Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  This is not good countryside for women. Where had she heard, There is a reality beneath the appearance of the world? The only way life here could be better was not to have known other places as she and Mama had, or had different husbands.

  Hal had moved away from the men’s conversation to the edge of the porch. His knees were too rounded and cute-looking in his tennis shorts. He looked like the Gingerbread Man in her old storybook; Run, run as fast as you. “Mister Mac.” Savano was talking. “That’s dog-bog land. Rains and it’s so slimy a dog can’t walk on it.”

  “I was waiting—” Daddy said.

  “These trees should have—” and Savano was out of earshot after more conversation. He glanced toward the porch’s far edge, where Hal escaped menfolks’ talk, and muttered what was not supposed to be heard: “No more ambition than a lap puppy.”

  Daddy looked toward the porch, smiling. “When I lift up my foot, I take my time about setting it down.”

  Mama was tired and would go upstairs to play her Confederate records. The music often wandered out over the orchard, a thin lonesome sound like that of a penny whistle. The spirit of the South reminds me of the spirit of the prison, Mama had written.

  Men who saw night coming down on them could somehow act as if they stood at the edge of dawn. Out of defeat they could still win something if nothing more—and it was everything—than a victory over the age-old impersonal foes of the human spirit. They were never quite licked because there can be something about human beings which in the last analysis is unconquerable. We all fight battles all our lives within ourselves, and to fight them as beautifully as our Confederate soldiers is a wonderful inheritance. So many men at the prison are like the Southern soldier the way they are fighting the battle.

  She had never known whether these were Mama’s own words or someone else’s, but in Connecticut she had been driven more toward the family she would adopt.

  She married not only heady days and this land but the South’s whole history.

  “Are you still going to your AA meetings, son?” Daddy said.

  “I hate going there and standing up, saying, I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Of course you can’t do that, darling,” Mama cried. “You’re not an alcoholic.”

  12

  In the old farmhouse, she felt cozy with the late winter storm outside, slashing against the windows, falling on the roof, springing up from tin rain gutters, falling down the bedroom chimney and into ashes, sending up their acrid scent, as if from all the fires that had ever been there. She stood at a window reaching from the floor almost to the ceiling. “‘That the small rain down may rain.’”

  “Huh?”

  “I was quoting something. Don’t you like ‘that the small rain down may—’”

  “You’re crazy,” Hal said.

  “Crazy?”

  He had gone out. “Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again,” she said. Soon she wondered where he went and followed him to the breakfast area. “Don’t you like to be all cozy inside when it’s raining?”

  Hal continually brought things back from his parents’ attic. Now he bent over looking inside a green tackle box at fishing flies. Yellow furry things were scattered around him, which looked like rags. “What are these?” Laurel asked, poking her foot at a bundle.

  He held still above the tray of flies too long. “Deerskin,” he said.

  “Deerskins? What are you going to do with them?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t want anything. I was wondering what the reason is for keeping them. What does one do with old deerskin or deerskins?”

  “Are you going to keep on standing over me?”

  “I’m not standing over you. I was only looking.”

  He shoved in the rickety tray of the tackle box. “These are my things. Do you want me to give them to Rick?”

  “Why should you give them to Rick?”

  “The same way you made me lend him the Holland and Holland.”

  She cast her mind back months before. “How could I make you? I asked if he could use a gun. I didn’t know that one was so valuable. You gave it to him. You’ve said you wanted to teach him to shoot.” Did it rankle him that his own children had not been here for Christmas? That was not her fault. “How did we get off onto the subject of Rick? We were talking about deerskins.”

  “You were running your mouth about them.”

  “Hal.”

  “Hal,” he said. “Apparently I’m not going to be able to look through my things.”

  “Go ahead. I didn’t realize it would bother you to have me look too.”

  “He didn’t clean it when he finished shooting.”

  “Oh, dear.” She switched back to the gun incident, feeling mired in the twists and turns of conversation. “If you told him to clean it afterward, I’m sure he will from now on.”

