The House on New Poplar Street

by Hunter James

The house on New Poplar Street was one of many fine dwellings that had clung stubbornly to its proud heritage amid the reverses of a declining city; but the boy would remember it only for a pervasive gloom that forever hung about the place: the fetid dark air, the smell of corncob pipes, of flowers too long in the jar; the shapes and shadows, the movement without sound, a lot of things indistinguishable to him in later years; but most of all the old man: the way he would always be standing out at the edge of the porch under the awning, watching his visitors as they mounted the two flights of stone steps from the street. The old man would emit a faint chuckle and then clutch the banister and lean over it, saying,

"Come on up here, boy. I gotta little something for you."

The boy would go up ahead of his parents—he never knew why—to confront his inevitable and predictable fate.

The old man would grab him rudely by the shoulder and lead him into the hall and over to the basement door. "I'll tell you what I'm a-gonna do to you, Ryerson, old boy. I'm a-gonna put you right down there in that coal bin. You hear me now? Git on down there! Yessir, we're gonna fix your little red wagon for sure. Lots of ‘em rats and moles down there waiting on their supper, boy. Ain’t had no taters lately. Har har har! So you git on down there, hear! Yessirreee. Why them rats will eat that pecker o’ yore’n right down to the nub. So you go on now. We'll let you know when them rats has got a bellyful of you. Har Har Har Har Har!"

He would hold Ryerson there for a long moment, the door open, the smell of dust and coal and death and everlasting darkness drifting up out of the cellar. "Git on down in that basement, boy! We gonna lock this here door and throw the key to Kingdom Come! Yessir, that's what we're gonna do all right. Where's the key, mama?"

Then he would turn away chortling madly, dragging his victim toward the parlor as he lit his corncob pipe and already spilling out to the boy's father some outlandish lie or other he had been working on, getting the details right, ever since their last visit.

The old woman would just be sitting there all this time, hardly palpable, stiff and not alive at all, only her outline faintly luminous in the late sun, the snuff stick sticking out of her mouth. The house was always dark like that, winter and summer, and heavy with all kinds of indiscriminate smells, even in the brightest part of the day—darker still in summer when the great oaks and sycamores and poplars dropped their heavy brooding shadows over the place.

Ryerson never knew how long it would be before his father would speak; but the old man, he just kept talking all the time, maybe about some ranch he'd lived on out West or how he'd once been with the FBI and knew for a fact that Jesse James was still alive and robbing banks as late as 1920.

Or maybe he would talk about the time he himself was riding the Western plains, and especially about the night he had shot and killed a whole pack of coyotes, just looking at them in the dark, watching them as they moved around beyond the campfire, and him with nothing to aim at but their evil, glimmering eyes.

In later years it was hard for the boy even to remember what the old woman sounded like. He couldn't remember anything she ever said, or for that matter anything else about her, only that she was his great-grandmother and had married the old man—Granddaddy Starnes, everybody called him—late in life. She would just sit there mummified in the dark, with the old man sitting directly across from her on the daybed, making hieroglyphics in the musty air with his pipe, and all of them swallowed up in the dark and he himself “all rared back” with his thumb hooked in the strap of his galluses and boring everybody half silly (except maybe Ryerson’s father) with one big lie after the other:

" . . . Made my first big gold strike in the summer of 1914 I believe it was—me and two other fellers I ran into up 'Frisco way."

Then he would lean forward slightly, dropping his voice and staring with new intensity at the boy's father. “But lemme me tell you something, Prather; it's a funny thing what gold will do to a man. My two partners, they allowed as how they'd team up on me and take my share of the strike; but as you've probably already guessed, I was a deal too fast for 'em. Yessir. I dropped the first one before he could get to his gun, and the second, well, he commenced crying and whimpering and begging for his life. Says to me that he'd do anything I asked. So I says to him—talking about the feller I'd just shot—I says, 'Bury that polecat.' Yessir, Prather, it's a funny thing what a little gold will do to a man."

The boy's father would sit grinning enigmatically, the gold sliver of a molar shining out of his mouth in the dark. Was that what had given the old man the idea for the story? Ryerson's father always looked forward to hearing the old man's lies even if they did make the boy and his mother a little ill.

Or maybe it was just the smell. You couldn't avoid it. It was all through the house, everywhere, as it the gloom itself had brought it in, as if it were as much a part of the house as the wood or the paint or the furniture. It would be Sunday afternoon when they went down there, the gloomiest time of the week along New Poplar Street, with all the gloomy branches of the trees hanging over the sidewalk and the old people all sitting on their front porches and their voices just kind of floating up in the dusk and hanging there. He had heard it said that the street was once the home of the town's early settlers and, after that, of the first tobacco millionaires; a street of real wealth and prestige in those days, though with little left now except the good memories.

