PORE PERRIE

For James McAllen

“Tell me the story of pore Perrie. Tell how she lived all her life till she died.”

“Hush asking me ’cause I don’t want to tell it. ’Twas buried with pore Perrie in her grave….”

“The flesh of it is buried, but we have the ghost of it again. Pore Perrie’s grave holds only half the story—the other’s yet to come.”

“Then let me bring the half to the half myself. When Perrie and I join in the Polk plot in the cemetery, laid side by side, we’ll settle it all, ghost and flesh, under the dirt. Dirt takes everything back again, in the end. Now let us alone. Leave us to dirt.”

“But this is a good time to tell, while I’m here and you’re here—and we may never be again. For soon (tonight) I moan be on my way; I cain’t stay. So tell it to me because I want to get it all straight. Let me have it from your mouth now, and for the last time, and then I can have it again from my memory as I go on, on the road.”

“Some one of you always passing through and stopping by, asking my stories, asking my time, asking my grief, won’t let a life be. Worse than a bed of red ants. Be glad when my life’s story settles down into the ground, a fallen message to be told out no more, locked in the box of my bones: message and bone go back into dirt. (Blood kin buried together settle their own stories, a family graveyard plot is a mailbox of messages all reading each other—who ever thought they lie quiet together and in peace at last, gladly beyond?)

“But go get me something to fan with, my cardboard fan from the church is done fanned out; the newspaper will do.…”

2

“Well if you see yonder at those bunch of houses by the boxy churchhouse and see the little squatty one huddling next to it like a chick to a hen, then that’s the house where we all lived during the story of pore Perrie. And if I tell you about it one more time, about Aunt Perrie and Uncle Ace (when he was home) and Son, man and boy, then I want you to hush ever asking me about it again. Because you know good and well that I’ve told it to you, chapter and book, time and time over, and this will be the last, until I go to my grave. Pore Perrie.”

3

The thing of it is, Son was over in Benburnett County working for a while with a rigging outfit when suddenly Aunt Linsie began to have his letters. Son wrote and said Aunt Linsie can you tell me about Aunt Perrie, all how she was when I wasn’t there to see, all how she lived and how she died. This gave Aunt Linsie a chance to write one of her long good letters that was like a story she was telling (when you can get her to tell one); and she wrote back, “Son to begin with why don’t you stop keeping me in a tumult, I should think you’d have seen for yourself, your pore Aunt Perrie’s ghost is haunting you and I’m glad, this is because you ought to have been here with her when she needed you (and not just skimming and skirting round the place here the way you did, like a ghost of yourself), not everywhere you were during those days, there’s plenty of ghosts will tell you that, won’t let you rest pretty soon, it’s your conscience, thas all, Son,” etc. etc.…

Son wrote back and said, “All right Aunt Linsie, I know I’ve led you and Aunt Perrie a life, but none of that ghost stuff, this is no ghost, I just want to know about Aunt Perrie and am asking you.”

Aunt Linsie wrote back and said, “Well, Son, if this is some other stunt of yours I’ll cherish it against you the rest of my life, for pore Perrie was my own sister and your only mother in this world and gave a goodly part of her life to raising and tending to you when you was a boy; but anyways you remember how she was such a stout woman when you left? She fell off so you wouldn’t have recognized her as the same pore Perrie after you and Ace left, and when she died (that death’s part yours and you know it) we buried her as small as a Cheedee. If you’re hurrawing about pore Perrie I can’t stand it, that pore suffering thang Perrie.”

Son wrote a letter back that said, “No, Aunt Linsie, I’m not making light of Aunt Perrie, how could I? So write me back and tell me what I ask, then I’ll tell you why I’m asking.”

Aunt Linsie’s answer said, “Son don’t you know by now there’s no room anywheres in the world, no quarters in any house or billin, that can hide you from your own folks, they live in your memory and blood, you bring them in a room when you move in. You can build a house against weather, but you can’t build it against your own conscience. Get right, face your life, all what’s in it, and that includes pore Perrie, was like your own mother, called you her own, and then you treated her like you did, when are you going to settle down? That’s all right, you’re coming outa the little end of the horn now, and I know it and you know it; but I’ll help you outa your trouble, will do it till I’m dead and gone (and then who’ll do it then, oh who, I wonder?)”

