Town Burning (38 page)

“I will?” she asked.

“Yes, you will.” He looked steadily into her eyes. “If you want to—if I can think of any to tell you.”

“You said, ‘Bruce.’” As she said the word he shivered slightly, and his face assumed the blank, watchful look again. He was completely still.

“I did?” He seemed to be trying to remember. “All right. First, would you bring me my clothes? I want to show you something in my pants’ pocket.” His face was deliberately calm, deliberately expressionless. She brought the torn and sooty clothes and he took a small pistol from the back pocket of his dungarees. He examined it and put it on the bedside table.

“That”—he had trouble getting a breath, then went on—”belongs to Bruce. It’s loaded. It’s dangerous, like Bruce. I’ve been carrying it around in my back pocket. I found it in the office, and I found—” His eyes searched the corner of the room, nervous and entirely unlike his usually steady eyes. “So I was crying? I found a book of Bruce’s—sort of a diary, all locked up in a drawer with this gun to guard it. Secret! Listen. He’s my
brother,
and I never knew how he felt. I never bothered to know how he felt. I didn’t know he hated me quite so much. I never
bothered
to know how much he hated me, hated our father. But he had it all locked up in the box and I read it. The thing is, there’s nothing
there.
It doesn’t come together. It doesn’t
make
anything. It’s just loose hate rattling around in the box. Like Bruce. Nothing there to hold the whole thing together at all. I don’t know what happened to make him like that. You know, you’ve got to find a reason or you can’t steady your mind. I don’t know my own brother! How can I know anybody?”

“Nobody knew Bruce,” she said gently. She wanted again to offer him the comfort of her flesh, and put one arm along his cheek.

“It wasn’t anybody else’s responsibility to know. I was nearest. It was my responsibility.”

“Not your father’s?”

“No, he doesn’t count,” he said, shaking his head impatiently.

“Poor man. He doesn’t count.”

“Poor man,” John said softly. “Poor man. He’s poor in sons.”

“No, you’re wrong.”

“I never bothered to pity anyone in Leah, much less my own father, or my own brother. Now, Christ! The poor guy’s
dying.
It’s killing my father, too. He dies right in front of my eyes. And my mother fiddles around wanting somebody to hug, and nobody will let her.”

He threw himself over against the wall, and put his hand flat against the wallpaper. “Jesus Christ, Janie, what the hell is the matter with us? You aren’t like that. What do you do to be different? Anybody can look at you and see how generous you are. Everybody knows it.”

“I’m not.”

“You are! And there’s someone else like that. Jenny Lou’s like that, and she’s kept my mother from coming all apart. That’s all it takes.”

“You mean the little Negro girl?”

“Yes, Jenny Lou. Maybe you’re born with it—with all that affection to give, and it never runs out—and the rest of us sit around worrying about ourselves so much we can’t give anything.”

“Maybe that’s it,” she said, “only I’ve always wondered why you should worry. What do you worry about? You’re John Cotter, and your family’s always been pretty well off. It isn’t as bad as you say it is, either. I mean, it’s bad that you and Bruce never got along, but don’t you know that every family has troubles like that? Worse ones. What if you were John Prescott, and your father was so mean—not even drunk—that your mother had to call the sheriff to protect you? What if he was so mean he cut the tails off his cows and beat his wife and his horse with a bamboo pole?”

“Ah, Janie. All our little problems seem big to us, but maybe if my father were more of a tail cutter it would have cleared the air long ago. Maybe Bruce and I would have found a common enemy, and that might have been better for both of us. Maybe we both love him, but we want him to be our father more. Maybe a man wants to respect his father more than love him, and then if he and his father can come to an understanding someday, well, it might seem more valuable. Bruce wrote in his hate-book that he wanted to work, to fight—for some crazy foreign-place happiness he kept wanting—or else it didn’t seem valuable. But who was he trying to impress with all the work he did? Maybe he wanted somebody who was hard to impress, not our poor father. All he did was grind the man down, and every time he got a chance he hurt him. God! Bruce could be mean!”