One Sunday there was somebody else at the house. A tall ghostly looking fellow named Myrtrice Jones, an automobile dealer related by marriage to Ryerson's mother. He certainly looked as though he belonged with the house and it always seemed to Ryerson Goode, as far back as he could remember, that his "uncle" Myrtrice always came in and looked it over with a certain proprietary air.

On this afternoon Ryerson and his parents had got there later than usual. His uncle was sitting on the daybed with the old man who, from across the room, stared blindly at them like always. The old woman and Myrtrice just sat there in that mummified way of theirs, listening to Granddaddy Starnes talk about the time he had thrown two holdup men off a passenger-freight down in Ninety Six, South Carolina.

It was some place all right—the old woman sitting propped up in the gloom as if the gloom itself was holding her up, and Myrtrice Jones tapping his cane on the rug, and the old man sitting there like always, with the pipe in his mouth and his shoulders all drawn back and both hands planted imperiously beneath his galluses.

He always looked as if he'd just got up from the table, although Ryerson couldn't actually remember ever seeing anything to eat in the house. He had never been invited to dinner or anything. He would just go down there on Sunday afternoon with his parents and sit and smell the smell and let the gloom stick to his face, and maybe along about sunset the old woman would come alive long enough to offer them a glass of iced tea.

Somehow Ryerson knew as soon as he went in the door that this Sunday was to be different. When he stepped into the parlor Myrtrice Jones rose abruptly. "Well, Prather. Who's that young fellow you've brought along with you?"

"Dunno. Just somebody we picked up on the way over. He just came to hear all the big talk."

"Lock him in the coal bin, Myrtrice."

Myrtrice came grimly forward while the old man sat in the dark, chuckling behind his corncob pipe. "Go on. Whatcha waiting on? Go on and lock him up."

Myrtrice Jones caught the boy's neck with the hook of his cane and drew him over to the basement door. Nobody said anything. Then the old woman spoke out of the gloom, holding her head slightly awry, her body almost palpable now, the snuff stick catching a last glimmer of sunlight.

"Leave that boy alone! Don't you be locking him in that coal bin!"

"Just a little joke, mama," the old man said, with a voice like broken glass, chortling, grim.

"Don't even think about putting him down there. Don't even talk about it any more. Do you hear me?"

Myrtrice kept poking the boy with the fancy walking stick and backing him toward the wall. Ryerson felt the sharp metal tip of the cane jabbing him in the groin—hard, much harder than necessary for "a little joke"—and then looked up desperately as the car dealer's face broke into a horrible grin.

"Did you hear what I said!" the old woman called out. For a moment the boy thought she had actually got half out of her chair.

Before he could be sure, his mother had stepped between him and Myrtrice Jones. "Get you hands off him? Are you deaf? Did you not hear what she said? Now I'm telling you: Leave him alone, damn you! Get your hands off him!"

Myrtrice stepped away, forcing a laugh. "It's nothing, Eleanor. Only a bit of fooling. Didn't think you'd mind." His last words were almost mocking, bitter. "Really, Eleanor."

"Well, I do mind. Do you hear me? I mind a great deal."

-*-

The next time Ryerson and his parents went down to New Poplar Street Myrtrice Jones was again sitting talking to the old man. He rose to greet the visitors, moving forward slowly, his face like granite, his cane pointed at Ryerson's stomach.

"Let's go, boy."

Ryerson's mother was between them in an instant. "Myrtice, sometimes you act as if you don't have half sense. I told you the last time we were here that you were to leave that boy alone, and if have to tell you again you may not like the result. Is that clear enough for you? And I will tell you this: he's been having terrible dreams about your last little episode all week. I'm not asking you, I'm telling you and I'm telling you right now you'd better stop pointing that idiotic cane at him and just leave him alone!"

Ryerson had seen a lot of his mother's anger and was surprised that his uncle, or whatever he was, would want to keep toying around with her like that. He was quite sure she could have knocked him flat with one blow. If not, there were plenty of other canes around—or maybe that little pistol she sometimes carried in her pocketbook.

"Just a bit to tomfoolery, Eleanor. Dreams? Surely you aren't suggesting . . . "

"Not just dreams—nightmares. And if you think this is only a suggestion you'd better get your head on straight right now. Do you hear me?"

