In a Shallow Grave Read online

  He got up and went over to the big window that looks out on the ocean side. I guess he was looking at the ocean (which he had never seen before till he visited us) for it to give him maybe a weather forecast.

  I went over to him then and looked at the expanse of blue-green sea also. It was still and smooth and to tell the truth didn’t look like itself. It looked like a field.

  “Why, Daventry,” I tried to comfort him, “we folks here don’t think about the hurricanes. If one does come, which ain’t probable, you can’t do anything about it any­how, can you? It’s no worse than floods. Don’t you have floods in Utah?”

  He shook his head and moved away from me.

  “Or cyclones or tornadoes?”

  He went on gazing out the window in the direction of the quiet sea.

  The day we were to be evicted had come at last. We had put some more of my grandfather’s furniture out by the side of the road, more commodes, china closets, Circassian walnut beds nobody had slept in since before I was born, and a long maple dining table that must have seated twenty-five people. We didn’t move yet our beds or the hundreds and hundreds of books. We were planning to move some of my things to Quintus’ ma’s house if the worst came to the worst, but he wasn’t too sure if he was going to be allowed to live there on account of the will had not been opened yet and studied because the lawyer lived in Rich­mond. Some people said his ma was well off on account of she had worked for rich white people for thirty years.

  “I am going to save you,” Daventry said, coming up to me where I was seated near the gas range in the kitchen. He looked mad as a farm of hornets. His eyes barely focused and I think if I had been really afraid of anybody anymore I would have been afraid of him at that moment. There were little thick pearls of sweat on his upper lip.

  “If you will let me,” he went on, “I will save you. I will do it, but I may never be the same again. Is that under­stood?”

  He walked about the room like a man standing on red-hot coals.

  “There is no other way but to do what I am going to do,” he spoke, really I suppose to himself. “I prayed all night,” he now came up to me, “but it didn’t work.”

  I remembered then how he had tossed and turned all night in the bed next to me. Actually I don’t think I ever sleep. I get a little quiet sometimes and my eyes are closed most of the time anyhow, or off and on closed at any rate. At the same time ever since I was blown up with my buddies I have never felt really wide awake either. I bet that they lying in in those far-off untended graves by the South China seas are about as wide awake as me most of the time.

  “Do you have any wine, Quintus?” Daventry turned to him now rather than me. Quintus begrudged giving up reading even for a minute, but he let him know there was a bottle of Virginia Dare in the cupboard, and so Daventry brought this out. It was a good thing I didn’t know what was coming, or I think I would have run as far away as Utah myself at that moment. I am trying to recollect it, for I think it was in a way the most horrible thing that ever happened to me.

  “Do you have big tin cups like they use on farms?” he then wondered.

  Quintus finally rose then for he felt something serious was in the offing, as I gradually did, and he got him a cup.

  “I need three,” Daventry said sharply.

  He meanwhile uncorked the wine.

  Looking at his eyes I felt he must have taken some pill or drug, for his eyes didn’t look anymore like his than a tiger’s, the pupils were coming out of him like big black beads from a busted necklace. Both Quintus and me were getting terribly uneasy and was looking toward the doors like for escape.

  “I will save your land and property, if you will commune with me.” Daventry spoke these words solemnly and in a voice that sounded like he was talking behind a blanket. It suddenly got more churchlike too in the kitchen than even the funeral of Quintus’ mother.

  Very gradually we all sat down at the table with our tin cups in front of us and wonder of wonders Daventry closed his eyes and began intoning. My lower lip shook so bad I had to hold it still with my fingers.

  I was about to say it’s all right for them to foreclose on us, but it was too late.

  I saw the knife, and I saw his chest bare without his shirt anywhere in evidence. He had the most beautiful chest of any man I have ever seen, and no wonder Georgina had to have him—if he was that beautiful all over, she was right.

