Authors: Thomas Williams
Before those people came
tomorrow to look at the house he must clean out the children's rooms
of their clothes and toys, books and trophies. And Helen's closet and
bureau, their bathroom's douches, toothbrushes, shampoos, creams
and menstrual supplies. He must remove all of the evidence. Those
poor people, knowing what had happened—if they saw the rooms as
they were right now it would hurt them. It would break their hearts.
He had to eat something first or
he would fall down. He was not thinking very well. He would have the
movers come and pack and store everything—everything down to
the last worn toothbrush and book of paper matches with two matches
left in it, the relics of his family put away in the dark until he
could face the choices.
He couldn't be here when those
people came tomorrow. He didn't have to be here. Let Ham Jones earn
his commission; he would leave a note on each door, and be gone when
they arrived. He would travel light. Ah. He would go to New
Hampshire. He must be practical now. Let us flee the past with all
its accidents and betrayals.
He stood in front of the
refrigerator, wondering why the word betrayal had come back. He
wondered why he was standing in front of the refrigerator. Because
there might be something inside it, and he had to eat something
today.
The door opened, its magnets
reluctant. Something was rotten in there—the cold sour stench
of refrigerated meat gone bad. It was a pound of hamburger he'd
bought and never opened. He tore the bloody plastic from the body of
it and pushed the meat into the disposal, where it roared stickily
into the nether regions. The milk was sour, so it went down as well,
with a wash of cold water as a chaser. The disposal, unburdened,
hummed contentedly before he turned it off, hearing, as it wound down
and stopped, the last few clicks of its teeth.
In the freezer compartment he
found a package of green beans and some pork chops, but the idea of
cooking those things was beyond consideration. He went to the canned
goods cupboard and found a small can of pork and beans, opened it on
the electric can opener, took a spoon and wolfed the beans down cold.
There. The electric can opener still held the can cover, so he took
it away, plucking it free and into the trash, the little disc sailing
down among its own, gold-silvery, with a clink.
It was getting dark, now, the
kitchen's white countertops and bright metal fading. He took his
suitcase from the hall and went upstairs to their bedroom, dreamlike
in the growing darkness. He put down his suitcase and went out into
the hallway, then to Grade's room, its Raggedy Ann rug smiling
up at his lowered eyes as in a dream. On her dresser was a small
cloisonné" box, a gift from Helen. He opened it and found there,
just still visible, seven folded dollar bills and forty-three
cents in tarnished coins. Gracie was a saver of her allowance. Money
was not ever personal; yes, he did think that, and put that saved,
time-cured money in his pocket. Her dolls, drawings, her bed made
neatly for going on a trip, her small possessions flickering across
his vision, he left her room and went down the hall to Johnny's.There
was the trophy between the two jaunty model airplanes, and on the
wall the poster of "The First American," a red Indian,
noble and long in the cranium. The trophy's glued-on plaque was
engraved,
John Carr, 1st Place, Across the Lake Swim, Camp
Ontowah, 1976.
He left Johnny's room, closed the door, and went
back to their room, where the big bed faded slowly in the dusk.
He slid open the door of Helen's
closet and put his hands in among her hanging clothes, the skirts and
blouses giving way with liquid acquiescence, slippery and cool. A
vague, clean yet powerful scent was still there. He took his
hands away from the garments so light on their hangers, and shut
the door.
He woke up, naked on their bed,
to the clamor of partly remembered dreams and an erection that
was so dead and distant, so purely physiological, that the thick
organ might have been connected to him by a leather strap.
There was always the small
distance of the return from dream to the facts of his life now, and
he slid along that ice until he was completely aware of where he was.
The digital clock in the radio said 7:50. He would get up and do the
mechanical things, dress in dungarees, work shirt and leather boots
for his evasive trip to New Hampshire. Evasive was a strange word to
come to mind; he had no one to whom he owed his presence. It was like
the word betrayal that had come into his head last night as he stood
in front of the refrigerator. Never mind. He would leave notes on the
doors for Ham Jones, the keys on the counter. He would call Ham
tonight.
