Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  The doctor swabs the wound with an orange substance that smells a little like creosote, then wraps it with gauze, around and around the thumb, securing it with strips of adhesive tape until it looks like a small mummy. “It’s going to throb for a while, so I’ll write you out a prescription for some pain pills.” No argument on that from Buster. “You’ll need to keep it clean. Change the bandage every day.”

  “I don’t know how,” Buster says obstinately.

  For the first time, the doctor looks exasperated. “Can you change his bandage, Miz Birdsong?”

  She is so mad now, she can hardly speak. “Yes. I’ll change his bandage.” She gets up from the stool, trembling. “Pay the bill, Buster,” she snaps. “I’ll be in the car.” And she turns on her heel, feeling both their eyes on her as she stalks out.

  It takes ten minutes for Buster to reach the car, but she is still seething, the anger gnawing at her empty stomach like a small razor-toothed animal. He has barely closed the door before she lurches away from the curb in front of the hospital and roars onto Birdsong Boulevard. Buster seems not to notice. He slumps against the door, staring vacantly out the window; he is somewhere far off, perhaps on a landing craft chugging toward some white-hot beach. He was wounded and decorated at Iwo Jima, she knows that. And there had been Korea. Is that what got him in hot water in Korea, his bullheadedness? She doesn’t want to know. She has had a bellyful of Buster Putnam this morning.

  But they have gone scarcely a block before her anger gets the better of her. She turns suddenly and barks at him, “Why did you do that?”

  “Do what?” Buster says absently.

  “What are you trying to do to yourself?”

  He rouses himself from wherever he has been, turns to her with an odd look, holding his injured hand gingerly, as if it belonged to somebody else. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “That…” Her voice shakes. Her hands grip the steering wheel like a vise. “That performance in there.”

  He turns away again, looks out the window.

  “Do you think if you hurt yourself enough you’ll find out who you are? Good Lord, Buster. That house, falling down around your ears, the hole in the roof, the way you live”—she is fairly sputtering now, the words pouring out in a torrent—“that … that thumb!”

  He stares at her for a moment, then says mildly, “Don’t you think you’d better slow down?”

  She realizes suddenly that she is driving much too fast. The old Plymouth is groaning and shaking as it hurtles down the long gentle hill that Birdsong Boulevard takes from the hospital to town, houses on either side whizzing by.

  “How I drive is my business!” she bellows, infuriated now.

  “And how I act is my business,” Buster says. “So if you’ll just pull over to the curb here and let me out, I’ll walk home and let you proceed on like Fireball Roberts.”

  She twists the steering wheel and jams on the brake and the car slews to a stop against the curb, the right front tire bumping up on the grass of somebody’s lawn, just missing a nandina bush and jostling both of them thoroughly. Buster reaches out with his good hand and braces himself against the dashboard until the car bounces to a stop. But he doesn’t say a word until he has opened the door and climbed out, taking his own sweet time about it, then stuck his head back in the open window.

  “And what about you, Bright?”

  It startles her. “What … ?”

  “Sitting over there so quiet in that big house of yours. What are you hiding from? Are you trying to figure out who you are too?”

  It stuns her. “You go to hell, Buster Putnam!” she cries. And he withdraws his head quickly before she takes it off, stomping the gas again and bumping back onto Birdsong Boulevard with a nasty roar of the Plymouth’s engine and a belch of gray smoke from the tail pipe, leaving Buster standing by the nandina bush. She doesn’t look back. Damn him! Who does he think he is!

  A block from home the car begins to sputter, the engine cutting in and out. Bright bangs her hand on the dashboard in anger and, with that, the car quits entirely. She shoves the gearshift into neutral and rolls to a stop against the curb, then sets the hand brake and sits there for a moment, boiling, muttering under her breath at Buster Putnam and the aging Plymouth. Both of them are old and ornery. She doesn’t know what is wrong with Buster, but she has no doubt about the Plymouth. Vapor lock. That’s what Big Deal O’Neill calls it, vapor lock. When the car gets overheated, the gasoline in the fuel line vaporizes. And the engine quits. Arzell, Big Deal’s chief mechanic at the Ford dealership, has clamped wooden clothespins along the length of the fuel line to absorb the heat, and things are fine as long as Bright doesn’t drive too far on a hot day or push the car too hard. Which she has just done.

