The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (7 page)

Dan felt that his accident had done one good thing at least, brought him and Laura closer together than they had been since they were married, certainly a lot closer than they had been for a long time lately.

Not that he wasn't worried just about every minute. He worried over the look of things, what the neighbors were saying about Laura spading the vegetable garden and pitching manure out of the barn. They had seen her, all right, gone out of their ways to see her, and he worried most over how she felt about the loss of her pride.

One Saturday after she had gone to town he found the washing machine gone. How she managed to get it into the car by herself he couldn't guess and didn't ask. Someday he would get her another one, meanwhile it wasn't as if it was any comedown. It wouldn't hurt her to wash a few clothes.

Laura said, “How did you do it?” glaring down at the boy. She was worn out with chopping kindling and he had been going like a wild Indian since the break of day. She would have to leave off her cooking and trying to get in a few strokes on the churn and trying to clean up the place that had got to looking like a pigsty and having to move Dan around to sweep under his feet with him sitting there like he didn't even know she was in the same room, much less trying to clean up where he was, have to break off and leave things to boil over and burn and come out to drag Harold down out of the mulberry tree or off the barn roof or out from under the house where all kinds of spiders and snakes were liable to get at him, a dozen times she'd had to come out and yell at him for something and now this cut thumb was the last straw.

“Drawing the knife towards you, I bet, weren't you?” He made her mad the way he stood there so hangdog and she had a mind to grab him and shake a little of the nonsense out of him. Didn't she have enough to do without this now and didn't anybody care even enough to look after their own selves? “How many times have I told you never to whittle towards yourself? Huh? How many times? Well, just march over to that washpan and daub it good with iodine.”

He twisted his face up at her with a plea. “Couldn't I use monkey-blood just as good?”

Dan put his paper down with a rustle and the boy looked at him with a slow flush of accusation, his eyes coming to rest on the leg stretched out under the table. He turned to Laura and began to whimper. She snatched him a turn and gave him a little whack, warmed up to it and gave him another.

“Stop it,” said Dan. “He wasn't doing that a bit. I saw him and he was cutting away from him.”

Laura shut her arm off midway and turned the boy to face her. He turned himself back and stared at Dan in bewilderment. Dan ducked back into his paper and when Laura looked down at Harold she knew instantly it was a lie. But what should she do? Not ask him and have Dan shown up, or if he said it was so, why, she'd be just encouraging him to lie. He started to tremble and she knew he was thinking the same thing. Poor little fellow, what a fix to put him in. He shied away when she tried to hug him. Dan put his paper down and cleared his throat and limped to the door while they both stood and gaped at him. The thought in Laura's mind scared her and made her ashamed. Her husband, the father of her child, and for a minute she had stood there and just hated him.

Harold knew how bad he always got to feeling after he told a fib, so he thought Dan might use a little cheering up. He found him in the barn and said, “You know, that was a pretty deep cut I got,” thinking he would give him a little company.

“It didn't look like much to me,” said Dan.

“Yes, it was but I didn't cry a bit.”

“Why should you have? It wasn't nothing but a scratch.”

Harold thought deeply. “I'm not as big as you are and for my size it was just about as much as your cut hand was for you.” After a moment he added gravely, “I don't think it needs stitches, though.”

“You look like stitches,” said Dan. “You couldn't even stand the thought of a little iodine.”

“Do you think I ought to lay off with it for a few days?” asked Harold.

Why, the little smart aleck! Dan drew back his hand to fetch him a good one, then let it fall. “Get out of here,” he said, “and leave me alone. And the next time I catch you whittling towards you I'll give you such a whipping as you never had.”

VII

Dan had been on his feet about two weeks when Mr. Johnson brought over a riding plow and an extra mule. Dan could not really make out now, he knew it and had for a long time, but maybe he could keep from getting quite so far in the hole with some late-maturing truck crop. He had the land for it, three acres, black as coal.

