Heading Out to Wonderful

by Robert Goolrick

  She told herself that she had acted to save her parents the misery of loss, to pay back a debt of care that was owed. She told herself that she did it because Boaty would have killed him. But she dimly knew somehow that she did it because she preferred the fantasy of the movie in her mind to the reality of Charlie Beale.

  So now she wandered her husband’s property in her plain housecoat, widowed but still married, in mourning for a man she had never really known. She crawled into thickets and lay down in the cool damp of the autumn woods and touched herself, remembering his hands on her, feeling the waves of pleasure, imagining him again, but this time as a shadow without weight or breath, without smell or sound or a hunger that surpassed her own.

  She knew that she had ruined his life. She was not unaware. But men recover. They go on. He was forty years old, and filled with a desire and a craziness for love that was too big, too desperate. She was pretty sure that his heart had been broken before, and hadn’t he come to her anyway?

  The leaves fell around her in the woods, the birds flew south, as she sat with her skirt hiked up around her waist and tried to play in her head the movie in which she could live out the rest of her life, the never-ending reel of her fantasy.

  She called Boaty Mister Glass, now, when she was with him. He called her nothing, slept apart, wouldn’t touch her or come near her. He seemed to be figuring out what to do with her. Throw her out, yes, but she’d cost a lot of money, and you don’t throw good equipment away. She made his supper, and behaved herself, as far as he could tell, and she’d taken down those foolish pictures and burned up her embarrassing clothes, and stopped her damned talk of Hedy Lamarr and such, so, for now, he’d just wait and see how she turned out.

  He was older. He’d never been attractive. He just didn’t have the taste for the hunt right now. Besides, the horse was already out of the barn. He saw the looks in people’s faces, felt their eyes on his back when he walked away. A man whose wife had cheated on him. They’d been snickering at him all his grown life, so what if they snickered now?

  Besides, now that the truth was out, or whatever version of it people took to be the truth, he was freed from the awful burden of having to touch her, visit her in the night, and all that mess was behind him. No more romancing. Better his own hands, his magazines, in his mother’s bed, in the dark, and breakfast on the table.

  He couldn’t stand her now, couldn’t take the sight of her for very long, but, as long as his house was clean and his food was on the table, why look for more trouble? She belonged to him, bought with good money, and he didn’t feel much like throwing out good property.

  No, he would keep her, keep her like Rapunzel in her tower, knowing that no prince would come near her, ever again. He would put up with the stares and the snide grins, knowing that they’d go away, in time. He’d even put up with having to see Charlie Beale every now and then, as long as the man didn’t open his mouth or look at him in any way. Truth is, Boaty was both lazy and a coward, and he knew that confronting Charlie would take a whole lot of doing, and that Charlie would probably kill him if he tried any funny stuff on him. If the man had any sense, he’d just go away, the same way he’d come, back to wherever he came from, or onto the next new place and the next man’s wife.

  One day Sylvan took the car keys from where she knew Boaty had hidden them—he wasn’t that complicated—and she drove into town to see Claudie Wiley, but Claudie, even though her car was parked right in front of her house, wouldn’t open the door when she knocked, again and again. Finally she drew back the blind on the glass-paned door—because she was in business and maybe it was a customer with a hem or an alteration—and stared straight at Sylvan for a full minute, before she let the curtain drop and disappeared back into the silence of her house, her life measured out in stitches. Claudie would never open the door to her again. She’d open it to any other woman with a bolt of cloth and a dream, but not to her.

