The Wild Palms: [If I Forget Thee Jerusalem] Read online

  She did not even offer to take the dish from him. “It’s not soup, it’s gumbo,” he said. “My wife made it. She—we.……” She did not move, looking at him as he stooped fatly in his crumpled seersucker, with the careful tray; he did not even hear the man until she spoke to him.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Take it into the house, Harry.” Now she was not even looking at the doctor anymore. “Thank your wife,” she said.

  He was thinking about his two tenants as he descended the stairs behind the jerking pencil of light, into the staling odor of gumbo in the lower hall, toward the door, the knocking. It was from no presentiment, premonition that the knocker was the man named Harry. It was because he had thought of nothing else for four days—this snuffy middleaging man in the archaic sleeping garment now become one of the national props of comedy, roused from slumber in the stale bed of his childless wife and already thinking of (perhaps having been dreaming of) the profound and distracted blaze of objectless hatred in the strange woman’s eyes; and he again with that sense of imminence, of being just beyond a veil from something, of groping just without the veil and even touching but not quite, almost seeing but not quite, the shape of truth, so that without being aware of it he stopped dead on the stairs in his old fashioned list slippers, thinking swiftly: Yes. Yes. Something which the entire race of men, males, has done to her or she believes has done to her.

  The knocking came again now, as if the knocker had become aware that he had stopped through some alteration of the torch’s beam seen beneath the door itself and now began to knock again with that diffident insistence of a stranger seeking aid late at night, and the doctor moved again, not in response to the renewed knocking who had had no presentiment, but as though the renewal of the knocking had merely coincided with the recurrent old stale impasse of the four days’ bafflement and groping, capitulant and recapitulant; as though instinct perhaps moved him again, the body capable of motion, not the intellect, believing that physical advancement might bring him nearer the veil at the instant when it would part and reveal in inviolable isolation that truth which he almost touched. So it was without premonition that he opened the door and peered out, bringing the torch’s beam on the knocker. It was the man called Harry. He stood there in the darkness, in the strong steady seawind filled with the dry clashing of invisible palm fronds, as the doctor had always seen him, in the soiled ducks and the sleeveless undershirt, murmuring the conventional amenities about the hour and the need, asking to use the telephone while the doctor, his nightshirt streaming about his flabby calves, peered at the caller and thought in a fierce surge of triumph Now I am going to find out what it is. “Yes,” he said, “you wont need the telephone. I am a doctor myself.”

  “Oh,” the other said. “Can you come at once?”

  “Yes. Just let me slip on my pants. What’s the trouble? So I shall know what to bring.”

  For an instant the other hesitated; this familiar to the doctor too who had seen it before and believed he knew its source: that innate and ineradicable instinct of mankind to attempt to conceal some of the truth even from the doctor or lawyer for whose skill and knowledge they are paying. “She’s bleeding,” he said. “What will your fee—”

  But the doctor did not notice this. He was talking to himself: Ah. Yes. Why didn’t I.… Lungs, of course. Why didn’t I think of that? “Yes,” he said. “Will you wait here? Or perhaps inside? I wont be but a minute.”

  “I’ll wait here,” the other said. But the doctor did not hear that either. He was already running back up the stairs; he trotted into the bedroom where his wife rose on one elbow in the bed and watched him struggle into his trousers, his shadow, cast by the lamp on the low table by the bed, antic on the wall, her shadow also monstrous, gorgonlike from the rigid paper-wrapped twists of gray hair above the gray face above the high-necked night-dress which also looked gray, as if every garment she owned had partaken of that grim iron-color of her implacable and invincible morality which, the doctor was to realise later, was almost omniscient. “Yes,” he said, “bleeding. Probably hemorrhage. Lungs. And why in the world I didn’t—”

  “More likely he has cut or shot her,” she said in a cold quiet bitter voice. “Though from the look in her eyes the one time I saw her close I would have said she would be the one to do the cutting and shooting.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, hunching into his suspenders. “Nonsense.” Because he was not talking to her now either. “Yes. The fool. To bring her here, of all places. To sealevel. To the Mississippi coast.—Do you want me to put out the lamp?”

