Kind One

7.





YOU WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that spring would be here by now, but I look out my window and there the snow still sits. They had me out to church again after several weeks this past Sunday, and after the singing and such the minister told us about Isaac and his son. I expect I was not the only one in the pews who thought, Here we go again with Isaac. It is one of the stories they like to tell. And as for that it is better than some. The burning bush is a choice touch. It is something you can see and believe in when they talk. It puts an image in the mind that will spit and scorch. After you leave the church and you have heard that story, it is hard not to look at every bush you pass a little crosswise. Even little spindly things all crushed up in the snow. Lucious Wilson and his people use sleighs to get to church when the snow is deep, and after church they loaded me into one of the sleighs and set off for home. I like a sleigh ride. That is one thing I never lost the pleasure of. I know I am not alone in it. The Draper Man made a remark to that effect on his second visit to my late husband’s piece of Kentucky paradise.

“I like a good sleigh ride, don’t you?” he said.

“Sliding and whooshing over the white world,” I said.

He came after they had pulled me out of that shed and stood me up in the basin and poured well water and soap bubbles over me until I was clean. They didn’t do it soft or rough. They just did it. When it was done they took me naked into the house, through the empty kitchen and into what had been my bedroom, and had me take down a dress and pull it over my head. Then they took me back to the kitchen and sat me down in my chair and worked the brush through my hair. They worked and worked and in other times I might have cried for it. Now I just waited and watched. When they were done and my wet hair was sitting on my back and shoulders like something come in from a wig shop, they put a wedge of salt pork in front of me and a cup of cider out of a barrel they’d found in the barn. The kitchen had been cleaned and they had on their old aprons, and there was a minute when I got to thinking that I’d blink and Linus Lancaster would walk in like it all never was through the door.

“Where is he?” I said.

“Where is who?” Cleome said.

“Linus Lancaster.”

“Gone,” Zinnia said.

“Gone off to his heaven.”

“He in his reward.”

“Sweetmeats for his pigs.”

“You dug the hole but we put Alofibras in it instead.”

I ate. I did not look at them as I did so. Neither did I speak anymore. By and by Zinnia put more pork before me and told me to eat it up. She said a pair of red Indians, a man and his woman, had come out of the wood and walked straight up to them and told them to expect a visitor. She had showed those Indians Linus Lancaster’s old gun and they had walked away back into the woods, but that night she had dreamed it up that they were there again and talking again, only this time they said who they meant.

“Draper Man’s comin’ back,” Zinnia said.

“When?” I said.

“Don’t know. Dream didn’t say. But when he gets here, Ginny, you will stand up straight and be the mother to us again.”

He came the next day down the lane with just one man this time, but otherwise with his top hat and purple britches like before. Zinnia was the one to go out and meet him. Cleome took me out of the shed and into the house while she did this. When Bennett Marsden got up to the yard, he took off his hat and bowed.

“I have come back in hopes of a parlay with your husband,” he said.

“My husband is away again.”

“Ah,” he said.

“And taken Ulysses and Horace away again with him.”

“Ah,” he said again. He looked around. “And that Alcofibras and his onion?”

“Deceased. Last autumn after your leaving.”

“I lost one of mine too. Pox took him during the snows. Did it come here and importune you?”

“Yes it did.”

Bennett Marsden sent his man to the barn and came into the kitchen, and we fetched up food and drink and placed the start of it down before him.

“You have been poorly, Mrs. Lancaster,” he said, looking me up and down.

“I have been unwell, yes,” I said.

“Was it the fever? The fever is a harsh master. It will smite you down.”

“It was an inconvenience, yes. But I’m mending now.”

I had taken my seat at the table and had twice reached for its surface to steady me and twice missed it. What color is the world when you can’t see it any longer? I had thought the second time. What is the smell of lobelia when they have removed your nose? How does a horse flank feel to your fingers when they have chopped off your hand? There was an awkwardness to all three of us. Cleome huffed in a corner and worked at the meat. Zinnia stirred away like she had before, only I knew, because they had told me how it would be, that she had the pig sticker from Linus Lancaster’s neck in her apron pocket. Bennett Marsden had taken his hat off upon entering the kitchen. His hair was greased up from his hat and his dirty fingers so it looked like three quarters of a crow’s wing had fallen out of the blue sky and smacked him on his head.

“Will you favor us with one of your tricks, Mr. Marsden?” I said.

Bennett Marsden smiled and told us he would entertain us presently. He had a tooth or two fewer in his mouth than he’d had before.

“Did you know your husband, Mr. Lancaster, and I were on the stage together in Louisville?” he said.

“I did not know that.”

“He was the center of it. He’d sing out his lines and they’d all sit tight. I got up there afterward and kind of clowned around. Not much talent to it. I’d clown and recite. This was recreational. Not neither one of our central remunerative lines.”

“Is that a fact?” I said.

“We had thoughts about making it otherwise, but they didn’t come to pass.”

“Didn’t they?”

