The wind was never idle in Beech summer or winter, nor was the windmill atop the shed behind The Inn. The ratchet and chain to pull the fin that dragged the face of the mill out of the wind-stream had broken long before the Gordons moved there. Winter and summer it turned, the shaft attached to the excentric purposelessly moving slowly up and down, doing no work, attached to nothing, squeaking, squeaking so painfully that sleep was difficult for the infrequent transients trapped in the town. Shortly after the Gordons moved there, Johnny Gordon the husband had tried to stop the thing, following a sharp complaint; he got a shaky ladder up against the shed, climbed up and tried to figure it all out. A sudden mean shift of wind turned the flying blades against him, tore his coat and cut his shoulder. He left it alone, after that.
‘We never should’ve moved here in the first place,’ he often told Rose, his wife, and when he told her she would look at him with her great eyes, begging him not to say it again, but saying nothing with her mouth. She was all eyes, that young woman.
Still, it was not only her eyes that had attracted him to her in the first place, in Chicago where he was finishing his internship at a desperate little hospital, mostly colored and charity patients. To escape the pain and the filth and squalor he largely lived with, he began to go in a few nights a week to a moving picture palace. Oh, he thought, if he could meet up with a girl with the warmth and tenderness and fortitude of Miss Mary Pickford, whose smile and whose eyes melted the human heart, her dimples, her glance! Once, a little drunk, he confessed his dream to two young doctors who hooted at him. ‘You talk too much,’ they advised him. But still he clutched his dream close, embroidered it, so that now in its fruition it included a vine-covered cottage and a white picket fence.
And imagine! He sat one night down front near the piano whose bright tunes and thumping base explained and underlined the flickering drama before him. He was lost in his dream for a few moments after the lights came up. The young woman at the piano touched her hat, fussed at her hair, and fussing with it, turned. Imagine! She had been sitting there not ten feet from him, sitting there every time he’d been there. They stared at each other, and he smiled.
He did not suggest that she come to his room; she didn’t look that kind, although his friends would have asked her right off, the ones who hooted at him.
‘She could always say no,’ they might have told him.
He didn’t want it like that. And his hunch was right. Imagine asking a girl to your room who Sundays played the piano in a church.
He said right off he was a doctor, hoping to impress her, to establish himself. ‘There’s a carnival by the lake,’ he offered. ‘They say it’s swell. You like carnivals?’
‘Just one of my favorite things!’
‘Say,’ Johnny asked. ‘What’s your favorite thing?’
‘Flowers,’ she said.
‘Mmmm.’
‘That wasn’t a hint. But you asked me.’
Her father certainly looked him over, even after he said he was a doctor. ‘We won’t be late, sir.’ Her father gave him a look and took his newspaper into another room.
‘Well, Mr Gordon,’ her mother remarked.
‘Doctor Gordon, Ma’am.’
‘… our only child. You understand how it is. Someday you may feel the same.’
‘Bet your boots I will.’ Breathless, he watched Rose pin the violets he’d brought to her coat; he’d never seen such affection in fingers.
Her mother sighed. ‘She’s always loved flowers. When she was a little girl, she was always touching people’s flowers.’
He’d say one thing for her — she was a game one! Game for all the rides, the roller coaster, and my, your stomach just left you, and the big pendulum you got into that swung and then went clean around. ‘Oh,’ she said, thrown against him, and he could smell the violets. ‘I’ll say one thing,’ she said when she caught her breath. ‘For a fellow who says he hasn’t got so much confidence, you have an awful lot to go on these terrible things!’
‘Oh, say, I’ve got plenty when you’re around.’
But she would not go into the tents where freaks were shown, and he only suggested it to see how she felt about freaks. He hated it for freaks, especially when they smiled.
Not, then, into the tent of freaks, but rather to hear a young man with a pointed beard sing songs from a new operetta; thus it was that Johnny and Rose emerged humming tunes from The Red Mill. Rose was not wearing the pretty little hat he first admired, decorated, he thought, with flowers. She wore instead a scarf tied round her head, sort of gypsylike.
‘It’s a bandeau,’ she told him, and stood back for him to get a good look at it. ‘You like it?’
‘It looks peachy to me,’ he said.
‘I got it out of a magazine,’ she said. ‘It’s what Mrs Vanderbilt wears.’
‘Oh, hey — I bet it looks better on you than on Mrs Vanderbilt,’ he said.
‘I’d hardly say that.’
‘I would,’ he said soberly. He remembered from somewhere a picture of Mrs Vanderbilt walking toward a Rolls-Royce touring car, and do you believe it, Rose did indeed look a little like Mrs Vanderbilt, but a Mrs Vanderbilt the merest breath would blow away. ‘You know, you do look like Mrs Vanderbilt?’
‘Honestly?’
He laughed. ‘Yes, and you think so, too.’
‘Now you know my little secret.’ That little band around her head was her badge.
