Swamp Sister

10

It was twilight when the bus let Mr. Ferris out at the forks. The sun was already below the cabbage palms and now they looked stark, stooped like tired people caught in the suspension of their weary thoughts. Mr. Ferris, holding a small travelling bag, stepped carefully down into the dust and paused a moment, looking up and away with the look of a man who has returned to a remembered place.

A woman was coming from a shanty down in a grove of shaggy trees, coming with the brisk, bright determination of a duty that was almost a pleasure. Mr. Ferris remembered her, a Mrs. Ty Waldridge, and he recalled that she had an idiosyncrasy. She took a daily newspaper. Each day at sunset she came up to her gate near the fork and was handed her paper by the bus driver. The thing that Mr. Ferris had found so charming was that neither Mrs. Waldridge or her husband knew how to read. The newspaper was a red herring. Mrs. Waldridge liked to see who got on and off the bus, liked the moments of gossip with the driver and any of the female passengers she happened to know.

The bus was an ancient three-ton affair with a roaring old monster for an engine. The only time the passengers could communicate verbally was during the stops. When the bus was in motion you had to settle for face and hand signals- unless you wanted to strain your lungs shouting.

One man, sitting on the right, had the dress and mannerisms that marked him for a northerner. He looked out the window and up at the cabbage palms. His expression was cryptic. He and Mr. Ferris had become friendly on the way from the airport. He was travelling to Three Creek to visit relatives for the first time. He looked down at Mr. Ferris standing below him and smiled wryly. "So this is what you thought you'd missed?" he wondered.

Mr. Ferris' dry features moved almost imperceptibly, coming to a slow, considered smile. He turned his head right-shoulder, then left-shoulder and nodded. "It takes some getting used to. But you see what I mean about the primitive?"

"Oh yes, yes, that's plain enough."

Both men smiled, understanding each other, as separate as two European adventurers set down in the center of Inner Mongolia. And the man in the bus emphasized their agreement by canting his eyes meaningfully toward his travelling companions, all of them natives of the district.

"I'm going to miss your company, Mr. Ferris, I can assure you."

Mr. Ferris' laugh was soundless but obvious. "Get to know them," he suggested. "It's worth while. They'll make you feel right at home. Just don't bring up the Civil War."

The man in the bus grinned. "Never heard of it."

Mrs. Waldridge came through her gate and stopped short at the edge of the road, blinking at Mr. Ferris.

"Why -" she began. "Why, it's Mr. Ferris! Well, lan'sake, it is Mr. Ferris!"

Mr. Ferris turned, smiling his slow smile and lifted his grey Borsalino hat to her, hearing the man in the bus murmur, "Well, I'll be damned!"

"Mrs. – Waldridge, isn't it?" Mr. Ferris said. "So good to see you again. How have you been? And your husband?" He turned smoothly and held his hand out to the emerging driver. "I'll take the newspaper, thank you. Here you are, Mrs. Waldridge."

The poor fat lady was flustered, at a loss for words. Some of the women in the bus were acquaintances of hers. They gawked at her, saying nothing. Mrs. Waldridge started to take the paper in her left hand, became confused and also started to reach for it with her right, suffered a hand collision in mid-air, and stood for a brief embarrassed moment simply waving both hands helplessly saying, "Why -why, Mr. Ferris – why -"

Mr. Ferris said, "Quite all right." Then, as the worn-out engine burst into a clattering roar, he stepped clear of the road – taking Mrs. Waidridge's meaty elbow and assisting her as though she were made of Dresden – and turned back to wave at the man in the bus.

The old ruin leaped forward as the driver released the clutch, and again Mr. Ferris laughed soundlessly when he heard his new friend shout back at him, "No wonder they make you feel at home! You should run on the Democrat ticket! Bye!"

Alone together by the road, Mrs. Waldridge seemed bent on continuing the stilted conversation that consisted primarily of unfollowed "why's" and "well's." But Mr. Ferris' gallantry had its limitations. He lifted his hat to her again.

"Nice to have seen you again – and remember me to your husband."

"Well – well, yes, I'll shore do hit, Mr. – Mr. Ferris. I'll -Did you come back on 'count a the Money Plane?"

Mr. Ferris looked back, nodding.

"Yes, that's right, Mrs. Waldridge."

"Well! Well, I never! Shad Hark – they say Shad Hark found hit, Mr. Ferris. Did you hear that already? Mr. Ferris?"

He was safely on his way by now. He smiled and waved, "Yes. Thank you, Mrs. Waidridge."

