The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (13 page)

They were very, very distant cousins, said Thomas's mother—so far removed nobody would think of counting it except old folks like Grandmother, who liked to keep track of such things.

Grandmother believed in owning all your kinships, but sometimes even she did not want to own to any more than she had to. “This is your fourth cousin Effie Hightower, Thomas,” she would say. “And this is her little boy Ferris and that makes him your fifth cousin, I suppose.” And she would smile at Effie's boy, glowering up at her like a gopher down a hole, as though he was lucky to be able to claim that much.

It was hard to smile all the way across a fourth cousinship.

Thomas lived in fear of the day when one of those children might turn up at school and claim kin with him. It was bad enough already, with Aunt Jessie's boys there.

Aunt Jessie was Mother's sister, the one who had moved into town. She thought she dressed her boys in very townish clothes. Their great red hands hung out of their sleeves, their tight shoes squeaked with every step. Giles, Jess and Jules were their names.

Aunt Jessie was always thinking up things for Thomas and her boys to do together. It never seemed to bother her that Mother always found some way to get Thomas out of it. Aunt Jessie said she, too, had decided she didn't like her boys to play with any of their other cousins, and she was sure Harriet would understand what she meant.

“They are your nephews, you know, Jessie,” said Mother. “The sons of your brothers and sisters.”

“They are
our
nephews, Harriet,” Aunt Jessie replied. “But I'm afraid there is nothing we can do about it.”

To get his mind off all this, Thomas thought how proud his father would be of his report card. He would be bragging about it for weeks. He loved to have Thomas in the shop to show him off to friends, to have him near whenever he told a story. Then he would choose his words carefully, working his way around to some big word that Thomas had taught him lately. Sometimes, Thomas suspected, he used a word wrong deliberately, just so he could correct him. Then Father would turn to his friend with a look of wonder, as much as to say: Would you just look a-there! You and me, Joe, have been using that word wrong all our fool lives, and would be still if it wasn't for this boy of mine. He would say, “There. What did I tell you? I declare, Joe, this boy'll educate me yet.”

When Father was eleven years old—and a little backward maybe, for even then he was only in low third, a big gangling boy and always in trouble, to hear him tell it—though Mother said he laid that on somewhat—he was taken out of school and put to work where there was cotton to hoe, sorghum to cut, and wood to chop.

Thomas would have advantages, a headstart such as Father never had. Thomas knew very well how lucky he was; it was nice to visit the country, but what a wonderfully lucky thing that he had been born in town! His birthday came on June the eighteenth. One day more, they told him when he was little, and he would have been born black, for that was Emancipation Day. That was silly, of course, but the feeling he once got whenever they told him that was like the feeling that came over him when he thought what a lucky accident it was that he had been born in town.

Grandmother was just the other way. When she came up to town once every year or two, it was hard to get her to stay even overnight. “Don't coax me, Harriet,” she would say peevishly, “I know very well I don't belong here and you don't need to worry that I'm going to stay very long.” She would not wear the clothes Mother sent her for just that trip, but came in her country bonnet and her shoes with the left one slit for her bunion. And each such visit was her last. Never again, she would tell Thomas time after time through the summer he spent with her. She was going to sit right under the grape arbor where she belonged. Those that wanted to see her, if anyone did, could come out here, where she wouldn't be any embarrassment to them.

He would certainly come, Thomas said.

“Why?” she demanded. “To keep me from coming to your place?”

But she was not really as cross as she sounded. He knew, for Uncle Ben would wink at him when she got going like that, to remind him that that was just her way.

Uncle Ben made little boxes for Grandmother to cover with quilting and tassels and braid, making footstools one after another as she sat in her rocker in the arbor. He brought her milk bottles that she covered with plaster and into that set pretty stones and sea shells and bits of colored glass. He collected tin cans for the thing she liked best of all to do—cut the sides halfway down into thin shreds that curled up and made a ruff collar around the top. Wrapped with crepe paper and tied with ribbon, they made the prettiest flower pots. When Ben was too busy to find things for her she sent Thomas out to scout for snuff boxes that she decorated for holding collar buttons, though nobody used collar buttons any more. People who came to visit brought things for her that no one else, they said, could find any earthly use for, but that she would know how to make something pretty of.

