Look Down, Look Down

A Story by JESSE HILL FORD

SOMETIMES Mrs. Gannaway felt light as a thistle. That was how she knew she was dying, but it didn’t bother her. She felt life drying up inside her, and when the last bit of its moist essence was gone she would float off to heaven, she would sail away.

Mrs. Gannaway drew a long breath. She stared doggedly through the back-porch lattices at the sweaty little man shoveling woods dirt from his pickup truck. With bones so light and frail and one veined hand resting on her cane, it was no problem for Mrs. Gannaway to stand up. Besides, she felt better standing up than sitting down, not like the fat young people she knew, always seeking a chair, always weary with carrying themselves about.

The gentle thunder of a jet plane roared in the August sky. The farmer paused to look for it, resting the shovel against his thigh and taking off his hat a moment to wipe the sweatband with a brightred handkerchief. The black earth about his feet was like a pool of velvet. The rest of the lawn, shiny with heat devils, shimmered in silvery waves like puddles of molten lead.

The old woman shaded her eyes. The jet’s roar faded. War and airplanes were joined for her like welded brass. Her son, Arthur Gannaway, her youngest, had been reported missing in 1943. Arthur’s bomber had last been seen flaming and plunging toward the Mediterranean. Not until the war’s end had she given up hope. Only then had she taken Arthur’s insurance money and purchased chimes for the First Methodist Church.

Watching the rich black dirt being unloaded from the truck drew some of the lonely coldness out of her body. She would have her rose garden now that Mr. Gannaway was gone. Mr. Gannaway had raised strenuous objections to everything, even to spending Arthur’s insurance money for church chimes. He had said a hundred times that he could see no help for Arthur, or Arthur’s memory, in the fact that “Rock of Ages” could be heard all over Somerton on Sunday morning and Sunday evening. Nor could he see that “The Old Rugged Cross,”at six thirty Wednesday evening, helped either. Mrs. Gannaway had given specific instructions with the memorial chimes: Sunday, “Rock of Ages”; Wednesday, “The Old Rugged Cross”; noon on Christmas Day, “Silent Night.”

Just as certainly, Mr. Gannaway would have scoffed at the idea of hauling in woods dirt at a dollar a load to make a rose garden. Thinking how Mr. Gannaway had pouted himself to death brought back some of her old anger against him. It gave her a furious, scalding sensation to recall how he had died as though to escape her. In dying her husband had served her with a final indignity, leaving her to face life alone, without any Mr. Gannaway to manage.

What a great handsome fool Mr. Gannaway had been. He had peddled jack lifts, traded mules, sold hardware, shoes, fences, tractors, popcorn machines, soda fountains, and electric guitars. He had been a good provider. In his prime he was a big-talking, rich-dressing, loud-laughing natural salesman. Luckily for him, he had a wife shrewd enough to take money from him before he lost it in bad investments or threw it away. All his married life Mrs. Gannaway had limited him to three cigars a day, with no one outside the family ever being the wiser. She had done other things. She had checked on Mr. Gannaway to keep him upright and good. She had not seen a little money spent now and then on private detectives as money thrown away. So long as Mr. Ganna way never could be sure when he was being watched, in other words!

Just so, she spied on the farmer through the latticework. Let him lag, let him make a mistake, and she would call to him. Otherwise she was content to talk to herself loud enough for the man to overhear. “Highway robbery,” Mrs. Gannaway said. “Dollar a load for dirt — I know when I’m being robbed.” She gave a short sigh. “But what can a defenseless old woman do?” The farmer bent to his work like a groundhog. His shovel scraped the wooden truck bed.

Were Mr. Gannaway alive he’d be outside in the yard now, talking so much the man wouldn’t have time to unload dirt for listening. That was Mr. Gannaway, hardly married five years before he suddenly volunteered for the Army and wound up in France, a buck private in the rear ranks, but enjoying every minute of it. Even when he was gassed and shot through the elbow he wrote home glowing reports.

Let him mention Paris, which he often did while telling tales of the war, and he automatically winked every time and brayed with laughter as though whatever had happened to him in Paris had been much too wonderful for words. No doubt he had smoked too many cigars while overseas. What a terrible emptiness she had felt through all those months of his absence, knowing full well how incapable the man was of taking care of himself, so feckless and absentminded, so careless of his clothes. At last she got him back, nursed him, fed him and fattened him, and restored him to health.

