The Complete Stories (65 page)

When he had explained to them that he despised their values, his parents had looked at each other with a gleam of recognition as if this were what they had been expecting from what they had read, and his father had offered to give him a small allowance to finance the flat. He had refused it for the sake of his independence, but in the depths of himself, he knew it was not for his independence but because he
enjoyed
selling. In the face of a customer, he was carried outside himself; his face began to beam and sweat and all complexity left him; he was in the grip of a drive as strong as the drive of some men for liquor or a woman; and he was horribly good at it. He was so good at it that the company had given him an achievement scroll. He had put quotation marks around the word
achievement
and he and his friends used the scroll as a target for darts.

As soon as he had seen Singleton's picture in the paper, the face began to burn in his imagination like a dark reproachful liberating star. The next morning he had telephoned his aunts to expect him and he had driven the hundred and fifty miles to Partridge in a little short of four hours.

On his way out of the house, his Aunt Bessie halted him and said, “Be back by six, Baby Lamb, and we'll have a sweet surprise for you.”

“Rice pudding?” he asked. They were terrible cooks.

“Sweeter by far!” the old lady said and rolled her eyes. He hastened away.

The girl next door had returned with her book to the lawn. He suspected that he might be supposed to know her. When he came for visits as a child, his aunts had always produced one of the neighbor's freak children to play with him—once a fat moron in a Girl Scout suit, another time a near-sighted boy who recited Bible verses, and another an almost square girl who had blackened his eye and left. He thanked God he was now grown and they would no longer dare to fill his time for him. The girl did not look up as he passed and he did not speak.

Once on the sidewalk, he was affected by the profusion of azaleas. They seemed to wash in tides of color across the lawns until they surged against the white house-fronts, crests of pink and crimson, crests of white and a mysterious shade that was not yet lavender, wild crests of yellow-red. The profusion of color almost stopped his breath with insidious pleasure. Moss hung from the old trees. The houses were the most picturesque types of run-down ante-bellum. The taint of the place was expressed in his great-grandfather's words which had survived as the town's motto: Beauty is Our Money Crop.

His aunts lived five blocks from the business section. He walked them quickly and came after a few minutes to the edge of the bare commercial scene, which had the ramshackle courthouse for its center. The sun beat down fiercely on the tops of cars parked in every available space. Flags, national, state and confederate, flapped on every corner street light. People milled about. On the quiet shaded street where his aunts lived and the azaleas were best, he had not passed three people, but here they all were, staring avidly at the pathetic store displays and moving with languid reverence past the courthouse porch, the spot where blood had been spilled.

He wondered if any of them might think he was here for the same reason they were. He would have liked to start, in Socratic fashion, a street discussion about where the real guilt for the six deaths lay, but as he surveyed the scene, he saw no one who looked capable of any genuine interest in meaning. Without set purpose, he entered a drugstore. The place was dark and smelled of sour vanilla.

He sat down on the high stool at the counter and ordered a limeade. The boy preparing the drink had elaborate red sideburns and wore on his shirtfront an Azalea Festival Badge—the emblem which Singleton had refused to buy. Calhoun's eye fell on it at once. “I see you've paid your tribute to the god,” he said.

The boy did not seem to get the significance of this.

“The badge,” Calhoun said, “the badge.”

The boy looked down at it and then back at Calhoun. He put the drink on the counter and continued to look at him as if he were serving someone with an interesting deformity.

“Are you enjoying the festive spirit?” Calhoun asked.

“All these doings?” the boy said.

“These grand events,” Calhoun said, “commencing with, I believe, six deaths.”

“Yessir,” the boy said, “six in cold blood. And I knew four of them myself.”

“You too have had your share of the glory then,” Calhoun said. He felt suddenly a distinct hush fall on the street outside. He turned his eyes to the door just in time to see a hearse pass, followed by a line of slowly moving cars.

“That's the man that's having his funeral to himself,” the boy said reverently. “The five that were supposed to get shot had theirs yesterday. One big one. But he didn't die in time for it.”

