James Purdy: In a Shallow Grave

“Mexicans.”

“Well, then,” I said, “you forget it.”

“God will send his messenger.” Daventry was firm. “You’ll see.”

“Then what about me?” I moved so that his chest came off my arms.

“Ain’t you suffered enough?” He began to look at me, and suddenly I think he saw me again as he had the first day when he had wanted to throw up at the sight of me, but now I was the sharer of his secret and so he held me tight again, as though a little child at last had embraced the dark goblin that has hid so long by the foot of his bed.

We didn’t sleep a wink that night, but his crying and scalding tears made my own dried-up lachrymal glands feel a bit easier. We were held then in bond to one another. Even Quintus noticed the next morning. Why do I say even. He sees through everything.

Quintus had taken to reciting now from old books of poetry, which I don’t think either of us enjoyed, but some­times a verse here and there of what he recited would stick in my mind more than the books that was in prose, and there was some verses he read one day which kept running about in my mind forever after:

I wondered what those words meant, I mean meant to me to the point that they arrested me so and would not leave my mind, or rather my mouth and tongue, they were always there, and then another thing Quintus said that same day after the poem which struck me almost more forcibly:

At noon you don’t have no shadow;

it’s then the Devil has power over you.

Almost like somebody who is trying to gain time when he is in a tight spot I changed the subject because the verses and the warning so disturbed me, and said, “Quintus, you are getting smitten on those old books almost more than me . . . Maybe you should take a correspondence course in high school.”

“I already been through high school,” came his icy reply.

“Well, then college, Quints.”

“Aha,” he said in his snottiest way, but I was not think­ing about his high-school or college career really and truly then, but about that idea of his which was pure nigger superstition I suppose about my having no shadow right then on account of it was high noon. That is how my mind works now, I am always troubled about something I thought a few minutes ago so that I don’t always hear what people say to me at this moment now, for my thoughts anyhow are far away, and so all of a sudden I said to Quintus, “That her in the Lilac River poem is Georgina” (which was the first name of the Widow Rance).

“Oh no it ain’t,” Quintus replied, “It’s nobody.”

“It’s anybody who hears it wants it to be.”

He studied me for a long uneasy time, and then he said, “ You’re getting awful cosy with the runaway. ”

“Oh. Well, you didn’t like taking and fetching messages, that’s for sure.”

“Never denied you, did I?” Quintus shot back.

He got so now he read on and on in the books to himself, and didn’t always share with me aloud. Anyhow he knew at noon now I was most sleepy (together with the fact that I didn’t have no shadow) owing to the fact the runaway, as he called him, kept me up all night.

I woke up a little later in the P.M. however long enough, my head against a young poplar tree, to hear Quintus’ honey voice going it again:

“With one son dead at his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand and held his rifle with the other, and com­manded the men to sell their lives as dearly as they could. Yet the remorseless spirit which governed the stern Puritan that terrible night on the Pottawatomie had departed . . .”

“Who you reading about now, Quintus?” I queried, noticing too just like he had said there was damned few shadows about still.

“Why, John Brown,” he answered right back. “Well, if you ain’t turning into a God-damned Yankee now before my eyes.”

“ You should beware of Daventry .” Quintus spoke in a hollow whisper, leaning over me to say this with his glasses still on, and the book laid down on some pine needles.

“It’s too late to beware of anybody,” I told him . . .

Then looking at him so close to me, I said, “There’s an eyewinker loose in the corner of your left eye, and it’s going to get into your pupil and blind you if you ain’t careful . . . Here, let me take it out before it gets into the inside of your eye.”

I removed the eyewinker.

“Don’t read anymore today, Quints. I’m already so full of ideas you have give me from all those damned tomes from my grandfather’s bookshelves. Jesus Christ, readin’ to me about John Brown though is the limit . . . I say, Quintus . . .”

That was the same P.M. Mrs. Gondess from the King William Savings and Loan Association appeared and had herself announced by Daventry before she billowed into the sitting room. Quintus was rubbing my feet because I had begun to have a spell, and there Mrs. Gondess stood before us in a white expensive hand-sewn dress, with a big brooch, and a long string of blue beads and smelling of face powder for ten miles.

“Have a seat, ma’am,” I said, disentangling myself from Quintus and stepping over him at last, while he quickly moved away into the next room where he began reading.

Mrs. Gondess stood looking from room to room, but with her gaze more or less focused on the ceiling of each room her eyes visited. Then smiling sadly but still not see­ing me, she said, “I won’t stay, Garnet,” and then her whole head and gaze were lowered like at evening prayer.

She talked about the crops and the weather while avoiding as her main occupation looking at me direct, but of course she had to steal a few peeks at me on account of the human eye always manages to see even more than it may want to.

“The land taxes, Garnet,” she said at last, and you would have thought she had mentioned the gayest subject in all of time.

“What about them, Mrs. Gondess?”

“Have you not received the notices?” she cried, her gaiety approaching laughter . . . “We’ve informed you, Garnet . . . You’re in arrears, payment after payment after payment in arrears . . .”

I waited but was really watching Daventry, who stood waiting some distance from us speakers and reminded me of a church usher waiting to get his cue to pass the collec­tion plate.

“I can’t believe,” she went on, but her gaiety had gone, and her mouth had frozen, “I find it, that is, implausible that you have not received our notices.”

And then in the kind of voice one of Quintus’ books describe as ringing , but was closer to screeching, or come to think of it croaking, she deafened us with “ You have got to pay those taxes or be thrown off your land! ”

I picked up a toothpick I had laid down on a little hand-painted saucer and touched my two front teeth with it, and then put it down.

“I’d think the God-damned Army would pay them for me,” I said after a minute.

“No, no, no!” She began in earnest now whether because of the profanity or fear more would come or because she was ready to spout. “I called you on the phone about it last February,” she reminded me . . . “Garnet, Garnet, you don’t want to lose this fine property over some little back taxes. Just think how far back it goes in your family. Why truth to tell, you are one of the oldest Virginians . . .”

We both stopped our wrangling because we could hear Quintus reading aloud to himself. At first I had thought it was birds. Quintus’ out-loud reading had embarrassed Mrs. Gondess, or made her feel awkward or something, and it sort of threw a monkey wrench into what we were talk­ing about, so that there was a long, I mean a preposterous, pause and silence, during which Daventry now finally entered the room in earnest and sat down near the banker.