Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  After dinner Mother would always switch off the principal light as she left the dining room, and the men’s talking was done in softer illumination from the side wall lamps.

  Brother had gone one night and climbed into Father’s lap, I was sitting beside Uncle Jake, and I leaned my head over on his knee. It seemed that the lights were lower than usual that night, and the Negro cook in her white serving apron seemed to take longer than ever in removing the dishes. She kept reaching over me to clear the dishes from my and Uncle Jake’s places, and once she told me to sit up and quit being a bother to my Uncle Jake. But he, without turning his eyes from Father, laid his hand lightly across my chest to hold me there; and the cook went off to the sideboard shaking her head. Uncle Jake had not spoken for a long while. He had sat smoking his white-bowled pipe and listening to Father, but I could tell now by the twitching at the corner of his mouth that he was finally about to speak. When his lips parted and he simultaneously removed the pipe I remarked the long distance between the point of his chin and his eyes and noticed that the eyes themselves were set far apart and were rather popped, I thought, from this upside-down view.

  Addressing Father as “Brother”—a thing he did only when they were reminiscing—he began to speak of Uncle Louis. He lifted his eyes to the ceiling, and from where I lay it seemed that he had rolled his eyeballs far back into his head, and I noticed the strange animal-like moisture of his upper lip. “Brother,” he said, “I was playing with Louis one day under the mulberry tree at the end of the side porch. We had a couple of pillboxes that old Dr. Pemberton had given us and we had caught two of the caterpillars that fell from the mulberry tree. With some black thread from Mama’s basket we were hitching the poor fuzzy worms to the little boxes and then filling the boxes with sand to see how heavy a load the caterpillars could manage. But Louis quite accidentally pulled the thread so tightly about the middle of one of them that he cut the little fellow half in two. Then he looked at me silently across the two pieces of worm. And, mind you, after several seconds he scrambled to his feet and ran the length of the porch to where Mama was sitting with her sewing in her lap.

  “I followed hot on his heels and stood by watching him as he fell on his knees and hid his face in her sewing. Pretty soon when he began to weep and shake all over—more like a girl than a boy—Mama thought he had hurt himself on the scissors or a needle and she jerked him up from her lap. He could not speak for his sobbing, and when I had told Mama that he had only cut a little worm half in two with a piece of thread, she drew him to her, smiling and patting his head tenderly. When at last he was able to speak he said, ‘I killed the little caterpillar, Mama, and he’ll never, never come back to life.’ ”

  Uncle Jake was stirring unconsciously in his chair as he spoke, and I raised up from his lap and peered across the tablecloth into Father’s face. His mouth literally hung open, and he said, “Why, Jake, I’ve never heard you tell that before.”

  Uncle Jake replaced his pipe between his teeth and chewed on it. He said, “Brother, I never had much heart for telling it, because it happened the same summer he caught the fever.” And in a few minutes he got up and went over and unlocked the door to the porch that nobody ever used. Before he went out Father called him in a very stern voice, but he went out anyway and sat on the porch for a long time by himself, still smoking his pipe. In the living room I asked Father if he supposed Uncle Jake was thinking about Uncle Louis. He said he supposed he was thinking about Aunt Margaret his wife who had died so many, many years ago and about their daughter who had been a prig and a fanatic. Mother said that Father should not talk that way before the children.

  Virginia Ann had innumerable beaux. It used to seem on Sunday afternoons that all the young men in Nashville had flocked to our house, some for but a few minutes’ visit, others to make an all-afternoon stay. Father called them the Arabs and the Indians. The Arabs were the timid or sulky boys who stayed a short while and then moved silently on to some other house. The Indians were those bold ones who, he said, camped or squatted on his property for the eternity of a whole Sunday afternoon.

