Трумэн Капоте. Луговая арфа (engl)

     Truman Capote. The grass harp


     For miss Sook Faulk
     In memory of affections deep and true

        One

     When was it that  first  I  heard of  the grass  harp? Long  before the
autumn we lived in the  China tree; an earlier autumn then; and of course it
was Dolly who told me, no one else would have known to call it that, a grass
harp.
     If on  leaving  town you  take the church  road you  soon  will pass  a
glaring hill of bonewhite slabs and brown burnt flowers: this is the Baptist
cemetery. Our people,  Talbos, Fenwicks,  are buried there;  my mother  lies
next  to  my father, and the graves of kinfolk, twenty or more,  are  around
them like the  prone roots of a stony tree. Below the  hill grows a field of
high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go  to see it in  the
fall, late September, when it  has gone red  as sunset, when scarlet shadows
like firelight breeze over it and the autumn  winds strum on its dry  leaves
sighing human music, a harp of voices.
     Beyond the field begins the darkness of River Woods.  It must have been
on one of those  September  days when  we were there  in the woods gathering
roots that Dolly said: Do you hear? that is the grass harp, always telling a
story-it knows the stories of all the people on  the hill, of all the people
who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too.
     After my mother  died, my father, a traveling man, sent me to live with
his cousins, Verena and Dolly Talbo, two unmarried  ladies who were sisters.
Before that,  I'd not ever been allowed into their house. For reasons no one
ever got quite  clear, Verena  and my  father did  not speak. Probably  Papa
asked  Verena to lend him  some money, and she  refused;  or perhaps she did
make the loan, and he never returned it You can be sure that the trouble was
over  money,  because  nothing else would have  mattered  to  them so  much,
especially  Verena,  who was the richest person in town. The drugstore,  the
drygoods store, a filling station,  a grocery, an office building,  all this
was hers, and the earning of it had not made her an easy woman.
     Anyway, Papa said he would  never set foot inside  her house.  He  told
such terrible things about the Talbo ladies.  One of the stories  he spread,
that Verena  was a morphodyte, has  never  stopped  going  around,  and  the
ridicule he heaped on Miss Dolly Talbo was too much even  for my mother: she
told him he ought to be ashamed, mocking anyone so gentle and harmless.
     I think they  were very much in love, my mother and father. She used to
cry every time he went away to sell his frigidaires. He married her when she
was  sixteen; she did not live to be thirty. The  afternoon she  died  Papa,
calling her name, tore off all his clothes and ran out naked into the yard.
     It was  the  day after the funeral that  Verena came to  the  house.  I
remember the terror of watching her move up the walk,  a whip-thin, handsome
woman with shingled peppersalt hair, black, rather  virile  eyebrows  and  a
dainty cheekmole. She opened the front door and walked right into the house.
Since  the  funeral.  Papa had been  breaking  things,  not with  fury,  but
quietly, thoroughly: he would amble into the parlor, pick up a china figure,
muse over it a moment, then  throw it against the wall. The floor and stairs
were littered with cracked glass, scattered silverware;  a ripped nightgown,
one of my mother's, hung over the banister.
     Verena's eyes  flicked over the  debris.  "Eugene, I want  a  word with
you,"  she  said in that  hearty,  coldly exalted voice,  and Papa answered:
"Yes, sit down, Verena. I thought you would come."
     That afternoon Dolly's friend  Catherine Creek came over  and packed my
clothes, and Papa drove me to the impressive,  shadowy house on Talbo  Lane.
As I was getting out of the car he tried to hug  me, but I was scared of him
and wriggled out of his arms. I'm sorry now that we did not hug each  other.
Because a few days later, on his  way up to Mobile, his car skidded and fell
fifty  feet  into the Gulf.  When I saw him again  there were silver dollars
weighting down his eyes.
     Except  to remark that I was small for my age, a  runt, no one had ever
paid any attention  to me; but now people pointed me out, and said wasn't it
sad? that poor little Collin Fenwickl I tried to look pitiful because I knew
it pleased people: every man in town must have treated me  to a Dixie Cup or
a box of Crackerjack, and at school I got good grades for the first time. So
it was a long while before I calmed down enough to notice Dolly Talbo.
     And when I did I fell in love.
     Imagine what it must have been for her when first I came to  the house,
a loud and prying boy of eleven. She skittered at the sound  of my footsteps
or, if there  was no  avoiding me, folded like the  petals of shy-lady fern.
She was one of those people who can disguise themselves  as an object in the
room, a  shadow in the  comer, whose presence is a delicate  happening.  She
wore the quietest shoes, plain virginal dresses with hems  that  touched her
ankles. Though older than her  sister, she seemed someone  who, like myself,
Verena had adopted. Pulled and  guided by the gravity of Verena's planet, we
rotated separately in the outer spaces of the house.
