The Aunt's Story (34 page)

Outside, the sound, the sound of a car had begun to increase. Then the car itself drove through a scattering of speckled pullets into the yard. It creaked, the old Ford, steaming with distance, and white with dust. The man got down from out of the old car.

This, Theodora supposed, would be Joe.

He walked across the yard with the nonchalance of ownership. There was the banging of a wire door. Then a silence, as if something great and extraordinary were being explained.

Now Theodora could not bear to go out. She was isolated in a small room, but it was not desirable to leave it.

‘Guess you're pretty hungry,' said Mrs Johnson, breaking in.

Theodora had not thought, but she supposed she was.

‘We got noodles,' said Mrs Johnson. ‘There's no meat,' she added, to flatten expectation.

Theodora did not expect. Not in the short passage. She expected nothing. The passage was not long enough. Brushing past several old coats, hanging stiffly from pegs, she was ejected brutally into comparative light.

‘Joe, this is Miss …? It
is
Miss?' asked Mrs Johnson.

Theodora's throat was tight with some new terror, that she could not swallow, in a new room. Her hands searched.

‘Yes,' she said, bringing it out of her throat. ‘Yes,' she said, but her hands could not find.

They waited. Her forehead pricked with sweat.

‘Pilkington,' she said.

‘Glad to know you, Miss Pilkington,' said Mr Johnson.

The room loosened. She felt Mr Johnson's hand.

Theodora could have cried for her own behaviour, which had sprung out of some depth she could not fathom. But now her name was torn out by the roots, just as she had torn the tickets, rail and steamship, on the mountain road. This way perhaps she came a little closer to humility, to anonymity, to pureness of being. Though for the moment she stood under a prim pseudonym in the Johnson's kitchen, waiting for the next move.

‘You just sit down and make yourself at home, Miss Pilkington,' Mr Johnson said.

It should have been so easy, but she sat carefully on the edge of a rocker. At least Mr Johnson had decided to take much for granted, she felt, and for this she was relieved. Probably there was a great deal, anyway, that Mr Johnson took for granted. It was in his body, a casualness of stance inside the shabby dungarees. He was dark and physical. There was not much connection between Mr Johnson and his children, though they did match his casualness, standing in positions of half-attention in different quarters of the room, each with his own personal occupation, whether whittling wood, turning the leaves of a catalogue, or pulling the wings of a fly. If there was a subtler link, it was with the dark boy. Mr Johnson had the same habit of stressing with his full dark mouth the expression of his eyes. Only the child was already older than the father would ever allow himself to be.

‘Queenie says you come a long way,' Mr Johnson said.

‘I have come from Europe,' said Theodora.

‘We been to San Francisco once,' Eunice said.

Nor could Mr Johnson quite visualize so far. He smiled, but it was for more familiar wonders. He shifted his position easily
in the chance surroundings of his own room. Theodora knew how there must have been times when Mr Johnson threw himself in long grass, and chewed the fleshy grass with his strong teeth, and half closed his eyes. He had that ease in his body. Mr Johnson's eyes were still full and blind.

‘Well, now, that's interesting,' he said. ‘They say there'll be a war.'

It would happen, Theodora saw, to the ants at the roots of the long suave stalks of grass.

‘Probably,' Theodora said, ‘unless God is kinder to the ants.'

She felt the eyes fix. On the mantelpiece there was an orange marble clock, which also had begun to stare.

At this point Mrs Johnson, her head held back, her sandy hair flying, in protest at the steam, brought a big white dish of noodles from the outer kitchen.

‘We're gonna eat now,' said the child Lily, who had touched Theodora's garnet in the wash-house, and who now took her hand.

‘You shall sit by me,' Lily said.

Then there was a great scramble, in which Theodora was caught up, whirled, and again isolated. It all revolved round the immense dish of steaming noodles, above which Mrs Johnson stood, wiping her freckled hands masterfully on her cotton skirt. When Theodora settled, she noticed that she was sitting opposite Mr Johnson and Zack. In the midst of so much sandy sediment, they were still and dark, like two dark, polished stones.

‘Gee, I do like noodles,' Arty sighed, holding his head on one side and looking along the table.

But Eunice said, ‘I like cornbeef hash best.'

