This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  Tom had said she was nuts to do the job in February, no way would that bunch of arthritic old-timers and assorted do-gooders the Reverend had building his house get around to shingling until well into the summer, if then. She’d freeze down in that cellar. No, she told him, she’d collect that old kerosene heater from Grammy’s house. Right, he said, blow yourself up, then. Be my guest. People who perish doing God’s work go straight to heaven, that the deal?

  Naturally Tom missed the point. She couldn’t explain it to him, didn’t even try. She thought—no, it was more she felt, deep in her bone marrow—that if she took pain and danger on herself, even in a small way, she could force God to take away some of Owen’s. Owen would have scolded her, if he’d known, for entertaining such a sacrilegious notion. But Owen made his home in the New Testament. Her experience and intuition drove her to dwell in the Old.

  Dipping those shingles had been something like dipping sheep, she thought now, that spring ritual they performed on the farm when she was a girl. He shall feed his flocks like a shepherd, she began to hum, and carry the young lambs in his bosom . . .

  It was shepherds that got saved in that avalanche, she remembered.

  Last March, a couple of weeks after Owen had come back from his stay in the hospital, she heard on the radio that there’d been an avalanche in Turkey or somewhere. Tons of snow loosened by a thaw slid down a mountain onto a village, burying hundreds of people, and the ones who survived were those who were at prayer and the shepherds out in the fields. A perfect idea for a sermon, she’d thought, and she’d given Owen a call, but there wasn’t any answer, and he hadn’t turned on that fool answering machine of his, which wasn’t like him. Must have forgot, she supposed.

  Well, when Tom got home from work she took the car to do one or two errands and returned the long way through town, figuring she’d stop at Owen’s and tell him about the sermon idea in person. He still rented that shabby apartment over the Bargain Box back then, waiting for his house to be finished. But he didn’t answer her knock, and she didn’t see his van in the place he always parked it. She had to start supper in a hurry because Monday was Tom’s lodge night and he had to be there early to polish the swords or something, and then after supper that woman from the recycling committee dropped by with the envelopes she’d mousetrapped Grace into addressing and stayed on to unburden herself on hazardous wastes and seepage. So with one thing and another Grace didn’t get around to calling Owen again until after eight. Still no answer. She began to have kind of a shivery feeling, and Tom wasn’t around to reason her out of it, so she decided to give Millard a call even though she risked dragging the old grouch out of bed. But if anyone would know where Owen was, he would.

  Those two had grown so close after Millard’s wife died and Owen’s wife, seized by some women’s liberation fancy, took it into her head to toss him out of the house and sue for divorce. An odd friendship, everybody said so: the dig-in-your-heels chair of the deacons, whose family had lived in town for six generations, and who wouldn’t water his garden because God knew best—and the easy-going doctor of divinity, who’d happened into town one July on vacation from the community college where he taught philosophy, and never left because the parish needed a preacher. The two of them, thick as thieves, making the rounds of public suppers and fish-fry nights from one end of the county to the other, more night life than they’d had in their two lives combined up until then, Grace guessed.

  So she’d dialed Millard’s number. “Haven’t seen him,” Millard said.

  “What about the Monday meatloaf luncheon special at Uncle Nippy’s? You two never miss that.”

  “Told me he couldn’t make it this week.”

  “Why not? Did he give you a reason?”

  “Nope.”

  Damn the man. “Millard, Owen doesn’t answer his phone. Or his door. His van’s not in the lot by the Bargain Box. It’s not like him just to disappear.”

  “Van’s here.”

  “What?”

  “Across the road. Parked in the driveway.”

  “But he can’t be staying there.”

  “Course not. Wood stove ain’t been installed yet.”

  “Well where is he then?”

  Grace could hear the old man’s sinuses reverberating as he mulled all this over. Maybe he’d turned off his hearing aid.

  “Millard,” she shouted, “did he tell you anything about what . . . the doctors said?”