  There is no use sitting here. Nothing to do but abandon the car. Later, she will send Big Deal to pick it up and have Arzell tinker with it some more. Big Deal is patient with Bright and her Plymouth, even though he is a Ford man. There is no longer a Plymouth dealer in town, and besides, Big Deal and Little Fitz Birdsong have been lifelong friends.

  So Bright gets out of the car, leaves the key in the ignition, walks the rest of the way home, calming herself as she goes. Enough of Buster Putnam, she decides. He can fall through the roof, cut off his head with a table saw for all she cares. She won’t be responsible.

  As she passes the Methodist parsonage, several doors down from her own, she thinks, That’s what’s got your bowels in an uproar, Bright Birdsong. Responsibility. For a few minutes there, she felt just a tiny bit responsible for Buster Putnam. It is a bad old habit she has meant to be rid of. Responsibility. For most of her life it has been her great burden—the aches, sufferings, worries about the people she has felt responsible for, those who had claim on her life and her heart. She realizes that she has largely defined herself by her responsibilities. She has a great sense of having poured her own life into the people she felt responsible for, then giving them up—parents, children, husband. Children she has been giving up since the beginning, with the sadness that came from releasing them from the womb. And Fitzhugh, dead on the sidewalk in front of the Commercial Bank before either of them had a chance to set things right.

  No, the devil with responsibilities. She wants no burden. No Buster Putnam with his life flaking away like weathered paint, no Roseann, no Little Fitz. They will come and go this week, and she will bear up as gracefully as possible. But she will welcome their leaving. No, Buster Putnam, I know exactly who I am. A woman who just wants to be quiet. It is precious little to ask after a long life filled with noise. Enough is enough.

  Once home, Bright shakes herself free of it and busies herself with routine. First to the backyard to retrieve Gladys’s empty dish, wash it out with the garden hose, and place it on the steps to dry in the morning sun. Then she drags the hose across the yard to splash the birdbath full of water while the birds scold her tardiness from the trees above. She coils the hose neatly beneath the kitchen window and goes back in the house, pours a cup of coffee in the kitchen and takes it to the front porch, sits in a wicker rocking chair, sipping the coffee and watching Claxton Avenue wake to the morning. It is seven-thirty. A refrigerated delivery truck throbs at the front of the Dixie Vittles across the way. The car that had been parked in front is gone, perhaps already home now with a batch of rutabagas. Big Deal O’Neill unlocks the door at his Ford dealership halfway down on Claxton. A steady stream of cars tops the rise on the River Bridge from the new subdivision beyond and traffic has picked up along Birdsong. It is already warm, even out here in the shade of the porch, the new sun climbing white and hot above the trees beyond the river. The quiet, best part of the morning is gone. But Bright means to collect her wits between now and midmorning, when Roseann arrives. She will need her wits for Roseann.

  And then, for some reason she can’t fathom, she thinks of Rhapsody in Blue.

  It happens to her often, has, in fact, for all her life. Snatches of music pop into her head and then grow,
passages repeating themselves and giving birth to others, sometimes staying with her all day until she drifts into sleep with melodies and words finally fading. It has become something of a game, trying to figure out where they come from and why. Why Rhapsody in Blue this particular morning?

  Whatever the reason, the music dances in her mind, piano and orchestra, bits and pieces from the score, until finally she gives in to it, sets her coffee cup down on the table beside the wicker chair and goes into the parlor, opens the phonograph cabinet, gets out the album she brought home from Washington in 1942, a gift from Fitzhugh. It is a two-record set of oversized 78’s in a cardboard sleeve. There is a picture of a champagne glass on the cover, musical notes rising like bubbles from the glass. It takes one side of each of the thick vinyl discs to get through Rhapsody in Blue. On the other record is An American in Paris. George Gershwin himself at the piano with Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, the original version from the masters. She has heard the piece played without interruption by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops on television, but it seems strange without the pause for the records to change. She prefers the old 78’s, the tiny clicks and scratches like static from an ancient radio, recalling sounds long lost in the ether. Bright stacks the records on the changer, and by the time she gets back to her rocker it has begun—the low trill of the solo clarinet climbing to a siren wail, high and lonesome, beckoning magic.

