The Man Who Loved Children (68 page)

“Hassie’s place smells like fish, and I come home to this: my life has been one blessed fish chowder!”

Then when she had gone upstairs “away from the stink”—though, heavy as it was, almost leaden in the heavy air, it was rising slowly, and flowing round the house, to reach the second story and the roofs and chimney pots and float sluggishly away to other parts—the fun really began. It was a night of jamboree with Sam, the boys and girls, the fire on the lower part of their faces, taking turns at watching the fire under the boiler and telling long anecdotes, joking, reminiscing, Sam reciting, “Good name in man and woman, good my Lord,” and Louie, “When Moloch in Jewry munched children with fury, ’twas thou Devil dining with pure intent.” Presently the house was ready for the night, and they expostulated with Sam about the smell, one at a time, but ended by settling down with the others and dreamily taking it in.

“
Superbus
,” cried Sam, “
superbus,
it is a good whiff; when you fellers snuff my mortal remains, it won’t be half what this is!”

“Stop it!” cried Louie.

“They is stinx en stinx,” Sam said, beginning to caper on his haunches; “they is good sniffs and bad whiffs; they is snot smells and pot smells; they is green-grown wells and hell’s bells; they is dogs what prowls and cats what howls, and showers what lowers for hours and hours, and they’s dead fish and dirty dish, en dead gulfweed what’s dead indeed, en clams en corpses en barnacles en all of the salt sea’s miracles; what is dead, what is dead en tho hit is dead, it floats en it bloats, en it gloats en—ef you stick a knife in it, whew!”

And he held his nose, while all around him they held their noses and said, “Phew!”

“Phew!” he continued, “say, kids, ain’t you en me havin’ a good time? Now, we got to take turns watchin’ this yere fire all the livelong night; we cain’t afford to let it get away from us: we live in a wooden house, though it don’t look wooden. Now, who is game for a fishing expedish?”

“I think it’s going to rain, Pad,” said Little-Sam, wrinkling his nose; “it sure smells like rain.”

As if in answer to him came a low growl, perhaps from the northwest, and the air trembled like a curtain.

“The fish will be there,” said Sam, “but maybe we are too late. So we’ll go to bed, and Little-Womey will take first watch till eight bells; then she will wake Looloo, who will take the dog watch becaze she is dogged, and then we will have two shifts, Little-Sam for two hours and Saul for two hours becaze they cain’t do nothin’ by halves.”

“When will you watch, Pad?” asked Ernie.

“Now, I am doing the superintendin’,” said Sam, “and I cain’t watch, it stands to reason de boss cain’t do everything.” He grinned wickedly at them. However, when Henny heard the watches the children were to keep, she sent down an angry message from her room, and presently they drew up a new roster, in which each was to watch two hours, including Sam, to watch and keep the fire, skim the scum, stir the stew, and make a cup of tea for the watch to follow.

The night was with them. Mutterings ran through the sky, and the land began to moan, and the trees heaved as if the whole earth was a timbered ship trying to make headway on a threatening sea. The thundering increased, coming nearer, and brilliant lightning began, splitting the entire sky, in which balls of fire seemed to bounce in an instant from the close doorstep of heaven to earth; then the sky and earth began to shudder and dissolve into one another like one corrugated sheet along which the lightning spilled. The children ran about pallid and tremulous through all this, long trained to be afraid of none of the effects of nature, and yet surprised at this bizarre electric storm.

Upstairs, Henny could not sleep and went downstairs to get the baby, which she took back upstairs with her. She got into bed, holding the heavy body of the unconscious child as long as she could, and then placed it in the bed alongside her. Meanwhile, she could see what she was accustomed to see from her bedroom window—the ghastly tilted roofs, a bit of stony street, the clumsy wooden bridge, the colorless lashing water with shells of boats tossing. Somewhere beyond the world, an enormous voice shouted, whips cracked, and sheet-iron clanged through space, while every few minutes the flares of an open hearth, distant and beneath, lighted the entire sky. Sometimes it was as the seven candlesticks seized at the horizon and carried by a rushing wing flickering to the other verge. Surge after surge in spouts and cataracts roared the rain.

Henny once wrapped her dressing gown round her and rushed down the stairs furiously, to knock at Sam’s door and ask if the children were not even to be allowed to have their night’s sleep on account of the cursed great fish and if they were to be allowed to drown down there in the brimming yard.

