Peace, p.2
Peace, page 2
“Now it’s all gone, and when I went back there with Mary, Sugar Creek itself was gone, just dry rocks where it had been. It was May—no, it wasn’t; it was June—the last part of May or the first part of June, it doesn’t matter. . . . And that house; so small. We never all lived there, we never could have. Falling down, falling to nothing, little narrow doors you couldn’t hardly get through. I never in my life been a hundred miles off from that little house, but it’s gone now, and I never saw it go.”
And I feel just as she does, yet differently. This house has grown larger, not smaller. (Nor is it falling down—not yet.) I wonder now why I asked for all these rooms—and there seem to be more and more each time I go exploring—and why they are so large. This room is wide, and yet much longer than it is wide, with two big windows along the west side looking into the garden, and along the east side a wall that shuts out the dining room, and the kitchen, and my den, where now I never go. At the south end is the fieldstone fireplace (which is why I live here; it is the only fireplace in the house, unless I have forgotten one somewhere). The floor is flagstone, the walls are brick, and there are pictures between the windows. My bed (not a real bed) is before the fireplace where I can keep warm. When summer comes— it is an odd thought—perhaps I will go up and sleep again in my own room.
And then, perhaps, the old days will really come back. I wonder what would have happened if Hannah had slept at Sugar Creek Farm (I will call it that; no doubt the neighbors called it simply “the Mill place”)? Would Sugar Creek have flowed again, babbling in the night, wetting all those dry stones?
“Hannah?”
“Well, what’s the matter, what do you want? That little boy, sitting there with his big eyes, what does he know? Work? Why, you never worked a day in your life. Look at that plate. Working for other people. Well, it’s not your fault. I ain’t got much longer to go, Denny. What does it matter? Want to wash these, and I’ll run out and play tag with the others. Wouldn’t your ma be surprised—she’d say, ‘Who’s the new girl?’ I was just about to say I remembered her when she was just a little bit of a girl herself, only I don’t, she’s not from around here; it was another girl, that your dad used to play with when he was small. When it was warm summer sometimes, there was more children around the gaslights out on the street than there was millers around the mantles. It will be warm summer again pretty soon and I guess you’ll be out there yourself, and I’ll bake gingerbread to go with the root beer; I’ve lived through another winter, and I’ve never figured to die in summer.”
I don’t think I have ever seen anyone wash dishes in our kitchen. There is a dishwasher there—they always used that, scraping the plates first into the sink, to go down the disposer, making the sink a kind of garbage can. I cook my food in the fireplace now, and eat it there, too, and I eat so little anyway.
“You are thin, Mr. Weer. Underweight.”
“Yes, you always check me for diabetes.”
“Strip to your shorts, please. I’m going to have the nurse come in and weigh you.”
I undress, conscious that Sherry Gold is in the next cubicle, probably stripped to her bra and panties. She is a small girl, a little plump (“You seem to be putting on weight, Miss Gold. Strip to your bra and panties, please, and I’ll come in and weigh you”) pretty, a Jewish face—Jewish faces are not supposed to be pretty, but pretty anyway. If I were to make a hole through the partition with my jackknife, I could see her, and if I were lucky she would not see the bright blade of the leather punch coming through the wall, or the dark hole afterward, with my bright blue middle-aged eye behind it. Knowing that I will not, in fact, do any such thing, I begin to go through my pants pockets looking for the knife; it is not there, and I remember that I have stopped carrying it months ago because I went to the office every day and, because I no longer worked in the lab, never used it; and that it wore the fabric of my trousers where its hard bolsters pressed at the corners of my right hip pocket, so that they wore out first there.
I stand, holding on to the mantel with one hand, and look again: it is not there. The rain patters down outside. It might be good to have it again. “If I did have a stroke, Dr. Van Ness, what should I do?”
“It is quite impossible for me to prescribe treatment for a nonexistent ailment, Mr. Weer.”