  Father really did seem to despise the Indians. But it was the Indians who were Uncle Jake’s delight. He would sit and talk to them while Virginia Ann gave her attention to those whose devotion had not been proved. And when they all had finally gone, he never failed to pretend that he was worried because Virginia Ann would not choose what he called a steady from among them. He would stop Virginia Ann as she was straightening up the parlor or perhaps by the newel post at the foot of the stairs and, rolling his eyes speculatively, he would enumerate the good and bad qualities of each of those he considered potential steadies.

  Virginia Ann would listen, pretending, like himself, to be in dead earnestness. I could not have told that they were not speaking their literal thoughts had it not been for the pompous gestures Uncle Jake made with his hands whenever he was making fun and for the broad smile that broke upon Virginia Ann’s face whenever Uncle Jake mentioned the devotion to herself which some young Indian had confided in him.

  It was at the dinner table one night in the presence of all the family that Uncle Jake began to describe a conversation he had had with Bill Evers. He began by professing to believe that Bill Evers was the beau whom Virginia Ann should choose as her steady. The things he was saying were so much of the kind he had so often said to her about other young men that I did not really listen at first. I only remarked the mock seriousness in the tone of his voice and saw him batting his eyes as he concealed a smile behind his coffee cup. Several times I watched him bring his cup up in rather a hurry to his lips and, as often before, I studied the wide gold band on the fourth finger of his left hand. Uncle Jake had large hands, and I thought, as I studied them, of how much softer to the touch they were than one could imagine from their rough appearance.

  It was likely the word “revolver” that finally made me listen to what he was actually saying about that particular one of the Indians. “Yes, Bill Evers tells me,” he said, “that he is never afraid anywhere on the darkest night or in the wildest country as long as he has his revolver.” And Uncle Jake each time he pronounced “revolver” would roll it out magnificently.

  Virginia Ann’s face suddenly blossomed into a broad smile that showed her lovely white teeth and revealed perhaps here and there on her teeth little splotches of orange-red paint that Mother said she applied “so liberally” to her lips.

  Then Uncle Jake reported several of the incidents wherein Bill Evers had felt himself more secure for having his revolver by his side. Once he had been camping in the Baxter Hills. Another time he had been hunting along Duck River and had met a couple of old moonshiners whom Bill had described as “very much intoxicated.” Whenever Uncle Jake was quoting Bill directly he would deepen his voice and roll his r’s, and for some reason this made Virginia Ann blush. It was, of course, because Bill was the only one of her beaux that really had a man’s voice. And it seemed that Uncle Jake by deepening his voice was referring to that fact rather too persistently and somehow indelicately. Possibly I was the first to feel that Virginia Ann was no longer feigning that sober expression that had settled on her face now. I was watching her when Uncle Jake said, “Bill Evers is never afraid so long as he has his revolver by his side. ‘My revolver,’ Bill told me, ‘is my best friend and just let any fellow take care who meddles with me when I have my revolver by my side.’ ”

  Without warning, Virginia Ann sprang from the table weeping, not like a kitten but like a wounded animal out in the woods in the Baxter Hills. She ran from the dining room crying, “Oh, you’re too cruel. You’re heartless.”

  Uncle Jake seemed unable to move or speak. He looked helplessly from Father to Mother whose faces registered nothing but half-amused surprise. Then he pushed back his chair and hurried clumsily after Virginia Ann calling, “Child . . . Child.” Brother and I slipped automatically from our chairs to follow as curious witnesses to the spectacle, but Mother and Father, who were no
w looking at one another, smiling and shaking their heads sadly, turned quickly to us and commanded us to return to our seats.

  “Poor Jake,” Father said, “always has to pay for what fun he has in life.”

  Mother continued to take an occasional sip from her white coffee cup. Finally she sighed, “Poor Jake. I’m sure he hadn’t suspected how things are.”

  Father raised his eyebrows. After a moment he shook his head emphatically and said that Mother was reading things into this incident. “The girl’s just tired tonight,” he said. “She doesn’t give a snap for the boy.”

  Mother shook her head with equal emphasis. “No. Grace told me before she left.” She replaced her cup in its saucer but continued for several seconds to hold to its handle with her thumb and forefinger. “I must say, I thought Bill Evers had long since passed out of her head. There was a time when young girls confided such prolonged crushes in their mothers.”

