Sometimes a Great Notion (96 page)

She had returned the dress to the box and started folding the tissue paper back over it when through her bedroom window she saw Indian Jenny passing, thick and dumpy and rubber-booted, in the dimming rain. Simone stared, lightly trailing her fingers along the rustling tissue.
That
—she grimaced at Jenny—is what I did not wish to become.
That
is the thing I did not wish to become. I made the confession, I swore on the Book, I promised the Sweet Mother of God to sin never again . . . but
that woman there
is what I do not wish to become.

She suddenly remembered her image in the mirror, and the pity in the eyes of the women who saw her on the street. Her eyes closed . . . I have had virtue. But it is almost that I have become through virtue what that heathen slut out there became through sin, a tramp, a shuffler in dumpy dresses. It is so now that to the women of the town I look like the town whore. Because of my appearance. Because I can’t afford to
look
decent. Oh,
oh
, Sweet
Mother!
She pressed the tissue against her lips. Oh
give
me strength in my weakness . . .

The sin that she now felt from looking sinful, Simone realized as she sobbed into the tissue, was more painful than the sin she had once felt from sinning. “What has happened, Holy Mother, that I become so sinful?” she beseeched the wooden statue in her closet. “What has happened that I become so
weak?
”

But another thought was already growing like yeast in her mind: And you, Holy Mother, to let this happen . . . what has happened to
you?

Fluorescent tubes fluttered and hissed. The air felt purified. The Amazon of a nurse had said, “Right this way, Mr. Stamper,” as soon as Hank approached her desk, before he had even asked to see his father. She picked up a clipboard and led him out of the newer part of the hospital, down a corridor so low he found himself ducking involuntarily to avoid the overhead lights, through hallways so old he thought they might have been carved out of the bygone centuries by Indians and whitewashed in honor of the white man’s coming. A section of the clinic that he had not seen before—wooden walls fossilized by endless scrubbings, linoleum floors worn bare by endless shufflings of white canvas shoes . . . and through open doors glimpses of old people propped like cloth dolls against brass bed-steads, hairless faces limp and wrinkled in the stony blue flickering of TV.

The nurse noticed his interest and paused, smiling into one of the larger rooms. “Each room’s got one now. Used, of course, but still in excellent shape. The DAR ladies donated them.” She adjusted a strap through the fabric of her uniform. “Gives the old folks something to
look at
, y’know, while they wait.”

The picture in the room they were looking into had begun to flip; yet no one called for an adjustment. “While they wait for what?” Hank couldn’t help wondering out loud. The nurse gave him a sharp look and started on down the corridor again toward the old man’s room.

“We had to situate him where we had room,” she felt compelled to explain, speaking sharply. “Even though he might not be classified geriatric. The new wing is always so crowded . . . babies and young mamas and the like. Besides, he’s not exactly a spring chicken any more, now is he?”

The place stank of age, of all the accouterments of age, strong soap and wintergreen salve, alcohol and baby food, and, over everything, the keen reek of urine. Hank’s nose wrinkled with distaste. But, he reasoned, when you come down to it, why shouldn’t the old live in an old world and the bright new wing be reserved for babies and young mamas and the like?

“No . . . I guess he ain’t exactly a spring chicken any more.”

The nurse stopped at the very last door. “We did give him a private room, you see. Mr. Stokes is in there with him now.” Her voice had dropped to a reedy whisper. “I know what you told us about nobody gettin’ in to see him for a while, but I figured . . . well, my lands, they’re such
old
friends I couldn’t see the harm.” She smiled quickly and opened the door, stepping in to announce, “
Another
visitor, Mr. Stamper.”

The gaunt and white- maned head reared up out of the pillow with a bray of laughter. “By god now, I was beginning to think all my kin had give me up for dead. Find a chair, son. Sit. Wait. Here’s old Boney. He’s been here
cheering
me up, like a good soul.”

“Afternoon, Hank. My condolences.” The cold hand touched Hank’s with a husking, parchment sound, then withdrew quickly to cover a practiced cough. Hank looked down at his father.

“How you makin’ it, Papa?”

