Home from the Hill

by William Humphrey

  “What do you mean? Are you going to get a divorce?”

  “Nome! No divorce! What I want,” she said, lowering her voice, only then to raise it for the next: “is a nullment!” From the way her eyes shone as she uttered the word you would have thought it was a process by which virginity was restored.

  “And so you’ve come to get my husband’s help,” said Mrs. Hannah.

  Opal blushed. She was reminded of the scene yesterday in which for the last time Verne had uttered the Captain’s name.

  “Tell me,” said Mrs. Hannah. “What makes you think he will help you?”

  “He knows what I had to put up with from Verne,” she said. And then she thought at last of a way of changing the subject: under the blanket she gave the baby a pinch. It groaned. “Oh, mama’s little man! Mama forgot all about him. Oh, my, my, my.” She rocked him against her breast.

  “He’s very quiet, isn’t he?” said Mrs. Hannah.

  “Yessum, he’s a real good little baby,” she said, and again she blushed. Talk about babies always reminded her of how they came, and her own was especially delicate that way.

  “May I see him?” said Mrs. Hannah. “Which does he favor, you or his daddy?”

  Again Opal blushed, this time because there was a certain small area of uncertainty in her mind as to just whom he would have to favor to favor his daddy. “Me,” she said. She drew aside the blanket and pulled back the bonnet.

  The little seamy-faced creature did favor Opal, because it favored mass humanity, and of that Opal was assuredly a child herself. But to Mrs. Hannah there was another resemblance. Satisfied, she tucked the covers back around the little face.

  “What you’re after takes time,” she said. “If you won’t go back to your husband and can’t go back home to your father, what do you mean to do?”

  “How long does it take?”

  “Weeks, I should imagine.”

  “Oh.”

  “Have you any relatives, any friends here in town?”

  Relatives, friends, in town? Her? She could not even imagine it. She shook her head.

  “Perhaps I could use you around the house.”

  “You could?”

  “I’ve taken a fancy to you. I like you, Opal.”

  “You wouldn’t if you knowed what Verne said,” she said, and could have bit her tongue.

  Mrs. Hannah smiled. What simplicity! “About me?” she said. And then she thought again, a child, a veritable child, absolutely defenceless.

  “Oh, nome!” said Opal, coloring. “I mean … I mean what he said about me.”

  About you and my husband, said Mrs. Hannah to herself. Aloud she said, “Well, you needn’t worry any more about what Verne says. You’ve come to the right place.”

  40

  It was a family custom, a rite, so rigidly observed that only physical indisposition was allowed to keep one away, to gather in the drawing room a quarter hour before dinner. Even in these late days, when none of them had anything to say, when each would rather have avoided the others, they all came glumly together. It was for this occasion that Mrs. Hannah, who believed she had to defend herself against Theron’s suspicions that she had lied about his father, saved Opal.

  Because each of them would have preferred not to see either of the other two, each saw to it that both of the others were there before putting in an appearance. Thus at the same moment Theron descended the stairs, the Captain emerged from the den, and Mrs. Hannah, with Opal, came from the kitchen.

  “Opal, you know my husband,” she said. “This is my son, Theron.”

  “We’ve met,” said Theron in astonishment—to which Opal nodded bashfully. He remembered their meeting. He remembered her husband’s wondering aloud whether he was the father of her child. He remembered her taunting him about it. He remembered her hiding behind his father and he remembered his father’s displeasure, uneasiness. He remembered the long, dawning look on Verne’s face as he stared at his wife and at his boss. Most of all he remembered the unexpected lack of chivalry his father had shown in sitting unmoved at the table, as if he had not even noticed, when Verne knocked his wife sprawling and sat down and again stared at him, daring him to interfere.

  Involuntarily he looked at his father now. Memory of all this was apparent in his face too. Guilt and shame were apparent on his face, too, and Theron quickly looked away. It seemed a long time since anyone had spoken. He said, “You … you’ve had your baby,” hardly knowing what he said. For Opal, for this presentation, had diked the baby out in his complete best, though her backwardness made her now wish she had not, made her hold him back, almost hide him.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Hannah in a loud unnatural voice, “Opal has had a baby.”

