We Are What We Pretend to Be (6 page)

“Well, I never,” said Annie, filling the door with her breadth, the more impressive for being sheathed in an orange, daisy-spattered bathrobe. Haley’s heart pumped harder and faster as Annie scratched herself and blinked at them sleepily. “Well, I never,” she repeated at last. “What’s going on at this hour?”

“Haley’s window wouldn’t open, and he asked me to help him get it unstuck,” said Hope.

Annie’s gaze, more wakeful now, turned toward the window.
Haley closed his eyes. “What’s that ladder and luggage doing there?” she demanded, taking a step forward. The drone of Roy’s motorcycle was still audible, and, when Haley opened his eyes for an instant, he saw Annie’s head cocked to one side, in an attitude of listening and incredulity. “She ran off with him, didn’t she?” she cried.

“Hush!” hissed Hope, and the General stepped from the darkness of the hallway.

“Kitty’s run off with Roy, and these two helped her,” said Annie, livid. “What’ll we do?”

The General breathed heavily, his eyes moving about the small room—from Annie, to the ladder and luggage, to Haley and Hope. “I’ll see you two downstairs in the sunroom in fifteen minutes, on the dot,” he said.

“You’ll see,” said Annie, and she followed the General down the hall.

Haley could hear the General dialing then shouting into the telephone. “He always yells into the telephone,” said Hope. Haley sensed that some of her defiant poise was gone, that she was worried. “He’s talking to the police,” she said with awe. They lapsed into despondent silence until Hope’s watch indicated that the time for their hearing had come.

The General was at his desk, his back to them. Annie sat on the edge of the couch, pouring two cups of coffee. She told them to sit down, and so they sat, with only their sins and the coffee’s fragrance to contemplate for perhaps ten minutes. Haley examined the back of his hand, which had begun to ache from the ladder’s blow. A long welt crossed the back of it, and the skin was broken in three places along the knuckles.

“I have a theory,” the General began suddenly, “that everybody with any sense has a good idea of how he looks to others. Let’s put it to a test, shall we?” His tone was polite, impersonal, like that of a lecturer, Haley thought. “Hope?”

“Yes?” Her voice was faint.

“You and I are pretty much strangers. You weren’t much more than a baby when I went away to war, so we never did have much time to get to know each other.” He paused to light a cigarette. “You don’t like me because you think I’m a bully, that it’s fun for me to push other people around.”

“Noooo,” objected Hope, tearfully. “I love you, Daddy, really I do.”

“Don’t doubt it. Never did. That’s an entirely different matter.”

Hope started to plead again, but the General cut her short by addressing Haley. “As for you, young man, I don’t think I’m far from the mark when I say that you think I’m pretty funny, even though you are scared to death of me. I’m a joke, an old fool who can’t forget for a minute that he was a general. Maybe it was your father who taught you that.”

“Hardly, sir,” said Haley, embarrassed, but at a loss as to how he might argue the point.

“Good—the cards are on the table,” said the General. “In case you haven’t figured out for yourselves just what I think of you, I’ll clear that up, too. First of all, I’m fond of you both. I think you’re too soft and spoiled for your own good. I want you to be happy, and I get no fun at all out of hurting you. But you’re still children, and I’m supposed to take care of you to the best of my ability. If I can teach you one simple lesson, I’ll have done a good job
of it. You’re evidently going to have to learn the hard way that your happiness for the rest of your lives depends on how well you fit yourselves into other people’s plans, not vice versa, and on how willing you are to submit to the judgment of someone who knows more than you do. Am I right or wrong?”

“You’re right,” faltered Hope.

“Yessir,” said Haley. The lesson sounded like an eminently reasonable one, easily committed to memory.

“What you have done tonight has hurt, not helped, all of us,” said the General, “and poor, harebrained Kitty most of all. You’ll see. Because you helped her run away with that crude, asinine chimpanzee, she is in for nothing but grief. We’ll get her back, because she’s too young to marry without my say so, but she’ll never be the same again—because you didn’t have the good sense to stop her. Am I right or wrong?”

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” moaned Haley. Hope remained silent.

“Do you feel I have stated the situation fairly, and that you have done something quite bad?” asked the General, his eyebrows arched.

