Proud Flesh (20 page)

One of ten it was, each higher and harder than the last—a whole Himalayan range. Atop the other nine one by one she succeeded in planting her flag, but the tenth turned her back time and again: an Everest of a problem. The porcelainized kitchen tabletop was covered with her figures: false trails leading nowhere. Her answer always came out the same, and different from
The Answer in the Back of the Book
. But Amy could not give up. To turn in a paper condemned from the start to a grade no higher than 90 was something she could not do. The curse of perfection was upon her.

She rested by doing her English assignment. That finished, she attempted the problem again. She merely retraced her former figures, like a lost person wandering in circles, retracing his own footsteps.

Joan Harvey, her closest rival in class, had probably solved that problem long ago and gone to bed, said Amy to herself. She erased all her figures from the tabletop and began afresh. She checked her calculations at every stage. The answer she got was the same as before. She heard her father climb the stairs and go to his bedroom. Alone in the kitchen in the stillness of the night her heart cried out for an end to her childhood.

At one in the morning her mother came down and told her she must give up and go to bed. It was silly to spend so much time over one problem. She went over her figures one last time, without hope, without avail. Before getting into bed she said her prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep;

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

But she knew the Lord would not take her soul with the sin upon it of that unsolved problem. If she should die before she woke, and she expected she would, she would go to hell, and there through eternity she would have to try to get her answer to that problem to agree with the answer in the back of the book.

She waited until she judged her mother was asleep and then got up and crept down to the kitchen again. Her eyes watered at the light. The clock on the wall said two.

Before beginning again she fortified herself with thoughts of all the hopes that she liked to imagine were invested in her.

Amy's parents were neither of them well educated. They were well enough off not to need to be, not to care—indeed, to be able to look down upon those who did. But in her longing for Ma's approval Amy had invented a role for herself in which her parents were not only uneducated, but lowly, and ashamed of their condition. The mother of this self-engendered Amy had sought to rise above her beginings, and those—still humbler—of her husband. She longed for gentility, and she believed that the path to it lay through the thicket of learning. In Amy, her eldest (sometimes in this daydream, her only) child, she placed all her hopes. In Amy she was determined to realize what in herself she had been denied. She could not bear for Amy to be anything but the best.—An exact description of the circumstances of Joan Harvey, Amy's closest competitor in school: that was what this was; Amy had swapped places with Joan in her imagination. With so much depending upon her, how could she let her mother down? Shouldering all these expectations, she again began to scale the slopes of that steep problem.

Again and yet again Amy's answer to that problem came out the same, and always the answer in the back of the book remained the same: obdurate and unattainable. The dead of night stretched around her; she felt herself alone in all the world. She was seized by a shivering she could not master. By 3 a.m. she could no longer see. She slunk upstairs and into bed and fell into a bottomless sleep.

Settled celibacy had given to Miss Allison Tate an awesome air of self-sufficiency. The severity of her disposition was reflected in her dress. This, which never varied, but was the same every day of the year, summer and winter, was as anachronistic as the habit of a nun: rusty black shot-silk, beginning in a high guipured collar, long sleeves cuffed in lace, the skirt terminating just above the tops of her fresh-polished, high-button shoes. She wore pince-nez glasses attached to a thin gold chain which, when the glasses were allowed to fall, coiled up on a spring inside a button pinned to her bosom, or where a bosom ought to have been. She sat at her desk as in a church pew; if one of her pupils slumped in his seat a glance over her glasses was enough to straighten him. When she passed down the aisles there came from her rustling skirts a faint dry fragrance as of a sachet of lavender long forgotten in a drawer.

Amy had lived for years in dread of the time when she would enter Miss Allison's class”. In fact, she had liked her from the start. Perhaps “liked” was not the right word. One would no more presume to “like” Miss Allison than one would to like Mt. McKinley. But she was a fixed mark in the landscape, something to take one's bearings by. To Amy, Miss Allison's hard unsentimental character was a rock of stability in a world of uncertainty. Amy might be one of her two best pupils but Miss Allison treated her no differently, that is to say, no less strictly, than she did the worst dolt in the class. By giving Amy no more affection or encouragement than she got at home from her mother, Miss Allison spared her any pangs of disloyalty.

