“No sir. It ain’t that. It’s because I want—she would want—” only he realized that it would not bear saying, would never bear saying to any stranger, not even to his father’s father. So he said, “I aim to be rich. And I reckon the only money that’s worth a hundred cents on the dollar is the money you earn yourself. And in the South cotton is money. And I reckon the only way to learn cotton is to be where you can touch it, pick it up. Try to,” he added with that sardonic humor beyond his years. “Pick up one end of it at least.”
“But you will come here to live? You can do that.”
“Could I pay board?” Then he said, “No sir. I got to do this my own way. The way I—she would.… I’ll come every Sunday.”
He went on Sundays and Wednesday evenings too, so that twice a week now he went to church. He had been to church but once before, to a negro church with Joanna, to a Sunday afternoon baptising. He slipped away. That is, he did not announce to his mother where he was going. He did not believe that she would object very much, forbid him. It was just that, though they accepted God as a force in the world which they held nothing either for or against, like weather, and with which, like weather, they had long since reached a working basis of live and let live, they did not go to church—this principally doubtless because there was no white church nearby and because his mother had not yet learned to condense a week’s work into six days, as men had learned to do it. But he went now; he did it with his eyes open; even at sixteen and seventeen he told himself with that stolid and sardonic humor, I reckon when she hears about this she will call it fudging too. So he wrote her about it himself, receiving after a while an acknowledgement of the letter but no reference to church; in fact he received few letters of any sort from her—scrawls on scraps of paper in a savage masculine hand ending always with a formal acknowledgement (in the third person) to his grandparents; when at the end of the first twelve months he wrote to her that he had saved two hundred dollars and was coming to fetch her to Memphis to live, he received no reply at all. He went home, also in a box car, even though he now had two hundred dollars this time in an ancient money belt he had bought in a pawn shop. The wagon met him—the same mules, the same old negro man in the same patched garments; it might have been standing there ever since that day a year ago when he had got out of it; he found his mother in the cow-shed with a manure fork. She would not return to Memphis with him and for a while she even refused the two hundred dollars. “Take it,” he said. “I don’t need it. I don’t even want it. I’ve got a better job now. I’m going to be rich,” he said, cried, bragging: the boastful loud dream (he was seventeen): “Soon I can begin to fix up the house. You can have a carriage too,” ceasing, finding the cold steady gaze on him, not on his face; his mouth. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “It ain’t just money I love, want. I reckon you know that by now.”
And I reckon she does he thought, because she took the money, thrust it uncounted into the pocket of the faded dress; from the wagon he looked back once and saw her standing with the two pails in the door to the cowshed. His new job was runner for a cotton broker. He sent money home each month now, expecting and receiving no acknowledgement. In fact, she stopped writing to him at all now, even though he did not always return home at the end of each twelve months, the months accumulating into years and marked only by the home cured hams which she sent up at Thanksgiving and Christmas and which he ate with his grandparents. “I don’t like writing letters,” she wrote him. “And you are all right now and you ought to know I’m all right. I always have been.” Always had been and always will be he thought. Only I am just finding out how little she seems to have thought of me once. So he waited this time until he had saved twelve hundred dollars. He went home, he reached the rotting house at dusk and watched her emerge from the cowshed with the two pails full now, as though, like the instance of the wagon, no time had elapsed since he had seen her last three years ago. And now she would not even let him do anything to the house. “Awce will prop it up before it actually falls down,” she told him. But she accepted the twelve hundred dollars, without comment as usual, but this time without protest: and now time began to go fast with him, as it does for the young who have a single idea. He was now a clerk in the brokerage house, in six years a partner; he had an actual bank account now, a sum too large to be carried about in a money belt, and he was married; at times he would pause in a kind of amazement, not winded but as a strong horse pauses momentarily just to breathe, and think I am thirty. I am forty and he would not be able to remember just when, in what summer, he had seen her last, fetched her grandchildren down for her to look at, the occasions interchangeable and identical—the same two milk pails either full or empty, the same thin erect woman showing no age, the very graying of whose hair but reaffirmed her imperviousness to time, the same faded sunbonnet and dress, only the printed figure in the calico different, as if the change from one dress to another constituted the only alteration; then one day I am fifty and she is sixty-nine and in his hearse-like limousine and president now of that bank where he had made his first deposit and now a millionaire in his own right, who had become his grandfather’s heir twenty years ago and declined the bequest, turning the estate into an endowed refuge for childless old women, he drove down into Mississippi beside the railroad where the old box car had run and then over the road once interminable beneath the laborious wagon and so up to the house which Awce (long since dead too, his place taken by a fourteen year old boy who was a man himself now, who plowed fast too when the white woman stood at the fence to watch him) had propped up. But she would not come to Memphis. “I’m all right, I tell you,” she said. “Didn’t I get along all right with Joanna for years? I reckon me and Lissy (Joanna’s and Awce’s daughter, Melissande her name, though probably none save the son remembered it) can do the same.”
