Robert Wilson: A Hidden Place

He ordered himself a hamburger and a Coke. The hamburger was a slab of broiled beef and the Coke came in a big soda-fountain glass with condensation on it like dew. The waitress was young, dark-haired, small-breasted under her uniform, and she gave him a series of covert glances. When she brought over the side of french fries she said, “You must be Travis Fisher.”

“Tray” he said automatically, only then realizing how odd it was that she should know his name. “How did you—?”

“Relax,” she said. She put her elbows on the counter. “I’m Nancy. Nancy Wilcox. My mom knows your Aunt Liza through the Baptist Women.” She rolled her eyes to demonstrate her attitude toward the Baptist Women. “I guess just about everybody knew you were coming in today.”

He was not sure he was pleased to hear that. But she was pretty, so he thanked Nancy Wilcox anyway and said he hoped he’d see her around.

“Probably you will,” she said. “Mom and Liza Burack aren’t exactly close, but they move in all the same circles. High-minded, you know: church committees, temperance league. Translation: busybodies.” She winked and turned away, flipping her long dark hair out of her eyes. Travis gazed at her a moment before directing his attention to the dime western and the hamburger.

The hamburger was satisfying, the magazine less so. He was an attentive reader, but today the heroes seemed too operatic, the violence perversely too affecting. Six-guns blazed, blood poured, justice (except in the “continued” serial) triumphed. But he could not help thinking of his mother and of the ugliness of her death and his impotent rage at it, so after a while he put down his thirty cents on the shiny Formica and left.

Haute Montagne was French for “high mountain,” his mother had told him, but whatever Frenchman named the place must have been drunk or blind. His aunt’s house, 120 DeVille, stood on the highest plot of land in town, where the prairie rose in a kind of swell for thirty or forty feet before sloping away to the bank of the Fresnel River and the railway bed. The house itself was old but had once been fine: two stories plus a small garret with oculus windows overlooking the town, but the wooden siding was textured with paint curls and the weather had got into the dormers. Yellow curtains were drawn against the sunlight.

Travis had not been there since he was six years old.

He knocked three times on the rim of the screen door and then Aunt Liza answered.

Liza was his mother’s older sister, in her middle fifties now, respectable in a print sack dress, and she opened the door and looked at Travis with a mixture of pity and suspicion that he recognized instantly over the gulf of years. She had aged some. There were lines in her high pale forehead; she wore a pair of silver-rimmed glasses with a bifocal half. Her figure was undefined, rounded. But she was unmistakably Liza Burack. “Well, Travis,” she said. “Well, come on in.”

His own reluctance to cross that threshold was surprisingly strong. But he shouldered his bag through the door and into the ticking silence.

Persian rugs. Mantle clocks.

In the whitewashed kitchen, an electric fan purred.

“Creath,” Liza said, “Travis is here.”

Creath Burack was the man Liza had married (“A steady man,” she always told Travis’s mother; he operated the Haute Montagne ice plant): immobile in an armchair, overalls riding up his big belly, hair thin, he stood up just long enough to shake Travis’s hand. His grip was huge, painful.

“You start work tomorrow,” Creath Burack said.

Travis nodded. Liza said, “Well, you probably want to see your room.”

She led him up a flight of carpeted stairs to a room with naked floorboards and whitewashed walls, empty but for a narrow brass bed and a pine dresser. Travis raised a yellowing sash and was able to see an arc of the river, the railway trestle, the horizon like a line drawn against the sky.

Something moved, lightly, in the attic room above him.

He looked at Liza. She avoided his eyes. “We have another roomer up there,” she said, “but you wouldn’t know about that. You’ll meet her at supper, I suppose.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Travis said.

She stood in the doorway and her eyes hardened.

“Travis, I want you to know there was never any question of whether you should come here or not.” “No, ma’am.”

“Oh, Creath might have raised a word or two. But he just likes his privacy. No, blood is thicker, I told him. Soon as I heard about your mama’s tragedy I said, well, we’ll take in Trav, and maybe you can get him a place down at the iceworks. I don’t guess it was your fault what happened to Mary-Jane. Her own fault … if any, if any.” This last because of the look Travis had given her. “But I want you to know. This is not the kind of household you might be accustomed to. We have standards of conduct. And Creath, he doesn’t like a lot of noise. Best you keep quiet around him, Travis, you understand? And not ask too many questions.”

Her face was shaded with old pain.

“Yes, ma’am,” Travis said.

She closed the door, and he gazed at the cream-colored walls.

Dusk came, and he had not switched on the single overhead light when Liza Burack called him down for supper.

The dining-room table was heaped high with food. He remembered this, too, about his Aunt Liza, the way she went all out cooking for people, not so much generosity as compensation, as if the sheer weight of food could disguise some hidden inadequacy. Creath was already seated at the table, a massive blank weight, as Liza delivered a white china bowlful of mashed potatoes, a brimming gravy boat.

“Looks fine,” Travis said. “Mama always admired your cooking very much, Aunt Liza.”

“Just you sit down,” Liza said nervously. “The proof’s in the eating, Travis.”

It was as if he was still six years old.

“Lot of work went into setting this table,” Creath said; and Travis thought, yes, her work, but it was obvious he meant the ice plant. “Lot of time, lot of work. Hope you appreciate that.”

“Yessir.”

“Nothing comes cheap.” Creath’s eyes were unfocused and Travis guessed he had said these things many times. “You work for what you get in this life, you understand that, Travis?” “Sir.”

“That may have been the problem with your mother. Expect too much without wanting to work for it. Well, we all know where that path inclines, I guess.”

I am a guest in his home, Travis thought, teeth clenched. I cannot say what I think. But he looked at Creath Burack with a barely restrained loathing.

“Creath,” Liza said, gently warning.

“It’s only what the boy has to hear. Better he should know it now than come to it hard later on.”

Liza, silent, delivered a steaming pot roast to the table. The heat and humidity of it filled the dining room,- Travis felt a drop of sweat travel down his chest. His stomach felt shriveled.

“Because,” Creath went on, “and I say this honestly, I won’t accept second-best from you down at the plant. Some might say it was favoritism, my hiring you on at all. Now I don’t believe that. I don’t mink it is un-Christian to help a family member in need. The opposite. But charity does not extend to indulgence. That’s all I’m trying to put across. Work is what is required. Maybe things have been easy for you before. But the sad truth is that they will not be easy now.”

Travis said quietly, “When Mama was sick I hired the men to harvest. I drove a tractor, and a team of horses when we sold the tractor. And when we couldn’t hire hands I took what I could of the harvest myself.”

“Well,” Creath said, “we know what the upshot of that was, don’t we?”