“Now, Dan,” Laura pumped herself up to begin, “I hope they won't be nothing else happen. And probably nothing will.” Lord, what else could? “But you never can tell and it's better to be safe than sorry. I was thinking, what if something was to happen and you wasn't able to get home. Here you are now still in that cast, I mean, and so you ought to have some way of calling me. Just in case, you understand.”

Dan nodded. He couldn't afford to seem mulish.

She looked at him to see if it was all right to go on. “Now they's an old cowbell hangs in the barn. Suppose we wrapped up the clapper and hung it on your plow, then, just in case—”

She stopped. He was hopping mad.

It made him madder every time he thought about it all day long and he wouldn't have spoken a word to her when he came home if he hadn't come with a big blue bruise like a windfallen plum over one eye where he had fallen off the plow seat and just laid there, unable to believe it, for half an hour. So he spoke just about a word and Laura didn't urge him to any more. Herself, she hadn't one. Next morning, without letting her see, he took the big brass cowbell off its hook in the barn, wrapped the clapper in a strip of burlap and hung it under the plow seat. It made him feel like a fool, like a clabber-headed heifer that jumped fences, but when he reached down to yank the thing off and throw it in a ditch the blood pounded in the knot over his eye and he left it.

He plowed along and tried to forget it was there, but it might just as well have been strung around his neck. He couldn't be mad at her, she meant well and he was past pretending she didn't have reason for fear. He had got to feeling like he ought to have a bell, not to call anybody to him, but to warn them he was coming and they'd all better hide so they wouldn't catch whatever it was he had. People already looked at him like they would rather he didn't come too close, like he had caught something nasty, not to be spoken of. He didn't imagine it, no more than he imagined the look on Mr. Johnson's face the last time he was over, like he just couldn't see how a man could change overnight and go so completely to the dogs, shaking his head as much as to say, I don't see how you could do it, a man with a wife and family. Then again, half-awake in the morning, aching all over and dreading the clang of the alarm, he would see a long row of backs all turned his way and hear sniggers, “You know, he ain't no good to his wife any more. Ain't been for months. So just keep your eye on her for the next little spell.”

He knew people talked about how tacky he dressed them, too, her and Harold. It looked like every dress she owned had a way of coming out at the seams under the arms and though he knew she had a lot to do, it did seem she could keep her things mended a little better. Not that she left those holes there to make him feel bad, but she ought to have seen they did.

Then her mama and papa would come over and the old woman would sit with her nose stiff and her eyes loose, looking behind and under and atop things as if what she saw before her, bad as it was, wasn't bad enough, and she was sure they had worse things hid away. And the old man would sit and rub his belly, ducking his head, pumping up a good long belch that rumbled like an indoor toilet, letting everybody know what a good dinner he had left home on and how little he looked forward to getting here for his supper.

The old man was the only one didn't think he had a nasty case of something. He just thought he was lazy and he had a sly steady look for him: I know what you're up to, tried it myself, but hell, they's a point to stop at and you passed it long ago.

And now, even Daisy, turning round with a long disappointed look at him. He pulled the team up, thinking he would eat, but he couldn't get a bite down.

He thought how Laura's mama shook her head over Harold every time she laid eyes on him. Dan couldn't see anything wrong with him. Kids were supposed to be a little dirty and wear old clothes around home. But to her he was such a pitiful sight, maybe he was just closing his eyes to all that was wrong with the boy.

He thought how long he had let that twenty-dollar bill Mr. Johnson slipped him stay in the cupboard, how he vowed to go over and give it right back the very next day but hadn't got around to it somehow, and instead come to say he'd let it lay there and never use it and return the very same one when he had enough for sure never to need it, and then, how he had turned it over to Laura and away it had gone. Gone fast, too, and he wondered was Laura really being careful of her spending. How he had stood around hemming and hawing and looking far-off when Mr. Johnson came again, waiting for him to slip him another, and then being mad when he didn't. Being mad when you didn't get charity—that was a pretty low comedown.