They used to turn in their assignments to Miss Allison on entering the classroom. The solutions were demonstrated to them in this manner: a pupil was called upon to go to the board. For this he was given back his paper, went to the blackboard and copied out his solution. He then turned in his paper again.

As she had known she would be, Amy Renshaw was called upon that day to go to the blackboard and do the one problem she had been unable to solve. Perhaps Miss Allison thought Amy was the only pupil able to have solved a problem so hard. Perhaps Amy's look of dread as Miss Allison ran her eye over the class had drawn her choice to fall upon her.

Amy went to the desk and got her paper. She did not say that that problem was the only one she had not been able to solve. With Miss Allison this was not done. One was not excused from going to the board merely because one had not solved a problem. One went just the same, and either copied out one's wrong answer or stood there facing the blank blackboard until Miss Allison took notice. It was then, generally, that either Amy Renshaw or Joan Harvey was called on to go to the board and show the class how it ought to be done.

Amy did not mechanically copy her wrong answer onto the board that day. Beginning at the beginning, she worked the problem one last time in front of the class. Her answer that time was the same as all the times before.

“That is not the answer in the back of the book,” Miss Allison said.

Amy hung her head. “No, Ma'am,” she said.

The class was hushed. It was the first time that Amy Renshaw had ever been humiliated at the blackboard.

“Who got that problem right?” Miss Allison asked the class. No hand was raised. Not even Joan Harvey's. But knowing that she was merely no worse than the rest gave Amy no comfort; on the contrary, by lowering her to the general level it deepened her shame.

“Do you want to try again, Amy?” Miss Allison asked. The offer was unprecedented, and made Amy feel more unworthy than ever.

Amy, choking back tears, shook her head. “No, Ma'am, thank you anyway, Miss Allison,” she said. “It wouldn't be any use. It always comes out the same, though I did it a hundred times.”

“Mmh, and always will, though you were to do it a thousand,” said Miss Allison. “Your answer is correct, Amy. The one in the back of the book is wrong.”

The class gave a gasp of amazement, then burst into gleeful laughter. The surprise was to find that schoolbooks could be wrong, that the world of teachers was not infallible. The laughter was triumph and self-delight. A world of their own had opened up to them and the pupils gazed at one another in a daze of self-discovery. The laughter swelled, passed out of control, became seditious. In it could be heard the rejoicing of a mob delivered from superstition and subjection.

But as for little Amy Renshaw, when the altars of discredited authority came crashing down she lacked agility, she could not jump aside in time, she was caught beneath, and crushed. Her answer was correct, her paper perfect. But Amy remembered her long lonely anxious hours in the night. She had trusted in the book, and her trust had been misplaced. If she could not believe in the answer in the back of the book, what was there for her to believe in?

“There is a lesson for you in this, Amy,” Miss Allison said. “A lesson,” she said to the class, “for all of you. The lesson is, it is not enough to be right; you must know that you are.”

As one, the class nodded to show that they had learned this lesson. Amy dutifully nodded, too. But she felt as though she had been set adrift upon the ocean of life in a boat without any rudder.

Adrift now upon this deep dream of that childhood tragedy, she could see the shore where duty stood calling to her, but she was swept with the tide out to a sea of sleep.

XXII

Long after the lights in the house had gone out, three sat on beneath the pear tree: Derwent, ghostly in the moonlight in his white sailor suit, Ballard and Lester. Twice Ballard's wife had come out in her nightgown to plead with him to come to bed. The second time he had not even answered her. None of the three had said anything. Yet in the air about them something almost crackled with imminence. Ballard himself seemed surrounded by a vacuum, as though he had sucked in all the air around him and was holding it in. So that on turning to leave, his wife had said, “Ballard? Ballard, don't youall do anything, hear? What are youall thinking of doing? Whatever it is don't do it. Hear?” Still she got no answer.

