A Piece of My Heart

1

He heard Robard go down the steps, walk to the Gin Den, pick up the gun and the box of bullets, and leave. Somewhere back of the house Mr. Lamb started yelling for the colored man to start the other jeep, and in a few minutes he heard Robard head back up the road in a hurry.

He lay listening to drops pilch outside the shed. In a little while the other jeep went banging around the house, the old man yelling something at Landrieu which Landrieu didn’t answer back. When the jeep got even with the shed the old man pulled up and sat a time in silence then finally fumed, “Goddamn it, get your fat ass out of the bed before I start Landrieu digging a grave for you.” Mr. Lamb fired the jeep and barged off toward the lake. And he lay in bed staring up in the metallic light, thinking about Robard and about nothing. In a while he heard Robard drive slowly back through the yard and go off in the other direction, the jeep hitting every third stroke. Elinor came to the door and stopped and looked in and sniffed, then passed by. And he lay silently, satisfied to collaborate with everything by sounds, lying bare in the cool without gawking into Mr. Lamb’s blistered old eye sockets, justifying himself a mile a minute.

Robard had caked his blankets back on his cot as carefully as if he thought he was something else besides cash help, and the idea that Robard miscalculated his circumstances pestered him and made him think that locked up behind Robard’s stingy mouth was a little fugitive terror that wanted everything just so and couldn’t keep still till he had it that way. And he couldn’t stop himself from thinking Robard was going to let him down sometime on account of it, on account, he thought, of just being fastidious. Though he admired him for that very thing, for keeping a kind of life apart and private, something he himself had never been lucky enough to cultivate, so that everything he thought he ended up having to say out loud.

Landrieu suddenly appeared in the doorway and batted the tin with his spatula, squinting to see inside without actually opening the door. “You better get up,” he shouted, twisting his face into a scowl. He had on his chintz chef’s hat.

“Who says?” He stayed out on the sheet just to antagonize Landrieu.

“She in there waitin,” Landrieu said, and disappeared. He could hear Landrieu pounding back up the steps.

He felt gratified at the prospect of sitting down to eat without the old man there to fence at him. He got off the bed onto the scaly concrete and stood looking out toward the trees where the morning light was waxy through the trees. He wondered about just how it would be when Robard let him down, and whether it would ever make any difference to either of them, in any way whatsoever.

He got dressed and hopped across the wet yard and up the steps into the house. Landrieu was in the kitchen overseeing four strips of bacon in an enormous skillet of grease, and refused to look up.

Mrs. Lamb was installed at the low end of the table wearing a man’s red plaid shirt that disagreed with the red in her hair. She glanced up at him and took off a pair of half bifocals fastened to a piece of string around her neck. She was reading a Farmer’s Almanac, her back to the kitchen.

“Predicts rain today,” she said smugly, as though she had found an amusing flaw in the book’s accuracy. She gave off a fresh lilac scent and had an old brown sachet sack stuffed down the front of her hunting shirt.

“Can’t fault it too much,” he said, smiling and trying to appear amiable.

Landrieu entered with a tulip glass of orange juice, set it in front of him and left.

“It also remarks,” she said, redeploying her glasses over her nose, “that it rained this day one hundred years ago, and that the rain caused a sinister flooding to occur in Mississippi — where this island is located — and that two hundred croppers washed out of their houses.” She pushed her glasses higher up onto her nose and peered at him over the rims, as if there were a gravity involved in what she’d said that anyone in a hundred miles should be able to grasp.

Mrs. Lamb’s right eye, though the same yellowish hazel color as the left, was not, he could see, a working eye in the ordinary sense, and owned a slightly mesmerized cast.

“Do you suppose history runs to cycles?” she said, observing him with the same interest he’d seen Mr. Lamb bestow on the infected well

“No.”

“Neither do I,” she said imperiously. “Gone is gone to me. Mark Lamb has a difficult time believing it.”

“Anything you’re attached to is hard to give up,” he said.

Mrs. Lamb frowned at the almanac again as if it were the bearer of faulty information.

“Where’s Mr. Lamb gone?” he said.

“He’s taken his Willys and gone across,” she said, her large rouged mouth turning down as though the remotest thought of Gaspareau had just awakened in her mind. “People were supposed to come this morning to hunt turkeys, but no one’s arrived. Mark thinks they aren’t coming. He thinks it’s terribly hard to find the island,” she said gravely, setting her almanac down. “He worries when people don’t come when they’re supposed to, so he’s over there calling Oxford, afraid they’ve all gotten lost. He conceives of Arkansas as another country where people need his special guidance to find their way.”

“I didn’t think he wanted people to find it,” he said.

“No,” she said deliberately. Landrieu installed a plate of scrambled eggs and two biscuits in front of her and an oval platter containing the bacon in the center of the table. “Mark doesn’t want the wrong people to find it. He does want Coach Wright to find it, and he does want Julius Henley, your friend Beebe’s uncle, to find it. He has it in his mind because it doesn’t appear on the Corps of Engineers’ map, it has ceased to exist for the rest of the world.”

T.V.A. entered with another plate of eggs and biscuits, put it down, and stood while Mrs. Lamb scrutinized the table for any signs of misrule, nodded, and returned him to the kitchen.

The house was quiet, and he could hear the tinkle of Mrs. Lamb’s fork against her plate.

“Do you approve of it down here, Mr. Newel?” she said.

“Yes ma’am,” he said.

