Next morning Cora was up before the sun had warmed the strawberry patch or the wind had stirred the pines.
Benjy was sitting up in his cot when Cora returned from the mailbox. ‘Too early,’ he said. ‘Postman won’t drive by yet.’
‘Drive by?’
‘They come in cars this far out.’
‘Oh.’ Cora sat down.
‘You sick, Aunt Cora?’
‘No, no.’ She blinked. ‘It’s just, I don’t recall in twenty years seeing no mail truck whistle by here. It just came to me. All this time. I never seen no mailman at all.’
‘Maybe he comes when you’re not around.’
‘I’m up with the fog spunks, down with the chickens. I never really gave it a thought, of course, but—’ She turned to look out the window, up at Mrs Brabbam’s house. ‘Benjy, I got a kind of sneaking hunch.’ She stood up and walked straight out of the cabin, down the dust path, Benjy following, across the thin road to Mrs Brabbam’s mailbox. A hush was on the fields and bills. It was so early it made you whisper.
‘Don’t break the law, Aunt Cora!’
‘Shh! Here.’ She opened the box, put her hand in like someone fumbling in a gopher hole. ‘And here, and here.’ She rattled some letters into his cupped hands.
‘Why, these been opened already! You open these, Aunt Cora?’
‘Child, I never touched them.’ Her face was stunned. ‘This is the first time in my life I ever even let my shadow touch this box.’
Benjy turned the letters around and around, cocking his head. ‘Why, Aunt Cora, these letters, they’re ten years old!’
‘What!’ Cora grabbed at them.
‘Aunt Cora, that lady’s been getting the same mail every day for years. And they’re not even addressed to Mrs Brabbam, they’re to some woman named Ortega in Green Fork.’
‘Ortega, the Mexican grocery woman! All these years,’ whispered Cora, staring at the worn mail in her hands. ‘All these years.’
They gazed up at Mrs Brabbam’s sleeping house in the cool quiet morning.
‘Oh, that sly woman, making a commotion with her letters, making me feel small. All puffed out she was, swishing along, reading her mail.’
Mrs Brabbam’s front door opened.
‘Put them back, Aunt Cora!’
Cora slammed the mailbox shut with time to spare.
Mrs Brabbam drifted down the path, stopping here or there, quietly, to peer at the opening wild flowers.
‘Morning,’ she said sweetly.
‘Mrs Brabbam, this is my nephew Benjy.’
‘How nice.’ Mrs Brabbam, with a great swivel of her body, a flourish of her flour-white hands, rapped the mailbox as if to shake the letters loose inside, flipped the lid, and extracted the mail, covering her actions with her back. She made motions, and spun about merrily, winking, ‘Wonderful! Why, just look at this letter from dear Uncle George!’
‘Well, ain’t that nice!’ said Cora.
Then the breathless summer days of waiting. The butterflies jumping orange and blue on the air, the flowers nodding about the cabin, and the hard, constant sound of Benjy’s pencil scribbling through the afternoons. Benjy’s mouth was always packed with food, and Tom was always stomping in, to find lunch or supper late, cold, or both, or none at all.
Benjy handled the pencil with a delicious spread of his bony hands, lovingly inscribing each vowel and consonant as Cora hovered about him, making up words, rolling them on her tongue, delighted each time she saw them roll out on the paper. But she wasn’t learning to write. ‘It’s so much fun watching you write, Benjy. Tomorrow I’ll start learning. Now take another letter!’
They worked their way through ads about Asthma, Trusses, and Magic, they joined the Rosicrucians, or at least sent for a free Sealed Book all about the Knowledge that had been damned to oblivion, Secrets from hidden ancient temples and buried sanctuaries. Then there were free packets of Giant Sunflower seeds, and something about HEARTBURN. They had worked back to page 127 of Quarter Murder Magazine on a bright summer morning when…
‘Listen!’ said Cora.
They listened.
‘A car,’ said Benjy.
