While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction

  She felt old because her husband, Ed, who really was old, had died and left her alone on the hog farm in northern Indiana. When Ed died, she had sold the livestock, rented the flat, black, rich land to neighbors, read her Bible, watered her houseplants, fed her chickens, tended her small vegetable garden, or simply rocked—waiting patiently and without rancor for the Bright Angel of Death. Ed had left her plenty of money, so she wasn’t goaded into doing anything more, and the people in the area, the only area Annie knew, made her feel that she was doing the right thing, the customary thing, the only thing.

  Though she was without relatives, she wasn’t without callers. Farm wives came often for an hour or two of stifled pity over cakes and coffee.

  “If my Will went, I just don’t know what I’d do,” said one. “In the city, I don’t think folks really know what it is to be one flesh. They just change husbands as often as they please, and one’s as good as another one.”

  “Yes,” said Annie, “I certainly wouldn’t care for that. Have another peach surprise, Doris June.”

  “I mean, in the city a man and woman don’t really need each other except to—” Delicately, Doris June left the sentence unfinished.

  “Yes, that’s true,” said Annie. One of her duties as a widow, she had learned, was to provide dramatic proof to the neighboring wives that, bad as their husbands might be at times, life without them would be worse.

  Annie didn’t spoil this illusion for Doris June by telling her about the letters—telling her what she had discovered so late in life about womanly happiness, telling her about one man, at least, who could make her happy from as far away as Schenectady.

  Sometimes other women’s husbands came to the farm, too, gruff and formal, to perform some man’s chore that their wives had noticed needed doing—patching a roof, putting a new packing in the pump, greasing the idle machinery in the barn. They knew she was a virtuous widow, and respected her severely for it. They hardly spoke.

  Sometimes Annie wondered how the husbands would act if they knew about the letters. Maybe they would think she was a loose woman, then, and accept her formal invitations for coffee which were meant to be declined. They might even make remarks with double meanings and full of shy flirtation—the sort of remarks they made to the shameless girl behind the coffee counter in the diner in town.

  If she’d shown the men the letters, they would have read something dirty into them, she thought, when the letters weren’t at all like that, really. They were spiritual, they were poetry, and she didn’t even know or care what the man who wrote them looked like.

  Sometimes the minister came for a visit, too, a bleak, fleshless, dust-colored old man, who was overjoyed by her deathlike peace and moral safety.

  “You make me want to go on, Mrs. Cowper,” he said. “I wish you could talk to our young people sometime. They don’t believe it’s possible for a person to live a Christian life in this modern day and age.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” said Annie. “I think all young people are kind of wild, and settle down later. Have another raspberry delight, won’t you? They’ll only spoil, and I’ll have to throw them away.”

  “You were never wild, were you, Mrs. Cowper?”

  “Well—of course I married Ed when I was just a little better than sixteen. I didn’t have much chance for running around.”

  “And you wouldn’t have, if you’d had the chance,” said the minister triumphantly.

  Annie felt a strange impulse to argue with him and tell him proudly about the letters. But she fought the wicked impulse, and nodded gravely.

  A few would-be lovers called, too, with honorable intentions and a powerful lust for her land. But, while these callers spoke clumsy poetry about her fields, not one made her feel that she was anything more than what she saw of herself in the mirror—a tall, lean woman, as unornamental as a telephone pole, with coarse, work-swollen hands, and a long nose whose tip had been bitten to a permanent red by frost. Like Ed, they never tried.

  The moment a would-be lover left after a chilly visit, mumbling about weather and crops and twisting his hat, Annie would feel a great need for the letters from Schenectady. She would lock the door, pull the blinds, lie on her bed, and read and reread the letters until hunger or sleep or a knock on the door forced her to hide them again until another time.