She picked up a biscuit and examined its sticky interior as if she expected to dislodge something hidden. She looked up thoughtfully. “What are your plans, Mr. Newel?” she said.

“Which plans?”

“You’re a man with several plans, then,” she said, inclining her head gently toward him.

He smiled, trying to guess if she was going to be sympathetic. “All divergent,” he said.

She sighed. “Everyone’s plans are diverging now. There’s no reason yours should be different. Beebe Henley’s diverge to the slightest mention of them.” She set her biscuit back on her plate. “You’re in the law?”

“Next month, I hope.”

She nodded, sliced a strip of fat off the rind of bacon, and put it in her mouth. “What are your plans for Beebe Henley?” she said in the same unmolesting tone.

“I don’t know,” he said, and wondered just what plans he did have. “There’s some chance I don’t have any.” He looked up uncomfortably.

Mrs. Lamb began carefully aligning her clean silverware at the edge of the table, swallowed the last morsel of bacon fat, and settled her gaze on him. “What are you doing here on my island?” she said coldly.

He remembered the old lady’s tough juridical frown freezing every available molecule between himself and Robard like they were two rarees about to sell Mr. Lamb an interest in the Helena Bridge. Mrs. Lamb’s good hazel eye grew considerably smaller and darker, and she levered her chin on the tip of her thumb and stared at him until he began to feel a flapping need of something else to attach his own eyes to. His gaze rose upward, then fell fugitively onto the two maps, showing the island from the air, and not showing it at all.

“People come down here, customarily,” she said casually, “to hunt or to fish or to rusticate. Some come down here just to visit with the Lambs.” She paused. “Under which category ought I to entertain you?” She kept her chin balanced on the tip of her thumb, not moving a flicker.

“It’s difficult to express,” he said, trying to separate his gaze from the maps and order it back down into the old lady’s immediate presence. “It would take a lot of patience,” he said.

He could hear the little jeep slamming into the yard behind a terrible fury.

“I have great reservoirs,” she said, looking annoyed. “When I was forty-five years old, Mark and I were living on this island, and I developed tuberculosis on account of the dampness, and had to be taken to Memphis in rather a hurry. And the way doctors treated tuberculosis at that time was to fill the afflicted lung with glass marbles and leave you stay a few months until the lung simply regenerated itself by forbearance.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said.

“It was awkward,” she said coldly. “But I developed great patience. And I think I have adequate patience to listen to anything you could ever tell me in your entire life.” She regarded him in an unfriendly way.

Someone’s feet began pounding the outside stairs and kicking every door on the way. Mrs. Lamb’s eyebrows rose to an aristocratic peak, and she raised her chin slightly and inclined her head in anticipation of an abrupt entry. He got his eyes solidly stationed on his plate and began eating eggs with as much application as he could rouse.

Mr. Lamb suddenly burst through the pantry door, red as a tomato, continued through the room straight into the sitting room, and disappeared around the corner without a word. He was wearing rubber boots that came to below his knees and a long canvas coat that reached the tops of the boots, giving him the appearance of a small bell with a long clapper. “Shit!” he yelled where no one could see him. “Son-of-a-bitch.”

Mrs. Lamb’s eyebrows re-arched themselves firmly, and she thrust her lower lip over her upper and set her hands on the table, waiting for Mr. Lamb to emerge from wherever he was fuming and cursing and banging. He felt at that moment like he would like nothing in the world as much as he would like to leave, and just hoped the old man hadn’t seen him on his way through. Mrs. Lamb, however, ruled everything with silence and with the expectation that Mr. Lamb was about to return and wouldn’t like it if anything had changed from when he’d seen it before. He set down his fork as unobtrusively as possible, drew in his legs, and let his hands come to rest in his lap.

“Sons of bitches, sons of bitches,” Mr. Lamb gurgled, appearing starkly around the corner in his sock feet, without the coat, and wearing a pair of gallused canvas pants and the same red shirt with the mallards on the collar. He glared at both of them and took a strangle grip on the back slat of his chair, his face overcome by red.

“What has happened, Mark?” Mrs. Lamb said patiently.

“The bastards ain’t coming,” the old man seethed. “I called both of them. And both of them said they weren’t coming. Said they was too goddamned tied up working or some stupid business like that. Julius said he had to be in court and Lonnie Wright said he had to fly to Pennsylvania to pay some nigger to play at Ole Miss. If that don’t beat anything I ever heard of. Neither one of them said a thing beforehand. Sons of bitches didn’t even intend to call me.” His face blackened.

“Did they say they were coming?” Mrs. Lamb said.

“Hell, yes. They come every year, don’t they?” Mr. Lamb glared at her as if he’d sensed betrayal. “They don’t have to say they’re comin, they just damn well are. Except the bastards ain’t, goddamn it.” The old man’s eyes snapped at him unexpectedly as if he were unquestionably to blame for everything, but was simply too despicable to look at for more than an instant at a time.

“Well, Mark, sit down,” Mrs. Lamb said softly.

“What the hell for?” the old man snarled. “Where has common decency gone to? I’d like to know that.” He glowered around the room as if decency were there someplace but wouldn’t let itself be seen. “What the hell business has work got coming into strife with turkey season? I’d like to know that, too.” Two tiny wads of white spit sproated in the crannies of Mr. Lamb’s mouth, threatening to rupture.

“Wipe your mouth, Mark,” Mrs. Lamb said.

