Narrow Rooms Page 10

  Jesse had stumbled out of the house at about daybreak. He had walked down to the Five Creeks, past the glue factory which had belonged to the renderer, then he went back ever so slowly to his own house and got the gun.

  Ruthanna had been promised to Jesse since he was a boy. It was arranged you see, their marriage, from the “beginning,” from, it seemed to Jesse, before their birth.

  The young uncle was seated at breakfast, his eyes riveted on the comic section of the Sunday paper.

  Jesse had walked up to him with a strange smile ruffling his mouth.

  The uncle looked up, turned his untroubled gaze and brow toward his assassin-­to-­be. He had no chance to beg for pardon. Jesse shot once, then twice, the bowl of morning cereal was covered with red like a dish of crushed berries.

  Jesse walked out with comely carriage to Ruthanna’s house. He stood before the white pillars and fired the same gun into his head, his brains and skull rushed from under his fair curly hair onto the glass behind the pillars, onto the screen door, the blood flew like a gentle summer shower. Jesse Ference lay on the front steps, the veins in his outstretched hands swollen as if they still carried blood to his heart.

  Then to go back to Gareth’s accident. Gareth of course was driving, but how was he driving?

  After Brian McFee had lost Sidney’s love, he sought out the only other possible person who might go hunting with him. (Roy during this time was cold as ice to him, he had failed him, he was through with him, he would never speak to him again, he might even murder him . . . The only way he could take him back was if he “killed Vance’s brother,” and that was that, etc.)

  Brian had a little more trouble leading Gareth “astray” than he had Sidney. But not a whole lot more. The trouble actually came after he had got him. Gareth almost immediately grew overfond of grass, and wanted more and more of it. The price for so much grass was Gareth’s (in the words of the court which convicted Sidney a few weeks later), “moral obloquy,” for the court had insisted the letter found in Brian’s blood-soaked breast pocket be read again at the conclusion of the trial, and the prosecutor had said right out that the letter showed that it was addressed to Sidney and that the two men, McFee and De Lakes, had some deep and unwholesome friendship.

  That was really what had convicted Sidney De Lakes. The accusation had sent Vance home with a sick headache.

  The “moral obloquy” of Gareth Vaisey was completed in less than a month, and the death of his father and two brothers and his own physical and mental ruin came just a few days before Sidney shot and killed Brian.

  For on the day his unsuspecting father and his two brothers elected Gareth to drive them and a trailer with the new horse just purchased in a famous stable in Kentucky, they had no idea they were going to their death because of the fact Gareth had elected to choose a “life style” (a phrase used in the trial) as utterly unknown to them as Sidney’s romance with Brian McFee was utterly unsuspected by his brother. For in the words of the scissors-­grinder, Roy Sturtevant, Brian had merely let Gareth find out who he was, anyhow, that is, the only thing he really liked was to have Brian McFee lie naked on him all night long and he liked even better smoking grass—six, eight joints a day if possible.

  Gareth had seen the fast train coming that evening, but it was not real to him, it was only lights and sounds, red and yellow and harmless in the thick dark of evening coming to meet night. And then Brian had appeared on his horse! Or seemed to appear! “Race me, Garey, you race me now . . . Beat me if you can to the crossing, double-­dare you!”

  “For God’s sake, Gareth, back up or go forward fast!” his father had cried and his hands were reaching out from the back seat to grab the wheel when there came the crash like world and sky had collapsed together in fire, and a stream of hot blood rained from everywhere, stinging the eyes and lips.

  A little less than a week later, in the Bent Ridge Tavern, Brian McFee had thrown down his gun after having tried to shoot Sidney several times in the nearby woods, and made no effort to protect himself when Sidney raised his own gun and deliberately aimed it at him.

  “Don’t shoot, Sidney, I love you . . .” Brian called to him.

  It was the surprise of those words which made the gun go off twice in his shaking hands, Sidney had told his lawyer.

