The Grass Harp (5 page)

“In this old tree?” said Catherine. “Just put that notion out of your head, Dollyheart.” And then: “You recall how we saw in the paper where a man bought a castle across the ocean and brought it every bit home with him? You recall that? Well, we maybe could put my little house on a wagon and haul it down here.” But, as Dolly pointed out, the house belonged to Verena, and was therefore not ours to haul away. Catherine answered: “You wrong, sugar. If you feed a man, and wash his clothes, and born his children, you and that man are married, that man is yours. If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours. The way I see it, both those houses up there belong to us: in the eyes of God, we could put That One right out.”

I had an idea: down on the river below us there was a forsaken houseboat, green with the rust of water, half-sunk; it had been the property of an old man who made his living catching catfish, and who had been run out of town after applying for a certificate to marry a fifteen-year-old colored girl. My idea was, why shouldn’t we fix up the old houseboat and live there?

Catherine said that if possible she hoped to spend the rest of her life on land: “Where the Lord intended us,” and she listed more of His intentions, one of these being that trees were meant for monkeys and birds. Presently she went silent and, nudging us, pointed in amazement down to where the woods opened upon the field of grass.

There, stalking toward us, solemnly, stiffly, came a distinguished party: Judge Cool, the Reverend and Mrs. Buster, Mrs. Macy Wheeler; and leading them, Sheriff Junius Candle, who wore high-laced boots and had a pistol flapping on his hip. Sunmotes lilted around them like yellow butterflies, brambles
brushed their starched town clothes, and Mrs. Macy Wheeler, frightened by a vine that switched against her leg, jumped back, screeching: I laughed.

And, hearing me, they looked up at us, an expression of perplexed horror collecting on some of their faces: it was as though they were visitors at a zoo who had wandered accidentally into one of the cages. Sheriff Candle slouched forward, his hand cocked on his pistol. He stared at us with puckered eyes, as if he were gazing straight into the sun. “Now look here …” he began, and was cut short by Mrs. Buster, who said: “Sheriff, we agreed to leave this to the Reverend.” It was a rule of hers that her husband, as God’s representative, should have first say in everything. The Reverend Buster cleared his throat, and his hands, as he rubbed them together, were like the dry scraping feelers of an insect. “Dolly Talbo,” he said, his voice very fine-sounding for so stringy, stunted a man, “I speak to you on behalf of your sister, that good gracious woman …”

“That she is,” sang his wife, and Mrs. Macy Wheeler parroted her.

“… who has this day received a grievous shock.”

“That she has,” echoed the ladies in their choir-trained voices.

Dolly looked at Catherine, touched my hand, as though asking us to explain what was meant by the group glowering below like dogs gathered around a tree of trapped possums. Inadvertently, and just, I think to have something in her hands, she picked up one of the cigarettes Riley had left.

“Shame on you,” squalled Mrs. Buster, tossing her tiny baldish head: those who called her an old buzzard, and there were several, were not speaking of her character alone: in addition to a small vicious head, she had high hunched shoulders and a vast body. “I say shame on you. How can you have come so far from God as to sit up in a tree like a drunken Indian—sucking cigarettes like a common …”

“Floozy,” supplied Mrs. Macy Wheeler.

“… floozy, while your sister lies in misery flat on her back.”

Maybe they were right in describing Catherine as dangerous, for she reared up and said: “Preacher lady, don’t you go calling Dolly and us floozies; I’ll come down there and slap you bowlegged.” Fortunately, none of them could understand her; if they had, the sheriff might have shot her through the head: no exaggeration; and many of the white people in town would have said he did right.

Dolly seemed stunned, at the same time self-possessed. You see, she simply dusted her skirt and said: “Consider a moment, Mrs. Buster, and you will realize that we are nearer God than you—by several yards.”

“Good for you, Miss Dolly. I call that a good answer.” The man who had spoken was Judge Cool; he clapped his hands together and chuckled appreciatively. “Of course they are nearer God,” he said, unfazed by the disapproving, sober faces around him. “They’re in a tree, and we’re on the ground.”

Mrs. Buster whirled on him. “I’d thought you were a Christian, Charlie Cool. My ideas of a Christian do not include laughing at and encouraging a poor mad woman.”

“Mind who you name as mad, Thelma,” said the Judge. “That isn’t especially Christian either.”