‘You tell ’em, I stutter!’ he said. That’s what they all said then. And Johnny laughed.
But when a few nights later she agreed to marry him, her eyes shining and her lips parted slightly like one who knows she is about to be kissed, tears suddenly sprung into his eyes; he felt his life, whatever that might be, was in-complete without her, and he was afraid. Afraid for her, or for himself? He couldn’t tell.
‘All I can say to you, young man,’ her father remarked, ‘is always be good to her.’
‘I assure you, sir, I always shall,’ Johnny said.
‘The first time you called,’ her father said, frowning, ‘you were a little under the influence.’
‘You’re a perceptive man, sir,’ Johnny said. ‘I admit to that charge. I took a drink to give me confidence.’
‘Liquor is a poor thing.’
‘It’s just a medicine, sir,’ Johnny said, ‘if you use it right.’
He was not asked to remain at the hospital when his internship was up; he knew he would not be asked, and yet he was disappointed; but the fact might have pointed up to him his tenuous connection with reality. He felt that if he had met Rose earlier, and put his shoulder to the wheel, as he phrased it, he would have been asked to remain. Why, until he met Rose, he had just gone through the motions, so to speak, or so it seemed to the director.
‘But I’ll say one thing for you, John,’ said the director, and looked across the skull he kept on his desk. ‘I have eyes and I have ears, and I know you’re probably one of the most naturally kind young fellows I’ve ever known.’
‘Kind?’ Johnny asked. ‘Kind? I never noticed, sir, that I was kind.’
‘Maybe not,’ the director said, smoking his pipe as Johnny wished he could smoke one — with authority. ‘That’s why I said naturally kind. It proceeds, these new psychiatrist fellows tell me, from a certain sensitivity. And —’
‘And what, sir?’
‘We sometimes have to control sensitivity. Can be dangerous. Not sure it’s a trait especially valuable to a doctor. Shame, but there it is.’
‘Then what should I do, sir, about getting a job?’
‘Some small town, John. Some small town, till you get on your feet.’
It embarrassed him to be called John. He didn’t feel like John. He felt like Johnny, and maybe that was his trouble, for who trusts the Johnnys of the world, they who skip through life laughing and crying, but always skipping.
He found the small town. This was it — Beech. This town of which he so often said, ‘We never should have moved here in the first place.’ And then Rose would look at him.
It had seemed so possible as a place where a young doctor not so sure of himself might settle and make a living. It was on the railroad. He had put Rose up in the hotel in Herndon, the county seat, twenty-five miles north, while he inquired around Beech, and everybody seemed enthusiastic about having a doctor.
‘Not for twenty-five years,’ they told him in the saloon.
‘That’s a long time,’ Johnny said.
Oh, they told him of the dryland farmers off behind the hill that slipped down to the town, and about the big ranches to the west. They told of talk that a spur of the Northern Pacific might come through and meet the Union Pacific. Beech at the junction was bound to grow, they said. Not months before, they said, surveyors had been working with their instruments, and what a fine bunch of young men they were!
Caught up in the enthusiasm generated in the saloon, Johnny bought another round of drinks for his new friends, and they all toasted a future so vast it left him breathless, vast as the land outside. And what about living quarters for him and his wife?
He had a wife? Now, that was a good thing.
He brought out her picture.
Well, he was fortunate indeed. ‘Strikes me,’ the bartender said, ‘you might take a look at the old hotel. The Inn, used to be called.’
A small hotel of six small identical rooms on the second floor, each with an iron bed, washstand, closet and neat coiled rope beside each window in case of fire. The Inn had been abandoned long enough to have got the reputation among the schoolchildren of being haunted; they had seen lights, they had seen faces at the windows. One of the bolder among them had shied a stone through an upper window, and told how he heard a kind of scream. Especially when the moonlight fell against the weathered brown clapboards, brightened the windows and picked out the bleached white deer horns over the sign that said the inn — especially then it seemed haunted.
But in the sunlight it looked solid and innocent enough; the windmill that stuck up out of the roof of the shed behind lent the place a practical air, and it seemed to Johnny that until he had established his practice, they might run the place as an inn again — have two strings to their bow. Impractical, was he?
The bank in Herndon owned the property, and he came almost at once to terms with the fellow there. The legacy of the aunt who had wanted him to study medicine covered the initial payment and bought him the secondhand Ford motorcar he’d need for his rounds. Enough remained to furnish an office in one of the rooms on the second floor. A clever metal chair collapsed into an examination table; a human skeleton grinned in a glass case.
Now he was doing the last necessary thing. ‘Come on over here and look, Rose,’ he said. Smiling, he watched her rise from her knees beside the building where she planted California poppies — one of the few flowers, they said, that thrived in the cranky, sour soil. He still held in his hand the spade he’d used to dig a hole for the post and top-piece, a kind of gibbet that displayed the sign he’d planed and sanded and painted and attached to the top-piece by four eye screws so that it swung free.
