If Morning Ever Comes Read online

  The cold of the metal glider soaked sharply through his trousers. He shivered and hugged his arms across his chest, and after a while his body became used to the cold and relaxed once more. The glider whined back and forth, making a lonesome, sleepy sound that sank into him as clearly as the sound of his footsteps had. If he were asleep now, safe inside his house in a warm, deep bed, and it were someone else upon this glider, those slow, gentle creaks would lull him into a deeper and deeper sleep. He would turn a little on his pillow and pull the blankets up closer around his ears, and the sound of the glider penetrating into his dreams would gradually build pictures in his mind of warm summer evenings and soft radio music drifting across green lawns …

  He stood up sharply, feeling his eyes begin to mist over with sleep. If he were found asleep here in the morning, wouldn’t they laugh then? Neighbors on their way to work would stop and look over the gate at him and smile. One sister would find him and would call the others delightedly, and they would all come out and laugh to see funny old Ben Joe torturing himself on a cold tin glider. Ben Joe the worrier. He would wake up to come in and have a sheepish breakfast among their little jokes, or he could sit huffishly out here and be even funnier. No, he didn’t want to take a chance on falling asleep in the glider.

  He sighed and crossed the wooden floor toward the front door. The backs of his legs were cold and stiff, like metal themselves, and there was a sore place in his side where Phoebe’s favorite couch spring had poked him. As he was turning the key in the door he decided the only thing to do was go to his own bed. Tomorrow—or today—was going to be hectic enough and he might as well get rested up for it. The lock clicked open and he went through the complicated process of getting inside the house, ordinarily an automatic one but now, in his dreamlike state, as sharp in his mind as a slow-motion movie: press down the thumb latch, pull back hard on the door until it clicked, then abruptly press downward and inward upon the door until it gave and swung open, creaking a little and brushing across the hall carpet with a soft sssh. He stepped inside, pushing the front door shut behind him. There was a close, dusty smell in the hallway that rushed to meet him instantly, and for a minute he paused to adjust to the sudden darkness and warmth. He could see almost nothing. A pale flash on the wall identified the mirror; that was all. There was a deeper silence here than outdoors, but also there was the feeling that people were in the area. He no longer felt that he was by himself, even though there was no definite sound to prove it.

  He headed blindly across the hall toward the stairs. As he passed the living room he looked through the wide archway of it and saw that the room was lighter, lit gray-white by the long bay windows. On the couch was a long, dark shape that stirred slightly as Ben Joe watched, and to satisfy his own curiosity, he changed direction and headed toward the couch. At his feet there was a sharp ping; a saucepan full of what looked like popcorn had been in his path. But the figure on the couch didn’t move again, and after holding his breath for a minute, Ben Joe went on. He stopped at the head of the couch and stooped over, squinting his eyes in the attempt to see through the dusty dimness. It looked like Gary. His expression was hard to see, but Ben Joe could make out his pale face emerging from the depths of two feather pillows. His mouth was open but he was not snoring, only breathing gently and regularly in little even sighs. And his hair, drained of all its flaming color by the night, stuck out in sharp spikes against his pillows. Ben Joe watched him for a minute, considering the blandness of people asleep. Not even dreams or fits of restlessness seemed to bother Gary; he was peaceful and relaxed. Ben Joe shook his head and then, after putting away the thought of waking Gary up and asking him what had happened that evening, he turned back toward the hallway again.

  Halfway up the stairs a sudden picture crossed his mind. He saw millions of houses, viewed from an airplane, and every couch in every tiny house was occupied by someone from yet another house. Everyone was shuffled around helter-skelter—Ben Joe on Shelley’s couch, Gary on Ben Joe’s couch, and God knew who on Gary’s couch. The picture came to him sharply and without his willing it, and before it faded, it had nearly made him smile.

