Читать книгу Kings Row - Henry Bellamann - Страница 19

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Sam Winters leaned on the short-handled, wooden-toothed rake he had been using, and mopped the sweatband of his heavy felt hat. The late September sun slanted through the tall trees of the Old South Cemetery and touched the white marble and gray sandstone monuments with dusty gilt. The trees billowed upward like pillars of cloud. The ground was strewn with colored leaves. The stretch of sward just cleared of them was emerald fresh and bright—all the glistening blades combed one way. Swales of brilliant leaves lay to left and right like the heaping of fabulous treasures.

Sam Winters was as oblivious of this prodigal fall beauty as the headstones clustering about him. Just now he was watching John Farrel. “Old John” was nearing eighty and was wobbly about the knees. As he teetered along he peered sideways with a look of eager curiosity. His interest in the Old South Cemetery was rather morbid. Most of his associates and acquaintances lay under the grass that waved liquidly across the wide area.

Old John came here often. He liked to remind himself of departed friends. Also he liked to remind himself that he was still aboveground. Walking beside the graves of the men he had known and talked with emphasized the life that still moved slowly through his ancient veins. He could see, and breathe, and feel. They were still and dead—boxed up and buried—insensate and rotting.

He came here two or three times each week. These visits gave him the keenest pleasure he knew. From time to time he would cover his mouth with his dry old hand to hide an expression of triumph. Then he would look cautiously about. He had a superstitious fear that some invisible power might observe this joy and take instant vengeance. Behind his hand he silently smacked his wet lips and forbore to smile.

Sam Winters missed little of this. His eyes narrowed with a sly but unrancorous amusement.

“Hi, John!”

“Oh, oh! How are you, Sam? Didn’t see you.”

“Pickin’ out a place for yourself, John? Thought you’d a-done that long ago. You’ll be needin’ it one of these days.”

Farrel’s eyes winked rapidly with anger. “Ain’t picked out a place, an’ I ain’t goin’ to. Leave that for somebody else to do—” he hesitated and added under his breath, “when the time comes.”

But Sam heard the muttered words. “Oh, the time’ll come all right. I’ll be digging a hole for you some cold winter mornin’.”

“Not you, Sam Winters! Lay you money I’ll outlive you. I’ve outlived a heap of ’em now—a heap of ’em.”

“Well, you won’t outlive everybody.”

“Ever’body’s got his time. No use worryin’ till it comes.”

“That’s right, that’s right.” Sam spoke conciliatingly. “Still,” he went on with a covert shine in his cool blue eyes, “there’s some like that fellow there.” He pointed at Farrel’s feet. The old man looked down quickly.

“What you mean, Sam?”

“That fellow whose grave you’re standin’ on.”

Farrel made a violent side step that almost threw him off balance. “What about him? Whose grave is it?”

“Morris Reagan. Recollect him?”

“Morris Reagan? Reagan—Reagan. No, no. Who was Morris Reagan?”

“Fellow got in a shootin’ scrape down at Faulter’s saloon. He shot Dorsey Sims. He was hung. I hung him myself—let’s see—twelve years ago the sixteenth of December. Well—he didn’t have to wait for his time. Judge Golden set the time fer him, an’ I did the job. Neat job, too.”

He made a gesture that ended with a swish and slap. “Just like that! You could a-heard his neck crack a hundred yards away. Never knew what hit him. I buried him right there next day—at the county’s expense.”

Sam raked a few leaves from the low unmarked mound, and tamped down an irregularity in the sod.

John Farrel walked away as fast as he could, and Sam resumed his work.

Peter McGurney, who kept the general store at Federal and Walnut Streets, once remarked: “Sam Winters does have the damnedest jobs I ever heard of.” Which was true. Sam had been the deputy sheriff of Burton County for many years. As such he was the official hangman. Sometimes he was summoned to neighboring counties for executions. He said he had hanged twenty men and one woman.

If some tramp was run over in the railroad yard, it was Sam who collected the remains. If a Negro was lynched, Sam cut down the body and buried it.

“By God, I can do anything,” he boasted.

“Remember Tom Shirly? He killed a woman down in the Westbrook bottoms. Mob got after him but I beat ’em to him with the bloodhounds. Stood ’em off, too. I took Tom to jail. Fed him for six months before the trial and afterward while he was waiting to get hung. I hung him, too; buried him, and a year later dug him up—what was left of him—and sent him to his folks down in Indian Territory. Hell, there ain’t nothing I can’t do.”

