Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  Wrestling with the matter, glad of something to occupy his mind in these last miles of the drive, the young man leaned back in his seat, and fussed with the radio, finally snapping it off altogether.

  He had been driving for hours, and for hours the sound of the buffeting wind had been rough in his ears; abruptly, it was less obnoxious, and the immediate world peaceful, almost shockingly still. The highway narrowed and grew friendlier; businesses crowded up to its edges, dozens of frame houses with signs painted on their roofs: ANTIQUES. He poked an elbow out of the car and grasped the side view mirror, letting the wind make free with his arm. It travelled up his shirt sleeve and rippled the thin fabric there.

  He passed signs advertising fresh fruit and hand-woven baskets. The frame houses and farm-equipment dealerships had given way now to pastureland, great rolling swaths of grass, cut here and there by streams, zigzagged by split-rail fences. To the east, mountains, blue giants, heavy and presiding, the green rushing up to their feet like a tide of wilderness. To the west, more distant peaks, hung about with mist. Now flat farmland stretched out on either side of the highway, draped with power lines strung from tall poles standing at the verges. Stiff, aluminum grey, they were motionless but graceful, resembling great flat-headed birds caught in a moment of astonishment. On a hill against the sky, the black shape of a cow; further on, clusters of them, their white faces looking amused, grazing just beyond the chain-link fences separating them from the shoulder of the road.

  It was not just that the greens here were deeper; it was also that they seemed to have all colors in them, so that if he looked hard enough, he could detect a fleeting rainbow. Yellow to violet to black, they were all in there, diffracted into that green, that silence, nothing but the onrushing wind and the hum of the engine. Making a hall for him, a safe-conduct.

  And for the rest of the journey, there was almost nothing else: just the sound of the car and the wind, and the green, the everycolor, bursting up from the earth, and him passing swiftly between. Little brooks glittered in the uncut brush alongside the road, which now curved more extremely, swinging back and forth along property lines, delivering him smoothly south at the rate of one mile a minute.

  He entered the town at a little past five o’clock. At first it was frightening to be off the highway, bumping along through quiet intersections, stopping for red lights. He drove numbly, running his eye over unfamiliar storefronts and the darkened windows of a modest church. Spotting a bar to his left, its sign unlit but obvious, he turned into the lot behind the building. Outside the car, he stretched, and tucked his striped cotton shirt into his jeans. Walking, he was loose jointed, his body reacting to its abrupt freedom with an excessive limberness.

  It was dark inside the bar, and cool, and musty, as though all of the dampness of the weather had collected and intensified in the one large room. The door swung closed behind him; after his eyes had adjusted, he could pick out the groups of men. Several together at a table near the counter, carrying on a low-pitched conversation. A pair of men at a table further back near the pinball machines; they sat unspeaking, their large hands curled around the necks of beer bottles, so that the glinting brown glass seemed to rise from their fists like stilled columns of blood or tobacco juice. One man by himself, at a table near the window, smoking.

  The young man went up to the counter and ordered a beer, which the bartender provided without comment. Leaning up against the wooden counter, smoothed to slickness by the intermittent pressure of a thousand elbows, the young man tipped the bottle up, swallowed, lowered it. He looked around: at the linoleum floor worn through in patches, at a dismal oil painting mounted on one wall of a ship listing badly in a storm, at a decrepit poster advertising a country-music duo appearing Thursday nights, at the poster next to it, offering half-priced drinks to ladies during Tuesday happy hour. The place was clean, but reeked with the passage of generations, the sweat and grime and worry of a town. Pushed tidily into corners, smeared between the wide cracks in the floor, it was hidden but powerful; and the young man’s nostrils flared, as though he could smell it.

  He looked around the room again, and then seemed to come to a decision, pushing himself away from the bar counter with the fingertips of one hand. He walked past the table of men, who fell silent as he passed them, and made his way to the solitary man by the window. After he’d gone by, the table of men began their soft muttering again, a slow, deep rumbling without inflection.

