Had I a Hundred Mouths (13 page)

The next morning early the white rooster was there, crowing in a glittering scale. Grandpa heard Marcy screaming at him, threatening, throwing little objects through the window at him. His son Watson did not seem disturbed at all; always it was Marcy. But still the rooster crowed. Grandpa went cold and trembling in his bed. He had not slept.

It was a rainy day, ashen and cold. By eight o'clock it had settled down to a steady gray pour. Mrs. Samuels did not bother with the morning dishes. She told Grandpa to answer all phone calls and tell them she was out in town. She took her place at the window and held the cord in her hand.

Grandpa was so quiet. He rolled himself about ever so gently and tried not to cough, frozen in his throat with fear and a feeling of havoc. All through the house, in every room, there was darkness and doom, the air of horror, slaughter and utter finish. He was so full of terror he could not breathe, only gasp, and he sat leaden in his terror. He thought he heard footsteps creeping upon him to choke his life out, or a hand to release some cord that would close down a heavy door before him and lock him out of his life forever. But he would not keep his eyes off Marcy. He sat in the doorway, half obscured, and peeked at her; he watched her like a hawk.

Mrs. Samuels sat by the window in a kind of ecstatic readiness. Everywhere in her was the urge to release the cord—even before the time to let it go, she was so passionately anxious. Sometimes she thought she could not trust her wrist, her fingers, they were so ready to let go, and then she changed the cord to the other hand. But her hands were so charged with their mission that they could have easily thrust a blade into a heart to kill it, or brought down mightily a hammer upon a head to shatter the skull in. Her hands had well and wantonly learned slaughter from her heart, had been thoroughly taught by it, as the heart whispers to its agents—hands, tongue, eyes—to do their action in their turn.

Once Grandpa saw her body start and tighten. She was poised like a huge cat, watching. He looked, mortified, through the window. It was a bird on the ground in the slate rain. Another time, because a dog ran across the yard, Mrs. Samuels jerked herself straight and thought, something comes, it is time.

And then it seemed there was a soft ringing in Grandpa's ears, almost like a delicate little jingle of bells or of thin glasses struck, and some secret thing told him in his heart that it was time. He saw Mrs. Samuels sure and powerful as a great beast, making certain, making ready without flinching. The white rooster was coming upon the grass.

He strode upon the watered grass all dripping with the rain, a tinkling sound all about him, the rain twinkling upon his feathers, forlorn and tortured. Yet even now there was a blaze of courage about him. He was meager and bedraggled. But he had a splendor in him. For now his glory came by being alone and lusterless in a beggar's world, and there is a time for every species to know lackluster and loneliness where there was brightness and a flocking together, since there is a change in the way creatures must go to find their ultimate station, whether they fall old and lose blitheness, ragged and lose elegance, lonely and lose love; and since there is a shifting in the levels of understanding. But there is something in each level for all creatures, pain or wisdom or despair, and never nothing. The white rooster was coming upon the grass.

Grandpa wheeled so slowly and so smoothly towards Mrs. Samuels that she could not tell he was moving, that not one board cracked in the floor. And the white rooster moved toward the trap, closer and closer he moved. When he saw the open door leading to a dry place strewn with grain, he went straight for it, a haven suddenly thrown up before his eye, a warm dry place with grain. When he got to the threshold of the trap and lifted his yellow claw to make the final step, Grandpa Samuels was so close to Mrs. Samuels that he could hear her passionate breath drawn in a kind of lust-panting. And when her heart must have said, “Let go!” to her fingers, and they tightened spasmodically so that the veins stood turgid blue in her arm, Grandpa Samuels struck at the top of her spine where the head flares down into the neck and there is a little stalk of bone, with a hunting knife he had kept for many years. There was no sound, only the sudden sliding of the cord as it made a dip and hung loose in Marcy Samuel's limp hand. Then Grandpa heard the quick clap of the door hitting the wooden floor of the trap outside, and a faint crumpling sound as of a dress dropped to the floor when Mrs. Samuels' blowsy head fell limp on her breast. Through the window Grandpa Samuels saw the white rooster leap pertly back from the trap when the door came down, a little frightened. And then he let out a peal of crowings in the rain and went away.

