All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories Page 6

  "So you have them too," I said. "I guess everyone in the village has a bed of them."

  "Your father," she said, "was one of the nicest men I ever knew. When I was a little girl he always gave me flowers. I'd go walking past and he'd pick a flower or two for me." Yes, I thought, I suppose he could be called a nice man. Nice and strong and strange, and yet, despite his strength and strangeness, a very gentle man. He had known the ways of flowers and of all other plants. His tomato plants, I remembered, had grown big and stout and of a dark, deep green, and in the spring everyone had come to get tomato plants from him.

  And there had been that day he'd gone down Dark Hollow way to deliver some tomato plants and cabbage and a box full of perennials to the widow Hicklin and had come back with half a dozen strange, purple-blossomed wild flowers, which he had dug up along the road and brought home, their roots wrapped carefully in a piece of burlap.

  He had never seen such flowers before and neither, it turned out, had anybody else. He had planted them in a special bed and had tended them with care and the flowers had responded gratefully underneath his hands. So that today there were few flower beds in the village that did not have some of those purple flowers, my father's special flowers.

  "Those flowers of his," asked Nancy. "Did he ever find what kind of flowers they were?"

  "No," I said, "he didn't."

  "He could have sent one of them to the university or someplace. Someone could have told him exactly what he'd found."

  "He talked of it off and on. But he never got around to really doing it. He always kept so busy. There were so many things to do. The greenhouse business keeps you on the run."

  "You didn't like it, Brad?"

  "I didn't really mind it. I'd grown up with it and I could handle it. But I didn't have the knack. Stuff wouldn't grow for me."

  She stretched, touching the roof with balled fists.

  "It's good to be back," she said. "I think I'll stay a while. I think Father needs to have someone around."

  "He said you planned to write."

  "He told you that?"

  "Yes," I said. "he did. He didn't act as if he shouldn't."

  "Oh, I don't suppose it makes any difference. But it's a thing that you don't talk about — not until you're well along on it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don't want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start."

  "And when you write," I asked, "what will you write about?"

  "About right here," she said. "About this town of ours."

  "Millville?

  "Why, yes, of course," she said. "About the village and its people."

  "But," I protested, "there is nothing here to write about."

  She laughed and reached out and touched my arm. "There's so much to write about," she said. "So many famous people. And such characters."

  "Famous people?" I said, astonished.

  "There are," she said, "Belle Simpson Knowles, the famous novelist, and Ben Jackson, the great criminal lawyer, and John M. Hartford, who heads the department of history at…"

  "But those are the ones who left," I said. "There was nothing here for them. They went out and made names for themselves and most of them never set foot in Millville again, not even for a visit."

  "But," she said, "they got their start here. They had the capacity for what they did before they ever left this village. You stopped me before I finished out the list. There are a lot of others. Millville, small and stupid as it is, has produced more great men and women than any other village of its size."

  "You're sure of that?" I asked, wanting to laugh at her earnestness, but not quite daring to.

  "I would have to check," she said, "but there have been a lot of them."

  "And the characters," I said. "I guess you're right. Millville has its share of characters. There are Stiffy Grant and Floyd Caldwell and Mayor Higgy…"

  "They aren't really characters," said Nancy. "Not the way you think of them. I shouldn't have called them characters to start with. They're individualists. They've grown up in a free and easy atmosphere. They've not been forced to conform to a group of rigid concepts and so they've been themselves. Perhaps the only truly unfettered human beings who still exist today can be found in little villages like this."

  In all my life I'd never heard anything like this. Nobody had ever told me that Higgy Morris was an individualist. He wasn't. He was just a big stuffed shirt. And Hiram Martin was no individualist. Not in my book, he wasn't. He was just a schoolyard bully who had grown up into a stupid cop.

  "Don't you think so?" Nancy asked.

  "I don't know," I said. "I have never thought about it." And I thought — for God's sake, her education's showing, her years in an eastern college, her fling at social work in the New York welfare centre, her year-long tour of Europe. She was too sure and confident, too full of theory and of knowledge. Millville was her home no longer. She had lost the feel and sense of it, for you do not sit off to one side and analyse the place that you call your home. She still might call this village home, but it was not her home. And had it ever been, I wondered? Could any girl (or boy) call a bone-poor village home when they lived in the one big house the village boasted, when their father drove a Cadillac, and there was a cook and maid and gardener to care for house and yard? She had not come home; rather she had come back to a village that would serve her as a social research area. She would sit up here on her hilltop and subject the village to inspection and analysis and she'd strip us bare and hold us up, flayed and writhing, for the information and amusement of the kind of people who read her kind of book.

  "I have a feeling," she said, "that there is something here that the world could use, something of which there is not a great deal in the world. Some sort of catalyst that sparks creative effort, some kind of inner hunger that serves to trigger greatness."

  "That inner hunger," I said. "There are families in town who can tell you all you want to know about that inner hunger." And I wasn't kidding. There were Millville families that at times went just a little hungry; not starving, naturally, but never having quite enough to eat and almost never the right kind of things to eat. I could have named her three of them right off, without even thinking.

