Slowly, Slowly in the Wind Page 7

  “Terrible introduction to a new house,” the policeman remarked, holding his steaming cup. “But we all sure hope—” Suddenly his words seemed to dry up. His eyes flickered and looked away from Ginnie’s face.

  A couple of men in plainclothes arrived. Photographs were taken of the dead man. Ginnie went over the house with one of the men, who made notes of the items Ginnie said were stolen. No, she hadn’t seen the color of the car, much less the license plate. The body on the floor was wrapped and carried out on a stretcher. Ginnie had only a glimpse of that, from which the detective even tried to shield her. Ginnie was in the dining room then, reckoning up the missing silver.

  “I didn’t mean to kill him!” Ginnie cried out suddenly, interrupting the detective. “Not kill him, honestly!”

  STAN ARRIVED VERY early, about 8 A.M., with Freddie, and went to the Inn to fetch Ginnie. Ginnie had spent the night there, and someone had telephoned Stan at the number Ginnie had given.

  “She’s had a shock,” Jake said to Stan.

  Stan looked bewildered. But at least he had heard what happened, and Ginnie didn’t have to go over it.

  “All the nice things we had,” Ginnie said. “And the cat—”

  “The police might get our stuff back, Ginnie. If not, we’ll buy more. We’re all safe, at least.” Stan set his firm jaw, but he smiled. He glanced at Freddie who stood in the doorway, looking a little pale from lack of sleep. “Come on. We’re going home.”

  He took Ginnie’s hand. His hand felt warm, and she realized her own hands were cold again.

  They tried to keep the identity of the dead man from her, Ginnie knew, but on the second day she happened to see it printed—on a folded newspaper which lay on the counter in the grocery store. There was a photograph of him too, a blondish fellow with curly hair and a rather defiant expression. Frank Collins, 24, of Hartford . . .

  Stan felt that they ought to go on living in the house, gradually buy the “nice things” again that Ginnie kept talking about. Stan said she ought to get back to work on her novel.

  “I don’t want any nice things any more. Not again.” That was true, but that was only part of it. The worst was that she had killed someone, stopped a life. She couldn’t fully realize it, therefore couldn’t believe it somehow, or understand it.

  “At least we could get another cat.”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  People said to her (like Mrs. Durham, Gladys, who lived a mile or so out of East Kindale on the opposite side from the Brixtons), “You mustn’t reproach yourself. You did it in defense of your house. Don’t you think a lot of us wish we had the courage, if someone comes barging in intending to rob you . . .”

  “I wouldn’t hesitate—to do what you did!” That was from perky Georgia Hamilton, a young married woman with black curly hair, active in local politics, who lived in East Kindale proper. She came especially to call on Ginnie and to make acquaintance with her and Stan. “These hoodlums from miles away—Hartford!—they come to rob us, just because they think we still have some family silver and a few nice things . . .”

  There was the phrase again, the nice things.

  Stan came home one day with a pair of silver candlesticks for the dining room table. “Less than a hundred dollars, and we can afford them,” Stan said.

  To Ginnie they looked like bait for another robbery. They were pretty, yes. Georgian. Modern copy, but still beautiful. She could not take any aesthetic pleasure from them.

  “Did you take a swat at your book this afternoon?” Stan asked cheerfully. He had been out of the house nearly three hours that afternoon. He had made sure the doors were locked, for Ginnie’s sake, before he left. He had also bought a metal wheelbarrow for use in the garden, and it was still strapped to the roof of the car.

  “No,” Ginnie said. “But I suppose I’m making progress. I have to get back to a state of concentration, you know.”

  “Of course I know,” Stan said. “I’m a writer too.”

  The police had never recovered the silverware, or Ginnie’s leather box which had held her engagement ring (it had become too small and she hadn’t got around to having it enlarged), and her grandmother’s gold necklace and so forth. Stan told Ginnie they had checked all the known pals of the man who had invaded the house, but hadn’t come up with anything. The police thought the dead man might have struck up acquaintance with his chum very recently, possibly the same night as the robbery.

