The Tin Can Tree Read online

  “Why, Simon—”

  “Hush,” said James. “Now, Simon, we got three kinds of pizza mix out there. Sausage, and cheese, and something else. I forget. You go choose and then we’ll cook it up. All right?”

  “All right,” Simon said. He turned and looked back at Ansel, and then he went on into the kitchen. When he was gone, James came over and sat down beside Ansel.

  “Listen,” he said.

  Away from outsiders now, Ansel slumped back in his seat and let his shoulders sag. There were tired dark marks underneath his eyes; he hadn’t slept well. “You’re on my couch,” he said automatically. “Do I have to tell you, James? Sitting like that makes the springs go wrong.”

  “Simon’s folks are still on the hill,” said James. “We’ve got to keep him here; I promised Joan he wouldn’t sit in that house alone.”

  “Ah, sitting alone,” Ansel said. He sighed. “That’s no good.”

  “No. Will you help keep him busy?”

  “The couch, James.”

  James stood up, and Ansel swung his feet around and slid down until he was lying prone. “I don’t see how he can eat,” he said.

  “He’s hungry.”

  “I wonder about this world.”

  “People handle things their own ways,” James said. “Don’t go talking to him about dying, Ansel.”

  “Well.”

  “Will you?”

  “Well.”

  There was a crash of cans out in the kitchen. A cupboard door slammed, and Simon called, “Hey, James. I’ve decided.”

  “Which one?”

  “The sausage. There was only just the two of them.” He came into the living room, carrying the box of pizza mix, and Ansel raised his head to look over at him and then grunted and lay back and stared at the ceiling. For a minute Simon hesitated. Then he walked over to him and said, “You’re the pizza-maker.”

  “Who said?” Ansel asked.

  “Well, back there on the hill James said—”

  “All right.” Ansel sat up slowly, running his fingers through his hair. “It’s always something,” he said.

  “Well, maybe—”

  “No, no. I don’t mind.”

  And then Ansel smiled, using his widest smile that dipped in the middle and turned up at the corners like a child’s drawing of a happy man. When he did that his long thin face turned suddenly wide at the cheekbones, and his chin became shiny. “We’ll make my speciality,” he said. “It’s called an icebox pizza. On refrigerator-defrosting days that’s the way we clean the icebox; we load it all on a pizza crust and serve it up for lunch. You want to see how I make it?”

  He was standing now, smoothing down his Sunday jacket and straightening his slumped shoulders. When he reached for the pizza mix Simon walked forward and gave it to him, not hanging back now but looking more at ease. Ansel said, “This is something every man should know. Even if he’s married. He can cook it when his wife is sick and serve her lunch in bed. Do you want an apron?”

  “No,” said Simon.

  “Don’t blame you. Don’t blame you at all. Well—” and he was heading for the kitchen now, reading the directions as he walked. His walk was slow, but not enough to cause James any worry. James could judge the way Ansel felt just by glancing at him, most of the time. He had to; Ansel would never tell himself. When he felt his best he was likely to call for meals on a tray, and when he was really sick he might decide to wallpaper the bedroom. He was a backward kind of person. James had a habit of looking at him as someone a whole generation removed from him, although in reality he was twenty-six, only two years younger than James himself. He was thinking that way now, watching with narrow, almost paternal eyes as Ansel made his way into the kitchen.

  “Naturally there are really no rules,” Ansel was saying, “since you never know what might be in the icebox.” And Simon’s voice came floating back: “Fruit, even? Lettuce?” “Well, now …” Ansel said.

  James smiled and went over to the easy chair to sit down, stretching his legs out in front of him. It felt good to be home again. The house was a dingy place, with yellow peeling walls and sunken furniture. And it was so rickety that whenever James had some photography job that required a long time-exposure he had to run around warning everyone. “Just sit a minute,” he would say, and he would pull up chairs for everybody in this house and then go dashing off to take his picture before people started shaking the floors again. But at least it was a comfortable house, not far from town, and Ansel had that big front window in the living room where he could watch the road. He would sit on the couch with his elbows on the sill, and everything he saw passing—just an old truck, or a boy riding a mule—meant something to him. He had been watching that long, and he knew people that well.

