Home from the Hill (4 page)

Nobody really blamed Mrs. Hannah for the tragedy. Enough of the story was out now for us to see that it was too complicated to have been any one person's fault. It was just one of those fated things. But as Graveyard Cleaning Day had neared and the scandal grown over her neglect of the Captain's grave, Mrs. Hannah's mother, old lady Griffin, had taken it upon herself to exonerate her daughter. She had been very busy telling her story all the week before, and so before work began that morning, as we lingered over breakfast-on-the-ground in the litter of leaves beneath the big bare oaks at the graveyard edge, rifling scythes and filing hoes while the women cleared away the dishes and filled seconds on the coffee, we began to criticize her afresh, and to remember that she had always taken being Mrs. Hunnicutt rather more for granted than such a plain girl had the right to do.

But if at last her patience had given way, it was not for her own sake that she had taken steps, and it was after years of the kind of selflessness and suffering that holy martyrs were made of. This was her mother's view. And in truth there was something in it, as all agreed to whom she told her story—though perhaps they saw things Mrs. Griffin did not see in one conversation of Hannah's which she reported in detail, to illustrate her point. It had occurred years before, just after some particularly loud scandal involving the Captain and somebody's wife had reached Hannah. Her mother had heard and had gone to her, but had found instead of the broken woman she expected, one to whom long-suffering had become a source of strength.

“He is my husband,” she had said. “It is a wife's duty to respect her husband, no matter how little he may deserve it—in fact, all the more as he doesn't. At least, so my father always told me [her father, Old Man Griffin, had passed on shortly before—to some eternal domino parlor for his sins], and it is certainly a daughter's duty to respect her father.”

There was bitterness—as her mother knew—in this. It was to her father that she had gone six months after her wedding to complain that Wade was not pure when he took her. And her father never afterwards occurred to her mind but in that pose of astonishment and amusement, asking her what on earth she had expected of a twenty-eight-year-old man. He had been a little disgusted to speak of the sort of fellow she apparently had wanted for a husband. He was disappointed that she had not known beforehand and did not appreciate what a ladies' man she was getting in Wade. He himself had known from the start, and though the Griffins were of even older stock than the Hunnicutts, he had been flattered when the Captain—the title was still new then, which would make it around 1919—came courting his daughter. Of course she was the kind of girl a man like him who had had his pick of women would choose when it came time to take a wife. He was twenty-eight, she twenty—time both of them were married. Old Man Griffin watched them for six months, as the whole town did, while they went for drives in the Captain's butter-colored Apperson, or sat behind the honeysuckle trellis on the front porch on warm Sunday afternoons. Then he began expecting the Captain to come for a talk with him. He did not believe, anymore than the rest of us did, those who said she was keeping him waiting for an answer. There were just too many good-looking girls ready to do what his man Chauncey was always declaring his readiness to do: wash dat man's feet an drink de water! But if Miss Hannah Griffin was flattered at being chosen the bride of the man with such a notorious long list of conquests, she certainly never showed it. How could her father, or anyone else, guess that she had never even heard the stories about him? That if she had she would have refused ever to see him again?

Her father told her, certain that this would set things right, that her husband was no different from any other man. He did not know his daughter. She was not so innocent that she did not know other men were like that. But her husband she had expected to be the one man who was different. He was to have kept himself for her. Her father, she realized, was not ashamed to include himself in that general ruck of men. Stunned, she returned to Wade, too sickened even to accuse him.

Yet she forgave him, hardly knowing she was doing it, when shortly after she discovered that she was pregnant.

Wade wanted a boy to make a hunter of. She wanted a boy too. It was a man's world.

In her sixth month she received an anonymous letter. It said that all the town knew her husband was deceiving her—“two-timing” was the low way the writer had put it—and named the woman, one of her friends. It was especially pitiful, said the letter, in view of her present condition. At first, despite what she knew now of his past, she refused to believe it. Then she recalled looks, words, silences that took on significance. She remembered excuses of his for late nights out, a weekend hunting party from which he, the best hunter in the county, had returned empty-handed. She had invited the couple often to her house, thinking Wade was fond of the husband. What a fool that must have made her in their eyes, in the eyes of the town!

