The Grass Harp Page 4

  Appalled by what had happened, and the part she herself had played. Dolly became so confused that she dropped the empty orangeade jar: it hit Mrs. Buster on the head with a ripe thud. "Beg pardon," she apologized, though in the furor no one heard her.

  When the tangle below unraveled, those concerned stood apart from each other embarrassedly, gingerly feeling of themselves. The Reverend looked rather flattened out, but no broken bones were discovered, and only Mrs. Buster, on whose skimpy-haired head a bump was pyramiding, could have justly complained of injury. She did so forthrightly. "You attacked me. Dolly Talbo, don't deny it, everyone here is a witness, everyone saw you aim that mason jar at my head. Junius, arrest heri"

  The Sheriff, however, was involved in settling differences of his own. Hands on hips, swaggering, he bore down on the Judge, who was in the process of replacing the violets in his buttonhole. "If you weren't so old, I'd damn well knock you down."

  "I'm not so old, Junius: just old enough to think men ought not to fight in front of ladies," said the Judge. He was a fair-sized man with strong shoulders and a straight body: though not far from seventy, he looked to be in his fifties. He clenched his fists and they were hard and hairy as coconuts. "On the other hand," he said grimly, "I'm ready if you are."

  At the moment it looked like a fair enough match. Even the Sheriff seemed not so sure of himself; with diminishing bravado, he spit between his fingers, and said Well, nobody was going to accuse him of hitting an old man. "Or standing up to one," Judge Cool retorted. "Go on, Junius, tuck your shirt in your pants and trot along home."

  The Sheriff appealed to us in the tree. "Save yourselves a lot of trouble: get out of there and come along with me now." We did not stir, except that Dolly dropped her veil, as though lowering a curtain on the subject once for all. Mrs. Buster, the lump on her head like a horn, said portentously, "Never mind, Sheriff. They've had their chance," and, eyeing Dolly, (hen the Judge, added: "You may imagine you are getting away with something. But let me tell you there will be a retribution -not in heaven, right here on earth."

  "Right here on earth," harmonized Mrs. Macy Wheeler.

  They left along the path, erect, haughty as a wedding procession, and passed into the sunlight where the red rolling grass swept up, swallowed them. Lingering under the tree, the Judge smiled at us and, with a small courteous bow, said: "Do I remember you offering a drumstick to anybody that would likeit?"

  He might have been put together from parts of the tree, for his nose was like a wooden peg, his legs were strong as old roots, and his eyebrows were thick, tough as strips of bark. Among the topmost branches were beards of silvery moss the color of his center-parted hair, and the cowhide sycamore leaves, sifting down from a neighboring taller tree, were the color of his cheeks. Despite his canny, tomcat eyes, the general impression his face made was that of someone shy and countrified. Ordinarily he was not the one to make a show of himself. Judge Charlie Cool; there were many who had taken advantage of his modesty to set themselves above him. Yet none of them could have claimed, as he could, to be a graduate of Harvard University or to have twice traveled in Europe. Still, there were those who were resentful and felt that he put on airs: wasn't he supposed to read a page of Greek every morning before breakfast? and what kind of a man was it that would always have flowers in his buttonhole? If he wasn't stuck up, why, some people asked, had he gone all the way to Kentucky to find a wife instead of marrying one of our own women? I do not remember the Judge's wife; she died before I was old enough to be aware of her, therefore an that I repeat comes second-hand. So: the town never warmed up to Irene Cool, and apparently it was her own fault. Kentucky women are difficult to begin with, keyed-up, hellion-hearted, and Irene Cool, who was born a Todd in Bowling Green (Mary Todd, a second cousin once removed, had married Abraham Lincoln) let everyone around here know she thought them a backward, vulgar lot: she received none of the ladies of the town, but Miss Palmer, who did sewing for her, spread news of how she'd transformed the Judge's house into a place of taste and style with Oriental rugs and antique furnishings. She drove to and from Church in a Pierce-Arrow with all the windows rolled up, and in church itself she sat with a cologned handkerchief against her nose: the smell of God ain't good enough for Irene Cool. Moreover, she would not permit either of the local doctors to attend her family, this though she herself was a semi-invalid: a small backbone dislocation necessitated her sleeping on a bed of boards. There were crude jokes about the Judge getting full of splinters. Nevertheless, he fathered two sons, Todd and Charles Jr., both born in Kentucky where their mother had gone in order that they could claim to be natives of the bluegrass state. But those who tried to make out the Judge got the brunt of his wife's irritableness, that he was a miserable man, never had much of a case, and after she died even the hardest of their critics had to admit old Charlie must surely have loved his Irene. For during the last two years of her life, when she was very ill and fretful, he retired as circuit judge, then took her abroad to the places they had been on their honeymoon. She never came back; she is buried in Switzerland. Not so long ago Carrie Wells, a schoolteacher here in town, went on a group tour to Europe; the only thing connecting our town with that continent are graves, the graves of soldier boys and Irene Cool; and Carrie, armed with a camera for snapshots, set out to visit them all: though she stumbled about in a cloud-high cemetery one whole afternoon, she could not find the Judge's wife, and it is funny to think of Irene Cool, serenely there on a mountain-side still unwilling to receive. There was not much left for the Judge when he came back; politicians like Meiself Tallsap and his gang had come into power: those boys couldn't afford to have Charlie Cool sitting in the courthouse. It was sad to see the Judge, a fine-looking man dressed in narrowcut suits with a black silk band sewn around his sleeve and a Cherokee rose in his buttonhole, sad to see him with nothing to do except go to the post office or stop in at the bank. His sons worked in. the bank, prissy-mouthed, prudent men who might have been twins, for they both were marshmallow-white, slump-shouldered, watery-eyed. Charles Jr., he was the one who had lost his hair while still in college, was vice-president of the bank, and Todd, the younger son, was chief cashier. In no way did they resemble their father, except that they had married Kentucky women. These daughters-in-law had taken over the Judge's house and divided it into two apartments with separate entrances; there was an arrangement whereby (he old man lived with first one son's family, then the other. No wonder he'd felt like taking a walk to the woods.