JOHN GORDON, M.D.
‘My, but there’s so much wind here,’ she said, watching the sign swing, ‘but I hardly hear it now. Oh yes, that does look nice.’
‘You get used to the wind,’ he said, ‘after a while.’ Then they went back inside and set to, cleaning up. Lysol and plenty of good hot soap and water put to flight old ghosts.
His son he delivered himself. He himself took his blessed son from the mother’s womb, and together they erred in attaching to the child the faintly epicene name of Peter because it had belonged to Rose’s father, and that burly man had become Pete.
Johnny thought he had never seen a lovelier sight than his wife lying in the bed, nursing the child; he waited on her, sat beside her and read to her from Byron, enchanted by the wonder and beauty of birth. How everybody congratulated him, and how straight he sat at the wheel of the Ford motorcar, grinning and handing out cigars. Once having caught sight of his own face in a mirror, he continued to stare at himself, thinking. He thought how it was that whenever she looked up from whatever it was she was doing, she always smiled. He wondered if anybody had ever noticed that before.
The poppies bloomed, withered and died; the winter wind screamed down from the distant mountains, and then again the ground was bare of snow, the poppies pushed up and bloomed again, withered and died. Although they did not speak of it to each other, the Gordons were disturbed that the blond little boy was late in walking and late in talking, and when at last he walked — and that was a day! — he walked with a stiff, mechanical gait that depended little on the use of the knee, a gait that hinted that walking was a painfully acquired skill and not a human instinct. And when at last he talked, the boy astounded them by speaking with a faint lisp in measured, adult cadences that assured them he was advanced and not retarded in spite of his slightly enlarged forehead, his wide, innocent eyes, and a disquieting habit of seeming to listen to the distance. At four he was able to read.
Johnny soon learned a curious fact that at first did not trouble him: when the big ranchers and their wives and families needed a doctor, they drove to Herndon and combined the visit with shopping, dinner at the Herndon House or the Sugar Bowl Cafe. They liked to sit in the big green leather chairs in the hotel lobby and greet friends, gaze out the big plate-glass windows at the townspeople on God knows what errands, and at their own motorcars nudging the curb out front; they liked to take a slow turn about the town, marvel at the neatness of the huge lawn that fanned out before the yellow brick Gothic courthouse and the jail behind where the sheriff kept his pet drunks and vagrants; they savored the tree-lined streets in the residential district, stood awed and embarrassed before the rubber trusses in the drugstore window, walked to the station to see the train pull in and stop. How the earth trembled! How the steam deafened! Then back to the Herndon House where they took a room with a bath, indulged in all that luxury, and smiled, anticipating the moving picture show later in the evening. There was no such luxury at The Inn, no such excitement in Beech, there where the wind howled. Nor is it relaxing to stop at a place that smells of despair and failure.
In all the years that Johnny Gordon practiced in Beech he was faithful, totally faithful, to the Hippocratic oath, and never refused a call for help whether he got a fee or not; his patients were the dryland farmers behind the hills whose lives somehow paralleled his; they had been lured West by colored handbills printed by the railroads, promised cheap land which God knew was there and rain God knew was not. Only the big ranchers who controlled the creeks and the river thrived. But at least the dryland farmers, the Norwegians, Swedes and Austrians, could fail in clean surroundings.
‘By golly, Rose,’ Johnny used to say, ‘but they sure all are clean. Why, you could eat off the floor. Drive on out with me one of these days, and we’ll picnic.’
Him they summoned to set broken bones, arms torn and shattered by the teeth of circular saws. Clumsy former city-dwellers, they were kicked in the groin by horses and cows. Their wives gave birth. When Johnny arrived in his Ford motorcar, they had the water boiling so he could clean his instruments; he laughed and complimented them on the babies he pulled forth raging or whimpering at the world around them; sitting at scrubbed kitchen tables, he celebrated with the fathers, joked to draw attention from their women’s suffering. ‘Why does Uncle Sam wear red-white-and-blue suspenders?’ Singing, he went careening back to Beech with a gallon or two of chokecherry wine in the back of the Ford. ‘They’ll pay up when they can,’ he reassured Rose. And they did, when they could.
But now the sign with his name that hung from the gibbet before The Inn had so weathered it was unreadable; the bleached deer horns over the entrance fell one night of the wind; The Inn itself wanted painting, but inside all was desperately clean, the windows shone. It was not Johnny’s fees but the drummers passing through with their lines of dry goods and notions, it was the occasional cattle-buyer who stopped for the night and took a meal — it was they who paid the bills.
