Grainger said “Trying to. What do I need to see?”
“You might like to see how well I’m doing. I’ve trimmed off eight pounds since last Christmas; everybody thinks I’m ten years younger.”
“Not me” Grainger said. “You’re sixty-three years old and look it—sit down.”
Hutch said “My birthday’s not for six weeks. Don’t rush me please.” But he sat in the rocker across from the automatic chair he’d bought as a gift the previous spring when Grainger turned a hundred. You pressed a button; it gradually rose and stood you up with no exertion. When Hutch’s eyes could finally see, he looked around the space for changes.
Nothing obvious, just the same strict order Grainger had laid down all his life, wherever he lived. This main room had its two good chairs and a long pine table against the wall with dozens of pictures framed above it—various kin whom he and Hutch shared, caught in photographs ranging from the 1850s to now.
The center of the cluster was a single oval tinted picture of Grainger’s wife Gracie, long gone and dead. The other face that caught at Hutch was his own child Wade at about age ten, in a fork of the oak tree not fifty yards from this dim room. Beside it was a tall dark picture of Rob, his own dead father and Grainger’s great friend. No one had ever looked finer than Rob, not the way he was here, in summer whites for highschool commencement more than seventy years past—a smiler as charged with electric attraction as the magnetic poles. All the others were distant kin and friends, a few stiff generals from the First World War (and oddly the Kaiser with his comical mustache) plus three or four modern Democratic politicians and Jacqueline Kennedy, a stalled gazelle of inestimable worth.
Otherwise there was only a big oil stove, a television and the neat narrow bed. It all looked as new and nearly unused as when Hutch had paid for Grainger and two boys to build the place thirty some years back. The kitchen and bathroom doors were shut.
When Hutch didn’t speak but went on looking, Grainger said “You planning to sell me out? It’s worth every penny you paid me to build it—two thousand, three hundred, twenty-two dollars and eighty-six cents. I got the receipts.” He actually pressed his chair button to rise.
“Sit still please—sit as long as you want. Every piece of this is yours and has always been.”
“Emily don’t think so.”
It riled Hutch instantly. “Emily’s dead wrong.”
Grainger pointed through the wall toward the main house. “She’s all the time saying how much it cost them to keep me warm.”
It was then Hutch realized the oil stove was burning, though the front door was open. He put his palm out toward the heat. “You know this blast furnace here is roaring?”
Grainger said “I do.”
“Shall I shut the door?”
“Shall not. Mind your business.” But he may have smiled again. “I’m drying my clothes.”
Hutch looked—had Grainger started fouling his pants? Then he noticed another khaki dress shirt, neatly hung on a wire hanger from the window ledge near the stove, and a pair of white socks. “You put out a wash? I pay Emily money to wash your clothes.”
Grainger said “She don’t get them dry enough—make my bones ache.”
“I warned her about that here last Christmas.”
“Remind her again; her memory’s failing.”
Hutch said “She’s a whole lot younger than me.”
“You failing too.” Grainger suddenly focused on Hutch’s face and gave it a thorough search. He’d watched it make every change it had made, through six decades.
“Me failing?” Hutch grinned. “I’m in fairly good shape; taught school today.” He flexed both arms in their blue sleeves.
Grainger shook his head firmly No. “You’re worse than you ever been in your life; you’ll be worse soon.”
At first Hutch thought it was old-man meanness or hard-edged teasing. But then he wondered what Grainger knew. Hutch had never mentioned his grown son’s illness; Emily and Straw knew little about it, if anything; surely Ann hadn’t blabbed. Hutch said “You know something I don’t know?”
Grainger froze up slowly through the next long minute. He sat in place perfectly still; then again his eyes found Hutch’s face as if they’d dug up the bones of a hand with scraps of skin. His old eyes were brimming.
So Hutch said “Wade? You heard from Wade?”
Grainger nodded but offered no more.
“When?”
“Just now. First thing this morning, still dark outdoors.” Grainger pointed to the telephone screwed to the wall by the head of his bed.
