The Second Coming (47 page)

“Very well. But don't stay long.”

“All right.”

She wet her thumbs with her tongue and smoothed his eyebrows. He was going to town.

8

Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ryan were lying in bed watching
Search for Tomorrow.
A curtain was drawn around the third bed. It seemed best to wait for a commercial break before putting his question. When it came, he turned down the volume and spoke fast.

“Excuse me, but this is important.”

The two men gazed at him.

“
YOU
fellows want a job?”

They gazed at each other.

“I have some property and I want it developed right,” he said, talking fast, so he wouldn't interfere with
Search for Tomorrow.
“I want well-built log cabins, enough land for privacy, and gardens, and at a price young couples, singles, and retired couples can afford. Not two hundred and fifty dollars maybe but less than twenty-five thousand. Mr. Ryan here has the know-how about financing, subdividing, contracting, and so forth. And he has the crew. Mr. Arnold has the building technique. What I want is for Mr. Arnold to work with Mr. Ryan's crew and teach them how to notch up a cabin, perhaps with more modern methods. I have plenty of timber, creek rocks, and flagstone. I'll handle the legal work. I figure we can build and sell cabins on ten acres of land and come out fine at twenty-five thousand.” The commercial was almost over. “What do you say?”

The two old men looked at each other.

“Whereabouts we going to live?” asked Mr. Arnold.

“Wherever you like. Here. Or Mr. Arnold could notch up a cabin for the two of you.”

“What, me live with that old peckerwood?” said Mr. Ryan.

“Hail fire,” said Mr. Arnold.

“Look, I don't care where you live. I'm making you a proposition. This is a good deal all around. We'll incorporate—that's one thing I know how to do—and share the profits. What do you say? Mr. Ryan, can you still get a crew?”

“Slick, Tex, Tomás, and Vishnu came by to see me last week. All of them said they wished they still worked for me.”

“Two of them looked like gypsies, the other two looked like women,” said Mr. Arnold.

“They may look funny,” said Mr. Ryan, “but they can outwork niggers. How am I going to get around?” He slapped the flat sheet where his leg should have been. “I'm missing two feet and one leg.”

“Any way you can. You figure it out.”

“They make cars now you can drive with your hands,” said Mr. Ryan, answering his own question.

“There you go. The corporation can afford one,” said Will Barrett. “Mr. Arnold, are you willing to teach this crew what to do?”

“All they got to do is watch me and keep out of my way. What land we talking about?”

“The Kemp property, over by the country club.”

“There's plenty of good timber there. All you got to do is keep me in logs—and somebody to pick up on one end.”

“You willing to use cement chinking instead of river clay and hog blood?” Mr. Ryan asked the silent TV screen. Neither of the men seemed to notice that
Search for Tomorrow
was playing without sound.

“I chinked a house on Dog Mountain with cement. Ain't nothing wrong with cement. You just bring your boys and keep me in straight logs. We going to need some boys to get the roof up. It takes several to mortise and peg the peaks. I can't climb no roof but I can show them how to split shingles and put the sap sides together. You going to need a forty-five-degree angle on your roof and a halfway lap to keep out leaks.”

“Your roof? Whose roof?” asked Mr. Ryan. “I'll show you some composition roofing that comes by the roll,” Mr. Ryan told the TV, “but it looks real good. I think you'll like it. It saves labor. You're talking about splitting shingles by hand, I mean Jesus Christ.”

“It sounds like tar paper but I'll look at it.”

It was a good time to leave. He turned up the volume on
Search for Tomorrow.

There was a commotion around the third bed. The curtain was pulled back. Two orderlies were trying to get an old woman onto a hospital stretcher. The woman was sitting on the edge of the bed and crying. She was no larger than a child but her ankles, clad in men's socks, were as thick as small trees. A great vessel moved in her neck in a complex out-of-sync throbbing. Her eyes were glossy and unblinking in her round heavy face. Tears ran down her cheek and caught in the dark down of her lip.

