It was his father's telescope and he was allowed to look through it unmolested as long as he ran a temperature. It was what they gave him instead of his pea-shooter and cap pistol. Smelling of brass and the drawer of the library table where it came from, it was an object hitherto brought out in the family group for eclipses of the moon; and the day the airplane flew over with a lady in it, and they all waited for it all day, wry and aching up at the sky; the telescope had been gripped in his father's hand like a big stick, some kind of protective weapon for what was to come.
Loch fixed the long brass tubes and shot the telescope out the window, propping the screen outward and letting more mosquitoes in, the way he was forbidden. He examined the size of the distant figs: like marbles yesterday, wine-balls today. Getting those would not be the same as stealing. On the other side of fury at confinement a sweet self-indulgence could visit him in his bed. He moved the glass lovingly toward the house and touched its roof, with the little birds on it cocking their heads.
With the telescope to his eye he even smelled the house strongly. Morgana was extra deep in smell this afternoon; the magnolias were open all over the tree at the last corner. They glittered like lights in the dense tree that loomed in the shape of a cave opening at the brought-up-close edge of the Carmichael roof. He looked at the thrush's nest, Woodrow Spight's old ball on the roof, the drift of faded election handbills on the porch—the vacant house again, the half of a china plate deep in the weeds; the chickens always went to that plate, and it was dry.
Loch trained the telescope to the back and caught the sailor and the girl in the moment they jumped the ditch. They always came the back way, swinging hands and running low under the leaves. The girl was the piano player at the picture show. Today she was carrying a paper sack from Mr. Wiley Bowles' grocery.
Loch squinted; he was waiting for the day when the sailor took the figs. And see what the girl would hurry him into. Her name was Virgie Rainey. She had been in Cassie's room all the way through school, so that made her sixteen; she would ruin any nice idea. She looked like a tomboy but it was not the truth. She had let the sailor pick her up and carry her one day, with her fingers lifting to brush the leaves. It was she that had showed the sailor the house to begin with, she that started him coming. They were rusty old fig trees but the figs were the little sweet blue. When they cracked open, their pink and golden flesh would show, their inside flowers, and golden bubbles of juice would hang, to touch your tongue to first. Loch gave the sailor time, for it was he, Loch, who was in command of leniency here; he was giving him day after day.
He swayed on his knees and saw the sailor and Virgie Rainey in a clear blue-and-white small world run sparkling to the back door of the empty house.
And next would come the old man going by in the blue wagon, up as far as the Starks' and back to the Carmichaels' corner.
"Buttermilk?
Buttermilk.
Fresh dewberries and—
Buttermilk."
That was Mr. Fate Rainey and his song. He would take a long time to pass. Loch could study through the telescope the new flower in his horse's hat each day. He would go past the Starks' and circle the cemetery and niggertown, and come back again. His cry, with a song's tune, would come near, then far, and near again. Was it an echo—was an echo that? Or was it, for the last time, the call of somebody seeking about in a deep cave, "Here—here! Oh, here am I!"
There was a sound that might have been a blue jay scolding, and that was the back door; they were just now going in off the back porch. When he saw the door prized open—the stretched screen billowing from being too freely leaned against—and let the people in, Loch felt the old indignation rise up. But at the same time he felt joy. For while the invaders did not see him, he saw them, both with the naked eye and through the telescope; and each day that he kept them to himself, they were his.
Louella appeared below on their steps and with a splash threw out the dirty dishwater in the direction of the empty house. But she would never speak, and he would never speak. He had not shared anybody in his life even with Louella.
After the door fell to at the sailor's heel, and the upstairs window had been forced up and propped, then silence closed over the house next door. It closed over just as silence did in their house at this time of day; but like the noisy waterfall it kept him awake—fighting sleep.
In the beginning, before he saw anyone, he would just as soon have lain there and thought of wild men holding his house in thrall, or of a giant crouched double behind the window that corresponded to his own. The big fig tree was many times a magic tree with golden fruit that shone in and among its branches like a cloud of lightning bugs—a tree twinkling all over, burning, on and off, off and on. The sweet golden juice to come—in his dream he put his tongue out, and then his mother would be putting that spoon in his mouth.
More than once he dreamed it was inside that house that the cave had moved, and the buttermilk man went in and out the rooms driving his horse with its red rose and berating its side with a whip that unfurled of itself; in the dream he was not singing. Or the horse itself, a white and beautiful one, was on its way over, approaching to ask some favor of him, a request called softly and intelligibly upward—which he was not decided yet whether to grant or deny. This call through the window had not yet happened—not quite. But someone had come.
He turned away. "Cassie!" he cried.
Cassie came to his room. She said, "Didn't I tell you what you could do? Trim up those Octagon Soap coupons and count them good if you want that jack-knife." Then she went off again and slammed her door. He seemed to see her belatedly. She had been dressed up for whatever she was doing in her room like somebody in the circus, with colored spots on her, and hardly looked like his sister.
"You looked silly when you came in!" he called.
