The little boy was down on all fours on the rug, running a black and yellow dump truck along the dark outlines of the faded flowers in the pattern. His face was unhealthily red, as his mother’s had been. The line he was on led to his father’s foot and he ran the truck up over his father’s shoe and down again. He looked up at his father, half-smiling, sly. He looked like an elf, the way his bushy blond eyebrows tipped up. Still Henry said nothing.
“How you think Jimmy’s going to feel?” George said.
Henry shook his head and let out a little heave of breath. He sat now with his hands limp in his lap, what there was of his lap—three, four inches, then his knees. His shirt was unbuttoned in two places, showing clammy gray skin and curly gray and black hairs. There were sweat rings under his armpits.
“Damn it all, Henry. I came here to talk with you, and I mean for you to talk. I asked you a question.”
Henry looked anxious. He always looked anxious, because of the way the rolls of fat fell away like the wake of a rowboat from his nose, but now he looked more so. He said, “I’m sorry, George, I’m afraid I’ve forgot what you asked me.
“I said,” George began grimly, hard-jawed—but by now he had forgotten too, and he had to think a minute. “I said, ‘How do you think Jimmy’s going to feel when you’ve killed yourself?’ ”
It sounded in his own ears like something out of Loretta Young. As if out of kindness, Henry said, “I don’t know, George.”
“Well, you’re a damn fool then,” George said, doing his best with a bad start, looking just over Henry’s head. “I mean it. Listen. All you do is stop that blame eating all the time.”
Henry studied the floor, politely not eating the ginger-snap he had now in his hand. George listened to the clock. Outside the open window it was very quiet, bright with moonlight. Nothing moved. At last Henry said, “Maybe that’s the answer, George.”
“Oh, hell,” George said. He felt the way he had felt long ago when his father would ask him, “Where have you been till this hour, young man?” knowing he had been nowhere, as always, had done nothing, as always, had driven his motorcycle around on the mountain roads in the vague hope that something new might happen, that the world might stand suddenly transfigured, transformed to a movie—a gangster picture, a love picture, anything but the tedious ruin it was, a worn-out country (not worn-out enough to be morbidly interesting), worn-out farmers, a worn-out sixteen-year-old boy partly too shy and partly too righteous (all things foul to his dry-rotted mind) even to look through car windows at lovers. He sometimes believed he had known all his life that he’d end up maimed, a brace on one boot, no arm in one sleeve, and no doubt worse yet to come. Once, lately, it had occurred to him that maybe he’d given up his foot and arm voluntarily, sacrificing up pieces of his body like an old-time Delaware to ward off destructions more terrible. It had seemed an interesting idea at first, but thinking about it an instant later he’d seen it for the paltry ruse it was, mere poetry, and, like all poetry, so irrelevant and boring he wanted to smash things.
He came partly awake. A movement of the drape, then stillness. A line from a tedious movie: Maybe that’s the answer, George. Not even patronizing: pure filler. Or it was like the chatter at one of his mother’s old-fashioned teas. Exquisite, they were always saying. Everything was exquisite. (He’d buried his mother in the way she’d wanted to be buried, in an iron casket with a window looking in at her now incorruptible face.) Because Henry knew perfectly well he had come because Callie had asked him, and knew there was nothing to talk about, that either he’d work it out alone or he wouldn’t, and that all the sympathy on earth wouldn’t change it by a hair, because Henry was no moron, after all. He would know without George’s being here that George was pulling for him. (No meaning even in that, really: the prejudice of people who by accidents of place and time were friends.) What more? You had friends, and that was useful to remember, and Henry Soames was not a self-pitying fool who’d forget it, and there it was.
He lit the match, surprised that it worked, since the matchbook cover was soft from the dampness inside his shirt pocket, and raised the match to his cigarette, thinking about cancer. When he’d put the matches away he said, “It’d be easier if you were stupider. Even stupider than you are, I mean.” And now he really did feel a twinge of anger, at nothing specific.
Henry smiled and for a second he was himself again, not working automatically like an old man playing checkers at the GLF.
