Thanksgiving Night
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He steps to the track, up the gravel bed, and along it for a few paces.
The wind is still for a few seconds. There seems to be no sound now, anywhere. Thin moonlight has broken through the cloud cover to the east, and the rain trails off in the distance in two narrow reflections of the rails, smooth, functional. He turns and looks back at the pool of raining light under the station lamp. Then he walks a few more paces, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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marking how the bare treetops close over the tracks in the distance, dark, bordering fretwork, going off and seeming to meet at the vanish-ing point. The station is small now, in the distance, and he sits down on one of the wet ties and folds his hands over his knees. He picks up a piece of gravel and throws it into the bushes below. How bizarre the world is. And how outlandish to have come this far and not to have seen how unadventurous and ordinary one has been, how willing to hide in one’s daily routines, avoiding things, living by keeping still. The first Elizabeth left him, and, in a way, he stopped there. He had kept himself in secret, lived in secret, nursing the wound, and the second Elizabeth had loved him through it all, loved him and searched for some way to bring him to herself, and then given up, let go of the idea of having children, spending her evenings with work and dope, and life was busy and empty, and Holly and Fiona came in and disturbed everything, because the two of them, old as the proverbial hills, are still passionately in the thick of life, still battering their way through the days, the days they understand are temporary, fleeting, and yet they are still agitated and hungry for everything.
He thinks of all this, sitting on the railroad tie in the dark. The clouds have covered the moon again. Slowly, he rises and starts to walk farther away from the station. But then he turns and heads back, toward the pool of lamplight with its lines of falling water. He can hear the train now at his back—it’s a few minutes late. He steps into the very middle, between the two rails, and walks on, forcing himself not to look back. Elizabeth has said she forgives him. It’s not real; he can’t get his mind around it, can’t process the information. The harm he has done to their lives looms over him, a dome, all heartbreak. The loneliness he felt when the first Elizabeth left seems small to him now, and again the fear spreads in him, like a cold vapor coming from his breastbone. The sound of the train is still far. He imagines it roaring over him. As another opening in the clouds gives forth the moon, he watches the little strands of reflection on the rails. He turns. The train is visible now, a big blackness, like the immense cold night itself shouldering toward him.
Nothing ever the same. Nothing like it ever was. He waits, feels the thrill of the train’s approach, the deadness at his heart, waiting, steeling 400
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himself. The wine is swimming in his head, and he’s decided that he’ll do this; he will, and why not? But then the air thrums at him, and, at last, he steps down into the gravel and away from the track, up onto the platform again. He steps to the edge and watches it come. It goes by in a rush, a prodigious blast of air, the horn sounding, he knows, off into the night, over his sleeping town. His own house, where his wife has said she would be waiting up for him, and he cannot address, or change, or lessen anything. The train recedes into the dimness toward Washington. He turns there in the light, breathing with effort, as if he has been running.
“Oh,” he says, “goddamn.”
The sound of the train dies away, and there’s just his breathing and the stirrings of wind. It’s getting colder. He walks out of the light and away from the station, heading back past Temporary Road, with its look of a place long-abandoned, windows shut, leaf-litter everywhere in the lawn, the hazy streetlamp shadow of tree branches reaching like skeletal, crooked fingers along the walls and up onto the roof, and he thinks of Holly sitting up there while the neighborhood gathered. Who can understand one human heart? He walks on, toward his own house, where he will have to be different, have to change himself somehow, for the woman who lives there, whom he has done such a bad job of loving. How he wants for her not to have escaped into the separateness of sleep tonight, this of all nights, the last Thanksgiving of the century.
“Please,” he murmurs as he turns the corner onto his street. “Please,” he says aloud.
The lights are on, upstairs and down.
13.
Brother Fire comes home to a locked door and a key that, for some rea -
son, won’t work. It’s the wrong key. He tries it several times, works it, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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jiggles it, but it won’t budge, and all the while he’s being rained on.
Finally, he drives up the street to an all-night 7-Eleven store and goes inside, where he moves to the counter, soaking wet, and asks for a cup of coffee. The man behind the counter is a Sikh, a dark brown man with thick, black brows and deep lines on either side of his mouth, with a turban on his head and sleepy, yellow eyes. He indicates where the coffee island is, and the priest walks over there to pour himself a cup.
“You are very soaked,” says the Sikh.
“Yes,” says Brother Fire. “Locked out of my own house.”
“Locked out how?”
“My key doesn’t work. I don’t understand.”
“The temperature maybe. The metal contracts, you see.”
“I couldn’t turn it,” Brother Fire says.
“It’s cold out there, too.”
“Yes.”
“One never gets used to the cold.”
He pays for the coffee and stands there sipping it, staring out at the rain. The road is empty; the street is empty. The only other car is this Sikh’s, a beaten-up Plymouth with no hubcaps and with rust holes along the bottom of the doors.
“Where are you from?” the Sikh asks.
“Just down the road,” says the priest. “Saint Augustine’s.”
“Ah.”
They both watch while the rain slows and ceases, leaving a hazy mist, and soon even that begins to dissipate in the cold.
The Sikh says, “I would bet that it’s the metal contracting. Or perhaps you tried the wrong one in the dark.”
“Pardon me?” Brother Fire says.
“Your key. Locking you out.”
“Oh, yes. Maybe. Yes.”
“Have more coffee, it’s on the house.”
“Thank you.”
“I believe in your god, too, you know.”