“Go back to bed,” called Sam’s voice from behind the door.

“If the miserable fish has to be watched, I’ll watch it, much as I hate it, rather than see the poor kids kept up all night for your idiot whims!”

“Go away,” called Sam, “now you’ve wakened me, and I’ll watch it.”

Henny went upstairs grumbling and whimpering to herself, but when she saw him come out dressed, she went back to bed. She began to play cards, determined to take the next two-hour watch after Sam, instead of Saul, who had to be waked then according to the roster.

Darkness poured from the sky with the hissing as of falling ashes, trickles of fire, and sudden explosion. Henny got out her cards and started to play her famous double patience (with two packs of cards). The first layout was all hearts and diamonds, yet impossible to make a move, the second all clubs and spades and again impossible to make a move; the third time, the layout, mixed, looked unpromising, but the game started to come out with the greatest rapidity, and yet by accident not by bad shuffling, and Henny, used to cheating herself, this time was tempted to cheat the other way, blocking the solution. In five minutes the game was out! Henny forgot the storm and the fish in the copper and looked helplessly at the eight stacks of cards before her, each with a king on top. The game that she had played all her life was finished; she had no more to do: she had no game. She was angry and, picking up the cards again, shuffled them carefully and started to lay them out in the same old pattern, but she had only laid down nine cards when she was seized with such a violent nausea, such a feeling of the emptiness and aimlessness of the game—thinking that she might have to go through another fifteen or twenty years before it came out again!—that she gathered them quickly and threw them into her drawer loosely. She got up and looked out at the window and the surging, swelling, yellowed creek.

When Ernie, who was wakened by the storm, got up to see the change of watch, his mother said, “Tell your father to let Saul sleep: I will go and sort the clothes and do my knitting out there,” and the message was delivered.

Sam, who merely regarded this as a feeble, shamefaced concession on Henny’s part, an admission that she was interested in the marlin boiling and his planned economy, said mischievously, “All right, tell your mother that she can watch the fish from two to four
A.M.
if she wants to—but only if she wants to—and Saul can come at four.”

Ernie said, “No, Tadpole, don’t let her: you know Mother doesn’t like the smell of fish.”

Sam laughed, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. Never mind, son: what the eye doesn’t see the mouth gapes at; the quickness of the intellect deceives the crooked; watch my patter, and I’ll hear you picking my pocket: Mothering, my dear boy, has a sneaking interest in our little proceedings, and this is her queer, obstinate, mulish, womanish way of showing it—she pretends to sacrifice herself, when she really wants to be one of us!—don’t you see that, Ermy? You must get to know women, Ermy! Women is trouble; women is cussed; you have got to learn to run women, boy, yes, sir. If Mother offers to watch the marlin, let her watch, says I.”

Ernie, laughing uncertainly backed down. Louie, waked by the commotion and the storm, came walking through the house and out to the washhouse too, and was most indignant when she heard that Henny was to watch, but Sam only laughed joyously, poked her in the ribs, and told her not to interfere, “Poor Old Mother Interference, someone ruined her appearance!”

Through the wet air, in the intervals of the storm, pockets of marlin fumes blew around them. Louie went storming upstairs, “Mother, I’m awake, I’ll watch the boiling.”

“You go to bed: you’ll look like the usual boiled owl in the morning!”

“I’ll watch!”

“I’ll watch! I can’t stand argument, go to bed. I hope I catch my death of cold!”

Louie, looking from their window, saw Sam and Ernie walking down to the bluff to look in the risen creek and plodding round the sodden grounds, squelching, laughing, dashing wet sprays in each other’s face.

“Race you to the washus,” cried Sam.

“All right,” said Ernie.

Neither was a good runner, and the boy soon got a stitch in his side, so that Sam got there first.

“Beatcha,” said Sam cheerfully, throwing down the stick he was carrying and darting into the washhouse to lift the lid and look into his stew. “My cooking,” said Sam, “my cooking—worth something! What Sam-the-Bold cooks up ain’t a angry stew like womenfolks. Sam-the-Bold cooks what air useful to man en horse en motorbike: the essential oil!”

