Collected Stories, page 5
“It’s been going since the Civil War,” Alma said, “and still there always seems to be somebody around to neighbor with.”
He rolled onto his back again and plucked a spear of grass. “We should be haying,” he said, “right now.”
“Sunday,” she said.
“Sunday or no Sunday. There’s still those two top meadows. Those city kids you got can’t get all that hay in.”
“All they need is somebody to keep ’em from raring back in the breeching,” Alma said. “I’ll be behind with a pitchfork if I have to.”
“I can see you.”
She did not stir from her comfortable sprawl, but her voice went up crisply. “You thought we ought to sell when you got called up,” she said. “Well, you’ve been gone going on a year, and hasn’t anything gone wrong, has there? Got seven new calves, an’t you? Milk checks have got bigger, an’t they? Learned to drive the tractor and the car, didn’t I? Got ten run of wood coming from DeSerres for the loan of the team, an’t we, and saved the price of feed all that time last winter.”
“Allen Swain can’t make it go,” Perley said.
“His farm don’t lay as good as ours, and he’s got a mortgage,” she said. “Mortgage,” the way she said it, sounded like an incurable disease. She half rose on her elbow to look at him. “And I ain’t Allen Swain, either.”
“So you want to be a farmer.”
“I am,” she said.
Perley picked another stem of grass and grinned up into the tops of the maples. They had been growing densely before the hurricane, and the going down of trees on every side had left them standing tall and spindly. The wind went through their leaves high up, a good stiff wind that bent and threshed their tops, but only a creeping breath disturbed the grass below. It was like lying deep down in a soft, warm, sweet-smelling nest.
“Laying here, you wouldn’t think anything could ever touch you,” he said. “Wind could blow up there like all get-out, and you’d never feel it.” Alma’s hand fell across his chest, and he captured it. “Unless you stuck your head out,” he said.
For a while he lay feeling the pulse in her wrist.
“Smell them raspberries?” he said once, and squirmed his shoulders more comfortable against the ground. “There ain’t anything smells sweeter, even flowers.” Alma said nothing.
“Funny about a berry patch,” he said. “Nobody ever plowed it, or planted it, or cultivated it, or fertilized it, or limed it, but there it is. You couldn’t grub it out if you tried. More you plow it up, the more berries there is next year. Burn it over, it’s up again before anything else. Blow everything down, that’s just what it likes.”
He filled his lungs with the ripe berry odor and let the breath bubble out between his lips. “Don’t seem as if you’d ever have to move,” he said. “Just lay here and reach up and pick a mouthful and then lay some more and let the wind blow over way up there and you never even feel it.”
“It’s nice,” Alma said. “I didn’t hardly think the blueberries would be ripe yet, it’s been so rainy.”
“Makes you think the world’s all right,” Perley said, “the way they come along every year, rain or shine.”
Alma stirred. “We better get busy,” she said. “Some gooseberries, too, if you’d like some.”
“Might use a pie,” he said. He sat up and stretched for the pails. There were only the granite kettle and the two-quart milk pail left. “You lay still,” he said. “I’ll get some.”
“ ’Tisn’t as if I needed a rest,” she said. “Here I’ve been just having fun all day.”
“Well, take the kettle then. It’s easier to pick into.” He picked up the milk pail.
“Perley,” Alma said.
“Uh?”
“This is what you want to do, isn’t it? I mean, you wouldn’t rather go see somebody?”
He watched her steadily. “Why?”
“Well, it’s only two more days. I just—”
“I already saw everybody I want to see,” he said. “I was saving the last couple days.”
“Well, all right,” she said, and went into the blowdown with the kettle.
He picked very fast, wanting to surprise her with how many he had, and when after a half-hour he worked back toward the side where she was picking he had the pail filled and overflowing, mounded an inch above the brim. He liked the smell of his hand when he scratched his nose free of a tickling cobweb. For a moment he stood, turning his face upward to watch the unfelt upper-air wind thresh through the tops of the maples, and then he came up softly behind Alma where she bent far in against a root table to reach a loaded vine. He bent in after her and kissed the back of her neck.
