The Night of Trees

by Thomas Williams

  “Happy?” she said dubiously. He knew what she wanted. He was ashamed of his selfishness. She wanted love and permanence, even as she saw by his little hesitations that he would never give them to her. There was a certain point, he knew, when terrible compromises were made, and he hoped for her sake that she wouldn’t make this one now, because she wasn’t quite yet a cheating wife; she had been in love with more than sensuality. She would be hurt in any case, but if she chose to take him without the faintest hope of permanence then what he had done to her would be unforgivable.

  She went back and sat on the bed. “Do you still love me?” she asked.

  That was the question he couldn’t answer. He sat beside her and put his arm around her. If only he could answer the question. She was passive, waiting. He moved his knife back along his belt so that it wouldn’t touch her. “I think you’re very sweet and wonderful,” he said.

  “But you don’t love me.” A statement of fact.

  Now she should get up and leave him, and try to make her life out of the materials she had. She got up and went to the window. She could lean her hands on the sill, her legs in her faded dungarees straight, her little waist now looking to him, in his great shame, beautiful and yet used, violated, and his problems with her were no longer exciting. He pitied her, but what a cheap thing pity was! She sniffled like a little girl, and kept her face turned away.

  “But I loved you so much!” she said unbelievingly. It wasn’t fair, of course. How had he managed to make her so unhappy? What sort of person was he, an ordinary man, forty-five years old, to be able to hurt this woman so much? But he had heard that past tense, all right, and he shamefully liked that: loved.

  She turned her crying face toward him. “What was so ’wonderful’?” she asked. “You said I was ’sweet and wonderful.’ What was so ’sweet and wonderful’ about me?”

  “You’re a beautiful woman.”

  “You don’t think so right now.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But you don’t love me.”

  He was silent.

  “You don’t even want to touch me.”

  He was silent.

  “You weren’t gentle with me, were you? You said you would be, but you weren’t. I didn’t want you to be.”

  “I know.” He wanted to help her, but he couldn’t. He realized that he simply had no resources, and could not communicate. He could only hide behind his smooth face and, in a way, agonize. What could be wrong with him? He couldn’t understand it. There must have been a way to try to repair this, but without the energy of excitement his mind was sterile; he had no arguments at all.

  “Shim never did what you did. I could never let him.” She found a Kleenex and wiped her nose. Perhaps the only thing he had left to give her was the opportunity to repulse him physically. He didn’t want to do it, but it seemed all he had to give.

  “Come here,” he said.

  “No.” She shook her head as she wiped her glasses, then put them firmly on.

  “Don’t cry, Opal,” he said, and at this she looked straight at him. He got up and went to her. She shook her head and put her forearms together in front of her chest, but that was the only defensive move she made.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said, and now she wasn’t crying. Her hands came around on his back, smooth on his skin, and as it had been before, her real power was one of touch. “Just don’t worry about me,” she said, and her voice was rough, a little ugly, but suddenly he changed, and held on to her. Her hand was at his belt. She had made the wrong choice, and would give for nothing, take nothing but the brutish moment, the shoddy, sweaty goods he had to give. He was ready, now, without love, and just before his lust became all of him again, he remembered shame. My God, he thought, I could do it anywhere; I could do it on a grave.

  Perception, clearing of the mind: her darkness around him, ready to make him mad again, but for a moment out of time they listened to the telephone’s faint cries, counting them. It was the Buzzells’ ring, and at that meaningful number they rolled stealthily out of bed and were mad this time for their clothes. They heard through their fever of buttons and laces Zach answer the telephone at the base of the stairs, his sucking gulps of air louder than his old voice. They heard him suck some more: “Hough! Opal!” Then he went away. Suddenly they thought that he knew, and she turned her frightened face toward him. She said, “He’d never tell,” and Richard saw that she was all plotter now. Now, because of him, she would have to be, and she would hate it.

  She finished dressing and pushed her hair into place as well as she could. On the way she stepped into the bathroom and flushed the toilet, then opened and closed the door loudly. Zach might not be sure, he might think she’d been in there: there was suspicion, and there was absolute knowledge, and the plotter had to run that knife edge all the time.

