by John Gardner
The story was puzzling, and Henry leaned on his fists, frowning. He was still thinking about it when he dozed off. When he woke up again—he couldn’t tell how much later—Simon Bale was standing over by the stove, blinking. He had on only his suitcoat and trousers, no shirt or undershirt, no shoes.
“Trouble sleeping?” Henry said.
Simon waved as if to say it was unimportant.
Henry squinted at him, wide awake now, and it was as if, seeing him here in his own kitchen where every pot and pan had its precise meaning, he was seeing Simon clear for the first time. It was like something that came to you early in the morning when you’d first gotten up: Compared to Callie’s light blue apron, not a brute object but the sum of its associations, Simon Bale was old and sallow-faced and strangely bitter, maybe devious. Against the yellow of the walls he was tortuously old-fashioned, grim, as rigid as an angle iron. It made Henry’s skin creep.
Simon stood with his big-knuckled hands at his sides, his belly out, chest caved in, head forward, looking at the coffeepot on the stove. He lifted the lid, saw that the pot was empty, and replaced the lid as if that too were of no importance. He came over and stood with his hands in his side pockets, looking disapprovingly at Henry’s ledger. After a moment he drew out a chair, smiled apologetically, then looked grim again, and sat down.
“The house gets cold, these foggy nights,” Henry said.
Simon nodded and smiled.
For a long time after that neither of them spoke. Henry thought of mentioning the funeral, then thought better of it. Not mentioning it was pure cowardice, he knew: To tell Simon would be, in effect, to tell Callie. But Simon was completely uninterested in her burial, or so he said; as likely as not, he wouldn’t even bother to go when Henry did tell him.
The muscles of Simon’s face were working, and he had his eyes fixed on Henry’s forehead. After a moment, with a darting motion, he drew a stack of small, white leaflets from his inside coatpocket. He leered and slid them across the table toward Henry, watch and wait! the top one said. The next said, who shall be saved? Under the title there were words in italics: But why dost thou judge thy brother? or why dost thou set at nought thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. (Rom. 14:10) It was not what Henry would have expected; he would have expected, well, something about God’s wrath, say, or the seven angels of doom. “Is this what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe?” Henry said.
However mild the text, there was a spark of anger in Simon’s eyes. “Not what we believe,” he said, “the truth!”
“Yes, of course,” Henry said, looking down.
“Do you dare to deny the Judgment of the Lord?” Simon said. He was leaning forward now, his lower lip trembling. His fury seemed to Henry inexplicable, unwarranted by anything Henry had said.
“I don’t deny anything,” Henry said.
“But there is evil,” Simon said. “Woe to that man—”
“Perhaps so,” Henry said sharply, cutting him off.
Simon looked at him for a long time, then at last bowed his head. “You have been kind to me, within the bounds of your understanding.” After another moment: “I am deeply grateful. May the Lord keep you, Mr.—” He seemed to cast about for Henry’s name.
Henry winced, watching him closely, at once repelled and fascinated, like a man watching a rattlesnake behind glass.
“I accept your hospitality,” Simon said, suddenly smiling grotesquely, tears in his eyes. “God’s will be done.”
7
The troopers came in the next afternoon and casually asked to speak with Simon. Behind the counter, Henry Soames stood thinking a moment, the lenses of his glasses blanking out his eyes. “I’ll see if I can locate him,” he said. He rubbed the side of his nose, still thinking, and then, reluctantly, he left the diner to look.
He was a little on edge to start with, as he frequently was when Callie’s mother decided to come down and help out. She’d been here most of the day again, busying herself when there was nothing to do, mopping the floor when it was perfectly all right, bending the old gray spoons back into shape, criticizing the electric potato peeler for eating up three-fourths of every potato. He wished she’d get down to what she’d come here to say, but she didn’t, and gradually Henry was beginning to believe she had no intention of getting down to it. Maybe she figured she would drive out Simon Bale by just hanging around. Well, she figured wrong. When Henry asked her, “You seen Simon, Ellie?” she had looked surprised, as if she hadn’t heard what the troopers had said, five feet from where she’d been careful to be standing, and she’d said, “Why, no, Henry, I been too busy. Does somebody want him?” Henry had nodded and hurried on by her.
