A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates
In the other seat Clara was holding Rodwell and Roosevelt apart. Rodwell must have been teasing the baby. “She's a real cute kid,” Nancy always said of Clara. “I never seen any kid nice like her, her age.” Clara was nice because she made supper if Nancy didn't feel up to it: she could make macaroni with melted cheese, and hot dogs fried in the pan, and rice with tomatoes and chopped field corn. She could sweep out the single room they'd be living in, place after place, and if she was fearful of Nancy she gave no sign. “She's done real well considerin her ma,” Nancy said.
“Her mother taught her a lot,” Carleton said sharply.
He stared out the window. In patches life came to him now. More and more in tattered patches like clouds—every time you looked, clouds were different-shaped, some of them weird and beautiful to knock your eye out, laced with sunlight like veins, but all of them swift-changing, forgettable. Christ, it was getting hard to stay sober: to want to stay sober. Carleton! Help me. Pearl had called for him like a woman waking from a dream but too late.
Nancy: a pretty oily-faced girl with a stale, sweet odor that Carleton liked all right, made him feel jumpy and sexy and almost-young, but shit she chattered all the time, wore a man out. In a group she was her best: when everyone was drinking, she could make them all laugh and men liked her, and Carleton felt a thrill of possession he hadn't felt in years, since Pearl had begun letting herself go.
When a woman does, that's the end. Like letting a garden go to weeds. Overnight it happens. Till you can't see what there had ever been in the garden to make it special, choked with weeds.
Carleton leaned his head against the window, that was cloudy with a light film of grease from where somebody else had been leaning his head. Outside there was nothing: countryside. Farmland, scrubby woods, hills in the distance. Carleton imagined a horse thundering along outside, keeping pace with the bus but oblivious of it. A high-stepping Kentucky Thoroughbred. The kind you never saw up close, only in pictures. A white star on his forehead, a long streaming shiny-black tail. Three white stockings, and the rest purely black. Carleton smiled feeling the horse's muscles plunge and jerk, admiring the ease of his galloping, the remarkably thin shinbones, ankles; he could feel the soft earth give way beneath the stallion's hooves. That way a horse had of frolicking in an open field, making nick-nick-nicking noises to his friends grazing in another pasture but ignoring any human being trying to call him over … All this while, the girl beside him was talking. Nudging her hot skin against his. Carleton was trying not to listen because behind such female chatter he could sometimes hear Pearl, the way she'd been before—
Carleton! Help me. I don't want to die.
Months Pearl had hardly spoken to him, or to anyone. All she could rouse herself for was nursing the baby. Then pushing the baby from her, to Clara. No more! No more! Carleton must've been drunk, goddamn he must've been, hadn't meant to get Pearl pregnant one more time he'd vowed, yet somehow it had happened. Those last months she'd worked in the fields slow and clumsy and indifferent as any mental case you'd see and sometimes she would lie down in the dirt and shut her eyes and nobody could rouse her, Carleton would have to haul her back to the cabin like a sack of seed. So shameful! Christ, he'd hated her. Pearl had ceased to know him, so that she need not despise him, Carleton believed. Until at the end, when the hemorrhaging began, she had called for him in a panic clear-minded and her eyes alert with pain Carleton! Help me and he'd been shit-faced drunk and slow to be roused and later there was a doctor who'd been so disgusted with Carleton he refused to look at him. Carleton had been humbled, stone-cold sober. Three-day drunk, and three days' whiskers, and he hadn't eaten a morsel in those days and so shaky on his feet he near-about fainted, yet had to endure the doctor's scorn like he was a filthy concrete floor being hosed down. “This should never have happened,” the doctor was saying in a low, rapid voice, not meeting Carleton's eye, “this poor woman, in her condition, how many pregnancies did you say she'd had? And these living conditions.” Carleton had but a vague sense of the room that was smelling of blood, buzzing with flies; he was grateful that the kids had been taken to the foreman's cabin, and kept from seeing their mother in such a state. The doctor was a youngish man, he'd shoved his mended glasses against the bridge of his nose, furious, frustrated; for of course Carleton could not speak, would not speak, out of Walpole shame and humility. “What's wrong with you people? Don't you know about birth control? Don't you ever—” Carleton stood mute and repentant and his face shut up tight as a fist. He had not believed even then that Pearl would die, or could die; he had no capacity to imagine the world of what-might-be, there was so damn much to worry about in the world that was. So he tried to grasp what was happening: the baby in Pearl's belly was twisted wrong, or something was wrong with Pearl's blood, and there was an infection, or—
All you can tell yourself, Carleton, it was Pearl's time. God took her back to Him. This consolation one of Carleton's women friends gave him, Carleton cherished in his heart.
