“You stop that, Roy Pike.”
They rose simultaneously, with their backs very straight. But even making the trip across the kitchen they walked slowly, preparing themselves for the stairs. “Be careful,” Joan told them. “Just see they don’t get out of breath, Uncle Roy.”
“I will.”
But Simon was frowning as he watched them leave. “Hey, Joan,” he said.
“Hmmm?”
“When they go up to bed at night, it takes them half an hour. They take two steps and then rest and talk; they bring their knitting along.”
“Well, that’s kind of silly,” said Joan.
“Could they crumple up and die on our stairs?”
“No, they could not,” she said. “It would take more than that.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard Dr. Kitt tell them so. They just shouldn’t get too out of breath, is all, or run in any marathons. He said—”
“I got an idea,” Simon said.
“What?”
“Listen.” He stood up from his place at the table and came around to face her, with his hands hitched through his belt loops. “How about us going to a movie,” he said. “That Tarzan movie.”
“We’re not supposed to.”
“Well, I got to get out,” he said.
She looked down at him, considering. His face had a thin, stretched look; patches of flour still clung to it like some sort of sad clown makeup and his hair stuck up in wiry tangles. “Well, I do have to get Aunt Lou’s prescription,” she said. “Would you comb your hair first?”
“Sure.”
“All right, we’ll go.”
“Right now?”
“If you want to.”
He nodded, but with his face still wearing that strained look, and turned to go upstairs and then turned back again. “I’ll wash downstairs,” he said.
“There’s no soap here.”
“I don’t care.”
He turned on the water in the kitchen sink and splashed his face, and then he reached spluttering for the dishtowel. “My allowance money’s all the way upstairs,” he said. “I’ll pay you back tomorrow, if you’ll lend me the money.”
“All right.”
She went into the living room, with Simon following, and handed him a comb from her pocketbook. While he was combing his hair she went upstairs for her shoes. Mrs. Pike’s door was open now. She was lying on her bed, with her head propped up on two pillows and the sisters beside her talking steadily, and when Joan walked past, her aunt followed her with her soft blue eyes but only vaguely, as if she weren’t seeing her, so Joan didn’t stop in to say anything. She put on her shoes and picked up a scarf and went downstairs, where Simon was waiting with his hand on the newel post and his face strained upward.
“What’re they doing?” he asked her.
“I don’t know.”
“Are they crying?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well. I would’ve gone upstairs,” he said. “You know.”
“I know.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t?”
“No.” She sighed suddenly, looking back toward the stairs. “I don’t know how to comfort people,” she said.
“Well.”
They went out the front door, across the porch, and down the wooden steps. It was beginning to get cool outside. Joan could hear tree frogs piping far away, and the wind had died down enough so that the sound of cars on the east highway reached her ears. She clasped her hands behind her back and followed Simon, cutting across the road and through the field toward town.
“Remember I’ve got heels on,” she called.
“I remember.”
“Remember that makes it hard walking.”
He slowed down and waited for her, walking backwards. Behind him and all around him the field stretched wide and golden, with bits of tall yellow flowers stirring and glimmering like spangles in the sunlight. And when Joan came up even with him, so that he turned and walked forward again by her side, she could look down and see how his hair, bleached lighter on top, took on a varnished look out here and the little line of fuzz down the back of his neck had turned shiny and golden like the field he was walking in. “Right about here …,” he said, but the wind started up just then and blew his words away.
“What?” she asked.
“Right about here is where I lost that ball. Will you keep a lookout for it?”
“I will.”
“Do you reckon I’ll ever find it?”
“No.”
“I don’t either,” Simon said.
But they walked slowly anyway, keeping their eyes on the ground, kicking at clumps of wild wheat to see what might turn up.
3
“Hold still,” James said.
He bent over and peered through the camera. No one was holding still. Line upon line of Hammonds, from every corner of the state, littered the Larksville Hammonds’ front lawn, sitting, kneeling, and standing, letting arms and legs and bits of dresses trail outside the frame of his camera. Whole babies were being omitted; they had crawled to other patches of grass. Yet the grown-ups stood there with their dusty blue, look-alike eyes smiling happily, certain that they and their children were being saved intact for future generations. James straightened up and shook his head.
“Nope,” he said. “You’ve moved every whichaway again. Close in tighter, now.”
He waited patiently, with his hands on his hips. For five years he had been going through this. Every year there was a picture of the Hammond family reunion to be put in the Larksville paper, and another two or three for the Hammonds themselves to choose for their albums. By now he was resigned to it; he had even started enjoying himself. He smiled, watching all those hordes of Hammonds close in obligingly with sideways steps while their eyes stayed fixed on the camera. Moving like that made them look like chains of paper dolls, bright and shimmering in the heat. Eyelet dresses and seersucker suits blurred together; their whiteness was blinding. James shaded his eyes with one hand, and then he said, “Okay,” and bent down over his camera again. But someone else was moving. It was Great-Aunt Hattie in the front row; she had started coughing. She was sitting in a cane-bottom chair, with children and animals tangled at her feet and the grown-ups forming a protective wall behind her. When she began her coughing fit, they closed in still tighter in a semicircle and the oldest nephew leaned down with his head next to hers. The coughs grew farther apart. After a minute the nephew raised his head and said, “She’s sorry, she says.” The others murmured behind him, saying it didn’t matter. “Swallowed down the wrong throat,” said the nephew.
