Ham's wife, Jane, answered and seemed joyful to be talking to him, although they had once had an argument over politics during which she'd accused him of patronizing her. She'd been very cool toward him for at least a year afterward. Now she asked when he could come for dinner, and why didn't he stop in and see them anytime? She was a tall California girl who had that brassy physical symmetry that made him think such people had bigger, straighter and brighter, though fewer, teeth than other people, or perhaps one less finger on each hand, like animated cartoon characters. Maybe he had patronized her. Maybe he hadn't signaled strongly enough that he found her attractive, if that was what she wanted. God knew. He promised to come see them. Then Ham came to the phone.
"Luke, if you want to go through with it, it's pretty much in the bag. Hell, we can set a closing date anytime."
"All right, Ham."
"You mean it, now? You're one hundred percent sure?"
Luke thought of Shem's farm, all its land and trees silent in the darkness of the summer night, the brook flowing in the dark. He felt himself there, alone with a clean terror of the dark.
"I'll see you tomorrow sometime, okay?"
"Come for dinner. Jane wants you to."
"All right. That's nice of you people."
"Just a minute—Jane wants to talk to you. See you tomorrow."
"Luke?" Jane said in her American voice that seemed totally clean of any regional inflections. "What would you like for dinner? How about a cookout? Drinks at five or so and barbecued spareribs or something when we're properly mellow? Would you rather have steak? Lobster? You name it."
He'd have to name one thing or she'd think him too indifferent. "Spareribs and your famous tossed salad," he said, feeling a touch of dishonor.
"Super! We'll see you at five or so. Bye bye, Luke."
From the television came the muted, portentous voice of Richard Burton. George's rough, compressed face seemed in black and white too as the ancient explosions of the British barrage before El Alamein rumbled from the set.
George looked up. "North Africa. Monty. Rommel. You remember?"
"Yes, I do," Luke said.
"When we come in we got our asses whipped at Kasserine Pass, but they said—some Kraut general said it—was the Americans always fouled up at first, but once blooded nobody learned faster. That's what this Kraut general said, anyways."
Phyllis came slowly into the room and George fixed her chair for her. She read a book while they watched the last days of the Afrika Korps. They watched in silence, and when it was over, the last columns of dusty prisoners trudging along in their visored caps, George sighed and clapped his palms down on his knees. "Well, we won that one," he said. "You always know how it's going to come out."
They wrestled the wooden chest onto the dolly, then out of the house and back to the shed. "You can leave her here as long as you like. It ain't in the way," George said. He sat down on the chest and filled his pipe. Luke found himself reaching for a cigarette for the first time that evening. He hadn't thought of having one, even though he just now remembered from six years ago that George didn't smoke in the house.
Suddenly George got up and said, "Now, what in the hell got into me? I got another box of Shem's belongings in the house I plain forgot! I'm losing my wits in my old age!" He put his unlit pipe back in his pocket, and Luke put his unlit cigarette back in the package. "I'll get it for you. Go ahead and smoke your cigarette. I'll bring it out here."
George brought back a shoe box, which they opened under the shed's cobwebby light bulb. "We found these on him, or near him," he said.
Inside the box was a large old-fashioned wallet with many compartments, the light tan leather disintegrating with age, rather than use. In it were some of the papers and documents of Shem's life—his discharge papers, Social Security card, Luke's address, old newspaper clippings, odd stubs, letters and his driver's license for the year 1960, among other things; Luke would look at them more carefully later. There was a worn black briar pipe and a package of Beechnut tobacco, and a large jackknife with staghorn slab handles smoothed by use down to the ivory, its largest blade honed narrow. Luke could hear Shem telling him that the blades were called clip, sheepfoot and spay, and that the knife "walked and talked," which had to do with how healthy a click the blades made when opened or shut. Back when Shem showed it to him his fingernails were not large enough or strong enough to dig into the blade nicks and open it. But now they were, and it still walked and talked. Also in the box were five one-dollar bills and forty cents in change, a silver necklace set with dark blue stones, a thick brass fountain pen and a split ring with several keys on it.
