“Ansel?” She had the door wide open now, and was throwing back one arm to show that they were welcome. James kept trying to peer past her, hoping to see Ansel, but the way the Potters’ house was arranged made it impossible. They had set up a labyrinth of tall black folding screens with needlework flowers on them, so that the house was divided into a dozen or more tiny rooms. No matter how James craned his neck around Miss Faye, all he saw was the screen behind her and more screens behind that. “Oh, Ansel,” Miss Faye was saying. “James, I worry about that boy. I was saying just a while ago; I said—are you coming in? Don’t stand outside; come on in.”
“We’ve only got a minute,” Joan said gently. “Is Ansel here?”
“Well, let’s see.” She stepped further back, leaving them the whole doorway to enter through, and after a minute the two of them came in. Who could tell what might be hidden in this maze of screens? The air was dark and stale, from being separated into so many cubicles in a tightly closed house. And there was a thick feeling to the walls that must have come from the heavy tapestries, because every place else in this house was shell-thin. When they were inside, Miss Faye shut the whole world behind them out; she said, “Now,” and slammed the door and slid the two locks into place. James frowned (it made him uneasy, being locked in this way) but Joan only looked amused.
“You were going to tell us if Ansel’s here,” she reminded Miss Faye.
“Yes. Yes, I was saying—Lucy? Lucy, are you coming to say hello?”
They heard Miss Lucy’s footsteps, sounding very faint and taking a long time to weave in and out among the screens. First she came close and then went farther away again, and suddenly she popped out right behind Miss Faye. She wore a huge white apron with jokes about outdoor barbecues printed all over it.
“Lucy, look who’s here,” said Miss Faye.
“Well, isn’t this nice?” Miss Lucy came towards them with both hands outstretched, making James wonder, just as he always did, what he was supposed to do when she reached him—hug her?—but Joan saved the day by stepping up and taking both Miss Lucy’s hands in her own. “You’re looking just as healthy,” Miss Lucy told her, and then gave a little giggle and shook her tight cap of curls. “We’ve had so much company today that I’m getting all—”
“Well, that’s really what we came to talk about,” said James.
“Aren’t you going to sit down?”
“We wanted to ask—”
“You have to sit down.” She began backing around the first screen, still holding Joan’s hands. James glanced over at a puffy plush chair, with its layers and layers of antimacassars, and then shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but it looks like Ansel isn’t here, and that’s what we came about.”
“Oh yes. Yes, he was here.”
“When?” James asked.
“At three o’clock today, on the nose. No, more like three fifteen. I forget, Faye …”
“It was three twenty exactly,” said Miss Faye. “It was my turn to wear the brooch-watch today. I had looked down at it, while checking to see if my blouse was clean, just before I answered the door. And it was Ansel at the door. Will you sit down, please?”
“That was nearly two hours ago,” James said.
“No, you’re wrong, James.”
“Well, it’s way past five.”
“Oh, it was nearly two hours ago that he came, all right. But it was more recently that he left, because he stayed to have a jam braid.”
“Well—”
“Also a glass of milk. I said, ‘Ansel, we’ve got to get some meat on your bones.’ So did Miss Lucy. She said so too. Ansel said, ‘Oh, Miss Faye, I just don’t know.’ He was feeling sad.”
“What about?” asked James.
“He didn’t say. Well, you know how he is. Some days the world is just too much for him. That’s how he put it. ‘Miss Faye,’ he said, ‘some days the world is just too much for me.’ He told Lucy that too. ‘Miss Lucy,’ he said, ‘some days the—’ ”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“Why, home, I reckon.”
“I have to leave,” James said.
“Oh, now. You only just—”
“I’m sorry, Miss Faye. Come on, Joan.”