Between more spectacular jobs Sam took care of the Old South Cemetery and acted as a sort of handy man at the insane asylum. He was assigned to the morgue there.

Sam looked as though he might be made out of some particularly durable kind of leather. His face was splotched with large areas of red and brown. He said the brown spots were freckles that had “run.” It was not a cruel, nor even a callous face. It was simply a face that had never registered feeling of any kind. It was easy to believe that he had never experienced feeling. What he had to do he did directly and indifferently. He acted as simply and as immediately as gravitation.

He lived alone in a tiny house at the edge of the cemetery and took his meals at Mrs. Monaghan’s boardinghouse. No one knew anything about his more intimate habits. He kept busy at his strange jobs, and talked but little. He had no real thoughts—only recollections.

The morning chill vanished. Sam squinted at the sun. Must be about eleven o’clock, he decided. He thrust the handle of the rake into the soft soil and set it firmly upright. Then he sat down on a wide flat tomb and fanned himself with his hat. Absently, he noted the brickwork supporting the moss-covered slab. Scratching the ancient lichens from the lettering, he read: john love, died july 10, 1780. Sam did not think of the long century of days and seasons that had passed over this forgotten grave or wonder about the man whose name it bore. He thought the brickwork was a good job—“A damn good job,” he said aloud. “They knew how to do things in the old days.” His sharp eyes appraised this and that burial plot with a certain grim matter-of-factness that came from a sure knowledge of the state of things underground as well as above.

“Guess I’ll go get a glass of beer.”

He walked heavily toward the stile, pausing now and then to scan some headstone that looked out of plumb.

“Mis’ Sheeley’s leaning way over a’ready. Ain’t been there a year.” Sam called each stone by the name of the person beneath. He considered the Greenway family plot near the gate. “H’m.” He shook his head. “They ought to clean the old man up a little. You can’t make out a word of that readin’ any more. That sandstone goes quicker’n one of them thirty-dollar coffins.”

He crossed the stile with stiff, mechanical steps. His movements might have reminded an observer of a badly made, animated effigy. As he passed the Bascom house he touched his hat brim to Mrs. Evelina Bascom who was sitting on the porch.

“Good mornin’, ma’am.”

“Good mornin’, Sam.”

She watched him idly for a moment and resumed her morning snack. She was eating thin strips of bread and butter. The thumb was missing from Evelina’s left hand, and she held the pieces of bread between her index and middle fingers, as men hold a cigar. This gesture imparted to her quiet little repast an air of rakish festivity. Her eyes still followed Sam Winters.

“Old buzzard,” she said to herself.

Finishing the bread and butter, she wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and the back of her hand on her blue-checked apron. Balancing the empty plate on the slanting porch rail, she rocked with a sort of idle vigor. Her farsighted gaze traveled between the houses on the other side of the street, across the town creek where a dazzle of light shuttled briskly, over the rise and along the south road toward the open country. But her mind outran her vision. She was thinking of the rough river hills which lay in that direction, and the shaggy slopes of scrub oak which marked the beginning of poorer land. That was what the whole country looked like when she came West with her father. That was—Lord, Lord!—that was away back in eighteen twenty-something. She wasn’t certain about the date just now. Anyway, all of seventy years ago, maybe seventy-five—yes, it had been seventy-five years. She was eighty-one now, and she had been six when Pa brought her there.

Kings Row was already a town then. She wondered why it was that those long-gone days seemed now to have been much like this bright sunny one. True, she could remember the winters. Cold—terribly cold, but more days like this one. There couldn’t have been more early fall then than any other time. But time was so different—much slower, and not broken up into such little bits as now, each one hurrying after the other like pieces of ice on the creek in a March freshet. There had been only seasons then. Great wide seasons—long arcs of time that stood over one like high heaven itself. Now it was different. There were too many events—Fourth of July celebrations, political rallies, county fairs, college commencements, and the like. Left a body downright breathless keeping up with them. Broke up time into too many pieces—small, hurrying pieces, rushing to catch something that was always ahead. Spoiled any kind of thinking. Spoiled people, too. People used to be big—like the place and the time. They didn’t move too fast. There had been a kind of peace that went with those great stretches of blue time arching over the seasons. Yes, people were big then, like Pa, like Thurston St. George, like Mason Thill, dead now, poor soul, and—yes, like herself, too. She felt crowded. People talked so much and about too many things. They didn’t finish one subject by half before they were already talking about something else. They nicked up time—that’s what they did—nicked it up into little pieces. One little piece for this and another little piece for that. Made themselves little, too, to fit into the pieces. That’s what made the days seem so short, and—so little. Now the world was just like a crazy quilt. Nobody could say a crazy quilt was restful, either.

