The Wintering (47 page)

As the train arrived, she saw an old man in a black suit, standing in a garden which was not fully planted. The garden mainly was mulched with pecan hulls, their brownness slick and shiny as mink. When she got off the train, the conductor reached up and helped her down the steps. “I see the old man's letting his garden go to seed,” he said conversationally.

“But why?” Amy said, pausing.

“Passenger trains being discontinued. The mail's all going by truck. Might be a freight'll stop occasionally.”

“That's too bad,” Amy said. Picking up his conductor's steps and getting on board, he said, “Progress, you know. It don't take human beings into consideration.” He faded with the train, tucking his brass watch into its vest slit.

Amy went along a path through the remaining flowers and spoke to the old man. His head shook back and forth involuntarily; his look said that was the way things happened to him. He looked at the garden as he had looked at the train, sorrowfully. Around them in a netlike haze, the afternoon had begun to dissolve. The trees seemed bent, but the leaves had a stilled quality, awaiting a presence, twilight. Without the accumulative dust of summer, the town had a more sparkling quality than Amy remembered. In the lighter air, people went by at a brisker pace, noticing the stranger. Like some unwanted appendage, Amy felt her pocketbook dangling by her side. She felt superfluous, wandering about the station. For Jeff to be late was unlike him.

Over the post office, the flag occasionally flew and subsided, in bright-dark ripples. There, a little boy held up a frantically wiggling puppy to drink from the bronze rim of the water fountain. Amy supposed this a foreign country and that she were here alone, with little money and in possession of little besides her toothbrush. She perched on the edge of a bench to watch pigeons, imagining herself in that lone situation, knowing she would then have to have help from others. She began to glance more directly at the Negroes and whites who had watched her promenade. They spoke or nodded in return; several people offered comments on the weather, to which she replied. Idle conversation was, after all, perhaps not so idle. “Warming for sho,” said an old man, who had dropped his cane. Amy retrieved it and, after speaking further of the day, she felt less a stranger. In a foreign country and without knowing the language, she would have to make contact with smiles, gestures, small attempts. She might be sending out some secret code. Sitting on the bench, she beat a little rhythm on the pocketbook in her lap. She gazed around, not realizing she was smiling. An older couple stopped and offered help. Both sundrawn faces stared at her with interest, kindly. After shaking her head, Amy watched them with equal interest, as they went on.

In the late spring evening, the sky gave to stalwart and gigantic old trees the appearance of being one-dimensional. Everything had a metallic look, the grey fuzzy appearance of an empty movie screen, and figures seemed superimposed on the day. After wandering to a rusty penny-gum machine, Amy looked toward the station, gum in her mouth, and felt the scene had been transfixed while her back was turned. The boy held up the puppy for a second drink at the fountain, the old man dug with his retrieved cane into dirt, and the old couple were climbing into their pickup truck. She walked eagerly back to the activity around the station and that look on her face again drew attention.

Suppertime was nearing. Storekeepers made preparations for closing. At the hardware store a man brought inside galvanized tubs which had been on display. Letters on the sagging marquee at the movie were being changed for the evening performance. Amy had been warmish in her spring jacket. Now there was prelude to a shower, and a breeze began. A crowd of Negro and white teen-agers clustered about a brand-new Mustang, just drawn up to the curb. Amy went near a short while and noted that other cars, pulling away, had on parking lights. She had to make some plan of her own, and went inside the station to inquire about returning trains.

There was no printed schedule, and only one train tonight, which would pass through in several hours. As once she would have, she did not feel terror or panic. Coming from the station, trailing momentarily through the disappearing garden, she did not fear desertion. Why Jeff had not come was disturbing, frightening—the chance being that something had happened to him. Otherwise, she felt quite settled in her mind.