Mrs Johnson dolloped the clumsy noodles with great agility on to Theodora's plate.

‘Guests first,' Mrs Johnson said.

Mr Johnson broke bread. He ignored the masterful ritual of his sandy wife. But she bent towards him. The gesture of her arms was gentler as she passed the plate, poured coffee, pushed across a knife. Once the back of her dry hand brushed the skin of his arm. Then she bent her head and touched her hair. There was something quite humble about the masterful Mrs Johnson
in the presence of her husband, or even before her children when they became a family.

Theodora swallowed the food. Very palpably she felt the presence of the Johnsons, their noise and silence. Their sphere was round and firm, but however often it was offered, in friendliness or even love, she could not hold it in her hand. So that she swallowed with difficulty the mouthfuls of warm smooth noodles, which to the Johnsons were just food. Everyone else ate the noodles, and, later, a pie, with dark sweet fruit.

‘Tell us something about your travels, Miss Pilkington,' Eunice said, as if you could tell all things always in words.

Eunice would.

‘You speak when you're spoken to,' said the mother. ‘Miss Pilkington is tired.'

‘Why don't Miss Pilkington visit with us, Mom?' said Zack, with the slowness of difficulty, counting the stones of fruit on the edge of his plate.

His mouth was stained.

Theodora heard her own spoon beating on the plate.

‘We can fix you a bed, anyways, for the night. Can't we, Joe?' Mrs Johnson said. ‘Then you can run Miss Pilkington into town in the morning in the Ford.'

‘Sure,' Mr Johnson said.

‘It is a trouble,' said Theodora.

She looked desperately at the marble clock, and at a long white feather that trembled in a vase at its side, in a slight breeze.

‘Why?' Mr Johnson laughed.

He showed his white teeth, on which a piece of the dark fruit skin had stuck.

‘No trouble at all,' he said.

There was no trouble when you sat easy in your clothes. Mr Johnson leaned back. Life had sluiced his casual, muscular body, leaving it smooth.

‘It is very kind,' said Theodora, out of her conflicting throat.

She heard her own spoon rattle. Mrs Johnson looked quite disturbed. She, after all, had more knowledge of anxieties.

So it was settled, at least in theory.

‘Miss Pilkington will stay,' they cried, beating with their spoons.

And then the plates were cleared.

Theodora sat, experiencing the superfluity, the slight imbecility of the stranger in a large family, in the face of the things that normally happen in the house.

‘Just you sit, Miss Pilkington,' Mrs Johnson called. ‘'Tain't no trouble at all.'

Theodora heard dishes plunged in water. She heard Arty flicking the legs of Eunice with a wet towel. Mr Johnson had slammed the wire door and gone across the yard on some mission of cows or chickens. In his absence she could see his hands plunged in moist bran or pollard, his contained and rather animal eyes intent above the tin.

So that Miss Pilkington sat alone.

She began slowly to rock in the old and ugly rocker, rocking to a more intimate relationship with the objects in the room. These were ugly too, but right, up to a point. They had grown purposefully out of the room, just as the four children, three sandy and one dark, had grown out of the mother's womb. Even as a skinny cavernous girl in a walnut frame, Mrs Johnson eyed the world with confidence, seeming to take for granted the logic of growth and continuity.

Why then, said Theodora Goodman, is this world which is so tangible in appearance so difficult to hold? Because she herself, in contradiction to the confidence of Mrs Johnson's photograph, could not answer for the substance of the marble clock. She went nervously and touched the clock. Her hands slid over the surface, not of objects, but of appearances.

‘That clock was a wedding present from somebody rich,' Zack said.

He had come and stood behind, and his face had opened, she noticed, to communicate.

‘It is a handsome clock,' said Theodora, who was ashamed that her secret gesture had been observed.

‘I never liked the clock,' said Zack.

‘Why?' Theodora asked.

He stuck out his dark lower lip.

‘I never liked it,' he said.

She went and sat on an ottoman, which obviously was not used much, both because it was hard and because it was covered
in a stuff that was proud and formal, something for occasions.

Zack came and looked at her. Now he was very close.

‘You don't want to stay with us,' he said, looking at her straight.