     In  the  attic,  a  slipshod  museum spookily peopled with  old display
dummies from Verena's drygoods store, there were many  loose boards, and  by
inching these I could look down into  almost any room.  Dolly's room, unlike
the rest of the house, which bulged with fat dour furniture,  contained only
a bed, a bureau, a chair: a nun might have lived there, except for one fact:
the walls,  everything was painted  an  outlandish  pink, even the floor was
this color. Whenever I spied on Dolly, she usually  was to be seen doing one
of two things: she was standing in front of a mirror snipping with a pair of
garden shears her yellow and  white, already brief hair; either that, or she
was writing in pencil on a pad of coarse  Kress  paper. She kept wetting the
pencil on the tip of her tongue, and sometimes she spoke aloud a sentence as
she put it down: Do not touch sweet  foods like candy and salt will kill you
for  certain.  Now I'll tell you, she was writing letters. But at first this
correspondence was a puzzle to me. After all, her only  friend was Catherine
Creek, she saw no one else and she never left the house, except once  a week
when  she  and Catherine  went  to  River  Woods  where  they  gathered  the
ingredients of a dropsy remedy Dolly  brewed and bottled. Later I discovered
she had customers for this medicine throughout the state, and it was to them
that her many letters were addressed.
     Verena's room, connecting with Dolly's by a passage, was rigged up like
an office. There was a rolltop desk, a library  of ledgers, filing cabinets.
After supper, wearing  a green eyeshade, she would  sit at her desk totaling
figures and turning the pages of her ledgers until even the street-lamps had
gone out. Though on diplomatic, political terms with many people, Verena had
no close friends  at all. Men were afraid of her, and she herself seemed  to
be afraid of  women.  Some years  before she had  been greatly attached to a
blonde jolly  girl called Maudie Laura Murphy, who  worked for a bit  in the
post office here and who finally married a liquor  salesman from St.  Louis.
Verena had been very bitter over this and said publicly that the man was  no
account.  It was therefore  a surprise when,  as a wedding present, she gave
the  couple a  honeymoon  trip to the  Grand  Canyon. Maudie and her husband
never came back; they opened a filling station nearby Grand Canyon, and from
time  to time sent Verena Kodak snapshots of themselves. These pictures were
a pleasure and a grief. There were nights when she never opened her ledgers,
but sat with her forehead leaning  in her hands, and  the pictures spread on
the desk.  After she had  put them away, she would pace around the room with
the  lights turned off, and  presently there  would come a hurt rusty crying
sound as though she'd tripped and fallen in the dark.
     That part  of the attic from  which I could have looked  down  into the
kitchen was fortified against me, for it was stacked with trunks  like bales
of cotton.  At that time  it was the kitchen I most wanted to spy upon; this
was the real living room of the house, and Dolly spent most of the day there
chatting with her friend Catherine Creek.  As a  child, an orphan, Catherine
Creek  had been hired out  to Mr.  Uriah  Talbo,  and they had all  grown up
together, she and the  Talbo sisters,  there on the old farm that has  since
become a railroad depot Dolly she called Dollyheart, but  Verena  she called
That  One.  She lived in the back yard in a  tin-roofed silvery little house
set among sunflowers  and trellises of butterbean vine. She claimed to be an
Indian, which  made  most  people wink,  for she was dark as the  angels  of
Africa. But for all I know it may have been true: certainly she dressed like
an  Indian. That  is, she had  a string of turquoise beads,  and wore enough
rouge to  put out your eyes; it shone on her cheeks like votive  taillights.
Most  of  her teeth were gone;  she kept  her  jaws  jacked  up with  cotton
wadding,  and Verena would  say Dammit Catherine,  since  you  can't  make a
sensible sound why in creation won't you go down to Doc Crocker and let  him
put some teeth in your head? It was  true that  she was hard to  understand:
Dolly was the only  one  who could fluently translate her  friend's muffled,
mumbling noises. It was enough for Catherine that Dolly understood her: they
were always together and everything they had to say they said to each other:
bending my ear to an attic beam I could hear the tantalizing tremor of their
voices flowing like sapsyrup through the old wood.
     To  reach  the  attic, you climbed a ladder in  the  linen closet,  the
ceiling of  which  was a trapdoor. One day, as I started up, I saw that  the
trapdoor  was  swung  open  and,  listening, heard  above  me  an idle sweet
humming, like  the  pretty sounds small  girls make  when  they are  playing
alone.  I would have turned back, but the humming stopped, and a voice said:
"Catherine?"
     "Collin," I answered, showing myself.