She looked back at her son. "He wakes up in the middle of the night thinking he's been locked in that coal bin with all those rats crawling over him. But you can't even understand that, can you? If you don't think I'll call the law and put a stop to this, you just try me one more time."

The room fell horribly still, everybody standing looking at Myrtrice Jones while the old man refilled his smelly pipe. Myrtrice pulled himself up taut, as though to bring the whole crowd down with a crash. Instead, he just took up his cane with a certain supercilious air and marched straight for the door, without so much as saying goodbye or stopping to look back or anything.

"Just a little joke," said Granddaddy Starnes. Then, with scarcely a pause, he took up his old story about the latter-day Jesse James, how there wasn't one speck of truth to all that talk about the dirty little coward who shot Mister Howard and laid poor Jesse in his grave.

"I know for a fact that him and his men robbed a couple of real big banks out in Nebrasky right after the first war. The spring of 1919 I believe it was. And that's a fact, Prather. That's a fact."

-*-

It was almost six months before Ryerson's next visit. The old woman was dead. All the windows had been thrown open and the smell of autumn drifted through the house, a smell of October, fresh sunlight and newly potted flowers even in this season of death and transfiguration. Somehow the place was a whole lot less gloomy now than when she was alive. The sun shone brightly along the hall, catching in its glimmer cabinets filled with crockery, crystal-ware, silver and, down at one end, the old man thumbing through a pouch of gold coins, telling Myrtrice Jones and some of the other mourners how a couple of toughs had tried to take the pouch off him one time while he was waiting to catch a train back from Reno. He sent the men reeling and left them for dead on the station platform.

"How many men you reckon you killed?" one of the relatives asked.

"Can't rightly say, son. But I'll tell you something and you can mark it down in your little black book: Ain't nothing like a big gold strike to change a man. I reckon I'm one of the few it never did change. And I can tell you this: I never lost a fight defending anything I ever got in a fair way."

"That's something, granddaddy. You must've had a lot of big write-ups in the paper."

Granddaddy Starnes looked momentarily stunned. Ryerson wasn't sure anyone else noticed, he recovered so quickly. "Oh yeah, a whole lot of those. Whole boxes full of that kind of stuff, you might say. 'Spect we'll run across a lot of it when we get to cleaning out the attic."

Myrtrice, meantime, was no longer looking at the gold. He took a couple of steps toward the upper hall, staring at Ryerson and his parents through rimless spectacles, the pearl-handled walking cane raised before him in a kind of taunt.

"Well, well, well, Eleanor. We are all here on a very sad occasion. Very sad indeed."

Prather Goode stood calmly holding his hat against his belly, his gold tooth glimmering with new life in the fresh light of the hall. He went on in the parlor and took a look at the casket—the old woman seemed almost alive for once—and then came back and sat in the front room for a while, a long ash curving off the end of his cigarette. Later, on the way home, Ryerson's mother said:

"I despise that Myrtrice Jones. I know that is not a very Christian thing to say. But I simply can't think of any other way to describe it. Why do you suppose he never stepped foot in that house until he heard grandmama had . . . that terrible thing growing inside her. Sniffing all around the place like the hypocrite he is. I suppose he's happy now that he thinks he's going to get all the old man's gold coins. Where did he get them anyway? I gather not from prospecting in the High Sierra. Probably stole them from some of his family before Roosevelt outlawed gold. It’s actually illegal for him to have them, you know. I wonder what else that monster will do to our lives.”

“Which one?” Ryerson asked.

“Which one? What do you mean, son?”

“Roosevelt or Granddaddy Starnes?”

“Well, I’m sure each in his own way will do as much to our detriment as he possibly can. Why did grandmother ever decide to marry that . . . that despicable old crank? Lord knows, I would be very much surprised if he hasn't worked night and day to make certain that Myrtrice gets everything and that the rest of us get nothing. Well, we'll just have to see about that, won't we?"

Nobody had any idea about the size of his estate. Or even if there was any estate, other than the house and maybe a couple of acres of land grown up in untended gardens. Granddaddy Starnes was such a miser and a crank that he couldn't possibly ever have spent any of his gold or silver dollars or V nickels or anything else he might have had, at least not in the time Ryerson and his parents had known him. Which actually wasn't all that long; he and the old woman had been married only a little more than ten years at the time of her death.

"That old crank," Eleanor said. "That miserly old infidel. It doesn't seem to bother him in the least that she's dead and gone. And did you notice the way Myrtrice looked. No need to tell me he wasn't glad to see her gone. If he wants to be that kind of fool, I'm certainly not one to interfere. Why should I care anyway? Why? I ask you. Why? What on earth of importance or real feeling could ever come from two utterly hateful old infidels like that anyway."

