Homeplace Read online

  Before she could reply, her father’s frail voice curled out on the air like smoke from his bedroom, calling Sam, and he got up abruptly and left the kitchen. Mike sat where she was, very still, flayed by his last words but at a remove. Like everything else he had said, they had been uttered beyond the anesthetizing walls of the bell jar and the white fatigue. After a while she tried to gather herself up and go upstairs, but succeeded only in shifting positions slightly. She wondered dully if she was going to have to ask Sam Canaday to help her up to bed.

  “He wants to take you down and show you the homeplace tomorrow,” Sam said, coming quietly back into the room. “Says you haven’t been yet. I told him I’d drive you all after work.”

  Mike simply lifted her head and stared at him. Could either one of them, Sam or her father, be serious? Take a little sentimental family journey together after the smoking, charring words that had been uttered this night?

  “It’s an apology, Mike. I never heard him make one before. I wish you could find it in you to give him just this one thing. I don’t think he’ll ask you for anything else.”

  He looked at her steadily in the clock-ticking silence of the big white kitchen. He looked less substantial than he had at the beginning of the summer, not nearly so squarely there. Mike wondered irrelevantly where, if anywhere, he ate his meals. She pulled herself to her feet with great effort.

  “All right,” she said, feeling the heavy plodding of her blood through her veins, and the weary drag of her heart. “Okay. You win, both of you. Tell him I’d like to see the homeplace. It’s been a long time. It’s been years.”

  22

  IT WAS PAST EIGHT O’CLOCK WHEN HE CAME TO PICK THEM UP the next evening, and the light in the west was the bright, pearled gray that comes sometimes to the Deep South with the heat of midsummer. Mike knew that the electricity had been cut off in the old farmhouse, but they would not need lights this evening. The slow, thick dark would not settle until well after nine.

  Sam turned John Winship’s old Cadillac south onto the highway, idling through Lytton and past the city limits. Mike saw little that she remembered. She had not been this way since she was a teenager, going with her father and DeeDee on some small errand at the homeplace, or to visit her mother’s grave in the antebellum cemetery south of town. Most of the old houses and farms that had stood along the highway then were gone now, and there was a Chevrolet dealership, a small shopping center, a Wendy’s and a McDonald’s, and a treeless new perpetual-care cemetery, engulfing the old one, as gaudy as a Mexican plaza with plastic geraniums. Mike recalled one particular old house, a vast, tumbledown frame structure set in a sunless tangle of honeysuckle, where she and DeeDee had gone to be fitted for silk velvet dresses with smocking and laceedged collars, identical except for their colors, when they were small. The seamstress had been a tiny, bent gnome of a woman, as gnarled and impossibly old as a terrapin, who had had a frail, fluting voice like miniature crystal and smelled of dusty fabric. Her arthritic child’s fingers made stitches so fine that they were nearly invisible, and she wore a length of ribbon around her neck in which glittered hundreds of tiny brass pins. Mike had loved to go there; it reminded her of a story from her illustrated Grimm Brothers fairy tales. All there was hushed, silken, dwarfed, dim, old, child-sized.

  “What happened to Miss Tally’s house?” she asked her father. “I don’t quite remember where it was. She couldn’t possibly still be alive, could she?”

  “Good God, no,” her father said. “She died right after you … went. City took her house down for the new cemetery. Godawful plastic thing; you remember I want to be planted in the old one with a real stone that sticks up, beside your mother. Plots there for you girls and your husbands, too. If you ever have another one.”

  Mike shot him a look, but there was no malice on his face, only a kind of abstraction.

  “I came down here and watched ’em knock her old house down,” John Winship went on. “Did it with wrecking balls in those days, not bulldozers, like they do now. It was quite a sight. There’s some dignity to a wrecking ball, I always thought. Bulldozer looks like an old scrub steer butting down an outhouse.”

  They stopped at a traffic light that had not been there when Mike went away and a rangy, sandy-haired man in nylon shorts and a sleeveless runner’s shirt sprinted up even with the car and put his head in on her father’s side.

