Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

“That one’s for you. So you won’t eat up all my humbugs on the way home.”

Further instructions:

“Don’t run all the way.”

“Don’t stop on the bridge.”

I do run, by Nate’s shop, glimpsing him inside, pumping away with one hand. We wave. The beautiful, big Newfoundland dog is there again and comes out, bounding along with me a ways.

I do not stop on the bridge but slow down long enough to find out the years on the pennies. King George is much bigger than on a five-cent piece, brown as an Indian in copper, but he wears the same clothes; on a penny, one can make out the little ermine trimmings on his coat.

Mealy has a bell that rings when you go in so that she’ll hear you if she’s at the switchboard. The shop is a step down, dark, with a counter along one side. The ceiling is low and the floor has settled well over to the counter side. Mealy is broad and fat and it looks as though she and the counter and the showcase, stuffed dimly with things every which way, were settling down together out of sight.

Five pennies buys a great many humbugs. I must not take too long to decide what I want for myself. I must get back quickly, quickly, while Miss Gurley is there and everyone is upstairs and the dress is still on. Without taking time to think, quickly I point at the brightest thing. It is a ball, glistening solidly with crystals of pink and yellow sugar, hung, impractically, on an elastic, like a real elastic ball. I know I don’t even care for the inside of it, which is soft, but I wind most of the elastic around my arm, to keep the ball off the ground, at least, and start hopefully back.

* * *

But one night, in the middle of the night, there is a fire. The church bell wakes me up. It is in the room with me; red flames are burning the wallpaper beside the bed. I suppose I shriek.

The door opens. My younger aunt comes in. There is a lamp lit in the hall and everyone is talking at once.

“Don’t cry!” my aunt almost shouts at me. “It’s just a fire. Way up the road. It isn’t going to hurt you. Don’t cry! ”

“Will! Will!” My grandmother is calling my grandfather. “Do you have to go?”

“No, don’t go, Dad!”

“It looks like McLean’s place.” My grandfather sounds muffled.

“Oh, not their new barn!” My grandmother.

“You can’t tell from here.” He must have his head out the window.

“ She’s calling for you, Mother.” My older aunt. “I’ll go.”

“No. I’ll go.” My younger aunt.

“Light that other lamp, girl.”

My older aunt comes to my door. “It’s way off. It’s nowhere near us. The men will take care of it. Now you go to sleep.” But she leaves my door open.

“Leave her door open,” calls my grandmother just then. “Oh, why do they have to ring the bell like that? It’s enough to terrify anybody. Will, be careful. ”

Sitting up in bed, I see my grandfather starting down the stairs, tucking his nightshirt into his trousers as he goes.

“Don’t make so much noise!” My older aunt and my grandmother seem to be quarreling.

“Noise! I can’t hear myself think, with that bell!”

“I bet Spurgeon’s ringing it!” They both laugh.

“It must have been heat lightning,” says my grandmother, now apparently in her bedroom, as if it were all over.

“ She’s all right, Mother.” My younger aunt comes back. “I don’t think she’s scared. You can’t see the glare so much on that side of the house.”

Then my younger aunt comes into my room and gets in bed with me. She says to go to sleep, it’s way up the road. The men have to go; my grandfather has gone. It’s probably somebody’s barn full of hay, from heat lightning. It’s been such a hot summer there’s been a lot of it. The church bell stops and her voice is suddenly loud in my ear over my shoulder. The last echo of the bell lasts for a long time.

Wagons rattle by.

“Now they’re going down to the river to fill the barrels,” my aunt is murmuring against my back.

The red flame dies down on the wall, then flares again.

Wagons rattle by in the dark. Men are swearing at the horses.

“Now they’re coming back with the water. Go to sleep.”

More wagons; men’s voices. I suppose I go to sleep.

* * *

I wake up and it is the same night, the night of the fire. My aunt is getting out of bed, hurrying away. It is still dark and silent now, after the fire. No, not silent; my grandmother is crying somewhere, not in her room. It is getting gray. I hear one wagon, rumbling far off, perhaps crossing the bridge.

But now I am caught in a skein of voices, my aunts’ and my grandmother’s, saying the same things over and over, sometimes loudly, sometimes in whispers:

“Hurry. For heaven’s sake, shut the door! ”

“Sh!”

“Oh, we can’t go on like this, we…”

“It’s too dangerous. Remember that…”

“Sh! Don’t let her…”

A door slams.

A door opens. The voices begin again.

I am struggling to free myself.

Wait. Wait. No one is going to scream.

Slowly, slowly it gets daylight. A different red reddens the wallpaper. Now the house is silent. I get up and dress by myself and go downstairs. My grandfather is in the kitchen alone, drinking his tea. He has made the oatmeal himself, too. He gives me some and tells me about the fire very cheerfully.

It had not been the McLeans’ new barn after all, but someone else’s barn, off the road. All the hay was lost but they had managed somehow to save part of the barn.

But neither of us is really listening to what he is saying; we are listening for sounds from upstairs. But everything is quiet.

On the way home from taking Nelly to the pasture I go to see where the barn was. There are people still standing around, some of them the men who got up in the night to go to the river. Everyone seems quite cheerful there, too, but the smell of burned hay is awful, sickening.

* * *

Now the front bedroom is empty. My older aunt has gone back to Boston and my other aunt is making plans to go there after a while, too.

There has been a new pig. He was very cute to begin with, and skidded across the kitchen linoleum while everyone laughed. He grew and grew. Perhaps it is all the same summer, because it is unusually hot and something unusual for a pig happens to him; he gets sunburned. He really gets sunburned, bright pink, but the strangest thing of all, the curled-up end of his tail gets so sunburned it is brown and scorched. My grandmother trims it with the scissors and it doesn’t hurt him.

Sometime later this pig is butchered. My grandmother, my aunt, and I shut ourselves in the parlor. My aunt plays a piece on the piano called “Out in the Fields.” She plays it and plays it; then she switches to Mendelssohn’s “War March of the Priests.”

The front room is empty. Nobody sleeps there. Clothes are hung there.

Every week my grandmother sends off a package. In it she puts cake and fruit, a jar of preserves, Moirs’ chocolates.

Monday afternoon every week.

Fruit, cake, Jordan almonds, a handkerchief with a tatted edge.

Fruit. Cake. Wild-strawberry jam. A New Testament.

A little bottle of scent from Hills’ store, with a purple silk tassel fastened to the stopper.

Fruit. Cake. “Selections from Tennyson.”

A calendar, with a quotation from Longfellow for every day.

Fruit. Cake. Moirs’ chocolates.

I watch her pack them in the pantry. Sometimes she sends me to the store to get things at the last minute.

The address of the sanitarium is in my grandmother’s handwriting, in purple indelible pencil, on smoothed-out wrapping paper. It will never come off.