He looked into his study before
he left. Dust covered his typewriter's dustcover. Manuscript
pages seemed to be turning faintly yellow at their edges. The idea of
sitting down to write was so alien to him it gave him a twinge of
actual nausea. It was as though the man who once worked in this room
had been doing something so frivolous and inaccurate as to be
dishonorable. Dishonorable—another of those abstractions that
seemed to follow him, baggage from a previous life. No words seemed
to apply to his present situation. He didn't seem to
be
in
a situation, to have a situation; he was a man without a situation.
He was not even hungry. His body
moved through the tasks he had set for it this morning without pain
or stress.
He took the Plymouth station
wagon, which had been, more or less, his car. Helen had chosen the
newer car, the Hornet, because she had been impressed by its
guarantee. It had sat there in the garage for six months without
being used; probably its battery was dead, its tires low, its oil
stratified and gummy. He would sell it when the time came—or
maybe turn it and the Plymouth in on something else. A small flash of
nostalgic interest there, because he had once been quite interested
in cars, even in their mechanics and engineering.
He stopped before Route 128 for
gas, then went on. He still wasn't hungry. A cigarette, in the draft
of the open window, burned in his lips like a small forge. He snuffed
it out, thinking as always that it would be the last one he would
ever light and inhale and crush out. On Interstate 93 he passed into
New Hampshire, no perceptible difference in the landscape or in the
commercial drabness of the buildings. Occasionally an old white
farmhouse would appear, high and many-windowed, framed by dead or
dying elms, television antennae another skein above dark brick
chimneys.
By noon he was above Concord,
where he left the interstate and entered Saxon County on a two lane
road that climbed hills and circled mountains. This part of the
journey had hardly changed since he was a boy, before the interstate,
when they had to go through the centers of towns and cities. The land
here had changed only in that the fields were smaller and fewer, the
trees coming in over wall and brook to cover them as the old farms
died and the farmhouses either rotted or had the sterile,
over-painted look of summer places. There were a few working farms
left, but not many now. His father once told him that he could
remember when there were four places up the mountain beyond Shem's,
but now those cellar holes and barn foundations were all shaded by
deep woods, the day lilies, roses, lilacs, and even the apple trees,
though they would try in the end to stretch up into the sun, all dead
of the green shade.
There was no restaurant or even
a store left in Cascom, so he went past the green square, the wooden
church, the former Grange Hall that was now the Town Hall, then five
miles further into the larger town of Leah, where he stopped downtown
at the Welkum Diner. One must put food into the body, which was,
after all, a machine. He would let all those involuntary processes
continue.
The old diner was the same, the
short order cook another in a long line of cadaverous bottle-hiders.
When he was ten he would rather have eaten the Welkum Diner's
hamburgers and hot greasy French fries, with an Orange Crush, than
any other food in the world. It had always been a treat when his
father took him here. And even now, whenever he passed a diner that
looked old enough, its exhaust fan's greasy dustlets a swath down a
side of it, he still thought of food that was so different from home,
so good, so bad for you that he remembered with pleasure that old
complicity between him and his father.
One change was that the Welkum
Diner now had a liquor license, which seemed the wrong sort of
bad influence altogether. He had coffee with his hamburger and fries,
feeling in himself at least a relic of that lost appetite. He and his
father always sat at the counter, never in one of the narrow booths,
so they could watch the great chromed boilers, gauges and spigots of
the coffee machine, and the bubbling glass dome full of a purple
drink he had never seen anyone order.
He entered the food into his
body, paid for it and went across the street to his car. It was one
of those June days that are so bright and still they seem improbable,
out of time, as if they could only occur during vacation. A few thick
white fair weather clouds moved like trains across the blue, coming
from Vermont and traveling straight east, their speed so silent,
the air here so still, there seemed a disconnection between that
element and this, as if he were watching a vast silent movie. His car
was sultry, baking, but then as he drove back over the hills to
Cascom it caused its own wind and clamor.