“Wade called you today?”
“Wade calls me every birthday I’ve had since he could talk.”
“He told you he’s sick?”
Grainger said “I could hear it.”
“You ask how he was?”
“He told me himself.”
Hutch suddenly felt cut loose from a chain and flinging through space. “He tell you it’s this terrible AIDS?”
“What?”
“This plague that’s speeding all over the world, that kills you by wiping out your whole immune system so you’re helpless to every germ and virus—”
Grainger said “I watch the TV. I’m not on the moon yet.”
Hutch could grin briefly. “But Wade told you himself, today?”
“You don’t know how your one child’s doing?”
That hurt more than Hutch’s own deep self-blame. He said “Wade hasn’t talked to me in three months.”
“Try calling him up. They invented the phone when I was a boy.”
Hutch said “He won’t answer me, hangs up soon as he hears my voice.”
Again Grainger waited to estimate if Hutch could take the fresh news. He finally said “Then you don’t know he’s blind.”
“Oh my Jesus—” For an instant Hutch felt he’d pitch flat forward on the bare oak floor.
Grainger just nodded.
Then another man’s voice called from well out of sight somewhere in the yard. “Mr. Walters, you seen that out-of-work poet we used to know?”
Hutch knew it had to be Straw, Strawson Stuart—the friend to whom he’d rented the place for nearly thirty years. Nobody but Strawson called Grainger Mr. Walters.
Grainger looked to Hutch and waved his hand slightly at the door. “Go show him it’s you. Tell him I ain’t dead.”
Hutch was still too dazed to obey. So he and Grainger waited, silent, as footsteps came toward them.
Though Hutch had seen Straw on campus at Duke for a basketball game a month ago, there was always a welcome jolt in running across him in person and seeing how little his excellent face and body had changed in the forty years since he was Hutch’s student in prep school in Virginia—Hutch’s first real job and his first strong taste of what seemed love at its full hot tilt. And here, for all of Grainger’s news about Wade, Hutch stood up smiling to shake Straw’s hand—an enormous hand that always engulfed you a second longer than you intended and, above it, the nearly black eyes that would have looked natural in the face of a hurtling Mongol rider.
They were set, a little slant, in a head as strong and encouraging to see as any antique head of a grown man—the Dying Gaul or Augustus Caesar in the prime of power, a face you’d follow through narrow straits. Hutch had lasted well enough too, but he always had to remind himself that Straw was only seven years younger—fifty-six years old and tanned by bourbon like a well-cured hide yet untouched at the core by the years he’d breasted.
Straw let go of Hutch’s hand and turned to Grainger. “How long’s he been here?”
Grainger said “Time don’t mean nothing to me. You ask him.” He hooked an enormous thumb toward Hutch.
Hutch went to his chair; but since there was no seat for Straw but the floor or Grainger’s bed, he stood and faced Straw. “I’ve still got some of my faculties intact—I can estimate I got here twenty minutes ago. You charging parking time in the drive?” Hutch was only half joking; something
was wrong here. Was Straw on the verge of one of his drunks (they’d grown increasingly rare in recent years but could still throw him badly for weeks at a time), or had Grainger let Straw know about Wade?
Straw said “Oh no, I’m just guarding Mr. Walters. He promised he’d rest all afternoon so we wouldn’t wear him out tonight.”
Hutch looked to Grainger and could see no sign of impatience or fatigue. But he also reminded himself he could see no adequate sign that this live body had lasted one year more than a century.
Grainger lifted a hand for quiet. “Old Mrs. Joe Kennedy—Miss Rose Fitzgerald, you know, the President’s mother? She just turned a hundred and three, going strong up yonder on the Cape Cod beach. Nobody tells her when to sleep or wake.”
Straw was suddenly as peaceful as the boy he’d been when Hutch first knew him, before the first drunk. He said to Grainger “Well, Hutchins and I aren’t President yet and you’re no rose. Emily’s up at the house now cooking the party. It’s the size of a circus and headed your way. So Hutch and I plan to find beds and lie down to rest up for it. Let’s stretch you out for a little nap too.” Straw went to the old man and took his elbow to help him rise.
