The Angry Dream (3 page)

“Why didn’t they borrow money in Westfield, or Riverton?”

“They wouldn’t make loans there. Who wants to make out-of-town loans on poor farms?”

“People left?”

“Hell, no!” Kirk propped his elbows on his knees. “He’d tell them he’d let them live on their own land that wasn’t their own land any more. You know how he was, Al. ‘Why, Jones,’ he’d say, ‘I’m certainly not that much of a downright heel, for sure, now! I’d like for you to live right there where you always did live. Town wouldn’t be the same without you. I’m sorry how it looks—but damn it! You read the mortgage, didn’t you? Sure, now—you go right ahead and live just like always, Jones. We’ll work something out.’ And work something out, he did. Time they bought clothes and provisions and seed at his general store at his prices, with money they didn’t even have, but were supposed to be earning on a share and share, they didn’t have anything. Crop come in, they were worse off than when they started.”

It should have been hard to believe, that a man like my father had done these things, but it wasn’t, because I could remember him so easily. Pine Springs was not large, perhaps fifteen hundred people lived here, and my father had planned it well.

“Land baron,” Kirk said. “That’s what was the matter. He wanted baronial times with himself king of the hill. Well, he was king. He was a usurer of the worst type. He robbed them and cut their throats. High payments, low payments. Wrong appraisals. If they got some money somehow and came in to satisfy a mortgage he held, he’d talk ‘em into worthless or unsound stock investments and
still
hold the mortgage. Made nice contributions to the sheriff’s fund. Oh, and Prouty always got re-elected down the line. Prouty was always there to serve the papers at a foreclosure.”

The room became quiet. I could hear Sally clanking pans in the kitchen.

“When he did away with himself, they found everything in the bank’s name—everything but the house. They couldn’t touch that and that’s how come you got it, I guess. The depositors had a judge appoint a receiver over in Westfield. He came out, supposed to liquidate the bank’s assets.” Kirk laughed softly. “The poor guy nearly went nuts. Old Cy was qualified as an appraiser, see? So he appraised the land and farms, homes, for his own loans. This man came out and a place valued at fifteen, sixteen thousand was worth about seven or eight. Anyway, he tried to sell and couldn’t, naturally. He couldn’t interest outsiders because there wasn’t a bargain in the lot. It was a mess, Al. So finally he auctioned off the whole caboodle. Everything. Well, all the folks got together on a base bid. They bid low. He got mad as hell, but they crowded him. It was something, let me tell you. If he backed down, they would have hamstrung him. They got their farms back for practically nothing and the fellow went back to Westfield.”

I started to get up, then sat back again.

Kirk said, “Cy had plenty of juggling to do on those books. But the bank examiners had never questioned a thing. He was sick, Al.”

“A wonder the house is still standing,” I said.

“I figure it’s like a monument, something. Anyway, there it sits. Maybe they hoped you
would
come back.”

“What do you mean?”

“Al, they’ll crucify you! They’re scared of you and fear’s the worst thing can happen in a town of this size. Right now, I bet they’re holding meetings in somebody’s barn. Maybe they want you to pay up, Al. That’s the way they think. Son shoulders the old man’s burden, all that. They’ll sure as hell believe you’ve got that money—or had it. They’ll want to believe that.”

“So he must have spent the money and killed himself because of final conscience,” I said.

“They say every man’s got a conscience. Nobody ever accused Cy of having one.”

I stood up. Kirk rose.

“I’m staying at the house,” I said.

“Al, I haven’t told you the half of it. You’ll never be able to imagine how they felt when the bank failed. Why don’t you get while the getting’s good?”

“Because I’ve got to stay.”

Outside, the hound barked several times.

“Where’d you get that dog?” Kirk said.

“He was over at the house, that’s all I know. Why?”

“Well, maybe he’s somebody’s dog. They’ll say you stole him.”

He lounged along beside me, opened the door.