Son’s answer said, “Aunt Linsie, hush lecturing me. I’m not perfect and I know it; and Uncle Ace was not perfect. But there was only one man in this wide world who was perfect and He was crucified. Just don’t devil me. I expect you’re right on most of what you say. The thing of it is, I all of a sudden see Aunt Perrie’s life so plain, plainer than I could ever see when I was looking, and I can see her rooms in our house, the one with the machine she pumped and sewed at, with the wooden drawers full of spools and bias tape. I want to get something straight.”

(Aunt Linsie did not answer, and the next thing she knew, Son was on the place.)

4

“Now listen to me while I tell you the story of pore Perrie, because it’ll be the last and enough. Then hush ever asking me about it.

“Well, as you know, because I’ve told you, they called us the Polk Sisters in this town of Crecy Texas. We were the seamstresses of the town. Our mother and father died young and Perrie took me and brought me up. Our house was a good house—’cept for the ’shackley steps in back—built next to the Campbellite church (now a Presbyterian one); cool in summer and then with a vine on every string that strung the porch like a harp, and cold in winter; but good lives found a home in it. Pore Perrie sat on the porch in summer and sang the hymns along with the congregation next door despite they was Campbellites, for hymns are the same in all Houses of God, she said. She had her own church there behind the vines. In the front flowerbeds was a duke’s mixture of Rainlillies after it rained, Touchmenots, Old Flags and Calico, with always a grasshopper on the Calico. There was a frail Huisache tree on the side of the house, brought there from a West Texas place by a cousin long ago who said it might live, she couldn’t say, in this damper climate; but it did, grew up pretty as a tree on a calendar, spraying out its yellow insect blooms and so limber that even a bird would bend it to light there, and scatter the blossoms. On one side was the churchhouse and in the afternoons the shadow of the churchhouse lay on the grass and Son played in the shadow; and on the other side was the patch. In back was the clothesyard where there lived several White Leghorn hens that left enough eggs for us to eat and bake with, and there was a few Golden Seabright Bantams just for ornament and for Son to have. Back of that was the grove of little pinetrees.

“Perrie and me were both cut out by the Lord, who had his designs for all of us, to be missionaries; but I gave my life to Perrie and Perrie had a lame foot, to begin with, and then she spoiled the Lord’s design by marrying—against all wishes—and so late.… And there my story commences. Or ends… ’cause I don’t want to tell it anymore. Hush making me.”

“Tell it out, this is the time to tell.”

5

“When Perrie Polk married—so late (she was thirty-eight and I was twenty-eight)—Ace Wanger, a traveling lumber salesman living in hotels and all that kind of boarding-house life, she adopted a child, little Son, through the Methodist Church Orphanage, because she could have none of her own. The Church was this orphan child’s parentage, and that’s the way Perrie wanted it.

“Now Uncle Ace had been an orphan too, a foundling of some kind, nobody knows or ever knew who his folks were; and he would never talk about it. He took our home when he came into it as Perrie’s husband and he took little Son as his son, as you will see; but this so late and after so much misery.

“Son grew along, in the house and in the yard, me and Perrie doing our sewing, Ace away on the road three weeks out of four all over Texas and Arkansas with his lumber, and little Son playing around the sewing machine that Perrie was pumping. When he could call a name he said Aunt Perrie and Aunt Linsie and Uncle Ace. So there was this household. All in the little house you can see right chonder, that nobody lives in since I moved, just a shell of a house.

“Son was the best child in this world, then; never put his fingers in the sewing-machine pedal, never took the bobbins or the needles, sat very quiet—whose child? As he grew along he never gave any trouble, not even to switch his legs, and when he was old enough in the summertimes—we never even had to send him to Bible School in the summertime—but he went of his own choosing—nor give him a real blistering. Pore Perrie and I would watch him through the window where he played in the woodpile and wonder where Son came from.

