Had I a Hundred Mouths (28 page)

But with the world changing so fast and all old-time word and way paying so quickly away, she will have to correct
herself
in the world she errs in and by its means; or, in some way, by her own, on her own path, in the midst of her traveling. Surely we knew she needed all of us and had to touch us there, living on endurable and permanent, she thought, in that indestructible house where everything was always the way it had forever been and would never change, she imagined; where all, for her, was redeemed and put aright. Then, when she got something straight—what it was no one but Rhody ever knew—she'd gather her things and go off again.

“The sad thing is,” Idalou said, rocking on the front porch looking at the empty pasture and the sad-looking path that Rhody took, “that years pass and all grow old and pass away, and this house will be slowly emptied of its tenants.” Had Rhody ever considered this? And what would she do when all had gone and none to come home to?

But surely all of us who were listening to Idalou were thinking together that the path would remain, grown over and hidden by time, but drawn on the earth, the pasture was engraved with it like an indelible line; and Rhody's feet would be on it, time immemorial, coming and going, coming and going, child of the path in the pasture between home and homelessness, redemption and error. That was the way she had to go.

Z
AMOUR,
OR
A T
ALE
OF
I
NHERITANCE

For Dorothy Brett

It is said—and true—that Wylie Prescott became the richest man in one part of Texas because of the accident of inheritance. But few people know the circumstances of his coming to power and wealth. That is the tale to be told.

One time were two sisters in a faraway county of Texas called Red River County, and they had little black beards. Their names were Cheyney and Maroney Lester—they were not twins but close to being that—and even when they were just young girls of about fourteen they had begun to grow a sprouting of black beard.

The way it began was that Cheyney's beard started to show first and then Maroney's. Cheyney was very distraught and particularly as she felt she might fall into bad light with her sister Maroney, whom she worshiped. But Maroney came to her and said quietly, “Don't worry, dear sister Cheyney, this will make no difference between us—and besides, now I will tell you that for a long time I have noticed the same thing slowly happening to me.” The two sisters embraced and vowed they would stay together for the rest of their lives. This bond was stronger than death, although death kept it, too, and a very beautiful one to see, endearing the Lester sisters to all Red River County.

Red River County was a wildwood in those days, neighbors far pieces apart, scattered along the wide red river and upon the red land. Rain would leave red puddles in the gullies, and red dust stained the water in stock tubs. It had a wildness to it, too, this county, and where it rose to hilly places there were rocks and trees of hard wood, there where the water of the red river could not soften it. It was a beautiful wilderness and plain simple folks lived in it, and until the time of this tale, very few ever left the county and practically none that would never come back to it. This was all in about nineteen-fifteen.

Now there was a younger sister in the Lester family, ten years younger than Maroney and Cheyney; and her name was Princis Lester. Princis Lester grew along with her sisters and never spoke one word about the difference between her own aspect and theirs, though she took notice of it at an early age. She came to regard it as just the way they were, and there was no talk about it. But when she reached the self-regarding age of eighteen, and as she was slender and beautiful and chestnut-haired where her sisters' hair was of the coldest black, and they plump as two biscuits, Princis considered point-blank for the first time the plight that had befallen her sisters and thought death more desirable.

She said to herself, if this were to happen to me, I would just kill myself, looking at her face very carefully in the mirror. She drew farther apart from her sisters, though she had never been close to them, for Cheyney and Maroney seemed to hang apart in space from her, two little hemispheres joined by this isthmus of hair. Anyway, times were changing and Princis was taking her start in a new time. There was a new commissary up a few miles on the riverbank, and there were gatherings of young and old here, giving the chance to farm people to dress up and look at each other and adding one more to the opportunities of Sunday church and family meetings up and down the valley.

