Clay Hand (8 page)

She hobbled into the living room ahead of him. “It’s the room at the front of the house,” she said. “Right over our heads here. Warm yourself there at the stove before you go up.”

He set his suitcase down and took off his overcoat. It was a cosy hodgepodge of a living room—oak furniture, leather-seated with hand embroidered pillows flung about, lace curtains, a pendulum clock. A large bay window was piled high with ferns, African violets, delphinium, and plants he had no notion the names of, a jungle of hanging, creeping vines and stalwart blades.

“Whatever’s bad in them, there’s a bit of kindness in all gardeners,” she said. “You’ll find that about me.”

He smiled and moved to the stove, its glass door glowing. She was following his eyes to take in every item they rested on. He looked up then to a picture that hung over the sofa. This was the instant in his observation she had been waiting for.

“There’s not been a man like that one walk the earth since he left it,” she said, gesturing with her cane. The mild-faced O’Grady looked down upon them from the faded picture, a little uneasy about the eyes. It might have been the first picture he ever posed for. Or the uneasiness might have come from the tightness of his high celluloid collar.

“A fine looking man,” Phil said.

“You’re wondering how an old hag like me could ever engage a man like that.”

Indeed he had been wondering the other way about. O’Grady hung there without a line of worry in his placid face. Phil turned and met the dimming eyes of O’Grady’s wife—fifty years later. “I imagine you were a very beautiful girl,” he said, meaning it.

“You’ve a fine imagination then,” she said. “Sit down there a minute. She’ll put their supper up to them.”

She lowered herself into a rocker. Instinct told him not to attempt to help her. The little
peh
of pain escaped her. Then she smiled, showing good teeth for an old woman. “Tim was killed in the great cave-in in nineteen-one, and us married three weeks. There was seventy-one men lost that time. The farmers brought their wagons from all around, and you could hear the hammers on the coffins all night long.”

These were the stories told in Winston, Phil thought. They were sung out by the firesides like sad songs, or told like the beads of a rosary, over and over again.

“We laid them out ourselves in them days. And if you could have heard the sermon Father Duffy preached, God rest his soul! He was a fine man, and not like the one we have now who wouldn’t bend over to brush a fly from a baby’s face… I can still hear Father Duffy that morning.” Her own voice rose, but the harshness was gone out of it, and the sound was like keening:

“‘Their faces are blackened and their eyes streaming red tears, but their souls are white as the morning…and at last they go marching, hand in hand. Would God they walked that way on earth…’”

She rocked to and fro, an old childless woman, approaching childhood herself again.

“There’s a long and bloody history to Number Three,” she continued more naturally. “They say there’s near the size of the streets of New York down there, and some of them not traveled for fifty years.”

“And there’s trouble there again,” Phil said.

“Trouble, and maybe no trouble at all. Kevin Laughlin, the poor soul. We all knew he was a bit daft, but nobody had the notion where he’d go wandering through the mine. It was the safety men going through found him. He was away off in a part hasn’t been worked for years.”

“Was he a miner?”

“Once he was, and he knew the diggings from a long time back. They say he went in an entry hadn’t been used for years, and there’s some say he went in thinking to die. The things you can remember at my age. I remember when he was married, the girl just coming off the boat. They were kids, the both of them, and they had one of their own in no time at all, and before that one was crawling, another was on the way. Well, the baby took terrible sick one day, and the wife went down to look for Kevin. The foreman wouldn’t send down for him, for his shift was due up in an hour. Well, the girl hadn’t the sense she was born with. She went round to another entry. Nobody knows how she got in, but to make an unfortunate story short, she was crushed by one of the loading cars.

“Kevin was never the same after that, and the baby died of the flu. That’s the time it was—the epidemic after the first war. He worked around for a while, but he began ailing and the doctor said he was tubercular. So he went off one day. A few years later he came back, and stayed a while working, but he wasn’t up to it. He drifted off again.

“We never heard a word of him for another ten years, and then one morning this old tramp, and that he was, showed up at the parish house asking for Father Duffy. Father Duffy was gone himself then. Father Joyce took him in, I’ll say that for him, and gave him an odd job around the church to keep body and soul together. But his mind was wandering, and he was always talking about the mines.”