The old man sawed his shirt sleeve across his mouth and plunked himself at the head of the table and eyed the two of them accusingly. His hair was tufted into two unruly swipes that gave him a wild look, lowering at the end of the table like a thwarted demon.

The room got very quiet suddenly, and he thought maybe this was the time. But the old man was holding everybody captive and was not about to commute a sentence without having a terrible penalty first.

Mrs. Lamb sighed and looked sympathetically at her husband, while Mr. Lamb gradually sank into a profounder gloom. The old man bit off a sizable chunk of his thumbnail and crunched it between his teeth.

“Mark,” Mrs. Lamb said, “you ought not gnaw your nails. All those little nails collect in your appendix and then you have to have it removed. When they took mine out it was chock full of little crescent slivers, and I haven’t bitten mine since.”

“I don’t know why,” he growled. “You ain’t got no appendix to worry about, you might as well gnaw what you please.”

She looked at Mr. Lamb casually and the old man seemed to take a certain pleasure in mocking her, though it quickly vanished and he sank back into his evil. Landrieu, who was sitting in the kitchen slicing boiled eggs, made a firm entry into the wall of an egg and plopped the white and the yolk into two crockery bowls.

“I just don’t know,” the old man said, jamming his little hands together and starting one thumb into orbit around the other, becoming momentarily engrossed as though it was no small task to keep them both going at once. “First my well goes queer, which it had never been known to do in fifty years. Then the turkey season fouls up, then the goddamn lease is coming up.” The old man squinted at him as if he were considering including him as a fourth calamity. “There’s something’s wrong, ain’t it, Newel?”

“I don’t know,” he said, hoping he wouldn’t have to say it again.

“Well, I know,” Mr. Lamb fumed. “Cept I don’t know what the hell it is wrong. Things have just gone sour as hell.”

The old man sank lower into his chair until his face was six inches above the top of the table, and the entire house was still, except the eaves dripping and Landrieu’s chair squeezing as he crept closer to his bowls. The air was warm and weighted and pressed on everything with a powerful force.

Mrs. Lamb got up, switched off the overhead, and strolled into the sitting room, leaving them in a gray light. She moved her chair beside the radio and began fanning herself with a cardboard church fan decorated with a sepia picture of Niagara Falls. He felt a hot drop of sweat on his temple, while the old man stared morosely into space.

“I didn’t know you leased it,” he said, unable to stay quiet.

“I ought not,” Mr. Lamb lamented. Mrs. Lamb fanned herself, smoothing the flecks of hair away from her forehead. “I ought to own the goddamned place,” he said. “I’ve had it fifty years this August. I give it to Mrs. Lamb”—he sprung his thumb back at her—“for her birthday and a wedding present both. I didn’t think I’d live fifty years, nor her either one.”

“Who owns it?”

The old man pinched his mouth with his fingers and let his eyes almost close. “Chicago Pulp and Paper owns the deed,” he said quickly.

“But won’t they renew?”

“I suppose they will,” the old man said sternly.

“So they’re not going to make you leave.”

“I suppose not.” Mr. Lamb sat staring abstractedly at the open kitchen door. Landrieu seemed to feel himself being watched and backed his chair out of sight.

“So it’s not so bad,” he said.

The old man batted his eyes hotly. “I’m the one says what’s bad and what ain’t. I don’t like them greasy dagos coming down here in their sorry-ass airplane, making me haul them around like I was a bus driver. It’s demeaning.” His eyes flamed again. “They come flying down here every five years, pissin around, messing in my business, marking my trees like I hadn’t been here fifty years. Not one of them was there when I took the land out, they’re all new. And I’ve got just about a good mind to plow up that airstrip they built and let them land their plane in the woods and be rid of them.” The old man ground his hands together as if they were two warty slabs of bark.

“It seems more important, though, that you keep it,” he said, trying to seem reasonable. “You could get a lawyer and have him show it to them, and you and Mrs. Lamb wouldn’t have to even be here.”

“A lawyer,” he said indignantly. “I said I done made my will. You’re trying to drum you up a little advance, are you, Newel?”

“I’m not a lawyer,” he said.

“The hell you’re not,” the old man said, and gaveled the table with his fist, his voice elevating with each succeeding word, so that the spider veins in his face thickened and turned blue. “But I’ll tell you this much. I’ll be there when them dagos step out of that airplane, and I won’t need a paid-to-talk mouth to cloud up my issues, either.”

“That’s fine,” he said, standing and starting toward the kitchen.

Mr. Lamb leered at him. “You don’t understand that, do you, Newel?” he said. “Why I don’t like them wops coming in here in their airplane piss-nosing around on my land, even if it’s them that owns it?”

“I think I do,” he said, stopping in the pantry door.

“No, you don’t!” the old man shouted. “It’s an in-dignity to suffer their presence on this island, like this was some part of De-troit or one of them other hellish places. It’s an in-dignity to stand it. That’s something they don’t teach you anymore. You don’t know nothing about dignity. I’m just afraid you don’t.”

“I was just trying to talk about priorities,” he said quietly. “But maybe you’re right.”

“Priorities be goddamned,” Mr. Lamb shouted, slamming both his fists on the oilcloth and glaring out of an enraged fury. “Piss on priorities and all that other horse shit. We’re talking about dignity and about Mrs. Lamb’s wedding present, by holy God.”

“I misunderstood,” he said, and disappeared out the door.