  From somewhere in the front part of the house we could hear Uncle Jake’s voice apologizing and entreating. Eventually we began to hear Virginia Ann reassuring him. And I recalled then how in front of the church one Sunday, after services, I had been tugging at Uncle Jake’s hand, trying to pull him away from a crowd of men who were talking foxhound and bird dog. My eyes, as I tugged, were on an old Negro man who was selling bags of peanuts on the street corner. I saw that the vendor was closing the lid to the primitive cart that he pushed and was preparing to move to another corner. I tugged at Uncle Jake’s hand and turned to beg him to come along. But upon turning my eyes to him I saw that he had somehow managed to slip my hand into that of a strange man; and he and all the others were standing about laughing at me.

  With a violent jerk I had broken loose and had run off down the street in a beastly rage. When Uncle Jake finally caught me he held me and knelt on one knee before me imploring humbly that I forgive him (instead of cajoling as most men would have done). And silently I began to blame myself for not having realized that the hand I had been pulling on had a hardness and coarseness about it that should have distinguished it from that of my gentle uncle’s.

  “Poor Jake.” Mother used to say that Father was “an omnivorous reader,” and I would say myself when I was nine or ten that she and he were both “omnivorous talkers” when they were alone together. They talked about everything and everyone under the sun. They didn’t talk especially kindly or unkindly about people, but I felt that in the years of their married life they had certainly left nothing that came into their heads unsaid. I was sometimes surprised to overhear them speak with such detachment of Virginia Ann or Brother or Uncle Jake. “Poor Jake,” Father would say, “he’s really incapable of being very realistic about his dealing with people. His real calling, his real profession is, you know, that of the Scoutmaster. It’s during those Thursday night meetings with the boys that poor Jake fulfills himself. I always knew that he’d never make a great go of it in business, and sometimes when he tells me that he should have held on to the homeplace and farmed it, I can barely keep from telling him that somebody would have gotten it away from him and that he would have ended up as the tenant, forever recollecting the good old days, y’know, when it was our own.” Mother would say that she didn’t understand how he had done even as good a job of raising poor Presh as he did.

  “Presh’s religious mania, it’s always seemed to me,” Mother would say, “began as very much the same sort of thing as Jake’s nostalgia. It was all tied up with notions of her mother’s existence in Heaven. Toward the last her social work consisted mostly of preaching to those wretched poor people in East Nashville about her mother in Heaven. She could just not be bothered with any real view of things.”

  Father would speculate concerning Uncle Jake’s fate and what it might have been if his wife had not died when Presh was only half grown: “If only Margaret, herself, had lived to make him and Presh a home, he might not have forever been looking to the past and being so uncritical of things in the present. He might have taken hold of himself.” Here Mother would disagree. Men’s natures weren’t changed by circumstances, she contended. And the discussion would continue thus long after my interest had lagged.

  At last I would hear Mother saying, “My Love, you simply have those age-old illusions of the male about Character and Fate. You’ve never really been Christianized.” To which Father’s favorite reply was: “I think you mean I’ve never been Calvinized.” Or he would say, “The female is the cynic of the species.”

  Then if it were bedtime they would go about the house together locking-up, shutting-down, turning-off, putting-out, arranging everything for the night. And I would hear them in their bedroom still talking as they undressed and went to bed.

  Father would never help us celebrate the Fourth of July. He said that it was because Vicksburg had fallen to the Yankees on the Fourth. And Uncle Jake would stand behind him and say he was exactly right, though Uncle Jake would, himself, come and help us set off the firecrackers in the backyard.

