Town Burning (16 page)

“I don’t know,” John said.

“I’ll tell you what happened the other night. Your mother came up to me and she said she…‘I just don’t feel like I ever had any babies!’ She said that.”

John winced.

“Oh, I know,” his father said, waving his hand and trying to grin, “I know how that sounds, Johnny. I read
Generation of Vipers,
you know!” He looked at John, and the expression was an undecided one. John finally realized that his father wanted to know whether or not
A Generation of Vipers
should be admired.

“Oh,
that!”
he said. All right. Now his father knew it wasn’t to be taken too seriously.

“I know mothers are out of style and all,” his father said, “but when she said that about the babies it struck me pretty hard. You’d just been mean to her. I know you were mad and I don’t blame you, but you know how easily you can hurt her.”

“I was sorry about that. I apologized,” John said.

“I know you did. And I respect you for it. But she’s having an awful hard time with Bruce not knowing…their not knowing if Bruce is going to wake up or not.” He paused and braced himself for a more horrible possibility. “Or if he comes to without everything up there.” His big shoulders twitched and he placed his finger ends against his forehead. “He’s all right physically, you know. They feed him with these tubes. I saw it this morning.”

“Did the doctors say anything more?”

“No. Just that they don’t know any more than you or I. They can’t tell what’s going to happen, even whether he’ll ever wake up or not or even live.” He kept turning the old-fashioned inkbowl around in its grimy stand.

They were both aware of the constant wind. The creaky old building moved and complained. The clapboards shifted and a shingle flapped as a cloud of cindery dust whicked against the windows of the west side, swirled by and over and roiled the weeds along the railroad siding. Inside, in a ray of the afternoon sun, fine diamonds of dust moved back and forth above the desks, never seeming to settle. The glass of the front window bulged in and out with the gusts, yet behind the gusts the steady push of wind was constant, a low whine John never got used to. Day after day it rose in force, and the lulls of today were as strong as the gusts of yesterday. There seemed to be a malignant force in the long pushes of the wind, and they grew until he wanted to cry, “Stop!” And then always, seconds or a full minute afterward the push that seemed bent on breaking the building down would subside a little, play with his expectancy, grow just at the end insupportable before it died back down to a forceful, steady monotone. Now a gust stopped all at once, and the building audibly relaxed. William Cotter felt it too, and smiled.

“Won’t it ever die down?”

“It makes you nervous,” John said.

“It makes me more than that. It blew all—damn’ near all, anyway, the fifteen pound felt off the Waters house before we got the roofing on and tarred down. It lifted—I mean
lifted
—the Miller house right up and the footing partly dropped out and it bent the stringers all to hell. Now that costs us money, Johnny.” He looked right at John, who saw immediately that this could lead to the subject of his working.

“We just don’t have a responsible man to watch things, Johnny. Madbury’s too damned
confused
all the time, but I can’t think of another yardman in the whole bunch. Maybe Bruce is right, and we’ve got a home for the aberrations here. What I mean is, if the carpenters go off and leave nothing but the felt on a roof in this wind, what can I do about it? I remember during the war thinking won’t it be wonderful after it’s over and the men won’t give you any sass any more! And look what happened! I guess they just got sassy when labor was scarce and never got over it. Anyway, I’ve
got
to stay here and take care of the retail and the books.”

“Yeah,” John said. “I know. Sure.” But the carpenters were the only ones who could be responsible for such things. You couldn’t tell a carpenter anything about his job. His father couldn’t and
he
certainly couldn’t. Maybe Bruce could. In Leah only Bruce’s frightening inner pressure could awe a carpenter. It was a habit in Leah not to take any sass from a superior.

“I don’t know why it is,” William Cotter said. “I’ve been working pretty hard ever since Bruce went to the hospital, but I just can’t seem to get things going right. Back before the war I did all right, but I can’t any more. I guess I’m getting old, Johnny.”

“You’re not too old,” John said, and then they waited for the wind to let up a little.

“Not too old for what? I guess I’m old enough to see what I can do. I know me pretty well by now, Johnny.”

