This Side of Jordan (23 page)

“So you were made chief of his tribe, right?”

“No, but I did receive a genuine war bonnet with eagle feathers in honor of my achievement, thank you.”

“Look, don't tell me another one of them stories,” said Alvin, kicking at a clump of dirt. He was tired of the dwarf's claptrappery. It gave him a headache. “I don't want to hear no more.”

Rascal set his suitcase down and sat on it to rest. Wisps of his white hair fluttered in the morning breeze as he stared out across the fields.

Alvin walked across the road and looked into the ditch where last night's rainwater puddled up under the weeds. He saw his reflection in little pools here and there. He looked filthy. It had been two days now since he'd taken a bath. He probably smelled, too. But what of it? Mostly it was just the dwarf who had to smell him and he wasn't no spring flower himself. Traveling was hard. Somehow Alvin had thought it would be a swell adventure, but he hadn't counted on the miles between towns, the empty roads, hours of boredom, and lonesome feelings that came more and more often, especially when he thought of the killings. If he lived on the farm until he was ninety, he didn't guess he'd see half of what he had witnessed since Hadleyville. If he lived.

Alvin looked across at the dwarf, still perched on his suitcase, eyes focused somewhere down the road ahead. “Tell me something,” the farm boy said. “How come you never run off before?”

The dwarf shifted to face Alvin, folding his ankles over one another and clasping his hands together in his lap. “That's a very good question.”

Alvin nudged a clump of dirt into the ditchwater and watched it sink. He put his own suitcase down and felt his forehead. Since they'd stopped to rest, Alvin guessed his temperature had gone up a degree or so. He still held out hope his clothes would be dry before he reached the church. Walking around in stinking clothes was bad enough without them being wet, too. One of the nurses at the sanitarium had told him that if he ever caught pneumonia, he'd be done for.

“Did you know that I come from a family of considerable means?” asked the dwarf. He left his suitcase and walked down into the ditch on the other side of the road until only his head showed above the dirt. Rascal began picking wildflowers from the embankment and formed a bouquet, which he clenched in his right hand. When he had gathered as many as he could easily hold, he climbed back up and told Alvin, “Auntie always said flowers gild the heart dearly, and that we ought never to go a day without appreciating their loveliness.”

Using the stem of one flower, he bound the bouquet, and recited,
“Wildflowers exhale the gentle fragrance of our Lord's sweet breath.”
He held the bouquet out to Alvin. “Would you like one?”

Alvin shook his head. “They give me hayfever.”

“How dreadful.” Rascal slipped the bouquet into his back pocket. “If I suffered such an affliction, I don't know that I'd survive. How would I be able to work in my garden?”

“I guess you couldn't.”

“Have you been feeling homesick lately?” the dwarf asked. “It would be quite understandable, given the circumstances of our journey thus far.”

Rascal took his suitcase and began walking down the road again toward Allenville. The farm boy kicked another dirt clod into the muddy ditch, then started walking again, too, keeping to his own half of the road. He lied to the dwarf when he told him, “I ain't homesick.”

“I've been worried lately about my garden,” Rascal said. “I'm sure it hasn't been watered since I left.” He shook his head. “Perhaps there've been rainshowers.”

“Maybe you ought've stayed put,” Alvin said, “not come along at all. Maybe you made a mistake.”

“I'm quite certain that if half of all the decisions we make in our lives prove to be correct, we are indeed fortunate. However, hindsight, Auntie always said, is a cat with his head stuck in a milk bottle. Had I remained in that crawlspace beneath my house much longer, I have no doubt I'd have become quite ill by now, perhaps even deceased. Do you miss your family?”

“I don't know.” Alvin shrugged. “Why?” He wondered who missed him. He knew his sisters didn't, but maybe his momma or Aunt Hattie. Daddy'd be too mad at him for running off. Did Frenchy? Who had he found to collect bait and go fishing with? That goddamned Herbert Muller?

“I never really knew my family. Did I tell you that?”

“You said your momma died when you were born.”

“Yes, she did, and my father left home when I was seven. That was when Auntie came to take care of me.”

