by Joan Aiken
“One goes with the man who chooses one.”
“Women are thus,” he admits patronizingly. Asi son las mujeres.
She releases his pinioned legs, but still crouches at his feet, looking questioningly upward.
He is still studying her face. “He could have done worse.” He reaches down and wags her chin a little with two pinched fingers.
She rises, slowly turns away from him. She does not smile. Her coquetry is more basic than the shallow superficiality of a smile. More gripping in its pull. It is in the slow, enfolding way she draws her reboso tight about her and hugs it to her shoulders and her waist. It is in the very way she walks. It is in the coalescing of the sunlit dust-motes all about her in the air as she passes, forming almost a haze, a passional halo.
In fact, she gives him not another look. Yet every step of the way she pulls his eyes with her. And as she passes where a flowering plant stands in a green glazed mould, she tears one of the flowers off. She doesn’t drop it, just carries it along with her in her hand.
She approaches one of the room-openings, and still without turning, still without looking back, goes within.
He stands there staring at the empty doorway.
The old woman squats down by the child, takes it up, and lowers her head as if attentively waiting.
He looks at the policeman, and the policeman at him, and everything that was unspoken until now is spoken in that look between them.
“Wait for me outside the house. I’ll be out later.”
The policeman goes outside and closes the wall-door after him.
Later she comes out of the room by herself, ahead of the man. She rejoins the old woman and child, and squats down by them on her knees and heels. The old woman passes the child into her arms. She rocks it lullingly, looks down at it protectively, touches a speck from its brow with one finger. She is placid, self-assured.
Then the man comes out again. He is tracing one side of his mustache with the edge of one finger.
He comes and stops, standing over her, as he did when he and the other one first came in here.
He smiles a little, very sparingly, with only the corner of his mouth. Half-indulgently, half-contemptuously.
He speaks. But to whom? Scarcely to her, for his eyes go up over her, stare thoughtfully over her head; and the police man isn’t present to be addressed. To his own sense of duty, perhaps, reassuring it. “Well—you don’t need to come in, then, most likely. You’ve told me all you can. No need to question you further. I can attend to the paper myself. And we always have the driver, anyway, if they want to go ahead with it.”
He turns on his heel. His long shadow undulates off her. “Adios, india,” he flings carelessly at her over his shoulder, from the wall-door.
“Adios, patrón,” she murmurs obsequiously.
The old woman goes over to the door in his wake, to make sure it is shut fast from the inside. Comes back, sinks down again.
Nothing is said.
In the purple bloodshed of a sunset afterglow, the tired horse brings its tired rider to a halt before the biscuit-colored wall with the bougainvillea unravelling along it Having ridden the day, having ridden the night, and many days and many nights, the ride is at last done.
For a moment they stand there, both motionless, horse with its neck slanted to ground, rider with his head dropped almost to saddle-grip. He has been riding asleep for the past hour or so. But riding true, for the horse knows the way.
Then the man stirs, raises his head, slings his leg off, comes to the ground. Face mahogany from the high sierra sun, golden glisten filming its lower part, like dust of that other metal, the one even more precious than that he seeks and lives by. Dust-paled shirt opened to the navel. Service automatic of another country, of another army, that both once were his, bedded at his flank. Bulging saddlebags upon the burro tethered behind, of ore, of precious crushed rock, to be taken to the assay office down at Tapatzingo. Blue eyes that have forgotten all their ties, and thus will stay young as they are now forever. Bill Taylor’s home. Bill Taylor, once of Iowa, once of Colorado.
Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where your woman is, that you come back to in the intervals between a greater love—the only real love—the lust for riches buried in the earth, that are your own if you can find them.
Perhaps you do not call it home, even to yourself. Perhaps you call them “my house,” “my woman.” What if there was another “my house,” “my woman,” before this one? It makes no difference. This woman is enough for now.
Perhaps the guns sounded too loud at Anzio or at Omaha Beach, at Guadalcanal or at Okinawa. Perhaps when they stilled again, some kind of strength had been blasted from you that other men still have. And then again perhaps it was some kind of weakness that other men still have. What is strength, what is weakness, what is loyalty, what is perfidy?
The guns taught only one thing, but they taught it well: of what consequence is life? Of what consequence is a man? And, therefore, of what consequence if he tramples love in one place and goes to find it in the next? The little moment that he has, let him be at peace, far from the guns and all that remind him of them.
So the man who once was Bill Taylor has come back to his house, in the dusk, in the mountains, in Anahuac.
He doesn’t have to knock, the soft hoof-plod of his horse has long ago been heard, has sent its long-awaited message. Of what use is a house to a man if he must knock before he enters? The door swings wide, as it never does and never will to anyone but him. Flitting of a figure, firefly-quick, and Chata is entwined about him.
He goes in, faltering a little from long weariness, from long disuse of his legs, she welded to his side, half-supporting, already resting, restoring him, as is a woman’s reason for being.
