Proud Flesh (29 page)

“Last night? Who says she died last night?” Doc demanded. He grew alarmingly agitated. “That's a lie! Listen, I know when somebody has died—though you didn't need to be a doctor to know that she was dead, even to see that she was dying. The look on her face would have told anybody that. But in Edwina's case I ought to know! You can be sure I wanted to make absolutely certain. I examined her thoroughly. I examined her when all I needed was my nose to tell me. And even after that I examined her again. Then I really examined her! But that was only because I was beginning to be as crazy as a Renshaw myself. I hadn't really seen anything to make me doubt my judgment. I only imagined I had. She was dead. I defy anybody to say otherwise. When a Renshaw dies she's dead, the same as you and me. Last night! Last night? Wait! You mean to tell me—? Wait. What day did you say this was? Saturday? And do you mean to tell me they still haven't buried her? When she's been dead now—and in this heat!—for five days!”

X

From that moment on, late that night or early that morning when he had eavesdropped on the three sisters in the kitchen, Doc had not let Edwina Renshaw out of his sight. If he had been conscientious before, if he had been constant, careful, if he had been terrified of making a mistake before, what was he after that!

He had said that after what he had just overheard it was all he could do to keep from screaming. To himself he
was
screaming as, holding his breath, he stole away from that kitchen door. He not only dared not protest against what he had just learned, he dared not let it be known that he knew it. He realized that they had suspected him of knowing it right along. This explained how it was that no amount of diligence on his part could ever allay the mistrust he saw in their eyes—perhaps even deepened their mistrust. They had known from the outset what he knew only now: that he was to be detained not to keep their mother alive for as long as the search for Kyle continued, but rather that the search—that futile, that impossible search—would continue for as long as he kept her alive. They supposed that he had guessed as much himself—and knowing that bunch as he did, he ought to have. In other words, they suspected him of knowing that by prolonging their mother's life he was prolonging his own captivity. From there to the next step would be natural for the Renshaws: to suspect him of trying to shorten his captivity by shortening her life.

What happened, of course, was that he began to suspect himself of that. And, in consequence, to be more diligent, more conscientious, more scrupulous, and more scared, than ever. Not just scared of them but scared now of himself. What a hell of a position to put a doctor in! To make the death of a patient in his care of benefit to him! To make a doctor suspect himself of secretly desiring the death of one of his own patients! The result was to make him his own jailer. Thus once again without any embarrassment to themselves they got the most out of him. He must watch himself night and day for any … Carelessness? Inattentiveness? Oh, Lord, help him! Amy! Watchful as he had been before, henceforth he would have to be more watchful than ever over her.

So when the end came he was there. He was always there. He went without sleep, without food, he drank enough coffee to have floated a battleship, took enough nitroglycerin to have sunk one. Exhausted as he was, half-hysterical himself now, he lived in that sickroom, he was there all the time, especially any time Amy was there.

Tuesday afternoon—repeat: Tuesday afternoon—it was hot as hell. Stifling. Hard enough for a healthy person, a young person, to get his breath. Hers, Edwina's, was coming short—a further strain on her already weak heart. To ease her they propped her up with pillows—Doc remembered the phrase “dead weight” passing ominously through his mind—and prepared her for a shot, he going to his bag—that was the moment he had spoken of before, when his back was turned—while Amy sterilized a spot on her arm with cotton and alcohol.

It was, as he had said, only an instant that his back was turned, but it had been like coming in halfway through a movie when he turned back, for in that instant much had happened. That is to say, nothing had “happened.” Neither woman had moved, neither had spoken nor even tried to speak. A look had passed between them. Or rather, in that short time already, a sequence of looks. From those on their faces at the moment he came in, Doc could reconstruct those that had gone before.

