The gang of cedar choppers came rattling down the road in a wagon. They hewed down acre after acre of cedar. They brought down the great mature cedars of the brake in perfumed chips and laid them in rows. Two mules towed the old wagon through the brush and out the barn gate. They swore in a conversational way, as if their sentences would be incomplete if they did not salt them with rich and graphic images. After one visit Jeanine stayed away. That goddamned Ross Everett can kiss my ass, they said. I should have burnt down his ass-hole house, cheap son of a bitch.
Milton stalked behind her as she unrolled the chicken wire.
“But I want you to say s-s-something like ‘Everybody gets drunk at bub-benefit dances!’ I want you to understand me. Look deep into my soul, ragged as it is, a mere unraveled thing.”
The wire caught on everything. Jeanine jerked at it. She was dressed in the same dress she had worn when the sheriff had come to them in Wharton and had told them that their father had been arrested. She should burn it, tear it up for rags, its loud tiger stripes were faded and apologetic. Mayme called it her Barnum & Bailey dress.
“Just help me, why don’t you?” she said. “All right, all right, here I am looking deep into your soul. Everybody gets drunk at benefit dances.” She wiped her face with the hem of her skirt. The flat sunlight stoked up the barn like a furnace even though it was only mid-March.
“Oh, Jeanine, you have released me from a hell of self-condemn-n-nation,” he said. “The nights I have sat awake listening to the St. St-St-Stephen’s Episcopaaaaal Church ringing the hours of one, two in the morning and reliving the dreadful scene as much as I could remember of it.” He reached out for the edge of the chicken wire and helped her pull it over the stall. He stuck himself with one of the ends and put his bleeding finger in his mouth and then took out a handkerchief and wrapped it around his finger. “I waited a whole month before d-daring to creep in here, wringing my hands. Ap-pologizing.” Biggity the rat terrier sped past them with a large, thrashing rat in his mouth. Since they would not allow him to kill the cat he took it out on the rodent population. He would bring Mayme the rat’s head because Mayme loved him.
“I hope you stayed awake until your eyes dried out,” said Jeanine. “You didn’t even ask me to the dance. It wasn’t even a date, and I was supposed to put up with you drunk?”
“I know it, I know, I know myself,” Milton said. He handed her nails. She slammed them in over the wire. “I know myself and every smoky b-b-backroom corner of my gelatinous mind. Who could c-c-care for me, Jeanine?” He caught his coat sleeve on the ends of the wire and tore loose more threads. “Every time I fall for a girl, I think, ‘I would never go out on a d-d-d-date with somebody like me.’ Take a girl with really really thick glasses, for instance, and a speech impediment, and twenty dollars a week at the local rag. I wouldn’t go out with her.”
Jeanine laughed and bent her head down on the chicken wire. “Stop, stop, stop,” she said.
“Here,” he said. “I am risking my mental health t-to offer this.” He reached in his jacket pocket and held up a small box covered with red satin. “The only thing a g-g-gentleman offers a lady is candy and flowers, and it was this or a set of new underwear. Do you need some underwear?”
Jeanine stared at the box and finally understood it was some sort of candy or chocolates.
“You’re breaking my heart,” she said.
“Kiss me,” he said, and closed his eyes. He tapped his lips with an inky forefinger. “Right here.”
Jeanine paused for a moment and saw his closed eyes behind the thick glasses, saw every eyelash and the darting movements of his eyes behind the lids. She leaned forward and kissed him. The wind was starting up again and old straw drifted down from overhead and landed on them.
“Again,” he said. His eyes were still closed. Jeanine reached out and took the box from him. She held the hammer in the other hand. She kissed him again, because he needed kissing. Maybe it would, like sticky tape, lift some of the stutter from his lips, and then they would say honest and heartfelt things to each other and his incessant light irony would crackle and drift off like onionskin.
He opened his eyes and smiled at her and put both his arms around her neck and pressed his forehead against hers. “No underwear?”
“Hush,” she said. She heard Bea calling from the back porch. She was calling Albert. She wanted to make sure the dog had not killed him. The wind increased and started tearing at the sheet iron of the barn roof. One of these days it was going to tear it off and send it flying across the pasture. Jeanine let out a long sigh and dropped the hammer. “No underwear.”
They walked back to the house against the hot wind, their arms around each other. The Spanish oak leaves were uncurling in tiny green fists and pushing off the tassels. He bent down his head against the wind and laid his hand flat on top of his hat to hold it on. He held the back door for her and dust followed them. Milton made himself at home in a kitchen chair, stretched out his legs. Biggety lay in the middle of the kitchen floor with half a rat body.
“Oh get it out of here!” said Jeanine. She found a paper sack and threw it in by the tail. She wadded up the sack and went outside and dropped it into the burn barrel. Biggety went after it. She came back in. “I’m making coffee,” she said. “Where are you going today?”
He put his chin on both hands and watched her fill the coffeepot and set it on the stove. She opened the box and looked at the chocolates, chose one. He chose another. They tapped them together as if they were champagne glasses and tossed them down. Then she found her sewing box and took his coat and turned it inside out and began to separate the lining from the sleeves. “This one is as bad as the overcoat.” She smiled at him and held up the needle. “Miss Fixer-upper.”
