The Art Of Living And Other Stories Part 4

1.

There's all kinds of justice, I suppose you might say. But give me the justice of Aunt Ella Reikert, the time she got run off the road by the Preacher's wife, down on Boskydell Road, this side of Makanda. By the time she got, for the second time, to the diner that her niece's husband ran-one of her real nieces, not one of the hundred, maybe two hundred kids that imagined "Aunt Ella" was her natural designation-she was hopping mad. She pulled that half-demolished old square-framed black-and-yellow Dodge up in front of the gaspumps and pushed open the only door that still worked. The car had rolled just once. The sticky red gumbo in the creekbed stopped it. The only real damage was to the tires and roof and sides-the whole right side of the roof was caved in so it looked like a chicken coop or hog-shed on wheels-or that was the only real damage unless you counted (and she did) the damage the Hume boys had done with their tractor, pulling it out of the mud and up onto the road. They'd broken off both b.u.mpers with their chain, one after the other, and then they'd looped the chain around the right-hand windshield post and broke that. When they'd started hitching onto the runningboard she'd made Ralph get out of the car, cast and all, and make them stop. He looked sadder than usual when she made him get out in that mud. He was sure he'd broken his leg all over again, which he had. But he got at least one crutch out the door, and all of his wide pink nose, and he said, looking as if he might cry, "Come on now, Gib, you mind Aunt Ella." She'd told them and told them they ought to use mules, they pulled easier; but they wouldn't try it, or not till they thought of it themselves. When it worked they grinned at her and said, "Now didn't we tell you we'd lug you out, Aunt Ella? There it is, setting in the sunshine as good as new, almost." If she hadn't been so angry at the Preacher she'd have given them a switching apiece, big as they were.

She got out nimbly for a woman of her years, considering the trouble she had with her knees, and she slammed the car door, forgetting Ralph would be coming out behind her since the door on his side wouldn't open. The window hit him squarely, high on the forehead, and he sat still a minute, wincing so hard you could see most of his gums, and he was rubbing his pink bald spot with both pink hands. Then he opened the door again and got his crutches under his armpits and started for the diner.

"Leon," she said to her niece's husband, "I been run off the road."

"Again?" he said.

He stood there tall as a pinetree, grinning at her, wiping his hands on a dishtowel. Darthamae came into the doorway behind him, holding the baby. The dog was with her.

"No, the same time," Aunt Ella said. "Wasn't it bad enough once?"

"But that was three days ago, Aunt Ella," Darthamae said. It was Leon who'd put on four new tires for her and straightened the fenders so the wheels would turn. She'd come into the Dew Drop Inn on the rims, the tires cut to ribbons and flopping, one of them completely gone, the whole car screaming like a cow the slaughterer's maul had glanced off too lightly. He'd bent the fenders into shape by hand, as if easily. For the roof he was going to need tools, though; and Aunt Ella was too angry and impatient to leave the car.

She said now, "It don't make a particle of difference how many days ago it was." Both her hands and her head were shaking, and her false teeth barely kept rhythm with her tongue. "I been shamed and humiliated and there'll not a soul lift a finger in my behalf."

"Now Aunt Ella," Leon said.

"I been to the lawyer and I've got no legal recourse, that's what he said."

"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord," Leon said sadly.

"Now don't you mock, young man," she said. She shook her finger. "He that saith unto the wicked, Thou art righteous, him shall the people curse, nations shall abhor him; but to them that rebuke him shall be delight, and a good blessing shall come upon them."

"The meek shall inherit the earth," Leon said.

"Leave not thy place, for yielding pacifieth great offenses," she said.

"And the greatest of these is charity," he said.

"Leon, stop it," Darthamae broke in. The dog looked up at her to see if she meant him too.