“Sit down, for God’s sake. Why the hell can’t you talk to a doctor as if he were a man?”
“Mr. Weer—”
“There’s not a man in my plant I’d talk to the way you talk to every patient you’ve got.”
“But I can’t fire my patients, Mr. Weer.”
I dress again and seat myself in the chair. The nurse comes in, tells me I ought to be undressed, and leaves; after a few moments, Dr. Van Ness again: “What’s the matter, Mr. Weer?”
“I want to talk to you; sit down.”
He seats himself on the edge of the examination table, and I wish Dr. Black were alive again, that formidable, heavy man of my childhood, with his dark clothes and gold watch chain. Barbara Bold must have gotten fat just cooking for him; after seeing him eat, she would lose all sense of proportion, since her own meals, however large, would be so much smaller; how could she have realized that a second baked potato, or a bowl of rice pudding with cream, was too much when her husband ate as much as three such women? My mother gives her another slice of pink cake, technically my birthday cake.
“Thank you, Delia.”
Barbara’s sister Eleanor says, “All right, we can write on that, but what do we write, and what with?”
“Oils, I suppose,” says my aunt Olivia. “You can use mine.”
Someone objects that the Indians had no oil paints, and Mrs. Singer points out that the children won’t know.
“But we will know,” Mother says. “Won’t we.”
“Listen,” says Mrs. Singer, “I have a fine idea. You know when they met? The settlers and the Indians? Well, they had the Indians do the writing, but what if they had done it? Then it would be ordinary writing and we could do it.”
One moment, please. Let me stand and walk to the window; let me put this broken elm branch—shaped as though it were meant to be the antler of a wooden deer, such a deer as might be found, possibly, under one of the largest outdoor Christmas trees—upon the fire. Ladies, this was not what I wanted. Ladies, I wish to know only if in my condition I should exercise or remain still; because if the answer is that I must exercise I will go looking for my scout knife.
“Mr. Weer! Mr. Weer!”
“Yes?” I poke my head around the edge of the door.
“Oh, you’re dressed; I can see by your sleeve.”
“What is it, Sherry?”
“Don’t come in, I’m not dressed. Oh!” (Dr. Van Ness is coming back, and Sherry withdraws, slamming the door of her cubicle.)
“Doctor, for a stroke—”
“Mr. Weer, if I answer your questions will you cooperate with me in a little test? A game with mirrors. Then will you look at some pictures for me?”
“If you answer my questions, yes.”
“All right, you have had a stroke. I must say you don’t look it, but I’m willing to accept it. What are your symptoms?”
“Not now. I haven’t had a stroke now; please try to understand.”
“You will have a stroke?”
“I have had it in the future, Doctor. And there is no one left to help me, no one at all. I don’t know what I should do—I’m reaching back to you.”
“How old are you? I mean, when you’ve had this stroke.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Ninety?”
“No, not ninety, not that old.”
“Do you still have your own teeth?”
I reach into my mouth, feeling. “Most of them.”
“What color is your hair?” Dr. Van Ness leans forward, unconsciously assuming the position of prosecuting attorney.
“I don’t know. It’s gone, almost all gone.”
“Do you have pain in your fingers? Are they knobbed, swollen, stiff, inflamed?”
“No.”
“And do you still, from time to time, feel sexual desire?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then I think you’re about sixty, Mr. Weer. That is to say, that your stroke is only fifteen or twenty years off—does that bother you?”
“No.” I have been standing in the door of my cubicle. I withdraw and sit down on the chair; Dr. Van Ness follows me in. “Doctor, the side of my face, the left side, is all drawn over—I have an expression I have never seen, and I have it all the time. My left leg seems always crooked—as though it had been broken and misset—and my left arm is not strong.”
“Are you dizzy? Do you frequently feel the urge to vomit?”
“No.”
“Is your appetite good?”
“No.”
“Do you find it painful to move about? Very painful?”