  “Doctors?”

  “After the operation. Do you know anything about Owen the rest of us don’t?”

  “Can’t say.”

  She recognized the intonation. It was the same way he said “Blest be the reading of God’s word” every Sunday morning at the end of the scripture lesson. Trying to drag any more out of him would be futile.

  She was about to hang up when he muttered, “Grace?”

  “Yes?”

  She listened to him breathe some more. Then he said, “He don’t have a gun. Not that I know of.”

  Grace flew into her coat and boots and out to the drive before she remembered that Tom had taken the car. She ran up the Strouts’ porch steps, nearly falling on the ice, and grabbed their car keys off the hook inside the kitchen door. “Explain later,” she shouted.

  She maneuvered the old boat of a car across the bridge, braked at Spindle Road, cut the corner, and floored the accelerator, which raised the Oldsmobile’s speed from seventeen to seventeen mph. “Damn. Damn. Damn.” With each explosion of breath the windshield clouded over more. Just like a Maine man . . . Furiously she rubbed at the fog with the heel of her hand—her gloves were still on the floor of the mud room—creating a smear that furred house lights along the road . . . to think the only way you can kill yourself is with a gun.

  At the top of the hill she found, sure enough, the van squatting in the drive, an inch of snow on it. Snow that had fallen the night before. He must have preached his sermon, shaken the hand of each of his parishioners, and then driven here and . . .

  With a start Grace recalled the text of the sermon. Lo, thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed. One of the prophets. Isaiah. But what had Owen preached on the text? Rummage through her brain though she might, Grace knew she’d never be able to reconstruct it. She must have woolgathered, as she often did during Owen’s meandering conversations with the text and with God, allowed her thoughts to turn toward some such question as whether she should make new slipcovers for the chairs in the sitting room, and if so, what color? Floral? Stripes? Grace cursed herself for failing to pay attention.

  Owen’s house would be locked, but Grace knew the whereabouts of a cellar door key. She’d used it all those days she dipped shingles. Hard going under foot: beneath the layer of new snow that slipped like quilt batting was mud frozen into ruts. She hugged the side of the house as she made her way, tarpaper snagging her coat. The penlight on the Strouts’ keychain flashed a feeble dime of illumination on the snow.

  At last she got to the bulkhead. The toe of her boot nudged the section of clay drainpipe where the key lay hidden. With fingers so numb she could scarcely move them she groped inside and found it. Now to open the bulkhead door. Tough enough to manage in daylight, the key stiff in the new lock, the heavy metal doors sloping at an awkward angle. Knees braced against the bulkhead, she brushed snow off the door with her coat sleeve, directed the penlight at the keyhole, and tried to poke the key into it. No luck. She backed off, pocketed the key, and rubbed her hands together to get some circulation into them. Try again. She leaned forward, key in hand, and as she bent to kneel on the door one foot slipped out from under her and she landed flat on her belly. The key skittered against metal and fell somewhere in the snow.

  “All right, if that’s the way you’re going to be!” she yelled at the sky, or the chink of it she could see, a leg or something of Orion’s. “Let somebody else find him! I quit!”

 
She didn’t, though. She found the key, got the door open, and searched the house, every cranny, with the penlight. He wasn’t there, of course.

  How could she have imagined he’d give up on life so easily? It must have been her own chicken heart made her react that way. She returned the car keys to the Strouts with some lame excuse, never mentioned to Tom she’d gone out, never confessed to Owen that she’d tried to break into his house, expecting to find a corpse. Even after she found out where Owen was—had a few things to talk over with his ex-wife, he said; left the van in the driveway on Spindle Road and went on foot the mile and a half to her house because he didn’t want people to see the van parked there and jump to the wrong conclusions—Grace didn’t say a word.

  Only Millard—sleepless, maybe, gazing across the road, wondering about guns—might have seen the car entering the driveway, seen her bundled stubby figure groping its way toward the house, and guess what she’d done.

