Stories of Erskine Caldwell (39 page)

I had been sitting on the porch steps for nearly an hour when my older sister came to the door and called me.

“We have a job for you, Frank,” Nancy said. “Mother wants you to come to the kitchen before you leave the house. Now, don’t forget and go away.”

I told her I would come right away. I was thinking then how much the surprise would mean to Rachel, and I did forget about the job waiting for me in the kitchen for nearly half an hour. It was then almost time for me to meet Rachel at the hydrant, and I jumped up and ran to the kitchen to finish the task as quickly as I could.

When I reached the kitchen, Nancy handed me a small round box and told me to open it and sprinkle the powder in the garbage can. I had heard my mother talking about the way rats were getting into the garbage, so I went down to the back gate with the box without stopping to talk about it. As soon as I had sprinkled the powder on the refuse, I ran back into the house, found my cap, and ran down the street. I was angry with my sister for causing me to be late in meeting Rachel, even though the fault was my own for not having done the task sooner. I was certain, though, that Rachel would wait for me, even if I was a few minutes late in getting to the hydrant. I could not believe that she would come to the hydrant and leave immediately.

I had gone a dozen yards or more when I heard my mother calling me. I stopped unsteadily in my tracks.

“I’m going to the movies,” I told her. “I’ll be back soon.”

“All right, Frank,” she said. “I was afraid you were going downtown or somewhere like that. Come home as soon as you can.”

I ran a few steps and stopped. I was so afraid that she would make me stay at home if I told her that I was going downtown that I did not know what to do. I had never told her a lie, and I could not make myself start then. I looked back, and she was standing on the steps looking at me.

“Mother, I am going downtown,” I pleaded, “but I’ll be back early.”

Before she could call me again, I ran with all my might down the street, around the corner, and raced to the hydrant at the alley. Rachel was not within sight until I had reached it and had stood for a moment panting and blowing with excitement and exertion.

She was there though, waiting for me beside the fence, and she said she had just got there the second before. After we had started towards the corner where the drugstore was, I took the money from my watch pocket and showed it to her. She was even more excited than I had been when I first saw it. After she had looked at it awhile, and had felt it in the palm of her hand, I told her what I had planned for us to do that evening.

We heard a streetcar coming, and we ran to the corner just in time to get aboard. The ride downtown was too fast, even though it took us nearly half an hour to get there. We got off near the theaters.

First I had planned for us to go to a small restaurant, and later to a show. Just as we were passing a drugstore Rachel touched my arm.

“Please, Frank,” she said, “I’m awfully thirsty. Won’t you take me into that drugstore and get me a glass of water?”

“If you must have a drink right away, I will,” I said, “but can’t you wait a minute more? There’s a restaurant a few doors below here, and we can get a glass of water there while we’re waiting for our supper to be served. If we lose much time we won’t have the chance to see a complete show.”

“I’m afraid I can’t wait, Frank,” she said, clutching my arm. “Please — please get me a glass of water. Quick!”

We went into the drugstore and stood in front of the soda fountain. I asked the clerk for a glass of water. Rachel waited close beside me, clutching my arm tighter and tighter.

In front of us, against the wall, there was a large mirror. I could see ourselves plainly, but there was something about our reflection, especially Rachel’s, that I had never been aware of before. It’s true that we had never stood before a mirror until then, but I saw there something that had escaped me for a whole year. Rachel’s beauty was revealed in a way that only a large mirror can show. The curve of her cheeks and lips was beautiful as ever, and the symmetrical loveliness of her neck and arms was the same beauty I had worshiped hundreds of times before; but now for the first time I saw in the mirror before us a new and unrevealed charm. I strained my eyes once more against the surface of the mirror, and once again I saw there the new sinuous beauty of her body.

“Quick, Frank!” Rachel cried, clutching me desperately. “Water — please!”

