“Well, I only want to explain.”
“I’m sleepy, Ansel.”
“I only want to explain.”
James kept going, heading in the direction of Miss Lucy’s tapping thimble. He could hear Ansel’s hands sliding along behind his now on the wall, and then the sliding sound stopped and there was a click as Ansel snapped the hall light on. For a minute the light was blinding. James screwed his eyes up and said, “Oh, Lord—” and Ansel turned the light off again, quickly and guiltily. “I just thought,” he said, “as long as we had electricity—”
“It’s four a.m., Ansel.”
“What’re you, wearing my pajamas?”
“Go to hell, will you?”
“I never,” said Ansel, but James was past listening. He was in the bedroom now, and on his way to bed he reached out and knocked on Miss Lucy’s wall for her to stop that tapping. She did. He eased himself down between the sheets, which were cold already and messy-feeling. When he was lying flat he closed his eyes and wished away the figure of Ansel, standing like a long black stick and swaying in the bedroom doorway.
“I wisht I knew what was wrong with you,” Ansel said. “You angry with me, James?”
“Yep.”
“I only went out for a walk.”
“You usually end up half dead after those walks. It’s me that’s got to nurse you back.”
“Well, wait now,” Ansel said. “I can explain. All you need to do is listen.”
“How can I listen when I’m asleep?” asked James, and turned over on his side with his face to the window. He could hear Ansel’s feet shuffling into the room, and he knew by the soft thumping noise that he had reached the other bed and was sitting on it.
“I tried and I tried,” Ansel told him. “I went to the Pikes’ first off, but Simon don’t like me any more. I went to the Potters’, and they locked me in and requested news of my hemoglobin. What could I do? At the tavern I said, ‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘I got a problem.’ But all Charlie did was sell me hard liquor under the counter; he didn’t listen to no problem.”
Ansel’s shoes were dropped on the floor, first one and then the other. There was a small whipping sound as he flung his tie around a bedpost. Even with his eyes shut James could picture his brother, how he would be leaning toward James with his shoulders hunched and his hands flung out as he talked, even though he knew he couldn’t be seen. “Go to sleep, Ansel,” he muttered, but Ansel only sighed and began unbuttoning his shirt with tiny popping sounds.
“This all has to do with Janie Rose,” he told James. “Are you listening?”
“No.”
“Just about everything has to do with Janie Rose these days. I don’t know why. Looks like she just kind of tipped everything over with her passing on. Janie don’t like gladioli, James.”
James didn’t answer. A button flew to the floor and then circled there for an endless length of time, and Ansel stamped one stocking foot over it and shook the whole house. James could feel the floorboards jar beneath his bed. There was a long silence; then Ansel bent, with a small puff of held-in breath, and scraped his fingers across the floor in search of the button.
“Got it,” he said finally. “All today, I was so sick and tired. I had looked at that picture of the Model A too long. I don’t know why I do things like that. Then I thought, well, I’ll just go up the hill and pay my respects to Janie Rose. I’ll go slow, so as not to get overtired. And I did. I stopped a plenty on the way. But when I got close I saw her flowers, how they had got all wilted. I thought: I wisht I’d brought some flowers. I thought: I wisht I’d brought some bluets. You listening, James?”
James gritted his teeth and stayed quiet.
“There’s four names for bluets I know of. Bluets, Quaker-ladies, pea-in-the-paths, and wet-the-beds. You can count on Janie Rose; she called them wet-the-beds. Well, she had problems herself in that line. But what I thought was: I wisht I’d brought some bluets. I didn’t think: I wisht I’d brought some wet-the-beds.”
“Oh, Lord,” James said tiredly. He turned his pillow to the cool side and lay back down on it.
“Now, bluets are not good funeral flowers. Too teeny. But Janie Rose is not a funeral person. Usually it’s only the good die young. Consequently I thought: I wisht I’d—”
James raised his head and shouted, “Ansel, will you hush?” and on his wall there was the sudden sound of frantic tapping. “I don’t want to hear,” he told Ansel more quietly, and then lay back down and forced his mind far away.
