The Complete Short Stories

  When he woke up in the afternoon, there was a pink open-mouthed face hanging over him and from two large familiar ears on either side of it the black tubes of Block’s stethoscope extended down to his exposed chest. The doctor, seeing he was awake, made a face like a Chinaman, rolled his eyes almost out of his head and cried, “Say AHHHH!”

  Block was irresistible to children. For miles around they vomited and went into fevers to have a visit from him. Mrs. Fox was standing behind him, smiling radiantly. “Here’s Doctor Block!” she said as if she had captured this angel on the rooftop and brought him in for her little boy.

  “Get him out of here,” Asbury muttered. He looked at the asinine face from what seemed the bottom of a black hole.

  The doctor peered closer, wiggling his ears. Block was bald and had a round face as senseless as a baby’s. Nothing about him indicated intelligence except two cold clinical nickel-colored eyes that hung with a motionless curiosity over whatever he looked at. “You sho do look bad, Azzberry,” he murmured. He took the stethoscope off and dropped it in his bag. “I don’t know when I’ve seen anybody your age look as sorry as you do. What you been doing to yourself?”

  There was a continuous thud in the back of Asbury’s head as if his heart had got trapped in it and was fighting to get out. “I didn’t send for you,” he said.

  Block put his hand on the glaring face and pulled the eyelid down and peered into it. “You must have been on the bum up there,” he said. He began to press his hand in the small of Asbury’s back. “I went up there once myself,” he said, “and saw exactly how little they had and came straight on back home. Open your mouth.”

  Asbury opened it automatically and the drill-like gaze swung over it and bore down. He snapped it shut and in a wheezing breathless voice he said, “If I’d wanted a doctor, I’d have stayed up there where I could have got a good one!”

  “Asbury!” his mother said.

  “How long you been having the so’ throat?” Block asked.

  “She sent for you!” Asbury said. “She can answer the questions.”

  “Asbury!” his mother said.

  Block leaned over his bag and pulled out a rubber tube. He pushed Asbury’s sleeve up and tied the tube around his upper arm. Then he took out a syringe and prepared to find the vein, humming a hymn as he pressed the needle in. Asbury lay with a rigid outraged stare while the privacy of his blood was invaded by this idiot. “Slowly Lord but sure,” Block sang in a murmuring voice, “Oh slowly Lord but sure.” When the syringe was full, he withdrew the needle. “Blood don’t lie,” he said. He poured it in a bottle and stopped it up and put the bottle in his bag. “Azzbury,” he started, “how long . . .”

  Asbury sat up and thrust his thudding head forward and said, “I didn’t send for you. I’m not answering any questions. You’re not my doctor. What’s wrong with me is way beyond you.”

  “Most things are beyond me,” Block said. “I ain’t found anything yet that I thoroughly understood,” and he sighed and got up. His eyes seemed to glitter at Asbury as if from a great distance.

  “He wouldn’t act so ugly,” Mrs. Fox explained, “if he weren’t really sick. And I want you to come back every day until you get him well.”

  Asbury’s eyes were a fierce glaring violet. “What’s wrong with me is way beyond you,” he repeated and lay back down and closed his eyes until Block and his mother were gone.

  In the next few days, though he grew rapidly worse, his mind functioned with a terrible clarity. On the point of death, he found himself existing in a state of illumination that was totally out of keeping with the kind of talk he had to listen to from his mother. This was largely about cows with names like Daisy and Bessie Button and their intimate functions—their mastitis and their screwworms and their abortions. His mother insisted that in the middle of the day he get out and sit on the porch and “enjoy the view” and as resistance was too much of a struggle, he dragged himself out and sat there in a rigid slouch, his feet wrapped in an afghan and his hands gripped on the chair arms as if he were about to spring forward into the glaring china blue sky. The lawn extended for a quarter of an acre down to a barbed-wire fence that divided it from the front pasture. In the middle of the day the dry cows rested there under a line of sweet-gum trees. On the other side of the road were two hills with a pond between and his mother could sit on the porch and watch the herd walk across the dam to the hill on the other side. The whole scene was rimmed by a wall of trees which, at the time of day he was forced to sit there, was a washed-out blue that reminded him sadly of the Negroes’ faded overalls.

