The Grass Harp (6 page)

“Thank you, Miss Dolly,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “That’s the best drumstick I’ve had since I was a boy.”

“It’s the least we can do, a drumstick; you were very brave.” There was in Dolly’s voice an emotional, feminine tremor that struck me as unsuitable, not dignified; so, too, it must have
seemed to Catherine: she gave Dolly a reprimanding glance. “Won’t you have something more, a piece of cake?”

“No ma’m, thank you, I’ve had a sufficiency.” He unloosened from his vest a gold watch and chain, then lassoed the chain to a strong twig above his head; it hung like a Christmas ornament, and its feathery faded ticking might have been the heartbeat of a delicate thing, a firefly, a frog. “If you can hear time passing it makes the day last longer. I’ve come to appreciate a long day.” He brushed back the fur of the squirrels, which lay curled in a corner as though they were only asleep. “Right through the head: good shooting, son.”

Of course I gave the credit to the proper party. “Riley Henderson, was it?” said the Judge, and went on to say it was Riley who had let our whereabouts be known. “Before that, they must have sent off a hundred dollars’ worth of telegrams,” he told us, tickled at the thought. “I guess it was the idea of all that money that made Verena take to her bed.”

Scowling, Dolly said, “It doesn’t make a particle of sense, all of them behaving ugly that way. They seemed mad enough to kill us, though I can’t see why, or what it has to do with Verena: she knew we were going away to leave her in peace, I told her, I even left a note. But if she’s sick—is she, Judge? I’ve never known her to be.”

“Never a day,” said Catherine.

“Oh, she’s upset all right,” the Judge said with a certain contentment. “But Verena’s not the woman to come down with anything an aspirin couldn’t fix. I remember when she wanted to rearrange the cemetery, put up some kind of mausoleum to house herself and all you Talbos. One of the ladies around here came to me and said Judge, don’t you think Verena Talbo is the most morbid person in town, contemplating such a big tomb for herself? and I said No, the only thing morbid was that she
was willing to spend the money when not for an instant did she believe she was ever going to die.”

“I don’t like to hear talk against my sister,” said Dolly curtly. “She’s worked hard, she deserves to have things as she wants them. It’s our fault, someway we failed her, there was no place for us in her house.”

Catherine’s cotton-wadding squirmed in her jaw like chewing tobacco. “Are you my Dollyheart? or some hypocrite? He’s a friend, you ought to tell him the truth, how That One and the little Jew was stealing our medicine.…”

The Judge applied for a translation, but Dolly said it was simply nonsense, nothing worth repeating and, diverting him, asked if he knew how to skin a squirrel. Nodding dreamily, he gazed away from us, above us, his acornlike eyes scanning the sky-fringed, breeze-fooled leaves. “It may be that there is no place for any of us. Except we know there is, somewhere; and if we found it, but lived there only a moment, we could count ourselves blessed. This could be your place,” he said, shivering as though in the sky spreading wings had cast a cold shade. “And mine.”

Subtly as the gold watch spun its sound of time, the afternoon curved toward twilight. Mist from the river, autumn haze, trailed moon-colors among the bronze, the blue trees, and a halo, an image of winter, ringed the paling sun. Still the Judge did not leave us: “Two women and a boy? at the mercy of night? and Junius Candle, those fools up to God knows what? I’m sticking with you.” Surely, of the four of us, it was the Judge who had most found his place in the tree. It was a pleasure to watch him, all twinkly as a hare’s nose, and feeling himself a man again, more than that, a protector. He skinned the squirrels with a jackknife, while in the dusk I gathered sticks and built under the tree a fire for the frying pan. Dolly opened the
bottle of blackberry wine; she justified this by referring to a chill in the air. The squirrels turned out quite well, very tender, and the Judge said proudly that we should taste his fried catfish sometime. We sipped the wine in silence; a smell of leaves and smoke carrying from the cooling fire called up thoughts of other autumns, and we sighed, heard, like sea-roar, singings in the field of grass. A candle flickered in a mason jar, and gipsy moths, balanced, blowing about the flame, seemed to pilot its scarf of yellow among the black branches.

There was, just then, not a footfall, but a nebulous sense of intrusion: it might have been nothing more than the moon coming out. Except there was no moon; nor stars. It was dark as the blackberry wine. “I think there is someone—something down there,” said Dolly, expressing what we all felt.

