The Clay Hand

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Doesn’t he get his money out of the first envelope comes into the house?”

  “He does. I’ve often thought to myself, if I had in a lump sum the accumulation of Lavery’s bills, my worries would be over.”

  The storekeeper himself added a word to that. “If you went without Lavery’s grub a week or two, your worries would be over also. You’d be lying on the hill up yonder, close to the church.”

  Phil put through his call to the Rockland Dispatch and arranged a few days’ leave from the office. He saw a customer leave, and another enter while he talked, and at every demand of the operator for another coin, and the tinkle of it into the phone box, he saw the eyes of those nearest to him turn at the wonder of his extravagance. His call finished, he waited a moment in the booth.

  “…Such a nice-seeming man. I danced with him myself that night at the church hall, and nothing put on about him.”

  “Whatever did he want taking up with that one?”

  “What did the one she got want?”

  “A face to frighten the children into behaving themselves…”

  “And him with a wife…”

  “Did you ever notice the resemblance between her and the goats?…”

  “They say the wife came in the town with him…” Phil caught the reflection of a thumb in his direction in the glass. He took off the receiver and waited to call his mother.

  “It’s been my observation, people living intimate with animals get to look like them. I’d an uncle once with an old bull terrier, and when he got all but his eye teeth pulled out…”

  The operator took the number.

  “…Talking to Mrs. Krancow, and the wife, she says, is the spitting image of the Holy Virgin…”

  “Them holy ones…”

  His mother answered the phone then and Phil lost the rest of the conversation on sanctity. The town was full of it, he thought.

  Returning to the funeral parlor, he learned from Mrs. Krancow that Margaret was sleeping. “The poor lamb,” she explained. “I gave her a glass of warm milk with a bit of whiskey, and she just wandered off.”

  Phil nodded.

  “This was a terrible shock to her,” she added when Phil had not seemed sufficiently sympathetic. “Not only learning about him dying…but that other.” She added the last phrase with a hopeless opening of her hands. “I’ve never liked them Clausons and that’s the truth of it.”

  “Don’t let me interrupt your work, Mrs. Krancow. I’ll just sit here, if I may, and wait for the sheriff.”

  “Do. There’s some nice comforting magazines there on the table.” She went to the door, catching wisps of her hair into the braid crowning her head. She turned back to him at the door. “It’s not that I’m prejudiced, him not burying his wife decent, mind you.”

  She waited hopefully to be asked to explain. Phil said merely: “I understand.” Let alone then, he picked up a magazine and waited for the sheriff.

  Fields came in a few minutes, and Phil went into one of the back rooms with him. The sheriff put the suitcase on a table and opened it. Dick’s linen had been neatly laundered and pressed, and Phil noticed how carefully Fields had packed it. Outside of clothes, there were only a few toilet articles, a cheap edition of Shakespeare, and a few pieces of note paper, some of them covered with Dick’s round, solid handwriting.

  “He did a little writing,” Fields said. “No dates or nothing. But I’d like you to take a look at it. See what you can make of it. They’re in the order he had them.”

  Phil picked up the papers and read:

  Mrs. O’Grady has taken me in—

  Or did I take in Mrs. O’Grady?

  She growled at my credentials,

  And howled at my essentials,

  And examined me only for—fleas.

  The second page:

  Out early examining the landmarks, I was seen in the cemetery by Father Joyce, and beckoned into the church. What other appointment can a man have at that hour? There is a frightening angel in the vestibule, mildewed green. I was reminded of Red Roses…I fancied myself as Brennan while I sat there and watched Father Joyce light the two candles by the tabernacle. I thought of the colors I might use to restore it. Blue for heaven? White for purity? Who would expect even an angel to keep its color here? Foolish men of faith? Or am I the fool—to have lost my faith in angels, when keeping it in men is so much harder? I have promised myself that I shall not write while I am here. But I have only words to warm myself with. And for what shall I save them, if striking them is a comfort now?

