The Complete Stories (56 page)

While he was still in New York, he had written a letter to his mother which filled two notebooks. He did not mean it to be read until after his death. It was such a letter as Kafka had addressed to his father. Asbury's father had died twenty years ago and Asbury considered this a great blessing. The old man, he felt sure, had been one of the courthouse gang, a rural worthy with a dirty finger in every pie and he knew he would not have been able to stomach him. He had read some of his correspondence and had been appalled by its stupidity.

He knew, of course, that his mother would not understand the letter at once. Her literal mind would require some time to discover the significance of it, but he thought she would be able to see that he forgave her for all she had done to him. For that matter, he supposed that she would realize what she had done to him only through the letter. He didn't think she was conscious of it at all. Her self-satisfaction itself was barely conscious, but because of the letter, she might experience a painful realization and this would be the only thing of value he had to leave her.

If reading it would be painful to her, writing it had sometimes been unbearable to him—for in order to face her, he had had to face himself. “I came here to escape the slave's atmosphere of home,” he had written, “to find freedom, to liberate my imagination, to take it like a hawk from its cage and set it ‘whirling off into the widening gyre' (Yeats) and what did I find? It was incapable of flight. It was some bird you had domesticated, sitting huffy in its pen, refusing to come out!” The next words were underscored twice. “I have no imagination. I have no talent. I can't create. I have nothing but the desire for these things. Why didn't you kill that too? Woman, why did you pinion me?”

Writing this, he had reached the pit of despair and he thought that reading it, she would at least begin to sense his tragedy and her part in it. It was not that she had ever forced her way on him. That had never been necessary. Her way had simply been the air he breathed and when at last he had found other air, he couldn't survive in it. He felt that even if she didn't understand at once, the letter would leave her with an enduring chill and perhaps in time lead her to see herself as she was.

He had destroyed everything else he had ever written—his two lifeless novels, his half-dozen stationary plays, his prosy poems, his sketchy short stories—and kept only the two notebooks that contained the letter. They were in the black suitcase that his sister, huffing and blowing, was now dragging up the second flight of stairs. His mother was carrying the smaller bag and came on ahead. He turned over as she entered the room.

“I'll open this and get out your things,” she said, “and you can go right to bed and in a few minutes I'll bring your breakfast.”

He sat up and said in a fretful voice, “I don't want any breakfast and I can open my own suitcase. Leave that alone.”

His sister arrived in the door, her face full of curiosity, and let the black bag fall with a thud over the doorsill. Then she began to push it across the room with her foot until she was close enough to get a good look at him. “If I looked as bad as you do,” she said, “I'd go to the hospital.”

Her mother cut her eyes sharply at her and she left. Then Mrs. Fox closed the door and came to the bed and sat down on it beside him. “Now this time I want you to make a long visit and rest,” she said.

“This visit,” he said, “will be permanent.”

“Wonderful!” she cried. “You can have a little studio in your room and in the mornings you can write plays and in the afternoons you can help in the dairy!”

He turned a white wooden face to her. “Close the blinds and let me sleep,” he said.

When she was gone, he lay for some time staring at the water stains on the gray walls. Descending from the top molding, long icicle shapes had been etched by leaks and, directly over his bed on the ceiling, another leak had made a fierce bird with spread wings. It had an icicle crosswise in its beak and there were smaller icicles depending from its wings and tail. It had been there since his childhood and had always irritated him and sometimes had frightened him. He had often had the illusion that it was in motion and about to descend mysteriously and set the icicle on his head. He closed his eyes and thought: I won't have to look at it for many more days. And presently he went to sleep.

*   *   *

When he woke up in the afternoon, there was a pink open-mouthed face hanging over him and from two large familiar ears on either side of it the black tubes of Block's stethoscope extended down to his exposed chest. The doctor, seeing he was awake, made a face like a Chinaman, rolled his eyes almost out of his head and cried, “Say
AHHHH
!”