“What about you?” I said. “You hate him, too?”

“All my savings were in that bank, Al.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t. You need anything, you holler. Right?”

I went on outside, stood by the car a moment, looking up at the hills. Bunk came rousting along and climbed in the side of the car through an open window. He was covered with burdock, burrs hung in clots to his ears.

It had been a long time since my father had worked this village to his own ways. It might have been yesterday. Kirk Hartmann was still excited about it, so what would other people be like?

Somehow I believed Hartmann was exaggerating.

I did not like thinking of what had happened to the people of this town. The whole business troubled me. My father had been dead long enough for me to remember some of the good things, or at least the things bad, but tempered. It would not add up correctly, not with my memories of him. He had been all Kirk called him, and more—much more than I knew about, apparently. But one thing he had never been—a secret spender. I had never known him to gamble—not according to rule. With other people’s money, yes—with surety of his own success.

That was not gambling. He was too much of a businessman to owe any gigantic sum, and less man enough to pay what he owed without somehow coming out on top. Where did the money go?

As I passed the sawmill, a man ran suddenly into the road. He staggered and lurched drunkenly, running directly at the car down the middle of the road, waving his arms.

I hit the brakes hard and Bunk began barking, short, strident yaps, his nose pressed to the windshield, paws up on the dash. The car slid in the wet-clay road, fishtailed as I tried to bring it to the shoulder. It caught in ruts, straightened out. The man kept waving his arms, shouting, and I managed to stop the coupé not three feet from him.

“Harper!”

He was a tall, broom-thin man, wearing a dark ragged suit, dirty white shirt and a knotted rag of tie. His hands looked skinny and cold, his dirty gray hair a thick mat on his head. He needed a shave, and across the car’s hood I could see the raw beeflike look to his eyes.

“Al Harper?”

I checked the rearview mirrow. No cars in sight. I got out and walked toward him.

He was very drunk, his clothes wet. He looked as if he’d slept out all night.

“Al Harper?” he said again.

“Yes?”

He stood by the front bumper of the car, cringing a little. He smelled strongly of the barnyard, and of fierce liquor.

“What do you want, man?”

He was grinning, saliva running from one corner of his mouth, his eyes slyly watchful.

“Herb Spash,” he said.

I still did not understand. Then something about him, some attitude, brought it back. Herb Spash, newly married just before I left town. He had been the town barber, and a good barber—taking up the trade from his father before him.

“Herb,” I said. “Yes.”

He suddenly began to weep, standing there. Tears sprang to his eyes, his nose ran. He coughed, lurched around and laid his head on his arms across the car’s grill. His shoulders hunched and rocked.

“What is it, Herb?”

He looked up, tears running down his whiskered, dirty cheeks. He began shaking his head.

There was agony in his face. He turned and began running off toward the sawmill buildings, hulked over there under broken-limbed elms and sparse hickory.

“Herb.” I started after him, then stopped.

Spash was running in a blind stagger. He tried to leap the ditch off the road and fell headlong. He crawled up the far side, got to his feet, ran into the lot where the mill buildings stood and vanished around the wet side of a huge sawdust pile.

All this time, Bunk had been barking. As I got beneath the wheel, he ceased and whimpered faintly.

Herb Spash had wanted something. He had not been able to bring himself to say what.

I suddenly wanted to get back to the house, clean it up, then sit and think. The sky was gray again, the sun was gone, the hills dark with cold shadows.

The hound had vanished.

I cleaned the kitchen and dining room, closed the glass doors between the dining room and the living room. I shoved the table and chairs out of the dining room, brought in a couch and an easy chair. The old kitchen wood cookstove would keep the room warm. Already it was much colder than yesterday. I avoided the rest of the house, but once I’d got the shelves stacked with food, everything else in order, I went into my father’s den, where I’d slept last night.

