The Grass Harp (14 page)

On our way we stopped by the Katydid where Elizabeth placed an order for a Halloween cake, and Mrs. C. C. County, her apron glittering with sugar crystals, appeared from the oven room to inquire after Dolly’s condition. “Doing well as can be expected I suppose,” she lamented. “Imagine it, walking pneumonia. My sister, now she had the ordinary lying-down kind. Well, we can be thankful Dolly’s in her own bed; it eases my mind to know you people are home again. Ha ha, guess we can laugh about all that foolishness now. Look here, I’ve just pulled out a pan of doughnuts; you take them to Dolly with my blessings.” Elizabeth and I ate most of those doughnuts before we reached her house. She invited me in to have a glass of milk and finish them off.

Today there is a filling station where the Henderson house used to be. It was some fifteen draughty rooms casually nailed together, a place stray animals would have claimed if Riley had not been a gifted carpenter. He had an outdoor shed, a combination of workshop and sanctuary, where he spent his mornings sawing lumber, shaving shingles. Its wall-shelves sagged with the relics of outgrown hobbies: snakes, bees, spiders preserved in alcohol, a bat decaying in a bottle; ship models. A boyhood enthusiasm for taxidermy had resulted in a pitiful zoo of nastyodored beasts: an eyeless rabbit with maggot-green fur and ears that drooped like a bloodhound’s—objects better off buried. I’d been lately to see Riley several times; Big Eddie Stover’s bullet had shattered his shoulder, and the curse of it was he had to
wear an itching plaster cast which weighed, he said, a hundred pounds. Since he couldn’t drive his car, or hammer a proper nail, there wasn’t much for him to do except loaf around and brood.

“If you want to see Riley,” said Elizabeth, “you’ll find him out in the shed. I expect Maude’s with him.”

“Maude Riordan?” I had reason to be surprised, because on the occasions I’d visited Riley he’d made a point of our sitting in the shed; the girls wouldn’t bother us there, for it was, he’d boasted, one threshold no female was permitted to cross.

“Reading to him. Poetry, plays. Maude’s been absolutely adorable. And it’s not as though my brother had ever treated her with common human decency. But she’s let bygones be bygones. I guess coming so near to being killed the way he was, I guess that would change a person—make them more receptive to the finer things. He lets her read to him by the hour.”

The shed, shaded by fig trees, was in the back yard. Matronly Plymouth hens waddled about its doorstep picking at the seeds of last summer’s fallen sunflowers. On the door a childhood word in faded whitewash feebly warned Beware! It aroused a shyness in me. Beyond the door I could hear Maude’s voice—her poetry voice, a swooning chant certain louts in school had dearly loved to mimic. Anyone who’d been told Riley Henderson had come to this, they’d have said that fall from the sycamore had affected his head. Stealing over to the shed’s window, I got a look at him: he was absorbed in sorting the insides of a clock and, to judge from his face, might have been listening to nothing more uplifting than the hum of a fly; he jiggled a finger in his ear, as though to relieve an irritation. Then, at the moment I’d decided to startle them by rapping on the window, he put aside his clockworks and, coming round behind Maude, reached down and shut the book from which she was reading. With a grin he gathered in his hand twists of her hair—she rose like
a kitten lifted by the nape of its neck. It was as though they were edged with light, some brilliance that smarted my eyes. You could see it wasn’t the first time they’d kissed.

Not one week before, because of his experience in such matters, I’d taken Riley into my confidence, confessed to him my feelings for Maude: please look. I wished I were a giant so that I could grab hold of that shed and shake it to a splinter; knock down the door and denounce them both. Yet—of what could I accuse Maude? Regardless of how bad she’d talked about him I’d always known she was heartset on Riley. It wasn’t as if there had ever been an understanding between the two of us; at the most we’d been good friends: for the last few years, not even that. As I walked back through the yard the pompous Plymouth hens cackled after me tauntingly.

Elizabeth said, “You didn’t stay long. Or weren’t they there?”

I told her it hadn’t seemed right to interrupt. “They were getting on so well with the finer things.”

But sarcasm never touched Elizabeth: she was, despite the subtleties her soulful appearance promised, too literal a person. “Wonderful, isn’t it?”

“Wonderful.”

“Collin—for heaven’s sake: what are you sniveling about?”

“Nothing. I mean, I’ve got a cold.”

“Well I hope it doesn’t keep you away from the party. Only you must have a costume. Riley’s coming as the devil.”