She sighed. “It wasn’t much of a shock to us, him going that way, with the gas backing in there from the new blasting.”

She pulled herself up then. “Well, you’ll be wanting your supper.”

“No, thank you, Mrs. O’Grady. I’ve work to do for the office. I’ve got to finish the story I was doing in Chicago, and get it off on the night train.”

“Then you better get a move on,” she said. “The night train leaves at seven-thirty, and it’s five now. I’ll put something on the back of the stove for you.”

Later that evening he was sitting in the living room, sleep heavy upon him. To fight it off, he smoked incessantly. The two regular boarders were listening to the radio—solid, contented-looking men who reminded him of the farmhands on his grandmother’s place, except for their complexions, the pallid faces of men who spend their days underground.

Mrs. O’Grady sat among them, crocheting. For a while, Phil watched her, marveling at the dexterity with which she maneuvered the thread over her stiffened fingers, but the monotony of the movement made him even drowsier. When their eyes met occasionally, the old woman would wink at him, and he would shift positions and hang on. As well as sleep, he was fighting his thoughts of Margaret, and the desire to see her.

Now and then one of the men would grunt at some amusing word from the radio, and exchanged looks with the other to see if he also enjoyed it. Phil’s presence was no more to them than a cat’s on the sofa. At nine o’clock they got up, and while one turned off the radio, the other knocked his pipe out into the coal bucket. Night in, night out, this was their routine. This and a Sunday movie, and good, solid food were their pleasures, and the world go hang, for they were not unhappy men.

“You’ll hear the big fellow snoring in five minutes,” Mrs. O’Grady said when the men had gone upstairs. “It’s the most penetrating sound you ever heard in your life.”

Phil went to the stove and flicked his cigaret into it.

“You burn the coal up that way, opening the door for nothing,” the widow said.

“Sorry.”

“You’ll know the next time. You’ve the need of something to put a stick in your back. Go in my bedroom there and look in the cubby behind the basin. I’ve a drop I keep for colds and the like. Bring it and a glass.”

Phil did as he was told. Finding the bottle, he went to the kitchen and brought two glasses from the cupboard. How many times had Dick done this very thing, he wondered.

“Pour it,” the widow said. “And as long as you brought the extra glass you can give me a drop.”

She watched him like a parrot from its perch. “Put enough so’s we’ll taste it, itself.”

Phil poured them each a stiff drink.

“What’s she doing tonight?”

“Margaret? Resting, I guess. The inquest is set for nine in the morning.”

“Wasn’t I given a summons?”

Phil sipped his drink. Mrs. O’Grady emptied hers in one pull. “I have to take it down for I can’t stand the taste,” she explained.

“Mrs. O’Grady, what was bothering Dick while he was here in Winston? He wasn’t much of a drinker, and yet drinking seems to have been the only pleasure he had here.”

“Oh, he had other pleasures,” the widow said, drawing her lips tightly over her teeth. “Off gamboling in the hills with that goatherd, and her with a husband. But I’d not blame him for that. I don’t blame the man.” She leaned toward him. “I blame the one sleeping up there in the room above him tonight. She’s come now when he’s gone.”

“There was no place for her to stay in Winston, even if she’d been asked to come with him.”

“Tu, tu, tu,” the widow said. “Go ahead. Stick up for her. He did too. You’re all alike. You’ll see. It’ll all come out in the wash.”

He lifted his glass and studied her over the rim of it, trying to determine whether she was enjoying the gossip. “Put it to me straight, Mrs. O’Grady. Do you mean Dick was having an affair with this woman?”

“An affair,” she mimicked. “There’s a fancy word, isn’t it? I mean he was carrying on with her and sleeping over there nights, and the father of her, the old devil, encouraging it.”

“That’s serious stuff you’re saying. I wouldn’t repeat it unless I was damned sure of it.”

“Do you take me for a fool? Wasn’t I laying in there tossing, listening for him, and him coming home to me in the light of morning, moaning and crooning about her. ‘Oh, the two brown eyes,’ he’d say, as though there was some of us with three. ‘The two brown eyes with the little candles burning in them.’”

