by Brad Watson
“How do you think I would like being in a house where behind every door a caravan of strange men were sticking their stinkhorns into the same women all day long? I wonder how long you will like it.”
Grace French-inhaled from her cigarette, squinting against the smoke, and blew it out the corner of her red lips.
“I guess I’ll find out,” she said. “But it’ll be them, not me. The only ‘stinkhorns,’ as you say, that I’ll see will be the ones I pluck for myself.”
Oblivion
But now there was the problem of how to go back home. Not the simple act of going home, which could be accomplished by calling and catching a ride with the doctor, or being packed and ready to go home next time her father came into town. The problem was that if she went home she would be questioned about why she was returning, and why now, and what was going on with Grace, and so on. And she had never lied to them, not exactly, and she wasn’t good at prevarication, anyway. Lying, or attempting to, or even considering it, embarrassed her, which felt like an oddly humiliating weakness.
And so she lingered, which irritated Grace, although it didn’t seem as if Grace’s new work disagreed with her. If anything, she came home in a better mood than she’d usually enjoyed coming home from the dry-cleaning and laundry shop. Jane tried to stay on her good side by keeping the house spotless, and the garden in shape, and the yard, and always had supper cooking and dishes washed. Grace grumbled a bit but it was also evident that she was glad she didn’t have to do those things. She hadn’t done much in the way of those things since Jane had arrived six years earlier.
Then her father came one day—he was not going to the stockyard every week or even every month anymore—and when she went out to his truck, which had no cattle in the empty bed, and spoke to him through the open passenger window, he didn’t seem to hear her. She spoke louder, and he turned his head slowly. Then he said, “Why don’t you drive us on over, sister?”
He shut the engine off and slowly got out and made his way around the hood, keeping one hand on the truck. He looked shaky and his eyes staked his path but really seemed to see nothing, blind sight. She caught his arm and helped him into the passenger seat. He felt even more bone-thin than he looked. He smelled of liquor already, in late morning, but it didn’t feel like that was the governing problem.
“Where are we going, Papa?” she said.
“Stockyard,” he said.
“Are you looking to buy something?”
He looked at her as if she’d said something odd or mysterious, then craned his neck around to look into the truck bed through the rear window.
“Well,” he said. “I thought I brought along a cow.”
“Did you forget to load her up?”
He looked at her again with that look of incomprehension. Then settled back in his seat and looked out the windshield. Raised a hand forward as if to say, Let’s go on now, then.
So she drove him across town to the stockyard and sat with him through the auction, but he hardly reacted to the business going on. Every now and then he seemed to pay attention to an animal, watch it enter the arena, get shown, and exit. But most of the time he had that same long, unseeing stare he’d had when he arrived at Grace’s house. When they were leaving, he asked her to get him something to drink.
“From where, or who?”
He just looked at her.
“Papa, I think the last thing you need right now is liquor. I’m sorry.”
He blinked. Looked at her. Then walked unsteadily away and over to a pickup, where he spoke with a man, and came back with a bottle tucked into the front pocket of his overalls.
Jane said nothing but got in behind the wheel. He got in on the other side, pulled out the bottle, took a swig from it after they left the lot. Sipped on the way to Grace’s house.
It was late afternoon then, November. The summer’s heat finally fully gone, enough to feel a nip in the evening air now and then.
“Are you chilled, Papa?” Jane said. “Want to roll up that window?”
“I’m fine,” he said, showing no discomfort aside from his mouth being parted as if to aid his breathing a bit. Cheeks sunken, and weathered skin pulled taut against the thin line of his jawbone.
She parked his truck in front of Grace’s house and helped him inside and onto the sofa in the parlor. Grace came home while she was making coffee, took a look around, came into the kitchen.
“What’s wrong? He doesn’t look right.”
“He’s not. I don’t know what it is. It’s not just drink, though I guess it could be, if he’s been on a long bender. Mama is not telling us everything, I know that.”
She took a cup of black coffee in to him and Grace followed.
He looked at the coffee as if it were a strange thing, then up at Grace and Jane. To Grace, he said, “I know what you’ve been up to, daughter. Don’t think people don’t talk.”
“I’m making a living.”
“As a whore. Bringing shame on your mother.”
“I’m not a whore, I’m the manager of a brothel. I do my work on my feet and behind a desk. Big difference there, you know. And it’s my business what kind of business I choose to run, anyway. You and Mama can like it or not. We’re surviving, here. Are you?”
“I’m taking Janie home with me, out of this.”
“She’ll be glad to hear it,” Grace said. Then she grabbed her purse off the chair in the foyer where she’d left it and went back out.
Their father was shaking his head. He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. Jane was shocked. She’d never seen him express much emotion at all, much less break down.
“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” he said.
“Papa, for what?”
“For you,” he said. “For your life. What you’ve had to live with.”
“Papa,” she said, “I’m fine. I am who I am. I know how to live with that.”
He shook his head, put his glasses back on, and seemed to pull himself together.
“I’m going home,” he said.