Big things happened back there. When she was a child Pa still talked about the British and 1812. Then there was the Mexican War, but nobody heard much about that. And the gold rush. Her two youngest boys went out, but they weren’t lucky. Brought back mighty little. The ring she wore had been made out of gold they found. She guessed that was about all, too. Then the Civil War with first one side and then the other burning the town. Pa preached on Sundays, and played the fiddle whenever a few young people could get together. She smiled, remembering the Saturday night he had played all night while the Rebs burned his church to the ground. Everybody thought it was a good joke on Pa. Next day he preached in Gilkey’s tobacco barn. After the war people didn’t want them because they had come from the North. Bushwhackers shot at Pa now and then. But they had stayed on.

She remembered the James boys. They had made quite a bit of excitement. There were contradictory tales about the Jameses. From what she had heard of Jesse he seemed a likable kind of a man. If she’d been a young woman she’d have liked to marry Jesse James.

Nothing like those things happened now. Whole business tamed down.

She peered at the sky. H’m. Eleven, or a quarter past. She arose, picked up the plate which had warmed in the sun, and walked firmly into the house.

In the narrow hall she passed beneath the portrait of her husband. She seldom noticed it, but today it caught her attention for a moment. He had been a good man. Many people had come to sit and talk with her after he died. They thought she must be lonesome. But she hadn’t been. She had felt like a free horse in a pasture.

On the back porch she surveyed her little garden patch. She took a short spade from a covered box.

“I think I’ll bank up some of that fall cabbage for the winter. We’ll be having frost the first thing we know.”

The thought of Sam Winters crossed her mind again. She grunted. “That Sam Winters!” The tone expelled some unpleasantness with it. He was associated in some way with the hidden and secret and disagreeable necessities of living. She supposed there had to be people like Sam. Life and living had a good many nasty incidents. Death had some pretty bad things about it. Birth was messy—for that matter, the whole getting of children wasn’t any too nice to think about.

Sam Winters, now. He was a pretty good example of the way nature worked. Yes—there had to be people like that. Just as she had to have a privy down at the end of her garden. Life had front porches, and privies. Sam belonged at the lower end of the garden. She believed the Bible said something about all this, but she couldn’t recollect just what it was. The Bible, though, had something to say about most everything. “It’s right wonderful that way,” she concluded.

In the meantime Sam continued on his way toward Faulter’s saloon. Old Farrel had gone the opposite direction. He was out at the edge of town now where the open country began. He had walked fast and was breathing hard. He worked his jaws, and tiny bubbles of saliva glistened in the corners of his mouth. He, too, was thinking of Sam Winters, and hating him. He was really afraid of Sam. Sam represented something indifferent, implacable, and inevitable. He meant death, and gravedigging, and burial, but he wouldn’t admit either the words or the images to his consciousness. He only knew that he disliked Sam more than he disliked anyone.

He thought Sam’s mouth looked like the rough, hard edge of a milk crock.

Father Donovan coming up from the lower end of town passed Sam just where the row of Lombardy poplars began in front of Mr. Foy’s house. They spoke: Sam with a sort of hard reserve—he didn’t like priests; Father Donovan with another kind of reserve—he didn’t like Sam. “He does some bad things—some very bad things.”

Sam walked on.

In the stillness of this September noon, his passing sent out a little slanting wave on either side of him, breaking the secret calm of the hour the way a water creature breaks the surface of a quiet lake. The waves sped out on either side, widening, and perhaps rolling more as they widened. Father Donovan felt that he could see those waves. They touched people and moved them, disturbed them, set them to doing this or that, set them to thinking or feeling something they would not otherwise have thought or felt. On the surface of the imaginary lake in Father Donovan’s vision clusters of leaves moved, shifted, changed relations. Here in the three-dimensional mirror of this hour, people moved like the little yellow leaves of his fancy. Shifts were made. New patterns formed. A dance changed time—and figure. Infinite angels on a needle’s point—infinite angels again....

