Jamie jumped past the pole just in time; the car roared by.
There now. Mama would be all well again.
He walked along some more.
Forget about her. Forget about wishes and things, he told himself. But it was tempting, like a hot pie on a windowsill. He had to touch it. He couldn"t leave it be, oh, no. He looked ahead on the road and behind on the road.
"I bet I can get down to Schabold"s ranch gate before another car comes and do it walking easy," he declared to the sky. "And that will make Mama well all the quicker."
At this moment, in a traitorous, mechanical action, a car jumped over the low hill behind him and roared forward.
Jamie walked fast, then began to run.
I bet I can get down to Schabold"s gate, I bet I can- Feet up, feet down.
He stumbled.
He fell into the ditch, his books fluttering about like dry, white birds. When he got up, sucking his lips, the gate was only twenty yards farther on.
The car motored by him in a large cloud of dust.
"I take it back, I take it back," cried Jamie. "I take it back, what I said, I didn"t mean it."
With a sudden bleat of terror, he ran for home. It was all his fault, all his fault!
The doctor"s car stood in front of the house.
Through the window, Mama looked sicker. The doctor closed up his little black bag and looked at Dad a long time with strange lights in his little black eyes.
Jamie ran out onto the desert to walk alone. He did not cry. He was paralyzed, and he walked like an iron child, hating himself, blundering into the dry riverbed, kicking at p.r.i.c.kly pears and stumbling again and again.
Hours later, with the first stars, he came home to find Dad standing beside Mama"s bed and Mama not saying much-just lying there like fallen snow, so quiet. Dad tightened his jaw, screwed up his eyes, caved in his chest, and put his head down.
Jamie took up a station at the end of the bed and stared at Mama, shouting instructions in his mind to her.
Get well, get well, Ma, get well, you"ll be all right, sure you"ll be fine, I command it, you"ll be fine, you"ll be swell, you just get up and dance around, we need you, Dad and I do, wouldn"t be good without you, get well, Ma, get well, Ma. Get well!
The fierce energy lashed out from him silently, wrapping, cuddling her and beating into her sickness, tendering her heart. Jamie felt glorified in his warm power.
She would get well. She must! Why, it was silly to think any other way. Ma just wasn"t the dying sort.
Dad moved suddenly. It was a stiff movement with a jerking of breath. He held Mama"s wrists so hard he might have broken them. He lay against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s sounding the heart and Jamie screamed inside.
Ma, don"t, Ma, don"t, oh, Ma, please don"t give up.
Dad got up, swaying.
She was dead.
Inside the walls of Jericho that was Jamie"s mind, a thought went screaming about in one last drive of power: Yes, she"s dead, all right, so she is dead, so what if she is dead? Bring her back to life again, yes, make her live again, Lazarus, come forth, Lazarus, Lazarus, come forth from the tomb, Lazarus, come forth.
He must have been babbling aloud, for Dad turned and glared at him in old, ancient horror and struck him bluntly across the mouth to shut him up.
Jamie sank against the bed, mouthing into the cold blankets, and the walls of Jericho crumbled and fell down about him.
Jamie returned to school a week later. He did not stride into the schoolyard with his old a.s.surance; he did not bend imperiously at the fountain; nor did he pa.s.s his tests with anything more than a grade of seventy-five.
The children wondered what had happened to him. He was never quite the same.
They did not know that Jamie had given up his role. He could not tell them. They did not know what they had lost.
A FAR-AWAY GUITAR.
OLD MISS BIDWELL USED TO SIT with a lemonade gla.s.s in her hand in her squeaking rocker on the porch of her house on Saint James Street every summer night from seven until nine. At nine, you could hear the front door tap shut, the bra.s.s key turn in the lock, the blinds rustle down, and the lights click out.
Her routine varied in no detail; she lived alone with a house full of rococo pictures, a dusty library, a yellow-mouthed piano, and a music box which, when she wound it up and set it going, p.r.i.c.kled the air like the bubbles from lemon soda pop. Miss Bidwell had a nod for everyone walking by, and it was interesting that her house had no front steps leading up to its wooden porch. No front steps, and no back steps. For Miss Bidwell hadn"t left her house in forty years. In the year 1911, she had had the back and the front steps completely torn down and the porches railed in.
In the autumn-the closing-up, the nailing-in, the hiding-away time-she would have one last lemonade on her cooling, bleak porch; then she would carry her wicker chair inside, and no one would see her again until the next spring.
