Homeplace (40 page)

“Not for now, Micah. Maybe after a while. Think I’ll take a little vacation and let you get on with that book thing. Don’t want to be wearing the famous author out beating a dead horse.”

“It’s no trouble,” she said. “And it wouldn’t hurt to let everybody know what happened about the house. Maybe we can’t change anything, but we might be able to help somebody else stop it happening to them. At least show the DOT up for what they are. I hate to see you giving up.”

“Not giving up,” he said. “Just taking a breather. I’ll
show the sons of bitches up when the time comes. Don’t nag at me, Micah. Pour me some of that whiskey and get on out of here and let me watch my goddamn game shows. I know you hate ‘em.”

She poured out the whiskey and put the glass and the bottle on the table next to his wheelchair. He drank steadily all day and into the evenings now, and no one made a move to prevent it. Even DeeDee had stopped her railing after Dr. Gaddis had told her to let her father have his liquor in peace.

“It stops the pain better than anything we’ve found so far, Daisy,” he had said when DeeDee called him in a blind rage after she had found Mike giving John Winship whiskey in the middle of the morning. “And that’s keeping him alive. It’s not the cancer that’s going to kill him; his heart is going to go before that. It’s pretty weak. Anything … bad pain, any kind of shock … could do it. Keep him calm and let him drink.” And so DeeDee did, reluctantly. And for the moment, John Winship seemed better than he had all summer.

Priss was as good as her word. The day after Sam Canaday called with the news about the declaration of taking, she appeared in the kitchen of the Pomeroy Street house bearing a lemon cheese cake going plushy in the heat, and pulled a kitchen chair up to the table at which John Winship sat, and sat down herself heavily.

“Well, Scamp, you look like you’ve been whupped through hell with a buzzard gut,” she said, and he stared at her, loose-wattled like an old turkey, and then laughed aloud. It was by far the most robust sound Mike had heard him make in all the weeks she had been home. He laughed until the pallid tears ran on his shocking-white skull’s face, and when he finally stopped, there was color in his cheeks. Priss grinned at him evilly. Her green eyes swam with unshed tears.

“Some kind of talk for a schoolteacher,” John Winship said. “Always did have the meanest mouth in
Fulton County on you. Look at you, old woman. You look like the hind axle of bad management yourself.” His own eyes shone wetly and he blinked several times, turtlelike. He reached out slowly and covered Priss’s hand with his splotched mummy’s claw.

Sam Canaday, coming into the kitchen hours later in the hot twilight, found them still laughing together and talking as if twenty-odd years of bitter silence had never lain between them. John Winship was down near the bottom of the whiskey bottle and Priss and Mike had eaten more than half of the cake, and the kitchen of the Pomeroy Street house was, at that moment, a better place to be than it had ever been before Mike had gone away.

“About damn time, Colonel,” Sam said matter-of-factly, and dropped a kiss on Priss’s red head. He said nothing else about the reunion, but poured himself a drink and cut a slice of cake and settled down at the table with them.

“Mike,” he said, nodding affably at her.

“Sam,” she said.

She knew that he would say no more. The old distance and formality was back between them, without the undercurrent of faintly admiring mockery that had been there at the first, and she knew that he would not stay long. Bay Sewell had said that he would drop by that evening, to try and cheer her father up, and Mike knew without knowing how she did that Sam Canaday would not be in this house again while there was a chance that he would meet Bayard Sewell here. Priss and John Winship looked keenly at the two of them and then at each other, but said nothing, and soon the rough, foolish talk spun on again like a river eddying around a rock. Sam did indeed leave before Bay arrived, but for a time the sunset kitchen was easy and comfortable and full of laughter and Mike thought that forever
after, when she heard the word “home,” this was what she would think of.

After that, for a bright and seemingly endless span of days, Priss Comfort came every afternoon to the house, and Sam came in the evenings, and between the two of them, they seemed almost physically to hold John Winship’s illness at bay. He sipped and nodded through the mornings in the kitchen, while Lavinia Lester pottered tidily about and Mike dozed and daydreamed and read in her room upstairs, but when the screened door banged in the afternoons and Priss came into the room, his palsied head came up and the color flooded back into his dead face, and life and vigor thrummed in the house like the beating of a great heart. The well-being lasted until Sam came and went, and then her father was often ready to be slipped into his bed by Mike and Priss like a drying feather, and was usually asleep before they turned off his lights. In those long, timeless days, he took very few pain pills and no sleeping tablets. Defeat and the ruin of old dreams seemed never to have happened. Nothing much at all seemed to have happened.