When she was gone, out of the darkness came Lester's voice:

“You don't suppose …”

“Forget it.” That was Derwent.

“Hmm?” said Ballard.

“Forget it.”

Silence fell. Then in a voice strained through clenched teeth, Ballard said, “Son of a—!

“Bast—!

“God damn the English language! Ain't there no way to cuss your brother without dragging your mother into it?”

TWO

I

Old Dr. Metcalf had brought into the world half the people in the county. He had nursed them and their children through the whooping cough and the measles and the mumps, and he was starting in now on their children's children. The men he had certified fit and sent off for duty in three wars. He had stitched them back together following disputes and set their broken bones following accidents. To Doc was owing the continued functioning of many a faulty organ, the continued pleasure in the company of many an aged parent, and to Doc was also owing, in many cases, his fee: he had carried half his patients on his books for years. Old as he was getting to be, Doc would still come out on call at any hour of the night and in all kinds of weather, though it meant getting over washed-out roads, getting mired in the mud and having to find and rouse from sleep some farmer with a tractor or a team to pull him out, often having to do the last mile or more on foot or on the back of the family mule behind the eldest boy sent down to meet him where the road gave out. All this to save the child of, or present with yet another, or, by the light of a coal-oil lamp, to remove the ruptured and gangrened appendix of some man who along next fall would come into the office and discharge his obligation with a mess of squirrels or a towsackful of hardshell pecans or maybe a pale, salty, undercured razorback ham. It was from just some such call that Doc had failed to return. He had disappeared, in circumstances suggesting foul play. It was a matter of concern and conjecture for the whole county.

The last person to see him was his wife. She reported that on Wednesday around five o'clock in the morning they had been awakened by the screech of car brakes in the street, followed instantly by a violent knocking on their door. Both had started downstairs, she in the effort to get there ahead of him, for she tried, without much success, to intercept these middle-of-the-night summonses—most of which, as it turned out, might just as well have kept until regular office hours—and especially ever since his last cardiogram some weeks earlier. As usual, however, he was quicker than she, and while the pounding on the door rose still louder and more peremptory, he went down to answer it, calling, “All right. AH right! I hear you. I'm coming!” The murmur of voices had reached her, men's voices, though whether apart from her husband's there had been just one or more than one she could not say for certain. The doctor had then come back upstairs and dressed, saying that he had to go out into the country and for her to go back to sleep and not to wait up for him. To express her disapproval she had pointedly asked for no details, and sensing her disapproval he had volunteered none. She heard the front door slam, then heard a car shoot away and down the street and off into the night with a whine like a ricocheting bullet.

Mrs. Metcalf did not fret when at breakfast that morning her husband was still not back. He was often kept out all night, sometimes by a stubborn delivery, sometimes by an easy one when the anxious young husband had sent to fetch him at the very first sign of the wife's labor pains. Nor was she disturbed that no call had come; the nearest telephone was often miles away. She worried only about that recent cardiogram, and hoped he had found time during the night's vigil to snatch a wink of sleep.

At ten that morning the waiting room began to fill with patients and the telephone to ring. Mrs. Metcalf took the calls, made appointments, explained that Doctor was out on an emergency, that she expected him back any time now, promised to have him call as soon as possible. There came a call from the hospital, which was in the neighboring county, to say that one of Doc's cases appeared to be taking a turn for the worse. He had not made his customary morning rounds, nor had he put in any call there. The morning passed and the waiting patients all had to be sent home unattended. Mrs. Metcalf ate her lunch alone and afterward lay down for the nap she always took during the heat of the day, but that day she could not sleep. The afternoon passed with still no word. Patients began to come for the evening office hours and had to be turned away, some of them in pain. She knew the doctor would be provoked if she did anything foolish; but at half-past six, when a car which had seemed about to stop sped up and drove on past instead, she had picked up the phone and rung Sheriff Faye Benningfield.