by Lee Martin
“Did you get it?”
She realized, then, that he’d seen her get out of the Impala with nothing in her hands.
“It was a funny thing. They were out.”
“Out,” said Ancil. “Flour? Whoever heard of a market being out of flour?”
“Something about a shipment that didn’t come in.” She was trying to think fast. “You done with your tea, baby?”
She took the cup and saucer from him and stood up. She turned toward the door, but he reached out and took her by her wrist.
“Look at me,” he said, and there was an edge to his voice that she didn’t like.
“You’re hurting my wrist,” she said.
He let her go then, and she tried to walk away as if nothing had happened, but she knew that something had.
Later that night, as they were falling asleep, he said to her, “Are you in the habit of going to town without your underpants on?”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“That white dress of yours. The sun behind you in the west this afternoon. A blind man could have seen.”
“You’re crazy,” she said.
“Am I?”
And like that, little by little, over the course of the night and on into the morning and afternoon of the next day, it all came out about Burtie Mack and her.
“Do you love him?” Ancil asked. He was still sick to his stomach and he was in his pajamas and his hair was wild on his head, and she was sorry for the hurt she’d brought him.
“No, no, of course not,” she said, even though she knew it was a lie.
ANCIL
The trail of Red Wing prints went along Main Street in front of the bank and Piper’s Sundries and the hardware store before turning right and heading west past the Odd Fellows’ Lodge and Hazel and Abner’s Café, where the tables were starting to fill up with folks trying to get a jump on the lunch crowd. Soon the noon fire whistle would blow, and then store clerks and the workers from the grain elevator and City Hall would come filing in. The door opened as Ancil went by, and he heard the clatter of dishes and silverware and the chatter of voices. Someone said, “My God, that’s rich,” and Ancil tried to look through the plate-glass window, which was steaming over from the heat inside. The waitresses looked like they were moving underwater. Ancil put his head back down and kept following the tracks.
At the end of the block, they stopped, the last ones turned toward the door of Tubby’s Barber Shop. Ancil pushed open the door and stepped inside.
Right away, his eyeglasses fogged over, and he had to take them off. Without them, he couldn’t see who was sitting in the chairs along the back wall, nor could he see who was in Tubby’s chair.
“Ancil, I’ve got a few ahead of you,” Tubby said in his gravelly voice. “Hope you got time to wait.”
“I got time,” Ancil said. He took a red bandana from his hip pocket and went to work on his glasses.
Someone had been telling a story, and now he returned to it. “Like I said, it was a Sunday, and Poke Hobbs had just got out of church.” The voice sounded familiar, but Ancil couldn’t quite place it. “You know how hard Poke is to understand when he talks. Well, he went up to Emma Lawson—you know, Mitt Lawson’s widow?—and he says, ‘Miss, may I walk you home?’ Everyone knows that Emma’s a little hard of hearing, and what with the way Poke was mushing up his words, well, she didn’t have a chance of getting what he was saying. So she says, ‘What’s that, Poke?’ And he comes at her again. ‘I said, may I walk you home?’ Still no luck. ‘I didn’t quite catch that,’ Emma said, and Poke says to her—now get this, boys—he says to her, ‘Miss, you can kiss my goddamn ass.’” The barber shop exploded with laughter. Ancil heard the hoots and belly laughs and the sound of men clapping their hands and slapping their thighs. Then when it was about to die down, the storyteller—Ancil had figured out it was Pat Best, who helped Charlie Sivert out at the funeral home—said, his voice rising with excitement, “You can bet she heard that. Clear as a bell.” And the laughter broke out again.
That was the sort of town it was—Ancil had always known it to be so—a town where everyone’s flaws were fair game for the loafers and the busybodies, everybody looking for a chance to feel grateful that their own lives were in order compared to those of their neighbors. To hear that story told on Poke Hobbs, a lonely man mustering up his courage to ask for companionship despite his speech impediment—that story told as a joke—added to the anger that Ancil felt.
