The Lockwood Concern (13 page)

When George Lockwood was about five years old and his brother Penrose an infant, their grandfather's health was bad. He had become so enfeebled that he seldom made the effort to walk the few squares to his office in Dock Street, and business matters that required his attention were taken care of at his desk in the den in the red brick box. All of his day was spent in the house or in the yard. He was up early in the morning, and the servants who were hired soon after his wife's, death took turns rising at five o'clock to get him his tea. On fair days he would be out in the yard, carefully dressed in the clothes he might wear for a business day, and walking a few steps at a time, from rose bush to elm tree, sometimes touching the petals of a rose, sometimes studying the tree from ground to topmost branch, pausing to rest in the rough-hewn oaken chairs and benches that were strategically distributed about the yard. On days when rain or snow or bitter cold kept him in the house he would walk about from room to room, stopping to study a statuette, a bit of porcelain, and often colliding with a servant on her cleaning rounds. The household was now a busy place, with Abraham and Adelaide and their two young children, and the two servants and nurse, and a coachman in and out of the kitchen; and yet wherever Moses Lockwood went in the house he would bring quiet with him; his entrance into a room would suspend conversations and the people would wait respectfully for him to tell them what he wanted; but most often there was nothing he wanted and he would take their continuing silence for the dismissal that indeed it was. Moses Lockwood did not like the coachman, Rafferty, who made him feel on visits to the stable that he was spying. Moses Lockwood was thus deprived of the company of the horses, of which he was not over-fond but which were at least living beings and would hear him if he said a few words. Abraham Lockwood, the only survivor of the four human beings with whom Moses had passed most of his life, was off in a hurry every morning, frequently gone for the day, fairly frequently gone for two or three days with his new interests in Philadelphia. Adelaide Lockwood, a pleasant little piece, had the children and the household on her mind, and she would almost never spare a few minutes just to sit down and converse. The servants were a pair of colored women, sisters, from Richterville, and they had a way of looking at a white man who conversed overlong that told plainly and embarrassingly their suspicions of him, although he was sixty-five years of age and weak in the knees. There was only one person in the household who had any time for Moses Lockwood, and that was his grandson, George. And what with the new baby and his mother's preoccupation with it, and his father's being engrossed in his business, the boy and his grandfather were mutually interdependent for stimulating company. The old man told stories, semi-inventions out of his early past, of which the boy soon had several favorites and in which, in the retelling, he would correct the old man's departures from the original versions. ("Grandpa, you told me the Indian had a rifle, but before you told me he had a tommyhawk. Then you shot him.") The differing versions and the boy's corrections made the storytelling sessions into a game, and the old man began deliberately to introduce new details into the basic stories to challenge the boy's alertness. Momma was Momma, Poppa was Poppa, but Grampa was Grampa, the storyteller with the funny ear and fascinating spitting and interesting sore on his left temple. ("Did the bullet go through your ear and then they cut off the bottom part? Or did the bullet shoot it an off?") Sometimes they would go to the privy together, the old man sitting on the elevated hole, the boy on the lower, smaller one. The boy would finish his business quickly and watch while his grandfather strained and grunted. ("Wait outside, boy, this is going to take a little time.") The boy would pick a capful of cherries, which the old man could eat with him. The old man could not bite into an apple, but he would peel one with his pocket knife, in a long continuous curl, and cut the apple up into small bits that they would share. Always there was something to talk about when they were together. ("Why don't you want me to touch your sore? Does it hurt? Is that from a bullet, too, Grampa? Grampa, let me see your teeth. Did you have to buy your teeth when you were little?") The old man taught the boy about money ("This is a penny. Here's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten pennies. All these pennies are worth one of these. One of these will buy as many sourballs as all these pennies.") and a little bit about flowers ("Never twist them off, cut them off with a scissors or they won't grow again.") and some American history ("Mr. Lincoln was shot because he made John Wilkes Booth give up his slaves."). Because of