The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Read online

  The crowd thinned out and I strolled over to look at the showcase of pocket knives, but seeing the clerk heading my way I rejoined my father.

  It pleased my father to be able to tell Mr. Forester that he had not come on business.

  “No, sir, I have come on pleasure. Not that it is not always a pleasure, of course.”

  “This is my boy, Mr. Forester. Son, shake hands with Mr. Forester. He is a backward boy, sir, but do not take it to mean that he is not aware of the honor.”

  Mr. Forester’s resemblance to General Beauregard added to the trouble I had remembering that he had not fought in the Civil War. At twelve, I had a very undeveloped sense of the distance of the past, and often, indeed, I found it quite impossible to believe that the Civil War was over. Certainly I could never believe that those remains of men, more like ancient women, who were reverently pointed out to me as Confederate veterans, could ever have been the men of the deeds with which my imagination was filled.

  “Mr. Forester,” said my father, “my wife has been after me I do not know how long to bring home some birds fit to ask company in to. Well, I went hunting today—me and the boy—and I will not say that what we brought home are fit, but as I said to my wife, I guess these birds are about as near worthy as I am ever going to come, for the birds do not get any better and neither do I.”

  I was aware of the solemnity of the moment by the lack of contractions in my father’s speech.

  “Now I would not know, myself,” he continued, “but some say my wife is a pretty fair cook.”

  My father waited then, and in a moment Mr. Forester got the idea that somewhere politely concealed in that speech was an invitation to dinner.

  Mr. Forester said, “Why now, this is mighty nice and thoughtful of you and your wife, John—of whose cooking I never would doubt. I don’t mind saying that it has been a while since I had quail! Is it tonight that you want me to come? And what time would your wife like me to arrive?”

  “What time do you generally take your supper?”

  “Why, I generally take it around eight, but—”

  “Then eight,” said my father, “is when you shall have it tonight.”

  My mother suggested I be given my supper early and sent to bed. My father disagreed, as she had meant him to, saying that it was an evening I should want to remember, and that I was old enough to behave like a little gentleman now.

  I was posted by the window to watch for him. Dusk spread in the street and it began to be dark. The street lamps came on at the corners of the block and I saw my friends come out of their houses up and down the street and gather in the light to play, and I wondered if they knew why I was not with them. I was hungry from the smells of the kitchen and restless in my Sunday clothes.

  At last I saw him round the corner. He wore his bowler and carried a stick with which he lightly touched the ground about every third step he took. My friends in the light of the lamp watched him and when he was past turned to whisper among themselves, for some of them dared to think such people as Mr. Forester old-fashioned and amusing. He carried something cone-shaped and when he was halfway down the block I saw that it was flowers wrapped in paper.

  At the door my mother took his coat and thanked him for the flowers and said she hoped he had not had too hard a day in the store. I was embarrassed at her mentioning that he had put in a working day, and using the word store, but my mother’s sympathy for Mr. Forester was deeper than the town’s, and went beyond any hopeless efforts to keep up appearances.

  Mr. Forester turned from my father and extended his fist to me and opened it palm up. It held one of the knives I had seen in the showcase in his store. It was a pearl-handled knife, and as we went into the living room he said, “I thought you might like that one because I was very fond of one just like it when I was about your age. It was given to me by a Mr. J. B. Hood. Did you ever hear of him, son?”

  I started to shake my head, then I thought and cried, “Do you mean John Bell Hood?”

  “Sir,” my mother reminded me.

  “Oh, you know about John Bell Hood, do you?” said Mr. Forester.

  My father guided him to a chair, saying, “Does he know about him! Sometimes I believe he thinks he is John Bell Hood.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Forester, “he couldn’t want to be a better man. Now could he?”

  My mother excused herself to look after the birds. My father mixed drinks.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Forester, “John Bell Hood was often in our house when I was a lad. A great soldier and a great gentleman. And a cagey cotton buyer.”

  I laughed, but weakly, for I would rather he had not mentioned that last.

  “You remember what General Lee said, son? ‘In the tight places I always count on the Texans.’ If they had had the sense to follow up Hood’s victory at Chickamauga the South might have won the war.”

  “I can vouch for this mash, Mr. Forester,” said my father. “I watched it made. It goes down like mother’s milk.”

  Mr. Forester took a sip, held the glass to the light, cocked an eye appreciatively at my father, then for my benefit he put on a moral frown and, nodding the glass at me, said, “He was right about this stuff, too—John Bell Hood. You remember, when he was wounded at Chancellorsville they tried to make him take a drink of whiskey to ease his pain, and he said he would rather endure the pain than break the promise he had made his mother never to touch a drop.”

  I felt my face redden and I stole a glance at my father.

  “That was not John Bell Hood, sir,” I said. “That was Jeb Stuart at Spotsylvania.”

  It was one of my favorite incidents.

  “Was it?” said Mr. Forester.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I looked at my father. He was glaring at me.

  “It was Jeb Stuart,” I said.

