The glare in Emily’s face hadn’t dimmed, but her hand moved over the gap between their moving bodies and took Ann’s fingers. “Don’t tear that pitiful boy any worse than he’s torn already. He’s plowed up my heart—I’ve loved him too—so I know he’s ruined yours.”
In all the years Ann had known Emily Stuart, she’d never had one firm word of warning from her; and the sudden freshness of this demand cut all the deeper. Ann couldn’t face Emily’s eyes, here and now; but as they reached the mouth of the drive and turned toward the house, Ann said “I thank you for taking me seriously.”
Emily said “I guess that’s my worst failing—seriousness. Strawson says I treat the damned birds in the trees like they were angels of God.”
Ann said “Which they are.” And in the sudden relief they felt—near as they were to Straw and Hutch, still there on the porch—both women laughed.
12
HUTCH and Straw had to wake Wade up to get him to the car. He sat up, fairly alert on the backseat, for the next twenty minutes as Hutch detoured them through the small and moribund town of Fontaine on a mission that Wade had failed to mention but might be glad of. Fontaine was where Hutch’s own father’s maternal family had lived when they moved off the Kendal land in the 1880s. The boxy two-story white frame house where they’d stayed for so long was still upright on its ample lot by the train depot at the north end of town—the actual roof and walls from which his grandmother Eva had eloped on a warm spring night ninety years ago with Forrest Mayfield, where Eva’s mother had drunk lye and died in agony on the kitchen floor, where Rob had spent his peaceful but longing childhood and where he’d brought the infant Hutch when Rachel died.
The depot was long since abandoned by trains, to be rescued ten years ago as a play-and-hobby center for the old and idle. But the Kendal house was barely fazed by its new coats of paint—a glossy blue-white with firetruck-red window frames and the plaster statue of a Mexican boy with a wide sombrero and a balky donkey near the stones of a walkway that still bore all the Kendals’ initials and every Mayfield’s who’d ever lived there.
Hutch paused at the curb and leaned to look past Ann. The house and its old trees could still move him strongly, in the right circumstances; but now it might as well have been foreign—a small dead factory.
Wade’s head turned too, for what that was worth. He recognized the air of the place but couldn’t really see more than shadows.
Ann said “Who painted the window frames red?”
Hutch said “The lawyer’s wife, I guess.” A Pennsylvania civil rights lawyer had bought the house back in the seventies once Eva died and, however tasteless, had kept it up.
Ann said “I like it—especially the windows: a nice whorehouse touch, might wake the town up. And the sculptural ornaments are equally welcome.” She was honestly trying for pleasantry.
Wade quietly said “What ornaments please?”
Ann suddenly found she could barely speak.
So Hutch said “A Mexican midget and his burro.” The yard behind the sculpture was cluttered with some child’s toys—a yellow tricycle and numerous pieces of bright equipment: a stroller, a playpen. The lawyer and his wife had never had children; whose could they be? But then Hutch recalled a possibility. “Maybe they’ve adopted a Chinese girl. The wife told me she’d been thinking that over, a year ago. You can rescue unwanted Chinese girls from death now, easy—there’s a place in Seattle makes all the arrangements, door-to-door.”
Wade nodded once as if any news about this house, with its outlandish weight of memory, had long since lost the power to shock. In another moment, before Hutch faced the road again and drove them off, Wade drew his legs up tight to his chest, bent himself together and lay on the seat.
BEFORE they were on the main highway, Ann had reached back and spread the two light cotton blankets up to Wade’s shoulders—he was already gone.
And his deep-drowned sleep lasted through the first three-fourths of the trip home. So Ann and Hutch had a further reason to ride in silence, speaking only at curious sights by the road—a palmist’s sign saying Mother Mindy’s Mysteries, three black children driving a mule and wagon so decrepit it looked like a natural object, not made by hands; and an early moon that was literally gold.
But when they were twenty miles from Durham in the full spring night, Wade suddenly spoke in his old normal voice. “I told Grainger where to strow my ashes—they won’t amount to much, just three handsful.”
