A Southern Exposure Read online

  They now pass an enormous hay wagon, coming from the other direction, east. All the kids reach out; they believe that a piece of straw from a wagon like that brings luck. On the other side of the road, Brett’s side, she glimpses a tall thin person, she thinks a woman, in big dark clothes, and beside her something small and dark and round. A very small child, probably.

  In the next instant several things happen: Russ swerves just slightly to the right, to avoid the hay wagon, probably (Russ is allergic to hay, a secret fact), the car bumps into something heavy, and two horrendous shrieks burst into the air, one obviously a woman’s, the other crazed, inhuman.

  The car stops.

  Russ opens the door, and in addition to the screams, which hardly stop, there is an explosion of foulness, a ghastly smell. Fecal—worse than fecal.

  “Doodoo!” the kids all shout. “Throw up! I’m sick! Icky doodoo!”

  “You kids just shut up!” shouts Brett, over all their voices, even as she thinks, I’ll cope with the kids, it’s all I can do, and more. Russ can deal with whoever he’s managed to kill.

  It was not the woman. Brett now sees Russ rounding the front of the car, and the large dark woman moving toward confrontation, the woman no longer screaming but sobbing loud, holding a red bandana across her face—whether to catch tears or to keep out the horrible smell, no one can tell.

  Oh Christ, good Christ, he’s killed her child, thinks Brett. But why did the child smell so?

  She can hear nothing of the interchange between Russell and the woman, can only see their impassioned pantomime; the anguished woman weeping still, implacable, so gaunt and tall—and Russ, in his gentle phase; Russ explaining, Russ very country charming. But his smile, is it possibly overdone? A dead child there in the road, and he smiles?

  Another minute, and Russ walks around to the window on Brett’s side, and motions her to roll it down.

  He whispers, “It’s her goddam pig.” He has said this too loudly for the children not to hear. “I’ve killed her damn pig, that’s pig shit you smell. Jesus Christ. Give me the money, will you.”

  “Pig shit!”

  “Daddy said shit—”

  “Oooh—smell—”

  This chorus comes from behind her as Brett reaches into the voluminous cracked patent-leather handbag that she insists on hauling around, as Russ puts it, including to Hollywood poolside parties. She pulls out some bills, not looking at them, not counting.

  “That’s not enough. It’s the only pig she had, and it was very big. Her husband’s dead.”

  Brett hands him more bills. She is unable not to think, Suppose it had been a child?

  Out in front of the car Russ is immersed in further colloquy with the woman, who has now stopped her weeping. Who even looks at Russ with a semi-smile. And Russ, smiling too, is backing off. Even from this distance, through the bug-spattered windshield, Brett sees that he is pale and upset. Poets, she thinks, as she sighs and turns back to face her children.

  “Look, you kids. Daddy feels very bad that he ran over the lady’s pig. He gave her some money to pay for the pig but he still feels very bad. So you kids just be quiet for a while, you hear?”

  Melanctha, who, despite Russ’s theories, does in fact have a sensibility quite similar to his own, a delicacy of spirit, along with his eyes—Melanctha begins to cry, very quietly.

  “Okay, Melly, you come up here with me. You sit on my lap. Darling girl,” her mother croons. “Don’t you fuss. For all we know pigs go to heaven too.”

  “We’ll stop at a tourist court,” says Russ, getting back into the car.

  “Really? I’ve always wanted to, I think they’re, uh, sexy.”

  “Christ, Brett. Your mind. Or maybe we’ll stop at some house. You know, the ones with the lights and little signs on the lawn.”

  “Tourist home. Overnight guests. Well, that’s okay too,” Brett tells him, thinking that it is considerably less than okay: in a tourist court the kids could have their own separate cabin, or maybe two cabins. And she and Russ could be—well, alone, for the first time in months, it seems to her. In the Santa Monica house the bedrooms were all strung out along a balcony, nice sunshine and ocean views but no privacy, none at all, not ever.

  “Ursula.” Russ has said this name musingly, almost romantically.

  “Who?”

  “That was her name, the woman with the pig. Unusual, isn’t it? Wasn’t there an Ursula the Pig Woman in some play? Jacobean, I think. Maybe Johnson. Bartholomew Fair?”

