Proud Flesh (33 page)

“I'd have sworn he said Thursday,” was her comment when they came out to find, to her visible disappointment, the world still there.

It was not long after that day that a cyclone had struck. He saw it coming, for he kept himself constantly alert to the signs, and hid himself beneath his parents' bed, shaking with terror alone in the house as lightning which seemed aimed directly at him crashed and crackled all around and thunder shook the floorboards underneath him, but preferring this, preferring death itself, to the clammy claustrophobia of the storm cellar. It was years before the family could induce him to take shelter with them there from a storm.

At least he had had company; Amy was all alone. No she was not. She was anything but alone. She had gone there to be alone but she was not. She shared her narrow cell now with a prisonful of uncaught criminals. Her living tomb was now a graveyard of unquiet ghosts. She had retreated from the world judging herself unfit for it, and the world, coming to convince her that it was unfit to live in, had worn a path to her retreat. Sin, like misery, seeks company. Amy's sin was not having loved her mother enough. Unlike many who have sinned grievously (or think they have, which comes to the same thing) and been found out, Amy had not succumbed to the temptation to believe that the only difference between her and other people was that she had been found out. To spare the world the sight of her she had taken to her cellar; now the whole world seemed to be trying its best to get in there with her. Around that bench beside her sat ghosts whose wounds for half a century had never ceased to bleed because their deaths were still unpunished, undetected, and yoked to them, like Siamese twins, their killers, the former alive in death, the latter dead though alive. Together there sat a family of three: the father, the mother who was his daughter, and the drowned infant who was her grandfather's daughter and her mother's sister. His own lurid imagination? He had seen the man, if what he had seen might be called a man, had watched him climb the mound and sink to his knees and pour his confession down the pipe, and if not what he imagined, it was something equally depraved. And that one was only one of many.

Not all who, because of their moral leprosy, ought to have been, were social lepers. Not all came shambling on foot wrapped in two cast-off overcoats and confessing endlessly to themselves. The man who pioneered what had now become the rite was said to have driven away afterward in a chauffeured Cadillac. Jonah at Joppa taking passage clean out of God's world could not have worn a more furtive and guilty look than that well-tailored customer. Even in his Cadillac he could never get away from what he was running from. He carried his pursuer with him like his own shadow wherever he went, a fugitive from himself.

The last man on earth (or so you thought at the time, not yet having seen some of those who were to follow this one) to want to draw attention to himself, he had, notwithstanding, been moved to rise from his place on the ground and work his way among the tangle of outstretched legs and down to the mound as though to the stage in response to the hypnotist's call for a volunteer from the audience, and while at least four hundred eyes watched, climb it and lower himself to his knees before the culvert pipe and, laying his fine felt hat on the ground beside him, speak into it. Vomit into it, was what it looked like he was doing, said those seated on the side where his face was visible—vomit up something he had had on his stomach for thirty years. Whatever he had to confess to, it was enough to keep him there on his knees for some time. When he came down, bareheaded, hat in hand, and made his way through the crowd, which, either out of revulsion against the man he had been or out of respect for the man he had just become, drew back all along his route, his eyes were shining bright with tears.

To see their self-sick faces was to know what soul-sickening confessions they were pouring in upon the head of their captive confessor trapped in her narrow cell. Unspeakable crimes, undiscovered, or for which an innocent person had paid in their stead, perhaps through their connivance, or else with hearts deformed by self-hatred for some monstrous wrong that had been done to them. He could picture his sister sitting on that which was to have been her mourners' bench, and the ghastly mockery of it: there forced to listen to the sins of others. It must have been for her like it used to be during a cyclone when the eye of the storm hung overhead and shut out the meager light and took your breath away, whenever one of those put his head inside the pipe and breathed down upon her the breath of his corrupt conscience. He could picture her in her vain efforts to escape it holding her hands over her ears while in that megaphone of a pipe and in that closed and narrow space it was magnified until it came to seem like the very voice of the earth, the dead in all their graves in all the world, victims and victimizers, relaying to her, as through a network of nerves, their pitiful and horrifying histories. Listening to confessions had always been Amy's second career, and he could see her, out of a sense of duty—misplaced—and out of her own sense of guilt—mistaken—taking her hands from her ears and forcing herself to listen and in her horror and disgust feeling her way in the dark around the clammy continuous wall as though to avoid a pile of excrement or a rotting corpse thrown in with her and lying in the center of her cell. And he could picture her when her hand touched the wood of the door drawing back in revulsion against re-entering a world where such things lay moldering in the cellars of human hearts.

