Other Voices, Other Rooms (14 page)

TEN

One grey curiously cool afternoon a week later Jesus Fever died. It was as if someone had been tickling his ribs, for he died in a spasm of desperate giggles. “Maybe,” as Zoo said, “God done told somethin funny.” She dressed him in his little suspender suit, his orange-leather shoes and derby hat; she squeezed a bunch of dogtooth violets in his hand, and put him in a cedar chest: there he remained for two days while Amy, with Randolph’s aid, decided the location of his grave: under the moon tree, they said finally. The moon tree, so named for its round ivory blooms, grew in a lonely place far back from the Landing, and here Zoo shoveled away with no one to help but Joel: the mild excavation they managed at last to make reminded him of all the backyard swimming pools dug in summers that seemed now so long ago. Transporting the cedar chest was an arduous business; in the end they hitched a rope to John Brown, the old mule, and he hauled it to the foot of the grave. “Papadaddy would be mighty tickled could he know who it is is pullin him home,” said Zoo. “Papadaddy surely did love you, John Brown: trustiest mule he ever saw, he said so many a time: now you member that.” At the last minute Randolph sent word he could not be present for the funeral, and Amy, who brought this message, said a prayer in his name, mumbled, that is, a sentence or so, and made a cross: she wore for the occasion a black glove. But for Jesus there were no mourners: the three in the moon-tree shade were like some distracted group assembled at a depot to wish a friend goodbye, and, as such gatherings long for the whistle of the train that will release them, they wanted to hear the first thud of earth upon the cedar lid. It seemed odd to Joel nature did not reflect so solemn an event: flowers of cottonboll clouds within a sky as scandalously blue as kitten-eyes were offensive in their sweet disrespect: a resident of over a hundred years in so narrow a world deserved higher homage. The cedar chest capsized as they lowered it into the grave, but Zoo said, “Pay no mind, honey, we ain’t got the strenth of heathen giants.” She shook her head. “Pore Papadaddy, goin to heaven face down.” Unfolding her accordion, she spread her legs wide apart, threw back her head, hollered: “Lawd, take him to thy bosom, tote him all around, Lawd don’t you never, don’t you never put him down, Lawd, he seen the glory, Lawd, he seen the light . . .” Up until now Joel had not altogether accepted Jesus Fever’s death; anybody who’d lived that long just couldn’t die; way back in his mind he kind of felt the old man was playing possum; but when the last note of Zoo’s requiem became stillness, then it was true, then Jesus was really dead.

That night sleep was like an enemy; dreams, a winged avenging fish, swam rising and diving until light, drawing toward daybreak, opened his eyes. Hurriedly buttoning his breeches, he crept down through the quiet house and out the kitchen door. Above, the moon paled like a stone receding below water, tangled morning color rushed up the sky, trembled there in pastel uncertainty.

“Ain’t I gotta donkey’s load?” cried Zoo, as he crossed the yard to where she stood on the cabin porch. A quilt stuffed fat with belongings bulged on her back; the accordion was tied to her belt and hung there like a caterpillar; aside from this she had a quite large jellyjar box. “Time I gets to Washington D.C. gonna be a humpback,” she said, sounding as though she’d swallowed a gallon of wine, and her joy, in the dimness of sunup, was to him disgusting: what right had she to be so happy?

“You can’t carry all that. You look like a fool, for one thing.”

But Zoo just flexed her arms, and stamped her foot. “Honey, I feels like ninety-nine locomotives; gonna light outa here goin licketysplit: why, I figures to be in Washington D.C. fore dark.” She drew back into a kind of pose, and, as if she were about to curtsey, held out her starched calico skirt: “Pretty, huh?”

Joel squinted critically. Her face was powdered with flour, a sort of reddish oil inflamed her cheeks, she’d scented herself with vanilla flavoring, and greased her hair shiny. About her neck she sported a lemon silk scarf. “Turn around,” he said; then, after she’d done so, he moved away, pointedly suppressing comment.

She placidly accepted this affront, but said: “How come you gotta go pull such a long face, and take on in any such way? Do seem to me like you’d be glad on my account, us bein friends and all.”

He yanked loose a trailing arm of ivy, and this set swinging all the porch-eave pots: bumping against each other they raised a noise like a series of closing doors. “Oh, you’re awful funny. Ha ha ha.” He gave her one of Randolph’s cool arched looks. “You were never my friend. But after all why should anyone such as me have anything in common with such as you?”

