The Grass Harp (9 page)

First off, Riley woke me by stepping on my fingers. Dolly, already awake, insisted I apologize for cursing him. Courtesy, she said, is more important in the morning than at any other time: particularly when one is living in such close quarters. The Judge’s watch, still bending the twig like a heavy gold apple, gave the time as six after six. I don’t know whose idea it was, but we breakfasted on oranges and animal crackers and cold hotdogs. The Judge grouched that a body didn’t feel human till he’d had a pot of hot coffee. We agreed that coffee was what we all most missed. Riley volunteered to drive into town and get some; also, he would have a chance to scout around, find out what was going on. He suggested I come with him: “Nobody’s going to see him, not if he stays down in the seat.” Although the Judge objected, saying he thought it foolhardy, Dolly could tell I wanted to go: I’d yearned so much for a ride in Riley’s car that now the opportunity presented itself nothing, even the prospect that no one might see me, could have thinned my excitement.
Dolly said, “I can’t see there’s any harm. But you ought to have a clean shirt: I could plant turnips in the collar of that one.”

The field of grass was without voice, no pheasant rustle, furtive flurry; the pointed leaves were sharp and blood-red as the aftermath arrows of a massacre; their brittleness broke beneath our feet as we waded up the hill into the cemetery. The view from there is very fine: the limitless trembling surface of River Woods, fifty unfolding miles of ploughed, windmilled farmland, far-off the spired courthouse tower, smoking chimneys of town. I stopped by the graves of my mother and father. I had not often visited them, it depressed me, the tomb-cold stone—so unlike what I remembered of them, their aliveness, how she’d cried when he went away to sell his frigidaires, how he’d run naked into the street. I wanted flowers for the terracotta jars sitting empty on the streaked and muddied marble. Riley helped me; he tore beginning buds off a japonica tree, and watching me arrange them, said: “I’m glad your ma was nice. Bitches, by and large.” I wondered if he meant his own mother, poor Rose Henderson, who used to make him hop around the yard reciting the multiplication table. It did seem to me, though, that he’d made up for those hard days. After all, he had a car that was supposed to have cost three thousand dollars. Second-hand, mind you. It was a foreign car, an Alfa Romeo roadster (Romeo’s Alfa, the joke was) he’d bought in New Orleans from a politician bound for the penitentiary.

As we purred along the unpaved road toward town I kept hoping for a witness: there were certain persons it would have done my heart good to have seen me sailing by in Riley Henderson’s car. But it was too early for anyone much to be about; breakfast was still on the stove, and smoke soared out the chimneys of passing houses. We turned the corner by the church, drove around the square and parked in the dirt lane that runs
between Cooper’s Livery and the Katydid Bakery. There Riley left me with orders to stay put: he wouldn’t be more than an hour. So, stretching out on the seat, I listened to the chicanery of thieving sparrows in the livery stable’s haystacks, breathed the fresh bread, tart as currant odors escaping from the bakery. The couple who owned this bakery, County was their name, Mr. and Mrs. C. C. County, had to begin their day at three in the morning to be ready by opening time, eight o’clock. It was a clean prosperous place. Mrs. County could afford the most expensive clothes at Verena’s drygoods store. While I lay there smelling the good things, the back door of the bakery opened and Mr. County, broom in hand, swept flour dust into the lane. I guess he was surprised to see Riley’s car, and surprised to find me in it.

“What you up to, Collin?”

“Up to nothing, Mr. County,” I said, and asked myself if he knew about our trouble.

“Sure am happy October’s here,” he said, rubbing the air with his fingers as though the chill woven into it was a material he could feel. “We have a terrible time in the summer: ovens and all make it too hot to live. See here, son, there’s a gingerbread man waiting for you—come on in and run him down.”

Now he was not the kind of man to get me in there and then call the Sheriff.

His wife welcomed me into the spiced heat of the oven room as though she could think of nothing pleasanter than my being there. Most anyone would have liked Mrs. County. A chunky woman with no fuss about her, she had elephant ankles, developed arms, a muscular face permanently fire-flushed; her eyes were like blue cake-icing, her hair looked as if she’d mopped it around in a flour barrel, and she wore an apron that trailed to the tips of her toes. Her husband also wore one; sometimes, with the fulsome apron still tied around him, I’d seen him crossing
the street to have a time-off beer with the men that lean around the corner at Phil’s Café: he seemed a painted clown, flopping, powdered, elegantly angular.

