by John Gardner
He sat on the toybox in the child’s room, holding him, shaking his head and groaning, seeing it again and knowing Simon was still lying there staring toward heaven, waiting. It began to get dark—he could feel the mountains closing in. He wished Callie would come home and tell him what to do.
VI
NIMROD’S TOWER
1
After the death of Simon Bale, Henry Soames took a turn for the worse. Doc Cathey said, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his suitcoat, wholeheartedly meaning every word of it, at least for that moment (in the muggy, baking heat of August more impatient than ever with the mere humanity that always finally eluded his craft), “The hell with you.”
Now, perhaps partly because of the heat—weather unheard of in the Catskills, a sure sign of witchcraft at work, or miracles brooding—the nervous eating that had troubled Henry Soames all his life slipped out of control, became a mindless external power against which it was impossible for him even to struggle, a consuming passion in the old sense, a devil (but blind, indifferent as a spider) in his guts. When he talked with customers in the diner he seemed on the surface as cheerful as ever; too cheerful, if anything, shouting over the drone of the fans in that high, thin voice of his like a goat’s, banging the counter-top, whinnying with laughter; and he seemed at least relatively cheerful, considering, when he drove out on still, hot Sunday afternoons to look at the hills, the green-brown river, the corn going yellow for want of rain. He’d sit sweating behind the steering wheel, pulled over beside the triangular white concrete posts at the edge of the highway, looking down at the valley that gasped away toward brown-blue mountains as if he owned it, for what it was worth, owned all the Catskills as far as the eye could see. Because of his fat he sat tipped back like a medieval baron, and he surveyed the world over his heavy shoulder as if with imperatorial disdain. Sometimes if the heat was unusually bad he would get out of the car and open the door for his wife and child—the dog would be back at the house, asleep—and lead them over to the shade of a pine grove. They were fair-skinned, Callie and the boy, and the heat made both of them nauseous and light-headed. Henry would lower himself onto a large, dusty surface root (the grass beside it bristly brown) and would fan himself with his hat. His hair was dark with sweat where the hat had been, and the folds of his neck were gritty. At last he would say like a king pronouncing judgment, “Hot.” Both his son and his wife would nod, solemn. The pine needles over their heads were whitish from the heat and drought. But wherever he walked or stood or lay, Henry Soames had food with him, and he ate. He ate steadily, calmly, his small teeth grinding on and on, like Time setting out to fill all the void with Space.
(“Like an elephant,” Old Man Judkins said, with more insight than any of them guessed, though even in his own mind the idea was obscure. He was thinking, vaguely, being old and tired, of the time he’d stood for an hour-and-a-half at the Coliseum in Buffalo—that sick-sweet chemical stench in the air—looking through the bars at a gigantic lean old African bull whose left hind leg was chained to the floor: he would lift the leg a little and find the chain still there, and he would be—as it seemed to Old Man Judkins, who knew about elephants only what he saw—so enraged that he couldn’t even trumpet, could merely set down his foot again and stand there hopeless, like an Indian waiting to die. After an hour or more of this he’d begun to walk around and around in a circle, sideways, each step a great, slow shifting of unspeakable weight. Old Man Judkins thought of Henry Soames’ father walking by the roadside, enormous and placid as a saint, singing in his reedy voice, Every time it rains it rains … pennies from heaven. “Terrible,” Old Man Judkins said, but no one paid attention.)
Henry Soames’ wife would say, more cross than usual, in this weather, “What’s the matter with you, Henry?”
“I’m sorry,” he would say, and he would seem to mean it, rolling his eyes up toward her; but he would go on eating, taking it in like a combine, or like a cutting-box, or a silo. She watched the weight he had lost coming back, pound by pound. He began to need his little white pills more often; he seemed to her to eat them like candy. It was not frightening to her but acutely annoying, one more irritation among a thousand—the movement of clothes on chafing skin, the piercing pinpricks of the bell on the diner door in front, the dust that lay over everything, no matter what you did to get rid of it—on the piano keys, on every flange of the old carved picture frames on the walls, on the soup cans and tops of boxes in the diner. One night she exploded, “Henry, you act like a crazy person.” As the words came out (she had said them many times before), she saw the truth. It was no matter of locked attics, burning churches, ice-cold hands around one’s throat—the kinds of madness she’d heard stories about and seen in movies at Athensville. That kind of madness she hardly believed in, accepted merely as she accepted technicolor movies of, say, San Francisco; but this was real, not a matter of poetry but a study for her country rules—the rules that a child should have a father, that a wife should have a husband, and that a man trying to kill himself should be stopped.