The Reverend Buster opened fire. “Answer me this, Judge. Why did you come with us if it wasn’t to do the Lord’s will in a spirit of mercy?”

“The Lord’s will?” said the Judge incredulously. “You don’t know what that is any more than I do. Perhaps the Lord told these people to go live in a tree; you’ll admit, at least, that He never told you to drag them out—unless, of course, Verena Talbo is the Lord, a theory several of you give credence to, eh Sheriff? No, sir, I did not come along to do anyone’s will but my own: which merely means that I felt like taking a walk—the
woods are very handsome at this time of year.” He picked some brown violets and put them in his buttonhole.

“To hell with all that,” began the Sheriff, and was again interrupted by Mrs. Buster, who said that under no circumstances would she tolerate swearing: Will we, Reverend? and the Reverend, backing her up, said he’d be damned if they would. “I’m in charge here,” the Sheriff informed them, thrusting his bully-boy jaw. “This is a matter for the law.”

“Whose law, Junius?” inquired Judge Cool quietly. “Remember that I sat in the courthouse twenty-seven years, rather a longer time than you’ve lived. Take care. We have no legal right whatever to interfere with Miss Dolly.”

Undaunted, the Sheriff hoisted himself a little into the tree. “Let’s don’t have any more trouble,” he said coaxingly, and we could see his curved dog-teeth. “Come on down from there, the pack of you.” As we continued to sit like three nesting birds he showed more of his teeth and, as though he were trying to shake us out, angrily swayed a branch.

“Miss Dolly, you’ve always been a peaceful person,” said Mrs. Macy Wheeler. “Please come on home with us; you don’t want to miss your dinner.” Dolly replied matter-of-factly that we were not hungry: were they? “There’s a drumstick for anybody that would like it.”

Sheriff Candle said, “You make it hard on me, ma’am,” and pulled himself nearer. A branch, cracking under his weight, sent through the tree a sad cruel thunder.

“If he lays a hand on any one of you, kick him in the head,” advised Judge Cool. “Or I will,” he said with sudden gallant pugnacity: like an inspired frog he hopped and caught hold to one of the Sheriff’s dangling boots. The Sheriff, in turn, grabbed my ankles, and Catherine had to hold me around the middle. We were sliding, that we should all fall seemed inevitable, the strain was immense. Meanwhile, Dolly started pouring what was left
of our orangeade down the Sheriff’s neck, and abruptly, shouting an obscenity, he let go of me. They crashed to the ground, the Sheriff on top of the Judge and the Reverend Buster crushed beneath them both. Mrs. Macy Wheeler and Mrs. Buster, augmenting the disaster, fell upon them with crow-like cries of distress.

Appalled by what had happened, and the part she herself had played, Dolly became so confused that she dropped the empty orangeade jar: it hit Mrs. Buster on the head with a ripe thud. “Beg pardon,” she apologized, though in the furor no one heard her.

When the tangle below unraveled, those concerned stood apart from each other embarrassedly, gingerly feeling of themselves. The Reverend looked rather flattened out, but no broken bones were discovered, and only Mrs. Buster, on whose skimpy-haired head a bump was pyramiding, could have justly complained of injury. She did so forthrightly. “You attacked me, Dolly Talbo, don’t deny it, everyone here is a witness, everyone saw you aim that mason jar at my head. Junius, arrest her!”

The Sheriff, however, was involved in settling differences of his own. Hands on hips, swaggering, he bore down on the Judge, who was in the process of replacing the violets in his buttonhole. “If you weren’t so old, I’d damn well knock you down.”

“I’m not so old, Junius: just old enough to think men ought not to fight in front of ladies,” said the Judge. He was a fair-sized man with strong shoulders and a straight body: though not far from seventy, he looked to be in his fifties. He clenched his fists and they were hard and hairy as coconuts. “On the other hand,” he said grimly, “I’m ready if you are.”

At the moment it looked like a fair enough match. Even the Sheriff seemed not so sure of himself; with diminishing bravado, he spit between his fingers, and said Well, nobody was going to accuse him of hitting an old man. “Or standing up to
one,” Judge Cool retorted. “Go on, Junius, tuck your shirt in your pants and trot along home.”

The Sheriff appealed to us in the tree. “Save yourselves a lot of trouble: get out of there and come along with me now.” We did not stir, except that Dolly dropped her veil, as though lowering a curtain on the subject once for all. Mrs. Buster, the lump on her head like a horn, said portentously, “Never mind, Sheriff. They’ve had their chance,” and, eyeing Dolly, then the Judge, added: “You may imagine you are getting away with something. But let me tell you there will be a retribution—not in heaven, right here on earth.”