“But you can’t drive in your condition.”
“I’ll ask you not to tell me what I can and cannot do, sister,” he said. “You can move back in with us in a couple days, after I settle some things and make sure your mama has your room ready. Do you hear?”
“All right.”
He looked up at her. “I want to say something to you.”
But he couldn’t seem to find whatever words he was looking for. He got up, put on his hat, and walked out. In a moment she heard the truck start up. She went to the window and watched it drive slowly away, her father stiff and steady behind the wheel.
HE DIDN’T GO straight home, but drove through downtown and over to the west part of town near the railroad tracks to a street of mostly vacant lots save for a few decrepit old crumbling brick or sagging wooden buildings that had housed various businesses, including a general store, livery, machinist, and such. One older grand home still stood on a large lot surrounded by broad oaks that all but obscured its galleries, where one could see upon driving the lane up to it the unoccupied ladies fanning themselves, smoking cigarettes, some of them sipping what looked like cordials or small measures of liquor. One of them stood, a girl who looked a bit familiar to him, and went inside. Another called out, “Come on up, Popsy.” He ignored them and went up to the front door, went in without knocking or taking his hat off, and when a young woman approached him looking a bit apprehensive he ignored her and just stood there as if waiting for something. There was the scent of something like dead roses. He heard his daughter Grace’s voice say, “I’ll take care of this, Neesa.”
He looked at her standing there in the doorway to what looked like an office, wearing the long, coatlike dress and cloche hat she’d had on when she left her house earlier.
“I guess you do look more like business than a whore,” he said. “You taken to working evenings now, too?”
“What do you want here, Papa?”
“I want you t
o leave this place. You don’t have to work here.”
“I choose to, Papa.”
“There’s other work, even in these times.”
“This work is steady. Besides, here I’m in management, befitting my experience. Would you have me making socks for fifty cents a day? Would a good businessman like you find such slave labor more noble than making good money providing a product that’s very much in demand?”
“You could work in a clothing store. You know fashion and such.”
“Selling fancy dresses to country club society women. Perfect.”
He took his hat off and walked over closer to her and met her hard gaze with a softer one of his own.
“Why have you always hated us?” he said, his voice quieter. “You were never content to be with your own family, cleared out soon as you could. I don’t understand it, daughter.”
She hesitated so long he thought she might not answer, then said, “Aside from having a good model in my mother, I could look to you.”
“I never did you wrong. I gave you a good living and upbringing.”
“There’s more to that than food on the table, Papa,” Grace said. “You know those words you just said to me might be the longest speech I ever got from you, and those words show more care for me than any others you ever spoke. If Mama was mean-spirited, then you seemed made out of stone. The only thing you ever talked to was a jug or bottle. I always knew you weren’t talking to yourself. You were talking to some imaginary world full of enemies. Well, I felt like we were among them, Papa. That’s what I felt.”
“Not enemies, and not my family, in any case. Adversaries, yes. People will take advantage and a man has to be hard, sometimes, if he wants to make it. It’s a hard world, as you are finding out.”
“Not so hard a body can’t have a little fun, enjoy something every now and then. You know what, Papa? I enjoy a drink now and then. You? Did you ever enjoy drinking, or is it only to deal with the demons in your head? Did you ever enjoy sex, like the so-called sinful men who come here do? Or was it just to calm your nerves and make a baby now and then?”
“I’ll not have you talking to me like that, right or wrong, girl. And I’ll tell you this. If you’re still working here when I pass, you shall not inherit anything from me—”
“I hope I haven’t.”
“Not cash money if there is any. Not land nor home. Not insurance. Not stock. You understand?”
“You in a hurry to go, Papa?”
“No, I’m not.” Then he spoke more quietly. “I’ve had some pains in my chest, but it’s not serious. Got some pills for when it hurts me.”
She looked at him hard as if to detect a lie, then closed her eyes for a moment.
“I don’t need anything from you or Mama,” she said. “I do just fine on my own.”
“I hope so.”
He let himself out and to his truck, his heart indeed on fire, took a largish draft from the bottle he’d left on the seat, and drove home in the receding light of late afternoon. He left his headlights off, as he knew he’d make the home road and quit the highway before dusk. He thought to honk as he passed the doctor’s house but wasn’t in the mood to hail him or anyone else just then. Off the highway, he drove by memory and what dim light remained like dying firefly glow in the foliage. He descended toward the darker area, where the old bridge his nemesis straddled the little creek. There he stopped, sat a moment looking at the bridge’s shadowed outline before him, as he still did not want to violate the sense of this evening with artificial light. Something fragile about it that would break if he did. Real lightning bugs flared down by the water and in the trees. He got out, walked to the bridge, and studied it a minute before going back to the truck and idling over the creaking boards, then gunning on up the hill. He parked beside the shed, saw his wife standing in the open doorway of the house like the backlit figure of a life-sized rag doll. She pushed open the screen door and spoke to him as he approached the porch steps slowly, tired out. His chest ached. He’d lied about the pills, or he would have taken one now for the strain he felt.
