Family Linen

  Finally one morning I got up and told Marvin I was leaving. He stood in the bedroom door in his work pants smoking a cigarette while I dumped the dresser drawers out on the bed and packed up everything I had in a cardboard box. It didn’t take long. Marvin looked real old. I used to love him, I thought. “Don’t you want—” he started, but I said no. “I don’t want a thing,” I said. When it’s time to go, you’d best get a move on, I think. I have always traveled pretty light. I hauled that box out to the pickup, Marvin standing there on the front porch smoking his cigarette and watching me. It was still early morning. The grass was real green, wet with dew. He watched me while I pulled out and drove off. Now I don’t remember this too good except for little things, like that Marvin had his thumbs hooked in his pants loops, watching me go, and that I had planted a bunch of crookneck squash along by the fence and they were blooming. Yellow flowers.

  I went on into town and rented a room from Lula Morris in the hotel, and the next day, I paid a boy to drive the truck back out there. Not too long after, Marvin sold that place for near about nothing, I heard, and went to live with his sister down in North Carolina, on a tobacco farm. The only thing I kept was a little yellow curl of Lou’s hair, in a locket that used to be Mama’s. I started waiting on tables at Ed’s, and took up with a lot of men. Now I’m not proud of this time, nor do I regret it either. It helped some.

  Eventually of course I met Millard Cline who used to come in there every day about eleven o’clock for a piece of coconut pie, and we started running around together. We used to go out on the highway to roadhouses, and dance. I remember dancing by a blue light, and somebody singing “Careless Love.” Millard had a weakness, he was bad to drink, but he was a lot of fun. Sweet-natured. After a while, he left his wife and kids for me. So you see how it is. If anybody’s passing judgment, I’ve not got a leg to stand on, I’ve not got a thing to say. I left one good decent man, and married another woman’s husband, and don’t regret any of it, to this day. You do what you have to. I quit over at Ed’s and started helping Millard with the flower business, and since his wife stayed on in their house of course, we just got us a couple of rooms over the shop there, and lived in them, and were happy. We were real happy. Millard could make you a bridal bouquet, or a funeral wreath, or whatever you fancied in between. He could do anything with flowers. So we were running the flower shop, and going out dancing on Saturday nights, and Elizabeth was really in trouble.

  I’d seen Jewell out once myself, with a woman named Mavis Lardner. They left the place they were at, when we came in. I didn’t say a word to them. Millard said that Jewell was becoming known around town as a ladies’ man, and also that he was known to make trips from time to time, and come back to town flashing money. He used to play the guitar and sing around here at dances. He was so good at it, that those that heard him said he ought to go over to Nashville and make a record, and be a star. But Elizabeth never did go to those dances, or say anything about them to her friends, nor about Jewell’s guitar playing. One time he came back with a mink coat for Elizabeth, and another time I heard he’d brought her a diamond ring. Which she wouldn’t have, either one of them. She was not that kind of a woman. But Mavis Lardner was seen by somebody’s cousin, over in Bristol, wearing a diamond ring that might have been that one. She was trying on clothes at King’s.

  Anyway, Jewell Rife never did get a job, or a job you could put your finger on, though he did as I said go away on “business.” Just what that business was, exactly, nobody ever knew. Except for those records in Bristol. More likely he was gambling. Anyway, they had been married about six years, and Jewell Rife was showing his true colors at last. Now this was not the strange thing, though. Anybody might have expected that. The strange thing, to my mind, was how Elizabeth acted, which was just like none of it was happening at all. Since she had those two little tiny children, Sybill and Arthur, she stayed at home a lot more, so that people in town didn’t see her much, but if you ever did see her, she looked fine. She had Jewell Rife take her to church every Sunday he was here, both of them dressed up fit to kill, and anybody that might of said anything to her about it just shut their mouth. She looked beautiful in those days, and Jewell Rife had his curly hair slicked down like a movie star. Sybill and Arthur had on little suits. Seeing them like that, it was hard to credit what you might have heard or might have thought you’d seen. And I didn’t have any regular truck with them then either, since I didn’t go to church, which would of been the one place I would of been sure to see them. Millard and me were more apt to lay up in the bed of a Sunday, and listen to the radio. Of course I heard people talking, and knew what they said. But the only thing I knew about it for sure was that every now and then Jewell Rife used to come in the shop, or call on the telephone, and order a dozen red roses sent up to Elizabeth.