Simon wasn’t in the garden, this time, and when Henry called into the house he found he wasn’t there either. “Why do you want him?” Callie called back, but Henry ignored her too. He started for the garage.
He didn’t know what to think by now. Not just about the money, about the whole damn business, from the minute he’d first seen Simon Bale slumped down on the ground by his snow fence, and the people around him not moving a muscle. There was something he’d read, about a week ago: Some old man had been stabbed in New York City, it said in the paper, and there were fifteen people standing around and even when he asked them to, they never even called the police. It was hard to believe they’d all just stand there, fifteen of them, and not even one of them lift one finger, and he’d thought and thought about it. It didn’t seem natural, and he’d tried to see it from their side, because if there was any way on earth to explain it, the secret had to be in those people’s feelings. He could understand their not helping: afraid of the fellow with the knife. But to merely stand there like a herd of cows—it was past all comprehending. A man could turn into an animal, then. It was something about living in the city, that was all he could figure. And he could understand that, it came to him. He’d felt it himself one time in Utica. He’d never have believed there were that many people in all this world, especially that many poor people, burnt-out-looking; and walking in that crowd, looking at faces that stared right through him (no two faces in all that city exactly alike, each one marked by its own single lifetime of weathers, suppers, accidents, opinions), he’d felt a sudden disgust—or not even that, a calm disinterest, as though he were seeing it all with the eves of a thinking stone to whom all human life was nothing, to whom even his own life was nothing. If there were millions and millions of people in the world, they were nothing compared with the billions and billions already dead. But then he’d seen a man he knew, and he could hardly recapture, when he’d thought back to it later, that vision of people as meaningless motion, a stream of humanity down through time, no more significant than the rocks in a mountain slide. It was different in the country, where a man’s life or a family’s past was not so quickly swallowed up, where the ordinariness of thinking creatures was obvious only when you thought a minute, not an inescapable conclusion that crushed the soul the way pavement shattered men’s arches. And so they had stopped being human. It was outrageous that it could happen, but maybe it did, and, worse, maybe it was the people in New York City that were right. What was pleasant to believe was not necessarily true. Elves, for instance, or Santa Claus, or what he’d never have doubted once, the idea that Henry Soames would live practically forever. He thought: Or angels. He could remember—it seemed like centuries ago, when he was four or five—lying in bed with his grandmother, looking at pictures in the Christian Herald. It was in an upstairs room in the big old house where his parents had lived, and outside the window there were pines moaning and creaking in the summer wind. She had told him about angels, and there had seemed no possible question of its not being true. Once, standing on a hillside watching the northern lights, he had seen an angel with absolute clarity—as clearly as, another time, he’d seen a great, round frying pan in the sky when he was looking for the Big Dipper. But then the evidence against them came in, piece by piece, fact after fact, until
by sheer bulk the facts overwhelmed them, and what was good to believe—for the world was vastly more beautiful with angels than it was without—was incredible. He’d been right, then, at least in this: He wasn’t acting for but against—Callie, Callie’s mother, the people who said on no earthly grounds but animal distrust that Simon had burned his own house. And maybe he had, who knew? How far would Henry Soames go on what George Loomis would call pure meanness? He thought of the money and the sinking feeling returned. He was sweating again.
He found them behind the garage. He stopped when he saw them, and neither Simon nor Jimmy looked up. Simon was sitting on a tipped-over oil drum, writing something with a pencil on a piece of wood, and Jimmy was standing at his elbow watching. Henry stopped and it came to him that, close he was, they didn’t realize yet that he was there. Jimmy was saying, “Why?” and Simon said, “Because he loves all little children, if they repent.” He spoke softly, insistently. Henry went cold all over. Jimmy said, “Who is God?” Henry said sharply, “Simon!”
