Mait came to the opposite side of the counter, two feet from Hutch. “Do you know Wade’s thought about suicide?”
It shocked Hutch cold. “I don’t know that—no sir, I don’t.”
Mait stood in place, two cups in hand, and signified Yes.
Hutch could only say “When?”
Mait knew he’d betrayed Wade—too late though. He forced himself to meet Hutch’s eyes and said “Last time I came out to your place—what, last Tuesday?—when you left us alone, Wade asked me if I could find him some cyanide.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I could try. At the bars I’ve met a couple of chemists from Burroughs Wellcome; they seem very friendly—” Mait carefully filled the cups with coffee and held one to Hutch.
“Do you plan to try?”
“As I said, I’ve got more than one chemist friend. Please say if I should.” When he’d thought for a moment, Mait said “I know that sounds awfully flip, but it could be easy if we did it right—the dying at least: we could bring that off, with the simple right substance, in a matter of seconds.”
Hutch waited a long time. “No soul in my family has managed his own death in ninety years—my great-grandmother Kendal drank lye and died on her own kitchen floor.” He waited again. “But you and Wade are both grown men.”
“Is that real advice or are you just polite?” In all Mait had said since waking today, his voice had served reliably—no highs or lows.
The scent of the brewing coffee had jostled Hutch’s exhaustion. He almost smiled to Mait. “I’m cursed with politeness, as you recall; but no, I’ve got no wisdom to give you. It’s Wade’s life and death; he’s been through more than I’ll ever imagine—far more pain than you’ll ever need to know, I hope.” That last was a warning which escaped unintended. Guard your body, whoever you’re with.
Mait said “Let’s talk about this later. It’s still not day.”
Hutch knew why he’d stopped here, not for simple company but on the off chance that Mait might finally be old enough to give what Hutch needed and had needed for weeks—a precocious offer of fatherly guidance, a strong voice to say Do this, now that, now stretch out and rest.
And there in his shorts, Mait seemed to bend to the role with no fear. His eyes looked wiser in an instant. But then, though his voice had kept its firmness, his face flushed brightly; and he said “Good morning” past Hutch’s shoulder.
Hutch looked behind him at a man as arresting in face and body as anything torn off a Roman basilica and painted again in the colors of life—black hair, dark eyes and biscuit-colored skin. Older than Mait, he also was naked except for a towel round his hips, and he’d stopped in the hall on the kitchen threshold. Hutch gave him a brief instinctive bow.
The man came on and held out his right hand. “Cam Mapleson, sir.”
Hutch said his own name and took the strong hand. “I’m more than sorry I woke you up. My son is ill in Duke Hospital. I was feeling lonesome and stopped to see Maitland.”
Cam said “He’s told me. I’m proud to know you, sir.”
Hutch thought You don’t know a thing about me. Don’t grab for more than I can give. But he only smiled.
Hoping to revert to cheer, Mait said “Is everybody hungry?”
Cam said “Are we up?”
Hutch said “No, I’m leaving—”
Mait said “I’m up and a carnivore to boot. Bacon and toast?”
Cam laid a light hand on Hutch’s shoulder. “Please stay. I’d welcome a chance to know you, sir.”
Hutch said “But if you keep calling me sir, I may well drop down dead on the floor of sheer old age.”
Cam said “I’m sorry—it’s my marine training. My dad objects as much as you, but it’s in my blood—maybe too late to change.” His hand had stayed on Hutch’s shoulder.
Mait was searching the refrigerator. “Mr. Mayfield, what’s the difference between a marine and a queer?”
Cam’s hand clamped tighter on Hutch’s shoulder.
“I surrender—what?”
Mait said “A six-pack.”
Hutch laughed but, by now, was resenting the weight of Cam’s hand. He’d begun to sense he was being lured into some narrow trap. What does this new boy want, from Mait and me? And in the next minutes, as he moved at Mait’s suggestion and sat at the bare dollhouse table, Hutch felt more and more like an excess wheel beside this pair who were young enough to be his sons, nearly his grandsons. They’d already shared more than Hutch could guess; and their readable faces had plainly known more pleasure in the last few hours than he’d known in months, if not years. But still the thought of heading home alone, or of waiting in his campus office till ten o’clock when he could visit Wade again, was harder to manage. Hutch said “Thanks, Mait—just toast for me; I’m giving up fat.”
