Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  Neither she nor Rick mentioned her going south again when Hal came back from Africa, in two months. These two months he had been gone were more precious than she had anticipated. But she had not expected the night Rick appeared on her rented doorstep with boxes of his possessions. “I told you you didn’t have to move in with me while Hal’s gone. I’m fine. You’ve had enough uprootedness.”

  He pushed on in, arms loaded. “Dad’s getting a divorce. I don’t want to live in a house without a woman in it.” Then he put down all those things in a room upstairs. “Where you are, Mom, is really where home is.”

  Those words brought the sharpest pain. Only now did she let herself think about the woman she had been who left him. What had she seemed like to the neighbors, what had his friends said, what had he gone through that she would never know anything about? she wondered.

  This time going south, she would not be looking for something that did not exist—the past. Too long, she had tried to return to her first memories knowing what she learned later. She had wanted to bring the past into the present, to say what she should have said at some time gone past when she had been too afraid to speak her mind, to jeopardize being loved and liked. William had always complimented her about not talking as much as most women; Hal, too, liked that she did not “run her mouth.” However, he preferred dogs to people; they did not talk back at all, he said.

  These mornings encountering Rick first thing, he threw his hands over himself. He slept in boxer shorts but must hide what she guessed was an erection. She wondered if he was a virgin, and what her son was like in bed, and whether this was a question you could ever ask a daughter-in-law. In the long months before her divorce, when William stayed in the house, she walked into the bathroom once while he was taking a bath. William threw a washcloth over his private parts. She had thought that silly after fifteen years of marriage. Hal was so jealous of William back then, she wondered what he would think, now, with her in Soundport alone, if he knew William was getting a divorce. “William doesn’t want your name mentioned in front of him,” her mother had said.

  The unexpected night Rick showed up with his possessions saying his dad was getting a divorce, she saw something in his face that made her fearful; yet she wanted him to be a man able to go out into the world better than Daddy and Hal, and maybe that took grimness. She had no right to ask about William’s divorce and only said lightly, “Without step brothers and sisters, you won’t have to go through all that quibbling I watched with Hal and Pris about dividing things up after Daddy died.”

  Once Daddy died, she and Hal had moved into the big house. They moved everything on flatbed trucks provided by Savano. She told Rick about the morning Hal let the dogs out, so early Carrie’s roosters had not even started crowing. He was back in the bedroom and shortly said, “Laurel. Somebody’s in this house.” They always had been slightly afraid someone from the prison might show up, even two years later. They went apprehensively down a hallway, hearing noises in the living room. Pris looked up at them. She was sitting on the floor swathing in tissue paper objets d’art from every table and shelf. Hal quietly asked if she’d return the few he had brought Mama from Japan when he was there in wartime. With a look of hatred, she complied. She and Hal could not stop talking about how Pris simply walked into the house, not knocking, not having called. She’d had to leave Delton before daylight to get there at that hour. She knew then, Laurel said, Pris was never going to accept her and Hal as the MacDonalds of Matagorda, never graciously accept that they lived in that house.

  For weeks, Pris scavenged the place, bringing her own lunch and six-packs of sodas for everyone. She only said, Pris, we have lunch every day anyway. You’re welcome to eat our food. She did not say they always had baloney sandwiches and she’d change the menu for her. She was then writing in Daddy’s old office, which looked over the orchard. She used to sit there hating the sight of Hal’s black pickup turning down the driveway between the trees at exactly twelve minutes past noon every day. He got out of the truck and seemed dwarfed by the house. Daddy had been slight, but there was a difference. Finally she realized the difference was dignity: something Hal lacked. She longed for it for herself sitting at the typewriter. But every morning Carrie interrupted to ask, “What us having for lunch, Miss Laurel?” She finally told Carrie to have baloney every day, and Hal never seemed to notice. He ate his sandwich carefully pinched between his hands, reminding her of a raccoon. Drinking iced tea, he gave her a sweet gaze over the rim of the glass. His expression was like that of a grateful child whose thirst has been quenched when the child’s too young to quench it himself. She sat at the table looking off into the magnitude of silence in the orchard, hating the tininess of her life, wondering that she had brought herself to it. All she could do was make each day pass, and then another day, and not look back. Where was the man who had written her those letters?

