The Hair of Harold Roux

by Thomas Williams

  * * *

  The telephone in the hall rings, and rings again. It demands him before he can gather his objections together. It rings again. “No!” he says. Let it ring. He will not face Agnes and her wounded wrath. His shame is too deep to have been caused only by that forgetfulness.

  Except that he must answer it; never has he been able to ignore any question. When he picks the live black thing out of its screaming cradle it is only George.

  “Hey, Aaron?”

  He is grateful, immensely relieved that he can now share some of this with George. The possibility hadn’t occurred to him, and he wonders what he has come to, that he didn’t think of a friend. George has been talking excitedly, and though Aaron half hears him he is immersed in the depressing consideration that perhaps he has come to think of himself almost as an institution—older, successful (at least to George), perhaps he can no longer afford to admit to anything.

  “I don’t know exactly why we got so worried about you,” George is saying. “Anyway, you were going like a scalded cat when you went out of sight. Hey, man?”

  “Yeah, George.”

  “You all right, Aaron?”

  “I guess so. Except that …” Here, with gratitude and a full breath, he explains, each word subtly lifting the more intense pangs from whatever morbid combination of emotions has him down. “Thus have I again betrayed my family, lost the love and trust of my children, revealed my cold monstrous egocentrism …” It is almost a pleasure.

  “Wow. I’ll bet you’ve got a fist full of bourbon,” George says.

  Aaron thinks of malt and Milton, or mash and Milton, but decides that he won’t say that (is this choice, too, the finicky hesitation of age?).

  “Are you going down there?” George says. “Hey, you want to borrow my car?”

  “No, I can’t go down there now. A hundred miles. I can’t even see straight. I’ll call and tell them I broke a leg. No, HI tell them I’m terribly confused, which isn’t much of a lie …” He began by trying to be funny, and now he stops. He will call Cynthia, Agnes’ mother—at least that will solve the problem of having to speak to Agnes.

  “Come out and have supper with us then, huh? No sense sitting around getting smashed all by yourself. HI come and pick you up. Leave the motorcycle alone. I’m scared of it. It hasn’t got enough wheels on it.”

  “I don’t know, George …”

  “Listen. Helga’s made son-of-a-bitch stew. You’ve got to try it. It’s fantastic. An old recipe from her grandmother in New Mexico. Among the ingredients is the lining of the second stomach of a calf. Helga just told me that would appeal to you.”

  “She’s right, George. She’s always right.”

  “Okay, it’s all settled. HI be right over.”

  “Wait a minute,” Aaron starts to say, not necessarily to refuse, but George deliberately hangs up. George must really be worried about him, because hanging up is simply not characteristic of George unless he has developed some theory of terrible need, in which case the end justifies the means.

  Ah, well. And now Aaron must deliberately use the telephone. He must pick it up and dial. No, wait, he wants to call person-to-person, so he’s got to converse with an operator, a voice through the opaque tunnel of all those wires and switches, diodes, rectifiers, solenoids—all those words for functions he doesn’t want to understand. He’ll get himself another drink.

  He comes back and studies the first several pages of the telephone book in order to find out how to call person-to-person long distance. The pages are full of open spaces and huge typographical devices earnestly designed to make the finding of this information simple, but as usual the information comes into his tricky brain full of connotations not meant for it. “Directory Assistance,” for instance: exactly why did someone take the old word, “Information,” and change it to “Directory Assistance”? He has theories. A directory is a telephone book. They want you to look in the book. They don’t want you to be a helpless slob who can’t read the book and asks for help. So some English major figured that the term for information ought to all inside itself serve to make you stop bothering the telephone company and look in the book.

  Then he is reading: Whoever willfully and wantonly or maliciously uses a telephone facility to transmit to another any comment, request, suggestion or proposal which is obscene, lewd, lascivious or indecent …

  Wait a minute! He has to call; he simply cannot think about this language. He cannot, for instance, make up a sentence to which all of these words exactly apply. The subtle difference between “obscene” and “lewd,” for instance …

  He dials the operator and begins to explain to her his inability to read the telephone book, but she, it seems, is the one he needs after all, and he reads the number from the back cover of the book where Agnes has written it down.

