“Would the king of cats like the ends of these pickles, do you think? Has he advanced enough in his appreciation of table food to enjoy a pickle?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
William T. shook his head.
“William T.?”
Again he shook his head. The men’s room door opened and Burl came back, eased himself onto his stool. Crystal set a glass of water in front of William T. and he swallowed long and hard, forcing the lump in his throat to dissipate. Crystal went over to Johnny’s booth and opened up the funnies. Johnny slept on.
“Welcome back, Mr. Evans,” William T. said. “You know what I’ve been thinking about in your absence?”
Burl raised his eyebrows. His look of inquiry.
“That Yankees game,” William T. said. “Remember that?”
It had been a summer day in late August. William T. and William J. had risen at dawn and driven up to Burl’s and honked the horn. That was the plan. The door had opened immediately and Burl appeared, nearly engulfed by his giant lilies. He was clean-shaven. He carried a Jewell’s Grocery paper bag with lunch for the three of them: tuna sandwiches, individual cups of applesauce, and a blue Tupperware container full of homemade molasses cookies. The whole way down to New York he and William J. had sung duets, Burl’s high, clear Welsh tenor soaring out the open windows of the truck, William J. on harmony. William T. had begged them to sing some Johnny Cash, some Emmylou, but they had refused. Burl had jeered, yes, jeered, at William T.’s musical taste, at Johnny’s eternal black.
“What the hell, Burl!” William T. had said. “Johnny Cash is a champion of the underdog and a fighter against injustice. He’s in black because he’s in mourning.”
“For who?”
“You. Me. The world.”
“Well, he doesn’t have to mourn for me today,” Burl said, the only time William T. could remember him talking like that. “Today is not a day of mourning for Burl Evans.”
At the ball game Burl had sat between the two of them. A vendor selling foot-long hot dogs had come by and Burl had bought one. William T. still could see that hot dog, the length of it, ribbons of ketchup and mustard spread neatly from one end to the other. Burl had said that it was the first foot-long hot dog he had ever eaten, that he had always heard about foot-longs but never had one before.
“Remember that foot-long hot dog at the ball game?” William T. said now.
Nod.
“Remember you and William J. singing out the truck windows on 87?”
Nod. Burl would not look at him. William T. wanted Burl to look at him. He wanted to hear Burl’s voice. He wanted the sound of Burl’s Welsh tenor rising in the air so that he could put the memory of William J.’s harmonizing next to it and close his eyes and listen to the notes drifting downward.
“Sing,” William T. said, and whispered, “‘The-ere is a balm—’”
Burl shook his head, a single definite back and forth. He snapped shut his paper, ready to leave.
“Mr. Evans. Don’t go.”
“Stop calling me Mr. Evans.”
“Burl then. Burl. Don’t go.”
Burl sat back down.
“Here’s a hypothetical question for you. Say you’re an old cat minding your own business out in the country.”
Burl relaxed. William T. could see it in the lines of his shoulders. Something for him to mull over. He was a muller, one thought following another in an orderly fashion, and he had always liked hypothetical questions. Burl had been good at geometrical proofs. He turned to William T., eyes dark and serious, ready to work.
“And?”
“And suddenly a tractor comes running amok down the field, say a tractor operated by one of the Miller boys, and runs right over you.”
“And?”
“And nothing. That’s it. That’s the question.”
“That’s not a question. It’s background. It’s the precursor to a question.”
“Semantics.”
“Semantics are important,” Burl said.
William T. waved his hand dismissively, the way Eliza might have done.
“Well then,” Burl said, “if there’s a question involved, then the question is why the owner of an old cat let it out like that. The owner should have kept the old cat inside, away from the Miller boys and their tractors.”
“The old cat didn’t want to be inside. The old cat wanted to be outside, strolling through the red spruce, hunting mice like he’d done all his life.”
“Things change. The old cat can’t do what he’s done all his life. It’s not safe anymore.”
Burl smoothed out his Sunday paper. Burl used his entire hand to smooth the paper. He glided his palm back and forth until an acceptable smoothness, known only to Burl, had been reached.
“The owner is at fault,” Burl said. “That’s the answer to your question.”
Over at Johnny’s booth, Crystal turned the funny pages. She smiled at something she read. Johnny slept on, the small red blanket clutched in his good hand. William T. noticed blond stubble on his chin, winking in the light from the table lamp. He remembered Johnny as a little boy, limping along the sidewalk clutching a red Popsicle.
Burl sat in his quiet way on his stool. As a boy Burl had been quiet, too, his desk underneath the flat wooden hinged top immaculately organized. He had been slow to raise his hand, slow to copy off the board in his small all-capital-letters printing. Burl, gripping his number two pencil near the point, laboriously adding and subtracting columns of numbers.
“Do things seem a lot different to you now from when we were young, Burl?” William T. said.
Burl set his coffee cup in the middle of his palm and studied the interior like a woman at the Remsen Field Days had once studied tea leaves for Eliza.
“No,” he said.
Burl put the coffee cup down and instead studied his hands as if he’d never seen them before, turning them over as if he were surprised they belonged to him.
