Jordan County (20 page)

So Hector came to believe that what he had seen in those eyes, fifteen years ago — they inside in the darkness, he outside in the sunlight — was a reflection of the thing that had brought Barney Sturgis thirty-five hundred miles across the ocean, then southward down a strange continent to tend bar in Mississippi. It explained why he had never had anything to do with women, not even for the sake of having one to raise his children, the two daughters married and gone by the time they were into their middle teens. Hector believed also that it perhaps explained much of what he had never understood about his father, who had been so gloomy, so melancholy, the dark-souled Anglo-Saxon hidden behind the flashy clothes and the salesman’s smile and smalltalk. He thought of his father as a child in faroff Ireland, not even old enough to go to school, leaning over the wall to watch the tinker run down the road with the bit of the ax wedged into his skull and the helve down his back like a wooden pigtail, then going into the
house, maybe even into the bedroom spattered with his mother’s blood shed by his father. John Sturgis had grown up with that; it stayed with him always, no matter how young he had been at the time. Probably from year to year, whether in Sunday school as a boy or later in fireside conversation with a garrulous preacher improving the shining hour, there had been talk about the mark of Cain—

And then it came into Hector’s mind that the same impulse must flow in his veins, the stain of blood carried down from father to son and from father to son. He tried to remember, but could not, the Bible verse about the sins of the fathers being visited. It said something about the third generation: “Yea, even unto the third and fourth generation …” He would remember to look it up, or ask Mr Clinkscales.

“I thought you knew,” Ella said. She had raised herself on one elbow and was looking down at him. He could barely see her in the gloom, the face above the faintly luminous shoulders.

“I didnt know.”

She let herself down. Again they lay side by side, as removed as two corpses in a winter tomb, both looking up toward the ceiling. Then she turned her head on the pillow and spoke with her lips close to his ear. “Well, goodness,” she said, “dont take it so serious. He had every right. Besides, it was a long time ago, way off in Ireland.”

This shadow moved over the first year of their marriage, was cleared momentarily by the birth of a son — called Hector too: Hector the fourth, in January of 1901 — but then moved back, even darker than before.

Two: then three: then four in the house, around the dining room table — mother and son and daughter-in-law and grandson, entering the new century: thus it progressed through a time without subtraction. Bristol continued its growth eastward
from the river, first to and then beyond the house (called the Sturgis house now, except by a few older Bristolians who still called it the Wingate place, out of habit and a determination never to give way); Mrs Sturgis had subdivided another Hundred, and this was Hector’s vocation, or anyhow his occupation; he drew the plans.

Mechanical drawing had been his favorite subject at school, and now he spent all his time at it; farming had gone by the board. He even kept regular hours — ‘office hours’ he called them, and so they were. His downstairs study was equipped as a draftsman’s office, including a desk with an adjustable lid, lamps to throw the light just right, India inks in all the colors of the rainbow, and T-squares hung like gripless broadswords on the wall. Here was where he drew and redrew plans for the subdivision, tree-bordered avenues named for historically prominent Mississippians from the state at large and cross-streets named for early Bristol settlers. It was more for amusement than in earnest, however; he enjoyed it too much to be able to think of it as work, and Mrs Sturgis used the plans or not, as she saw fit.

That was at first. A time was coming when she would prize them, would use them as a blueprint for East Bristol, overriding her advisory engineers whenever they suggested a change — even in such small matters as the location of a fire hydrant (“I want it precisely the way it is on the map.” “But, Mrs Sturgis, the pipe line …” “I want it this way.” “Yes maam”) — and would offer them as the Wingate bid for a place in the world of art. But that was later; that was ten years after he put ten years of work on them.

It began at the suggestion of his mother, while Ella was far along in pregnancy. They had Mr Clinkscales out for supper one night; he had recently lost his wife and the parishioners were taking turns at trying to console him. They were in the parlor, having coffee, when Mrs Sturgis began to speak of her plans for extending the subdivision.

“You took that kind of work at school,” she said to Hector.
“Maybe you could block it out for me. It doesnt have to be anything special, just sketches I could use to show the men who do such things approximately what I want. They gave me the address of a man they said could do it, but I dont know. Do you think you could?”

“I think I could.”

“You could?”

“I think I could.”

“A truly noble conception!” Mr Clinkscales suddenly cried. He sat forward on the edge of his chair as he said it, and for the rest of the evening he spoke with enthusiasm of the notion of a mother and son working together to build a new Bristol. It appealed to him morally and esthetically, so to speak. “Who knows?” he said. “Who can tell? Together, with God’s blessing — which surely He will not withhold — you may perhaps be laying the groundwork, the foundation for a future Athens, an Athens of the South. Yes. And this young woman’s child, so soon to be born,” he added, indicating Ella with a deferential nod, “will be one of its leading citizens, the one perhaps under whom it will come to flower, a beacon for the South, a torch held out.”

His voice had regained its old resonance. Mrs Sturgis beamed with pleasure, for up until this outburst of enthusiasm no one had been able to bring him out of the despondency into which he had sunk when he buried his wife three weeks before. Then, the notion having served its purpose, she would have forgotten it. But next morning Hector went downtown immediately after breakfast and returned with a roll of drafting paper, a packet of thumbtacks, and a box of hard-lead pencils. He rummaged in his trunk until he found his drawing instruments, then took them out of their plush-lined case and polished them. While the cook looked on resentfully, he commandeered the big biscuit board from the kitchen, tacked a sheet of the drafting paper to it, and set to work.