  “And do you expect anybody to believe that, Sidney, even if I could persuade myself to.”

  “I’m telling you what happened, sir.”

  “And this anonymous letter, Sid, you said you received just before the shooting at the tavern.” He consulted his notes. “The letter said, ‘Brian McFee aims to kill you tomorrow!’ Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you say the letter said?” The lawyer checked his notes again. “And furthermore you say you burned this self-­same letter?”

  Sidney only stared at his lawyer. A few bubbles of spit formed on his mouth.

  “When I heard Brian say, ‘Don’t shoot, Sidney, I love you,’ you see I believed him . . . I knew he meant it. . . . I didn’t ever mean to shoot him just then even though he had been shooting at me back in the woods, but I knew why he had shot at me. It was for the same reason, don’t you see, he loved me.”

  The lawyer folded all his papers and put them in his briefcase.

  “You get a good night’s sleep now, Sidney,” he advised, rising and taking his client’s hand. “But what you just mentioned now, keep that all a secret like something that never happened, understand? He never said that to you so far as we are concerned. . . .”

  The deposit of spit on Sidney’s lip slipped down his chin and onto his sleeveless sweater, onto the floor. He heard the attendant let the lawyer out and close the iron door.

  Roy, his mission or errand completed at Mrs. Vaisey’s, had come back to his own house fully expecting to find his “suppliant” waiting for him, but there wasn’t hide nor hair of the “Murderer” as Roy called him to himself from time to time. He had slipped out the back window.

  But Roy had a hunch where he might find him.

  There were several times since his return from jail when Sidney would steal off by himself and go sit down on the front porch steps of Brian McFee’s house. The red-­winged blackbirds were making a fuss in the wet and swampy places and in the wild cherry trees that grew behind the old untenanted property. Sidney always marveled how so young a man as Brian, who was so childish in so many ways, could have lived alone like this after his Grandpa died, with only the red-­winged blackbirds to keep him company, had fended for himself, and then once near the end of his brief life, Brian had said to him, “All these years, Sidney, I was waiting only for you.”

  The more he thought about his own life the more he considered himself now a killer; in jail he had felt, had known even, he was innocent, but having come back to the “Mountain State,” he felt he was at fault. At any rate he had been the instrument of Brian’s death. And he knew deep inside himself that one day despite his horror that Brian had been the lover of Roy Sturtevant and had therefore soiled himself, he knew that one day he would have asked for Brian to come back to him. As a matter of fact he was priming himself to ask Brian to come back just a day or so before he received the anonymous threat.

  During and since jail Sid had got more and more to talk to himself. “I think my heart will break” was one sentence he kept mumbling aloud, in a dry, cold, expressionless voice, perhaps even without feeling anymore.

  He knew that today it would not be good for him to “break in” and look around the house where he had been so often with Brian, but maybe it was the sound of the red-winged blackbirds that made him so starved for some glimpse of Brian again. So he broke open the door and went in.

  They had done nothing with the house in all these years, it was abandoned and yet everything was in its place still—the kitchen stove (a good one), the huge cupboards, the linoleum (brand new in its day), in the front parlor a grandfather clock, mute, but even stopped the very embodiment still of Father Time, the immense dining room with twelve chairs grouped a
round the elegant mahogany table.

  Sidney, as in his other past visits, had planned to go upstairs, but he began to have the funny feeling around his heart again, like he had the first day he had called on Gareth and Mrs. Vaisey, so he sat down in the parlor until the painful sensations should subside.

  He felt he could almost smell Brian. Then without warning he began to sob and cry. He saw that his whole life was a failure and that he was nothing, and the only thing that had meant anything to him had been Brian and he had snuffed that hope out. Finally he made himself get up and go upstairs. There was the bed they had slept in, the moths had been into the big comforter that covered it, and there was a musty stale odor but mixed somehow with the aroma of lavender. He opened the window with great difficulty, and then sat down by the bed in a rocker.

  Outside evening was falling, the birds were now still, a crescent moon was rising.