Cam had lifted his hand and was standing in their midst, in his towel. His eyes frisked Hutch. “You’re too thin, man; keep your energy up.”
Hutch thought Your eyes are flat as a puppet’s; is there anyone in you? But he told Cam “Relax, endurance is my strong suit.” The pompous sound of that on the air made Hutch laugh first.
Mait and Cam joined gladly in the noise.
And Cam’s towel fell to the floor round his feet. His whole body, pure white in the loins and bushed with black, flared like a phosphorous fire in the kitchen.
Mait roared “Help! A man!”
Not rushed, Cam bent, retrieved the towel and fastened it safely.
At once Hutch took the glimpse as an omen on Wade’s behalf. All his life Hutch had trusted in such quick meetings with another human’s grace and worth. This strange bare man—some kind of nurse and as easy to watch as any man in Wade’s sheaf of pictures—was signaling better times for Wade or, at the least, an easier death. When Maitland reached above the sink and opened the blinds on first daylight, Hutch suddenly knew and actually said eight words in his mind. This whole story can end soon now.
He meant the story of his joined families, all the story he’d witnessed or heard from kin whose memories ranged two centuries back—most of them burning what they called love as their treacherous, always vanishing fuel when what they craved was merely time: more time above ground anyhow to feed their dry unquenchable sovereign hearts. That story was ending in Wade Mayfield, who was hardly breathing less than a quarter mile from this room and from these two ready likable boys whose excellent bodies, a few years back, Wade might have plumbed in thoughtless safety or held and honored for long paired lives.
By the time Hutch worked his way through that, drinking coffee, Cam and Mait had dressed for the cloudless sweltering day at hand and were laying out food like a four-handed creature, with that little waste of minutes or motion.
Those smooth moves gave Hutch even more hope that someway Wade’s hurried dissolution had slowed and leveled and could now be guided or aimed at least toward a dignified close. Hutch said to Mait “Thank God I woke you.”
“Don’t mention it please.”
Cam kicked out at Mait’s butt. “Take the compliment, child; the man clearly means it.” And only then did Cam look to Hutch; he thought he could see in Hutch’s eyes that his own hawk-face was as fine to see as the rest of his hide when the towel had dropped.
Hutch was thinking He’s maybe eight years older than Mait, those eyes want something Mait doesn’t have to give, when did they meet? But all Hutch said was another fact. “I’d got fairly near the end of my rope.”
Cam brought bacon, toast and jam to the table and said “Jump or fall. We’re a good strong net; Mait and I’ll catch you.”
Hutch knew they were promising more than they’d give—more than they had, whoever they were to one another (and hadn’t Mait said this was their first night?)—but he thanked them again and buttered the bread.
When Hutch turned the curve and saw his own house, it was seven o’clock and growing clearer and brighter by the minute. When he reached the backyard, Ann’s car was parked in its old plac
e—no sign of her in it. Wade’s worse; she’s here to get me. Hutch paused long enough to face due south and see the highest roofs of Chapel Hill over green intervening miles of trees. For a moment he felt he was calmed. Life at a distance anyhow. We’ll last some way. He didn’t think who he meant by we. He turned, walked around to the front door and tried the knob. Generally double-locked, it was open. Hutch entered the hall and listened—silence. He froze in place, invaded and offended. Ann had long since carried off every thread and book that was rightly hers. She’s rummaging through my desk, on a hunt.
She almost was. Though Hutch hadn’t tried to muffle his steps, Ann was startled when he got to the door of his study and found her seated near the desk. Like a child, she held her hands up empty. “I was reading this sadness—” Wyatt’s long hateful letter to Wade was open on her lap.
“It isn’t yours.”
“You haven’t read it?”
Hutch said “Wade left it here with me.”
“And told you to read it?”
Hutch wouldn’t lie. He shook his head No. “I read it in the night, when I couldn’t sleep. I thought it was something I might need to know if Wade lasts long.”
