Dinner Along the Amazon (9 page)

Then into the midst of this noise and into the motion of the rushing, came again the picture of his father’s face. Harper could see both his father’s face and also his father’s body—the face close to him and the body far away. Harper was trying to get past his face to the body but the face kept getting in his way. It spoke, over and over again, Harper’s own name, but like the silent figures on the ground and the bleeding figures against the city’s walls, no voice accompanied the speaking. The lips moved over his name, again and again, but no sound came with the movement.

Soon, beyond the face, he saw his mother and his mother was wearing his own white sun hat with the green eye-shade and she carried the stone jug of ‘lemonade’ in one hand. She went straight to his father’s body and she poured the ‘lemonade’ into a cup and gave it to the body to drink. Then she hunched down on the ground and began to drink the lemonade herself.

Harper knew that he must stop her—but he couldn’t get past his father’s face, which continued to blink at him, mouthing the shape of his name.

Harper remembered the Colt revolver in his father’s highboy, which he saw sitting in the corner of his dream. He ran to it and pulled the drawer open. The gun was there and he took it out and ran back towards his father’s body and towards his mother hunched on the ground beside him. They were both drinking lemonade and they were laughing.

He was about to reach them, about to throw the gun away, when his father’s face suddenly blanked out the entire picture and he shot at it, firing three times straight into the mouth.

The face fell apart as though it had been torn like a piece of paper and the pieces melted into the air and ran, waxlike, down a pane of glass. After that, everything began to fade—the pictures and the noises together—rushing away into final darkness and silence.

Harper lay awake.

He listened, rigid and wet with perspiration. Someone was running down the hall past his door.

He turned his head to listen. For a moment there was no further sound, until suddenly there was a violent knocking, he guessed at his mother’s bedroom door.

Was someone trying to get in or to get out?

He went to his own door, unlocked it and opened it.

Bertha stood near his mother’s room, wrapped in a blue dressing gown, barefooted and wild-eyed.

“Harper, get a key,” she said.

“What key?”

“Any key. Any key. Just get a key.”

Bertha turned back to the closed door and knocked on it again.

“Mrs Dewey!” she said. “Mrs Dewey you gotta let me in. It’s your Bertha, Mrs Dewey—you gotta open it up.”

Harper, not being able to guess at all what was happening, ran back to his own room and got the key out of his door. He took it to Bertha. She put the key into the lock and turned it from side to side.

“Oh Lord,” she said, “you gotta make this work.”

The key, however, jammed in the lock and presently broke off in her hand. Instead of becoming angry Bertha turned to calmness. She came to Harper and spoke quietly.

“Honey Harper, we’re gonna hafta break it down.”

“What’s it about?” said Harper. “What’s it about, Bertha?”

“I don’t know, baby, but something pretty bad’s just happened to your mother and we got to get her out. Come on now, what’ll we do it with?”

Harper suddenly felt sick to his stomach. He turned away and sat on his little chair beside the door. Sitting there the sick feeling receded and he tried to think.

“We could hit it with a brick,” he said.

“That won’t do nothing. We gotta ram it right down. I know,” she said. “We take away the handle.”

“It’s the lock that’s busted,” Harper reminded her. “Handle won’t count anyway.”

“Dear God please tell me what’s to do.”

Bertha prayed.

They both fell silent as Bertha waited for guidance.

After a moment she announced mysteriously: “He says we ought to use the phone.” She went downstairs, switching on the lights as she did, and took up the receiver in the hall.

“Get me police,” she said. “Get me police. Don’t wait.”

The stunned operator connected Bertha with the police station and the night sergeant answered her thickly.

“Listen,” said Bertha. “Get here quick. She’s locked the door and you gotta come quick.”

While they waited, Bertha telephoned, or at least tried to telephone Dr Hamilton, but she got many wrong numbers and irate answers before she finally reached him. All this while Harper stood, hands behind his back, standing silently by the front door.

The situation having been explained, the first policeman, when he finally appeared on the verandah, carried an axe in his hand.