"Come on in and sit down, Aunt Ella," Leon said, timid all at once, ashamed of himself-as he usually was when Darthamae came down on him. He pulled off the army cap he always wore and led Aunt Ella to the middle booth, poor Ralph hopping along behind. It came to Leon too late that with her gimpy knees she couldn't comfortably get into the booth, and neither could Ralph with his leg in a cast. He brought over chairs for them and set them down facing out the window to talk to the gaspumps and the highway. It was a bad arrangement, he saw right away. With the wrecked car sitting in front of her-the car she'd taken care of all these years like the child of her own she'd never had-she couldn't forget her indignation for a minute. Leon squeezed into the booth himself and sat wedged there, hands folded, trying to look sympathetic. "Darthamae," he said, "bring over some tea for Aunt Ella." She got the tea, carrying the baby on her hip. The baby kept his eyes on them, especially on Ralph. Neither Leon nor Darthamae thought of getting tea for Ralph too.

"Boo!" Ralph said to the baby. The baby looked at him.

"It was the Preacher's wife," Aunt Ella said.

"We know that, Aunt Ella," Leon said. "That's what you told us before."

Nevertheless, she said it again. "It was her, it wasn't him at all. As I hope for Glory there wasn't a soul in that blessed car but her." She was outraged, which made her palsy worse. Her eyes were big as saucers, and her nose twitched. She told them the whole story again, fighting her teeth over every third word-it must be fifteen times she told it by now-and they shook their heads and nodded and agreed.

It was Monday. She was only going over to Henry Hawkins' for milk and eggs, not a two-mile drive and all country road, as sunny a day as you'd hope to see. She'd been driving herself because she hadn't any choice, Cousin Gordon was over to the market with his turkeys, and Ralph was laid up with a broken leg from Sylvester Lipe's running him over with the buckrake. Ralph had no license anyway, but the sheriff allowed him to drive the truck between fields, as long as he kept it in low-low and off on the shoulder. It was wrong, her driving an automobile with her eyes not what they used to be (from the front pew she couldn't see whether the Preacher was bowing or looking at the ceiling). But a person had to eat, and there was Ralph to think of, her own dead sister's son. And so she was inching around the corner, not yet three rods from the foot of her driveway, heading up toward the church, when there was the Preacher's car heading straight toward her, way over on the wrong-hand side of the road, and she'd had to take the ditch. When they were sitting down there in the creekbed and the Preacher's car jacked up on the shoulder from when it had started to follow them down, who should they see climbing out of that car but the Preacher's wife, all painted up with rouge and lipstick, running up the hill for her house. ("It was her," she said fiercely. "I told them and told them who it was. Who was it, Ralph?" "It was her," he said.) And then pretty quick down comes the Preacher, still wearing his black-and-white cowboy shirt from riding that palomino horse, and he came down to the cattails where the mud began and leaned toward them, saying, "You all right, Sister Reikert?" "Don't you sister me" she said. "Your wife run me clear off the road." "My wife?" he said. "Why, Sister, my wife hasn't even got a driver's license."

And he'd stuck to it. He'd told the deputy how sorry he was, Sister Reikert had been over on his side of the road and hadn't seen him till the last minute and he'd surely be glad to help defray the expenses of fixing her car. "Why that's a blessed lie," she'd said, "it was his wife driving. Ralph, tell them it was his wife." "It was his wife," Ralph said. But they didn't believe her, nor Ralph either. He was the Preacher, and she was half blind, and Ralph would say anything she told him. He'd say it was Grover Cleveland, if Aunt Ella said to. He'd even believe it. "Are you saying I'm bearing false witness?" she said. The deputy said (no more than a youngster; he was one of the Howard children), "We just think you might be mistaken, Aunt Ella, what with your eyesight. We'll look into it, you can be sure." Yes indeed. Shortly after Doomsday. She'd said to Ed Hume, "Ed Hume, he was never in that car at all. He was up on that palomino horse he bought with people's t.i.thes." "That may be so," Ed Hume said, "and then again it may not be so." "Well I saw him," she said. "If I never saw him the Lord strike me dead on this spot." Ed Hume took a puff from his cigar and looked at his shoes and said, "Anyways, I'll send down the boys to try and lug you out."

Leon shook his head sadly.

"He never believed me," Aunt Ella said. "I nursed him through scarlet fever when he was no more than a little thing, but he never believed me now."