The Judge lifted the candle. Night-crawlers slithered away from its lurching light, a snowy owl flew between the trees. “Who goes there?” he challenged with the conviction of a soldier. “Answer up, who goes there?”

“Me, Riley Henderson.” It was indeed. He separated from the shadows, and his upraised, grinning face looked warped, wicked in the candlelight. “Just thought I’d see how you were getting on. Hope you’re not sore at me: I wouldn’t have told where you were, not if I’d known what it was all about.”

“Nobody blames you, son,” said the Judge, and I remembered it was he who had championed Riley’s cause against his uncle Horace Holton: there was an understanding between them. “We’re enjoying a small taste of wine. I’m sure Miss Dolly would be pleased to have you join us.”

Catherine complained there was no room; another ounce, and those old boards would give way. Still, we scrunched together to make a place for Riley, who had no sooner squeezed into it than Catherine grabbed a fistful of his hair. “That’s for
today with you pointing your gun at us like I told you not to; and this,” she said, yanking again and speaking distinctively enough to be understood, “pays you back for setting the Sheriff on us.”

It seemed to me that Catherine was impertinent, but Riley grunted good-naturedly, and said she might have better cause to be pulling somebody’s hair before the night was over. For there was, he told us, excited feelings in the town, crowds like Saturday night; the Reverend and Mrs. Buster especially were brewing trouble: Mrs. Buster was sitting on her front porch showing callers the bump on her head. Sheriff Candle, he said, had persuaded Verena to authorize a warrant for our arrest on the grounds that we had stolen property belonging to her.

“And Judge,” said Riley, his manner grave, perplexed, “they’ve even got the idea they’re going to arrest you. Disturbing the peace and obstructing justice, that’s what I heard. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this—but outside the bank I ran into one of your boys, Todd. I asked him what he was going to do about it, about them arresting you, I mean; and he said Nothing, said they’d been expecting something of the kind, that you’d brought it on yourself.”

Leaning, the Judge snuffed out the candle; it was as though an expression was occurring in his face which he did not want us to see. In the dark one of us was crying, after a moment we knew that it was Dolly, and the sound of her tears set off silent explosions of love that, running the full circle round, bound us each to the other. Softly, the Judge said: “When they come we must be ready for them. Now, everybody listen to me.…”

“
WE MUST KNOW OUR POSITION
to defend it; that is a primary rule. Therefore: what has brought us together? Trouble. Miss Dolly and her friends, they are in trouble. You, Riley: we both are in trouble. We belong in this tree or we wouldn’t be here.” Dolly grew silent under the confident sound of the Judge’s voice; he said: “Today, when I started out with the Sheriff’s party, I was a man convinced that his life will have passed uncommunicated and without trace. I think now that I will not have been so unfortunate. Miss Dolly, how long? fifty, sixty years? it was that far ago that I remember you, a stiff and blushing child riding to town in your father’s wagon—never getting down from the wagon because you didn’t want us town-children to see you had no shoes.”

“They had shoes, Dolly and That One,” Catherine muttered. “It was me that didn’t have no shoes.”

“All the years that I’ve seen you, never known you, not ever recognized, as I did today, what you are: a spirit, a pagan …”

“A pagan?” said Dolly, alarmed but interested.

“At least, then, a spirit, someone not to be calculated by the eye alone. Spirits are accepters of life, they grant its differences—and
consequently are always in trouble. Myself, I should never have been a Judge; as such, I was too often on the wrong side: the law doesn’t admit differences. Do you remember old Carper, the fisherman who had a houseboat on the river? He was chased out of town—wanted to marry that pretty little colored girl, I think she works for Mrs. Postum now; and you know she loved him, I used to see them when I went fishing, they were very happy together; she was to him what no one has been to me, the one person in the world—from whom nothing is held back. Still, if he had succeeded in marrying her, it would have been the Sheriff’s duty to arrest and my duty to sentence him. I sometimes imagine all those whom I’ve called guilty have passed the real guilt on to me: it’s partly that that makes me want once before I die to be right on the right side.”

“You on the right side now. That One and the Jew …”

“Hush,” said Dolly.

“The one person in the world.” It was Riley repeating the Judge’s phrase; his voice lingered inquiringly.

