The Tin Can Tree

12

The things Joan Pike owned in this world could be packed in two suitcases, with room to spare. She was putting them there now, one by one, folding the skirts in two and laying them gently on the bottom of the big leather suitcase her father's parents had given him to take to a debating contest fifty years ago. Her own suitcase, newer and shinier, stood waiting on the floor already filled and locked. She had saved out her big straw pocketbook, which was hard to pack and could hold all the things she might need on the bus. It stood on the floor, with one corner of a Greyhound ticket envelope sticking out of it. The ticket she had bought this morning, after spending all Wednesday night lying in bed rolling up the hem of her top sheet while she thought what to do. She had ridden into town for it on Simon's bicycle, and come back with it hidden inside her white shirt. Nobody knew she was going.

When her closet was empty she cleaned it out carefully, picking up every stray bobby pin and button from the floor and bunching the hangers neatly at one end of the rod with the hooks all pointing the same way. Mainly she wanted to save her aunt the trouble, but also she wanted to go away feeling that she had left a clean sweep behind her – not a thread, not a scrap of hers remaining that she could want to return for. She would like to have it seem as if she had never been here, if that was possible. So she closed the closet door firmly and turned the key in its lock. Then she began on the rest of the room.

She rolled her silver-backed dresser set in sweaters, so that none of the pieces would get scratched. Seeing the set, which her parents had given her on her eighteenth birthday, made her remember that she should be bringing back presents for them, and she frowned into the mirror when she thought about it. Always before, after two weeks at Scout camp even, she had brought back gifts for each of them and formally presented them, and her parents had done the same. But this time she hadn't thought far enough in advance; she would have to come home empty-handed. The idea bothered her, as if this were some basic point of guest etiquette that she, always a guest, had somehow forgotten. She shook her head, and laid the wrapped silver pieces carefully on top of her skirts.

Out in the back yard Simon was running an imaginary machine gun, shouting 'ta-ta-ta-ta-tat' in a high voice that cracked and aiming at unknowing wrens who sat in the bushes behind the house. She could see him from her window – his foreshortened, blue denim body, the swirl of hair radiating out from a tiny white point on the back of his head. With luck, he wouldn't see her go. He would stay there in the back yard, and his mother would stay in bed for her afternoon nap, and she could sneak out of the house and across the fields without anyone's seeing her. It might even be supper before they noticed. Mr Pike would fuss a little, feeling responsible for his brother's child. Mrs Pike was still too sad to care, but Simon would care. He would ask why she had left without telling them, and how would they answer him? How would she even answer him? 'Because I don't want to think I'm really going,' she would say. It was the first time she had thought that out, in words. She stopped folding a slip and looked down at where Simon sat, with his legs bent under him and the toes of his boots pointing out, sighting along a long straight stick and pulling the trigger. As soon as she got home, she decided, she would telephone to make it all right with him.

Then after supper James would come. 'Joan ready?' he'd say. 'She's gone,' They'd tell him. Then what would he do? She couldn't imagine that, no matter how hard she tried. Maybe he would say, 'Well, I'm sorry to hear that,' and remain where he was, his face dark and stubborn. Or maybe he would say, 'I'll go bring her back.' But that was something she didn't expect would ever happen now. A week ago, she might have expected it. She'd thought anything could happen, anyone would change. But now all she felt sure of was that ten years from now, and twenty, James would still be enduring, on and on, in that stuffy little parlour with Ansel in it; and she couldn't endure a minute longer.

She turned away from the window and went back to her suitcase. Everything was in it now. The bureau was left as blank as the bureau in a hotel room; its drawers were empty and smelled of wood again. On the back of the door hung her towel and washcloth, the only things left of her. She plucked them off the rack and carried them out to the laundry hamper in the hall, and then she was finished. No one would ever know she had lived here. When she had locked the second suitcase, and stepped into the high heels that she had taken off so as not to make a noise, she stood in the doorway a minute making sure of the blankness in the room. Then she picked up the two suitcases and the pocket book and went downstairs.

