September Song (2 page)

“I was emancipated from school. Until then I had been like a chick trying to peck its way out of its shell. On our tour we never stayed in one spot long enough for the local authorities to seize me and send me back to my textbooks. I was saddened to say goodbye to Mammy but glad to see the last of Josh. While I was slaving away at compulsory education he was a junior high school dropout and his color freed him from the attentions of the truant officer. How he did swagger in his liberty and idleness! He had become a bully and, I regret to say, a bigot. Mind you, I blame his prejudice on environment, not heredity, for a more tolerant person than his mother could not be found. He and I were raised as equals. When she weaned me she shut off Josh's tap too. If in fact she showed any partiality it was toward me because, knowing I had no claim on her maternity, I never sassed her.

“At first I was only my father's assistant. Like the organ-grinder's monkey. I tossed the glass balls into the air, he burst them. I set up the plaques on which, in bulletholes, he drew the cartoon characters, the kitchen matches he lighted with a shot and the candles he snuffed shooting backwards over his shoulder using a mirror, the nails he drove all the way into the board. I passed the hat after the show was over. Even as nothing more than his helper I was the starry-eyed envy of every boy in our audience.

“But, disappointed by the size of the crowds we drew and in our gate receipts, my father had an inspiration. I went into training.

“I thought I had worked hard in school. No little musical prodigy deprived of a normal childhood by practicing his instrument from dawn to dusk ever applied himself more diligently than I did to that .22 rifle. We were now a father-and-son act. A comparison with the Mozarts,
père et fils
, or with the elder Picasso's giving his son his paintbrushes would not be amiss.

“The times were bad and getting worse by the day. Those were the Depression years and our territory was the Dust Bowl. We played to thin crowds and they were composed of dirt farmers, small-town tradesmen. We couldn't charge admission because we performed in cow pastures. Sometimes when I passed the hat afterwards we took in barely enough to pay for our ammunition.

“Now there was never any doubt that I was the star attraction of our show. Not because I was a better shot than my father but because I was a prodigy. Although I was fourteen, owing to my stunted development I passed for eleven. I was the boy wonder of the trick-shot circuit. So in looking for a way to improve our attendance it was natural that my father think of featuring me more prominently. To train for this we wintered down on the Rio Grande where the climate permitted me to practice nonstop. For I had to become not just a better shot than I already was—I had to become a perfect shot, no allowance for a miss. You will understand why when I tell you in a minute how I was billed.

“By spring I must have fired a hundred thousand rounds. I attribute my present hardness of hearing to all that persistent shooting. Sounded like an agitated woodpecker at work on my eardrums. We headed north. We went on as before drawing the bullethole pictures, striking matches, snuffing the candles, bursting the balls in the air, but the grand finale featured me as William Tell, Jr.

“Take it from one who knows, Miss, the biggest apple in the world looks mighty small when it's sitting on your father's head and you're drawing a bead on it from fifty feet away. Father had the utmost confidence in me and that bolstered my self-confidence, still—

“I can tell by your look of expectancy and dread that you have anticipated my dénouement. Yes, alas, we tempted fate once too often. It caught up with us on a hot day in a hayfield outside Wichita Falls. After the fatal shot I got to him just in time to hear my father say, ‘Son, it was not your fault.'

“My career as a trick-shot artist in shambles and I a self-made orphan twice over, hounded by guilt and remorse I joined the ranks of the homeless and became a drifter, fleeing from my memories yet compelled to tell my story to any and all who would listen. My wanderings were as driven and as aimless as those of eyeless old Oedipus only unlike him I was unattended by two devoted daughters. I was a teenage outcast. The account of my attempts to start life anew—well, you've got a deadline to meet. Let two stand for the lot. I got to be a good enough pool shark to take in the small-town players, fill my pockets with cash, get cocky, challenge the hustlers, and lose. My hopes of becoming the next Benny Goodman and forming a jazz band were disappointed when, after six months' dedication to the instrument, I was forced to acknowledge that I was not progressing because for me one note was one beat and one beat one note.

