Jordan County (29 page)

— You shouldnt have waited so long, he says.

— What?

Apparently it has affected her hearing too, even those small bones of the inner ear which murder-story writers tell us are the last to go, even in the searing heat of a furnace, and therefore serve to establish a corpus delicti.

— You should have come sooner, Ella.

— I havent come at all, she says. Youre only dreaming, Hector. Look behind you.

He looks over his shoulder and sees himself lying full-length on the bed, asleep, corpse-quiet, arms rigid at his sides, the incipient beard dark against the waxen face, the nose like a beak arching upward. Then he looks back at Ella, halfway across the room. The light is weak but lucent, without shadows, and now that he has learned the cause of what he thought was faulty vision on his part, he can see her face quite clearly. The chin moves with a curious up-and-down motion, like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy, between slits extending vertically from the corners of her mouth, downward past both sides of the point of her chin, and as she speaks she makes a scratching movement with the hand at the back of her head.

She goes on speaking, telling him it is only a dream, a dream within a dream. But he is not listening; he is getting out of bed, moving cautiously for fear that she will see him. There must be something wrong with her sight as well, for she does not see that he is approaching; she goes on speaking, her face toward the figure asleep on the bed. The ruin is more apparent at close range. One cheek has crumbled nearly away, and
the flesh of her throat is mottled with yellow and purple, a marbled effect. He is alongside the chair by now, passing to its rear, when he sees something that stops him.

The hand he thought was scratching the back of her head is actually working a lever which extends from a hole in her skull; she moves it up and down with her fingers as she speaks. Evidently a system of wires and pulleys connects the lever with her chin, for he can hear them creaking as they move. He is horrified past caution.

— Ella! he cries.

She sees now for the first time that he has left the bed, has discovered the extent of her disintegration, the secret lever. She is embarrassed, flustered, and she turns her head to hide the mechanism. However, she soon recovers her composure.

— You neednt be so ill-mannered, she says primly. We’re all this way, this side of death. Youll see.

And she begins to fade. He calls after her, Ella! Ella! but she has faded; “Ella! Ella!” he called. But he was alone in the room, sitting bolt-upright in the bed with both arms stretched toward the empty chair, and dawn had not even broken.

February went out raw and windy, with blackbirds in startled flight like dashes of pepper blown across a page, but March brought a week of warm rain that melted the snow in the secret shady places, sluiced the dirty ice from fields and gutters, and pattered monotonously against the window panes. This in turn gave way to a spell of sunny weather. Birds hopped and sang in the tasseling oaks; cottonwoods popped their buttons, and the sky was high and dazzling. The cold returned for a three-day Easter snap; then the pecan trees put out their pale green leaflets and spring came in to stay. Barefoot children all over Bristol leaped and shouted in the
puddles, and people once more took the time and trouble to speak to one another on the street.

But no matter how much wind might veer and bluster, or rain come down, or April sunlight pave the streets with gold, there was little change inside the Sturgis house. Hector’s mother continued to avoid provoking him. He seemed almost happy nowadays, for all his absent manner, and she accepted this as a sign that he was making progress toward the day when he would be cured — ‘himself again’ she called it. She watched and waited and let him strictly alone. As the year wore on, however, moving now toward summer, the long hot days with the sun like hammered brass, she began to note an increasing discontent. He was as preoccupied as ever, communicating with no one; but he was restless, fretful.

He had developed a facial tic that twitched one corner of his mouth, agitating the beard which had been growing since the time of the big snow. The hairs grew thick and soft about his lips and on his chin, the color of burnt-over grass or sun-bleached hay, but they thinned out along the lower planes of his cheeks and did not grow at all on his upper jaws, where an adolescent fuzz tapered down from the sideburns. Negroes called it a Chinaman’s beard, and it did in fact give him rather a Mongolian aspect. Much else had changed as well. In the old days he had been meticulous about his clothes, making a complaint if the washwoman ironed wrinkles in his collars or his shirtfronts, insisting that his suits be sponged and pressed each time he took them off, and wearing the latest styles ahead of their general adoption. For all this the town had called him a dude and made conjectures about his prowess as a lover. But now when he went for his afternoon walk he wore rumpled trousers without a belt and a shirt without a tie. There were days when he neglected to comb his hair, and sometimes in setting out he even forgot to change from carpet slippers.

Mrs Sturgis of course observed all this and she worried more as time went by, though it did not show in her face.
She had not aged perceptibly in the seventeen years since her ordeal with the fever that had killed her husband and her mother. (Nor did her appearance change appreciably in all the years that followed. It was as if she had been baked by some ceramic process in the fever oven; all that Time could do to her had been done in that one month, with her fellow townsmen dying all around her and the bell of the dead wagon sounding through the streets. Perhaps the secret of her longevity was that no germ could live where all those stronger ones had raged and been defeated. For when, eventually, the machine wore out by pure and simple friction and they put her into the ground at last, she looked almost exactly as she had looked on the afternoon when Hector arrived from the depot, found her asleep in bed and mistook her for her mother.) But now, no matter how little it showed, she was worried about her son. She thought perhaps she should call in a doctor or try again to persuade Hector to go somewhere with her for a consultation, inventing any pretext. Then she remembered the look on his face when she suggested Cooper’s Wells, half blankness and half hatred, and more than anything else she feared, she feared that he would hate her.

