Proud Flesh (23 page)

—Noises from the house. Wails, moans, shrieks: a chorus of lamentations that seemed to be the voice of the building itself, wrung from its very timbers. Doc's two companions stopped, and between them passed a look not so much of alarm as of utter consternation.

“Something's gone wrong,” said one of them to the other.

Which even at the time, ignorant as he was of the true state of affairs, had struck Doc as an odd thing to say. Not suspicious, not alarming—not then; but odd. Surely something
had
gone wrong to send them to fetch him at that hour and rush him out there at that speed? What was he doing there with those bottles of dextrose banging against his legs unless something had gone wrong? He did not know then that it was not a sudden turn for the worse in their grandmother's condition but rather a sudden determination in their plans, plans which depended upon the very fact that she was holding her own, that had caused them to come and fetch him. He did not know that the two sent to bring back their missing brother were even then speeding toward Dallas. And how could he, how could anybody, possibly have imagined the part they had prepared for him in all this?

Brooding on it later—and he was later to have lots of time to brood—he had had to admit that actually they had not misled him. Not with words, at any rate. In his office it was not they but he himself who had said, “She's worse.” They had not even answered him. Indeed, it was not even a question. In fact, they had not said anything. They had not even had to tell him to hurry. He himself, as he left them to go back upstairs and get dressed, had said, “I won't be a minute.”

“You are saying then,” said Mr. Murphy, “that they did not actually threaten you, force you, order you to accompany them.”

“Eh? No. They didn't have to do anything like that. I had left their grandmother very sick only a few hours earlier. I was planning to go out there on my own the first thing that morning. Now there they were pounding on my office door at that hour. What else for? I knew at once, or thought I knew—”

“Excuse the interruption. Just keeping the record straight. Go on, Doctor, please.”

Standing, stunned, midway across the yard, listening to the sounds of grieving inside the house, first one then the other of Doc's companions began to make a strange sound. It was a whimper deep in their throats, exactly, Doc thought, like a pair of stray wolves answering a howl of distress from the pack. He thought, what a hold that domineering old woman has—had—on all her offspring! And then he thought, no, it's not that, or not only that. It's the pack that is threatened when its leader is brought down, and it's as members of the pack that they are responding now.

And then they turned and shot Doc a glare that blazed even in that dim early light of dawn and shed another illumination upon the Renshaw mentality. It was a look hot with resentment, menacing, and Doc thought, they hate me at this moment. Not just because I'm alive and their grandmother is dead. Not just because I'm a doctor and I have not saved her with my skills. They hate me simply because I am not one of them. Their loss is not my loss.

They began to run toward the house, dragging Doc along between them, both whimpering, growling louder the nearer they approached the family's concerted wail. At the foot of the porch steps they stopped and stared. The door knocker was tied with a bow of black crepe. As they stood staring at this, a woman's black hand slowly drew the shade of one of the parlor windows, then the other one. Forgetting him, Doc's companions bounded up the steps and across the porch and inside, leaving the door ajar.

Doc went inside. In the parlor the Negro servant women were silently at work. In observance of custom the house was being darkened, the light of day shut out. They were rubbing soap on the mirrors and shrouding all other reflecting surfaces with bedsheets, for according to the old superstition, whoever sees himself in a house where death is will die before the year is out. A few electric lights left burning shed a murky light in the room and in this light the Negro women were like shadows without substance.

A woman in the living room screamed, “I killed her!”

Doc groaned to himself, weary already of all that Renshaw emotionalism, that Renshaw excess. That would be Amy. It could be any one of them, for the old woman had dressed all her children in homemade hair shirts, but the odds were it was Amy. The one with the least to reproach herself with, she would be the one to reproach herself the most. The sight of the guilt toward her that Edwina Renshaw had inspired in all her children (all except that one who got away), and especially Amy, sickened Doc, gave him the creeps. In fairness to Edwina it had to be said that Amy's fanatical devotion to her had given her the creeps, too. It was hard to be patient with Amy's breast-beating, with such wild expressions as the one she had just uttered. Doc had to remind himself that the feelings of very demonstrative persons were not necessarily insincere. Threadbare phrases often cloaked genuine and deep emotions.

