Collected Stories, page 25
“Ma,” Harvey called from the next room, where he was lying down. “What’s all the noise about?”
They stopped talking and listened. The church bell was ringing madly. In a minute the bell in the firehouse joined it. The heavy bellow of a shotgun, both barrels, rolled over the snowflats between their street and the main part of town. A six-shooter went off, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang, and there was the sound of distant yelling.
“Fire?” Mr. Chance said, stooping to the window.
“Here comes somebody,” Ed said. The figure of a boy was streaking across the flat. Mr. Chance opened the door and shouted at him. The boy ran closer, yelling something unintelligible. It was Spot Orullian.
“What?” Mr. Chance yelled.
Spot cupped his hands to his mouth, standing in the road in front of Chet’s as if unwilling to waste a moment’s time. “War’s over!” he shouted, and wheeled and was gone up the street toward Van Dam’s.
Mr. Chance closed the door slowly. Mrs. Chance looked at him, and her lips jutted and trembled, her weak eyes ran over with tears, and she fell into his arms. The three boys, not quite sure how one acted when a war ended, but knowing it called for celebration, stood around uneasily. They shot furtive grins at one another, looked with furrowed brows at Mrs. Chance’s shaking back.
“Now Uncle Joe can come home,” Ed said. “That’s what she’s bawling about.”
Chet bolted out the door, raced over to his own house, pulled the loaded shotgun from the mantel, and burst out into the yard again. He blew the lid off the silence in their end of town, and followed the shooting with a wild yell. Ed and Harvey, leaning out their windows, answered him, and the heavy boom-boom of a shotgun came from the downtown district.
Carrying the gun, Chet went back to Chance’s. He felt grown-up, a householder. The end of the war had to be celebrated; neighbors had to get together and raise cain. He watched Mrs. Chance, still incoherent, rush to the calendar and put a circle around the date, November 11. “I don’t ever want to forget what day it happened on,” she said.
“Everyone in the world will remember this day,” said Mr. Chance, solemnly, like a preacher. Chet looked at him, his mind clicking.
“Mr. Chance,” he said, “would you like a drink, to celebrate?”
Mr. Chance looked startled. “What?”
“Pa’s got some whiskey. He’d throw a big party if he was home.”
“I don’t think we should,” said Mrs. Chance dubiously. “Your father might …”
“Oh, Mama,” Mr. Chance said, and laid his arm across her back like a log. “One bumper to honor the day. One leetle stirrup-cup to those boys of the Allies. Chester here is carrying on his father’s tradition like a man.” He bowed and shook Chet’s hand formally. “We’d be delighted, sir,” he said, and they all laughed.
Somehow, nobody knew just how, the party achieved proportions. Mr. Chance suggested, after one drink, that it would be pleasant to have a neighbor or two, snatched from the terrors of the plague, come and join in the thanksgiving; and Chet, full of hospitality, said sure, that would be a keen idea. So Mr. Chance called Jewel King, and when Jewel came he brought Chubby Klein with him, and a few minutes later three more came, knocked, looked in to see the gathering with cups in their hands, and came in with alacrity when Chet held the door wide. Within an hour there were eight men, three women, and the two Chance boys, besides Chet. Mr. Chance wouldn’t let the boys have any whiskey, but Chet, playing bartender, sneaked a cup into the dining room and all sipped it and smacked their lips.
“Hey, look, I’m drunk,” Harvey said. He staggered, hiccoughed, caught himself, bowed low and apologized, staggered again. “Hic,” he said. “I had a drop too much.” The three laughed together secretly while loud voices went up in the kitchen.
“Gentlemen,” Mr. Chance was saying, “I give you those heroic laddies in khaki who looked undaunted into the eyes of death and saved this ga-lorious empire from the rapacious Huns.”
“Yay!” the others said, banging cups on the table. “Give her the other barrel, Dictionary.”
“I crave your indulgence for a moment,” Mr. Chance said. “For one leetle moment, while I imbibe a few swallows of this delectable amber fluid.”