  “Yes. You’ll probably be there a long time if you are going to wait until you are paid.” He blew out the lamp and descended the stairs again behind the torch. His black bag sat on the hall table beside his hat. The man Harry still stood just without the front door.

  “Maybe you better take this now,” he said.

  “What?” the doctor said. He paused, looking down, bringing the torch to bear on the single banknote in the other’s extended hand. Even if he has spent nothing, now he will have only fifteen dollars he thought. “No, later,” he said. “Maybe we had better hurry.” He bustled on ahead, following the torch’s dancing beam, trotting while the other walked, across his own somewhat sheltered yard and through the dividing oleander hedge and so into the full sweep of the unimpeded sea-wind which thrashed among the unseen palms and hissed in the harsh salt grass of the unkempt other lot; now he could see a dim light in the other house. “Bleeding, hey?” he said. It was overcast; the invisible wind blew strong and steady among the invisible palms, from the invisible sea—a harsh steady sound full of the murmur of surf on the outside barrier islands, the spits and scars of sand bastioned with tossing and shabby pines. “Hemorrhage?”

  “What?” the other said. “Hemorrhage?”

  “No?” the doctor said. “She’s just coughing a little blood then? Just spitting a little blood when she coughs, eh?”

  “Spitting?” the other said. It was the tone, not the words. It was not addressed to the doctor and it was beyond laughter, as if that which it addressed were impervious to laughter; it was not the doctor who stopped; the doctor still trotted onward on his short sedentary legs, behind the jolting torch-beam, toward the dim waiting light, it was the Baptist, the provincial, who seemed to pause while the man, not the doctor now, thought not in shock but in a sort of despairing amazement: Am I to live forever behind a barricade of perennial innocence like a chicken in a pen? He spoke aloud quite carefully; the veil was going now, dissolving now, it was about to part now and now he did not want to see what was behind it; he knew that for the sake of his peace of mind forever afterward he did not dare and he knew that it was too late now and that he could not help himself; he heard his voice ask the question he did not want to ask and get the answer he did not want to hear:

  “You say she is bleeding. Where is she bleeding?”

  “Where do women bleed?” the other said, cried, in a harsh exasperated voice, not stopping. “I’m no doctor. If I were, do you think I would waste five dollars on you?”

  Nor did the doctor hear this either. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. I see. Yes.” Now he stopped. He was aware of no cessation of motion since the steady dark wind still blew past him. Because I am at the wrong age for this he thought. If I were twenty-five I could say, Thank God I am not him because I would know it was only my luck today and that maybe tomorrow or next year it will be me and so I will not need to envy him. And if I were sixty-five I could say, Thank God I am not him because then I would know I was too old for it to be possible and so it would not do me any good to envy him because he has proof on the body of love and of passion and of life that he is not dead. But now I am forty-eight and I did not think that I deserved this. “Wait,” he said; “wait.” The other paused; they stood facing one another, leaning a little into the dark wind filled with the wild dry sound of the palms.

  “I offered to pay you,” the other said. “Isn’t five enough? And if it isn’t, will
you give me the name of someone who will come for that and let me use your telephone?”

  “Wait,” the doctor said. So Cofer was right he thought. You are not married. Only why did you have to tell me so? He didn’t say that, of course, he said, “You haven’t.… You are not.…… What are you?”

  The other, taller, leaned in the hard wind, looking down at the doctor with that impatience, that seething restraint. In the black wind the house, the shack, stood, itself invisible, the dim light shaped not by any door or window but rather like a strip of dim and forlorn bunting dingy and rigidly immobile in the wind. “What am I what?” he said. “I’m trying to be a painter. Is that what you mean?”

  “A painter? But there is no building, no boom, no development here anymore. That died nine years ago. You mean, you came here without any offer of work, any sort of contract at all?”

  “I paint pictures,” the other said. “At least, I think I do.—Well? Am I to use your phone or not?”

