Next morning Cora was up before the sun had warmed the strawberry patch or the wind had stirred the pines.
Benjy was sitting up in his cot when Cora returned from the mailbox. “Too early,” he said. “Postman won’t drive by yet.”
“Drive by?”
“They come in cars this far out.”
“Oh.” Cora sat down.
“You sick, Aunt Cora?”
“No, no.” She blinked. “It’s just, I don’t recall in twenty years seeing no mail truck whistle by here. It just came to me. All this time, I never seen no mailman at all.”
“Maybe he comes when you’re not around.”
“I’m up with the fog spunks, down with the chickens. I never really gave it a thought, of course, but——” She turned to look out the window, up at Mrs. Brabbam’s house. “Benjy, I got a kind of sneaking hunch.” She stood up and walked straight out of the cabin, down the dust path, Benjy following, across the thin road to Mrs. Brabbam’s mailbox. A hush was on the fields and hills. It was so early it made you whisper.
“Don’t break the law, Aunt Cora!”
“Shh! Here.” She opened the box, put her hand in like someone fumbling in a gopher hole. “And here, and here.” She rattled some letters into his cupped hands.
“Why, these been opened already! You open these, Aunt Cora?”
“Child, I never touched them.” Her face was stunned. “This is the first time in my life I ever even let my shadow touch this box.”
Benjy turned the letters around and around, cocking his head. “Why, Aunt Cora, these letters, they’re ten years old!”
“What!” Cora grabbed at them.
“Aunt Cora, that lady’s been getting the same mail every day for years. And they’re not even addressed to Mrs. Brabbam, they’re to some woman named Ortega in Green Fork.”
“Ortega, the Mexican grocery woman! All these years,” whispered Cora, staring at the worn mail in her hands. “All these years.”
They gazed up at Mrs. Brabbam’s sleeping house in the cool quiet morning.
“Oh, that sly woman, making a commotion with her letters, making me feel small. All puffed out she was, swishing along, reading her mail.”
Mrs. Brabbam’s front door opened.
“Put them back, Aunt Cora!”
Cora slammed the mailbox shut with time to spare.
Mrs. Brabbam drifted down the path, stopping here or there, quietly, to peer at the opening wild flowers.
“Morning,” she said sweetly.
“Mrs. Brabbam, this is my nephew Benjy.”
“How nice.” Mrs. Brabbam, with a great swivel of her body, a flourish of her flour-white hands, rapped the mailbox as if to shake the letters loose inside, flipped the lid, and extracted the mail, covering her actions with her back. She made motions, and spun about merrily, winking. “Wonderful! Why, just look at this letter from dear Uncle George!”
“Well, ain’t that nice!” said Cora.
Then the breathless summer days of waiting. The butterflies jumping orange and blue on the air, the flowers nodding about the cabin, and the hard, constant sound of Benjy’s pencil scribbling through the afternoons. Benjy’s mouth was always packed with food, and Tom was always stomping in, to find lunch or supper late, cold, or both, or none at all.
Benjy handled the pencil with a delicious spread of his bony hands, lovingly inscribing each vowel and consonant as Cora hovered about him, making up words, rolling them on her tongue, delighted each time she saw them roll out on the paper. But she wasn’t learning to write. “It’s so much fun watching you write, Benjy. Tomorrow I’ll start learning. Now take another letter!”
They worked their way through ads about Asthma, Trusses and Magic, they joined the Rosicrucians, or at least sent for a free Sealed Book all about the Knowledge that had been damned to oblivion, Secrets from Hidden ancient temples and buried sanctuaries. Then there were free packets of Giant Sunflower seeds, and something about HEARTBURN. They had worked back to page 127 of Quarter Murder Magazine on a bright summer morning when …
“Listen!” said Cora.
They listened.
“A car,” said Benjy.