  Sitting now on her front porch with the music drifting through the screen door from the living room, it all rushes back, speaking of time forever lost. It was supposed to be so different. He was supposed to come home from Washington satisfied that he had made an indelible mark on history, satisfied to grow old with Bright in the company of this small Southern town that had revered him and sent him to Congress as many times as he cared to go. And then they would make amends and nobody would have to choose anymore, nobody would have to win or lose. But it took Fitzhugh just two weeks after he’d come home to drop dead of a heart attack, to leave her with the terrible, numbing sense of being abandoned again.

  Bright Birdsong does not want to think about all this here on her front porch on this warm June morning. Or does she? Why has she put Rhapsody in Blue on the phonograph, if not to stir up old haints and poisons? She just wants to be quiet, to be left alone. Doesn’t she? And she wants very much not to be mad as hell at Fitzhugh Birdsong. But she is.

  2

  Nine o’clock, Bright finally preparing her own breakfast, thick round slices of banana on a bowl of Post Raisin Bran.

  She tried to ignore the knocking at the front door, hoping that whoever it was would give up and go away. But it was persistent, and she finally put the knife and the half-peeled banana down on the counter and wiped her hands on a dish towel, then stepped to the breakfast room doorway to see Flavo Richardson standing on the porch. Flavo, unmistakable even in silhouette with the bright morning at his back, short and a bit stooped from age and struggle. Bright smiled. Beginning with the day Flavo Richardson had arrived with his rowboat to rescue Bright and Little Fitz from the Great Flood of 1939, he had always come to the front door. Neither of them would have it any other way.

  “Whoever you are,” Bright called from the breakfast room doorway, “go away. I don’t want to buy any Bibles or detergent.”

  “You’re gonna wish I was selling Bibles or detergent,” Flavo said somberly.

  Bright walked to the screen door and opened it. Flavo looked decidedly sour this June morning. He was holding a newspaper.

  “Why doesn’t a smart woman like you take the newspaper, Bright?” he asked.

  “Because newspapers are fractious and noisome,” she said.

  “Humph,” he grunted, and handed her the paper, carefully folded to show a picture and article on the front page. The bold black headline said, “FITZ DIDDLES?” Below it, a picture of a man and a woman on the porch of a house, obviously taken at night, with a flashbulb that cast stark shadows on the wall behind them. The man was wearing only boxer shorts and a look of desperate surprise. The woman, clutching a robe tightly about her, didn’t look surprised at all. Bright had never seen the woman, but the man was her son, Governor Fitz Birdsong. And she recognized the porch as that of the old camp house her father, Dorsey Bascombe the lumberman, had built several miles up-river, a very private place deep in a pine forest next to the river. There, on the wall between Fitz and the woman, was the horseshoe Dorsey had nailed up when he finished the camp house in 1919. Dorsey had believed in things like luck and romance. At least, he had in 1919.

  Bright looked up from the paper at Flavo. “This morning’s paper?”

  “Yep.”

  She read:

  Governor Fitz Birdsong denied vehemently Sunday that any impropriety was involved in his meeting with a young woman at a rural house in Sumiton County early Sunday morning. An Enquirer-Journal reporter and photographer, acting on an anonymous telephone tip, surprised the scantily clad couple about 3:00 A.M. Birdsong at first denied he was the governor, then ordered the Enquirer-Journal reporter and photographer from the property. The woman identified herself as Drucilla Luckworst, 27, a cocktail waitress from Columbus.

