The Tin Can Tree

9

All Tuesday morning, Ansel had visitors. The first one was Joan. She mustn't have stayed long because she came and went while James was emptying the garbage, which only took a minute. When he returned Ansel said, 'Joan's been here,' and then dumped a cupped handful of sunflower hulls into an ashtray and sat down to read the paper.

'What'd she want?' James asked.

'Oh, nothing,' said Ansel. He opened the paper out and stayed hidden behind it, with just one tuft of pale hair on the top of his head exposed to view. 'You won't have to work tobacco today,' he added as an afterthought.

'How's that?'

But Ansel didn't answer. Ever since he had awakened he had been angry; James could tell by his long silences, but he knew there was no point asking what was wrong. So he went on fixing breakfast, and while he was doing that he figured out that Joan must have come to say her uncle was working today. He flipped over a fried egg that was burning and called, 'Ansel?'

'Hmmm.'

'Is Roy Pike working today?'

But that was another question he never got the answer to. All he heard was the steady thumping of Ansel's foot (Ansel kept time to everything he read, as if it were a poem) and the crackling of newspaper pages. He didn't try asking again.

The second visitor was Maisie Hammond. She came while Ansel was eating breakfast off the Japanese tray, and when she walked in Ansel said, 'Um. Maisie,' and went on munching on his fried egg. (It was one of those days when James had brought a tray without being asked, simply because it was more comfortable to eat in the kitchen alone. Ansel had said, Well. I see you've taken up cooking again,' which hadn't even made sense.) Maisie was wearing a white summer dress with a full skirt, and she stood over his couch like Florence Nightingale and bent down to inspect Ansel's egg. 'What's that?' she asked.

'Fried egg, of course.'

'It looks kind of funny.'

'It's James's,' said Ansel.

'Ah.' And she turned around, so that now she could see James where he sat eating in the kitchen. 'Hey, James,' she said.

'Hello, Maisie.'

‘Taken any pictures lately?'

'No.'

That seemed to end the conversation; she turned back to Ansel. 'You mind if I sit on your couch?' she asked.

"I'd prefer the armchair.'

'Well.'

She settled on the very edge of the armchair, spreading her skirt around her. When she bent her head toward Ansel, with the tow-white hair falling over her face, the morning sun seemed to pass right through her hair. She looked like glass. James studied her through the doorway as he munched on a piece of toast, but she didn't look his way again. 'I came to ask you to a picnic,' she told Ansel.

'Oh, no. Thank you anyway.'

'Aunt Connie's giving it.'

'Well, it's nice of you to ask,' Ansel said.

'Don't you want to come?'

'Oh, I can't. James, I'm through with my tray.'

'Put it on the table,' said James.

"There's too much other stuff there.'

James scraped his chair back and went to the living room, still chewing his piece of toast. By the time he reached the couch, Ansel was already preparing to lie down; he held the tray out in one hand, while he swung his feet up onto the couch.

'Ansel won't come to Aunt Connie's picnic,' Maisie said.

'That's too bad,' said James. He picked the tray up and went back to the kitchen.

'He just won't be reasoned with,' Maisie called after him.'

'Maybe he don't feel up to it.'

'Will you hush?' Ansel asked. ‘I’m not giving any excuses; why should you?'

James made another trip back for the salt and pepper, which were sitting on the arm of the sofa. As he bent to pick them up, Maisie said, 'Will you talk to him?'

'Nothing I can say.'

'Why doesn't he ever go places?'

‘That's my secret,' Ansel said. They looked at him. He was lying on his back, with his hands crossed over his chest as if he expected to be laid out any minute, and his eyes were staring upwards, wide and blank. But now that he had their attention, all he did was switch his eyes suddenly to the window overhead and say, 'Well, now. Yonder goes a jet.'

They both waited, still watching him.

'Little white tail behind it,' he said finally.

'Are you in some pain?' Maisie asked.

'Well, yes.'

She looked across at James. 'Ansel's in pain,' she told him. But James just sat down on a wooden chair, still holding the salt and pepper, and stretched his legs out comfortably in front of him. If Ansel began an answer by saying, 'Well,' there was no use believing him.

'What shall I do?' Maisie asked him.

'I don't know.'

'Get him a hot water bottle?'

'Hot water bottle on my feet won't help,' said Ansel.

'Oh. Is it your feet that hurt?'

'I think it is.'

'I declare,' said Maisie, and then looked at James again, but he didn't offer any suggestions. Finally she said, 'Is that why you won't come to the picnic?'

'No.'

'It's not till Sunday, you know. You'd be all better by then.'

'I just don't want to come,' Ansel said. 'But thank you anyway.'

Maisie couldn't seem to find anything to say to that. She sat there, twisting at the hem of her white skirt, and James began hitting the plastic salt and pepper shakers together until he had worked up to a good rhythm. He was considering starting some more complicated beat when Maisie said, 'Will you stop that noise?'

