Jordan County (19 page)

“You had this house, Mrs Simmons, and all that went with it. What can
I
do, me with these bad legs?”

“Do? Goodness. Just look at here.” They were sitting face to face, Mrs Lowry holding Ella on her lap, and Mrs Simmons leaned forward and fingered the hem of the baby’s dress. She pursed her lips as she did so, nodding positively. “Let me tell you, thats as nice a piece of stitching as ever I saw. Thats one thing you can do.”

So the two signs, one weathered and the other shiny new, decorated the pillars on opposite sides of the boarding-house steps. After the shingles had been exposed to two years of rain and sun, alternate heat and cold, anyone without particular information would have thought they had been nailed to the flanking pillars at the same time. By then Mrs Lowry was established. She had a straight-back chair equipped with casters so that she could move about the room without having to stand on her swollen legs. Her skill with the needle was praised for miles around. Mothers from surrounding towns and plantations throughout the central delta brought their daughters to her sewing room for fittings whenever the dress was to be a special one. They could recognize her work from across a ballroom and they pronounced the name Lowry with the same tone of respect and awe that women in other parts of the world adopted when they said Worth or Fortuny.

Ella grew up with the rapid stutter of the sewing machine
constantly in her ears. Her mother’s customers cooed with admiration; “
Such
a lovely child!” they cried, partly to curry favor with Mrs Lowry but mostly because it was true. At school the other girls liked to be with her because she drew the boys. By then she was not as pretty as she had been, for this was a transition stage; the prettiness was changing into beauty, and also into something else which the boys could recognize by instinct though they could not identify it as readily as the men who saw her on the street, still in ribbed stockings and button shoes, carrying school books. Her popularity held, being based now on talk of her promiscuity. For the past five years, up to the month preceding her sudden marriage to Hector Sturgis when she was nineteen, her only concern had been young men (but she never called them that; she called them ‘boys’) and thus she had acquired a reputation. When she was fourteen the watchers downtown would see her pass the barber shop or pool hall window, legs wobbly on high heels and wearing the flimsy, violent-flowered dresses she persuaded her mother to make for her — a juvenile Lillian Russell, emphasizing the bosom she already had — and returning, out of the tail of her eye, the stares of all the watchers. She not only seemed not to care what they thought, she seemed to go out of her way to make sure they understood that she did not care: so that, in the end, she showed how much she did care after all (but in reverse) and they responded with the frank, lickerish stares and the gossip she not only provoked but invited; it was reciprocal.

In those days she would be with girls older than herself and usually from families who disapproved of their being in her company, the disapproval of course adding to her attractiveness in their eyes. The watchers observed her moving with a sort of vicious jerkiness — slouched posture, high-colored cheeks, and languid eyes — to the murmurous accompaniment of their gossip. Presently, however, she left the girls behind. They saw her in the Kandy Kitchen drinking sodas with high school boys, ululant, head backflung, lips parted and damp.
Then she left the high school boys behind. On their way home to their farms, they saw her emerge from lonely back-roads, high on the seats of buggies with the blotch-faced youths of the town. And the watchers, farmers in Bristol for haircuts or pool or just for conversation, would return the following Saturday and tell about it, until finally it was mentioned only in passing — “I saw that Lowry girl again, out Dundrum way with a gig full of boys.” “Yair?” “Yair” — like fair weather or international politics. They had worn it out with too much talk, just as a popular song can be worn out with too much playing.

Then something changed all this. Suddenly, without any preliminary gesture so far as anyone observed, Ella sloughed her promiscuity. It was puzzling to the watchers, especially to those who had compounded it with her. Certainly something must have caused the reformation, or anyhow led up to it; or maybe not, maybe it just happened. Anyhow, for whatever reason or lack of a reason, she no longer welcomed the advances of the rounders nor addressed them with the encouraging smile and sidelong glance of Lilith on the lookout; she wore instead the mournful, slightly soured expression of Magdalene redeemed.