  One day in the orchard, she and Savano reminisced. She talked about missing the noise she heard when she and Hal lived in the farmhouse: the intermittent crack of Daddy’s rifle. He used to sit on the front porch in striped pajamas picking squirrels out of the pecan trees. It took Daddy till his final years to accept what he’d always been told, how great the financial damage was squirrels did to the pecan crop. He became fanatical. Savano had laughed. “A man don’t speak no louder than his guns,” he said. They went on talking about Daddy’s fighting his declining years. She wondered if Savano had not included, too, Hal’s obsession with hunting all his life. In the orchard was the only place left Daddy had to affect anybody, she and Savano agreed. “Hal’s never had much ambition,” she had said.

  “A man blessed without aspirations,” Savano said. “Or they were youthful ones and never realized. It’s the dark crossroads of a man’s life to realize you’ll never live up to what you visualized for yourself.”

  “A woman’s too,” she had said. “But Hal was blessed.”

  After Daddy died, even things left over in the attic had to be divided. She and Pris were up there, and she had said, “We ought to have a tag sale.”

  “Don’t you get rid of anything till Hal’s paid for half this house.”

  Paid? Paid? The word echoed off the rafters till she could ask him about it that night. “The will says you are to live in this house free for the rest of your life,” she said. “It doesn’t say anything about paying Pris for her half.”

  “She and Pete want to be paid.”

  She went on reiterating what the will said; Hal agreed. He shrugged. “I didn’t know what to say, so I said, ‘All right.’ If I can afford to pay them.”

  Tina had been in the attic that day with Pris. She kept opening boxes and taking things out. “Look,” she had said. “A Halloween costume.” She held up a long white robe, a hood with eyes. Pris blanched; she went home without saying goodbye. Laurel went on laughing. Hal did not think it so funny. She didn’t think it was Daddy’s robe, she said, but it was some MacDonald’s.

  He could not buy out Pris and Pete; surely they knew that. She went on begging Hal to stand up to them, but the house went on the market. They would move to Delton. Really, they had no life at Matagorda; Hal—she by association—was always going to be a pariah in Swan. They were cut out of things; she was told that frankly. A man from the North was looking for a location for an umbrella factory, to make use of the Delta’s cheap labor. Talk of a factory was the biggest news in Swan in years; it sounded as if the owner was going to hire every black in the county, white people too. The Chamber of Commerce wined and dined him; at one of these dinners, his wife was overheard saying, “Get me out of this burg.” Local wives were furious. “Her social life here is already ruined,” one said. But if she had to move down here, the wife said, she wanted a showplace: Matagorda was the only one. The eagerness they encountered from everyone about Hal’s selling the place became embarrassing. “Mama and Daddy would turn over in their graves if they knew we sold this house. And worse, sold it to Yankees,” he said. A painter began taking
down Mama’s fine imported handpainted wallpaper in the hallway on instructions from the Yankee wife. He looked at Laurel. “Mrs. MacDonald would kill me. I put this paper up for her.” Their furniture went into storage. Hal’s old Lab Jiggs had died, and there was the new black Lab puppy, Bud. Tenants in their old farmhouse would keep him and Jubal for a while. As plans for the umbrella factory materialized, it would employ a total of thirty people, blacks and whites; it was a factory only to assemble some part.

  But they were driving away from Matagorda, their car loaded and a niche on the backseat for Buff. Carrie was the only person there at that moment to say goodbye; she honored them by wearing her wig. Laurel remembered how perturbed she felt about leaving. A light rain fell. The steadfast silence had seen worse times and better ones. The rain fell in the woods, on ponds, lakes, and fields, binding all together the way it had done long before she came to this place and the way it would be doing long after she left there. What must Hal be feeling? “Do you feel sad leaving?” she said.

