HE DIDN’T GO straight home, but drove through downtown and over to the west part of town near the railroad tracks to a street of mostly vacant lots save for a few decrepit old crumbling brick or sagging wooden buildings that had housed various businesses, including a general store, livery, machinist, and such. One older grand home still stood on a large lot surrounded by broad oaks that all but obscured its galleries, where one could see upon driving the lane up to it the unoccupied ladies fanning themselves, smoking cigarettes, some of them sipping what looked like cordials or small measures of liquor. One of them stood, a girl who looked a bit familiar to him, and went inside. Another called out, “Come on up, Popsy.” He ignored them and went up to the front door, went in without knocking or taking his hat off, and when a young woman approached him looking a bit apprehensive he ignored her and just stood there as if waiting for something. There was the scent of something like dead roses. He heard his daughter Grace’s voice say, “I’ll take care of this, Neesa.”
He looked at her standing there in the doorway to what looked like an office, wearing the long, coatlike dress and cloche hat she’d had on when she left her house earlier.
“I guess you do look more like business than a whore,” he said. “You taken to working evenings now, too?”
“What do you want here, Papa?”
“I want you to leave this place. You don’t have to work here.”
“I choose to, Papa.”
“There’s other work, even in these times.”
“This work is steady. Besides, here I’m in management, befitting my experience. Would you have me making socks for fifty cents a day? Would a good businessman like you find such slave labor more noble than making good money providing a product that’s very much in demand?”
“You could work in a clothing store. You know fashion and such.”
“Selling fancy dresses to country club society women. Perfect.”
He took his hat off and walked over closer to her and met her hard gaze with a softer one of his own.
“Why have you always hated us?” he said, his voice quieter. “You were never content to be with your own family, cleared out soon as you could. I don’t understand it, daughter.”
She hesitated so long he thought she might not answer, then said, “Aside from having a good model in my mother, I could look to you.”
“I never did you wrong. I gave you a good living and upbringing.”
“There’s more to that than food on the table, Papa,” Grace said. “You know those words you just said to me might be the longest speech I ever got from you, and those words show more care for me than any others you ever spoke. If Mama was mean-spirited, then you seemed made out of stone. The only thing you ever talked to was a jug or bottle. I always knew you weren’t talking to yourself. You were talking to some imaginary world full of enemies. Well, I felt like we were among them, Papa. That’s what I felt.”
“Not enemies, and not my family, in any case. Adversaries, yes. People will take advantage and a man has to be hard, sometimes, if he wants to make it. It’s a hard world, as you are finding out.”
“Not so hard a body can’t have a little fun, enjoy something every now and then. You know what, Papa? I enjoy a drink now and then. You? Did you ever enjoy drinking, or is it only to deal with the demons in your head? Did you ever enjoy sex, like the so-called sinful men who come here do? Or was it just to calm your nerves and make a baby now and then?”
“I’ll not have you talking to me like that, right or wrong, girl. And I’ll tell you this. If you’re still working here when I pass, you shall not inherit anything from me—”
“I hope I haven’t.”
“Not cash money if there is any. Not land nor home. Not insurance. Not stock. You understand?”
“You in a hurry to go, Papa?”
“No, I’m not.” Then he spoke more quietly. “I’ve had some pains in my chest, but it’s not serious. Got some pills for when it hurts me.”
She looked at him hard as if to detect a lie, then closed her eyes for a moment.
“I don’t need anything from you or Mama,” she said. “I do just fine on my own.”
“I hope so.”
He let himself out and to his truck, his heart indeed on fire, took a largish draft from the bottle he’d left on the seat, and drove home in the receding light of late afternoon. He left his headlights off, as he knew he’d make the home road and quit the highway before dusk. He thought to honk as he passed the doctor’s house but wasn’t in the mood to hail him or anyone else just then. Off the highway, he drove by memory and what dim light remained like dying firefly glow in the foliage. He descended toward the darker area, where the old bridge his nemesis straddled the little creek. There he stopped, sat a moment looking at the bridge’s shadowed outline before him, as he still did not want to violate the sense of this evening with artificial light. Something fragile about it that would break if he did. Real lightning bugs flared down by the water and in the trees. He got out, walked to the bridge, and studied it a minute before going back to the truck and idling over the creaking boards, then gunning on up the hill. He parked beside the shed, saw his wife standing in the open doorway of the house like the backlit figure of a life-sized rag doll. She pushed open the screen door and spoke to him as he approached the porch steps slowly, tired out. His chest ached. He’d lied about the pills, or he would have taken one now for the strain he felt.
“You left that cow you were going to trade standing right there tethered to the post by the shed,” she said to him. “Are you going morbus on me now? I can’t take care of an old crazy man out here by myself.”
“Just hush on me, wife.”
“Well, what’s wrong with you?”
“Too much on my mind. I’m flustered.”
“More woolly-headed, seems to me. Where you going now? You think going down in there and drinking is going to clear your head? Maybe, Mr. Chisolm, you have just simply gone stupid. I’ve seen men go stupid with drink. My own daddy, for one. At the end there he couldn’t even tot a bill—”
“I said to hush,” he said, in such a way that she did. She held her mouth in the attitude of her next unspoken words as if someone had frozen or suspended time. He went on around the house and down the shadowy trail to his still, heard the screen door at the house slap to. He moved with such distraction he may as well have been blind, could have walked the trail without sight. In that state he rekindled his fire, hooked a jug off the shelf, sat down before the flickering flames, and woke to himself sitting there on the stump rolling a cigarette, as if he’d sleepwalked from the house to this moment.
