by Packer, Vin
“Sometimes when I’d miss you I’d come out here to the clearing and recite all those poems we read out here together. I’d pretend you were right here beside me.”
“But you didn’t write me.” “I did too.”
“Oh, finally! Finally, you did.”
“I’ve got my problems, I guess. My share.”
“What are they, I wonder.”
“Look out for that branch, Ada. That’s a mean one.”
“I see it. Hollis?”
“Huh?”
“You still an atheist?”
“I never was, Ada. A man that doesn’t call God by his first name isn’t necessarily an atheist. I’ve got a faith.” “But you don’t believe in God.” “In other things. Related things.” “Like?”
“Like the land. Like those spiderwebs over there on the hedgerows, and the morning glories down behind my place, growing on the bean poles. Like your breasts too.”
“Hollis, please.”
“Aw, Gawd, Ada, what’s the matter with saying that?” “It’s dirty.” “You think that?”
“Well, it’s like you’re always bringing up things like that in the middle of something you’re saying about something else altogether. I don’t know.”
“I’m not going to worry the subject, Ada.”
“I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Look at the chinquapins over there!”
“It’s not that it makes me mad or anything, Hollis. It just makes me feel — tacky.”
“Okay, Ada.”
“Don’t you see what I mean?” “Umm-hum.”
“Particularly when we haven’t ever — ” “Ever what?”
She stopped the same time he did; stood and looked up at him, him down at her. A long time, it seemed, before his arms pulled her into his body, and bending for her mouth his own worked on hers, slowly, finding hers in every way; for a while and more. The first kiss they’d ever taken from one another. And she could actually feel it, through all of her, not like the other times when she necked around with the boys from High, or the Pike House she was dating in up in Athens; not like that at all. Which was the reason she had to laugh — to stop it.
He let go of her and said solemnly, “The broken little laugh that spoils a kiss … Well, then, c’mon, Ada. We’ll be at the clearing soon and we can talk. I want to hear all about what you’ve been learning.” Disappointed, hurt.
“Where’s it from, Hollis?” And she was sorry, and the feeling through all of her was physical, too still, and what could she say?
The broken little laugh that spoils a kiss, The ache of purple pulses, and the bliss Of blinded eyelids that expand again Love draws them open with those lips of his —
“Oh, I know. Shelly.”
“No. No,” he said. “You haven’t been keeping up with things up there in Athens. It’s Swinburne.”
“Oh, gee, sure.” What could she say?
Ada Pirkle was Ada Adams when he came to Paradise to settle. She was twelve and he was twenty-two. Before everyone found out he had inherited wealth they speculated as to what a young fellow like him was going to do with the Veer place he bought, when Bill Veer went into lumber and moved to Macon. As it turned out he grew pumpkins, apples, scuppernongs, zinnias, dahlias, and chrysanthemums; none of them for sale. Not a patch of cotton, nor a row of corn heads.
He came, they heard not from him, but from the postmaster who judged by his mail, somewhere from over in Criss County, Georgia, and near as anyone could figure he had no living kin. Why he ever picked Paradise, no one knew.
“As a rule,” Pop Maurer, the postmaster used to say, “you can judge a man by his mail, but this one only gets three kinds: bank mail, mail from some book store in Atlanta, and seed catalogs. Never says thank ya or good morning.”
In Paradise they say about some. “Well, he’s a colorful character anyway.” About black Bryan Post, who hardly ever is completely sober, they say it — not out of any crazy admiration for a souse, but out of a helpless appreciation for the wild and fantastic performances black Bryan can’t keep from giving when the gin’s full to the top in him. They say it about “Can’t” Twiddy too, because he’s so bad clear through and never was any other way, that the evil in him is first monotonous, then laughable in its awful extreme. And they feel almost sentimental about Can’t, because he’s theirs, and he’s never let them down by acting any other way than the way he’s promised his whole seventeen years. About senseless Lennie Waite, they say it, not in a mean way because he’s off his tick, but in a gentle, chiding way, because he’s been around forever telling them the things God whispers to him at three o’clock every third Tuesday, and saving olive pits….