George and Phyllis Bateman lived
in a small white clapboard house on the Cascom town square, with a
large garden behind it extending to a pine woods that someone had
planted in even rows at least forty years before. He drove into their
gravel driveway and parked behind their pickup truck. George was in
the garden so he went around back and walked down its edge. George,
wearing the dark green chino work pants and shirt that were the
rural working man's uniform, was bent with the intensity of a
wood-chuck over the row of carrots he was thinning. With that same
alert attention he suddenly turned his head and saw Luke, picked out
one of the pencil-sized carrots, and while still looking at Luke drew
it through his fingers to wipe the dirt from it and ate it. Luke
didn't know if he was recognized. The gray-stubbled chin chomped the
thin carrot until only the fringy green top was left.
George was in his late sixties,
a short, square-faced, husky man. He had been a stonemason, among
other things, for most of his life. From beneath gray eyebrows the
faded gray eyes calmly examined him, then George nodded once and
said slowly, "I thought you looked kind of natural."
"You recognize me, then?"
Luke said.
"Well, it's been a while.
You're Shem Carr's brother's boy, Luke." George wrung off the
tops of his culled carrots, picked up the colander and carefully
stepped over the rows of carrots, chard and beans. He wiped his right
hand on his thigh and they shook hands. "Been a while," he
said, smiling, though Luke thought he heard some disapproval in
George's words. Then George's face went stern. "About your
family, now, Luke. When we heard, it was like the world come to a
stop." He looked away, embarrassed, scowling so hard he might
have been threatening someone. "The goddam things that happen,"
he said. "Ayuh, and you never get used to 'em. Come on in the
house. Phyllis was wondering if you'd come and see us one of these
days. She'll be glad you did."
Luke thought of the suicide of
one of their sons, so long ago. He remembered, too, that at one time
George had a reputation as a violent and disputatious man. One story
was that once he'd thrown all of the furniture in his house out onto
the front lawn.
George went on ahead, then
stopped and turned at the kitchen door, his voice lowered. "She's
got the arthritis pretty bad now, you know. You'll notice she don't
get around the way she used to." He scraped and stamped the
garden dirt from his boots before he opened the screened door, then
went in first himself, because he was the one burdened, to put his
colander in the sink.
Luke followed him into the dark,
cool kitchen, the small double-hung windows filled with potted
plants. At first it smelled like a greenhouse, but then came an old
farmhouse's grave-whiff of cellar, and of ferment—vinegar,
cider, and then the faint odor of creosote from the somnolent cast
iron woodstove, its fires out for the summer. In winter the black
range, whose name, cast into its oven door, was FORTRESS UNION, would
be the warm center of the kitchen, but now it had lost its power and
was in the shadows, with potted plants on its warming shelves. A
small white-enameled gas stove beside the sink cooked the summer
meals.
After George had washed the
garden dirt from his hands they went through the small dining room
with its oilcloth-covered table and crowded glass-fronted cabinets
full of dishes, over the big floor register and into the front room.
Phyllis sat with her back to them at a maple rolltop desk, her thick
back as upright as if she were playing a piano. When she turned on
her swivel chair she was startled, took off her hornrimmed glasses
and peered at Luke.
"Well, well, it's Luke
Carr," she said. "You think I wouldn't know you after all
these years, when I used to take care of you and change your
diapers?"
"I'll bet I was too old for
that," Luke said.
"No, you weren't. When you
was three and four you used to have accidents. Maybe it wasn't
diapers, but it was six of one and half a dozen of the other."
She looked at him excitedly and
fondly. Her face was puffy, soft white, her hair in a loose bun and
half gray. He always remembered her absolutely black hair, so
black and lusterless it seemed all one piece. He remembered one time
when he must have been five or six, and she twenty or twenty-one,
when he was staying overnight one summer at her parents' farm on the
River Road, and she'd let him climb into her bed and stay. Her belly
and smooth white sides were snowfields, heaven and sin to slide
himself against. That fresh cool skin he could touch, nothing
else, but at that time it was all he could imagine of pleasure. Now
that same girl was sixty years old, but as she smiled and nodded and
moved her swollen hands, the flesh of her forearms swinging loosely
on the bones, he saw her as she had changed, becoming the old woman
but still being that unmarried young girl, Phyllis Follansbee, bored
with her life, who would every once in a while go into a sad, staring
mood and give a great romantic sigh.