He reached the door before Miss Faye could, and he slid the bolts back himself, with Miss Faye’s hands fluttering anxiously above his. Then he shot out on the porch, not even trying to be polite about it. Joan followed, but with her head turned toward the Potters, her voice drifting back to them as she tried to smooth everything over. “I’m sorry we have to leave this way,” she said, “but I know you see how it is—” and the Potters made thin, sad little sounds to show that they did.
“Just please come back,” Miss Faye told them, and James nodded tiredly and let the door swing shut. The two bolts slid back into place.
When they were outside again James just stood there, trying to think where to begin. Joan didn’t seem worried at all. She said, “I got tobacco gum all over Miss Lucy’s hands.”
“That’s too bad,” James said absently.
“She was staring at her hands all funny-like; that’s how I noticed. Little bits of black were sticking to them.”
James turned around and looked at her. “Will you listen?” he told her. “I can’t find Ansel.”
“I’m sorry, James.” She grew serious, and came over to stand beside him. “He’ll come back,” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“He always has before.”
“Well, I just don’t know,” James said. He knelt to tie his shoe and then stayed that way, looking down the porch to see who might be coming along the road. No one was in sight. “We don’t know what might have happened,” he said.
Joan squatted down beside him and said, “Well, he’s come back every other time, James.”
“You already said that.”
“I just meant—”
“I know he comes back. I been through this a hundred times. If I didn’t even go looking for him, he’d come back. But I can’t be a hundred percent sure of that.”
Down the road came a red hen, strutting importantly, sticking her neck far out as if she were heading someplace definite. As she walked she talked to herself, in little conversational clucks. James and Joan watched after her until she had disappeared.
“Somehow I can’t get what Maisie said off my mind,” James said finally. “How would I feel if just once he went too far? There’d be no one to blame but me, if that happened.”
“Maisie who?” Joan asked.
“Maisie Hammond.”
“Well, if you did go after him, you know how it’d be. You ever seen Ansel standing on a street corner waiting for you? He goes somewhere you’d never think to look, James. You go up and down town all night searching for him, waking every drinking man to ask him if he knows, and where does it get you? You always end up right here, waiting for him to decide to come back.”
“I like to think I looked,” James said.
“I know that.” She stood up again, and the cotton smell of her shirt floated past him. “I can see it better than you can,” she told him. “I don’t like him. I can see easier than you how he will always come back.”
“You can’t see.”
“Look,” Joan said. “What’s got into you? Things were getting better for a while. You weren’t fussing over him, and he had almost stopped wandering off. Why have you started acting this way?”
He stared down at her feet, long and dirty in sandals that had molded themselves to the curl of her toes. Her feet made him so angry that he almost didn’t answer her. But then she looked down at him, with her face worried and unsure, and he said, “I don’t know.”
“Well, there’s got to be some reason.”
“Will you stop asking me that? You don’t have a brother.”
“Maybe not,” Joan said, “but there is nothing I like or understand about you going to look for Ansel all the time. If he wanted he
could have done a full day’s work today, and been off at a dance right now.”
“No, he couldn’t.”
“Yes, he could. He could be dancing and you and I could be going someplace. We could be doing something. We could be someone besides an old familiar couple that’ll be courting when they’re seventy and the town’s fondest joke. Are you listening?”
“No,” James said.
He got up off his knees and went down the porch steps. Bits of tobacco gum and dust from the floorboards clung to the knees of his pants, but he didn’t brush them off. The sunset glowed red and dull across the roof of the pickup. “Don’t bother fixing supper,” he called.
“I wouldn’t think of fixing supper.”
He stopped and looked back at her. She was standing at the edge of the porch now, with her arms folded and her feet planted solidly apart. “I wish you’d wear some real shoes once,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m sick of those sandals.”
“Well, I’m sick of everything,” Joan said.
Her voice was flat now, and only sad-sounding. It made him look back at her one more time, but by then she had turned away and was walking down the porch. “Joan?” he said. She went on walking, not answering. From behind, her folded arms gave her a thin, round-shouldered look, and she stepped in that gentle way she had, with her bare pointed heels rising and falling delicately across the long gray porch.