"It's criminal," Darthamae said. She shifted the baby to her other hip, and Aunt Ella looked at him. After a minute she patted the baby's shoulder, her hand as stiff as wood. The baby rolled his eyes down to look at the fingers and smiled, drooling. "Bless him," she said, but only from habit; she was still thinking of the Preacher's wife. The dog lay next to the foot of Ralph's cast, sniffing at it.

Leon James tapped the tips of his fingers together. "Aunt Ella," he said, "let's try and be reasonable about this. It was a bad thing for the Preacher to do, we all admit...."

"Preacher!" she said. Her mouth worked as if she were lining up her teeth, getting ready to spit.

"Ain't much of a preacher," Ralph said, speaking slowly, concentrating on getting the sounds right so they'd understand him. He shook his head.

"Let's look at this thing from the Preacher's side," Leon said. "He's a young man yet, you've got to remember. He's not mature in judgment." He sighed, once more tapping his fingers together. He was moved for a moment, thinking of judgment. Then he was moved by the thought of youth. (Sometimes looking at Darthamae sitting at the window with the baby, light falling into the nearly-one-year-old's delicate new-grown hair and into Darthamae's, rich and full and warm as ripe wheat or an orchard in August-or looking at the flawless smoothness of their faces, the child's still innocent and undefined, Darthamae's blooming and too easily wise-the heaviness of his middle age, the indignity of his baldness and, worse, his monstrous, gangling, ridiculous height seemed more than he could carry. He could envy Ralph, a man still innocent at forty, kicked by a cow at the age of six and transformed to a kind of earthly angel, his baldness a halo, the lines at his eyes mere weather marks like the cracks in a smooth old rock.) "It's his first call, this job here, and everything's gone well for him so far. The people all like him. He gives good sermons. He's found himself a pretty wife-"

"A Jezebel," Aunt Ella said. Her teeth clicked. "She's like apples laying in the hay."

"Well, she's young too" Leon said.

"They're not either one of 'em as young as all that. If a ten-year-old that was kin to me tried a stunt like that I'd thrash 'em to an inch of their life."

He sighed and looked out at the car. Smashed, black and yellow, it made him think of a crushed yellow-jacket, and his mind wandered vaguely to the differences, not yet quite clear in his mind, between hitting a grown-up, a child, and a bee. He'd had a tendency to strike out at people himself, once; a bad tendency in a man as big as he was. The doctors at the university claimed that he was a bona fide giant; some glandular disorder. He tried to think whether he'd stopped for any reason. He realized he couldn't remember what they'd been saying, and he concentrated.

"Aunt Ella," he said firmly, when he'd caught the thread, "the Preacher was upset, that's all. If he'd had time to think he might've done something different. You can't really blame him. Then too, he was protecting his wife. He might have had better sense if it was just himself."

"She's a vixen besides," Darthamae said. "You know what she does if he doesn't do every last thing she asks him to? I know people that's friends with her ..."

Aunt Ella wasn't interested. "Man seven foot tall can handle a flabby little hussy."

"Now Aunt Ella," Leon said, "she's no hussy, and he's not-"

"Seven foot tall and not one inch under or the Lord strike me dead on this spot."

Ralph looked at the ceiling.

Darthamae said, "He may be eight-six for all I know, but that's no help in the bedroom."

Aunt Ella looked around her, shocked at her coming out with it in front of Ralph and Leon. But after she'd thought about it a minute she smiled. She was beginning to like the Preacher's wife.

Darthamae leaned over closer to Aunt Ella. "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if she married him in the first place just to torment him. Betty Jane always was a tease. She'd come to Sundayschool in those white frilly dresses, and she'd smile and smile till every boy for half a mile around had his eye blacked and his clothes torn to pieces fighting for her, and when somebody won, oh my but she was cooled! She doesn't really like boys, that's my opinion."

Aunt Ella smiled, looking at the baby again, and this time she was conscious of it when she patted him and said, "Bless you." Then she looked back out the window and saw the car. "I want justice," she said fiercely. She clenched both fists. "I just want satisfaction, and not a soul will lift their finger in my behalf!"

"Now Aunt Ella," Leon said, "put on charity."

She drew herself up. "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted."

Darthamae's eyes widened. "Are you thinking of plucking up the Preacher, Aunt Ella?"