He leaned back against the tree, worn out, his leg thumping with pain, and let the team stray off down the fencerow. He lay down to rest a while but the sun shifted and bored through the branches as if it wanted to get a look at him. He tried to doze but he could hear that cowbell ringing in his head. Each of his hurts came back to him and he tried to recall the day it happened, hoping to remember something that might seem to deserve such punishment. The details of his troubles began crawling up over the edges of his mind and grew thick, like a gathering swarm of bees. It was not his family nor the people on the street—he was the one who had changed. Other men had troubles but they were separate and unconnected, each came and stung and went on. Something was wrong with a man when they came and did their hurt and then stayed, waiting for the next, until they'd eaten him hollow. He didn't have any troubles any more, he just had one big trouble. For a moment that gave him a sad thrill. He had been marked out. But why? He started to raise himself to see if the answer didn't lie somewhere near at hand, and halfway up was caught and held by the thought that nobody knew why, nobody could tell him. He lay back heavily and said aloud, “I probably have it all coming to me.” It made him sad that he couldn't remember whatever he had done to deserve it.

They sat down to supper with Harold quiet and cautious. He had been punished for something and Dan felt like being sure he had deserved it. “What's wrong with him?” he asked.

Laura looked at Harold, waiting for him to speak up and declare how bad he had been and just what he had got for it. “He got a spanking,” she said. Harold squirmed. Laura straightened him up with a look and said, “He got hisself a bell and went around ringing it all day. I asked him a hundred times to stop it but he wouldn't. I was jumping out of my skin all day long every five minutes thinking it was you and something bad had happened.”

Dan threw his knife on his plate with a clatter. “Jesus Christ! Did you have it on your mind every minute that I was going to sound off on that damn thing!”

Laura bounced in her seat as if he had hit her; a slow hard pinch started in around the edges of her eyes. “Well, yes,” she said, picking out all the bruises and breaks and bumps up and down him, “I did!”

VIII

Dan sat hunched up on the front porch, wandering wearily back and forth between the two minds he had about everything. He had sat there, just breathing, ever since they left, and now it was hard to believe that in the house behind his back anything had happened for years, or again, it seemed something had happened all right, the last thing that ever would, and now the house lay dead. Laura, she was down behind the barn, crying, he supposed, and one minute he would reckon he ought to stir himself and go out and try to comfort her, and the next minute figure he had just better keep out of her sight—not rousing himself to do either and not caring the next minute one way or the other, just wishing he could keep out of his own sight.

She was only going to take the boy over to her place until Laura had a little more time to spare him, the grandmother said, and Laura had taken no exception, even agreed with a tired nod that she hadn't given him much time of late and that Harold looked it every bit. It was not time she hadn't given him—though she hadn't given him that, either—and she knew it wasn't time or attention that his grandmother was thinking he needed. The old woman looked the boy over, tallying all the hollow spots that a few square meals would fill out. Her man was torn—strutting around throwing it up to Dan that he couldn't support his only child, pleased that
he
could, had figured for years that sooner or later he would have to, then suddenly fearing they might get to thinking he was better able to do it than he wanted them to think. Then he would pull a thin face to show how pinched he was going to be with his new responsibility.

Laura had followed them out to the buggy, wanting to say, We'll have you back soon, Harold, don't you worry. And afraid he would act as if that were the only thing that worried him. Suddenly she wanted to tell him that it wasn't any of her doing, that she wasn't that way, that there wasn't anything wrong with her—because he did look at her as though, since she was staying behind, the same thing must be wrong with her. Instead, settling him on the seat, not thinking, she said, “Drive careful, Papa.”

She watched them move away and, turning, shoved the gate shut and watched it fall back in exhaustion. As she walked up the path her words scraped dryly in her mind: be careful, Papa. Be careful, careful, be careful. She came to the front steps and stood looking at Dan as she would at an old no-good hound dog lolling on the porch, then turned and walked around the house.