James Purdy - In a Shallow Grave

“You can stay here, Garnet,” she kept saying, thinking, I guess, I had no home now. “You’re always welcome here, remember that. The welcome mat is always out for a Vir­ginia boy.”

But it was too soon! She should have warned me, even if I knowed. It was way too soon.

We stood before this mammoth four-poster bed made from walnut, and there Daventry lay, a little tiny trace of a smile on his face. I think I kept watch on his breast for what seemed like six months. Of course it never raised once, and then I would look at her, and she would nod and smile so sad. A red circle of blood not really dry traced it­self around his hairline.

“The undertaker will be here any minute,” she said, “and I thank God you have come in time. So look all you care to, on account of you were so close, he told me.”

I walked over to the bed and lifted up the sheet and looked at him down to his feet.

“Do you really think he was a sheep-rancher’s son?” I inquired.

“If he told you so, I expect.”

“Were you very happy?” I inquired.

Georgina was telling me about how it had happened. After the wedding ceremony, they had decided to begin their honeymoon, but the roads were blocked on account of the hurricane warnings, which was supposed to have bypassed our community, but at the last moment there was a radio warning, and an alert, and almost an entire flock of birds was killed and throwed right against the lighthouse and then the hurricane began in earnest.

Georgina had gone inside the house when she realized it had hit.

“It was the wind done it,” she said, “a freak wind within the hurricane itself. It lifted Daventry up and carried him to that clump of pitch-pine trees and then just left him standing at the base of the tree trunk, so that when I went in search of him I thought he was just waiting for me, Garnet, but when I went up to him and spoke, I saw he was mashed into that tree as though he belonged in it, and his arms was stretched out as if he would enfold me.”

I kept lifting and putting back the sheet, and whether it was the slight breeze created by my raising the sheet or what, his eyes came open and rested on me.

“Do you have any pennies, Georgina?” I said. She had begun to cry then, and she pointed to the bureau where there was some money which had been removed from his pants pockets. I stepped over to the bureau and took up two pennies. I trembled a little, and deposited them on his blue eyes.

The placing of the pennies on his eyelids is the thing, I do believe, that will never leave me out of all the things I have done or had done to me. Why that is I will never know.

Shortly after this Quintus disappeared. I had feared for a long long time that he too was a casualty of the hurricane until one day Edgar Doust drove past to see if I was in need of any produce, and he let out a lot of sly hints based on sly rumors that Quintus had been taken up by some smart rich black people in Richmond whom he had some­how met before but had run into again during the bad storms, and had gone off somewhere with them. I didn’t pursue the conversation or ask any information about where this “somewhere” might be, though for all I knew, it might be Africa since he had been threatening to go back there to his homeland, but he knew as well as I that his real homeland and mine is Virginia.

Then I went into the hospital, though there was nothing new wrong with me. I simply asked admission.

But the second or third day after I had been readmitted there, the doc came into my room and then was about to step out again for he thought he had the wrong patient.

“Why, Garnet, is this you?” he inquired after several double takes.

I had known even before Daventry was killed something was changing with me. It was certainly something the doc had never promised. My appearance of having been turned to mulberry wine, actually my appearance of having been massacred and yet left among the living had been changing ever since Daventry had arrived. I will always look horrible, of course, but now instead of a massacred man—and this is what the doc took in immediately—I look in his words merely like a man that has been in a boxing match every day for five years without stopping. So even now the few times I go to a strange place people will say or whisper behind my back, “ What do you suppose the other fellow looks like? ” A kind of standard joke around here.

Winter came, most of the birds had left except the chickadees, and it was colder and rawer than I ever remembered it. Sometimes in those long-drawn-out evenings I would go to the hall mirror and study myself. To tell the honest truth I think I look worse now that I have turned back into resembling any Virginia white man who gets beat up frequently to someone I do not know. But it is no even slight exaggeration to say that I have come back from another world.

I was thinking then of putting more ads in the newspaper and interviewing new applicants, but when you have met the real applicant, and if you count Quintus also and say applicants, then why have any more? I read those hard deep books also between whiles occasionally, but all the pith and substance has gone out of them. Like today I picked up a tome at random and read,

They used no images to represent the object of their worship, nor did they meet in temples or buildings of any kind for the performance of their sacred rites. A circle of stones constituted their sacred place, situated near some stream or under the shadow of a grove or wide-spreading oak.

I thought of the ruined dance hall, and could not wait to get my togs on and visit there. Why had I not gone sooner? Yes, for it was all that was left, all that would ever partly satisfy my longing.

I hurried up the cliff, but at the top, my stay in the hospital having made me soft, I sort of gave out, losing my breath, but I got up again and then ran all the way. I decided once I got inside all would be revealed, all would be known forever and ever. I felt he would come and explain everything.

But it was a pretty sorry mess inside. The great revolving moon was gone with its polka-dot lights, and the piano was busted, together with the bandstand, innocent victims of the hurricane and the flood of rain concomitant with it.

I stood a long time weeping, for my lachrymal glands have come back to normal along with my complexion. Then my eye, still swimming, spied with some difficulty the old victrola. I went over to it, and wound it up. “On the Alamo” was already on the turntable, and I set the motor to going.

I was dancing all by myself, as happy as one who had lost everything, even the stain of his horror, could be, when I heard the big front door open. Then steps. I dared not turn round, I dared not stop dancing, and the music sounded so pitifully far-off and thin, so old-fashioned and vanished, and long ago with its words about garden gates and moonlight and roses and love’s dream being o’er. My new tears had also blinded me, so there was no point even trying to see who had come in, but I felt a gentle hand on the nape of my neck.

“Daventry?” I inquired.

“No, it’s just me, Garnet,” the voice said.

I turned then to look and it was of course her, who else?

She had put her arms about me, I had never quit dancing anyhow, and we moved off into the center part of the circular ballroom with the music reaching us fainter and fainter.

The record stopped, and we stopped. We looked into one another’s eyes.

“So you knew my secret all the time then too, along with him?” I said.

All of a sudden the music started again, the same number, and we stood hardly moving our feet at all, but holding one another, the way you hold people in dreams you don’t want to go on holding, and at the same time you can’t let go. I smelled her favorite heliotrope perfume and there was never any skin like hers, if snow was warm it would be Georgina, Daventry’s skin might have looked fresher, but it was not soft as falling snow.