The Tin Can Tree (6 page)

“We only stopped by for a minute,” said Miss Faye. “We wanted to bring your supper.”

“Well, come on in,” Joan said. “Really, do. Come out to the kitchen, why don’t you.”

“Oh, I don’t think—”

“No, I mean it.” She took Miss Faye by one plump wrist, almost pulling her. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you,” she said.

“Well, if you really think—”

They walked on tiptoe, bearing their covered dishes before them like sacred offerings. When they reached the kitchen door, Mr. Pike stood up to greet them and his chair fell backwards too, so that the room with its overturned furniture looked stricken. “Why, Miss, um, Miss Lucy,” he said. “And Miss Faye. I declare. Come in and have a—” and he bent down and pulled the chairs up by their backs, both at the same time. “Sit down, why don’t you,” he said.

Joan drew up the chair from beside the stove, and Miss Lucy sat down in it with a sigh while Miss Faye
went to sit beside Simon. “We only mean to stay a minute,” said Miss Lucy. She plopped the bowl she was carrying down on the table in front of her and then sat back, sliding her purse strap to a more comfortable position on her wrist. The Potter sisters always carried handbags and wore hats and gloves, even if they were going next door. They were small, round women, in their early sixties probably, and for as long as Joan had known them they had had only one aim in life: they wanted to have swarms of neighborhood children clamoring at their door for cookies, gathering in their yard at the first smell of cinnamon buns. And although no one came (“Children nowadays prefer to buy Nutty Buddies,” Miss Faye said), they still went on baking, eating the cookies themselves, growing fat together and comparing notes on their identical heart conditions. It was those heart conditions that Miss Faye was discussing right now. She was saying, “Now, you and Lou know, Roy, how much we wish we could have climbed that hill today. If there was
any
way, the merest
logging
trail, we would’ve got there. But as it was, it would just have meant more tragedy. You know that.”

And Mr. Pike was saying, “Well, I know, I know,” and nodding gently without seeming to be listening. There was chicken salad on his chin, which meant that both the Potters kept staring tactfully down at their gloves instead of looking at him. Joan passed him a paper napkin, but he ignored it; he sat forward on his chair and said, “It surely was nice of you to come. Nice to bring us supper.”

“It’s the
least
we could do,” said Miss Lucy. She looked around her, toward the kitchen door, and then lowered her voice. “Tell me,” she whispered. “How is she now? How’s Lou?”

“It just breaks my heart,” said Mr. Pike.

“Oh, my.”

“Not a thing I can do, seems like. She just sits. If she would stop all this
blaming
herself—”

“They all do that,” said Miss Faye.

“She said Janie was the one she never paid no mind to.”

“Will you listen to that.”

“Never gave her a fair share.”

“If it’s not one reason it’s another,” Miss Lucy said. “I’ve seen that happen plenty of times.”

“Maybe if you talked to her,” said Mr. Pike. He pushed his plate away and straightened up. “You think you could just run up there a minute?”

“Well, not
run
, no, but—”

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “No, you can take the stairs as slow as you want to. But if you two would talk to her a minute, so long as you don’t mind—”

“Why, we don’t mind a bit,” said Miss Faye. “We’d be proud.” She reached up to set her flowered hat straighter, as if she might like to put an extra hat on top of the first one for such a special visit. And Miss Lucy pulled gloves to perfect smoothness, and then folded her hands tightly over her purse.

“I just don’t like to trouble you,” Mr. Pike said.

“You stop that, Roy Pike.”

They rose simultaneously, with their backs very straight. But even making the trip across the kitchen they walked slowly, preparing themselves for the stairs. “Be careful,” Joan told them. “Just see they don’t get out of breath, Uncle Roy.”

“I will.”

But Simon was frowning as he watched them leave. “Hey, Joan,” he said.

“Hmmm?”

“When they go up to bed at night, it takes them half an hour. They take two steps and then rest and talk; they bring their knitting along.”

“Well, that’s kind of silly,” said Joan.

“Could they crumple up and die on our stairs?”

“No, they could not,” she said. “It would take more than that.”

“How do you know?”

“I heard Dr. Kitt tell them so. They just shouldn’t get too out of breath, is all, or run in any marathons. He said—”

“I got an idea,” Simon said.

“What?”

“Listen.” He stood up from his place at the table and came around to face her, with his hands hitched through his belt loops. “How about us going to a movie,” he said. “That Tarzan movie.”

“We’re not supposed to.”

“Well, I got to get out,” he said.

She looked down at him, considering. His face had a thin, stretched look; patches of flour still clung to it like some sort of sad clown makeup and his hair stuck up in wiry tangles. “Well, I do have to get Aunt Lou’s prescription,” she said. “Would you comb your hair first?”

“Sure.”

“All right, we’ll go.”

“Right now?”

“If you want to.”

He nodded, but with his face still wearing that strained look, and turned to go upstairs and then turned back again. “I’ll wash downstairs,” he said.

“There’s no soap here.”

“I don’t care.”

He turned on the water in the kitchen sink and splashed his face, and then he reached spluttering for the dishtowel. “My allowance money’s all the way upstairs,” he said. “I’ll pay you back tomorrow, if you’ll lend me the money.”

“All right.”

She went into the living room, with Simon following, and handed him a comb from her pocketbook. While he was combing his hair she went upstairs for her shoes. Mrs. Pike’s door was open now. She was lying on her bed, with her head propped up on two pillows and the sisters beside her talking steadily, and when Joan walked past, her aunt followed her with her soft blue eyes but only vaguely, as if she weren’t seeing her, so Joan didn’t stop in to say anything. She put on her shoes and picked up a scarf and went downstairs, where Simon was waiting with his hand on the newel post and his face strained upward.

“What’re they doing?” he asked her.