The noise went up and up. Chet went among them stiff with pride at having done all this, at being accepted here as host, at having men pat him on the back and shake his hand and tell him, ‘You’re all right, kid, you’re a chip off the old block. What’s the word from the folks?” He guggled liquor out of the sloshing cask into a milk crock, and the men dipped largely and frequently. About four o’clock, two more families arrived and were welcomed with roars. People bulged the big kitchen; their laughter rattled the window frames. Occasionally Dictionary Chance rose to propose a toast to “those gems of purest ray serene, those unfailing companions on life’s bitter pilgrimage, the ladies, God bless ’em!” Every so often he suggested that it might be an idea worth serious consideration that some liquid refreshments be decanted from the aperture in the receptacle.
The more liquid refreshments Chet decanted from the aperture in the receptacle, the louder and more eloquent Mr. Chance became. He dominated the kitchen like an evangelist. He swung and swayed and stamped, he led a rendition of “God Save the King,” he thundered denunciations of the Beast of Berlin, he thrust a large fist into the lapels of new arrivals and demanded detailed news of the war’s end. Nobody knew more than that it was over.
But Dictionary didn’t forget to be grateful, either. At least five times during the afternoon he caught Chet up in a long arm and publicly blessed him. Once he rose and cleared his throat for silence. Chubby Klein and Jewel King booed and hissed, but he bore their insults with dignity. “Siddown!” they said. “Speech!” said others. Mr. Chance waved his hands abroad, begging for quiet. Finally they gave it to him, snickering.
“Ladies and gen’lemen,” he said, “we have come together on this auspicious occasion …”
“What’s suspicious about it?” Jewel King said.
“… on this auspicious occasion, to do honor to our boys in Flanders Field, to celebrate the passing of the dread incubus of Spanish Influenza …”
“Siddown!” said Chubby Klein.
“… and last, but not least, we are gathered here to honor our friendship with the owners of this good and hospitable house, Bo Mason and Sis, may their lives be long and strewn with flowers, and this noble scion of a noble stock, this tender youth who kept the home fires burning through shock and shell and who opened his house and his keg to us as his father would have done. Ladies and gen’lemen, the Right Honorable Chester Mason, may he live to bung many a barrel.”
Embarrassed and squirming and unsure of what to do with so many faces laughing at him, so many mouths cheering him, Chet crowded into the dining-room door and tried to act casual, tried to pretend he didn’t feel proud and excited and a man among men. And while he stood there with the noise beating at him in raucous approbation, the back door opened and the utterly flabbergasted face of his father looked in.
There was a moment of complete silence. Voices dropped away to nothing, cups hung at lips. Then in a concerted rush they were helping Bo Mason in. He limped heavily on bandaged and slippered feet, his hands wrapped in gauze, his face drawn and hollow-eyed and noticeably thinner than it had been ten days ago. After him came Chet’s mother, half carrying Bruce, and staggering under his weight. Hands took Bruce away from her, sat him on the open oven door, and led her to a chair. All three of them, hospital-pale, rested and looked around the room. And Chet’s father did not look pleased.
“What the devil is this?” he said.
From his station in the doorway Chet squeaked, “The war’s over!”
“I know the war’s over, but what’s this?” He jerked a bandaged hand at the uncomfortable ring of people. Chet swallowed and looked at Dictionary Chance.
Dictionary’s suspended talents came back to him. He strode to lay a friendly hand on his host’s back; he swung and shook his hostess’s hand; he twinkled at the white-faced, big-eyed Bruce on the oven door.
“This, sir,” he boomed, “is a welcoming committee of your friends and neighbors, met here to rejoice over your escape from the dread sickness which has swept to untimely death so many of our good friends, God rest their souls! On the invitation of your manly young son here we have been celebrating not only that emancipation, but the emancipation of the entire world from the dread plague of war.” With the cup in his hand he bent and twinkled at Bo Mason. “How’s it feel to get back, old hoss?”
Bo grunted. He looked across at his wife and laughed a short, choppy laugh. The way his eyes came around and rested on Chet made Chet stop breathing. But his father’s voice was hearty enough when it came. “You got a snootful,” he said. “Looks like you’ve all got a snootful.”