  “Mea culpa,” he murmured to his boot as he laced it up.

  Soon Opal came running back upstairs and opened his door. She didn’t bother to knock, and that was a mistake…. Her face filled him with something very much like dread.

  “It was Shim,” she said. She kept shaking her head. “Murray’s been hurt. He said it was a freak accident. He’s been shot. He took him down into Leah and then to Northlee Hospital.” Her face was full of pain.

  “Where was he hit?” He had asked that question so many times in his life. He was putting on his still damp shirt, carefully tucking it in, now, and buttoning the pockets.

  “Shim said his arm—something about his arm.”

  Oh, thank God! Only then did his hands begin to shake. But a hunting bullet. My son! The boy’s pain made him wince. Murray was there, whole, in his mind—no, there were his strong arms, and the young face smiled at him. He was almost sick; the faint symptoms of shock. Opal had tactfully gone on ahead, and let him pass her in the hall. He ran down the narrow stairs, grabbed his jacket in the kitchen, and ran through the tracked-up snow to his car. He must be there right now. But he mustn’t panic. He had to drive on snow; he had to be careful; he had to get there quickly and efficiently. Ten miles—five to Leah town square, five or six more to Northlee and the hospital. The main roads would be cleared by the salt, by now, but he must—the car started easily, thank God; the sun had been on it—he must take it easy going down the mountain.

  His wheels spun as he backed around. The car itself would be plowing snow until he reached the town road, which by now would be open. “Easy,” he said. His speedometer needle swung violently around to forty as his wheels spun in the snow, just out of phase with the tachometer needle. He must take it just right; he would go off the road if he tried it too fast, or stick if he were too cautious. Right at the end of Shim’s road he would have to speed up and plow through the banking left by the town plow, and then it would be tricky to slide around parallel to the road without shooting straight across into the other embankment. The road was clean snow, gentle curves and luminous blue indentations. It was like driving across a sheet, and the car handled on the soft white stuff mushily, boat-like. It steered from the rear, and the slipping body of the car responded slowly to his nervous work with wheel and accelerator. His hands ached on the wheel, and the cold air came past the side curtains and burned his sweating face.

  That part of it went quickly; he mushed through the plow’s soft wave—the snow was cold and light—and stopped on the plowed surface to push snow out of his radiator and front wheel wells. Then came the slow descent, where the driving could not take all of his thoughts, and he must live with Murray’s hurt.

  He turned the wheel when he had to, shifted down and up, felt the car’s rear end move out and then catch traction again. The white road curved down between the heavy drooping pines and the rigid hardwoods. The day was cold and bright. Murray’s flesh and nerves had been viciously ripped.

  He asked God, not knowing who God was, never having had such a need before, please to let it be nothing much. Will You let it be? But he knew that it could not be small. He knew too much
about bullets and flesh, and none of the sweet blank spaces of ignorance could help him not to see. He knew too much all at once, and from too much knowledge he could only try to go beyond it—if there were such a place. I love my son, God. I can’t bear to have him hurt!

  Watch it! He’d nearly left the road—had begun in terror to pick an impossible course through the iron trees. He cursed the snow and the bright hard day: his terror was for delay. If he lost the car he couldn’t run far enough. He couldn’t wait; if he found himself standing, weak in his heavy boots, alone on the white road he would—yes, he believed he would go crazy. He slowed down. There were no alternatives to his getting to his son, none. And so he would have to make it. Slow, now, slow.

  All he could see, big as the mountain, hovering beyond the road he must steer, was a terrible wound, close to his eyes; there was the tender skin, ripped there, curled, and slivers of wrecked bone. He had seen many such wounds made by shell fragments—vicious because of the random jagged shapes of blown-apart steel, but they were not so fast, those little shards, as a bullet. They had not been designed, like the bright little machine a hunting bullet was, to turn the velocity of a small mass into maximum destruction. Don’t think, he informed his brain, drive.