  “You paint pictures,” the doctor said; he spoke in that tone of quiet amazement which thirty minutes later and then tomorrow and tomorrow would vacillate among outrage and anger and despair: “Well. She’s probably still bleeding. Come along.” They went on. He entered the house first; even at the moment he realised that he had preceded the other not as a guest, not even as owner, but because he believed now that he alone of the two of them had any right to enter it at all so long as the woman was in it. They were out of the wind now. It merely leaned, black, imponderable and firm, against the door which the man called Harry had closed behind them: and now and at once the doctor smelled again the odor of stale and cooling gumbo. He even knew where it would be, he could almost see it sitting uneaten (They have not even tasted it he thought. But why should they? Why in God’s name should they?) on the cold stove since he knew the kitchen well—the broken stove, the spare cooking vessels, the meagre collection of broken knives and forks and spoons, the drinking receptacles which had once contained gaudily labelled and machine-made pickle and jam. He knew the entire house well, he owned it, he had built it—the flimsy walls (they were not even tongue-and-groove like the one in which he lived but were of ship-lap, the synthetic joints of which, weathered and warped by the damp salt air, leaked all privacy just as broken socks and trousers do) murmurous with the ghosts of a thousand rented days and nights to which he (though not his wife) had closed his eyes, insisting only that there be always an odd number in any mixed party which stayed there overnight unless the couple were strangers formally professing to be man and wife, as now, even though he knew better and knew that his wife knew better. Because this was it, this the anger and outrage which would alternate with the despair tomorrow and tomorrow: Why did you have to tell me? he thought. The others didn’t tell me, upset me, didn’t bring here what you brought, though I dont know what they might have taken away.

  At once he could see the dim lamplight beyond the open door. But he would have known which door without the light to guide him, the one beyond which the bed would be, the bed in which his wife said she would not ask a nigger servant to sleep; he could hear the other behind him and he realised for the first time that the man called Harry was still barefoot and that he was about to pass and enter the room first, thinking (the doctor) how he who actually had the only small portion of right to enter of either of them must hold back, feeling a dreadful desire to laugh, thinking You see, I dont know the etiquette in these cases because when I was young and lived in the cities where apparently such as this occurs, I suppose I was afraid, too afraid, pausing because the other paused: so that it seemed to the doctor, in a steady silent glare of what he was never to know was actual clairvoyance, that they had both paused as if to allow the shade, the shadow, of the absent outraged rightful husband to precede them. It was a sound from within the room itself which moved them—the sound of a bottle against a glass.

  “Just a minute,” the man named Harry said. He entered the room quickly; the doctor saw, flung across the beach chair, the faded jeans that were too small for her in exactly the right places. But he did not move. He just heard the swift passage of the man’s bare feet on the floor and then his voice, tense, not loud, quiet, quite gentle: so that suddenly the doctor believed he knew why there had been neither pain nor terror in the woman’s face: that the man was carrying that too just as he carried the firewood and (doubtless) cooked with it the food she ate. “No, Charlotte,” he said. “You mustn’t. You cant. Come back to bed now.”

  “Why cant I?” the woman’s voice said. “Why bloody cant I?” and now the doctor could hear them struggling. “Let me go, you bloody bungling bastard” (it was ‘rat’, the noun, which the doctor believed he heard.). “You promised, rat. That was all I asked and you promised. Because listen, rat—” the doctor could hear it, the voice cunning, secret now: “It wasn’t him, you see. Not that bastard Wilbourne. I ratted off on him like I did you. It was the other one. You cant, anyway. I’ll plead my ass like they used to plead their bellies and nobody ever knows just where the truth is about a whore to convict anybody—” The doctor could hear them, the two pairs of bare feet; it sounded as if they were dancing, furiously and infinitesimally and without shoes. Then this stopped and the voice was not cunning, not secret. But where’s the despair? the doctor thought. Where’s the terror? “Jesus, there I went again. Harry! Harry! You promised.”

  “I’ve got you. It’s all right. Come back to bed.”

  “Give me a drink.”

  “No. I told you no more. I told you why not. Do you hurt bad now?”

  “Jesus, I dont know. I cant tell. Give me the drink, Harry. Maybe that will start it again.”

  “No. It cant now. It’s too late for that too. Besides, the doctor’s here now. He’ll start it again. I’m going to put your gown on you so he can come in.”

  “And risk bloodying up the only nightgown I ever owned?”

  “That’s why. That’s why we got the gown. Maybe that’s all it will take to start it again. Come on now.”