He drank headlong into and out the other side of melancholy, laid himself down beside the glowing warmth of the fire’s coals to rest and try to empty his mind, the soft glow of firelight on the leaves above.
Copper Pennies
It was nearing noon the next day when Jane came home from a walk to the grocery and saw the doctor’s pickup at the curb in front of the house. At first her heart lifted, but then she felt something cold and viscous flood into it.
When she stepped into the parlor, she saw the doctor and Grace sitting in the two chairs by the bay window, partially drunk cups of coffee on saucers on the table between them, seeming to have quietly awaited her arrival into the world from some long, childish dream. The doctor stood, his hat in his hands. She set her sack of groceries down on the floor.
“It’s Papa,” Grace said. “He passed.”
“What happened?”
“Went quietly,” the doctor said. “In his sleep.”
Dr. Thompson offered to drive them both up home, but Grace said she would drive her own car so she could come into town to check on things if she needed to.
“You know he came to see me yesterday, after leaving here,” she said. When neither replied to that she said, “He wanted me to quit my job.”
After an awkward silence, Jane said, “Was he still angry, Grace?”
Grace looked at her, an unfamiliar emotion in her face.
“He seemed more sad than angry, I thought,” she said. “I hate my last words to him were so harsh.”
No one said anything and it was quiet in the room. Death was in the room and they were quiet in its presence. Then Grace gathered her bag and keys and left.
Jane and Dr. Thompson were quiet during the drive up, the doctor taking it slow. At first they drove in the wake of billowing dust and slung gravel from Grace’s Plymouth until she pulled well ahead, out of sight. And only then, as if Grace could have heard them before, Jane said, “What happened?”
The doctor, who’d been seeming to chew on something, a habit with his mouth he’d taken up in his age, was quiet a long moment. Then he said, “No mystery. I guess he finally drank himself to death.”
“He’s been doing that a long time,” Jane said.
“Well. That’s pretty much how it’s done.”
They drove a good mile without speaking. The hem of her light fabric dress fluttered against the layered slips she’d taken to wearing and she pressed it down against them, to keep it still. She noticed the doctor glance over discreetly.
“I don’t really read it as liver failure,” he said. “Most likely his heart. Heavy drink will do that. Plus his heavy smoking.”
Jane watched the road ahead.
“I guess it was a worse binge than the usual,” the doctor said. “Or one too many.”
“How is Mama taking it?” Jane said.
“She’s quiet.”
After a while, Jane said, “Was he in the house?”
“She found him down at his shed. He’d been down there all night. She woke up and he wasn’t at the house, and she made coffee and breakfast, all but the eggs. When he still hadn’t showed she went down and found him there. Lying on the ground next to the little fire pit. It was just smoldering a bit. There was a nearly empty jug. Doesn’t mean he drank it all last night, though. He was lying like he’d lain down to go to sleep. Not like he’d fallen. Gets chilly at night, this time of year. Alcohol lowers the body temperature, actually. Could have been exposure involved, too. His little fire seemed long cold, time I got there.”
After a while, Jane said, “I wonder what she’s going to do now. She always seemed like she just wanted people to leave her alone, but being alone like this, with nobody. I’ll be around of course. I was going to move back, anyway. I can’t live with Grace. Not anymore.”
With that she gave just a glance at the doctor, who seemed to have taken on a momentary rictus himself.
He slowed and turned off the main road onto the dirt road that her father had taken so often on his trips to and from town, crossed the old bridge, and at the top of the rise turned left onto the drive to the home where Jane had grown up.
Grace was in the kitchen with her mother. A single bare bulb burned in its outlet in the ceiling there. They’d had a power line strung to the house the year before. And a phone line, too—the new crank telephone on the wall. Her mother’s face was set in some kind of slackened flatness, her hair combed straight back on her head. She looked up at Jane and the doctor, her face set and pale in the glaring light. Jane reached up and pulled the string to turn it off.
Her father was in the bedroom, in his clothes and shoes, on top of the made-up counterpane, arms crossed over one another on his chest. She was surprised, almost alarmed, to see that a bright copper penny rested on top of each of his closed eyes. She almost reached over to remove them but heard something and her mother came in.
“Well,” her mother said. “There he is.”
She took in a heavy, tired-sounding breath, and let it out.
Dr. Thompson said he would arrange for the grave to be dug, and that the notice would be in the next afternoon’s papers for the service and burial on Sunday.
“I’ll send telegraphs to your brothers, if you like,” he said.
“Thank you,” Jane said.
“He’ll be fine in there if you keep it cool, closed off from the heated rooms, with the shades down. Mr. Finicker will come by with a casket for when you have him cleaned up and dressed. I doubt you’ll need ice beneath him unless we have to wait for burial, but if you think differently, just give me a telephone call and I’ll have some delivered.”
No one said anything in response and the kitchen was quiet but for the ticking of the stove from the dying noon-meal fire in there.