She must act, she saw (wearily and angrily, flushed and spent, past all endurance), but how she must act would not come clear. With a part of her mind she wished him dead, the whole world dead; the heat coming up to her from the grill and flooding out into the heat of the room made her want to break free into violence. And yet even now, though abstractly, now, she “loved” him, for lack of a better word. She could think about her love—still there, she knew perfectly well, but dormant, an emotion locked up, waiting for September—as she might think about a pain she’d felt long ago and would one day feel again. It was the most vital emotion she had ever felt, on one hand, but, on the other, an emotion partly revolting to her: She had not seen much sign of it in her mother and father; it was an emotion they shrank from, lashed out against as they might at something obscene. She understood. But Henry, like her cousin Bill, or like Cousin Mary Lou, had accepted that feeling, had in a way made it into his identity, hugging her in his great loose arms, womanishly patting some truck driver’s shoulder, bending down to kiss the forehead of their child as he slept. He was obscene to her, to tell the truth. His whole gross being, the very possibility of his existence at the height of a weedy, rainless summer was obscene. When he stood at the kitchen door watching her with eyes like an infinitely gentle pig’s, his face thrown forward, leaning against the warm (she imagined) edge of the door, he would smooth the paint with absentminded fingers; and sometimes he would turn his face and touch the wood with his lips, this, too, absentmindedly, trying the texture with his mouth as a child would, and Callie would look down, revolted. Once she had said, “Henry, you’re kissing that door!” and he had looked ashamed. Instantly she’d thought she shouldn’t have said it, though she wasn’t sorry. She’d never caught him doing it again, and, almost below thought, in the dark of her mind, she’d been annoyed at her pettiness and his, for paying attention.
“Crazy,” she thought, coming suddenly awake, toying with the word’s dull echo in her head, standing over the hissing grill and staring through the grill’s blackness at the pitch-dark center of things. She thought of George Loomis, sitting alone in his unlighted, funereal old brick house on Crow Mountain, watching television in the kitchen, his eyes like a murderer’s. Henry respected George, and George had a kind of sense: He could talk to Henry if anyone could, and George could do it without making them all feel like worms. She set her lips and, as though someone else had suggested it, she nodded.
And so George Loomis sat down grinning in the armchair facing the davenport late one night and stretched out his legs, his left hand over his belly, relaxed, the empty right sleeve pinned up to the shoulder of his shirt. He smelled of whiskey. It gave her a turn, but she said nothing. She thought of her father, the car parked down in the creek below the DL&W bridge where he’d pulled to sleep it off. When he brought in the smell of whiskey with him, her mother would sometimes cry. “You never think of anybody but yourself,” she would say,
“that’s truly all you think about.” And he would nod, scowling, not offended by what she said but outraged by the maudlin vulgarity of her saying anything at all. Once, long ago, he’d hit her. When Callie was little, she too would cry, and her father would wince, looking at her, and then he’d shut his eyes with disgust and sit down and cover his face with his hands and wait for them to go. His verdict was right, she knew, and she knew that all women were evil. When they were loading hay he would lift her in his arms, laughing, and would throw her up onto the load. She was terrified—the load was high and round, and she was sure she’d roll off on the other side from the force of his throw—yet she would wish he would do it again and again, hoist her up in his arms and laugh, looking at her face for just a second, and throw her up at the white clouds and the deep blue glodes between. Her mother would say, “She’ll be hit by dry lightning up there, Frank Wells. You know what happened to Covert’s boy.” “Crap,” he would say. He would lift his arms and say, “Ok, scout,” and Callie would half-slide half-jump and he would catch her. Her mother said someday he would break her leg, and Callie thought, Evil, evil! Once he had turned his back and let her fall. She was fourteen. He and the two hired men had laughed, leaning on their forks, showing their dark yellow teeth. That night she had run away, intending to drown herself, but beside the creek—Prince running up and down joyfully, yipping at shadows—she’d found herself too cowardly and base for even that; there was no hope left for her but forgiveness. It was the troopers that had found her, and when she got home her father was asleep in his chair, snoring like a horse.
George Loomis said, “How things going, boy?”
“Oh, so-so,” Henry said.
Still no relief from the heat had come. Her head ached, and their voices sounded hollow, like voices in a dream.
George Loomis looked down for perhaps a minute, then cleared his throat and looked over at little Jimmy, playing with a truck on the davenport arm. George’s hair was going prematurely gray, but across from Henry he looked like a high school boy. He had a boy’s face, a boy’s way of sitting—except for the one boot locked rigid in its iron brace. He had a look of innocence like a boy’s, too, vaguely associated in Callie’s mind with virginity.
“Sure dry,” George said.
Henry nodded. “Things burning right up.” His voice was mechanical, like his words. Even his eating looked mechanical, and George was doing nothing to help.
Callie looked toward heaven in despair.