"There she goes," said Mr. Widmer, the grocer, pointing with the red apple in his hand. "Take a good look at her." He tapped the wall calendar. "Nine o"clock of an evening in the month of September, the day after Labor Day."
Several customers peered over at Miss Bidwell"s house. There was the old lady, looking around for a final time; then she went inside.
"Won"t see her again until May first," said Mr. Widmer. "There"s a trapdoor in her kitchen wall. I unlock that trapdoor and shove the groceries in. There"s an envelope there, with money in it and a list of the things she wants. I never see her."
"What"s she do all winter?"
"Only the Lord knows. She"s had a "phone for forty years and never used it."
Miss Bidwell"s house was dark.
Mr. Widmer bit into his apple, enjoying its crisp succulence. "Forty years ago, she had the front steps taken away."
"Why? Folks die?"
"They died before that."
"Husband or children die?"
"Never had no children nor husband. She held hands with a young man who had all kinds of notions about traveling. They were going to be married. He used to sit and play the guitar and sing to her on that porch. One day he just went to the railway station and bought one ticket for Arizona, California, and China."
"That"s a long time for a woman to carry a torch."
They laughed quietly and solemnly, for it was a sad admission they had made.
"Suppose she"ll ever come out?"
"When you"re seventy? All I do every year is wait for the first of May. If she don"t come out on the porch that day and set up her chair, I"ll know for sure she"s dead. Then I"ll "phone the police."
"Good night," said everyone, and left Mr. Widmer alone in the gray light of his grocery shop.
Mr. Widmer put on his coat and listened to the whining of the wind grow stronger. Yes, every year. And every year at this time he"d watched the old woman become more of an old woman. She was as remote as one of those barometers where the woman comes out for fair weather and the man appears for bad. But what a broken instrument, with only the woman coming out and coming out alone, and never a man at all, for bad or for better. How many thousands of July and August nights had he seen her there, beyond her moat of green gra.s.s which was as impa.s.sable as a crocodile stream? Forty years of small-town nights. How much might they weigh if put to the scale? A feather to himself, but how much to her?
Mr. Widmer was putting on his hat when he saw the man.
The man came along the street, on the other side: an old man, dim in the light of the single corner street lamp. He was looking at all the house numbers, and when he came to the corner house, number 11, he stopped and looked at the lightless windows.
"It couldn"t be," said Mr. Widmer. He turned out the light and stood in the warm grocery smell of his shop, watching the old man through the plate gla.s.s. "Not after this much time." He shook his head. It was much more than ridiculous, for hadn"t he felt his heart quicken at least once a day, every day, for four decades whenever he saw a man pa.s.s or pause by Miss Bidwell"s? Every man in the history of the town who so much as tied a shoelace in front of her locked house had been a source of wonder to Mr. Widmer.
"Are you the young man who ran off and left our Miss Bidwell?" he cried to himself.
Once, thirty years ago, white ap.r.o.n flapping, he had run across the brick street to confront a young man. "Well, so you came back!"
"What?" the young man said.
"Aren"t you Mr. Robert Farr, the one who brought her red carnations and played the guitar and sang?"
"The name"s Corley," and the young man drew forth silk samples to display and sell.
As the years pa.s.sed, Mr. Widmer had become frightened about one thing: Suppose Mr. Farr did come back some day, how was he to be recognized? In his mind, Mr. Widmer remembered the man as striding and young and very clean-faced. But forty years could peel a man away and dry his bones and tighten his flesh into a fine, acid etching. Perhaps some day Mr. Farr might return, like a hound to old trials, and, because of Mr. Widmer"s negligence, think the house locked and buried deep in another century, and go away, never the wiser. Perhaps it had happened already!
There stood the man, the old man, the unbelievable man, at nine-fifteen in the evening of the day after Labor Day in September. There was a slight bend to his knees and his back, and his face was turned to the Bidwell house.
"One last try," said Mr. Widmer. "Sticking my nose in."
He stepped lightly over the cool brick street and reached the farther curb. The old man turned toward him.
""Evening," said Mr. Widmer.
"I wonder if you could help me?" said the old man. "Is this the old Bidwell house?"
"Yes."
"Does anyone live there?"
"Miss Ann Bidwell, she"s still there."
"Thank you."