Nevertheless, things were different. Because Priss was there in the afternoons now, Mike could not meet Bayard Sewell in the upstairs bedroom, and both of them grew edged and sharpened and famished for each other. He came by once or twice to see her father after Sam and Priss had left, but John Winship was drifting far out on his whiskey sea and could not or did not respond to him, and Bay could not stay until the old man fell asleep so that he could take Mike up the dark stairs and slake himself at her body. Sally and the old nurse waited at home; Sally eddied now in a poisoned sea of her own. There were frantic, starved kisses in the darkening foyer, and frenzied hands on each other’s body, and gasps and hot, wild words torn out of laboring chests, but there was for them no surcease and no
release. Once, when John Winship slept through a morning of darkness and thunder and Lavinia Lester was at the dentist, he came hurriedly into the house and up the stairs and they took each other standing up in the upstairs hall, braced against the wall, silently and savagely and so quickly that they did not even remove their clothes, their ears straining even through their sobbing breath for any sound from the old man below. It was wrenching and emptying and awful, and he was gone in less than ten minutes, and they did not attempt it again. He became grim-faced and so tense that even a small noise would make him start, and Mike was consumed with a prickling restlessness that was more than sexual, and prowled the house through the empty hours. A relentless and ungovernable motor seemed to have started up within her, throbbing sturdily and steadily through the heat-jellied nights and days, and it neither roused her to any action nor left her any peace. It was not a return of the early summer’s terror, but more a kind of pulsing waiting, a sense of slow and inexorable gathering. Something was growing, something was deepening, something was coming.

And yet, nothing did. Priss came and went, Sam came and was gone again, DeeDee trundled in and out, paler and damper and more distracted than Mike had ever seen her. She did not mention the terrible morning at the club; seemed, in fact, to have forgotten it in her concern for her father. For she was obsessed in those long, heavy days with John Winship. She came nearly every day, leaving a presumably chastened and biddable Duck to stay with his mother, and fussed and whimpered and fidgeted until Priss and Mike and sometimes John himself shooed her home again. She had reacted with tears and wails when Mike had told her about the Department of Transportation’s ponderous victory over their father and had insisted on coming directly over to flutter at his side until he had exploded at her, and she
had gone home in fresh tears. After that, she was on to Mike about him several times a day, either by telephone or in person, dropping in in the mornings before he was up or in the evenings after he had been put to bed.

“But how is he
really?”
she would say, and her voice would tremble on the edge of hysterics. “I know he’s putting up a brave front, but how is he really, when he’s by himself with just you? Didn’t it just about kill him? What does he say? Did he ever cry, or anything? Oh, God, poor Daddy, poor Daddy …”

“It’s not a front,” Mike would try to reassure her. “He’s really fine. He took it wonderfully, we’re surprised at how well. Of course he didn’t cry. When did Daddy ever cry? He’s accepted it better than the rest of us. He doesn’t say anything at all about it; he seems to have almost forgotten it. Really, Dee, what on earth is
wrong
with you? You wanted this over. You’d think you’d done the black deed yourself, the way you’re carrying on. You’re upsetting him far more than the DOT with all this crying and hovering.”

And DeeDee would take herself off, tear-stained and distraught, but she would call again, or come by again, and again she would say, fearfully, the tears standing in her blue eyes, “How is he, really?”

Mike had never seen her sister so agitated and finally she asked Bay Sewell if he could reassure her, as he seemed to have done after the debacle at the country club with Duck. He must have done so, because after that DeeDee did not come so often to the Pomeroy Street house, and she did not call, and the airless stasis of the suspended time between the end of the fight and the death of the homeplace dropped down again. August was totally stopped and still, an underwater place.

In the last week of the month, Sam Canaday learned that the Department of Transportation would move onto the homeplace the Tuesday after Labor Day with a bulldozer and crew. He told Mike and Priss and J.W.
that evening, on the shadowy porch, before he came in to see John Winship, and he cautioned them to keep the news from him.

“Treat it as a normal day,” he said. “Don’t do anything different. Try not to think about it. Don’t go down there yourselves. You don’t want to see that. I’m not going. We’ll tell him when it’s over and cleaned up.”