  Sylvan drove into Lexington and walked into the State Theater one more time, not even looking up to see what was on the marquee. She sat herself down in her usual seat, thinking for a second of Claudie upstairs in the Negro balcony with her sketch pad, thinking of the days when that had been good and possible, and then she drew a breath as the lights went down and the picture began to roll on the screen. The same silver light, the same bright faces with their handsome, big features that seemed to throw off light into a darkened world, but there was nothing there for her. Not any more. She left the theater, walking out into the blinding fall sunshine of Nelson Street, searching for her car keys in her purse, trying to see her way through the blinding, chilly brightness, back to her car, back to her life, back to her self. Back to being a country girl she did not know and had never known.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE FIRST WEDNESDAY in December that year came on the seventh. It was Pearl Harbor Day and the flags were out, there would be services in every church in the afternoon to honor the almost five thousand who were killed or injured on that awful day only eight years before, every man and woman in town wore a little rosette to mourn the tragedy, so fresh in their minds, that day of infamy, as they all thought. But it was getting on toward Christmas, so there were also Christmas decorations hanging along with the flags, and there was a lot of butchering and planning to be done. Things went on in the world; Chiang Kai-shek fled China for Taiwan, but hardly anybody in Brownsburg noticed. The fate of millions of Chinese people didn’t matter nearly as much as the fate of the souls they lived beside every day. The rich soil of the undulating, stony county lay still and mute, cold but not frozen yet. The land, rocky as it was, had been kind to its people, and they were pretty generally kind to one another in return. Maybe that was something that the land whispered, maybe that was the message—there is kindness. There is kindness everywhere. Hard won, long remembered and rarely noticed, but there. There forever.

  Charlie Beale woke up in despair, as he did, as he did every morning now. At least he woke up in his bed this time, and not on the sofa or the kitchen floor, where he had found himself too many mornings since that morning, that morning she had walked from the court and out of his life, changing the course of that life beyond recognition.

  Even though he looked the same to the people he passed, the people who now both loved and shunned him, he was unrecognizable to himself. It took an hour every morning for him to take a familiar shape again, eyewash to clear his eyes, a hot bath to wash away the night sweats, the slick sheen of fear and rage that covered his body in the night. His body, thinner now but somehow stronger still, lay inert in the bath, and all the night terrors gradually were rinsed away, dissipated in the water as the water cooled, and when he felt, even for a moment, at peace, he rose dripping from the water as he had from the river—so long ago, that—and he dressed, and crept past the door to the room where his brother slept, whiskey and sawdust, that wiry boy who had come and showed no signs of leaving, as though he knew beyond knowing that Charlie Beale could not live alone now, could not feed himself or ask for the help he needed, had to get it from somewhere and that somewhere might as well be his own flesh and blood, at least that comfort.

  It was hard for Charlie, now, to face Alma. It was her warmth he couldn’t take, because he knew it was a warmth mixed with disapproval, and rightly so—her disapproval of what his lust had led him to. She was never less than kind, but now she was afraid, too, afraid for him and, of course, afraid for her boy. She and Will had talked the night before. The outings had to stop, they agreed, some way had to be found to separate the man from the boy, even though Sam seemed to be Charlie’s only comfort now, and it broke Alma’s heart even to think it, but it had to be done. Sam spent half the day in school now, and he should be playing with boys his own age, other first-graders. At least that was the reason she gave, while Sam listened from the top step.

  She was just putting on the coffee pot when she saw Charlie pass on his way to open the shop. He wasn’t wearing a coat, and his cuffs were unbuttoned. Al
ma thought that both of these things were a sure sign of mental disturbance. Crazy people didn’t wear enough clothes in the winter, and they wore too many in the summer. He seemed, to her, not to know where he was, although he walked steadily and directly toward the butcher shop. Before—when it was before—he might have stopped in for a cup of her coffee and one of her biscuits. He hadn’t done that since then, since that day in October. A man who was innocent, but who had sinned. Now a prisoner of sin, as the good book said. She measured out the coffee and wondered what to do. So much happens, she thought, when you’ve got biscuits in the oven. Her heart went out to him, but she didn’t call out or wave. She didn’t know what she would have said if he had come in, which he wouldn’t have done anyway. Not now.