Grainger shook Straw off and pressed his stand button.
Hutch went to the other side to help Straw guide the frail bones to bed.
But once the chair had stood him upright, Grainger held in place to loosen his collar—the pearly button; he never wore a tie. Then on his own he moved to the bed with no sign of age but a kind of dream slowness like fleeing in a nightmare with no hope of rescue.
First Grainger sat on the edge of the bed, then laid his head back and drew up his legs. Only then did he ask for help. “Strawson, take my shoes off.”
Straw untied the clean black brogans and slipped them off. Beneath them the feet were in high thick cotton socks, spotlessly white.
Grainger said “Hutchins, help smooth out my pants.”
Hutch arranged the khaki pants along and around the legs they covered—smoothing wrinkles, straightening creases.
The old man’s eyes were shut by then, the eyeballs big as pullet eggs through the thin tan lids. He hooked his thumbs in the waist of his pants. “Now both of you cover my feet. I’m cold.”
Straw looked to Hutch; both silently grinned and together unfolded the green summer blanket and laid it over the legs, to the knees.
They were shutting the door when Grainger said “Too mean to die.”
As Hutch glanced back, he met the opalescent eyes, open on him again.
Grainger told Hutch “I’m talking about nothing but me. Nobody you know.”
Hutch said “I’ve known you every day of my life.” It was literally true and he had clear memories from as early as two and three years old of this same soul here.
But the old eyes shut again. “That’s what you think. Live on in the dark.” Grainger gave a rough grumble and waved the boys off—two tall men in late midlife, whose ages combined exceeded his by a mere eighteen years. Before they’d both got down his front steps, he was gone in sleep, entirely serene.
4
OUTSIDE Hutch turned toward the main house. A nap might not be a bad idea, or an hour alone in deep country quiet.
Straw, though, had turned left toward the pine woods. From a hundred yards’ distance, the trees were so dense they looked more like a bulwark than trees, some old fortification abandoned but guarding still its forgotten cause. When Hutch didn’t follow, Straw looked back. “We need a short walk.”
Hutch fell in five yards behind him. They didn’t make a sound between them till they were deep enough in the pines for all other signs of human life to be screened out so thickly that civilization seemed denied. Hutch thought he and Straw might have been air-dropped on an island owned by nothing but evergreens, a brown bird or two and the dark gray owl they startled awake (it flew ahead like a spirit guide in an Indian tale).
He and Straw were in sight of a small clearing with a single whitebarked sycamore before Hutch knew he was being led down the same dry path they’d taken thirty-seven years ago after they’d buried Rob Hutch’s father, and Straw had flunked out of Washington and Lee in his first semester and moved here with Grainger while Hutch went back to England to finish his graduate study. Hutch even spoke out now. “You picking this same old trail on purpose?”
Straw never turned. “What trail?”
“The one we took in ’56 when I flew back from Rome for Rob’s funeral.”
Straw said “Sure, since you noticed, I did. Walk on a short way.”
The leafy ground began a slow decline toward the valley, and step by step Hutch could barely believe the near-silent show of early spring fullness. There were spry red cardinals every few yards. At his feet there were frequent blooms of a shape and color he’d never seen, and overhead there were glimpses of a sky so blue it seemed to be working to match the pleasure he’d felt today on the road. But what kept slamming against Hutch’s eyes was not this masterful calm unfolding—a natural life indifferent to him and all his kind, proceeding along its immortal rails—but the new raw idea of his son’s face, blind with all its other punishments, if Grainger was right. And what Hutch asked himself every step was What am I doing on a sightseeing hike five hundred miles from my only child, who needs me whether he’ll say so or not?
After the better part of a mile. Straw pushed on faster ahead, then stopped with his back toward Hutch and waited stock-still.