  “Brian, Brian,” Sidney called, and then feeling a presence, turned and saw the renderer.

  “Brian can’t help you no more, Sidney, if he ever could, but somebody else has been busy doin’ you a favor today . . .”

  “So you come here too,” Sidney whispered.

  “I have gone to the trouble of having you reinstated with Mrs. Vaisey,” Roy said as he knelt beside Sidney seated in the rocking chair. “You hear?”

  “How did you do that?” Sidney said, breathless as he felt Roy kiss him in, he supposed, mockery.

  “I all but own the Vaisey house now,” Roy said.

  “You do?” Sidney said moonily.

  “I have since before you got out of jail, matter of fact.”

  Sidney turned his face away from the scissors-­grinder.

  “So your post is waiting for you again, if you want it, hear? Gareth is waiting for you . . . They have both missed you a lot . . . You listening?”

  The renderer suddenly shook Sidney with fury.

  “I heard you,” Sidney answered.

  “Then you get on back over there, I say.”

  “I’ll go by and by, but will you just let me sit here in peace awhile, mind . . . ? Huh?” He turned his full gaze on his tormentor.

  “So he sent you back to me” was all Gareth said when Sidney arrived, having already been greeted as effusively by Irene Vaisey as if he were the great specialist they were always talking about and whose coming would immediately cure her boy.

  “I wish you wouldn’t put it that way, Garey,” Sidney replied. Gareth sat in the very same chair and wore the very same clothes as he had the day Sidney was dismissed from serving him. But his face was thinner and sadder, and his eyes flashed some poorly repressed fury and smoldering disappointment.

  “He has us now where he wants us,” Gareth said.

  “You won’t let me kiss you, Garey?”

  “No.”

  “Suit yourself then . . . You don’t love me anymore?”

  “I’ll tell you by and by.”

  “That means you don’t.”

  “You shouldn’t have come through him.” Gareth returned to this.

  “But I was drove out of your house by your Ma . . . What was I expected to do?”

  “Knock her down and stay . . . Kill the bitch and rule instead of her.”

  “He has always been like a goblin or booger watching me,” Sidney began without warning, talking about the scissors-­grinder like he was alone at Vance’s and his house and watching the thick wet snowflakes fall over the stunted cornstalks. “You say I shouldn’t ought to have come through him. Everything has come through him. From the beginning. I’m telling you,” he sat on the floor now and took Gareth’s indifferent hand in his. “Once when the snow was beginning to fall for the first time that year—we was in the eighth grade together—and because the weather was bad we could not play outside in the recess yard. . . .” Gareth closed his eyes and swallowed. “Like I say with bad weather, Garey, we played and ran downstairs in the school basement where they had a big old track for running, as big as if you expected horses to gallop there. . . . For to tell the truth even then I felt he seen me as a horse as he watched me run from where he stood on a little balcony they had built over the track. He was gazing down on me. He looked older than me, and he was taller. I run faster and faster around the track and he never took his orbs off of me. Sometimes he nodded, and I would lift my eyes and follow his eyes as if he was the runner. . . . So when I shot Brian McFee that afternoon the first thing I thought was I was rid of him, that is rid of the renderer, the scissors-­grinder, you follow me? I felt they would hang me and I would be rid of him . . . But I believe if I was to die and am buried a hundred feet deep he will dig me up and render me . . . I do for a fact. . . . Sometimes I think the safest thing to do is maybe surrender to him. . . . Except I have you, don’t I, Gareth? . . . Don’t I?

