Proud Flesh (32 page)

By then it was already too late for him to do anything about it. It had already gotten out of hand. It was no longer a family affair. The woman in the storm cellar had ceased to be his sister and become a public figure. A sacred figure, in fact, and anybody, even her own kin, who tried now to take her from them, that mob of zanies out there would probably have torn limb from limb.

Their fear lest she heed the family's pleas to her to come out (they still made them, daily, it had become a part of the ritual, though she had told them in her farewell speech to leave her alone, that they were wasting their breath) was visible on their faces. When the preacher came and tried to coax her out, when the psychiatrist was brought in from Dallas, you could see them holding their thumbs in suspense for fear one of them might succeed in winning her over. The preacher's text was from Ecclesiasticus—“Let tears fall down over the dead … but just for a day or two … and then comfort thyself for thy heaviness. For of heaviness cometh death, and the heaviness of the heart breaketh strength”—the psychiatrist's from Freud; both fell on deaf ears. Having failed with her, both men ended by sermonizing the crowd. The preacher told them it was God's will that Amy's mother be taken from her, and that she was being sinful not to submit to His will. To everything there was a season, he said: a time to mourn and a time to stop mourning. And, saying that they themselves were abetting her in it, he warned of another peril to Amy's soul. There was a limit set, he said, beyond which we were forbidden to love another human being, even our own mother. God was a jealous God, and would have none other before Him, and by adoring her dead mother—and that was what she was doing—Amy was skirting very near the deadly sin of idolatry. The psychiatrist told them that Amy was sinning against reason. She had not killed her mother, she only thought she had. It was all in her mind. So some said, agreed the farmer whom the psychiatrist chose to concentrate his reasoning upon. It was so. It was all in her mind. Yes, said the farmer to the psychiatrist, maybe so, but then, so much is, isn't it, if you know what I mean?

There are people sick in body who change doctors continually in search of one who will cure them—they invariably wind up in the hands of a quack; there are people sick of soul who change faiths the same way. These were such seekers. Religious addicts. The comparison was apt. In their hollow eyes burned the same unappeasable craving as of someone addicted to drugs and ever in need of stronger ones. In the pasture there was neither shelter nor shade. Beneath the sun that beat upon their heads like a hammer or streaming with rain, patient as plants, they stood or squatted or sat gazing at the cellar mound with the rapt attentiveness of the already converted waiting for a new religion to be born. The observable events of the day numbered two: the coming of one or another of the family to climb the mound and plead vainly with her to come out, and the appearance of Eulalie with her wagon bringing a bottle of drinking water, the meal she always sent back untouched, and a change of slopjars, but there they were ready and waiting—some of them since before sunup—waiting to participate with their mouths agape like a congregation of Campbellites at communion awaiting their half-shot of grape juice. Grandparents, parents, children: all sat gaping at that mean low mound of earth as though at a holy shrine, as though by staring at it long and fixedly enough they might see through it to where the sybil sat self-immured, doing penance and prayer for them all, in her dark, dank cell, waiting for the spirit to move her and she would speak.

She did speak, but not until these, the credulous, who had followed the curious, were themselves followed by the criminal.

Each day she stayed down there drew a bigger crowd. As word spread outward they came from farther and farther away, in cars bearing license plates from out of the county, from out of the state, from two, three, four states. And some who came farthest came on foot, burdened by nothing but their consciences, which it was impossible not to imagine looking like the motheaten, threadbare, tattered overcoats—often two, one over the other—which they wore in spite of the sweltering heat.

Eulalie now laying on for the TV reporter's benefit the mushmouthed old faithful family darky act: Wellsuh, for this evening I fixed her a breaded veal cutlet with mash potatoes and limas but if I know her—Yessuh, I fix her something hot but she—Yessuh, well, I try my best to think up things to tempt her appetite but—Nawsuh, just send it all back up. Nawsuh, never nothing but just them three-four slices of lightbread and a glass of water. She mortifying herself.