“Oh, I'm so afraid,” she said loudly with a little smile and a shrug. She pronounced
afraid afred,
like ladies in Memphis and Vicksburg.

“What you scared of, honey?” asked one orderly, a giant black woman big as an old black mammy but young.

“I'm afraid I'm never going to leave the hospital. Oh, I'm so afraid.”

“You be all right, honey,” said the black woman, her eyes absentminded, and put a black-and-pink hand on the patient's swollen leg. “You gon be fine, bless Jesus.”

Will Barrett was standing at the foot of the bed.

“Oh, hello, Will,” said the patient with the same smile and shrug. “Oh, Will, I hate to leave here!”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “I—” Oh Lord, I am supposed to know her. Was she an aunt? No, but she was one of ten or twelve ladies from Memphis or Mississippi he should have recognized. He made as if to give the orderlies a hand.

As he came close to her, he could hear her heart, which raced and rumbled so hard it shook her thick body.

He took her arm. It was not necessary. The other orderly, a sorrel-colored man who wore his mustache and short-sleeved smock like Sugar Ray Robinson, picked up the woman and in one swift gentle movement swung her onto the stretcher. He was an old-style dude who still wore a conk! He chewed gum like Sugar Ray. Where did he come from? Beale Street twenty years ago? After he centered the woman on the stretcher (ah, I know what that feels like, to be taken care of by strong quick sure hands at one's hips) and buckled the straps, Sugar Ray leaned close to her.

“Listen, lady, I'm gerng to tell you something.” (That was the difference between them, the two orderlies, that
gerng,
his slightly self-conscious uptown correction of the black woman.) “The doctors know what they know, but I have noticed something too. I can tell about people and I'm gerng to tell you. We taking you to the hospital in Asheville and we coming to get you Tuesday and bringing you back here and that's the truth, ain't that right, Rosie?” And he smiled, a brilliant white-and-gold Sugar Ray smile, yet his eyes had not changed because they didn't have to. The patient couldn't see his eyes.

“Sho,” said Rosie, her eye not quite meeting Sugar Ray's eye and not quite winking. “You gon be fine, honey.”

“Ah,” said the patient and, closing her eyes, slumped against the straps like a baby in its harness.

Then how does it add up in the economy of giving and getting, he wondered, that the two orderlies cared nothing (or did they?) for the old woman, that even in the very act of their offhand reassurances to her they were probably cooking up something between themselves, that they, the orderlies, who had no reason to give her anything at all, gave it because it was so little to give and so much for her to get? 2¢ = $5? How?

Does goodness come tricked out so as fakery and fondness and carrying on and is God himself as sly?

In the hall he stood gazing after the three of them. Young big black mammy, Sugar Ray, and the sick woman, the great machinery of her heart socking away so hard at her neck, it made her nod perceptibly as if she understood and agreed, yes, yes, yes.

9

Mr. Eberhart was watering small pine trees with a green plastic mop pail. He walked in a fast limping stoop from tree to tree. Standing with one leg crooked and with his long-billed cap fitting tightly on his head, he looked like a heron.

“Why are you watering these pine trees? It rained yesterday.”

“It didn't rain enough. They planted these seedlings too early. The rains don't come till after Christmas.”

“Didn't you used to run a nursery in Asheville?”

“Atlanta and Asheville. For forty years.”

“How would you like to run a greenhouse now? Perhaps several greenhouses.”

“What kind of greenhouse?” He had not yet looked up.

“An old kind. About fifty by twenty-five feet. No fans, no automatic ventilation, no thermostats.”

“That's the kind I started with. You cain't build them like that now. What kind of heat? That's what put me out of business. My gas bill was nine hundred dollars a month in the winter.”

“No gas bill. No electric bill. No utilities. It runs on cave air.”

“Cave air,” said Mr. Eberhart, watching water disappear into the sandy soil. Now he looked up.

“That's right. Cave air. A steady flow winter and summer. A steady sixty degrees. Is that too cold?”

“Cave air. I've heard of that around here.”

“Is that too cold?”

“Not for lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, or parsley. Or some orchids. What is your monthly utility cost?”

