The Grass Harp (12 page)

“Or amnesia,” I said. “You forget everything, even your own name.”

“A man with the whole Bible on the tip of his tongue—would you say he was liable to forget something like his name? One of them Cajuns murdered him for his amethyst ring. Naturally I’ve known men since then; but not love. Lillie Ida, Laurel, the other kids, they happened like. Seems somehow I can’t get on without another life kicking under my heart: feel so sluggish otherwise.”

When the children were dressed, some with their clothes inside out, we returned to the tree where the older girls, bending over the fire, dried and combed their hair. In our absence Dolly had cared for the baby; she seemed now not to want to give it back: “I wish one of us had had a baby, my sister or Catherine,” and Sister Ida said yes, it was entertaining and a satisfaction too. We sat finally in a circle around the fire. The stew was too hot to taste, which perhaps accounted for its thorough success, and the Judge, who had to serve it in rotation, for there were only three cups, was full of gay stunts and nonsense that exhilarated the children: Texaco Gasoline decided she’d made a mistake—the Judge, not Riley, was her papa, and the Judge rewarded her with a trip to the moon, swung her, that is, high over his head:
Some flocked south, Some flocked west, You go flying after the rest, Away! Awhee!
Sister Ida said say you’re pretty strong. Of course he lapped it up, all but asked her to feel his muscles. Every quarter-minute he peeked to see if Dolly were admiring him. She was.

The croonings of a ringdove wavered among the long last lances of sunlight. Chill green, blues filtered through the air as though a rainbow had dissolved around us. Dolly shivered: “There’s a storm nearby. I’ve had the notion all day.” I looked at Riley triumphantly: hadn’t I told him?

“And it’s getting late,” said Sister Ida. “Buck, Homer—you boys chase up to the wagon. Gracious knows who’s come along and helped themselves. Not,” she added, watching her sons vanish on the darkening path, “that there’s a whole lot to take, nothing much except my sewing machine. So, Dolly? Have you …”

“We’ve discussed it,” said Dolly turning to the Judge for confirmation.

“You’d win your case in court, no question of it,” he said, very professional. “For once the law would be on the right side. As matters stand, however …”

Dolly said, “As matters stand,” and pressed into Sister Ida’s hand the forty-seven dollars which constituted our cash asset; in addition, she gave her the Judge’s big gold watch. Contemplating these gifts, Sister Ida shook her head as though she should refuse them. “It’s wrong. But I thank you.”

A light thunder rolled through the woods, and in the perilous quiet of its wake Buck and Little Homer burst upon the path like charging cavalry. “They’re coming! They’re coming!” both got out at once, and Little Homer, pushing back his hat, gasped: “We ran all the way.”

“Make sense, boy: who?”

Little Homer swallowed. “Those fellows. The Sheriff one, and I don’t know how many more. Coming down through the grass. With guns, too.”

Thunder rumbled again; tricks of wind rustled our fire.

“All right now,” said the Judge, assuming command. “Everybody keep their heads.” It was as though he’d planned for this moment, and he rose to it, I do concede, gloriously. “The women,
you little kids, get up in the tree-house. Riley, see that the rest of you scatter out, shinny up those other trees and take a load of rocks.” When we’d followed these directions, he alone remained on the ground; firm-jawed, he stayed there guarding the tense twilighted silence like a captain who will not abandon his drowning ship.

FIVE OF US ROOSTED IN
the sycamore tree that overhung the path. Little Homer was there, and his brother Buck, a scowling boy with rocks in either hand. Across the way, straddling the limbs of a second sycamore, we could see Riley surrounded by the older girls: in the deepening burnished light their white faces glimmered like candle-lanterns. I thought I felt a raindrop: it was a bead of sweat slipping along my cheek; still, and though the thunder lulled, a smell of rain intensified the odor of leaves and woodsmoke. The overloaded tree-house gave an evil creak; from my vantage point, its tenants seemed a single creature, a many-legged, many-eyed spider upon whose head Dolly’s hat sat perched like a velvet crown.

In our tree everybody pulled out the kind of tin whistles Riley had bought from Little Homer: good to give the devil a scare, Sister Ida had said. Then Little Homer took off his huge hat and, removing from its vast interior what was perhaps God’s Washline, a thick long rope, at any rate, proceeded to make a sliding noose. As he tested its efficiency, stretched and tightened the knot, his steely miniature spectacles cast such a menacing
sparkle that, edging away, I put the distance of another branch between us. The Judge, patrolling below, hissed to stop moving around up there; it was his last order before the invasion began.

