100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  Yesterday she had seen that native Guy Richards going by wild-drunk again, fit to do any crime. He was a great offense to Rosaleen with his shaggy mustaches and his shirt in rags till the brawny skin showed through, a shame to the world, staring around with his sneering eyes; living by himself in a shack and having his cronies in for drink until you could hear them shouting at all hours and careering round the countryside like the devils from hell. He would pass by the house driving his bony gray horse at top speed, standing up in the rackety buggy singing in a voice like a power of scrap-iron falling, drunk as a lord before breakfast. Once when Rosaleen was standing in her doorway wearing a green checkerboard dress, he yelled at her: “Hey, Rosie, want to come for a ride?”

  “The bold stump!” said Rosaleen to Dennis, “if ever he lays a finger on me I’ll shoot him dead.”

  “If you mind your business by day,” said Dennis in a shrivelled voice, “and bar the doors well by night, there’ll be no call to shoot anybody.”

  “Little you know!” said Rosaleen. She had a series of visions of Richards laying a finger on her and herself shooting him dead in his tracks. “Whatever would I do without ye, Dennis?” she asked him that night, as they sat on the steps in a soft darkness full of fireflies and the sound of crickets. “When I think of all the kinds of men there are in the world. That Richards!”

  “When a man is young he likes his fun,” said Dennis amiably, beginning to yawn. “Young, is it?” said Rosaleen warm with anger. “The old crow! Fit to have children grown he is, the same as myself, and I’m a settled woman over her nonsense!” Dennis almost said, “I’ll never call you old,” but all at once he was irritable too. “Will you stop your gossiping?” he asked censoriously.

  Rosaleen sat silent, without rancor, but there was no denying the old man was getting old, old. He got up as if he gathered his bones in his arms, and carried himself in the house. Somewhere inside of him there must be Dennis, but where? “The world is a wilderness,” she informed the crickets and frogs and fireflies.

  Richards never had offered to lay a finger on Rosaleen, but now and again he pulled up at the gate when he was not quite drunk, and sat with them afternoons on the doorstep, and there were signs in him of a nice-behaved man before the drink got him down. He would tell them stories of his life, and what a desperate wild fellow he had been, all in all. Not when he was a boy, though. As long as his mother lived he had never done a thing to hurt her feelings. She wasn’t what you might call a rugged woman, the least thing made her sick, and she was so religious she prayed all day long under her breath at her work, and even while she ate. He had belonged to a society called The Sons of Temperance, with all the boys in the countryside banded together under a vow never to touch strong drink in any form: “Not even for medicinal purposes,” he would quote, raising his right hand and staring solemnly before him. Quite often he would burst into a rousing march tune which he remembered from the weekly singings they had held: “With flags of temperance flying, With banners white as snow,” and he could still repeat almost word for word the favorite poem he had been called upon to recite at every meeting: “At midnight, in his guarded tent, The Turk lay dreaming of the hour—”

  Rosaleen wanted to interrupt sometimes and tell him that had been no sort of life, he should have been young in Ireland. But she wouldn’t say it. She sat stiffly beside Dennis and looked at Richards severely out of the corner of her eye, wondering if he remembered that time he had yelled “Hey, Rosie!” at her. It was enough to make a woman wild not to find a word in her mouth for such boldness. The cheek of him, pretending nothing had happened. One day she was racking her mind for some saying that would put him in his place, while he was telling about the clambakes his gang was always having down by the creek behind the rock pile, with a keg of home-brew beer; and the dances the Railroad Street outfit gave every Saturday night in Winston. “We’re always up to some devilment,” he said, looking straight at Rosaleen, and before she could say scat, the hellion had winked his near eye at her. She turned away with her mouth down at the corners; after a long minute, she said, “Good day to ye, Mr. Richards,” cold as ice, and went in the house. She took down the looking-glass to see what kind of look she had on her, but the wavy place made her eyes broad and blurred as the palm of her hands, and she couldn’t tell her nose from her mouth in the cracked seam . . .

  The pipe salesman came back next month and brought a patent cooking pot that cooked vegetables perfectly without any water in them. “It’s a lot healthier way of cooking, Miz O’Toole,” Dennis heard his mouthy voice going thirteen to the dozen. “I’m telling you as a friend because you’re a good customer of mine.”

