Authors: William March
Christine said, “I loved
Robinson Crusoe
as a child. I’m sure Rhoda will, too.”
“Then, when Hobart was twenty,” said Mrs. Breedlove implacably,
“his father hanged himself in the garage. It was all most vague, and nobody seems to have understood the truth of it, even now. Then his mother died suddenly, too. An attack of acute indigestion, they said. And now this dreadful thing about his wife and the shotgun!” She sighed, and continued shrewdly, “But why are you reading murder cases all of a sudden?”
The next morning, Mrs. Penmark left her daughter with Mrs. Forsythe, saying she’d pick her up as soon as she returned from her visit to Benedict. Rhoda had her copy of
Robinson Crusoe
with her, and she went to the small marble balcony that jutted out in a sort of plump half-moon from the side of the Forsythe apartment. She sat down to read, but almost at once she heard Leroy laughing and talking guardedly to himself. She bent over the balcony, and saw him at work on the sweet olive bush below.
He did not look up, but he knew he had her attention, and he said out of the side of his mouth, “There she sits on Mrs. Forsythe’s little gallery, reading her book and looking cute and innocent. Looking like butter wouldn’t melt on her tongue. She can fool some people with that innocent look she can put on and take off when she wants to, but she can’t fool me. Not me! Not even a little bit, she can’t!”
The child stared down at him with no expression at all, and then, as though his presence bored her, she turned back to her book.
Leroy laughed and said softly, “She don’t want to talk to nobody smart. She likes to talk to people she can fool, like her mamma and Mrs. Breedlove and Mr. Emory.”
Rhoda closed her book on her forefinger, and said, “Go trim your bush. You talk silly all the time.”
His eyes met the coldness in her own, and raising his head, tilting his neck back, he pressed his shears against his dirty coveralls, and said, as though they were playing the balcony scene
in some ancient play, “I been way behind the times heretofore, but now I got your number, miss! I been hearing things about you that ain’t nice. I been hearing you beat up that poor little Claude in the woods, and that all three of the Fern sisters had to pull you off him. They tell me it took that many to pull you off him. I heard you run him off the wharf, he was so scared. That’s another thing I heard.”
Rhoda put down her book, gave him her full attention, and said, “If you tell lies like that, you won’t go to heaven when you die.”
“I heard plenty,” said Leroy. “I listen to people talk, and hear what they say. I’m not like you who’s gabbing all the time and won’t let nobody get a word in edgeways. I listen all the time. That’s the way I learn things. That’s why I’m smart and you’re so dumb.”
“People tell lies all the time,” said Rhoda. “I think you tell them more than anybody else.”
Leroy swung his shears outward in a wide, impassioned gesture. “I know what you done to that boy when you got him out on the wharf. I know. You can fool other people, but you can’t fool me, because I’m not dumb. I got your number, miss. You better treat me pretty from now on.”
“What did I do, if you know so much?”
Leroy made a downward, dramatic movement with his shears, and said, “You picked up a stick and hit him with it, that’s what you done! You hit him because he wouldn’t give you that medal like you told him to. I thought I’d seen some mean little girls in my time, but you’re the meanest.”
Rhoda rested her arms on the marble of the balcony, and said, “You tell lies. Everybody knows it. Nobody believes anything you say.”
“You want to know what you done after you hit that boy? Okay, I’ll tell you what you done then. You jerked that medal
off his shirt. Then you rolled that sweet little boy off the wharf, among them pilings.” He laughed silently to himself, thinking:
I got her listening to me now. I got her real worried.
Rhoda stared down at him, her clear, luminous brown eyes stretched wide in innocent surprise. “I’d be afraid to tell lies like that,” she said primly. “I’d be afraid I wouldn’t go to heaven.”
“Don’t bother to give me that innocent look, Miss Rhoda. I ain’t no dope like them others. I ain’t—”
But at that moment Mrs. Forsythe came onto the balcony, and Leroy dropped suddenly to his knees and began pruning the sweet olive bush. “Who were you talking to, Rhoda?” asked the old lady. She looked about mildly, but seeing nobody, she said, “I was sure I heard voices out here.”
“I was reading out loud to myself,” said Rhoda. She picked up her book, opened it, and said, “I like to read out loud. It sounds better to read out loud.”