“I guess you did,” the old man shouted. “I guess you did, too.”

2

When he was twelve he had gone with his father and his mother to Biloxi, and they had stayed on the beach at a large white hotel called the Buena Vista that had deep shady verandas and rows of white cottages in the back under the banana trees. His father went away in the day and came back in the evening, until Saturday when they went to visit a man his father had known in New Orleans, named Peewee McMorris, who had worked on oil derricks until another man had dropped an orange on his head accidentally from the top of the derrick, and after that he never worked again and was permanently stiff in his left leg and stayed in bed in his shabby pink cottage in the palmettos behind Keesler Air Force Base near the VA. His wife’s name was Josephine, and when they arrived she made them all take tall drinks and took them out to visit Peewee, who was sitting on a nylon chaise in the back yard, putting down sprigs of St Augustine grass from his chair, out of a peach basket he had beside him. Peewee was a small knuckly man with a long Italian jaw and was very glad to have a drink in the hot afternoon. When he had taken his first long sip of whiskey, he smiled at him and asked him if he wanted to see a trick. When he said yes, he would, Peewee jimmied himself off the chaise longue and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and walked stiff-legged to the corner of the house to where Josephine had planted azaleas and hydrangeas to hide the water meter. Inside the largest azalea bush, which was blooming with violent pink petals, Peewee found a large wasp nest and pointed for him to see. He was afraid of wasps and did not like it, if that was to be the trick, and stood back Peewee laughed, and when the last wasp had landed on the broad crusty hive and none were left flying around that he could see, he carefully put his hand into the nest and let the wasps light on him and walk around on his knuckly skin and try their stingers on his flesh, until it seemed they would reach the bone. Peewee, without shaking, began to laugh and laugh, and said that since the man had dropped the orange on his head he had not been able to feel pain in many parts of his body, and that his hand was one of the parts, and that a wasp could sting him until he was blue in the face and that it would not hurt. He drew back his hand with one wasp still clinging to his middle finger, his stinger sunk in Peewee’s flesh. And Peewee laughed and flicked the wasp away like he would a match and left the stinger in place inside his hand. When he had looked at Peewee’s hand for a long time, dangling beside his highball glass on the thick mat of St. Augustine, he told his mother he would like to go for a swim in the gulf before he went to bed. And when he had stood in the brown brackish gulf water for a long time and looked out along the hotel’s whitewashed pier at the old men dipping crab nets down toward the shallow water, he could see the blue man of wars floating in on the tide, riding the lazy surf toward the beach, and he wondered if they would sting him if he mingled his legs among their straggling tentacles.

3

He spent the day in bed in a surly temper contemplating Beebe’s father, who had been the lawyer for the city of Jackson, and who had begun drinking whiskey in genuine earnest the moment destiny locked him onto a course straight for the state supreme court, and afterward expended a great deal of energy appearing drunk in courtrooms, submitting clownish briefs, making ill-considered statements, and ultimately bringing general odium on himself at the expense of judges and juries all over the state of Mississippi.

He could perfectly think of sitting in the sun porch of Beebe’s old yellow colonial with a remuda of Impalas and Town Wagons in the drive, while Hollis paced back and forth contrasting the law of Mississippi with the Napoleonic Code of Louisiana and trying to epitomize precisely what it was like to lawyer in the state of Mississippi.

Hollis was a short volatile man with jet hair and small arms, who at certain extravagant moments favored Senator Theodore G. Bilbo. In the course of talking, Hollis would stride out of the sun porch into the living room, speaking all the time, make a circuit through the room, pick up some petty table article and conduct it back to the sun porch cradled in his hand, eventually returning it during the next circuit, when he would appear with something else, a lighter, or a shell figurine, a framed photograph of someone, anything he could conveniently fondle and still talk. He had recognized this as Hollis’s ultimate courtroom stratagem, an intrigue for diverting the jurors’ attention from what he was saying to whatever singular object he was hoisting around, lulling them into only an addled interest in what he was saying by manufacturing a more thralling interest in what he was holding, and thereby implanting the conviction that he must be saying something worth listening to or they wouldn’t be paying such close attention.

At Ole Miss Hollis had come under the sufferance of an agitating nervous tic. At the conclusion of every lengthy sentence, which ended, by design, in a burst of hard short consonantal sounds culminating in an upward trill of voice as if a question were being asked when it was not, Hollis would thrust the left corner of his mouth down and wildly to the side, jarring his body as though he’d been stamped by a horse, and in a way that suggested he might be trying to scratch his shoulder with his chin. Immediately, he would spin heel and toe and stride off in the direction the tic had driven him, so that if the listener was not watching closely, or was watching something else, the speed of the agitation and the evasiveness of the turn might cloak the tic completely, and the listener, already perhaps in thrall to whatever Hollis was holding, would see nothing, yet be convinced something heartbreaking had been said, even though he himself had not heard it.

Hollis had begun the afternoon toting around a small porcelain bird that resembled a stylized replica of a frigate bird, transporting it periodically to the living room, yet returning each time with the same bird webbed in his fingers, as if his point swelled to greater and greater pertinence each time he reunited it with the bird.