Leon said, "It is better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and an angry woman."

"It is a joy to the just to do judgment," she said, "and destruction shall be to the workers of iniquity." She stood up. She felt more cheerful now. There was nothing she liked better than quoting the Scriptures. Also, she had a plan.

"G.o.d help the Preacher," Leon said.

He watched them go out to the car. Ralph got in before her, sliding in back end first, Aunt Ella hanging on to his leg. Then Aunt Ella got in and drove.

2.

He wasn't out riding, as she'd somehow expected him to be (though it was dark). He was sitting at the round table in the diningroom, writing. He was less than six feet from the window she watched through, and she put off knocking. It was the first really good look at him she'd gotten. The light over the table was the only one they had on in the house, as near as she could tell from the porch. His wife must have gone to bed. He had on a clean blue workshirt with the sleeves rolled up, and horn-rimmed gla.s.ses she'd never seen on him before. There were papers scattered all over the table, and books lying open. He'd been at it for a long time, she could see, and the way he was working-writing a sentence, reading a page from one of the books, writing two more words, scowling and chewing on his pencil, reading some more-she knew he was going to be at it for a while yet. Working on next Sunday's sermon, she guessed. His sermons were humdingers, that was the truth. They could make you perspire.

He was a nice-looking preacher, really. He was tall as a stalk of fieldcorn, though not as tall as Leon, of course. He had big broad shoulders and a chest like a stove; nice tanned skin; a handsome face with a cleft in the chin. It wasn't a weak face or the usual kind of liar's face (Aunt Ella trusted her judgment in these matters), and it wasn't the face of a stupid person. The face of a young man too tall for his grade all the length of his childhood, a mother's pride and joy too often praised-for his voice, a big ba.s.s voice that could fill the whole church; for his marks in school; for his hearing the call of the Lord; for his height and for his weird gray-blue eyes, and for the lock that fell over his forehead, suspiciously casual, from his otherwise straight hair.

"What's he doing?" Ralph whispered, just audible over the clicking of the crickets and the rustle of the maple leaves.

"I don't know," she whispered. "Writing something."

"Oh," he said.

"Shhh!"

The Preacher put down his pencil and got up. He arched his back and stretched, pulling his chin into his neck. Then he picked up the cup from beside his papers on the table and walked toward the kitchen. When he reached the door Aunt Ella heard the Preacher's wife calling, "You coming to bed, Bill?"

He looked cross. "Pretty soon, honey," he said. He was too far away for her to see his features clearly.

His wife's voice said, "All you care about is your preachin."

"Now Betty Jane, that's not so."

She said nothing more, and his blurry shape stood undecided. He went on standing in the doorway a long while, his hands around the cup, but then at last he went into the kitchen.

"What's he doing?" Ralph asked.

"Shh." She raised one finger to her lips. "Gone for some coffee."

Ralph tried to get closer, to help her watch, but the porch wasn't wide enough-not a proper porch at all but a concrete square with wrought-iron ornamental supports on each side and a roof over it. He couldn't get both crutches up onto it at once, and when he did he couldn't get his feet on it right. He stood with one crutch on the cement and one in the gra.s.s, hovering precariously between them like a beetle with some of its legs missing.

The Preacher came back in and set the cup on the table. He stood a minute listening for something more from the bedroom, then pulled out his chair and brushed his hair back and sat down. It was true, Aunt Ella reflected, uneasy at heart, that the Preacher was a worker. It was a piece of luck when a country church like the Ebenezer Baptist got a man like that. Mostly they either got old men that ought to be retired years ago or young men not smart enough to get called to a church in town. Why he'd come had been a puzzle to them all until the day that horse appeared. Then they knew. Pretty soon he'd put up a white fence made out of boards and had barrels for the horse to run between. You might have seen him riding along anywhere between here and the other side of Cobden. But she had to be fair, the Preacher got his work done. He put on the best weddings the church had ever seen, and he went and prayed with the sick and decrepit, and he built up church attendance till they hardly knew what to do with the offering. If he had his way, they'd be putting up a new brick church before long, and he'd probably fill it, too.

