We drove to the house the next day, Monday, around ten in the morning. Peter would be at the real estate office in Jackson. I had the hard top on the T-bird. At Canton, we turned off on a gravel road. The house itself was two miles down this road. It had an overgrown gravel turnaround in the yard. The house was a large thing; the white paint was falling off its boards, and it had a swollen gray aspect. I kicked through a window, and we climbed in with no trouble. We were looking for the attic, but I noticed that the downstairs was sparse of furntiture, the floorplanks were bare, and there was a desk standing right out in the middle of the biggest room. At the top of the stairs, before you got to the attic stairs, there were other rooms on both sides. I saw a made bed in one, and a pair of aqua-blue nylon fur house slippers resting by the front leg of it. A woman was living in this house, now.
We had two duffel bags. The crate was there. We pulled all the rest of the letters out. They stunk, like a mixture of spice and dung. They got yellower toward the bottom. My hands were rancid, with flecks of orange on them. We had them all and it was time to go, down the attic stairs, past the room with the house slippers. We were in a hurry, but when we got to the main room downstairs, I saw some more envelopes on the big desk in the middle of the room and ran over to them. I saw one with a letter in it stuffed into one of the cubby holes and took it. We were at the front door going out when I saw the back door of the house opening, hard. I caught a glimpse of Peter and then showed him my back. Peter hollered out. “Yaaaaaaaa!”
We barreled for the T-bird, but I saw there was a white Chrysler parked sideways across the drive right in front of it. We threw the bags into the well of the car and I tore down on the key of my T-bird. I would have to back up into some huge growth of briars to get out of here. The car wouldn’t start. I bent the key again.
“Here he comes around the house!” said Fleece.
Then the T-bird reared back on pure fire into those briars, the back end of the car rose up in the air, I was getting no soil with the wheels; then the wheels came down and I steered out of the yard, framming his car with gravel and red dust Fleece said he was in his car now, coming after us. We made the hardtop on the outskirts of Canton, then got on the four-lane of Highway 51, and he was still trying, though way back there. I put the accelerator down the last quarter-inch, and left him out of sight. Fleece thought he might’ve taken down the license plate number. But I still had the old California plates on the car. I’d take them off and get new Mississippi ones.
The letters, the yellower they were, the more unspeakable. The last one fell apart in your hands. It was still Peter writing to his wife Catherine. There were no letters from Catherine in the crate. The last letter set another scene, this time out on the front porch of the house, in the open air. The two of them seemed to have gotten out here from the upstairs room in some method which allowed them to make their way while at no moment uncoupled. There was a potted fern on the porch which was a sort of shrine and destination. Around this fern they emitted climactic fluids, blood included, and somehow they collected most of these fluids into one offering, which was poured on the fern in the last gasps of exhaustion. The letter ended in an undiminished mating calclass="underline" “Let us see, beloved Catherine, how the fern will dol”
All over Fleece’s house lay letters. The duffel bags sat tumbled over on the couch. The house smelled like swamp gas. Your hands were brown from handling the last letters. It wouldn’t wash off. Your hands stank; you couldn’t eat a sandwich with your hands that way.
Fleece handed me a page which consisted of nothing but a crescendo of spelled-out grunts.
“It’s not fun any more,” he said. “He doesn’t have any style any more. Let’s build a fire. Get this filth out of my house, I do believe I’m going nuts with him, Monroe.”
The other letter, the one I’d gotten off his desk, was post-marked last year—
… taken poor me unner you wing like this I caint hardily thank you eneough, Uncle Peter, I just do hope Im sharp enough for college.
Love,
Vinceen.
What was this? The postmark was Mobile. Looking again, I saw the date was August, exactly a year to the day ago.
“Who could it be?”
“Thinking is making me sick. I said help me with this filth,” whined Fleece.
10 / Shades of the Belly and Bean
Bobby Dove meant it. Exams were on, it was not a good season for it, but he was having a dark fit again. He slept in his mother’s room and opened her drawers and held her articles. I saw that accidentally in the door-length mirror. I also saw him standing in front of his mother’s closet, peering in, for an overlong period. He went into the closet and I think he cast himself onto the clothes on the hangers.
After exams I let him have the house and left for Dream of Pines. He hadn’t spoken directly to me for two weeks. I didn’t want to become implicated in his mental condition.
The old man had been playing golf all summer and he was suntanned, with the gray hair a little longer than usual.
“A doctor in the house,” he said.
“If I can keep it up.”
“Do you think you’re finding your way? You know, you could still play your horn, all that wouldn’t be wasted. Doctor Israel plays the drums in his basement, you know, even as a G.P. Music can be a lifelong hobby.”
Ode was really betting on me as a doctor, and even though we had little to say to each other, it was fine with me to give my daddy that happiness. While I was at the house, my grades from Hedermansever came in. B’s in chemistry, a D in hateful German.
My mother had the beer in the icebox again. She wanted to know if I had a sweetheart. I told her I’d been casual with a few. She told me how important it was to meet someone with Faith. We were sitting at the kitchen table. I had never drunk liquor right in front of her before and was holding the can as if I weren’t interested in it. She told me to drink it, she knew I drank beer in college. After two cans, she looked at me. She wanted to know if I felt easier about talking now. Her eyes were moist and she had turned slightly breathless of voice. She asked me whether I thought they, Ode Elann and she, had instilled me with any things of the spirit when I was growing up.
“N—” Then I saw the trust she had in me, how hopeful she was, and said, “I know you did.”
“You’re bored here, aren’t you? All your college activities. You shouldn’t be always scowling though. You’re a nice-looking boy. Don’t spoil your face.” She’d seen the other children come home during the vacations from L.S.U. Their lives were not lived in her house. They had their sweethearts. They were on the phone or waiting for the mail, their lifeblood was in the telephone wires and the post office. Now I was home, but without a sweetheart, so she could talk to me.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked Ode.
“She’s gotten holy.” He talked to one side of me, as if some person next to me would understand. He didn’t like it anymore than I did, I don’t think.
“Your mother and I have read these magazine articles about how fifty-five is just middle age. That’s a lie. Even if you feel good. I feel good. But when you look down the end of the path, ‘Let this cup pass from me.’ You know who said that?”
“Jesus.”
“Even Him. He didn’t want it any more than I do. Let it pass on down the line to the other fellow who hasn’t taken care of his health and deserves it. It just isn’t fair that once you get fifty you have to worry about death any second. You start listening to sounds in your body. You see how lonely it will be. So you want a friend with you, you see. You have your children, you, your sister and your brothers. But a woman with religion, she wants much more sympathy than that. Even more than her husband. A woman hurts more times than ten men could ever take notice of. I can’t say anything about it.”