Peter suffered not only the gamut of childhood diseases but also a myriad of chills and fevers that sapped his strength and left his arms and legs nothing but the merest crust of bone around the vulnerable marrow. Johnny wondered if people might not take his son’s constant ailments as a reflection on his own abilities, and if there were not perhaps some paradox in the ancient books — along with that of the shoemaker’s child — that the doctor’s son is always sick. But Peter never complained nor demanded, and dutifully handled the toys his parents pressed on him. He learned early what it is to be an outcast and looked on living with deepset, expressionless eyes that saw everything or nothing. He played no ballgames, preferred books and solitude, had an aversion to sunlight and on going out into it always paused, squinted, and shaded his eyes.
People blew out their lamps early in Beech — a single puff down the chimney — and so their world was left to the single light behind a sickroom window, to the pale, flickering flames behind the glass in the switches near the railroad station, and sometimes to the moon. It was then Peter liked to leave the house.
‘What were you doing?’ Rose would ask, or Johnny, and always Peter answered, Nothing.
Nothing, and they took nothing to mean he walked, walked to nowhere. But once the clock in the kitchen moved around and around until two hours passed and Johnny was seized with sudden panic, a twisting in the region of his bowels; for fifteen minutes he sat paring his nails, afraid to communicate his queer terror to Rose. ‘I think I’ll take a walk out and see what he’s up to,’ Johnny said.
The land was flat and bright with the moon whose beams caught in the early dew on the sagebrush and defined a path ahead like moon on water; he could think of nothing that might beckon the boy but the river, and nothing on the bank of the river but the single huddle of willows. There the boy must be. If he was not there, well, what? As he approached the willows, he slowed his steps.
And there he found the boy, found him sitting with his back against the willows nearest the river where, in the middle, the water parted, disturbed and glittering, around a stump that caught in a sandbar, and the rippling murmur perhaps swallowed up Johnny’s careful footfalls, for the boy sat motionless, his face caught in the cool radiance, his bony temple casting a shadow that hid his deepset eyes like a domino. Sensing he was intruding on some mystery, Johnny hesitated. Just so had he hesitated on the several occasions when he’d come on the boy regarding himself in the wavy mirror that hung over the washbasin; Johnny could not tell from the level expression of the eyes whether the boy was searching for something, judging himself, or simply seeking companionship in his own image, and when the boy turned, it was without embarrassment — he seemed unaware of the strangeness or wrongness or whatever it was; it was Johnny who felt the prickles of guilt, and he wanted to share the burden of the several incidents with Rose, but each time he kept silent.
Now something in the fall of the cloth of the coat the boy wore, something in the shadow that obscured the boy’s expression and the half-web of black willows that spread fanlike above him suggested the religious, a monk engaged in prayer. Johnny was struck with the idea that perhaps the boy’s habitual remoteness was not the detachment of the doctor or scientist but the withdrawal of the mystic, the priest. When he spoke, Johnny was struck with the impropriety of his own voice. ‘Peter?’
‘I was coming right back.’ Unsurprised.
‘I wondered what you were doing.’
‘I was watching.’
‘Watching?’
‘The moon.’
As poultry in the pen pecks to death the maimed or strange among them, so at school was Peter hazed, taunted and named a sissy — the hiss of the word was everywhere. But only when they named his father a drunk did he turn on them. Quicker than he, they dodged easily and stood in a circle around him, their eyes bright with fun, their mouths making in unison the cruelly lacerating sound of the nasal ‘a.’ Just so, he knew, in other circles had their fathers stood, and their grandfathers, tormenting some other pariah, some other odd one; just so would their own sons stand.
Doctor Johnny
Is a rummy.
Again he started to lunge, hunching his thin shoulders, but then stood suddenly still, looking at first one and then another, at Fred who rode to school each day on a horse with a fifty-dollar saddle, at Dick the bartender’s son who wrote on the walls in the toilet and bored a hole so he could peek at the girls, whose marks in class were very nearly as good as Peter’s own; at sly Larry who already weighed nearly two hundred pounds and grinned often without speaking much. And watching, Peter knew with a knowledge as tempered as a sly old man’s that he must oppose them on his own terms, not theirs. And he knew it was not only they for whom he harbored this novel, cold, impersonal hatred, but for all those normal, rich, envied and secure ones who might dare insult his private image of the Gordons.
That image began to take concrete shape when he started a scrapbook of photographs, drawings and advertisements cut from old magazines few in that country had ever heard of — Town and Country, International Studio, Mentor, Century — all passed on to the school by an unusual woman up the valley, piling up unread over the years in the dark of the cloakroom alongside cartons of unclaimed overshoes and forsaken mittens. The schoolteacher, a kind, phlegmatic lady who thought often of childhood and of a kitten she’d had and loved, saw no reason why they should not be cut up; they had little to do with anything she or her other pupils might find valuable. What characterized the drawings Peter chose and clipped and pasted in with his pale hands was luxury and affluence — scenes of the sailing of ocean liners, the departure of a crack railroad train, collections of jewels, English country houses, heavy draperies, leather luggage, the beach at Newport and the automobiles that brought the fashionable bathers there — Locomobiles, Isotta-Fraschinis, Minervas. But luxury and affluence were not all that characterized his choices: each drawing, photograph or advertisement contained human figures that reminded him of his father or his mother, his mother standing on a terrace gazing across a sculptured lawn, his father checking in at a great hotel. Thus he began a book of dreams raised up against his family’s failure and the everlasting whimper of the wind, a blueprint of the world to come. He would bring this world about by becoming a great surgeon, reading a paper before learned men in France, standing aside while strangers spoke of his mother’s beauty and his father’s kindness.
