Had I a Hundred Mouths Page 10

  “Marcy,” Grandpa said calmly and with power, “that rooster’s not dead that easily. Don’t you know there’s something in a rooster that won’t be downed? Don’t you know there’s some creatures won’t be dead easily?” And wheeled into the living room.

  But Mrs. Samuels yelled back from the kitchen,

  “All you have to do is wring their necks.”

  All afternoon the big wire wheels of Grandpa Samuels’ chair whirled through room and room. Sometimes Mrs. Samuels thought she would pull out her mass of wiry hair, she got so nervous with the cracking of the floor under the wheels. The wheels whirled around in her head just as the crow of the rooster had burst in her brain all week. And then Grandpa’s coughing: he would, in a siege of cough, dig away down in his throat for something troubling him there, and, finally, seizing it as if the cough were a little hand reaching for it, catch it and bring it up, the old man’s phlegm, and spit it quivering into a can which rode around with him on the chair’s footrest.

  “This is as bad as the crowing of the white rooster,” Mrs. Samuels said to herself as she tried to rest. “This is driving me crazy.” And just when she was dozing off, she heard a horrid gurgling sound from the front bedroom where Grandpa was. She ran there and found him blue in his face and gasping.

  “I’m choking to death with a cough, get me some water, quick!” he murmured hoarsely. As she ran to the kitchen faucet, Marcy had the picture of the white rooster in her mind, lying breathless on his back in the chickenyard, his thin yellow legs in the air and his claws closed and drooped like a wilted flower. “If he would die,” she thought. “If he would strangle to death.”

  When she poured the water down his throat, Marcy Samuels put her fat hand there and pressed it quite desperately as if the breath were a little bellows and she could perhaps stop it still just for a moment. Grandpa was unconscious and breathing laboriously. She heaved him out of his chair and to his bed, where he lay crumpled and exhausted. Then was when she went to the telephone and called Watson, her husband.

  “Grandpa is very sick and unconscious and the stray rooster is caught and in the chickenyard to be killed by you,” she told him. “Hurry home, for everything is just terrible.”

  When Marcy went back to Grandpa’s room with her hopeful heart already giving him extreme unction, she had the shock of her life to find him not dying at all but sitting up in his bed with a face like a caught rabbit, pitiful yet daredevilish.

  “I’m all right now, Marcy, you don’t have to worry about me. You couldn’t kill an old crippled man like me,” he said firmly.

  Marcy was absolutely spellbound and speechless, but when she looked out Grandpa’s window to see the white rooster walking in the leaves, like a resurrection, she thought she would faint with astonishment. Everything was suddenly like a haunted house; there was death and then a bringing to life again all around her and she felt so superstitious that she couldn’t trust anything or anybody. Just when she was sure she was going to lose her breath in a fainting spell, Watson arrived home. Marcy looked wild. Instead of asking about Grandpa, whether he was dead, he said, “There’s no stray rooster in my chickenyard like you said, because I just looked.” And when he looked to see Grandpa all right and perfectly conscious he was in a quandary and said they were playing a trick on a worried man.

  “This place is haunted, I tell you,” Marcy said, terrorized, “and you’ve got to do something for once in your life.” She took him in the back room, where she laid out the horror and the strangeness of the day before him. Watson, who was always calm and a little underspoken, said, “All right, pet, all right. There’s only one thing to do. That’s lay a trap. Then kill him. Leave it to me, and calm your nerves.” And then he went to Grandpa’s room and sat and talked to him to find out if he was all right.

  For an hour, at dusk, Watson Samuels was scrambling in a lumber pile in the garage like a possum trying to dig out. Several times Mrs. Samuels inquired through the window by signs what he was about. She also warned him, by signs, of her fruit-jars stored on a shelf behind the lumber pile and to be careful. But at a certain time during the hour of building, as she was hectically frying supper, she heard a crash of glass and knew it was her Mason jars all over the ground, and cursed Watson.

  When finally Mr. Samuels came in, with the air of having done something grand in the yard, they ate supper. There was the sense of having something special waiting afterwards, like a fancy dessert.

