Johnny had a sixty-four-count box of crayons. He selected a red crayon from it and drew a long line that went from the top of the bag to the bottom.
“That used to be the biggest box of crayons you could buy,” William T. said to Crystal. “Now they’ve got a ninety-six-count.”
He had noticed it in the store the other day. It was an odd shape, strangely long. Didn’t have the compact, sturdy heft of the sixty-four-count box.
Johnny selected another red from the box and drew a line that intersected with the first. This second line was slightly curved, a slender snake. Johnny replaced the red crayon and drew out another. Red.
“Johnny’s a man of red, yes,” Crystal said. “But only the true reds. He doesn’t like pink or variations on pink.”
“Cerise would be out then,” William T. said. “Along with mulberry.”
Crystal smiled. “I guess they would,” she said.
William T.’s swollen arm pulsed and throbbed beneath his flannel shirt. He put his head in his hands and looked through the bars of his fingers at the diner. The booths with their scratched wooden tabletops and red vinyl seats, the counter with the revolving red-topped stools, the grill, the big windows looking out onto Route 365, Johnny Zielinski, chin in his good hand. He gazed out the window in his Johnny way, toward where the gray ribbon of 365 threaded its way through Sterns and then Floyd and Rome and all points westward where it would join other gray ribbons, narrow and wide, flowing into one another, conjoining and dispersing, all the way to California.
WILLIAM T. STOOD AT HIS BEDROOM WINDOW, storm yanked up. He gazed through the screen at the giant maple crowning the end of his upper driveway, the one that Niagara Mohawk had been threatening to cut down for fifteen years. It’s gotten too big, they said. It’s too old. It’s dying from the inside out. Can’t you see that, William T.?
Hell no.
When William T. looked at his maple he saw splendor. Bare branches twice as wide as his thigh, black against white on a winter’s day. Furled new buds of the palest green. A thousand summer leaves gone to flame in a September sky.
Dying? Never.
William T.’s tree was nothing but beauty, enormous and transcendent.
“And what the hell do you mean it’s ‘too old‘?” he had said to Niagara Mohawk. “When’s a tree too old?”
Fifteen years now he had been saying it, and so far they had let the maple alone.
Give or take five minutes, Burl was a three o’clock man. The station wagon with its lopsided U.S. Mail sign came rolling up in its stealthy, silent way, barely a sound to be heard as the tires pressed themselves into the pebbles and sand of William T.’s upper driveway. Every few weeks Burl tried a new method to keep his sign straight: bungee cords, twine, once a pulleylike system that required him to keep his passenger window ajar.
It was un-Burl-like to have a lopsided anything. It went against his very nature.
William T. pulled up the storm and pressed his forehead gently into the screen. Cold air breathed in at him from the outside like a living being, invisible tendrils pluming into the house. In days and weeks and months and years past, Burl’s singing had come soaring out of his car when he rolled the window down: There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul. Burl’s Welsh tenor was the most beautiful in the Sterns Valley. The choirs in Utica and Syracuse sometimes asked him for a solo.
Burl had once been invited to become a permanent member of the New York City Men’s Chorus and tour the country, the world even. Had he accepted? He had not.
Burl’s hand snaked out of his window with the pile of folded mail.
No balm in Gilead today.
Eliza had once wanted to trade in their plain gray mailbox for a painted enamel one shaped like a rooster that she had seen in a store in Clinton. But roosters were mean animals. Nasty pecking creatures.
Burl’s hand withdrew into his car.
Silence. William T. watched as the window slid back up its sheath. Silence. Burl was a meticulous man. He opened and closed his window at every single mailbox. He never drove from one to another with the winter wind blowing into his car, chilling his hands on the steering wheel, making him squint against the bitterness, the way that were William T. a postal carrier he would no doubt drive. William T. watched as Burl backed up slightly, then swung his car back onto the pavement and purred down Jones Hill toward Tamar Winter’s house, half a mile away. William T. headed downstairs.
Still no snow.
No snow, and this was upstate New York, where snow came early, where snow lingered. Where snow longed to fall. William T. had stayed inside most of the day, emerging only to feed the flock. The oil furnace rumbled to life every hour or so, keeping the house at sixty. William T. had no faith that it would keep rumbling, and as a precautionary measure he was wearing an extra flannel shirt. Besides, he didn’t trust oil heat. It was not as warm as wood. Not as dry. Not as pulsing and alive, alive the way the heat that came shimmering out of a wood-stove was alive.
His arm was killing him.
For lunch he had opened a can of tomatoes and mixed them in with some boiled noodles, thinking that the heat of the noodles would warm the tomatoes. No such luck.
The sky hung low and pressed upon the horizon with a blank determination.
“The time for snow is here, and yet snow has not come to pass,” William T. said aloud in the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator to see if the light, which had burned out, had miraculously come back to life. It had not.
Genghis’s insulin in its tiny rubber-stoppered glass jar, his syringe, and the medicine dropper that in a panic William T. had once used to pump corn syrup down his tiny mute cat throat when Genghis was in insulin shock sat in their Dairylea mug in the door of the refrigerator.
