Collected stories, p.20
Collected Stories, page 20
“If you said it you didn’t mean it, did you?”
“I never … No, I didn’t mean it.”
“Now let’s get Grandma moved back before lunch,” Janet said brightly, and motioned Jack to take some clothes from the dresser. When he moved to lift them off, Grandma took them from him with a hard look; he stood back and let her carry her own things to her room.
Back in the kitchen, Oliver said, “Boy, she’s crazy as a bedbug. I never said a word to her. Where does she get it I made her move? She’s nutty.”
“Say she gets notions,” Janet said. “I shouldn’t have to tell you again. She’s had a hard life. If we humor her and treat her nicely maybe she’ll get well.”
Oliver thoughtfully ate a prune off the work table. “How’d she get that way, fall downstairs or something?”
“I don’t know,” Janet said. “It just grew on her, I guess.”
That was on Friday. On Sunday afternoon, when the prune orchard was dotted with people from the city who had come down to pick their own fruit, and Tom and the boys were out distributing ladders and pails and weighing up baskets and keeping the unpracticed pickers from breaking down limbs, Janet took a cool limeade in to Grandma and found her gone. Her closet was empty; her bureau drawers cleaned out.
Janet went out through the porch, across a road’s-width of passionate sun, and under the shade of the oaks, where Tom had his scales. She waited while he weighed two baskets of prunes and carried them to a car. “Grandma’s gone,” she said when he came back.
She saw his patience bend and crack, and she stood guiltily, granting him the right to blame her but at the same time not admitting that she was in any way wrong. After a moment Tom said, “How long?”
“I don’t know. I just took a drink in, and she was gone, with all her stuff. Sometimes since dinner. Maybe an hour.”
“We’d have seen her if she’d come out through here,” he said. He looked across into the orchard, where three different parties were picking. “I just about have to stay here till these folks clear out. Can you and the kids look?”
She called the boys and they came at once, intent, sun-blackened, interested like setters being called up for a walk, and she thought as they came under the bronze shade: My nice boys! She thought it with a rush of affection, irrelevantly, grateful to them for their clear eyes and their health.
Trying to forestall in them the impatience that had jumped into Tom’s face, she put on a crooked and rueful smile. “Grandma’s abandoned us,” she said, making it a joke between them.
They groaned, but more to acknowledge the joke than for any other reason, and wobbled their knees and crossed their eyes in dismay. Jack ran up the ladder of the tree house built in the oak and stood like a sailor on the crosstrees, peering into the empty shanty with a hand cupped over his eyes. Oliver sniffed the foot of the tree, followed an imaginary trail into the garage, through the car, around the woodshed, and back to the driveway. “Hey!” they said. “No Grandma. Man overboard. Fireman, save my child.”
The three of them went across the brittle oat stubble, stopped to search the pump house, glanced into the chicken house and disturbed some matronly hens. They went through the stable and tackroom, and Janet stayed below while the boys climbed up into the mow. A drift of straw and dust fell from the trapdoor and filled the slant sunbeams with constellations.
The boys came down again. “No Grandma,” they said. “Call the St. Bernards; she must be lost in the snow.”
They went to the stable door and looked down across the lower orchard and the dry creek bed toward Hillstrom’s. There was a breeze coming around the corner, a cool, horsy breath. They stood in it, searching the neighboring orchard and pastures, looking along the quarter-mile of white road that showed on the ridge above Kuhn’s.
“She couldn’t have gone far, with the suitcase,” Janet said. “Did you look carefully in the garage, Oliver?”
“She wasn’t there. I looked all over.”
At a slight sound behind her, Janet turned. Grandma’s cat came out of one of the horse stalls, balancing his tail, blinking slit-eyed in the bright doorway, rubbing against her legs.
“Now where’d you come from, kitty?” Janet said. “Where’s your mistress?”
“He comes down here to catch mice,” Jack said. “I saw him with one the other day.”
“But where’s your boss?” Janet said, and stooped to let the lifting furry back pass under her hand.
