In An Arid Land (5 page)

The screen door slams. There is a loud stamping of little feet on the hard wooden floors. Up rises the usual: "Mom?"

Alfred jumps back. Angelica jumps to her feet. The boys are there, in the room, gazing at them in disbelief. It is a long and awful moment, frozen with shame. "Yes, Miguel, what is it?" she asks. And the disbelief vanishes. They are no longer shocked; they no longer care. At the sound of their mother's voice, so common, so feeble, she thinks, they realize that what they saw must have been an illusion. It is only Alfred, after all, and besides they are in the wrong room for such things. The boys have seen Angelica and Jorge kissing, seen them even naked, but always in the bedroom. This is the kitchen, where dinner is cooked, meals are served, arguments thrashed out. It is not for kissing.

Miguel says, coarse and direct, "He won't play right, I'm going over to Mack's house." Then Gabe makes his complaint, "He won't ever let me win," and he stomps up the stairs to his room. The screen door slams again; Miguel is gone. It is another awful moment. She is afraid he will say,
Now, we're alone, come with me.

She finds her voice; she says, "I think you'd better go."

"Yes, of course, I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize, Alfred, just go. Please."

He leaves with heavy footsteps.

Midnight now and not a sound. The boys upstairs are asleep, she assumes, she hopes, in their costumes. Tomorrow, Monday, is Halloween and they couldn't wait to try on their outfits. Gabe will be a pirate and Miguel a skeleton. His costume is black with white lines showing the bones, the headpiece skull-like. Once dressed, they insisted on sleeping in their assumed identities and after a brief but furious dispute she relented. She imagines them now, curled in their separate beds up there, close and yet far away in this tainted house, and she thinks she should go up and check on them. But not tonight; she hasn't the will to move. The weekend and its afflictions have drained her of everything.

So she will remain where she is, lying in her bed as she has been lying in it for some time now. Sleep is doubtful, but there is solace here, a certain soft and giving nature that comforts more than the weary body, and there are memories that come so clearly at times she can't distinguish them as memories. The morning they bought the bed at a garage sale and cheerfully brought it home; the way the mattress sags, always has, and used to draw them together at its center; the way Jorge would sprawl across it for a few more moments of rest when she had risen for the day. This was their place, their one true haven in the world.

She hears something out in the house. A creaking door perhaps? Feet skittering across the floor? A bump against a table? She is uncertain but for this: someone is there. Must be one of the boys come down for a glass of water or some mischief.

She should go see; she should help if she can, stop the mischief if that's what it is. When Jorge was alive this was his job, his duty, to rise in the night and see what was wrong, as it was his duty to scold and reprimand, for she seldom had the strength or the courage to correct and guide at midnight.

Get up from there and get on with it,
her mother's voice reminds, and again she obeys. She switches on her lamp; she slips on her robe; she opens the door.

Standing there in the hall as if he's about to enter her bedroom is old Mr. Morris. At first she is not even certain it's him, this is so unlikely, so outrageous; there is simply someone there. But the eyes tell her, those brilliant blue orbs. Nothing in them threatens. They gaze at her as if he too is stunned, surprised by what he has found, as if he expected to walk in and go to bed as he did on all those nights through all those years of living here with his wife. Five, ten, fifteen seconds they stare at each other and nothing in his face changes. Then there is a change so swift and profound it's as if those fifteen seconds never existed.

He smiles, as a young man smiles at a young woman, to appeal, to entice, to tease a lover's look. Never do his eyes leave hers and his face is radiant with pleasure and happiness and loving tenderness. He is overjoyed now to see her.

He says, his voice a little hoarse and croaking, "So then, have you found that earring? I've come to look for it."

She understands. It takes a moment, but she understands. And she returns the smile. It would be impossible not to return it, he is so hopeful, so expectant so elated.

"You step back," he says. "You watch and see. I'll find it."

Why blast his dream? He is harmless. She will play along for a while and then call the daughter to come pick him up, or walk him home herself. Angelica moves aside and allows him to enter. He takes her hand; she turns with him and they step to the foot of the bed. He glances around and lets out a long light sigh.

"You know," he says. "This room could use some paint, some curtains, a new rug. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

"Oh, yes," she says.

They gaze at each other; they share a look of friendship, of contentment, of devotion. He seems suddenly youthful and strong.

"So then, let me get busy," he says.

He urges her to sit on the bed. He hangs his cane on the footboard. He stalks the room, looking high and low in a jesting mock search for the earring.

"You might try there," she says, pointing. "In the corner."

He pulls the chair away and goes down cautiously on all fours. He looks, he probes with his fingers, he shuffles about on his hands and knees. He moves along the wall, searching, probing with his fingers in the shadows. It is all exaggerated. He is playacting for her; he is entertaining her. He looks beneath the dresser, bending low, but soon he lifts his old body and shakes his bald head, glancing back at her with a teasing-serious face.

"No?" she says. "Then try there, beneath the chest."

He shuffles over, but finds nothing of course. He shuffles all around, searches everywhere, until their eyes are glowing with joy and their shoulders are trembling with quiet laughter.

"Oh, my aching knees," he says and puts out a hand.

She helps him up. He sways on his feet, seems dizzy, disoriented. She guides him to the bed and helps him to sit. He looks up at her, moving his head slowly, and, still holding her hand, he draws her to his side. Their thighs are touching through the material of her robe, his baggy trousers.

"Next week," he says. "Next week, I'll buy you another earring. What's an earring?"