  "Thank you. Miss Dolly," he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "That's the best drumstick I've had since I was a boy."

  "It's the least we can do, a drumstick; you were very brave." There was in Dolly's voice an emotional, feminine tremor that struck me as unsuitable, not dignified; so, too, it must have seemed to Catherine: she gave Dolly a reprimanding glance. "Won't you have something more, a piece of cake?"

  "No ma'm, thank you, I've had a sufficiency." He unloosened from his vest a gold watch and chain, then lassoed the chain to a strong twig above his head; it hung like a Christmas ornament, and its feathery faded ticking might have been the heartbeat of a delicate thing, a firefly, a frog. "If you can hear time passing it makes the day last longer. I've come to appreciate a long day." He brushed back the fur of the squirrels, which lay curled in a corner as though they were only asleep. "Right through the head: good shooting, son."

  Of course I gave the credit to the proper party. "Riley Hen-derson, was it?" said the Judge, and went on to say it was Riley who had let our whereabouts be known. "Before that, they must have sent off a hundred dollars' worth of telegrams," he told us, tickled at the thought. "I guess it was the idea of all that money that made Verena take to her bed."

  Scowling, Dolly said, "It doesn't make a particle of sense, all of them behaving ugly that way. They seemed mad enough to kill us, though I can't see why, or what it has to do with Verena: she knew we were going away to leave her in peace, I told her, I even left a note. But
if she's sick-is she. Judge? I've never known her to be."

  "Never a day," said Catherine.

  "Oh, she's upset all right," the Judge said with a certain contentment "But Verena's not the woman to come down with anything an aspirin couldn't fix. I remember when she wanted to rearrange the cemetery, put up some kind of mausoleum to house herself and all you Talbos. One of the ladies around here came to me and said Judge, don't you think Verena Talbo is the most morbid person in town, contemplating such a big tomb for herself? and I said No, the only thing morbid was that she was willing to spend the money when not for an instant did she believe she was ever going to die."

  "I don't like to hear talk against my sister," said Dolly curtly. "She's worked hard, she deserves to have things as she wants them. It's our fault, someway we failed her, there was no place for us in her house."

  Catherine's cotton-wadding squirmed in her Jaw like chewing tobacco. "Are you my Dollyheart? or some hypocrite? He's a friend, you ought to tell him the truth, how That One and the little Jew was stealing our medicine..."

  The Judge applied for a translation, but Dolly said it was simply nonsense, nothing worth repeating and, diverting him, asked if he knew how to skin a squirrel. Nodding dreamily, he gazed away from us, above us, his acomlike eyes scanning the sky-fringed, breeze-fooled leaves. "It may be that there is no place for any of us. Except we know there is, somewhere; and if we found it, but lived there only a moment, we could count ourselves blessed. This could be your place," he said, shivering as though in the sky spreading wings had cask a cold shade. "And mine."

