Peace, p.12
Peace, page 12
Mr. Macafee was silent, and kept his eyes cast down. On the few occasions when he attempted to assist in the preparations for the meal—moving chairs and suchlike—he was slow and clumsy. And yet this—this silence, this ineptitude—was clearly not caused by bad temper but rather by a species of shy desire that, occupying the center of his thought, left him a kind of idiot, and could not be dismissed (as he may have imagined) at will.
My aunt’s reaction, though it proceeded from the same cause, was quite different. She was high-spirited, talkative, and exceedingly efficient. She set Mrs. Lorn’s table for her, and did it so quickly that it seemed as if she moved by magic, actually tossing the plates and cups into place, but so dexterously that hardly a piece needed to be adjusted from the point at which it came to rest. She was the spring from which there flowed a constant stream of little sallies more remarkable for gaiety than wit but made very acceptable by the infectious good will that accompanied them, and at which she laughed more loudly than anyone: louder than Margaret, who went off into giggles when her cheeks were pinched and she was asked about boyfriends at school and promised a sample of my aunt’s perfume; louder than I when she called Mr. Macafee “Jimmy-wimmy” and pretended to feel in the pockets of his vest to see if he kept marbles there; louder even than Mrs. Lorn, who was losing her nervousness at having strange company, and beginning already to store her head with tales of that company and the way they had behaved, the storm, the car, the supper eaten without her husband, “with everybody cracking jokes and carrying on like we was all children again, though there wasn’t a drop of liquor served and no one wanted it,” the praise she knew would come to her food, and the talk afterward “about China, where my family used to live and everything, and going-ons in Cassionsville, too—that Mr. Macafee, that’s the Macafee that owns the store, and don’t he know who owes what.”
We suppered on the cold biscuits left from dinner, with honey and farm butter, tea, the promised corn relish, homemade vegetable soup, and more doughnuts. My aunt fell into conversation with Margaret, asking her where she went to school, what she studied, what she did to help her mother, and so on. “She’s a bright one,” Mrs. Lorn said. “She’ll be a better cook than me soon’s she understands the management of the stove. She can play, too, and sings a bit.”
“The piano? Why, we’ll have to play a duet, Margie—later this evening if your mother will let us.”
“It’s sad how out of tune it is now. That parlor’s too wet for it, is what I tell Carl, but you can’t have it nowhere else. Carl plays a bit—he taught Margie—and I try to get him to tune it, but he says his ears isn’t good enough.”
“You have to use a tuning fork and listen very carefully. I watch when the man from Jimmy’s store does mine. But I never could do it—I don’t understand about all the little wrenches and things.”
“Well, if we’re going to go into the parlor by and by,” Mrs. Lorn practically, “we ought to have a fire started in there now— it’ll be as cold as a frog in a clabber crock.” She looked at me. “Margie could do it, child, but it’s more a boy’s work and you look antsy. She’ll show you where the things is.”
“Oh, Den lays fires for me all the time,” my aunt said. I could see she felt that having me as her representative in the parlor brought her in some mystical way a step closer to the egg. Under Margie’s supervision I collected an armload of kindling from the smaller division of the woodbox by the stove, and we made our way back down the narrow hall to the parlor door.
It was a small room—no more, I think, than ten by twelve feet—much smaller than the parlor at my grandmother’s or my aunt Olivia’s. The fireplace was at one end of the room, the piano at the other; while I busied myself at the grate and brought in more wood from the box in the kitchen, Margie lit a kerosene lamp for me, showed me where the matches were, played a swift chorus of “Jingle Bells,” and ran out of the room —I suppose to tell her mother the fire was laid, or to get another doughnut. I used the opportunity provided by her absence to look for the egg, first along the mantelpiece, then peering, with the aid of the lamp, through the somewhat dusty glass doors of a bookcase full of framed photographs and mementos. For a moment I stood in the middle of the room and held the lamp as high as I could, turning slowly about: the kindling in the grate was blazing brightly, and the larger pieces of wood were beginning to catch; the rain beat insistently on windows and walls and sent a thin trickle of water over one sill to form a small pool on the floor beneath; the yellow lamplight seemed to bathe the entire room; and yet I could not see the famous object. I returned to the kitchen dejected, and when my aunt sent me a piercing look I could only shake my head. Mr. Macafee was telling Mrs. Lorn about the Tuesday and Thursday Nankeen Nook, and Mrs. Lorn said, “Why, that’s wonderful! I wouldn’t have thought, Mr. Macafee, that a big store like yours would think about people like that at all.”