Songless Burl was gone. William T. walked down the driveway with his black rubbers flapping on his stocking feet. He was going straight back inside with the mail. Why bother with boots?
A green slip lay on top of the pile. Certified mail. William T. stared at it for a minute. Certified mail?
Then it came to him.
William J. had sent him a letter. His son had explained everything in a letter and sent it certified. William J. had gone the extra mile, paid the extra money to make sure the letter got to his father.
A letter meant there would be some explanation. There would be some explanation for that day, that soft spring day when his son had walked backward down the train tracks, his hazel eyes fixed on his father, a smile spreading slowly across his face.
Wherever William T. went, people regarded him with a certain look on their faces. Questions chasing themselves across the sadness and the pity. Imaginations were running hog-wild out there. William T. could hear them talking around their kitchen tables: What was he doing up there that train doesn’t come through but twice a day he’d just lost his hearing you know how much he loved music and singing you know he was always an impulsive kid remember the night of the fire tower jesus christ he almost electrocuted himself way back then and he was only seventeen—
William T. felt himself swelling with anger at all of them: Cease and desist your goddamned gossip.
But even Eliza, Eliza the truthteller, Eliza who had never countenanced her son telling even the tiniest of white lies, Eliza had questions, questions she couldn’t bear to give voice to.
The letter would explain it all. William T. would read it, and read it through again, and then he would get in his truck and drive to Speculator. He would sit at the sister’s kitchen table with Eliza, and together they would read the letter, the letter from their boy.
And they would have the answers.
And Eliza would cry, half in relief, finally able to find some peace.
And William T. would drive the long way home, through towering stands of white pines.
And the giant maple would be waiting for him at the end of the driveway, patient, biding its time till spring.
And hi
s red spruce would still be lining the drive and the long dirt road. And he would let them live out their lives, grow as tall as they wanted to grow, arch themselves toward the noontime sun. And he would not ever cut them down.
But why so long, William J.? You’ve been gone months now. Months upon months.
It had been a long time.
Days and weeks and months, months, had passed since that day.
But so what!
Things didn’t always happen the way they were supposed to. The U.S. Mail had been known to misdeliver, to hold mistakenly for years, to lose. Over and over again, the U.S. Mail screwed up. It was common knowledge. It was possible that a certified letter written months ago by William J. had just yesterday been discovered by a clerk with a broom, lying behind a radiator at the Remsen Post Office. Maybe the clerk had put aside the broom, brushed away the lint and dust bunnies from the letter, examined it for date of delivery, shaken his head and sent it on its delayed way. It was possible. It was entirely possible.
The green slip sat there, small and calm, waiting for him to pluck it up like a tiny loved child and run with it to his truck. William T. turned the key and backed straight out of the upper driveway, barely missing the ditch, unable to feel the pedals the same way he usually did, given the fact of his rubbered shoeless feet.
There was a short line at the Remsen Post Office. Soft chimes announced William T.’s presence. William J.’s, a string of slender silvery bars that William T. vaguely remembered his son working on. One of a series of them, a silver bar wind chime phase.
Go in peace, chimes. Ring at will.
A young woman in high-heeled boots and an odd-colored long dress that might well have been bought at the Twin Churches Thrift Shop stood at the utility table with a pile of boxes and packages, cutting up brown paper grocery bags and wrapping the boxes neatly, taping them with packing tape, addressing each in black Magic Marker. Had this been a normal winter, a winter with snow and ice, she would have been in trouble with those boots.
“Christmas already?” William T. said to the woman.
She looked up at him and went back to her wrapping and taping and Magic Markering. “What planet have you been living on?” she said.
William T. glanced around and saw the wreaths, the red bows, the miniature tree propped in the corner. Carols wafted overhead from an unseen speaker.
“I see that your packing tape exceeds U.S. Postal regulations,” William T. said. He was charitable. Garrulous even. Glimmers of his old self were shimmering through, when talk had been easy and laughter was all about him.
“How observant of you.”
“Let me ask you something,” William T. said. “Would you consider the color of your dress to be puce?”
The young woman frowned. She did not answer.
“Because I’ve been trying to figure out puce for a long time now,” William T. said. “It’s a difficult color to track down.”
“It’ll have to remain a mystery for a while longer then,” the young woman said. “Because I have no goddamned idea. Merry Christmas.”
She went back to her packing.
William T. got at the end of the line and squeezed the green slip between both hands.
“William T. Jones,” the post office man said when it was his turn. He looked familiar, but who the hell was he?
“Your wife was my tenth-grade English teacher. About twenty years ago.”
That would put him in the same ballpark as Wayne Brill of Queen of the Frosties.
“I see you survived her then,” William T. said, adding the “then” in honor of Wayne. He had the sensation of time, time to spend talking, conversing, now that he had the green slip and would soon be holding a letter from his son. The man laughed.
“Indeed I did. Not only survived but thrived, I might add. Your wife was one hell of a teacher.”
The man shook his head appreciatively.
“They broke the mold with her. How is Mrs. Jones, anyway?”
“Surviving.”
“Excuse me?”
