Her father told her not to bother with breakfast, but she made coffee for him and put toast and jam on the lamp table next to his chair. And the newspaper, as if this were an ordinary morning. She did what she could to make him comfortable. He was irritated by the delay.
“I’ll be gone a little while,” she said, and he nodded. He asked nothing, which meant he knew everything.
He said, “You’d better go.”
She dressed and brushed her hair. Then she looked into Jack’s room. The bed was neatly made, his books and clothes were still there, and his suitcase. She found the car keys where she had left them, on the windowsill in the kitchen.
She thought Jack might have found his way out of town somehow, hitched a ride with someone passing through, and if she did not find him in Gilead, she would drive to Fremont to look for him, just to see if he might be on the street. If she was delayed, she would telephone Lila and ask her to look in on her father. Two hours there and back, at best. Her father would be as patient as he could, knowing as he clearly did why she had to leave him.
She put the keys in her pocket and walked out to the barn. She opened the door and stepped into the humid half-darkness. And there he was, propped against the car, with the brim of his hat bent down, holding his lapels closed with one hand. He held the other out to her, discreetly, just at the level of his waist, and said, “Spare a dime, lady?” He was smiling, a look of raffish, haggard charm, hard, humiliated charm, that stunned her.
“It’s your brother Jack,” he said. “Your brother Jack without his disguise.”
“Oh dear Lord! Oh dear Lord in heaven!” she said.
He said gently, “No reason to cry about it. Just a little joke. A kind of joke.”
“Oh, what are we going to do?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been wondering about that myself. He can’t see me like this. I know that much.”
“Well, where is your shirt?”
“I believe it’s with my socks. I seem to have stuffed them into the tailpipe. The shirt is hanging out of it, the sleeves. Not much good to me now.”
She said, “I have to sit down.” She could hear herself sobbing, and she couldn’t get her breath. She leaned against the car with her arms folded and resting on the roof and wept, so hard that she could only give herself over to it, though it kept her even from thinking what to do next. Jack hovered unsteadily at a distance from her, full of drunken regret.
“You see, I was right to give you the key,” he said. “I guess I tried to start the car without it.” He gestured toward the open hood. “It looks like I did some damage. But I’m glad I didn’t bother you for the key. I’m not always thoughtful. When I’m drinking.”
She said, “I’m going to put you in the backseat, and then I’m going to get some soap and water and a change of clothes, so we can get you back into the house. You can lie down here and wait for me. Stay here now. I’ll be right back.”
He was docile with embarrassment and weariness and relief. He lay down on the seat and pulled up his knees so she could close the door.
When she went into the house her father called to her, “Is Jack here?”
“Yes, Papa, he’s here.” She could not quite control her voice.
There was a silence. “Then I suppose we’ll see him for supper tonight.”
“Yes, I think we will.” Another silence. The old man was giving them time, a reprieve, restraining curiosity and worry and anger and relief, too, while she tended to whatever the situation required. She took a sheet and a blanket and a washcloth and towel from the linen closet at the top of the stairs, and she took a pail from the broom closet, rinsed it out, and filled it with hot water. She had worried about her father’s hearing all this haste and urgency, but clearly he had mustered the courage of patience—yet again, dear Lord, she thought. She dropped the bar of laundry soap into the water and carried the things she had gathered out to the porch step.
Now what. She dragged an Adirondack chair from the side yard to the back of the barn. It was concealed from the neighbors by the lilac bushes. The sunlight was full there, but it was mild enough. She took the sheet with her into the barn through the side door.
“Jack,” she said, “Jack, I want you to take off your clothes and wrap yourself in this sheet and come outside. We’re going to get you clean. Did you hear what I said?”
He moaned and roused himself and squinted up at her.
She said, “I’ll help you. I’ll get you a change of clothes. You’ll feel so much better.”
He shook his head. “I think I ruined my clothes.”
“I’ll take care of that. But you have to give them to me. Then I can try to clean them up.”