  Ed died in October, and Annie got along without him and without the letters, too, until the next spring—or what should have been spring. It was in early May, when a sudden, bitter frost killed the daffodil sprouts, that Annie had written:

  “Dear 5587: This is the first time I have ever written to a total stranger. I just happened to be waiting in the drugstore to get a prescription for my sinus trouble filled, and I picked up a copy of Western Romance Magazine. I don’t usually read magazines like that. I think they are silly. But I just happened to turn to the pen pals section, and I saw your letter, and I read where you are lonely and could sure use a pen pal.” She smiled at her foolishness. “I will tell you a little about myself,” she wrote. “I am fairly young still, and I have brown hair, green eyes, and …”

  In a week, a reply had come, and the code number used by the magazine became a name: Joseph P. Hawkins, of Schenectady, New York.

  “My dear Mrs. Cowper:” Hawkins had written, “I have received many replies to my plea for pen pals, but none has moved me more deeply than yours. A meeting of kindred spirits, such as I believe ours to be, is a rare thing, indeed, in this vale of tears, and is fuller of true bliss than the most perfect of physical matings. I see you now as an angel, for the voice I hear in your letters is the voice of an angel. The instant the angel appeared, loneliness fled, and I knew I was not really alone on this vast and crowded planet after all …”

  Annie had giggled nervously as she read the first letter, and felt guilty about having led the poor man on so, and she had been a little shocked, too, by the ardent tone of the letter. But she’d found herself rereading the letter several times a day, each time with increased pity. At last, in a fever of compassion, she had given the poor man his wish, and painstakingly tried to create another angel for him.

  From then on there had been no turning back, no will to turn back.

  Hawkins was eloquent and poetic—but most of all he was exquisitely sensitive to a woman’s moods. He sensed it when Annie was depressed, though she never told him she was, and he would say just the right thing to cheer her. And when she was elated, he nourished her elation, and kept it alive for weeks instead of fleeting minutes.

  She tried to do the same for him, and her fumbling efforts seemed to sit surprisingly well with her pen pal.

  Never once did Hawkins say a vulgar thing, nor did he harp on the fact of his being a man and her a woman. That was unimportant, he said vehemently. The important thing was that their spirits would never be lonely again, so splendidly were they matched. It was a very high-level correspondence—on such a high level, in fact, that Annie and Hawkins went for an entire year without mentioning anything as down-to-earth as money, work, age, physical appearances, organized religion, or politics. Nature, Fate, and the undefinable sweet aches of the spirit were subject matter enough to keep them both writing on and on and on and on and on. The second winter without Ed seemed no worse than a chilly May to Annie, because, for the first time in her life, she had discovered what true friendship was like.

  When the correspondence finally came down to earth, it wasn’t Joseph P. Hawkins who brought it down—it was Annie. When spring came again, she was writing to him, as he had written to her, about the millions of tender little shoots poking their heads up, and about the mating songs of the birds and the budding of the trees, and the bees carrying pollen from one plant to the next—when she suddenly felt compelled to do what Hawkins had forbidden her to do.

  “Please,” he had written, “let us not descend to the vulgarity of, as I believe the phrase goes, ‘exchanging snaps.’ No photographer, save in Heaven, could ever take a picture of the angel that rise
s from your letters to blind me with adoration.”

  But one heady, warm spring night, Annie enclosed a snapshot anyway. The picture was one Ed had taken at a picnic five years before, and, at the time, she’d thought it was a terrible likeness. But now, as she studied it before sealing her letter, she saw a great deal in the woman in the picture that she had not seen before—a haze of spiritual beauty that softened every harsh line.

  The next two days of waiting were nightmares. She hated herself for having sent the picture, and told herself that she was the ugliest woman on earth, that she had ruined everything between herself and Hawkins. Then she would try to calm herself by telling herself that the picture couldn’t possibly make any difference—that the relationship was purely spiritual, that she might as well have enclosed a blank sheet of paper, for all the difference the picture, beautiful or ugly, could make. But only Joseph P. Hawkins could say what the effect of the picture was.

  He did so by special-delivery airmail. “Bright angel, adieu!” he wrote, and Annie burst into tears.

