Collected Stories

and she was glad of that. But all summer long the king snakes were after them and she was afraid to walk in the garden. When the sparrows scratched the ground for seed they took a funny bound; they held their legs stiff and flung back the dust with both feet. Hattie sat down at her old Spanish monastery table, watching them in the cloudy warmth of the day, clasping her hands, chuckling and sad. The bushes were crowded with yellow roses, half of them now rotted. The lizards scrambled from shadow to shadow. The water was smooth as air, gaudy as silk. The mountains succumbed, falling asleep in the heat. Drowsy, Hattie lay down on her sofa, its pads to her always like dogs’ paws. She gave in to sleep and when she woke it was midnight; she did not want to alarm the Rolfes by putting on her lights, so she took advantage of the moon to eat a few thawed shrimps and go to the bathroom. She undressed and lifted herself into bed and lay there feeling her sore arm. Now she knew how much she missed her dog. The whole matter of the dog weighed heavily on her soul. She came close to tears, thinking about him, and she went to sleep oppressed by her secret.

suppose I had better try to pull myself together a little, thought Hattie nervously in the morning. can’t just sleep my way through. She knew what her difficulty was. Before any serious question her mind gave way. It scattered or diffused. She said to herself, I can see bright, but I feel dim. I guess I’m not so lively anymore. Maybe I’m becoming a little touched in the head, as Mother was. But she was not so old as her mother was when she did those strange things. At eighty-five, her mother had to be kept from going naked in the street. I’m not as bad as that yet. Thank God! Yes, I walked into the men’s wards, but that was when I had a fever, and my nightie was on.

She drank a cup of Nescafe and it strengthened her determination to do something for herself. In all the world she had only her brother Angus to go to. Her brother Will had led a rough life; he was an old heller, and now he drove everyone away. He was too crabby, thought Hattie. Besides he was angry because she had lived so long with Wicks. Angus would forgive her. But then he and his wife were not her kind. With them she couldn’t drink, she couldn’t smoke, she had to make herself small-mouthed, and she would have to wait while they read a chapter of the Bible before breakfast. Hattie could not bear to sit at table waiting for meals. Besides, she had a house of her own at last. Why should she have to leave it? She had never owned a thing before. And now she was not allowed to enjoy her yellow house. But I’ll keep it, she said to herself rebelliously. I swear to God I’ll keep it. Why, I barely just got it. I haven’t had time. And she went out on the porch to work the pulley and do something about the adhesions in her arm. She was sure now that they were there. And what will I do? she cried to herself. What will I do? Why did I ever go to Rolf’s that night—and why did I lose control on the crossing? She couldn’t say, now, “I sneezed.” She couldn’t even remember what had happened, except that she saw the boulders and the twisting blue rails and Darly. It was Darly’s fault. He was sick and old himself. He couldn’t make it. He envied her the house, and her woman’s peaceful life. Since she returned from the hospital he hadn’t even come to visit her. He only said, “Hell, I’m sorry for her, but it was her fault.” What hurt him most was that she had said he couldn’t hold his liquor.

Fierceness, swearing to God did no good. She was still the same procrastinating old woman. She had a letter to answer from Hotchkiss Insurance and it drifted out of sight. She was going to phone Claiborne the lawyer, but it slipped her mind. One morning she announced to Helen that she believed she would apply to an institution in Los Angeles that took over the property of old people and managed it for them. They gave you an apartment right on the ocean, and your meals and medical care. You had to sign over half of your estate. “It’s fair enough,” said Hattie. “They take a gamble. I may live to be a hundred.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Helen.

However, Hattie never got around to sending to Los Angeles for the brochure. But Jerry Rolfe took it on himself to write a letter to her brother Angus about her condition. And he drove over also to have a talk with Amy Walters, the gold miner’s widow at Fort Walters—as the ancient woman called it. The fort was an old tar-paper building over the mine. The shaft made a cesspool unnecessary. Since the death of her second husband no one had dug for gold. On a heap of stones near the road a crimson sign FORT WALTERS was placed. Behind it was a flagpole. The American flag was raised every day.

