The Wintering (2 page)

Jessie's grey hair stuck in wisps from a skullcap, the top half of a woman's stocking, twisted at the top of her head like a balloon's end. “You all right?” she said, meaning that moment when, with the same effort with which he had propelled himself awake, he propelled himself into a sitting position and swung his feet from the hammock to the porch, deck-grey and wetted by blown rain.

“So-so,” he answered. Sitting up, he was sickened by the back swaying of the hammock and the smell that clung faint and near and as invisible as memory. Paraldehyde, he thought. This siege must have been bad and long if they had called a doctor. He wondered if time lost had been really lost or whether he would eventually remember everything.

When he let the hammock go, it swung softly toward him and moved him several stumbling steps forward. They must have been the first in some time, for he was stiff. He wondered again how long he had been lying there. His steps seemed without aim or stability, as if he were a child learning to walk.

“Can you eat?” Jessie said.

Everything was indeterminate and without purpose and unwanted, he thought. “Soup, I guess,” he said. Though feeling sick at the thought of food, he needed something.

Jessie went ahead of him down the hall, the whites of her heels visible one after the other in a pair of his old slide-in bedroom shoes. He stood adjusting to the hall's dimness after the porch speckled by sun and shadow. His hand trembled reaching behind him to close the door, gently.

Dizzy, he sought something steady to look at, feeling the need to lose everything. He called after the flapping heels, “Just broth, bouillon, something light,” swallowing rapidly. The hall was warm and smelled of age. Moving down it slowly, he was pervaded by the dream- and memory-smell of horseflesh and barn and hot afternoon. The wallpaper had an English hunting scene, in black and white except for red jackets, and had been long faded. Floor to ceiling, he confronted a confusion of men and horses and beagles with ecstatic tails, jumping and running and scrambling beneath brush. It was too deadly serious, he thought, studying the paper at eye-level. For years, he had believed there had to be some joking fox's face hidden in all that confusion, the clue to what the hurrah was about.

In the kitchen, he sat down and watched Jessie stir soup. “I'm going to get after those vines in the pine copse today,” he said.

Noticing he was already wearing old work pants and a T-shirt, he wondered when he had put them on and why. Even sitting still, he perspired in the hot sticky aftermath of the summer rain. The last thing he remembered was going into town properly dressed to have his Seconal prescription filled. By happenstance, as he came out of Chester's drugstore, he had seen Cole, the Negro bootlegger.

“You got something I can wash down some pills with?” he had said.

“Suh,” Cole had answered.

He remembered racing along the softly crushed, red gravel road, his pickup behind the Negro's, and going around back of a rural store he knew the Sheriff owned. Why not keep the whiskey closer to town, at the jail? he had wondered, going back through the pine-sweet, shining countryside with an old tarpaulin thrown over a case of beer and several bottles of bad Scotch, wishing for a bootlegger who knew more about whiskey. “Hardly no calls for Scotch,” Cole had said. “We gets the cheapest.”

Now, watching Jessie set down consommé, Almoner wondered whether anything was left to drink and where it was. The soup's steaming smell thrust upward. It was like the smell of a wet chicken or a wet hound, and suddenly he tasted again the first can of warm beer chasing the first capsule. He remembered little beyond that except a progression of daylights and darks. But what day or week it was now, he had no idea. He had managed, finally, to know nothing but darkness. Spooning soup wearily and without curiosity about those missing days, he recalled a sensation of glitter and gorgeousness, which meant he had spent time on a chaise in the dining room. Imprinted on his memory was the gleam of crystal, in bright sunlight let in through the muscadine, and that would have been the chandelier. He had a connecting memory of some green outdoors scent, lilies-of-the-valley, but not growing in spring's moist ground along the edges of the porch. He thought the scent had been Amelia's ritualistic perfume. He remembered opening his eyes and glimpsing her standing in some light-colored, sprigged dress, holding a white patent-leather pocketbook off which sun bounced as dazzling as snow.