Haley and Hope nodded.

“Very well, then, some kind of punishment is in order. Hope, Annie and I have decided that you should be sent away to some boarding school. I’ll look into the matter tomorrow, and I’ll pick one where you’ll be watched carefully and kept in line. I think one of your big troubles has been the smart-aleck company you’ve been keeping at the high school.”

“Daddy!” cried Hope.

“Haley, I have decided that for your own good you’d better not go to the Conservatory. You will work around the farm instead. I wouldn’t class that as punishment, actually. It’s the greatest kind of character training a man can get.”

Haley did not believe it. He shut out the sound of the General’s voice and nodded mechanically. It was hours later that a chill passed over him and he knew that the small parcel of dreams he had brought with him into his new home was hopelessly smashed.

“That is all. Good night,” said the General, without rancor.

“But, Daddy,” began Hope.

“I said good night.”

Annie had sat quietly, nodding in agreement whenever the General had spoken. “Better go now,” she said. She rose and shooed them from the room. “What in Heaven’s name happened to your hand, Haley?”

“The ladder banged it. It doesn’t hurt much.”

“You come with me,” said Annie. She took him up to the bathroom and painted his cuts with iodine. Involuntarily, Haley jerked back his hand. “Hurt?” asked Annie.

“A little,” said Haley, sucking in air between his teeth.

“Fine,” said Annie, plainly satisfied. “Shows it’s doing some good.”

V.

“Quite a ruckus last night, eh?” called Mr. Banghart to Haley above the rattling and creaking of the empty wagon on its way to the fields. Haley sat on the rear corner of the wagon, kicking dispiritedly at the fragile white heads of milkweeds lining the lane. He did not hear Mr. Banghart’s question; his senses were turned inward, examining his conscience.

Annie had aroused him this morning and reminded him that he and Mr. Banghart were to work today, even though it was Sunday. The radio had predicted rain, she had said, and the hay bales would be too heavy to lift and too wet to store if they were not brought in before the downpour. The General and Hope still slumbered, and Annie had returned to bed after warming coffee left over from the night before and laying out a bowl of cold cereal and an orange for Haley’s breakfast. He had met Mr. Banghart in the barn and done what he could to help harness Caesar and Delores. The coffee had purged him of his sleepiness, giving him in its stead a keen, tense wakefulness.

He was willing to admit that he had done a bad thing in
helping Kitty elope with the somewhat substandard Roy Flemming. He did, then, for his own good, as the General had said, deserve to be punished. But he searched his conscience in vain for a grain of remorse to justify the desolating punishment the General had promised. “When you punish somebody, you take something away from them that they want,” he reasoned. “All I had in the whole wide world was my music, so that’s what I lost—everything.”

As he reviewed his condition again and again in the light of a spotless conscience, he found himself starting to derive from it the pungent, bittersweet pleasure of righteous indignation. Another thought, however, nagging on the fringes of his consciousness, soon came into view to spoil his pleasure. He lived again his ignominious flight from the secret room in the loft, and his abandoning of Hope, and his spirits tumbled into depths of recrimination.

He looked up at Mr. Banghart and wondered how he had found out about the turmoil of the night before. “Probably watched it all through the windows,” he thought. “Hope said he did a lot of that.”

“Horses seem pretty frisky this morning,” said Mr. Banghart, tugging gently on the reins to slow the pace of Caesar and Delores. Haley stood up and walked to Mr. Banghart’s side. He saw that the corners of the horses’ mouths were raw, and that every pull on the edged bits made them swing their heads wildly from side to side.

Mr. Banghart took out his hunting knife and began shaving fat splinters from a wagon stake. The cuts were effortless, Haley
noted, with a youngster’s admiration for a keen edge. “There’s a great day coming,” his companion crooned. “There are a lot of people around who are going to be wishing they had been a lot nicer to old Bing.” He winked and returned the knife to its case. “A man can stand so much and no more, and they’re all going to have to learn
that
the hard way.”