“That's it! I killed her! I killed my mother! As surely as if I had taken a knife!”

It was not Amy. It was Lois. Well, as he had remarked to himself, it could be any one of them. On Lois's conscience lay that divorce of hers which had so displeased her mother that she had not dared show her face at home since it was granted three months earlier.

“Shut your mouth! Say that again and I'll kill you!”

That was Amy! That Amy? Amy who never raised her voice in anger, Amy of proverbial patience, gentleness, understanding? “Hear me? I'll kill you!” And there were sounds of a scuffle. There came another scream, this a scream of fright, and out of the room Lois came running, with Amy at her heels. Impossible as it was to believe, that was Amy, transformed into a fury, murderous. Right behind Amy came Clifford. He succeeded in grabbing Amy and holding her while Lois made her escape up the stairs. Next came Ross, weaving, drunk already—or still. He grabbed Doc's lapels and breathing fumes into his face said, “Make very sure. Hear?”

“I always do,” said Doc.

“Make very sure. Cause if there was one thing she feared worse than death itself …”

“I always do, but I'll make very sure.”

“Cause if there was one thing she feared—”

“You don't have to say it. I understand. I know. She spoke to me about it. I'll make very sure.”

Often in the still of the night lying sleepless in the dark Edwina Renshaw had seen herself lying like that following one of her attacks. She had been in a coma, now she had regained consciousness. Had regained consciousness, but not the strength to move so much as an eyelid. Her pulse and her breathing were so faint they were undetectable. Her limbs were cold. Her children and grandchildren and all her relatives gathered at her bedside wept and wailed. She struggled desperately to speak, to make a sound, a movement, give some sign of life; she was powerless, paralyzed, incapable even of blinking when the sheet was drawn over her eyes. Next she saw herself lying on the cold slate slab of the worktable in the undertaker's parlor. She felt the prick of needles in her arms and legs, and not even this could rouse a response from her lifeless but living body. And so she lay stretched out listening as her blood was pumped from her veins and washed down the drain in the concrete floor.

On the only occasion that she could bring herself ever to speak to them about it, Edwina had secured from her children a solemn promise that when she died they would not have her embalmed.

Her second fantasy, which grew out of that promise, was even more terrifying than the first. In this she saw herself in her coffin, unembalmed, struggling to communicate that she was alive to the people who filed past for their last view of her or to bend and kiss her goodbye. Then the last one bade her goodbye forever and the lid of the coffin was closed, bolted. She was lowered into her grave. The dirt was shoveled in upon her. And thereupon her struggles suddenly availed: her strength, her voice were restored to her, and for half an hour, before she suffocated, she clawed at the lid and screamed.

“If anything will bring me back to haunt you,” she had said, “that is it. So don't be in any hurry. Make sure I'm really gone before you put me away for good.”

To her children, as to Doc, she had said it just once. That once to her children she had rather enjoyed. For if the thought of her death terrified her, at least it was gratifying to see that it terrified them even more, especially Amy.

The long upstairs hallway was packed now with the many survivors of the dead woman. In one corner lay a woman stretched out on the floor in a faint. A swarm of her women-kin keened over her. They were trying to revive her with a bottle of household ammonia held to her nose. That sharp odor pierced the stale air of a hot night and a hotter day just beginning and of the closeness of many bodies packed into a narrow space.

Himself often death's messenger, a doctor saw many bereaved families; Doc Metcalf, in the course of his long practice, had seen a very great many. Some—for families, like individuals, varied in their responses—bore their suffering privately, with little outward show, while others broke down in uncontrollable outpourings of grief. But in all his long experience Doc had never seen anything to equal that of the Renshaws. Like sufferers from some epidemic disease that deranged its victims with pain, so that they sought relief from worse torment in self-inflicted wounds, the women tore their hair and scratched their faces while the men punished their bodies for daring to feel and protest against pain when their mother's body no longer could, never again would, Clifford smashing his heavy fist against the wall, then staring contemptuously at his raw knuckles and smashing them again, scattering drops that glistened like bright red berries amid the printed foliage of the wallpaper, his brother Ross striking himself repeatedly on the chest with a noise like a drum, blow on blow, any one of which would have felled a man in his right mind, and not only did none of the others try to stop him, they watched in approval. Rending the air with their shrieks, they goaded themselves and their fellow-sufferers into an orgy of anguish.