I called to the clerk again, not looking, because I was afraid to take my eyes from the new beauty I saw in the mirror, I had never before seen such beauty in a girl. There was some mysterious reflection of light and shadow that had revealed the true loveliness of Rachel. The mirror had revealed in one short moment, like a flash of lightning in a dark room, the sinuous charm that had lain undiscovered and unseen during all the time I had known her. It was almost unbelievable that a woman, that Rachel, could possess such a new, and perhaps unique, beauty. My head reeled when the sensation enveloped me.

She clutched my arm again, breaking as one would a mirror, the reflection of my thoughts. The clerk had filled the glass with water and was handing it to her, but before he could place it in her hands, she had reached for it and had jerked it away from him. He looked as surprised as I was. Rachel had never before acted like that. Everything she did had always been perfect.

She grasped the glass as if she were squeezing it, and she swallowed the water in one gulp. Then she thrust the glass back towards the clerk, holding her throat with one hand, and screamed for more water. Before he could refill the glass, she had screamed again, even louder than before. People passing the door paused, and ran inside to see what was taking place. Others in the store ran up to us and stared at Rachel.

“What’s the matter, Rachel?” I begged her, catching her wrists and shaking her. “Rachel, what’s the matter?”

Rachel turned and looked at me. Her eyes were turned almost upside down, and her lips were swollen and dark. The expression on her face was horrible to see.

A prescription clerk came running towards us. He looked quickly at Rachel, and ran back to the rear of the store. By that time she had fallen forward against the marble fountain, and I caught her and held her to keep her from falling to the floor.

The prescription clerk again came running towards us, bringing a glass filled with a kind of milk-white fluid. He placed the glass to Rachel’s lips, and forced the liquid down her throat.

“I’m afraid it’s too late,” he said. “If we had known ten minutes sooner we could have saved her.”

“Too late?” I asked him. “Too late for what? What’s the matter with her?”

“She’s poisoned. It looks like rat poison to me. It’s probably that, though it may be some other kind.”

I could not believe anything that was being said, nor could I believe that what I saw was real.

Rachel did not respond to the antidote. She lay still in my arms, and her face was becoming more contorted and darker each moment.

“Quick! Back here!” the clerk said, shaking me.

Together we lifted her and ran with her to the rear of the store. The clerk had reached for a stomach pump, and was inserting the tube in her throat. Just as he was about to get the pump started, a physician ran between us and quickly examined Rachel. He stood up a moment later, motioning the other man and myself aside.

“It’s too late now,” he said. “We might have been able to save her half an hour ago, but there is no heart action now, and breathing has stopped. She must have taken a whole box of poison — rat poison, I guess. It has already reached her heart and blood.”

The clerk inserted the tube again and began working with the pump. The physician stood beside us all the time, giving instructions, but shaking his head. We forced stimulants down her throat and attempted to revive her by means of artificial respiration. During all of that time the doctor behind us was saying: “No, no. It’s of no use. She’s too far gone now. She’ll never live again. She has enough rat poison in her system to kill ten men.”

Some time later the ambulance came and took her away. I did not know where she was taken, and I did not try to find out. I sat in the little brown-paneled room surrounded by white-labeled bottles, looking at the prescription clerk who had tried so hard to save her. When at last I got up to go, the drugstore was empty save for one clerk who looked at me disinterestedly. Outside in the street there was no one except a few taxi drivers who never looked my way.

In a daze I started home through the deserted streets. The way was lonely, and tears blinded my eyes and I could not see the streets I walked on. I could not see the lights and shadows of the streets, but I could see with a painful clarity the picture of Rachel, in a huge mirror, bending over our garbage can, while the reflection of her beauty burned in my brain and in my heart.

(First published in
Clay
)

I
T WAS THE FIRST
time in his whole life that Orland Trask had done such a thing. Even Orland’s wife could not say afterward what had got into Orland to cause him to tell the strange man from the eastern country that he might remain in the house and stay for the night. And it was the last time. Both Orland and Emma knew better than to do a thing like that again.

The stranger from the eastern country knocked on the door that evening while Orland and his wife were eating supper. Orland heard him knock at the beginning, but he did not make an effort to get up from the table to answer a knocking on his door at suppertime.