“Sir,” said Dictionary Chance, “I haven’t had such a delightful snootful since the misguided government of this province suspended the God-given right of its free people to purchase and imbibe and ingest intoxicating beverages.”
He drained his cup and set it on the table. “And now,” he said, “it is clear that our hosts are not completely recovered in their strength. I suggest that we do whatever small tasks our ingenuity and gratitude can suggest, and silently steal away.”
“Yeah,” the others said. “Sure. Sure thing.” They brought in the one bed from the sled and set it up, swooped together blankets and mattresses and turned them over to the women. Before the beds were made people began to leave. Dictionary Chance, voluble to the last, stopped to praise the excellent medicinal waters he had imbibed, and to say a word for Chet, before Mrs. Chance, with a quick pleading smile, led him away. The door had not even closed before Chet felt his father’s cold eye on him.
“All right,” his father said. “Will you please tell me why in the name of Christ you invited that God-damned windbag and all the rest of those sponges over here to drink up my whiskey?”
Chet stood sullenly in the door, boiling with sulky resentment. He had held the fort, milked the cow, kept the house, sold all that whiskey for all it was worth, run Louis Treat and the other man out with a gun. Everybody else praised him, but you could depend on Pa to think more of that whiskey the neighbors had drunk than of anything else. He wasn’t going to explain or defend himself. If the old man was going to be that stingy, he could take a flying leap in the river.
“The war was over,” he said. “I asked them over to celebrate.”
His father’s head wagged. He looked incredulous and at his wits’ end. “You asked them over!” he said. “You said, ‘Come right on over and drink up all the whiskey my dad almost killed himself bringing in.’ ” He stuck his bandaged hands out. “Do you think I got these and damned near died in that hospital just to let a bunch of blotters … Why, God damn you,” he said. “Leave the house for ten days, tell you exactly what to do, and by Jesus everything goes wrong. How long have they been here?”
“Since about two.”
“How much did they drink?”
“I don’t know. Three crocks full, I guess.”
His father’s head weaved back and forth; he looked at his wife and then at the ceiling. … “Three crocks. At least a gallon, twelve dollars’ worth. Oh Jesus Christ, if you had the sense of a pissant …”
Laboriously, swearing with the pain, he hobbled to the keg. When he put his hand down to shake it, his whole body stiffened.
“It’s half empty!” he said. He swung on Chet, and Chet met his furious look. Now! his mind said. Now let him say I didn’t hold the fort.
“I sold some,” he said, and held his father’s eyes for a minute before he marched out stiff-backed into the living room, dug the wad of bills from the vase on the mantel, and came back. He laid the money in his father’s hand. “I sold a hundred and twenty-four dollars’ worth,” he said.
The muscles in his father’s jaw moved. He glanced at Chet’s mother, let the breath out hard through his nose. “So you’ve been selling whiskey,” he said. “I thought I told you to leave that alone?”
“People wanted it for medicine,” Chet said. “Should I’ve let them die with the flu? They came here wanting to buy it and I sold it. I thought that was what it was for.”
The triumph that had been growing in him ever since he went for the money was hot in his blood now. He saw the uncertainty in his father’s face, and he almost beat down his father’s eyes.
“I suppose,” his father said finally, “you sold it for a dollar a bottle, or something.”
“I sold it for plenty,” Chet said. “Four-fifty for bottles and four for quarts out of the keg. That’s more than you were going to get, because I heard you tell Ma.”
His father sat down on the chair and fingered the bills, looking at him. “You didn’t have any business selling anything,” he said. “And then you overcharge people.”
“Yeah!” Chet said, defying him now. “If it hadn’t been for me there wouldn’t’ve been any to sell. Louis Treat and another man came and tried to steal that whole keg, and I run ’em out with the shotgun.”
“What?” his mother said.
“I did!” Chet said. “I made ’em put it down and get out.”
Standing in the doorway still facing his father, he felt the tears hot in his eyes and was furious at himself for crying. He hoped his father would try thrashing him. He just hoped he would. He wouldn’t make a sound; he’d grit his teeth and show him whether he was man enough to stand it. … He looked at his father’s gray expressionless face and shouted, “I wish I’d let them take it! I just wish I had!”
