“What kind of vehicle you drive, Sophie?”
“A ‘vette!”
“The hell you do. My son, dating a girl with a Corvette?”
“Come on and check it out,” she said. “It’s a red one, too.”
She had matched him word for word, getting louder and happier as William T. got louder and happier.
“Jesus H. Christ,” William T. had said. “William J. found himself a girl with a red Corvette. Imagine that.”
William J. had said nothing, just kept his arm tight around Sophie’s shoulders, and the three of them had tromped down to the back of the broken-down barn and taken a good look at the Chevette, shabby even then.
“Here she be,” Sophie had said. “What do you think?”
Then she started laughing and couldn’t stop. William J. smiled down at her, and William T. felt a big bellow starting up in his gut and he let it out. The three of them, down behind the broken-down barn peering in the eternally open passenger-side window of Sophie’s little red Chevette. Soda cans lined up three deep. Tapes jammed into the car cushions of the passenger seat.
“Is that how you organize your music, Miss Sophie?”
“That’s how I organize my music, Mr. Jones!”
She was not injurable back then, Sophie; it was part of her nature. When others were stung by hornets, Sophie remained inviolate. When Eliza and William J. and William T., all of them, erupted in welts from the poison ivy they didn’t know was behind the old spring house, Sophie alone remained clear. She did not wear a helmet when she rode on the back of William J.’s motorcycle; she drove barefoot in the truck.
Now she sat on her stool next to him at Crystal’s, thin and hunched in that goddamn parka. William T. looked down at her dirty white sneakers. I wear out one pair, I buy another.
“Are you finished with my son, Sophie? Is that why you spend so much time down at that cabin? From one carpenter to another?”
She looked at him. She didn’t blink. William T. felt suddenly weak. Sophie was rubbing her face with her fingers, thin white pencils moving up and down on her pale cheeks. She looked at him, her eyes darkening.
“William T.,” Sophie said. “William T., listen to me. I can’t live like you.”
“Live like me how?”
“Sometimes I just want to forget. I want to forget. And when he touches me, I do.”
His breath was ragged in his throat, and he realized that he was crying. She shook her head violently, as if he had said or done something fundamentally wrong.
“William T.,” Sophie whispered. “William T.”
“Sophie, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save him. I would have given anything.”
She pulled her arms back into the sleeves of the too-big parka and hunched over the counter. William T. got up. The flock was waiting.
WILLIAM T. STOOD AT HIS BROKEN-DOWN barn on Sunday morning, the flock fed and watered, doors latched. His red spruce all around him, the red spruce that should be weighted with snow by now but were not. Their empty arms curved beseechingly to the still cold air: Fill me. Weight me. Cover me. Help me. Behind the barn door the flock was uncharacteristically silent. Just after the incident with the crow, William T. had taken a piece of plywood and shoved it up against the broken window, and now he looked at it, the jury-rigged job, and thought it was high time to do something about the mess.
But he was tired. So tired.
And his arm. Jesus, his arm.
William T. took a deep breath of the cold air, sucked it into his lungs, and held it there. Off to his side a stick lay on the ground. He picked it up to use as a support.
He looked down the dirt road, the road he had trod every day as a child, when the pines were greenish twigs stuck into upturned dirt. His parents had planted the spruce forest across the road and down the dirt road when he was born.
“You wait till you’re fifty years old, William T., and you’ll have a nest egg in those trees,” they had said to him. “You can sell them. The finest musical soundboards are made with Adirondack red spruce, did you know that? Not to mention the value for paper pulp.”
All around William T. people planted their pines and watched them grow and then cut them down, sooner for Christmas trees and later for logs. But William T. had not cut down his red spruce. They rose higher than the house, higher than the barn. When had they gotten so big? At some point William T. must have been taller than the trees. At some point they had been the same height as him. Each tree had, at some specific moment in its individual past, been the exact same height that William T. was right now. There he had remained, while they kept on growing. They were as tall now as they would ever be.
Was it possible that their son might have grown any taller? He had asked that question of Eliza the day it happened.
“What do you mean, would he have gotten any taller?” she said, staring up at him. Her eyes were bloodshot and slitted. “What are you talking about?”
William T. had had no answer. He himself didn’t know what he meant.
“He was twenty-seven years old, William T.! People stop growing at eighteen!”
She had bent her head into her hands, the same way she’d been for most of the day.
“What are you saying? That you haven’t looked at him for the past nine years? That you didn’t even know he’d stopped growing?”
She kept spitting out the questions, the same ones over and over. William T. had stood next to her, her words washing over him, untouchable. The receptionist and secretaries and cops had stared at them.
Ahead of William T. was the winding dirt road, overgrown with weeds. In the stillness of the frigid air the spruce stood unmoving, witnesses to all of William T.’s property, his unplowed upper field, his frozen lawn, his house, the broken-down barn and its sturdy brother. Behind him was the narrow trail, lined with spruce, that led to the far meadow. The meadow was small, a simple square bordered with the remains of an old stone wall. The Welsh settlers had laid stone walls through all the forests when they came to Sterns. Most of the walls were crumbling now, time transforming them into scattered piles of rock. But they still delineated borders, one farm from the next, one homestead from another.
