September Song (3 page)

She did not even bother to answer. They understood each other, the only ones who could. French was a folly they shared.

“Speak some to me,” she said.

He hesitated for a moment, then he intoned:

“Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l'automne

Blessent mon coeur

D'une langueur

Monotone
.”

The singsong cadence, the rhymes, the pitch of it brought to her mind the melancholy call of the mourning dove.

When the recitation ended, the words—if words they were and not musical notes—lingered on in a withdrawing echo. Wrapped in revery, she could say nothing for a while. Then she said, “Beautiful. That is beautiful. To think there is a country where people sound like that! Tell me now, what does it mean?”

He translated.

Again she was silent for a while before saying, “How sad. How beautiful.”

She had him recite it so many times over the next weeks that she learned it by heart.

He was impatient to get on with his studies. He had no time to lose. He would soon be going back to school. He could not just lie idle.

But, “I don't understand what I'm reading,” he said.

She took the book from him and scanned a page.

“Who could?” she said.

Then she regretted her flippancy. His expression was one of despair.

“When I fell off that pole I fell a long way,” he said. “I was reaching for the stars.”

She was the first person to whom he had ever confided his aspirations, and he could do so now only because they had been dashed. He had kept them to himself for fear that in him they would be thought presumptuous, preposterous. He was ashamed of being an orphan and beholden to all the world. She was flattered to be singled out as his confidant.

As a boy he had delivered groceries after school and on Saturdays. He had mowed lawns in summer, raked leaves in the fall. He ran errands for shut-ins. All that he earned he saved. He had neither time nor money for amusements. He came to be well known and he made himself well liked. Dependent upon charity, he learned early in life the worth of a smile. “That young fellow will go far,” he overheard said of him.

He had a long way to go to reach the goal he had set for himself. But he believed then that nothing could stop him.

She listened to the story of his poor and joyless life, his lack of affection, of any true childhood, of a home, even a room of his own, and though she was years younger than he it appealed to her motherly feelings. She could see before her the earnest, unsmiling boy dressed in ill-fitting castoff orphanage clothes.

By dint of hard work he stood near the head of his class, and when he graduated this earned him a scholarship to college. He supported himself by working nights as a janitor, during the summer vacation as a telephone linesman. He had fixed his sights on a distant target, and he never lifted his eyes from it. Law school, the bar exam, legal practice, then …

He blushed for his immodesty. “Would you believe, I had dreams of someday being governor.”

“You will! You will!” she said fervently.

“I will never climb another telephone pole. I can't work as a janitor anymore.”

“You'll get a desk job.”

“Not if my brain has been damaged, I won't.”

He told of that last moment of consciousness before his fall when light was dark and dark was light, and it seemed to him that his world, once so sharp and clear, was that way now. He had lost his bearings.

“The head will clear up,” said the doctor. He warned of atrophy of the muscles of the legs through disuse. As instructed, Beth suspended bags of sugar from her patient's ankles and he lifted and lowered them. He clenched his teeth in pain and the sweat stood out on his brow. He shook his head in discouragement.

“Five minutes more,” she said. “You can do it.”

When the time for it came she trained him to walk again without crutches. She exercised him like a drill sergeant making a raw recruit shape up.

“Come to me. Come to me,” she coaxed, backing away and beckoning as he advanced.

Each step toward her was a step away from her. She likened herself to a bird teaching its young to fly, knowing all the while that it would fly the nest first thing.

Probably he was as near to loving her as anybody in his loveless life. That he was fond of her she could see. That he was not shy of showing it made plain how far it was from being anything more. They were friends, and there was no greater bar to love than friendship.

Yet she wondered whether his feeling for her ran deeper than he would allow himself to declare or even acknowledge. Obliged to work his way through school and attend classes part-time, he had years yet to go. Then he could not expect to attract clients at once. Perhaps he was shy of asking her to wait for him, thinking that it would be unfair to her, that some good man might propose to her and, bound by her promise, she lose out on him.

Their time together was drawing to a close. Soon would sound
les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne
. Harvest time had come. She was busy in the kitchen putting up the garden produce. He was helping. While she sterilized jars and skinned tomatoes he sat at the table snapping beans. What neither was doing demanded concentration but they worked in silence. The snapping of each bean sounded like somebody cracking his knuckles.

Several times he rested from his labors and she observed him gazing out the window. He seemed to be rehearsing a speech and refining it.

“What did you say?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, and went back to snapping beans.

But something, she felt, was simmering in him like the pot on the range. Again the snapping stopped and he cleared his throat.

“Yes?” she said eagerly.

He said, “I've been trying to find words—”

“Yes? Yes?”

“—to thank you for all you've done for me. You and your father.”

“You don't need to,” she said, and turned away to hide her tears of disappointment.

When the cast was removed he said, “Struck off my ball and chain.”

She wondered where a person might get splints and a cast for a broken heart.

He would be going back to the rooming house which had been his home during the school session for years. He was already late for classes. He must make applications for a new job. His being crippled would only strengthen his resolve. He was sure to succeed. She would follow his rise from afar.

In preparation for his departure he sat in the yard wrapped in a bedsheet while she clipped off his beard. Unlike Delilah, she was not unmanning her Samson, she was grooming him to take on the Philistines. Clean-shaven, he was a different person, a stranger to her, and belonged to the outer world.

On the way to the depot the three sat on the single seat of the pickup, she in the middle pressed against him. Though ordinarily her father liked to let her drive them, a little mark of his confidence in her, today he drove. She sensed that he knew she did not trust herself to do it, that she had her thoughts to think. Looking straight ahead, they rode in silence while the seams in the pavement ticked as regular as a clock.