  The upstairs hall was almost black; no windows opened onto it. He felt his way past the circle of tall white doors, all of them closed and with only the murmuring sounds of sleep behind them. Then he was in his own room, where his bed was a welcoming white blur with the covers turned neatly down and waiting for him. From the bedside stand he picked up his alarm clock and tilted it toward the light from the window, frowning as he tried to see where the hands stood. Five-thirty. That gave him at least another hour, and maybe more if only the girls would rise quietly for a change. The shade on his window was raised and a square of pale white shone through it onto the rug; he pulled the shade down to the sill so that the sun wouldn’t waken him. Then he undressed, doing it slowly and methodically and hanging his clothes neatly in the closet so that he could go to sleep with the feeling that everything had been attended to in an orderly fashion. His socks he put in the small laundry hamper behind the door, making sure to lower the lid again without a sound. All his sisters slept lightly—downright night birds they were, and prone to wandering around at all hours—and right now there wasn’t a one of them he wanted to see. He tiptoed to his bed and lay down, still in his underwear, and reached for his blankets gingerly so as not to creak the springs. The top sheet against his skin was cold and smooth and he felt immediately protected, and more ready for sleep than he had been under the rough, mothball-smelling quilt at Shelley’s. He pulled the sheet up under his chin and closed his eyes, feeling them burn beneath the lids.

  Wanting to be quiet kept him from changing his position. Gradually he grew stiff and tense, and his face muscles wouldn’t loosen up, but he was afraid to move around. Why hadn’t he got into bed on his stomach? He knew he couldn’t sleep on his back. Carefully he turned on his side, trying to make his body light on the mattress and tightening his jaw with the effort. Now he was facing the center of the room, away from the wall. He could see all the dim objects he had grown up with and a white rim of pillow case besides (his right eye was half hidden in the pillow), and he couldn’t not see them because his eyes wouldn’t close. They kept springing open again. They looked around the room continually and searched out the smallest thing to stare at, while the rest of his body ached with tiredness and a headache began just above the back of his neck.

  His room seemed to be made up of layers, the more recent layers never completely obliterating the earlier ones. Of the first layer only the peeling decals on the closet door remained—rabbits and ducks in polka-dotted clothes, left over from that time when he had been a small child. Then the layer from his early boyhood: a small red shoe bag, still in use, with a different symbol of the Wild West on each pocket, a dusty collection of horse books on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. And after that his later boyhood, most in evidence: a striped masculine wallpaper pattern, brown curtains, a microscope, the National Geographies. He tried closing his eyes again and thought about how each layer had become less distinct progressively; the top layer was flat and impersonal, consisting only of a grownup’s clothes in the closet and a grownup’s alarm clock on the stand, while the bottom layers were bright and vivid and always made him remember things, in striking detail, that had happened years and years before. He turned to the other side, grimacing at a creak in the springs, and faced the one picture on the wall: a black-and-white photograph of himself and Joanne on tricycles, in look-alike playsuits, with a younger, out-of-date mother between them in a mannish shoulder-padded suit and black lipstick. There had been another picture, with the cleaner square on the wall left to prove it, of his father in slacks on the mowed lawn with his hand on a teen-aged Ben Joe’s shoulder; but during the bad years Ben Joe had burned it, not knowing what else he was supposed to do.

  He pushed his eyes shut; they popped open again. He turned on his back and looked at the ceiling and switched the room upside-down, picturi
ng the furniture hanging from the ceiling and the light fixture sticking straight up from a bare and peeling plaster floor. To go out of the room, he must reach up an unusual height to the white china doorknob, and when the door was opened he must step over a two-foot threshold of striped wallpaper onto the chandeliered floor of the hallway …

  The door opened. The crack of black at one side of it widened and widened until a girl’s face appeared in it, a small oval that could have been any of them except that a sort of space helmet of lace above it identified the face as Jenny’s. She didn’t speak out but crept very stealthily toward his bed without so much as creaking the floor. To Ben Joe, lying there watching her from under heavy, aching eyelids, she seemed very funny all of a sudden—cautious and bent forward like a nearsighted old woman.

