Monday, May 11, 2015

The Dumbwaiter

[Feel free to print the Google document instead of reading the story as a blog post. Photo below by Elliot Margolies.]

legs

When Mr. Hexter died, there was a lot of curiosity, morbid curiosity you might call it, about his artificial leg. Some people thought that it was like false teeth, that nobody would think of removing a person’s false teeth before burial, while others argued that he had died in bed with the leg off and it would be more natural not to strap it back on just for the show.

Actually the question was moot because no one knew where he kept the leg at night when he took it off and was resting in bed. The funeral director said he couldn’t find it.

The other mystery which puzzled people like my brother, who had read all the Sherlock Holmes books, was that Mr. Hexter’s house was supposed to have a dumbwaiter. It didn’t seem reasonable. The house was only one story with three rooms, barely large enough for a bachelor like Mr. Hexter who took his meals at the boarding house downtown and who had no relatives to entertain and never engaged in card parties or otherwise invited anyone save the minister to cross his threshold.

How could a one-story house have a dumbwaiter, my brother and I asked ourselves over and over. No other house in town had such a device. The grandest domestic arrangement we knew of was a backstairs in the home of a former congressman, a person far above Mr. Hexter’s station in life. Yet we had always known about the dumbwaiter the same as we had always known not to ask Mr. Hexter how he lost his leg or how it was he had no family.

“He came here a grown man,” our father said, severely, when my brother brought the matter up. “If he wanted folks to know his life story, he’d have told us.”

“Perhaps no one ever gave him a chance,” my brother said. Like myself he was rather fond of Mr. Hexter, who always seemed glad to see us when we were sent to his shop with our parents’ shoes.

After we had stood respectfully at the counter for a while, he would look up and stop his noisy machine. Then he would limp over and hold out his hands expectantly, fondling the leather at the points of pressure, pushing at the sides for stitching that might have loosened, and finally slipping his hand inside to see if the inner sole had been abused.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he would say and launch into a recital of the deficiencies which must be corrected, giving a financial accounting for each item. While he was making this examination and diagnosis, he would limp restlessly back and forth in the small space behind the counter and giant sewing machine, the stiff leg heaved along by the rest of him.

He limped that way into church too, taking the steps one leg at a time, settling into a pew towards the front, his stiff leg stretched straight out. Invited to rise and fall as the minister directed, most of the infirm and elderly remained seated; but not Mr. Hexter, no matter how awkward. He was a man of observance.

“Too bad he wasn’t more of a mixer,” our mother said after the funeral, helping the funeral director to arrange the flowers over the new mound.

“We could have asked him to Sunday dinner,” my brother said, as if there were something about Mr. Hexter he would like to know in particular.

“A shoemaker must stick to his last,” I said, eager to change the subject for I could not bear to hear it when my brother was being impertinent.

“And now he’s had his last chance,” my brother whispered in my ear, pulling me aside to tell me that the funeral director when he was accused of misplacing the artificial leg had sworn on Mr. Hexter’s Bible (lying open where he had read his last devotional) that he had looked in every nook and cranny and the leg was nowhere to be found. He told the minister that he had no thought but to fix Mr. Hexter up the same as if he were going to church.

Since Mr. Hexter never used crutches, there was no way he would have taken the leg off in one room and then gone into his bedroom and gotten into bed. A person would have to be extremely nimble to hop about like that on one leg and clearly old Mr. Hexter wasn’t, heaving his artificial leg along like a great stiff board, a burden if ever there was one, but still a great invention for a person deprived of the normal leg that most of us enjoy without giving it a second thought. My brother compared him to Long John Silver with his craggy visage and tapping peg leg and we were relieved that Mr. Hexter could wear a regular shoe and hide his maimed body under the long canvas apron which protected him from the grime and messiness of his trade.

On Sunday at church he was often accompanied by some lost soul he had badgered into coming with him. I came into his shop one day when he was after one of these poor sinners and heard Mr. Hexter meeting his protests. “You just get down there to the clothing store and buy yourself a suit of Sunday clothes. They’ll put it on my bill.” And when Sunday came, I saw the man, suitably clothed, sitting with Mr. Hexter. They never came twice these lost sheep, but Mr. Hexter made a rich man of the clothing store owner, my father said.

“Still, it beats the loneliness of sitting there by yourself week after week,” our mother said. “I’ll say amen to that,” our father said, smiling at my brother and me.

I felt at that moment what the Bible meant when it spoke of lying in the bosom of Abraham and I could feel my brother beside me grow tense with the desire to know some other way of life besides our own, to say to our father that not everyone was bon to marry and beget children, that Mr. Hexter might have chosen bachelorhood even if he had not lost a leg.