  “The boy is probably right,” said Mr. Forester. “It’s a long time since I went to school—and you, too, John, for that matter. Whoever it was, it is a good story. And in any case it was a Southerner who said it. But I am glad to see that they still teach them about the war in school.”

  “Oh, school!” said my father. “He reads all that on his own. I will say that for him. If you depended on what they teach them at school—!”

  My mother came in. We rose.

  “The schools!” she cried. “You wouldn’t believe it was Texas, Mr. Forester, the things they teach them in the schools nowadays!”

  “Now, now,” said Mr. Forester, “things can’t have had time to change much since your own school days.”

  My mother turned red with pleasure. “Oh, Mr. Forester!” she cried. And she was so carried away she forgot what she had come in for and my father finally had to ask was she hatching those birds out there before she remembered with a cry, “Oh! That’s it! It’s served!”

  The table had the leaf in. It was lighted by three tall slender candles in a triple-branched holder. The shadows on the silver and glasses were deep, and the highlights seemed thick, the way the white paint is laid on in old pictures. The water flask seemed filled with trembling quicksilver. Side dishes of black and green olives and pearl-like pickled onions were stationed around the center platter, in which, nested in fried potatoes as yellow and as slender as straw, were the golden-crusted quail. Nearby was a basket of smoking rolls blanketed with a white napkin. There were bowls of deviled eggs, brandied peaches, creamed onions, peas, mustard greens, whipped yams topped with toasted marshmallows, and a bowl of green salad shimmering with oil. Stacks of dishes stood waiting on the buffet and a bank of apples on a dish there glowed like dying coals. I could hardly believe I was in my own home.

  When we had spread our napkins there was a silence and everyone looked at me. I bent my head, closed my eyes, and said, “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which through Thy bounty we are about to receive through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  “Amen,” said Mr. Forester.

  We were very hungry, for it was long past our usual supper-time. Mr. Forest
er was very hungry, too. So after everyone had servings of everything and Mr. Forester had praised each dish, for a few minutes there was no sound—not even the clatter of silver, since we were all mainly interested in the quail and this was eaten with the fingers—except, occasionally, the clink of a birdshot dropped on a plate.

  When our first pangs had been assuaged my father signified the time for talk by leaning back in his chair, patting his stomach, and looking gratefully at my mother.

  “I seem,” said Mr. Forester, “to recall having heard these birds disparaged earlier in the day.”

  “Well, you may thank old man Walter Bledsoe,” said my father. “We got these birds in his oat field. It seems he gave up about halfway through this year, and left more oats standing than he took in to the barn.”

  Mr. Forester shook his head sadly.

  “And to think,” said my mother, “what the name Bledsoe once stood for.”

  “They have gone even further downhill,” said my father. “Me and the boy were up to the house today to ask permission to hunt. You ought to have seen the place. Gate hanging loose, weeds grown up, junk in the yard—just one step away from white trash now.”

  “And I myself,” said my mother, “remember when old Miss Jane Bledsoe thought nothing of going over to Europe every other year and bringing back a boxcar full of souvenirs and treasures.”

  “Even then,” said my father, “she was spending money she didn’t have.”

  “Well, in those days you didn’t expect a woman like Miss Jane Bledsoe to keep up with whether or not she had it to spend,” said my mother.

  We returned to our food, this time talking as we ate.

  My father said, “Getting back, Mr. Forester, to what you were saying earlier. About the South winning the war if they had followed up the victory at Chickamauga. It is interesting, isn’t it, to try to imagine how things might be now if it had turned out the other way?” He laughed a little from embarrassment.

  “Well, I can think of a few things that would be very different,” said my mother with a meaningful, sad look at our guest.

  “Yes, yes,” said my father.

  “People may laugh at us for fighting it all over time and time again—even Southerners, the kind coming up now—but they just don’t know,” said my mother.

  “Not that you remember any much better times,” said my father with a laugh to her.

  “No,” said my mother, “Lord knows that’s true. But I’ve been told. Well, but it’s not for us to tell Mr. Forester.”

  “Well now,” said he, “I don’t know. We have the electric lights now and the telephone, and now the automobile.”

  “Doubtful blessings,” said my mother.

  “And there is the motion picture,” said Mr. Forester.

  “Indeed there is,” said my mother.

  “Oh, I agree with you in disapproving them,” said Mr. Forester, “as a general thing. But some of them, you know, are quite amusing, I must say. Very amusing,” and he chuckled ever so softly over some memory.

  “Light amusements,” said my mother sternly, “don’t seem becoming to people with what we have to remember. That’s how it seems to me. Of course, you don’t need any reminders, Mr. Forester. Not a person who has what you have to remember.”

  “Yes, our family lost a lot, of course,” said Mr. Forester. “But then, every family with a lot or a little to lose lost it, and I am sure it was less hard on such as we than it was on those who may have lost less, but lost all they had.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “By Jim!” said my father. “Excuse me for being carried away, but that was well said, Mr. Forester!”

