Jordan County (24 page)

“All right,” the constable said at last, not in answer to anything the night clerk had said, merely as a sign that he was leaving. He had not decided how to break the news to Hector that his wife was dead in bed with another man, but he could not put off leaving any longer. He drove slow. Then he was there, and when Hector came downstairs with the ax, all the constable said was that he thought Ella was dead, meaning that he did not know how successful the firemen might have been with the pulmotor by then. Hector did not question him, and though the constable thought this strange he certainly did not regret it and he did not attempt any further explanation until he turned, just short of the death-room doorway, extending one hand palm-forward. Even then he did not really know what he intended to say, and this time too he was glad when Hector brushed past him, refusing to listen, determined to see for himself what he must have suspected he would see ever since he had begun to hear the chain-reaction of murmurs down the corridor: “It’s the husband. It’s the husband. It’s the husband.”

Presently, while the firemen continued to labor over the couple on the bed, Hector and the constable — who were merely in the way, particularly the former, for the firemen were distracted, sneaking sidelong glances at the husband of the woman on the bed — returned to the lobby and sat in overstuffed leather chairs with a potted plant between them in the
background. “Cigar?” the constable asked. His hand moved toward his breast pocket; he wanted to offer what condolence he could. Hector shook his head. It was the only sign he gave that he had heard. “Well,” the constable said. He fell silent, too, looking uneasily about the empty lobby. Then he saw something he had not seen before. The gray-haired Negro bellboy was asleep in a straight-backed chair beside the registration desk, his chin down near his chest. “Hey — boy!” the constable cried, loud with sudden inspiration. The bellboy, startled, jerked awake, then crossed the lobby to where the constable sat with one arm already extended. “Take this and get us some coffee,” he said, and he handed the bellboy a dime.

The coffee was a failure, too, as much so as the unproduced cigar. The bellboy returned in about ten minutes with two heavy white earthenware mugs, each wearing a plume of steam. The coffee was pale yellow, the color of river water, already sugared and creamed, and very hot, as if the cook had tried to make up in heat for what it lacked in strength. The constable drank his, taking finicky sips from under the straw-colored walrus mustache, but Hector sat holding the mug with both hands between his knees, gazing down into it as if it had been as deep as a well, with the answer to all his problems at the bottom. He sat thus for a long while, not drinking. The plume of steam disappeared; the coffee cooled; finally it was all the way cold, truly like river water now, and the constable leaned forward and relieved him of it. “Here,” he said; “I’ll take that.” He set it, still full, untasted even, beside his own empty mug at the foot of the potted plant. “Well, Mr Sturgis, it’s a trial,” he said at last.

Shifting his great, sad eyes with their oversized bright red tear ducts, he avoided looking at Hector as he spoke. This was all he managed to produce out of all the words of condolence he had rehearsed in the buggy, riding to and from the Sturgis house. Hector still said nothing. He was more or less in a state of shock, and he looked it. From time to time the
night clerk emerged on tiptoe, peered at them, then tiptoed back down the corridor to look once more at Ella and the drummer sprawled on the bed as if they had fallen from the ceiling. The firemen continued their work and the dead couple continued their thin, reedy imitation of breathing.

At last, however, the ghostly sighing stopped. It stopped quite suddenly, and somehow the silence that followed immediately upon it seemed louder than the sighing, like the vacuum at dead center of a typhoon. This was either a reprieve or a death knell, and Hector and the constable rose together. They went down the corridor toward where the night clerk stood in the doorway, leaning forward with a hand on each side of the frame. He had not heard them coming; he stood there until the constable touched his shoulder, at which he leaped as if from a bee sting or a boo. Then, looking back over his shoulder, he saw Hector.
“Ex-excuse
me,” he stammered. He stood aside and Hector saw that the firemen were disassembling the pulmotor to carry it out to the gig. They had given up. The dead couple now were laid lengthwise on the bed, like any two sleepers anywhere, side by side and covered with one sheet. Except for the stillness, they might indeed have been sleeping, but this was a stillness beyond the stillness of slumber. The drummer lay on the far side, rather bulky. Ella’s body, on the near side of the bed, looked very flat beneath the four-point lift of her breasts and toes, with a smooth, empty curve of sheet between the pairs of points.