They agreed.

“But I really think he’s made his peace with it,” Mike said.

“Oh, sure,” Sam said. “Like a death he can’t prevent. But that doesn’t mean he has to watch the execution.”

Mike’s heart lay heavy and stonelike within her for the rest of the days in that week. The heaviness damped, for a time, the prowling, prickling unease.

“It’s like waiting for another death, a second one,” she told Bayard Sewell on the phone that evening, after her father was in bed and everyone had gone. “In a way it’s worse, because I know the date of this death. Bay, you mustn’t let on to him. You know what Dr. Gaddis said about his heart, and a shock …”

“Jesus, Mike, what do you think I am?” he said. “God, poor John. It’ll be better when it’s all over. It really will. We can all … get on with things, see where we are, sort of. Make some plans. Mike … if I don’t see you soon I think I’ll go out of my mind.”

“Me, too,” she said miserably. “Oh, me too.”

Three days later her father waked her in the night screaming hoarsely and terribly with the pain, and he screamed over and over again, monotonously and rhythmically, thrashing from side to side in the sweat-soaked bed, the cords of his gaunt old neck standing out, the bursting veins crawling like worms under the dead-white skin of his forehead, his eyes vacant and focused far away; screamed and screamed and clawed with his corpse’s fingers at the agony-reddened air until
the running feet and plunging needle of Dr. Gaddis hurled him fathoms deep into unconsciousness. Mike, dripping wet and shaking so that she could scarcely stand, cleaned his wasted, motionless old body of the excrement that it had ground itself in, and J.W. helped her put clean pajamas onto him and strip the fouled sheets. There was blood and mucus on the bedclothes as well as feces, and a ghastly, fetid, green-black stain that was like nothing she had ever seen before. Sam Canaday arrived after the doctor had come out of her father’s room, and they all sat drinking the coffee that J.W. had made, not speaking. It was nearly four in the morning, but no one, not even the bonelessly slumped doctor, made a move to leave. No one broke the silence. There was, Mike knew, nothing now to say. They had come to an ending. Whatever it was she had felt coming was here.

“What now?” Sam Canaday said, finally. His voice was rusty and hoarse, as if it had not been used for a long time. “The hospital?”

“If you want to, Mike,” Dr. Gaddis said, looking at her. “I can admit him in the morning. Maybe save you a good bit of work and grief. But they’ll just give him more of what I’ve been giving him, and I can up the dosage as high as he can stand without killing him as well as they can. He might as well stay here, if you can take it. He’ll need lots of nursing.”

“I can take it,” Mike said. “I don’t want him to go to the hospital. I can look after him, Lavinia and I. But he can’t stand anything like tonight again, and I can’t either.”

“He won’t have that again,” the doctor said. “That’s one thing I can make sure of. I guess I should have upped that dosage before now. He was doing so well, though, and it seemed like he was enjoying those visits with Priss, so I wanted to let him stay lucid as long as
he could. I can stop most of the pain, but he isn’t going to know much from here on out.”

“Do it,” Mike said. “I’m not going to have him hurt like that. I don’t want him aware that he’s … not in control. Priss and I will be here when he
does
wake up, and Sam, too …” She looked at him, and he nodded. His face was as still and white as that recent afternoon in the back hall, looking up at her …

“We’ll all be here,” he said. He turned to the doctor. “Is it … now? Is this going to take him out, like in the next few days?” Mike knew he was thinking of the bulldozers crawling insectlike onto the swept white yard around the homeplace, of the terrible mandrake scream of splintering wood. Better, maybe, if it were now …

“I don’t have any idea,” the doctor said. “Probably not. His heart’s still hanging in there. It’s amazing.”

“Way to go, Colonel,” Sam Canaday said softly.

John Winship did not wake up until the following afternoon. Mike and Sam had been sitting in silence for almost two hours, in kitchen chairs drawn up beside the old bed in the dark, monkish bedroom. The air conditioner pumped steadily, almost in rhythm with the pulse that beat shallowly in the parchment-yellow throat. Mike had slid almost into sleep, and she jerked awake when she heard her father’s voice, sharp and birdlike and clear in the thrumming room, say, “Are you still working on your book, Micah? I don’t want you to let that slide, whatever you do.”