The Grass Harp, Including a Tree of Night and Other Stories Page 5

  “And Judge,” said Riley, his manner grave, perplexed, “they’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.…”

  III

  “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 Sheriff’s party, I was a man convinced that his life will have passed uncommunicated 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 one 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: the 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, they feel they know something shameful about me. I’ll 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 Falls, as though the gently bright gift balanced in his palm was part of her heart.

  “And that’s what they think is shameful?” said Dolly, more piqued than indignant. “Because you’ve helped keep company a lonely little child in Alaska? It snows there so much.”

  Judge Cool closed his hand over the nugget. “Not that they’ve mentioned it to me. But I’ve heard them talking at night, my sons and their wives: wanting to know what to do about me. Of course they’d spied out the letters. I don’t believe in locking drawers—seems strange a man can’t live without keys in what was at least once his own house. They think it all a sign of …” He tapped his head.

  “I had a letter once. Collin, sugar, pour me a taste,” said Catherine, indicating the wine. “Sure enough, I had a letter once, still got it somewhere, kept it twenty years wondering who was wrote it. Said Hello Catherine, come on to Miami and marry with me, love Bill.”

  “Catherine. A man asked you to marry him—and you never told one word of it to me?”

  Catherine lifted a shoulder. “Well, Dollyheart, what was the Judge saying? You don’t tell anybody everything. Besides, I’ve known a peck of Bills—wouldn’t study marrying any of them. What worries my mind is, which one of the Bills was it wrote that letter? I’d like to know, seeing as it’s the only letter I ever got. It could be the Bill that put the roof on my house; course, by the time the roof was up—my goodness, I have got old, been a long day since I’ve given it two thoughts. There was Bill that came to plow the garden, spring of 1913 it was; that m
an sure could plow a straight row. And Bill that built the chicken-coop: went away on a Pullman job; might have been him wrote me that letter. Or Bill—uh uh, his name was Fred—Collin, sugar, this wine is mighty good.”

  “I may have a drop more myself,” said Dolly. “I mean, Catherine has given me such a …”

  “Hmn,” said Catherine.

  “If you spoke more slowly, or chewed less …” The Judge thought Catherine’s cotton was tobacco.

  Riley had withdrawn a little from us; slumped over, he stared stilly into the inhabited dark: I, I, I, a bird cried, “I—you’re wrong, Judge,” he said.

  “How so, son?”

  The caught-up uneasiness that I associated with Riley swamped his face. “I’m not in trouble: I’m nothing—or would you call that my trouble? I lie awake thinking what do I know how to do? hunt, drive a car, fool around; and I get scared when I think maybe that’s all it will ever come to. Another thing, I’ve got no feelings—except for my sisters, which is different. Take for instance, I’ve been going with this girl from Rock City nearly a year, the longest time I’ve stayed with one girl. I guess it was a week ago she flared up and said where’s your heart? said if I didn’t love her she’d as soon die. So I stopped the car on the railroad track; well, I said, let’s just sit here, the Crescent’s due in about twenty minutes. We didn’t take our eyes off each other, and I thought isn’t it mean that I’m looking at you and I don’t feel anything except …”

  “Except vanity?” said the Judge.

  Riley did not deny it. “And if my sisters were old enough to take care of themselves, I’d have been willing to wait for the Crescent to come down on us.”

  It made my stomach hurt to hear him talk like that; I longed to tell him he was all I wanted to be.

  “You said before about the one person in the world. Why couldn’t I think of her like that? It’s what I want, I’m no good by myself. Maybe, if I could care for somebody that way, I’d make plans and carry them out: buy that stretch of land past Parson’s Place and build houses on it—I could do it if I got quiet.”

