Joel, who was squatting on the grass nibbling a leaf, stretched his legs, and said: “What’s wrong with that?”
“Now, Mister Knox, surely you’re just teasing,” said Florabel. “Whoever heard of a decent white girl wanting to be a farmer? Mama and me are too disgraced. Course I know what goes on in the back of her mind.” Florabel gave him a conniving look, and lowered her voice. “She thinks when Papa dies he’ll leave her the place to do with like she pleases. Oh, she doesn’t fool me one minute.”
Joel glanced about at what Idabel hoped to inherit: the house stood far away in a grove of shade trees; it was a nice house, simple, solid-looking, painted a white now turned slightly grey; an open shotgun hall ran front to back, and on the porch were geranium boxes, and a swing. A small shed housing a green 1934 Chevrolet was at one side. Chickens pecked around in the clean yard of flowerbeds and arranged rocks. At the rear was a smoke house, a water-pump windmill, and the first swelling slope of a cottonfield.
“Ouch!” cried Florabel, and tossed the tweezers aside. She gave the hammock a push and swung to and fro, her lips pouting absurdly. “Now me, I want to be an actor . . . or a schoolteacher,” she said. “Only if I become an actor I don’t know what we’ll do about sister. When somebody’s famous like that they dig up all the facts on their past life. I really don’t want to sound mean about her, Mister Knox, but the reason I bring this matter up is she’s got a crush on you . . .” Florabel dropped her gaze demurely, “and, well, the poor child does have a reputation.”
Though he would never have admitted it, not even secretly, Joel felt sweetly flattered. “A reputation for what?” he said, careful not to smile.
Florabel straightened up. “Please, sir,” she intoned, her old-lady mannerisms frighteningly accurate. “I thought you were a gentleman of the world.” Suddenly, looking rather alarmed, she collapsed back in the hammock. Then: “Why, hey there, sister . . . look who’s come to call.”
“Howdy,” said Idabel, surprise or pleasure very absent from her woolly voice. She carried a huge watermelon, and an old black-and-white bird dog trotted close at her heels. She rolled the melon on the grass, rubbed back her cow-licked bangs, and, slumping against a tree, cocked her thumbs in the belt rungs of the dungarees which she wore. She had on also a pair of plowman’s boots, and a sweatshirt with the legend DRINK COCA-COLA fading on its front. She looked first at Joel, then at her sister, and, as though making some rude comment, spit expertly between her fingers. The old dog flopped down beside her. “This here’s Henry,” she told Joel, gently stroking the dog’s ribs with her foot. “He’s fixing to take a nap, so let’s us not talk loud, hear?”
“Pshaw!” said the other twin. “Mister Knox oughta see what happens when I’m trying to get a wink in edgewise: wham bang whomp!”
“Henry feels kinda poorly,” explained Idabel. “I’m fraid he’s right sick.”
“Well, I’m right sick myself. I’m sick of lotsa things.”
Joel imagined that Idabel smiled at him. She did not smile in the fashion of ordinary people, but gave one corner of her mouth a cynical crook: it was like Randolph’s trick of arching an eyebrow. She hitched up her pants leg and commenced picking the scab off a knee-sore. “How you making out over at the Landing, son?”
“Yes,” said Florabel, bending forward with a rather sly smirk, “haven’t you seen things?”
“Nothing except that it’s a nice place,” he said discreetly.
“But . . .” Florabel slid out of the hammock, and sat down beside him with her elbow propped against the melon. “But what I mean is . . .”
“Watch out,” warned Idabel, “she’s only trying to pick you.”
And this gave Joel an opportunity to ease the moment with a laugh. Among his sins were lying and stealing and bad thoughts; disloyalty, however, was not part of his nature. He saw how cheap it would be to confide in Florabel, though there was nothing he needed more now than a sympathetic ear. “Does it hurt?” he asked her sister, anxious to show his gratitude by assuming an interest in the sore.
“Why, this old thing?” she said, and clawed the scab. “Shoot, boy, one time I had me a rising on my butt big as a baseball, and didn’t pay it any mind whatsoever.”
“Hmn, squalled loud enough when Mama smacked you and it busted,” reminded Florabel, bunching her lips prissily. She thumped the melon and it made a ripe hollow report. “Hmn, sounds green as grass to me.” With her fingernails she scratched her initials on the rind, drew a ragged heart, arrowed it, and carved M.S., which, eyeing Joel coyly, she announced stood for Mysterious Stranger.
Idabel displayed a jackknife. “Look,” she demanded, releasing a thin vicious blade. “I could kill somebody, couldn’t I?” And with one murderous stab the melon cracked, spraying icy juice as she chopped off generous portions. “Leave Papa a hunk,” she said, retiring under the tree to gorge in peace.