  Murray (soft, the name meant to him—tenderness and bright, precarious intelligence): the boy he saw in flashes of unbearable love was not always twenty years old (last February 10th at one minute past five in the afternoon. “You have a son—a beautiful son,” Dr. Silver said on the telephone), but sometimes a younger Murray in scenes where his right to the boy’s company and need was too much taken for granted. Much too much. He had been angry, and spanked Murray! God should whip him with steel for his anger.

  Now, hold on, he thought. You never spanked him very much, and only when he really deserved it. Did he deserve this? The bullet, whose ever it was—Shim’s, Murray’s own, some other hunter’s—should have hit him, not his son. He could have taken it. He would take it anywhere. But Murray, who didn’t even want to be there! Murray wanted to be off on his trip, and had only stayed to please his father. His father, who was in love only with his own selfishness.

  Drive.

  Hadn’t he looked forward to his shoddy triumph with the hung trophy! And then, while he might have been helping Murray, he wasted his energy dragging out his game; he came back gloating and sweating over a dead animal; he used Opal—used her—to prove himself the man still. He hurt her for his selfish lust while his son was in pain, and while the very man he had cuckolded helped Murray down the other side of the same mountain. He didn’t deserve to be a father. He’d be in his shoddy, adulterous bed when his son needed him, or shedding blood when it was so precious, so precious. What could he do for Murray now? Perhaps it wasn’t really so bad—just a rather deep tick through the muscle, which they could sew up and bandage but had needed stitches and antisepsis and all that. “For Christ’s sake, calm down, now,” he said, his voice strange with only the empty seat beside him. But it was a relief to put a thought out of his head into the air.

  He turned onto the blacktop road, where the salt had worked the snow back almost to the shoulder. Here he began to make better time, but still he kept everything in control. He must have no trouble. The wheels hissed on the asphalt, and the air seemed a little warmer in the valley. It was a beautiful day—perversely so—a day he might have been so happy with Murray in. The blue sky was deep and clear, and the sun shone on the fresh snowbanks—one of those winter afternoons when the cold had turned, begun to lose out, and the world seemed warm and friendly again. Now all this was artificial to him. He was not part of this day, as if he looked out of the small windshield at an overpretty Kodachrome.

  Could he face Murray, knowing what he knew, that he had kept the boy near him out of avarice? His watch, his wife, his car, his son. Had he really been worried about Murray’s adjustment to Murray’s life, or had he been a miser about those things he considered to be his? His son comforted him, brought life back together again, made him forget the approach of an age like Zacharia Buzzell’s when he would be a man no more, no more, but an old crock with plastic plumbing. He had wanted to take youth from Murray’s youth, and to remember good old times when he had his beautiful wife and son. Had them.

  “No, I loved them,” he said to the buzzing car. “I loved them.” No one was there to hear him. He looked guiltily, and no one was there to hear a man blubber to himself. Who the hell was he to blubber out his love to the air and expect an eavesdropper? Who would be listening—God? He had heard men ask the most reasonable questions of that One, men who meant them sincerely, too; what man wouldn’t who looked at his own insides or the shank ends of his legs or arms? He had seen too many of that One’s handymen at their games to expect Him to watch less interesting phenomena. They loved badly and killed well. They were lousy lovers and good shots. They made good livings and hoarded life, the tough little bastards; you found out about the Father from the sons.

  Not Murray. There had been too many times in his life when he had taken sustenance from the boy’s love, taken it for granted and used it and gone his own prideful way. Against the pretty winter day, as if in a montage, he saw a winter twilight once soon after the war when they had been skiing at Stowe. Murray was about ten, and had fallen and twisted the ligaments in his knee. He and Rachel had taken the last run of the day on the Nosedive, and when they came out below the chairlift someone had just come by, and told them, and they had raced across to the slopes; there was Murray still on the toboggan, and his pale face, his stern expression of pain. He saw them (had a light been flashed on his face just at that moment?) and he smiled, so relieved—and yet he was confident that they would come—and said as if the pain, worry, all the fuss were now practically over, “There he is! My daddy’s here now!”

