The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Read Free Page B

children. They were so selfish. Hers no more than anybody else’s, they were just all. As long as they were at home they simply took for granted you had nothing else to think about except them; once they were grown you weren’t supposed to have any reason for living left at all. The way they were surprised if you came out once in a while with something that showed you weren’t thinking only of them at the moment, that old as you were you might still have a few worries of your own, absolutely surprised.
    She gathered her keepsakes into her apron and sat down on the side of the bed. She thought of her life, how little of it had been her own. Before she got half a start she simply bolted to seed.
    After a while she went up to the attic. Mrs. Hardy pulled up a crate and sat down, and opening the big old packet trunk was like opening a door and watching herself, young and gay, walking down a long hall to meet her.
    At the county fair they were alone together once for a change, with a neighbor woman in to look after the children. Mr. Hardy told her not to waste a minute worrying over them and she wasn’t. She couldn’t believe it was him; he was like a boy, shot the ducks and threw the baseballs at the bottles and wanted to ride her on the Ferris wheel. “The Ferris wheel, Mr. Hardy!” she declared—and you a man, she started to say, with four children—but he was the father of seven, and instead she said, “And us an old married couple.” She won first prize in jellies and fourth in cakes and Mr. Hardy sold a bull for more money than she had ever seen in one lump sum. Mr. Hardy took a drink of whiskey with a man, something she had never seen him do before or since. She didn’t scold him but said she was glad he took it; my goodness, everybody had to do something a little different from the workaday run once in their life.
    Mr. Hardy bought her this mantle. It wasn’t Mexican, it was real Spanish, the man said, but that you could tell by looking. It was heavy like wool but soft and smooth as silk with lace around the edges and must have had every color in the rainbow, but all blended and soft, not gaudy. The minute he laid eyes on it, Mr. Hardy said, he knew she had to have it. He smoothed it across her shoulders and put the ends down through her hands on her hips, saying that was how the ladies in Spain wore theirs.
    Of all the moments in her life that had been one of the happiest. Mr. Hardy practically made her blush the way he looked at her in front of all those people. He said when the other women saw hers on her that man would sell every mantle he had.
    In the wagon that night riding home, she laid her head on Mr. Hardy’s shoulder smelling the good smell of him and listening not so much to his words as to the gentle sound of his voice. He was saying he had known beforehand she would like that shawl. She felt it again while he rode silently for a while. Then he said he never forgot how crazy Virgie was over the one he had given her just like it. He hadn’t seen another one and thought he never would. They buried Virgie in hers, as she asked to be. Smiling, he turned and told her that as if he expected it to make the shawl all the more precious to her.
    While Clara washed the supper plates Mr. Hardy sat by the stove and chewed and spat in the ash box. He felt as if he had put in fifty years’ work all over again today, but at the same time he felt good. Clara had not made the fuss he expected and the job was done before he thought it would be, wasn’t nearly as bad as he had been dreading.
    It was easier to believe he had lived in this house for fifty-six years. Today he had turned up whole pieces of his life like something he had lost and given up all hope of ever finding. Lately he noticed he was going kind of stale; now he would have a lot of new things to think about. Going to stay with the children didn’t make him feel quite so bad any more.
    Maybe he