Not quite a political job, at least as I sized it up, but if that’s what it took to please her, I meant to do it her way. I drank from my Thermos of coffee, told how my heart had stopped beating when I saw the death trap I’d dug, assuming there’d be a taproot when nothing was down there but dirt, and we both shivered to think of it, and relived each horrible moment. But whatever we said always led back to the fat. She kind of chanted it: “It’s glandular, glandular, I know it. There’s no cure, none at all, none, and I’ll never live to be thirty. I don’t complain, I speak no word of that kind. I do what I can, my small mite of good, so I leave this earth a little bit better than I found it. But can’t they leave me alone? Do they, do they all, do they every last one—have to talk?”
I was so flabbergasted, since I had supposed her middle-aged, maybe fifty or more, that I was a second late answering: “ ... Why—O.K., but don’t you talk.”
“You told me to.”
“Out there. Here now, take it easy.”
Her face beaded up, as it did when flashes hit her, and I dried it off with a face towel, wrapping it on, then patting it soft. Then again, pretty soon, she was off: “And, Duke, talking’s not all they do. They laugh. That’s the worst, as it’s meant to be mean. And they turn away, or close their eyes, or make a face, as though you were a mess on the pavement. That cuts into your heart. Maybe they can’t help it, but you’d think they could if they tried. Why do they do things like that?”
“People are funny.”
“You didn’t.”
“I don’t really know what you mean.”
“That’s not true but it’s nice. It’s nice because it’s kind. Duke, I want you as my friend.”
“Mrs. Val, can I say something?”
“Please, Duke. What is it?”
“I was in jail.”
“I didn’t mention it.”
“I spent a night there, and if you ever looked at the moon shining at you through bars, it puts a scar on your soul. And when you didn’t mention it, when you treated me human, it healed that scar—just a little. I’m proud to be your friend, and I want you for mine.”
“The afflicted, Duke, they know.”
“You bet they know.”
“We could say one thing more.”
“Yes, Mrs. Val, what?”
“You being so gentlemanly.”
That kind of shook me up, and for some little time we said nothing. When the time came for the wash-up, I worked through the shower curtains, a one-inch slit I pulled open, but to me she wasn’t sickening any more. I could see her, and the fat rolled and dappled and shook. But all I noticed was her slim, pretty shanks, and all I thought was what a shame they should tremble so, under that mountain of meat!
CHAPTER III
MR. VAL WAS A TALL, thin man around forty, with gray hair, sallow skin, and a pious stoop, who got on my nerves, I didn’t exactly know why. Part of it, maybe, was how he rubbed his hands and jerked his head as he talked, reminding me of a waiter. And part of it, I’m sure, was his everlasting ant-pantedness, which had even annoyed the girls in the Marlboro courthouse. He cut in on everybody, hustled things up, listened to nothing at all. I owed him my freedom, it was only sense I should like him, and I tried to, don’t get the idea I didn’t. And yet, in the half-hour it had taken for him to drive me over, I don’t think I finished one answer to the questions he popped at me. He’d cut in, blow his horn, feed gas, or do something that made it impossible to talk.
He was that way tonight, soon as he got home. She’d called him, so he knew she was there, and the lights were on very friendly. You’d have thought he’d have lingered with a young wife who had been away, going inside with her when she stepped out the kitchen door. But he had no sooner spoken to her than he was calling to me that I should help him unload. I was back of the cottage, splitting the wood I had sawed, and was perfectly willing to help with whatever he had. But I hated to leg it, while he stood snapping his fingers and slapping his luggage compartment. Thermos buckets were in it, that he said went to the kitchen, and hams in muslin bags, that he said went to storage. She took the buckets from me and set them down. Then she led on to the cold room, which was a low brick building across the patio from the cottage. It had a Yale lock, which she opened, and steel racks inside with rows of hooks, where I hung the hams as she told me.
