Authors: Davis Grubb
They're saying out there, she whispered, that any boy who goes with me is cursed. All the people out there tonight in Adena's pantries over midnight milk and cookies—in
their holy, married bedrooms—they're saying that any boy who goes with the Sheriff's oldest girl is bound headlong for a bad, sad end. Why, Jason? Why do they lie? Why do they blame Papa, Jason?
No one blames him, Jill, he said, covering her hand with his fingers and feeling it quiver wonderfully beneath that fresh, lovely touch so new and strange to his flesh. No one does.
You swear that you don't, Jason? she said like a child.
I swear.
And you didn't mean anything?—you didn't—you weren't hinting like they are at something awful about my papa?
I swear I was not, Jill.
Then she was still a spell more, while he watched her in that dark honey dusklight: watching her slender fingers clasp and unclasp, clasp and unclasp on the table before her shabby coat sleeves. Beyond in the lobby someone thumped and scuffled, slipshod and stumbling sloven-footed on the stoop and the big door slammed, setting the water tumblers behind the counter to chattering like glass gossips upon their shelves. Jill took in a deep breath of braveness, caught her breath up sharp as if at some half-seen memory, her eyes closed and her head tilted a little to one side in a clenched squint of effort to define the shape among the mists of her fears.
Sometimes, she said. Sometimes, Jason, I half-remember— sometimes I can almost see something— feel something, someone—a face, a hand—something, someone up there on the Mound that night. And then—well, it's just no use—it's not there. It's like a picture—a dark, colored picture. But somehow some of the picture has been washed away. Scratched out with soap and scouring steel wool. I think—I think if I could see—could make myself remember that part of the picture—I think I'd know who killed Cole.
Don't try now, he said in kindness, gently. There'll be time. Remembering's a thing that sometimes can't be made to come back.
No, wait, she said in a sharp whisper. I can hear that flat —that awful—jarring crack and I can see—I can see—
Someone's silhouette filled suddenly the yellow door into the lobby. It swayed and sobbed a little, faceless and massive, staggered and shouldered hard into the door frame with a creak of old woodwork and a tinkling, muffled gibberish of hidden crystals striking together somewhere in the folds of the great, ill-fitted overcoat. It was Matthew Hood,
drunk as old Noah, and close to seeing every pair of beasts within the mad, sad ark of his proud, uptilted head, weathering the floods beneath it: laughing a little, then a soft snatch of hymn, then a sob and the quiet, dreadful laugh more sad than ever the sob could have been.
My children, he announced with the plodding, careful articulation of drunk men who must keep the secret of their drunkenness from others not so much as from themselves. My young and beautiful lover-children. Shhhhh! Don't fret now! Don't think I've come to—hssp!—to intrude. Shhh. Now don't get up. I just stopped a second on my way upstairs to bed. Bed bed bed. I was setting yonder in the fog sipping my tonic—my medicine, that is—I heard that sweet old church tune softly through the doors. Great Maker, I says to me. Great Maker, is there dead men singing high up yonder in the fog? And then I seen the familiar shape and shadows of you two in here. And I sat a spell more in the—-hssp —the—the fog—and had me a sip more of my tonic and I thought it was a good world maybe. Just maybe. A good world maybe and all the bad things undone like ropes untied—d'you see?—ropes untied. Lovers—darling young lovers knotted together in the dark, praising Great Maker Him in the dark. I had to stop and see you plain and tell you: Thank you.
He bowed precariously, with the learned caution of men often pitched headlong; bending from the waist, keeping his legs planted apart, his shoes askew but steady on his numbed feet.
—thank you, my dears, for minding me that there is still —that there are still lovers. That there is still Love in this knotty world—Oh, Great Maker, thanks to you, God, for that. And thanks to you, my dears. My child-lovers. Was that you singing? So many voices. Wonderful—wonderful! "Abide with Me." Wonder-ful.
