Proud Flesh Read Free

was her domination that boys in the first hot flush of long trousers meekly suffered themselves to be put back into kneepants: two pairs white flannel, two of blue serge. At the County Fair on Labor Day, the summer’s last excursion, they looked like a select, well-endowed orphanage, and she its directress, or, nunlike in her own habit-shaped black or gray dress, and nunlike in her severity—at least toward the girls—like its mother superior.
    And so the farm came to be home for the grandchildren as well. It did not lack a man. There was unmarried Uncle Cliff, the one the whole family looked up to—though in middle-age he was a child, backward and tonguetied and countryfied, childishly good-natured when not in the throes of some childish tantrum and off somewhere pouting, who spent all his time with a pack of hounds and who knew where to find wild honey and the biggest blackberries and the best baits for catfish and when the bream were biting, but nothing more—because he was the one who had stayed with Ma and never left home.
    But it was not in the summertime only that Edwina’s daughters and daughters-in-law relinquished their sons to her. In the independence, the impudence, the sassiness which she fostered in a boy (her favorite endearment was “rascal”), they felt her between their sons and them the year round. With their daughters they were free to do pretty much as they pleased. Girls had only to meet certain negative requirements: to be chaste, demure, silent, and when the time came, long-suffering and uncomplaining toward some vagrant man of their own, preferably one chosen, certainly one approved, by Ma. It was boys Edwina cared about, and that they should grow into men. She knew what made a man. He must be braggardly and bold, touchy, trifling, headstrong, wild—obedient to no one in the world but her. They were glad to obey her. Pretending to disapprove, she egged on her grandsons as she had their fathers before them by winking at their escapades with girls, their recklessness with cars and horses and guns. She wanted them vigorous but idle. Polite but bawdy. Chivalrous but predatory. In a word: men.
    Although widowhood now seemed her lifelong vocation, there had been a husband once … dust and a handful of anecdotes for twenty years: Lonzo (Alonzo), known behind his back as old Dot-and-Carry because of the hitch in his gait, not congenital but from a crippled big toe, broken, then disowned and neglected, grown gnarled as a brier root, in a kick he had given a calf that persisted in wishing to suck its mamma whom he was trying at the time to milk. Tame as a tabby cat with his wife, with all the rest of the world he had been quarrelsome, self-opinionated, abrasive. This tale was told of one fistfight he had gotten himself into. One day in a cafe in town he had hailed a man sitting on a stool at the far end of the counter as his long-lost friend Lew Pearsall, and stumped down to shake old Lew by the hand. The fat was in the fire when the stranger failed to lay down his knife and fork. Said he was afraid there was some mistake. His name was Selby, and he did not remember to have had the honor. Lonzo stood there with his empty hand stuck out. Perhaps one or more of the other diners snickered. Lonzo swore he never forgot a face, and reminded Lew of that night in Texarkana when together they—The stranger said he was afraid there was some mistake. Then Lonzo accused him of thinking he was too good for his old friends, said now that he came to think of it that was the sort he had always been, and called him by six or eight names which the stranger found even less acceptable than Pearsall, and which could only lead to the backalley behind the cafe, where finally the spectators had had to disarm Lonzo of the brass knuckles he happened to be carrying in his hip pocket at the time.
    This readiness to fight a man over his own name was something the Renshaw boys had all