Now he stood unmoved when at school they said his father talked to a whore.
And so his father had, talked to one who had started in a good house in Salt Lake City. When the bloom was gone and she’d had a few quarrels, she took the train to Herndon and worked there in the Red-White-and-Blue Rooms. In Herndon she began to pray a good deal, was found kneeling beside her bed many times. She would seek out churches at night (two were never locked) and she was thought to be out of her mind. Had she not drawn attention to herself by all this kneeling and praying, she might have escaped the sharp eye of her current madam who now detected symptoms of consumption. She liked to keep a clean house, and suggested that the sick woman, named Alma, go to Beech where a girl was badly needed and the clientele was not so fussy.
‘Maybe God will help you,’ the madam suggested. ‘You put a lot of stock in Him.’
She arrived in Beech with a cardboard suitcase containing several kimonos, a carton of Milo Violets, and an old photograph of the father who had thrown her out. If only she had listened to him. Had he not loved her, he would not have disciplined her.
It was apparent to Doctor Johnny, in for an early drink, that Alma’s trouble was other than consumption — the eyes showed it and the complexion, and the workings of the mind. He had an astounding gift for diagnosis. Years later, in the days of the specialist, he might have triumphed, might have had an office with heavy Spanish furniture and Persian rugs — and so are we sometimes born in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he examined a patient, he seemed to hear a whisper in his ear, perhaps through the stethoscope, and this gift for diagnosis was one he passed on to his son.
Johnny took the whore Alma aside and bought her a drink. ‘You shouldn’t be working, you know,’ he said.
‘God told me to work,’ she remarked, and sipped her drink.
‘Not just because of yourself.’
‘I don’t owe them nothing,’ she said.
‘Yes, you do. You know you do, or you wouldn’t talk about God. You know what He wants.’
She touched her temple with the flat of her fingers. ‘If God’s lied to me, what will I do?’ She had been in bed for some days and was now tottering.
‘Don’t have contact with anybody, just for now.’ And another month went by, many nights and many dawns.
‘It’ll be another week, anyway,’ Johnny told Rose. ‘Maybe a little longer, but she’ll never get out of bed; now they say they don’t want her to die over there, and anyway, that’s one hell of a place to die, in that little room.’ He glanced at Rose and took out a Sweet Caporal. ‘Of course, some would say she doesn’t deserve much.’
‘You’re very cold, aren’t you, John?’ Rose remarked. ‘I’ve already fixed a room for her here.’
His smile was crooked, and he went to her and tipped up her chin. ‘That’s my little Mrs Vanderbilt.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Mrs Gordon, Mrs John Gordon.’
Now in the town they called The Inn the Whorehouse Inn because a mad, praying whore had died there, and in Herndon and Beech many good women — doctor though her husband might be — felt free to cut Rose dead on the streets. And truly her beauty — useless and careless as a butterfly — was hard to forgive, and so was her quick smile and proud carriage.
‘Oh, he’ll be a doctor you bet,’ Johnny said, making plans. ‘How he reads all the time? Eyes open — notice? That’s the thing, open eyes. He loves the facts.’
Peter did indeed love the facts, shut in his room with the Britannica; at twelve he was studying the drawings of Vesalius, reading Hippocrates and certain passages in Virgil and the medical journals his father no longer broke from their wrappers.
‘Oh,’ Johnny said, ‘he’ll get to places I never got to,’ and his heart grew big with pride, his mind swept over the enchanting landscape of his son’s future. ‘You wait and see.’
‘You’re a good man, too,’ Rose reminded him.
‘Good? A man once called me kind, not good. I don’t fool myself. That’s my virtue. If you notice, it’s almost always what a man wants is to have his son better than he is. Rose, I’ve noticed that. And then, I never had much confidence. But every man lacks something.’ And thus do we excuse our failures, by admitting them.
Sometimes when Johnny drank he felt the equal of the big ranchers: they had money, he had education. When they drove cattle into town he’d saunter into the saloon after the dust had settled and the cowhands were in there whooping it up, and he’d talk — horn in, as the bartender put it. He’d stand up there with the best of them in his dark doctor’s suit and a starched collar and expound his theories on politics, on education and on Europe.
