Tales for a Stormy Night (6 page)

“This is George, my son,” the old man said.

“My name’s Jackson. Al Jackson. Glad to meet you, George.” He half rose from the chair and extended his hand.

George was pleased at that, the handshake offered him as between men, and in itself a rare custom among the day workers. The handshake was firm but the hand soft, and George made up his mind then to keep his distance when this rookie started to wield a pitchfork.

“Al, here,” his father said, “he’s been in the army. He’s going to take a day or so getting into shape. Man, how your back’s going to ache.”

There were plenty of men around already in good shape, George thought. There was not even the look of weather about Jackson. His face was newly sunburned, his nose peeling. Still, he was a big man, good-looking, and it might be fun to have someone around whose tongue wasn’t wadded in his throat like a plug of tobacco.

“Can you milk?” George asked, for he did love to be relieved of that chore.

“Beg pardon?”

“Cows. Can you milk them?”

Jackson shook his head doubtfully. “I broke my arm a year back. It stiffened up on me. I don’t think I’d do ’em justice.”

This amused the old man, and Elizabeth, bringing the coffee pot, giggled. Jackson looked up at her and smiled. “That’s the best oatmeal I’ve had since I left home.”

Elizabeth blushed and had to set the pot on the table to get a better hold on it.

George, trying to blend his cereal with the milk, said, “It’s got lumps in it.”

“Maybe it’s got lumps,” Jackson said, “but the stuff I’ve been having could’ve been chipped off a rock pile.” He reached across the table for the coffee pot. “Here, let me pour that for you. Sit down, Miss.”

“Her name’s Elizabeth,” the old man said.

“Really? That was my mother’s name.”

The right arm was limber enough with the coffee pot, George noticed.

But that summer George obtained his driver’s license, and in the month between haymaking and threshing, and again between threshing and silo-filling, he spent his spare time in Masonville. His father paid him the wage of a hired hand on condition that he outfit himself for school that fall and buy his own books. It left him ample change for the juke box and the trivia he needed to bolster his attentions to Thelma Sorinson, a classmate of whom he had grown very fond.

Many times, with Thelma sitting beside him in the Ford, he remembered his father’s outbreak when he had asked him about Elizabeth, his warning that George was not to touch a girl he didn’t intend to marry. George reasoned that he might be willing to marry Thelma some day if she would have him. She was pretty and she could dance like a feather in a whirlwind. Thelma didn’t care much what George reasoned, for he had grown tall and he shaved now once a week.

More and more at home he talked about her. His father nodded and asked such questions as what church she attended and what her father did for a living. Al, who had a bedroom in the attic, played a lot of checkers with the old man and a card game called “War” with Elizabeth, so that he was around often enough to take his turn in conversation.

“You ought to invite her out sometime so we can take a look at her, George,” Al said one morning.

It was the first time since Al’s arrival that George had felt one way or another about him. Now he measured how much a part of the family Al had become. He went to church with them Sundays, having bought a suit with his first pay; he took his bath in the family tub where other hands had always scrubbed down at the dairy pump; his shirts and underwear hung on the line with the household wash every Monday. More than any one thing, it suddenly irked George that Elizabeth should do his underwear.

“What do you mean, ‘we’?”

Al shrugged and winked at the old man. “I like to see a pretty girl as much as the next guy.”

“I’ll say you do.”

“That’s enough, George,” his father interrupted.

“Who’s coming?” Elizabeth asked.

“A pretty girl like you,” Al said soothingly.

Elizabeth clapped her hands.

The old man was still talking through it. “…getting too big for your britches, driving off in a car and your pockets jingling…”

“For God’s sake, Pa.”

“You’ll not swear in this house, boy.”

George pushed back from the table, the anger choking him.

“He didn’t mean no harm,” Al said.

“I meant plenty!” George shouted.

Still Elizabeth clapped her hands. “When’s she coming, George?”

“She’s not coming ever, not here she’s not!”

“Out! Outdoors with you.” His father pointed, his finger trembling.

“I’ll go when I’m ready,” George said. “I live here, too.”

