Moving On (105 page)

“Folks, these are songs you’ve all heard many times, songs we all love. Some of the singers you’ll hear are dead now, but I know most of you haven’t forgotten them and I know you’ll want this album. Why, it’ll bring all these great country singers into your homes again, just like old times, you know, when all you had to do to hear ’em was turn your radio dial. Just as soon as I tell you what you have to do to get this fine album we’re going to play another song, this one’ll be the old “Panhandle Rag,” by Monroe Malory, the old Wichita Ranger, but first get out your pencil and paper and take down this address . . .”

It scarcely registered; Patsy crumpled up the cellophane the cheese crisps had come in. When it did register, the announcer was going on about how they could receive the album C.O.D. She waited, not sure she had heard aright, but it turned out she had. Finally, after the announcer had repeated the address four times, she heard the voice of Hank’s father:

I was ram-bullin’ throoough
A Texas border tooown
. . .

and on through a little story about a traveling man who met a woman. They fell in love but it didn’t work out and the man went on to ramble through other towns. It was not a convincing song; the rhythm was too snappy for the story. There were tones in the voice that were like tones in Hank’s, but the person Monroe Malory’s voice really reminded her of was her own father. There was whiskey in the voice, and the same falseness of tone; it brought back to her her father’s red-faced confusion at the supper table, confusion perpetually trying to wear the mask of good nature. The young attendant came in while the song was playing and Patsy got some change and walked across the street to a phone booth near a street light. It seemed to be the only phone booth in town. Hank was not at his apartment but she got him at the movie theater where he worked. He was just closing up. It was a bad connection, as if the cold north wind were blowing through the phone.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m on my way to a funeral and I just heard one of your father’s records.”

She told him about it and they both laughed a little at the incongruity of their positions in the world, he in an art theater on the cap rock, she in a spidery phone booth in Bowie. “Amazing invention, the phone,” she said.

When she told him where she was going he was silent a minute and she knew why. It was less than two hundred miles from where he was. He wanted to come and see her. She had considered it as she walked across the street, and she didn’t feel against it. She felt for it. So when he asked she said okay. He agreed to come the day after the burial.

“I’ll be at the ranch house, I guess,” she said. “I’m getting all these houses lately. You’ll have to ask someone how to get there. I don’t really remember.”

The connection got dramatically worse and they gave up on the conversation. Patsy got in the Ford and went on. For forty-five miles she drove through a townless stretch of ranch country, rolling, scarcely wooded at all, no lights except those of distant oil rigs or oil flares. The little town, when she finally came to it, was on a hill, or a ridge, so that she saw its lights miles away. Once she did get there she realized how stupid she had been not to wait until morning, for it was obvious that everyone in the tiny hotel was long since asleep. There was a light over the desk and in lieu of a bell there was a horseshoe which could be struck with a piece of iron if the management had to be summoned. Patsy felt very silly. She carried in her suitcase, in order to delay striking the horseshoe. She was tempted to try and sleep in the car, but it was too cold. Finally, reluctantly, she hit it. It made an amazingly loud sound, but the silence of the hotel, and of the town, was as complete as ever once the sound had died. She had to strike it twice more before she heard a thump upstairs. Very shortly an old man came running downstairs and crashed into the desk alarmingly hard. It startled her a great deal. In his grogginess he had accidentally built up speed and had to keep running to keep from falling. He wore a flannel robe of faded maroon and had a mop of tousled gray hair.

“Excuse me,” he said, holding his side and grimacing. “I ain’t got my wits about me. I started downstairs thinking I was in a dream, and when I woke up I was about to fall on my face. Good thing the desk was between me and the window, I’d a run right through it and cut myself up.”

“I’m sorry,” Patsy said. “It’s my fault for coming in so late.” He was obviously in pain from having hit the desk so hard, and she felt herself to be an inordinate lot of trouble, especially since the room she took only cost three dollars.

“That’s very cheap,” she said, wondering what the room would be like.

“Yeah, about the only people who sleep here are folks who break out of jail,” he said. “It’s just across the alley. You must have read your map wrong, or you wouldn’t be here. This ain’t exactly the crossroads of the world.”

