News from the World (10 page)

“Don't worry,” Ben said. “I can move if you crowd me.” She looked from father to son; a resemblance echoed back and forth between them.

“Everything going good for you?” Ben asked.

“Fairly well,” Harry answered. Couldn't he give his father the satisfaction of knowing how far he had traveled away from this awful place? Harry had a fundamental frugality, she thought, a reluctance to admit obligation to anyone or anything.

“Remember your aunt Thyra?” Ben asked.

“Sure . . . of course,” Harry said.

“Well, she got into trouble up in Albuquerque,” Ben went on. “She kept on borrowing money, signing papers she couldn't understand.”

“What did she want money for?” asked Harry irritably. “I thought you wrote last year that Winslow was doing pretty well?”

“Women get queer around a certain age, I guess. She decided she'd missed out on the grander things, bought herself one of them hairless Mexican dogs, took up smoking, bought a truckload of clothes and fifteen silk ties for Winslow. Not to leave out expensive liquor.”

Harry began to laugh. Broken, sibilant, it sounded like weeping. He bent over and covered his face with his hands. When he took them away a moment later, only a faint smile remained.

They all heard Mrs. Coyle nearing the shed as she crooned to the chickens. She entered the room carrying a small tray on which a plate crowded a jelly glass of milk. “Here you are, Ben. Show your boy how you can eat!”

She put the tray on the dresser, walked between Harry and Amelia, and began to plump up the thin pillows behind Ben's head, arranging his shoulders against them with demonstrative efficiency. Ben's eyes were half-shut, but his left hand moved convulsively. His right arm was immobile on the cotton coverlet. Once the tray was on his lap, he stared up at Mrs. Coyle. With ferocity, as though the sentiment had been hoarded until this moment, he said, “I don't want this stuff!”

Mrs. Coyle, her authority questioned, was at a loss. She sighed heavily. “Well—then I'll attend to my other charges,” she said, crossing to a door on the other side of the room Amelia hadn't noticed. It led to another room, into which Mrs. Coyle disappeared.

Harry asked Amelia for matches. As she began searching her bag, Mrs. Coyle reappeared, her plump hands each placed on the heads of two children who clung to her skirt.

Framed by folds of cotton were the pale protuberant foreheads and silken-skinned faces of two little girls, thick pleats of skin around their slanted eyes.

“Alice and Pearly are going to have a little walk, then their lunch, then their naps,” Mrs. Coyle said in a singsong voice.

“Get this tray off'n me,” Ben demanded. Harry carried the tray to the dresser as Mrs. Coyle left with the children.

“Amelia . . . you've forgotten to give me the matches,” Harry said. Amelia held out a book of them as Ben's voice trembled in the close air of the room. “Verbena takes care of lots of folks around here,” he said.

“I thought I'd drop in on Dr. Treviot, Dad,” Harry said.

“He can't tell you nothing I don't know,” Ben said. “When you're old and sick, doctors get this secret organization all rigged up. It's all about you, but you can't join it.”

“No secrets,” Harry said briskly. “I'll stick to the facts.”

“The facts!” exclaimed Ben scornfully, just as Mrs. Coyle knocked on the door and stuck her head into the room. “Mr. Coyle is playing with the children,” she announced. “Perhaps you'd come over to the kitchen, Mr. Tilson, now that I've got some time.”

Amelia smiled at Ben, who didn't smile back, and followed Harry and Mrs. Coyle into the yard. Mr. Coyle was just rounding the house holding the hands of the girls. They moved torpidly beside him, their faded smocks flattened against their legs. Amelia turned from them into Mrs. Coyle's huge smile. “Perhaps you'd keep old Ben company while your husband and I talk business,” she said.

Amelia cast a pleading glance at Harry; he ignored her.

She went back to the shed. The old man looked at her without much interest as she resumed her seat on the bed. “Well . . . ,” he sighed.

“I've never been to this part of the country before,” Amelia said. Perplexed when Ben didn't answer her right away, she fell silent.

