Homeplace (16 page)

“All right, then,” Sam Canaday said, and stood and fished a fat white business envelope out of his back pocket and handed it to her. She took it, feeling slimily like a child or a servant, or a whore.

“The arrangement is that I bring this over every Monday morning,” he said. “Of course, if you run
short, just holler. All other household bills come to me, and any repairs. You can use the Colonel’s charge cards, but bring me the receipts. I know you need some help in the house, and that’s already taken care of. J.W.’s found a woman over in Lightning, a widow with a practical nursing license, who’ll come every morning at nine and stay until three, when her son gets out of school. She doesn’t do housework, but the Colonel keeps all but these two rooms and his bedroom downstairs closed off, and only your room upstairs is open, so there’s not that much to do, and we can get somebody in once a week to clean if you like. Mrs. Lester … Lavinia … will leave supper for the two of you to warm up before she goes home, so you’re free to come and go as you please until about three. J.W.’s here afternoons, too, and does what lawn work needs doing, and sometimes he takes the Colonel out for a drive when he wakes up from his nap. He always sleeps from two to about four. J.W.’s not underfoot; he never comes to the house unless somebody calls him … I put a phone out there when the Colonel got sick … but he’s generally around. I’ve been taking him his supper, and Mrs. Lester says she’ll do that, too. He eats at his place or goes out for breakfast and lunch. I think it’s a good setup. You won’t be burdened any at all, just need to keep a light hand on the tiller, and you can go around and see folks, or do some writing, or just rest if you want to. I’ve been to see Mrs. Lester and I think she’s sound as a bell, but you’ll be the one to approve her, of course. Here’s her number. She’s expecting you to call.”

“Don’t want a strange nigger in here,” John Winship snapped petulantly, but Sam Canaday ignored him as though the objection were merely rote. Mike suspected he had heard it many times, remembering her father’s virulent bigotry. He handed a slip of paper across the table to Mike, and she took it and then put it down on
the table. The level calm was slumping again, incredibly, into fatigue.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” she said. “Anybody J.W. picks is all right with me. What does DeeDee think of her?”

“Haven’t asked her,” Sam said briefly. “This is your decision, not Miz Wingo’s.”

“Thinks she’s an uppity nigger, too prissy and put on for her own good,” droned John Winship. “Got a degree from some junior college. Calls herself
Miz
Lester. Daisy says she isn’t gon’ have her in this house.”

“Well, then, it’s lucky DeeDee isn’t going to be around much, because I think she sounds perfect,” Mike said evenly. “Will you call her for me, Sam, since you’ve already talked to her? Whenever she wants to come is fine.”

John Winship cackled again, and Sam Canaday took the slip of paper back. “I’ll call her when I get to the office,” he said. “She can probably come in Monday morning. She needs the money. Well, I better be shoving off. I’ve got to go into Atlanta and take a deposition from one Mr. Bob Carithers at three.”

“Goddamned son of a bitch …” The words exploded from John Winship. They were as unlike his other grumblings and protests as a dagger was a child’s plastic scissors. Mike jerked her head around to look at him. Fury burned the pale, whitish eyes to fire and his palsied mouth trembled.

“He’s just the surveyor, Colonel,” Sam Canaday said matter-of-factly, but she saw that he was watching her father closely. “He was just doing his job. I’m not going to be talking directly to the high-up DOT weasels. I’ll talk to their lawyers. That’s down the road a piece, anyway. We’re just beginning. You’re going to have to calm down, or we’re not going to get to first base.”

John Winship lowered his head and clasped his mottled hands on the table in front of him. Mike sent the scene spinning to beyond the glass wall of the dome.
She said nothing, asked no questions. She had no intention of getting involved in this business, wanted to know as little as possible about it. Her father raised his head, and there were hectic red spots on his sharp cheekbones, and the weak tears were back in his eyes. At first she thought he was looking at her, but then realized that he was looking beyond her at nothing that she could see.