  So I was surprised that day the phone rang and it was Grace Harrison calling me, her voice so old and thin it was like the rustling of tissue paper. “I remember you, Nettie,” Grace Harrison said. “And you were always a good, strong child. You need to see to Elizabeth now, I don’t know who else to tell.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “See to Elizabeth?” I was talking on the phone in the flower shop which was full of people, people were always hanging around in there talking to Millard.

  “Listen,” Grace Harrison said, her voice like a little wind way up on the mountain. “Something must be done. He beats her,” Grace Harrison said. She hung up, leaving me holding the phone in one hand and a bunch of glads in the other, and all upset.

  “Well, go right on up there and see about it,” Millard said when I told him, “and call me if you want me, I’ll be here,” and so I went. Millard said he’d drive me, but I said I’d walk.

  She was not expecting me. Nobody up there was expecting me, which is why I saw what I saw, and know what I know. This was early February 1940. We had had one of the awfulest winters we ever did have, and it was still hanging on. The snow was dirty gray and as hard as a rock, pushed up against the new sidewalk all along Main Street. The big stumps where they had cut down those pines looked like something awful sticking up out of the snow as you got on out of town, and all those tacky new little houses that Olan Griffith had built along there looked naked and cold. Olan Griffith said it was progress, to cut down the pines and build those houses in there. He had painted every one of those houses the kind of light green that makes you think about vomit. On the other side of the road, way back, sat Grace Harrison’s house, hiding behind her shade trees and her ivy. You couldn’t tell, looking at it, if she was home or not. You never could. I walked past Grace Harrison’s house and those other big houses, and stopped to get my breath where Main Street does the dogleg, so it looks like Elizabeth’s house is smack at the end of the street.

  I stood right there with my hand on my side, breathing puffy white clouds out into the freezing air. It put me in mind of summers gone, and better times. I felt a sadness. Also I was not feeling good that day anyway. I was on the rag, and it was a disappointment to me, as Millard and me had been trying and trying to get us a baby, which never did happen. The only baby I ever had was my pretty Lou. Anyway I stood there awhile looking up that long walk to the house with the boxwoods on each side of it like so many big round snowballs. The walk was not shoveled off, so I knew I’d have to go around to the side and up the driveway. I was just thinking it was a funny thing how I felt no connection to that house that I’d grown up in, no connection at all. I thought in my mind, Elizabeth’s house. But I have noted a strange thing in a lot of families, how one child might take after one parent, and the other after the other. I loved Mama, what I can recall of her, but I guess I was Daddy’s girl, and even if he did make considerable money at one time, he was a country man with not a highfalutin bone in his body which I could remember. So that house was Mama’s, then Elizabeth’s, and not ever Daddy’s or mine. I never did think, and I don’t believe anybody did, Elizabeth and Jewell’s hou
se. I felt like Jewell was just a fancy storebought dress that she was trying on, which was bound to split at the seams or pucker at the neck or in general wear out after a while. I hated to go up there and get into all of it, but blood is thicker than water, after all.

  It was getting on for dark and I knew if I didn’t go on up there then I wouldn’t, and so I went. The driveway had been shoveled, all right, and the Packard was gone. But lights were on in the kitchen, so I kept walking. I figured that Jewell was gone probably, out playing the guitar someplace or doing whatever it was that he did, and Elizabeth was there in the house with the children. I couldn’t quite get my mind around it, that Jewell had been beating Elizabeth, in fact I doubted it was true, and thought Grace Harrison had probably made it up. I didn’t think Elizabeth would stand for beating. But people had remarked a look of strain on her face, and said how the skin seemed stretched too tight across the bone, and we all knew that Jewell was running around. So I was aware of these things. But one thing about life which I learned from Millard Cline is that even if you know something’s wrong, you don’t have to deal with it right then. It’s best to take your time, and poke around it a little, because the plain truth is that most things will just go away of their own accord. But Grace Harrison had called, it was time I went up there.

