the notion strongly because, she said, the old wooden bed up there
was unsafe- it was wobbly and the heavy headboard would crash down on father's head in
case the bed fell, and kill him. There was no dissuading him, however, and at a quarter
past ten he closed the attic door behind him and went up the narrow twisting stairs. We
later heard ominous creakings as he crawled into bed. Grandfather, who usually slept in
the attic bed when he was with us, had disappeared some days before. (On these occasions
he was usually gone
six or seven days and returned growling and out of temper, with the news that the Federal
Union was run by a passel of blockheads and that the Army of the Potomac didn't have any
more chance than a fiddler's bitch.)
We had visiting us at this time a nervous first cousin of mine named Briggs Beall, who
believed that he was likely to cease breathing when he was asleep. It was his feeling that
if he were not awakened every hour during the night, he might die of suffocation. He had
been accustomed to setting an alarm clock to ring at intervals until morning, but I
persuaded him to abandon this. He slept in my room and I told him that I was such a light
sleeper that if anybody quit breathing in the same room with me, I would wake instantly.
He tested me the first night-which I had suspected he would by holding his breath after my
regular breathing had convinced him I was asleep. I was not asleep, however, and called to
him. This seemed to allay his fears a little, but he took the precaution of putting a
class of spirits of camphor on a little table at the head of his bed. In case I didn't
arouse him until he was almost gone, he said, he would sniff the camphor, a powerful
reviver. Briggs was not the only member of his family who had his crotchets. Old Aunt Melissa
Beall (who could whistle like a man, with two fingers in her mouth) suffered under the
premonition that she was destined to die on South High Street, because she had been born
on South High Street and married on South High Street. Then there was Aunt Sarah Shoaf,
who never went to bed at night without the fear that a burglar was going to get in and
blow chloroform under her door through a tube. To avert this calamity -for she was in
greater dread of anesthetics than of losing her household goods-she always piled her
money, silverware, and other valuables in a neat stack just outside her bedroom, with a
note reading,: "This is all I have. Please take it and do
not use your chloroform, as this is all I have." Aunt Gracie Shoaf also had a burglar
phobia, but she met it with more fortitude. She was confident that burglars had been
getting into her house every night for four years. The fact that she never missed anything
was to her no proof to the contrary. She always claimed that she scared them off before
they could take anything, by throwing shoes down the hallway. When she went to bed she
piled, where she could get at them handily, all the shoes there were about her house. Five
minutes
after she had turned off the light, she would sit up in bed and say "Hark!" Her
husband, who had learned to ignore the whole situation as long ago as 1903, would either
be sound asleep or pretend to be sound asleep. In either case he would not respond to her
tugging and pulling, so that presently she would arise, tiptoe to the door, open it
slightly and heave a shoe down the hall in one direction, and its mate down the hall in
the other direction. Some nights she threw them all, some nights only a couple of pair. But I am straying from the remarkable incidents that took place during the
night that the bed fell on father. By midnight we were all in bed. The layout of the rooms
and the disposition of their occupants is important to an understanding of what later
occurred. In the front room upstairs (just under father's attic bedroom) were my mother
and my brother Terry, who sometimes sang in his sleep, usually "Marching Through
Georgia" or "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Briggs Beall and myself were in a
room adjoining this one. My brother Roy was in a room across the hall from ours. Our bull
terrier, Rex, slept in the hall.
My bed was an army cot, one of those affairs which are made wide enough to sleep on
comfortably only by putting up, flat with the middle section, the two sides which
ordinarily hang down like the sideboards of a drop-leaf table. When these sides are up, it
is perilous to roll too far toward the edge, for then the cot is likely to tip completely
over, bringing the whole bed down on top of one, with a tremendous banging crash. This, in
fact, is precisely what happened, about two o'clock in the morning. (It was my mother who,
in recalling the scene later, first referred to it as "the night the bed fell on your
father.")
Always a deep sleeper, slow to arouse (I had lied to Briggs), I was at first unconscious
of what had happened when the iron cot rolled me onto the floor and toppled over on me. It
left me still warmly bundled up and unhurt, for the bed rested above me like a canopy.
Hence I did not wake up, only reached-the edge of consciousness and went back. The
racket, however, instantly awakened my mother, in the next room, who came to the immediate
conclusion that her worst dread was realized: the big wooden bed upstairs had fallen on
father. She therefore screamed, "Let's go to your poor father!" It was this
shout, rather, than the noise of my cot falling, that awakened Herman, in the same room
with her. He thought that mother had become, for no apparent reason, hysterical.
"You're all right, Mamma!" He shouted, trying, to calm her. They exchanged shout
for shout for perhaps ten seconds: "Let's go to your poor father!" and
"You're all right! " That woke up Briggs. By this time I was conscious of what
was going on, in a vague way, but did not yet realize that I was under my bed instead of
on it. Briggs, awakening in the midst of loud shouts of fear and apprehension, came to the
quick conclusion that he was suffocating and that we were all trying to "bring him
out." With a low moan, he grasped the glass of camphor at the head of his bed and
instead of sniffing it poured it over himself. The room reeked of camphor. "Ugf,
alifg," choked Briggs, like a drowning man, for he had almost succeeded in stopping
his breath under the deluge of pungent its. He leaped out of bed and groped toward the
open window, but he came up against one that was closed. With his hand, he beat out the
glass, and I could hear it crash and tinkle on the alleyway below. It was at this juncture
that I, in trying to get up, had the uncanny sensation of feeling my bed above me. Foggy
with sleep, I now suspected, in my turn, that the whole uproar was being made in a frantic
endeavor to extricate me from what must be an unheard-of and perilous situation. "Get
me out of this!" I bawled. "Get me out!" I think I had the nightmarish
belief that I was entombed in a mine. "Gugh," gasped Briggs, floundering in his
camphor.
By this time my mother, still shouting, pursued by Herman, still shouting, was trying to
open the door to the attic, in order to' go up and get my father's body out of the
wreckage. The door was stuck, however, and wouldn't yield. Her frantic pulls on it only
added to the general banging and confusion. Roy and the dog were now up, the one shouting
questions, the other barking.
Father, farthest away and soundest sleeper of all, had by this time been awakened by the
battering on the attic door. He decided that the house was on fire. "I'm coming, I'm
coming!" he wailed in a slow, sleepy voice-it took him many minutes to regain full
consciousness. My mother, still believing he was caught under the bed, detected in his
"I'm coming!" the mournful, resigned note of one who is preparing to meet his
Maker. "He's dying!" she shouted.
"I'm all right!" Briggs yelled to reassure her. "I'm all right!" He
still believed that it was his own closeness to death that was worrying mother. I found at
last the light switch in my room, unlocked the door, and Briggs and I joined the others at
the attic door. The dog, who never did like Briggs, jumped for him assuming that he was
the culprit in whatever was going on and Roy had to throw Rex and hold him. We could hear
father crawling out of bed upstairs. Roy pulled the attic door open, with a mighty jerk,
and father came down the stairs, sleepy and irritable but safe and sound. My mother began
to weep when she saw him. Rex began to-howl. "What in the name of God "s going
on here?" asked father.
The situation was finally put together like a gigantic jig-saw puzzle. Father caught a
cold from prowling around in his bare feet but there were no other bad results. "I'm
glad," said mother, who always looked on the bright side of things, "that your
grandfather wasn't here." |
