The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (28 page)

The Jehovah's Witness church brought out the story of how they had come to her door, two of them, and tried to convert her and how she had sent them packing. Lost again, she was restored to calm by the sight a bit farther down the road of what was now The Highway Inn. A farmhouse then, it had been one of the many homes of her childhood, and what a time they had had trying to get rid of them bedbugs! One hundred and four times a year I heard about the bedbugs, how many times Ernest had heard about them—well, in fact, Ernest had long ago ceased to hear it. As a defense against hearing this and the other set pieces, such as that prompted by the Garrison place, where his younger brother had come close to getting caught by the no-good daughter of the house, Ernest kept up a running chatter of his own. This went into my left ear while Mother's went into the right. If sometimes I felt I had two heads, other times I felt I had none at all, that into my one ear, as into a speaking tube, and out the other passed her questions to Ernest and his answer, when there was no longer any getting out of one, to her. The trip home was a re-run, in reverse, which accounts for my hearing all this twice as many times annually as there are weeks in the year.

What would Ernest do without his mother to look after?: the question came to seem an idle one. Indeed, you now heard it asked in the village, what would she do without him to look after her? Which would have been a harder case materially but not of course emotionally. However, it never came to that pass. For though it looked as though she were destined to outlive him and go on forever, during the bitterest stretch of last year's bitter winter old lady van Voorhees died, aged God only knows what. Ernest came very near dying along with her. Some were convinced that was what he had been trying to do. And nearly everybody thought he would have been better off if he had.

We were away on vacation at the time, gone south to escape the rigors. I heard about it by letter. It was Jay Campbell, my friend and neighbor, another of Ernest's part-time employers and the doctor in the case, who wrote informing me, knowing I would be especially concerned, I being the nearest thing to a friend that Ernest had. But it was not until our return in the spring that I heard the details.

Ernest was then still in the hospital but his mother was already long in her grave, a last mark of his respect and of the self-sacrifice he was prepared to make for her. For, be it understood, in these parts the dead cannot be buried in winter, not, that is, without considerable expense, the ground being frozen so hard and to such a depth that only the heaviest earth-moving equipment can open it. With the return of the robins and the wild geese and the spawning runs of the herring and the shad in the river the ground can again be worked and one of the crops for spring planting is the dead; over the winter they are kept in cold storage. Last winter was, as I have said, a hard one even for us.

But although it is accepted as a fact of life, the local people dislike this usage forced by the climate upon them, and the family that says, “Never mind the cost, Mother is going into her grave now, without delay,” is one that is looked up to. It came as a surprise to nobody that even from his hospital bed and chronically hard up as he was, Ernest van Voorhees had directed that his be laid at once to her eternal rest.

A virulent strain of the flu, made worse by the weather, had swept the region, bringing life to a virtual standstill. It was the sort of epidemic that drew Ernest, always immune himself, out on his errands of mercy for his stricken neighbors. Not this time. His absence from his accustomed rounds was noted only quite belatedly, so unused was everybody to thinking of him, or his mother either, for that matter, being sick. Both were, as the neighbor discovered who knocked on their door, sick enough to alarm the man, to make him call in Jay Campbell.

Ernest looked every bit as bad off as his mother, which was to say he looked worse, taking into account their respective ages. A glance at them was enough to tell Jay that both had pneumonia, but to his recommendation that they enter the hospital Ernest returned a flat “no.” This did not much surprise Jay. He was used to that irrational fear of hospitals so common among country folks, and to this Ernest added the false sense of security of never having been seriously ill, the false confidence of having for so long nursed his mother himself, and his jealousy in the possession of that filial obligation. Disclaiming further responsibility, Jay did the only thing he could do: he phoned in prescriptions for drugs to the pharmacy and had them delivered to the house. Ernest agreed to let him know should either of them take a turn for the worse.