When we came out he was off in the field, looking at my tree. It was easy to see in the dark, looking like a fire in a Western oil field; I’d done it all as she said, using plenty of sawdust, as it turned out they had a lot of it, stored for smoking the hams. So you could have read the print in a newspaper when I stepped up beside him and said: “I’m sorry it took so long, sir. One whole day to get out just one tree. But—”
“Could you get it out at all—that’s what I wanted to know. Naturally it had to take time. I knew that. But you did it, and you did it right. Filling that hole, burning the stump—just right. I hadn’t expected it, but the ash’ll be wonderful fertilizer. We’ll plow it in, then disk it, with lime and the regular stuff. We’ll be set by the first of May to put in our corn. I’m well pleased, Duke. Now I know you’re my man.”
I’d have been better pleased if he’d let me say something once, but at least he seemed to mean well, and I went to the cottage to dress, as at least I had slacks, sport coat, and a couple of clean shirts.
Dinner, I must say, was remarkable, verging on art. Some of it, the hot vegetables and cold dessert, came from the Thermos buckets, the ones he brought from the Ladyship. But the steak was out of the storage room, the biggest piece of sirloin I think I ever saw. He brought it in the living-room, and told me crease with my fingers where I wanted mine cut. I creased an inch, and with the knife he marked an inch and a half. He marked his own, a half-inch minute steak. But when he went to the kitchen she followed him out. I heard her say: “No, Val, please! Cut me one like Duke’s and take the rest of it back. I shouldn’t have that much, and besides it’s too thick to broil.”
“Broil? I’ll bake it!”
“But it’s three pounds of meat and—”
“You’ve been down to St. Mary’s, and after that mule meat they eat down there, you need something to stick to your ribs.”
I thought to myself: “Is he giving her all the rest of that chunk? Doesn’t he know it’s practically murder, considering that weight she carries?” That was the answer, though, as came out when she waddled back and sat down to wait. She said: “Duke, he tries his best to make me happy—but he’s like all the others—he can’t understand—what this affliction is. It’s glandular! If the food is there on my plate, I have to eat it, I can’t help myself. No overweight person can. Not saying I don’t need a lot, else I get so terribly weak. But—all that meat—”
An electric stove cooks fast, and in a few minutes he was back, saying we’d eat in the nook. We went in there, and I caught the light in his eye as he served the meal, so pretty it was like an ad in the Saturday Post. I also caught how she ate, very dreamy, once she tasted that steak. She cut each piece off slow, sopped it in blood, and closed her eyes as she chewed. So as not to be caught looking, and more or less make like sociable, I put it on with a squirtgun, how wonderful everything was.
Even for goose grease he didn’t seem to have time, and took it over himself, smearing it the way he wanted it. He said: “The steak I admit is O.K. But my real contribution, Duke, is the lunchbox I gave you today. Mr. Val’s Take-Out, I call it, and it’s a revolution on behalf of the American wife. All she does, Duke, is ring us, and she gets it—a unit, to fit other units. One person, one box, that goes in one stove, complete as is, without even breaking the string. When it’s hot she opens it, and it’s ready to eat, there on its plastic plates. When it’s eaten, the plastic burns, it’s all gone, and she’s free. She’s spent five minutes at the stove, and five more at the incinerator—ten minutes out of her day, and the whole family is fed. She has leisure, she can play, she can hold a job, for cash! I tell you, it’s tremendous!?
??
I piled more compliments on, and for perhaps a minute he listened. Then, in the middle of a word, he cut me off. He said: “O.K., Duke, let’s get at it.”
“ ... Get at what, sir?”
“All of it. What led you astray, the whole story. Wait a minute, while I put these dishes in the washer, and we’ll sit in the other room. I want to go into this. Thoroughly.”
The dishes took some minutes, my fire some minutes more. I said I was proud of my wood, but actually wanted to stall, because how I wanted to go into it was practically not at all. But at the end of a half-hour or so she was camped on the sofa, in close to the flames, he on the other end, his knees under his chin, I on the love seat across from them, with the cocktail table between. He said: “Now!”—and I couldn’t stall any longer. I said: “ ... I wanted to be a fighter.”