Block was irresistible to children. For miles around they vomited and went into fevers to have a visit from him. Mrs. Fox was standing behind him, smiling radiantly. “Here's Doctor Block!” she said as if she had captured this angel on the rooftop and brought him in for her little boy.

“Get him out of here,” Asbury muttered. He looked at the asinine face from what seemed the bottom of a black hole.

The doctor peered closer, wiggling his ears. Block was bald and had a round face as senseless as a baby's. Nothing about him indicated intelligence except two cold clinical nickel-colored eyes that hung with a motionless curiosity over whatever he looked at. “You sho do look bad, Azzberry,” he murmured. He took the stethoscope off and dropped it in his bag. “I don't know when I've seen anybody your age look as sorry as you do. What you been doing to yourself?”

There was a continuous thud in the back of Asbury's head as if his heart had got trapped in it and was fighting to get out. “I didn't send for you,” he said.

Block put his hand on the glaring face and pulled the eyelid down and peered into it. “You must have been on the bum up there,” he said. He began to press his hand in the small of Asbury's back. “I went up there once myself,” he said, “and saw exactly how little they had and came straight on back home. Open your mouth.”

Asbury opened it automatically and the drill-like gaze swung over it and bore down. He snapped it shut and in a wheezing breathless voice he said, “If I'd wanted a doctor, I'd have stayed up there where I could have got a good one!”

“Asbury!” his mother said.

“How long you been having the so' throat?” Block asked.

“She sent for you!” Asbury said. “She can answer the questions.”

“Asbury!” his mother said.

Block leaned over his bag and pulled out a rubber tube. He pushed Asbury's sleeve up and tied the tube around his upper arm. Then he took out a syringe and prepared to find the vein, humming a hymn as he pressed the needle in. Asbury lay with a rigid outraged stare while the privacy of his blood was invaded by this idiot. “Slowly Lord but sure,” Block sang in a murmuring voice, “Oh slowly Lord but sure.” When the syringe was full, he withdrew the needle. “Blood don't lie,” he said. He poured it in a bottle and stopped it up and put the bottle in his bag. “Azzbury,” he started, “how long…”

Asbury sat up and thrust his thudding head forward and said, “I didn't send for you. I'm not answering any questions. You're not my doctor. What's wrong with me is way beyond you.”

“Most things are beyond me,” Block said. “I ain't found anything yet that I thoroughly understood,” and he sighed and got up. His eyes seemed to glitter at Asbury as if from a great distance.

“He wouldn't act so ugly,” Mrs. Fox explained, “if he weren't really sick. And
I
want you to come back every day until you get him well.”

Asbury's eyes were a fierce glaring violet. “What's wrong with me is way beyond you,” he repeated and lay back down and closed his eyes until Block and his mother were gone.

*   *   *

In the next few days, though he grew rapidly worse, his mind functioned with a terrible clarity. On the point of death, he found himself existing in a state of illumination that was totally out of keeping with the kind of talk he had to listen to from his mother. This was largely about cows with names like Daisy and Bessie Button and their intimate functions—their mastitis and their screw-worms and their abortions. His mother insisted that in the middle of the day he get out and sit on the porch and “enjoy the view” and as resistance was too much of a struggle, he dragged himself out and sat there in a rigid slouch, his feet wrapped in an afghan and his hands gripped on the chair arms as if he were about to spring forward into the glaring china blue sky. The lawn extended for a quarter of an acre down to a barbed-wire fence that divided it from the front pasture. In the middle of the day the dry cows rested there under a line of sweetgum trees. On the other side of the road were two hills with a pond between and his mother could sit on the porch and watch the herd walk across the dam to the hill on the other side. The whole scene was rimmed by a wall of trees which, at the time of day he was forced to sit there, was a washed-out blue that reminded him sadly of the Negroes' faded overalls.

He listened irritably while his mother detailed the faults of the help. “Those two are not stupid,” she said. “They know how to look out for themselves.”

