Jordan County (27 page)

But whether she knew it or not, she still had a rival, a new one more formidable than any she had faced before. That evening when Hector came home from the funeral and lay on the bed, repeating the dead woman’s name to soothe his grief while he fumbled at her imprint on the mattress and mistook the warmth of his hand for the warmth of her body, he began to realize for the first time that what he had thought was hate was love; he was in love. It came to him as he lay staring upward. He was in love as few men ever had been, sincerely and with all his heart, calmly and with infinite tenderness — not infatuated, as he had been on the night of the elopement: nor entranced, as he had been during his initiation into the rites of marriage: nor bewitched, as he had been through the years of inadequacy and torment. He knew all this, and he trembled with the strength of his desire. Knowing that the object of his love was dead was no deterrent; no man was ever inadequate with the dead. Besides, he intended to bring her alive again in his mind. He saw his task clearly.

The first step had been shown him by Mrs Lowry that afternoon in the carriage when she revealed things about her daughter which Hector had never suspected. He determined now to reconstruct her life, their life together. He would join fact to fact with all the patience and skill of a paleontologist reconstructing a skeleton from what few bones had been dug up, with all the devotion and industry of a biographer piling scene upon scene with the use of jotted notes until the figure grew rounded and warm and breathed beneath his touch. When she had been alive he had thought he wanted to kill her, but now that she was dead he wanted to bring her back to life.

That was his task as he saw it. And best of all, he told himself, when he was done she would be exclusively his. She would
never demand more than he could give. She would never be unfaithful, at least not without the permission he might sometimes grant for the sake of the comfort that followed forgiveness. He set himself this task; he began it that first evening after the funeral, and he began it in the classical manner, invoking her spirit by calling her name, repeating it in his mind until even the curtains sighed it.

Once past the invocation, however, he struck an impasse. All his sources of information were blocked. He could not go to the various men she had known, especially not to those who could tell him most, for even if he could learn their names and locate them — which was highly improbable, scattered all over the country as they were, drumming up trade for their products — they would mock him with their eyes and tell him nothing. “It’s the husband,” they would say, like the nightshirted people lining the hotel corridor that night. Nor could the women help him; all they knew was gossip, and he had ruled out hearsay evidence. Then, to his dismay, the one source on which he counted most was cut off from him. Three days after the funeral Mrs Lowry died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

She had continued her tirade after being carried into the house by the two workers. She sat in her castered chair, flailing her arms and shouting at the boarders and neighbors who gathered in her room. Her excitement mounted. Then suddenly she halted in midsentence, mouth open, one arm raised; a surprised expression came onto her face; she fainted, then passed into a coma. She lay unconscious Saturday and Sunday, filling the house with the uproar of her breathing. The doctor called it brain fever — the same doctor who had diagnosed her swollen legs as dropsy. Monday she died and Wednesday they buried her. Mrs Simmons took the shingle off the pillar and rented the two rooms to a foreman from the oil mill, a man with seven children.

So now there was only himself, and in time he learned to believe that it was better this way. He kept a ten-cent copybook
locked in a drawer of the night table beside his bed. On the first page he printed in block capitals: ELLA LOWRY STURGIS, and centered beneath it in smaller letters:
WIFE OF HECTOR WINGATE STURGIS
. At the foot of the title page he wrote:
B May 80: M Dec 98: D Aug 10
—
These are Facts
. The second page was blank. The third page was about half filled:

And that was all. The remaining half of the page was blank, as was the rest of the book. He had intended to make it a solid fund of fact. In time, for all he knew, the drawer might overflow with copybooks, each bursting at the seam with information on which to draw for the projected
Life of Ella Sturgis
. Then, perhaps, he would turn to his own life, recording it in this same fashion, with scrupulous exactitude and honesty, and later maybe the two could be combined, in literature as in life, to constitute a whole called
Hectorella
.

