For a while we tried to pretend that Richard spent his days out seeking employment. But of course we were deluding ourselves. Richard Atlee could never have worked for anyone, at least in the sense that people work for people. As in the case of the fuel company, his employment could only be sporadic and short-lived at best. He was by instinct and temperament a transient, and to think of him in terms of long-term employment, a person concerned with pensions, health plans, retirement benefits, was pure self-delusion on our parts. And as I’ve said before, we didn’t press him on the subject, at least in the beginning, because to be perfectly honest, we weren’t ready to give him up to a job. We rather liked having him around the house and playing at doting parents. And so, in truth, no job that would’ve come along then would’ve been good enough for him anyway. Certainly not the kind of job he could get with Washburn, or Winslow, or the like. It had to be something worthy of him—whatever that was—we told ourselves.
And so Alice and I came to love Richard Atlee with all the blindness and error common to natural parents. We blessed all of his strong points and ignored all his faults. We thought of him as our child and of ourselves as parents jealously guarding that child until such time as he was strong enough and mature enough to fend for himself. Alice said that it was like having a wild creature in the house—an animal—that you’d brought in from the woods and tried to domesticate. And that was in a sense true. Each day watching his growth as a person, and his amazing transformation from that of a wild thing into a civilized being, we congratulated ourselves. We looked on each new achievement, no matter how small, and gloated. We were pleased with ourselves and concluded that we had set an example that Richard Atlee had chosen to follow. He was in short, the apple of our eye, and a feather in our caps.
I have mentioned all the work that Richard Atlee did about the house. But of all the many jobs that he did that winter, I think of one as especially noteworthy. He built a stone wall at the bottom of the garden where the lawn borders the fringe of the woods leading to the bog.
It was an enormous job, and he did it all by himself, hauling great, frozen boulders in a wheelbarrow that he’d pushed great distances through the forest. It had gone up over the space of two weeks, almost entirely unnoticed until the point where it was just at the brink of completion.
It was a beautiful stone wall such as the kind you see in this part of the country set up to define pasture boundaries. Not an inconsiderable job, I might add, for a single man. The wall was three feet high and ran nearly two hundred feet in length, each boulder of it weighing between fifty and eighty pounds.
When we first saw it, we were delighted. But purely on esthetic grounds. We could see no practical use to it, since the line along which he had built the wall was not a boundary.
That night at supper I asked him why he had built the wall.
“To keep off strangers,” he said, and went on spooning his soup.
“You were a stranger when you first came here,” Alice said very gently.
“I know,” he said. “So I don’t want any more comin’ in.”
We laughed at that, but as we learned later, he hadn’t intended it to be funny.
One thing about that wall did disturb us, however. He had never bothered to ask us whether or not we even wanted it.
A small incident occurred during the building of that wall that’s worth mentioning.
Emil Birge came up our drive one day in his station wagon with the state police shield plastered over the door. At the time, Alice and I were outside watching Richard working at the bottom of the garden.
At the top of the drive, Birge honked his horn several times in greeting and got out of the car, smiling and waving. He ambled slowly toward us, moving like a big man—shoulders slightly stooped and shuffling immense feet.
When he reached us, he thrust a raw red paw of a hand at me and doffed his trooper’s hat to Alice. It all had a ridiculously gallant air about it.
“Howdy. How’re you folks?” He put his arm about my shoulder, full of good will. We chatted for a while, and then Alice asked him in for a cup of coffee.
“That’s very kind. But no, thank you. Mrs. Birge and I was just wonderin’ how you folks was gettin’ on through the winter out here. I was in the neighborhood so I thought I’d just mosey out and see if you needed anything.”
Just then Richard came thrashing through the woods with his wheelbarrow and halted at the bottom of the garden. Birge’s eye traveled slowly down to where Richard, now bent over, was lifting a large boulder from the barrow.
“He building that wall for you?” Birge asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s might pretty,” he said.
“Isn’t it?” Alice agreed. She seemed very pleased and startled to rhapsodize about Richard and all his good works and what a comfort he’d been to us since he’d come.