The priest stumbled a little where a root had lifted a flagstone in front of Lafe King’s gate. His lips twitched in the beginning of a wry smile. His visions and his fancies were always being broken by some trivial awkwardness. It was a good thing, he supposed. There was no telling, otherwise, where his imagination might carry him.

Isaac Skeffington eased into the one comfortable chair gracing the office of Miles Jackson. The Colonel’s angled bones made him cautious about chairs. His eyes, old and a bit rheumy behind double glasses, glinted with malice. Jackson, milder of face than the Colonel, smiled.

“What’s on your mind, Ike?”

“Not a thing. Just thinking, though, as I came around the square. This damn town’s changing so I hardly know it.”

“The city administration would be pleased to hear that ‘old inhabitant’ notes signs of progress.”

Skeffington spat. “Progress! Hell. Sansome’s a young squirt. Every time we get a new mayor in Kings Row he thinks he has to tear up something to show how earnest he is. Look at those sidewalks on Union Street! What they call it!—granitoid. Hell of a name, anyhow. Looks ugly; hurts your feet; imitation of something or other. You know, Miles, that’s what we’re coming to. Characteristic of the times. Every damn thing is an imitation of something else. Galvanized-iron false fronts on the new store buildings—sanded to make them look like stone. Posh!”

“I hear Sansome wants to cut down the trees around the Square.”

Skeffington glared. “What for?”

“He claims Kings Row looks like a village. Says we ought to imitate Camperville and some of the places that size....”

“We are a village. Got village ways—village minds. We’re country people! Anything wrong with that?”

“Well, Ike, I guess Sansome would say you aren’t exactly in line with progress.”

Jackson always declared Skeffington’s whiskers grew redder with his face when he was in a rage.

“Progress! You’re not progressing unless you’re going somewhere that’s a good place to go to. Oh, hell—let’s don’t talk about it. I’ll have a fit someday over that infernal young fool Hart Sansome, and I don’t want to pay him that much of a compliment.

“We stumble a lot; but I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t get somewhere with it.”

“You don’t believe any such stuff. You’re too smart—at least, I’ve always thought so. We’re no better off than we were when this town was a trading post. Old stock had the right ideas. We haven’t improved on ’em. Don’t grow that kind any more either, Jackson. You know that. Take all the old stock in the county—the old men, old women, too—look at ’em. Got anything to beat ’em, or to match ’em, even, coming up with the young ones?”

“Hart Sansome says—”

“Sansome’s a pissant.”

Jackson laughed. “I see there’s going to be a job for Sam Winters in Camperville. They found that young fellow guilty over there last week.”

“So I heard. Well, he was. Guilty as hell; no doubt about it.” Skeffington picked up his hat and smoothed it. “I saw Sam a little while ago. He was passing the time of day with that priest Donovan. God, this world makes me laugh! Donovan spending his life trying to teach faith to a handful of ignorant Irish and foreigners, and Sam standing around waiting for the chance to break their necks with a rope. Hell of a thing for a man to do, when you come to think of it. I don’t know anything that’ll give me goose bumps quicker than seeing Sam Winters sitting in the back of the courtroom during a murder trial.”

“Turkey buzzard, eh?”

“Worse. I swear I don’t believe Sam can keep his eyes off a man’s neck any more than Shoemaker Schwartz can keep from looking at your shoes. Ever notice?”

“Every man to his trade?”

“Father Donovan and Sam Winters! One of ’em trying to pull a few souls into a heaven he believes in, and the other ready to kick ’em to hell for a fee of twenty-five dollars.”

“Is that what the county pays Sam for a hanging?”

“Yep. Twenty-five dollars. By God, we ought to make it thirty just to be dramatic.”

The talk dwindled. Skeffington smoked, and Jackson, tilted back in his swivel chair, stared out of the window. The bright fall trees seemed to gild the air. The courthouse clock struck the afternoon hours. The mellow rings of sound dropped down and swung outward over the town, settling here and there like slow golden quoits encircling a stake.

Jackson spoke after a long silence, quite as though he spoke to himself. “Often wondered about Winters. How does a man get to be like that?”

“Born that way.”

“I don’t believe it. There’s always a story somewhere.”

“Pish-posh, Jackson! Newspaper point of view.”

“There’s always a story, Ike, and where there’s one story there are two—two sides.”

“Um—maybe.”

“Fact. And both of ’em true.”

Skeffington nodded, but not in agreement. It was merely a sign that he was saying nothing for the moment.

“Think of these files, Ike, and the old stories. There’s the story we print—”

“Which mostly isn’t true.”