“Where to today? To the sulfur springs at Arlington. People drink the stuff for their health. Vile. I am inured to all the d-d-depravities of human nature. Why do they not do stories of the families living under the Trinity bridge in Dallas? People in tents, little children sleeping in the dirt. Living on stuff from garbage cans.” He slumped back in his chair, watching Jeanine fix his coat. It made him feel quiet and unstuttering. The chair creaked. The dry air had shrunk up the glue and it was about to fall apart. “I drift around the country looking at drought and the soil is like concrete, abandoned farms taken over by cedar, and all they want to hear about is all these people trying to attract t-t-tourism with concrete dinosaurs and rotten-egg water.”
“I would pay a dime to see dinosaur tracks,” said Jeanine. She turned back the cuffs an inch and snipped off the ragged threads and began to stitch them back to the lining.
“Then, my dear, you would love the town of Fairy.” He bent forward to watch her sew his sleeves up again as if she were neatly repairing his very self. “Named for some railroad owner’s daughter. What’s interesting about it is the cemetery. The Fairy Cemetery. I told them to put up some tombstones for Snow White and her dwarf entourage but d-d-do they listen to me? No. Then there are the weddings of all the rich oil people. Murchisons, Hunts.”
“What about ordinary people?” she said. “The ones who haven’t hit oil.”
“Ordinary people getting married?” He laughed heavily. Ha. Ha. Ha. “They have to pay to get their notices in the paper. Irish potatoes, chickens, eggs, and sometimes b-b-banknotes.” He lifted one clasped hand to his eye and peered through it. “Fifty cents to the photographer. We get to go to the big weddings sometimes.”
“Because you get free party favors. Free chocolates.” She threw his coat at him and he caught it up.
“N-no! Oh cold and r-r-rejecting one! Rife with suspicion!” He stood up and put on the coat and shot out his wrists, admiring the sleeves.
“You did! You didn’t buy them, you got them at some Dallas society wedding.”
“You don’t trust men, Jeanine. C-c-common psychological problem. Your father b-b-betrayed you, all men are suspect.”
She got up and crossed her arms. “What is this about my dad?” she said.
He was blank for a moment. “I’m trying to think what I just said. Mouth running but brain not engaged.” He put his finger to his lips. “Ah, your dad was arrested and unfortunately died in, in, ah jail.” He walked over to her and took her hand. She pulled it away. “They never said what for. Wasn’t reported in my paper.” He stared at the floor. Then at her. “I always wondered what for.”
Jeanine didn’t know what to think or what to say. The chocolates suddenly had a dismal and dusty look to them scattered in their brown paper cups. She listened to Bea’s light humming in the parlor across the hall. The wind made the back screen door open and shut, open and shut, bang bang bang.
“For gambling,” she said, finally, and stabbed the needle into her pincushion.
“There!” He snapped his fingers. “They didn’t even give him any medical care, I would bet. Scandalous, the way p-p-people are treated by Texas justice is scandalous. No good making a complaint, either, not with James Allred running things.” She watched as he struggled with himself to say something serious, to utter some genuine and sincere sympathy, some condolence. He made little waving motions as he fought without much conviction against the incessant stream of irony, and silliness, and derision. It was an affliction. He loved it. “Terrible loss,” he said. “Sad. Bitter.”
“I’m not sad and bitter, Milton,” she said. She marched back and forth across the kitchen twice and took an enormous breath of air, slapped both hands on the table and smiled. “See?”
“No, stupid thing to say. Always saying something stupid.” He took her hand again. “I am on the outside of everything, Jenny, and I like it. I am not g-g-good for much else. I am the perfect newspaperman. I would love to be K-K-Kaltenborn, I would love to intone in a deep clear voice that the Reichstag has burnt down or the Hindenburg exploded-Oh the humanity!-that was Herb Morrison. It was spontaneous. He said it on the spot. That will go down through the ages.”
“Milton, you know, maybe you’d better give up on radio.” She smiled at him once more.
“I work the buttons, though. I give airtime to hog callers. But no airtime for me.” He pushed a chair toward her and she sat down again. “How’s that for stimulating the economy? He may sound like a soul tortured in hell but he’s only c-calling hogs and making six bits for doing it on air.”
“Can’t you do anything about your stutter?” Jeanine didn’t know what caused stuttering but she could ask, couldn’t she?
“Yes.” He took another chocolate. “A school in Chicago. Excellent. Costs a lot of money. Saving every penny.” He ate the pecan creme and swallowed. His pale unweathered skin glowed in the dusty evening light and Jeanine heard her mother and Mayme drive up outside. His pinwheel cowlick made it seem as if his face were topped by a kind of toy. “And by God I will go there. And I am going to make it in radio. W-w-wait and see.” He stood up and put on his hat and walked to the door, waved at her mother and sister, turned back and took her by the shoulders and kissed her. “What if I asked you to go to the movies with me?”
“Try me,” she said. “See what happens.”
“What if I inquired about your interest in Fred Astaire and um, let’s see, we could bring our own popcorn?”
“Ask and ye shall receive.”
“What if I p-pressed myself upon you with insistence?”
“I would melt in your arms, Milton.”
In the little parlor Bea lay in a haze of liquid morphine; the pain that radiated from the pin in her broken leg was moderating and she dreamed of going to school again. Where the pretty teacher Miss Callaway would ask her about her day. Would lay out new books for her to read.