Stories of Erskine Caldwell (11 page)

While she sat across the room she had not fully realized her loneliness. The curve of her head and shoulders drooped with the enveloping shadows, but she was not thinking of even her own presence. Finley had been dead such a short time.

When she got up to go, I got up also, and walked across the room towards her. I went to her side and stood at arm’s length from her, but the distance between us could only have been measured by the bounds of the room’s infinite space. I wished to put my arms around her and comfort her as I would have comforted the one I loved, but she was Finley’s widow, and the room with its walls made distance immeasurable. The room in which we stood was hollow and wide, and it swam in the darkness of its vast space. A spark from a flint would have struck us blind with the intensity of its light, and the certain conflagration would have consumed us to ashes.

Before I came to the house I had given no thought to a girl whose name would be Thomasine, and now she was my brother’s widow.

Some of the flowers in the room had curled for the night, but petals from the roses fell gently to the floor.

Suddenly she whispered, turning in the darkness towards me.

“Did you feed Finley’s rabbits tonight?”

“Yes, I fed them,” I told her. “I gave them all they can eat. They have everything they want for the night.”

Her hair had fallen over her shoulders, boiling thickly about her head. Her hair was citrus color, and it strangely matched the darkness of the room and the blackness of her clothes. Its color made her sorrow more uncomfortable, because hers was the head that bowed the deepest in the darkness of the immense room. When I stared at the inky blackness of the walls not within sight, I could somehow see the quickness of her citrus hair tousled on my brother’s chest while he kissed the smoothness of her profile and caressed the softness of her limbs. The beauty and richness of their year of love was yielding, though slowly, to the expanding darkness. It was in the darkness of the hollow room that I was able to believe in the finality of death, and to believe the sorrow I felt in her heart. Lovers for a year cannot believe the finality of death, and she least among them. I wished to tell her all I knew of it, but my words would have told only the triviality. Her love was not to be confused with death, and she would not have wished to understand it.

It was then to be the beginning of night.

I could not see her go, but I felt her leave the chair by the window. I walked behind her, touching the unfamiliar furniture, and guiding myself through the room and around it time after time by the direction of the citrus scent of her hair.

She stopped then, and I realized that I was in the bedroom. I found myself standing in the doorway knowing only one direction, and that was the fragrant citrus scent which came from her hair. When she went from corner to corner, I stood in the doorway of the room waiting for her to speak, for a word to send me away until morning. If there was anything else she wished, or if there was nothing I could do, she had not told me.

The lonely walk from corner to corner and back again, and the still coldness of her bed, echoed through the hollow room. I could hear her walk across the floor to the bed, touch it with her fingers, and walk back across the carpeted floor to the window. She stood by the window looking out at the nothing of night, the black nothing, while I waited for her to tell me to close the door and go away and leave her alone.

Though she was in the room, and I was in the doorway, and the rabbits were just outside the window, the emptiness about us descended upon the house like the stillness of night without stars and the moon. When I reached out my arms, they stretched to regions unknown, and when I looked with my eyes, they seemed to be searching for light in all corners of the dark heavens.

She knew I was waiting in the doorway for a word to send me away, but she was helpless in her loneliness. She knew she could not bear to be alone in the room whose walls could not be seen at such a great distance. She knew her loneliness could not be dispelled with a word uttered in the hollow darkness, and she knew herself alone could not be propelled from the immensity of the house.

My brother had written to me of her with a feeling of regret because I did not have someone like her to love. He had been with her a year, sharing this house and sharing this bed. Each night they had gone side by side into this room where she was now but for me alone. Then it was that I could feel the loneliness of this night, because he had been taken away from her; while I, who had never known such love, was never to be made a part of it.

Once more she went to the bed and touched it. The room was dark and the bed was still. She knew now that she was to be alone.

She began to cry softly, as a girl cries.

Her slippers dropped from her feet, and the echo was like the throwing of a man’s solid-heeled shoes against the floor.

When she touched a comb on the table and it fell to the floor in the darkness, it might have been a man’s clumsy hands feeling in the night and knocking clocks and mirrors from their places.

Her knees touched a chair, but the sound was like a man walking blindly in a dark room, stumbling over furniture and cursing hoarsely under his breath.

The clothes she removed were laid on a chest at the foot of the bed, but it was as if a man were tossing his heavy-laden coat and trousers across the room towards a chair.

Noiselessly she raised the window, but it was as if a man had thrown it open, impatient with delay.

She sat on the side of the bed and lay down upon it, but it was like a man hurling himself there and jerking the cover over him.

Softly she turned over and lay her arm across the far pillow, but it sounded in the hollow room as if a man were tossing there, beating the pillows with his fists.

Her body began to tremble with her sobs, faintly shaking the springs of the bed and the mattress, but it was like the ruthless action of a man quick with his uncontrolled strength.

I do not know how long I had stood in the doorway waiting for a word from her to send me away. Time in the pitch blackness of the house of hollow darkness had passed quickly at first, and then slowly. It may have been an hour, it may have been five.

I parted my lips and spoke to her. The sounds of my words seemed to be without an end in their echo.

“Good night, Thomasine,” I said, trembling.

She screamed with fright and with pain. Had someone cut her heart with a knife, she could not have screamed more loudly.

Then slowly she turned over in bed and lay on her other side.

“My God! My God! My God!”

The pillow she had been clutching fell from the far side of the bed to the floor, crashing in the darkness like a felled tree deep in a forest. Evening gave way, and night in the empty room began.

(First published in
Pagany
)

T
HE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE’S
special train was due to arrive from Monterrey at nine o’clock, and it was expected to come into the station at eleven. The track was in poor condition farther west, but the General had taken that into consideration and had started the journey three hours ahead of schedule in order to arrive in Ciudad Tamaulipas not more than two hours late.