“Harry's mother died young,” he said suddenly.

“Yes. He told me.”

“You were saying?”

“I've never been out here,” she repeated.

“Oh?” He spoke with faint interest. Could he be falling asleep or was it that she'd lost his attention? It was as if she'd never appeared in the room. Then his voice came out of the absence in his face. His lips parted and revealed a few brown teeth.

“. . . like his mother,” Ben said, continuing an inner story. He went on.

“When he was little, he had fat little legs, short like this—” He placed his index finger in the dead hollow of his right arm. “No longer than my forearm. I used to run him down paths, and those fat little legs of his . . . My! He could run!” They looked at each other for a long moment. Amelia thought, it's not going to be so hard. But she felt some betrayal of Harry. Had he ever thought his father knew him in such a way?

“He always did have friends,” the old man went on. “Wherever we went and stopped a bit.” He looked warily at Amelia. “Maybe you didn't know that?”

“No, I didn't,” she said.

“I'll be getting dressed now,” he said gruffly. With his good left arm, he lifted his right onto his lap.

“Shall I go get Mrs. Coyle to help you?”

“I'll manage,” he said.

She left the shed. The chickens were gathered around a pile of potato peelings. Amelia avoided them, repulsed by their scrawniness.

Harry was sitting at the kitchen table with the Coyles. Mr. Coyle was staring at his wife with doggy admiration. No one looked up as Amelia came into the kitchen.

“Your father is getting dressed,” she said sharply.

Mrs. Coyle nodded. “Sure he is. He expects you to take him around the valley to visit old friends. He doesn't hardly get anywhere these days.”

Harry got to his feet. “Is there anything else?” he asked.

“I've tried to tell you all of it,” Mrs. Coyle replied. “There'll be no point in your seeing the doctor.”

“I'd like to use your bathroom,” Harry said with a touch of plaintiveness.

“Mr. Coyle will show you the facilities,” Mrs. Coyle said. Her husband rose obediently, and Harry followed him out of the kitchen. The clump of their footsteps sounded very loud, as though the house were hollow. Mrs. Coyle made no effort to detain Amelia, and after a minute she walked out of the kitchen. Ben, wearing khaki pants and a faded blue work shirt, leaned against the shed door. She ran to him, but he waved her away.

“Where's the car?” he wanted to know.

Slowly, they made their way to the front of the house. He wouldn't let her take his good arm. Once they were inside the car, he seemed to ignore her. After several minutes, he reached across her and pressed the horn.

“He'll be along soon,” she said.

“What's he doing in there?” Ben asked irritably. Harry emerged from the house to the sagging porch, wiping his mouth fastidiously with a handkerchief. Ben moved one foot back and forth, and Amelia felt on her cheek a drop of sweat like a tear.

“Where to?” Harry said as he got into the car.

“Toward town,” Ben said.

Here and there houses like shacks rose into the yellow light of the still afternoon. Once, Amelia saw a truck without wheels, abandoned in a field. A dog ran by the side of the road, its pink tongue hanging out. They went past a porch upon which an old person sat in a rocking chair, unmoving, mouth open to the heat. As they drove by a store, Ben poked Amelia with unexpected familiarity. “You can buy a pork chop or a hoe in our store . . .” Next to it stood a gas station with a large tin bucket in front of a solitary gas tank.

“Stop here,” Ben directed. Harry pulled off the road in front of what Amelia guessed was a boardinghouse. After the motor died, the two men got out of the car without a backward glance. Amelia scrambled out and followed them as they approached the steps leading up to a narrow swayed porch. In the shade of its overhang stood a cluster of old men. Their work clothes were shapeless with use and age. It crossed Amelia's mind that if touched, they'd turn to dust.

Ben neared the steps cautiously, his head down. Harry walked beside him. Amelia sensed a struggle between them as Ben edged away from his son, holding the dead arm with his other. As he placed his foot on the first of three steps, the old men began to shout his name again and again. One did a short buck-and-wing. Amelia imagined she heard the click-clack of ghostly bones.

