He lifts the jug and when he swallows I can see his Adam’s apple moving up and down. It gives him a clownish and caricatured look, and out of regret for this, rather than any desire to hear more, I bend forward and touch his hand.
“Then?”
“It’s a funny thing,” he says. “She thought it would come from so far away. The Almighty voice and the rain of locusts and blood. The moon turned dark and the stars gone wild. And all the time it was close by.”
He pauses and then with some effort goes on.
“I got home a quarter of an hour after the fire trucks,” he says. “It started in the basement, and spread. The house was old—about twenty-five years, I’d say—and all the timber inside was very dry. The house was a total loss. We had insurance on that, of course.”
“But the—”
He nods. There is something bemused about his look, an inarticulate bewilderment.
“They say it’s quick,” he says. “They’re not actually burned, you know, not until afterward. It’s the smoke.”
He turns to me. “That’s what I was told. But how do I know it’s quick? It might not be. I’d only know for sure if it happened to me.”
He jerks his head away. “I wish to Christ it had,” he says.
He thinks he’s discovered pain, like a new drug. I could tell him a thing or two. But when I try to think what it is I’d impart, it’s gone, it’s only been wind that swelled me for an instant with my accumulated wisdom and burst like a belch. I can tell him nothing. I can think of only one thing to say with any meaning.
“I had a son,” I say, “and lost him.”
“Well,” he says abruptly, “then you know.”
We sit quietly in this place, empty except for ourselves, and listen for the terrible laughter of God, but can hear only the vapid chuckling of the sea.
“I can’t figure out whose fault it could have been,” he says. “My granddad’s, for being a Bible puncher in the first place? Mother’s, for making me prefer hellfire to lavender talcum? Lou’s, for insisting nothing could happen to him? Mine, for not saying right out, long before, that I might as well not go, for all the good it was doing me?”
Why does he go on like this? I’ve heard enough.
“No one’s to blame.”
“Well, but you know what I used to do before I went to vigil? I used to have a slug or two of rye in the basement, to get me going. Maybe I left a cigarette burning. I could never remember for sure.”
He puts a hand on the jug. “You know something? You know what she says, Lou I mean?”
“What?”
“She says now I’ve got the perfect excuse. And I can’t say she’s wrong. Maybe that’s all it is, now. It was five years ago.”
He gets to his feet. “If I knew where your soda biscuits had got to, I could eat a few right now.”
He takes the candle, leaving me in darkness, and lurches across the resounding planks. I close my eyes. “I’ll rest for a while, and think of nothing. But when my eyes no longer receive even the impressions of shadows to steady myself by, I dip and dart inside my skull, swooping like a sea gull. I feel ill at the sensation. I feel I may not be able to return, even if I open my eyes. I may be swept outward like a gull, blown by a wind too strong for it, forced into the rough sea, held under and drawn fathoms down into depths as still and cold as black glass.
He’s back. I open my eyes and find there’s no light in the room.
“Candle’s had it,” he says matter-of-factly. “Seems colder in here with the light gone, doesn’t it? You must be frozen. You’ve only got a sweater.”
He’s noticed what I’m wearing, then. Fearfully, I try to feel with my fingers to discover whether my dress is really torn or not, and where. The cloth bunches and puckers. I can feel nothing except my own rolls of fat, shivering with chill. I’m making the dress worse, pulling at it like this. The candle is out. He can’t see now, whatever I look like.
“I’m fine,” I say. “It’s a heavy cardigan. You’re not going away, are you? It’s not too cold for you?”
“Not for me,” he mumbles. “I guess I should give you my coat. Sure you’re warm enough?”
“Oh yes, quite sure.”
“Well, okay, then. I just wondered.”
We are silent, both of us. I close my eyes once more.
John came in one afternoon to tell me Arlene was going East for a year.
“Her dad’s cousin is going to pay her for helping in the house. It’s all in the family, so they get hired help for practically nothing. It’s a hell of a fine arrangement.”
“Why is she going, then, if it’s all that bad?”
“Oh, it’s not bad on the surface—these things never are. The invitation’s been put very nicely. Arlene says if she turns it down, her mother and father would never see what she meant, nor how she could possibly object to such a reasonable offer. Anyway, she’s lived off her parents for long enough, she feels, and now that she has the chance of earning something, she’s determined to pay back at least part of what it’s cost them to keep her since she’s been out of work. Only a year, she says, and then we can start off free.”
“You surely can’t disagree with that, can you? I’m glad to hear she has that much sense of responsibility.”
“That kind of a debt,” John said, “you’re never free from, if the person you owe doesn’t want you to be. Nothing is ever enough. The Simmons don’t want the money—they want her. She can’t buy herself away from them. A year won’t make any difference.”
“Funny way of keeping her,” I said, “by having her go.”
John shrugged. “The best way in the world, right now. Maybe she’ll meet some well-fixed guy in Toronto, and then when Telford retires, he and Lottie can move East.”