  Charlie made his way down the street in the new light of a December day, and opened the shop and flipped on the lights. He went through the familiar routines of sweeping the floor, checking the freezer, washing down the butcher block. Everything seemed tender to him, everything fragile. The sad, cold beef in the locker, the coarse salt and steel brush on the wood, the bleach on the marble counter. His own hands doing these things, sweeping, scrubbing, making ready for the day, the day he could not envision or enter, although he was there, he was doing these things, he was making do. Just don’t ask any questions, he silently begged Will, who was still at the breakfast table. At the last, he raised the flag on the pole outside the shop, to honor the dead and the day.

  When Will came in at nine, everything was in perfect order, the slicer and the grinder shining, the knives whetted into razor sharpness, the goods, the chops and ground meat laid out in the case. “Pearl Harbor Day,” said Will, handing Charlie a brown paper bag that had, he knew, an egg and bacon sandwich that they both knew he would not eat. “Sad.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Charlie.

  “Lose anybody?”

  “Not there.”

  “No. Me neither. Still.”

  “Yes.”

  “A lot of boys.”

  The morning began, the black women coming in first, as always, counting out their money in quarters and nickels, speaking little. Then came the parade of white women, all of them talking only to Will while Charlie waited on them, each wishing in her heart that she might be the one to save the man who had saved the boy, and each knowing that it was not she, if any such person existed, with the power to bring him back into the fold. Once done, it was done forever, beyond amelioration or exoneration, or even acceptance. If they ever forgot that fact for a moment, their preachers had reminded them every Sunday, and their faith kept that truth in their hearts, as much as it saddened them.

  If he knelt among them and begged for salvation, as Sylvan had done, if the preacher laid on the hands and made him whole, it might be different. But that, Charlie wouldn’t do, and so it was the way it was.

  They all wished something else, something they could not say even to themselves. Each wished she had been the one, the woman. There was not one among them who would not have gone to hell with him, just like that Glass girl did, not one who would not have opened her door to him, whatever the ferocity of her belief.

  But they just told Will what they needed for the day, and took the packages from Charlie without a word, noticing, as they did, how thin he’d grown, how sad, how marked by his own infamous sin. Yes, he had saved the boy, but, still, the mighty are often fallen and even the divine are sometimes damned. They were kind, or thought themselves so, but they were not forgiving. Perhaps God would be—they were certain of it—but not them.

  By noon, most of the ladies had come and gone, and Sam ran in from school. A boy had peed on the floor and the teacher had called him a baby and made him sit in a high chair for the rest of the day. That was the most exciting thing pretty much ever at school, and Sam was just glad it wasn’t him.

  They had pork chops for lunch, fried in a black cast-iron skillet. Ned joined them, hungover, looking like he couldn’t find his way to the door even if you left it open. Alma tried not to let her sadness show, the loss of respect, the anger she felt in her heart toward this man who had brought her own, her only boy, back from the dead in what she still believed was a miracle. The men ate well. She ate little.

  “Sam? You ready to go see the cows?” Charlie turned to him.

  “Will?” asked Alma, looking at her husband. They had talked, hadn’t they?

  “Oh, let the boy go, Alma. It’s a beautiful cold day, he could use the fresh air, now that he’s cooped up all morning at school.”

  Alma rushed back to her classes, the dishes still in the sink, where, by nightfall, they would bring such a rush of tears to her eyes that she would have to grab the counter to stop herself from falling.

  By nightfall, she could only think of all the things she had meant to say, about forgiveness, about her gratitude that the life of her boy would continue, the continuance making everything else possible, almost all else bearable, except this, her own neglect. By nightfall, she could only wonder, staring at the dishes, trying to think of how people were to be fed, how they were to go on, one supper after the next. She could only think, There are no fires of hell. There is only mercy.

  But that was later. After lunch, Ned walked back home to read his mysteries and replace a rotted board on the back porch, and Will went back to the shop to wait for the customers who never came, whittling the afternoon away, talking to other shop owners, knowing he’d close up the shop at three thirty to join Alma for services for the dead boys.