His comparison had fulcrumed on the point that in Louisiana deeds and all legal instruments were not collected in a central archive, but were maintained among the papers of the parish magistrates, who exacted unregulated fees to authorize copies and institute searches, and by that fief, oversaw a large pork barrel, the spoils of which were pared in favor of themselves and the governor. The creative case in point had been that of Governor Long, who granted appointments in exchange for whatever obstructions and embarrassments the appointees could promote against the governor’s enemies, such as leaking accusations that well-known legislators were partners in Bossier City whorehouses, then being out of the parish when attorneys arrived to certify the deeds.

“In Mississippi,” Hollis declared in a rounding voice, taking a sober look at the frigate bird as if it deserved an immense amount of specific attention, “it is a far simpler system, often too simple for my lights. Litigation is sometimes too available. Yet our deeds and public records are housed in the capitol”—and he pointed the bird in the general direction of the capital building, several miles back into town—“and legal action is not subject to the canton system, which sponsors so much subornment across the river.” He frowned and looked perplexed in the direction of Louisiana and ended in an upward trill in his voice followed by the trick in his mouth that sent him striding into the living room, but quickly returned holding the bird with an abstracted look as if his exemplum had somehow failed. “It isn’t my intention,” he said balefully, “to aver that law practice in Mississippi is interesting or even mildly diverting, which is why I do my practicing before the NLRB and the ICC, which is where the money is, though not the celebrity.” He took a glance into the living room, which was backed up with overstuffed wing chairs, stinking floral antimacassars and mismatched end tables, the sole remainders of his wife’s dowry. “The state court of Mississippi is an informal affair requiring an attorney loving humanity somewhat more than the law, affections I lack in favor of loving money.” And he strode promptly out, made a turn in the living room, took a peek into the dining area as if he was contemplating a future trip there, and returned again with the bird.

He himself had since sunk deep into the couch mesmerized by the bird, nodding only when Hollis’s voice crescendoed in the manner of a question that didn’t desire an answer.

“I believe I can make the point this way,” Hollis said, lifting the bird as if he were about to let it speak for itself. “When I was the prosecutor I was called once to try three Negroes charged with stealing a house off another man’s land. We were never able to discover how they actually managed to remove the house, but they did it nevertheless, in the space of a few hours. So a little while before their case was to be brought up, they were all three led into the court, just as another case was being concluded. There, the jury had been dismissed, and the attorneys were talking, and the space at the defense table was still cluttered with papers and documents, and the bailiff simply led them to the jury box, sat them down, handcuffed them to the balustrade, and left the room entirely. The men had already entered a plea of not guilty to the charge of conversion,” he said, “and were there to be placed in actual trial without a jury. So time passed and the other attorneys left, and my assistant and I and the attorney for the Negroes entered, with various of the witnesses, and finally the judge and clerk. The bailiff never did come back. And all of us sat down and I noticed that the three Negroes were all sitting together in the jury box by themselves, looking around as if they knew what they were doing. And the old judge took his seat and looked at the defense and said, ‘Is the defense ready?’ And they announced that they were. ‘And is the prosecution ready?’ And I said we were ready. And the judge’s eyes strayed over to the jury box, where the three Negroes were sitting there like they owned all the chairs, ‘And who are you?’ the judge said, somewhat stoutly, since Negroes were not allowed on juries then. And the one tall shovel-jawed nigger jumped up, snatched off his cap, grabbed the balustrade, and said, ‘Why, we’s the thieves.’ “

Hollis stopped and stared at him significantly, as if taking account of his deep fascination with the bird. “So there you are,” Hollis said very disgustedly. “A mistrial was immediately motioned, granted, and all three of them got off, though I later put one in Parchman for stabbing the poor bastard who confessed.” His mouth snapped toward his shoulder and he went lurching off to the living room and never returned.

And it had stayed in his mind that law in Mississippi would probably be a blend of imbecility and gentle fastidiousness that didn’t allow you any recourse but to get drunk and remain that way.

One day three years later, Hollis drove his Cadillac to New Orleans to try a case before a Labor Relations Board referee, and at the noon recess, drove out onto the Huey P. Long Bridge, got out, and jumped in the river. The people who stopped to get a glimpse of whoever it was floundering around in the dishy water said that by a stroke of famous bad luck Hollis had missed the river and landed like a sack of nails on top of the concrete piling. Though, they said, with effort he had managed to crawl off into the water before anyone could skinny the ladder and hold hirn back, and had gone out of sight immediately.

Beebe said everyone could figure what got him off the bridge. Some people had actually been wondering what had taken him so long. But no one, she said, could understand what got him off the concrete.

And he had sat in his apartment on 118th Street above Columbia and decided that nothing less than two thousand miles would be safe enough to keep him off the bridge. Or worse, that he might just make all the necessary adjustments to imbecility and boredom and unreasonable gentility that everybody there seemed to make, but that nobody seemed to care much about.

4

Early in the evening Robard arrived, changed to his green rodeo shirt, and left, mumbling about business. He sat on the side of the bed and asked after the nature of the business, and Robard smiled and disappeared out the door.

He lay up and thought about his plans for Beebe since he’d told Mrs. Lamb he didn’t have any, and tried to come to what was true. He thought about the pleasure of taking the IC up in the afternoon, getting off at Randolph, and riding a bus to Goethe, then walking the two blocks. At midnight she’d take off to Tokyo or Addis Ababa, and he wouldn’t think about her anymore and would take the train home. It made him feel fulfilled.