The door closes behind them. She palms him to wait, then whisks away.
He stands there, looking about.
She comes back, holding something bebundled in her arms.
“What happened to the roses?” be asks dimly.
She does not answer. She is holding something up toward him, white teeth proudly displayed in her face. The one moment in a woman’s whole life. The moment of fulfillment.
“Your son,” she breathes dutifully.
Who can think of roses when he has a son?
Two of the tiles that Fulgencio had laid began to part. Slowly. So slowly who could say they had not always been that way? And yet they had not. Since they could not part horizontally because of the other tiles all around them, their parting was vertical, they began to slant upward, out of true.
At last, the strain became too great. They had no resiliency by which to slant along the one side, remain flat along the other. They cracked along the line of greatest strain, and then they crumbled there, disintegrated into a mosaic. And then the smaller, lighter pieces were disturbed still more, and finally lay about like scattered pebbles, out of their original bed.
And then it began to grow. The new rosebush.
There had been rosebushes there before. Why should there not be one there now again?
It was full-grown now, the new rosebush. And he had gone and come again, Bill Taylor; and gone, and come again. Then suddenly, in the time for roses to bloom, it burst into flower. Like a splattering of blood, drenching that one particular part of the patio. Every rose as red as the heart.
He smiled with pleasant surprise when he first saw it, and he said how beautiful it was. He called to her and made her come out there where he was and stand beside him and take the sight in.
“Look. Look what we have now. I always liked them better than the white ones.”
“I already saw them,” she said sullenly. “You are only seeing them now for the first time, but I saw them many days ago, coming through little by little.”
And she tried to move away, but he held her there by the shoulder, in command.
“Take good care of it now. Water it. Treat it well.”
In a few days he noticed that the sun was scorching it, that the leaves were burning here and there.
He called her out there, and his face was dark. His voice was harsh and curt, as when you speak to a disobedient dog. “Didn’t I tell you to look after this rosebush? Why haven’t you? Water it now! Water it well!”
She obeyed him. She had to. But as she moved about it, tending to it, on her face, turned from him, there was the ancient hatred of woman for woman, when there is but one man between the two of them.
She watered it the next day, and the next. It throve, it flourished, jeering at her with liquid diamonds dangling from each leaf, and pearls of moisture rolling lazily about the crevices of its tight-packed satin petals. And when his eyes were not upon her, and she struck at it viciously with her hand, it bit back at her, and tore a drop of blood from her palm.
Of what use to move around the ground on two firm feet, to be warm, to be flesh, if his eyes scarce rested on you any more? Or if they did, no longer saw you as they once had, but went right through you as if you were not there?
Of what use to have buried her in the ground if he stayed now always closer to her than to you, moving his chair now by her out there in the sun? If he put his face down close to her and inhaled the memory of her and the essence of her soul? She filled the patio with her sad perfume, and even in the very act of breathing in itself, he drew something of her into himself, and they became one.
She held sibilant conference with the old woman beside the brazero in the evening as they prepared his meal. “It is she. She has come back again. He puts his face down close, down close to her many red mouths, and she whispers to him. She tries to tell him that she lies there, she tries to tell him that his son was given him by her and not by me.”
The old woman nodded sagely. These things are so. “Then you must do again as you did once before. There is no other way.”
“He will be angered as the thunder rolling in a mountain gorge.”
“Better a blow from a man’s hand than to lose him to another woman.”
Again the night of a full moon, again she crept forth, hands to ground, as she had once before. This time from his very side, from his very bed. Again a knife between her teeth blazed intermittently in the moonlight. But this time she didn’t creep sideward along the portico, from room-entry to room-entry; this time she paced her way straight outward into mid-patio. And this time her reboso was twined tight about her, not cast off; for the victim had no ears with which to hear her should the garment impede or betray; and the victim had no feet on which to start up and run away.
Slowly she toiled and undulated under the enormous spotlight of the moon. Nearer, nearer. Until the shadows of the little leaves made black freckles on her back.
Nearer, nearer. To kill a second time the same rival.
Nearer, nearer. To where the rosebush lay floating on layers of moon-smoke.
They found her the next morning, he and the old woman. They found the mute evidences of the struggle there had been; like a contest between two active agencies, between two opposing wills. A struggle in the silent moonlight
There was a place where the tiled surfacing, the cement shoring, faultily applied by the pulque-drugged Fulgencio and his nephew, had given way and dislodged itself over the lip of the well and down into it, as had been its wont before the repairs were applied. Too much weight incautiously brought too near the edge, in some terrible, oblivious throe of fury or of self-preservation.
Over this ravage the rosebush, stricken, gashed along its stem, stretched taut, bent like a bow; at one end its manifold roots still clinging tenaciously to the soil, like countless crooked grasping fingers; at the other its flowered head, captive but unsubdued, dipping downward into the mouth of the well.
