By then Hutch was half hoping Emily would strike back. It showed in his face.
When Straw hung up, he said “You hate me.”
Hutch all but agreed. “Almost.”
“Where’s your license to hate—hate me anyhow?”
Hutch shook his head at the flagrant nonsense, the foul idiocy of Straw’s self-defenses.
But Straw said “You’ve told me some of your cheats. I don’t recall they smelt sweeter than mine. Hell, you dealt your biggest cheat to me, when I’d offered you nothing less than my life. What have I done worse?”
Hutch knew the accurate answer was Nothing, but he couldn’t say it. He knew Straw deeply believed he’d offered his entire life on the threshold of manhood, and Hutch had refused him. Maybe Straw was right. So Hutch went on watching Straw’s disarranged face, baited as it was with remnants of his shine from years ago.
Straw sensed that Hutch was aimed at the past, and a splendid piece of it rose up in him. “Forest Hill,” he said. “Remember us at Forest Hill?”
At first Hutch didn’t and shook his head No.
“The church where you said John Milton got married to his first wife; the girl that left him straight from the honeymoon, dick in hand—what was her name?”
Hutch said “Mary Powell, age sixteen; John was twice her age. I seem to recall us driving out there, yes.” Forest Hill itself was barely a village, a few miles from Oxford on the London road—several low cottages, stands of old trees, a pleasant but undistinguished early church where Milton and Mary had recited their vows, a disastrous union that maimed them both—and, yes, Hutch had driven Straw there in the three days they spent together in England, July ’55.
“You don’t remember the offer I made?” Straw’s eyes were clearing by the moment, firm in the memory they were still seeing.
“I know I’ve got a snapshot of you, in the churchyard, pouting.”
Straw said “Surely a famous American poet can tell the difference between a pout and a bruised damned heart.” No one else could have made that sentence sound almost sane.
“We were happy those days, in my mind at least.”
Straw said “You refused to take my hand.”
“Beg pardon? When?”
“In Forest-damned-Hill that hot afternoon. We had that dim church all to ourselves, you were up by the altar, I came up behind you and reached for your hand, you let me take it for one cool second, then pulled it away.”
Hutch thought This is more than mildly crazy. “We’d held a lot more than hands, the night before.”
Straw said “Amen—I feel every minute still. But in Forest Hill I offered you my time, my whole life to come.”
“In the form of a handshake? You were eighteen, friend; your mind and your cheerful cock were headed off in six or eight directions—no hint whatever of a real destination. And I was in no state, psychic or otherwise, to give or take anything or anybody, not anybody that threatened to last.” When Straw’s eyes heated and fixed Hutch in place, Hutch said “I’m sorry I ignored your gesture.”
Straw held stock-still. “Get it straight, here now where it’s past too late—it was no gesture, Hutchins; no offer to shake hands and pledge blood brotherhood. I wanted all of you.”
Hutch quickly said “All of it would have killed you—it killed Ann Gatlin; it may be killing Wade.” At once Hutch thought What the hell do I mean? I’m crazy as Straw. But as he watched Straw’s face respond to the wild outburst, Hutch understood fully—and for the first time—that, in the raddled mind Straw brought here today, he believed himself. Straw fiercely believed in his right to have borne this mammoth grudge through four decades, minus two years and counting.
Whatever the buried facts of that summer afternoon in ’55—lazing through a musty church that had seen John Milton at the pitch of his pride, on the ledge of a fall—Hutch felt he should honor Straw’s maddog force: it was scarce as valor, words like honor and valor and the force they’d once had to shape whole lives. So he said “Old friend, I’ve loved you as long as anybody breathing. Through the years, I haven’t had as much to give as you.”
Straw’s head ducked gravely. “You’re goddamned right.”
For a moment Hutch thought Straw’s the lightning rod; I’m just the rain barrel. It snagged up a laugh from deep in his chest; but in respect to Straw’s ravenous heat, Hutch swallowed it down. He thought I can’t use this; get Straw out of here, quick as you can. Then he turned his back and went toward Wade.