Edwina had wakened suddenly to find, for the first time since coming down sick, Amy bending over her. As always at the sight of Amy, she frowned. Being in pain, frightened, disoriented, no doubt she frowned all the deeper. This was just what poor despised Amy dreaded: her mother's waking and finding her there, and she was frightened and flustered. As always, her mother's frown brought to Amy's face that cowed and hangdog look she had, and set her lips to twitching with that uncertain, sickly smile. Doc had not known which of the two exasperated him the more: Edwina for her incorrigible misprizing of Amy, or Amy for her incorrigible endurance of it. To anyone else poor Amy's expression would have been pitiable; to her mother it was guilty. Guilty as she had always suspected, without herself suspecting until now the depth of that guilt. At that same moment Edwina's wakened body reported to her from all parts how mortally sick she was. A last illumination lit up her eyes, growing more incandescent momentarily, as a bulb flares up just before burning out. The look on her face declared more loudly than words, “You have murdered me.”

He could have murdered her himself at that moment. The care that this daughter had lavished upon her, the superhuman care, and this was her reward! He turned to comfort, to support, to sympathize with that poor misbegotten soul and saw—

Only his practice as a doctor could supply a comparison. More than once in his long career he had seen people who had lost their faces. Had them burnt off, cut away, shot away—once saw a woman who had been thrown by a trusted saddlehorse head-foremost onto a gravel riding path and had her face simply scraped off. And after surgery, when the bandages were removed, had seen the stiff new man-made substitute and had watched as the patient was handed a mirror and hesitated, afraid to look, and then the shock, the shake of the head, the rejection. Such was Amy's face now as she looked into the mirror her mother held up to her. Raw, tender, sensitive to exposure as though freshly unbandaged—and hideously ugly. The eyes in it begged him not to look, and not to look away.

He looked away—he couldn't help it; but not without first looking long—he couldn't help it. Her face was a map of dismay and despair. At what? At being seen for what she had been shown to be? Or at his misjudging her now as her mother had misjudged her? Before looking away he saw her face harden, and he exulted to see it. There was a bottom at last to even her bottomless patience, and Edwina had touched it. Then his exultation changed to alarm, from alarm to fear, from fear to horror. He looked away barely in time to keep from being turned to stone by that face. The last thing she saw, it did just that to Edwina Renshaw.

They, the living, stood for some moments as rigid as the dead woman. Then with a low cry Amy threw herself upon the corpse. To Doc her intention seemed to be to mutilate it. Instead she pried open its jaws and put her mouth to its mouth. She was trying to resuscitate it, to breathe life into it, to breathe her own life into it. Doc succeeded at last in pulling her away. She gave a last groan—or a last growl: impossible to say which, as it was to say whether her last look at her mother's remains was one of reproach or remorse.

The corpse slumped against the headboard staring with eyes like bulletholes and howling with wide-open mouth. The reason he did not hear it was, it seemed to Doc, because he had been deafened by it. He closed the jaw and held it closed until—it was not long—it set.

XI

“There was one thing,” said Clifford, “that Ma always feared worse than death itself.”

“What?” said Doc, meaning, not what was it she had feared, but what had he said?

He had not been listening. His nerves were shattered by all he had been through. He was further agitated—elated—by the prospect of his imminent release—at seeing his poor Kate again—if she was still alive. His bag was packed. He was busy in his mind laying plans for avenging himself upon this family of outlaws. And now he was distracted by a thought just forming in his mind about this one here, Clifford. This thought was, that Clifford might be classifiable as criminally insane, and thus not responsible for what he had done to him, and that this might hold good for them all, and that they might escape his vengeance and go free. Criminally insane. Wouldn't any judge say so? Wouldn't he have to? Applying the legal test, M'Naghten's Rule: whether the accused knew at the time that what he was doing was morally wrong. Morally wrong? Of course Clifford Renshaw had not known that. For Clifford Renshaw it was not only not wrong to have kidnaped the family doctor and held him prisoner in personal attendance upon his dying mother, it would have been criminal of him not to have done it. Oh, Lord! He had said he was no psychiatrist, but had it all been psychotherapy all along? A family that would do what they had done to him. That mad search for their missing brother. One of them forcing herself to eat cowdung. Another one—

Ah. Would she—Mrs. Metcalf—mind just stepping out for a minute and bringing him a glass of ice water?

