In a Shallow Grave

  James Purdy

  In a Shallow Grave

  First published in the USA in 1975.

  This edition published in October 1988 by GMP Publishers Ltd

  PO Box 247, London N15 6RW, England.

  © James Purdy 1975

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Purdy, James

  In A Shallow Grave

  I. Title

  8i3’.54

  ISBN 0 85449 093 0

  Printed and bound in the European Community

  by Nørhaven A/S, Viborg, Denmark

  For John Uker,

  Robert Helps,

  and George Andrew McKay.

  “WHAT you will need now you are about to be separated from the Army,” my captain had told me as I was picking up my mustering-out pay, “is what in the days of my grandfather they called a valet or maybe a hired man. Unless of course you want to stay in the Vets’ hospital, which you have more than every right to . . . But you will need someone to watch over you now . . .”

  I didn’t think about a valet and/or hired man until I was back home in Virginia for a week or so. Somehow all I thought about the first few days was how many birds there were singing in the early or premorning hours, I never heard such a fuss. I thought some too about my parents who had died whilst I was in service, and I thought about somebody else whom I am coming to very presently. I felt also a certain kind of angry satisfaction, if not gratitude, for all the money I had on hand, not to speak of some my uncle had willed me, I say angry or grim satisfaction owing to the fact that both the captain and me knew there would be no valet, hired man, even slave who would want to come and stay with me, not to mention eat with or touch me, for I may as well explain at once that owing to my war injuries which took place near the South China Sea, my appearance is such that anybody’s stomach is turned at the sight, enough to make him throw up, if not to faint.

  I kept sort of grinning thinking over the captain’s advice about valets and servants and hired men, but as another soldier who was being mustered out at the same time as me had quipped, “When you can’t even find anybody to shine your shoes anymore, let alone somebody to watch over you.”

  But behind all these practical considerations and worries, there was this flitting dim thought never absent but never put into words at this time, that down the road about two mile was living Widow Rance, who had been, though this seems a thousand years ago and must surely have passed out of her mind entirely, my childhood sweetheart.

  But though I thought of her every moment asleep or awake, under the sound of all those bird choristers, it finally wasn’t my lifelong crush on her that made me hold my breath with panic but what was I to do with the little that was left of myself.

  The Army doc, just before he signed my papers, had said, “Although your skin bears a total disfigurement from your war injuries, you ought to bear in mind, despite your outward appearance you have a wonderful fine and strong bone structure, and it is the bones that are the real measure of a man’s bearing and good looks.”

  In the darkness now sometimes after my return I would take out a large hand mirror and look at myself as if searching for the bones that he had said I should be so proud of. By moonlight it is true, I looked sort of almost normal, the scars, gashes, and discoloration sort of melting into the night . . . Yes, I needed a servant, I kept returning to this. No woman would take the job, that’s certain, though I would have preferred one. It would have to be not only a man, but a young one, for already you see I had my plan, and I would run his legs off. So I put some notices in the local papers advertising for him, for I knew then that I would court the Widow Rance through these letters I was going to write to her.

  But it was maybe my greatest sorrow since I was hurt so bad in the war when the ads started to be answered and the applicants began coming in person. I had never interviewed anybody before, and always been the one to have to answer all the questions, and here I was about to ask these young men if they would care to accept employment. But there were few questions asked, let me tell you, and almost no answers, for all the young men acted the same way, that is they took one look, and their gorge started to rise, and they would strain and cough, wanting to vomit as they looked over at me. After that, they would get up, knocking over a stool or taboret somewhere, some mumbling “No thanks, buddy” or “Sorry about all your trouble over there.” One even started to shake hands with me, but when he saw the disfigurement had reached as far down as my fingertips he thought better of it, and hiked out faster than the ones who had left almost as soon as they caught sight of me.

  I am glad the doc has left me a generous medicine cabinet, for as soon as an applicant had retched and knocked over the furniture and hurried out, I would take more than my usual handful of pills.

  I presided over fifty acres here, left me by my grandfather, who in turn had it from his father. Nearby is the ocean, which sort of follows my moods, that is sometimes even when the sky is bright he thunders and thumps and howls and even cries like a little child. And speaking of crying, my doc says my injuries have not really damaged my lachrymal glands, but I think on this score as on many others, he must have blundered, for I cannot weep, and if I start to I feel a great pain in these said glands, like there were sharp rocks or millstones being drawn through raw nerves.

  I don’t know what I would do without the ocean, come to think of it.

  At first I wrote down in diary form my thoughts, but I burned them one morning. The pages from my diary though began with one sentence which from then on seemed to float through the air like smoke rings from a billboard cigarette, I am the color now of mulberry juice.

  It’s as though any chair I sat on was a red-hot stove, my bed is like ground glass, and even when walking, from my scalp down to my big toe I feel I am on fire . . . “It is memory,” said the docs, “you have recovered from your war injuries, it is your memory which keeps you in pain, learn to forget and you will be well again.”

