“It’s Aunt Sally,” Lewis said. “It looks like she’s been usin the bedpan and dumpin it out the window.”
The old man’s heart sank. Sure as anything, they’d lay it all to him.
Lewis had come up to them now and stood three, four feet away, still holding the boy’s hand, looking like a helpless little boy himself, miserably watching Ginny. James compressed his lips, still clumsily patting his daughter’s arms on the fat place just below the shoulders, and could think of nothing to say but “There, there now, honey. There there, sweet-hot.” It was time—more than time—to get the milkers changed, and if he didn’t get down to it pretty quick, he thought, he’d have his milkers kicked clear past the barnyard. “Sweet-hot, I gotta change the milkers,” he said. Ginny nodded, vocally drawing in breath, getting her crying in control at last, and he patted her arms two or three more times then left her, went over to the Guernsey that was next in line and hung the strap over her back. He stooped to take the milker from the cow in the next stanchion, turned off the air, and stepped carefully across the gutter to dump the milk from the filled-up machine into the pail. By the whitewashed post six feet away the cats sat watching, soft and tame looking as pillows on a couch, though if you touched one you’d likely lose a finger. He went over to the cats’ post and splashed a little leftover milk into their dish, an old dented lid from a ten-gallon can, then went back, still doubled over, to put the milker on the cow he’d just strapped.
Ginny, better now, came down the line to where he was working and was able to speak, though she wasn’t entirely through crying. Lewis and Dickey came part way, too. She said, “How could she do it? She must be senile!”
Lewis said. “Could be that. When my gramp got old, he use to walk around the house with ah his clothes off, carryin a bucket.”
“I just don’t know what to do,” Ginny said. Her head was stuffed up and she kept sniffing. “We can’t put Aunt Sally in a Home. They cost a fortune.”
James knew pretty well that he’d better speak up; but all he could bring himself to say at the moment was, “Oh, I wouldn’t worry, if I was you, bout Sally bein senile.”
“Well then she’s crazy,” Ginny said, “and that’s worse.” It looked as if she was about to cry again. Lewis was shaking his head, thinking God knows what. The boy was leaning far over, pulling Lewis’s arm out straight, dangling a piece of straw over the cats.
James straightened up enough to walk and stepped over the gutter, hanging the strap around his neck as he walked. Little as he cared, right now, for that witch of a sister, it wasn’t in his nature to leave the error stand. “I doubt that a doctor’d call her crazy,” he said.
“I don’t know, though,” Lewis said, noncommittal, “you can’t say it’s normal, emptying your potty out the window, and in the front of the house.”
“Prob’ly couldn’t get to the bathroom,” James said, equally noncommittal, and stepped back across the gutter to hang the strap on the cow due next. “So-o-o bahss,” he said.
Ginny’s head swung around. “You locked her in again ?”
He pressed his forehead against the cow’s warm belly. “Nope,” he said. “Just saw to it she didn’t change her mind about stayin in her room. Used the aht of pahsuasion.”
They waited. When he said no more, Ginny asked, “Dad, what did you do ?”