     The  snowflake of Dolly's  face  held its shape;  for once  she did not
dissolve. "This  is where you come-we wondered," she  said, her voice  frail
and crinkling as tissue paper. She had the eyes of a gifted person, kindled,
transparent eyes, luminously green as mint jelly:  gazing  at me through the
attic twilight they admitted, timidly, that I meant her  no  harm. "You play
games up here-in the attic? I told Verena you  would be lonesome." Stooping,
she  rooted around in the depths of a barrel. "Here now," she said, "you can
help me by looking in that other barrel. I'm hunting for a coral castle; and
a  sack of  pearl pebbles, all  colors. I think Catherine  will like that, a
bowl of  goldfish,  don't you? For  her birthday. We used to have a bowl  of
tropical fish-devils,  they were: ate each  other up. But I remember when we
bought them; we  went all the  way to Brew-ton,  sixty  miles.  I never went
sixty miles before, and I don't know that I ever will again. Ah see, here it
is, the castle." Soon afterwards I found the pebbles; they were like kernels
of corn or candy,  and: "Have a piece of candy," I said, offering  the sack.
"Oh thank you," she said, "I love a piece of candy, evea when it tastes like
a pebble."
     We were friends. Dolly and  Catherine and me. I was  eleven, then I was
sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.
     I never brought anyone home with me, and I never wanted to. Once I took
a girl to the picture show, and on the way  home she asked couldn't she come
in for a  drink  of water. If I'd thought she was  really thirsty I would've
said affl right;  but I knew she was faking just so she could see inside the
house  the  way people were always wanting to, and so I told her  she better
wait until she got home. She said: "All the world knows  Dolly Talbo's gone,
and  you're gone too." I liked that girl well enough, but I gave her a shove
anyway, and she  said her brother  would  fix my  wagon, which he did: right
here at the comer of my mouth I've  still got a scar where he  hit me with a
Coca-Cola bottle.
     I know: Dolly,  they said, was Verena's cross, and said, too, that more
went on in the house on Talbo Lane than  a body cared to think  about. Maybe
so. But those were the lovely years.
     On  winter  afternoons, as soon  as  I came in  from  school, Catherine
hustled open a  jar of preserves,  while Dolly put a foot-high pot of coffee
on the  stove and pushed a pan of bis"  cuits into  the oven; and the  oven,
opening, would  let  out a hot vanilla fragrance, for  Dolly, who lived  off
sweet  foods,  was always baking a  pound cake, raisin bread,  some kind  of
cookie or fudge: never would touch a vegetable, and the only meat she  liked
was the chicken brain, a pea-sized thing  gone before you've tasted it. What
with a woodstove  and an open fireplace,  the  kitchen was warm  as a  cow's
tongie. The nearest winter came was to frost the  windows with its zero blue
breath. If some  wizard would like  to make me a present, let  him give me a
bottle  filled  with  the voices of  that kitchen,  the  ha  ha ha and  fire
whispering, a  bottle  brimming with its buttery sugary bakery smells-though
Catherine smelled  like  a  sow  in  the spring.  It looked more like a cozy
parlor  than  a kitchen; there was a hook rug  on the floor, rocking chairs;
ranged along the walls were pictures  of kittens,  an enthusiasm of Dolly's;
there was a geranium plant that bloomed, then bloomed  again all year round,
and Catherine's goldfish, in a  bowl on the  oilcloth-covered  table, fanned
their  tails  through the  portals of  the coral castle. Sometimes we worked
jigsaw puzzles,  dividing  the  pieces  among  us,  and Catherine would hide
pieces if  she  thought  you were going to  finish  your part  of the puzzle
before she finished hers. Or they  would help with my homework;  that was  a
mess.  About  all natural  things  Dolly  was  sophisticated;  she  had  the
subterranean  intelligence of  a bee that knows where to find  the  sweetest
flower: she could tell you of a storm a day in advance, predict the fruit of
the fig tree, lead you to mushrooms and wild honey, a hidden nest  of guinea
hen eggs. She looked around  her, and felt what she  saw. But about homework
Dolly  was as ignorant as Catherine.  "America must have been called America
before Columbus  came.  It stands to  reason.  Otherwise,  how would he have
known  it was America?" And Catherine said: "That's  correct.  America is an
old  Indian word." Of the two,  Catherine was the worst: she insisted on her
infallibility, and if you did not write down  exactly what she said, she got
jumpy and spilled the coffee or something. But I never listened to her again
after  what  she said  about Lincoln: that he was part Negro and part Indian
and only a  speck white. Even  I knew  this  was  not true.  But I am  under
special obligation  to  Catherine;  if it  had not  been for her  who  knows
whether I would have grown  to  ordinary human size?  At fourteen  I was not
much bigger than  Biddy Skinner, and people told how he'd had  offers from a
circus. Catherine said don't worry yourself honey, all you need is  a little
stretching. She pulled at my arms, legs, tugged at my head as though it were
an apple latched to an unyielding bough.  But it's the truth that within two
years  she'd stretched me from four feet nine to five feet seven, and  I can
prove it by the breadknife knotches on the pantry door, for even now when so
much has gone,  when  there is  only  wind in  the  stove and winter  in the
kitchen, those growing-up scars are still there, a testimony.
