Authors: Thomas Williams
"It was so long ago,"
Tillie said.
"The truth then ain't
necessary the truth now," Eph said. "And what in hell do
you know about it, anyways?"
"I slept in your bed forty
years, listening to your babble asleep and awake. Tell about how when
the REA first come in under the New Deal, there was wire left over
here and there. Copper-coated steel. You used to sing that in your
sleep sometimes: 'copper-coated steel.'"
"I don't see how you can
'strapolate nothing from some goddam dream I had once. What are
you after, anyway, Tillie Cole?"
"I just thought you was
going to tell the truth for once, after all the years."
Eph wiped his hands over his
pate, shaking his head. "You sure don't humor a man, to speak
of, do you?"
"Well, I never married you,
Eph Buzzell, if that's what you mean."
Eph's exasperation seemed out of
place in such an old man, and Luke recognized in himself one of those
wrong, romantic assumptions of youth, that the old have long ago
signed their contracts with life, all the paragraphs, subheadings and
codicils in order for the calm, resigned autumnal retreat.
"Women, women!" Eph
said. "They ain't never satisfied. All right, maybe we made a
mistake. Maybe Shem made a mistake. The idea was to give him a
wing-ding he'd remember when he was pulling all that gravel out of
his skin. I took a couple of turns around a pole, Shem around a maple
tree. It was supposed to catch him just above his wheel, on the fork
by the stem of his handlebars, below that little windshield, but one
way or another it caught him just above his teeth, peeled his face
off up to his hair and broke his neck. Him and his motorcycle went
off in the woods, leaving his face laying there on the gravel. Shem
found it with his flashlight, picked it up like you would a used
hanky, you know, somebody else's snot in it, scuffed the gravel
around to hide the blood, what little there was of it. We found
Wallace Ellis amongst the saplings and Shem kind of stuck his face
back on. Deader'n a mackerel, of course. Then we took our wire and
went on home. There!" he said, looking closely at Tillie. "You
satisfied now?"
"You think I never guessed
that part?" she said. "Tell us what Shem said to you last
fall, then."
Eph looked at Luke, thinking
hard. "He said that about the license they give him in the
war."
"I believe that part,"
Tillie said.
"All right! He says when he
heard that Indian Chief coming along so proud, he says to himself
maybe the son-of-a-bitch has a way to feel gratified by what he done
to Heidi. He says he remembered all in a flash how she run her
heart out for him time and time again, and how she used to greet him
when he come home. Then he says, 'Eph, I just took a higher turn
around that white maple.'"
Tillie said, "Eph, it don't
matter that much to Luke, that he knows the truth about what his
uncle Shem done so long ago. Luke was in a war himself."
"Well, I never was in no
war," Eph said. He was silent for a while, and Luke felt that in
Eph's old brain, clogged here and there as it must be after eighty
years, he was slowly and carefully rearranging the units of his
story, his truths and devices.
Finally Eph said, "Well, I
says to Shem—this was last November, just before the first big
snow—I says, 'Shem, that was forty years ago, when we was both
full of piss and vinigar.' I'm looking at him, thinking he won't last
the winter out, he looked so poor. He seemed to read my mind. He's
setting there in his Morris chair. Lord, the old house was falling
in, not a wall was straight, and water had leaked all over his
stove, it was all rusty where the splattering grease couldn't reach.
He looks at me and says, 'I know you're an atheist, Eph, but I don't
know what I am. I got a feeling one of us is wrong and the other's
confused, but I ain't certain. I don't know what's going to fall down
first, this old house or the old bag of guts you're looking at, but
it ain't going to be long, so maybe I'll get some answers. I killed a
man for killing a dog, and if you can say it in so many words, and it
don't turn your stomach, well, shit on it.'
"That was the last time I
seen Shem alive. Ayuh. Well, looks like this rain don't want to let
up after all, Luke. We'll see you Monday forenoon, do the rest of the
cleaning up around here. Won't take long, once we get to it."
They left in the old Buick,
Tillie driving.