“They have innocent as well as guilty blood on their hands,” Calhoun said and glared at the boy.

“It wasn't no
they,
” the boy said. “One man done it all. A man named Singleton. He was bats.”

“Singleton was only the instrument,” Calhoun said. “Partridge itself is guilty.” He finished his drink in a gulp and put down the glass.

The boy was looking at him as if he were mad. “Patridge can't shoot nobody,” he said in a high exasperated voice.

Calhoun put his dime on the counter and left. The last car had turned at the end of the block. He thought he observed less activity. People had obviously hastened away at the sight of the hearse. Two doors from him an old man leaned out of a hardware store and glared up the street where the procession had disappeared. Calhoun's need to communicate was urgent. He approached diffidently. “I understand that was the last funeral,” he said.

The old man put a hand behind his ear.

“The funeral of the innocent man,” Calhoun shouted and nodded up the street.

The old man cleared his nostrils loudly. His expression was not affable. “The only bullet that went right,” he said in a rasping voice. “Biller was a wastrel. Drunk at the time.”

The boy scowled. “I suppose the other five were heroes?” he suggested archly.

“Fine men,” the old man said. “Perished in the line of duty. We givem a hero's fu'nel—all five in one big service. Biller's folks tried to rush up the undertaker so they could get Biller in on it but we saw to it Biller didn't make it. Would have been a disgrace.”

My God, the boy thought.

“The only thing Singleton ever did good was to rid us of Biller,” the old man continued. “Now somebody ought to rid us of Singleton. There he is at Quincy, living in the laper luxury, laying in a cool bed at no expense, eating up your taxes and mine. They should have shot him on the spot.”

This was so appalling that Calhoun was speechless.

“Going to keep him there, they ought to charge him board,” the old man said.

With a contemptuous glance, the boy walked off. He crossed the street to the courthouse square, moving at an odd angle in order to put as much distance between himself and the old fool as quickly as possible. Here benches were scatterd beneath the trees. He found an unoccupied one and sat down. To the side of the courthouse steps, several viewers stood admiring the “jail” where Singleton had been locked with the goat. The pathos of his friend's situation was borne in on him with a rush of empathy. He felt himself flung in the privy, the padlock clicked, he glared between the rotting planks at the fools howling and cavorting outside. The goat made an obscene noise; he saw that he was confined with the spirit of the community.

“Six men was shot here,” an odd muffled voice close by said.

The boy jumped.

A small white girl whose tongue was curled in the mouth of a Coca-Cola bottle was sitting in a patch of sand at his feet, watching him with a detached gaze. Her eyes were the same green as the bottle. She was barefooted and had straight white hair. She withdrew her tongue from the bottle with an explosive sound. “A bad man did it,” she said.

The boy felt the kind of frustration that accompanies contact with the certainty of children. “No,” he said, “he was not a bad man.”

The child put her tongue back in the bottle and withdrew it silently, her eyes on him.

“People were not good to him,” he explained. “They were mean to him. They were cruel. What would you do if someone were cruel to you?”

“Shoot them,” she said.

“Well, that's what he did,” Calhoun said, frowning.

She continued to sit there and did not take her eyes off him. Her gaze might have been the depthless gaze of Partridge itself.

“You people persecuted him and finally drove him mad,” the boy said. “He wouldn't buy a badge. Was that a crime? He was the Outsider here and you couldn't stand that. One of the fundamental rights of man,” he said, glaring through the child's transparent stare, “is the right not to behave like a fool. The right to be different,” he said hoarsely, “My God. The right to be yourself.”

Without taking her eyes off him, she lifted one of her feet and set it on her knee.

“He was a bad bad bad man,” she said.

Calhoun got up and walked off, glaring in front of him. His indignation swathed his vision in a kind of haze. He saw none of the activity around him distinctly. Two high school girls in bright skirts and jackets swung into his path and shrilled, “Buy a ticket for the beauty contest tonight. See who'll be Miss Partridge Azalea!” He swerved sharply to the side and did not throw them so much as a glance. Their giggles followed him until he was past the courthouse and onto the block behind it. He stood there a moment, undecided what he would do next. He faced a barber shop which looked empty and cool. After a moment he entered it.