  “Why? What’s Matagorda done for me?”

  Laurel wished to say “Everything,” but she said nothing. What was the point of wasting breath on a fool?

  After Daddy’s death even Savano said it was ridiculous for Hal to go on being his bookkeeper. He quit work and took her on safari. They stayed six weeks in Africa while he collected trophies. “Ye gods, more heads.” Mrs. Wynn had rolled her eyes to heaven. Hal was with the same white hunter he’d hunted with before, a German named Hauser. They were in remote camps. Every day Hauser shouted to contact Nairobi by shortwave radio; it was cackly and filled with voices trying to break in. One morning when he was busy, he asked Hal to call. “Hello, Nairobi.” He spoke in his ordinary telephone voice. “Shout, man,” Hauser cried. He grew more livid according to the number of times Hal humbly said, “Hello, Nairobi.” Afterward, the Germanic Hauser began to humiliate him. “Tell the wogs to bring more hot water,” Hauser would say, poking his head from the makeshift shower tent. “Yell, man. They’re used to it.” Hal trotted the distance to the kitchen tent to deliver the order; Hauser and his wife exchanged contemptuous smiles. Laurel watched Hal’s bent shoulders thinking, My husband. She built him up, talking about wonderful things he made from deerskins: moccasins, belts, gloves. “Maybe that’s what you should do,” Hauser said. “Be an artisan. Open a little shop.”

  “I probably should.”

  “Well, man. You’ve got to find something.”

  “I’m doing what I was made to do.” Hal smiled. “Spend money and have a good time. I’ve always known how to spend money, I’ve just never known how to make any.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought. I’ve lived in that small town most of my life. I’m formed, and nothing can change what I am.”

  She understood why Hal did not understand her difficulties in the Delta. He was unable to perceive the different life she had led before. Having lived in one spot most of his life, with his impressions coming from his daily environment, he had little to compare things to.

  One day Hauser said to her, “You’ve got a real problem.” They were walking along on a path and jumping over safari ants. “All you can do is try to keep yourself from going mad.”

  “That is all I’ve done,” she said. “I go back to Connecticut a lot to visit my mother and son.”

  “That’s not the answer.”

  “I know. But what is?”

  “Ten years ago I could have told you. I’d have said get a dee-vorce.”

  “And not now?”

  He gave her a stare out of hard blue eyes. “Time makes a difference. It’s unfortunate but true.”

  She was forty-four years old. He meant her ability to catch a man was over, which was maddening. She faced for the first time what, really, she had done to her life. She had better be practical and stick with what she had. Hauser was not an unkind man. Having spent his lifetime with animals, he believed they knew the moments of their own deaths. He saw a certain look come into their eyes. Laurel wondered if she was to face that look in glass eyes the rest of her life when she walked into Hal’s trophy room. In a rain forest in Africa, she looked at her husband through another man’s eyes and saw him wanting. She had known the truth herself; she had only tried to hide it. All the embarrassing moments they had lived through on Matagorda, suffered through, she thought. Connie had said, “My mom says I don’t have to come here and put myself through this, but he is my dad.” Also, in her heart, Laurel thought about his children’s loyalty; they knew there was money to come: TK.

  Hauser was being forced by the Kenyan government to turn over 51 percent of his business to “wogs.” He was selling out and moving to the States. First, he wanted to make a documentary and hoped to distribute it worldwide. Hal went back for four months to be his cameraman. She wondered if he would have been selected if he had not had ten thousand dollars to invest in the homemade project. She prayed the venture would widen their horizons and lead to something interesting and worthwhile.