Nancy was about eighteen. She was the daughter of a man Carleton knew and she wanted to leave Florida, so she just ran away with Carleton and his kids. She had dark hair cut very short and jagged about her face, exposing the tips of her soft ears, and when she laughed she squinted with hilarity—everything was so funny, she made you want to laugh along with her. That was one thing about the bus and the camps, Carleton thought; everyone was quick to laugh. They were good people. Right now they were laughing on the bus, carrying on. Just behind him was a family from Texas, Bert something and his wife, both of their faces tanned and round, and across the way were two of their children, Rosalie and Sylvia Anne, and behind them two more children—two boys. Carleton didn't like so many kids but he liked Bert and his wife because nothing got them down. Rosalie was Clara's best friend, but Carleton didn't like her quick clever eyes. They all liked to laugh. Carleton didn't mind hearing them, but he was different and thought of himself as different: he was better than these people, whose parents had traveled on the season too, because his family owned land and were farmers and he was about ready to go back there himself. The problem was that in 1933 everyone had it bad.
“I sure do like New Jersey. We're in it now,” Nancy said. She was talking with Bert and his wife. “I s'pose you been up here too?”
“Look, I been all over,” Bert said.
They laughed at this or at some comical twitching of his face. Bert always made everyone laugh, especially women. Carleton stared out the window at his leaping figures and saw that they jumped and twisted with a freedom that was almost desperate—there he was himself, free, able to glide along inches above the ground, easily outdistancing this old bus. A young Carleton, running along, letting his arms swing— The Texas couple started talking about something that had happened back home, a hurricane, and Carleton tried to shut his mind off since he'd heard this four or five times already. He concentrated on his running figures but Bert's voice kept coming through.
Bert was a thin, earnest man of about forty, with a meek bald head shining through his hair. But his earnestness and his meekness kept giving way to big mocking good-natured grins; he couldn't stop grinning. His wife had no face that Carleton could remember. It was just a woman's face.
“Somebody with no head?” Nancy shrieked.
“It was a nigger. We all seen it ourselves,” Bert said.
Nancy giggled. “You're kiddin me!”
“Honey, I ain't kiddin you. Why for would I kid you?”
“Seen worse things than that,” his wife said, pushing forward. “Don't you believe me? That was one real hard storm in Galveston.”
“What's Galveston?” said Nancy.
“Yeah, we seen some sights,” said the woman enthusiastically. Her voice slowed as she raked through debris and peeked into darkened ruins of houses. “A funnel come right down out of the sky—”
Carleton squirmed in his seat. The harder he stared at the figures the less clear they became, as if they were afraid of a funnel
Carleton still tried to stand straight and tall before witnesses. For always witnesses are judging you. Conscious of his muscled arms, shoulders, legs. But Christ, it was getting to be hard work keeping his shoulders straight when they were wanting all the time to bend like a bow, from stooping over in the fields. And Carleton's face— now he was missing front teeth, and his damn nose more crooked-seeming for some reason God only knew, gave him a cockeyed look sometimes like a mental case, lines in his forehead like cuts made by a knife, he had to practice making his face like the faces of men outside. Outside the farmworkers' camps. Bastards eyed you like expecting you to steal from their pockets or stink up the fuckin air they own. Some of 'em knew: a man like Carleton Walpole would wish to tear out their throats with his teeth if nobody knew, if he would never be caught.