“Cold,” said Joel, a trickle of red dyeing his shirt. “That creek must be freezing like an icebox; where’s it come from: does it flow down from Drownin Pond?”
Florabel looked at Idabel and Idabel looked at Florabel. Neither seemed able to make up her mind which should answer. Idabel spit pulp, and said: “Who told you?”
“Told me?”
“About Drownin Pond?”
A touch of hostility in her tone made him wary. But in this case he could not see where the truth would cost more than a lie. “Oh, the man who lives there. He’s a friend of mine.”
Idabel responded with a hoarse, sarcastic laugh. “I’m the only person in these parts that’ll go anywhere near that creepy hotel; and, son, I’ve never even got so much as a peek at him.”
“Sister’s right,” added Florabel. “She’s always had a hankering to see the hermit; Mama used to say he’d grab us good if we didn’t act proper. But lately I’ve come to think he’s just somebody grown people made up.”
It was Joel’s turn for sarcasm. “If you’d been out on the road an hour ago I would’ve been glad to introduce you. His name is Little Sunshine, and he’s going to make me . . .” but he recalled that to mention the charm was forbidden.
Against such testimony Idabel had no comeback. She was stumped. And jealous. “Huh,” she snorted, and shoved a chunk of melon in her mouth.
Rings of sunlight, sifting through the tree, dappled the dark grass like fallen gold fruit; bluebottle flies swarmed over melon rinds, and a cowbell, somewhere beyond the windmill, tolled lazily and long. Henry was having a nightmare. His fretful snores seemed to annoy Florabel; she spit seed into her hand, and, chanting, “Nasty old nasty,” hurled them at him.
Idabel did nothing for a moment. Then, rising, she closed the blade of her knife, and stuck it in her pocket. Slowly, without expression, she moved toward her sister, who went quite pink in the face and began to giggle nervously.
Hands on hips, Idabel stared at her with eyes like granite. She did not say a word, but her breathing hissed between clenched teeth, and a vein throbbed in the hollow of her neck. The old dog padded forward, and looked at Florabel reproachfully. Joel inched several feet backwards: he didn’t want to become involved in any family fracas.
“You’re going to bug-out those eyes too far some day,” sassed Florabel. But as the rock-like stare continued her impertinent pose gradually dissolved. “I don’t see why you want to take on about that nasty hound thisaway,” she said, looping a curl in her strawberry hair, blinking her eyes innocently. “Mama’s going to make Papa shoot him anyway cause he’s liable to give us all some mortal disease.”
Idabel sucked in her breath, and lunged, and over and over they rolled tussling on the grass. Florabel’s skirt got hiked up so high Joel’s cheeks reddened: then, scratching, kicking, screaming, she managed to break loose. “Sister, please . . . please, sister . . . I beg of you!” She ran behind a pecan tree: like figures on a two-ponied carousel they whirled around the trunk, first one way, then the other. “Mama, get Mama . . . oh, Mister Knox, she’s loony . . . DO something!” Hen
ry set up a barking commotion, and commenced to chase his tail. “Mister KNOX . . .”
But Joel was afraid of Idabel himself. She was about the maddest human he ever saw, and the quickest: nobody at home would believe a girl could move this fast. Also, he knew from experience that, if he interfered, the finger of blame would ultimately point in his direction: he started the whole thing, that’s how the tale would read. Besides, Florabel had no call to throw those seeds: deep in his heart he didn’t care if she got the daylight whammed out of her.
She cut across the yard, and made a desperate sprint for the house, but it was useless, for Idabel hedged her off. Close together they went whooping past Joel, who suddenly became, like the pecan tree, and through no fault of his own, a shield. Idabel tried to push him aside: when he did not budge, she tossed her sweaty hair, and fixed him angrily with her bold green eyes: “Outa the way, sissy-britches.”
Joel thought of the knife in her pocket, and despite Florabel’s pleas, concluded it might be wise to move elsewhere.
So they went off again, running in circles, zigzagging between trees, Florabel’s hair jouncing on her back. When they reached the pecan tree, tallest of two, she began to climb. Idabel pulled off her clumsy boots. “Ha, won’t get far that way,” she hollered, and agile as a monkey shinnied up the trunk.
The branches swayed, broken twigs, torn leaves showered at Joel’s feet: as he darted around hunting a clearer view the sky seemed to crash bluely through the tree, and the twins, climbing nearer the sun, grew smaller and dizzy bright.
Florabel had gone as far as she could, the top; but it was a safe and fortified position: here, balanced in the crotch of forked limbs, she was immune to any assault, for to force the enemy’s retreat she had only to kick.
