When I came to myself again, my face was wet with tears.
16
Rose of San Antone
Back in those days I still wanted to take an active part in the ongoing life of the twentieth century, and so two or three years after the war I bought a car. There had been a lot of public works during the Depression, a lot of new roads had been built, and the country had opened up. Along the river on our side, from Ellville up to Stoneport and beyond, the all-weather roads had gone in, and home dances and moonshine had gone out. Until the 1930s the roads in these parts went to the river; there was not much need for a road along the river, which was in its way a road.
In Port William after the war the idea that you could “jump in a car” and drive to Hargrave in only a few minutes was still fairly new. The time had been, and not long back, when people in Port William who wanted to go to Hargrave would walk down to Dawes Landing and take the boat.
The old homemade Saturday nights, when they would carry the furniture out into the yard and roll up the rugs and dance until sunup, were gone and done for. Now especially the young ones wanted to jump into a car on Saturday night and run down to Hargrave where whiskey and beer were legal and there were picture shows and places where you could drink and listen to the jukebox and dance. In fact, you could go and do those things on any night except Sunday. Hargrave was the great world, in a small way. Down there they did distinguish the masses from the classes. There was real money in Hargrave, and real poverty, and public virtue, and semiprivate depravity. There was always something of interest going on that you had to pay to get into. A bachelor barber of limited means in Port William, where most of the entertainment was free, obviously needed to pass downward to Hargrave now and again. And so I bought the car, and with the help of a lot of free advice learned to drive it, and went down to Hargrave and got myself licensed.
The car was an old green Dodge sedan from the age before the war. I bought it, on time, from Mr. Milo Settle, who halfway did not want to sell it to me, for he had so enjoyed having it to sell. He gave me a look and a snort, and said, “Boy, where have you got any business going?”
After I had bought it, I was secretly a little horrified by it. When I was not driving it, which was nearly all the time, it sat with a complacent expression in the driveway beside the shop, seeming to be eating and digesting my money. Like certain women I had encountered out in the great world, it would not be available unless paid. It was quite a nice car, except that it needed a new set of rings. When I drove it, a great cloud of blue smoke rose behind it. A number of people told me that from the Grandstand on a clear winter day they could watch my progress all the way to Hargrave, as if I had been driving a steam engine.
I was not quick in making up my mind to get the engine overhauled—that required five years. Otherwise, I took good care of the car, as I did of everything I spent money on. I drove it very little, rarely going any farther than Hargrave. I never drove it over forty miles per hour, and seldom that fast. I did not enjoy being inside a machine that was under any kind of a strain. Though it had never had so much as a dent and I kept it as shiny and new-looking as I could, the sight of it easily reminded me of wreckage. Because the nicer it looked the more fragile it appeared to be, and because I was always a little afraid of it, the old Dodge and I often seemed to be on the verge of becoming junk, flesh and metal beyond the help of money. The thought of that would make me grunt. It seemed to me more than a little hellish to be traveling by fire. And yet there were times when I would see in my mind’s eye my shiny and stately car passing down through the river bottoms toward Hargrave, gliding smoothly onward in front of its plume of smoke, its engine madly and almost silently whirling under the hood, and I would be deeply impressed. I called it the Port William Zephyr.
Why did I need to go to Hargrave? For one thing, I needed a haircut every couple of weeks or so. The barber I patronized was a large, clumsy man named Violet Greatlow, whose shop was in the living room of an old brick farmhouse on the edge of town. Violet had married past middle age a woman as large in girth though not so tall as himself, and the floor of the shop was always strewn with the fruit of his loins and various playthings. Violet was always saying, “Honey, sweetheart, watch out of the way now so Daddy don’t tramp on your little laigs.” I enjoyed the homey atmosphere, and I found Violet a source of endless wonder and delight.
I never told him I was a fellow barber, and if he knew he never said so. He wasn’t much of a listener, not a great payer of attention to things outside his head.
When I first went to him, I said, “Do you give discounts to bald customers?”
