by Lee Smith
They bark up a storm when Harold finally gets back out to the farm, at one-thirty. The cockapoos are barking, Cherry’s mom is snoring like a chain saw. Harold doesn’t see how Tammy Lynn can sleep through all of this, but she always does. Teenagers can sleep through anything. Harold himself has started waking up several times a night, his heart pounding. He wonders if he’s going to have a heart attack. He almost mentioned his symptoms to Lois Hickey last week, in fact, but then thought, What the hell. His heart is broken. Of course it’s going to act up some. And everything, not only his heart, is out of whack. Sometimes he’ll break into a sweat for no reason. Often he forgets really crucial things, such as filing his estimated income tax on January 15. Harold is not the kind to forget something this important. He has strange aches that float from joint to joint. He has headaches. He’s lost twelve pounds. Sometimes he has no appetite at all. Other times, like right now, he’s just starving.
Harold goes in the kitchen and finds a flat rectangular casserole, carefully wrapped in tinfoil, on the counter, along with a Tupperware cake carrier. He lifts off the top of the cake carrier and finds a piña colada cake, his favorite. Then he pulls back the tinfoil on the casserole. Lasagna! Plenty is left over. Harold sticks it in the microwave. He knows that the cake and the lasagna were left here by his ex-wife. Ever since Cherry has been in Intensive Care, Joan has been bringing food out to the farm. She comes when Harold’s at work or at the hospital, and leaves it with Gladys or Tammy. She probably figures that Harold would refuse it, if she caught him at home, which he would. She’s a great cook, though. Harold takes the lasagna out of the microwave, opens a beer, and sits down at the kitchen table. He loves Joan’s lasagna. Cherry’s idea of a terrific meal is one she doesn’t have to cook. Harold remembers eating in bed with Cherry, tacos from Taco Bell, sour-cream-and-onion chips, beer. He gets some more lasagna and a big wedge of piña colada cake.
Now it’s two-thirty, but for some reason Harold is not a bit sleepy. His mind whirls with thoughts of Cherry. He snaps off all the lights and stands in the darkened house. His heart is racing. Moonlight comes in the windows, it falls on the old patterned rug. Outside, it’s as bright as day. He puts his coat on and goes out, with the cockapoos scampering along beside him. They are not even surprised. They think it’s a fine time for a walk. Harold goes past the mailbox, down the dirt road between the fields. Out here in the country, the sky is both bigger and closer than it is in town. Harold feels like he’s in a huge bowl turned upside down, with tiny little pinpoints of light shining through. And everything is silvered by the moonlight—the old fence posts, the corn stubble in the flat long fields, a distant barn, the highway at the end of the dirt road, his own strange hand when he holds it out to look at it.
He remembers when she waited on him in the Food Lion deli, three years ago. He had asked for a roast beef sandwich, which come prepackaged. Cherry put it on his plate. Then she paused, and cocked her hip, and looked at him. “Can I give you some potato salad to go with that?” she asked. “Some slaw?”
Harold looked at her. Some red curls had escaped the required net. “Nothing else,” he said.
But Cherry spooned a generous helping of potato salad onto his plate. “Thank you so much,” he said. They looked at each other.
“I know I know you,” Cherry said.
It came to him then. “Cherry Oxendine,” said Harold. “I remember you from high school.”
“Lord, you’ve got a great memory, then!” Cherry had an easy laugh. “That was a hundred years ago.”
“Doesn’t seem like it.” Harold knew he was holding up the line.
“Depends on who you’re talking to,” Cherry said.
Later that day, Harold found an excuse to go back over to the deli for coffee and apple pie, then he found an excuse to look through the personnel files. He started eating lunch at the deli every day, without making any conscious decision to do so. In the afternoons, when he went back for coffee, Cherry would take her break and sit at a table with him.
Harold and Cherry talked and talked. They talked about their families, their kids, high school. Cherry told him everything that had happened to her. She was tough and funny, not bitter or self-pitying. They talked and talked. In his whole life, Harold had never had so much to say. During this period, which lasted for several weeks, his whole life took on a heightened aspect. Everything that happened to him seemed significant, a little incident to tell Cherry about. Every song he liked on the radio he remembered, so he could ask Cherry if she liked it too. Then there came the day when they were having coffee and she mentioned she’d left her car at Al’s Garage that morning to get a new clutch.