And up the blue hills and through the tall fiery green pines and along the dusty road, mile by mile, came the sound of a car riding along and along, until finally, at the bend, it came full thundering, and in an instant Cora was out of the door running, and as she ran she heard and saw and felt many things. First, from the corner of her eye, she saw Mrs. Brabbam gliding down the road from the other direction. Mrs. Brabbam froze when she saw the bright green car boiling on the grade, and there was the whistle of a silver whistle and the old man in the car leaned out just before Cora arrived and said, “Mrs. Gibbs?” “Yes!” she cried. “Mail for you, ma’am,” he said, and held it toward her. She put out her hand, then drew it back, remembering. “Oh,” she said, “please, would you mind, would you put it, please … in my mailbox?” The old man squinted at her, at the mailbox, back at her, and laughed. “Don’t mind,” he said, and did just that, put the mail in the box.
Mrs. Brabbam stood where she was, not moving, eyes wild. “Any mail for Mrs. Brabbam?” asked Cora.
“That’s all.” And the car dusted away down the road.
Mrs. Brabbam stood with her hands clenched together. Then, without looking in her own letter box, turned and rustled swiftly up her path, out of sight.
Cora walked around her mailbox twice, not touching it for a long time. “Benjy, I’ve got me some letters!” She reached in delicately and took them out and turned them over. She put them quietly in his hand. “Read them to me. Is my name on the front?”
“Yes’m.” He opened the first letter with due carefulness and read it aloud in the summer morning:
“‘Dear Mrs. Gibbs ...’”
He stopped and let her savor it, her eyes half shut, her mouth moving the words. He repeated it for artistic emphasis and then went on: “ ‘We are sending you our free folder, enclosed, from the Intercontinental Mailing Schools concerning full particulars on how you, too, can take our Correspondence Course in Sanitary Engineering——’”
“Benjy, Benjy, I’m so happy! Start over again!”
“‘Dear Mrs. Gibbs,’” he read.
After that the mailbox was never empty. The world came rushing and crowding in, all the places she had never seen or heard about or been to. Travel folders, spice cake recipes, and even a letter from an elderly gentleman who wished for a lady “—fifty years old, gentle disposition, money; object matrimony.” Benjy wrote back, “I am already married, but thank you for your kind and thoughtful consideration. Yours truly, Cora Gibbs.”
And the letters continued to pour across the hills, coin collectors’ catalogues, Dime Novelty books, Magic List Numbers, Arthritis Charts, Flea Killer Samples. The world filled up her letter box, and suddenly she was not alone or remote from people. If a man wrote a form letter to Cora about the Mysteries of Ancient Maya Revealed, he was likely as not to receive three letters from Cora in the next week, budding out their formal meeting into a warm friendship. After one particularly hard day of writing, Benjy was forced to soak his hand in Epsom salts.
By the end of the third week Mrs. Brabbam no longer came down to her mailbox. She didn’t even come out the front door of her cabin to get the air, for Cora was always down at the road, leaning out, smiling for the mailman.
All too quickly the summer was at an end, or, at least, that part of the summer that counted most, anyway; Benjy’s visit. There was his red bandanna handkerchief on the cabin table, sandwiches folded fresh and oniony in it, tied with a mint sprig to keep it clean to the smell; there on the floor, freshly polished, were his shoes to get into, and there on the chair, with his pencil which had once been long and yellow but was now stubby and chewed, sat Benjy. Cora took hold of his chin and tilted his head, as if she were testing a summer squash of an unfamiliar variety.
“Benjy, I owe you an apology. I don’t think I looked at your face o
nce in all this time. Seems I know every wart on your hand, every hangnail, every bump and every crinkle, but I might pass your face in a crowd and miss you.”
“It’s no face to look at,” said Benjy shyly.
“But I’d know that hand in a million hands,” Cora said. “Let anyone shake my hand in a dark room, a thousand people, and out of all those I’d say, ‘Well, this one’s Benjy.’ ” She smiled quietly and walked away to the open door. “I been thinking.” She looked up at a distant cabin. “Ain’t seen Mrs. Brabbam in weeks. Stays in all the time now. I’ve got a guilty feeling. I’ve done a prideful thing, a thing more sinful than she ever done me. I took the bottom out of her life. It was a mean and spiteful thing and I’m ashamed.” She gazed up the hill toward that silent, locked place. “Benjy, would you do me one last favor?”