The cellar hole still smoked and
hissed, live coals beneath. Drops of rain touched the gray ash with
little plucking sounds. Jake had come out of the tent with him, and
when Luke just stood there looking down into the cellar hole, where
rot and fire had taken down Shem's house, Jake curled up in the wet
grass and the rain, and waited, his brown hound's eyes alert.
At the Batemans' house that
evening there had been a great shifting of books so that Phyllis's
office could work as a living room. George had piled them around the
walls, behind the sofa, to the ceiling of the small closet off the
hall. "You don't know how dirty books are until you get your
hands on 'em," George said.
"Dirty books? Oh, my,"
Louise Sturgis said, which disgusted George, though he looked down at
his feet to try to hide the expression. He wore a necktie and a
dark blue suit that was too narrow and too long for him—his
funeral and wedding suit, he told Luke when no one else was
listening.
Phyllis had introduced Luke to
"Louise and Coleman Sturgis," and for a while Luke thought
Coleman Sturgis must be Louise's husband, or ex-husband, but it
turned out he was her brother. A young-looking, lanky man in his
forties, he had the slightly rumpled, translucent face of a
drunk who seemed, for the evening, to be watching his intake. His
eyes were blue, watery and ingratiating, and he didn't resemble
his darker sister at all.
"Actually we've met,"
he said, "though you'd have no reason to remember me. It was at
a party after a rather bizarre poetry reading at Moorham. I teach in
the English Department and knew your wife. I'm terribly sorry about
what happened. We were all absolutely devastated when we heard."
Luke could think of nothing to
say about Helen, so he made a rather desperate jump in memory, to a
time when he'd gone with Helen to a poetry reading. "Was that
the reading where the fellow took his clothes off?" he said.
"Yes, and blew his nose in
his underwear and everyone had to be so polite, since no one could
decide how to react, and we were supposed to admire the man's poetry.
In a way, a fairly tense scene. What did you make of it?"
"I was glad I wasn't
connected to the college," Luke said.
"And then when his
boyfriend demanded a tape recorder and we couldn't find one at that
hour. Lord! We were all so embarrassed for the Lectures
Committee. But of course that wasn't the end of it, beause
then
we
found that the boyfriend was really the poet, and it had been the
boyfriend, the actual boyfriend, who had given the reading and it was
the poet who had demanded the tape recorder. It's always so damnably
embarrassing to be the butt of a poor joke. Don't you think so?"
"I agree," Luke said.
"It's one of the more
untenable positions. But why would this poet have done it? Here we
were, a rather poor little community college, all of us underpaid, no
tenure, trying to do our job with the materials available, and we
scrape up three hundred dollars to have the man come and read, and we
turn out to be 'The Establishment' or something, deserving
nothing but an arrogant switch of his boyfriend's hairy ass. Imagine
the hatred and resentment underneath the japing! Or was it just the
arrogance of the artist? Can a poet be such a shit? You're a literary
man—that is, you're a writer . . . journalist? What do you call
yourself?"
"I've never known exactly
what to call myself," Luke said.
"Oh."
"I'm not putting you on,"
Luke said hastily. The blue eyes seemed confused and hurt. "I've
done a lot of things for a living, and most of them were literary.
None were very dishonest."
"That's as much as anyone
can say, I suppose," Coleman Sturgis said. "I've taught for
sixteen years, and even teaching's not the purest of occupations.
No."
"Once I edited a house
journal for a corporation that made, among some useful things, a
particularly horrible chemical weapon," Luke said.
"Napalm?"
"No, but something along
that line. It ate feet."
"Ugh! But you quit that
job?"
"I could afford to at the
time," Luke said, wondering why he'd had the urge to do a little
confessing to Coleman Sturgis. It had been a shock that the man had
taught with Helen, and that he'd had a right to mention her and the
accident. At first he'd thought Coleman's washed, faded youthfulness
was the result of alcohol, but it could have been any sort of
disease, suffering and possible cure. He couldn't decide without more
evidence, and didn't want to ask. His own pseudo-confession had been
warped by Coleman's need for reassurance, unless Luke himself was
slightly insane this evening. His attitudes about corporate
responsibility were much more complicated than they had sounded. Also
his attitudes toward war; when one compared, say, a .45 slug in
a lower intestine full of partly digested C-ration or rice and fish
to a compound that had an affinity for epidermal cells, one's
judgments became desperate, soiled by the desire to purify. If
the former seemed less mysterious and horrible than the latter, that
was the result of ignorance.