—Another one of them trying to mutilate himself! He had spoken—remember—of a piece of emergency surgery he had had to perform that first day? Self-mutilation—also his first case of that. There had been times when Doc had thought that somebody else had done it to him. There were some with cause. At least, there were stories. But would somebody else have stopped with the job only just begun? It had been self-inflicted. He had been going to lay
that
as his offering on his mother's funeral pyre! Shaving accident! Nobody shaved with one of those antiques any more. Not even the oldest man Doc knew. They went out with bustles. Their only use nowadays was as a weapon for drunken Negroes to carve one another up with in barroom brawls on Saturday nights. He ought to know: he had stitched many a one back together. Clyde Renshaw did not even shave with a safety razor. He ought to know. He himself had cured him of a chronic facial rash by switching him onto an electric years ago. Oh, Lord! Very well, instead of put in jail he would have them all committed to the insane asylum. One way or another he would put them all behind bars. All but Amy. She was the only sane one of the lot, and she had just been cured after a lifetime of self-delusion.

“There was one thing Ma feared worse than death itself.”

“What? Oh. Oh, yes. Yes, I know all about that. I know what you mean. Listen, set your mind at rest. Your mother is—” He broke off. The man could not endure to hear it said. He looked ready to pounce upon and throttle anybody who said it, as though to say it would make it so, as though the word were the thing itself. Did he suspect Doc of pretending that his mother was dead when she was really still alive so that he could go home? It was possible. With these people anything was possible. They were crazy. They were enough to make you think you were crazy.

“I could be mistaken, of course,” Doc found himself stammering. “Such things have happened. If it would make you feel any better I could make one last—”

“I think,” said Clifford, “it would be better if we moved you in here with her. Then at the least little sign … I'll be right out here in the hall.”

“You were wondering,” said Doc to the Sheriff, “what became of those three days between the time Edwina Renshaw died and the time I was found and picked up …

If any additional evidence was needed that that one, Clifford, was mad: that was the night the dogs commenced to howl.

It began with one of the ones on the place there, one of Clifford's own coondogs, and just as it was popularly supposed to, at sundown. The most distressful, the most godforsaken, most spine-chilling sound this side of hell or Hollywood. Something to raise the hair on a dead man's scalp and wring tears from tombstones—almost human, like the grieving of an idiot. You didn't have to be shut up in a room with a corpse—though that helped. No wonder people had always associated that dismal sound with death!

“There!” he said—to himself—to his jailer on guard over him out in the hall. “Maybe that will convince you, you—!”

And had to break off. To take it back. To wonder whether that maniac might not be right. To—Well, he could tell it on himself now, but if anybody had walked into the room he would have denied to their face that what he was doing holding that cadaver's cold and rigid wrist was feeling it for a pulse beat. What had happened was that the dog had suddenly stopped its howling. Not just stopped. Stopped in a way so blood-curdling it made you long for the howling. A sickening sound, as though, having learned what a dreadful mistake it had made, the dog had bitten off its tongue in remorse. It had made him leap out of his chair and—Just remember, please, she had been thought dead once before, and by a trained nurse, when she was not. Or had she been? There was a possibility that had not occurred to him before. Did Edwina Renshaw possess the power of bringing herself back from death?

Well, not for a second time, at any rate. No more pulse in that stiff wrist than in the bedpost which his other hand held onto to steady himself. Confirmation of his diagnosis came from another dog off in the distance.

After howling for fully half an hour that dog, too, reconsidered and feel silent. Then before Doc had time to sigh in relief, the one, or another of the ones, there on the place started up again.

Just when Doc thought he could not stand another minute of it, it stopped as it had the first time with a hideous whimper that made him leap out of his chair and across the floor, only this time he went not to the deathbed but to the window to see if he could see what on earth was going on out there.