But he went quickly and strode down the path to the chicken house. He caught up the scraper and basket and flung into the coop with such violence that the birds indoors fled screeching to the entry.

“His arm’s not strong enough,” George screamed after them, “to clean out a chicken coop, but he can bounce his backside on a tractor seat all day!”

It was milking time before George saw his father, for he did not go into the house at noon, tearing a few ears of corn from the stalks and eating them raw in the field.

“What have you got against him, George?” the old man asked when they met at chores.

“I don’t know, Pa. All of a sudden it just seemed to me there was something bad about him. Maybe the way he looks at Liz.”

“And maybe the way you’re jealous, son?”

George did not look up. He had been afraid all afternoon that that was it. “Maybe,” he admitted.

The old man weighed the words before he said them. “I’m hoping he’s going to marry Elizabeth.”

George could feel a sickness rising in him. “Oh no, Pa!”

“She isn’t going to have you and me to look out for her always. Already you got a girl.”

“And you?”

The old man squinted at him. “There’s a place for me beside your mother. It’s just looking at things straight. Nobody lives forever.”

George thought about it. “But him, Pa. What’s he see in Liz?”

He knew he had put it wrong the moment the words were out, for the anger flickered up in his father’s eyes. But he spoke slowly and the anger eased away. “Can you tell me why you think a sunset’s pretty and you wouldn’t look up at the sun at noon? Can you tell me why?”

George shrugged.

“I couldn’t tell you either. I think that a shock of corn is beautiful. But there’s some folks who’d tell you it reminded them of scarecrows. Now I think Elizabeth is beautiful.”

“So do I, Pa.”

“Do you, boy? Do you really? You better look down deep inside yourself. I ain’t waiting for the answer, but you better look.”

George tried to look while he went about the chores, but he knew he was missing the heart of the matter. Still, he searched his memory for moments when he had loved his sister best. He dwelt especially on her singing near the campfire, and since he had not brought about such occasions this summer, he thought he had struck upon his father’s meaning. It was true, he had neglected the most beautiful thing about her.

Going into the house at suppertime, he decided that an apology was due Al for the morning’s incident. He tried to summon the courage for it. But Al greeted him heartily as though he had been off on a vacation, and because he had decided Al deserved an apology he disliked and distrusted him for not expecting it.

Within the week George arranged a beach party. It was too late in the season for swimming, but the full moon rose early over the lake, and as they huddled near the fire, boys and girls, their song was like a serenade to its great gold face. They were a long time singing before Elizabeth joined her melody to theirs, and her voice came faint and tentative at first, like a bird’s mimicry. George, his arm in Thelma’s as they swayed to the music, felt a star-tied pressure from her, and glanced up to see her smile as she withdrew from him. She was not sharing her discovery with him. It was a quick and private ecstasy, and he realized this must happen to everyone. Catching beauty was a selfish thing. A person had to catch it alone before he could share it. Elizabeth had found the courage of her voice now; she sang out her wordless music as she had never done before. And George had never felt so lonely.

He got up and moved away from the fire. He watched in the shadows while another boy filled his place. He saw that boy pull Thelma down backwards and kiss her quickly, as one couple and then another were doing.

He turned away and his eyes grew accustomed to far images lighted only by the moon. Elizabeth stopped her song abruptly, and George climbed up from the beach. He trod amid the debris cautiously and searched the shadows. His eyes found her and Al, except that they were almost one person, so close was their embrace. He started toward them. Soundlessly, his father caught him from behind, whirled him around to face his own party and shoved him toward it. George went, but he sat apart and joined no more songs that night, blaming himself for having opened the full measure of his sister’s beauty to her lover.

He stayed at home more after that and tried to pretend to a camaraderie with Al, asking him all sorts of questions about the army, his family, his schooling. Al parried the questions like an experienced boxer would an amateur, always keeping him at arm’s length. He could tell him he’d served in Afghanistan, George realized, and he could not prove otherwise. On an inquiry about his family, Al said he was an orphan. George remembered the day he came: his saying that his mother’s name was Elizabeth. Apparently George showed triumph in his face, because Al drawled: “When you don’t have one of your own, you’re liable to call any woman who’s good to you ‘mother.’ Ain’t that a fact, George?”

