Great Short Stories by American Women (30 page)

Again, for one brief moment, the two women’s eyes found one another.

The sheriff came up to the table.

“Did you want to see what Mrs. Peters was going to take in?”

The county attorney picked up the apron. He laughed. “Oh, I guess they’re not very dangerous things the ladies have picked out.”

Mrs. Hale’s hand was on the sewing basket in which the box was concealed. She felt that she ought to take her hand off the basket. She did not seem able to. He picked up one of the quilt blocks which she had piled on to cover the box. Her eyes felt like fire. She had a feeling that if he took up the basket she would snatch it from him.

But he did not take it up. With another little laugh, he turned away.

“No; Mrs. Peters doesn’t need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff’s wife is married to the law. Ever think of it that way, Mrs. Peters?”

Mrs. Peters was standing beside the table. Mrs. Hale shot a look up at her; but she could not see her face. Mrs. Peters had turned away. When she spoke, her voice was muffled.

“Not — just that way,” she said.

“Married to the law!” chuckled Mrs. Peters’ husband. He moved toward the door into the front room, and said to the county attorney:

“I just want you to come in here a minute, George. We ought to take a look at these windows.”

“Oh — windows,” said the county attorney scoffingly.

“We’ll be right out, Mr. Hale,” said the sheriff to the farmer.

Hale went to look after the horses. The sheriff followed the county attorney into the other room. Again — for one final moment — the two women were alone in that kitchen.

Martha Hale sprang up, her hands tight together, looking at that other woman, with whom it rested. At first she could not see her eyes, for the sheriff’s wife had not turned back since she turned away at that suggestion of being married to the law. But now Mrs. Hale made her turn back. Her eyes made her turn back. Slowly, unwillingly, Mrs. Peters turned her head until her eyes met the eyes of the other woman. There was a moment when they held each other in a steady, burning look in which there was no evasion nor flinching.

Then Martha Hale’s eyes pointed the way to the basket in which was hidden the thing that would make certain the conviction of the other woman — that woman who was not there and yet who had been there with them all through that hour.

For a moment Mrs. Peters did not move. And then she did it. With a rush forward, she threw back the quilt pieces, got the box, tried to put it in her handbag. It was too big. Desperately she opened it, started to take the bird out. But there she broke — she could not touch the bird. She stood there helpless, foolish.

There was the sound of a knob turning in the inner door. Martha Hale snatched the box from the sheriff’s wife, and got it in the pocket of her big coat just as the sheriff and the county attorney came back.

“Well, Henry,” said the county attorney facetiously, “at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to — what is it you call it, ladies?”

Mrs. Hale’s hand was against the pocket of her coat.

“We call it — knot it, Mr. Henderson.”

Djuna Barnes

(1892—1982)

BORN IN CORNWALL-ON-HUDSON, New York, Djuna Barnes was the product of what would today be called a dysfunctional family. Barnes’s father was artistic and eccentric; her paternal grandmother, Zadel, was a dominant figure in her life, and biographers have noted their close, possibly sexual, relationship. Whatever the nature of the relationship, Barnes’s writings reflect the unconventionality of her childhood.

From 1913 to 1919, Barnes earned her living as a writer for various New York newspapers. In addition to celebrity interviews and feature articles, Barnes’s newspaper writings included drama and short fiction, often accompanied by her own illustrations. In 1920, she moved to Europe and stayed there until 1941. Leading the life of an expatriate at the height of the modernist movement, Barnes assumed a respected place in avant-garde circles. A multidimensional artist herself (journalist, playwright, novelist and short-story writer), she counted James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy and Samuel Beckett among her friends. She also frequented the bohemian and lesbian salons of Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein. Barnes’s long affair with sculptor Thelma Wood was the subject of her most famous novel,
Nightwood
(1936), considered by many her finest work.

“Smoke” explores the effect of traditional family structures on the individual. The Fenkens, Zelka, her father and her husband Swart, are all fine specimens of strength and vitality. But the demands of living up to such strength — injunctions to keep “a little iron in the blood” — prove too much for Zelka’s son and his daughter, Little Lief. The Fenkens, as one character notes, “live themselves thin,” and eventually go “out like a puff of smoke.” Barnes’s story is full of such striking imagery, and her experimental prose style, evident even in the early newspaper pieces, marks her as one of this century’s most innovative writers.

Smoke

THERE WAS SWART with his bushy head and Fenken with the half shut eyes and the grayish beard, and there also was Zelka with her big earrings and her closely bound inky hair, who had often been told that “she was very beautiful in a black way.”

Ah, what a fine strong creature she had been and what a fine strong creature her father Fenken had been before her, and what a specimen was her husband Swart, with his gentle melancholy mouth and his strange strong eyes and his brown neck.

Fenken in his youth had loaded the cattle boats, and in his twilight of age he would sit in the round-backed chair by the open fireplace, his two trembling hands folded, and would talk of what he had been.

“A bony man I was, Zelka — my two knees as hard as a pavement, so that I clapped them with great discomfort to my own hands; sometimes,” he would add, with a twinkle in his old eyes, “I’d put you between them and my hand; it hurt less.”

Zelka would turn her eyes on him slowly — they moved around into sight from under her eyebrows like the barrel of a well-kept gun; they were hard like metal and strong, and she was always conscious of them even in sleep. When she would close her eyes before saying her prayers she would remark to Swart, “I draw the hood over the artillery.” And Swart would smile, nodding his large head.

In the town these three were called the “Bullets” — when they came down the street little children sprang aside, not because they were afraid, but because they came so fast and brought with them something so healthy, something so potent, something unconquerable. Fenken could make his fingers snap against his palm like the crack of a cabby’s whip just by shutting his hand abruptly, and he did this often, watching the gamin and smiling.