Then it was time for World War II, and she was caught by surprise with all her children old enough to go and all but Arthur having inherited Mr. Gannaway’s mischievous love of war. Her oldest, Edna, joined the Women’s Army Corps. Philip, a doctor, went to the Navy. Fred Junior, just out of college, was drafted. That left Arthur, the only one Mrs. Gannaway had succeeded in raising as a conscientious objector.

As for Mr. Gannaway, incurable fellow that he was, he tried to join everything — Navy, Army, Marines, even the Coast Guard — and they all turned him down. It was the beginning of the man’s pouting ways, his being so fretted to be left out of the war. But if his father fretted, Arthur at least managed very well. The Army was going to take him, along with the other conscientious objectors, and use him for a guinea pig. The Army would try out poisons on him, Mrs. Gannaway had decided, or let him shoot new guns to see if they would blow up. She had warned him of this ahead of time, and Arthur was ready for anything. Though full-grown, he was as pure in his habits as a lamb. The boy neither smoked, like Edna, nor sipped whiskey toddies, like Philip and Fred Junior.

Test her memory as she might, Mrs. Gannaway always found Arthur perfect. Let the doors of the First Methodist Church of Somerton open, and Arthur was there with Mrs. Gannaway on his arm. Hadn’t she known somehow from the first that anyone as good as Arthur couldn’t live long?

Never a boy to carouse at night, Arthur had not wrecked cars the way his brothers had. He had not done other things Mrs. Gannaway felt it best not to think about, things that had required Mr. Gannaway’s getting up in the middle of the night to fix, affairs involving strange young women and their vindictive kinsmen. Never a soul had threatened either to shoot Arthur dead or have him immediately married.

Soft-spoken and clean, Arthur had played the piano softly, for the most part hymns, but, again, such favorites of Mrs. Gannaway’s as “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” and “Still Is the Night.” Music made her heart ache so, she never touched the piano now but left it locked. Of late she only dusted it.

It had been Mr. Gannaway’s secret purpose to entice Arthur out of his goodness and into the ways of the Devil, but Arthur could never be tempted. His father had tried to make the boy play canasta, but Arthur would never touch cards. At such moments Mrs. Gannaway could feel her breast rise with a lightness that told her plainer than words that someday she would have wings and someday Arthur would be a star in her crown.

Mr. Gannaway’s trouble had been that when the Second War began he looked on Arthur not as a son but as a cell mate. With his other children gone to war without him, Somerton was Mr. Gannaway’s prison and Mrs. Gannaway was his jailer.

She peered through the latticed wall and suddenly rapped against it with her cane. She clutched her handkerchief in her free hand and raised it to her nose. “Careful! Careful there!” she cried. Having spread the loamy soil, the little man was planting the first rosebush. “Mind how you handle those young bushes!” she said.

For an instant the man stopped working and peered at the porch, his face shaded by the brim of his hat. His cheeks were pale as biscuit dough. He leaned forward and spat on the ground.

“I hope you’re not chewing tobacco,” Mrs. Gannaway said. “I don’t allow it on these premises.”

The farmer spat the quid lightly into his hand and threw it away. She had, she thought, a glimpse of his eyes then. They seemed moist, evil perhaps, and a little red and squinty. A lazy man’s eyes, she concluded, thinking at the same time of Arthur’s eyes, blue and pure as oceans, set like jewels in an angel’s forehead.

Those last months at home Arthur had been like an angel chased by demons. Mr. Gannaway had given Arthur no rest— talking, talking, and always talking at him.

“What fun docs a conscientious objector have?” Mr. Gannaway would begin. “Can you answer me that?”

“I just don’t believe in fighting and killing,” Arthur had said.

“But, listen! Boy, you go places! See sights you never dreamed about your whole life long. It makes you broad,”said Mr. Gannaway.

“Then I’ll stay narrow,” Arthur said.

“For a son of mine to turn out a coward!”

“I’m not a coward!”

