Proud Flesh

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Proud Flesh

A Novel

William Humphrey

ONE

After forty years as their family physician, Dr. Metcalf—“Doc” to all the world—knows the Renshaws better than anybody else. Which means only that Doc knows even less than anybody what ever to expect of them. Expect the worst: everybody who knows the Renshaws knows that. Having brought them all into the world, having cured their illnesses and healed their hurts, having come when summoned to their every call, in all seasons, at any hour, Doc has a larger claim than anybody else upon the Renshaws' gratitude, but Doc is not relying on this now to save him from blame, from threats, from who knows what Renshaw unreasonableness, when he breaks his news to them.

For even in a place where every man's first loyalty is to his own clan, with the state of Texas coming a distant second and the South a still more distant third (and there it ends; even as a schoolboy, at morning assembly, the Texan mentally invokes the doctrine of interposition upon his pledge of allegiance to the United States of America one nation indivisible), the Renshaws are known, are notorious, for their clannishness. Being Renshaw is a state of mind. They are not a family, they are a nationality and a cult—pharisaical, fanatical. The Renshaws are like a colony of bees, just as exclusive, just as singlemindedly self-intent, and just as ready, each and every one of them, to sting its sting and die should the hive be attacked. And it is Doc's duty now to tell them that the queen bee, their mother, Edwina, is dying.

The Renshaws are unprepared for this. “Ma's heart condition” is something they have known about for a long time, but they have been led to believe, by none other than Doc himself, that it is a mild one. Now Doc is in a dilemma. Shall he reveal that, like the court physician to an aging monarch tenacious of her power and mistrustful of her waiting heirs and successors, he has watched her condition worsen for years but has kept it from them on orders from her, not being allowed to tell even her daughter Amy, the nurse, and the most devoted of her children, its seriousness? Or shall he let them think it is as sudden a shock to him as it is to them, and risk having the Renshaws suspect him of incompetence, or negligence, or both? The sigh with which Doc prepares to break his news is as detached as he can make it, professional, philosophical, fellow-human. There comes a time, he says, when all the advancements of science are to no avail. Which to anybody else would convey the message that he, Ben Metcalf, MD, is up on all the latest advancements of science; but with these Renshaws you never know.

They stand in the shade of the pear tree where generations of Renshaw men have stood to receive such news, have squatted and kept vigil whenever there was sickness in the house. In their sweat-soaked clothes, panting for breath, they look like survivors from a capsized boat just washed ashore, especially as one of them is dressed in a sailor's white suit. The sailor's eyes brim with tears. The three older men only swallow hard, their Adam's apples working audibly. Three of the fruit from the tree they stand beneath are not more alike than they, so strong is the family resemblance among them. They do not look griefstricken at Doc's news; their resentful expression is habitual, it is the Renshaw look, with which they confront all of life; it is a family feature, like the Renshaw brow, the Renshaw jaw. They say nothing. They level at Doc three identical sets of eyes, or rather of shadowed eye-sockets, which are like the muzzles of three double-barreled shotguns. If there is a difference of temper among the three brothers it is this: that like the three stops made by the hammer of a gun as it is cocked to be fired, Clyde's is at the first stop, Clifford's at the second, and Ballard's at the third, ready to go off at any moment. The silence is filled with the drone of wasps among the fallen and liquefying pears—for the old tree can no longer hold its fruit until ripe—and the stridulation of a locust like a telephone ringing insistently in an empty house. Up from the fields comes the mournful chant of Negroes picking cotton.

Their mother—grandmother—is a strong-willed woman, as they well know, Doc says, and one with a tight hold on life. But she is also a sick woman and one no longer young, and knowing them as he does, how close a family theirs is, he feels they will want to be told his worst fears now so they can call the others home to her side. Hope for the best still, he tells them, but—and he draws another sigh—be prepared now for the worst. He has done all he can do for her.

—All anybody can do, he hastily amends. All anybody can do. For you never know what is going on behind those slits of eyes. Only that they think as one, if they stop to think, then they act as one. She may be sick and old, but when Edwina Renshaw dies her sons and grandsons, not to mention those daughters of hers, are going to want somebody to blame. Then Doc's white hairs and the fact that he brought them all into the world will count for nothing. These four here: they would not seriously suspect him of leaving anything untried; but they are perfectly capable of believing it a duty to the old lady, to the absent members of the clan, and to themselves, to accuse him of it just the same.