She had once had a boy named Ray Blier she was in love with, and who had gone to Annapolis. She had spent almost every college spring in expectation of spending nights with Ray Blier whenever there was an opportunity, flying off to New York, amusing herself in the way some women amused themselves sufficient to carry them to their graves. And it seemed strange to him that she would let it go. She said Ray Blier was holding down a pencil in the War College and champing to get back to Ole Miss Law School, where he’d feel safe. And she said it was venomous and she didn’t want it. There were times when she came and didn’t call. And there were times when he heard the phone and decided it was her and didn’t answer. And none of it was ever charged. Everything was based on a nonchalance that didn’t include plans in any customary sense. Though there was something to it all that made him feel dreary, and that made him believe it would lead to something bitter, and that it would all sweep over him one day without his knowing it was happening.

5

“Have you wondered about my eye?” Mrs. Lamb said, setting her cup on the oilcloth, regarding him through a denser aroma of lilacs than usual. She had explained that Mr. Lamb was feverish and had gotten in bed, put his good ear to the pillow, and gone straight to sleep. He felt a vague contrition for having been the catalyst that sent the old man to bed in a snit, and the thought occurred to him that the best thing to do would be to catch the bus after dinner and make the morning train to Chicago.

“I’m sorry,” he said, denying any notice of the eyeball.

“My left eye is a prosthetic one,” she said, concentrating on lining her silverware again along the edge of the table and making no effort to demonstrate the eye in any way. “In 1919, before Mark and I were married,” she said, smiling to herself, “I had a job in a broom factory in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Mark was trying to make a start farming and I was merely marking time until we could get married. It was long before the child labor laws, at least in Mississippi, and I felt it would be nice if I took a job to support myself. My father was considerably older than he should have been to have had a daughter fifteen in 1919. And he worked only now and again, as a cotton estimator, and did well considering the little time he spent at it. So I went to Clarksdale patently against his wishes and took a job in the Choctaw Broom Works, binding broom ends with red twine. And one day as I was walking out to go sit in the shade, a broom handle went flying out of a circular saw and hit me right in the eye, and I subsequently lost it.”

She smiled and he tried to seize on something sympathetic to say, but had to work to keep himself from looking point-blank at the eye.

“I was vastly afraid Mark would see me with my little glass eye and be reviled,” she mused, toying with her cup handle, “shrink from marrying me. And so I went for some time without seeing him.”

“But he didn’t care, though, did he?” he said, denying himself another look at the eye.

“No,” she said. “It didn’t bother him. Mark was a very enthusiastic farmer then. He had several hundred acres to farm when he was twenty-two years old. So it wasn’t actually until we were married four years that he looked at me one afternoon, sitting in the breezeway of our house in Marks, snapping beans, and said, ‘Fidelia, have you got something in your eye?’ I said, ‘No, Mark, I have not.’ My terror had considerably subsided, as you might imagine. And he said, ‘I think so.’ And it was then I told him about the broom.”

“What did he say?”

“He said. . let’s see if I can remember. He said, ‘Well, that’s one less eye to keep on me.’ He fancied himself a ladies’ man then, but I always thought he was too short.”

“He might’ve made it up in spirit,” he said.

“I expect he might have,” she said, and brushed at her eyebrows.

The outside light was smeared into the trees, the last of the daylight. Landrieu came in and cleared the table, and went back to the kitchen and began pouring water from a metal bucket into a dishpan.

“The first spring we came,” she said, staring dreamily at the lintel over the gallery door as though the season were represented by a frieze, “the river flooded, and Mark and I had to stand on the porch killing water moccasins with hoes as they came up out of the water. We were afraid the whole house would break loose and drown us both. I was pregnant with Lydia, and Mark was afraid something awful was going to happen to her on account of my having to kill all the snakes. But I said I wasn’t afraid of snakes, and there was nothing to injure the baby, as long as I wasn’t bitten, and that seemed to satisfy Mark, who simply wanted somebody to tell him he was wrong. And as it turned out, Lydia was never afraid of snakes, although she is deathly afraid of the river for some silly reason.”

“I think I understand,” he said grimly.

She looked at him curiously and composed her hands on the edge of the oilcloth. “We’re very much tied to the river stages here,” she said scrupulously. “Much more than to the clock and the calendar. Though the river doesn’t change so often since they’ve finished the T.V.A. and stopped the Tennessee adding its part.”

Landrieu popped his head around the corner, looked strangely, and disappeared.

“Mark put the house on concrete so we wouldn’t have to worry with being washed away, but the ground is porous and very moist. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pilings were beginning to deteriorate, nineteen and a quarter feet in the ground, fat end down.”

He lifted his eyes to the old woman’s shiny face. Her eyes seemed larger and darker, reading his face vigorously.

He wanted to render a private gesture of recognition and absolute submission, but the old lady unexpectedly got on her feet.

“It’s hedonistic of us to suppose we should perplex the world by lasting on it forever — don’t you think that’s a true fact?” She tended her smile forthrightly.

“Yes ma’am,” he whispered.

“Good,” she said, and walked straight out the gallery door, pausing a moment at the window to inspect her radio, then disappearing into the dark where Mr. Lamb was sleeping.

6

He wandered out through the kitchen and down the steps, past Landrieu straddling a nail keg savoring a cigarette. The sky still looked as if it might turn and rain. The moon was visible very high, but there were scabs of ash cloud sliding by it, growing denser as they went, as though they had detached from some large, lightless vault out over Arkansas.

Elinor uncoiled under the steps, slapping her tail on the risers, and trotted off into the dark, where he could hear her collar tink in the stillness.