  He listened irritably while his mother detailed the faults of the help. “Those two are not stupid,” she said. “They know how to look out for themselves.”

  “They need to,” he muttered, but there was no use to argue with her. Last year he had been writing a play about the Negro and he had wanted to be around them for a while to see how they really felt about their condition, but the two who worked for her had lost all their initiative over the years. They didn’t talk. The one called Morgan was light brown, part Indian; the other, older one, Randall, was very black and fat. When they said anything to him, it was as if they were speaking to an invisible body located to the right or left of where he actually was, and after two days working side by side with them, he felt he had not established rapport. He decided to try something bolder than talk and one afternoon as he was standing near Randall, watching him adjust a milker, he had quietly taken out his cigarettes and lit one. The Negro had stopped what he was doing and watched him. He waited until Asbury had taken two draws and then he said, “She don’t ’low no smoking in here.”

  The other one approached and stood there, grinning.

  “I know it,” Asbury said and after a deliberate pause, he shook the package and held it out, first to Randall, who took one, and then to Morgan, who took one. He had then lit the cigarettes for them himself and the three of them had stood there smoking. There were no sounds but the steady click of the two milking machines and the occasional slap of a cow’s tail against her side. It was one of those moments of communion when the difference between black and white is absorbed into nothing.

  The next day two cans of milk had been returned from the creamery because it had absorbed the odor of tobacco. He took the blame and told his mother that it was he and not the Negroes who had been smoking. “If you were doing it, they were doing it,” she had said. “Don’t you think I know those two?” She was incapable of thinking them innocent; but the experience had so exhilarated him that he had been determined to repeat it in some other way.

  The next afternoon when he and Randall were in the milk house pouring the fresh milk into the cans, he had picked up the jelly glass the Negroes drank out of and, inspired, had poured himself a glassful of the warm milk and drained it down. Randall had stopped pouring and had remained, half-bent, over the can, watching him. “She don’t ’low that,” he said. “That the thing she don’t ’low.”

  Asbury poured out another glassful and handed it to him.

  “She don’t ’low it,” he repeated.

  “Listen,” Asbury said hoarsely, “the world is changing. There’s no reason I shouldn’t drink after you or you after me!”

  “She don’t ’low noner us to drink noner this here milk,” Randall said.

  Asbury continued to hold the glass out to him. “You took the cigarette,” he said. “Take the milk. It’s not going to hurt my mother to lose two or three glasses of milk a day. We’ve got to think free if we want to live free!”

  The other one had come up and was standing in the door.

  “Don’t want noner that milk,” Randall said.

  Asbury swung around and held the glass out to Morgan. “Here boy, have a drink of this,” he said.

  Morgan stared at him; then his face took on a decided look of cunning. “I ain’t seen you drink none of it yourself,”
he said.

  Asbury despised milk. The first warm glassful had turned his stomach. He drank half of what he was holding and handed the rest to the Negro, who took it and gazed down inside the glass as if it contained some great mystery; then he set it on the floor by the cooler.

  “Don’t you like milk?” Asbury asked.

  “I likes it but I ain’t drinking noner that.”

  “Why?”

  “She don’t ’low it,” Morgan said.

  “My God!” Asbury exploded, “she she she!” He had tried the same thing the next day and the next and the next but he could not get them to drink the milk. A few afternoons later when he was standing outside the milk house about to go in, he heard Morgan ask, “Howcome you let him drink that milk every day?”

  “What he do is him,” Randall said. “What I do is me.”

  “Howcome he talks so ugly about his ma?”

  “She ain’t whup him enough when he was little,” Randall said.