“They don’t seem a lot different to me,” he said. “You’re young, you go to school, you grow up, you graduate, you start work. You get married and have children, or you don’t. You buy a house. You go to church. You mow the lawn in summer and shovel the snow in winter. You get older. Everyone you knew when you were young gets older, too.”
Burl pressed back the first digits of each finger, delicately, as if they might break if he pressed too hard.
“You try to live a good life,” he said.
“And what’s the point?”
“That is the point,” Burl said. “The point is to live a good life. To do right in the eyes of the Lord.”
Burl had been going to the Remsen Congregational Church all his life, first with his parents and later, when they were gone, alone. Once in a while, if William T. was driving by on a Sunday morning, he saw Burl disappearing into the church’s interior.
“There’s a reason for everything,” Burl said. “I’ve believed that all my life.”
“What if you’re me?” William T. said. “I tried to do right. I tried to live a good life.”
Burl studied his Band-Aids.
“And next thing you know you’re alone,” William T. said. “Your wife’s shivering up at the sister’s in Speculator. Your daughter-in-law, she’s talking about college.”
In his booth Johnny Zielinski stirred, the muscles of his face twitching as if something disturbed his dreams. Crystal passed her thumb over his cheek, stroking back and forth until he relaxed.
“You don’t even know if she’s still your daughter-in-law,” William T. said. “Is she?”
RING.
William T. picked up the phone with his bad hand—-Jesus H. Christ—and dropped it immediately. With his left hand he picked it up off the floor and replaced it in the cradle.
Ring.
“William T.?”
“Sophie J.?
Silence.
“Sophie, I mean. Sophie.”
Don’t hang up. It was an honest mistake. Don’t hang up.
“Sophie? Sophie?”
“I’m here.”
His head swirled at the sound of her voice. He sat down in the chair, keeping his bad arm stiff in front of him, the other hand clutching the phone so that it would not go away.
“William T.?”
She sounded far away. William T. stared at the red lines beginning to crawl up his wrist and forearm. The arm had pulsed all night long. It would be a relief to lay it in a pan of snow, but there was no snow.
“William T. Can you hear me?”
At seventeen, Sophie had sat on William J.’s lap. She had brushed his hair off his forehead, smoothing and smoothing, back and back. There had been no talk of college. No talk of doing something with her life. They were doing with their lives what they wanted, which was being together.
“I can hear you, Sophie.”
William T. clutched the phone with his unhurt arm and stared out the window to his right. January and no snow. The frozen ground was unadorned, naked. The mountains rose low behind the Buchholzes’ farm, huddled themselves between the gunmetal sky and the fields. The fields with their stalky remains of harvested corn that should be covered with whiteness but were not. There had been a summer day when seventeen-year-old Sophie called from the middle of that same cornfield. William J.? Can you find me?
Cornfield hide-and-seek. William T. had stood on the porch and looked down at the sweet-corn field. It began where the lower driveway left off and was bordered by the topmost row of red spruce. Ally ally all’s in free. Their voices had risen above the corn and floated away into the twilight air.
“William T.?”
“Yes.”
“What are you thinking about?”
William T. stared out at the clouds. Ally ally all’s in free. In free, home free, which was it? He had listened to children calling that phrase all his life. He must have called it himself, as a child. Was it possible that he had never even known what he was saying?
It was possible.
“I’m thinking that I wish he’d had more time,” William T. said. “There’s a lot of things I never said to him, things I wish now I’d said way back then.”
Silence. He could hear her exhale on the other end of the line.
“Me, too,” she whispered. “Me, too.”
William T. curled the phone cord around his arm as far as it would go, until his wrist was locked tight against the phone receiver, and looked out at the beginnings of the Adirondacks. Above the Buchholzes’ barn they sat, shoulders shrugging the surface of the earth.
“I want peace,” Sophie was whispering now, into the phone. “If I could just find peace.”
“Sophie,” William T. said. “If I could give it to you, I would.”
“Do you want peace, too, William T.?”
“Peace isn’t what I want.”
“What is it that you want then?”
Sophie’s voice was lightened and softened by the fact that the phone cord was wound too tight around William T.’s wrist to allow him to press it against his ear in the normal way.
“I want him,” he said. “I want my life, the way it used to be.”
“So do I,” her voice said in a tiny, thready way, whispering out of the strangled phone. When she had said good-bye, William T. sat in the chair with the phone cord still strung around his wrist and let the buzzing of it go on until it, too, ceased.
When the sunless sky had shrouded his mountains, William T. went to the kitchen. He took the bottle of Clorox down from its shelf and upended it onto his swollen arm. That had been his father’s method, and he was his father’s son. For a moment the shadow of his father passed before him, his head outlined in the golden light of the barn window, himself a child on the outside looking in. When the initial fire had subsided, William T. rolled his flannel sleeve back down.
One-handed, he fished another flannel shirt out of his shirt drawer and laid it on the kitchen table. One-handed, he scissored the kitchen shears through the seam of one arm. One-handed, he wrestled the new split-armed shirt over the original shirt, buttoned it up, and headed out to his heatless truck.
He was hemmed in by darkness. Bitter wind pushed its way into the cab and nosed around William T.’s bleach-soaked arm.