If she had spoken, he might have responded, but she had instead only looked, and closing his eyes, he had kept them resolutely closed, without being able to help his mouth's corners turning up, like a cat's mouth. Exasperated, she had turned and gone sharply away, leaving to trail across the air the smell that made him want to possess something as unbelievably sweet. He had seen her as if through one-way glass. That would be his choice now in life, he thought, to see but not to be seen and to know things but not to have to contend with anything else. He had felt stretched beyond himself by forty and had had, then, a surfeit of the feeling for ten years.

At forty, he had thought life had to be faced as being made up of many shortcomings. And thinking this moment of Inga, he wished there were some way of supposing her somewhere besides in the house. The pain of recalling was too sharp, but something always brought him back to it. He spooned soup rather sullenly, and Jessie, noticing, stood at the sink with a hand kneading her back.

“You got the misery?” he said, stopping the spoon, solicitously.

She only mumbled and pretended inability to answer because her lip was too full of snuff, though it was not. He was able to interpret this as awareness of his feelings; their thoughts scattered in varied directions, but in the way she stood and he ate, they meant compassion for each other. He was wondering what point there was to reaching on and on outward into life if, now, he was to be so overcome with some indefinable need that not even Seconal and beer could deaden it. Spoon resting in empty bowl, he thought, staring down at the table and mentally composing a picture which he titled Emptiness.

“Is that axe still on the back porch?” he said.

“Was,” Jessie said.

Jammed into an old cotton basket beside a saw, which was also rusty, the axe came out, dull-edged and with a scraping sound that set his nerves vibrating as wrongly as musical strings plucked by some untutored hand. And his nerves kept vibrating as they did at the sound of Amelia's voice. She had followed him into every room of the house, once. He could not escape. She had stood even outside the bathroom door crying, “Everything's falling apart, the yard's a mess. If you're not going to fix it up, you got to at least get some Negro to.” Flushing had barely drowned her out. He had been angered into action when the toilet would not flush immediately a second time, as she droned on. Going for his tools, he had fixed the toilet to flush when needed, and she had watched disbelievingly. In the dining room now, the sideboard's door clicked shut. He made it almost from the kitchen before Inga came in, wearing a soft fawn-colored robe, the softness, the fawn, like her eyes, he thought. Sniffing for sherry, he smelled, so far, only the sweet scents of her bath. Her hair was damp at the base of her neck and pulled up onto the top of her head, then stuck with heavy gold pins. Artificially colored now, he supposed. But her hair had the naturally progressed look from virgin gold to her present age, and he anguished over what age could do.

“I have a headache,” Inga said. “What should I take for it?”

“Aspirin, fresh air, try those,” he said. Jessie, having gone to the back door to spit, had come back. “What us going to have for supper?” she said.

“Ask the mistress of the house,” he said. Going by Inga, and wondering why she had on silver dancing shoes, he then smelled menthol from her medicated eye pads and the bittersweet smell of her cough syrup, which was heavy with codeine. A moment, that smell seemed to take him back into his own drugged sleep, and he struggled to keep his eyes open. Inga's voice was thick, her eyes were heavy, and the medicine was a whiff on the hand she raised in a gesture not hopeful of detaining him. In the hall, the telephone rang as he passed it. He answered only to sever himself from his previous conversation. Inga's hand had continued upward to her forehead, and she had said, “Oh, Jessie. Is the pain never to end?”

“Hello,” he said.

A male voice young enough to quiver and quivering on a rising note rushed at him, without pause. “Mr. Almoner, sir, this is Borden Lake Decker, you went to school with my mother, Winifred Lake, Winnie they called her (Would the boy never breathe? he was wondering, smiling), and I go to Princeton (here he did breathe, waiting hopefully, Almoner thought, for at least a fraternal grunt, but he was silent), and my roommate is here, Quill Jordan,
Quill
Jordan, from Delton, you know (but he was not to be impressed, either), and we're both English majors at
Princeton
(yes, I got that), and we admire your work so much (whispering in the background), and, oh yes, Quill's writing a senior thesis on your work, and could we possibly come over and just meet you a moment? And, oh (more whispering), there's a girl here who wants to be a writer, too.”

Whew, Almoner thought, though the young voice seemed not at all breathless. He said gravely that he was sorry, but he was leaving that moment on a fishing trip, not to return for several days.

