Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (20 page)

“Good-bye.”

And so she went off down the steps and into the car and that was all he heard or saw of her for seven years. He sent them checks through Finney for schooling and clothes and vacations, but never for the rent.

Now he walks into the hay barn and picks out a bale. Time was he’d walk with one in either hand or lend a hand at stacking and not notice when the lunch break came; now a single light-packed bale is overmuch to manage, so he cuts the twine and takes the hay in sections, clump by clump. He carries it assiduously to the stacked locust wood and uses it as chinking where the logs let too much wind in; he spreads himself a pallet in the center of the square. There are burrs and thistles in the hay; there is too much weed for use as anything but bedding, and he is glad for that. He wouldn’t have wanted, he tells himself, to use feed hay for a pallet; it would have been a waste.

What pure grass they have is timothy, and he calculates which field this cutting comes from. The Shed field had been planted in timothy three years back, and Judah decides it will be time, this spring, to turn it over into corn. He coughs; there is chaff in his throat. He comes across a garter snake, crushed by the baler, and what was likely a chipmunk that is pressed now and extended like a carpet of itself. He hawks and spits.

(“Judah,” they told him. “We got enough now.”

“It’s coming on rain.”

“Maybe just a little bit. No more than a wetting.”

“Not enough to mention. To say so.”

“Dinnertime.”

“Suppertime.”

“Smoke time. I need me a cigarette.”

“Jimmy Slocum’s cousin said he seen a camel. Like that old workhorse, Clyde, they called him, only humpbacked and not swaybacked and spavined and maybe three times as big.”

“Judah. J. P. Sherbrooke. Mr. Jude.”

“You got a name to match each name they give your wife.”

“Except maybe vixen and harlot and Abishag the Shunnamite.”)

His sleep this night was troubled, and his digestion troubles him, and everywhere he aches. “Flesh of my flesh,” he intones. “Betrayal on betrayal.” He likes repeating words for the sense of solidity, and balance; he feels himself a tightrope walker using words as a way now to ward off collapse. He extends both arms. There are spotlights trained on him, and he tries not to lose his focus on the necessary end; the inner ear, however, is the root of balance and he prays that his hearing will hold. “Flesh of my flesh” means sons, though what he planted in her was more a seed than flesh. He pictures his seed clinging to her womb wall like a cockleburr, or swimming, and then it was not “it” but Ian, and then not “it” but Seth, and Seth reverted.

“Of the various infirmities,” Peacock wrote, “I hold with those sages who hold loss of Faith the Gravest, since belief in Wrongs is tantamount to the belief that Wrongs shall be redressed. Yet without the latter conviction, Man is but cast ashore as if he were a Castaway upon this Life’s grim Strand, nor can sumptuous food or welcome or a bed of goosedown and Satin be the jot and tittle of True Comfort by Compare. Therefore for every Inward Arch I wish an outward Pillar, and for each circle a square or rectangular Shape. It is necessary in this monotonal Era to provide Relief. When tired with a long day’s wrangling in the dusty offices or glittr’ing Courts of Law, I sometimes for an hour at work’s End seek diversion with fencing; then do I see on the target before me not some dancing bobbin or Image of th’ Adversary, but rather Delirium’s Fancy: my house in Female Shape, its outline dark yet definite, and with one single window lit there on the Second Story’s left-hand passage where reside the Heart. I lunge and pierce it through. There is an Awful Glory in the sight. Long past what we Inheritors have come to Know as the Expulsion, the light of incorruptibility still flickered—and as I lay my foil to rest I seem to see it beckon me, the Devil’s very handiwork tricked up as foxfire. Gleaming.”

When Judah finishes he pulls the barn door to. It squeaks and complains, and he tells himself the rollers should be oiled. The struts in the barn rainbow out. There are springs beneath it, and he’d cursed the siting often. They should have built above. There are springs that fill the gutter every time he cleans it, and one of them is strong and pure enough to bubble up above the rim; he’s lost more lambs to water than disease. They’d cleared the barn of stock when he quit his serious farming, and now it holds only hay.

