Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “Now she’s hungry,” the old man said with authority.

  There could be no doubt that that was what this sort of fretting meant. Emmaline automatically stepped up and took the baby from him. She went into the lighted room where the crib was and closed the door. As she sat down in the wicker rocking chair and gave the baby her breast, she could hear the old fellow still talking to Bert in the next room. It occurred to her then that all the while they had stood there passing the baby back and forth and delighting in the baby’s good spirits, the old man had been talking on and on, as though he didn’t know how to stop once he had begun. Emmaline hadn’t listened to him, but as she now heard his bass voice droning on beyond the closed door, she began to recollect the sort of thing he had been saying. Off his tongue had rolled all the obvious things, all the unnecessary things, all the dull things—every last thing that might have been left unsaid: He guessed he had a way with children, they flocked to him in the neighborhood where he lived, and he looked after them and did for them. Along with the quality of kindliness in his voice was a quality that could finally make you forget kindliness, no matter how genuine. Why, he didn’t mind doing for children when their folks ought to go out and have their good time of it before they got like him, “a decrepited and lonesome old wreck on time’s beach.” What Bert and Emmaline needed was some of their old folks from Tennessee—or the likes of them—to show them something about raising children, so they wouldn’t go scaring themselves to death and worrying where they needn’t. Tears of pity came into Emmaline’s eyes—pity for herself. It would be like that from now on. She heard the old man’s voice going on and on in the next room even after she had heard Bert letting himself down on the bed. She even thought she heard the old man saying that if they didn’t want him to stay, he would leave tomorrow. That’s what he would say, anyhow. He would be saying it again and again for years and years because he knew that Bert would not have the heart, any more than she would, to run him off after tonight.

  She got up and turned off the light, and then, with the baby in her arms, found her way to the rocking chair. She continued to sit there rocking long after the old man had talked himself out for this time and had, without shutting the bathroom door, used the toilet and finally gone off to his own room. She went on rocking even long after she knew the baby was asleep and would be dead to the world until morning. During the time she and Bert and the old man had stood in the shadowy room in silence, each absorbed in his own thoughts, she had been remembering that the baby’s shrieking had awakened her from a nightmare of her own. She had not been able to remember at the time what the nightmare was, but now she did. There wasn’t much to the dream. She was on the Square in Thornton. Across the courthouse yard she spied old ’Stracted Mag coming toward her. The old woman had three or four cur dogs on leash, and she was walking between two Thornton white ladies whom Emmaline recognized. As the group drew near to Emmaline, she had the impulse to run forward and throw her arms about old Mag and tell her how she admired her serene and calm manner. But when she began to run she saw old Mag unleash the dogs, and the dogs rushed upon her growling and turning back their lips to show their yellow, tobacco-stained teeth. Emmaline tried to scream and could not. And then she did manage to scream. But it was the baby shrieking, of course, and she had woken from her nightmare.

  As she rocked in the dark with her sleeping baby, she shook her head, trying to forget the dream she had just remembered. Life seemed bad enough without fool dreams to make it worse. She would think, instead, about the old man and how she would have to make him clean himself up and how she would have to train him to do for the baby when the baby got older. She even tried to think kindly of him and managed to recall moments of tenderness with her old granddaddy and her uncles in Thornton, but as she did so, tears of bitterness stung her eyes—bitterness that out of the past, as it seemed, this old fellow had come to disrupt and spoil her happy life in St. Louis.

  In the next room, Bert, in his white pajamas, lay on their bed listening to the noise that the rocking chair made. It went “quat-plat, quat-plat,” like any old country rocking chair. He knew the baby must be asleep by now, but he didn’t want Emmaline to come back to bed yet. For while he and Emmaline and the old man had stood together in the brief silence, Bert, too, had realized that the baby had awakened him from a nightmare. He had thought he was a little boy in school again, in the old one-room Negro grade school at Thornton. He was seated at the back of the room, far away from the stove, and he was cold. It seemed he had forgotten to go to the privy before he left home, as he so often used to forget, but he could not bring himself to raise his hand and ask to go now. On top of all this, the teacher was asking him to read, and he could not find the place on the page. This was a dream that Bert often had. It could take one of several endings—all of them equally terrible to him. Sometimes the teacher said, “Why can’t you learn, boy?” and commenced beating him. Sometimes he ran past the teacher (who sometimes was a white man) to the door and found the door locked. Sometimes he got away and ran down to the school privy, to find indescribable horrors awaiting him there.

  As he lay in bed tonight, he could not or would not remember how the dream had ended this time. And he would not let himself go back to sleep, for fear of having the dream again. There had been nights when he had had the dream over and over in all its variations. Why should he go back to sleep now and have that dreadful dream when he could stay awake and think of pleasant things?—or the pleasanter duties ahead of him tomorrow, of polishing the silver, of scouring the tile floor in the pantry, perhaps of washing Miss Amy’s car if she didn’t go out in the afternoon. He stayed awake for a long time, but without thinking of the old man at all, without even thinking of what could be keeping Emmaline in the next room.

