The Tin Can Tree (26 page)

T
he first thing Simon said was, “If I’d known
you
were coming, I’d of hitched a ride with you.” He was sitting in old Mr. Green’s platform rocker, with his elbows resting lightly on the arms of it and his fingers laced in front of him. “Did you just leave home and not tell anyone?” he asked.

“I told everyone,” said James, and looked straight across at the others. They stood in a line behind Simon, the three of them—his father, Claude, and Clara, the one brother and sister still at home. They were standing very still, all three of them in almost exactly the same position, with their eyes on James. When James looked at them Simon turned around and looked too, and just in that one turn of his head, with his chin pointed upwards and the shock of hair falling back off his forehead, he seemed to be
claiming
them somehow, marking them as his own. James’s father looked down at him soberly, and Clara smiled, but by then Simon had turned to James again and couldn’t see her. “I came on a bus,” he said.

“I guessed you had.”

“I found them in a telephone book.”

Clara said, “James, will you sit down?”

“Oh, I guess not,” said James. “Did you call the police?”

“I don’t hold with police,” his father said.

“I forgot.”

“We figured you’d come after him. We didn’t call no one.”

“I see,” James said. He folded his arms and stared down at one shoe. “His mother was wondering where he was.”

“Well, now she’ll know,” said his father. “
Your
mother used to wonder.”

“Sir?”

“What did she say?” Simon asked. “Did she see I was gone? What did she say about it?”

Instead of answering, James turned around and looked out the open door. There was Mrs. Pike, picking her way through the dandelions and toward that rectangle of light across the porch. She had come unasked, having waited long enough in the pickup, and because she didn’t know whose house this was or what she was doing here her face had a puckered, uncertain look. She stumbled a little on the porch and then came forward, her eyes squinting against the light. “James—” she began, and then saw Simon and stopped. “Is that Simon?” she asked. Her finger began plucking at her skirt, and she stayed poised there on the porch.

Simon stood up and looked at James, but he didn’t say anything.

“Simon, is that you?” his mother asked.

“Yes.”

“Where did you go?” She called this into the room from her place on the porch; she didn’t seem able to step inside. “Why did you leave?”

“Oh, well,” Simon said uncertainly. He looked over
at James’s family, as if they might tell him what was going on here, but they were all staring at Mrs. Pike. “I just came to see these people,” he said.

“Oh,” said his mother. She looked down at her skirt. The longer she stood there the more distant she seemed to become, so that now James couldn’t imagine her
ever
walking in of her own accord. He said, “Mrs. Pike, will you come in?” and then Clara, who had been gazing open-mouthed, came to life and said, “Oh. Yes,
please
come in.”

Mrs. Pike took a few steps, just enough to get her safely into the room, without moving her eyes from Simon. “What happened to your hair?” she asked him.

“What hair?”

“I wish you’d have a seat,” Clara said.

“Simon, were you not going to come back?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Simon. “I just came away, I guess.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Pike said. She wet her lips and said, “Will you come back now?”—not looking at Simon any more but at James, as if he were the one she was asking.

“What for?” Simon asked.

“Why—just to be back.”

Whatever Simon was thinking, he didn’t show it. He began walking in those small circles of his, with his eyes on his boots. And James suddenly thought, what if he
won’t
come back? The same idea must have hit Mrs. Pike. She said, “Don’t you
want
to come?”

“Well,” Simon said.

“You can’t stay
here.
”

“How did you happen to come by?” he asked.

“James thought of it.”

“I mean, what for? Did you just go off driving?”

Mrs. Pike frowned at him, not understanding. “
James
thought of it,” she said. “He thought you’d be in Caraway.”

“You mean you came specially?”

“Well,
yes,
” said Mrs. Pike. “What did you think?”

“
Oh,
” Simon said, and the sudden clear look that came across his face made James feel light inside and relieved. It was that simple, he thought; Simon didn’t know they had come just for him. “You mean you’re here on
account
of my going off,” he said.