Mr. Macafee said, “You don’t understand, Mrs. Lorn; thinking about people is good business—it really is.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you say that,” Mrs. Lorn said, “because I’ve always felt it was real important.”
My aunt touched her arm. “Now that there’s a fire in the parlor, Em, why don’t we go in and have a look at that wonderful egg of yours; and then your daughter and I can play that duet.”
Mrs. Lorn looked embarrassed. “I hope you won’t mind,” she said. “I wasn’t going to say anything about it—Carl says I’m foolish, and you folks drove so far out here to see it in all this rain. . . .”
“We don’t want to put you to any trouble, Em,” my aunt said. I saw her knuckles tighten, and knew that she feared the egg had been broken; I thought so myself.
“It’s the Lord’s day,” Mrs. Lorn said. “I do want to sell it— that is, if you folks are willing to give as much for it as that nice Miss Bold said you might—but it’s the Lord’s day. I was always taught it was a sin to buy or sell on the Lord’s day, and particularly something like that that has his picture on it, or a Bible or a prayer book. Simony is what my father would of called it. So I thought the Lord sent the rain so you’d stay over —and then it will be the day after, you know. Just to relieve my feelings.”
“Macafee’s is never open on Sunday,” Mr. Macafee said.
My aunt put an arm about Mrs. Lorn’s shoulders, and I noticed how odd the lace at the end of her sleeve looked against the older woman’s worn face. “We certainly don’t have to talk about price,” she said. “Indeed, I wouldn’t, not if you felt the least scruple about it, Em. Why don’t we just look at it today— you show it to company, don’t you? Mr. Macafee and I are so eager to see it—we love that sort of thing.”
“It’s in the parlor,” Mrs. Lorn said, “on the mantel.”
I knew that it was not, but I followed them into the parlor nonetheless; my fire was crackling on the grate now, and the lamp Margaret had lit still illuminated the room. Mrs. Lorn walked to the mantel and picked up a squat three-legged wooden stand I had noticed there earlier. “Why, it’s gone,” she said. “It was right here.”
My aunt and Mr. Macafee looked at one another.
“It’s gone,” Mrs. Lorn said again. “Why, you don’t suppose that boy—”
My aunt’s mouth tightened. “I’m sure Den wouldn’t do anything like that,” she said. “Or if he did, it would be just to play a harmless joke on us—just for a moment. You wouldn’t, would you, Den?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Could your girl—”
“Margie, dear, did you take it? You were in there with Den.”
Margaret shook her head, then ran to her mother’s side and, drawing her down, whispered in her ear. “That man!” Mrs. Lorn said.
“Could your husband have done something with it?”
“That’s what the child says—I guess it could be true. I’ll send her out, though I hate to on a night like this.”
“It’s outside?”
Mrs. Lorn nodded grimly. “It could be—that’s what the child said.
“Margie, you go out and look, and if it’s there, fetch it.”
My aunt and Mr. Macafee protested.
“I’m not sending her out there on your account,” Mrs. Lorn said, “I wouldn’t do that. But I want to know myself, and the rain won’t hurt her—she’s a healthy girl.”
“Den,” my aunt said suddenly, “you go with her.”
“There’s no need of that,” Mrs. Lorn protested.
“She should have somebody with her if she’s going out in that storm—it’s not far, is it?”
Mrs. Lorn shook her head. “Just out back. You children come with me, I’ll get you a light.”