The thing that bothered me most of all was to hear John’s deliberate rudeness, referring to Telford and Lottie that way, by their first names.
“I think that’s an awful way to talk,” I said.
“Do you? You don’t seem very surprised, though, by all this. Were you expecting it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped. “I haven’t the foggiest notion what you’re talking about.”
“Yeh?” he said. Then, fiercely, “She goes in two weeks’ time. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to bring her home here every single night from now until then, and if she gets pregnant, so much the better.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” I cried. “You’ve been talked about enough in Manawaka. Only a child can’t wait for something it wants.”
“That’s what you think,” John said. “Maybe you never wanted anything enough.”
All at once my anger fell, and I could only look at him and plead and try to make him see.
“I want your happiness,” I said. “You’ll never know how much. I don’t want you to make a mistake, take on responsibilities beyond your means. I know where it leads. You think I don’t, but I do. John, please try to understand—”
He lost his anger, too, then, and his gray eyes grew baffled as he looked into mine.
“But that’s crazy,” he said. “You’ve got it all wrong. I was—well, I was just about okay, after a long time—didn’t you know?”
“Stony broke,” I protested. “With no trade nor training, and nothing in sight, and you can say that?”
“You always bet on the wrong horse,” John said gently. “Marv was your boy, but you never saw that, did you?”
That night, and on the nights following, he took the truck out instead of the car-buggy. I guess he thought he needn’t save it any longer. But despite what he had said, he never brought Arlene back. They never played at house again in the Shipley place.
The evening I’m thinking of, I decided not to wait up for him. He used to come in very late, later all the time, it seemed to me, and each time I’d be furious, thinking that the money spent on gas for the truck was my money. He had no business using it to drive Arlene goodness knows where around the country. I tol
d him so, in no uncertain terms that evening, but he only replied that he’d kept account of the money and would pay it back when he could, and they didn’t use much gas, anyway, for they never went very far.
“I don’t doubt that,” I said. “You’re brazen enough, the pair of you, to go no further than the caragana hedge outside the Simmons’ house.”
I was a little sharp with him, I know, but he was accustomed to my ways, and wouldn’t have taken the words at their face value. He must have known I only did it for his sake.
“In a place where everyone knows everyone else,” I said to him that night, “you have to avoid not only evil but the appearance of evil.”
Unexpectedly, he grinned.
“That’s a tall order, all right,” he said. He opened the kitchen door. “So long. I’ll be seeing you.”
He went out, and I went up to bed. I couldn’t sleep. Sleep came so easily to me when I was younger—I never thought of it as a gift. But by that time, it had to be coaxed with murder mysteries. Reading didn’t turn me drowsy that night. The August air was heavy and still. I sat propped up with pillows, wondering if I should give in and take a phenobarb.
Then I heard someone thumping at the door, and I was terrified, thinking it might be some hobo who had ridden the rods this far and wanted food and lodging, a despairing man, perhaps, who might be tempted to ransack the house. I waited, uncertain whether to go down or not, and then I heard a voice calling my name. “Hagar—Hagar—”
When I opened the door, Henry Pearl was standing there. He fumbled for speech, and finally blurted the words out roughly.
“You’d best come along with me, Hagar. It’s John.”
“What is it? What’s happened?”
But Henry was unable to speak. He had grown too thin of late years. His clothing hung awkwardly on him and his face was streaked with wrinkles like the grain in hardwood. He had three of his own sons, sober and stolid—they’d never given him a moment’s worry, to my knowledge, or maybe they had and I merely didn’t know. My only thought was that John had got into some kind of trouble. Sometimes there were fights at the Flamingo Dance Hall on a Saturday night, and the broken beer bottles, so I’d heard, flew like birds.
“Henry—what is it?”
“Get dressed and come on,” he said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
The few miles into Manawaka seemed thousands. Henry, behind the wheel of his old Ford truck, spoke in a manner that was so painfully slow I could have screamed at him to tell it all, now, this minute.
“He’s at the hospital,” he said. “It was an accident, Hagar. He—”
“How bad? Is he all right?”
“I don’t know,” Henry mumbled. “I guess they can’t say yet.”
And then he told me. His eldest son had been at the dance, and had seen John, drunk for the first time in months, take on a bet with Lazarus Tonnerre that he could drive the truck across the trestle bridge. Arlene had tried to persuade him not to go, but he wouldn’t listen. So she went with him.
“He made sure no train was due,” Henry recounted. “He wasn’t that far gone, if you know what I mean. He made good and sure of that, Hank said.”
“The truck—it went over—”
“No,” Henry said. “He got it across, God knows how. He got it across all right.”
“Then—”
“It was a special freight,” Henry said. “Unscheduled. It was carrying potatoes and stuff, for people on relief. It came around the Wachakwa bend there, just before the trestle bridge. They couldn’t have seen it until it was too late.”
No one’s fault. Where do causes start, how far back?
“Arlene—” I said, suddenly aware of her. “How badly hurt is she?”