  “Is it so?” thought Dennis, and his gall stirred within him.

  “You’ll find it’s going to be a perfect God-send for your husband’s health. Old folks need to be mighty careful what they eat, and you know better than I do, Miz O’Toole, that health begins or ends right in the kitchen. Now your husband don’t look as stout as he might. It’s because, tasty as your cooking is, you’ve been pouring all the good vitamins, the sunlit life-giving elements, right down the sink . . . Right down the sink, Miz O’Toole, is where you’re pouring your husband’s health and your own. And I say it’s a shame, a good-looking woman like you wasting your time and strength standing over the cook-stove when all you’ve got to do from now on is just fill this scientific little contrivance with whatever you’ve planned for dinner and then go away and read a good book in your parlor while it’s cooking—or curl your hair.”

  “My hair curls by nature,” said Rosaleen. Dennis almost groaned aloud from his hiding-place.

  “For the love of—why, Miz O’Toole, you don’t mean to tell me that! When I first saw that hair, I said to myself, why, it’s so perfect it looks to be artificial! I was just getting ready to ask you how you did it so I could tell my wife. Well, if your hair curls like that, without any vitamins at all, I want to come back and have a look at it after you’ve been cooking in this little pot for two weeks.”

  Rosaleen said, “Well, it’s not my looks I’m thinking about. But my husband isn’t up to himself, and that’s the truth, Mr. Pendleton. Ah, it would have done your heart good to see that man in his younger days! Strong as an ox he was, the way no man dared to rouse his anger. I’ve seen my husband, many’s the time, swing on a man with his fist and send him sprawling twenty feet, and that for the least thing, mind you! But Dennis could never hold his grudge for long, and the next instant you’d see him picking the man up and dusting him off like a brother, and saying, ‘Now think no more of that.’ He was too forgiving always. It was his great fault.”

  “And look at him, now,” said Mr. Pendleton, sadly.

  Dennis felt pretty hot around the ears. He stood forward at the corner of the house, listening. He had never weighed more than one hundred thirty pounds at his most, a tall thin man he had been always, a little proud of his elegant shape, and not since he left school in Bristol had he lifted his hand in anger against a creature, brute or human. “He was a fine man a woman could rely on, Mr. Pendleton,” said Rosaleen, “and quick as a tiger with his fists.”

  “I might be dead and mouldering away to dust the way she talks,” thought Dennis, “and there she is throwing away the money as if she was already a gay widow woman.” He tottered out bent on speaking his mind and putting a stop to such foolishness. The salesman turned a floppy smile and shrewd little eyes upon him. “Hello, Mr. O’Toole,” he said, with the manly cordiality he used for husbands. “I’m just leaving you a little birthday present with the Missis here.” “It’s not my birthday,” said Dennis, sour as a lemon. “That’s just a manner of speaking!” interrupted Rosaleen, merrily. “And now many thanks to ye, Mr. Pendleton.”

  “Many thanks to you, Miz O’Toole,” answered the salesman, folding away nine dollars of good green money. No more was said except good day, and Rosaleen stood shading her eyes to watch the Ford walloping off down the hummocky lane. “That’s a nice, decent f
amily man,” she told Dennis, as if rebuking his evil thoughts. “He travels out of New York, and he always has the latest thing and the best. He’s full of admiration for ye, too, Dennis. He said he couldn’t call to mind another man of your age as sound as you are.”

  “I heard him,” said Dennis. “I know all he said.”

  “Well, then,” said Rosaleen, serenely. “There’s no good saying it over.” She hurried to wash potatoes to cook in the pot that made the hair curl.

  The winter piled in upon them, and the snow was shot through with blizzards. Dennis couldn’t bear a breath of cold, and all but sat in the oven, rheumy and grunty, with his muffler on. Rosaleen began to feel as if she couldn’t bear the feel of her clothes in the hot kitchen, and when she did the barn work she had one chill after another. She complained that her hands were gnawed to the bone with the cold. Did Dennis realize that now, or was he going to sit like a log all winter, and where was the lad he had promised her to help with the outside work?

