The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Page 2

  Clara had to stop and reminisce over everything she came across and persuade herself to part with it. If the job was ever to get done they ought to separate for the rest of the day. But he could not trust her to put sensible prices on things. Already he had spent a good half-hour talking her, first into giving it up at all, then out of asking five dollars for an old table that was not worth fifteen cents and ought, in fact, to have been chopped into kindling long ago, but was the one, she maintained, on which she had fixed the first meal she ever made for him. Then, things that were in perfectly good shape, unless they had some memory for her, she was liable to let go for nothing.

  He struck a bargain with her—she could sort the things in the children’s rooms if she would leave the rest of the house to him. How nice it would have been, she sighed, to go around with him and recall old times together as they turned up things, but as he didn’t want her, she agreed. She worked her way up the steps and when she got her breath back, found she could not get up for the load of memories the girls’ room laid on her.

  If there was such a thing as being sorry and glad about something at the same time, thought Mrs. Hardy, she felt that way about leaving the house. Really her life hadn’t been lived at all the way it was meant to be. It was a mistake to spend your life doing the same things day after day and she never got over feeling she was meant for something better, exactly what, she couldn’t say, but she felt she would have been a great one for change, for setting out on new things, traveling. You could change the furniture around every week but it still all had to be dusted.

  The trouble was, when a change happened to her it never really made much difference. Even the auction sale and leaving the home she had known so long she could barely remember any other, no longer seemed such a great upheaval, in fact, seemed already done with, accustomed to. Now, instead of her own, she would have a steady succession of her children’s houses to look after, their children to bring up, just the same old thing when you got right down to it. It must be wonderful to look ahead and find in the days coming up a choice of ways to spend them. There were only the same old ways of doing the same old things, so she always fell back on the past; what else was there to think about?

  She liked to sit like this and figure up how many diapers she must have washed in her time, how many times she had scrubbed this floor, how many strokes she had taken on the churn, and as the numbers climbed beyond her reckoning, she would sit back and rock inside herself in contented amazement. She liked best of all to recall suddenly that she had borne Mr. Hardy ten children.

  Pregnancy had taken her by surprise. Mr. Hardy had to tell her she was in the family way. Her ignorance touched him. He thought it becoming; the truth was, as near as she could guess, it had not occurred to her. She had raised so many children not hers, children who had never known their own mothers, beginning at home with her brother and sister, then two cousins and then Mr. Hardy’s boys, maybe she had forgot that children could have mothers of their own, that living women might have children.

  Taken by surprise, she hadn’t enjoyed that first confinement much, Mrs. Hardy thought. She had been scared. There was no time to store up memories of it, not time even to think up a name for the child, only time to think that if it was a boy she couldn’t name it Charles Junior and, despite all she could do, to get to disliking the little boy who already bore that name through no fault of his own. The sickness and the pain she remembered and, as though it was yesterday, the feeling that came over her when they laid the child, raw and red, in her arms and she remembered that this was not new to Mr. Hardy, that he had gone through it for the first time with someone else. The doctor smiled and said she would be all right. She thought of how the other woman had gone through all this twice for Mr. Hardy and trying once again, died at it for him.

  She made up her mind to live for Mr. Hardy. Out of bed a week her joy in the child grew such that she determined to have another as soon as possible. For twenty years she was never happy unless she was with child or brought to bed of one.

  She had her favorites but didn’t show it. Mr. Hardy had none and that had always made her feel he didn’t like any of them well enough. He made a little joke, that, to be frank, she never had found so funny, of telling the children she was never pleased with any of them and would keep on having more until she was. Her pains were severe. She loved them all and the more she had the more she loved Virgie’s as well, but her own she never forgave the travail they cost her coming into the world. “Lord!” she could gasp at one of them still, unable still to understand how she had endured it, unable to understand how the boy could spend his time except in making it up to her every minute of the day, “the trouble I had with you!”