And suddenly his father was laughing. He reared back in the chair and threw back his head and roared, his bandaged hands held tenderly before him like helpless paws. He stopped, caught his breath, looked at Chet again, and shook with a deep internal rumbling. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, kid. You’re a man. I wouldn’t take it away from you.”
“Well, there’s no need to laugh,” Chet said. “I don’t see anything to laugh about.”
He watched his father twist in his chair and look at his mother. “Look at him,” his father said. “By God, he’d eat me if I made a pass at him.”
“Well, don’t laugh!” Chet said. He turned and went into the living room, where he sat on the couch and looked at his hands the way he had when Louis Treat and the other man were walking up the ditch. His hands were trembling, the same way. But there was no need to laugh, any more than there was need to get sore over a little whiskey given to the neighbors.
His mother came in and sat down beside him, laid a hand on his head. “Don’t be mad at Pa,” she said. “He didn’t understand. He’s proud of you. We all are.”
“Yeah?” said Chet. “Why doesn’t he come and tell me that?”
His mother’s smile was gentle and a little amused. “Because he’s ashamed of himself for losing his temper, I suppose,” she said. “He never did know how to admit he was wrong.”
Chet set his jaw and looked at the shotgun above the mantel. He guessed he had looked pretty tough himself when he had the drop on Louis Treat and his thieving friend. He stiffened his shoulders under his mother’s arm. “Just let him start anything,” he said. “Just let him try to get hard.”
His mother’s smile broadened, but he glowered at her. “And there’s no need to laugh!” he said.
The Sweetness of the Twisted Apples
For a while the road was graded, with the marks of a scraper blade gouged into the banks on both sides. Then the graded road swung right, and a painted sign on a stake said “Harrow.” Harrow was where they had come from. But straight ahead a barely traveled road led on between high banks like hedgerows. From the brief clearing at the fork they saw the wild wooded side of South Maid Hill, the maples stained with autumn, and far up, one scarlet tree like an incredible flower.
Ross slowed down—his foot on the clutch. “Which?”
“Oh, straight on!” Margaret said. “That other one circles right back to the highway.”
“Chance of getting stuck.”
“There are tracks.”
“Not many.”
“Enough to show it’s passable.”
“You’re crazy,” he said. “Vermont-autumn crazy.”
He eased the car into the trail, and Margaret leaned back in the open car and watched the sky pour over her in one blue rounding cascade, carrying with it branches of trees and little cream-puff clouds.
She said, “Who wouldn’t be? Days like these. There’s such a wonderful resigned tranquillity about everything.”
She got a sour-fragrant whiff of his pipe and rolled her head back against the seat to look at him—a shaggy man with a kind face, a painter, inexplicably her husband. It was so fine for him to be there, smoking, his square hairy hands on the wheel, and so wonderful that the day was such a day as it was, that she shivered with an almost unbearable sense of life and well-being.
In the quick sun-and-shadow of the woods, white trunks of birches flashed. The car wallowed through a low spot where a spring muddied the road, and she got the scent of mint, clean and cold. On the other side of the swale they met a stone wall that within a few feet bent off to the right and was swallowed in impenetrable brush.
Margaret turned and stared back, but the wall did not appear again. It was lost in the woods, still carefully enclosing some obliterated and overgrown meadow, and all the labor that had built it was gone for the greater comfort of woodchucks and foxes. “It doesn’t seem as if anything in America could be this old,” she said.
The trail climbed steeply, rocky as the bed of a brook, and gravel chattered under the tires. Someone had chopped away limbs that overhung the road. At one place a log had been laid across the ruts and half buried, to act as a dam against washouts. Then, at the top of the rise, a fence of split cedar rails jutted out of the trees, and a weathered house with staggering sheds and a sag-backed barn. A foxhound charged out, heavy-voiced, and a man working in one of the sheds straightened up and stared silently. When they were almost past, Margaret saw a woman in the doorway of the house.