“Of course we are. Will you let us take you home?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

Everyone seemed to loosen up then. James’s father said, “
Well
, now,” and Mrs. Pike crossed over to Simon and hugged him tightly. He stood straight while she hugged him, looking very stiff and grown up, but there was a little shy, pleased smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “I came on a bus,” he said.

“Wasn’t anyone
with
you?”

“No.”

“I’m glad I didn’t know about it, then. I’m glad I—oh, goodness. Miss, um—”

“Green,” James said. “Clara Green, and Claude, and my father. This is Mrs. Pike.”

“Your
family?
” said Mrs. Pike. She looked at them more closely. “Well, of
all
things,” she said. “I never thought I’d—well. Miss Green, do you have a telephone?”

“In the dining room,” said Clara. “I’ll show you.”

“I want to reach my husband somehow. I hope someone’s at the house.”

She followed after Clara, with one arm still around Simon, and James watched after them because he didn’t know where else to look. Simon walked very straight,
holding up the weight of his mother’s arm but keeping himself tall and separate from her, and Mrs. Pike moved almost briskly. “They’ll be half insane,” James heard her say. “Oh, good. Thank you.” They were out of sight now. Clara reappeared in the doorway, and James turned away and put his hands in his pockets.

He was standing squarely in front of the fireplace, a small one with a marble mantelpiece. Everything in the room was exactly the way it had been before—the linoleum rug with the roses painted on it, the bead curtains, the turquoise walls made up of tongue-and-groove slats. On the mantelpiece was a Seth Thomas clock that his mother had brought when she came, and a picture of Jesus knocking at the door and a glass plate that looked like lace. At first, not knowing what else to do with himself, James absentmindedly stooped nearer to the fireplace and held out his hands to be warmed. It was only after a minute that he remembered it was summer and the fire unlit. So he had to straighten up again, his hands in his back pockets and his face toward the others. They were all looking at him. Clara had sat down on the footstool, thinner and sharper and with the look of an old maid beginning to set in around her mouth. And Claude was on the couch, twisting a leather lanyard in his hands. He was grown now. The last time James had seen him, Claude was in his early teens and had turned red from the neck up every time he was directly addressed. There had been more of them then. His mother, small and dark, scared of everything, humming hymns under her breath in a tinny monotone as she sewed. His sister Madge, whose one romance they had broken up and who was now in China doing missionary work. And Ansel.

If he had ever imagined coming back here—and it
seemed to him now he had, without knowing it—he had not imagined standing like this, wordless. He had thought that of all the mixed-up, many-sided things in the world, his dislike of his father was one complete and pure emotion and that that alone could send words enough swarming to his mouth. Yet his father stood before him like a small, battered bird, the buttonless shirt folded gently over his thin chest and the worn leather slippers searching out the floorboards hesitantly when he walked. He was making his way to the rocker. All the time that Simon had sat there, the old man must have been watching shyly and eagerly, waiting for his chance to reclaim it. (It had always been his property alone, forbidden to the children. On Bible Class nights, when both parents were gone, James would sit in that chair and rock fiercely, and the other children stood around him with wide scared eyes.) Now James’s father sat down almost gratefully, feeling behind him first to make sure it was there and then slowly lowering himself into it. When he rocked, the chair complained; it had grown old and sullen with time.

“Yes, the dog died,” he said. He surveyed his three children out of eyes the same startling blue as Ansel’s, and he smiled a little, “She died.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said James.

“It happens.”

“She had cancer,” Claude said.

“Can dogs get cancer?”

“Get everything people get,” said his father, rocking steadily. “The vet told us so, at the time.”

“I never heard that.”

There was a silence. Clara sat forward suddenly, throwing her arms around her knees in that swooping way she had and craning her neck up, and everyone
looked at her as if they expected her to say something but she didn’t. She just smiled at them, with her lips tightly closed.

“You’ve got your hair a different way,” James told her. Clara went on smiling at him and nodded.

“Yes, I do,” she said.

“Every thought of every curl is another stroke for the devil,” said her father. “Have you ever thought of that? But
Clara
here don’t care; she
likes
short hair.”