     Despite  the generally beneficial effect  Dolly's medicine appeared  to
have on those who sent for it, letters once in a while came saying Dear Miss
Talbo  we  won't be needing any  more dropsy cure on  account of poor Cousin
Belle (or whoever) passed  away last week bless her soul.  Then  the kitchen
was a  mournful place; with folded  hands  and  nodding heads my two friends
bleakly recalled  the circumstances of the  case, and well, Catherine  would
say, we  did the best  we could  Dollyheart,  but the  good  Lord  had other
notions.  Verena,  too,  could  make  the  kitchen  sad,  as  she was always
introducing a new rule or enforcing an old one: do,  don't,  stop, start: it
was as though we were  clocks  she kept an eye on to see that our time jibed
with her own, and woe if we were ten minutes fast, an hour slow: Verena went
off like  a  cuckoo. That One! said Catherine, and Dolly would go  hush now!
hush now! as though to quiet not Catherine but a mutinous  inner whispering.
Verena in  her heart wanted, I think, to come into the kitchen and be a part
of it; but she  was too  like  a  lone man  in a  house full  of  women  and
children,  and the only  way she  could  make  contact  with us was  through
assertive outbursts: Dolly, get rid of that kitten, you want to aggravate my
asthma?  who left the water running in  the bathroom? which one of you broke
my umbrella? Her ugly moods sifted through the house like a sour yellow mist
That One. Hush now, hush.
     Once a week, Saturdays mostly, we went to River Woods. For these trips,
which lasted the  whole day,  Catherine fried a  chicken and deviled a dozen
eggs, and Dolly took along a chocolate layer cake  and a supply of  divinity
fudge. Thus  armed, and carrying three empty grain  sacks, we walked out the
church road  past the  cemetery and through the  field of Indian grass. Just
entering the woods there was a double-trunked China tree, really two  trees,
but  their branches  were so embraced that  you could step from one into the
other; in fact, they were bridged by a tree-house: spacious, sturdy, a model
of a tree-house, it was like a raft floating in the sea of  leaves. The boys
who built  it, provided they are still alive, must by now be very  old  men;
certainly the tree-house was fifteen or twenty years old  when  Dolly  first
found it and that was a quarter of a century before  she showed it to me. To
reach it was  easy as climbing stairs; there were  footholds of gnarled bark
and tough vines to grip; even Catherine, who was heavy  around  the hips and
complained of rheumatism, had no trouble. But Catherine felt no love for the
tree-house; she did not know, as Dolly knew  and made me know, that it was a
ship, that  to sit up there was to sail along the cloudy coastline  of every
dream. Mark my word, said Catherine, them boards are too old, them nails are
slippery as worms, gonna crack in two, gonna fall and bust our heads don't I
know it.
     Storing our provisions in the tree-house, we  separated into the woods,
each carrying a grain sack to be filled with  herbs, leaves, strange  roots.
No one, not even Catherine, knew altogether what went into the medicine, for
it was a secret Dolly kept to herself, and we were never allowed to  look at
the gatherings in her own sack: she  held tight to it,  as though inside she
had captive a  blue-haired  child, a  bewitched  prince. This was her story:
"Once, back yonder  when we  were children (Verena still with  her babyteeth
and Catherine no higher than a fence post) there were gipsies thick as birds
in  a blackberry patch-not like  now,  when  maybe you see a  few straggling
through  each year. They  came with spring: sudden,  like the dogwood  pink,
there they  were-up and down the  road and in the woods around. But  our men
hated the sight of them, and daddy, that was your great-uncle Uriah, said he
would shoot any he caught on our place. And so I  never told when  I saw (he
gipsies  taking water from  the creek or stealing old winter  pecans off the
ground.  Then one evening,  it was April and falling rain, I went out to the
cowshed where Fairybell had a new little calf; and there in the cowshed were
three gipsy women, two of them old and one of them young, and  the young one
was lying naked and twisting on the cornshucks. When they saw that I was not
afraid, that  I  was not going to run  and tell,  one of the old women asked
would I bring a light So I went to the house for a candle, and when  I  came
back the woman who had sent me was holding a red hollering baby upside  down
by  its feet, and the other woman  was milking Fairybell. I helped them wash
the baby  in the warm milk and wrap it in a scarf. Then one of the old women
took my hand  and  said: Now I am going to give you a gift by teaching you a
rhyme. It was a rhyme about evergreen bark, dragonfly fern-and all the other
things we come here  in the  woods to find: Boil  till dark and  pure if you
want a dropsy cure. In  the morning they were gone; I looked for them in the
fields and on the road; there was nothing  left of them  but the rhyme in my
head."