  Thinking of Ansel and his window made James look toward it, to see what was going on, but all he saw from where he sat was the greenish-yellow haze of summer air, framed by mesh curtains. He rose and went over to look out, with his hands upon the sill, and peered down the gravel road toward the hill he had just come from. No one was in sight. Maybe it would be hours before they returned; Joan might still be standing there, trying to make her aunt and uncle stop staring at that grass. But even so, James went on watching for several minutes. He could still feel the wind, gentler down here but strong enough to push the curtains in.

  For a long time now, wind would make him think of today. He had climbed that hill behind all the others, and seen how the wind whipped the women’s black skirts and ruffled little crooked parts down the backs of their hairdos. And when the first cluster of relatives had taken their leave at the end, stopping first to touch Mrs. Pike’s folded arms or murmur something to Mr. Pike, the words they said were blown away and neither of the parents answered. Though they might not have answered anyway, even without the wind. The day that Janie Rose died, when James had spent thirty-six hours in the hospital waiting room and finally heard the news with only that tenth of his mind that was still awake, he had gone to Mrs. Pike and said, “Mrs. Pike, if there’s anything I or Ansel can do for you, no matter what it is, we will want to do it.” And Mrs. Pike had looked past him at the information desk and said, “Just falling off a tractor don’t make a person die,” and then had turned and left. So James had let them be, and went home and told Ansel to keep to himself a while and not go bothering the Pikes. “Not even to give our sympathy?” asked Ansel, and James said no, not even that. He hadn’t liked the thought of Ansel’s going to the funeral, either. Ansel said he had half a mind to go anyway—he could always rest on the way, he said—but James could picture that: Ansel toiling up the hill, clasping his chest from the effort and gasping out lines of funeral poetry, calling out for the whole procession to stop the minute he needed a rest. So James had gone alone, and quietly, and had promised to report to Ansel the minute it was over. The only one there that he had spoken to was Joan; the only two sounds he carried away with him were Joan’s low voice and the roaring of the wind. He thought he would never like the sound of wind again.

  Out in the kitchen now, Janie Rose’s brother was talking on and on in his froggy little voice. “I never saw peanut butter on a pizza,” he was saying. “You sure you know what you’re doing, Ansel?”

  “Just wait’ll you taste it,” Ansel said.

  James left the window and went out to the kitchen. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “It’s coming along,” Ansel said. He was swathed in a big checked dishtowel, wrapped right over his suit jacket and safety-pinned at the back, and on the counter stood the almost finished pizza that Simon was decorating. The kitchen was rippling with heat. James took his shirt off and laid it on the counter, so that he was in just his undershirt, and he opened the back door.

  “Aren’t you hot?” he asked Simon.

  But Simon said, “No,” and went on laying wiener slices down. On the floor at his feet were little sprinklings of flour and Parmesan, and the front of his suit was practically another pizza in itself, but the impor
tant thing was keeping him busy. It was too bad the pizza-making couldn’t go on for another hour or so, just for that reason; they would have to find something else for him to do.

  Ansel said, “Now the olives, Simon.”

  “I don’t think I like olives.”

  “Sure you do. Olives are good for the brain. Will you look at your shirt?”

  Simon looked down at his shirt and then shrugged.

  “It’ll wash,” he said.

  “Your mama’ll have a fit.”

  “Ah, she won’t care.”

  “I bet she will.”

  “She won’t care.”

  “Any mother would care about that,” said Ansel. “Makes quite a picture.”

  “Pictures,” James said suddenly. He straightened up. “Hey, Simon. You seen my last photographs?”

  “No,” said Simon. “You get another customer?”

  “Not in the last few days, no. But I took a bunch on my own a while ago. When you’re done I’ll show you.”

  “Okay,” said Simon.

  “Olives,” Ansel reminded him.