He looked at her. “You’re still crying.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m sorry. Terribly sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She took his arm and helped him up, leaned him against the side of the car. “Give me your coat.” Under his coat he was bare-chested. He crossed his arms and laughed with a bitter sort of embarrassment.
“Maybe I should get a little more sleep.” He started to open the car door.
She pushed it shut again. “I don’t have all day. I have Papa to think about. He’s worried half to death. Hold this.” She gave him a corner of the sheet and bundled the rest around him, just under his arms. “Now, I’ll wait for you outside. I have a chair for you out there where no one will see you.”
“I managed to smell like death, at least,” he said. “This seems a little too—appropriate. What is it called? A winding sheet.”
“Oh!” she said. “What should I do with you? Tell me what to do!”
“I wish you wouldn’t cry,” he said. “Give me a minute here. I know you want to help me, Glory.”
She went outside and waited, and in a little while he emerged, barefoot, wincing, abashed by daylight, startlingly white and thin. He lowered himself into the chair and she brought the bucket and the soapy water and the cloth and began to wash him down, starting with his hair and face and neck and shoulders, wringing out the cloth again and again, scrubbing his arms and his hands, which were soiled with grease and were injured, marred. Her father would notice that.
“Lavender,” he said.
She leaned him forward to wash his back. His head lolled on her shoulder. He said, “I once worked in a—mortuary. Briefly.”
“That’s fine,” she said.
“Yes. I didn’t mind. It was quiet.”
“You don’t have to talk.”
“Then a citizen came in. Wrapped in a sheet. Complete stranger. There was a piece of paper tied to his toe, tied on with a red ribbon. It was an IOU with my name on it. My—signature. People sell those for a—fraction of their value.” He looked at her. “Have you ever heard of that? Someone else has your note. You don’t know who to be afraid of.”
“That’s a shame,” she said, since he seemed to hope she would share his sense of injury.
He laughed. “I never even knew how much I owed. On those notes. I never wrote one when I was sober. Couldn’t have been much. I wasn’t, you know, a good risk.”
“Probably not.” She would have to try to shave him. His beard made his face look pallid, and his pallor made his beard look dingy.
“I think they just liked to see me jump,” he said. “I’m highstrung. Never let people know that about you. They figure it out anyway.”
She said, “You should have come home.”
He laughed. “Maybe.” He said, “I failed as a lowlife. But not for want of—application.”
“I’m sure,” she said.
She settled him back against the chair and toweled him down and bundled the blanket around him. She put one of his feet and then the other into the soapy bucket. “That’s the best I can do for now. Are you comfortable? Does the light bother you?”
“I’m all right. Much better. Maybe a glass of water?”
“Yes. I’ll find some clothes for you. I’ll have to go into
your room. Is that all right?”
He seemed to drift off and then to startle awake. “My jacket—” he said.
“It’s right here.” She brought it out and hung it on the back of the chair. Then she took the slim leather case out of the breast pocket and, being careful first to dry the place very thoroughly, put it down on the arm of the chair.
“Thank you, Glory,” he said, and he covered it with his hand and closed his eyes again.
“I’ll just get some clothes out of your room. If you don’t mind.”
He said, “You might notice a bottle or two in there.” He laughed. “I’ve been getting into the piano bench lately.”
“You stay right here. I’ll be back.”
She had stopped crying, but she had to sit down in the porch. She put her head on her knees. She imagined him in that bleak old barn in the middle of the night, stuffing his poor socks into the DeSoto’s exhaust pipe, and then, to make a good job of it, his shirt. He’d been wearing his favorite shirt, the one with the beautiful mending on its sleeve. All the drunken ineptitude and frustration, his filthy hands, everything he could reach in the engine pried at, pulled loose. She couldn’t leave him alone for more than a few minutes, but her father needed her, too. She might call Lila. Not yet. Her family was slower to forgive a failure of discretion than they were to forgive most things actually prohibited in Scripture. If Jack’s notions of privacy were generally indistinguishable from furtiveness, there was only more reason to be cautious about offending them.
