“I said, Oh no, and she said, ‘If he does I’ll just knife him while I’m here.’ She started dabbing at her eyes and I said, ‘I think he’s still in love with you, Cathy. I offered him a bed and he wouldn’t touch it.’”
(“You didn’t offer me a bed.” “I certainly did.” “I had a doctor’s appointment.”)
“I told her I thought she ought to talk to you; she said she was leaving as soon as they buried poor Uncle Nolan. And wished they were burying you, Bob,—if you don’t mind my saying so.”
Supplementing her account with what I put together later, the episode at the airport looks a little like this: Mr. Grimes’s professional appointments that day were not run-of-the-mine. Two transactions of a morning was not so out of the way, or the fact that one involved a coffin and the other an urn (not so everyday though natural enough); but the widely separated destinations, one to the Telfair Plot and one to Ash Island BWI, while clear enough in theory did call for some care in execution. Which he realized well in advance and took special pains to put the specifications for each in a precise place where he would have no trouble finding them quickly if he had to refresh his memory on some detail.
When he couldn’t remember where that was, searched high and low and couldn’t lay his hand on them, searched along (conscious of being not as young as he had been and a little foggier, sensitive about asking help from his young men—and young women—whom he had already surprised several times exchanging glances meant for behind his back), he considered calling Mr. Brownell or the Judge but decided it was not the sort of detail to bring up now before a house of mourning. “Use your head, Sam, what’s the old bean for?” he surely must have whispered to himself, listening while his backup chips buzzed briefly and replied that he had never buried anything but coffins in the Telfair Plot and it was inconceivable that ashes could belong anywhere but on Ash Island.
He checked by phone on flights to Miami and the Islands, was pleased to be told there was a plane out of Wilkes City arriving at Fredericksville at 9:53, departing at 10:11, and, leaving his young people with oral (and exasperating) instructions on the Telfair-Bohlen contract, set out by himself for the airport with the urn. He supervised the shipping details directly through the Airport Manager, whose grandfather had been a client of his: Bill of Lading for the ashes, first-class ticket for Mr. Tolliver, Leon, “who will be along shortly,” all charges authorized to a To-Whom-it-May-Concern signed “J. Brownell Baker, Trustee, Contingency Fund, Homestead Foundation” (the note omitting in the interest of brevity that the Fund itself was largely contingent on the Jewell Street girls, the enlisted personnel at our local army installation, the Treasury Department, and of course the American taxpayer).
He waited conscientiously to see the urn stowed away with miscellaneous freight and then, after most of the passengers had boarded, to see the ambulance from the hospital draw up beside the plane and deliver Mr. Tolliver himself, on a stretcher, conscious apparently but “under heavy sedation” the female ambulance driver told him after a professional exchange of Good-mornings. Mr. Grimes had never “been up in an areoplane” and perhaps for that reason lost no opportunity to watch one of them rise off the runway and help it into the blue with a sympathetic lift of his shoulders; when he had done that in this case, Mr. Tolliver safely aloft and the plane fading out fast into the southeast, he felt he had carried out his responsibilities, politely declined the driverette’s invitation to join them all for coffee-and-a-doughnut and hurried back to his car. Then driving past the entrance and seeing a young woman waiting for the bus he felt a sudden impulse denying he was not as young as he had been and, lifting his black hat, asked if he might offer her a ride into town—a little disappointed at finding there were two of them, but such was Life!
I hope “Dad” hadn’t been picturing much wailing and gnashing of family teeth; as I have suggested, we bore up very well. If any of us were so influenced by the surroundings as to take a dim view of our own long-term prospects, the closer prospect of Mrs. Bohlen’s winding-up gala at the Country Club was offering us a warm interlude in the meantime and we moved away from the chilly stones like joyful birds migrating to a warmer climate: the starters on the lines of cars rang out in the unison of the Boston orchestra closing out a heavy symphony, my own starter included as I handed Miss Becky in one door, backed through the other and turned the key, the idea of an even further gala already building in my mind (re-building). She had no way of getting home to Rockbridge except by another plane—unless I drove her? Saturday. Tomorrow was Sunday. Avoiding Cathy’s knife at the same time.