But over at the empty house was a stillness not of going off and leaving him but of coming nearer. Something was coming very close to him, there was something he had better keep track of. He had the feeling that something was being counted. Then he too must count. He could be wary enough that way, counting by ones, counting by fives, by tens. Sometimes he threw his arm across his eyes and counted without moving his lips, imagining that when he got to a certain amount he might give a yell, like "Coming, ready or not!" and go down by the hackberry limb. He never had yelled, and his arm was a heavy weight across his face. Often that was the way he fell asleep. He woke up drenched with the afternoon fever breaking. Then his mother pulled him and pushed him as she put cool pillow cases on the pillows and pushed him back straight. She was doing it now.
"Now your powder."
His mother, dressed up for a party, tilted the little pinked paper toward his stuck-out, protesting tongue, and guided the glass of water into his groping hand. Every time he got a powder swallowed, she said calmly, "Dr. Loomis only gives you these to satisfy me you're getting medication." His father, when he came home from the office, would say, "Well, if you've got malaria, son..." (kissing him) "... you've got malaria, that's all there is to it. Ha! Ha! Ha!"
"I've made you some junket, too," she said with a straight face.
He made a noise calculated to sicken her, and she smiled at him.
"When I come back from Miss Nell Carlisle's I'll bring you all the news of Morgana."
He could not help but smile at her—lips shut. She was almost his ally. She swung her little reticule at him and went off to the Rook party. By leaning far out he could see a lackadaisical, fluttery kind of parade, the ladies of Morgana under their parasols, all trying to keep cool while they walked down to Miss Nell's. His mother was absorbed into their floating, transparent colors. Miss Perdita Mayo was talking, and they were clicking their summery heels and drowning out—drowning out something....
A little tune was playing on the air, and it was coming from the piano in the vacant house.
The tune came again, like a touch from a small hand that he had unwittingly pushed away. Loch lay back and let
it persist. All at once tears rolled out of his eyes. He opened his mouth in astonishment. Then the little tune seemed the only thing in the whole day, the whole summer, the whole season of his fevers and chills, that was accountable: it was personal. But he could not tell why it was so.
It came like a signal, or a greeting—the kind of thing a horn would play out in the woods. He halfway closed his eyes. It came and trailed off and was lost in the neighborhood air. He heard it and then wondered how it went.
It took him back to when his sister was so sweet, to a long time ago. To when they loved each other in a different world, a boundless, trustful country all its own, where no mother or father came, either through sweetness or impatience—different altogether from his solitary world now, where he looked out all eyes like Argus, on guard everywhere.
A spoon went against a dish, three times. In her own room Cassie was carrying on some girls' business that, at least, smelled terrible to him, as bad as when she painted a hair-receiver with rosebuds and caught it on fire drying it. He heard Louella talking to herself in the lower hall. "Louella!" he called, flat on his back, and she called up for him to favor her with some rest or she would give up the ghost right then. When he drew up to the window again, the first thing he saw was someone new, coming along the walk out front.
Here came an old lady. No, she was an old woman, round and unsteady-looking—unsteady the way he felt himself when he got out of bed—not on her way to a party. She must have walked in from out in the country. He saw her stop in front of the vacant house, turn herself, and go up the front walk.
Something besides countriness gave her her look. Maybe it came from her having nothing in her hands, no reticule or fan. She looked as if she could even be the one who lived in the house and had just stepped outside for a moment to see if it was going to rain and now, matter-of-factly, a little toilsomely with so much to do, was going back in.
But when she began to hasten, Loch got the idea she might be the sailor's mother come after her son. The sailor didn't belong in Morgana anyhow. Whoever she was, she climbed the steps and crossed the wobbly porch and put her hand to the front door, which she opened just as easily as Virgie Rainey had opened the back door. She went inside, and he saw her through the beady curtain, which made her outline quiver for a moment.
Suppose doors with locks and keys were ever locked—then nothing like this would have the chance to happen. The nearness of missing things, and the possibility of preventing them, made Loch narrow his eyes.
Three party ladies who were late and puffing, all hurrying together in a duck-like line, now passed. They just missed sight of the old woman—Miss Jefferson Moody, Miss Mamie Carmichael, and Miss Billy Texas Spights. They would have stopped everything. Then in the middle of the empty air behind everybody, butterflies suddenly crossed and circled each other, their wings digging and flashing like duelers' swords in the vacuum.
Though Loch was gratified with the outrage mounting—three people now were in the vacant house—and could consider whether the old woman might have come to rout out the other two and give them her tirade, he was puzzled when the chandelier lighted up in the parlor. He ran the telescope out the window again and put his frowning eye to it. He discovered the old woman moving from point to point all around the parlor, in and out of the little chairs, sidling along the piano. He could not see her feet; she behaved a little like a wind-up toy on wheels, rolling into the corners and edges of objects and being diverted and sent on, but never out of the parlor.