Was this what they had always been afraid of, that he would really leave, that he would truly and finally put himself beyond the reach of help and harm, beyond self-consciousness and all its humiliations, beyond all that loneliness and unspent anger and all that unsalved shame, and their endless, relentless loyalty to him? Dear Lord. She had tried to take care of him, to help him, and from time to time he had let her believe she did. That old habit of hers, of making a kind of happiness for herself out of the thought that she could be his rescuer, when there was seldom much reason to believe that rescue would have any particular attraction for him. That old illusion that she could help her father with the grief Jack caused, the grief Jack was, when it was as far beyond her power to soothe or mitigate as the betrayal of Judas Iscariot. She had been alone with her parents when Jack left, and she had been alone with her father when he returned. There was a symmetry in that that might have seemed like design to her and beguiled her with the implication that their fates were indeed intertwined. Or returning herself to that silent house might simply have returned her to a state of mind more appropriate to her adolescence. A lonely schoolgirl at thirty-eight. Now, there was a painful thought.
She recalled certain moments in which she could see that Jack had withdrawn from her and was looking through or beyond her, making some new appraisal of her trustworthiness, perhaps, or her usefulness, or simply and abruptly losing interest in her, together with whatever else happened just then to be present and immediate. She found no consistency in these moments, nothing she could interpret. He was himself. That is what their father had always said, and by it he had meant that Jack was jostled along in the stream of their vigor and purpose and their good intentions, their habits and certitudes, and was never really a part of any of it. He had eaten their food and slept beneath their roof, wearing the clothes and speaking the dialect of their slightly self-enamored and distinctly clerical family and, for all they knew, intending no parody even when he was old enough to have been capable of it, and to have been suspected of it. A foundling, she thought, even though he had been born in that house at memorable peril to himself and their mother, alarming her two older sisters so severely that for years they had forsworn the married life. Oh, it was the loneliness none of them could ever forget, that wry distance, as if there were injury for him in the fact that all of them were native to their life as he never could be. She was almost disappointed that she couldn’t be angry at him. He had very nearly brought a terrible conclusion to his father’s old age. It would have been an inexpressible, unending grief to the whole family to have the old man’s patience and his hope recoil on him so mercilessly. How resigned to Jack’s inaccessible strangeness she must be to forgive him something so grave, forgive him entirely and almost immediately. They all did that, and he had understood why they did, and he laughed, and it had frightened him. She thought, I will not forgive him for an hour or two.
She took Jack his glass of water. He was dozing in the sunlight, lacquered with sweat. He opened his eyes, only a little, but she saw a glimmer of his familiar, wry despair at himself. “I’d forgotten how much I sweat,” he said. “It’s disgusting.”
She set his feet on the towel and dumped the filmy water out of the pail and went into the house and filled it. She found a sponge. She took them outside and began to bathe him again, his hair, which looked surprisingly thin when it was wet, and his face, his beloved and lamented face. Ah, Jack, she thought. He looked like destitution. He looked like the saddest fantasy she had ever had of the worst that might have become of him, except that he was breathing, and sweating, and a little tense under her touch.
“I can do this,” he said. “You don’t have to.”
So she handed him the sponge and went inside and brought back a razor and shaving cream. “Excuse me,” she said, and lifted his chin. She squirted the foam into her hand and lathered his jaw.
He studied her face. “You’re furious.”
“That’s right.”
“I can’t say I blame you.”
“Don’t talk.”
He looked away. There was grief in his expression, a kind of bewilderment. Could he be surprised? Or was it only the shock of finding himself back in the world, with all his defenses ruined and his one friend lost to him?
She said, “Do that thing with your lip.” So he pulled his lip taut over his teeth and she shaved it. “Now your chin.” And he did the same. She lifted his chin and shaved his throat. Then she wiped away the foam with the sponge and inspected him.