“I don’t know.”

“Are they crying?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well. I
would’ve
gone upstairs,” he said. “You know.”

“I know.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

“No.” She sighed suddenly, looking back toward the stairs. “
I
don’t know how to comfort people,” she said.

“Well.”

They went out the front door, across the porch, and down the wooden steps. It was beginning to get cool outside. Joan could hear tree frogs piping far away, and the wind had died down enough so that the sound of
cars on the east highway reached her ears. She clasped her hands behind her back and followed Simon, cutting across the road and through the field toward town.

“Remember I’ve got heels on,” she called.

“I remember.”

“Remember that makes it hard walking.”

He slowed down and waited for her, walking backwards. Behind him and all around him the field stretched wide and golden, with bits of tall yellow flowers stirring and glimmering like spangles in the sunlight. And when Joan came up even with him, so that he turned and walked forward again by her side, she could look down and see how his hair, bleached lighter on top, took on a varnished look out here and the little line of fuzz down the back of his neck had turned shiny and golden like the field he was walking in. “Right about here …,” he said, but the wind started up just then and blew his words away.

“What?” she asked.

“Right about here is where I lost that ball. Will you keep a lookout for it?”

“I will.”

“Do you reckon I’ll ever find it?”

“No.”

“I don’t either,” Simon said.

But they walked slowly anyway, keeping their eyes on the ground, kicking at clumps of wild wheat to see what might turn up.

“
H
old
still,” James said.

He bent over and peered through the camera. No one was holding still. Line upon line of Hammonds, from every corner of the state, littered the Larksville Hammonds’ front lawn, sitting, kneeling, and standing, letting arms and legs and bits of dresses trail outside the frame of his camera. Whole babies were being omitted; they had crawled to other patches of grass. Yet the grown-ups stood there with their dusty blue, look-alike eyes smiling happily, certain that they and their children were being saved intact for future generations. James straightened up and shook his head.

“Nope,” he said. “You’ve moved every whichaway again. Close in tighter, now.”

He waited patiently, with his hands on his hips. For five years he had been going through this. Every year there was a picture of the Hammond family reunion to be put in the Larksville paper, and another two or three for the Hammonds themselves to choose for their albums. By now he was resigned to it; he had even started enjoying himself. He smiled, watching all those hordes of Hammonds close in obligingly with sideways steps while their eyes stayed fixed on the camera. Moving like that made them look like chains of paper dolls, bright
and shimmering in the heat. Eyelet dresses and seersucker suits blurred together; their whiteness was blinding. James shaded his eyes with one hand, and then he said, “Okay,” and bent down over his camera again. But someone else was moving. It was Great-Aunt Hattie in the front row; she had started coughing. She was sitting in a cane-bottom chair, with children and animals tangled at her feet and the grown-ups forming a protective wall behind her. When she began her coughing fit, they closed in still tighter in a semicircle and the oldest nephew leaned down with his head next to hers. The coughs grew farther apart. After a minute the nephew raised his head and said, “She’s sorry, she says.” The others murmured behind him, saying it didn’t matter. “Swallowed down the wrong throat,” said the nephew.

Someone called out, “Give her brown bread.” And someone else said, “No, rock candy will do it.” But the aunt spread her old hands out in front of her, palms down and fingers stretched apart, signifying she was better now and wanted to hear no more about it. “Back in your places,” James said, and the twenty or thirty Hammonds closest to him drifted back to their original positions and made their faces stern again. Mothers looked anxiously down the rows, gripping their neighbors’ arms and peering around them to make sure their children were at their best, and fathers hooked their thumbs into their belts and glared into the lens. “Hold it,” James said. When he snapped the picture there was a little stirring through the group, and everyone relaxed. “That’s the second,” he called to the hostess. “You want another?”

“One more, James.”

While he was fiddling with the camera people began
talking again, still standing in their set places, and some lit cigarettes. He peered through the view-finder at them. If this were any other picture he would snap it now, catching them at their ease, but family pictures were different. He liked the way they stood so straight in jumbled, self-conscious rows, and molded themselves to make a block of tensed-up faces. “I’m ready,” he warned them, and they did it again—closed their mouths and narrowed their eyes and set their shoulders. He snapped the picture that way. Then he said, “That’s all,” and watched the children as they shook themselves and scattered off to play.

The hostess walked up to him, trailing white lace, sinking into the ground at every step in her high-heeled pumps. “There’s one more I want, James,” she said, and then stopped and let her eyes wander after her youngest child. “Joey, you
know
not to ride that dog,” she called.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I want you to photograph Great-Aunt Hattie alone,” she told James. “She’s getting old. Can you do that?”

“If she’s willing,” said James.

“She’s not.”

“Then maybe we should—”

“Now, don’t you worry,” said Mrs. Hammond. “I’ll talk her around. They’re serving up the ice cream over there. You go and get you some, and when you’re through I’ll have Aunt Hattie ready. Hear?”

“Well, okay,” James said. But Mrs. Hammond hadn’t stayed to hear his answer.

He folded his equipment up and put it on the porch, out of the way of the children. Then he went across the yard to the driveway, where the others were standing in line for ice cream. They looked different now, quick-moving
and flexible, with the paper-doll stiffness gone. In a way James was sorry. Some of the best pictures he had were these poker-straight rows of families, Hammonds and Ballews and Burnetts; he kept copies of them filed away in his darkroom, and sometimes on long lonesome days he pulled them out and looked at them a while, with a sort of faraway sadness coming up in him if he looked too long. He might have seen any one of those families only that morning in the hardware store, but when he looked at their faces in pictures they seemed lost and long ago. (“I just wish once you’d take a
giggly
picture,” Ansel said. “You make me so sorrowful.”) Thinking about that made James smile, and the girl in front of him turned around and looked up at him.