The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  Willa enjoyed her evening with the governor. It gave her a chance to try some things that Eden and Tom had considered either unnatural or unmanning. But there was a distance to this kind of passion that didn’t appeal to her, and when Alvah came in to find out how things had gone, she told her she didn’t think she had the stuff it took for the life.

  “Oh, you got what it takes, honey,” said Alvah, sitting beside her. “You just don’t know it.”

  Her robe had fallen partway open, and the globes of her breasts were visible, marble-white and moon-smooth. Looking at them, Willa suddenly perceived in Alvah a kind of sad blankness, as if a greater sadness had been erased or paved over, and she felt a wave of affection for this sculpture of a woman. And maybe her affection washed across the space between them, because Alvah put a hand on Willa’s stomach and caressed its curve, resting it on her upper thigh. One of her fingertips brushed the margin of Willa’s curly hair.

  “You’re so beautiful,” said Alvah, her voice a tongue of shadow in that perfumed place.

  There was a squirmy feeling in Willa’s stomach, and she was a bit scared…but not scared enough to ask Alvah to take her hand away. “You’re prettier than me,” she said meekly, entranced by the desire in Alvah’s face and by an anticipation of forbidden fruit.

  Alvah eased her hand an inch south and down between. “No, honey,” she said. “It’s you, it’s you.”

  Willa tried not to respond, but she could feel her pulse tapping out the message, “Yes, I will,” against Alvah’s fingertip.

  “Please,” whispered Alvah, and that word was a little wind that went everywhere through Willa, that told her a thousand things no one had ever troubled to tell her, that elevated her to something perfect and needed, that showed Alvah’s need to be as strong and unalloyed as her own. Please, please. The word lowered over her like a veil, like the veil of Alvah’s black hair fanning across her stomach, curtaining her off from the moral precincts of Lyman and her marriage. Willa wouldn’t have believed a woman could make her burn, and true, it felt strange to be loved and not have a body covering her upper half, but Alvah’s kisses and touches gave a tenderness to pleasure that she had never known from a man’s rough bark. And though Willa had dreaded the idea of doing to Alvah what Alvah had done for her, though she set to it out of duty not desire, she came to desire. It seemed she had entered some Arab kingdom of musk and honey, some secret temple where a new god basked in its own heat, and when Alvah’s white stomach quaked and her thighs clamped tight, Willa knew for the first time what it was to have the power and pleasure of a man.

  For six years thereafter Willa guest-starred at Mrs. Gacey’s and passed the idle hours in Alvah’s arms. Eden’s stocks had proved worthless, but Willa’s one-trick stands gave her the profit required to justify her Cleveland weekends to Tom, and she let him think that the stocks were the source of this extra money. Her relationship to Alvah was the closest thing to love she had ever known, soft and slow and undemanding, and she would have told far greater lies to maintain it. But all good things must come to an end, or such was the regulation of Eden’s curse. When Tom got fired from the seat-belt factory (Woman, don’t you even think ’bout sellin’ that bottomland!), Willa was forced to take a job, and her weekends were no longer her own.

  The memory evaporated, and Willa pinched up a nose from the Black Clay Boy’s face. His chest rose and fell rapidly, and breath whined through his tiny nostrils. But no new memory breathed from him. She gouged out a mouth and listened hard. Heard a noise that brought to mind those lumps of sadness often disgorged from her own chest. But maybe that was his first word, because the noise opened just like the widening of a silver eye into a world as fresh as yesterday.

  “What’s happening?” Willa asked, becoming terrified now of magic and miracles.

  The kitchen ticked and buzzed, and the Black Clay Boy lay silent. But Willa thought this absence was an answer all the same.

  Willa waited tables at O. V. Lindley’s Dirtline Café, its name deriving from the line of dirt that showed on the wrists of the farm boys who ate there when they took off their work gloves. They would come in drunk and sit swaying at the counter, pawing and teasing Willa, plugging the leaks in their souls with quarters’-worths of country and western philosophy from the glowing sage of the jukebox. She searched among them for a lover, but found no one of the proper measure. Sometimes she would go into the john on her break, skin down her panties, sit on the toilet, and remember Alvah, her hand moving between her legs. Sweat would pour off her, and she would bite back her cry. But even so, they caught her on occasion and would offer to help scratch her itch.

