked down the lane with Katie, laughing out loud while Katie nodded her head vigorously. On the way back to the house she thought of people timidly touching Bill and felt restless and unhappy. She noticed that the barn roof was sagging. The foundations of the house and barn were of stone. The house was of brick but the shingles on the roof were warped and loose. Next time she met Katie she would tell her about Bill’s fine thoughts and how he had studied hard and the story of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Katie would shake her head two or three times and go home and tell it to her mother. Then Flora felt ashamed of herself for taking Katie’s talk seriously, as if anyone could tell her anything about Bill.

  For days she was muddled, wondering why so many people should be interested in Bill now that he was sick and out of his mind. Three weeks later, in the morning, she took the buggy and drove to Gardner’s grocery store. Mr. Gardner was amiable, and, wrapping up tea and bananas for her, asked if she thought old Mrs. Lawson would mind if on Sunday afternoon he dropped in to see Bill. He admitted that he hadn’t known Bill very well when he worked on the paper, but had heard, since, that he was a great thinker and scholar, and believed he might have many wonderful things to tell someday, if he ever got better. She assured Mr. Gardner that it was all right for him to go and see Bill. She spoke spitefully of Mrs. Lawson, who was practically an interloper.

  “They say he just sits there in a chair,” Mr. Gardner said.

  “Yes, he just sits there, looking out the window.”

  “They say he’s out of his mind, but I don’t believe it. The Lord only knows the things he sees and hears sitting there like that. It’s not the likes of us to say. And, besides, he was a very religious man.”

  “You go and see him, Mr. Gardner, and it’s all right.”

  In the buggy again she was indignant that people would ask if old Mrs. Lawson would mind if they saw Bill. “He’s at least my husband,” she thought.

  Most of the way home she thought of Bill sitting in the chair and believed now that it was wonderful that people should be anxious to see him and touch him, though he never moved or opened his mouth. It was likely, as Mr. Gardner suggested, that he was not really out of his mind at all but having his own fine thoughts. She slapped the horse’s haunches, the buggy swaying, the wheels grinding over small rocks on the road. Sawed-off or charred stumps stuck out of the melting snow.

  In the evening she discovered that her mother had heard all the strange talk about Bill. Flora spoke angrily of Bill’s mother, and then told the story of the grandmother who had got off the boat before it left the old country. Her mother was ironing and listening attentively. Flora said: “Oh, I’ll bet a dollar most people’s grandpeople were just as interesting when it comes down to brass tacks.”

  She coaxed her mother to talk of her people. Her mother remembered an aunt who had lived in the town, in the days when people thought it would become a railroad center. The aunt ran a boarding house for trainmen and travelers near to the station. She ran the house for ten years and made some money. “I can remember seeing her one day with her apron full of dollar bills,” she said. And then the boarding house was burned down. “She had few boarders, and I can remember plain as day seeing my aunt coming out of a hole in the fence, and I knew in my soul that she had set fire to the house to get the insurance.”

  Flora thought that it wasn’t a story she could very well tell to other people. “Wasn’t there anybody in our family who got to be well known up here years ago?” she asked.

  “Of course there was; people to be proud of.”

  “Who? Have I heard about them?”

  “For instance, there was my uncle on my mother’s side that laid the first track in a section of the country up around here when most of it was bush. They gave him a gold watch and a beautiful broadcloth suit. I can remember that broadcloth suit as plain as day, seeing the way he’d hang it up or put it on.”

  9

  Early in March she thought of going into town some night and peering in the window at Bill. Slowly she would look in the back window and see him sitting in his chair; no one else would be there; she would not have to talk to him or the old lady. Other people, not even her mother, would know that she had seen him, for he no longer was her husband, but a strange man who sat all day in a chair without opening his mouth.

