Eleven Page 5

  “Did you have to kill him like that?”

  “How else? The same way you kill a lobster. Don’t you know that? It doesn’t hurt them.”

  He stared at her. When she started to touch him, he stepped back. He thought of the terrapin’s wide open mouth, and his eyes suddenly flooded with tears. Maybe the terrapin had been screaming and it hadn’t been heard over the bubbling of the water. The terrapin had looked at him, wanting him to pull him out, and he hadn’t moved to help him. His mother had tricked him, done it so fast, he couldn’t save him. He stepped back again. “No, don’t touch me!”

  His mother slapped his face, hard and quickly.

  Victor set his jaw. Then he about-faced and went to the closet and threw his jacket onto a hanger and hung it up. He went into the living-room and fell down on the sofa. He was not crying now, but his mouth opened against the sofa pillow. Then he remembered the terrapin’s mouth and he closed his lips. The terrapin had suffered, otherwise it would not have moved its legs so terribly fast to get out. Then he wept, soundlessly as the terrapin, his mouth open. He put both hands over his face, so as not to wet the sofa. After a long while, he got up. In the kitchen, his mother was humming, and every few minutes he heard her quick, firm steps as she went about her work. Victor had set his teeth again. He walked slowly to the kitchen doorway.

  The terrapin was out on the wooden chopping board, and his mother, after a glance at him, still humming, took a knife and bore down on its blade, cutting off the terrapin’s little nails. Victor half closed his eyes, but he watched steadily. The nails, with bits of skin attached to them, his mother scooped off the board into her palm and dumped into the garbage bag. Then she turned the terrapin onto its back and with the same sharp, pointed knife, she began to cut away the pale bottom shell. The terrapin’s neck was bent sideways. Victor wanted to look away, but still he stared. Now the terrapin’s insides were all exposed, red and white and greenish. Victor did not listen to what his mother was saying, about cooking terrapins in Europe, before he was born. Her voice was gentle and soothing, not at all like what she was doing.

  “All right, don’t look at me like that!” she suddenly threw at him, stomping her foot. “What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy? Yes, I think so! You are seeck, you know that?”

  Victor could not touch any of his supper, and his mother could not force him to, even though she shook him by the shoulders and threatened to slap him. They had creamed chipped beef on toast. Victor did not say a word. He felt very remote from his mother, even when she screamed right into his face. He felt very odd, the way he did sometimes when he was sick at his stomach, but he was not sick at his stomach. When they went to bed, he felt afraid of the dark. He saw the terrapin’s face very large, its mouth open, its eyes wide and full of pain. Victor wished he could walk out the window and float, go anywhere he wanted to, disappear, yet be everywhere. He imagined his mother’s hands on his shoulders, jerking him back, if he tried to step out the window. He hated his mother.

  He got up and went quietly into the kitchen. The kitchen was absolutely dark, as there was no window, but he put his hand accurately on the knife rack and felt gently for the knife he wanted. He thought of the terrapin, in little pieces now, all mixed up in the sauce of cream and egg yolks and sherry in the pot in the refrigerator.

  His mother’s cry was not silent; it seemed to tear his ears off. His second blow was in her body, and then he stabbed her throat again. Only tiredness made him stop, and by then people were trying to bump the door in. Victor at last walked to the door, pulled the chain bolt back, and opened it for them.

  He was taken to a large, old building full of nurses and doctors. Victor was very quiet and did everything he was asked to do, and answered the questions they put to him, but only those questions, and since they didn’t ask him anything about a terrapin, he did not bring it up.

  WHEN THE FLEET WAS IN AT MOBILE

  With the bottle of chloroform in her hand, Geraldine stared at the man asleep on the back porch. She could hear the deep in, short out breaths whistling through the moustache, the way he breathed when he wasn’t going to wake up till high noon. He’d been asleep since he came in at dawn, and she’d never known anything to wake him up in mid-morning when he’d been drinking all night, had she? Now was certainly the time.

