Authors: William Gay
They passed through the front room past the dead stove the old man kept up winter and summer and stepped down into the long, narrow lean-to that served as the old man’s bedroom. The room was dark and lowceilinged and Winer stood uncertainly for a moment letting his eyes adjust to the cloistered gloom and watching shapes gain outline and solidity, ephemeral shapes halftransient lock themselves into recognizable form: an old chifforobe whose dusty mirror presented him with a warped sideshow representation of himself, an old rustcolored iron bed, boxes stacked on boxes nigh to the ceiling, old lavender and gray Sunday dresses fading and shapeless on their hangers, faint scent of lemon verbena out of some other time, or life. Oliver fetching up from the bottom of the chifforobe a newlooking pair or black hightop shoes, freshly removed from their box and tissue paper like some memento covertly hidden from time.
“Here we go,” the old man said. He handed the shoes to Winer. “Hold em up agin ye shoes there and measure em.”
“I believe they’ll fit. How much do you want for them?”
“Nothin.”
“I’ll pay you.”
“Take em on. They ain’t doin nobody no good settin there. I don’t need em noway.”
“I’d rather pay you.”
“I may get you to sell my sang for me some Saturday. Either my legs ain’t what they used to be or they keep scootin town a little farther west ever year.”
After the fetid room the air outside seemed fresh and clean. With the shoebox turned upside down and tucked under his arm Winer stepped into the rain. He crossed under the pear tree through the spate of discarded scrapiron that lay like mutant fruit and onto the road. Oliver sat back in the swing. The chain creaked, tautened. He watched Winer out of sight beyond the hedge broke in a curve of the road and the road ascended. The road crossed the creek there and he could hazily see the wooden bridge. Then dusk moved in unnoticed with the rain and a little wind blew chill out of the west and stung him with spray. Winer disappeared in blue dusk. Dark gathered in the shadow of the pear tree and crept toward the porch and Oliver rose and went into the house to light his lamp.
These evenings Winer’s mother would be in the front room awaiting him and she would be sitting motionless on the rocker before the dead fireplace. Tonight she had the lamp lit on the mantle and she sat at the repair of some garment made soft and nigh shapeless by repeated washing and she did not even look up when he came in. A sallow young-old woman whose highcheeked face looked somehow androgynous, nunlike perhaps or resembling an ascetic priest at some vague rites. Coronaed by the yellow halo of light she looked unreal, a ghost at some vigil, faded sepia image on a funeral-home calendar.
His room was in the attic and he climbed a ladder to it, she did not even ask him about the box. He stowed the shoes in a wooden trunk then sat at the foot of his bed a moment looking at them. He figured Oliver could wear them. He sat staring at them in a curiously hopeless way and then closed the lid.
The loft room was unbearable during the summer and Winer had taken to sleeping wherever the heat would let him. Tonight the window was open and the attic cool. Winds had blown the curtains off and they lay on the floor, gauzy specters twice lifeless and crumpled. The floor was damp with blown rain. The roof formed an A above him, with the tin that comprised both roof and ceiling pockmarked by nails that had missed the rafter, and when he laid a hand against the tin it felt cold and damp. He changed hurriedly into dry clothes and went back down the ladder.
She seemed long taken by some vow of silence or a malfunction of whatever produced words or inspired them. He didn’t speak either. He knew she would talk sooner or later, conquer momentarily whatever had closed her lips, anger or simply boredom with one day the same as any other.
She’d left his plate on the table with another upturned over it and he lit the kitchen lamp and sat down to eat. He ate hurriedly, seemingly without tasting the food, fried okra and greenbeans and new potatoes, fending away onehanded moths and bugs drawn by the light or driven in the open window by the windy rain. A candlefly guttered in the quaking heat above the globe, plummeted to the orange flame, convulsed, died in silent white agony behind the hot glass.
She was standing in the door watching him eat. “Did he pay you?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s Friday. He pays off every Friday.” He pushed his plate back.
“I keep lookin for him to cheat you. You just a boy and him in a position to take advantage.”
It was an old argument and he didn’t care to reopen it. “If he does it’s just me,” he said. He arose, fumbling the money from his pocket, offered it to her. She took it wordlessly, he watched it disappear into her apron pocket.