Swart, too, had his power, but there was a hint at something softer in him, something that made the lips kind when they were sternest, something that gave him a sad expression when he was thinking — something that had drawn Zelka to him in their first days of courting. “We Fenkens,” she would say, “have iron in our veins — in yours I fear there’s a little blood.”

Zelka was cleanly; she washed her linen clean as though she were punishing the dirt. Had the linen been less durable there would have been holes in it from her knuckles in a six months’. Everything Zelka cooked was tender — she had bruised it with her preparations.

And then Zelka’s baby had come. A healthy, fat, little crying thing, with eyes like its father’s and with its father’s mouth. In vain did Zelka look for something about it that would give it away as one of the Fenken blood — it had a maddeningly tender way of stroking her face, its hair was finer than blown gold, and it squinted up its pale blue eyes when it fell over its nose. Sometimes Zelka would turn the baby around in bed, placing its little feet against her side waiting for it to kick. And when it finally did, it was gently and without great strength and with much good humor. “Swart,” Zelka would say, “your child is entirely human. I’m afraid all his veins run blood,” and she would add to her father, “Sonny will never load the cattle ships.”

When it was old enough to crawl Zelka would get down on hands and knees and chase it about the little ash-littered room. The baby would crawl ahead of her, giggling and driving Zelka mad with a desire to stop and hug him; but when she roared behind him like a lion to make him hurry, the baby would roll over slowly, struggle into a sitting posture, and putting his hand up would sit staring at her as though he would like to study out something that made this difference between them.

When it was seven it would escape from the house and wander down to the shore, and stand for hours watching the boats coming in, being loaded and unloaded. Once one of the men put the cattle belt about him and lowered him into the boat. He went down sadly, his little golden head drooping and his feet hanging down. When they brought him back on shore again and dusted him off they were puzzled at him — he had neither cried nor laughed. They said, “Didn’t you like that?” And he had only answered by looking at them fixedly.

And when he grew up he was very tender to his mother, who had taken to shaking her head over him. Fenken had died the Summer of his grandchild’s thirtieth year, so that after the funeral Swart had taken the round-backed chair for his own. And now he sat there with folded hands, but he never said what a strong lad he had been. Sometimes he would say, “Do you remember how Fenken used to snap his fingers together like a whip?” and Zelka would answer, “I do.”

And finally when her son married, Zelka was seen at the feast dressed in a short blue skirt leaning upon Swart’s arm, both of them still strong and handsome and capable of lifting the buckets of cider.

Zelka’s son had chosen a strange woman for a wife. A thin little thing, with a tiny waistline and a narrow chest and a small, very lovely throat. She was the daughter of a ship owner and had a good deal of money in her own name. When she married Zelka’s son she brought him some ten thousand a year, and so he stopped the shipping of cattle and went in for exports and imports of Oriental silks and perfumes.

When his mother and father died he moved a little inland away from the sea and hired clerks to do his bidding. Still, he never forgot what his mother had said to him:

“There must always be a little iron in the blood, sonny.”

He reflected on this when he looked at Lief, his wife. He was a silent, taciturn man as he grew older, and Lief had grown afraid of him, because of his very kindness and his melancholy.

There was only one person to whom he was a bit stern, and this was his daughter, “Little Lief.” Toward her he showed a strange hostility, a touch even of that fierceness that had been his mother’s — once she had rushed shrieking from his room because he had suddenly roared behind her as his mother had done behind him. When she was gone he sat for a long time by his table, his hands stretched out in front of him, thinking.

He had succeeded well; he had multiplied his wife’s money now into the many thousands — they had a house in the country and servants. They were spoken of in the town as a couple who had an existence that might be termed as “pretty soft,” and when the carriage drove by of a Sunday with baby Lief up front on her mother’s lap and Lief’s husband beside her in his gray cloth coat, they stood aside not to be trampled on by the swift legged, slender ankled “pacer” that Lief had bought that day when she had visited the “old home” — the beach that had known her and her husband when they were children. This horse was the very one that she had asked for when she saw how beautiful it was as they fastened the belt to it preparatory to lowering it over the side. It was then that she remembered how when her husband had been a little boy they had lowered him over into the boat with this same belting.

During the Winter that followed, which was a very hard one, Lief took cold and resorted to hot water bottles and thin tea. She became very fretful, and annoyed at her husband’s constant questionings as to her health; even Little Lief was a nuisance because she was so noisy. She would steal into the room, and crawling under her mother’s bed would begin to sing in a high, thin treble, pushing the ticking with her patent leather boots to see them crinkle. Then the mother would cry out, the nurse would run in and take her away and Lief would spend a half hour in tears. Finally they would not allow Little Lief in the room, so she would steal by the door many times, walking noiselessly up and down the hall; but finally, her youth overcoming her, she would stretch her legs out into a straight goose step, and for this she was whipped because on the day that she had been caught her mother had died.

And so the time passed and the years rolled on, taking their toll. It was now many Summers since that day that Zelka had walked into town with Swart — now many years since Fenken had snapped his fingers like a cabby’s whip. Little Lief had never even heard that her grandmother had been called a “beautiful woman in a black sort of way,” and she had only vaguely heard of the nickname that had once been given the family, the “Bullets.” She came to know that great strength had once been in the family, to such an extent indeed that somehow a phrase was known to her, “Remember always to keep a little iron in the blood.” And one night she had pricked her arm to see if there were iron in it, and she had cried because it hurt, and so she knew that there was none.