So be imagines himself in the gloom in the hay barn, with Maggie beneath. He would have baled and stacked three hundred bales that afternoon, and they would fill the top loft full, leaving only the drop-chute uncovered. There are tree trunks shoring up the barn with the bark still on them, and the braces and crossties are two foot across. The men would leave but his wife would be waiting, expectant, with wine and soft words and balm that beat horse liniment to stir the warmth in him.

That afternoon the sun would angle through the barn boards, roseate. She would fall on her back in the third rank of hay, in a level space he’d made when stacking, and where the sun illuminated air motes and her hair’s wheat sheen. He, Judah, lowered himself. She spread and murmured “Husband,” to the rhythm of his strokes, and there was pain and pleasure intermingled, fused, or more like cream and milk suspended in one rich solution, and he bent his head to kiss her and kissed the hay chaff and sneezed.There was a profusion of barn swallows; he counted six, then ceased.

Now Judah wads up newspaper and spreads it from his pallet to the wall. Hattie made what she called
Rutland Herald
logs. She twisted the paper tightly and tied it in three places and soaked it in the bath, then let the whole thing dry. She piled her paper logs in the corner of her closet, saying this will always burn and what else is it used for once you eat the headlines up. He should read in a mannerly fashion, and let the news digest.

The barn cats play about him, and the pigeons settle back. Chaff dances in the light; the air is wet but warm. He inhales it lazily. Maggie sleeps. She is his dream of consummation, light in the heart of the house. He throws his head back to study the vaulting and hears himself half singing, making noise in his throat. This is it, he tells himself. This is as close as man need ever get to where he’s going, and still call it worth it, and still have a handhold on joy. This is more than most.

“Let there be chestnut and butternut wood; let the mantel be oaken, and every door be walnut of the House. Let there be Chinese Porcelains and statuary abounding, and fluted columns of the Doric Mode. I wish Lamps to be ceaselessly burning, in Continual Remembrance of the wakeful Husband that is Christ. Let there be four large rings and additional Cross Braces; let there be protective Skyworks to harbor the design from weather and Wind . . .”

He unscrews the kerosene cap and sluices his pallet of straw. Then Judah walks—the kerosene not racing out but not just trickling either, a stream he can control with his thumb on the air hole, a rivulet corkscrewing over the hay, a reservoir he dams and then, swinging, unplugs. He likes the smell. He likes the odor of resin, syrup, creosote, and the patterned wetness of the hay. He splashes his initials, then hers. He splashes a cross, then triangle, then circle, then paces the floor’s dark perimeter until the can is empty. He wipes his hands.

(“J.P. Hiya, how’s my girl.”

“Son of a son of a son of a bitch.”

“They’s dead in the ditches of France. Come here till I tell you, mister. Count to one one hundred. Two one hundred. Three.”)

Such voices natter at him, dying, like casement flies in the window in winter: a black swarm falling as they rise. It wouldn’t be so bad, he tells himself, if there were instruction in the prattle; Judah sits. They breed in the corners by the thousands. They live in his refracted heat and cannot be expunged. He works his toes in the boots. He loosens the laces, then removes them from the top eyelets and lets the ends hang free.

“Hiding in the pine lot. Hiding in the tack room. Hiding up under the roof.”

“Ready or not,” she repeated—and he was tenderfooted, naked, picking his way through underbrush. The leaves were wet. She hung her skirt and sweater on a low extended birch branch, so as not to soil them. She wore a yellow skirt. But he has lain with Abishag and shaken off the fleshly envelope and he knew her not. There is no luxury remaining; he has put back childish things.

So lying there he thinks the straw shape beside him is hers, the cold indistinguishable from that pervasive chill they’d known by the Walloomsack in their second marriage-winter, sleeping out. Wild nights, he tells himself and remembers how he wrestled with “Bear” Starkey, not losing. He tries his memory trick. It is April seventh, and he remembers that day a decade previous, then a score, then thirty years. He remembers forty years previous but only inexactly; he knows, of course, that he was living in the Big House even then, that there were hard times because Roosevelt knew nothing about orchards, and what he did know he forgot in order to build roads.