  “Didn’t his daddy teach him anything about guns?”

  “You know William doesn’t have a gun, or hunt. He couldn’t have taught Rick about one. In Soundport, he couldn’t even shoot his BB or his twenty-two.”

  “I thought William’s family had everything.”

  “Jesus. How do conversations get so confused, or turn into not being conversations? I’ll never know what one does with old deerskin or skins.”

  She went back to the love seat in the bedroom. Here she was sitting the day Rick came in and set the gun in its rack. She listened to him go to his room. She looked in and he was lying down with his eyes closed.

  “Meditating?”

  He looked at the ceiling. “I’m thinking. Seeing, I guess.”

  “What?”

  “The buck I just killed. My first deer. I thought I wanted to.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. I was in the stand. I kept telling myself, I’m a boy in Mississippi. The woods. Rite of passage. I kept praying no deer would come. Then four! Four came out of the woods and started by. I told myself to shoot. But I was so far away, I didn’t think I could possibly hit one. By the time I thought all this, they were almost gone. I thought they were safe, and then I said, ‘Oh, no!’ The one at the end, the big buck, slowly crumpled. I started to cry. I said, ‘Forgive me.’ He was alive when I got there.”

  “Deer have to be culled; there has to be a hunting season.”

  “It’s OK, Mom.” He closed his eyes. “It’s my vacation. I just want to rest now.”

  In the bedroom then, too, she wished she had realized you could not change your own life without changing the lives of those involved with you. In a while, Field, the old Negro helper, came singing unmelodiously from the direction of the orchard. He came from his cabin beyond Mama and Daddy’s for his evening chores. Passing the windows, he wore a green poncho, Hal’s old Wallabees, and an old hat of Daddy’s. Field was senile, but half-witted also. He swung plastic milk bottles tied together by rope; these were for carrying home a water supply from their house to his. She thought it wrong in this day and time Daddy did not supply water for those left living on the place. Pepper had complained.

  She wanted Field to stay at home more, but he had nothing to do there, and at her house he felt necessary. All day he regaled her with religious sermons, which at first were quaint and by now were tiresome. She picked up a magazine. He came in saying, “Evening, Miss Laurel,” shedding rain and tracking mud across the light-colored carpet. The kind of thing you let go. “How you this evening?”

  They had only parted at lunchtime. “Fine. How’re you?”

  They made small talk about the weather. “I heard from Rick today. He’s done well on exams at school.”

  “I say.”

  “Only thirty-two more days, and he’ll be back.”

  “I’ll sho’ be glad to see him.”

  “He said tell you he has that picture of Jesus you gave him up on his wall.”

  He looked up from laying a fire. “Say he do. Carried that picture all the way?”

  “Oh, yes. He loved you
r giving it to him.”

  “You want me to light this now?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Flames splayed up against the walls, lighting up the cabbage roses. Field held his hand out to them and then rose stiffly. She wanted him to stay. “We going to see his sweet face in the by-and-by then,” he said.

  “Just about a month more.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Are you talking about Rick?”

  “Talking ’bout Jesus.”

  “Oh.”

  “Everybody be the same in heaven.”

  “You mean there won’t be blacks and white?”

  “No’m. Everybody be good and everybody be happy.”

  “Where are the bad?”

  “Bad folks go to hell. H-e-double-l, hell.”

  “Who are the bad? People who kill people?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. Peoples who kills peoples, they sho’ be bad.” He made his slow way out enumerating. “Peoples who takes po’ folks’ money.…” She looked into the fire. It was five o’clock. Ice cubes fell singly into a glass in the kitchen. She would wait and see if Hal asked if she wanted a drink. How long would he remain there in his accumulative world, with possessions no one else must look at? What went on in Hal’s head?