“But you don’t have to do the milking,” he said. She didn’t answer this at all. “And I reckon you won’t promise to write oftener either, will you?” She would not, so he stopped at a crossroad store a few miles away, the proprietor of which agreed to ride out to the house once a week and send him a report, which the proprietor did, the letter arriving five months later saying that his mother was ill and he returned and for the first time in his life he saw her in bed, the face still cold and indomitable and withal a little outraged at the failure of her flesh.
“I’m not sick,” she said. “I could get up this minute if I wanted to.”
“I know it,” he said. “You’re going to get up. You are coming to Memphis. I’m not asking you to this time. I’m telling you. Never mind your things. I’ll come back to-morrow and move them. I’ll even bring the cow back with me in the car.” Perhaps it was because she was on her back and helpless and knew it. Because after a moment she said,
“I want Lissy to go too. Hand me the box on the mantel there.” It was a cardboard shoebox; It had sat there for thirty years, he remembered it, and it contained every penny he had ever sent her or brought her, in the original bills, even in the original folds.
And now, as Gordon told his listener, he realized that she had never been in a car before. Not a moving car that is, though she had sat for a moment in the first one he had brought there; she had set the two milk pails down and got into it in the faded sunbonnet and dress and sat for a second and grunted grimly once and got out, although the negro chauffeur had given the negress Lissy a ride out to the main road and back. But she got into it without demurring, refusing to let him carry her, walking out to the car and standing beside it while the excited and wellnigh hysterical negress fetched out the few hurriedly wrapped bundles and bags. Then he helped her in and closed the door and he thought that the click of the door would be the end, just as the captive’s freedom ends with the click of the handcuffs, but he was wrong. He told that too: It was night now, the car ran now on a paved road and already the glare of the city lay ahead and he sitting beside the small, still, shawl-wrapped figure clutching a basket on its knees, thinking with that
amazement how never in his life before had he seen her lying down or even sitting down for this long, when she leaned suddenly forward and said in a faint sharp voice: “Stop. Stop.” and even his negro obeyed her as Awce and Awce’s successor did, the car slowing, the brakes squealing, and she leaning forward over the basket, peering out. “I want to stop here,” she said and he looked out too and saw what she seemed to be looking at—a neat toylike bungalow among neat shrubs in a small trim lot.
“It’s a nice place isn’t it,” he agreed. “Drive on Lucius.”
“No,” she said. “I ain’t going any further. I want to stop here.”
“In that house? that belongs to somebody. We can’t stop there.”
“Then buy it and turn them out, if you are rich as you tell me.” And he told that too: How they sat there in the halted car filled with the loud consternation of the negress Lissy who saw the prospect of Memphis steadily vanishing out of her life. But the mother was adamant. She would not even go into Memphis to wait. “Take me back to Holly Springs,” she said. “I’ll stay with Mrs. Gillman. You can buy it tomorrow and come and get me.”
“Will you promise not to go back home?”
“I ain’t going to promise anything. You just buy that house. Because I ain’t coming any further.” So he took her back to Holly Springs, to the old friend with whom she had gone to school in girlhood, knowing she would not stay there and she did not; he made a last trip down to Mississippi and fetched her and the negress out of the old house once more and into the new one, where the cow and her chickens were already installed, and left her there. She would never come into town though now he could drive out each Sunday evening to see her, in the faded gingham and the sunbonnets, standing in the summer twilights in a swirling cloud of chickens, the hem of the apron clutched up in one hand and the other arm performing the immemorial gesture of the sower of seed. Then one afternoon he was sitting in the small bare cubby hole which he called his office when the door burst open and he looked up into the sick face of the man who was shouting at him:
“She is your mother! Lewis Randolph is your mother!” crying, “My name is Gavin Blount too. I’m his great-nephew,” crying, “Didn’t you know? He and Charles Gordon were both in love with her. They both proposed to her that same day: they cut a deck of cards to see who would propose first and Gavin Blount won. But she gave Charles Gordon the rose.”
III
Each afternoon from that office window Gordon could look down into Battery Park and see Blount sitting on a bench facing the River. He was always alone and he sat there, in an overcoat in winter or in the linens of summer, among the old spiked cannon and the bronze plaques, for an hour sometimes, even in the rain.
He had known Blount for a long time now, yet even after twelve years he still regarded the other with tolerance and some affection and a little contempt. Because to him—the sane co-ordinated man with his healthy stocky mind—the life which Blount led was no life for a man. It was not even a woman’s life. A doctor, Blount had inherited from his father a practice which, by twenty years of unflagging effort, he had reduced to the absolute minimum; what cases now entered his office came between the covers of medical journals, what patients passed his door consisted of himself.
He was sick. Not physically, but born sick. He lived with two maiden aunts in a solid well-preserved heavy house built without grace of brick in a street which was, fifty years ago, one of the select residential districts of the city but which now was a clutter of garages and plumbing shops and decayed rooming-houses backed by a section of negro tenements, and he came to town each morning just as Gordon did though not to any office (there would be days when he would not even visit that office whose door still bore his father’s name) but to spend the day in the Nonconnah Guards Club, then to the River, the Battery, in the afternoon, to sit among the spiked old cannon and the bragging bas-reliefs, and at least once each week to sit for ten minutes or an hour in that high room whose proprietor and occupant had already come to think of him as existing nowhere else. “You ought to get married,” Gordon once told him. “That’s all that’s wrong with you. How old are you?”
