The Tin Can Tree (5 page)

Out in the parlor now Joan heard the squeaking of leather as Simon rose, and the sound of his shoes across the scatter rug. She stopped in the act of closing the box and waited, silently; his footsteps came closer, and then he appeared in the doorway. “Hey, Joan,” he said. There was something white on his face.

“Hey.”

He looked at the cardboard boxes without changing expression, and then he went over to the bed and sat down, picking up the teddy bear in one hand. “Hey, Ernest,” he said. He laid Ernest face down across his lap, circling the bear’s neck with one hand, and leaned forward to watch Joan.

“I’m packing things away,” she told him.

“Well, I see you are.”

She folded the flaps of the box down, one corner over another so as to lock them, and then stood up and pushed the box toward the closet. “Some of your things’re on the shelves there,” she told Simon while she was opening the closet door. The box grated across the hangers on the floor. “You better take out what’s yours, before I pack it away.”

“None of it is,” said Simon, without looking at the shelves.

“Some is. That xylophone.”

“I don’t play that any more. Don’t you know I’ve stopped playing with that kind of thing?”

“All right,” Joan said.

“I gave it for keeps.”

“All right.”

“Unliving things last much longer than living.”

“That’s true,” Joan said. She chose an armload of
things from the shelves—dolls, still shining and unused, a pack of candy Chesterfields, and an unbreakable yellow plastic record ordered off a cereal box. She dumped them helter-skelter into a second box and returned for another armload. “James give you a good lunch?” she asked.

“No.”

“What was wrong with it?”

“Nothing,” said Simon. “There just wasn’t any. Because I didn’t eat it.”

“Oh.”

“If I
had
of eaten it, it would have been a pizza.”

“I see.”

She dumped another armload in the box. It was half full now, and junky-looking, with the arms of dolls and the wheels of cars tangled together.

“I better make you a sandwich,” she said finally.

“Naw.”

“You want an apple?”

“Naw.”

He crossed over to where she was standing and laid the bear gently on top of the other things. “James has got this photograph,” he said, and went back to sit on the bed. “That Ansel, boy.”

“What about him?”

“I just hate him. I hate him.”

When it looked as if he weren’t going to say any more, Joan began removing the last few things from the shelf. Every now and then she looked Simon’s way, but he sat very quiet with his back against the wall and his face expressionless. Finally she said, “Well, Ansel has his days. You know that.” But Simon remained silent.

The room was bare now; all that remained were the things on the clothesline. She pushed the second box
into the closet and then said, “I’m going out back a minute. After that I’ll fix you a sandwich.” Simon stood up to follow her. “I’m only going for a minute,” she said, but Simon came with her anyway, and they went down the hall and through the kitchen and out the back screen door.

It was hot and windy outside, with the acres of grass behind the house rumpling and tangling together. The few things on the line—Simon’s bathing suit and Janie Rose’s crinoline and Sunday blouse—were being whipped about by the wind so that they made little cracking sounds. While Joan unpinned Janie’s things, Simon wandered nearby snapping the heads off the weeds.

“Simon,” she called to him, “what kind of sandwich you want?”

“I ain’t hungry.”

“I’ll just make you a little one. And go call your mama and daddy; they have to eat too.”

“I wish
you
would.”

“Come on, Simon.”

He shrugged and started toward the house, still walking aimlessly and kicking at things. “All right,” he said. “But I’ll tell them it’s your fault I came.”

“They won’t mind you coming.”

“You think not?”

He banged the screen door behind him. After he was gone Joan stood in the yard awhile, clutching Janie’s things against her stomach, feeling the dampness soak into her stocking feet. She wished she could just walk off. If it weren’t for Simon, she would; she would go find some place to sit alone and think things out. But her feet were growing cold, and there were sandwiches to make; she shook her hair off her forehead and started
back toward the house. The closer to the house she came the quieter the wind sounded, and when she stepped back into the kitchen there was a sudden silence in her ears that felt odd.