“I’ll just get to the point,” Ansel said. “I have to tell you this. James, there are gladioli on Janie’s grave.”
James heard a zipper slide down, and after a minute a pair of trousers were tossed shuffingly across the floor. Then Ansel’s socks dropped one after the other beside his bed, in soft crumpled balls, and James heard them fall and winced because his ears seemed raw tonight.
“Janie Rose despises gladioli,” said Ansel.
James said nothing.
“She hates and despises them. Believes they’re witches’ wands, all frilled up. She told me so.”
James opened his eyes and rolled over. “Funerals are for parents,” he said. “Ansel, Janie Rose is dead.”
He waited, frowning. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the white blur that was Ansel in his underwear, standing before the bureau with his skinny arms folded across his chest. Finally Ansel said, “I know.”
“She’s dead.”
“I know all about it. Nevertheless, she despises gladioli.”
“The funeral is not really for her,” James said, and rolled over again to face the wall. “It don’t make any difference to her about those gladioli.”
“Oh now,” said Ansel. “Oh now.” He crossed to his bed, heavily. “It’s hard to bury people, Jamie. Harder than digging a hole in the ground.”
“Will you go to bed?”
“They keep popping up again, in a manner of speaking.”
James dug his head into his pillow.
“I remember Janie Rose’s religious period,” Ansel went on comfortably. “It was a right short one, wouldn’t you know. But she took this tree out back, this scrubby one she was always drawing flattering pictures of. Dedicated it to God, I believe; hung it with tin cans and popcorn strings. Didn’t last but a week; then she was on to something new. The birds ate the popcorn. But those tin cans are still rattling at the ends of the branches when a wind passes through, and Mr. Pike sits out back all day staring at them. Thought he had placed every last bit of her in a hole in the ground. Ha.”
James reached behind him for the sheet and pulled it up over his head, making a hood of it. The rustling of the sheet drowned out everything else, and then when he was still again the sounds couldn’t come through to him so clearly. The creaking of Ansel’s bedsprings when he sat down was muffled and distant, and his voice was thin-sounding.
“I ought to studied botany,” he was saying. “Don’t you think? All I know about flowers, I ought to studied botany.”
James lay still, and stared at the dark vines running up the wallpaper until his eyes ached.
“With Mama it was lilies,” said Ansel. “Lord, she hated lilies. All she wanted, she said, was just a cross of—”
“We won’t go into that,” James told the wallpaper.
“We don’t go into nothing. Getting so the only safe topic around here is the weather. Well, I was saying. Just a cross of white roses, she wanted. No lilies. And you know what they sent? You know what?”
He waited. The silence stretched on and on. James’s arm, pressed beneath his body, began to go to sleep, but he didn’t switch positions for fear of breaking the silence. He wiggled his fingers gently, without making a sound.
“Well, they sent lilies,” Ansel said finally. “I thought you would have guessed. If you’d been there, I wouldn’t have to be telling you all this. But I called you. I called you on the phone and said, ‘James,’ I said, ‘will you kindly come to Mama’s funer
al?’ I called you long distance and person-to-person, Caraway to Larksville. But you never answered me. Just hung up the telephone, neat and quiet. If I was the persistent type, I’d be asking still. I’d ask it today: ‘James, will you kindly come to Mama’s funeral?’ Because you never have answered, never once, not once in all these years. I’ll ask it now. James, will you kindly—”
“No, I won’t,” said James.
Across the room there was a little intake of breath, quick and sharp, and over behind the Potters’ wall the measured pacing suddenly began again, with the weighted bathrobe sighing behind it. Ansel lay down on his bed.