  He stood by the table for a minute, talking, and then was offered a seat. He sat, and went on talking, his face earnest and pinched, setting his beer bottle on the table, leaning forward. The older man said little, listening, sitting with his legs wide apart, resting his beer in a hand dropped against a thigh. If his face seemed to change while the other spoke, it might have been a trick of the waning light, which filtered in over the red half-curtains stretched across the windows, and changed things.

  After a while, the older man got up, the young man trailing him, and went over to the table of men near the bar.

  “This here’s Buddy Whyte,” said the older man to the group, who lifted their heads to look up at him. “He’s come home.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Stranger

  HE WENT TO Jack first, I’m not sure why. I suppose there were a dozen reasons for approaching Jack; I didn’t know any of them then. Jack introduced him as Buddy, and we all called him that. Some of us didn’t even understand that the boy’s real name wasn’t Buddy or anything like it, nor that he’d never been called that before he came to Naples, but I suspected it. I figured that Jack had given him that name; knowing Jack, it’s what he’d do; and from looking at the boy, you could see that he’d take it, that casual nicknaming, without a murmur. He probably even felt it was a sign of acceptance, a friendly nickname, although it was hardly that. Jack-style, it was the antithesis of friendliness, a tip-off that this boy was not our buddy, and would never be.

  Jack called for two beers; Wallace, the owner, delivered them; and we all kept silent, drinking.

  “This is Buddy,” said Jack again. “Treat him right, you all, he’s making a movie about Naples. Tell them what you told me,” said Jack, around the mouth of his beer bottle.

  Buddy cleared his throat and began, in a high, nervous voice that went with the baby-fine hair and clean, though wrinkled, clothes. His voice was flat and lifeless, Northern; but not unpleasant.

  He’d grown up in Connecticut, said Buddy, but his mother had been born in Naples. He was here on his spring vacation to do a project for school.

  “What school’s that?” asked Sam Lucas, finally.

  “In New York,” began Buddy, timidly.

  “We-ell,” drawled Sam, interrupting. “Stands to reason they got a school up there.”

  “Now they got everything up there, don’t they?” put in Ned, Sam’s brother, who acted sometimes as his sparring partner, sometimes as a kind of Greek chorus.

  “I’m taking a film class,” Buddy broke in, explaining. “I want to make movies.”

  At his first syllable, the men, who had been talking to one another, turned back to him and left off speaking. Buddy stood self-consciously finishing out his statement, his voice too loud now in the sudden silence. It was a palpable thing, that silence. Not a weapon, exactly; a tool. A kind of trap to make the pale embarrassed boy more aware of his own intrusiveness and to hold him there before us while we looked him over.

  “And he’s starting right here,” said Jack, covering up the general quiet with his mocking ringmaster voice. “Line up, boys; he’ll make you famous.”

  Jack’s statement had an immediate effect; the men relaxed, even went to rustling and moving around a little, where before they’d been keeping still, so as to maximize the silence. I looked on, amazed at the force of Jack’s charisma. It had been a long while since Jack had been friendly with the men I was sitting with now; he’d heard what they’d said about him around that time, and he had withdrawn a little then and still kept himself
apart. For twenty years, my brother and I had taken our liquor at opposite sides of the same room; now, in a simple five minutes, Jack had destroyed the veil between our two groups. Now, frustrated, I could see that it had been flimsy all along, and that he’d always had the power to destroy it. People just liked Jack; they couldn’t help themselves.

  He had given the signal, the way he used to do when he was the hub of this group of men; he’d sent the message to them: relax, and they had obeyed. Buddy, with some kind of animal sense, perceived the lessening of tension and began to speak again.

  “My mother talked a lot about her hometown,” said Buddy. “I wanted to see it for myself.” No one said anything; inwardly I rejoiced. Jack might be able to call off the dogs, but he couldn’t make them friendly. His power was not absolute, after all; the men had some will of their own. The boy was uncomfortable again, still speaking.

  “… she left here a long time ago.” He forced the words out against the silence and then stopped.