“They need to,” he muttered, but there was no use to argue with her. Last year he had been writing a play about the Negro and he had wanted to be around them for a while to see how they really felt about their condition, but the two who worked for her had lost all their initiative over the years. They didn't talk. The one called Morgan was light brown, part Indian; the other, older one, Randall, was very black and fat. When they said anything to him, it was as if they were speaking to an invisible body located to the right or left of where he actually was, and after two days working side by side with them, he felt he had not established rapport. He decided to try something bolder than talk and one afternoon as he was standing near Randall, watching him adjust a milker, he had quietly taken out his cigarettes and lit one. The Negro had stopped what he was doing and watched him. He waited until Asbury had taken two draws and then he said, “She don't 'low no smoking in here.”

The other one approached and stood there, grinning.

“I know it,” Asbury said and after a deliberate pause, he shook the package and held it out, first to Randall, who took one, and then to Morgan, who took one. He had then lit the cigarettes for them himself and the three of them had stood there smoking. There were no sounds but the steady click of the two milking machines and the occasional slap of a cow's tail against her side. It was one of those moments of communion when the difference between black and white is absorbed into nothing.

The next day two cans of milk had been returned from the creamery because it had absorbed the odor of tobacco. He took the blame and told his mother that it was he and not the Negroes who had been smoking. “If you were doing it, they were doing it,” she had said. “Don't you think I know those two?” She was incapable of thinking them innocent; but the experience had so exhilarated him that he had been determined to repeat it in some other way.

The next afternoon when he and Randall were in the milk house pouring the fresh milk into the cans, he had picked up the jelly glass the Negroes drank out of and, inspired, had poured himself a glassful of the warm milk and drained it down. Randall had stopped pouring and had remained, half-bent, over the can, watching him. “She don't 'low that,” he said. “That
the
thing she don't 'low.”

Asbury poured out another glassful and handed it to him.

“She don't 'low it,” he repeated.

“Listen,” Asbury said hoarsely, “the world is changing. There's no reason I shouldn't drink after you or you after me!”

“She don't 'low noner us to drink noner this here milk,” Randall said.

Asbury continued to hold the glass out to him. “You took the the cigarette,” he said. “Take the milk. It's not going to hurt my mother to lose two or three glasses of milk a day. We've got to think free if we want to live free!”

The other one had come up and was standing in the door.

“Don't want noner that milk,” Randall said.

Asbury swung around and held the glass out to Morgan. “Here boy, have a drink of this,” he said.

Morgan stared at him; then his face took on a decided look of cunning. “I ain't seen you drink none of it yourself,” he said.

Asbury despised milk. The first warm glassful had turned his stomach. He drank half of what he was holding and handed the rest to the Negro, who took it and gazed down inside the glass as if it contained some great mystery; then he set it on the floor by the cooler.

“Don't you like milk?” Asbury asked.

“I likes it but I ain't drinking noner that.”

“Why?”

“She don't 'low it,” Morgan said.

“My God!” Asbury exploded, “she she she!” He had tried the same thing the next day and the next and the next but he could not get them to drink the milk. A few afternoons later when he was standing outside the milk house about to go in, he heard Morgan ask, “Howcome you let him drink that milk every day?”

“What he do is him,” Randall said. “What I do is me.”

“Howcome he talks so ugly about his ma?”

“She ain't whup him enough when he was little,” Randall said.

The insufferableness of life at home had overcome him and he had returned to New York two days early. So far as he was concerned he had died there, and the question now was how long he could stand to linger here. He could have hastened his end but suicide would not have been a victory. Death was coming to him legitimately, as a justification, as a gift from life. That was his greatest triumph. Then too, to the fine minds of the neighborhood, a suicide son would indicate a mother who had been a failure, and while this was the case, he felt that it was a public embarrassment he could spare her. What she would learn from the letter would be a private revelation. He had sealed the notebooks in a manila envelope and had written on it: “To be opened only after the death of Asbury Porter Fox.” He had put the envelope in the desk drawer in his room and locked it and the key was in his pajama pocket until he could decide on a place to leave it.