“I don’t know.”
“When? Tell me when.”
“No, Dick. No! No! For God’s sake, can’t you see—— Oh, I’m getting so stewed … I’m getting——” She flung her head into his lap, squeezing his leg with her hand. He didn’t flinch but looked straight ahead and said nothing as the car plowed through the mist, the green ineffable morning. A wood of oaks and pines appeared, two plain pillars of brick flanking the entrance to a gravel road; they turned off here. Half a mile beyond stood the house, deserted and silent. They passed over a small causeway which spanned the pond. Somewhere among the whitewashed outhouses, which had once been slave quarters, a rooster crowed. Huge oaks arched over the driveway, and as they drove up, the car caused terror among a flock of geese, which fled their advance in clumsy haste, emitting honks of dismay.
“Harvey must be up,” Dick said, “I never saw such an energetic nigger.” Peyton didn’t answer, only raised her head a bit and let it fall again in Dick’s lap. Her face was as pale as death.
With coffee they revived themselves a little. Still tense and nervous, they were too tired to sleep. It was five o’clock by the kitchen clock, but the clock had stopped and they wearily figured between them, somehow, not caring really, that it must be nearly seven. There was no one in the house but themselves, the family having gone—as Dick had explained before—over to King and Queen County, to visit relatives. The house itself was weary and still, and nothing disturbed the quiet, except for the infrequent crackle of timbers that stretched like a man’s limbs upon awakening, warming to the dawn with a somnolent snapping noise as they had done each morning for nearly two hundred years. There was a musty smell about—the windows had been closed since Thursday—and they wandered aimlessly, not speaking, through the musty airless rooms, neither able to return to their conversation, nor to forget it. And it was as if their tension and their exhaustion—mainly Peyton’s grief and lostness, her despair—had begun to communicate itself to the house. Amid those ancient rooms which carried even to this day, along with the radio, electric lamps and modern chairs, a sort of minor squalor of ancestral piety—old canes carved from a hickory, many years dead, long before the war began, and a pulpit-sized, rat-chewed Bible, and ante-bellum novels still dusty and uncut in their cases, and faded Christian lithographs of the Apostles and the Ascension and a swooning Susanna—amid all these they wandered, bearing with them, like an anachronistic odor, their peculiarly modern despair. …
They slumped down together on the couch, and agreed that they needed a drink. Dick got his father’s bourbon and poured out two stiff ones. While Peyton was drinking hers, he went out and found Harvey, an old Negro who, a stereotype from his high-button Sunday shoes to his toothless grin and bleached poll, looked like Uncle Remus.
“I don’t want you mention to Pop about Miss Loftis staying here,” Dick said, somewhat thickly. Being worldly-wise and very old, Harvey understood and responded with a placid, “Yes, suh, Mistah Dick.”
When Dick returned to the parlor he found Peyton standing by the window, a second drink in her hand. She had turned the radio on. He stood beside her for a moment, saying nothing. The sun had come up over the river. It was a beautiful river, broad and blue and serene, with no cities defacing its shore. There was something primeval about this river: with the woods crowding its banks, and the vacant tidal flats and the ducks winging southward through a blue, cloudless sky, it seemed as if the river had remained forever changeless, undisturbed by the tools or weapons of man, and would remain like this until the land returned to the sea, and the sea to the land, and the wash of tides would obliterate all—woods and seashells and homing ducks—and the river would roll on at the floor of some surging eternal ocean. Peyton turned to Dick and said, “They thought that they had had it.”
“Who, honey?”
“Those people back in the Lost Generation. Daddy, I guess. Anybody who thought about anything at all. They thought they were lost. They were crazy. They weren’t lost. What they were doing was losing us.”
“Us?”
“Yes. They didn’t lose themselves, they lost us—you and me. Look at Daddy, I love him so. But he lost me and he doesn’t even know it.” She took the ring out of her pocket and looked down at it. “The dear. I think we’ve got a Freudian attachment. The dear. He’s such an ass. If it just hadn’t been Mother he married, we all might have made out all right. She’s been too much for him. So we’re lost. He lost me and all of his friends lost their children. I don’t know why, but they did. At least they had a chance to live for a while. But they didn’t care and they lost you, too, and now you’re going off to war and get killed.”
