In a Shallow Grave Read online

  My back was to the kitchen, you see, so I hardly noticed this hand on the back of my neck. It was a warm soft hand not unlike the goat. It moved gently on the nape of my neck, and then after it seemed I had gone to sleep I heard his sort of hillbilly, sort of goat voice inquiring, “You was talking about an applicant.”

  “What of it?” I cried, taking hold of his hand and throwing it off of me like you would a beetle that had crawled on you.

  “Well,” he said, putting his hand back on my neck, “I wondered what an applicant did.”

  I wheeled round then and looked at him, for I had decided all of a sudden he was some runaway from the law.

  “What would I want with a applicant who pukes when he looks at me, huh?” I shouted at him, beginning to rave. “A fucking little trespasser who feels he must puke and maybe shit when he sees my face. Get out! Get out of my house and off of my property, you little crud.”

  He only looked at me then with his questioning sky-open eyes.

  “What are the duties of this applicant?” he wondered, quiet as a spring zephyr.

  My anger simmered down as I studied his eyes, and the vacant space of his missing teeth.

  “What does he do?” I repeated after him, as if he had put me under a quieting draught like the doc used to hand me in a little paraffin cup full of something red and drowsy . . . “Why, what does a applicant do?” I said, staring at him like I had just awoke in the hospital and the nurse stood there and said, “You’re better, Garnet.”

  “Can you bear messages?” I began cautiously with the most important duty. “That is deliver and fetch letters from down the road?”

  “I don’t see why not,” he contested.

  “I reckon you’re too good, being white, to rub feet.”

  “I could take a try at that,” he said, looking down at my shoes.

  “What size shoe do you wear?” he wondered.

  I swallowed hard, and then replied, “Thirteen.”

  “That’s a lot of rubbin’,” he remarked, and suddenly we both laughed.

  He avoided looking at my face still, and I don’t suppose anybody ever got any pleasure looking at it, but of course once the girls in school had liked to gaze at me and flirt, that’s no exaggeration either, I was once able to put a crush on all the girls, well, that was like an age ago, if not in time, in events . . .

  “And is there any payment?” he went on warming up with questions.

  “Usually I give only board and room, but well, in your case, I guess . . . spending money is in order.”

  He nodded.

  “Where’s my bed?” he queried, looking up at a big stopped grandfather clock.

  “Down the hall. But it’s in the same room next to mine, you see.” I studied him . . . “In case I die in the night, you see,” I joked, “I would want you to put some pennies on my eyelids . . .”

  He sort of grinned.

  “My name, by the way,” he offered his hand, “is Daventry.”

  “And where did you run off from, Daventry?” I inquired, and then put my hand gentle over his mouth and said, “Don’t answer that one.”

  He complained about all the birds making so much noise in the morning he couldn’t sleep—oh maybe complain is not the word but comment. Then he said he had never seen so many books in a house. There were more books than wallpaper, furniture, pictures, or proper rugs. I told him the books was not mine.

  “In the winter”—I went to his first point of criticism— “the birds for the most part are quiet, oh a few chickadees scold and call and a crow here and there caws of course. But until you spoke of it I guess I hadn’t any note of the fuss the birds do make of a morning . . . Now you come from Utah, Daventry . . . That is plains, isn’t it?”

  He nodded, as he went from one shelf after another, taking the books down, blowing off the settled dust, staring at a page here, another page there.

  Meanwhile I was holding my breath, trying to work myself up to having him take his first letter to deliver to Widow Rance. I wondered if he would do, for with all the “interviewing” of applicants I had done, and with none of them panning out, if this one didn’t work, I would have to fall back on Quintus, for I couldn’t go on seeing all these young men forever, picking and choosing and being disappointed. But speaking of Quintus, as I sat there in a study, I suddenly thought of the word for him, he was sober, maybe not too sober, but sober. I don’t mean in regard to not drinking, I don’t dare drink myself, on account of my veins and arteries being all but murdered, but Quintus when you got right down to it, didn’t approve of anything but doing chores for his ma and watching the chickens grow up. Too perfect, Quintus—he made me feel no-account. Still, if this Daventry doesn’t pan, I thought, I will have to have Quintus forever on account of I can’t keep on interviewing the whole world.

  “Oh, Christ Jesus,” I let slip out, and he said immediately, “What’s wrong with you now?”

  “Nothing. Can’t I sigh if I want to?”

  He began looking at me from that moment more and more straight in the face without so much as batting an eye.

  “How did you sleep last night, Daventry?”

  “Oh I slept good.”

  “I don’t snore or anything do I?”

  “Didn’t hear you.”

  I was looking through an old book on Arabia, trying to get my inspiration up to pen or rather dictate a letter to Daventry for the Widow Rance—my own hands will barely hold a pen anyhow, and for some time now if they hold anything too long all the flesh will come off clear to the bone . . .

  “Are you ready, Daventry?” I spoke in my most quavering voice, and I jumped up from my chair and went and stood in the middle of the room ready to dictate and I always felt like the leading baritone in the church choir when I done that, but instead of music of course it was just letters that came out, and this leads me to a remark he made right at the first and shows how he was, for I had begun the letter like this, My precious Dear, I am sending you a courtly young man named Daventry.