  But Mother, as she and Father sat playing Russian bank on the screened porch, would denounce Father as a hypocrite and remind him that he had some excuse or other for not celebrating any of the holidays in hot weather. He simply could not abide hot weather. Nothing could stir him to action from Decoration Day till after Labor Day in September. But after that it was very different. Mother would say that a week before Thanksgiving he began to develop holiday spirits that were continuous through Easter. Yet she, in turn, could not abide the cold weather; and that, Father maintained, was responsible for her “scaring up” such a religious point of view about Christmas and New Year’s. Except for the Thanksgiving football game they would stay home on holidays reading or playing cards or maybe receiving a few friends or kinspeople. And the next day you could hear Mother on the telephone telling the woman who took her orders at the grocery, “We had a very quiet holiday at home, which is after all a more fitting way to spend such a day. . . . The children were in and out with their friends, so it was quite gay for us. . . . I think such days, after all, should be a time for the family to be together. . . . Yes, a time for us to count our blessings.”

  Uncle Jake never failed to comment upon the old-fashionedness of holidays at our house. When Aunt Grace had once accused Mother and Father of being together too lazy to face any kind of weather and had said that each of them was the other’s worst enemy—socially—he had come forward most earnestly in their defense. He said that their mutual sacrifice of practically all social life for the sake of the other’s comfort amounted to no less than “a symbol of unity.”

  “Besides,” he said, “it’s not as though they were denying themselves the sort of social gatherings that there were in and around Nashville a generation ago.”

  Aunt Grace had expressed her delight at this with several seconds of laughter so violent that she finally choked. With her face still very red, her eyes watery, and her voice hoarse she said, “How perfectly wonderful, Jake!” Then she leaned toward him, narrowing her eyes till they were two dark slits in her fair complexion, and said, “But you might be surprised, Jake, at what really grand old times some of the married set do have at their ‘social gatherings’ today.”

  Uncle Jake merely nodded soberly.

  Aunt Grace laughed again, but carefully now so as not to choke. “I know what you mean,” she added with a wink that had a little self-consciousness about it. “Look at what it ‘done done’ to me.”

  Uncle Jake blushed and remained quite serious for a moment. But he could not long resist the persistent, infectious laughter. He smiled genially and softly repeated the phrase which he must have thought good—“A symbol of unity.”

  It would sometimes be irksome to Virginia Ann that Mother planned all of the meals around Father’s special tastes. Rarely did an evening meal come to our table, for instance, without there appearing on the menu either turnip salad or string beans cooked in ham fat. Aunt Grace had amused Virginia Ann mightily at breakfast one morning by her response to Mother’s compla
int against the drudgery of planning meals. She had pulled a small daisy from the centerpiece and offered it to Mother saying, “All you have to do is pluck off the petals repeating, Turnip greens—Beans. Turnip greens—Beans.’ And so on till you get the answer.” Virginia Ann had already made this something of a sensitive subject with Mother who now only closed her eyes and pressed down imaginary creases in the tablecloth with her small hand.

  Father seemed no more amused than Mother by the suggestion for deciding the menu and he chose that as the signal for him to down the last of his coffee, pull his napkin loosely through his napkin ring, and go into the living room to look for the morning paper.

  Uncle Jake, too, rose from his chair. But he reached out and took the daisy from Aunt Grace’s hand and said slyly, “It’s not a bad suggestion, Grace. But you don’t understand that she’s just telling her fortune the way clever women have always done. She pulls the petals not saying, ‘He loves me. He loves me not,’ but saying, ‘He loves me. He loves me.’ ”

  Aunt Grace laughed appreciatively. “Jake, how perfectly wonderful.”

  But when the men had gone to work, Virginia Ann, being a little out of humor that morning, said again that she could not see why Mother had always to put Father’s tastes before those of the children. Mother turned to her and spoke finally, “If you don’t know why, Daughter, then let me tell you: Some fine day each of my children will have a husband or a wife or some other equally absorbing and wonderful interest in life that will take them away from me. And so some fine day I shall have only your father’s tastes to cater to. I don’t want there to be any doubt in his mind on that fine day that he always came first at my table. I don’t like the prospect of two old souls’ turning from loneliness to one another because their children have left them.”