“No, I’m not. I’m tough as hell.”
“You’re not tough. You’re just like me, you don’t know which way to go.”
“I know I want to marry you.”
“No, Dick, don’t start——”
“Oh, honey, listen now, we could”——
It was as if his words had, with their persistence, hurt her physically, stirring up an agony of regret and memory and desire. She turned furiously upon him, and because she was drunk her voice was hoarse and the words confused. “Quit talking about getting married, Dick! Quit talking about it! You’re selfish about me. And stupid. And if you want to know why I’m like this it’s because I don’t love you and I never have. Not because of you or anything like that but just because I don’t love and I can’t love and isn’t that too bad. Isn’t that too bad, Dick? Because I’m sick isn’t that too bad? That you’ll never——”
He knew she’d get over it. He took her in his arms, holding her tightly. She struggled for a bit but then became limp and because he loved her and understood her the kiss he pressed upon her lips was a devout one, sending a sort of holy delight through his soul. She said, “No,” once, but that was the last word she said, for something had passed between them, a longing voiceless as air, and he led her into the bedroom. There was an old four-poster here, his grandmother’s, and all day long they lay on it—the blankets pulled back because the room was hot and stuffy—naked and sleeping. The act of love had exhausted them but they slept restlessly, dreaming loveless dreams. The sun rose, began to descend, and afternoon brought a flood of light to the room. The radio, playing faintly from the living room, sent through their dreams a murmurous flow of intrusions: the war, a preacher said, was general throughout the world and at the smoky edge of sleep, between wakefulness and dreams, their minds captured words like Christ and anti-Christ, only to lose them and to forget, and to stir and dream again.
Sleeping, he took her in his arms; she drew away. A dog barked across the wintry fields. There was dance music and later, Mozart, a song of measureless innocence that echoed among lost ruined temples of peace and brought to their dreams an impossible vision: of a love that outlasted time and dwelt even in the night, beyond reach of death and all the immemorial, descending dusks. Then evening came. Arms and legs asprawl, they stirred and turned. Twilight fell over their bodies. They were painted with fire, like those fallen children who live and breathe and soundlessly scream, and whose souls blaze forever.
6
CAREY drove cautiously, for now through the afternoon heat they had begun to come in droves—Negroes in turbans and white flowing baptismal robes. They came in busses and rattletrap cars and on the back ends of trucks; some came on foot. Out of dusty side roads they streamed, laughing and sweating, carrying between them paper banners—
DADDY FAITH BRINGS LOVE TO US
—and it was difficult to drive because of the children, draped in miniature robes, who ran out in front of the car. In fact, the confusion of traffic had become so general—the drivers of the trucks and cars passing each other, turning to shout greetings, with a kind of intoxicated recklessness—that for a moment he drew over to stop at the side of the road, beneath a grove of trees. They were stranded there briefly, run hopelessly aground amid a flood of surging robes, and Carey had a touch of panic: he felt that, with Helen, he
was the only white person for miles, like a missionary isolated among hostile natives who tramped ceaselessly past, seeking some pagan redemption in the waters of the Congo. Then suddenly there was a lull; most of the Negroes had vanished down the road toward town, leaving behind them a cloud of hot, powdery sand which swarmed in the air and fell, and left on the hood of the car a white film of dust. Helen coughed and wiped her brow. Carey started the car again and they drove on down the highway. Neither of them, since they got into the car, had spoken, although Carey had on one or two occasions essayed a tentative throat clearing. Now, however, he found himself talking, almost before he knew what he was saying: “What is it you feel now, Helen?”
There was a long silence. Past them rolled woods and swampland, gas stations, a seedy roadhouse. Finally she said, in level voice, “Fatigue.”