-*-

In the weeks to come Myrtrice Jones was seldom far from the old man's side. Every time Ryerson went down there the two men would be sitting in the parlor, Granddaddy Starnes all “rared” back like always, telling one big lie after another, and Myrtrice Jones not even bothering to acknowledge the presence of the newcomers, just sitting there gazing silently at them from the chair that had once belonged to the old woman.

Which suited Ryerson just fine. For the first time in his life he didn't have to worry about getting kicked down in the coal bin for the rats to nibble at, although he was old enough now so that neither of them would have dared try to put him in the coal bin or anywhere else. Ryerson had imbibed enough from his mother to know that some kind of fight was shaping up, and he didn't want to be left out of it.

Maybe the time had come to lock Myrtrice and the old man both in the coal bin rather than waste a whole Sunday afternoon just sitting and staring at one another. What the hell were they doing there anyway? Nobody could actually think of the house as belonging to Granddaddy Starnes, the famous night-rider and gold prospector, and as for Myrtrice Jones, it was long past time for him to give up any idea of claiming a share of the inheritance.

Except that he might be just a little too shrewd for that. Ryerson's mother would bite her lips plumb white just thinking about it, and now she was more heavily into her tranquilizers than ever.

"Well," she would say. "I just hope he'll be happy when he has it all. That fraud, that crank, that miserable old infidel!"

"Now, now, honey. Just try not to keep dwelling on it. You'll find out that these things eventually work themselves out for the best."

Well, maybe not. For the day came when Myrtrice Jones did have it all. He had everything his own way. The only problem was that he had to take the old man as part of the bargain. Took him way out at his country estate in the foothills of the Sauratown mountains. Ryerson almost never saw him after that—only on those times when his parents out of some sense of obligation neither of them quite understood drove the fifteen miles or so out there to pay them a visit. Once—maybe twice—a year at most.

After the first year they began to hear a lot of talk about how things were going. Everybody in the family—at least everybody who had taken the trouble to go out there—said it was one more rotten shame the way Myrtrice was treating the old man.

Ryerson himself had begun to notice it. On one of his first visits to Sauratown he saw at once how much Granddaddy Starnes had changed since his days on New Poplar Street. He suddenly seemed much older, all humped over and shrunken, and he had a walking stick now—not one of Myrtrice Jones elegantly carved models, just a plain old cane he'd picked up a dime stone somewhere or maybe carved out of one of the hickory trees that grew along the back of the lot. Strangest of all was how little he had to say. No more talk of train robbers and heroic deeds on the Great American Plains. He had quit all that lying; he had just about quit talking altogether.

On that day Ryerson and his mother found him in the sun-parlor, off on one side of the house, a room almost completely walled with glass and surrounded by thick masses of greenery. He held his sorry old cane across his lap and hardly looked up at them as they came in. Watching him, Ryerson got the dreary feeling that he would linger on like that for some time to come—years maybe—no matter how badly Myrtrice Jones treated him.

He just sat there humped over like some kind of grotesque hot-house flower, his rheumy eyes staring off at nothing and the vines of the sun-parlor beginning to creep down on him. Toward the end of their stay Myrtrice Jones's housekeeper came to the door.

"Now, Mr. Starnes. Time for a little nourishment."

She got him up and led him out to the kitchen, where, as always (so they had gathered) he would enjoy his "little nourishment" alone.

Later she took him out for his constitutional. Ryerson could see them walking around in the formal gardens back of the house, him with his scroungy cane and the housekeeper holding his arm. Meantime, Myrtrice Jones had come in to greet his company and explain that Granddaddy Starnes had become a terrible burden in his life and how nothing ever seemed to please the old crank any more and what a hardship it had been putting up with him all these months.

Myrtrice, who did in fact look a little undone by it all, said the old man never had a kind word for anybody and never did for himself any of the things he could do easily enough if ever he’d wanted to take a mind to it. Always expecting somebody to come and wait on him. He, on the other hand, had scarcely a moment to call his own. Some people were born to waste their days in licentiousness and others to serve a higher cause. Only God would ever know the full measure of his burden . . .

-*-

That was a kind of a funny thing to say; Myrtrice Jones didn't even believe in God. Ryerson found that out for certain one afternoon when Granddaddy Starnes was in one of his rare talkative moods. When he was sure that his keeper was out of earshot he told his visitors how Myrtrice had refused to let him read his Bible and how he broke out into foul oaths every time the name of God or the church or eternal life were so much as mentioned in his presence. The old man had lived a life without God, and now, as he looked out on eternal night, he had to face the thought that he might very well have committed sins for which there would be no forgiveness when he stood at the Judgment Seat of the Almighty.