Uncle Ben had an old car, but when his stay was up Thomas liked to be taken home in the buckboard. His things would be all packed in, Uncle Ben would climb up on the seat, Grandmother would kiss him and Grandfather shake his hand, then at the last minute Grandmother would make up her mind to send some little thing for Harriet. Thomas and the two men would wait while she went into the house, and all three were embarrassed. She would come back loaded down; she had so many and she had been unable to decide between three or four.

Riding in, Thomas held the reins while Uncle Ben enjoyed his tobacco. He chewed. And sometimes he spat long streams of juice, which was disgusting enough, but most of the time he swallowed it. Around ladies, to be polite, he swallowed. But around Harriet he never chewed at all, so as soon as they came in sight of Thomas's house he would clear his throat and spit out his wad and wipe his mouth. Then, reaching behind him, he would cover over Grandmother's gifts with a towsack or a tarpaulin. He pretended not to be doing anything and Thomas pretended not to notice, for they both knew that Mother always threw those things right out.

Wasn't that Katherine Spence? It was. She had left her car and was coming over to chat until the children were let out. Harriet found her left shoe under the clutch pedal and forced it on. She fluffed out her hair and gave Katherine just two minutes to work her way around to Our Walter. Had she told what our Walter came out with the other day? Did your Thomas ever do what our Walter did last week?

Harriet smiled. Didn't it go to prove something, the way women were always coming to her to talk about their children? It reminded her of an old colored woman who used to sit up on her front porch and explain the meaning of their dreams to darkies that came to her from miles around. For Katherine was only one of many. Harriet had noticed how the bridge women, and before them the forty-two club women, could talk among themselves about other things, but turning to her they invariably got off on the subject of children. She could not help feeling they wanted to check and see how theirs were coming along compared to Thomas Erskine at a certain age.

Katherine Spence came and stood with her foot on the running board, chatting away and trying to be carefree, but really nervous and hot and tired. The poor thing was Harriet's own age and looked five years older.

“Harriet,” she said, interrupting herself in the middle of something to which she herself was not paying any attention, “I don't know how you manage to always look so cool and collected. All I can say is, you're lucky you don't have three of them.” Which was her way of saying she felt lucky that she did. Katherine was known to think that having had three children showed she had been well able to afford them.

Katherine Spence was from a good old family, long settled in town. And here she was now, envying Harriet for being so cool and collected. Who could have predicted it, to see them when they were in grammar school together, where Katherine was one of the cruel little town girls, all cool and prim and sweet-smelling in their stiff Kate Greenaways, that grimy little Harriet Purdy wanted so much to be like? Harriet began to feel rather warm toward Katherine. To ask after her children gave her a charitable glow. Were they looking forward to vacations? Mercy yes,
they
were—but as for herself—

How awful, how guilty it must make you feel, thought Harriet, to know that you would feel relieved to be rid of your children for the summer. She said, “Well, if Thomas was like other children so you could get his nose out of a book once in a while and send him out to run and play, then I wouldn't let him go to the country for the summer. But he always comes back looking so good, it seems selfish of me not to want him to go.” She smiled at the sight of him in her mind, so fresh and rosy and filled-out.

“Well,” Katherine sighed, “all I can say is, you're lucky to have a place to send him and know he's safe without worrying every minute.”

Without worrying! As if she would get a wink of sleep all summer! All she had been able to think about lying awake at night for the last two weeks was all the terrible accidents she'd seen happen to her brothers when they were boys. She would never have said such a thing, of course, and even to think it seemed wrong, but that did not keep her from feeling that Katherine, nor any other woman, did not know what it was to worry over a child!