He said, “Young feller, I don’t charge for cutting; I charge for knowing when to stop.”
Violet was a semi-drunk, an inventor, a great talker. His purpose in telling his elaborate tales seemed to be to reduce them finally to the lowest platitude. “Well, sir,” he would say, concluding, decisively clearing his throat, “you never know, do you?” Or: “It takes all kinds to make a world.” Or: “Well, it’s a fact, ain’t it, that there ain’t nothing certain in this world but death and three good meals a day.”
Or he would say, out of the midst of one of his rare silences: “I’m telling you what—I don’t know what we’re going to do about this goddamned government. It’s getting bad. Do you know that?”
Violet believed that you couldn’t tell he was drunk if he chewed caraway seeds. In truth, it was hard anyhow to tell when he was drinking, he was by nature so stolid and deliberate and firm on his feet. The best evidence that he was drunk was that he pulled out about as much hair as he cut off. When I was his only customer, I would always sit down in one of his waiting chairs as if I had come in to visit. If I smelled the faintest hint of caraway, I would listen to him a while and then leave.
As an inventor, Violet was not quite the Thomas Edison of his time. During the war, I remember, he invented a tank that was so big it would have to be rafted across the water on two aircraft carriers. It would scarcely ever have to shoot. It could destroy a good-sized town merely by running over it. Like most of Violet’s inventions, this one was all in his mind. He had offered his idea to the government in a letter he wrote one day with his bitten pencil, but had received no answer. “Now, I want you to tell me,” he said, “can you beat that?”
Violet’s greatest true-life adventure was the long afternoon he had spent locked up in jail. He had been, for want of a client, more than half asleep, lounging in the barber chair after he had eaten his dinner, when Loony Riggins, the jailer, came rushing in to get him to cut a prisoner’s hair. The prisoner needed to look good for his appearance in court.
“You just as well come on right now,” Loony said. “I’ll let you in and let you right back out when you’re done.”
And so Violet (in the spirit strictly of public service, for he did not enjoy these assignments) allowed himself to be transported to the jail and locked into a cell with the needy prisoner. Loony went out with a great clanking of metal doors and clicking and clashing of locks. In the silence that followed, the prisoner sat in a chair and submitted to Violet’s cutting and combing, which did greatly improve his looks. The newly barbered prisoner looked, Violet thought, “respectable and maybe even honest.”
When the job was done, and five and ten and then fifteen minutes passed without so much as a message from Loony, Violet began to get nervous. He ran out of anything to say to the prisoner whose hair he had cut, and sweat broke out on his face. He tiptoed and leaned this way and that, trying to catch sight of some free man in the outer world who might be called to, but he saw no one.
“He ain’t going to come back,” said the prisoner in the next cell with no attempt to disguise his pleasure. “You might as well make yourself at home.”
When Violet turned his sweaty face to look at him, the prisoner in the next cell grinned at him with several golden teeth and said, “It’s lucky you didn’t bring them scissors of yours. We would cut your wee-wee off.”
&n
bsp; In fact, Violet had prided himself on his foresight in not bringing his scissors to the jail. Nobody had had to tell him not to. He made out with just his clippers and a comb.
But the prisoner in the next cell had no sooner made his disrespectful remark about Violet’s wee-wee than Violet put his hand into his pants pocket and recognized there the shape and heft of his pocketknife, which was sharp.
This complicated his mind. “There I was,” he said, “just as much a prisoner as if I had committed a crime and got caught, an innocent man in there with, for all I knew, felons and murderers—in danger. And that son of a bitch didn’t do a thing but sit there all afternoon grinning at me, with them gold teeth! I tell you what, I’m telling you right now, I was in a heck of a fix.”
Fortunately, there were only two prisoners, the one now honest in appearance and the one with the gold teeth.
Violet found that there was a corner he could stand in with nobody behind him, watching both of the prisoners and also the door of the jail for the return of Loony Riggins, his deliverer. All afternoon as he stood there, pretending not to be worried, his hands were deep in his pants pockets, keeping track of his wee-wee and his knife.