  I didn’t exactly see him slash himself, but saw the blood first spurt and spray all over the table, but he had self-command enough to fill each tin cup with the jetting stream of his blood. Quintus sort of lay back in his chair and his arms got loose like they was made of straw.

  But each of the tin cups had been filled with blood and wine, and the look on Daventry’s face was so fearful, and the knife resting in his left hand so fierce, there was noth­ing to do when he said “Drink” but swallow it, and I decided of course he was going to kill us then too and though I was trembling like a young quail when it’s picked up from its covey, I was ready for whatever he had to pro­pound for us, and Daventry was, I guess, the person I had always been seeking, he could make me obey, he had come too late of course, but if he was to lead me out of my perplexities and sorrows into the next kingdom, well and good.

  That was when time stopped.

  I don’t think it was the grass. Was it the blood? It couldn’t have been that old wine.

  No, I seemed to have been sitting with Daventry and Quintus four thousand years around that table with the tin cups and the boy with all that blood on his chest and side.

  Finally I could see it was dark outside, and raining.

  We were to have been evicted at ten o’clock that morning and it was now God knows what time. The clock in the front sitting room registered twelve, and so that must mean midnight judging by the darkness outside. There that good furniture stood too out there all by itself on the side of the road, getting all wet and damaged. I went out and started to fetch some of it in.

  “He’s delirious,” Quintus told me as I was dragging in a big chest of drawers.

  I went into the room and looked at him. We had bandaged his chest and side where he had slashed himself. I caught a sudden glimpse of myself in the mirrror. I have never seen such a face. There was blood on my mouth and chin, but looking a bit closer I did not think I looked so horrible as usual, I mean I looked sort of almost human. I studied myself though only a split second for I had to tend to Daventry now.

  “We wasn’t evicted.” I spoke this to Quintus after another long spell of time had passed. He was reading as usual, but he read silently now, hardly ever giving me any of his information.

  He took off his glasses and stared at me.

  “Maybe the sheriff will come tomorrow,” he suggested.

  “Did you ever hear of an eviction that didn’t take place? Huh-huh,” I answered my own question. “There won’t be any eviction. Something’s changed . . .”

  As I sat by his bed, he sort of come to gradually and said in a hoarse changed voice . . . “Garnet?”

  “I’m right beside you, Daventry.”

  “You didn’t vomit up any of my blood, did you?” he questioned.

  As he said this I did turn quite nauseous and began to retch, and he sprung up out of bed like a wildcat and pressed his hand against my lips, so that whatever the liquid was that was spoiling to come out would go back into me.

  “You mustn’t lose a drop, Garnet . . . I have saved you, I believe. Wish I could save myself . . .”

  “Can’t I save you?”

  “No, you can’t, Garnet.”

  The wind had come up and he listened to it so carefully. He listened to the wind in a way like Quintus read books, like he had already understood what the wind was saying before he began to listen.

  “Daventry, you are a messenger, aren’t you?” I don’t know why I said this, and I don’t know what I meant when I said it. Often though I do say things, they come out of me, like Daventry’s blood tried to c
ome out from my mouth, and the words have a meaning, but I don’t know what they signify. As Daventry said once later on before he left us for good, “Garnet, you are a vessel in which is flowing the underground river of life.”

  “Oh, that wind, that wind!” he cried.

  “It’s not a hurricane,” I comforted him. “But it’s wind.” He shook his head mournfully.”I never heard such a terrible wind.”

  “It’ll stop in a little while,” I tried to comfort him. “Don’t listen to it meanwhile . . .”

  “Why, what was that?” He suddenly let out a cry and took hold of my shoulder blade with a grip of iron. “What is it?”

  I had to listen myself very carefully for you see I am so used to all the sounds around here and pay no special mind to them, whilst Daventry coming from so far off, prac­tically the South China seas, is aware of and studies every little whichever noise.

  “That awful sound like a lion or an elephant!” And he raised his right hand upwards.