“I can wait,” said Idabel, and straddled a branch. She glanced down at Joel irritably. “Go on home, you.”
“Please disregard her altogether, Mister Knox.”
“Go on home and cut out paper dolls, sissy-britches.”
Joel stood there hating her, wishing she’d fall from the tree and bust her neck. Like every other tomboy, Idabel was mean, just gut-mean: the haircut man in Noon City sure had her number. So did the husky woman with the wart. So did Florabel. Then he shrugged, and hung his head.
“Come back when she’s not around,” called Florabel as he started for home. “And Mister Knox, remember what I said about you-know-what. Well, a word to the wise . . .”
A pair of chicken hawks wheeled with stiffened wings above smoke, dimly yellow in the distance, rising spire-like out the Landing’s kitchen chimney: that would be Zoo fixing dinner, he guessed, pausing by the roadside to stampede a colony of ants feeding on a dead frog. He was tired of Zoo’s cooking: always the same stuff, collards, yams, blackeyed peas, cornbread. Right now he would like to meet up with the Snowball Man. Every afternoon at home in New Orleans the Snowball Man came pushing his delicious cart, tinkling his delicious bell; and for pennies you could have a dunce-hat of flaked ice flavored with a dozen syrups, cherry and chocolate, grape and blackberry all mingling like a rainbow.
The ants scurried like shooting sparks: thinking of Idabel, he hopped about mashing them underfoot, but this sinful dance did nothing toward lessening the hurt of her insults. Wait! Wait till he was Governor: he’d sic the law on her, have her locked in a dungeon cell with a little trapdoor cut in the ceiling where he could look down and laugh.
But when the Landing came in full view, its rambling outline darkened by foliage, he forgot Idabel.
Like kites being reeled in, the chicken hawks circled lower till their shadows revolved over the slanting shingled roof. The shaft of smoke lifting from the chimney mounted unbroken in the hot windless air; a sign, at least, that people lived here. Joel had known and explored other houses quiet with emptiness, but none so deserted-looking, silent: it was as though the place were captured under a cone of glass; inside, waiting to claim him, was an afternoon of endless boredom: each step, and his shoes were heavy as though soled with stone, carried him closer. A whole afternoon. And how many more for how many months?
Then, approaching the mailbox, seeing its cheerful red flag still upraised, the good feeling came back: Ellen would make things different, she would fix it so he could go away to a school where everybody was like everybody else. Singing the song about snow and the north wind, he stopped and jerked open the mailbox; deep inside lay a thick stack of letters, sealed, as he found, in watergreen envelopes. It was like the stationery his father had used when writing Ellen. And the spidery handwriting was identical: Mr Pepe Alvarez, c/o the postmaster, Monterrey, Mexico. Then Mr Pepe Alvarez, c/o the postmaster, Fukuoka, Japan. Again, again. Seven letters, all addressed to Mr Pepe Alvarez, in care of postmasters in: Camden, New Jersey; Lahore, India; Copenhagen, Denmark; Barcelona, Spain; Keokuk, Iowa.
But his letters were not among these. He certainly remembered putting them in the box. Little Sunshine had seen him. And Zoo. So where were they? Of course: the mailman must’ve come along already. But why hadn’t he heard or seen the mailman’s car? It was a half-wrecked Ford and made considerable racket. Then, in the dust at his feet, torn from the toilet-paper wrapping, he saw his coins, a nickel and a penny sparkling up at him like uneven eyes.
At this same instant the sound of bullet fire cracked whiplike on the quiet: Joel, stooping for his money, turned a paralyzed face toward the house: there was no one on the porch, the path, not a sign of life anywhere. Another shot. The wings of the hawks raged as they fled over tree tops, their shadows sweeping across the road’s broiling sand like islands of dark.
PART TWO
SIX
“Hold still,” said Zoo, her eyes like satin in the kitchen lamplight. “Never saw such a fidget; best hold still and let me cut this hair: can’t have you runnin round here lookin like some ol gal: first thing you know, boy, folks is gonna say you got to wee wee squattin down.” Garden shears snipped round the rim of the bowl, a blue bowl fitted on Joel’s head like a helmet. “You got such pretty fine molasses hair seems like we oughta could sell it to them wigmakers.”
Joel squirmed. “So what did you say after she said that?” he asked, anxious she return to a previous topic.
“Said what?”
“Said you’ve got a big nerve shooting off rifles when Randolph’s so sick.”