  The insufferableness of life at home had overcome him and he had returned to New York two days early. So far as he was concerned he had died there, and the question now was how long he could stand to linger here. He could have hastened his end but suicide would not have been a victory. Death was coming to him legitimately, as a justification, as a gift from life. That was his greatest triumph. Then too, to the fine minds of the neighborhood, a suicide son would indicate a mother who had been a failure, and while this was the case, he felt that it was a public embarrassment he could spare her. What she would learn from the letter would be a private revelation. He had sealed the notebooks in a manila envelope and had written on it: “To be opened only after the death of Asbury Porter Fox.” He had put the envelope in the desk drawer in his room and locked it and the key was in his pajama pocket until he could decide on a place to leave it.

  When they sat on the porch in the morning, his mother felt that some of the time she should talk about subjects that were of interest to him. The third morning she started in on his writing. “When you get well,” she said, “I think it would be nice if you wrote a book about down here. We need another good book like Gone with the Wind.”

  He could feel the muscles in his stomach begin to tighten.

  “Put the war in it,” she advised. “That always makes a long book.”

  He put his head back gently as if he were afraid it would crack. After a moment he said, “I am not going to write any book.”

  “Well,” she said, “if you don’t feel like writing a book, you could just write poems. They’re nice.” She realized that what he needed was someone intellectual to talk to, but Mary George was the only intellectual she knew and he would not talk to her. She had thought of Mr. Bush, the retired Methodist minister, but she had not brought this up. Now she decided to hazard it. “I think I’ll ask Dr. Bush to come to see you,” she said, raising Mr. Bush’s rank. “You’d enjoy him. He collects rare coins.”

  She was not prepared for the reaction she got. He began to shake all over and give loud spasmodic laughs. He seemed about to choke. After a minute he subsided into a cough. “If you think I need spiritual aid to die,” he said, “you’re quite mistaken. And certainly not from that ass Bush. My God!”

  “I didn’t mean that at all,” she said. “He has coins dating from the time of Cleopatra.”

  “Well if you ask him here, I’ll tell him to go to hell,” he said. “Bush! That beats all!”

  “I’m glad something amuses you,” she said acidly.

  For a time they sat there in silence. Then his mother looked up. He was sitting forward again and smiling at her. His face was brightening more and more as if he had just had an idea that was brilliant. She stared at him. “I’ll tell you who I want to come,” he said. For the first time since he had come home, his expression was pleasant; though there was also, she thought, a kind of crafty look about him.

  “Who do you want to come?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I want a priest,” he announced.

  “A priest?” his mother said in an uncomprehending voice.

  “Preferably a Jesuit,” he said, brightening more and more. “Yes, by all means a Jesuit. They have them in the city. You can call up and get me one.”

  “What is the matter with you?” his mother asked.

  “Most of them are very well-educated,” he said, “but Jesuits are foolproof. A Jesuit would be able to discuss something besides the weather.” Already, remembering Ignatius Vogle, S.J., he could picture the priest. This one would be a trifle more worldly perhaps, a trifle more cynical. Protected by their ancient institution, priests could afford to be cynical, to play both ends against the middle. He would talk to a man of culture before he died—even in this desert! Furthermore, nothing would irritate his mother so much. He could not understand why he had not thought of this sooner.

  “You’re not a member of that church,” Mrs. Fox said shortly. “It’s twenty miles away. They wouldn’t send one.” She hoped that this would end the matter.

  He sat back absorbed in the idea, determined to force her to make the call since she always did what he wanted if he kept at her. “I’m dying,” he said, “and I haven’t asked you to do but one thing and you refuse me that,”

  “You are NOT dying.”

  “When you realize it,” he said, “it’ll be too late.”

  There was another unpleasant silence. Presently his mother said, “Nowadays doctors don’t let young people die. They give them some of these new medicines.” She began shaking her foot with a nerve-rattling assurance. “People just don’t die like they used to,” she said.

  “Mother,” he said, “you ought to be prepared. I think even Block knows and hasn’t told you yet,” Block, after the first visit, had come in grimly every time, without his jokes and funny faces, and had taken his blood in silence, his nickel-colored eyes unfriendly. He was, by definition, the enemy of death and he looked now as if he knew he was battling the real thing. He had said he wouldn’t prescribe until he knew what was wrong and Asbury had laughed in his face. “Mother,” he said, “I AM going to die,” and he tried to make each word like a hammer blow on top of her head.