When Ben reached the porch, he looked back triumphantly at Harry. Look what I've done, his look seemed to say; I'm somebody here in my own country.

He introduced her: “Amelia, my daughter-in-law.” His voice loud. Amelia smiled, and it seemed to suffice, because the old men, Ben along with them, drifted to the other end of the porch. Amelia looked around for Harry and found him a few steps behind her. He pointed at Ben, shook his head, and sighed exaggeratedly. They listened to the loud guffaws, the moments of silence broken sharply by the rise of someone's cracked old voice, a faint mumble.

“I'll wait in the car,” Amelia said. She was nearly asleep when Harry and Ben rejoined her.

That afternoon they paid another visit. All the way to the Sherman ranch, Ben was loquacious. He told stories about his friends, the ones they had just seen on the boardinghouse porch. Their stories all bore the same stamp of misfortune—long droughts, disastrous storms, grudging harvests. They had outlived it all, Ben said, they had the last laugh.

No one has the last laugh, Amelia thought.

They parked in a driveway of sorts and entered a darkened room that held a stale coolness. A rancher's huge, callused hand swept a black tomcat from a chair.

“Get off there, cat,” Mr. Sherman said. “You sit right down here, Ben. It's fine to see you. So your boy come home and brought his new wife? Well now, Mrs. Tilson, why don't you go visit with Mrs. Sherman?” He pointed toward the kitchen.

Mrs. Sherman, the middle-aged woman in a housedress who had greeted them at the front door, was making coffee. She wiped her hands on her dress and pulled out a chair at a round table for Amelia.

“You must find it different here from back East.”

“Yes, it is.” From the other room, she could hear the men's voices rising and falling. What could wake her up fully? Her eyes nearly closed, she looked up to see Mrs. Sherman pouring coffee into thick white mugs. She was speaking about children.

“No. We don't have any,” Amelia replied listlessly to the question.

“Whatever would that be like?” exclaimed Mrs. Sherman. “My children are all grown up and they've moved away. I don't know why I bother with that cat. It spends its nights getting into fights and coming home limping with its ears unstitched. I suppose you got to have something around that's alive and don't fight with you.”

“Those two children Mrs. Coyle takes care of—” Amelia began impulsively.

“Pearly's my niece's little girl. Alice comes from somewhere down the valley. Bless Verbena. It isn't everybody who would bother.”

“But there are special places for children like that,” Amelia insisted, remotely outraged that anyone would bless Mrs. Coyle.

“I suppose so,” replied Mrs. Sherman. She put the mugs of coffee on a tray and started off to the parlor. Amelia followed, carrying a sugar bowl and a pitcher of milk. Mrs. Sherman served Ben first, placing the mug on a stool where he could reach it.

“I'm not supposed to drink coffee,” Ben said. “But I will, thank you. If Verbena was here she'd knock it out of my hand.” He drank the coffee slowly, only his eyes closing to show his pleasure. Amelia sat down beside Harry. He seemed unaware of her. No one spoke or moved until Ben put his emptied mug down.

“You've got to take care of yourself, Ben,” Mrs. Sherman said in a kindly voice.

“Yeah . . . ,” the old man sighed, opening his eyes, his mouth slack. Mr. Sherman, who had been watching him, turned his attention to Harry.

“You going back East soon?” he asked.

“This afternoon,” replied Harry, shooting a warning glance at Amelia.

“It's a short visit,” Mrs. Sherman remarked. Nothing more was said. And what if they were leaving? Amelia asked herself. What could be solved if they stayed longer? People went off and returned, again and again until they died. Generations of tomcats left and came back, staying home until their wounds healed. The heat was immutable.

Harry stood up and handed his mug to Mrs. Sherman. “Dad,” he said. Ben looked blankly about the room. “We're going?” he asked. He too got to his feet, but this time he took Harry's arm.