“By the time he was twelve he had turned real dark complected and very very nervious. His nerviousness so worried Perrie that she took him to Doctor Browder for it. Perrie said Doctor Browder said this is the most nervious child ever I saw in my practice, but think he’ll outgrow it—Perrie said Doctor Browder said—if he has his tonsils and adenoids out. Son had these out, and then we got him glasses. But we had to take him out of school.

‘Then we trained him ourselves, with the Bible, Stories of the Bible, Children of Faraway Lands—put out by the Missionary Society; and had him count eggs and tomatoes. He planted and pruned and toted round the place; and grew along.

“By the time he was seventeen his distress began, finding him dark and lean and beginning to be very different. He was so nervious that if he’d be sitting by the washhouse studying something on his mind—oh I wonder what?—and the Leghorn rooster would crow in his face, Son would startle up and chunk a rock at him. Once he did this; and hit the Leghorn rooster in the head and killed it—to give you a notion of how Son was in those days. We didn’t know what to do with Son, and pore Perrie worried and worried. I worried too. Uncle Ace was no help, as he should have been, for he was always off traveling. So what could we do, so what could pore Perrie do? We tried to quieten Son down. We read him out of the Bible—My mother and my brethren are these… Saint Luke eight twenty-one.

“The thing of it is he had never had it told to him that he was an orphan. People who knew it kept it quiet; but they tried to tell him about it in ways that people have about a stranger—as you will later see. Some came to Perrie and said Son probably had some foreign blood in him, did he have nigra blood in him maybe? Did he have any papers? These things hurt pore Perrie, and hurt me; but Perrie said Son was Child of the Church and any parentage beyond that was unbeknownst to her. Once I said, ’Perrie regg’n it is the time to tell, do you think Son is of the age to have it told him’; but Perrie said, ’Not yet.’

“Something had happened between Perrie and Ace, as it was bound to. One day in July he wrote a letter from Memphis and said he had a new job that would keep him there and he was going to take it and stay. Perrie would not quarrel with him and sent him all his things. There had never been a whole minute’s talk between Son and Ace, but suddenly when it was known that Ace was gone, and to stay, Son’s change happened. He was gone from his room one July morning soon after and there was a message left saying, ’I have gone to Memphis to see Uncle Ace.’

“A long terrible time and no word. Perrie was ailing most of the time now, her lame foot had caused her hip to ache so that she could scarcely pump the sewing machine. I said a mite, not much; but I was grieving. We ate supper together quietly. There was a medicine show come through, but we didn’t go. A Preacher Healer from the ’Postolics came to town and the town filled his tent and several were healed by the Miracle; but Perrie said that if the Lord had taken her one side it was for His uses and that he had strengthened the other for her own; it was His Design; she pumped left-footed and would not go to the Healer. Now that’s enough; quit asking me. My mouth is shut.”

“But tell how the letters started. Tell about the letters.”

6

“Well, then the letters started. First Son wrote and said, ’Aunt Perrie why did you have to let me find it out for myself that I am somebody’s son we never knew, probably a bastard’—he wrote that word. ’Uncle Ace has told me again what was first told to me on the Church Hike the Fourtha July.’

“Perrie wrote back and said, ‘Son I never wanted to hurt you and you were too young to know, besides. If you hadn’t run off I’d have told you, or had Brother Riley at the church to tell you. But I have been your mother as good as any mother could have been; and your Aunt Linsie, too. If you had no mother then think how you had two mothers showering all their love and care on you, count your blessings Son, and don’t make light of me. For I done the best I could.’

“Son wrote a letter back that said, ‘Aunt Perrie I am working in a lumbermill out of Memphis and like it; and if I had two mothers in Crecy Texas then I have three in all, but one to begin with and that one to end with, will you please do me the favor of telling me who my mother was, and where; and I’ll be much oblige.’