“Good enough,” she said. It was a relief to see him looking more like himself. She smoothed his hair away from his brow. The gentleness of the gesture seemed to come as a relief to him. So she kissed his cheek.
He said, “I’d never have done that if I’d been sober. I don’t even remember—anything about it.” He looked at his hands, as if to confirm to himself that it had happened.
“It’s over now.”
He smiled at her as if to say, No, it isn’t, and it won’t be. “I’m sorry you saw me like that,” he said.
“I’m glad it wasn’t worse.”
He nodded. “Now you know me—some other aspects of my character.”
She said, “Let’s not talk.”
“All right.”
“I still haven’t brought clothes for you. You’ve made me nervous about going into your room. Do I have your permission?”
He laughed. “Yes, you have my permission.”
SO HE WENT INTO THE BARN AND DRESSED HIMSELF AND came out in his father’s dark pants and beautiful old shirt, the sleeves rolled for lack of cuff links. It bothered her that she had forgotten to bring him socks. They walked together up the path to the porch, he behind her, the two of them no doubt looking very unlike two ordinary people who had not passed through fearful and wearying hours together. If anyone saw them, which God forbid. She could hear Jack’s breathing and his footsteps in the grass, neither of which she could take for granted anymore, if she ever had.
They heard voices from the road. He stopped. It was as if he turned to face some last, unimaginable trial. But she said, “It’s nothing to do with us,” and he nodded and followed her again, up the step, into the porch.
“Is that Jack with you?” their father called, and she said, “Yes, Papa,” and Jack smiled at her and shook his head. He was sober enough to know that speech was not a thing he could risk. They went up the stairs, and she drew his blinds and brought a glass of water to set on the night table. She f
ound a ball of socks in the dresser and put it beside the water. He rolled onto his stomach and hugged the pillows to his face. He was relieved to lie down on his own bed, as if he had been too long away from home and had come back again to a kind of rest that meant, That’s all over now, or Now at least I know it will be over sometime.
She washed her face, brushed her hair, and changed her dress and went downstairs to tend to her father. She said, “He’s getting some rest.”
The old man was rigidly wakeful. She knew he had been sitting there, interpreting noises, interpreting her haste and her strained assurances, then Jack’s slow steps on the stairs behind her. He would have interpreted her reddened eyes, too, if he had looked at her. “He’s all right,” he said.
“Yes, he’s all right.”
He closed his eyes. He was as still as if he had expended all the life that remained to him composing himself to accept this cross. His jaw slackened a little, and she thought for a terrible moment that he might have died, but then his hands adjusted themselves on the quilt and she knew it was only sleep.
TIRED AS SHE WAS, SHE COULD NOT POSSIBLY SLEEP. SHE felt lonely, lonely. She found a wire coat hanger in the front closet and straightened it, and went out to the barn. She pulled Jack’s shirt out of the exhaust pipe. He had managed to jam in the tails of it only. The body and the sleeves were lying on the ground, a greasy clay of perpetual dank and animal waste and vehicle seepage, old life and old use whose traces outlasted the memory of them. She caught one sock and then the other with the hanger. So, the proof of what he had intended was removed, and that was a comfort to her, as if she could now stop believing it entirely herself. She put the socks in the fireplace on a pyre of kindling. They made a smoldering fire. Then she filled the sink with water and scrubbed at the shirt, careful of the embroidery. It might be best to let it soak for a while. She went up the stairs as quietly as she could, and into Jack’s room. She found two pints of whiskey in the bottom drawer, as he had said. He stirred and raised his head and looked at her, irritated, but it was troubled sleep, not awakening. She took the bottles out to the orchard and emptied them on the ground, and put the empty bottles in the shed. Then she went back to the silent house. That shirt. It had to be put out of sight. She squeezed the water out of it and put it on a hanger, carried it out to the shed, and hung it from a nail in the wall behind the door.
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