"There's salvageable stuff in that kitchen you might want to poke around for," George said, knocking out his pipe at the shed door. "It was pretty near flat when we found him. Hell of a blizzard the night before, no telling how long before the plow'd get up there, so I borrowed my neighbor's snowmobile, and Jim Pills-bury—he's the game warden now—he took his and we went up to check. That's when we found him."
Their silence was the comment upon that fact.
Luke finally said, "I'd like to leave all this stuff here for a few weeks, if you don't mind. Except for the knife, I guess." He put the knife in his pocket, then found room in the chest for the shoe box.
"You might as well take the money," George said. "Ain't no sentimental value to it." Luke put the dollar bills next to those that had belonged to Gracie.
When they went back in the house they found that Phyllis had gone upstairs to make up a bed for Luke, which exasperated George, who went up after her. "God damn it, mother!" Luke heard him say. "It hurts you to lick a goddam postage stamp, and now ..." A door shut. Luke looked at the book Phyllis had been reading. It was a novel, Time Out of Mind, by Rachel Field, published a generation ago. He wondered if Rachel Field were still alive, and what she might have thought if she knew that her scenes and people lived again in another mind.
Phyllis stayed upstairs, said good night from the landing, told him about towels and asked what he wanted for breakfast. George muttered that he'd take care of all that, and came back downstairs.
"I don't know why she won't sit still for a goddam minute," he said. "She's in pain every time she moves."
"But it comes and goes, she said?"
"Mostly it comes," George said. "But let me tell you, she's a fine woman, Luke. Well. I'm going to have myself a little nightcap and go out on the steps and smoke my pipe, if you'd care to join me, and then hit the sack."
The nightcap was blended whiskey poured over an ice cube in a juice glass. Their glasses tinkled as they sat on the front steps, sipped the whiskey and looked across the green square. One streetlight, the only one in town, grew out of its circle of green and softly brought the white church and the white town hall out of a darkness roofed by trees. Fireflies made their dotted lines of greenish yellow as they flew slowly over the grass, a light Luke knew was cold, not given for him or his purposes. He wanted to say to George, "Look, from all I know you're a fine man, too." But that would be a doubtful and demeaning simplification and would not do. He did say, "I want to thank you for all you've done, George."
"Weren't nothing," George said.
"I mean it, though."
"You paid his taxes for him and sent him money. It was little enough for me to look in on him once in a while and do some grocery shopping for him." George puffed on his pipe a few times. "Anyway, I owed Shem. Maybe you don't know, but I lived with him and Carrie four years, starting when I was thirteen and my mother went to the lunatic asylum. Samuel was just a baby then. I done chores a'nd let me tell you I worked my tailbone off. But they took me in, and no kin of theirs. My father run off to Manchester, to the mills. He couldn't handle me."
"No, I didn't know that."
"Shem taught me a lot," George said. "He sure wouldn't take no sass, neither. Ouch!"
"He used to scare me a little when I was a kid," Luke said.
"Nobody
screwed around with Shem Carr. He put them blue eyes on you and your gizzard froze up solid!" George chuckled and then finished his whiskey, rattled his ice cube and took the last drop. "Anyways, I owed him," he said.
Luke finished his own whiskey, wishing he had more of it, wishing that he didn't want any more of it. He field-stripped his cigarette and put the filter in his breast pocket. George was watching him, which startled him a little. Out of the corner of his eye, in the light from the window, he saw George nod.
"Well," George said, yawning the words, "I guess I'm going to hit the sack. What time you want to get up in the morning?"
"Whenever you do."
"You got the room to the left, head of the stairs. She had it all made up, God bless her."
They said good night. Luke used the downstairs bathroom, then found his room, the overhead light left on for him. His bed was old, swaybacked, made of iron. He had slept on such beds before, at the farm, at Phyllis's—maybe this very bed.