When he had first gone to work for Weiss she had raged against it: a boy shouldn’t have to do a man’s work for a boy’s pay. All she said now was that if he had a proper father to look after him things would never have come to this. To such a desperate pass. She looked at him now as if all this was some contrivance of his own.
“Just walk out and pull the door to,” she said with an old bitterness. “Gone and never a word to nobody.”
That was an old argument too and if he had any words or refutation now he kept them to himself. When he was younger and easier to hurt he had said, “He never run off.”
She had gestured around the room with an expansive arm movement halftheatrical and halfdemented and shouted, “Well, do you see him anywhere? You reckon he’s behind the door playin a prank on you?” He had just watched her with eyes that were no longer child’s eyes and he had had nothing to say.
When he went up the ladder at bedtime the rain still fell and it was still cool. Feeling carefully in the dark he found a box of matches and lit the lamp and then sorted through books in a cardboard box under his bed. The bedclothes were slightly damp but after the day’s heat they felt comfortable. He lay down, positioned the lamp, and began to read, barely hearing the sibilant murmur on the tin. After a time he heard her come up the ladder and cross the floor with a kind of ratlike stealth.
“What are you doin in there?”
“Reading.”
“It’s getting late,” she said. “You blow out that lamp. Coaloil’s high.”
“All right,” he said. He got up and took a quilt from the bed and laid it across the bottom of the door to block out the light. He could hear her, satisfied, retreating back down the ladder. He read awhile longer then blew out the lamp.
He lay for a time in a weary torpor, aware that he was in bed and yet still feeling the endless motions of the shovel, scoop and throw, scoop and throw. In another part of his mind he was still occupied with acquaintances real as the denizens who peopled his day, corporeal as Weiss or William Tell Oliver. He felt a vague anticipation of Saturday and town and at length he fell asleep.
The storm sometime in the night reversed its course or its brother passed for he woke in a lull of the rain, the air leaden and motionless and the night holding its breath. Then lightning came staccato and strobic, a sudden hush of dryflies and frogs, the walls of the attic imprinted with inkblack images of the trees beyond the window, an instantaneous and profound transition into wall-less night as if the lightning had incinerated the walls or had scorched the delicate tracery of leaf and vine into wallpaper. Then gone in abrupt negation to a world of total dark so that the room and its austere furnishings seemed sucked down into some maelstrom and consigned to utter nothingness, to the antithesis of being, then thunder came uttering balefully down the wall of ridges and a cool wind was at the trees, the calm eddying away like roiled water.
He could not sleep. He stood at the window for a time, watching across the bottom where the storm was forming, banked lighting pulsing and limning the landscape with a black-and-silver nightmare quality.
Downstairs the windows were raised to the cool night and the house was a house of winds. It seemed enormous and barren in the dark, something abandoned to the windy reaches of space. He crossed the porch and went into the yard. The wind was stronger now and wove against the heavens a patternless and everchanging tapestry. Where three trees formed a triangle he had built a treehouse from old salvaged bridgetimbers and he climbed the ladder to it. The trees leaned their disparate ways, the treehouse creaking and popping, the branches above him a steady rushing sound.
It still was not raining. The storm passed to the south, the sky in a constant flux of electricity, sleek metallic clouds burnishing orange and pink. Ovoid and tracking west they look composed of some gleaming alloy, a vast armada visiting upon the world a plague of fire then fleeing on to some conjunction of all the world’s storms.
The treehouse rocked and yawned and here in the dark it seemed a craft adrift in roughening water, its decks tilting and sliding to the caprice of the seas, sails shredded and mast tilted and clocking like a gyroscope gone berserk: beyond it the night was unstarred, nothing for a mariner’s glass to fix upon.
Rain came like an afterthought. A belated kindness rapping at the makeshift roof. Resting on the deck with his head against the listing bulkhead he watched through the cracks the lightning grow faint and fainter, the thunder dimming away, muted by the rain. Winer half dozed, listening to the rain intensifying, spreading surcease across the dark and sleeping land.
William Tell Oliver awoke sometime in the night. The storm had passed and smoothed out to a steady downpour with an air of permanence about it. He went back to sleep and when he arose at five it was still raining. Day came halfheartedly to a grim and sunless world. It kept raining all day.