There were footsteps in the tackroom, and Tom came in. “Find her?”
“Not a sign.”
Tom stood with his hands in his back pockets, chewing his upper lip. “Oh, damn!” he said, without real anger.
Jack picked up the cat and stood petting it, watching his parents, and the noise of the cat’s purring was loud in the stable until the noise of a car ground over it and drowned it out, and a green sedan came around the corner and stopped in the barnyard. “Is this where you can pick your own prunes?” the driver said. A woman and three children were crowding to look through the rear window.
“Up above,” Tom said. “If you’ll drive back up to the house I’ll be with you in a minute.” He looked at Janet. “You want me to go hunting, or handle the pickers, or what?”
“The boys and I can cruise around.”
Then their voices filled the stable. “Mom! Here she is. Here she is, Mom!”
The sedan started to turn around. Back in against the manger of the second stall there was a threshing and rustling, and as Janet squinted into the shadows she saw Grandma sitting up in the manger. She reared up and scolded the boys, “… never get a minute’s peace somebody always prying around spying on a person go away you boys or I’ll tell your father he sent me down here now you leave me be go ’way.”
“For the love of God, Ma, come out of there,” Tom said. He went in and half lifted her over the front of the manger. Rigid with anger, muttering, she jerked away and came at a half run out into the doorway. The sedan was just leaving; Janet saw the faces staring, and then she grabbed Grandma and held her until Tom pulled her back inside. Grandma’s clothes were slivered with hay, gray with dust. There were oat hulls caught on her lip.
“Oliver,” Janet said. “Jump on that man’s running board and show him where to go.”
“Aw, Ma!”
“Please!” she said. “Get those people out of here!”
Tom hung on to Grandma’s arm till the sound of the car had died. “I don’t suppose it will do any good to ask you what you thought you were doing down here,” he said.
Grandma sniffed. “I know I don’t count for anything here,” she said. “When I had my own home it was different, before Henry died, but around here I only do as I’m told. If you tell me to live in the stable and eat with the horses that’s all right with me. I know I’m on charity, I don’t complain.”
Abruptly Tom let go of her arm. “You handle this,” he said to Janet, and went out into the hot light that lay like a sea around the warm dark island of the stable.
“You must trust us, Grandma,” Janet said softly. Without really watching him, she was aware how Jack stared with the cat purring in his arms, and she reached out to pull him against her, knowing how Grandma’s queerness must trouble his understanding. “You must let us love you and take care of you,” she said. “Don’t feel that any of us are against you. We all love you. You don’t have to move out of your room, or eat out of the horse’s box …”
Before she could move Grandma had lunged forward and snatched the sleepy tomcat out of Jack’s arms. She clenched it against her fiercely, fighting its clawing desperate feet, and turned half around to shield it from their sight. The cat yowled, a frantic squashed sound, as Grandma retreated into the stall from which she had just come.
Janet shook her head at Jack and whispered, “You’d better run up and help Dad and Oliver.” She steered him to the edge of the hard sunlight, whispering, “We’ll just let her alone a few minutes. She’s so excited she shouldn’t be pushed around. I’ll bring her up in a little while.”
“What if she—”
“Run along. She’ll be all right.”
Her own nerves were on edge; she was trembling. Back in the shadow the cat squalled again, and then the sounds were muffled, as if Grandma had got the animal under her sweater. After a minute or two they stopped entirely. Either the old lady had got over her fright and stopped squeezing the cat, or it had escaped.
Janet waited another five minutes. It was perfectly quiet; she heard the slightest tick of falling straw. She did not like to think of Grandma back there in the shadow, her mouth going on some vehement silent tirade, her mind full of suspicion and crazy notions.
She went to the front of the stall and said casually, “Shall we go back to the house, Grandma?”
Grandma jerked around. She had been bending over the manger, and now she pulled out the brown suitcase, the arm or leg of a suit of winter underwear trailing out of its corner. Janet smiled. “Did the cat get away? Never mind, he likes it here. He’ll be back.”
