Peace, p.3
Peace, page 3
But the house was of safe wood, which being nailed together would not tumble down, and would not be heavy if it did. My grandfather and his housekeeper met us on the porch; I am certain of that. Everyone’s breath steamed, and while my mother fumbled in her purse my grandfather paid the man who had brought us. Mrs. Crawford, who had not worn a coat outside but only her long dress, hugged me and told me to call her Mab; she smelled of scented powder and sweat, and the laundry-day smell of that time: dirty water reheated on a coal stove. All this sounds unpleasant, but actually was not. These—except for the scented powder, since my mother and my aunt Olivia and the other women I knew used different brands—were familiar smells, much less foreign than the odors of the railway coach in which we had come.
I remember a great deal of moving about, of circling each other on the creaking porch boards, while all this hugging and paying, baggage unloading and greeting took place, the white plumes of breath, the blown snow clinging to the dirty screen door still in place in front of the real door, which stood a quarter open. There was a potbellied stove inside, and when we got to it the blond woman, Mab, tried to help me off with my galoshes, but could not get them over the heel, so that my mother had to come in the end, leaving my grandfather, for the moment, to take them off. The ceilings in all the rooms were very high, and there was a big Christmas tree, with toys and balls and candles that had never been lit to decorate it, and cookies painted with egg white colored with beet juice and dotted with small candies.
At dinner I noticed (that is to say, in all of this, I think, I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe—but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of these events I describe never occurred at all, but only should have, and that others had not the shades and flavors—for example, of jealousy or antiquity or shame—that I have later unconsciously chosen to give them) that though my grandfather called Mrs. Crawford Mab, which I felt sure was what he always called her, she called him Mr. Elliot; and that this was new between them, that she valued herself on using it and felt herself to be humbling herself in a noble cause—an emotion that in those days, when it was discussed among adults, always evoked the phrase “Bible Christian.” My grandfather, I think, was embarrassed by this new deference; knowing it to be false, he felt my mother knew it to be false as well (as she surely must before the meal was over) and was shamed and angered by it. He insulted Mrs. Crawford in the rough country style both of them understood, telling my mother (as he wolfed down dumplings) that he had not had a tolerable meal since her mother “passed over,” that some people had little enough to do, with only one other to take care of, unlike herself “with that little scamp to keep you on your feet all day and all night, Delia, and a church husband to look out for, too.” This of course ignored the existence of Hannah, about whom he must have known, who did all the cooking and heavy housework at home. The walls of the dining room were hung with sepia photographs of trotting horses, the only exception being that part of the wall which was directly behind my grandfather’s head, and thus completely out of his view when he sat at the table: this held a large picture of a woman in the majestic and complex costume of the eighteen-eighties—my other grandmother, Evadne.
When the meal was over, I was undressed and put into bed by the combined efforts of my mother and Mab, who had come with, us carrying a lamp—not, as she said, to show the way, which she avowed my mother would know far better than herself, but because “it isn’t right you should go up without no one to take you when you’ve just come, it wouldn’t seem right, and I couldn’t sleep if I did that; I couldn’t sleep a wink, Mrs. Weer.” My mother said, “Call me Delia,” and this so flustered Mrs. Crawford that she nearly dropped the lamp.
When she had gone, my mother began an inspection of the room, which she told me she had occupied as a child. “That was my bed,” she said, indicating the one she had been sitting on a moment before, “and that other was your aunt Arabella’s.” I asked if I had to sleep in it, and she said I could sleep with her if I preferred. I trotted over, across a cold floor not much mitigated by a rag rug, and sat in the middle of the bed watching her. “We had a dollhouse here,” she said, “between the dormers.”
“Will I get a dollhouse for Christmas, Mama?”
“No, silly, dollhouses are for girls. You’ll get toys for boys.”
I regretted this; a playmate (a girl, though I had never before realized that this was other than incidental to her possession of it) owned a large and beautifully painted dollhouse with removable walls. I had assisted her several times with it, and because I had seen it so often I could visualize it quite well—now never to be found at the base of any Christmas tree of mine, floating away, just when I had thought it so near, into the misted realm of the impossible. I had planned to put my toy soldiers in it, firing from the windows.
“A book,” my mother said after a long silence, during which she had been examining the interiors of cabinets. “Santa might bring you a book, Den.”
I liked books, but I was far from sure that Santa Claus visited any house but ours—or at least any house outside Cassionsville. Surely not this strange, silent house, with its smells of old clothing hanging in closets year upon year. I asked my mother, and she said she had told Santa we were coming.
“Will Santa bring stuff for Granpa?”
“If he’s been a good boy. Turn around, Den. Look at the wall. Mama wants to undress.”