  Dennis sat wordless under her unreasonableness, thinking she had very little work for a strong-bodied woman, and the truth was she was blaming him for something he couldn’t help. Still she said nothing he could take hold of, only nipping his head off when the kettle dried up or the fire went low. There would come a day when she would say outright, “It’s no life here, I won’t stay here any longer,” and she would drag him back to a flat in New York, or even leave him, maybe. Would she? Would she do such a thing? Such a thought had never occurred to him before. He peered at her as if he watched through a keyhole. He tried to think of something to ease her mind, but no plan came. She would look at some harmless thing around the house, say—the calendar, and suddenly tear it off the wall and stuff it in the fire. “I hate the very sight of it,” she would explain, and she was always hating the very sight of one thing or another, even the cow; almost, but not quite, the cats.

  One morning she sat up very tired and forlorn, and began almost before Dennis could get an eye open: “I had a dream in the night that my sister Honora was sick and dying in her bed, and was calling for me.” She bowed her head on her hands and breathed brokenly to her very toes, and said, “It’s only natural I must go to Boston to find out for myself how it is, isn’t it?” Dennis, pulling on the chest protector she had knitted him for Christmas, said, “I suppose so. It looks that way.”

  Over the coffee pot she began making her plans. “I could go if only I had a coat. It should be a fur one against this weather. A coat is what I’ve needed all these years. If I had a coat I’d go this very day.”

  “You’ve a great coat with fur on it,” said Dennis.

  “A rag of a coat!” cried Rosaleen. “And I won’t have Honora see me in it. She was jealous always, Dennis, she’d be glad to see me without a coat.”

  “If she’s sick and dying maybe she won’t notice,” said Dennis.

  Rosaleen agreed. “And maybe it will be better to buy one there, or in New York—something in the new style.”

  “It’s long out of your way by New York,” said Dennis. “There’s shorter ways to Boston than that.”

  “It’s by New York I’m going, because the trains are better,” said Rosaleen, “and I want to go that way.” There was a look on her face as if you could put her on the rack and she wouldn’t yield. Dennis kept silence.

  When the postman passed she asked him to leave word with the native family up the hill to send their lad down for a few days to help with the chores, at the same pay as before. And tomorrow morning, if it was all the same to him, she’d be driving in with him to the train. All day long, with her hair in curl papers, she worked getting her things together in the lazy old canvas bag. She put a ham on to bake and set bread and filled the closet off the kitchen with firewood. “Maybe there’ll come a message saying Honora’s better and I shan’t have to go,” she said several times, but her eyes were excited and she walked about so briskly the floor shook.

  Late in the afternoon Guy Richards knocked, and floundered in stamping his big boots. He was almost sober, but he wasn’t going to be for long. Rosaleen said, “I’ve sad news about my sister, she’s on her deathbed maybe and I’m going to Boston.”

  “I hope it’s nothing serious, Missis O’Toole,” said Richards. “Let’s drink her health in this,” and he took out a bottle half full of desperate-looking drink. Dennis said he didn’t mind. Richards said, “Will the lady join us?” and his eyes had the devil in them if Rosaleen had ever seen it. “I will not,” she said. “I’ve something better to do.” While they drank she sat fixing the hem of her dress, and began to tell again about the persons without number she’d known who came back from the dead to bring word about themselves, and Dennis himself would back her up in it. She told again the story of the Billy-cat, her voice warm and broken with the threat of tears.

  Dennis swallowed his drink, leaned over and began to fumble with his shoelace, his face sunken to a handful of wrinkles, and thought right out plainly to himself: “There’s not a word of truth in it, not a word. And she’ll go on telling it to the world’s end for God’s truth.” He felt helpless, as if he were involved in some disgraceful fraud. He wanted to speak up once for all and say, “It’s a lie, Rosaleen, it’s something you’ve made up, and now let’s hear no more about it.” But Richards, sitting there with his ears lengthened, stopped the words in Dennis’ throat. The moment passed. Rosaleen said solemnly, “My dreams never renege on me, Mr. Richards. They’re all I have to go by.” “It never happened at all,” said Dennis inside himself, stubbornly. “Only the Billy-cat got caught in a trap and I buried him.” Could this really have been all? He had a nightmarish feeling that somewhere just out of his reach lay the truth about it, he couldn’t swear for certain, yet he was almost willing to swear that this had been all. Richards got up saying he had to be getting on to a shindig at Winston. “I’ll take you to the train tomorrow, Missis O’Toole,” he said. “I love doing a good turn for the ladies.”