"I guess he's thinking about all those men he shot down in cold blood in the desert," Ryerson said. His father shushed him, frowning at him across the room, maybe fearful that he would interrupt another of the old man's good stories.

"A shame," Ryerson's mother kept saying. "Such a terrible waste."

Old man Starnes sat there crying and shaking amid the greenery and, later, after they had left the house and were on their way back to town, she was still talking about it.

"You know, I think he would like to believe in God if only somebody would give him a little encouragement. Do you know what he told me? He said, 'Eleanor, when I was only sixteen years old I heard the Lord speaking to me, but I wouldn't listen. I still had a life to live. I still had a world of adventures ahead of me, and I just wouldn't listen. Then he began to cry. "I just wouldn't listen, Eleanor. And now it's too late, Eleanor, too late... '"

-*-

The next time they went out there it was winter; a cold bleak afternoon with the light of eternal gloom settling slowly over the house. Even Myrtrice seemed to feel it as he sat shivering in a cashmere sweater by the hearthfire. He said little and looked increasingly uneasy and grim. When the old man came out—he was in a wheelchair now—Ryerson's mother rose with the Bible she had brought especially for the occasion and, after excusing herself, swung him right around and rolled him out to the sun-parlor.

The boy watched them sitting out there with the French doors shut. She would lean over and speak to him quite sternly (so at least it seemed to young Ryerson Goode) and he would nod and she would stand back and lecture him some more and then he would nod again and finally she would read something from the Book of Daniel, her favorite, or maybe from Revelation. And again he would nod.

Would it ever come to anything?

Had the old man found God at last?

Just from looking at him it was hard to say whether she had saved him for the Lord or whether she would just have to mark him down as another lost cause. Toward nightfall Mrs. Bruce, the housekeeper, went out to throw a shawl over him and wheel him back inside to supper.

"How is he?" Ryerson's father asked.

"Some better perhaps. But you can never be certain about these things. My only hope is for him to understand what the Lord expects of him and that a life of sin does not necessarily mean an eternity of Hellfire."

Myrtrice said nothing. He just stood there carved out of granite, waiting, looking, scowling.

"I hope for his sake that he will start to read his Bible and that no one will be so audacious as to keep him from his prayers."

She was looking right at Myrtrice when she said it. Lest he miss the point she kept right on looking at him and recounting the whole story of how the old man had been robbed of his Bible and how certain people—if indeed one could imagine such a thing—had even forbidden him to pray or even so much as beg forgiveness for his many sins.

"For we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God." She looked at Myrtrice, or rather had never stopped looking at him. "All! Do you hear me? All?"

Myrtrice just stood there, at times almost alive, at other times a mere statue, collecting dust. Almost imperceptibly, a tiny snarl twisted his lips as she lectured him even more fervently on the ways of violent and evil men, and the fate that awaited them in the hereafter.

"'. . . I saw a new heaven and a new earth,'" she said, quoting again from Revelation. "'For the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea . . . . "

Well, if it was too late for Myrtrice Jones, maybe there was still time for the old man. Ryerson and his parents went back more frequently now, none of them expecting him to outlast the winter. The boy would always remember his last visit, how Granddaddy Starnes had sat looking at them pitifully out of a mass of greenery of which his head seemed a mere shriveled sprout, waiting for somebody to provide him with assurances that he would not be spending eternity in Hell after all.

Nobody could think of exactly the right words. After a long afternoon of really banging the gospel into the old man's head, Ryerson's mother turned away and said in a low and despairing voice: "Yes. Maybe it is too late. Maybe he just doesn't understand after all. I suppose that this is what they mean by the ultimate blasphemy: the time in a man's life when he can no longer hear the appeal of Christ. And so is beyond all hope. I suppose that is why they call it the one sin that is unpardonable."

So he just sat there, nodding and sobbing by turns, wasted and all but invisible amid the devouring shadows. Ryerson couldn't help feeling a little sorry for the old infidel. On this last visit they did not even see Myrtrice Jones until they were ready to leave. As they went down the front steps past the two huge neoclassical columns Ryerson turned and saw the two infidels staring out the casement window into the heavy, sullen December dusk. Myrtrice Jone's granite face had begun to melt and his hair was gone and for the first time the boy noticed how terribly sad he looked.