Amy was working in the garden in one of dead Bill’s shirts. Bill had brought water down from the mountains for her in a homemade aqueduct so she could raise her own peaches and vegetables.

“Amy,” Rolfe said, “Hattie’s back from the hospital and living all alone. You have no folks and neither has she. Not to beat around the bush about it, why don’t you live together?”

Amy’s face had great delicacy. Her winter baths in the lake, her vegetable soups, the waltzes she played for herself alone on the grand piano that stood beside her woodstove, the murder stories she read till darkness obliged her to close the book—this life of hers had made her remote. She looked delicate, yet there was no way to affect her composure, she couldn’t be touched. It was very strange.

“Hattie and me have different habits, Jerry,” said Amy. “And Hattie wouldn’t like my company. I can’t drink with her. I’m a teetotaler.”

“That’s true,” said Rolfe, recalling that Hattie referred to Amy as if she were a ghost. He couldn’t speak to Amy of the solitary death in store for her. There was not a cloud in the arid sky today, and there was no shadow of death on Amy. She was tranquil, she seemed to be supplied with a sort of pure fluid that would feed her life slowly for years to come.

He said, “All kinds of things could happen to a woman like Hattie in that yellow house, and nobody would know.”

“That’s a fact. She doesn’t know how to take care of herself.”

“She can’t. Her arm hasn’t healed.”

Amy didn’t say that she was sorry to hear it. In the place of those words came a silence which might have meant that. Then she said, “I might go over there a few hours a day, but she would have to pay me.”

“Now, Amy, you must know as well as I do that Hattie has no money—not much more than her pension. Just the house.”

At once Amy said, no pause coming between his words and hers, “I would take care of her if she’d agree to leave the house to me.”

“Leave it in your hands, you mean?” said Rolfe. “To manage?”

“In her will. To belong to me.”

“Why, Amy, what would you do with Hattie’s house?” he said.

“It would be my property, that’s all. I’d have it.”

“Maybe you would leave Fort Walters to her in your will,” he said.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Why should I? I’m not asking Hattie for her help. I don’t need it. Hattie is a city woman.”

Rolfe could not carry this proposal back to Hattie. He was too wise ever to mention her will to her.

But Pace was not so careful of her feelings. By mid-June Hattie had begun to visit his bar regularly. She had so many things to think about she couldn’t stay at home. When Pace came in from the yard one day—he had been packing the wheels of his horse trailer and was wiping grease from his fingers—he said with his usual bluntness, “How would you like it if I paid you fifty bucks a month for the rest of your life, Hat?”

Hattie was holding her second old-fashioned of the day. At the bar she made it appear that she observed the limit; but she had started drinking at home. One before lunch, one during, one after lunch. She began to grin, expecting Pace to make one of his jokes. But he was wearing his scoop-shaped Western hat as level as a Quaker, and he had drawn down his chin, a sign that he was not fooling. She said, “That would be nice, but what’s the catch?”

“No catch,” he said. “This is what we’d do. I’d give you five hundred dollars cash, and fifty bucks a month for life, and you let me sleep some dudes in the yellow house, and you’d leave the house to me in your will.”

“What kind of a deal is that?” said Hattie, her look changing. “I thought we were friends.”

“It’s the best deal you’ll ever get,” he said.

The weather was sultry, but Hattie till now had thought that it was nice. She had been dreamy but comfortable, about to begin to enjoy the cool of the day; but now she felt that such cruelty and injustice had been waiting to attack her, that it would have been better to die in the hospital than be so disillusioned.

She cried, “Everybody wants to push me out. You’re a cheater, Pace. God! I know you. Pick on somebody else. Why do you have to pick on me? Just because I happen to be around?”

Why, no, Hattie,” he said, trying now to be careful. “It was just a business offer.”