  “Darling,” Stan said, “do you think we should move from this house? I’m willing—if it’d make you feel—less—”

  Ginnie shook her head. It wasn’t the house. She didn’t any longer (after two months) even think of the corpse on the floor when she went into the kitchen. It was something inside her. “No,” Ginnie said.

  “Well—I think you ought to talk to a psychiatrist. Just one visit even,” Stan added, interrupting a protest from Ginnie. “It isn’t enough for neighbors to say you did the natural thing. Maybe you need a professional to tell you.” Stan chuckled. He was in tennis shoes and old clothes, and had had a good day at the typewriter.

  Ginnie agreed, to please Stan.

  The psychiatrist was in Hartford, a man recommended to Stan by a local medical doctor. Stan drove Ginnie there, and waited for her in the car. It was to be an hour’s session, but Ginnie reappeared after about forty minutes.

  “He gave me some pills to take,” Ginnie said.

  “Is that all?—But what did he say?”

  “Oh.” Ginnie shrugged. “The same as they all say, that—nobody blames me, the police didn’t make a fuss, so what—” She shrugged again, glanced at Stan and saw the terrible disappointment in his face as he looked from her into the distance through the windshield.

  Ginnie knew he was thinking again about “guilt” and abandoning it, abandoning the word again. She had said no, she didn’t feel guilty, that wasn’t the trouble, that would have been too simple. She felt disturbed, she had said many times, and she couldn’t do anything about it.

  “You really ought to write a book about it, a novel,” Stan said—this for at least the fourth time.

  “And how can I, if I can’t come to terms with it myself, if I can’t even analyze it first?” This Ginnie said for at least the third time and possibly the fourth. It was as if she had an unsolvable mystery within her. “You can’t write a book just stammering around on paper.”

  Stan then started the car.

  The pills were mild sedatives combined with some kind of mild picker-uppers. They didn’t make change in Ginnie.

  Two more months passed. Ginnie resisted buying any “nice things,” so they had nothing but the nice candlesticks. They ate with stainless steel. Freddie pulled out of his period of tension and suppressed excitement (he knew quite well what had happened in the kitchen), and in Ginnie’s eyes became quite normal again, whatever normal was. Ginnie got back to work on the book she had started before moving to the house. She didn’t ever dream about the murder, or manslaughter, in fact she often thought it might be better if she did dream about it.

  But among people—and it was a surprisingly friendly region, they had all the social life they could wish—she felt compelled to say sometimes, when there was a lull in the conversation:

  “Did you know, by the way, I once killed a man?”

  Everyone would look at her, except of course those who had heard her say this before, maybe three times before.

  Stan would grow tense and blank-minded, having failed once more to spring in in time before Ginnie got launched. He was jittery at social gatherings, trying like a fencer to dart in with something, anything to say, before Ginnie made her big thrust. It’s just something they, he and Ginnie, had to live with, Stan told himself.

  And it probably would go on and on, even maybe when Freddie was twelve and even twenty. It had, in fact, half-ruin
ed their marriage. But it was emphatically not worth divorcing for. He still loved Ginnie. She was still Ginnie after all. She was just somehow different. Even Ginnie had said that about herself.

  “It’s something I just have to live with,” Stan murmured to himself.

  “What?” It was Georgia Hamilton on his left, asking him what he had said. “Oh, I know, I know.” She smiled understandingly. “But maybe it does her good.”

  Ginnie was in the middle of her story. At least she always made it short, and even managed to laugh in a couple of places.

  Slowly, Slowly

  in the Wind

  Edward (Skip) Skipperton spent most of his life in a thunderous rage. It was his nature. He had been full of temper as a boy, and as a man impatient with people’s slowness or stupidity or inefficiency. Now Skipperton was fifty-two. His wife had left him two years ago, unable to stand his tantrums any longer. She had met a most tranquil university professor from Boston, had divorced Skipperton on the grounds of incompatibility, and married the professor. Skipperton had been determined to get custody of their daughter, Margaret, then fifteen, and with clever lawyers and on the grounds that his wife had deserted him for another man, Skipperton had succeeded. A few months after the divorce, Skipperton had a heart attack, a real stroke with hemi-paralysis from which he miraculously recovered in six months, but his doctors gave him warning.