Motormouth Hodges had in mind specifically a radio he had seen sitting on a bedside table. By standing on tiptoe and peering through a crack in the venetian blinds he could just make it out, it had a wooden case and an expensive look about it and it was a small radio that would be easy to carry through the woods.
He had found it by accident. He’d been squirrelhunting here back in the spring and come up for a drink of water and there had been no one about, the intense craving to possess that radio had not come until later. Watching the house from his makeshift shelter of windbrought tin he had no doubt there would be other knickknacks he could use as well and he has visions of himself sitting before a cozy fire next winter listening to the wonders the radio unfolded for him.
Knowing the habits of country folk he had waited until Saturday. Through the slanting rain he had watched the pickup leave. Taking into consideration the cornerstanding and talking and lunch, then buying groceries, he figured he had about all day. He hurried anyway. He came out of his shelter in the stand of pines and down a sawbriarchoked gully to the blacktop. He walked up the highway toward the house, elaborately casual, whistling to himself, hands in pockets, only removing the right hand when a car passed him, raising it then in a perfunctory greeting. They’d think he lived here, who knew.
There was a look of well-kept prosperity about the house. It was a white two-story with a steeply gabled roof and neat green trim. An enormous hiproofed barn painted red loomed behind it and it was surrounded with newlooking farm equipment, cultivators and combines, an outsize orange tractor. A small yellow Caterpillar bulldozer he’d have started up and driven had he the time and clement weather. Beyond the barn a field of soybeans followed the curve of the road.
Prior reconnaissance had shown there were no dogs and no children so he scrambled down the embankment from the blacktop and across the drive. He followed a line of closecropped hedge to the front door, moving with some haste now, purposeful, fumbling the screwdriver out as he came.
The storm door was locked from the inside as he had known it would be. He had the hinges off and the door set aside before he noticed that the hinges of the front door were not accessible from the door jamb, apprentice burglar fallen afoul of the intricacies of doors and locks. He stood listening. All he could hear was the rain.
The back screendoor was not even latched. He came into a screened-in back porch used for the storage of a freezer and an aggregation of junk. Here he fared better. One side of the hinges was beneath the doortrim but the side screwed to the door was visible. He hurriedly backed out the woodscrews. He could feel a line of sweat moving down his ribcage. He set the door aside and glanced once toward the road, his vision of the outside world darkened by the filtering screen. A line of shade trees all but blocked the house from whatever traffic might pass on the highway. Satisfied he pocketed the screwdriver and ventured inside.
He was in a hall. The floor was some richly gleaming wood not of his acquaintance and the house smelled like furniture polish. He concentrated on a mental floorplan, trying to remember where the radio had been. He turned into a bedroom and saw immediately that he had been right: there it sat as if it had been awaiting him all this time. He unplugged it, peering about the room as he wound the cord around the radio. A great profusion of red roses climbed the wallpaper. From an oval picture frame an old hawklike man watched him with fierce and impotent anger.
Small baubles on the dresser, old, heavy, awkwardlooking jewelery he judged worthless. Feminelooking gewgaws and jars of curious potions he stood smelling. A smell of lilacs. Tubes of bright lipstick like highpowered rifle cartridges. Some of these he pocketed, telling himself his wife might use them.
He was taken with a felt fedora he found dangling on a bedpost. He tried it on, turning it this way and that, flattening the brim. Eyeing himself in the mirror, he squared his shoulders, worked his face into a sneer, made his eyes cold and implacable. “Hell no I won’t talk,” he told the face in the glass. “You just wastin my time, cop.”
Wearing the hat and carrying the radio tucked under his arm he went out of the room and up the hall and stepped into the kitchen just as a heavyset middleaged woman turned at his step from the sink. She had a plate in one hand and a soapy rag in the other. She cried out and dropped the plate.
Motormouth reeled back in shock, his eyes grown saucerlike and disbelieving in his freckled face. He made some terrorstricken sound deep in his throat and he was already whirling to run. Brandishing the dishrag like a weapon she started after him.
“They shitfire,” he cried.