In the middle of the night he woke up in the deep woods, in absolute darkness, where he'd made his bed in a gulley overhung with branches. Water was coming, which would flood him out unless he climbed out of the gulley through the thick brush. The sides were steep, and he gathered up his sheets, blanket and pillow and tried to climb out, reaching up for purchase with his right hand, which grasped a string and pulled it. The overhead light came on and he was standing in the middle of the swaybacked old bed in Phyllis Bateman's house in Cascom, with all the bedclothes clutched to him. The unnerving recognition of the dream came first, but then it was all pleasant. He had to go to the bathroom, yes, and perhaps that was the water part of it, but it seemed such a beautiful adventure, one to be remembered and treasured. He put the sheets back on the bed, went to the bathroom down the hall, and came back to the bed that was now so safe and old that he melted down into it.
8.
In the morning Phyllis was so painfully stiff George had to help her into the bathroom and Luke and George had to help her down the stairs to the breakfast table in the kitchen. She wore an old blue bathrobe, frayed at its cuffs and seams, and men's leather slippers with elastic at the sides.
"I don't like to be helped," she said. "I never liked to be helped and I never will and that's a great disadvantage in your old age."
"Hell, you're only sixty," George said. "You ain't even at retirement age yet."
George made coffee and toast and fried eggs on the bottled gas stove, while Luke set the table under Phyllis's supervision.
After they had eaten they had more coffee, and as they sat there Phyllis had that secretive, yet slightly avid look that meant she was having plans for Luke. Even when he was a little boy he knew she wasn't good at secrets.
"When you sell your house are you going to come back to Cascom sometimes?" she asked.
"I'll come back and visit," he said.
"There's some awful interesting new people in town you ought to meet."
"You going to look after the land at all?" George said, changing the subject. "There's some timber. Yellow birch, white birch, maple—veneer logs in there worth a lot of money. Hemlock, pine—not so many—spruce, beech, ash. You got seventy acres of woods ain't been logged in thirty years. You should ought to do some thinning."
"I was thinking when I was there yesterday I'd like to clear the old pastures."
"Ayuh," George said, nodding. "It's a damn shame to let it all close in like that. Ain't good for much but red squirrels and porcupines once the brush grows up in trees."
"Maybe I will sometime," Luke said.
George looked at him skeptically, his gray eyes just visible, like little glints of washed metal in the complicated folds of his old eyelids. "Naw, you won't," he said.
Luke felt heat in his cheeks, as if he'd been accused, correctly, of lying. He wanted to deny it. He thought of the dream last night of the black woods. There had been other dreams last night, too; they reached for his mind as if with hands, but he could not quite remember them.
The farm had been a place where he was before he was a husband and father. Cascom was like that too, the weight of his earlier past seeming heavier here.
"Did you swim in the brook when you were a kid?" he asked George.
"I'd go down to fetch the cows in the lower pasture on a hot day, you can bet I was out of my overalls quick as a wink and down the chute. That was the coldest water! I swear it was almost too cold to drink!"
"I took a short dip there yesterday. I thought I was paralyzed for a minute."
"I got a great affection for that place up there," George said. "I hate to see it go back, but I guess that's what's happening to all the old farms. Sometimes you wonder how any of 'em ever made half a living, but what I seem to recall is plenty of good company and good food. Weren't much cash money, but in them days a man could pretty near fix anything that broke, doctor his animals, build what he wanted and shoot the varmints." He shook his head once, a jerk of his bristly chin to the right and back. "Now it does feel a long time ago."
Phyllis said, "When you come back, maybe I'll be up and around and we can have some people in for supper."
"That would be nice," Luke said with something like dread—a minor form of dread.
Before he left he made George call around and find out how much Shem's stone had cost altogether, then made a check out to George for it. Phyllis made him promise again to come back soon, and George said he was always welcome. Suddenly without thinking much about it, because if he had he would have seen how complicated it was, he told George he wanted to give him the .22 caliber pistol on the .45 frame.
George was startled and not exactly pleased. "That's a matched pair!" he said.
"It'll match your .45 as well as Shem's," Luke said. "I'll keep the .45 and the holster, but I want you to have the .22 and whatever tools go with it."