We were discussing business matters in a not-too-concentrated way, gathered with the others round the bits and twirls on the chef’s long virtuoso table (Cathy not there, or I didn’t see her) when she said, “I forgot to tell you, Bob, she said she had ditched the airlines pilot—or he had ditched himself. In the wilds of Wisconsin.”
I said, What difference did that make to me? and she said, “She’s still in love with you, Bob.”
“You said she had a knife out for me.”
“Same idea. She said the little boy, what’s his name? Mike?, didn’t get along with Number Two—Great Day!” with a stare at her watch on the arm reaching for red caviar. “Number One’s coming over to pick me up at the hotel, he’s probably already there!”
And so he was—sitting on the broad stone step of the Jonathan Copp, idly brushing the strings of a worn guitar as if about to lift his voice and sing of Roland and of Charlemagne, a black-bearded youth in cowboy boots who gave me a look like a push in the chest; which I hardly felt for gazing at Cathy coming through the door, well-dressed in details beyond a man’s vocabulary (except the earrings she had “forgotten” to return), not one Cathy but hundreds, one of them speaking for a moment with Becky, another one glancing at me with a “Hello, Robert,” the rest of them floating like echoes, like images in a sequence of time-mirrors.
Number One struck a petulant resounding discord, stashed the guitar in the back of a four-wheel-drive Cherokee Chief and said, “Wrap it up, Beck!”
As they drove off she leaned over the half door to say, “Don’t forget to sync your watch tonight, Bob. Time-change,”—my nod meaning to say that I had heard her, not that I thought my watch would ever sync with hers.
AFTERNOON IN THE COUNTRY
They invited us to drive over some day for “an afternoon in the country,” seemed really to want us to come—the woman, anyway, Barbara, Babs. The invitation was casual enough but she wasn’t looking at us casually when she gave it. “We’re thirty miles out in deep country, but do come.” I thought, for some reason she really means it. She was blue-eyed (giving her a sort of imported look—blue eyes not an everyday thing with us in Georgia), slim in an urban, auburn, well-brought-up way; white, even teeth that had certainly been brushed and dentisted all her, maybe, thirty years. She suggested fond parents to me, security, happy-childhood. But the look in her eyes was the look a small child might give you remembering it is nearly time for the light to be turned off.
We had met them at a flower show in town in February. Except for the momentary look, which I half thought I was imagining, she seemed animated and bright, the panels of pink blooms shining a damp radiance up against her face and giving her more color, I noticed, than she had when she turned away. We took them out to our house and we all sat around for a while drinking bourbon whisky. It came out that they had been married only a year or so; this was her first winter at the place, The Vale. “Tom’s father bought it years and years ago when he moved south from Pennsylvania. Brought in lots of exotic trees and plants.” “Trying to make them catch on,” he put in as if exonerating his father; “not the right soil for most of them but—” “Tom was raised there. In the winters, that is.” They had eighteen hundred acres, “counting the Lower Vale.”
We guessed he was twelve or fifteen years older than she, a big hunting-field sort of man with heavy soles to his shoes and strong fingers at a handshake that you felt would be at home with gun barrels and shells and the fluffy dead feathers of partridges. He said carelessly he had lost a lot of money in the stock market at one time and now they had hardly enough to live on (smiling at his fingers as if to say of course that was just a manner of speaking). But he had The Vale; they could live inexpensively at The Vale, and he hunted and farmed a bit, and wrote on his collection of legends of the countryside, suddenly reciting, “‘Will Cunningham of Rosemont Hall / Rode back from the battle at Charles Town, / He had risen in arms at his country’s call, / He had seen an English admiral fall, / he had watched a British ship go down,’” laughing, “I can’t write,” rolling the ice in his glass round and round. “‘He was riding Silverheels his mare / That never was beat in the straightaway …’” The stuff was no good, but he enjoyed doing it, and (an apology in his smile), “It has helped me over a bad time.”
She said they had a “beautiful lake,” and I asked her more about it because natural lakes are rare in our part of the State. “You must come and see it. I was telling your wife.” And as they left she mentioned our coming again.