So again he was in the wrong. It was always nobody’s fault but his. “Whant you go look for yourself?” he said. His jaw stiffened and his voice stepped higher with indignation and self-pity. His faith in laconic truth cracked and gave way like the wall of a haybarn now, broken by the weight of the injustices done him. “Look with your own two eyes and you’ll know I ain’t lying,” he said. “You mistrust I chopped off her head, you two? Well mebby so. You go look. Ain’t that the custahd, though? Sally can do ennathing she pleases in my house, and the minute I try’n put a stop to’t, I be a criminal. No end to’t! It’s just like them terrorists. They can shoot the police like they was squirrels in a tree, and nobody says one blessed word, but let some Government shoot five convicted terrorists, and there be letters gonna come from all hell and gone! It’s just like the Italians. Write down the truth about the Mafia in some book—how they’ll shoot a man quick-er’n they’ll look him in the eye, even shoot John F. Kennedy, and the country can go knit—and before ye can say Jack Robinson they got you in court, fightin off the Italian League cause you made it seem some of ’em ain’t honest.” He had the milking machine on now, rhythmically chugging, and came back across the gutter. “Ah my life I been fair’s I know how to be, and you know it, the both of you, and with Sally there was never but one thing I balked at, which is the root of all the rest, and it’s that blame TV. ‘You could’ve had her keep it in her room,’ you’ll say to me, but I tell you that ain’t true, it want possible. I’d still have heard the rumble, and I’d’ve known what sickness and filth it was spewing through my house. You might as well tell me I should let people murder little children, long’s they do it in their room. You’ll say it ain’t the same. Well I don’t care to argue. I believe it’s the same. I set there by the fire every night for two weeks and watched it, as fair as any man in a jury box, and I’ll even admit I saw one or two things I thought was more-less hahmless. But on the whole I say it was filth and corruption: murderers and rapists, drug addicts, long-hairs, hosses and policemen till yer so weary ye could spit except your mouth’s too tired. Half-naked women with microphones, stretchin out their long, limp ahms to you and puckerin and smilin with all their big, glassy teeth, singin you the damn foolest songs you ever heard, mostly bedroom talk. Quiz-shows where people go insane to get some money, news that goes jumpin around from one thing to another like a blame three-ring circus that’s in a hurry to get struck, and no more attempt to make sense of what you’re seein than a ten-cent get-well cahd from the drugstore. Sober conversations about the failure of America and religion and the family, as if there want no question about the jig bein up, and sober conversation bout how a man that’s homosexual is just as nahmal as you or me—” A catch came into his voice and he broke off abruptly.
Ginny stared at him, shocked, her heart going out to him. She’d never heard such a tirade from him, never more than glimpsed the anger and helplessness now suddenly made plain. Even Dickey understood, standing by the wall with a guilty look, as if everything were his fault. As for Lewis, she realized glancing at him now that he’d probably understood from the beginning. She could only stand with her mouth open. Staring at the tremor in her father’s cheek, watching him go past her, angry as a bot and close to tears, taking the pail of warm milk up to the milkhouse, she saw from inside him what it was like to be old and uncomfortable, cheated, ground down by life and sick to death of it. As if suddenly coming to, she started after him. “Dad, I’m sorry,” she said.
“Of course you’re sorry,” he snapped back.
“Listen,” she added quickly, “I’ll fix you supper.” Though his walk was slow, ordinarily, she had to hurry now to keep up with him. He moved bent over and tilted to one side, compensating for the weight of the brim-full pail, driving along swiftly and solidly like a hurrying, tipped tractor, one back wheel in the furrow. You might have thought he weighed tons. Tears shone in paths down his cheeks, which increased his fury.
“You won’t fix suppah,” he said, “when you see what I done in there.”
“You didn’t hurt her?” she asked, but even that had now no accusation in it.
“No, course not, course not.”
“I’ll fix you supper,” she said. They were going up the stairs now. The stairs were narrow and she had to drop behind.
“Don’t want you to,” he said. A little milk sloshed out and quickly went tan on the step. He pushed through the milkhouse door, where the light was suddenly bright and everything was clean, efficient, the icy air pungent with the smell of some powerful detergent, and he slid off the stainless-steel milktank cover and with both hands lifted the pail up to dump the milk in.
br /> “You don’t want me to fix supper?” she said.
“Wouldn’t be fair, now would it,” he said. “Give me an unfair advantage.”
“What are you talking about?”
His eyes narrowed, brilliant icy blue in this bright, bright light. “It’s a battle of the bowels, ye see,” he said, and gave a quick, fierce smile though he was as angry and unhappy as ever. “There sits Sally up there on her hunger strike, prov’n if she can that I can’t suhvive without her, tryin to bring me low the way Gandhi did the British, or unions do the companies. Fair enough, I say. We’ll see who needs who! But I’ll tell you this for certain: I’ll outlast yer Aunt Sally as sure as I’m standin here, long as she don’t cheat. And just to make sure she don’t come sneakin to my kitchen and stealin food like a rat in the granary, breakin the agreement, I’m takin certain special precautions to see that she stays right there in that room like she claims she intends to.”
“You two have agreed on all this?” Ginny asked.