  The light. Someone must have had a flashlight. There on the luminous snow was the complex of objects—the birch toboggan with the guiding handles; he saw it now. A ski—one of the ridgetops that were fashionable then, and the dark blanket, the blocky ski boots. All the tows had closed a few minutes before; the sky was still deceptively bright; yet its final light seemed to end just above the earth, and the snow's whiteness was more remembered than real—cold phosphor, brittle with the turning wakes of earlier skis. It was too dark then for the remembered vision of his son's loving face, which shone now with almost holy warmth in his memory.

  Some time after that they had the discussion about the word "daddy." Murray came to him one evening and brought it up. He was quite serious about it, and didn't want to hurt his father's feelings, but he thought he was a little too old, now, to use it any more. He had prepared a list of possible choices, with his opinion of each designated by a system of checks and asterisks:

  DAD *

  PA *

  POP *

  FATHER

  RICHARD

  DICK

  PATER

  OLD MAN (O.M.) ****

  It was then Richard realized that Murray hadn't called him anything at all for several weeks, and as he scanned the list with tolerant amusement Murray stood next to his chair fidgeting with embarrassment. His lips were pursed in an imitation of deep consideration, his dark, wide eyes were serious—but couldn't look with serious purpose at his father. Murray preferred “O.M.” because, he said, it was "humorous" and he just couldn't make himself (after so many years) call his father "Dad"—it sounded as if his father were a grandfather or something. Anyway, it didn't sound right. But "O.M." now—it was sort of friendly, like friendly competition?

  And in his pride Richard took everything for granted. His tolerance, his superiority, were colossal. What boy, he must have thought, would not admire such a man as he, and imitate him? Hadn’t he had the time to argue with his son what amounted not only to a father’s name but to the boy’s own counterimage, the image he had of himself, and after that the image of mankind? Shallow, superior in his puffed-up manhood, he had agreed too easily, and never thought that a name was not that
important. Murray had gone away without the information he sought.

  And hadn’t he always? How responsible was the father for the son’s despair about the future of the world? Who would kill mankind—the kind of man he had for his very own father?

  “Oh, God!” he groaned, and drove on as fast as he dared. He went through Leah, past the Welkum Diner where he had stopped such a few days before to call the lodge (a mean figure in a selfish plot), went north on Northlee Street, and soon was out of Leah, past the service stations, again in the hills, the Connecticut River on his left, black water between its sun-white banks. Then into Northlee, past the campus of Northlee College—the hospital was farther north at the edge of the town. He took the wrong way, a newly designated one-way street, his eyes seeing, emergency ignoring the little sign, then around the square. He knew this way; a little street, now, on the left. Then he turned down toward the squat, spreading, yellow brick hospital with its new red brick and glass modern wing, its tall, factory chimney coming strangely out of the bare white ground fifty yards away: steam in puffs along a wall, cars in the parking lot parked in amazing order, all carefully angled against the barrier, all coldly in formation there.

  “Murray, Murray,” he heard himself saying. He was rehearsing, composing an argument: “Look, Murray. Look how I love you, how I will love easily from now on, without any pride. Don’t despair about the world. See? Even your father can change in time to save himself, and maybe the world can, too.” But how could he tell Murray? “Look at me. I’m the worst animal in creation, and now you see how I’ve given up my vanity? We are still a loving family, Murray, and you’ll see—your mother and you and I—you just wait and see. When you get out of here (tomorrow?) I’ll prove it to you, Murray!”

  Stop talking, you fool! He parked the car and ran down the swept gray cement to the hospital entrance. Heavy glass doors—his hand stuck to the cold brass handle and came away with soft, painless reluctance—a ghost of tearing. Modern motel chairs, people crumpled in them like old newspapers, a smell like the lobby of a big apartment house, his largeness, his hunting redness watched by all as he crossed the rubber and the shining floor. The low desk: the girl turned her pretty, institutional face toward him, her hand upon a telephone.