Up to the time the train pulled into the station she kept hoping without hope that he would ask her to wait for him. She would have had to nod her answer.

He shook hands for the last time with her father and gave her a peck on the cheek. He cleared his throat, and for an instant she thought he was going to say the word. He said goodbye.

Ahead of the train a wind blew down the tracks, sweeping before it an early-fallen leaf. She recited to herself:

“Et je m'en vais

Au vent mauvais

Qui m'emporte

Deça, delà

Pared à la

Feuille morte
.”

Like an executioner's order to fire, the conductor's cry rang out, “'Board!”

She watched him limp across the tracks. She longed to call, “Come back! Come to me!” Before mounting the steps he turned and waved goodbye.

No sound was so sad and lonesome as the whistle of a departing train to one left behind.

A Labor of Love

T
HEIR MOTHER HAD HAD A CRAVING
for sour pickles all the while she was carrying Berenice: that was how Henry Howard accounted for his sister's disposition.

It was not for sweets, that was for sure, his wife Susan, avoiding contractions for the sake of emphasis, agreed. And I do not believe Wendell's mother ever ate anything at all while she was carrying him: that was her explanation for their brother-in-law's disposition, or lack of any.

“Cut that man with a blade and I vow he wouldn't bleed. If anything flowed at all it would look like skim milk,” she declared. “That woman has drained him dry of what little sap he ever had in him.” Among Susan's many names for her sister-in-law one was the Praying Mantis.

“Wendell has never done anything but take up space,” said Henry.

“He only knows two words,” said Susan, and she quoted them, mimicking to perfection Wendell's mousy manner: “‘Yes, Berenice.' When what she needed all along was somebody to whale the stuffing out of her.”

Berenice now wrote that Wendell was at death's door.

“As somebody said of Calvin Coolidge,” said Susan, “how can they tell?”

“She'll have nowhere to go,” said Henry.

“Nowhere to go? She's got three grown children. Though how she managed it I don't know, except like the Virgin Mary.”

“They wouldn't keep her in their doghouse.”

“So now at your age you're going to build her a home.”

“I'll get Junior to help me.”

“When? After he has already put in a day's work at the mill? On his Sundays off? A lot his dear Aunt Berenice has ever done for Junior!”

“Between the two of us it ought to go up pretty quick. It's not going to be any mansion. One floor. One bath. And she won't need a guest room. She hasn't got a friend in the world. Maybe a fireplace to sit by in the evening. Keep her at home and away from here.”

Actually he was looking forward with some relief to coming out of retirement, if only temporarily. It had not suited him. He knew of no way to occupy himself except with work.

“You just better not skimp on it if you want to have a minute's peace.”

“I'll make it nice. After all, I don't want to shame myself before the neighbors—me a builder by trade, or was—by putting my widowed sister in a shack. Do I?”

“Well, it's going to be a labor of love. If you think you'll ever see a red cent for all your work then, Buster, you're a bigger chump than I take you for.”

“Well, like I say, your only sister. Or brother.”

“And just who, if I may make so bold, is going to pay for the building materials?”

“Well, I've got a lot of stuff out in the shop left over from my contracting days. Enough of just about everything you need to make a nice little bungalow. It's all just sitting there. Besides, I never paid today's prices for it.”

“No, but you could get today's prices for it.”

“She'll need what she'll have to live on. Widow-woman.”

“Hah! Buy and sell you ten times over. Still got the first dollar she ever laid hands on.”

“Well, you know, your parents' daughter.”

“Has she ever paid you her share of either of them's funeral expenses? Been diddling you since childhood. Never played a game without cheating. Does it still with Wendell. He's the only person who'll play a game with her. Build her a treehouse. That's where she belongs. In a tree.”

Henry enjoyed hearing his wife run down his sister. Berenice might think she had the world fooled but at least one person saw through her.

“Now where are you going to put this house?” “Over in the northwest corner of the property. As far away from here as possible.”

“Just means you'll have that much further to trot to answer her beck and call. You're setting up a sweet life for yourself in your golden years.”

At twelve dollars a foot, the well-digger he hired went down two hundred and fifty feet before striking water, for this was a country of floods followed by long dry spells—Dust Bowl country once upon a time. A crew was brought in with a back-hoe to sink a septic tank and dig trenches for the leaching field. Then the form was built, the cement mixer summoned and the foundation poured. Junior and he could then set to work. They worked after Junior got off work, into the night, and all day Sundays, holidays.

He wavered between working fast and working slowly. For while he was building a house for his sister he was all the while building a coffin for her husband. He fully expected that upon his announcement of its completion Berenice would say, “Well, Wendell.” And Wendell would say, “Yes, Berenice.”

What would she do without him? To her he was what a clawing post was to a cat. Henry knew very well what Berenice would do without Wendell. She would turn all her attention upon him.

Now that his stem was wound and he ticking again, he rediscovered all his old skills that he had laid aside. He would need them all. For although he had always been a conscientious craftsman, never before had he worked for a more demanding customer, one harder to satisfy. Like his tools, those skills were a bit dull now and hard to hone, but they were still serviceable. The years of nailing down underlayment, floor boards, shingles, laying tiles had stiffened his knees so that in getting up off them now he almost required a crane, and it was not as easy as it had once been to lift his end of a rafter. His hands that in retirement had shed their lifelong calluses first blistered then regained them. Still, there was pleasure in the curl of a shaving from the plane, pride in the tightness of a joint. To cut a board to measure, fit it in place and drive the nail home was as satisfying as putting a period at the end of a sentence that said just what you wanted said—which, come to think of it, was something he had never done with Berenice.