  But if I do have memory, like they say it is buried to the core of the earth, for I really have trouble recollecting one day from the next.

  The “interviews” and the “advertisements” for hired help took all of a year. Even now I can see the long line of young men who came to apply for a job nobody could want.

  I thought once, and wrote it out on a scrap sheet from a ledger, The lowest slave in the world wouldn’t accept the job of tending me if he was to starve to death.

  Only it finally “came” to me in the night that somebody desperate was going to apply, and as soon as this thought warned me of his coming, I got sort of quiet even for me, and slept.

  There was a little old pump-organ upstairs, and I used to go up and pump it and play folk songs on it, and even sing, but it only made me more uncomfortable in my head, for the purpose of folk songs whether they admit it or not is to get you to weep.

  None who came, then, as applicants could bear the sight of me, all turned aside to retch or to groan or to sit down too faint to stand, and would beg for a glass of water. The hired girl I had at this time used to let them in, and almost as quick let them out. One applicant who lingered a little longer than the others while the girl waited at the door to allow him to leave opined that when winter came he feared the house would be too skeletal and thin to keep the big winds and ocean blasts out. I nodded, as cold was the last thing on my mind, and I reminded him that in the summer it is breezy and cool here when the rest of the country is sweltering and broiling.

  All the time the applicants was coming and going I was thinking if only I could lay my head in her (Widow Rance’s) lap, my brow and brain would get cool, my lachrymal glands would work, and I would be my old self.

  Your old sweet self.


  Now as to the applicants for this job. I drew up a list of their duties on the same scraps from the ledger on which I finally wrote down the story of my life. They were to sit with me, fetch me a glass of water so I could swallow my pills, occasionally or even frequently when my feet went cold they would rub them and the skin over my heart, and see I got three square meals a day, even though I didn’t even want one, and finally read to me, though I was too nervous to sit still to hear them. They would read to me as I paced up and down the sitting room, or wherever.

  So I got quite handy at shooting those questions to the applicants, while neither of us looked at the other: “Can you prepare simple food? Like say heat already prepared soup, boil coffee, rub my feet when my attack comes on and the flesh above my heart, and can you take letters to the Widow Rance?” (She had agreed to accept messages from me through the offices of an intermediary.)

  Each minute, each hour lasted an eternity. I am twenty-six according to the back pages of the family Bible that lies open over there to the Book of Second Samuel, but the handwriting should say twenty-six millennia, maybe. No medicine or new pharmaceutical can help when I look in the mirror. What age is that looking back at me in that antique glass decorated with painted nasturtiums on the surrounding wood, is he human, a man, some stray animal, who is looking back at me? Somebody I never met, nor knew, nor saw . . .

  But to return to the duties of these applicants. They was to sit with me, fetch me a glass of water, and so on. But I said all this before, see how wrong the docs are about my memory.

  The Widow Rance is twenty-eight but sometimes acts like some old rich woman of sixty. Of her two husbands (she was first married at sixteen), the first died in the same war I was in, then she remarried his brother a year after his death, he ditto went to war and died. She told everybody that was enough, she would not remarry. Oh yes I forgot, her babies both died, she had one each by the two brothers.

  James Powell, my first hired applicant, gave me the distinct impression she hated me now, and only accepted the letters because I am a hero, but we will come to James Powell first.

  I can kind of see him yet if I close one eye, if I close two he disappears on me, this first applicant. What makes me remember him at all may be only that he was the first.

  He stood over me, I remember, like a barber and that made me jumpy. When he brought in my scrapple and eggs, he stood behind my head at the big pine table while I ate. Finally, after the second day, I said, “James Powell, do you have to stand behind my head always? Go to the other end of the table, and stand with your hands along the seams of your trousers, head and nose slightly raised, eyes on . . . nothing. Is that clear?”

  Powell swallowed hard, I suppose with choler, and said it was.

  I would eat the scrapple then but only in order to have the strength to bear my suffering for that day, as I have no taste for food.

  “How old are you, Powell?”

  “Would you mind calling me either by my Christian name or say Mister when you address me?”

  “Of course, Mr. Powell. How old then are you?”

  “Sixteen years and four months and two days.”

  “I never heard of anybody that age being called ‘mister.’ ” I said this so under my breath he may not have heard it.

  “It’s only fair to tell you, James,” I began, but I could not remember what I was going to say to him, and got up from the table, spinning. He rushed over to me and held me under the armpits, and we walked that way to a large overstuffed sofa, and I sort of slipped from his arms onto it.

  The routine after breakfast was interrupted then by this “spell” of mine—he was to have taken a letter I was writing to the Widow—for I had this strange feeling of ice beginning to flow from my feet and legs upwards like the poison hemlock reported by Socrates’ pupil, on its way to my heart. I wanted to die, but I feared the experience of death itself.

  His hands began rubbing my feet, for I guess, to give him his due, he understood my condition at that moment.