He hiccupped again and his fingers of frailest, china-pale delicacy reached up to brush certain droplets of fog or perhaps the exudation of some deeper mists behind a forehead which was pale and broad as a greasy soup platter beneath the shabby havoc of unkempt gray-brown hair. He hunched a little and flapped his arms out, letting them fall with a slap to his sides and again that remote chink of little glass among the threadbare drape of his old cloak. It was a gesture of beholdenness beforehand, a petition of irresistible hungering.
Might I just set a spell?—a span of no more than three
minutes so that I can go up yonder to my bed with my head remembering the sight of child-lovers here? There now! Til fetch out my Elgin and keep time on myself. Three minutes. Not a second more.
He fumbled struggling in the vast, ragged woolen snarl of his cloak, his glove-tight, bulged and bursting suit, feeling for the watch to fetch it out.
It's all right, Mister Hood, said Jason. You're not intruding. I have to get Jill home in half an hour. We were just talking.
Great Maker, my dears, you have the most God-almighty sweet singing voices! he cried out. Sitting out yonder in the fog—having my midnight tonic, as it were—I heard you plain. Angels of the souls of dead men high up yonder in the fogs, I thought, and it scared me some to think of angels who could sing so sweet and all their poor throats broken. But Heaven patches up all things, eh? Throats, eh? The Great Maker like a toy-man mending his lost and shattered dolls. Religion. Ah, it's a good thing to see in young folks in these knotty, twisted times. Where did you learn to sing that sweet? "Abide with me—amid the encircling—" Which encircles what? I never can mind the rest—that kind, old gospel tune. Encircling? No matter. An old man wanders on and on because he dreads it when the gas is twisted out like the light of an eye and the dark is cold as the quilt round his neck. Used up—thrown out. The Board—the damned Board! Excuse me, Miss Jill. Please pardon my loose, coarse tongue, Master Cole.
Jason could not look at Jill, his eyes wanting to see her face, to tell them that it was all right, not to be afraid: that an old man like drunk, mad Matthew Hood might not know the quick from the dead in the dusk of a darkness in which he had so often seen another boy's long gone face. Matthew Hood for an instant turned into himself, wound up and inward like a sea-creature in the momentary nautilus of his crusty grief.
Do you know what I hate? said the old hangman. Would you care to know? The power companies, that's what I hate! The electric! They're crawling through this lovely valley like an octopus. Wires. Wires. Ain't that so, Cole Blake? Wires every which where! Eh, Cole?
Mister Hood, he said, for Jill's sake he told himself, but deep down for his own. I'm Jason Hunnicutt. Cole Blake passed away.
Oh? Ahh! he mused, his lovely fingers pinching his gray, grieving lips together in a pout of thoughtfulness. Now, I am really saddened. When did it happen, boy?
Jason laid out his hand and squeezed Jill's iced and fist-clenched knuckles.
Oh, I sleep badly badly badly, mumbled the old hangman. Badly, indeed. That's no worry of yours, I know. D'you mind my saying I sleep badly, Master Cole?
No, Mister Hood, said Jason. I'm sorry.
Did I hear you—did you just say something recently—I mean a moment back to the effect that young Jase Hunnicutt was—didn't you just say it, I mean, that he was sick in bed and at Death's Door?
I'm Jason Hunnicutt, Mister Hood, he said.
The vast head shot forward two inches, the big frame tinkled and tottered, steadying itself, the eyes of the old hangman squinted and strove to pierce the dark.
Why, no, boy. I know you. You're Cole—Master Cole Blake. And you. Miss Jill. No, boy. And I want it said for the record here and now, Master Cole and Miss Jill Alt that you are sweet singing children.
He straightened, shoulders thrust back like a sergeant, his big head high and his girl-hands laced primly before him: a child about to confess a theft of apples.
I Ued to you, he said. And I loathe and abominate untruth. It wasn't medicine I was a-sipping out yonder on the steps. I am drunk.
It's all right, Mister Hood, Jason said.
Thank you. Master Cole, I thank you. But it is not all right. I lied to you. Tonic, I said. Medicine, I said. Not medicine. Not tonic. Booze, my babies, booze! I am staggering drunk and soused as a trough-foundered percheron. And for that —for the lie—I apologize. Accepted?