‘You wait,’ he’d say. ‘They’re going to fight over there and then we’re going to be in it, you’re going to be in it and I’m going to be in it.’ They thought him mad. He didn’t seem to notice when they edged away from him as his speech grew slurred, when he spilled on himself and impulsively touched people’s arms. For the most part they respected him; some pitied him. Some remembered how he’d wandered out on the highway when he’d first come to town, anxious to see his first big herd of cattle, and how a man had shot right over his head and cursed him, and how he’d run and cowered behind the freight depot. Lord, he must have been there hours.
But once Johnny got talking to the wrong rancher. You could see the fellow standing there with his drink, beginning to get riled as Johnny pursued the most recent phantom in his mind — the lack of civic pride in Beech. Why, he wanted to know, didn’t they paint the schoolhouse? Why did they just dump their trash back there on the hill where the world could see it, why desecrate the beautiful country?
‘Why look right out there now!’ he commanded, and looked out the saloon door at the spot on the hill where the sun caught on the most recent cans and broken glass. ‘Ten feet and they’d have dumped it in the graveyard. It’s an eyesore, that’s what I call it.’
The rancher spoke. ‘That’s what I’d call you,’ the rancher said.
‘What’s that, sir?’ Johnny asked, not understanding.
The rancher said nothing, but there was a small appreciative murmur in the saloon.
‘Now you take flowers,’ Johnny advised. ‘You go into a little town, and you see flowers here and there and around and about, and you know the people in that town have what you call civic pride, from the Latin civatas meaning city. You take railroad stations, even right there in Herndon, they’ll have a nice bed of flowers out there on a neat green lawn there. People in the cars looking out the windows can see them, and they leave that little town with a mighty fine impression. You wouldn’t be surprised if sometime people came back to settle in that little town, now would you?’ Johnny paused and looked thoughtfully into his drink. The silence in the room encouraged him. ‘Now you take flowers,’ he began again. ‘You take what we did, my wife and son and I.’ He and his wife and son had prettied up The Inn, hadn’t they noticed? Hopvines climbing up the side of the porch, and you had to have the right kind of twine for them to climb on or they got up there and fell kerbang, a green heap, of their own weight. Well, hopvines, and the California poppies, and the nasturtiums. All grew well there in Beech, wanted only watering. ‘You probably’ve seen us out there watering plants.’
The rancher spoke again. ‘Was that what you was up to a few years back when I shot a gun over your head?’
‘What’s that, sir?’
‘I say, was it you out there watering your flowers when I shot a gun over your head?’
‘So it was you did that? Well, I will admit, sir, I had it coming. I didn’t know much about customs in those days.’
‘That a fact?’ the rancher said.
‘Come winter,’ Johnny said, ‘and you’ve got no flowers, have you? So my boy and my wife, that’s why they go out there in the fall onto the flats off from town and gather what some call weeds, and then they dye them, and you’ve got flowers all winter.’
‘That a fact?’ the rancher murmured, and somebody coughed.
‘Nor is that all,’ Johnny said, and carefully slopped a drink of whiskey into his glass. ‘My son has a surgeon’s hands, very clever hands. He’ll take crepe paper and twist it and make it into artificial flowers and those, sir, are what you find on our dinner table in the winter months. Imagine,’ Johnny said, ‘a boy twelve studying the drawings of Vesalius and reading very deep material at the age of twelve years! Will you imagine that.’
‘And making paper posies, too,’ the rancher said.
‘Sir?’ Johnny looked up and down the bar, from face to face. Now he felt a sudden need to impress them further, and quoted some Greek concerning flowers.
‘What’s that?’ the rancher asked.
Johnny smiled, and glowed. ‘Greek, sir. A doctor studies the Greek language, a part of his arduous training.’
‘It don’t sound like Greek to me,’ the rancher said.
‘I assure you, sir.’
The rancher laughed. ‘You better go back then to your little school, wherever it was. The word in Greek for that sort of flower is πὁθos. They put them on graves.’
The laughter was like a shot, and Johnny stood uncertainly, trying to understand and to focus on some face that might comfort him. He didn’t find that face. ‘Well, sir …’
Now the rancher spoke, and the room was quiet again, thick with quiet. ‘Did you ever hear this one, doctor?’ and the rancher quoted a line from Ovid in Latin, ‘What do you think of that one?’
Johnny understood, and blushed the color of blood. ‘Why would you say that to me?’ he asked.
‘Because I believe in telling the truth, doctor. Would you care to tell the fellows here what it means?’
‘No, sir, I would not.’
‘Then I’ll tell them,’ the rancher said. ‘It means you’re a horse’s ass. And for that matter, so is your sissy of a son.’
Johnny removed his hat, smoothed his hair, and put his hat back on. He didn’t take his eyes from the rancher. ‘My son is not a sissy.’
‘The boys around here say so.’
‘Because he reads. Because he thinks.’
‘Because he makes paper posies. Because he don’t know a foul ball from a fly.’