“Baby, baby . . .” said Zoo, her voice rocking in a tender way “. . . baby, I make you a promise: whenever I gets all fixed . . . I’m gonna send for you and take care you all the resta your years. Before the Almighty may He strike me dead if this promise ain’t made.”

Joel jerked away, flung himself against a porch-pole, embraced it, clung there as though it alone understood and loved him.

“Hold on there now,” she told him firmly. “You is almost a growed man; idea, takin on like some little ol gal! Why, you mortify me, I declare. Here was bout to give you Papadaddy’s fine handsome sword . . . seen now you is not man enough for to own it.”

Parting the curtain of ivy, Joel stepped through and into the yard; to walk straight off, and not look back, that would punish her. But when he reached the tree stump, and still she had not relented, not called him back, he stopped, retraced his steps onto the porch, and, looking seriously into her African eyes, said: “You will send for me?”

Zoo smiled and half picked him up. “Time I gets a place to put our heads.” She reached down into her quilt-covered bundle, and brought out the sword. “This here was Papadaddy’s proudest thing,” she said. “Now don’t you bring it no disgrace.”

He strapped it to his waist. It was a weapon against the world, and he tensed with the cold grandeur of its sheath along his leg: suddenly he was most powerful, and unafraid. “I thank you kindly, Zoo,” he said.

Gathering the quilt, and jellyjar box, she staggered down the steps. Her breath came in grunts, and with every loping movement the accordion, bouncing up and down, sprinkled a rainfall of discordant notes. They walked through the garden wilderness, and to the road. The sun was traveling the green-rimmed distance: as far as you could see daybreak blueness lifted over trees, layers of light unrolled across the land. “I spec to be down past Paradise Chapel fore dew’s off the ground: good I got my quilt handy, may be lotsa snow round Washington D.C.” And that was the last she said. Joel stopped by the mailbox. “Goodbye,” he called, and stood there watching until she grew pinpoint small, lost, and the accordion soundless, gone.

“. . . no gratitude,” Amy sniffed. “Good and kind, that’s how we were, always, and what does she do? Runs off, God knows where, leaving me with a houseful of sick people, not one of whom has sense enough to empty a slopjar. Furthermore, whatever else I may be, I’m a lady: I was brought up to be a lady, and I had my full four years at the Normal School. And if Randolph thinks I’m going to play nursemaid to orphans and idiots . . . damn Missouri!” Her mouth worked in a furious ugly way. “Niggers! Angela Lee warned me time and again, said never trust a nigger: their minds and hair are full of kinks in equal measure. Still, does seem like she could’ve stayed to fix breakfast.” She took a pan of biscuits from the oven, and, along with a bowl of grits, a pot of coffee, arranged them on a tray. “Here now, trot this up to Cousin Randolph and trot right back: poor Mr Sansom has to be fed too, heaven help us; yes, may the Lord in his wisdom . . .”

Randolph was propped up in bed, naked, and with the covers stripped back; his skin seemed translucently pink in the morning light, his round smooth face bizarrely youthful. There was a small Japanese table set across his legs, and on it were a mound of bluejay feathers, a paste pot, a sheet of cardboard. “Isn’t this delightful?” he said, smiling up at Joel. “Now put down the tray and have a visit.”

“There isn’t time,” said Joel a little mysteriously.

“Time?” Randolph repeated. “Dear me, I thought that was where we were overstocked.”

Pausing between words, Joel said: “Zoo’s gone.” He was anxious that the announcement should have a dramatic effect. Randolph, however, gave him no satisfaction, for, contrary to Amy, he seemed not at all upset, even surprised. “How tiresome of her,” he sighed, “and how absurd, too. Because she can’t come back, one never can.”

“She wouldn’t want to anyway,” answered Joel impertinently. “She wasn’t happy here; I don’t think nothing would make her come back.”

“Darling child,” said Randolph, dipping a bluejay feather in the paste, “happiness is relative, and,” he continued, fitting the feather on the cardboard, “Missouri Fever will discover that all she has deserted is her proper place in a rather general puzzle. Like this.” He held up the cardboard in order that Joel could see: there feathers were so arranged the effect was of a living bird transfixed. “Each feather has, according to size and color, a particular position, and if one were the slightest awry, why, it would not look at all real.”

A memory floated like a feather in the air; Joel’s mental eye saw the bluejay beating its wings up the wall, and Amy’s ladylike lifting of a poker. “What good is a bird that can’t fly?” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

Joel was himself uncertain what he meant. “The other one, the real one, it could fly. But this one can’t do anything . . . except maybe look like it was alive.”

