Homeplace (17 page)

“You ought to be writing literature, not teaching it,” Mike said. “You’re wasted on ninety-nine percent of the little wretches in your classes.”

“What classes?” Priss Comfort said. “I’ve been retired for more than twenty years. I do absolutely nothing I don’t have to do now, except read, work doublecrostics, and take care of this failed poet here. And eat, of course.”

“Why did you quit?” Mike asked in genuine bewilderment. “I can’t imagine you not teaching English literature. It’s like the ocean without tides.”

“Mike, I’m exactly your father’s age. They’d have had to put me out to pasture eventually, even if I hadn’t wanted to retire. Which I did.”

Mike looked at Priss, huge and vital in the dimness of the room. That she could be the same age as the embittered and embattled cadaver back in the Pomeroy Street house was nearly incomprehensible. Yet she knew that it was true. Priss and her father had gone all the way through grammar and high school together.

“You seem about a century younger than he does,” she said.

“Four months and five days, to be exact,” Priss said. “The only difference is that I don’t have cancer and I haven’t had a stroke.”

“No,” Mike said. “That’s not the only difference.”
But she did not pursue it, and Priss let the statement lie. They sat in peaceful silence for a space of time, memories and impressions from the nearly two decades of afternoons and evenings she had spent in this room rolling over Mike like a warm sea.

Presently Priss said, “Tell me what’s happened in your life since you left here. I don’t mean the divorce and all that … DeeDee’s kept me filled in on the mechanics. I mean what’s really been happening with you. I can’t tell from your writing. There’s nothing of you in it.”

“There’s not supposed to be,” Mike said, a bit testily. “A journalist isn’t supposed to intrude herself into her work. I’ve always tried to let my subjects speak for themselves …”

“I wasn’t criticizing your work,” Priss said, holding up one large hand and smiling. “I’m very proud of your work. You’ve made a good start on what you can do. But you’re by no means there yet. And I think you’re wrong. The best journalists … the very top two or three … aren’t afraid to let themselves show under and through their work. They don’t hide behind it. It’s what makes them the best; a kind of pentimento. You’re still hiding, no matter what you think. What
has
happened to you, Mike?”

Without meaning to at all, Mike found herself telling Priss. She talked and talked, about the early days of her marriage and her career, about the growing estrangement between her and Richard, and the divorce; about Rachel and her troubling transmutation and abrupt, agonizing defection; about the job and the apartment and all the other events of that bizarre and devastating week in May just past; about DeeDee’s importuning letter, and her own decision to come home and help her sister with their father. She said nothing of the terrible, killing fear that had struck her on the train to Bridgehampton, or of the flight to Derek Blessing and his betrayal;
nor of the Xanax trance that had ended only the night before, in her old bedroom upstairs in the Pomeroy Street house, or of the bell jar that had since slid down over her. She simply and meticulously offered the bare, neatened bones of her life for Priss, aware as she talked of the brisk, neutral northeastern timbre of her voice in her own ears, of what DeeDee had called the “New Yorkiness” of her speech.

When she was through, Priss grinned at her.

“So the whole shooting match just fell in on you, did it?” she said. “And now here you are, back where you started out. Well, good for you, Mike, though I don’t for a minute suppose you came for the reasons you say you did. Since when did you give a tinker’s damn about helping DeeDee, or did she need help, for that matter? Duck’s sorry slob of a sister could take on that old harpy as well as he and DeeDee. She didn’t have to call you home. Whatever the reasons, though, I’m glad you’re here. It’s time you came home.”

“I’m not here to stay,” Mike said hastily. “I didn’t really come home to stay, Priss. Please don’t think that. This is just for a while …”

“Where will you go, then? When you do go.”

“Back to New York, I guess. Or almost anywhere my work takes me. On. I’ll go on. I always meant to do that. You know as well as I do that you can’t go home again,” Mike said.

“Sometimes you have to go home before you
can
go on,” Priss said. “Almost all of us do, Mike, some time or other.”

They were silent again, and then Mike said, “Is he really dying?”

“Yes,” Priss Comfort said. “He really is.”

“Does he know it?”