37
TWO minutes later Hutch was sitting by Wade, who seemed asleep, when Straw came to the door and stood. Hutch didn’t speak or even look back. He was aiming a powerful thought at Straw, a thought that was very nearly an order. Leave now. I’ll call when I’m calm.
Straw understood but wouldn’t leave. He had a strong sudden knowledge that this would be his last sight of Wade. He’d always liked the boy, had always felt at least partly his father; but not till today had he felt that Wade’s leaving would tear his own heart, which Straw dreaded tearing. The least he could do here was have some sober last word with the boy. He came forward quietly and whispered to Hutch “Can I wake him a minute?”
Hutch leaned toward Wade; the sleep seemed genuine, though dreamless. In his normal voice Hutch said “All right,” then stood and moved toward the door. “I’ll leave you. Don’t wear him out, don’t beg him for pardon, and call me when you leave.” Then he went to the study.
Straw stood awhile longer, moving the last few inches to the chair and sitting beside his young friend’s bed, among the futile defense equipment of tubes and wires against a death manned by ten billion enemies, visible to nothing but electron microscopes. Straw slowly shifted his mind off the shock of new life he’d got in the hours inside Charlotte’s body and her avid mind; and eventually he was reeling back through pictures of Wade from infancy on through late boyhood to the time when Straw had ceased to see him often, the day Wade took his degree at State and headed north.
Straw’s own child had given no tangible cause for offense—a pale tall smart girl, now a married woman in suburban Atlanta, certifiably successful, though barren as sand and with less family feeling than most third cousins. Wade had won all hearts from the day he was born, a child with each of his parents’ strengths and no great weakness except his constant aim to please every soul around him. After maybe five minutes, Straw actually said, in the lowest whisper, “Take what’s left of me and let Wade be.” By be he meant live—Let Wade live on past me, years longer. I’ve had too much; I’ve used up me and too many others. Warmed as he’d been by his hours with Charlotte, Straw was intent as any threatened creature longing to last in the wild—the black rhino or the snowy egret. He literally hoped to die in this chair here and set Wade free into new healed life, a calm eternity or pure oblivion.
And Wade’s head finally turned toward Strawson. In the past two weeks, since shaves had proved painful and dangerous, the boy had accumulated a beard—short and patchy, as if the hair itself were exhausted, but still a surprise. Now his eyes opened as if they still worked; and when he’d sensed what lay beyond him in reach of his hand. Wade put out his arm and said “Thank God.”
Straw took the hand and said “What for?”
Wade had to decide. At last he said “For somebody happy to be here now.”
Straw thought at first You couldn’t be wronger; but as he felt the chill fingers heat in his grasp, he knew Wade was right as he’d mostly been. After they’d got through minutes of silence, joined that closely, Straw finally leaned to kiss Wade’s wrist and replace it carefully under the sheet. He told the boy “I recall every hour,” and he felt that was true—all their hours at the Kendal place, in the woods and fields, whole years of laughter and ten thousand stories.
When the words were out in the air between them, Straw suddenly hoped for the least hint that Wade had heard him and halfway agreed. But the glazed eyes held on Straw’s face, unblinking; and the dry lips were set. Then after a long time th
e lips said “Minutes. I know all the minutes—” Nothing else came.
So at last Straw stood and forced himself to turn his back on the vacant face and its awful eyes. Then he left the house in total silence, without so much as a sign to Hutch, and was gone toward home.
38
ON the fifth of July, a blistering Monday, Hutch met Jimmy Boat at the Durham bus station. By then it was past eight o’clock in the evening, and the heat had relented, so Boatie could say as he came down the steps “Ocean breezes! This is cooler than Mama’s.”
Hutch told him not to get his hopes up; they were locked in a drought. But the sturdy refusal of Boat’s short body to show discouragement cheered Hutch enough to let him laugh for the first time in days. He made Boat let him carry the suitcase; and all the way to the car, they talked about nothing but Boat’s family and the feast they’d offered him yesterday in rooms as hot as any brick kiln.