  “What I got right here,” she’d say, holding up her hand, “can do the job a damn sight better than any one of you.”

  And because she was still beautiful, they worried that she might be right.

  Three years of this.

  Time seemed to speed up, to turn a corner on an entire era and accelerate into an unfamiliar country, a place without hope or virtue. Before Willa knew it, she was wrapped in a web of trouble so intricate and thick that her own needs were suffocated. First, Annie—herself a redhead and possessing a streak of Willa’s wildness—got pregnant by an unknown agency, her teenage stomach stretched by a baby boy who weighed fourteen pounds on delivery, and whom she was dissuaded from naming Nomad. Bruce, her second choice, was deemed acceptable. Willa went through Annie’s high-school yearbook, looking for Bruces. Found two. One deceased, one long departed. After giving birth, Annie took to her room and would pass the days listening to vapid love songs on the radio and gazing out the window, leaving Willa to care for the infant. She spooned jar after jar of purée into its mouth, watching it pale and fatten under the harsh kitchen lights, wondering if this monster child might not be the ultimate credential of the efficacy of Eden’s curse. She had begun to believe in the curse, that Eden had breathed some vileness out with the words that enveloped her like an aura and restricted her life—all her pleasures seemed to run a minimal course and span that accorded with Eden’s notions of moderation.

  Tom developed cancer (Don’t sell the bottomland), and Tom, Too took something that caused him to vomit blood and avoid mirrors for almost a month. Not long thereafter he ran away from home. Willa found a note on his pillow confessing that he was Bruce’s father. From his bed of pain, Tom shouted that all this was the fault of Willa’s abnormal sexual urges, and while she did not accept his reasoning, she knew it was her fault in that she had not entered motherhood with love but out of boredom. Four years after his departure, Tom, Too returned, a convert to that mean, squinty-eyed form of Christianity that everywhere spies out its enemies. He begged forgiveness and received his father’s blessing. The two of them would go bowling on Wednesday nights and walk home along the river, discussing philosophy (his brush with cancer had provided Tom with the insight that We Are Everyone of Us All Alone) and real estate (Tom, Too’s chosen profession). Annie had moved with Bruce into a newly built garage apartment, and Tom, Too would visit them frequently, proclaiming that the boy needed a dad. One night Willa saw him coming down Annie’s stairs long after the lights had been switched off. Two weeks later, following a whirlwind courtship, Annie married a fishing-tackle salesman and moved to Akron, vowing never to set foot in Lyman again.

  Willa turned fifty-one.

  Amazingly she looked to be in her early thirties, an age not without a hint of maturity yet nonetheless appealing. However, there was no one in sight who might respond to her appeal, and hoping to subsume her desires in spiritual pursuits, she began attending church with Tom and Tom, Too. And, lo, her faith was rewarded. The new pastor, the Reverend Robert Meister, was a ruggedly handsome man of thirty-five, with piercing blue eyes and a virile physique. A heavenly hunk. But his most attractive feature was his bachelorhood. Willa noticed the tension that flooded his face when he talked to the young girls after services, when they stuck out their gloved hands for him to shake. The poor man, she thought, imagining his solit
ary bouts of guilt-ridden self-abuse in a dark rectory bedroom. He didn’t look at her the way he looked at the younger girls, but she determined that one day soon he would.

  With a fervor that even drew grudging praise from Tom, Too, who had become the family’s spiritual drill sergeant, Willa threw herself into church work. Nothing was too inconsequential for her attentions. She served on the Ladies’ Auxiliary, she taught Sunday School, she organized fund-raisers and baked truckloads of cakes and cookies, all the while carrying on a flirtation with the Reverend, contriving to brush against him, touching his hand in conversation, gradually making him aware of her fundamental charms. And when the Reverend timorously suggested that she accompany him to a church conference on famine in New York, Willa knew that paydirt was near.