He remembered the way. The trail he was on was used by half-wild cattle and gaunt pigs. It led him down to a deeprutted turpentine road that was used by Negroes with mule wagons who came to scrape resin from the clay cups on the tapped turpentine trees.

And he remembered the next place very well, remembered the smell. It was a turpentine still. Negroes lived there in ratty cabins and abject poverty. It was a part of the swamp that Mr. Ferris didn't find at all picturesque. The little pickaninnies scattered to the weeds when they saw him coming, their eyes like small snowballs, each dotted with a single raisin. He nodded to a heavy Mammy, saying "Good evening," in passing, and heard her chanted "Yus suh, yus suh," follow him beyond the quarters.

He paused reflectively when suddenly confronted with a shallow dirt path running out of the bush to become a tributary to the road. That was his path, wasn't it? The path leading to the Culvers? Yes, he was certain of it.

A man passing through the shrub stopped a moment to look at Mr. Ferris. Then he put his hands akimbo and cocked his head off centre, as though the unbalance would help his power of observation. Suddenly he called. "Hey! Hi there, Mr. Ferris!" and waved.

Mr. Ferris smiled and waved back without stopping. Mr. Ferris frequently forgot other people, but other people never forgot Mr. Ferris.

The path led one mile from the road, around the head of a horseshoe lake and down to the Culver place. Mr. Ferris stopped and looked at the remembered wilderness. The lake lay like a chunk of blue shadow, lustrous and empty, while beyond the cypress barrier the swamp squatted green under the opaque sky. It recalled to his mind Heyst's abrupt declaration in Victory, "I am enchanted with these islands."

He climbed a shaky stile – remembering with amusement that four years ago Larry Culver was promising Iris he would do something about it – and traversed the meadow, coming at last to the grassy yard and the house. He paused on the bottom step, glancing at his shoes. No shine left; they looked like two small loaves of powdered bread. He looked right and left, didn't see what he wanted, and drew a handkerchief from his pocket. He swatted, not rubbed, at the shoes; then shook out the handkerchief, folded it neatly and returned it to his pocket. He picked up his bag and went up the steps to the screen door.

"Larry?" he called across the veranda. "Iris?"

He could hear the mechanical whirr of the air conditioner pulsating through the open living-room doors, and heard the drone punctuated by a liquid click of sound, like ice in a drink. Then he heard Iris Culver's voice. "Who is it?"

And a moment later he listened to her heels clicking toward him. She was but vaguely visible through the veranda screen, and the shadow from the porch overhang only showed her feet, legs, and bottom of her dress clearly. The rest of her was suggested dimly like a wraith.

"Why, Tarleton!" she said. "Why, it is you, Tarl!"

He smiled fleetingly and said yes and tried the screen door. It was open and he stepped inside, set down his bag and looked at Iris Culver.

Even with him, he noted, she smiled her practiced smile, the porcelain pose that belonged to the tall, thin, aloof girls of _Harper's Bazaar_, who give you cold scarlet smiles out of white faces as they stare at you fixedly with green eyeshadow eyes.

She came to him with a slender, pale hand, and that amused him because it was such a contrast to the manner in which she had said goodbye to him four years ago. But no, he amended, that wasn't quite correct. They had shaken hands four years ago. She and Larry had seen him off at the bus, and so of course they had had to shake hands. It was the night before he left that he was thinking about – the last night, when Larry was in his loft playing slave to that mechanical monster that typed out one inked letter after another, endlessly. In the bedroom with the Venetian blinds, in the rumpled double bed with the warm, moist sheets – No. Later may be too late. Listen to me. Find some young man, a stupid one preferably – but of course that means any of them around here. Listen to me. Find some young man and get him interested in you: keep him interested in the Money Plane. Do you understand? Keep him looking for it. But make certain – if and when he finds it- that he tells you and no one else. You can do that, can't you? You can handle a situation like that, can't – Oh, for Godsake, of course I can. But I don't want to discuss it now.

The rest didn't matter because Mr. Ferris was not ruled by Freudian passion, but he was an accommodating man and he firmly believed in living by the set standards of his hostess, whoever she might be at the time.

And now this same pale, icy woman with the hot Tarquin eyes was holding his hand again, was saying, "I don't understand, Tarl. I only just sent you a wire, only a few hours ago."

He nodded, taking back his hand. "Joel Sutt telephoned me long distance last night. Where's Larry?"

"Where would you expect him to be? He is far off in paradise writing deathless prose. Come in. Let me fix you a drink. Isn't this climate God awful?"

She tapped away from him and he followed slowly in the faint perfume of her wake. She had always been a nervous woman, but as a rule – especially when meeting people – her cover up had been superb. So she worried him, because now her cover was slipshod.