He slipped his eyeglasses back on and took a look around the shop. There was Pat Best in his sport coat and tie, his high forehead shiny under the lights, a grin on his face. There was Ellis Roderick from the Texaco station, bent over at the waist from laughing so hard, a cigarette dangling from his fingers, the marks from his comb visible in his oiled hair. And there in the corner, laughing the loudest of them all, was Burton Mack. He was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a green-and-black-checked flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled to show the long-sleeved thermal shirt he had on underneath. He wasn’t a boy anymore, but even Ancil had to admit he was still a handsome man—lean face, square jaw, broad shoulders, a man muscled with the work of farming. Burton Mack. He laughed so hard that he kicked a leg up in front of him, and when his boot lifted off the floor, for just an instant, Ancil saw the sole: Red Wing.
Three strides took him to where Burton Mack was sitting.
“I don’t think that’s funny,” Ancil said, and everyone in the barber shop, Burton Mack included, fell silent.
Then he said, “What’s that, Ancil? I didn’t quite catch that.”
And the whoops and hoots and guffaws started in again.
Ancil stood there, feeling the heat come into his cheeks. He stood there a long time, letting the men laugh themselves out, and when finally they had and the silence waited for him to fill it, he said to Burton Mack, “I want you to stay away from my house.”
For a good while, there was only the sound of the strop slapping as Tubby began to put an edge to a straight razor.
Then Burton Mack said, “Your house? What in the hell would I want at your house?”
Ellis Roderick ground out his cigarette in the smoking stand. Pat Best leaned back in his chair, his posture erect and his face solemn as if he’d suddenly found himself back at work at the funeral home.
Ancil felt certain that they both knew the story of Lucy and Burton Mack. It was no secret in town, particularly after that Saturday night when Ancil found him in the café and said to him loud enough that everyone could hear, “What kind of man tries to steal another man’s wife? A lowlife, I’d say. A no-account. Is that the kind of man you want to be?” When Burton wouldn’t answer him, wouldn’t even look at him, just kept his eyes on his glass of Coca-Cola as he stirred it with the drinking straw, Ancil said, “You’ll have to answer for what you’ve done. There’ll come a day when you’ll have to answer.” Then he turned and walked out of the café, leaving everyone there to tell the story. How many times had it been told over the years? He knew if he’d walked into Tubby’s at another time, he might have heard someone telling it to whoever was waiting for a haircut, the story of Burton and Lucy and the night Ancil confronted him, a story of love in ruins.
Now Ancil said, “I might be an old man, but I haven’t forgotten. You know I haven’t. You come around my house again, and I swear I’ll do to you what I should’ve done all that time ago.”
“That’s ancient history,” Burton Mack said.
“Not to me,” said Ancil. “Not by a long shot. I’ve lived with it every day of my life.”
Burton Mack stood up. He was only inches from Ancil. The two of them stood there, neither saying a word. Then Burton, in a soft voice, said, “You’re right, Ancil. You’re an old man. Time runs out. Life’s shorter than we’d want it. Trust me, you should let it go.”
Burton reached out and laid his hand on Ancil’s shoulder, and that’s what finally did it, broke through whatever restraint Ancil had been able to manage. T
hat touch. That gentle voice. That holier-than-thou tone. It was more than he could stand.
He knocked Burton Mack’s hand off his shoulder. Then he pushed his forearm into Burton’s throat, driving him backward toward the wall, and he held him there, rage giving him the power he’d lacked on that long-ago Saturday night in the café when he’d still been sick to his stomach and weak with the thought of what Lucy had done. Now he was so gone-to-crazy his voice was a noise he didn’t recognize. Later, he’d try to remember exactly what he said—at least what he tried to say. Something about pain. Something about trying to make a life beyond the moment when all reason to live went away. Something about standing back and taking a long look at your life. Something about knowing exactly who you were.
The only thing he could remember for sure that he said was, “That baby. That poor baby.” But even that was said in a strangled voice, just a bunch of gobbledygook, something to be turned into a joke.