“Dad-durn scaredy-cat for a son!” Flinging off his coat, Mr. Gannaway would roll up his shirt sleeve. “Take a look! See there, where Fritz got me in the elbow? See there, scaredy-cat? I had the gangrene. Sure, you could see little bitty pieces of bone working their way out like maggots, and some shrapnel’s still in it! Fellow next to me had the whole side of his head blowed away. I laid hung up in barbwire like a bug in a web, and they commenced hollering “Gas, gas, gas!' Wasn’t nobody around to put a mask on me. So I drawed a whiff or two of that!” Mr. Gannaway must pound his chest and cough. “Down here it settled on me. I spit up blood, understand?”

“What does that prove?” Arthur said.

“I went to Paris,” cried Mr. Gannaway, winking and laughing. “Great gad, wasn’t Paris a wonderful place?”

ROLING down his shirt sleeve, putting on his coat, going on with his endless tales about war, Mr. Gannaway began having a certain effect on Arthur.

Though it was long past, merely remembering the final fateful interview gave Mrs. Gannaway a present giddiness. The sun on the windshield of the farmer’s truck glanced and struck her eyes. She reeled and caught the latticework to steady herself. Her throat hurt with the memory of Arthur, so tall and young, so pure when he came hesitantly where she sat in the living room, sitting down beside her on the sofa and taking her hand with great tenderness. Just then Mr. Ganna way had come into the house from outdoors whistling a strange little marchtime melody. Her husband’s happiness threw her first into panic and then into despair. There was no need then for Arthur to tell her, saying it so softly: “Mother, I’ve joined the Army Air Force.”

“But you’ll be a mechanic. You’ll put gas in the planes,” she had said quickly. “Well, if it had to be anything —”

But there was Mr. Gannaway, suddenly grinning like one of his trade mules. “Wrong guess!”

“Arthur!”

“Oh, that’s where he’ll start, all right,” said Mr. Gannaway, “but once he’s shook off that dad-durn conscientious objector stuff, once he’s proved himself, they’ll promote him up to pilot—just see if they don’t!”

“Ultimately, I’m going to fly,”said Arthur.

“He’s gonna drop bums on people!” cried Mr. Gannaway in a great, gloating voice.

Near to fainting, Mrs. Gannaway held to her senses. “The war will be over,” she said. “It will end before Arthur can possibly be trained.”That same night she wrote her congressman. She fell asleep praying and weeping. Hadn’t she already realized no power on earth or in heaven could keep Arthur from being taken from her?

Feeling so faint, Mrs. Gannaway decided she must lie down. She rapped again on the lattices. “It’s time for my nap,” she said. “Come wake me when the roses are planted, you hear? Tap on my bedroom windowpane from outside.”

The farmer looked up and nodded.

“Rap on my window,” she said. “I’m a light sleeper, and I’ll get up and pay you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the farmer said in a muffled voice. She watched while he took a drink of water from the mason jar beside him on the running board of the truck. Then he looked up at the cobalt sky. She left the porch to lie on her bed.

Waiting for her dizzy spell to pass, she had a vision of Arthur’s plane skimming high above the Mediterranean Sea with Arthur inside at the controls, the plane flying in the midst of a great formation headed like a flock of starlings to some distant goal of importance. They had left the curving North African shore behind and were flying over the great blue brilliance of the seas which Arthur had written her about so lovingly, time and time again. He had said that nothing was more beautiful, no earthly sight more magnificent than that distance of rippling azure beauty.

His words put her in mind of heaven and the shores of Galilee, of Christ’s own eyes dazzling with the water’s beauty. Arthur must have felt close to Christ, must have been thinking of Christ and nothing else when a tiny spurt of flame popped out of his left wing and a jolt such as a passenger train makes when it starts told him his plane was stricken. There was no time left for anything. A few words of prayer, perhaps. Arthur might quickly have said: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.”

No more than that, because he was falling, wings broken like an angel’s, and he must have wheeled over and over between sea and sky until it might have appeared to him that he was rising into heaven instead of dropping swiftly down to smash a cottony froth into those wide green waves. He must have glided then, going underseas slowly down and ever downward amidst brilliancies of sunlight spearing straight down into the Mediterranean from the meadows of paradise. About his neck on a golden chain he wore his mother’s ring; in his pocket over his heart he carried his New Testament, both given him by Mrs. Gannaway when he left home. And Arthur was never found.