“My daddy told me time and time again that his heart’s blood was in that land,” he said, and his voice was faraway, an echo of another man’s in another time. “He gave his very blood for it. And on the day he died, I went out to the lily pond in the side yard, where he always sat in the evenings when it was fair, and I took my pocketknife that he gave me when I was twelve years old, and I cut my hand and left my own blood right there in the earth, with his. And now those goddamned hyenas from Atlanta think they’re just going to take it away from me. Build a goddamned road through it so the jungle bunnies can swarm in there and build nests all over everywhere. Tear down that house that my folks built with blood and sweat and muscle. Well, by God, they’ve got another think coming, eh, Sam?”

The look he gave Sam Canaday, though filtered through tears, was that of a molting old eagle.

“We’ll make ‘em think hard, at least, Colonel,” Sam Canaday said. He smiled, an easy, defusing smile, and John Winship’s face relaxed and slid back into its strictured calm.

“Goddamn right,” he said.

From her sphere of distance, Mike heard herself say, “Daddy, the way you’re carrying on is going to make you sick again,” and was astonished, both at the epithet, untasted all those years, and at the exasperation she felt at Sam Canaday for egging her father on.

“Thought you were a fighter, Miz Singer-Winship,” Sam Canaday drawled, grinning the doggy white grin.
“Understood you were a pretty tough lady, a real champion of the underdog.”

“And what makes you think that?” Mike snapped. She really did dislike this insinuating man.

“Oh, I read you sometimes, like I said. When I’m not reading
Car and Driver or Penthouse
. Seems like I saw something you did just recently in
People. “

“I don’t write for
People.”

“Well, then, it must have been the
New Republic
or the
Nation
. And then the Colonel’s told me a lot about you.”

Mike looked at her father, who had picked up a cast-off piece of toast and was chewing on it wetly. He did not raise his eyes from his plate. Behind his diminished figure she seemed suddenly to see another man sitting at another table in this same spot, in this same kitchen: a young man, fine-faced, erect, remote, contained. It was the first sense of John Winship as the man she had once known that she had had. The gray eyes of both men, real and spectral, were veiled with lashes, and did not look up. Then the shadow figure vanished and only the old man chewing toast was left.

Sam Canaday walked to the door of the kitchen just as J.W. Cromie came up onto the back porch.

“Good, here’s J.W.,” he said. “He’ll wheel the Colonel back to his room for a little nap, and you won’t need to worry about his lunch till midafternoon, since we had breakfast so late. Why don’t you take the car and get out a little while? Drive around, go see Priss Comfort, maybe? She’s real eager to see you.”

The thought was like sunlight pouring down onto dark water. Mike smiled with pleasure.

“Oh, yes, Priss. Oh, that’s a good idea, I will. How
is
Priss? Does she still live in that funny little stone house down by the ball field? Does she still knock back the bourbon in her iced tea? Do you know her well?”

“She still lives there,” Sam Canaday said, smiling at
her tumble of words. “And no, I don’t think she’s had a drink in years. And yes, I do know her right well. I was by there after I left here last night, in fact. Priss is one of the main reasons I stay in Lytton. Her and the Colonel here.”

“Oh, maybe we can have her to dinner one night soon,” Mike said. “I’d like to show her that I really can cook. She used to say I was going to starve by the time I was twenty-five.”

“Priss Comfort hasn’t set foot in this house in more than twenty years,” John Winship spat from the chair where he had been chewing and nodding. “Not since the day you slunk out of here, Micah. So you want to do any cooking for her, you best plan on doing it in that rathole of hers.”

Mike went still-faced with the venom in the words. Anger crawled again in the glass. She stared at her father, who raised his head and gave her back the look.

“Then that’s just what I’ll do,” she said. “That’s a fine idea. Thanks for filling me in, Sam.”

“You’re real welcome, Miz Singer-Winship.” She felt, rather than saw, his amusement as she went smartly up the stairs to change her clothes. A moment later she heard the screen door bang softly behind him and knew he was gone.

P
RISS
C
OMFORT HAD NOT SO
MUCH CHANGED IN TWENTY-TWO
years as she had, simply, expanded. Before, she had had the look of petrified redwood, all massive, columnar height and rich, Renaissance coloring. Now her body was as formless as DeeDee’s, but it was androgynous, not DeeDee’s melted and sprawling femaleness, and she carried its bulk as lightly as she ever had. Her stride, as she moved through the familiar dim clutter of the little house’s living room to greet Mike, was as free and impatient as ever, and the eyes that glowed from the serene, unlined face were as raw a green. Priss’s face was like a great harvest moon, smooth and high-colored and magnetizing to the eye. Her shining coil of chestnut hair was still vivid, even with strands of vigorous iron gray woven through it here and there. Her arms around Mike were as solid as chestnut wood. Only the smell of her was different. Where once Priss Comfort had breathed forth warm gusts of bourbon and Lavoris, now she smelt powerfully of Calgon Bouquet and the arid, inoffensive sweat of age.