Carrying it all was harder than she remembered. She kept having to switch the pocket book strap from one arm to the other, and although the suitcases weren't heavy they were big and bulky and banged against her legs when she walked. Before she was even off the front porch she was breathing hard. Then in the yard, the spikes of her high heels kept sinking into the earth and making things more difficult. If she'd had any sense, she thought, she would have called Mr Carleton and his taxi service. Except then everybody and his brother would have known she was leaving. She waited until she had crossed the road and was into the field and then she took her first breather, chafing the red palms of her hands and looking anxiously back at the house. No one had seen her yet.

All the evening walks through this field with James or the children had taught her the shortest way to town – the straight line through burrs and bushes, leading apparently to nowhere but more field, emerging suddenly upon Emmett Smith's backyard and from there to Main Street. She walked carefully, to avoid getting runs in her stockings, and kept her eyes strained ahead for the first sight of the Smith house. Around her ears the breeze made a hot, lulling sound, drying the dampness on her forehead to a cold thin sheet. Then another sound rose, like wailing, and she turned and saw Simon running to catch up, his brown hands fluttering to part the weeds in front of his chest and his face desperate. 'Jo-oan!' he was calling. He made two syllables out of it. Joan set down the suitcases and waited, with her hands crossed over her pocketbook. 'Joan, wait' he said, and floundered on. 'Oh, Simon,' she said, but she kept waiting.

When he came up even with her he was out of breath, and covered with burrs. For a while he just stood there panting, but then his breath came more slowly and he straightened up. 'Can I come?' he asked.

'Oh, Simon-' '

'I came in to see what you was doing. I couldn't find you; I thought -' He stopped, and switched his eyes from her face to the field behind her. 'I wouldn't be a bit of trouble,' he said softly. She leaned forward, trying to catch his words and he said it louder: 'I wouldn't be a bit of-'

'Well, I know that.'

'Old James came over with that picture he took yesterday,' he said. 'You were gone off on my bicycle. He brought it in a special brown envelope like he does to customers. I said, "Mama, here is that picture you was asking for." She says, "What?" I pulled it out to show her. She said, "Oh," and then went back to her sewing and didn't look any more. I put it back on James's doorstep.'

‘Well, now, don't you worry-' said Joan, but she had to stop there, because she wasn't sure what he was talking about. She stood frowning at him, with the wind whipping the hair around her face and her hands clenched white on the pocketbook.

'I won't be a bit of trouble,' he said again.

She said, 'No,' and stooped nearer to him. 'I can't take you,' she said. 'I have to go off, Simon. And you have to stay with your family. When they are back to normal, though, you can come and visit.'

Simon just stood there, very straight. She didn't know what to do, because he had his head drawn back in that way he had and if she'd hugged him he would have hated her. So she waited a minute, and then she said, 'Well, goodbye.' He didn't answer. 'Goodbye,' she said again. She kept on facing him, though, because she couldn't turn first and just leave him there. Then when she was beginning to think they would stand that way forever he swung around and left, and she watched him go. He stumbled through the field in a zig-zagging line, not parting the grass ahead of him but pressing on with his hands at his sides. 'Simon?' she called once. But Simon never answered.

When she turned away herself, and bent to pick up her bags again, she was thinking that out of all the bad things she had ever done this might be the one sin. It made her feel suddenly heavy and old; the weight of her sadness dragged behind her through the fields like another suitcase, and she couldn't look up or let herself think about anything but walking, putting one foot ahead of the other.

The Smith house loomed up suddenly, just beyond a little rise in the ground. Inside a wire fence the hens scratched irritably at the dirt, and from the house came the sound of someone's singing. Joan set her suitcases down and looked back, thinking to see some sign of what she had left, but there was only the gentle slope of wild grass stretching as far as she could see. Behind that was James, dark and slow and calm, rocking easily in his chair and never knowing. And that long front porch where she and Simon used to shell peas on summer evenings, while Janie Rose sang ‘The Murder of James A. Garfield' through the open window. She picked up her suitcases and walked on, with that sudden light, lost feeling that came from walking in a straight line away from people she loved.