“I’ll give you a ride over there to pick it up,” said Harold instantly. In his mind he immediately canceled the sales meeting he had scheduled for four o’clock.
“Oh, that’s too much trouble,” Cherry said.
“But I insist.” In his conversations with Cherry, Harold had developed a brand-new gallant manner he had never had before.
“Well, if you’re sure it’s not any trouble . . .” Cherry grinned at him like she knew he really wanted to do it, and that afternoon when he grabbed her hand suddenly before letting her out at Al’s Garage, she did not pull it away.
The next weekend Harold took her up to Memphis and they stayed at the Peabody Hotel, where Cherry got the biggest kick out of the ducks in the lobby, and ordering from room service.
“You’re a fool,” Harold’s friends told him later, when the shit hit the fan.
But Harold didn’t think so. He doesn’t think so now, walking the old dirt road on the Oxendine farm in the moonlight. He loves his wife. He feels that he has been ennobled and enlarged, by knowing Cherry Oxendine. He feels like he has been specially selected among men, to receive a precious gift. He stepped out of his average life for her, he gave up being a good man, but the rewards have been extraordinary. He’s glad he did it. He’d do it all over again.
Still walking, Harold suddenly knows that something is going to happen. But he doesn’t stop walking. Only, the whole world around him seems to waver a bit, and intensify. The moonlight shines whiter than ever. A little wind whips up out of nowhere. The stars are twinkling so brightly that they seem to dance, actually dance, in the sky. And then, while Harold watches, one of them detaches itself from the rest of the sky and grows larger, moves closer, until it’s clear that it is actually moving across the sky, at an angle to the earth. A falling star, perhaps? A comet?
Harold stops walking. The star moves faster and faster, with an erratic pattern. It’s getting real close now. It’s no star. Harold hears a high whining noise, like a blender. The cockapoos huddle against his ankles. They don’t bark. Now he can see the blinking red lights on the top of it, and the beam of white light shooting out the bottom. His coat is blown straight out behind him by the wind. He feels like he’s going blind. He shields his eyes. At first it’s as big as a barn, then a tobacco warehouse. It covers the field. Although Harold can’t say exactly how it communicates to him or even if it does, suddenly his soul is filled to bursting. The ineffable occurs. And then, more quickly than it came, it’s gone, off toward Carrollton, rising into the night, leaving the field, the farm, the road. Harold turns back.
It will take Cherry Oxendine two more weeks to die. She’s tough. And even when there’s nothing left of her but heart, she will fight all the way. She will go out furious, squeezing Harold’s hand at the very moment of death, clinging fast to every minute of this bright, hard life. And although at first he won’t want to, Harold will go on living. He will buy another store. Gladys will die. Tammy Lynn will make Phi Beta Kappa. Harold will start attending the Presbyterian church again. Eventually Harold may even go back to his family, but he will love Cherry Oxendine until the day he dies, and he will never, ever, tell anybody what he saw.
Me and My Baby View the Eclipse
Sharon Shaw first met her lover, R
aymond Stewart, in an incident that took place in broad daylight at the Xerox machine in Stewart’s Pharmacy three years ago—it can’t be that long! Sharon just can’t believe it. Every time she thinks about him now, no matter what she’s doing, she stops right in the middle of it while a hot crazy ripple runs over her entire body. This makes her feel like she’s going to die or throw up. Of course she never does either one. She pats her hair and goes right on with her busy life the way she did before she met him, but everything is different now, all altered, all new. Three years! Her children were little then: Leonard Lee was eleven, Alister was ten, and Margaret, the baby, was only three. Sharon was thirty-four. Now she’s over the hill, but who cares? Since the children are all in school, she and Raymond can meet more easily.