Corn stubble; a furrowed field; his red spruce marching up the hill by the spring; the watercress a splotch of almost-green by the creek. The milkweed, the last of their pods burst into down weeks ago, the parent stalks drooped and patient now, waiting for the snow to come and put them to sleep. William T. had lived here all his life. The land had been his parents’ before him.
If he cut his spruce down he’d have a pile of money.
A pile of it.
Think about the reams of paper, wrapped and boxed and loaded into copy machines the country over.
And maybe an Adirondack soundboard or two, made from the most perfect of William T.’s red spruces. That would be something that a Burl could appreciate, or a William J. William T., he himself had no ear for that kind of thing.
William T. pictured Eliza sitting at the sister’s kitchen table in Speculator. What was she doing now? Was she shivering? Was she wrapping herself around with one of the sister’s endless crocheted afghans, the kind made of one square strung onto another? They were full of holes, those afghans, designed not for warmth but to be draped over the back of a couch, drawing attention to themselves because of their ugly colors. Skeins of fake wool, bought on clearance by the sister, no doubt.
Did Eliza remember William J. as a child, playing hide-and-seek in the red spruce?
William T. lowered himself to the ground and curled up with his head on his knees, his bad arm held stiffly to one side. The frozen hardness of the earth made his legs and back ache with the cold. Behind the latched door of the broken-down barn the flock sensed his continued presence and started fluttering and squawking and pecking. They were not used to William T. being out there. They associated him with food and water, and when he had provided that, they expected him to be gone.
“What�
�s wrong with your arm?”
William T. looked up to see Eliza standing before him, wearing a shapeless coat of a color that he couldn’t put a name to. Could it be puce? Was this the color called puce? It would only make sense: the ugliest-sounding name for the ugliest color in the world. Her car was parked up at the house. William T. had not heard her tires crunching on the gravel, nor had he heard her make her way across the silvery frozen grass to the broken-down barn. He looked down; dark red lines of dried blood meandered across puffy angry-looking skin.
“I fell,” he said. “What the hell kind of coat is that?”
“It’s my sister’s.”
“It’s the ugliest coat I’ve ever seen.”
“Thanks.”
“I don’t blame you for wearing it, though. You need to be warm. I blame your sister, for buying it.”
“Do you ever blame yourself, William T.?”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? His arm prickled with fire. She stood before him, the coat halfway down to her ankles. Her hand came out and made its way up to her throat. Her fingers began a delicate, familiar tracery. Eliza didn’t even know she had the habit but she did, the pads of her fingertips fluttering against her heartbeat. Making sure she was still alive? Still part of this old world? His heart swelled inside him and he rose to his feet.
“Stop,” he said, closing his fingers over hers.
Eliza stood before him, her fingers retreating into the folds of the sister’s coat sleeves.
“How much did she pay for that thing?”
“I didn’t come here to talk about my sister’s coat,” Eliza said.
“What did you come here to talk about then?”
William T. looked down the dirt road, following Eliza’s gaze. How had it happened that without his knowing it, his tiny trees had grown as tall as they ever would? They lined the trail on either side, their full crowns lifted to the sky above, stretching toward the sun even in its absence. Across Route 274 from the house the entire field of them had filled his vision as long as he could remember. As long as he could remember he had waited for the morning sun to come and clarify the treetop line, bring each branch into sharp relief.
“Eliza. Why are you here?”
Had the sun been out he would have needed to shade his eyes from its glare, but the sun was not out, and Eliza’s eyes were dark and full of unshed tears. Her voice ripped its way out of her throat.
“William T., you should never have left him alone on those tracks. You should have been next to him the whole time.”
“Eliza—”
“You should have been with him every minute. You never, should have left him, alone.”
He looked at her, gazing until her eyes dropped. She pulled her arms into the brown sleeves of the coat and curled her shoulders over.
“Eliza, are you trying to ask me something?” he said carefully. “Something you’re scared to ask?”
She shook her head, a violent motion.
“He was my boy,” she wept. “He was my boy.”
He watched her hunch into herself, as if that might somehow make a difference. Then she turned and ran back up the grass, her footprints making dark boot-shaped impressions in the silvery grass. In her absence William T. became aware of the flock, scrabbling and yammering behind the closed barn door.
Pancakes were popular at Crystal’s on Sunday morning. When had pancakes become a Sunday morning affair? Crystal was busy behind the grill, pouring and flipping. William T. admired her precise way of spooning blueberries into the center of each pancake so that the blueberries remained distinct from the creamy batter. In other diners, Queen of the Frosties being one of them, the entire pancake turned blue, which William T. found unappetizing.
Blue food. Not good.
Burl was at the counter eating an English muffin, a surprise for Burl. He was a hot-cereal-at-home man.
“I see you’re eating an English muffin, Mr. Evans,” William T. said. “Spread with mixed-fruit jam even. Living on the edge today, are we?”
