“What do you mean?”
“You don’t set easy. You set like you got a knotted belly. You’re a man thinking of yourself too much and not liking it much. I had one son like that. He lived a mean small life because he wouldn’t do what I told him.”
“What did you tell him, Aunt Middy?”
“I kept telling him until he was past forty to go find himself a healthy young girl and get as many young off her as she was able to bring into the world.”
“I’m married.”
“To what? A sorry piece of flesh that’ll never know you again in this world, that they keep breathing just to prove they can do it when it would be God’s mercy to let her go. Any lawyer would know what to do about crossing that kind of marriage off the legal books. But it pleasures you more to go around acting tragical.”
He shook his head. “How can you sit on this porch and know everything about everybody?”
“People stop by and set and talk about things. You want a good young wife? You couldn’t get her right off, but in six months she’d be ready. Judy Barnsong, down to Everset, widow of Claude that just got hisself killed without a dime of insurance money. She’s twenty-three and got three young, bright as buttons. She’s pretty and healthy and even-tempered, and built good for having babies. She’s a good cook and she keeps a clean house. She’s got three years of high school, and she’d make you a proud wife, if you got sense enough to go after her.”
“Aunt Middy, you are an astonishing woman.”
“There’s been fine marriages arranged right here on this porch. You think about Judy Barnsong. You go sneak a look at her. She’s a worker and she’ll keep her looks. A ready-made family with more to come will keep you out of devilment.”
“What do you mean?”
“A man snaps at an old lady that way over a little thing like I said has got a bad conscience. You doing something you shouldn’t be doing, boy?”
“I drink and smoke and stay out late.”
“Never knew a whole man who didn’t. It’s in the breed.”
He stood up to go and said, “What do you think about them filling up the bay?”
“I’m eighty-four years old, and I’ve been watching the bay of an evening for seventy-four years. I’m not tired of looking at it. I just don’t know how I’ll be at looking at houses. I’ve got the feeling they won’t hold my interest.”
He went down off the porch, walking slowly to his car. A bay boat was at the old fishhouse dock, and two men were shoveling mullet into hampers to carry them up to the fishhouse scales. The fish seemed to catch the silvery dusk light and gleam more brightly than anything else in the scene. The old coquina-rock smokehouse was in operation, and there was a drift of burning oak in the evening air, flavored with the slight pungency of the barbecue sauce which had been rubbed into the white meat of the hanging fish. Somewhere nearby a girl laughed and a saw whined through a board.
Blessings on you, Mrs. Judy Barnsong, he thought. On your tidy house and fertile hips. I saw a little bit of what that marine engine did to your Claude when it slid forward into the front seat of the panel truck, and it was not anything I cared to look more closely at. But it left the face unimpaired, so you may safely have a viewing of the body. You’ll never know how a dry and dreary man considered you almost seriously for half of one moment. Perhaps you would have said yes quite readily, because you sound like a person who would sense the kind of need I have. But the lust is for a more complex widow, and it is a little past the time when I could have escaped gently into you, into your tidy house, amid your busy button-bright children, to mist your memories of Claude and cushion my awareness of many dark things.
As he drove slowly toward town he remembered the sailor. Gloria had been missing for five days. They’d found her at that motel in Clewiston. They stopped the sailor as he was walking back there with a sack of hamburgs and a bottle of bourbon. The three of them had talked to the sailor out under the bright driveway lights. He was young, and at first he was defiant. He did not know how to handle being confronted by a deputy, a doctor and a husband. He thought it was some kind of a raid.
“Listen,” he said, “all I did was I picked the broad up in Palm City. Okay? I was bumming to Montgomery, Alabama. I’m stationed in Key West and I got ten days. She has a car, this broad, and I changed my mind about going home. Okay?”
When he began to comprehend what they were telling him, the surliness and the defiance disappeared and he began to look younger, earnest and alarmed. “You mean she’s nuts? You telling me she’s a crazy? Honest to God, how would I know that? She doesn’t talk much. She laughs a lot. We’ve been drinking some. Mostly, I never seen anything like it, all she wants to do is scr... Geez, I’m sorry, sir. You being her husband, I shouldn’t say stuff like that. But how the hell would I know she was a nut?”
They told the boy what they wanted him to do. He agreed to get out of the way until they’d taken her away. He turned over the key. They said they would leave it unlocked, and he could come back for his gear after she was gone.
He went in with the doctor. She was asleep. A lamp was burning on the bedside table. Her face was puffy. She woke when he touched her shoulder. She looked at him without surprise and sat up and looked at the doctor. “Hello, Jimmy,” she said. “Hello, Dr. Sloan.”
“Better get dressed, honey. We’re taking you home.”
“Sure,” she said, showing neither gladness nor regret, only a childlike obedience. She dressed quickly, used the sailor’s comb on her hair, made up her mouth and came out to the car and they took her home.
That was back in the days when the doctors had thought it was psychological, when they were trying, with drugs and patience and depth analysis, to reach down into her darknesses and find the cause of this destructive behavior. Those were the days when they questioned him at great length, dredging up every detail of the sexual relationship between them, finding nothing of significance. Most of the time, under treatment, she was as mild and dutiful as a child, but when they would reach her with an awareness of what she had done, she would be torn by grief and guilt.
Then it was Sloan who had made the significant discovery about her, detecting the deterioration of intelligence and memory, then proceeding to other tests and pinpointing the parallel decay of manual dexterity. (She said her fingers felt thick.) They looked eagerly for the expected tumor and found none. Elmo helped get her into the special setup at Oklawaha.
“It would be God’s mercy to let her go,” Aunt Middy had said.
But she was gone. She was beyond torment. Dr. Freese at Oklawaha had explained the prognosis. “From her history we know there have been periods of progressive degeneration alternating with periods of stasis. She is in a period of stasis now, and if there are no other physical complications she might live a long time. The next period of degeneration, if we have one, could easily affect the motor centers of the brain, and death would follow, very much like the sort of death which occurs when the motor centers are gravely depressed through, say, the use of a heavy dosage of barbiturates.”
“Why was the first symptom the sex thing, Doctor? I didn’t know she was sick. I’m ashamed of what I did to her, the way I acted toward her when that started.”