Dirt layered tables and chairs, bookcases, and the gigantic old secretary. This was what drew me. It had been his desk, forever stuffed and jammed to bursting with papers and ledgers that marked his personal history in Pine Springs.

I opened the desk below the glass doors.

The desk was empty. There was not a single shred of paper, not a letter, nothing. I went through all the drawers, including the two secret back panels I’d discovered as a child. There were four marbles, a line and fishhook still holding the dried carcass of a worm that had possibly been there fifteen years. In one of the drawers I found three Caruso records and recalled my father’s admiration for the Italian singer.

I covered the room. Nothing.

I decided to search the house, and spent two hours at it, from attic to cellar. There was nothing but books, kitchen utensils, and furniture. Not even an old newspaper stack in the cellar, not a paper bag, not a forgotten grocery list, and the attic looked incongruous. Everything neat, yet nothing to remember him by. Nothing to recall my mother, either.

I had avoided my old room. I needn’t have. It evoked nothing of the past—the bare bed, the old bureau, an empty closet and an old oil painting that my mother had done when I was ten of a Spanish galleon sailing heavy seas.

I brought my bags into the house from the car, opened the one with the whisky inside, and poured a water glass full. I drank it neat, chased it with well-water, got cigarettes and started walking through the cold afternoon toward the far hill.

I couldn’t get Herb Spash out of my mind. He hadn’t shown animosity; he had wanted to tell me something.

“Al.”

“Yes.”

We stood there in the doorway and looked at each other. I didn’t really see her—I saw memory. It was a very bright memory for the moment. I had walked to the ornate, wrought-iron door and worked the black knocker, disturbed slightly with the changes around the Gunther place. It was no longer just a hill farm, as I had remembered. There was something about it of idleness and rich discontent. Trimmed box hedges meandered about the grounds enclosing graveled drives. It was horsy, the paddocks in sight and far beyond, where corn and wheat and alfalfa used to grow, the fields lay fallow.

“There’s no one home but me, Al.”

“All right, I’ll come in then.”

I followed her through a vestibule that I did not recall, and into a hall. She swung the heavy mahogany and glass door shut, and immediately this was no longer a farm. It hadn’t been outside, either—that’s what had bothered me. Quiet jazz filtered through the house from somewhere.

“It’s good to see you,” she said. “I heard you were in town.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was like approaching somebody you knew very well you knew, then discovering after the first loud blunder that you’d never seen the person before in your life.

“I thought I’d better–”

“I’m glad you did, Al.”

She wore a soft dark skirt, a thin white blouse slashed deeply at the throat, the collar broad and flaring, and a tan Cashmere sweater. The sweater was open, yet it clung to her body. The hair was richer, darker, more luxurious, and heavy to her shoulders, curling on the soft weave of the sweater. Her face was pale, her lips dark and full, her eyes still darker than I remembered, and boldly staring. The smile was the same. And the body of this woman was full-blown now. She turned lazily and walked away from me.

“Let’s not stand in the hall, Al.”

I followed her, the trimly stockinged calves, the low white leather moccasins. It was a careless walk, her body active. The back of the sweater rode across her fine hips as she moved slowly down three fieldstone steps that hadn’t been here before, into a sunken room of heavy drapes, thick carpeting and music.

She walked over to a large window looking out from the side of the house into the failing afternoon. There was a broad couch beneath the window, and slightly to one side.

“Would you like a drink, Al?”

“No, thanks.”

“Sit down.”

I sat on the couch, glanced up at her, then away. Somehow I couldn’t look at her without wanting to stare. She stood looking out the window. Light snow began to fall out there.

“Why did you come back?” she said.

I tried to tell her. It came out a jumbled mass. She had changed, yet she had not changed. “I didn’t expect you to be still living here, Lois.”

“I didn’t expect that, either. But I’m still here.”

She had not turned around. There was a wall between us, almost as if she could not turn around and face me.