“For a long time I prayed that old Mr. Hexter would grow a new leg from his stump,” I said, wanting to veer the conversation in some safe direction, not caring that my father would look at me sharply and inquire how I knew anything about Mr. Hexter’s poor stump.

“The Bible wants us to believe in miracles and it says if you believe you can move mountains,” I said, grown heady with the knowledge that through my efforts my brother had relaxed and was smiling at the childish nature of my thought. I admired him too much and wanted his approval too much to sit still while he singlehandedly confronted our father with some idea which our father would find unspeakable and forbid us to hold to.

“Mr. Hexter is a mystery man,” my brother said, smiling at me. “A great saver of souls.”

We thought it a wonderful pun and even now I can never hear the word salvation without thinking of Mr. Hexter and his cobbler shop. Only now I think of him as free and mobile, enjoying forever the life of the spirit.

When he died there wasn’t much furniture in his little house, but what there was he left to the church along with the house. Even when the furniture and odds and ends were auctioned off, the artificial leg didn’t turn up. There was a lot of talk then, but by the time the house had stood empty for six months or more, most people had forgotten all about Mr. Hexter and his artificial leg.

I was sure, however, that my brother hadn’t forgotten, that he meant to investigate for himself the inside of Mr. Hexter’s house; and I watched all through the summer for signs of the irresistible itch that I had seen come over him before when a house stood empty for any length of time. Because I had proved my trustworthiness on several occasions, I hoped that he would take me with him when he decided to break into Mr. Hexter’s house. Even though it was church property under the terms of Mr. Hexter’s will and I knew well the penalty for violating church property with an unclean heart, I prayed nightly that my brother would invite me to go with him.

When the day came, he stood in front of our parents with his fingers crossed behind his back and said that he would take me swimming with him if they gave permission. It was late in August just before school started up again and right after lunch when we could be pretty sure that there would be nobody on the streets or busy in their yards. Any neighbors who hadn’t gone to the mountains for the worst of August were at least sensible enough to lie down and be still in the early afternoon.

We headed off in the direction of the ballast pits where we swam in the hot weather and cut through some vacant lots to come up onto the back of Mr. Hexter’s house.

There was a window where the latch had rusted loose, and since nothing of value was left inside the house, nobody had bothered to fix it. My brother carefully raised the window and we crawled into what appeared to be a kitchen; the next room was a small sitting or dining room and the next was a bedroom or so it seemed from the built-in cupboard and the faded wall paper where pictures or at least a calendar had been hung. We shone the flashlight in closets and cupboards, but not even a button or stray pin was left. We looked carefully about the paneling supposed that we would see immediately the place where the dumb waiter would be, but there was no sign of any opening. We felt about for a secret spring that would reveal an opening, but with no luck. Then we looked for stairs to go down to a cellar or maybe a trap door. Nothing. The house was too simple and beastly hot. There was no break in the flooring anywhere. Defeated and perspiring, we crawled outside again and looked around to see if there was some clue we had missed.

“Three chimneys,” my brother said, “and only two fireplaces in the house.”

We knew that there had to be a cellar door. Two old-fashioned rambling rose bushes had been planted in the back; and as we gingerly lifted back the long, intertwined canes, we could see a small wooden cover. My brother got out his jackknife and pried at the edge until it splintered and gave. We crawled backwards down five rotting steps. He shone his flashlight around the room and sure enough there was a fireplace, large enough for open-hearth cooking.

“It was the kitchen in slave times, for sure,” he said. “The poor devils.”

The flashlight beam lit on an open space in the brick; and even though I couldn’t see his face at all, I knew his eyes were shining.

“Look,” he said, pulling at the rope. “They put the food on a tray and there was another person upstairs who took it off and served it.” He tugged again at the rope. At first it didn’t budge; but when he tried harder, it pulled loose and we could hear the sound of the platform breaking loose overhead seconds before it landed with a plop and clatter, raising the dust of years.

When we opened our eyes and took our hands away from our mouths, the flashlight beam rested on Mr. Hexter’s leg. The dumb waiter must have been his hiding place; and what we had thought was the dining room was really his bedroom. Probably the panel was where he could reach it from his bed and along with the funeral director we had been too dumb to spot it.

For a minute we looked at the foot and the toes molded into terrible togetherness, then at the faint glow which came from the upper part of the leg, pink and smooth, the thigh shapely with an ankle as neat as a girl’s. How Mr. Hexter must have laughed with delight every time he strapped that beautiful leg onto the rest of him.

We closed the cellar door as if it had been a tomb, spreading the rose bushes back as best we could in a hurry.

[Undated short story by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

No comments :

Post a Comment

Comments are welcome!