by Peter Straub
—
After showering on Sunday morning I went upstairs and hugged my bathrobe about me while I examined my clothes. Mrs. Sunderson had wordlessly washed my muddy jeans and shirt and folded them on top of the bureau. The jeans had a quarter-sized hole at one cuff; looking at it awakened uneasy memories of my scramble through the woods; I was grateful that I had gone back to the clearing and found no more than a dying picnic fire. I fingered the hole in the jeans then withdrew my hand. I remembered a portion of Polar Bears’ advice to me, and wandered indecisively to the closet where I’d put the one suit I had brought with me. It was seven thirty; I had just time enough to dress and make the service. It had to be done correctly—I had to be dressed correctly, I could display no nervousness, my attitude must shout innocence. Just thinking about it while looking at the suit in the closet made me nervous. You’re like Paul Kant if you don’t go, stated a clear voice in my mind.
I took the suit from the hanger and began to dress. For a reason probably closely related to vanity, in New York I had packed, along with clothing appropriate to the farm, my most expensive things—eighty-dollar shoes, a lightweight pinstripe from Brooks, several of the custom-made shirts Joan, being nicely ironic, had once had made for me for Christmas. I certainly had not foreseen wearing them to Gethsemane Lutheran church.
After I had knotted a thick, glossy tie and put on the jacket I looked at myself in the bedroom mirror. I resembled a Wall Street lawyer far more than a failed academic or murder suspect. I looked innocent, big and bland and prosperous and washed in milk. A baby for the work of the Lord, a man who would absentmindedly mutter a prayer while sinking a difficult putt.
On the way out of the house I slipped the copy of She into my jacket pocket: a sliver of Alison for company.
I pulled the Nash into the last space in the gravel parking lot before the church and got out into the hot sun and began to walk over the crunching white stones to the church steps. As they did every Sunday, the men were standing on the wide high steps and on the concrete walk, smoking. I could remember them standing there, smoking and talking, when I was a child; but those men had been the fathers and uncles of these, and they had dressed in sober, poorly cut suits of serge and gabardine. Like the previous generation, these men had the badges of their profession, the heavy hands with stiff enormous thumbs and the white foreheads above sunburned faces, but Duane’s was the only suit among them. The rest wore sport shirts and casual slacks. Walking toward them, I felt absurdly overdressed and urban.
One of them noticed me, and his cigarette had frozen in midarc to his mouth. He muttered to the man beside him, and I could read the three syllables of Teagarden on his lips.
When I reached the concrete walk to the church steps, I here and there recognized a face, and greeted the first of these. “Good morning, Mr. Korte,” I said to a squat bulldoglike man with a crew cut and heavy black glasses. Bud Korte owned a farm a mile or two down the valley from the Updahl land. He and my father had often gone fishing together.
“Miles,” he said, and then his eyes shot wildly away toward the cigarette he was pinching between two fingers the size of small bananas. “Howdy.” He was as embarrassed as a bishop just greeted familiarly by a hooker. “Heard you was back.” The eyes shot away again, and landed with painful relief on Dave Eberud, another farmer I recognized, now looking in his horizontally striped shirt and plaid trousers as if his mother had dressed him in too much haste. Eberud’s snapping turtle face, twisted slightly in our direction, snapped forward. “Gotta have a word with Dave,” said Bud Korte, and left me examining the shine on my shoes.
Duane, in his double-breasted suit, its jacket unbuttoned to reveal wide red braces, stood halfway up the church steps; his posture, one foot aggressively planted on a higher step, his shoulders brought forward, plainly said that he did not want to acknowledge me, but I moved toward him through men who drew together as I passed.
When I began to go up the steps I could hear his voice. “…the last auction. How can I wait it out? If beef goes down below twenty-seven a pound, I’m through. I can’t raise all my own feed, even now with that new land, and that old M I got is fallin’ apart.” Looming heavily beside him was Red Sunderson, who stared at me, not even bothering to pretend to listen to Duane’s complaints. In the sunlight, Sunderson looked younger and tougher than he had at night. His face was a flat angry plane of chipped angles.
