Tales for a Stormy Night (5 page)

Sarah could hear only her own sobbing breath in the hollow of the mouth piece. She tried to settle her mind by pinning her eyes on the stairway. But the spokes of the stairway seemed to be shivering dizzily in the circle of light, like the plucked strings of a harp. Even the sound of them was vibrant in her head, whirring over the rasp of her breath. Then came the pounding footfalls and Joyce’s fists on the door. Vainly she signaled the operator. And somewhere in the tumult of her mind she grasped at the thought that if she unlocked the door, Joyce would come in and sit down. They might even light the fire. There was plenty of wood in the basement. But she could not speak. And it was too late.

Joyce’s fist crashed through the glass and drew the bolt. With the door’s opening the wind whipped her coat over her head; with its closing, her coat fell limp, its little pressure about her knees seeming to buckle them.

“I’m sorry,” came the operator’s voice, “the call was canceled ten minutes ago.”

She let the phone clatter onto the table and waited, her back still to the door. Ten minutes was not very long ago, she reasoned in sudden desolate calmness. She measured each of Joyce’s footfalls toward her, knowing they marked all of time that was left to her. And somehow, she felt, she wanted very little more of it.

For only an instant she saw the loop he had made of the electric cord, and the white cuffs over the strong, gnarled hands. She closed her eyes and lifted her head high, expecting that in that way the end would come more quickly…

1952

T
HERE IS A SORT
of legend about Corporal George Orbach. More than one man of his outfit has summed him up as the only person he ever met who didn’t know what fear was. They have a good many pat explanations, the way men will when they have nothing to do between patrols but pin labels on one another. “A born killer” is a favorite. A lieutenant called it “a suicidal complex.” This particular phrase did not take with the men. A handful of sleeping pills, a loaded .32, they figure, and he could have died in bed without scurvy, without frostbite, and without Migs.

He was up once for rotation and asked to stay. Forced into regulation five-day leaves in Japan, he walks the streets there, striding along them like a farmer behind a plow who sees neither birds nor trees nor sky except to measure the daylight left in them. The one piece of information about himself which he ever volunteered was the remark: “I bet I’ve walked more than any goddamn soldier in the infantry.”

No one doubted it, which is strange only in the fact that George Orbach is just nineteen years old. He lied about his age when he signed up. At sixteen he said he was twenty-one, and the recruiting officer studied him trying to decide which way he was lying. He was bent like a man with something on his back and his eyes were old; but his skin was smooth and his dirty, nervous hands boy’s hands.

“Home?”

“U.S.A.”

“Where were you born, wise guy?”

“Masonville, Wisconsin. Ever hear of it?”

“They’ll clip your tongue in the army, farm boy. Why don’t you take a haircut?”

“I don’t have any money.”

“Family?”

“Don’t have any.”

“That’s a shame. You ought to have an insurance beneficiary.”

“What insurance?”

“What they make you take out before you go overseas.”

“Look, Mister…”

“Sir!”

“Sir. I got a sister. Put her down for it. Elizabeth Orbach, Route 3, Masonville, Wisconsin.”

“That’s better. How did you get to New York?”

“I walked.”

“Fair game for the infantry. Got a police record, Orbach?”

“No, sir.”

The recruiting sergeant watched him closely. “They’ll extradite you if you have.”

George slurred the word wearily. “I don’t think they’ll extradite me.”

“Think it over.” The sergeant gave him a card. “If you still want to join up, be at this address at 8 o’clock tomorrow morning.”

George was born in violence, in a storm that tore great pines out by the roots and so flattened the tall white birches that ten years later George himself, then given to visualizing good and evil, counted the stricken birches pure white souls bowed by the devil, as he scrambled over them on his shortcut home from Sunday school. But on the night he was born, his father killed a horse racing him to Masonville to bring the doctor. Electric wires were down, the phone dead, the truck useless on the washed-out road. George and his mother were attended by Elizabeth, twelve years old. George lived. His mother died.

Elizabeth learned more in going over George’s lessons with him than she had in attending school herself. She was more delighted with his first, second, and third readers than he was, and when he was nine or so, he could not quite understand her pleasure in them. By then Elizabeth was over twenty, which to George meant that there was less difference in age between Elizabeth and their father than between his sister and himself.

