Proud Flesh (10 page)

Edwina Renshaw had taught her sons to court ruination but had omitted to teach them how to avoid or endure it. Their idolatry of their mother kept them from ever going to her when they got into trouble. Instead they went, as to a second, less awesome, less exacting mother, to their eldest sister. Amy was always ready with sympathy and cash, patient with repeated lapses (a little too unsurprised by them, indeed), and confidential. Amy helped them because she loved them, but more because she believed it to be her main duty in life to intercept any worries and keep them from reaching Ma.

She had intervened at some crucial turn in the affairs of each and every one of them; yet though there was not one whom she herself had not preserved from disgrace as the result of some defect of character peculiar to him, or to the extravagance which, Clifford only excepted, was their common failing, Amy stoutly maintained, in between lapses, that her brothers were all perfect, each possessed of some one outstanding virtue (to which her husband Ira found his own faults frequently contrasted), all models of the greatest virtue of all: filial devotion, family loyalty. She was perhaps a trifle more allergic to shortcomings in her sisters; but she would permit none of them to criticize another in her hearing, would defend even Hazel, would smile and shake her head in mild admonishment and lay her finger on her lips whenever they launched into a comparison of her own generosity with Hazel's penuriousness. Tribute, even thanks, for her help, Amy steadfastly refused. She rather enjoyed suspecting them of ingratitude, or at least of very short-lived memories. To feel that they took her somewhat for granted only strengthened Amy's sense of dedication.

A show of contrition for having done a thing which, if she should know about it, would break Ma's poor heart: this was all Amy asked of them in return for her help. This of course they would have made without any prompting from Amy—though perhaps they would have let themselves off lighter than Amy let them off. Amy made them feel so miserable, it was a question whether Ma herself would have made them feel that bad if they had gone and confessed themselves directly to her. Indeed, some of the things which they agreed with Amy would have broken Ma's heart to know—well, Ma had a stronger heart than that. And more of a sense of humor. Some details of the scrapes they had gotten themselves into, and to which Amy listened so gravely, would probably have broken Ma up in laughter. But in the end it was no laughing matter—they would not have been there seeking help if it were; and by going to Amy with it, although they came away feeling criminal, they had the comfort of knowing that Ma had been spared pain and disappointment, and that was the main thing.

When they came to her for help and Amy had heard their confession, had shriven them and had written them a check and sent them away to sin no more until the next time, she shed tears. Their misdeeds and their indiscretions saddened Amy as a priest is saddened by what he hears in the confessional: not for any betrayal of him, but for the disappointment to their Holy Mother.

Amy's patriotism, her politics, her religion, all resembled her piety toward her mother and her allegiance to her clan. A fundamentalist, she believed in a hot hell, a chilly heaven. A royalist with a worship of authority, she voted always for the incumbent. George Washington's decision not to seek a third term as President, Calvin Coolidge's choice not to run again had always confounded her, as did Truman's in her own time. Had she been of voting age she would have voted for Hoover in 1932 because he was President, then would have voted for Roosevelt for a fifth, a sixth, a seventh term because he was. The only time she had ever sided against time-honored institutions was in the abdication of King Edward VIII (the British royal family came just after her own in Amy's affections); however, she was very young then. A tireless slacker-baiter—there was probably not another woman in greater Waxahachie who had accosted so many ablebodied-looking young men on streetcars and street-corners and demanded to know why they were not in uniform as Amy Renshaw Parker.

In Amy's pantheon even Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth II were mere idols in the side chapels leading up to her mother's high altar. The others, her brothers and sisters, all acknowledged Amy as the most devoted child of them all. Her reward for her devotion was to be the child her mother loved the least—the one whom she did not love at all.

