The Tin Can Tree (4 page)

“I don’t know,” said James. “I doubt it.”

A fly buzzed in, humming its way in zigzags through the room, and Ansel followed it with his eyes. When the fly had disappeared into the kitchen he lay back again, gazing upwards. “I’m doing all my dying in one room now,” he told the ceiling.

“Oh, stop that,” James said.

“It’s true. I’m getting contained in smaller and smaller spaces. First it was the whole of North Carolina; then this town; then this room. Soon no place. We
all
got to go.”

“Look,” James said. “I know of one stone-cold pizza in the kitchen. What do I do with it? Throw it out?”

“Well,” said Ansel. He sat up and peered over at Simon. “Why do you keep looking at that picture?”

Simon put the picture down. He looked from Ansel to James, and then he stood up and stuck his hands in his pockets. “When I come to think of it,” he said, “I don’t want no pizza.”

“Well you don’t have to eat it,” said James.

“I think I’ll just pass it up.”

“All right.”

“It’s hard to say what’s happening to people,” Ansel said. “They don’t seem to realize, no more. Don’t think of
themselves
being dead someday; don’t mourn no more. It’s hard to say what they
do
do, when you stop and consider.”

“Don’t die of anemia no more, either,” said James.

“What do you know about it?”

Simon was tilting gently back and forth, from his toes to his heels and his heels to his toes, with his shoulders hunched high and his eyes on a spot outside Ansel’s window. He didn’t seem to be listening.

“Nobody’s perfect,” Ansel said. “Janie wasn’t exactly a pink-pinafore type, I admit it. Rattling through her prayers in purple pajamas: Deliver us from measles. But she’s under the earth like you’ll be someday, have you thought of that?
You
in that clay, and your survivors calling you a pig in a tree?”

“Ansel, there’s not a thing in this world you do right,” James said.

But Ansel waved him aside and sat forward, on the edge of his couch. “What will you do about me?” he asked. “How
about
that, now? When I am—”

Simon was crying. He was still rocking back and forth, still keeping his hands jammed tightly in his pockets, but there were wet paths running through the flour on his cheeks and his eyes were frowning and angry. “Well—” he said, and his voice came out croaky. He took a breath and cleared his throat. “Well, I reckon I’ll be getting on home,” he said.

“Oh, now,” said Ansel.

But James said, “All right. It’s all right.”

He crossed over to open the door and Simon went out, stumbling a little. James followed him. He stood on the porch and watched Simon all the way down to
his end of the house, hoping Simon might look back once, but he never did. He walked stiffly and blindly, with his sharp little shoulder-bones sticking out through the back of his jacket. When he reached his own door he hesitated, with his hand on the knob and his back still toward James. Then he said, “Well,” again, and pulled the door open and went on in. The screen door slammed shut and rattled once and was still. James could hear Simon’s footsteps clomping on across the hollow floor of the parlor.

The aluminum porch chair was still beneath the window, where Ansel had been sitting in it to watch the funeral go by. After a minute James went over and sat down on it. He let his arms rest along the arms of the chair and the metal burned him, making two lines of sunbaked heat down the inside of his forearms. Behind him was the soft sound of the mesh curtains moving, and the sleeves of Ansel’s rough black suit sliding across the splintery windowsill. “Hot out,” Ansel said.

James squinted toward the road.

“I wish it was the season for tangerines.”

There were no people passing now, only the yellow fields across the way rippling in the wind and one gray hound plodding slowly through the yard. In the house behind James were the soft, humming sounds of other people, murmuring indistinct words to one another and moving gently around. James closed his eyes.

“Hey, James.”

He didn’t answer.

“
James.
”

“What.”

“James, I told you he wouldn’t eat.”

The wind began again, and James rose from his chair
to go inside. He didn’t want to sit here any more. Here it was too still; here there was only that wind, rushing over and around the house in its solitary position among the weeds.