When the lamp went out, the whole house was plunged in quiet. Even with my eyes closed in the dark, I was aware of the snow sifting down outside; aware, too, that we were the only people on this floor, until at last, very late as it seemed to me, I heard Mab come wearily up the stairs to sleep in the room that —so my mother told me much later—had been Grandmother Vant’y’s mother’s when she was a girl. I was warm where my back pressed against my mother’s, dreadfully cold everywhere else despite the crushing weight of quilts and feather beds; this partly, no doubt, because I was so tired, partly because the Southern house was unaccustomed to the cold that fell on it now, an airy, drafty house that even in the depth of winter dreamed of still, hot evenings, of rocking on the porch and the hum of mosquitoes. My mother slept, but I did not. There was a chamber pot beneath the bed; I used it and returned to the warmth of the covers again, unrelieved.
At last, quite certain in my own mind that I had lain awake almost all the night and that the dawn must even now be graying the windows (though my “dawn” was nothing more than the moon on the new-fallen snow outside), I crept down to warm myself at the parlor stove and to look at the Christmas tree, though I think I still expected my gifts—if I received any at all that year—to be at home, in the place where our tree would have been had we had one, or piled beneath our stockingless mantel. I had only a vague idea, I suppose, of the plan of the house; I know I blundered several times into the wrong rooms—the big kitchen, the dining room with horses trotting all around its walls, the museum-like front parlor with some large bird beneath a glass bell jar on the center table, as though the company (if company ever came again, if there could be company grand enough to merit that parlor, with its cut-glass bowls and wax fruit, its horsehair furniture and morning-glory trompe-l’oeil phonograph horn) would be expected to sit studying its dust-free molt, as though this were the simurg, the last bird of its kind in all the world, as though my grandfather were expecting a company of naturalists, and perhaps it was, and perhaps, indeed, he did.
The door to the correct room, the “everyday parlor,” was shut; but even before I opened it I saw, yellow as butter, the line of light at the base of the door. Whether I thought it was light from the isinglass window of the stove, or that someone had left a lamp burning, or that it was the sun in an east window—for I was firmly convinced, remember, that it was morning—I am no longer sure; probably I did not stop to speculate. I opened the door (not with a knob that turned, as we had at home—as we had also gaslights and only used kerosene when a light had to be carried about, so that I thought, when I first came, that my grandfather’s house was in a constant state of emergency—but with a strange latch that lifted to the downward pressure of my thumb) and as I did so the soft yellow light, as soft as a two-day-old chick, as soft as the blossom of a dandelion and more radiant, came pouring out, and I saw to my astonishment that the Christmas-tree candles were all lit, each standing erect as its own flame near the tip of a limb, a white specter crowned with fire. I walked toward the tree—halfway, I believe, from the door—and stood rooted. It shone against the dark glass of the window; behind it, far away, shone the stars, and the river below with the stars reflected in its water; a steamboat, blazing with lights, but now, at this remove, tinier and brighter than a toy, passed among the branches. There were presents under the tree, and more thrust into the lower boughs, but I hardly saw them.
“Well, I guess you’re late,” my grandfather said. “Old Nick, he’s already been here.” His “well” was wa-ul.
I said nothing, unable at first to see him in the corner in which he sat in a huge old oak rocker with a mask carved in the towering headrest.
“Come, left his stuff, lit all these here candles, and gone on out the chimney. Look at that clock yonder—past twelve. He ’most always comes here at twelve, and goes then, too. I just come down myself to have a look at these here candles before I puts them out and goes up to bed. I used to do that, years ago, after he was gone. Can you tell time, young Weer?”
My name was not Young, but I knew he meant me and shook my head.
“I guess it won’t hurt you to look, too. Then you can go back up to your bed. Got your eyes full yet?”
I said, “We don’t have candles on our tree at home.”
“Your pa, I guess, is afeared it will burn his house. Well, that might be. I come pretty quick after Nick and blow ’em out, and I cut that tree myself not two days gone. When your ma was little, her ’n’ her sister would come down to see it. I guess she’s forgot now—or maybe she sent you.”
“She’s asleep.”
“You want to see what Nick brought?”
I nodded.
“Well, I can’t show you your own, but I guess you could see what other folks is getting. Now look here.” He got up from his chair, a tall figure in dark clothing, his chin whiskers as stiff and black as the end of a fence post dipped in creosote. Assisted by his cane, he knelt with me at the foot of the tree. “This here,” he said, “is yours.” He showed me a heavy, square package with its ribbons and trimmings somewhat crushed and flattened. “And so is this’n here.” A small box that rattled. “You’ll like that’n. I fancy.”
“Can I open it now?”
My grandfather shook his head. “Not till breakfast. Now you look here.” He held up a large and heavy box, which gurgled when he tilted it. “That’s toilet water for Mab. And look here” —a smaller box, held shut with a single loop of red ribbon. “You look here a minute.” Painstakingly he removed the ribbon, slipping it down until the box could be opened like a blue leather clamshell. “These are for your ma. Know what they are? Pearls.” He held up the string for me to admire by candlelight. “Matched, every one. And a little silver catch with diamonds in it at the back.” I nodded, impressed, having already been made aware by my mother of the importance of her jewelry box and the wisdom of leaving this sacred treasury strictly alone.
