The Grass Harp, Including a Tree of Night and Other Stories

  “That she is,” sang his wife, and Mrs. Macy Wheeler parroted her.

  “… who has this day received a grievous shock.”

  “That she has,” echoed the ladies in their choir-trained voices.

  Dolly looked at Catherine, touched my hand, as though asking us to explain what was meant by the group glowering below like dogs gathered around a tree of trapped possums. Inadvertently, and just, I think to have something in her hands, she picked up one of the cigarettes Riley had left.

  “Shame on you,” squalled Mrs. Buster, tossing her tiny baldish head: those who called her an old buzzard, and there were several, were not speaking of her character alone: in addition to a small vicious head, she had high hunched shoulders and a vast body. “I say shame on you. How can you have come so far from God as to sit up in a tree like a drunken Indian—sucking cigarettes like a common …”

  “Floozy,” supplied Mrs. Macy Wheeler.

  “… floozy, while your sister lies in misery flat on her back.”

  Maybe they were right in describing Catherine as dangerous, for she reared up and said: “Preacher lady, don’t you go calling Dolly and us floozies; I’ll come down there and slap you bowlegged.” Fortunately, none of them could understand her; if they had, the sheriff might have shot her through the head: no exaggeration; and many of the white people in town would have said he did right.

  Dolly seemed stunned, at the same time self-possessed. You see, she simply dusted her skirt and said: “Consider a moment, Mrs. Buster, and you will realize that we are nearer God than you—by several yards.”

  “Good for you, Miss Dolly. I call that a good answer.” The man who had spoken was Judge Cool; he clapped his hands together and chuckled appreciatively. “Of course they are nearer God,” he said, unfazed by the disapproving, sober faces around him. “They’re in a tree, and we’re on the ground.”

  Mrs. Buster whirled on him. “I’d thought you were a Christian, Charlie Cool. My ideas of a Christian do not include laughing at and encouraging a poor mad woman.”

  “Mind who you name as mad, Thelma,” said the Judge. “That isn’t especially Christian either.”

  The Reverend Buster opened fire. “Answer me this, Judge. Why did you come with us if it wasn’t to do the Lord’s will in a spirit of mercy?”

  “The Lord’s will?” said the Judge incredulously. “You don’t know what that is any more than I do. Perhaps the Lord told these people to go live in a tree; you’ll admit, at least, that He never told you to drag them out—unless, of course, Verena Talbo is the Lord, a theory several of you give credence to, eh Sheriff? No, sir, I did not come along to do anyone’s will but my own: which merely means that I felt like taking a walk—the woods are very handsome at this time of year.” He picked some brown violets and put them in his buttonhole.

  “To hell with all that,” began the Sheriff, and was again interrupted by Mrs. Buster, who said that under no circumstances would she tolerate swearing: Will we, Reverend? and the Reverend, backing her up, said he’d be damned if they would. “I’m in charge here,” the Sheriff informed them, thrusting his bully-boy jaw. “This is a matter for the law.”

  “Whose law, Junius?” inquired Judge Cool quietly. “Remember that I sat in the courthouse twenty-seven years, rather a longer time than you’ve lived. Take care. We have no legal right whatever to interfere with Miss Dolly.”

  Undaunted, the Sheriff hoisted himself a little into the tree. “Let’s don’t have any more trouble,” he said coaxingly, and we could see his curved dog-teeth. “Come on down from there, the pack of you.” As we continued to sit like three nesting birds he showed more of his teeth and, as though he were trying to shake us out, angrily swayed a branch.

  “Miss Dolly, you’ve always been a peaceful person,” said Mrs. Macy Wheeler. “Please come on home with us; you don’t want to miss your dinner.” Dolly replied matter-of-factly that we were not hungry: were they? “There’s a drumstick for anybody that would like it.”

  Sheriff Candle said, “You make it hard on me, ma’am,” and pulled himself nearer. A branch, cracking under his weight, sent through the tree a sad cruel thunder.