“And so, having failed at everything else I had tried my hand at, I took up writing.

“If I thought I had worked hard in school and at trick-shooting—!”

“Do you think,” asked his wife when the reporter had departed, “that young woman believed a word of that rigamarole?”

“I thought I made it quite convincing. I was breaking my heart.”

“You've had a sad enough life. You've told me about your poverty-stricken childhood. You've described to me with tears in your eyes watching your poor father die from his injuries in that automobile accident. You've told me about how they put your mother on roller skates so she could fill the mail orders faster at the Sears, Roebuck warehouse in Dallas, struggling to support the two of you on eleven dollars a week's pay. What satisfaction do you get out of making up for yourself an even worse life than the one you've had?”

“Makes mine more tolerable. And as long as I can make up one I'm still here.”

“But what are you going to say to people who know you when that yarn appears in print?”

“I won't be here.” And he then explained to her what the reporter's assignment was. “In the trade they're called ‘ghouls' or ‘buzzards.' She was here to gather material for what they call an ‘advance obituary.' Somebody's got to do it, but it is dirty work. What I didn't tell her was my last words.”

“Oh, you've got them ready, have you?”

“Mmh.”

“What are they?”

“They're the last words of a writer: ‘In that case, I've got nothing more to say.'”

The Farmer's Daughter

T
HERE WAS NOBODY TRAVELING
on the road nor working in the fields alongside to see the man fall off the telephone pole, for the day was the Fourth of July and the farmfolks had all gone into town for the celebrations. He had been replacing broken insulators on which boys liked to practice their marksmanship. He had just loosened his safety belt to descend. He fell without a cry, for he was already unconscious, having worked on to finish this job without going down to retrieve his fallen hat, something anybody should have known better than to do in the blaze of a Texas midsummer day, and had had a sunstroke. When he hit the ground he seemed to explode, the powdery dust bursting about him in a puff. He fell on his right leg, which broke with a crunch like a soda cracker. The climbing spur on his twisted foot, ripping through his trousers, tore the calf of his other leg. His head struck the base of the pole hard enough to make the crossarm quiver.

In a last convulsive movement before falling the man had clutched the wire. It broke where he had spliced it, the loose ends snapping back toward the adjacent poles fifty yards away on both sides. The birds perched upon the wire bounced into the air on the wave of the shock, twittering at the disturbance. As the vibration ceased and the ends of the wire dangled motionless, they flew back and alighted again. The disconnected pole stood like a cross above the prostrate figure.

The young man lay face up in the glare of the sun, yet he did not sweat. On the contrary, the sweat bathing his face when he fell, that icy eruption which comes, in sunstroke, as all the lights and darks are reversed and the world becomes a photographic negative, just before the loss of consciousness, had quickly dried, and his face, streaked with dirt, was now unnaturally cool-looking. His leg skewed in an inconceivable direction. His palms, black with creosote from the pole, were turned upwards as though in supplication. His breathing was so shallow his chest barely rose.

It was after noon when the man fell. His lunch pail sat at the base of the pole. Beside it and his fallen hat lay the book, a thick volume entitled
Torts
, which he had read while eating. A few grasshoppers clicked in the air. A terrapin, having struggled across the road only to come up against the wheel of the telephone company truck, turned and dragged itself back again. The man's face drained a shade paler and his jaw sagged, causing his mouth to gape.

The shadow of the pole lengthened and slowly semicircled, a sundial needle, throughout the long afternoon. Occasionally the man's throat commenced to work, trying to swallow. His eyelids opened, fluttered, then swooned shut again. His chest expanded, he gasped, and from his depths came a thick-tongued groan, a sound palateless and glottal such as deaf-mutes make.

From time to time the two-way radio in the truck crackled to life and squawked, “Jeff Duncan. Come in. Where are you, Jeff Duncan?”

After nightfall the holiday fireworks in the town erupted. Several times the injured man regained consciousness, only to lose it again shortly, which was merciful. For, as he would later tell his rescuers, it seemed to him that the explosions and the bursts of light were inside his head.

