Jack

by Marilynne Robinson

  He had fallen asleep thinking how to put an end to himself. There was the lake, and, in a virtual forest of low-hanging boughs, he had his necktie. Grotesque in either case. Sure to break his father’s heart, once and for all, if word got back to him. He imagined Teddy there, somehow first to know, plumbing his gentle, practical wits for a way to make things seem other than they were. Then he woke up with that boot in his ribs, but on the undamaged side, and Bradshaw struggling out of his uniform and laying out a hectic plan for Jack’s immediate future, which meant that that other decision could be postponed.

  Perhaps. Jack put on the enormous overall, which fit over his jacket with room to spare, solving the problem of what to do with it, at least till the day warmed up. The cuffs dragged and the sleeves had to be rolled, but he was ready to give this Bradshaw business a try, in the absence of other options than those two he really hated to consider. Clothes make the man. He could see up the hill a big burlap sack. It did have bulbs in it. He found a spade lying in the grass nearby. Off to work.

  Walking along a path, looking for a place where he might reasonably plant something, he passed a man who rather pointedly paused to read the patch on his pocket. The man said, “I’m surprised you’d even show your face around here!” His obvious disgust meant he would not take it well if Jack asked him to clarify.

  So, something else to consider. What had Bradshaw been doing in the cemetery in his work clothes in the middle of the night? And he had been in too great a hurry to ask Jack why he was sleeping on a grave with a wilted bouquet on his chest. Other people spent nights in the cemetery, but the flowers would have given pause, under normal circumstances. Self-parody can be hard to explain. But no small talk, just that prodding boot. And the hasty handing over of money, to overwhelm possible reluctance, Jack thought. And the hurried exit into the near-night. That man had shed Bradshaw to make himself anonymous, with good reason, no doubt, and had left another Bradshaw behind for when the cops came.

  Short of that, if the man had done something obnoxious and reprehensible by the code of the brotherhood of cemetery gardeners and punishable by their contempt and ostracism only, this would suit Jack’s purposes, such as they were. He had thought at first that the man on the path was noting the mismatch of the name on the pocket and the battered face under the cap, and so he was relieved by the thought that, though the name might be locally notorious, the man it belonged to was a stranger somehow, successfully furtive. A remarkable thing in a giant, true. Worthy of emulation, and made easier in Jack’s case by the repugnance Bradshaw had left in his wake.

  Dear Jesus. Jack’s mind ran over the very long list of possible offenses, saw himself accused and convicted, favored drowning as less judicial than hanging, as less likely to be seen as an implied confession, and wondered for the millionth time how he had trapped himself in such a ridiculous life. Harmlessness is not for the faint of heart.

  If he had decided on drowning, it might be better to take care of it before he was embroiled in l’affaire Bradshaw. But if Bradshaw’s transgressions were truly grievous, maybe he should wait around to defend himself, with all the futility that would involve, rather than seem to confess to it and let it cast whatever shadow it might over that rigorous pulpit, that upright house, that unoffending town, that earnest state—here he was sweating and trembling over an unspecified crime that might not have happened and that in any case was not his crime. He couldn’t even think of Della.

  But what if someone saw him pulling a bloodstained shirt out of the lake? Then again, what if he left it there to be found in the inevitable search of the area? Was it worse to be seen retrieving the shirt at night? Though night would diminish the chance that he would be seen doing it, which, of course, is what made doing anything at night presumptively incriminating. The thought occurred to him suddenly that he had not looked over these gabardines Bradshaw was so desperate to climb out of. Blood? Hair? So he also climbed out of them. There were a hundred stains, impossible to interpret. Dried sweat, of course, which could testify to the desperations of guilt and concealment. He was studying the cap when a man with an official air called to him, “Seen Bradshaw?”

  Jack called back, “Not today,” standing there with the flayed giant crumpled at his feet, implicating himself pointlessly in whatever it was, because that was just the kind of thing he did.

  Why did he want that damn shirt, anyway? He imagined the cuffs floating up like some last supplication. A necktie on a bare neck looks ridiculous. Forget the damn necktie. A suit jacket over a bare chest looks ridiculous. He wasn’t thinking clearly. Did he owe Bradshaw anything? Had there been some sort of agreement? A few bucks, or their equivalent in time spent abetting a crime. If the crime was truly grave, that time would have expired already in light of the risks involved. He had spent the morning as near guilt and humiliation if not death as an imaginative man could come without actually passing through them, and he had money in his pocket, which seemed fair. For one sick instant he thought he had put the money in the pocket of the uniform, and that he would have to go back and rifle its pockets in what was now broad daylight, workers everywhere, but no. He took the bills out and looked at them. Three twenties. More amazing still, they were absolutely new, the newest money he had ever seen in his life. This was exhausting. A bank heist, an armored car. Counterfeiting. This last would account for his readiness to pull bills off that roll he had, to silence objections Jack had been too sleepy to come up with. Suddenly he was thinking about cops again. Where did you get this money, pal? Somebody paid you? For what? In the dark? In the cemetery? The name Bradshaw mean anything to you?

