Had I a Hundred Mouths Read online

  The two women shook hands, here were the two ghosts down in the basement making covenant, bargaining to make the ghost story come true for Little Pigeon upstairs—who already believed in it anyway and had more or less made it come true, will or nill.

  But Sammye and Old Mrs. Woman had a few things to settle first. Old Mrs. Woman said, “This basement is as much your house as it is mine, you seemed to like it well enough to live down here once. Why don’t you move in the basement, Sammye Johnson?” Sammye did not argue and suggested that they take turns living in the basement, adding that the divan was uncomfortable, though, even for a ghost to sleep on. Old Mrs. Woman said she would move in her daybed that the roomers had bought for her; and it was agreed upon. “One last thing,” Mrs. Woman said, “and that is please to note that my name is Lucille Purdy and you will do me the favor of please calling me the same.”

  So Lucille moved her cedarchest with the Letter in it into the basement, and the daybed, too; and the household flourished. In a few years the life of the town all shifted in another direction and moved there, towards the new development of what had been just a no-good thicket, something was suddenly there—oil or mineral or better land or something—that the town craved or thought it did, the way towns do, sometimes; change their shape and size and way, trying to form something—what?—and trying to find something to gather round. It was a time when everything shifted and changed, swarmed and clustered around an idea or a craving, used it up or wearied of it, then scattered to pieces again, it was a time of clashes of cravings, it was like a bunch of sheep moving and wandering, shepherd or no—he only followed when he was supposed to lead and could not summon them all together, or there was no shepherd (maybe that was the trouble), he was lost under the hill.

  People of this section followed the town into the thicket where the town became so changed; politicians fought, money came from another part of the country; the town thrived. The old houses in the left-behind section were torn down or simply just abandoned, almost as if in a hurry because of a plague or a flood, this left-behind section became a kind of ghost town—almost as if the whole living town had turned away from Little Pigeon and Sammye and Lucille and would have nothing to do with them. But they stayed behind, and did not even know they stayed behind, they did not even know there was another place to want to go to, their shuttling was through. For the shape of the household in Little Pigeon’s house was fixed forever, and it never changed again, it went on aflourishing—it had found something to hold it together, and that was a covenant of ghosts.

  In a few years Little Pigeon died, still believing her house had two ghosts living in it, one above and one below, one stealing her purse and the other dancing with her in the paper room; and both of them giving her her insulin, listening to her count her things and tell about them.

  After Little Pigeon was buried, the two women Sammye and Lucille had several good years together in Little Pigeon’s house; you could see them swanking down the sidewalk on many a sunshiny afternoon, arm in arm, hair all set and good clothes on, strolling through the neighborhood of empty houses and down deserted streets, Sammye in Little Pigeon’s ruby earbobs and in her good fur coat, Lucille fat as ever; and few people will ever know what had brought them together to be such friends, who had been such enemies.

  Those who know the story to the end say the ghost of Little Pigeon came regularly and counted and touched all her things, but no more to devil the household or to cause it trouble, only just to join it and keep it whole, and that the basement room was always kept nice for her—it was her turn down there, now—until Sammye finally died and left Lucille with too many ghosts for flesh to bear; and so she opened her cedarchest and took out the Letter and put it in her bosom and then took out the revolver Mr. Purdy had given her years ago and ended the last life of the household—joining ghost to ghost, the best household and the longest lasting.

  People of the town, the kind who always know mysterious stories about this old house ot that dead person, say the ghosts of two old women walk arm in arm through this ruined section when the sun shines in winter. That you can occasionally still see the three ghosts moving through the house. That one of the women was crazy and another committed suicide, and that the house was a household of violence and hatred and jealousy.