  “Ben Joe?” she whispered.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Ben Joe.”

  Her whisper was piercing; she must have seen the slits of his half-open eyes. Ben Joe stirred slowly and then muttered something, making his voice purposely sleepy-sounding.

  “Come on,” she said patiently. “You’re not asleep.”

  She came to the foot of his bed, hugging her bathrobe around her, and sat down with a bounce that he was sure would wake up the whole household. He sighed and drew his knees up.

  “I’m almost asleep,” he said.

  “You’re not.”

  She settled herself down more securely, tucking her feet up under her to keep them warm. Her face was lively and wide awake.

  “How come you’re up?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Well, for one thing, I was wondering where you were.”

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “Well, I was just wondering.”

  He lowered his knees and swung his feet to the other side of the bed so she would be more comfortable, and smiled at her, but all he could think of to say was “I’m all right” again.

  “I know.” She rested her chin in one hand and looked at him seriously. “Where’d you go?”

  “Just out.”

  “Oh.”

  He paused a minute, and then finally gave in and said, “What happened to Gary?”

  “He’s asleep on the couch.”

  “I know, but what happened to him? To him and Joanne?”

  “Nothing, I guess.” She began stirring around restlessly and after a minute she rose and pulled the window shade up. “Joanne said she was committed to a date and was darn well going to keep her commitments.” she said. She was leaning her elbows on the window sill now; her whisper came back cool and sharp, resounding off the pane. “And even though that Horner guy said he thought it’d be better to take a rain check, she said no and went out real quick, leaving Gary kind of empty-handed-looking and Gram crying into the sofa cushions and wishing she’d married Jamie Dower—”

  “What happened when she got back?” Ben Joe broke in.

  “Joanne? I don’t know. I don’t think her date came inside with her when he brought her home again—”

  “Thank God for small gifts,” he said.

  “Well, but she and Gary didn’t talk too much. She just went on to bed after a few minutes. I reckon she’s counting on getting it settled in the morning. While she was on her date, Gary stayed home and taught us how to make a French omelet. You take—”

  “Jenny, I’m getting awfully sleepy.”

  Jenny went on looking out the window, her face cheerful and her mouth pursed silently to whistle. “You should see Lisa,” she said after a minute. “She’s out walking under the clothesline. Can’t get to sleep, I guess.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “Well, it’s no wonder she had to go all the way outside, considering she shares a room with Jane. Can’t make a sound in there. Step on a dust ball in your bare feet and Jane’s wide awake wanting to know what that crunching sound was.”

  “Well, tell Lisa to come in,” Ben Joe said. “Makes me nervous.”

  “You’d be more nervous if she did come in.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, she’ll come soon of her own accord, anyway. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Well, all right,” said Ben Joe. But he frowned and picked at the tufts of his bed spread. He never could have the feeling that the whole family was under one roof and taken care of; one always had to be out wandering around somewhere beyond his jurisdiction.

  “You try and get some sleep, now,” Jenny was saying. She straightened up and left the window, heading toward the door and tying the sash of her bathrobe as she walked. When she reached the hallway she turned back and said, “Night.”

  “Night.”

  “See you in the morning.”

  “If morning comes,” Ben Joe said.

  She smiled suddenly and closed the door on him with a gentle click. Ben Joe turned over on his side, facing the wall. He closed his eyes and found that this time they stayed closed, although the muscles of his face were still drawn tight. Against his cheek the pillow was cool and slightly rough. Every time he breathed, the pillow brushed his skin with a soft, crisp sound and it made itself into a rhythm, plunging him farther and farther down until he found himself in the black, teetering world of half-sleep.

