Slowly, Slowly in the Wind Read online

  Andy arrived next morning, Monday. He had already heard the story in the village, and also the police had found Mr. Frosby’s car not far away in the woods, Andy said. Skip feigned mild surprise on hearing of the car. Andy didn’t ask any questions. And suppose he discovered the scarecrow? Skip thought a little money would keep Andy quiet. The corn was all picked up there, only a few inferior ears remained, destined for the pigs. Skipperton picked them himself Monday afternoon, while Andy tended the pigs and goats.

  Skipperton’s pleasure now was to survey the cornfield from his upstairs bedroom with his 10¥ binoculars. He loved to see the wind tossing the cornstalk tops around old Frosby’s corpse, loved to think of him, shrinking, drying up like a mummy in the wind. Twisting slowly, slowly in the wind, as a Nixon aide used to put it about the president’s enemies. Frosby wasn’t twisting, but he was hanging, in plain view. No buzzards came. Skip had been a little afraid of buzzards. The only thing that bothered him, once, was seeing one afternoon some schoolboys walking along a road far to the right (under which road the Coldstream flowed), and pointing to the scarecrow. Bracing himself against the window jamb, arms held tightly at his sides so the binoculars would be as steady as possible, Skip saw a couple of the small boys laughing. And had one held his nose? Surely not! They were nearly a mile away from the scarecrow! Still, they had paused, one boy stamped his foot, another shook his head and laughed.

  How Skip wished he could hear what they were saying! Ten days had passed since Frosby’s death. Rumors were rife, that old Frosby had been murdered for his money by someone he’d picked up to give a lift to, that he had been kidnapped and that a ransom note might still arrive. But suppose one of the schoolkids said to his father—or anyone—that maybe the dead body of Frosby was inside the scarecrow? This was just the kind of thing Skip might have thought of when he had been a small boy. Skip was consequently more afraid of the schoolkids than of the police.

  And the police did come back, with a plainclothes detective. They looked over Skipperton’s house and land—maybe looking for a recently dug patch, Skip thought. If so, they found none. They looked at Skip’s two rifles and took their caliber and serial numbers.

  “Just routine, Mr. Skipperton,” said the detective.

  “I understand,” said Skip.

  That same evening Maggie telephoned and said she was at the Frosby house, and could she come over to see him?

  “Why not? This is your house!” Skip replied.

  “I never know what kind of mood you’ll be in—or temper,” Maggie said when she arrived.

  “I’m in a pretty good mood, I think,” Skipperton said. “And I hope you’re happy, Maggie—since what’s done is done.”

  Maggie was in her blue dungarees, sneakers, a familiar sweater. It was hard for Skip to realize that she was married. She sat with hands folded, looking down at the floor. Then she raised her eyes to him and said:

  “Pete’s very upset. We never would have stayed a week in Boston unless he’d been sure the police were doing all they could here. Was Mr. Frosby—depressed? Pete didn’t think so.”

  Skip laughed. “No! Best of spirits. Pleased with the marriage and all that.” Skip waited, but Maggie was silent. “You’re going to live at the Frosby place?”

  “Yes.” Maggie stood up. “I’d like to collect a few things, Daddy. I brought a suitcase.”

  His daughter’s coolness, her sadness, pained Skip. She had said something about visiting him often, not about his coming to see them—not that Skip would have gone.

  “I KNOW WHAT’S in that scarecrow,” said Andy one day, and Skip turned, binoculars in hand, to see Andy standing in the doorway of his bedroom.

  “Do you?—And what’re you going to do about it?” Skip asked, braced for anything. He had squared his shoulders.

  “Nothin’. Nothin’,” Andy replied with a smile.

  Skip didn’t know how to take that. “I suppose you’d like some money, Andy? A little present—for keeping quiet?”

  “No, sir,” Andy said quietly, shaking his head. His wind-wrinkled face bore a faint smile. “I ain’t that kind.”

  What was Skip to make of it? He was used to men who liked money, more and more of it. Andy was different, that was true. Well, so much the better, if he didn’t want money, Skip thought. It was cheaper. He also felt he could trust Andy. It was strange.