Clearing a place on her work table, Mrs. County set me down to a cup of coffee and a warm tray of cinnamon rolls, the kind Dolly relished. Mr. County suggested I might prefer something else: “I promised him, what did I promise? a gingerbread man.” His wife socked a lump of dough: “Those are for kids. He’s a grown man; or nearly. Collin, just how old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Same as Samuel,” she said, meaning her son, whom we all called Mule: inasmuch as he was not much brighter than one. I asked what was their news of him? because the previous autumn, after having been left back in the eighth grade three years running, Mule had gone to Pensacola and joined the Navy. “He’s in Panama, last we heard,” she said, flattening the dough into a piecrust. “We don’t hear often. I wrote him once, I said Samuel you do better about writing home or I’m going to write the President exactly how old you are. Because you know he joined up under false pretenses. I was darned mad at the time—blamed Mr. Hand up at the schoolhouse: that’s why Samuel did it, he just couldn’t tolerate always being left behind in the eighth grade, him getting so tall and the other children so little. But now I can see Mr. Hand was right: it wouldn’t be fair to the rest of you boys if they promoted Samuel when he didn’t do his work proper. So maybe it turned out for the best. C. C., show Collin the picture.”

Photographed against a background of palms and real sea, four smirking sailors stood with their arms linked together; underneath was written, God Bless Mom and Pop, Samuel. It rankled me. Mule, off seeing the world, while I, well, maybe I deserved a gingerbread man. As I returned the picture, Mr.
County said: “I’m all for a boy serving his country. But the bad part of it is, Samuel was just getting where he could give us a hand around here. I sure hate to depend on nigger help. Lying and stealing, never know where you are.”

“It beats me why C. C. carries on like that,” said his wife, knotting her lips. “He knows it irks me. Colored people are no worse than white people: in some cases, better. I’ve had occasion to say so to other people in this town. Like this business about old Catherine Creek. Makes me sick. Cranky she may be, and peculiar, but there’s as good a woman as you’ll find. Which reminds me, I mean to send her a dinner-tray up to the jail, for I’ll wager the Sheriff doesn’t set much of a table.”

So little, once it has changed, changes back: the world knew us: we would never be warm again: I let go, saw winter coming toward a cold tree, cried, cried, came apart like a rain-rotted rag. I’d wanted to since we left the house. Mrs. County begged pardon if she’d said anything to upset me; with her kitchen-slopped apron she wiped my face, and we laughed, had to, at the mess it made, the paste of flour and tears, and I felt, as they say, a lot better, kind of lighthearted. For manly reasons I understood, but which made me feel no shame, Mr. County had been mortified by the outburst: he retired to the front of the shop.

Mrs. County poured coffee for herself and sat down. “I don’t pretend to follow what’s going on,” she said. “The way I hear it, Miss Dolly broke up housekeeping because of some disagreement with Verena?” I wanted to say the situation was more complicated than that, but wondered, as I tried to array events, if really it was. “Now,” she continued thoughtfully, “it may sound as though I’m talking against Dolly: I’m not. But this is what I feel—you people should go home, Dolly ought to make her peace with Verena: that’s what she’s always done, and you can’t turn around at her time of life. Also, it sets a poor example for
the town, two sisters quarreling, one of them sitting in a tree; and Judge Charlie Cool, for the first time in my life I feel sorry for those sons of his. Leading citizens have to behave themselves; otherwise the entire place goes to pieces. For instance, have you seen that wagon in the square? Well then, you better go have a look. Family of cowboys, they are. Evangelists, C. C. says—all I know is there’s been a great racket over them and something to do with Dolly.” Angrily she puffed up a paper sack. “I want you to tell her what I said: go home. And here, Collin, take along some cinnamon rolls. I know how Dolly dotes on them.”