Tossing the cardboard aside, Randolph lay drumming his fingers on his chest. He lowered his eyelids, and with his eyes closed he looked peculiarly defenseless. “It is pleasanter in the dark,” he said, as if talking in his sleep. “Would it inconvenience you, my dear, to bring from the cabinet a bottle of sherry? And then, on tiptoe, mind you, draw all the shades, and then, oh very quietly please, shut the door.” As Joel fulfilled the last of these requests, he rose up to say: “You are quite right: my bird can’t fly.”

Some while later, Joel, his stomach still jittery from having fed Mr Sansom’s breakfast to him mouthful by mouthful, sat reading aloud in rapid flat tones. The story, such as it was, involved a blonde lady and a brunette man who lived in a house sixteen floors high; most of the stuff the lady said was embarrassing to repeat: “Darling,” he read, “I love you as no woman ever loved, but Lance, my dearest, leave me now while our love is still a shining thing.” And Mr Sansom smiled continuously through even the saddest parts; glancing at him, his son remembered a threat Ellen had delivered whenever he’d made an ugly face: “Mark my word,” she’d say, “it’s going to freeze that way.” Such a fate had apparently descended upon Mr Sansom, for his ordinarily expressionless face had been grinning now no less than eight days. Finishing off the beautiful lady and lovely man, who were left honeymooning in Bermuda, Joel went on to a recipe for banana custard pie: it was all the same to Mr Sansom, romance or recipe, he gave each of them staring unequaled attention.

What was it like almost never to shut your eyes, always to be forever reflecting the same ceiling, light, faces, furniture, dark? But if the eyes could not escape you, neither could you avoid them; they seemed indeed sometime to permeate the room, their damp greyness covering all like mist; and if those eyes were to make tears they would not be normal tears, but something grey, perhaps green, a color at any rate, and solid, like ice.

Downstairs in the parlor was a collection of old books, and exploring there Joel had come upon a volume of Scottish legends. One of these concerned a man who compounded a magic potion unwisely enabling him to read the thoughts of other men and see deep into their souls; the evil he saw, and the shock of it, turned his eyes into open sores: thus he remained the rest of his life. It impressed Joel to the extent that he was half-convinced Mr Sansom’s eyes knew exactly what went on inside his head, and he attempted, for this reason, to keep his thoughts channeled in impersonal directions. “. . . mix sugar, flour, salt and add egg yolks. Stir constantly while pouring on scalded milk . . .” Every once in a while he was tantalized by a sense of guilt: he ought to feel more for Mr Sansom than he did, he ought to try and love him. If only he’d never seen Mr Sansom! Then he could have gone on picturing him as looking this and that wonderful way, as talking in a kind strong voice, as being really his father. Certainly this Mr Sansom was not his father. This Mr Sansom was nobody but a pair of crazy eyes. “. . . turn into baked pieshell. Cover with . . . it says meringay or something like that . . . and bake. Makes nine-inch pie.” He put down the magazine, a journal for females to which Amy subscribed, and began straightening Mr Sansom’s pillows. Mr Sansom’s head lolled back and forth, as if saying no no no; actually, and his voice sounded prickly as though a handful of pins were lodged in his throat, he said, “Boy kind kind boy kind,” over and over, “ball kind ball,” he said, dropping one of his red tennis balls, and, as Joel retrieved it, his set smile became more glassy: it ached on his grey skeleton face. Then all at once a whistle broke through the shut windows. Joel turned to listen. Three short blasts and a hoot-owl wail. He went to the window. It was Idabel; she was in the garden below, and Henry was with her. The window was stuck, so he signaled to her, but she could not see him, and he hurried to the door. “Bad,” said Mr Sansom, and let go every tennis ball in the bed, “boy bad bad!”

Detouring into his room long enough to strap on his sword, he ran downstairs, outside and into the garden. For the first time since he’d known her Joel felt Idabel was glad to see him: a look of serious relief cleared her face, and for a moment he thought she might embrace him: her arms lifted as if to do so, then instead she stooped and hugged Henry, squeezed his neck until the old hound whined. “Is something wrong?” he said, for she had not spoken, nor, in a sense, taken notice of him, not enough, that is, even to mention his sword, and when she said, “We were scared you weren’t home,” all the rough spirit seemed to have drained from her voice. Joel felt stronger than she, and sure of himself as he’d never been with that other Idabel, the tomboy. He squatted down beside her there in the shade of the house where tulip stalks leaned around, and elephant leaves, streaked with silver snail tracks, hung above their heads like parasols. She was pale beneath her freckles, and a ridge of fingernail-scratch stood out across her cheek. “How’d you get that?” he said.