He said, “We’re mighty fancy today, Miles.”
Duane irritably glanced at me, and then shifted his cocked leg. The sunburned part of his face was unnaturally red. “I considered we might see you here sometime.” But it’s too late now, his tone said.
“I said, we’re mighty fancy today.”
“It’s all I brought with me besides jeans,” I said.
“Ma says you finished playing with that old furniture.”
Duane made a disgusted, angry sound with his lips. Behind me, a man drew in a hissing breath like a secret laugh.
“What’s an old M?” I asked.
Duane’s face became a deeper shade of red. “A goddamned tractor. A goddamned tractor with a busted gearbox, if you wanta know. Since you’re through wrecking my furniture, maybe you’d like to junk up my tractors too, huh?”
“Been in the woods lately, Teagarden?” asked Red Sunderson. “Been gettin’ any up in the woods?”
“What’s that about the woods?” asked my cousin. Red was still staring at me from his flat chipped face incongruously mounted with his mother’s blobby nose.
Some tribal signal was drawing the men at the bottom toward the steps; at first I thought they were coming for me, but when the first shouldered past without looking at me, I knew that the services were about to begin, and it was time to rejoin the women. Red turned away as if he could no longer bear to look at me, and I was left with red-faced furious Duane. I said, “I have to talk to you about something. About Alison Greening.” “Hell,” he uttered, and then, “Don’t you sit with me, Miles,” and stomped up the stairs with his friends.
I could hear them whispering as I followed them into the church. By either gossip or telepathy, they all knew who would be the last man to enter the building, and the women were all craning their necks to look at me. On several of their plain country faces, I caught expressions of horror. Duane went his shovel-handed way down to the right aisle. I went to the left, already sweating through the tailored shirt.
Halfway up toward the front I slid into a pew and sat down. I could feel their faces pointing at me, white and red, and tilted my head back and examined the familiar interior. White arched wooden ceiling, white chaste walls, four stained-glass windows on either side with Norwegian names at the bottoms: in memory of Gunnar and Joron Gunderson, in memory of Einar and Florence Weverstad, in memory of Emma Jahr. Up in Bertilsson’s sanctuary behind the altar, a huge sentimental painting of Jesus anointing St. John. A white bird like one of the town hall pigeons hovered above the pale symmetrical face.
When Bertilsson popped like a figure on a German clock through his entrance at the front of the church, he unerringly looked at me first. The telepathy had reached him too. After that, much standing up and sitting down, much responsive reading, much singing. A wizened woman in a purple dress gave abrupt, unmusical accompaniment on a small organ. Bertilsson kept watching me with oily eyes: he seemed to brim with a generalized emotion. His ears were very red. The four or five other people in my pew had moved farther and farther away from me, taking advantage of all the standing and sitting to shift a few inches each time.
My shirt felt like paper about to shred; a fly buzzed angrily, obsessively, somewhere up near the ceiling; whenever I leaned back, I stuck to the wood of the pew. Above the blond wood of the pew before me protruded a boy’s vacant face, regarding me with dull eyes and open mouth. A drop of saliva hung on the full part of his lower lip.
After “O God Our Help in Ages Past” Bertilsson motioned for us to sit, using the gesture with which an actor silences applause,
and moved to the pulpit. Once there, he deliberately removed a handkerchief from his sleeve, dabbed his shiny forehead, and replaced it. More time wasting while extracting his sheaf of notes from within his loose garments. All this time, he was looking directly at me.
“The text for the day,” he said, his voice light and confidential, “is James II, verses one to five. ‘My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect to persons. For if there come into your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment…’ ”
I tuned him out and let my head fall forward, wishing that I had not taken Polar Bears’ advice. What good could come of this? Then I was needled by a sharp awareness that Polar Bears had told me something far more important—a fact that connected to another fact. It was like a thorn in my side, nagging at me. I tried to go over the conversations I’d had with Hovre, but Bertilsson’s sermon kept breaking in.