“He’s better this morning; I called the ward. They said his fever’s down and he’s breathing better. I stopped by here to wash some nightshirts and sheets.” As proof, the washing machine in the kitchen pumped and chugged beyond them. Ann gathered the furious pages and laid them neatly facedown in the box.
Hutch could see her own letters to Wade, still sealed at the side of the box. But he only said “You think Wyatt’s dead right, I very much bet.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Wyatt. In his letter. About you and me.”
Ann intended no harm when she said “Are you sure he included me?”
Hutch was also calm when he nodded Yes. “Everybody with eyes in the past three centuries knows that white women were the engines of slavery.”
“You want to defend that wild proposition? It’s new to me.”
Hutch rushed it out toward her. “White men shanghaied slaves to America, bought and sold them, worked them to death in sugarcane fields or treated them like pet minstrel dolls you can slam up against the wall anytime you’re tense or a little discouraged with your day; but unless the perpetual-virgin white wives and daughters had stood on the porch or at the field edge, broadcasting hate and fear and attraction, the worn-out men would have given up such a costly burden long years sooner—the whole monster business—and done their own work, just killing each other and occasional Indians.”
Ann eventually smiled, suppressing a laugh. “That’s appropriately weird.”
“It’s true.”
She still smiled. “Some part of it may be—Lord knows, my mother and all her sisters suffered most from the simple fact that they had to have black women cooking and cleaning all day behind them while they sat idle, depressed and picking at the slightest flaw in every life near them.”
Hutch said “So Wyatt was more than half right.”
“Wyatt got his revenge.”
“How?”
“Look, Hutchins—Christ Jesus, he’s killing our child.”
Hutch said “We can’t lay that on the dead.”
“You just laid slavery on a million dead women.”
He waited to think of one more answer, then raised both open hands. “Truce. I’m too tired.”
“You didn’t sleep either?”
“I got scared in the night and drove in to see Wade. You’re right; he’s better. Very slightly better. For a day or so, till this afternoon maybe when some barely harmful germ blows in and carries him—”
Ann stood. “You want me to fix you some breakfast?”
“I’ve eaten, thanks. You’re not working today?”
“I took the day off. I needed some quiet.”
“Lucky job,” Hutch said. “The Hurdle Mills Meat Man get the day off too?”
Ann said “Read the newspaper, Hutch. We’re saving his skin. Last week he got his charges reduced—stands a good chance of nothing worse than life with no parole.”
“Who doesn’t get more or less that exactly?”
“Well, you.” Ann took a step toward him and studied his eyes.
Hutch realized she hadn’t been this good to see for a very long while—a new kind of force flushed all through her skin; her hair and eyes, her elegant bones. He studied her, silent.
Then she finally said “You’ve had a full life. You used yourself. You liked most of it.”
“Didn’t you? Sure you did—”
“The jury’s still out on me.” But she smiled. “Permission for coffee?”
Hutch gave it. “Permission.”
Ann turned toward the kitchen and Hutch came behind.
* * *
TWENTY minutes later, with nothing transacted beyond small talk, Ann headed out “to mow the lawn”—she had a little hearthrug of grass by her back door—and Hutch moved toward his study in the slim hope of starting at least to choose the poems for his new selected volume. The box of Wade’s papers was where Ann had left it—Wyatt’s letter on top, Ann’s own sealed letters untouched where they’d been. It came to Hutch suddenly. Read just one letter; you need to know it somehow. If the thought hadn’t come with a taste of hope in it, he’d have pushed it back. All his novelist friends were abject snoopers; Hutch had seldom shared the urge.
Now with no qualm, he sat at his desk and asked himself which letter to choose. The last one she sent. But that was still sealed, dated March 29. Breaking Ann’s seal was not yet allowed, not under the rules that were running Hutch here. So he rummaged carefully through the box, hunting the most recent letter from Ann that Wade had opened—Wade or Wyatt or Ivory or Boat. At last he found one, slit neatly open, and postmarked just after this past Christmas.