“No!” John said involuntarily, then didn’t want to go on. His father waited expectantly. He didn’t want his father to say such a thing—to make such a final verdict. And it was not just because he didn’t want to stay in Leah and work for Cotter & Son—now another son! He’d had the same opinion of his father for a long time, but for the man himself to say it, to see the end of his own life! Nobody should do that. As for himself, he’d always considered himself full of
potential,
and he firmly believed that one day everything would change and he would suddenly find himself in the midst of the future, happy and full of accomplishment. But he was thirty years old, and time was settling in. Would he ever have to make an admission like his father’s, see himself one of the admitted mediocrities? For a moment he toyed with the idea of making such an admission, and saw with a chill how seductive, how peaceful it would be. The long years had once been his friends, when age itself was an accomplishment, but now they had turned into quick enemies.

“I don’t want to push you, Johnny.”

“I’ll start to work tomorrow,” John said. He would have to get used to this new feeling of mortality. If fate could strike so close as to take away his father’s pride, to smash his only brother! He’d always been lucky in little things: he’d never had to be hungry for very long, money had always come from somewhere when he needed it, he was extremely lucky in poker, lucky with girls, lucky about catching trains. Maybe he’d been given this petty good fortune in place of happiness, or maybe some final tragedy would come along and smash him all at once.

He hadn’t expected to see Jane at the Paquette farm. He hadn’t expected to stay for supper, either, even though he knew that anyone who happened to be there after five-thirty had a difficult time refusing.

Bob had finally bought Mike’s motorcycle, and he and two of his younger brothers were excitedly pushing it, starting it, running it down the driveway and back, burning their fingers on the hot cylinders as they probed in the grease for the carburetor adjustment screws. Any small damage to the machine was explained to him—the bent crashbar, the tiny licks of paint scratched off here and there. Oh, it was in wonderful shape, they told him, and a little red enamel would fix it right up. Before milking, John helped them clear a space for it in one of the sheds. They piled all scratchy, puncturing junk out of the way and led the machine inside.

“There!” Bob said, patting the saddle, “Ain’t it pretty, John? I mean Jerome.” They always called each other Jerome, for some reason.

“I guess so.”

“You
guess
so! That’s all my chicken money right there, Jerome. Worth it!”

He followed Bob to the barn. Bob walked ahead, impatient, springy on his feet.

“I’ll get the hay,” John said. He climbed the ladder into the great hayloft and walked along above the stanchions, throwing a forkful of hay to each cow. The heat and the heavy odor of the cows came up around him and mixed with the mown smell of the hay. The beams leaned together above him in gray clouds of cobwebs, and dusty rays of cathedral light shone from the gable-end ventilators. Bob came down the cement aisle below, followed by four milk-hungry cats.

“Hey, Bob,” John said, and dropped a bunch of hay on his head.

“You’ll give me the willyprickles, you horse’s ass!” Bob went down beside a cow and shot a stream of milk six feet into the air, splattering John’s shoes. The cats sat in a row and opened their mouths, presenting little pink targets. Bob sprayed them and they retreated to lick the milk out of their fur.

“That shaggy one can carry off a whole quart in his overcoat,” Bob said. “Git yourself a bucket, you want anything to eat tonight, Jerome. We got twelve cows to milk.”

John got a pail from the milkhouse and took the cow next to Bob’s. She stopped eating long enough to turn her neck in the creaking wooden stanchion and look him over with one brown eye, then went back to chewing the thin hay. The milk sang into the pail, and the cats, hearing it, lined up for him, too. By the time he finished the one cow his hands were nearly paralyzed. Bob had finished two more and had moved on up the line of craggy rumps.

“You hear about old Prescott, Johnny? I mean Jerome?” he called above the zinging of the milk.

“Yuk, yuk,” John said.

“Listen, Jerome. That old bastard, you know what he done? He got so rang-dang mad from being swatted on the head by his critters’ tails while milking…Jesus! He took a hand ax and a block and chopped off every one of ’em’s tail. The ASPCA preferred charges and it cost the old fool eleventeen bucks per whack! Hundred and fifty bucks he had to pay. You know what? He lost every damn’ one of his cows come inspection. TB. How do you like that?”

“He always was a mean old bastard,” John said.

“Cruel,” Bob said thoughtfully, “awful cruel.”