Outside the dead matriarch's door the women of the clan were gathered as at the wailing wall, in sackcloth and ashes, that is to say, in their nightgowns and wrappers, their hair in hairnets or straggling loose, their unmade faces pale and puffy and streaked with tears. Clutching imploringly at him as he cleared his way through them, they thrust their twisted and ravaged faces into Doc's face and howled.

The children clung to their mothers, terrified by the unbridled passion they were seeing. Instead of being quieted they were urged on in their screaming with shrieks that Ma was dead and they would never see her again until they saw her in heaven. The grown men, too, wept unashamedly, big, burly Derwent with his face to the wall and his head in his folded arms sobbing as loudly as any of the women.

At the end of the hall the fat sister, Gladys, had also fainted, fortunately in her case not without having given sufficient forewarning to be steered to a settee. Now she resumed consciousness and seeing Doc rose up disheveled and distraught and in loud dramatic tones cried as he entered the sickroom, “Doctor! Bring her back! Restore our precious mother to us, we beg and pray of you!” Hysteria, of course, if not pure histrionics, and not the first time Doc had ever been addressed that same supplication. But with this bunch you never knew. People were forever reading some newspaper account of somebody dead at ninety-three of heart failure complicated by lung cancer and with just a touch of Bright's disease being brought back to life—if that doctor out in Keokuk could do it what was the matter with you?

So if he had had any presence of mind he would have availed himself of his heaven-sent opportunity. Would have come back from the sickroom and said it was indeed out of all human hands now; however, with nothing to be lost by trying, he would see what he could do. And then have gone back inside, shutting the door behind him, and set to work on her, and when he had brought her around, returned to the hall looking as though he had just wrestled with the angel of death and thrown him for a fall, and wordlessly, letting them see that the struggle had all but cost him his own life, invited them in with a weak wave of his hand to see for themselves what he had wrought, what they owed him. But no. Better that he had done just what he did. Which was, turn down the bedsheet and take one look and, not even bothering to feel her pulse, dash to the door and fling it open and demand, “What is going on here? Stop your racket! Your mother is not dead. Whoever told you she was?” Because if he could do it once then he could do it again, had just better by God do it again, and if he had made them believe he had found her dead and had resurrected her then he would have been there still—what day was today? Saturday?—then he would be there still, working over a corpse now five days high in heat that hit a hundred and fifteen in the daytime and even at night fell not much below—

“Wait. Wait, Doc,” said the Sheriff. “Just a minute. You've lost me. I don't—”

Not only was Edwina Renshaw not dead, she was, although unable to utter a sound and too weak, or too petrified with horror, to move a muscle, fully conscious, and as Doc could tell just by looking into her eyes, fully aware of all that was going on outside her door and what it all signified. No knowing how long she had lain there like that, in the very plight which Doc had just been reminded was her worst fear, with that sheet drawn over her face and she powerless to lift it, to call for help, to put a stop to those shrieks and wails and that battering of fists against the wall, so that whatever had been her condition on first coming to, by the time Doc got to her she was nearly dead from terror.

Now he was in a plight. His telling them that their mother was alive when they had given her up for dead was almost as if he had brought her back from the dead; to tell them now that with him in attendance she had died after all would be almost as if he had killed her. Out in the hallway now reigned a silence as loud as the commotion had been before, and in that silence Doc found himself praying to the ampule of adrenalin as to a vial of holy water attested to have wrought miraculous cures, and nicking its neck with the little serrated blade packaged with it and snapping it off, he filled the hypodermic syringe and administered the injection with all the awe and the fear and the hope of a priest administering a rite.