It seemed to her that there was some admiration in his voice, yet she still saw, beneath his quick words, a real despair—something that threatened her, too. The wounds of his brother, or the wounds his brother had given him (what was the difference?) must be healed before she could end this limbo of the farm—this meaningless calm between the two parts of her life. The fire, too, had been stopped for a while, and now she thought of it almost as an ally. Why couldn’t it burn up everything—Leah, Bruce, the farm, the Spinellis; burn out all the old places and people and leave her free, burn this futile despair out of the man she wanted?

“What to do?” John said, tossing the pistol in his hand. “Shoot myself with it? Did Bruce deliberately leave me that box—a sort of booby trap?” He tried to smile.

“You’d better stop trying to fool me,” she said, “I love you, but that doesn’t make me blind. I can love and see, both.”

“How do you know it’s love, then, Janie?”

“I’m gambling,” she said, and for a moment she was frightened.

“I’m a good poker player,” he said, “or else I’m awfully lucky.” He pulled her down against him and held her rigidly against his chest, his hands tight on her arms.

She was still frightened, not of her love for him—that was no gamble—but of her vision of life with him. Was it a qualification of her love that she wanted him whole and permanent? When the time came, if it ever did, she knew she would never marry another defective; he must at least match her in his ability to live. Her heart made itself felt as it had when she thought the reflection of the fire in the farmhouse windows was real, dark fire; each beat was strong, and between each thudding beat there was a long and wearisome pause, as if her heart were reluctant to beat again. John’s trouble was real—she must believe that. It was real, and he was eaten by it. He could not be cured by a slap or a shock—not even by the hottest fire. I must remember that, she said to herself,
I must remember that.

“I should have gone up to him,” John said, his hands tighter around her arms. “I should have shoved them all out into the hall and gone up to him and held out my hands, palms up, and said, ‘Gentle, gentle, I give you everything.’ I should have done it before they cut his mind out of his head.”

She began to cry, not wanting to, partly because he hurt her arms. It was as if she felt some of his pain. The back of her throat hurt worse than her arms, and she knew her tears were sliding against his face. He put his arms around her and slid her off his chest so that her face was against his neck.

“Janie, Janie,” he said gently, “what a self-pitying slob of an actor I am, making you cry. It doesn’t bother me, really. I’ve just got to impress you somehow.”

“Don’t try to lie to me. Don’t have good motives with me, you bastard,” she said, and bit him on the neck. He jumped, but with a certain precision. He pulled the sheet out from under her and put it over her so that she was underneath it with him, his hands coming up her legs, his body insistent against hers.

“My motives toward you are dark and strong,” he said in a dry, husky voice. His hands worked at her clothes and she tried automatically to resist them. His breath was warm, humid and alive in her ear. “I look at you and talk to you,” he said urgently, “and then all of a sudden I say to myself, ‘My God, John Cotter! She’s not only honest and generous, she can listen to my weeping and cry! She’s not only beautiful, she’s as spare and trim as a deer—but she’s soft and warm and nervous. Listen to her tremble! She’s not only all these things, but she’s here. I
got
her!’”

“Yes, you got me,” she whispered, and as she let herself stop resisting, as his hands prepared her for him, the walls of the room, even the glass of the window, seemed to become round; each surface part of a sphere with her body the center of it. Then the sphere became opaque, transfixed, revolving slowly as her arms slid around his covering body. Again the mind blunted, and the sphere, the live center of her, turned….

William Cotter saw Franklin standing by the stairwell, stiff and black, one small hand grasping the railing. His solemn black face, so black it seemed to gather light, to absorb it, was, in the familiar hallway, a point of focus where all certainty—the daily unnoticed comforts of Gladys Cotter’s decorating instinct—faded into dark; and in the deep, dark hole there lurked, perhaps, some frightening small animal, an animal that might bite you out of nothing more than fear. Every other object, every other color bore the touch of Gladys Cotter, from the hung tin trays with their fragmentary gold-leaf shepherdesses, whose awkward hands were stuck on black, whose heads had just separated from shoulders and were ever about to collide with borders of fleurs-de-lis, to the bronzed doorstops in the shape of butting goats, screwed by their tails to the summer-party wallpaper.

No reassurance, however, could he find in that ten-year-old African face. Those big brown eyes whose color had seemed
to
leak over into the whites, those wide white teeth, were always about to draw his startled eyes. All faces were strange to William Cotter, beginning with his own. And the more he studied faces, the more they reflected darkness; the more he peered nervously into them, suspecting that there must be a way he didn’t know to get down past the mask of expression.