“Perrie wrote back an answer that Son was to please not change his nature and his ways, that he was please not to hurraw about three mothers, that she would tell him now that who or where his mother and father were never would be known, and to send his things on home and come on with them. To just count her, Aunt Perrie, as his mother and go on with his life. ‘For I have raised you,’ Perrie’s letter said, ‘In this house and yard in Crecy Texas to the best of my gumption, under the shadow of the Church and in the name of God. You was a good child and now can be a good young man. I ask you to abide in the Lord who is our only Father.’

“No answer.

7

“On the Fourtha July on account of the celebration at the Picnic Grounds all the heavens was aglow for two hours, just one solid blast, shook us all up, you’d have thought the world was coming to an end; and about nine o’clock I looked out and here was Son coming from the to-do and we could see something was wrong, that he had been hurt. He looked so hurt. Perrie said, ‘Son commere to me and tell me who or what it is that’s hurt you; I can tell when something has hurt you, and come and tell me.’ But Son wouldn’t say. And I thought, because he was so peculiar and so changed, what child is this? And I thought child o child what is ever going to happen to you in this world I wonder, oh what will your life be, if we could just put it into the right hands, see that it goes right and good and doesn’t get hurt or astray—who will ever look after you, you little thing. But I know we can’t help, no one can do that for nobody, have to go this way and that, find our ground and try to stand our ground, learn our wisdom and then try to be strong enough to bear our wisdom, O hep this little boy, child a mine, is what I thought.

“Well, Son wouldn’t tell and so Perrie didn’t press him, he went to bed and I said, ’Perrie regg’n what’s the matter with him?’ and Perrie said, ’Let him alone, Linsie, he’ll tell dreckly.’

“The next day he was so peculiar, we was so far apart, wouldn’t say much, face right peaked, until that afternoon Perrie said he come to her with the wildest face and said, ‘Aunt Perrie I’ve hurt myself and I’m scared, maybe we ought to call Doctor Browder.’ Perrie said, ‘Son what have you done to yourself, come talk to me, come let me see.’ Son said, ‘Aunt Perrie I can’t tell you or show you, ’cause you see I was climbing over a bobwire fence at the Fourtha July fireworks and I slipped and fell upon the bobwire. I didn’t look until we got in the light of the fireworks and then I saw blood on myself.’

“Oh, I said, this is when he needs his Uncle Ace, but let Ace stay on away on the road, let him stay until Doomsday, we can get along without him (this boy was always trying to run away from where he was or from people he was with to be by himself, as if to still something rankling in him, as if to put something to rest within him or for some reason we could never know. But everytime he broke and ran away, and mind you this, he harmed or wounded himself in some way: it was the harm and the wound that brought him back, then, time and time again, so as to heal harm and hurt, it seemed). ‘Come let me see,’ I said, ‘Son.’

“‘Nome,’ he said, ‘you can’t see, either, just call Doctor Browder.’

“Doctor Browder come and he and Son went in the back room and closed the door, and we heard Doctor Browder say, ‘Son let me see you, let me see what have you done to yourself.’

“After that we scarcely knew Son anymore, he was a stranger in the house. It was just a little after this that the letter came from Ace saying he was staying in Memphis and then Son left his message and left. [Child a mine, child a mine, something touched you and changed you all over. I know some hand touched that good boy Son and left him never the same again. Some hand led him away from pore Perrie (Lord hep me forget his face, his head of hair, let me forget him all over, the way he was all over, bless his hide, he was the only thing I ever had. I remember him in the garden counting the tomatoes for arithmetic, I remember him in the clothesyard bumping like a ghost through the wet sheets, I remember him in the pinegrove; child a mine.)]

“And that’s the end of this story. Don’t ask me no more. Because I’m old, poor Perrie’s buried in her grave, and Ace, too—you know this—and Son is out somewhere in the world on the road like his Uncle Ace before him. There is no more to tell.”

“But tell it all, Aunt Linsie, tell about the two Sons, the ghost and the flesh of Son. This is the time. Go on to the end, and then we’ll let it alone, the sad story, forever. By telling it true we’ll keep it straight and never tell it again. We’ll let it go.