  “Skip, it’s life or death. You quit smoking and drinking and right now, or you’re a dead man before your next birthday.” That was from his heart specialist.

  “You owe it to Margaret,” said his GP. “You ought to retire, Skip. You’ve plenty of money. You’re in the wrong profession for your nature—granted you’ve made a success of it. But what’s left of your life is more important, isn’t it? Why not become a gentleman farmer, something like that?”

  Skipperton was a management adviser. Behind the scenes of big business, Skipperton was well known. He worked free-lance. Companies on the brink sent for him to reorganize, reform, throw out—anything Skip advised went. “I go in and kick the ass off ’em!” was the inelegant way Skip described his work when he was interviewed, which was not often, because he preferred a ghostly role.

  Skipperton bought Coldstream Heights in Maine, a seven-acre farm with a modernized farmhouse, and hired a local man called Andy Humbert to live and work on the place. Skipperton also bought some of the machinery the former owner had to sell, but not all of it, because he didn’t want to turn himself into a full-time farmer. The doctors had recommended a little exercise and no strain of any kind. They had known that Skip wouldn’t and couldn’t at once cut all his connections with the businesses he had helped in the past. He might have to make an occasional trip to Chicago or Dallas, but he was officially retired.

  Margaret was transferred from her private school in New York to a Swiss boarding school. Skipperton knew and liked Switzerland, and had bank accounts there.

  Skipperton did stop drinking and smoking. His doctors were amazed at his willpower—and yet it was just like Skip to stop overnight, like a soldier. Now Skip chewed his pipes, and went through a stem in a week. He went through two lower teeth, but got them capped in steel in Bangor. Skipperton and Andy kept a couple of goats to crop the grass, and one sow who was pregnant when Skip bought her, and who now had twelve piglets. Margaret wrote filial letters saying she liked Switzerland and that her French was improving no end. Skipperton now wore flannel shirts with no tie, low boots that laced, and woodsmen’s jackets. His appetite had improved, and he had to admit he felt better.

  The only thorn in his side—and Skipperton had to have one to feel normal—was the man who owned some adjacent land, one Peter Frosby, who wouldn’t sell a stretch Skipperton offered to buy at three times the normal price. This land sloped down to a little river called the Coldstream, which in fact separated part of Skipperton’s property from Frosby’s to the north, and Skipperton didn’t mind that. He was interested in the part of the river nearest him and in view from Coldstream Heights. Skipperton wanted to be able to fish a little, to be able to say he owned that part of the landscape and had riparian rights. But old Frosby didn’t want anybody fishing in his stream, Skipperton had been told by the agents, even though Frosby’s house was upstream and out of sight of Skipperton’s.

  The week after Peter Frosby’s rejection, Skipperton invited Frosby to his house. “Just to get acquainted—as neighbors,” Skipperton said on the telephone to Frosby. By now Skipperton had been living at Coldstream Heights for four months.

  Skipperton had his best whiskey and brandy, cigars and cigarettes—all the things he couldn’t enjoy himself—on hand when Frosby arrived in a dusty but new Cadillac, driven by a young man whom Frosby introduced as his son, Peter.

  “The Frosbys don’t sell their land,” Frosby told Skipperton. “We’ve had the same land for nearly three hundred years, and the river’s always been ours.” Frosby, a skinny but strong-looking man with cold gray eyes puffed his cigar daintily and after ten minutes hadn’t finished his first whiskey. “Can’t see why you want it.”

  “A little fishing,” Skipperton said, putting on a pleasant smile. “It’s in view of my house. Just to be able to wade, maybe, in the summer.” Skipperton looked at Peter Junior, who sat with folded arms beside and behind his father. Skipperton was backed only by shambly Andy, a good enough handyman, but not part of his dynasty. Skipperton would have given anything (except his life) to have been holding a straight whiskey in one hand and a good cigar in the other. “Well, I’m sorry,” Skipperton said finally. “But I think you’ll agree the price I offer isn’t bad—twenty thousand cash for about two hundred yards of riparian rights. Doubt if you’ll get it again—in your lifetime.”