He looked like no more than an overgrown boy, she thought, feeling still more uneasy. She'd looked after she didn't know how many young ones just like him-but not so tall. She could see as well as Leon James how he must have felt, that first minute, when his wife came in and told him she'd run some old lady off the road, maybe sent her to Glory. Maybe if Ed Hume and the Howard boy had believed her when she told them the truth, if they'd gone along with him only because he was the Preacher, knowing all he said was lies ...

"Aunt Ella," Ralph whispered.

"Hush," she said.

"Aunt Ella, I'm cold," he said. He was shaking like a leaf, trying to balance on the crutches and hug himself.

"Won't be long now," she said. She was about to knock. She stood with her fist raised near the door, hesitating not from curiosity now but because she wasn't sure she wanted to go through with it. That very second the Preacher's wife came in from the bedroom. Quickly, Aunt Ella got in front of the window again so Ralph wouldn't see.

The Preacher's wife had nothing on but a pale blue nightgown that didn't hide one thing. She came over and stood beside him, with one hand on the nape of his neck, and she said very sweetly, "Billy?"

Just then, like a house tipping over, Ralph fell down. Aunt Ella got her face back out of the window as quick as she could and knocked at the door. She got a glimpse of the Preacher's wife running for the bedroom. Ralph couldn't get up.

The Preacher was white as a sheet when he came to the door. "Who is it?" he said. He bent down a ways, squinting, holding his gla.s.ses in his two hands.

"Ella Reikert," she said. "I'm sorry to call so late."

"Good evening," the Preacher said. He looked past her. "Evening, Brother Ralph."

"Evening," Ralph said. He was trying to pull himself up on the crutches. His mouth was twisted all out of shape from the effort, and his eyes were crossed, but he made a quick s.n.a.t.c.h at his hatbrim.

The Preacher said, "Won't you come in?" He showed Aunt Ella into the parlor, and when Ralph didn't come he went outside to help. When finally they were all sitting down, Aunt Ella said, "I owe you an apology, Brother Flood. I ought not to been so stubborn."

The Preacher smiled, but a trifle vaguely, looking at his interlocked fingers. "We all make mistakes," he said.

She studied him.

He said with more spirit, "Leg giving you any discomfort, Ralph?" Just talking he sounded more musical than the ba.s.ses in the choir when they sang.

"I'm all right," Ralph said. "Your wife did it." He shaped the words with extreme care, and every one of them came out clearly. When he finished he smiled with pleasure and crossed his eyes on purpose.

"I was sinfully proud," Aunt Ella said. "Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit."

"Well, then too," the Preacher said, smiling kindly, "our eyes play tricks on us."

Again, longer this time, she studied him. That man was truly obstinate. His neck was an iron sinew and his brow was bra.s.s. Except that it was worse than just stubbornness; it was as though he was an invisible man and could do whatever he pleased against her. If one of them was blind or confused or crotchety, if one of them was slipping back into petulant childish fibbing, it had to be her. She wondered in sudden panic if even Leon and Darthamae believed her. "Put on charity," he'd said. Well enough for him. You could choose to step on an ant or not, but the ant had no say about it. No sir! She was shaking so badly she had to keep her hands folded.

Ralph said something neither of them caught and began to say it again more slowly, but Aunt Ella interrupted. She felt a rush of wicked pleasure the instant she knew she was actually going to say it. "That's not what we came here to talk about, Brother Flood. I'm here to see about buying your palomino horse."

His eyebrows went up, and a second later he laughed. "Sister Reikert, that horse is worth two hundred dollars."

"I'm willing to pay, if I look at him and see it's fair."

Now it was the Preacher's turn to do the squinting. "Golly," he said finally, "I'm sorry, Sister. I'm really not thinking of selling him. Star's like one of the family." He laughed again.

"Well, you think about it," she said. "Call me if you change your mind."

"I'm afraid that's not likely," the Preacher said.

And so it was done, or would be done pretty soon now. She felt light, as though she were sitting in empty air. She said, "Ralph, we better go home now." Ralph opened his mouth and eyes wide, reaching over the chair arms for his crutches. And so they left.

At the door the Preacher said, puzzled-looking, "What did you want him for, Sister Reikert?"