The invaders themselves made no pretense at stealth. Swinging their rifles against the undergrowth like canecutters, they swaggered up the path, nine, twelve, twenty strong. First, Junius Candle, his Sheriff’s star winking in the dusk; and after him, Big Eddie Stover, whose squint-eyed search of our hiding places reminded me of those newspaper picture puzzles; find five boys and an owl in this drawing of a tree. It requires someone cleverer than Big Eddie Stover. He looked straight at me, and through me. Not many of that gang would have troubled you with their braininess: good for nothing but a lick of salt and swallow of beer most of them. Except I recognized Mr. Hand, the principal at school, a decent enough fellow taken all around, no one, you would have thought, to involve himself in such shabby company on so shameful an errand. Curiosity explained the attendance of Amos Legrand; he was there, and silent for once: no wonder: as though he were a walking-stick, Verena was leaning a hand on his head, which came not quite to her hip. A grim Reverend Buster ceremoniously supported her other arm. When I saw Verena I felt a numbed reliving of the terror I’d known when, after my mother’s death, she’d come to our house to claim me. Despite what seemed a lameness, she moved with her customary tall authority and, accompanied by her escorts, stopped under our sycamore.

The Judge didn’t give an inch; toe to toe with the Sheriff, he stood his ground as if there were a drawn line he dared the other to cross.

It was at this crucial moment that I noticed Little Homer. He gradually was lowering his lasso. It crawled, dangled like a snake, the wide noose open as a pair of jaws, then fell, with
an expert snap, around the neck of the Reverend Buster, whose strangling outcry Little Homer stifled by giving the rope a mighty tug.

His friends hadn’t long to consider old Buster’s predicament, his blood-gorged face and flailing arms; for Little Homer’s success inspired an all-out attack: rocks flew, whistles shrilled like the shriekings of savage birds, and the men, pummeling each other in the general rout, took refuge where they could, principally under the bodies of comrades already fallen. Verena had to box Amos Legrand’s ears: he tried to sneak up under her skirt. She alone, you might say, behaved like a real man: shook her fists at the trees and cursed us blue.

At the height of the din, a shot slammed like an iron door. It quelled us all, the serious endless echo of it; but in the hush that followed we heard a weight come crashing through the opposite sycamore.

It was Riley, falling; and falling: slowly, relaxed as a killed cat. Covering their eyes, the girls screamed as he struck a branch and splintered it, hovered, like the torn leaves, then in a bleeding heap hit the ground. No one moved toward him.

Until at last the Judge said, “Boy, my boy,” and in a trance sank to his knees; he caressed Riley’s limp hands. “Have mercy. Have mercy, son: answer.” Other men, sheepish and frightened, closed round; some offered advice which the Judge seemed unable to comprehend. One by one we dropped down from the trees, and the children’s gathering whisper is he dead? is he dead? was like the moan, the delicate roar of a sea-trumpet. Doffing their hats respectfully, the men made an aisle for Dolly; she was too stunned to take account of them, or of Verena, whom she passed without seeing.

“I want to know,” said Verena, in tones that summoned attention, “… which of you fools fired that gun?”

The men guardedly looked each other over: too many of
them fixed on Big Eddie Stover. His jowls trembled, he licked his lips: “Hell, I never meant to shoot nobody; was doing my duty, that’s all.”

“Not all,” Verena severely replied. “I hold you responsible, Mr. Stover.”

At this Dolly turned round; her eyes, vague beyond the veiling, seemed to frame Verena in a gaze that excluded everyone else. “Responsible? No one is that; except ourselves.”

Sister Ida had replaced the Judge at Riley’s side; she completely stripped off his shirt. “Thank your stars, it’s his shoulder,” she said, and the relieved sighs, Big Eddie’s alone, would have floated a kite. “He’s fairly knocked out, though. Some of you fellows better get him to a doctor.” She stopped Riley’s bleeding with a bandage torn off his shirt. The Sheriff and three of his men locked arms, making a litter on which to carry him. He was not the only one who had to be carried; the Reverend Buster had also come to considerable grief: loose-limbed as a puppet, and too weak to know the noose still hung around his neck, he needed several assistants to get up the path. Little Homer chased after him: “Hey, hand me back my rope!”

