The collected stories (5 page)

They were soon on their way. There was a rime of froth on the necks and fetlocks of the horses, and great syrupy strings of yellow

world's end

saliva dripped from their jaws. The road narrowed as it grew steep; then it opened again. The horses fought for footing and the wheels chimed as they banged against the wagon. The Negroes did not sing as they had on the early-morning ride, nor did they speak. Mr Hand nodded, sat upright, slumped again, and was asleep.

Sensing the wagon slowing, John Paul put his shoulder under the back flap and gave a push. His shoulder was soaked; the wagon had begun to drip, dark pennies in the dust that dried almost as soon as they formed. He placed his forearms on the flap and put his head down and let the wagon carry him.

Passing the spring where they had stopped that morning for a drink, John Paul called out to Mr Hand and asked if they could rest. No, said Mr Hand, waking again and spreading his fingers to push at the sunlight. They would go on, he said; they were in a hurry. Now Jacket sang out - a brief squawking ditty, interrupting the silence of the hot road. He was answered by John Paul, another birdlike cry, and then Macacque's affirming gabble. John Paul took his ice pick and reached beneath the canvas. He chopped a wedge, and sucked it, then shared it with the two other Negroes. Mr Hand gasped in sleep.

There was a cracking, a splintering of wood like a limb twisting from a tree. John Paul tossed his chunk of ice into the grass by the roadside, and he saw the rear wheel in pieces, a bunch of spokes settling under the wagon.

Glassy eyed from his nap, Mr Hand announced to them that he had a spare wheel. He unbolted it from the bottom of the wagon and fitted it to the axle, but from where the others stood idle they could see that the ice had shifted and cracked the side boards. And yet, when the trip was resumed, the wagon rolled more smoothly, as if the load were lighter than before - the springs had bounce, the wheels were straighter.

More ice was chopped away by John Paul, and this he shared, and while Mr Hand slept the three Negroes quarreled silently, sniffing and sighing, because John Paul had the ice pick and he would not let any of the others use it.

The road became bumpy again; the ice moved in the wagon. It had been securely roped, but now it was loose; it was a smaller load; its jarring woke Mr Hand. He worked himself into a temper when he saw the diminished load. He stopped to tighten the canvas around it and screamed at the puddle that collected under the

THE IMPERIAL ICEHOUSE

wagon. He would not let the Negroes drink. There will be cold drinks in plenty, he said, when we arrive home. Later, he got down from the seat on a steep grade and got behind and pushed with his shoulder like John Paul, and he said: That's how we do it.

They passed a fragrant valley. Negroes in that valley whispered and laughed and jeered at the Negroes in this procession. Now the ice was melting so quickly there was a stream of water pouring from the wagon and its cracks. The mockery was loud and several Negroes followed for some distance, yelling about the melting ice and the trail of mud they left through the pretty valley. The wagon wood was dark with moisture, as dark as the Negroes' faces, which were streaming with sweat.

Mr Hand began to talk - crazy talk about England - and his men laughed at the pitch of his voice, which was a child's complaint. They did not understand his words; he ignored their laughter.

The left trace snapped as the right had done, a spoke worked loose and dropped from a wheel, although the wheel itself remained in position. One horse's shoe clanged as he kicked it into the belly of the wagon. These incidents were commented upon, and now the Negroes talked loudly of the stupidity of the trip, the waste of effort, the wrong time of day, the color of Mr Hand's cheeks. Mr Hand sat holding the reins loosely, his head tipped onto his shoulder. His straw hat fell off and the Negroes left it on the road where it fell. John Paul looked back and saw his footprint crushed into the crown.

They had gained the second range of hills, and descending -slowly, so that the wagon would not be shot forward - the late-afternoon sun, unshielded by any living tree, struck their faces like metal. The road was strewn with boulders on which the horses did a tired dance, stepping back. There was a curve, another upward grade, and at that corner the horses paused to crop the grass.

There was no sound from Mr Hand. He was a crouching infant in his seat, in the sun's glare, his mouth open. The horses tore at the grass with their lips. The Negroes crept under the wagon, and there they stayed in the coolness, for an hour or more, the cold water dripping on them.

Mr Hand woke, stamping his feet on the planks. They scrambled to their places.