"Well," said Ryerson's mother as they were on the long highway back to town. "I hope he's satisfied with what he’s won out of life. I hope that tight-fisted rascal who nobody ever invited into our lives has finally found out what it's like to live with another human being who has no more feeling for his fellow man than he does."

"Myrtrice, you mean."

"Of course. Myrtrice. I hope he's happy now that's he's got it all and at the price he's having to pay for it."

Myrtrice had probably figured by now that the old man would never die. He was stuck with him. Why was it, Ryerson wondered, that infidels always managed to live so much longer than ordinary people? His mother said it was because even the godless—and maybe especially the godless—must be given every chance to redeem themselves.

So it was with Granddaddy Starnes and Myrtrice Jones. Years from now they would still be sitting together in the great mansion to which no guest ever came, just two old infidels alone, the darkness slowly consuming them, their voices like crickets' voices, their bodies nothing but dry husks and the talk growing fainter and fainter until at last a wind would come up and blow them out to eternity. Ryerson kept thinking about the time the old man had been alone in the desert and how the coyotes had come and how he had shot them down, one bullet to a coyote, without being able to see anything but their eyes shining in the dark.

Yes. And the time he had thrown those two characters off the train down in Ninety-Six, South Carolina. And how he had always thought Jesse James would have made a marvelous president. But now the evil days had come, and the years had drawn nigh when he could say, "I have no pleasure in them." Nothing left for him but to sit around and think back on all the wasted years and wonder why nobody ever came to talk to him about God any more.

"What good is his gold now?" Ryerson's mother said as they were driving away on that last afternoon. "Yes. What good?"

"Seemed kinda down on himself today."

"Down on himself. Down on everything. But there is nothing new in that. It is only because you haven't been paying attention. My word, as little as I cared for him I can certainly feel sorry for him now that he's found out what Myrtrice really thinks of him. Is he getting what he deserves? That's not for me to say. But we all do, I suppose, in one way or an another, either in this world or the next. Or in both. I know how hard it was on grandmama having to live with him all those years. I know what she must have gone through in her mind. But people always get paid back, and you can count on that for a certainty." She turned to Ryerson. "Remember that, son. People always get paid back no matter what."

"Oh, I don't know about that," his father said.

"Oh, you don't, don’t you? Do you mean to tell me that you think he is being treated far worse than he deserves? Well, I suppose it's easy enough for you to forget. I suppose you can't even remember the way he treated Aunt Lou Anne that time, making her move out of the house when all she wanted was to be near her mama and care for her. Because she certainly realized he would never assume the responsibility on his own. And I don't suppose you remember the way he sneaked off with some of grandmama's very best China and sold it and kept the money for himself.

She was looking back at Ryerson again. “Nobody else in the family ever saw a piece of it. You don't remember any of that. It wasn't that I ever expected anything from him, and don't now, but I'll never forgive him for the way he treated grandmama and Aunt Lou Anne. But he's got what he deserves now, and more too, and so has that devil Myrtrice. I'm just thankful that I lived to see it all. The very confirmation of all we have been taught to believe. He sure didn't get his little cache of gold by holding up trains all these years, or whatever that nonsense is that he's been telling you all this time. I'm just glad I lived to see it all. Two infidels who deserve each other. I don't suppose there's any more you can say about it than that."

"Reckon not.”

The boy never saw either of them again. When the old man died no one went to his funeral. All anybody could think to say was: "May the Lord have mercy on his soul!" And nothing could have been more certain than that Myrtrice Jones would soon be following him right straight on down to Perdition.

-*-

Having committed the Unpardonable Sin, Myrtrice Jones apparently felt that he was free to commit as many others as he chose, at no extra penalty. He eventually got everything the old man had, just as everyone had foreseen—all of his money, his rare coin collection and even those pouches full of gold currency he wasn't even supposed to have in the house after Roosevelt came into office. He got what little was left of the expensive China plate that the old man hadn't already sneaked off and sold for himself. He got all the silverware and fine crystal and antique furniture and expensive wall hangings and even the photograph album that contained pictures of Ryerson's mother as a young bride.

Still, it wasn't actually true to say that he got everything. The old woman had seen to it in her will that Ryerson's mother was to get the house. Everybody kept saying how fortunate she was to have inherited such a fine old place in one of the best parts of town.

Maybe it was true. But Ryerson never was quite sure how he was supposed to feel about it. He never would learn to feel at home there. He just never could forget those old bad days when Granddaddy Starnes sat in the dark parlor chortling wildly as he recounted his impossible stories. He couldn't forget the smell of the corncob pipe, the thought of the coal bin or his great-grandmother sitting in the big easy chair chewing her snuff stick.