He had managed to wrestle the Good Samaritan into James II, I noticed, quite a feat even for someone as glib as Bertilsson. It seems the Samaritan was not a superficial respecter of persons. “But this works in reverse, my friends.” I looked up at his odious, glistening moonface and silently groaned. He was still fixing me with his eyes. “Yes, my friends, we must not condemn the Samaritan to seeing but one side of the coin.” I closed my eyes.
Bertilsson rolled on inexorably, and it was only his pauses while he rummaged for the ripest vocabulary that told me he was improvising. I looked up and saw him folding his notes, unconsciously making them into neat square packages with sharp edges. The boy before me permitted his chin to drop even further.
Then I realized what Bertilsson was going to do, and he did it while I witnessed the malice leaking from the glistening eyes and the rolling voice. “Is not there one among us in fine raiment, one who cannot hide his anguish beneath fine clothing? Is not there one among us needful of the Samaritan’s touch? A man in pain? Brethren, we have with us a man sorely troubled, who imagines life not God’s gift, as we know it to be. A sparrow’s life, a child’s life, all are precious to Him. I speak of a man whose whole soul is a cry of pain, a cry to God for release. A sick man, my brethren, a man sorely ill. My friends, a man in need of our Christian love…”
It was unbearable. The fly still angrily thrummed against the ceiling, wanting out. I stood up, stepped out of the pew, and turned my back on Bertilsson. I could hear the glee in his voice, far below the message of love. I wanted to be up in the woods, holding my hands above the warmth of an ember. A woman began to chatter like a bird. I felt shock radiate between the white walls. Bertilsson rolled on, calling for my blood. I walked down the side aisle, going as quickly as I could. At the front of the church I swung open the big door and stepped outside. I could sense them all twisting their necks, looking at me. A vision of fish.
Back across the gravel to the ugly little car, and home in sweltering sunlight. I yanked off my jacket and threw it into the back seat. I wanted to be naked, I wanted to feel mulch and pine needles beneath the soles of my feet. Halfway to the farmhouse on the valley road, I began to shout.
EIGHT
As I went across the lawn toward the house I could hear the stereo going. Someone was playing the song “I’m Beginning to See the Light” on the Gerry Mulligan record. My anger at Bertilsson’s inspiration left me all at once: I felt tired, hot, directionless. The smell of bacon cooking drifted toward me with the sound of Chet Baker’s trumpet. I came up onto the screen porch and felt suddenly cooler.
Alison Updahl, chewing on something and dressed in her uniform, appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. Her T-shirt was pale blue. “Where were you, Miles?” I just went past her. When I reached the old bamboo couch I collapsed into it, making its joints creak and sing. “Would you mind if I turned off the music? I don’t think I can listen to it now.”
“You don’t mind my—” She pointed to the turntable and lifted her shoulders.
“Not enough to actually object,” I said. I leaned over and lifted the tone arm with trembling fingers.
“Hey, you were in church,” she said grinning a little. She had noticed my necktie and striped trousers. “I like you in those clothes. You look sort of classy and old-fashioned. But isn’t it early for church to be out?”
“Yes.”
“What did you go there for anyway? I don’t think they want you there.”
I nodded.
“They think you tried to kill yourself.”
“That’s not all they think.”
“Don’t let them bug you. You and old man Hovre are in real good, aren’t you? Didn’t he invite you to his house?”
The bush telegraph. “How do you know that? Did I tell you?”
“Everybody knows that, Miles.” I sagged back into the couch. “Hey, it doesn’t mean anything. Not really. They just talk.” She was trying to lift my mood. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for the positive thinking. Did you come over just to play the records?”
“You were going to meet me, remember?” She pulled her shoulders back, smiling at me, and put her hands in the small of her back. If the clothing she wore had seams, they were straining. Her blood smell hovered between us, neither increasing nor decreasing. “Come on. We’re going on an adventure. Zack wants to talk to you.”
“Women would make great generals,” I said and followed her back outside.