  “Evening, Mr. Winship, Sam,” he said affably. He was breathing hard, and sweat shone on his thin, corded arms and legs. His chest and shoulders were prodigiously freckled. “Good to see you out, sir. This must be Mike. I’d hoped to get a chance to meet you, Ms. Winship, but your dad doesn’t grace us with his presence anymore, and I can’t make an official call because he’s threatened to throw me out of the house if I do. I’m Tom Cawthorn.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Cawthorn.” She smiled at him, briefly and uncertainly. Why would her father have occasion to visit this strange young man, whom she had never seen before? Why would he visit her father? Why would John Winship forbid him the house?

  He saw her confusion and laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I thought you’d know. Sheer ego. I’m the pastor at First Methodist now. I’ve only been here three years, but I’ve known who you are longer than that, and I’ve wanted to tell you how much I’ve admired your work. It’s no good telling your dad. He just snorts. He’s one of my notable failures. Just refuses to be reclaimed back into the bosom of the church.”

  “Goddamn Good News Bible,” her father piped peevishly. “Jazz bands in the sanctuary. Dog collars and robes. Might as well be St. Peter’s.”

  The young preacher and Sam Canaday both laughed.

  “I’ll get you yet,” Tom Cawthorn said.

  “Over my dead body, that’s how you’ll get me. That’s just how you’ll get me,” her father snapped.

  “I hope not. Well, I’ve got another couple of miles before I call it quits. See you tomorrow night, Sam?”

  “Right,” Sam said. The young man flipped his hand at them and loped off, and Sam slid the car back onto the highway.

  “Going to choir practice, Sam?” John Winship said sarcastically.

  “Nope. Going to play poker with the preacher and a couple of deacons. You know we’ve got a game every month, Colonel.”

  “It’s certainly not the church I remember,” Mike said, watching the near-naked pastor dwindle into the distance along the shimmering highway.

  “Not much in Lytton is, I’ll be bound,” Sam Canaday said.

  They rounded a deep bend in the highway and the bulk of the homeplace rose up on the right, dark in its grove of old pecan trees against the clear evening sky. Something turned in Mike’s chest. How many times had she seen it like this, from the window of John Winship’s car, approaching in the evening light? Nothing seemed to have changed about the house and the fields around it that swept off on both sides toward stands of woods. But the outbuildings that stood behind the house at a distance of twenty yards or so were huddling and sliding near to the earth, and the grape vines and flower and vegetable gardens that surrounded the house were gone now to lush and surging wild. It looked as it was: derelict and poignant, but beautiful in its loneliness. Dignified, like a widow. The particular cant and sweep of hills, woods, and fields around the homeplace were sweet.

  I never realized it was such a pretty piece of land, Mike thought. I guess I never really looked at it.

  Instead of turning in at the overgrown driveway, off the dirt road that ran down beside the house, John Winship directed Sam to follow the road for a short distance and turn the car off into a deep, overarching avenue of gnarled old cedars. Mike remembered playing house in the magical, enclosed spaces inside the ground-sweeping branches. She had named the little kingdom, for some unremembered reason, Skunktown.

  “Want to sneak up on the house,” John Winship said. “You can’t see a car parked here from there, and if there are any sons of bitches prowling around there I want t
o catch ’em redhanded.”

  “Who do you think would be hanging around an empty house?” Mike asked, curious.

  “Didn’t used to be empty,” her father said. “That’s why I’m trying to catch ’em. Sons of bitching niggers have stolen just about every piece of furniture and pot and pan and dish in there over the years, even took the coat hangers. There’s nothing left, except a few things I got out early and put in the basement, or up over the garage for J.W. Goddamn it, my folks didn’t have much, but I wanted to keep what they did have. Didn’t want niggers using it. Never have been able to catch the bastards, though; I tried having tenants here, but they were so sorry they were worse than the niggers. Police say they come by here every night, but they never see anything. How come everything’s just disappeared out of here, then, I asked Olin Henderson. It just happens when a house is abandoned, he says. But it didn’t used to … not in Lytton. I know it’s because the police aren’t looking. Half of ’em niggers themselves. Half of ’em probably got my mama’s furniture in their houses. So I try to catch ’em myself when I can. Don’t get down here much anymore, though. Oh, well, not much left to take now, I reckon.”

