And now we could already see them, gigantic and white, taller on their marble pedestals than the rose-and-honeysuckle-choked fence, looming into the very trees themselves, the magnolias and cedars and elms, gazing forever eastward with their empty marble eyes—not symbols: not angels of mercy or winged seraphim or lambs or shepherds, but effigies of the actual people themselves as they had been in life, in marble now, durable, impervious, heroic in size, towering above their dust in the implacable tradition of our strong, uncompromising, grimly ebullient Baptist-Methodist Protestantism, carved in Italian stone by expensive Italian craftsmen and shipped the long costly way by sea back to become one more among the invincible sentinels guarding the temple of our Southern mores, extending from banker and merchant and planter down to the last tenant farmer who owned neither the plow he guided nor the mule which drew it, which decreed, demanded that, no matter how Spartan the life, in death the significance of dollars and cents was abolished: that Grandmother might have split stovewood right up to the day she died, yet she must enter the earth in satin and mahogany and silver handles even though the first two were synthetic and the third was german—a ceremony not at all to death nor even to the moment of death, but to decorum: the victim of accident or even murder represented in effigy not at the instant of his passing but at the peak of his sublimation, as though in death at last he denied forever the griefs and follies of human affairs.
Grandmother too; the hearse stopped at last beside the raw yawn of the waiting pit, the preacher and the three old men in gray (with the dangling meaningless bronze medals which didn’t signify valor but only reunions, since in that war all the men on both sides had been brave and so the only accolades for individual distinction were the lead ones out of the muskets of firing squads) waiting beside it, now carrying shotguns, while the pallbearers removed the flowers and then the casket from the hearse; Grandmother too in her bustle and puffed sleeves and the face which we remembered save for the empty eyes, musing at nothing while the casket sank and the preacher found a place to stop at last and the first clod made that profound quiet half-hollow sound on the invisible wood and the three old men fired their ragged volley and raised their quavering and ragged yell.
Grandmother too. I could remember that day six years ago, the family gathered, Father and Mother and Maggie and I in the surrey because Grandfather rode his horse—the cemetery, our lot. Grandmother’s effigy pristine and dazzling now out of its packing case, tall on the dazzling pedestal above the grave itself, the undertaker, hat in hand, and the Negro workmen who had sweated it erect, withdrawn to one side for us, the family, to look at it and approve. And in another year, after the tedious carving in Italy and the long Atlantic ship, Grandfather too on his pedestal beside her, not as the soldier which he had been and as I wanted him, but—in the old hard unalterable tradition of apotheosis’ apogee—the lawyer, parliamentarian, the orator which he was not: in frock coat, the bare head thrown back, the carven tome carved open in one carven hand and the other extended in the immemorial gesture of declamation, this time Mother and Maggie and I in the surrey because Father was now on the horse, come for the formal private inspection and approval.
And three or four times a year I would come back, I would not know why, alone to look at them, not just at Grandfather and Grandmother but at all of them looming among the lush green of summer and the regal blaze of fall and the rain and ruin of winter before spring would bloom again, stained now, a little darkened by time and weather and endurance but still serene, impervious, remote, gazing at nothing, not like sentinels, not defending the living from the dead by means of their vast ton-measured weight and mass, but rather the dead from the living; shielding instead the vacant and dissolving bones, the harmless and defenseless dust, from the anguish and grief and inhumanity of mankind.
III
UNPUBLISHED
STORIES
Adolescence
I
She was not indigenous to this section. Having been foisted upon it by the blind machinations of fate and of a still blinder county School Board, she would remain, to the end of her days, a stranger to this land of pine and rain gullied hills and fecund river bottoms. Hers should have been a background of faintly sentimental decadence, of formal ease among rites of tea and graceful pointless activities.
A smallish woman with enormous dark eyes, who found in the physically crude courtship of Joe Bunden the false romance with which she had banked the fires of her presbyterian inhibitions. The first ten months of her married life—a time of unprecedented manual labor—failed to destroy her illusions; her mental life, projected forward about her expected child, supported her. She had hoped for twins, to be called Romeo and Juliet, but she was forced to lavish her starved affections on Juliet alone. Her husband condoned this choice of name with a tolerant guffaw. Paternity rested but lightly upon him: like the male of his kind, he regarded the inevitable arrival of children as one of the unavoidable inconveniences of marriage, like the risk of wetting the feet while fishing.
In regular succession thereafter appeared Cyril, one day to be sent to the State Legislature, Jeff Davis, who was finally hung in Texas for stealing a horse; then another boy whom, her spirit broken, she was too apathetic to name at all and who, as a matter of convenience, answered to Bud, and became a professor of latin with a penchant for Catullus at a small mid-western university. The fifth and last was born four years and seven months after her marriage; but from this event she fortunately failed to recover, whereupon Joe Bunden in an unusual access of sentimental remorse named his youngest son for himself, and married again. The second Mrs Bunden was a tall angular shrew who, serving as an instrument of retribution, was known to beat him soundly on occasion with stove wood.