their companionship the boy was on his grandfather's side during the worst fight he had ever witnessed in the household. His mother started the fight. "Mr. Lockwood, when are you going to be as good as your word and tear down the wall?" said his mother. "As long as there's a Bundy alive-' "The last Bundy died two years ago, and the wall is still up yet," said Adelaide Lockwood. "Well, don't hurry me, young lady." "Two years is time aplenty. You promised you'd tear it down." "I don't remember no promise. I said we'd talk about it." "Mr. Lockwood, that's a falsehood. You're prevaricating." "Call me a liar and be done with it, why don't you?" "If the boy wasn't present - George, run out and play." The boy, trained to obedience, left the room but stayed in the hall outside the den. "Now, Mr. Lockwood, either that wall comes down inside of the next six months or we move out of this house." Adelaide was getting Dutchier by the second: "We moo otta this hahs," was the way she pronounced the threat. "My son won't move." "There is where you're wrong, Mr. Lockwood. Abraham wants the wall down as much as I do. I won't have my children raised in such a penitentiary with a prison wall around it. Now mind, you listen. Six months, Mr. Lockwood." "Who's going to pay to have the wall torn down and them bricks carted away?" "With my own money it won't cost you." "There's better things you could do with your money." "I don't take orders how I spend my own money, Mr. Lockwood. Such as I could build a new house and take my boys and my husband and let you sit behind your wall." "Tear it down and be damned to you." "Will you order the contractor?" "I'll order the contractor. And I'll pay the money." "Mr. Lockwood, I'm not a mean person, but I don't like my boys growing up in such a penitentiary. They make jokes about my boy George, and they'll make jokes about the baby too." "I never heard any jokes about my grandson." "You never see anybody anymore. But they say is my boy like - you know - in the Insane." "Not a mean person, you call yourself, but you say a thing like that." "Well, it's what they say and I won't have it said about mine." Little of the conversation had much meaning for George, but a few days later workmen appeared on the property and began the long, noisy, fascinating task of taking the wall apart, stacking the freed bricks that would be carried away by the wagonload. The boy could not persuade his grandfather to come out into the yard to watch the workmen; the old man would not leave the house nor look out the window to see how strange the yard seemed without the wall, not even to observe the men when they began putting up an iron fence that was not much higher than the boy himself. The old man now spent most of his time in his room, taking his meals alone there, and he no longer had time, he said, to tell the boy any stories. So matters stood for about a month, and then the grandfather changed his habits. Every day he would leave the house in the morning, go to the barber shop and from there to the Exchange Hotel bar and remain until late afternoon, when Rafferty would bring him home in the cut-under and assist him to his room. In a year he died, without ever telling his grandson another story, but by that time George was in the first grade, in the company of boys and girls his own age. A lot of soldiers were at his grandfather's funeral and his grandfather was in a box that was covered by an American flag and instead of a hearse the box was on a sort of cart drawn by four horses, two ridden by soldiers, and at the cemetery the soldiers shot their guns in the air and another soldier played a bugle. George's father was in a soldier suit and so were a lot of other men who were not soldiers. After the funeral was over George saw a lot of the real soldiers from out of town and many of them were drunk. An old man named Mr. Baltz had supper with his mother and father and all he seemed to do was shake hands with everybody that came along. George Lockwood had never seen anyone shake hands so much. His other grandfather, in Richterville, was not a teller of stories, but it was pleasant to visit him even so. Near Richterville there were two pony farms, and Grossvater Hoffner, as he preferred to be called, usually took George to look at the ponies and ride around in the shiny wagon that was drawn by a four-pony hitch, always promising George that when he got a little older he could have a pony of his own. At Grossvater Hoffner's house George would sometimes be visiting at the same time his cousin Davey Stokes, a year older, was visiting. "Are you going to get a pony from Grossvater?" George once asked his cousin. "He says I am, but I don't believe him," said Davey, who then reported to George that several other cousins, one of them eleven years old, had been promised ponies, but that Grossvater always kept putting off the actual purchase. Their cousin Leroy Hoffner, the eleven-year-old, was still being taken out to look at the ponies