“Right here on earth,” harmonized Mrs. Macy Wheeler.

They left along the path, erect, haughty as a wedding procession, and passed into the sunlight where the red rolling grass swept up, swallowed them. Lingering under the tree, the Judge smiled at us and, with a small courteous bow, said: “Do I remember you offering a drumstick to anybody that would like it?”

HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN PUT
together from parts of the tree, for his nose was like a wooden peg, his legs were strong as old roots, and his eyebrows were thick, tough as strips of bark. Among the topmost branches were beards of silvery moss the color of his center-parted hair, and the cowhide sycamore leaves, sifting down from a neighboring taller tree, were the color of his cheeks. Despite his canny, tomcat eyes, the general impression his face made was that of someone shy and countrified. Ordinarily he was not the one to make a show of himself, Judge Charlie Cool; there were many who had taken advantage of his modesty to set themselves above him. Yet none of them could have claimed, as he could, to be a graduate of Harvard University or to have twice traveled in Europe. Still, there were those who were resentful and felt that he put on airs: wasn’t he supposed to
read a page of Greek every morning before breakfast? and what kind of a man was it that would always have flowers in his buttonhole? If he wasn’t stuck up, why, some people asked, had he gone all the way to Kentucky to find a wife instead of marrying one of our own women? I do not remember the Judge’s wife; she died before I was old enough to be aware of her, therefore all that I repeat comes second-hand. So: the town never warmed up to Irene Cool, and apparently it was her own fault. Kentucky women are difficult to begin with, keyed-up, hellion-hearted, and Irene Cool, who was born a Todd in Bowling Green (Mary Todd, a second cousin once removed, had married Abraham Lincoln), let everyone around here know she thought them a backward, vulgar lot: she received none of the ladies of the town, but Miss Palmer, who did sewing for her, spread news of how she’d transformed the Judge’s house into a place of taste and style with Oriental rugs and antique furnishings. She drove to and from Church in a Pierce-Arrow with all the windows rolled up, and in church itself she sat with a cologned handkerchief against her nose:
the smell of God ain’t good enough for Irene Cool
. Moreover, she would not permit either of the local doctors to attend her family, this though she herself was a semi-invalid: a small backbone dislocation necessitated her sleeping on a bed of boards. There were crude jokes about the Judge getting full of splinters. Nevertheless, he fathered two sons, Todd and Charles Jr., both born in Kentucky where their mother had gone in order that they could claim to be natives of the bluegrass state. But those who tried to make out the Judge got the brunt of his wife’s irritableness, that he was a miserable man, never had much of a case, and after she died even the hardest of their critics had to admit old Charlie must surely have loved his Irene. For during the last two years of her life, when she was very ill and fretful, he retired as circuit judge, then took her abroad to the places they had been on their honeymoon. She never came back;
she is buried in Switzerland. Not so long ago Carrie Wells, a schoolteacher here in town, went on a group tour to Europe; the only thing connecting our town with that continent are graves, the graves of soldier boys and Irene Cool; and Carrie, armed with a camera for snapshots, set out to visit them all: though she stumbled about in a cloud-high cemetery one whole afternoon, she could not find the Judge’s wife, and it is funny to think of Irene Cool, serenely there on a mountain-side still unwilling to receive. There was not much left for the Judge when he came back; politicians like Meiself Tallsap and his gang had come into power: those boys couldn’t afford to have Charlie Cool sitting in the courthouse. It was sad to see the Judge, a fine-looking man dressed in narrowcut suits with a black silk band sewn around his sleeve and a Cherokee rose in his buttonhole, sad to see him with nothing to do except go to the post office or stop in at the bank. His sons worked in the bank, prissy-mouthed, prudent men who might have been twins, for they both were marshmallow-white, slump-shouldered, watery-eyed. Charles Jr., he was the one who had lost his hair while still in college, was vice-president of the bank, and Todd, the younger son, was chief cashier. In no way did they resemble their father, except that they had married Kentucky women. These daughters-in-law had taken over the Judge’s house and divided it into two apartments with separate entrances; there was an arrangement whereby the old man lived with first one son’s family, then the other. No wonder he’d felt like taking a walk to the woods.