His father must have felt much the same. He began spending more time away from home and had taken more heavily to drink. But what the boy mainly noticed, almost from the day they moved in—he was eleven—was that his mother herself had fallen into a deep unshakable gloom. She had wanted the house more than anything. She had thought she would finally be happy there. Not only for herself, she always explained, but for her son as well, so that he could attend the best of the city schools and get the kind of education he would need to amount to something in the world.

So his father had sold the house on the northwest side of town, which he had bought mostly because it was not much more than a long walk from the community of Dobbs Station and the farm where he had grown up. He had planted his first Victory Garden there and would often say in later life that those had been his best years. Still, he had given it up in the hope that if he could give his wife what she wanted she would recover from the mental instability that had haunted her with growing frequency since the first years of their marriage.

He had never fought her in anything. He had even allowed her to vote Republican —in the good days when she was able to vote at all—and get away with it. And if moving to New Poplar Street would make her more content—well, he would not fight her in that either.

Yet the thing she had wanted most of all would one day drive her to the very edge of madness, and, as some would later say, right over the edge. Was it possible that the shade of old man Starnes still walked those halls? That she alone of all who came there could smell his pipe and hear his footsteps? The boy was never sure. All he knew was that none of their lives were ever to be the same after they had left their first house out on the northwest edge of the city.

He would never be sure when he first came to believe in the evil power of the house. It wasn't just the memory of old man Starnes, and all the other bad memories: it was the house itself. Even if he couldn't always hear the footsteps or voices. Or smell the old man's pipe.

"Is it just the house?" he used to ask his father. "I mean is there some, well, presence here that we don't know about?"

"I rightly don't know, son. Lord help me, sometimes I just don't know what to think."

"Everything seemed to go wrong after we moved in."

Meantime, the farm where his father had grown up would eventually become almost a second home to him; he would begin to spend a great deal more time there as a teenager. More often now his mother would be away from the house on New Poplar Street for weeks at a time, weeks that grew into months and finally into years.

In time Ryerson would grow to hate and fear the house even more than he had as a child. Half the time he never knew where his father was anymore. When he was out at the farm and his mother at the rest home in the mountains, trying to recover from her latest seizure of melancholia, he would always have to content himself with the knowledge that he was where he said he was: that is, at his "office" downtown. Or what he called his office. Actually it was nothing more than the storage section of his Trade Street barbershop, set off from the front by a freshly painted piece of latticework, a place mainly for him to keep his important business papers and to invite his old pals in for drinks and cards.

Sometimes his father would be there, and the boy with him; other times out on the road, explaining that he had heard about some new bargain or other in rental property and would need a considerable amount of time to go and take a look. All Ryerson knew for certain was that even his father would never spend a night alone in the house on New Poplar Street. Unlike Ryerson, he never quite believed in another world that lay just beyond their seeing or hearing. But there was quite definitely something about the house that put him in much the same state as his wife and son.

During those times when his mother was away his father would always give it out that she was recuperating from one of her "little spells" at a secluded mountain hotel known mainly as a refuge for tobacco millionaires and other members of the city's elite. People close to the family would say little, but everybody knew that she was really at the insane asylum in Morganton.

His mother had always been given to dark moods, long brooding spells of uncertainty, great flights of temper that would suddenly end in bouts of frantic sobbing—her "little spells," as his father called them. Mostly they would come over her when he came home a little drunk after staying out late with the boys. But there were darker spells now, long hours when she would lock herself in her bedroom and forget to prepare meals, sobbing, clinging to her Bible without really reading it, talking brokenly of the coming Tribulation and the reign of the Antichrist, for whom Roosevelt had been—as she now saw more clearly—merely one more false prophet sent to prepare for The Way.

Not that there weren't some good times in the old place, glorious days in the autumn after the leaves had fallen, the laughter and sunshine of summer mornings and all the big Sunday dinners and family reunions, the good times when he was able to see his half sister Deni again, not knowing that even though they were Southerners they would never be able to get away with the passionate love affair that one day would enkindle them both.

She was only a year younger than he was, dark and intense, child of his father’s first brief marriage, with something a little wild in her eye, already liking him as more than just a brother when she was barely twelve years old. Sometimes she would visit him at his father's old homeplace out at Dobbs Station during revival time. Those were always the best times. A hint of evil seemed to hang over the whole community of Dobbs Station during those two weeks of the summer revival, bringing him and his sister ever more closely together, some would say, too close . . . Ah, but that is too much a story for another day.

