Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“There’s something I’d like you to do for me,” she said, slightly breathless.

“Something that you—” He faltered.

Talbot knew that the Hurd household was a troubled one. He had spoken more than once with his equally sympathetic wife about how hard it must be for a child to have to grow up in such a noxious environment. He worried in that moment that the girl might be preparing to ask him if he would take her home with him — let his wife and him be her new parents. He had heard stranger requests.

But this is not what Joanna sought. What she wanted was simply this: “Would you take your shears, please, Mr. Talbot, and cut off all my hair?”

“Cut off—”

“All of my hair.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I can’t do it myself. My parents have forbidden me. But they haven’t said that someone else couldn’t do it.”

“Good God, Joanna. I can’t cut off your hair. Not unless your parents asked me to, and even then, it would be a crazy thing to cut human hair with these things. You take scissors to hair. Have you never been to a beauty parlor?”

Joanna shook her head. “The last time my hair was cut I was just a little girl.” Joanna looked down. It would be difficult for her to say what needed to be said while she looked at him. “Mr. Talbot, they won’t stop. I’ve asked them to stop. I’ve told them what I will do if they don’t. But then they would punish me. They won’t punish me if you do it. They can’t . Cut it very short, please. I want them to know that it’s their hatred of one another that’s made me look this way — like, like Joan of Arc. Like Joanna of Arc!”

“You want to martyr yourself to bring peace to your family.”

Joanna nodded.

There followed a long silence. The silence was broken by the sound of Mr. and Mrs. Hurd’s raised voices inside the farmhouse. Talbot watched what the anger-laced words did to the girl — how they made her flinch and shudder, made her retreat inside herself. He took out his shears.

Over the phone that night, Dewey Hurd said he would have Talbot arrested.

“You arrest me, Hurd, and you’ll have to find another shearer. Nobody in this county does as good a job as I do for the price that I charge. You’d be an ass and a fool to do it.”

Dewey didn’t call the sheriff.

Even stronger words were leveled against Joanna, who sat on the sofa in the front room of the simple stone house looking very much like Joanna of Arc but looking not saintly at all.

“We told you that if you cut off your hair we’d have to punish you,” said Dewey. Florence nodded. It had been a long time since the two had been in full agreement about anything.

“But I didn’t cut off my hair,” said Joanna matter-of-factly. “Mr. Talbot did it. You didn’t say that I couldn’t have someone else do it.”

“But you knew the intent of our warning!” screamed Florence.

“Yet that isn’t what you said. You should really try to be more specific in the future, Mother.”

Florence Hurd wasn’t accustomed to such insolence from her daughter. For a moment she said nothing in response. Then through growing tears: “Just look at yourself. How in the world can we let you go to school on Monday looking like that?”

“You made your bed,” said Joanna in a low, severe voice.

The next night, after Mr. and Mrs. Hurd had had time to think and had time to talk with one another in this brief holiday from mutual hatred — to examine their feelings and actions toward one another and how these actions had affected their now embittered, bald-headed daughter — they sat the sixteen-year-old again upon the sofa to take up the matter, this time in softer, more conciliatory tones. Joanna wore a scarf, which had the effect of making her parents feel strange and guiltier still. Dewey spoke first. “We’ve decided not to punish you, because if taken to the letter of what we said to you, you didn’t cut off your long, lovely hair. Instead, you asked someone else to do it, and Talbot, the son of a bitch, has obliged you.”

Now Florence Hurd spoke. “But let us be clear from this point forward, darling girl — and especially after your hair has grown out and you begin to resemble our beloved daughter again, and not some mannish aviatrix — that you are forbidden ever again not only to cut off your hair while still beneath the roof of this house, but to ask anyone else to do it for you.”

Joanna nodded. It was a simple request and one that she vowed to keep.

There was peace of a sort in the house for several months thereafter — all the time that Joanna’s tawny locks were growing by leaps and bounds from living on a farm and ingesting ample protein and other healthful nutrients at every meal. When the circumstantial truce inevitably ended and Mother and Father were back at each other’s throats with a vengeance that made up for lost time, Joanna once again weighed her options.

There was a lice epidemic in the grammar school, and great platoons of young schoolchildren were being sent home to have their hair shorn and pediculicides applied. She could easily find a little boy who could rub his pretreated head against hers. She would not have to ask anyone to cut her hair; it would simply be done as a part of prescribed medical procedure.

She had also heard of a female worker at one of the Chillicothe shoe factories who had gotten her hair caught in a leather strip-cutting machine and was thoroughly scalped. Should Joanna take this course, it would be the machine itself — a non-human entity — that would do the deed. Scalping seemed an extreme measure for Joanna’s purpose, but she remained open to the idea of it.

Joanna Hurd had become a determined young woman.

Dear Miss Allie (Gator):

Greetings from the great American plains, where it might be cold but boy are these cats playing hot! Goodman’s Carnegie gig beat it down, and the jitterbugs at Harvest Moon kept me swing-happy for days, but it ain’t just New York and L.A. where the cats are sending and the jitterbugs are flittercutting, and it ain’t just New York and L.A. where you and me and the rest of the whackies can watch all those boys and girls posing and pecking and grinding the apple. They’re sending here too, Allie. Right here in North Omaha.

There’s a place here called the Dreamland Ballroom and they’ve got this cat, Lloyd Hunter, who formed his own band back in the mid-twenties, and this kid saxophonist Preston Love who lets it ride — oh my good woman, does he LET IT RIDE! And weekends, Allie, this joint is one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock jumpin’! Makes me a little ambivalent about coming back to New York, when everything I need is right here.

Which is what we’ve got to talk about. The old man’s after me to hire on with the company he works for. He’s an insurance man with Mutual Benefit Health and Accident Company. Pop’s wacky for the insurance game but I never gave it much thought. Me, your favorite alligator, pushing a pencil all the livelong day? I guess it beats pushing a broom, not that pushing a broom’s an easy thing to do from a wheelchair. The old man’s laid down the law, though. His crippled son’s got to start pulling his own weight. The years of me living off Daddy’s dough in my ground-floor Greenwich Village rabbit warren have come to an abrupt end.

I’m going to call you long distance on Sunday night and you be close to the phone, ya hear? You remember that question I popped a few weeks before I headed west to spend some time with the folks? Remember how I wouldn’t take your answer without giving you some time to think it over? Well, Allie, your Icky’s going to ask it again and now I need to know where you stand. Could you possibly see your way to spending the rest of your life with a hopelessly lovestruck one-legged future pencil-pusher here among the cornhuskers and the insurance actuaries and all of Father Flanagan’s orphaned delinquents? (You saw Boy’s Town with Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy last month? Flanagan’s place is right down the road. My parents always threatened to send me there if I didn’t keep my nose clean.)