“It’s nobody I want dealings with,” Orland said to his wife. “A man who would come knocking on a neighbor’s door at mealtime hadn’t ought to be listened to. Finns and Swedes are the only people I ever heard of who didn’t have better sense.”

“Maybe some of the Morrises are sick, Orland,” Emma said. “I’ll go see.”

“Stay sat in your seat, woman. Even those Morrises have got better sense than to take to illness at mealtime.”

The knocking became louder. The man out there was pounding on the storm door with a heavy oak walking stick.

Orland’s wife turned and looked out the window behind her. It was still snowing. The wind had died down with nightfall and the flakes were floating lightly against the panes.

The stranger at the door was impatient. He opened the storm door and banged on the panels of the house door and against the clapboards with the knotted end of his walking stick, and then he turned and beat against the door with the heels of his studded boots. He was making a lot of noise out there for a stranger, more noise than Orland had ever heard at his door.

“I’ll go see,” Emma said again, rising from her chair at the other end of the table.

“You stay sat in your seat, woman,” Orland told her.

Orland’s wife sank back into the chair, but barely had she settled herself when suddenly the door burst open with a gust of snow and icy wind, and the strange man stood there glaring at them. He was wearing black leather breeches and a red and green mackinaw and a brown fur cap pulled so far down over his ears that only his eyes and nose were showing. Snow had clung to his eyelashes and had frozen in long thin icicles that reached almost to his mouth. He stomped and blew, knocking the snow from his boots and shaking it from his cap and mackinaw. The heavy oak walking stick rapped as loudly as ever against the door sill. The man had not entered the house, but the door was open and the frosty air blew inside.

Orland’s back was turned to the door and the first that he knew of the man bursting in was when the icy blast of snow and wind struck him. His wife, Emma, had seen everything from the beginning, but she was afraid to say or to do anything until Orland turned around. She knew that a man who would burst open a door would not wait to be asked into the room.

“Holy Mother,” the stranger who stood in the doorway muttered, “the bones of my body are stiff as ice.”

He came into the room then, his mittens under his arm, and his hands full of snow that he had scooped from the doorstep. He shut the door with the heel of his boot and walked around the table at which Orland was sitting, and rubbed his hands with the new snow.

Orland had not said a word. He sat glaring at the heavily clothed man who had entered his house unbidden.

Emma asked the strange man, guardedly, if his hands were frozen. While she waited for him to answer, she glanced again at Orland.

“Holy Mother,” the stranger said again, “the bones of my body are stiff as ice.”

He continued to rub the new snow over the backs of his hands and around his fingers. He still did not go near the heater in the corner.

“My name is Phelps,” he said, “and I come from the eastern country of Maine. Down there the townsmen take in cold men from the frost at night.”

“Well,” Orland said, pushing back his chair from the table, “the townsmen in this part of the state have got the sense to stay indoors when they have no good business out in a frosty night.”

Emma went to the door and brought back a bowl of new snow. She placed the bowl on the carpet in front of the stranger who had said his name was Phelps. He began to unlace his boots while Emma got ready to take away the supper dishes.

“Freeze your toes, too?” Orland said. “Any man who would walk out and freeze his hands and feet ought to have them drop off with frostbite.”

Phelps removed his boots and socks and began rubbing his toes with the new snow.

“Am a poor man,” Phelps said, “and I’m not a house owner. My brother wrote me a letter to come over to New Hampshire and help him peel pulpwood. Started out walking, and I’ve got the high mountains yet to cross. Guess you will take me in and put me up for the night.”

Orland filled his pipe and struck a match before he answered. He then waited until Emma had gone into the kitchen again.

“The country would be a heap better off without fools like you walking through the snow and frost to New Hampshire in dead of winter, and it’s my duty to turn you out and let the frost finish its job of freezing you. That’s what I ought to do to a man who would come into a neighbor’s house without asking. The country has got too many like you in it now. But my wife would take on if I was to turn you out, so I’ll have to let you stay for the night. Will give you warning, though; the next time your brother writes you to come over to New Hampshire to help him peel pulpwood, it had better be before winter sets in. You won’t get aid here again. Won’t stand to have strangers coming into my house unbidden.”