September Song (16 page)

In the evening after the dinner table had been cleared and the dishes put to wash we three settled down, she with her earphones on, the husband reading his newspaper, I with my book or magazine. There was a television set and she urged me to watch it but I seldom switched it on because she could not watch. And light entertainment seemed unsuited.

I would stifle a yawn and lift my eyes from the page and sometimes then I found him studying me over his paper. We both quickly looked down and resumed our reading. Between us there was some little awkwardness. It was as though she was not there, being both blind and, shut off by her earphones, deaf, and he and I were as good as alone together.

Then one evening in the kitchen he grabbed and kissed me. I was surprised at myself as much as at him. I did not resist nor protest. I felt a thrill at having attracted a man. Strongly enough to overcome his scruples. I, Cinderella in her chimney corner, had made a conquest—and the glass slipper fit. Never mind that I had not much competition.

He had seen in me something more than met the eye. He had shown me a side of myself that the mirror did not show. Of interest for the first time ever to another, I was instantly more interesting to myself. I had always been lonely, unloved. Placed as an infant in the care of paid guardians, strictly reared, dependent on the charity of strangers, I had had to be well behaved all my life. I was tired of being well behaved.

I now had a double life—I who until then had hardly had one to call my own.

I hardened my heart against her for what I was doing to her. The ease with which it could be done did not reproach me. Living with it as I did, I had come to hate infirmity, helplessness, dependency. Maybe my orphanage experiences conditioned me for that. I knew what it was to be both pitied and despised. Rather than appealing to my compassion, misfortune frightened me. It exposed the unforeseeable possibilities that lurked in life.

These are not excuses. Neither are they self-accusations. I have no need of either. My bad conscience, rather than making me repent, reform, goaded me on. I was trying to train it into submission, teach it that I was the mistress, it the dog, ordered to heel. That I can admit that now is the measure of how much I have paid for it. For what I did I deserved punishment, but not what I got. I have been more sinned against than sinning. I have more than atoned. I have been purged of remorse.

So we became a cozy little family. There was no reason that we should not live happily ever after.

But I was always nervous, ill-at-ease. Because her eyes were outwardly unimpaired I had to reassure myself constantly that she could not see us. Maybe it was partly to test that which made me more and more audacious.

Then there was that dog. I have since wondered whether it was not Rex who alerted her to the suspicion that something funny was going on. He was her eyes. The animal could do everything but talk, and his whole life was devoted to her protection. He was the fourth member of the family. He was as jealous of her as a lover, resented even my attentions to her. At anything out of the ordinary he bristled, and the telepathy between the two of them conveyed that to her.

Or maybe her suspicions had already been building before that evening, aroused by things I had said. I enjoyed saying things to her that had for me a double meaning. I had become perhaps reckless at that, skating on thin ice. I would say as I applied her lipstick, combed her hair, “We must look our best for our man. When he gets home from his day's work we must make things as inviting for him as possible.
N'est-ce pas?”

I enjoyed also hearing her say things with meanings for me of which she herself was unaware.

“It's you who make things inviting. I can hear the difference in James's voice. I, too, am lighter-hearted thanks to you. I am so grateful to you for bringing light into this dark house. You do so much more than just your duty.”

“It's my pleasure. Now then, what shall we wear this evening? Our purple paisley blouse and pleated white skirt?”

“Good. And you too, dear. I know it's dreary for you here, but make yourself decorative, for my sake.”

“I'll do the best I can with what I've got to work with.”

Had I overstepped myself? Had I allowed my tone in speaking to him in her presence to become unguarded, familiar, intimate? To any such inflection she would have been extra sensitive. When he and I left her alone to clean up the kitchen did she wonder what else we were doing as we did that? Did she, like any creature handicapped, feel herself vulnerable to attack?