  “Not interested in my lifetime,” Frosby said with a faint smile. “I’ve got a son here.”

  The son was a handsome boy with dark hair and sturdy shoulders, taller than his father. His arms were still folded across his chest, as if to illustrate his father’s negative attitude. He had unbent only briefly to light a cigarette which he had soon put out. Still, Peter Junior smiled as he and his father were leaving, and said:

  “Nice job you’ve done with the Heights, Mr. Skipperton. Looks better than it did before.”

  “Thank you,” Skip said, pleased. He had installed good leather-upholstered furniture, heavy floor-length curtains, and brass firedogs and tongs for the fireplace.

  “Nice old-fashioned touches,” Frosby commented in what seemed to Skipperton a balance between compliment and sneer. “We haven’t seen a scarecrow around here in maybe—almost before my time, I think.”

  “I like old-fashioned things—like fishing,” Skipperton said. “I’m trying to grow corn out there. Somebody told me the land was all right for corn. That’s where a scarecrow belongs, isn’t it? In a cornfield?” He put on as friendly a manner as he could, but his blood was boiling. A mule-stubborn Maine man, Frosby, sitting on several hundred acres that his more forceful ancestors had acquired for him.

  Frosby Junior was peering at a photograph of Maggie, which stood in a silver frame on the hall table. She had been only thirteen or fourteen when the picture had been taken, but her slender face framed in long dark hair showed the clean-cut nose and brows, the subtle smile that would turn her into a beauty one day. Maggie was nearly eighteen now, and Skip’s expectations were being confirmed.

  “Pretty girl,” said Frosby Junior, turning towards Skipperton, then glancing at his father, because they were all lingering in the hall.

  Skipperton said nothing. The meeting had been a failure. Skipperton wasn’t used to failures. He looked into Frosby’s greenish-gray eyes and said, “I’ve one more idea. Suppose we make an arrangement that I rent the land for the duration of my life, and then it goes to you—or your son. I’ll give you five thousand a year. Want to think it over?”

  Frosby put on another frosty smile. “I think not
, Mr. Skipperton. Thanks anyway.”

  “You might talk to your lawyer about it. No rush on my part.”

  Frosby now chuckled. “We know as much about law as the lawyers here. We know our boundaries anyway. Nice to meet you, Mr. Skipperton. Thank you for the whiskey and—good-bye.”

  No one shook hands. The Cadillac moved off.

  “Damn the bastard,” Skipperton muttered to Andy, but he smiled. Life was a game, after all. You won sometimes, you lost sometimes.

  It was early May. The corn was in, and Skipperton had spotted three or four strong green shoots coming through the beige, well-turned earth. That pleased him, made him think of American Indians, the ancient Mayans. Corn! And he had a classic scarecrow that he and Andy had knocked together a couple of weeks ago. They had dressed the crossbars in an old jacket, and the two sticks—nailed to the upright—in brown trousers. Skip had found the old clothes in the attic. A straw hat jammed onto the top and secured with a nail completed the picture.

  Skip went off to San Francisco for a five-day operation on an aeronautics firm which was crippled by a lawsuit, scared to death by unions and contract pull-outs. Skip left them with more redundancies, three vice-presidents fired, but he left them in better shape, and collected fifty thousand for his work.

  By way of celebrating his achievement and the oncoming summer that would bring Maggie, Skip shot one of Frosby’s hunting dogs which had swum the stream onto his property to retrieve a bird. Skipperton had been waiting patiently at his bedroom window upstairs, knowing a shoot was on from the sound of guns. Skip had his binoculars and a rifle of goodly range. Let Frosby complain! Trespassing was trespassing.

  Skip was almost pleased when Frosby took him to court over the dog. Andy had buried the dog, on Skipperton’s orders, but Skipperton readily admitted the shooting. And the judge ruled in Skipperton’s favor.