Shot of Eulalie climbing the steps with her rope and her pail. Letting the pail down the pipe on her rope and hauling up—

Cut, so as not to offend the users of the sponsors' laxative while the full slopjar was brought up out of the hole. Faces in the crowd as the camera roved. Jesus, who ever saw such a collection? Where were the police, the men with the straightjackets? What were these people doing outside of the penitentiary, the insane asylum? It looked like the faces on the wall alongside the rental boxes in the post office. No it didn't. Those were fugitives from the laws of society, wanted for mentionable crimes, like mail fraud, bank robbery; these had transgressed the very laws of nature. There, look at that one! Just look at that face! Child-molester was written in every line of that face. A face like that was enough to make you turn in your membership card in the human race. That one there! What uninvented atrocities did that degenerate have on his conscience that made him shirk away as the camera's eye sought him out? What was it for which the police in eleven states had orders to shoot that monster on sight?

A close-up now of the offerings at the cellar door. No matter how he stormed and railed at them to clear that junk away and burn it on the trash pile, Archie and Eulalie just drew that extra lid over their eyes which seemed to shut out hearing as well as sight. They were scared to touch any of those things. So now there was a heap there that looked like what was left unsold at the end of a flea market. For instance a glass breast pump with a rotted red rubber bulb. What in hell could that possibly symbolize to the nitwit who had left it there? The illegitimate child she had abandoned on the orphanage steps, and the milk left to curdle in her afterward? A pint, half empty, of Four Roses whiskey. A .380 caliber Colt automatic pistol, red with rust now from the seasonal dews but blue with oil when it was left there in its worn leather shoulder holster. A pair of aluminum crutches. A hypodermic syringe and needle. Bouquets and floral wreaths, fresh, faded, and plastic. And one—not shown—the biggest—so far—testimonial to the renunciatory spirit of the place: a 1961 Oldsmobile left down in the road by some penitent pilgrim who had been moved to journey along his straight new path in life on foot.

And now, following another break for a commercial for the laxative doctors recommend most, was Lois making her television debut. Well, he could sneer, but somebody had had to do it. In fact, Lois had had to do it. Who else? Ira had refused to go before the cameras. Clifford? Ross? He could never have gotten up the steps on his knees. Himself? People, might think he was climbing up there to confess to something. Hazel? Not even if she had been willing. Show Hazel to the whole curious world? As for Gladys—well, she had won the disqualifying contest. All three of the sisters always went noisily to pieces in any crisis. It was Amy who had always kept her composure, her efficiency under stress. And so she had had to do, as her sisters were prostrated by the slightest mishap, totally incompetent, professed themselves so, prided themselves upon it. Helplessness in the face of calamity was their gauge of depth of feeling, and as they confessed self-complacently, “I'm just not to be relied on for anything in time of trouble.—And what about me? The least little thing and I just—And me? Perfectly useless. Have to be put to bed and looked after myself.” These contests usually ended in agreement all around that they were lucky Amy was there for all of them to fall back upon. But somebody had to do it. It was pointless, but they could not just all sit there shut up inside the house. They had to show the world they still cared, were still trying. So Lois, as the family's representative, went out and made the climb up the cellar mound to plead with her once again.

It was just a damned good thing
she
hadn't known that the TV crew was there or else she might have repeated her farewell speech. Those newshounds were perfectly capable of climbing up there and dropping a microphone down the pipe on a wire to her—in fact, he wondered that they had not thought of that. Then the whole world might have been treated to her saying how she cared nothing for any of her family and wanted only to be left alone and how she had killed their mother.

It had been done just to be seen, done just because it had to be done. There was no earthly use in it any more. They had all taken turns and had gotten nothing but silence and groans and growls for their pains. And for poor Lois there was much that was embarrassing, irritating, painful: to allow that TV technician to hang that microphone around her neck like a halter and with the cord of it trailing behind her to mount the steps cut into the mound and kneel to the pipe while all those strangers watched and prayed that she would fail in her purpose and need not have prayed, for she was doomed to fail, and she knew it. Yet Lois, maybe because she knew how hopeless it was, pitched herself heart and soul into the plea she made to Amy on the family's behalf. Despite the staged air of it all, despite the intrusion of vulgar and vast curiosity into the family's private misfortune, or perhaps just because of this, Lois had been moved by her mission, and it moved her to tears now to see herself on the TV screen dropping to her knees at the mouth of the pipe and looking down into that blackness where her poor grief-crazed sister had sequestered herself. He had been in that spot himself. He had looked into that void, listened to that silence. Or rather, to that everlasting sigh, and felt the dankness emanating from the pipe, without current behind it—stillness itself—yet with that steady emanation, cool and dank, and with a smell to it like toadstools.