At last one of them speaks. It is Clyde. He says it is just like Ma never to let them know how really sick she was so as to spare them worry, even to mislead her doctor, suffer in silence and all alone. Doc heaves another sigh, this one of relief, and saying that he must not be away from his patient any longer, makes his escape. He turns and steps out of the shade into the blaze of day. At the touch of the sun his head appears to flare into incandescent white ash like the mantle of a lamp. Head down, he wades through the shimmering heat waves on the far shore of which stands the house. The porch runs the width of the house, casting a shadow as straight as a ruled line which divides it into layers of black and yellow. In the upper story the windowpanes glint darkly, all but the one in the corner room, with its day-drawn shade.

Ballard volunteers to go to the telegraph office.

Derwent, wiping his tears on his sleeve, offers to drive him. It was Derwent who drove the doctor out from town, fifteen miles in just over ten minutes.

Clifford reminds them that somebody will have to go after Uncle Howard and Aunt Estelle and them; they cannot be reached by wire.

There is a silence during which each man stares off in a different direction. Finally Clyde says what all are thinking:

“They're not the only ones.”

There follows another silence.

“Well,” says Clifford, “you can't go after him.”

There follows another, deeper, longer silence. The wasps drone, the locust repeats its ring, up from the fields floats the Negroes' melodious moan.

Then in a tone of dreamy defiance, “Can't?” says Ballard.

I

Of Edwina Renshaw's ten children only Clifford, her eldest son, was left at home; the rest were scattered and gone. But with one exception they had not gone far, and their fixed orbits within their mother's strong gravitational field brought them home regularly and often. In recent years they had rallied still closer around their mother to close that one gap in their ranks. It was always open house at Edwina's. None of the children ever wrote or phoned ahead to announce a homecoming. None of the boys would have dreamed of giving his mother warning that he was on his way out bringing five or six hunting companions with him to spend the weekend. Bring as many as they pleased and arrive just at mealtime, they would find places set and the table heaped high.

Her table was set in the old-fashioned farmhouse style, with the plates turned bottom side up waiting for grace to be said over them, the spoons in a pewter stand in the center, cone-rolled yellowed linen napkins as supple as chamois in cracked and yellowed ivory rings, toothpicks in a holder of Bohemian ruby glass. She served the old country-style recipes: chess pie, chowchow, fruit and berry cobblers; at hog-killing time in the fall, backbone and baked sweet potatoes, cracklin' bread. A great deal of game birds in, as well as out of, season: quail, woodcock, doves, tangy black-meated wild duck.

Eulalie, the cook, had an antique boy's coaster wagon with removable sideboards, the envy of every little boy in the neighborhood, which sat outside the kitchen door, and every morning at seven, as soon as the cream had been separated, the breakfast dishes washed and the milk utensils scoured, the two women would jam on their sunbonnets and Eulalie would take up her old sliver of a knife and they would trundle off together to the garden or to the root cellar, silent, synchronized, like one woman and her shadow. When they came back, wagon creaking beneath pecks of tomatoes, three or four dozen roasting ears, heads and heads of lettuce and bunches upon bunches of carrots and onions, it would be an hour later; for each ear of corn had to be tested, the shucks peeled back below the tassel, a kernel punctured by thumbnail, the ear selected only if it spurted milk. Down the rows of watermelons they would go, Eulalie thumping each one with her yellow nail, the two of them huddled down, heads cocked, listening: the one over which they nodded together would, when cut, split with a loud crack running ahead of the blade and part with a smack like two red lips. Then out to the smokehouse, where hams hung from the blackened beams for three years were adjudged ripe when they had attained the color and the texture of a mossy stone. Or out to the chickenyard where soon they might be seen surrounded by half a dozen headless pullets flopping on the ground in successive stages of death while Edwina pointed out and Eulalie enticed yet another with a handful of grain, then swooped and grabbed and wrung its head off in mid-squawk, execrating it and its whole race so as to work herself up against it and excuse her cruelty. By late morning the air of the back yard was spiced and sugared by the aroma of pies set out rim to rim to cool on the kitchen window ledges, and outside the door stood a queue of neighbor children waiting for pots and pans to lick. Hulls and shells and pods and peels and feathers and shucks and bones went out of that kitchen by the cartload—and with them went about half of the food. For the Renshaws admired nothing so much as bounty, lavishness, waste, despised nothing so much as “chinchiness”—their word for thrift. Everything Renshaw was overfed. The turkeys, chickens and geese rendered buckets when cooked. The pigs were so larded they scarcely opened their eyes when their evening trough was filled. The only lean creature on the place was Edwina. Tall and spare, she ate like a hummingbird: a shirred egg, the pullybone of a cold fried chicken, a dish of clabber. Ten cups of blistering black coffee per day, despite doctor's orders. And at night before bed a hot toddy, the ingredients for which stood on her night table, for she trusted no one to make it to her taste—that is, to put in such a dollop of bootleg Old Overholt as, for the sake of her heart, she spiked it with.