The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (13 page)

At first he was afraid but he tried to act amused. “Look, what’s the difference? I’m too late now. I might as well stay out all night eh?”

“But Jesse, you know what it’ll be like when you come home.”

“So? Will it be any worse in the morning?” The look on Donny’s face plainly indicated that it would.

“Jesse, what will I tell them?”

“Tell them I’m playing pool.”

“They don’t know what pool is and what if they ask where?”

“Tell them.”

“Jesse, you’re nuts. The old man will be down here in five minutes if he knows. You know what he’s like. There’s no telling what he’ll do.”

He thought then of the awful violence that was within his father; a something that rumbled deep below like some subterranean mountain stream of roaring white water, splashing and pounding dark rocks within deep unseen caves. He remembered seeing it only once as a child, in Hazard or Harlan and he could not now remember which, the man his father had hit, literally flying like a grotesque rag doll across the space of the behind-the-store parking lot and how he had lain there so crumpled and still for so long with the blood trickling past his broken teeth in slender, threadlike, crimson streams. And his mother had prayed, “O Lord may this man not die, I’m asken you.” And his father had buried his head within his arms and leaned against the wall of the store, perhaps praying too while his fists remained so tightly clenched that the knuckles showed white, as if he were trying to hang on to something very desperately but was uncertain what it was. And after a while they, as children, cried too, because they knew there was something wrong but did not know what else to do.

Behind him now, the door opened and as he turned he saw the dancers again along the bar, and the man framed in the doorway saying, “you goen to finish this game? I
ain’t got time,” and he started nervously and said to Donny, “Look, I gotta go. Make up your own story. Tell them I’m okay. I’ll be home later.” As he turned to the building he averted his eyes from his brother’s face in order to avoid the tears that he sensed but did not wish to see.

So he went back in and thought of how Donny was the greatest little brother in the world. Of how he had never broken any of his brother’s confidences, of how he would spend hours shining that brother’s shoes or running faithfully after the baseballs he lofted into the skies and of how when the brother had first started smoking he would go all over town like a tireless little robot gathering bottles until he had acquired enough for the precious package of cigarettes. Sometimes he had the feeling that if he told Donny to walk off the edge of a towering building he would do so without a moment’s hesitation and the thought of the awful power seemed to tighten around his heart.

At three he left the bar that had officially closed at two and felt that he had no place to go. It was both too late and too early to go home. He went into the street and then entered an alley and stood in the darkness, listening to the scuffle of the rats and waiting for the dawn; he shivered in the cold and tried to think of what he would say if anyone should come along and see him standing there, shivering in an alley with his books beneath his arm. Almost fearfully he backed into the shadow of a building and shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers. It was then that he felt the money and jumped as if he had been shocked. He had been so intent on playing that he had forgotten about the dollar bills he had been pocketing. But now he felt them in two tangled, crumpled lumps. Lumps that were now a chilly damp, but had once been warm and almost soggy from the perspiration of his thighs. He tried to count them without light and without taking them from his pockets, fingering what he thought was a new corner, and then another, and counting the corners of one
pocket and then the other, and finally in despair, because he never got the same number twice, giving it up altogether and starting suddenly back into the street.

When he entered the all-night coffee shop he sat on the second last stool and laid his books on the very last, hoping that he would not be noticed there and that he might have at least some privacy. The cloth of his trousers pulled tight against his thighs when he sat and he could feel and sense the protruding of the pockets’ bulges, knowing what they looked like without even looking down, and afraid to look down lest his worst fears be confirmed, or that by so doing he should draw attention to something he had no wish to publicize. Thinking it was like the mysterious coming of the ill-timed adolescent erection, when one knows that it is there, unbidden and unwanted and unbecomingly wrong.

He ordered the coffee and then slowly drew the crumpled bills from the right pocket. Probably, he thought, because he was right-handed. One by one he uncrumpled and flattened them. They were still damp and smelled faintly of salt. There were nineteen. Then he did the same with the contents of the left. There were twelve. Thirty-one dollars.

He left the coffee shop with the bills neatly folded in the breast-pocket of his shirt and with his mood completely changed. He would go home and he would give it to them he thought. It would be the first worthwhile gift that he would give to those from whom he had always taken. And he was filled with a great love for the strange people that were his parents. Parents whom he found so difficult to understand, who still made treks to Kentucky and who were not above being openly emotional when their battered old car crossed the mighty bridge from Cincinnati to Covington, and who would not wash the red hill mud from that car on their return, waiting for the rains to do so as it stood out in the yard, and who listened always to their hillbilly music.

And he was ashamed now of the times he had been
ashamed of them. He remembered the awful experience of the “Parents’ Night” when he had been in fourth grade, the year after the move, and of how he had wildly begged them to accompany him to view the wonders of his school, and of how they themselves had become even mildly excited and had washed and scrubbed themselves to redness in anticipation of the big event. Once inside the great building, however, what natural dignity they possessed had seemed to drain from them immediately, as if some magic stoppers had been pulled beneath their shoes. And they had become blank and dumb and very nearly overcome by panic in that strange foreign world of animated numerals and foot-high ABC’s and posters that told one how to do everything it seemed, from brushing one’s teeth to crossing at street corners to feeding birds in winter. His mother had said, “Mighty fine,” “This sure is mighty fine,” “It sure is mighty fine,” over and over again as if her mind were locked in a groove, and his father’s line, while crushing his hat in his massive hands, had been, “Ah sure do appreciate all this here,” and he had said it indiscriminately, to teachers, to other parents and to janitors alike. And in the eyes of Miss Downs, the fourth-grade teacher, he had seen the unspoken question: “How can such a bright little boy as Jesse have parents such as these?” He remembered now that he had rather wondered how, himself.