  But two days passed at the conference, and the Reverend had yet to make his play. At last Willa contrived a trap. She ordered from room service, went to take a shower, and called out to the Reverend—who had at least been sufficiently bold to reserve adjoining rooms—asking him to answer her door when her order arrived. Then when she heard the waiter close the door behind him, heard the Reverend wrestling with the food cart, she walked buff naked into the room, affecting surprise that he was still there. The Reverend’s jaw went slack, his eyes bugged, and turning back to the bathroom, Willa gave him a full view of her pert breasts, her long legs, and thighs undimpled by cellulite.

  That evening over dinner, though nothing was said, Willa was, as ever, familiar with the Reverend, touching him often, letting him know that she was not displeased by the afternoon’s event. But again he made no move to deepen their relationship. Desperate now, that night Willa disrobed and waited beside the connecting door until the Reverend’s light was dimmed. She pressed her ear to the crack, and when she heard the beginning of heavy breathing, of creaking bed-springs, she threw open the door and walked in. The Reverend tried to conceal his actions, pretending to be wrestling with the bedclothes. But Willa was not to be denied. She flung back the covers, exposing the limp yet still tumescent evidence, and then with all the wiles she had learned while in Mrs. Gacey’s employ, she proceeded to restore it to its former fisted grandeur.

  The Reverend Meister proved Willa’s equal in need, and together they explored the realm of Position, tying complex knots of heat and sinew that often took hours to unravel. Once Position had been exhausted, they began a study of Location. There was scarcely a place in Lyman that did not know their clandestine passion, and each grunting thrust, each stifled cry, was a godsend to Willa after those long and joyless years. She came half to believe that the Christian God had truly blessed her. “Hallelujah,” she whispered as they lay in sweet congregation beneath the church’s midnight altar. “Thank you, Jesus,” she sighed as she stood pressed into a corner of the closet below the choir stalls, her skirts lifted high and the Reverend kneeling down to take communion. “Praise the Lord,” she breathed, bending over a projector in the darkened Sunday School basement, while the Reverend mounted her from behind, and a dozen children sat in front, munching cookies and ice cream, their eyes fixed on a slide show of the Holy Land sans narration.

  Willa lived in a green world again, in a world where hope and possibility conjoined. Her relationship with the Reverend was that rarest of commodities—they were friends who could make love and not allow their carnality to lead away from friendship. And in their lovemaking…well, let it suffice to say that the depth of Willa’s devotion and the extent of the Reverend’s commitment to excellence were compatible in every extreme.

  But, lo, this too shall pass.

  One night at the suggestion of Tom, Too, they had the Reverend over for dinner, and after the dessert dishes had been cleared away, Tom, Too displayed a packet of photographs he had taken, their subject being Willa and the Reverend. “Now this here,” he said, handing one around, “it’ll blow up real nice for the church newsletter. And this here”—he handed over another displaying a complex tangle of flesh, half of which comprised an illegality in the state of Ohio—“I was figurin’ to do up some eight-by-ten glossies.”

  The Reverend lowered his eyes, and Willa shut hers.

  “This has really got to stop,” said Tom, Too. “Right, Dad?”

  Tom was trembling, apoplectic, squeezing the arms of his chair.

  Tom, Too held up yet another photograph that showed the lovers beneath the altar, the moonlit shadow of the cross thrown across them. “This one’s got dandy symbolic value. Oughta raise a few eyebrows in the bishop’s office.” He searched among the remaining photographs. “Hey, Dad,” he said breezily, picking one and sliding it over. “Check that out…Never woulda thought Mom was so limber.”

  Despite his choler, Tom looked broken, frail, on the verge of passing out, and two weeks later, he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed and requiring constant nursing.

  “Wouldn’t sell the bottomland if I were you,” Tom, Too advised Willa, reminding her of the leverage of his photographs. “I been considerin’ puttin’ up a shoppin’ mall…after it’s mine legal, of course. I ’spect the state’ll take care of Dad if you can’t.”