Judah remembers running from his mother’s sickbed’s side. Nose clamped against the smell of it, mouth full with air gone rancid, unable to swallow, he left the elevator’s close enclosure and bounded down the steps; there on the portico breathing, there across the trellis with his lungs commencing to clear, there quicker than it takes to tell it in the tack room, taking his saddle and bridle and breathing in the smell of horse, out of this barn and already at a canter as he passed the gate. It had been he, of course, who found Lavinia Sherbrooke—hands crossed as though to save them the trouble, eyes shut, with only her tongue hanging out to instruct him, and nothing moving in the room except the long-fluked fan.

He tries the fifty states. He tries their capitals. Once he knew all the states and capitals and state flowers and could fit them lickety-split together for Ian’s jigsaw puzzle. He knew the boundaries of Arkansas the way he knows the Shed field’s perimeter, and remembers North and South Dakota, and North and South Carolina, but has the nagging sense that there are other pairings; New Mexico, New Jersey and New Hampshire aren’t the only states, for instance, with the label “New.”

There are other games to play. There is tick-tack-toe. He’d played leap-frog and Scramble and football in his time. Later he played hide-and-seek and Fuck the Upstairs Maid and then The Neighborhood Virgins and then Your Neighbor’s Wife. My Lord, Judah thinks, there was gaming. Cards and horses and baseball and dogs and fighting cocks and you name it, he’d place a bet; given odds enough, he’d have bet against the dawn. Or at least that it was visible, or at least that it was visible past ten o’clock, and to a blind or sleeping man. He’d have bet his bottom dollar things would bottom out, that Roosevelt would get us into war and guns and profit and he, Judah, would do best by letting well enough alone.

“Let there be fifteen-hundred and forty component parts in the Stain Glass design. It was in the year Fifteen-hundred and forty that the descendants of Canute, the lineal cadet inheritors of that Excellent King Alfred, first considered travel from the Sherbrooke Seat. The actuall Pilgrim entrusts himself to ill-favored or favoring winds. The actuall Voyager will think of his body as a Boat and entrust it to the Isthmus as I myself have done, for what was lost is always found in Christ’s pocket, and the accounting kept Completely in his ledger-book, if one might write of a pocket and ledger-book in this Connection. Then let us think of Him as a clerk of all souls, as an Adding Instrument that never makes mistakes.”

Judah strikes a match. He does so negligently, not cupping his hands. The matchbook is damp, and the flame sputters out. He tries again. This time the match fails to take; he watches the sulfur-head disintegrate. His third match takes, however, and he protects it and tries to kneel. His body has gone clumsy, and as he shifts position the match is extinguished. He wonders, does that signify reprieve? He wonders, does it mean she seeks and yearns for him in their shared bed? His fourth match fails; his hands are shaking; he is an idiot, he tells himself, to have brought no lighter. The fifth match breaks in his fingers and the sixth shreds; the last has no sulfur-head.

Therefore he tells himself that he must ferret Ian out; he’ll follow his son west. He turns. He stands and sets out from the barn, following the track from the sugarhouse to the garage and stealthily past the Big House porch and past the Toy House to the entrance gate. The moon is gone. He knows the path so well, however, he could walk it blind. He steps out unburdened, his bootlaces flapping. The iron gate is open; he closes it behind him. This takes some doing; he puts his shoulder in it, and the thing clatters clangingly shut. There are stone entrance pillars; they recede. The road is tarmac now; he sees the night lights of the village beneath him and starts down the hill. His neighbor, Willis Reed, sold farm-fresh eggs but never kept a chicken. He had a fifteen-foot-high elm sprouting in front of the house; nobody planted elms these days, but Reed’s kept right on growing. He kept his hat on, always, and Judah knew the man was bald as billiards—Hattie said he wasn’t human, with no eyebrow hair.

The slope is considerable. Judah picks up speed but steps in a pothole and buckles, nearly falls. There is no pain but he continues slowly now, favoring his ankle. The brick bulk of the Library is to his left and Morrisey’s ahead of him, and as he hits the crossroads he sees cars. There is mud on the road. The curb is a perilous height. He wears his walking boots. He will shave this afternoon. The cars that idle at the light send smoke at him and at the mountain ash trees in the traffic island. There are, in that one engine, three hundred fifty horses shitting smoke.