“There’s two kinds of sin,” he said after a minute. His voice was directed toward the ceiling now, and sounded dreamy. “There’s general sin and there’s private sin. General sin there’s commandments against, or laws, or rules. Private sin’s a individual matter. It’s hurting somebody, personally. You hear me? Listen close now; this is essential. What I chose was a general sin, that they’ll be a long time forgiving. I did all that drinking, and ran around with that girl that everyone knew was no good. But what you chose was a private sin, that they’ll never forgive. They got hurt personally by it—you forever running away, and telling them finally what you thought of them and leaving home altogether. Then not coming to the funeral. Think they’ll forgive that? No, sir. Me they will cry over in church and finally forgive, someday. But not you. I’m a very wise man, every so often.”
James didn’t say anything. Ansel raised himself up on one elbow to look over at him, but he stayed within his hood of sheets. “James?” Ansel said.
“What.”
“You don’t care what I say, do you?”
“Yes,” James said.
“Don’t it bother you sometimes? Don’t you ever think about it? Here we are. You walked off from them without a backward wave of your hand, and I got thrown out like an old paper bag. Don’t it—”
“Got what?” James asked.
“What?”
“You got what?”
“Got thrown out, I said, like an old—”
“You never got thrown out,” said James.
“I did. Daddy said I was an alcoholic; he said I was—”
“He never said that.”
“Well, almost he did. He said, ‘Leave this house,’ he said. ‘You and your drinking and that girl in red pedal pushers, I never want to see you again.’ That’s what he told me.”
James raised himself slightly from beneath the hood of the sheet. He peered across the dark room toward Ansel and said, “Don’t you give me that, Ansel.”
“What?”
“You left. You left, I left. Tell it that way.”
“Well, what difference does it make? Who cares?”
“I care,” said James. “Do I make excuses for leaving? Run out on him or don’t run, but don’t make it easy on yourself; don’t tell me he kicked you out.”
“Well,” Ansel said after a minute, “I was drinking all that—”
“You don’t even like the taste of it,” said James.
“I do too.”
James lay back down and pulled his sheet closer over him, and Ansel’s voice rose louder. “It has a wonderful taste,” he said. And then, “Well, maybe he didn’t exactly throw me out, but anyhow—”
Up on the tin roof, rain began. It started very gently, pattering in little sharp exclamation points that left spaces for Ansel’s voice. “James?” Ansel said.
“Hmm.”
“There’s one thing I don’t get, James. It was you they liked best. The others weren’t nothing special, and I was so runny-nosed. I had a runny nose from the moment I was born, I think, and pinkish eyes. One time I heard Daddy say, ‘Well, if there’s ever a prize for sheer sniveliness given, he’ll take it,’ and Mama said, ‘Hush now. Maybe he’ll grow out of it.’ They didn’t think I heard them, but I did.”
“They didn’t mean that,” said James.
“You know they did. But you they liked; why did you leave? Why didn’t you come to the funeral? I said, ‘Daddy,’ I said, ‘you want I should ask James to Mama’s funeral?’ ‘Which James is that?’ he asks. ‘James your son,’ I tell him. And he says, ‘Oh. Oh, why, anything you want to, Ansel.’ This was when I was still home and they had hopes I would change my ways; they let me do some things I wanted. I called and said, ‘James, will you kindly come to Mama’s funeral?’ Then he asked what happened. ‘Ansel,’ he said, ‘did you invite that person you had mentioned previously?’ And I said no, figuring it was better that way. Daddy said, ‘He wouldn’t have come. He was born that way,’ he said, ‘lacking our religion. There was no sense asking him.’ ”
The rain grew louder. Now it was one steady booming against the sheets of tin, and all of Ansel that could be heard was his words; the quality of his voice was drowned out.
“I’m going back there sometime,” he was saying. “They’ll forget, and I’ll go back. I crave a religious atmosphere.” He lay back down and James nodded to himself, thinking maybe he would be sleepy now. “Churches here are somewhat lacking, I think,” Ansel went on. “Quiet-like. At home it was better. Mrs. Crowley spoke in tongues. There was things that bound you there. A red glass on the windowsill in the choir loft, with something brown rising above it like the head of a beer. I think now it was wax, and the glass was a sort of candle. But before I thought it was a sort of brown fungus, some kind of mold just growing and growing. Do you remember, James?” He waited a minute. “James?” he said, and now his voice rose even above the roaring of the rain.