“You left that cow you were going to trade standing right there tethered to the post by the shed,” she said to him. “Are you going morbus on me now? I can’t take care of an old crazy man out here by myself.”
“Just hush on me, wife.”
“Well, what’s wrong with you?”
“Too much on my mind. I’m flustered.”
“More woolly-headed, seems to me. Where you going now? You think going down in there and drinking is going to clear your head? Maybe, Mr. Chisolm, you have just simply gone stupid. I’ve seen men go stupid with drink. My own daddy, for one. At the end there he couldn’t even tot a bill—”
“I said to hush,” he said, in such a way that she did. She held her mouth in the attitude of her next unspoken words as if someone had frozen or suspended time. He went on around the house and down the shadowy trail to his still, heard the screen door at the house slap to. He moved with such distraction he may as well have been blind, could have walked the trail without sight. In that state he rekindled his fire, hooked a jug off the shelf, sat down before the flickering flames, and woke to himself sitting there on the stump rolling a cigarette, as if he’d sleepwalked from the house to this moment.
He drank headlong into and out the other side of melancholy, laid himself down beside the glowing warmth of the fire’s coals to rest and try to empty his mind, the soft glow of firelight on the leaves above.
Copper Pennies
It was nearing noon the next day when Jane came home from a walk to the grocery and saw the doctor’s pickup at the curb in front of the house. At first her heart lifted, but then she felt something cold and viscous flood into it.
When she stepped into the parlor, she saw the doctor and Grace sitting in the two chairs by the bay window, partially drunk cups of coffee on saucers on the table between them, seeming to have quietly awaited her arrival into the world from some long, childish dream. The doctor stood, his hat in his hands. She set her sack of groceries down on the floor.
“It’s Papa,” Grace said. “He passed.”
“What happened?”
“Went quietly,” the doctor said. “In his sleep.”
Dr. Thompson offered to drive them both up home, but Grace said she would drive her own car so she could come into town to check on things if she needed to.
“You know he came to see me yesterday, after leaving here,” she said. When neither replied to that she said, “He wanted me to quit my job.”
After an awkward silence, Jane said, “Was he still angry, Grace?”
Grace looked at her, an unfamiliar emotion in her face.
“He seemed more sad than angry, I thought,” she said. “I hate my last words to him were so harsh.”
No one said anything and it was quiet in the room. Death was in the room and they were quiet in its presence. Then Grace gathered her bag and keys and left.
Jane and Dr. Thompson were quiet during the drive up, the doctor taking it slow. At first they drove in the wake of billowing dust and slung gravel from Grace’s Plymouth until she pulled well ahead, out of sight. And only then, as if Grace could have heard them before, Jane said, “What happened?”
The doctor, who’d been seeming to chew on something, a habit with his mouth he’d taken up in his age, was quiet a long moment. Then he said, “No mystery. I guess he finally drank himself to death.”
“He’s been doing that a long time,” Jane said.
“Well. That’s pretty much how it’s done.”
They drove a good mile without speaking. The hem of her light fabric dress fluttered against the layered slips she’d taken to wearing and she pressed it down against them, to keep it still. She noticed the doctor glance over discreetly.
“I don’t really read it as liver failure,” he said. “Most likely his heart. Heavy drink will do that. Plus his heavy smoking.”
Jane watched the road ahead.
“I
guess it was a worse binge than the usual,” the doctor said. “Or one too many.”
“How is Mama taking it?” Jane said.
“She’s quiet.”
After a while, Jane said, “Was he in the house?”
“She found him down at his shed. He’d been down there all night. She woke up and he wasn’t at the house, and she made coffee and breakfast, all but the eggs. When he still hadn’t showed she went down and found him there. Lying on the ground next to the little fire pit. It was just smoldering a bit. There was a nearly empty jug. Doesn’t mean he drank it all last night, though. He was lying like he’d lain down to go to sleep. Not like he’d fallen. Gets chilly at night, this time of year. Alcohol lowers the body temperature, actually. Could have been exposure involved, too. His little fire seemed long cold, time I got there.”
After a while, Jane said, “I wonder what she’s going to do now. She always seemed like she just wanted people to leave her alone, but being alone like this, with nobody. I’ll be around of course. I was going to move back, anyway. I can’t live with Grace. Not anymore.”
With that she gave just a glance at the doctor, who seemed to have taken on a momentary rictus himself.
He slowed and turned off the main road onto the dirt road that her father had taken so often on his trips to and from town, crossed the old bridge, and at the top of the rise turned left onto the drive to the home where Jane had grown up.
Grace was in the kitchen with her mother. A single bare bulb burned in its outlet in the ceiling there. They’d had a power line strung to the house the year before. And a phone line, too—the new crank telephone on the wall. Her mother’s face was set in some kind of slackened flatness, her hair combed straight back on her head. She looked up at Jane and the doctor, her face set and pale in the glaring light. Jane reached up and pulled the string to turn it off.