“Yes’m.”
“Write a letter for Mrs. Brabbam.”
“Ma’am?”
“Yes, write one of those companies for a free chart, a sample, something, and sign Mrs. Brabbam’s name.”
“All right,” said Benjy.
“That way, in a week or a month the postman’ll come by and whistle, and I’ll tell him to go up to her door, special, and deliver it. And I’ll be sure and be out in my front yard where I can see and Mrs. Brabbam can see I see. And I’ll wave my letters to her and she’ll wave her letters to me, and every body’ll smile.”
“Yes’m,” said Benjy.
He wrote three letters, licked the envelopes carefully, stuck them in his pocket. “I’ll mail them when I get to St. Louis.”
“It’s been a fine summer,” she said.
“It sure has.”
“But, Benjy, I didn’t learn to write, did I? I was after the letters and made you write late nights, and we were so busy sending labels and getting samples, land, it seemed there wasn’t time to learn. And that means … ”
He knew what it meant. He shook her hand. They stood in the cabin door. “Thanks,” she said, “for everything.”
Then he was running off. He ran as far as the meadow fence, leaped it easily, and the last she saw of him he was still running, waving the special letters, off into the great world over the hills.
The letters kept coming for some six months after Benjy went away. There would be the postman’s little green car and the sharp ice-rimed shout of good morning, or the whistle, as he clapped two or three pink or blue envelopes into that fine mailbox.
And there was that special day when Mrs. Brabbam received her first real letter.
After that the letters were spaced a week apart, then a month, and finally the postman didn’t say hello at all, there was no sound of a car coming up that lonely mountain road. First a spider moved into the mailbox, then a sparrow.
And Cora, while the letters still lasted, would clutch them in her bewildered hands, staring at them quietly until the pressure of her face muscles squeezed clear round shiny drops of water from her eyes. She’d hold up one blue envelope. “Who’s this from?”
“Don’t know,” said Tom.
“What’s it say?” she wailed.
“Don’t know,” said Tom.
“What’s going on in that world out there, oh, I’ll never know, I’ll never know now,” she said. “And this letter, and this one, and this!” She tumbled the stacks and stacks of letters that had come since Benjy ran off. “All the world and all the people and all the happenings, and me not knowing. All that world and people waiting to hear from us, and us not writing, and them not ever writing back!”
And at last the day came when the wind blew the mailbox over. In the mornings again, Cora would stand at the open door of her cabin, brushing her gray hair with a slow brush, not speaking, looking at the hills. And in all the years that followed she never passed the fallen mailbox without stooping aimlessly to fumble inside and take her hand out with nothing in it before she wandered on again into the fields.
Powerhouse
The horses moved gently to a stop, and the man and his wife gazed down into a dry, sandy valley. The woman sat lost in her saddle; she hadn’t spoken for hours, didn’t know a good word to speak. She was trapped somewhere between the hot, dark pressure of the storm-clouded Arizona sky and the hard, granite pressure of the wind-blasted mountains. A few drops of cool rain fell on her trembling hands.
She looked over at her husband wearily. He sat his dusty horse easily, with a firm quietness. She closed her eyes and thought of how she had been all of these mild years until today. She wanted to laugh at the mirror she was holding up to herself, but there was no way of doing even that; it would be somewhat insane. After all, it might just be the pushing of this dark weather, or the telegram they had taken from the messenger on horseback this morning, or the long journey now to town.
There was still an empty world to cross, and she was cold.
“I’m the lady who was never going to need religion,” she said quietly, her eyes shut.
“What?” Berty, her husband, glanced over at her.