James stopped. Outside a car suddenly drove up, making a great racket as it skidded to a stop on the gravel road. Maisie stood up and bent forward a little to peer out the window. 'It's Aunt Connie,' she said.

'Maybe she's come to invite me personally,' said Ansel.

'No, she's going toward Mrs Pike's.'

'She won't stay there long. Mrs Pike wants to be by herself.'

'Aunt Connie's very cheering,' Maisie said.

'Sometimes, I'm very cheering, but you know what happened when I -'

'It's Aunt Connie's biggest party of the summer I'm asking you to,' Maisie told him. 'That's all. The one where she hires the magician and all.'

Ansel sighed and looked at the ceiling. After a minute he said, 'The actual place it hurts is right behind the ankle-bones. The pain is awful.'

'The anklebones?'

'Last night I walked too much.'

'Where'd you walk to?' Maisie asked.

James frowned at Ansel. He didn't want Maisie to hear about last night, not after the scolding she'd given him. But Ansel wasn't looking at James; he went on, placidly.

'I walked just about everywhere,' he said. 'I thought, "I got to get out of here. This is no place for me." I went everywhere I could think of.'

'You shouldn't take such strenuous exercise,' Maisie said.

'You have no idea how dizzy I was,' Ansel told her. 'How swimming in the head I was. I couldn't even pack my things. I had to have a little something first to steady my nerves.'

'To – oh,' Maisie said, and she shot a glance over at James and narrowed her eyes. 'Ansel, you know what happens. If you get drinking, you see how you feel.'

'It was my mood,' said Ansel. 'I started walking.'

James sat forward and said, "There's a pitcher of Kool-Aid in the icebox. Anybody want some?'

'No,' Maisie said. 'Where were you when all this was going on?'

'I was working,' said James. He stood up, before she had a chance to say any more. 'I've got to go see Dan at the paper. Take him those pictures.'

'Well, goodbye,' Maisie said, and turned back to Ansel. James was relieved she had let him go that easily.

In the darkroom he got his pictures together – one fire, one family reunion, two ladies' meetings – for this week's paper. Then while he was hunting for a manila envelope he heard a knock on the door. He straightened up and listened (it might be Joan again) but it was only the Potter sisters, dropping in for their biweekly visit to see how Ansel was. He heard their little chirping voices, with Maisie's voice running flatly behind them. 'We brought some Jewish grandmother cookies, the kind you like,' Miss Lucy said, and Ansel said, 'Why, that's real -' 'I'll take them,' Maisie said, Maisie was always butting in, James thought. He set down his pictures and came out to the living room, just to say hello, and saw that both the Potter sisters were still standing in the doorway while Maisie sat back in her easy chair with a bag of cookies in her lap. 'Why don't you sit down?' he asked them, and then the chirping sounds began all over again, and the sisters came toward him with their hands outstretched. They had on those dressy white gloves of theirs with the ruffles around the wrists. Seeing that made him sad – they looked as if they were expecting so much out of the visit, when all they were going to do was sit on the threadbare plush chairs a minute and then go home again. He said, 'It's good to see you, Miss Lucy. Miss Faye. Nice of you to bring the cookies.'

'We like doing it,' said Miss Lucy.

'Will you have a seat?'

Miss Faye took the chair he pointed out to her, but Miss Lucy chose to sit by Ansel on his couch. He didn't object. He was sitting upright now, and when she settled down next to him he only smiled at her. 'I heard you tapping those walls last night,' he said.

Tapping the what?' asked Maisie.

Miss Lucy looked very severe suddenly and tucked her head further inside her high collar. She never mentioned her nightwalking during the daytime. 'We came to see if you're well,' her sister said, and to remind you that tomorrow's Wednesday. Time for your shots.'

'James already told me,' Ansel said.

'Last time you forgot anyway. You went visiting.'

'That's true, I did,' said Ansel, and then he sat back and smiled around the room, looking so happy and pleased with himself that everyone else smiled back. The Potters made little ducking smiles down at their gloved hands, and Maisie smiled with narrow eyes straight into Ansel's face. James stood up; now that people were seated and comfortable he could go.

'I have to see Dan Thompson at the paper,' he told the Potters. 'Sorry to run off.'

'Well, now, have a good time,' said Miss Faye. 'Will you remind him of that announcement about our niece's baby?'

'I sure will. See you later.'

He went back to the darkroom. Here it was cool and distant-feeling; the voices in the living room were faded. He put the week's pictures in the envelope and then, to prolong his stay in the coolness, he set that down and began filing away the pictures that Ansel had been looking at a couple of days before- the Model A, Ansel on his couch, Joan in the dust storm. When he came to the picture of Joan he stopped and studied it; he thought it might be the best thing he had ever done. Her figure made a straight, black line through a circle of wavery blurs, and her head was bent forward in that way she had when she walked. He didn't know how many hundreds of times he had seen her like that. And facing that photograph head-on, having a tangible picture of the way he saw her in his mind, made him think about the quarrel again. All last night and all this morning, he had been trying not to.