  It is true that the house of Little Pigeon still stands, closed up and passed by, as it had always been even when the town was living close around it; so go and look at it if you don’t believe it. Go and look through the side windows at the faded paper streamers in the paper room, go around and find the withered tissue snow crystals peeling from the sunporch windows in the back. It has not been sold or rented or tampered with until this day, that anybody knows of, but has grown along in some dream of its own. The trees have grown up high around it and locked branches over it as if to roof it away from the world, and the hedges are uncropped and rank, high and thick as a wall. This makes it seem ghosthouse enough, and it is true that the house is known only as the house where three old evil women lived, a crazy woman and her sister and a woman who shot herself. But that’s one story. And if you know the whole story, as now you do, you can come stand at the window and hear a ghostly voice counting out the silverware and linens, or the riffle of ghost feet to the music of “Whispering”; and then you can have it all straight and can understand the household that was covenanted for there. And can understand the town, too; and can have your own story, ghost story or flesh story, out of the whole thing.

  Anyway, that is the story about the lives of Old Mrs. Woman, Sister Sammye and Little Pigeon, and how they formed a household in a town that passed them by.

  PORE PERRIE

  For James McAllen

  “Tell me the story of pore Perrie. Tell how she lived all her life till she died.”

  “Hush asking me ’cause I don’t want to tell it. ’Twas buried with pore Perrie in her grave….”

  “The flesh of it is buried, but we have the ghost of it again. Pore Perrie’s grave holds only half the story—the other’s yet to come.”

  “Then let me bring the half to the half myself. When Perrie and I join in the Polk plot in the cemetery, laid side by side, we’ll settle it all, ghost and flesh, under the dirt. Dirt takes everything back again, in the end. Now let us alone. Leave us to dirt.”

  “But this is a good time to tell, while I’m here and you’re here—and we may never be again. For soon (tonight) I moan be on my way; I cain’t stay. So tell it to me because I want to get it all straight. Let me have it from your mouth now, and for the last time, and then I can have it again from my memory as I go on, on the road.”

  “Some one of you always passing through and stopping by, asking my stories, asking my time, asking my grief, won’t let a life be. Worse than a bed of red ants. Be glad when my life’s story settles down into the ground, a fallen message to be told out no more, locked in the box of my bones: message and bone go back into dirt. (Blood kin buried together settle their own stories, a family graveyard plot is a mailbox of messages all reading each other—who ever thought they lie quiet together and in peace at last, gladly beyond?)

  “But go get me something to fan with, my cardboard fan from the church is done fanned out; the newspaper will do.…”

  2

  “Well if you see yonder at those bunch of houses by the boxy churchhouse and see the little squatty one huddling next to it like a chick to a hen, then that’s the house where we all lived during the story of pore Perrie. And if I tell you about it one more time, about Aunt Perrie and Uncle Ace (when he was home) and Son, man and boy, then I want you to hush ever asking me about it again. Because you know good and well that I’ve told it to you, chapter and book, time and time over, and this will be the last, until I go to my grave. Pore Perrie.”

  3

  The thing of it is, Son was over in Benburnett County working for a while with a rigging outfit when suddenly Aunt Linsie began to have his letters. Son wrote and said Aunt Linsie can you tell me about Au
nt Perrie, all how she was when I wasn’t there to see, all how she lived and how she died. This gave Aunt Linsie a chance to write one of her long good letters that was like a story she was telling (when you can get her to tell one); and she wrote back, “Son to begin with why don’t you stop keeping me in a tumult, I should think you’d have seen for yourself, your pore Aunt Perrie’s ghost is haunting you and I’m glad, this is because you ought to have been here with her when she needed you (and not just skimming and skirting round the place here the way you did, like a ghost of yourself), not everywhere you were during those days, there’s plenty of ghosts will tell you that, won’t let you rest pretty soon, it’s your conscience, thas all, Son,” etc. etc.…

  Son wrote back and said, “All right Aunt Linsie, I know I’ve led you and Aunt Perrie a life, but none of that ghost stuff, this is no ghost, I just want to know about Aunt Perrie and am asking you.”

