The Art of Living (15 page)

But Aunt Ella was shaking her head, staring at the center of the table. “No he didn't,” she said. “Not a soul in that whole church saw him, far's I know.”

Leon mused, studying her. “How unsearchable are His judgments,” he said. “His ways are past finding out.”

“Leon,” Darthamae warned.

Aunt Ella said calmly, “There's no satisfaction.”

“What happened, Aunt Ella?” Darthamae said.

She and Ralph had driven up the hill right behind where the Preacher and his wife were walking. They walked with their arms around one another's waists. Her dark hair fell to the middle of her back. She'd forgotten her hat. When they got to the churchyard most of the cars were there already, and most of the people were waiting inside. There were two or three older boys on the porch, and they waved at the Preacher and his wife when they saw them, and the Preacher and his wife waved back. They walked on toward the rear of the church—the Preacher had to get into his robe—and Aunt Ella pulled the car up under a maple tree and parked. She left Ralph in the car. She couldn't have him seen that way, and yet she hadn't dared leave him home alone either. He didn't mind staying. In fact when she said, “You stay here, Ralph,” he never answered. She walked along the side of the church, keeping to the shadows by the graveyard fence.

When the Preacher had his hand on the knob of the narrow back door, he paused a moment and looked at his wife. (She saw all this more or less clearly. She was too far away to see what kind of expressions they had—for which she was grateful: she was old, and such things could be tiresome—but the light over the door was on, making their figures unnaturally sharp against the drab white of the church. She could see as much as she'd have seen at any other time.) After he'd thought about it first, he leaned down and kissed her. Aunt Ella looked away, and when she looked back again they were hugging. She felt pleased for an instant, thinking it was she who had brought them together, had made them see by the simplest and most ancient of tricks how trivial, really, were all the eternal differences between women and men—not differences of wish at all, mere differences of pride. The next instant she remembered she was here for vengeance, and she felt confused and unhappy. When she looked again the Preacher's wife was looking at the moon and the Preacher had gone inside. For a time there was no sign of him. Then she saw him going past the window with his robe on and his hands out in front of him, holding something. She couldn't see what he was holding, and yet she knew, instantly, even before she was aware of the glow high on the window. He was carrying a lighted candelabrum, just like a Catholic. It seemed to her now that she'd understood from that first second what was going to happen. She went for the church as fast as her stiff knees would carry her, and by the time the people in the front started shouting she was already in the hallway, the Preacher's wife beside her, and they were dragging him away from the burning drapes and toward the back door.

“What will we do?” the girl was yelling. She seemed to believe he was dead already, and it made her cold sober.

There was no time to think, certainly no time to unscramble the confusion of her feelings about them, but Aunt Ella knew for certain it wasn't anything like this she'd intended for the Preacher and his wife. “Get him over in the weeds,” she said. And so, each of them pulling one leg, they dragged him into the high weeds by the graveyard fence, and she told the girl to stay there with him, out of sight. “Aunt Ella,” she said, “do you think he'll be all right?” “Don't be silly,” she said, “he hasn't hurt a hair of his head. You just stay here.”

And so the Preacher's wife stayed, lying in the weeds with her arms around him (and Aunt Ella could guess what would come of that, too). Aunt Ella went back to her car.

By that time the whole inside was afire, and she woke up Ralph, because it was something he wouldn't want to miss. There were people running around every which way, throwing buckets of water on the outside walls and running back to the well in front, and there were boys pushing cars back out of the way, and lights going on in the house across the road, the Poleham place, and Lucy Poleham yelling, “Ma, you better put some cocoa on!” It had come to Aunt Ella suddenly, like a thundering voice out of heaven:
The Preacher's going to get his new brick church
.

“Aunt Ella,” Darthamae said, “you've really gone far enough. You've got to stop now.”

She was so serious Aunt Ella couldn't meet her eyes.

“Think, Aunt Ella,” Leon said, and he too was so serious she felt like a scolded child. “Suppose somebody'd gotten killed in that fire. You want a thing like that on your conscience?”