December 30, 1992
Dear Wade,
I hope you’re weathering the post-Yule blues a lot better than me. Don’t mean to burden you with my small troubles—and not to imply that I’m standing here, armed to kill myself—but my first Christmas entirely alone was an awful idea. Oh I had three invitations to parties and one to dinner with my boss and his clan; but believe it or not, I was fool enough to sit out here with the bare trees around me and wait on the phone. I even picked it up more than once as the day went on, to see if it worked; and there Oh Lord was the healthy dial tone, saying “Yah, yah, yah, nobody needs you.” The rest of the day and the whole night proved it, not even one wrong number or a pitiful handicapped lightbulb salesman.
You’re right if you’re thinking “She volunteered for it with both eyes open.” I did, you warned me, Hutch warned me, God warned me. But Wade, let me tell you what you already know. My last four years under Hutch’s roof—and it was never my roof, not the smallest shingle from the day they were laid—I’d wake up beside your father in the night and feel the weight of every object in the rooms stacked on me. Every bed and table, the stove and freezer and washer and both cars, my own small lot of precious possessions (most of which pertain to you) and—topping the pile—your father’s billion souvenirs from a rich strong life, everything from the carved-bark man with the workable penis to your father’s books and pictures and the manuscript mountains. I thought I’d loved them, or been glad to live near them; but in those last four years, I couldn’t stop thinking They were all meant to kill me. That’s why they’re here. You stand up and run, girl.
Eventually I ran; as you well know, I ran. Nobody but me; nobody forced me, least of all Hutch—not consciously, never.
So why am I sitting here moaning to you, when your outlook is what it is? I’m not too sure what the answer is, but I have learned one thing I didn’t quite know. There’s not much out here for any woman my age, unless she wants to take the veil (and even that convent of cloistered nuns on the Roxboro road shut down years ago; they ran out of sisters). If I’d started life as a virgin martyr and taught long division for the past forty years, I might at leas
t get occasional cards from giants of industry that I’d helped launch on their grisly course. If I’d had real friendships outside my marriage (which all but no American mates do), there’d be somebody I could eat supper with at least or join at the movies on my day off. If I’d had a real mind (a strong imagination as opposed to a dedicated homemaking robot inside my skull), I’d have sure-God never let my private soul just die down to nothing but a warm coal or two the way I did.
You’re surely asking yourself—if you’ve read this far—“What’s she want from me?” I trust I don’t need to restate my offer to care for you—here or there, any place you say. Beyond that, I sometimes pray for the phone to ring and you to be there saying “Call him up, Ann. Start talking anyhow about what’s left, if anything, between you and what you could stand—you and Hutch, both alone now.” Second to praying you call with the news that a cure’s been found, I pray for that—a way we could all live together a few years longer.
Is that what you mean, when you think about us—assuming you do? Again, forgive this burden from me. But the Season of Hope has very nearly killed me. What I may have learned in this new life is clearer, though, after these lonely days—I’m as good a woman as I know how to be (and I’m at least normally smart for my age), and the same is surely true for Hutch. He’s got a whole lot less greed and malice than the average songbird—I know; I watch my bird feeder closely.
And the absolute unquestioned truth of my life is, I love you and am yours—with whatever good I could bring—for the simple asking. A premature Happy New Year, Wade. Ignore this if you need to.
All the love left in
Ann Gatlin Mayfield
Hutch placed the pages back in their envelope, then buried the letter deep in the box. He’d barely thought that it might have snagged a hold in his mind.
21
TEN days later at Hutch’s house, on a bright dry June afternoon, Cam Mapleson stood up to leave Wade and Maitland. Cam was due at work in the hospice; Mait was going to stay on with Wade since Hutch was in Richmond to read his poems at a summer writers’ conference. When Cam had stroked Wade’s forehead by way of saying goodbye, he noticed for the first time the drawing that hung above Wade’s bed—Hutch’s childhood drawing of mountains and trees, the one Wade had wanted at the last moment as they left New York. Cam had spent a good part of his own childhood painting and drawing landscapes near Nag’s Head where he’d grown up, and Hutch’s drawing of Virginia mountains struck him as fresh and oddly impressive. It had the homemade but masterful quality of certain unique accomplishments—things done just once, got perfectly right, then never repeated. Cam said to Wade “Did you draw this?”
The Promise of Rest Page 20