“That one’s expecting,” Bennett Marsden said, holding out his cup to Cleome, who had ceased belaboring the meat and passed it over to Zinnia, who was leaning against the counter looking over at us. She pushed herself off the counter, carried the bottle to Bennett Marsden, and filled his cup.

“She is encumbered, yes,” I said.

“Encumbered,” Bennett Marsden said.

This was the way my father had liked to say it. I had never become encumbered, and Linus Lancaster had put his boot in my back and never had me back into his bed. I could see, from where I sat at the kitchen table, the door to the room where Cleome and Zinnia had received their visits. My own door was somewhere farther off down in the dark.

“Well, nature will find its ways to multiply,” Bennett Marsden said with a fat, wet smack of his lips. Then he finished his cup, called Zinnia over for another, then said we could now have our trick and should prepare ourselves for something with more spectacle to it than the previous time, something that would hold the mind as well as Alcofibras’s story had. He pushed up from the table, smoothed down his crow’s wing, hunched his shoulders over, and turned a handstand right there at my dead husband’s kitchen table. Then he walked around the kitchen, past me, past Cleome, past Zinnia, and then around again and twice more. As he did this, I reflected on Zinnia’s pig sticker and the shallow hole that was waiting for me in my shed. They seemed like one thing in my mind. More and more as the trick went on. While our guest ran upside down around that kitchen he recited.

All the infections that the sun sucks up

From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him

By inch-meal a disease! His spirits hear me,

And yet I needs must curse.

Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me

And after bite me, then like hedgehogs which

Lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount

Their pricks at my footfall

After his performance, which I clapped for, Bennett Marsden drank and told me that my husband, Linus Lancaster, owed him enough money to sink a Spanish ship out of the old stories, and that he aimed to have it from him.

“Does that seem inopportune or incourteous to you, madam?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. “It seems fair.”

“Fair indeed,” he said. “When do you expect him?”

I watched Zinnia’s back stiffen and Cleome’s swollen midsection rise up and flop when Bennett Marsden asked this.

“My husband, Linus Lancaster, does not tell me such things,” I said.

“Well enough and true enough, I expect,” said Bennett Marsden.

“Yes, it is true,” I said.

After I had said this Zinnia came over to the table with a plate of fried pork swimming in molasses and put it down in front of our guest.

“It’s minutes like these I thank the dear Lord he’s left me teeth enough to chew,” Bennett Marsden said.

“Zinnia’s cooking is truly a blessing,” I said. I said this without any playacting. I’d forgotten for that five seconds who or what I was. I had always commented on Zinnia’s cooking. Even in those days when I was taking the strop to her for no crime but being candy with her sister to that dead husband of mine.

That night I slept in my old room and Cleome and Zinnia in theirs. There were all my things. My chest of notions. My little vase with dead stalks in it. My frocks and dresses hanging like leftover slab meat from pegs on the wall. Bennett Marsden, lying in Linus Lancaster’s old bed, had a snore could crack a coffin lid. A body could offer evil to a man who snored that loud. Whether or not he could turn on his hands and sing out pretty about monkeys and hedgehogs.

But at that moment there wasn’t any evil or much else in my body to offer. So there I lay breathing my breaths. Linus Lancaster came to visit me that night. He stood at the end of my bed with the pig sticker borrowed out of Zinnia’s apron pocket and put back in his neck.

“Have you come to dance for me, Husband?” I said.

He shook his head. His eyes had a glow to them. He looked smaller than he had in life. There were no ears or eyes on his arms. He wore no crimson cape. After a time he cleared his dead throat and said he would tell his side of the tale of the dealings between him and Bennett Marsden and made the following speech:

“We went in halves to build a grand theater, Bennett Marsden and I, but I borrowed my half from him and he borrowed his half from me. We thought there was considerable good jest in this and sat down to our fresh partnership with the laugh of it still on our lips. We had our drink in the good old Louisville Belle, then walked down the street to what he thought we ought to call the Flourish and what I thought we ought to call the World. We stood outside it when it was close to finished, him calling it his name and I calling it mine. There was work aplenty to do before we had to put a name up over the doors, time and more for me to make sure the name to it was mine.

“Well, Wife, we did that work with each of us in his shirtsleeves and sweating the same sweat. We’d each put in two of our creatures to the job, and even though mine were bigger and better in all ways, I couldn’t fault his that they took after him, nor credit mine for taking after me. At the end of the sweeping and the dusting and the breaking down and the building up each day we would drink at the Belle or send out for a bottle. Then, with drink in our bellies, we would throw lines into the evening airs: ‘Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.’ Or: ‘Sure, her offence must be of such unnatural degree that monsters it.’ Or: ‘You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames!’ Or: ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes.’ After which, I would to my house and he to his to sup our own suppers and dream the separate parts of our dream.

