Трумэн Капоте - Other Voices, Other Rooms

Zoo took a reasoning tone. "Papadaddy, now honey, we all us gonna melt… so hot Mister Randolph done change clothes three times today." But Jesus would not listen, and asked for a quilt to wrap around his legs, a wool sock to stretch over his head: the whole house, he argued, was rattling with wind: why, look, there was old Mr. Skully, his fine red beard turned white with frost. So Zoo went out in the dark of the yard to find an armful of kindling.

Joel, left in charge, started when Jesus beckoned to him secretively. The old man was sitting in a rattan rocker, a worn scrapquilt of velvet flowers covering his knees. He could not stay in bed: a horizontal position interfered with his breathing. "Rock my rocker, son," he said in a reedy voice, "it's kinda restful like… makes me feel I'm ridin in a wagon an got a long way to go." A kerosene lamp burned in the room. The chair, shadowed on the wall, swished a gentle drowsy sound. "Can't you feel the cold, son?"

"Mama was always cold, too," said Joel, prickly chill tingling his spine. Don't die, he thought, and as he pushed the chair back and forth the runners whispered, don't die, don't die. For if Jesus Fever died, then Zoo would go away, and there would be no one but Amy, Randolph, his father. It was not so much these three, however, but the Landing, and the fragile hush of living under a glass bell. Maybe Randolph would take him away: there had been some mention of a trip. And he'd written Ellen again, surely something would come of that.

"Papadaddy," said Zoo, lugging in a bundle of wood, "you is mighty thoughtless makin me hunt round out there in the dark where theys all kinda wild creatures crawlin just hungry for a nip outa tasty me. They is a wildcat smell on the air, they is, I declare. And who knows but what Keg's done runaway from the cabin gang? Joel, honey, latch the door."

When the fire commenced to burn Jesus asked that his chair be brought nearer the hearth. "I used to could play the fiddle," he said, wistfully watching the flames slide upward"… rheumatism stole all the music outa my fingers." He shook his head, and sucked his gums, and spit into the fire. "Don't fuss with me, child," he complained as Zoo tried to adjust the quilt. "Tell you now, bring me my sword." She returned from the other room bearing a beautiful sword with a silver handle: across the blade there was inscribed, Unsheath Me Not Without Reason-Sheath Me Not Without Honor. "Mister Randolph's granddaddy gimme this, that be more 'n sixty year ago." In the past days he'd one by one called forth all his treasures: a dusty cracked violin, his derby with the feather, a Mickey Mouse watch, his high-button orange shoes, three little monkeys who neither saw, heard nor spoke evil, these and other precious things lay strewn around the cabin, for he would not allow them to be put again out of sight.

Zoo presented Joel with a handful of pecans and gave him a pair of pliers to crack them with. "I'm not hungry," he said and rested his head in her lap. It was not a comfortable lap like Ellen's. You could feel too precisely tensed muscle and sharp bone. But she played her fingers through his hair, and that was sweet. "Zoo," he said softly, not wanting the old man to hear, "Zoo, he's going to die, isn't he?"

"I spec so," she said, and there was little feeling in her voice.

"And then will you go away?"

"I reckon."

At this Joel straightened and looked at her angrily. "But why, Zoo?" he demanded. 'Tell me why!"

"Hush, child, speak quiet." A slow moment followed in which she twisted her neckerchief, felt for and found the charm Little Sunshine had given her. "Ain't gonna hold good forever," she said, tapping the charm. "Someday he gonna come back here looking for to slice me up. I knows it good as anythin. I seen it in my dreams, and the floor don't creak, but what my heart stops. Every time a dog howls I think, that's him, that's him on his way, on accounta dogs just naturally hate that Keg and start to holler time they smell him."

"I'd protect you, Zoo," he pleaded. "Honest, I'd never let nobody hurt you."

Zoo laughed, and her laugh seemed to fly around the room like a frightening black bird. "Why, Keg could drop you with just the look of his eyes!" She began to shiver in the suffocating room. "One day he gonna come crawlin through that window, and won't nobody hear nothin; else I'll find him waitin in the dark tween here and the house, gotta long shiny razor: Lawd, I seen it a million times. So I gotta run, gotta go where there's snow and he ain't gonna catch me."

Joel squeezed her wrist. "If you'd let me go with you, Zoo… oh, we could have such a lot of fun."

"Don't talk foolishness, baby."