  But then she forced herself to read on. “Frail, wispish counterfeit of my mind’s eye, stand aside, dethroned by warm and earthly, vibrant bride of my mind—my Annie as she really is! Adieu, ghost! Make way for life, for I live and Annie lives, and it is spring!”

  Annie was jubilant. She hadn’t spoiled anything with the picture. Hawkins had seen the haze of spiritual beauty, too.

  It wasn’t until she sat down to write that she understood how changed the relationship was. They had admitted that they were not only spirit but flesh, and Annie’s skin tingled at the thought—and the pen that once had wings did not budge. Every phrase that came to Annie’s mind seemed foolish, inflated, though phrases like them had seemed substantial enough in the past.

  And then the pen began to move with a will of its own. It wrote two words that said more than Annie had said in the hundred pages that had gone before:

  “I come.”

  She was blind with love, gloriously out of control.

  Hawkins’s reply, a telegram, was almost as short: “PLEASE DON’T. AM DEATHLY ILL.”

  That was his last communication. Annie’s telegrams and special-delivery letters brought no more response from Joseph P. Hawkins. A long-distance call revealed that Hawkins had no telephone. Annie was shattered, able to think of nothing but the gentle, lonely man, wasting away without a soul to care for him, really care, seven hundred miles from the vibrant bride of his mind.

  After one agonized week of Hawkins’s profound silence, Annie strode from the Schenectady railroad station, flushed with love, suffocating in her new girdle, tormented by her savings, which crackled and scratched in her stocking-tops and spare bosom. She carried a small suitcase and her knitting bag, into which she’d swept the entire contents of her medicine cabinet.

  She wasn’t afraid, not even rattled, though she’d never been on a train before, and had never seen anything remotely like the clouds of smoke and clanging busyness of Schenectady. She was numbed by duty and love, impressively tall and long-striding, leaning forward aggressively.

  The cabstand was empty, but Annie told a redcap Hawkins’s address, and he directed her to a bus that would take her there.

  “You just ask the bus driver where you should get off,” said the redcap.

  And Annie did—at two-minute intervals. She sat right behind the driver, her modest luggage on her lap.

  As the bus picked its way through mazes of noisy, fuming factories and slums and jounced over chuckholes and railroad tracks, Annie could see Hawkins, thin and white, tall, delicate, and blue-eyed, wasting away on a hard narrow bed in a tenement room.

  “Is this the place where I get off?”

  “No, ma’am. Not yet. I’ll let you know.”

  The factories and slums dropped away, and pleasant little houses on neat, green, postage-stamp lots took their place. Peering into the windows as the bus passed, Annie could imagine Hawkins lying abed in his small, shipshape bachelor’s quarters, once husky, now wan, his body ravished by disease.

  “Is this where I get off?”

  “A good ways, yet, ma’am. I’ll let you know.”

  The small houses gave way to larger ones, and these gave way to mansions, the largest homes Annie had ever seen. She was the only passenger aboard now, awed by a new image of Hawkins, a dignified old gentleman with silver hair and a tiny mustache, languishing in a bed as big as her vegetable garden.

  “Is this the neighborhood?” said Annie incredulously.

  “Right along here somewhere.” The bus slowed, and the driver looked out at the house numbers. At the next corner, he stopped the bus and opened the door. “Somewhere in that block, lady. I was looking for it, but I guess I missed it.”

  “Maybe it’s in the next block,” said Annie, who’d been watching too, with a quaking heart, as the house numbers came closer and closer to the one she knew so well.

  “Nope. Got to be in this one. Nothing up ahead but a cemetery, and that goes for six blocks.”

  Annie stepped out into the quiet, shaded street. “Thank you very much.”

  “You’re certainly welcome,” said the driver. He started to close the door, but hesitated.

  “You know how many people are dead in that cemetery up there?”

  “I’m a stranger in town,” said Annie.

  “All of ’em,” said the driver triumphantly. The door clattered shut, and the bus grumbled away.

  An hour later, Annie had rung every doorbell and been barked at by every dog in the block.

