Strange doings

Part 2

“No, dear, I’ll be the one to cope with the shoes, yes? And you, why this will give you the time to go and prepare our own meal, yours and mine!”
No. She stood unsmilingly until at last Lee turned and tiptoed back to where the creature lay snoring among books and paraphernalia and, withal, the best accommodations this side of River Cahawba. Quickly he cut loose the moccasin on the boy’s left-hand side and tossed it as far from himself as he could, where it bounced against the wall. No socks. Nor did the boy seem to require them. Suddenly Lee uttered out loud, dismayed to find that the remaining foot, the one in leather, was fitted with a prosthetic device of strange nature, crude beyond imagination, the work most likely of some fellow tribesman, an iron monger possibly, or good-intentioned smith who had wanted by such means to make the legs more or less equal in length by comparison to each other. Lee dropped it at once, but then immediately gathered it up again and fastened it into place.
Of the boy’s upper parts, his face for example and head in general, they belonged to a person of whom it was difficult to make to make final judgment. Next, working tenderly, Lee lifted the lid on the right-hand side, uncovering an eye that was large, hazel, and highly clarified. It was not uncommon to come across features of this kind, hazel ones, in certain upriver counties toward the north. Thinking on this (and taking out his pipe and filling it), he was slow to drop the lid and slow, too, in running around to the other side where the eye proved so much like the first one that right away Lee began to confuse them in his mind.
Outside, his wife was where he had placed her. “I’m thinking we should have the ham tonight,” he said, “and black-eyed peas. You’re very hungry and…”
“Is he all right?”
“Fine, fine. Knows how to sleep certainly! Yes, indeed.” He hummed. “There is that little… how to say? Anomaly.”
She stopped.
“No, no, no, I didn’t do it. It’s one leg, you see - shorter than the other. And that will explain his limp. For my part, I think we should have gravy with the ham and gravy with the grits.”
She said nothing. Lee knew what she was thinking however.
“He doesn’t belong to us, dear. Why, he’s nearly a full-grown man!”
“What’s his name?”
“Never asked. And I will not have you plucking some adorable little name out of mid-air and foisting it off onto him like you did for…” (He mentioned here the dog, who also had come to them from out of the hills.) “Anyway, he’ll be gone by tomorrow.”
“Oh don’t be ridiculous. Who would feed him?”

It nearly always gave Lee pleasure when at the end of a tumultuous day he would throw himself inside the house and, shivering with the most delicious sense of security, pull Judy in after him.
He looked upon it as his own special place, and never mind that the structure was too tall by far and excessively narrow for its height. As to the ceilings (and the house was full of them), they were so high that only with great difficulty could he actually perceive them, and even then he had to use his better glasses. But primarily it was the wallpaper he adored, hundred-year-old stuff so faded by now and so grainy that it turned one’s thoughts to classic nineteenth-century postage stamps. Many were the times he used to stand facing the wall with his lantern, endeavoring to read those old newspaper accounts wherewith the surface had been mended and patched. But mostly he was drawn to the damp places where some of his earliest ancestors had been immured.
There were a number of things that committed him to this place and marked him out, not so much as “the captain of his own destination” as rather the captive, so to speak, of self-fascination. But all this was as nothing when held up next to the objects (books) and items (musical recordings) that he had abstracted from New York City, hundreds of good things that filled the shelves that ran back and forth and extended even unto the ceiling itself where a ladder was needed to get them down. They covered the moist places, the books did, and offered tens of thousands of pages amongst which a person could hide his bills of money.
He was aware of everything - the furniture, the mice, the smell of mildew, calomel and soot. Aware, too, that the closet was full of canned foods. Climbing to the third floor, he also became aware of Judy who, often as not, would be seated on the floor among her belongings.
These were the good years. No one whom he had ever known had any desire to find him. In Africa, meantime, and points further east, sixteen wars were being carried out with sticks, rifles, and razor blades. One could do worse than pilot even such an unwieldy house as this one over the dark, deep, and unsettled sea that comprised a typical black night in the land called Alabama.
And: “Did I not say, dear,” (he said), “that our love would persist for ten thousand years?”
She couldn’t hear him, not so long as he remained in his vestibule, a narrow space beneath the stairs where he had room but for a chair, lamp, and old-fashioned radio that had gone bad except for certain highly irregular wave lengths in the extreme right-hand region of the dial. Approaching the thing with circumspect - it was as big, almost, as the refrigerator - he now switched on the motor and prepared himself for a very long wait. Thus several minutes went by, which is to say until some of the more conspicuous tubes (the machine had long ago lost its housing and was kept together with rubber bands and cellophane) until the essential tubes, as he was saying, began to blush and, finally, throw off sparks.
Somehow he had tapped into a comedy show, an uproarious affair that had originated from somewhere in Chicago shortly before the War. Coming nearer, he did his best to understand the jokes, but soon was overwhelmed by blasts of trash music breaking in from two neighboring channels. It was quite useless - each time he thought that he was at last keening in on the old songs, that was when evilness took possession of the wires.
Turning to the news, he heard two stories each about racism and price movements. Quickly he turned off the power, waited, counted and then, bending over the machine, tried to ascertain if the tubes had cooled sufficiently and whether he could find Chicago amid the static.

They ate in silence, the woman and Lee. Good years were these, now that the tedium of youth was behind them; they liked to sit for hours in the dim, gloating conjointly over what they had accomplished in the past and what they hoped to avoid in the future. And in short he foresaw for them nothing but music and dogs, nights and long walks in the increasingly depopulated countryside. Suddenly, that moment, the radio spoke out loud and clear, Lee having forgotten to turn it off. And because it was a weather report (their favorite kind of listening), and since it referred to a nearby locality and to current time, Lee chose to give heed to it and, if possible, memorize it before too much static got between the meteorologist and he.
Thunder and rain, coming from opposite directions, were anticipated on two different fronts. And someday, he knew, great balls of fire would come rolling down the valley, evaporating the Cahawba. Bending nearer, he learned that December would be upon them much sooner than he had provided for. It promised high winds, the premier danger in these parts to his all-too-narrow-and-excessively-tall home that already listed to one side.
“December,” he said, looking meaningfully at his wife.
She paled. This was the weather that each year sent her running for her mittens and ear pads and never mind that there were still 60 degrees of mercury both inside and out.
“But if you think this is chilly, just you wait till…”
“No, Lee, don’t. Please.”
“… till snow has filled the attic and little hills of frost sit athwart your nipples, then what will you do, hm?”
She shivered violently and put on an anguished expression. Lee watched calmly as she tore loose the shawl that adorned the sofa and wrapped herself in it. The radio was continuing, a lugubrious voice telling of:
“… high water in Tennessee.”
“Tennessee!” said Lee. “Oh my, now that is getting close, isn’t it?”
“How close is it, Lee?”
Not immediately answering, he began to do the mental geography in his head. These were the good years and he foresaw no true danger for them, or anyway not for so long as they remained in a county that itself lay in the shade of a thousand defunct volcanoes, a peerless defense against all sorts of weather, northern invasions, interest rates, and television beams.
He had wanted to do the dishes; instead, at the last moment, a crime show came on, emanating from the only station he could trust. Of the story itself and its outcome, he was able to recall only very little of it later on. His preoccupation was with the way the world was when first the radio waves had set out on their long journey over the fields and furrows of Illinois. Meantime in the kitchen his wife was up to her elbows in dishes and, although he could decipher no word of it, singing non-stop.