  Now Grace laid the paintbrushes out on newspaper to dry, disposed of the turps-soaked rags, and left the house. Wonder what the old goat’s got for sale? she said to herself as she unhitched her bicycle handlebars from the popple trunk.

  Behind her, on the crushed stone, she heard Owen’s footsteps. Unmistakable, his gait, ever since they cut the muscle in his thigh to get at the tumor lodged against his pelvic bone. She turned and let him catch up.

  “Do you really think he’ll do it—move to Aurora?”

  Owen’s face opened into its grin, which only made her realize how slack his jaw had become. “You know Millard when he makes up his mind about something.”

  “But he built that house with his own hands.” The bike wobbled as she steered it over the gully at the foot of the drive. “His kids grew up there. His wife died there.”

  Owen waved at the driver of a pickup that passed in the road and then said, “We all do what we have to do, Grace.”

  She leaned her bike against Millard’s mailbox post and they walked across the grass, dry blades crunching under their feet, past the jungle of raspberry bushes that year by year ate up a little more of Millard’s lawn. The crop hadn’t been good this year; she’d heard that for the first time in living memory Millard had neglected to fertilize them. Must be getting past it, somebody’d said. Beyond the raspberries lay a vegetable garden—pumpkins the size of boulders sprawled on the tough clay—and beyond that his acreage gradually sloped down to the rock-strewn river. Cattails and reeds by the riverbank looked dry enough that the next tide might snap them off. No rain to speak of had fallen since June.

  “Garden sure is parched,” she said. “I have half a mind to sneak out here some night with a hose and water those poor desiccated beans myself.”

  “He’d probably take after you with a baseball bat if he caught you. The way he does with porcupines.”

  “He wouldn’t catch me.” She rolled up the cuffs of her dungarees. “Thick skulls, porkies. Funny how they keep coming back for more.”

  “He claims all he does is stun them a little.”

  They turned and began to walk toward the garage, where five or six customers stood pawing through Millard’s goods and chattels. “You in the market for anything?” Grace asked him.

  “He mentioned he was putting his boys’ old bunk beds in the sale.”

  “What would you do with those?”

  “Set them up in the back bedroom for when Celia and the kids come to visit.”

  Celia, Owen’s daughter, lived in Cincinnati and was married to some kind of engineer. She’d made herself pretty scarce all those months Owen was in Bangor under the knife and being pumped full of poisonous chemicals. Of course, she had a job and those kids, and airline tickets cost money. Still, Grace wondered if Celia would ever stay in his house, bunk beds or no.

  Millard had moved his pickup and tractor-mower out of the garage and set up boards and sawhorses inside. On the planks, in heaps and stacks, was all manner of old rubbish. Dozens of those canning jars, the kind with glass lids that clamp on. His wife, Aldina, had been noted for the quality of her preserves, and she’d apparently assembled quite a stock of jars. Pairs of rubberized boots in various sizes and stages of decay. Primitive-looking power tools. At one time Millard used them to make toys to sell at the church fairs, trains and pull-toys and such. The toys hadn’t gone over very well lately, except to the summer people; kids nowadays went for bright plastic, not wood. Cords on the tools looked dangerously frayed. A pair of bedroom dresser lamps, milk glass painted with roses, their ruffly shades on crooked so it appeared their necks were twisted out of whack. Everything musty-smelling and strung with cobwebs. At the back of the garage, in a lawn chair, presiding over the dispersal of the earthly remains of his whole past life, sat Millard, glowering.

  “Well, Millard,” Grace said, “this is a surprise.”

  “Guess you don’t read the paper.”

  “Not the yard sale ads.” She picked up a dented aluminum six-cup percolator and peered underneath. “You didn’t put prices on, Millard?”

  He grunted. “Make me an offer.”