“Well, he’s a colorful character anyway,” they say, not with acceptance; still not with resignation, either, nor tolerance, but more with some insidiously tender sentiment, that has some sly peppering of possessiveness over it.
Hollis Jordan is one of those about whom they say this. His solitary figure looming in the shadows of some spent field, gilded by a harvest moon, is as indigenous to Paradise now as is the weather- and time-whipped county courthouse in the town’s square. His reticence is as familiar as Doc Sell’s garrulousness. The story of that day in Awful Dark Woods with Ada is a part of the folklore of Paradise.
• • •
How Ada came to know him, Ada only knows. The Adamses were his nearest neighbors; that everyone knows — still his nearest neighbors could be his farthest, so conspicuously did he keep his distance. Mostly he worked his land, and stayed out of town, except to get supplies.
Reverend Joh Greene, who had more conversations with Hollis than anyone else in Paradise, said, “Hollis Jordan talks about the land like it was a woman.”
“Did he read you any poetry?” someone asked him.
“I read him poetry,” Joh answered. “When you try to sell a man something, you talk in his own tongue.”
“Maybe you’d be better off telling him as how them pumpkins he’s growing look like the behinds of every bad woman you ever saved from sinning again.”
“Naw,” Joh laughed. “Hollis Jordan isn’t buying any faith.”
The winter Ada Adams was sixteen was the first time she ever spoke with Hollis Jordan. Hoschton High was making plans to present “Strange Interlude” for the Drama Club’s spring production, and Ada had a craving to play the part of Nina Leeds. After school that afternoon she had walked out toward Dark Woods with a copy of the play under her arm. If she could get off to herself where no one could hear her, she had an idea she could become Nina Leeds incarnate. She walked deep into the woods until she came to the clearing near the Judas Trees — two years from the time that that clearing became notorious — and began reading Nina’s lines. She was a long time reading them aloud; feeling them deeply the more time she was there, and when Hollis Jordan came upon her, she was in the center of the clearing, her voice raised to the old noble oaks; the light blue wool dress clinging to her in the breeze, with her long red hair tangling around her shoulders, and her blue eyes shining with excitement as she began act six:
I wonder if there’s a draft in the baby’s room … Maybe I’d better close the window? Oh, I guess it’s all right … he needs lots of fresh air … little Gordon … he does remind me of Gordon … sometimes in his eye —
Then she became aware of Hollis Jordan standing there looking at her. “Oh, gee — no!”
“It’s all right. You were doing fine.”
“Oh! I could die!”
“Strange Interlude?”
“Yes. Gee, how’d you know?”
“I know it.”
“I guess you think I’m crazy.” “I don’t think that at all.”
“It’s a part for school … I thought I could do it better out here where nobody’d hear me … I never thought … it’s so embarrassing!”
“Don’t be embarrassed. I read a lot aloud out here.”
“I know. But I’m doing it for school.”
“I’m not. So I
should be the one to be embarrassed.”
“I didn’t mean anything like that.”
“Look — ”
“I guess you think I’m crazy.”
“No. No. Look, maybe I could make it up to you for being a Peeping Tom.”
“Oh, you couldn’t help coming along. It just embarrassed me.
“Is there a part I can read?”
“I — don’t know. I guess there is.”
“All right, then. Let’s get down to work. Okay?” “Well, gee. Gee — sure!”
He was twenty-six then, a great, tall fellow, with a long lean look like a climbing weed, a rugged farmer’s face, stained red from the sun and wind, beautiful white teeth that showed when his wide curving lips spread in a mild grin, and a broad and bony masculine nose. What Ada remembered most about him that day was his hands and his voice. He held the book for them with his hands. Ada had never known a man to have such huge hands, their fingers long and square; the flesh of them clean and tanned and solid. And his voice, when he read the role of Marsden, was clear, deep and powerful, giving meaning to those words Ada never knew existed. He stood beside her in his blue wool shirt, his worn black corduroy trousers tucked into his high boots, the thick mop of wild black hair cropping out from under his red cap, and they read for hours.