“Nothing,” she whispered, shaking her head. In all the years, how certain she had been. Never, never would she have need of a church. She had heard fine people talk on and on of religion and waxed pews and calla lilies in great bronze buckets and vast bells of churches in which the preacher rang like a clapper. She had heard the shouting kind and the fervent, whispery kind, and they were all the same. Hers was simply not a pewshaped spine.
“I just never had a reason ever to sit in a church,” she had told people. She wasn’t vehement about it. She just walked around and lived and moved her hands that were pebble-smooth and pebble-small. Work had polished the nails of those hands with a polish you could never buy in a bottle. The touching of children had made them soft, and the raising of children had made them temperately stern, and the loving of a husband had made them gentle.
And now, death made them tremble.
“Here,” said her husband. And the horses dusted down the trail to where an odd brick building stood beside a dry wash. The building was all glazed green windows, blue machinery, red tile, and wires. The wires ran off on high-tension towers to the farthest directions of the desert. She watched them go, silently, and, still held by her thoughts, turned her gaze back to the strange storm-green windows and the burning-colored bricks.
She had never slipped a ribbon in a Bible at a certain significant verse, because though her life in this desert was a life of granite, sun, and the steaming away of the waters of her flesh, there had never been a threat in it to her. Always things had worked out before the necessity had come for sleepless dawns and wrinkles in the forehead. Somehow, the very poisonous things of life had passed her. Death was a remote storm rumor beyond the farthest range.
Twenty years had blown in tumbleweeds, away, since she’d come West, worn this lonely trapping man’s gold ring, and taken the desert as a third, and constant, partner to their living. None of their four children had ever been fearfully sick or near death. She had never had to get down on her knees except for the scrubbing of an already well-scrubbed floor.
Now all that was ended. Here they were riding toward a remote town because a simple piece of yellow paper had come and said very plainly that her mother was dying.
And she could not imagine it—no matter how she turned her head to see or turned her mind to look in on itself. There were no rungs anywhere to hold to, going either up or down, and her mind, like a compass left out in a sudden storm of sand, was suddenly blown free of all its once-clear directions, all points of reference worn away, the needle spinning without purpose, around, around. Even with Berty’s arms on her back it wasn’t enough. It was like the end of a good play and the beginning of an evil one. Someone she loved was actually going to die. This was impossible!
“I’ve got to stop,” she said, not trusting her voice at all, so she made it sound irritated to cover her fear.
Berty knew her as no irritated woman, so the irritation did not carry over and fill him up. He was a capped jug; the contents there fo
r sure. Rain on the outside didn’t stir the brew. He side-ran his horse to her and took her hand gently. “Sure,” he said. He squinted at the eastern sky. “Some clouds piling up black there. We’ll wait a bit. It might rain. I wouldn’t want to get caught in it.”
Now she was irritated at her own irritation, one fed upon the other, and she was helpless. But rather than speak and risk the cycle’s commencing again, she slumped forward and began to sob, allowing her horse to be led until it stood and tramped its feet softly beside the red brick building.
She slid down like a parcel into his arms, and he held her as she turned in on his shoulder; then he set her down and said,, “Don’t look like there’s people here.” He called, “Hey, there!” and looked at the sign on the door: Danger. Bureau of Electric Power.
There was a great insect humming all through the air. It sang in a ceaseless, bumbling tone, rising a bit, perhaps falling just a bit, but keeping the same pitch. Like a woman humming between pressed lips as she makes a meal in the warm twilight over a hot stove. They could see no movement within the building; there was only the gigantic humming. It was the sort of noise you would expect the sun-shimmer to make rising from hot railroad ties on a blazing summer day, when there is that flurried silence and you see the air eddy and whorl and ribbon, and expect a sound from the process but get nothing but an arched tautness of the eardrums and the tense quiet.
The humming came up through her heels, into her mediumslim legs, and thence to her body. It moved to her heart and touched it, as the sight of Berty just sitting on a top rail of the corral often did. And then it moved on to her head and the slenderest niches in the skull and set up a singing, as love songs and good books had done once on a time.