And up the blue hills and through the tall fiery green pines and along the dusty road, mile by mile, came the sound of a car riding along and along, until finally, at the bend, it came full thundering, and in an instant Cora was out the door running, and as she ran she heard and saw and felt many things. First, from the corner of her eye, she saw Mrs Brabbam gliding down the road from the other direction. Mrs Brabbam froze when she saw the bright green car boiling on the grade, and there was the whistle of a silver whistle and the old man in the car leaned out just before Cora arrived and said, ‘Mrs Gibbs?’ ‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘Mail for you, ma’am,’ he said, and held it toward her. She put out her hand, then drew it back, remembering. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘please, would you mind, would you put it, please…in my mailbox?’ The old man squinted at her, at the mailbox, back at her, and laughed. ‘Don’t mind,’ he said, and did just that, put the mail in the box.
Mrs Brabbam stood where she was, not moving, eyes wild. ‘Any mail for Mrs Brabbam?’ asked Cora.
‘That’s all.’ And the car dusted away down the road.
Mrs Brabbam stood with her hands clenched together. Then, without looking in her own letter box, turned and rustled swiftly up her path, out of sight.
Cora walked around her mailbox twice, not touching it for a long time. ‘Benjy, I’ve got me some letters!’ She reached in delicately and took them out and turned them over. She put them quietly in his hand. ‘Read them to me. Is my name on the front?’
‘Yes’m.’ He opened the first letter with due carefulness and read it aloud in the summer morning:
‘“Dear Mrs Gibbs…”’
He stopped and let her savor it, her eyes half shut, her mouth moving the words. He repeated it for artistic emphasis and then went on: ‘“We are sending you our free folder, enclosed, from the Intercontinental Mailing Schools concerning full particulars on how you, too, can take our Correspondence Course in Sanitary Engineering—”’
‘Benjy, Benjy, I’m so happy! Start over again!’
‘“Dear Mrs Gibbs,”’ he read.
After that the mailbox was never empty. The world came rushing and crowding in, all the places she had never seen or heard about or been to. Travel folders, spicecake recipes, and even a letter from an elderly gentleman who wished for a lady ‘—fifty years old, gentle disposition, money; object matrimony.’ Benjy wrote back, ‘I am already married, but thank you for your kind and thoughtful consideration. Yours truly, Cora Gibbs.’
And the letters continued to pour across the hills, coin collectors’ catalogues, Dime Novelty books, Magic List Numbers, Arthritis Charts, Flea Killer Samples. The world filled up her letter box, and suddenly she was not alone or remote from people. If a man wrote a form letter to Cora about the Mysteries of Ancient Maya Revealed, he was likely as not to receive three letters from Cora in the next week, budding out their formal meeting into a warm friendship. After one particularly hard day of writing, Benjy was forced to soak his hand in Epsom salts.
By the end of the third week Mrs Brabbam no longer came down to her mailbox. She didn’t even come out the front door of her cabin to get the air, for Cora was always down at the road, leaning out, smiling for the mailman.
All too quickly the summer was at an end, or, at least, that part of the summer that counted most, anyway: Benjy’s visit. There was his red bandanna handkerchief on the cabin table, sandwiches folded fresh and oniony in it, tied with a mint sprig to keep it clean to the smell; there on the floor, freshly polished, were his shoes to get into, and there on the chair, with his pencil which had once been long and yellow but was now stubby and chewed, sat Benjy. Cora took hold of his chin and tilted his head, as if she were testing a summer squash of an unfamiliar variety.
‘Benjy, I owe you an apology. I don’t think I looked at your face once in all this time. Seems I k
now every wart on your hand, every hangnail, every bump and every crinkle, but I might pass your face in a crowd and miss you.’
‘It’s no face to look at,’ said Benjy shyly.
‘But I’d know that hand in a million hands,’ Cora said. ‘Let anyone shake my hand in a dark room, a thousand people, and out of all those I’d say, “Well, this one’s Benjy.”’ She smiled quietly and walked away to the open door. ‘I been thinking.’ She looked up at a distant cabin. ‘Ain’t seen Mrs Brabbam in weeks. Stays in all the time now. I’ve got a guilty feeling. I’ve done a prideful thing, a thing more sinful than she ever done me. I took the bottom out of her life. It was a mean and spiteful thing and I’m ashamed.’ She gazed up the hill toward that silent, locked place. ‘Benjy, would you do me one last favor?’