  I scraped the snow off my feet on the porch steps and then for some reason I just walked on into the entryway, the cold-pantry as Mama used to say, without knocking. I don’t know to this day why I did that. There is two doors, see, and usually I’d knock on both of them.

  What I saw was awful.

  And it was the very last thing I ever expected to see.

  First I stood there in the cold-pantry shaking the snow off myself. There was one more door still closed between me and the kitchen, remember, but that was a new door with a big pane of glass that Jewell had put in it early on when he was making himself so useful. So I could see everything. Elizabeth wasn’t in there. Fay stood at the sink, her back to me, washing dishes. Of course this didn’t surprise me none. Fay was different, no question about it, but she had turned out to be a pretty good hand at helping out around the house, where she could understand enough to do most things. Since she had Fay to help her, Elizabeth never had hired anybody to come in and clean for her, the way most of her friends in town did, not even when Sybill and Arthur were little babies. If she had of hired somebody, if there had of been somebody else up in that house with them, it might have put some checks on Jewell’s behavior, and things might not have happened the way they did. But it’s easy, looking back, to see something like that, it never comes to mind at the time.

  Anyway, Fay was a big strapping girl, twenty-five years old. She looked a whole lot younger than she was, with her yellow hair falling in curls down her back, like a schoolgirl. I know for a fact that Elizabeth tried to get her to keep it pinned up. She had a wide, fair face, with pretty, regular features. She looked like Mama in the face. But there was something missing, which had always been missing, around her eyes. You couldn’t put your finger on what it was exactly, but you knew it wasn’t there. She was real shy, and looked down a lot when you tried to talk to her. And of course, she wouldn’t hardly talk at all. Everybody in town said how good Elizabeth was to her, and I guess this was true, but it was also true that she did a mighty lot of work for Elizabeth. The only thing Fay ever did, that I knew of, besides stay up there in Elizabeth’s house, was go to the movies. Every time the picture changed, which was once a week, Fay would walk down the hill and go see it, sit through it twice. Coming or going, she’d usually stop by the flower shop, and Millard would give her a flower, or a fancy ribbon, she used to love those, and a Coke. Everybody in town was real nice to Fay, out of regard for Elizabeth, and also because that’s the way they are. People here are real nice.

  So Fay was washing dishes at the sink, with her hair all down her back. She had on a big old dark green sweater which I think used to be Daddy’s, and some kind of a printed skirt, and white socks and house shoes. Now all of this part is burned in my brain, I remember it like it was yesterday. Jewell Rife sat at the round oak table under the hanging lamp, reading a newspaper. Jewell used to be a fancy dresser. That day he was wearing a white shirt, no tie, and dark blue suit pants. He wore his hair a little longer than most of the men hereabouts, kept wearing it in fact like he had worn it back when you might have thought he didn’t have the money for a haircut. Well, now he had the money, but he still had those black curls, which popped back up no matter how hard he tried to slick them down. He had his chair pulled up to the table at an angle to it, so his back was to me, too, he didn’t have the faintest notion I was there.

  For some reason I didn’t make a move to let him know it, either. I stood out there in the freezing cold-pantry, and it had grown dark by then so I stood there in the dark, looking through that pane of glass like I was watching a picture-show. There was some music going on which I could barely hear, and this puzzled me, their radio being on a stand in the parlor, and I knew it. So it wasn’t the radio. It was a high, thin, singing sound. Finally it came over me, real gradual, that what I heard was Fay singing. She was singing, “Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun,” which was real popular then. It made me feel faint, and sick-like, to hear Fay sing. I’d scarcely heard her speak since Mama died. Fay’s singing kind of stopped me, I couldn’t move a muscle. I watched.