But Birge wasn’t listening. His eyes fastened on the sight of the boy about a hundred yards off, lifting boulders and setting them in place on the wall. He had a distant look, as if he were suddenly deep in thought. After we’d watched Richard working a while, Birge said, “That’s a powerful boy you got there.”
I laughed. “Powerful and reliable.”
“Think he’d like to come work for me?” Birge asked.
The question took us by surprise.
“I’m lookin’ for an assistant deputy,” Birge went on, still staring down at him. “Boy like that’d be just right.”
When I looked at Alice, I could tell she wasn’t entirely put off by the idea. Although we felt a great deal of conflicting emotion about Richard’s going to work, we still wanted to see him get back on his own feet with a job. And a job with Birge was quite a few cuts above working as a service station attendant. There were, too, certain advantages to working in law enforcement: the salary while modest was respectable; there were automatic pay raises as well as the peripheral benefits of insurance, pension, and retirement funds. Most importantly, it was out-of-doors work. He wouldn’t be penned up in some airless loft carrying out dreary, mindless little drudgeries. All in all, it sounded good, and I could see Alice was thinking it, too. Still we couldn’t bring ourselves to say anything one way or another.
“You’ll have to ask him yourself, sheriff,” I said.
“The boy makes his own decisions,” Alice added.
“Call him up here,” Birge said. He appeared suddenly very excited.
Richard had just emptied his wheelbarrow of boulders and was about to thrash off back into the woods when I called:
“Richard—You—Richard.”
He turned and gazed back up toward us, shading his eyes from the sun. When I signaled him to come up, he set his barrow down and with hands plunged deeply into his coat pockets, he trudges up to where we stood.
“Richard,” I said, when he reached us, “you remember Sheriff Birge.”
He nodded and Birge thrust a hand out toward him. Richard’s hand fumbled toward it. There was an awkward gap and then Alice said, “The sheriff has something he’d like to say to you, Richard.”
Smiling and more expansive than ever, Birge launched into his proposition. He presented it wonderfully, painting a glowing picture of life as a deputy with its challenges and many benefits. All the while he spoke I could sense disaster coming on fast. I could see it coming in the way Richard’s body stiffened, in the slight recoil of his body, in the hardening of the jaw line, and the way the lips, whiter than usual, pressed against each other, like thin taut cords.
When Birge finished, his eyes glowed and he was still smiling. “Well, Richard,” I said with a lot of bogus enthusiasm. “What about it? Want to go to work for the sheriff?”
The answer was immediate and brutally brusque. “No.” He stared back unflinchingly into Birge’s eyes. “I don’t wanna work for him.”
The moment that followed was awful, chiefly because of Birge—the fading smile, the look of disbelief, the color bleaching from his face, until it seemed that a black cloud had passed overhead. And then the anger—the pure, naked anger. Their gazes locked and they glared at each other, as if there were some ancient unspoken antagonism between them.
“All right, Richard,” I said, my legs trembling a bit. “Go on back to your work now.”
He turned immediately and walked back down to where his barrow stood at the bottom of the garden. We watched him lift it, then thrash off through naked branches and vanish into the forest.
We were left there—the three of us in the driveway, hanging in a grim gray space. Birge looked awful. As we walked back to the car’ with him, Alice stammered a few hollow-sounding pleasantries, and so did I. Once there, he said very little, tipped his hat stiffly, got into the car, and slammed the door. In the next moment, his tires screeched out of the drive, leaving deep ugly scars in the gravel.
It was terrible while it lasted, but afterwards, when Alice and I had calmed down and then discussed the matter, we both confessed that we were relieved when Richard turned the job down.
We had no hint of the trouble that was to come to us until the early spring of the year—those early days of March when the ground is still hard, when it’s warm in the sun and cold in the shade. Then the buds on the trees, still closed tight, stand out on the branches like tiny green jewels, there’s a sense of the earth moving beneath your feet, and you can smell things starting to grow.
Those are the days when people begin to think about lawns and gardens and taking down storm windows. And, of course, Alice was thinking along those lines too.