  “Still, we don’t have to be modest for you,” said my mother. “And we know how much more it must have hurt the more you had to lose. Anyhow, it’s not the money loss alone I mean. It’s the whole way of life, as they say.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Mr. Forester somewhat impatiently. “But times change and ways of life must change and we must accustom ourselves and make the best of it. Though I must say that this is the closest to the plentiful old way that I have been in a long while,” and he indicated the table.

  “Oh! Have more! Give Mr. Forester another one of those bird breasts. Here we have been talking and keeping him from the food!”

  “Not at all. Not at all. You can see from my plate that nothing has been keeping me from the food! But I will just pick at another half of one of those birds.”

  With little urging he took a whole one, and he absorbed himself in it so completely that my mother could watch him openly. As his enjoyment increased so did her sadness over the decay of the Old South, as evidenced by Mr. Forester’s appetite.

  My father extended his plate and said, winking at me, “I vow, I believe I might work me up an appetite yet. Mr. Forester is ready for more, too. Give Mr. Forester that brown one there. That one was my best shot of the day—it must have been seventy-five yards, if I do say so myself.”

  “No more for me,” said Mr. Forester. “I have disgraced myself quite enough already.”

  “Mr. Forester,” said my mother, “you will hurt my feelings if you don’t eat more than that little smidgin-bit.”

  “Well, ma’am,” he replied, “I hope I am the son of my father enough not to hurt a lady’s feelings,” and he extended his plate.

  “I just can’t have any respect for a man with a finicky appetite,” said my mother.

  “Then you would have enjoyed making a meal for my father,” said Mr. Forester. “There was a man who could eat!”

  “We’re none of us the men our fathers were,” said my father.

  The night had turned chilly and when we went into the living room after dinner my father lighted the gas stove. The gas lines had been laid in the town only that spring and the stove was a novelty still. It had pipe-clay chimneys and it was pretty to watch the red climb quickly up them from the row of sputtering blue flames. We had bought the stove at Forester’s Hardware.

  Mr. Forester said that they were just that week laying the pipes to bring the gas into his house. He would be glad to see the last of his sooty old furnace. It never had kept the big old house warm.

  More and more, since his wife’s passing, he said, as he watched the sputtering flames, he had thought of giving up the old place.

  My mother said she hoped he did not mean that seriously.

  Oh, said Mr. Forester, it would probably not come to anything more than talk. But something like we had, now—that would more than suit his needs, he, a lone man, without children—what use did he have for eighteen huge, high, drafty old rooms? The thing he could never understand was what had made him buy it back, how it was he hadn’t known when he was well out of it. Probably simply because people expected it of him.

  My mother said she supposed a certain amount of family feeling had been in it, too.

  Mr. Forester said he supposed so.

  My mother said she was sure of it, and that she did not think that it was a feeling to be ashamed of, surely.

  No, of course not, said Mr. Forester. But when a person reached his age, for good or bad he began to think more of a little bodily comfort. Those old houses were all right in the days when people had big families and many guests always in the house, when relatives were closer than they were now and lived closer by and came often for long visits, and when people gave lots of parties and balls. But now—and what with the taxes …

  “I declare it’s a shame, just a shame,” said my mother, “to make you pay taxes, Mr. Forester!”

  Mr. Forester did not know whether this pleased him or not. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Taxes!” cried my mother. “On top of everything else!”

  Mr. Forester colored.

  “What short memories the people in this town have!” said my mother. “You might think that out of memory of old Colonel Forester and all he did for this town—you might think that just out of appreciation for your keeping up su
ch a historic old home they might remit the taxes at least. What short memories! To me, Mr. Forester, you are a living reproach to them!”

  Mr. Forester colored more deeply and turned to my father for help.

  “Can’t you just see them remitting the taxes!” said my father.

  My mother shook her head sadly. But Mr. Forester laughed good-humoredly. He changed the subject. He and my father spoke of the cotton crop and of the coming state elections, while my mother got out her knitting and I sat listening, unnoticed. I was beginning to be disappointed in Mr. Forester. He did not seem different enough from us. And while I felt no particular shame of us, I did feel that Mr. Forester had lowered himself for the sake of his appetite to come to dinner at our house.

  The clock on the mantel struck ten. Mr. Forester said it was time for him to be going. He was not good for much, he said, after ten o’clock on a Saturday evening.

  Mr. Forester ducked his head to check a belch, then munched reminiscently a few times. He said he had not had such a dinner since—since he didn’t know when. Since he was a boy. He ducked his head again, and when he looked up, his eyes, whether from gas or from emotion, were filled with tears.

  “I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed it,” he said, first to my mother, then to all of us. “How nice it was of you to think of me and how—I—”

  My mother was embarrassed and made a joke, saying he must come some evening when her cooking was really good.

  Mr. Forester rose and we all followed him to the door. My father held his coat. When he had it on, Mr. Forester was overcome once more and again his eyes filled with tears.

  “Really, I—” he began.

  “It’s only what you were brought up to expect!” my mother cried. “It’s not as much as you ought to have every day! Don’t thank us. The only thanks we deserve is for being among the few still about who realize that!”