“Only emotionally—you know, because of the things I see.”
“But not physically.”
“No.”
“Has there been only one stroke?”
“I think so. I woke up like this. It was the morning after Sherry Gold died.”
“Miss Gold?” The doctor’s head makes an unintentional and almost imperceptible movement toward the partition that separates us. I wonder if the girl is listening; I hope not.
“Yes.”
“But it hasn’t gotten any worse.”
“No.”
“You need exercise, Mr. Weer. You need to get out of the house, as well as walking around inside the house, and you need to talk to people. Take a good walk—several blocks—each day, when the weather permits. I believe you have a large garden?”
“Yes.”
“Well, work in it. Pull weeds or something.”
And that is what I so often do, pull weeds or something. And the something is usually flowers when it is not vegetables; or often I discover later that the weed I pulled was nicer than the blossoms I cultivated. There is one in particular that I have not seen in years, which used to grow just between the fence and the alley at my grandmother’s house, a very tall weed with a tender, straight column of green stem and horizontal branches at the most regular intervals, airy and slender, each perfect and each carrying its tiny group of minute leaves to stare happily at the sun. I have sometimes thought that the reason the trees are so quiet in summer is that they are in a sort of ecstasy; it is in winter, when the biologists tell us they sleep, that they are most awake, because the sun is gone and they are addicts without their drug, sleeping restlessly and often waking, walking the dark corridors of forests searching for the sun.
And so will I search now for my knife, thus getting the exercise Dr. Van Ness prescribes. It was large, and stamped with the words “Boy Scout.” The scales were of simulated black staghorn, bringing to mind (at least to mine) the image of a simulated stag, his horns held proudly as those of any elm-deer, ranging the forest among the now-waking trees, trees whose leaves are dying with the summer in every color, like bruises, but bruises beautiful as the skins of races unborn, withheld from us because God, or destiny, or the bland chance of the scientists (whose blind, piping ape-god, idiot-god, we have met before; we know you, troubler of Babylon) has denied us the sight of all these scarlet and yellow—truly red, orange, russet-brown—races on our sidewalks, and all the wonderful richness of stereotypes we might have entertained ourselves with if only they had been permitted us: the scarlet people with tight fists and loose women, gobbling dialects, a talent for paintings done with chalk upon the sides of newspaper kiosks, and high abilities in the retail merchandising of hobby supplies such as tiny-toy jet engines, and model garbage trucks whose hungry rumps, trundled about the wooden tops of retired dining-room tables in basements, will devour the dross of train-station quick-eat restaurants; the orange people with their weird religion demanding the worship of sundials (as our own seems to others that of telephone poles), so that in friendly locker-room conversations, when we have at last and at the threat of certain legal pressures admitted them to Pinelawn and are discussing the round now past, they out with strange oaths. What is a wabe?
And all of them, since all the lands of this earth are occupied, must be from strange and farther countries, from Hi Brasil and the Islands of the Sun, from the Continental Islands and the Isles of the Tethys Sea. Only the rarest, the russet browns, belong here, native to St. Brendan’s land, and they are dying; the things they are famous for are not strange oaths, or ability at any art, or cunning in a trade, but alcoholism and gonorrhea and dwindling. They make good soldiers and that is fatal, just as is the bravery of the simulated stag, which will bring him to death, answering the call of the simulated war cry to meet bullets in the dry autumn woods and fall, his lungs hemorrhaging substitute blood at the edge of the potato fields. The imitation huntsman shouts and dances for joy, and then, having learned very well to shoot, but never to butcher, and being, in his own opinion, no longer of an age to carry heavy burdens, leaves him to rot and stink, the bait of plastic flies with fishhooks in their bellies. In time his flesh, torn by such fur-like foxes as remain, and by the teeth of curs, falls away, and only his horns and his celluloid bones remain, the prey of the boys’-knife maker.