“Pore Perrie.”

8

“One summertime something made a ghost out of the Huis-ache tree—spun a web around the top of it—some treedevil that lime wouldn’t drive away; it seemed the touch of Satan. It was so hot and no Gulf hurricane would come, to bring a norther, the whole world stood still, trees hot and tired with their limp leaves hanging like a panting animal’s tongue, flowers in a trance; and us all fanning ourselves. At dark in the evenings a ghost would come. He would linger at the edge of the yard just when Perrie would be feeding the chickens or bringing in the clothes, and Perrie would come in the house white yet her calm prayerful self, but not to mention a ghost. Finally she told me one evening at the suppertable. ‘He is at the window,’ she said. ‘The ghost of Son. And next he will be in the house. He comes closer and closer.’ I sat still and told no lie by opening my mouth.

“(Oh don’t ask me no more, ’cause I’m uneasy to tell it; don’t ask me no more. You’ve heard it—don’t beg me no more.)”

‘Tell how it wasn’t the ghost of Son, Aunt Linsie, tell how it was the flesh and blood Son. Go on, go ahead, make haste and tell it…”

“It was no ghost atall but the genuine flesh of Son. I had known it for some time, had met him in the grove. He was dressed like a tramp and he said, ‘Aunt Linsie commere and don’t be afraid of me, I’m Son and I’m all right. I’ve come back to see you all, to see the house, to see the place, if everything and everybody is all right.’

“‘Well come on home, come on in the house,’ I said, ‘Son, pore Perrie’s waiting for you, in her sickness, in her quiet Christian sorrow.’

“‘Nome Aunt Linsie,’ Son said. ‘Never tell her I’ve been here. I’m going away again, after a little while. Just come to see everything for myself, and not in dreams or imagination, but everything the way it really is and was. Look by the Huisache tree and find some money I’ve left for you and Aunt Perrie. And cross your heart you’ll never tell her I was here.’

“‘All right, Son,’ I said, ‘if that’s the way you want it, that’s the way it has to be. Except I wish you’d come on through the yard and into the house and have yew some supper with us.’

“Then Son went away. I watched him go. He had that same walk.

“But he’d be back again, I’d see him here and there on the place, got to looking for him, would see him behind the barn, in the field, and at the Huisache tree on a moonlight night—he was leaving his money again—and sometime by the chimney window, eyes between the green fringe of the velveteen curtains in the living room. Pore Son, Lord hep this boy; what child is this? I thought and prayed; he can’t stay and he can’t go away. Pore Perrie. Perrie would see him and say in a low voice her prayer, ‘Go away, ghost of Son, go ’way and let me be.’

“Then he’d be gone again for a while, no sign of Son. I’d look and look for him, but he’d have disappeared, and for a long time sometime, no sight of Son. I’d wait for the flesh of Son and Perrie would wait for his ghost.

“Perrie got weaker and weaker, and sweeter, like a lovely angel. She took to her bed. We had this ghost and this flesh between us, but we never mentioned it, never broached the subject, but it was between us, living and real. It bound us together and broke us apart—we’ll settle it one day.

“One night at the end of this hottest summer in our memory, the saving storm came. The trees were nervious and jumpy, but all in the house was green and still. Then it hit. I was in my bed in my front room, next to Perrie’s middle one; and I said Lord let it come, it has been trying to come for so long, it has been so slow, let it come, our salvation. Son had not been around the place for some time, but I knew he was there, somehow I knew it. Then in a brightness of white lightning I saw him at my window, and I spoke out, ‘Hello Son, please to come in out of the storm.’ But the blackness of the night flashed on again, like black lightning, and took away his face. I knew pore Perrie would see him, her ghost, at her window, for he would be there next; so I got up and put on my kimona and using the lightning like a lamp, went to her room. I stood in the doorway and saw this in the lightning: Perrie was standing before her window, beautiful and white as a Saint, naked, the white voile curtains waving and falling and rising round her like the garments of an angel. She seemed young, like a vision of herself, frail and fleshly, and this vision was burned upon my sight, and upon the sight of Son, whose face was there at the window like a lantern; and it will be there till we both of us die, Son and me, I know to God.