Sometimes I thought she might not have minded if she had known. Sometimes I thought she
did
know, and that that was another reason for her appreciation of my putting myself out “beyond the call of duty.” For they had separate bedrooms and when he left his it was to come to mine. There was something behind the way she sighed, “Poor James,” that seemed to say she felt herself beholden to him for more than just her blindness. I came to feel I was doing her a favor, two favors. Keeping her man happy while relieving her of an unwanted duty.

As I had nowhere else to go on being discharged from the hospital, and had already concocted my story for the doctor, I was brought back here. It was where I would have chosen to go if I had had a choice. I did not fear any further harm from her. She had done her worst. She would want me here. And I was going to need a home, someone to take care of me from now on. In him I would have a devoted attendant.

The first time I ventured downstairs afterwards I got evidence for my suspicion that she had a sixth sense which only the blind could develop over time, hearing like radar to compensate for the loss of sight. She could have heard a kiss, the touch of two hands, the blink of an eye.

She joined me. I made not a sound. I hardly breathed. Yet, her voice aimed directly at me as though by an antenna, she said, “Is that you?”

I said, “What's left of me.”

I rose from my chair, found my way to her, took her hand and placed it on my head. I wanted her to know just what she had done to me. At the same time I wanted to deny her the credit for it.

Her fingertips fluttered over the bald patches of my scalp, the pits and ridges of my face, the scars that were my eyes.

“Feel what I did to myself,” I said.

I let that sink in.

“I mistook the bottle of acid James used to unclog the sink for shampoo.”

It was what I had told the doctor.

She would be indebted to me for not denouncing her. Then she would understand that I was not letting her off light. She would get no chance to defend herself, to expose my part in the affair. She would not serve out her sentence and then be let go. She would have me on her hands for the rest of my days. She would have to play along in the fiction of my “accident.”

And he would come home to us both every evening and be turned to stone by the sight of me.

A Tomb for the Living

W
E WERE PLANTING POTATOES
when the storm sprang up. What we were planting were potato skins. There was a better way to plant potatoes: in pieces, two eyes to a piece. But you did that only if you could afford to and if you had some hope that they were going to sprout. We had eaten the potatoes and we had no faith that these would come up. We were planting in dirt as dry as gunpowder and we had not even spit to water with. The well and the cistern and the stock pond were empty and we were hauling drinking water for ourselves and the mule. Nobody spoke anymore of a “dry spell.” A spell could be short or long but not this long. As Pa said, speaking of rain, he was plumb prayed out.

This storm came on us so suddenly we had to run for it to the cellar. Or try to run, as we were heading into a northwest wind all the way from Kansas and it was like swimming against a flash flood. We had to close our eyes to keep from being blinded by the dust but you could not have seen anything with them open and besides, we had had to take to the cellar so often by then we could have found it in the dark. In years past we had sheltered there from the occasional cyclone, but in these years of the dust storms we spent almost as much time down there as we did in the house. The sound of the wind reached us through the ventilation pipe overhead like someone blowing across the mouth of a jug. It could be hours before it quieted down and we surfaced blinking at the light like prairie dogs.

Pa raised the double doors and held them while Ma and I went down the steps. There was headroom for me but Ma had to duck. We went always in fear of finding a rattler in there with us. We sat ourselves on the bench that ran around the wall. Pa lowered the doors behind him, shutting out what light there was.

When he quit coughing and gasping and hawking Pa said, “Lost my hat. Lost my goddamned hat.”

He made it sound like the final blow.

“Don't take the Lord's name in vain,” Ma said. “He hears you.”

“He ain't heard nothing else I've said to Him,” Pa said.

We sat silent for some while, coughing now and again. Then Pa said, “This is no way to live. This is hell on earth.”

Yet the word that came back from those who had given up and gone west in search of a new life was to hold on if you could.

The way things were going we could not hold on much longer. We were not yet quite as bad off as some of our neighbors but we were only a step behind them. They were sharecroppers, we owned our land. At one time Pa had talked of selling out while we still could. But we had waited too long. As Pa said, we couldn't give the place away now.

