In a Shallow Grave Read online

  “Once in Sparta,

  at the palace of golden-haired Menelaus, maidens with bloom of hyacinth in their hair danced before the new-painted bridal chamber.”

  “Oh, Garnet, thank God you’ve come,” Georgina was speaking to me now. The wedding, you see, along with the hurricane was past. “Be strong now, won’t you?” she admonished when she saw me close my eyes.

  “I’ll take you to his room.” She led me by the arm.

  That was a big house that the Widow Rance had, my grandfather’s don’t compare, and we seemed to walk acres and acres that morning, if it was morning, but of course I kept making her tarry and loiter and say little things, I didn’t want to get to his room too soon. I explained also in detail to Widow Rance my fight with Quintus, and that he was leaving me for some high-class black folks in Richmond who had untold wealth, and I told her also how I had been dispossessed, and she was so understanding, though she didn’t listen close to what I said.

  “You can stay here, Garnet,” she kept saying, thinking, I guess, I had no home now. “You’re always welcome here, remember that. The welcome mat is always out for a Vir­ginia boy.”

  But it was too soon! She should have warned me, even if I knowed. It was way too soon.

  We stood before this mammoth four-poster bed made from walnut, and there Daventry lay, a little tiny trace of a smile on his face. I think I kept watch on his breast for what seemed like six months. Of course it never raised once, and then I would look at her, and she would nod and smile so sad. A red circle of blood not really dry traced it­self around his hairline.

  “The undertaker will be here any minute,” she said, “and I thank God you have come in time. So look all you care to, on account of you were so close, he told me.”

  I walked over to the bed and lifted up the sheet and looked at him down to his feet.

  “Do you really think he was a sheep-rancher’s son?” I inquired.

  “If he told you so, I expect.”

  “Were you very happy?” I inquired.

  Georgina was telling me about how it had happened. After the wedding ceremony, they had decided to begin their honeymoon, but the roads were blocked on account of the hurricane warnings, which was supposed to have bypassed our community, but at the last moment there was a radio warning, and an alert, and almost an entire flock of birds was killed and throwed right against the lighthouse and then the hurricane began in earnest.

  Georgina had gone inside the house when she realized it had hit.

  “It was the wind done it,” she said, “a freak wind within the hurricane itself. It lifted Daventry up and carried him to that clump of pitch-pine trees and then just left him standing at the base of the tree trunk, so that when I went in search of him I thought he was just waiting for me, Garnet, but when I went up to him and spoke, I saw he was mashed into that tree as though he belonged in it, and his arms was stretched out as if he would enfold me.”

  I kept lifting and putting back the sheet, and whether it was the slight breeze created by my raising the sheet or what, his eyes came open and rested on me.

  “Do you have any pennies, Georgina?” I said. She had begun to cry then, and she pointed to the bureau where there was some money which had been removed from his pants pockets. I stepped over to the bureau and took up two pennies. I trembled a little, and deposited them on his blue eyes.

  The placing of the pennies on his eyelids is the thing, I do believe, that will never leave me out of all the things I have done or had done to me. Why that is I will never know.

  Shortly after this Quintus disappeared. I had feared for a long long time that he too was a casualty of the hurricane until one day Edgar Doust drove past to see if I was in need of any produce, and he let out a lot of sly hints based on sly rumors that Quintus had been taken up by some smart rich black people in Richmond whom he had some­how met before but had run into again during the bad storms, and had gone off somewhere with them. I didn’t pursue the conversation or ask any information about where this “somewhere” might be, though for all I knew, it might be Africa since he had been threatening to go back there to his homeland, but he knew as well as I that his real homeland and mine is Virginia.

  Then I went into the hospital, though there was nothing new wrong with me. I simply asked admission.

  But the second or third day after I had been readmitted there, the doc came into my room and then was about to step out again for he thought he had the wrong patient.

  “Why, Garnet, is this you?” he inquired after several double takes.

  I had known even before Daventry was killed something was changing with me. It was certainly something the doc had never promised. My appearance of having been turned to mulberry wine, actually my appearance of having been massacred and yet left among the living had been changing ever since Daventry had arrived. I will always look horrible, of course, but now instead of a massacred man—and this is what the doc took in immediately—I look in his words merely like a man that has been in a boxing match every day for five years without stopping. So even now the few times I go to a strange place people will say or whisper behind my back, “What do you suppose the other fellow looks like?” A kind of standard joke around here.

  Winter came, most of the birds had left except the chickadees, and it was colder and rawer than I ever remembered it. Sometimes in those long-drawn-out evenings I would go to the hall mirror and study myself. To tell the honest truth I think I look worse now that I have turned back into resembling any Virginia white man who gets beat up frequently to someone I do not know. But it is no even slight exaggeration to say that I have come back from another world.

  I was thinking then of putting more ads in the newspaper and interviewing new applicants, but when you have met the real applicant, and if you count Quintus also and say applicants, then why have any more? I read those hard deep books also between whiles occasionally, but all the pith and substance has gone out of them. Like today I picked up a tome at random and read,

  They used no images to represent the object of their worship, nor did they meet in temples or buildings of any kind for the performance of their sacred rites. A circle of stones constituted their sacred place, situated near some stream or under the shadow of a grove or wide-spreading oak.