The first official act of the new regime was to dispense with Juliet, which became Jule; and from that day Juliet and her stepmother, between whom an instinctive antipathy had smoldered on sight, hated each other openly. It was two years later, however, before conditions became unbearable. At seven Juliet was an elfish creature, thin as a reed and brown as a berry, with narrow eyes as black and depthless as a toy animal’s and a shock of sun-burned black hair. A hoyden who cuffed her duller witted brothers impartially and cursed her parents with shocking fluency. Joe Bunden, in his periodical fits of maudlin inebriation, wept at the disintegration of his family and implored her to be kinder to her step-mother. The breach between the two was impassable so at last, to attain some sort of peace, he was forced to send Juliet to his mother.
Here everything was different, so much so that her defiant protest against the existing order became only a puzzled belligerence; and, after a while, a negative sort of happiness in the absence of any emotional stress. There was work to be done here as well, in house and kitchen garden, but the two of them lived smoothly together. Her grandmother, having passed the troubling ramifications of sex, was wise; and she controlled Juliet so subtly that there was never friction between them. She possessed at last undisturbed the quiet and privacy she desired.
The household whose storm center she had been would not have known her. The change, coming at a crucial time, had purged her of her fierce sensitive pride, of her restlessness and nervous bellicosity as her former life had purged her of all animal parental affection. The mere mention of father or brothers, however, roused in her all her once uncontrolled turbulence, dormant now, but dynamic as ever.
At twelve she was unchanged. Taller and quieter, perhaps, but still brown and thin and active as a cat; hatless in faded gingham, bare feet or wearing shapeless broken shoes; shy with strangers who occasionally stopped at the house or gawky and uncomfortable in hat and stockings on their rare trips to the county seat. Her father and brothers she avoided always with a passionate animal cunning. She could climb faster and surer than a boy; and naked and flashing, she spent hours in a brown pool of the creek. Evenings she sat and dangled her legs from the edge of the porch while her grandmother from the doorway filled the quiet twilight with burning home
cured tobacco.
II
A happy time, with duties to be done, and pride in her flat body, climbing and swimming and sleep. Happier still, for in her thirteenth summer she found a companion. She discovered him while swimming lazily in her pool. Looking up at a sound she saw him, in faded overalls, watching her from the bank. Once or twice before strangers, hearing the splash of her dive, had parted the underbrush upon her. As long as they watched her in silence she regarded them with a belligerent indifference, but once they tried to engage her in talk she left the water in a mounting sultry hatred and gathered up her few garments.
This time it was a boy about her own age, in a sleeveless undershirt and with the sun on his round crisp head innocent of brush, staring at her silently, and it did not even occur to her that she was undisturbed. He followed her slow movements for a while in quiet provincial curiosity and without rudeness, but at last the cool brown flashing of the water was too much for him.
“Gosh,” he said, “kin I come in?”
Lazily floating she made no reply, but he waited for none. With a few uncomplex motions he divested himself of his wretched garments. His skin was like old paper, and he climbed out on a limb above the water. “Whee, watch me,” he shrilled; and writhing awkwardly, dived with a prodigious splash into the pool.
“That aint divin’,” she told him calmly, on his spluttering reappearance, “lemme show you.” And while he floated and watched her, she climbed to the limb in turn and stood precariously erect a moment, her flat gleaming body a replica of his. She dived.
“Gosh, that’s right, lemme see kin I.” For an hour they took turns. At last, wearied and with humming heads, they followed the stream until the water became shallow, and lay down in the hot sand. He told her his name was Lee, “fum acrost the river;” and they lay in silent companionship, falling asleep finally, and awoke hungry. “Les git some plums,” he suggested, and they returned to the pool and donned their clothes.
III
This was the happy time, so clear and untroubled that she forgot it had not been like this forever; that he and she could not remain unchanged, two animals in an eternal summer. Hunting berries when hungry, swimming in the bright hot noon, fishing in the quiet level afternoon, and scuffing the dew-heavy grass homeward in twilight. Lee, surprisingly, seemed to have no responsibilities whatever; he apparently suffered no compulsions at all, nor did he ever mention home or refer to any other life except that which the two of them led together. But this was not strange to her: her childhood had inculcated her with an early realization of the eternal feud between parent and child, and it had never occurred to her that any childhood could be different from her own.
Her grandmother had never seen Lee, and so far circumstances had fallen in with her own wishes: her grandmother should never see him. For Juliet feared the older woman would feel it her duty to interfere in some manner. So she was careful not to neglect her work in any way, or to arouse a suspicion in the other’s mind. With the cunning which a child who learns young from experience gains, she realized that their companionship would remain uninterrupted only so long as it was unknown to those possessing authority over her. She did not mistrust her grandmother particularly, she did not trust any one at all; not even, though certain of herself, Lee’s ability to cope with an older person’s active disapproval.
August came and went, and September. Through October and early November they dived and swam; but after the first light frosts the air became perceptibly cooler, though the water was still warm. They swam now only at noon and afterward lay together, wrapped in an old horse blanket, talking and dozing and talking. Winter followed the late November rains but there was still the brown sodden woods, and they built fires and roasted corn and sweet potatoes.