“That’s appropriate.”

“Of course we want you in a skeleton suit. I know there’s only a day left …”

I had no intention of going to the party. As soon as I got home I sat down to write Riley a letter. Dear Riley … Dear Henderson. I crossed out the dear; plain Henderson would do. Henderson, your treachery has not gone unobserved. Pages were filled with recording the origins of our friendship, its honorable
history; and gradually a feeling grew that there must be a mistake: such a splendid friend would not have wronged me. Until, toward the end, I found myself deliriously telling him he was my best friend, my brother. So I threw these ravings in a fireplace and five minutes later was in Dolly’s room asking what were the chances of my having a skeleton suit made by the following night.

Dolly was not much of a seamstress, she had her difficulties lifting a hemline. This was also true of Catherine; it was in Catherine’s makeup, however, to pretend professional status in all fields, particularly those in which she was least competent. She sent me to Verena’s drygoods store for seven yards of their choicest black satin. “With seven yards there ought to be some bits left over: me and Dolly can trim our petticoats.” Then she made a show of tape-measuring my lengths and widths, which was sound procedure except that she had no idea of how to apply such information to scissors and cloth. “This little piece,” she said, hacking off a yard, “it’d make somebody lovely bloomers. And this here,” snip, snip, “.… a black satin collar would dress up my old print considerable.” You couldn’t have covered a midget’s shame with the amount of material allotted me.

“Catherine, now dear, we mustn’t think of our own needs,” Dolly warned her.

They worked without recess through the afternoon. The Judge, during his usual visit, was forced to thread needles, a job Catherine despised: “Makes my flesh crawl, like stuffing worms on a fishhook.” At suppertime she called quits and went home to her house among the butterbean stalks.

But a desire to finish had seized Dolly; and a talkative exhilaration. Her needle soared in and out of the satin; like the seams it made, her sentences linked in a wiggling line. “Do you think,” she said, “that Verena would let me give a party? Now that I have so many friends? There’s Riley, there’s Charlie, couldn’t we
ask Mrs. County, Maude and Elizabeth? In the spring; a garden party—with a few fireworks. My father was a great hand for sewing. A pity I didn’t inherit it from him. So many men sewed in the old days; there was one friend of Papa’s that won I don’t know how many prizes for his scrapquilts. Papa said it relaxed him after the heavy rough work around a farm. Collin. Will you promise me something? I was against your coming here, I’ve never believed it was right, raising a boy in a houseful of women. Old women and their prejudices. But it was done; and somehow I’m not worried about it now: you’ll make your mark, you’ll get on. It’s this that I want you to promise me: don’t be unkind to Catherine, try not to grow too far away from her. Some nights it keeps me wide awake to think of her forsaken. There,” she held up my suit, “let’s see if it fits.”

It pinched in the crotch and in the rear drooped like an old man’s B.V.D.’s; the legs were wide as sailor pants, one sleeve stopped above my wrist, the other shot past my fingertips. It wasn’t, as Dolly admitted, very stylish. “But when we’ve painted on the bones …” she said. “Silver paint. Verena bought some once to dress up a flagpole—before she took against the government. It should be somewhere in the attic, that little can. Look under the bed and see if you can locate my slippers.”

She was forbidden to get up, not even Catherine would permit that. “It won’t be any fun if you scold,” she said and found the slippers herself. The courthouse clock had chimed eleven, which meant it was ten-thirty, a dark hour in a town where respectable doors are locked at nine; it seemed later still because in the next room Verena had closed her ledgers and gone to bed. We took an oil lamp from the linen closet and by its tottering light tiptoed up the ladder into the attic. It was cold up there; we set the lamp on a barrel and lingered near it as though it were a hearth. Sawdust heads that once had helped sell St. Louis hats watched while we searched; wherever we put our hands
it caused a huffy scuttling of fragile feet. Overturned, a carton of mothballs clattered on the floor. “Oh, dear, oh, dear,” cried Dolly, giggling, “if Verena hears that she’ll call the Sheriff.”

We unearthed numberless brushes; the paint, discovered beneath a welter of dried holiday wreaths, proved not to be silver but gold. “Of course that’s better, isn’t it? Gold, like a king’s ransom. Only do see what else I’ve found.” It was a shoebox secured with twine. “My valuables,” she said, opening it under the lamp. A hollowed honeycomb was demonstrated against the light, a hornet’s nest and a clove-stuck orange that age had robbed of its aroma. She showed me a blue perfect jaybird’s egg cradled in cotton.

