The Grass Harp (13 page)

“That,” Verena managed after some suspenseful seconds, “is,” she said, regarding her gloved hands, “remarkable. Very. I wouldn’t have credited either of you with so much imagination. Or is it that I am imagining? Quite likely I’m dreaming of myself in a wet tree on a thundery night. Except I never have dreams, or perhaps I only forget them. This one I suggest we all forget.”

“I’ll own up: I think it is a dream, Miss Verena. But a man who doesn’t dream is like a man who doesn’t sweat: he stores up a lot of poison.”

She ignored him; her attention was with Dolly, Dolly’s with her: they might have been alone together, two persons at far ends of a bleak room, mutes communicating in an eccentric sign-language, subtle shifting of the eye; and it was as though, then, Dolly gave an answer, one that sapped all color from Verena’s face. “I see. You’ve accepted him, have you?”

The rain had thickened, fish could have swum through the air; like a deepening scale of piano notes, it struck its blackest chord, and drummed into a downpour that, though it threatened, did not at once reach us: drippings leaked through the leaves, but the tree-house stayed a dry seed in a soaking plant. The Judge put a protective hand over the candle; he waited as anxiously as Verena for Dolly’s reply. My impatience equaled theirs, yet I felt exiled from the scene, again a spy peering from the attic, and my sympathies, curiously, were nowhere; or rather, everywhere: a tenderness for all three ran together like raindrops, I could not separate them, they expanded into a human oneness.

Dolly, too. She could not separate the Judge from Verena. At last, excruciatingly, “I can’t,” she cried, implying failures beyond calculation. “I said I would know what was right. But it hasn’t happened; I don’t know: do other people? A choice, I thought: to have had a life made of my own decisions …”

“But we have had our lives,” said Verena. “Yours has been nothing to despise, I don’t think you’ve required more than you’ve had; I’ve envied you always. Come home, Dolly. Leave decisions to me: that, you see, has been my life.”

“Is it true, Charlie?” Dolly asked, as a child might ask where do falling stars fall? and: “Have we had our lives?”

“We’re not dead,” he told her; but it was as if, to the questioning child, he’d said stars fall into space: an irrefutable, still unsatisfactory answer. Dolly could not accept it: “You don’t have to be dead. At home, in the kitchen, there is a geranium that blooms over and over. Some plants, though, they bloom just the once, if at all, and nothing more happens to them. They live, but they’ve had their life.”

“Not you,” he said, and brought his face nearer hers, as though he meant their lips to touch, yet wavered, not daring it. Rain had tunneled through the branches, it fell full weight; rivulets of it streamed off Dolly’s hat, the veiling clung to her cheeks; with a flutter the candle failed. “Not me.”

Successive strokes of lightning throbbed like veins of fire, and Verena, illuminated in that sustained glare, was not anyone I knew; but some woman woebegone, wasted—with eyes once more drawn toward each other, their stare settled on an inner territory, a withered country; as the lightning lessened, as the hum of rain sealed us in its multiple sounds, she spoke, and her voice came so weakly from so very far, not expecting, it seemed, to be heard at all. “Envied you, Dolly. Your pink room. I’ve only knocked at the doors of such rooms, not often—enough to know that now there is no one but you to let me in. Because
little Morris, little Morris—help me, I loved him, I did. Not in a womanly way; it was, oh I admit it, that we were kindred spirits. We looked each other in the eye, we saw the same devil, we weren’t afraid; it was—merry. But he outsmarted me; I’d known he could, and hoped he wouldn’t, and he did, and now: it’s too long to be alone, a lifetime. I walk through the house, nothing is mine: your pink room, your kitchen, the house is yours, and Catherine’s too, I think. Only don’t leave me, let me live with you. I’m feeling old, I want my sister.”

The rain, adding its voice to Verena’s, was between them, Dolly and the Judge, a transparent wall through which he could watch her losing substance, recede before him as earlier she had seemed to recede before me. More than that, it was as if the tree-house were dissolving. Lunging wind cast overboard the soggy wreckage of our Rook cards, our wrapping papers; animal crackers crumbled, the rain-filled mason jars spilled over like fountains; and Catherine’s beautiful scrapquilt was ruined, a puddle. It was going: like the doomed houses rivers in flood float away; and it was as though the Judge were trapped there—waving to us as we, the survivors, stood ashore. For Dolly had said, “Forgive me; I want my sister, too,” and the Judge could not reach her, not with his arms, not with his heart: Verena’s claim was too final.