Since Wade was sleeping at the house with Maitland reading beside him, Hutch took the chance to drive Boat through both halves of Duke campus, locked in their annual chaste summer daze.
Not till they’d passed the chapel tower did Boatie speak of why he was here. He’d talked on the phone with Hutch yesterday, so he felt fairly safe in saying “Our boy bearing up all right?”
“He’s been a little stronger all afternoon, I’m glad to say. I honestly think he’s waiting for you.”
Boat looked to Hutch’s face; any trace of the jockey or clown had leached from him. “For me to do what?”
Hutch could only laugh again. “For your kind face.”
“He won’t see that.” Then after they’d left the campus gates, Boat said “You mean he’s waiting on me to die, Hutch?” It was the first time Boat had said only Hutch, and it didn’t feel right.
Hutch said “May be.” The chance implied in Boat’s last question had not quite dawned on Hutch till he heard it. Boaties his last bridge to Wyatt and that world.
Boat’s head moved slowly. “Lord Jesus, again. You know I’ve been to forty-eight funerals in the years since this thing took real hold—eleven years?” Though he managed to hide it, Boat felt a sudden longing to open the car door and fling himself out, anything now but the fresh sight of Wade after three more months of a pain and wasting more savage than any locust plague in the Bible—a book which Boat read nightly in his narrow room, a room Boat scrubbed on his hands and knees nightly and loveless as any field of chalk.
39
BUT when they reached Wade, he was propped in bed on a thick nest of pillows; and Mait had shaved him and tamed his long hair.
Boat had learned, in the years of the plague, to freeze his face against the ambush of a person’s changed body or the air that clung round him. He’d learned to scent, sharp as any deer, the distant signs of a new assault—bacterial, viral, parasitic—or the inevitable rush to surrender, after years of drawn-out hope and fight, to a matchless foe. Now Boat kept his smile at full white blast as he faced Wade and thought You can’t weigh eighty pounds. He saw right off that Wade had passed through the narrows at least toward the broader water that would be his death soon, and the first thing he said was “If you get any handsomer, baby, I’ll call the cops.” In a strange way, he meant it.
Boat’s voice and the crisp charge of his attention reached Wade quicker than most things lately. In under five seconds he also grinned. “I’m out of the running, I lost the bikini competition, save the public funds.”
Boat said “Naw, boy. You’re too hot to handle—Mr. America in Technicolor!”
Wade said “I’ve settled for the Mr. Congeniality prize.” His hand pointed to the bedside chair where Mait was sitting.
Mait stood at once and Hutch introduced him to Boat. Mait said “Boatie, sit here. It’s the best seat we’ve got.”
Boat said “Keep your place. I been sitting all day. Anyhow I need to hug this child.” He went to Wade, touched the dry hair lightly, then bent to his forehead and kissed him there. Boat glanced back and—quick, while no one saw him—he made a short sign of the cross on Wade, where his lips had touched the disappearing child.
As Boat leaned back. Wade said “You scared to kiss my mouth?”
Boat understood at once. “Come on—you know me better than that. I just didn’t want to be overfamiliar after so long apart and give you all my big-city germs.”
Wade looked like Death on his cold white horse, but he said “Nobody’s kissed me head-on since I left New York.”
Hutch knew it was true and felt rebuked.
Boat bent again, with no hesitation, and met Wade’s thin lips—dry as clean cloth.
Wade said “Many thanks.”
“My pleasure, all mine.” Boat took the chair then and laid a hand on the bone of Wade’s arm. “Tell me all the trash you seen since you left me. I’m starving for news.”
Mait and Hutchins left him there.
40
IT didn’t seem strange to Hutch that—once Wade fell asleep and he and Mait fed soup and sandwiches to Boat, who was finally showing hunger from his trip—Boat said “You mind if I sleep in yonder with Wade?”
Hutch thought Boat meant to sleep in Wade’s bed with him; even then he could think of no objection except the chance that a healthy body might bruise or break Wade, but he said “If you think that can help him any—it’s not a wide bed.”