  Aunt Linsie wrote back and said, “Well, Son, if this is some other stunt of yours I’ll cherish it against you the rest of my life, for pore Perrie was my own sister and your only mother in this world and gave a goodly part of her life to raising and tending to you when you was a boy; but anyways you remember how she was such a stout woman when you left? She fell off so you wouldn’t have recognized her as the same pore Perrie after you and Ace left, and when she died (that death’s part yours and you know it) we buried her as small as a Cheedee. If you’re hurrawing about pore Perrie I can’t stand it, that pore suffering thang Perrie.”

  Son wrote a letter back that said, “No, Aunt Linsie, I’m not making light of Aunt Perrie, how could I? So write me back and tell me what I ask, then I’ll tell you why I’m asking.”

  Aunt Linsie’s answer said, “Son don’t you know by now there’s no room anywheres in the world, no quarters in any house or billin, that can hide you from your own folks, they live in your memory and blood, you bring them in a room when you move in. You can build a house against weather, but you can’t build it against your own conscience. Get right, face your life, all what’s in it, and that includes pore Perrie, was like your own mother, called you her own, and then you treated her like you did, when are you going to settle down? That’s all right, you’re coming outa the little end of the horn now, and I know it and you know it; but I’ll help you outa your trouble, will do it till I’m dead and gone (and then who’ll do it then, oh who, I wonder?)”

  Son’s answer said, “Aunt Linsie, hush lecturing me. I’m not perfect and I know it; and Uncle Ace was not perfect. But there was only one man in this wide world who was perfect and He was crucified. Just don’t devil me. I expect you’re right on most of what you say. The thing of it is, I all of a sudden see Aunt Perrie’s life so plain, plainer than I could ever see when I was looking, and I can see her rooms in our house, the one with the machine she pumped and sewed at, with the wooden drawers full of spools and bias tape. I want to get something straight.”

  (Aunt Linsie did not answer, and the next thing she knew, Son was on the place.)

  4

  “Now listen to me while I tell you the story of pore Perrie, because it’ll be the last and enough. Then hush ever asking me about it.

  “Well, as you know, because I’ve told you, they called us the Polk Sisters in this town of Crecy Texas. We were the seamstresses of the town. Our mother and father died young and Perrie took me and brought me up. Our house was a good house—’cept for the ’shackley steps in back—built next to the Campbellite church (now a Presbyterian one); cool in summer and then with a vine on every string that strung the porch like a harp, and cold in winter; but good lives found a home in it. Pore Perrie sat on the porch in summer and sang the hymns along with the congregation next door despite they was Campbellites, for hymns are the same in all Houses of God, she said. She had her own church there behind the vines. In the front flowerbeds was a duke’s mixture of Rainlillies after it rained, Touchmenots, Old Flags and Calico, with always a grasshopper on the Calico. There was a frail Huisache tree on the side of the house, brought there from a West Texas place by a cousin long ago who said it might live, she couldn’t say, in this damper climate; but it did, grew up pretty as a tree on a calendar, spraying out its yellow insect blooms and so limber that even a bird would bend it to light there, and scatter the blossoms. On one side was the churchhouse and in the afternoons the shadow of the churchhouse lay on the grass and Son played in the shadow; and on the other side was the patch. In back was the clothesyard where there lived several White Leghorn hens that left enough eggs for us to eat and bake with, and there was a few Golden Seabright Bantams just for ornament and for Son to have. Back of that was the grove of little pinetrees.

  “Perrie and me were both cut out by the Lord, who had his designs for all of us, to be missionaries; but I gave my life to Perrie and Perrie had a lame foot, to begin with, and then she spoiled the Lord’s design by marrying—against all wishes—and so late.… And there my story commences. Or ends… ’cause I don’t want to tell it anymore. Hush making me.”

  “Tell it out, this is the time to tell.”

  5

  “When Perrie Polk married—so late (she was thirty-eight and I was twenty-eight)—Ace Wanger, a traveling lumber salesman living in hotels and all that kind of boarding-house life, she adopted a child, little Son, through the Methodist Church Orphanage, because she could have none of her own. The Church was this orphan child’s parentage, and that’s the way Perrie wanted it.