“But you can’t prove it,” he said doggedly.

The widow rocked back in her chair. “Proof, poof. You’ll see. I’m not the only one knows it.”

He got up and went to her chair and stilled its rocking. “I thought you were a friend of Dick’s. I thought you were fond of him.”

She looked up at him, a faded rag doll, its head still cocky. “I was. You can’t say I wasn’t.”

“Then if I were you, I’d never let that filthy scandal out of my mouth.”

He set the bottle down hard on the table beside her and went up to his room. He had had quite enough for one day.

H
E AWAKENED TO SOUNDS
in the house and to utter darkness. He lay a few minutes feeling the edges of the narrow bed, gradually recalling where he was, and the circumstances which had brought him there. The sound of wind along the side of the house was a high-pitched whistle that broke off at times, and slid through the rough-hewn window frame and whispered about his head…. “The wind…at night…lies down beside me,” Dick had written.

Phil threw off his blankets and groped for the light cord. It was five-thirty, and the other boarders were going downstairs to their breakfast. He dressed and made up his own bed. Downstairs, Mrs. O’Grady was making sandwiches, two lunch buckets open before her. A bumpy handkerchief covered her hair, done up in curls, no doubt.

“There’s no warm water yet,” she said, seeing him.

“I’ll wash in cold then.”

“Get the bucket and take it out. Don’t leave the door open.”

The men nodded and continued eating when he said good morning to them. Their leather jackets and mining caps were laid out on the kindling box by the stove to warm them after having hung in the back kitchen all night. Phil drew his bucket of water and took it out. He stripped to the waist and washed quickly. Once dressed again, he felt alert and more awake than he could remember having been for some time. He went out on the porch and emptied the tub with the wind. Below him, the early lights in a hundred kitchens dotted Winston. There were no stars, and still no shade of dawn. Down the hill and up another, the church bell tolled an early Mass. The miners came out of the house and thumped down the steps, one of them carrying a flashlight. Phil heard the tinkle of the bell on the outside gate presently, and then watched their circle of light rise and fall along the road until it was lost among the first stores. A minute later the siren sounded once. Six o’clock.

“Do you want your breakfast or no?” the widow called.

He went into the house. “Just coffee, Mrs. O’Grady.”

“You’ll not go long on coffee. You better let me fix you a couple of eggs. They’re just out of the nest, you might say.”

“Just coffee, thank you.”

She rattled the cup in the saucer as she poured it. He took it from her hand to the table. The spoons were in a glass on the table, and in another glass were paper napkins.

“Fill it up with cream there. If I heat some biscuits will you eat them? I’ve a jar of honey.”

“No thanks. I’m not used to eating this early.”

“Then what did you get up for?”

Having no particular answer for it, he gave none. She gathered the used breakfast dishes in a stack and hobbled across to the sink with them. She returned, bringing a half-filled cup of coffee with her. “You’re sore at me for what I said about him last night, aren’t you?”

“No,” he said. “I’m disturbed by it. That’s all.”

She leaned close to him, the smell of sleep and liniment still on her. “Do you think that one up there is disturbed about it? No sir. Not her.”

He nearly scalded himself getting the coffee down. He got his overcoat and went out. The chickens were coming alive in the coop, and although the sky still seemed dark, a light haze was shimmering along the ground. He would not lessen her venom by escaping it himself. And God knows, he thought, how hard it is for the mind to stand up straight when the body is bent in two. He went back and asked her if there was anything he could do before he left.

“Will you open the door of the chicken coop, the way I can feed them over the rail?”

“Anything else? Can I feed them for you?”

“No. I’ll want a mouthful of air. It’ll be daylight soon, and that simple one’ll come up to help me.” She reached her hand toward him. “You mustn’t think I want to be hard on Dickie, for I was a long time fond of him.”

“He was just here six weeks,” Phil said.

“There’s three weeks longer than I had a husband.”

At the corner of Lavery’s he turned up, and climbed the long slope to the church. He had seen many a city cemetery smaller than the one there, with so many of its markers identical except for the names on them. In the little distance they were like white sheaves stacked side by side in a long, smooth field. The great harvest.