7
At night, when everyone was in bed, the house seemed to belong to one family instead of three. The separate sleeping-sounds mingled and penetrated through all the thin walls, and by now James could identify each sound exactly and where it came from. He knew Miss Faye’s snore, as curlicued and lacy as she herself was, and the loud, honking sound that Mr. Pike made. He knew Miss Lucy’s rat-a-tat on the walls, first on Mr. Pike’s wall when the snoring grew too noisy and then on his own wall if he talked in his sleep. He thought it must be a thimble she tapped with. Because there was a big room’s width between his end of the house and the Pikes’ end, he wasn’t sure of the softer sounds there—Simon’s snoring, for instance, or Mrs. Pike’s. And he had always wondered if Joan snored. But he had heard Janie Rose’s nightmares often enough. They came through loud and clear, drifting up from the open window of her tacked-on bedroom downstairs. “That’s not something you should be doing,” she would say reasonably. And then, “Daddy, would you come quick?” and the floundering thuds across the floor as Mr. Pike began groping his way toward her voice in the dark. But if Simon talked in his sleep, he must have talked quietly. All James heard of him was in the morning, when they tried to wake him and he bellowed out, “Oh, fine, I’ll be right there! I already got my socks on. Ain’t this some day?”—yet all the while sound asleep, and just trying to fool people. Sometimes Mr. Pike shouted too. He would have too many beers on a Saturday night and throw all the pillows out the window. “Ninety-nine point two percent of all the people in the southern states die of smothering,” he would roar to the night, and then Miss Lucy would rap on the wall. Miss Lucy never slept at all; James was convinced of that. She spent her time policing the area. On nights when Ansel was restless, when he tossed around on his old wooden bed across the room from James (he wouldn’t sleep in the other bedroom, for fear of waking alone and finding his feet numb), and when he kept calling, “James, how long has this night been going on?” Miss Lucy would tap very gently and ask if Ansel wanted her hot water bottle. “No, ma’am,” James always said, and Miss Lucy would go back to her quiet, patient pacing. Sometimes James had a great urge to go see what she was wearing. He pictured her in a twenty-pound quilted robe with lead weights at the bottom, like the ones sewn into curtains, because it dragged so loudly across the floor at every step she took. But once he had had a horrible nightmare, right after eating two pizzas. He had shouted out, “My God!” and awakened shaking, with the terrible sound of his own shout still ringing in his ears. Then Miss Lucy had tapped and called, “Why, it’s going to be all right,” and the horror vanished. He had lain back down, feeling comforted and at home, and now it never annoyed him to hear Miss Lucy’s bathrobe dragging.
In the Potters’ bedroom the clock struck four, whirring and choking before each clang. James lay tensed, counting the strokes, although he already knew how many there would be. He had slept only in patches all night, and even in his dreams he was searching streets full of people for the thin stooped figure of his brother. In the last dream it had been a year ago—that time they had called from ten miles away to tell him Ansel had been run over, but neglected to add it was only a bicycle that had done it. After that he couldn’t sleep at all. He thought of all the things that had happened to Ansel in the past, the really serious things, and all the things that might be happening to him tonight. When the clock had stopped whirring he found that he was frowning into the darkness so hard that the muscles of his forehead hurt. Then, as if that clock had been some sort of musical introduction, a faraway voice began singing outside:
There’s sunshine on the mountains,
And spring has come again.…
James sat up and pulled back the curtain. Outside it was pitch black, with a handful of small stars scattered like sand across the blue-black sky. The trees beyond the field were only hulking dark shapes, and not one light glimmered from the town behind them.
My true love said she’d meet me,
But forgot to tell me when.
