No Place for an Angel (11 page)

They always had trouble. People sometimes walked up to the Latham house, way back then, asking, “Ain't there some other way across all that sand?” “No other way,” all the Lathams would say. “Won't you stay for dinner?”

“Then,” Uncle Mark would say to nobody in particular, “there was that boy that broke his back.” “Oh, tell about it!” Catherine would cry.

Why did it give her such a thrill, this tale of suffering? She did not know, but could securely feel that she was no different in this from everybody else. Negroes told about it, and Indians and white people, and the story went that on clear September nights you could still hear the boy crying, some said he was crying “Mother, mother!” but others said “Mercy, mercy!”

He had been trying to get a foundering wagon across the sand and as the wheels had strained up a series of willow logs, the logs had slipped and one wheel had come down upon him. They had lifted the wheel away, but his back was broken.

The whole countryside had come, rising up along the edge of the bluffs that rimmed Sandy Gulch. The boy lay in the center of silent human circles, which enlarged continually. No one could touch him for fear of further harm. Someone rode for a doctor. The doctor did all he could but the boy died, toward morning. He was buried in the Latham graveyard—they offered it, like offering dinner. Then the wagons pushed on.

“You know, Mark,” said Uncle Dick, for there was always some new part of the story you got when it was retold, “when Papa went out West in nineteen-oh-two he looked those people up. They had a little dry-goods business by then. They said that boy was no blood child of theirs, but an orphan. He had come along with them from west Tennessee.”

“Well, now,” said Uncle Mark, “they sacrificed the orphan. Hee, hee. That's how come he was under that wagon doing all that risky work. Warn't none of their'ern. Hee, hee.”

“They never felt that way,” said Uncle Dick. “They mourned him like their own blood kin.”

“It's all right to say,” said Uncle Mark.

But Catherine sat silent, bare feet tucked beneath her skirts on the porch steps, lost in the terrible event.

“And then there was a wedding down in Sandy Gulch,” said Uncle Dick, observing her.

“A
wedding!
” said Uncle Mark. “I never heard about that.”

“Well, there was,” said Uncle Dick. “You're hearing about it now.”

“Oh, tell about it!” Catherine cried.

“There was a wedding,” said Uncle Dick, and poked a walnut hull off the side of the porch with the end of his walking cane, “because a whole train of wagons got stuck in Sandy Gulch, and a boy from one family in the train had got right well acquainted with a girl from another family in the train, along the way, and since they had got so bad stuck and Saturday night was coming on and then Sunday—they were strict religious people and wouldn't travel Sundays anyway—it seemed like a good time for marriage. So they took out a team and rode for the preacher that very night. Built a big bonfire, you could see from right this spot, danced in the firelight, played the banjo, all barefoot and happy on the sand. Played a tambourine,” he added, looking at Catherine.

“I've got a tambourine!” Catherine cried, as though Uncle Dick didn't know it.

“I never heard that story in my life,” said Uncle Mark.

“Sister Bessie remembered it,” said Uncle Dick. “She baked a cake and took it down next morning.”

“If they's in that big a hurry to get married,” said Uncle Mark, “there must a been a pretty dern good reason.”

“Hush your mouth,” said Uncle Dick. “This is my story, not yours.” And he got up and walked off toward the scuppernong arbor, looking very straight and angry.

Uncle Dick was good and Uncle Mark was mean, but they both died, Uncle Dick slowly, in the hospital, with cancer, and Uncle Mark quickly: he got caught out in a rain on a fishing trip, took pneumonia in his left lung and was gone after three or four days of coughing and wheezing and swilling whiskey. When Catherine was home on holiday from finishing school, she went to see Uncle Dick in the hospital. He seemed about half the size of the man she remembered and his color was very bad, but his expression was pure sweetness, his eyes terribly bright, gentle and mild, so that she felt struck through with them, as though with a glance from an angel.