He retreated, bested in that as he was in all such encounters, and hated himself for it. He grew sullen, and now when Elizabeth sang often, even about the house as she had never done before, he snapped at her for it. She merely laughed and was still for a few moments. Then, her happiness bubbling up like spittle in a baby’s mouth, she would have to let out the sound of it. He fled outdoors.

His father spent almost every evening poring over the Bible. Sometimes, coming on a phrase especially to his liking, he would read it aloud. “Ah,” he would say as though he had discovered something for which he had been searching, “ah, listen to this.” And he would read a passage, most often describing monumental sins true penitents had been forgiven.

From this, too, George fled.

His father came on him shivering in the pumphouse one night when it was time for him to start back to school. Cornered there, George took a screwdriver to the pump motor.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” the old man said, watching him tinker in hurried clumsiness. “Put down your tools for a minute.”

George obeyed him.

“A few years back,” the old man started, “I was thinking serious of marrying Miss Darling…”

Miss Darling had been George’s Sunday-school teacher.

“…I figured we’d go away a while, her and me, and then come back to the farm. That way I thought you and Liz would be so glad to see me, you’d like her here, too…”

George felt something drop down inside him like a plunger.

“But things weren’t as good as now, and it just got put off until it was too late. I’m going to send you away to school this year, son. I talked to Reverend Johns about it. He’s recommending me a school after service tonight.”

“Pa, I don’t want to go.”

“You always took to books. Now’s your chance. No chores, no milking. You can go to the University then.”

“No, Pa.”

The old man looked at him. “Elizabeth and Al’s getting married next week. I don’t want you around then, George, the way you’re acting.”

George could not hold back the tears. “Pa, wait. Make them wait. Ask him where he came from. What does he want with us? Maybe he’s got a wife already some place…He’s 30, Pa…”

“He’s being baptized tonight,” the old man interrupted. “The Lord is cleansing him whatever sins he’s done. I’m satisfied in that. He’s seen salvation.”

“He’s seen a farm and a sucker!” George shouted.

The old man struck him hard across the face, the force of the blow knocking the boy backwards. The fan belt broke his fall, but before he got to his feet the old man was at the door. He turned and looked back at his son, his eyes streaming. “All we seem to do any more is hurt each other.”

When he was gone, the stench of sulphur from the well added to George’s nausea. He went outdoors and retched. He was sitting on the stone hedge when he heard the car drive out. He watched for the taillight to appear on the highway, and seeing it, went into the house.

He could hear the clock tick in the stillness, and the water dripping at the sink. There was no other sound and he went up the steps to Al’s room, He searched every drawer, finding nothing but clothes; not a letter, not a paper nor a picture, not even an army “dog tag.” He almost tore the bed apart, and that search, too, was futile.

“Satisfied, kid?”

The boy whirled around. Al had climbed the stairs without a sound.

“You’re supposed to be in church,” George blurted out.

“And you’re past due for hell,” Al said, drawling the words as though there were no threat in them. “What did you find against me, George?”

Everything, George thought, but he could name nothing. He stood, stiff-tongued and awkward in every limb, while Al sauntered to the window and looked out. “I work hard, I go to church regular, and I’m going to marry your sister. I don’t know another guy who’d do that.”

George clenched his fists and managed but one step forward. Al spun around, holding in his hand the pearl-handled revolver.

“That’s Pa’s gun,” George said.

“Pa’s gun and Pa’s bullets. You’re a fool, kid. We could’ve got along fine, the four of us.”

George was near to tears, fear and hatred torturing him. “Liz,” he cried. “You don’t love her. I know it. I can’t prove it, but I know it.”

“So what? Just so what? I never saw the beat of you and your old man for playing God almighty.”

Al moved a step toward him, the gun real and steady in his hand.

The fear grew thick in George’s throat. “What are you going to do?” he managed.