The clock in the drugstore where the buses stopped said there were ten minutes to go. Tommy Jones behind the soda fountain checked her bags and handed her the tags, and she said, 'Thank you,' and smiled at him dazedly without thinking about him.

'Coke while you wait?' he asked.

'No, thank you.'

'On the house.'

'Oh. No.'

Her voice sounded thin and sad. She felt like a stick, very straight and alone, standing upright with nothing to lean against. Surely people should have noticed it, but they didn't; Tommy smiled at her as if this were any normal day, and the two other people in the store went on leafing through their magazines. Dan Thompson's wife came in, wearing one of Dan's baggy printing aprons the way she usually did and carrying a fresh stack of this week's newspapers. The insides of her forearms were smeared with ink from them. When she saw Joan she smiled and came over toward her. 'Hi,' she said. 'You want a paper?'

'I guess so,' said Joan. She fished in her purse for the money and handed it over, and Carol gave her a paper off the top of the stack.

'Nothing but the most startling news,' she said. 'We took it all from the Rockland paper this week. Usually we get it from Clancyville.'

'Well, that's all right,' Joan said. 'I haven't read the Rockland paper either.'

'Good. You know what I think sometimes?' She heaved the papers onto a soda fountain stool and began rubbing the muscles of her arm. 'Sometimes I think, what if every paper gets its news from the other papers? What if this is twenty-year-old news we're reading, just circulating around and around among newspapers?'

'I don't suppose it'd make much difference,' Joan said absently.

'Well, maybe not.' She picked up the papers again. 'You bring James over for supper some night, you hear? We haven't had the two of you together in a long time.'

'All right,' said Joan. She didn't see much point in telling Carol she was leaving, not if Carol hadn't noticed for herself. And she hadn't. She went off jauntily, with a wave of her hand, and threw the papers on the floor in front of the magazine rack and left the store. Yet there was Joan, all dressed up in her high-heeled shoes. She looked around at the other customers again, but they went on reading their magazines.

When the bus drew up, she was the only person to board it. The driver didn't smile or even look at her; already she was outside the little circle of Larksville, and only another stranger to the people on this bus. She sat in a seat by herself, toward the rear, and smoothed her skirt down and then looked at the other passengers. None of them looked back except a sailor, who stopped chewing his gum and winked, and she quickly looked away again and sat up straight. The bus started with a jerk and wheezed up to full speed along Main Street, making a sad, going-away noise. Through the green-tinted windows Larksville looked like an old dull photograph, and that made her sad too, but once they had passed the town limits she began to feel better. Some of that light feeling came back. It crossed her mind, as she was pulling on her gloves, that all she was going to was another bedroom, to years spent reading alone in a little house kept by old people, remembering to greet her mother's friends on the street, smiling indulgently at other people's children. But then she shook that thought away, and folded her gloved hands in her lap and began looking out the window again.

It was almost an hour before the bus made its next stop, in a town called Howrell that Joan had always hated. Gangling men stood lined along the street, spitting tobacco juice and commenting on the passengers whose faces appeared in the bus windows. Underneath Joan was the slamming and banging of bags being shoved into the luggage compartment, and then the driver helped a little old lady up the steps and into the bus. She wore a hat made entirely of flowers. From the way she advanced, clutching her pocketbook in both hands, examining the face of each passenger and sniffing a little as she passed them, Joan knew she would sit beside her. Old ladies always did. She stopped next to Joan and said, 'This seat taken?' and then slid in, not waiting for an answer. While she was getting settled she huffed and puffed, making little comments under her breath; she would be the talkative kind. 'I thought this bus would never come,' she said. 'I thought it had laid down and died on the way.' Joan smiled, and turned her face full to the window.