It's all right, Mister Hood, Jason said. Everybody—sometimes—
Shouldn't, said the old man. Nobody anytime shouldn't. And most especially shouldn't a man with a lifetime of honored and artistic journeyman skills behind him—a man once looked up to—no, I shouldn't put it so. Looked down to, I will say. What I mean to convey to you is that the—the patrons of my art, so to speak, looked down to me at the very moment they were looking up. Up at the Great Maker. Do I convey my meaning? It's a most contrary thing to shape into sensible and poetic speech, don't you agree? And I am drunk.
And, Great Maker, forgive me that. I drink seldom. I do it few and far between. And they're only little drinks— little bottles—see?
And with that he thrust his fingers gingerly into either pocket of his coat and fetched out four miniatures of whiskey, club-car size, and he swayed a little with again that vast, bandaged, secret chinking touch of glass upon glass; his pockets in overcoat, vest, jacket, trousers were sagging with them: a good three dozen, to say the least, his whole vast, absurd vestments, stuffed and hoarded with these little whiskey bottles like draperies in the shoddy drawing room of an insane and alcoholic midget.
My older sister Viney, he confided, with a Dresden forefinger holding fast to one of the bottles while, dextrously, he touched a fingernail secretly to his lips. She sends them to me every two months from Baltimore, Maryland, packed amongst medicinal cotton in a fruitcake box. Viney's good. When the Board first fired me for the Chair I went and stayed with Viney in Baltimore for two whole drunken, shameful months. And whilst there it come upon me that if ever I was to take hold of my soul again it would mean giving up the Big Bottle forever. Just one of these little ones —enough to carry me along when the shivers come over me and shook me like a tree worried in a wind of bitterness and remembered ingratitude. Master Cole Blake, mind this! If ever the Drink takes hold of you—if ever, I say, and may the Great Maker forbid it ever should—half the battle's licked when you put forever away from your hand the Big Bottle and learn to get along with one of these nice tinies tucked in your vest. See? Sometimes you don't want it at all—just knowing it's there's enough. See? One or two or three of these little tinies. Oh, the darlings. There's not enough in one to make a babychild tipsy.
He sobbed suddenly and leaned his face into his hands and one of the tinies fell to burst and tinkle: a splatter of drink and diamonds across his shoes.
Sometimes, he chuckled, I forget. This pocket—that pocket! Blast the pockets to tarnation!—all the pockets!— sometimes I forget which pocket my tiny is in and I fetch another and forget it and another. Till in the end I'm nothing more than a bagful of glass and drunk past remembering my pockets from my hat. Drink! Oh, I should know better. Viney told me. She prays and I thank the Great Maker that she does pray because it seems the thirst only
seizes me every few months or so with nothing in between to do but think and remember. Remembering what? Remembering my lost life, that's what! Remembering man's ingratitude to man, is what! And sometimes—sometimes remembering poor Buddy and knowing that it was drink that blinded his sense, conscience, mind and seized his poor senseless, conscienceless, mindless hand and put a gun in it and told him to shoot that poor harness-maker's wife in Cameron more than twenty years ago. A man has to unburden his memory now and then and again. Buddy hanged. And it was my hand hanged him. And it was drink that should have stood before the bar and heard the sentence of judgment if there was a true justice to this knotty world. The Drink. The Big Bottle. Couldn't I guess it plain from Buddy? Couldn't I read it plain in my own brother—my mother's oldest child? Well, she never forgave me. I am a much maligned man, my darlings—a misunderstood man. Can you guess now why I need my night of many many tinies ever few months or so?
But neither of them could answer: Jason cold-sweating and the bowed figure of Jill, silent now beyond the speech of grief or horror, clenching her blue knuckles in the neon's loveless dusk.