  James went over to the back window and looked out. There was the Pikes’ Nellie, burrowing her way through a tangle of wild daisies and bachelor’s buttons. He had been planning to pick Joan a bunch of those daisies, before all this happened. They were her favorite flowers. Now he couldn’t; the house would be stuffed with hothouse funeral flowers. And anyway, he couldn’t just walk in there with a bunch of daisies in his hand and risk disturbing the Pikes. The daisies would have grown old there, waving in the sunshine on their long green stems, before he could go back to doing things like that again.

  The pizza was in the oven. Ansel slammed the door on it and wiped his hands and said, “There, now.”

  “How much longer?” Simon asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Fifteen-twenty minutes. We’ll go out where it’s cool and wait on it. You coming, James?”

  James followed them out to the living room. It seemed very dark and cool here now. Ansel settled down on his couch with a long contented groan, and Simon went over to Ansel’s window and stood watching the road.

  “Anybody seen those people?” he asked James.

  “What people?”

  “My mama and them. Anybody seen them?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Simon, “I reckon I’ll just run on over and have a look, see if maybe they haven’t—”

  “I think we’d have seen them if they’d come,” said James. “Or heard them, one.”

  “Still and all, I guess I’ll just—”

  “You two,” Ansel said. “Do you have to stand over me like that?” He was lying full length now, with his head propped against one of the sofa arms. “Kind of overwhelming,” he said, and James moved Simon gently away by one shoulder.

  “I almost forgot,” he said. “You want to see my pictures?”

  “Oh, well I—”

  “They’re good ones.”

  “Well.”

  James went down the little hallway to his darkroom. There was a damp and musky smell there, and only the dimmest light. He headed for the filing cabinet in the corner, where he kept his pictures, and opened the bottom drawer. The latest ones were at the front, laid away carefully (taking pictures for fun wasn’t something he could afford very often), and when he pulled them out he handled them gently, examining the first two alone for a minute before he returned to the living room.

  “Here you go,” he said to Simon. “Your hands clean?”

  “Yes.”

  His hands were covered with tomato sauce, but he held the pictures by the rims so James didn’t say anything. The first picture didn’t impress Simon. He studied it only a minute and then sniffed. “One of those,” he said. James grinned and handed him the next one. Neither Simon nor Janie Rose had ever liked anything but straight, posed portraits—preferably of someone they could recognize, which always made them giggle. But when James wasn’t taking wedding pictures, or photographs for the Larksville newspaper, he turned away from portraits altogether. He had the idea of photographing everyone he knew in the way his mind pictured them when they weren’t around. And the way people stuck in his memory was odd—they were doing something without looking at him, usually, wheeling a wheelbarrow up a hill or hunting under the dining-room table for a spool of thread. Old girlfriends of his used to object to being photographed in their most faded blue jeans, the way he remembered them from some picnic. But almost always he won out in the end; the pictures of people in his mind and in his filing cabinet were nearly identical. Joan he imagined in a dust storm, the way he had first seen her (she had come down the road with two suitcases and a drawstring handbag, spitting dust out of her mouth and turning her face sideways to the wind as she walked). For a long time now he had waited for another dust storm, and last week one had come. That was in those first two pictures, the ones that Simon had barely glanced at. Even when James said, “That’s your cousin Joan, if you don’t know,” thinking to make Simon look twice, Simon only raised his eyebrows. It was the third picture he liked. In that one Ansel was lying on his couch, looking up at the sky through the window and absently playing with the cord of the shade. “Ansel!” Simon said, and Ansel turned his head and looked at him.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “I just seen your picture here.”

  “Oh, yes,” Ansel said.

  “Of you on your couch and all.”

  “Oh, yes. Here, let me look.” He raised himself up on one elbow, reaching out toward the picture, and Simon brought it over to him. “That’s me, all right,” said Ansel. He studied it for a while, smiling. “It’s not bad,” he said.

  “I think it’s a right good picture.”

  “Yep. Not bad at all.” He handed the picture back and lay down again, staring up at the ceiling and still smiling. “They’re wonderful things, pictures,” he said.