  At the end of March there was a thaw. The first weeks in April were warm, with a little rain that took the last snow from the fields. The roads were muddy, though they could use the Ford; the sound of running water came from streams in the hills. She drove into town with her father at the end of the second week in April. Her father got out at the flour-and-feed store and left her sitting in the car. Her father had his hand on the doorknob when she called to him that she would go and see some neighbors and meet him later, at four o’clock, opposite the town hall. He opened his mouth, surprised, shrugged his shoulders, and went into the store. She walked south as far as the station and began to cross the tracks to the path on the field by the water tower. Halfway across the field she stood still, nervous and hesitant. The strong sun and the clear day and the green tints underneath the dun-colored grass gave her assurance. She looked toward the house. The shade on the front window was raised. The veranda was clean. The lawn, drab and dirty after the winter snow, held a strip of ice the sun could not reach, close to the base of the veranda.

  Slowly she walked along the path, and at the iron gate her fingers fumbled with the catch; the gate, released, swung away from her, her eyes following it anxiously, waiting for the swing toward her, as though the movement away from her held some personal rebuff. Smiling to herself, she walked as far as the front veranda, then hesitated, feeling that she ought to rap on the door, angry with herself for being embarrassed. It made her uncomfortable to think of entering her own house. She went around the side entrance to the back door, because she knew that if she went up the front steps she would rap on the front door. She walked quietly along the alleyway.

  Standing on the second step of the back porch, leaning to the left, she could see into the kitchen. New white lace curtains were on the window. Almost off balance, she peered through the window and saw Bill sitting in an armchair at the end of the kitchen table. She knew that it was Bill, though he resembled no one she had ever known, with his beard long and black, cut squarely and awkwardly, and the old pair of pants, and white shirt open at the throat. Trembling, she sat down slowly on the step. Thoughts of Bill were confusing because she could think only of the man in the chair. “Now I’ve seen him, I’ll go away,” she murmured, and got up, but couldn’t move away from the steps. She reached out to touch the doorknob. Her mouth opened a little, and hardly breathing, she twisted the knob, opening the door two inches. Quickly she closed it again, rubbing the tips of her fingers together.

  Again she turned to leave and go home, but her right hand reached out, turned the knob, and opened the door wide. Treading cautiously, she tiptoed on the kitchen floor toward Bill. His head, turned away from the door, did not move. She stood three paces away from him, regarding him intently, and when he never moved,
her eyes glanced quickly around the room. The kitchen oilcloth on the floor was clean and freshly washed. She moved closer to him, craning her neck to see his face, putting out her right foot gradually, taking the long step deliberately, prepared to lower her eyes when he turned. He didn’t hear her. Uneasily she put the palm of her hand over her mouth, ready to run out of the room. Instead, she bent down, extended her arm, and with the tips of her fingers touched his knee. His head moved slowly, she withdrew her hand, imagining that she was smiling nicely. She stepped back a pace, watching his head moving. Steadily he regarded her, without knowing her, and she knew that she had become simply another object in the room, one with the stove, the sink, the table. She felt helpless and unimportant.

  “How are you feeling, Bill?” she asked, hoping no one had heard.

  Softly she said: “Bill, Bill, Bill,” but he paid no attention. More confidently she moved closer to him and touched his shoulder, then she touched his other knee. Listening carefully, she bent toward him, her mouth opening as her right hand touched his beard, crisp and dark, her fingers passed through the hair, her arm trembling as she watched him.

  At first she had been timid, like a little girl, now she breathed easily, ready to talk to him as though he were a child. “He knows I’m here, that’s one thing he can’t fool me about,” she thought. She remembered that Gardner, the grocer, had insisted that Bill had many thoughts about people as he sat in the chair. Such a notion made her feel uncomfortable, and she moved away, afraid that he might be thinking of the night she had sat on the sofa in the front room with Pete Hastings. “Well, now, Bill,” she said quietly and firmly, liking the sound of it, “well, now, Bill.” That was the way she would have talked to him before he got sick and he would have listened good-naturedly. Now he remained aloof and solemn, his face white and thin, absolutely uninterested in her. She was impressed and knew she could not talk authoritatively. He was far beyond her, she could not touch him.