That afternoon lasted a month, maybe a year. By suppertime, Violet said, he had got a lot older, and was hungry too.
“One of them flunkeys brought in supper—as bad a food as ever I eat—and I said, ‘I want out of here.’”
“And he said, ‘I don’t know nothing about you getting out of here. I ain’t received no orders to that effect.’”
Loony didn’t come back until dark, after Violet had given up all hope, and he came hurrying because he had suddenly remembered that he had forgotten Violet.
“I didn’t know whether to kiss him or kill him,” Violet said. He thought of doing both, and then he did neither, for it was wonderful to be free.
Of course, a man does not have to buy a car in order to get his hair cut (though there have been worse reasons). That was just an incidental advantage. What I really got the car for was to participate in the nighttime social life of Hargrave. I was already participating, but I was getting tired of riding down there on the running boards of cars and in the back ends of trucks, and then maybe having to walk home. And so I squandered some of my savings and some of my wages in the interest of living life more fully and abundantly.
To be plain about it, I was lonesome. I wanted the company of women. The male society of my shop was pretty steadily available, and it provided a great variety of intelligence and amusement. But in Port William, for the reasons I have named, I was pretty much denied the society of women. Oh, at church and other places I would be among women, but I would not be with them. Maybe this is not easy to explain. It is not exactly a hardship but it is not a pleasure either to be among women who know you are there but don’t look at you, or who speak to you in a distant and resolutely friendly way as if you might be anybody on earth except in particular yourself.
It was longing for the society of women that sent me smoking down to Hargrave, where I would dance the awkward jig of ineligible and undyingly hopeful bachelorhood. I wanted to talk with women while being looked straight at. I wanted to joke and laugh and flirt with women. I wanted to be with women who would let you do something nice for them—take them to the picture show, buy them some supper, hold open the car door while they got in and out, give them a little present of some kind. Whatever rewards might lie beyond would be fine with me, but in those days what I elaborated in my waking dreams were the possible pleasures of the mere society of women.
My situation seemed to call for the society of bold women, who would not be put off by my ineligibility, my semi-youth, my rather obscure handsomeness. They did not need to be women of the higher type, or of penetrating intelligence. Like many another man in my position, I rambled among the beer joints and roadhouses, and enjoyed mostly the society of barmaids and waitresses. Because of my duties at the shop, I would often get to Hargrave late. I would park the Zephyr and go into the dim light and the mixed smells of spilled beer and cooking meat and disinfectant and urine and perfume and sweat, as pungent as a fox’s den. If I could—if I didn’t get hailed by any of my Port William colleagues—I would sit at a booth or table by myself and order a beer.
Sometimes I would just sit there by myself and drink my beer while Mr. Ernest Tubb, on the jukebox, wished that his blue moon once again would turn to gold. He did not wish it prettily, I thought, but he wished it sincerely. After a couple of beers I would wish it sincerely also.
If it was late enough and business was slow, one of the waitresses might come and sit down with me, and we would visit. These women were bold enough to suit anybody—they were knowing and unsurprised—and the ones that liked me I liked back. Often one or another would go out with me after closing time, or we would arrange a date for the picture show on Sunday night.
Sometimes, at first, my nights in Hargrave would have no social result at all. Or the only social result of a Saturday night would be a date for a picture show on Sunday night, and I would have to bum another ride to Hargrave and maybe walk home after the show. It was completely awkward, and I would have to ask afterward why I had gone to so much trouble for so little pleasure. So you can see why I bought the Zephyr. But even after I got the car, there would be a sort of hangover of vanity and futility—much hankering and trouble in return for satisfactions that were small and fleeting. And then I got together with Clydie.
