The Bad Seed (8 page)

That night, before he had his supper, he sat on the porch with his wife, his feet resting on the rickety railing. At once he began to tell his wife about the death of the Daigle boy, but Thelma slapped at mosquitoes, yawned, and said, “Don’t bother to tell me about it. I heard it on the radio.” Then, as though his words had reminded her of something, as though silence were a thing she could not endure, she went inside and turned on the radio, selecting one of the dance programs she liked so well. When she returned to the porch, Leroy said, “Jesus Christ, can’t you turn that thing down some? Can’t a man have quiet even in his own house?”

“I like it that way,” she said. “I like to hear music loud.”

She was a big, dull woman with the empty face of a fat baby, and as she sat again in her rocking chair, she said petulantly, “Quit spitting on them petunias. It was hard enough to coax them up as high as they are now. If you got to spit, sit on the steps.”

He moved to the steps, grumbling a little. Then, as though he’d forgotten for a moment that his present audience was not one he could impress with his tales of injustice, he said, “Pick on
me. Pick on me and belittle me like everybody else does. I’m used to it. I can take it. I know I’m nothing but a poor sharecropper.”

“Listen, Leroy,” said Thelma patiently. “Don’t try to tell me them lies, because I know better. You never was a sharecropper; you never even lived in the country, like I did when I was a girl. Your papa wasn’t any sharecropper, either. Your papa was a long-shoreman, and you know that as well as I do. Your papa made good money doing it, too. Nobody went hungry or wanted for anything in your papa’s house. It’s a pity you didn’t turn out like him.”

“I didn’t have a chance,” he said. “I didn’t have a chance to accomplish nothing.”

“You had chances. You had plenty chances. You’re lazy.”

She fanned herself languidly, pulling down the yoke of her dress; then, thrusting her legs against the banisters, she went on to berate him for his laziness, his lying, his dirtiness, his unwillingness to play up to people who could help him along, her voice carrying well over the radio. The way he acted, the way he insulted people, was about as silly a way as a man could act. No wonder he was always losing his job. For instance, she knew some of the people at the Florabelle who he was always belittling, and they wasn’t no way at all like the way he said they was—that Mrs. Breedlove, for instance, was a real nice, jolly woman, and a kindhearted one, too. Maybe if he started doing nice things for people instead of griping all the time; maybe if—

Then, in the middle of a sentence, she said quickly, as though bored with her own moral advice, “How about a can of beer before I start supper?” She got the beer and brought it to the porch. It was still not dark, and the children were playing a game in the backyard, a game that seemed to require a great deal of bickering and screaming. Their voices interfered with the music, and Thelma went into the house and turned up the radio a little more. “Jesus Christ!” said Leroy, draining his beer. “Can’t a man
get no quietness even at home? If I catch them kids, I’ll tan the tar out of them.”

“You won’t catch them, though,” said Thelma placidly. “Them kids run too fast.”

It was then that Leroy repeated Rhoda’s remark about the death of the Daigle boy, and Thelma, laughing a little, threw her empty can high over the fence and into the street. She got up from her chair, pulled her dress away from her sweating buttocks, and said, “I think that was a real cute thing to say.”

“That’s a real mean little girl,” said Leroy. “I never seen a little girl like that one in all my born days.” He got out his pipe, lit it, and smoked in silence, thinking how the other children who played in the park—them other ones that wasn’t mean—were all afraid of him, just like he wanted them to be. He could make them jump and run out of the park if he barked at them loud enough; he could even make the little girls cry, and run off to tell their mammas on him, although he had always got out of it so far by being humble, and saying it wasn’t so, or that the little girl had been acting ugly—like trampling down the flowers, or trying to scoop goldfish in the lily pond. But that little Rhoda Penmark he couldn’t make no impression on at all—at least not so far. But give him time and he would. Give him a little time and he’d make her jump and run from him like the others. He chuckled in anticipation of that pleasant day, and then, defiantly, he spat into his wife’s flower bed again.

Thelma, slapping at mosquitoes with her palmetto fan, said, “Your papa made good money all his life. Your papa was a good provider. That I can say for him, and do so gladly.”

