James Purdy: In a Shallow Grave

“Because the other thing I might ask you, and I don’t know why I forgot it, for it’s way and beyond the most important thing, is to deliver and fetch letters . . . Well, we’ll talk later . . . Till the P.M. then, Quints . . .”

It’s like I disremember Quintus’ ever coming on that P.M., though, but of course he come, and was to come and go again and was regular about a lot of things, but he didn’t have had to come in a way, because somebody else did.

Oh, there was other applicants too. I can’t begin to remember all of them, though I have wrote their names down on a slip of paper I keep in the family Bible, but none of them was right, and Quintus might have been too right, but you see this other person came, and that’s the real occasion of me writing down on, slip by slip of paper, this diary in my mind.

Let me try to say it like this. I thought he was a will-o’-the-wisp when I first laid eyes on him, for we have plenty of them here in the early summer. I had gone to let the goats sleep in one of the little sheds we used to have for sheep in the winter, the goats were making a fuss, I guess, at their strange surroundings, and I paused, after having locked them in, and I looked out toward the ocean, which was still as flat sand, and I saw this motionless something that looked like a light about maybe to go out.

“Who is that?” I said to this “appearance” which was now leaning on the pine tree as I spoke. “What are you about?” No answer.

I didn’t need any sign about warning trespassers on my land because I was dreaded more than a hundred riflemen.

Had my appearance scared the daylights out of whoever was leaning against that tree? I walked slowly over the sloping ground to the hemlock tree. There he was, the trespasser and staring at me with his open blue eyes, with his hair even lighter than mine, and a face that was most winsome except he had, as I was later to understand, no front teeth, which only made him somehow more agreeable, at least younger looking.

“Are you an . . . applicant?” I inquired at last, as he merely stared in my direction.

“Go away,” the trespasser finally spoke, and a moment later, “Can’t you leave me be, mister?”

“Go away, huh?” I chewed my ire. “Do you realize you’re on my property . . . ?”

“I’ll get in a minute. Give me a chance to catch my breath . . .”

Just then he slipped and fell to one knee, and I instinctively reached down and lifted him up, and then he caught a full view of my face as I was bending over him and he let out a yell of horror. Before I knew what I had done I had struck him, and I don’t think I have ever struck a man before except in self-defense in all my life, and I mean I really struck him, for the blow brought the blood.

He kept wiping off the blood and looking at it on his fingers, and paid no attention to my many apologies of “ I’m heartfelt sorry, I didn’t mean to, don’t know what come over me .”

Just then the smallest of the young goats, which had escaped from the shed where I put them, come wandering out and crying. The trespasser stooped down and began petting it.

“Well, what do you aim to do?” I questioned him at last, my anger sort of returning. “You can’t just stand here . . . Tell you what, I’ll invite you in even though you say you ain’t an applicant . . .”

He paid me no more attention, absorbed in his attentions with the kid.

Disgusted with him and his having made me lose control of myself I said, “ To hell with you then ” and went inside.

I got all wrapped up after a bit in taking apart an old hall clock that had belonged to my grandfather, and forgot all about the incident in the pine grove.

I don’t know how much time had slipped by, but I know it was dark, black dark out. I looked up from my sitting room where I was fixing the tiny wires of the clock and seen the trespasser standing at the kitchen screen door still holding the kid in his arms. We stared at one another through that long expanse of rooms as if he was looking at me from the entrance of the world to come.

Suddenly he reached to open the screen door and came inside with the goat.

“You can’t bring no animal in here,” I spoke sharply.

He paid no mind and sat down on the smallest kitchen chair with the kid in his lap. It had gone to sleep under his petting.

I came rushing then into the kitchen.

“You have a most irksome way of not answering questions,” I said. “I asked you if you was an applicant and you didn’t deign to answer.”

“I ain’t an applicant,” he replied, saucy, through his missing front teeth.

“Where you from then, and what do you want?”

“Utah,” he said after a deliberate hesitation.

Then for the first time he looked me straight in the face with his merciless wide-open sky-blue eyes, and then making a terrible sound, dropping the goat, he retched fearfully bending down trying desperately to vomit, but nothing coming up but a few strands of phlegm and water.

I left the kitchen and stumbled into the big front sitting room, and sat down under an old floor lamp with a shade decorated with tassels. I often played with these tassels when I was upset, but I was too upset now even to have the strength to touch one. In fact I felt then I was going to die. I felt again somehow like I had the day I and my buddies was all exploded together and we rose into the air like birds, and then fell to the erupting earth and the flames and the screams of aircraft and sirens and men calling through punctured bowels and brains. My face was bathed in a film like tears, but it wasn’t tears, it was the sweat of death.

My back was to the kitchen, you see, so I hardly noticed this hand on the back of my neck. It was a warm soft hand not unlike the goat. It moved gently on the nape of my neck, and then after it seemed I had gone to sleep I heard his sort of hillbilly, sort of goat voice inquiring, “ You was talking about an applicant. ”

“What of it?” I cried, taking hold of his hand and throwing it off of me like you would a beetle that had crawled on you.

“Well,” he said, putting his hand back on my neck, “I wondered what an applicant did.”

I wheeled round then and looked at him, for I had decided all of a sudden he was some runaway from the law.

“What would I want with a applicant who pukes when he looks at me, huh?” I shouted at him, beginning to rave. “A fucking little trespasser who feels he must puke and maybe shit when he sees my face. Get out! Get out of my house and off of my property, you little crud.”

He only looked at me then with his questioning sky-open eyes.

“What are the duties of this applicant?” he wondered, quiet as a spring zephyr.

My anger simmered down as I studied his eyes, and the vacant space of his missing teeth.

“What does he do?” I repeated after him, as if he had put me under a quieting draught like the doc used to hand me in a little paraffin cup full of something red and drowsy . . . “Why, what does a applicant do?” I said, staring at him like I had just awoke in the hospital and the nurse stood there and said, “ You’re better, Garnet. ”

“Can you bear messages?” I began cautiously with the most important duty. “That is deliver and fetch letters from down the road?”

“I don’t see why not,” he contested.

“I reckon you’re too good, being white, to rub feet.”

“I could take a try at that,” he said, looking down at my shoes.

“What size shoe do you wear?” he wondered.

I swallowed hard, and then replied, “Thirteen.”

“That’s a lot of rubbin’,” he remarked, and suddenly we both laughed.

He avoided looking at my face still, and I don’t suppose anybody ever got any pleasure looking at it, but of course once the girls in school had liked to gaze at me and flirt, that’s no exaggeration either, I was once able to put a crush on all the girls, well, that was like an age ago, if not in time, in events . . .