  And while Bert lay there carefully not thinking of his bad dream and not thinking of the old man and wept bitterly because of him, wasn’t it likely that the old man himself was still awake—in the dark room with the three-legged chest of drawers, the unplastered walls, and the old harness hooks? If so, was it possible that he, too, had been awakened from a bad dream tonight? Who would ever know? Bert and Emmaline would tell each other in the morning about their dreams—their loneliness was only of the moment—and when Baby grew up, they would tell her about themselves and about their bad dreams. But who was there to know about his ? Who is there that can imagine the things that such a dirty, ignorant, old tramp of a Negro thinks about when he is alone at night, or dreams about while he sleeps? Such pathetic old tramps seem, somehow, to have moved beyond the reach of human imagination. They are too unlike us, in their loneliness and ignorance and age and dirt, for us even to guess about them as people. It may be necessary for us, when we meet them in life or when we encounter them in a story, to treat them not as people but as symbols of something we like or dislike. Or is it possible to suppose, for instance, that their bad dreams, after all—to the very end of life, and in the most hopeless circumstances—are only like Bert’s and Emmaline’s. Is it possible that this old fellow had been awakened tonight from a miserable dream of his own childhood in some little town or on some farm in that vague region which the Tollivers called West Tennessee? Perhaps, when he returned from the toilet, he sat up in bed, knowing that at his age he wasn’t likely to get back to sleep soon, and thought about a nightmare he had remembered while standing in that shadowy room with Bert and Emmaline. It might even be that the old fellow smiled to himself and took comfort from the thought that anyway there were not for him so many nightmares ahead as there were for Bert and for Emmaline, and certainly not so many as for their little woolly-headed baby who didn’t yet have a name.

  The Dark Walk

  IT WAS a rather old-fashioned sort of place with no entertainment except expeditions to Pikes Peak to see the sunrise, horseback riding on Tuesday and Thursday, and a depressing dance (“For Young and Old”) in the dining room every Saturday night. The first thing Sylvia Harrison’s children said upon arriving was: “
Why, there’s not even a swimming pool!” To the two older children, Margaret and Wallace, it seemed an impossible place. They were aged fifteen and sixteen at the time, and they would have much preferred being back in the heat of Chicago. To them the depressing Saturday night dances in Mountain Springs were an anathema. Wallace said the notice on the bulletin board should read: “For the very young and the very old.” Twelve-year-old girls, still wearing sashes and patent-leather pumps, danced with their grandfathers. Worse still, old ladies danced together and “broke” on each other. The music was unspeakable: a drum, a piano, and a saxophone. Margaret and Wallace soon got in touch with school friends whose sensible parents were staying in Colorado Springs. The two of them were forever dashing over to the Antlers and the Broadmoor in a rented automobile; but even that was not much fun, because Sylvia always made them get back to Mountain Springs before midnight. And on Saturday night, for at least a few minutes, they had to appear at the Mountain Springs dance.

  Those Saturday nights in Colorado were even more painful to Sylvia’s two younger children, Charley and Nora. They had to stay at the dance until 10:30 and they, as well as their mother, had to dance time and again with old Miss Katty Moore, who owned and managed Mountain Springs Hotel. The three of them—Sylvia and the two younger children—took turns dancing with Miss Katty. When she approached their table they would whisper among themselves whose turn it was; and soon, off one of them would go in the arms of the muscular little old lady. It was a humiliating experience—the dancing was. But somehow it wasn’t itself so bad as those awful moments when Miss Katty was approaching. It was that that the children dreaded all week long. The old lady would come toward them with a bouncing step, sometimes with her incredibly muscular arms outstretched as she snapped her fingers to the rhythm of the music. Her snow-white hair was bobbed, and shingled in the back. She wore a white satin evening dress, and, for dancing, a pair of low-quarter, white tennis shoes. As she stopped at their table she would roll her eyes back into her head until only the whites were showing. This was her facetious way of issuing an invitation to the dance. . . . An unbelievable sight the old woman was. And a dreadful reality she presently became for him or her whose turn it happened to be.

  But why need this macabre invitation be accepted? Because old Miss Katty Moore was a native of Tennessee. Because she had taught gymnastics at Ward-Belmont School in Nashville when Sylvia was a student there and had taught Sylvia and all Sylvia’s contemporaries there the art of swinging Indian clubs. It was, in fact, because of this old association that Sylvia took her family to Mountain Springs instead of to the Broadmoor that summer. She told herself it would be fun to see her old teacher again and she enjoyed thinking of the pleasure her old schoolmates would receive from the letters she would write them about Miss Katty. She pictured those old schoolmates—the half-dozen or so with whom she had kept up a regular correspondence through the years, pictured them opening her letters about Miss Katty as they stood on the front porches of their white clapboard houses in Tennessee. Four of them lived in the very town where Sylvia had grown up, and rarely did a month pass without her writing to and receiving a letter from one of them. Her life and theirs had followed such different courses in recent years that there was always something newsworthy to write. She knew how her “western trip” would interest them and could hear them exclaiming, “Good heavens! Miss Katty Moore in Colorado!”