“That little Rhoda Penmark is a mean little girl,” said Leroy aloud. “But one thing you can say for her, and it’s this: she don’t blab nothing. Anything that happens, happens between me and her.”

“Listen to me,” said Thelma. “You leave that little girl alone.
You hear me, Leroy? You going to get yourself in trouble if you don’t quit messing around with those rich folks and their children. I’m telling you, you going to get yourself in a mess of trouble.”

“I don’t do nothing to her,” said Leroy, “except maybe plague her and tease her a little.”

“I’m telling you,” said Thelma. “I’m telling you right now.”

She got up from her chair, called her children, and went into the kitchen to start supper, but Leroy remained on the steps for a time, smoking his pipe and thinking of the little Penmark girl. He would have been surprised to know that, in a sense, he was in love with the little girl, and that his persecution of her, his nagging concern with everything she did, was part of a perverse and frightened courtship.

That night after dinner Christine went to the Daigle home on Willow Street, her purpose still not clear in her mind. It was not quite dark when she came up the steps. The sky was soft, dark blue, with only the early stars against the horizon. Mr. Daigle answered the bell. He was a larger image of his son; there was the same pale, blue-veined forehead, the same outthrust jaw and small, puckered underlip. The hand he offered Christine was cold and damp. She gave her name and explained her mission; she wanted to offer her sympathy, and to ask if there were anything she could do; and he said in a voice that trembled in spite of himself, “Anyone who knew our son is welcome in this house.” Then, opening the door wider, he added, “You are the first to call. We are not people who entertain a great deal, and we have not made many friends.”

The living-room had that depressing look of expensive bad taste. There were beads and bows of ribbon everywhere. Everything was wrong, she thought, the furniture, the colors, the
paintings; even the big Oriental rug somehow offended. Mr. Daigle said, “You must excuse the looks of the place. We have just returned from the funeral home where they’ve taken him. Everything is a little disarranged and lacks Mrs. Daigle’s touch.”

Then, standing there beside his visitor in the hall, he said, “You must go in and speak to my wife. Perhaps something you say will—perhaps, in some way you can—” He knocked on his wife’s door, whispering, “Hortense! Here’s a visitor. It’s someone who knew Claude. Her little girl was his classmate, and was with him at the picnic.”

He went away silently, and Mrs. Daigle sat up on the sofa where she had been resting. Her hair was disarranged, her eyes red and swollen, her mind still a little drugged from the sedatives she had been given. She said, “It’s not true that Claude was timid and lacked confidence in himself, as some people have said. I’m not saying he was a pushing, aggressive boy, because that wouldn’t be true, either. What I mean is, he was a sensitive boy, an artistic child, really. I’d like to show you some of the flower drawings he did so beautifully, but I can’t bear to look at them again so soon.”

She broke off and pressed her face into her pillow. Christine sat beside her and took Mrs. Daigle’s plump, ringed hand in her own, pressing it in sympathy. “We were so close to each other,” Claude’s mother said. “He said I was his sweetheart, and he would put his little arms about my neck and tell me every thought he had.”

She paused, unable to go on, and then said, “I don’t see why they couldn’t find the medal. I’m sure the men didn’t look hard enough. It was the only thing he’d ever won in his life, and he valued it so much.” Then, as though the loss of the medal were more terrible to her than the loss of her son, she wept without constraint, her face pale and bloated, her hair falling limply over her eyes. When she could speak again, she continued. “Somebody
said the medal must have fallen off his shirt and sunk down into the sand, but as I told my husband, I don’t think so. I don’t see how the medal could possibly have come off by itself. I pinned the medal on him myself, and the clasp was strong and tight.”

She wiped her face with a damp towel, and in the silence, Christine said softly, “I know. I know so well.”

“The men simply didn’t look hard enough,” said Mrs. Daigle. “They said they’d looked over and over, but I told them to go back and look again. There was such a wonderful bond between us. We were so close to each other. He said I was his only sweetheart, and that he was going to marry me when he grew up. He obeyed me completely. He wouldn’t even go to the corner until he’d discussed the matter with me, and I’d told him it was all right. He’d want to be buried with his medal. I know that without being told. I want to please him in every way I can— Will you tell the men to please look for the medal again?”

