In a Shallow Grave

“What does he do?” I repeated after him, as if he had put me under a quieting draught like the doc used to hand me in a little paraffin cup full of something red and drowsy . . . “Why, what does a applicant do?” I said, staring at him like I had just awoke in the hospital and the nurse stood there and said, “You’re better, Garnet.”

“Can you bear messages?” I began cautiously with the most important duty. “That is deliver and fetch letters from down the road?”

“I don’t see why not,” he contested.

“I reckon you’re too good, being white, to rub feet.”

“I could take a try at that,” he said, looking down at my shoes.

“What size shoe do you wear?” he wondered.

I swallowed hard, and then replied, “Thirteen.”

“That’s a lot of rubbin’,” he remarked, and suddenly we both laughed.

He avoided looking at my face still, and I don’t suppose anybody ever got any pleasure looking at it, but of course once the girls in school had liked to gaze at me and flirt, that’s no exaggeration either, I was once able to put a crush on all the girls, well, that was like an age ago, if not in time, in events . . .

“And is there any payment?” he went on warming up with questions.

“Usually I give only board and room, but well, in your case, I guess . . . spending money is in order.”

He nodded.

“Where’s my bed?” he queried, looking up at a big stopped grandfather clock.

“Down the hall. But it’s in the same room next to mine, you see.” I studied him . . . “In case I die in the night, you see,” I joked, “I would want you to put some pennies on my eyelids . . .”

He sort of grinned.

“My name, by the way,” he offered his hand, “is Daventry.”

“And where did you run off from, Daventry?” I inquired, and then put my hand gentle over his mouth and said, “Don’t answer that one.”

He complained about all the birds making so much noise in the morning he couldn’t sleep—oh maybe complain is not the word but comment. Then he said he had never seen so many books in a house. There were more books than wallpaper, furniture, pictures, or proper rugs. I told him the books was not mine.

“In the winter”—I went to his first point of criticism— “the birds for the most part are quiet, oh a few chickadees scold and call and a crow here and there caws of course. But until you spoke of it I guess I hadn’t any note of the fuss the birds do make of a morning . . . Now you come from Utah, Daventry . . . That is plains, isn’t it?”

He nodded, as he went from one shelf after another, taking the books down, blowing off the settled dust, staring at a page here, another page there.

Meanwhile I was holding my breath, trying to work myself up to having him take his first letter to deliver to Widow Rance. I wondered if he would do, for with all the “interviewing” of applicants I had done, and with none of them panning out, if this one didn’t work, I would have to fall back on Quintus, for I couldn’t go on seeing all these young men forever, picking and choosing and being disappointed. But speaking of Quintus, as I sat there in a study, I suddenly thought of the word for him, he was sober, maybe not too sober, but sober. I don’t mean in regard to not drinking, I don’t dare drink myself, on account of my veins and arteries being all but murdered, but Quintus when you got right down to it, didn’t approve of anything but doing chores for his ma and watching the chickens grow up. Too perfect, Quintus—he made me feel no-account. Still, if this Daventry doesn’t pan, I thought, I will have to have Quintus forever on account of I can’t keep on interviewing the whole world.

“Oh, Christ Jesus,” I let slip out, and he said immediately, “What’s wrong with you now?”

“Nothing. Can’t I sigh if I want to?”

He began looking at me from that moment more and more straight in the face without so much as batting an eye.

“How did you sleep last night, Daventry?”

“Oh I slept good.”

“I don’t snore or anything do I?”

“Didn’t hear you.”

I was looking through an old book on Arabia, trying to get my inspiration up to pen or rather dictate a letter to Daventry for the Widow Rance—my own hands will barely hold a pen anyhow, and for some time now if they hold anything too long all the flesh will come off clear to the bone . . .

“Are you ready, Daventry?” I spoke in my most quavering voice, and I jumped up from my chair and went and stood in the middle of the room ready to dictate and I always felt like the leading baritone in the church choir when I done that, but instead of music of course it was just letters that came out, and this leads me to a remark he made right at the first and shows how he was, for I had begun the letter like this, My precious Dear, I am sending you a courtly young man named Daventry.

I will not say he was angered by this sentence, but I could see he had been troubled by something about me from the start, not my nauseous appearance (though as I want to never fail to emphasize, at night or in dim house- light I am still not a million miles away from what I was when the high school girls mooned over me), but by what I spoke.

So there he was the new applicant making a little speech, which begun something like this, “Where do you get all those odd expressions, Garnet,” he began talking to me as familiar as if he had knowed me all my days, “for I never have heard anybody talk like you, and I don’t think anybody does talk like you.”

“Like the word courtly young man,” he swept right along.

He stood there now like a judge behind a bench awaiting for my defense.

“As I was saying, Daventry,” I began in the greatest confusion at his charge, “not knowing I talked any different from anybody, when we talked earlier, not seeing many persons but the applicants and people not liking to talk to me since I was blowed up for dead, and my buddies all killed and parts of their bodies blown over me, buried under them for some days you know before I was found (I go off on this speech every so often when I know I should follow Doc’s advice and forget), you know, well of course in the beginning I spoke like all Virginia boys do, and that is a good speech, but when I fell in love all over again with the Widow Rance and had nothing anyhow to do but read these books, which I will be the first to say I don’t understand a jot or tittle of, but all the same I have become habituated to reading these hard tomes I can’t understand: for instance I don’t take any pleasure anymore in reading the newspapers, and anyhow they are about the living, Daventry, and writ in living language, no, I have got firmly habituated to these old books, like this thick one here about Arabia nearly two hundred years ago, and so gradually you see these old books have seeped or trickled into my speech and have took over maybe from the way people talk today. But until you spoke just now I didn’t know I had this peculiarity even. So that explains how I call you a courtly young man, dig?”

Daventry shook his head slowly again like the old half-broken pendulum of the clock when I am dickering with it.

“So I talk now the way it gives me pleasure,” I went on somewhat offended at his criticism, “If you don’t understand anything I say,” I appealed to his forbearance, “ask me, and I will try to explain it then, although the Sunday School superintendent when he was up here a year or so back said I didn’t know how to use any of the words right I do pick up from the old tomes, though he was half-joking, and you are serious . . . Well, back to the Widow Rance . . .”

“Just one second, though, Garnet,” he began again, “if you don’t mind . . . What do I do now if, say, the Widow Rance, as you call her” (I could see he felt this way of speaking of her was queer) . . . “what if she don’t want me to deliver these letters, I mean you said something kind of suspicious about her maybe not wanting you to write them.”

“To tell the truth,” I took up his point, “she don’t want my letters.” I got somewhat sheepish now. “But the preacher,” my voice got persuasive, “talked to her about it, and well, hell, to tell you the truth it’s charity . . .”

“Charity?”

“Yes, God damn it!” And in the old days I would have flushed a angry beet-red at having to eat humble pie like this in front of another man, and admit to groveling, but being so discolored I don’t suppose if I did flush it would be visible, for instance I can’t bear to study myself in the mirror unless all the lights is out except for a teeny candle,