She had stopped paying attention to traffic, in congestion around town at this hour. Farmers headed home. In stores which stayed open late, lights had come on. Activity had begun in the town's one restaurant. Sitting down again, she became engrossed in watching sparrows in a tizzy over popcorn dropped by the bench's previous occupant. He had, at the moment Amy went by him toward the gum machine, held out the bag toward her, and she had declined fearing popcorn would make her thirsty. A shuddering green coupe stopped nearby, and she noticed the car's occupants when they were getting out. The Negro boy, who had been driving, headed toward the red Mustang, but she was unsuccessful in reading the yellow lettering on the back of his jacket. Her attention went to the woman with him, having difficulty struggling from the running board to the ground. As the woman started toward her, careful of stiff joints, Amy knew certainly who it was. She got up, meeting her halfway. “Jessie.”

“Yes 'um.” The whole of Jessie's hazel eyes appeared covered with a milky haze; that registered something besides recognition and greeting. Deeper than she yet knew it, Amy recognized sorrow. “Bad news,” Jessie said.

“He can't come?”

“He's gone.” Jessie's voice broke. “Went this morning. But—have told me, no matter what—be here this time.”

Amy's lips formed the word, Where? She knew better than to ask, Gone where? She merely watched Jessie cry. She cried without sound, her shoulders heaving. Amy's lips had set so tightly, they caused her face to turn whiter. She and Jessie went together to a bench and sat down.

The station and the stores surrounding it now looked entirely different, the silvery stillness dissolving, clouds gathering. Beyond the post office, where the flag alternately dropped and flew, where surrounding fields began, Amy supposed rain had already begun.

“That's impossible.” She had spoken finally, with difficulty.

“No'm. It ain't.”

Nothing was impossible. Those words bore home. Impossibility was as far-reaching as the horizon, as enormous as the world. She must now know as much of compassion and sorrow as there was to know; but another self stood aside, watchful and wise, to tell her there was more of everything to learn. Learning must not cease. She and Jessie had gripped hands. Amy would be able to recall instantly, forever, the feel of Jessie's skin, recall the proximity of her body; someone, she had to find, would be an extension of her own being; that alone would be life: would be living. She and Jessie were not alone in their grief. Lights blazing in the newspaper office across the way gave its plate-glass window a look of bulging with importance. A man, in shirtsleeves, came out to stick a bulletin to the window. Darkness gathered in from the surrounding small hillsides, lavender with vetch. On the rising wind came the smell of spring land, rowed-up and waiting. Flower petals lifted in the old man's garden, the sparrows' feathers ruffled, the edges of Amy's and Jessie's skirts lifted. After that moment, Jessie said, “Seems like it would be impossible. But it ain't. His heart been so bad, honey. Gotten worse. It ain't all that surprise.”

“It doesn't seem to me,” Amy said lonesomely, “it was his time to die.”

“In the kitchen the other day, he sayed, Gettin' time for me and him to move over for the young peoples.”

The astonishing silver glow of the afternoon, relentless, would not give in. The sun even stubbornly reappeared, and strongly, as if it had not been satisfied with its finale. Amy held back tears for later. “He was out driving,” Jessie said, “and shouldn't have been. The car left the road, went over a ditch into a field. The doctor think his heart had quit.”

“He wasn't on the way to meet me?”

“No'm.”

“I'm glad of that.” Then Amy said, puzzled, “But he told you to meet me. Why did he say that this morning?”

Jessie might not have heard. Deep in her eyes, a shadowed look only told she understood. She gave Amy, barely, a glance sideways. “Just sayed, meet Miss Amy 'bout fo-thirty. She'll be on her own.”

“He knew he wasn't coming, Jessie, then—But, God!”

“Sho is the truth.”

“Does anybody else know he told you that?”

“What, Miss Amy?” She gave Amy a practiced dumb look, for white people.

“Nothing.” Amy took the cue. Her own face set in a closed firm look. The rain had not yet come, though a breeze smelling more strongly of it began to disrupt town. The bulletin on the newspaper window flapped insistently. Around the Mustang, the boys began to make signs of leaving. Town had begun to look empty.

“Do I have time to go out to where Jeff will be buried before the train comes?”

“Ain't far, but it's fixing to rain,” Jessie said. “I can get my sister's boy to carry us.” Vern had separated himself from the car and, looking around, now came toward them. “My sister's boy, Vern, Miss Amy.”

“Amy Howard. Vern?”

At the introduction, Vern slightly nodded. He stared a full instant before understanding that Amy was asking him a question. “Vern Dell.”