  “I’ll take you out in a while and show you the good trap I built,” Watson said. “That’ll catch anything.”

  Grandpa, who had been silent and eating sadly as an old man eats (always as if remembering something heartbreaking), felt sure how glad they would be if they could catch him in the trap.

  “Going to kill that white rooster, son?” he asked.

  “It’s the only thing to do to keep from making a crazy woman out of Marcy.”

  “Can’t you put him in the yard with the rest of the chickens when you catch him?” He asked this mercifully. “That white rooster won’t hurt anybody.”

  “You’ve seen we can’t keep him in there, Papa. Anyway, he’s probably sick or got some disease.”

  “His legs are scaly. I saw that,” Mrs. Samuels put in.

  “And then he’d give it to my good chickens,” said Mr. Samuels. “Only thing for an old tramp like that is to wring his neck and throw him away for something useless and troublesome.”

  When supper was eaten, Watson and Marcy Samuels hurried out to look at the trap. Grandpa rolled to the window and watched through the curtain. He watched how the trap lay in the moonlight, a small dark object like a box with one end open for something to run in, something seeking a thing needed, like food or a cup of gold beyond a rainbow, and hoping to find it here within this cornered space. “It’s just a box with one side kicked out,” he said to himself. “But it is a trap and built to snare and to hold.” It looked lethal under the moon; it cast a shadow longer than itself and the open end was like a big mouth, open to swallow down. He saw his son and his son’s wife—how they moved about the trap, his son making terrifying gestures to show how it would work, how the guillotine end would slide down fast when the cord was released from inside the house, and close in the white rooster, close him in and lock him there, to wait to have his neck wrung off. He was afraid, for Mrs. Samuels looked strong as a lion in the night, and how cunning his son seemed! He could not hear what they spoke, only see their gestures. But he heard when Mrs. Samuels pulled the string once, trying out the trap, and the top came sliding down with a swift clap when she let go. And then he knew how adroitly they could kill a thing and with what craftiness. He was sure he was no longer safe in this house, for after the rooster then certainly he would be trapped.

  The next morning early the white rooster was there, crowing in a glittering scale. Grandpa heard Marcy screaming at him, threatening, throwing little objects through the window at him. His son Watson did not seem disturbed at all; always it was Marcy. But still the rooster crowed. Grandpa went cold and trembling in his bed. He had not slept.

  It was a rainy day, ashen and cold. By eight o’clock it had settled down to a steady gray pour. Mrs. Samuels did not bother with the morning dishes. She told Grandpa to answer all phone calls and tell them she was out in town. She took her place at the window and held the cord in her hand.

  Grandpa was so quiet. He rolled himself about ever so gently and tried not to cough, frozen in his throat with fear and a feeling of havoc. All through the house, in every room, there was darkness and doom, the air of horror, slaughter and utter finish. He was so full of terror he could not breathe, only gasp, and he sat leaden in his terror. He thought he heard footsteps creeping upon him to choke his life out, or a hand to release some cord that would close down a heavy door before him and lock him out of his life forever. But he would not keep his eyes off Marcy. He sat in the doorway, half obscured, and peeked at her; he watched her like a hawk.

  Mrs. Samuels sat by th
e window in a kind of ecstatic readiness. Everywhere in her was the urge to release the cord—even before the time to let it go, she was so passionately anxious. Sometimes she thought she could not trust her wrist, her fingers, they were so ready to let go, and then she changed the cord to the other hand. But her hands were so charged with their mission that they could have easily thrust a blade into a heart to kill it, or brought down mightily a hammer upon a head to shatter the skull in. Her hands had well and wantonly learned slaughter from her heart, had been thoroughly taught by it, as the heart whispers to its agents—hands, tongue, eyes—to do their action in their turn.

  Once Grandpa saw her body start and tighten. She was poised like a huge cat, watching. He looked, mortified, through the window. It was a bird on the ground in the slate rain. Another time, because a dog ran across the yard, Mrs. Samuels jerked herself straight and thought, something comes, it is time.