Grandpa sat silent for a moment and then said to Mrs. Samuels, “You will never die any other way, Marcy Samuels, my son's wife, you are meant to be done away with like this. With a hunting knife.”

And then he wheeled wildly away through the rooms of Marcy Samuels' house, feeling a madness all within him, being liberated, running free. He howled with laughter and rumbled like a runaway carriage through room and room, sometimes coughing in paroxysms. He rolled here and there in every room, destroying everything he could reach, he threw up pots and pans in the kitchen, was in the flour and sugar like a whirlwind, overturned chairs and ripped the upholstery in the living room until the stuffing flew in the air; and covered with straw and flour, white like a demented ghost, he flayed the bedroom wallpaper into hanging shreds; coughing and howling, he lashed and wrecked and razed until he thought he was bringing the very house down upon himself.

When Watson came home some minutes later to check on the success of his engine to trap the rooster and fully expecting to have to wring his neck, he saw at one look his house in such devastation that he thought a tornado had struck and demolished it inside, or that robbers had broken in. “Marcy! Marcy!” he called.

He found out why she did not call back when he discovered her by the window, cord in hand as though she had fallen asleep fishing.

“Papa! Papa!” he called.

But there was no calling back. In Grandpa's room Watson found the wheel chair with his father's wild dead body in it, his life stopped by some desperate struggle. There had obviously been a fierce spasm of coughing, for the big artery in his neck had burst and was still bubbling blood like a little red spring.

Then the neighbors all started coming in, having heard the uproar and gathered in the yard; and there was a dumbfoundedness in all their faces when they saw the ruins in Watson Samuels' house, and Watson Samuels standing there in the ruins unable to say a word to any of them to explain what had happened.

T
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ETTER
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EDARCHEST

Now this is about the lives of Old Mrs. Woman, Sister Sammye, and Little Pigeon, and how they formed a household; but first, about Old Mrs. Woman.

Her early name, and rightful one, was Lucille Purdy; and she had had a pretty good life until she started getting fat. Lucille's husband, a tall, good-looking man, with no stomach, a good chest and a deep voice, but he had evil lips—and whose mother had lived with him and Lucille from the day they married until the day she died in Lucille's arms—had begun to hurrah her some two or three years back, especially when he saw her in her nightgown. He had said, “Lucille, one thing I cannot stand and that is a fat woman; I'll leave you, swear to God, if ever you get fat. …” At first Lucille had laughed and said, “Don't worry, Mr. Purdy (no one ever heard her call him anything but Mr. Purdy—when his name was Duke), I won't; I have already given up bread and potatoes.”

Yet Lucille kept putting on weight, there seemed nothing she could do to stop the fat acoming; and with the constant increase in stoutness came a more and more nervousness. Naturally. Mr. Purdy's threat seemed to produce as much fat on Lucille as bread and potatoes. She noticed Mr. Purdy had begun to wear a moustache, which made him look younger and devilish, what with those lips, now with fringe on top.

When Mr. Purdy moved into a room to himself, Lucille cried alone in the master bedroom at night. Finally, one night she went into hysterics and accused Mr. Purdy of no longer caring about her. Mr. Purdy lost his temper and said, “You ought to kill yourself, Lucille, because you're slobby and no longer any good to anybody, and you're nervous and going crazy”; and he laid a revolver on the table by the side of Lucille's bed. She lay all night crying and thinking seriously of taking Mr. Purdy up on his suggestion to blow out her brains. But she prayed and remembered the sweet Christian memory of old Mother Purdy who had suffered out her life to the end and then died in her arms; and did not use the gun.

Then Lucille found out Mr. Purdy was carrying on with his stenographer. A voice advised her this on the telephone, and then Lucille called on the phone, made certain investigations, and found it all out to be true. She had hysterics and ordered Mr. Purdy out of the house. He gladly went, admitting everything, said he wanted a divorce, Lucille said she would not give him one to her dying day, he said that he was going to be married to the woman in question (who was twenty-one). And he reminded Lucille of the revolver, to take her out of her misery.