“ ‘Middlin’, Hank, middlin’.” His brows lowered despondently over defeated eyes—“The doc says it’ll be a piece before I can get back to loggin’, maybe a long piece . . .”—then lifted quickly to reveal a flash of ornery green. “But he says I’ll be playin’ the violin again before the week’s out. Oh yee haw, hee hee
haw!
Look out for me, Boney, they been shootin’ me fulla dope an’ I’m a caution.”

“Henry.” Boney spoke through his fingers, hiding the thin slot of mouth. “You had best take it easy now. . . .”

“Listen to him, son; don’t you know he brings me a lot of pleasure comin’ here? Here, sit down on the edge of the bed if you can’t run down a chair. Nursie, don’t I get but one chair? And what d’ya say you bring another scuttle of mud for my boy?”

“Coffee is provided for the patients, Mr. Stamper, not for the visitors.”

“I’ll pay for it, goddangit!” He winked at Hank. “I tell ya . . . when they fust brought me in here the other night you just would not
believe
all the crap and paraphernalia they wanted me to fill out. Seems as you
neglected
to, so I had to do it.”

“That’s not true!” the nurse hoped in horror; but there was no telling about that night staff. “I don’t think it’s true.”

“Yessir, fill all kinds of the stuff out. Even was after my
fingerprints
by god till they seen I weren’t equipped for it.” The woman turned and huffed away down the corridor. Henry studied her departure with an expert’s eye. “Hogs fightin’ under a sheet . . . how’d I like to sink my long yellows in
that
an’ let it drag me to my death?”

“If you was of an age,” Boney added on, “to have long yellows.” He wasn’t giving a thing.

“Maybe you’d have to sink your gums into her, Boney. But I still got three my own teeth, if you’ll notice”—he opened his mouth to display the proof—“an’ two of ’em meet.” This seemed to tire him momentarily and his high spirits waned while he lay for a few seconds with his eyes closed. When his head rolled on the pillow to look again at his somber visitor his good humor seemed strained. “You know, that damned woman, she’s been waiting all the livelong day for this ol’ nigger to give up the ghost an’ get it over with so’s she can make the bed. Now I believe she’s peeved that I haven’t.”

“Maybe she’s just worried,” Boney observed solemnly. “She’s had a lot of reason to be worried about you, old fellow.”

Henry rallied to meet the challenge. “Reason the bull. I weren’t even close, not even
close
, you goddam vulture. Listen at him, Hank, the old buzzard. Why I weren’t even in
shoutin’
distance!”

Hank smiled weakly. Boney looked down at the floor with a slight shaking of his head. “My, my, my.” It was his day, he felt, and he wasn’t about to let his toll of doom be drowned out by a few tinkles of humor.

Henry didn’t like that shake of the head. “You think no? I always said, didn’t I, that I could outlog any man this side of the Cascades, with one arm tied behind my back? All right, now I get a chance to prove it. An’ you by god wait an’ see if I—” A sudden thought occured to him; he turned back to Hank. “Say, what come of that arm, anyhow? Because, y’know . . .” He timed a little pause before he announced, “I was kinda
attached
to it!”

His head fell back to the brass bars, mouth going wide in voiceless laughter. Hank knew the old man had probably been waiting for hours for the opportunity to make that announcement. He told Henry that he’d kept good track of the limb. “I had a notion you might want to keep it. I got it in the freezer with all the other meat.”

“Well, you watch that Viv don’t fry it up for supper,” Henry warned. “For I was always mighty attached to that arm.”

When Henry tired of his joke he fumbled for the buzzer button that dangled on a wire beside his head. “Where in hell that woman go to now? I ain’t been able to get anything out of her all day, and I don’t just mean coffee. Hank, I want you to bring me up on—here! damn it, ring this gizmo for me; she keep puttin’ it on the wrong side where I can’t get at it. On my wingless side. Hm. You be careful of that ol’ wing, now. Damn. Where is that old cow? A man could die in this place and people wouldn’t know it till the stink got bad. Listen, I want to know what’s happenin’ with the show an’ if—Come on! don’t just fiddle with it, buzz hell out of it. That’s what it’s here for. Boney, what’s the matter’th you? Sittin’ there like you lost your best friend . . . ?”

“It’s only that I’m worried for you, Henry. Just exactly that.”