Deni liked her father as well, and would embrace every opportunity to spend as much time as she could at the house on New Poplar Street. But as she sat with her brother on the stairs or on the porch even she could sense the dark moods of the house.

"There's something about this place that's a little scary," she would say. "Didn't you like it better where you were before?"

"Mother always had a great love for this old place, even since she was a girl. It was her fondest dream fulfilled when she realized that it was actually hers."

"But she doesn't seem to be enjoying it at all, does she? And Father, really, I worry about him. I shouldn't stick my nose into your business, but I can't help noticing that he seems to be drinking a lot more. Do you think it's the house?"

"Dunno."

"I guess that's silly. You wouldn't think a house all by itself had the power to change a person or drive them into—what do they call it? Melancholia? That's what the doctors say, isn't it? I love that word. Melancholia. The sound of it, I mean. I think if I spent much more time here I would have a very bad case of it myself. I really do wonder if that is why Father seems to be drinking more than is good for him."

Ryerson was sure of it, though he rarely spoke of how he felt about his new home to anyone else: a house that could exercise its own dark power over you and give you more than just a little case of the shudders. It was something to think about all right. Deni saw very little of his mother even when she was back home from the mountains. Sometimes she would go to the door of her bedroom and listen for a long time and then maybe she would knock sharply and, in that nervy way she had, would ask if she might come in and talk.

Sometimes his mother would come to the door all bleary eyed from crying and let her into a room even darker and more frightening and mysterious than the house itself. Had it got to the point that she could no longer survive in the full light of day? Sometimes she would not come to the door at all.

He always hated to see Deni leave and would always arrange to invite her to the farm whenever he was going out there to help with the haying or with the tobacco crop. Even on New Poplar Street she was always ebullient and cheerful, even when the heavy threat of the house lay over them all. When the time came for her to go he would sometimes walk her as far as Old Salem, the eighteenth-century Moravian congregation town where Aunt Ethel lived and where, in later years, Deni would usually leave her car, maybe just to give herself an excuse for the two of them to be together.

"You know," she would say as they parted. "I really hate to think of it in just this way, and I know I shouldn't talk about it at all. But I have to wonder if your mother will ever be truly well again."

He would walk back in the heavy gloom of the afternoon and stand looking at the house for a long time before climbing the two flights of stone steps to the porch. He would think about all the times he had come there to see old man Starnes waiting for him beneath the awning, smoking his corncob pipe and laughing his sinister laugh. And he would think again about all the things Deni had said about the house.

It would simply destroy me, Ryerson. I'm sure of it. If Ihad to spend all my time here. Do you plan to stay here forever? Do you think your father willever stop drinking?

Yes. It would destroy her, just as it was destroying his mother. Perhaps it would also destroy him. Perhaps it would destroy them all. Yet those who did not know it as he knew it had always said it was very possibly the most elegant and warmest house on the whole street and how fortunate it was that his mother could afford a maid to keep the place up since she herself was so seldom up to the task.

-*-

By the time he was in his teens he was spending whole summers at the farm. His uncle Clint always needed his help with the tobacco and corn harvest, and he could always find an excuse to go out and visit even when his mother was able to leave her room and go out to work in her flower-bed again. Those times would grow fewer as he reached his high school and college years. By that time she would be spending less time than ever in the house where she had hoped to find the first real happiness she had ever known and where she had found instead only a terrible frightening days and nights that were the foretoken of her final doom.

She would often come back to New Poplar Street, sometimes for prolonged periods during the twenty years or so she had left to her. There would always be some new medication, some new pill or bottle of dope that would be sure to work this time and bring her to a full and complete recovery.

It never did.

Yet there were times when she would be almost as she was on the good days when they had lived outside of town, in the little house where father had planted his Victory Gardens and where she had spent long hours each afternoon digging in her roses. She would cook big meals, as she had in the old days, and start cleaning house and throw open all the blinds and curtains.

Then it would begin again. One day they would come home to find her locked in her room, sobbing uncontrollably and talking about the last days and the Great Tribulation. All the old arguments would start again, and then more crying, and the pills and the jars of blue medicine and green medicine would be brought out and none of them ever seeming to do any good: and again the not-quite-heard-voices, the brooding darkness, the strange musty smell you could never quite get rid of, the footsteps that were never quite there.

Foolish, perhaps. And his father would always manage an uneasy laugh when Ryerson started talking that way. It would go on like that for years, while he was in college and for a long time after, and he had known all along that he would never really feel right about the house on New Poplar Street until the day when he himself could put a FOR SALE sign in the yard and walk away from the place forever