“No, I don’t,” James said.
“Sometimes I think your mind is just a clean, clean slate, James.”
“I keep it that way,” said James.
“You do. I bet when I go back you won’t even miss me. I’ll go and bring presents. A natural-bristle hairbrush for each sister and a table game for Claude, and a French briar pipe for Daddy. Flowers for the grave and a set of them new, unbreakable dishes to go in the kitchen. A conch shell with the crucifixion inside to make up for that one you dropped, and a crane-necked reading lamp …”
The rain roared on, and James listened to that with all his mind. He thought it was the best sound he had heard all day. The heavy feeling was beginning to fade away, and the rain was lulling him to sleep.
“… a new swing,” Ansel was saying, “though none of us would use it now, I reckon. Before, it was a tire we swung on. It was all right and it went high enough, but there wasn’t no comfortable way to sit in it. Inside it, your legs got pinched. Straddled above it, you’d be dizzy in no time what with all that spinning. ‘Stop!’ you’d say, and cling like a monkey on a palm tree while everybody laughed …”
8
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Pike was the second person awake. He arrived in the kitchen wearing his work clothes and carrying a nylon mesh cap, and when he sat down at the table he sat heavily, stamping his boots together in front of him and scraping the chair across the linoleum. “I’m picking tobacco today,” he told Joan. Joan was at the stove, peering into the glass knob on top of the percolator to see what color the coffee was. When her uncle made his announcement she said nothing, because she was thinking of other things, but then she turned and saw him looking at her expectantly.
“I’m sorry?” she said.
“I’m going to pick tobacco,” he repeated.
“Oh. All right.”
But he still seemed to be waiting for something. He folded his big bony hands on the table and leaned toward her, watching, but Joan couldn’t think what was expected of her. She picked the coffeepot off the stove and carried it over to the sink, in order to dump the grounds.
“We need the money,” her uncle said.
Joan shook the grounds into the garbage pail, holding the coffee-basket by the tips of her fingers so as not to get burned.
“Well, sometime I got to start work,” he said.
“Of course you do, Uncle Roy.”
“Things are getting worse and wors
e in this house. I thought they’d get better.”
“Pretty soon they will.”
“I wonder, now.”
He watched as Joan set his cup of coffee before him. She handed him the sugar bowl but he just stared at it, as if he’d never seen one before.
“Sugar?” Joan prodded him.
He shook his head, and she set the bowl down at his elbow.
“It’s no good sitting in a room all my life,” he said.
“Drink your coffee,” Joan told him. She poured a cup for herself and then sat down opposite him hitching up the knees of her blue jeans. Her eyes were still foggy from sleep and things came through to her blurred, in shining patterns—the blocks of sunlight across the worn linoleum, the graduated circles of Mrs. Pike’s saucepan set hanging on the wall, the dark slouched waiting figure of her uncle. When she stirred her coffee with a kitchen knife that was handy, the reflection of the sunshine on the blade flashed across the wall like a fish in a pool and her uncle shifted his eyes to that. He watched like a person hypnotized. She set the knife down and the reflection darted to a point high on the wall near the ceiling, and he stared upward at it.
“You going to want sandwiches?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. She took a sip of her coffee, but it was tasteless and heavy and she set the cup down again. “Putting my foot down,” her uncle mumbled. Joan drew lines on the tablecloth with her thumbnail. Outside a bird began singing, bringing back all the spots and patches of restless dreams she had had last night, in between long periods of lying awake and turning her pillow over and over to find a cool place. Ever since the rain stopped those birds had been singing. She rubbed her fingers across her eyelids and saw streaks of red and purple behind them.
“In regard to sandwiches,” her uncle said suddenly, “I don’t want them. I’ll come home for lunch.”
“All right.”
“Least I can do.”
“All right.”
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked, and reached finally for the sugar bowl. “You mad I’m picking tobacco?”
“No, I think it’s the best thing you could do. Don’t forget to tell James he won’t need to work today.”