“Mr. Cotter,” Franklin said in his high, shy, boy’s voice.

“What can I do for you, Frank?” He cursed himself for a hale and hearty fool. Franklin was about to cry, and his hand trembled at his mouth.

“It’s Mrs. Cotter. She’s sick or something. She’s crying on the davenport!”

William Cotter quickly considered: was it something he’d done? Had she had news of Bruce from the hospital? No. He’d have heard the telephone. John? No. Nothing ever happened to John. Fire or not, John wouldn’t burn. Someone might have come to the door during the time he’d run his electric razor. Let it be something! Let it please not be the culmination of this summer, the addition of all the blows poor Gladys had suffered! He put his hand over the little boy’s sharp wingbones.

“Come on, we’ll see,” he said to Franklin, who looked up, expressionless, yet followed him down the stairs.

They both peered reluctantly around the corner of the living-room arch. The sobbing had been just audible from the stairs; now it was rythmical and phlegmy, with a ghastly bubbling in it, and he thought how talented his wife was. No matter how many times he heard her cry, had been the one to do fumbling comfort in the presence of her grief, each new time she was able to tear him in the throat. And it was her crying itself, not necessarily the cause of her grief, even though it might be his grief too, that always worked upon him.

This time, however, he saw with a sense of guilty relief the slight, yet vivid figure of Jenny Lou leaning over the body of his wife. Black pigtails brushed Gladys’ washed-out hair, one shiny black arm moved gently over the lank back and collapsed shoulders. Jenny Lou did not cry, but with a gravity of expression that seemed terribly old, terribly wise, crooned into Gladys’ ear, over and over, a kind of meaningless lullaby: “Now it’s all,
all
right, and the day will come. Now it’s all,
all
right, and the day will come,” as if, instead of a thin seven years, she possessed a great black mammy’s fund of worldliness and warmth.

Gladys Cotter shrugged and gasped, her body full of bones, her long shanks twitching beneath her cotton summer dress. For a long time he and Franklin stood watching—for such a long time, minutes, that he felt himself to be part of the scene, and Franklin too; part of the conscious artistry of some stage director, as if they all belonged, had been assigned there, and were not temporarily and by chance arranged to witness sorrow. My wife, he thought. This poor old dame is my wife. And what specific thing did she now cry about? What now? Some thing or some time—what caused it? Whatever it was, he agreed with her, was tortured into agreeing. It was terrible, godawful, and he could cry too. For a moment, considering the most obvious reason, he was overcome by a vision of Bruce’s incomplete, vegetable body: not by the injustice of Bruce’s fate, but by the sharp horror of the knife against comatose flesh. Was Bruce’s fate unjust? No more than any man’s. The horror was that he half believed that Bruce deserved some kind of punishment.
My son, my
flesh!
Had Bruce’s cruelness turned his tissues rotten, corrupted his brain? There was the horror! God or Fate or whatever should never work such neat sums out.

And how unnatural, how prone to work some havoc on the tender flesh of his own body, that he feared his own son! Feared even to visit the unconscious wreck of his son in the hospital. Knowing this, no wonder Gladys cried! His son—could he remember?—whom he once held up to pee, his hands gentle on the warm little body, whom he had taught such joyful disciplines as how to tie his shoes, and how to tell the right shoe from the left, and how to button buttons.

Why this family had disintegrated neither he nor Gladys knew. It was the fact her woman’s mind seized and mourned. No wonder she cried; and let her.

He stepped back, right on Franklin’s toe. The little boy winced, but made no sound, and they looked at each other, understanding the need for retreat. He motioned for Franklin to follow him into the kitchen, where they sat hiding in the breakfast nook with a Pepsi-Cola and a can of beer he had opened as silently as possible.

“Do you know what she’s crying about, Frank?” he asked. Franklin sat across from him with, as near as he could tell, a sympathetic yet remote expression on his face; Franklin wasn’t about to let himself become too much involved.

“I think she’s crying mainly because Jenny Lou has to go home,” Franklin said. “I mean that sort of started it.”