When they had finished they were tired, and it was late, after sunset. Together they walked slowly back toward town, with the slate-gray sky above them pressing on the dun fields in which coffee-colored stalks of last year’s cotton stood around shabbily.
Neither said very much to the other. But Ada was glad, strangely glad he was with her. The blue supper smoke from the chimneys off in the distance seemed somehow divorced from those moments, and she found herself listening to the sound of the acorns crunch underfoot.
They came to his house first, a small brown frame one hidden by the huge boxtrees surrounding it.
“Well,” he said, pausing before the wrought-iron gate, “it has been a strange interlude.”
She said, “Thank you very much.”
“Good-by,” he told her, looking squarely at her. She murmured something, gazing away from him; then turning, went on. A curious light hid in her lowered eyes.
When she got home, her father said: “That Hollis Jordan you was talking to, Ada?”
“Just walking a piece with him. Not saying much.”
“He’s crazy!” her father said.
“Sure is!” she said.
That night Ada took the red autograph book she’d been saving for the Christmas Club Frolic, and turned it into a dairy.
“Why do I care so much about what people say all the time?” was all she wrote on the first mint-shaded page….
After that there were other times; more times than most knew or cared about. Ada’s father was a widower who worked hard at farming, and made no bones about visiting Mary Jane Frances Alexander’s establishment for relaxation. He saved his money religiously, and worried about sending Ada up to Athens to college when she finished at High; and when Ada told him sometimes she had had conversation with Hollis Jordan, he listened and grunted and likened it in his mind to the way her mother used to take in any stray hound that bayed within a mile of their place, and gab at it like it was human.
“What’s he talk about?” he’d asked her once.
“Oh, nothing.”
“They say he’s educated.”
“Some,” playing it down.
“He’s crazy!”
“Not so much.”
“Even a little’s too much.”
“I know it,” Ada would say. “He reads poetry aloud.”
Sometimes, just so she could talk about him, she made fun of him, because that was the only way anyone talked about Hollis Jordan in Paradise. She had a hunger to say his name; to tell things he said to her — not everything, though; and then she felt a certain sorry grief when her girl friends would laugh at what she told them, even though the way she told them was amusing and meant to be a joke.
“You mean he made you get down and feel the earth?” they’d scream uproariously.
“That’s the truth.” Ada would giggle, with her heart aching. “He said, ‘Ada, feel it! Feel this land with your fingers! Smell it and taste it! Roll in it and it’ll make you clean and true!” I said, ‘Roll in it, Hollis Jordan? Roll in it!”
“ ‘N what’d he say then, Ada?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she’d answer them; suddenly tired of the game she was playing against herself. “I guess he read some of his crazy old poetry.”
He read poetry almost all the time to her, and she to him, reading poems he had selected for her, as though their first meeting when they had read together was to establish the pattern of their future meetings. While she saw him more times than anyone but he or she knew, there was no regularity to those intervals; and they were spaced weeks and often months apart. She would walk purposely to the woods to find him, and at times she would find him; other times, merely sit there in the clearing alone, wondering about him, and wondering what was happening to her because of him.
Never once until the day of their humiliation did Hollis Jordan speak to her of any feeling he might have had other than a friendly one. What she never got used to about Hollis when they were together was the way he would tell her things about herself, which a man to Ada’s mind didn’t tell a girl unless there was something between them. The third time they were ever together, out in back of his place, when she was watching him mend a fence worn in with the wind, he stopped what he was doing suddenly and said, “You have fine legs. Are you going to college?”