As I left the bakery the bells of the courthouse clock were ringing eight, which meant that it was seven-thirty. This clock has always run a half-hour fast. Once an expert was imported to repair it; at the end of almost a week’s tinkering he recommended, as the only remedy, a stick of dynamite; the town council voted he be paid in full, for there was a general feeling of pride that the clock had proved so incorrigible. Around the square a few store-keepers were preparing to open; broom-sweepings fogged doorways, rolled trashbarrels berated the cool cat-quiet streets. At the Early Bird, a better grocery store than Verena’s Jitney Jungle, two colored boys were fancying the window with cans of Hawaiian pineapple. On the south side of the square, beyond the cane benches where in all seasons sit the peaceful, perishing old men, I saw the wagon Mrs. County had spoken of—in reality an old truck contrived with tarpaulin covering to resemble the western wagons of history. It looked forlorn and foolish standing alone in the empty square. A homemade sign, perhaps four feet high, crested the cab like a shark’s fin. Let Little Homer Honey Lasso Your Soul For The Lord. Painted on the other side there was a blistered greenish grinning head topped by a ten-gallon hat. I would not have thought it a portrait of anything human, but, according to a notice, this was:
Child Wonder Little Homer Honey. With nothing more to see, for there was no one around the truck, I took myself toward the jail, which is a box-shaped brick building next door to the Ford Motor Company. I’d been inside it once. Big Eddie Stover had taken me there, along with a dozen other boys and men; he’d walked into the drugstore and said come over to the jail if you want to see something. The attraction was a thin handsome gipsy boy they’d taken off a freight train; Big Eddie gave him a quarter and told him to let down his pants; nobody could believe the size of it, and one of the men said, “Boy, how come they keep you locked up when you got a crowbar like that?” For weeks you could tell girls who had heard that joke: they giggled every time they passed the jail.

There is an unusual emblem decorating a side wall of the jail. I asked Dolly, and she said that in her youth she remembers it as a candy advertisement. If so, the lettering has vanished; what remains is a chalky tapestry: two flamingo-pink trumpeting angels swinging, swooping above a huge horn filled with fruit like a Christmas stocking; embroidered on the brick, it seems a faded mural, a faint tattoo, and sunshine flutters the imprisoned angels as though they were the spirits of thieves. I knew the risk I was taking, parading around in plain sight; but I walked past the jail, then back, and whistled, later whispered Catherine, Catherine, hoping this would bring her to the window. I realized which was her window: on the sill, reflecting beyond the bars, I saw a bowl of goldfish, the one thing, as subsequently we learned, she’d asked to have brought her. Orange flickerings of the fish fanned around the coral castle, and I thought of the morning I’d helped Dolly find it, the castle, the pearl pebbles. It had been the beginning and, chilled suddenly by a thought of what the end could be, Catherine coldly shadowed and peering downward, I prayed she would not come to the window: she would have seen no one, for I turned and ran.

Riley kept me waiting in the car more than two hours. By the time he showed up he was himself in such a temper I didn’t dare show any of my own. It seems he’d gone home and found his sisters, Anne and Elizabeth, and Maude Riordan, who had spent the night, still lolling abed: not just that, but Coca-Cola bottles and cigarette butts all over the parlor. Maude took the blame: she confessed to having invited some boys over to listen to the radio and dance; but it was the sisters who got punished. He’d dragged them out of bed and whipped them. I asked what did he mean, whipped them? Turned them over my knee, he said, and whipped them with a tennis shoe. I couldn’t picture this; it conflicted with my sense of Elizabeth’s dignity. You’re too hard on those girls, I said, adding vindictively: Maude, now there’s the bad one. He took me seriously, said yes he’d intended to whip her if only because she’d called him the kind of names he wouldn’t take off anybody; but before he could catch her she’d bolted out the back door. I thought to myself maybe at last Maude’s had her bait of you.

Riley’s ragged hair was glued down with brilliantine; he smelled of lilac water and talcum. He didn’t have to tell me he’d been to the barber’s; or why.

Though he has since retired, there was in those days an exceptional fellow running the barbershop. Amos Legrand. Men like the Sheriff, for that matter Riley Henderson, oh everybody come to think of it, said: that old sis. But they didn’t mean any harm; most people enjoyed Amos and really wished him well. A little monkeyman who had to stand on a box to cut your hair, he was agitated and chattery as a pair of castanets. All his steady customers he called honey, men and women alike, it made no difference to him. “Honey,” he’d say, “it’s about time you got this hair cut: was about to buy you a package of bobby-pins.” Amos had one tremendous gift: he could tattle along on matters of true interest to businessmen and girls of ten—everything from what
price Ben Jones got for his peanut crop to who would be invited to Mary Simpson’s birthday party.