“Looks like to me she had.”
“But it was by mistake he went there.”
“Oh, pshaw,” Joanne said. She turned to see how Carol was and then faced Ben Joe again. “What about their little boy, his and Lili Belle’s? That was named after Daddy? That’s more’n you were named for. I don’t see that your name is Phillip. Do you think he would have walked off and left a baby named Phillip for good?”
“That’s beside the point. You know, Joanne, sometimes I wonder whose side you’re on.”
She smiled and ground out her cigarette and stood up. “Don’t you lose sleep on it,” she said. “Come on, we’re keeping Carol awake. I’m going to do my nails and I reckon you have people you’ll want to visit.”
“I don’t know who.”
But he straightened up anyway and followed Joanne out of the room. In the hall she gave him a little pat on the arm and then turned toward the bathroom, and he started for the stairs. He stopped at the hall landing, which looked down over the long stairway, and put one hand on the railing.
“You know where the emery boards are?” Joanne called from the bathroom.
He didn’t answer; he leaned both elbows on the railing and stared downward, thinking.
“Oh, never mind. I found them.”
He was remembering one night six years ago; this spot always reminded him of it. He had been studying in his room and at about ten o’clock he had decided to go downstairs for a beer. With his mind still foggy with facts and dates, he had wandered out into the hallway, had put one hand on the railing and was about to take the first step down, when the noise began. He could hear that noise still, although he always did his best to forget it.
First he thought it sounded like an angry bull wheezing and bellowing in a circle around the house. But it was too reedy and penetrating to be that; he thought then that it must be an auto horn. Kerry Jamison had an auto horn like that. Only Kerry Jamison was a well-bred boy and didn’t honk for Ben Joe when he came visiting him. And he certainly didn’t drive on the Hawkes’s carefully tended lawn.
All over the house the girls had come swarming out of the various rooms, asking what the racket was. Tessie, who was scarcely more than a baby then and should have been asleep for hours, inched her bedroom door open and peeked out to ask Ben Joe if she could come downstairs with the others, because there was a trumpet blowing outside that wouldn’t hush for her. She spoke in a whisper; their mother was reading in bed in the room next to Tessie’s and would surely say no if she heard what Tessie was asking. But what neither Ben Joe nor Tessie realized at the time was that their mother was answering the telephone in her room, listening to Lili Belle Mosely tell her her husband was dead. Right then she wouldn’t have cared if Tessie never went to bed again, but Tessie couldn’t know that and she went on in her whispery voice: “Can I, Ben Joe? Say yes. Cani?”
“No, “ said Ben Joe. “I’ll go down and shut it up, whatever it is. Get back in bed, Tessie.”
“But it’s so scary, Ben—”
Their mother’s door opened. Tessie popped back into her room just as Ellen Hawkes flew out of hers; they were like the two figures in a weather house. Ellen had on a pair of blue cotton pajamas and her hair was rumpled and she was struggling into a khaki raincoat of her husband’s as she ran.
“Your father’s dead,” she said, and rushed down the stairs.
Ben Joe put both hands on the railing and leaned down. His mother had passed the little landing at the curve of the stairs and now she was directly below him, still running down; he could see the top of her head, and the curls lifting a little as she came down hard on each step. “Your father’s dead,” she repeated to the girls downstairs. Above her voice came the eerie sound from outside, wheezing and bellowing its way around to the front of the house.
Ben Joe let go of the railing and tore down the stairs after his mother. His shirt was open, and the tails of it flew out behind him as he ran. He had no shoes on. On one of the steps his stockinged foot slipped and he almost fell, but he caught himself and kept on going. The girls were waiting for him at the bottom, with stunned white faces. Tessie had come out to stand on the landing where Ben Joe had stood a minute ago and now she looked down at the others and began to cry without knowing why. She had poked her head through the bars because she was not yet tall enough to see over the railing. Her mother, holding on to the newel post at the bottom of the stairs while she struggled into a pair of Susannah’s loafers, looked up at Tessie briefly and said, “She’ll have got her head caught in those bars again. Better get her out, somebody.”
Tessie’s head was a tiny yellow circle on the second floor, outlined against the dark cupola that rose above the stairwell. The house seemed enormous, suddenly. The whole world seemed enormous.
“Where are you going?” Ben Joe asked his mother.
“To your father’s friend’s house,” she said, without expression. “I’ll be back. Gram’s asleep now. Don’t wake her. And try and figure some way of getting Tessie’s head free without sawing the bars down again, will you?”
Ben Joe nodded. None of it made sense. Everything was harried and nightmarish and yet the same small practical things were going on at the same time. His mother patted his shoulder and then, abruptly, she was off, out the front door and into the darkness of the moonless, early-autumn night. As she crossed the front porch the eerie, wailing sound from outside became louder; as she descended the steps down to the front walk a soldier came into view playing a bagpipe. He was small and serious, with his eyes fixed only on his instrument, and he walked in a straight line across their front lawn and then around to the other side of the house. He and Ellen crossed paths with only inches between them; neither one of them paused or looked toward the other one.
Jenny, standing with the rest of them on the front porch, said, “It’s a bagpipe.”
From out in the back of the house came the sound of their mother’s car starting, rising above the piercing sound of the bagpipes. A minute later the yellow, dust-filled beams of two headlights backed past them out into the street and then swung sharply around and disappeared.
Susannah stopped staring after the car and turned to Jenny, frowning, trying to sort her thoughts and figure what should be done.
“It’s no bagpipe I ever heard,” she said finally. “Bagpipes make tunes. This is only making one note.”
“Maybe he can’t play,” Jenny said. She was only twelve then, a thin, nervous little girl, and she was shivering and seemed to be trying desperately to get a grasp on herself. “I’m sure that’s it,” she said. “He’ll practice this note for a while and then go to the next, and then go—”
“Not in our yard he won’t,” Susannah said. “Run around the back and stop him, Ben Joe.”
But there was no need to; the soldier had come around the front again. Apparently he liked having an audience. He emerged from the side of the house at a scurrying little run, with his short legs pumping as fast as they could go, and then as soon as he came into the light from the front porch he slowed to a leisurely stroll in order to parade before them for as long as possible. His chest heaved up and down from the running he had done, and the horrible wailing sound was jerky and breathless now.
“Um …” Ben Joe said. He stepped down from the porch and the little soldier stopped. “You think you could do that somewhere else?”
The soldier grinned. He had a small, bony face, with the skin stretched tight and shining across it when he smiled. “No sir,” he said. “No sir. Man said no.”