The Aunt's Story (33 page)

‘Are you sick?' the woman asked.

Theodora said that she was not.

Then it occurred to the small woman that she should start to arrange this stranger's life, who had come by train, and did not know much.

‘Because you gotta go
some
where,' the woman replied, when Theodora said she had not thought.

‘I do not particularly want to go anywhere,' Theodora said. ‘Though I have money in my bag.'

There was not, fortunately, a great deal the woman wanted to know. So long as she could arrange a life she was content.

So she said there was a guest house farther up that was fine, with individual cabins, where people went, and artists, where Theodora should go, and there was a canyon, and an Indian pueblo, and an Indian that was petrified, from falling down a cliff and lying upside down in the right kind of water for many years. This is where Theodora should go. To rest. The woman's son was going that way with a load of apples, presently, and Jake would run her up.

‘Jake!' the small woman called. ‘Jake!'

The son raised his head from a dark window. He laughed, because he was still half-asleep, and because he did not know what else to do. Jake's neck was muscular and golden. He rose, and he was a statue, but he would not reflect much, Theodora saw.

So it was arranged, while Jake threw water at his body.

Theodora sat in Jake's truck. She waved good-bye to the small old child. She saw that by the middle of the day the fierce sunflowers would be oozing dust. Already the bronze cock brooded and drooped.

Then they went. The stiff road began to move. It became more sinuous. It swerved and dipped. The wind was quite serpentine at each curve of road, and before the hollows of white, flumping dust. They dived. Theodora Goodman and Jake sat high. It was grave, and dignified, and beautiful to fly like this through the empty landscape, but an emptiness that did not matter. The emptiness of this landscape was a fullness, of pink earth, and chalk-blue for sky. And the rim of the world was white. It burned.

Jake held the wheel. Driving, Jake was good. But they stopped too, and he was the same statue of hard, golden wax, that conveyed one or two ideas. From the back of the truck there was a smell of hot apples, the apples that they stopped for Jake to deliver, beside the road, or just off. Then Theodora sat in the smell of hot apples and dust. Once there was a bus pulled in at a gas station, and a dwarf was singing of eternity, as if he knew, and meant it.

They went on. Jake did not speak much. He laughed. They went on across the world, which Jake took for granted. Or they stopped. And Jake got down to juggle apples. Finally, Theodora was tired of Jake. She looked back once to see, but Jake did not, before she took the road that opened.

Theodora walked up the small side road, which went up the mountain, steep enough, and full of rocks. The sandy, rocky road wound up the mountain, for no set purpose, you would have imagined, except there was evidence occasionally that this must exist. The sand in softer parts between the rocks was bruised by tyres. Theodora was determined to follow this road. She was rigid with determination and purpose as she walked. Sometimes she bent to the greater incline of the road. Sometimes her dry mouth gulped. Sometimes the brown leathery flaps of her nostrils fastened with desperation on the air. She was walking between pines, or firs, anyway some kind of small coniferous tree, stunted and dark, which possessed that part of the earth. Animal life was moving in the undergrowth of dark, dead twigs and needles, and stiff, thistly things, and yellow grass. Small clearings were covered wholly with dead grass, which made a queer stiff sound of moving when there was wind. Theodora could smell the dust. She could smell the expanding odour of her own body, which was no longer the sour, mean smell of the human body in enclosed spaces, but the unashamed flesh on which dust and sun have lain. She walked. She smiled for this discovery of freedom.

In her hand she still held, she realized, the practical handbag, that last link with the external Theodora Goodman. Out of the undergrowth a small furred animal raised its head to examine her surprise. She stood, tall and black, making a shadow, at the bend in the road. She rummaged in the handbag, amongst the startling objects that people carry in such receptacles, and found aspirin and eau-de-Cologne, the snapshot of children in a row, nickels and bills and a sticky lozenge. There were also, she saw, the strips and sheaves of tickets, railroad and steamship, which Theodora Goodman had bought in New York for the purpose of prolonging herself through many fresh phases of what was accepted as Theodora Goodman. Now she took these and tore them into small pieces which fell frivolously at the side of the
road. The shock of this disturbed the furred thing in the undergrowth. It ran. She heard it over sticks. Even the undergrowth, she reflected, rejects the acts of honesty. But she personally was gladder. After dawdling away quite a lot of what was now afternoon, she continued with longer strides up the rough road.