Foolish of a small man like Johnny to lunge. Foolish of him to say, ‘You can’t call my son a sissy!’ because the rancher could and the rancher did and did and did.
The rancher held Johnny by the front of his starched white shirt, held him and shook him, and then straightening his arm, flung Johnny like a wet rag so that he smacked the wall opposite and fell in a heap. There Johnny started to rise, but sank back. Then after a little, looking at nobody, he got to his feet and they watched him wander across the road, across the empty space to The Inn. His progress disturbed some magpies who had found a dead gopher and they cried at him.
‘My God, what’s happened to you?’ Rose cried. ‘Who tore, who tore your shirt?’
‘I got in a fight, Rose.’
‘Please, are you hurt?’
‘No, Rose. I’m not hurt. I just want to go up to my bed.’
‘To bed, John? If you’re not hurt, why do you want to go up to the bed?’
‘I don’t know. But I want the bed.’ He got up from the chair. ‘Where is the boy, Rose?’
‘I don’t know where he is.’
‘Where do you suppose he is?’
Rose spoke quietly. ‘I think he went down to the river.’
‘I wouldn’t want him to see me fighting.’
‘Please, don’t worry about that.’
‘Rose — Rose?’
‘Yes, John.’
‘Rose, I wasn’t telling the truth. I wasn’t worried about him seeing me fighting. Maybe the trouble with me is, I can’t stand the truth?’
‘I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about, John.’
‘Second ago, I said I didn’t want Peter to see me fighting. I said that.’
‘Yes.’
‘And it wasn’t the truth.’
‘Why wasn’t it? You wouldn’t want him to see you fighting.’
‘Yes, I would.’
‘Why, why would you?’
Johnny screwed up his face. ‘To show him I’m a good fighter.’
‘There are better things to be. You know that.’
‘If you’re a good fighter, you can knock down anybody who tears your shirt and knocks you against the wall and says your son — says your son is a sissy.’ Johnny closed his eyes. ‘There, I said it.’
‘Said what, John?’
‘Said all the truth. What I wouldn’t want him to see is his father knocked down against the wall, and fellows looking.’
‘He didn’t see, John.’
‘Who can be sure? With so much noise in the place? You know how people hear a voice, and how they gather?’
‘I’m certain he was by the river. He has a place there he goes.’
‘You see, what a humiliation,’ Johnny said, and stared a moment into his wife’s eyes. ‘What a terrible, terrible humiliation. For a boy.’
‘Humiliation?’ Rose said. ‘For the boy or for you? How can there be humiliation if we’re humble, as Christ tells?’
‘Christ,’ Johnny said. ‘Would you fix me a cold towel.’
She fixed the towel, and applied it and watched him until he slept. She expected the usual when he woke, the request for a drink; for the next few days she would carefully portion out just enough so that he could function; he never asked for more than she thought necessary.
But now when he woke he lay there, staring, demanding nothing. Nothing. It was this time that she suggested he take a drink, for he had often told her that whiskey killed pain, and it was pain he had.
‘No,’ he said.
She brought him soup. It cooled, untouched. He lay with his hands clasped outside the covers; the day lengthened, the light faded, geese flew south. From the saloon across the vacant space came the bright tinkle of the player piano.
‘Please close the window, Rose.’
It was not Rose who answered him, but Peter. ‘I came to bring you something, father.’
Johnny opened his eyes, and smiled. His son stood in the middle of the room. ‘To bring me something?’
‘Can you see in this light, father?’
‘Oh, certainly.’
‘I did these things for you. This summer.’
Johnny sat up, and his son propped pillows behind his back, ‘That feels good, Peter. The pillows. Now, what have you got there?’
‘These drawings, father.’
Father, Johnny thought. My God, what a word, what a responsibility, and he took the drawings. There were ten, all of the root systems of plants from near the river. Johnny closed his eyes and sucked his lip. How they reminded him, in their excellence, of his own poor drawings! ‘I’m mighty proud,’ Johnny said. ‘I never did so well.’
‘You taught me,’ Peter said. When Peter had gone, Johnny turned his face to the wall. So the boy knew, or had heard, for why else would he bring gifts, but out of pity?
During the next year, he didn’t drink. He no longer sang; the flesh fell away from his face and his eyes invited no intimates. He spoke to few, and no one called him Johnny anymore. Late one fall afternoon, the air smelling strong of snow, Johnny returned from a trip out into the hills behind the town. He had delivered a woman of a dead child.
Lucky, lucky child, he thought. One soul who would never fail, would never cower before the inexorable naturalistic principle — that the weak are destroyed by the strong. Traveling up there in his old Ford motorcar to that tar paper shack he had looked down from the crest of the hill and seen the dust disturbed by the buggies and thin old saddle horses of the Indians thrown off the last of their land in the valley — thirty families, off to the reservation, wards of the government now, objects of stingy charity. So do the strong dispossess the weak. Some are singled out.