“Mr Sturgis,” the constable said—

Hector turned, as if the voice were a leash that had been tugged, and followed the constable into the corridor. There they encountered Harry Barnes, the undertaker. He evidently had just gotten the news, for he wore list slippers and had his nightshirt tucked into his trousers. “Leave everything to me,” he said by way of greeting. He was always on hand for misfortune, among the first to arrive when tragedy struck, and for this reason was known as Light Hearse Harry. Sideburns framed his face, like the clamp of a vise, and his chin
and upper lip were blue with stubble. His attitude was invariably sympathetic, but there was a glint of curiosity in his eyes, so long intent on watching the various reactions to death.

“Go on home and get some sleep,” he said. His voice was low and confidential; he always spoke this way. “I guarantee you, when I bring her out to the house this afternoon youll never have seen her looking prettier. Mind you, I dont make idle promises. When I say pretty I mean it, and I promise you I’ll do a careful job. Let me handle all this, Hector; I’ll take care of everything.”

Dawn was coming through when Hector and the constable left the hotel. Bristol was still asleep, profoundly relaxed behind drawn blinds, awaiting another tomorrow, another tick of the giant clock of time, but the streets looked harsh in contrast to the way they had looked three hours ago, bathed in moonlight. The year was into the dog days, the heat a steady glow. As a fire burns to embers, hotter than flames, so summer had burned to its climax. The sky was a cloudless, smooth gray dome like cast-iron perfectly joined and tinted with rose at its eastern rim predicting the sun. A file of men in work clothes, whites and Negroes, walked home from the oil mill, their lunch buckets under their arms. They were the night shift, coming off. Sloping their shoulders, they scuffed their shoes on a pavement still warm from yesterday’s sun, while behind them the oil mill ground its teeth, crushing the cotton seed with a hungry-making odor like broiling ham. Hector, who had never been to town at this hour before, saw them thus for the first time. They lifted their heads as he came past, the buggy intersecting their line of march, and he looked down at them. With their stubble-darkened jaws and work-splayed hands, their eyeballs etched with tiny red threads of fatigue, they might have been visitors from another planet. He looked at them and they looked at him, down and up, and he was vaguely afraid, without knowing why. He believed he saw hate in their faces.

The moon was still up in the daylight sky. As the buggy turned into the Sturgis drive the sun came up too; it broke clear of the landline with a sudden jump and quickly turned from red to fiery, blinding whoever looked eastward, throwing a yellow-pink glow over the front of the house and softening the gray planks and pillars. The first thing Hector noticed was the ax, a steely glint among the shadows of the doorway. The buggy stopped; Hector got down and went up the steps, not saying Thank You or Goodbye, not even looking back. But then, as he took up the ax and started through the doorway, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the constable watching him. He stopped. For a moment they looked at each other. The horse was already asleep in the shafts, its muzzle down near its knees, and the constable sat with the reins held loose in his hands. When Hector suddenly looked back, returning his gaze, the constable, startled thus out of contemplation, twitched the reins and made a clucking sound with his tongue (it resembled the sound the out-going drummers had used, describing Ella): “Tchk!” and the horse lurched into motion, still asleep.

Going into the house was like re-entering the coolness of night. As Hector passed through the lower hall he looked to the right, into the parlor, and saw his mother sitting in her armchair, a shawl about her shoulders and her hair a pale gleam in the dawn-shadowed room. ‘She knows all about it,’ he thought. ‘She sat right there, speaking to no one and no one speaking to her, yet she knows all about it.’

Then, taking the first step on the stairs, he heard her say his name. He did not stop or even hesitate, any more than he had done three hours ago when she spoke from her room as he came downstairs to investigate the constable’s rapping at the door. He could not afford to stop; he was hoarding that diminishing span of time before he would burst into tears. Climbing the stairs was like ascending a slope at a high altitude, each step demanding an exertion out of all proportion to the gain involved, where a degree or two of fever would
approach the boiling-point of blood. What was more, something seemed to be dragging his arm out of its socket. Then he remembered the ax. He dropped it on the landing. That was better, though not much better. Crossing the upper hall he staggered like a man who has swum from a shipwreck a long way through surf before reaching the beach. He went directly to his room, sat on the bed, and began to unlace his shoes. But he was too tired even for this. He had one shoe off and the other half-unlaced when the weariness came down; he sank back, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. ‘Now I’ll cry,’ he thought, surrendering at last to what he had fought against for the past three hours. But the tears did not come. He could feel the tear ducts trying to function, pump, but no tears came.