Boat could hear, in just those words, that Hutch had watched this death too closely; he was losing grip. What Boat had meant was a cot or a pallet beside Wade’s bed.
And there was an antique folding cot. Hutch and Mait brought it up from the cellar, opened it in the kitchen to check for mice or flying squirrels’ nests, found it clean and dry, and rolled it into Wade’s room where Boat insisted on fitting it out with the sheets Hutch gave him—Wade had long since drifted off.
That got them to nearly eleven at night; and though Boat was plainly tired from his trip, Hutch offered him and Mait a drink. So the three men sat in Hutch’s study and drank small quantities of good apple brandy, atom by atom, making it last. They were that slowed down by the weight and heft of oncoming death which was pressing now at all the boundaries of the house and at every window. There was no sense of fear or dread in anyone, only the mild hope to huddle down with reliable friends and see death work its final will.
Exhausted as he was, between sips of brandy, Boat went on responding with pleased surprise to this or that picture on the walls or the odd arresting object nearby—an ostrich egg brought from Africa by a cracked old missionary woman Hutch had known in boyhood, a framed lock of what claimed to be Thomas Jefferson’s hair (given to Hutch by a student years back, a red-haired boy who was Jefferson’s great-great-great blood nephew); a brass bugle that had sounded taps in France on November 11th, 1918 (a gift from Grainger, who’d blown the call for his own black contingent and could guarantee it). Boat touched, then stood before each object as if each one were giving off rays—invisible power he could feel but not see. Wherever it came from, Boat sensed it was good; so he let it flow through him, hoping it had some strength to give, some guidance in moving this house toward its end.
Watching Boat stand in such mute patience deepened Hutch’s trust in the small burdened man. All Hutch’s life he’d noticed with puzzlement the fact that ninety-eight percent of his visitors never gave a moment’s attention to any manmade or natural thing in the house. They were not only legally blind, like most Americans in a swarming television-blinded century; they were likewise trapped in the tunnel vision of self-absorption or were swaddled to the ears in the devastatingly barren legacy of a puritanism that refuses all worldly pleasures to the eye, not to speak of the mind or the lonely body.
When the three men had gone for ten minutes more with very few words, Boat walked a straight line toward the mantle. Most of the rocks Hutch had gathered through life were laid out there in long months of dust—flint arrowheads he’d found in childhood at the old Kendal place, an almost perfect Indian axe-head Grainger had found when he dredged ou
t the creek, a stained shard of marble from the days Hutch spent with Ann in Rome when she met him there on his first Oxford Christmas; and a flat white pebble from the town of Capernaum on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, Simon Peter’s home.
What Boat picked up though and held toward the light was something Hutch had almost forgot. A primitive carving in thick pinebark five inches long. It was all Hutch had of his great-grandfather, old Robinson Mayfield, the family starveling who’d consumed so many lives, white and black. Well over a century ago, Rob had whittled it brutally into the rudimentary shape of a man and had hung in its crotch, on stiff copper wire, a half-inch cock you could flip up or down. (Polly had persuaded old Rob to remove the prong; Hutch had restored its full flagrance, in his childhood, when Polly gave it to him.)
Boat worked the toy cock up and down twice, then shook his head. “One piece of skin has killed all my boys.”
Hutch smiled bleakly and agreed.
But it struck Mait wrong—a small attack on his own person; the choice his body had made, whenever. He said “Skin is mainly what’s killed men always. And women have certainly used theirs for harm.”
When Boat looked embarrassed, Hutch defended him calmly. “I don’t think Boatie’s indulging in blame, Mait. That’s just an old carving an ancestor made—my great-grandfather. He all but killed four or five of my kinsmen with the works of his cock—the acts it led him to anyhow. Nothing new about that—right—but don’t take it personally.”
Boat set down the carved man and came to his chair. “Some nights I get back to my room late, after spending fifteen hours or more with boys that are dying in shit and shame just because they ran their cock into one wrong socket or got run into; and all I can think to pray is ‘Lord, let people just cool off from here out; let em stop hunting skin like skin is coal or oil for their fire.’”
The Promise of Rest Page 27