Someone called out, “Give her brown bread.” And someone else said, “No, rock candy will do it.” But the aunt spread her old hands out in front of her, palms down and fingers stretched apart, signifying she was better now and wanted to hear no more about it. “Back in your places,” James said, and the twenty or thirty Hammonds closest to him drifted back to their original positions and made their faces stern again. Mothers looked anxiously down the rows, gripping their neighbors’ arms and peering around them to make sure their children were at their best, and fathers hooked their thumbs into their belts and glared into the lens. “Hold it,” James said. When he snapped the picture there was a little stirring through the group, and everyone relaxed. “That’s the second,” he called to the hostess. “You want another?”
“One more, James.”
While he was fiddling with the camera people began talking again, still standing in their set places, and some lit cigarettes. He peered through the view-finder at them. If this were any other picture he would snap it now, catching them at their ease, but family pictures were different. He liked the way they stood so straight in jumbled, self-conscious rows, and molded themselves to make a block of tensed-up faces. “I’m ready,” he warned them, and they did it again—closed their mouths and narrowed their eyes and set their shoulders. He snapped the picture that way. Then he said, ??
?That’s all,” and watched the children as they shook themselves and scattered off to play.
The hostess walked up to him, trailing white lace, sinking into the ground at every step in her high-heeled pumps. “There’s one more I want, James,” she said, and then stopped and let her eyes wander after her youngest child. “Joey, you know not to ride that dog,” she called.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I want you to photograph Great-Aunt Hattie alone,” she told James. “She’s getting old. Can you do that?”
“If she’s willing,” said James.
“She’s not.”
“Then maybe we should—”
“Now, don’t you worry,” said Mrs. Hammond. “I’ll talk her around. They’re serving up the ice cream over there. You go and get you some, and when you’re through I’ll have Aunt Hattie ready. Hear?”
“Well, okay,” James said. But Mrs. Hammond hadn’t stayed to hear his answer.
He folded his equipment up and put it on the porch, out of the way of the children. Then he went across the yard to the driveway, where the others were standing in line for ice cream. They looked different now, quick-moving and flexible, with the paper-doll stiffness gone. In a way James was sorry. Some of the best pictures he had were these poker-straight rows of families, Hammonds and Ballews and Burnetts; he kept copies of them filed away in his darkroom, and sometimes on long lonesome days he pulled them out and looked at them a while, with a sort of faraway sadness coming up in him if he looked too long. He might have seen any one of those families only that morning in the hardware store, but when he looked at their faces in pictures they seemed lost and long ago. (“I just wish once you’d take a giggly picture,” Ansel said. “You make me so sorrowful.”) Thinking about that made James smile, and the girl in front of him turned around and looked up at him.
“I’m thinking,” he told her.
“That’s what it looked like,” she said. Her name was Maisie Hammond, and she lived across town from here and sometimes came visiting Ansel. She thought Ansel was wonderful. James was just considering this when she said, “How’s that brother of yours?” and he smiled at her.
“Just fine,” he said. “He’s home reading magazines.”
“Well, say hello to him.” She moved up a space in line, still facing in James’s direction and walking backwards. Standing out in the sunlight like this she was pretty, with her towhead shining and her white skin nearly transparent, but Ansel had always said she was homely and only out to catch a good husband (it was rumored James and Ansel came from an old family). Whenever she came visiting, Ansel turned his face to the wall and played sicker than he was. That was how he planned to scare her off, but Maisie only stayed longer then and fussed around his couch. She liked taking care of people. She would fetch pillows and ice-water, and Ansel would wave them away. When she was gone, James would say, “Ansel, what you want to treat her like that for?” But by that time Ansel had fooled even himself, and only tossed his head on the pillow and worried about how faint he felt. To make it up to Maisie now (although she wasn’t aware there was anything to be made up), James stepped closer to her in the line and said, “Maisie, it’s been a good two weeks since you’ve been by.”
“Two days,” said Maisie. “Day before yesterday I was there.”
“I never heard about it.”
“You were off somewhere. Taking care of some arrangements for the Pikes.”
The man ahead of her left with his Dixie cup of ice cream, and Maisie turned forward again and took two cups from the stack on the table. “Here,” she said. She passed him a fudge ripple, with a little paper spoon lying across the top of it. “The children got to the strawberry before us.”
“That’s all right,” said James. “I don’t like strawberry.”
He followed her back across the lawn, preferring to stick with her rather than interrupt the little individual reunions that were going on among the others. When she settled on the porch steps, fluffing her skirt out around her, he said, “You mind if I sit with you?” She shook her head, intent on opening her ice cream. “I’m going to take a picture of your great-aunt,” he said.
“Oh, her.”
“Do you like sitting out in the sun like this?”
“Yes,” she said. But she looked hot; she was too thin and bird-boned, and being the slightest bit uncomfortable made her seem about to topple over. James was used to Joan, who was unbreakable and built of solid flesh.