  Mike sighed faintly. The desire to fly furiously at her father’s bigotry had long since faded under the leavening of Bayard Sewell and the bell jar.

  There was no one about, but Mike was startled to see that new scaffolding had been put up around the back door, framing the wheelchair ramp that had been installed sometime past, and spanking new paint gleamed whitely in the dusk. The shutters had been removed, and stood, scraped and bleached, against the fender of the old covered well beside the doorstep, ready for new black paint. Cans and ladders bulged under tarpaulins. Mike’s breath caught in her throat; the old well house was literally covered in a hectic pall of red roses, and their perfume was so heavy and evocative on the still air that for a moment she was literally plunged into another country, that of her childhood. It had not seemed so vivid and near in all the weeks she had been home. Pure sensation dove and shrieked at her like bats.

  “I remember those roses,” she said. “I remember that smell as if it were yesterday. I don’t remember them being all over the well like that, though.”

  “Paul Scarlets,” her father said. “My grandmother planted the first ones, I think. Climbers. Mama always used to keep ’em cut back, and I did too, up until a few years ago. Make a real show, don’t they?”

  “What’s with the painting, Colonel?” Sam Canaday said, halting the wheelchair at the foot of the ramp. His voice was neutral, but Mike saw that his mouth was tight.

  “Got Amos Butler down here with a crew finally,” the old man said. He did not look at Mike or Sam. “Been putting me off for almost a year, but finally got around to it. About time, too. The place was about to rot. Looked like a nigger shack. This ought to last another ten years, though.”

  In her mind, Mike saw the great mandibles of the bulldozer, blood-rust red against the new white paint. Oh, God, Daddy, she thought in irritation and pain.

  “Looks like a good job,” Sam Canaday said mildly. He pushed John Winship’s chair up the ramp and into the house, and Mike followed.

  Mike had been in the homeplace hundreds of times, but it was altogether alien and strange to her now, in the half light, its slanted, warped floors bare of her grandmother’s rag rugs, the stained beaverboard walls empty of the massive old mail-order fumed oak furniture she remembered. There had never, in her memory, been anyone living in the house, but before, the artifacts of a hundred-odd years of hardscrabble life had filled the myriad small rooms to bursting. Even then, though, she had never been able to imagine people actually living here; had no sense of her kinsmen moving in their joy and pain and rage and fatigue and laughter through these rooms, of her father as the living and lively small boy he must have been. The homeplace had always seemed as flat and two-dimensional as a stage set.

  Now, though, in the blue-dim, empty, and filthy rooms, smaller than they had seemed when furnished, shadows stirred in corners and surged at ceilings; fragile, voiceless voices drifted in stale, hot air; smells curled ever so faintly into her nostrils. Or rather, not smells, but the ghosts of them, phantom scents. The whole house whispered with phantom life.

  Silently, she followed her father and Sam Canaday from room to room, the wheelchair leaving stark snail’s tracks in the thick felting of dust on the random boards of the floor. In some rooms in the oldest part of the house, the boards were joined and secured not with nails, but with pegs. Her father talked as they went; under his reedy voice, other voices whispered, whispered. Mike did not want to hear them. She fastened her eyes on the knobbed parchment back of her father’s skull and focused her whole attention on his voice. Occasionally he had to stop for a long moment to gulp drafts of the thick air, but then he would begin again. He talked and talked, of the time when there was life and living in this dead house.

