by John Gardner
Willard stared at his cigarette, then shrugged. “Guess it is,” he said. “I don’t really start till the summer session, but my old man swung this job for me, if I can start right now …”
“You told Callie?” Henry said.
“I mean to tell her tonight.”
“Will you need money?”
Willard blushed. Like father like son, Henry thought. A friend as close as Henry was ought to have a right, surely, to offer money. But he was more sorry for the boy than bitter. Like father like son, he thought again. A terrible shame. He jerked his head in the direction of the door into the lean-to room in back, and after a minute Willard went in.
Henry turned off the grill, though it was early, and gently scraped the grease into the trough, listening. He heard them talking quietly, and he could hardly stand the sadness of it, the doom of hope. It was a good thing to be old and past that, rolling steadily downward to the grave. In his mind he could see her clinging to him, crying maybe, and confused with the picture was another of her reaching, on tiptoe, for a plate on the top shelf, her head back and her breasts high. They might have done each other good, Callie and Willard. Good kids, he thought, half in sorrow, half in thanksgiving. Fine, fine kids. He laid the scraper down quietly on the tray beside the grill—his fingers were still trembling, he noticed—and he pulled on his brown wool sweater. His belly pinched behind the wheel, he drove out onto 98, heading south. In his rear-view mirror he saw the light in the back room go off. He felt a moment’s unrest, like a parent. But he said to himself then, Sensible. Now drunks wouldn’t interrupt their parting. Still, Henry was puzzled and a little frightened, though he could not admit what it was exactly that frightened him. He shifted to high.
By the time he reached Nickel Mountain he was calm. The air was clean here, with cool wisps of fog in the hollows. The brilliance of the night, the shocking perfection of the stars, the trees, the rocks, made dawn seem far away. As he curved above the river, he rode the brake gently, oppressed by an odd notion that he was somehow not on the usual road. Then came an even stranger idea, almost a conviction, the old fantasy with a new face. Somehow, emerging from a draught of winter wind, he found himself not little Fats and not Henry Soames but someone who had been cold and dead for a long time—his father, perhaps, or someone whose life Henry Soames had lived hundreds of years ago. He was making it up, of course, and he knew it; but he let himself believe it nevertheless, or let himself toy with it; and it grew on him. At the top of the mountain he parked the Ford and leaned back in his seat, waiting for the pleasure of the delusion to pass.
When he returned to the Stop-Off, Willard and Callie were gone. Henry undressed for bed and, without realizing he was doing it, snapped off the neon light. Catching himself an instant later, he turned the light on again, shaking his head. From his lean-to window he could see the fog wallowing down through the trees, stretching out thick, fleshless arms like the tentacles of some cavern beast, or like the white arms of a blind man. After a little more than an hour he pounded the dottle from his carved black pipe for the last time and lay down.
11
When Callie Wells came in, the following morning, Henry saw almost at once that she was as cheerful as ever—more cheerful than usual if anything. She talked of Willard as she always had, of what a fine driver he would be, of how clever he was, how kind, how terribly thoughtful. And so Henry saw that Willard had lied. He hadn’t told her and hadn’t intended to.
Henry said nothing.
The following day the cheerfulness was gone, and all the rest of the week was a grim business. The weather maybe. The wind had turned wintry, and for two days it snowed. Still neither of them said a word. On Monday she was in good spirits again, and it wasn’t long before she told him what he could easily have guessed, that she’d gotten a letter from Willard. His job was going fine. He’d be home toward the middle of August. He sent his best to Henry. She worked him out of things to do that week, finishing up every chore he gave her in half the time it should have taken and driving him pretty near to his wits’ end. She would hum to herself from morning to night, sometimes the same song hour after hour, and he thanked God he’d had the jukebox taken out three years ago.
