Proud Flesh (9 page)

“You sure,” said Mrs. Sibley, fanning herself with one of the pasteboard fans she gave away to advertise her line of products, “that you know how to put all that back together again?”

“Yes'm,” said Hugo.

There was only one thing to do. That was to leave Mrs. Sibley, take the rod, and his tire (unfortunately, though she had just about everything else, Mrs. Sibley had no tire tools in her kit either), to town and get a new one. Or rather, to Hogan's used car parts and automobile graveyard eight miles the other side of town, and just hope and pray that Hogan had down there among all the other wrecks in his apple orchard a 1954 Nash. So Hugo set off, and after about three miles flagged a ride into town, where he finally found a man at the compress going out Hogan's way as soon as his cotton was ginned and baled, and hitched a ride with him.

Hogan seemed to recollect a Nash somewhere around and Hugo finally located it down at the foot of the orchard, upside down in a gully and overgrown with creepers and vines. It was a '49 as near as he could make out. Did a '54 and a '49 take the same size connecting rod? Hugo wasn't sure. Neither was Hogan.

“Well, there's one way to find out,” said Hugo with a sigh.

They brought down Hogan's old tractor and a towing chain and turned the wreck right side up. Then Hugo went to work and took off the pan, took out the plugs (a little harder in this case, as the car had been sitting there rusting for eight or ten years), took off the head, took out a piston, took off the rod. If it had once been the same size, it was worn down considerably now. Shimmed up with a little babbitt, however, it might do. So Hugo took it back to the shop and melted down some babbitt and babbitted it. By the time this was done Hugo had just about forgotten about his flat tire. Did Hogan have a pretty good 7.50–15 innertube? He did. It had just come in on a wreck. How much? Seventy-five dollars if he had to take it off himself on a day as hot as this, seventy-five cents if Hugo did it himself. For another half a dollar he could have the tire, rim and all. Just leave his in exchange.

That certainly would have saved a lot of time and work, but as luck would have it, the wreck was an International Harvester and Hugo's truck, or rather his neighbor's, was a Dodge and the rims were not interchangeable. So Hugo jacked up the wreck and took off the wheel and pried the casing off and pried his casing off the rim and put the innertube in his and pumped it up. Now he was ready to start back. He borrowed off of Hogan half a Dixie cup full of cylinder head gasket seal compound and set off down the road to flag a ride.

When Hugo finally got Mrs. Sibley going again it was four o'clock in the afternoon. She very kindly offered to drive him back to where his truck sat. “Boy, that sure took you a while!” said Hugo's wife. “And us sitting here in the heat all this while with no dinner nor nothing to eat.”

Now at half past four, having overtaken and passed Mrs. Shumlin herself some distance back, Hugo was chugging down the road, still proceeding very cautiously on account of that spare tire, not to mention the left rear, when there ahead of him, ambling down the middle of the road, was Trixie, Mrs. Shumlin's cow. Hugo pumped the brake pedal and slowed up. He stuck his head out the window and yelled, “Hoo, cow!” Trixie merely flicked one ear.

“Hop out and lead her off and tie her to a fence post with that rope around her neck, Billy,” said Hugo, “so I can get around her.”

“Don't you do any such thing, Billy,” said his mother. “She looks mean to me. She's one of them old Bramers. Honk at her, Hugo, why don't you?”

“I honk at her and she jump that fence and rip her bag on one of them bobwires we'd be in some fix, wouldn't we?” said Hugo.

But when after about a quarter of a mile the radiator recommenced to boil, Hugo decided to risk a little toot on the horn. He pressed the button and nothing happened. He knew he had no headlights—that was why he had had to promise the owner of the truck to be back before nightfall; but he never knew he had no horn.

Hugo stopped the truck to get out and lead the cow off the road and tie her to a fence post himself. The glance Trixie flung at him over her hump changed his mind. She did look mean, and Hugo was just as glad his wife had forbidden Billy to go near her.

Between the middle of the road, occupied by the cow, and the deep ditch on either side of the road there was, Hugo gauged, just about enough space to squeeze the truck through. Drawing up close behind, he prepared to inch past. The cow sidled in front of him. He fell back, then started around her on the other side. She tacked that way. Again to the left, then again to the right he tried; each time she veered in front of him. While pretending not even to know he was there, the cow forestalled Hugo's every maneuver. This went on for three-quarters of a mile, bringing them to the junction with the paved road and to that moment when the men squatting beneath the pear tree up at the Renshaw place were rising on the balls of their feet and listening with clenched teeth and bated breath to the zoom of a speeding car.