     Calling to each  other,  hooting like owls  loose  in  the daytime,  we
worked all morning in opposite parts  of  the  woods. Towards afternoon, our
sacks fat with  skinned bark, tender,  torn roots, we climbed  back into the
green web  of the China tree and spread the food. There was good creek water
in  a mason jar,  or if the weather was cold a thermos of hot coffee, and we
wadded leaves to wipe our chicken-stained, fudge-sticky fingers. Afterwards,
telling fortunes with flowers, speaking of sleepy things, it was  as  though
we floated through the afternoon on the raft in the tree; we belonged there,
as the sun-silvered leaves belonged, the dwelling whippoorwills.
     About once a year I go over to the house on Talbo Lane, and walk around
in  the yard. I  was there the other day, and came  across an  old iron  tub
lying  overturned  in  the weeds  like a black  fallen  meteor: Dolly-Dolly,
hovering over the tub dropping  our grain-sack gatherings into boiling water
and stirring, stirring with a sawed-off broomstick the brown as tobacco spit
brew. She did  the mixing of the medicine alone while Catherine and  I stood
watching like apprentices to a witch. We all  helped later with the bottling
of it  and, because  it produced  a fume  that  exploded ordinary corks,  my
particular  job was to roll stoppers of toilet paper.  Sales averaged around
six bottles a week, at two dollars a bottle. The money. Dolly said, belonged
to  the  three  of  us, and we spent it fast as  it  came in. We were always
sending  away  for stuff  advertised  in  magazines:  Take  Up  Woodcarving,
Parcheesi: the  game for  young and old.  Anyone Can Play A Bazooka. Once we
sent  away for a book of French lessons: it was my idea  that if  we got  to
talk  French  we would  have a secret language that Verena  or  nobody would
understand. Dolly was willing to try, but "Passez-moi  a spoon" was the best
she ever  did, and after learning "Je suis fatigue," Catherine  never opened
the book again: she said that was all she needed to know.
     Verena  often remarked  that there would  be trouble if anyone ever got
poisoned, but otherwise  she  did not show much interest in the dropsy cure.
Then one  year we totaled up and found we'd earned enough to  have to pay an
income  tax.  Whereupon  Verena began  asking questions:  money  was like  a
wildcat whose trail she stalked with a trained hunter's muffled step  and an
eye for every broken twig. What, she wanted to know, went into the medicine?
and Dolly,  flattered, almost giggling, nonetheless waved her hands and said
Well this and that, nothing special.
     Verena seemed to let  the  matter die; yet  very often,  sitting at the
supper table,  her eyes paused ponderingly  on Dolly, and once, when we were
gathered in the yard around the boiling tub, I looked up and saw Verena in a
window watching  us with  uninterrupted fixity: by then, I suppose, her plan
had taken shape, but she did not make her first move until summer.
     Twice a  year, in  January and  again in August,  Verena went on buying
trips to St. Louis or Chicago. That summer, the summer  I  reached  sixteen,
she went to Chicago and after two weeks returned accompanied by a man called
Dr. Morris  Ritz. Naturally  everyone  wondered who was Dr. Morris Ritz?  He
wore bow ties and sharp jazzy suits;  his  lips were blue  and  he had gaudy
small swerving eyes; altogether, he  looked like a mean mouse. We heard that
he lived in the  best room at the Lola Hotel and ate steak dinners at Phil's
Cafe.  On  the  streets he  strutted  along bobbing his shiny  head at every
passerby; he made  no friends, however,  and was not seen in the  company of
anyone except Verena, who never brought him to the house and never mentioned
his name until one day Catherine had the gall to say, "Miss Verena, just who
is this funny  looking little  Dr. Morris Ritz?"  and Verena, getting  white
around the mouth, replied: "Well now, he's not half so funny looking as some
I could name."
     Scandalous,  people said, the  way  Verena  was  carrying on with  that
little Jew  from Chicago: and  him twenty  years younger. The story that got
around was that they were up to something out in the old canning factory the
other side of town. As it developed, they were; but not what the gang at the
pool-hall  thought Most  any  afternoon you could see Verena and  Dr. Morris
Ritz walking out toward the canning factory, an abandoned blasted brick ruin
with jagged windows and sagging doors. For a generation no one had been near
it except school-kids who  went  there to  smoke  cigarettes  and  get naked
together. Then  early in September,  by way of a notice in  the  Courier, we
learned for  the first time that Verena had  bought the old canning factory;
but  there was no mention as to what  use she was  planning to make  of  it.
Shortly after this, Verena told Catherine to kill two chickens as Dr. Morris
Ritz was coming to Sunday dinner.