George said, “I’d be very serious. Grim, you know what I mean? I’d get a glint in my eye, and I’d say—” He became still grimmer, theatrically. “Listen, Henry Soames, you’re feeling guilty, right? You’re saying it was your fault he fell, you might as well killed him outright, and it was wrong. Well, listen, I’ve been through all that myself. Truth. Over in Korea I used to think, ‘Some poor bastard comes at me, he no more wants this war than I do, they took his name from some crumby file and that made him a soljer and here we are.’ But I’ll tell you something. One day there was a Korean sergeant—South Korean, one of ours—tore off the fender from one of our staff cars with his jeep. That afternoon—this is the truth, now—that afternoon a couple of Korean lieutenants and this sergeant drive off with a shovel in the back of their jeep, and when they come back to the base, no sergeant. That’s what they think of human beings. Maybe they’re right and maybe they’re wrong, but when one of them comes after you, you shoot.
“Now you take Simon Bale. Screw, I’d say—” He remembered that the boy was there, but Jimmy didn’t seem to have heard it. He sat leaning his head from side to side, forming motor sounds with his lips, barely letting them out, vrooming the motor as he pushed the toy truck up his legs to his knees and over them and down in a rush to the rug once more to careen along the labyrinth of roads to the higher mountains, the elephantine legs of his father. (That was how Henry had driven in the old days, George remembered—before he’d married Callie.) Henry ran his forearm across the stubbly underside of his chin. The gingersnap that had been in his hand was gone. George leaned forward.
“I’d say, full of righteousness—because I would be right and you would be wrong—‘Simon Bale was the same as one of them Koreans, not civilized. You took him in out of the cold when his house burned and he scared your kid with his talk about the devil and you yelled at him, and out of his own stupidity he fell down the fucking stairs. You ought to have buried him like a cat and forgot it!’ And there we’d be: I’d have you.”
Henry smiled, only his lips, his eyes unfocused. “And what would I say to that if I was smart?” He spoke with his mouth full, and George puffed at the cigarette a minute, uncomfortable and yet half-enjoying the senseless game.
“You’d wipe your forehead and say, ‘Sure is hot.’ He made his voice high and thin, mimicking Henry’s.
Henry nodded, pleased.
George said, “I’d say, ‘Pay attention, damn it. It wasn’t your fault. Face up to it. It’s just the way things came out.’ ‘Oh, it was my fault all right,’ you’d say. ‘Well all right, your fault then,’ I’d say, ‘but you couldn’t help it.’ ‘Oh, I know I couldn’t help it,’ you’d say.”
There was no movement out in the kitchen. Callie would be standing by the sink, listening, hopeless, feeling betrayed—not by George Loomis, exactly. Or by the open door, pressing her forehead to the screen. Betrayed merely by the nature of things, or the nature of men. He looked up at the clock. Five-to-twelve. Henry sat looking out the window, his head tilted, the gingersnap box standing upright in his hand like something up a tree. His nose and mouth and eyes were small in that wide, shiny face. His hair looked thinned by age, like the mohair on an old, old couch, or the hair of a dog with mange.
George said, “You’d say, ‘Now you listen a while.’ You’d tell me, ‘I’d been waiting to kill him a long time—him or somebody or something. People don’t know what they’ve got inside them. Except that Simon Bale did, or he wouldn’t have gone around handing out pamphlets and preaching doo
m. All right. I’d been waiting all my life like a loaded gun and he’d been waiting to drive me to it, and neither of us is to blame for that; a lion’s a lion and a cow’s a cow. But people aren’t only animals. When it’s over, a man gets to judge. After he’s found out, he can say Yes to it, or No. He can say Yes, it was right—no matter who it happened to or where or when—or No, it was wrong.’ And you’d sit there like a grieved hippopotamus.” He realized abruptly where the queer play was taking him and leaned forward farther, feeling sweat prickle on his back as he shifted position. “At last it would hit me, and I’d say: ‘You think you’re God!’ And you’d say, ‘Yes.’ I’d be stopped. Cold. What can you say to a man that’s decided to be God?” His voice cracked. He laughed suddenly, furious.
Henry squinted, thinking about it, or put off by that laugh. Callie stood now in the doorway to his right, the yellow kitchen walls shiny behind her, making her face very dark. Jimmy stood watching the television picture flip. He stood perfectly still now, spent. His face too was dark red, the eyebrows white.