Below them, Leroy crouched against the side of the building, laughing with pleasure at his cleverness. That mean little girl talking about
him
lying! That little girl could out-lie anybody in town without half trying! His fantasy about Rhoda and the stick was real smart. He didn’t believe it for a minute himself! He wasn’t dumb enough to believe a little eight-year-old girl would have the nerve to do a thing like that. But it was real clever, anyway. Not everybody could think up a story like that on the spur of the moment. And then, when Mrs. Forsythe’s voice ceased, and he heard the screen door shut, he rose cautiously and said in a whisper, “You know I’m telling the God’s truth. You know I’ve done figured out what happened.”
Rhoda leaned forward on the marble balustrade and said, “Everything you say is a lie. You tell lies all the time, Leroy. Everybody knows you tell lies.”
“It ain’t me that tells lies all the time,” said Leroy. “It’s you that tells lies all the time.”
And then, as though to close this little balcony scene of hate, Rhoda took her book inside, and Leroy pruned at the branches of the sweet olive with pleasure, as though it were the child, and not the shrub, he snipped.
Mrs. Penmark parked at the Fern School gate, and Miss Octavia, spying her through the blinds, came down the walk to meet her. They rode for a time in silence, or discussing things in which neither had the least interest; and then, as they approached Benedict, and came down the long avenue of live oaks and azaleas, Miss Fern said, “You must examine our oleanders while you’re here. They’re very old. My grandfather planted them originally as a hedge to screen the place from the road, but now they’re like trees. They’re in full bloom at this season, as you see.”
Then, as the two women got out of the car, Miss Fern said she’d phoned the caretakers at Benedict the evening before, and lunch would be ready at noon. It would be a simple one: crab omelettes, buttermilk biscuits, a green salad of some sort, and iced coffee. She did hope Mrs. Penmark like crabs. “They are so plentiful at this time of year,” she said. “All you need do is scoop them up in the shallow water near the beach. Once, when I was a little girl like Rhoda, my father had the idea of building a pen out into the water, so we could put crabs there and fatten them up to eat when they weren’t plentiful at all; but it was as impractical as most of my father’s ideas. You see, the crabs, when they were penned together, ate one another before we could eat them.”
They walked about the grounds, examining everything. They stood on the bridge that spanned Little Lost River, and looked at their shallow reflections in the black, sluggish water; then, hearing the luncheon bell, they came back to the house. Afterward, Christine said she’d like to go to the wharf alone, if Miss Fern would permit it; and Miss Fern nodded graciously and said, “Of course. Of course. I’ll join you there later, if that’s agreeable. I want to take some cuttings from the flame-colored oleander for a
friend in town who’s always loved that color. It’s a sort of botanical sport, and I’ve never seen that exact shade anywhere else. We have lots of time. I’ve no plans at all for the afternoon.”
Christine went to the end of the wharf, and stood there in indecision; then, knowing why she wanted to visit this place alone, she opened her bag, took out the penmanship medal, and dropped it among the pilings. In a way, she was as guilty as Rhoda, she thought. She flinched a little, seeing how furtive, how dishonest she had become, how greatly her character was disintegrating under the force of her anxiety and guilt. But this seemed the best way to dispose of the medal now, for she had known, after her visit to the Daigles, she could never return it to them. Then, as though to justify her action, she said softly to herself, “Rhoda is my own flesh and blood. It’s my duty to see that she isn’t harmed.”
She went into the summerhouse, a rickety structure which hurricanes had almost demolished, and stood there in uncertainty, trying to arrange her thoughts logically. Perhaps her worries were justified, perhaps not. But how could she know? How could she be entirely certain? Doubt was a dreadful and destroying thing, she thought. It would be better to know surely, no matter what the answer was. She sat down and raised her hands in a gesture of impotent helplessness.
Miss Fern joined her, a basket of the cuttings she had taken resting on one arm. They sat in silence, watching the level bay, with only gray mullet breaking the silence as they jumped in long, graceful arcs over the sandspit that ran out from shore. Then, at length, Miss Fern said, “Smooth those lines out of your brow. You’re so much prettier when you’re smiling. Believe me, there’s nothing in the world worth a frown, much less a tear.”
Christine said, “Will you tell me what you think happened that day at the picnic? I’m nervous and worried, as you see.”