Never found, and in fact no one saw his plane strike the sea, though some had seen him begin his long fall.

Then, after the war, a lean ball-turret gunner who had been flying in the next plane when Arthur’s was crippled had stopped by to see her. A pocked-faced young man with long, nervous fingers, he had not been the clean-cut sort. Smiling his queer, vacant smile, he had confessed to Mrs. Gannaway that he had been out of work, had flunked out of college after going back to school on the G.I. Bill. He had also put up a little time in jail, he said. For an hour the down-and-out fellow stayed and talked about Arthur, telling her Arthur had been very popular with the other men in his squadron. She knew this was a lie because Arthur had always been too good to be popular. Yet she enjoyed the visit anyway, and when the young man left she gave him fifty dollars, which he accepted with just that same queer smile. Watching the ball-turret gunner leave, she had thought that there was no justice in a world which let such as him live while it took Arthur away.

Yet the thought had no sooner occurred than she was sorry for it and silently prayed for forgiveness.

Arthur dead. Yet for some time he had not been officially listed as dead. He was kept on the roster of the missing until the very last days of the war, though she knew well enough he was dead. Strangely, Mr. Gannaway had never given up hope that Arthur might be alive somewhere. It was just another of Mr. Gannaway’s follies that he clung stubbornly to his queer belief long after the government had sent Mrs. Gannaway the insurance money. Even on his deathbed, when Mr. Gannaway lay pouting himself into the next world, full of bitterness and spite for having been kept at home during the Second War, even then her husband had held to the outlandish hope. It was his way of beating down his guilt and making his grief a bit more manageable.

SHE was so tired that lying on her bed didn’t seem to help very much. Having lain down, she wanted to be up again, but then she felt her bones getting lighter by the instant, a strange, dripping sensation. Still and all, she must get up soon, she thought. She would be needed to make sure the man in the garden was still at work.

And, once finished, the garden would need her then just as the house needed her now. Brownedged watermarks on the papered ceiling high above her bed were scars to remind her. Without her the house would be helpless. Should a pipe give way or the roof spring a leak from the winter rains, who would call the repairman if she were gone?

When last the roof leaked and the ping-ping-ping of water dripping into stewing pans and broilers had followed her about the house. Eve Craddock, a young woman who had since married and moved from Somerton, had come calling on Mrs. Gannaway. Speaking slowly and carefully, Eve Craddock, who was Arthur’s age and had gone to high school with him, told what she had seen in Memphis.

She had seen a man playing the piano at the Peabody Hotel, with the band, and it had come to Eve that she knew him. Not until she had gotten all the way home to Somerton had she realized that the piano player was Arthur Gannaway. Then, because she had remembered Arthur was supposed to be dead, she had been hesitant about coming to see Mrs. Gannaway.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Ganna way said. “Arthur’s plane fell into the sea.” Still, she felt a cruel and wild hammering in her breast. “Arthur was killed.”

“I was so sure it was someone I knew,” Eve Craddock said. “I even went back to the bandstand a second time. I stood beside the piano. He played very beautifully, and except for a deep scar on his check —”

“Arthur had no scars, not on his face, not anywhere on his whole body,” said Mrs. Gannaway. “But, all the same. I’ll look into it. I can’t thank you enough.”

The young woman had seemed embarrassed. She hadn’t quite known how to leave and had said over and again, “Of course, it wasn’t Arthur.” Yet, on the other hand, why had she come to see Mrs. Gannaway? When Eve Craddock finally left, Mrs. Gannaway had gone trembling to the phone and called a reliable private detective in Memphis, one who had done a bit of checking up on Mr. Gannaway for her in bygone years. She had risen the next morning at dawn to catch the early Memphis bus.

Though she had paid him fees, talked to him on the telephone, and received his letters, she had never before then seen Fred Atkins, the private detective, in person.

Instead of the bright young man she had always imagined him to be, instead of the piety and cleanliness she had known she was sure to find in him, she discovered in the real Fred Atkins a man of quite another sort. She saw an old man with spongy skin and whiskery checks, a stupid-looking old fellow in a wrinkled gray suit and dirty, frayed shirt cuffs.