  He would go back to his room. Just two nights had passed. It was the endlessness of all recent experience that had made him sure he was late with his rent, but he wasn’t. It was a relief to be out on the street. His razor and comb would be there on the dresser where he left them. He thought, I have been outside time and St. Louis, I have been in a dream, a Russian novel. And he decided to put the twenties in his shoes so that he could walk them into a state of wear that would make them less suspect. As an added benefit, should he be shaken down on the long walk home, he might get away with saying he had no money. A woman was waiting at the streetcar stop, watching him with that look people have when they’re trying to make sense of something. He gave her a battered smile and she looked away. It occurred to him that Bradshaw might be getting his money’s worth. The best thing about taking a punch or two in an alley is that, when they ask that witness what Bradshaw looks like, he’ll say he had a terrible black eye, lots of swelling. That’s all people notice. Jack would lie low, and Bradshaw was too big to get hit in the face, so pretty soon no one would match the description, or no one would if Jack remembered not to go down alleys.

  The desk clerk glanced at him as he came in the door and said, “Ouch!”

  Jack said, “The other guy looks worse.”

  The clerk laughed. “Then I guess the poor devil must have been born ugly.”

  Very funny.

  * * *

  He lay down on his bed and reflected on the night he had passed. Was there, or was there not, a Bradshaw? He was clearly a cosmic ruse, a means to an end, in fact a punch line, which was to put money in Jack’s hands that he could not spend. Did he eat and sleep? Or was he conjured for just these few minutes, to rattle the jar in which Jack the specimen was trying to understand the transparent barrier between himself and ordinary life. The money was actually there, he had checked several times, twenty in the left, forty in the right. He did not know of a single establishment in walking distance whose till would not have been completely emptied by making change for a twenty-dollar bill. Nor was there a store where he could make reasonable use of twenty dollars to avoid the problem of change. Then he had a thought. He went down to the desk and said to the clerk, “I would like to pay a few weeks’ rent in advance. With five dollars back.”

  The clerk said, “That will require money.”

  “Yes, I have money,” but it w
as in his shoe, which might make the whole transaction less attractive, objectively speaking. He searched his pockets. “Oh, I left it upstairs.” So he went upstairs, took a bill out of his right shoe, evening things up, he thought, and laughed, and went down to put the twenty on the counter. You would have to look very closely to see any sign that it was not brand-new.

  The clerk took the bill to the window to see it in a better light. “Where did you get this?”

  That dread question. Jack had no better option than the truth. “It’s hush money.”

  The clerk laughed. “I guess that means you’re not saying.”

  “Yes, I believe it was a mistake. I didn’t actually witness a crime. I saw the fellow run off, probably from the scene of the crime, which I suppose is a crime in those circumstances. He gave me money and told me not to tell anybody anything. Which of course I won’t.”

  The clerk shook his head, but he opened the till and put a five on the counter. “There’s your change. But if this twenty is as phony as it looks, I’m calling the cops.”

  Jack actually thought about asking if he could have it back, but that would look like a confession. Well, at worst he had five dollars in his pocket. No, at worst he had passed counterfeit currency that he had received for abetting a crime. And at second worst, the clerk would forget to note that Jack had paid rent in advance and Jack would have no way to prove that he had, since the improbability of his having twenty dollars could only be countered by his producing another twenty dollars, which would raise and compound every suspicion. So, after an hour or two, he went back down to the desk and he said, “Pardon me. Could I have a receipt for that fifteen dollars I paid in advance? Or you could just write it down somewhere.”

  The clerk shrugged and said, “Maybe you gave me fifteen dollars, and maybe you didn’t.”

  Exhausting. How could a man whose life amounted to absolutely nothing have so many things to worry about?

  He went up to his room, lay down on his bed, and considered his choices. He could get dead drunk, let the world turn a few times, rouse himself with his face more like his face, his problems receded, even if that meant they were further from his grasp. It might be cops who woke him up, those heavy shoes on the stairs, and then those questions about whatever pernicious thing Bradshaw had been up to, about concealing evidence. He decided to stay sober, to give himself a chance, at least.

  This was the world after Della. There were the hours in which he resigned himself, not for the first time, to the fact that he had nothing to give anyone, that his life was an intricate tangle of futility, sustained by the faithful brotherliness of Teddy, that impeccable human being, whose kindness shamed him because he could never reciprocate. He could have gone to his mother’s funeral. How much of his reluctance had to do with a black suit and brown shoes? He laughed abysmally at the thought, the utterly damning triviality of it. It would have meant he could not contrive to maintain himself as himself, and they would all notice and know what it meant. And prison, and that grudging submissiveness to other people as authorities of some kind, which made sense to him, since even that desk clerk had something to do, and did it to some standard of sufficiency. Could I have a receipt? Pardon me. Almost asking him to say no. People in his family did not go to prison. They worked scrupulously, reproduced, and died in a good old age, as his father would say. It had never seemed to him that this was so much to aspire to. He still could not quite aspire to it, and yet any modest version of it was so tauntingly unattainable by him. Taking a preacher’s daughter out for supper. How could this involve them both in humiliation? Clearly harmlessness was more than he could aspire to.