“I don’t know,” Priss said. “I haven’t talked to your father since the day you left that house. Seen or talked
to him. I’m sure DeeDee has told you that, or John himself. It’s certainly no secret in Lytton.”

“Oh, Priss … why?” Mike cried softly. The old pain deep under Priss’s words, not the words themselves, hurt her in turn.

“Because,” said Priss Comfort, “I can’t forgive either one of us. Him or me.”

“Priss …” Mike began, but the older woman held her hand up again, a white blur in the hot red dimness of the room.

“No, Mike, I’m not going to talk about it with you, now or ever,” she said. “I was drunk and I let you down, and I will never forgive myself for it, and I stopped drinking that day … stopped teaching, too … but that’s neither here nor there. And I will not forgive your father for what he said to you that day, in that house, and I will not go into that house again while he lives in it. And if you persist in talking to me about it, I’m going to ask you to go home.”

“Priss, I can’t bear you punishing yourself for something that doesn’t matter,” Mike said urgently. “Believe me, I never …”

“Mike!”

“All right,” Mike said, a prickle of salt in her eyes and throat. “Then we won’t talk about it. Tell me about this business with the … what is it? The DOT? Tell me about the homeplace.”

Priss looked at her with the mulish, oblique look she remembered from her high school days, when Mike had stopped short of grasping some point Priss had been trying to make to her, or from arriving at some conclusion. There was no help in that look.

“Do you really care about the homeplace, Mike? Or any of this business with the Department of Transportation? I don’t think you do,” she said.

“No,” Mike said, relieved that once again Priss had read her thoughts, and that, in this house, at least, she
did not have to pretend. “I don’t especially care, except that it’s obvious I’m going to be hearing it night and day while I’m here. It seems to upset him … my father … a great deal, and that’s obviously not good for someone who’s already had one stroke. I couldn’t care less what happens to that broken down old farmhouse—Dee’s probably right; he’d be far better off without the worry of it hanging over him, and after all, he
would
still have the land—but I can tell already that he’s not about to drop the suit, or whatever it is he and that Canaday person have going. I just thought it might be good for me to know a little of what’s been going on.”

“You really ought to ask Sam Canaday, then,” Priss said. “I’m hazy on the details and timing. All I know is that the whole thing boiled up about six months ago; I heard at the Food Giant that the state wanted to build an access road from all that new development over to the west of us, around Carrollton and all, to 1-85 over east yonder, and that it would come right smack through the old Winship homeplace. I can’t imagine why they want to do it; there’s another access road not five miles down toward Shelbyville. It’s not going to save anybody but about two minutes. Well, the next thing I knew, your daddy had hired Sam Canaday to fight it, and that’s really the gist and sum of it. You ask Sam. You’re right; you really ought to know what’s going on if you’re in the house with it, whether or not you give a flip about the old place. Tell you the truth, it
has
gotten to be an eyesore since your daddy hasn’t been able to keep it up.”

“I don’t want to ask Sam Canaday anything,” Mike said. “He’s a boor and a bore and a professional Southerner, which is even worse, and I’m already tired of having him shamble around the house being all folksy and warm and cotton-mouthed. I don’t plan to have anything more to do with him than I have to. It’ll be
easy enough to stay out of his way. How in God’s name did my father find him in the first place?”

“As a matter of fact, I sent him over there about four months ago,” Priss said enigmatically, feeding bits of chocolate chip cookies to the mad-eyed white cat, who gobbled them indelicately. “I knew John wasn’t up to going up to East Point every day to see that McDonough fellow up there, and there hasn’t been another lawyer in Lytton since your father retired. Sam Canaday came to town about a year ago and set up an office over the hardware store, in that space old Dr. Gaddis used to have … not much more than a slum now … and I had a little law business over a piece of property needing doing, and I didn’t want to drive to East Point to do it. So I went to see him, and he did a real good job for me and didn’t charge me an arm and a leg, so I told him to go on over there and see John Winship about this DOT thing, and he did, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

“I didn’t know reputable lawyers went around soliciting business door-to-door,” Mike said. “Though I haven’t seen anything yet to make me think he’s reputable.”