His anger was exhausted in three shouts. He promised them ice,

WORLD S END

cold drinks, a share for everyone, and as he spoke the Negroes could see how the ice beneath the sagging canvas was a quarter the size of what it had been. Divided, it would be nothing. They did not respond to Mr Hand's offer: it was a promise of water, which they had already as their right, from their own spring.

Mr Hand tugged the reins and the men helped the horses, dragged the wagon, dragged the ice, dragged this man through the tide of heat. Mr Hand chattered, repeating his promises, but when he saw the impassive faces of the Negroes he menaced them with whining words. He spoke sharply, like an insect stirred by the sun.

If you don't pull hard, he said to the men, I'll free the horses and hitch you to the wagon - and you'll take us home. He thwacked the canvas with his whip. There was no thud, nothing solid, only a thin echoless smack, and he clawed open the canvas. Shrunken ice blocks rattled on the planks.

He stopped the wagon and leaped out and faced each man in turn and accused him. The men did nothing; they waited for him to move. And he did. He hit Macacque and called him a thief. Jacket was lazy, he said, and he hit him. John Paul prepared himself for worse. Mr Hand came close to him and screamed and, as he did, the wagon lurched. The horses had found grass: they pulled the wagon to the roadside.

The sounds of the horses chewing, the dripping of the wagon in the heat; it was regular, like time leaking away. Mr Hand raised his whip and rushed at John Paul. And then, in that low sun, Mr Hand cast three shadows; two helped him aside, and he struggled until a sound came, the sound John Paul had made in town with his ice pick, like ice being chipped, or bone struck, and the hatless man cried out - plea, promise, threat, all at once - and staggered to the wagon and shouted at the water dripping into the dust. The ice was no larger than a man, and bleeding in the same way.

At last it was cool and dark and they were passing the first fences of the farm and turning into the drive. There were lighted huts and lights moving toward them, swinging tamely on nothing in the darkness. Voices near those lanterns cried out - timid questions. The three men answered in triumph from the top of the heavy wagon, which rumbled in the road like a broken catafalque, streaming, still streaming, though all the ice was gone.

Yard Sale

As things turned out, Floyd had no choice but to spend the summer with me in East Sandwich. To return home to find his parents divorced was awkward; but to learn that they had already held their yard sale was distinctly shaming. I had been there and seen my sister's ghastly jollity as she disposed of her old Hoover and shower curtains and the chair she had abandoned caning; Floyd senior, with a kind of hostile generosity, turned the whole affair into a potlatch ceremony by bestowing his power tools on his next-door neighbor and clowning among his junk with the word 'freebie.' 'Aunt Freddy can have my life jacket,' he crowed. 'I'm not your aunt,' I said, but I thanked him for it and sent it via the local church to Bangladesh, where I hoped it would arrive before the monsoon hit Chittagong. After the yard sale, they made themselves scarce - Floyd senior to his Boston apartment and his flight attendant, my sister to the verge of a nervous breakdown in Cuttyhunk. I was glad to be deputized to look after little Floyd, and I knew how relieved he would be, after two years in the Peace Corps in Western Samoa, to have some home cooking and the sympathetic ear of his favorite aunt. He, too, would be burdened and looking for buyers.

At Hyannis Airport, I expected a waif, an orphan of sorts, with a battered suitcase and a heavy heart. But Floyd was all smiles as he peered out of the fuselage, and when the steps were lowered and he was on them, the little plane actually rocked to and fro: Floyd had gained seventy-five pounds. A Henry Moore muppet of raw certainty, he was dark, with hair like varnished kapok and teeth gleaming like Chiclets. He wore an enormous shirt printed with bloated poppies, and the skirtlike sarong that Margaret Mead tells us is called a lava-lava. On his feet were single-thong flip-flops, which, when he kicked them off - as he did in the car, to sit cross-legged on the bucket seat - showed his toes to be growing in separate directions.

'Wuppertal,' he said, or words to that effect. There was about

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him a powerful aroma of coconut oil and a rankness of dead leaves and old blossoms.

'Greetings,' I said.

'That's what I just said.'

'And welcome home.'

'It doesn't seem like home anymore.'