“Forty-one,” Blount said. “Admitting for the moment that there is anything wrong with me: Do you know why I have never married? It’s because I was born too late. All the ladies are dead since 1865. There’s nothing left now but women. Besides, if I married I’d have to give up the chairmanship of the Guards.” And that, the Nonconnah Guards, was, according to Gordon, both his sickness and his sanitarium. He had been chairman of the Committee for seventeen years now, ever since he had inherited it from a man named Sandeman who had inherited it in his turn from a man named Heustace who had inherited it on the field of Shiloh from the first Gavin Blount. That was the sickness—a man still young yet who had firmly removed himself out of the living world in order to exist in a past and irrevocable time, whose one contact with the world of living people was the weighing and discarding of submitted names of anonymous young girls hoping to attend a dance, according to a scale of values postulated by the uncaring dead; a man in whom the machinery for living lay as pristine and unworn and motionless as on the day he received it like that of an unlaunched hull rotting slowly and quietly in the ways, who spent his time sitting solitary among a few mute rusting guns and verdigrised bronze plates in the intervals of sitting across a table from a man twice his age and saying, “Tell me again about that. When she leaned on the musket barrel and told you. Tell it again. Maybe there were parts of it you forgot before.”
So he told it again: how the girls fell in line and kissed the members of the battalion one by one, and how the niggers were fiddling again now only his mother said you couldn’t hear it, and how he said to her once (he was fifteen then and it seemed to him that he had listened to it a right considerable of times), “How do you know you couldn’t hear it?” and his mother estopped for that moment, standing there on the musket barrel and glaring at him, her mouth still open for talking beneath the sunbonnet which she wore indoors and out, which, so he told Blount, he believed she put on each morning even before her shoes and petticoat. “I bet when you came to Charley Gordon they couldn’t even see the niggers’ elbows working,” he told her.
“What you mean is, they didn’t need to listen,” Blount said. “What you mean is you could hear ‘Look away, look away’ without having to listen then. There are folks that can still hear it, even after seventy years,” he added. “That cant hear anything else.”
“But you cant live now and then both,” Gordon said.
“You can die trying.”
“You mean, you will die trying.”
“All right. What if I do? Who will be harmed by it?”
That was the first time Gordon told the other he should marry, saying it again on the afternoon when Blount had burst in with his astonishing request and in a condition even more hysteric than when he had burst in twelve years ago crying You are her son, you are Lewis Randolph’s son—the wild sick intelligent face—the doctor who, as he said, preferred an anecdote to an appendectomy, who spent his days weighing the names of candidates for an annual ball like the head of a new and still precarious revolutionary government choosing his cabinet and ministers. “So I am to drag her, a woman almost ninety years old, in by main force from where she is contented and comfortable, to go to a dance with a lot of prancing jellybeans.”
“But don’t you see? She attended the first one. I mean the real first one, the first one that meant anything, when the Guards were really born, when they sang Dixie under that flag most of them had never seen before and she kissed a hundred and four men and gave Charles Gordon the rose. Can’t you see?”
“But why mother? There must be one woman still alive here in Memphis who was there that night.”
“No,” Blount said. “She’s the last one. And even if there were others alive she would still be the last one. It was not one of the others that left on that troop train that night with a Confederate officer’s cloak over
a hooped ball gown and the flower still in her hair, to be married bareheaded in the snow in a square of troops like a court martial and spend four hours with the husband she was never to see again. And now to have her attend the la—this one, to enter the ball room on my arm like she did seventy years ago on Charles Gordon’s.”
“You started to say the last one. Is this the last one you are going to hold, or is it the last one you expect to attend yourself? I thought only death or marriage could relieve you of your chairmanship.”
“I’m not getting any younger.”
“For marriage or for dying?” Blount did not answer. Apparently he was not listening either, the intelligent tragic face downlooking, sick, and bemused. Suddenly he looked up, full at the other, and Gordon knew that he was sicker than he or anyone else suspected.
“You say for me to marry,” he said. “I can’t marry. She wouldn’t have me.”
“Who wouldn’t have you?”
“Lewis Randolph.”
So he departed, and Gordon sat bemused too. But there was nothing sick about him—this stocky solid man, gray successful and sane, sitting in his sober good broadcloth and his enormous immaculate old-fashioned cuffs, the expensive cigar burning in the clipped hand soft and smooth now but which still had not forgot the shape of a plow handle, rousing, waking suddenly, saying aloud: “Well, by damn. By damn if I don’t do it.”
So two days later his secretary telephoned Blount’s home; within an hour Blount was in the office. “Well, I persuaded her,” Gordon said. “She’s coming in. But not to the ball. I expect that will be too much for her. We’ll just call it dinner at my house, with a few guests. I’ll have Henry Heustace and his wife. She’s only about twenty years older than they are. We’ll see about the ball later.” Only Blount was not listening to this either.