Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  The second time was when he found inside a Prayer Book in his father’s scruffy suitcase—open on the floor of his small hotel room, and filled mostly with sheet music, mismatched socks, and soiled shirts—a picture taken by one of those itinerant photographers who’d once combed neighborhoods with their Shetland ponies looking for children to pose. In it, Gates and Raleigh both sat on the back of the sturdy dappled pony. At the pommel sat Gates, no more than two, his dark curls like a cluster of grapes, his bare toes pointed with delight. Holding him from behind, frowned a thin, stiff-backed boy of eleven, his eyes a glitter of glass.

  The third time was when Toutant Kingstree, arriving at the funeral home with a potted Easter lily wrapped in pink tinfoil, solemnly shook Raleigh’s hand and said, “Earley was good on the trumpet. I enjoyed playing with him.” He added, “Man, turns out I was right, didn’t it? You being in the music business after all. I appreciate that ride to New Orleans.”

  Kingstree was returning to Charleston only long enough to dispose of his private personal property and livestock; then he was coming straight back to the French Quarter. He was convinced, and had convinced Jubal Rogers, that they could find work there as musicians. “Maybe I’m too old for the big time, but I was too good for the small town. Now, I’m home.”

  While our hero rushed through New Orleans from place to place, his aunt Victoria took care not to rob him, by offering assistance, of any of his time-consuming tasks. She had her own busy work to do to deal with sorrow. And not just new sorrow, but old. And old anger as well. For in the hospital waiting room, Raleigh had handed her a letter that he said was from Earley. It was, in fact, to Earley; sent to him ages ago from New Orleans, and enclosing an unopened message for “Victoria.” A message from Jubal Rogers, asking her—no, telling her—to come to New Orleans and join her life to his. A message from the dead to the dead, written whole lost lives ago, and saved by a man who’d died today, foolishly trying to tear half a century from the past’s calendar as if the years had never happened. It was just like Earley to have saved the letter, not to have opened it. To have thought, at twenty, that it was his God-demanded responsibility to run her life for her own good. And to have preserved the evidence of his maddening usurpation of her choice, and, at seventy, to have confessed it. Just like his repenting the decision into which he’d browbeaten her—to put the baby up for adoption—and then, without telling her, bringing Joshua home to Thermopylae. Just like his losing the affection of a wife whom he loved when she’d objected to his decision that the “right” thing for him to do was marry a woman whom, in a casual affair, he’d impregnated. The man was, had been, a fool. And everything he’d done, he’d done for love. So thinking, in that too-bright emergency room lobby, Victoria Hayes had placed the letter in her purse, taken out her notebook, and begun to list the busy necessary details that would keep out of her mind the love, and fury, she felt toward her dead brother.

  She comforted Billie, telling her it was as much nonsense to blame herself for Earley’s leaving the hospital and racing around the country, as to blame herself for his bad habits, bad diet, and lack of sense.

  She broke the news to her siblings in North Carolina. She packed. She opened a savings account for Billie in New Orleans with the money Jubal had returned to Earley. She took a sizable order from the New Orleans–based coordinator of a Central American missions council. She persuaded Billie to sell the smoke-sputtering yellow Cadillac convertible and then herself bargained with half-a-dozen car dealers until she finally drove one to such exasperation that he paid her almost what she asked. She persuaded Raleigh that it wasn’t necessary to hire a driver to bring his Cadillac back to Thermopylae, since Billie had offered to drive it up a few weeks from now, when she came to visit. She talked to Allen Thornhill about college costs. She advised Billie to start familiarizing herself right away with university buildings and the locations of apartment possibilities near grocers and dry cleaners, so that when she returned to New Orleans she’d already know her territory.

  She listened to a man to whom Toutant Kingstree introduced her—a man in a blue blazer who said he owned two nightclubs and a radio station—tell her that Billie had a great future in music. She told the man, “Billie’s future is Billie’s business.” She said the same thing to Jubal Rogers the only time she saw him in those twenty-four hours, which was when he appeared Friday morning in the lobby of the St. Ann’s Hotel. Victoria said the same thing to Billie herself when the girl asked her how she’d feel if—instead of returning to Thermopylae as they’d arranged—she stayed in New Orleans for a while with her grandfather.

  On the airplane, when Raleigh walked back down the aisle to ask his aunt if there was anything he could do for her, she’d been thinking of having said just that to Billie: “If there is ever anything you want me to do for you, that I can do, you ask me. But don’t ever ask me, or anybody else, permission. Your future is your own business, Billie, where you go, what you do, whom you love. If you never want to set foot in Thermopylae, don’t you hesitate to say so. If you don’t want Mr. Thornhill’s help, tell him no. If you want to move to Timbuktu, get up and go. That’s my advice, take it or leave it. But I hope you will come visit me, whenever you want to. You’re a gift to me I never earned.”