and ride around in the wagon, but had been given no pony of his own, and soon would be getting too big to have a pony. George hated David Stokes for telling him these things and went on believing Grossvater. He discussed the matter with his mother, and on his next birthday he got a pony, a set of harness, a trap and a cutter. Within a few weeks David Stokes likewise had a pony, and so did Leroy. "Did Grossvater give me the pony?" George asked his mother. "You might say he did." "But did he?" "You might say so. Why do you care, as long as you got it?" "Because I want to tell Davey." "Well-no. Poppa and I gave you the pony, but Grossvater gave me the money for my share, so you might say he gave you the pony too." "But do I have to thank Grossvater too?" "No, you don't have to thank him." "Then he didn't give it to me, or you'd make me thank him." "You're like your Poppa. You can twist around with your questions. Just don't say any more about it." Davey Stokes, when he got his pony, told George that their Grossvater had not bought it, that it had been bought by his parents, and that Leroy Hoffner was getting one from his parents. "Grossvater is a big liar," said Davey Stokes. "He's a dumb-Dutch big liar, that's what my father says. My father says all the Dutch are stingy." "Your mother's Dutch." "Not anymore." "She talks Dutch." "She does not," said Davey Stokes. "My father won't let her." "She does so. She talks it to my mother. My mother is your mother's sister." "Anybody knows that." "Anyway, your mother talks Dutch to my mother, so you, don't know everything." "Anyway, my grandfather didn't kill two men and your grandfather did." "My grandfather was a soldier in the War." "That's all you know. Ha ha ha ha. Your grandfather killed two men." "He was a soldier, that's why. My father was a soldier, too." "Ha ha ha. Your grandfather killed two men before he was a soldier. He was arrested." "He was not. He killed an Indian." "He did not. He killed a man that owed him money. Ha ha ha ha." Davey Stokes was so sneering and positive that George Lockwood asked his father about Grampa. "Poppa, did Grampa kill a man? Two men?" "Where did you hear that?" "Davey. He said Grampa was arrested." "Oh, your uncle's been talking. Well, it had to come out sooner or later," said Abraham Lockwood. "Yes, Grampa killed two men." "Not Indians?" "No, not Indians. White men. Long before I was born, one man tried to rob your Grampa, sneaked into his room in a hotel, with a dagger, and Grampa shot him to save his own life. That was long ago, before I was born, when it wasn't safe to go out at night. In fact, your Grampa was what you might call a constable, a policeman." "Then they couldn't arrest him if he was a policeman, could they?" "Yes, a policeman can be arrested. Anybody can be arrested. Even somebody named Stokes can be arrested." "Was Uncle Sam arrested?" "No. But that's not saying he couldn't be. Or that no Stokes ever was arrested. Anybody at all can be arrested." "Was Grampa?" "Yes. He shot another man. He thought the man was going to shoot him, and Grampa shot first." "Is that why they arrested him?" "Yes. You don't know about courts, yet, do you?" "About what?" "In a court a judge decides whether a man is guilty. A judge and a jury. Twelve men and a judge. They decide if a man is guilty, and they decided Grampa was not guilty." "Didn't the man die when Grampa shot him?" "Yes, he died. But Grampa wasn't guilty. I'll have to explain these things when you get older. You're too young to understand it now." "Davey understands it." "No he doesn't." "But he told me Grampa shot two men, and you said he did too." "He still doesn't understand about the law, and court. His father neglected to explain that. It's too bad his father had to say anything at all." "Are you mad at Uncle Sam?" "Oh, no. No, of course not, son. But Davey shouldn't listen to grownups' conversations. Little boys never should. They hear things they shouldn't hear." "Are you going to have a fight with Uncle Sam?" "Of course not." "Poppa, didn't Grampa ever kill an Indian?" "No. He killed some Rebels, but not Indians." "He told me he did." "Oh. Well, I don't know what stories Grampa told you, but he made up most of them." The boy remembered that his grandfather's stories varied from telling to telling, but basically the stories had been the same. He wanted to ask his father how he knew that Grampa had made up the stories if he did not know what stories Grampa had told; but the question was too complicated to present. The disclosure of the conversations in the Samuel Stokes household was a disconcerting one to Abraham Lockwood. Sam's marriage to Sarah Hoffner, followed by Abraham's marriage to Adelaide, had seemed to Abraham Lockwood to have the immediate effect of connecting Richterville, Swedish Haven, and Gibbsville in an alliance that was momentarily a merely social one. But since the alliance plainly did connect the first families of Gibbsville, en bloc, with the first