A burst of laughter and a strange bray of musicâthe TV set was on. On the screenâa man dressed in black with a pale, totally bald head shaped like a bullet clamped by big black earphones was standing, laughing at what must have been the funniest thing in the world and pressing both hands into some sort of electrified keyboard. The keyboard was making the braying sound. Buddy and Sam, of course; first things first; turn on the TV.
Daddy stood up from the potbellied stove and went over to the boys. “Hey, turn that off! It's after midnight! This iddn' TV time. It's bedtime. The Sandman's who you boys best be turning on.”
The Sandman ⦠Charlotte couldn't hold back any longer. She burst into tears, although quietly. Momma put an arm around her and said, “What's wrong, little darling?”
Thank God, Daddy and Buddy and Sam were involved in the TV set and its imminent fate. Charlotte managed to stop crying, but she could tell her eyes were red, puffy, and bleary.
“It's nothing, Momma. I'm just so tired. That bus ride ⦠and I had to stay up so late studying all week ⦔
The TV setâoff. Momma still had her arm around her, the good girl. Charlotte was ashamed to look at Daddy and her little brothers, because there was no hiding the fact that she had been crying.
Momma said, “She's just tired.”
Jes tarred.
It was all Charlotte could do to keep from crying again.
When she got into bed in her old room, that little five-foot-wide slot of a room, she lay there unable to sleep, which she knew would happen. Her mind was a machine turned up high, and it wouldn't slow down. She kept thinking about the day, her trip back home, but not the way a calm person would, in terms of sequences in the flow of time or incidents. The whole day was like scenes on a stageâdark scenery, a forbidding backdrop for the ⦠dreaded thing, which was closing in on her stillâno exit, only the end, which was inevitable. When was Momma to learn that she was unclean, polluted beyond all redemption? When was Miss Pennington to learn that her special creation, the girl who was the glory of her career, anointed in her name to keep her eye on the future and create a glory that would light up the worldâwhen was poor Miss Pennington to learn that her prize pupil had thrown away her future, wrecked it in four short months in the most sordid
and juvenile way, besotted with a frat boyâa frat boy!âthe epitome of all that is immoral, mindless, childish, cruel, irresponsible, affectless, and vile among American youth?
Perhaps she should tell everybody ⦠everything ⦠first thing in the morning and get it over with. But what would that change? These were not matters you “put behind you and moved on” from. She was no closer to knowing what to do than she had been at the bus stop in Galax.
The wind was howling now. Good. Please make this storm long and dark, dear Lord. If morning must come, let it be grim and gray. Let the snow pile deep and paralyze the world.
She lay there listening to the storm and trying not to feel her heartbeats, which she knew were too rapid again, and praying that the moaning and keening of the wind would put her to sleep at last. Would she ever be able to sleep again? Here in her old bed, the snug harbor ⦠where Daddy used to get on his knees and lean over her and say, “Warm, toasty, cozy, comfy, safe, and secureâ
ahhh,
” and she always fell asleep before he could complete the crooning three times, “Warm, toasty, cozy, comfyâ”
She decided to chant it to herself. In a tiny, low voice she said, “Warm, toasty, cozy, comfy, safe, and secureâ
ahhh â¦
Warm, toasty, cozy, comfy, safe, and secureâ
ahhh
⦠Warm, toasty, cozyâ”
She stopped and slid out from under the covers. It was freezing, but that was the least of her worries. She got on her knees beside the bed and closed her eyes and pressed her palms together and let her fingertips touch her chin. She said to herself in a very low voice:
“Now I lay me down to sleep
.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
.
If I should die before I wake
,
I pray the Lord my soul to take
.
Bless Momma
,
Daddy, Buddy
,
and Sam and tell them
,
after
â”
She paused. She wanted to get it right.
“â
and after, dear Lord, you descend in flight and take a soulless one away this night ⦔
Â
Â
Charlotte remained stricken with insomnia throughout the storm, which began to let up around three or four a.m. She would have never known she had slept at all except for the fact that she had a dream shortly before she woke up. She was in the City of God, and it was unpleasant. Beyond that she couldn't retrieve a thing.
Daylight created a blazing frame around the shadesâwhereas she had prayed for, counted on, heavy gray skies ⦠as a shield. She could hear children romping in the snow. She got out of bed and pulled the shade back. The snow was a blinding white sheet of light that ran into the woods. There were Buddy and Sam and little Mike Creesey from just down the road, him and Eli Mauck, all of them bundled up in puffy quilted jackets that made them look like four hand grenades, playing some sort of game that had them feinting this way and that on either side of a tarpaulin-covered hulk out back.
She wanted to stay in her bed forever; but with the sun up that high, it must be well into the morning, and the dread of Momma having to come back and pry her out of bed and thereby sense how depressed she wasâthat was even worse than her dread of facing the world. She forced herself to rise and get dressed ⦠in the tapered jeans and cardigan sweater she had brought from home to Dupont and worn exactly once. She hadn't dared come home with the Dieselsâon which she had blown twenty-five percent of her allowance for the semester. All were incriminating evidence ⦠of her self-degradation. Her mind was racing again. Her head felt like the ashes from the coal grate.
She went into the kitchen and found Momma, who seemed to be puzzling over a recipe. Please, Momma, don't say a word. Just keep on doing what you're doing. You're not obliged to make any fuss over me whatsoever. Only a girl who has experienced it herself has any idea of how conversations
pain
girls who are depressed. She vowed to summon up the willpower to act like a normal girl home for Christmasâbut could she even remember?
Momma looked up from her book and smiled ever so cheerily and said, “Well! She is arisen! Did you have a good sleep?”
“I did”â
dee-udâ
said Charlotte, forcing a smile. “What time is it?”