“Where'd your daddy go?”

“Out West, so I'm told. Auntie says he went to seek his fortune in gold somewhere in Alaska. By all accounts, he was quite successful, as he sent a great deal of money back to Hadleyville until the day he died in a mine explosion.”

From the grassy fields ahead, a flock of sparrows suddenly took flight, angling overhead to the west. Rascal hummed a few notes of a tune he'd been working on since Omaha. After a moment, he stopped and said, matter-of-factly, “Auntie's a very wealthy woman. She's invested quite intelligently for many years and now she's one of the richest women in all of Missouri.”

“Sure don't show it much, does she?” said Alvin. A bee buzzed his head and he swatted at it with the back of his hand. It'd be just his luck to get stung.

“I assume you're referring to the dilapidated condition of our house. Well, to be truthful, since it doesn't actually belong to her, Auntie doesn't much care about its appearance. We had a gardener for several years, but Auntie dismissed him last June when she took a summerhouse with friends in Mobile. I tried keeping the yard up by myself, but I fatigue quickly in the heat, and, of course, we had an awful winter, which kept me confined indoors for weeks at a time. I suppose I ought to have hired more help, but…”

The dwarf's voice trailed off as he looked down the narrow dirt road. “Actually, I'm a pathetic little coward.”

“Huh?”

“Truth is, Auntie's stolen my inheritance and locked me away. The house in Hadleyville, its contents, the fortune held by the bank, were all kept in trust for me by my mother and father. When I contracted scarlet fever several years ago, Auntie had herself appointed executor of my estate in the event I became too ill to manage my own affairs. She's been using my money to finance her investments in expectation of my death which the doctors have always assured her is imminent.”

“That don't seem fair.” Now he understood why the dwarf had acted so nutty in the bank.

Rascal shrugged. “Since Auntie's my closest living relation, upon my death, everything I now possess, all my estate, becomes hers.

Knowing this, I believe she persuaded Mr. Harrison B. Sinclair to gain the advantage of investing these funds in advance of my demise. He and Auntie are crazy about the stock market. Of course, the house and several other properties are another matter entirely. She cannot touch them until I die and their worth far outweighs the money kept in Mr. Sinclair's bank.”

The dwarf walked on quietly for a few minutes, but farther up the road he stopped and told the farm boy, “I lied to you back in Hadleyville when I said Auntie locked me in my room because she didn't trust me alone in the house. Before she left for Dayton, we had an awful fight and called each other names and I told her if she spent one more night there I'd burn us both up. Well, you can just imagine! She grabbed me by the arm and tossed me into my bedroom and locked the door. Sometime in the middle of the night while I was asleep, she stuck some bottles of water, crackers and peach jars in a box, and slipped them into my room. Then she went off to the medicine show. I tried to pick the lock, but she'd also taken my Houdini kit while I was sleeping, so I had to pry up the floorboards with that old butterknife and make my escape. I had no idea I'd offended her that badly. Am I so ugly?”

“Well—” the farm boy paused a second. “I guess I ain't never seen nobody like you before.”

Ordinarily, human deformities turned his stomach. He had seen patients at the sanitarium whose faces were so encumbered with what he thought were tubercles that their heads looked like big overripe vegetables. Uncle Truman had a stump for a left arm that always gave Alvin the shivers, and whenever he and Frenchy went to the carnival, Alvin steered clear of the freak pavilion because it scared him so to see people with misshapen heads and no limbs and contorted bones and other oddities of nature.

“You mean, a dwarf.”

Alvin nodded.

“Well, I'll tell you, Auntie led me to believe that when my father received word of my affliction, he blamed it for my mother's death. However, in those dear dead days before he left to go out West, he never let on that he felt so. We seemed to be quite close.”

“Maybe he didn't blame you at all,” Alvin suggested, resisting a cough. “Maybe she just made it up to get under your skin.”
Why was everyone so damned mean these days?

