A Death in the Family - James Agee [60]
“It doesn’t’ seem to have any effect,” she said, her voice still liquid. “The only times I drank before I had a terribly weak head, just one drink was enough to make me absolutely squiffy. But now it doesn’t seem to have any effect in the slightest.” She drank some more.
“Good,” he said. “That can happen. Shock, or strain. I know once when your mother was very sick I ...” They both remembered her sickness. “No matter. Take all you want and I’ve more if you want it, but keep an eye on yourself. It can hit you like a ton of bricks.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Time we went back to the others.” He helped her to her feet, and put a hand on her shoulder. “Just bear in mind what I said. It’s just a test, and it’s one that good people come through.”
“I will, Papa, and thank you.”
“I’ve got absolute confidence in you,” he said, wishing that this was entirely true, and that she could entirely care.
“Thank you, Papa,” she said. “That’s going to be a great help to know.”
Her hand on the doorknob, she turned off the light and preceded him into the kitchen.
Chapter 11
“WHY WHERE . . .” Mary began, for there was nobody in the kitchen.
“Must be in the living room,” her father said, and took her arm.
“There’s more room here,” Andrew told her, as they came in. Although the night was warm, he was nursing a small fire. All the shades, Mary noticed, were drawn to the window sills.
“Mary,” her mother said loudly, patting a place beside her on the sofa. Mary sat beside her and took her hand. Her mother took Mary’s left hand in both of her hands, drew it into her lap, and pressed it against her thin thighs with all her strength.
Her aunt sat to one side of the fireplace and now her father took a chair at the other side. The Morris chair just stood empty beside its reading lamp. Even after the fire was going nicely, Andrew squatted before it, making small adjustments. Nobody spoke, and nobody looked at the Morris chair or at another person. The footsteps of a man, walking slowly, became gradually louder along the sidewalk, and passed the house, and diminished into silence; and in the silence of the universe they listened to their little fire.
Finally Andrew stood up straight from the fire and they all looked at his despairing face, and tried not to demand too much of him with their eyes. He looked at each of them in turn, and went over and bent deeply towards his mother.
“Let me tell you, Mama,” he said. “That way, we can all hear. I’m sorry, Mary.”
“Dear,” his mother said gratefully, and fumbled for his hand and patted it. “Of course,” Mary said, and gave him her place beside the “good” ear. They shifted to make room, and she sat at her mother’s deaf side. Again her mother caught her hand into her lap; with the other, she tilted her ear trumpet. Joel leaned toward them, his hand behind his ear; Hannah stared into the wavering hearth.
“He was all alone,” Andrew said, not very loudly but with the most scrupulous distinctness. “Nobody else was hurt, or even in the accident.”
“That’s a mercy,” his mother said. It was, they all realized; yet each of them was shocked. Andrew nodded sharply to silence her.
“So we’ll never know exactly how it happened,” he went on. “But we know enough,” he said, speaking the last word with a terrible and brutal bitterness.
“Mmh,” his father grunted, nodding sharply; Hannah drew in and let out a long breath.
“I talked with the man who found him. He was the man who phoned you, Mary. He waited there for me all that time because he thought it would help if—if the man who first saw Jay was there to tell one of us all he could. He told me all he knew of course,” he said, remembering, with the feeling that he would never forget it, the awed, calm, kind, rural face and the slow, careful, half-literate voice. “He was just as fine as a human being can be.” He felt a kind of angry gratitude that such a man had been there, and had been there first. Jay couldn’t have asked for anyone better, he said to himself. Nobody could.
“He said he was on his way home, about nine o’clock, coming in towards town,