She never knew how to answer him when he said things like that. She even loathed him some, imagining the dirty pictures in his mind. Yet at night sometimes for no reason she would wake up restless and warm; take off her flannel nightgown, and stand naked before the open window in the cold breeze and wish she had a reason to cry….
Hollis and she grew on one another like intertwining vines of ivy along some old, cold wall, without either of them really knowing it. They began to finish sentences for each other, and to laugh too much too easily together. They learned to walk in silence, and to hand one another leaves, or stones, or pine cones, for no reason. Yet when it came time for them to be separated, she told him.
“Well, I’ll be going up to Athens next week.”
“I’ll miss you, Ada.”
“Athens isn’t so far.”
“Still, you’ll be meeting new people. You’ll have to hit the books too.”
“Where’d you go to college, Hollis? Did you?” “Nope. Athens, Georgia, huh?” “Yes. Dear old Athens.”
“Uh-huh. Well, you come home brilliant, hear?” “I hear, Hollis.”
It was two weeks and twenty letters after she went to the University when she received her first communication from Hollis. The lines scrawled on the postcard were familiar ones:
I wonder if there’s a draft in the baby’s room … Maybe I’d better close the window?
And I’ll be in Scotland before you, But me and my true love will never meet again …
The Paradise Bigger Band hammers at the piece ambitiously, with Kate Bailey tapping out the rhythm. Doc Sell’s wife holds her lips from the tuba to allow Guessie to take her notes on the drum; all of them are in accord, and Ada remembers:
“I didn’t mean to laugh back there, Hollis, when you kissed me.
“I know you didn’t.”
“I wish I knew how to be more honest with myself.”
“We all have trouble in that department.”
“Hollis, I used to laugh about you to people. I used to tell things we did together like it was a joke, like I didn’t even care about any of it, like you were some kind of character.”
“I guess I am.”
“No, don’t say that. Don’t laugh, Hollis. Do you know something?” She was eager now, suddenly buoyant, possessed of some new feeling of liberation, and the physical too, still. “In Athens, when I’d be ou
t on some silly, tacky beer party, sitting on some boy’s blanket on the ground while he was trying to paw me, I used to think what you always said about dirt, about how good it felt in your hands, and how it smelled and tasted. And I’d get this idea, Hollis, that I had to get away from there and go someplace by myself. And I’d miss you so, Hollis. I know we never talk like this — you and I — but Hollis, I’d miss you!”
“All right,” he said, putting his arm around her. “All right, Ada.”
He touched his mouth again to hers, and she leaned deeply into him then, her own mouth warm and alive, no longer passive against his. Her eyes were half shut watching him, and her breath came and went in little quick gasps, drinking his. For a long time he kissed her, until her hair was all shaken down, touching his cheeks and shaking around his face, while the man in him grew; and unbuttoning her; then buttoning her up again, whispering some vague, nearly incoherent something about not wanting to do that to her; but she put his fingers back on the buttons and begged him with that gesture.
When his own hands fumbled clumsily with the clothing he undid, hers hurried the undressing, until he felt the warm bare arms around his neck. He held her in his lap, embracing her nakedness with a trembling strength. And then, before the time of their love, he was compelled to lift her from his lap, to kneel there in the clearing before those young unpendulous breasts, the lithe body clad in its garment of nudity. He knelt, clinging to those ripe white knees in that instant before he would bend them in the act of love —
When, “Ada!” they both heard. “Ada Adams!”
And as any two ever caught near climax by an outsider, they felt immediately ridiculous, rude, and laughingly unattractive.
“Ada! Put your things back on and come along!”
• • •
“No more to it than that?”
“Nope. That’s the funny thing about it.”
“But that didn’t make Ada the way she is now, you think?”
“The whole story ain’t been told, for my cotton!”
“Imagine the bastard getting her to do a regular old striptease up in Awful Dark Woods!”
“Aw, sheet anyway! He’s crazy! Didn’t even fight in the war!”