“That boy tried to steal it,” Grandma said.
She came out quietly enough, but when Janet offered to carry the suitcase she swung it far over on one side, guarding it jealously, and Janet sighed. It was so easy to make a mistake. The slightest gesture of kindness was likely to rouse suspicion. You had to be as soft and smooth and easy as cottonwool, or you did harm instead of good. She watched Grandma marching ahead of her; as the old lady turned the sun was golden on the oat husks caught on her lip. Janet smiled, following her up to the house and into the cool porch, and, still smiling, followed her down the hall to her room.
It was not until two hours later, after she had calmed the old lady and talked her into taking a tepid bath, and had then started to unpack and put away Grandma’s clothes, that she discovered about the cat. It was jammed into the suitcase, tangled among long drawers and petticoats and damask napkins. And it was desperately and resistantly dead. Its eyes were half open, its mouth wide so that the needle teeth showed in a grin. Its front legs were stiffened straight out, as if it had died pushing against the smothering lid.
That evening after dinner Janet sat on the porch looking across the little valley and feeling how the heat left the earth as the night came on. The boys were playing checkers in the living room behind her; she felt their presence in the lamplight that yellowed the windows. Tom was hammering at something down in the pump house. Grandma was in her room.
Over the ridge of the stable the pasture knoll beyond the Wilson place shone a lovely fawn color in the last flat sun. But all around, in the valley itself, the earth was already going gray and shadowy. In a little while the light would lift off the last knoll; the clouds would change and darken back of the coast hills; the ranches would begin to melt back into the trees; lights would wink on; the clean sky would be pricked with stars.
It was a most peaceful place and a peaceful life. Half irritably, she thought that Grandma should find healing in every hour of it. But she knew she would have to talk to Tom about Grandma later; for now she put the whole problem away, sitting with her hands turned palm upward in her lap and listening to the lulling rise of the night noises, crickets and tree frogs and the far musical cry of a train down toward San Jose. When it was all but dark she leaned near one of the open lighted windows and said, “Time for bed, boys.”
“Just till we finish this game,” Oliver said, and looking in, she saw them hunched head to head over the card table. There was a rhythm in that too, the same rhythm through which she herself swung, moving evenly through the warm, temperate, repetitive events of a life that was not going anywhere because it was already there; it lived at the center.
She heard Tom coming through the dusk, his steps soft in the disked ground as he crossed a strip of orchard, then grating in the gravel drive, and he came up on the porch and sat down heavily in the wicker chair beside her.
“Boy, I’ve got you cornered now!” Oliver said from inside. “You give up?”
“Like heck,” Jack said. “Not as long as I’m in a double corner.”
“Time they were in bed?” Tom said.
“They’re just finishing a game.”
They sat on without speaking in the dark. Out over the main valley, moving smoothly among the orderly stars, the running lights on the wing tips of an air liner winked on and off. Sometimes, when clouds bridged the main valley trough, the motors of a plane like that could fill their little hollow with sound, but now in the clear night the noise was only a remote and diminishing hum. The lights winked unfailingly far down toward the south until the hills rose and cut them off.
Inside, the boys broke up their game and snapped off the light. For a minute or two they stood together at the French doors looking out on the porch. “Well, I guess we’ll go to bed now,” one of them said, and Janet was amused that in the dark she really couldn’t tell which one had spoken.
“I’ll look in on you later,” she said. “It’s so nice out I think I’ll sit awhile.”
When they had gone, she and Tom sat on. The wicker chair squeaked; she knew he had turned his head.
“Well?” he said.
“Well?” She did not want to make it hard for him to begin; she even wanted with an odd sense of urgency to try again to tell him how she felt, how she knew that even a thing badly done, if it was done with love, was better than a thing done efficiently but without love. But she was in a defensive position, like Jack in his double corner. Tom had to move first. … “You realize she has to be sent away,” Tom said.