Henry put an arm around my shoulder, almost apologetically, as though it were somehow his fault for having to tell me.
“They think she must have been killed instantly,” he said.
I felt there must have been a mistake, that it couldn’t be true, any of it. One always feels there has been a mistake. The transition is too swift. They had both been all right only a few hours before. They couldn’t have been so altered in such a short time.
“Will he live?” I said.
Henry did not reply, and I saw how lunatic it was to ask such a question of another mortal.
The hospital was deeply silent at that time of night, barely a stirring of air in the sterile corridors. Then the matron came, wearing a look of solemn importance, and I followed her. I was not thinking at all, not at all, and yet I recall some words that must have spun, unspoken, through me at that moment. If he should die, let me not see it.
His face had been lacerated, but only superficially. The injuries that threatened him were unseen. He was not conscious. I sat beside the high narrow hospital bed, waiting. Nurses and doctor came in and out, performed rituals, spoke to one another and to me. I remained unaware of them. I was looking only at his thin sun-browned face, his straight black hair. And then—was it hours or minutes after I arrived?—he opened his eyes. The same gray eyes they’d always been, and in unguarded moments they would look on the world with such an unreasonable hope, you could hardly face it. In an instant now, though, they changed to a kind of panic.
“Arlene—” he said. “Is she okay?”
“She’s quite all right,” I said. “You rest.”
He breathed shallowly, with difficulty, and half closed his eyes.
“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” he said. “I’m sorry—”
He turned his head a little toward me, opened his eyes once more, and grinned in that bitter and incomprehensible way of his.
“I acted like a kid, didn’t I?” he said. “I should know by this time that it doesn’t work.”
“Hush,” I said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
He was quiet for a moment, and then his own pain seemed to reach him suddenly, to penetrate him and force upon him its demoniac possession. He began to cry. When he spoke again, his voice was torn and fragmentary.
“Mother—it hurts. It hurts. Can’t you—make them do something for me? Make them—give me something?”
I was going to tell him I’d go to find a nurse, a sedative needle. But before I could speak or move, he laughed, a low harsh laugh that increased his pain.
“No,” he said distinctly. “You can’t, can you? Never mind. Never mind.”
He put a hand on mine, as though he were momentarily caught up in an attempt to comfort me for something that couldn’t be helped.
Whether I spoke or not, or what I said, or whether he heard me, I do not know. He lay without speaking, his breathing becoming narrower. And then he died. My son died.
When the matron led me out that night, down the clean quiet halls to the waiting-room where Henry Pearl was still patiently sitting, I saw in an alcove what had evidently not been meant for my eyes, a wheeled table bearing something that was covered with a white cloth like a communion. Matron coughed with embarrassment.
“Oh dear, the man from Cameron’s Funeral Parlor hasn’t got here yet. The Simmons were here earlier. Such a lovely girl, she was.”
I turned on her savagely, bereft of reason.
“What do you know of it, what she was, or he?”
She put a well-meaning arm around me. “Cry. Let yourself. It’s the best thing.”
But I shoved her arm away. I straightened my spine, and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my entire life, to stand straight then. I wouldn’t cry in front of strangers, whatever it cost me.
But when at last I was home, alone in Marvin’s old bedroom, and women from the town were sitting in the kitchen below and brewing coffee, I found my tears had been locked too long and wouldn’t come now at my bidding. The night my son died I was transformed to stone and never wept at all. When the ministering women handed me the cup of hot coffee, they murmured how well I was taking it, and I could only look at them dry-eyed from a great distance and not say a single
word. All the night long, I only had one thought—I’d had so many things to say to him, so many things to put to rights. He hadn’t waited to hear.
I guess they thought it odd, some of the Manawaka people did, that after the funeral service was over I wouldn’t go out to the cemetery. I didn’t want to see where he was put, close by his father and close by mine, under the double-named stone where the marble angel crookedly stood.
After a while, I went to see Lottie. But whatever flimsy bond had once been there between us, it was broken now. I saw her only for a few minutes. She didn’t blame, nor I, but we had nothing to say to one another. It had been too much for her. She’d taken to her bed, and when I walked in, Telford stumblingly guiding my elbow, I saw only a crumpled peach satin nightdress on a soaked linen pillowcase, and closed eyes.
“She’s not herself,” Telford said. “I’m sure you’ll understand.”
I looked at him and wondered what it would be like to have a willing man around, so you could afford to take to your bed and have your meals served on a tray. Perhaps I did her an injustice. But I couldn’t collapse. Who’d see to me?
I crated anything of value—the walnut corner cupboard, the oak buffet, the armchair and sofa, the few pieces of china that were left—and had them sent to Marvin’s. I put the sale of the Shipley place in the hands of the lawyer who’d taken over Luke McVitie’s practice after his death. Then I went back to the coast and Mr. Oatley’s house. I was just in time to have the place cleaned up before he returned from California.
The Stone Angel Page 21