There was a roofed porch with rusty, sagging screens behind the kitchen; dimly I could see a table upon which tomatoes were stacked like cannon balls, and from under it Mrs. Lorn took a huge old-fashioned lantern, which she lit and gave to Margie. To me she said, “That’s big enough for both of you. You, Den —that your name?—watch she don’t set the henhouse afire with it. That coat fit you?” I was wearing her slicker; it did not, but I nodded. “Well, don’t trip over the hem. And don’t step on it neither if you can help it. And don’t push your hat back like that—it’ll rain on your face and run down through the neck; wear it way forward.” She pulled the too large sou’wester hat over my eyes and Margie laughed, a laugh that, at the time, cut to the quick. “Go on, now.”
We did not have to leave the porch to enter the rain; it splashed through the screens at us. But when Mrs. Lorn (getting wet herself, no doubt, in doing it) unhooked the door for us, it was as though we had stepped beneath a waterfall. I was still unsure of where we were going, and the noise of the rain was now too loud to permit me to ask; but the girl gestured imperiously for me to follow and we set out across what I knew must be the farmyard.
We skirted what looked like a woodshed and, splashing through puddles higher than the tops of our ankle-high shoes, made our way around the wreck of an old hay wagon. A moment later I saw that Margie was pulling at a low, crooked door set in a building hardly higher than my head, and I took the lantern from her. The door opened, and I heard, much muted by the roar of the rain, the sleepy protests of disturbed fowl. “This is the laying house,” Margie said as soon as we had stepped inside.
The significance of the location escaped me, and I fear I stared at her.
“When one of the hens won’t lay, Daddy puts a china egg under her—sometimes that starts them. Only it broke; last week that was. He said something about using the one off our mantel until he got another one at the store, only Daddy never gets nothing at the store if he can find something else that’ll do. I thought he was funning, because he wouldn’t set something with Jesus’ picture on it under a hen. But it’s gone, so I told Mother. He don’t want her to sell it.”
“Your father?”
The girl nodded. She had enormous eyes, wide and solemn; they seemed to glow in the lamplight. “He can be funny. Do you think he’d put a egg with Jesus on it underneath a common hen like that? Suppose it was to hatch?”
I said, “I don’t think it’s a real egg, is it?”
“Suppose it was. It’d be blasphemy to put it under a ordinary hen like that. It might hatch something little and squirmy, with a hundred little teeth as sharp as needles, and when it got big it would be one of those things that live in the woods and at night when it’s raining like this come out and kill the cows and sheep, and even people if they get too close.”
I shrugged, endeavoring to show that it made no difference to me whether the Chinese egg hatched into such a creature or not.
“So we’d better get it out,” the girl continued, “before it does. Stick your hand under the hens and feel if there’s any eggs—it’s bigger than the other kind. You start on that side and I’ll start over here and we’ll meet in the middle.”
I did, with a nervousness compounded of a town boy’s fear of hens, and the unpleasant image the girl had just introduced into my mind—the whole multiplied by the fact that she had taken the lantern, so that I worked in near darkness, with my own magnified shadow bobbling on the unpainted boards of the wall before me. I found two eggs, both of the ordinary, dirty sort laid by chickens.
When we met (she had examined about twice as many nests, I noticed, as I had), she said, “Didn’t you find it?”
I shook my head.
“Let me look,” she said, and she quickly rechecked the nests I had already searched. When she had finished, she said, “It’s not here.”
I readily agreed, and without saying anything more she threw open the door and stepped out into the rain again, leaving me to close it behind her. After a wild dash—I was afraid that she would get so far in advance of me that I would be left in total darkness, which in that rain would have required a distance of only a few yards—I found myself in a cavernous building filled with the odors of cattle and cow dung. I asked if we were not going back to the house.
“This is our barn. I thought you might like to see the animals.”
“I’ve seen lots of cows.”
“We’ve got some real good ones. See that red one over there? That’s Belle, she’s a Jersey; and that one next to her—Bessy— she’s half Jersey.”
I showed my courage by stroking Bessy, very gently, on the nose.
“Some of them will hook you. That Bessy’d hook anybody, and there’s a billy goat in one of these stalls.”