  "Brad," she said, "you don't like the idea of the book."

  "I don't mind," I said. "I have no right to mind. But when you write it, please, write it as one of us, not as someone who stands off and is a bit amused. Have a bit of sympathy. Try to feel a little like these people you write about. That shouldn't be too hard; you've lived here long enough."

  She laughed, but it was not one of her merry laughs. "I have a terrible feeling that I may never write it. I'll start it and I'll write away at it, but I'll keep going back and changing it, because the people I am writing of will change, or I'll see them differently as time goes on, and I'll never get it written. So you see, there's no need to worry." More than likely she was right, I thought. You had to have a hunger, a different kind of hunger, to finish up a book. And I rather doubted that she was as hungry as she thought.

  "I hope you do," I said. "I mean I hope you get it written. And I know it will be good. It can't help but be." I was trying to make up for my nastiness and I think that she knew I was. But she let it pass.

  It had been childish and provincial, I told myself, to have acted as I had. What difference did it make? What possible difference could it make for me, who had stood on the street that very afternoon and felt a hatred for the geographic concept that was called the town of Millville?

  This was Nancy Sherwood. This was the girl with whom I had walked hand in hand when the world had been much younger. This was the girl I had thought of this very afternoon as I'd walked along the river, fleeing from myself. What was wrong, I asked myself.

  And: "Brad, what is wrong?" she asked.

  "I don't know," I said. "Is there something wrong?

  "Don't
be defensive. You know there's something wrong. Something wrong with us."

  "I suppose you're right," I told her. "It's not the way it should be. It's not the way I had thought it would be, if you came home again." I wanted to reach out for her, to take her in my arms — but I knew, even as I wanted it, that it was not the Nancy Sherwood who was sitting here beside me, but that other girl of long ago I wanted in my arms.

  We sat in silence for a moment, then she said, "Let's try again some other time. Let's forget about all this. Some evening I'll dress up my prettiest and we'll go out for dinner and some drinks." I turned and put out my hand, but she had opened the door and was halfway out of the car.

  "Good night, Brad," she sad, and went running up the walk.

  I sat and listened to her running, up the walk and across the porch. I heard the front door close and I kept on sitting there, with the echo of her running still sounding in my brain.

  5

  I told myself that I was going home. I told myself that I would not go near the office or the phone that was waiting on the desk until I'd had some time to think. For even if I went and picked up the phone and one of the voices answered, what would I have to tell them? The best that I could do would be to say that I had seen Gerald Sherwood and had the money, but that I'd have to know more about what the situation was before I took their job.

  And that wasn't good enough, I told myself; that would be talking off the cuff and it would gain me nothing.

  And then I remembered that early in the morning I'd be going fishing with Alf Peterson and I told myself, entirely without logic, that in the morning there'd be no time to go down to the office.

  I don't suppose it would have made any difference if I'd had that fishing date or not. I don't suppose it would have made any difference, no matter what I told myself. For even as I swore that I was going home, I knew, without much question, that I'd wind up at the office.

  Main Street was quiet. Most of the stores were closed and only a few cars were parked along the kerb. A bunch of farm boys, in for a round of beers, were standing in front of the Happy Hollow tavern.

  I parked the car in front of the office and got out. Inside I didn't even bother to turn on the light. Some light was shining through the window from a street light at the intersection and the office wasn't dark.

  I strode across the office to the desk with my hand already reaching out to pick up the phone — and there wasn't any phone.

  I stopped beside the desk and stared at the top of it, not believing. I bent over and, with the flat of my hand, swept back and forth across the desk, as if I imagined that the phone had somehow become invisible and while I couldn't see it I could locate it by the sense of touch. But it wasn't that, exactly. It was simply, I guess, that I could not believe my eyes.

  I straightened up from feeling along the desk top and stood rigid in the room, while an icy-footed little creature prowled up and down my spine.

  Finally I turned my head, slowly, carefully, looking at the corners of the office, half expecting to find some dark shadow crouching there and waiting.

  But there wasn't anything. Nothing had been changed. The place was exactly as I had left it, except there wasn't any phone.

  Turning on the light, I searched the office. I looked in all the corners, I looked beneath the desk, I ransacked the desk drawers and went through the filing cabinet.

  There wasn't any phone.

  For the first time, I felt the touch of panic. Someone, I thought, had found the phone. Someone had managed to break in, to unlock the door somehow, and had stolen it. Although, when I thought of it, that didn't make much sense. There was nothing about the phone that would have attracted anyone's attention. Of course it had no dial and it was not connected, but looking through the window, that would not have been apparent.

  More than likely, I told myself, whoever had put it on the desk had come back and taken it. Perhaps it meant that the ones who had talked to me had reconsidered and had decided I was not the man they wanted. They had taken back the phone and, with it, the offer of the job.

  And if that were the case, there was only one thing I could do — forget about the job and take back the fifteen hundred.

  Although that, I knew, would be rather hard to do. I needed that fifteen hundred so bad I could taste it.