“It would have taken me longer to say,” Henry said. He smiled to show he meant it as a compliment. He was as far away as ever.
George ground out his cigarette in the ash tray from Watkins Glen on the table beside him. “What I can’t understand is how a man with ideas as crazy as that can just set there, chewing away like a cow.”
“Why, they’re your ideas, George,” Henry said.
It startled him. “That’s not true,” he said. He looked at Callie and saw that she too believed it. “Well, shit!” he said. He hit the chair arm with his fist. “They’re not! That just isn’t true!”
The clock began striking, a whir of gears, then twelve sharp, tinny notes. To Callie the strokes of the clock sounded like a voice, bored and scornful. After the last stroke the whir of gears stopped with a click and the room was unnaturally hushed. She waited, but George said nothing more. He went into a new, even queerer act, and Callie suddenly knew as she watched him precisely what George was going to be like when he was old. He cocked his head as if straining for the exactly right word, drew back the corners of his mouth and raised his hand, half-closed as if around an invisible rock. He held that position for a moment, tensely, then smiled, grim, with his head tipped as if to duck something; then, as if realizing there were no words for what he wanted to say, he lowered his hand again, letting the invisible rock roll out between his thumb and index finger. She knew (standing remote as the clock) that there was something he’d been trying to say, something that both she and Henry had missed. And she knew with equal certainty that he had no intention of hunting for a way of saying it now. They’d demanded of him already more than was decent. He was standing up, smiling, shaking his head, saying he had to leave.
“I’m sorry you can’t stay longer,” she said.
He shrugged as if sadly and said good-night to Henry. At the door Prince opened his eyes but didn’t move. George stepped over him.
Outside it was even hotter than inside. The air was lifeless, heavy as dust. She felt faint. “Surely is dry,” she said softly. Something nagged at her thought but refused to come clear.
George Loomis nodded politely. “Keeps on like this it’ll burn up all the corn.”
She looked at his face. He had his head bent now, trying to see his watch in the dark of the porch. The tilt of his head made her think of a raven. Beyond the porch, the moonlight made everything it touched unnaturally sharp: the lines of the diner, the garage, the burdocks, Henry’s old black Ford up on blocks in the high brittle weeds. The mountains seemed very close, right over your head, stifling. She thought as she had thought before, at the kitchen window, looking out and listening to their talk in the living room, Something is coming. Nothing was, she knew. She felt tense, as if walking on a high ledge above dark, fast water. She was sorry for George Loomis, annoyed as she was at his senseless retreat. She should have expected it, of course. Maybe she had.
“Well, sooner or later it’s bound to rain,” she said. “It always does.” She laughed.
“Aeyuh,” he said. He was thinking about something else.
“Thanks ever so much for coming by,” she said.
“Don’t mention it,” he said, “it’s been my pleasure.”
They shook hands, and he went down the steps and limped over the moonlit path to his truck. His hair needed cutting—dark shadow against the bone-white of his ears. Dust rose from the path and hovered like granary sift behind him.
“Good-night, George,” she said.
He half turned, smiling again, nodding, almost bowing.
She thought of her father, then of Henry’s father as he stood in the picture they had upstairs, huge and placid, with a cardigan sweater that was buttoned wrong and under his arm an absurdly small violin. With a part of her mind she heard George Loomis’s truck start up, saw the lights go on, and saw him backing away. Something flew soundlessly past, between the garage and where she stood. She knew what it was, but she couldn’t remember for a moment what it was called.
At last, looking over at the gray-white bench in the garden, she saw the ghost of Simon Bale. He was staring mildly, patiently, at the house. He was bent forward slightly, his knees together, the Bible closed in his lap. One of the bookmark ribbons hung over his knee. When he saw that she was looking at him, he gave a start and reached toward his hat-brim, perhaps about to stand up. But then he vanished, leaving only the shadows of tamaracks on the empty, moonlit bench.