  “What’s your mama’s name?” asked Steve Grissom, blandly, but meaning to be kind.

  “Beth Whyte,” said Buddy, gratefully, turning to Steve. “I mean, Crawford,” he corrected himself. “Her name was Crawford when she lived here.”

  That changed things. We’d had only a passing interest in the unnamed stranger who might have lived in Naples at one time in her life; with the name, he invoked her presence, and we all sat up a little and looked at the boy with greater attention. Buddy looked back at us; he seemed to be waiting for something, and no one about to provide it.

  “You mean Miller,” I said, finally. “Miller was her maiden name.”

  “That’s right,” said Buddy, looking at me.

  “My brother,” said Jack, introducing us. “Gil Corbin.”

  “You knew her, then,” said Buddy, smiling. I stood up, and he moved closer, to shake my hand.

  “From the time she was a—” I said, grasping his hand and stopped. Buddy looked confused, but everyone else simply waited, without seeming to, as though time had stopped. “Girl,” I said, releasing his grip. Buddy nodded, looking expectant, but I said nothing more.

  “This is Ned Lucas, Sam Lucas, Steve Grissom, Andy Swann,” said Jack. Buddy shook hands all round. “Our cheerful host there, that’s Wally Stokes.”

  Wallace, behind the counter again, nodded to Buddy.

  “Beth Miller,” mused Sam. “She was something around here for a while. Tobacco queen back in forty-eight.”

  “Forty-seven,” said Ned.

  “I heard she went to New York,” said Andy.

  “That’s where I was born,” Buddy told him.

  “I guess she left here in sixty-four, sixty-five maybe,” said Sam.

  “Sixty-three,” said Ned. “There was all that trouble downtown, right afterward.”

  “Nope, it was sixty-six,” said Sam, as though Ned hadn’t spoken. “She had a sixty-six Ford Mustang,” he told Buddy. “Candyapple, a beauty. I remember that car. Our daddy tried to buy it off her once, but she wouldn’t sell.”

  “He never did,” said Ned, but it was heatless, compelled by a lifetime habit of arguing.

  “If I recall,” responded Sam, as mildly, “you weren’t seeing too much more than that Baker girl, around then.”

  “Pah,” said Ned, a sound somewhere between agreement and dismissal.

  “What trouble downtown?” asked Buddy, who had been following the conversation between the two with his head, like a table tennis spectator.

  “Well, now, people always fussing about something or other,” said Wallace, who was wiping a glass behind the bar, listening.

  “It’s the blacks,” said Ned.

  “Not just the blacks,” said Sam. “Whites, too. But they was all poor, and angrier than hell.”

  “Riots,” said Buddy, comprehendingly. “You had riots down here?”

  “Riots makes it sound like more than it was,” said Steve. There was a little pause while he considered his beer. “Some folks get to thinking they deserve more than they got.” He looked at Jack. “It only takes some little thing to remind them.”

  Sam took up the story.

  “Some fellow got hisself killed somewhere, and some of them here rose up and went crazy for a while. Stopped traffic on Main Street, heaved a few bricks through a few windows, then it was all over.”

  “Lots of trouble right around then,” said Steve.

  “Strange times,” agreed Sam and seemed about to elaborate, but I interrupted, turning to Buddy.

  “How is—” I said. The group went silent, waiting. “Beth?” I finished. “New York treating her all right?”

  “Connecticut,” said Buddy, flushing. My stutter embarrassed him more than it did me. “She, um, died about two years ago.”

  There was another silence.

  “I’m real sorry to hear that, son,” said Sam.

  “Sad thing,” agreed Andy.

  “She was a looker,” said Ned, shaking his head.

  I looked over at Jack, to see how he was taking it. I myself hadn’t heard from Beth in many years, and this was the first I’d been told of her death. Jack showed nothing; obviously, he had already had the news from the boy when they were alone at the table by the window. He’d had time to cover over any initial shock.