  Subtly as the gold watch spun its sound of time, the afternoon curved toward twilight. Mist from the river, autumn haze, trailed moon-colors among the bronze, the blue trees, and a halo, an image of winter, ringed the paling sun. Still the Judge did not leave us: 'Two women and a boy? at the mercy of night? and Junius Candle, those fools up to God knows what? I'm sticking with you." Surely, of the four of us, it was the Judge who had most found his place in the tree. It was a pleasure to watch him, all twinkly as a hare's nose, and feeling himself a man again, more than that, a protector. He skinned the squirrels with a jackknife, while in the dusk I gathered sticks and built under the tree a fire for the frying pan. Dolly opened the bottle of blackberry wine; she justified this by referring to a chill in the air. The squirrels turned out quite well, very tender, and the Judge said proudly that we should taste his fried catfish sometime. We sipped the wine in silence; a smell of leaves and smoke carrying from the cooling fire called up thoughts of other autumns, and we sighed, heard, like sea-roar, singings in the field of grass. A candle flickered in a mason jar, and gipsy moths, balanced, blowing about the flame, seemed to pilot its scarf of yellow among the black branches.

  There was, just then, not a footfall, but a nebulous sense of intrusion: it might have been nothing more than the moon coming out. Except there was no moon; nor stars. It was dark as the blackberry wine. "I think there is someone-something down there," said Dolly, expressing what we all felt

  The Judge lifted the candle. Night-crawlers slithered away from its lurching light, a snowy owl flew between the trees. "Who goes there?" he challenged with the conviction of a soldier. "Answer up, who goes there?"

  "Me, Riley Henderson." It was indeed. He separated from the shadows, and his upraised, grinning face looked warped, wicked in the candlelight. "Just thought I'd see how you were getting on. Hope you're not sore at me: I wouldn't have told where you were, not if I'd known what it was all about."

  "Nobody blames you, son," said the Judge, and I remembered it was he who had championed Riley's cause against his uncle Horace Holton: there was an understanding between them. "We're enjoying a small taste of wine. I'm sure Miss Dolly would be pleased to have you join us."

  Catherine complained there was no room; another ounce, and those old boards would give way. StiB, we scrunched together to make a place for Riley, who had no sooner squeezed into it than Catherine grabbed a fistful of his hair. "That's for today with you pointing your gun at us like I told you not to; and this," she said, yanking again and speaking distinctively enough to be understood, "pays you back for setting the Sheriff on us."

  It seemed to me that Catherine was impertinent, but Riley grunted good-naturedly, and said she might have better cause to be pulling somebody's hair before the night was over. For there was, he told us, excited feelings in the town, crowds like Saturday night; the Reverend and Mrs. Buster especially were brewing trouble: Mrs. Buster was sitting on her front porch showing callers the bump on her head. Sheriff Candle, he said, had persuaded Verona to authorize a warrant for our arrest on the grounds that we had stolen property belonging to her.

  "And Judge," said Riley, his manner grave, perplexed, èthey've even got the idea they're going to arrest you. Disturbing the peace and obstructing justice, that's what I heard. Maybe I shouldn't tell you this-but outside the bank I ran into one of your boys, Todd. I asked him what he was going to do about it, about them arresting you, I mean; and he said Nothing, said they'd been expecting something of the kind, that you'd brought it on yourself."

  Leaning, the Judge snuffed out the candle; it was as though an expression was occurring in his face which he did not want us to see. In the dark one of us was crying, after a moment we knew that it was Dolly, and the sound of her tears set off silent explosions of love that, running the full circle round, bound us each to the other. Softly, the Judge said: "When they come we must be ready for them. Now, everybody listen to me..."

  Three

  We must know our position to defend it; that is a primary rule. Therefore: what has brought us together? Trouble. Miss Dolly and her friends, they are in trouble. You, Riley; we both are in trouble. We belong in this tree or we wouldn't be here." Dolly grew silent under the confident sound of the Judge's voice; he said: "Today, when I started out with the Sheriffs party, I was a man convinced that his life will have passed un-communicated and without trace. I think now that I will not have been so unfortunate. Miss Dolly, how long? fifty, sixty years? it was that far ago that I remember you, a stiff and blushing child riding to town in your father's wagon-never getting down from the wagon because you didn't want us town-children to see you had no shoes."