Hugo heard it just seconds before he saw it, and even before it left the paved road and came into the turn he was already pressing instinctively, frantically and futilely on the horn. The moment caught him in yet another attempt to get around the cow, this time legally, which is to say on the left, or in other words, in the lane of oncoming traffic. It was this that saved him. For the other car was also in the wrong lane, and although Hugo swerved hard right and stomped the accelerator, the worn-out and overladen old truck responded sluggishly, thus the two vehicles passed safely if illegally, separated by exactly one cow width. The other car went off the road and into the ditch and up the bank, leveling a line of fence posts, shot down the bank and across the ditch and back onto the road and continued on its way. The truck went lumbering across the highway and into the ditch and up the bank, Hugo now stomping the brake pedal and hauling back on the wheel as though on a pair of reins, his eyes shut tight against the collision and/or the blowout he expected momentarily.

The truck rolled to a stop and Hugo opened his eyes to find himself and his family alive and unhurt. They had stopped on the crest of the roadbank, were tilting sharply toward the roadbed. The Mattoxes all climbed out and Hugo ran to inspect that spare tire. There it stood, plump and sound. So did the left rear. The right front was another matter. Hugo got to it in time to see a rubber bubble swelling from a break in the cords like a bubble of bubble gum. It burst. That corner of the truck settled. The rear spring shackles snapped one below the last with a sound like a handful of knuckles being cracked. A solitary, louder snap succeeded. “Stand back!” yelled Hugo, and a good thing he did, for that big snap was the rear axle breaking in half, and with that the truck keeled over, strewing three bales of unbaled cotton from one side of the highway across to the other.

Trixie, on the road in her customary outward bound course, appeared to have escaped whole and unharmed. However, she laid down at regular intervals on the pavement a trail of drops of blood. Examination by her mistress, who caught her some minutes afterward, disclosed that Trixie had somehow lost the tuft of her tail in the encounter. This is a small part of a cow, but indispensable. Without it she cannot switch flies. They torment her to distraction and she goes off her feed. Her yield of milk dwindles. Maddened by irritation, she may even turn dangerous. Mrs. Shumlin was not exaggerating when she declared that Trixie was worth nothing to nobody now but the knackers.

The silence lasted only a moment, then the men beneath the pear tree heard the car roaring down the dirt road with undiminished speed and above the tops of the pines saw the dust rise in billows like smoke.

This car did not stop in the road below the house; it shot up the drive, plunging to a halt in front of the garage and disappearing momentarily in the swirl of dust drawn after it by the vacuum its passage had created. When the dust settled it was seen that one entire side of the car was corrugated, the top dented in, the hood sprung, the rear bumper twisted loose and flapping, the rear window a spider's web of cracks. Out of the car came a chorus of voices, the cries, the whimpers of children, above them a woman's voice wailing and sobbing brokenly. Out of the dust, without looking back, Lester Renshaw came striding. His brother Ballard rose from his place in the circle of men beneath the pear tree and crossed the lawn to greet him.

From the car now came a moan, a rising wail, ending in a loud sob, and then in a choking voice, above the crying of the children and the ministrant murmur of the neighbor women, the woman shrieked, “Oh, you don't know! You don't know! Nobody knows what I've been through!”

“All right, honey. All right. It's all over now. Get out of the car, Sybil, dear, and come in the house and lay down and rest. Come on now.”

“I begged and I pleaded with him. I threatened to jump out of the car. He only went all the faster. Youall don't know. Nobody will ever know what he put me through.”

“Ssh. There, there, honey baby. It's all over now. Here you are all safe and sound. All right. All right. It's all over now, hear?”

“I don't know how we came through it alive. I don't know how we did it. We like to have killed an old woman crossing the road to her mailbox and still he never slowed down. I begged him with tears in my eyes to let the children out at least, stop and leave them with somebody along the road. How was it going to help his mamma if he killed himself and his wife and own children, can anybody tell me? Oh, my babies! My poor innocent babies!”

