Frolic of His Own (11 page)

As though regretting this show of impatience, THOMAS seats himself back against the sill, and picks up a strip of rag he finds there.

They're expecting you . . .

H
IS
M
OTHER

Is that the same uniform you went off in? Yes, it looks like it, now I can see.

Restraining himself, THOMAS crosses a boot over his knee and begins to rub it clean with the rag.

I remember when it was new, before you went off, you'd lay a handkerchief over your knee when you crossed your leg up that way, with your soiled boot . . .

T
HOMAS

(WITH EFFORT, NOT LOOKING UP, CONTINUES RUBBING)

They've done things, at Quantness, getting ready. A room . . .

H
IS
M
OTHER

That cloth, Thomas.

THOMAS (HOLDING UP THE RAG, PERPLEXED)

What?

H
IS
M
OTHER

Please don't use it, for that. We've kept it for lampwick.

T
HOMAS

(STANDING, BARELY ABLE TO CONTROL EXASPERATION)

Listen, will you get ready? They expect you. They're waiting. They expect you up there to stay while I'm gone.

H
IS
M
OTHER

(QUIETLY)

I've kept well here this whole year you've been away Thomas, and the chance that you mightn't come back at all. I can't leave here now.

T
HOMAS

(BURSTING OUT AT LAST)

Can't leave? Here? Look at it! The gate off, the fence fallen, corn dead on the stalk and tobacco rotted on the ground. The door latch was broken when I came in. I'm not blaming, I know it's been hard, I'm not blaming anyone. You or old Ambers, or John Israel, no, I know it's been hard. But now? You can leave it! Leave all this behind, things broken and worn out and saving precious rags, the cold and . . . all this.

THOMAS flings the rag to the floor between them and stands confronting her.

H
IS
M
OTHER

(WITH A SORROWING CALM)

I was proud of you here, Thomas.

T
HOMAS

Proud!

H
IS
M
OTHER

(AS THOUGH TRYING TO REACH HIM)

Of your work, your courage, that you'd found a place, your . . . you loved this land, Thomas. The life, things growing, even your new tobacco, your new bright leaf, you called it? It's still down in the barn where you hanged it to cure. I gave orders no one to disturb it. I've thought I've heard you down there at night sometimes, Thomas. The way you used to go down and grind corn? Do you remember?

T
HOMAS

(BROODINGLY)

Remember . . . !

H
IS
M
OTHER

And the way you went off, when the war came . . .

T
HOMAS

(WITH BROODING INTENSITY)

Yes, and who do you think I've been fighting up there, but my uncle and all his damned Bagbys? Fighting, for this? For the right to lie down at night counting the minutes, the years, the days that can't be told one from another? And a red stripe in that flag of theirs for every year of . . . humiliation, straining side by side in the mud with old Ambers and John Israel, two black wretches who can't call their souls their own, planting and putting in fence. Yes, four years of that, and then three talking poormouth at Quantness, and you ask me to hesitate? With these seven stripes across my back, and now this on my face to remember?

(PAUSING, AS SHE JUST LOOKS AT HIM, HE ADDS WITH BITTER AFTERTHOUGHT, LOOKING ROUND)

‘One of the finest private mansions in the Carolinas,' and look at it. Look at it now. That's what my uncle called it that day, just to get rid of us. Lord! the way he described it. Had he ever come down here and seen it? Why, he talked as though he'd seen Quantness.

H
IS
M
OTHER

(COLDLY DIRECT)

The way you did.

T
HOMAS

(DRAWN UP SHORT)

I . . .

H
IS
M
OTHER

The way you saw it that first day we came, and you drove that old rig right up to Quantness as though you'd lived there all your life. Standing up as you drove and pointing things out with the whip, the house and the tall white columns, and seeing it all for the first time yourself. I might have thought that you'd been born there, if I wasn't your mother and knew.

T
HOMAS

(ANNOYED BUT TAKEN ABACK)

And why not? It was just a mistake, following what directions we had and after he'd described this place as ‘one of the finest private mansions . . . '

H
IS
M
OTHER

(CUTS IN SHARPLY)

And this now? This great fortune? No Thomas, your father had a friend, what was his name from back in the old whaling days, they called him the Sage of Sag Harbor and what he used to say. There is never a treasure without a following shade of care . . .

