James Purdy: In a Shallow Grave

“I heard him.”

“Couldn’t you sort of care for me just a little?”

“I feel we are connected, Garnet. I feel we have been chose to be together for a while.”

“Do you think Daventry was chose to come here . . . ?”

“I believe everything is chosen and destiny,” he replied. He took the book out from my hands then and started off to the kitchen, his favorite site for reading.

“I’ll be awful beside myself and lonesome when he is a married man.” I raised my voice so it would reach the reader.

“You’ll get over it,” Quintus spoke through yawns. “I ain’t going to leave you anyhow. Not just yet,” he said and that not just yet went through me like a knife, it con­firmed my fears, you see.

“I don’t confess my love to folks, though,” Quintus began like he was going to give a short speech, but then he stopped and said no more right then.

“Well, I care about you anyhow, Quintus . . . That’s something Daventry taught me, I guess. I don’t know what love means, but I think I am getting to have an inkling about it sometimes . . .”

Rocked in the boughs of slumber.

That is of course from one of those books Quintus, in his day, was constantly reading to me. So many phrases, parts of sentences, even paragraphs have stuck in my mind from those last days, Daventry’s last days.

I remember those final few days mostly by sounds. Everything was sound. Daventry had taught me to listen to the winds and the ocean again. I had paid them no more attention than my own beating heart and pulsing arteries. But now I listened to the ocean. I knew he was angry. I knew the winds were not ordinary winds either. They ran like spirits in search of something. And the sky looked like lemon mixed with ashes. The moon was not right either. It looked like gray foam. And the birds, Daventry had wondered at their constant comment on everything from before dawn to our swift twilight. They were mostly silent, and they had lost a lot of their nests in the gales. A sandpiper was blown all the way from the ocean to our front porch, and had hurt its wing and breast, and I nursed it a while until one day it disappeared. One morning too I saw an eagle pursuing a waterbird, and both, I swear, dipped into the ocean and did not appear again.

But Daventry said nothing about the rising winds and the tides which he had worried so much about. He studied me a lot though.

Georgina was home getting ready her wedding dress. They had invited me to the ceremony, and its not being her first marriage by any means, not much was being done to inviting other people in, considering too the bridegroom was unknown in this community.

Then Quintus came in one day and said the kids and goats had disappeared. But Daventry made no comment on that or on most other things said, and was in a brown study, and his absentmindedness left me a little more free to pay my secret calls to the dance hall, which my closeness to him of late had deprived me of.

The rough winds and the brine from the ocean had done their recent work on the entrance to my dance hall. More of the windows was busted. The roof looked like a tent that had billowed and sunk, and lots of big water birds of all kind were circling over the whole edifice. The pines and firs were moving all the time like the winds were in­side them, and so many flowers and tufts of grass uprooted by the winds of the past days strewed the ground wherever one stepped. I saw the moon in the sky by daylight, horned and angry and discolored.

But a new strange pith was circulating in my body, a new strength, and looking down at my arms, which had never lost their sinews in all my trouble and absence, I came to with a start. They looked paler, as if the arteries and veins which had moved from within out were deciding to sink back down into my anatomy.

Inside the dance hall nothing had changed however. And one could not hear the winds from within or see the un­natural moon.

I looked through all the victrola records and put on the selection Daventry had played on his harmonica, “On the Alamo.”

I was aware night was descending and gradually purpling the ocean, but I felt so strong I danced and danced under the revolving polka-dot ballroom light. I was sick unto death, but there is nothing like dancing to keep one hold­ing to some thread with this world.

I heard the big main entrance door open then, but I did not look round, the record player needed winding, it was ancient, that’s why I call it a victrola, it is a victrola. I put on “My Blue Heaven” and danced some more.

I looked up and saw Daventry.

The expression on his face dumbfounded me. I have never seen such a countenance. Oh, if only as they say, one had the power of words, or was a painter, if only—no, no photographer could have caught it either, for the eye sees so many movements and flashes and colors no photo can ever bring—his face, well I knew then he was not human, but a messenger, even his missing teeth was right for his face, which in all the gloom and wind and bad moon shone like spun gold.

I saw the knife in his hand, gleaming, and didn’t care, wasn’t worried.

“Shan’t we die, Garnet, and be rid of this hell, shan’t we . . . ?”

“If you say so,” I answered him, but a sob escaped me.

“Oh, Garnet,” he sighed, “you do so cling to life, poor kid.”

He had put the knife to my throat with such force I felt I had already begun to bleed under its cold fine edge.

“We will both die together, in any case, Garnet,” he whispered. But as he spoke, I slipped involuntarily from his grasp, so that he had to bring me up again to him and the blade. How odd, I who had lived only with death these four, five years at least, when death was rapping on the portals of my heart, I closed them fast and held to life.

“Whatever you say, Garnet, whatever you wish,” I heard him speak, his voice already distant as the storm out­side. I heard the knife fall to the bare wood floor.

Then after that terrible embrace, before either of us knew what was happening we were dancing under the shifting many-colored ball that had seen at least a million young girls and boys hold one another as they moved and shifted across the polished floors. Here was a couple the moon had not seen before. I think we were dancers in the grave, or had crossed the great river and left the ferryman and the three-headed Dog far behind. But I was happy again, though it was all so strange, and I wanted to whisper now in his ear to ask him who he was, but what did it matter, someone was holding me again when even the docs had retched and puked at the sight of me, somebody was holding me tight the night before he was to marry my girl.

“You won’t leave me now, will you, Daventry?”

He did not answer.

“You mean to leave me.” I disengaged myself from him. “You mean to leave me after all that wait and vigil I’ve had for you.”

“That’s not so and you know it,” he began to reply. “But even should I be called away,” and he looked at me in my eyes, which alone now are unharmed by all that happened to me in war, are as bright as anybody’s, the whites clear and pure, the blue deep, the pupil inky black and movable as the sun’s disc. “Hear me, Garnet,” he was going on, looking at me like he was in search of my soul, “I will never leave you even though the firmament part, because we are one, one soul in two tormented halves . . .”

Then he put the pressure of his mouth like a brand on my eyes and lips as if I was soon never to know his pres­ence or touch again . . .

I walked out to the ocean’s shore. The sea looked very peculiar, I had never seen it or any other body of water such a color, the height of the waves was tremendous, and the beach was covered with masses of foamy seaweed, dead starfish, rays, and a dead young tern. The sun looked like a cracked brooch such as Mrs. Gondess might wear as a heir­ loom. From every point of the compass came the cries of warning, from lighthouses, from foghorns, from God knows where: Go home, go hide, go away, don’t linger, clear the beach, run!