  Wind surprised, pealed the leaves, parted night clouds; showers of starlight were let loose: our candle, as though intimidated by the incandescence of the opening, star-stabbed sky, toppled, and we could see, unwrapped above us, a late wayaway wintery moon: it was like a slice of snow, near and far creatures called to it, hunched moon-eyed frogs, a claw-voiced wildcat. Catherine hauled out the rose scrapquilt, insisting Dolly wrap it around herself; then she tucked her arms around me and scratched my head until I let it relax on her bosom—You cold? she said, and I wiggled closer: she was good and warm as the old kitchen.

  “Son, I’d say you were going at it the wrong end first,” said the Judge, turning up his coat-collar. “How could you care about one girl? Have you ever cared about one leaf?”

  Riley, listening to the wildcat with an itchy hunter’s look, snatched at the leaves blowing about us like midnight butterflies; alive, fluttering as though to escape and fly, one stayed trapped between his fingers. The Judge, too: he caught a leaf; and it was worth more in his hand than in Riley’s. Pressing it mildly against his cheek, he distantly said, “We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed—begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First, a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I’ve never mastered it—I only know how true it is: that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.”

  “Then,” said Dolly with an intake of breath, “I’ve been in love all my life.” She sank down into the quilt. “Well, no,” and her voice fell off, “I guess not. I’ve never loved a,” while she searched for the word wind frolicked her veil, “gentleman. You might say that I’ve never had the opportunity. Except Papa,” she paused, as though she’d said too much. A gauze of starlight wrapped her closely as the quilt; something, the reciting frogs, the string of voices stretching from the field of grass, lured, impelled her: “But I have loved everything else. Like the color pink; when I was a child I had one colored crayon, and it was pink; I drew pink cats, pink trees—for thirty-four years I lived in a pink room. And the box I kept, it’s somewhere in the attic now, I must ask Verena please to give it to me, it would be nice to see my first loves again: what is there? a dried honeycomb, an empty hornet’s nest, other things, or an orange stuck with cloves and a jaybird’s egg—when I loved those love collected inside me so that it went flying about like a bird in a sunflower field. But it’s best not to show such things, it burdens people and makes them, I don’t know why, unhappy. Verena scolds at me for what she calls hiding in corners, but I’m afraid of scaring people if I show that I care for them. Like Paul Jimson’s wife; after he got sick and couldn’t deliver the papers any more, remember she took over his route? poor thin little thing just dragging herself with that sack of papers. It was one cold afternoon, she came up on the porch her nose running and tears of cold hanging in her eyes—she put down the paper, and I said wait, hold on, and took my handkerchief to wipe her eyes: I wanted to say, if I could, that I was sorry and that I loved her—my hand grazed her face, she turned with the smallest shout and ran down the steps. Then on, she always tossed the papers from the street, and whenever I heard them hit the porch it sounded in my bones.”

  “Paul Jimson’s wife: worrying yourself over trash like that!” said Catherine, rinsing her mouth with the last of the wine. “I’ve got a bowl of goldfish, just ’cause I like them don’t make me love the world. Love a lot of mess, my foot. You can talk what you want, not going to do anything but harm, bringing up what’s best forgot. People ought to keep more things to themselves. The deepdown ownself part of you, that’s the good part: what’s left of a human being that goes around speaking his privates? The Judge, he say we all up here ’cause of trouble some kind. Shoot! We here for very plain reasons. One is, this our tree-house, and two, That One and the Jew’s trying to steal what belongs to us. Three: you here, every one of you, ’cause you want to be: the deepdown part of you tells you so. This last don’t apply to me. I like a roof over my own head. Dollyheart, give the Judge a portion of that quilt: man’s shivering like was Halloween.”

