A Garden of Earthly Delights (35 page)

“How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing.”

“Why nothing?”

“Forget it.”

He turned away. Clara forgot the sick baby and said, “My money's good enough for you!” Mr. Mack did not acknowledge this. He let the screen door slam after him. Clara wanted to run to the door and yell something out, something to make them all sorry.… But she put the baby in the car and tried to get quiet. He was fighting at the air now, kicking. She took that for a good sign. “What the hell do we care for these people,” she muttered. She wiped the baby's mouth on her skirt. She opened the blanket and unbuttoned the baby's shirt, and using her skirt again she dabbed some of the alcohol on his chest for a minute or so. Then she wondered if maybe this was a joke, that Mr. Mack had played a trick on her.… But she guessed it must be right: it said Rubbing Alcohol. She had never heard of it before; she thought alcohol was something you drank.

Across the street the kids were saying something. “Gonna give us a ride, Clara?” one of them yelled. He was big and had a familiar face: one of Caroline's brothers.

“What the hell are you asking?” Clara cried.

She climbed in the car and closed the door behind her, awkward in her haste, suddenly panicked by the children there and the other faces attracted by the commotion—someone was coming out the drugstore door to watch. She felt how they were all together and how she was alone. “I'll tell him and he'll kill you,” she muttered.
She was thinking of Lowry; Lowry had maybe killed someone already and he could do it again. She tried to start the car but the engine must have been flooded. It was very hot. One of the boys yelled again and Clara did not look around, remembering how she and other kids had yelled at people, making fun.

A pickup truck turned the corner and approached slowly, driving down the middle of the street. Clara sat with her head bowed over the steering wheel and saw through a mass of hair one of the local farmers driving the truck. Some farm boys were in the back, their legs dangling over the edge. She felt heat push in on all sides of her and tried to start the car again.

“You havin trouble, you want a push?”

The driver stopped right by her, leaning out his open window to look into hers. He had a broad, thick, tanned face, and hair everywhere on his body that you could see—Clara's face went hard just to see him. “Little Clara, huh?” he said. “You want a push somewhere in your new car?”

“Go to hell,” Clara said.

The boys in the back thumped against the roof and shrieked with laughter about something. Clara saw the farmer's face break into a happy grin and she did not bother to listen to his words, but cut through them viciously: “Go to hell, you fat old bastard, you fat-assed son of a bitch of an ape! You monkey's ass!” They were silent for a moment just out of surprise. Clara fumbled with the ignition and this time got it started.

“Whose car is that?” someone yelled. There was a rising, buoyant joy in everyone but Clara; she could sense it. “Whose baby is that? Whose baby?”

Clara got the car going and it leapt ahead, away from the truck. She saw heat glimmering over the road like figures dancing to distract her. In a minute she would be out of this and safe. Nothing like this would ever happen again. Those bastards, she thought, her mouth like a slit outraged by pain, and as she turned the car into the center of the street to get out of town she felt and heard something crash against the roof. A clod of mud burst there and fragments flew to all sides. Her first instinct was to press down on the gas pedal, but something made her look back—she could not help her-
self. Caroline's brother was running after her with something else to throw, and while she looked right at him he slammed another heavy clod of mud against the back window. People laughed. The boys on the pickup truck had jumped down. Caroline's brother ran at her, yelling “Shoo—shoo! Scat!” as if he were chasing chickens out of the yard.

Clara sat frozen, the engine idling, her body twisted so that she could see them all—these boys and those young men, running after her car, drawn by something feverish and hunted in her face. “Shoo! Get on home—you stink! Clara stinks!” the boy yelled, pounding his fists on the side of the car.