  There was, thought Theron, something in her words and in her tone meant for him, some meaning he was meant to catch. He refused to. “Boy or girl?” he said.

  “A boy,” said Mrs. Hannah. “Yes, Opal? A big bouncing boy.”

  “How is Verne?” said the Captain, and to anyone his tone would have seemed to demand to know what on earth she was doing here.

  “Opal has left Verne,” said Mrs. Hannah. “Verne was not good to her. Opal has not said this, but I suspect he was not good to the baby either. So she has left him and has come to you, Wade.” She saw him jump slightly at that, and she felt a thrill of triumph. “She says you know what she had to put up with from him. And her daddy won’t take her back. So she has turned to you. Yes, Opal?”

  The facts were right, but, remembering her husband’s insane suspicions of the Captain, Opal found in Mrs. Hannah’s arrangement of them something that hindered her assent. If she only knew what Verne had said, and how that made what she had just said sound! Assent, after a moment, Opal did, but her thoughts colored her face with a deep blush.

  “Opal is the daughter of Ollie Jessup, Theron,” said his mother. “One of your father’s tenants.”

  He knew Ollie Jessup. A craven, whining creature, and the thought came to him that Ollie would have taken anything sooner than complain of his boss, that he might have taken a little money for not complaining. He was sick with disgust—sick most at the disgusting thoughts of which his mind was capable.

  “So naturally she turns to him when she’s in trouble,” Mrs. Hannah was saying. “Yes, Opal?”

  “Verne too,” said Opal, and her unfortunate backwardness brought another suffusion of red to her face.

  “Pardon?” said Mrs. Hannah.

  “Verne too,” said Opal. “Captain Wade found me and Verne a place too.” And she thought of the cause of their need for a place and how urgent the need was and of the deception she was not sure but what she was practicing upon Verne, and she thought that if he was deceived it was not entirely, and all these things dyed her scarlet from her collar to the roots of her hair. And then from under her brows she looked for the first time at the Captain, and a fresh wave of red followed the one just ebbing from her face when she saw his scowl.

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Hannah.

  “What is it you want me to do?” said the Captain, and he, for the first time in his life, blushed.

  Opal was too tongue-tied to utter a word.

  Mrs. Hannah allowed the silence to steep for a moment, then said, “Opal wants you to help her get ‘a nullment.’”

  “I’ll see what I can do for you,” the Captain muttered, and Mrs. Hannah rejoiced at the hatred in his voice.

  “I told her she could count on you,” said Mrs. Hannah. Turning to the girl, she said, “All, Opal, if only you had gotten a husband like mine!” and she had the satisfaction of seeing her glow like a stovelid. Turning back to her husband she said, “I know you will approve what I’ve done. Since Opal has nowhere to go I have taken her in. She will stay with us while you’re getting her decree for her—she and the baby, of course.”

  The Captain’s mind went back years, to that period when she had made a practice of taking up with every woman who took his fancy. He had thought then, and had continued to think
until this moment, that she had been not only blind but downright dense. Now he knew that he had never fooled her. Like Albert Halstead, she knew all about him. He was so surprised that he almost forgot he was innocent in this case.

  Mrs. Hannah was saying, “Opal, show them the baby. She says it doesn’t favor Verne. Of course I don’t know Verne. You know Verne, Theron,” she said, and turned. But Theron was not there.

  41

  She was busy, she said, with a dingy flash of teeth and a roll of reddened eyeballs, standing in the doorway in a bright red chenille robe, through the opening of which with indifferent pride she allowed one soft white thigh to show. In the yellow light of the lamp inside, through his drunken haze he saw a dimly lighted doorway in the rear. The room sent forth a hot, rank, rutty smell. Wait, she said.

  He waited his turn, wondering who the man was inside, half relishing the imminent meeting with him. Apparently, however, when finished you left by the back door—no doubt an arrangement to spare the customers, the paid and the prospective, that moment of recognition he had been anticipating—for after a while she reappeared, and smiling around the doorjamb, said, “Awrighty. Who’s next?”