The yellow tabby scooted from under the bed, darted before the fire, arched its back and hissed. "What he see?" cried Jesus, pointing his sword: firelight ran up the gaunt blade like a gold spider. "Answer me, cat, you see somethin?" The cat relaxed on its haunches, and fixed the old man coldly. Jesus giggled. "Try to joke ol Jesus," he said, wagging his finger. "Try to scare him." His blindlike blue-looking eyes closed; he tilted back his head so that the stocking-foot dangled like a Chinese pigtail, sighed and said: "Ain't got no time left for to joke, cat." And then, holding the sword to his chest: "Mister Skully gimme this my weddin day; me and my woman, us just jumped over a broom, and Mister Skully, he say, 'All right now, Jesus, you is married. Travelin Preacher come tell me and my woman that ain't proper, say the Lawd ain't gonna put up with it: sure enough, the cat done killed Toby, and my woman grieves herself so she hangs on a tree, big cozy lady got the branch bent double: back when I was just so high my daddy cut his switches offen that tree…" remembering, it was as if his mind were an island in time, the past surrounding sea.

Joel cracked a pecan, and tossed the hull into the fire. "Zoo," he said, "did you ever hear of anybody called Alcibiades?"

"Who that you say?"

"Alcibiades. I don't know. It's somebody Randolph says I look like."

Zoo considered. "You musta heard wrong, honey. The name he most likely said is Alicaster. Alicaster Jones is a Paradise Chapel boy what used to sing in the choir. Looks like a white angel, so pretty he got the preacher and all kinda men and ladies lovin him up. Leastwise, that's what folks say."

"I'll bet I can sing better than him," said Joel. "You know, I bet I could sing in vaudeville shows and make a whole lot of money, enough money to buy you a fur coat, Zoo, and dresses like they show in the Sunday papers."

"I want red dresses," said Zoo, entering the spirit. "Look real nice in red, I do. We gonna have us a car?"

Joel was delirious. It seemed so real. There he was bathed by spotlights, and wearing a tuxedo with a gardenia in his lapel. But there was only one song he knew how to sing all the way through. So he said, "Listen, Zoo," and sang, "Silent Night, Holy Night, all is calm, all is bright, round yon Vir…" his voice, up to this point high and sweet like a girl's, broke in an ugly, mystifying way.

"Uh huh," Zoo nodded knowingly. "Little tadpole growin to be fish."

In the fireplace a log, cracking dramatically, sent out a sizzle of sparks; then, with no warning, a nest of newborn chimney sweeps fell into the flames and quite swiftly split with fire: the little birds burned without sound or movement. Joel, somewhat stunned, remained silent, and Zoo's face was blankly surprised. Only Jesus spoke: "In fire," he said, and had it not been so quiet you could not have heard him, "first comes water, and last comes the fire. Don't say no place in the Good Book why we's in tween. Do it? Can't member… not nothin. You," his voice rose shrilly, "you-all! It's gettin powerful warm, it's gettin fire!"

One grey curiously cool afternoon a week later Jesus Fever died. It was as if someone had been tickling his ribs, for he died in a spasm of desperate giggles. "Maybe," as Zoo said, "God done told somethin funny." She dressed him in his little suspender suit, his orange-leather shoes and derby hat; she squeezed a bunch of dogtooth violets in his hand, and put him in a cedar chest: there he remained for two days while Amy, with Randolph's aid, decided the location of his grave: under the moon tree, they said finally. The moon tree, so named for its round ivory blooms, grew in a lonely place far back from the Landing, and here Zoo shoveled away with no one to help but Joel: the mild excavation they managed at last to make reminded him of all the backyard swimming pools dug in summers that seemed now so long ago. Transporting the cedar chest was an arduous business; in the end they hitched a rope to John Brown, the old mule, and he hauled it to the foot of the grave. "Papadaddy would be mighty tickled could he know who it is is pullin him home," said Zoo. "Papadaddy surely did love you, John Brown: trustiest mule he ever saw, he said so many a time: now you member that." At the last minute Randolph sent word he could not be present for the funeral, and Amy, who brought this message, said a prayer in his name, mumbled, that is, a sentence or so, and made a cross: she wore for the occasion a black glove. But for Jesus there were no mourners: the three in the moon-tree shade were like some distracted group assembled at a depot to wish a friend goodbye, and, as such gatherings long for the whistle of the train that will release them, they wanted to hear the first thud of earth upon the cedar lid. It seemed odd to Joel nature did not reflect so solemn an event: flowers of cottonboll clouds within a sky as scandalously blue as kitten-eyes were offensive in their sweet disrespect: a resident of over a hundred years in so narrow a world deserved higher homage. The cedar chest capsized as they lowered it into the grave, but Zoo said, "Pay no mind, honey, we ain't got the strenth of heathen giants." She shook her head. "Pore Papadaddy, goin to heaven face down." Unfolding her accordion, she spread her legs wide apart, threw back her head, hollered: "Lawd, take him to thy bosom, tote him all around, Lawd don't you never, don't you never put him down, Lawd, he seen the glory, Lawd, he seen the light…" Up until now Joel had not altogether accepted Jesus Fever's death; anybody who'd lived that long just couldn't die; way back in his mind he kind of felt the old man was playing possum; but when the last note of Zoo's requiem became stillness, then it was true, then Jesus was really dead.