September Song Read online

  He experienced some unsteadiness in getting to his feet. He was trembling; his heart was pounding and he was short of breath. After all the excitement he needed a few minutes’ rest. He went inside the grove and stretched himself out.

  Weak though he was, a feeling of satisfaction filled him. He had read his adversary’s wise and wary mind. He had foreseen his moves. The game was not yet to checkmate but he had brought it to check. He had the king on the run. And a king he was, even bigger than could be imagined, filling the landscape for that instant he was in the gunsights, and that rack on his head was a thicket of branches. Those two shots at the running dogs were surely the best of his life. He deserved congratulations for getting rid of those vermin. He felt a glow of charity in having spared the deer’s life, and a sense of possession. That life was now owed to him. No doubt the deer too was resting somewhere at this moment, overtaxed and winded.

  After a while the beating of his heart calmed and his breath grew regular. Still he allowed himself a few more minutes’ rest. He would get home the sooner for it.

  He was going to be tired when he got home. He could feel already how tired he was going to be. Tomorrow he would give both himself and the deer the day off. They had earned it. When he did get home this evening he would thaw himself out with a hot buttered rum and after dinner tuck in early.

  Just thinking of that while watching the hypnotic snow sift down in this silence as deep as sleep made him drowsy. He must stir himself, get moving. He must not be caught out in this weather—or worse. Soon. Just a few more minutes …

  Old Rip Van Winkle—whose haunts these were—did not wake from his long hunter’s sleep to find the world more changed than he from his. He had a few moments of amnesia. The grove was walled in by falling snow. It was heavy enough to come through the thick treetops. He was covered with it from top to toe as though while he slept a sheet had been drawn over him.

  He must get home!

  He started to rise, gasped, and fell back unconscious.

  There the body was found by the search team two days later following the biggest blizzard in modern memory.

  Ties of Blood

  NO TWO BROTHERS were ever closer than Joe and I. The difference of four years in our ages made him look after me as if I was his child, especially after our mother’s death, and made me look up to him with something akin to worship. For me my big brother could do no wrong.

  Joe taught me to swim, to shoot, to drive. He helped me with my homework. He trained me in my trade. He could fix anything. Dad was handy, as a man has got to be around a farm, but Joe was a wizard. He could study a piece of machinery that he was seeing for the first time, and in minutes figure out how it was meant to work and what was now wrong with it. He kept the truck and the tractor running, the implements working. I never got to be the master mechanic Joe was, but whatever I know I owe to him.

  When Dad remarried Joe felt himself to be in the new wife’s way. It was time he left home and struck out on his own. He went to Dallas where he got a job as maintenance man in a plant. Dad was talking of selling the farm, so when Joe wrote saying there was work for me too at the plant I joined him. We set up house together. He worked nights, I worked days.

  I took care of the same machines on my shift as Joe did on his. Between us we kept things humming. I might say, “Lathe number eleven seems to me to be spinning a little off center.” And he, “I’ll have a look at it this evening.” At home we shared the cooking and the chores, and there too things went smoothly.

  So did they after Gloria joined us. When I proposed and she accepted me I felt as if I had planted my flag on the moon. She gave up her job to become a housewife. Joe offered to move out but we would not hear of it. Gloria understood that he and I were inseparable. The two of them got along as well as she and I did.

  The one thing that might have made me happier would have been for Joe to be as happy as I was. But as time passed I came to believe that he would never marry. All the more reason for him to stay with us. We were his family.

  As soon as we learned that there was going to be an addition to it I said, “Joe, congratulations! You’re going to be an uncle. If it’s a boy he’ll be called Joey.”

  Joe flushed with pleasure, and again offered to move out.

  I told him this was his home.

  One day shortly afterwards there was a power failure on my shift at the plant. Operations were shut down.

  When I arrived home unexpectedly, I found my brother and my wife in bed together.

  Had it been any other man I would have felt myself dishonored but I would not have been so hurt.

  As I was loading the shotgun I heard Joe go out the back door. I spared Gloria, or rather, I spared her child. Which of us its father was I would never know, but in either case it was innocent.

  Joe was waiting for me in the yard. To support my testimony he was still naked.

  I said, “Joe, I idolized you.”

  I could barely see to shoot him for my tears.

  Auntie

  I

  “MISS REBECCA” to all others, she was “Auntie” to just one. And as she was quick to point out on their being introduced to somebody, she was only Evan’s great-aunt. Not that she wished to distance herself from him, as might have been supposed, but rather to account for the disparity in their ages. The villagers of course all knew the relationship. They had watched the Davis family drama played out on the street over the years. In his childhood they had pitied the boy. Who could help but pity the poor little waif, a runaway from the time he could toddle, seeing him being yanked by the ear or switched home by that mother of his, whimpering, humiliated before all the world, but still the picture of diminutive defiance? It pleased them to be able to pity her too, seeing that she had a heart to break after all. Even now, reading in the local paper of Evan’s latest scrape with the law, they said, “Well, what do you expect?” But of her they said, some to her face, that she was a fool. Out of consideration, they refrained from saying an old fool.