“Zero. Unless you want to live there and turn on the lights.”

“Cave air.” He couldn't get it through his head.

“Did you say orchids?”

“Sure.” He put down the can, adjusted his cap, picked up a handful of soil. Standing alongside Barrett, he spoke quickly in an East Tennessee accent. He gave his long-billed cap a tug. They could have been a couple of umpires.

“You can grow your cymbidium cooler than that, or laelia. But you don't want to repot your cymbidium.”

“Okay.”

“I got my own way of growing vanda—that's what you call Hawaiian orchid. Don't nobody know about it. I've applied for a patent. You're a lawyer. You want to know what it is?”

“Sure.”

Mr. Eberhart moved closer. “I use chestnut chips and a steady temperature. Most people think they got to have seventy to eighty degrees. But what vanda don't like and you got to watch is your sudden temperature change. And up here you can give them full sunlight.”

“We got plenty of both, chestnut and steady temperature.”

“That's where your money is.”

“Where's that?” Arms folded, they gazed out over the St. Mark's putting green.

“In orchids.”

“Is that right?”

“You want to know who buys orchids now?”

“Yes.”

“The colored. I sold five hundred corsages to one colored-debutante ball.”

“You want the job? I can get you some help.”

“Sure. When do I start?”

“Next week.”

“Okay.” He went back to watering the pines but called after him. “I'll tell you where else the money is.”

“Where?”

“Lettuce. If we got the room.”

“We got the room. Do you know what a head of lettuce costs you up here?”

“No.”

“A dollar and a half.”

Mr. Eberhart blinked. “Did you say cave air?”

“Yes.”

“I got to see that.”

10

Before he found Father Weatherbee in the attic, watching trains, he was stopped by a big florid fellow wearing an L & N engineer's cap. The man had a nose like J. P. Morgan—there were noses on his nose—and wore a double-breasted blue blazer with brass buttons.

“Aren't you Will Barrett?”

“Yes sir.”

“Boykin Ramsay of Winston-Salem. Reynolds Tobacco.”

“Yes sir.”

“You own this place.”

“Yes.”

“You don't charge enough.”

“Is that right?”

“I understand you're going
to
start a Council on Aging here.”

“I hadn't heard of it. It sounds like my daughter's idea—I was thinking of starting something else—farming in cave air.”

“I'm eighty-five years old and I'm here to tell you I don't need any goddamn Council on Aging.”

“I see.”

Mr. Ramsay grabbed him around the shoulders and pulled him close. “Come here, Will,” he said with a heavy but not unpleasant bourbon breath. “I want to tell you something.”

“Okay. I'm here.”

“I'm going to tell you the secret of getting old.”

“Okay.”

“Money.”

“Money?”

“Making money and keeping it. If you work hard and make money and keep it, I'm here to tell you you don't need any goddamn Council on Aging or educating the public and all that shit. That's how come the Chinese were right or used to be. They kept their money and kept the respect of their families. That's the secret.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I'm married to the sorriest damn woman in North Carolina and I got three sons who the only reason they are working is I won't support them. They're all waiting for me to die and I'm just mean enough not to. I came up here to take care of myself. Will, you be a mean old son of a bitch like me and you'll have a long happy life.”

“Is that right?”

“And I'm also up here to play golf. I hear you're a real sandbagger.”

“Well—”

“Let me tell you something, Will.”

“All right.”

“I'm eighty-five years old and I play eighteen holes of golf every day. I line up nine mini-bottles of square Black Jack Daniel's on the tray of the golf cart when I start out and knock back one on every other tee and I break ninety. Council on Aging my ass. How you going to counsel me?”

“Well, I wasn't.”

“Come on down to my room and I'll counsel you. I got some Wild Turkey.”

He looked at his watch. It was three-thirty. She might still be at the greenhouse. Suppose she went back to the greenhouse and forgot about time and got becalmed by her four o'clock feeling. Suppose they came to get her. What would he do if they took her away?

“I just thought of something. I have to go out for a while.”