Henny, with sunk angry eyes, got up and brushed past him suddenly. She said to the boy, “Ernie-dear, since your clever father is here, perhaps the stupid people can go and get something to eat: come, and I’ll give you some milk and put you to bed.”

Sam gave a comical jeering snarl, “Ermy-boy, you c’mere! Boy, you’re on sentry-go: you’re up, you may as well stick along o’ Sam. Go tell your mother to make some corf for all hands.”

“I’m so sleepy, Pad,” said the boy.

“You do what the Old Man says,” Sam smiled.

Henny said outside, to the white night, “I wish he’d stop playing his silly monkey tricks with the children and let them grow up,” and she went into the house to make the fresh coffee. When it was made, she put it steaming on the table with fruit and sandwiches and, going to the door of the porch, called, “Ernie, tell your father his coffee’s on the table.”

“Is it on the table, is it on the table?” Sam shouted. “Can’t come unless it’s on the table.”

“Oh, shut up,” Henny said to herself. The boy looked at his father.

“Get me corf,” said Sam; “then you get a drop of suthin good what slides down quick, and you go to bed. Meanwhile, you unravel them grapevines you got in the line, Ermy: you’ll never make a proper fisherman with the instincts of a fisherman if you let grapevines stay in.”

The boy took up the wet mess of tangled line and began to pick it over. As Sam continued to give him advice, Ernie sulkily moved across the yard to the kitchen to do his picking.

Sam felt lonely suddenly in the washhouse, with only the bubbling of the fish stew to keep him company. It was a glorious, rich smell certainly, and Sam counted on getting a gallon of oil at the least, probably nearer two gallons, but what was the purpose of it all? Wasn’t his life empty, always amusing the kids, thinking up projects for them, teaching them to be good men and women when they ran off upon their own bents and a woman was always twisting them, snatching them away from him? I mustn’t think that, thought Sam, shaking himself and beginning to hammer out bent nails that he had saved from old packing cases: waste not, want not, same applies to energy. Mustn’t waste emotion, want it for a great job in the future, maybe: I may be called to a great position later on—never can tell, preparedness is everything: you work for years and the opportunity comes—meanwhile, here I work with my little community, leading it, creating a feeling in Eastport, a civic feeling, speaking to the Parents’ Association about peace and progress, and soon I’ll be helping to watch our waters and foreshores and increasing their fertility. Man is the symbol of fertility, and increase is his job. Yes, mustn’t despair: everything comes to him who waits—waits with preparedness. Overcome all enemies, including spiritual enemies, weariness, disappointment. I carry the torch, I will pass it to one, two, three, of my spawn; in the meantime, I must watch, wait, pray—not pray, no, but learn to lead my fellow man, for the spirit was given to me. Where is Looloo? These are thoughts which she should understand. Poor, lost, worrying Looloo! I bet she’s awake now; because my spirit is awake and between her and me is immediate communication, mental radio. …

Sam walked round the house. As he reached the front lawn, Henny’s light went out. The effluvia of the fish, all that could be conveyed by air, were seeping again round the house, for the storm was passing away at last, and all that remained of it was the flickering of the sky, fringes of rainy cloud, and the pools of water underfoot. The water in the creek was lapping high too. It seemed to Sam that nature was licking at his feet like a slave, like a woman, that he had read of somewhere, that washed the feet of the man she loved and dried them with her hair.

The light went on in Louie’s room. “Just as I thought,” said Sam to himself, “I knew it.” He saw Louie come to the veranda and look out, look down on him, and then go back. He thought, “It’s early, nearly light, and she’s awake: we’ll go for a little walk since she’s awake.” He went back into the house and crept up the stairs, thinking about Jenny Maxim, the little girl in Baltimore, that he met at Mrs. Pilgrim’s house and who was so in love with Nature. Henny’s door was shut. Louie was muttering in her room, but the door stood open. The light was on, and through the crack of the door Sam perceived Louie lying on her bed with her hands crossed behind her head (she was twisting her hair round and round on her fingers), and he heard her say, “ ‘Bear me out in this, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict Bunyan the pale poetic pearl: Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes. …’ ” (Melville:
Moby Dick
.) Sam, who was ignorant of all literature and thought Louie had invented this herself (but said to himself that it was no more than might be expected of a child of Samuel Clemens Pollit), leaned against the crack, peering still and smiling to himself.