  “You don’t have any right to her,” Jubal Rogers had said, standing by the doors of the small, spare lobby; his first words. “She came to Thermopylae looking for me. Not you, not Earley. Her name is Rogers, it isn’t Hayes. You’ve got nothing to do with her.”

  “I know that. I don’t claim any right. I didn’t claim any right to Joshua. I know that.” She’d looked at the man, fully, for the first time in almost fifty years; angry at her cheeks for reddening, at her heart for knocking so fast at her breast. He had changed less than she, but he was still a stranger, and there was nothing familiar in his eyes but their strange gold. Then all at once, someone she’d once known appeared in the eyes, someone no less angry, and she felt she needed to say something to that person, although he might not even remember what she was talking about. She waited until she knew her breath would carry her through, then said, “I never answered your letter because I never got it. Earley thought he was keeping me from making a mistake.”

  Rogers’s chin went up, and stayed cocked, while he searched for a cigarette. Finally he said, “Yeah. Well, you did what you did. I didn’t expect anything different.”

  Her cheeks flamed. “You could have sent the letter straight to me. Not through him. You could have written more than one.”

  “I could have done a lot of things.” His smoke curled toward her. “But would you have done different?”

  Her arms tightened around the blue suit jacket. “Yes. I think I would have. I’ll go see if Billie’s ready.”

  Up in the front of the plane, Mingo was still ordering drinks of all varieties, in order to save the little bottles for souvenirs, when Raleigh returned from checking again on his aunt. He sat back down and tried urgently to think of something else to do. He couldn’t afford to stare out the window at the night. He couldn’t afford to close his eyes. He looked at his account book, the superfluous expenses of this trip, never totaled; the scribbled musical staff crossed out when Earley decided it would be easier for Raleigh if he wrote the letters of the notes instead. Feeling through his pockets, Raleigh found the pieces of paper that were either his legacy or another one of his father’s moronic jokes. The torn page of the Bible, with its brown marginalia inscribed by a man clearly proud of his name and title: “Gen. G. H. Hayes. General Goodrich H. Hayes.…He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha.” No wonder the words had caught Earley’s eye. And then, the paper taken from Jimson’s bust, with all its odd columns of numbers. Well, here was something to do. Raleigh pulled out his tray, took a pencil, and set to work. He tried adding, subtracting, he tried inches, miles, alphabet substitutions. None of it made sense.

  Finally Mingo returned from his long visit to the bathroom. He’d asked Raleigh to accompany him on the t
rip. “I heard about a lady that opened the wrong door and fell right out of the plane, and nobody even knew she was gone till they landed.”

  “That’s impossible, Mingo. Things like that just don’t happen.” Of course, maybe, on the other hand, things like that did. “Well, wait till somebody else comes out before you go in.”

  Now Mingo bounced back into his seat with a souvenir bar of soup. “Boy, that toilet was a tight squeeze. You know, it looks like it just flies out a hole in the bottom, right out into the sky!…What’s that, Raleigh?”

  “I don’t know what it is. It’s a list of numbers. I’m trying to figure it out.…Here, what do you think it is?”

  Sheffield stared at the yellowed fraying paper.

  3.15 (6) 1.7 (22-24) 1.5 (31-34)

  1.7 (17) 1.10 (11-12) 38.6 (11-12) 9.9 (12) 1.7 (18-19) 1.10 (5-6) 9.17 (9) 1.2 (7,9-10)

  41.32 (4) 1.7 (18-19) 41.24 (18)

  9.9 (12) 42.16 (5-8) 40.17 (7)

  38.24 (1-7) 2.11 (4) 3.6 (25-30) 40.21 40.22

  40.14 (9-12) 20.25 (11-13) 38.31 (14)

  “It’s a real old piece of paper,” Mingo decided.

  “Yes, thank you. But what do you think the numbers mean? When you look at these numbers, do they say anything to you?” “Oh.” Sheffield’s wide face tightened with thought. “Well, gosh,

  Raleigh, I guess they just look like the Bible to me.”

  “The Bible?”

  “You know, chapter three, verse fifteen. But I don’t know about

  that extra six. What is this anyhow, is it trigonometry or something?

  I wasn’t very good at that.”

  Hayes stared at his friend, then grabbed up the torn opening

  page of the Book of Job. All it had on it was Chapter One and part

  of Chapter Two. And the Bible itself was packed away in his suitcase. “Mingo, you don’t by any chance have a Bible in your carry-on

  bag?”

  “Gosh, no.”

  “Well, could you go get the stewardess to find me one? I need a

  Bible.”

  Sheffield patted his arm. “I know. I think that’s wonderful,

  Raleigh. It’ll do you a lot of good. When the dark times come over

  me, I just open the Savior’s book and let Him—”

  “Mingo, please, just go find me a goddamn Bible, will you?” The numbers in parentheses couldn’t be whole lines; they were

  too high. They had to be, yes, individual words in the text. So, he

  should try Chapter 1, Verse 7, the twenty-second through twentyfourth words. That meant that 1.7 (22-24) was, let’s see…“And the

  Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered

  the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth.” So, “in the

  earth.” Blank…in the earth. And, so, 1.10 (11-12) was “Hast not

  Thou made an hedge about him, and about his house…?” His house.