“Which mostly is a polite outline for anybody to fill in that wants to. Then there’s the real story.”

He paused to fill a charred corncob pipe and light it. “Nobody knows the true story. As far as that goes—the truth of anything—there are only points of view.” The pipe drew badly and required probing. Jackson kept some broom straws in his desk drawer for the purpose.

The sunlight poured through the flyspecked window and emphasized the dingy disorder of the room. The two men talked on, glossing each other’s remarks, checking and rechecking details of buried scandals, romances, and tragedies—stories that came again into lively existence through the foreshortened memories of men growing old.

They had a talent for homely philosophy, and the happy gift of appreciating platitudes. Their conversational coinage was worn smooth with long use, but they had a sensitive knowledge of its basic values. They played their verbal duos with acknowledgment of the dignity of human communication. Talk for these two friends was one of the ways of life. Their daily use of the plain and local flavors of language was unself-conscious, but it had, nevertheless, something of the nature of a personal testament.

There was always a great weaving of talk in Kings Row. Over and back and across, the strands fell and interlaced. Town talk was town history. Year after year it was selected, and fitted together, and colored by the town’s composite mind and personality.

Father Donovan often thought of this. He pictured the great talk, in which he had so little part, as an invisible shape of the town itself, a sort of hovering ghost of the past, or again as a shell having only the form of the life that created it—a shell sounding with illusory echoes.

One Sunday morning this image broke into his consciousness while he was preaching. Old thoughts and ideas did this from time to time, sometimes causing his discourse to take sudden and amazing turns. His small gathering of faithful listeners, understanding little enough of what he said at any time, were fortunately undisturbed by these excursions into the byways of the father’s fancy. This fine Sunday morning the little church was a cool grotto still fresh against the pressing warmth of a delayed Indian summer. Bees sounded outside the windows among the gay yellow flowers Mariah Shane had planted close to the church wall. They stood straight and still, a few belated blossoms, looking for all the world, Miss Mariah thought, as she noticed them, like curious children peering over the window ledges. Father Donovan’s voice buzzed deep in his throat—somewhat like the buzz of the bees themselves, God bless him! Miss Mariah murmured a pious phrase and brought her wandering mind firmly to attention.

She knew that look which was coming now into the eyes of the fervent speaker. He’s not in this world at all now, not at all, she thought.

Father Donovan was saying: “Strive as we may with the present, it is constantly being destroyed even in its moments of realization. We build, moment by moment, living only on an infinitely small needle point of time and consciousness. Moment by moment as we live and build, the life and the structure of the life of those moments are swept into a past which is recoverable and tenable only through the medium of memory.”

“Memory ... memory ...” Miss Mariah said the words almost audibly. “Memory. It’s a beautiful word.... My father, and my mother, and my two sisters who went to heaven....” She lowered her head a little, her stiff old fingers made the sign of the cross, and her lips moved. The priest’s voice came from far away....

“It is an illusion that the present moment is the sum of all our past successions of moments. It is only that the present moment is colored by all that has gone before, standing for its own instant of consciousness in the long increasing shadow cast forward by the past.”

His voice rose a little in pitch. His congregation was quite lost to him now, but they felt a sense of tragedy in the sound of the strange words he spoke—words as incomprehensible as the Latin phrases of the Mass.

“We have no home in the present because it is too fleeting—vanishing segment by segment, as it comes, with incalculable swiftness.

“We have, equally, no home in the future because the future is a vast and mysterious and unpredictable complex of chance combinations. Any accident of fate, any slightest interference of our own will, and the whole kaleidoscope of possible destinies shifts in a bewildering haze of possibilities.”

Father Donovan was looking out of the window now as though his mind sought some conclusion far beyond the visible. He spoke softly.

“Our real home is in the past, in the silent place of memory—itself a shadow, and ourselves but shadows moving amid the uncertain ghosts of imperfectly remembered events.”

Almost by some other sense than sight he was aware of Miss Mariah lifting her face, half startled, at the word “ghosts.” He caught his breath sharply. He had been talking out of the back room of his mind again—and being all flowery, too—an esthetic as well as a theological error. Was he not safe from the Devil, even in his own pulpit?

The listeners settled again into the warm drowse of sermon-time. The words which fell now on their ears were the familiar ones of admonition, exhortation, and reproof.

Miss Mariah sighed. I wish he’d gone on about the ghosts, she thought, it sounded beautiful.