  I will not say he was angered by this sentence, but I could see he had been troubled by something about me from the start, not my nauseous appearance (though as I want to never fail to emphasize, at night or in dim house-light I am still not a million miles away from what I was when the high school girls mooned over me), but by what I spoke.

  So there he was the new applicant making a little speech, which begun something like this, “Where do you get all those odd expressions, Garnet,” he began talking to me as familiar as if he had knowed me all my days, “for I never have heard anybody talk like you, and I don’t think anybody does talk like you.”

  “Like the word courtly young man,” he swept right along.

  He stood there now like a judge behind a bench awaiting for my defense.

  “As I was saying, Daventry,” I began in the greatest confusion at his charge, “not knowing I talked any different from anybody, when we talked earlier, not seeing many persons but the applicants and people not liking to talk to me since I was blowed up for dead, and my buddies all killed and parts of their bodies blown over me, buried under them for some days you know before I was found (I go off on this speech every so often when I know I should follow Doc’s advice and forget), you know, well of course in the beginning I spoke like all Virginia boys do, and that is a good speech, but when I fell in love all over again with the Widow Rance and had nothing anyhow to do but read these books, which I will be the first to say I don’t understand a jot or tittle of, but all the same I have become habituated to reading these hard tomes I can’t understand: for instance I don’t take any pleasure anymore in reading the newspapers, and anyhow they are about the living, Daventry, and writ in living language, no, I have got firmly habituated to these old books, like this thick one here about Arabia nearly two hundred years ago, and so gradually you see these old books have seeped or trickled into my speech and have took over maybe from the way people talk today. But until you spoke just now I didn’t know I had this pec
uliarity even. So that explains how I call you a courtly young man, dig?”

  Daventry shook his head slowly again like the old half-broken pendulum of the clock when I am dickering with it.

  “So I talk now the way it gives me pleasure,” I went on somewhat offended at his criticism, “If you don’t understand anything I say,” I appealed to his forbearance, “ask me, and I will try to explain it then, although the Sunday School superintendent when he was up here a year or so back said I didn’t know how to use any of the words right I do pick up from the old tomes, though he was half-joking, and you are serious . . . Well, back to the Widow Rance . . .”

  “Just one second, though, Garnet,” he began again, “if you don’t mind . . . What do I do now if, say, the Widow Rance, as you call her” (I could see he felt this way of speaking of her was queer) . . . “what if she don’t want me to deliver these letters, I mean you said something kind of suspicious about her maybe not wanting you to write them.”

  “To tell the truth,” I took up his point, “she don’t want my letters.” I got somewhat sheepish now. “But the preacher,” my voice got persuasive, “talked to her about it, and well, hell, to tell you the truth it’s charity . . .”

  “Charity?”

  “Yes, God damn it!” And in the old days I would have flushed a angry beet-red at having to eat humble pie like this in front of another man, and admit to groveling, but being so discolored I don’t suppose if I did flush it would be visible, for instance I can’t bear to study myself in the mirror unless all the lights is out except for a teeny candle, then in the darkness and teeny illumination I sometimes look at myself in a bowl of water, and is what I see sad, well . . .

  “Don’t be downhearted,” I returned to Daventry. “She will receive you, if not with open arms, as a respected messenger, if not a guest.”

  Again he shook his head, but he had the freshly sharpened pencil ready, and was ready to go:

  Dearest, only dear, I began all over again,

  I am getting on better now, and some adjustments are being made. I have goats now, which are mine from the death of Mr. Pettison, brought by Quintus, who by the way I thought of as having as an applicant, and I believe he will look in on me from time to time, but, dear lady, this letter is to introduce you to . . . Daventry . . . He is from the grazing lands of Utah, and will be attending me as an applicant. I believe him and me will get on, and I would like to have you trust him also. Never fear, I will never ever again intrude myself on your presence, and remember there is nothing on or about my person which can bring disease or other complications because the army docs assured me without quite swearing on the Bible I am absolutely sterilized from any Indo China germs, so be of good cheer. And know that I love you more than life.

  Your servant, Garnet

  I had not been studying his face whilst I was dictating because the effort and pain of expressing my thoughts had taken all my attention and strength, but when I looked down on him from my six feet four I was struck with amazement at his expression. He was looking at me with a kind of sick awe, certainly with amazed wonder.

  “What is it?” Daventry, I inquired.

  “Nothing, Garnet.”

  “Yes, there is something. You think I’m crazy, don’t you . . . ?”

  “No I don’t,” Daventry countered. “I don’t think that.”

  “Well . . .”

  “I just wonder at it all,” he spoke after a while in a whisper. Then all of a sudden he swatted a daytime mosquito that had settled on his cheek, and having swatted it his cheek was all covered with blood for it must have been biting us all night. I walked over to him, and almost without thinking I was going to do it, took out a clean pocket handkerchief and wiped the blood from off his face. He looked at me with more wonder.