  She paled slightly but she did not blink. “Do you think for one minute,” she said angrily, “that I intend to sit here and let you die?” Her eyes were as hard as two old mountain ranges seen in the distance. He felt the first distinct stroke of doubt.

  “Do you?” she asked fiercely.

  “I don’t think you have anything to do with it,” he said in a shaken voice.

  “Humph,” she said and got up and left the porch as if she could not stand to be around such stupidity an instant longer.

  Forgetting the Jesuit, he went rapidly over his symptoms: his fever had increased, interspersed by chills; he barely had the energy to drag himself out on the porch; food was abhorrent to him; and Block had not been able to give her the least satisfaction. Even as he sat there, he felt the beginning of a new chill, as if death were already playfully rattling his bones. He pulled the afghan off his feet and put it around his shoulders and made his way unsteadily up the stairs to bed.

  He continued to grow worse. In the next few days he became so much weaker and badgered her so constantly about the Jesuit that finally in desperation she decided to humor his foolishness. She made the call, explaining in a chilly voice that her son was ill, perhaps a little out of his head, and wished to speak to a priest. While she made the call, Asbury hung over the banisters, barefooted, with the afghan around him, and listened. When she hung up he called down to know when the priest was coming.

  “Tomorrow sometime,” his mother said irritably.

  He could tell by the fact that she made the call that her assurance was beginning to shatter. Whenever she let Block in or out, there was much whispering in the downstairs hall. That evening, he heard her and Mary George talking in low voices in the parlor. H
e thought he heard his name and he got up and tiptoed into the hall and down the first three steps until he could hear the voices distinctly.

  “I had to call that priest,” his mother was saying. “I’m afraid this is serious. I thought it was just a nervous breakdown but now I think it’s something real. Doctor Block thinks it’s something real too and whatever it is is worse because he’s so run-down.”

  “Grow up, Mamma,” Mary George said, “I’ve told you and I tell you again: what’s wrong with him is purely psychosomatic.” There was nothing she was not an expert on.

  “No,” his mother said, “it’s a real disease. The doctor says so.” He thought he detected a crack in her voice.

  “Block is an idiot,” Mary George said. “You’ve got to face the facts: Asbury can’t write so he gets sick. He’s going to be an invalid instead of an artist. Do you know what he needs?”

  “No,” his mother said.

  “Two or three shock treatments,” Mary George said. “Get that artist business out of his head once and for all.”

  His mother gave a little cry and he grasped the banister.

  “Mark my words,” his sister continued, “all he’s going to be around here for the next fifty years is a decoration.”

  He went back to bed. In a sense she was right. He had failed his god, Art, but he had been a faithful servant and Art was sending him Death. He had seen this from the first with a kind of mystical clarity. He went to sleep thinking of the peaceful spot in the family burying ground where he would soon lie, and after a while he saw that his body was being borne slowly toward it while his mother and Mary George watched without interest from their chairs on the porch. As the bier was carried across the dam, they could look up and see the procession reflected upside down in the pond. A lean dark figure in a Roman collar followed it. He had a mysteriously saturnine face in which there was a subtle blend of asceticism and corruption. Asbury was laid in a shallow grave on the hillside and the indistinct mourners, after standing in silence for a while, spread out over the darkening green. The Jesuit retired to a spot beneath a dead tree to smoke and meditate. The moon came up and Asbury was aware of a presence bending over him and a gentle warmth on his cold face. He knew that this was Art come to wake him and he sat up and opened his eyes. Across the hill all the lights were on in his mother’s house. The black pond was speckled with little nickel-colored stars. The Jesuit had disappeared. All around him the cows were spread out grazing in the moonlight and one large white one, violently spotted, was softly licking his head as if it were a block of salt. He awoke with a shudder and discovered that his bed was soaking from a night sweat and as he sat shivering in the dark, he realized that the end was not many days distant. He gazed down into the crater of death and fell back dizzy on his pillow.