“Yes, I do,” Clara said again. The tone of her voice was indifferent, and she included her father in her smile. No one seemed to be as James remembered.

Out in the dining room, Mrs. Pike said, “Yes? Miss Lucy, I’m glad you’re there. I was hoping you would hear the phone and—”

“You’re back,” James’s father said.

The others looked at him.

“You’re back in this house.”

“Yes,” James said. “Just for—” He stopped.

“Just for a while,” his father said. “Just for the boy.”

“Yes.”

“Ah, well.”

Mrs. Pike was talking loudly, apparently trying to break in on something Miss Lucy was saying. “Yes, I know,” she said. “I know—Miss Lucy, will you try and find Roy? First go and shout for him. Yes, I’m feeling fine, thank you. Then if he’s too far away I’ll leave a message. But I’d like to have Simon tell him—”

“The phone is a precarious instrument,” said James’s father.

“Hush, now,” Clara told him. “There’s not a machine in this world you don’t say that about.”

“A
wavery
thing,” said the old man, overriding her. “On a thin line between what’s real and what isn’t. Is that person
really
sitting next to you, the way he sounds? When I called you at your neighbors, three Christmases ago—”

“Sir?” said James.

“When Clara called three Christmases ago, and Ansel wouldn’t talk to her but stayed in the other room, I happened to be passing near enough to hear what was going on at the other end. Heard Ansel shouting how he wouldn’t come. And it seemed to me his voice was trembly-like, unsteady. Is his sickness worse?”

“No,” James said. “He’s just a little weak sometimes.”

“It’s the forces from inside that weaken.”

“He’s all right,” James told him.

Simon was on the telephone now. He was talking to Miss Lucy. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Then I got on the bus. I figured out the schedule in the drugstore.” James’s father rocked sharply forward and slapped both slippers on the floor.

“That boy is too
young
to travel alone,” he said.

“He ran away,” said James.

“I realize that. He came to our door and asked to be a lodger. Did you tell him this family ran a boarding house?”

“No.”

“He seemed to think you had.”

He rocked on in silence for a minute; the only sound was Simon’s voice. Then Clara looked up and, finding her father’s eyes on her, gathered her skirts beneath her and spoke. “He likes mayonnaise,” she said.

“Who does?” asked James.

“The little boy. He wanted a mayonnaise sandwich.”

“Oh.” He frowned at her a minute, and then looked over at his father. “What were you going to do with him?” he asked.

“The boy? I figured someone’d come after him.”

“What if they hadn’t?”

“You
did,
” said his father. “Someone
did
. I don’t hold with police.”

“You could have called the parents.”

“I don’t speak on telephones.”

“His sister just died,” said James. “His mother had enough to worry about.”

“Most do.”

“
More
than enough. Clara could have called.”

“I never turn a stranger from my door,” his father said. He let his head fall back against the rocker. “Can
you
say that? Did
you
never let a man down?” He looked at James from under white, papery eyelids, waiting for an answer. No one said anything. It seemed to James that his father had raised a banner in the room—the same one as in old days, long and dark and heavy. His lowered eyes were asking, “What can you do about it? Can you take my flag down?” and smiling faintly. Yet the lines around those eyes were deep and tired; his children sat limp, not bothering to answer. “Ah me,” said the old man, and rolled his head to the other side and then back again and closed his eyes.

“This has nothing to do with me,” James said. “It was his
mother
you made worry; it wasn’t me.”

“Stop it,” Clara told him.

“Clara, are you against telephones?”

“You could have telephoned here,” his father said suddenly. He opened his eyes and looked over at James.

“I was hoping he hadn’t got this far,” said James.

“I see. Have you got a telephone yet? I didn’t think to ask.”

“No.”

“And money. Have you made a lot of money in your life?”

“No. But I get along.”

“Get along, do you.” He nodded to himself, several times. “Changed your ways?”

“No.”

“No,” his father agreed, and relaxed against the back of the rocker again.