"Good night." And Mr. Widmer walked off, his heart pounding, cursing himself. Why didn"t you ask him, you idiot! Why didn"t you say, Mr. Farr? Is that you, Mr. Farr?
But he knew the answer. This time, he wanted it to be Mr. Farr. And the only way to insure that it was Mr. Farr was not to shatter the thin bubble of reality. Asking outright might have evoked an answer which would have crushed him all over again. No, I"m not Mr. Farr; no, I"m not him. But this way, by not asking, Mr. Widmer could go to his home tonight, could lie in his upstairs bed, and, for an hour or so, could imagine, with an ancient and implausible tinge of romanticism, that at last the wandering man had come home from long trackways of traveling and long years of other cities and other worlds. This sort of lie was the most pleasant in which to indulge. You don"t ask a dream if it is real, or you wake up. All right then, let that man-bill collector, dust-man, or whatever-for this night, at least, a.s.sume the ident.i.ty of a lost person.
Mr. Widmer walked back across the street, around the side of his shop, and up the narrow, dark stairs to where his wife was already in bed, asleep.
"Suppose it is him," he thought, in bed. "And he"s knocking on the house sides, knocking on the back door with a broom handle, tapping at the windows, calling her on the "phone, leaving his card poked under the doors, suppose?"
He turned on his side.
"Will she answer?" he wondered. "Will she pay attention, will she do anything? Or will she just sit in her house with the fenced-in porch and no steps going up or down to the door, and let him knock and call her name?"
He turned on his other side.
"Will we see her again next May first, and not until then? And will he wait until then . . . six months of knocking and calling her name and waiting?"
He got up and went to the window. There, far away over the green lawns, at the base of the huge, black house, by the porch which had no steps, stood the old man. And was it imagination or was his voice calling, calling there under the autumn trees, at the lightless windows?
The next morning, very early, Mr. Widmer looked down at Miss Bidwell"s lawn.
It was empty. "I doubt if he was even there," said Mr. Widmer. "I doubt I even talked to anyone but a lamp post. That apple was half cider; it turned my head."
It was seven o"clock; Mrs. Terle and Mrs. Adams came into the cold shop for bacon and eggs and milk. Mr. Widmer edged round the subject. "Say, you didn"t see no prowlers near Miss Bidwell"s last night, did you?"
"Were there some?" cried the ladies.
"Thought I saw some."
"I didn"t see no one," they said.
"It was the apple," murmured Mr. Widmer. "Pure cider."
The door slammed, and Mr. Widmer felt his spirits slump. Only he had seen, and the seeing must have been the rusted product of too many years of trying to live out another person"s life.
The streets were empty, but the town was slowly arising to life. The sun was a reddish ball over the courthouse clock. Dew still lay on everything in a cool blanket. Dew stood in bubbles on every gra.s.s blade, on every silent red brick; dripped from the elms and the maples and the empty apple trees.
He walked slowly and carefully across the empty street and stood on Miss Bidwell"s sidewalk. Her lawns, a vast green sea of dew that had fallen in the night, lay before him. Mr. Widmer felt again the warm pounding of his heart. For there, in the dew, circling and circling the house, where they had left fine, clear impressions, was a series of endless footprints, round and round, under the windows, near the bushes, at the doors. Footprints in the crystal gra.s.s, footprints that melted as the sun rose.
The day was a slow day. Mr. Widmer kept near the front of his shop, but saw nothing. At sunset, he sat smoking under the awning. "Maybe he"s gone, maybe he"ll never come back. She didn"t answer. I know her. She"s proud and old. The older the prouder, that"s what they say. Maybe he"s gone off on the train again. Why didn"t I ask him his name? Why didn"t I pound on the doors with him!"
But the fact remained that he hadn"t asked and he hadn"t pounded, and he felt himself the nucleus of a tragedy that was beginning to grow far beyond him.
"He won"t come back. Not after all night walking round. He must have left just before dawn. Footsteps still fresh."
Eight o"clock. Eight-thirty. Nothing. Nine o"clock. Nine-thirty. Nothing. Mr. Widmer stayed open until quite late, even though there were no customers.
It was after eleven when he sat by the upstairs window of his home, not watching exactly, but not going to bed either.
At eleven-thirty, the clock struck softly, and the old man came along the street and stood before the house.
"Of course!" said Mr. Widmer to himself. "He"s afraid someone will see him. He slept all day somewhere and waited. Afraid of what people might say. Look at him there, going round and round."