(The Preacher would come to see Callie’s father and would go out to the barn where he was milking, and Callie would go with him to show him the way. He’d step gingerly, behind the cows, worrying about getting manure on his pointed black shoes—good honest shit, her father called it and when her father saw him he would nod politely. In front of her mother, her father would mock religious people, but he was always polite to them otherwise. He was not a cruel man—she had learned that only lately, from Henry, or rather had only lately discovered by way of Henry that that was what she’d always known. He too was like a boy, her father—in a different way from George Loomis, though. Her father was easygoing, open, free with his money, a storyteller people would listen to for hours. He didn’t believe or disbelieve in God, he said; he just didn’t like churches. He didn’t like hearing what he had to believe and what he mustn’t believe—the very word believe made him curl his lip as he would when he listened to tear-jerking poetry or talk about flowers or songs about faraway places—and above all, he said, he didn’t like grown men standing up and confessing in front of everybody, like drunks or like young lovers. But that was not what he said to the Preacher. He said, “Evening, Reverend,” and nodded, and when the Preacher talked about what a fine herd of cows he had (it had chronic mastitis and there wasn’t a cow in the barn that gave more than a gallon) he would agree. Rightly, Henry said. (That too she had always known but had realized only when he said it.) If you told the Preacher the truth he would soon have control of you, would milk you dry. The Preacher would say, “We’ve missed you lately in church, Frank,” and her father would say only, “I haven’t been going very regular, that’s true.” He hadn’t darkened those doors in fifteen years. The Preacher would talk to him sadly, man to man, high-tone Biblical language that embarrassed Callie, and after her father had heard him out he’d look thoughtful and say, “There’s a lot to what you say, Reverend.” She would want to laugh, and only later had she come to see that she’d wanted to laugh with fury. There was something vile in her father’s arrogant detachment. She wondered what her father would say if someone smarter than he was had come to talk about religion to him. Henry’s father, for instance, when he was alive, who’d read hundreds and hundreds of books. But she knew what her father would have done, of course. How could even arguments have touched him?)
All of that came back to her clearly, in the odd vagueness that had captured her mind—those nights in the barn with the milkers chugging and the Preacher straddling a spatter of manure, huge gray moths batting at the whitewash-caked bulbs, the cool sound of pigeons in the mow overhead. She stood in the living room doorway listening as if in a trance to Henry and George Loomis, and when her mind came alive again her heart sank. They were equals, they would be honest with each other; and there was nothing George could do. (I loved him though, she thought, giving way again, seeing her father in her mind as before, his eyes cocked up at the sharply protruding hipbone of the cow. She’d been older than her father all her life, and even as she’d struggled to be the boy he wished she was, because the idea of her being his daughter was for both of them unmanageable, she had known the futility of it and had forgiven him. For an instant that seemed timeless but which nevertheless passed, she did not care whether George succeeded or not.)
For an instant she knew with a part of her mind that behind the house, motionless, oblivious to the deadly heat, Simon Bale’s ghost sat listening in the dark, solid as granite, hearing all they said and thought and hearing the noise still miles away of something (wind?) bearing vengeance toward them: some change, subtle and terrible. They were caught. She concentrated. It was gone.
2
George Loomis knew well enough that he’d come for nothing. When he looked up at Callie in the doorway—pretty, in a tough-jawed, persecuted-looking way, her face flushed, prepared for wrath—he had a feeling that in Henry’s position he might do the same damn thing.
Henry sat unmoving—as still as the enormous old sleeping dog by the door—huge, like the dog, and spent—huge and dark as the centuries-old pile of boulders and shale and crumbling mortar looking down Crow Mountain at the bottom of the shadow-filled glen. (It was a lookout tower from before the Revolutionary War, his grandfather said, and it was built by one of his ancestors, a Loomis. “Nimrod’s Tower,” his grandfather said. “So much for the pride of man!” And he, ten years old, had looked up at the tower, baffled between pride and inexplicable shame at the pride he felt—like his grandfather.) Henry Soames’ forearm stood straight up, resting on the arm of the davenport, holding the box of gingersnaps, and his arm was so thick (it seemed for that moment) that if the boy were to pass behind it he would vanish from sight as though passing behind a tree. Callie gave George a meaningful look, something she’d learned from TV, he thought, and dropped back into the kitchen, out of sight. There were only two dim bulbs that worked in the gilt, Max Pies Furniture chandelier that hung by a chain from the middle of the ceiling. (That was Callie’s work, he knew. Henry would never have chosen the thing.) He could see one of the bulbs reflected in the picture directly across from him, high on the wall over Henry’s head, above the clock on the mantel, a brownish picture (a gift from Callie’s mother, one of them had told him) of Jesus praying. The Soames’ TV was on, over in what Callie called the music corner—radio, record player, television, sagging homemade shelves of records and old TV Guides—but the sound was turned off and the picture was flipping. It gave you a feeling of endless falling in space.
He said, “What’s ea
ting you, Henry?”
Henry smiled, gloomy. “Oh, I’m all right, George.” He put a gingersnap in his mouth whole and let it dissolve there. “How things with you? Seems like we don’t see you much any more.”
George got out his cigarettes with two fingers, slipped one from the pack, and fitted it between his lips. He got out his matches. “Now don’t change the subject, Henry.” He looked at the matches, considering, and decided on directness. “You quit eating all the time or you’ll kill yourself. You know it.”