I remembered the room, as it had been, not as it was. I remembered us, and what we’d had, and all the promises and the plans we’d made, banking on something we could not understand, only anticipate. She was not the same person I remembered, yet more of a person, and all the recollection of what she had been was in her—for me to see. As I sat there, she gave a little gasp.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” She turned quickly from the window and walked across the room to a cocktail table of gleaming black wood. “Won’t you have that drink?”

“All right.”

She smiled, poured whisky into two glasses, came across the room and handed one to me. We drank, looking into each other’s eyes. She held her glass familiarly and I suddenly realized that Lois was drunk. Something in her eyes gave it away, something in the way she drank from the glass, turned and set it down on an end table. She clasped her hands in front of her, tipped her head at me.

“You shouldn’t have come back, Al.”

“Everybody tells me that.”

“But this is me telling you.”

The whisky burned faintly in my stomach. I stood up and we were very close, watching each other. I wanted to take her in my arms, and she wanted me to.

“Everything’s changed around here,” she said.

“Don’t tell me you had money in the bank, too?”

“No.” She turned away, stepped over to the window again, then came back toward me. Her breasts were full and set firmly wide apart beneath the delicate blouse, the subdued smoothness of the sweater. She stood there, smoothing the sleeves of the sweater halfway up her forearms, watching me. “But my father had money in that old bank, darling. A great deal, and what happened made him unhappy.”

“I see.

“He wouldn’t like to know you were here.”

“He seems to be doing well now.”

“He’s doing well.”

“How’s your brother?”

“Weyman? Weyman is a case.” She did not move, staring at me. The desire to take her in my arms, to kiss the defiant lips, was very strong.

“It’s been eight years, Al. Eight long, long years. You can’t expect me to leap into your arms, all love and abandon, after eight years.”

“I didn’t expect anything like—”

“Yes, you did! I can see what you’re thinking. All very dramatic. We should hurl ourselves at each other—and we could bring it all back in a fine, mad frenzy.”

“Cut it out, Lois.”

“Eight years is a long time. Yet that’s what you want to do—” She turned sharply away, found her glass, drained it. She set the empty glass down, then looked at me again, smiling now.

“It would probably be wonderful, too.”

“Lois, I thought—”

“You thought eight years was long enough to get over it all. To forget the bad times. To remember only what we had—” She snickered softly. “What we had. Boy, didn’t we, though?”

“Stop it!”

I stepped close to her, put my hands on her waist. Her head went back, eyes shining at me with all the bitterness and confusion and something I didn’t know about, and I drew her to me, felt the soft impact of her body and kissed her—her throat and then her lips. Her mouth opened and her body abandoned itself to mine, her fingers clutching at my shoulders, the nails digging. She broke away, stumbled off, breathing heavily, her eyes very dark.

“Damn you!”

She brushed the thick hair away from both sides of her face with the palms of her hands, pressing her face, holding her hands there.

For an instant there was something almost savage in her eyes. Then she seemed to regain a semblance of aloof untouchableness.

“You’d better go, Al.”

I did not move.

“We’ll never have what we had again. It’s all gone, like the way the wind goes through this valley. That’s the way our love was—or whatever it was. It’s dead, Al. Dead and gone.”

“Trying to convince yourself?”

“No.”

She laughed lightly, quietly. Then she walked lazily past me to the couch. She sprawled out on the couch on her back, her dark skirt pulling tautly over her knees. She gave a huge sigh, then turned her face halfway to the wall and was quiet.

I moved to her side, leaned down. She was breathing heavily, sound asleep—passed out cold. There was a colorful woolen shawl at the foot of the couch. I drew this over her legs, then stood up again. She was very beautiful to me, all that I had remembered, and much more. For a moment a sense of nostalgia swept over me, the deep and poignant memories of what we’d had together once. I leaned again, kissed her on the soft lips that smelled strongly of whisky and gin. She opened her eyes wide, seeing nothing, and smiled. Then her eyes closed again.