  This morning as she made Rick’s bed and shook out his pillow, she thought of the shock she had at Matagorda when she found he slept with a pistol under his head. “I told myself I was going to sleep with a gun any time Hal was crocked. That’s every night,” he had said. Now there was peacefulness; they agreed being in the rented cottage was like being back at the cabin in Mississippi. Soundport was changed in two years. Most of her friends were divorced or were in the process. She’d only been a step ahead, Laurel thought. The look of the town went on changing from being a New England village of old frame buildings to being a modern town of smart brick shops and small office buildings, which lined the river through town and obscured it from view. The gulls remained swooping up and down and intent on their business. Back at the YMCA, she could stand on her head taking yoga.

  She and Buff had seen Hal off to Atlanta, and from there he flew to Africa; Southerners didn’t need New York any longer for anything. Pris called in her sick cat voice to say goodbye; Pete came to the airport and then by Laurel’s motel room nearby. She and Buff would start the long drive to Connecticut the following morning; she had not expected to make it again. She asked what Pete thought of the African venture. “It’s worth risking the money at this point,” he said. “Hauser’s a good man. Hal’s not equipped for business. God knows, Laurel. I waited and waited for him to settle his father’s estate, until I began to hate him. I prayed about that. One morning I got up and said, He doesn’t do anything because he doesn’t know how. I’ll have to do it. Let’s order champagne and oysters.”

  “What are we celebrating?” But she knew, a night out. And why not? She owed nothing to this family any longer.

  Later she could say, “Salud. Oysters go down better with champagne.” She told Pete about the night Hal threw her out of their car, on the way back from a party; he had done the same thing to Sallie a week before he killed Greg. “You never know what happens to set him off,” she said. “I was there in the middle of nowhere, nothing but fields. A man who had been at the party happened along and brought me home. Hal came out and said, “Well, did you fuck her like everybody else?” The man told him no matter what, no man would throw his wife out into the Delta in the middle of the night, at the mercy of any Negro who came along. She laughed. “That’s the last thing I’d have been afraid would happen. Pete, is no one going to help me with his drinking?”

  “No one,” he said. “You’re all alone.”

  When Rick moved into the cottage with her, he had said, “Mom, you know I thought a lot about your and Dad’s divorce. Don’t worry, it was all in your favor. I began to see reasons for it.” She tried to think of William as twice divorced. She knew that did not fit his image of himself. A chain of events had been started and they were not only no longer the people they had been, but not people they wanted to be, either. Rick said he was glad she had not taken him away from his father when he was a baby. “Yes, I’m glad you never had to invent a f
ather,” she said. “It’s hard enough living with people and still not knowing them.”

  What about her nights here, were they too mellowed by Scotch, a habit begun at Matagorda when she would think she was going crazy too? The blacks there grew to accept odd behavior as normal. She broke out all the windows in the study one night when Hal locked himself inside and would not hand her out her reading glasses which she’d left there; Pepper replaced windowpanes in silence. He and Field toted Mama’s oil portrait off the wall after the night Hal got up and slashed it from one corner to another one with a knife. Carrie spoke matter-of-factly about the nights Daddy half carried Mama from the dinner table when she fell asleep there. “Did you ever say anything to him?” Laurel asked.

  “No’m.” Carrie gave her elfin grin. “Miss ’Cilia told me one time I was so quiet I ought to jine the Caf’lic church. She didn’t even know that man had piles like I knowed it.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I washed his bloody underdrawers in the laundry,” Carrie said. “Work in a house and you knows things.”

  “Marry into a family and you know them too,” Laurel said.

  Was it mellowed evenings then that had made her overlook what was right beneath her nose in this cottage? In the bottom of Rick’s closet there was a television set half covered by a blanket. When she returned to Soundport, she’d expected Rick to have a new set of friends in high school. But boys came so often to this house, hurrying inside and going past her without speaking, not waiting for introductions. Always they had something in their arms, wrapped up in blankets or in boxes. They hurried up the stairs to Rick’s room; she asked once why they went up to the attic. When he said, “To smoke marijuana,” she’d told him to smoke openly rather than to burn the house down. Rick was a fence. She told herself she was not going to phone William.