“Is the coast clear?” Raymond will ask with his high nervous giggle, at her back door. Raymond speaks dramatically, emphasizing certain words. He flings his arms around. He wears huge silky handkerchiefs and gold neck-chains and drives all the way to Roanoke to get his hair cut in what he calls a modified punk look. In fact Raymond is a figure of fun in Roxboro, which Sharon knows, and this knowledge just about kills her. She wants to grab him up and soothe him, smooth down his bristling blond hair and press his fast-beating little heart against her deep soft bosom and wrap him around and around in her big strong arms. Often, she does this. “Hush now, honey,” she says.
For Raymond is misunderstood. Roxboro is divided into two camps about him, the ones who call him Raymond, which is his name, and the ones who call him Ramón, with the accent on the last syllable, which is what he wants to be called. “Putting on airs just like his daddy did,” sniffs Sharon’s mama, who works at the courthouse and knows everything. Raymond’s daddy was a pharmacist who, according to Sharon’s mama, never got over not being a doctor. She says this is common among pharmacists. She says he was a dope fiend too. Sharon doesn’t know if this part is true or not, and she won’t ask; the subject of his father—who killed himself—gives Raymond nervous palpitations of the heart. Anyway this is how Raymond came to be working at Stewart’s Pharmacy, where he mostly runs the Xerox machine and helps ladies order stationery and wedding invitations from huge bound books which he keeps on a round coffee table in his conversation area—Raymond likes for things to be nice. A tall, sour-faced man named Mr. Gardiner is the actual manager—everybody knows that Raymond could never run a store. Raymond stays busy, though. He does brochures and fliers and handouts, whatever you want, on his big humming Xerox machine, and he’ll give you a cup of coffee to drink while you make up your mind. This coffee is strong, sweet stuff. Sharon had never tasted anything quite like it before the day she went in there to discuss how much it would cost to print up a little cookbook of everybody’s favorite recipes from the Shady Mountain Elementary School PTA to make extra money for art.
It was late August, hot as blazes outside, so it took Sharon just a minute to recover from the heat. She’s a large, slow-moving woman anyway, with dark brown eyes and dark brown hair and bright deep color in her cheeks. She has what her mother always called a “peaches-’n’-cream complexion.” She used to hear her mother saying that on the phone to her Aunt Marge, talking about Sharon’s “peaches-’n’-cream complexion” and about how she was so “slow,” and wouldn’t “stand up for herself.” This meant going out for cheerleader. Later, these conversations were all about how Sharon would never “live up to her potential,” which meant marrying a doctor, a potential that went up in smoke the day Sharon announced that she was going to marry Leonard Shaw, her high school sweetheart, after all.
Now Sharon talks to her mother every day on the telephone, unless of course she sees her, and her mother still talks every day to Sharon’s Aunt Marge. Sharon has worn her pretty hair in the same low ponytail ever since high school, which doesn’t seem so long ago to her either. It seems like yesterday, in fact, and all the friends she has now are the same ones she had then, or pretty much, and her husband Leonard is the same, only older, heavier, and the years between high school and now have passed swiftly, in a strong unbroken line. They’ve been good years, but Sharon can’t figure out where in the world they went, or tell much difference between them.
Until she met Raymond, that is. Now she has some high points in her life. But “met” is the wrong word. Until she saw Raymond with “new eyes” is how Sharon thinks of it now.
She went into Stewart’s that day in August and showed Raymond her typed recipes and told him what she wanted. He said he thought he could do that. What kind of paper? he wanted to know. What about the cover? Sharon hadn’t considered the cover. Raymond Stewart bobbed up and down before her like a jack-in-the-box, asking questions. It made her feel faint, or it might have been the sudden chill of the air-conditioning, she’d just come from standing out in her hot backyard with the hose, watering her garden. “What?” she said. Sharon has a low, pretty voice, and a way of patting her hair. “Sit right down here, honey,” Raymond said, “and let me get you a cup of coffee.” Which he did, and it was so strong, tasting faintly of almonds.
They decided to use pale blue paper, since blue and gold were the school colors. Sharon looked at Raymond Stewart while he snipped and pasted on the coffee table. “Aha!” he shrieked, and “Aha!” Little bits of paper went flying everywhere. Sharon looked around, but nobody seemed to notice: People in Stewart’s were used to Raymond. She found herself smiling.