  On graduation from high school, head of her class, at age eighteen, she went to work in the local branch bank. She declined the honor of being the commencement valedictorian—the beginning of her reputation for being “different,” one which escalated to the proportions of a scandal when, at twenty, on the death of her father, she left home and moved into the house next door, a rental property belonging to the family. There had been no quarrel between her and her mother and brother, she just wanted to be independent.

  For forty years, immune to illnesses, she was at her post as surely as the flag outside the bank was raised and lowered daily on its staff. Indeed, because of her dependability, that task came to be entrusted to her. To nettle those who marveled at her constitution as though it were another of her oddities and who disapproved of old-maidenhood, she explained, “No husband, no kids to bring home bugs.”

  In all those years only one workday differed from the rest: the day the bank was held up.

  Of the two tellers, the other one an elderly widow ripe for retirement, she was the one chosen by the robber. Sizing him up, she was not the least afraid of his deliberately using his pistol. Her only uneasiness came from his nervousness.

  “That’s as much as I can get under the grate,” she said of the paper bag he had ordered her to fill with money. In fact, it was too much, as she had calculated. While he, having laid down his pistol on the countertop, tugged with both hands at the bag, she said, speaking low so as not to embarrass him, “Are you sure you want to do this, young man? They’ll catch you sure as shootin’ and clap you behind bars.”

  He gave her a startled look. Plainly she had said the very thing he was saying to himself. Leaving behind him the bag of money and his pistol, he bolted. He was arrested before the day was done, charged with attempted armed robbery.

  She visited him in his cell at the county jail. At the time when they ought to have stood by him his family had disowned him. Customers at the bank wagged their heads and said, “
Go visit the fellow who aimed a gun at you?”

  At the trial she was the prosecution’s chief witness. Having given the testimony that convicted the culprit, she pled the court for leniency on the grounds of his youth, his lack of a criminal record, and because “he had not gone through with it.” Her unsolicited remarks were ordered stricken from the record.

  Years later she received from Arizona a snapshot of the robber and his family and a note thanking her for having saved him at an early age from a career of crime.

  She was credited with having risked her life to protect the bank depositors’ money. A dinner was given in her honor, she was rewarded with a hundred dollars, and when the job fell vacant, was promoted from teller to loan consultant. Few borrowers ever defaulted on loans approved by her.

  Banker’s hours were short. Much of her time was her own. All the more reason for her to have a man to look after, said the village.

  Her spinsterhood was held against her, as was her subscribing to magazines, which, there being no home delivery of mail, she was seen taking from her rental box in the Post Office. These contacts with the outer, alien and hostile world were suspicious; they might almost have been trafficking with the occult. She was too independent by half. Local boys were not good enough for Missy. Hoity-toi! She was known to have rejected two perfectly acceptable suitors in her twenties. One beau had come around to look her over as he might have hung over the fence to inspect a hunting hound or a head of stock. No more ardor did she expect, for so she thought most matches were made. The other fellow pestered her for a while with an attraction as one-sided as a fly’s for a person. While both suitors seemed steady, neither inspired her to want to shop and cook for him, darn his socks, iron his shirts or share her bed and bathroom with him. “Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage,” said the song. As far as she could see, the wives were the horses and the husbands the carriages.

  Her brother married and their parents thereupon retired to Florida. Over the following years the gate in the fence between the two houses stood open, but with the old folks gone and she with no children to play with their cousin, not much traffic passed through it. Her nephew, an only child, grew up, got married and brought home his bride, and her brother thereupon took early retirement, at a cut in his pension, and fled to Florida. Her nephew’s wife was a gorgeous girl, the queen bee of the village, and might have had her pick of local men. She was said to have made the mismatch she had to spite the lover with whom she was quarreling.

  She soon repented of her folly and she took out her discontent on her husband. Her voice was heard by the neighbors raised in anger; doors slammed, her car gunned off. The child that came did not bring with him harmony. It seemed that to his mother he only compounded her mistake. Miss Rebecca had another reason to bless her singleness.

  One day while gardening she heard the child crying. On and on it went, until finally her concern overcame her reluctance and she went to investigate. He was alone in the house. She walked him until he quieted. She was returning him to his crib when her niece-in-law entered.

  “He was crying,” she said, feeling like a kidnapper caught in the act.

  “They do that,” said the young mother to the old maid.

  On the way home she latched the garden gate behind her, and so it mostly stayed until the boy began to run away from home.

  It was next door, to Auntie’s house, that his first flight took him. No amount of exasperation could justify the mother’s violence on retrieving him. She seemed to be taking out on their child her dissatisfaction with his father. The boy looked at his auntie tearfully and with a trembling lip.

  Her maternal feelings were awakened as though by the angel of annunciation.

  The mother cared about where the child was only when she did not know.

  The little fugitive was not long in learning that his auntie’s house was no safe haven. It was there that he was looked for first.

  Fledged, he flew further from the nest, seeking refuge with the housewives of the village. They reported him by phone to his mother. He conceived a mistrust for the race of women.