  She remembered getting up from that first one dissatisfied. How could she have let so many things slide or just stay the way they were when she came to Mr. Hardy’s house? They made the upstairs over into rooms for the children. Mr. Hardy let her have every whim. He was glad, he said, to be able to give hers all the things that Virgie’s children never had.

  Mrs. Hardy went through the chests and halfheartedly made a pile of ragdolls and teething rings, baby slippers, a moth-eaten hairbrush, a gold-plated diaper pin, and found herself working up a quarrel against her children. They were so selfish. Hers no more than anybody else’s, they were just all. As long as they were at home they simply took for granted you had nothing else to think about except them; once they were grown you weren’t supposed to have any reason for living left at all. The way they were surprised if you came out once in a while with something that showed you weren’t thinking only of them at the moment, that old as you were you might still have a few worries of your own, absolutely surprised.

  She gathered her keepsakes into her apron and sat down on the side of the bed. She thought of her life, how little of it had been her own. Before she got half a start she simply bolted to seed.

  After a while she went up to the attic. Mrs. Hardy pulled up a crate and sat down, and opening the big old packet trunk was like opening a door and watching herself, young and gay, walking down a long hall to meet her.

  At the county fair they were alone together once for a change, with a neighbor woman in to look after the children. Mr. Hardy told her not to waste a minute worrying over them and she wasn’t. She couldn’t believe it was him; he was like a boy, shot the ducks and threw the baseballs at the bottles and wanted to ride her on the Ferris wheel. “The Ferris wheel, Mr. Hardy!” she declared—and you a man, she started to say, with four children—but he was the father of seven, and instead she said, “And us an old married couple.” She won first prize in jellies and fourth in cakes and Mr. Hardy sold a bull for more money than she had ever seen in one lump sum. Mr. Hardy took a drink of whiskey with a man, something she had never seen him do before or since. She didn’t scold him but said she was glad he took it; my goodness, everybody had to do something a little different from the workaday run once in their life.

  Mr. Hardy bought her this mantle. It wasn’t Mexican, it was real Spanish, the man said, but that you could tell by looking. It was heavy like wool but soft and smooth as silk with lace around the edges and must have had every color in the rainbow, but all blended and soft, not gaudy. The minute he laid eyes on it, Mr. Hardy said, he knew she had to have it. He smoothed it across her shoulders and put the ends down through her hands on her hips, saying that was how the ladies in Spain wore theirs.

  Of all the moments in her life that had been one of the happiest. Mr. Hardy practically made her blush the way he looked at her in front of all those people. He said when the other women saw hers on her that man would sell every mantle he had.

  In the wagon that night riding home, she laid her head on Mr. Hardy’s shoulder smelling the good smell of him and listening not so much to his words as to the gentle sound of his voice. He was saying he had known beforehand she would like that shawl. She felt it again while he rode silently for a while. Then he said he never forgot how crazy Virgie was over the one he
had given her just like it. He hadn’t seen another one and thought he never would. They buried Virgie in hers, as she asked to be. Smiling, he turned and told her that as if he expected it to make the shawl all the more precious to her.

  While Clara washed the supper plates Mr. Hardy sat by the stove and chewed and spat in the ash box. He felt as if he had put in fifty years’ work all over again today, but at the same time he felt good. Clara had not made the fuss he expected and the job was done before he thought it would be, wasn’t nearly as bad as he had been dreading.

  It was easier to believe he had lived in this house for fifty-six years. Today he had turned up whole pieces of his life like something he had lost and given up all hope of ever finding. Lately he noticed he was going kind of stale; now he would have a lot of new things to think about. Going to stay with the children didn’t make him feel quite so bad any more.