This time she went to her mother. But her father, having heard the rumors and sensing something afoot, burst in on them. He dismissed the letter, swore that the writer was some disappointed admirer of Wade's, cursed the town gossips, and ended by calling her a bad wife with no trust in her man.

She could see he did not want a young divorcée with an infant on his hands.

She prayed that she might miscarry.

But as her time neared, Wade's part in the child came to seem less and less …

… Until now that white stone in the middle, as even the stranger who brought her home for good in that padded hearse remarked, makes no more mention of any father than her own red stone does of a husband, but reads:

Theron

ONLY CHILD OF HANNAH HUNNICUTT

or, as some have read it, Child of Hannah Hunnicutt Only—as if hers had been the world's second immaculate conception, or as if she had reproduced by dividing herself in half—which in fact does pretty well state the case.

“He is my husband,” she had said, “and I took him for better or worse. It is his weakness. His weakness and my cross. I suppose I ought to consider myself lucky it's my only one. He vowed to forsake all others and he has broken his vow a dozen times to my knowledge, which means a hundred times more that I never knew of, no doubt, and a thousand times more in his thoughts. But let him see how I keep my vow! Except that that is just what he knew to expect and won't put him to any shame! Well, even so, let him see how I keep my vow. Every time he breaks his will make me strengthen mine!”

“Well, I hope, dear,” her mother timidly interposed, “I hope you weren't ever thinking of getting back at him by
breaking
it.”

“He knew I was different from all the other women he ever had to do with. Well, I will be an even better wife to him than he was counting on!” she threatened.

“Yes, and no doubt that will make him reform,” said her mother.

“Never! Can the leopard change his spots? Nothing will ever make him reform and nobody can help him do it. Nobody. And why should he want to reform? Why should he have any regrets? Who has ever reproached him?”

She had not. She could say that with pride. And if there was a weakness in the Captain's character, it was that he allowed himself to be forgiven easily—if that is a weakness. She never reproached him, never even made him feel guilty, so that at last her uncomplaining and unnatural silence inspired him with a certain suspicion of her intelligence. To feign blindness was what her convention demanded, but it got so that no sooner had he become interested in some woman than she would take her up, begin to be seen with her around town, and chummier with her than she had ever been with any woman before. And that woman would be her only friend for just so long as his name stayed linked with hers before moving on—though just how Mrs. Hannah knew his name had moved on was a mystery, considering that she had no one to gossip with (and would have scorned to if she had) but the rather unlikely woman whom he had just left behind. Some of us in town came to feel that she just about selected them for him, had them up to the house and first brought them to his notice. In any case, she was sensitive to the first signs of his weariness of a woman, and when he dropped one she dropped her even harder.

“Hah! I'd reproach him all right!” her mother had said. “Any other woman would reproach him. But that is just one more way you're better than other women. You're too good for your own good, Hannah, as I have often told you. But,” she then sighed, “maybe he will settle down without anyone's help in time, as he grows older.”