  Rosaleen said very stiffly, “I’ll be going in with the letter-carrier, and many thanks just the same.”

  She tucked Dennis into bed with great tenderness and sat by him a few minutes, putting cold cream on her face. “It won’t be for long,” she told him, “and you’re well taken care of the whole time. Maybe by the grace of God I’ll find her recovered.”

  “Maybe she’s not sick at all,” Dennis wanted to say, and said instead, “I hope so.” It was nothing to him. Everything else aside, it seemed a great fuss to be making over Honora, who might die when she liked for all Dennis would turn a hair.

  Dennis hoped until the last minute that Rosaleen would come to her senses and give up the trip, but at the last minute there she was with her hat and the rag of a coat on, a streak of pink powder on her chin, pulling on her tan gloves that smelt of naphtha, flourishing a handkerchief that smelt of Azurea, and going every minute to the window, looking for the postman. “In this snow maybe he’ll be late,” she said in a trembling voice. “What if he didn’t come at all?” She took a last glimpse of herself in the mirror. “One thing I must remember, Dennis,” she said in another tone. “And that is to bring back a looking-glass that won’t make my face look like a monster’s.”

  “It’s a good enough glass,” said Dennis, “without throwing away money.” The postman came only a few minutes late. Dennis kissed Rosaleen good-by and shut the kitchen door so he could not see her climbing into the car, but he heard her laughing.

  “It’s just a born liar she is,” Dennis said to himself, sitting by the stove, and at once he felt he had leaped head-first into a very dark pit. His better self tried to argue it out with him. “Have you no shame,” said Dennis’s better self, “thinking such thoughts about your own wife?” The baser Dennis persisted. “It’s not half she deserves,” he answered sternly, “leaving me here by my lone, and for what?” That was the great question. Certainly not to run after Honora, living or dying or dead. Where then? For what on earth? Here he stopped thinking altogether. There wasn’t a
spark in his mind. He had a lump on his chest could surely be pneumonia if he had a cold, which he hadn’t, specially. His feet ached until you’d swear it was rheumatism, only he never had it. Still, he wasn’t thinking. He stayed in this condition for two days, and the underwitted lad from the native farm above did all the work, even to washing the dishes. Dennis ate pretty well, considering the grief he was under.

  Rosaleen settled back in the plush seat and thought how she had always been a great traveller. A train was like home to her, with all the other people sitting near, and the smell of newspapers and some kind of nice-smelling furniture polish and the perfume from fur collars and the train dust and something over and above she couldn’t place, but it was the smell of travel: fruit, maybe, or was it machinery? She bought chocolate bars, though she wasn’t hungry, and a magazine of love stories, though she was never one for reading. She only wished to prove to herself she was once more on a train going somewhere.

  She watched the people coming on or leaving at the stations, greeting, or kissing good-by, and it seemed a lucky sign she did not see a sad face anywhere. There was a cold sweet sunshine on the snow, and the city people didn’t look all frozen and bundled up. Their faces looked smooth after the gnarled raw frost-bitten country faces. The Grand Central hadn’t changed at all, with all the crowds whirling in every direction, and a noise that almost had a tune in it, it was so steady. She held on to her bag the colored men were trying to get away from her, and stood on the sidewalk trying to remember which direction was Broadway where the moving pictures were. She hadn’t seen one for five years, it was high time now! She wished she had an hour to visit her old flat in 164th Street—just a turn around the block would be enough, but there wasn’t time. An old resentment rose against Honora, who was a born spoilsport and would spoil this trip for her if she could. She walked on, getting her directions, brooding a little because she had been such a city girl once, thinking only of dress and a good time, and now she hardly knew one street from another. She went in to the first moving picture theatre she saw because she liked the name of it. “The Prince of Love,” she said to herself. It was about two beautiful young things, a boy with black wavy hair and a girl with curly golden hair, who loved each other and had great troubles, but it all came well in the end, and all the time it was just one fine ballroom or garden after another, and such beautiful clothes! She sniffled a little in the Azurea-smelling handkerchief, and ate her chocolates, and reminded herself these two were really alive somewhere and looked just like that, but it was hard to believe living beings could be so beautiful.