She must have had a moment in which to think, to choose, but at once she opened the door and got out of the car. She ran right at the boy, running into him. He was about twelve years old and as tall as she was. She surprised him so, butting him like that, that he fell backward and his mouth jerked open. “You little fucking bastard!” Clara screamed. She kept on screaming and pushed into him, digging at his face with her nails. The other boys stood around, amazed, and Clara kept striking at Caroline's brother with her furious blows, and when the boy recovered enough sense to fight back she was ready for him and met the blow with one of her own, pounding the soft inside of his arm with her fist. “I'll teach you! I'll kill you!” Clara screamed. Something kept her going—rising in her like madness, pushing her forward and running her into the boy so that he never got his balance, but only yelled at her in desperation. She had the feverish vision of his face streaked with tiny bands of blood, then she lunged at him again and caught hold of his hair with both hands and swung him around. She kicked him as hard as she could between the legs and let him fall groveling in the street. “There! I told you!” she cried. She turned to taunt them all, her hair loose and wild about her face, and all their faces were just one blurred face to her—then she was back at the car and pressing down on the pedal. They let her go.

If Revere ever found out about that he said nothing to her and she certainly said nothing to him. Sitting on the floor with the baby, playing with him, Clara could forget her humiliation in his face and the clumsy motions of his hands, fascinated by how everything was
diminished in Lowry's baby that had been so hard, so strong in Lowry himself. If she had been insulted because of the baby it was nothing—she could go through it again and again, what did she care? “What the hell do we care?” she murmured to him.

She sang:

She imitated the baby's patience, the cat's long sleepy patience, the turning of the days into nights and the relentless trancelike motion of the seasons, feeling herself sinking down to a depth that was not quite unconscious but where all feelings, emotions of love and hate, blended together in a single energy. She remembered her father's anger that had never been directed toward anything that made sense and Lowry's insatiable yearning, a hunger that could take him all over the world and never give him rest; these impulses belonged to men and had nothing to do with her. She could not understand them. The most she did was ask Revere about his house sometimes, innocently: “Is it drafty like this house? Is there a special room for a baby?”

She got the impression of something vast and unexplored, a big stone house with elms around it, the house a century old and in better condition than new houses—everything must be perfect there. Judd had told her the barns had the name REVERE painted on them in big black letters; Clara had been struck by that. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what that might be like, to see your name written out like that. It was hard for her to put together the man who sat in the kitchen of this old farmhouse, watching Clara and the baby playing together, and the man who had barns with his name on them: how could he be the same person? How could a single man be so expanded? Or how could it be that a name on a barn, something so big, could be diminished into this man who was tall and strong but weakened by his love for her?

She asked Revere: Did the boys have anywhere special to play around that house? Were they getting big? Did the house have a porch where you could sit out in the summer at night? Did the
house have lightning rods? Was there a nice garden? Was there a fireplace? Was the kitchen nice and clean, or was it big and drafty like hers?

That winter passed by and in the spring she began to dream about Lowry again. She had the idea he might be coming back. There were hours when she wandered around outside with the baby, staring off toward the road and waiting for someone to appear without knowing what she wanted. If she understood what she was waiting for, she rejected it angrily; there really was no room in her life for Lowry now. She would give up nothing of it for him. But she kept looking and waiting and there were times at night when she rose dizzy with sleep and tried to get her head clear, wondering at the power of her body and at the deep vast depths of herself where there were no names or faces or memories but only desires that had no patience with the slow motion of daily life.

In the summer after Clara's eighteenth birthday, Sonya died and Clara went to her funeral. Revere was gone away to Chicago and so Judd was good enough to come and watch Swan, and Clara drove by herself to the little country church ten miles from Tintern where Sonya was going to be buried. She had forgotten Sonya for some time and the news of the girl's death was at first something oblique and impersonal, like a newspaper item. Then it began to eat into Clara and she thought of the many times they had been together— already years ago, in what had been left of their childhoods; but even then they had not been children.

Everyone was silent in church. Clara saw Sonya's mother and a few kids who were Sonya's brothers and sisters, and some relatives, old women she had never met before, sitting up in the second pew wearing black and looking sick and heavy. There were not many people in church. Clara recognized some of the faces and sensed that these people could look at her today without any special hatred, believing that she was like Sonya and therefore destined to be punished for everything sooner or later, like Sonya. And it did happen, Clara thought, that you were punished sooner or later. It happened whether you did anything wrong or not. So she sat in a black cotton dress with a wide-brimmed black hat on her head, pulled down a little over her forehead to hide her bangs, and watched the
coffin as the minister talked over it, wheedling and prodding them into thinking about a strange invisible world of God that was somehow simultaneous with this world but never found in it, until she wanted to cry out to the man that he should shut up—what did all that have to do with Sonya? “There are some bastards that don't do nothing but talk, talk all their lives,” she thought.