  “Now Uncle Ace had been an orphan too, a foundling of some kind, nobody knows or ever knew who his folks were; and he would never talk about it. He took our home when he came into it as Perrie’s husband and he took little Son as his son, as you will see; but this so late and after so much misery.

  “Son grew along, in the house and in the yard, me and Perrie doing our sewing, Ace away on the road three weeks out of four all over Texas and Arkansas with his lumber, and little Son playing around the sewing machine that Perrie was pumping. When he could call a name he said Aunt Perrie and Aunt Linsie and Uncle Ace. So there was this household. All in the little house you can see right chonder, that nobody lives in since I moved, just a shell of a house.

  “Son was the best child in this world, then; never put his fingers in the sewing-machine pedal, never took the bobbins or the needles, sat very quiet—whose child? As he grew along he never gave any trouble, not even to switch his legs, and when he was old enough in the summertimes—we never even had to send him to Bible School in the summertime—but he went of his own choosing—nor give him a real blistering. Pore Perrie and I would watch him through the window where he played in the woodpile and wonder where Son came from.

  “By the time he was twelve he had turned real dark complected and very very nervious. His nerviousness so worried Perrie that she took him to Doctor Browder for it. Perrie said Doctor Browder said this is the most nervious child ever I saw in my practice, but think he’ll outgrow it—Perrie said Doctor Browder said—if he has his tonsils and adenoids out. Son had these out, and then we got him glasses. But we had to take him out of school.

  ‘Then we trained him ourselves, with the Bible, Stories of the Bible, Children of Faraway Lands—put out by the Missionary Society; and had him count eggs and tomatoes. He planted and pruned and toted round the place; and grew along.

  “By the time he was seventeen his distress began, finding him dark and lean and beginning to be very different. He was so nervious that if he’d be sitting by the washhouse studying something on his mind—oh I wonder what?—and the Leghorn rooster would crow in his face, Son would startle up and chunk a rock at him. Once he did this; and hit the Leghorn rooster in the head and killed it—to give you a notion of how Son was in those days. We didn’t know what to do with Son, and pore Perrie worried and worried. I worried too. Uncle Ace was no help, as he should have been, for he was always off traveling. So what could we do, so what could pore Perrie do? We tried to quieten Son down. We read him out of the Bible—My mother and my brethren are these…
Saint Luke eight twenty-one.

  “The thing of it is he had never had it told to him that he was an orphan. People who knew it kept it quiet; but they tried to tell him about it in ways that people have about a stranger—as you will later see. Some came to Perrie and said Son probably had some foreign blood in him, did he have nigra blood in him maybe? Did he have any papers? These things hurt pore Perrie, and hurt me; but Perrie said Son was Child of the Church and any parentage beyond that was unbeknownst to her. Once I said, ’Perrie regg’n it is the time to tell, do you think Son is of the age to have it told him’; but Perrie said, ’Not yet.’

  “Something had happened between Perrie and Ace, as it was bound to. One day in July he wrote a letter from Memphis and said he had a new job that would keep him there and he was going to take it and stay. Perrie would not quarrel with him and sent him all his things. There had never been a whole minute’s talk between Son and Ace, but suddenly when it was known that Ace was gone, and to stay, Son’s change happened. He was gone from his room one July morning soon after and there was a message left saying, ’I have gone to Memphis to see Uncle Ace.’

  “A long terrible time and no word. Perrie was ailing most of the time now, her lame foot had caused her hip to ache so that she could scarcely pump the sewing machine. I said a mite, not much; but I was grieving. We ate supper together quietly. There was a medicine show come through, but we didn’t go. A Preacher Healer from the ’Postolics came to town and the town filled his tent and several were healed by the Miracle; but Perrie said that if the Lord had taken her one side it was for His uses and that he had strengthened the other for her own; it was His Design; she pumped left-footed and would not go to the Healer. Now that’s enough; quit asking me. My mouth is shut.”