When he had pried the lid off his own ice cream, and dipped into it with his paper spoon, he said, “It’s sort of melty-looking.” Maisie didn’t answer. She was staring off across the yard. “Better eat yours before it turns to milk,” he told her.
But Maisie said, “Ansel was laying down, when I went to see him.”
“He does that,” said James.
“I mean laying still. Not doing anything.”
“Well, it was nice of you to come,” he said.
She shrugged impatiently, as if he hadn’t understood her. “You were out doing something,” she told him. She seemed to be starting all over again now, telling the story a second time. “You weren’t around.”
“I was helping Mr. Pike with some arrangements,” said James.
“That’s what Ansel said.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t around.”
“Well. When I came in I said, ‘Hey, Ansel,’ and Ansel didn’t even hear me. He was just laying there. I said, ‘Hey!’ and he jumped a foot, near about. He was a million miles away.”
James was making soup out of his ice cream. He had it down to a sort of pulpy mess now, the way he liked it, and then he looked up and saw Maisie wrinkling her nose at it. He stopped stirring and took his first bite. “Ansel’s a great one for daydreaming,” he said with his mouth full.
“He wasn’t daydreaming.”
“Oh.”
“He was crying, near about.”
“Ansel?”
“Well, almost,” said Maisie. She sat forward, with the ice cream still untasted in her hand. “I said, ‘Ansel, what’s the matter?’ But he never did say. His eyes were all blurry.”
“You got to remember Janie Rose,” James said. “It was only three days ago.”
“Well, I thought of that. But then I thought, no, Janie wasn’t all that much to him. She was right bothersome, as a matter of fact. We had her over for supper just a month ago, her and her family; we gave them chicken. Mama forgot about Janie being vegetarian. Janie said, ‘This chicken’s dead,’ and her daddy said, ‘Well, I hope so,’ and everybody laughed, but Mama’s feelings were a little hurt. Though she went to the funeral and all, just like anyone else. I said, ‘Ansel, is that what’s bothering you? Janie Rose Pike being taken?’ But the way he was acting, I don’t think that was the real reason.”
“His feet hurt him sometimes,” said James.
“This is serious, James.”
“I’m being serious.”
“Anyway,” Maisie sighed, and she took the first mouthful of her ice cream. It bothered him, the way she ate it; she chewed, slowly and carefully, even though the ice cream was nothing but liquid now. When she had swallowed, she said, “All he would talk about was dying. He said he could see how it would all turn out; they would mourn him like they mourn Janie Rose, not sad he died but sorry they hadn’t liked him more. He’d rather they be sad he died, he said.”
“Oh, now,” said James. “He’s been on that for days. It’ll pass.”
“Will you listen? I can’t hardly sleep nights, for thinking about it. I keep wondering if he’s all right.”
“Of course he’s all right,” James said.
But Maisie was still hunching over, frowning into space. Her ice cream was forgotten. A child ran by, chased by another child, grabbing Maisie’s knee for support as he pivoted past her, and Maisie only brushed his hand away absentmindedly. “Those times he goes away,” she said finally, “those times he starts to get better and then goes off drinking for a night and can’t be found
till morning. He’ll die of it.”
“He won’t die,” said James. “He could lead a life like any other man, if he wasn’t so scared of needles.”
“He might die,” Maisie said. “What if one of those nights of his, he don’t come back?”
But James was getting tired of this. “Look,” he said firmly. He swallowed the last of his ice cream and said, “Ansel only goes so far, you notice. Only enough to worry people. You ever thought of that?”
“What? Well, if that isn’t the coldest thing. How do you know how far he’ll go?”
“I just do,” James said. “I been through this.”
“Can you say for sure how far he’ll go?”
“I been through it hundreds of times.”
“I believe you don’t even give it a thought,” said Maisie. “That’s what Ansel said. He said, ‘What does James care—’ ”
“Well, we’ve got to be clearheaded about this,” James said.
“You’re clearheaded, all right.” She jabbed her spoon into her ice cream and left it there, standing straight up in the middle of the cup. “ ‘What does James care,’ he said, and then just lay there with his eyes all blurry—”
“I do everything I can think of,” said James.
“Oh, foot.”
“I try everything I know.”
“Then tell me this, if you do so much all-fired good. Can you say that never, never once in all your life, have you thought about Ansel’s going off and letting you be someday?”
“Well, for—”
“Never thought how nice it would be to live on your own for a change, just one little old TV dinner to pop into the—”
“I try everything I know!” James shouted, and then noticed how loud his voice was and lowered it. “I mean—”
But Maisie just folded in the rim of her Dixie cup with all her concentration, as if her mind was made up. Then she rose and said, “Well, I’ll be seeing you.” Her skirt was rumpled in back, but she didn’t bother smoothing it down. When she walked away James stood up, from force of habit, and waited until she was halfway across the yard before he sat down again. Inside he felt slow and heavy; he was chewing on his lower lip, the way he did when he didn’t know what to say. All the way across the yard he watched her, and turned his empty ice cream cup around and around in his hands.