     During  the  years that  I lived there.  Dr.  Morris  Ritz was the only
person ever invited to dine  at the house on Talbo Lane. So for many reasons
it was an occasion.  Catherine  and Dolly did a spring  cleaning:  they beat
rugs, brought china from the attic, had every room smelling  of floorwax and
lemon polish.  There was to be fried  chicken and  ham, English peas,  sweet
potatoes, rolls, banana pudding,  two  kinds  of  cake and  tutti-frutti ice
cream from the drugstore.  Sunday noon Verena  came in to look at the table:
with  its  sprawling  centerpiece  of  peach-colored roses and  dense  fancy
stretches  of  silverware,  it seemed set  for a party  of twenty; actually,
there were  only two places. Verena went ahead  and set two more, and Dolly,
seeing this, said weakly Well, it was all right if  Collin wanted to  eat at
the table, but  that she was going to  stay  in the kitchen with  Catherine.
Verena put her foot down: "Don't  fool  with me. Dolly.  This  is important.
Morris  is  coming  here expressly  to  meet  you.  And  what-is  more,  I'd
appreciate it if you'd hold  up  your head: it  makes me dizzy, hanging like
that."
     Dolly  was scared to  death: she hid  in her room, and long  after  our
guest had arrived I had to be  sent  to fetch her. She was lying in the pink
bed  with a  wet washrag on her  forehead, and Catherine was  sitting beside
her.  Catherine was  all sleeked up, rouge on her cheeks  like lollipops and
her jaws  Jammed with more cotton  than ever; she said, "Honey, you ought to
get up from  there-you're going to ruin that pretty  dress." It was a calico
dress Verena had brought from  Chicago; Dolly  sat up and smoothed it,  then
immediately  lay down again:  "If  Verena knew how  sorry  I  am,"  she said
helplessly, and so I went and  told Verena that Dolly was sick.  Verena said
she'd see about that, and marched off leaving me alone in  the hall with Dr.
Morris Ritz.
     Oh he was  a hateful thing. "So you're sixteen," he said, winking first
one,  then the  other of his sassy  eyes. "And throwing it around, huh? Make
the old  lady take you next  time she goes to Chicago. Plenty of good  stuff
there to throw it at." He snapped his fingers and jiggled his  razde-dazzle,
dagger-sharp shoes as though keeping time  to some vaudeville tune: he might
have been a tapdancer or a soda-jerk, except that  he  was carrying a  brief
case, which suggested  a more serious  occupation. I  wondered what kind  of
doctor he was supposed to be; indeed, was on the point of asking when Verena
returned steering Dolly by the elbow.
     The shadows of the hall, the tapestried furniture failed to absorb her;
without raising her eyes she lifted her  hand,  and Dr. Ritz  gripped  it so
ruggedly, pumped it so hard she  went nearly off  balance. "Gee, Miss Talbo;
am I honored to meet you!" he said, and cranked his bow tie.
     We sat down to dinner, and Catherine came  around with the chicken. She
served  Verena, then Dolly, and when the  doctor's turn came  he said, 'Tell
you the  truth, the only piece of chicken I  care  about is the brain: don't
suppose you'd have that back in the kitchen, mammy?"
     Catherine looked so far down her nose  she got almost cross"  eyed; and
with  her  tongue  all  mixed up in  the cotton wadding she  told him  that,
"Dolly's took those brains on her plate."
     "These southern accents, Jesus," he said, genuinely dismayed.
     "She says I have the brains on my plate," said Dolly, her cheeks red as
Catherine's rouge. "But please let me pass them to you."
     "If you're sure you don't mind..."
     "She  doesn't mind a bit,"  said Verena.  "She only  eats sweet  things
anyway. Here, Dolly: have some banana pudding."
     Presently  Dr. Ritz commenced a  fit of sneezing.  "The flowers,  those
roses, old allergy..."
     "Oh dear," said Dolly who,  seeing  an opportunity  to  escape into the
kitchen, seized the bowl of roses: it slipped, crystal crashed, roses landed
in  gravy and gravy  landed  on  us all.  "You see," she said,  speaking  to
herself and with tears teetering in her eyes, "you see, it's hopeless."
     "Nothing is  hopeless. Dolly; sit down and finish your pudding," Verena
advised in a substantial,  chin-up  voice. "Besides, we have  a nice  little
surprise for you. Morris, show Dolly those lovely labels."
     Murmuring "No harm done," Dr. Ritz stopped  rubbing gravy splotches off
his sleeve,  and went  into  the hall,  returning  with his  brief case. His
fingers  buzzed through a sheaf of  papers, then lighted on a large envelope
which he passed down to Dolly.