The barber, alone in the shop, raised his head from behind the paper he was reading. Calhoun asked for a haircut and sat down gratefully in the chair.

The barber was a tall emaciated fellow with eyes that might have faded from some deeper color. He looked to be a man who had suffered himself. He put the bib on the boy and stood staring at his round head as if it were a pumpkin he was wondering how to slice. Then he twirled the chair so that Calhoun faced the mirror. He was confronted with an image that was round-faced, unremarkable-looking and innocent. The boy's expression turned fierce. “Are you eating up this slop like the rest of them?” he asked belligerently.

“Come again?” the barber said.

“Do the tribal rites going on here improve the barber trade? All these doings, all these doings,” he said impatiently.

“Well,” the barber said, “last year it was a thousand extra people here and this year it looks to be more—on account,” he said, “of the tragedy.”

“The tragedy,” the boy repeated and stretched his mouth.

“The six that was shot,” the barber said.

“That tragedy,” the boy said. “And what about the other tragedy—the man who was persecuted by these idiots until he shot six of them?”

“Oh him,” the barber said.

“Singleton,” the boy said. “Did he patronize your place?”

The barber began clipping his hair. A peculiar expression of disdain had come over his face at the mention of the name. “Tonight it's a beauty contest,” he said, “tomorrow night it's a band concert, Thursday afternoon it's a big parade with Miss.…”

“Did you or didn't you know Singleton?” Calhoun interrupted.

“Known him well,” the barber said and shut his mouth.

A tremor went through the boy as he realized that Singleton had probably sat in the chair he himself was now sitting in. He searched his face in the mirror desperately for its hidden likeness to the man. Slowly he saw it appear, a secret message brought to light by the heat of his feelings. “Did he patronize your shop?” he asked and held his breath for the answer.

“Him and me was related by marriage,” the barber said indignantly, “but he never come in here. He was too big a skinflint to have his hair cut. He cut his own.”

“An unpardonable crime,” Calhoun said in a high voice.

“His second cousin married my sister-in-law,” the barber said, “but he never known me on the street. Pass him as close as I am to you and he'd keep going. Kept his eye on the ground all the time like he was following a bug.”

“Preoccupied,” the boy muttered. “He doubtless didn't know you were on the street.”

“He known it,” the barber said and his mouth curled unpleasantly. “He known it. I clip hair and he clipped coupons and that was that. I clip hair,” he repeated as if this sentence had a particularly satisfying ring to his ears, “and he clipped coupons.”

The typical have-not psychology, Calhoun thought. “Was the Singleton family once wealthy?” he asked.

“It wasn't but half of him Singleton,” the barber said, “and the Singleton's claimed there wasn't none of him Singleton. One of the Singleton girls gone off on a nine-months vacation and come back with him. Then they all died off and left him their money. It's no telling what the other half of him is. Something foreign I would judge.” His tone insinuated more.

“I begin to get the picture,” Calhoun said.

“He ain't clipping no coupons now,” said the barber.

“No,” Calhoun said and his voice rose, “now he's suffering. He's the scapegoat. He's laden with the sins of the community. Sacrificed for the guilt of others.”

The barber paused, his mouth partway open. After a moment he said in a more respectful voice, “Reverend, you got him wrong. He wasn't a church-going man.”

The boy reddened. “I'm not a church-going man myself,” he said.

The barber seemed stopped again. He stood holding the scissors uncertainly.

“He was an individualist,” Calhoun said. “A man who would not allow himself to be pressed into the mold of his inferiors. A non-conformist. He was a man of depth living among caricatures and they finally drove him mad, unleashed all his violence on themselves. Observe,” he continued, “that they didn't try him. They simply had him committed at once to Quincy. Why? Because,” he said, “a trial would have brought out his essential innocence and the real guilt of the community.”