“Do you believe all that about giants and princes?” he asked her more than once.

“They’re nice,” she would say. “They’re real pretty. I like them.”

Mike Orbach, who read only the Masonville weekly,
Hoard’s Dairyman
, and the Bible, would shake his head. He should have liked to see her reading the Bible, but all he ever said was, “You just read whatever you like, honey. You got it coming to you.”

George was further puzzled when, bringing home a geography and then a history, and books called literature which he could now read himself, he found Elizabeth still smiling over his tattered primers.

The world was at war then, and even to the backwoods of Wisconsin the mobile blood-bank units came. Across the lake, five of the Bergson boys went into service, but four were left and nothing changed very much. At the church basket-suppers there were more women than men, and Elizabeth was not unusual in having her father take her to dances. Nor did she mind sitting them out. She smiled and nodded as the dancers passed her and clapped her hands when a couple did an elaborate bow before her.

“She’s so good-natured,” George overheard Mrs. Bergson say once. “God’s been kinder to them than he has to lots of us.”

George could not see where the kindness of God had much to do with it. He was fourteen and going by bus to the township high school. Every day when he came home Elizabeth would have his dinner warm on the back of the stove—meat, potatoes, and vegetables, always in the one pot. It didn’t have much taste, he discovered, after his lunches in the school cafeteria.

“Can’t you put some sugar or salt or something in it, Liz?” he said one day.

The next day there were both sugar and salt, and more of them than his stomach could take. His father had come in from the barn for a cup of tea, for he liked to hear George tell of school as much as Elizabeth did. He scowled when George pushed the plate away.

“For Cripe’s sake, Liz, what did you do to this?”

“Eat it,” his father said quietly.

Elizabeth went out to the icebox in the back kitchen.

“I can’t, Pa,” George said.

“God damn you, eat it and keep your mouth shut!”

He had not heard his father swear before. He pulled the plate back and swallowed one mouthful after another, trying to deaden the taste with tea.

Elizabeth returned and watched him. “Sugar and salt,” she said.

“It’s swell,” George murmured.

He went to his room to change his clothes, and changing them, caught sight of himself in the mirror. He moved closer to it and examined his face. There was fuzz on his upper lip and on his chin. He twisted his neck that he might see himself from other angles. He was blond like his sister, but there all resemblance that he could find ended. He wondered which one—his sister or himself—did not belong in the family. The possibility that he might be an orphan did not hurt so much as the thought that there might be no bond of family between Elizabeth and him. But there was; he was sure of that. As long as he could remember, Liz had been taking care of him. He could remember her brushing his hair. Then he distinctly remembered his father taking the comb to part it. Liz put his shoes on when he was a child. His father tied the laces.

His face, as he stared at it, seemed to quiver—as though someone were jiggling the glass. He thrust himself into his work clothes and rushed out of the house. His father had already let the cows in and now was in the loft shoveling hay down the chute. The cows nearest it were straining in their stanchions, the metal of their collars jangling.

George measured their grain, and until the last one was fed they snorted and bellowed greedily. It was his practice to start at opposite ends on alternate days, and he was always annoyed that they had no appreciation of his fairness. That day he didn’t care.

His father eased himself down the chute, dropping on the hay.

“You’ll hurt yourself doing that, Pa. You should walk around.”

“I was doing that before you was born.”

“Where was I born?”

“Better get the milking pails.”

“It’s early. Where, Pa?”

“Right in the house there.” The old man motioned toward it. The early darkness of winter was coming down fast.

“Was that when my mother died?”

“It was. Your sister took care of you till I got home. It was a terrible storm and I couldn’t get Doc Blake to come. He was drunk. That’s why I’ll whip you if you ever take to liquor. Now get the buckets.”

“Pa, what’s the matter with Liz?”

His father looked at him. Even in the half-darkness he could see the anger in the old man’s eyes.

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody. I can see. Maybe you told me something when you swore at me.”