Presently this eased out. Soon we shall come to something, she knew. In a rut there was an empty can that had not yet filled with dust and stones, the wrapper still pink with an unnatural formation of Vienna sausages. Later she began to smell cool sand, soaked apparently by the trickle from a hidden spring. She noticed initials carved in the scaly bark of a tree, an uneven
AJ
, from which resin oozed. This last clue made her debate whether she was prepared. She touched the face which soon other faces would perhaps attempt fumblingly to read, but after hesitating a moment with her feet in the consoling sand, she went on towards the words and silences of human intercourse.

Trees thinned out in front of her, leaving an open space, a patch of ragged, ripened corn, a house that had been built purposely for living, the clutter of sheds, hutches, corral, cans, hessian tatters, and broken toys that such houses accumulate. Theodora was glad of all this. The prospect warmed many past failures. She gathered her humility and approached the wood gate, beyond which a scruffy red dog bristled and barked. At what point after she had lifted the latch the dog stopped tearing at her skirt she was not sensibly aware. Only that she looked down into his red eye, and found that he was regretting anything that might have occurred. He ran, whined, quivered, and slobbered at her hand with a large tongue.

‘Hi, Red! Down Red!' a woman called from the house.

Although there was no need, although the dog was now abject in his puzzled friendliness, the woman called and protested until she could see her way closer to contact with the stranger.

‘You darned idiot dog!' the woman shouted in a kind of pleasant and confused exasperation.

She was sandy as her own mountain road. Her skin was rough, freckled, unequivocal stuff.

‘It is all right,' Theodora said. ‘We are friends.'

Children had come now. They were grouped about the mother, waiting for something to happen, to which they them
selves would not immediately contribute. The children stood in the silences of expectation.

‘Come far?' the mother asked.

‘Yes,' said Theodora. ‘Very far.'

She hoped the woman would not make any awkwardness. She hoped this very much. The great awkwardness of questions that people ask, though they content themselves with half-answers.

‘What can we do for you?' the woman asked.

She had screwed up her eyes in their sandy skin, but not in hostility. The children had turned to look, not at the stranger, but at their mother, as if the clue would come from her.

‘Well,' said Theodora, ‘I don't know that there is anything in particular.'

She could not ask to be allowed to stand, unpersecuted, there in the yard, or to sit on the edge of the porch and look at her own hands, or the children's faces, and back to her own hands.

‘You're miles from anywhere, you know,' the sandy woman said. ‘Are you lost?'

‘No,' Theodora said.

The woman quickly brushed back her sandy hair away from her eyes. She turned her face sideways and said to the corner of the porch, ‘Guess you'd better eat. Joe'll be back soon. Then we'll see. Eunice, quit picking your nose.'

She slapped the hand of a thin child, who put the hand behind her back and frowned.

‘Our name's Johnson,' the mother said.

She waited for some such contribution from Theodora, who did not make the move. So the woman immediately shifted away into deliberate activity.

‘Better come and get that dust off of you,' she said. ‘You look a sight. It hasn't rained here in months. We're lucky to have our spring.'

Theodora followed Mrs Johnson into the dark confusion of the house. She avoided a celluloid doll, upturned on boards. She knocked against a sewing machine. There was a smell of boiled potatoes.

‘You must be happy to live in this house,' Theodora said.

‘Are you crazy?' said Mrs Johnson.

‘I mean,' said Theodora, ‘everything is so clear. I mean …'

But she could not explain the rightness of objects to someone who already knew those objects by heart.

‘We're well enough,' Mrs Johnson said. ‘Though we'll die poor. Joe ain't got the touch.'

She pushed through into what appeared to be a wash-house, and Theodora followed behind. Then Mrs Johnson kicked some shape into chaos. The children stood around.

