The Messenger

A Story by Jesse Hill Ford

THE postmaster does that which is neither allowed nor not allowed. During the noon hour he shoots pigeons. His twelve-gauge shotgun is a full choke automatic. The gleaming weapon smells of Hoppe’s No. 9 Nitro-Solvent.

Perhaps the postmaster violates city ordinance 177, subsection B. which states that firearms shall not be discharged inside the corporate limits of Somerton, Tennessee, except by police in the line of duty or other designated officials.

“Other designated officials” will take care of Judge Andrew Frick, now dead, and the lawyer Carter French, now dead, both of whom, for reasons long forgotten and best known to themselves even at the time, would draw pistols from their pockets and begin firing at each other. At the hotel once, during Sunday dinner, they shot the plate glass windows out of the front of the place. In the lobby of the First Baptist Church one Wednesday after prayer meeting the judge caught a slug never removed from his knee. Carter French lost a tooth that time, not from a bullet, but from being shoved or in somehow ducking, dodging, or falling against a stair rail.

Again, one morning in court the judge, firing at close range from a position of superior advantage — that is, from behind the bench — felled the lawyer. At the time, it was thought that the judge had killed Carter French. However, Carter French lived. Or, another way to say it, the lawyer didn’t die for six months, and the seventh month he was up walking again, the eighth month was back in court, and the ninth month, one cold Tuesday, shot Judge Frick down, in front of city hall, stomped him, and would have ridden a horse over him had the animal not shied at the smell of blood.

The judge didn’t die from his wounds. Both men abruptly patched up their mysterious differences. Soon they were close friends. Then they became best friends. Carter French with his paralyzed arm, his crooked jaw, and little or no vision from his left eye; Judge Frick with his stiff right leg, a shattered left hand, maimed left ankle, and a drooping left cheek.

Carter French’s son, Gabe, married Judge Frick’s daughter, Melissa. “Blood spilled will now be mixed,” people said.

The mansion built by Carter French comes down to make way for a post office annex. Poplar beams such as will never be sawn again from American forests are revealed. Slates such as never again will cover a roof in Somerton come falling. They shatter on the ground. At noon the housewreckers abruptly stop work. Negro men in hard hats sit down on the lawn. They eat from paper sacks. They drink milk from cardboard cartons.

Nothing has permanence, thinks the postmaster. Everything moves, changes, marches in bizarre directions. A new motel obstructs the lawn of an antebellum home-turned-mortuary. North of town a bypass slices smack through the great home built by Judge Frick on original land his people settled when they migrated from Cincinnati.

The postmaster, gassed and machine-gunned years ago in France, turns off his hearing aid. He raises the gun. It jerks against his shoulder. The pigeons leave the roof of the old house and light on the First Baptist Church. Leaving federal property, the postmaster (a Baptist) crosses the street. He fires again. A pigeon staggers in midflight, bounces off the church roof, and falls dead beside the churchyard water fountain. The flock circles away toward colored town. The postmaster turns suddenly and makes do with a cowbird passing high overhead, stubby-winged and speckled. Crumpling, the bird strikes the post office steps and lies fluttering. The postmaster crosses the street and jerks off its head.

Eating contentedly, the Negroes on the lawn of the old mansion seem not to notice. The postmaster reloads, lights a Kool cigarette, and switches on his hearing aid. He lifts a gold watch from his pocket and returns it — thirteen minutes to go. Pigeons have an uncanny, indeed, the postmaster thinks, a devilish, sense of timing. Some days they return to the house, the church, or the post office roof one second to the tick after shooting time.

So long established is the postmaster’s habit, shooting pigeons every noon using dove loads, full choke barrel, and number eight shot, that word of mouth has it such shooting is legal. Some say it is required by the postal service, others that it has been decreed and set down in writing by the board of aldermen. The postmaster encourages the myth. From being a bit timid about such shooting as he was when he began it in a tentative way seventeen years ago, the postmaster has become bold. Moreover, sale of the Gabe French home to the federal government has opened new shooting territory, ground that was a game sanctuary while French was living.