  Charlie gathered his knives from the shop, Sam got the baseball glove he took everywhere now, except to school, where it was not allowed. Then Charlie hoisted the boy into the cab of the truck, and waited for Jackie to jump into the front seat. They drove out of town about one thirty, listening to the radio.

  “Beebo, why are there flags everywhere?”

  “Something bad happened on this day, Sam.”

  “What happened?”

  How to explain the awfulness of that cataclysm, that grinding of metal under bomb, those men sitting there like ducks in a pond, the bombers coming out of nowhere and raining fire? How to explain the death toll, the mothers and fathers bereft, the president on the radio? How to explain the size of it to a six-year-old boy?

  “It was in the war, before you were born. Some planes came and dropped bombs and a lot of people died.”

  Suddenly, their favorite song came on the radio, and its magic lightened their hearts, and Charlie and Sam laughed and sang along with the Count Basie Orchestra.

  Did you see Jackie Robinson hit that ball?

  It went zoomin cross the left field wall.

  Yeah boy, yes, yes. Jackie hit that ball.

  Young again, young and free and completely at ease, Charlie sang at the top of his lungs, and pulled on his Lucky Strike and threw the butt out the window, but the sparks were invisible in the bright rushing sun.

  Yes, yes, yes. . . Jackie’s a real gone guy.

  The song ended as they passed her house, as they always did, except this time she was standing on the porch, and this time Charlie did look up and over, and he saw her, a simple girl on a plain, whitewashed porch, his girl once. No, this time he saw her clearly, not a movie starlet anymore, those days were gone and would not return, but he saw her as she was, as God had made her, and he saw also his fields and his houses, the house in the woods, and he wanted her beyond belief. He drove on with only the slightest hesitation, the tiniest slowing of the black truck. He tousled the boy’s hair, sang, “Yes, yes, yes, Jackie’s a real gone guy,” even though some other song had come on the radio, and it seemed as though they had never done more than look, had not stopped that first time on the road, then driven through the gate and hidden the truck behind the house.

  CHARLIE SEEMED SUDDENLY FREE at last, as though the charges had finally been dismissed just this minute. He was free of guilt, free of property, and he laughed with the boy and talked about exactly how long it was until spring training, and what Sam supposed the real Jackie Robi
nson was doing right that very minute, up there in Connecticut where he lived. Playing with his kids, Sam guessed. Taking a nap, as Sam had to do, still, every day except Wednesday, when he went to the slaughterhouse with Charlie. On those days he had to go to bed early to make up for it, even though he stayed awake, as he always did now, until the whole street was asleep and dark, in case he missed anything, in case somebody decided to creep into the house and murder his whole family, his mother and father, whom he guarded fiercely in the dark.

  THE SLAUGHTERING WENT QUICKLY. Sam waited outside with Jackie, messing around. There weren’t flies, this time of year, not much for Jackie to chase, so Sam and Jackie played ball, the thud of the ball in his glove, the racing of the dog and the return of the ball, all slimed up, until the palm of his mitt was dark with the dog’s spit; Charlie inside, cutting, carving, doing his work, during which he didn’t like to be interrupted, couldn’t play catch with a boy.

  DONE AND WASHED, THE sides of beef hanging in the coolers, the back of the truck filled with steaks and chops and rumps and legs, covered with a clean white cloth, Charlie came out, his sharpest knife in its leather case hanging from his belt, and he looked at the boy, and he looked like a boy himself again, fresh and ready and rested, and he and Sam threw the ball back and forth while Jackie raced in and out of their legs, trying to steal it. Charlie caught the ball, and jumped and spun in the air like a shortstop, magic in the fluidity and grace of his motion, and threw gently, more gently than his arm motion would suggest, and landed the ball smack in Sam’s glove.