  From her window Miss Rebecca watched him yanked home, his mother loud in her denunciations, he unrepentant but suffering in silence so as not to draw attention to his humiliation.

  She knew that he would be the one to pay for her interference, and so she usually managed to restrain herself and, biting her lip, look on from behind her curtains, but sometimes the sight was too much for her and she dashed out for all the world to see, dressed as she was, uncombed, her hands clasped imploringly, and begged, “If you don’t want him give him to me.”

  “Home! Get home! You brat, you!” the mother snapped, and she lashed the boy onward while he tried to protect his bottom with his hands, until they could stand no more and, sniveling, he sucked one and then the other to ease the pain. She felt the blows herself—as the mother had meant that she should.

  As the boy grew and his stride lengthened and he ranged beyond his mother’s reach, he passed beyond her concern. Her storming at him only made him more rebellious. She gave up on him. Once too strict, she was now too lax. She being the one who wore the pants in the family (for which the boy disrespected his father) he was turned loose. He was hardly ever at home. He began to run with a pack of local boys and was constantly in trouble.

  Exasperated by both the boy’s unruliness, his truancy and bad grades, and the parents’ unconcern, the school officials threatened to take him from them and place him in a foster home. The father shrugged helplessly, the mother indifferently.

  Because of this indifference Auntie’s interference was no longer objected to. She was welcome to try her hand at reforming him. Trouble was, her pity for him made her excuse his misbehavior. What was to be expected of the child from a home like his? Temperamentally she sided with him against the authorities. In her own way she too was an outsider, a loner like him. Her halfhearted admonitions were ignored. He was not told that he was bad but that he had cause to be.

  At seventeen—old enough to be tried as an adult offender—Evan was arrested as one of a ring charged with an epidemic of recent break-ins, convicted and sent to prison. He was hardly gone when, like a she-bear, which takes a new mate after her cub has been evicted from the den, his mother ran off with another man. The father went west and sank from sight.

  When after four years Evan was released on probation, his auntie took him in to live with her.

  II

  To preserve her independence she had refused marriage. She wanted not to share her neat little nest. Not have to concern herself with another person’s wants and ways. Not to wait hand and foot on a man. Now in her old age she had invited disruption into her home, servitude into her life.

  The villagers all smirked. Let them. They knew nothing about her that she herself did not know. She was as aware as they were of the irony of her situation, but she now knew the rewards of self-sacrifice and devotion, and the transfiguration that glowed about her like a halo wiped away the smirks.

  Around the house Evan was idle, demanding, thankless, often moody. She excused him. He had had an unhappy life. He was untidy. This too she excused. At home he had gotten no training while in prison he had been harshly disciplined. To make up for this she let him sleep late on weekends, she made his bed, she picked up after him, washed his clothes, cooked for him tasty meals. Craving his affection and fearing his resentment, she refrained from criticizing him, from ever complaining. And indeed, happy to serve him, she harbored no complaints.

  But about one thing she did nag him, for his own good, and this caused friction. She was worse than his mother had been in keeping tabs on him, in criticizing the company he kept.

  He could not leave the house without her asking where he was going nor come back without her asking where he had been. “Out,” was his surly answer to the first question, “Nowhere,” to the second.

  “Evan, you didn’t get home until two in the morning.”

  “
So?”

  She lived in fear that he would violate his probation, the conditions of which were strict, and be taken from her and sent back to prison. She knew peace of mind only when he was at work, and she often phoned him on the job with such questions as, “What time can I expect you?” and, “What would you like for dinner?” to make sure he was there.

  He resented the legal restrictions on his freedom of movement and association, the denial of his manhood. It was as if he were one of those wild animals, trapped then released with a radio attached to him to monitor his every moment. She pitied him and was pained to feel that he looked upon her as his jailer.

  “Where were you last night, Evan?”

  “At the Upshaws’.”

  The probation officer had called to check on his whereabouts. There had been some trouble in the area. She feared that if she were to say he was there with her he would be asked to come to the phone. It was to the Upshaws that she knew to go in search of him.

  “What time were you there?”

  “I was there all evening.”

  “You were not there when I was.”

  “Well, Auntie,” he said impudently, “that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.”

  And those Upshaws he consorted with would swear to it on a stack of Bibles.

  She who had always been so self-sufficient and had never needed friends now solicited the sympathy of mere acquaintances: postal clerks, checkout women, mechanics, the new generation of tellers at the bank where she went to cash her pension checks.

  “Here,” she lamented, “is a young fellow. Well, so he made a few mistakes as a kid, but he’s served time for that and now he’s going straight, keeping his nose clean (she had picked up her jailhouse jargon from Evan), trying to make a fresh start. Still they watch over him every minute like guards. Any little two-bit break-in anywhere in the county and that probation officer is at the house grilling him. Car theft, arson, shoplifting—you name it, there’s nothing but what he’s number one on the suspect list. He’s free to go to work but his free time isn’t his. Can’t have a friendly drink in a bar. Can’t keep company with anybody who’s ever had so much as a parking ticket. They keep him on a leash. It’s not fair.”