Obviously the detective had not been able to hold on to any of the fees he had collected over the years. His tiny office consisted of a desk, two chairs, a telephone, and stacks of old newspapers and magazines. From time to time, while he talked to her, Fred Atkins glanced at a 1936 calendar on the wall beside his desk. Only the voice belonged to the Fred Atkins she knew. With grief bending her heart, she agreed that the best plan would be first to see the young man for herself. Mr. Atkins would take her to the Peabody Roof that evening, he said. “That way you can see for yourself if she really seen anything or not before I start my investigation. Rent yourself a day room at the hotel.”

When he opened the office door for her to leave, her worst suspicions were realized. She smelled whiskey on his breath.

All that day, waiting at the hotel, she had sat on the strange bed putting her handkerchief to her nose time and again, thunderstruck by the sure knowledge that Fred Atkins’ grammatical slips, far from being the kindly failings of a kindly, religious man, were proof of his commonplace origins. Not only was he not a Christian; the detective was a drunken boor.

Betrayal wound like a tight steel spring in her stomach. She was waiting in the lobby when Mr. Atkins finally arrived, an hour late and unsteady on his feet. He stumbled getting on the elevator and would have fallen had he not been steering her by the elbow. While the car rose briskly to the Peabody Roof he continued to grip her arm. When the door opened he steered her ahead of him once again, straight across a dance floor hazy with tobacco smoke, straight into the reek of everything she had hated her whole life long.

In the midst of the musicians playing vulgar ragtime a pathetic little man sat pawing the saweddown piano. A scar slashed his face from chin to forehead, a jagged red stripe interrupted only by an eye which lurked deeper in its socket than the other one.

Closer and closer still Mr. Atkins pushed her, until only the clanging, skeletal piano separated her from the mutilated face. Then, without warning, the creature suddenly smiled, and Mrs. Gannaway dropped in a faint, her senses drowning in the evil thumps of the Dixieland music.

She came to with her feet propped up indecently, in the lobby again, lying on a sofa which smelled of stale cigars. Mr. Atkins bathed her temples with water from the lobby fountain. She lay stunned, as though crushed by a ton of falling ice. “Feeling better now? How about it?” The detective’s voice seemed at a distance; the sound was like oil secretly cascading through a tube.

“I was just going to say it seems likely to me that this little fellow upstairs could be your son. Arthur,” he went on. “I’ll go have a word with him and —”

“No, thank you,” she had replied, getting off the sofa and brushing Mr. Atkins away. When she rose to her feet he staggered back uncertainly, the dawn of a bleak astonishment flooding across his face, blurring his wrinkled features.

With a summoning of strength she struck him on the temple with her fist, feeling her hand break in a shooting pain that leaped into her shoulder and lodged there like a white tongue of flame. Fred Atkins smacked the lobby floor like a fish on a stone slab. With her purse in her unbroken hand, Mrs. Gannaway walked straight out and across the street to the bus station, supported by the pain in her arm.

Because she was up in years it had taken her hand six months to heal. Abscesses had formed. There had been the threat of gangrene and no comfort at all except in reflecting that Mr. Gannaway had gone through much the same thing with his elbow and had bragged about it until the very day of his death. In the midst of her pain, Mr. Fred Atkins had sent her a bill for two hundred dollars, which she paid.

Then, while standing on the back porch that winter, looking through the lattices and thinking there was no comfort left in the world, she had conceived of the rose garden, even while a cold rain poured on the hard clay ground.

Still, she was midsummer getting the project under way. Late, and everything was late, and all her children gone now. Mr. Gannaway gone off and nothing ever on time anymore, yet quite suddenly it seemed to her that the garden was finished. She saw that the roses were all blooming. Then she, Mrs. Gannaway, with the effort of one deep frothy breath of indrawn air became as light as autumn’s spider webs. She drifted slowly as mist through the rose garden. The chimes at the First Methodist Church began sounding. Gently she went, wafted along. Then she soared. Without warning she rose and was disappointed by the blinding flash of the sun, falling and covering her, as it did, like golden feathers. Yet the surge of disappointment left. For as suddenly as the sun faded, the sea appeared. One final breath, and she felt herself swiftly rising into the dark green fire of its waves.