  “God, Russ, I don’t know.” Brett is experiencing a terrible and familiar sense of defeat.

  • • •

  That night in the large (six bedrooms) farmhouse that is now, in these hard times, a tourist home, Brett sleeps between Melanctha and Lowell, with Walker sprawled near their feet. Fitfully she thinks of home, of Pinehill, and their big spreading-out house. With the children off in their wing. Suppose the Depression got worse, and she and Russ had no money left, would they have to turn their house into a tourist home? Brett doubts it: “I’d rather dig ditches, I’d get me a job with the CCC” is what Russ would undoubtedly say. “No way strange folks are going to be sleeping over at our house.”

  But he seems to enjoy it very much when they stay in those places. Tonight he has spent an hour or so after dinner, down in the living room, making talk with Mr. and Mrs. Williston, their hosts, a plump and red-faced couple (they look much alike), who visibly hang on Russ’s words, his stories. Not to mention all the time spent at the garage discussing their car; the pig had made serious dents in the right front fender, the garage was sending to Topeka for parts. And time visiting Ursula, the pig woman, from whatever play. Russ returns with stories of Ursula’s childhood, her husband’s death (TB), her seven children, all now grown. Her pig. Ursula is a fine brave woman, both Willistons confirm; they have known her always.

  Indeed, Russ has seemed to settle into Kansas. Brett could easily imagine the two or three days becoming a week, and at that she thought, Oh good, I won’t have to go to the Hightowers’ party, and push off those stupid passes from Jimmy, and have those terrifying Hitler conversations with Esther.

  Mostly, though, Brett is haunted by the child, the child who was not there but whom if he or she had been there, walking along with Ursula, instead of the pig, Russ could have—he would have killed. Changing everyone’s life entirely. Irrevocably, for good. That nonexistent dead child is much more real to Brett than the vague seven live grownup children that Ursula actually has.

  Instead of a dead child there was a big fender-bending shit-stinking pig.

  Ursula the pig woman. Ursula the pig woman. A play of Depression Kansas. For the Group Theatre? Provincetown Players? Well, the thing is to write it, forget who for—for whom. And forget too the actual Ursula and her pig, and Kansas. A familiar but recently unavailable excitement trembles in Russ’s blood, and his face involuntarily smiles as he thinks, I could, no reason why not. It’s what they’ve wanted and kept saying I could do. An American classic. Folk but never folksy. I could do it.

  He allows himself this moment of mindless excitement, of baseless confidence, silly joy—but only a moment, before he begins to think, But Jesus, the work, all the words, I’ll never be able.

  Next he wonders if he gave Ursula enough money. Fifty bucks is a lot for these days, but it wouldn’t hurt to add a few bucks, maybe another twenty or so? What’s money for, anyway?

  And how can he sleep with these kids all over him? Disentangling his legs from the warm, insistent arms and legs, Russ creeps from that bed toward the door to the hall, down which is the bathroom and presumably other sleeping quarters. But just as he gets to the door there is Brett, suddenly beside him, her hand on his arm as she whispers, very softly, “There’s another bed right next door. A nice big wide one. Want to meet me there?”

  “But—” But he doesn’t, for so many reasons: one, a ravishingly beautiful girl named Deirdre.

  “They probably hoped they’d rent it late tonight
. Just lucky for us they didn’t.”

  “I guess—”

  “Oh, Russ, come on.”

  He does.

  3

  “And then there’s the suite,” says the clerk at the Pinehill Colonial Inn, after a pause during which Harry and Cynthia have considered other offerings—a double room, with two beds; two single rooms, connected; or a double room with a single room down the hall. None of which were very appealing. Also, Harry is already having trouble with what he takes to be the local accent. At first he thought this young man was kidding, dragging out his words that way and seeming to make fun of certain words even as he spoke them, but then Harry realized that this was how he, the clerk, talked: when he said “suite,” in three or maybe four syllables, he may have been kidding the concept (Southerners, as the Bairds are soon to learn, are quick to knock pretense of any sort; anything that smacks of “airs” invites derision), but a suite is what this young man meant. “There’s this sitting room and two—I think three—little bitty bedrooms, and then there’s this sort of a breakfast room. And a kitchen. But I think y’all better take a look.”