“Huh,” Zoo grunted, “why, I just come right out and tol her, tol her: ‘Miss Amy, them hawks fixin to steal the place off our hands less we shoo em away.’ Said, ‘Done fly off with a dozen fat fryers this spring a’ready, and Mister Randolph, he gonna take mighty little pleasure in his sickness if his stomach stay growl-empty.’ ”
Removing the bowl, making a telescope of her hands, she roamed around Joel’s chair viewing his haircut from all angles. “Now that’s what I calls a good trim,” she said. “Go look in the window.”
Evening silvered the glass, and his face reflected transparently, changed and mingled with moth-moving lamp yellow; he saw himself, and through himself, and beyond: a night bird whistled in the fig leaves, a whippoorwill, and fireflies sprinkled the blue-flooded air, rode the dark like ship lights. The haircut was disfiguring, for it made him in silhouette resemble those idiots with huge world-globe heads, and now, because of Randolph’s flattery, he was self-conscious about his looks. “It’s awful,” he said.
“Huh,” said Zoo, dishing supper scraps into a lard can reserved for pig slop, “you is as ignorant as that Keg Brown. Course he was the most ignorant human in my acquaintance. But you is both ignorant.”
Joel, imitating Randolph, arched an eyebrow, and said: “I daresay I know some things I daresay you don’t.”
Zoo’s elegant grace disappeared as she strode about clearing the kitchen: the floor creaked under her animal footfall, and, as she bent to lower the lamp, the hurt sadness of her long face gleamed like a mask. “I daresays,” she said, plucking at her neckerchief, and not looking at Joel. “I daresays you is smarter’n Zoo, but I reckon as she knows better abou
t folks feelins; leastwise, she don’t go round makin folks feel no-count for no cause whatsoever.”
“Aw,” said Joel, “aw, I was just joking, honest,” and, hugging her, smothered his face against her middle; she smelled sweet, a curious dark sour sweet, and her fingers, gliding through his hair, were cool, strong. “I love you because you’ve got to love me because you’ve got to.”
“Lord, Lord,” said Zoo, disengaging herself, “you is nothin but a kitty now, but comes the time you is full growed . . . what a Tom you gonna be.”
Standing in the doorway he watched her lamp divide the dark, saw Jesus Fever’s windows color: here he was, and there she was, and there was all of night between them. It had been a curious evening, for Randolph kept to his room, and Amy, fixing supper trays, one for Randolph and the other, presumably, Mr Sansom’s (she’d said: “Mr Sansom won’t eat cold peas”), had stopped at the table only long enough to swallow a tumbler of buttermilk. But Joel had talked, and in talking eased away his worries, and Zoo told tales, tall funny sad, and now and again their voices had met and made a song, a summer kitchen ballad.
From the first he’d noticed in the house complex sounds, sounds on the edge of silence, settling sighs of stone and board, as though the old rooms inhaled-exhaled constant wind, and he’d heard Randolph say: “We’re sinking, you know, sank four inches last year.” It was drowning in the earth, this house, and they, all of them, were submerging with it: Joel, moving through the chamber, imagined moles tracing silver tunnels down eclipsed halls, lank pink sliding through earth-packed rooms, lilac bleeding out the sockets of a skull: Go away, he said, climbing toward a lamp which threw nervous light over the stairsteps, Go Away, he said, for his imagination was too tricky and terrible. But was it possible for a whole house to disappear? Yes, he’d heard of such things. All Mr Mystery had to do was snap his fingers, and whatever was there went whisk. And human beings, too. They could go right off the face of the earth. That was what had happened to his father; he was gone, not in a sad respectable way like his mother, but just gone, and Joel had no reason to suppose he would ever find him. So why did they pretend? Why didn’t they say right out, “There is no Mr Sansom, you have no father,” and send him away. Ellen was always talking of the decent Christian thing to do; he’d wondered what she meant, and now he knew: to speak truth was a decent Christian thing. He took the steps slowly, awake but dreaming, and in the dream he saw the Cloud Hotel, saw its leaning molding rooms, its wind-cracked windows hung with draperies of blackwidow web, and realized suddenly this was not a hotel; indeed, had never been: this was the place folks came when they went off the face of the earth, when they died but were not dead. And he thought of the ballroom Little Sunshine had described: there nightfall covered the walls like a tapestry, and the dry delicate skeletons of bouquet leaves littering the wavy floor powdered under his dreamed foot-step: he walked in the dark in the dust of thorns listening for a name, his own, but even here no father claimed him. The shadow of a grand piano spotted the vaulted ceiling like a luna moth wing, and at the keyboard, her eyes soaked white with moonlight, her wig of cold white curls askew, sat the Lady: was this the ghost of Mrs Jimmy Bob Cloud? Mrs Cloud, who’d cremated herself in a St. Louis boarding house? Was that the answer?