William T. saw that the clerk didn’t know what had happened. He started to say, “She’s fine,” but his throat clenched up.
“She’s having a bit of trouble keeping warm these days,” William T. heard himself say. “You’d have to know the sister, then you’d understand.”
The clerk stared at him. William T. saw that he had spoken wrong. He tried to chuckle and wave his hand dismissively the way Eliza might have done. The man frowned. He was all business now. Get rid of the loony-tune, that’s what he was thinking. William T. could tell. Moving right along. Next! Next!
“So what can I do for you today, Mr. Jones?”
William T. held out the green slip as if it were just another day, as if he got certified letters all the time, as if Eliza were at home sitting by the woodstove, as if William J. always sent his letters certified, as if William J. were still alive and still married to Sophie. As if in a few days William J. and Sophie and William T. and Eliza would be opening gifts and singing Christmas carols, with William T. mouthing the words, soundless.
The man came back with the letter in his hand.
William T. thought he could wait until he was back home but that proved not to be the case. Right over by the post office Christmas tree he ripped the seal open. William J. had stuck the letter into an official-looking envelope, he saw, some kind of governmental return address. He must have been in a hurry, but he had taken the time, anyway. William T. imagined his son, his head bent over the piece of white paper that he, William T., was now unfolding.
His eyes couldn’t seem to take in the entire letter at a glance. He flicked his gaze up and down, searching for his son’s familiar spiky signature. He wanted to see that W the way William J. always made it, with the second upward swoop so much taller than the first. Where was it? He glanced up and down, both hands holding the letter, but he could not find it anywhere no matter how hard he searched.
There was a noise around him. One hand let go of the letter, and William T. felt backward for the wall of the post office. He felt something prickly against his leg and looked down: a Fraser fir. The most expensive of Christmas trees. The wall came up against him and felt solid and cold. William T. leaned against it. He was having a hard time holding on to the letter.
“Mr. Jones?”
It was the postal clerk, the one who’d survived Eliza. He’d lifted up the hinged table at the side of the counter and come around from behind.
“Are you okay?”
William T. was leaning against the wall. He wouldn’t have thought that this wall was as solid as it was, looking so flimsy from the outside, with its aluminum siding and the first o missing. Pst Office.
“Mr. Jones?”
Then William T. was sliding down. He was sitting on the floor, which was also heavy and cold through his denims and the thin rubbers and socks. In front of his nose the lights on the little Christmas tree blinked and winked. Why did so many people like blinking Christmas-tree lights? They were abhorrent, flashing on and off like some kind of distant lighthouse, some kind of code he had never been able to interpret.
“Is it bad news?”
The postal clerk was on the floor next to William T., kneeling, his face inches from William T.’s. The clerk’s eyes blinked irregularly, on and off like the Christmas-tree lights. William T. closed his eyes. He sensed the clerk’s hands picking the letter up off the floor. People gathered around him, but he kept his eyes closed. There was a short silence, then the clerk spoke in a low voice, the sound aimed upward and away from William T.
“It’s a warrant for his arrest,” he heard the clerk say. “Says he failed to return a rental car to the San Diego airport three months ago.”
A murmur of voices rose around him, fluttering about his head. William T. kept his eyes closed and pressed his forehead into the cool blankness of the wall.
A swirl of whispers. Feet treading back and forth across the plank floor. Beyond his closed eyes, William
T. knew that the Christmas-tree lights were blinking insanely. He could not open his eyes as long as they were out there waiting for him, the little tree with its small presents wrapped in red and green strewn carefully at the base. Was there anything in them or were they empty? Tease gifts.
Silence.
William T. kept his forehead pressed into the wall until the wall grew warm or his forehead cooled to meet its temperature. It must be past time for the post office to close, he realized after a long time. The chimes again. Grating. Jangly.
“Thanks for coming, Mr. Evans,” he heard the clerk say.
Mr. Evans?
Had William T. ever heard Burl referred to as Mr. Evans? Come to think of it, had anyone ever referred to him, William T., as Mr. Jones? Quite possibly no. William T. was not the Mister type.
A familiar measured tread came across the creaky floor. Stopped.
“William T.”
Burl’s voice was hushed and sad.
“Hello,” William T. said. “Hello, Mr. Evans, the Mr. Evans who once planned to go to California.”
William T.’s hands were empty, and he wondered whether the postal clerk had taken the letter from him.
“You ever been called Mr. Evans before, Burl? Or was that a first?”
“James read me the letter over the phone,” Burl said. “There’s a mistake, William T. Let me take you home.”
Home. William T. thought of home, the flock squawking and nattering among themselves behind the latched door of the broken-down barn. He thought of the steps he would have to take before he would be home, before he would be walking down to the barn, distributing the feed and water, relatching the first o missing. the door, walking back up to the house, finding something for himself to eat.
“You’ve got to feed the flock,” Burl said in an uncanny mind-reader way.
Burl leaned in closer to him. He was crouching. William T. could tell by the audible creak in Burl’s knees. Burl was a man who either sat or stood. He was not a kneeler.
“William T. This too shall pass.”
Was It Beautiful? Page 7