And from its thorns, caught fast in a confusion hopeless of extrication, it supported two opposite ends of the reboso, whipped and wound and spiraled together into one, from some aimless swaying and counter-swaying weight at the other end.
A weight that had stopped swaying long before the moon waned; that hung straight and limp now, hugging the wall of the well. Head sharply askew, as if listening to the mocking voice whispering through from the soil alongside, where the roots of the rose bush found their source.
No water had touched her. She had not died the death of water. She had died the death that comes without a sound, the death that is like the snapping of a twig, of a broken neck.
They lifted her up. They laid her tenderly there upon the ground
She did not move. The rosebush did; it slowly righted to upward. Leaving upon the ground a profusion of petals, like drops of blood shed in combat.
The rosebush lived, but she was dead.
Now he sits there in the sun, by the rosebush; the world forgotten, other places that once were home, other times, other loves, forgotten. It is good to sit there in the sun, your son playing at your feet. This is a better love, this is the only lasting love. For a woman dies when you do, but a son lives on. He is you and you are he, and thus you do not die at all.
And when his eyes close in the sun and he dozes, as a man does when his youth is running out, perhaps now and then a petal will fall upon his head or upon his shoulder from some near-curving branch, and lie there still. Light as a caress. Light as a kiss unseen from someone who loves you and watches over you.
The old woman squats at hand, watchful over the child. The old woman has remained, ignored. Like a dog, like a stone. Unspeaking and unspoken to.
Her eyes reveal nothing. Her lips say nothing. They will never say anything, for thus it is in Anahuac.
But the heart knows. The skies that look forever down on Anahuac know. The moon that shone on Montezuma once; it knows.
Afterword
We at Mystery Writers of America hope you enjoyed this collection of stories from our great writers. Merchants of Menace, edited by Hillary Waugh, is the latest in a series of classic crime collections in our new program, Mystery Writers of America Classics.
Since 1945, MWA has been America’s premiere organization for professional mystery writers, a group dedicated to learning from each other, helping new members, and sharing our successes and good times. One way we celebrate our talent is through the production of original, themed anthologies, published more or less yearly since 1946, in which one remarkable writer invites others to his or her collection.
Read more about our anthology program, both the new ones and classic re-issues, on our web page: https://mysterywriters.org.
And watch for future editions of Mystery Writers of America Classics. To receive notifications, please subscribe here: http://mysterywriters.org/mwa-anthologies/classics-newsletter/.
The authors of the stories in this collection have kindly granted special permission to the editor and the Mystery Writers of America to include them in the book. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the authors and also to the copyright holders, magazines, and publishers named below.
“Marmalade Wine” by Joan Aiken. Copyright © 1958 by Joan Aiken. First published in the United States by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of Joan Aiken Brown.
“The Tilt of Death” by Rod Amateau and David Davis. Copyright © 1968 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc.
“Amateur Standing” by Suzanne Blanc. Copyright © 1969 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.
“The Real Bad Friend” by Robert Bloch. Copyright © 1957 by Renown Publications. Reprinted by permission of the author and Renown Publications.
“The Front Room” by Michael Butterworth. Copyright © 1969 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.
“Farewell to the Faulkners” by Miriam Allen deFord. Copyright © 1946 by The American Mercury, Inc. (now Davis Publications, Inc.) First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
“Death on Christmas Eve” by Stanley Ellin. Copyright © 1950 by Stanley Ellin. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permis
sion of the author.
“Counter Intelligence” by Robert L. Fish. Copyright 1965 by Popular Publications, Inc. First published in Argosy. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Robert P. Mills.
“Something Evil in the House” by Celia Fremlin. Copyright © 1968 by Celia Fremlin (C. M. Coler). First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Wide O—” by Elsin Ann Gardner. Copyright © 1968 by Elsin Ann Gardner. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Peppermint-Striped Goodbye” by Ron Goulart. Copyright © 1965 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published In Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Cries of Love” by Patricia Highsmith. Copyright © 1968 by Patricia Highsmith. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Gone Girl” by Ross MacDonald. Copyright © 1953 by Kenneth Millar. Reprinted by permission of Kenneth Millar.
’’The Dead Past” by Al Nussbaum. Copyright © 1968 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of H.S.D. Publications, Inc.
“The President’s Half Disme” by Ellery Queen. Copyright © 1947, 1952 by Little, Brown and Company. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Never Hit a Lady” by Fred S. Tobey. Copyright © 1967 by The Diners Club, Inc. First published in Signature. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Theron Raines, 244 Madison Avenue, New York, New York.
“H as in Homicide” by Lawrence Treat. Copyright © 1964 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of Samuel French, Inc., agent for Lawrence Treat.
“The Man Who Played Too Well” by Don Von Elsner. Copyright © 1968 by Behn-Miller Publishers, Inc. First published in Popular Bridge. Reprinted by permission of the author.