  What difference did it make if he quit AA? She knew he would after Mama’s remark. But attending a meeting one night a week had done nothing but put off the hour he had his first drink. Not to drink seemed impossible here, evenings were so long. She had well understood the lonely drinking he did in his hunting cabin the night before he killed Greg. She drank that way herself when William was not at home, she had confessed. She fought the pattern as a divorcee, not wanting Rick to be ashamed or to jeopardize her custody of him. Unfortunately, she had read an article in Vogue at the time about letting lemon peel remain in a bottle of vodka till it turned yellow; delicious, the article had said. And it is! she wrote Hal. She had said, “The world is no longer as lonely a place as it was. Even if you died, it still wouldn’t be, for after so long, I’ve finally touched another human being. I could never again believe there could be no one, that forever I was abandoned to wander about lonely. During that long waiting period, her mother took her for drives, to get her out of the house. She still wondered what other suburban divorcées did; there had been no reason for her to get a job since she was leaving Soundport. What did she know how to do, anyway, but write novels that never made money?

  Now at least, she thought, Hal has a job. Her mother said over the phone, “Thank God and little fishes.” She had been sympathetic all along about having a man at home all day. “You marry for better or for worse but not for lunch,” she had quoted, and went on in her characteristic manner, “And that’s that. Period.”

  However, Hal came home for lunch, like most men in these parts. She ought to explain her former life to women here when they complained about long hours their farming husbands kept. It was a simpler life, to her. Why say your husbands are nearby in fields, pop in and out during the day, and are home for supper by sundown? Wintertimes, they had a long laying-off period. Hal had written her that while his friends were playing poker at the Swan Country Club, he used to spend days in Miss Jimmie June’s grocery, drinking beer and eating the best corn pone he’d ever tasted.

  She had looked forward to such times; they did not exist, like much she had expected. The woman had died and her store fallen into disrepair like little cabins left on Matagorda, which once housed a hundred families. Today a plantation is a factory under the sky, just business, Savano had said. And Hal had no head for business. She had come too late. Nothing but dregs of a real plantation life remained, a commissary across the highway going to ruin; the last shells of cabins had been burned, not enough left of them to claim arson and collect insurance, as was customary around the countryside. Cabins left where the few blacks on Matagorda lived were not much better.

  The day they played tennis, she had waited in the car and thought Hal looked cornered. Daddy talked to him urgently, waving one arm up and down like a maestro, as was necessary when he tried hard to get thoughts across. Each word had its own accent. Hal’s slowness had come from Daddy and another side from Mama.

  Listening that day, Hal shuffled his feet about on a walkway that had been built by German prisoners of war housed nearby during World War II, who were given jobs by local people. She had not known the war came that close to home. Mostly, it meant shortages to her, no White Shoulders cologne or Spalding saddle oxfords. Then on VJ night, she had danced with friends in a fish pond in the lobby of a Delton hotel. “… love and laughter and peace ever after,” someone had begun to sing. A bluebird flying over the white cliffs of Dover could render the world right. They daringly splashed in the hotel’s pond believing they celebrated the end of wars forever, so naïve had the times been.

  Too late, she had thought that day waiting in the car, for close contact with German prisoners to have effect on her. She had had to learn secondhand also about the hundred families and about the plantation bell that had been at Matagorda’s entranceway and called them to the fields. It had had an especially sweet sound because it had silver dollars embedded inside when commissioned by a MacDonald in the past. Belonging to Daddy’s family, nevertheless Mama donated the bell to the scrap iron drive during that Second World War; the family were outraged, but Daddy made no protest. This much later, Laurel thought, What a futile gesture. The entranceway now had a great gap in an iron fixture where the bell once hung. Hal got into the car, his tic beating. He couldn’t tell Daddy they had a fixed time for a tennis court. What was all that about? she had asked.

  “A proposition from Savano. I can work for him.”

  Benefits from a job flew to her mind. “That’s great,” she said.

  Hal spun wheelies on the long gravel driveway. “Yeah. I can work for somebody who rents land from me. I’ll be Robert Ruark’s little pigeon-breasted clerk.”