Somewhere near midnight the rain slackened, halted; wind barreled about wringing out the trees. Singly, like delayed guests arriving at a dance, appearing stars pierced the sky. It was time to leave. We took nothing with us: left the quilt to rot, spoons to rust; and the tree-house, the woods we left to winter.

FOR QUITE A WHILE IT
was Catherine’s custom to date events as having occurred before or after her incarceration. “Prior,” she would begin, “to the time That One made a jailbird of me.” As for the rest of us, we could have divided history along similar lines; that is, in terms of before and after the tree-house. Those few autumn days were a monument and a signpost.

Except to collect his belongings, the Judge never again entered the house he’d shared with his sons and their wives, a circumstance that must have suited them, at least they made no protest when he took a room at Miss Bell’s boarding house. This was a brown solemn establishment which lately has been turned into a funeral home by an undertaker who saw that to effect the correct atmosphere a minimum of renovation would be necessary. I disliked going past it, for Miss Bell’s guests, ladies thorny as the blighted rosebushes littering the yard, occupied the porch in a dawn-to-dark marathon of vigilance. One of them, the twice-widowed Mamie Canfield, specialized in spotting pregnancies (some legendary fellow is supposed to have told his wife Why waste money on a doctor? just trot yourself past Miss Bell’s: Mamie Canfield, she’ll let the world know soon enough
whether you is or ain’t). Until the Judge moved there, Amos Legrand was the only man in residence at Miss Bell’s. He was a godsend to the other tenants: the moments most sacred to them were when, after supper, Amos swung in the seat-swing with his little legs not touching the floor and his tongue trilling like an alarm-clock. They vied with each other in knitting him socks and sweaters, tending to his diet: at table all the best things were saved for his plate—Miss Bell had trouble keeping a cook because the ladies were forever poking around in the kitchen wanting to make a delicacy that would tempt their pet. Probably they would have done the same for the Judge, but he had no use for them, never, so they complained, stopped to pass the time of day.

The last drenching night in the tree-house had left me with a bad cold, Verena with a worse one; and we had a sneezing nurse, Dolly. Catherine wouldn’t help: “Dollyheart, you can do like you please—tote That One’s slopjar till you drop in your tracks. Only don’t count on me to lift a finger. I’ve put down the load.”

Rising at all hours of the night, Dolly brought the syrups that eased our throats, stoked the fires that kept us warm. Verena did not, as in other days, accept such attention simply as her due. “In the spring,” she promised Dolly, “we’ll make a trip together. We might go to the Grand Canyon and call on Maudie Laura. Or Florida: you’ve never seen the ocean.” But Dolly was where she wanted to be, she had no wish to travel: “I wouldn’t enjoy it, seeing the things I’ve known shamed by nobler sights.”

Doctor Carter called regularly to see us, and one morning Dolly asked would he mind taking her temperature; she felt so flushed and weak in the legs. He put her straight to bed, and she thought it was very humorous when he told her she had walking pneumonia. “Walking pneumonia,” she said to the Judge, who had come to visit her, “it must be something new, I’ve never
heard of it. But I do feel as though I were skylarking along on a pair of stilts. Lovely,” she said and fell asleep.

For three, nearly four days she never really woke up. Catherine stayed with her, dozing upright in a wicker chair and growling low whenever Verena or I tiptoed into the room. She persisted in fanning Dolly with a picture of Jesus, as though it were summertime; and it was a disgrace how she ignored Doctor Carter’s instructions: “I wouldn’t feed that to a hog,” she’d declare, pointing to some medicine he’d sent around. Finally Doctor Carter said he wouldn’t be responsible unless the patient were removed to a hospital. The nearest hospital was in Brewton, sixty miles away. Verena sent over there for an ambulance. She could have saved herself the expense, because Catherine locked Dolly’s door from the inside and said the first one to rattle the knob would need an ambulance themselves. Dolly did not know where they wanted to take her; wherever it was, she begged not to go: “Don’t wake me,” she said, “I don’t want to see the ocean.”

Toward the end of the week she could sit up in bed; a few days later she was strong enough to resume correspondence with her dropsy-cure customers. She was worried by the unfilled orders that had piled up; but Catherine, who took the credit for Dolly’s improvement, said, “Shoot, it’s no time we’ll be out there boiling a brew.”