     There were gum-stickers in the envelope, triangular  labels with orange
lettering: Gipsy Queen Dropsy Cure: and a fuzzy picture of a woman wearing a
bandana  and gold earloops. "First class,  huh?"  said  Dr. Ritz.  "Made  in
Chicago. A  friend of mine drew the picture: real artist, that  guy,"  Dolly
shuffled  the labels  with a puzzled, apprehensive  expression  until Verena
asked: "Aren't you pleased?"
     The labels twitched in Dolly's hands. "I'm not sure I understand."
     "Of course you do," said Verena, smiling thinly. "It's  obvious enough.
I told Morris that  old story  of yours  and  he  thought  of this wonderful
name."
     "Gipsy Queen  Dropsy Cure: very catchy, that," said  the doctor.  "Look
great in ads."
     "My  medicine?"  said Dolly, her eyes  still lowered. "But I don't need
any labels, Verena. I write my own."
     Dr. Ritz snapped his  fingers. "Say,  that's  good! We can have  labels
printed like her own handwriting: personal, see?"
     "We've  spent  enough  money already," Verena  told him  briskly;  and,
turning to Dolly, said: "Morris and I are  going up  to Washington this week
to  get  a  copyright  on  these  labels  and  register  a  patent  for  the
medicine-naming you as the inventor, naturally. Now the point is. Dolly, you
must sit down and write out a complete formula for us."
     Dolly's face loosened; and the labels scattered  on the floor, skimmed.
Leaning  her  hands  on  the table  she pushed herself  upward;  slowly  her
features came together again, she lifted her head  and looked blinkingly  at
Dr. Ritz, at Verena. "It won't do," she said quietly. She moved to the door,
put  a hand on  its handle.  "It won't  do:  because  you haven't any right,
Verena. Nor you, sir."
     I helped  Catherine clear the table: the ruined roses, the uncut cakes,
the vegetables no one had  touched. Verena  and her guest had left the house
together; from the kitchen window we watched them as  they went  toward town
nodding and shaking their heads.  Then we sliced the devil's-food  cake  and
took it into Dolly's room.
     Hush now! hush now! she said when Catherine  began light' ing into That
One.  But it was as  though  the  rebellious inner whispering  had  become a
raucous  voice,  an opponent she  must outshout: Hush now! hush  nowl  until
Catherine had to put her arms around Dolly and say hush, too.
     We got out a deck  of Rook  cards and spread them on the bed. Naturally
Catherine had to go and remember it was Sunday; she said maybe we could risk
another black mark in the  Judgment Book, but there were too many beside her
name already. After  thinking it  over,  we told fortunes  instead. Sometime
around dusk Verena came home. We heard her footsteps in the hall; she opened
the door without  knocking, and Dolly, who was in the  middle of my fortune,
tightened her  hold on my  hand.  Verena  said: "Collin, Catherine, we  will
excuse you."
     Catherine wanted to follow me up the ladder  into the attic, except she
had  on her fine clothes. So I  went alone. There  was a  good knothole that
looked straight  down into  the  pink room; but Verena was standing directly
under it, and all I could see was her hat, for she was still wearing the hat
she'd put on when she left the house. It was a straw skimmer decorated  with
a  cluster  of celluloid fruit. "Those are facts," she was  saying, and  the
fruit shivered,  shimmered in the  blue dimness. "Two  thousand for the  old
factory. Bill Tatum and four carpenters working out there at eighty cents an
hour,  seven  thousand dollars worth  of machinery already  ordered, not  to
mention what  a specialist  like  Morris Ritz  is costing. And why?  All for
youl"
     "All for me?" and Dolly sounded sad and  failing as the dusk. I saw her
shadow  as she moved from  one part of the room  to another. "You are my own
flesh, and I love you tenderly; in my heart I love you. I could prove it now
by giving you the only thing that has ever been mine: then you would have it
all.  Please,  Verena," she said, faltering, "let  this one thing  belong to
me."
     Verena switched  on  a light. "You speak of giving," and her voice  was
hard  as the sudden  bitter glare. "All these years that I've worked  like a
fieldhand; what haven't I given you? This house, that..."
     "You've  given  everything to me,"  Dolly interrupted  softly. "And  to
Catherine and to Collin. Except,  we've earned  our  way a bit: we've kept a
nice home for you, haven't we?"
     "Oh a fine home," said Verena, whipping  off her hat Her  face was full
of  blood. "You and  that gurgling fool. Has it not struck  you that I never
ask anyone into  this house? And  for a very simple reason: I'm ashamed  to.
Look what happened today."
     I could hear the breath go out of Dolly. "I'm sorry," she said faintly.
"I  am truly.  I'd always thought  there was a place for  us here, that  you
needed us somehow.  But it's  going  to be all right  now, Verena.  We'll go
away."
     Verena sighed. "Poor Dolly. Poor poor thing. Wherever would you go?"