She held Mike hard against her for a long time, saying nothing, breathing audibly, and then held her off with both strong hands and looked at her. Priss’s smile
had not changed, either; it was even more Buddha-like in the large, untroubled face. The fierce hawk’s eyes, unclouded and unprompted by lenses, searched Mike’s face like electronic scanners.

“‘For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land,’ “she intoned, in the powerful clarion voice that might have rung in Mike’s ears only this morning. Mike felt a surge of lightness and what might pass for joy.

“I’ve missed you,” she said, smiling at Priss. “I didn’t know how much until I saw you. Priss, you’re uncanny; you look years younger than you did when I left. And you still sound like Brünnhilde riding into battle. What on earth have you done, found the fountain of youth?”

“Laid off the sauce,” Priss said in her beautiful contralto, leading Mike across the room to where the deep old sofa and Priss’s shapeless leather Morris chair still sat. “When I stopped drinking I started eating, and all the wrinkles and crannies filled in. I’m not younger, I’m just stretched like a balloon. If I lost any weight I’d look like the picture of Dorian Gray.”

She stepped deftly over the objects strewing the faded old Navaho rug that had always lain in the middle of the floor, and Mike picked her way behind her. Shoes, a pile of books and magazines, an unopened sack of birdseed, and one rubber Wellington boot cluttered the path to the sofa. One anonymous heap uncoiled from the floor and scurried away under the coffee table, and Mike remembered Priss’s omnipresent cats. Tune seemed to have passed the tiny house by entirely.

Priss sagged into the Morris chair and gestured at the pitcher of iced tea on the table. A plate of store-bought
chocolate chip cookies sat beside it. Mike shook her head, and Priss raised one coppery eyebrow.

“I started eating and you stopped, apparently,” she said. “Are you anorexic, or is this what the best skeletons in the naked city are wearing these days?”

“I know, I know … I look like a gay young thing of a hundred and ten,” Mike said. “You don’t have to rub it in. I’ve just gotten in off a long assignment. I’ll make it up in a week.”

“You don’t look a hundred and ten, you look fourteen,” Priss Comfort said, frowning at her. “An Ethiopian fourteen. How old are you now, Mike? I forget exactly … thirty-seven? Thirty-eight?”

“I’ll be forty in November,” Mike grimaced. “You ought to remember, Priss. You saw me before anybody else in the world did, except the doctor and Rusky.”

Priss smiled. “So I did,” she said. “A ridiculous, squalling little scrap with a cotton boll on your head and the face of John Winship on you before you were an hour old. And that hasn’t changed, Mike. You look so much like your father when he was your age that it’s almost laughable. I’d know you were his daughter if I were meeting you for the first time today. Even more now, somehow. It’s the eyes, I think …”

“I’ve never really seen that,” Mike said.

“No,” Priss said. “I guess you wouldn’t.”

The cat came warily out from under the coffee table and wafted up onto Priss’s polyester lap and settled himself into its cushiony vastness. Like DeeDee, Priss wore a pantsuit, hers green with a mammoth floral top to complement the shiny trousers. The cat was white, with a large bullet head and thick neck and slanted, mad blue eyes. It stared steadily at Mike, purring like a Mixmaster and kneading its big front paws on Priss’s knee.

“This is Walker Pussy,” Priss said. “So named because of his startling resemblance to—”

“Don’t tell me,” Mike said, laughing. “He really does, doesn’t he? Can he write?”

“I suspect he can, and quite well,” Priss said, rubbing the big, blunt head. “But he’s been blocked ever since I had him. Found him last winter up that china-berry tree out back, where Cooper’s brute of a Doberman had chased him. He was so traumatized that he hasn’t written a word yet. But I think it may break any day now. I hope so. People are going to forget who he is; you know how fickle the reading public is. He’s only as good as his last book.”