The Perfect Host (33 page)

Agnes turned again to look at the statue. Behind her, Jessie, said, almost sleepily, “There’s more to a marriage than a wedding, Agnes.”

“I—don’t think I ever realized that before, in just that way,” said Agnes. She looked profoundly troubled. “I don’t see how you
did
it! Where was your security—how could you know he would always stay with you? What guarantees—”

“The guarantees were between us; we had our faith and ourselves to answer to, first and above all,” snapped Jessie. “And—there it is again—as long as I had Miss O’Casey, I could be sure. I’m no super-woman, Agnes. I did nothing that any other married woman hasn’t done; I just played it a little differently, that’s all, because my man was happier when I did. He’s been happy, Agnes.”

“Yes,” said Agnes, “he has.” She rose slowly. “I’ve been here too long, Jess. I didn’t mean to tire you. I wish you could do as I asked, but I can see now why you wouldn’t—why, at least according to your way of thinking, you don’t have to. I can’t condone it; I’m sorry as I can be. I wish I could feel easy in my mind about it, but I can’t. I’m sorry, Jessie, more sorry than I can say.” She sighed, and rose slowly, feeling her weight, her years.

“Aggie—”

“Yes, Jess.”

“Aggie—I can’t have you feeling this way, when it’s all so simple … Aggie, for all Tommie told you—did we have a marriage?”

Agnes stood between the bed and the door, fighting something within herself, a battle between two definitions of a word.

“Aside from the wedding, Agnes—
was it a marriage?
”

“I—I think it was,” Agnes whispered.

And then Jessie began to cry.

Agnes stared at her, completely bewildered. For years she had been convinced that Jessie couldn’t cry. For many of those years she
had been certain that Jessie was so hard, so tough, she couldn’t be hurt, couldn’t be reached.

“Jessie! What is it?”

“I’m—I’m
happy
, damn it. B-because of what you said. Here, get me Miss O’Casey. Put her right down on the bed.”

Thunderstruck, quite beyond thought, Agnes lifted the statuette and put it on the sheet. Jessie toppled it on its side.

“She’s Balinese,” she said. “The top part, the figure itself. Quite old. The little man in the antique shop told us. But the pedestal is American, Victorian. And—”

She put one hand on the elaborate head-dress of the dark goddess, and the other under the base. There was a faint click, and then Jessie gave the base a quarter turn to the right. It fell away.

“He showed us that, too, but Tommie didn’t remember. He didn’t remember anything that happened that night. Here.”

From the depths of the statue, Jessie drew a folded square of paper and extended it to the other.

Agnes absently found her spectacles and perched them on her nose. “What is it?”

“Read it!”

“This is to certify …”
she read haltingly, “
before me this day of … Jessica Mavis Tortelle and Thomas Davis van Creeft … holy matrimony …
Jessie! A license! A marriage license!” She fell down on her knees by the bed. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why?”

Jessie tangled her fingers in the other’s obedient hair. “Honey,” she said huskily, “You’d’ve blabbed to Tommie. It meant too much to you. You couldn’t have helped yourself.”

“But—you mean Tommie doesn’t know, at all?”

“He does not. Look: I wanted to be married to Tommie. But he was so scared of marriage he couldn’t see straight. If I’d told him this—” she struck the license with her knuckle—“that first morning, he’d have been ashamed of it. I won’t have anyone ashamed of any marriage of mine. And—afterwards, you know, Agnes, Tommie’s a writer, but he’s no bohemian. At heart, he’s a timid, clean-cut, conventional citizen. Thinking he was living in sin has made
him a gay dog, a little cut above the rest of ’em. It’s done wonders for his work; his books are full of tolerance for the way the other fellow lives, because he wants that tolerance for himself.” She plunged the paper back into its hiding place and deftly fitted the statuette together again. “Miss O’Casey is the Official Keeper of the Compact, Agnes; and now she has a partner. You. Guard it well.”

Agnes put the figure back on the night table, and her hands lingered on the glossy back surface. “Jessie,” she said, “I’ll never understand you.”

“Don’t try,” said Jessie, sinking back into the pillow. Her eyes closed. Agnes stared down at her through her misted spectacles. Where had she seen that expression of strength, and of peace? Oh, yes …

Suddenly Jessie’s eyes sprang open, and they blazed. “And if you ever tell him,” she rapped, “so help me, Aggie, I’ll come back and haunt you!”