It seemed to him, now that he stopped to consider, that if he wanted things to be smoothed over again it would have to be he who took the first step. Joan wouldn't. She would never change her mind about Ansel or even pretend to, in order to make things easier. He would have to go over and say, 'Well, however we feel, I'm sorry that fight happened,' or else she would just stay quietly in her own house, playing games with Simon and occupying herself with little private chores until she died. And all over nothing. He tucked her picture back into the file. Mr Pike was always saying, 'Someday, boy, that girl is going to walk off and leave you,' and he didn't know how right he was. Last month

Joan had packed her things and gone downtown to catch a bus for home, but then she had decided she might as well go to a movie first and by the time the movie was over she had changed her mind and come home again, dragging two big suitcases behind her and hobbling along on her dressup shoes. She had told James about it, laughing at herself as she told it, but James hadn't laughed with her. If she were to go, what would he decide to do about it?

Out in the living room, he could hear Miss Lucy discussing her nephew, who was a missionary in Japan and a great curiosity there because of his red hair. 'You ought to see him bow,' she said. 'They bow all the time, he tells me…' James half-listened, drumming his fingers on the steel file drawer.

If Joan were to go, he had only two choices. That was the way he saw it. He could let her be, and spend the next forty years remembering nothing but the way she used to walk across the fields with him from the tobacco barns and the peppermint smell of her breath when she kissed him good night. Or he could go after her and say, 'Come back. And will you marry me?' In his mind he could say that, but not in real life. In real life he had Ansel, and would have him always because he couldn't walk out on that one, final member of his family that he hadn't yet deserted. And in real life, he could never make Joan and Ansel like each other.

'I'll take Africa any day,' Miss Faye was saying. 'Africans know they need a missionary, but these Easterners are eternally surprised.' And Miss Lucy chirped something at the end, but James couldn't hear what she said.

He stood up and rubbed his knees where they ached from being bent so long. Then he picked up the pictures for the paper and left the dark-room. Instead of going out through the front he crossed to the back door, in order to make his escape as quickly as possible. Outside, his eyes searched out those daisies he had been meaning to pick, blowing in the wind and about to be too old. He tucked the pictures under his arm and went deeper into the field, heading toward the tallest ones. It always made him feel silly, picking flowers. He didn't mind doing it (Joan liked daisies far better than bought flowers, or any other kind of present), but he didn't like thinking that anyone might be watching. In case someone was, he picked very offhandedly – yanking the daisies up nearly by their roots, jumbling them together helter-skelter without looking at them. But while he was rounding the side of the house and heading toward the front yard he arranged them more carefully, and held them up to see if they were all right.

Mrs Hammond's car was gone; that was one good thing. She must have left while he was in the darkroom. Now all he wanted was for Joan to be the one to answer the door. He knocked and waited, frowning tensely at the screen. For a long time nobody came. Then from somewhere else in the house, Joan called, 'Was that a knock?' Her voice echoed; she must have been standing at the head of the stairs.

'It's me,' James said.

'Simon, will you let James in?'

Simon came out of the kitchen, dragging his feet. Through the screen, all James saw of him was his silhouette – his spidery arms and legs, his shoulders hunched up as if he were scared of something. Before he reached the door he stopped and said, 'You come by yourself?'

'Who would I be bringing?' asked James.

'Oh, no one.' And he came the rest of the way to the door and pushed it open. 'Joan's upstairs,' he said, 'putting Mama to bed. She'll be down.'

'Your mother got up already?'

'Well, but now she's going back to bed. I said everything all wrong.'

'I'll bet you didn't,' said James, without being quite sure what he was talking about. He closed the door very softly behind him and went over to a chair. 'Is Joan too busy to talk?'

But just then they heard Joan coming downstairs, walking on tiptoe and taking only one step at a time where usually she took two. Simon jerked his thumb toward the sound. 'Here she is,' he said. When Joan came into view she looked at James blankly a minute, as if she'd forgotten he was here, and then she smiled and said, 'Oh. Hello.'

'Hello,' James said. He stood up and held out the flowers. 'I brought you some daisies. I was walking through the field and happened to come across them.'

'That was nice,' she said, and then frowned at the daisies.

James looked at them. They seemed old and draggled now, in a messy little cluster in his hand. 'They're not all that special, I guess,' he said, but Joan had come out of her thoughts. 'I think they're fine,' she said. 'I'll get a vase.'

'Oh, you don't have to get a vase for them -'

'Well, of course I do.'