‘Yes’m.’
‘Write a letter for Mrs Brabbam.’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Yes, write one of those companies for a free chart, a sample, something, and sign Mrs Brabbam’s name.’
‘All right,’ said Benjy.
‘That way, in a week or a month the postman’ll come by and whistle, and I’ll tell him to go up to her door, special, and deliver it. And I’ll be sure and be out in my front yard where I can see and Mrs Brabbam can see I see. And I’ll wave my letters to her and she’ll wave her letters to me, and everybody’ll smile.’
‘Yes’m,’ said Benjy.
He wrote three letters, licked the envelopes carefully, stuck them in his pocket. ‘I’ll mail them when I get to St Louis.’
‘It’s been a fine summer,’ she said.
‘It sure has.’
‘But, Benjy, I didn’t learn to write, did I? I was after the letters and made you write late nights, and we were so busy sending labels and getting samples, land, it seemed there wasn’t time to learn. And that means…’
He knew what it meant. He shook her hand. They stood in the cabin door. ‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘for everything.’
Then he was running off. He ran as far as the meadow fence, leaped it easily, and the last she saw of him he was still running, waving the special letters, off into the great world over the hills.
The letters kept coming for some six months after Benjy went away. There would be the postman’s little green car and the sharp ice-rimed shout of good morning, or the whistle, as he clapped two or three pink or blue envelopes into that fine mailbox.
And there was that special day when Mrs Brabbam received her first real letter.
After that the letters were spaced a week apart, then a month, and finally the postman didn’t say hello at all, there was no sound of a car coming up that lonely mountain road. First a spider moved into the mailbox, then a sparrow.
And Cora, while the letters still lasted, would clutch them in her bewildered hands, staring at them quietly until the pressure of her face muscles squeezed clear round shiny drops of water from her eyes. She’d hold up one blue envelope. ‘Who’s this from?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Tom.
‘What’s it say?’ she wailed.
‘Don’t know,’ said Tom.
‘What’s going on in that world out there, oh, I’ll never know, I’ll never know now,’ she said. ‘And this letter, and this one, and this!’ She tumbled the stacks and stacks of letters that had come since Benjy ran off. ‘All the world and all the people and all the happenings, and me not knowing. All that world and people waiting to hear from us, and us not writing, and them not ever writing back!’
And at last the day came when the wind blew the mailbox over. In the mornings again, Cora would stand at the open door of her cabin, brushing her gray hair with a slow brush, not speaking, looking at the hills. And in all the years that followed she never passed the fallen mailbox without stooping aimlessly to fumble inside and take her hand out with nothing in it before she wandered on again into the fields.
The Playground
A thousand times before and after his wife’s death Mr Charles Underhill ignored the Playground on his way to and from his commuters’ limited train. He neither liked nor disliked the Playground; he hardly knew it existed.
But only this morning his sister Carol, who had occupied the empty space across the breakfast table from him each day for six months, quietly broached the subject.
‘Jim’s almost three years old now,’ she said. ‘So tomorrow I’m going to start him at the Playground.’
‘Playground?’ said Mr Underhill.
At his office, he underlined a memorandum with black ink: Look at Playground.
That afternoon, the thunder of the train subsiding in his body, Underhill struck up through town on his usual path home, newspaper tucked crisply under arm to prevent reading himself past the park. So it was, at five-ten in the late day, that he came to the cool iron fence and the open gate of the Playground, and stood for a long, long time, frozen there, gazing in at it all…
At first there seemed absolutely nothing whatever to see. And then as he adjusted his attention outward from his usual interior monologue, the scene before him, a gray, blurred television image, came to a slow focus.
Primarily, he was aware of dim voices, faint underwater cries emerging from a series of vague streaks and zigzag lines and shadows. Then, as if someone had kicked the machine, screams jumped at him in full throat, visions leaped clear. Now he saw the children! They were dashing across the Playground meadow, fighting, pummeling, scratching, falling, every wound bleeding or about to bleed or freshly caked over. A dozen cats thrown among sleeping dogs could not have shrieked as loud. With incredible clarity, Mr Underhill saw the tiniest cuts and scabs on knees and faces.