She nods approval, and then he is holding her in his arms. He is hugging her, embracing her. It is a moment she has known before, has longed to know again, and she receives him warmly. They pat each other's backs, rest their heads against the other's shoulder. In the dim light they sit like this for a long time, saying nothing, only touching. She can feel his heart beating in his withered old chest, beating in time to hers.

I

The words that haunted the boy's mind as he walked through the woods that fine spring morning would live with him for the rest of his days.

"Depression," the men kept saying.

"Ruin," his father had mentioned, and, "Poorhouse."

This had come from his mother: "We won't take charity, you see. I'd sooner die."

"Bread lines," he had heard from another and tried hopelessly to imagine such a thing.

"The newspapers say it's thousands, millions."

"And hoboes everywhere, in the trains, on our streets."

"What's a hobo, Mother?" the boy had asked and she looked at him sharply, wondering how to answer. She said, "Hush."

He thought of the words as he passed over the familiar trail, under the tall pines, the blooming redbuds and dog-woods that his mother loved so much, the occasional white oak, the hickories, the sweet gums, walking among the shrubby yaupon that caught at the wool of his short pants and knee socks. He repeated the words to himself, walking on, mindless of the warm roasting pan which he carried before him by its handles. He said the words out loud to the rising sun, golden and brilliant beyond the leaves and branches and trunks of the well-known trees along the creek. And the words, the sound of his own ten-year-old and puny voice, returned to him in echo like something huge and formless and forever terrible.

"Even in Texas," he repeated, uncertain which of the men had said it. Was it Daddy or Uncle Buster or Mr. Ramsey? "They even let it come to Texas, to these woods, dang 'em."

The thought of such an outrage halted him. He looked down at the roasting pan; he looked out into the woods; he remembered everything. "No, it's a lie. We'll be back, I'll bring us back."

Then he ran. Carefully, in short kicking-out steps, like a boxer in training, he skipped over the trail. At the creek's log bridge he slowed, sidestepped, and paused on the other side to look, just to look and listen, to remember the place.

He ran through the hollow where the marsh smelled of old dead things, and here he quickened his pace, for he hated the marsh and its smell. At the top of the hill he stopped.

Smoke puffed lazily from the chimney of the cabin and spread upward through the morning-still trees and the striking rays of the sun, glowing golden just beyond the cabin so brightly now that the cabin itself existed in its meager clearing only because he knew it existed. The boy had seen it there every day, every morning and every evening, through four of his ten short swift years. Something moved in the shadow of the cabin's porch. Though he could not see what it was that moved, he knew.

That's him, the boy thought. Just like always. Waiting. The old slave. Waiting.

He ran again. At the bottom of the hill, moving into the clearing, he stopped abruptly, hesitated and walked ahead with a kind of formal purpose in his steps and his attitude, carrying the blue pan before him with care, holding the pan out as an offering to the old man when he reached the cabin's porch.

"Well, it's about time," came the black voice from the black face, as old as any voice and any face he had ever heard or seen.

"So this is it," said the voice, still powerful, still deep, but not unfriendly. The old man loved the boy, though the boy was not to realize this until years later when he reached an age at which he thought he understood love, thought he understood everything he needed to understand.

"So y'all going today," said the voice, softer now and with tenderness, and with regret too. The boy nodded his head.

The old man took the boy's offering and with one hand balanced it like a platter. He said, "Morning, Walter," as he did every morning, had done every day for each of those four incredibly swift years. It was their way with each other, this ritual, a way born in uncertainty, established in distrust, nurtured in a kind of ancient solicitude that kept the one always up, up on the porch, and the other always below, below the porch; it was their way, a pact almost, a manner born in the distance that difference fosters, grown now into a certain grudging but admiring respect.

"Morning, Mr. Hick," returned the boy and he removed his cap. If the old man had owned a hat he too would have removed it. The black hand reached toward the white head in an old and remembered instinct of youth, but nothing was there.

"I thank you, as always," said the voice on the porch.

"You're welcome, as always," came the other, smaller, thinner, from below.

The one above spit out his quid and a long black line traced from his mouth to the dewy dust beyond a porch plank that the boy saw was dark and spotted from no telling how many thousands of misses. He wiped his chin with the sleeve of his yellow-stained and stinking undershirt and then sat down on the weathered-gray and backless pew taken forty years before from a burned-down Baptist church in Karankawa and brought here to stay.

With a great teasing kind of ceremony, he removed the top of the pan, glanced with a grin at the boy, held up his nose to catch the rising aromas and then took out the two covered bowls and the new plug of tobacco. One bowl contained his breakfast, honey-sweetened oatmeal and biscuits made by the boy's mother's hands, and one contained his lunch, an apple, four biscuits and a piece of ham, also prepared by the hands of Elvira McIntyre.

"She says for you to just keep the dishes," said the boy.

"You tell her thank you, will you?"

"Yessir."

"Won't you have a seat, young Walter?" asked the black voice. This too was part of their way with each other and every morning the boy refused, adding, "But thank you just the same."

He ate then, with fierce delight, for the boy's mother could make even oatmeal and biscuits taste like the delicacies of Houston. And the boy watched intently as each mouthful found its destination. Why he waited and watched was never clear to him, though he would think later that he understood this too. This too was part of their way with each other. It would be indelicate, wrong, perhaps even an insult simply to bring the old man's feed. All his life the boy (and later as a man and even later as an old man) would hate to eat alone and he would hate for those he loved to have to eat alone. So he stood there below the porch and watched, even though time that Sunday was precious and he would be punished by his mother's tongue for making his family wait on him. They had much to do and far to go.