The Tin Can Tree

'I reckon you're wondering where I was at,' Ansel said, and there was another creak when he stood up again. 'You always do wonder.' He banged into something, and then his footsteps wavered uncertainly toward the stairs. 'You're taking all my places from me. Once I tell you, I can't go back no more. How long you guess it'll be before I've used up every place there is?' He was climbing the steps behind James now. His voice rang hollowly through the stairwell. For a minute James paused, listening to him coming, and then he continued on up and reached the top, with his hand still on the wall so that he could find his room. 'It's all a question of time,' Ansel said sadly. 'Time and geography.'

'If you're coming to sleep in my room,' James told him, 'you'd better shut up that talking.'

'Well, I only want to explain.'

'I'm sleepy, Ansel.'

'I only want to explain.'

James kept going, heading in the direction of Miss Lucy's tapping thimble. He could hear Ansel's hands sliding along behind his now on the wall, and then the sliding sound stopped and there was a click as Ansel snapped the hall light on. For a minute the light was blinding. James screwed his eyes up and said, 'Oh, Lord -'and Ansel turned the light off again, quickly and guiltily. 'I just thought,' he said, 'as long as we had electricity -'

'It's four a.m., Ansel.'

'What're you, wearing my pyjamas?'

'Go to hell, will you?'

'I never,' said Ansel, but James was past listening. He was in the bedroom now, and on his way to bed he reached out and knocked on Miss Lucy's wall for her to stop that tapping. She did. He eased himself down between the sheets, which were cold already and messy-feeling. When he was lying flat he closed his eyes and wished away the figure of Ansel, standing like a long black stick and swaying in the bedroom doorway.

'I wisht I knew what was wrong with you,' Ansel said. 'You angry with me, James?'

'Yep.'

'I only went out for a walk.'

'You usually end up half dead after those walks. It's me that's got to nurse you back.'

'Well, wait now,' Ansel said. 'I can explain. All you need to do is listen.'

‘Can I listen when I'm asleep?' asked James, and turned over on his side with his face to the window. He could hear Ansel's feet shuffling into the room, and he knew by the soft thumping noise that he had reached the other bed and was sitting on it.

'I tried and I tried,' Ansel told him. 'I went to the Pikes' first off, but Simon don't like me any more. I went to the Potters', and they locked me in and requested news of my hemoglobin. What could I do? At the tavern I said, "Charlie," I said, "I got a problem." But all Charlie did was sell me hard liquor under the counter; he didn't listen to no problem.'

Ansel's shoes were dropped on the floor, first one and then the other. There was a small whipping sound as he flung his tie around a bedpost. Even with his eyes shut James could picture his brother, how he would be leaning toward James with his shoulders hunched and his hands flung out as he talked, even though he knew he couldn't be seen. 'Go to sleep, Ansel," he muttered, but Ansel only sighed and began unbuttoning his shirt with tiny popping sounds.

'This all has to do with Janie Rose,' he told James. 'Are you listening?'

'No.'

'Just about everything has to do with Janie Rose these days. I don't know why. Looks like she just kind of tipped everything over with her passing on. Janie don't like gladioli, James.'

James didn't answer. A button flew to the floor and then circled there for an endless length of time, and Ansel stamped one stocking foot over it and shook the whole house. James could feel the floorboards jar beneath his bed. There was a long silence; then Ansel bent, with a small puff of held-in breath, and scrapped his fingers across the floor in search of the button.

'Got it,' he said finally. 'All today, I was so sick and tired. I had looked at that picture of the Model A too long. I don't know why I do things like that. Then I thought, well, I'll just go up the hill and pay my respects to Janie Rose. I'll go slow, so as not to get overtired. And I did. I stopped a plenty on the way. But when I got close I saw her flowers, how they had got all wilted. I thought: I wisht I'd brought some flowers. I thought: I wisht I'd brought some bluets. You listening, James?'

James gritted his teeth and stayed quiet.

'There's four names for bluets I know of. Bluets, Quaker-ladies, pea-in-the-paths, and wet-the-beds. You can count on Janie Rose; she called them wet-the-beds. Well, she had problems herself in that line. But what I thought was: I wisht I'd brought some bluets. I didn't think: I wisht I'd brought some wet-the-beds.'

'Oh, Lord,' James said tiredly. He turned his pillow to the cool side and lay back down on it.

'Now, bluets are not good funeral flowers. Too teeny. But Janie Rose is not a funeral person. Usually it's only the good die young. Consequently I thought: I wish I'd-'

James raised his head and shouted, 'Ansel, will you hush?' and on his wall there was the sudden sound of frantic tapping. 'I don't want to hear,' he told Ansel more quietly, and then lay back down and forced his mind far away.

'I'll just get to the point,' Ansel said. 'I have to tell you this. James, there are gladioli on Janie's grave.'

James heard a zipper slide down, and after a minute a pair of trousers was tossed shuffingly across the floor. Then Ansel's socks dropped one after the other beside his bed, in soft crumpled balls, and James heard them fall and winced because his ears seemed raw tonight.

'Janie Rose despises gladioli,' said Ansel.

James said nothing.

'She hates and despises them. Believes they're witches' wands, all frilled up. She told me so.'

James opened his eyes and rolled over. 'Funerals are for parents,' he said. 'Ansel, Janie Rose is dead.'

He waited, frowning. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the white blur that was Ansel in his underwear, standing before the bureau with his skinny arms folded across his chest. Finally Ansel said, 'I know.'

'She's dead.'

'I know all about it. Nevertheless, she despises gladioli.'

‘The funeral is not really for her,' James said, and rolled over again to face the wall. 'It don't make any difference to her about those gladioli.'

'Oh now,' said Ansel. 'Oh now.' He crossed to his bed, heavily. 'It's hard to bury people, Jamie. Harder than digging a hole in the ground.' '

'Will you go to bed?'

'They keep popping up again, in a manner of speaking.'

James dug his head into his pillow.

'I remember Janie Rose's religious period,' Ansel went on comfortably. 'It was a right short one, wouldn't you know. But she took this tree out back, this scrubby one she was always drawing flattering pictures of. Dedicated it to God, I believe; hung it with tin cans and popcorn strings. Didn't last but a week; then she was on to something new. The birds ate the popcorn. But those tin cans are still rattling at the ends of the branches when a wind passes through, and Mr Pike sits out back all day staring at them. Though he had placed every last bit of her in a hole in the ground. Ha.'

James reached behind him for the sheet and pulled it up over his head, making a hood of it. The rustling of the sheet drowned out everything else, and then when he was still again the sounds couldn't come through to him so clearly. The creaking of Ansel's bedsprings when he sat down was muffled and distant, and his voice was thin-sounding.

'I ought to studied botany,' he was saying. 'Don't you think? All I know about flowers, I ought to studied botany.'

James lay still, and stared at the dark vines running up the wallpaper until his eyes ached.

'With Mama it was lilies,' said Ansel. 'Lord, she hated lilies. All she wanted, she said, was just a cross of-'