  Sunday, the Birdsong campaign headquarters issued a statement that read in part: “Governor Fitzhugh Birdsong was resting alone after an arduous day of campaigning at his family’s Sumiton County hunting lodge Saturday night when he was roused from sleep by a woman’s voice on the front porch of the lodge. When Governor Birdsong stepped onto the porch to inquire about the commotion, a photographer lurking in the yard suddenly snapped a picture of the scene. Governor Birdsong had never seen the woman before, and is convinced that the entire business is a last-minute and desperate attempt to smear his good name by despicable elements in the camp of his opponent in the governor’s race.”

  “Great God,” Bright said with a sharp intake of breath, as if someone had punched her in the stomach. She looked up at Flavo, back down at the paper. “Hunting lodge,” she said after a moment. “It never was a hunting lodge. My father never hunted a day in his life. It was a camp house, not a hunting lodge.” She read on:

  Governor Birdsong’s wife, Lavonia, reached at the Governor’s mansion shortly after the picture-taking incident, said she did not know her husband’s whereabouts. “He said he was going to be all weekend at a strategy meeting,” Mrs. Birdsong said.

  Miss Luckworst, contacted at her Columbus apartment Sunday, refused further comment on the affair, and referred reporters’ questions to her attorney.

  Lieutenant Governor Maurice Calhoun, Birdsong’s opponent in the June 10 Democratic runoff, was unavailable for comment. His press aide did not return the Enquirer-Journal’s telephone calls.

  There was more. “Please turn to Page 6,” it said at the bottom of the article. Instead, she handed the paper back to Flavo, who was standing there with his arms crossed, studying her closely. He tucked the paper under one arm. “Well, are you going to make me stand here on the porch like some common jigaboo, or are you going to invite me in like proper folks?”

  She opened the door wider for him, letting more of the morning in. “Excuse me. I forgot my manners. I guess I’m a little …”

  “Hmmmm. Yes.” He stepped past her, stood for a moment in the middle of the cluttered parlor.

  “Do you want a cup of coffee?” she asked.

  “I don’t drink the foul stuff. It rusts your bowels. I’ll take a glass of ice water if you have it.”

  He had seated himself on the sofa when she returned with the glass of water. She handed it to him, sat down heavily in the wing-back chair across from him. The newspaper was open on the coffee table, Little Fitz and Drucilla Luckworst staring up at them in bold black and white. Flavo crossed one thin leg over the other, took a sip of his ice water, uncrossed his legs, drummed his fingers against the glass, crossed his legs the other way.

  Bright sat staring at the newspaper for a long time, finally took a deep breath and asked, “What do you think?”

  Flavo pursed his
lips. “I hope he’s been framed.”

  She shook her head. “I hope so too,” she said. “But I tell you this, it’s mighty strange that he was at the camp house by himself Saturday night instead of coming on here to stay with me. And another thing is, he hasn’t called me yet.” She tapped the paper with her finger. “This says it happened Saturday night. Here it is Monday morning and I have to find out in the newspaper.”

  “Are you going to give him the benefit of the doubt?”

  Bright handed the paper back. “I’m just saying what I think.”

  Flavo looked up at the ceiling. “He had it won,” he said. “Fitz had it in the bag. No way Calhoun could have caught him.”

  “Had?”

  “Yes, had. This”—he pointed at the paper—“puts everything somewhat in doubt.”

  “But what if he was framed,” Bright said, realizing as she said it that “what if” was a kind of passing judgment. Was Little Fitz Birdsong capable of a midnight tryst with a cocktail waitress? Was any man?

  Flavo snorted. “We vote a week from tomorrow, Bright. You know politics, you of all people …”

  “Damn politics,” she said.

  “Damn it all you want, but it’s a fact of life. It’s the way things get done. Not just this business”—he waved at the newspaper—“but all the other, too. You’ve been up to your neck in it all your life.”

  There was a tinge of disgust in his voice. Flavo Richardson was a little like Gladys, she thought. Neither had any truck with nonsense. “Politics is the art of what’s real,” he went on, “and what’s real is what folks think, not what the truth may be. Damn the truth if you want, but don’t damn politics.”

  Bright thought about that for a moment. “So you think Fitz has lost?”

  “I didn’t say that. But he’s got eight days to convince folks that this”—he indicated the paper again—“ain’t real. Especially white folks.”