  Actually it is his father-in-law, John Campbell, who first answers the phone. He would just as soon speak to John, but the operator insists upon Cynthia, who finally comes to the phone and says “Hello?” with a worried little quirk in her voice.

  “It’s me—Aaron,” he says.

  “Are you all right?” Cynthia’s young-sounding voice is really asking why he is calling her person-to-person, and they like each other because both of them are tolerant enough to answer implied questions.

  “Naturally Agnes is highly pissed off at me,” he says, “and I didn’t want to talk to her. And if feeling like a shit is all right, I’m all right.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Whatever Agnes told you was probably for your own benefit,” Aaron says.

  “I’m sure you had a reason, Aaron. Both John and I would find it impossible to believe you didn’t want to see us. It would take too much reinterpretation of former conduct.”

  “How well you put it, Cynthia! God damn, I really dig your mind! How do you put words together like that?” He feels the sliding of the whiskey. “You could cheer me up on the scaffold, you and John both. Let me put it this way, Cynthia: I had a reason for forgetting, an opportunity to feel somewhat noble, and my desire for that nobility overrode memory. Hell, anything can override my memory. Also, you’ve got to admit it isn’t exactly a pleasant drive from here to there, and that may have helped blank it out. I do wish with all my heart I was there with you now, toasting your nobility and lasting dignity and wit and love and care. In fact, in my right hand is a noble drink, as my rhetoric has no doubt already informed you, and I now toast you, Cynthia. May you and John be there forever and ever; if I didn’t believe that were somehow possible I would despair. Half of what I do seeks your approval. More than half, and I wish I were there with you right now, sober and hearty and above all—innocent.”

  She laughs, and then says seriously, “Don’t go riding your motorcycle, Aaron. You hear?”

  “Okay. And so you won’t worry I’ll tell you that George Buck, a colleague, is picking me up and taking me to his house for supper. Tell Agnes that, if she seems at all inquisitive. And give her my wretched love, and John, and the kids. Tell them Daddy’s done wrong but someday we’ll all make a new life together.”

  “You’re funny but you make me sad too, Aaron.”

  “I don’t mean to do that.”

  “Cheer up. We’ll see you soon.”

  “Thanks, Cynthia. Really I do appreciate it. I’m not really drunk, either.”

  “I know that.”

  They are both silent for a moment. He sees Cynthia Campbell, nee Holloway, his mother-in-law, standing, probably, in the kitchen, her bony hip leaning against the Formica counter, the yellow Princess telephone in the soft flesh of her neck. As she grows older, near her seventies, she is fading out of her light clothes, and her skin is somehow like wheat moving in the wind. There has always been an intimacy between them that goes just so far. Then his younger brashness goes beyond the pale and she begins not to hear him quite as well. If he were to ask her now “Are you happy? What are you wearing? Is your daughter the kind of person you wanted her
to be? Am I the sort of man you wanted her to marry?”—if he should do this and continue to do it, she would smile vaguely and have something else to do. And she would be right to hear the patronization, as though he were stating that the old people were no more real than history, a merely ornamental frame surrounding what is real.

  “I’m sure Agnes will forget it, Aaron,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says. “We can’t ever forgive, but thank God we can at least partly forget.”

  “Aaron, I’m sure it isn’t that bad.”

  “Yes, yes,” he says. “Think of all the things I haven’t done.”

  “That’s right. You’ll both get over it.” After a pause in which he thinks she wants him to say goodbye, she says, “Goodbye, Aaron.” She is fading out, fading away now.

  “Goodbye, Cynthia.” They both gently hang up.

  In one way he feels a little better, but somehow the conversation has gone too far. He thinks maybe he has blabbed too much, and a little worm of shame appears—not from his original forgetting but from the conversation itself. Christ, when is this sort of progression going to stop? His hands are shaky. They seem as weak as leaves.