He had written rapidly through the first three notes, had set down the Four in parentheses, and then had paused, chewing on the penstaff. There was no Four; there never would be, now that Mrs Lowry was dead. Looking at the scant half-page of notes, he realized the hopelessness of his task. Half a page in a dime copybook held all he would ever know about her from any source outside himself, and even that had to be qualified: “Biassed but cannot check.”

All that was left was what was in his head, a hopeless clutter of half-remembered scenes, conversations about nothing
definite, dresses she had worn on forgotten occasions, her way of pronouncing certain words; ‘Yes,’ for instance, had always had two syllables. It was little enough to work on. He wished now that he had thought to keep a diary, noting what she had said and done on particular days, the songs she hummed, the color of her eyes and hair——

He stopped, astounded. Her eyes were green, her hair brown; yes. But what shade of green, what shade of brown? He did not know. Already she was escaping him, just as she had done in life, and there was no way to call her back.

Suddenly he remembered the sound of her laughter, the peculiar ringing quality it had, pitched on a rising note. He was filled with wonder at why this memory of her laughter should come to him now that he saw how much else he had forgotten. Then he realized, with considerable shock, that memory had nothing to do with it. He was not remembering her laughter: he was hearing it. It was here in the bedroom with him, not loud but quite clear — so clear, indeed, that he could place it exactly. She was in the far corner, laughing at him; she had escaped him, gone the other side of death, and now she had returned to mock him. Invisible in that far corner, she was laughing at him, or her ghost was.

It was shortly after this that the servants began to avoid his room. The upstairs maid, a cocoa-colored, high-strung girl, keeping an eye on the door for fear it might blow shut (or something) while she was in there, never stayed any longer than was required to make up the bed and flick at the furniture with the dust cloth on her way out. In mid-October, when at last Hector denied admission even to her, the other servants began to say the thing that had frightened the maid from the beginning. He was carrying on with a ghost, they said. Their eyes rolled balefully, displaying a good deal of the whites. They said they heard his voice starting and stopping irregularly beyond the locked door, the intervals filled with something profounder than silence, and they went past on tiptoe, in a hurry.

“He’s got him a spook in there,” they said.

By then the house had been prepared for winter. The curtains in his room were now of velvet, full length, with heavy silken tie-ropes. During the daylight hours he kept them closed. At night, however, when he drew them apart, people passing along the street or the sidewalk would look up at the tall windows and into the room where the bedside candle twinkled and guttered like a lamp in a shrine. It gave them at once a feeling of awe and pity and excitement.

They had begun to talk about him all over Bristol, at lotto and poker gatherings, retelling things they had heard from their servants, who in turn had heard them from the Sturgis servants at lodge meetings and religious celebrations. But the white people did not say that he was haunted; they left that kind of talk to the Negroes. The white people said he had lost his mind.

Women in the Kandy Kitchen for sodas, or in each other’s parlors for tea, discussed it in the particular way they had. One would advance a piece of information, received perhaps from her cook that very morning; then the others would hunch forward, eyes sharpening over the glasses or cups, and pass it back and forth, with variations and embellishments.

“They say he just sits there in the bedroom, mumbling, and wont let anyone in. Nobody at all.”

“Talking to
himself
?”

“Yes.”

“Thats bad. Oh, thats a bad sign.”

“Yes. And wont let anyone in for anything. He just sits there, round the clock they say, mumbling. Hour after solid
hour
, Louella says.”

“Did you ever. Mrs Sturgis must be worried sick.”

“Well — you know
her
.”

“Thats true; yes. But how would you feel if your only son took it into his head to—” And so forth.

Men at the Elks Club or at their places of business used it to fill an interval while waiting for the cards to run or customers to happen in. They sought the humor in the situation.
And though they were more cautious with their information, being inclined to qualify it with disclaimers, their ultimate flights of fancy soared as high.

“You mean he just sits there?”

“Thats right: talking to himself. So they say.”

“Then he must not have all his marbles. Hey?”

“Something like that I reckon; yair. But I dont know. Maybe it’s his way of grieving for his wife.”

