didn’t explain well enough. There were whole families destroyed, little children had terrible, uncommon accidents, disease would break out among healthy people. And all this they thought might be Ansel’s doing. They were afraid. And so, with things like that, everyone was going to be absolutely sure that something was not their business before they ignored it for even a little while. Maybe I didn’t explain that there was more, that Ansel worked his sons into the ground, making them cut wood with him. There were stories of how much corn he could pick by hand, ungodly amounts.”
Glove then remembered the only other thing he knew, at that time, about Ansel Easter . . . he remembered someone saying that his grandfather had taken all the broken, cracked, and rusted parts from his automobile as they’d worn out, the mufflers, clamps, old tires, hoses, brake shoes, carburetor gaskets, etc., and put them in the trunk, like a chain the car must wear for its sins. They said he didn’t beat his children for their transgressions but inflicted nightmarish lectures upon them that would live like weights in their memories.
AND THE STORY OF C
And so it may be imagined that C Easter, on the supposedly unmysterious death of his father, after the expenses of the burial and the more than adequate fee charged by attorneys for extricating the actual man Ansel Easter from his partnership with Johnie Fotsom while retaining his name for possible printed material in the future, had little more than enough money to rent a small basement apartment in Iowa City, enroll in the University with the intention of going on to law school, eat moderately, live as though each moment was a new one and might fool him into remembering those things he wanted to forget, and be secure that this way of life might last five and three quarters years until the money ran out. And C intended to do that—run his money out. He was just under twenty, shy, reticent, and fearful of things he couldn’t see or identify. He believed the world was hostile—that if in any way it could direct misfortune and calamity toward him, it would. His own mental image of himself was one of victim. Nightmares filled his sleeping. He did the things he had to do by living in a sense of routine: this thing now, that thing at five thirty. If he could go through a whole day without emotion, it was a success. Everything he did had a plan. Going to the University amounted to giving himself time, five and three quarters years, in which to discover a friendly attitude toward living. If at the end of that time there was no change—still the same gnawing hope that it might improve—then he would let the trickling out of his money be the end to everything, and have no more moments that might ever again fool him.
With an enforced serenity and one thin carpetbag, C said goodbye to Sam and went away to school, not so that he might learn, but to nullify all the rest. Apartment hunting nearly finished him, and though he finally succeeded in finding one, it was a meager success. The rhetorical lectures at the University were a comfort to him. He studied late into the night in his basement, a gaudily furnished, L-shaped, concrete room with pole lamps, a space heater, pictures of musical instruments, and everything that a non-student might imagine a student wanting in his place. The only change he made in this arrangement (after obtaining with difficulty an approval from his upstairs landlady) was to streak black and white brush-width stripes along the walls and across the ceiling, converging on the outside corner of the L at the spot in front of and slightly above the top of his study desk. In this way he changed a kitchen-living-room-bedroom-dining-room space into an area for work, and the means for forgetting. The stripes could not be ignored. There was no place in the entire apartment where he could rest his eyes without their being led to his desk. And at this place the moral questions of the day neither disturbed nor distracted him from studying for long hours until sleep, and he would crawl off into his “Hollywood bed” and wait/ sleep until morning.
The months rolled by. The only break in the routines he set up was the operation of setting up new ones, registering for new classes and fitting into different time slots. So each semester varied his life only that much. For instance, he might be getting up at eight thirty instead of nine o’clock. Everything else was the same. He took summer courses in the summer. The seasonal changes passed almost without notice. His professors’ names he forgot after the first two weeks of their classes. The other students he never talked to or looked at, in the halls looking at his feet and sitting at the lectures taking volumes of notes. And when the professor would make a joke and the room would roar with laughter, he would write it down: Joke made here, about how ancient culture seems like ours today. Years went by.
His upstairs landlady thought he was not right and probably for that reason fetched him upstairs whenever she could bring herself to impose on his solitude, to eat dinner, lunch, and breakfast with her four children. She’d never had a renter stay so long, and she felt this was a kind of intimacy, at least compared to the few students she’d had before whose lives were so erratic that they’d be here one day and breaking leases another with no regard for any responsibility.
C dreaded her children. He dreaded eating with them. He dreaded eating. After two and one half years he still dreaded living. And then what he dreaded most of all and knew would happen happened on a dreaded afternoon in winter. Mrs. Sorenson, his upstairs landlady, had slipped silently into the apartment. She often did this and would sit—C did not know for how long—watching him work at his desk (he imagined for hours) until he finally turned around or got up for a drink of water. At first this so distressed him that he made a point of turning around every ten minutes in order to catch her (he could not bring himself to lock the door). His studies suffered. His plan suffered; and he finally turned the desk around so that he sat with his back toward the wall. Even with this she managed, despite her lumbering size, to enter without being noticed. This particular afternoon she did not wait to be caught, but spoke out from her seated position on the Hollywood bed.
“How did you get a name like C?” she asked.
“My father,” C said and did not look up from his books.
“Your father called you C?”
“Yes.” He looked at her now—dreading. “That is, he called me Cecil and my mother didn’t like that because it was too long.”
“Then your mother named you C,” she concluded, with satisfaction, and crossed her heavy legs.
“I suppose so.”
“I’m not old enough to be your mother,” she confessed and re-crossed her legs the other way.
Dread, thought C, staring into the pages of his book, through the desk, through the cement, and into the ground—hoping she would think he was reading.
“I’m only thirty-six.”
“Your children,” said C.
“No; we’re a very liberal family. I have made it a point for my children to be completely used to their bodies and mine. There’s nothing dirty about it.”
“I can understand that,” said C, “for you.”
“You too, C. You study too hard. Come upstairs and let me stick you between my thighs and shake something loose.”
He’d expected it might come in that way, nothing but the terrible facts of the desire. There was no other way for her. It was her attitude. Dread, thought C . . . but he believed then, and always, that relationships between people were like nothing else—that somehow it was partly his own responsibility for his landlady feeling the way she did, and because he was partly responsible for agitating this desire, then it would be wrong not to help her satisfy it. Dread, he thought. Involvement, maybe, but like this, now . . .
“Can’t you think of anything else to do?” he asked himself, “like shopping, or laundry, or working, or . . . no, I don’t suppose you can.” And he got up and they went upstairs and upstairs again and into