  His wife and children. They are his, the three people who have gone away from him because his memory abandoned them.

  Once, before a fire on a winter evening, snow falling outside the warm house, he sat on the sofa with Janie on one side of him, Billy on the other. Billy had his feet up and was leaning back against the arm. Both were in their pajamas, washed and lively and ready for bed. Agnes sat in the easy chair next to the fireplace, a cone of yellow light from a lamp illuminating her head and shoulders and the book she had stopped reading, outlining in dark gold the now passively content, loving woman who had given him these children and also the stillness or gravity that had let him stay in one place and build this house among the trees in the small university town. It was an island not necessarily reflecting his deepest needs, but he had grown into it and here he was. Janie was six, Billy eight. Was it before Christmas, or after? And what year? No matter, it was a winter evening with the snow closing the warmth of his house within itself, the walks and driveway and the streets muffled up and blanketed away until there was no departing, even in the imagination, from this comfort. It was now all love and expectation, the bright, washed children having lost their jealous edges, softly uniformed for sleep but insisting that the last hour of wakefulness not be wasted.

  Janie held his arm in both her hands, her round face turned up toward his. “Tell the story about the old lady that smelled,” she said. Her eagerness to be enthralled by the old story gave him a power he hesitated to use. Billy said, “And the little boy! And the little girl,” he added as if to be completely fair.

  “I always forget it,” Aaron said.

  “I’ll tell you when you forget!” Janie said.

  “But if you know it better than me, why don’t you tell it?”

  “No! You tell it! Come on, Daddy!” Janie was kind and forgiving, except at times toward her brother, but the idea that she might have to tell the story she wanted to hear was bad, teasing, beyond toleration. Anger and frustration darkened her eyes.

  “Yeah,” Billy said, kicking him in the leg. “It’s your story and you tell it. Come on, Dad. ‘Once upon a time there was a family named Hemlock …’ Come on!”

  “Who lived either before or after …” Janie said.

  “In a log cabin on the side of the Mountain,” Billy said.

  “Mount Gloam,” Aaron said. “The darkest mountain of all.”

  “That’s right!” They both settled in, having primed him, the big presence moving their way, the one who could at times be weary, bored, illogical, asleep or gone. They must feel, he thought, the wonder of their occasional control of one of those dark, mountainous adults who had so much arbitrary power. But it was the power their attention gave him that he used with fear and care, hardly daring to look at their faces as he told the story. A phrase, a deepening of his voice, even a single word could cause in them real sorrow, anxiety or joy, and when he saw that he had caused such deep emotion he would feel the story with their reality and lose his voice.

  Perhaps it was the past (he began), but if so it was a different past. Perhaps it will be, but then how do we know the story? All we know is that once upon a time there was a family named Hemlock, who lived either before or after, in a log cabin on the side of the Mountain, Mount Gloam, the darkest mountain of all. Eugenia was the mother, Tim the father, Janie and Billy the children. No other people lived in houses for a hundred miles of forests and meadows and swamps, lakes and rivers blue and unnamed where the swift animals lived in their ways, running and flying, and the slow animals blinked away their long years.

  Tim Hemlock was a hunter, a maker of things, and a farmer; his two small fields were the only ones cultivated for a hundred miles around. He was a silent, thoughtful man, kind to his family and to his animals, though at times he seemed to hear voices that made him sad and stern. He watched and listened most of the time, as a hunter must.

  In the Hemlocks’ log cabin, Janie, who was six, was helping her mother with the big wooden butter churn, spelling her mother while the clabber was new and the crank easy to turn. Billy, who was eight, was out in the cold-storage cave that was dug into the hill behind the cabin, helping his father cut the venison jerky that they would dry in long strips in the short-lived October sun. For it was fall, the time before the cold storms would come with the white hiss of snow over Gloam Mountain, and they must prepare for the long dark season when the days were short and the wind like frozen iron, when their cow, Oka, and their ox, Brin, and the three goats and the pig would barely heat the small barn with their bodies, and in the cabin the fireplace would burn by day and ember by night, eating the precious cords of hardwood Billy and his father had stacked under the long eaves after Brin had hauled them from the woods on the iron-shod sledge.