He weathered the first blast of sound, blinking. His nostrils took over when his eyes and ears retired in panic.
He sniffed the cutting odors of salve, raw adhesive, camphor, and pink Mercurochrome, so strong it lay bitter on his tongue. An iodine wind blew through the steel fence wires which glinted dully in the gray light of the overcast day. The rushing children were hell cut loose in a vast pinball table, colliding, and banging, a totaling of hits and misses, thrusts and plungings to a grand and as yet unforeseen total of brutalities.
And was he mistaken or was the light within the Playground of a peculiar intensity? Every child seemed to possess four shadows: one dark, three faint penumbras which made it strategically impossible to tell which way their swift bodies were racing until they bashed their targets. Yes, the oblique, pressing light made the Playground seem deep, far away, and remote from his touching. Or perhaps it was the hard steel wire fence, not unlike those barriers in zoos, beyond which anything might happen.
A pen of misery, thought Underhill. Why do children insist on making life horrible for each other? Oh, the continual torture. He heard himself sigh with immense relief. Thank God, childhood was over and done for him. No more pinchings, bruisings, senseless passions and shattered dreams.
A gust of wind tore the paper from his hand. He ran after it down the Playground steps. Clutching the paper, he retreated hastily. For in that one brief instant, stranded in the Playground’s atmosphere, he had felt his hat grow too large, his coat too cumbersome, his belt too loose, his shoes too big; he had felt like a small boy playing businessman in his father’s clothes; the gate behind him had loomed impossibly tall, while the sky pressed a huge weight of grayness at his eyes, and the scent of iodine, like a tiger’s breath exhaled upon him, blew his hair. He tripped and almost fell, running back.
He stood outside the Playground, like someone who has just emerged, in shock, from a terrible cold sea.
‘Hello, Charlie!’
He heard the voice and turned to see who had called him. There on top of a metal slide, a boy of some nine years was waving. ‘Hello, Charlie…!’
Mr Charles Underhill raised a hand. But I don’t know that boy, he thought. And why should he call me by my first name?
The boy was smiling high in the misty air, and now, jostled by other yelling children, rushed shrieking down the slide.
&
nbsp; Underhill stood bemused by what he saw. Now the Playground was an immense iron industry whose sole products were pain, sadism, and sorrow. If you watched half an hour there wasn’t a face in the entire enclosure that didn’t wince, cry, redden with anger, pale with fear, one moment or another. Really! Who said Childhood was the best time of life? when in reality it was the most terrible, the most merciless era, the barbaric time when there were no police to protect you, only parents preoccupied with themselves and their taller world. No, if he had his way, he touched the cold fence with one hand, they’d nail a new sign here: TORQUEMADA’S GREEN.
And as for that boy, the one who had called out to him, who was he? There was something familiar there, perhaps in the hidden bones, an echo of some old friend; probably the son of a successfully ulcered father.
So this is the Playground where my son will play, thought Mr Underhill. So this is it.
Hanging his hat in the hall, checking his lean image in the watery mirror, Underhill felt wintry and tired. When his sister appeared, and his son came tapping on mouse feet, he greeted them with something less than full attention. The boy clambered thinly over him, playing King of the Hill. And the father, fixing his gaze to the end of the cigar he was slowly lighting, finally cleared his throat and said, ‘I’ve been thinking about that Playground. Carol.’
‘I’m taking Jim over tomorrow.’
‘Not really? That Playground?’
His mind rebelled. The smell and look of the place were still vivid. That writhing world with its atmosphere of cuts and beaten noses, the air as full of pain as a dentist’s office, and those horrid ticktacktoes and frightening hopscotches under his feet as he picked up his newspaper, horrid and frightening for no reason he could see.
‘What’s wrong with that Playground?’ asked Carol.
‘Have you seen it?’ He paused in confusion. ‘Damn it, I mean, the children there. It’s a Black Hole.’
‘All the children are from well-to-do families.’
‘Well, they shove and push like little Gestapos,’ said Underhill. ‘It’d be like sending a boy to a flour mill to be crushed into meal by a couple of two-ton grinders! Every time I think of Jim playing in that barbaric pit, I freeze.’