And so we left it.
Later, when I’d left Birge and was standing in the street outside his office, I knew that very little would be done to redress -the wrongs. But then, I wanted so much to wash my hands of the whole unpleasant business. I started to think about my health and worried about what excitement could do to it. I told myself that I believed Birge even when I knew I didn’t. Aiid my greatest concern that morning was whether or not I could get Richard to believe Birge. And even if Birge were telling the truth, I wasn’t certain that Richard’s acute sense of justice would consider a tepid reprimand from a conniving small-town law official fair exchange for the gratuitous beating he’d taken on the Bog Road the day before.
Early on, I said that you would get to loathe me. It was just this sort of flabbiness of character that I had in mind.
There’s a month of the year I hold most bitter and most sweet, and that month is April. I claim no great originality here. At least a dozen poets and sensitive types in general have noted the peculiar melancholy of that month. By that time the birds are all back from wherever they’ve gone, and the old brown earth has turned full green again. There’s not a bare branch around, and the heady scent of lilac and honeysuckle hangs heavy over the dreamy, lengthening days. It’s a time of renewal, and yet the bitter taste of winter and death lingers on in our heads.
It’s time made doubly melancholy for me because the anniversary of my father’s death falls in that month, and since that day in April nearly forty years ago, I’ve celebrated the anniversary of his death by his graveside.
It’s a peculiar and barbarous custom, I know, and yet I yield to it annually, almost unwillingly, like a reflex action you have no control over.
When you think about it, it’s almost comical. You go forth to confront old ghosts and commune with old guilts. You hope to exorcise old griefs and leave some awful burden there, like a bundle of dirty laundry, beside a mouldering stone.
But nothing like that ever really happens. You simply place a small nosegay of flowers by an old stone, mumble a few silly endearing words, or a formal incantation (which is even sillier), and shuffle off through the neat little aisles of stones and ghastly funeral statuary.
Afterwards you go to some restaurant and eat a bad meal. But by then the thing is safely out of your head for another year. I’ve long since given up trying to understand the whole silly business. It’s grist for the mills of psychologists and anthropologists who’ve been enterprising enough to turn that sort of thing into a thriving industry.
My father is buried in a large city due north of here, about a day’s drive on one of the great, ugly turnpikes of the nation.
Alice and I have always celebrated the day in precisely the way I’ve described it. Only, now that we were living in a rural region, we took the opportunity of tinning the trip of grief into a small spree. Like bumpkins, we’d fly to the city wide-eyed and innocent, with some extra money in our pockets, and as soon as the period of lamentations was safely out of the way, we’d doff our sackcloth and ashes and dash off to the shopping districts. Antique shops and clothing boutiques were our chief targets. At night there’d be a play or a good foreign film. Then supper at a French restaurant. I suppose the pattern is common enough to most suburban couples who’ve transplanted themselves from large cities. Most of us are even able to be a little humorous and self-mocking about it.
At any rate, the anniversary I’ve spoken about came upon us in this year as a complete surprise. I suppose our forgetting the date had something to do with the presence of Richard Atlee in our house. But lo, the date was upon us before we knew it, and it was late afternoon before we realized the oversight. I fumed about it for a while and carried on, But I reasoned if we were to drive all night, there’d be time enough to reach our destination early in the morning, go directly to the gravesite, have our day in the city, our night in town, sleep in a hotel, and leave early the following morning in time to reach home late that afternoon.
Such a situation before would’ve presented no great problem, but now there was Richard, and what troubled us was the fact that he was away from the house for the day and couldn’t be found in any of the usual places in order to tell him we were leaving. It occurred to me that he was at the cave, where I was certain he’d been spending increasing amounts of time. If that was the case, then I was sure I couldn’t locate him, because I could never have found that cave without him, although I knew in which direction it lay and the general vicinity of it.
It wasn’t our intention to take him with us. We simply wanted to tell him we were going and when he could expect us back. There were also a few elementary instructions about the running of the house in our absence—dreary little matters about the hot water heater and the oven, and some instructions Alice wanted to convey about the watering of the lawn—all things, knowing Richard, which he would have taken care of automatically anyway.