“Oh ⦠pert' near ten-thirty. You slept nine and a half hours. Do you feel better?”
“Sure do,” said Charlotte. “I was so tired last night.” She slipped a little bit of down-home
tarred
into the word and then figured she'd establish a hedge against whatever might be ⦠crushing ⦠later on. “I still feel sort
of ⦠like woozy. I don't know what the matter is. What are you fixing, Momma?”
“Remember once, when you were nine or tenâmight a been your birthdayâI been trying to recollectâand I fixed something I'd never fixed beforeâand you called it âmystery,' and it was the first mixed vegetables you ever did like? You always wanted things plainâplain-long mashed potatoes, plain-long boiled snaps, and you hated things as had carrots in âem, but you liked âmystery'? Well, we haven't had mystery for a long time, but I thought we oughta have it tonight, you being home.”
“Tonight?” Charlotte just said it as a response. Whether they would have mystery tonight or not was not something her mind could tarry on.
“I didn't tell you last night, you were so tired”â
tarred
â“but tonightâ” Momma halted and broke out a big smile. “You notice something new in the living room last night? I don't think you did.”
The conversation was already such a burden, so heavy, inexplicably heavy, such an
invasion
of her mind, but Charlotte soldiered on. “No, I don't think I did, eitherâoh, wait a minute. You mean the holly wreaths?”
“I reckon they are new,” said Momma, “but I'm talking about something bigger'n holly wreaths.” Big, beaming smile again. “Come on!” She headed toward the living room. Charlotte followed.
The light reflecting from the field of snow across County Road 1709 was dazzling. It lit up the living room brighter than Charlotte remembered ever seeing it. The very
air
in the room seemed to be lit. It was magical ⦠but in a terrifying way to a depressed girl who sought refuge in light dimmed, in the snuffing out of the lightâas they called it in Momma's Church of Christ's Evangelâthe light at the apex of every human soul.
“You see it yet?” said Momma. “It's practically under your nose!”
Snapped back into the here and now, Charlotte concentrated onâwhat was practically under her nose ⦠But of course! The chairs, eight of them, old bentwood like the ones they used to have at the little tables near the soda fountain in McColl's drugstore, with wooden seats and the simplest sort of bent rods of wood as the backsâall of them newly sanded, oiled, stained, and polished, by the looks of them, and drawn up close to the picnic table in neat ranks, so that the backs almost touched the white tablecloth.
“The chairs?” said Charlotte. “They really were here last night?” A wisp of memory of chairs from last night ⦠during that terrible moment of tears and agony.
“The chairs and what else?” said Momma. “What do the chairs go with?”
Charlotte studied the chairs again. “The chairs are right up against the top of the picnic table? You took those big old benches off?”
“Look at it real close.”
Charlotte lifted up the end of the white tableclothâand there was no picnic table at all, but a real table. She looked at Momma in a wondering way. Momma's smile was as happy as a smile could be. Charlotte pulled the cloth back farther. It was a very plain old table, with no carved ornamentation and made of loblolly woods at best, the kind of table they used to refer to as a kitchen table. It must have actually been a worktable, because there was a line of drawers with metal pulls beneath the top on both sides. But like the chairs, it had been restored to within an inch of its never-elegant life, arduously waxed and polished until a certain luster had been coaxed out of its close, bland grain.
“Where'd it come from, Momma?”
“Over't the Paulsons' in Roaring Gap.” She proceeded to recount, with considerable pride, how the Paulsons had wanted Daddy to take it to the dump, but he hauled it home and worked on that table for mighty near a week solid and took it all apart until the whole thing was in pieces and then put it back together until it was true and steady as a rock and got new pulls for the drawersâthe ones on them when he got it were all rustyâand sanded and oiled and waxed and polished the whole thing until it was a new table.
“And don't tell him I told you, but you know why he did it? Because his little girl was coming home from college. He knew what you must've thought about eating on that picnic table. He wanted to surprise you. Your daddy dud'n say a lot, but he sees a
whole
lot.”
“What happened to the picnic table?”
“It's out back where it ought to be. They're made for outdoors.”
Whereupon Momma led her back to the kitchen door and pointed out the covered hulk out in the snow. Buddy was chasing Mike around it, and Sam and Eli were laughing at them. “It'll be real nice to have it out there in the spring.”
As soon as they returned to the living room and Charlotte laid eyes on the “new” table again, she began weeping, without even realizing it was going to happen. She forced a smile through the flowing tears and threw her arms around Momma's neck and sobbed out, “Oh, Momma, Daddy's such a ⦠good ⦠person ⦠and you're such a ⦠good ⦠person ⦠and you
all are ⦠so ⦠good to me ⦔ She buried her face beneath Momma's chin.
Momma evidently didn't know what to say, because she just held her close for a bit. Finally she said, “There's nothing to cry about, my little girl. I think maybe
part
of you's still my little girl.”
“A whole
lot
of me is, Momma. That's one thing I learned, and I had to go all the way to Pennsylvania to learn it.” Pennsylvania. For some reason she didn't want to utter the name Dupont. “I don't care about everyone else. I just don't want to let
you
down.”
“How could you let me down? I can't figure out what's going through your head, my good girl. Ever since you got off that bus last night, I've been wondering.”
Wellâwould there ever be a better moment to tell her everything, to confess to everything and beg forgiveness? But what would
that
solveâforgiveness? Momma would never be able to call her “my good girl” again, never look at her as the same person again. Knowing it would mortify her, no matter how she found out, what were the proper words for the confession? Could she possibly look Momma in the face while she told herâand watch the face of her mother change before her very eyes as she realized what her good girl had become? But this was the momentâ