  “If he lays a hand on any one of you, kick him in the head,” advised Judge Cool. “Or I will,” he said with sudden gallant pugnacity: like an inspired frog he hopped and caught hold to one of the Sheriff’s dangling boots. The Sheriff, in turn, grabbed my ankles, and Catherine had to hold me around the middle. We were sliding, that we should all fall seemed inevitable, the strain was immense. Meanwhile, Dolly started pouring what was left of our orangeade down the Sheriff’s neck, and abruptly, shouting an obscenity, he let go of me. They crashed to the ground, the Sheriff on top of the Judge and the Reverend Buster crushed beneath them both. Mrs. Macy Wheeler and Mrs. Buster, augmenting the disaster, fell upon them with crow-like cries of distress.

  Appalled by what had happened, and the part she herself had played, Dolly became so confused that she dropped the empty orangeade jar: it hit Mrs. Buster on the head with a ripe thud. “Beg pardon,” she apologized, though in the furor no one heard her.

  When the tangle below unraveled, those concerned stood apart from each other embarrassedly, gingerly feeling of themselves. The Reverend looked rather flattened out, but no broken bones were discovered, and only Mrs. Buster, on whose skimpy-haired head a bump was pyramiding, could have justly complained of injury. She did so forthrightly. “You attacked me, Dolly Talbo, don’t deny it, everyone here is a witness, everyone saw you aim that mason jar at my head. Junius, arrest her!”

  The Sheriff, however, was involved in settling differences of his own. Hands on hips, swaggering, he bore down on the Judge, who was in the process of replacing the violets in his buttonhole. “If you weren’t so old, I’d damn well knock you down.”

  “I’m not so old, Junius: just old enough to think men ought not to fight in front of ladies,” said the Judge. He was a fair-sized man with strong shoulders and a straight body: though not far from seventy, he looked to be in his fifties. He clenched his fists and they were hard and hairy as coconuts. “On the other hand,” he said grimly, “I’m ready if you are.”

  At the moment it looked like a fair enough match. Even the Sheriff seemed not so sure of himself; with diminishing bravado, he spit between his fingers, and said Well, nobody was going to accuse him of hitting an old man. “Or standing up to one,” Judge Cool retorted. “Go on, Junius, tuck your shirt in your pants and trot along home.”

  The Sheriff appealed to us in the tree. “Save yourselves a lot of trouble: get out of there and come along with me now.” We did not stir, except that Dolly dropped her veil, as though lowering a curtain on the subject once for all. Mrs. Buster, the lump on her head like a horn, said portentously, “Never mind, Sheriff. They’ve had their chance,” and, eyeing Dolly, then the Judge, added: “You may imagine you are getting away with something. But let me tell you there will be a retribution—not in heaven, right here on earth.”

  “Right here on earth,” harmonized Mrs. Macy Wheeler.

  They left along the path, erect, haughty as a wedding procession, and passed into the sunlight where the red rolling grass swept up, swallowed them. Lingering under the tree, the Judge smiled at us and, with a small courteous bow, said: “Do I remember you offering a drumstick to anybody that would like it?”

  HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN PUT together from parts of the tree, for his nose was like a wooden peg, his legs were strong as old roots, and his eyebrows were thick, tough as strips of bark. Among the topmost branches were beards of silvery moss the color of his center-parted hair, and the cowhide sycamore leaves, sifting down from a neighboring taller tree, were the color of his cheeks. Despite his canny, tomcat eyes, the general impression his face made was that of someone shy and countrified. Ordinarily he was not the one to make a show of himself, Judge Charlie Cool; there were many who had taken advantage of his modesty to set themselves above him. Yet none of them could have claimed, as he could, to be a graduate of Harv
ard University or to have twice traveled in Europe. Still, there were those who were resentful and felt that he put on airs: wasn’t he supposed to read a page of Greek every morning before breakfast? and what kind of a man was it that would always have flowers in his buttonhole? If he wasn’t stuck up, why, some people asked, had he gone all the way to Kentucky to find a wife instead of marrying one of our own women? I do not remember the Judge’s wife; she died before I was old enough to be aware of her, therefore all that I repeat comes second-hand. So: the town never warmed up to Irene Cool, and apparently it was her own fault. Kentucky women are difficult to begin with, keyed-up, hellion-hearted, and Irene Cool, who was born a Todd in Bowling Green (Mary Todd, a second cousin once removed, had married Abraham Lincoln), let everyone around here know she thought them a backward, vulgar lot: she received none of the ladies of the town, but Miss Palmer, who did sewing for her, spread news of how she’d transformed the Judge’s house into a place of taste and style with Oriental rugs and antique furnishings. She drove to and from Church in a Pierce-Arrow with all the windows rolled up, and in church itself she sat with a cologned handkerchief against her nose: the smell of God ain’t good enough for Irene Cool. Moreover, she would not permit either of the local doctors to attend her family, this though she herself was a semi-invalid: a small backbone dislocation necessitated her sleeping on a bed of boards. There were crude jokes about the Judge getting full of splinters. Nevertheless, he fathered two sons, Todd and Charles Jr., both born in Kentucky where their mother had gone in order that they could claim to be natives of the bluegrass state. But those who tried to make out the Judge got the brunt of his wife’s irritableness, that he was a miserable man, never had much of a case, and after she died even the hardest of their critics had to admit old Charlie must surely have loved his Irene. For during the last two years of her life, when she was very ill and fretful, he retired as circuit judge, then took her abroad to the places they had been on their honeymoon. She never came back; she is buried in Switzerland. Not so long ago Carrie Wells, a schoolteacher here in town, went on a group tour to Europe; the only thing connecting our town with that continent are graves, the graves of soldier boys and Irene Cool; and Carrie, armed with a camera for snapshots, set out to visit them all: though she stumbled about in a cloud-high cemetery one whole afternoon, she could not find the Judge’s wife, and it is funny to think of Irene Cool, serenely there on a mountain-side still unwilling to receive. There was not much left for the Judge when he came back; politicians like Meiself Tallsap and his gang had come into power: those boys couldn’t afford to have Charlie Cool sitting in the courthouse. It was sad to see the Judge, a fine-looking man dressed in narrowcut suits with a black silk band sewn around his sleeve and a Cherokee rose in his buttonhole, sad to see him with nothing to do except go to the post office or stop in at the bank. His sons worked in the bank, prissy-mouthed, prudent men who might have been twins, for they both were marshmallow-white, slump-shouldered, watery-eyed. Charles Jr., he was the one who had lost his hair while still in college, was vice-president of the bank, and Todd, the younger son, was chief cashier. In no way did they resemble their father, except that they had married Kentucky women. These daughters-in-law had taken over the Judge’s house and divided it into two apartments with separate entrances; there was an arrangement whereby the old man lived with first one son’s family, then the other. No wonder he’d felt like taking a walk to the woods.

  “Thank you, Miss Dolly,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “That’s the best drumstick I’ve had since I was a boy.”

  “It’s the least we can do, a drumstick; you were very brave.” There was in Dolly’s voice an emotional, feminine tremor that struck me as unsuitable, not dignified; so, too, it must have seemed to Catherine: she gave Dolly a reprimanding glance. “Won’t you have something more, a piece of cake?”

  “No ma’m, thank you, I’ve had a sufficiency.” He unloosened from his vest a gold watch and chain, then lassoed the chain to a strong twig above his head; it hung like a Christmas ornament, and its feathery faded ticking might have been the heartbeat of a delicate thing, a firefly, a frog. “If you can hear time passing it makes the day last longer. I’ve come to appreciate a long day.” He brushed back the fur of the squirrels, which lay curled in a corner as though they were only asleep. “Right through the head: good shooting, son.”

  Of course I gave the credit to the proper party. “Riley Henderson, was it?” said the Judge, and went on to say it was Riley who had let our whereabouts be known. “Before that, they must have sent off a hundred dollars’ worth of telegrams,” he told us, tickled at the thought. “I guess it was the idea of all that money that made Verena take to her bed.”

  Scowling, Dolly said, “It doesn’t make a particle of sense, all of them behaving ugly that way. They seemed mad enough to kill us, though I can’t see why, or what it has to do with Verena: she knew we were going away to leave her in peace, I told her, I even left a note. But if she’s sick—is she, Judge? I’ve never known her to be.”

  “Never a day,” said Catherine.