After that Jay was busy doctoring so many victims of the epidemic he had little time for thought of any particular ones. Patients of his who were neighbors of the van Voorhees, seeking at last to repay the many favors Ernest had done for them over the years, reported being thanked but no-thanked, which, considering the old lady's indestructibility and Ernest's own lifelong ruggedness, worried none of them overmuch. “Smoke still coming out their chimney. Reckon they must be alive in there,” they said. “Take a lot of killing, them van Voorhees.” After a week or so of hearing nothing further about them, Jay concluded—insofar as he gave the matter any consideration at all—that they were recovering on their own.

When the phone call came Jay could hardly make out who the man was on the line, much less what he was struggling to say. How, in his condition, Ernest had managed even to get to the phone was a wonder. He said he reckoned the time had come for them to be taken to the hospital. The time had not just come, it had come and gone, several days before.

After being brought in by ambulance, the old lady lasted just twenty-four hours. Meanwhile Ernest was responding to treatment in the intensive care unit no better than his mother had. His condition worsened hourly. His pneumonia was the least of Ernest's troubles. It was discovered that in addition to it he had peritonitis from a ruptured strangulated hernia.

“He must have been going around with that hernia for years,” Jay said to me, and I groaned to recall the hours of raking leaves, pushing the lawnmower, shoveling snow, lifting logs that Ernest had put in for me. Heroically neglecting his own condition to look after his old mother, Ernest had very nearly killed himself.

Emergency abdominal surgery was performed on Ernest although even the doctor who did it considered the case hopeless.

“Made of leather,” that was Jay Campbell's comment on Ernest's miraculous survival.

I found him emaciated, pale, feeble, and still in a mental daze when I went to see him in the hospital. I thought the locals were right, that with nothing left to live for he would have been better off dead. His listlessness and absence of mind were owing to shock and grief, loneliness and lack of purpose more than to his own close encounter with death. I forebore to condole with him on the loss of his mother, afraid even to mention her name.

Visiting hours were almost over and I was preparing to leave when Ernest asked me to find and hand him his mother's purse from his nightstand. He then entrusted to my keeping her gold brooch, her engagement ring, and her wedding band. But not without first an incident affecting in the extreme. As he was fumbling in the purse for the jewelry something flew across the bed and struck the wall with a clatter. At the same moment Ernest let out a screech.

“Get those out of here!” he cried.

I looked on the floor and under the bed I found the object, or rather the two objects: his mother's dentures. It was deeply affecting, this pain at the sight of something so intimately associated with his mother, with which she had sustained life itself, and now would never again have use for.

I disposed of them in a trash bin out on the street.

It was to a house from which his mother was now absent but which was filled with mementoes of her that Ernest came home. Old lady van Voorhees had been one of those people who never throw anything away. Into that tiny trailer was crammed everything brought there from the big old family farmhouse. To clean it all out would be an enormous undertaking, one that I urged Ernest to let wait until he was stronger. But reminders of his mother and of their long life together were too painful to him. Just as his first act on being discharged from the hospital was reclaiming her jewels from me and selling them, he now insisted on cleaning out the house as soon as he was inside it. For the next week he and I in his pickup truck, its bed heaped high, plied back and forth from his place to the dump. Very different these trips were from the former ones, with silence now on either side of me. When we were done not a relic of Ernest's mother remained. Every least trace of her sojourn on earth, lengthy as it had been, was gone.

On our return from the last of all those trips I sat down with a sigh in the recliner, more than ever the dominant piece in that now bare little room. The place smelled of disinfectant. The time seemed to me momentous, the turning point in poor Ernest's life. The past was past, the future had arrived.

Ernest, too, sat down with a sigh. Looking about him at his altered arrangements, he, too, was evidently conscious that the moment marked a milestone. “Well,” he said, “it come awful close to backfiring on me but I seen my chance and I took it. Lord knows it was long enough in coming!”