  First had been the whiskey, the spirit of which was still strongly with him, though he had lost the substance in a fit of retching. To find the whiskey had been easy. Not so easy, however, had been to buy it. It had not been easy to bear being thought by Hubb Lewis too good a boy to take the downhill path to which he kept the gate. Not easy to bear having to calm Hubb’s fear of his father.

  Here now he got no lectures. She praised him. Yessir! He knew how! She’d bet he had had plenty of experience! Not so much experience, he said to himself: he just came by it naturally.

  The cry of the baby in the house woke him early the next morning. He awoke sick. His slightest movement made his stomach flutter, his head throb. Listening to the distant wail of the child, he stared at the ceiling. Soon the baby’s crying ceased. Listening, he could see the scene: Opal unbuttoning her blouse, blushingly offering the baby her heavy, swollen breast. Countrified Opal, crude yet bashful, slatternly, childish Opal, who, assuming she had wanted to, would not have dared resist her father’s boss and landlord. And despite himself, in his throbbing brain he then imagined the scene of intimacy between his father and Opal, modeling it upon his own two experiences combined.

  He tried to get up, but to move nauseated him. He lay staring at the ceiling. He seemed, after a time, to see through it into the attic overhead. Just over the spot at which he was looking must be the boxes on which he and Libby had sat as they ate lunch together that day. He had not been back up there since then—or rather, since the evening of that day, when he returned to get the core of the apple they had shared, and from which Melba had prophesied happiness for his love. So far as he knew, no one had been in the attic since then; it must be just as they had left it. He turned (though even turning his head caused it to throb, caused his stomach to flutter) to look at the corner of the ceiling. The door of the attic should be just above that spot, and on the floor beside the door, where it had fallen when she threw it at him playfully, must still lie the toy telephone over which he had first, with her encouragement, made love to her.

  He sat up. His head swam, his stomach heaved.

  He dressed and stole out on the landing and to the door of the attic. He opened the door and smelled the dusty smell, unlike the smell of any other place. He climbed the steps, wondering what drew him there. Did he expect the memory of that innocent day to annihilate all that had intervened, or did he go, with the stain of last night upon him, hoping to defile the place?

  The toy phone was where he expected it would be, and, holding the cylinder to his ear, he found still echoing in it the words she had spoken to him that day. The string still seemed to vibrate with her laughter, and when he lowered the phone and stared at the spot where she had stood and then, still holding the carton, walked there as she had drawn him to her that day, he heard again her husky, “Hello.”

  The boxes on which they had sat as they shared the lunch he had sneaked up still stood in the aisle into which he had drawn them, and behind hers he found the handkerchief he had lent her for a napkin, and on it the faint pink print of her lips.

  He sat in the spot where he had sat then, and he looked at the spot where she had stood beside the fan window. She had turned to him, her eyes sparkling with excitement beneath her dark lashes, her hair still sparkling with raindrops, and he had wanted suddenly to kiss her. He had not. He had not kissed her even later that morning, when she would not have minded if he had. A moment later she had been glad, grateful, that he had not kissed her just then and there. Such things as that had taught her to trust him. He had trusted himself then. He had thought then that that pure-minded, chivalrous Theron Hunnicutt was the real him.

  He pressed his head in his palms to still its throbbing, and closed his eyes. When he opened them he saw upon the box on which Libby had sat that day a label inscribed in his mother’s hand, Theron. He raised the lid. A newspaper covered the contents. He lifted it and saw a collection of his toys. He saw a telegraph template and key, a spur, a roller skate. He removed these things and found a fishing reel, a leather aviator’s cap with goggles, a stamp album. Removing these revealed a tobacco sack full of marbles, a dollar watch on a plaited leather chain with a beaded fob, a book, a battered top, a first grade school paper of Spencerian push-ups and whorls. Then he found a diary of his. Below, on the bottom of the box, were relics of his infancy: a baby rattle, a teething ring, and the souvenir of his weaning, his mother’s breast pump.