At any rate, we finally settled on writing a small list of instructions, told him where we were going, where we could be reached in the event of emergency, and when we’d be back. We urged him to take full advantage of the house and the larder and gave him our best. Then we were off.
We had our day in the big city and did everything we ordinarily do when we go on such junkets. We had supper at a French restaurant. It was neither memorable nor gracious, but it was good just being there—in the din and clatter of that hot little place—watching the waiters and the people in all that happy turmoil of activity. Afterwards we saw a comedy at the theater and laughed a lot and suddenly realized how long it’d been since we’d had a good laugh. We even managed to buy a full complement of Chinese vegetables and condiments, and a wonderful cast-iron wok, just as Alice had said we would on Christmas Eve when I gave her the Chinese cookbook.
It all seemed perfectly harmless and we laughed most of the way back, with the packages of food and vegetables and the large, improbable wok, all rattling in their wrappings on the back seat. It was a good trip, highly therapeutic, and driving home that day we were very pleased with ourselves.
It was only a matter of two nights that we were away—slightly more than forty-eight hours in all, but driving up the gravel path, the place already had a foreboding look about it. I shouldn’t say that. There was really nothing terribly untoward about the way the house looked. It was rather more something in the mind of a person given to sinister premonitions. I knew something was wrong even as we were coming up the drive. Maybe it had something to do with the way the light of late afternoon fell over the place.
The air was sultry, and there was an imminence of rain. A curiously unnatural quiet hovered over the grounds—a hush born of the absence of customary bird chatter and insect buzzing. The place too had a vaguely unpleasant air about it—the way a house looks when someone has died in it under violent and rather shadowy circumstances. There was a kind of sullenness about it now—a jarring and uncharacteristic inhospitality. And the way the sun’s rays slanted on the windows, its brilliant orange light imprisoned in the leaded panes, gave the casements a vacant look, like the eyeless sockets of a skull.
What we found inside was not that immediately remarkable. What I most recall, going from room to room, was the uneasy stillness of everything, and the thick, oppressive mustiness, as if the place had been shut up for years. At every corner I turned I expected to find something grisly or horrible. But everything in the house appeared to be just as we’d left it.
I was about to laugh at myself and scoff at my suspicious nature, when Alice, who’d wandered up ahead, called me from the kitchen. I went there immediately and found her staring at the floor. What her eyes had fastened on I didn’t see immediately. But then, suddenly, I was staring at the jagged shard of a shattered coffee cup just beside the sink. Then it seemed dozens of other pieces from the same cup, strewn all about in different corners of the room, came slowly into view.
On the far side of the kitchen, still clinging to the wall, where the cup had undoubtedly been flung, were the remains of the coffee that had been violently dashed at the wall. The hundreds of tiny grounds that had been flung there inscribed a large, graceful curve like a piece of calligraphy. You might have thought it was the signature of an artist appended to an enormous canvas. There was the great pride and defiance in the work.
In terms of money or value there was no great loss. Just a bit of cheap crockery. All quite replaceable. But in terms of our feelings about Richard, and our own peace of mind, something had changed drastically inside us that afternoon.
There was no sign of him. We looked in his room. It remained neat and spotlessly perfect, but absolutely vacant of its occupant. When Alice, somewhat later, checked the refrigerator, she found the things we’d left him—cold chicken, meat loaf, salad fixings, and a quart of ice cream—all untouched.
We walked back into the kitchen and examined the large coffee stain on the wall. For some reason I’d been reluctant to wipe it off, I suppose because I wanted to confront him with it when he came back. It would be something with which to glare at him across the kitchen, when he opened the door.