And then, some while later—a month, maybe—another change came: She worked harder than ever, but not singing now, not laughing with truckers, never speaking except when she was spoken to; and finally it dawned on him that Callie was afraid she was pregnant. Her fear turned into near certainty—it was easy to see, though she still said nothing about it to him. She vacillated between stony silence and intense, nervous chatter, and she began to ask pointed questions about the Freunds. As for Henry, the suspicion that Callie was pregnant touched him deeply and gave her in his eyes a kind of holiness. He began to worry constantly that she would overdo or that she would fall. He began to walk, himself, like a man on ice.
June ended; haywagons stopped rolling by, and the farmers, up and down the road turned to cultivating corn. The pines took their richer summer color, and the maples and beeches were so full of leaves that the woods across from the Stop-Off were dark as an apple bin. July came, and farmers began to combine oats. The silence in which he and Callie worked had become a settled matter now, as if something they’d consciously agreed on. And yet, in spite of the silence, it seemed to Henry that he and the girl were closer than they had been before. Perhaps she guessed that he knew and shared her fear—surely she must have guessed—but if she did she did not tell him. He studied her eyes, her hands, her ankles, watching the signs, and at night he couldn’t sleep for worry and the pain in his chest. Because sleep came later and later, he began to oversleep sometimes. When he awakened, in the middle of the morning, he would find the door of his room closed and he would hear the clatter of dishes and the small-boy banter of truckers in the diner. When he went in to help her, Callie would snap, “You need your rest, Henry,” and would turn away, too busy to waste more words. Tears would smart in his eyes. He would insist—these days, it seemed to him, Callie ought hardly to lift a napkin—and she would give in without ever asking the obvious question, Why are you doing this? She’d begun to show a little now, and those who watched their comedy—his solicitude, her indignation—drew the obvious conclusions (but this neither one of them would know until later). At night, just before she left, she would come to his room to dust or straighten his chairs, irritably, then stand near the table in the middle of the room, sharing his dull, trivial thoughts, wondering with him, but wordlessly, whether or not the rain would come or, after it came, whether it would stop in time. Henry, alone with her in his room, learned to hug his arms to his sides as though the slightest movement might drive away a mist that protected them both, covered, on his side, sagging flesh, lumbering absurdities of soul, and covered, on her side—well, nothing, of course. Youth. Unhappiness. Her stony Baptist guilt and, maybe, terror.
One afternoon (it was the end of July; a hot, muggy day) Henry said, “I sure don’t know what I’ll do around here without you, Callie. When you go and get married this place here’s gonna fall down around my ears.”
She smiled, false, then covered her face and cried, and it hit him that Willard Freund was not coming back.
“Now here, here,” he said, going to her, patting her shoulder. “Callie old girl, you been working too hard. You just take this afternoon off.”
“Get away,” she said, pushing at his arm. “Damn you, please. Just this once, leave me alone!”
Henry backed off, scratching the back of his hand. He went back into his room.
12
“All right, then,” he said to himself. “All right, then.”
He’d sent her home early, a little before eight, and had turned out the neon and the diner lights and closed the lean-to door behind him. The only suit he had was the black one his father had left, but it fit as though it had been made for him. (He was getting heavy, by Jesus. He’d never have believed he could fill the old man’s suit.) He found the old brown fedora on
the shelf, and that fit too, nearly. It rested on his ears. When he inspected himself in the mirror he found he looked very good. Big as the world, but good. Serious, anyway; imposing. That was what he was after. He locked the back-room door behind him, because of the dark formality in his chest—he hadn’t locked that door for maybe fifteen years—and went out to his car. The night was as hot and muggy as the day had been; not a breath of air, not so much as a cricket stirring. He took one of the little white pills and started the motor.
Crow Mountain was dark as a tomb. All the way up to George Loomis’s place there wasn’t a car but Henry’s on the road. He pulled up in the driveway and sat a moment to calm himself and go over what he meant to say one last time; then he got out. The house was dark and he felt an instant’s panic: He hadn’t been prepared for the possibility that George might be away. But then he saw he’d made a mistake. There was the usual blue-white flicker in the kitchen. He knocked.