He let his arm drop to his side. He took a few uneasy steps backward and slumped down in a chair, his breath coming fast.
Burton Mack was coughing, sucking air down his windpipe.
Tubby stepped out from around his barber chair with his straight razor. “Everyone just calm down now,” he said. “Everyone just take it easy.”
“What’d you say, Ancil?” asked Burton when he could find his voice. “I couldn’t quite make it out.”
But all Ancil could do was shake his head as he got to his feet and headed toward the door.
He heard Burton say with a lisp, “I guess you can just kiss my goddamn ass.”
LUCY
And so, in that long-ago day, there came a time when she had to tell Ancil that she was with child. She told him on a winter day when the snow was on the ground, as it was now, and the mercury in the thermometer had dropped below zero. A cold snap. Days and days of it. Days with anguish between them and no way for them to escape each other. Windows iced over on the inside. Ancil kept faucets dripping to save the pipes from freezing. The wind howled down the stovepipe while in the house their voices rose and fell, became silent, then started in again. “Is it his?”Ancil said. “It is, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” she told him, and it was true. She didn’t. She and Ancil had been trying to have a baby for some time with no luck. The first time with Burtie, he had no condom, and she wanted him so badly she lied and said she was on the pill. After that, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth, and so they went on and on. “Ancil,” she said, “what am I to do?”
This was the moment that always came back to her each winter, the moment when she left everything up to him. She stood at the frozen foods case in Ferguson’s Market, about to reach for a carton of butter pecan ice cream—Ancil’s favorite—and she remembered how lost she’d been, the child taking hold inside her, and how much she needed Ancil to tell her the right thing.
“It’s your mistake,” he said. “I’ll be no part of it.”
Which she took to mean he wouldn’t allow her to stay if she kept the baby.
She realized then that she wanted to stay. Yes, it was exactly what she wanted. What had ever made her think that a boy like Burtie would have any interest in a life with her? If she went to him, what a shame she’d be, she and the child. Burtie had his college to finish. He had his whole life ahead of him, a life that, she was beginning to see now, would have no place in it for her.
So she did what she needed to do. She found a doctor in St. Louis who for the right price would perform a dilation and curettage and make the baby go away. She asked her sister, Eva, to drive her, Eva who had been dead now for years, Eva who said to her, “Oh, honey, this just breaks my heart.”
That evening, when they came back, Ancil was sick with worry. Where had she been? Where had they driven in weather like this?
Eva helped her into bed. She closed the door and went out to face Ancil. Lucy heard their voices.
“Jesus, Eva,” Ancil said. “I was ready to call the State Patrol.”
His frantic worry soothed Lucy.
“Hush,” said Eva. “You’ve got what you wanted.”
Then she went on to tell him exactly where she and Lucy had been.
Lucy waited for Ancil to answer, but for a good while there was only the sound of wind rattling the windowpanes and the whoosh of the gas heating stove as it kicked on.
Finally, he said, “What I wanted? Oh, good Christ.” His words came out in a nearly breathless rush, as if all the air had left him. Lucy heard the springs of his chair as he sat down. Then he said, in a shaky voice, “Was he with her? Does he know?”
“It was the two of us. You know he’s back at school.”
“But does he know?”
“That’s something to ask Lucy,” Eva said.
And finally he did. He waited until the morning after Eva, who had stayed the night, had gone. The sun was out, and from the bed Lucy could see the long icicles outside the window beginning to drip.
Ancil came into the room and stood by her bed. He said to her, “So it’s done.”
She couldn’t look at him. Everything felt so strange. She knew she was in her own house, in the bed they shared, but all of the things around her—the baby-doll nightie tossed over the back of a chair, the bottles of perfume on the dresser, the combs for her hair, the bottles of lotion—seemed as if they belonged to someone else.
“It was for the best,” she said.
“Is that what you decided?”
She turned then and looked at him. He’d spent the night pacing through the house, and once, though Lucy hadn’t been sure, she thought she heard him sobbing. His clothes were wrinkled, his hair uncombed. His eyes were wide with fear or amazement or both.