He touched the closest column that held up the house, and made a flat echoless slap on the girth. He shoved up into the dingy shadows where the air got colder and limey all at once. He could see strung to the joists several cane poles, a few broken and rusting garden implements, and something that filled half the length of one entire joist board, and looked in the oily darkness like small three-finger garden trowels, but on better looking turned out to be small cartilaginous birds’ feet, turkey feet, he guessed, maybe a hundred nailed to the wood with roof studs, hardly noticeable above the darkness. He reached through the cobwebs and fingered one set of toes so that it cracked against the rafter and threatened to break loose in his hand. It seemed perfectly plausible for these feet to be here, bolted to the house, waiting for their bodies to come pluck them off and go hurrying back down in the woods. He couldn’t quite sense the necromancy, but he thought highly of the idea and felt certified somehow just by standing in the province.

He heard Landrieu step down the steps unaware of him and walk out across the wet yard toward his house, the glow of his cigarette marking him down into the dark. The lime smell seemed to be growing intenser toward the middle of the house, and he thought quickly about breaking down one foot for himself and having off with it, but the idea seemed like some vague mistake, and he bent over instead and backed out of the cold shadows, trying to stay clear of the pipe courses and keep from getting gashed. He stood up clear in the moonlight, and watched the door go closed to Landrieu’s house and the light paint over the shade. A queasy light was still burning in the Gin Den, seeped between the joints, making the shed its own skeleton in the dark. Elinor moseyed back across the dooryard and looked at him sullenly and disappeared back under the steps. He thought wistfully that if he could just arrange a good enough subject he could go present himself to Landrieu and make the evening out to talk. Except he couldn’t arrange anything Landrieu was likely to want to talk over as much as he wanted just to be left alone, and he gave up the thought.

A number of paths similar to the one they’d driven in on all converged on the house, and in a complicated way, through several shunting tracks, reconnected and provided a transport to anyplace on the island. He had traced during breakfast an itinerary to the river using the aerial map, tracking the roads as they coiled back toward the house, and intersected other lanes that led nearer and nearer the outside of the island. He traced what seemed like the simplest path, and with it in mind struck out past Landrieu’s house through the oak, across a queer patch of burnt ground he hadn’t seen before, and made to the edge of the woods, where he could smell the sweet milfoil and the privet deep down in the brake.

He could see a gray dog trail down into the dark, leading east away from the house clearing. He felt confident he was walking faithful to the river.

When he had walked fifty yards, the bush path ended in one of the two-track jeep roads, and he took that toward what seemed south. He looked back up toward the clearing where the three buildings had blossomed in lights, and there was nothing now but the gray path eclipsed into the privets and cotton bush.

Water stood in both axle paths, and he walked on the hump, where it was soft but less saturated. He could see in the trees shadows where the land appeared to back low into larger oaks and separate clusters of shrubbery and briers, though nothing past that. He supposed there were bays trapped parallel to the river, and past that a raised sand barren, and then the river. The road, according to the estimate, canted closer to the river as it swung round the first thick lobe of the island, and passed finally within twenty yards of the main river channel, necessitating no pathway through the bottom. He thought he was almost where Mr. Lamb had stood his salt lick.

The crickets had begun and the clouds that had been threatening had dissipated. The moon hung out at the end of the road so that the light illuminated the path and into the first trees on both sides.

He thought he felt fitter than he had since August, when he and Beebe had taken the ferry across from Waukegan and spent Labor Day on the dunes. He remembered feeling dazzling. Beebe had gone to Bangkok, and he had taken her apartment and gone off to school twice a week and hung around the Law Review basement reading headlines in the Washington Post In the evenings he ate dinner out and strolled up the cement beach to North Avenue and finished the day watching television.

In a month classes began and he moved back on Kenwood with strangers trafficking through the park all night, and things began to get suspicious. At Halloween his knee ligatures had begun to crepitate, and little launching pains began popping around his ear and burying themselves in his head. All that had seemed nicely parsed out began muddling into obsessions about starting the future with the past completely settled.

By Christmas he had an inventory of afflictions, and spent a lot of time worrying about them, forgetting his essay for the Review, which was late. He made conciliatory phone calls to the editor, who accused him of sitting in the lounge drinking coffee and skimming prestige while the staff burrowed in the stacks running down case notes they hoped would land them a job clerking on somebody’s court. He eventually developed a dislike for the editor, a Jew from Ohio named Ira Lubitsch, and made loud inflaming remarks over the phone, agreeing to finish the article by May. In February the afflictions divided and became virulent. He detected a yellowing in the sclera of both eyes, though there were no conforming symptoms. His ligaments were tight. In March he stopped going to school and spent every day glowering out the window at the Negro women walking children in the park and the winos pissing in the bushes. At the end of the month he had an uproar with Mrs. Antonopoulos, who accosted him on the stairwell with two nephews lingering around the newel post like shoplifters. She said she had not received the rent for February and that if he did not remit she would not be responsible for the consequences. She cast a long and darkly prophetic look at her nephews. The next day he found a cloth bag of carpenter’s tools in the hall and screw holes in the door and tiny mounds of sawdust on the carpet. The carpenters had gone down to the deli, where he had seen them drinking milk and eating cheese blintzes. He entered the room, locked the door, and when the carpenters arrived, flung it open and threatened to call the police and charge them with detainment. The carpenters were bewildered, packed their drills, and left. He had closed the door then and not come out for a month, pestered by a return of the little pinching pains behind his ear, a stiffening in his knees, and an inability to yawn properly, as though a governor had been gauged to his yawning mechanism, leaving him with a growing anxiety like wanting to sneeze but lacking the pent-up strength to bring it off.