  And then it seemed there was a soft ringing in Grandpa’s ears, almost like a delicate little jingle of bells or of thin glasses struck, and some secret thing told him in his heart that it was time. He saw Mrs. Samuels sure and powerful as a great beast, making certain, making ready without flinching. The white rooster was coming upon the grass.

  He strode upon the watered grass all dripping with the rain, a tinkling sound all about him, the rain twinkling upon his feathers, forlorn and tortured. Yet even now there was a blaze of courage about him. He was meager and bedraggled. But he had a splendor in him. For now his glory came by being alone and lusterless in a beggar’s world, and there is a time for every species to know lackluster and loneliness where there was brightness and a flocking together, since there is a change in the way creatures must go to find their ultimate station, whether they fall old and lose blitheness, ragged and lose elegance, lonely and lose love; and since there is a shifting in the levels of understanding. But there is something in each level for all creatures, pain or wisdom or despair, and never nothing. The white rooster was coming upon the grass.

  Grandpa wheeled so slowly and so smoothly towards Mrs. Samuels that she could not tell he was moving, that not one board cracked in the floor. And the white rooster moved toward the trap, closer and closer he moved. When he saw the open door leading to a dry place strewn with grain, he went straight for it, a haven suddenly thrown up before his eye, a warm dry place with grain. When he got to the threshold of the trap and lifted his yellow claw to make the final step, Grandpa Samuels was so close to Mrs. Samuels that he could hear her passionate breath drawn in a kind of lust-panting. And when her heart must have said, “Let go!” to her fingers, and they tightened spasmodically so that the veins stood turgid blue in her arm, Grandpa Samuels struck at the top of her spine where the head flares down into the neck and there is a little stalk of bone, with a hunting knife he had kept for many years. There was no sound, only the sudden sliding of the cord as it made a dip and hung loose in Marcy Samuel’s limp hand. Then Grandpa heard the quick clap of the door hitting the wooden floor of the trap outside, and a faint crumpling sound as of a dress dropped to the floor when Mrs. Samuels’ blowsy head fell limp on her breast. Through the window Grandpa Samuels saw the white rooster leap pertly back from the trap when the door came down, a little frightened. And then he let out a peal of crowings in the rain and went away.

  Grandpa sat silent for a moment and then said to Mrs. Samuels, “You will never die any other way, Marcy Samuels, my son’s wife, you are meant to be done away with like this. With a hunting knife.”

  And then he wheeled wildly away through the rooms of Marcy Samuels’ house, feeling a madness all within him, being liberated, running free. He howled with laughter and rumbled like a runaway carriage through room and room, sometimes coughing in paroxysms. He rolled here and there in every room, destroying everything he could reach, he threw up pots and pans in the kitchen, was in the flour and sugar like a whirlwind, overturned chairs and ripped the upholstery in the living room until the stuffing flew in the air; and covered with straw and flour, white like a demented ghost, he flayed the bedroom wallpaper into hanging shreds; coughing and howling, he lashed and wrecked and razed until he thought he was bringing the very house down upon himself.

  When Watson came home some minutes later to check on the success of his engine to trap the rooster and fully expecting to have to wring his neck, he saw at one look his house in such devastation that he thought a tornado had struck and demolished it inside, or that robbers had broken in. “Marcy! Marcy!” he called.

  He found out why she did not call back when he discovered her by the window, cord in hand as though she had fallen asleep fishing.

  “Papa! Papa!” he called.

  But there was no calling back. In Grandpa’s room Watson found the wheel chair with his father’s wild dead body in it, his life stopped by some desperate struggle. There had obviously been a fierce spasm of coughing, for the big artery in his neck had burst and was still bubbling blood like a little red spring.

  Then the neighbors all started coming in, having heard the uproar and gathered in the yard; and there was a dumbfoundedness in all their faces when they saw the ruins in Watson Samuels’ house, and Watson Samuels standing there in the ruins unable to say a word to any of them to explain what had happened.