I had never seen any area of Georgia quite like where they lived, the physical appearance of it, even. Our section is on the upper edge of the Coastal Plain; ten miles below us the land flattens out like a vast beach with hardly a knoll to break the level, and even on the upper edge it is only gently rolling. Sand and red clay make up the low hills, and forests of pine and scrub oak cover them except for the open fields, fallow and planted. But when we left the highway about twenty miles from town we entered a deep woods of sweetgum and hickory and other forest trees, and after three or four miles of that we came to a rise in the dirt road so steep I had to go into second speed. And then, some five miles on through country that looked as if it hadn’t been plowed in a generation, never meeting anyone or seeing any sign of life except crows now and then—we did see one small red fox, that stood in the road until I honked; then we circled into a wooded driveway and saw the first of the rocks and boulders. I hadn’t thought there was stone within a hundred miles.
But they were everywhere, gray pitted boulders in the fields and among the trees, some on the surface as if they might be rolled away, some thrusting up out of the earth like glacial rocks in New England. They didn’t look right, there in the midst of magnolias and liveoaks; gave you an odd wry feeling.
We could see the door of the house from some distance and they were standing bareheaded waving at us from the shade, for it was almost hot in the March sun—they must have heard me blow at the red fox; two old pointer dogs on their haunches in front of them, the slanting sun striking in under the low roof of the porch. My wife said, “Oh, Rosemont Hall!” but I had forgotten.
They took us inside, which was much colder and made you glad for the oak logs burning in the hall and in the living room. “These old walls are solid concrete,” he said, glancing about as if seeing beyond the surface of books and sporting prints and two or three old guns on racks. “It takes a while for the outside warmth to penetrate. Babs has lived all her life in the North—until her mother and father died—and she says she has never been so cold.”
“Now and then it seems awfully cold,” she said almost as if to herself.
He rubbed his fingers at the fire and slapped one of the old dogs on the side of the neck. “Shall we sit down for a drink, or look round the place a bit first?” I mentioned the lake; I really wanted to get out of the room’s dim chill (the porch roof stopped much of the light). I said, “You don’t find many lakes round here. Or many such stones as these either.”
“You won’t see another spot in Georgia like The Vale,” he said. “Or anywhere else. There’s only one Vale,—isn’t there, Babs?” She assented with a wan smile that seemed out of place on her fresh lips, laying her palm on one of the dogs as if her fingers were cold.
He put a heavy brown walking stick in my hand, selected one for himself that was almost a cudgel, and we went out by a side door, all four of us, and down some chipped concrete steps, the dogs going on ahead. “Have you ever seen a cork tree?” smiling proudly, pointing the stick. “There’s a real cork tree. Quercus suber.”
It rose in the middle of the drab winter pasture like a gray-green boulder itself or a gigantic piece of shrubbery, dome shaped, compact, branches on the ground in a resigned sort of stillness. Its appearance was so odd, its very presence so surprising, surrounded by Georgia fields and woods, I felt the same note quiver in me as when I had first seen the stones, the same almost imperceptible sense of quiet discord, though it was so subtle and gone so quickly I was hardly conscious of it at the time. “One of father’s imports. Used to bring exotic plants here, just to see if he could make them grow. We have a Chinese tallow tree in the Lower Vale. A cacao too. Most of them didn’t make it. Soil, rainfall, temperature. Something didn’t agree with them,” following along after his pale wife as she led the way on toward the strange tree.
He broke off a piece of the bark and handed bits of it to my wife and me, and we wandered away down a path winding among the gray boulders. It began to step down now, with slabs of rocks across for treads, twisting right and left through the great trees to break the descent. Then we came out on a sharp little plateau and he pointed his stick triumphantly off beneath us.
Once more I had that slight shock of incongruity. There in the midst of the dense March-bare forest that clung to the steep enclosing slopes lay a still, black, egg-shaped pool. A toned-down reflection of a sliver of sky seemed, literally, asleep on its surface; there was no movement in the water to break the film of mirror and for a minute everyone was as still as the water and I could hear no sound at all. “It’s fed by springs below the surface,” he said, then laughed and added, “But aren’t we all?”