Harriet was pleased when Katherine Spence left. She soon grew tired of listening to women talk about their children. She found it hard to follow, never having in mind a very clear picture of their children. That was because to think of children automatically got her mind on Thomas.

At seven months he had talked. Immediately he knew eleven words and from the very first there was never a baby flavor to his speech. Often as Harriet called that to mind, it never failed to surprise and please her. The reason for it was, she had never spoken baby talk to him and never allowed anyone else to, so much as a word. At eight months and three days he said, “Oh, look at the dog.”

What a shame it was, thought Harriet for the hundredth time, that the classes were attuned not to the quickest, but to the very slowest pupils.

At last the doors were opened and the children tumbled out. How loud and rough they were! Harriet hardly saw them, but looked over them, around, and through them impatiently. Then, there he was! Each time she saw him was a surprise. He is mine, she told herself; I am responsible for him. But she felt she would never get quite used to the idea.

He walked down the steps with his shoulders square, very dignified and grown-up. Before long he would be changing to knickers, then long pants before you knew it. He did look sweet in short pants, his knees were never scuffed, his stockings never sagged.

The compliments she had had on him would fill a mail-order catalog. His fine nose, his high clear forehead and long lashes were like no one else's in her family, thank goodness, and certainly not like anyone's in his father's. He was fair, almost pale. Not sickly-looking, but not a big freckle-faced bumpkin. He never had a cowlick. Everybody wondered how she kept his hair always so neat. In fact, in every way he was something to wonder over. In fact, thought Harriet, he was the absolute despair of every other mother in town.

Thomas said, “Miss Carpenter wants to see us both in her office.”

Miss Carpenter's office was a dark room with a wall map and an old globe. It was a room which once held terrors for Harriet and it gave her a funny feeling now. She was amazed how little it had changed since the day she came there to tell old Miss Briggs that she was being taken out of school. Harriet had been through four grades, which was four more than anybody else in the whole connection, her father said, and as many as he could afford. She had expected Miss Briggs to see how cruel that was and to say that she would speak to her father. She had broken down and sobbed. And then Miss Briggs had said, in what she meant to be a soothing tone, “Well, Harriet dear, I guess it
is
enough, really, for living on a farm.” She wished it was Miss Briggs sitting there now so she could see the change in things.

“Mrs. Erskine,” said Miss Carpenter, “I, and Thomas's other teachers, have been watching him closely this year, and we feel that he is decidedly in advance of his class.”

Harriet sat quietly and tried to look solemn. But she had to grin. The next minute she felt a pang of disappointment that no one else was there to hear.

Miss Carpenter brought out her roll book. “Erskine, Thomas,” she read. “Class response—at random: 99, 98, 97, 99, 96, 98.”

Miss Carpenter never gave 100's, Harriet reflected. No one was perfect, she maintained.

“Music 96, Geography 98, English 98—but you know all this, of course,” said Miss Carpenter, and Harriet nodded, though she would not have minded hearing more of them read out. Miss Carpenter closed the book. “So we feel, Mrs. Erskine, that with your permission—for we don't want you to feel we're rushing him—we might give Thomas a try at high fifth next year.”

From now on, Harriet sat thinking, he would do three semesters in every two. Think how young he would be to enter college!

“Well, how do you feel about this, Thomas?” she said.

He was thinking back through the year, trying to find what he had done to deserve this. He had studied every night and raised his hand for every question. But he had done all that before, too, and not been double-promoted. What more could he do to be sure of getting double-promoted again next year?

“Perhaps,” said Miss Carpenter kindly, “perhaps Thomas feels sad at the thought of leaving all his little friends behind.”

Tommy smiled faintly. Harriet smiled broadly, delighted with the thought of his leaving them behind.

“Well,” said Harriet, “Thomas will soon make new friends in high fifth.”

“Then it's all settled,” said Miss Carpenter rising.