The median path bent perpendicularly to the left, and a new dog trail drove straight into the cluster of weeds beyond which was a break of scrubs that seemed completely to absorb the track. He heard the crickets behind him in the direction of the house, and in the opposite direction a sound like a low deep-mouthed hissing, more like the absence of sounds than the emanation, as though the hissing were a constriction in his mind to account for the silence. It was like the sound of wind, though not the wind, but the sound a great empty place makes in the distance. He concluded it was the river, beyond the next tier of trees and over the hummock where the sand would give out onto a clay shingle that sloped straight to the water, and he would be there.

He stepped into the path toward the hissing, the ground becoming quavery as if it were suspended over jelly. His feet made a sucking percussion back into the swamp. With one hand to guard his eyes, he poked into the grove, which seemed to be beech saplings and plum bush, until in front of him he could no longer see how the trail parted the brush, and he could smell the sweet plums, and his next step was a long one down into the water.

The breath caught in his throat and no sound got out. He realized he was sinking and sprawled forward in the direction of his momentum toward the closest tree trunk, so that he floundered farther into the water to keep from going under. He hugged the tree while the cold water waffled around his waist and trickled by his stomach, tugging at him stiffly. He let one gasp free, trapped another one and held it, and smelled the sweet fertile river aroma on his tongue. His weight seemed not to affect the tree, and he had the thought that he was not going to drown at that instant. The fact that he had been floating on the same water thirty-six hours ago fetched up and seemed mildly irrelevant since the situation now was all out of control and there was no one there to see if he stayed down for good.

He gripped more tightly to the beech bark, and with his foot felt along the bottom roots. He experimented letting go of the tree by degrees and extending one foot in the direction of what seemed like the ground, but the water persuaded his foot easily downstream, and he had a bad sense about the depth of the water a foot below where he was holding on.

His teeth began to chatter and he tried to see upstream. There seemed to be other trees between himself and the step-off, and he felt maybe that by reaching trunk-to-trunk and root-to-root in a cumbersome, Tarzan-like way, he could tack back up the river and get nearer to land.

He realigned his hands on the bark and faced precariously against the river. The stinking water sagged against him, and he began to feel giddy and not in complete control of what he might do.

From the first beech trunk he made a roundabout extension to the next closest upstream grip, which was an oak husk that he had to slip past, standing on roots, toward where trees were more thickly disposed, and where he could bend out more in the direction of the bank. A little at a time, he waded in the tufts of foam over the roots and disintegrating bottom to the semiknee of land he had stepped off several yards down the stream.

He bellied out of the water, and somewhere up the bank he heard the water whacked loudly, and the commotion of something frothing in the water, then the sound of limbs popping and sediment rolling onto the surface, and the lesser noise of some beast wheezing and snorting and trotting into the break. He wondered, shivering with his legs caved under him and his shoes full of silt and draining, whether some animal had swum the river, and if so, which didn’t seem likely, what could have driven it. He filled his cheeks and let it slowly out and thought about Beebe’s theory that animals remained faithful to their own wretched unpromising territory — past when the food had depleted and they were impoverished and falling over to predators. “It’s the strongest urge they have,” she said, nibbling a piece of her thumb in the manner he’d seen her grandfather munch his own after breakfast. “And the stupidest,” she said.

7

In New Orleans his mother took the train to Jackson, and he went with his father up Canal Street in the sun to the Monteleone, where they had oysters and root beer and took a long nap in the shady room. At six o’clock his father was asleep, and he dressed in the shadows and put on his shoes and took a walk down the long silent hallway that smelled like hot bread and clean laundry. At the end of the hall underneath the exit triangle he stood and looked down into the deep well of Royal Street, where the people looked small and silent, until the breeze through the long green corridor blew ajar the door beside him and he could see two women on the bed side by side smiling into the narrow angle of the doorway. They were lying on the fresh white sheets, naked, with a pint of whiskey half finished between them, and their hair wet and dripping as if they had just come out of the tub and chosen the bed as a place to dry off. He stood looking at the women for a long time, while they looked at him and made smiling buzzing remarks that he could not hear. In a little while a fat man came with white hair and a shiny blue suit, and looked in the open room and saw the women and told them to go back where they belonged because he was going to call someone. He went back to his room, where his father was still asleep. And after a while he got in the bed and slept until it was dark. When his father woke up he said he had seen two women naked in their bed drinking whiskey. His father said he would ask, and in the lobby he approached the fat man and asked about the women, and the fat man said they were women whose husbands owned plantations east of Baton Rouge, and who had sons in the state legislature and daughters who were state debutantes, and who had reputations to consider where they lived. He said that the women had come to the city to buy clothes for a trip to Los Angeles, and after spending one day in Godchaux’s had spent the next two getting drunk and raising cain, and that he had been sorry but had called the police just the same and had them taken away to the station on Broad Street.

He went with his father for a walk down to the ferryboat across to Algiers, and asked him why the women would do such a thing as that. And his father said that now and then things get away from you and you couldn’t control events anymore, and that though the ladies had probably seemed like trash to him, they probably were not, or else they wouldn’t have raised sons to the state legislature.