  The leaves began to fall in earnest. Halloween was coming, and Andy removed the driveway gate in advance, just lifted it off its hinges, telling Skip that the kids would steal it if they didn’t. Andy knew the district. The kids didn’t do much harm, but it was trick or treat at every house. Skip and Andy made sure they had lots of nickels and quarters on hand, corn candy, licorice sticks, even a couple of pumpkins in the window, faces cut in them by Andy, to show any comers that they were in the right spirit. Then on Halloween night, nobody knocked on Skip’s door. There was a party at Coldstream, at the Frosbys’, Skip knew because the wind was blowing his way and he could hear the music. He thought of his daughter dancing, having a good time. Maybe people were wearing masks, crazy costumes. There’d be pumpkin pie with whipped cream, guessing games, maybe a treasure hunt. Skip was lonely, for the first time in his life. Lonely. He badly wanted a scotch, but decided to keep his oath to himself, and having decided this, asked himself why? He put his hands flat down on his dresser top and gazed at his own face in the mirror. He saw creases running from the flanges of his nose down beside his mouth, wrinkles under his eyes. He tried to smile, and the smile looked phony. He turned away from the mirror.

  At that instant, a spot of light caught his eyes. It was out the window, in the upward sloping field. A procession—so it seemed, maybe eight or ten figures—was walking up his field with flashlights or torches or both. Skip opened the window slightly. He was rigid with rage, and fear. They were on his land! They had no right! And they were kids, he realized. Even in the darkness, he could see by the procession’s own torches that the figures were a lot shorter than adults’ figures would be.

  Skip whirled around, about to shout for Andy, and at once decided that he had better not. He ran downstairs and grabbed his own powerful flashlight. He didn’t bother grabbing his jacket from a hook, though the night was crisp.

  “Hey!” Skip yelled, when he had run several yards into the field. “Get off my property! What’re you doing walking up there!”

  The kids were singing some crazy, high-pitched song, nobody singing on key. It was just a wild treble chant. Skip recognized the word “scarecrow.”

  “We’re going to burn the scarecrow . . .” something like that.

  “Hey, there! Off my land!” Skip fell, banged a knee, and scrambled up again. The kids had heard him, Skip was pretty sure, but they weren’t stopping. Never before had anyone disobeyed Skip—except of course Maggie. “Off my land!”

  The kids moved on like a black caterpillar with an orange headlight and a couple of other lights in its body. Certainly the last couple of kids had heard Skip, because he had seen them turn, then run to catch up with the others. Skip stopped running. The caterpillar was closer to the scarecrow than he was, and he was not going to be able to get there first.

  Even as he thought this, a whoop went up. A scream! Another scream of mingled terror and delight shattered their chant. Hysteria broke out. What surely was a little girl’s throat gave a cry as shrill as a dog whistle. Their hands must have touched the corpse, maybe touched bone, Skip thought.

  Skip made his way back towards his own house, his flashlight pointed at the ground. It was worse than the police, somehow. Every kid was going to tell his parents what he had found. Skip knew he had come to the end. He had seen businessmen, seen a lot of men come to the end. He had known men who had jumped out of windows, who had taken overdoses.

  Skip went at once to his rifle. It was in the living room downstairs. He put the muzzle in his mo
uth and pulled the trigger.

  When the kids streaked down the field, heading for the road a few seconds later, Skip was dead. The kids had heard the shot, and thought someone was trying to shoot at them.

  Andy heard the shot. He had also seen the procession marching up the field and heard Skipperton shouting. He understood what had happened. He turned his television set off, and made his way rather slowly towards the main house. He would have to call the police. That was the right thing to do. Andy made up his mind to say to the police that he didn’t know a thing about the corpse in the scarecrow’s clothes. He had been away some of that weekend after all.

  Those Awful Dawns

  Eddie’s face looked angry and blank also, as if he might be thinking of something else. He was staring at his two-year-old daughter Francy who sat in a wailing heap beside the double bed. Francy had tottered to the bed, struck it, and collapsed.

  “You take care of her,” Laura said. She was standing with the vacuum cleaner still in her hand. “I’ve got things to do!”

  “You hit her, f’Christ’s sake, so you take care of her!” Eddie was shaving at the kitchen sink.