When the bus had started up again, and was rolling through the last of Howrell, Joan checked her watch. It would be nearly suppertime now. If she were in Larksville she would be sitting at the kitchen table cutting up a salad. She pictured herself there, her bare feet curled around the rungs of the chair. In her mind she seemed to be sitting an inch or so above the seat, not resting on anything but air. She ran through other pictures of herself – sitting in her parents' parlour, sitting on the porch with James, even sitting now beside this old lady on a bus rolling west. In all the pictures, she was resting on nothing. She turned her mind back to the firmest seat she knew-James's lap, in the evenings when Ansel had already gone to bed. But even there, there was a good two inches of air beneath her and she seemed to be balanced there precariously, her arms tight around James. She turned away from the window quickly, and said to the old lady, 'It'll be getting dark soon.'

'It certainly will,' said the lady. 'My daughter will be getting supper on now. The married one. I left them a cold hen, barbecued the way I like to do it.'

Joan went back to looking out the window. She stared steadily at the clay banks that rose high and red along the side of the road, and the tall thin tobacco barns from which little strings of brightly dressed women were scattering home for supper. Who would take her place tomorrow at the tobacco table? She stopped watching the barns. All around her in the bus, people were settled firmly in their seats, with their hands relaxed on the arm rests and their heads tipped against the white starched bibs on the backs of the seats. They talked to one another in murmuring voices that mingled with the sound of the motor. A little boy was playing a tonette.

'I'm going to my other daughter,' the old lady told her. 'The one that never married. She has a kidney ailment.'

'I'm sorry to hear that,' said Joan.

'She's in terrible pain, and there's no one to take care of her.'

Out of the corner of her eye Joan saw the Larksville paper she had bought, folded neatly and tucked down between her seat and the wall of the bus. She picked it up quickly and unfolded it, and the old lady turned away again.

There would be nothing interesting in the paper, but she read it anyway. She began with the first page and read through the whole paper methodically, not even skipping the ladies' meeting announcements or the advertisements.

There had been one birth in Larksville this week, she saw, and two deaths. The first death was Jones, Laramie D., whom she had never heard of, but she read all about him anyway – the circumstances of his death, the highlights of his life, the list of relatives who had survived him. The second death was Pike, Janie Rose. The name hit into her stomach, as if she hadn't known of the death until this instant. She started to pass over it, but then she went back to it and read it through:

Pike, Janie Rose. At County Hospital, in her sixth year,

of internal injuries caused by an accident. Beloved

daughter of Mr and Mrs Roy J. Pike, sister of Simon

Lockwood Pike. Funeral was held from Collins

Memorial Home, July 16, interment in family cemetery.

She read it twice, but it seemed unreal still, something vague and far off. Nothing that bad could happen. When she had finished with it a second time she folded the paper very carefully in half, so that the obituaries were out of sight, and then went on to the rest of the paper. She read very closely now, even moving her lips, so as to shut out all thought of anything she had read before. 'Teller-Hokes Wedding Held in First Baptist Church,' she read, and although neither name meant anything to her she was careful to find out exactly what the bride wore and who her guests were. Next came the memorial notices, ringed in black like the obituaries. She had never looked at the memorial notices before. She read about someone named Auntie Peg Myers, who had passed away on July 16,1937, and was dearly remembered by her two nieces. Then she read about Nathan Martin, who had been taken from his wife in 1941. For him there was a quotation. 'Too dearly beloved ever to be forgotten,' it said. Further down, for other people, there were little poems, but Joan stopped reading. She had a sudden picture of all the years of this century, stretching far back in a chain of newsprint that grew yellower and yellower as the years grew older. 1937 was almost orange, older than she herself was; 1941 was growing brittle at the edges. How would this year look? The print on January was already blurred. And then she pictured how it would be when today was yellowed too, years from now, and the Pikes themselves were buried and Simon an old man. Then on the third week in every July he would print his notice: 'In memory of Janie Rose, who passed away just fifty years ago July 13th. Fondly remembered by her brother Simon.' He would be remembering her as someone very small with spectacles, who had lived in the tacked-on bedroom in back of the house. But he himself would be a grandfather then, and nobody Janie would recognize. How would Simon look in fifty years? Joan tried to think, but all she saw was Simon as he was today -hunching his shoulders up, tucking his head down in that uncertain way he had.