We passed the colonial-style (rough-hewn logs, split-rail fence, mullion windows) Puritan Funeral Home, Kopper Krafts, the pizza joints, and it occurred to me that this part of Route 132 had changed out of all recognition. I thought: Poor kid.

The foreknowledge that I would be led disloyally into loose talk about his father's flight attendant kept me silent about his parents' divorce. I asked him about Samoa; I was sure he was aching to be quizzed. This brought from him a snore of approval and a native word. I mentioned his sandals.

He said, 'My mother never wears sandals. She's always barefoot!'

I determined upon delicacy. 'It's been a hard year.'

'She says the craziest things sometimes.'

'Nerves.'

Here was the Hyannis Drive-in Movie. I was going to point out to him that while he had been away, they had started holding drive-in church services on Sunday mornings - an odd contrast to Burt Reynolds in the evenings, the sacred and the profane in the same amphitheatre. But Floyd was talking about his father.

'He's amazing, and what a sailor! I've known him to go out in a force-nine gale. He's completely reckless.'

Aren't the young downright? I thought. I did not say anything about the life jacket his old man had given me; I was sure he had done it out of malice, knowing full well that what I had really coveted was the dry pinewood sink lost in the potlatch.

'Floyd,' I said, with a shrill note of urgency in my voice - I was frantic to drag him off the topic I knew would lead him to his parents' fractured marriage - 'what about Samoa?'

'Sah-moa,' he said, moving his mouth like a chorister as he corrected my pronunciation. So we have an emphatic stammer on the first syllable, do we? I can take any amount of well-intentioned pedantry, but I draw the line at condescension from someone I have laboriously diapered. It was so difficult for me to mimic this unsayable word that I countered with 'And yet, I wonder how main of them would get Haverhill right?'

YARD SALE

Floyd did not move from his Buddha posture. 'Actually, he's wicked right-wing, and very moralistic about things. I mean, deep down. He hates change of any kind.'

'You're speaking of-?'

'My father.'

Your psychiatrists say grief is a great occasion for rationalizing. Still, the Floyd senior I knew was indiscernible through this coat of whitewash. He was the very engine of change. Though my sentence was fully framed, I didn't say to his distracted son, That is a side of your father I have not been privileged to observe.

'Mother's different.'

'How so?'

'Confident. Full of beans. Lots of savvy.'

And beside herself in Cuttyhunk. Perhaps we do invent the friends and even the parents we require, and yet I was not quite prepared for what Floyd said next.

'My sister's pretty incredible, too. I've always thought of myself as kind of athletic, but she can climb trees twice as fast as me.'

This was desperate: he had no sister. Floyd was an only child. I had an overwhelming desire to slap his face, as the hero does in B movies to bring the flannel-mouthed fool to his senses.

But he had become effusive. 'My sister . . . my brother . . . my grandmother' - inventing a fictitious family to make up for the one that had collapsed in his absence.

I said, 'Floyd dear, you're going to think your old auntie is horribly literal-minded, but I don't recognize your family from anything you've said. Oh, sure, I suppose your father is conservative - the roue is so often a puritan underneath it all. And vice versa. Joseph Smith? The Mormon prophet? What was it, fifty wives? 'When I see a pretty girl, I have to pray,' he said. His prayers were answered! But listen, your mother's had a dreadful time. And, um, you don't actually have any brothers or sisters. Relax. I know we're under a little strain, and absolutely bursting with Samoa, but-'

'In Samoa,' he said, mocking me with the half sneeze of its correct pronunciation, 'it's the custom to join a local family. You live with them. You're one of them.'

'Much as one would join the Elks around here?'

'It's wicked complicated.'

'More Masonic - is that it?'

WORLD S END

'More Samoan. You get absorbed kind of. They prefer it that way. And they're very easygoing. I mean, there's no word for bastard in Samoan.'

'With so little traffic on the roads, there's probably no need for it. Sorry. I see your point. But isn't that taking the extended family a bit far? What about your parents?'

'He thatches roofs and she keeps chickens.'

'Edith and Floyd senior?'

'Oh, them' was all he said.

'But you've come home!'

'I don't know. Maybe I just want to find my feet.'

Was it his turn of phrase? I dropped my eyes and saw a spider clinging to his ankle. I said, 'Floyd, don't move - there's a creature on your foot.'