Though the crops kept failing we went on trying. To plant this year's we had borrowed seed money. For Pa to be in debt was like having a noose around his neck.

Above the sound of the wind wailing in the pipe Pa said, “Like Onan, I have spilled my seed upon the ground, and the Lord has smitten me.”

“Hush your dirty mouth!” Ma said. “For shame!”

“I'm only quoting scripture,” Pa said.

A long time passed in silence.

“It's blowing to peel the paint off a house,” Pa said.

“If a house was to have paint,” Ma said.

It was still storming as hard as ever when Pa said, “I'm going out.”

“What!” Ma cried. “Going out? In this weather?”

“I can't do what I've got to do in here,” Pa said.

When he returned, he reported that the outhouse had been knocked to flinders.

Hunched in the darkness and silence of the cellar a person lost all sense of time. It was like being buried alive. None of us felt like talking. All we could think of was our troubles. At one point, even though the wind was then blowing its loudest, Pa could be heard groaning. Lately he was always shaking his head, as if disbelieving, and I had seen him often with tears in his eyes. Listening to the wind whistling in the pipe like a locomotive at a level crossing we knew that when we got above-ground we would again find the cornstalks leveled, the plowed land laid bare as a carcass skinned of its hide. This one might be no worse a storm than others before, but each took more of what little the others had left.

The wind blew and blew. It was hours before it died down, and it seemed longer. Even so we sat on for yet a while. We were in no hurry to have a look at the world after this.

At last Ma sighed and said, “Will, I reckon we can go out now.” What she meant was she reckoned we had to.

Pa neither stirred nor spoke.

“Will?” Ma called again.

Still he gave no sign.

“He must have fallen asleep,” Ma said. “Give him a shake, son.”

I did, and he slipped from the bench to the floor.

I went up the steps and flung open the doors and let in the light.

Ma screamed and passed out.

Pa had cut his throat. His pocketknife lay open on the bench.

Buck Fever

O
NE MORE SEASON
and then he would call it quits, hang his gun on the wall. This being his last, he was going for broke. The big buck or none.

The odds were long on none. That deer had become a lottery prize, growing bigger after each annual drawing without a winner—and attracting more bettors. For although hunters who had seen a trophy head of game did not spread the news in bars or clubs, over the years this one had been seen by enough to have a following dedicated to killing him. Deer like this one—if he had his like—were handed down from father to son, willed by friend to friend. The seasons passed with no report of his being killed. If and when that happened it would be news. Not just in the local paper but in the magazine published by the state conservation agency, in the annual review of the Boone and Crockett Club—just possibly in
The Guinness Book of Records
.

He had resolved at the end of last season that it would be his last. At his age it was time to quit, especially when you went for the whole two weeks without so much as aiming your gun. He had passed up a couple of long-range chances, ones he might have taken in younger years but not anymore. He wanted a sure shot, a clean kill—no trailing a wounded animal. It was not faith nor even hope, it was an obligation to stick it out to the end that kept him in place till dark on closing day.

It was that final hour when deer ventured out of hiding to move about, the time for the hunter to be most alert, but having in his mind now put his lifelong sport behind him he was inattentive. As the light waned and darkness fell it was as if the curtain was lowering on his farewell appearance. Already he was leafing through his scrapbook of memories.

If added proof was needed that the time had come for him to quit he got it. He woke from sleep barely in time to keep from falling out of the tree-stand twenty feet to the ground. Trudging home, tired, stiff, chilled, old, he was half glad that he had made no kill. He had neighbors to help him, as he helped them in return, but he was relieved not to be doing his share in dragging a carcass out of the woods.

Then as he entered the alfalfa field he saw the big buck silhouetted against the sky in the last glow of light. He saw two, both big. It was the comparison with the smaller one that was the measure of the bigger one's size.