  That tore it for Willa. She crumbled all at once. It was as if her beauty had been its own self, had been hanging on for hope of some lasting appreciation, and now had just given up. By the time she reached the age of sixty, she looked it. At seventy, she looked a spry seventy-five, and at seventy-eight, morticians would perk up when she passed, clasp their hands and say, “How you feelin’ today, Mrs. Selkie,” in a tone that made clear they really wanted to know.

  Tom died nine years after the disclosure of the photographs, having never spoken another word, and after the funeral, the Reverend Meister dropped over to see Willa. He had married a mousy little woman, and had written a book that everyone said was going to make him famous. Willa had never expected him to stay alone and didn’t resent his marriage. In truth, she rarely thought about him anymore, being already a little distracted, halfway to dotty. But she was pleased about his book, and even more pleased when he told her that she was partly responsible for his writing it.

  “Me?” she said. “What’d I do?”

  “It was your intensity,” he said. “When you made love, it was pure, an expression of something that had to come out. It was all of life you were taking in your arms. And if you’d been allowed to express it fully, it would have taken other forms as well. You made me want to find a way to express my own truth, to equal that intensity.”

  She often thought she might have done something with her life, but was glad to hear it from somebody else. “That’s the second nicest thing anybody ever said to me,” she told him.

  “What was the nicest?”

  “‘Please,’” she said, remembering.

  He didn’t press for clarification, and for a while they talked about trivial matters.

  “How’s it being married?” she asked.

  “I don’t love her,” he said. “I just…”

  “I know,” she said. “What’s it like?”

  He thought a second or two. “It’s like being sick…nothing serious. Like being in mild constant pain, and having a nurse and air conditioning.”

  For some reason that started her crying. Maybe it was because having him near made her notice her old-lady smell. Because he still looked young and she looked like death warmed over. He put an arm around her, but she shrugged it off. “Leave me be,” she said.

  “Willa…”

  “You can’t help me,” she said. “I’m crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy.”

  “Not now,” she said. “But the minute you go, I’m gonna be wanderin’ around the house, talking to myself, thinking all kinds of crazy thoughts. Now you get outta here and leave me to it.”

  He got to his feet, pulled on his coat, looking helpless and grim. “God bless you, Willa,” he said.

  “Ain’t no such thing as God,” she told him. “And don’t argue with me ’bout it, ’cause I can feel the place where he ain’t.”

>   “Maybe you can at that,” he said glumly.

  When he closed the door, she had the idea that he stood outside for a long time…or could be he’d just left a thought leaning against the door, a wish for her, like an umbrella he had forgotten.

  Night had fallen. Out the window, bare trees cast blue shadows on the rippled snow, and the air was so crystal clear it seemed you might be able to reach out and break off a chunk with a star inside it and put it in the fridge to save for Christmas. Oh, God…but it was a lonely clarity. And oh, God, there was life in the old girl yet, and wouldn’t she love to move her hips again, and wouldn’t it be more than love to know that sweet feeling of being filled, of being needed, instead of sitting here with liver spots a plague on her hands, with her son a Christian villain, and her daughter estranged, and her grandchild a hulking teenage monster who visited once a year and stole money from her purse. With no future and all her memories played, all her lovers dead…

  Not all, whispered the Black Clay Boy.

  Yes, all! Even the Reverend Meister gone, a victim of that new disease taking the gay boys. Who’d have thought it? If she’d have stayed with him, she’d bet he wouldn’t have strayed that far from heaven.

  The Black Clay Boy seemed to smile at that.

  “Quit makin’ fun of me!” she said. “You’re worse than them Kandell brats.”

  Much worse, Willa.

  Lewd little bastard! I hear that sly tone, I know what you want!

  And what’s wrong with that? It’s what you want, too.

  She made a disparaging noise. “A runt like you couldn’t give me a tickle.”

  You might be surprised, Willa.

  Willa studied him. With his silver eyes and gouged mouth, he looked like a surreal Little Black Sambo. And, she realized, he favored Eden some. Eden had had that same unfinished look. She could, she supposed, give him hands and feet. But then he’d be traipsing his footprints all over her nice carpet, strewing black crumbs everywhere.