Brother Fire regards him—his dark-lipped smile. There’s something almost impish about it.
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“I do. I believe all the religions are true.”
“Yes,” says the priest.
“Except where they say the others are not.”
He nods, feeling the chill of his wet clothes but also warming himself in the friendliness of the other man. “I believe a version of that, too,” he says. “Yes.”
“Now, if we could only get the others to comply.” The Sikh smiles, and then laughs, showing stained, small, uneven teeth.
“Well, thank you for the hot coffee,” says Brother Fire. “It was good.”
“Good night to you, sir.”
“Good night. Yes.” He walks over and offers his hand.
The Sikh grasps it and says, “Thanks be to our one god.”
“Yes, my friend.”
Brother Fire goes out to the car, gets in, waves at the other man, pulls around, and heads back to his church, the rectory. The rain is gone, but the wind pushes at him as he gets out of the car; it blows his coat back and exposes the skin of his belly where his shirt has come out. The icy band of air makes him shiver, and he hurries, muscles aching, remembering his age, to the door. The key won’t turn, because his hand is shaking now. He takes it out, then puts it back, and tries one more time, and it slips, does turn, the door opens, a gift. The house is warm, the rooms quiet and clean. He goes upstairs and gets out of his wet clothes and takes a bath, sitting in the blessed quiet and replaying the day, the e
vening. He’ll tell Mr. Petit about the Sikh. It’s something to help him see the decency in things. After his bath, he puts a robe on and goes back downstairs. He’s still full from the dinner, and he makes coffee, sitting in his kitchen in the robe. This coffee is good, too; he puts a drop of brandy in it.
He reads in Saint Thomas’s great book, that wonderful book with its propositions and answers, and, outside, the wind lashes at the windows, winter rolling in, more snow before morning, say the television news people. The day after Thanksgiving. The last part of the last century of the second millennium. How strange. In the next instant, he has a sense of something gigantic approaching, unfathomable, unimaginable, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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and terrible. The new century. What horrors await? He gets down on his knees, shaking again as if he hasn’t got out of the wet clothes, and begins to say the Lord’s Prayer, realizing as the words go off from him that he can feel them; he can say them as they are meant, without a wandering mind. So he does say them. “Our Father, who art in Heaven.
Hallowed be Thy name.” The wind moans in the eaves of the house.
The dark seems to lean in, colliding with the window glass like a spirit seeking entry. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.” He closes his eyes, touches the tips of his fingers to his lips, murmuring the words. “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” He breathes and waits, and the wind keeps pounding at the walls of the house. Finally, he rises, creakily, putting the bad thought, the evil premonitory phantasm, the dread of events, of history itself, away from himself, striving again for thankfulness. He can pray again, and a man who can pray is not ever truly lost.
Father McFadden calls to inquire about his holiday feast (the young priest’s phrase) and to read a little poem dedicated to him; how thankful to be remembering the goodness of God in November rain, he says, and the faith of the Lord in the storming sky; how thankful to be remembering the kindness of hearts in a day of feasts, when people feed family members and priests. It goes on in this vein, and Brother Fire admires it accordingly, and speaks with all the fervor he can muster about the year ahead, the grace of God, the abundance of good hearts, the joy of life working in the vineyards of the Lord.
About the Author
RIchaRd Bausch is the author of ten novels and seven volumes of short fiction. He won the 2004 PEN/
Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Esquire, among other publications, and has been featured in numerous best-of collections, including the The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South.
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a l s o b y r i c h a r d b a u s c h
Real Presence (1980)
Take Me Back (1981)
The Last Good Time (1984)
Spirits, and Other Stories (1987)
Mr. Field’s Daughter (1989)
The Fireman’s Wife, and Other Stories (1990) Violence (1992)
Rebel Powers (1993)
Rare & Endangered Species: Stories and a Novella (1994) Selected Stories of Richard Bausch ( The Modern Library, 1996 ) Good Evening, Mr. & Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea (1996) In the Night Season (1998)
Someone to Watch Over Me: Stories (1999) Hello to the Cannibals (2002)
The Stories of Richard Bausch (2003) Wives & Lovers (2004)
Credits
Designed by Sarah Maya Gubkin
Cover photograph © Johnér Images/Getty Images
Copyright
THANKSGIVING NIGHT. Copyright © 2006 by Richard Bausch.
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Document Outline
Cover Image
Title Page
Dedication Page
Epigraph Page
Contents Part One August-October Crazies
Brother Fire
The Comforts of Home
Night Hours
Cost of Living
Force of Gravity
Faith and Logic
Will And the Elizabeths
Long Division
Half A Stolen Car
A Matter of Small Historical Consequence
Part Two: October-November Incidental Finding
Fault
Perdition
Winter History
Convalescing
Part Three: November Inclemency
Thanksgiving Night
About the Author
Also by Richard Bausch
Credits
Copyright Notice
About the Publisher
Table of Contents
Epigraph
Part One: August-October
Crazies
Brother Fire
The Comforts Of Home
Night Hours
Cost of Living
Force of Gravity
Faith and Logic
Will And The Elizabeths
Long Division
Half A Stolen Car
A Matter Of Small Historical Consequence
Part Two: October–November
Incidental Finding 169
Fault 192
Winter History 241
Convalescing 277
Part Three : November 321
Inclemency 323
Thanksgiving Night 352
About the Author
Other Books by Richard Bausch
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Pa r t O n e
w i n t e r h i s t o r y