Haley asked to have a look at the knife. Mr. Banghart was hesitant. At last he handed it over, admonishing him to be careful. “It’d take your arm off quicker than you could say ‘Jack Robinson,’” he said proudly. “You’re the only one I’d ever let look at it except Hope,” he added. He shook his head mournfully. “A fellow’s in pretty sad shape when he can only trust two people, isn’t he, now?”

Haley nodded and found himself wondering who it was that
he
could trust. Everyone seemed intent on worrying him into a pattern of their own making, rather than trying to understand what it might be like to be Haley Brandon. He wondered most about Hope. With discomfiting insight, he recognized that any attention she might have shown him was probably a subtle defiance of her father. “Like protecting Caesar and Delores from him,” he thought ruefully.

When they set about flinging bales onto the wagon, the circle of Haley’s thoughts grew smaller, with limits set at the hard work on hand. He was pleased to see that he was accomplishing nearly as much as Mr. Banghart. It was more a matter of rhythm than strength—swinging the bales several times, then giving them a hearty boost with a knee on their upward arcs. True, when the load was three bales high, pitches more hefty than Haley’s
were called for, but he was able to make himself useful by sitting atop the load and pulling the bales into place as Mr. Banghart tossed them.

“It’s a load!” he cried, when the fifth tier was complete.

Mr. Banghart shook his head. “We’ll stack her seven high and save time,” he said.

“That’ll be above the stakes,” Haley warned.

“I’ve done it a million times,” said Mr. Banghart. “Nothing to it. Just drive easy, that’s all.”

Haley looked dubiously at the horses, who were keeping their harness taut and clinking with their restlessness. In a few minutes he was seated uneasily on a swaying load seven bales high, with Mr. Banghart beside him singing and preparing to start the team for the barn. He peered over the edge of the bales at the ground and had the chilly impression of being perched on a steep cliff overlooking a gorge miles below.

At Mr. Banghart’s soft clucking, Caesar and Delores started off evenly and good-naturedly. The bales rocked as the wheels struck rocks and pits in the lane, but not one had dropped off when the wagon rolled at last onto the hard-packed earth of the barnyard near the house. Mr. Banghart had looked at the sun and guessed that the time was between 8 and 9 o’clock. Haley noted that the General was no longer abed, for his beloved automobile, as immaculate and glistening as a thousand-dollar casket, was out of the garage and parked in the driveway near the kitchen door. No one was outside.

Suddenly the bales beneath Haley gave a great heave, and he felt himself hurtling downward, with Mr. Banghart shouting in
midair beside him. The whack of his chest against the earth stunned away his breath and senses. When he regained them, it was in time to roll out of the way of Caesar and Delores, who had made a full circle in the barnyard and now bore down upon him with fury. The emptied wagon clattered behind them, its steel-bound wheels screeching on dry bearings and striking sparks from rocks as it came. The team turned into the driveway at a full run. The wagon shot a spray of gravel rattling against the back of the house, and its right wheels skidded into a shallow ditch to set it careening at a crazy angle.

Haley tried to shout at the horses, but he managed only a whisper, which was immediately overwhelmed by a splintering, ripping, staggering crash, followed by silence, unruffled save for a muted, rhythmic roar in the now-motionless horses’ throats. On one side of the General’s new automobile stood Caesar, his harness askew and dragging, blood streaming from his wounded mouth. On the other side Delores lay gasping, festooned in a tangle of snapped lines and straps.

“God save us,” moaned Mr. Banghart sitting up. “God save us,” he repeated. “Look at the General’s car, would you.”

Haley steered a wobbling course for the rear of the team, where he freed a line that still bound Caesar to the wagon. With a dreamy sort of horror, he saw that the wagon tongue had plunged through the trunk door, burst the cushions of the back and front seats, and buried its iron head at last in the instrument panel, splintering the windshield above it.

He looked up dumbly from the unholy wreck to see Hope running down the walk toward him. She examined the damage
with profound respect. “Wow,” she said at last, under her breath. “It would have been kinder of you two to saw the General’s legs off.”

“It wasn’t our fault,” Haley protested.

Hope looked at the car again and shook her head. “You poor kid. You’ve really managed to pack a lot into a few days, haven’t you?” she said, her eyes full of sympathy. “Boy, with this to top off Kitty’s elopement—”