“In those days,” Linus Lancaster my dead husband said to me, “Louisville was still something worth the shooting, and a man of caliber could make himself a man of property if he had a way with the world and his hands around the throat of a salable notion, and that was me. That was me! I could sing like one of God’s own angels, could strut the stage and turn a line, and there wasn’t a man in Kentucky could charm a creature like I could. Once, when I was just down to Louisville and getting started, I had had to take Bennett Marsden by the scrawny arm and throw him out the door because he had come between me and some of the flora arrived to us by boat from Baton Rouge. This was at auction, and when I saw her I had to have her, and I had had her and now she was in my home. Bennett Marsden had thought to have her, but it was I who had offered up the best pile of coin. Some several years had scrawled on past since that affair, and the business had been forgotten. Bennett Marsden had found himself one or two fine ones I wouldn’t have argued against tasting, but the fever took them. It never touched mine.

“‘The World,’ I would tell my lady creature of an evening. ‘The World, yes, that’s a dandy name for a theater,’ she would say. One night, when the theater was finished, we said this back and forth as I had at my own bottle then at her, and I went out with my paintbrush in the moonlight and the next morning all the city walked by my sign. When Bennett Marsden came he said nothing, but clapped me on the shoulder and acknowledged that my paintwork was fine.

“We draped the World in gold and purple and spread out word that we would have us a performance after a fortnight,” my dead husband, Linus Lancaster, went on. “We beat the bushes and banged the drum and sold every bench place in the house. We were to play a shortened version of Lear and I was to be Lear and Bennett Marsden my good Gloucester. There were some boys for the other parts and two fine fat ladies Bennett Marsden had found for us to play the three daughters. We rehearsed each night then drank, and after we had drunk I would sit one or both those fine fat ladies across my knees. Bennett Marsden would chuckle when I did this then fill my glass full. They told me there was enough of me for both of them, and as you well know, Wife, this was true. Sometimes when I had them on my knees I would sing. All I had to do was open my mouth and they would all shut theirs. This was also true. Everything I say is true. Many was the time after the rehearsals and this knee-bending with the ladies that Bennett Marsden had his boys or mine carry me home. At home I knee-bended with my own fair creature maiden then slept as something come to the end of its good long labors. Normal times I slept a deep and happy blank, but one night I had the purest vision of a field filled with pigs and me the happiest man alive in the middle of it. You know of that dream.

“We opened to a house as full as the World could hold. One of the boys played a flute and the other a drum. Come time for it and they put their hands together and you couldn’t have heard a word. I stepped out onto the stage for a speech with Gloucester and I took in my breath and let it roar. I said my speech and pulled my wig hair and wept a tear, but when I had finished the house wasn’t weeping. I said ‘fog, fen, and bash’ with every ounce I had but none stirred. Nor did Gloucester stir, so I said some of my speech again. Him as Gloucester came over to me and whispered up at my ear: ‘We’re playing Coriolanus, act four.’

“‘We’re playing shortened Lear,’ I said. ‘Enough with your jokes now.’

“‘I am King Lear,’ I said aloud. I stepped around the stage. I gave the fresh planks some whacks with my foot. I said some of my lines from farther along.

“‘Come, leave your tears; a brief farewell: the beast with many heads butts me away…’ he said, in a stage whisper, plenty loud enough for the hall to hear.

“The room laughed with it. Some of them held up their programs. I had never seen these programs. They must have been passed out while I was at my preparations. Coriolanus at the World, they read.

“I stepped to the side and as I did, the boy who had been beating the drum and the two fine fat ladies Bennett Marsden had found for us stepped onstage, and after he had made a speech to the crowd about lightness and levity and my good nature to launch off the World’s first show with such a flourish, he started in on Coriolanus and the others played it right along with him. I had on my Lear wig and my Lear crown and all my Lear lines in my head. I saw straightaway the trick he had played me, understood the payment he had given me for my World. I left out the back door. Walked the alleys home. On the way I passed a creature hauling its master in a little wagon. The master was awake and singing a courting song, the creature had a purple hat on its head.

“That night I dreamed my own creatures hauled me out of Louisville with bits in their mouths. That I sat in the driver’s seat and they stood in for the horses. That I whipped them till the froth flew, till they howled against the metal, till we all fell over dead.”

“You sure fell,” I said when he had at last stopped. “Right over onto your face in the kitchen light.”

He nodded.

“Anyways, I already heard all about the way of the World and liked the first telling better; it came with a dance,” I said.

He gave out a smaller smile this time and adjusted the pig sticker in his neck and nodded again.

“You can see why we broke off our association, me and Bennett Marsden.”

“You mean I can see why you broke it off. Why maybe you left him holding the bills. Left him to carry all the load.”

He smiled.

“Why did you wait so long?” he asked me before he left.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The next morning I stood at the kitchen door and waved the Draper Man back off down the lane.

“I’ll call to see your husband, who owes me money from our business together, before the fortnight, Mrs. Lancaster,” he called. “I’ll add that it will be a pleasure to see you again too.”

“Good journey, Mr. Bennett Marsden,” I called back.

Before he had broken out of sight I had stepped back into the kitchen again.