The man jumped a foot, then instantly went into his obsequious cowering. He said, “H’lo.”
Henry said nothing. A muscle was jumping in his jaw, and his chest was churning so badly he could hardly get his wind. Jimmy looked up as if caught at something. At last Henry said, “The troopers would like to talk to you, Simon. In the diner.”
For a moment Simon seemed unable to make sense of the words, but then their meaning came through, and he stood up.
Henry waited with his hands behind his back, keeping his fury inside, and when Simon reached him, he turned and walked with him toward the diner. Jimmy started to follow, and Henry said, “You go back to the house.” The child opened his mouth to protest, but Henry pointed toward the house angrily and Jimmy started across the grass. By the time he reached the door he was crying.
“What were you making?” Henry asked abruptly.
Simon blushed like a child and held out the piece of wood. The letters were cut deep, like the writing on a schoolroom desk: GOD IS LOVE. Around the writing there were curlicues.
Henry said nothing. They reached the back door of the diner and Henry reached ahead of Simon to push the door open. Simon hesitated a moment, looking up at him as if in fright, and the tic played on his face; then he went in. Callie’s mother stood fussing with the mustard pots at the end of the counter.
The younger trooper had a clean-cut, Italian look. The other one was maybe fifty, a large belly but a small, lean face. They had their hats off. Simon went over to stand beside them, leaning on the counter, his suitcoat hanging down limp, the crotch of his baggy trousers low, and he waited. He looked very small, to Henry, and he stood like an old man, bent forward a little, his knees turned slightly inward. The trooper closest to him, the younger one, said, “Sit down, Simon.” Simon got up on the stool.
Henry went to the near end of the counter and stood with his arms folded, looking at the floor. His anger began to cool a little now. He’d been unfair, in a way; there was no doubt of it. It was ridiculous to fly into a rage at an old man’s teaching a child that God was Love. It was the word “repent,” maybe, that had set him off. But if so, that was more ridiculous yet. What did “repent” mean to a boy two years old? Or maybe what had done it was his finding them out there behind the garage. But he couldn’t blame Simon for that, after all. Jimmy followed him everywhere, and in fact they themselves, he and Callie, had encouraged it. Even now he felt angry, but he felt, at the same time, ashamed. Then what the trooper was saying caught his attention:
“What happened before you went to work the night of the fire?”
“Why?” Simon said. It was as if he wanted assurance that the question was important before he would trouble to remember.
“Just tell us what happened,” the other trooper said.
Simon touched his forehead with the back of his hand. “I had supper,” he said.
The younger trooper said impatiently, “We understand you had a disagreement with your wife.”
Simon looked at the man in surprise, then over at Henry. “Why, no,” he said, “no.” His smile came. Callie’s mother was standing motionless, looking out the window, and Henry felt a clutch of fear.
“Did you ever have arguments with your wife?”
Simon seemed baffled, and the older trooper said, “How did you and your wife get along, Simon?”
Simon said, “We never had any trouble.”
“We’ve talked to your son Bradley,” the younger trooper said. Then, casually: “We understand you used to beat him some, with your fists.”
Simon flushed and said nothing. He leaned his elbows on the counter and began folding and unfolding his hands.
“Is it true?” the trooper asked.
Henry’s hands were sweating. He began to doubt things he’d have sworn to five minutes before. Why were they questioning him here, in front of strangers?
“He’d sinned,” Simon said. It was almost too soft to hear, and he cleared his throat and said it louder.
“Sinned?” It was as if it were the first time the trooper had heard the expression.
Simon said nothing, and the trooper said with distaste, “Let’s talk about your daughter, Simon. Your son tells us you used to lock her in the shed for days.” He waited. “Is that true?”
“Not days,” Simon said in a whisper. He went on folding and unfolding his hands.
“But you locked her in the shed.”
He said nothing.