“I won’t, dear; oh, I won’t!” and, impulsively, she did something she never would have allowed herself to do ordinarily, for fear of a bruising rebuff: she bent and kissed her sister-in-law. The thin arms came up from the bed and went round her; Jessie hugged her, hard.

The funeral was short, and full of music and flowers—what Jessie would have called “happy flowers, not sad flowers.” Drapes were drawn back to let in the light, and the room was fragrant and warm and waiting for laughter; none of your shadows and silences, wax and lilies for Jessie van Creeft.

The coffin lay on a long, low trestle, covered with white silk, and, at its foot, on a glass-topped table, stood the dark goddess. If the attending priest regarded it as a pagan thing, then he had faith in the power of his own doctrines, and said nothing against its presence.

After the words were spoken, Agnes stood for a long time looking at the coffin and at the statue. Suddenly she stepped to the lowboy, and from a vase took two or three rosebuds. She dropped them on the table before the dark goddess, and left the room.

A man followed her. He was tall, timid, balding, gentle. “Agnes.”

“Yes, Tommie.”

“I saw you put the flowers there. I was—I … Why did you do it, Agnes? Will you tell me?”

She looked at her gloves. “I just—thought Miss O’Casey deserved it,” she said softly. “It was a real marriage.”

He put his arm around her. “Sis,” he whispered, “I didn’t know you knew that.”

“I haven’t known it long,” she said into his lapel, “And oh, Tommie, I wish I’d known before!”

T
HERE IS A
time when a thing in the mind is a heavy thing to carry, and then it must be put down. But such is its nature that it cannot be set on a rock or shouldered off on to the fork of a tree, like a heavy pack. There is only one thing shaped to receive it, and that is another human mind. There is only one time when it can be done, and that is in a shared solitude. It cannot be done when a man is alone, and no man aloof in a crowd ever does it.

Riding fence gives a man this special solitude until his throat is full of it. It will come maybe two or three weeks out, with the days full of heat and gnats and the thrum of wire under the stretcher, and the nights full of stars and silence. Sometimes in those nights a chunk will fall in the fire, or a wolf will howl, and just then a man might realize that his partner is awake too, and that a thing in his mind is growing and swelling and becoming heavy. If it gets to be heavy enough, it is put down softly, like fine china, cushioned apart with thick strips of quiet.

That is why a wise foreman pairs his fence riders carefully. A man will tell things, sometimes, things grown into him like the calluses from his wire cutters, things as much a part of him, say, as a notched ear or bullet scars in his belly; and his hearer should be a man who will not mention them after sun-up—perhaps not until his partner is dead—perhaps never.

Kellet was a man who had calluses from wire cutters, and a notched ear, and old bullet scars low down on his belly. He’s dead now. Powers never asked to hear about the scars. Powers was a good fence man and a good partner. They worked in silence, mostly, except for a grunt when a post-hole was deep enough, or “Here,” when one of them handed over a tool. When they pitched for the night, there was no saying “You get the wood,” or “Make the coffee.” One or
the other would just do it. Afterward they sat and smoked, and sometimes they talked, and sometimes they did not, and sometimes what they said was important to them, and sometimes it was not.

Kellet told about the ear while he was cooking one evening. Squatting to windward of the fire, he rolled the long-handled skillet deftly, found himself looking at it like a man suddenly scanning the design of a ring he has worn for years.

“Was in a fight one time,” he said.

Powers said, “woman.”

“Yup,” said Kellet. “Got real sweet on a dressmaker in Kelso when I was a bucko like you. Used to eat there. Made good mulligan.”

They were eating, some ten minutes later, when he continued. “ ‘Long comes this other feller, had grease on his hair. He shore smelt purty.”

“Mexican?”

“Easterner”

Powers’ silence was contributory rather than receptive at this point.

“She said to come right in. Spoons him out what should be my seconds o’ stew. Gets to gigglin’ an’ fussin’ over him.” He paused and chewed, and when the nutritious obstacle was out of the way, spat vehemently. “Reckon I cussed a little. Couldn’t he’p m’self. Next thing you know, he’s a-tellin’ me what language not to use in front of a lady. We went round and round together and that ended quick. See this ear?”

“Pulled a knife on you.”

Kellet shook his big, seamed head. “Nup. She hit me a lick with the skillet. Tuk out part o’ my ear. After, it tuk me the better part of an hour with tar soap to wash the last o’ that hair grease offen my knuckles.”

One bullet made the holes in his stomach, Kellet told Powers laconically while they were having a dip in a cold stream one afternoon.