Bertha was still on the telephone getting Dr Hamilton out of bed, so Harper let them in. “Please now, come quick,” she said and banged down the receiver. “The door’s upstairs,” she said to the policeman. “I guess she locked it first and then I broke another key trying to get it open. But we just got to get inside.”

“All right m’am. We’ll try and be careful.”

Harper followed at a distance behind them and stood at the far end of the hall while they broke the door down with the axe. Actually, all they did was hit it with the blunt edge of the axe-head and the lock and the doorjamb shattered, swinging the door wide on its hinges.

Before they went in they set the axe against the wall beside Harper’s chair.

“Is there a light?” one of the policemen asked Bertha.

“Yes sir—over here.”

Harper heard the light switch go on and then there was silence.

Outside, the storm had broken and Mrs Jamieson had turned all the lights on in her house. Harper saw them flicker on through the window at the top of the stairs.

Voices drifted from his mother’s bedroom and presently one of the policemen came out into the hall. He walked past Harper, patting him on the head as he did so, and went down the stairs at a trot.

Presently Dr Hamilton came up the stairs in his black overcoat and hat, but underneath still dressed in his pajamas. He passed Harper and went straight to Mrs Dewey’s bedroom. The door closed.

Harper sat at the top of the stairs. He was numb and cold and he could think of nothing to think about except Mrs Jamieson’s lights shining inquiringly forth from next door.

In half an hour his mother’s door opened and another policeman came out and stood in the hall.

“Harper?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Come here,” he said gently, “don’t be frightened.”

Harper got up and pulled his pajama bottoms up tighter around his waist. He took a final look at Mrs Jamieson’s windows and went meekly down the hall. The policeman took his hand.

“Your nanny wants to see you,” he said.

Harper guessed that he meant Bertha.

When they went in the lights had been turned very low and Harper could only just make out the shapes of the furniture in the room. It still smelt of the spilt perfume.

Bertha was sitting on the far side of his mother’s bed and Dr Hamilton was standing on the near side. There were three policemen in the room, huddled over by the highboy. His mother lay on the bed under a blanket.

The policeman took Harper around the foot of the bed to beside Bertha.

Bertha took his hand now and the policeman went back to the bedroom door.

Harper focused on Bertha.

“Honey,” she said, “I guess we didn’t just pray enough—and now we’ll have to pray a whole lot more.” She was crying, but she pulled him close to her shoulder and looked right into his eyes and smiled. “God does a lot of funny things—he has a lot of funny ways for us to walk. I’m just awful sorry that I ain’t walked closer to your mother and to you these past few months or this might never have happened.” She blinked away some tears and looked down for a moment. She buttoned up his pajamas coat where it was undone and looked at him again. “We went and lost her, Harper” she said simply. “We went and lost your mother to the Lord.”

Harper looked shyly at the bed.

His mother was covered to her chin with a blanket, which was folded back down from her face onto her chest.

She looked confused and her forehead was wrinkled as though in deep thought and conjecture. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was slightly open. There was dried blood at the corner of her lips. She was as pale as that other day, when Harper had come into the bedroom and had seen her asleep. He thought secretly—“She’s not dead now, but she was the other day.”

Bertha held his hand lightly and looked at Mrs Dewey too.

“I’m sorry,” said one of the policemen—“but you’ll have to come downstairs now please and answer some questions. Dr Hamilton, are you ready sir?”

As they went out Harper saw one of the policemen carrying his father’s Colt revolver in a handkerchief.

Bertha sighed and got up.

Harper reached out and touched his mother’s lips with his finger. They were hard and cold. He stood rigid and still. Bertha waited. Then he put his hand in Bertha’s and went down the stairs and into the living room.

Outside, Mrs Jamieson’s windows showed that her lights were finally going out, one by one, like sighs.

The next day the house was full of people Harper had never seen before, people who drove up to the boulevard in big, handsome cars and who came to see his dead mother dressed in black clothes and carrying fur pieces over their arms or, if they were men, carrying black hats and umbrellas.

