The Tin Can Tree (19 page)

If Joan were to go, he had only two choices. That was the way he saw it. He could let her be, and spend the next forty years remembering nothing but the way she used to walk across the fields with him from the tobacco barns and the peppermint smell of her breath when she kissed him good night. Or he could go after her and say, “Come back. And will you marry me?” In his
mind
he could say that, but not in real life. In real life he had Ansel, and would have him always because he couldn’t walk out on that one, final member of his family that he hadn’t yet deserted. And in real life, he could never make Joan and Ansel like each other.

“I’ll take Africa any day,” Miss Faye was saying. “Africans
know
they need a missionary, but these Easterners are eternally surprised.” And Miss Lucy chirped something at the end, but James couldn’t hear what she said.

He stood up and rubbed his knees where they ached from being bent so long. Then he picked up the pictures
for the paper and left the darkroom. Instead of going out through the front he crossed to the back door, in order to make his escape as quickly as possible. Outside, his eyes searched out those daisies he had been meaning to pick, blowing in the wind and about to be too old. He tucked the pictures under his arm and went deeper into the field, heading toward the tallest ones. It always made him feel silly, picking flowers. He didn’t mind doing it (Joan liked daisies far better than bought flowers or any other kind of present), but he didn’t like thinking that anyone might be watching. In case someone
was
, he picked very off handedly—yanking the daisies up nearly by their roots, jumbling them together helter-skelter without looking at them. But while he was rounding the side of the house and heading toward the front yard he arranged them more carefully, and held them up to see if they were all right.

Mrs. Hammond’s car was gone; that was one good thing. She must have left while he was in the darkroom. Now all he wanted was for Joan to be the one to answer the door. He knocked and waited, frowning tensely at the screen. For a long time nobody came. Then from somewhere else in the house, Joan called, “Was that a knock?” Her voice echoed; she must have been standing at the head of the stairs.

“It’s me,” James said.

“Simon, will you let James in?”

Simon came out of the kitchen, dragging his feet. Through the screen, all James saw of him was his silhouette—his spidery arms and legs, his shoulders hunched up as if he were scared of something. Before he reached the door he stopped and said, “You come by yourself?”

“Who would I be bringing?” asked James.

“Oh, no one.” And he came the rest of the way to the door and pushed it open. “Joan’s upstairs,” he said, “putting Mama to bed. She’ll be down.”

“Your mother got up already?”

“Well, but now she’s going back to bed. I said everything all wrong.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t,” said James, without being quite sure what he was talking about. He closed the door very softly behind him and went over to a chair. “Is Joan too busy to talk?”

But just then they heard Joan coming downstairs, walking on tiptoe and taking only one step at a time where usually she took two. Simon jerked his thumb toward the sound. “Here she is,” he said. When Joan came into view she looked at James blankly a minute, as if she’d forgotten he was here, and then she smiled and said, “Oh. Hello.”

“Hello,” James said. He stood up and held out the flowers. “I brought you some daisies. I was walking through the field and happened to come across them.”

“That was nice,” she said, and then frowned at the daisies. James looked at them. They seemed old and draggled now, in a messy little cluster in his hand. “They’re not all that special, I guess,” he said, but Joan had come out of her thoughts. “I think they’re fine,” she said. “I’ll get a vase.”

“Oh, you don’t have to get a
vase
for them—”

“Well, of course I do.”

She went out into the kitchen, still seeming to walk on tiptoe. Now that James thought of it, there was an uneasy silence about this house. He couldn’t tell if it was because of something to do with Mrs. Pike or because Joan was still mad at him, and he didn’t know how to ask. He looked across at Simon, who was still
standing and staring into space. “Did I come at a bad time?” James asked him.

“Huh?”

Joan came back, carrying a cut-glass vase full of water. He asked her, “Did I come at a bad time?”

“Oh, not really.”

“Well, did I or didn’t I?”

“It’s all right,” Joan told him. “Aunt Lou didn’t feel well this morning, but she’s upstairs now and everything’s all right.” She took the daisies from him. Her hands when they brushed his were cool and impersonal, and she didn’t look at him. “We have to go gradually,” she said. “I keep forgetting that. I don’t seem to have a
light
touch with anything.” Yet her fingers when she arranged the flowers were as light and gentle as butterflies, and the daisies stood up or bent gracefully over the minute she touched them. When she was done they had stopped looking draggled; James was glad now that he had brought them.

“You ought to work for a florist,” he told her.

But she set the vase down on a table without even noticing how they looked. She hadn’t glanced at them once, all the time she was arranging them. “Mrs. Hammond does,” she said. “Have a light touch, I mean. But I’m not sure that’s the kind I’m talking about right now.”

“I don’t know that I follow you,” James said.

She shook her head and sat down, as if she had given up on him. “Never mind,” she said.

“Mrs.
Hammond
has a light touch?”

“Never mind.” She looked suddenly at Simon. “Simon, do you want lunch?” she asked him.

“I just had breakfast.”

“Oh.”

“
You
have a light touch,” James said. “You have the lightest touch of anyone I know.”

“Oh, James,
you
don’t know.”

“Well, I’m trying—” He stopped and glanced toward Simon. It seemed to him Simon looked cold. “Don’t you want to sit down?” he asked.

“I’m okay.”

“Come on.”

Simon shrugged and sat down on the couch. Now that they were all seated here, facing each other and keeping their hands folded in their laps, it seemed more awkward than before. It seemed they should be having a
conversation
of some kind, something that made sense. Not these little jagged bits of words. He tried smiling at Joan but all she did was smile back, using only her mouth while her eyes stayed serious and maybe even angry; he didn’t know. “Would you rather I come back another time?” he asked.

“It’s all right.”