He went fulltilt down the hall in a rising crescendo of sound from his tennis shoes on the polished floor. He went out the hall door and through the screened-in porch without moderating his pace. He felt the radio slip from his hands and tumble, he grasped desperately for the cord, felt the radio wedge itself between door and jamb. “Broke my radio,” the woman shrieked and he redoubled his efforts. He went through the hedge without slackening, bent over and his feet pumping madly. Ascending the bank he was running almost parallel with the ground. He crossed the blacktop swearing at a carload of startled faces that almost ran him over and went into the rainglutted bracken toward the hillside where the dark spruce beckoned.
He went into the woods running in silence save the ragged tear of his breathing and the rain in the trees. When at length he ceased he fell to earth and lay gasping for breath. For some time he lay inert and then cautiously rose to a crouch and strained for any noises of pursuit. All there was the sound of raincrows jeering at him from the sanctity of the treetops.
He looked ruefully at his fist, still clutching the plug and four or five feet of electric wire. He threw it disgustedly from him and sat for a time on a stump, still wearing the hat. A dark, inklike stain was seeping down his temples. He just sat listening to the wild hammering of his heart slowly begin to subside.
Monday Winer loaded the manure spreader and listened to the rain beat on the tarpaper roofing, for the rain to slacken so they could unload it, but it did not. In the middle of the morning Weiss came down to the chickenhouse. Herman Weiss was a short, thick little man with crinkly black hair shot through with gray. Winter and summer he wore a pith helmet and clean-pressed khakis and walking boots as if perpetually ready to join a safari should the opportunity arise. Folks said he was impossible to get along with. Hardly anyone would work for him but Winer thought him not a bad employer. Weiss had a clipped, brusque way of talking that folks didn’t take kindly to and no one knew where he had come from. They said he was a rich Jew, a hunky, and Italian. He was a white slaver, or a doperunner, or a retired motion-picture photographer, and his own tales were so convoluted and absurd that perhaps he no longer knew himself.
Winer didn’t care who he was. To Winer he was just a poultry farmer. He had three enormous chickenhouses and each housed six thousand chickens. Winer fed them twice a day, watered them morning and night. When they were nine weeks old Weiss hired a few extra hands and the chickens were caught and crated on a trailer truck and hauled away. The houses were cleaned out, a new crop started.
All Winer knew was that he halfliked Weiss. Weiss had a wry, ironic amiability that amused Winer. He did get excited. He was full of stories about far places and easy women and huge amounts and with the rain drumming on the roof, and Winer a willing audience, he told of them again.
He had a thousand tales to tell and perhaps one or two of them were even true. He was a consort of presidents and kings. Generals sought his advice on military matters, he and Blackjack Pershing had been just like that. (Taking the chalk of Pershing’s uncertain fingers, turning to the green chalkboard, signifying with dots and dashes the movement of troops across terrain contested by the maimed and the dying: No, the Germans’ll expect you here. If you’ll…) Had it not been for a crooked business associate he would have been a millionaire a hundred times over, for he had invented Coca-Cola. The formula had been stolen and sold out from under him.
“I bought one for a nickel in Topeka, Kansas,” Weiss said. “In a drugstore. It was my drink, right down to the secret ingredient. I could have wept.”
“I imagine so,” Winer said. “Did you ever see your partner again?”
“As a matter of fact I did,” Weiss said. “I saw him on State Street in Chicago in I believe it was 1922. He was driving a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost and he had a blondhaired woman with him who would have altered your heartbeat. Moseby just threw up a hand at me, casual, how do you do. And kept on going…but that woman. I’d have taken her on the White House lawn had the opportunity ever presented itself.” He fell into a ruminative silence. “Or any other reasonable place of her choosing,” he said after a time.
Weiss and his wife subscribed to several magazines and once a month or so they’d bundle them up and give them to Winer. Sometimes they’d give him books they’d accumulated. Once Weiss’s wife, Alma, gave him a new copy of Sandburg’s
Complete Poems
. Winer’s mother viewed this habit with suspicion, she kept thinking the gifts would be held out of the boy’s pay or someday they would be tallied up and retroactively accounted for, annihilating an entire paycheck.
