Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar Part 26

Eventually, she stopped that, too.

"Come on," she said in a firmer voice. "If you got to the door to lock it, you can get there to open it up."

Nothing happened. She came and looked over the bannister and saw me.

"Did you take Mr. Crozier's water into his room?"

I said yes.

"So his door wasn't locked or anything then?"

No.

"Did he say anything to you?"

"He just said thanks."

"Well, he's got his door locked and I can't get him to answer."

I heard Old Mrs. Crozier's stick reaching the top of the back stairs.

"What's the commotion up here?"

"He's locked hisself in and I can't get him to answer me."

"What do you mean, locked himself in? Likely the door's stuck. Wind blew it shut and it stuck."

There was no wind that day.

"Try it yourself," Roxanne said. "It's locked."

"I wasn't aware there was a key to this door," Old Mrs. Crozier said, as if her not being aware could negate the fact. Then, perfunctorily, she tried the k.n.o.b and said, "Well. It'd appear to be locked."

He had counted on this, I thought. That they would not suspect me, that they would a.s.sume that he was in charge. And in fact he was.

"We have to get in," Roxanne said. She gave the door a kick.

"Stop that," Old Mrs. Crozier said. "Do you want to wreck the door? You couldn't get through it, anyway-it's solid oak. Every door in this house is solid oak."

"Then we have to call the police."

There was a pause.

"They could get up to the window," Roxanne said.

Old Mrs. Crozier drew in her breath and spoke decisively. "You don't know what you are saying. I won't have the police in this house. I won't have them climbing all over my walls like caterpillars."

"We don't know what he could be doing in there."

"Well, then, that's up to him. Isn't it?"

Another pause.

Now steps-Roxanne's-retreating to the back staircase.

"Yes. You'd better just take yourself away before you forget whose house this is."

Roxanne was going down the stairs. A couple of stomps of the stick went after her, then stopped.

"And don't get the idea you'll go to the constable behind my back. He's not going to take his orders from you. Who gives the orders around here, anyway? It's certainly not you. You understand me?"

Very soon I heard the kitchen door slam shut. And then Roxanne's car start.

I was no more worried about the police than Old Mrs. Crozier was. The police in our town meant Constable McClarty, who came to the school to warn us about sledding on the streets in winter and swimming in the millrace in summer, both of which we continued to do. It was ridiculous to think of him climbing up a ladder or lecturing Mr. Crozier through a locked door.

He would tell Roxanne to mind her own business and let the Croziers mind theirs.

It was not ridiculous, however, to think of Old Mrs. Crozier giving orders, and I thought she might do so now that Roxanne-whom she apparently did not like anymore-was gone. But although I heard her go back to Mr. Crozier's door and stand there, she did not even rattle the k.n.o.b. She just said one thing.

"Stronger than you'd think," she muttered. Then made her way downstairs. The usual punishing noises with her steady stick.

I waited awhile and then I went out to the kitchen. Old Mrs. Crozier wasn't there. She wasn't in either parlor or in the dining room or the sunroom. I got up my nerve and knocked on the toilet door, then opened it, and she was not there, either. Then I looked out the window over the kitchen sink and I saw her straw hat moving slowly along the cedar hedge. She was out in the garden in the heat, stumping along between her flower beds.

I was not worried by the thought that seemed to have troubled Roxanne. I did not even stop to consider it, because I believed that it would be quite absurd for a person with only a short time to live to commit suicide.

All the same, I was nervous. I ate two of the macaroons that were still sitting on the kitchen table. I ate them hoping that pleasure would bring back normalcy, but I barely tasted them. Then I shoved the box into the refrigerator so that I would not hope to turn the trick by eating more.

Old Mrs. Crozier was still outside when Sylvia got home.

I retrieved the key from between the pages of the book as soon as I heard the car and I told Sylvia quickly what had happened, leaving out most of the fuss. She would not have waited to listen to it, anyway. She went running upstairs.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs to hear what I could hear.

Nothing. Nothing.

Then Sylvia's voice, surprised but in no way desperate, and too low for me to make out what she was saying. Within about five minutes she was downstairs, saying that it was time to get me home. She was flushed, as if the spots on her cheeks had spread all over her face, and she looked shocked, but unable to resist her happiness.

Then, "Oh. Where is Mother Crozier?"

"In the flower garden, I think."

"Well, I suppose I'd better speak to her, just for a moment."

After she had done that, she no longer looked quite so happy.

"I suppose you know," she said as she backed out the car. "I suppose you can imagine Mother Crozier is upset. Not that I am blaming you. It was very good and loyal of you. Doing what Mr. Crozier asked you to do. You weren't scared of anything happening, were you?"