  THE LETTER IN THE CEDARCHEST

  Now this is about the lives of Old Mrs. Woman, Sister Sammye, and Little Pigeon, and how they formed a household; but first, about Old Mrs. Woman.

  Her early name, and rightful one, was Lucille Purdy; and she had had a pretty good life until she started getting fat. Lucille’s husband, a tall, good-looking man, with no stomach, a good chest and a deep voice, but he had evil lips—and whose mother had lived with him and Lucille from the day they married until the day she died in Lucille’s arms—had begun to hurrah her some two or three years back, especially when he saw her in her nightgown. He had said, “Lucille, one thing I cannot stand and that is a fat woman; I’ll leave you, swear to God, if ever you get fat. …” At first Lucille had laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Purdy (no one ever heard her call him anything but Mr. Purdy—when his name was Duke), I won’t; I have already given up bread and potatoes.”

  Yet Lucille kept putting on weight, there seemed nothing she could do to stop the fat acoming; and with the constant increase in stoutness came a more and more nervousness. Naturally. Mr. Purdy’s threat seemed to produce as much fat on Lucille as bread and potatoes. She noticed Mr. Purdy had begun to wear a moustache, which made him look younger and devilish, what with those lips, now with fringe on top.

  When Mr. Purdy moved into a room to himself, Lucille cried alone in the master bedroom at night. Finally, one night she went into hysterics and accused Mr. Purdy of no longer caring about her. Mr. Purdy lost his temper and said, “You ought to kill yourself, Lucille, because you’re slobby and no longer any good to anybody, and you’re nervous and going crazy”; and he laid a revolver on the table by the side of Lucille’s bed. She lay all night crying and thinking seriously of taking Mr. Purdy up on his suggestion to blow out her brains. But she prayed and remembered the sweet Christian memory of old Mother Purdy who had suffered out her life to the end and then died in her arms; and did not use the gun.

  Then Lucille found out Mr. Purdy was carrying on with his stenographer. A voice advised her this on the telephone, and then Lucille called on the phone, made certain investigations, and found it all out to be true. She had hysterics and ordered Mr. Purdy out of the house. He gladly went, admitting everything, said he wanted a divorce, Lucille said she would not give him one to her dying day, he said that he was going to be married to the woman in question (who was twenty-one). And he reminded Lucille of the revolver, to take her out of her misery.

  Lucille had a very hard time. She read books from the Normal for the dreams she was having, about white and black horses pulling her up mountains, and about her pulling the same horses up mountains. She was also riding the horses sometimes. The books helped her some (yet they didn’t stop the dr
eams); but it was the minister of her church that really helped her—for a while. Helped her so much that she begun to have giggling and crying spells when she was in his office counseling with him. The minister was stumped as to what to do. The minister suggested that Lucille go into Sunday School work with children, and Lucille added that she loved working with children; so she did this. But other Sunday School teachers complained that Lucille was too fussy with the children, that she would humor them, then pinch them and even slap them, then cry over them. They asked her to take a rest.

  It was while she was taking a rest, and crying most of the time, that she decided to go on with the divorce which she had so stubbornly opposed up to now. She took it to court, got the divorce, Mr. Purdy (still not married) left her the big house but took all the furniture out which was his by rights, he said, since it had been his mother’s. This left Lucille’s house completely bare except for the cedarchest which she had married Duke with, from her girlhood—she had been raised by two old women cousins, and an orphan since she was twelve.

  Now Lucille was alone in her big empty house, and still putting on poundage. Her minister advised her to put her house up for sale and move into just a little board cottage somewhere, but the house was all Lucille had and she wanted to cling to it. She made her a cat pallet in the master bedroom and cooked on a gas burner she bought. She barely lived on the monthly allowance Mr. Purdy was compelled by law to send—and when he pleased, sometimes on time, most of the time not. She cried nearly all the time; and the neighbors who had known her all these years naturally began to turn from her and to suspicion her because she acted so funny. If they asked her questions about herself or her husband, she was quick to snap at them, “Ask me no questions I’ll tell you no lies,” and walk away. Therefore, one by one they let her alone; politely but firmly.