  “Well, some of them.”

  “Very remaining things, you know?”

  “I don’t like them other kind, though,” Simon said. “Dust clouds and all. I can’t see what they’re for.”

  “They’re for me,” said James. “Here, I got another one of Ansel.”

  “James,” Ansel said, “do your legs ever get to feeling kind of numb? Kind of achey-numb?”

  “Prop them up.”

  “Propping up won’t do it.”

  “It’s what you get for not having your shots,” James said.

  “Oh, well. Right behind the knee, it is.” He propped his legs against the back of the couch and slid farther down, so that his feet were the highest part of him. “This couch is too short,” he said. “Here, Simon. Hand me the next one.”

  The next picture had Ansel sitting up, looking self-conscious. When Ansel saw it he smiled his dippy little smile again and brought the picture closer to examine it. “This is one I posed myself,” he said. “Had James take it like I wanted. James, I believe it’s my shoes aggravating that feeling.”

  James set the rest of the pictures beside Simon and reached over to untie Ansel’s shoes. “If you’d get the right size,” he said.

  “No, it’s to do with my illness. I can tell.”

  “It’s on Wednesdays you get your shots,” said James. “This is Saturday. That’s five times you missed.”

  “Lot you care. Listen—” He twisted around, so that he was facing Simon. “What was I talking about? The picture. That’s right. I was about to say, in my estimation this picture is the best of the lot. The one of me sitting up.” He tilted the picture toward the light. “Heroic, like,” he said. “Profile to the window and all.”

  “The other one’s better,” said Simon.

  “What other one?”

  “The first one. You lying down.”

  “That’s because you’re used to me lying down,” Ansel said. He sighed and tossed the picture onto the coffee table. “Everyone’s used to it. When I stand up they hardly recognize me. Faces change, standing up. B
ecome more bottom-heavy. Pass me the next one.”

  “I think the pizza must be done,” said James. “Hey, Ansel?”

  “Well, take it out. This one of Mr. Abbott—I’d be insulted if I was him. Troweling up the garden plot with his back to the camera and his rear end sticking out.”

  James got up and went to the kitchen. The pizza-smell filled the whole room, and when he opened the oven he thought it looked done. From a hook on the wall he took a pot-holder and then hauled the pizza out and set it on the counter, burning one finger on the way. “Ansel!” he called. He came to the living room doorway. Ansel was just bending over a picture, rocking slightly back and forth and frowning at it, and Simon was sorting through the rest of them. “Ansel,” James repeated.

  “This one here,” said Ansel, “ought not to’ve been included.”

  “Which one?” Simon asked.

  “I’m ashamed of James. You ought not to see it.”

  “Well, I just saw it,” said Simon. “What’s the matter with it?”

  “Nothing’s the matter. I’ll just set it aside.”

  He pulled himself up and laid the picture face down on the back of the couch, looking over his shoulder to make sure Simon hadn’t seen. “Shamed of James,” he said.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake,” James said from the doorway. “What’s all that about, Ansel?”

  “It ought never to’ve been included, that picture.”

  James crossed the living room and picked up the picture. It was a perfectly ordinary one—he’d done it as a favor for Miss Faye, who wanted her screened back porch photographed now that her nephew had spent half the summer building it. She had led James way behind the house, deep into the wild grass that grew there among scattered piles of rusted stoves and old car parts, and she directed him to photograph the whole long house so that her people in Georgia could get an idea how the porch was proportioned. “I think this is too far, ma’am,” James told her, but she insisted and this was what had come of it—a wild, weedy-looking picture, with the house rising above a wave of grass like a huge seagoing barge. Miss Faye’s porch was only a little bump sticking out along with a lot of other bumps—Janie Rose Pike’s tacked-on back bedroom, the woodshed under James and Ansel’s bathroom window, and the rusted old fuel barrel on its stilt legs beside the middle chimney. He hadn’t shown the picture to Miss Faye yet, for fear of disappointing her. But it wasn’t all that bad; he couldn’t see what was upsetting Ansel.