The Grass Harp, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

by Truman Capote

WHEN WAS IT THAT FIRST I heard of the grass harp? Long before the autumn we lived in the China tree; an earlier autumn, then; and of course it was Dolly who told me, no one else would have known to call it that, a grass harp.

One of the stories he spread, that Verena was a morphodyte, has never stopped going around, and the ridicule he heaped on Miss Dolly Talbo was too much even for my mother: she told him he ought to be ashamed, mocking anyone so gentle and harmless.

Since the funeral, Papa had been breaking things, not with fury, but quietly, thoroughly: he would amble into the parlor, pick up a china figure, muse over it a moment, then throw it against the wall.

She was one of those people who can disguise themselves as an object in the room, a shadow in the corner, whose presence is a delicate happening.

Do not touch sweet foods like candy and salt will kill you for certain.

Soon afterwards I found the pebbles; they were like kernels of corn or candy, and: “Have a piece of candy,” I said, offering the sack. “Oh thank you,” she said, “I love a piece of candy, even when it tastes like a pebble.”

Afterwards, telling fortunes with flowers, speaking of sleepy things, it was as though we floated through the afternoon on the raft in the tree; we belonged there, as the sun-silvered leaves belonged, the dwelling whippoorwills.

There are two things that will drive a boy crazy (according to Mr. Hand, who caught me smoking in the lavatory at school) and I’d given up one of them, cigarettes, two years before: not because I thought it would make me crazy, but because I thought it was imperiling my growth.

“Preacher lady, don’t you go calling Dolly and us floozies; I’ll come down there and slap you bowlegged.”

“All the years that I’ve seen you, never known you, not ever recognized, as I did today, what you are: a spirit, a pagan …”

I mean,” the Judge explained, “a person to whom everything can be said. Am I an idiot to want such a thing?

What one says hardly matters, only the trust with which it is said, the sympathy with which it is received.

I don’t believe in locking drawers—seems strange a man can’t live without keys in what was at least once his own house.

Wind surprised, pealed the leaves, parted night clouds; showers of starlight were let loose: our candle, as though intimidated by the incandescence of the opening, star-stabbed sky, toppled, and we could see, unwrapped above us, a late wayaway wintery moon: it was like a slice of snow, near and far creatures called to it, hunched moon-eyed frogs, a claw-voiced wildcat.

“Son, I’d say you were going at it the wrong end first,” said the Judge, turning up his coat-collar. “How could you care about one girl? Have you ever cared about one leaf?”

“We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed—begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First, a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened.

No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I’ve never mastered it—I only know how true it is: that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.”

“I’ve got a bowl of goldfish, just ’cause I like them don’t make me love the world.

While we were undressing I had a kind of dream. I dreamed the houseboat had been launched on the river with the five of us aboard: our laundry flapped like sails, in the pantry a coconut cake was cooking, a geranium bloomed on the windowsill—together we floated over changing rivers past varying views.

“We’re very fond of you, Collin, I don’t have to say that you’re welcome in this house at any time. But dear, the truth is you have no ability for music; it happens that way occasionally, and I don’t think it’s fair on either of us to pretend otherwise.”

You know how men are, always looking for an ailment.

I don’t know what gave them the idea I was such a storyteller, unless it was at school I’d shown a superior talent for alibis. I said it sounded fine, the party. “But you better not count on me. We might be in jail by then.”

Regretfully she gazed at me. “It’s better you know it now, Collin; you shouldn’t have to wait until you’re as old as I am: the world is a bad place.”

“Oh Collin,” said Dolly, a sudden stark thought widening her eyes, “you and I, we’re the only ones that can understand a word she says!”

Big Eddie Stover had taken me there, along with a dozen other boys and men; he’d walked into the drugstore and said come over to the jail if you want to see something. The attraction was a thin handsome gipsy boy they’d taken off a freight train; Big Eddie gave him a quarter and told him to let down his pants; nobody could believe the size of it, and one of the men said, “Boy, how come they keep you locked up when you got a crowbar like that?” For weeks you could tell girls who had heard that joke: they giggled every time they passed the jail.

Amos had one tremendous gift: he could tattle along on matters of true interest to businessmen and girls of ten—everything from what price Ben Jones got for his peanut crop to who would be invited to Mary Simpson’s birthday party.

“I imagine there’s a law against it; there are laws against everything, especially here.”

The Sheriff said didn’t he have enough problems? and said: Maybe those fools have the right idea, sit in a tree and mind your own business—for five cents he’d go out there and join them.

The children made a rollcall of their names: Beth, Laurel, Sam, Lillie, Ida, Cleo, Kate, Homer, Harry—here the melody broke because one small girl refused to give her name. She said it was a secret. Sister Ida agreed that if she thought it a secret, then so it should remain.

Not many of that gang would have troubled you with their braininess: good for nothing but a lick of salt and swallow of beer most of them.

But a man who doesn’t dream is like a man who doesn’t sweat: he stores up a lot of poison.”

I disliked going past it, for Miss Bell’s guests, ladies thorny as the blighted rosebushes littering the yard, occupied the porch in a dawn-to-dark marathon of vigilance.

A waterfall of color flowed across the dry and strumming leaves; and I wanted then for the Judge to hear what Dolly had told me: that it was a grass harp, gathering, telling, a harp of voices remembering a story. We listened.

HER HIGH HEELS, CLACKING ACROSS the marble foyer, made her think of ice cubes rattling in a glass, and the flowers, those autumn chrysanthemums in the urn at the entrance, if touched they would shatter, splinter, she was sure, into frozen dust; yet the house was warm, even somewhat overheated, but cold, and Sylvia shivered, but cold, like the snowy swollen wastes of the secretary’s face: Miss Mozart, who dressed all in white, as though she were a nurse.

The real trouble with Henry and Estelle was that they were so excruciatingly married. Nambypamby, bootsytotsy, and everything had a name: the telephone was Tinkling Tillie, the sofa, Our Nelle, the bed, Big Bear; yes, and what about those His-Her towels, those He-She pillows? Enough to drive you loony.

Every man I ever met here who seemed the slightest bit attractive was either married, too poor to get married, or queer.

He was singing to her, his voice gentle but jaunty: cherryberry, money-berry, happyberry pie, but the best old pie is a loveberry pie …

YESTERDAY AFTERNOON THE SIX-O’CLOCK BUS ran over Miss Bobbit.

Aunt El said they ought not to behave that way about a fellow child, a stranger in the town, but the girls went on like a huddle of witches, and certain boys, the sillier ones that liked to be with the girls, joined in and said things that made Aunt El go red and declare she was going to send them all home and tell their daddies, to boot.