Daily on his walks, skirting the woods two miles beyond the house, Hector went past a cabin where Samuel and Emma, the coachman and his wife, had lived since Mrs Sturgis pensioned them off, five years ago. She gave them the cabin to live in and an adjoining half-acre garden plot where Samuel raised vegetables which he sold in Bristol, either to the markets or from door to door whenever the markets would not take them, for enough small change to keep a bait of sidemeat and molasses in the larder, coffee in the coffee pot, and coal-oil in the lamp. They were both incredibly old, older Hector thought than any two people he had ever known, and they lived apart from the world. Other Negroes, on the way from town in their Sunday clothes, would take off their good shoes and go half a mile across muddy fields to keep from having to pass the cabin after dark. Emma was supposed to have powers of evil at her command.

She had always been peculiar, from back in her nursemaid days, but a little over five years ago she went out of her mind completely. It happened at a religious gathering, a sanctifying held on the banks of Moccasin Creek. Though Emma had never been especially religious, at least so far as anyone had known, the Spirit moved her this day, and she came through with such fervor that she never recovered from it — another instance, perhaps, of the medieval legend depicted in woodcuts, showing the devil in church whispering into the ear of a maiden who knelt in prayer, though of course it might have been much simpler; maybe she just went ‘off.’ At any rate, Mrs Sturgis had had to let her go soon afterwards, and Samuel as well. Nowadays Emma sat by the fire (there was always a fire on the cabin hearth, big and roaring in the winter, smaller in the summer, a glow of embers) watching it through a pair of old-fashioned, octagonal spectacle frames that had belonged to Mrs Wingate. Hector remembered the day his grandmother dropped them out of the carriage; Samuel got down and picked them up, and Mrs Wingate let him keep them for ‘pride specs.’ Emma claimed them soon afterwards; she had kept them ever since. One of the eyepieces was empty. The other held a jagged star; it glittered in the flicker and dance of flames on the hearth.

Samuel was suspect too, since he lived with Emma and suffered no resultant hurt. When he went into town with the sack of vegetables across his shoulder, small children ran from the sight of him in fear that he would carry them off in his sack, as their nurses had told them he would do if they misbehaved, and older ones ran after him to prove their heroism, chanting “Sam, Sam, the conjure man! I aint scared of the conjure man!” but keeping safely out of reach of the stick he brandished. The bravest of them threw clods at him. Age had bent him; he had the wrinkled, grimacing face of a gnome.

Day after day Hector went past the cabin, a sway-backed, paintless two-room structure of home-ripped plank, built in his grandfather’s time, before the war. The yard was grassless and the gallery sagged upon the rotting steps. When the
weather was fine he would see a little man standing in the vegetable plot, leaning on a spade to watch him pass. He did not recognize Samuel until one day the former coachman left his spade stuck upright in the earth and came running out to the road to meet him, crying “Marster! Little mars!” Hector stopped and he approached, bobbing and grinning. “Lord a mercy,” he said, wheezing from the run, “I like not to knowed you with all that hair on your face. Aint you got a kindly word for old Samuel helped to raise you out of knee pants? Seem to me lak you ought to have, all them times we spent together.”

From now on Samuel greeted him in this way every afternoon. He seemed glad to have found someone to speak to. “I mind the time you whopped them town boys with the book sack. He-he! You really whopped um.” Another day he said, “You look something lak your grandpappy with the musstache cross your face.” (Samuel had skipped a generation; he meant the original Hector, the one who lost his life in Mexico. The second Hector had been beardless.) “Yassah, and he was a proud, tall man in his day — a proud tall man I’m here to tell you. They dont grow um lak that no more. I members the morning he rode off to war, the one before the big one, and never come back, till all they was was a marker in the graveyard. I was stable boy then. But I dont know. It appear to me lak everything is shrunk, and me along with um. Even the watermillions is little bitty.”

Hector scarcely replied, except with nods and headshakes; but he stood and listened willingly enough, which was certainly far more than he had done with anyone else for a long time. There was a certain kinship established. Both of them had rejected the world, or had been rejected by it, and this was their one connection.

In June, after a month of such encounters, Samuel asked him: “Little mars, dont you want to come in the house and see old Emma used to nurse you when you was a child?” He spoke hesitantly but with a quality of urgency in his voice. “She aint just right in her mind nowdays, and it mought do
her good. People talking about she’s crazy. Emma aint crazy; Emma’s lonesome, that what
she
is.” He led the way toward the cabin, across one corner of the vegetable patch, and Hector followed.

Half an hour later, at home again after a two-mile run through the midsummer heat, when he looked back on what had happened in the cabin, all he could remember was the sudden scream that rose in terror and the swirl of motion on the hearth where the woman crouched and hid her eyes and called on God to save her from the devil.

They had crossed the sagging gallery, Samuel muttering at Hector’s elbow, and when he first entered the cabin, out of the blaze of sunlight, it was as if he had stepped downward into a pit. Soon, however, his pupils dilated; objects began to appear. They came out one by one at first, then a whole cluster in a rush. All he saw at first was a dancing gleam of orange where firelight flickered in the grate on the opposite side of the room. Then the gloom paled rapidly, and he saw — so suddenly that she seemed to appear by magic, materialized out of empty air — a Negro woman turned sideways in her chair, looking at him with a querulous expression. It was Emma.

“Who that there?” she said.

She had aged; she had aged indeed, so completely gaunted to skin and bones that if he were to grasp and shake her by the shoulders, Hector thought, her body beneath the voluminous skirts and petticoats would give off a dry, fusty clatter like pine kindling shaken in a sack. The cabin had that nigger smell of clean quilts and cornstarch, the walls covered with newspapers; beyond Emma’s shoulder a headline shouted the loss of the
Maine
with an exclamation-point six inches tall. She looked at him, the face like a mummy’s face behind octagonal spectacle frames, the skin stretched nearly transparent over Indian cheekbones, the headrag drawn so tightly over her scalp that it shone like naked bone. Mrs Wingate would look like this if she had lived, he thought, for they were of an age.