“Why did you?”
“Well—why not? I’m six feet high, strong as a bull, and weigh a hundred and seventy. As a light heavy I looked like a natural. And in the Army it helps. With—whatever you’re bucking for.”
“Army? Where was this?”
“Germany.”
I edged it to the hitch I’d served, how I got to be technical sergeant, and got my honorable discharge. I worked back to my very young days, when I was a kid out in Nevada, to the car crash that killed my parents, and how I was raised by my grandmother. He asked if she was still living, I said no, and he seemed to be sidetracked. But then: “All right, let’s get to the point. You wanted to be a fighter. What then?”
“I found out I couldn’t hit.”
“What then?”
“ ... I found out I could.”
“Listen, Duke, stop gagging.”
I said I wasn’t gagging at all, and tried to explain how it was, as a doctor had explained it to me. I said: “Seems to be a question of adrenalin. What gives you the strength to hit. Some fighters have it as needed, and they can hit for money. I didn’t have it at all—no killer instinct, the sports writers called it. Except, unfortunately, I found out, if I got sore enough, I did have it—maybe a little too much. I broke a champion’s jaw, and—”
“Then you were light-heavyweight champion?”
“This was in training camp.”
“Why would you do it there?”
“He gypped me out of some dough.”
“I don’t get this at all, Duke.”
“I was working for him. If you can’t hit you’re just a punk and help train guys that can. I was his sparring partner, at Ojai, California, and I stretched him out on the grass. I also broke his jaw. And, with the smart money that was back of him, I had to get out of the state. I hopped a truck, at Ventura, and kept moving, headed east. Then I went a little bit haywire, and pulled this stick-up, last week. And then didn’t have the adrenalin to scram. I just lay there, on the bed in that little hotel.”
“Wait a minute, Duke.”
“That’s all. Then the officer came.”
“Wait. Smart money?”
“Gunsels.”
“Duke, will you forget about adrenalin, punks, gunsels, and all such irrelevant things and give me a straight answer on a simple question of morals, so—”
“He did give it!”
She was standing there, in the light dress she had put on, like some pink blimp with electric lights for eyes. She said: “Are you deaf, Val? Or stupid? Or what? He’s been trying to tell you, he couldn’t hit for money, but he could hit for the right. Isn’t that straight enough? And is it so terrible? I tell you right now I wouldn’t have him here if it was the other way around. Sometimes, Val, I don’t understand you at all. All Bill needed was just one look, and he knew Duke had been in the ring, that he was decent, and—”
“Bill saw Duke?”
“I told you he was here.”
“That’s all I want to know.”
They had it some more, he giving ground fast, and why Bill should settle it I couldn’t quite figure out, as there seemed to be more to it than a favorite brother-in-law. But at last they calmed down, and he said we’d look at the stump. As he led the way outside, she said to me very quiet she’d fallen into the barbwire, at her father’s sawmill in St. Mary’s—“which of course you couldn’t know.” That seemed to cover that, and at the tree I made them stand back while I chunked it with a bar, to knock the red charcoal off and break it down to embers. Then we walked around, and he looked at the house, as it shone in the night, the shells sparkling in front. I looked at the moon, which looked so beautiful now, with no bars between. What she looked at I couldn’t tell, but it seemed the farthest of all.
But after a while we went in, and when I said goodnight, they walked with me to the cottage, to make sure I had enough blankets. As they stepped out on the porch, he said: “Wilkes Booth knocked on that door.”
“Val!”
“Well, he did.”
“It’s not a nice thing to say!”
She was sharp, but he kind of grinned about it, and as to who Wilkes Booth might be, or when he knocked on my door, I had no idea at that time. But later, when I’d gone to bed, prayed up my thanks to God and even I think slept, I sat up in bed quite suddenly. Outside was the sound of a bell, the tiny bell people use to put on a cat. It came to me that while most of the plumbing here drained into the septic tank, the shower water ran out in an open gutter that led to a little ravine, so maybe, if drops of blood were still there, an animal could smell it. But even that didn’t seem to account for a feeling of evil out there.
