‘Whyncha leave me alone? You dirty! Dirty jealous mean of ever’thing I do. I took shine off your nose when I brung the jar home. You didn’ sleep right ‘til you ruined things!’
She laughed nastily. ‘Then I won’t tell anybody,’ she said.
He caught on to her. ‘You spoiled my fun. That’s all that counted. It don’t matter if you tell the rest. I know. And I’ll never have no more fun. You and that Tom Carmody. Him laughin’. I wish I could stop him laughin’. He’s been laughin’ for years at me! Well, you just go tell the rest, the other people, now — might as well have your fun — !’
He strode angrily, grabbed the jar so it sloshed, and would have flung it on the floor, but he stopped, trembling, and let it down softly on the spindly table. He leaned over it, sobbing. If he lost this, the world was gone. And he was losing Thedy, too. Every month that passed she danced further away, sneering at him, funning him. For too many years her hips had been the pendulum by which he reckoned the time of his living. But other men, Tom Carmody, for one, were reckoning time from the same source.
Theyd was standing, waiting for him to smash the jar. Instead, he petted and stroked and gradually quieted himself over it. He thought of the long good evenings in the past month, those rich evenings of camaraderie, conversation moving about the room. That, at least, was good, if nothing else.
He turned slowly to Thedy. She was lost forever to him.
‘Theyd, you didn’t go to the carnival.’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘You’re lyin’,’ he said, quietly.
‘No, I’m not!’
‘This — this jar has to have somethin’ in it. Somethin’ besides the junk you say. Too many people believe there’s somethin’ in it. Thedy. You can’t change that. The carny-boss, if you talked with him, he lied.’ Charlie took a deep breath and then said, ‘Come here, Thedy.’
‘What you want?’ she asked, sullenly.
‘Come over here.’
‘No, I won’t.’
He took a step towards her. ‘Come here.’
‘Keep away from me, Charlie.’
‘Just want to show you something, Thedy.’ His voice was soft, low and insistent. ‘Here, kittie. Here kittie, kittie, kittie — HERE KITTIE!’
It was another night, about a week later. Gramps Medknowe and Granny Carnation came, followed by young Juke and Mrs. Tridden and Jahdoo the coloured man. Followed by all the others, young and old, sweet and sour, creaking into chairs, each with his or her thought, hope, fear and wonder in mind. Each not looking at the shrine, but saying hello softly to Charlie.
They waited for the others to gather. From the shine of their eyes one could see that each saw something different in the jar, something of the life and the pale life after life, and the life in death and the death in life, each with his story, his cue, his lines, familiar, old but new.
Charlie sat alone.
‘Hello, Charlie.’ Somebody glanced around, into the empty bedroom. ‘Where’s your wife? Gone off again to visit her folks?’
‘Yeah, she run off again to Tennessee. Be back in a couple weeks. She’s the darndest one for runnin’. You know Thedy.’
‘Great one for ganntin’ around, that woman.’
Soft voices talking, getting settled, and then, quite suddenly, walking into the dark porch and shining his eyes in at the people — Tom Carmody.
Tom Carmody standing outside the door, knees sagging and trembling, arms hanging and shaking at his side, staring into the room. Tom Carmody not daring to enter. Tom Carmody with his mouth open, but not smiling. His lips wet and slack, not smiling. His face pale as chalk, as if it had been kicked with a boot.
Gramps looked up at the jar, cleared his throat and said,
‘Why, I never noticed so definite before. It’s got blue eyes.’
‘It always had blue eyes,’ said Granny Carnation.
‘No,’ whined Gramps. ‘No, it didn’t. They was brown last time we was here.’ He blinked upwards. ‘And another thing — it’s got brown hair. Didn’t have brown hair before!’
‘Yes, yes, it did,’ sighed Mrs. Tridden.
‘No, it didn’t!’
‘Yes, it did!’
Tom Carmody, shivering in the summer night, staring in at the jar. Charlie, glancing up at it, rolling a cigarette, casually, at peace and calm, very certain of his life and thoughts. Tom Carmody, alone, seeing things about the jar he never saw before. Everybody seeing what they wanted to see; all thoughts running in a fall of quick rain:
‘My baby! My little baby!’ screamed the thought of Mrs. Tridden.