“I mean, Helen dear,” he went on, “I mean … about all this.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw her raise her hand and with two thin, blanched fingers pluck at the loose folds of her neck. It was an intense, ruminative moment, as if he had asked her something mathematical and involved and requiring heavy concentration. Then she said, in clear conversational tones: “I don’t know, Carey. Is it possible to know when you’ve finally gone … haywire? You know what I mean? Years ago it would have been different. Everything was different then. I could feel things as well as another. But you know as well as I what happened when everything collapsed. Peyton and all. When Milton left. I told you about it then. I don’t want to go on about it.” She turned her face away, looking out of the window.
“You lost—” he began—“you deserted God.”
“God deserted me. Before that. When Maudie died.”
“No,” he said, “God never deserts anyone,” thinking, I won’t go on about that. It’s too late for that sort of thing. It’s this other thing that counts right now, and we can talk about God later.
“Have you thought about Milton?” he said. “Have you thought about what I told you this morning?”
“I went to sleep,” she said. “I dreamed. I didn’t think about anything at all.”
“What—what did you dream?” he asked hopefully.
“Lovely things. The way the beach was years ago. The sand. The fog in the morning. My garden, the way it was then, when I cared.”
“Milton needs you and wants you,” he said. “He’s repentant. He’s suffered enough.”
“Yes, I’ve thought about that. Maybe he has.”
Carey’s heart beat faster, as if he had inhaled a thrilling breath of hope. “He does need you,” he said quickly, “he does. And you need him. It’s all you have. Don’t you see, Helen dear? Don’t you see?”
“Yes,” she said quietly, “yes.” But it was a faint tired answer, that really committed itself to no conviction at all, and Carey thought: Yes, maybe it’s true, she’s so far gone that nothing can help her. Not even God. So it’s madness, after all.
And he thought briefly about madness, and this family, which had succeeded—almost effortlessly, it seemed—in destroying itself, and he became so overwhelmed by melancholy that his stomach rumbled and his hands and wrists became limp and trembled on the steering wheel. He thought of the wild evening after Maudie’s funeral when, with Peyton absent and Loftis, he supposed, hiding upstairs, Helen had told him that everything was finished, there was no God, no anything, behold (with a nod upstairs toward Loftis, and which included, he gathered, Peyton, too) this breed of monsters. God, what words she had used! And then, at that moment, he had realized that it was impossible to believe otherwise: she had gone mad; how mad he was unable to say, but enough for him to understand, with an inward groan of despair, that she was too far gone for his ministrations to be of any use. And his own personal despair had arisen not completely from her tragedy, but from his: he had failed; all those years he had known her she had gradually become a sort of symbol to him, of every lost person who seeks Christ, no matter how fitfully, and is salvageable. But he had not saved her, he had not taught her faith enough to endure disaster; and that night, with the wind moaning through the weather stripping and Helen shivering in the cold of her house—and Loftis upstairs too drunk to fix the furnace—the sense of horror and failure had clutched his spine like the wet, wrinkled hand of a drowned woman, and he had become for a moment apostate, addressing a peevish, cruel prayer to the God who had still not revealed himself: why, You God? Yet he had tried, even after that.
Now this. Who was to blame? Mad or not, Helen had been beastly. She had granted to Loftis, in her peculiarly unremitting way, no forgiveness or understanding, and above all she had been beastly to Peyton. Yet Loftis himself had been no choice soul; and who, finally, lest it be God himself, could know where the circle, composed as it was of such tragic suspicions and misunderstandings, began, and where it ended? Who was the author of the original misdeed? Peyton, think of Peyton. Was she beyond reproach? Other children had risen above even worse difficulties. Maybe Peyton was the answer.
He jammed on his brakes. In his woolgathering he had almost run down a skinny colored woman who, bicycling, swaddled in the robes of her baptism, paddled away heedlessly, with a supreme look of joy. “S-sorry, Helen,” he exclaimed, and then, recovering himself: “I thought you had found it for a while, Helen.”
“What?” she said listlessly.
“All that that you were searching for.” He drove on. “For a while. After … after Maudie died.”
“No.”
“No—” he sighed in agreement—“no, you didn’t.” Then, “He needs you. You need each other,” he murmured again, mildly and futilely.
“Oh, look,” he said suddenly. “Look there.”