  “Mama always kept a white flour-sack tablecloth over the dinner table,” he said, in the vast kitchen. “Did it to keep out chickens and me and the cats. We had two when I was growing up, and Mama called ’em the ashcat and the tray-riding cat, because one of them always slept in the warm ashes from the fireplace in the winter, and the other kept trying to sneak up under the tablecloth and get at the cream and the crackling corn-bread and boiled potatoes on the tray she kept under there. I don’t remember if they had names or not, but I sure remember them. Old yellow tiger and a big tom as black as the ace of spades. I tied their tails together once and hung, ’em over the clothesline, to see ’em fight. Lord God, they nearly killed each other before Mama caught me and made me let them go. She tanned my hide good for that.” He cackled aloud. “Used to tie kernels of corn to string on the end of fishing poles and trail ’em around the chicken yard, too. Old Dominecker hen would swallow the corn and you could lead her around all day. Got a hiding for that, too.”

  “You must have been a devil,” Sam Canaday said, chuckling. Mike did not laugh. He might have been talking about a boy in a Victorian youth’s novel. She could no more imagine her father’s childhood than she could his vigorous youth. He had, for her, only two personas: remote, glacial middle age and this molting old raptor’s dying.

  “Worst hiding I ever got, though, was for jumping out of the cottonseed loft down onto the wagon full of cotton, before it went to the gin. Pa had the team hitched up all ready to go, and I was up there with a pitchfork, just a little old thing, pushing it out to him, and all at once I just hollered, ‘Look, Pa! Look at me!’ and I jumped right out of there and landed on top of a whole bale of cotton. I don’t know if it was me or the cotton he was worried about, but he took me out behind the calf shed and made me drop my britches, and just wore me out with his belt. He never did that before or again. Mama always had to do it, and she used a switch from the privet hedge. Made me go out and pick my own, and sent me back if it was too little. Must have done it a hundred times. But it was that one time with the belt that I remember.”

  In one room there was a small, whitewashed fireplace, blackened on the inside and stained around its perimeter with odd, starshaped brownish splotches.

  John Winship smiled. “Daddy chewed tobacco. Used to sit here every night before they went to bed … we all sat in their bedroom in the winter, because it was the only bedroom with a fireplace … and I’d eat Yates apples out of a basket by the fireplace, and Mama would tell me stories about the family and all, and Daddy would nod and rock and chew and every now and then he’d let fly … and usually miss. I can still hear Mama squalling at him. She whitewashed that fireplace four or five times a year, and it never went a week before he’d get it again. He never drank or smoked or cussed; no other bad habits, but he did love to chew. I can still see him. You’re the image of him, Micah.”

  He did not look around at her, did not seem to realize, even, that there was anyone in the room with him.

  He showed them the front parlor, and the pantry, and the little glassed sunroom where his mother had kept h
er sewing machine and her chum and her quilting frame.

  “This is sort of her place; I always remember her here,” he said. “When I think of her, it’s here that I see her.”

  He motioned Sam through the room and out to the small veranda off it, and pointed with one thin old claw to the dried bed of an old lily pool. There was a high, curly stone bridge over it, cracked and fallen now, and the collapsed corpses of old white lawn furniture around it. Mike remembered when the pool had been kept full, and there had been great, thick, glossy lily pads in it, and huge, starlike pink and white waterlilies in the summer. She and DeeDee had caught tadpoles there.

  “This is his place, Daddy’s. This is where I see him. He used to love to sit out here by the lily pond at night, after supper, and listen to the frogs and watch the lightning bugs. There was one big old frog that hung around here several years; a real monster. I saw him once, and you could hear him to College Park when he let go. Daddy called him Gikiwalli. Said somebody told him that was Italian for frog. Doesn’t sound right to me, but that’s what we called him. He was still here when I went away to law school. I don’t know what happened to him; wasn’t a cat or a coon alive that could catch him. Pa was out here every night it wasn’t just out and out cold.” He paused, his eyes traveling over the ruined pond and bridge and furniture.

  “It was here that I came when he died and cut my hand and let it bleed into the ground,” he said. “Right over there, by that Spanish bayonet. That’s where his chair always was. I’ve still got the scar.”