At five-forty-five he went home after stopping at an all-night service station to convert thirty-one dollar bills into a twenty and a ten. Everybody was up; his mother was getting breakfast although it was too early; the table was set and his father’s lunch pail lay open on its side. No one said a word, and he had a strange feeling that he had gone deaf. He had never thought the house could be so quiet. He looked at his mother, but she kept her eyes on the stove, and then he looked at Donny who seemed about to burst into tears.

And then it was like the beginning of a play in which his father had the first lines, “And where the hell have you
been?” Lines that came out clear and well rehearsed, as if he had been practicing and practicing, and they were not loud nor hard as he had expected. And he – he had not rehearsed, he had not studied his lines well enough, but he stumbled out into the middle of the stage and began to take his part, and a voice within him said, “Tell him the truth,” and the peculiar unrehearsed voice said, “I was playing pool.”

“We have been waiting for you all night,” said his mother evenly, sounding the endings to all her words, “we thought something had happened to you, that you’d been beaten or that you’d been robbed.”

He was very happy suddenly and filled with love because of their concern. His voice said excitedly: “No, no, nothing happened. I didn’t lose anything. I won. Look!” And he began to withdraw the thirty-one dollars from his pocket. Someone said, “How much?” and he almost laughed and said, “Thirty-one dollars,” drawing the gift completely from his pocket and laying it on the table.

His mother said, “Before you have a bite of breakfast in this house, go and give it back.”

He was stopped then in full tilt and almost crushed, as if he were bolting for the hole in the football line and suddenly found that the daylight had vanished and the hole had closed and the opposition’s weight was squeezing out his life.

And then he was angry and shouted, “Give it back? Who to?”

And his mother said, still evenly, “To the people you took it from. The Lord has been good to us and it seems He wouldn’t want none of this.”

He burst into tears of anger and sorrow and hopelessness, and tried to explain: “But you don’t understand. The Lord has nothing to do with it. I didn’t steal it. It’s mine. I won it. I can’t give it back. I don’t even know their names.”

His father said, “You heard your mother,” so he
stormed out of the house and stood at the gate, crying, until Donny came out and he was forced to stop. In his pocket his hand clutched the little ball that was now the thirty-one dollars, three bills that were soaked from the sweat of his perspiring palms. He looked at the sleeping soon-to-be-awakened city and did not know what to do.

He started to walk then but soon he was running. Down several streets and across several others in the almost-light of early morning. He slowed down just as he entered the Caudells’ yard, trying to walk slowly as if just out for a stroll, though breathing heavily.

He found Everett Caudell in the kitchen, sitting by himself with a cup of coffee and listening to his little radio as it valiantly tried to pull in the fast-fading signal from Wheeling, West Virginia. The others were still in bed and he himself was not completely dressed, being still in his stockinged feet, and with his heavy shirt yet unbuttoned and his trousers not yet firmly fastened by the broadness of his heavy belt.

“How do, Jesse?” he said as casually as if he had been whittling a stick on his doorstep in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. “How ya bin? Coffee?”

He was surprised first because he hadn’t been asked why he was about at such an hour but the surprise was shortlived and soon buried beneath the avalanche of his reason for coming. “Here,” he said, pulling the three criminal, sweat-stained bills from his pocket and thrusting them at the man, “here, take them. They’re for you – you lost last night.”

The big man said kindly: “Take it easy lad. Sit down now. What’s all this? What’s all this?” and he began to fill his pipe as if there were all the time in the world and the world were never to end. And the words tumbled out then, one after the other, on top of one another, passed and thundered and banged one against the other, like the coal when it comes bounding down the chutes, which was one of the few images he remembered from Kentucky, crashing and rolling and pounding, in big lumps and little
ones, and the big being broken into the small, and he ended saying: “I’ve got to give it to someone, and it’s for you because you lost and I won – and I shouldn’t have.”

The man took them then, the three dirty bills, the twenty, the ten and the one, and put them in the pocket of his still unbuttoned shirt. “Aye lad,” he said, “your father is a good man and your mother a good woman; now go on back and tell them what you’ve done, and if they come to me, why I’ll tell them, ‘Sure, he give it to me, a twenty, a ten, and a one,’ just like you did.”

When he was at the door he heard his name immediately behind him and turned to find that Caudell had followed him on silent stockinged feet and was now standing directly in front of him. And then before he could move he saw the older man quickly and quietly tuck the three bills into the shirt pocket of his guest. “Now there,” he said, “there ain’t nothen wrong. There’s no lie. You give it to me and I took it. We’ll leave it be like that. Now go on home as I hear the army starten to move upstairs.”

And he went out then into the new day and after a while he even whistled a bit, and he thought of how he’dknock the geometry exam dead next week and of how the football pads would settle with familiar friendliness upon his waiting shoulders that very afternoon. Already he could sense the shouts and hand-claps from the sun-drenched field and as he began to jog, he could hear the golden leaves as they turned beneath his feet.

T
HERE ARE
times even now, when I awake at four o’clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth. There are times when I am half out of bed and fumbling for socks and mumbling for words before I realize that I am foolishly alone, that no one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides restlessly in the waters by the pier.

At such times only the grey corpses on the overflowing ashtray beside my bed bear witness to the extinction of the latest spark and silently await the crushing out of the most recent of their fellows. And then because I am afraid to be alone with death, I dress rapidly, make a great to-do about clearing my throat, turn on both faucets in the sink and proceed to make loud splashing ineffectual noises. Later I go out and walk the mile to the all-night restaurant.

In the winter it is a very cold walk and there are often tears in my eyes when I arrive. The waitress usually gives a sympathetic little shiver and says, “Boy, it must be really cold out there; you got tears in your eyes.”