He moved his eye upstairs, up an inch on the telescope. There on a mattress delightfully bare—where he would love, himself, to lie, on a slant and naked, to let the little cottony tufts annoy him and to feel the mattress like billows bouncing beneath, and to eat pickles lying on his back—the sailor and the piano player lay and ate pickles out of an open sack between them. Because of the down-tilt of the mattress, the girl had to keep watch on the sack, and when it began to slide down out of reach that was when they laughed. Sometimes they held pickles stuck in their mouths like cigars, and turned to look at each other. Sometimes they lay just alike, their legs in an M and their hands joined between them, exactly like the paper dolls his sister used to cut out of folded newspaper and unfold to let him see. If Cassie would come in now, he would point out the window and she would remember.
And then, like the paper dolls sprung back together, they folded close—the real people. Like a big grasshopper lighting, all their legs and arms drew in to one small body, deadlike, with protective coloring.
He leaned back and bent his head against the cool side of the pillow and shut his eyes, and felt tired out. He clasped the cool telescope to his side, and with his fingernail closed its little eye.
"Poor old Telescope," he said.
When he looked out again, everybody next door was busier.
Upstairs, the sailor and Virgie Rainey were running in circles around the room, each time jumping with outstretched arms over the broken bed. Who chased whom had nothing to do with it because they kept the same distance between them. They went around and around like the policeman and Charlie Chaplin, both intending to fall down.
Downstairs, the sailor's mother was doing something just as fanciful. She was putting up decorations. (Cassie would be happy to see that.) As if she were giving a party that day, she was dressing up the parlor with ribbons of white stuff. It was newspaper.
The old woman left the parlor time and time again and reappeared—in and out through the beads in the doorway—each time with an armful of old Bugles that had lain on the back porch in people's way for a long time. And from her gestures of eating crumbs or pulling bits of fluff from her bosom, Loch recognized that mother-habit: she had pins there. She pinned long strips of the newspaper together, first tearing them carefully and evenly as a school teacher. She made ribbons of newspaper and was hanging them all over the parlor, starting with the piano, where she weighted down the ends with a statue.
When Loch grew tired of watching one animated room he watched the other. How the two playing would whirl and jump over the old woman's head! That was the way the bed fell to begin with.
As Loch leaned his chin in his palm at the window and watched, it seemed strangely as if he had seen this whole thing before. The old woman was decorating the piano until it rayed out like a Christmas tree or a Maypole. Maypole ribbons of newspaper and tissue paper streamed and crossed each other from the piano to the chandelier and festooned again to the four corners of the room, looped to the backs of chairs here and there. When would things begin?
Soon everything seemed fanciful and beautiful enough to Loch; he thought she could stop. But the old woman kept on. This was only a part of something in her head. And in the splendor she fixed and pinned together she was all alone. She was not connected with anything else, with anybody. She was one old woman in a house not bent on dealing punishment. Though once when Woody Spights and his sister came by on skates, of course she came out and ran them away.
Once she left the house, to come right back. With her unsteady but purposeful walk, as if she were on a wheel that misguided her, she crossed the road to the Carmichael yard and came back with some green leaves and one bloom from the magnolia tree—carried in her skirt. She pulled the corners of her skirt up like a girl, and she was thin beneath in her old legs. But she zigzagged across the road—such a show-off, carefree way for a mother to behave, but mothers sometimes did. She lifted her elbows—as if she might skip! But nobody saw her: his forehead was damp. He heard a scream from the Rook party up at Miss Nell's—it sounded like Miss Jefferson Moody shooting-the-moon. Nobody saw the old woman but Loch, and he told nothing.
She brought the bunch of green into the parlor and put it on the piano, where the Maypole crown would go. Then she took a step back and was as admiring as if somebody else had done it—nodding her head.
But after she had the room all decorated to suit her, she kept on, and began to stuff the cracks. She brought in more paper and put it in all the
cracks at the windows. Now Loch realized that the windows in the parlor were both down, it was tight as a box, and she had been inside in the suffocating heat. A wave of hotness passed over his body. Furthermore, she made her way with a load of Bugles to the blind part of the wall where he knew the fireplace was. All the load went into the fireplace.
When she went out of the parlor again she came back slowly indeed. She was pushing a big square of matting along on its side; she wove and bent and struggled behind it, like a spider with something bigger than he can eat, pushing it into the parlor. Loch was suddenly short of breath and pressed forward, cramped inside, checkerboarding his forehead and nose against the screen. He both wanted the plot to work and wanted it to fail. In another moment he was shed of all the outrage and the possessiveness he had felt for the vacant house. This house was something the old woman intended to burn down. And Loch could think of a thousand ways she could do it better.
She could fetch a mattress—that would burn fine. Suppose she went upstairs now for the one they played on? Or pulled the other one, sheet and all, from under Mr. Holifield (whose hat had imperceptibly turned on the bedpost; it changed like a weathercock) ? If she went out of sight for a minute, he watched at the little stair window, but she did not go up.
She brought in an old quilt that the dogs there once slept on, that had hung over the line on the back porch until it was half light-colored and half dark. She climbed up on the piano stool, the way women climb, death-defying, and hung the quilt over the front window. It fell down. Twice more she climbed up with it and the third time it stayed. If only she did not block the window toward him! But if she meant to, she forgot. She kept putting her hand to her head.