Burl was halfway through the Sunday Observer-Dispatch, which was about one-third thicker than the daily edition. Flyers. Coupons. Classifieds.
“If you could be any animal, Mr. Evans, what animal would you be?” William T. said.
“That’s the kind of question William J. would have asked,” Burl said. “In fact he did ask me that question, when he was a kid.”
“And what was your answer?”
“A greyhound.”
“A greyhound?”
Burl, a greyhound. My God. This was Burl, the boy who in fifth grade had vomited after the gym teacher made them run twice around the perimeter of the football field.
“Why a greyhound?”
“They’re very fast.”
“I didn’t know you liked fast.”
“I like fast.”
“Then why do you drive a fifteen-year-old Buick?”
“It runs, is why. It’s reliable.”
“What I’m trying to say, Mr. Evans, is if you like fast, why don’t you drive a fast car?”
Burl extracted two quarters from his breast pocket and stacked them, heads-up, next to his empty coffee mug. Did Burl always have two quarters in his breast pocket? Where did all his quarters come from? Did he go to the bank on a regular basis and trade in his dollar bills for quarters?
“Because then it would be the car that was fast, William T., not me. And it’s me that I want to be fast.”
Burl smiled, the rare Burl smile that made him look about ten years old. William T. felt the familiar sadness, a nameless sadness, that he felt whenever Burl smiled. Burl, a slow man who wanted to be fast. How had it happened that William T. did not know this fundamental fact about his oldest friend? Spoken aloud in Burl’s quiet voice, it felt like an essential desire, one that Burl had harbored all his life. And yet William T. had not known. All these years, had Burl longed for speed? It’s me that I want to be fast, he had said.
Burl got up and went into the men’s room. Unlike the Miller boys, he left his paper behind him, neatly folded on the counter.
“If you could be an animal, William T., any animal, what animal would you be?” Crystal said.
She was standing before him, cutting lemons into wedges and placing them into a small white bowl. The eaters of pancakes had eaten, blueberry or plain, and left. The diner was empty save for Burl and William T. and Crystal. And Johnny, asleep in his booth, the little red blanket tucked up around his shoulders. William T. could remember when that red blanket had more than covered the boy’s entire body, drooping down to the floor.
“I used to think I’d be an eagle,” William T. said. “That used to be my animal of choice. It’s changed, though.”
Crystal’s knife was small and thin. It had a black handle. William T. had watched her use this same knife to slice lemons as far back as he could remember. Occasionally she pulled a sharpener from a drawer and swiped the blade across it: once, twice, three times.
“Haven’t you about worn that blade down by now?”
Crystal paused in her slicing and held the blade up. Examined it. Ran her finger down its brief length. Shook her head. Resumed cutting.
“Why an eagle?” she said.
“They can fly, is why. High.”
William T. thought of the eagle he had observed the other day. He had lain out on the hood of his truck until it cooled, until the metal turned cold and the cold weaseled its way through his two flannel shirts until he himself was shivering with cold, and still the eagle had not landed. Still the eagle had hung on the air what looked like miles and miles high, circling. Never tiring of its spiral.
“Do eagles have a memory, do you think?” William T. said.
“What would memory be to an eagle?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you,” William T. said.
“I don’t know either.”
“Maybe an eagle memory would be the remembrance of a perfect day,” William T. said. “A perfect day
in which not one but two rabbits were seized, in which the wind lifted you as high as you wanted to go, in which the sun was shining but the air was cool.”
Crystal finished cutting up the lemons and spread plastic wrap over the bowl.
“But who the hell am I to know?” William T. said. “I’m just speculating. I’m an ordinary man with no knowledge of true flight.”
Crystal smiled. She brought out her giant jar of pickles and extracted three of them and laid them on her cutting board.
“Pickles?”
“Tuna salad,” she said. “My secret ingredient.”
“Like the olive oil? Don’t forget about your one-sixteenth Greekness.”
“Never. I like being one-sixteenth Greek.”
“I wouldn’t choose to be an eagle anymore, though,” William T. said. “I’d choose to be a cat.”
“A cat’s pretty ordinary, William T.”
“I’m an ordinary man, Crystal. I’ve already told you that.”
“What kind of cat would you be then?”
“Black. Old. With a glorious hunting past that I could reflect on. I would be a feline legend in my own time, the scourge of rodents for miles around.”
“I know a cat like that,” Crystal said. “His name is Genghis. How the hell is Genghis, anyway?”
Crystal never said hell. She never said shit or damn or goddamn or Christ Almighty or any of the other words that came so easily to William T.’s tongue. Now she laughed. How the hell is Genghis, she said again, as if the word hell. had a particular, unfamiliar taste, one that she had enjoyed and wanted to taste again.
“Hell,” she said. “I think I like the word hell”
“It’s a good word,” William T. said. “I myself have always been fond of it.”
“So anyway, how the hell is Genghis?”
“Genghis is the king of cats, Crystal.”
Was It Beautiful? Page 9