No matter what he might say, trying to turn facts into something that sounded better, Sonya was dead and that was that. The top of the coffin was closed. Sonya had been her best friend in those days before Revere came and changed her life, they'd slept in the same bed and talked all night long, but now Clara sat healthy and erect in the pew and Sonya lay dead while everyone stared gloomily up at the coffin as if a little put out that they had to be here on this beautiful day. Clara could see the side of Sonya's mother's face—a pale hawkish profile that showed no grief. Everything eroded downward in that face and whatever happened that was ugly just etched the lines in deeper, convincing her she had been right all along. But then, Sonya's mother was supposed to be a little crazy; she wouldn't know what to feel. How did you know what to feel? Sonya had been strangled by the man she'd been living with for nearly a year, and now the man was in jail waiting to be killed himself and his wife was going around making trouble everywhere, drunk half the time—so how did you know what to feel? Sonya just hadn't gotten out in time, that was all.

The ceremony came to an end. Clara heard the minister's words stop a moment after they had actually stopped; she had been so wearied by them. Everyone stirred and the church felt hot again. Sonya's oldest brother and some other young men went awkwardly up front and picked up the coffin. Clara flinched when they lifted it into the air, feeling the sudden heavy weight of Sonya's body on their shoulders—but they picked it up with no effort and walked out into the sunlight and around back, their young faces grim and faintly sullen in this company of women; they were out of their own world. Everyone else filed along behind with that pretense of hurry that disguises a confused reluctance. The outdoors made everything different—a little unreal. Clara smelled sun-drenched, sunburnt corn and wheat, and her eyes moved involuntarily to the
sky where the future lay eased out forever, without boundaries. There, anything could happen: you need only be alive. The pulsing of her veins and the slight trembling of her body made her feel light, while Sonya in that coffin must be heavy, gravitating already down toward the dry earth. It was not fair, Clara thought, but she was alive and Sonya was dead. Something gleamed and caught her eye: the amethyst ring Revere had bought her.

The grave was ready. Clara caught up with everyone and then stopped still; there was nowhere farther to go. She stared from face to face at those people on the other side of the open grave, and felt tears at last coming into her eyes. She could not quite believe that Sonya was in that box. She had not seen Sonya for many months, for a year. What had she to do with Sonya? Everything was unreal, faintly incredible—the soft warm air and the hard black coffin, the songs of birds and insects invisible all about them and the minis-ter's droning voice, the hole there dug right out of the earth that was so peaceful on all sides, with its ancient tilting gravestones and weeds and forgotten, forlorn flowerpots with dried-out plants in them like tiny skeletons.… In the middle of all this, while the minister went on with something he had to get said, Clara thought quite clearly and desperately of Lowry. She could not live out her life and die and never see him again. She could not die and be buried, like Sonya, with strangers standing around who did not give a damn, or who believed God's will was being done, sin punished, while Lowry was somewhere else—or maybe dead himself, buried by people who also did not give a damn and who could not have known who he was. Something wanted to claw its way out of her, made wild by this thought. She covered her face and wept.

Then it was over. People turned to leave, relieved, their eyes skidding away, breaking up into little clumps—family, mainly. Those people who hated one another and fought every evening in their homes banded together comfortably out of loyalty, or habit, or spite; Clara was the only person who was really alone. The minister would have walked with her, to prove something or other, and to make Clara think seriously of her own future—as if anyone was ever going to strangle her! But she walked fast to avoid him. She said nothing to anyone, not even to Sonya's mother. She had nothing
to do with these people. She had nothing to do with Sonya either, now that Sonya was dead.