On his way to Utica Memorial William T. turned on the radio. All the stations were jumbled, fragments leaping one into another. No rhyme. No reason. With his bad hand he turned the dial slowly, hoping for a melody, for even a few notes of something that he could listen to, something that would soothe his ear, that would give rhythm to the flashing of the center stripes under the headlights. The way was long and there were no other headlights on the road.
His glass-stung arm flamed.
Somewhere in the blackness ahead was the Dairylea building, darkened for the night, the frozen ground around it still showing the remains of last year’s landscaping: sculpted hedge, arborvitae reaching their slender arms toward the sky.
The red needle of the gas gauge suddenly leaped with abandon up toward F and as quickly fell back to E. William T. willed it to leap again, but it remained lifeless behind its cracked plastic shield.
He kept on toward Utica Memorial and its emergency room. Here on Route 12 the lights were high and bright, illuminating the road that only he seemed to be traveling on. Where was everyone? It was late evening in mid-January, a time for travelers to be about. Anytime was a time for travelers to be about, behind the wheels of their cars and trucks, staring at the flashing white dividing stripes underneath the arching highway lights.
His arm throbbed.
Eliza had stopped sleeping with him right after it happened.
“No,” was all she had said.
Nothing else.
Time stretched ahead of William T., black and infinite, measured by the curving highway lights that swept toward him and then were gone. The turnoff to the hospital came and William T. turned, the wounds up and down his puffy arm pricking.
Emergency
William T. pulled into the Patient Pick-Up/Drop-Off Only slot and parked. He turned off the engine and sat for a minute listening to its tick, tick, tick. It was settling down, preparing itself to wait. William T. rolled down his window and stuck his head out to the starless night sky, gazing straight up at where he thought the moon might be, invisible beyond the thick layers of clouds that refused to release their frozen water, refused to allow the earth the sleep it craved.
Holding his arm, William T. approached the automatic doors. He was dizzy. He stood outside the emergency room, the double doors sliding open, sliding closed, sliding open, sliding closed.
Make up your mind, they taunted. We haven’t got all night.
They did, though. They would open and shut for anything that walked into their electronic path. They had no choice. William T. stood outside in the frigid still air and watched. A figure appeared behind the doors: Eliza. She stood behind the glass doors, but her voice was clearly audible even when they were closed: You didn’t watch out for him, you didn’t take care of him, you didn’t think. She appeared and disappeared, the sister’s ugly coat hanging on her like a coat on a paper doll. Was that color puce?
You vowed you’d keep us safe, she called. I was counting on you, William T.
Then she was gone. Open. Close. Open. Close.
“Sir? Are you planning to come in?”
William T. stood outside and held his arm.
“Are you injured?”
Open. Close. Open. Close. In the light above the sliding doors William T. could not tell if the speaking figure was man or woman, young or old. The figure stepped forward into the night air and came close.
“Let me help you. It’s awfully cold to be out here.”
No snow, though, William T. wanted to say, no snow, but didn’t. He allowed himself to be steered inside. Fluorescence was everywhere, turning the faces of the people inside greenish-gray no matter what color their real skin. A man handed him a clip
board with a form and pointed to where he should sign.
William T. Jones. A woman led him to a room with a reclining gray cushioned table and sat him down on it. Vinyl. Paper gown. Fluorescence, fizzing and blurting above him. His son would have heard cicadas in the buzz.
William T. closed his eyes. There was a soft brushing at the door.
“Mr. Jones?”
A man came in wearing jeans and a sweater and an unbuttoned white coat. Had doctors always dressed like that? Why could William T. not remember? A vision of a nurse’s cap came to him, its stripes, its three-corneredness.
“Mr. Jones? I’m Dr. —”
William T. couldn’t make out his name. Dr. —. Dr. —. He tried to open his eyes, but the light was too overwhelming and he shut them again.
“You have a problem with your arm?”
William T. tried to say yes, but nothing came out. An infinite weariness spread through his bones and blood and muscle. Let Dr. — figure out what was wrong.
“Mr. Jones?”
William T. tried to shake his head, but even that effort proved to be too much. Rest for the weary, he wanted to say, but felt the words slipping out of his mind the minute they appeared. He kept his eyes closed and sensed the doctor standing next to him. Fingers tugged at his flannel sleeves, the newly split one and the one that by now felt like a tourniquet. All the little wounds opened again. The cool touch of scissors whispered on his bare skin. Fingers again, pressing lightly up and down his arm.
A pause.
The sound of water running. Behind William T.’s shut eyes an image of his son came to him, nestled into the kitchen sink as a baby, water from the tall faucet falling and playing on his bare skin. He and Eliza had taken turns bathing him there. Stop. No. The sound of water stopped, and a warm cloth was placed against William T.’s arm.
“Some pretty bad cuts you have there,” the doctor said. “Infected.”
The doctor didn’t seem to mind a lack of response. The scrape of a chair being dragged filled William T.’s ears, then the doctor was closer than before, the same height as the reclining William T. He could feel the heat of the doctor’s skin as he bent close over William T.’s arm.
Was It Beautiful? Page 10