It took me some while to grasp what I was being told—after all, it isn't every day that somebody lets you in on his having murdered his mother. So long, in fact, did it take me that I detected in Ernest some confusion, some regret for having misgauged my acuity. It now appeared that mine was the same incorrigibly sentimental view of him as the one the villagers all had. From them he knew he had nothing to fear; he might have shot his mother dead at high noon on the main street and they would have sworn to a man that the killer had been somebody else. Me he credited with more imagination, or maybe with less imagination and more common sense, more knowledge of life as it is, and I had disappointed him.

I nodded, and with my gesture regained Ernest's confidence.

Nobody could have looked more impenitent. He positively radiated the certainty that he had done what anybody else would have done in his place. While hoping to succeed in his desperate gamble, he was quite prepared to fail, to go out with the old lady rather than go on with her any longer. To be sure of her not recovering he had waited until the last possible moment before calling for help, risking his life and coming within an inch of losing it.

He had come through. Ernest van Voorhees was free, his own man, at long last. Not much time was left him, perhaps, but that made it all the more precious, was all the more reason to seize it. A family of his own he would never have, no wife, no children, no grandchildren, but at least he would have himself to himself for however long he lasted.

I thought of Oedipus the King, of his horrendous self-punishment for his awful crimes, of Prince Orestes and the bloodthirsty Furies that pursued him. Or, rather, I tried to think of them but in their larger than life size, their exalted station, their superhuman suffering, those legendary figures eluded me. Unlike those of Oedipus, Ernest's bright blue eyes, still in their sockets, shone with the innocence of a child. Sister-sufferers though they were, I could not, here in this tiny tin trailer with its color TV and its La-Z-Boy recliner, equate Clytemnestra and old lady van Voorhees. The high-flown word
parricide
that had entered so clamorously through the front door of my mind, finding itself woefully out of place, slunk quietly out the back. My brain spun but not with horror and shock, rather because it all seemed so simple, so down to earth.

The Ernest who comes now to work on our grounds is a new man and it shows in his new, sprightlier pace. He has not had to tell Mother half a dozen times on the way over where she is nor listen yet again to the tale of the man on the roof of the Bohnsack farmhouse. She is not dozing in the cab of the truck as he works. He will not have to spoon-feed her this evening nor go to the Laundromat tomorrow morning with the bedsheets she has soiled in the night.

Meanwhile both his fortitude and his weakness equally excite the admiration of the villagers. To the one they ascribe his reappearance at the Grange Hall, where one night recently he won the door prize, and to the other his frequenting the local bar, breaking a lifetime's abstinence, in an effort to drown his sorrow. Typical is our Giuseppina, who, pausing in her work and looking out the window and catching sight of Ernest, fetches a sign and says, “He may not be quite all there, as they say, but he has feelings the same as anybody else and he's a brave soul to carry on as he does all alone in this terrible cruel world with nothing left to live for.”

A Fresh Snow

I
T WAS
silly and a waste of time. School was not even out yet. She could not expect him for half an hour at least. Still she sat at the window watching the corner of the block.

Snow, dingy with soot, lay thick upon the window ledge. The street ran with slush and through the gray light hovering in the street the mass of buildings opposite looked black and close.

As she watched, a few large flakes began to fall. They lighted on the window ledge, and bending forward to look at them, her breath condensing on the glass, she thought of the thrilling, rare snows of her childhood.

She had been five years old when she was wakened in the night to see her first snow. Wrapped in quilts, she and her brother had stood at the window wiping away the steam of their breaths and peering into the blackness, while their father told of the snows he had seen. Two inches fell that night, a good fall, and in the morning the grown-ups were gay and happy for the children's sake. After breakfast everyone went out with soup bowls. Each looked for a drifted spot to fill his bowl; even so, they had to scrape lightly to keep from picking up dirt. They ate it sprinkled with sugar and flavored with vanilla extract. Her brother came home in midmorning, for school had been let out to celebrate, and through the afternoon they watched the snow disappear. By night it was gone. She was eight before she saw her next.