Coming down off the hill, the valley was a driving pale of snow obscuring the hills on the other side, obliterating trees in blankets of white. The sky was dark, snow whirlpooling and eddying seemingly of itself, because there was little wind. Out there somewhere in the bright world, the sun had not yet set, but here in the valley, night was a blue-black fall.

Coming down the dirt road, time went back again. How many times did I recall the valley being like this? And worse. Snow house-high, and still driving down. And Lois running through it all, her cheeks flushed, promising to meet me tonight in the warmth of fragrant hay in somebody’s barn, behind the church, in the laundry room on the piles of freshly washed clothes at her father’s house, out among the pines in the glen, the snow, too, deep but warm.

I started hurrying down the road toward the house.

“Your mother was weak,” he had said. “Let’s hope you haven’t inherited her weaknesses, Al, my boy. I don’t hate her, mind you—she was very dear to me. But she was weak, a weeper. I can’t stand a weeper.

“You’re an only child, Al. I didn’t want it that way, but she was always tired, always weeping—too sick to build babies. Fear ran through her like a trace chain; it was a motor, kind of. It ran her.

“I should have married again, I know that now, some big-bodied woman, more to my taste. An only son can make it difficult for himself. She was a good woman in many ways. She was kind to you, certainly—too kind. She never liked me using the strap out in the barn. She’d weep then, too—remember?”

I remembered all right, and the times then, too, when she was still alive.

“Try and understand your father, Son,” she said. “Try. I know it’s hard, but he needs understanding same as a cow needs milking if it’s going to be any good to a soul. He’s done wrong, and you’re too young to know about that, and he’s doing wrong and he’s come to be more alone every blessed day of his life. But try and understand him.”

And she would weep. He was right about that, but there had been a time of sunlight, when she had not wept. A time before she did understand, a time when all she did was accept and believe. So then when she saw clearly, she just went out something like a candle guttering, burning its wick to a charred core. Believed, accepted, found out, died.

And later, he said, “I don’t want to visit her grave, Al. The house is not the same without her, but I don’t want to bring any of the dust of her back with me. She could never understand me. She hated business. ‘Business, Laury,’ I would tell her, ‘is man. You’re a woman and you’ll never understand man, so how can you fathom business?’ So she would weep, Al.”

By the secretary in his room, he would sit in the cane-bottomed chair with pen at hand, telling me. The desk stuffed and oozing papers, all with other men’s and women’s signatures on them, and figures and amounts and sums, the transactions of corruption.

“So they dislike you, Al. What do you care? Tell them you’ll buy them. Only tell them in a nice way, Al—with a laugh. Without money, you have nothing, Son—you are nothing. Less than that, even. So I’ll teach you how to get money. It’s entirely possible that your ma endowed you with a sense of disregard toward the dollar bill. Well, we’ve got to knock that out of you. You’re old enough to know. My daddy knocked the thought of it into my mind early. We were poor folk, Al. I know what it is not to have bread on the table. Not to have a table …

“You say you hate me, Al. Nobody hates Cy Harper.

“You’ve been to war, Al. Now’s the time to forget and begin. You’re a man now. I’m going to take you down to the bank and show you the vault.”

And he did, too—the drawers of money, of currency, banded and marked.

“Now, what place in town you want to set up business? Not big-city, boy. Take it here, where the pickings are just right. I can talk plain now, can’t I?”

I turned in the driveway, walked past the coupé, a snow-blurred shadow, and fumbled across the lawn toward the front porch. It was growing darker.

I stepped onto the first step of the porch, slipped, and caught the top step with both hands, then straightened. My hands came away sticky, thickly coated with gobs of dark red, almost like raspberry jam, but not quite like jam.

I went on up across the porch, my feet sliding slightly in the puddled liquid.

Bunk hung there beside the front door, dead. His throat had been cut. A long iron railroad spike was driven through his chest, securing him to the wooden side of the house.