(HOLDING UP A HAND TO FORESTALL HIM)

And you sound like you did seven years ago, like you did when we drove into Quantness, standing up in that old rig and crowing. Pointing out things that you thought were yours, horses, stables, I won't forget, even that sundial by the drive, there wasn't a tree or a blade of grass, a dog or a darkie that wasn't yours the moment you saw it, not a fear or a doubt in your mind, and now . . .

T
HOMAS

(CUTTING HER OFF FIRMLY)

Quantness is my home now.

H
IS
M
OTHER

(SNIFFING, FUMBLING AS THOUGH SEEKING A HANDKERCHIEF)

It has changed you, Thomas. A year from home and people.

T
HOMAS

And people! By heaven, people? What do you think war is?

H
IS
M
OTHER

No, mindful of others, I mean to say. I cannot see you, a year ago, using such language in the parlour, lighting up your tobacco without excusing yourself, putting your feet up on the woodwork . . . No,
not only this, only this as a part of you now. Coming so sudden at dawn, you look so big to me, so different, so like and so different. Some dream of yourself, coming in so rumpled, your beard not trimmed and the way your face is drawn on that one side . . . you look outraged. I've dreamt of you Thomas but not my dream. Someone's dream, someone else, yours perhaps, coming in with this letter from your Mister Bagby and your talk of going north now, today, when you've scarcely laid eyes on your family at Quantness, when you haven't been home yet once round the clock . . .

T
HOMAS

(BLURTS OUT)

Listen . . . ! If all this is to keep me here, Mother? Because I can't stay, isn't that clear? If you'd . . . tell me what it is that you want. When war came you didn't want that, you didn't want me to go, and now you don't want me to leave it? When I planted tobacco you didn't want that, we couldn't eat it or wear it, and now you were proud of it. You said I was vain when I put on this uniform, now when I cross a boot over my knee . . . what is it you want? And when this fortune was out of our reach, why you . . . and now, you won't have it? What is it!

H
IS
M
OTHER

(WITH REPROACHFUL CALM)

What I have always sought, for myself and those in my keeping Thomas. To know the Lord's will, and submit. To lay up treasures in heaven, Thomas, treasures even for you, while you seek here below . . .

T
HOMAS

(HOARSELY CHALLENGING)

Only justice!

THOMAS draws both hands down his face and stands staring.

All of this came when my spirit was almost broken . . . or when I suddenly knew that it could be, and that's the same thing . . .

He turns away slowly as he speaks, nearing the door and there staring at an old shotgun racked on the wall.

When I've laid out there with their screams in my throat, the screams of men being torn to pieces in my own throat because I had to be next, but I couldn't be . . .

He takes down the shotgun as he speaks and with the suppressed horror of somnambulism goes through the scene which he describes.

All of it couldn't be happening. There? to me? It couldn't be, no . . . But what happened once, what happened there, what happened before still happens at night. It happens the way it happened then, when I went up hunting on their property, over the rise where the chapel looks across the fields and over the creek, staring through rail fence and that creek to Quantness house itself. It was when we first came here, we knew no one, and I'd never hunted a thing in my life. With this gun . . . there's a path that runs up the rise and broadens into a wagonroad straight through a clearing a half mile long and brown with cornstalks standing uncut where the woods farther on fall back. And there, coming over the foot of that rise, three cock pheasants burst up off the ground with the terrible slowness of things in a dream. They wheeled, I fired, and they were gone . . . but there on the ground with a broken wing one of them struggled across the stones, and I fired again, and it kept on, struggling until it reached a wall where it fought its head in amongst the stones. I wanted to leave it, and let it live, to remember as something I hadn't seen. Worse happens in nature that we never see. Worse happened. I killed it cutting its throat, too kind to do it the violence of wringing its neck or snapping its head against a stone. But around its throat, the brilliant feathers, I couldn't get the knife through . . . It wouldn't cut without . . . God! The absurdity of it. It wouldn't stop fighting, and not fighting me . . . It was fighting to fly from what was happening.