3
It was the next morning, at the crack of dawn, that the Goat Lady—otherwise known as “Mother”—reached New Carthage. You could tell where she was by the smell from a half-mile away, and if your nose wasn’t working you could tell by the noise. She had homemade tin-can bells all over her homemade pink and purple cart, fixed on the sides with fencepost staples and baling wire, and her goats bleated like the seven angels of death. She had a shaggy, dun-colored billygoat and a square, black, six-year-old nanny up in front, pulling as though the rig had no wheels, and there were four more nannies behind, dragging along Indian-file on braided binder twine. Alongside the last of the four was a six-months’ kid. The four nannies in back were the milkers. One of them had tits so big she’d have stepped on them if the Goat Lady hadn’t had them up in a kind of sling made out of some kindly farm-woman’s bedsheet. On top of the cart she had a sign like a housetop—which in fact it was, the cart being the Goat Lady’s house, the rear wall an old tarpaulin—and on the sign, in lettering that looked like a joke from some children’s cartoon book that no child would think funny: MOTHERS GOTS MILK.
The Goat Lady sat up in front like a midget stagecoach driver or a burlesque of the fiery charioteer, her legs splayed out like an elderly madam’s, her skirt hiked up over her dust-specked, yellow-gray thighs, on her head a dusty black bonnet like an Amish woman’s. She had on, despite the muggy heat, every stitch of clothing she owned—a couple of coats, a sweater, three or four dresses, a dark red shawl. She had iron-toed shoes. People that passed her on the highway would run off onto the far shoulder from staring, and when she pulled up onto some farmer’s front lawn to eat her dinner or strip out her goats or try to peddle her goat’s milk and cheese, women would call in their children from outdoors. She had a face that caught the eye and held it, amazing and revolting, flatly inhuman: yellow teeth like an old sick dog’s, eyebrows like a badger’s, an enormous wide-bridged nose very much like—a goat’s. She looked about sixty but she said she was thirty-six, and no doubt it was true. It was unthinkable that the Goat Lady should lie, as unthinkable as that she should cheat or steal or plan. Most people thought she was part Indian; the Indians said she was a Gypsy. If people took her in, nights, fed her, clothed her, provided her with orange pop or root beer, it was not so much out of charity as out of impotence in the face of her boundless gall. The first place she stopped when she reached New Carthage, the Bill Kelsey place, they called the troopers; but there was nothing the troopers could arrest her for. In her old bl
ack purse inside the cart (the troopers said after she’d gone for good), she had three hundred dollars and a gun that was missing a firing pin. People were surprised that the Goat Lady had three hundred dollars, but how she came by her savings was no great mystery. She could no more make change than fly, or if she could she didn’t; she would merely pocket whatever you gave her, accepting it as a mother’s right, up to and including a twenty-dollar bill, and if you had nerve enough to ask for change she’d merely hold out her money, with magnificent disgust—wadded-up bills and dimes and quarters and three or four brand-new galvanized nails—and you could take whatever you wanted, including the nails. No doubt people gypped her from time to time—and perhaps worse. When a pack of small boys came close to her cart her eyes would awake like a chipmunk’s, and she’d begin to squeeze her hands together in an agitated, fierce-looking way. But finally she was ungyppable and untormentable: charmed. She seemed not really to understand the value of whatever money she lost, though she could count when she absolutely had to, and her fear of small boys was manifestly impersonal, like other people’s fear of snakes. She had more pack rat than human in her: She collected and jealously guarded her utterly meaningless treasure, and if in the end she lost all she’d saved, she lost it as pack rats lose their bits of bright cloth, old bobby pins, and tinfoil to large, inscrutable movements in space. At the same time, she was herself a large, inscrutable movement—as George Loomis said, though he knew her only by report, he said. She’d started out twenty-four days ago (this she had counted, marking off the days with a nail on the plywood wagon seat) from Erie, Pennsylvania, in quest of a son who’d left home in July to find work where the drought hadn’t hit so hard, and who had loyally sent for her at last, telling her to come to a place she had never heard of, didn’t know where to find and no longer remembered the name of. (It sounded like Fair.) She’d set out in an arbitrary direction, taking the only highway out of town that she knew (so that for her it was not arbitrary), and she’d been helped and hustled along (not even really knowing she was helped or hustled) in a generally north-eastward direction to the heart of the Catskills—through coal country and oil country and timber country—heading on in full confidence, saying only, when people tried in vain to break down the walls of her faith, “It’s a small world.” Now she was back in farming country, and she knew—though in fact her son may have been in, say, Blair, Wisconsin—she was getting there.