The Western Shore by Clarkson Crane

Author:Clarkson Crane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: West Margin Press

EPISODE TWO

XI

ETHEL DAVIS

The wooden house in Monterey which Ethel’s grandfather had built in the seventies was painted white and surrounded by a box-hedge that was becoming worn. Here and there, on both sides of the small gate, gray twigs were visible: one could peer through holes into the front yard (the old swing that all four of the Davis boys had used still rotted there;) and one could see a few bits of colored glass left on the front door shining in the afternoon when no fog covered the western sun. In the old days Joe Davis, fat and bald-headed, used to sit on the porch in his shirt-sleeves, one rheumatic leg established on a kitchen chair; and not far away against the white wall his rifle would always be leaning; for certain men in town had sworn that they would get him, and he often said in his wheezing voice: “There ain’t no use takin’ chances.” But old Joe Davis had died quietly at the age of seventy, and the house had gone on decaying after him, standing large among low adobes, its two pointed cupolas against the blue sky.

Only two of the boys were left in Monterey when the old man died in nineteen-hundred. Sixteen years before, the second son, Frank, had been thrown from a bucking horse during a Fourth of July rodeo and his skull crushed against the edge of the grandstand; and John Davis, the eldest, was running a saloon on Turk

Street in San Francisco. And so Robert and his wife, Jane, and the kid, Ethel, and Ted Davis, the youngest of the four brothers, went on living in the old house, behind the box hedge that was more solid in those days. That worked in the bank (he had begun when he was seventeen) and Robert managed the estate and lost some of it every year, and then died of pneumonia when his child was six or seven. Ethel barely remembered her father. He was a tall, dark man who smelt of whiskey: she was always afraid of him, and spent her time with Jessie Schmidt, the fat cousin who had come down from San Francisco after her own husband’s death. The child felt that the big man disliked her, and as her mother, even before she went to the hospital. brooded more and more in her room facing the hills, Ethel was alone or with Jessie, and her parents were never more in her life than shadows.

So many memories of her childhood in this silent house awoke whenever she returned there. Long ago she had wandered among the big rooms and paused timidly in the kitchen door to watch Sing at work over the stove. The Chinese cook had been with the family for thirty years. He would shuffle toward her, stoop ing a trifle, a dead scrap of a cigarette hanging like a limp fang from his mouth, and hold out a cake and say: “Likee?” One morning they found him dead

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