In the driveway of a ramshackle gas station, which also seemed to be a roadhouse, the hearse was parked, drawn up ahead of the deserted limousine. Quickly Carey turned off the road, with a squeal of tires. He stopped behind the limousine and gazed around him. He could see no one, yet from somewhere near the hearse, and on the other side of it, where the hood was thrown up, came the low sound of voices. Something made of metal, a hammer or wrench, fell on the gravel.
“Well,” he said to Helen, “they must be here.”
“Yes.”
“I wonder what’s wrong.”
“I don’t know.”
“I wonder what could be wrong,” he repeated, but there was no answer. “Well,” he said, “I’d better get out and see.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to get out and go inside for a minute? It’s hot out here. Sitting in the car.”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
The afternoon heat bore in its embrace a drugged and heavy stillness; a truckful of Negroes passed on the road, and the sound died away to the east. Around them the sun-streaked fields were empty, wilted, almost blighted, as if by drought, and there was no sound of insects, no passionate flight and murmur among the weeds, and in the dark pinewoods behind them there was no sound of birds. Everything had flown the heat. Fumes of gasoline smoldered on the air, and Carey began to sweat.
“Helen. You don’t want to sit … here.”
“Yes.”
He began to move toward the hearse, when she said something. “Wait,” he thought it was. He turned.
“I don’t want to see that woman,” she said, in a flat, explicit voice. “Do you understand, Carey? She’s——”
“What, Helen dear?”
“I don’t want to see that woman. I don’t want to lay eyes on her.”
He returned to the car window and looked down at her. He felt angry and bitter and futile. “Helen,” he said, in a mild, bitter voice, “why did you come today? If this is the way you feel about everything. Why? Only because it’s the proper thing to do? Only——” He halted, trembling. “I’m sorry, Helen,” he said.
She turned away and bowed her head slightly. “I’d give anything for a cigarette,” she said. “Anything.”
“I’m s
orry, Helen,” he repeated, and walked toward the hearse. She’s lost love and grief maybe, he thought, but not hate. Not hate.
Over the motor three forms stooped—the garageman, Mr. Casper and Barclay. Mr. Casper stood up at Carey’s approach, exposing his gums in the parched smile of his trade. “Ah,” he sighed, “Mr. Carr. It’s a bad day. A bad thing. A frightful thing. You came with the deceased’s mother?”
“Yes. It’s a terrible thing.”
“Yes, it is. We’ve had some trouble here, but we’ll have it fixed in no time. No time at all. I’ve called the sexton at the cemetery. Everything’s been prepared. Oh, this is a sad thing, one of my saddest cases.”
Carey agreed again that it was, indeed, a sad thing, and for a moment, with the sweat streaming off both of them, Mr. Casper, who in private felt himself as surely anointed as any of God’s ministers, told Carey about the ways of the Lord, which are exceeding strange and move for causes unbeknownst to mortal men; and in spite of the heat, the blazing sun which threatened to burn holes through their identical white panama hats, they chatted for a moment, understanding each other.
But the heat really was dreadful, and Carey broke in on Mr. Casper—who, with his red freckled hands clasped together at his breast, spoke of the saving grace of a sanctified Christian burial—to ask where Loftis was.
“In there,” Mr. Casper said, “with that woman … Mrs. Bonner, I believe.” His bleak eyelids sank; over his face passed an ambiguous flicker, both roguish and disapproving, then it vanished. “In there,” he repeated. “Please, sir, tell Mr. Loftis that we’ll be ready to leave in just a few minutes. We’ve already been a half-hour, and the sexton——”
Carey hurried into the filling station. At the doorway he turned to look back at Helen. She was still seated in the front of the car, looking sternly ahead. Some puff of wind came, humming faintly in the pines; a curtain of dust blew over the hearse and cars, bearing with it dry weeds and cinders, but Helen took no notice: she gazed straight ahead at the barren fields, the wind in its diminishing blast still rustling, white curl by fine white curl, so perfectly waved, the ghostly shock of her hair. “Helen——” he began, and beckoned with his finger, but it was no use, she didn’t see him. He went on in.
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