“You think these here are bright?” my grandfather said. “You wait till she sees them and look at her eyes. When Vant’y passed on, I took everything we didn’t send down with her and shared it out between Bella and Delia. So I saw it all, but there wasn’t anything half so fine as this, not anything I got her or anything she brought from her ma. Now you go up to bed.”
And as if by magic—and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it, waiting now to stand to some unguessable generation of the future as the nameless pre-Mycenaean tribes did to the Greeks, ready, at a word, each of us now, to flit piping through groves ungrown, our women ready to haunt as lamioe the rose-red ruins of Chicago and Indianapolis when they are little more than earthen mounds, when the heads of the trees are higher than the hun-dred-and-twenty-fifth floor—it seemed to me that I found myself in bed again, the old house swaying in silence as though it were moored to the universe by only the thread of smoke from the stove.
The next morning I woke with my mother’s arm about me, my face cold but the rest of me warm. We carried our clothes to the kitchen and dressed there, finding Mab already up and cooking, and heating the water my grandfather would use when he trimmed the stubble around his beard with his big razor, for today was Christmas, a great day, and though he seldom shaved thus once a week he would do it today. She gave me a sugar cookie with an enormous raisin in the middle to stay my appetite before the grits and ham and eggs, the icy milk from the “larder” abutting the back porch, the coffee—for me, too, for by custom I got coffee here, I discovered, though never at home—and the biscuits and the homemade doughnuts were ready. I wanted, indeed, not breakfast, but to see what was under the tree; but this—by the rule of the house, as my mother explained—was out of the question. Breakfast first. This her own mother, the dead and by me unremembered Vant’y, had imposed upon her and her sister throughout their childhood; and this she and her father were determined to impose upon me, though I strongly suspected there would be oranges (which I have always loved) and nuts in my stocking that would make a more satisfactory collation than any sugar cookie. Even my mother, who made several journeys of inspection to the parlor between her brief bouts of assisting Mab (in the same vague way she assisted Hannah at home) with the preparation of the meal, swore that she went no farther than the parlor door, and I was not even permitted to leave the kitchen. My grandfather came down and shaved around his beard in a corner where a mirror hung—for the first time I noticed that he was smaller than my father. He ignored the women until he had finished, then seated himself at the head of the table, where my mother at once poured him coffee.
“Coldest Christmas I can remember,” Mab said. “Snow out on the stoop’s that deep.” She made an exaggerated gesture, her hands three or four feet apart. “I suppose we’re going to be snowed in.”
“You’re a fool, Mab,” my grandfather said. This made her smile, her plump face dimpling, made her push her fingers, slightly damp from the eggs she had broken, into her butter-colored hair. “Why, Mr. Elliot!”
“This will be gone by noon,” my mother said. “I think it’s a shame. It’s so pretty.”
My grandfather said, “You wouldn’t talk like that if you had to go out tramping through it to fork down hay for them horses.”
Mab jostled my mother with her elbow. “I bet you wish that Miss Bella was here! Wouldn’t you and her throw snowballs at him!”
“I might anyway,” my mother said. “I’ll get Den to help me if you won’t.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Mab said, and giggled.
My grandfather snorted and said to me obscurely, “Runnin’ around without any stays on.”
We breakfasted, the adults with a deadly slowness, then trooped into the parlor. There were oranges and nuts, as I had envisioned. Candy. A pair of suspenders for my grandfather, and a box of (three) bandannas. For me a weighty book, bound in green buckram with a highly colored picture—an art-nouveau mermaid, more graceful and more sea-born than any wet girl I have seen since, signaling with languid gesture to a ship of the late Middle Ages manned by Vikings—sunk in the front board, and a multitude of other, similar pictures, the equal—and in some cases the superior—of the first, scattered throughout a text black-printed and often confusing, but to me utterly fascinating; and a knife. Just such a knife, I feel sure, as my grandfather would have selected for himself, a man’s knife, though it bore the words “Boy Scout” on that plate let into its side. Closed, it was longer then than my hand, and in addition to a huge spear blade that, once opened (I could not open it without his assistance), was held so by a leaf spring of brass, it had a corkscrew and a screwdriver, a bottle opener, a smaller blade which my grandfather warned me was very sharp, a leather punch, and an instrument for removing pebbles from the hooves of horses—this last, I think, is called a stonehook. Unlike the blades of boys’ knives to come, all these were of high-carbon steel and rusted if they were not kept oiled; but they would take and hold a good edge, as the bright and showy blades will not.
For my mother a large bottle of toilet water, and for Mab a small string of pearls, which made her first dance with joy, then weep, then kiss my grandfather several times, and at last rush from the room, upstairs to her own room (we could hear her feet pounding on the steps, so rapid and unsteady that she might have been a drunken roisterer fleeing the police), where she stayed for nearly half the day.
As a child I believed that my mother, from that unquestioned generosity children so readily assume in a good parent, had exchanged gifts with Mab. At some time before I entered college, I realized (as I thought) that my grandfather himself must have made the exchange—not when I had spoken to him the night before, but later in payment for some sexual favor, or in the hope of securing one imagined as late that night he lay alone in the big first-floor bedroom.