“Amy, this is Lois,” said she, her voice choked with tears. “I hope you will listen to me. Please, listen. I've come to beg you again to come out and rejoin your family who love you and let us try to comfort and take care of you. I know what you're feeling, Amy, hon. Like you just never want to set eyes on another human face, knowing you'll never see Ma's dear loving face again.” Lois had touched the nerve that was exposed: the groan that arose from the pipe and was picked up by her microphone confirmed it. “I know. I know. It's how I feel, too. How all of us feel. But, sweetheart, you're not helping things any by hurting yourself. You're only making it harder on us all, worrying over you like we are. Open the door, Amy, dear sister, please, I beg of you, we all beg of you, and come out and let us look after you. Come out where we can all be together and comfort one another.”

She had told them, or rather, had relayed to them through her chosen messenger, that she had said her last, and she was true now to her word. From the cellar now—or rather, yesterday, when this had been filmed—came no sound. Lois sighed and got up off her knees and with tears glistening in her eyes came down the steps of the mound. She rose now from her armchair and quit the room, shaking with sobs. Clifford followed her.

As though to add to the insult, it was Jug Amy chose through whom to convey her last word. He was on guard duty beside the pipe. It was night, four hours before he could expect to be relieved. He was groaning inwardly but did not know he had groaned aloud until he heard a voice from beneath him say, “Who is there?”

Speaking into the pipe, he said, “Me, Miss Amy. Jug.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Watching out over you. I'm here to see that you don't do yourself no harm.”

“I'm doing myself all the harm I know how.”

“Yes'm, you surely are taking it mighty hard. How much longer you reckon on before we can expect you to get feeling better in your mind and come out?”

“The rest of my life,” she said.

To the family, Jug said, wetting his lips, and having primed himself with drink, “Now don't blame me if yawl don't like this. I'm only saying what she told me to say.”

He shut his eyes and kept them shut throughout his recitation. The effect was as if he were a medium at a seance transmitting to them a communication from beyond the grave.

“She say she gone stay right where she is and for all the world to just go about their business and forget about her. She say anybody try to bust down the door and get her out they gone have her blood on their hands.”

“Just like I said,” said Lois.

“She say tell yawl to keep your preachers and your psychatrists cause she don't care to hear nothing they got to say. She say she know her own soul better than any preacher and her own mind better than any psychatrist. She say she is where she belongs and where she wants to be. She say she the meanest woman alive and not fit to look nobody in the face nor see the light of day. She say she killed yawl's mother. She say to say that again: ‘I killed my mother.' She say for yawl not to come talk to her no more. She say she not interested in anything any of yawl got to say, either. She say, tell them if they knew how little I care about any of them they wouldn't care no more what becomes of me. I told you yawl wasn't gone like it but she made me swear and that is what she told me to say. And that, she say, is all the more she ever gone say.”

Now the preliminaries were over; the feature attraction could begin. She had had her daily bread and water, had heard the family's daily plea; now she belonged to them. The camera roved over the crowd; faces appeared on the screen as in the sights of a rifle. For TV this coming interval would have to be shortened. Sometimes it took so long before anybody mustered the courage to go first that everybody there seemed to be saying to himself, if somebody doesn't do it soon then I will have to. As over the faces of the suspects in a police line-up, the camera roved over the crowd, seeking the one ready first to break and confess his guilt.

Time now for a commercial.