“Balls. You’re worryin’ I’ll outlive you is just exactly what. You been worryin’ that ever since I can remember. Son, Jesus Christ ohmighty, give me that outfit!” Swinging it by the wire, he clanged the button loudly against the nightstand and called in a pained and angry voice, “Nurse!
Nurse!
” His eyes clenched with the effort. “Get me another shot o’ that dope, and where the hell’s that
caw-fee!
”

“Easy, Papa . . .”

“Yes, Henry . . .” Boney spread his web of fingers over the sheet covering Henry’s knee. “You better take it a little easier.”

“Stokes”—Henry’s eyes, usually so wide that white could be seen all the way around pupils hot as Fourth of July flares, went narrow and cold—“git your fishy old mitt off’n my leg. Just git it off.” He glared at Boney until the other’s eyes dropped; he felt a surge of delight at finally voicing a feeling long unvoiced. He continued to look straight at Boney and went on, speaking with unusual softness, “You’re just as bad as she is, Stokes; you know that. Except you been forty-five years at it. Hopin’ I’ll give up the ghost.” He drew back the button-on-wire threateningly. “Now git it off, I tell you. Off!”

Boney withdrew his hand and held it at his chest, looking wronged. Henry dropped the button and began jerking about beneath the covers in a state of tense agitation.

“That’s not true, old friend,” Boney said in a hurt voice.

“ ’S true. ’S true as the day is long, an’ we both know it. Forty-five years, fifty years,
sixty
years.
Nurse!
”

Boney sighed and half turned in his chair, presenting a face pained by the injustice of the accusation. But there was something so false in his attitude of wronged friendship, something so vicious in the denying shake of his head, that Hank was certain that the whole act was a deliberate admission to all of Henry’s charges. Fascinated, he moved back to the foot of the bed and stood there, half hidden by the yellowed bed curtain. The two old men had forgotten him in their confrontation of each other. Boney continued to shake his head sadly; Henry jerked about beneath the covers and glared sideways at the figure in the chair from time to time. After a minute of silence, he worked his mouth to express a feeling that had burned so long unworded that now it threatened to rage out of control.

“A good sixty years. Ever since . . . ever since . . . goddam you, Stokes, I can’t even remember when it first started, it’s been there so long!”

“Ah, Henry, Henry . . .” Boney chose to acknowledge the fire through his overdrawn denial of it. “Can you
truthfully
now recall me ever giving you anything but what I considered the
soundest
advice, the very
soundest
, in all our years? Can you?”

“Like which? Like the time you advised me and Ben and Aaron to bring Ma to go to Eugene for the
Welfare
, because we couldn’t endure a season alone in those woods? Somebody that ain’t used to it, you says, can’t
endure
a season in these woods. You recall that advice? Well, we endured it fine, as I look back. . . .”

“You lost your mother that winter from your stubbornness,” Boney reminded him.

“Lost her? She
died!
The woods didn’t have beans to do with it. She just
got sick
and
laid down
and
died!
”

“It mightn’t of happened in town.”

“It’d of happened anywhere. She died that year cause she made up her mind that she was bound and
determined
to die.”

“We all offered to help.”

“I’ll say you did. You helped us right out of that feed store.”

“We all unselfishly offered the necessities of life—”

“And wanted what in payment? Our house an’ property? A mortgage on the next ten years?”

“Henry, that’s unfair; the organization made no such demands.”

“Not wrote down any place, maybe, but they was demands made just the same. I never seen your old man—or that goddam organization neither one—get hurt from any of these unselfish
offerings.
You did all right with your
offerings.
”

“Be that as it may, there’s no one who can accuse us of havin’
anything
but the interests of the community at heart.”

Before Henry could answer, the door opened and the nurse entered with a small paper cup of coffee. She set it on the bed-stand, looked around at the silent men, and hurried back out without saying anything. Henry took up the cup and drank. He watched Boney through the rising steam. When he brought the cup from his lips, Hank saw that the rim bore mark of those two teeth out of three that met. Henry placed the cup back on the nightstand, never taking his eyes from Boney’s bent head. With the sleeve of his white flannel robe he wiped his mouth. Boney continued to shake his head, clucking pityingly over his old companion’s unbalanced state.