‘A brain!’ thought Gramps.
The coloured man jigged his fingers. ‘Middibamboo Mama!’
A fisherman pursed his lips. ‘Jellyfish!’
‘Kitten! Here kittie, kittie, kittie!’ the thoughts drowned clawing in Juke’s skull. ‘Kitten!’
‘Everything and anything!’ shrilled Granny’s weazened thought. ‘The night, the swamp, the death, the pallid moist things of the sea!’
Silence, and then Gramps said, ‘I wonder. Wonder if it’s a he — or a she — or just a plain old it?’
Charlie danced up, satisfied, tamping his cigarette, shaping it to his mouth. Then he looked at Tom Carmody, who would never smile again, in the door. ‘I reckon we’ll never know. Yeah, I reckon we won’t.’ Charlie smiled.
It was just one of those things they kept in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you. . .
The Lake
THEY cut the sky down to my size and threw it over the Michigan Lake, put some kids yelling on yellow sand with bouncing balls, a gull or two, a criticizing parent, and me breaking out of a wet wave, finding this world very bleary and moist.
I ran up on the beach.
Mamma swabbed me with a furry towel. ‘Stand there and dry,’ she said.
I stood there, watching the sun take away the water beads on my arms. I replaced them with goose-pimples.
‘My, there’s a wind,’ said Mamma. ‘Put on your sweater.’
‘Wait’ll I watch my goose-bumps,’ I said.
‘Harold,’ said Mamma.
I put the sweater on and watched the waves come up and fall down on the beach. But not clumsily. On purpose, with a green sort of elegance. Even a drunken man could not collapse with such elegance as those waves.
It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason. The beach was so long and lonely with only about six people on it. The kids quit bouncing the ball because somehow the wind made them sad, too, whistling the way it did, and the kids sat down and felt autumn come along the endless shore.
All of the hot-dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing in all the mustard, onion, meat odours of the long, joyful summer. It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins. One by one the places slammed their covers down, padlocked their doors, and the wind came and touched the sand, blowing away all of the million footprints of July and August. It got so that now, in September, there was nothing but the mark of my rubber tennis shoes and Donald and Delaus Schabold’s feet, down by the water curve.
Sand blew up in curtains on the sidewalks, and the merry-go-round was hidden with canvas, all of the horses frozen in mid-air on their brass poles, showing teeth, galloping on. With only the wind for music, slipping through canvas.
I stood there. Everyone else was in school. I was not. Tomorrow I would be on my way west across the United States on a train. Mom and I had come to the beach for one last brief moment.
There was something about the loneliness that made me want to get away by myself. ‘Mamma, I want to run up the beach aways,’ I said.
‘All right, but hurry back, and don’t go near the water.’
I ran. Sand spun under me and the wind lifted me. You know how it is, running, arms out so you feel veils from your fingers, caused by wind. Like wings.
Mamma withdrew into the distance, sitting. Soon she was only a brown speck and I was all alone.
Being alone is a newness to a twelve-year-old child. He is so used to people about. The only way he can be alone is in his mind. There are so many real people around, telling children what and how to do, that a boy has to run off down a beach, even if it’s only in his head, to get by himself in his own world, with his own miniature values.
So now I was really alone.
I went down to the water and let it cool up to my stomach. Always before, with the crowd, I hadn’t dared to look, to come to this spot and search around in the water and call a certain name. But now —
Water is like a magician. Sawing you in half. It feels as if you were cut half in two, part of you, the lower part, sugar, melting, dissolving away. Cool water, and once in a while a very elegantly stumbling wave that fell with a flourish of lace.
I called her name. A dozen times I called it.
‘Tally! Tally! Oh, Tally!’
Funny, but you really expect answers to your calling when you are young. You feel that whatever you may think can be real. And sometimes maybe that is not so wrong.
I thought of Tally, swimming out into the water last May, with her pigtails trailing, blonde. She went laughing, and the sun was on her small twelve-year-old shoulders. I thought of the