“I've considered that. Auntie raised me, you see, with the help of my Uncle Augustus. After his death, however, I was left permanently in Auntie's charge. She hired tutors to educate me, citing my condition to the Hadleyville schoolboard as part and parcel of a chronic health problem that prevented me from attending school with other children. To me, she said it was necessary that I be educated away from wicked boys and girls who would certainly taunt me and break my heart long before I had the chance to strengthen and bloom. Uncle Augustus provided that part of my education which involved the out of doors by taking me on excursions into the wild, and trips out West where I had the opportunity to ride horses and strike fire from flint in the deep woods. We read
The Strenuous Life
together by firelight on the banks of the Belle Fourche River and fished with our bare hands. I think Uncle Augustus had honest affection for me and I loved him like a second father. When he was killed in the World War, I felt his absence greatly. From then on, I had to remain in Hadleyville, studying piano and literature and tending garden at the rear of our yard where Auntie had granted me the favor of a sunny parcel.”

The dwarf set the suitcase down again to catch his breath. A warm wind blew across the wheat fields on both sides of the road. Alvin felt himself wheezing and stopped to rest. His breathing had begun to sound funny. He saw an automobile raising dust on another road in the distance and decided to hitch a ride if the opportunity came along. Whether it was good for him or not, he was tired of walking, and his right instep was throbbing like a bone felon.

“Do you read many books?” the dwarf asked.

“Nope.”

“You see, I believe I've learned most of what I know by reading. My mother loved to read, or so Auntie told me. Many of the books we own were hers left to me in her will. And Uncle Augustus had a great library in Hannibal, more than ten thousand volumes containing the collected wisdom of our entire civilization. As a child I was left for hours in that room to browse on my own, which I did quite enthusiastically. Have you read much of Oscar Wilde?”

“Who's that?”

“A writer I much admire.”

“I already told you, I don't like books. I quit reading soon as I got out of school.”

“Well, that's too bad.”

“You can't learn nothing about life from a book. None of those books got you away from your aunt, did they?”

“No.”

“They didn't get you that money of yours from your daddy, did they?” Before the dwarf could answer, Alvin asked, “You got any friends back home?”

“Auntie wouldn't let me out of the yard unsupervised, but if by friends you mean—”

Alvin interrupted the dwarf. “You ain't got no friends back there because you don't do nothing but sit in that garden of yours fiddling with flowers like an old lady.”

“There's no need to be cruel.”

“I ain't being cruel,” Alvin shot back. “Just truthful.”

“I've already admitted to being a coward.”

“It ain't just that,” Alvin said, feeling anxious all of a sudden and jittery, and no idea why. “You got nobody yelling in your ear to get out of bed in the morning, no chores between you and fishing whenever you like. What do you have to kick about? You got the swellest life I ever heard of. I'd swap with you in a second. Anybody says they wouldn't's a damned liar.”

“If someone offered me a job, I would certainly trade places with him. I believe the discipline of manual labor would be instructive and helpful.”

“It'd kill you, is what it'd do.”

The dwarf waved off a nosy bee. “Look, I don't expect you to be sympathetic, of course, as I haven't had cause to labor for wages a single day of my life. In terms of basic needs, such as food and clothing and shelter, I've never wanted. Auntie made certain of that. We had a cook, and a delivery boy for groceries, and a woman who came in twice a week to clean. Each was under specific instructions to speak to me only when addressed and never to discuss away from our house what had occurred indoors that day. While the delivery boy had a distinctly unfriendly manner about him, I can say, I think quite confidently, that I made fast friends with Bessie, our cook, and Pleasance, the cleaning lady. In the afternoons, when Auntie was gone visiting friends, the three of us would sit together in the parlor and play whist for lemon candies, and in the evening we'd sip apricot brandy and use Auntie's Ouija board to communicate with the spirit world.”

“Why didn't you get yourself a regular job?” Alvin asked, his eyes fixed on a grain silo about half a mile to the east. Not since his year at the sanitarium had he had the opportunity of playing cards in the middle of a workday. Even afterward, when he was still sick, his mother made him clean house and wash windows and follow her around picking up clothes after his sisters. Frenchy laughed at him and said he ought to start wearing an apron dress.