Too quickly, Hutch tried for levity. “I heard we amount to three quarts of ashes. Don’t sell yourself short.”
Wade said “You heard wrong again; I know—I’ve scattered more than one friend these last few years. Anyhow, old Grainger will show you the resting place, when it’s time.” Wade waited a long time and then said “Rest,” like a long-sought name that had dawned at last.
Ann looked to the side of Hutch’s face. It was the first time she’d watched him challenged for a sizable response since she left their house. You answer him. Now.
Hutch laughed and glanced back to Wade. “You better draw a good map and file it with me; you’re going to outlast Grainger by years.”
If Wade heard that, he didn’t speak again.
And when Ann looked back a minute later, Wade seemed plunged again into sleep like a river too swift to touch. She got to her knees in the passenger seat and reached to his forehead. It was burning hot and his hair was drenched with an oily sweat. She adjusted his blankets, then faced forward. “He’s got a fever, Hutch.”
“I know. I could feel it when we laid him down.”
“Then we should head straight for the hospital now.” Ann hadn’t delivered that strong an opinion since Wade’s return.
Hutch said “No, we’ll go home and check. If Wade’s really feverish, I’ll call Dr. Ives.”
In that short time Wade’s breathing had gone from quiet to grating, slow but painful to hear.
Ann lowered her voice. “You know he’s had pneumonia once already?”
Hutch said “In early March—he’s told me the grim details several times. I doubt this is it. We’ve taken all the preventive measures.” But Hutch did silently recall the times Wade would claim to be too exhausted for his inhalation treatment.
They continued in silence till they got to the bottom of Hutch’s drive. It had been a long time, nearly four decades, since they’d been this sad and thwarted in one another’s presence; and that had been over the transatlantic phone lines when Hutch learned Ann had aborted the child they conceived at Christmas in Rome during his first year abroad. They understood tonight that the fact of their separate nearness in the car, with their sick child behind them, was increasing the pain—a pain neither one of them could touch, much less banish. And though they literally hadn’t touched for nearly a year, Hutch took his right hand off the wheel and laid it on the seat between him and Ann.
Ann waited a moment, not denying the offer but meaning to brace her feelings first and not think ahead. No further than here. Then she laid her left hand above Hutch’s and kept it there till they stopped at the side door of the house.
Odd as it felt after celibate months; and in this space with a dying man, Hutch was stirred in a way he’d only known in dreams the past year—his cock still blindly faithful after so long, such gain and loss. Sad as he was, he almost grinned to think it might moan aloud any instant; it had been friendless so long.
Ann was still faced forward, unsure of how she could manage to turn and meet Hutch’s eyes.
But he turned and saw her clean profile, her finest side always. Only just lately the edge of her jaw had begun to loosen; that and the slightly hooded eyelids were all the genuine change Hutch could see. Finally he could tell her “It’s meant a good deal, having you along today.”
That brought on her tears, the few quiet tears Ann could ever shed. And they came always for someone else’s authentic trouble, never for her own—Hutch’s feelings had always shown themselves more freely than Ann could
manage. She dried the tears with her one free hand and finally turned to Hutch.
His eyes looked worse than Wade’s, already somehow bereft of his whole world and as far past reach as any lost astronaut.
Ann had never for an instant thought Hutch could come to this. She’d never seen him break; he was plainly close to breaking. She pressed his hand lightly once, then left her own in place above it. “I’ll be with you both, anytime you say.”
“Then why did you leave us?”
“I left you, Hutchins. No way I could stay.” Ann waited, then whispered “Let’s don’t start this again, not here tonight.”
Hutch whispered too. “No, tell me why you’d want to come back.”
“You’re what I’ve got.”
“Me? Or Wade and me?”
Ann said “Both of you. Or either one.”
“Come back for good, you mean?”
“I’m an old woman. Hutch; but I’m not on trial nor volunteering for a polygraph test. I’m offering the little I’ve got to give; please take it or leave it.”
So Hutch left his hand on the seat under hers and shut his eyes a moment. “Let’s see if we can get this boy indoors. If not, I’ll call somebody for help.”