“How’re you doing?” she said, and worked her way out. Her shirt was unbuttoned halfway down, her throat was brown even in the hollow above where her collarbones joined, and her eyes sought his with that anxiety to know that he was content, that he was doing what he wanted to do, which she had shown all the time of his furlough. “I got quite a mess,” she said, and showed the berries in her pail. “How about you?”
“All I want,” Perley said. He was watching the sun dapple the brown skin of her throat as the wind bent the thin tops of the maples. “I wouldn’t want any more,” he said.
The Women on the Wall
The corner window of the study overlooked a lawn, and beyond that a sunken lane between high pines, and beyond the lane a point of land with the old beach club buildings at one end and a stone wall around its tip. Beyond the point, through the cypresses and eucalyptuses, Mr. Palmer could see the Pacific, misty blue, belted between shore and horizon with a band of brown kelp.
Writing every morning in his study, making over his old notebooks into a coherent account of his years on the Galápagos, Mr. Palmer could glance up from his careful longhand and catch occasional glimpses, as a traveler might glance out of the window of a moving train. And in spite of the rather special atmosphere of the point, caused by the fact that until the past year it had been a club, there was something homey and neighborly and pleasant about the place that Mr. Palmer liked. There were children, for one thing, and dogs drifting up and down, and the occasional skirr of an automobile starting in the quiet, the diminishing sound of tires on asphalt, the distant racket of a boy being a machine-gun with his mouth.
Mr. Palmer had been away from the States a long time; he found the noises on the point familiar and nostalgic and reassuring in this time of war, and felt as if he had come home. Though California differed considerably from his old home in Ohio, he fell naturally and gratefully into its procession of morning and afternoon, its neighborhood routines, the pleasant breathing of its tides. When anything outside broke in upon his writing, it was generally a commonplace and familiar thing; Mr. Palmer looked up and took pleasure in the interruption.
One thing he could be sure of seeing, every morning but Sunday. The section was outside the city limits, and mail was delivered to a battery of mailboxes where the sunken lane joined the street. The mail arrived at about eleven; about ten-thirty the women from the beach club apartments began to gather on the stone wall. Below the wall was the beach, where the tides leaned in all the way from Iwo and Okinawa. Above it was the row of boxes where as regularly as the tide the mail carrier came in a gray car and deposited postmarked flotsam from half a world away.
Sometimes Mr. Palmer used to pause in his writing and speculate on what these women thought of when they looked out across the gumdrop-blue water and the brown kelp and remembered that across this uninterrupted ocean their husbands fought and perhaps bled and possibly died, that in those far islands it was already tomorrow, that the green water breaking against the white foot of the beach might hold in suspension minute quantities of the blood shed into it thousands of miles away, that the Japan Current, swinging in a great circle up under the Aleutians and back down the American coast, might as easily bear the mingled blood or the floating relics of a loved one lost as it could bear the glass balls of Japanese net-floats that it sometimes washed ashore.
Watching the women, with their dogs and children, waiting patiently on the stone wall for that most urgent of all the gods, that Mercury in the gray uniform, Mr. Palmer thought a good deal about Penelope on the rocky isle of Ithaca above the wine-dark sea. He got a little sentimental about these women. Sometimes he was almost frightened by the air of patient, withdrawn seriousness they wore as they waited, and the unsmiling alacrity with which they rose and crowded around the mailman when he came. And when the mail was late, and one or two of them sat out on the wall until eleven-thirty, twelve, sometimes twelve-thirty, Mr. Palmer could hardly bear it at all.
Waiting, Mr. Palmer reflected, must cause a person to remove to a separate and private world Like sleep or insanity, waiting must have the faculty of making the real unreal and remote. It seemed to Mr. Palmer pathetic and somehow thrilling that these women should have followed their men to the very brink of the West, and should remain here now with their eyes still westward, patiently and faithfully suspending their own normal lives until the return of their husbands. Without knowing any of the women, Mr. Palmer respected and admired them. They did not invite his pity. Penelope was as competent for her waiting as Ulysses was for his wars and wiles.