(MORE DISTANTLY, STANDING AS THOUGH DAZED)

She was a child, Giulielma then, come up behind me demanding to know what I was doing on their property. And it was as though I'd strayed into a kingdom, a fool from nowhere with blood on my hands and that bird dropping blood on the ground between us. I gave her father the bird when I met him, as though I'd been out and shot it for sport. ‘I never knew anyone to hunt without dogs,' was what she said when she took me in . . .

(SHUDDERING, HE CLUTCHES A HAND OVER HIS EYES)

And I never climb that rise today without seeing them wheel up before me, without a tearing ache in my stomach. I was hunting because we were hungry.

HIS MOTHER half rises from her chair, her arms tendering an embrace which she drops slowly as he stares without seeing her.

H
IS
M
OTHER

(SINKING BACK IN CHAIR, QUAVERINGLY DIRECT)

And you married her . . . for Quantness and, you're going there? now?

T
HOMAS

(SPEAKING WITH EFFORT, NOT LOOKING AT HER)

Out to wake John Israel and Ambers, to pack up your things.

H
IS
M
OTHER

(COLDLY)

John Israel's gone.

T
HOMAS

(STOPPING SHARPLY IN THE DOOR)

Gone?

H
IS
M
OTHER

John Israel's gone, Thomas. He ran off.

T
HOMAS

(AMAZED, STEPPING BACK INTO THE ROOM)

But . . . why didn't you tell me? Or write?

H
IS
M
OTHER

(WITH RUEFUL SATISFACTION)

What could you have done, so far away?

T
HOMAS

When? When did he go?

H
IS
M
OTHER

In dead of winter. We worried sick, if he was running away up north, where it's colder.

T
HOMAS

But . . . him run off, and you worried for him?

(HE COMES SLOWLY TO REST AGAINST THE DOORFRAME)

And after I left him safe behind, instead of taking him up to the war . . .

H
IS
M
OTHER

(DISTANTLY RESENTFUL)

The way you used to take him to work up at Quantness, and you and her brother used to devil him up there.

T
HOMAS

(WITH EFFORT AT WEARY INDULGENT LAUGH, AS THOUGH THIS IS AN OLD ARGUMENT)

Mother . . . devil him? Why, John Israel, he was our ‘noble savage,' and Will wasn't more than twelve years old. Did you know that the Major wanted to buy him? that he offered me six hundred dollars for John Israel once? And that it was Will that talked me out of it? giving me back all my own ideas, that I'd brought back here from France?

H
IS
M
OTHER

You took him to build that fine staircase at Quantness when our barn roofs needed mending right here.

T
HOMAS

(IMITATIVE)

‘A niggra like that that can turn wood and read,' the Major said . . .

H
IS
M
OTHER

(IN A SUDDEN OUTBURST OF BITTER AND DESPERATE ACCUSATION)

I taught him to read in the Bible, Thomas! John Israel was given into my keeping, Providence gave him into my keeping and I taught him where to seek the Lord's grace, to find his duty in the Lord's will . . . to submit to the Lord's everlasting mercy . . . to fight the temptation to . . . harden his heart . . . !

T
HOMAS

(BURSTS OUT AS DESPERATELY)

The Lord's grace! And . . . is it my heart that's hardened? Mine? You ask me if I remember those nights, when I used to go down to the barn and grind corn? Remember? I went out and worked in the darkness because I was trapped, because I was baffled, because I was through but I couldn't end it, I . . . I died too, but I couldn't lie down. I still had strength that was left from the day, I still had anger that I hadn't spent pulling stumps, or putting in fence, and there was nothing to do with my anger and strength but to stand in the dark and grind corn. To stand, like a blind horse chained to a millstone, and accept it, as though it were mine . . . but knowing it . . . couldn't be! You . . . you talk of laying up treasures in heaven? I . . . I want order here. And the way, Mother the way you cling to this place, to that pension, and even the way John Israel ran off, it's as though you . . . cherish injustice. When I left John Israel to keep things
up here, I gave up a commission, if I'd taken a servant I would have accepted an officer's commission, but I . . . left him here safe, for you . . . for you, that pension? When my father died in an embassy post where they gave him nothing, no promotions, they let him rot there until it was over and every idea he had was dead, and we had to come back and beg from his brother what was his? what was ours? And then to be put off with this?