“Well, Jesus please us,” George said, stepping back from the door. “Who in hell died?”
Henry took off his hat. “Do you mind if I come in, George?”
George held his hand up. “Let me think a minute. Yes, I do. I do mind. You’ve taken up selling Bibles on the side.”
“Now, George,” Henry said.
“Well, shit,” George said, “come on in, then. But don’t tell me why you’re dressed up like that. Either you been to church or you been courting, and whichever it is, I think I might get sick.”
“Now, damn it, George,” Henry said.
“Oh, hush up and sit down. It’s good to see you. I’ll see if I still got some whiskey.” He started past the television, paused a moment to watch one of the cowboys shoot the other one, then went on to the cupboard under the sink. “Just a little bourbon left,” he called back.
“That’s fine,” Henry said. He could use it.
George talked about television programs while he fixed the drink and brought it over to the metal table. Henry was missing a great deal, George said, refusing to give in to the electronic revolution. He ran on for maybe five minutes or more, Henry merely nodding helplessly, playing with the hat on the table in front of him, missing half of what George said because of the noise from the machine. At last Henry said feebly (it was hardly going exactly as he’d planned), “Could we turn the television off, George, so we could hear?”
“What the hell? Sit in the dark?”
“Maybe the room lights still work,” Henry said. He laughed.
George considered it, then got up and went over to the switch by the door. The lights went on, and George seemed surprised and pleased. He turned off the television. “Ok,” he said then, “what are you selling.”
“I want you to marry Callie Wells,” Henry said. He had not meant to make it quite so blunt, and he felt himself reddening.
George stared, then looked over at the television as though maybe that had said it. He came over and sat down. “You’re willing to pay me, I suppose?” he said, lifting his glass to drink.
It seemed to Henry a natural question, though he hadn’t expected it would come up so quickly. He said, “I’ll write you a check right now for a thousand dollars.”
George choked, set down his glass, and got up to go to the sink. “You crazy old goat,” he began, but another choking fit hit him. The cords of his neck pumped, and it looked as if he might retch. Henry watched, wide-eyed, the checkbook in his fist. “You crazy old goat,” George Loomis roared, “you think I’d marry some girl I hardly know for a thousand dollars? Or ten thousand? Or a thousand million? Look, I don’t love her. I don’t even like her. She stinks. You know that? The word of God!”
“George, that’s not true. You said yourself—”
“I said myself what?”
“You said you were thinking of marrying her.”
His eyebrows lowered, and suddenly he wasn’t partly joking any more. He looked scared. “Now, wait a minute,” he said. He looked at his hands, saw they were empty, then came over quickly to the drink on the table. He said when he’d swallowed, “Since the day I was born, Henry Soames, I never said—”
“Yes, you did,” Henry said. “That night when you came to my place drunk you said to her—to her, George—”
“Jesus God,” George said.
“You did, George.” He added, inspired, “There were witnesses, too.”
George Loomis bit his lip, staring. Abruptly, he got up and went over to the cupboard below the sink. The bourbon bottle was empty now. He dropped it in the wood-box beside the stove and opened the cabinet to the left of the sink—full of antique china and real cut glass—then closed it again and went over to the cabinet on the right. At last he came back to the table and sat down. He leaned his forehead on his hands.
Henry said, “She’s a fine girl, George. It’s the truth. She’d make you a good wife. Inside a month she’d have this place of yours—” He caught himself too late.
“Christ, don’t I know it,” he said. He shook his head like a man driving out a nightmare. Then he said, “What else happened that night, Henry?”
Henry frowned, puzzled.
“I mean, what did I say exactly? And did I—” He waved vaguely.
“You said you admired her and you were thinking of marriage.”
“I remember that, yeah. But did I—?” He wet his lips, then said quickly, “Well, I noticed that Callie these last few weeks—that is, there are signs—you know what I mean.”