J
oan Pike was twenty-six years old, and had lived in bedrooms all her life. She lived the way a guest would—keeping her property strictly within the walls of her room, hanging her towel and washcloth on a bar behind her door. No one asked her to. Her aunt had even said to her, once, that she wished Joan would act more at home here. “You could at
least
hang your coat in the downstairs closet,” she said. “Could you do that much?” And Joan had nodded, and from then on hung her coat with the others. But her towel stayed in her own room, because nobody had mentioned that to her. And she read and sewed sitting on her bed, unless she was expressly invited downstairs.

If they had asked her, point-blank, the way they must have wanted to—if they had asked, “Why do you have to be invited?” she wouldn’t have known the answer. It was what she was used to; that was all. When she was born, her parents were already middle-aged. They weren’t sure what they were supposed to do with her; they treated her politely, like a visitor who had dropped in unexpectedly. If she sat with them after supper they tried to make some sort of conversation, or gazed at her uneasily over the tops of their magazines until she retreated to her room. So now, a hundred miles from
home and on her own, it felt only natural to be living in another bedroom, although she hadn’t planned it that way. She had come here planning just to stay with the Pikes a week or two, until she found a place of her own, and then the children made her change her mind. When Janie Rose’s hamster ran away, and Janie Rose stayed an hour in the bathroom shouting that it wasn’t important, brushing her teeth over and over with scalding hot water that she didn’t even notice and crying into the sink, Joan was the only one who could make her come away. After that the Pikes asked if she would like to live with them, and she said yes without appearing to think twice. This bedroom wasn’t like the first one, after all. Here there was always something going on, and a full family around the supper table. When she went walking with Simon and Janie Rose, she pretended to herself that they were hers. She played senseless games with them, toasting marshmallows over candles and poking spiders in their webs to try and make them spin their names. For four years she had lived that way. Nine months of each year she worked as a secretary for the school principal, giving some of her salary to the Pikes and sending some home to her parents, and in the summers she worked part-time in the tobacco fields. In the evenings she sat with James, every evening talking of the same things and never moving forwards or backwards with him, and she spent a little time with the Pikes. But she still lived in her bedroom; she still waited for an invitation, and when any of the Pikes wanted to see her they had to go knock on her door.

Today no one knocked. Her aunt and uncle had gone straight to their room after the funeral and were there now—the sound of Mr. Pike’s murmuring voice could
just be heard—and Simon was alone in his room and seemed to be planning to stay there. That left Joan with a piece of time she knew would be her own, with no one interrupting, and at first she thought it was what she needed. She could sit down and get things sorted in her mind, and maybe catch some sleep later on. There was still that heavy feeling behind her eyes from the long aching wait in the hospital. But when she tried sorting her thoughts she found it was more than she could do just now, and then when she tried sleeping her eyes wouldn’t shut. She lay on top of her bedspread, with her shoes off but her dress still on in case her aunt should call her, and her eyes kept wandering around the bland, motel-like cleanness of her room. It seemed every muscle she owned was tensed up and waiting to be called on. If she were alone in the house she would have gone down and scrubbed the kitchen floor, maybe, or at least had a long hot bath. But who knew whether her aunt would approve of that on a day like today?

When she finally thought of what she could do, she sat up quickly and frowned at herself for not thinking of it sooner. It was the one thing her aunt had asked of her all day: she had been sitting at the breakfast table, digging wells in her oatmeal and staring out into the back yard, and suddenly she had caught sight of Janie Rose’s draggled blue crinoline flapping on the clothesline. “Take everything away, Joan,” she said.

“What?”

“Take Janie’s things away. Put them somewhere.”

“All right,” said Joan, but she was hunting raisins for Simon’s oatmeal and hadn’t really been thinking about it. Now she wasn’t sure how much time she would have; Simon might come in at any moment. She wanted to do the job alone, keeping it from the rest of the
family, because different things could bother different people. With her it had been Janie Rose’s pocket collection—modeling clay and an Italian stamp and a handful of peas hidden away during supper, sitting on the edge of the tub where they had been dumped before a bath five nights ago. She didn’t think any more could bother her now.