Some among the watchers, unable to account for it otherwise, claimed that her mother had straightened her out; but even those who said this did not believe it. For, two years earlier, when a delegation of Baptist ladies, members of the Bible Union carrying out a decision reached in caucus, called on Mrs Lowry to acquaint her with the talk about her daughter, the seamstress received them with smiles and an offer of tea, until the member previously appointed began to tell her why they had come: whereupon she cursed them from the room in a fit of indignation and passion, herding them out of the door like frightened sheep, the casters of her chair making a clatter like roller skates on the floorboards of the sewing room, and would never accept a dress order from one of them again.

Whatever else Ella gave up, she did not give up dancing. The Christmas holidays began, the series of dances that would continue through New Year’s, and Hector saw her as if for the first time. She had always gone with older boys; he had entertained no hopes, considering her beyond him. But now he did — and she saw him, too; he could tell. Abnegation lent sorrow to her face, a new, profounder beauty supplementing that which always had caused half the stags to cluster about her portion of the dance floor. With a suddenness and force that knocked all other thoughts from his head, Hector believed he had found the answer to every problem that had ever come his way.
Love
was his release from the burden coming-of-age had thrust upon him; Love was his consolation for all failures, all short-comings; he perceived now that nothing could ever be really unbearable if a man had Love to turn to. Also, she needed him. This alone, in Hector’s mind, was enough to recommend marriage. In point of fact, however, he was gone before he ever suspected a bait or looked for a reason. He was wooed, snared — thrown — by the old eternal feminine, the nun-like attitude of fallen women who have changed their ways if for no other cause but a whim.

He proposed on the fire-escape landing at the Elysian Club; they had stepped out for a breath of air between numbers, and Ella did what she had every cause to do; she accepted. They left at once, not going back through the ballroom because she had a date in there; woke up the old j.p. who filled out the license and married them, his wife and spinster daughter standing by in wrappers and curl-papers, two gray loveless ghosts; and then drove home in the surrey, all before midnight. They were in evening clothes, Ella’s satin dance slippers peeping from under the hem of her gown. Hector kept talking, talking; his eyes glittered with excitement and his starched white shirtfront flashed cold in the moonlight, like a shield. Ella had never seen him like this before, nor had anyone else. However, as they rode out toward the Sturgis house along the quiet, moon-silvered road, the mare’s hoofs clopping with a hollow sound like drumtaps along the way to a scaffold, he
became less and less hilarious and more and more preoccupied. The euphoria was playing out.

‘He’s scared of that old woman,’ Ella thought. ‘Of what she’ll do.’

She was right; he was frightened — and so for that matter was she. For Mrs Sturgis was formidable, especially when challenged on her own ground, which was where they were headed now in the surrey. Hector was her chief possession, the one to which all others — house, plantation, bank account, even the highborn insularity — were adjunct. Ella imagined the scene she believed would greet them. Yet presently, as the three of them stood in the parlor, mother and son and daughter-in-law, it was not at all as she had feared. Mrs Sturgis did not rave and wring her hands or tear her hair. Rather, she was remembering a similar scene a generation back, in the time of fever, when the red-faced feed and grain salesman with the celluloid collar and the carroty hair had come into this same room and spoken for her hand with such well-founded assurance. She remembered the sound of their voices: “When?” “Soon” — “How soon?” “Soon as possible,” and the way her mother had looked at the young man with a curiously combined expression of pride and defeat. (Six months later Hector was born and they swathed his hands in oil-soaked cotton and told callers he had no fingernails.) But this time it was a woman being brought into the house, and somehow that seemed a greater desecration. She herself was in her mother’s position, faced with what the diplomats called a
fait accompli
, having to accept what she could not alter. There was nothing she could do about it, any more than there had been anything Mrs Wingate could do about it twenty years ago. Remembering that time, Mrs Sturgis crossed the parlor and sat in the chair her mother had sat in when the roles were reversed.

She assigned Hector and Ella the upstairs front left bedroom where she and Sturgis had lived. Her room, formerly her mother’s, was directly across the hall. Sometimes in the night she would lie awake, hearing the muffled voices and the profound silence and then the voices again, and she would hate
them in her heart for having what she had lost, for having what she perhaps had never known. She would lie awake in the cold wide bed and hate them out of envy and regret, with a taste in her mouth like brass and a tight, constricting hoop about her chest. There was satisfaction, though, in suspecting that her mother had felt the same things in her time, fifteen and twenty years ago, when she was the one who lay awake in this same bed, tasting brass and breathing pain, while her daughter in the room across the hall took her pleasure, emitted those little choking sobs, never knowing how soon it would end, how soon the wheel would come full circle and passion be replaced by emptiness.