John managed to do four cows while Bob did eight. With aching hands he helped Bob lower the tall milk cans into the water tank in the milkhouse.

“Water’s too low. We ain’t going to just but scrape by this year,” Bob said. “Spring’s going dry. First time in my young life I ever seen that happen. They closed the woods yesterday, you hear about it?”

“My father told me today. Hey, Bob? I mean Jerome!”

“Huh?” Bob let the trapdoor down over the water tank.

“Did you know anything about Bruce going out with Minetta Randolf?”

“
Bruce?”

“I mean it. She told me.”

“Bruce
Cotter?
No, I guess you wouldn’t joke right now. Don’t that tear it? Bruce!”

“I guess so. I never knew Bruce to go out with any girl,” John said.

Then Bob asked the inevitable question: “I wonder if he made out?” He looked shrewdly at John. “Old Minetta’s one to speak right out, by God. I got a kind of natural feeling she and Bruce might of just hit it off.”

“It was pretty strange. I brought a case of beer and old Howard and I drank it.”

“You mean the old bag’s on the wagon?”

“No, she stuck to her wine.”

“She sure does, don’t she?” Bob said.

“Wait a minute. Let me tell you how Minetta acted. Afterward we went down to the car—Minetta and I…”

“Yow!” Bob said, putting out his fist.

“No, wait a minute! Let me tell you! I started to neck with her—you know—same old story. Nothing. I was kind of lit.”

“No gibroni,” Bob said.

“God dammit, listen! I must have said something she didn’t like, and she blew her stack.”

“She did!”

“She said nobody in Leah was a man except Bruce. She said the rest of us were all honyaks. Stuff like that. Nobody was a man except Bruce.”

“She never give me a chance to prove that, one way or the other,” Bob said regretfully. “Well, I’ve more or less rang-dang had it! Bruce!” He continued to shake his head as they went toward the house.

They went through two dark connecting sheds and then a door opened into the bright, crowded kitchen, where the Paquettes seemed to do everything at once in a continuous roar. John said hello, shouting and being shouted at, to Ma, Pa, Dick, Paul, Jean, little Timmy, and Charlotte. It was then that he noticed Jane, sitting behind the huge kitchen table in a relatively calm, protected spot, talking to Charlotte. He started across the room toward her, but Timmy, who was seven, had spread a series of Montgomery-Ward catalogues, wooden blocks, little cars and a model road grader in and out among the table legs and out across the linoleum. John accidentally shifted one of the blocks, and Timmy’s shrill voice came from under the table: “Dammit! Who done that?” He put his head out.

“Hush, now!” Ma said to him, a frown passing over her face. She poured water from a dishpan full of steaming boiled potatoes. In spite of the uproar she had to contend with all the time, she looked quite young, with a kind of French
chic
about her. Bob, the oldest, had been born when she was seventeen, and Bob was thirty. Pa was a good deal older than Ma; a wide, thick-featured man. All his children looked like Pa. His round face rarely showed any expression but one of serene amusement. He sat at the head of the table and said very little except, “Pass the picklelilly,” but he did listen to the constant hubbub and seemed to get from it a certain infusion of contentment. The Paquettes set a loud, happy table.

John still tried to reach Jane, and found that in order to get there he would have to go underneath the table, where he moved another part of Timmy’s highway system.

“Jesus, you’re clumsy, John,” Timmy said, but gently, to show there were no hard feelings.

Under the table John met Shep, who had been stepped on so often he had evidently decided not to worry about it. Shep knew him, nodded once, once flopped his much trodden-upon tail and went back to watching a cat who watched back from beneath the woodstove.

Jane raised the oilcloth to let him come out. For a second he looked up at her, seeing her arm above him, her face and silvery blonde hair, in a kind of shock. She smiled down at him, and she seemed terribly beautiful to him all at once. He had never before thought of her as anything but mildly pretty—in fact, rather funny-looking in a pleasing way, with her little puggish nose and crinkly eyes. Now she was clean and fresh, her summer dress crisp, her breasts small and firm, her narrow waist trim. There seemed to be a
tone
to her flesh; a healthy, spare, animal tone to it he had never seen in a girl before.

“Are you coming out?” Jane asked. Charlotte had been watching, smiling in a thoughtful way.