  Despite my being took so bad, my mind was on having hurt his feelings by saying nobody his age could be called Mister, and considering how after all he was younger than me, a boy and a childlike one, though in some respects old and mean in his ways, I began to apologize to him somewhat profusely in order, I do believe, to keep my thoughts away from my possible death, but he was even more afflicted by my apologies, and got up in confusion and went over to a rocking chair and sat down, but kept his feet in such a position the chair would not rock with him.

  “All right, I am sorry, Jim. I am sorry, Mr. Powell.”

  He broke down then and began to bawl. I am not exactly sure what he was bawling over, but I suppose everything.

  The second part of the day began then, as I say, when we were interrupted by my “attack” by us going into the study and I would start writing a letter to Widow Rance.

  James would take a pad and pencil (he claimed to know shorthand), and I would begin to dictate:

  “Dearest and only Girl”

  But after that I could think of nothing to say, and finally looking up and catching the expression on his face, I let out, “See here, Mr. Powell, I don’t see why you act more miserable and more on a bed of hot coals than me.”

  He was looking down at his hands and especially his fingernails, and then it began to dawn on me a little bit what was bothering him, he did not like having to rub my feet to prevent the cold from going up and reaching my heart, that is he had a real distaste for having to touch the human foot. Well, the human foot is the real nigger of the human body, as my sergeant once said to me outside our tent, mistreated, bad-smelling even in the most elegant lady, deformed by footgear, unhappy by the burdens placed on it from the time you begin to toddle, and is the first part of the body (he was thinking of soldiers) to die.

  I had never quite understood the sergeant’s speech until James Powell maybe. But now it all came back to me in a rush, but I didn’t care, I mean my coming death meant nothing to me, it was the fact I had never known joy in this world that seemed so terrible, mind you I didn’t blame anybody or circumstances, but what I wondered suddenly was had anybody known joy in this world, real joy? I knew James Powell never had, there was no use asking him.

  I had begun dictating my letter to Widow Rance, James’ long, untrimmed fingernails making sounds on the yellow-lined paper:

  Dear Widow Rance, All I meant to say when you granted me my last interview is that I am not spying on you at all when I stand so considerably hidden by the hollyhocks which I also understand are growing on another property than your own, I am standing partially hidden as I speak to you behind these tall plants only to spare you from being upset and/or affrighted by my changed aspect since we were schoolmates, for I understand my appearance causes you to be discomfited, at least James or Mr. Powell so informs me that you are unhappy when I do appear whether behind or in front of the hollyhocks . . .

  “Stop!” the first applicant called out to me . . . “Stop, do you hear? You are making fun of me . . . I never reported anything you ever said to the Widow Ranсe.”

  I looked at him dumbfounded, because it was true, I did despise him, and was probably making fun of him in my heart. We certainly were not getting on.

  “And these letters!” he cried, throwing his pencil to the floor. “Don’t you understand Widow Rance has no use for . . . them. She never wants to hear from you again. She hates your letters!”

  I slumped back in my chair, really done up at what he had said.

  By the way, my name is Garnet Montrose. It is a name people stumble on, a fact I noticed in the first grade, at school dances (I was a great dancer, I think it is the one thing I did good, dance, I could dance all day or night to Kingdom Come, I lived at dance halls all the time before I was drafted, under the ballroom moving lights, you know, the little dappled specks of color and the girl with her young little breasts so neatly against my ribcage, well, maybe come to think of it I have known joy, my trouble then as now i
s I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life). As I say, people stumble on hearing my name, the first name doesn’t fit with the second, the first name, they feel, sounds like a girl’s, and the second sounds to them too historical. In the Army most often as not they just called me by two nicknames which have, to tell the truth, always puzzled me, one was Granite, and the other was Morose, and at the beginning they used to joke and pun around the first nickname and say “Don’t let them take you for granite, soldier.” But now I am home I want only my own names used, but actually nobody calls me anything because nobody can see me to call me, you might say. I am more vague than the fog, and not even it seems to me as palpable as night.

  Mr. Powell then really tore into me, he said I was an ignorant, arrogant, half-assed plantation owner, and so on, and then he fled out of the house like it was afire, and I realized I would never see him more, and would have to put in ads all over again, on the long tiresome search for a nurse, bodyguard, or whichever to watch over somebody who didn’t want to be among the land of the living even. Where would I find him, you tell me.

  I looked over my file of letters to Widow Rance as I was cooling off from my battle with Mr. Powell, letters I keep faded copies of. I heard secondhand from somebody, maybe Mr. Powell himself, that the Methodist minister had paid the widow a visit, and said to her, “Just keep the letters from him coming, he means you no harm.”

  The other thing that annoyed the applicants about me was this, they did not like what one smartass called my metaphysical speeches. I know no metaphysics or philosophy, I don’t know anything. But I would talk on two topics which are simply reality to me, joy and the meaninglessness of death. Is there joy in this world for anybody, and has death any meaning? They would, as one of the early applicants phrased it, like to foam at the mouth when I did these discussions.