  I thought of the ruined dance hall, and could not wait to get my togs on and visit there. Why had I not gone sooner? Yes, for it was all that was left, all that would ever partly satisfy my longing.

  I hurried up the cliff, but at the top, my stay in the hospital having made me soft, I sort of gave out, losing my breath, but I got up again and then ran all the way. I decided once I got inside all would be revealed, all would be known forever and ever. I felt he would come and explain everything.

  But it was a pretty sorry mess inside. The great revolving moon was gone with its polka-dot lights, and the piano was busted, together with the bandstand, innocent victims of the hurricane and the flood of rain concomitant with it.

  I stood a long time weeping, for my lachrymal glands have come back to normal along with my complexion. Then my eye, still swimming, spied with some difficulty the old victrola. I went over to it, and wound it up. “On the Alamo” was already on the turntable, and I set the motor to going.

  I was dancing all by myself, as happy as one who had lost everything, even the stain of his horror, could be, when I heard the big front door open. Then steps. I dared not turn round, I dared not stop dancing, and the music sounded so pitifully far-off and thin, so old-fashioned and vanished, and long ago with its words about garden gates and moonlight and roses and love’s dream being o’er. My new tears had also blinded me, so there was no point even trying to see who had come in, but I felt a gentle hand on the nape of my neck.

  “Daventry?” I inquired.

  “No, it’s just me, Garnet,” the voice said.

  I turned then to look and it was of course her, who else?

  She had put her arms about me, I had never quit dancing anyhow, and we mov
ed off into the center part of the circular ballroom with the music reaching us fainter and fainter.

  The record stopped, and we stopped. We looked into one another’s eyes.

  “So you knew my secret all the time then too, along with him?” I said.

  All of a sudden the music started again, the same number, and we stood hardly moving our feet at all, but holding one another, the way you hold people in dreams you don’t want to go on holding, and at the same time you can’t let go. I smelled her favorite heliotrope perfume and there was never any skin like hers, if snow was warm it would be Georgina, Daventry’s skin might have looked fresher, but it was not soft as falling snow.

  The droll thing about getting what you long for is the longing was better, longing pains more, but it’s more what you want. I had just walked away from Georgina leaving her under the ruined polka-dot moon and the orchestra doing “On the Alamo” for the twentieth time. I hardly knew I had left her.

  The tables were turned then, but their turning bored me more than they vindicated me. They were, though, turned completely. I had tried to tell the doc about my feelings, that is, that at first I had loved Georgina, childhood sweet­heart, etc., and now I was in love with this son of a sheep-rancher from Utah who had been killed in the hurricane. The doc smiled and nodded and listened. He would always let me say anything, I guess, but he never said much back, but this time he said something vague, like all human feel­ings, you see, are as old as history. As if I cared about history or it was any use to me.

  I missed Quintus almost more than Daventry because as long as he was sitting around reading, and sharing his learn­ing with me, why the very irritation of his presence, his peevishness, the fact that he hated me even maybe (I guess he hated me), all made me feel at home with him, for there is nobody more Virginian than Quintus. Daventry had become my permanent secret like the ruined dance hall, but Quintus was home, and so I missed him fearfully, but would have bit my tongue off rather than say it.

  Then she got her “applicants.” That took the place of me being irritated and riled up and puzzled and half-entertained by Quintus and his old reading texts.

  Her applicants were young men who had been children when I was fighting for my country.

  They came in the morning and sometimes again in the P.M. with a letter signed always “Your Georgina.”

  I could tell of course they were all—the letters—imitated from Daventry and even me, and here now I had taken Georgina’s place in the scheme of events. I no longer loved her. I would go and look at myself in the mirror, I sort of looked normal now except I reminded myself of the man in the nursery rhyme who had scratched out both his eyes in a quickset hedge and then jumped into another hedge and scratched them in again.

  A young man came one forenoon with a larger than usual letter, to judge by the envelope, and I embarrassed him greatly by asking him to read the contents. He looked about fourteen, the down was just showing on his cheeks but not really on his upper lip.

  All the time though while he read the letter I was thinking about how I didn’t even have a snapshot of Daventry. The only thing I had from him to prove he even ever existed was a bandana handkerchief and I kept it under my pillow.

  “Would you mind reading the letter again?” I said, for I realized that all the time he had been droning out what she had penned I hadn’t heard a syllable.

  The boy’s chin trembled, but I gather she must have paid him good, for he swallowed his choler and began to read it all over again:

  “What can I say to convince you that it has been you all along that I have cared for . . . When you came home from the war it was not that I rejected you, I suffered I do believe more from what had happened to you than you yourself . . .”