  “Daventry, you do surprise me. That’s the ocean you hear, that’s the ocean’s own voice.”

  His face relaxed in a grin. “Oh go on with you,” he quipped. “I guess I walked into that one.”

  “Well, he is trumpeting and hollering a lot . . .”

  Everything indeed shook, everything trembled, and then everything got deathly quiet, except for the ocean, which still moaned and hammered on the sand, and splashed and howled and then sort of whined even, and kept beating.

  He was looking at my mouth and I got an uneasy feeling again. He picked up a box of kleenex, wetted a sheet of it with his own mouth, and wiped my mouth off, I don’t know what it had on it he felt it should be cleaned, I dared not ask.

  “Will you remember me as much as you do your buddies who was with you in the war?” he inquired.

  I was so terribly moved my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth.

  He didn’t ask the question again. I wanted to tell him I would remember him forever, nobody had ever impressed me like Daventry, but I could not say a thing, for if I had spoken I would have vomited, and he had forbid that.

  Then the first thing I knew I was looking out the window, and the sun was coming up like a gold watch over the stilled ocean.

  I always got up earlier than either Quintus or Daventry because I am the light sleeper.

  I was drinking this cup of strong coffee, with a little fresh honey in it, when I saw the mailman get out of his delivery truck, and take out a big letter which he peered down at and which I later discovered had a special delivery stamp on it.

  I watched the mailman walk up the front path, from the road, and then I jumped up and walked out to meet him halfway for I didn’t want him to wake my applicants.

  “Couldn’t get here yesterday night on account of the storm,” the mailman began. Actually all he was doing was staring at all my furniture by the roadside, its heirloom wood ruined by wet.

  The special delivery was from Mrs. Gondess, and I opened it in front of the mailman because to tell the truth I thought this was what you were supposed to do.

  It was a cold, disappointed letter, informing me that all my back taxes had been paid by a Veterans Organization in Richmond, who had heard of my hard-pressed situation. Mrs. Gondess said she hoped I would have learned from this harrowing experience in which I had put everybody including myself to such hardship and worry.

  “You would judge,” I began, looking from the mailman to the ruined wood of my grandfather’s furniture, “that we was about to have an auction. Fact is though we ain’t, not now anyhow . . .”

  He began to move off in the direction of his truck, but I detained him with, “Do you think,” I put to him, as his eye roved over the wet commodes and bedsteads and chif­foniers, “that anybody ever learns from experience?” . . . a question that was prompted by Mrs. Gondess’ letter of course.

  The mailman grinned. “By the time,” he said, “you’ve learned from one experience you’re up against some new one with no experience to help you with it, and so you make all the same mistakes again only in a new setting . . .”

  I went on studying my special-delivery letter.

  “His shed blood turned the trick,” I said. I got cold all over and I realized I was going to have an attack.

  The next thing I knew I was lying under two hand-sewn quilts from Quintus’ ma’s house. They were so silk-smooth and quite beautiful but covered with the sweat that poured down from me. I forget whether I have mentioned that I have contracted at least two strains of malaria that don’t have no cure in this country, and I have another strain that sort of responds to quinine.

  It was night again by now, so that day beginning when I had read the letter had just vanished away like the dew, and Quintus was poking me in the ribs, and he had to re­peat the thing he was saying several times: “She is outside a-asking to talk with you.”

  I knew who he meant so I didn’t bother to reply. At first I thought I would act cute and say “Mrs. Gondess?” but I knew that old harridan-hellion would never darken my door again unless she could dispossess me for sure of course. No, I knew who she was. There was only one she in my life anyhow, and she is everywhere. But it did fell me more or less that she had come to see me in her own person.

  The Widow Rance stood before me then in a big shim­mering cloak people wear around here in hurricane season. She removed it, and was in her creamy summer dress.

  I had just enough strength to motion her to sit down beside me.

