James Purdy: In a Shallow Grave

“Now look here, Garnet, why didn’t you tell me?” he spoke, and I felt indeed as if they had put something in the newsprint I had said in his disfavor, that maybe it was claimed I had reported he was a desperado.

Going back to the paper and reading more, he then looked up again and exclaimed, “Well, I’ll be damned . . . Is this true?”

Even Quintus looked up and gave his undivided attention.

“You mean to tell me you have hurricanes here?” Daventry accused us.

He acted as affronted as if I had invited him down here to Virginia, had given him his job, and then had withheld this sensitive information.

“Don’t they have hurricanes just about everywhere, Daventry,” I replied, for I was more than dumbfounded by the way in which he was plainly holding me accountable for this.

“And it’s expected in a few days, they claim!” He threw the paper in my direction.

“Oh, those weather forecasts,” I scoffed. “Why, you can’t go by them. They have them around here, bad storms of course, sure, but we never get hurricanes Daventry . . .”

“You don’t care about anything!” he vociferated. “Your girl Georgina, your hemorrhaging (here I gave him a rather nasty look), the sheriff, losing your land and home when as that old rip from the Real Estate Office said your family goes way back to the beginnings of this country. You just don’t care, Garnet . . .”

“I care about your harmonica playing, Daventry.”

“Oh well, yes I suppose you do . . . But why oh why, Garnet, didn’t you tell me about the hurricanes . . . ?”

Both Quintus and I just stared at him point-blank.

“Just the name hurricane scares me to death. I can’t bear it!”

He got up and went over to the big window that looks out on the ocean side. I guess he was looking at the ocean (which he had never seen before till he visited us) for it to give him maybe a weather forecast.

I went over to him then and looked at the expanse of blue-green sea also. It was still and smooth and to tell the truth didn’t look like itself. It looked like a field.

“Why, Daventry,” I tried to comfort him, “we folks here don’t think about the hurricanes. If one does come, which ain’t probable, you can’t do anything about it any­how, can you? It’s no worse than floods. Don’t you have floods in Utah?”

He shook his head and moved away from me.

“Or cyclones or tornadoes?”

He went on gazing out the window in the direction of the quiet sea.

The day we were to be evicted had come at last. We had put some more of my grandfather’s furniture out by the side of the road, more commodes, china closets, Circassian walnut beds nobody had slept in since before I was born, and a long maple dining table that must have seated twenty-five people. We didn’t move yet our beds or the hundreds and hundreds of books. We were planning to move some of my things to Quintus’ ma’s house if the worst came to the worst, but he wasn’t too sure if he was going to be allowed to live there on account of the will had not been opened yet and studied because the lawyer lived in Rich­mond. Some people said his ma was well off on account of she had worked for rich white people for thirty years.

“I am going to save you,” Daventry said, coming up to me where I was seated near the gas range in the kitchen. He looked mad as a farm of hornets. His eyes barely focused and I think if I had been really afraid of anybody anymore I would have been afraid of him at that moment. There were little thick pearls of sweat on his upper lip.

“If you will let me,” he went on, “I will save you. I will do it, but I may never be the same again. Is that under­stood?”

He walked about the room like a man standing on red-hot coals.

“There is no other way but to do what I am going to do,” he spoke, really I suppose to himself. “I prayed all night,” he now came up to me, “but it didn’t work.”

I remembered then how he had tossed and turned all night in the bed next to me. Actually I don’t think I ever sleep. I get a little quiet sometimes and my eyes are closed most of the time anyhow, or off and on closed at any rate. At the same time ever since I was blown up with my buddies I have never felt really wide awake either. I bet that they lying in in those far-off untended graves by the South China seas are about as wide awake as me most of the time.

“Do you have any wine, Quintus?” Daventry turned to him now rather than me. Quintus begrudged giving up reading even for a minute, but he let him know there was a bottle of Virginia Dare in the cupboard, and so Daventry brought this out. It was a good thing I didn’t know what was coming, or I think I would have run as far away as Utah myself at that moment. I am trying to recollect it, for I think it was in a way the most horrible thing that ever happened to me.

“Do you have big tin cups like they use on farms?” he then wondered.

Quintus finally rose then for he felt something serious was in the offing, as I gradually did, and he got him a cup.

“I need three,” Daventry said sharply.

He meanwhile uncorked the wine.

Looking at his eyes I felt he must have taken some pill or drug, for his eyes didn’t look anymore like his than a tiger’s, the pupils were coming out of him like big black beads from a busted necklace. Both Quintus and me were getting terribly uneasy and was looking toward the doors like for escape.

“ I will save your land and property, if you will commune with me. ” Daventry spoke these words solemnly and in a voice that sounded like he was talking behind a blanket. It suddenly got more churchlike too in the kitchen than even the funeral of Quintus’ mother.

Very gradually we all sat down at the table with our tin cups in front of us and wonder of wonders Daventry closed his eyes and began intoning. My lower lip shook so bad I had to hold it still with my fingers.

I was about to say it’s all right for them to foreclose on us, but it was too late.

I saw the knife, and I saw his chest bare without his shirt anywhere in evidence. He had the most beautiful chest of any man I have ever seen, and no wonder Georgina had to have him—if he was that beautiful all over, she was right.

I didn’t exactly see him slash himself, but saw the blood first spurt and spray all over the table, but he had self-command enough to fill each tin cup with the jetting stream of his blood. Quintus sort of lay back in his chair and his arms got loose like they was made of straw.

But each of the tin cups had been filled with blood and wine, and the look on Daventry’s face was so fearful, and the knife resting in his left hand so fierce, there was noth­ing to do when he said “ Drink ” but swallow it, and I decided of course he was going to kill us then too and though I was trembling like a young quail when it’s picked up from its covey, I was ready for whatever he had to pro­pound for us, and Daventry was, I guess, the person I had always been seeking, he could make me obey, he had come too late of course, but if he was to lead me out of my perplexities and sorrows into the next kingdom, well and good.

That was when time stopped.

I don’t think it was the grass. Was it the blood? It couldn’t have been that old wine.

No, I seemed to have been sitting with Daventry and Quintus four thousand years around that table with the tin cups and the boy with all that blood on his chest and side.

Finally I could see it was dark outside, and raining.

We were to have been evicted at ten o’clock that morning and it was now God knows what time. The clock in the front sitting room registered twelve, and so that must mean midnight judging by the darkness outside. There that good furniture stood too out there all by itself on the side of the road, getting all wet and damaged. I went out and started to fetch some of it in.