Another habit Weiss had that the boy liked was that about nine thirty he looked at his watch and said, “Well, let’s drink one,” and they walked to the porch of Weiss’s house. Weiss opened the old icebox he kept stocked with Coca-Cola and homemade wine. He opened Winer a Coke and poured himself a glass of strawberry wine.
Winer studied his Coca-Cola, the slow rivulets of icewater sliding down the green bottle. “Did you bottle this one?” he asked innocently. “Or just buy it at the grocery store like everybody else?”
“What?”
“I thought maybe you just ran off a batch every two or three weeks.”
Weiss studied him above the rim of the upraised wineglass. He drank lowered his glass. “Respect for your elders is a trait not to be sneered at,” he told Winer after a time.
“You might amount to something someday if you didn’t work so damned hard.” Weiss told him that morning. “A man works as hard as you do doesn’t ever have time to make something of himself.”
“Do you want your money’s worth?”
“I’ll get my money’s worth. You go at every job as if it were the last one and you’re trying to finish up. You’ve got to get out of that. There isn’t any last job. You finish one and there’s another one waiting for you. You’ve got to pace yourself.”
Winer leaned on his spade, resting. Through the screened window the sky had darkened, clouds arisen in the west.
“Most folks around here are a little different,” Weiss was saying. “You must be a throwback or something. A mutant. Those woolhats or rednecks, whatever…I’ve lived here twenty-five years and I’m still a foreigner. I guess they’re waiting to see if I stay or not.”
“I guess some of them are peculiar all right.”
“Peculiar? Trifling is the word I had in mind. I had that shack up by the mouth of the creek and rented to a fellow named Warren one time. Boy, he was industrious. He liked to sit on his front porch and watch his garden grow. Only moved when the shade did or his wife yelled supper. Used to brag about that garden. ‘Fine garden,’ he’d say. ‘Fine garden.’ I was up there once when it all come in and I think he had maybe four head of cabbage. I could have carried off the stringbeans in this helmet and only made one trip. He only had about eight kids so I don’t know what in hell he planned to do with the excess. Can it for winter, maybe. Truckcrop it out.
“And honest? While I built this house I lived over across the creek in a little place I threw up temporarily. When I moved I hired a couple of these fellows to help me. I lost a Browning automatic shotgun I wouldn’t have let go for three hundred dollars. A pair of riding boots I bought in Spain and a silver-inlaid handgun my wife gave me. You understand we’re talking about two or three hundred yards here. I hate to think what would have happened if I was moving to the west coast.”
That night Weiss took him home. “There’s nothing else do to inside,” he said. “If this mess is still going on in the morning don’t even bother to come out. I can feed myself. There’s no point in soaking yourself getting here just to wait until feeding time.”
The creek was already yellow and ominiouslooking and had picked up speed and small sticks and debris that spun in gouts of foam. The branch behind Oliver’s house came out of its banks and fanned into his piglot, festooning fenceposts and saplings with drifts of dead brush and cartires that looked like buoys left to navigate a world going to water, and from where he stood in the hall of the barn he could see it lapping upward out of the hollow.
A disgusted Dallas Hardin counted two days’ receipts and grew tired of the company of Pearl and the girl Amber Rose and went out into the rain and stood on the lip of the pit and it seemed to him that he could hear turbulent waters deep in the earth. A change in the earth’s pulse, a quickening, a curious occult change. He looked up at the leaden sky. He looked west and there was just more of the same as if the earth’s weather had coalesced in this mode. “Then rain some more, by God,” he told it.
It did. The third day the bridge between Mormon Springs and town wrenched free of its concrete pylons with shrieking of timbers and lurched into the canefield at the creek’s edge spinning lazily in the calm eddies, drifting into the swift mainstream of the creek, where it picked up speed and went spinning crazily downstream like a calliope snapped free of its moorings. Half the road was underwater now and Oliver could sit on his front porch and look off into a vast wet world, a stretch of muddy water reaching all the way across the field to the creek unbroken save by the treetrunks and the tips of the brush. He’d had to move the goats to higher ground and set pans and tincans under leaks he hadn’t even known his house had. He sat on his porch like some grim and hopedrained survivor awaiting rescue or the ultimate cessation of the waters.