Hutch came on and stopped in reach of Straw. Only then did he realize they’d come to a place he’d never seen, not in the childhood years he’d roamed these woods alone or with Rob or Grainger. Fifty yards downhill from where he and Straw stood, a wide creek ran in banks so even and clean that the whole scene looked manmade and tended.
The bed of the creek was deep and apparently clear of rocks; but hundreds of rocks in every shade of brown and white paved the banks and made a thick border, far as Hutch could see, to left and right. In broad clumps, scattered among the boulders, were flowers a foot high—a bright egg-yellow. Late wild jonquils maybe?
The scene was admirable but a little funny. It had the look of an accidental stretch of city park, spliced in here and lost. Hutch looked to Straw to check for signals. Was he meant to laugh at the incongruities or praise whoever had curbed raw nature into this tame stretch?
Straw’s eyes brimmed tears, though none had yet fallen.
Hutch said “It’s handsome. Who do we thank?”
“Grainger.”
“Grainger gets down here to tend all this?”
Straw hadn’t faced Hutch, but he knuckled at his eyes and sat on the dry ground. “Grainger spent most of his spare time, twenty-odd years ago, making this place right. He’d sometimes be down here in the near-dark, hauling rocks till I’d come down and make him quit.”
“What was he planning?”
Straw said “He never told me and I never asked. You know me—I leave people to their own designs.”
“But somebody’s keeping it up, I can see—not Emily surely?”
Straw said “Emily doesn’t know it’s here. Hell, Em doesn’t know we live in the country, not for all the looking around she’s done. Never walks an inch beyond the garden. No, I keep this place up, after every big storm—pull on my hipboots and gouge it out again. I put in a hundred new bulbs last winter; every one of them lived. I take pictures of it for Grainger to see—he hasn’t been down here for, oh, eighteen years.”
Hutch had also sat and by now the sight looked0 more appropriate. The water even sounded pure and free-flowing from some intentionally guarded source way uphill from here. “Why do you think he did it, back here where nobody much would see?”
Straw finally faced Hutch; his eyes had a trace of their old ferocity—eyes you might see as your last sight before violent death. But his voice was low and steady on. “Mr. Walters told me, flat-out plain, the day he finished. He’d asked me, weeks before, to leave him be—just let him work down here alone. But finally lat
e one fall afternoon, he quietly found me when Em was in town. He led me to this spot, sat me down and said ‘It’s all I can leave you, Strawson.’ I begged his pardon; I didn’t understand. So he tried again. He laughed a long time—he’d almost quit laughing, even back then—and he said ‘Your inheritance. My deathbed gift. Keep it clean in my memory.’ I thanked him and then said ‘You killing yourself some evening soon?’
“He picked that over in his mind and laughed again. ‘It hasn’t come to me that directly, no. Very few black people kill themselves—you noticed that?—not with razors or guns, not fast anyhow. No, I’m just thinking I’m past eighty years old. The Bible doesn’t promise but three score and ten; and very few of my family, black or pink, lived nearly that long.’ So I told bun I was sure we’d celebrate his hundredth together. He said he partly hoped I was right. Then he never mentioned the place again—never came back down here, not to my knowledge; never asks me one word about it, even when I show him the pictures I take.”
Hutch owned all the land they’d crossed to get here; he owned this valley. Years back he’d tried to give it to Straw when Straw’s daughter was born, an only child. But Straw had said he didn’t want to “lay up treasure” instead, let him keep on supervising the Negro tenant who worked the tobacco and running the place on straight half-shares (Straw had money from his own dead mother). So Hutch thanked Straw for tending Grainger’s peculiar improvement.
And Straw agreed as solemnly as if they’d concluded a treaty exchanging some isthmus or bridge.
Hutch couldn’t help smiling. “Hell, we may have the core of a gold mine on our hands—buy the rest of the county, clear-cut all the trees, build a cinderblock music hall for tacky stars from Las Vegas and Nashville, run a paved road back here, build parking lots, lure in busloads of senior citizens; and I’ll sell tickets when I retire. That’ll be any day.”
The Promise of Rest Page 3