The Long Home by William Gay

Author:William Gay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 2011-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

Lately Winer’s mother had taken to cleaning herself up more and doing her hair. She seemed always to have on a clean dress and there was something foreign about her. Winer realized for the first time how much she had let herself go down through the years. She was not pretty but had she been less dour and practical she would have qualified as plain.

He noticed tiretracks even before she got the pans.

“Had company today?”

“No. A salesman stopped by.”

“A salesman? Selling what?”

“Sellin pots and pans,” she said irritably as if there were no other kind of salesman, as if he was interrogating her.

A week later she had the pans. He saw them when he came in from Hardin’s, a great motley collection of them, coppercolored, gleaming, skillets and cookers and spatulas and doubleboilers and seemingly a pan for every purpose the mind of man could devise.

“Great God,” he said.

“What?”

“Where’d you get all that stuff?”

“I bought em.”

“Bought em? Why?”

“Because I wanted em is why. I always wanted me a set of cookers like that.”

He was a little awed by them. “Well.” He paused. “What’d they cost?”

“Never you mind what they cost. It won’t be a nickel of your pocket.”

He took his razor and mirror and a bar of soap down to the branch. Beyond the barn it curved and there was a hole of water deep enough to swim in. He washed and shaved and came back out of the woods and onto the stoop and she was awaiting him. Apparently their conversation was not yet over.

She laid a hand on his arm. “I got a friend,” she said. “Sells them pots and pans.”

He thought, a friend, not understanding at first. Then he saw in her sallow face some commingling of shame and pride, the eyes imbued simultaneously with humility and stubbornness, and he thought, she means a man. He didn’t know what to say though her face expected something, she looked as if she were ashamed of whatever it was she was doing but had no plans to stop.

“I think you’d like him, Nathan. He wants to see you.”

“Well. Sure.” He was looking all about. “Where is he?”

“He’s supposed to be here next Friday,” she said. Not “He’ll be here Friday,” Winer noticed, not yet with sureness or even confidence, she was uncertain of her hold on him, or did not believe it yet.

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