James Purdy: In a Shallow Grave

“Oh, Daventry,” was all I could say. I knew I had gone mad. I knew I loved him, and not the Widow anymore. And how did I love him? I didn’t know because I had never loved a man. I loved him like a mad child loves flame and fire. I wanted to be immolated in his conflagrant blaze.

“ Come home, why don’t you you, making a fool of yourself! ”

“All right for you, Quintus,” I answered my reader back. He stood there holding a coat for me to put on.

“Are you comin’, Garnet, or am I goin’ to have to drag you . . . ?”

My mouth worked to say something, but only spittle came out, which was good because usually even my spit glands don’t work. Maybe the coming hurricane was curing them.

“ You can thank God I didn’t kill your master .” Quintus reported Daventry as having made this statement as the sheep rancher’s son was packing to leave.

“Ain’t that a joke,” Quintus went on, “packing when he has about four articles in a paper sack, not counting his socks, and no toothbrush.”

I don’t know what outraged Quintus more, his (Daventry’s) calling me his master, D’s offering to murder me for nothing, or his having no belongings to pack, or all of them together.

“Don’t you like Daventry by now?” I said after a rest in the conversation. I was back home leafing through a book that Quintus had just finished, some old play written in poetry.

“What are you staring at?” I hear Quintus’ voice after a long silent spell rising in alarm.

I looked up from my perusing to study his troubled face.

I put that book away, but he dove for the place in it where I had studied and perused.

I do not have much memory, I can hardly recall my mother’s face now, and as I’ve said in this story of my days, even the daily events fog after an hour of their happening, but the words of that old play, the title of which of course I’ve lost in disremembrance, were engraved in my brain like electric lights over a movie house:

I began to recite it then to Quintus, I think, as soon as his hand had found my place in the book:

I was never sure what happened after that, and even if Quintus had stayed beside me at that climax of catastrophe, I doubt he would be able to recollect it either. I had never had a real quarrel with a black man, and I had never heard words like then come from his throat. I was blamed all upon a sudden, you might say, for all the wrongs com­mitted by one man against another since the dawning of the world, and all this while the hurricane was arriving. He taunted me likewise again and again with having let a mur­derer take my girl away from me.

I was so confused by Quintus’ reproaches, and I had taken so many pills that day, gradually it seemed to me he was the master and had drove me out from my house, I was untenanted, that is, and had no land . . . But though I heard his sorry voice later calling “ Come back, Garnet . . . Come back, Montrose !” I ran out into the night and into the little woods behind the house, I was on my way to the dance hall, I reckon, when I run across a group of people in outlandish get-up, chanting. I didn’t know if I imagined them or not, anyhow I never saw them again after that night, but there about ten to fifteen, all dressed in nightgowns, their heads shaved, and with white paint on their faces, most of them in beads, and yelling some words that couldn’t be English. They seized me for a while and asked if I would stay with them and worship their Lord.

I remember telling them about Daventry stealing my girl. They knew all this already, to judge by the expression on their nodding countenances, and they held me tight, which reminded me of how Daventry had danced with me under the revolving dance-hall moon. I knew I was mad then, that my brain had finally suffered the shame and ruin of my body and had likewise turned to the consistency of mulberry wine.

It was at that moment it struck. But it struck again and again, it was all strikes. The firmament parted, to judge by the sickening sound, like all God’s handiwork had been throwed down by him in disgust, and the universe smashed to little bits and pieces. I saw, if I can trust to recollection, a whole forest rise and fly into the turbulence, pieces of buildings and bird feathers, clothing and earth, and sheets of water fell and then rose like the ocean had gone up to replace the heavens. There were sounds so terrible I felt my eardrums split, and where the sky had been black as a hundred midnights rushed this new heaven that was the mountain-high sea.

I lay in some hollow where a forest had once been. I was fearful to open my eyes, and fearful not to. I felt my clothes, and for some reason they were not as wet as they should be. Then I looked upwards. There was the sky again, but of course it would never be a real sky again. Its light was coming from too far away, I thought, and was not warmed by the sun I had known. And all around me the teeth of this great wind had left nothing untouched.

“ I don’t have too long. ” I remember saying that. I don’t know how long I had laid there since I escaped from the band of those shaved-head people in nightgowns. I don’t have too long now , I kept saying. I was unharmed, it was my mind didn’t seem to work now, my body was recovered. I walked straight on because the familiar trees and cliffs and gently sloping beaches had all been torn from their sites, and I was walking in a new land.

The first thing I know I was standing in front of Widow Rance’s big house. Save for the ravages about the house like lost trees and torn up earth, her home stood without a mark on it. The back screen door was unlatched. I walked up the steps, each creaking like to be heard a mile away, and I was already beginning to weep a little, it was the pills, it was Quintus’ cruelty and bitter reproaches, no, I was mad, that was what, I was mad for I had been sane too long, like the doc had said long ago, “ Don’t hold it all in, Garnet, tell the world what you feel and keep locked within, let it all spill out, boy .”

Don’t you ever say boy to a Virginia white man, I had replied to the doc.

I stood now in Daventry and Georgina’s wedding room, for now it all rushed back to remembrance. I had, after all, attended the marriage ceremony at the Grace Evangelical church, and I pained Georgina, I think, by my quoting during the service in audible tones from one of those books, instead of listening to all the preacher said addressing us as “ Dearly beloved ,” and “ I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement ,” and finally “ With this ring I thee wed ”—well right over the voice of the minister I (I remembered now) muttered these profane but maybe older words picked up from Quintus’ voice and let them be heard in the church, this is what comes of being a slave to a nigger and hearing things without sense, for I prophesied aloud:

“Once in Sparta,

at the palace of golden-haired Menelaus, maidens with bloom of hyacinth in their hair danced before the new-painted bridal chamber.”

“Oh, Garnet, thank God you’ve come,” Georgina was speaking to me now. The wedding, you see, along with the hurricane was past. “Be strong now, won’t you?” she admonished when she saw me close my eyes.

“I’ll take you to his room.” She led me by the arm.

That was a big house that the Widow Rance had, my grandfather’s don’t compare, and we seemed to walk acres and acres that morning, if it was morning, but of course I kept making her tarry and loiter and say little things, I didn’t want to get to his room too soon. I explained also in detail to Widow Rance my fight with Quintus, and that he was leaving me for some high-class black folks in Richmond who had untold wealth, and I told her also how I had been dispossessed, and she was so understanding, though she didn’t listen close to what I said.