  “Then why the doctor? Why the five dollars? Oh you damned bloody bungling—No no no no. Quick. There I go again. Stop me quick. I am hurting. I cant help it. Oh damn bloody bloody—” she began to laugh; it was hard laughing and not loud, like retching or coughing. “There. That’s it. It’s like dice. Come seven come eleven. Maybe if I can just keep on saying it—” He (the doctor) could hear them, the two pair of bare feet on the floor, then the rusty plaint of the bed springs, the woman still laughing, not loud, just with that abstract and furious despair which he had seen in her eyes over the bowl of gumbo at noon. He stood there, holding his little scuffed worn serviceable black bag, looking at the faded jeans among the wadded mass of other garments on the beach chair; he saw the man called Harry reappear and select from among them a nightgown and vanish again; the doctor looked at the chair. Yes he thought. Just like the firewood. Then the man called Harry was standing in the door.

  “You can come in now,” he said.

  Old Man

  Once (it was in Mississippi, in May, in the flood year 1927) there were two convicts. One of them was about twenty-five, tall, lean, flat-stomached, with a sunburned face and Indian-black hair and pale, china-colored outraged eyes—an outrage directed not at the men who had foiled his crime, not even at the lawyers and judges who had sent him here, but at the writers, the uncorporeal names attached to the stories, the paper novels—the Diamond Dicks and Jesse Jameses and such—whom he believed had led him into his present predicament through their own ignorance and gullibility regarding the medium in which they dealt and took money for, in accepting information on which they placed the stamp of verisimilitude and authenticity (this so much the more criminal since there was no sworn notarised statement attached and hence so much the quicker would the information be accepted by one who expected the same unspoken good faith, demanding, asking, expecting no certification, which he extended along with the dime or fifteen cents to pay for it) and retailed for money and which on actual application
proved to be impractical and (to the convict) criminally false; there would be times when he would halt his mule and plow in mid-furrow (there is no walled penitentiary in Mississippi; it is a cotton plantation which the convicts work under the rifles and shotguns of guards and trusties) and muse with a kind of enraged impotence, fumbling among the rubbish left him by his one and only experience with courts and law, fumbling until the meaningless and verbose shibboleth took form at last (himself seeking justice at the same blind fount where he had met justice and been hurled back and down): using the mails to defraud: who felt that he had been defrauded by the third class mail system not of crass and stupid money which he did not particularly want anyway, but of liberty and honor and pride.

  He was in for fifteen years (he had arrived shortly after his nineteenth birthday) for attempted train robbery. He had laid his plans in advance, he had followed his printed (and false) authority to the letter; he had saved the paper-backs for two years, reading and rereading them, memorising them, comparing and weighing story and method against story and method, taking the good from each and discarding the dross as his workable plan emerged, keeping his mind open to make the subtle last-minute changes, without haste and without impatience, as the newer pamphlets appeared on their appointed days as a conscientious dressmaker makes the subtle alterations in a court presentation costume as the newer bulletins appear. And then when the day came, he did not even have a chance to go through the coaches and collect the watches and the rings, the brooches and the hidden money-belts, because he had been captured as soon as he entered the express car where the safe and the gold would be. He had shot no one because the pistol which they took away from him was not that kind of a pistol although it was loaded; later he admitted to the District Attorney that he had got it, as well as the dark lantern in which a candle burned and the black handkerchief to wear over the face, by peddling among his pine-hill neighbors subscriptions to the Detectives’ Gazette. So now from time to time (he had ample leisure for it) he mused with that raging impotence because there was something else he could not tell them at the trial, did not know how to tell them. It was not the money he had wanted. It was not riches, not the crass loot; that would have been merely a bangle to wear upon the breast of his pride like the Olympic runner’s amateur medal—a symbol, a badge to show that he too was the best at his chosen gambit in the living and fluid world of his time. So that at times as he trod the richly shearing black earth behind his plow or with a hoe thinned the sprouting cotton and corn or lay on his sullen back in his bunk after supper, he cursed in a harsh steady unrepetitive stream, not at the living men who had put him where he was but at what he did not even know were pen-names, did not even know were not actual men but merely the designations of shades who had written about shades.