I took what he pulled off his shelves that day, and while he was upstairs looking for more, I stuffed it all in the big leather mail pouch. My heart cantered, I have no nerve for crime. But that day, found some. By the time he was watching me out the upstairs window, I was half done. You should see what all I threw in that tar barrel: wastepaper, advertising supplements, the whole trash basket under my table, and more. Quite a few ugly letters I’d set aside. Things that deserved to be gone.
His notebooks went home with me to Mrs. Bittle’s, and there they stayed in a box in my wardrobe, hidden under some knitting wool. Let those men come and search the place, was my thought, for they’d not have a second look at a box of knitting wool and needles. Most will run from the sight. I thought I would only keep it there until Mr. Shepherd changed his mind. Or until such time as needed, to prove he’d done no wrong. No such time came, as far as I could see, though I still had no idea what he’d written in a natural lifetime of little books. A nerve for that sort of crime I did not have, to poke my nose in a living man’s diary.
I didn’t do that until coming back from Mexico. At first, a glance was all I could endure, looking for certain dates and such, to make a proper obituary. But of course that did not come to pass, they ran their own little useless piece, so my researching wasn’t any excuse for long. But still I went on glancing, a page here and thither. Time and again I took up his notebooks knowing they were not meant for my eyes, yet my eyes went on looking, many were the reasons. Some of them plain by now, I surely think.
Going to Mexico, that had been my idea. I didn’t like to say so afterward, due to events. But at the time I proposed it, things had come to a point. After the hearing he’d stopped writing, for good he said. Instead he bought a television set and let its nonsense rule his days. Mook the Moon Man comes on at four, and so on. I still came to his house twice a week, but the mail was not worth answering. My concern wasn’t to take his money, I’d found another job. I could have left him alone, but feared to do it.
One day he sat staring at the advertisements and declared he hated what America looked like now. Sofas and chairs with little pointy legs. Like a woman in high heels, he said, walking around smiling with a bad backache. And those metal funnel-hat lamps on poles, they look like they want to electrocute you. He missed beauty.
I asked him, why not go to Mexico then, I reckon it is prettier there. He said he couldn’t unless I went with him. Thinking that would be that. But I said, “All right, I will call the air-port right now.” What possessed me? I can’t say.
He was so changed by then, even his looks. Whatever used to show up for its workaday there inside him, it had shut off the lights and gone on home. He was fagged out in the chair as usual, in his old gray flannels, smoking, never taking his eyes off the set. Captain Video was on, some underwater band of thieves fighting. They had Al Hodge by the neck, fixing to drown him. I asked him whether we ought to go back to Mérida, because he’d seemed to like it there. He said no, let’s go to Isla Pixol so he could dive in the ocean, because that was all that made him happy as a boy. That was a grave moment, I see that now. Full of all that was to come, and me with no inkling. But I believe he did. Have an inkling.
That was in April, a year and some past the hearing. A Monday or Thursday, for those were the afternoons I still came. A joyful month if there ever was one, you’d think. Even a feather duster will lay an egg in April. But such generous feeling had gone from the land. No real work remained for me at Mr. Shepherd’s after the hearing, and I’d commenced looking for another income, disliking to be any burden. I was floored to find the city wouldn’t hire me. Not at the clerk’s office, though I’d once kept that whole place afloat. Not at the library where I’d volunteered. I can’t be a government employee due to previous association with the wrong element, they told me, it is all in print, and nothing to be done about it. It was the same at the Teachers College. After some months of asking, a hateful thing in itself, an acquaintance from the Woman’s Club consented to recommend me as a bookkeeper at Raye’s Department Store. It was a low position, mornings only, and I had to work in a basement office. They could take no chance on a customer seeing my face.
Hard times are nothing new to me. My father used to say a man can get used to anything except hanging by the neck. I believe that. But Mr. Shepherd could not. He had a well of hopelessness inside him, and it bubbled out to flood his days and his sights for the future if any. He said if readers found him so despicable, he wouldn’t trouble them with more books. It was hard to argue, as the trinkle of mail that still came was dreadful. Why does a person spend money on a stamp, to spout bile at a stranger? “Now our boys are going to Korea to be killed and mutilated by the Communists. So if one of them named Harrison Shepherd is starving, that delights me immeasurably.”
He’d been called names before, and borne it. But when a man’s words are taken from him and poisoned, it’s the same as poisoning the man. He could not speak, for how his own tongue would be fouled. Words were his all. I felt I’d witnessed a murder, just as he’d seen his friend murdered in Mexico. Only this time they left the body living.
His books weren’t banned anymore, just gone. They said he’d defrauded the publisher with the loyalty affidavit, so the advance money had to be returned and the book dropped. Not many options remained to Harrison Shepherd, watching a Moon Man in his living room being one of the few. He said Artie Gold had predicted it. That sometimes you really can see the empire is falling, and Mr. Gold saw it coming, all the green grass of our land killed for good. I said fiddlesticks, grass will grow right up through a sidewalk and the Lord loves what He cannot kill.
But that was false cheer, I knew better. Nothing was coming up by then, no gumption rising anywhere without a resolution promptly passed to cut it down. The Woman’s Club had become a drear business, their sole concern to oppose waywardness: a City Council man or a school history book. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass no good for children, they set a bad example. It’s the same everywhere now, look at faces. In the luncheonettes on Charlotte you’ll see people lined up with a haint upon them, sore afraid of not being as American as the next one. What’s the matter, sir, you look as though you’ve seen a Communist! The word itself could get a child’s mouth washed with soap. It used to be in the Geographics, I learned the word as a child, “Every-Day Life in the Ukraine” and so forth. But the newspapers and magazines have had their mouths washed with soap too. Even today, years after Mr. Shepherd’s hearing. It would still proceed just about as it did then. People have no more vinegar in them. You can resign from the Woman’s Club, but the world is all, you can’t just stop attending.