Minutes later I was driving past the church. The sound of singing carried all the way to the road. She looked at the cars in the parking spaces, stared at the church, and then turned to look at me with genuine astonishment. “You left early? You walked out?”
“What does it look like?”
“In front of everybody? Did they see?”
“Every single one of them.” I loosened the knot of my tie.
She laughed out loud. “Miles, you’re a real cowboy.” Then she laughed some more. It was a pleasant, human sound.
“Your pastor seems to think I’m a sex murderer. He was shouting for the noose.”
Her high approving good humor suddenly died. “Not you not you,” she said, almost crooning. She twisted her legs up beneath her. Then she was silent for a long time.
“Where are we going?”
“One of our places.” Her voice was flat. “You shouldn’t have gone. It just makes them think you’re trying to trick them somehow.”
It was better advice than Polar Bears’, but it was too late. She let herself slump over so that her head rested on my shoulder.
I had undergone too many swift alterations and swings of feeling, and this gesture nearly made me weep. Her head stayed on my shoulder as we drove toward Arden through the rising, sun-browned hills. I was looking forward to seeing her march into Freebo’s as though beneath her sandaled feet were not wooden boards but a red carpet. This time, I considered, we would both need the mysterious protection of “who Zack was” to get into Freebo’s.
Yet it was not Freebo’s to which she was taking me. A mile outside of Arden we approached a juncture I had not yet permitted myself to notice, and she straightened up and said “Slow down.”
I glanced at her. Her head was turning, showing her blunt profile beneath the choppy blond fringe of hair. “Left here.”
I slowed the Nash to a crawl. “Why here?”
“Because no one ever comes here. What’s wrong with it?”
Everything was wrong with it. It was the worst place in the world.
“I’m not going up there,” I said.
“Why? It’s just the old Pohlson quarry. There’s nothing wrong with it.” She looked at me, her face concentrated. “Oh. I think I know why. Because it’s where my aunt Alison died. The one I was named after.”
I was sweating.
“Those are her pictures in your upstairs room, right? Do you think I look like her?”
“No,” I breathed. “Not really.”
“She was bad, wasn’t sh
e?” I could sense her heating up again, pumping out that odor. I stopped the car. Alison said, “She was like you. She was too freaky for the people around here.”
“I suppose.” My mind was working.
“You in a trance or something?” She biffed my shoulder. “Get out of it. Turn up. Turn up the path.”
“I want to try something. An experiment.” I told her what I wanted her to do.
“You promise you’ll come up afterward? You won’t just drive away? It’s not a trick?”
“I promise to come up afterward,” I said. “I’ll give you five minutes.” I leaned across and opened her door. She crossed the deserted road and began to march stiffly up the track to the quarry.
—
For two or three minutes I waited in the heat of the car, looking unseeing down the highway. A wasp flew in, all business, and bumped his head against the windshield several times before losing his temper and zooming by accident out the window on the other side. A long way down the highway a broiler farm occupied the fields to the left, and specks of white which were chickens moved jerkily over the green in the sunlight. I looked up toward a flat blue sky. I heard nothing but the mindless twitter of a bird.
When I got out of the car and stood on the sticky tar of the highway I thought I could hear a faint voice calling; if it was a voice, it seemed indistinguishable from the landscape, coming from nowhere in particular; it could have been a breeze. I got back in the car and drove up the track to the quarry.
The day I had returned to the Updahl farm I had expected a surge of feeling, but experienced only flatness and disappointment; the act of stepping out into the terrific heat of the flat grassy area near the quarry hit me with an only half-anticipated force. I anchored myself in the present by placing the palm of my right hand on the baking metal of the top of the Nash. It all looked very much the same. The grass was browner, because of the summer’s dry heat, and the outcroppings of speckled rock appeared more jagged and prominent. I saw the same flat gray space where the workmen’s sheds had stood. The screen of bushes above the quarry itself had grown spindly, the small leaves like brushstrokes, dry and brown, papery. Drawn up nearer to them than my car was a dusty black van. I pulled my hand off the hot metal of the car and walked on the path through the bushes to the rocky steps down to the lip of the quarry.