James Purdy: In a Shallow Grave

He looked at me for some time. I didn’t know what that look meant, and as a matter of fact I was thinking too how I was going to sneak off to the dance hall without being missed. You see, it had to be kept secret. I didn’t want him or nobody to know I went there. It was all that was left of my past life, when I had been young and personable, the blood had coursed in my veins, everything was ahead, everything was then and now , there was no yesterday or tomorrow, and now there is no time at all, tomorrow is not a word I can pronounce, there is no now really, and yesterday I never think of except as dance music. All I have is the letters, the applicants, and the dance hall, and none of them is real. I do not even believe in death because what I am is emptier than death itself.

“ So how did you find the Widow Rance? ” I said in my tough soldier voice, which some people have described as coming from my big size thirteen shoes.

He sat down, and looked nowhere now in particular. “She accepted the letter,” he began, “but then she made me read it to her.” He passed his hand over his face, and a strand of his corn-tassel hair came down.

“That’s new,” I informed him. “Of course, the other bearers was mostly black fellows, so maybe your color has something to do with it.”

I ushered him now to come with me into the parlor, where we hardly ever went because it is the most stiff and grandfathery of all the rooms.

“Where did she have you sit?” I wondered after we got settled.

“We went into a parlor like this one,” Daventry replied, looking around this unfamiliar part of the house. “She offered me some shortbread and coffee.”

He stood up then, sort of bending like a young choke-cherry tree in one of our bad winds. “Then, Garnet,” he went on, “as I said she made me read the letter to her, but instead of reading it once or even twice, I had to read it a dozen times . . .”

“And you obliged her . . . a dozen?” I sort of gasped. It was me now that was not looking at him, and he was looking at me full in the face like I was any other fellow he had ever met.

“She is a beautiful young woman.”

Later I realized he had said this sentence in a prayerful way.

“The way I came upon her,” I began, like when I talk to myself, “is like this. I was walking in the woods shortly after I come back from over there you know.” I stopped just a second on that word there, “I had been back only a short time, and everything looked different. I mean I could find my way around but it was like I was using a map of a place I had never yet visited, for the real terrain didn’t seem like mine or where I was born. But I knew of course her house, it is one of the biggest and whitest in this part of the state. It was night on this time of my return home, and I stopped in a clump of woods, and without warning see her in her kitchen. She had no lights on but a kerosene lamp. I knew her at once after all the years, and I was about to turn back into the clump of woods and go the short stretch home, when all of a sudden she took off her blouse, and began to work up some kind of ointment there in the palm of one hand, which later I was to learn was cocoa butter, and she began to massage her nipples with this butter, oh so gently so tenderly, and I became so excited. I was like somebody who had eat of some strange plant, I had to hold my own mouth shut with my handkerchief, I bit my lips not to cry out and terrify her. I was so aroused, Daventry, so beside myself, I fell to the base of an old pine tree. I came then all over myself like I had burst open all my insides through and through, I felt like all my manhood had gushed out of me. She turned out the light by and by and I lay at the base of the tree on a carpet of pine needles. I don’t know if I had passed out or not. I lay on them pine needles carpet till morning . . .”

There began to be a division of work in my household largely owing to the fact that Daventry didn’t have all his front teeth and when he read to me this imperfection of his made me not understand all the words and his tongue moving across the upper part of his mouth like a snake’s also got a bit on my nerves but only when he read.

But just before the division was made and Quintus appointed as reader, I think Daventry suspected me, I mean suspected about me going to the dance hall. I mean I think he knew I had a secret. I didn’t know yet about his secret. But then he was all secrets. He should have been called Secret Daventry instead of Potter Daventry. Yes, his Christian name he kept a secret too for some weeks, and can you blame him, for Potter is about the worst name I ever heard baptized on a boy, if Daventry ever was baptized.

Quintus then was reinstated for reading, and he was sitting in a big straw-bottomed chair with dime-store glasses on, reading to me out of one of the more ancient of the books I have inherited:

“Before the victory of Lucius Lucullus in the war against Mithridates, that is down to 74 B.C., there were no cherry tress in Italy. Lucullus first imported them from Pontus . . .”

“Where you going, Daventry?” I interrupted the reading, or rather just punctuated it, for Quintus went right on:

“. . . and in 120 years they have crossed the ocean and got as far as Britain.”

“Why, the Widow Rance asked me to stop by her place this evening,” he replied to my question.

“But all the same no attention has succeeded in getting cherries to grow in Egypt. Of cherries the Arponian are the reddest, and the Lutatian the blackest, while the Caecilian kind is . . .”

“All right, Quints,” I said, “that will do for the P.M.”

I walked over to where Daventry was sort of slouching by the kitchen screen door, his hand in midair about to reach for the latch.

“You know I haven’t had time to write her a message today,” I told him.

“I know that,” he replied, sort of uppity I thought. I swallowed hard.

The understanding was you go only when you bear messages were the words that were about to come forth, but I checked them, and said instead. “Supposing you sit down a while until I pen a short message for you to take her.” I tried to keep the anger out of my voice.

“Suit yourself,” he mumbled.

I knew then he had been invited back by the Widow. My head was swimming, yet I had to go through with the pretense of writing her something. No words at all would come to me, except the usual old salutation My Only Darling when here she was driven to retch when she only thought of me, and yet, wait a moment now, I had been told nonetheless by two different parties she kept my letters, so at least the letters was all right and that gave me the second wind to give out.

I have split up the household chores now between Quintus and Daventry, and soon we are going to give a big party here when everything is painted and the Congoleum rugs brought down from the attic. We are also going to grow plants indoors so that in the winter it will look gay here. I am sure you found Daventry the most . . .

The pen had froze in my hands, for I became aware Daventry himself was standing over me watching my hand. The effrontery, the nerve, the cool gall. But instead of taking my ire out on Daventry it was poor Quintus now I rated and abused, for I could hear his honey voice still reading from that old Roman history book, like an elocution pupil, droning on about a Roman cherry which has an agreeable flavor but only if it is eaten under the tree on which it grows as it is so delicate that it won’t stand carriage.

“Stop it! Stop that!” I found myself shouting so close to Quintus’ glasses that they fogged over, but that devil went right on with his reading aloud.

I licked the envelope, handed the letter to Daventry, and rushed fleeing from my own house into the meadow and then begun to climb the cliff, but of course I could not go to the ruined dance hall now because the sun had not quite sunk out of sight in the western hills.