‘You won't mind this,' Mrs Johnson said, indicating with her shoulders the haphazard nature of the wash-house, its old frayed baskets, sticks, bottles, and faded cretonne.

‘You won't mind,' she said.

But it did not matter whether Theodora did.

While Mrs Johnson went for water, which she said was on the boil, Theodora was left to withstand the impact of the glances of children, not so much boys and girls as inquiring silences. There were four of these. Three were sandy, but one was dark. His lips were full, and red, and dark. There was a great space between the dark one and the shadowless, sandy three, the difference between depths and surface. Mrs Johnson would accept the depths, and love the depths fearfully, but she would not understand. At the moment of his birth, or moments in the arms of her husband, she had come closer to her rich dark child. But she preferred to sun her sandy self, to cover doubt with humorous exasperation. She preferred life to be unequivocal and freckled. Eunice was her mother's child.

‘Why do you wear a hat?' Eunice asked finally.

‘I got into the habit,' Theodora said. ‘Like most other people, I suppose.'

‘Mother don't wear a hat,' Eunice said. ‘None of us don't wear hats.'

‘Don't you listen to her, ma'am,' said a long boy. ‘She's fresh.'

Theodora removed her large and shameful hat.

‘I ain't,' Eunice said. ‘You quit pushin' me around, Arty. I'll tell Mom.'

‘I like you,' said a girl whose voice touched.

She fingered Theodora's garnet ring.

‘What's your name?' the child asked.

‘Theodora.'

‘
Theerdora
? I never heard that before.'

‘What sort of name is that?' Eunice said. ‘Hi, quit, Arty, Lily!'

Because there was a need to express shame, and they had begun to push, kick, cuff. And Eunice screamed, more out of convention than from pain.

‘Don't you listen to her,' they all cried.

All except the dark boy, who said nothing. He picked with a knife at the wicker of an old basket and smiled.

‘Eh, you kids, what's all this?' said Mrs Johnson, returning with a black kettle. ‘Kids are a pest,' she said.

The water fell with a warm hiss into an old enamel bowl.

‘There's soap an' all,' she said. ‘Now come on, you kids. Leave the lady alone.'

Theodora began in the agreeable silence of the wash-house to wash her hands. She folded them one over the other. She folded them over the smooth and comfortable yellow soap. Her heart was steady. If all this were touchable, she sighed, bowing her head beneath the balm of silence contained in the deserted iron room.

Then she heard the pick, pick. She turned and saw the serene closed lips of the silent boy.

‘Oh,' she said. ‘I thought you had all gone.'

He compressed his lips and picked.

‘And
your
name is what?' she asked.

‘Zack,' he said firmly, as if it could not have been anything else.

She could not read him, but she knew him.

‘Are you visiting with us?' he asked.

Because she was a blank, he added, ‘Are you going to be here some?'

‘No,' she said.

She shook her head, but it was the finality of sadness.

‘Why?' he asked.

‘You will know in time,' she said, ‘that it is not possible to stay.'

He looked at her queerly, with his mouth as much as his eyes, as she cupped her hands and spread her face with water from the enamel bowl.

‘What is that?' he asked, touching the flattened gauze rose on her discarded hat.

She turned to see what, so that he saw her face, soft and shiny with water.

‘That,' she said, ‘is supposed to be a rose.'

‘A rose?' he said. ‘A black rose?'

Then he went quietly, and she watched him through the window walking alone through the stunted pines at the bottom of the dirt yard.

Although Zack had gone, Theodora continued to experience all the triumph of the rare alliances. And because the wash-house had contained the mystery of their pact, its darkness glowed. There was no form, whether of abandoned furniture or discarded clothing, that had not grown. Theodora wiped the water from her face. The rough, scorched towel was all virtue. She was touched by the touching shapes of the hugger-mugger room, but while admitted into their world, it was with no sense of permanence. She noticed from a distance an old distorted pair of women's shoes that had sunk in mud once when there had been rain. To live with these, she knew, required a greater degree of indifference or else humility.