"Naw!" George said.
"Yes," Luke said. "We'll go shoot rats with it at the dump when I come back. It's yours, George, I mean it."
"Well, God damn it, I'll think about it!"
"All right!"
George wouldn't quite smile. Luke knew how the pistol fascinated him, but he also knew that the gift of such an elaborate and expensive object would seem beyond the pale to George, an act of irresponsibility, and somehow suspect. But George wanted to play with the pistol, and shoot it, and now he would have permission in his own mind to do that much, anyway.
That afternoon Luke turned into the shaded driveway of his house in Wellesley and stopped behind the Hornet, which protruded slightly from the garage because of bicycles and other gear. The other half of the garage was full of lawn furniture and other summer things he hadn't taken out.
He didn't want to open the car door. The magnitude of the tasks before him was too great. He wondered, even began to calculate, the expense of shame and general self-hatred and disgust it would cost him to just stop functioning in any responsible way. Let everything go, let everything rot. He didn't want to sell anything, store anything, have anything, except maybe a drink.
The engine creaked, cooling. His hands on the steering wheel looked craggy and old. You could always tell the true age by the hands, someone once told him, but who cared. He looked at his hands and discovered the slivers from the old wooden chest, deep and turning the skin around them red. They looked like a flight of little arrows embedded in his flesh. He needed a tool, and there was Shem's jackknife in his pocket, so he took it out and opened the longest, or clip, blade, which had a sharp point. John Fredericton Knives, Stamford, Conn, was etched in tiny letters on the handle. It was a fine knife, a fine thing, perfect in its detailing, fit for a man to carry all his life and leave to his descendants. Without bothering to sterilize the tip he sternly and efficiently dug out each sliver. The pain seemed to come from far away, diminished by travel. He licked the salty blood from the blade, wiped it well on his dungarees, clicked (walked or talked) it back into the handle and slid the knife into his right fron
t pants pocket, where it had made a shape for itself and seemed to belong.
In the house he would find antiseptic and a couple of adhesive bandages. The surgery seemed to bring him back into the world, so he got out of the car and out of habit went to the mailbox, brought the mail into the kitchen and let it fall onto the counter. There was no letter from the Avenger. Two windowed envelopes looked like bills and the rest were ads and solicitations, tabloids full of exclamations and coupons. Helen used to clip the coupons out and use them while shopping; he couldn't imagine ever doing that.
In the bathroom he found himself brushing his teeth. A grainy feeling discovered by his tongue had resulted in this action directly, involuntarily—part of the sympathetic nervous system, no doubt. Also, he would shave, and did. He had a few hours before he was supposed to be at the Joneses, so he collected trunks and boxes from the various storage places and began to pack those possessions he would put into storage.
How many souvenirs of his family, if any, did a man need? There must be some system here. He must make choices based upon some reading of intensity. What did he want to remember? What would he use each object for? Would he in his old age sit in a room in softly nostalgic light and muse fondly upon the mementoes of his lost son and daughter? His old age wasn't that far away and he foresaw no such room or mood. His wife, whose companionable body and soul he knew, mole and freckle, wound and phobia, irrationality and loyalty—what souvenirs would he keep of her?
There must be four categories: 1. Those things he would keep with him. 2. Those things he would store for possible later use. 3. Those things that might be useful to such an organization as the Salvation Army. 4. Those things that would go to the dump. Use seemed the principle here.
He would keep: photographs and letters. Naturally; no thought involved there. He did not want to look at them but there were albums and drawers full of loose photographs and envelopes of negatives. There were albums of his babyhood and youth, albums of Helen's babyhood and youth, albums belonging to Johnny and Gracie, albums that he'd forgotten about. He stopped in the upstairs hallway and put down a cardboard box full of albums and loose photographs. He could not do it this way. If he went into each room and removed one category of objects from each, he would never finish. He must do this in terms of space, cubic feet, not categories. He had never been good at any category except miscellaneous; categories overlapped and slid together like a shuffled deck of cards.
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