“No, I came for a funeral. I’ll just be here one night.”

“Oh, Roger, I guess,” he said, still rubbing his ribs. “Knew him all my life. Been funny if I had killed myself coming down to register you, wouldn’t it? They could have buried me and Roger together, except they’d have had to bury me on credit.”

The morning took some getting up to. The old man, whose name was Holiday, had provided her with ample cover and she slept so well and warmly that when she awoke she was extremely reluctant to exchange the comfort and snugness of the bed for the grimness of everything around it. The night before the room had seemed all right. In the flat morning light it was bare and dusty and ugly, a hotel room out of Dreiser or some Midwestern novelist, chair, scratched yellow pine dresser, white gas stove which she had no way of lighting. The rug was frayed. It was a room for males, and males who didn’t intend to use it more than a night or two. The shade was only half drawn and beyond it she could see the housetops of the town, and the country beyond the town. The sky was gray, almost the color of dust, though she didn’t know if the dustiness was in the sky or on the unwashed windows. It didn’t look like a world worth getting up to, particularly since it was very cold. She solved the heat problem by skipping in and running a hot bath in the narrow tub. Fifteen minutes’ soaking left her warm enough to dress in the sober dress she had brought, and when she got downstairs Mr. Holiday, looking as if he still hadn’t his wits fully about him, told her not to worry, it was due to warm up in the afternoon.

At the little cafe where she ate breakfast they fried eggs exactly as Roger had fried them. A couple of cowboys were there, and a civil servant or two, having coffee. All looked at her curiously.

The funeral was to be in a small red brick church, with cedar trees flanking the door. Patsy sat in front, in the Ford, with the motor running and the heater on, waiting for the crowd to gather. Roger’s sister found her easily. She was as tall and angular as he had been, and looked twenty years older than he had looked, with white hair and furrows of powder on her cheeks. She and her heavy, silent bald husband, along with Patsy, constituted Roger’s family, and they sat in the front of the church. Soon the church filled with his friends. The men looked uncomfortable in their suits, and in contrast to them the two heavy young men from the funeral home, in attempting to appear suave, appeared dandified. With their pompadours and heavy self-seriousness they reminded her of the show steers she had seen at the stock show. Roger’s sister—Mrs. Daniels, she was—kept whispering details of this and that as the church filled and the organist began to play.

Perhaps because of the ushers, perhaps because of Mrs. Daniels, perhaps because she couldn’t really connect it with Roger, the funeral didn’t touch her. She was dry-eyed and not sorrowful at all. It was a generally quiet funeral. No one seemed near hysterics. Mrs. Daniels’ long narrow face was grave, but scarcely racked by emotion. Two ministers gave modest eulogies; a fat woman sang “The Old Rugged Cross”; and an aged preacher, considerably shakier than Roger had ever been, gave a short sermon on the theme of dust to dust. Patsy’s mind was on Hank. She was getting a slight case of cold feet, a slight sense that it had been a mistake to agree to let him come.

Passing out of the church, she glanced at the dead man as briefly as was decent; she didn’t want to see him. It was the only time she had ever seen him in a tie; the oddness of that was enough to cause her to turn away. At the graveyard, watching the people who stood around waiting for the casket to be lowered, it occurred to her that probably the only times Roger had worn ties was at funerals, his own or someone else’s. The tall rawfaced men stuck out of their department store suits as angularly and awkwardly as the bare mesquites around the graveyard stuck out of the wintry earth. They were all wrists and necks, but afterward, when several of them grouped together to smoke, they made a good windbreak. The sprays of flowers looked odd against the cold clods and gray mesquite grass. They were real flowers, but were so unnatural there that they looked like plastic. Mrs. Daniels introduced her to a number of the old ladies; they were so kindly that they made her feel shy, and their stockings were twisted. The graveyard stood on the northeast edge of the ridge that held the town, and the wind that sang across the rolling gray plains rustled the old ladies’ veils. In the northeast the gray clouds were breaking a little, and patches of sky could be seen. It was far from warm and Patsy was glad when they could go. She felt quite calm.