But the two of them managed it; Wade was that nearly weightless and easy to help, though every atom of his body hurt—one more fact he kept to himself.
13
WADE was running only three degrees of fever when they laid him down; and though he was still in the curious daze he’d moved in through the entire day, Wade told Hutch and Ann, who were by his bed, “Nobody’s calling a doctor tonight. I’m just worn out. Go cook your supper and bang some pans—it’ll cool me down, just to hear you in the kitchen.”
While neither Hutch nor Ann had thought they were hungry, they obeyed Wade’s instructions, cooked a mushroom omelet and ate every morsel with Ann’s fresh soda bread and a glass of wine. When their plates were empty, it was past ten o’clock; and they each felt nearly as tired as Wade.
Ann glanced to her sensible big-number watch and said “You tell me what to do next.” When Hutch looked quizzical, she said “Do you need me here tonight? If so I’ll run home and get a few clothes.”
Home, she says—meaning St. Mary’s Road, eight miles from here. What needed Ann here and now was Hutch’s body, beat as it was, and his mind that had starved itself for so long of any assurance that his skin and bones were welcome in someone else’s life. But he couldn’t ask to feed off Ann tonight, not in these straits, unless she flagged a similar need. Has she stayed as dumbly faithful as me? No sign she hasn’t. Hutch sat there beside her another half minute, but all he could sense from Ann was exhaustion. He ringed her wrist with his hand. “Go rest in your own bed. Let’s talk tomorrow.”
She was mildly relieved that he’d made the choice, for now at least. Much as she needed to stay near her son, she knew what a thicket of choices would follow—to spend the rest of her daily life near Hutch Mayfield, or another agonized disengagement and a gypsy move to smaller quarters. “You’ll call me if Wade takes a turn for the worst?”
Hutch agreed. “The minute he’s worse but I doubt he’ll get worse tonight somehow. The trip was just hard, seeing weird old Grainger and the house Wade loved so much as a boy.” Hutch stood and gathered their few dishes.
So Ann rose too. “Does it feel like I’m asking to come back for good?”
Hutch couldn’t quite face her; he rinsed a plate. “I never went anywhere, Ann—swear to God. I’ve just never been the world’s most present man. You may well remember, I don’t turn up—not fully armed—till most bystanders have given up and gone. But I somehow thought, anybody who waited, would somehow collect on his or her patience—I’d have some feeling or fact ripe to give.” At last he turned with one hand raised to back his oath, his strong right hand, as if it were proof that even as close a witness as he could still drift farther off than most lone voyagers and could only signal Farewell or Save me, knowing both were useless.
“Oh Hutch, you went—you’re out there now, on your fragile wings, insisting on bearing all the weight of a death that’s at least half mine. I made that child, with this same body you’re looking at here.” She had the grace not to touch her own body; it stood for itself.
Hutch knew she was right. Distance was his oldest instinct, seizing what looked like the full brunt of something—death, love, failure, abandonment—then winging off with it for lone decades of slow ingestion, concoction, assimilation, then a guaranteed (if long overdue) return. He sometimes thought the tendency came from the enormous fact of his mother’s death the day he was born and the ensuing fact that his lovable destitute father quickly became more nearly a son than a father to Hutch. For the first time, in his memory at least, he told Ann now “I’ve borne the weight till today, yes ma’m. Let’s talk tomorrow. Maybe we can shift the load.”
Ann agreed. “Good night.” She was already moving to check Wade’s room and drive home alone.
Wade’s light was still out and his breathing was maybe more regular.
So Ann went on.
14
BUT it was pneumonia, the parasitic swamping of the lungs so common to this plague and so often lethal. Hutch had waked on his own at three in the morning, dreading the duty to check on Wade and maybe find him worse than before. But Hutch rose finally and went to Wade’s doorway. At first the slow breaths sounded normal, but Hutch went on in and leaned to feel the boy’s hair.