What we saw on the wall and strewn across the floor was appalling. In its meanness, in its willfulness, and in its careful deliberation, it was a threat, bald and naked, and not to be countenanced. You could read there on the wall in the large, graceful arc of spattered coffee grounds all the rage behind the act. It had all the earmarks of the kind of fury that was vented on Petrie’s place. In fact, it was Petrie all over again on a midget scale. At the point on the wall where the cup had impacted against it, the wallpaper was torn open, and a nearly perfect crescent of plaster had been gouged out behind it.
We walked around the kitchen for a while, weaving our way through the shards of crockery, trying to avoid each other’s eyes.
“Now what the hell do you suppose this is all about?” I said, finally at the end of my patience.
She sat here merely shaking her head, unable to speak.
“Well, I’m not going to stand for it this time,” I went on.
“Albert,” she said trying to hush me, as if she were afraid he might walk in any moment.
“He promised me, Alice. I made it very clear. He promised there was to be no repetition. He promised—”
She stood up and walked wearily to the sink, where she found a damp sponge on the drain and started to saturate it with liquid detergent. Then she turned on one of the taps. A tepid stream of water leaked out onto the sprong, and she stood there for a time leaning against the sink with the sound of water splashing on the porcelain just below her. When she’d finished, she turned off the taps and with the sponge in hand started for the stained wall.
I headed her off. “No. I don’t want you to do that. I want him to.” When I snatched the sponge from her she tried to take it back from me.
“No, Alice. He’s going to clean it up. He’s got to learn—”
All the while we’d wrestled for the sponge, she’d been rigid and wild-eyed. Now suddenly she sighed and collapsed wearily into one of the kitchen chairs.
“What’s going to happen?” she said.
“Nothing—absolutely nothing. He’s going to clean the wall. That’s all.”
Suddenly she grabbed my hand and pressed the back of it to her burning cheek. Hot, tired tears rolled down that cheek onto my hand.
“Alice, dear. Don’t.”
“I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”
I stroked her head desperately, as if I were trying to console a small child.
“What’s going to happen, Albert?” She was weeping freely. “I’m tired of him, and I shouldn’t be. I’m tired of his waiting on me. I’m tired of his fussing in my garden and all around my house. I know he means well, but dear God forgive me, I can’t stand him around me any more. The sight of him makes me sick, and I hate myself for it.”
It had all come out of her like pus from a suppurating wound.
“It’s all my fault, too, isn’t it?” she went on.
“No. Of course not.”
“You would’ve never taken him in if I hadn’t goaded you.”
“No. No, Alice. That’s not true. I wanted this just as much as you did.” Suddenly I saw myself lying flat on my back in the crawlspace, on that mound of damp, mouldering hay. “Maybe more.” I said, “Maybe even more.”
“It’s my fault, Albert. It’s my fault.”
“No, dear. We did it together.”
She turned her face and buried it against my thigh and wept bitterly.
“We wanted to do something,” I went on. “Something worthwhile—It just didn’t work out. That’s all.” After a while I took her shoulder firmly and forced her to look up at me.
“What do you want me to do, Alice? Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” She shook her head despairingly back and forth.
“Do you want me to send him away?”
“Oh, no.” She half-rose, a look of horror on her face.
I forced her gently back down into the chair. “Tell me what you want me to do.”
“I’m so frightened. Something about him frightens me so.”
“Frightens you?”
“I’d be afraid to send him away now. He’d never go.” Her body was convulsed with sobs. “God knows what he’d do now if you tried to send him away.”
I’d been kneeling by her side. Suddenly I stood up. “Well, that settles that—”
“Oh, Albert—” She half-rose again as if to head me off.
“He goes.”
“Oh, I don’t know—”
“Nonsense, Alice! We can’t live this way.”
“He has no one. He’s so alone and so attached to us.”
“You just said you were terrified.”
“Yes, I am. But he’s tried so hard to please.”
“And at the same time made us outcasts in a community where we were once welcome.”
I could see she was relenting now. “He’s a good boy, Albert.”
“He is a good boy. But there’s an aspect of him that’s so unpredictable, and we can’t afford to take any more chances.”
So we went on like that, back and forth, alternately reproaching and absolving ourselves of any guilt.