Mrs. Daniels took her to the house of a friend, where they had lunch. It was a small squat house whose living room was almost filled with ugly china dogs. The two old ladies talked about their high school romances, and Roger’s, while their husbands and Patsy ate in silence the fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans that were available in quantity.

After lunch she was introduced to Roger’s lawyer, a paunchy man who apparently owned the best suit in town. Her duty done, Mrs. Daniels and her husband departed for their home in Wilbarger County, assuring Patsy that there was everything at the ranch house that she would need. The lawyer looked her over circumspectly and came straight to the point, which was oil leases. Various companies had drilled with no success, but various others wanted to drill.

“Be funny if they were to bring in a big well now, after he lived there bone poor all his life,” he said. “That’s the way it happens half the time.”

Patsy told him her father was an oil man; she would ask him about it. She thought of Roger, and of Jim, and became depressed. Roger’s gift had shown a faith in them that they had not lived up to. She left the law office feeling slightly cheap but equipped with numerous keys and the name of a neighbor whom she could consult if anything puzzled her. On the way out of town she stopped at a filling station to find out how to get to the ranch. They told her, of course, that the owner of the ranch had just that day been buried and were very surprised when she told him she was his heir.

The warming that Mr. Holiday promised had come, after all. It was three in the afternoon when she left the town; all the morning’s clouds had blown away, the western sky was a lovely deep blue, and the sun was just beginning to drop in its short arc. It had grown so much warmer in only a few hours that she shrugged her coat off and turned down the heater in the Ford.

As soon as she got to the brown road turning off into the pastures, she felt secure about the way and began to feel happy, though it was a little strange to be spending a night in the country absolutely alone. Once she slipped off in a rut that had been made by some heavy vehicle after a rain, and the Ford bounced and squirmed the whole length of the rut before climbing out. “Atta boy,” she said, patting the dashboard. When deprived of all other companions she often talked to the Ford. In the corner of the back seat was one of Davey’s boot socks, kicked off while he was napping and overlooked, giving her a vision of him scrabbling about her mother’s house with one foot bare. A covey of bobwhites scurried across the road in front of her and she slowed so as to miss a laggard. After the grim cloudiness of the morning the bright sun was beautiful, touching the grass and the wires of the fences, the coats of the small hurrying birds, and the old fraying bark that still clung to the fence posts. A longing took her for Jim. If she had been able to get him, and he had come home, and could be driving with her, surely it would fix them and they would be all right. She regretted having called Hank at all. She should have kept on until she got Jim. It was Jim Davey needed, or would need.

The ranch house was unusually, almost uncomfortably, clean and spic and was well provisioned, along certain lines. There were three cakes on the kitchen table, an angel food, a chocolate, and a coconut, each minus one slice. There was also a huge neatly covered plate of cold fried chicken and a bowl of cole slaw—all gifts of the funeral party.

Out of habit, Patsy went into the bedroom where she and Jim had stayed, took off her sober funeral dress, put on blue jeans and sneakers and a sweater, and combed her hair. As she was looking out the window a red pickup drove past and stopped at the barn. A tall man in a Levi jacket got out and went quickly into the barn. For a second she was frightened, but then she remembered that someone had described the neighbor she was supposed to rely on as a tall fellow. That was probably the man. She looked up his name in her address book and saw that it was Melvin Huston. She decided to be bold and go and meet him. She got her leather jacket, the most Western thing she owned, and left the house.

When she got to the barn and peeped in, Melvin was standing in the hallway sacking oats, scooping them out of a bin with a big scoop shovel and easing them skillfully into a sack set between his legs. Patsy felt shy about making her presence known. Melvin was as tall as Roger, at least twice as heavy, and was very absorbed in sacking oats.

“Hi,” she said. “You must be Mr. Huston.”

Melvin deftly sacked the scoopful of oats he had in hand, looked up at her in blank surprise for a second, then gave her the sort of grin that is said to be as big as all outdoors. It certainly seemed to stretch across the hallway of the old barn.