My favorite sitting and beer-drinking place was the Rosebud Cafe, just a few steps off the courthouse square. It was a friendly, homey place that served generous hamburgers, and excellent fried oysters in the months whose names contained an r. After a while (I had just entered the era of the Zephyr), Clydie came to work there. She was Clyda Greatlow—Violet Greatlow’s niece, in fact. But whereas the Greatlows tended to be large and lumbering (“swole-gutted,” Burley Coulter called them) and dark, Clydie was slender (“a mite on the buxom side of scrawny,” she would say), quick on her feet, and a freckled redhead. She had a lot of humor but no nonsense.
I got so I really liked her. And she seemed to like me. When she got a break in her work she would come and sit with me. I would give her a cigarette and light it for her, and she would relax for a few minutes and we would talk. It was a little scrap of homelife we would have then. We would exchange the news about ourselves and tell each other our stories. When we met we both were more or less thirty-four. I was feeling a little shelf-worn, and maybe she was too.
Clydie lived with and, I believe, pretty much supported her widowed mother, Mrs. Sigurnia Greatlow, and her old-maid aunt, Aunt Beulah. Miss Sigurnia and Aunt Beulah were elderly and needed some looking after. Clydie never said so, but I think she might already have married somebody if she had not been caught in obligation to the old ladies. She was Miss Sigurnia’s only child and didn’t feel she could leave, and it wasn’t the sort of household a young woman would feel like bringing a husband into. They lived in a rickety big old white frame house in not the best part of town. Miss Sigurnia was deaf and tended to stay either somewhat behind or out of the running entirely, crocheting an interminable sequence of doilies and listening to “Ma Perkins” and “Our Gal Sunday” and “The Romance of Helen Trent” on the radio turned up to thunderous volume. The roost was ruled by Aunt Beulah, who had her ways from which she deviated no more than a train from the track. Her hearing was as sharp as Miss Sigurnia’s was dull. Aunt Beulah could hear the dust motes collide in a sunbeam; she could hear spiders chewing on flies. Aunt Beulah thought the world had done her a long list of disservices, and she kept the list faithfully and knew it by heart and recited it often. She was, in fact, a sort of old-age version of Cecelia Overhold. She felt that the entire population of Hargrave had failed to recognize her innate superiority. “People in Hargrave,” she would often say, “don’t know whom I am.” She was in favor of perfection and hated everything that was not perfect, and for this she had God’s permission. I liked hearing Clydie tell
stories about Aunt Beulah because they were fairly terrifying, and because Clydie had the grace to think they were funny. Clydie’s life was poor and hard enough, but in her stories and her laughter you never felt any suggestion of complaint. You felt strength. She had the courage of a bear.
I was a longish time asking Clydie to go out with me. I was enjoying things as they were, and I was afraid she would turn me down, which would change things. I had seen that she was a woman of penetrating intelligence. Somehow I had learned that she had a boyfriend who came to Hargrave during the tobacco market and who returned from time to time to see her. But I noticed that in her conversations with me, which were getting more familiar, she never mentioned this other fellow, and that made me think the way might be clear.
I couldn’t bear to ask her during one of our conversations, because it would have interrupted something I did not want interrupted. But one night when I had ordered a beer and she had brought it, and “San Antonio Rose,” a particular favorite of mine, was playing on the jukebox, and the singer sang, “Be-neath the stars all alo-one,” I said, “Fair maiden, might I have the inexpressible pleasure of escorting you to the picture show?”
She painted me a brief mustache with the wet rag she was carrying in her hand, and went her way.
In a little while, though, when she got a break she came back and sat down. She looked straight at me, for I was watching her and waiting, and said, “Why, sure. When?”
I would be pleased to say I loved her, but “liked” is probably the better word. I liked her hugely and thoroughly and admired her and was in a way crazy about her, but I did not love her in the way that, later, I would come to love Mattie Chatham. She did not overly occupy my mind when we were apart. Though she gave me much happiness, I did not long for her. I think I took my cue from her in this, and she defined for us the way we would be. We were dear companions, but we were independent. I think she always kept her other beau, the tobacco buyer from somewhere down south, and we both pretended that I didn’t know it.