The bolsters—those hard bolsters which, when my life was over and I had come to my desk, wore out so many gabardines and serges—were of German silver, of Funfcentstucksilber, like the buttons of the SS. It is a metal soft yet tough, and incor-ruptibly dully shining. Do not confuse us with pewter, which is a thing of plates and platters and drinking vessels.
But these things, the scales and bolsters, were on the exterior; they were the trim, as it were, of the knife. The truth within was prefigured by the plate in its side, which was of steel.
I remember very well the Christmas my knife was given to me; it was the one—the only one—I spent at my grandfather’s, my mother’s father’s. That house stood high on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi and had many wide windows, though like my grandmother’s narrow-windowed house it, too, was of white-painted wood. The Christmas tree stood against certain of these windows, so that, through its branches, among the trumpery dolls and tinsel and brilliant mock-fruit balls of painfully thin glass, one could watch the steamboats. It snowed that Christmas, I am sure, though it was rare to have any snow that far south, and when it came, if it came at all, it was usually later in the year. My mother had brought me; my father had remained behind at home, no doubt to hunt. There were, then, four of us in the house: myself, my mother, my grandfather (a tall old—as I thought then—man who dyed his beard and mustache black), and his housekeeper, a plump blond woman of (I now suppose) about forty. My mother would have been twenty-five, I six. It was the year after Bobby Black was hurt.
We came by train, arriving at a station already lightly powdered with snow, my mother’s coat with fox fur around the neck, a black man—who grinned whenever my mother looked at him—to help us with our bags, help us into the wooden-bodied car that would take us, so my mother told me, to Granpa’s. “You’re cold, aren’t you, Den?”
I said that I was not.
“Cold and hungry. We’ll get you warmed up there, and into bed, and then it will be Christmas and you’ll get your toys.”
The driver said, “I guess you’re Vant’y’s daughter.” He had long cheeks like a face seen in the back of a spoon, and blackheads at the corners of his eyes.
Mother said, “Yes, I’m Adelina.”
“Well, you’ll find he’s fine; he’s stronger right now than most men ever get to be. Guess you heard he’s got Mab Crawford keeping house for him now.”
“She wrote me.”
“She did? Well, I guess.” The man turned away from us, leaning forward, and the wooden-bodied car, which had been shaking and chattering to itself, lunged ahead, stopped almost as abruptly, exploded under the place where Mother and I had our feet, then began to move in a more or less normal manner. “Earl run off from her—you heard?”
Mother said nothing, drawing her coat more tightly about her. The tall windows beside us rattled and let in cold air.
“I guess he’s gone to Memphis; but your pa is fine—he’s fit as fit, good as any younger man.” We were passing among stores with dark windows, down a street that, perhaps only because it was empty, seemed very wide. “That’s what he says, and what I believe; that’s the way it is. She went to Memphis, too—you heard? Leastwise, that’s where she went, and that’s what made everybody to think that’s where he did. ’Bout three months after he was gone. She stayed till pretty near the Fourth of July; then she come back—well, she has to do something, is what I say, I guess a woman that has had her own house like that isn’t ever going to want to be a hired girl to no other woman, not that it was much of a place with Earl.”
No doubt the house—my grandfather’s house—had exterior architecture, but I do not remember it. It was a wooden house, as I have said, and I believe white, though that may have been the snow. I had been afraid, just before we arrived (or, actually, for some minutes before we arrived, since I thought, as children I suppose usually do, that we were at our destination almost as soon as we had begun the trip), that it would not be a real house—that is, a house of wood—but one of those somehow unnatural brick or stone houses that (like stage sets, but more unreal to me, because I was unfamiliar with the term and even with the concept at the time) served, as I felt, only to wall off the margins of streets from something else; inhabited by people, so far as I could see, but fit homes for trolls (of whose existence I remained convinced for years after this visit, as I remained, for that matter, convinced of the reality of Santa Claus).