  “Now, Daventry,” I went on, “we seal this letter just as though it was to go through the U.S. mails, and you walk the mile and a half or so down the back road and put it in her hands.”

  “With pleasure,” he said, jumping up like he was coming to from a nap, and took the letter from my loose hands.

  When he was gone, I put my face to the wall and began to bawl.

  “He pities me, God damn it,” I said, “that’s what that look meant, and God damn it and him I won’t have it. I won’t have the motherfucker pity me . . .”

  And at the same time I was celestially happy at the look he had given me.

  It was the first time for I don’t know when that someone had looked at me like I was another man, a little nauseated sure, but still like he seen me as I was. And here I was too almost shedding tears for the first time in so long after writing down on these slips of paper that I could not cry, well, it was mostly bawling, not real tears come out from my lachrymal glands, but still some did. A milestone.

  When he was gone, then, when nobody was about and the shadows begin to fall, my own secret from everybody would come to the fore. Everybody knows about my secret of reading books I don’t properly understand, whose words I don’t properly fathom, but I don’t think anybody had found out where I go when all is dark and still. I left Virginia when I was only, as folks reminded me, little more than a boy, seventeen, and went to war, but though I was gone some nine years, I did not come back so much a man, which is what the sergeant and the captain promised us when we had took the oath of allegiance, I came back like somebody immemorial, drained of everything except some tiny shreds of memory. For I felt I had been gone a million years. Not only did I come back looking like somebody that was not me, but everybody close to me had left or died, the old houses were vacant about the seashore, and the young men and women were either gone or looked old and unremembering. I mentioned I believe some time ago that I was this great dancer, loved to dance all night, danced in the ballroom long after the band had left if any young girl would stay on. Then we would go out beside the side entrance of the hall, where the musicians used to come in carrying their instruments, beside a little dam over the old river, and neck and spoon and kiss until dawn. Then we would walk home hand in hand as slow as clouds when there is no breeze.

  That dance hall has long been in disuse, partly because of the long war I was in, and young people have left for all other parts of the country, and the people who are left don’t dance. There is a shortcut to this dance hall nobody knows but me, right back of my property, there is a sort of little steep cliff you climb, and once at the top a good fifty feet or so you go for quite a stretch through little pine trees, and rough ground, then you come to a pond that shines most blue at night, and beyond the pond is another incline, then more trees, and from the top of a sort of cliff again you look down on the Marigold Meadows, though the sign with these big letters is defaced, certainly the light-bulbs that illuminated the letters are nearly all gone, the big windows are all busted, the great staircase which led to the box office is full of rubble and pine cones so that you have to take a running jump and leap over it, but once inside things look somewhat the same, the big dance floor itself almost the size of an acre is still sort of shiny like just polished, the bandstand is still up where some of the best saxophonists and piano players once sat, and above the floor itself is that great revolving many-colored moon which flicked down on us dancers all its purple and red and orange and white motes, turning us into strange creatures who were I do swear experiencing our only happiness. The many-colored moon above us turned us into people with entirely different clothes from what we had on, our hair became purple, our hands orange, our shoes diamond studded, but the happiness in our eyes was our own as we pressed against our young girls’ nipples and firm belly, we lost all track of time or where we had driven in from, or our names or tomorrow, yes, for those few hours in the Marigold Meadows it was, who knows? . . . almost worth having been born, we could say anyhow we were full of some sort of pure joy.

  I would return there secretly, then, when night came, would light a candle which I kept there, for I feared the law might see any stronger illumination and come to investigate,
a phonograph, a windup kind, had been left behind with some old records, some jazz, a few rock, and I would turn it on and dance with myself, the candle making the many-colored moon seem to gyrate again until one visit very late I found by turning a switch the damned thing did work just like in past times. But mostly I sat at the piano, which though missing a few black keys could still be played, and I would strum a little, and then before I knew it it was dawn.

  When Daventry moved in I felt I would not dare go so often, and would have to wait also until he was asleep and then I would steal out. The first night I did it I don’t think he noticed, but after that, well, I am getting ahead of my story, and what I am trying to recollect now is how he had gone to the Widow Rance with my latest letter, and I was sitting on pins and needles wondering how she was going to take the new applicant.

  “You was gone one whale of a time” was what I had decided to say to him when he got back, but somehow when he did walk in, I felt too glad to see him to scold him. What I had feared all the time he was away, without quite knowing it then, was that he had left me. So, I would have looked pale with worry when he sort of tiptoed in late had my complexion not been transformed by war not to show pallor.

  He looked at me for some time. I didn’t know what that look meant, and as a matter of fact I was thinking too how I was going to sneak off to the dance hall without being missed. You see, it had to be kept secret. I didn’t want him or nobody to know I went there. It was all that was left of my past life, when I had been young and personable, the blood had coursed in my veins, everything was ahead, everything was then and now, there was no yesterday or tomorrow, and now there is no time at all, tomorrow is not a word I can pronounce, there is no now really, and yesterday I never think of except as dance music. All I have is the letters, the applicants, and the dance hall, and none of them is real. I do not even believe in death because what I am is emptier than death itself.