James Purdy: In a Shallow Grave

“Let me tell you something,” Edgar began.

He was a short, stubby man, came only to my breastbone, for as the doc always said when I felt I was too much a goblin to be counted among mankind, “ Remember your height, Garnet. You have the great bone structure of the English-speaking race . . .” (I am six foot four in my stocking feet).

“Now see here,” Edgar was going on, starting to touch my shoulder and then drawing back suddenly. “You have scared that poor woman nearly into her grave. She has a fear of you that is killing her. She may even pull up stakes and move away.”

“No, Edgar,” I began proudly. “Let me tell you something. I have news that puts your cocky little know-it-all palaver to shame . . .”

“What’s in this letter then that I am to bear?” Edgar Doust wanted to know, drawing back.

“Nothing anybody need be ashamed of having writ or to receive,” I tossed back at him.

“All right then,” he said, starting to saunter off, and I handed him his money for the poultry, milk, and eggs. “But if I hear you has put anything low-down in this letter, and I am the bearer of it . . . watch out!”

I am in such an absentminded distant frame of mind that people often say goodbye to me or give me whole long speeches and then leave and I haven’t heard what they said at all or noticed they have even left. Then suddenly I come out from this brown study and I am sitting looking at vacant chairs. When young men are not reading to me or rubbing my feet, I sometimes say aloud the names of my buddies who were blown up with me. Being Virginians their names are all sort of like mine, names city people say they find odd or made-up when here they are the real names of this country. Still they are hard, I guess, to pronounce for outsiders.

But Widow Rance, though she loathed and despised me and would rather meet an army of black spiders than see me behind the hollyhocks, here she had give me a reprieve by her kind words issued through that conceited snot James Powell. He done that one good thing anyhow, given me a shred of hope. Though dead I could tell one person some of my thoughts even though she forbade me to tell them face to face as she would had I been counted among the living.

It must have been the middle of June, because the bob-whites were making such a fuss in the woods as it was their mating time, and they were hollering to one another, and this black fellow about eighteen came up and rapped on the screen door. I don’t know whether he had heard of me or not, evidently not really for he started to speak as I stood slightly shaded by the screen, holding the Book of Prophecies in my right hand, and commencing to lift the latch and saying, “What you want?”

He started to speak again, his tongue moving and his lips twisting, but no words came out the second time either.

“Mrs. Pettison wonders if you wants the goats,” he finally got out after looking every which way when he spoke.

“Why, what does she want to give them to me for?” I inquired.

“Old Mr. Pettison is dead, and she can’t keep them no more,” he replied. “She gonna move to Richmond.”

“What are you, their hired man?”

I opened the door and let him in.

We was in the kitchen now, if I recollect accurately, and I invited him to sit down partly, I think, so he wouldn’t fall down. There was a sliver in my finger that was causing me no end of pain, and having laid down the Book of Prophecies on the tablecloth, I was trying to work it out with a tiny pair of scissors. When I quit looking in his direction to get this sliver out he got easier with me. I heard him tell me his name after a while, Quintus Pearch.

“Why I know your folks, Quintus.”

Just then we both looked up at the same time and saw the goats had come up on the back porch and were looking through the screen.

“Why there’s five of the buggers, Quintus,” I said. “I don’t know, I never kept goats before . . . What I’m really looking for,” and I studied him a little bit out of the corner of an eye, “is a sort of helper around here for myself . . .”

Before I knew what had happened, he was working that sliver out from my finger without being asked.

“Mrs. Pettison’s niece Miss Ledsam must have been the one sent you about the goats, wasn’t it?” I went on talking to keep from screaming as he took out the sliver, for my flesh, you see, all falls away at the slightest pressure, exposing the bones.

He showed me the sliver now caught in the blades of the scissors.

I thanked him, and then hurried to get out, “Excuse me, but can you read?”

“I read, Mr. Montrose.”

“What do you read?”

“Anything printed I can run my eye over.”

“Can you read . . . aloud?”

“How do you mean that?” Quintus inquired.

“I mean, if I was to put a book in your hands and I sat on a chair, see, when I’m not well, especially come winter, would you sit and face me and read out loud to me?”

Quintus thought about this, and then I rushed into the next room, and took down a dusty volume of history and put it in his hands and said, “Read this, why don’t you, any place at all will do.”

Quintus held the book as if it was as alive as one of the young goats outside, that is the book seemed to struggle in his hands and want down, but he began nonetheless to read very neatly and fluidly from this book writhing in his strong fingers:

“You shed the blood of my brother on the banks of the Mississippi twenty years ago, and what then? I am here today, thank God, to vindicate the principles baptized in his blood.”

I took the book from his hands, just as it was about to wiggle out from his grasp, and put it down on the cloth.

“I could pay you good, Quintus,” I said after complimenting him in my mind on the way he could read, “I’m most desperate for company in the bargain . . . Can you rub cold feet, by the way?”

“I couldn’t leave Mama,” Quintus finally said. “She most bedridden.”

“Aha . . . Why don’t you want the goats?” I sort of turned the subject.

“Well,” Quintus stumbled around, “we don’t want the care of animals now.”

“Well, I want the goats,” I told him, looking out through the screen.

One was only a small kid, and I went out on the back porch and picked it up and brought it in. “I want the goats,” I said again, holding the little fellow to me. Its fur was quite damp, and I asked Quintus to reach me a cloth and I wiped him dry. “Why didn’t I think of having goats before?” I said.

I looked up suddenly and saw that expression on his face that everybody eventually gets when they look at me. We both looked down immediately at the floor.

“Do you find me so sickening to look at, Quintus?” I said throatily after a long pause.

“No, sir.”

“You read good, Quintus . . . Would you read for me in the evening, or maybe rub my feet when they get to be on the ice-cold order?”

“I could come in the evenings, after I tend to Mama . . .”

“I’ll pay you good, Quintus.”

“Tell you what,” Quintus began, standing up, “I could come over most days in the P.M., and do your chores.”

“I don’t want chores, Quintus. I want somebody to read to me and rub my feet.”

He looked discontented and troubled.

“Well, don’t come then, Quintus, don’t come . . . I have to have my feet rubbed, though . . . I’m not trying to . . . you know . . .”

“I’ll come at four today if you want me to,” he all of a sudden blurted out, and rose.

“By the way, do you know Widow Rance, Quintus, who lives down the road?”

“Oh yes.”

“You’re a familiar face to her and all?”

“Widow Rance knows me, knows Mama, yes . . .”