“Not in so many words,” he said. “But we ain’t exactly strangers, Sally and me.” He put the metal cap over the tank-hole again and started for the door. Lewis and Dickey came in just as he was about to go out. He stepped back, making way, and Lewis and Dickey did the same. “Come on through,” her father said, jerking his arm, and at once, sheepishly, they obeyed.
Ginny said, “Dad, if I make you supper it’ll be over all the sooner. She’ll see you’ve got others who can do for you if she won’t.”
He paused for an instant and slightly turned his head. “You plannin to come feed me for as long as I’m stubborn enough to stay here on the fahm?”
She blushed. “No, of course not. You know how far it is.” She was getting out cigarettes; smoking in the milkhouse was all right, there was nothing here to burn.
“Then it wouldn’t be fair. I’ll beat her my own way, by tunkit.” He started down the steps into the dimness, into the chugging of the milking machines and the oceanic rumble of the cows’ chewing, and said not another word.
“That’s an obstinate old man,” Lewis mentioned, as if to the lightbulb.
“Dad,” Ginny called, “let me take the house key.”
The old man stopped, set down the pail, and, holding his trousers with his left hand, just below the pocket, wormed down in with his right to find the key.
Outside the milkhouse, to their surprise, it was dark now. The sky was full of stars. Up the hill, there was only one light on in the house, Aunt Sally’s. A chicken ducked out of the way, looking up, and said something.
She’d been in her room now for two nights and days, without a single bite to eat, or so Ginny believed, yet Aunt Sally was unchastened. She was more stubborn than ever and wouldn’t even answer when she was spoken to. Sometimes, intending to infuriate, she would hum a little. Ginny’s father could say what he liked, it was at least a little bit senile, that behavior. And so was his, of course. Halfway up the stairs she’d glimpsed, at the rim of her peripheral vision, the trap that was almost directly above her, and she’d been so shocked she’d almost fallen—would have fallen, probably, if Lewis, coming up behind her, hadn’t seen and reached forward to steady her.
“Lewis, we’ve got to get it down!” she’d said.
He’d pursed his lips, looking up, not completely in agreement.
“Make sure Dickey stays out of here,” she remembered to instruct him then. “He mustn’t see it.”
Lips still pursed, the side of one finger brushing at his moustache, Lewis slowly turned, still looking up, then went back downstairs. She heard his voice rumbling in the living room, talking with Dickey, telling him, presumably, to get the blocks out and play. “Aunt Sally,” she said sternly, “I’m warning you, I’ve just about had it with these stupid childish antics of yours.” She listened. No answer. She felt compelled to add, for fairness’ sake. “Dad’s too. You’re both acting like you’ve gone dotty or something. Aunt Sally are you going to answer me or not?”
No answer.
Lewis put his head in at the foot of the stairs. “Sweet-hot,” he called, “I think I’ll go out to the cah and bring in the tools.”
“Tools?” she said.
“I thought I’d stot scrapin the paint off.”
“What?”
“Be right back,” he said.
“Lewis, we got to take this gun down!”
But he was gone. When he came back, three minutes later, with a cardboard box that had scraping knives and steelwool, cans and bottles, rags, a screwdriver, a hammer, and a putty knife, she decided for some reason not to mention the gun just this moment. It was wrong of her, she knew, and she half believed that in a minute she was bound to bring it up again; but for now she put it off. Aunt Sally was still refusing to answer, which made Virginia Hicks simply furious, as angry as she’d been, as she was growing up, when a cow got out and was so stupid it couldn’t find the fence-hole and be driven back in. If she could get her two hands on the old woman right now, heaven only knew what she’d do to her. But it was more than that. Her father’s extraordinary outpouring of anger and grief, out in the barn, was still fresh with her, and in Ginny’s heart, whatever fairness might dictate, the choice between the two of them was no contest.
She heard the back door open and scrape closed again, her father coming in from the milking, moving slowly. Filled again with pity, she listened for his footsteps moving toward the kitchen, carrying tonight’s milk for the house to the white porcelain pitcher in the refrigerator; but she could hear nothing now, the sound was drowned out by Lewis’s scraper, gritching through the dry white enamel almost down into the wood. He was starting on the molding, taking off the old paint in two-inch wide strokes, making it look easy.
“Why are you doing that, Lewis?” she asked.