“Oh,” the boy said. His voice sank deep enough to hold a more masculine hint, as if he had touched the bottom of disappointment. Still, Almoner thought, he was not going to relent. The boy said, “Thank you for this much time, I know how you guard it.”

Then why had he called? Almoner wanted to ask.

The boy cried as if he were within hailing distance. “But I want to tell you, Mr. Almoner. You're not forgotten at Princeton!” Then the phone was clamped down, abruptly, on his own confusion.

Almoner was chuckling and almost laughing continuing down the hall, but he was touched by the sincerity. And, I'm not forgotten at Princeton, he reminded himself, thinking of the vast gap between them that the boy would think that would matter. Yet it meant something to be told he was not forgotten. He had attended the university only a year. It had receded in his mind into all the university campuses he had ever visited. He went back into the sun, realizing he was appreciative, too late, of the boy's wanting to comfort him.

Crossing the porch, going into and out of the speckling shade of the muscadine, he was aware again, with a seasick feeling, of the light and dark of sun and shadow on the grey porch. He descended two steps down from it and crossed the sunlit yard toward the pine copse where it was hot and airless. Lifting the axe with effort, he was grateful for the shade and hacked at heavy tenacious kudzu vine grown in from the road and choking young trees. Old rain loosened, and drops glanced away like flint sparks from the gum-scented trees, while the afternoon grew muggier.

The work should have been done earlier, before the sun was out or after it had gone down. But it was a kind of punishment to lose through perspiration both liquor and medicine. He felt himself like a candle melting, perspiration flying from his elbows as he swung the axe above his head. He smelled on himself the stale smell of his obliterated days and nights. Beyond the copse, he faced gigantic and now flowerless forsythia bushes guarding the house. They swam before his eyes. Wiping perspiration, he drew an arm across his face and thought, Damn, did he have the d.t.'s? when a maroon Chevrolet appeared. However, it ground real gears beyond his cattle gap after slowing for it, then travelled toward the house with its wheels bearing, Ferris-wheel-fashion, wet leaves. He watched it curiously as if it had nothing to do with him; people in his house seldom had visitors. His brain was still dulled and received slowly a second image: that it was Roy Scarbrook who had just passed.

Starting toward the house, Almoner set the axe against a tree. He thought of Roy and his ever-wide, proprietary grin as he had seen him last, among his counters with their overhead labelling signs slightly wavering, Men's, Women's, Children's Wear, titillated into motion by an old, revolving-bladed fan fixed to the ceiling. It must have been last summer, Almoner thought, when he had done his most recent shopping for himself and had purchased the khaki pants he wore now. Shaking hands with Roy Scarbrook, presently, would seem a continuation of that day, the year having evolved with his having almost no memory of it.

Roy, in a shiny plaid suit and with a pink cornflower in his buttonhole, was almost to the front door before Almoner realized the grin seemed recent because of a newspaper picture when Roy was elected Rotary president. It's going to be some other damn thing about promoting the town as a spa and needing me to help, he thought. He considered going back to the pine copse, but Roy, at the door, stuck his head forward and back, like an apprehensive but curious bird, apparently having been asked to enter and obviously reluctant to do it. Almoner would laugh, later, thinking what was strong enough to propel Roy forward eventually was ingrained, old-fashioned middle-class manners.

He gained the steps as Roy relinquished the door, having held it to the last possible moment, his hand remaining now behind him and in touch with the screen. Through it, having reached the porch, Almoner saw a face come forward as pale as death and looking disembodied. Thinking back to his dream, he almost instinctively called “Ma!” before seeing it was Inga encased in an invisible-looking dress. It was less than smoke-colored and drifting and its fragility was due mainly to age; the bodice once had been covered with iridescent sequins; now failing, they clung like fish-scale remnants on some half-cleaned fish. She came totteringly on the weak heels of the aged silver dancing shoes.

God, Almoner thought, she had done it all in exact sequence, the sweetly seductive bath, then her hair and her make-up and a nap in her robe; her dress had been donned a moment before the beau's arrival. Now, she held out a hand. For the corsage? Almoner anguished over life itself as much as over what it had done to Inga.