Winter at last. A time of dark iron dawns and an icy floor to curl the toes of bare feet while she dressed, of fires to be built in a cold stove. Later when heat had clouded the window panes of the tight little kitchen and the dishes and churning done, she cleared a pane with the corner of her apron and staring out, saw him waiting for her, a tiny figure on the brown edge of the bottom land below the house. He had acquired an ancient single barrelled shot gun and they hunted rabbits in the skeletoned cotton and corn fields or futilely stalked ducks in the marshy back-waters. But at last winter was gone.
At last winter was gone. The wind shifted southward and the rains came: the creek was sullenly full, muddy and cold. Then the sun, and they found the first willow shoots and the first red birds like flaming arrows in the tangled brier. The fruit trees bloomed in gusts of pink and white, clustering like fragrant bees about the weathered grey hives of houses and stained hay ricks; and beneath capricious marbled skies on which slender trees drunkenly leaned the wind sucked among the pine uplands like a remote long passing of far away trains.
On the first warm day Lee waited for her impatiently. And she, clattering recklessly and ineffectively at a dark sink, could stand it no longer. “First in,” he whooped when she appeared running, a damp cloth flapping behind, and they raced creekward undressing as they ran. The two plunges were simultaneous, though in her haste she had neglected to kick off her shoes. She stamped out of them to Lee’s raucous merriment, gasping at the shock of the icy water.
“Why, you’ve got white again,” she said in surprise, as he climbed the tree to dive. He was startlingly white: last summer’s tan had faded from them both during the winter, and they felt almost like strangers. During the cold months, as the temperature lowered, she had donned successive layers of clothing: so that now, compared with her former bulk, she seemed extremely thin. She had also, in her fourteenth year, reached the gawky stage; and beside Lee’s smooth ivory symmetry her thin arms and shoulders and little bony hips made her appear almost ugly.
The water was too cold for them so after diving once or twice they got out, shivering, and raced through the woods until their blood was warm again. Then they dressed, and Lee produced two fishing lines and a tin can containing a complexity of red worms. “It’ll be warmer tomorrer,” he assured her.
Not tomorrow, but in a few weeks the water was warmer, and as the days grew longer their strange whiteness of skin disappeared and soon they were as brown as ever. And another year had passed.
IV
They lay together, wrapped in the horse blanket beneath the high bright October noon, dozing and waking; almost too warm in the generated heat of their two young bodies to be perfectly comfortable. The heat, the scratchy roughness of the blanket made Juliet restless: she turned and changed the position of her limbs, and changed again. The sun beat on their faces in a slow succession of blows, too blinding to allow them to open their eyes.
“Lee,” she spoke at last.
“Huh?” drowsily.
“Lee, what you goin’ to do when you get to be a man?”
“Aint goin’ to do nothin’. ”
“Nothin’? How you goin’ to get along without doin’ nothin’?”
“Dunno.”
She raised herself on her elbow. Lee’s tousled round head was burrowed into the hot sand. She shook him. “Lee! Wake up.”
His eyes were startling in his dark face, the color of wood ashes. He closed them quickly, crooking his arm above. “Aw, gosh, what you worryin’ about when we grow up for? I dont want to grow up: I rather stay like this—swimmin’ and huntin’ and fishin’. Aint this better’n bein’ a man and havin’ to plow and chop cotton and corn?”
“But you cant stay like this always: you got to grow up and work some day.”
“Well, les wait till we’re growed up ’fore we start worryin’ about it.”
She lay back again and closed her eyes. Bright sun spots danced before and behind her lids, madly and redly. But she was not satisfied: her feminine insistence was not to be placated so easily. As she was vaguely troubled and sad, like the changing year, with an intimation of mortality and mutability, learning that nothing is changeless save change. They were voluptuously silent in the strong refulg
ence of sunlight until a sound caused Juliet to open her eyes.
Ludicrously inverted above her stood her grandmother, a shapeless hunched figure against the bland ineffable blue of the sky. The old woman and the girl stared at each other for a space, then Juliet closed her eyes again.
“Git up,” said the old woman.
Juliet opened her eyes and half rose, pushing back her shock of hair with the bend of a bare arm. Lee, motionless on his back, gazed up at the figure standing over them shaking with the palsy of extreme age.
“So this is what’s been goin’ on behind my back, is it? This is how come you never have time to half do your work, hey? This is how come we got to have a nigger to cook and clean up?” She mumbled and chuckled, “Git up, I tell ye.”
They did not move. It had all happened so quickly that their sleep-clogged brains refused to function. So they lay and stared at her while she wagged her mask of a face above them. She raised her stick and shook it.
“Git up, ye slut!” she quavered in sudden anger.
They rose and stood side by side in the implacable sunlight like two bronze carvings. The toothless mouthing face and its bleared dim eyes wavered before them.
“Stark nekked, both of ye. Your paw told me you was wild, but I never thought to find you a layin’ up with some body I never see before. And this aint the first one neither, I bound you! You with your innocent ways, likin’ to fish and roam the country by yerselfl Do you know what you’ve done? Spiled yer chances for gittin’ a decent, well-to-do husband, that’s what you’ve done.”