Louise Sturgis had been talking
to Phyllis and glancing over at Luke and her brother. George kept
moving, making drinks, handing out hors d'oeuvres he wouldn't
pronounce and couldn't help signalling his disapproval of. Luke
wanted to talk to George, if to anyone. He felt that out of loyalty
to Phyllis he was being forced into dishonesty. On the way here he'd
gone twenty miles out of the way, down the other side of the mountain
on dirt roads that threatened to end anytime, just to play with his
new truck and to think of what good and useful things he would carry
in it. The metallic hollowness of the truck, the rugged controls that
worked, its new solidity and smell pleased him in simple ways.
Freddie Hurlburt arrived,
dressed in gaudy, reddish plaid trousers and a red sport jacket,
seeming wider than tall. Luke thought of Shem's wooden rule, and how
he might unfold it and measure Freddie to see if he were really wider
than tall, a Tweedledee without his Tweedledum. He seemed about to
burst out of his skin, though he was not that fat, really; it was the
broadness of his pelvis, a large woman's breadth of body on the short
man. While he spoke to Phyllis, his words coming across the room as
little snaps and pops, Phyllis seeming pleased and slightly hard
of hearing, which she was not, Louise came over to Luke and Coleman.
"First, are you wearing a
gun?" she said to Luke. She wore a filmy short dress of light
brown material, which Helen would have called beige and known the
name of, tied at her waist with white cord. The outfit looked
expensive, and she herself, her dark skin, thin muscles and black
hair, seemed to have been turned, by the kind of preparation women
did to themselves before they went out for an evening, into a visual
object that, strangely, could talk. There had been a darkening of
eyelash, some kind of smoothing, the sheen of colorless lipstick. He
looked at the texture of her upper lip and the skin over her
cheekbone, her coarse yet smoothly shining black hair, her nipple
indenting the expensive fabric, and a small rise of lust and almost
detatched curiosity came over him. He saw her in his mind with light
blue eyes, like her brother's, but she would be too intense and
perverse then. Her olive eyes were more consistent with the whole
configuration she made, as an animal's eyes would be, and
although he felt some perversity in his attraction to her, because he
didn't like her that much, he was attracted and would be open to
whatever possibilities there were. The whiskey he was drinking had
something to do with it, and also the interesting feeling of playing
hooky. Then came the emptier realization that he had no need to
play hooky.
Since she wanted to be cryptic
about the gun, Luke explained to Coleman how they'd met at his
uncle's place on the mountain and how he happened to be wearing his
uncle's pistol when she and Freddie came by.
Presumably
these were people whose accents, vocabularies, ironies and
values were also his, so he found it necessary to lie, as he would
not have had to lie to Phyllis or George. He could assume, with
discouraging accuracy, Coleman's at least public attitudes, and so
frivolously explained away the gun.
Coleman then told him about the
old house their parents had bought in the fifties—the old Bean
house, about a mile up the road—and how he and Louise had
inherited it and were fixing it up. Their parents had been members of
the Cascom Mountain Club since the thirties and that was how they'd
come to know the area. Louise, since her divorce, had taken up
ceramics and had fixed up a studio in the barn, a gas-fired kiln in
the cement base where the silo had been. He went on to tell how it
had been impossible to keep antiques in the house until Louise
had lived there the last two winters, because they were always ripped
off. They'd lost all kinds of good things their parents had
collected. "They simply come with a truck, break in and take
what they want," Coleman said. "If a house doesn't look
lived in, they'll clean it out." According to the State
Police these weren't local people, necessarily, but professionals who
sold the stuff out of state.
"Anything old is valuable,"
Louise said, "and it doesn't have to be very old any more,
either."