  Back in the car, I sat for a moment before starting the motor, wondering what I should do next. And there didn't seem to be anything to do, so I started the engine and drove slowly up the street.

  Tomorrow morning, I told myself, I'd pick up Alf Peterson and we'd have our week of fishing. It would be good, I thought, to have old Alf to talk with. We'd have a lot to talk about — his crazy job down in Mississippi and my adventure with the phone.

  And maybe, when he left, I'd be going with him. It would be good, I thought, to get away from Millville.

  I pulled the car into the driveway and left it standing there.

  Before I went to bed, I'd want to get the camping and the fishing gear together and packed into the car against an early start, come morning. The garage was small and it would be easier to do the packing with the car standing in the driveway.

  I got out and stood beside the car. The house was a hunched shadow in the moonlight and past one corner of it I could see the moonlit glitter of an unbroken pane or two in the sagging greenhouse. I could just see the tip of the elm tree, the seedling elm that stood at one corner of the greenhouse. I remembered the day I had been about to pull the seedling out, when it was no more that a sprout, and how my dad had stopped me, telling me that a tree had as much right to live as anybody else. That's exactly what he'd said as much as anybody else. He'd been a wonderful man, I thought; he believed, deep inside his heart, that flowers and trees were people.

  And once again I smelled the faint perfume of the purple flowers that grew in profusion all about the greenhouse, the same perfume I'd smelled at the foot of the Sherwood porch. But this time there was no circle of enchantment.

  I walked around the house and as I approached the kitchen door I saw there was a light inside. More than likely, I thought, I had forgotten it, although I could not remember that I had turned it on.

  The door was open, too, and I could remember shutting it and pushing on it with my hand to make sure the latch had caught before I'd gone out to the car.

  Perhaps, I thought, there was someone in there waiting for me, or someone had been here and left and the place was looted, although there was, God knows, little enough to loot. It could be kids, I thought sonic of these mixed-up kids would do anything for kicks.

  I went through the door fast and then came to a sudden halt in the middle of the kitchen. There was someone there, all right; there was someone waiting.

  Stiffy Grant sat in a kitchen chair and he was doubled over, with his arms wrapped about his middle, and rocking slowly, from side to side, as if he were in pain.

  "Stiffy!" I shouted, and Stiffy moaned at me.

  Drunk again, I thought. Stiffer than a goat and sick, although how in the world he could have gotten drunk on the dollar I had given him was more than I could figure. Maybe, I thought, he had made another touch or two, waiting to start drinking until he had cash enough to really hang one on.

  "Stiffy," I said sharply, "what the hell's the matter?" I was plenty sore at him. He could get plastered as often as he liked and it was all right with me, but he had no right to come busting in on me.

  Stiffy moaned again, then he fell out of the chair and sprawled untidily on the floor. Something that clattered and jangled flew out of the pocket of his ragged jacket and skidded across the worn-out linoleum.

  I got down on my knees and tugged and hauled at him and got him straightened out. I turned him over on his back. His face was splotched and puffy and his breath was jerky, but there was no smell of liquor. I bent close over him in an effort to make certain, and there was no smell of booze.

  "Brad?" he mumbled. "Is that you, Brad?"

  "Yes," I told him. "You can t
ake it easy now. I'll take care of you."

  "It's getting close," he whispered. "The time is coming dose."

  "What is getting close?" But he couldn't answer. He had a wheezing fit. He worked his jaws, but no words came out. They tried to come, but he choked and strangled on them.

  I left him and ran into the living-room and turned on the light beside the telephone. I pawed, all fumble-fingered, through the directory, to find Doc Fabian's number. I found it and dialled and waited while the phone rang on and on. I hoped to God that Doc was home and not out on a call somewhere.

  For when Doc was gone, you couldn't count on Mrs Fabian answering. She was all crippled up with arthritis and half the time couldn't get around. Doc always tried to have someone there to watch after her and to take the calls when he went out, but there were times when he couldn't get anyone to stay.

  Old Mrs Fabian was hard to get along with and no one liked to stay.

  When Doc answered, I felt a great surge of relief.

  "Doc," I said. "Stiffy Grant is here at my place and there's something wrong with him."

  "Drunk, perhaps," said Doc.

  "No, he isn't drunk. I came home and found him sitting in the kitchen. He's all twisted up and babbling."

  "Babbling about what?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Just babbling — when he can talk, that is."

  "All right," said Doc. "I'll be right over." That's one thing about Doc. You can count on him. At any time of day or night, in any kind of weather.

  I went back to the kitchen. Stiffy had rolled over on his side and was clutching at his belly and breathing hard. I left him where he was. Doc would be here soon and there wasn't much that I could do for Stiffy except to try to make him comfortable, and maybe, I told myself, he might be more comfortable lying on his side than turned over on his back.

  I picked up the object that had fallen out of Stiffy's coat. It was a key ring, with half a dozen keys. I couldn't imagine what need Stiffy might have for half a dozen keys. More than likely he just carried them around for some smug feeling of importance they might give to him.