  The third page:

  I am growing cold here, even as the days grow warmer. What did I expect? The widow pursues me with her kindness, and it pours over me like ice water. I hate myself for the revulsion because I know she is a very lonely woman, and loneliness makes desperate wooers of us. Christ!

  The fourth page:

  A letter from Margaret today—a hundred bounties she will bestow on me. The voice of my beloved, behold it cometh leaping upon mountains, skipping over hills.

  The fifth page:

  A night with Mr. Clauson among old splendors, the reading of scriptures and long talk. All the while two candles burning softly warm, starting up at a strange sound and quieting at a kindly word, a benediction on the house. The smell of spiced tea, old wine, and the goddamn goats.

  The sixth page:

  It began raining in the night, a hammering, wind-ridden rain that tormented my sleep. I dreamed of Laughlin’s coffin tumbling down the hill, washed free of the dirt I packed too loosely. I was out of the house at dawn to look, expecting a ghoulish search for it. But it was only I the storm disturbed. The earth had pressed more tightly on him. The few poor wreaths were washed away, and as well. What does the dead want of flowers, who had no more of them alive than a rented lily for a Holy Thursday procession and a boutonniere for his wedding?

  The last page written on, and the writing there less regular, but as though it had been done with great effort at correctness—perhaps, Phil thought, the effort of a man dulled with drink:

  The wind crawls through the cracked window at night and lies down beside me, sapping the warmth from my body. I turn to it and spread my arms.

  Phil gave the papers back to the sheriff and lit a cigaret, his fingers trembling a little as he held the match. “There was something wrong. That’s certain.”

  “He lost his faith,” Fields said. “That’s a terrible thing for a man.” He hoisted himself up on the table and accepted the cigaret Phil offered him. “I’ll give them to his wife now. But I think I’ll take them back again till we find out more.”

  “The letter from her,” Phil said, “what was in that?”

  “All about waiting in Cincinnati for him. How she’d wait forever if he’d come.”

  “And he didn’t go,” Phil said.

  “I guess not.”

  “Laughlin was the man killed in the mine. Did Dick dig his grave?”

  “Yes,” Fields said. “He went up and offered…. Funny thing about what you said up at the widow’s this morning, about him taking his own life maybe. I didn’t even mention that.”

  “I know. Margaret asked me if it was possible when she learned there was to be an inquest.”

  Fields nodded. “There’s somebody else takes that point of view, and Coffee spent some time with him—Father Joyce.”

  Chapter 8

  MAURICE HANDY, THE COUNTY coroner, came in then. He nodded to Phil and sat down on the extra chair in the room. “You’ll be ready in the morning, Sam?” It was more of an order than a question.

  “I’ll be able to round up my witnesses, if that’s what you mean, Maurice. What I won’t be able to do by morning is know if they’re telling you the truth.”

  “I don’t like rushing you, but there’s a delicate situation here, Sam. I was just talking with Lempke and some of the mine people. I think you and I better go over it.”

  Phil made his excuses and left them. At the front of the building, Mrs. Kranc
ow was watering the ferns in the parlor window. “She was asking for you just now,” she said. “She’s feeling better, poor thing. It’ll be all right for you to go up. The room’s just ahead of you at the top of the stairs.”

  “Thank you. They’re beautiful ferns.” And they were, great languid branches of them, spilling down to the floor.

  “Aren’t they nice? Do you know, I tried all my life growing them, and it wasn’t till I married Joseph I succeeded. But maybe it’s where they sit here in the sun.”

  Phil wondered if there was that much sun in Winston. “I’ll go up now.”

  “Do. Are you her brother?”

  “No. A family friend.”

  “Oh.” Mrs. Krancow returned to her fernery, and he could hear her humming tunelessly as he climbed the stairs.

  He tapped on the door, and Margaret’s voice came to him out of a deep melancholy when she inquired who it was. It quickened into welcome at the sound of his voice answering.

  “What a dear sight you are, Phil. Come in and close the door. These people do nothing but stare at me.”