She looked quickly out the window and saw the town of Graham rolling up, and the bus station with its line of coin machines. 'Is this where you get off?' the woman asked her.

'No.'

'Oh. You just sat up so sudden -'

'No,' said Joan, 'but I think I might buy a Coke.'

She stood and wormed her way out past the woman's knees, and as soon as she was out the woman slid quickly over to the window. Joan didn't care. She went down the aisle without looking at anyone, and then descended the bus steps. A team of some kind was waiting to board, a group of boys in white satin wind-breakers with numbers on them, and when Joan stepped down among them they remained stolidly in her path, ignoring her. 'Excuse me,' she said, 'excuse me, please,' and then when no one noticed she shouted, 'Excuse me!' For a minute they stopped talking and stared at her; then they moved aside to let her through. She walked very quickly, holding her head up. Out here she felt thinner and more alone than before, with the team of boys all watching her down the long path to the Coke machine. And when she reached the machine she found she didn't even want a Coke. But she put her dime in anyway, and just as she was reaching for the bottle someone said, 'Ma'am?'

It was a young man in sunglasses, standing beside her and looking straight at her. She felt scared suddenly, even with all those people around (had he been able to see how alone she felt?) and she decided not to answer. Instead she uncapped the Coke bottle and then turned to go.

'Ma'am?' he said again.

She couldn't just leave him there, still asking. 'What is it?' she said.

'Can you show me where the restroom is?'

'Why, it's right inside, I guess. Over there.'

'Where?'

'Over there.'

'I don't see.'

'Over there.'

'I don't see. I'm blind.'

'Oh,' said Joan, and then she just felt silly, and even sadder than before. 'Wait a minute,' she told him. She turned around and saw two bus drivers walking toward her, looking kind and cheerful. When they came even with her she tapped the older driver on the arm and said, 'Um, excuse me.'

'Yes.'

'Can you show this man the restroom? He doesn't see.'

'Why, surely,' said the driver. He smiled at her and then took the blind man by the elbow. 'You come with me,' he said.

'Thank you, sir. Thank you, ma'am.'

'You're welcome,' Joan said.

The other driver stayed behind, next to Joan. He said, 'Can you imagine travelling blind?' and stared after the two men, frowning a little.

'No, I can't' Joan said. She automatically followed the driver's eyes. Now that she looked, she couldn't think why the blind man had frightened her at first. He wore his clothes obediently, as if someone else had put them on him – the neat dark suit with the handkerchief in the pocket, the shoes tied lovingly in double knots. He reminded her of something. For a minute she couldn't think what, and then she remembered and smiled. That slow, trusting way he let himself be guided forward with his hands folded gently in front of him, was like Simon during the first year she'd lived there, when he was six and still had to be awakened at night and taken to the bathroom so he wouldn't wet his bed. He had gone just that obediently, but with his eyes closed and the shadows of some dream still flickering across his face. (You couldn't stop walking with him for a minute, not in a doorway nor going around the bend in the hall, or he would think he had reached the bathroom and proceed to go right then and there.) He had held his elbows in close to his body that way, too, against the coolness of the night. Joan stopped smiling and looked down at her feet.

'You all right?' the driver asked.

'I want to go back.'

'Ma'am?'

'I want to go back where I came from. Can I take my bags off my bus and wait for the next one going back?'

'Why, surely,' the driver said. 'You on that bus over there?'

'Yes. I know this is -'

'Women got a right to change their minds,' the driver called. He was already heading toward her bus, and Joan followed him with her untouched Coke bottle still in her hands.

'I always do this,' she said. 'But this time it's -'

'You got the right,' said the driver.

'This time it's different. I can't help it, this time; I'm not just -'

But the driver didn't hear her. He was walking up ahead of her and laughing over his shoulder, thinking it was all a joke. She stopped trying to tell him it wasn't.