Spencer's Mountain (18 page)

“Mrs. Hughes, Mama told me to hurry home if you don't mind.”

“All right, son, there's fifteen cents for the buttermilk there on the table. Don't you mind me teasen. I'm glad you goen to that party 'cause I know you ain't one to put on airs about it. You go and have yourself a good time.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” he said, took the fifteen cents from the table and fled.

***

On the afternoon of the party Clay-Boy came home from his job at the library and found his mother near tears.

“I wanted your good pants to be nice and clean so I washed 'em and I reckon they were just too threadbare at the knees. They couldn't take it.”

He looked at the pants. They were knickers, the good pair he wore to church and any other time he had to dress up. He had no others except his two everyday pairs, which were in much worse condition.

“I reckon I'll just have to stay at home,” he said. He tried to hide his disappointment, but he could not fool his mother.

“Of course you're not going to miss Claris' party,” she said. “Now, there's a pair of britches your Uncle Virgil gave your daddy that are too small for him. They're in there in his closet. You go in there and try them on.”

Clay-Boy had only to hold the trousers up to his waist to tell that his legs needed to be at least five inches longer if he were to get into his uncle's pants.

Olivia agreed that they just wouldn't fit. “If I had the time I could put new cuffs on them for you, but it would take longer than we've got. Well, I'll just have to do the next best thing. I'll darn those holes at the knees and nobody'll ever be able to tell the difference.”

Olivia worked furiously, stopping only to make a light supper for the family, and without taking any herself returned
to her darning. At a quarter to seven she brought the darned trousers up to the boys' room where Clay-Boy was completely dressed except for his trousers.

“It isn't the best job of darnen I ever did,” said Olivia, “but it's one of the best. Put 'em on and let's see how they look.”

Clay-Boy pulled on the knickers and his mother looked him over. “You look just fine,” she said. “And anyway, it isn't the clothes that count. It's the person that's in them.”

After his mother left the room, Clay-Boy went to the mirror and examined himself. His hair was plastered down with water. His white shirt had been freshly laundered and ironed by Olivia that afternoon. His blue tie was knotted in a perfect bow. The knickers had been so perfectly mended that the darned places in each knee were barely visible. His shoes were shined to such a high polish that they almost gave off an incandescence of their own.

At seven-fifteen Olivia called from the foot of the stairs.

“Clay-Boy, it's getten late.”

“All right, Mama,” he called back.

At the last minute he decided not to go. He didn't know exactly how he should be dressed but he decided that what he was wearing was completely wrong.

He spent the next fifteen minutes trying to imagine himself sick. At least if he became sick he would not have to give his real reason to his parents. He would also have an excuse to give Claris. Already he could see her disappointment which would express itself in lofty contempt and half-concealed wrath. But try as he might he could not make himself sick.

“Seven-thirty, son,” his father called from the foot of the stairs. “If you're goen to that party you better get a move on.”

“I'm not going,” Clay-Boy said, and once the words were out of his mouth he felt even worse than he had before.

“What's that?” his father called.

“I said I'm not going to the party.” He tried to keep any feeling out of his voice but a thin edge of nervousness forced its way through. Clay detected it and climbed the stairs.

“How come you decided not to go?” Clay asked.

“Oh, I just decided it probably wouldn't be much fun,” Clay-Boy said.

“I thought you liked that little girl,” said Clay.

“I like her all right, but I got to thinking it over and I decided I'd just rather not go.”

“That ain't the whole truth is it, son?”

“No, sir.”

“Maybe you got yourself a little quivery and wrought-up about this party. Maybe that's it a little bit.”

“Well, yes sir, a little bit.”

“If you don't want to go that's one thing, but if you do want to go and you're scared that's somethen else. You see what I'm getten at?”

“Yes sir.”

“If you let somethen scare you off the first time, the next time somethen come along that scares you, you might back off from that too. Now, if you honestly don't want to go to that party, you ain't got to, but if you're too scared to go then maybe you ought to think about it a little more.”

Clay-Boy rose from the bed. He walked over to his desk, his shoes squeaking as he went, and without looking at his father he said, “I guess I'll go.”

When he turned to face his father he saw that Clay was smiling.

“She wouldn't of asked you in the first place unless she wanted you, would she?” Clay asked.

“I reckon not,” Clay-Boy said.

“Just remember this one thing,” said Clay. “There ain't goen to be a soul there that's had the ancestry and the upbringing you have. If they say anything about the kind of blood they come from, you speak up and tell 'em you got stock in you that goes back to the beginning of this country. But don't you bring it up first because it ain't polite to brag about your background unless somebody else starts it.”

“Yes sir,” said Clay-Boy.

“And don't forget what you're goen for. You're goen to this party to have yourself a good time. When the time comes for eaten, eat like you're goen to bust a gut. Folks love a hearty eater. When the time comes to dance, get out there and sashay them gals till you wear out the fiddler. Squeeze 'em up a little bit. Gals say they don't, but they'll stick to you like honey in a bee tree if they find out you like a little squeezen now and
again. And if there's any old folks there don't forget to say ‘Yes sir,' and ‘Yes ma'am,' to 'em.”

“All right Daddy,” promised Clay-Boy. “I'd better get going or I'll be late.”

His whole family had gathered to see him off and as Clay-Boy walked down the front walk he could feel their eyes following him. He felt stiff and self-conscious. As he came to the corner of the sharp curve he looked back. His mother, father, brothers and sisters were lined up across the front porch, silently and gravely watching him. He waved farewell and was gone from them into high society.