  But Sylvia Harrison would never have thought of going West at all except that Nate Harrison’s business had taken him for several weeks to Denver and to Salt Lake City. She and the children had accompanied Nate to those places, and he had afterward gone with them through Yellowstone Park. After Yellowstone he had had to return to Chicago. Originally he had had his secretary make reservations for Sylvia and the children at the Broadmoor, and it was Sylvia herself, of course, who remembered about Miss Katty and changed the plans. Nate had laughed at her for it and had been especially tickled by the fact that she was going to keep in touch with her Tennessee friends during the summer and probably wouldn’t write a line to anybody in Chicago. But he said it was all right if that was what she wanted and said there was no use in his trying to change her about such things. One thing he would never attempt, so he said, was to change Sylvia about such things as that. He, of course, never set eyes on Mountain Springs and never danced a step with Miss Katty Moore. During the summer Sylvia carried through her plan to write notes to her old schoolmates (all of whom replied with messages for Miss Katty) and when she was back in Chicago she wrote a long letter to be passed among them, in which she depicted the trip as “an awful failure” for the whole family. “The hotel was really a mess,” she wrote. “The long train ride was ghastly. Miss Katty, despite her foxtrotting and two-stepping on Saturday nights, was the only bright spot for me.”

  Afterward Sylvia would refer to that summer in Colorado whenever people tried to sympathize with her for having had to move about the country so many times. For more than ten years Nate’s business had kept the family almost constantly on the move, but Sylvia said she would rather pack and move her possessions a hundred times than take one such trip as that. The children were always so keyed up on a vacation trip, and they were always so disappointed over the way things worked out. Whereas a move was a very different matter. It was like ordering the groceries. The only bad thing about a move, said Sylvia, was the respect in which it was like taking a trip—a certain inescapable human element. For instance, on moving day somebody in the family would burst into tears at the sight of some particular piece of furniture’s being shouldered out of the house by the moving men. Or somebody would decide—“somebody” being always one of the children, of course—that he or she would never be as happy in another house or neighborhood as in the one they were leaving. It was nearly always Sylvia’s lot to combat the bursts of tears, to remind someone that none of these houses was really home for them, to say again that home for them would always be Tennessee. Home was not Chicago or Detroit, or any of the other places they had lived. Home was the old Harrison place at Cedar Springs, or perhaps Sylvia’s own family house at Thornton.

  Yet there had been one occasion on which Sylvia herself had shed tears. It was in the year 1922, in the late spring of the year—toward the end of May. The Harrisons were then setting out from Cedar Springs for Memphis, where Nate was going to act as a sort of “efficiency vice-president” of a concern that had been badly mismanaged. On the day of that first move the sycamores and the oak trees which shaded the streets of the country town still had the first greenness of spring, and so did the grass in the big yards about the houses and in the cow pastures that came up to the edge of town. In some of the ditches along the streets day lilies were already in bloom. Nate and Sylvia had planned to be up and on their way before sunrise while it was still cool and before the roads became dusty. But they didn’t get away that early, of course. Even though they had only the two children then, it was all they could do to have everything and everybody ready to set out by 7:30. The moving vans from Memphis had waited there overnight to pack the last beds, and it was seven o’clock before even the vans could get under way.

  At 7:30 on that spring morning the Harrisons drove west through the old town. All the family were in the new Nash touring car. Following them in the Ford sedan were the two servants and the family pets. As they drove the length of the one long block between their house and the town square they passed a number of their fellow townsmen hurrying along their way to work. It was the sight of one of these men waving good-by to them—a man whom Sylvia Harrison hardly knew—that made her forget herself that morning and look over her shoulder in the direction of the empty house they had left behind. And the one glance was fatal.

  At the first little choking sound in her throat, Nate began to slow down the car and commenced speaking comforting words to her. But Sylvia only sobbed: “Go on. Go on, Nate. Don’t stop the car. If only we could have left while it was still dark! I wouldn’t have minded so much if we could have l
eft before sunup. And why couldn’t we have left before the spring was so far advanced? Oh, everything is at its peak, Nate!”

  Nate tried to reason with her, saying that this was the normal time of year to move. He had to keep his eyes on the road but there was a smile of infinite tenderness on his face and he even reached out his right hand and pressed the back of it gently against her cheek.

  But Sylvia continued as before: “We ought to have left last year, somehow. Or we ought to have left Cedar Springs before we ever had any children.”

  At this slight reference to themselves, the two children in the back seat also began to cry. Nate brought the car to an abrupt stop. Behind them, the brakes of the Ford sedan screeched. And Sylvia, turning just then to comfort the children, saw over the children’s heads and through the isinglass rear window of the car the astonished faces of the Negro man and woman in the sedan. She saw the Negro woman, just after the sudden stop, trying to comfort the canary bird in the cage which she held on her lap, and saw the man reaching back with his long arm to pet Toto, the fox terrier, who was riding between the bundles in the back seat of the sedan. This picture of the servants and the pets seen over the heads of her weeping children immediately revived Sylvia’s spirits. With tears still in her eyes she had begun smiling and even chuckling to herself; for here in these two cars were all the members of her household. A few miles ahead of them on the road to Memphis were the four vans of furniture—almost everything in the way of furniture that her family or Nate’s had ever owned.