She was close to his fringed eyes, which had approached, till his forehead touched hers, and she could feel the soft questioning of the lashes of his eyes.

‘Oh, Zack,' she said, ‘you must not make it difficult.'

Because he had rubbed his cheek against her cheek. Their blood flowed together. Her desperate words, ordinarily dry, had grown quite suddenly fleshy and ripe. Their locked hands lay in solid silence.

‘If I go,' she asked, ‘will you sometimes remember me, Zack?'

He hung his dark head.

‘Nothing much happens here,' he said.

‘I shall remember this house,' said Theodora.

She got up, ostensibly to escape the aching position on the ottoman, and went and pushed the wire door that opened on to the front porch. Zack was following, she heard, but he would remain on the steps. One of these moved slightly beneath her feet.

‘You have forgotten your hat in the wash-house. With that black thing,' he said, ‘the black rose.'

‘So I have,' said Theodora.

But she continued to walk on, away from the house in which she might not be able to make the necessary answers. She knew by this time that there was often a kind of surprise in people's eyes, and this she was anxious to avoid. So she walked. Zack was taking it for granted. He bent and turned up a stone on a fresh phase of strange, slow life.

Theodora walked beyond the yard, beyond the dry flags of corn, and the gate upon which the red dog was stiffly lifting his leg. She walked to that point in the road where she had left off. She continued, climbing higher, where the road led, though this was less determinate. It wandered over rocks and sand, almost obliterated, or else its ruts cut deep where floods of rain had run, giving these scars the appearance of natural formation. Trees encroached too, the same stunted pine, bluish in sunlight or where dust lay, black in shadow. Although the Johnsons had
already eaten, it was not yet late. The light had reached that metallic stage, of yellow metal, before the final softening. In its present phase it gave a greater tension. Theodora heard the crackle of the undergrowth. Sudden glimpses of the black trees struck cold. Then, there was a small plateau and a house, which she imagined must formerly have been the final objective of the faint road.

Theodora did not stop to investigate for signs of life. Her feet led deliberately. She went towards the house. It was a thin house, with elongated windows, like a lantern. The lower part was black slabs of logs with paler clay or adobe slapped into the interstices, but higher up the house became frailer frame, with the elongated windows, through which nothing showed of course, on account of the height. But the windows had also the blank look of the windows of deserted houses. Because there is nothing inside, they do not reflect. The glass coats up with dust.

This, then, was the blank house that Theodora found. But it did not deter. She went towards the house door, which was frame like the upper part, and a natural colour, darkened by the weather. All through the clearing where the house stood, the grass was yellow, dead. Fire would have run here. But the house itself in no way suggested that it might be carried away by the passions of fire.

Theodora found the padlock that the owners had left, presumptuously protecting their house with a seal of iron. Another time she might have been deterred, but not now. It was obvious that this must break. She had never been more confident. She picked at the screws of the hasp with her fingernails, and the screws came out easily, out of the old soft wood. The token padlock fell away from the house, so that she was able to walk in, into the smell of dust and animals.

The rough and awkward sounds of her motion yawned up through the house. The exterior had not deceived. There was not much inside. The objects that people had not valued. The things that were old or broken. And dust. The world was dim with dust through the coated windows, the glass of which normally would have had the amethyst tinge which is noticeable in certain light.

Theodora Goodman walked through her house with pleasure.
She walked up the narrow, railed stairs to the upper part. There was the same space of emptiness, but the larger windows gave more light, the windows that she threw open now, and there the valleys flowed. In this light the valleys did flow. At the foot of mountains they moved in the soft and moving light, the amethyst and grey. They flowed at the roots of the black sonorous islands. All the time the light seeped deeper into the craters of the earth.

Seen from the solitude of the house the process of disintegration that was taking place at the foot of the mountains should have been frightening and tragic, but it was not. The shapes of disintegrating light protested less than the illusions of solidity with which men surround themselves. Theodora now remembered with distaste the ugly and unnatural face of the Johnsons' orange marble clock. Because the death rattle of time is far more acute, and painful, and prolonged, when its impermanence is disguised as permanence. Here there were no clocks. There was a time of light and darkness. A time of crumbling hills. A time of leaf, still, trembling, fallen.