When Christine returned home, Rhoda was curled up in one of the big chairs studying her Sunday school lesson for the following day, her lips shaping aloud the text that she read. She went each Sunday, with the little Truby girls who lived across the street, to the Presbyterian church on Lowell Street; and she was ardent in study, and faithful in attendance as well. Her teacher, Miss Belle Blackwell, believed in encouraging both attendance at her class and seriousness of purpose in her pupils, through a series of small rewards. Each time a child came promptly to the
Sunday school room when the second bell rang, and knew the lesson printed on the back of the illustrated card which had been distributed in class the previous Sunday, she surrendered the card temporarily, and Miss Blackwell pasted a golden butterfly on it as a testimonial of piety and application. When a child had twelve of these cards with their twelve golden butterflies, she was given “a pleasant and instructive reward” in return.

The lesson this particular Sunday was concerned with one of the bloodier precepts of the Old Testament; it centered around the damnation and most cruel destruction of those who had been unable, or unwilling, to conform blindly to some Hebraic party line of that day; and when Christine sat quietly beside her daughter under the lamp, her mind still fixed on the suffering of the Daigles, Rhoda passed the card, on which she was to be examined next morning, to her, and asked that her mother question her about it. Christine read the text slowly, shook her head, and thought:
Is there nothing but violence everywhere? Is there no real peace anywhere in the world?
She wondered if her daughter should be taught such things, but sighing in a gentle protest, feeling that others surely knew more about these matters of faith than she did, she asked her daughter the questions required. Rhoda had learned her lesson well, and, smiling her charming, shallow smile, she nodded in triumph, and, going to her treasure box, she returned with the eleven butterfly-starred cards she’d already earned.

“I’m sure to get a prize tomorrow,” she said. “I’m just
sure
to.”

“What do you think it will be? Will it be something quite nice?”

“It’ll be a book, I guess,” said Rhoda. “Miss Belle almost always gives a book that improves the mind.”

The anticipation of possession was already in her face, and, gathering her cards together, she returned them to their original place in her dresser drawer.

Later, Mrs. Penmark read the afternoon paper, and went to bed early; but she found it hard to sleep, for Hortense Daigle’s tear-stained, disintegrating face kept coming in the dark before her eyes; but at last she did fall asleep, and had a dream which disturbed her, but which she could not remember afterward. She got up earlier than she usually did on a Sunday morning, the liquid, triumphant sound of church bells in her ears, and fixed breakfast for herself and her child.

Later that day, when Rhoda returned from church, she had her prize tucked under her arm; it was a copy of
Elsie Dinsmore,
and, going at once to the park, she opened her book and began eagerly to read, as though she hoped to find there an understanding of those puzzling values she saw in others—values which, though she tried her best to simulate them, were so curiously absent from herself. But the book bored her after a while, and, returning to the apartment, she sat at the piano to practice her scales. Her teacher said she had almost no musical ability, in the true sense of the word—she had only patience and tenacity. But she would play acceptably some day, more accurately, perhaps, than children with talent.

At noon, old Mrs. Forsythe, who lived across the hall, brought over a tray of lemon meringue tarts she’d just baked. She knew that often a woman didn’t feel in the mood to prepare for herself or her child, particularly if the child were a little girl, with the man of the house not there, these little extra treats, and she thought perhaps that Christine and Rhoda would enjoy the tarts for lunch, since they’d turned out quite well this time. It was such a pretty day, too; and if Mrs. Penmark had planned to go out, she’d be glad to keep an eye on Rhoda. It would be no trouble, really, for her grandchildren were coming over that afternoon, and one more would hardly make any difference.

Mrs. Penmark, the depressed direction of her thoughts broken for a time, bent forward impulsively and kissed the old woman
on her forehead. And Mrs. Forsythe, returning to her own apartment, said softly to her husband, “Christine is a very kind, gentle woman. She’s a nice neighbor to have.”

The funeral of the Daigle boy was held on Monday, and an account of it was in the afternoon paper. The grave had been “banked with floral tributes,” but the most imposing tribute of all had come from the children of the Fern Grammar School, which he had attended; each of his little classmates had contributed to the beautiful blanket of gardenias which had lain first on the coffin, and later on the grave itself.