Mr. Palmer had been working in his new house hardly a week before he found himself putting on his jacket about eleven and going out to join the women.
He knew them all by sight just from looking out the window. The red-haired woman with the little boy was sitting on the wall nearest him. Next was the thin girl who always wore a bathing suit and went barefooted. Next was the dark-haired one, five or six months pregnant. And next to her was the florid, quick, wrenlike woman with the little girl of about five. Their faces all turned as Mr. Palmer came up.
“Good morning,” he said.
The red-haired woman’s plain, serious, freckled face acknowledged him, and she murmured good morning. The girl in the bathing suit had turned to look off over the ocean, and Mr. Palmer felt that she had not made any reply. The pregnant girl and the woman with the little girl both nodded.
The old man put his hands on his knees, rounded his mouth and eyes, and bent to look at the little boy hanging to the red-haired woman’s hand. “Well!” he said. “Hi, young fella!”
The child stared at him, crowding against his mother’s legs. The mother said nothing, and rather than push first acquaintance too far, Mr. Palmer walked on along the wall. As he glanced at the thin girl, he met her eyes, so full of cold hostility that for a moment he was shocked. He had intended to sit down in the middle of the wall, but her look sent him on further, to sit between the pregnant girl and the wrenlike woman.
“These beautiful mornings!” Mr. Palmer said, sitting down with a sigh.
The wrenlike woman nodded; the pregnant one regarded him with quiet ox-eyes.
“This is quite a ritual, waiting for the mail,” Mr. Palmer said. He pointed to the gable of his house across the lane. “I see you from my window over there, congregating on the wall here every morning.”
The wrenlike woman looked at him rather oddly, then leaped to prevent her daughter from putting out the eyes of the long-suffering setter she was mauling. The pregnant girl smiled a slow, soft smile. Over her shoulder Mr. Palmer saw the thin girl hitch herself up and sit on her hands. The expression on her face said that she knew very well why Mr. Palmer had come down and butted in, and why he watched from his window.
“The sun’s so warm out here,” the pregnant girl said. “It’s a way of killing part of the morning, sitting out here.”
“A very good way,” Mr. Palmer said. He smoothed the creases in his trousers, finding speech a little difficult. From the shelter of his mother’s legs the two-year-old boy down the wall stared at him solemnly. Then the wrenlike woman hopped off the wall and dusted her skirt.
“Here he is!” she said.
They all started across the mouth of the lane, and for some reason, as they waited for the mailman to sort and deliver, Mr. Palmer felt that his first introduction hadn’t taken him very far. In a way, as he thought it over, he respected the women for that, too. They were living without their husbands, and had to be careful. After all, Penelope had many suitors. But he could not quite get over wanting to spank the thin girl on her almost-exposed backside, and he couldn’t quite shake the sensation of having wandered by mistake into the ladies’ rest room.
After that, without feeling that he knew them at all, he respected them and respected their right to privacy. Waiting, after all, put you in an exclusive club. No outsider had any more right on that wall than he had in the company of a bomber crew. But Mr. Palmer felt that he could at least watch from his window, and at the mailboxes he could, almost by osmosis, pick up a little more information.
The red-haired woman’s name was Kendall. Her husband was an Army captain, a doctor. The thin girl, Mrs. Fisher, got regular letters bearing a Marine Corps return. The husband of Mrs. Corson, the wrenlike woman, commanded a flotilla of minesweepers in the western Pacific. Of the pregnant girl, Mrs. Vaughn, Mr. Palmer learned little. She got few letters and none with any postmarks that told anything.
From his study window Mr. Palmer went on observing them benignly and making additions to his notes on the profession of waiting. Though the women differed sharply one from another, they seemed to Mr. Palmer to have one thing in common: they were all quiet, peaceful, faithful to the times and seasons of their vigil, almost like convalescents in a hospital. They made no protests or outcries; they merely lived at a reduced tempo, as if pulse rate and respiration rate and metabolic rate and blood pressure were all turned down. Mr. Palmer had a notion how it might be. Sometimes when he awoke very quietly in the night he could feel how quietly and slowly and regularly his heart was pumping, how slow and regular his breathing was, how he lay there mute and cool and inert with everything turned down to idling speed, his old body taking care of itself. And when he woke that way he had a curious feeling that he was waiting for something.