Introspective and self-critical, Amy knew she rather craved a feeling of being insufficiently appreciated. But her mother more than gratified this craving. Amy tried to reason why. Her mother disliked feeling beholden to anybody for anything; could it be that, all Amy's covering up notwithstanding, she chafed at a sense of indebtedness for the help Amy had given her brothers and sisters? For it is one thing to dislike unpleasant duties, something else again to feel obligated to somebody for doing the unpleasant duties you have neglected. Perhaps Ma resented Amy's interference. Perhaps she would rather the children had come to her with their troubles. At times Amy almost felt that her mother hated her, positively hated her, for knowing all her other children's failings, those guilty secrets which only a mother has the right to know.

But Amy's love for her mother was like the camomile: the more it was stepped on the more it grew. She bore her lot patiently, penitentially, telling herself she deserved no better, never letting up in her attentions but persisting in hopes of someday winning her mother's trust and affection. Yet it pained and saddened her.

One particularly painful thing was her mother's dislike of being alone with her. Amy knew herself to be oversensitive, prone to exaggerate her wounds, even to invent them; but this she had seen too many times to be mistaken, and more and more just lately: her mother's uneasiness whenever they were alone together, her relief at the appearance of another person, at remembering something else that she ought to be doing.

Amy attributed this in part to her profession. Her mother had a terror of death, and a consequent dislike of doctors; and the next thing to a doctor was a nurse. She might enjoy being babied by others of her children, whose concern over her health she could dismiss as arising simply out of love; but Amy's concern frightened her, and because it frightened her it angered her. Probably she suspected that Amy had noticed, and knew how to interpret, what had passed unnoticed by the others: a certain bluish swelling around the bases of her fingernails, which she herself knew to connect with her heart condition because the two had appeared at the same time, and that Amy might have caught and identified the odor of valerian and digitalis in her bedroom. When Amy was around she went to great lengths to keep her hands, with their telltale bluish swellings around the nails, hidden from sight.

Between the two there was also another barrier, and that was Amy's childlessness. Edwina, mother of ten, could not help pitying a barren woman, and Edwina's pity was what in another person might have seemed almost like contempt. Over Amy, Edwina had not the hold she had, through their children, over her other daughters.

Amy and her mother were divided on yet another matter, that of Amy's baby brother and his disaffection. Amy was the only one ever to dare speak of this to Ma. She could see it was painful to Ma, but she could not hold her tongue, her feelings were too strong for her. She did not understand, she did not ask, she did not want to know the cause of her brother's final quarrel with her mother. It was not to be understood, only condemned. And there, for Edwina, was the rub. This was something worse than being disagreed with; this was being agreed with when you did not want to be. For by day Edwina might be unforgiving and inflexible and proud of herself for it, but by night, across the years and the miles separating him from her, Edwina pleaded with her errant baby boy to come back home to her, abjectly promising to forgive him and take all the blame upon herself if only he would come home to her; and Edwina did not like to hear from another of her children expressions of the rigor she professed to feel, knew she had every right and duty to feel, and did feel for just half the time.

“A bolt from the blue,” said Gladys. She was describing the effect upon her of Ballard's wire.

Amy started. She had the sensation that her thoughts were being read. For her this was no trite figure of speech; indeed, it was not a figure of speech at all. Among Amy's most vivid memories was having seen a bolt from the blue strike and kill a living creature.

She was seventeen. One sultry summer afternoon a storm had blown up, one of those sudden prairie storms from out of nowhere that within a minute can change day into night. By the time Amy got to a window it was already so dark that the windowpane mirrored her own face and she had to cup her hands to her eyes to see out. This she was doing when a flash, a flare like some elemental short-circuit illumined the lot beyond the fence, the bolt striking dead the horse pastured there. It all happened in a fraction of an instant, and yet quick as it was, there had been a sequence to the events. The horse had leapt into the air not on being struck but before. It was as if it had been given an instant's foreknowledge of its doom and had risen to encounter the bolt, rushing to its annihilation. Just such an instant had Amy experienced when, knowing its contents before opening it, indeed already seeing it in her mind, she was handed Ballard's wire. And just as the stricken horse, suspended in air with its nostrils flaring, its mouth agape, its mane streaming as though each separate strand were electrically charged, had seemed in an ecstasy of dying, so to Amy had come a moment when anguish passed a bound, became a feeling to which she could not give a name, but the memory of which filled her with consternation and with a sense of deepest shame. “Disgusting!” she thought of it now, though why “disgusting” she did not know.