“Carried a leetle pot-belly in them days,” said Kellet. “Bullet went in one side and out t’other. I figgered fer a while they might’s well rack me, stick me, bleed me, and smoke me fer fall. But I made it. Shore lost that pot-belly in the gov’ment hospital though. They
wouldn’t feed me but custards and like that. My plumbin’ was all mixed up and cross-connected.”

“Feller in th’ next bed died one night. They used t’wake us up ’fore daylight with breakfast. He had prunes. I shore wanted them prunes. When I see he don’t need ’em I ate ’em. Figgered nobody had to know.” He chuckled.

Later, when they were dressed and mounted and following the fence, he added, “They found the prune stones in m’bandages.”

But it was at night that Kellet told the other thing, the thing that grew on like a callus and went deeper than bullet scars.

Powers had been talking, for a change. Women. “They always got a out,” he complained. He put an elbow out of his sleeping bag and leaned on it. Affecting a gravelly soprano, he said, “I’d like you better, George, if you’d ack like a gentleman.”

He pulled in the elbow and lay down with an eloquent thump. “I know what a gentleman is. It’s whatever in the world you cain’t be, not if you sprouted wings and wore a hello.
I
never seen one. I mean, I never seen a man yet where
some
woman,
some
time, couldn’t tell him to ack like he was one.”

The fire burned bright, and after a time it burned low. “I’m one,” said Kellet.

Powers sensed that thing, that heavy growth of memory. He said nothing. He was awake, and he knew that somehow Kellet knew it.

Kellet said, “Know the Pushmataha country? Nuh—you wouldn’t. Crick up there called Kiamichi. Quit a outfit up Winding Stair way and was driftin’. Come up over this little rise and was well down t’ord th’ crick when I see somethin’ flash in the water. It’s a woman in there. I pulled up pronto. I was that startled. She was mother-nekkid.

“Up she goes on t’other side ’til she’s about knee-deep, an’ shakes back her hair, and then she sees me. Makes a dive fer th’ bank, slips, I reckon. Anyway, down she goes an’ lays still.

“I tell you, man, I felt real bad. I don’t like to cause a lady no upset. I’d as soon wheeled back and fergot the whole thing. But what was I goin’ to do—let her drown? Mebbe she was hurt.

“I hightailed right down there. Figured she’d ruther be alive an’ embarrassed than at peace an’ dead.

“She was hurt all right. Hit her head. Was a homestead downstream a hundred yards. Picked her up—she didn’t weigh no more’n a buffalo calf—an’ toted her down there. Yipped, but there wasn’t no one around. Went in, found a bed, an’ put her on it. Left her, whistled up my cayuse, an’ got to me saddlebags. When I got back she was bleedin’ pretty bad. Found a towel for under her head. Washed the cut with whiskey. Four-five inches long under the edge of her hair. She had that hair that’s black, but blue when the sun’s on it.”

He was quiet for a long time. Powers found his pipe, filled it, rose, got a coal from the dying fire, lit up, and went back to his bedroll. He said nothing.

When he was ready, Kellet said, “She was alive, but out cold. I didn’t know what the hell to do. The bleedin’ stopped after a while, but I didn’t know whether to rub her wrists or stand on m’ head. I ain’t no doctor. Finally I just set there near her to wait. Mebbe she’d wake up, mebbe somebuddy’d come. Mebbe I’d have my poke full o’ trouble if somebuddy did come—I knowed that. But what was I goin’ to do—ride off?

“When it got dark two-three hours later I got up an’ lit a tallow-fat lamp an’ a fire, an’ made some coffee. Used my own Arbuckle. ‘Bout got it brewed, heard a funny kind of squeak from t’other room. She’s settin’ bolt upright lookin’ at me through the door, clutchin’ the blanket to her so hard she like to push it through to t’other side, an’ makin’ her eyes round’s a hitchin’ ring. Went to her an’ she squeaked ag’in an’ scrambled away off into the corner an’ tole’ me not to touch her.

“Said, ‘I won’t, ma’am. Yo’re hurt. You better take it easy.’

“ ‘Who are you?’ she says. ‘What you doin’ here?’ she says.

“I tol’ her my name, says, ‘Look, now, you’re bleedin’ ag’in. Just you lie down, now, an’ let me fix it.’

“I don’t know as she trusted me or she got faint. Anyway down she went, an’ I put a cold cloth on the cut. She says, ‘What happened?’

“Tole her, best I could. Up she comes ag’in. ‘I was bathin’!’ she says. ‘I didn’t have no—’ and she don’t get no further’n that, just squeaks some more.