     The  answer,  a little while in coming, was fragile as  the flight of a
moth; "I know a place."
     Later, I  waited in  bed  for Dolly to come and  kiss me goodnight.  My
room, beyond the parlor in a faraway comer of  the house, was the room where
their father, Mr. Uriah Talbo,  had  lived.  In his mad old  age, Verena had
brought him  here from the  farm, and here  he'd  died, not knowing where he
was. Though dead ten, fifteen  years, the  pee and tobacco old-man smell  of
him still saturated  the mattress, the closet,  and on a shelf in the closet
was  the  one possession he'd carried away with him from  the farm,  a small
yellow  drum: as a lad  my own age he'd marched in a Dixie regiment rattling
this little yellow drum, and  singing.  Dolly said that when she  was a girl
she'd liked to  wake up  winter mornings  and hear her  father singing as he
went about  the house building fires; after he was old, after he'd died, she
sometimes  heard his  songs in the  field of  Indian  grass. Wind, Catherine
said; and Dolly told her: But the wind  is us-it gathers and  remembers  all
our  voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and  the
fields -I've heard Papa clear as day.
     On such a  night, now that it was September, the autumn winds  would be
curving  through the taut  red grass, releasing all the  gone voices, and  I
wondered  if  he was singing  among them, the  old  man in whose  bed I  lay
falling asleep.
     Then I thought Dolly at last had come to kiss  me goodnight, for I woke
up sensing her near me in  the  room; but it  was almost  morning, beginning
light was like a flowering  foliage  at the windows,  and roosters ranted in
distant yards. "Shhh,  Collin," Dolly whispered, bending  over me.  She  was
wearing a woolen winter suit and a hat with a traveling veil that misted her
face. "I only wanted you to know where we are going."
     "To the tree-house?" I said, and thought I was talking in my sleep.
     Dolly nodded. "Just for now. Until we know  better  what our plans will
be." She could see that I was frightened, and put her hand on my forehead.
     "You and  Catherine:  but not me?" and I was jerking with a chill. "You
can't leave without me."
     The town clock was tolling; she seemed  to be waiting for it  to finish
before making up her mind. It struck five, and by the time the note had died
away I had climbed out of  bed and rushed into my clothes. There was nothing
for Dolly to say except: '"Don't forget your comb."
     Catherine met us in the yard; she was crooked over with the weight of a
brimming oilcloth satchel; her eyes  were  swollen, she had been crying, and
Dolly, oddly calm and certain of what she was doing, said it doesn't matter,
Catherine-we  can send  for  your  goldfish  once  we find a place. Verena's
closed quiet  windows  loomed above us;  we moved  cautiously past  them and
silently out  the gate. A fox terrier barked at us; but  there was no one on
the street, and  no one  saw us pass through  the town  except  a  sleepless
prisoner gazing from the jail. We reached the field  of  Indian grass at the
same  moment  as the sun. Dolly's veil flared  in the morning breeze, and  a
pair of pheasants,  nesting in our path, swept before us, their metal  wings
swiping the cockscomb-scarlet  grass. The China tree was a September bowl of
green and  greenish gold:  Gonna fall, gonna bust our heads, Catherine said,
as all around us the leaves shook down their dew.

        Two

     If it hadn't been for Riley Henderson, I doubt anyone would have known,
or at least known so soon, that we were in the tree.
     Catherine  had loaded her  oilcloth  satchel  with  the  leftovers from
Sunday dinner, and  we  were enjoying a breakfast of cake  and chicken  when
gunfire slapped through the  woods. We sat there with cake going  dry in our
mouths.  Below,  a sleek bird  dog  cantered  into view,  followed by  Riley
Henderson; he  was shouldering a shotgun and around his  neck  there  hung a
garland of bleeding squirrels whose tails were tied together.  Dolly lowered
her veil, as though to camouflage herself among the leaves.
     He  paused  not far  away, and his  wary, tanned  young face tightened;
propping his gun into position he took a roaming  aim, as if  waiting  for a
target  to  present itself. The suspense  was  too  much for  Catherine, who
shouted: "Riley Henderson, don't you dare shoot us!"
     His gun wavered, and  he spun  around, the  squirrels  swinging  like a
loose necklace. Then he saw us in the tree, and  after a moment said, "Hello
there,  Catherine  Creek; hello. Miss  Talbo.  What are  you  folks doing up
there? Wildcat chase you?"
     "Just sitting," said  Dolly promptly,  as  though  she  were afraid for
either Catherine  or I to answer. "That's a  fine mess  of squirrels  you've
got."
     'Take  a couple,"  he said, detaching two. "We had some for supper last
night and they were real tender. Wait a minute, I'll bring them up to you."
     "You don't have to do that; just leave them on the ground." But he