“I was too principled. So Catherine stole the egg for me, it was her Christmas present.” She smiled; to me her face seemed a moth suspended beside the lamp’s chimney, as daring, as destructible. “Charlie said that love is a chain of love. I hope you listened and understood him. Because when you can love one thing,” she held the blue egg as preciously as the Judge had held a leaf, “you can love another, and that is owning, that is something to live with. You can forgive everything. Well,” she sighed, “we’re not getting you painted. I want to amaze Catherine; we’ll tell her that while we slept the little people finished your suit. She’ll have a fit.”

Again the courthouse clock was floating its message, each note like a banner stirring above the chilled and sleeping town. “I know it tickles,” she said, drawing a branch of ribs across my chest, “but I’ll make a mess if you don’t hold still.” She dipped the brush and skated it along the sleeves, the trousers, designing golden bones for my arms and legs. “You must remember all the compliments: there should be many,” she said as she immodestly observed her work. “Oh dear, oh dear …” She hugged herself, her laughter rollicked in the rafters. “Don’t you see …”

For I was not unlike the man who painted himself into a
corner. Freshly gilded front and back, I was trapped inside the suit: a fine fix for which I blamed her with a pointing finger.

“You have to whirl,” she teased. “Whirling will dry you.” She blissfully extended her arms and turned in slow ungainly circles across the shadows of the attic floor, her plain kimono billowing and her thin feet wobbling in their slippers. It was as though she had collided with another dancer: she stumbled, a hand on her forehead, a hand on her heart.

Far on the horizon of sound a train whistle howled, and it wakened me to the bewilderment puckering her eyes, the contractions shaking her face. With my arms around her, and the paint bleeding its pattern against her, I called Verena; somebody help me!

Dolly whispered, “Hush now, hush.”

Houses at night announce catastrophe by their sudden pitiable radiance. Catherine dragged from room to room switching on lights unused for years. Shivering inside my wrecked costume I sat in the glare of the entrance hall sharing a bench with the Judge. He had come at once, wearing only a raincoat slung over a flannel nightshirt. Whenever Verena approached he brought his naked legs together primly, like a young girl. Neighbors, summoned by our bright windows, came softly inquiring. Verena spoke to them on the porch: her sister, Miss Dolly, she’d suffered a stroke. Doctor Carter would allow none of us in her room, and we accepted this, even Catherine who, when she’d set ablaze the last light, stood leaning her head against Dolly’s door.

There was in the hall a hat-tree with many antlers and a mirror. Dolly’s velvet hat hung there, and at sunrise, as breezes trickled through the house, the mirror reflected its quivering veil.

Then I knew as good as anything that Dolly had left us. Some moments past she’d gone by unseen; and in my imagination I followed her. She had crossed the square, had come to the
church, now she’d reached the hill. The Indian grass gleamed below her, she had that far to go.

IT WAS A JOURNEY I
made with Judge Cool the next September. During the intervening months we had not often encountered each other—once we met on the square and he said to come see him any time I felt like it. I meant to, yet whenever I passed Miss Bell’s boarding house I looked the other way.

I’ve read that past and future are a spiral, one coil containing the next and predicting its theme. Perhaps this is so; but my own life has seemed to me more a series of closed circles, rings that do not evolve with the freedom of a spiral: for me to get from one to the other has meant a leap, not a glide. What weakens me is the lull between, the wait before I know where to jump. After Dolly died I was a long while dangling.

My own idea was to have a good time.

I hung around Phil’s Café winning free beers on the pinball machine; it was illegal to serve me beer, but Phil had it on his mind that someday I would inherit Verena’s money and maybe set him up in the hotel business. I slicked my hair with brilliantine and chased off to dances in other towns, shined flashlights and threw pebbles at girls’ windows late at night. I knew a Negro in the country who sold a brand of gin called Yellow Devil. I courted anyone who owned a car.

Because I didn’t want to spend a waking moment in the Talbo house. It was too thick with air that didn’t move. Some stranger occupied the kitchen, a pigeon-toed colored girl who sang all day, the wavery singing of a child bolstering its spirit in an ominous place. She was a sorry cook. She let the kitchen’s geranium plant perish. I had approved of Verena hiring her. I thought it would bring Catherine back to work.