That's why, concluded the old hangman. That's why, I reckon, I taken the job of sexton—janitor, too—at the First Protestant Episcopal Church when Doctor Godd and the members offered it. Sometimes I think there's some among them that know the clean, good work I've always tried to do in the old days before the Board threw me away like a wind-broke horse to the boneyard. I was God-fearing as a child back in St. Louis from whencet I come to this fine state to do my work with the ropes. It's nice to be used again— needed again. And ropes again! Ropes to toll the bells! And sometimes when I sweep up in the Sunday dusks before the eight o'clock service it's like I'm sweeping up God's sinners for the dustpan. Like I used to do. Don't hangmen sweep the corners clean in this twisted, knotty world? Great Maker, what sweet singers you two make. Cole—Master Cole Blake, there's only one tenor I ever heard could beat yours and that was my brother—mother's oldest—Buddy Hood.
He sighed and sat a moment with his head nodding and tiien chuckled a profound, stomachy grunt of bitterness.
Great Maker, he whispered. This past master of one rope
now has sixteen. Sixteen! Think of that now. And each one with a bronze man on the end crying to the quiet Sabbath to make men heed the wrath of God and the justice of man. Oh, they hke me. Sometimes I think there's some among them—Doctor Godd, mind you, is also chaplain up yonder at the prison—well, they thank me. Even that one time he scolded me—he forgave—he understood. He didn't even speak of firing me. It was a Sabbath after a Saturday night when I'd had a little too many of the tinies in my pockets and I'd had a sip or two—not all, mind you—just a sip or two from each one of maybe thirty-five or forty of them. Oh, I wasn't really what a man might call drunk. I was what you might label—reminiscent! And homesick! So I done it. Doctor Godd forgave me. Rut there was many and many's the church-goer that morning that just couldn't seem to understand how a man homesick and a whole keyboard full of ropes and bells in front of him can get a notion in his fingers that nothing can shake loose till he's gone and done what those fingers have to do. And it was beautiful in its way—startling but beautiful, I may say— folks on their way to church on a soft, sweet morning in Easter Week and suddenly the bells in the Protestant Episcopal Church starts ringing out the "Saint Louis Blues." Missus Octavia Merkin who is choir leader was the one who started the drive that Monday to get me fired. Lord Great Maker, that pathetic old whistle-tit! It is my belief that church altos should be used only for the study and experimenting of medical science! And it is and has been for some fifteen years my careful and studied opinion that this so-called Missus Octavia Merkin is a morphadite. Forgive me, Miss Jill—Master Cole. I thank you again. Your sweet voices rising in the fogs of this knotty, troubled night will sing sweetly tonight in my dreams. I thank you. I'll sleep tonight! Ah, Great Maker, maybe no more tur'ble tur'ble nightmares of big, roped bronze bells swinging and roarin' their damned booming ding-dongdell chimes above my poor head sweatin' on the bolster—trying to hide 'neath the quilts!
Jason, his mind filled suddenly with the thunder of his own bells of judgment; the quick memory and sweet vision of friendship and love and loss, felt a surge of pity and a queer admiration for the old hangman.
I wish, he said, almost in spite of himself, and wholly heedless of the Jill in the dark between himself and the other man. I wish it was you that would be there to do the job, Mister Hood—I wish it was to be you when the time comes to hang the man that killed my friend.
Hang? Hang who? Lord Maker, Hood's hangin' days is done. Master Cole. Hang who, boy? Buddy, you say? No— Buddy was a good boy. It was the Big Bottle should have swung off the gallows that night. Hark now! Is there a bell swinging somewheres? No. Ah, thank the Great Maker. It's only the clock of Peace struck twelve!
Be proud of yourself, Mister Hood, said Jason. I say again that I wish it was your hand—your rope that would hang his murderer when time comes.
No, muttered the downcast head of Matthew Hood, his sloppy lips now gone fumbling, his chest bubbling like the pipe of the gaslight above the storm-stained wallpaper of his hemp-haunted room. No, he muttered bitterly. It will be the Electric, Master Cole. The chair. Thankless men! Ungrateful Great Maker, Lord forgive me! Time and progress won! The Board won! They don't deserve the skills of my breed any more! Yes! Hanging is too good for them!
Jason got up to help him to the lobby, to the broad steps, and the worn mahogany banister rail.
Still maybe. Mister Hood, Jason said in a spurt of reassuring inspiration. Maybe he'll be caught, tried and get off clean, scot-free! Walking Adena streets in the end and mocking us all. Maybe then you can do the job! To a lamp post. Mister Hood. To the good, strong limb of a high sycamore!