Henry’s heart ticked rapidly, and for an instant the temptation seemed irresistible. But he said, knowing the moment he said it that he was beaten now, “No, not that. That was somebody else.”
George let out his breath as though he’d been holding it half-an-hour.
Henry said, “It’s not true that she stinks, George. It’s a lie and you know it.”
George smiled, watching him, sly.
“I’ll give you fifteen hundred dollars,” Henry said. “That’s as high as I’ll go.”
“I don’t love her, Henry,” George said. “And Callie don’t love me either, near as I can tell. I seen on television how they act when they love you.”
“Well you can learn to love her. She’s a good, hardworking, honest girl, and she’s a sweet girl, too. When she touches you she can be gentler than—I don’t know what.”
George still sat watching him, more sly than ever. “Why don’t you marry her, Henry?”
“Listen, a man that can’t learn to love Callie Wells can’t learn to love anybody. You ready to admit you can’t love any woman at all? You ready to admit you want to die all alone in this godforsaken museum and be found sometime two years later?”
George said, “Why not you, Henry?”
He clenched his fist. “I’m twenty-five years older than she is, that’s why. And fat and ugly to boot.”
“But you love her,” George said, grinning like a cat.
“Love her, hell! I’ll be dead inside a year. Doc Cathey said so.”
“But you love her,” George said, dead serious all at once.
It suddenly came to Henry that that was true. “Maybe so,” he said. He drank. The next instant Henry felt faint, then violently sick, some sudden incredible explosion of, maybe, indigestion, and George jumped up and came around to him.
When he woke up he was in George Loomis’s bed and Doc Cathey was over by the window. When Henry moved his hand Doc Cathey whirled and pointed at him. “Lie still, you damn fool,” he shouted. “You stay like you are or I’ll cave in the side of your head.”
13
He didn’t know and didn’t ask whose idea it was that Callie move in to look after him. She hung a curtain across the corner of his room behind the diner and put a cot there for herself, and she fed him and looked after him as if she were his slave, or maybe his mother. If he moaned in the middle of the night, bothered by dreams, or if he woke up suddenly and stirred in his bed, she’d be there in a minute with one of the six different pill bottles. He did whatever she told him to do,
not because Doc Cathey had told him to on pain of death but because he liked to, at least for now. During the day she’d come in to see him from time to time, to bring him the paper or see how he was or make sure he didn’t try crossing to the toilet by himself. He felt strong as an ox, and secretly he suspected it was all some kind of plot; but he had no objections. At the end of a week Doc Cathey let him up again, and at the end of two weeks he was doing as much as he’d ever done, except at mealtimes. He had to lose weight, Doc Cathey said, and Callie could see through walls. Then one day Callie took down the curtain and folded up the cot, and that night, when the diner was straightened up, she went home.
Henry Soames felt more lonely than he could remember ever having felt in his life. He sat in his room sunk in despair, and then, wanting no intrusions on his grief, he turned out every light in the place, then sat for a full two hours on the side of his bed, dressed in the old black suit, brooding. Though the room was dark he could make out the lines of the chairs, the tables, the books distinctly. Outside the room he could hear the faint creaking of the pines. Misty rain was muttering on the gravel driveway and the lean-to roof. He breathed slowly.
“I’m sorry,” he thought, thinking of his father and mother, the injustice he’d done them, his presumption that he knew anything at all about their life.
A truck was roaring past, building up speed for the hill. Henry listened, feeling his muscles tighten, then grow limp once more. Useless, he thought. He wouldn’t sleep tonight, not unless he knocked himself out, which perhaps he could do by sitting out in the diner with the fluorescent glaring on the page of some dull old book from his father’s shelf. He slid one foot along the side of the bed, hunting for his slippers, but he didn’t get up. There was a sound then, the rattle of a sudden gust, or perhaps a knock. When the knock came again he recognized it, pushed himself up from the bed, and called, “Come on in. I’ll be right with you.”