  His father was sitting at the sunlit breakfast table. His mustache was gone and his face was as lined and leathery as it had been the day he died, although Ben Joe himself was only a small boy sitting at the table beside him. Why wasn’t he dreaming the ages correctly? Either his father should be a mustached, smooth-faced young man or Ben Joe should be at least old enough for high school. He pulled his mind up from the deep water of his dream and opened his eyes. He must get all this arranged right. No, he thought suddenly, he had to stop the dream altogether. He thought about flat, green things—leaves, chalk boards, lawns seen from a distance—to make his mind blank again. The face of his father stayed in one corner, twinkling and deeply lined.

  He closed his eyes and gave in, sinking back into the stream of the dream. His father, frozen in one position at the breakfast table, became animated again, like a movie that has been stopped and then started at the same place. He was telling a story, one that they all knew by heart. Only he told it in that anonymous voice inside Ben Joe’s head instead of his own deep booming one; Ben Joe’s mind, searching frantically, was unable to recapture even the vaguest semblance of his father’s voice. But the story came to him perfectly, word for word:

  “When I was young, and liked to go places, my Uncle Jed said he’d take me to the Farmers’ Market in Raleigh. You remember Uncle Jed. He was the one could walk barefoot on broken glass without feeling it and went on farming even after the family got their money. Well, sir, this was back in the days when the farmers went to market the night before and all slept on the ground in blankets so as to be up at five. And that’s how I saw my first silly-minded boy.

  “Not that I haven’t seen plenty since.

  “Big as an ox, he was, and kind of round-eyed, and hung his head like he knew he was silly and was damned ashamed of it, too. And well he might be. For soon’s we all got to bed this boy began saying, ‘What time’s it, Pa?’

  “And his pa would say, growly-like, ‘’Bout ten o’clock, Quality.’

  “Quality Jones, that’s what his name was.

  “Name like that would make anybody silly-minded.

  “And then Quality would say, ‘What time’s it now, Pa?’

  “And his pa’d say, ‘Little after ten, Quality.’

  “Well, sir, this went on for maybe two hours. Farmers are patient men. They got to be. Got to see those seeds come up week by week, fraction by fraction, and sweat it out for some days not knowing yet is it weeds or vegetables making all that greeny look. So they kept quiet—just sort of muttered around a little. And when Quality started snoring, there was this little relaxing kind of sigh, like a breeze through a cornfield, all over the Farmers’ Market. />
  “What good’s a clock to a man in bed? What good?

  “But that wasn’t the half of it. For soon’s Quality started snoring, his pa raised up on one elbow and looked over at him and he says, ‘Quality, son?’

  “ ‘Huh, Pa?’ says Quality, all sleepy-like.

  “ ‘You all right?’ his pa asks.

  “And Quality says, ‘Yes, Pa.’

  “That’s the way it was all right. A fellow didn’t have time to get his eyes shut properly before it’d be, ‘You want to pee, son?’, ‘You want a drink of water, Quality?’ Lord, I never will forget.

  “After about two hours of his, my Uncle Jed he stood up and grabbed his army blanket and he shouted, to the whole market place he shouted, ‘Folks,’ he says, ‘if morning ever comes, I hope you get to meet this Quality!’

  “And everyone laughed, but Uncle Jed paid them no mind. He grabbed my blanket right up from under me and said, ‘Come on, boy, we’re going home,’ and that sure enough is where we went.

  “I never went back to that market place. Folks say it is still going, only modern now, but every time I think about it, it seems like the only way I can see it is at nighttime still, with Quality still on his crazy quilt, and all those men still waiting, waiting still, for morning to be coming. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

  His father smiled, and leaned back to look around at his family. In his sleep Ben Joe smiled too. (He was proud of himself; he’d dreamed it all correctly from beginning to end.) And there was the contented murmuring of the family settling back in their chairs in the sunlight. It was their favorite story. It belonged to them; their father always told it after a night like this one, when he said the women in this family thought night was only a darker kind of daytime, just as good as any time for wandering and for talking. Ben Joe leaned back in his chair exactly the way his father did, and looked around and smiled at his family smiling.

  His mother said, “The least you could do is try to keep it a secret from the children.”