  Maybe he did have to sell his house—at least he had a good house to sell when the time came, with good things in it, well cared for. He never realized he owned so many fine things. There was nothing he need feel ashamed to have strangers see and handle and own. It was a feeling you couldn’t get seeing the place day by day that came over him now. His mark was set on this spot; the work he had done was here for everybody to see. There were not a lot of things lying around half-finished. The man who bought this land would be lucky and would thank him for working it into such fine shape. A good neighbor for fifty years, he had never had any trouble with anybody, always minded his own business. People would miss him. They would point it out and say, “That’s the old Hardy place,” no matter how long the next man owned it.

  Actually he had done twice as well as most men; it wasn’t bragging of him to say it. For he had raised not one but two families here and raised them the best he knew how. He had done well by his first wife and what things he hadn’t been able to give her before she died, he’d seen to it that his second wife got.

  Without Clara, thought Mr. Hardy, he never could have done it.

  Mr. Hardy collected the stray bits of tobacco in one cheek and squeezed them dry. He shot the wad into the ashes and ran his tongue around his mouth.

  “You know,” he began and paused, waiting for Clara to reach a stopping place in her thoughts. She had fallen into a way of not answering when he spoke. Her mind was so far away, forever thinking over some old party or the time she had the twins or some such thing. She didn’t like to be interrupted in her thoughts and he could appreciate that himself. In a minute she would answer in a tone of voice that let him know she heard him the first time.

  Mrs. Hardy stopped washing a teacup and dangled her hands in the dishwater, waiting for him to call her by name. Why couldn’t he at least begin what little he had to say with, “Clara this, or Clara that,” at least show he knew it was her he was speaking to, that he had something he really wanted her to hear, that it made some difference to him who listened. She stood remembering the early days when time and again he had called her Virgie. Oh, she couldn’t count the times he had done that, and each time was like a slap in the face.

  “You know,” he tried once again, and she wondered if the fear of making that same mistake over and over had brought him to call her by no name at all.

  Today must have taken him right back. Reminded in a thousand ways of Virgie who had died young, his own years had peeled in layers off his mind. He could see the two of them young and happy together, only to look up and find her there, stooped and worn with years of work and sickness, no teeth of her own, a thing that could never have been young. “Look at yourself!” she felt like telling him. “Do you think a young girl would look twice at you now?”

  From the corner of her eye she watched him inspect the things she was putting aside. Was he afraid some of it was Virgie’s? Wasn’t it little enough for fifty years? You have yours; leave me to my own.

  Mr. Hardy yawned loudly. He stretched and the effort sounded down his body like the snapping of many strings. Clara was tired and he decided to leave her be, when she turned and asked, “What were you going to say?”

  He couldn’t recall. “Nothing,” he said. “It wasn’t important.” He smiled to show that she wasn’t to worry herself, that she hadn’t missed anything.

  No, she supposed it wasn’t. When had he ever had anything to tell her that he thought was important? She stood waiting.

  “It takes you back, a day like this,” he said, “makes you think. Brings back things you hadn’t thought of for years. For instance—”

  He looked up and there was Clara, her fingers pressed white against her temples. “Oh, what’s the use,” she cried, “of thinking over things past and done with?”

  She started to say something more, then turned back to her dishes. Mr. Hardy got up and quietly stole off to bed. At the door he scratched his pate and thought to ask which of them was it that was always thinking over things long ago done with, but decided not to.

  She had to sit; her backbone was like spools on a string. She rocked her head in her hands and wondered would all this misery never end. She thought of Virgie, Safe in Heaven these fifty years, safe in Mr. Hardy’s mind, forever young and pretty. Surely, she thought, shuffling a finger across her withered lips, surely when the Lord called you you didn’t have to come as you were. What else could Hell be?

  Quail for Mr. Forester

  WHETHER IT was the same all over Texas I do not know, but in Columbia there was quite a rigid caste system based on the kind of goods a person sold. To deal in notions was probably the lowest, and dry goods was pretty low. Groceries was acceptable, pharmacy quite acceptable, furniture almost genteel. In all this I mean retail. To be in anything wholesale, even in a modest way, was higher than to be in the highest retail. And yet no kind of wholesale was higher than retail hardware. For it was into that that the Foresters went, with that indifference to the conventions which only they could afford, when the last of the old family property was sold at public auction.