He could picture his sister where she sat, or rather, he could not picture her, it was too dark down there ever to see anything, for the bench ran around the wall and what little light there was was funneled down the pipe and fell like the beam of a flashlight in a circle in the center of the floor. Yet he could see her sitting there in the dark, for he had sat there himself many and many a time, had passed the most frightening hours of his life there—once an entire day while waiting for the end of the world.

He remembered the clamminess of it even on the hottest day and the dank, moldy, mushroom-y smell, and in the fall, cyclone season—right now: and he just wished one would spring up and catch them all out there and whirl them off to the kingdom-come they believed in and yearned for—the smell of potatoes, and the sweet putrid smell of rotting potatoes, and of carrots and apples and pears laid down for the winter on the shelves over your head above the bench. But he was wrong: you could see in there sometimes—whenever a bolt of lightning breaking overhead sent a momentary flare down the pipe and you saw the white faces around the wall with eyes as wide and dark and deep as the eyeless sockets of the skulls on the shelves in the catacombs. He remembered how they sang songs at his mother's urging to keep their spirits up and played guessing games, recited poems and told stories and asked riddles in voices unnaturally high with forced gaiety. The winds of the storm would moan over the mouth of the pipe like someone blowing across the lip of a jug, and you knew when the eye of the storm was directly overhead not just because the hole in the ceiling had blacked out but because the atmospheric pressure outside had dropped and inside it was hard to draw your breath, so hard there were moments when you feared you would surely all suffocate and be found sitting upright in your places around the wall like in a tomb in Pompeii. Hailstones would rattle against the pipe and sometimes come down the pipe and strike the lighted circle on the floor and scatter like popcorn in a pan.

The time he remembered best, or rather worst, was the day he spent there waiting for the world to come to an end. His grandmother was alive then, ancient, senile, superstitious—an easy convert for the wild-eyed itinerant millenarian minister who passed through the district preaching damnation, destruction and doom. Doomsday was nothing new, of course; it had come and gone before, came periodically to this district. But usually it stayed outside the city limits, in the tabernacles of country crossroads tent revivals: the brimstone creeds of the religious underprivileged. The Renshaws were of a caste to find such cults not only crazy but common and comical. But somehow this particular prophet got to Grandma and managed to convince her that he really had been shown God's calendar and that on it the second Thursday of next month was marked with a big red X, and that after that there was no more calendar.

The minister convinced Grandma and Grandma convinced him. Her only convert. Whether she had tried to convert the others and been laughed at or whether she knew she would be laughed at by anybody else over twelve and had not tried, he did not know. In any case, she pledged him to secrecy while, in preparation for Judgment Day, they provisioned the storm cellar, their refuge. She was not sure how long they would have to stay down there before it would be safe for them to come out—they would be given a sign—so he laid in plenty of peanut butter and graham crackers and she an ample store of condensed milk and the cigarettes for her asthma that smelled like feathers burning.

Maybe some of what was wrong with him still, all these many years later, was owing to the terrors of that day. They closed and bolted that huge heavy door upon themselves when the dawn sky was streaked with red—it really did look like the dawn of earth's last day—and there they stayed until found by his frantic mother after sundown, by which time he was tonguetied with terror. For something like sixteen hours he had sat on the bench beside the crazed, incontinent old woman who smelled of stale pee-pee and who, serenely confident of her own salvation, and maybe that minister's—he did not count, he realized about halfway through the afternoon—and enjoying the thought that outside the sinners were being toasted at God's bonfire like marshmallows on a fork, sat grinning a self-righteous grin that did not have to be seen to be felt.