  Their first “y’all.” Harry and Cynthia exchange glances.

  The “suite,” reached at the end of a very long hall and up a small creaking flight of stairs, has turned out to be amazingly pretty. “Attractive,” which is Cynthia’s usual word, even uttered at its most intense, did not seem sufficient. It was Abigail who, standing on tiptoe to look out from a narrow window, turned back to gasp, “This is beautiful. We could stay here forever. Have people over all the time.”

  Abigail was right. The rooms were beautifully proportioned, and the furniture, instead of the anticipated shabby pseudo-Victorian, or some other bogus Sears antique, was very plain and comfortable. In fact it all looked handmade, beautiful wood all polished, and upholstered in obviously handwoven wool and linen of a remarkable spectrum of color, colors in amazing combination, as in a garden. A small fireplace had as its mantel some of the same plain dark and resinous wood. Next to the hearth were large unpainted clay pots, which Cynthia’s ready imagination instantly filled with roses or, perhaps in another season, clusters of bright leaves.

  “Well,” said Cynthia and Harry, in almost identical tones, simultaneously. “It’s really nice. We’ll take it.”

  Cynthia in her mind has already peopled the room with a small dinner party, one of her elegant but unpretentious ventures. A simple French casserole, a little salad. Herself and Harry, in their elegant old clothes, last year’s—but who would know? Some terribly nice new people, just two or three nice new couples. Mr. and Mrs. James Russell Lowell Byrd.

  In Harry’s mind a cocktail party has formed in that very same room, a good-sized crowd, on maybe a cold October football day, people all packed around the fire. Pretty women in tight sweaters. Lots to drink.

  Abigail’s fantasy removes all the grownups from the scene; she is there with a nice big group of brand-new friends, all girls from school. The grownups are all off at a party somewhere, and she brings out Cokes and cookies for the girls, and they laugh and tell secrets about the boys and the other, uninvited girls.

  “… these here rooms are mainly Miz Bigelow’s doing,” the clerk is saying. “And she’ll be real glad to hear that you folks approve. Mr. Duke, he’s the owner, he just told her to go ahead and do any old thing she felt like doing in these rooms, and I don’t think he’s had any cause to regret it.”

  Daylight shifts and brightens the colors of those rooms, adding, from long windows, vistas of the town: church steeples and tree-lined streets, gravelled sidewalks, a two-story brick business area, small stores with offices above. And houses: everywhere, shyly glimpsed between those huge green trees, behind hedges there are houses. Large white clapboard houses with heavy front porches; small gray-shingled cottages, daintily decked out in vines. From this distance all the Depression shabbiness is quite invisible—no matter that new paint is needed everywhere, and repairs to those sagging porches, those broken flagstone steps.

  Off to one side a cluster of large square pillared buildings, many overgrown with what must be Virginia creeper, now red-leafed, thick. This group is surely the local college, with its yellowed areas of grass, walled off in brick—and, at the moment, its uninhabited look: no school just yet, only here and there a stray professor or an eager freshman makes his way to the library, or the bulletin board at the Y.

  In another direction darkly wooded hills rise up; there too small bits of houses can be seen, a peaked roof here, an ornamental cornice there. A grape arbor, a tennis court, and a twinkling blue swimming pool.

  “Goddam place looks like a movie set” is Harry’s comment, on their first morning.

  “I can’t wait to start looking at houses,” Cynthia tells him.

  “When can I get a bike?” asks Abigail. “I’m really going to need one here.”

  “I’ll take you to Sears this afternoon,” her father tells her. “Surely there is a Sears?”

  His wife and daughter exhibit some surprise; it is not like Harry to be so instantly generous. What neither of them knows is the outcome of a conversation between Harry and the hotel’s owner, Mr. Duke. The “suite,” for reasons unfathomable to Harry, is so cheap (so reasonable, as he prefers to think of it) that he seriously wonders if they should ever move. It is a little small for permanent living, that is true; on the other hand, if one thinks of it as a little pied-à-terre, it is perfect. And who knows just how long this Pinehill phase of their lives will last? “No rush to look at houses,” he says to Cynthia. “Let’s sort of settle ourselves in first.”