The very air had been electrified, washed with ozone, and breathing had been almost dizzyingly deep during that instant when the horse hung Pegasuslike in the burst of light against the livid sky. Then as the thunder slammed down overhead, darkness returned, and the horse, rigid as bronze, was dropped lifeless to earth. This too had had its counterpart in Amy's experience that morning. The halo of light surrounding the pimply-faced Western Union boy, waiting for the tip he never got, burnt out, her mind darkened, her body stiffened: it had been a moment of death, and to recall it now was almost to endure it again.

“A bolt from the blue,” said Gladys.

Observing Amy's silence, her sisters turned to her, deferential as always, now a little shamefaced, as the voluble always are before the mute.

“Poor Amy!” said Lois. “It's hard on us all, but
you
—
!
”

Again it was as if her mind had been read, and Amy shrank from her sisters' solicitous gaze. All day she had been haunted by words her mother had once said to her. Finding the courage to speak of what she could not bear to contemplate in the knowledge that it was even more unbearable, because more real, to Amy, her mother had said, “You will all be sorry when I am gone. But you, Amy, will be the sorriest of all.” The words seemed now to contain some hidden and menacing meaning, like a letter found afterward inscribed, “To be opened when I am dead.”

XII

She felt sorry for that little wife of his. She really did. Married to a man with no more grit in him than he showed. Them two little tykes of his, too, such a regular doormat for a daddy as they had, ready to just lay down and let anybody walk all over him. Ride all over him, rather.

All he was trying to do was just be perfectly fair and honest about it, Hugo said.

Him with his truck laying in the ditch with its wheels in the air and his cotton all strewed from one side of the highway to the other and he was just trying to be perfectly fair and honest about it. Well, said Mrs. Shumlin, she thought she had heard just about everything but—

All he meant to say was that if anybody was to ask him he would have to admit that he too had been on the wrong side of the road when—

Out of my way, Mrs. Shumlin said, cause here I come! Off of the road, all you pee-ons. Shoo! Into the ditch if you don't want to get knocked down and run over. All you poor lone widow women's only cows, all you poor hard-working cotton farmers trying to get your crops in, out of the way, cause my name's Renshaw and I'm coming through.

—when that other car came into that turn. And if he was to be sworn to testify under oath which one of them it was that actually clipped her cow, well, he would have to say that the minute he saw that car coming toward him—

Going ninety miles an hour if it was going a one, Mrs. Shumlin said.

—he had winched his eyes and never opened them again until—

“Hugo?” said Mrs. Shumlin.

She had stopped. Had planted her feet wide apart and stood with her fists on her hips waiting for Hugo to hush.

He concluded by saying that all he meant to say was that while he couldn't honestly swear it wasn't him that had hit her cow, he couldn't honestly swear it was, either.

“Hugo?”

“Yes'm?”

“Hugo, can you afford to buy me another cow?”

“Ma'am?”

“Hugo, have you got a cow of your own?”

“What we do,” said Hugo—

“I ought to have known better than to even ask,” said Mrs. Shumlin.

“What we do, we've got a neighbor with a cow that gives more than they can use so we buy ours off of him,” said Hugo.

Mrs. Shumlin said she just felt sorry for that little wife of his. She would be ashamed of herself if she was him, having to have a woman show him how to be a man. Now what?

Nothing. He had been just fixing to say maybe it would be better if they was to wait and come back again some other time because with all these cars here it looked to him like they were throwing a party or something.

Well they were fixing to have a couple of uninvited guests. Now then, he was to march right up to the front door, not go sneaking around to the back, she said, shaking the tuft of Trixie's tail at him, and call his man out—it was that Lester that he wanted—and have it out with him. Hear?