  She ran in her silk-stockinged feet to the rag drawer below the kitchen cabinets, tore a big rag from a worn-out towel, and then a smaller one. She folded the big rag to a square lump and on second thought wet it at the sink, and after some trouble because her hands had started shaking, tied it in front of her nose and mouth with the cloth belt of the dress she’d just ironed and laid out to wear. Then she got the claw hammer from the tool drawer in case she would need it, and went out on the back porch. She drew the straight chair close to the bed, sat down, and unstoppered the bottle and soaked the smaller rag. She held the rag over his chest for a few moments, then brought it slowly up toward his nose. Clark didn’t move. But it must be doing something to him, she thought, she could smell it herself, sweet and sick like funeral flowers, like death itself.

  Behind her, she heard the whine Red Dog always gave at the crest of a yawn, and his groan as he turned around and lay down in a cooler spot by the side of the house, and she thought: everybody thinks the chloroform is for Red Dog, and there he is out there sleeping, as alive as he’s been in fourteen years.

  Clark moved his head up and down as if he were agreeing with her, and her hand, her rigid body, followed his nose like a part of him, and a voice inside her screamed: I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing this if there were any other way, but he won’t even let me out of the house!

  And she thought of Mrs. Trelawney’s nod of approval when she told her she was going to put Red Dog to sleep, because it wasn’t safe for strangers to come around anymore, Red Dog nipping at them with his one eyetooth.

  She peered at the pulse in Clark’s temple. It beat at the bottom of a wriggly green vein along his hairline that had always reminded her of a map of the Mississippi River. Then the rag bumped the end of Clark’s nose, he turned his head aside, and still her hand followed the nose as if she couldn’t have dragged it away if she’d wanted to, and perhaps she couldn’t have. But the black eyelashes did not move at all, and she remembered how distinguished she’d once thought Clark looked with the hollows either side of his high thin forehead and the black hair like a wild bush above it, and the black moustache so big it was old-fashioned but suited Clark, like his old-fashioned tailor-made jackets and his square-toed boots.

  She looked at the grey alarm clock that had been watching it all from the shelf—for about seven minutes now. How long did it take? She opened the bottle and poured more until it fell cool onto her palm, and held it back under the nose. The pulse still beat, but the breaths were shorter and fainter. Her arm ached so, she looked off through the porch screen and tried to think of something else. A rooster crowed out by the cow barn, like a new day a-dawning, she thought remembering a song; and she counted twenty ticks on the clock, one for each year old she was, and looked at it, and it was twelve minutes now, and when she looked again, the pulse was gone. But she mustn’t be fooled by that, she thought, and looked harder at the hairs in his nostrils that didn’t move and maybe wouldn’t have anyway, but she couldn’t hear anything. Then she stood up, and on second thought set the rag on the black moustache and left it there. She stared at the arm lying out on the sheet and the hand, a well-shaped hand, she’d always thought, for all its hairiness, with the gold band on the little finger that was his mother’s wedding ring, he said, but the very left hand that had hit her many a time nevertheless, and she’d probably felt the ring, too. She stood there several seconds, not knowing why, then she hurried into the kitchen and whipped off her apron and her housedress.

  She put on the flowery-printed summer dress she deliberately hadn’t worn much with Clark, because it reminded her of the happiest days at Mobile, tossed the ruffled short sleeves into place with a
familiar almost forgotten shake of her shoulders that made her feel practically her old self again, and with the dress still unfastened, ran on tiptoe out on the porch and saw the rag was still lying on his mouth. For good measure, she poured the rest of the bottle on the rag. And didn’t the claw hammer look silly now? She took the hammer back to the drawer.

  When she was all dressed except for make-up, she took the towel from her face, and propped the window of her room as wide as it would go. She stepped back from the dresser mirror, appraising herself anxiously, then stepped forward and put wide arcs of red on the bows of her upper lip, the way she liked it, dropped a cloud of powder on her nose and spread it quickly in all directions. Her cheeks were so curved now, she’d hardly have known herself, she thought, but she wasn’t too plump, just right. She still had that combination everyone said was unique of come-hither plus the bloom of youth, and how many girls had that? How many girls could be proposed to by a minister’s son, which was what had happened to her in Montgomery, and then have a life like she’d had in Mobile, the toast of the fleet? She laughed archly at herself in the mirror, though without making a sound—but who was there to hear her if she did laugh—and jogged her brown-blonde curls superfluously with her palms. She’d curled her hair with the iron this morning after Clark got in, and done as good a job as she’d ever done in her life, though all the while she’d known what she was going to do to Clark. And had she packed the curling iron?

