James Purdy: In a Shallow Grave

Again he shook his head, but he had the freshly sharpened pencil ready, and was ready to go:

Dearest, only dear, I began all over again,

I am getting on better now, and some adjustments are being made. I have goats now, which are mine from the death of Mr. Pettison, brought by Quintus, who by the way I thought of as having as an applicant, and I believe he will look in on me from time to time, but, dear lady, this letter is to introduce you to . . . Daventry . . . He is from the grazing lands of Utah, and will be attending me as an applicant. I believe him and me will get on, and I would like to have you trust him also. Never fear, I will never ever again intrude myself on your presence, and remember there is nothing on or about my person which can bring disease or other complications because the army docs assured me without quite swearing on the Bible I am absolutely sterilized from any Indo China germs, so be of good cheer. And know that I love you more than life.

I had not been studying his face whilst I was dictating because the effort and pain of expressing my thoughts had taken all my attention and strength, but when I looked down on him from my six feet four I was struck with amazement at his expression. He was looking at me with a kind of sick awe, certainly with amazed wonder.

“What is it?” Daventry, I inquired.

“Nothing, Garnet.”

“Yes, there is something. You think I’m crazy, don’t you . . . ?”

“No I don’t,” Daventry countered. “I don’t think that.”

“Well . . .”

“I just wonder at it all,” he spoke after a while in a whisper. Then all of a sudden he swatted a daytime mosquito that had settled on his cheek, and having swatted it his cheek was all covered with blood for it must have been biting us all night. I walked over to him, and almost without thinking I was going to do it, took out a clean pocket handkerchief and wiped the blood from off his face. He looked at me with more wonder.

“Now, Daventry,” I went on, “we seal this letter just as though it was to go through the U.S. mails, and you walk the mile and a half or so down the back road and put it in her hands.”

“With pleasure,” he said, jumping up like he was coming to from a nap, and took the letter from my loose hands.

When he was gone, I put my face to the wall and began to bawl.

“He pities me, God damn it,” I said, “that’s what that look meant, and God damn it and him I won’t have it. I won’t have the motherfucker pity me . . .”

And at the same time I was celestially happy at the look he had given me.

It was the first time for I don’t know when that someone had looked at me like I was another man, a little nauseated sure, but still like he seen me as I was. And here I was too almost shedding tears for the first time in so long after writing down on these slips of paper that I could not cry, well, it was mostly bawling, not real tears come out from my lachrymal glands, but still some did. A milestone.

When he was gone, then, when nobody was about and the shadows begin to fall, my own secret from everybody would come to the fore. Everybody knows about my secret of reading books I don’t properly understand, whose words I don’t properly fathom, but I don’t think anybody had found out where I go when all is dark and still. I left Virginia when I was only, as folks reminded me, little more than a boy, seventeen, and went to war, but though I was gone some nine years, I did not come back so much a man, which is what the sergeant and the captain promised us when we had took the oath of allegiance, I came back like somebody immemorial, drained of everything except some tiny shreds of memory. For I felt I had been gone a million years. Not only did I come back looking like somebody that was not me, but everybody close to me had left or died, the old houses were vacant about the seashore, and the young men and women were either gone or looked old and unremembering. I mentioned I believe some time ago that I was this great dancer, loved to dance all night, danced in the ballroom long after the band had left if any young girl would stay on. Then we would go out beside the side entrance of the hall, where the musicians used to come in carrying their instruments, beside a little dam over the old river, and neck and spoon and kiss until dawn. Then we would walk home hand in hand as slow as clouds when there is no breeze.

That dance hall has long been in disuse, partly because of the long war I was in, and young people have left for all other parts of the country, and the people who are left don’t dance. There is a shortcut to this dance hall nobody knows but me, right back of my property, there is a sort of little steep cliff you climb, and once at the top a good fifty feet or so you go for quite a stretch through little pine trees, and rough ground, then you come to a pond that shines most blue at night, and beyond the pond is another incline, then more trees, and from the top of a sort of cliff again you look down on the Marigold Meadows, though the sign with these big letters is defaced, certainly the light-bulbs that illuminated the letters are nearly all gone, the big windows are all busted, the great staircase which led to the box office is full of rubble and pine cones so that you have to take a running jump and leap over it, but once inside things look somewhat the same, the big dance floor itself almost the size of an acre is still sort of shiny like just polished, the bandstand is still up where some of the best saxophonists and piano players once sat, and above the floor itself is that great revolving many-colored moon which flicked down on us dancers all its purple and red and orange and white motes, turning us into strange creatures who were I do swear experiencing our only happiness. The many-colored moon above us turned us into people with entirely different clothes from what we had on, our hair became purple, our hands orange, our shoes diamond studded, but the happiness in our eyes was our own as we pressed against our young girls’ nipples and firm belly, we lost all track of time or where we had driven in from, or our names or tomorrow, yes, for those few hours in the Marigold Meadows it was, who knows? . . . almost worth having been born, we could say anyhow we were full of some sort of pure joy.

I would return there secretly, then, when night came, would light a candle which I kept there, for I feared the law might see any stronger illumination and come to investigate, a phonograph, a windup kind, had been left behind with some old records, some jazz, a few rock, and I would turn it on and dance with myself, the candle making the many-colored moon seem to gyrate again until one visit very late I found by turning a switch the damned thing did work just like in past times. But mostly I sat at the piano, which though missing a few black keys could still be played, and I would strum a little, and then before I knew it it was dawn.

When Daventry moved in I felt I would not dare go so often, and would have to wait also until he was asleep and then I would steal out. The first night I did it I don’t think he noticed, but after that, well, I am getting ahead of my story, and what I am trying to recollect now is how he had gone to the Widow Rance with my latest letter, and I was sitting on pins and needles wondering how she was going to take the new applicant.

“ You was gone one whale of a time ” was what I had decided to say to him when he got back, but somehow when he did walk in, I felt too glad to see him to scold him. What I had feared all the time he was away, without quite knowing it then, was that he had left me. So, I would have looked pale with worry when he sort of tiptoed in late had my complexion not been transformed by war not to show pallor.