Princis asked no questions of her sisters about what she considered a fatal infirmity—they might have been dwarfs or albinos from the way she regarded them. Still, they were sweet and gentle, laughing little creatures, her sisters; and in the autumn she listened to them laughing in the apple orchard in their nunlike felicity, and she watched out her window at them sitting in the apple trees like charming coons throwing down the fruit. What did they have that she didn't? she asked herself at the dresser. A beard, she answered herself directly. The beard seemed to make all the difference, even that of blessed happiness. But she liked them, they were so loving with her, their own young sister Princis, they never once looked closely at her face to see if there was the slightest trace of beard, they never once mentioned it; and if she had not been their sister and that close kin to them, Princis might never have noticed their peculiarity after being with them for a little while, the way other more distant kinfolks seemed not to notice, coming once and a while on Sundays to visit in the afternoons. Eccentricities that take on price and preciosity in cities become humble matter of fact in country places among country folk.

She yearned to go away to a city, to get her a job or learn to be a beauty operator, or take a course in something, as so many others were doing. But she waited. She finished high school and then her mother and father died within a year. She stayed on at home until she was twenty-five, yearning to run away. There was such a distance between her and her sisters, one she felt she could never bridge, never as long as she lived—she could not cross that bridge of hair. The neighbors and cousins were miles down the road and there were few callers besides them. She waited on. At night as she sat by the light of the glass lamp while her sisters played the xylophone in the parlor, she would scout her face very carefully in her hand mirror. Sometimes she fell into a kind of trance before the face in the mirror as though it put her into a sleep. Then the whole world lay only in the oval pool of her mirror.

One time at the supper table, Princis suddenly cried out to her sisters, “Stop staring at me!” and left the table. Maroney said to her, “Why, Princis, our own beautiful little sister, we were not staring at you.” But Princis put on her coat and went out the back door. It was drizzling and December. She walked in the orchard under the dripping fruidess trees. “This means I must run away,” she told herself, “or I will end up by harming my two sisters, who mean no harm to anyone.”

What was that little cry she heard in the dark orchard, some animal or what? She walked softly toward the cry and saw two lovely burning lights. Those were its eyes. She went closer toward the lights, and it was a cat that leaped away from her. She pursued it. Up it went, scratching into a tree, where its eyes burned like some luminous fruit growing on the bare branches.

“Kitty!” she called. “If you are wet and cold, come to me. I am Princis Lester and I will do you no harm. We can be friends with each other, if you will come on down.”

She waited and watched the lights swinging through the tree. Then the cat came slowly down to where she stood and brushed a greeting against her. She picked him up, and he let her, and she felt how friendly his wet fur was to her hand, as though she had known it always. But its coat felt torn—it had been hounded by some animal.

Walking back toward the house with the cat, she said to it, “You have been lost in the cold rain and darkness. You had lost your way because you were nobody's cat and now you are mine; and what will I call you?”

In the house, Princis saw that the cat was a big black congenial male with cotton-eyes. She took off her new orange velveteen coat and wrapped him in it and took him into the parlor to show to her two sisters, and this would be an offering, too, to make up to them for what she had said at the supper table.

“Look here!” she said. “I have found a friend in the orchard.”

Cheyney and Maroney ran delighted to Princis and the cat, whose head shone wet and black where it nestled in the orange velveteen. But the cat grumbled and spat at them and wanted to claw out to keep them away. Cheyney and Maroney drew back together, and Princis said, “He is just nervous,” and took him into her room.

She sat down on her bed with the cat, dried him and brushed him with her hairbrush and said to him, “But what will I name you, because you are mine to keep.” Some beautiful name, she thought. What beautiful names did she know? She could not think of any; but then suddenly a name breathed into her head, almost as though someone else were whispering her a name: Zamour! It was a lovely name she had seen on a poster nailed to a tree on the road and advertising a magician who would come to the commissary with a carnival that she never saw.

And so Zamour became Princis' own. He either stayed in her room behind closed doors or walked with Princis in the orchard where they had met. He stayed away from Cheyney and Maroney, never taking to them, and they, in their kind way, did not press themselves upon him but let him go his way under his own affections.