That was the very beginning. The old fascination the work had had for him in school returned, the precise, mathematical
beauty, the neat geometrical simplicity in which a single line, drawn clear and sharp, was as mind-filling as the most complicated theory any philosopher ever contemplated and evolved. Hector wondered why he had forgotten how much pleasure it gave him, both to do the work and to look at it after it was done. He began with a small-scale drawing, but new ideas came crowding fast. By the time he was half way through it he had conceived the project which, in one sense, was to be his life’s work. Gridding the sheets into sections, he reproduced these sections a sheet at a time, on a scale of one to one hundred — “A shade more than an eighth of an inch to a foot,” he explained, showing them to his mother.

He was enthusiastic from the start, and though Mrs Sturgis was a bit perturbed at seeing him race off with her suggestion in this manner (his hands trembled with excitement, holding the sheets for her to examine) she was glad to see him interested in something besides Ella and she encouraged him to continue with the work. It solved another question, too — the question of what he was going to
do
— for after all, this was not Europe; even the highborn Wingate tradition could not support an idler. Ever since he had failed at farming, Mrs Sturgis had had the problem of finding an occupation for her son. It could not be a menial job, such as weigher in the gin, yet apparently he could not fill a responsible position. Now there was this, and she welcomed it because it automatically made him something more than an idler and a husband. She paid for whatever special equipment he ordered. “Go right ahead. Whatever you need,” she told him. Soon his study was crowded with the paraphernalia of draftsmen.

The total absorption came later, in the troubled years. It was in those years that he began to add colors, green for trees and lawns, blue for the water in drainage ditches and artificial ponds, red for underground installations, mains and sewers. By then black was reserved for details such as carriage blocks and arc lights, streetcars and delivery wagons, and finally the people themselves, as seen from above, going about their work
and their pleasures. In the end it became compulsive, obsessive. He would see a thing while out for a stroll, for instance a group of boys running after the ice wagon, and would hurry home to get out his instruments and put it on the map, crowding them in one after another, colors and details overlapping, until at last the sheets resembled a futuristic painting, a bird’s-eye view of Utopia, one to one hundred.

But that was later; that was during the troubled years immediately ahead, when he turned to the work for more consolation than he needed now. Now he was just beginning. It was twenty years later, ten years after all his troubles were over, that Mrs Sturgis — ‘Mother of Bristol’ by then — collected the drawings, had them bound in tooled morocco with watered silk end-sheets and his name stamped in gold on the cover, and presented them to the city council in a ceremony which included a speech of acceptance by the mayor. She instructed that they be placed on display in the foyer of the city hall for all the people to see, and it was done. They stayed there through another twenty years, on display under glass, and the people came and looked at them — the crowded, multicolored sheets that had begun as maps and wound up resembling work done by a latter-day amateur Bruegel or Bosch looking down from a seat in the clouds — and found in them confirmation of their suspicions (“Look! Look at there,” they said; they sniggered and nudged each other; “I
told
you he was crazy as a betsy bug. Look how he spent all those years!”) until finally Mrs Sturgis was dead in her turn and the map-drawings were removed to the belfry, filed among the dusty clutter of old records, deeds and resolutions, council minutes and building permits, all jumbled together for the pigeons to coo and strut over and stain with their droppings.

Now, however, he was only beginning the work; it was still in simple black and white and on a small scale, used mainly to fill the hours while he waited for his child to be born. Ella went past her time, unbelievably swollen, and at last the pains came on her. They were protracted. When the doctor said,
“Bear down; bear down, now,” she bore down and chewed at her under lip to keep from crying. No one had told her it was going to be like this. The doctor stood beside the bed, sleeves rolled, watching over the tops of his spectacles, calling her ‘mother’ to encourage her. “Bear down, Mother. Be brave,” he said, and she tried. She had decided at the outset that this was her chance to show Mrs Sturgis that there could be bravery under adversity even where there was no trace of the Wingate strain.

That was what she intended, but by the end of the first day she was too taken with pain and exhaustion to be concerned about anything except the sensations of the minute. She stopped chewing at her lip, and now whenever the pain returned and shook her, she filled the house with her screams. Between times, she called on God to forgive her her sins. By morning of the third day she was begging to be allowed to die.

Hector was not with her then; he had not been with her since the start. On the evening of the first day, believing that she needed him, wanted him by her or anyhow close at hand, he went upstairs and stood outside her door. Until an hour ago she had kept control of herself, chewing at her under lip, but since then she had been making a steady whimper, punctuated from time to time with groans. He meant to knock, then put his head around the door and wish her well, anything to let her know that he was standing by, sharing her travail so far as he was able. However, as he raised his arm to rap on the panel, Ella suddenly broke into a new series of cries, high yelps like those he once had heard a hurt dog make, and he lost his nerve; he dropped his arm and broke. He was halfway down the stairs before he realized he had run.

Next afternoon he tried again. He went upstairs and stood outside the door, and this time he saw her. It was during a lull. As he stood there, trying to make up his mind to knock, the door came open; a Negro woman faced him with a basin in her hands, and he saw beyond her shoulder into the room. Ella sat in the center of the bed, leaned slightly forward,
gripping the knotted ends of two sheets tied to the footposts. Posed thus in an attitude of terrific exertion, like an oarsman collapsed on his sweep at the end of a course, she glistened with sweat. Her gown had been slit up the front, from hem to neckline, the pale enormity of her belly filling the fork of her thighs, and her breasts, formerly so beautiful but large as melons now, sagged obscenely. Her face was toward him, the lips bloodless, the jaw dropped slack, and though her eyes were open, staring out of bruised sockets, she did not see him. She obviously did not see anything.