Lucille had a very hard time. She read books from the Normal for the dreams she was having, about white and black horses pulling her up mountains, and about her pulling the same horses up mountains. She was also riding the horses sometimes. The books helped her some (yet they didn't stop the dreams); but it was the minister of her church that really helped her—for a while. Helped her so much that she begun to have giggling and crying spells when she was in his office counseling with him. The minister was stumped as to what to do. The minister suggested that Lucille go into Sunday School work with children, and Lucille added that she loved working with children; so she did this. But other Sunday School teachers complained that Lucille was too fussy with the children, that she would humor them, then pinch them and even slap them, then cry over them. They asked her to take a rest.

It was while she was taking a rest, and crying most of the time, that she decided to go on with the divorce which she had so stubbornly opposed up to now. She took it to court, got the divorce, Mr. Purdy (still not married) left her the big house but took all the furniture out which was his by rights, he said, since it had been his mother's. This left Lucille's house completely bare except for the cedarchest which she had married Duke with, from her girlhood—she had been raised by two old women cousins, and an orphan since she was twelve.

Now Lucille was alone in her big empty house, and still putting on poundage. Her minister advised her to put her house up for sale and move into just a little board cottage somewhere, but the house was all Lucille had and she wanted to cling to it. She made her a cat pallet in the master bedroom and cooked on a gas burner she bought. She barely lived on the monthly allowance Mr. Purdy was compelled by law to send—and when he pleased, sometimes on time, most of the time not. She cried nearly all the time; and the neighbors who had known her all these years naturally began to turn from her and to suspicion her because she acted so funny. If they asked her questions about herself or her husband, she was quick to snap at them, “Ask me no questions I'll tell you no lies,” and walk away. Therefore, one by one they let her alone; politely but firmly.

When she went back to her church they would not have her in the Sunday School and so she cried and said she knew it was because she was too fat, the minister couldn't do much with her, she went into a red rage with the woman in the Sunday School, and this is when she asked to have her church Letter out. She got it, read it carefully to see that there were no mistakes in it: “This is to certify that Lucille Marie Purdy is a member of the Lord's Household in good standing and full fellowship and to recommend her as a faithful servant to all those present. …” She put it in her cedarchest.

It was then that Lucille decided to take on boarders. She furnished two bedrooms when she found out three young men from the Normal would rent the rooms. The three young men moved in, two in the big room—these were the gentle one and the outspoken one—where Mr. Purdy had gone off to sleep and live when Lucille had got so stout, and one in the corner bedroom next to Lucille's—this one was the young wild one who had worked his way to Spain on a freighter and had gone crazy over bullfights, bringing back from Spain a long black whip which he practiced cracking, even late at night you could hear the stinging hot crackling of it in his room. Lucille's room continued to be the master bedroom, just furnished with a pallet and a cedarchest.

These three young men are a story in themselves, and it is peculiar how life arranged to bring them into Lucille's house, and at such a time in Lucille's life. Often Lucille said, “I know the Lord sent you all here; it is His Divine Hand; there is more love in this household than in any church, I am glad I have moved my Letter into this house.” But anyway, these three young men were a nice thing for Lucille to have in her house and Lucille became very nice with them in her house. They wondered about the state of the house, why it was not furnished, and so on, but they did not ask questions. Mostly they were at the Normal all day, and at nights they studied in their rooms or met in one another's room to have their talk and laughter, which Lucille would overhear if she stood against the wall and listened; until one night Lucille knocked on their door at late night and said, “Listen here, since you are still up and talking would you like to move your conversation on down to the kitchen and have you some hot cocoa with it?” and in a little while they had formed the pleasant habit of meeting in the kitchen for hot cocoa every night about eleven. Naturally some talk ensued. The young men told of their work at the Normal and told of their lives and interests, the gentle one told how he wanted to be a poet (Lucille said she often wrote poems and would show him hers); the outspoken one disagreed with most of Lucille's philosophy about life, but in a friendly way that made Lucille feel intellectually stimulated; and the wild one said he only wanted to wander and to travel, free on the road. Lucille responded that her father himself had been a sea captain and roamed and that that was why she was part gypsy, her two cousins raised her but never understood her, she had always had a gypsy heart. Then Lucille had something in common with each of the roomers, she declared; and it wasn't long before Lucille had told the roomers all about her husband leaving her, explaining that he had taken the furniture; and as she told her story she broke out crying. The roomers were very sympathetic and tried to comfort Lucille.