Amos Legrand waited to accompany Verena; she told him to go without her as she had no intention of leaving unless Dolly—hesitating, she looked at the rest of us, Sister Ida in particular: “I would like to speak with my sister alone.”

With a wave of her hand that quite dismissed Verena, Sister Ida said, “Never mind, lady. We’re on our way.” She hugged Dolly. “Bless us, we love you. Don’t we, kids?” Little Homer said, “Come with us, Dolly. We’ll have such good times. I’ll give you my sparkle belt.” And Texaco Gasoline threw herself upon the Judge, pleading for him to go with them, too. Nobody seemed to want me.

“I’ll always remember that you asked me,” said Dolly, her eyes hurrying as though to memorize the children’s faces. “Good
luck. Good-bye. Run now,” she raised her voice above new and nearer thunder, “run, it’s raining.”

It was a tickling feathery rain fine as a gauze curtain, and as they faded into the folds of it, Sister Ida and her family, Verena said: “Do I understand you’ve been conniving with that—woman? After she made a mockery of our name?”

“I don’t think you can accuse me of conniving with anyone,” Dolly answered serenely. “Especially not with bullies who,” she a little lost control, “steal from children and drag old women into jail. I can’t set much store by a name that endorses such methods. It ought to be a mockery.”

Verena received this without flinching. “You’re not yourself,” she said, as if it were a clinical opinion.

“You’d best look again: I am myself.” Dolly seemed to pose for inspection. She was as tall as Verena, as assured; nothing about her was incomplete or blurred. “I’ve taken your advice: stopped hanging my head, I mean. You told me it made you dizzy. And not many days ago,” she continued, “you told me that you were ashamed of me. Of Catherine. So much of our lives had been lived for you; it was painful to realize the waste that had been. Can you know what it is, such a feeling of waste?”

Scarcely audible, Verena said, “I do know,” and it was as if her eyes crossed, peered inward upon a stony vista. It was the expression I’d seen when, spying from the attic, I’d watched her late at night brooding over the Kodak pictures of Maudie Laura Murphy, Maudie Laura’s husband and children. She swayed, she put a hand on my shoulder; except for that, I think she might have fallen.

“I imagined I would go to my dying day with the hurt of it. I won’t. But it’s no satisfaction, Verena, to say that I’m ashamed of you, too.”

It was night now; frogs, sawing insects celebrated the slow-falling rain. We dimmed as though the wetness had snuffed the
light of our faces. Verena sagged against me. “I’m not well,” she said in a skeleton voice, “I’m a sick woman, I am, Dolly.”

Somewhat unconvinced, Dolly approached Verena, presently touched her, as though her fingers could sense the truth. “Collin,” she said, “Judge, please help me with her into the tree.” Verena protested that she couldn’t go climbing trees; but once she got used to the idea she went up easily enough. The raftlike tree-house seemed to be floating over shrouded vaporish waters; it was dry there, however, for the mild rain had not penetrated the parasol of leaves. We drifted in a current of silence until Verena said, “I have something to say, Dolly. I could say it more easily if we were alone.”

The Judge crossed his arms. “I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me, Miss Verena.” He was emphatic, though not belligerent. “I have an interest in the outcome of what you might have to say.”

“I doubt that: how so?” she said, recovering to a degree her exalted manner.

He lighted a stub of candle, and our sudden shadows stooped over us like four eavesdroppers. “I don’t like talking in the dark,” he said. There was a purpose in the proud erectness of his posture: it was, I thought, to let Verena know she was dealing with a man, a fact too few men in her experience had enough believed to assert. She found it unforgivable. “You don’t remember, do you, Charlie Cool? Fifty years ago, more maybe. Some of you boys came blackberry stealing out at our place. My father caught your cousin Seth, and I caught you. It was quite a licking you got that day.”

The Judge did remember; he blushed, smiled, said: “You didn’t fight fair, Verena.”

“I fought fair,” she told him drily. “But you’re right—since neither of us like it, let’s not talk in the dark. Frankly, Charlie, you’re not a welcome sight to me. My sister couldn’t have gone
through such tommyrot if you hadn’t been goading her on. So I’ll thank you to leave us; it can be no further affair of yours.”

“But it is,” said Dolly. “Because Judge Cool, Charlie …” she dwindled, appeared for the first time to question her boldness.

“Dolly means that I have asked her to marry me.”