“Hmmm,” Raymond said critically, laying out the pages, and “This sounds yummy,” about Barbara Sutcliff’s Strawberries Romanoff. Sharon had never heard a grown man say “yummy” out loud before. She began to pay more attention. That day Raymond was wearing baggy, pleated tan pants—an old man’s pants, Sharon thought—a Hawaiian shirt with blue parrots on it, and red rubber flip-flops. “Oh, this sounds dreadful,” Raymond said as he laid out Louise Dart’s famous chicken recipe where you spread drumsticks with apricot preserves and mustard.
“Actually it’s pretty good,” Sharon said. “Everybody makes that.” But she was giggling. The strong coffee was making her definitely high, so high that he talked her into naming the cookbook Home on the Range (which everybody thought was just darling, as it turned out), and then he drew a cover for it, a woman in a cowboy hat and an apron tending to a whole stovetop full of wildly bubbling pans. The woman had a funny look on her face; puffs of steam came out of some of the pots.
“I used to draw,” Sharon said dreamily, watching him. Raymond has small, white hands with tufts of gold hair on them.
“What did you draw?” He didn’t look up.
“Trees,” Sharon said. “Pages and pages and pages of trees.” As soon as she said it, she remembered it—sitting out on the porch after supper with the pad on her lap, drawing tree after tree with huge flowing branches that reached for God. She didn’t tell him the part about God. But suddenly she knew she could, if she wanted to. You could say anything to Raymond Stewart, just the way you could say anything to somebody you sat next to on a bus: anything.
He grinned at her. His hair stood up in wild blond clumps and behind the thick glasses his magnified eyes were enormous, the pale, flat blue of robins’ eggs. “How’s that?” He held up the drawing and Sharon said it was fine. Then he signed his name in tiny peaked letters across the bottom of it, like an electrocardiogram, which she didn’t expect. Something about him doing this tugged at her heart.
Sharon drank more coffee while he ran off four copies of the recipe booklet; he’d do five hundred more later, if her committee approved. Raymond put these copies into a large flat manila envelope and handed it to her with a flourish and a strange little half-bow. Then somehow, in the midst of standing up and thanking him and taking the envelope—she was all in a flurry—Sharon cut her hand on the flap of the envelope. It was a long, bright cut—a half-moon curve in the soft part of her hand between thumb and index finger. “Oh!” she said.
“Oh my God!” Raymond said dramatically. Together they watched while
the blood came up slowly, like little red beads on a string. Then Raymond seized her hand and brought it to his mouth and kissed it!—kissed the cut. When Sharon jerked her hand away, it left a red smear, a bloodstain, on his cheek.
“Oh, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” Raymond cried, following Sharon out as she fled through the makeup section of the pharmacy where Missy Harrington was looking at lipstick and that older, redheaded lady was working the cash register, and where nobody, apparently, had noticed anything.
“I’ll call you about the recipe book,” Sharon tossed back over her shoulder. It was only from years of doing everything right that she was able to be so polite . . . or was it? Because what had happened, anyway? Nothing, really . . . just not a thing. But Sharon sat in her car for a long time before she started back toward home, not minding how the hot seat burned the backs of her legs. Then, on the way, she tried to remember everything she had ever known about Raymond Stewart.
He was younger—he’d been three or four years behind Sharon in school. Everybody used to call him Highwater because he wore his pants so short that you could always see his little white socks, his little white ankles. He’d been a slight, awkward boy, known for forgetting his books and losing his papers and saying things in class that were totally beside the point. Supposedly, though, he was “bright”; Sharon had had one class with him because he had advanced placement in something, she couldn’t remember what now—some kind of English class. How odd that he’d never gone on to college. . . . What Sharon did remember, vividly, was Raymond’s famous two-year stint as drum major for the high school, after her graduation. Sharon, then a young married woman sitting in the bleachers with her husband, had seen him in this role again and again. Before Leonard Lee was born, Sharon went to all the games with Leonard, who used to be the quarterback.