  “Anyhow, to go back to how he watched me,” Sidney resumed when Gareth made no response, but showed he was listening. “My running over the little track and he always watching me, you know . . . Well this one day, it must have been late fall and the last of the bad thunder-­and-­lightning storms before winter takes over had kept us all indoors, and like always on bad days I was running like a horse or colt and he was standing on the balcony like he was timing me, scowling, with his eyes almost closed, and I was watching him almost more than he me, and suddenly I turned around without warning like I was going to run away from him this time, and I run and crashed square into another runner at full speed. I was knocked down unconscious. A black fellow some years older than me but who was in my class as a ‘repeater’ stooped down and picked me up and carried me into the toilet, and had me sit on one of the stools, keeping my head down so that I would regain consciousness, but he had nothing in his hands or pockets to staunch the consider­able flow of blood coming from my mouth and nose until like out of nowhere this brown not overclean hand stretched out and put in the hands of the black youth who was tending me a fancy silk handkerchief of the kind sent over the border from Mexico with exotic scenes depicted on it, just as I was coming to, and I seen the hand of the son of the renderer extending the cloth which had the faintest whiff of perfume too, but the cloth itself you could tell had never been used at all till when it was thrust into those black hands to soak up and wipe from my face the thick clots of blood . . .”

  Sidney had opened his mouth wide now as if to scream or utter some fearful blasphemy, but then instead he fell into Gareth’s arms just as he had, that afternoon long ago when he was knocked out, fallen into the arms of his black rescuer.

  Then something happened which brought Gareth and Sidney closer together, almost as close as Brian McFee and Sidney had been. The cause of their closeness was a dream Sidney had.

  The night of the dream, Sidney had for the first time slept in the same bed with Gareth, and it was not too long after Gareth had turned out the lights for sleeping that Sidney had cried out with such force he had wakened the entire house.

  In the dream, he later told Gareth, he felt that he had finally captured the booger which had been staring at him since the eighth grade. He had put him in a crate filled with clean straw, although he seemed to be still alive—at any rate his eyes moved from time to time under the straw. Sidney used a horse and wagon to transport the booger. They were headed for the rendering sheds.

  When they reached the sheds, Sidney carefully took the booger out of the straw. His eyes were closed now but they pulsated under the blue lids and his mouth moved in a smile. He took off all the booger’s clothes, which were actually corn shucks and wire grass braided tightly together. He removed his shoes and his socks, which were made however of spun gold (he was not at all surprised at that). Then the terrible part began. He put him in the boiling tub of sizzling, burning, foaming lye-­treated water, and boiled and cooked him stirring all the time with a wooden spoon eight feet long.

  When the “rendering” was done he took out Roy Sturte­­vant and he was a beautiful beguiling bouncing young man except he had no mouth. But he would take care of that
, and he painted in the mouth, he painted it with blood from the edges of the rendering tubs.

  Roy Sturtevant stood there in all his glory before Sidney, and then Sidney bowed his head and bent his knees and fell before him and kissed his feet and said, “You are the one I have been waiting for all this while. You are my life.” But when he looked up, expecting to see the handsomest man who ever drew breath standing before him (for this was what the booger had turned into after his bath in boiling water and lye), he saw only a freshly picked clean skeleton save for the mouth which was all blood and a few bits of half-­consumed flesh. . . . That was when Sidney screamed as if his lungs had been pierced with a thousand tiny needles­. Footsteps then sounded from all through the house, doors opened, and Irene Vaisey stood before him more dreamlike and filmy than his nightmare in her shimmering white nightgown over which she had thrown a sumptuous purple dressing gown held together with a shining clasp. She had insisted Sidney take a tablet with a tumbler of water for sleeping which had made him so drowsy he was unable to tell Gareth what he had dreamed until the next afternoon just as the winter light was failing.

  When Sidney told Gareth his dream then the next day when they were both more rested and composed and more used to being in one another’s company again, Gareth’s only comment was, “Roy don’t render anymore if he ever did. The rendering establishment has been closed since the days of his Grandpa.”

  Gareth felt that closed the chapter and certainly made the dream of no significance, made it even contemptible.

  He’s got me in the same corner he had Brian and me in. This thought was on the very edge of being uttered, instead Sidney pressed his lips against Gareth.

  “I don’t never want to see the son of a bitch again, though,” Gareth fulminated. “But I don’t fear him like you do.”