She opened her door and looked out into the hallway. No one was there. Behind the Pikes’ door the mumbling voice still rambled on, faltering in places and then starting up again, louder than before. When Joan came out into the hall in her stocking feet, a floorboard creaked beneath her and the murmuring stopped altogether, but then her uncle picked up the thread and continued. Joan reached the steps and descended them on tiptoe, and when she got to the bottom she closed the door behind her and let out her breath.

Janie Rose’s room opened off the kitchen hall. It had had to be built on for her especially, because the Pikes had never planned for more than one child and the room that was now Joan’s had been taken up by a paying lodger at the time. Janie didn’t like her room. She liked Simon’s, with the porthole window in the closet and the cowboy wallpaper. When Simon wasn’t around she did all her playing there, so that her own room looked almost unlived in. On her hastily made-up bed sat an eyeless teddy bear, tossed against the pillow the way Janie Rose must have seen it in her mother’s copies of
House and Garden
. And her toys were neatly lined on the bookshelves, but wisps of clothes stuck out of dresser drawers and her closet was one heap of things she had kicked her way out of at night and thrown on the floor.

It was the closet Joan began with. She pulled back
the flaps of a cardboard box from the hall and then began to fold the dresses up and lay them away. There weren’t many. Janie Rose hated dresses, although her mother had dreams of outfitting her in organdy and dotted swiss. The dresses Janie chose for herself were red plaid, with the sashes starting to come off at the seams because she had a tendency to tie them too tightly. Then there were stacks of overalls, most of them home-sewn and inherited from Simon, and at the very bottom were the few things her mother had bought when Janie Rose wasn’t along—pink and white things, with “Little Miss Chubby” labels sewn into the necklines. While she was folding those Joan had a sudden clear picture of Janie Rose on Sunday mornings, struggling into them. She dressed backwards. She refused to pull dresses over her head, for fear of becoming invisible. Instead she pulled them up over her feet, tugging and grunting and complaining all the way, and sometimes ripping the seams of dresses that weren’t meant to be put on that way. She had a trick that she did with her petticoat, so that it wouldn’t slide up with her dress—she bent over and tucked it between her knees, and while she was doing all this struggling with the dress she would be standing there knock-kneed and pigeon-toed, locking the petticoat in place and usually crying. She cried a lot, but quietly.

When Joan had finished with the closet, the cardboard box was only two-thirds full. The closet was bare, and the floor had just a few hangers and bubble gum wrappers scattered over it. It looked worse that way. She reached over and slammed the closet door shut, and then she dragged the box over to the dresser and began on that.

Upstairs, a door slammed. She straightened up and
listened, hoping it was only the wind, but there were Simon’s footsteps down the stairs. For a minute she was afraid he was coming to find her, but then she heard the soft puffing sound that the leather chair made when someone sat in it, and she relaxed. He must not want to be with people right now. She pushed her hair off her face and opened the next dresser drawer.

Janie Rose had more sachet bags than Joan thought existed. They cluttered every drawer, one smell mixed with another—lemon verbena and lavender and rose petals. And tossed in here and there were her mother’s old perfume bottles with the tops off, adding their own heavy scent, so that Joan became confused and couldn’t tell one smell from another any more. She wondered why Janie Rose, wearing all this fragrant underwear, had still smelled only of Ivory soap and Crayolas. Especially when she wore so
much
underwear. On Janie Rose’s bad days, when she thought things were going against her or she was frightened, she would pile on layer upon layer of undershirts and panties. Her jeans could hardly be squeezed on top of it all, and if she wore overalls the straps would be strained to the breaking point over drawersful of undershirts. Sometimes her mother made her take them off again and sometimes she didn’t (“She’s just hopeless,” she would say, and give up), but usually, if the day turned better, Janie peeled off a few layers of her own accord. On the evenings of her bad days, when Simon came in for supper, he had a habit of reaching across the table and pinching her overall strap to see how many other straps lay beneath it. It was his way of asking how she was doing. If Janie was feeling all right by then she would just giggle at him, and he would laugh. But other days she jumped when he touched her and hunched up her
shoulders, and then Simon would say nothing and fix all his attention on supper.