  “Oh, she’s upset all right,” the Judge said with a certain contentment. “But Verena’s not the woman to come down with anything an aspirin couldn’t fix. I remember when she wanted to rearrange the cemetery, put up some kind of mausoleum to house herself and all you Talbos. One of the ladies around here came to me and said Judge, don’t you think Verena Talbo is the most morbid person in town, contemplating such a big tomb for herself? and I said No, the only thing morbid was that she was willing to spend the money when not for an instant did she believe she was ever going to die.”

  “I don’t like to hear talk against my sister,” said Dolly curtly. “She’s worked hard, she deserves to have things as she wants them. It’s our fault, someway we failed her, there was no place for us in her house.”

  Catherine’s cotton-wadding squirmed in her jaw like chewing tobacco. “Are you my Dollyheart? or some hypocrite? He’s a friend, you ought to tell him the truth, how That One and the little Jew was stealing our medicine.…”

  The Judge applied for a translation, but Dolly said it was simply nonsense, nothing worth repeating and, diverting him, asked if he knew how to skin a squirrel. Nodding dreamily, he gazed away from us, above us, his acornlike eyes scanning the sky-fringed, breeze-fooled leaves. “It may be that there is no place for any of us. Except we know there is, somewhere; and if we found it, but lived there only a moment, we could count ourselves blessed. This could be your place,” he said, shivering as though in the sky spreading wings had cast a cold shade. “And mine.”

  Subtly as the gold watch spun its sound of time, the afternoon curved toward twilight. Mist from the river, autumn haze, trailed moon-colors among the bronze, the blue trees, and a halo, an image of winter, ringed the paling sun. Still the Judge did not leave us: “Two women and a boy? at the mercy of night? and Junius Candle, those fools up to God knows what? I’m sticking with you.” Surely, of the four of us, it was the Judge who had most found his place in the tree. It was a pleasure to watch him, all twinkly as a hare’s nose, and feeling himself a man again, more than that, a protector. He skinned the squirrels with a jackknife, while in the dusk I gathered sticks and built under the tree a fire for the frying pan. Dolly opened the bottle of blackberry wine; she justified this by referring to a chill in the air. The squirrels turned out quite well, very tender, and the Judge said proudly that we should taste his fried catfish sometime. We sipped the wine in silence; a smell of leaves and smoke carrying from the cooling fire called up thoughts of other autumns, and we sighed, heard, like sea-roar, singings in the field of grass. A candle flickered in a mason jar, and gipsy moths, balanced, blowing about the flame, seemed to pilot its scarf of yellow among the black branches.

  There was, just then, not a footfall, but a nebulous sense of intrusion: it might have been nothing more than the moon coming out. Except there was no moon; nor stars. It was dark as the blackberry wine. “I
think there is someone—something down there,” said Dolly, expressing what we all felt.

  The Judge lifted the candle. Night-crawlers slithered away from its lurching light, a snowy owl flew between the trees. “Who goes there?” he challenged with the conviction of a soldier. “Answer up, who goes there?”

  “Me, Riley Henderson.” It was indeed. He separated from the shadows, and his upraised, grinning face looked warped, wicked in the candlelight. “Just thought I’d see how you were getting on. Hope you’re not sore at me: I wouldn’t have told where you were, not if I’d known what it was all about.”

  “Nobody blames you, son,” said the Judge, and I remembered it was he who had championed Riley’s cause against his uncle Horace Holton: there was an understanding between them. “We’re enjoying a small taste of wine. I’m sure Miss Dolly would be pleased to have you join us.”

  Catherine complained there was no room; another ounce, and those old boards would give way. Still, we scrunched together to make a place for Riley, who had no sooner squeezed into it than Catherine grabbed a fistful of his hair. “That’s for today with you pointing your gun at us like I told you not to; and this,” she said, yanking again and speaking distinctively enough to be understood, “pays you back for setting the Sheriff on us.”

  It seemed to me that Catherine was impertinent, but Riley grunted good-naturedly, and said she might have better cause to be pulling somebody’s hair before the night was over. For there was, he told us, excited feelings in the town, crowds like Saturday night; the Reverend and Mrs. Buster especially were brewing trouble: Mrs. Buster was sitting on her front porch showing callers the bump on her head. Sheriff Candle, he said, had persuaded Verena to authorize a warrant for our arrest on the grounds that we had stolen property belonging to her.