Stoner

"You don't know me. I was passing by, and your ma asked me to call. I been trying all afternoon."

"Yes," Stoner said. His hand holding the mouthpiece was shaking. "What's wrong?"

"It's your pa," the voice said. "I don't rightly know how to start."

The dry, laconic, frightened voice went on, and William Stoner listened to it dully, as if it had no existence beyond the receiver that he held to his ear. What he heard concerned his father. He had been (the voice said) feeling poorly for nearly a week; and because his field hand by himself had not been able to keep up with the furrowing and planting, and even though he had a high fever, he had started out early in the morning to get some planting done. His field hand had found him at midmorning, lying face down on the broken field, unconscious. He had carried him to the house, put him in bed, and gone to fetch a doctor; but by noon he was dead.

'Thank you for calling," Stoner said mechanically. "Tell my mother that I'll be there tomorrow."

He put the receiver back on its hook and stared for a long time at the bell-shaped mouthpiece attached to the narrow black cylinder. He turned around and looked at the room. Edith was regarding him expectantly.

"Well? What is it?" she asked.

"It's my father," Stoner said. "He's dead."

"Oh, Willy!" Edith said. Then she nodded. "You'll probably be gone for the rest of the week then."

"Yes," Stoner said.

"Then I'll get Aunt Emma to come over and help with Grace."

"Yes," Stoner said mechanically. "Yes."

He got someone to take his classes for the rest of the week and early the next morning caught the bus for Booneville. The highway from Columbia to Kansas City, which cut through Booneville, was the one that he had traveled seventeen years before, when he had first come to the University; now it was wide and paved, and neat straight fences enclosed fields of wheat and corn that flashed by him outside the bus window.

Booneville had changed little during the years he had not seen it. A few new buildings had gone up, a few old ones had been torn down; but the town retained its bareness and flimsiness, and looked still as if it were only a temporary arrangement that could be dispensed with at any moment. Though most of the streets had been paved in the last few years, a thin haze of dust hung about the town, and a few horse-drawn, steel-tired wagons were still around, the wheels sometimes giving off sparks as they scraped against the concrete paving of street and curb.

Nor had the house changed substantially. It was perhaps drier and grayer than it had been; not even a fleck of paint remained on the clapboards, and the unpainted timber of the porch sagged a bit nearer to the bare earth.

There were some people in the house--neighbors--whom Stoner did not remember; a tall gaunt man in a black suit, white shirt, and string tie was bending over his mother, who sat in a straight chair beside the narrow wooden box that held the body of his father. Stoner started across the room. The tall man saw him and walked to meet him; the man's eyes were gray and flat like pieces of glazed crockery. A deep and unctuous baritone voice, hushed and thick, uttered some words; the man called Stoner "brother" and spoke of "bereavement," and "God, who hath taken away," and wanted to know if Stoner wished to pray with him. Stoner brushed past the man and stood in front of his mother; her face swam before him.

Through a blur he saw her nod to him and get up from the chair. She took his arm and said, "You'll want to see your pa."

With a touch that was so frail that he could hardly feel it, she led him beside the open coffin. He looked down. He looked until his eyes cleared, and then he started back in shock. The body that he saw seemed that of a stranger; it was shrunken and tiny, and its face was like a thin brown-paper mask, with black deep depressions where the eyes should have been. The dark blue suit which enfolded the body was grotesquely large, and the hands that folded out of the sleeves over the chest were like the dried claws of an animal. Stoner turned to his mother, and he knew that the horror he felt was in his eyes.

"Your pa lost a lot of weight the last week or two," she said. "I asked him not to go out in the field, but he got up before I was awake and was gone. He was out of his head. He was just so sick he was out of his head and didn't know what he was doing. The doctor said he must have been, or he couldn't have managed it."

As she spoke Stoner saw her clearly; it was as if she too were dead as she spoke, a part of her gone irretrievably into that box with her husband, not to emerge again. He saw her now; her face was thin and shrunken; even in repose it was so drawn that the tips of her teeth were disclosed beneath her thin lips. She walked as if she had no weight or strength. He muttered a word and left the parlor; he went to the room in which he had grown up and stood in its bareness. His eyes were hot and dry, and he could not weep.