I said no. Then I said, "I think Roxanne was."

"Mrs. Hoy? Yes. That's too bad."

As we were driving down what was known as Crozier's Hill, she said, "I don't think he wanted to frighten them. You know, when you're sick, sick for a long time, you can get not to appreciate other people's feelings. You can get turned against people even when they're doing what they can to help you. Mrs. Crozier and Mrs. Hoy were certainly trying their best. But Mr. Crozier just didn't feel that he wanted them around anymore today. He'd just had enough of them. You understand?"

She did not seem to know that she was smiling when she said this.

Mrs. Hoy.

Had I ever heard that name before?

And spoken so gently and respectfully, yet with light-years of condescension.

Did I believe what Sylvia had said?

I believed that it was what he had told her.

I did see Roxanne again that day. I saw her just as Sylvia was introducing me to this new name. Mrs. Hoy.

She-Roxanne-was in her car and she had stopped at the first cross street at the bottom of Crozier's Hill to watch us drive by. I didn't turn to look at her, because it was all too confusing, with Sylvia talking to me.

Of course, Sylvia would not have known whose car that was. She wouldn't have known that Roxanne must have been waiting to see what was going on, driving around the block all the time since she had left the Croziers' house.

Roxanne would have recognized Sylvia's car, though. She would have noticed me. She would have known that things were all right, from the kindly serious faintly smiling way that Sylvia was talking to me.

She didn't turn the corner and drive back up the hill to the Croziers' house. Oh, no. She drove across the street-I watched in the sideview mirror-toward the east part of town, where the wartime houses had been put up. That was where she lived.

"Feel the breeze," Sylvia said. "Maybe those clouds are going to bring us rain."

The clouds were high and white, glaring. They looked nothing like rain clouds, and there was a breeze only because we were in a moving car with the windows rolled down.

I understood pretty well the winning and losing that had taken place between Sylvia and Roxanne, but it was strange to think of the almost obliterated prize, Mr. Crozier-and to think that he could have had the will to make a decision, even to deprive himself, so late in his life. The carnality at death's door-or the true love, for that matter-was something I wanted to shake off back then, just as I would shake caterpillars off my sleeve.

Sylvia took Mr. Crozier away to a rented cottage on the lake, where he died sometime before the leaves were off.

The Hoy family moved on, as mechanics' families often did.

My mother struggled with a crippling disease, which put an end to all her money-making dreams.

Dorothy Crozier had a stroke, but recovered, and famously bought Halloween candy for the children whose older brothers and sisters she had ordered from her door.

I grew up, and old.

Joyce Carol Oates.

HIGH LONESOME.

The only people I still love are the ones I've hurt. I wonder if it's the same with you?

Only people I'm lonely for. These nights I can't sleep.

See, my heartbeat is fast. It's the d.a.m.n medication makes me sweat. Run my fingers over my stub-forefinger-lost most of it in a chain saw accident a long time ago.

Weird how the finger feels like it's all there, in my head. Hurts, too.

Who I think of a lot, we're the same age now, I mean I'm the age Pop was when he died, is my mother's step-daddy who wasn't my actual grandfather. Pop had accidents, too. Farm accidents. Chain saw got away from Pop, too. Would've sliced his foot off at the ankle, except Pop was wearing work boots. Bad enough how Pop's leg was sliced. Dragged himself bleeding like a stuck pig to where somebody could hear him yelling for help.

I wasn't there. Not that day. Maybe I was in school. Never heard Pop yelling from out behind the big barn.

Pop Olafsson was this fattish bald guy with a face like a wrinkled dish rag left in the sun to dry. Palest blue eyes and a kind of slow suspicious snaggletooth smile like he was worried people might be laughing at him. Pulling his leg. He'd say, You kids ain't pullin' my leg, are yah? When we were young we'd stare at Pop's leg, both Pop's legs, ham-sized in these old overalls he wore.

Wondering what the h.e.l.l Pop Olafsson meant. In this weird singsong voice like his nose is stopped up.

We never called him Grandpa, he wasn't our Grandpa. Mom called him Pop. He was a Pop kind of guy. Until the thing in the newspaper, I don't think I knew his first name which was Hendrick. He was a dairy farmer, he smelled of barns. A dairy farm produces milk and manure. What a barn is, is hay, flies, feed, milk (if it's a dairy barn), and manure. It's a mix where you don't get one ingredient without the rest. Hay flies feed manure. You can smell it coming off a farmer at fifty yards. Why I left that place, moved into town and never looked back.

Except for not sleeping at night, and my stub-finger bothering me. I wouldn't be looking back now.