  He sat down again and opened the diary. The flyleaf was inscribed, “Merry Christmas to Theron, from Mama with love. Only you will read what you write in this book, but write nothing you would not have everybody read.” He turned to the first page, which was headed Tuesday, January 1, 1935, and read his first entry—appropriately enough, a list of New Year’s Resolutions:

  1. To keep this diary (and the way Mama says).

  2. Chin myself 25 times per day.

  3. Do my lessons early instead of at the last minute.

  4. Be thoughtful of others.

  Apparently he had had to study to think of any possible improvements. Had he kept even those undisturbing resolves? He had kept the first, at least—kept it for a time, anyway—for about two months, to be more exact. He had, “Received letter from penpal Roger Duncan in Dundee, Scotland. Very interesting. Went to visit Grandma. Rode Daisy.” Queen had had a litter of seven, and Papa had killed an albino (white) squirrel. There was not much space, not much more than an inch—for it was a five-year diary—allotted to each day; but for those days that had sufficed him. It had been enough to record the receipt of his first rifle, his first hunt, and after that more than enough; after that the pages turned blank. The blank pages were a record, too—more eloquent than the written ones—of days too full and inconsequent to be written up—busy, thoughtless, happy days.

  The next New Year, bringing with it another conventional time of spiritual inventory, had reminded him of his diary, and again he had taken resolutions, again rather self-complacently general and vague, rather a variation on the first set, among them one to keep this diary. He had not done much better at that on second try, he thought, shuffling the blank pages which, beginning shortly after, continued to the end.

  Flicking the pages, he was stopped by the dateline of one of them towards the end. He turned back to it. A sensation of eeriness tickled his scalp. It was today. The blank page returned his blank stare. He had a sense of being watched, and he glanced furtively behind him. This diary, begun when boyish dreams of grand exploits filled his life, ran up to this very day. When he made those entries in it he had held in his hand the spaces waiting to receive the account of last night, and of that other night. He turned the pages back to that other night—August 31, and stared at its virginal whiteness.

  It was one of those diaries with a loop stitched in the back cover and in the loop was a mini
ature mechanical pencil. Removing the pencil and running out its lead, he wrote:

  Which do I hate most—my father for being a reprobate or my mother for telling me tonight that he is—or myself for having just proved that she was right?

  He put the pencil back in its loop and closed the book. A cabinet across the room caught his eye. It seemed familiar. In another moment he remembered it. Laying aside the diary, he got up, stepped over the row of cartons, and went to it. Yes, it was the cabinet in which was mounted his old butterfly collection. He drew out the top drawer. Dust lay thick upon the glass cover. He drew out the tray. Once purple, the plush now was greenish. This tray was of Lepidoptera Fritillary, and the first, though dry, brittle, faded, was still recognizable as Argynnis Cybele. This with the fiery-tipped wings was Argynnis Diana, this speckled one Argynnis Idalia. He was pleased to have remembered their names without having to consult the legend on the side of the tray. But not all were recognizable; some were quite ghostly. He bent close over one pale, characterless specimen, and its wings evaporated into dust from his breath, leaving a frail and sapless little skeleton impaled upon the rusty pin.

  He drew back in momentary surprise. Then, sweeping his hand across the tray he crumbled all the butterflies to powder.

  He returned to the toy box and dumped the things back into it, resolved to burn them.

  But on the way downstairs a better plan struck him.

  About an hour later Mrs. Hannah came into the den and was horrified, when after a moment she recognized them, to discover Opal’s baby sprawled in a clutter of pages torn from a postage stamp album, with one hand banging a rattle, already in a precious state of decay, and with the other banging a watch upon the floor, all Theron’s, all of which she had saved, had put into a special box, his old toy box, in the attic. She swooped down upon the loathsome child and wrenched the watch from its hand, and then her horror suddenly took quite a different turn. She stifled the cry of outrage she had been about to loose upon the baby, and her grip upon the watch, the rattle, the book, a top, all of which things she had been gathering to her breast, relaxed. One by one the things fell back upon the floor. She shuddered, rose, straightened herself. A dizziness, quite physical, dimmed her sight for a moment, and her walk as she made her way to the door was suddenly much altered. Suddenly she was no longer herself, but an old woman.