  She dragged her old black suitcase from behind the curtain under the sink, and found the curling iron right on top. She went back into the bedroom for her handbag. Her cigarettes. She ran to get the package of Lucky Strikes from beside the soap dish in the kitchen, and for a moment her spaced front teeth bit her underlip, the penciled eyebrows lifted with a deploring quiver, as she gazed for the last time at the red rickrack she’d tacked around the shelf to beautify it, which had been completely lost on Clark, then she turned and went across the back porch and out.

  Red Dog whined at her, and she dropped the suitcase and ran back into the house with his empty pan, got a hunk of stale cornbread from the breadbox and crumbled it, scraped skillet grease over it and with reckless extravagance the rest of the beef stew, too. Wouldn’t Red Dog be surprised at such food at eleven in the morning? Red Dog was so surprised, he got onto his legs for it, wagging his old red tail that was as thin and full of jagged points as a rooster feather.

  Hopping and dodging the puddles of red water, she ran daintily in her high-heeled grey lizard pumps down the rut of a road across the west meadow. She felt happy as a lark this morning in her best shoes that weren’t at all practical for travelling, she supposed, with their open toes and heels, but gave her such a lift! At the edge of the thicket, she turned and looked back at the farm. It wasn’t the time of day she liked best. She liked just before sunset and just after sunrise, when the sun caught the tops of things and the level country was dotted with little bright green islands and the grazing cows had streaks of red along their straight backs. Red and green like a Christmas tree, she’d said fourteen months ago when she’d come here to live with Clark, the land always so cool and fresh as if a light shower had just stopped falling and the sun had come out. It’ll be Christmas from now on, Clark, she had said, feeling like the end of a movie, and the teeth bit ruefully for another delicious moment of self-pity. Good-bye to the long brown house, the cow barn and the henhouse and the little privy!

  The northbound bus wouldn’t pass for nearly an hour, she knew, so she went on across the highway and into the other woods where there was a brook, and sat down and washed the red mud off her heels with a piece of Kleenex. The smoke from her cigarette was exactly the color of the Spanish moss. It drifted upward as slow and unbroken as if she sat in a nice room somewhere talking. She sprang to her feet at the sound of a motor, but it was only a big gasoline truck coming up from New Orleans, and then she did hear the bus purring around the curve and she should have known the gasoline truck wasn’t it, because her heart jumped now as if all the happiness in the world lay in the bus, and she was out in the road waving her arm before she knew it. The many, many times she’d watched the bus go by without being able to catch it!

  And now she was climbing aboard, the floor rattling and swaying under her feet, northward.

  “Where’re you going, ma’am?” the driver asked.

  She almost said Mobile, but she laughed and said, “Birmingham,” instead, which was where her sister lived. “But I’d like to go to Alistaire first.” Alistaire was just a little town in northern Louisiana where she’d stayed overnight once with her parents when she was a child, and she’d planned on stopping there for a couple of hours on her way to Birmingham. She paid with the 10-dollar bill she’d taken from Clark’s pocket that morning. Besides that, she had nine dollars saved out of grocery money when Clark had used to let her go with the Trelawneys to Etienne Station.

  The bus was so crowded, there were three or four people standing, but when she walked up the aisle, a young man in blue overalls got right up and gave her his seat. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  “You’re welcome, ma’am,” the young man said, and stood in the aisle beside her.