  Oh no, she wasn’t going to play that game. Offer too much and he’d think you a fool. Offer too little and he’d take it as an insult. She set down the coffee pot and began to examine some Christmas tree ornaments in a flimsy box stamped Made in Occupied Japan. “I’m surprised you decided to move,” she said. Meanwhile, Owen had put on a pair of hunting boots and was stomping around in them. He spotted someone he knew on the lawn and went traipsing out of the garage, rawhide laces trailing behind. “Aurora, is it? The real sticks.”

  “Those’re antique,” Millard told her.

  1946? Well if that’s antique so am I. She had to admit the ornaments did have a certain something about them, though. Maybe the forty-odd years of grime. “How much do you want for them?”

  “How much are they worth to you?”

  Oh well, why not let him think her a fool? “How does seven dollars sound?” she said, figuring that was the absolute tops he could expect for them in his garage.

  “Eight,” Millard said.

  “Seven-fifty.”

  “Done,” he said. He hefted himself out of the lawn chair and moved over to the plank that displayed the Christmas decorations. “What about Rudolph?” he asked, pointing to a plastic reindeer with one missing hoof. Millard’s plump hand squeezed the tail and a bulb at the end of Rudolph’s nose flickered. “Fella from the realty told me confidentially this here’s a collector’s item. Probably worth upwards of a hundred, fella said, but I could let you have him for seventy-five, keep him here in town.”

  “I appreciate that, Millard, but I think just the ornaments will do me.” As she was counting singles out of her wallet to pay for them, Owen came limping back into the garage, the rawhide laces dragging on the concrete. They’d collected some twigs and a shriveled leaf.

  “Those boots suit you?” Millard asked. He was back in his lawn chair.

  “A little snug,” Owen said.

  “That’s because they’re stiff. Nobody’s been wearing them lately.”

  Forty years or so, Grace thought.

  “You walk around in them, they loosen right up.”

  Or he could always lop his toes off.

  The bunk bed parts, boards of varying widths and lengths, leaned against a wall of the garage. If it hadn’t been for the scuffed blue paint on them, you’d probably have thought they were just a bunch of old planks stacked together for no particular reason. Millard noticed Owen eyeing them and said, “You interested in those beds?”

  Right away Grace saw that Owen wasn’t going to play games with Millard; in fact, the idea would never enter his mind. They were friends, buddies. Eating companions. Companions in misery. Those are the kind of people you’re above-board with. “Sure am,” Owen said.

  From the depths of the lawn chair Millard said, “Make me an offer.” It was so di
m in that garage you couldn’t see the expression on his face.

  Grace stopped breathing. She sensed that something awful was about to happen.

  “Fifty dollars,” Owen said heartily. Generously, or so he must have believed.

  Millard scrunched down farther into the lawn chair. “Made those bunk beds,” he said in a voice you could hardly hear. Nevertheless, a summer person inspecting one of the frilly-shaded lamps swiveled her head to catch what he was saying. “For my boys.”

  “I know,” Owen said, his face bright and cheery. “It’s good they’ll be put to use again.”

  “I don’t accept your offer,” Millard said, dropping each word like a wad of biscuit dough.

  “Fifty dollars, and not a penny less.”

  Oh my God, Grace thought. Owen must think Millard’s angry because he offered too much! How could Owen be so numb, even if he is from away? Grace wanted to sprint over and drag Owen out of the garage, but three long planks balanced on sawhorses and loaded with possessions intervened.

  Slowly Millard rose out of the lawn chair, like a backhoe out of a bog. The inner corners of his eyes almost met and his wattles quivered. “I do not. Accept. Your offer,” he said.

  Grace gripped the box stamped Made in Occupied Japan. One or two ornaments crunched sickeningly in the box.

  The following day, for the first time since the weekend his wife died, Millard did not appear in church. As the choir was filing in singing the processional, someone grabbed Perley Pinkham, shoved him into the aisle, and pointed him toward the pulpit. Poor Perley stumbled over so many words in the scripture lesson it was agonizing. The text: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. To every thing there is a season . . .