  “She died young,” I said, to Buddy, who lowered his eyes. “She—” and I paused, while the other men fell silent, “was only a little older than me.”

  “She’d be fifty-six this spring,” mumbled the boy, sounding a little choked, his eyes still on the floor.

  “Sorry to hear it, son,” I said, turning away, making my way to the bar. The conversation continued at my back.

  “I can see her now, clear as day,” said Sam. “A real knockout.”

  There were murmurs of agreement.

  “Kind of a hellcat,” said Andy, with a smile on his face, then darted a look at Jack, then at Buddy. “Sorry,” he said.

  “She talk some about this place?” Wallace asked Buddy.

  “About her childhood here,” said Buddy. “School dances. A place she used to go to, to swim—a lake.”

  “The quarry,” said Ned, with satisfaction.

  “What else she tell you?” asked Jack. I turned around and leaned up against the bar.

  Buddy gestured vaguely. “A lot about the town,” he said. “I even thought I might know my way around, just from the way she described it. But I guess it’s changed since she left.”

  “Yes sir,” said Jack.

  “She didn’t talk too much about people,” said Buddy, almost apologetically. “Names, sometimes. Someone she called G.I.”

  Smiles broke out now, spreading across leathery, deadpan faces, twitching at colorless lips.

  “No one,” I said, and hesitated, “calls me that anymore.” I smiled.

  “Not to his face, anyhow,” said Jack.

  Jack, anyway, never said anything much to my face. The two of us hadn’t spoken directly to one another for many years. If one had anything to tell the other, he enclosed it in a comment of a general nature and addressed a room. It was a quiet sort of feud, and no one had remarked upon it, not in all of this time. It was just something they respected, like the way Sam and Ned bickered all the time; it was something to do with brothers, and they let us alone.

  “She marry again up there?” asked Wallace, who was gathering up empties.

  “My father. Bill Whyte,” said Buddy.

  “Youda thought she’d had enough of those,” commented Andy, and there was an indulgent round of smiles.

  “Your mother’s first husband,” I told Buddy, who was looking bewildered, “was also named Bill.”

  “And he never paid none,” said Andy, happy with his pun.

  “He left town a step ahead of the law,” said Ned, dramatically. “Went to Texas.”

  “On his way to California,” said Sam. “But old Billy Crawford only had him just about enough get-go to take him to Dallas. I guess he’s still there.”

/>   “I thought he was in Houston,” said Ned.

  “Naw,” said Sam.

  Buddy, looking impatient, cut in.

  “What I want to do—” he began.

  “You want to start with Tess DeWitt,” Jack interrupted; and the others nodded their heads. “She’s lived here all her life, and a long one, too. There ain’t much she don’t know about Naples. She’s a little deaf, but sharp as ever. What she don’t find out for herself, Gus tells her.”

  “Gus,” snorted Andy. “He ain’t no servant, now,” he said, in a high voice, mock stern.

  “No sir,” said Jack, gracing Andy’s remark with a smile.

  Buddy looked puzzled; no one offered to explain.

  “What I want—” he began again.

  “What you want is a good meal, and a night’s sleep, and see Miss Tess in the morning.”

  “But—” said Buddy.

  “Tess is where you want to start,” said Jack, firmly. “And you want to start tomorrow. You just got out of a car, boy, and a long drive behind you. It can wait until tomorrow.”

  “Well,” said Buddy, giving in. “Thanks. Where can I find—what’s her name again?” he asked, taking a small spiral notebook out of his front shirt pocket.

  “Where she’s always lived,” said Sam, looking curiously at the notebook. “In her father’s house, over on the hill.”

  “Her grandfather’s,” corrected Ned. “Her family ran to girls.”

  “It’s in the old village,” said Jack. Buddy looked blank. “I can take you there tomorrow.” Buddy nodded. “You look half dead, boy,” said Jack. “You got a place to stay?”

  “I was looking for a motel,” said Buddy. “It doesn’t have to be too fancy,” he added. “Just a place to sleep.”

  “Plenty of room at my place,” said Jack.