He climbed out of bed and untwisted the legs of his pajamas. At his bedroom wall there was one sharp tap, questioning (he had learned to read Miss Lucy’s thimble language), and he called, “It’s all right, Miss Lucy.” She resumed her pacing again, with her robe trailing her footsteps like a murmuring companion. James shot out of his room, still buttoning his pajama top, and went downstairs in the dark. The voice was nearer now.
I was walking down the track, Lord,
With a letter in my hand,
A-reading how she’d left me
For that sunny Jordan land.
The front door was open but the screen was hooked shut. James pushed the hook up, jabbing his finger, and swung the screen door open. Then he walked across the porch barefoot, with the cold rough grain of the wooden floorboards stinging the soles of his feet. Around his ankles the cuffs of his pajamas fluttered and ballooned and nearly tripped him (they were Ansel’s, and too long); he bent to roll them up. Then he descended the steps, scowling into the dark as he tried to see. He was halfway down the path before he stopped, more by sensing someone in front of him than by seeing him. Ahead of him was a long tall shape, swaying gently, smelling of bourbon. The voice was so close now that James could feel its breath.
Oh, there’s sunshine on the hills, Lord,
And the grass is all of gold.…
His reedy roice was piercing, but the thinness of it made it seem still far away. James stepped closer. “Ansel,” he said.
My love has gone and left me,
And I’ll cry until I’m old.
“Ansel,” James said again.
“I’m singing, please.”
“Come on in.”
He took Ansel by the arm. It was stone cold; he could feel the bone underneath. When he pulled Ansel toward the porch Ansel came, but lifelessly and with the shadow that was his face still averted. “People keep asking you in nowadays,” he told the dark. “They got a thing about it.”
“Careful,” said James. “We’re coming to the steps.”
“The Potters downright lock you in. Slide little bits of machinery around. You mind if I finish my song?”
“I certainly do.”
“I might just finish it anyway. Where you taking me, James?”
“In,” said James, and half lifted him up the first step. Ansel was as limp as a rag doll. His limpness made James realize suddenly how angry he was at Ansel, after all this worrying and waiting; instead of guiding him so carefully, he felt like giving him a good shove into the house and having done with it. “Get on in,” he said,
and took his hand away from Ansel’s arm. Ansel gave him a deep lopsided blow and entered first.
“Certainly nice of you to ask me,” he told James. “Certainly are a hospitable man.”
“If you’re hungry, Ansel—”
“I’m starved.”
“Cook up some eggs,” said James, and began making his way across the dark living room toward the stairs. Behind him Ansel said, “Hey, now—” but James paid no attention. The way he felt, he couldn’t even make a cup of coffee for Ansel; he had been worrying for too long, and all he wanted now was sleep. Already he was unbuttoning the tops of his pajamas, preparing to go back to his bed.
“Don’t you have food waiting?” Ansel asked.
“Nope.”
“Don’t you even care if I come back?”
“You know how to fry an egg.”
“Well, I’ll be,” said Ansel, and sat down suddenly on something that creaked. “I take it back, James. What’s so hospitable about you?”
The stairs were narrow, and James kept stubbing his toes against them. He touched the wall to guide himself, feeling the ripples and bubbles of the wallpaper as he slid his fingers along it. Behind him Ansel said, “You mad at me, James?” but James didn’t answer. He could already hear the tapping sound that was coming from upstairs. Miss Lucy must be worried.
“I reckon you’re wondering where I was at,” Ansel said, and there was another creak when he stood up again. “You always do wonder.” He banged into something, and then his footsteps wavered uncertainly toward the stairs. “You’re taking all my places from me. Once I tell you, I can’t go back no more. How long you guess it’ll be before I’ve used up every place there is?” He was climbing the steps behind James now. His voice rang hollowly through the stairwell. For a minute James paused, listening to him coming, and then he continued on up and reached the top, with his hand still on the wall so that he could find his room. “It’s all a question of time,” Ansel said sadly. “Time and geography.”
“If you’re coming to sleep in my room,” James told him, “you’d better shut up that talking.”