“Don't work yourself up no more now, Sybil, dear. Come on now. Come in the house and lay down and rest yourself. Try to get a hold on yourself now. It's all over now, you hear? Ssh. Don't take on any more. You're upsetting the children. It's all over now, hear?”

“You couldn't even see the road go by, the telegraph poles. It was all just a blur. Three hundred and seventy miles we drove like that. I begged and I pleaded with him. I—”

“Run get the doctor, somebody. And somebody get the children out of there.”

“And then we came to a turn in the road and there was a cow and a truck coming the other way and he never even oh I think I'm going to—”

“Hurry! And tell him to bring his little black bag!”

XI

The three sisters bore up well on meeting, so long as their circle remained incomplete. With the arrival of Amy, the last of them to get home, all three broke down. They had to leave the house, leave the porch, and withdraw to a corner of the yard. Reproaching themselves for not appreciating their mother until it was too late, each offered the others comfort while refusing all comfort herself.

“Ah, such a good woman!” This from Gladys, whose voice, coming over the seared lawn, reached the men down around the pear tree, causing them to shift their feet and clear their throats, reached the Negroes out in the side yard and, like a hand brushed across the strings of a guitar, drew from them an echoing chord, melodious and woeful. “Such a good woman! Such a good mother! Thinking always of her children, never a thought for herself. I took her for granted and now it's too late to ever make up. How can I ever forgive myself for all the heartache I brought on her?”

“Oh, you were good, Sister!” cried Lois. “You've been good. You were a joy to her. It's me. I'm the one. I was always the troublesome one. She worked and she slaved for me and all her reward was disappointment and tears.”

“Oh, if only I could bring her back!” Hazel wailed: “Just for one hour! Just one more chance to show her how much she meant to me.”

Then the drone of the neighbor women: “Honey. Don't take on so. She wouldn't want youall to take on this away. She may yet recover. Where there's life there's hope. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. She's going to her everlasting reward. She's had a good long life, a fine big loving family—all a woman could want. Don't take on so, sweetheart, you'll do yourself harm.”

“I never answered her last letter!” cried Gladys. “Oh, she's gone from me forever and I never even took time to answer the last letter I'll ever get from her. I kept putting it off from day to day, never thinking she might be taken from me, and now it's too late. Too late!”

“None of us deserved her!” cried Lois.

“Now, baby. Now, baby. She understood youall were thinking of her all the while. Now now now. Don't youall carry on like this, hear?”

The three sisters wailed to one another, “How can we give her up? How can we do without her? Oh, what will become of us?”

“She was too good for this life!” Hazel cried. “Too good for it!”

“An angel from heaven, hon. Ne'er a finer woman drawed the breath of life. But stanch your tears now, love. She's going to a better world.”

Needless to say, it would never have occurred to Amy Renshaw Parker to doubt the sincerity of her sisters' grief. Their lamentations were heartfelt. But Amy could not help contrasting her sisters' grief with her own. She could not utter a sound—not one monosyllable of woe. Her sisters might ask themselves how they could live without their mother, and for a while might find it all but impossible; but they had their children and their children's children to live for. Amy had no one. Of all the others only Clifford would be left as desolate and inconsolable as she.

Amy was not only childless, she was friendless as well. Her entire emotional life had been expended upon her family, and the approaching death of her mother, head and symbol of it, seemed to Amy to signal the family's break-up. To a lesser extent this was true of all the Renshaws, but for Amy outsiders had scarcely existed. Oh, she had Ira, to be sure—her husband; and she was fond of Ira. But he was only a husband, after all.

Excepting Hazel—who professed to have less than any—Amy was the only one of the girls with money of her own, being the only one who had made a career. A registered nurse, she had always earned good pay, had invested regularly in blue chip common stocks, and had seen their worth multiply into a very considerable sum. Early in marriage she and Ira had come to an arrangement. The costs of living were divided between them, she paying the grocery bills and car costs, he the mortgage and utility bills. She bought her clothes, he his. Whenever they dined out, as they often did, Amy's schedule leaving her little rime for housework and she being an indifferent cook, they asked for separate checks. Thus it was none of Ira's business if her savings were always available as an emergency loan fund for her brothers and sisters and her favorite nephews and nieces, amongst whom she was flagrantly partial, those of her brothers and sisters whose children she scanted not daring to take exception, being too deeply in her debt for favors rendered them.