  He closed it, although aware of the possible implications. Or was that in his mind only? He stood inside the room like a gawking schoolboy. She was a pale loveliness, he thought. The flower-papered room was loud, gaudy, the furniture rough, cleanliness its only virtue. And that thought annoyed him. He was not critical of other people’s houses… He went to the window. “How do you feel, Margaret?”

  “Better now. But still lost.” She followed him. “Is this happening, Phil? Is that dirty street out there something I saw once and have held all this time in my subconscious? Is it something I was afraid of, that’s coming back to me now because I never wanted to see it again?” She laid her hand on his arm and forced him to look at her. “Is it really Dick lying down there? My imagination couldn’t have conjured him up that way. I’m not cruel, Phil.”

  “No, my dear, you’re not. Some things are cruel. But you are not.”

  Her hand slipped down his arm and clung to his a moment. “You’re a very comforting person.”

  It reminded him of Mrs. Krancow’s parlor literature. “Margaret, this morning you said you thought Dick was leaving you. Why?”

  She returned to the one armchair in the room and slumped into it. “I don’t know, Phil. I don’t know what happened to him at all. Or maybe it happened to me. I’m not ugly. I haven’t grown old all of a sudden. I suppose you grow old and don’t know it. Looking in your mirror day to day, you don’t get the truth from it.”

  “You’re not growing old, Margaret. You haven’t changed from the day I met the two of you in New York. Do you remember?”

  “I do. Your uniform was two sizes too small for you.”

  “You noticed that? I didn’t even know you saw me at all—the kid from the country town…”

  “With eyes that hungered for the world. Satisfied yet, Phil?”

  “No. I’ve been nauseated with some of it I’ve seen since then. But I wouldn’t say that I’m satisfied.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  Her eyes flared a quick anger. She looked away. “You have a nasty way of making a person feel small.”

  “I didn’t intend it.” He was aware of the exchange as something that had happened to him before—his mind, his emotion playing tricks on him. He was aware, also, of a certain pleasure in it, and an immediate disgust with himself.

  It was Margaret who took him out of contemplation of it. “Did these people like Dick?”

  For the moment, he had completely forgotten Dick. “I think they did. Some of them certainly. They’re not very fond of outsiders in Winston.”

  “Are you trying to tell me they won’t like me? I know it already.”

  “They have great sympathy for you, Margaret.”

  “Why?”

  “In the death of your husband.”

  “And not because of what the sheriff told us?”

  “That, too. I don’t value that sympathy. It’s given out of too much curiosity—or worse. And I don’t believe that’s the truth, anyway. Dick wasn’t that kind of a guy.”

  “You see things very black and white, don’t you, Phil?”

  “I was never much of a sophisticate,” he said. “Have you had lunch?”

  “She’s bringing it to me on a tray. But I’d love to go out. I feel all choked in here. I seem to be growing into the wallpaper.”

  “Come then.”

  “They’ll talk if I don’t behave as they expect a widow to.”

  “How is a widow supposed to behave, except as a widow feels?”

  Two little spots of color rose in her cheeks. “Spare me your moralizing, Phil. This is quite enough of an ordeal without it.”

  “Forgive me. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  She got up and took her coat from a hanger behind the door. “You do want to hurt me. You think I’m responsible in some way for Dick’s death. Be honest with yourself at least, Phil. Now will you drive me out to where he was killed?”

  He held her coat for her, and followed her down the stairs. Mrs. Krancow smiled sympathetically when Margaret told her where they were going. “You mustn’t dwell on it, Mrs. Coffee. There’s some things we aren’t meant to understand. Like Father Joyce said just last Sunday: ‘If man was to understand all the ways of God, God would be hard put to understand the ways of man.’ That’s a lovely thought. Isn’t it?”

  “Lovely,” Phil repeated.

  “Lord, what a desolate place to die,” Margaret said, as they drove through the town. “Look at those houses.”

  “Or to live,” he added.

  “Have you found a place to stay?”