He pretended not to hear.
She let it pass. “Aunt Sally?” she called. She tapped on the bedroom wall, keeping back from the strings. “Aunt Sally, if we take this thing down, will you come and have supper?” She stared at the end of her cigarette and listened.
No answer.
“If you don’t, you know, I couldn’t care less,” she called.
Lewis said, casting his voice above the scraper’s noise, not turning, “She’s a smot cookie, refusin to talk to us. Makes us feel more guilty.”
It was true. Since Aunt Sally would say nothing, Ginny found herself saying in her mind what Aunt Sally disdained to say, thinking up justifications. She could understand well enough her father’s hatred of television. He belonged to a different world and time than the rest of them did, even Aunt Sally, and the hatred he felt for all things shoddy, according to his lights, didn’t even seem, in Ginny’s mind, particularly cranky or unnatural, though she liked TV herself. What he said when he ranted and raved had a fair amount of truth to it. Once when their own TV had come back after two months in the shop, she’d seen it for a while—perhaps two, three days—with entirely new eyes. She’d noticed how tiresomely gay things were if they were supposed to be funny, how tiresomely earnest if they were supposed to be mysteries, how program after program had boats or motorcycles in them, as if the same half-wit mind, or eleven-year-old mind, maybe, had written every single story. On any given night it was common to see three different programs in which people were murdered in exactly the same way, drowned in a bathtub or run over by a bulldozer; or three different programs in which a girl was threatened by urban witches; or three different programs in which someone said, word-for-word the same, “Walter! Something’s happened!” or “No use, she’s dead”; and six in which someone said, “Hold your fire!” and maybe twenty in which someone said, “Drop it and turn around slow!” (She wondered if anyone had ever said that, ever even once, in the real world.) The commercials were no relief, buzzing in again and again like flies, sometimes in two hours one of them repeating up to five or six times until at sight of that waterfall or horse or snowmobile or slow-motion swing of some pretty girl’s hair you felt your vital signs weakening, or yo
ur hackles going up like a tomcat’s. And she could easily understand why her father thought them evil: they prostituted children, hard-selling Pop-tarts with a three-year-old’s smile, selling washing soap or toothpaste or imitation orange juice by sweet displays of five-year-olds with footballs. It was all a kind of crime against decency and goodness, when you thought about it. You could never again see a white country church, or a cute little puppy or kitten, without thinking of some mouthwash.
But it was silly, all the same, to worry about it. For all its faults, she’d hate to have to live, herself, without her color TV. Perhaps it was true, as magazines kept saying, that somewhere in the world—in big-city ghettos, presumably, or in the suburbs where rich people’s children all took drugs—there were people who did the things they saw on TV. If so that was too bad, but she and Lewis weren’t about to snap matches into somebody’s eyes because they’d seen it on Kojak. For them it was all harmless make-believe, trivial and insignificant as stovepipe potatoes, and they would stretch out in their chairs in the darkened room, Lewis with his bottle of ginger ale, she with her cigarettes and coffee, and they would rest after the wearying activities of the day, turn their minds from the bills that somehow never got paid, piled on the kitchen table, and the repairs around the house that would never be finished no matter how hard they worked, and they’d relax and let the noise and pictures bathe over them for an hour or two or three, drifting off occasionally, waking when the music got ominous or sugary to watch some character whose name and significance they’d failed to notice fall screaming off a cliff or be run over by a train or kiss some beautiful woman on the mouth and throat. It was a way of life, nothing more than that but nothing less, either. Having it taken away when you were used to it—as her father in his righteousness had taken it from Aunt Sally—would be a terrible deprivation. For Aunt Sally especially, when it came to that. TV was her link, almost the only one left, with life as she’d known it in North Bennington. They had concerts there, from time to time. (Ginny’s father had never heard a concert in his life.) And in North Bennington people had all the latest gadgets. It was at Aunt Sally’s and Uncle Horace’s that Ginny had seen her first Saran Wrap, her first plastic dishes, her first dishwasher, her first TV dinner. Coming to Ginny’s father’s must have been, for Aunt Sally, like sinking back to the Dark Ages. Shooting her TV was like locking her away in a dungeon.