“Oh, he’s reputable,” Priss said. “He hasn’t had time to be disreputable yet. Only got his law degree a couple of years ago. Put himself through Oglethorpe University law school at night, I think. Came straight on down here from Atlanta and hung out his shingle. I think I was his first client, and John is probably his second and only one so far. Like to be his last, too. Folks down here don’t like him much.”

“I can see why,” Mike said.

“No, you can’t,” Priss said tartly. “The reason they don’t is that he got up in Sunday school class one morning right after he got here and as much as told that pompous old fool Horace Tait that he didn’t know his
Old Testament, and then proceeded to make a speech about integration.”

“God, really?”

“Really. You know—or I guess you don’t know—Horace Tait thinks he’s the greatest expert on Bible history since the Dead Sea scrolls, and he was blowing up like a puff adder, and then when Sam made his little speech on the ancient and modern prophets and the Civil Rights Movement, you could have heard a pin drop. Melvin and Carrie Sue Hinds got up and walked out. I knew he’d just cooked his goose in Lytton, of course, so I asked him over here for Sunday dinner and he came, and we’ve been friends ever since.”

“I bet you have.” Mike smiled at her, interested in spite of herself. “What on earth did he say?”

“Well, Horace was holding forth about Ezra in the court of the high priest, and how the high priest told him to go on back south, that he was nothing but a tender of sycamore trees. And Sam got up and said that wasn’t Ezra, it was Amos. He was right, of course; Horace is getting as senile as a goat. And while he was sputtering, Sam went on and said that Amos had always reminded him of the ‘outside agitators’ in the Civil Rights Movement, the ones who came in from up north and kicked up such a fuss and made such trouble and almost got run out of town by the very liberal white Southerners who were trying to do the same things that the agitators were. Well, you could cut the quiet with a knife, and I got tickled and interested, so I said that I thought they
were
too strident for their own good, whatever they were trying to do; the northern agitators, I meant. And he said yes, but, like Amos and the others, it was the strident outside saints, the troublesome loudmouths, that got the changes made, not those of us down here who had all the experience and tools and sensitivities and understanding that our long association with the blacks gave us to work with. And so then I
asked why he thought that was, and he said because the blacks are us, a part of us, whether we like it or not, and that working for their real liberation would be like self-mutilation. That’s when Melvin and Carrie Sue got up and left, when he said they were us. Didn’t have any more idea than a pair of donkeys what he was talking about. And then he went on to say that the real prophets were more than just liberal humanists; they were mystics as well as social activists; and that their social activism sprang from a strong inner life, a sharp sense of vocation and a single-minded obsession, a real mystical vision. Like Gandhi, he said, or Martin Luther King. I knew then he wasn’t going to get any more clients in Lytton, so that’s when I asked him home to dinner, and I was right. He hasn’t had another one.”

“I’m surprised anybody’s still speaking to you,” Mike said, amused.

“Oh, everybody’s used to me,” Priss said comfortably. “Everybody knows that the Comforts were always wild-eyed and smartmouthed, and half-cracked to boot. They grew up with me. Sam made the mistake of spouting off way too early in the game.”

“Well, it really was pretty stupid,” Mike said. “Especially if he’d just gotten his law degree at age … what? He must be my age or older. I wonder why he bothered to get a degree if he was going to blow it the first time he opened his mouth? He must have known what this town was like. What has he done for the rest of his life, anyway? Sold Chevrolets?”

“You’ll have to ask him that,” Priss said. “I never bothered. Doesn’t matter a happy rat’s fanny to me what he did. He’s a good lawyer and he makes me laugh, and that’s enough for me.”

“Well, he may be smarter than I thought, but I still don’t like him,” Mike said. “He’s ruder and cruder than he has to be if he does indeed know better, as you say he does, and he’s in and out of that house far too much.
He calls Daddy ‘Colonel,’ did you know that? It makes me want to throw up.”

She was aware that she had said “Daddy” freely and naturally, and for some reason felt heat rising from her chest and neck into her face.

“What does it matter to you what he calls your father, if you’re not going to be around him and don’t care about the whole DOT thing? The point is that John likes and trusts him, and he doesn’t anybody else, much. You ought to be glad he’s got some company and won’t be on your neck. How
do
you and John get along, anyway?” Priss Comfort said. She looked keenly at Mike.