  “Mrs. O’Grady has taken me in,” he said, repeating the phrase from Dick’s notes.

  “What’s she like?”

  “A ferocious old parrot. Or maybe an eagle. Fields called her that. She was very fond of Dick.”

  “Old people always were. Old people and children.”

  They crossed the railroad tracks, and Phil pointed out the cliff.

  “Drive close to it,” Margaret said.

  He drove past the Clauson house, set far back from the road.

  “Was it the people who live there found him?” she asked.

  “No. A youngster from town.”

  “They didn’t hear anything that might have been associated with his death?”

  “I don’t know, Margaret. The girl lives there with her husband and father.”

  “Oh. Naturally they wouldn’t have heard anything then.”

  It was an unwarranted conclusion, but he was not going to argue the point with her. He pulled off the road before the face of the cliff. “I think this is close enough. He fell from the highest point there. Can we go back now?”

  “Wait, Phil.”

  Among the slag heaps several goats were grazing on the frozen moss and dead grass. Even as Phil and Margaret watched them, a tall, gangling woman came from behind one of the heaps near them and looked at the car. It was not possible to see the detail of her face, but from the distance they could discern enormous eyes in an extraordinarily long and somber face. She turned quickly, seeing them, and herded the animals to the end of the valley and up the far slope out of sight.

  “Phil, is that the woman?”

  “I think it is.”

  Margaret’s face became contorted; into tears or laughter he could not tell for a moment. Then it was laughter, unmistakably, a laughter she could not control. He put his arm around her and drew her close to him. She stopped abruptly and looked up at him, her face so close that their breath mingled. He kissed her on the mouth for the first time.

  Chapter 9

  THEY DROVE BACK TO the town silently, the road before them and behind them empty. He went to the door of Krancow’s with her. “Forgive me, Margaret.”

  “Skip it.” She started into the house. “Don’t leave me alone on account of it, Phil. I don’t need you any the less now than I d
id before.”

  “You’ll be all right. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He left the car where it was, and walked the block to McNamara’s. It was a hell of a time to get involved in a feeling of guilt himself. But there it was: he couldn’t think of Dick Coffee, dead or alive, when Margaret entered into it. “How is a widow supposed to behave?” He could hear himself saying the words. The sweat broke out on him with the thought.

  Randy Nichols was at the bar alone with McNamara. They nodded to him as he came in, but continued their conversation. It was McNamara talking: “‘Whee, look at me,’ everybody’s saying. ‘I’m going to hell on a bicycle.’”

  Nichols interrupted him. “Listen to this, McGovern. It’s Coffee talking with a mine inspector here one night. Go on, Mac.”

  “‘Then why don’t you get off, you damn fool?’ … ‘I can’t. Nobody showed me how’ … ‘How did you get on then?’ … ‘I was just sitting, getting the feel of it and somebody gave me a push.’” McNamara leaned across the bar. “They were both on the leeward side of sobriety by then, and the inspector gives him a poke in the ribs. ‘Wouldn’t you like to get hold of the bastard giving him the push?’ he says. ‘Hell, no,’ says Coffee. ‘The guy I’d like to get is the little one riding the bicycle, the one doesn’t take himself seriously, the one doesn’t know his own worth, and the world depending on it.’”

  “There,” Nichols said as the barkeep straightened up. “Doesn’t that sound more like the man you knew, McGovern? They were talking about the state inspector at Naperville: a good man, incorruptible. He reported every safety violation, nearly got himself fired for refusing to go along on state election-fund-raising from the operators. But the explosion occurred all the same. Coffee said he felt cleansed, confessed, having written his report. He didn’t know his own strength, his own worth.”

  “I read the article,” Phil said. He ordered a drink. He remembered then Dick’s notes which the sheriff had shown him. Dick had intended to do no writing while there. Why? Out of this same reasoning—that setting it down on paper might dull his conscience? Phil found it all too subtle for the confusion now upon him. He emptied the glass as soon as McNamara set it before him, and shoved it across the bar for a refill.