  Laura dropped the vacuum cleaner, started to go to Francy, whose cheek was bleeding, changed her mind and veered back to the vacuum cleaner and unplugged it, began to wrap the cord to put it away. The place could stay a mess tonight for all she cared.

  The other three children, Georgie nearly six, Helen four, Stevie three, stared with wet, faintly smiling mouths.

  “That’s a cut, goddamnit!” Eddie put a towel under the baby’s cheek. “Swear to God, that’ll need stitches. Lookit it! How’d you do it?”

  Laura was silent, at least as far as answering that question went. She felt exhausted. The boys—Eddie’s pals—were coming tonight at nine to play poker, and she had to make at least twenty liverwurst and ham sandwiches for their midnight snack. Eddie had slept all day and was still only getting dressed at 7 P.M.

  “You taking her to the hospital or what?” Eddie asked. His face was half covered with shaving cream.

  “If I take her again, they’ll think it’s always you smacking her. Mostly it is, frankly.”

  “Don’t give me that crap, not this time,” Eddie said. “And ‘they,’ who the hell’re ‘they’? Shove ’em!”

  Twenty minutes later, Laura was in the waiting hall of St. Vincent’s Hospital on West 11th Street. She leaned back in the straight chair and half closed her eyes. There were seven other people waiting, and the nurse had told her it might be half an hour, but she would try to make it sooner because the baby was bleeding slightly. Laura had her story ready: the baby had fallen against the vacuum cleaner, must’ve hit the connecting part where there was a sliding knob. Since this was what Laura had hit her with; swinging it suddenly to one side because Francy had been pulling at it, Laura supposed that the same injury could be caused by Francy’s falling against it. That made sense.

  It was the third time they’d brought Francy to St. Vincent’s, which was four blocks from where they lived on Hudson Street. Broken nose (Eddie’s fault, Eddie’s elbow), then another time a trickling of blood at the ear that wouldn’t stop, then the third time, the one time they hadn’t brought her on their own, was when Francy had had a broken arm. Neither Eddie nor Laura had known Francy had a broken arm. How could they have known? You couldn’t see it. But around that time Francy had had a black eye, God knew how or why, and a social worker had turned up. A neighbor must have put the social worker on their tail, and Laura was ninety percent sure it was old Mrs. Covini on the ground floor, damn her ass. Mrs. Covini was one of those dumpy, black-dressed Italian mommas who lived surrounded by kids all their lives, nerves of steel, who hugged and kissed the kids all day as if they were gifts from heaven and very rare things on earth. The Mrs. Covinis didn’t go out to work, Laura had always noticed. Laura worked as a waitress five nights a week at a downtown Sixth Avenue diner. That plus getting up at 6 A.M. to fix Eddie’s bacon and eggs, pack his lunchbox, feed the kids who were already up, and cope with them all day was enough to make an ox tired, wasn’t it? Anyway, Mrs. Covini’s spying had brought this monster—she was five feet eleven if she was an inch—down on their necks three times. Her name, appropriately enough, was Mrs. Crabbe. “Four children are a lot to handle . . . Are you in the habit of using contraceptives, Mrs. Regan?” Oh, crap. Laura moved her head from side to side on the back of the straight chair and groaned, feeling exactly as she had felt in high school when confronted by a problem in algebra that bored her stiff. She and Eddie were practicing Catholics. She might have been willing to go on the Pill on her own, but Eddie wouldn’t hear of it, and that was that. On her own, that was funny, because on her own she wouldn’t have needed it. Anyway, that had shut old Crabbe up on the subject, and had given Laura a certain satisfaction. She and Eddie had some rights and independence left, at least.

  “Next?” The nurse beckoned, smiling.

  The young intern whistled. “How’d this happen?”

  “A fall. Against the vacuum cleaner.”

  The smell of disinfectant. Stitches. Francy, who had been nearly asleep in the hall, had awakened at the anesthetizing needle and wailed through the whole thing. The intern gave Francy what he called a mild sedative in a candy-covered pill. He murmured something to a nurse.

  “What’re these bruises?” he asked Laura. “On her arms.”

  “Oh—just bumps. In the house. She bruises easily.” He wasn’t the same intern, was he, that Laura had seen three or four months ago?