  Her look tells Harry a great deal; he could have described her expression as an essay in contempt, which he is all too able to read. Don’t you understand anything? she soundlessly asks him. Don’t you know that we came down here for a house, and new people to see, so that maybe we could begin to like ourselves again, with a new house and new people liking us? Not just to camp out in some hotel.

  Interestingly (and Cynthia is interesting, and contradictory), what she says has quite another tone from her visible feelings. In a light voice she comments, “You’re certainly dapper this morning. You’re going out on the town?”

  “Well, maybe I could do the shopping.” He grins, not very nicely. “Maybe I’ll pick up some new friends.”

  “Daddy, can I come too? Can we look for a Sears?”

  He hesitates, looking for a bare fraction of a second at Cynthia, who is fingering her long fair hair in a tentative way.

  Then, “Sure, Abby-pie,” he says merrily. “Come along. We’ll find Sears, and knock the natives dead.”

  Left alone, Cynthia is instantly cheered by the view, or views—by the sheer prettiness of where she is. The colors of the fabrics in the sunlight, and the throng of hopes within her own very pretty breast. Standing there, having happily kissed her husband and her child goodbye, for a while she simply relishes the moment—and her own luck: she has outwitted Lord & Taylor (so far); and it was she who found this attractive little town for them. And she who insisted on the Inn—Harry might have gone to some awful tourist camp.

  It is she who is beautiful (still) and who has memorized a great deal of poetry by James Russell Lowell Byrd, whom any day now she will surely meet. Whom she will get to know.

  And that is what she wants of Mr. Byrd, Cynthia in her more rational moments is aware—she is, on the whole, a highly rational woman; she wants, in a social, friendly, possibly even an intimate way to know J. Russell Lowell Byrd. She has wondered what his intimates call him. She hopes not “Jim.” Even “Russ” would be, she feels, inappropriate for a great poet. But she wants him for a friend, to lay claim to him in that way.

  Her encounters—whatever one might call them—those backseat or off-in-the-countryside (once in some actual bulrushes, so wet and terrible) with Jack Morrissey in Connecticut have been a lesson for Cynthia, she believes. A lesson in how desperately you can want something that turns out to be purely ugly, sordid. Like dousing
a flame with mud. Thank God they never went further than they did, thank God they never actually did it. (Cynthia has no clear word for the sexual act, which she tends to think of in capitals, S E X.) Though God knows they came too close. “Affairs” (a word she likes) are best simply fantasized about; they should be left to novels, or poetry.

  And so, if she meets—or, rather, when she meets—James Russell Lowell Byrd, if he turns out to be as compellingly attractive as she has imagined, she can write a few poems, or maybe sometimes just close her eyes and think of him. With Harry she can pretend that he is Mr. Byrd. She pretends a lot with Harry, and the awful part is that it works; Harry adores her passion, believing himself to be its genesis, its source.

  Sitting down, regarding the room around her, Cynthia is struck again by its extraordinary style. Someone knows what she is doing, thinks Cynthia. Or does she? Could this Mrs. Bigelow be some entirely natural, native, untutored talent? Maybe just a woman working there in the Inn—a Negro woman, maybe? It does not strike Cynthia, a Yankee, that in that case she would not have been referred to as Mrs. Bigelow. Certainly the use of color is highly original, those pink-mauve striped pillows on the rich purple easy chair. Vogue magazine, collectively, would go absolutely mad; in fact Cynthia at this moment determines to bring this about, somehow, this “discovery” of hers. To bring about a meeting between Mrs. Bigelow and the doyennes of New York taste. She is surely not about to waste this Mrs. Bigelow on Lord & Taylor, despite what she has heard about their decorating department.

  But first they must meet Mrs. Bigelow, which in a town of this size should be easy enough. As Harry set off with Abigail, she even said to him, “Maybe you’ll run into Mrs. Bigelow in the A&P. Keep your ears open.”

  Harry, however, had a much better idea. After settling Abigail into a chair in the lobby of the Inn—as always, she carries a book; today it is Five Cousins—he goes over to the desk clerk.