  Shyly Dolly lifted a wing of the quilt and nodded to him; the Judge, not at all shy, slipped under it. The branches of the China tree swayed like immense oars dipping into a sea rolling and chilled by the far far stars. Left alone, Riley sat hunched up in himself like a pitiful orphan. “Snuggle up, hard head: you cold like anybody else,” said Catherine, offering him the position on her right that I occupied on her left. He didn’t seem to want to; maybe he noticed that she smelled like bitterweed, or maybe he thought it was sissy; but I said come on, Riley, Catherine’s good and warm, better than a quilt. After a while Riley moved over to us. It was quiet for so long I thought everyone had gone to sleep. Then I felt Catherine stiffen. “It’s just come to me who it was sent my letter: Bill Nobody. That One, that’s who. Sure as my name’s Catherine Creek she got some nigger in Miami to mail me a letter, thinking I’d scoot off there never to be heard from again.” Dolly sleepily said hush now hush, shut your eyes: “Nothing to be afraid of; we’ve men here to watch out for us.” A branch swung back, moonlight ignited the tree: I saw the Judge take Dolly’s hand. It was the last thing I saw.

  IV

  RILEY WAS THE FIRST TO wake, and he wakened me. On the skyline three morning stars swooned in the flush of an arriving sun; dew tinseled the leaves, a jet chain of blackbirds swung out to meet the mounting light. Riley beckoned for me to come with him; we slid silently down through the tree. Catherine, snoring with abandon, did not hear us go; nor did Dolly and the Judge who, like two children lost in a witch-ruled forest, were asleep with their cheeks together.

  We headed toward the river, Riley leading the way. The legs of his canvas trousers whispered against each other. Every little bit he stopped and stretched himself, as though he’d been ridi
ng on a train. Somewhere we came to a hill of already about and busy red ants. Riley unbuttoned his fly and began to flood them; I don’t know that it was funny, but I laughed to keep him company. Naturally I was insulted when he switched around and peed on my shoe. I thought it meant he had no respect for me. I said to him why would he want to do a thing like that? Don’t you know a joke? he said, and threw a hugging arm around my shoulder.

  If such events can be dated, this I would say was the moment Riley Henderson and I became friends, the moment, at least, when there began in him an affectionate feeling for me that supported my own for him. Through brown briars under brown trees we walked deep in the woods down to the river.

  Leaves like scarlet hands floated on the green slow water. A poking end of a drowned log seemed the peering head of some river-beast. We moved on to the old houseboat, where the water was clearer. The houseboat was slightly tipped over; drifts of waterbay sheddings were like a rich rust on its roof and declining deck. The inside cabin had a mystifying tended- to look. Scattered around were issues of an adventure magazine, there was a kerosene lamp and a line of beer empties ranged on a table; the bunk sported a blanket, a pillow, and the pillow was colored with pink markings of lipstick. In a rush I realized the houseboat was someone’s hide-out; then, from the grin taking over Riley’s homely face, I knew whose it was. “What’s more,” he said, “you can get in a little fishing on the side. Don’t you tell anybody.” I crossed an admiring heart.

  While we were undressing I had a kind of dream. I dreamed the houseboat had been launched on the river with the five of us aboard: our laundry flapped like sails, in the pantry a coconut cake was cooking, a geranium bloomed on the windowsill—together we floated over changing rivers past varying views.

  The last of summer warmed the climbing sun, but the water, at first plunge, sent me chattering and chicken-skinned back to the deck where I stood watching Riley unconcernedly propel himself to and fro between the banks. An island of bamboo reeds, standing like the legs of cranes, shivered in a shallow patch, and Riley waded out among them with lowered, hunting eyes. He signaled to me. Though it hurt, I eased down into the cold river and swam to join him. The water bending the bamboo was clear and divided into knee-deep basins—Riley hovered above one: in the thin pool a coal-black catfish lay dozingly trapped. We closed in upon it with fingers tense as fork-prongs: thrashing backwards, it flung itself straight into my hands. The flailing razory whiskers made a gash across my palm, still I had the sense to hold on—thank goodness, for it’s the only fish I ever caught. Most people don’t believe it when I tell about catching a catfish barehanded; I say well ask Riley Henderson. We drove a spike of bamboo through its gills and swam back to the houseboat holding it aloft. Riley said it was one of the fattest catfish he’d ever seen: we would take it back to the tree and, since he’d bragged what a great hand he was at frying a catfish, let the Judge fix it for breakfast. As it turned out, that fish never got eaten.