“Wasn’t it what you decided, too?” she said.
They looked at each other for a long time before he bit his lip and looked away and his face seemed to fall in on itself, cheeks hollowing with a sudden breath, brow sinking, chin wobbling, before he said, “Does he know?”
“No,” she said. “This was our choice, yours and mine.”
He took a long, staggered breath. He lifted his chin, drew his shoulders back. Then he gave the slightest nod and said, “Is there something I can bring you?”
She took that as a sign, the first sign that there might be a chance for them. Winter would pass and spring would come, and they would have years and years.
“Some tea,” she said. “Some hot tea.”
He went out to fetch it, and they went about the business of trying to forget.
ANCIL
What work it had been to get through the days. That’s what Ancil recalled as he walked from Tubby’s Barber Shop to Ferguson’s Market. The grim effort of believing in the future at a time when so much seemed to be lost. He didn’t know whether Lucy ever told Burton Mack about the child. He didn’t know whether she ever talked to him again, and he couldn’t know whether she regretted the decision she made to stay. He only knew he now felt embarrassed over the scene he’d made at Tubby’s and ashamed to be a part of this story that he’d given new life to, this story of lives in disarray that would live longer than any of the people involved. The only person he could think to speak of it with was Lucy, who was just then stepping out of the Market, the box boy behind her, two bags of groceries in his arms.
“I can take those,” Ancil said, and he reached to grab the bags.
But the boy was insistent. “That’s all right, sir,” he said. Such a polite and earnest boy. “It’s what Mr. Ferguson pays me to do.”
What could Ancil do but give in, even though what he really wanted was to be alone with Lucy so he could tell her about the footprints in the snow and the fool thing he did in the barber shop.
“It’s the truck down there,” he said, and raised his arm to point.
“You drive that silver Explorer?” the boy said. They all started walking toward the truck. “Do you live at the end of Cedar Street in the white house, the last one as you go out of town?”
/> “That’s us,” said Lucy. “The last house on your left.”
“I was out there yesterday looking for you.” At the truck, the boy put his foot on the front bumper, so he could use his knee to boost the grocery bags up in his arms as he adjusted his grip. “I knocked and knocked, but no answer. I even went around looking in windows, hoping I might raise someone.”
Ancil looked down at the boy’s boot. Red Wing.
“What in the hell did you want?” Ancil said. His mistaken assumption about who’d left those footprints filled him with anger. “What was so urgent that you felt you should go around looking in our windows?”
“I just…”
“You just what?” To think he’d raised a ruckus in Tubby’s—had actually pressed his forearm into Burton Mack’s throat—with no cause other than the bitter history between them left Ancil with little patience for the boy. “Well, what was it?”
“Ancil,” Lucy said, “there’s no need for that tone.”
“It was your change from when you were in the store that day,” the boy said. “You walked out without it. Didn’t you find it in the envelope I put between your front door and the storm door? I didn’t want to leave it like that, but like I said, I couldn’t raise anyone.”
Ancil had trouble finding his voice. He remembered now, laying the change on the counter while he reached for his keys. Lucy had gone ahead and was already on her way to the truck. He was in a hurry to catch up with her so he could be there to steady her in case she slipped on the ice. He knew now that he’d left the change—a five, two quarters, and a nickel—on the counter, and that had been the start of this sequence of events that had brought them to where they were now.
“Unlock the truck, Ancil,” Lucy said, and he did what she told him to do.
Lucy reached into her purse and took out a ten-dollar bill. “You take this,” she said to the boy. “Go on. Take it for your trouble. It was a good thing you did.”
He put his hand out in front of him and shook his head. “I can’t do that, ma’am. No, ma’am. It was no trouble at all.”
Lucy looked at him a good while before folding the ten and putting it back into her purse. She reached out, then, and touched him on the cheek, just the way, Ancil thought, that a grandmother would, and the boy let her, as if he sensed somehow that this was what she needed to do and who would he be if he stopped her?