In the fields, people let their faces go, mostly. Nobody's watching or gives a damn so maybe you talk to yourself, squinch up your eyes replaying old quarrels and fights and sometimes old good times too, if you can recall the good times, spit into the dust, all the time thoughts buzzing through your skull like fat black flies over coils of human shit out back of the fields in the scrub pinewoods where, if you got to go, you go there. And the foreman watching you leave the field, to see you don't linger. And the people in town, they seem to know all this. Even the women, with powdered faces and white high-heeled shoes, eyes sliding on you in pity and revulsion. Even the young ones. So in town you must walk in a certain way, or god-damn you try. There Carleton Walpole carried himself straight as he could and his face reserved and dignified like a soldier who would fight to the death if you challenged his honor. Or the honor of his family. No: you would not wish to do that.
Yet alone sometimes his shoulders sagged with the hurt of what he'd done he had not meant to do, Christ as his witness.
At that tavern outside Ocala. Far away in the fuckin Sunshine State.
“It wasn't. It was never. Not my fault. It was not.”
They'd believed him. No: they'd believed the witnesses, not him.
They'd believed the witnesses speaking carefully yet with contempt as you would speak of two dogs fighting in the dirt. The one, going for the jugular; so the other had no choice but to go for the jugular, too. That was all it was. Two dogs.
Something had gone out of Carleton since that night. And the terrible days and nights following.
Like losing teeth. Your jaws feel better in time. But there's the emptiness, dead nerves. Like dead wires. No current going through them. His mind worked slower now. His flaring-up times were maybe more frequent but did not require thought. He talked slower, and heard words slower. Like coming at him slow through murky water. So he'd wake in some godforsaken place like the mid- dle of a potato field having seen the circle of faces smiling at him like welcoming him back and for a confused moment he'd think I was back home and almost he would think It's a place I can get to, from here.
Except they would stare at him in astonishment demanding to know what he had done with his little blond wife that sweet little Brody girl hardly came to his shoulder.
“Not my fault. Christ as my witness.”
A woman's hand prodded his side. Nancy giggled he was talking in his sleep again. Twitching, kicking.
Damn bus was bouncing on a dirt road. Must've left the highway so Carleton pretended to know this. Something hot and hungry in his gut like a ball of baby snakes. He fumbled for the whiskey. What was left of it.
It burned as it went down, and then it stopped burning.
A warm numb sensation. Baby snakes settling to sleep.
“Hon, you gonna share? Sure!”
Nancy pried the bottle from his fingers and lifted it to her mouth drinking quick and practiced wiping her mouth with the back of her hand as a man would do, and her eyes glowing warm and amber like the whiskey. You weren't supposed to drink on the bus but the driver himself sometimes drank. Some way to get through the long hours, the fuckin heat. Nancy was passing the bottle to the Texas couple behind them, these two she'd struck up a friendship with as Nancy had a way of doing, quick to make friends and quick to make enemies that was Nancy's way. Now she was acting like it was Carleton's idea to pass the whiskey to them, boastful of her man she saw as good-looking and a real man, Christ it pissed him hearing her bragging on him like he was somebody special. Stroking his upper arm, his ropey muscles like it thrilled her. “This man of mine he's been all over the map, comes from Kentucky, lived in a hotel in Cincinnati for a while, he crossed the Mississippi how many times, hon?—” and Carleton only just shrugged. He knew sometimes when she was drunk and feeling sexy she would hint to people that Carleton had hurt—her words were hurt, hurt bad, had to hurt— a man back in Florida, but she never spoke of this to Carleton's face, she knew she had better not.