She went out into the kitchen, still seeming to walk on tiptoe. Now that James thought of it, there was an uneasy silence about this house. He couldn't tell if it was because of something to do with Mrs Pike or because Joan was still mad at him and he didn't know how to ask. He looked across at Simon, who was still standing and staring into space. 'Did I come at a bad time?' James asked him.

'Huh?'

Joan came back, carrying a cut-glass vase full of water. He asked her, 'Did I come at a bad time?'.

'Oh, not really.'

'Well, did I or didn't I?'

'It's all right,' Joan told him. 'Aunt Lou didn't feel well this morning, but she's upstairs now and everything's all right.' She took the daisies from him. Her hands when they brushed his were cool and impersonal, and she didn't look at him. 'We have to go gradually,' she said. 'I keep forgetting that. I don't seem to have a light touch with anything.' Yet her fingers when she arranged the flowers were as light and gentle as butterflies, and the daisies stood up or bent gracefully over the minute she touched them. When she was done they had stopped looking draggled; James was glad now that he had brought them.

'You ought to work for a florist,' he told her.

But she set the vase down on a table without even noticing how they looked. She hadn't glanced at them once, all the time she was arranging them. 'Mrs Hammond does,' she said. 'Have a light touch, I mean. But I'm not sure that's the kind I'm talking about right now.'

'I don't know that I follow you,' James said.

She shook her head and sat down, as if she had given up on him. 'Never mind,' she said.

'Mrs Hammond has a light touch?'

'Never mind.' She looked suddenly at Simon. 'Simon, do you want lunch?' she asked him.

'I just had breakfast.'

'Oh.'

'You have a light touch,' James said. 'You have the lightest touch of anyone I know.'

'Oh, James, you don't know.'

'Well, I'm trying -'He stopped and glanced toward Simon. It seemed to him Simon looked cold. 'Don't you want to sit down?' he asked.

'I'm okay.'

'Come on.'

Simon shrugged and sat down on the couch. Now that they were all seated here, facing each other and keeping their hands folded in their laps, it seemed more awkward than before. It seemed they should be having a conversation of some kind, something that made sense. Not these little jagged bits of words. He tried smiling at Joan but all she did was smile back, using only her mouth while her eyes stayed serious and maybe even angry; he didn't know. 'Would you rather I come back another time?' he asked.

'It's all right.'

'Well.' He sat further forward and looked at his fingernails. 'I guess your uncle's working today,' he said.

'Didn't Ansel tell you so?'

'In away he did.'

'There's nothing bad about it,' said Joan.

'Why, no, of course not.'

'You have to do something. You can't sit around. It's not fair to sit around, reminding people all the time -'She stopped, and James looked sideways at her while he kept his head bent over his fingernails. Her voice was so sharp sounding it made him uneasy, and he didn't know what he was supposed to say to her. But then she said, "Well. So you don't have to work tobacco any more.'

'No, 'James said.

'That's good.'

He waited a minute, and then cleared his throat and said, 'It'll be a good season, they say.'

'Billy Brandon told me that,' Simon said suddenly.

'Barns are nearly full already.'

In his shirt pocket he found a plastic comb, with little pieces of lint sticking to it. By running his index finger across its teeth he made a sound like a tiny xylophone, flat and tinny. Joan and Simon both sat watching him. When he saw them watching he stopped and put the comb back in his pocket. 'I guess I'll be going,' he said helplessly. 'I could come some other time.'

'All right,' said Joan.

'Do you want me to?'

'What?'

'Do you want me to come back?'

'Oh. Yes.'

'Okay,' he said, but he still wasn't sure. He stood up and went over to the door, with Joan and Simon following solemnly behind. Then he turned around and said, 'I could take you to the movies, maybe, Thursday night. The two of you.'

'We'll see,' Joan said.

'Do you want to come or don't you?'

'I don't know yet if we can,' she said.

'Well, I wouldn't ask so far in advance, but tomorrow night I can't go. I'm going to take Ansel playing cribbage. But Thursday-'

‘We'll see, 'said Joan.

‘I know I wasn't going to chauffeur him around no more, but lately he's been – Well. We don't have to go into that.'

‘I'm not going into anything,' Joan said.

‘Yes, you are.'

‘I wasn't saying a word.'

‘I could tell the way you were looking.'

‘I wasn't looking any way. I wasn't even thinking about it.’

She sounded near tears. James stood there, trying to think of what to say next, but he figured anything he came up with would only make things worse. So he waited a minute, and then he said, 'I think I'd better leave. Goodbye.'

'Goodbye,' Simon said.

He was down the porch steps and halfway across the yard when he heard their door close; Joan had never said goodbye. The only sounds now were from Ansel's window – the birdlike sounds of women laughing, all clustered around his brother, their laughter pealing out in clear happy trills that drifted through the window and hung like a curtain across the empty porch.