  No one had ever heard of Joseph P. Hawkins. Everyone agreed that, if there were such an address, it would be a tombstone in the next block.

  Desolately, her big feet hurting, Annie trudged along the grass outside the iron-spiked cemetery fence. There were only stone angels to return her bewildered, searching gaze. She came at last to the stone arch that marked the cemetery entrance. Defeated, she sat down on her suitcase to wait for the next bus.

  “Looking for somebody?” said a gruff voice behind her.

  She turned to see a dwarfed old man standing under the cemetery arch. One eye was blind and white as a boiled egg, and the pupil of the other eye was bright and cunning, and roamed restlessly. He carried a shovel clotted with fresh earth.

  “I—I’m looking for Mr. Hawkins,” said Annie. “Mr. Joseph P. Hawkins.” She stood, and tried to conceal her horror.

  “Cemetery business?”

  “He works here?”

  “Did,” said the dwarf. “Dead now.”

  “No!”

  “Yep,” said the dwarf without feeling. “Buried this morning.”

  Annie sank down, until she was seated on the suitcase again, and then she cried softly. “Too late, too late.”

  “A friend of yours?”

  “The dearest friend a woman ever had!” said Annie passionately, brokenly. “Did you know him?”

  “Nope. They just put me on the job out here when he took sick. From what I hear, he was quite a gentleman, though.”

  “He was, he was,” said Annie. She looked up at the old man, and contemplated his shovel uneasily. “Tell me,” she said, “He wasn’t a—a grave-digger, was he?”

  “Landscape architect and memorial custodian.”

  “Oh,” said Annie, smiling through her tears, “I’m so glad.” She shook her head. “Too late, too late. What can I do now?”

  “I hear he liked flowers pretty well.”

  “Yes,” said Annie, “he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him. Where could I get some?”

  “Well, it’s supposed to be against the law, but I guess maybe it’d be all right if you picked some of those crocuses inside the gate there, just as long as nobody saw you. And there are some violets over there by his house.”

  “His house?” said Annie. “Where’s his house?”

  The old man pointed through the arch to a small, squat stone building, matted with ivy.

  “Oh—the poor
man,” said Annie.

  “It’s not so bad,” said the old man. “I live there now, and it’s all right. Come on. You get the flowers, and then I’ll drive you over to where he’s buried in the truck. It’s a long walk, and you’d get lost. He’s in the new part we’re just opening up. First one there, in fact.”

  The cemetery’s little pickup truck followed ribbons of asphalt through the still, cool, forest of marble, until Annie was lost. The seat of the truck was jammed forward, so that the old man’s short legs could reach the pedals. Annie’s long legs, as a consequence, were painfully cramped by the dashboard. In her lap was a bouquet of crocuses and violets.

  Neither spoke. Annie couldn’t bear to look at her companion, and could think of nothing to say to him, and he, in turn, didn’t seem particularly interested in her—was simply performing a routine and tiresome chore.

  They came at last to an iron gate that barred the way into mud ruts leading into a wood.

  The old man unlocked the gate. He put the truck into low gear, and it pushed into the twilight of the woods, with briars and branches scratching at its sides.

  Annie gasped. Ahead was a peaceful, leafy clearing, and there, in a patch of sunlight, was a fresh grave.

  “Headstone hasn’t come yet,” said the dwarf.

  “Joseph, Joseph,” whispered Annie. “I’m here.”

  The dwarf stopped the truck, limped around to Annie’s side, and opened her door with a courtly gesture. He smiled for the first time, baring a ghastly set of dead-white false teeth.

  “Could I be alone?” said Annie.

  “I’ll wait here.”

  Annie laid her flowers on the grave, and sat beside it for an hour, reciting to herself all the wonderful, tender things Joseph had said to her.

  The chain of thought might have gone on for hours more, if the little man hadn’t broken it with a polite cough.

  “We’d better go,” he said. “The sun will be going down soon.”

  “It’s like tearing my heart out, leaving him here alone.”

  “You can come back another time.”