  I don’t know if she looked at my face or not. There was nothing else of me to look at for my hands and body were wrapped in Quintus’ ma’s quilts.

  I guess she looked more beautiful than ever, but I got to thinking that if you could forget his vacant teeth, Daventry was possessed of a better complexion and his hair would have graced Absalom of old. But of course she was the beautiful woman of this vicinity, only she was after all, I realized now, just human.

  “Well, Georgina,” I said, “so you have humbled yourself this much . . .”

  “I would apologize, Garnet, if I could. I know I have not been good to you. And I thank you, if I haven’t said so before, for all you did for this country.”

  “Hollow,” I said. I had just about enough strength to say it.

  “I have also kept your letters,” she proceeded, “because they are from a hero.”

  “That ain’t any reason for even readin’ them. I didn’t write them to you as a hero.”

  “However that may be, Garnet,” she continued, lowering those long gorgeous eyelashes and folding her shell-pink hands that had never done any more work than rinse out her breakfast dishes or maybe shake out a tiny rug . . . “I have come here to ask you a favor,” she finished.

  “And that is?”

  “I know, Garnet, I deserve your contempt and coldness, but pray, for what you felt for me before you went so far away and fought for us all . . .”

  Here of course she began to bawl, but I was a stone wall to tears by now.

  “You know I think, Garnet, what has happened . . .”

  “Speak your piece, Georgina, speak it out . . .” I was able to say that much by rising up to a sitting position, after which exertion I plumped back onto the pillow cases.

  “Daventry told me that I would require . . . your per­mission if not your blessing . . .”

  “Aha,” I grinned.

  “So I have come for that permission, for oh, Garnet, I do love him so very much . . . But he will not leave you without your blessing.”

  “Daventry is welcome to you,” I said. “And it.”

  “You won’t turn against him when he is mine?”

  I couldn’t speak now. I think I may have wanted to, but you see my strength had completely gone. I could not even call for Quintus.

  “You might say,” she reflected, her attention straying for a moment to take in a little path of day lilies outside that had run wild, “that I have come to ask his hand in marriage of you.”

  “Then take it, and
take him,” I told her.

  “But you don’t say it with your blessing.”

  “I bless him and all he does because he’s blessed me . . . But beware,” I warned her then.

  “Don’t say it,” she begged me. “Just give me the right to marry him.”

  “I have been reading or had read to me,” I began after I had calmed down a bit, “strange old books from my grand­fathers library, Georgina . . . And we, that is Quints and me, has read there all sorts of prophecies, prognostications, forecasts and so on, and have consulted flowers and herbs, at least Quintus swears he has. Daventry too has looked into the eye of the future more than most . . .”

  She was weeping hard now, a true picture of a woman in love. I wanted to hate her but I was too sick through and through. His blood maybe had curdled in me—anyhow I had not eat or drunk a thing since that terrible drink he give me.

  “What I mean is,” I consoled her, “enjoy him all you can, for the future is dark, do you mind me? . . . There ain’t no future . . .”

  “Oh, Garnet, bless you, bless you . . .”

  “That’s not needful, Widow Rance. I’ve been blessed already . . .”

  She looked me full in the face, and then she got up and left.

  She had only been gone the space of a few moments when I raised up with some difficulty, for I had not felt up to even my own morbid self after that ceremony with the tin cups and Daventry, and I run after her calling in a voice that made echoes all through the cliffs and little woodlands nearby “Georgina! Wait up!”

  I had to hold on to one of the white cedar trees that grew along the shortcut to her house in order to get back my breath, and this time she waited as composed and toler­ant as if I was the bridegroom or at least the desirable best man.

  “I wanted you to know,” I gasped out to her, “that it was Daventry who saved my house and land from being dispossessed . . . Don’t ask me how he did it,” I vetoed the questions that I saw beginning to form themselves on her mouth. “All I can say at this juncture is he did the trick that saved me . . . My house and land, you understand,” I repeated . . .