  She was the sweetest a wife could be. “It could lead to something else.” She seriously imagined Savano and Hal building up a little empire. “You could go into truck farming together. Invest in irrigation and plant rice.” She talked about other ideas she had heard kicked around, talked further about her own. “Reading about the population explosion and the difficulty of feeding people, I don’t see why it’s said farming’s on the decline.”

  “Eight hundred a month,” he said. “That’s not bad for around here. Daddy will match that. We can still live free on Matagorda.”

  That was the only real reason for living here, she had thought, looking out the car window. They had passed the brick pillar and the iron arch where the bell no longer sounded. Mama’s maid Carrie had told her, “Hands be all over this place when that bell rang.” Then Carrie told her sadly, Miss ’Cilia had brought her in from the fields to work in the house. “She said, ‘Carrie, you don’t want to be doing that hard work in the sun.’”

  “I said, ‘Yes’m, I do.’ Then Miss ’Cilia said, ‘Aw, Carrie.’ Then I said, ‘Miss ’Cilia, I wants to ketch air with my own color sometimes.’ She let me go on back to the fields one day a week then.”

  “You liked picking cotton?” she had asked Carrie.

  “I sho’ did. Be in the field and everybody laughing and carrying on. Be shady and cool under them plants.”

  She had laughed. “Don’t tell anybody else, Carrie. You’re not supposed to like picking cotton.”

  “All the folks I knowed liked picking it.” Carrie gave an elfin grin. “I never did like to do no cooking.”

  Sisters under the skin, she thought. She had moved heaven and earth to win her way here, changed her existence, but one steadfast thing remained: shopping for food and cooking it. Hal did not like Almond Mocha ice cream, and these days she was on the lookout for his favorite food, canned white asparagus, a rarity here. Twilights were long, and often she stared out her kitchen window, thinking of her Connecticut kitchen, and Rick being there; the enormity of what she had done pressed in on her. Why whe
n she so feared loneliness had she brought herself to this devastating kind?

  When Hal came home shortly after five from his work at the nearby cotton gin, she tried to be expectant about his arrival. He leaned with his back to a wall of the kitchen and waited apparently for her to begin to chatter as Sallie must have, waited in silence. She tried to extract interesting information about his office, the price of cotton, to make him rail against legislation passed in Washington concerning farmers—anything. “What happened today?”

  “Kathleen, that woman who’s Savano’s secretary, brought in a carrot cake.”

  “A carrot cake?”

  “It had real carrots in it. It was delicious.”

  “My goodness, a cake with real carrots in it. Why don’t you go on and watch television while I cook.”

  “Sallie always liked for me to be in the kitchen while she was fixing dinner.”

  Sallie had a different personality and mentality. “Well, it gets on my nerves,” she told him, ending those moments.

  Heading on toward the tennis court, she thought how Hal would never again farm, and looked back toward the big house, which had dwarfed them all standing there, with its great columns, screened porches, wide verandas, and the dark orchard overshadowing everything; Daddy looked so small going inside; Savano rode the shiny tractor that was like a Tootsie Toy. They had faced then their own house a stone’s throw away through pecan trees, and it was nearly hidden by privet hedges flattened against the screened porch that ran across its front; because in the old farmhouse the windows were nearly as tall as the high ceilings, there was light. A tall privet hedge divided their house from a cabin next door where three blacks lived: Annie Mae cleaned for her; there was her sister Marcie, and Willie, who was Annie Mae’s husband but father of the baby Marcie was soon to have. Nearly hidden by nondescript bushes, Pepper’s cabin was in front of Annie Mae’s. Along the highway, other blacks lived, not connected to the place. On down the highway, with a railroad paralleling it, lived her closest white neighbor, eight miles away. Just then, Hal had put his foot on the brake, crying, “What the hell is Field doing?” He had been cutting their grass for the last time of the season. Hal got out to explain. “You’ve got the belt on wrong. You’re cutting the grass backwards.”