“Why?” She would not move until he absolutely forced her.
“My God!” he said. “Why?”
She heard his chair squeak again. Another plane was coming up the valley, its motors a distant even drone. “I’ll tell you why,” he said. “Just because she breaks everything up. She can’t live with sane people. She’ll bust the whole pattern of our lives.”
“By pattern you mean comfort,” Janet said, and heard her own voice, stiff and resistant, and the irritation that jumped in Tom’s voice when he answered.
“No, I don’t mean comfort! I mean the way we live, the way the kids grow up. Do you think it does them any good, seeing her batting at empty air?”
Janet had thought of the boys herself, plenty of times. But they were steady and well-balanced. It might even teach them forbearance and kindliness to have the old lady around. It wasn’t fair of Tom to bring them into it now.
“I wonder how the boys would like to be responsible for condemning Grandma to prison for life, just to protect their own routine?” she said.
“That’s better than letting her break up other people’s lives.”
“Oh, break up our lives!” Janet said. “The little trouble we’ve had …” She leaned forward, trying to reach the vague shadow of her husband with her eyes and voice. “Don’t you realize what it would mean if we sent her away? We’d be treating her exactly as strangers might treat her, as if we had no feeling for her at all. We’d be washing our hands of her, just so we could be more comfortable.” She sat back, suddenly so angry and hurt that her hands shook. “I’m surprised you don’t …”
“Don’t what?” Tom’s voice said.
“Nothing.”
“Nazi methods?” Tom said. “That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it? You’re surprised I don’t want to cyanide her.”
“You know I didn’t—”
“Sometimes you have to do a thing you don’t want to do,” Tom said. “You can do it kindly, even when it’s something hard.”
“But that’s just what I wish you could see!” Janet cried. “There’s no chance of any kindness in an institution, and it’s kindness she needs.”
There was a pause. “So you don’t want to send her away,” Tom said. “Not even after that cat business.”
“I couldn’t forgive myself if we did,” she said. “It would be throwing her out when she was crying for help and not knowing how to say the words. That cat was the one thing she had left to love. Remember how afraid she was that the man on the train was going to steal it? That cat was half her life.”
“And she killed it.”
“Out of fear! We haven’t got her over her fear, that’s all. She was getting along fine, till this last spell. I’ve got enough confidence in the way we live to think we can change her pattern instead of her changing ours.”
“Then you’re crazier than she is.”
Janet stood up. Her knees were trembling a little, and the thought crossed her mind that now, without the cat, Grandma was going to be harder than ever to win over. Maybe she would even get the notion that someone in the family had killed it. But that was not the question. The question was whether they could feel right about giving her over to some cold-blooded aseptic hospital that would surely drive her deeper into her persecuted dream.
“I don’t see how we could respect ourselves,” she said. “It’s at least worth a better try than we’ve given it.”
For a time the little night noises were still. Then a cricket started up again, a tinny fiddling under the porch. Tom’s face was lost in the dark, but finally he spoke. “Okay. You’re the doctor.”
“Just the thought of giving up after less than two months.”
“Okay, okay.”
“I wish you could see it, Tom.”
“I see it,” he said. “I just don’t believe it.”
She hesitated. Then she went past him, walking quietly as if he were sleeping and she did not want to disturb him, and opened the screen and let it close softly behind her. The house was still. The padded living-room rug muffled her steps, and she had a feeling that it was very late at night, though she knew it couldn’t be past ten. There was a light burning in the hall, and by the diffused glow she made her way to the hall leading down the bedroom wing.
As if a hand had closed around her heart she stopped dead still at the entrance. Halfway down the hall Grandma was standing, looking into the open door of the boys’ room. Her head was sunk between her shoulders with the intensity of her stare, and her mouth moved on some secret malevolence. She made no move to enter, but only stood there staring, stooping forward a little. Then she heard Janet and whirled, and all the light that filtered into the hall flashed in her eyeballs, and she scuttled down the hall and into her own room.