“Check. If I’d had that to call my own, then up and lost it overnight, I reckon I’d do some grieving, too. Tchk! I’d let them hear me the other side of the county.”

The year declined, the first sharp cold of late October bruising the late-blooming flowers, then the flare and haze of Indian summer, the air scented with woodsmoke and red leaves piled shoetop-deep in the yards. After a shirtsleeve Christmas — “Wont it ever get cold?” people were asking — winter came, and came with a vengeance, the bitter, icy winter of 1911. The earth was frozen iron-gray, hard enough to strike matches on, and the fields were gridded with long silver pencilings of ice in the furrows. In the leafless trees the sparrows huddled in ruffled groups along the boughs, like clusters of feathery fruit, looking out through slits of eyes. Pipes burst and sleepers woke to find the water in their bedroom basins frozen firm as marble.

“Well,” people were saying now, shivering, shaking their heads, “we asked for it. Now we’ve got it.”

Mrs Sturgis, who had waited before, did not change her tactics now that her adversary was what people were calling a ghost. She continued to wait, believing that Hector’s mind would clear in time and the ghost would be gone. Then she would step in and claim her own, but not before. The thing she feared most was that, by word or gesture, she might provoke him into taking a stand against her. Once he and the dead woman were joined against a common enemy — in his mind, that is — the ghost might never fade. The main thing, she decided, was to give it nothing to feed on. Her attitude
in this resembled the treatment old-time physicians prescribed for tuberculosis, placing the sick man on a diet of moss and goat’s milk in the belief that the ailment, being more fragile than the body it occupied, would starve before the patient, who then would be left weak but uninfected.

She decided, however, to speak to him about plans for a vacation the following spring, a six-week stay at Cooper’s Wells for the benefit of the waters. “Youre looking a little peak-ed,” she ventured to say. Yet she had no more than mentioned the trip when he turned on her with a peculiar expression, one she had never seen before, half blankness and half hatred; so she took it no further. He was sick in his mind and Mrs Sturgis knew it. The cure would have to come from within, not from any outside influence; she preferred no cure at all, in fact, to a cure at such a price. So she told herself, and she waited, maintaining the insularity that had given her life its meaning.

A cold rain fell the final week in January. The wind came out of Arkansas, then veered clockwise and blew steadily from the north, out of Tennessee, driving the rain in scuds. At length the wind died, but the rain drummed on, turning at last to sleet, a constant, icy sifting mixed with flutters of snow like tiny feathers that floated about and never touched the earth. This continued through the night, and next morning the town lay blanketed with white, a wonderland. Telegraph wires were sheathed in ice. Trees wore brittle armor, the air filled with the sound of limbs breaking beneath the weight of frozen rain; they fell like cutglass chandeliers, scattering diamond-bright, prismatic fragments up and down the street. The schools declared a holiday, and boys invented sleds from scraps of lumber and rode them, whooping, down the eastern slope of the levee and the steep banks of the Indian mounds scattered about the county. Everyone else stayed indoors as much as possible, close by their stoves and firesides. Bristol lay cramped corpse-fashion under its shroud, a bit of New England translated south to Mississippi.

Hector came to the door of his room every morning to pick up the two scuttles of coal the houseboy left in the hall for him, and usually he came downstairs for meals, sitting bemused, uncommunicative over food he often left untasted. Otherwise he kept to his room, the door bolted against intrusion. This continued until the week of the big freeze, when he began to take long walks in the woods beyond town. He would come out and lock the door behind him, putting the big old-fashioned key into an inside pocket beneath layers of coats and scarfs. Some days he would be gone for hours, without explanation. He took slices of bread and leftover biscuits with him to feed the birds. When he returned, half frozen, he would go immediately to his room and lock himself in. If anyone spoke to him, either in the house or while he was out walking, he would not answer. He would not give a sign that he had heard them or suspected in any way that they were near, not even a nod of the head or a flick of the eye; he would stride on or just stand there. Apparently his whole life was in the room, behind the bolted door. He wanted no other contact, human or otherwise.