He lay there, flat on his back and trembling, and suddenly for no reason he remembered Sunday mornings at church when he was a boy. He always went with his grandmother. She wore a dress that rustled and Samuel wore a broadcloth coat with fire-gilt buttons. All the way to church they heard the bell toll; they got there just as it stopped, and the others were all in their places, turning to watch as Hector and Mrs Wingate came down the aisle. Mr Clinkscales apparently took this as a signal, for then the service would begin, though maybe it was coincidental; they were never really late enough for Hector to know for sure. The pew had a smell of varnish which he thought of as the special odor of sanctity. The dime he held was sweaty by the time the plate came round. To his left a stained-glass window showed an angel standing barefoot in a field of bright green grass that grew brighter and greener as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that wall of the church. The angel had one hand on the head of a fuzzy, blue-eyed lamb. The scarlet of the angel’s lips had been misplaced in processing and lay outside the border of the mouth like a lipsticked kiss of shame. Hector recalled, too, that the lamb had carried a cross, one of its cloven forehoofs hooked around the upright.

Remembering, almost dreaming, he lay on the bed. Then,
without having heard any sound precede it, he felt something cool and soft upon his forehead. His lids lifted and the shape hovering above him might have been a ghost, Ella come back; he caught his breath. But when he focussed his eyes he saw that the shape was his mother. “There, there,” she said, stroking his brow as she said it. “There, there.” This soothed him. He relaxed and the tears came at last; the tears welled up. “There, there. There, there,” his mother said as he wept.

She had waited for this through all these years, and now she had it.

That was a Thursday. The funeral was Friday. Normally this would have been considered indecent haste, but people not only ‘understood,’ they even stayed away — out of delicacy, they said; that was the word they used. Many, however, did not forego the chance to ride past during the graveside service, some in buggies, some in automobiles, to see if their fellow townsmen (they said) had shown a like consideration. Just as that morning they had collected at the depot, craning over each other’s shoulders to watch the drummer’s coffin and sample cases being put aboard the northbound train, so now they formed a parade going past the cemetery, riding slow in order that only a thin screen of dust would obscure their view of the little knot of mourners about the grave, and lacking only hampers and blazers and mandolins to make it resemble the holiday outing it really was.

For thirty-six hours Bristol had hummed with the news. People heard it with incredulity and passed it along with an air of having foretold it. Women discussed it in grocery stores and over backyard fences, tipping their heads together and hiding their mouths with their hands as they spoke, as if in fear of lip-readers, their eyes at once shocked and eager, their cheeks flushed as if they were into the final stage of what was called galloping consumption. “Have you heard about Ella Sturgis? Did you
ever?”
Men gathered on street corners and reviewed her life over bars and café counters, philosophizing on mortality and the sanctity of marriage, much as the night clerk had done in conversation with the constable, in defense and condemnation, alternately saturnine and sardonic. This
death seemed such a waste. “They say you cant take it with you. Ha. By golly, she took it with her.”

It had been a crazy year, a keyed-up summer. There was a fat man in the presidency who was everything a fat man ought to be, jovial and expansive, yet the government was split on issues that were hard to understand. Society women up East were said to be smoking cigarettes, and at a private dinner in Washington when the Russian ambassador’s wife asked for a light, the president himself had held the match. A man flew in an aeroplane from New York to Philadelphia and back, making a mile a minute some of the time. The comet hung in the sky like a warning sign from God, but in early summer when the earth was scheduled to pass through its flaming wake there had been neither a bombardment of meteors nor clouds of poisonous gases to choke them in their beds; there wasnt even any stardust in the streets, and after the first elation at having been spared the fire from heaven, there was also a feeling that God had forgotten them, a feeling that God had no care for either their enormities or their prayers. Then in the month just past, on the Fourth — which, except by scattered groups of unregenerate and pastless Irishmen whooping and blowing anvils, went uncelebrated still in Mississippi because that was the day when Vicksburg fell nearly fifty years ago — a white man and a Negro stevedore stood toe to toe on a roped-off square of canvas in Reno, Nevada, slamming away at each other for the championship of the world, fifteen rounds under a broiling sun, and the Negro won. Bonfires that night in Lick Skillet and Ram Cat lighted the northeast sky; there was dancing in the streets in front of the cabins, and a hum of voices: “Jack Jawson whupped that white man to his
knees
!” But next morning when they came to work in the kitchens and gardens there was nothing in their faces to show their feelings, nothing at all, except that the whites of their eyes were threaded with red in proof of the whiskey drunk.