  In the kitchen Eugenia was singing, her long brown hair in braids Janie had woven, her blue eyes as clear as the October sky. She sang the butter song. Sometimes Janie sang along with her, but sometimes she just listened to her mother’s sweet voice as she sang.

  “Out of night comes daylight.

  Out of thin comes thick.

  Oka knows how butter grows

  So turn the paddles quick.”

  In the storage cave, on the thick maple table by the door, Billy’s knife sliced the dark red venison into the thinnest ribbons. His father was quicker and his ribbons of meat thinner and longer, but his father told him he was doing well.

  “You must be quick and careful with the gift the deer have given us,” he said. “Remember, we do nothing for the deer as we do for Oka and Brin, the pig and the goats. The deer feed themselves and nearly starve every winter, and we don’t help them at all, so their flesh is a gift to us.”

  “Like the salmon in the river,” Billy said.

  Now, the Hemlocks were all expecting the Traveler, who came once a year in his long canoe. Every once in a while Billy or Janie would stop what they were doing and look down into the valley to the river, wondering with excitement if they could see the Traveler’s canoe in the distance as he poled his way up the rapids to the last landing of all. Every October he brought them lead ingots for rifle balls; saltpeter and sulfur for making black powder; salt, oil, steel, iron strapping, needles and flint. If Tim Hemlock had a good year of hunting and trapping and a good winter at the forge beside the barn, and if Eugenia and Janie had a good winter making the beautiful deerskin moccasins decorated with porcupine quills they cut into beads and strung on thread (I forgot to say that Billy pumped the bellows for his father!), there would be skins and fur, the Tim Hemlock knives of steel and deer horn that couldn’t be duplicated anywhere, the most beautiful moccasins in the world to trade, and the Traveler would return to his canoe and bring them licorice, powdered chocolate, tea, tobacco and other things they enjoyed but didn’t really need …

  “They didn’t need the tobacco
,” Billy Benham said.

  “You forgot the colored ribbons,” Janie Benham added.

  And colored ribbons. So it happened that Janie, having taken her turn at the butter churn, went to the cabin door thinking she might be the first to see the Traveler’s canoe on the blue river. As she opened the door …

  “There was the old lady!” Janie Benham said. Her hands kneaded his arm, their small strength great in her excitement. Her blue eyes were wide in anticipation, the whites showing all around, pure as the whitest milk. She breathed fast, waiting with an intense expectation for what she knew was coming. Billy, too, though a little cooler, stared at him, at the scene, waiting.

  … As she opened the door she jumped back with a cry, for standing there, absolutely still, was a person, a small person all in brown, her brown deerskin dress touching the ground. It was an old, old woman, her hair thin and white, her old face as brown as her deerskin clothes. She didn’t speak or change her expression, just stood there with her bright old eyes staring at Janie. Her face was covered with wrinkles so deep, crisscrossing like the cracks in the mud of a dried pond, that her face looked like it could have been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle. Between the wrinkles her skin was as smooth and shiny as shoe polish. In her hands she held a basket made of water reeds.

  Janie’s mother had heard her cry and came quickly to the door. She was startled, too, because the Hemlocks hadn’t had a visitor other than the Traveler for many years.

  “Who are you?” Eugenia asked, but the old woman didn’t move or say a word. Only her brilliant old eyes moved from Janie to Eugenia, then into the open door of the cabin as if she were looking for someone else.

  “Go tell your father,” Eugenia said to Janie, who made a wide circle around the old woman and ran to the storage cave.

  “There’s an old brown woman!” Janie said. She felt like crying as she tried to tell her father and Billy, she was so excited and upset. “At the door! She scared me!”