Matthew Hood turned on the bottom step, stared hard, focusing with delicate, washy imprecision at the boy's face. He snatched his sleeve from Jason's touch, and pulled back against the newel post.
That's lawless talk! he snapped soberly. Master Cole, you make me ashamed for you! Lawless. A lamp post? A tree? Why, boy, shame on you. I'm purely disappointed! What's the earth without Law! No! No, by Judas, never that. Why, I'd rather know I'd never knot another noose than harbor such a fancy. Lamp? Tree? No! A man shouldn't never swing till the judge and the people and the doctor and the God-fearing preacher makes it all fair and right and clean! He snuffled, straightened, cast upon Jason one last pitying, condemnatory eye of bloodshot indictment and turned to go laboring up the stairway, still fiercely, stiffly upright with that precarious, tilt-wary caution of the drunken, his little hand clawing and stabbing along the painted rail;
moving with queasy, upright care of ropewalkers who balance baskets of eggs upon their heads, while from his preposterous out-sized overcoat there came murmuring the cut-glass tinkle and clink of the myriad tinies: he sounded like an enormous Victorian chandelier ascending to some rococo paradise of useless and discarded ornaments: the parlor junkshop of a dusty crystalled Valhalla. When Jason turned he saw the weary figure of Jill waiting for him beyond the lobby window in the milk of the mists.
Jason stood Jill on the time-scooped dip of the stone threshold of the house on Water Street. He could smell her sweetness mingling with the many and curious herbal sweetnesses of the gardens: the death of the rose and the scent of her and something from Dede Moonshine's tangled maze of dooryard, too: wisteria or the wisping reek of jasmine spilling through the dark, and that smell, that compost of scents became more than a sense in his nostrils, became that emotion which is the only truth any of us ever carries away from great and secret encounters which, in a twinkling, change or sanctify or curse the fifty or sixty years of life yet left to us. Jason fell in love as haplessly as if, had he gone stumbling twelve feet further back into the Persian-rug pattern of Dede Moonshine's dark, wild, gardened yard he would have fallen into her cistern by the rose of Sharon. She kept a massive oak board covering across that cistern and held that down with a thirty-pound sandstone as if the latter were a paperweight to keep the oak lid from blowing away. That night she had dragged off both stone and lid and left the cistern wide agaping in the dangerous and enchanted darkness of her spicy dooryard jungle so that any fresh night prowlers were sure to tumble in and she, hearing the curse, ultimate splash, and hollow, muddy cries, would holler for neighbors to come fetch him out: a precaution of some pantry risk, to be sure, inasmuch as Dede was certain that an intruder of Scotch-Irish, English or valley German ancestry would not hurt anything, whereas a Spaniard or Polack would taint the cistern's sweet store of hoarded rains forever and gone. Dede Moonshine was a wild-hearted gambler.
And though that night the cistern would hold no one, Jason's heart was tumbling full of Jill. He decided not to kiss her. It had nothing to do with the artifices of courtship, was in no way concerned with whether Jill wanted him to kiss
her or not, first date or thirtieth date whatever. It had to do with the thing that moment of scents had whipped together in his mind: an alchemist's trick with smidgens of this and the other and that in the enchanted, alembic of his heart which now felt enormous as the night, the dark, the mist itself. He wanted to keep hold of this strange and beautiful rush of things inside him: his blood, it seemed, reversing its course suddenly and running in playful pellmell backwards to his heart, and his breath come up short and gasping like after a belly punch in boxing, but without that pain. He wanted to take the feeling home and look at it in the dark of his bedroom, as once he had fetched home a blazing, cold chunk of forest stump, cold-burning like the moon with the heatless light of foxfire. How long ago, he could not imagine, although it was a bare second past, she had said to him: I'm glad we were together tonight, Jason.
He said, I am glad too, Jill.
And bit his lip because it seemed there might have been something much more clever and poetic to be said if only he had thought a minute.
I'm sorry about poor Mister Hood, he said.