Pop Olafsson spent his days in the dairy barn. He had between fifteen and twenty Guernseys that are the larger ones, their milk is yellowish and rich and the smell of it, the smell of any milk, the smell of any dairy product, doesn't have to be rancid, turns my stomach. Pop loved the cows, he'd sleep out in the barn when the cows were calving. Sometimes they needed help. Pop would cry when a calf was born dead.

Weird to see a man cry. You lose your respect.

Pop wore bib-overalls over a sweat-stained undershirt with long grimy sleeves. Summers, he'd leave off the undershirt. He wasn't a man to spend time washing. He never smelled himself at fifty yards. There was a joke in the family, a cloud of flies followed Pop Olafsson wherever he went. Mom was ashamed of him, when she was in school. Why her mother married the old man, old enough to be her grandfather not her father, n.o.body knew. Mom said if her mother had waited, hadn't been desperate after her husband died of lung cancer young at thirty-nine, they'd have done a whole lot better.

Mom made her own mistakes with men. That's another story.

Pop didn't care for firearms. Pop wasn't into hunting like his neighbors. He had an old Springfield .22 rifle like everybody had and a double-barrelled Remington 12-gauge shotgun with a cracked wooden stock, heavy and ugly as a shovel. From one year to the next these guns weren't cleaned. When my cousin Drake came to live with us, Drake cleaned the guns. Drake was five years older than me. He had a natural love for guns. Pop was so clumsy with a gun, he'd be breathing through his mouth hard and jerk the trigger so he'd never hit where the h.e.l.l he was aiming. Always think the d.a.m.n thing's gonna blow up in my hands, Pop said.

Pop told us he'd seen a gun accident when he was a boy. He'd seen a man blasted in the chest with a 12-gauge. These were duck hunters. This was in Drummond County in the southern edge of the state. It's a sight you don't forget, Pop said.

Still, Pop taught me to shoot the rifle when I was eleven. When I was a little older, how to shoot the shotgun. It's something that has to be learned, you live on a farm. You need to kill vermin-rats, voles, woodchucks. Pop never actually killed any vermin that I witnessed but we gave them a scare. We never went hunting. Once, I went with Drake and some of his friends deer hunting. Drake was all the time telling me get back! get down!

Must've f.u.c.ked up. I remember crying. It hurt me, my cousin turning on me in front of his friends. I was thirteen, I looked up to Drake like a big brother.

On the veranda, summer nights, Pop sat with his banjo. People laughed at him saying Pop thinks he's Johnny Cash, well Pop wasn't anywhere near trying to sound like Johnny Cash. I don't know who in h.e.l.l Pop sounded like-n.o.body, maybe. His own weird self. He's picking at the banjo, he's making this high old lonesome sound like a ghost tramping the hills. It wasn't singing, more like talking, the kind of whiney rambling a man does who's alone a lot, talks to animals in the barn, and to himself. Pop had big-knuckled hands, splayed fingers and cracked dirt-edged nails. Like he said he was accident-p.r.o.ne and his fingers showed it. Pop kept a crock of hard cider at his feet all the hours he'd sit out there on the porch so it didn't matter how alone he was.

We never paid much attention to Pop. My grandma who'd been his wife died when I was little. That was Mom's mother. Mom still missed her. Pop was just Mom's stepfather she made no secret of the fact. It was just that Pop owned the property, why we moved in there when my dad left us. When Mom was drinking and got unhappy she'd tell Pop that. Pop right away said, Oh I know. I know. I appreciate that, honey.

The songs Pop sang, I wish I'd listened to. They had women's names in them, sometimes. One of them was about a cuckoo-bird. One was about a train wreck. These were songs Pop picked up from growing up in Drummond County. He'd got the banjo in a p.a.w.nshop. He never had any music lessons. Most of the songs, he didn't know all the words to so he'd hum in his high-pitched way rocking from side to side and a dreamy light coming into his face. A banjo isn't like a guitar, looks like it's made of a tin pie plate. A guy from school came by to pick me up one night, there's the old man out on the veranda with that d.a.m.n plunky banjo singing some weird whiny song like a sick tomcat so Rory makes some crack about my grandpa and my face goes hot. f.u.c.k you Pop ain't no grandpa of mine, he's what you call in-law.

Didn't hardly care if Pop heard me, I was feeling so p.i.s.sed.

Why're you so angry, Daryl girls would ask sort of shivery and wide-eyed. Skin's so hot it's like fever. Like this is a way to worm into my soul. You ain't going to hurt me, Daryl, are you? h.e.l.l no it ain't in Daryl McCracken's nature to hurt any girl.

No more than I would wish to hurt my mother. Nor anyone in my family that's my blood kin.