  Soon Raleigh had deciphered:

  blank in the earth according to the number from his house blank blank going to an hedge It was possible, it was just possible…

  “I got it,” said Mingo happily. “A real nice lady back in coach

  had one in her purse. I hope you don’t mind. I told her your daddy died, and a little bit about him, and she wants you to try Psalm Ninety-eight.”

  “Give it here.” Hayes grabbed the Book. He was so preoccupied he didn’t notice until Mingo cut off the circulation in his left arm by grabbing it that they were descending to Atlanta.

  “You mean we have to go down and come back up?! Oh God, Raleigh, don’t forget my insurance for Vera.”

  “Mingo, if the plane crashes, I’m not any more likely to be in a

  position to remember your insurance than you are.”

  “Oh, why’d you say that? You think it’s going to crash?” “Calm down. We’ve already landed.”

  “Then why aren’t we stopping?”

  But after the second successful takeoff, Sheffield decided that

  maybe airplanes weren’t so bad, and maybe he’d been too much of a

  chicken in avoiding them. Because the stewardesses were really nice,

  and it was wonderful the way they’d bring you magazines and little

  snacks whenever you asked them. “That’s one thing I’ve learned on

  the road with you, Raleigh.” Sheffield raised his swizzle stick in a

  pontificating way: “If you have to, you can do a lot of things.” “Well, yes, that’s good, Mingo, but just let me concentrate here,

  all right? Thank you.”

  The No Smoking sign never went off, so Mingo could only suck

  on the cigarette he held clamped in his teeth. He did so as Raleigh

  extracted the message from Job. In so doing, he parenthetically read

  the miserable Job’s story, struck by echoes of his own indignation, his

  own refusals to deny his righteousness, his own realization that his

  righteousness was, like this tiny aluminum container now shooting

  through the measureless night, neither here nor there.

  Decoded, the instructions, if such they were, left much to be

  desired, as treasure maps go. The message appeared to say, “Gold in

  the earth according to the numbers/ From his house corner stone

  south going to an hedge multiplieth seven-and-three/ Path going to

  millstone/ South an hundred and forty cedar/ By what way is the light parted? Three into the number of the months./ He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens. The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him

  about/ Thy own right hand the glittering sword. Orion.” Raleigh ordered himself a scotch. Hadn’t he always been good at

  logic problems, at cartography, at thinking things through? All right.

  What did he have? There was gold in the earth according to the [following] numbers [measurements]. From [Goodrich Hayes’s] house[’s]

  cornerstone, [proceed] south going to an hedge. Multiplieth seven

  and three? [Twenty-one feet, yards?] Path going to millstone.…He

  tried to imagine walking in the tangled underbrush at Knoll Pond.

  The stone foundations of the old house were still there, moss covered, a home for spiders, slugs, and ants. If he started there, and

  walked south, yes, he’d be headed toward the pond. Say he found the

  path to the millstone. Then south again, “an hundred and forty”—it

  must be feet—to a cedar. Well, why shouldn’t the cedar still be there?

  “By what way is the light parted?”

  “What did you say, Raleigh?”

  “By what way is the light parted?”

  “You mean, where does the sun go down? Is this like a crossword

  puzzle?”

  “God bless you, Mingo.”

  All right. West. Three into the number of months was four. Four

  feet. Then all this stuff about shady trees and willows and fens and

  reeds. Ah, okay, he was down by the cabin [Jess’s hearth?] near the

  pond now. He could remember the two willows, and the cat’s-paws

  in the muddy water. Thine own right hand the glittering sword?

  Orion? Obviously, the constellation, the Hunter, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it

  near the Big Dipper? But what did it mean? Had there really been

  gold bullion lying buried there, all those years, all those days of lazy

  peaceful fishing and dreaming stories in the clouds?

  “Aunt Vicky,” said Raleigh, crawling into the empty seat beside

  her place at the window. Across the aisle, a man stared glazed at his

  briefcase. “I thought maybe you’d be asleep. I don’t see how you’ve

  borne up under all this.”

  The old traveler was mending rips and unraveled edges in a

  lapful of white handkerchiefs.
“I am a little tired,” she said—an

  astonishing admission from her.

  “Well, you’ll be home soon, and you can get some rest.…What

  are you going to tell the family? I mean, about Billie?”

  She looked at her nephew. “The truth. What else would I tell

  them? If they bother to ask me. And if they don’t, I won’t tell them

  anything.”

  “Can I tell you something, Aunt Vicky? It’s just that I think that

  was very brave of you, getting Toutant to call Jubal about Billie. It

  can’t have been easy to see him, now.”

  “He never was an easy man.” Her needle moved briskly in and

  out of the white linen. “Why should he be? How could he? Compared