“
I
never started that fire,” she said. But she knew herself how feeble it was. She remembered standing in the woodshed, infinitely long ago, her father towering above her scolding her though she was already sorry and helplessly miserable and too small to make him stop. (What had she done, that time? She tried to remember. It wouldn't come. Perhaps it was the time she'd murdered the cat.)
You get old
, she thought,
and you go into your second childhood
. And maybe that was all it had been from the beginning. She had a feeling she'd be crying in a minute. A feeble old woman, nobody left that cared about her, nobody to lift a finger in her behalf. She folded her hands tightly and clamped her lips.

Darthamae said softly, looking at her in a motherly way which so outraged Aunt Ella she wanted to scream, but a way which was insidiously comforting as well, “Fighting's no real answer, Aunt Ella. That's what you always used to tell us yourself.”

“It was
her
,” Aunt Ella said. “I told them and told them.” Again she saw clearly—more clearly than she'd seen anything for the last fifteen years—the Howard boy looking down at the dirt, moving a pebble with the side of his boot, waiting patiently for her to give up. The sky was deep blue and enormous behind him, falling away over the blue of the hills toward Kentucky. It was as though neither of them could hear her—neither the Preacher nor the Howard boy—they merely stood on their side of the glass and saw her shaking her finger and stamping her foot. She said again, violently, “It was
her
, Leon.” Tears blinded her.

“You want them to put her in prison?” Leon said. “Aunt Ella, is that what you want?”

She was confused, hounded half to her grave. “If preachers commence to bear false witness, what's to become of the world?”

“You've got to stop brooding on it,” Leon said. “You're supposed to be a Christian woman. You act like the kind of Christian wants to burn somebody.”

And this time it was Darthamae who did it, the only verse she knew. “Aunt Ella,” she said, “remember what you taught us? ‘Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise—think on these things.' ”

Tears streamed down Aunt Ella's cheeks. “That's wrong,” she said. “The
just
comes before the
pure
.”

It checked her for only an instant. “All the same,” Darthamae said. She took Aunt Ella's hand. “All the same.”

For two minutes Aunt Ella cried and Darthamae held her hand. While she cried, it all seemed clear to her: she didn't want the Preacher's wife in prison, of course not, nothing of the kind. She wanted her to be happy, have children, be a good preacher's wife. And she wanted good for the Preacher too. They ought to
know
that, hadn't she wanted good for people all her life? But she wanted vengeance, it was right.

Leon said, “Aunt Ella, you need to get some sleep. Let's talk about it later.”

After a minute Darthamae helped her up and they went down the long hall to the bedroom off the parlor, and Darthamae helped her into bed, still in her clothes.

“Why couldn't he just have apologized?” Aunt Ella said.

“Shh!” Darthamae said, lifting her finger to her lips. The instant before she snapped out the light, she stood smiling kindly, for all the world like some gentle aunt of half a century ago, and Aunt Ella felt in the same rush of emotion loved and crushed. The light went off then. But inside Aunt Ella's head the light had come on at last, a radiant joy like revelation: she knew what she had done wrong.

6

When Aunt Ella woke up in the morning, Darthamae was still in the house. Leon had gone home, and the baby with him. Darthamae offered to comb Aunt Ella's hair for her, and Aunt Ella thanked her meekly and got up. Her knees were so stiff she could hardly walk, but she refused to be troubled today. The Lord was with her. She sat still in front of the dresser mirror, deliciously conscious of the lightness of Darthamae's combing, and she tried to think how old Darthamae was, whether she was old enough to remember when the yellow-white hair had been red. Darthamae began to roll the bun and slip in the amber pins. All quickly, quickly.

“I've been thinking,” Darthamae said.

Aunt Ella looked at Darthamae's face in the mirror and waited.

“About Brother Flood,” Darthamae said. “It doesn't really matter that he won't admit what he did. That is, it doesn't hurt
us
.”

Aunt Ella smiled docilely and waited.

“And of course it
does
hurt
him
, you know? I mean, how can his wife respect him, knowing what she does? And how can other people—those of us who know the truth, that is? How can he even respect himself?” Her hands hesitated a moment. She said, “You know, Aunt Ella, I feel sorry for him. Really.”

“You're a wise girl for your years,” Aunt Ella said, smiling. “Bless you.” She felt light as a bluejay, warm and sweet and old as summer fields.

Darthamae's glance was sharp, and Aunt Ella looked down at the dresser doily. “I've been foolish,” she said with sincere humility. “Leon was right from the beginning. I should have put on charity.”