“That was the last of the life of pore Perrie, for I picked her up when she folded on to the floor and put her in her bed, a little bundle. I sat the rest of the night through by her side, both of us quiet, Perrie quiet forever—so small and so beautiful in her corpse, the storm raving round the house in great boots, sloshing in the muddy yard and road, and the trees wild and hysterical, Son somewhere outdoors in the storm, me saying, ‘Son, Son come on in, come on in and join us now’; and the night passed. When Doctor Browder came the next morning I said Perrie has passed away, into God’s Kingdom; and Doctor Browder said rest her weary Christian soul.

“Pore Perrie was buried in her grave, you know it well, where it tis and what grave will hold her eternal neighbor, room for me, when I will come. And that Uncle Ace is not there beside her but over alone in a corner of the Crecy graveyard—how Son brought him back to bury him, how they had wandered all over three States together, two pore homeless thangs, Son writing me the letters to tell him again all about pore Perrie; he never could seem to get it all straight. This Noah’s bird that went forth from the ark kept coming back to us, coming back, with no place to rest his foot; until the last time he came with his burden, his pore homeless, childless, wifeless father; and then he went away for good, in peace, and never returned. He must have been put on this earth to rove about and nurse the wandering homeless, to find them graves to rest in, to bring them to that home again, yet he was homeless too and I wonder who will go out to find him and bring him back? He is aloose forever and in what world and on what way I wonder? The world is too big; we lose people in it. This weatherbird flies into all the four corners of the wind, Lord pity pore little suffering children, oh come on home Son and let’s cry together like we use to, even when you were little we would cry together… even if you were playing in the clothesyard I’d just run out to you under the shadetree and grab you and cry and you would cry with me. You little trembling thing you already knew (how did you know?) what breaks a heart; nobody ever had to tell you a thing you just knew. That’s your purpose you were placed in the world to cry with people, you were sent for grief, called to the grieving world. But I know you’re a gay little thing, too, and that’s why I know you’re meant for grief because you are so gay and are so good to laugh with, oh we’ve had our laughs, laughed until we cried… why don’t you send your clothes on home you said you would where are your things?

“Go on now. That is all I will tell and I will never tell it again. Now I’ve told you it and I never will again. Go on now and hush ever thinking about it.

“Pore Perrie.”

9

(The thing of it is, they say Son still comes to Crecy once in a while. That Linsie would see him at the edge of the grove and go out to meet him, after Perrie passed away, speak his name, “Son,” and say, “Commere Son,” only to find him not there at all. She would see him and then she wouldn’t. Had he come, or hadn’t he? Sometimes she would see a lantern going over the ground or hanging in a tree in the grove; sometimes it was just the light in the brooder. Was he there or wasn’t he? They say a Peeping Tom with a flashlight has been seen at windows of Crecy houses. That the ’Postolics say the Devil was seen walking in the pastures at night with a torch. That somebody has been living with the Gypsies up on the hill. That a Negro on the road saw Son and Linsie dancing naked in the pinegrove one night. And that Linsie’s seen Son all through the house, behind the beaded curtains between the hall and middle bedroom, his face at the frosted pane on the front door and called, “Son Son commere to me and tell me what is in your craw.”

The thing of it is (and then I’m through, this story is done), when Linsie is buried in the family plot next to pore Perrie, these two sister-mothers will have this to settle between themselves there under the dirt. Linsie has a message for pore Perrie, and it won’t be long, now, before she takes it to her. They have this Son between them, until Doomsday, ghost and flesh.

And now I’m moving on (oh hear my song); this is the story as it was told to me; and as I go on, on the road, with a message to deliver, I want to get it all straight. There is this Son’s pain to understand and tell about and I look for tongue to tell it with.

Pore Perrie.)