She put the things from the clothesline into the closet, and then she returned to the kitchen and leaned against the refrigerator while she planned a meal. The room was so cluttered it made thinking difficult. Small objects lay here and there, gathering dust because no one had ever found a place for them. The kitchen windows were curtainless, and littered with lost buttons and ripening tomatoes. And the wall behind the stove was covered with twenty or thirty drawings, Scotch-taped so closely together they might have been wallpaper. Most of them were Simon’s—soldiers and knights and masked men with guns. His mother thought he might be an artist someday. Scattered among them were Janie Rose’s drawings, all of the same lollipop-shaped tree with hundreds of tiny round apples on it. She said it was the tree out back, but that was only a tiny scrubby tree with no leaves; it had never borne fruit and wouldn’t have borne apples even if it had, since it was some other kind of tree. Once her mother said, “Janie, honey, why don’t you draw something
else?
” and Janie had run out crying and wouldn’t come down from the attic. But the next day she had said she would draw something different. She came into the kitchen where they were all sitting, carrying a box of broken crayons and a huge sheet of that yellow pulpy paper she always used. “What else
is
there to draw?” she asked, and her mother said, “Well, a house, for instance. Other children draw houses.” Then they all hung over her, and she drew a straight up-and-down line and a window, and then a green circle above it with lots of red apples
on it. Everybody sat back and looked at her; she had drawn an apple tree with a window in it. “
Oh
, my,” she said apologetically, and then she smiled and began filling in the circle with green crayon. After that she never tried houses again. She labored away at apple trees, and signed them, “Miss J.R. Pike” in the corner, in large purple letters. Simon never signed his, but that was because his mother said she would recognize his style anywhere in the world.

When Simon came downstairs again he had changed into his boots; he was trying to make the floor shake when he walked. “Daddy’s coming and Mama ain’t,” he said. “She ain’t hungry.”

“Did you ask if she wants coffee?”

“She didn’t give me a chance. She said go on and let her rest.”

“Well, run up again and ask her.”

“
No
, sir,” Simon said. He sat down firmly in one of the chairs.

“Just run up, Simon—”

“I won’t do it,” he said.

Joan thought a minute, and then she said, “Well, all right.” She reached out to smooth his hair down and for a minute he let her, but just barely, and then shrugged her hand away.

“Daddy wants just a Co-Cola,” he told her.

“He’s got to have more than that.”

“No. He said—Hey, Joan.”

“What.”

“I got an idea.”

“All right.”

“Why not you and me go
out
and eat. You like that?”

“We can’t,” Joan said.

“We could go to that place with the chicken.”

“We have to stay home, Simon.”

“I would pay for it.”

“No,” Joan said, and she touched one upright piece of his hair again. “Are you the one that doesn’t like using other people’s forks? That makes twice in two days you’ve had that idea.”

“Well, anyway,” said Simon. But he must have been expecting her to say no; he sat back quietly and began drumming his fingers on the table. Above them was the sound of Mr. Pike’s footsteps, crossing the hall and beginning to descend the stairs, and Joan remembered why she was in the kitchen and went back to the refrigerator. She opened the door and stared inside, at shelves packed tightly with other people’s casseroles. At the kitchen doorway her uncle said, “I only want a Coke, Joan,” and came to stand beside her, bending down to peer at the lower shelves.

“You have to eat something solid,” Joan told him.

“I can’t.” He straightened up and rubbed his forehead. He was a lean man, all bones and tough brown skin. Ordinarily he did construction work, but for the month of July he had been laid off and was spending his time the way Joan did, helping Mr. Terry get his tobacco in. Years of working outdoors had made his face look stained with walnut juice, and his eyes were squinted from force of habit even when he wasn’t in the sun. They were narrow brown slits in his face, the same shade as Simon’s, and they were directed now at Joan while he waited for her to speak.

“There’s a chicken salad here from Mrs. Betts,” said Joan.

“No, thank you.”

“The kind you like, with pimento.”

“No.”

“Now, eat a
little
something,” she said. “I could be perking coffee for you to take Aunt Lou, if you’d sit down a minute.”

“Oh, well,” he said.

He sat down awkwardly, across from Simon, giving his Sunday pants a jerk at each knee to save the crease. “How you been getting along?” he asked Simon.

“Okay.”

“Not giving Joan any trouble.”

“No, sir.”

“He’s been just fine,” said Joan. She set the salad out and laid three plates on the table. Her uncle studied his own plate seriously, hunching his shoulders over it and working his hands together.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said finally. When Joan looked over at him he said, “About Simon, I mean. James and Ansel feed you okay, boy?”