Carleton supposed the Texas couple was wondering why he didn't turn around and be friendly with them well fuck 'em let 'em wonder: Carleton Walpole wasn't any old trained bear. Let them go to hell: he hated them. Not as bad as spics and niggers that you hated on principle, these types you hated soon as you laid eyes on them for what they were. Fuckin losers, deadbeats and assholes and drunks. And the women loud, worse than the men. Mostly everybody on the bus Carleton was feeling savage about except his kids and maybe Nancy if she didn't gab so fuckin much, like to tie a sack over her head to shut her up. His kids he would spare, though Rod-well was pissing him off with his smart-ass mouth, hee-hawing at the back of the bus with some boys, and Roosevelt was the homeliest kid you ever saw like a retard with that glaze in his eyes and a stammer if his pa looked at him crossways. Carleton took back the bottle and drank and shut his eyes to the fiery blur of the sun thinking if this busload all died in a crash it'd be no loss to the world. Except the fuckin bus was not going fast enough on this dirt road to crash hard. Turn over into a ditch? A creek? Might not be deep enough, a creek. Over the side of a bridge into the Mississippi River, that would do the trick: maybe a hundred feet deep, and a mile wide, and a fast-moving current and undertow.
Except: say the bus careened off a bridge and into the river and everybody on the bus drowned except Carleton Walpole and his family for God had spared them.
Know why I spared you, Carleton Walpole?
And he would bow his head in meekness. For he would not know.
Seek and ye shall find was God's reply. All the corners of the world shall ye seek and one day ye shall find.
The camp was just off the dirt road, hidden by a scrubby orchard. When they climbed out of the school bus everyone felt the ground wobble. Carleton looked suspiciously about to see what it was like. Nancy helped Roosevelt down, scolding to Clara, “He shouldn't ought to do that in his pants, old as he is. You got to teach him better, honey. You're his sister.”
Clara bit at her thumbnail. “I thought he was O.K.”
Before them the grassless space was strewn with junk. The remains of a trash fire. On both sides were shacks that had been whitewashed years ago. At the far end was a tomato field. Carleton shielded his eyes looking that way: heat waves glimmered there like gasoline fumes. “They painted these places up nice,
Carleton frowned. Being called honey didn't always ring right with him. He grunted, “Looks all right.”
They were assigned to their cabins. Carleton never looked at the crew recruiter, who spoke in the same loud bossy way to everyone— Carleton Walpole as well as old deaf cripples who could hardly walk—and who liked to pretend that Carleton wasn't as good a man as he was. This recruiter also drove the bus to make a little more money.
“This'll suit us fine. Ain't this fine?” Nancy said.
“Somebody left some clothes for us.” Carleton kicked at a pile of soiled clothes on the floor of the cabin. Bloodstained underpants.
They were always happy on the first day. Even Carleton would feel some hope. This shanty, that the recruiter called a cabin, wasn't too bad, bigger than the previous one, and not so smelly. There were cobwebs and dead insects and more trash on the floor, but Nancy and Clara would take care of that. Carleton said nothing and let them unpack. His underarms and sides were slick with sweat. Damn crack in his ass burning-hot. He was damn thirsty but would have to wait on that, he knew. That whiskey-dryness in his throat like he'd been sleeping. Carleton tested the lightbulb over the kitchen table and it worked. That was good. He plugged in the hot plate and that worked too. With his knee he prodded the mattresses; they were all right. When he was finished he jumped down from the doorstep and stood in front of the shack with his hands on his hips.
Each of the shacks was numbered. Theirs was. Carleton stared at this figure in disgust, to think that he would have to live in a shanty with a six painted backward on it, as if he himself had been stupid enough to do that! Children were already out playing around the shacks. The shacks were propped up off the ground on concrete 6 blocks and some of them did not look very stable. Carleton walked slowly along, his hands still on his hips as if he owned everything. Back between the shacks were old cardboard boxes and washtubs. Some were turned over, others were right side up and filled with rainwater. He knew that if he went over to look he'd see long thin worms swimming gracefully in the tubs. Out in front of some of the shacks were big packing crates filled with trash. Some kids were already picking through them.