"I'm glad that Sutt person phoned you. I only found out about it this morning. Larry heard in the village." She was at the bar, bruising pale silver and ice in a shaker. Mr. Ferris said nothing. He watched her. His sense of perception was as delicate as radar and he was in tune with her agitation.

She came back to him with a martini glass in either hand. She came all the way with her eyes on his, came up close to him, the glasses now held out from their bodies and giving them the look of a grotesque candelabrum.

"Tarl -" a whisper. "I'm so very glad you've come."

There had always been something about him that stirred her. He had the gift of individuality which sparks excitement by its intangibility. "Kiss me, Tan."

He did, but stiffly, and she tried to melt him and he stepped back suddenly, precisely, and said, "Watch the drinks."

She stared at him, her mouth open, a fleck of red showing in both pupils, still standing with the glasses out like branches. He reached and relieved her of one. "Later," he said flatly. "Let's talk of the money."

She turned abruptly and put the glass to her mouth, drank half the martini in one swallow. He watched her, remembering the time when she wouldn't be caught dead drinking without sipping.

"That Shad Hark boy found it."

"How do you know?"

"Everyone knows. It's all over the village." Her voice had an insistent edge. "He found it, but he won't admit it. Not to anyone."

"How do you know that?"

She looked around at him and her eyes were like shards of glass.

"How do you think I know?"

He did something slight with his face, a noncommittal shifting of his features. "Shad Hark?" he tested the name. "I don't know him, do I? Oh wait – no, that was Holly. Yes, I remember a Holly Hark. He went out with me in the skiffs a few times."

"He's dead," she said. "Lost in the swamp right after you left. Shad is his brother."

"Oh yes. He was just a boy. But of course by now he's a man."

She looked away from him. "That's right – a man."

"Is he the one you took under your wing, as I advised you to?"

"Yes, he's the one."

She walked away from him, going back to the bar. "Would you care for another drink?"

He looked down at his hand, remembering that it held an untouched martini. "No thanks. One is enough."

So it had happened as he thought it might. She'd found a stupid boy and made him her slave; had sent him boggleeyed into the swamp to find that airplane, and lo-he had. But then something went wrong. Very wrong. She'd scared him somehow. And now he wouldn't admit it. Now he was trying to get away from her. And it wasn't the money so much that was killing her, as the fact that she had been rejected.

"What happened?" he asked.

"He's a stupid little swamp creature." Iris didn't look at him. She set down the shaker and put her hand around the stem of the glass. "He found the money, and now he thinks he can keep it all for himself."

"But what went wrong? Why do you think he didn't come and tell you he'd found it? That was the plan, wasn't it?"

"I don't know! How can I be expected to know what goes on in his abysmal little mind! He – he's -"

For a moment he thought she was going to smash her glass, and he felt a touch of superior disgust. She had always been a fool. And he had been a fool as well. He'd trusted her too much, but there hadn't been any help for it. You either trust a woman completely or not at all. There can be no half measures between females and trust.

"I don't want to discuss him," she said.

A silence tumbled between them as if they were afraid to speak, as if conscious, in an obscure sense, of an impending crisis. He knew that for a woman, passing the age of thirty-five created a compulsion of recklessness, a kind of helpless wild defiance against the approaching horrors of middle-old age. After thirty-five everything was downhill – a roller coaster hill going faster, faster, screaming into broken-down skin tissues, unmanageable bulges, greyness and decay. It was something a woman couldn't be expected to take graciously.

"That's rather absurd, isn't it?" he said finally. "I mean this Hark boy is the point of my being here. I feel it's imperative that we discuss him." She looked at him, a long, studied across-the-room look.

"You've never really loved anyone, have you, Tar!?" she said. "Never wanted anyone. Things, yes. But never a person." She paused, searching down inside herself for meanings, finding a clutter of old truths that she usually managed to keep swept back in a corner, but also finding herself in the corner with them.

"It makes our situation rather awkward, doesn't it?" she said quietly, absently amazed at her own new strength and reserve. "You see, I'm not sub-human."

He said nothing. He watched her. She came part way into the centre of the room, stopped.

Mr. Ferris realized that he was surrounded by the mysterious aura of femininity, and felt like a man lost in a fog and afraid to move because of unseen deadf ails.

Because they were playing a game over eighty thousand dollars, and because they were partners on the same team and partners must make concessions, he went to her with an odd little smile and let her swarm all over him, and put his arms around her.

"Tell me you love me," her mouth whispered. And her brain cried -Lie to me! Lie to me! He heard the stem of her glass snap behind his neck and heard the glass shatter on the floor near his feet.