“No, sir.”

“Well. Joan, Dr. Kitt left a prescription for your aunt but I don’t see how I can go into town and leave her. I wonder, would you mind too much if—”

“I’ll see to it after we eat,” Joan said.

“All right.”

He accepted his chicken salad wordlessly, keeping his eyes on Joan’s hands as she dished his share out. When she had passed on to the next plate, he said, “Thank you,” and the words came out hoarse so that he had to clear his throat. “Thank you,” he said again. Even then his voice was muffled-sounding. In the last three days he had been talking steadily, always mumbling something into Mrs. Pike’s ear to keep her going. It was probably the most he had talked in a lifetime. Ordinarily he sat quiet and listened, with something like awe, while his wife rattled on; he seemed perpetually
surprised and a little proud that she should have so much to say.

When Joan had sat down herself, after filling the others’ plates and passing out forks, she said, “Eat, now.” She looked at the other two, but neither of them picked up his fork. “
Come
on,” she said, and then Simon sighed and tucked his paper napkin into his collar with a rustling sound.

“This feels like Sunday-night supper,” he said.

“It does.”

“Not like afternoon. Why’re we eating in the afternoon? What the
day
feels like, is Wednesday.”

“Wednesday?”

“Feels like Wednesday.”

“Why does it feel like—?”

“She blames it on herself,” said Mr. Pike.

“What?”

“It breaks my heart. She keeps saying how she was hemming Miss Brook’s basic black at the time—I never
have
liked that Miss Brook—and Janie Rose comes up and says, ‘Mama,’ she says, ‘I’m going off to—’ and Lou just never did hear where. Miss Brook was going on about her bunions. ‘Lou,’ I told her, I said, ‘Lou, I don’t think that would have—’ but Lou says that’s how it come to happen. She
never
let Janie Rose play with those Marsh girls. Never would have let her go, if she had known. But she was—”

“Never let her ride no tractors, either,” said Simon. “Shakes a girl’s insides all up.”

“Hush,” Joan told him. “Both of you. There’s not even a dent made in that chicken salad.”

Her uncle picked his fork up and then leaned across the table toward her. “She
blames
herself,” he said.

“I know.”

“She keeps—”

“
Eat
, Uncle Roy.”

He began eating. His fork made steady little clinking sounds on the plate, and he chewed rapidly with the crunchy sound of celery filling the silence. When he was done, Joan put another spoonful of salad on his plate and he kept on without pause, never looking up, making his way doggedly through the heap of food. Simon stopped eating and stared at him, until Joan gave his wrist a tap with her finger. Then he started eating again, but he kept his eyes on his father. When Mr. Pike reached for the bowl and dished himself another helping, still crunching on his last mouthful, chewing without breathing, like a thirsty man drinking water, Simon looked over at Joan with his eyes round above a forkful of food and she frowned at him and cleared her throat.

“Um, Mrs. Hammond phoned today,” she said. “She’s a very
cheering
person, Uncle Roy; maybe Aunt Lou could talk to her later on. I told her to call back in a day or—”

“Remember Janie Rose?” Simon asked.

His father stopped chewing. “Remember
what?
” he said.

“Remember how she did on the telephone? Never answering ‘Hello,’ but saying, ‘I am listening to WKKJ, the all-day swinging station,’ in case WKKJ was ever to call and give her the jackpot for answering that way. Only you know, WKKJ never
did
call—”

“Simon, I
mean
it,” Joan said.

“Lou is breaking my heart,” said Mr. Pike.

“Wouldn’t you feel funny, if you was to call someone that answered like that? ‘I am listening to—’ ”

“It wasn’t her
fault,
” Mr. Pike said. “Janie never
asked
for no special attention, like. She just kind of—”

“God in heaven,” Joan said.

The doorbell rang. It made a sharp, burring noise, and Joan stood up so quickly to answer it that her chair fell over backwards behind her. She let it stay. She escaped from the kitchen and crossed the parlor floor, smoothing her skirt down in front of her, making herself walk slowly. Behind the screen, standing close together with their faces side by side and peering in, were the Potter sisters from next door. They stepped backwards simultaneously so that Joan could swing the door open, and then Miss Faye entered first with Miss Lucy close behind her.