“Well.” He sat further forward and looked at his fingernails. “I guess your uncle’s working today,” he said.

“Didn’t Ansel tell you so?”

“In a way he did.”

“There’s nothing
bad
about it,” said Joan.

“Why, no, of course not.”

“You have to
do
something. You can’t sit around. It’s not
fair
to sit around, reminding people all the time—” She stopped, and James looked sideways at her while he kept his head bent over his fingernails. Her voice was so sharp-sounding it made him uneasy, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to say to her. But then she said, “Well. So you don’t have to work tobacco any more.”

“No,” James said.

“That’s good.”

He waited a minute, and then cleared his throat and said, “It’ll be a good season, they say.”

“Billy Brandon told me that,” Simon said suddenly.

“Barns are nearly full already.”

In his shirt pocket he found a plastic comb, with little pieces of lint sticking to it. By running his index finger across its teeth he made a sound like a tiny xylophone, flat and tinny. Joan and Simon both sat watching him. When he saw them watching he stopped and put the comb back in his pocket. “I guess I’ll be going,” he said helplessly. “I could come some other time.”

“All right,” said Joan.

“Do you want me to?”

“What?”

“Do you want me to come back?”

“Oh. Yes.”

“Okay,” he said, but he still wasn’t sure. He stood up and went over to the door, with Joan and Simon following solemnly behind. Then he turned around and said, “I could take you to the movies, maybe, Thursday night. The two of you.”

“We’ll see,” Joan said.

“Do you want to come or don’t you?”

“I don’t know yet if we can,” she said.

“Well, I wouldn’t ask so far in advance, but tomorrow night I can’t go. I’m going to take Ansel playing cribbage. But Thursday—”

“We’ll see,” said Joan.

“I
know
I wasn’t going to chauffeur him around no more, but lately he’s been—Well. We don’t have to go into that.”

“I’m not going into anything,” Joan said.

“Yes, you are.”

“I wasn’t saying a word.”

“I could tell the way you were looking.”

“I wasn’t looking
any
way. I wasn’t even
thinking
about it.”

She sounded near tears. James stood there, trying to think of what to say next, but he figured anything he came up with would only make things worse. So he waited a minute, and then he said, “I think I’d better leave. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” Simon said.

He was down the porch steps and halfway across the yard when he heard their door close; Joan had never said goodbye. The only sounds now were from Ansel’s window—the birdlike sounds of women laughing, all clustered around his brother, their laughter pealing out in clear happy trills that drifted through the window and hung like a curtain across the empty porch.

T
hat afternoon, Joan had a telephone call from her mother. She was upstairs when it came, getting Mrs. Pike out of bed for the second time and finding it a little easier now than it had been in the morning. “What do you want to wear?” she asked, and her aunt actually answered, with only a slight pause beforehand. “The beige, I guess,” she said. She waited while Joan lifted it off the hanger. “Can I wear the abalone pin with that?”

“Of course,” Joan said. She would have agreed if her aunt had wanted to wear the kitchen curtains. She picked the pin out of the bureau drawer and laid it beside the dress, and then the phone rang. Both of them stopped to listen.

“Hey, Joan!” Simon called.

“I’m up here.”

“Someone wants you on the telephone.”

“Well, I’ll be back,” Joan told her aunt, and she went down the stairs very fast, two steps at a time. She didn’t know who she was expecting, but when she heard only the ice-cold, nasal voice of the operator she was disappointed.

“Miss Joan Pike?” the operator asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you Miss Joan Pike.”

“Yes.”

“Long distance calling.”

“All right,” Joan said.

There was a pause, and then her mother said, “Is that Joan?”, formally, and waited for Joan to go through the whole business of identifying herself again.

“It’s me,” said Joan. “Hello, Mother.”

“Hello,” her mother said. “I called to see how Lou was. Your father said to ask.”

“She’s getting better,” said Joan. She heard her mother turn and murmur to her father, probably relaying Joan’s answer. In normal speech her mother had a very soft voice, held in as if there was somebody sick in the next room. But when she returned to the phone her tea-party voice came back, louder and more distinct, the voice of a plump woman who stood very straight and placed the points of her shoes outward when she walked.

“Your father feels bad we couldn’t make it to the funeral,” she was saying. “He says it’s only a sniffle he has, but I don’t like the sound of it. Is there anything we can do for Lou?”

“Not that I can think of. The flowers were very nice—Uncle Roy said to tell you.”

“Well. We weren’t quite sure. Some people have a dislike of gladioli.”

“No, they were fine,” said Joan.

“That’s good. How’s Simon?”

“He’s all right, I guess.”

“Tell him hello for us, now. Tell him—”

Her voice had grown almost as soft as it normally was. Joan could picture her, sitting on the edge of that rocker with the needlework seat, with Joan’s father
standing behind her and bending cautiously forward to hear what was going on. He was a little afraid of telephones himself; he treated them as though they might explode. She saw how her mother would be smoothing down that little crease between her eyebrows with her index finger, and then letting the crease come back the minute she dropped her hand. The thought of that made Joan miss her; she said suddenly, “I’m tired.”

“What?”

“I’m just tired. I want to come home. I don’t want to stay here any more.”

“Why, Joan—” her mother said, and then let her voice trail off. Finally she said, “Don’t you think you should be with Lou now?”

“I’m not helping,” said Joan. “She just sits. Every place I look, Janie Rose is there, and I don’t feel like staying here. Nothing is right.”

“Doesn’t Simon need you?”

“Well—” Joan said, and then stopped because her father must have asked to know what was going on. The two of them murmured together a while, her mother’s voice sounding faintly impatient. Joan’s father was growing deaf; he had to be told twice. When her mother finally returned to Joan, she was sighing, and her voice was loud again.