He was late. As he came up out of the darkness he stood for a moment at the edge of the light thrown by the porch light and listened to the sounds of merriment within. Someone was playing the piano and shadows bobbed against each other and moved across the shades at the windows. Again Clay-Boy felt the unreasonable wave of fear. He felt clumsy and countrified. He wouldn't know what to say or how to behave. He took a deep breath and plunged into the circle of light.

At his ring the door was opened by an absolute stranger. A vision in white organdy ruffles whom he recognized only when she whispered in his ear, “What are you doing so late?”

Without bothering to wait for an explanation, Claris ushered him into a roomful of boys and girls. The girls were all dressed like Claris and all the boys, he discovered to his horror, were dressed in blue serge coats and white flannel pants. He was the only boy in the room not wearing a coat, and not a single one was wearing knickers, to say nothing of knickers that were darned at each knee.

His entrance had interrupted a game they were playing and those in the room fell silent when he came in. Numbly he felt himself guided through a blur of names and faces until mercifully he found himself in a corner near the door he had come in. Afterward he had no recollection of a single name or of any intelligible response he had made to any introduction. He remembered only that after shaking each outstretched hand his right had gone down automatically to cover the darned place in the knee of his knickers.

“What's the matter with you?” Claris asked in a low voice when she brought him a glass of lemonade.

“I guess I'm not feeling very well,” he said.

“You'll feel better once you drink that lemonade,” she said. “There's a couple of shots of gin in it.”

He sat gulping down the lemonade and stealing furtive glances around at his handsomely dressed, sophisticated companions. He admired the ease with which they talked to each other and their confidence. As each person had arrived Claris had given them party napkins designed to help everybody get to know everybody else. On the napkin was printed a thing which the bearer had to do. Clay-Boy realized suddenly that everyone was looking at him and that they expected something of him.

“It's your turn, Clay-Boy,” called Claris from across the room.

“Oh,” he said, and consulted his napkin. Tell a story, it said. Clay looked out at the faces in front of him. They seemed to have doubled. He tried to speak but his throat was full of dust.

“It says tell a story,” he blurted finally.

“Clay-Boy Spencer is a master hand at telling stories,” said Claris.

“Well, go on,” somebody said after a moment.

“Which one?” Clay-Boy asked in a suffocated whisper.

“Tell the one about the natural-born homing pig,” urged Claris.

“This is a story I got from my Daddy,” Clay-Boy began, his voice hardly above a whisper. “It seems like one time Grandpap came down with the polio and left Grandma and all her children to take care of themselves. Grandma had this Uncle Benny Tucker over in Buckingham County…”

As he told the story he looked around; he saw that every eye was resting on him and that they were looking at him with interest. The attention of his audience encouraged him. His voice rose and he repeated the story exactly as he had heard it hundreds of times from his father. Once he faltered, trying to remember his father's version.

“And what happened then,” someone asked, and he
knew that they were waiting and wanted him to go on. He picked up the story where he had left off. He even embroidered it a bit, improving on it where he felt his father had left off, and when he came to the end of the story he was on his feet, acting out each bit, dramatizing each event as it had happened.

By the end of the story he had the fascinated attention of every person in the room.

“And as Daddy says,” he finished, “he never knew if that shoat was in love with Uncle Benny Tucker or whether he was just a natural-born homing pig.”

He sat down; as long as he lived he would never forget the laughter and applause that greeted the end of the story.

“Whatever happened to Jabez?” they wanted to know.

“Tell another story,” somebody urged.

Clay-Boy had made his entrance into high society and they were his.

It was twelve-thirty when he arrived home that night. Clay and Olivia were sitting up in the living room waiting for him.

“Did you have a good time,” asked Olivia.

“I had a wonderful time,” he said. He sat down on the sofa, pulled off his shoes, and yawned.

“What was it like, son,” asked Clay.

“Just like any old party,” Clay-Boy replied. “Them city people ain't no different from the rest of us.”

The post card had arrived on Wednesday. By nightfall everyone in New Dominion knew of Virgil's impending visit. The fact that he was bringing a girl home and that she was a Jewish girl heightened everybody's anticipation and was the subject of conversation at every supper table that night. Half the people in the village began making plans to be in the vicinity of Clay's house on Sunday morning on the chance that they might get a look at the Jew.

Claris Coleman, hearing the conjecture about what a Jew might be, had attempted to explain Judaism to Olivia, but since Claris' explanation centered entirely around the ill-founded contention that Jews were said to be against birth
control and thus had large families as a rule, Olivia rejected the explanation as another aspect of Claris' obsession with sex and did not believe one word she was told.

Olivia was far more concerned with Lisa as a person than she was with her religion. It did not matter to her what the girl believed in, but the kind of girl she might be. Olivia's main concern was whether or not the two of them, Virgil and Lisa, would be willing to take Clay-Boy in while he was getting his college education.

“Virgil must mean to marry her,” she remarked to Clay that Sunday morning at breakfast. “He wouldn't be bringen her up here for everybody to take a look at if he wasn't goen to marry her.”

“Well, I hope that's what the boy's got on his mind,” observed old Grandmother Elizabeth. “That boy needs a wife, somebody to do for him down there in Richmond. It's way past time for Virgil to have himself a little wife.”

“That boy is haven himself a good time,” chimed in Grandfather Zebulon. “He ain't figuren to settle down and I don't blame him. He's down there in Richmond frolicken them city gals and I don't blame him a speck.”

“What do you know about city gals, old man?” asked Elizabeth dryly.

“I memorize the time I was down there in Richmond and looked 'em all over. Every one of them just dressed up in silk stockens and high-heel shoes looken like they stepped right out of the Sears Roebuck catalogue. That's the kind of woman I'd get me if I had it to do over again.”