“She’s raised you like she was your mother. There ain’t ever going to be a woman love you like she’s done.” The old man drove the pitchfork down on the cement floor, striking sparks. “You’ve been hanging around that Jennie Bergson…”

“No, Pa.”

“Don’t ‘no pa’ me. I seen you cutting out across the lake. Don’t you go touching that girl, George. I’ve been watching her. She’s just asking you to get her in trouble. That’d suit Neil Bergson fine. He’s got too many girls to home now.” He poked his finger into the boy’s chest. “You don’t touch a girl till you get one you want to marry. If you get feeling queer, you tell me about it, George. Maybe I can help you. I don’t know. You can chop down trees.” He made a wild gesture toward the woods. “We can read the holy Bible like I did. Now I’m going for the milking pails.”

“Pa, what’s all this got to do with Liz?”

“She’s your sister, ain’t she?”

The old man’s voice cracked on the words, and George let him go, not wanting to see him cry. Their conversation never did make sense to the boy, although he thought about it many times. He did not try to talk about it to his father again, but he tried to be kinder toward his sister. He did not comment further upon her cooking, and sometimes, making a sort of game of it, he let her wash his hair, and then in turn washed and braided hers.

“Don’t you tell,” he’d say. “I don’t want them calling me sissy.”

“It’s a secret,” Elizabeth agreed. “I like secrets.” She would examine herself at the mirror over the kitchen sink, smiling vacantly into it.

Now and then, after staying overnight in town with a schoolmate because of a late basketball game or class play, George would say to his father, “Pa, I need $10 for the house.”

“Do you?” the old man always said, but it was not a question. He led the way into the parlor where his rolltop desk stood and from the window ledge above it took the key and unlocked the desk. Within it he kept a strong box, also locked, and within that his cash and milk receipts, and over them a pearl-handled revolver.

“That’s like giving a burglar a gun, keeping it there, Pa.”

“Guns ought to be locked up,” the old man said. He carried the revolver in his pocket once a month when he collected on the milk receipts and took the money into Masonville to the bank. Giving the boy $10, he would say: “Something special?”

“I want to surprise Liz and you.”

Thus George brought home now a table lamp, again a cover for the daybed, curtains, and sometimes a dress for his sister. He went alone and picked them out, and watched furtively while he did it that a schoolmate did not come upon him unawares.

His friends began to come to the house, some of them old enough to drive a car, and George had learned to play the mouth organ. In the summertime they swam in the lake below the Orbach farm, and afterwards roasted hot dogs on the beach. George played the tunes he knew, and all of them sang loudly, their voices carrying up to the house so that Elizabeth and her father felt compelled to go down to where they were. They sat quietly, father and daughter, in the shadows, and only when the fire blazed up, were they to be seen and waved at, but not heard.

But one night, above a rollicking song, Elizabeth raised her voice in a high sweet reverie of her own. It was like a bird’s song, native to the night and the great high pine trees and the stars. There was no one there who could have said what happened to them, hearing it, but afterwards, the boys always inquired of George about his sister. They did it reverently, as they might point out the moon’s rising or a shooting star. They thought her very shy. Some nights she did not make a sound, as if there was no one song which seemed especially to tempt her. But when she sang, all of them felt happier and somehow wiser, and George thought that it was her way of saying things she never managed to get out in words.

Mike Orbach had never known such prosperous days. He often remarked that things were bound to bust wide open soon. “When a farmer makes a living,” he would say, “the rest of the country must be making fortunes.” He bought a new car and a good bull, and was at last able to breed his own cattle.

In the late spring the usual migratory strays started dropping off the freight train and applying for work by the day. They would come and go until harvest time. Mostly they were men of George’s father’s age, lean and grimed with the dust of many roads, and all of them with one habit in common: they were always in search of a place to spit, as though the chaff of a thousand threshings was in their throats. The only qualifications on which Orbach ever questioned a man was his sobriety. None of them admitted drinking, and most all of them drank, which he knew, but Orbach calculated his question to have a restraining influence. His only real measurement of a man was his day’s work. The summer before George was to enter his third year of high school, Al Jackson came. He was at the breakfast table when George came in from chores one morning.