Every morning at ten-thirty, as regular as sun and tide, Mrs. Kendall came out of the beach club apartments and walked across the point, leading her little boy by the hand. She had the child turned down, too, apparently. He never, to Mr. Palmer’s knowledge, ran or yelled or cried or made a fuss, but walked quietly beside his mother, and sat with her on the big stump until five minutes to eleven, and then walked with her across to the end of the stone wall. About that time the other women began to gather, until all four of them were there in a quiet, uncommunicative row.
Through the whole spring the tides leaned inward with the same slow inevitability, the gray car came around and stopped by the battery of mailboxes, the women gathered on the wall as crows gather to a rookery at dusk.
Only once in all that drowsy spring was there any breaking of the pattern. That was one Monday after Mr. Palmer had been away for the weekend. When he strolled out at mailtime he found the women not sitting on the wall, but standing in a nervous conversational group. They opened to let him in, for once accepting him silently among them, and he found that the thin girl had moved out suddenly the day before: the Saturday mail had brought word that her husband had gone down in flames over the Marianas.
The news depressed Mr. Palmer in curious ways. It depressed him to see the women shaken from their phlegmatic routine, because the moment they were so shaken they revealed the raw fear under their quiet. And it depressed him that the thin girl’s husband had been killed. That tragedy should come to a woman he personally felt to be a snob, a fool, a vain and inconsequent chit, seemed to him sad and incongruous and even exasperating. As long as she was one of the company of Penelopes, Mr. Palmer had refused to dislike her. The moment she made demands upon his pity he disliked her very much.
After that sudden blow, as if a hawk had struck among the quiet birds on the wall, Mr. Palmer found it less pleasant to watch the slow, heavy-bodied walking of Mrs. Kendall, her child always tight by the hand, from apartment to stump to wall. Unless spoken to, she never spoke. She wore gingham dresses that were utterly out of place in the white sun above the white beach. She was plain, unattractive, patient, the most remote, the most tuned-down, the quietest and saddest and most patient and most exasperating of the Penelopes. She too began to make wry demands on Mr. Palmer’s pity, and he found himself almost disliking her. He was guilty of a little prayer that Mrs. Kendall’s husband would be spared, so that his pity would not have to go any farther than it did.
Then one morning Mr. Palmer became aware of another kind of interruption on the point. Somebody there had apparently bought a new dog. Whoever had acquired it must have fed it, though Mr. Palmer never saw anyone do so, and must have exercised it, though he never saw that either. All he saw was that the dog, a half-grown cocker, was tied to the end of a rose trellis in the clubhouse yard. And all he heard, for two solid days, was the uproar the dog made.
It did not like being tied up. It barked, and after a while its voice would break into a kind of hysterical howling mixed with shuddering diminuendo groans. Nobody ever came and told it to be still, or took care of it, or let it loose. It stayed there and yanked on its rope and chewed at the trellis post and barked and howled and groaned until Mr. Palmer’s teeth were on edge and he was tempted to call the Humane Society.
Actually he didn’t, because on the third morning the noise had stopped, and as he came into his study to begin working he saw that the dog was gone. Mrs. Corson was sitting in a lawn chair under one of the cypresses, and her daughter was digging in the sandpile. There was no sign either of Mrs. Kendall or Mrs. Vaughn. The owner of the house was raking leaves on the lawn above the seawall.
Mr. Palmer looked at his watch. It was nine-thirty. On an impulse he slipped on a jacket and went down and out across the lawn and down across the lane and up the other side past the trellis. Where the dog had lain the ground was strewn with chewed green splinters.
Mrs. Corson looked up from her chair. Her cheeks were painted with a hatchwork of tiny ruddy veins, and her eyes looked as if she hadn’t slept. They had a stary blankness like blind eyes, and Mr. Palmer noticed that the pupils were dilated, even in the bright light. She took a towel and a pack of cigarettes and a bar of coco-butter off the chair next to her.