On the other side of that coin of which Heads, I Win is the ideal old age he imagines for himself, there is for every man Tails, I Lose: the worst old age he can imagine befalling him. The future the man dreads may be remote from his circumstances in life, as remote as—heads and tails: opposites, but not separated from each other by very much. The rich man may see himself winding up a pauper. The man with a family as large and as close as Clyde Renshaw's may see himself a lone and homeless old tramp sleeping in a doorway on Skid Row. In fact his, Clyde's, familiar vision of the worst old age that could be his lot was to become one of those homeless old men in two tattered overcoats who, always going from somewhere, never to anywhere, ply the nation's highways on foot in all weathers. Perhaps, in fact no doubt, part of his resentment against those of them who had lately begun to show up here on the place came because they brought to mind his old fear of winding up just such a one himself—though not, of course, with so many outward marks of the outcast upon him as these bore. Surely to be a homeless old man bad luck was enough; it was not necessary to have committed whatever things these had done to set them on the road and muttering to themselves.

Now—the ads over and the program resumed—seeing one of them get up from his seat on the ground and make his way down to the cellar mound (rather as if he needed to relieve himself, and was about to do it in public, Clyde thought) there came into his mind a picture of himself doing that very thing. He saw himself some years hence, though not so many as to account for that shuffle to his gait, the slouch to his shoulders, the silent movement of his lips and that look in his eyes hungry for home, as he came along the road. For it was the road home. The road to this place which had always been home to him but from which he had been gone for a long time, having left it for some reason he could not find, or rather, having had to leave it for some reason, something that had caused him not just to leave home but to expect never to see it again. What was this? Was it just this beard and the long hair which made him feel like one of those old tramps—look like one, too, he expected—along with that foolish old fear of his of being left old and homeless and a wanderer, and added to that, his thought of his self-exiled baby brother and his inability ever to come home again? He could not say, but in this vivid vision he saw himself trudging up the road, unknown and grateful to both his overcoats for hiding his identity, unrecognizable in his rags and behind his beard and the premature whiteness which had settled upon him like an early winter, even to his close kin. He saw himself come among that crowd, mount the cellar mound, up those steps he himself had ordered cut there years before not knowing he was cutting them for himself, and to his sister—still there, still faithful to her vow of seclusion—pour down the pipe his history. His history? What history? He did not know. He only knew he had one, and that he had come home, to Amy, hoping by telling it to her to gain readmittance not just to his own family but to the human family, if only as the poorest of poor relations.

It was the beard and this long hair. Two cast-off overcoats one on top of the other was all he needed now to make him look like another of those old tramps. Were there white whiskers in his beard? he wondered. Of course there were. There were in Ross's, and Ross was younger than he. He would soon know, even if the mirrors were not washed off. If things went on as they were much longer it would be grown out long enough for him to see it without a mirror. Already they—the men—looked like castaways, with these whiskers, with hair beginning to straggle over their collars. The women, without make-up on their faces, were faded and dim and looked like ghosts of themselves.

On her return from taking the boys their lunch today Gladys reported more spots on the walls of the cold storage vault where chunks of ice had loosened and fallen to the floor, leaving the pipes bare. Beneath the thick coat of frost still sheathing the walls a steady dripping could now be heard. It was still like an igloo in there, but who knew how long the thawing had been going on before they noticed it?

It was cooler weather now and the town not quite so dependent upon the ice house. Even those who would have liked to resume their use of the cold storage vault, the butchers and grocers and cafe owners, forebore under the circumstances to press. The crowd that gathered daily outside the ice house was definitely with them. Respect for parents, alive or dead, family feeling to the point that made the family a law unto itself: the Renshaws were not alone in that. Observance of the proper form, not wanting to bury their mother without all her children present, or at least until they had done all in their power to bring the last one home: all shared that. The Renshaws' audacity in commandeering the ice house out of respect for custom commanded universal admiration. Well, almost universal. When they stood off the U.S. Navy the crowd was with them to a man. That was when the two MPs came from Waco to arrest Derwent for being AWOL. When Derwent announced his refusal to go back until his grandmother had been buried, the crowd formed a living wall around that Jeep.