Laird Hunt - Kind One

“In those days,” Linus Lancaster my dead husband said to me, “Louisville was still something worth the shooting, and a man of caliber could make himself a man of property if he had a way with the world and his hands around the throat of a salable notion, and that was me. That was me ! I could sing like one of God’s own angels, could strut the stage and turn a line, and there wasn’t a man in Kentucky could charm a creature like I could. Once, when I was just down to Louisville and getting started, I had had to take Bennett Marsden by the scrawny arm and throw him out the door because he had come between me and some of the flora arrived to us by boat from Baton Rouge. This was at auction, and when I saw her I had to have her, and I had had her and now she was in my home. Bennett Marsden had thought to have her, but it was I who had offered up the best pile of coin. Some several years had scrawled on past since that affair, and the business had been forgotten. Bennett Marsden had found himself one or two fine ones I wouldn’t have argued against tasting, but the fever took them. It never touched mine.

“‘The World,’ I would tell my lady creature of an evening. ‘The World, yes, that’s a dandy name for a theater,’ she would say. One night, when the theater was finished, we said this back and forth as I had at my own bottle then at her, and I went out with my paintbrush in the moonlight and the next morning all the city walked by my sign. When Bennett Marsden came he said nothing, but clapped me on the shoulder and acknowledged that my paintwork was fine.

“We draped the World in gold and purple and spread out word that we would have us a performance after a fortnight,” my dead husband, Linus Lancaster, went on. “We beat the bushes and banged the drum and sold every bench place in the house. We were to play a shortened version of Lear and I was to be Lear and Bennett Marsden my good Gloucester. There were some boys for the other parts and two fine fat ladies Bennett Marsden had found for us to play the three daughters. We rehearsed each night then drank, and after we had drunk I would sit one or both those fine fat ladies across my knees. Bennett Marsden would chuckle when I did this then fill my glass full. They told me there was enough of me for both of them, and as you well know, Wife, this was true. Sometimes when I had them on my knees I would sing. All I had to do was open my mouth and they would all shut theirs. This was also true. Everything I say is true. Many was the time after the rehearsals and this knee-bending with the ladies that Bennett Marsden had his boys or mine carry me home. At home I knee-bended with my own fair creature maiden then slept as something come to the end of its good long labors. Normal times I slept a deep and happy blank, but one night I had the purest vision of a field filled with pigs and me the happiest man alive in the middle of it. You know of that dream.

“We opened to a house as full as the World could hold. One of the boys played a flute and the other a drum. Come time for it and they put their hands together and you couldn’t have heard a word. I stepped out onto the stage for a speech with Gloucester and I took in my breath and let it roar. I said my speech and pulled my wig hair and wept a tear, but when I had finished the house wasn’t weeping. I said ‘fog, fen, and bash’ with every ounce I had but none stirred. Nor did Gloucester stir, so I said some of my speech again. Him as Gloucester came over to me and whispered up at my ear: ‘We’re playing Coriolanus , act four.’

“‘We’re playing shortened Lear ,’ I said. ‘Enough with your jokes now.’

“‘I am King Lear,’ I said aloud. I stepped around the stage. I gave the fresh planks some whacks with my foot. I said some of my lines from farther along.

“‘Come, leave your tears; a brief farewell: the beast with many heads butts me away…’ he said, in a stage whisper, plenty loud enough for the hall to hear.

“The room laughed with it. Some of them held up their programs. I had never seen these programs. They must have been passed out while I was at my preparations. Coriolanus at the World , they read.

“I stepped to the side and as I did, the boy who had been beating the drum and the two fine fat ladies Bennett Marsden had found for us stepped onstage, and after he had made a speech to the crowd about lightness and levity and my good nature to launch off the World’s first show with such a flourish , he started in on Coriolanus and the others played it right along with him. I had on my Lear wig and my Lear crown and all my Lear lines in my head. I saw straightaway the trick he had played me, understood the payment he had given me for my World. I left out the back door. Walked the alleys home. On the way I passed a creature hauling its master in a little wagon. The master was awake and singing a courting song, the creature had a purple hat on its head.

“That night I dreamed my own creatures hauled me out of Louisville with bits in their mouths. That I sat in the driver’s seat and they stood in for the horses. That I whipped them till the froth flew, till they howled against the metal, till we all fell over dead.”

“You sure fell,” I said when he had at last stopped. “Right over onto your face in the kitchen light.”

He nodded.

“Anyways, I already heard all about the way of the World and liked the first telling better; it came with a dance,” I said.

He gave out a smaller smile this time and adjusted the pig sticker in his neck and nodded again.

“You can see why we broke off our association, me and Bennett Marsden.”

“You mean I can see why you broke it off. Why maybe you left him holding the bills. Left him to carry all the load.”

He smiled.

“Why did you wait so long?” he asked me before he left.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The next morning I stood at the kitchen door and waved the Draper Man back off down the lane.

“I’ll call to see your husband, who owes me money from our business together, before the fortnight, Mrs. Lancaster,” he called. “I’ll add that it will be a pleasure to see you again too.”

“Good journey, Mr. Bennett Marsden,” I called back.

Before he had broken out of sight I had stepped back into the kitchen again.

IT WAS LUCIOUS WILSONthought I might be quick with a piece of chalk and one day asked me was I interested in tending the school he had it in mind to set up. He had people in his employ, and those people had children and he had his own, and the only school nearby was farther away than he liked to send them. He had seen me gobbling at the books on his shelves and had watched me help his children make their numbers and letters and had a feeling it would work out right. He had hired a teacher from Marion to come out by autumntime and had a shed at the edge of one of the fields that would make a fine school by then, but if I was willing to work in rough conditions I could get it going now. He would see to the slates and primers and make sure I had what I needed.

He put this to me while I was scraping spilled oatmeal off the wall in his front hall. He had his hands kind of slipped into the pockets of his purple vest as he spoke. This was still in my early days in his employ. They hadn’t started in to call me Scary. He had seen the fresh blood on my ankle but hadn’t blinked. I was still what you could call young then and had been some time away by then from Charlotte County, and some of the freshness of strong young arms and strong young legs had likely bubbled up into my head and made me think some of the furniture had floated back into its right place, and I set down my scraper and looked up at Lucious Wilson and told him, yes.