“Well, upon my soul,” he said when he saw Catherine, “she's a regular young lady, and pretty as a picture. Well, bless my soul.” He never took any advantage in his life and didn't now, saying nothing the whole time they were there to make them feel bad about his dying.

“He's a lover of the Lord,” said Catherine's mother after they left, and dissolved into tears.

Bad times came upon the Lathams after Uncle Dick died. The bad times started out like good times, for a new oil field came in, this time on Latham land which had been turned over to cattle, but the cattle were going to have to be inconvenienced for a time before they could return to former pastures and graze among the derricks. Catherine's mother remarked about this time that now the Lathams had their own oil they could have given the Hickmans those leases back after all. Since Mrs. Latham had been patiently echoing through the years everything Catherine's father said about how unreasonable, foolish, jealous, spiteful, sinful and downright ridiculous the Hickmans were, the note so casually sounded indicated wrong-thinking to a degree nobody could even contemplate. Catherine's father, who had been known to lose his temper over much slighter things, did not even go so far as to recognize that the remark had ever been made. Catherine herself could not believe her ears. Her sister Priscilla and her brother Edward were looking up from their plates and staring, but nobody spoke until Catherine said, “Why, Mother? Why give them back?” “Well,” said her mother, “what do we need with all that money?” Catherine's father had never stopped eating, or even looked up. She might as well have been sick with high fever, talking out of her head. He presently got up to leave the table. “On Christmas?” the three children asked, and their mother said it, too. “Oh,” he laughed and sat back down. “I forgot all about it being Christmas.”

Soon after the New Year Edward left home. He vanished. Troubles were upon them.

Catherine always believed that the troubles started around the dinner table when her mother revealed she had never been heart and soul involved in hating the Hickmans. Christmas afternoon, which contained all the assorted boredoms and depressions of ten family Sunday afternoons in one, Catherine saw Edward out under the oak trees in the side yard, alone. She went out to him. He was a sullen boy who had possessed the turret from the first. The day they moved into that big house they had missed him, and by then he had it—a tower to himself. No one was allowed to enter there. Whenever Catherine thought of Edward it seemed to her that he had lived forever and had been frowning and disdainful while the pyramids were being built. He would work with cattle but didn't like oil. Nobody could get any reason out of him. Lately, of all things, he had made friends with Alice Hickman. She was so plain nobody went with her, but Edward called himself helping her pass some kind of entrance examination to business school. “Don't you know why she's doing that? Don't you know what everybody will say?” Their mother could use any weapon to keep them away from common people, so she gave Alice a dark motive: family revenge. But all she ever had against the Hickmans, it now seemed, was simply that they were common. “Better watch out,” their father warned her, behind Edward's back. “He'll marry her to spite you.”

When Catherine came outside on Christmas afternoon, eating biscuit with strawberry jam, Edward threw an oak ball at an oak tree and said, standing on the damp ground (it was hard to get grass to grow in Texas) on the russet wet fallen oak leaves that spread evenly up the gentle slope of their yard, “I've got so I hate everything here.”

That would be true anywhere, Catherine thought, for already she was getting to be a wise little girl and studied psychology 2B at finishing school and loved figuring people out.

“Why don't you go off to college, Edward?” she asked.

“I went for two years,” he said. “What are you eating?”

“Biscuit and butter and strawberry jam,” she said.

“Don't you ever get enough? God A'mighty. Fifteen different things for Christmas dinner. Is that a different dress?”

“Yes.”

“God A'mighty. Fifteen hundred different dresses.”

That was the last conversation she ever had with him. He left early in the New Year, had been, apparently, planning the move for some time, for when they broke into his turret rooms they found everything smoothly packed away, with accurate labels written on the outside tabling the contents. On each, in capitals, he printed:
NO NEED TO LOOK INSIDE AS THIS LIST IS CORRECT
.

His mother, weeping, as usual in time of trial, locked the door so that he would find everything just as he left it when he got back. A post card arrived the next month from St. Louis which said: “Am fine. Have job here. Do not try to find me.” Others came from time to time.