  I don’t recollect all she said and having the boy read it a second time didn’t keep my mind on it successively, so I missed several paragraphs. In fact he could have read it over and again until the Last Judgment, I wouldn’t have heard it all, for my mind was on other things, and I was also looking in the mirror at myself most of the time he was reading, so at least hearing the silence that came from his final delivery, I turned to him, and give him a fifty-cent piece for his pains.

  The thing I had been looking at in the mirror while he read was this, my face was no longer anywhere the color of mulberry.

  That was the longest and coldest winter I ever remember, the very tears froze on one’s face. Even the ocean acted funny, like it was sulking, though I listened to it now more than before, before him, that is, before the one I love, for it had bothered him, the wind, and the ocean he was criti­cal of, whereas I had always taken them for granted, but that long winter I am talking about when I was alone, when I had changed from the color of mulberry back to my white Virginia winter face, it seemed to me that the ocean was complaining, rather than angry, that it whim­pered and sobbed and talked to itself in its sleep, that it digged and delved like it was looking for Daventry too, who is buried nearby in a Confederate cemetery, which I don’t know would please him, but we didn’t have any idea where to send him in Utah, and the Widow tends his grave, and when good weather comes, we will bring fresh flowers to it, you can count on that.

  But spring did come finally, and I found in one of Quintus’ tomes some lines I did prize, see if I can recollect them right:

  The blossom is the token of the rebirth of the year, it is the trees’ rejoicing. It is then that trees show themselves new creatures and are transformed from what they really are, and quite revel in rivaling each other with their varied hues of coloring.

  I was pretending to read one night late, for I had been in some pain in my chest, I was reading as usual in some ancient book about a place once called Arabia Felix, when I hear a kind of banging at the garden gate. The goose-pimples came over me like a sheet of ice had been slipped down over the base of my spine.

  Then I heard a soft knock. I don’t think I would have ever gone to the door had whoever it was not been so pa­tient, that is he sort of went on drumming on the wood, like a bird, and I knew he would never let up until I went out and let him in.

  I didn’t know him at all. It was his clothes that threw me off. He was dressed like some old-time swell, gold watchchain, cuff links, tie clasp, big parrotlike showy tie, hand-sewn lapels, flashy high shoes, oh you name it.

  He streaks in and rushes to the kitchen and took down a glass and was drinking some water from the hydrant without so much as hello, kissmyass, or what have you.

  I was gasping with rage and terror, but then I looked again and who of course was it but Quintus, but trans­formed like he had been touched by a wand, in fact I looked around to see if he didn’t have any retinue of followers.

  “Why didn’t you speak?” I began my wrangling, but then after a moment I felt too good to be mad, and I sat down beside him there in the kitchen.

  My eyes were riveted to his fingers, for there they sparkled, diamond and precious gem rings, or so they seemed.

  “Did you have a rich uncle or somebody die?” I had begun my interrogatory, but he held up his fingers to be silent.

  “I couldn’t pay the price anymore, Garnet.”

  That “Garnet” sounded so good, for he said it as only a Virginian can say it, and I gave out two short sobs before I could control myself.

  “These rich black people from Richmond I met during the hurricane offered to take me to Mexico.” He began a long narrative, which like the Widow’s applicant letters to me, did not hold my undivided attention. So I did not and do not recollect any more of what he done or had done to him than phrases like all they wanted was sex . . . my peter . . . money . . . they drunk so damn much . . . tequila can kill a man . . .

  Then there was a long long talk again like his reading to me, about the Aztec ruins and Chapultepec and another city that had a church built in it for every day in the year and blinded you with its white domes in the sun . . .

  “So you come home, then, did you?” I begun on him in earnest at last. “And yo
u expected the door to be open wide, did you, and the welcome mat still out?”

  “I did hear one thing in town, before I come back,” Quintus spoke somewhat uneasy like. “That the Widow Rance has asked your hand in marriage . . .”

  I grinned then in spite of myself.

  “So,” I chose my own words carefully, “are you home to stay, Quintus, after this sex and tequila spree in Old Mexico . . . or did you just come past to crow over me in all your riches and splendor . . . ?”

  “I know where I belong,” Quintus began again, “but I ain’t told you why I come back, you see.”

  “I thought it was ’cause you got tired of sex, you said.”

  “One night,” he began, and again it was like the old days when he would recite to me out of the hard books whose long crawling sentences and tales of times and deeds so long forgotten make the mind pain and slow down, he spoke of a garden fragrant with jasmine in this Old Mexico town where he had gone. “One night I had taken a seat in an antique carved chair, and whether it was the fragrance of the strange flowers or what, I looked up and seen . . . Daventry . . .”

  I buried my head in my hands.

  “It was him all right,” Quintus went on implacable, “just like he looked in life, Garnet.”

  I covered my ears then too, but his words rung through to my brain and hammered there.

  “He said to me, ‘Go home, Quintus, for he needs you, go home at once . . .’”

  There was this prolonged cessation of talk then during which only the water hydrant dripped, which has needed fixing with a new washer for a year or more.

  I brought my eyes to the level of his eyes after a while, and my face must have been as red as when it was the stain of mulberry, and I said, “And did you just obey him or was there some small part of you wanted to come home?”