I thought you were real kind, she said. I'm g^ad he came in tonight and carried on that way, Jason. I never thought of you as a really understanding person. I mean kind like that, Jason. It made me—you reminded me of things in Cole.
Oh, Lord, Jill. Me! No. Not like Colel
Yes, she said, and it had not mattered what he had decided about not kissing her and he was not yet old enough to know that it never matters anyway, because she bent forward suddenly, the flower-pale heart-shape of her face tilting a little, and put her lips against his. He did not move. Not even his lips moved because hers did not move and that somehow all the more moving, more stunning with the wild astonishment of wonder's wine: her lips a little wet and the moistness half her and half the mists and the smell closer and blowing sweeter: the httle hurricane thunder of their breaths between their upper lips and the scent of her hair and the soul of the dead rose risen and the mist's scent, too, wisteria or jasmine or whatever and even the smell of himself: an ozone. She kept her lips against his, very still, breathing very still as if it were an effort to do that, and then her whole mouth shivered and something moaned so deep within her that he thought it was not in her but
a voice somewhere behind them both, across the waters, among the bobbhng oil lamps of the frog-gigging skiffs. He wanted her to keep her mouth there, her lips against his lips, her smell making the magic things be all round him in the night which now he filled. But she made that low, lorn moan again and suddenly drew back and stood above him on the stoop, her eyes seeming to see beyond the dark, the mists, her fingers of one hand stroking his hair as if it were something fresh and treasured that she must touch just now and never touch again.
He wondered what he had done; he thought perhaps she had guessed when, for an instant, he had remembered and forced from his mind the vision and sensation remembered of another mouth: Cristi's—open and wild beneath him among the tangled violet-reeking pillow of her little room; her tongue was a craziness in his mouth, like a creature independent of the rest of her, gone amok in wild search for his tongue and in the end, always, the muffled, groaning shriek in her throat and her white teeth deep in the subsiding flesh of his thrusting shoulders, and all of them both like a rocking chair run down. This kiss scarcely like that kiss, this row of beautiful teeth behind these lips not like those of Cristi's however beautiful once they may have seemed. Jill. Cristi. The dark and the light. The night, the morning. The moon—the noonday. Would he ever, could he ever want to do that to her: to the moon, the dark one, the night one, the girl of scents and praise-causing and love Hke a new moon, sickle-thin and frail as curl of soft silver whittled from a spoon. He thought of the embarrassment it was to stand up at a table to greet her when Cristi appeared in the doorway of Deke Virgin's Lunch because every man in the place would look at him and know the way it was with him and Cristi. Though they might have spent an afternoon in August up in the swelter and cologne of her room above the drugstore, four hours of tooth and tongue and lip and the insatiate twined, grinding frolic of bounding hip and rollicking loin, a madness of deep though always depthless pleasure, yet it was as if he were striving to dipper out the ocean of all ecstasy with a golden dessert spoon, and fall at last spent, the nearest, sweetest death this side of death herself or of her kind kinswoman sleep; done, finished, drained as a child's sucked orange—an afternoon of this kind of brass-bed music like a concert of soprano wailing above the backing of a hundred spring orchestra.
total exhaustion. And always when you had done your own man's best to banish it somehow for more than your own pleasure: rather for your own protection, more even than merely that: for the protection of all boys and men, males anywhere within wind of that crazy she-spoor. It was an emanation, an essence, which spoke one word: Come. And he thought often that had her body chosen any other idiom to express this particular petition— in speech, perhaps, or by intimate exposure of her body—she would have been sent away to prison for the rest of her Ufe and even then would have driven her warders mad or watched them waste away in happy, sated comas.
He stood now scarcely finding it possible to believe that this loveliness half-visible in the dark above Dede Moonshine's trelliced stone stoop was the sister of Cristi. Time, like his blood, was running the wrong way, too. Hadn't she just said something to him about his being kind? Like Cole? And hadn't he said some sort of modest No? But that seemed to have been words uttered in a time so ancient; older than the river. But still, for all that, only an astonished breath ago. There are no clocks in the room of love.