I suddenly knew who Booth was.
It came to me, I’d prayed up plenty of thanks, for being out from the bars, but hadn’t asked forgiveness for what I’d done to put me behind them in the first place. I worked on that for a while, then felt better, heard nothing more, and fell asleep.
CHAPTER IV
SO FOR A WHILE Val laid off of me, at least off my misspent life, and for a couple of months I was happy, with my freedom, my work, and her, though busier than that paperhanger, with mosquitoes as well as hives. I snatched the trees out quick, now that I knew how to do it, and was done with them later that week. Then I raced the calendar, to get stuff in the ground so it would start to grow. First I had to lime, or double-lime actually, as the land was fairly poor, and turn it in with a plow. Then I double-fertilized, and cut that in with a disk. Then I seeded, for lettuce, spinach, broccoli, corn, and all kinds of stuff. I did that all with the tractor, sometimes needing help, like someone to ride the planter putting tomato seedlings in, and was given a boy named Homer. He was a colored fellow who parked cars at the Ladyship, and came out every day in the truck to pick up stuff to take in, green stuff, that is, as soon as it was ready and I could cut it and pack it in crates.
On top of all that were the hams, a big source of profit, now the Ladyship was open and made a sales outlet. Getting them ready in town, it seemed, was much too complicated, as they had to be smoked out here, and besides, it was a different kind of routine from what restaurant chefs are used to. From the carcasses he bought, he had them cut every day, and brought them out at night, usually four, two picnics and two big ones, but sometimes eight. She did the curing and cooking, squirting formula into a vein with a little pump she had, then later steaming them under pressure, baking them, and doing them up in plastic, with “MR. VAL’S FINE HAMS” printed on. Once a month, when enough had been formulated up and hung in the cold room, I did the smoking. I rolled the racks to the smokehouse, dumped sawdust out on the floor, tossed a lighted newspaper in, closed up, and watched the dampers. At the end of forty-eight hours, out they came, brown as hickory nuts. The racks, it turned out, were called “trees.” Until then I had thought the Ham Tree some kind of a comedian’s gag, like the Rock Candy Mountain. It turned out, though, to be real.
The formula, she told me, was secret, but one day I called it skookum, and that started her laughing. Then we both laughed so hard we cried. Then she got ashamed, and said stop talking like that. So I did. So she did. So I didn’t. So she didn’t. So
after that it was skookum, our own little private joke.
The hams we always did early, as soon as he shoved off for town, but I’d see her again for lunch, and, for her, generally dressed up. Or at least I put on a coat, a new one I bought. It turned out, once I’d made restitution, I was on a salary, one hundred dollars a month and my keep, and the coat was my first outlay. But every little thing brought us closer, like the color the coat should be. I got brown, but she said it ought to be blue, to go with my hair, which is yellow, like molasses taffy, and my eyes, which she said are blue, though until then I hadn’t much noticed. I said brown was quiet, and then we’d argue it out, but it seemed sweet that anyone cared what I wore. In between we’d talk of the fat, but kind of around the edges, generally working in toward the good that needs to be done. She spoke of the church they went to, off Branch Avenue in the city, but more often of another one, in St. Mary’s, that she’d gone to when she was little.
In between everything she’d eat and eat and eat, great big ham sandwiches, with pie, often a whole one, ice cream, pastry, and yogurt. Then at night she had her “one real meal of the day,” as she called it, and he did. We lived on beef, pork, ham, veal, and lamb, with occasional poultry; on potatoes, another vegetable, and gravy; on pie, ice cream, pastry, and pudding, but never fresh fruit or green salad. It was the best food for taste I ever ate in my life, and the worst for health I could even dream of. I couldn’t, of course, say such a thing to him, but to her I thought I should, just as a favor, since I was somewhat an expert on it, from my days in the training camps. I got the surprise of my life. We’d been talking along quite friendly, and I sort of hinted, when she cut herself more pie, that it might not be the best thing for a person of her peculiarity.