Miss Fern said in surprise, “Why, I thought you knew.” Then,
lifting her cuttings and arranging them one by one in the basket, she said it was her belief that the boy, to escape Rhoda’s persistence, had hidden on the wharf, perhaps in the summerhouse where they now were. But Rhoda had found him, and when he saw her approaching, he became confused and backed away from her into the water.
Christine said. “Yes. Yes, I can imagine that.”
Miss Fern continued, saying that Claude, despite his seeming frailness, was a good swimmer, and, of course, Rhoda knew that. Once in the water, she had every reason to expect him to swim to shore. How could she have known the pilings were at that exact spot? Children were quite strange, she felt. We should not judge them by the standards we use in judging adults. Children are often so insecure and helpless. Perhaps the thought in Rhoda’s mind at the moment of the boy’s falling into the water was that he’d ruin his new suit, and she’d get a scolding for causing it. The guard’s calling to her at about that time had made her even more panicky, perhaps, and she ran ashore. Perhaps she stood behind those crepe myrtles to watch; but when Claude didn’t swim ashore at once, she probably thought, with the odd logic of childhood, that he’d hidden under the wharf to frighten her. So she did nothing at first; and of course later on, when it was too late to do anything, she was afraid to admit what had happened.
She put down her basket, shaded her eyes, and looked at the blue, rippling bay. She said, “I think the worst thing we have to face, since you want me to be frank with you, is this: Rhoda, in an emergency, deserted under fire like a frightened soldier. But then so many soldiers, so many older and wiser people than herself, have run away at their first barrage.”
They got up and moved down the wharf, and impulsively Miss Fern rested her hand on Christine’s forearm. “I am not your enemy,” she said. “You must not think of me that way again. If you need me, you must come to me at once.”
“I have been so distressed about the boy’s death,” said Christine. “So anxious, and so guilty, too.”
Miss Fern said she could understand Mrs. Penmark’s feelings very well; but insofar as guilt was concerned, she was hardly in position to give advice to others, since she, herself, had been raddled with irrational guilts all her life. It was all so foolish, so illogical, to feel that way, for guilt, when you examined it dispassionately, could be seen to be only a painful form of pride.
But it was only natural to expect that we all have our particular guilts, since our development, our very place in the world we live in, is based on that premise. We are taught from the beginning that the human impulses we have are shameful and degrading, that man himself is entirely vile, that his very birth is the end result of a furtive sin to be wailed over and atoned somehow. She thought it rather ingenuous of those who were shocked when the bishops and preachers and cardinals the Communists took broke down so easily under stress and confessed every evil action, every ill-defined sin their captors put into their mouths: they had been conditioned to an acceptance of their individual guilts from the cradle onward. The surprising thing, in her opinion, was not that they confessed to monstrous impossibilities so soon, but that they held out as long as they did.
Christine said, “I don’t know. I’m not really intellectual.”
They got into the automobile, and Miss Fern, continuing her theme, said that unless man was able to comprehend infinity, that baffling anomaly of a universe without dimensions, he could not comprehend the nature of God. She thought the efforts of mortals like ourselves to catalogue, to limit, to attribute our own moral precepts to Him, or even to define His nature, were both foolish and presumptuous.
Christine thought:
I’m going to accept what Rhoda told me. I’m going to give her the benefit of every doubt. There’s no reason to think
the death of the old lady in Baltimore, and the death of the little Daigle boy are connected. There’s nothing else I can do but trust her, unless I want to worry myself sick.
Miss Fern continued to speak softly, breaking off her discourse occasionally to point out an unusual tree, or some historical landmark with which she was familiar. She said, “How can we know that our own concepts of good and evil concern God in the slightest? How can we be so sure He’d even understand our tests and definitions? Certainly there’s nothing in nature, in the cruel habits of animals, that should lead us to think He does.”
Christine said, “Perhaps so. I don’t know.”
“Monica Breedlove once referred to me humorously—it was in a speech for one of her drives—as ‘that simple, romantic Whistler’s Mother among school ma’ams.’ ” She laughed disdainfully, steadied her basket on the seat beside her, and said, “Actually, it’s the other way round. Monica thinks man’s mind can be changed through lying on a couch and talking endlessly to another man who is often as lost as the patient. Really, Monica is far more trusting and romantic than I.”