Three weeks earlier one of the other candidates had made the fatal mistake of not thinking about the poor condition of the track, merely leaving Monterrey on schedule. Consequently, he arrived in Ciudad Tamaulipas five hours late, and by that time all the people had decided to go home and eat and take the siesta.

The bands, cheated out of their opportunity to play three weeks before, were practicing all over town that morning. They had been up since sunrise. Three of them, along with some of the shoeshine boys and lottery-ticket vendors, were marching up and down in the dusty arroyo behind the bull ring.

In the plaza two more bands were practicing bars and scales and getting a feeling for the pitch. Several other bands were riding through the streets in trucks and practicing at the same time.

The special train bearing the General and his party suddenly puffed up to the station, the engineer tooting the whistle a long and two shorts only when it was a mere dozen rail-lengths away. Everybody was caught unprepared. It had arrived an hour and a half late, but a full thirty minutes before it was expected.

As it was, the only persons on the station platform when the General’s train puffed up and stopped were some shoeshine boys and lottery-ticket vendors, and they would have been there even if the special had not been coming that day at all.

The official welcoming committee was still in the cantina two blocks away, and the chauffeur of the limousine in which the General was to ride to the bull ring for the speech was sitting comfortably in a restaurant across the street eating fried beans. The limousine itself, however, was parked at the station platform.

The General and his party bought up all lottery tickets on which the numeral 5 appeared in the serial numbers and went directly to the limousine. Somebody blew the horn three sharp blasts. The chauffeur came running out of the restaurant with his mouth full of hot beans, thinking somebody was playing with it. When he recognized the General on the back seat, he swallowed the beans, saluted, and slid under the steering wheel.

News of the General’s arrival had already begun to spread through the town. Shopkeepers began pulling down the steel blinds over their plate-glass windows, expecting the crowds to jam the streets at any moment.

One of the bands in the plaza heard the news and opened up right away, the bandsmen pulling out all the stops in their instruments so the sound would carry four blocks across town to the station, where the General could hear and appreciate it.

But before the music reached the General’s ears, he and his party were off in a burst of scudding speed and billowy dust. Six of his rangers who could not find space inside the limousine clung to the outside along with five or six shoeshine boys, several lottery-ticket vendors, and a delegate from an
ejido
, who happened to be at the station early because he had misjudged the time.

Halfway to the bull ring a shoeshine boy and the
ejido
delegate fell off when the limousine struck a bounce in the street.

When the General arrived at the bull ring there were seven or eight thousand men in the stands, filling them to capacity, and two or three thousand more were on the outside trying vainly to gain entrance by scaling the adobe walls and tunneling with their machetes under the concrete stands.

Just as he and his party were about to enter the bull ring a squad of soldiers that had been detailed to protect the life of the presidential candidate came forward and forcibly disarmed his rangers, taking all their automatics and dumping them into a canvas sack.

The rangers resented the attitude of the soldiers, who were comrades of the revolution, too, but the General laughed and beckoned to half a dozen of the prettiest girls around him. He requested the girls to precede him through the passageway, and then they all entered the bull ring together. The rangers stayed behind and argued with the soldiers while all of them took advantage of the opportunity to get their shoes shined and buy some lottery tickets.

The General mounted the platform that had been erected in the middle of the bull ring while an
ejido
delegate was delivering an introductory speech to the crowd over the loud-speaker system. When the people recognized the General, their voices drowned out the words of the delegate and he had to resign himself to leaving his speech half unread.

As the clamor was dying down, two bands arrived and began playing as they marched around the platform several times. In the meantime several shoeshine boys and lottery-ticket vendors made a dash for the platform, making it safely while everyone’s attention was being held by the performance of the band.

After a while there was less noise and commotion, and the General went to the microphone and greeted the people. He was able to speak only a few words before the shouting of the crowd made it impossible to continue.

“What did the General say?” we asked one of the lottery-ticket vendors beside us.

“The General said it has made him happy to be here, because now he has seen the most beautiful girls and the strongest men in all Mexico!”

After a while the General was able to resume his address. He spoke one full sentence and half of another into the microphone before the shouts of the people again drowned out his voice.

“Viva el General!”

“Viva Mexico!”

“Viva el General!”

In wave after wave the shouts of many thousands of voices thundered through the bull ring.

“What did the General say?” we asked excitedly.

“The General said it has made him happy to come here where all the land is rich and fertile — even the mountainsides!” the lottery-ticket vendor said, excitedly waving his arms in a gesture that took in the whole world.

Just as the General was getting ready to attempt to speak again, two more bands arrived. They began playing the marches they knew, circling the platform time after time. While they were playing, the arena gates suddenly burst open and dozens of men on horseback swarmed across the bull ring. They were carrying banners of the revolution and flags of the republic, but they had no musical instruments, and soon nobody noticed them any more.

There was a period of comparative calm in the bull ring, and the General stepped briskly to the microphone and spoke rapidly to the people. This time he completed two sentences before the crowd’s shouts of approval stilled his voice once more. He stepped back, wiped his face, and waited patiently for the din to subside.

“What did he say this time?” we asked eagerly.

“The General said he wished all the people in the world could have the good fortune to come to Ciudad Tamaulipas!”

During an unaccountable lull, the General hurried back to the microphone, but before he could utter any sound another band arrived and struck up its music as it began circling the platform. When it was all over, the General grasped the microphone firmly in both hands and quickly resumed his speech. This time he raced through several sentences before the swelling roar of the crowd forced him to pause.