His wife spoke out at once, in a haphazard rush of animation as if her attention had loitered behind. “You see the little summer house,” she said, like someone half dressed hearing a knock at the door and grabbing up the first thing that came to hand; in the cold light under the boughs and the stagnant green of the few evergreens her face seemed as pale as ashes as she gestured at a small shelter out in the lake, the shingles of the roof so mossy and weathered that you felt as though the winter color of the woods had run in many rains and dripped down upon it. It was hardly distinguishable from the water except that it did not reflect the sky. Leafless undergrowth had sprouted up about it and along the jut of land that joined it to the bank; it was the sort of place that made you think most of the timbers in it would have partly rotted. “That’s where the snakes live,” she laughed.
“Oh, there’re no snakes!” he said quickly. “Just enough to keep us free of mosquitoes.”
He led off down the path, my wife behind him, the dogs going on. Babs followed in a minute in silence and I after her, thinking I had never seen three things so quietly and inexplicably somber as the stones and the cork tree and now this brooding pool. I tried to put my finger on why they seemed so; they were somewhat unusual features in that part of the State but they were simple and tangible enough. It was a little like trying to see a small animal or a bird that someone else keeps silently pointing at.
Then a strange thing happened to me. It was as if two streamlets of rain running down a window glass suddenly united. What I felt seemed suddenly to join with what I saw; suddenly there was a bridge between, an understanding—or part of an understanding. I was looking down the path, and the girl, ahead of me, turning her head, happened to frame her face against the black pool. Her pallor now was like the gray of a newly broken stone; almost blue in its whiteness. And something in me leapt to join that visible fact to the mood of the lake and all the rest, as if what I had felt was in them only by reflection, as if the source of it were elsewhere and animate, reflected also in her face. I was sure then that what I had felt was not in my imagination; she had sensed it too. I thought if I spoke of it she would show no surprise—though I was a long way from speaking of it. The last thing she wanted, I believed, was to talk about it; I was certain if I mentioned it she would shy. I had an idea it was hardly in her conscious thoughts, just on the border, just crossing over.
She moved on ahead, easily, sure-footed, as if she knew every twig and spider web, and I followed—into the hollow and across the narrow dam, the clear wintry water flowing under the footbridge and tumbling in a slow spreading fall into the ravine and crawling away covertly into the brush and vines. She was not morose. On the surface she appeared quite lighthearted. But I thought it was the lightness of someone trying to cover an anxiety; not so much trying to seem unafraid as, what was worse, trying honestly to be so, trying honestly to steady herself on our being there, to touch something out beyond the shadow.
Then, like moving into a less-dark space in a dark corridor, the thought came to me that if I, a stranger, could perceive it, this gloom, she, living with it, must know it like the palm of her hand, whether or not she confessed the spell of it to herself in so many words. And what began to oppress me now was, not thinking of what I had seen but wondering how much more there was I hadn’t seen. “Don’t you think it’s beautiful?” looking at me, not what surrounded us, as if seeking help in quelling an apprehension it was something else than “beautiful.”
It was precisely the beauty of it that gave it such a turn; if it had been repulsive you might have thought nothing of the other quality, but to be beautiful and yet somehow sinister too set you more against the edge. Then I heard her husband ahead of us up the rising trail toward the house whistling for the dogs, and the note was so cheerful and bright and everyday that I began to wonder if all of it had not been, after all, my own invention, the strangeness, her feeling it, almost her pallor even. Everything seemed all right again, with his whistle ringing through the woods and his hearty voice shouting for the dog named “Jerry.” I picked up a pebble and sailed it out into the middle of the pool and she said matter-of-factly as we walked away, “You and your wife must come over and shoot with us.”
Then up ahead the whistle split through the pines, louder this time and somehow suggesting impatience. “Oh dear!” she breathed, almost as if it were a tragedy; “Jerry’s run away to the Lower Vale again. Poor Jerry.”
We overtook them near the stables and talked of hunting and forest fires and land, turning in an arc round the hill. “For something beautiful, though,” he said as we passed above the pool, “you should see the Lower Vale. Next time you come, perhaps.—If Babs will consent,” laughing, turning to her. “Babs doesn’t like it, do you, Babs?” She shaking her head with a surprisingly solemn emphasis, saying nothing.