  Jewell threw down his paper in a heap on the floor and ran a hand through his hair. He was looking at Fay, too. Fay sang, “Roll out the barrel, we’ve got the rain on the run.” Then Jewell banged his hand down on the tabletop, it was so loud I liked to have jumped clean out of my skin.

  “Fay!” he said.

  Fay did everything slow. She wiped off her hands on the front of her skirt, slow, and then she turned around. She had the awfulest look on her face, I hope to die before I ever see anything else like it. That blankness was gone, and I’d never seen it gone before. In its place was a whole new thing, a completely different way for Fay to be. Her lips looked redder, kind of wet, her eyes were shining, her cheeks were pink, her whole face had taken on a waiting look. Her mouth was open with singing sounds still coming out of it, but garbled. You couldn’t tell the words. The sound was high and thin, strained, like the wind through a barb-wire fence. She was smiling a loose, sweet smile. But her face looked awful, it looked—how can I tell it?—it looked like the end of the world.

  “Fay!” Jewell Rife said again. He stood up.

  While I watched her, Fay backed up to the sink and hiked up her skirt and hoisted herself up there, on the edge of the counter, spraddling her legs. She didn’t have on any drawers. Then Jewell was at her, his trousers down around his feet, didn’t even bother to take them off, fucking her. That’s all. He never kissed her, or nothing. He was just fucking her. And the worst part about it was Fay’s face, which I could still see, I could see her face all the time, over Jewell’s back, above his white shirt. Her face had changed from that waiting, knowing look into something terrible where wanting and hating went back and forth like the shadows of clouds across a field, back and forth faster and faster, ending up as something awful which you’ve not got the words to say.

  Soon enough, Jewell was done. He flopped his head down over her shoulder, and let his hands drop too, he was breathing hard. Fay stopped making the singing sounds. She was staring straight out over his dark head at the pane of glass in the back door, staring straight out to the cold-pantry where I stood watching. Now I know she couldn’t see me, out there in the dark. I don’t think she could have seen me at all. But a look came into her eyes for just a minute, it was the strangest thing, like she could see me, and like she was a reasonable person after all, a regular girl, a girl with good sense. This look said, I know what I’m up to. I know. And it was all pain. This was pain so pure it was like a real thing twisting and yelling in the air between her and me. Then while I still watched, that was gone and gone entirely, nobody
home. And nobody’s been home since. Nothing there except Fay’s sweet blank expression the way it was before he said “Fay!” the way it always was.

  Now I can’t even remember leaving the cold-pantry or going out on the porch and down those steps and down that long hill, back toward town. I don’t know if I made any noise or not, or if I did and if he looked out and saw me. I didn’t care. I can’t even remember that long walk home. I felt awful, my mind in a whirl like the kind of a wind that blows when a thunderstorm’s on the way, and I thought about how excited we used to get when we were little, the three of us, and how we’d run out in the yard and twirl around and around and around in the high fierce wind that came then and turned the leaves of the trees to their silvery insides-out. The way that house sits up on the hill, you could see the thunderstorms coming miles away, all across Long Valley, see the blowing clouds and the lightning and the moving sheets of rain. We used to run out and wheel around and around in that strange wild-smelling air you get right before the rain comes, until Mama came out, too, and shooed us back in the house. I couldn’t stand it to think of those days, to think of Fay as a little child, as she was then. It made me feel black and empty, like losing Lou. My mind went around and around, but there was one thing I knew for sure, that I would of staked my life on.

  I told it to Millard, who was real nervous waiting for me. He had closed up the shop by then of course, and had been looking out the window for me, and worrying. This is the first thing I remember, in fact, about that long walk home, Millard at the window, against the yellow light. He met me there at the top of the stairs, and hugged me, and sat me down on the sofa inside, and I told him all of it. I used to tell Millard everything. He was good to talk to. I’ve never told it since.