  For a while after Mr. Forester bought the hardware store it had looked possible that the town might bankrupt him out of respect for him. No one could picture himself being waited on by a Forester. The first customer told how it seemed as if the world was coming to an end, and said that she had had to turn her head while Mr. Forester wrapped her package. Everyone had been touched and pleased to hear that it had been a very clumsily wrapped package.

  But Mr. Forester had such dignity, and carried through with such an air of remaining untouched, that people grew to feel it was not too insulting of them to trade with him, and he began to show a profit.

  It was not a very big store and certainly Mr. Forester did nothing to bring it up to date; people like the Foresters did not put on show. Yet in ten years, while the town, so to speak, turned its head in order not to see a Forester practicing economies, he saved enough to buy back—just in time for his wife to die there—his family home, the largest house on Silk Stocking Street. That was the nickname of the street, but to show you how generally it was called that, I do not even remember its real name. It was where all the quality lived.

  We lived on Oak Street and every morning at eight o’clock Mr. Forester passed our house on his way to business. My mother would let the milk stay on the porch until it was time for him to pass, and he always tipped his bowler to her, and sometimes he paid her a compliment in the old style.

  My father was a hunter, one who never came home empty-handed, and we never sat down to a dinner of wild duck or woodcock or quail but my mother thought of the faded sovereignty of the Foresters, of the days when none of their many tenants would have dreamed of a trip into town without bringing some fresh game for them. In the lull after I had said grace, while we spread our napkins, my mother was sure to say, “Wouldn’t poor Mr. Forester enjoy some of this.”

  She would have sent my father to him with presents of fish and game, except that she was sure it would be a perfect waste, for though she had never set foot in the house, much less eaten there, my mother had deci
ded that Mr. Forester’s Negro cook was not only a very poor cook, but that she took a vengeful delight in being so.

  Time was, my father recalled, when hunters brought home towsacks full of quail, like to the present-day birds as a Brahma rooster to a bantam pullet; but when he and I, one fall Saturday in my twelfth year, brought home nine plump ones, we had had an unusual good day. When they were plucked and laid in a row my father said that, by Jim, you could almost recognize these as kin to the old-time quail. My mother seized this moment to suggest inviting Mr. Forester to dinner. Before she could take it back, my father said that that mess of birds was about as near worthy of a Forester as you would come nowadays, and, all right, we’d do it, by Jim.

  He and I walked downtown. It was midafternoon and the square was filled with country folks. There were farmwives in poke bonnets, with snuff stains at the corners of their mouths, and bold country girls in overlong dresses who would say even coarser things than their brothers whenever they passed a town boy like me. Ordinarily I hurried past, pretending an errand of deafening urgency, while I tried to fix my thoughts upon some moment out of history. It was thanks to these girls that I had some idea what the word violation meant and I was fond of imagining that I had only lately saved these unworthy girls from violation at the hands of Union soldiers, and of enjoying the irony of their ingratitude. Today I was glad to have my father with me. I was even gladder to have him guide me past the corners of the square, where the narrow-eyed, dirty-talking country men collected, squatting on alternate haunches all afternoon and senselessly whittling on cedar sticks until they were ankle-deep in curly, red-and-white, tobacco-spattered shavings.

  A crowd was in the hardware store and both Mr. Forester and the Saturday clerk were busy. My father and I stood out of the crowd near the coil of hemp rope, and by breathing deeply of the dry, clean, grassy smell of it I felt purified and removed. I felt acutely what disgust must fill a man like Mr. Forester to have to sell cow salves and horse collars to such men, and to have to refuse to dicker with their women over the prices of pots and mops and over the measure of a dime’s worth of garden seed.