But Hector entered this new world without considering anything from the old one. He was young in it, quite unaware that anyone ever before had had what he was having. Sometimes at the breakfast table, after all that had happened in the night, he would look at Ella, the pale loveliness, the big green eyes, the mass of dark hair crowning the triangle of brow and chin, and his hands would become so awkward that he could not hold the fork; he would sit with his head lowered, feeling turmoil in his chest, the pounding that came whenever he looked at her and told himself that she was his, that they belonged to each other. It was like nothing he had ever suspected. When the three of them were together this way and Mrs Sturgis happened to have her attention drawn aside, giving instructions to one of the servants, Ella would look at him covertly, smiling that slow, secret smile, and he would feel the hair stir at the nape of his neck and his mouth would go dry.

It continued like this, with nothing to distract him. He did not even wonder where she had learned all she was teaching him. The academic Why he had brought to farming was forgotten; now his only concern was How. Then one night in early February they lay in bed talking, and Ella said suddenly, almost casually, as if it has just occurred to her: “Did you know we’re kin to each other, sort of?”

“What do you mean, kin? How kin?”

“I dont know exactly, for sure. But we’re kin, all right.”
Ella was quiet for a moment. Then she told him. “My great-grandfather, my father’s grandfather, brought your grandfather over here from Ireland after his trouble. Your father’s father, that was. My great-grandfather had a saloon here in Bristol called the Palace, and he came over to work for him. They were cousins. Second cousins, once removed I think. What does that make us?”

Hector did not answer. He was recalling something. It floated up from the dark well of the past, and when it broke the surface he saw again the hunch-shouldered man posed against the backdrop of racked bottles, looking at him with narrowed eyes out of the cavernous gloom while he sat in the carriage outside in brilliant sunlight; he heard Emma as she leaned forward, balancing the parasol like a tightrope walker, and whispered: “Thats yo granddaddy!” He had never seen him again, for when he came back from his freshman year at Virginia the saloon had been remodeled and there was a different bartender, a young man in a drill jacket. Hector went into the saloon for the first time in his life. “Old Barney?” the new man said. “He died last winter,” and that was all.

“What kind of trouble?” Hector asked.

“Hm?”

“You said your grandfather brought him—”

“
Great
-grandfather.”

“— brought him over from Ireland after his trouble. What kind of trouble was it?”

“Oh,” Ella said. She paused. “I thought you knew. They always kind of kept it in the family. Mamma told me about it years ago; she heard it from Daddy. I thought surely your father would have told you. He was there and saw it, and anyhow he must have heard about it afterwards, even if he was too young to remember.”

Hector lay staring up toward the invisible ceiling, his breath coming quicker and sharper while Ella told about Barney Sturgis, a farmer in one of the worst farming countries in the world. He had lived on rented land in County Down with his young wife, children coming regularly — there were
three, two girls and a boy; the boy was the youngest — and one morning he came back unexpectedly from the field and found his wife in the house with a man. They were in bed, the two heads on one pillow, looking at him in the doorway. At first the wife was frightened, but at length, as Barney continued to stand there looking foolish and too hurt to speak, she began to smile. Maybe it was from nerves or embarrassment or even fright; he told himself later that he could have forgiven it. But then the man smiled too, the two smiling faces on the one pillow. That was what did it, the smiles. Barney went to the woodpile and returned with the ax, running. He killed his wife right there in the bedroom, one blow with the blunt end, and killed the man, still running, when he caught up with him half a mile from the house. The way Ella heard it, the man (“He was what they call a tinker, and traveled round in a pony cart mending pots and pans and grinding scissors”) ran the last fifty yards with the bit of the ax in his skull and the helve down his back like a queue. The children looked over the low stone wall flanking the road the two men ran their race along; they saw the whole thing, round-eyed.