  "They had shoes. Dolly and That One," Catherine muttered. "It was me that didn't have no shoes."

  "All the years that I've seen you, never known you, not ever recognized, as I did today, what you are: a spirit, a pagan..."

  "A pagan?" said Dolly, alarmed but interested.

  "At least, then, a spirit, someone not to be calculated by the eye alone. Spirits are accepters of life, they grant its differences-and consequently are always in trouble. Myself, I should never have been a Judge; as such, I was too often on the wrong side: the law doesn't admit differences. Do you remember old Carper, the fisherman who had a houseboat on the river? He was chased out of town-wanted to marry that pretty little colored girl, I think she works for Mrs. Postum now; and you know she loved him, I used to see them when I went fishing, they were very happy together; she was to him what no one has been to me, the one person in the world- from whom nothing is held back. Still, if he had succeeded in marrying her, it would have been the Sheriff's duty to arrest and my duty to sentence him. I sometimes imagine all those whom I've called guilty have passed the real guilt on to me: it's partly that that makes me want once before I die to be right on the right side."

  "You on the right side now. That One and the Jew..."

  "Hush," said Dolly.

  "The one person in the world." It was Riley repeating the Judge's phrase; his voice lingered inquiringly.

  "I mean," the Judge explained, "a person to whom everything can be said. Am I an idiot to want such a thing? But ah, the energy we spend hiding from one another, afraid as we are of being identified. But here we are, identified: five fools in a tree. A great piece of luck provided we know how to use it: no longer any need to worry about the picture we present -free to find out who we truly are. If we know that no o
ne can dislodge us; it's the uncertainty concerning themselves that makes our friends conspire to deny the differences. By scraps and bits I've in the past surrendered myself to strangers-men who disappeared down the gangplank, got off at the next station: put together, maybe they would've made the one person in the world-but there he is with a dozen different faces moving down a hundred separate streets. This is my chance to find that man-you are him. Miss Dolly, Riley, all of you."

  Catherine said, "I'm no man with any dozen faces: tile notion," which irritated Dolly, who told her if she couldn't speak respectably why not just go to sleep. "But Judge," said Dolly, "I'm not sure I know what it is you have in mind we should tell each other. Secrets?" she finished lamely.

  "Secrets, no, no." The Judge scratched a match and relighted the candle; his face sprang upon us with an expression unexpectedly pathetic: we must help him, he was pleading. "Speak of the night, the fact there is no moon. What one says hardly matters, only the trust with which it is said, the sympathy with which it is received. Irene, my wife, a remarkable woman, we might have shared anything, and yet, yet nothing in us combined, we could not touch. She died in my arms, and at the last I said. Are you happy, Irene? have I made you happy? Happy happy happy, those were her last words: equivocal. I have never understood whether she was saying yes, or merely answering with an echo: I should know if I'd ever known her. My sons. I do not enjoy their esteem: I've wanted it, more as a man than as a father. Unfortunately, (hey feel they know something shameful about me. Ill tell you what it is." His virile eyes, faceted with candle-glow, examined us one by one, as though testing our attention, trust "Five years ago, nearer six, I sat down in a train-seat where some child had left a child's magazine. I picked it up and was looking through it when I saw on the back cover addresses of children who wanted to correspond with other children. There was a little girl in Alaska, her name appealed to me. Heather Falls. I sent her a picture postcard; Lord, it seemed a harmless and pleasant thing to do. She answered at once, and the letter quite astonished me; it was a very intelligent account of life in Alaska-charming descriptions of her father's sheep ranch, of northern lights. She was thirteen and enclosed a photograph of herself-not pretty, but a wise and kind looking child. I hunted through some old albums, and found a Kodak made on a fishing trip when I was fifteen-out in the sun and with a trout in my hand: it looked new enough. I wrote her as though I were still that boy, told her of the gun I'd got for Christmas, how the dog had had pups and what we'd named them, described a tent-show that had come to town. To be growing up again and have a sweetheart in Alaska-well, it was fun for an old man sitting alone listening to the noise of a clock. Later on she wrote she'd fallen in love with a fellow she knew, and I felt a real pang of jealousy, the way a youngster would; but we have remained friends: two years ago, when I told her I was getting ready for law school, she sent me a gold nugget-it would bring me luck, she said." He took it from his pocket and held it out for us to see: it made her come so close. Heather Palls, as though the gently bright gift balanced in his palm was part of her heart.