  The woman next to her had a little boy asleep in her lap. His head pressed roundly against Geraldine’s thigh. In a moment, she thought, she would ask the woman a question about her child, she didn’t know what as yet. Loosening the imitation sable furpiece around her neck—she’d just realized from the dark blue splotch under the arm of the young man that it was really quite hot today—Geraldine settled back to enjoy the ride. She smiled up at the young man and he smiled back, and she thought: how nice everybody is on the bus and they know by looking at her she’s just as nice as they are. And what a relief it was, too, not to have Clark along, accusing her of wanting to sleep with the young man in blue overalls, just because she’d accepted his seat! She shook her head deploringly, felt a curl come undone over her ear, and casually tucked it back. And accusing her of flirting with Mr. Trelawney, when everybody knew Mrs. Trelawney was her best friend and always was along when they drove to town, which was the only time she ever saw him.

  “Women that sleep with ten men at a time never get pregnant!” Clark’s voice boomed out from the privy before he banged the door to, and fidgeting, Geraldine leaned toward the woman beside her and asked, “Do you have many children?” and the woman gave her such a long, funny stare that Geraldine almost laughed out loud despite herself before the woman answered:

  “Four. That’s enough.”

  Geraldine nodded, and glanced up at the young man standing beside her who shifted and smiled down at her, showing pink gums and big white teeth with one upper molar missing. Young and shy and lonely, Geraldine thought, almost as fine as the young sailors in Mobile, only not so handsome as most, but she edged away from him nevertheless, because the blue overalls seemed to be rubbing against her shoulder in a way she didn’t like, or was she getting just as prudish as Clark? Oh yes, if they asked her any questions, she’d tell them what a prudish old maid Clark really was, not even fulfilling his marital duties, not that she cared, but she’d heard of a lot of women suing for divorce just for that. Then accusing her of not being able to have children! Everyone in Etienne Parish knew Clark was strange. He’d served a jail sentence for swindling a business partner when he was young, and not so long ago people couldn’t remember had been clapped in jail for preaching religion, but preaching like a maniac and nearly killing a man who had disagreed with him. Geraldine crossed her legs and pulled her skirt down.

  The bus made her feel safe and powerful, as if she were in the center of a mountain, or awake in the center of a rather heavy, pleasant dream that would just keep on and on. She might stay on until her money gave out, then stop off and take a job somewhere. She’d go back to her own name, Geraldine Ann Lewis, plain and simple, and rent a little furnished apartment and potter around every evening cooking things, going to a movie maybe once a week and to church Sunday mornings, and be ve
ry cautious about making friends, especially men friends.

  The little boy’s head pressed harder against her thigh, the bus turned, and she saw they were approaching a town. She didn’t know it, she thought excitedly, but she did. It was Dalton.

  And if anyone cared to question her as to why she had done what she did, she thought as she made her way down the aisle, taking her suitcase with her, she would tell them the whole story, how Clark had told her he loved her and asked her to marry him and live with him in his house near Etienne Station, north of New Orleans, and how she had cooked and cleaned and been the best wife she knew, and how as the months went on she saw that Clark really hated her and had only married her to be able to pick on her and—she saw it clearly now—had deiberately chosen a wife from a place like the Star Hotel so he could hold it over her and make himself feel superior. She poked her straws through the hole in the top of the milk container.

  “Hey, cain’t you say nothin,” girl?” It was the young man in the blue overalls grinning down at her, the sudden burr of his voice making her think first of a man who’d bent down to say something to her in a wheatfield once where she’d come with her father to watch the threshing, then of the sailors’ voices in Mobile, and fear dropped like a needle through her before she could even wonder why she’d thought of that wheatfield she hadn’t thought of since, and she turned away, leaving the 15 cents on the counter, not knowing if it was his or hers, replying, strangely breathless:

  “I just can’t talk just now!”

  She’d been riding several minutes on the bus before she noticed the young man wasn’t aboard. If he got himself a girl in Dalton, she hoped she’d be a nice girl. But maybe he was just going home to his folks, why should she even think he was going to a girl? She’d stop thinking things like that once she got far enough away from Clark. Clark wouldn’t even let her ride to Etienne Station with the Trelawneys any more. She could let them know about the last time she’d gone with the Trelawneys, when Clark had been off somewhere for two days and there’d been no food in the house. He’d knocked the groceries out of her arms and slapped her face, back and forth, not saying a word, until she just collapsed on the groceries, crying as if her heart would break. And the scar from the belt buckle, she could show them that.