Catherine and Priscilla, whispering, drew closer after this. Quivering with those ideals that mushroom in the hearts of little girls taught to mind their manners day by day in Victorian households, they solemnly decided to make up to their parents for the loss of Edward. “Poor Mamma and Daddy,” they said. “But we won't hate Edward either.” So they vowed.

It was about this time, in the summer, that Jerry Sasser started asking Catherine for dates.

Why had she married Jerry? There had been lots of other boys. And Jerry Sasser in those days was not even particularly good-looking; nobody mentioned him as being much of anything, and girls did not giggle pleasurably among themselves when they talked about him. He did not really belong in Merrill, his father having come there to teach economics at a small agricultural junior college somewhat contemptuously known as the “Aggie.” Catherine married him because he understood how Edward had grieved her father and mother; she knew he understood because he said so. One by one, and altogether, he heard them out on this matter with serious sympathetic nods, and when they finished, he said, “I understand.” But once she was alone with him on that same evening, when the family had confided in him, almost like a son, for the first time, Catherine went on to say, “I don't want you just to listen to them all the time. My feelings aren't just about family things. I want to live my own life, even if I do think I'll never get over what Edward did.” And Jerry Sasser looked at her over the wheel of the car—they had driven out to look at Sandy Gulch in the moonlight, which after the picture show and the drugstore was the standard thing to do—and said, “I understand.”

When they were not busy understanding all these grave issues about the Latham family, they were doing everything together in high school, joining the band, getting out the paper, and being in plays together. Jerry made the highest grades, Catherine the next highest—they leapfrogged each other, it was like a game. Poor Priscilla wasn't in it, she trailed way behind, but got to be a cheerleader for the basketball team and screamed her lungs out. Then it was over, speeches all made and dances done and Catherine off at finishing school where she kept right on, serious way down where it mattered, considering motives, her own and everybody else's, thinking that she would like to do the right thing; but among the deep drives of life she might as well have spent her time counting eggs or smoothing out quilt scraps. The result was the same whether she had spent even five minutes thinking or not. She quit school and she and Jerry got married in Merrill at the First Baptist Church, and went to live in Dallas for two years while Jerry studied law, a blissful bit of canoe-drifting toward the war.

The war changed everything.

There had been a reconciliation of sorts between Catherine's parents and Edward, who, after ten years, had finally revealed his address, along with photos of a wife, a shoe business, and two babies, grinning in sunbonnets. Visits were exchanged and babies hugged and checks signed. “I just never did like oil,” said Edward, the only excuse he ever offered anybody for all the anguish he had caused. “I'd like to kill him with my bare hands,” said Priscilla, who, if she didn't watch out, was going to be an old maid. She was terribly glamorous, kept an apartment in Dallas, had dozens of men on her mind, and went to New York every winter to see all the plays.

Just before Jerry was drafted, Catherine made sure she got pregnant. For six months, until the doctor made her stop it, she chased around the army camp circuit to be near Jerry, squeezed up in day coaches with people whom she found awful, interesting and funny by turns, went for days without a bath, slept in dingy rooming houses where roaches and spiders ran through at night. Catherine's mother got wind of what things were really like on these wild trips and bitterly complained. “I know we used to be poor,” she said a dozen times a day, “but we were always clean. Suppose you had a miscarriage in one of those places, what could you do, who could you call on?” “It's as bad as the Hickmans,” Catherine agreed. “It certainly is,” said her mother. For years now, the girls had had their little jokes about the Hickmans.

When Jerry went overseas, the grey density of the war years came down over them in earnest. Catherine cried at night; she cried the baby into birth a month too soon, she thought; at least, it always seemed that way. Did it really rain so much during the war? In Catherine's memory she was always at the house in Merrill and it was always a winter afternoon, the big living room chill and empty (they lived on a side porch and only went to the front to get the Dallas paper from the door around dusk), the baby to be fed, and after that the war news on the radio. So one day during the war was as like another as the footprints of one man walking on smooth sand.