‘I saw those Indians,’ he told Rose that night.
‘Maybe in some ways they’ll be better off?’
‘In some ways? But dispossessed, dispossessed. Rose, where is the boy?’
‘In the shed out back. He says he has more things to show you.’
‘He shouldn’t work by lamplight. His eyes.’
‘John?’
‘Rose?’
‘John, are you all right?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You looked funny for a minute.’
‘Funny?’
‘You had gone away. Left me.’
‘I’m fine.’ He smiled, then went suddenly to her and he kissed her. ‘You’re a brave person,’ he said. ‘Now I’ll go see Peter and then I think I’ll go upstairs.’
‘Do you want anything? Is there anything?’
‘No, there’s nothing, Rose.’
The shed, over which the windmill whirled, was attached to the inn; a small wood stove made it comfortable, and it smelled of smoke and kerosene. Around the walls Peter had built shelves that sagged a little under the dead black weight of Johnny’s medical books. There, too, were the stuffed bodies of gophers and rabbits, the beakers and retorts and such chemical paraphernalia; there Peter escaped the pain of the daily Gethsemane at school, the taunts and jibes; there he lost himself in a private world, the world he never doubted; sitting there at his table, his eyes had an inward gaze, the withdrawn, intent look of the deaf. His pale face was so smooth Johnny wondered if he’d ever have to shave, and nothing betrayed his emotion but the faint throbbing of a vein in his right temple.
‘Your mother says you have something new to show,’ Johnny said.
‘This new slide, father.’
Johnny approached. ‘Peter, you seemed to be listening to something.’ The boy had fixed a flashlight to a wooden stand that threw the beams exactly under the lens. ‘Mmm. That’s a rare one.’ The slide was of a bacillus that kills rodents. ‘And fine drawing, too.’ Johnny straightened up slowly, and like an old man he reached around and pressed the small of his back, making a small grimace. ‘You have fine hands, Peter. Let me take a look at one of your hands.’ He took Peter’s hand, and looked into the smooth palm. ‘It’s so funny, you know.’
‘What’s funny, father?’
‘Oh,’ and Johnny smiled, ‘I guess it’s funny that it’s so hard for a father to speak. Maybe my own father found it so. Maybe that’s why he never did. But I’m going to say just once what I mean. And what I mean to say, Peter, is that — I love you.’
Peter was silent then, and fixed his enormous eyes, eyes that seemed to reflect the entire room, the entire world, on his father. But the blue vein in his right temple, crooked as a worm, grew a little. Johnny was about to turn away when Peter spoke. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘I love you, too.’
Johnny sucked in his lips, and when he could speak he said, ‘So then, all is well. And if I was going to tell you one thing, you know what that would be?’
Above them the windmill turned in the cold, dry wind, that mill turning to no purpose, doing no work, going through the motions only. Johnny hadn’t even conquered that, for it turned on him and cut him long before this brilliant son was born.
‘I’m not sure, father,’ Peter murmured.
‘I would tell you, Peter, never to mind what people say. People can never know the heart of another.’
‘I’ll never mind what people say.’
‘And Peter, please don’t say it quite like that. Most who don’t mind — most of them grow hard, get hard. You must be kind, you must be kind. I think the man you will become could hurt people terribly, because you’re strong. Do you understand kindness, Peter?’
‘I’m not sure whether I do, father.’
‘Well, then. To be kind is to try to remove obstacles in the way of those who love or need you.’
‘I understand that.’
Johnny sucked in his lips again. ‘I’ve always been something of an obstacle, Peter. But now I feel good. Thank you for understanding. And so now I’m going to go.’ But he stood yet another moment, a small smile on his lips, and then stepped suddenly forward and laid the flat of his hand on Peter’s head. ‘Good, good boy,’ he said. Then he went out and went upstairs to one of the rooms up there.
Up there Peter found him later, having heard a noise.
‘Peter?’ Rose called. ‘Peter? What on earth are you doing up there?’
Peter didn’t answer. She called again in a stage whisper from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Try not to wake your father. I think he’s very tired.’
‘I’ll be right down.’
When he came down, he stood in the doorway of the kitchen, and he addressed her as ‘Mother,’ not ‘Rose.’ The word in his mouth sounded so odd, so formal that she turned from the stove where she boiled water for tea.
‘Yes, Peter?’
He had apparently just completed combing his yellow hair, for he still bore in his right hand the black pocket comb he always carried, and before she spoke again he dragged his thumb over the teeth, and then again and again. She found the sound chilling. ‘Peter, please.’
He stood looking past her, at the opposite wall. She turned to follow his eyes. ‘What do you see there?’
Peter stood wondering what words he would use to tell her he had found his father upstairs, and had just cut him down from where he had hanged himself from one of those ropes coiled by the window for escape, in case of fire.