It was our custom to bring Richard Atlee to church with us each Sunday. Mind you, we knew nothing of his religious life. I tend to think he had none, and conversion is the last thing that interests me. But at church, he enjoyed the songs, and in his odd croaking voice, which I always found so curiously touching, it was a great pleasure to watch him singing from the hymnal and looking around at people—the sun streaming down through the clerestory onto his great wreath of hair. For one who was generally tight as a clam, he had the capacity to give himself up completely to song. I think it had some liberating effect on him, and being witness to it was a source of no small pleasure to Alice and me.
Up long before anyone on Sunday mornings, he would bathe and attend rather more scrupulously to his toilet than on weekdays. Next, he would put on a fresh shirt and tie and of course the suit I’d bought him for Christmas. He was ready to go an hour or so before Alice and I were even up. When we’d finally come down, we’d find him sitting all scrubbed and brushed and anxious in the parlor. And while we’d have our breakfast, he’d be outside dusting the car.
I’ve already mentioned a certain mocking attitude we sensed from our fellow parishioners when we first brought Richard to church. In the weeks that followed, the mocking amusement turned to a chilly remoteness. Then finally, one Sunday, at the conclusion of services, as we were filing out the door, waiting to greet the pastor, instead of shaking my hand he smiled very warmly and stopped me.
“May I have a word with you, Mr. Graves?” His name was Reverend Horn.
“Of course, Reverend,” I said and waited there for him to speak.
“No—in my study, if you will—”
“Certainly.” I turned to Alice. “You and Richard wait for me in the car. I should be along shortly.”
When they left I stood aside and waited for Horn to finish greeting the rest of the parishioners.
Later, following him back to his office through the empty church, our footsteps echoing around the vacant pews, I imagined that he was going to ask me for money for some charity or church function and in my mind I was already computing a figure that I could afford to give without feeling too much of a pinch.
After we’d settled in chairs and exchanged brief amenities, he offered me peppermints from a bag he kept in his desk. “Who is this boy who comes to church with you and Mrs. Graves?” he said quite pleasantly.
“His name is Richard Atlee, Reverend. He lives with us. We’ve taken him in.”
“I know,” he said, smiling more pleasantly than ever and twisting in his chair. “Do you know anything about him?”
“Very little. He’s not overly communicative.” I laughed a little apprehensively.
Horn leaned back in his chair and locked his fingers over an ample paunch. “Isn’t that a bit unwise—opening your doors like that to a perfect stranger?”
“He’s hardly a stranger, now, Reverend.”
“Yes. But he was once. And you say yourself you don’t know very much about him.”
“Do I have to?” I said, smiling confidently. “We feel in no special danger.”
I can still recall the large, well-shaped head nodding as I spoke. When I finished, he shifted in his chair. “I don’t want you to be upset by what I tell you now.” He spoke in the most earnest and friendly fashion. “But then I’m sure you’re aware there’s been talk here.”
Of course I’d been, but I wasn’t going to let on. “Talk?”
“Yes. Talk.”
“No. I’m not aware.” We were both silent as his eyes fixed me through rimless spectacles. “What sort of talk? Unpleasant talk?”
“Of a sort;”
“I can’t imagine why. What cause has he given?”
“Oh, it’s not so much cause, Mr. Graves—”
“I assure you, the boy’s behavior has been exemplary.”
“I don’t doubt it. But still—”
“Still—” My voice was curt. “What else is there?”
“Now make no mistake. What I tell you now is not the result of a rash decision, but carefully and most painfully considered.”
“Yes?” I could barely suppress my impatience.
“The presence of this boy here each Sunday has had a most disturbing influence on several of the members of this congregation.”
“Disturbing influence?” I thought I’d laugh. “What could he possibly have done to have any influence whatsoever?” I suspect at this point that Horn sensed an explosion. His manner became more conciliatory. “It’s not so much the adults I worry about, you see, Mr. Graves. But there are children here of an impressionable age.”
I was speechless as he rattled on.
“He makes, you will admit, a somewhat unorthodox appearance.”