It was soaked and snaky, the pillow beneath Wade was drenched, his chest and sheets were sopping wet with the desperate effort to break a fever that only descends on very young children or dying adults. When Hutch took a step to find the thermometer, Wade sang “ ‘Old Paint, I’m a-leaving Cheyenne.’”
“Did I wake you up?”
“Oh no, I’ve been swimming laps for an hour in this cold bed.” Wade gave a hard shudder as a chill wrenched through him.
Still in the dark, Hutch sat on the edge of the mattress and felt the forehead again. Surprisingly cool, if this was fever—maybe the bedtime aspirin had finally broken the heat. Some minor bug surely.
But Wade said “Hutch, this is pneumocystis.”
“You’re breathing easy—”
“I recognize the thing I’ve got, my lungs are filling, it’s only just starting.”
Hutch could hear a trace of burr on the voice—the distant warning of a real death rattle from deep in Wade’s lungs. “Then I’ll call Dr. Ives.” Hutch stood to go to the kitchen phone.
“Wait, Father—I don’t plan to fight this again.” Wade hadn’t called Hutch Father more than twice in the past decade.
“The hell we won’t fight it.” Hutch went to the door. Any minute or second he could add to Wade’s life was a monumental gain.
But Wade found strength to give what was almost a bellow of rage in the silent house—rage to do his own will this instant, to let death in and bend to its power. When Hutch turned to face him, Wade said “We’re riding this through, or out or whatever, under this roof. You, Mother and me. Please help me go.”
Hutch came back, sat and stroked the damp brow. “You’ll let me call Dr. Ives at least?”
Wade shook his head ferociously.
“Then you’re asking us to watch you drown with our hands tied.”
Wade said “That well may be. Many parents have done it, from the edge of the pool.” He took a long wait, then managed to laugh, then coughed convulsively. At last he could whisper “How crazy is that?”
“Not crazy at all. It’s cruel as hell.” Hutch had almost whispered it; but once it was said, he wanted it back. Any parent’s volunteered for this. Stand and take your punishment.
Before Hutch could speak again. Wade said “Cruel? To you and Ann? It’s no big moonlight hayride for me.”
“Look, Son, the hospital’s ten minutes away. We’ll put on your robe, I’ll call Margaret Ives, she’ll tell us where to go, they’ve got the right drugs and the oxygen.”
Wad
e’s hand fumbled up and found Hutch’s mouth, trying to mute it. “Promise me?”
“Yes. Wait—promise you what?”
“—That you and Ann won’t keep me alive when it stops being me.”
“How will I know that?”
“Say we—you and Ann. Ann Gatlin’s my mother.”
Hutch said “Ann Mayfield—don’t forget we’re legal still. But all right, how’ll we know when you’re ready?”
“I’ll either tell you or—didn’t you used to pray every year or so? Try that again maybe; ask God or somebody in his line of work.”
Wade’s skin still felt strangely cool to the hand, but he was plainly skirting delirium. Hutch leaned to speak clearly. “Let me be sure I understand you. You’re willing to go to the hospital, aren’t you?”
Wade shut his eyes and slowly agreed, barely moving his head.
Hutch accepted the signal and switched on the dim lamp.
The skin of Wade’s face and neck was purplish; his eyes were wide but fixed on a far point—the eyes of some sky god hacked out of granite five thousand years back but fulminant still.
At the edge of the commanding gaze, Hutch could say only “I make you that promise, I’m sure Ann will, we won’t hang on when you give the sign.” Though Hutch knew it was only the simplest humane good sense, he’d have made the vow to nobody else, alive or dead. But what else can you say to your own crushed child who begs to die? Hutch pressed the switch that slowly raised the head of Wade’s bed till the boy was half upright. As it rose, Wade’s face—even with the eyes shut—looked like some corpse, long sunk in peace but dragged back to life and mindlessly tortured.
Wade said “Make your plans before I start howling.” By now, he couldn’t have howled in a firestorm; his wind was that scarce.
Hutch went toward the kitchen to make the two calls—the doctor and Ann. He’d rather have called in nuclear ruin on the entire American continent at sunrise.
The Promise of Rest Page 17