When Princis was thirty, she met at the commissary a young railroad man named Mr. Simpson. She spied upon him regularly at the commissary from then on. As each got to know when the other would come to buy supplies, each made a secret plan. She knew by his eyes that he would one day come to call on her, and she told Zamour about it, and that they would have to watch and wait for him to come. She and Zamour played a secret game together—“When Mr. Simpson Comes”—and they often sat together on the front-porch swing to watch for him or in her bedroom at night, with only the little blue glass lamp burning, playing the game of waiting for him maybe to come while Princis looked at her face in the hand mirror.

Though she never invited Mr. Simpson, she knew he would come. The night he came sure enough to call, her sisters were playing the xylophone in the parlor, “Beautiful Ohio,” their favorite, over and over, such a music of gliding in a dream. Princis and Mr. Simpson sat in the hall on the hat-tree seat until the concert would be over and they could go into the parlor. But Cheyney and Maroney went on playing “Beautiful Ohio,” their favorite, over and over, a music to rock a canoe or swing a seat in a Ferris wheel.

Mr. Simpson told Princis that he was an orphan from St. Louis, had no folks, and that he was being transferred to the city of Houston to work in the railroad yards there—he was a switchman—and Princis told him without catching a breath a word that might be used to sing “Beautiful Ohio” with:
elope:
that she would like to elope with him, a beautiful word that loped into her mouth out of the music and lovely enough, too, to name a cat by if she had not first found the gift of the lovely word Zamour nailed to a tree.

Mr. Simpson was so thrilled by Princis' generous offer that he took it, right there in the hall sitting on the seat of the hat tree that could have been the seat of a gondola they rocked in to the music whose glassy purlings sounded like a dripping and rippling of water to throb together upon and move a boat—toward all their future ahead. And so they eloped that very night, before the xylophone concert was ever over.

“Now we will have a chance to know each other,” Mr. Simpson told her, “and we will make our future of a long time together until we are very old, when we will have my pension. That is why it is good to be a railroad man.”

“And Zamour's future, too,” Princis added. “For he will go with us.”

Princis pinned a note on the hat tree saying, “I have eloped to Houston to get married and to make my future. Love, Princis.”

Princis sent her sisters one postcard, showing a view of Houston looking north toward Red River County; and for many, many years there was no other word exchanged between them.

This was the time when people from small towns and farms were migrating to bigger towns and small cities, the time of change in Texas. Princis and Mr. Simpson moved into a small frame house in a neighborhood on Hines Street in Houston. The block of houses, called the Neighborhood by those living there, was inhabited by migrants from little towns, and a few were even from Red River County. These people had changed their style of living and slid into the pattern of the city. But oddly enough—for one would have thought she would be the first to change—Princis Lester did not alter, but from the day she settled there went on living as if she were still in Red River County. Something in Red River County kept her.

She did not dress up and catch the bus to spend all day in town, picking through Kress's or having a Coke and sandwich in a department store luncheonette, gazing at women to see if their purse and shoes matched; nor did she spend her afternoons in vaudeville matinees at the Prince Theatre that bubbled dazzling lights even in the daytime; nor shop in Serve-Yourself Piggly Wigglys: she had a charge account at a little grocery store nearby where the man whom she knew personally reached up to the top shelf with a clamping stick to get her a box of Quaker Oats. “Whenever I get homesick for Red River County,” one of the neighbors said, “which is less and less—it's all so changed, not like it used to be there—I just go look in Mrs. Simpson's house and feel I've been home to Red River County right on Hines Street in Houston. Why does she harbor home and past?”

When Princis raised the windows in her little house, she put sticks there to hold them up until Mr. Simpson explained to her that windows held up by themselves in the city of Houston. She had her Singer sewing machine and she pumped the pedal to make her print dresses with country flowers on them; she made her own sunbonnets and wore them in the Neighborhood and even in the house or when she swung on the front porch, like her sisters. She put her crocheted counterpane on the bed and her doilies, turned under her own hand, on the dresser and on the arms of the upholstered chairs to protect them.