Smoking, waiting, enjoying the sun, the postmaster thinks ahead to the moment when according to his own rules he must step inside the building, dismantle the gun, and carefully clean it. Returning from lunch then, the assistant postmaster will collect the postmaster’s empty shotshell hulls, left to lie where ejected. The assistant postmaster has a reloading tool in his garage at home. He hasn’t, so he claims, bought a shotgun shell in seventeen years.

With a dry popping of wings, the pigeons return. Off goes the hearing aid. A blue pigeon the color of slate comes falling, already dead. A pink one is hit, flutters on, is hit again on the third shot, and falls dead. On comes the hearing aid. The postmaster lights another Kool. He reloads.

GABE FRENCH dead; who would have believed Gabe French would die? Least of all Gabe French, or Gabe’s Negro man, Henty, a paroled murderer who upon a time bathed the white man, dressed Gabe, cooked his meals, and poured his whiskey. The Negro let Gabe French win at checkers to keep the invalid man happy.

The oaks have been cut down, sawn up, split into cordwood, and hauled away. The house has been Gabe French. Turn it around, Gabe French for years and years has been the house. Its destruction becomes his monument, his memory, the nonmonument, nonmemory of progress, sullenly progressing. No one really thought Gabe French dead until work was begun on the house, until we realized. The scrollwork, the inlay, the Doric columns, and the roof peaks; coppered valleys, the long sighing porches where girls in the family, generations of them, courted in creaking wooden swings—all this would disappear. Gone would be the ballroom on the third floor never once used for a ball but put there anyhow by the gunfighting Carter French, who didn’t believe in dancing all this, we suddenly realize, will be coming down.

Death, we think, is the coming down of all these, the taking away of all that. Death is something that wasn’t there before, built over it all; earth where we played as children, hidden under the mausoleum shape of a strange building.

Thus it cannot be that the French place is being torn down, that day by day slates are swiftly dropping into the forsythias. It cannot be that the house is to be seen intimately from without, that rude sunlight will shine on its secret entrails, that parts of it built into darkness will be illuminated. Nothing ever should stand so exposed, to be slowly mutilated down to ruin.

Worse is the same sight in the rains of April. It cannot be. The postmaster has said and the assistant postmaster has acknowledged the fact that is no sort of fact. Nothing, the postmaster admits, agreeing with everyone, nothing is the least real about violent change.

It’s as though Gabe French still lived. Gabe sits in his wheelchair before the tall narrow window at the west corner looking out north past the white porch rails. Looking out at nothing, he has the submerged look of a man with certain memories. The dark oaks, the maples, someone passing along the sidewalk, children at play in the churchyard by the fountain; a squirrel hesitating, leaping, hesitating with a magnolia pod in its little jaws, graybrown tail fetching and fetching the air—Gabe sees none of this, but something else and more.

Four women were all his grief and happiness. His mother, his wife, his mistress, his daughter; they showered him with jealousy. His mother began by not speaking to his wife, Melissa, when she was yet a bride in the house; Melissa in turn not speaking to Gabe on account of the mistress, a salesgirl at the Somerton dime store. Gabe’s daughter, Mattie, ended not speaking to her mother because of Melissa’s meanness to Gabe. Thus he was ringed, caught in a perfect circle of misery.

The Negro, Henty, was summoned like an interpreter. Henty conveyed whole conversations between members of a family celebrated for rhetoric. The Negro parolee enjoyed a diplomat’s immunity. It is said that they never struck him.

“Tell my husband the roof has sprung a leak and carpenters will be wanted to fix it.”

“She say the roof done sprang a leak. She need a carpenter.”

“Well, tell my wife to phone Mr. Dick Bass.”

“He say phone Mr. Dick Bass.”

“Tell my mother she’s going to be late for missionary circle if she doesn’t get ready instantly.”

“Miss Mattie say makase and get ready, Miss Melissa. The circle meeting.”

“Tell my daughter I’m well aware that the circle meets.”

“She say she know it.”