“He will never change but to get worse until the day he dies. They never do. How can you be so childish, Mama? Or are you trying to coat the pill for me? Well, don't try. If there is anything I despise it's a person who closes her eyes to keep from seeing what's right in front of them. But even knowing he will never change, even that I can live with, and without complaining. Complain? I would die sooner than give him the satisfaction! I will show a brave face to the world! I'll show them they don't have to pity me for a blind fool. For instance. You know of course that he is carrying on right now with Jane Watson. Hah! You didn't think I knew, did you? Mama, you do not make me feel better, as you suppose, by pretending it isn't so, or that you don't know about it if it is. The whole town knows, and I am sure one of your dear friends will have come by now to pity your poor, fond, foolish, deceived daughter to you. Oh, yes, the whole town knows. But I knew before anybody! I saw it coming even before it happened. Didn't I invite her and that idiot of a husband of hers to dinner a second time after I saw him looking her up and down with that quick little look of his, that special look? Though not so special after all, since it's the same he uses to appraise a horse or a shooting dog—except he studies a little longer over a horse or a dog. Oh yes, I actually make it easier for him. How many women would do that for a philandering husband? Why, I don't think he'd ever noticed little Jane Watson until I had her over here—and indeed why should anybody? Well, and would you believe it, I like her—the little fool. At first—afterwards, if you know what I mean—she was afraid I knew and had invited them over to make a scene in front of her husband. And I confess I did drop a few hints just to watch her squirm. Not that that husband of hers would do anything if you told him to his face—and that is what you would have to do. He must know Wade would squash him like a hoecake if he so much as looked suspicious. I thought once of letting the kitten out of the bag just so she could see how much of a fight her husband would put up for her. You should see her now whenever they come over—and they come often because she's afraid to refuse my invitations, and I invite her daily, in fact I don't give her a minute's rest from me. (And I just wonder how Wade likes seeing
that
much of her!) Well, she's on pins and needles for fear I've found out, and at the same time I believe she can't help despising me just a wee tinesy bit for not having seen. Oh, she pities me too, which I think is awfully sweet of her. Now, though, it's begun to irk her just a little that I don't know or at least suspect something. In fact, I suppose she feels a bit slighted that I don't suspect her, for I've told her that my husband is a great philanderer (I believe she had had the idea that she was his first great outside love) without ever letting her think I've suspected him of looking twice at her. So lately she's even begun to toy with me a little, hinted to me a little, and if Wade just gives her time I believe she will simply have to tell me. She pities me! Poor fool! If she only knew how short-term a lease she has on his affections. I had the Sloanes over the other night and Elizabeth was simply fetching in a new black velvet gown (oh, they all put on their best when they're coming to my house for an evening!) and I was so sorry for poor little Jane. I had forgotten to tell her anybody was coming besides her and her husband, and so she had on her old gray taffeta that Wade had seen her in twice already. Well, really, she owes it to me that she has kept him as long as she has. Lord knows she couldn't have done it on her own. I really can't help liking her, poor, poor little idiot—though I don't know if I'll be able to resist telling her when the blow comes that I knew all along.”

“You're a saint, Hannah, a saint,” her mother put in, when, flushed, hot with excitement, and out of breath, she sat down. “Not another woman in a million—what am I saying? Not another woman alive would have put up with—”

“Theron must never know,” said Hannah.

“Any other woman would see to it that—”

“He adores him. Who doesn't? You should have heard his man Chauncey this morning: ‘Dat Cap'm Wade, I would wash dat man's feet an drink de water!' Theron worships him. And who has taught him to? Who has lied herself into eternal damnation for his sake, letting his son believe he is the very model of mankind? And maybe you think he's grateful? He takes it as his due. And even that I can stand, and will, and no one but you, Mama, will ever know that my life was anything but heaven on earth.”

There was talk that morning of the first Graveyard Cleaning Day afterwards of buying the Captain a stone by popular subscription. Meanwhile it was unanimous, even unspoken, that we were all to pitch in and clean his neglected grave first. Everybody wanted to help, and so we went there in a body, and found—she had had them brought in from out of town and put up the night before—the three stones, and the open grave. Somebody ran back and got the stragglers and the missing women still cleaning up the breakfast mess, and soon even the children stopped playing and came in from the scattered parts of the cemetery, and we all stood gaping—as the stranger from Dallas did—and reading the inscriptions aloud again and again.

Over the Captain's grave was set a stone of marble so black you had to stand up close to make out what was cut on it. Next to it stood a stone of white marble, white for innocence, no doubt, a tombstone over no tomb, for Theron. Next was a stone of red granite for herself, date of death, the same as on the other two, already cut on it—red, to signify who knows what … her long-suffering, her grief, remorse, the bloody hue of her vengeful mind perhaps—and beneath it that raw and gaping hole and beside it that mound of moist red clay.