Every afternoon, promptly at four, the Judge presented himself at the garden gate and whistled for me to let him in; by using the garden gate, rather than the front door, he lessened the chance of encountering Verena—not that she objected to his coming: indeed, she wisely supplied for his visits a bottle of sherry and a box of cigars. Usually he brought Dolly a gift, cakes from the Katydid Bakery or flowers, bronze balloonlike chrysanthemums which Catherine swiftly confiscated on the theory that they ate up all the nourishment in the air. Catherine never
learned he had proposed to Dolly; still, intuiting a situation not quite to her liking, she sharply chaperoned the Judge’s visits and, while swigging at the sherry that had been put out for him, did most of the talking as well. But I suspect that neither he nor Dolly had much to say of a private nature; they accepted each other without excitement, as people do who are settled in their affections. If in other ways he was a disappointed man, it was not because of Dolly, for I believe she became what he’d wanted, the one person in the world—to whom, as he’d described it, everything can be said. But when everything can be said perhaps there is nothing more to say. He sat beside her bed, content to be there and not expecting to be entertained. Often, drowsy with fever, she went to sleep, and if, while she slept, she whimpered or frowned, he wakened her, welcoming her back with a daylight smile.

In the past Verena had not allowed us to have a radio; cheap melodies, she contended, disordered the mind; moreover, there was the expense to consider. It was Doctor Carter who persuaded her that Dolly should have a radio; he thought it would help reconcile her to what he foresaw as a long convalescence. Verena bought one, and paid a good price, I don’t doubt; but it was an ugly hood-shaped box crudely varnished. I took it out in the yard and painted it pink. Even so Dolly wasn’t certain she wanted it in her room; later on, you couldn’t have pried it away from her. That radio was always hot enough to hatch a chicken, she and Catherine played it so much. They favored broadcasts of football games. “Please don’t,” Dolly admonished the Judge when he attempted to explain the rules of this game. “I like a mystery. Everybody shouting, having such a fine time: it might not sound so large and happy if I knew why.” Primarily the Judge was peeved because he couldn’t get Dolly to root for any one team. She thought both sides should win: “They’re all nice boys, I’m sure.”

Because of the radio Catherine and I had words one afternoon. It was the afternoon Maude Riordan was playing in a broadcast of the state musical competition. Naturally I wanted to hear her, Catherine knew that, but she was tuned in on a Tulane-Georgia Tech game and wouldn’t let me near the radio. I said, “What’s come over you, Catherine? Selfish, dissatisfied, always got to have your own way, why you’re worse than Verena ever was.” It was as though, in lieu of prestige lost through her encounter with the law, she’d had to double her power in the Talbo house: we at least would have to respect her Indian blood, accept her tyranny. Dolly was willing; in the matter of Maude Riordan, however, she sided with me: “Let Collin find his station. It wouldn’t be Christian not to listen to Maude. She’s a friend of ours.”

Everyone who heard Maude agreed that she should’ve won first prize. She placed second, which pleased her family, for it meant a half-scholarship in music at the University. Still it wasn’t fair, because she performed beautifully, much better than the boy who won the larger prize. She played her father’s serenade, and it seemed to me as pretty as it had that day in the woods. Since that day I’d wasted hours scribbling her name, describing in my head her charms, her hair the color of vanilla ice cream. The Judge arrived in time to hear the broadcast, and I know Dolly was glad because it was as if we were reunited again in the leaves with music like butterflies flying.

Some days afterwards I met Elizabeth Henderson on the street. She’d been at the beauty parlor, for her hair was finger-waved, her nails tinted, she did look grown-up and I complimented her. “It’s for the party. I hope your costume is ready.” Then I remembered: the Halloween party to which she and Maude had asked me to contribute my services as a fortune-teller. “You can’t have forgotten? Oh, Collin,” she said, “we’ve worked like dogs! Mrs. Riordan is making a
wine
punch. I shouldn’t
be surprised if there’s drunkenness and everything. And after all it’s a celebration for Maude, because she won the prize, and because,” Elizabeth glanced along the street, a glum perspective of silent houses and telephone poles, “she’ll be going away—to the University, you know.” A loneliness fell around us, we did not want to go our separate ways: I offered to walk her home.