  “Can you wait just a minute?”

  The nurse came back, and she and the intern looked at a card that the nurse had.

  The nurse said to Laura, “I think one of our OPTs is visiting you now, Mrs. Regan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you an appointment with her?”

  “Yes, I think so. It’s written down at home.” Laura was lying.

  MRS. CRABBE ARRIVED at 7:45 P.M. the following Monday without warning. Eddie had just got home and opened a can of beer. He was a construction worker, doing overtime nearly every day in the summer months when the light lasted. When he got home he always made for the sink, sponged himself with a towel, opened a can of beer, and sat down at the oilcloth-covered table in the kitchen.

  Laura had already fed the kids at 6 P.M., and had been trying to steer them to bed when Mrs. Crabbe arrived. Eddie had cursed on seeing her come in the door.

  “I’m sorry to intrude . . .” Like hell. “How have you been doing?”

  Francy’s face was still bandaged, and the bandage was damp and stained with egg. The hospital had said to leave the bandage on and not touch it. Eddie, Laura and Mrs. Crabbe sat at the kitchen table, and it turned into quite a lecture.

  “. . . You realize, don’t you, that you both are using little Frances as an outlet for your bad temper. Some people might bang their fists against a wall or quarrel with each other, but you and your husband are apt to whack baby Frances. Isn’t that true?” She smiled a phony, friendly smile, looking from one to the other of them.

  Eddie scowled and mashed a book of matches in his fingers. Laura squirmed and was silent. Laura knew what the woman meant. Before Francy had been born, they had used to smack Stevie maybe a little too often. They damned well hadn’t wanted a third baby, especially in an apartment the size of this one, just as the woman was saying now. And Francy was the fourth.

  “. . . but if you both can realize that Francy is—here . . .”

  Laura was glad that she apparently wasn’t going to bring up birth control again. Eddie looked about to explode, sipping his beer as if he was ashamed to have been caught with it, but as if he had a right to drink it if he wanted to, because it was his house.

  “. . . a larger apartment, maybe? Bigger rooms. That would ease the strain on your nerves a lot . . .”

  Eddie was oblig
ed to speak about the economic situation. “Yeah, I earn fine . . . Riveter-welder. Skilled. But we got expenses, y’know. I wouldn’t wanta go looking for a bigger place. Not just now.”

  Mrs. Crabbe lifted her eyes and stared around her. Her black hair was neatly waved, almost like a wig. “That’s a nice TV. You bought that?”

  “Yeah, and we’re still paying on it. That’s one of the things,” Eddie said.

  Laura was tense. There was also Eddie’s hundred-and-fifty-dollar wristwatch they were paying on, and luckily Eddie wasn’t wearing it now (he was wearing his cheap one), because he didn’t wear the good one to work.

  “And the sofa and the armchairs, aren’t they new . . . You bought them?”

  “Yeah,” Eddie said, hitching back in his chair. “This place is furnished, y’know, but you shoulda seen that—” He made a derisive gesture in the direction of the sofa.

  Laura had to support Eddie here. “What they had here, it was an old red plastic thing. You couldn’t even sit on it.” It hurt your ass, Laura might have added.

  “When we move to a bigger place, at least we’ve got those,” Eddie said, nodding at the sofa and armchairs section.

  The sofa and armchairs were covered with beige plush that had a floral pattern of pale pink and blue. Hardly three months in the house, and the kids had already spotted the seats with chocolate milk and orange juice. Laura found it impossible to keep the kids off the furniture. She was always yelling at them to play on the floor. But the point was the sofa and the armchairs weren’t paid for yet, and that was what Mrs. Crabbe was getting at, not people’s comfort or the way the house looked, oh no.

  “Nearly paid up. Finished next month,” Eddie said.

  That wasn’t true. It would be another four or five months, because they’d twice missed the payments, and the man at the 14th Street store had come near taking the things away.

  Now there was a speech from the old bag about the cost of installment-plan buying. Always pay the whole sum, because if you couldn’t do that, you couldn’t afford whatever it was, see? Laura smoldered, as angry as Eddie, but the important thing with these meddlers was to appear to agree with everything they said. Then they might not come back.