  On the other hand, he had tried from time to time to do something baldly self-interested, and not much came to mind. A few minor thefts, that old habit, nothing acquisitive about it, since the things he took were worthless to him if not to the people he took them from. Moral scrutiny was invited by this habit of his, he knew. He believed it might be an attempt on his part to weave himself into the emotional fabric of another life. That sounded right. It was a speculation of his father’s, once when he had found a shoebox half full of Jack’s pilferings. “I think we should talk about this,” his father had said, and they had had a good conversation, his father weighing his words so carefully. “I know that you are most at ease by yourself. That’s fine. But you may be lonelier than you realize.” He liked the thought that he was weaving himself into the emotional fabric of another life. And then he took the experiment much too far. “There was pure malice in it,” his father had said. “Surely you see that, Jack.” He saw it, he remembered it, the way you remember the mood of a dream. With that impulse, when his thoughts centered on fragility—fixed on it. No doubt also malice, always compounding itself by a logic of its own.

  So, harmlessness. This really might be too much to hope for. He actually shuddered at the harm Della might have suffered, perhaps did suffer, from his stupidly hanging around her door. How could she have explained him to a principal, a board of some kind? He shuddered as if the thought had not occurred to him a thousand times before. And still he thought that he might sometime loiter near Sumner when school was letting out, just for a glimpse of her, to be sure that things were all right with her. This would not happen. He could not promise himself no harm would come of it.

  * * *

  Simplify, simplify. He had made a good beginning when he forbade himself the thought of Della. Once she was banished, he was freed of anticipation and regret, both of which were attended by calculation of a kind—how to have a glimpse of her, which became how to pass her on the street, and then what to say to her, what would make her smile. Or he would fall to thinking how to put something right, how to make something clear, for example that he avoided her for her sake and at some cost to himself, emotionally speaking. For a day or two he would take pleasure in the thought that her good life was unthreatened by his Jackness, Jackitude, Jackicity. How was it possible to be encumbered with slyness, so that his blundering always ended as shrewd harm? It was a shock to his metaphysics to discover that when he had forsworn malicious intent, the effects of his actions, his mere presence, were changed very little and not reliably for the better. What if Della read Paterson and was offended by it? He hadn’t been to the library since he went there to draw that picture, chicken joint with angels. He had been, as the fellow said, ashamed to show his face, though he knew that the most respectable man in Missouri could be mugged if he happened to turn down the wrong alley. It was ridiculous to have believed that the circumstances of his life would not have touched him essentially so long as they left no visible scars. As if he could just walk into the old house and take his place at the dinner table. He usually banished that thought once or twice a day, but now he gave up on it for good. It was gone now, and all the sorrow he would surely have brought with him, like the wind he brought in at night when the house was warm and asleep. It was like a black cloak that swept around him, setting off disturbances among the crystals on the lampshades, leafing books left open, losing places in them. Scattering letters, half-written or half-read. He couldn’t say he hadn’t done any of these things. If they asked him why he had done them, he could not say, “I am at the center of a certain turbulence.” That would sound flippant at best, a little deranged if they took him seriously.

  He was inclined to believe that there were (a): energy, and (b): displacement. Any gesture was, whatever else, like freeing something from your hand, some living thing that would touch or settle wherever it happened to be carried on the surge of displacement. Rattle or fracture confirmed this. So as a living creature he was ill suited to the brittle, frangible world of things. It was as though planet Energy and planet Order had collided and merged, leaving displacement as the settling of the ruins. By extension, he thought, though he knew it was only by analogy, the small gesture of, say, recommending a book of poetry to someone became displacement that struck where it would, as it would, converting itself in midair into malice or stupidity. How did p
eople live? His oldest question.

  * * *

  Nevertheless. But. Still. And. He went to the library, though his face was zombie lavender and zombie green, especially around his right eye, which looked a little reptilian with the swelling half gone. He hoped that kindly woman was not there, but she was, at the front desk, where she would be sure to see him. When he saw her there, he paused, thinking he might try another hour, another day, since there was certainly no urgency about this or anything else, but she glanced up at him just as he was stepping away. “Good morning,” she said, which was kind in the circumstances, and then went back to sorting her cards, which was also kind. So he said, “Good morning,” and smiled, insofar as he could manage a smile, and went off to the stacks, overtaken by that strange awkwardness that comes with feeling watched as you walk away. Shady intentions always make it worse.

  He went to the place where he had hidden Paterson, behind The Dream of the Rood and Other Early English Religious Poems, the title he had memorized, and it wasn’t there. It was not behind twenty books in either direction, above or below. He sat down at the table to think about this. Then he took down Robert Frost, so that he had something to look at while he absorbed his disappointment, which was really out of all proportion to the situation. He only meant to read the book over to resolve in his mind whether it would have offended Della or not. He hardly knew her—how could he be sure in any case? He could commit the whole thing to memory and be none the wiser. And she might have forgotten about it the minute he mentioned it.

  He didn’t look up when the librarian came into the room, but he could smell the bologna in the sandwich that, yes, she set on the table by his elbow.

  “Frost is good,” she said. “Williams is shelved in the W’s.”