“I'm glad to meet you.”

“Glad to meet you.”

“How far is it to the cemetery from here?”

“Almost two miles. Aunt-tie and I can take you.”

“I'd rather walk. I have time.”

Beside the Mustang, a boy in a satin shirt, holding up his guitar, called to Vern about meeting later. Vern lagged behind, shouting confirmation. As Amy and Jessie went toward the car, an old man hailed Jessie, took off his hat and held it against his chest. Amy moved away while he spoke comfortingly, sadly shaking his head. All his life, she heard him say, he had known Mr. Jeff, and he looked about seeing other changes. A large blinking neon sign helped color the evening blue, and suggested
EATS
at the restaurant. That once had been a mansion. Vern at the Mustang joined the boy, playing the guitar, in an impromptu dance, their gyrations in pulsating beat to the on-off blinking of the blue sign. Their voices blended. Amy opened the car door and Jessie climbed inside, having hugged her.

“I'm glad to have seed you.”

“I'm glad to have seen you.”

Part of the plan, Amy thought, turning away, had been for her not to hear the news from a stranger.

First, she saw willows, topping the hillsides the cemetery covered. On its far side, it slanted toward a muddy yellowish pond. There in the cautious twilight, people were fishing. Having trailed between gates and now following a walkway, Amy pretended not to see the plot, while going directly toward it, knowing the spot from Jessie's directions; past the World War I monument, a carefully tended rose garden, a grove of cedars. As a cry went up collectively from those at the pond, she saw a large Negro woman hold up a fish on the end of a bamboo pole. Afterward, in the quietness, she heard the soughing of the cedars. Their bark peeled, leaving them, whitely, with a look of being frail. They might yet totter and bend with the wind, like bamboo. Yet, if trees could, she felt they had a look of wisdom, being so old. How much they had seen; how many people had come here and gone. People were sorrowful here, or secretly in their hearts glad, lovers hid in the grove. Inside there, Amy sat with her chin to her knees, her hands plying dry auburn needles. On some of the graves were wax or paper flowers, impermanent and fading and shredding. Other places, ivy fled along the ground, its tendrils as stong as cord. Lichen clung to old headstones. At the pond, everyone now was industriously and silently fishing. Bobwhites, in weeds along the road, called to each other by similar name. Amy wondered if ordinariness and everydayness would have destroyed what she and Jeff had; those things, she suspected, were death on marriages and might ruin less binding relationships. Nothing she and Billy Walter shared would have held up under them.

A caretaker, wandering about, made it obvious he wanted to lock the gates for the night. Women and children at the pond suddenly squealed, for rain had begun there. Amy could see it pockmarking the muddy water and that it came toward her, with colors of the rainbow misting. With saw-toothed edges, lightning broke across the sky.

She had come out of the grove of cedars but did not shy at either the thunder or the lightning. “Better hurry somewhere,” said the caretaker, locking the gates behind her.

“Yes, I will,” she said, darting across the road and toward the sidewalk back to town. Another thunderhead burst, its roll afterward like a drum's. Either that noise or being intent on her thoughts kept her from hearing the noise of Vern's old coupe, idling alongside her. He leaned across the front seat to the open window opposite him and said, “Want a ride?”

She had reached a sheltered spot along the walk, where enormous oaks provided a dry area. She looked at him in surprise. “Sure,” she said, and came down a slick-wet incline and got in the car.

He drove on. “You afraid to ride all the way into town with me? I can drop you off a piece of the way?”

“I'm not afraid,” she said. “How did you happen to come get me?”

“I knew it was time you'd have to leave, and then when the rain come up, I just thought you'd get soaked. I was just, you know, driving around. So, I come to get you. If you want to know, because you were friendly to me. Not like most white girls.”

“I see. But you live here. You're the one who might get in trouble if we go riding through town together.”

“Well,” he said. “Who going to see us in the dark?”

“We are brave,” she said, smiling back.

“I don't want trouble. There is hardly anybody would believe that. I just want, I don't know, you know, something.” Amy longed at the sadness in his voice to touch him, and dared not. He gripped the steering wheel as if to quiet desperation.