“Did she cry, Simon?” It was faintly ironic. After a moment: “Did she scream sometimes—for hours?”
“God forgive—” he began vaguely. No one spoke for a minute.
The younger trooper sat watching Simon’s hands. “What was the argument with your wife that night?”
He shook his head. “We didn’t argue.”
“Your neighbors say—”
“False witnesses!” For an instant anger flared up in his look, but he stopped it.
The older one said, “What was her sin, Simon?”
Again he shook his head. He was pale, and he was wringing his hands as if in anguish, but his jaw was set.
“Why would they lie—your son, your neighbors?” the younger one said. “What difference would it make to them?”
Henry pulled at his lip. He kept from breaking in, but he knew he wouldn’t keep still much longer. His anger was confused now, aimed at all of them. Strange to say, he was angriest of all at Callie’s mother, who had nothing to do with it. Her face was turned away and he couldn’t read her expression. But he could see the eavesdropping tilt of her head, the tense, righteous indignation in every muscle and bone.
“Mr. Bale,” the trooper said, “the fire at your house was arson, set with burlap and gas from your own shed. Who had any reason to set it? Who knew you had the makings right there?” And after a second: “Besides you.”
And at that Henry did break in, no more knowing now than he would know later why he did it. “That’s not fair, officer.” He went over to stand bent toward them, in front of them, the blood stinging in his face, and Callie’s mother, behind them, looked up at him, wide-eyed. “Any tramp could have come onto the gas and rags. And the neighbors—anybody in the county, for that matter—maybe they took it into their heads to hate him. It would be natural. No, let me finish. He does what he believes in, he even sneaks around trying to convert your children behind your back. It’s natural it would make people mad—maybe so mad they tell lies about him, or imagine things. You can’t take a man to jail because people don’t like him.” In his excitement Henry didn’t see George Loomis’s pickup truck pull in in front of the diner, and, though he saw the door open, he paid no attention. “People don’t believe in Simon’s God, the end of the world anyday now, things like that. They think a man that believes such things has to be crazy, and crazy people burn houses, so Simon must have burned his own house down. Pretty soon they remember a fight they never heard, and it fits in with everything they know and pretty soon it’s
not even remembered any more, it’s predestined fact. People think—”
“Simon,” the younger trooper said, getting the floor from Henry without ever raising his voice, “have you ever seen the devil?”
Henry waited, checked, not sure what the man was driving at but thrown off balance, frightened again.
Simon nodded.
“Many times?” the trooper said, as if innocently, as if strictly from curiosity.
Simon nodded again.
The trooper looked at Henry, and there was no triumph in the look; a kind of helplessness. “How can you know if he’s sane, a man like that?”
George Loomis was leaning against the doorpost. He said heartily, “What the hell! Of course he’s sane. Lots of people see the devil. Happens all the time. You ever see the Watkins Man? I do. I believe in him. The Watkins Man is good.”
“Don’t clown, George,” Henry said.
George came over to the counter, the brace on his boot clumping on the linoleum, the empty sleeve dangling. To Simon Bale he might have been, even then, the devil himself: triangle-faced, maimed, a cynic, waspish in his irony; but Simon was grinning apologetically, his mouth trembling, ducking his head away from George Loomis as if afraid George might strike at him.
George said, “What’s going on around here, Ellie?”
Ellie said, tight-lipped, “They think Simon—” All at once she was in tears, and George looked startled. Henry hurried around to her, furious, and furious at Simon Bale and himself as well. “It’s all right,” he said. “Here now, after all—”
The two troopers sat relaxed and patient, watching, looking vaguely interfered-with but mainly just patient.
“Look, you guys leave Henry alone,” George said.
Henry said, “They’re just doing their job.” He felt furious at the troopers now, too. “I’m sorry I lost my temper,” he said. He went on awkwardly patting Callie’s mother’s shoulder. She cried into her apron as well as she could; it was too short to get up to her eyes. A little peeping noise came out as she cried, and she said, “I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry.”