When she glanced up into the mirror again, Darthamae was looking at her harder than ever.

“Aunt Ella,” she said, “I want to know what you're thinking.”

“Why, Darthamae!” she protested sweetly. Outside her window there were butterflies playing over the grass. The lightest of them was not as light as she was.

“I
warn
you, Aunt Ella,” Darthamae said. She clenched her teeth.

Ralph moaned, in the parlor, and Darthamae went to him. His head was splitting, poor boy. Aunt Ella thought sadly,
Poor Ralph, poor dear child
. It was Ralph who'd gotten the worst of it, right from the start. It was all her fault, and no one else's. And the greatest of these is charity. Yes. Oh yes.

“Ralph's got a headache, Aunt Ella,” Darthamae said. “What should I do?”

“It's going to be all right,” she said. “There's aspirin in the medicine closet in the bathroom.” On second thought she said, “Perhaps if you run cold water over his head it will help. Run it for three, four minutes.” As soon as Darthamae was gone she got up, still light, despite the sharp pains in her knees, found her cane in the closet, and went as quickly as she could out onto the porch. Slowly, slowly (and yet quickly, for all that, borne aloft on the mighty wings of charity), she slipped around to the barn.

The white hat was right where Betty Jane Flood, poor dear, had left it, hanging on the chair. She made her way back to the corner of the house with it and stood there a moment, head cocked craftily, listening. When she heard water running, she hurried as fast as she could to the Preacher's car and got herself up in behind the steering wheel. Merely by releasing the emergency brake she was able to back the car fifteen feet down the driveway. She got out and planted the white hat on the ground beside the driver's door. Then she went back in the house, listened at the door, then went in and sat down by the window, meek as a dove, to watch. She heard Darthamae helping Ralph to his bed.

At lunchtime Darthamae said, “Aren't you going to eat, Aunt Ella?”

“No thank you, dear,” she said. (Outside there were swallows, light as feathers blowing.)

Darthamae stood thinking, her forehead troubled. “You just keep looking out the window,” she said.

“I'm praying,” Aunt Ella said, smiling sweetly. “You run along and eat.”

Darthamae said, “Are you praying
for
somebody or
against?
”

“Have charity, child,” Aunt Ella said. “Do unto others …”

She pretended to be satisfied.

It was midafternoon when Aunt Ella saw the Preacher walking down from the manse for his car. Darthamae was in the kitchen cleaning beet greens. Aunt Ella got up as quietly as possible and went out onto the porch and down, slowly, to the driveway. He hadn't yet seen her, though she made no effort at secretiveness, knowing the Lord watched over her. Six feet behind the car, on a span she'd backed over earlier, she smoothed the pebbles away and eased herself down onto her back. It wasn't as comfortable as she'd expected. She closed her eyes, and stretched one arm out awkwardly in a gesture oddly humble, like a broken wing. It seemed a long time before she heard his footsteps coming up the drive, the sound loud under her ear, far away, then closer and closer. Perhaps ten feet from where she lay, the footsteps stopped. She resisted the urge to peek. He'd be looking at the car, his heart beating slightly faster now—poor dear, poor dear!—remembering it wasn't where he'd parked it. Now he would have seen the hat. Now he came closer, his feet moving very slowly, his reeling wits knowing without any need of evidence that she was dead. He whispered, so close that she almost jumped, “My God.” Then poor Darthamae was out on the porch, screaming in terror, and the Preacher was exclaiming, “I never saw her. She came out of nowhere. Call Dr. Coombs, quick.” They went up on the porch and she waited until the door slammed, then opened her eyes. She couldn't see them or hear what was happening inside, and she could have kicked herself for forgetting to leave that blessed window open. Then she heard the door open again, and she snapped her eyes shut tight. It was Darthamae, running to her, weeping and bending over her. Aunt Ella opened her eyes and winked. Darthamae's face froze, first amazement, then outrage. “Aunt Ella!” she whispered. But by the very act of whispering she'd turned herself into an accomplice. Aunt Ella closed her eyes. “I called Leon,” Darthamae whispered. “And we called Doc Coombs, too. And the sheriff. Oh, Aunt Ella,
really!
” Aunt Ella said nothing.