Cliff and Beth Etheridge took a proprietary interest in the young man whom they had found so badly injured, whose life they may have saved, all the more so when they learned that he was alone in the world, orphaned in his infancy. Having lost her mother just three years earlier, Beth marveled at anyone's courage and resourcefulness in bringing himself up without one. No breast to nurse at, none to cry upon! Their day's work done, father and daughter drove every evening to the hospital, their patient's only visitors.

The broken leg—broken in three places—remained in splints and a cast; it would forevermore be shorter than its mate. But the bandages had been removed from his head, and his hair, shorn for surgery, was an inch long, his beard twice that length, when the doctor said, “He could go home now, if he had a home to go to. He can't look after himself, but he doesn't have to stay here. And his workman's compensation is soon coming to an end.” Cliff Etheridge had no need to confer with his daughter. “He's got a home with us,” said Cliff.

The discharged patient was taken by ambulance to the farm, there carried inside on a stretcher. The Etheridges led the way in the pickup, bringing with them a wheelchair and crutches lent by the hospital. A bouquet awaited their guest and the television set had been moved into his room. Such kindness—not just from strangers, for everybody was a stranger to Jeff Duncan—left him tongue-tied. He was like a stray cat, grateful but mistrustful on being taken in, housed and petted.

The door to his room was left open for Beth to hear his call. At first, still on painkillers, he slept much of the day. She went about her housework noiselessly, peeking in on her patient from time to time, never without a pang of pity, sometimes a tear, for his injuries and for his lifelong loneliness, and a feeling of gratitude for being able to nurse him. Her father's unhesitating hospitality, though it was just what was to be expected of him, also produced an occasional tear, as did his certainty that she would concur. Later, when her patient was more alert, she felt called upon to sit with him, though she worried over what she might say that would interest a person so serious-minded and so well educated. Daytime television did not.

She was his only company, for at this season her father was in the fields from dawn to dusk. She wanted her patient to feel at home, welcome, not beholden. She wanted to make up for all the neglect he had endured. She looked in on him every few minutes, for he was so undemanding she had to thrust her attentions upon him. She had all but to woo him. Having been made to sit up and beg for every scrap of kindness, he did not bite the hand that fed him, but neither did he lick it.

“You've been to college,” she said admiringly.

“You have to in order to get into law school,” he said.

“I've never known anybody who's been to college,” she said.

“You have if you've ever gone to a doctor or a lawyer,” he said.

“We had the doctors with my poor mother,” she said sadly. “But—knock wood—we've never had to have a lawyer, thank goodness. Oh! I didn't mean that the way it sounded.” And she blushed.

“I hope you never have need of one. But if you ever do, call on me. Just manage to keep out of trouble for another few years. Then I'll get you out of any scrape.”

“I suppose you speak French,” she said.

“I studied it in school,” he said somewhat warily. “Why?”

“To me being able to speak another language is like being given an extra life. I've heard it said that every educated person speaks French.”

“I have never had much use for mine. But then, I never expected to.” It was an admission that caused him some embarrassment.

“Oh,” she said impatiently, “does everything have to be useful? Can't some things just be beautiful? I was planning to take it in my junior year but when Mom died I had to drop out of school to look after Dad. I wouldn't have had anybody to speak it with, but that, if you can believe it, was one of my reasons for wanting to know it. It would have been something all my own. I might have written my diary in it. I expect you think that's silly.”

He looked at her so closely and for so long that she said, “What is the matter?”

“What you just said,” he said. “You might have been speaking for me.”

Studying French had been his one deviation from the straight and narrow path he plodded down—or rather up. He ought instead to have elected Spanish. He might in time have some Spanish-speaking clients. But he wanted to know a language unknown to anybody around him, to belong to a select, almost a secret society. Institutionalized all his life, he had never known privacy. His very name seemed something conferred upon him for the convenience of his keepers. “I suppose you think that's silly,” he said.