“I mean,” the Judge explained, “a person to whom everything can be said. Am I an idiot to want such a thing? But ah, the energy we spend hiding from one another, afraid as we are of being identified. But here we are, identified: five fools in a tree. A great piece of luck provided we know how to use it: no longer any need to worry about the picture we present—free to find out who we truly are. If we know that no one can dislodge us; it’s the uncertainty concerning themselves that makes our friends conspire to deny the differences. By scraps and bits I’ve in the past surrendered myself to strangers—men who disappeared down the gangplank, got off at the next station: put together, maybe they would’ve made the one person in the world—but there he is with a dozen different faces moving down a hundred separate streets. This is my chance to find that man—you are him, Miss Dolly, Riley, all of you.”

Catherine said, “I’m no man with any dozen faces: the notion,” which irritated Dolly, who told her if she couldn’t speak respectably why not just go to sleep. “But Judge,” said Dolly, “I’m not sure I know what it is you have in mind we should tell each other. Secrets?” she finished lamely.

“Secrets, no, no.” The Judge scratched a match and relighted the candle; his face sprang upon us with an expression unexpectedly pathetic: we must help him, he was pleading. “Speak of the night, the fact there is no moon. What one says hardly matters, only the trust with which it is said, the sympathy with which it is received. Irene, my wife, a remarkable woman, we might have shared anything, and yet, yet nothing in us combined, we could not touch. She died in my arms, and at the last I said, Are you happy, Irene? have I made you happy? Happy happy happy, those were her last words: equivocal. I have never understood whether she was saying yes, or merely answering with an echo: I should know if I’d ever known her. My sons. I do not enjoy their esteem: I’ve wanted it, more as a man than as a father. Unfortunately, they feel they know something shameful about me. I’ll tell you what it is.” His virile eyes, faceted with candle-glow, examined us one by one, as though testing our attention, trust. “Five years ago, nearer six, I sat down in a train-seat where some child had left a child’s magazine. I picked it up and was looking through it when I saw on the back cover addresses of children who wanted to correspond with other children. There was a little girl in Alaska, her name appealed to me, Heather Falls. I sent her a picture postcard; Lord, it seemed a harmless and pleasant thing to do. She answered at once, and the letter quite astonished me; it was a very intelligent account of life in Alaska—charming descriptions of her father’s sheep ranch, of northern lights. She was thirteen and enclosed a photograph of herself—not pretty, but a wise and kind looking child. I hunted through some old albums, and found a Kodak made on a fishing
trip when I was fifteen—out in the sun and with a trout in my hand: it looked new enough. I wrote her as though I were still that boy, told her of the gun I’d got for Christmas, how the dog had had pups and what we’d named them, described a tent-show that had come to town. To be growing up again and have a sweetheart in Alaska—well, it was fun for an old man sitting alone listening to the noise of a clock. Later on she wrote she’d fallen in love with a fellow she knew, and I felt a real pang of jealousy, the way a youngster would; but we have remained friends: two years ago, when I told her I was getting ready for law school, she sent me a gold nugget—it would bring me luck, she said.” He took it from his pocket and held it out for us to see: it made her come so close, Heather Falls, as though the gently bright gift balanced in his palm was part of her heart.

“And that’s what they think is shameful?” said Dolly, more piqued than indignant. “Because you’ve helped keep company a lonely little child in Alaska? It snows there so much.”

Judge Cool closed his hand over the nugget. “Not that they’ve mentioned it to me. But I’ve heard them talking at night, my sons and their wives: wanting to know what to do about me. Of course they’d spied out the letters. I don’t believe in locking drawers—seems strange a man can’t live without keys in what was at least once his own house. They think it all a sign of …” He tapped his head.

“I had a letter once. Collin, sugar, pour me a taste,” said Catherine, indicating the wine. “Sure enough, I had a letter once, still got it somewhere, kept it twenty years wondering who was wrote it. Said Hello Catherine, come on to Miami and marry with me, love Bill.”

“Catherine. A man asked you to marry him—and you never told one word of it to me?”

Catherine lifted a shoulder. “Well, Dollyheart, what was the
Judge saying? You don’t tell anybody everything. Besides, I’ve known a peck of Bills—wouldn’t study marrying any of them. What worries my mind is, which one of the Bills was it wrote that letter? I’d like to know, seeing as it’s the only letter I ever got. It could be the Bill that put the roof on my house; course, by the time the roof was up—my goodness, I have got old, been a long day since I’ve given it two thoughts. There was Bill that came to plow the garden, spring of 1913 it was; that man sure could plow a straight row. And Bill that built the chicken-coop: went away on a Pullman job; might have been him wrote me that letter. Or Bill—uh uh, his name was Fred—Collin, sugar, this wine is mighty good.”