Bertha put on her black uniform and held a Bible in one hand all day long. She met the people in the hallway and spoke quietly to them about Mrs Dewey and then led them upstairs to the spare room where his mother’s body had been laid on the bed dressed in a clean nightgown and one of the pink negligees of which she had been so fond. Bertha had put makeup on Mrs Dewey’s face so that it wouldn’t be so pale and she had tried to smooth the wrinkles from her forehead. She had also put a pretty ribbon around her hair. You couldn’t see where she had shot herself—that was all covered up.

By afternoon flowers began to arrive, some of them addressed to Harper, some to Bertha and some to ‘Rennie’ or to ‘Darling Rennie’ from ‘So-and-So.’ Harper had some from people he’d never ever heard of.

Also in the afternoon his two aunts, his mother’s sisters, arrived and his grandmother, who had been told only that her daughter had ‘passed away.’ His aunts had thought it best to keep the details of her death from their mother, because of her great age. She came in a wheelchair, his grandmother, and was carried upstairs by her own chauffeur together with Mrs Dewey’s chauffeur. No one came from his father’s family.

At three o’clock Harper went into the back garden to feed his guinea pig.

He reached under the porch and found the cage swamped in a pool of water caused by the storm. The guinea pig was dead. It had drowned. Harper took the cage in his arms and went and sat under the lilac trees with it. He took the dead pig out and laid it on the ground in front of him.

All around him the birds sang and the insects clamoured for attention. Far away the traffic moved steadily to and fro in the city, humming its monstrous mechanised song.

He tried to think, but nothing happened.

Nothing.

That was all he could grasp. Nothing. Everything was over—everyone went away—and finally you went away yourself.

He got up and went into the house where he got a spoon and returned after that to the garden. He dug a hole with the spoon and put the guinea pig inside and covered it with earth.

Then he stamped it down to a level with his feet.

Bertha came to the sun room door. “Harper, come and say good-bye to your granny, she’s going home now.”

“No thank you,” said Harper.

“She’ll be real disappointed,” said Bertha, fanning herself with the Bible. “You come and say good-bye.”

“No thanks. You tell it to her.”

“All right, Harper, you please yourself,” said Bertha. “There’s iced tea in the fridge.” She went inside.

Harper stood in the garden and listened to the birds.

He looked at the back of the house and counted the rooms by their windows.

Ten minutes later he was standing in the front hallway with Bertha. “I won’t be long,” he said. “I only have to go and then I’ll be right back.”

“All right then, if you got to. You didn’t disturb nothing up there in that spare room, I hope. There’s getting so there ain’t no room for flowers almost,” she said. “You didn’t shunt nothing around I hope.”

“No. I just went in and looked,” he said.

“All right. You go and come straight back.”

He looked at her.

“Bertha,” he said. “I take back that I don’t like you anymore” and then he opened the door and went down the walk.

Woolworth’s was crowded when he got there and he had a hard time making the saleslady pay attention to him because he could only barely see her above the counter and people kept pushing him away. But finally he had all that he wanted and he paid her and made his way home.

In the spare room he closed the door and stood at the foot of the bed.

The perfume from the flowers hung heavily in the air and there was a bee buzzing and banging itself against the screen at the window.

For a moment, Harper was afraid to go further into the room. The silence was terrifying to him and especially the silence that clung like something tangible to his mother’s form on the bed.

Harper began to sing and then, less conscious of the stillness, he went up and stood beside his mother.

He looked on her intently, humming the tune in short gasps of sound. When he finished the tune he brought a chair and sat beside her. Then he put the words to it. “Walking in the garden, walking with my Lord—.”

He felt as though she lay there listening to him; there was a peaceful expression on her face and she looked as though she only slept and could hear him in a dream. “Walking in the garden, talking with my Lord—.” Soon, he stopped singing and just watched her.

He held the Woolworth’s package in his hand. He looked at it and then back at his mother. She looked sad. The package was suddenly heavy and awkward in his hand and he stepped back from the bed, blushing.

He felt sorry and confused and ashamed all at once. He went to the door. He opened it, turned for a final look and then ran down the stairs and out into the garden.