“Tell my wife, Mrs. French, for me, that I perceive a positive ignominy, that I blanch at the spectacle of so vile-tempered and shortsighted a woman as herself daring approach the altar of charity with her neighbors. Ask her how she can muster the effrontery to contribute good money, how she can openly advocate out of one side of her mouth the teaching of Christian mercy to heathens, when she sponsors no good works in her own home, beneath her own leaking roof.”

“He say mean womens got no business to meet the circle when they never one time pramalgates no hominey at home. He say how come you such a mean old she hen?”

“Tell Mr. French for me that for all my shortcomings, I have managed to maintain the standard of connubial fidelity. That is more than can be said for him. I have not dipped my banners of honor in the dust, nor do I sit paralyzed from the waist downward by an angry God who was made sick by a shameless spectacle of licentious wickedness.”

“She say you the one done the outside courting, not her. You the one laid out on her till God switched dat pretty automobile down the bankment in Mississippi.”

“Tell my husband, a man in title only, that I do not unwind the spell of my days reeking of the satanic spirits of John Barleycorn. Tell him I am not the one who must weep for my dead paramour because her silly little dime-store brains were clashed out. Tell him I’m not the one paralyzed with guilt and grief. I thank the Powers that my heart isn’t black as the roots of her dyed Jean Harlow hair.”

“Henty, before you tell that you tell my daughter-in-law to mind her invidious viper’s tongue if she intends to remain under this roof, leaking or not; tell her April will afford her no protection from the lady who is still mistress here.”

“Miss Missy say you shut up that yow-yow at Mr. Gabe ‘fore she take a mind to clean somebody’s plow, raining or not. Den ‘fore that Miss Melissa say it weren’t no dime-store brains of hers was dashed out in Mississippi. She say she ain’t weeping over yellow hair with black roots. She ain’t sucking no bottle of John Grandad like some peoples.”

“Tell my wife that if she dare impugn the memory of one I still hold dear that, crippled and maimed though I am, brought low by the harsh chariots of iron destiny though I am, yet I may forget a gentleman’s code if pushed. I’ll cease looking on her for a woman. I will not be responsible for what I may do!”

“Tell him I’ve never feared swine!”

“To speak so of the dead,” Gabe French says.

“Hush, everybody hush!” Henty shouts. Just as suddenly he begins pushing the wheelchair. He takes Gabe French back to the sanctuary of the corner room. Henty sets up the checkerboard to turn the white man’s mind away from a soft night when the Southern highway unwound beneath the Buick like the beginning of a long, unending dream. The woman beside him would always be beautiful and twenty-four; he would forever be handsome and forty-three.

They had been running away, Gabe French and the girl from the dime store, going first to New Orleans, and after that South America. Ahead of them were ships and staterooms, the taste of real champagne, he told her, whispering into her soft, fluttering hair. It was good-bye to Somerton’s dusty midnight lanes.

Forever brand new, always grenadine red, Gabe French’s automobile would be hitting ninety on the straightaways clown through eternity for her. The car was off the embankment then with a crash like falling slate, which came slipping like a vaporous column down and into the yellow forsythia blooms edging the porch.

At four minutes to one o’clock the slate fell. The falling slate turned the pigeons off and sent them sailing clean away before the postmaster could raise his gun. Returning the watch to his vest pocket, the postmaster looked up at the roof to confirm what he already knew.

The old Negro, his hard hat flashing in the sun, was up there sure enough, already at work. The rest were still on the ground smoking, taking the full hour like reasonable men.

The assistant postmaster appeared and began gathering spent shotshell hulls into his cigar box. The postmaster looked at the man on the roof. It was him all right. The Negro waved. The postmaster nodded and turned to go into the building.

“Isn’t that him on the roof?” the assistant postmaster asked. “Working to tear down the very house that sheltered him all those years?”

“It’s him,” said the postmaster. The two men entered the building together. The assistant waited for what the postmaster would have to say. “The worst to me — aside from the fact I can’t realize Gabe French is gone — the worst is how that damned old savage seems to take downright willful pride in what he’s doing. Four or five times I’ve observed Henty for the last to sit on the ground at noon to eat and the first to be up again afterward, pulling on his gloves.”