“Which one?”
“This one.” She walked across the barn to an apparently empty stall and looked inside. “He’s lying down now.”
“Can I see?” I began to follow her, but she laid her free hand on the latch menacingly.
“What I do,” she said slowly, “is just open it here, and pull it back on me so I’m behind it and he can’t get at me. He comes straight out like a bullet, then goes for whatever moves. Then while he’s busy I give a jump for that ladder over there and get up in the haymow.”
I backed away from the stall and said, “I don’t think there’s really a goat in there at all,” and as I did, I caught my heel on the handle of a hayrake and, putting out a hand to steady myself, put it purely by accident into the feedbox of an empty stall. Under musty hay it met something smooth, round, and cool.
My face must have told Margie that something extraordinary had happened. The goat (who had been purely imaginary, in any case) was forgotten as she came rushing to see what I had found; it was too large for me to grasp securely with one hand, and I was rooting in the box with both. When I drew it up at last, my first impression, still not totally erased, was that I had found a pearl.
It was cream white and gleaming, and the light of the lantern seemed to penetrate it slightly. I had imagined that it would be nearly spherical, with one tapering (but only slightly tapering) end like the chicken eggs with which I was familiar. In fact its length was somewhat more than twice its diameter, so that it resembled, at least in shape, the eggs of certain wild birds. It was white, as I have said, with the pictures that decorated its surface executed in a brown so dark that I then, in the lantern light, believed them black.
“You’ve got it!” Margie said. “We found it.”
I wanted to look at it, but she stopped me by depriving me of the light. “Come on,” she said, “let’s show everybody. Only don’t drop it.”
I was careful not to: ignorant though I was, I had already seen that the egg was not ivory (as had sometimes been reported) but porcelain.
3 THE ALCHEMIST
I SAW Margaret Lorn only rarely after my aunt Olivia bought the egg. Only rarely, that is, until we were of high school age and found ourselves (who had so often, it seemed, been kept apart by destiny) now thrust together. The mobility furnished —or, rather, dropped raw and unfurnished—into the hands of young people by the invention of the automobile has often been commented upon. The mobility conferred at a much earlier age by the bicycle has been wholly neglected. Margaret and I wheeled ours down narrow footpaths, threading the woods lining the banks of the Kanakessee below Cassionsville, threading the banks in early spring, when the black willows were dabbed with green, and birds called through a forest littered with the wind-fallen branches of the winter past, coming out at last on stony banks, with sand farther down, sand where the high winter water had cast it in making its wide turn: a beach that would grow cockleburs later, but was fine sifted sand now, dotted with driftwood. Bass in the clear river water dodging in and out; brown moccasins without venom swimming upstream like sea serpents in long lashing esses, their heads above the ripples; minnows with theirs in a circle, their bodies radiating out like the petals of the memorial daisy.
“Now, Mr. Weer, if you will just sit down. . . .”
“I thought we were finished with you, a long time ago.”
“In a moment. You promised to look at these cards for me, remember?”
“Ink-blot cards? I’ve heard of those.”
“No, these are TAT cards, Mr. Weer. Thematic Apperception Test cards. You stood very straight in front of the mirror, Mr. Weer, but I notice that you are slumping in your chair now. Are you ill?”
“Just tired.”
“Very well—”
“The fool. One of the greater trumps—some say second only to the juggler.”
“I haven’t even shown you the first card yet, Mr. Weer. Or explained how the test works. I’d like you to answer a very important question very honestly for me, Mr. Weer. Do you use drugs? Drugs of any kind?”
“No. Oh, I smoke an occasional cigar, drink coffee, sometimes a highball.”
“Do you enjoy your work?”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t say. I’m usually too busy to notice.”
“You are the president of your company, are you not? As well as its board chairman and chief stockholder?”
“Yes.”
“I had a professor in medical school who used to say, ‘Happy is the man who has found his work—but of course the addict who has found a quart jar of heroin is happy, too.’ One kind of addiction is approved by society, Mr. Weer, and the other is not, but both destroy their victims.”
