The situation was clear. I couldn’t leave Alice, and the pharmacy wouldn’t make a delivery that far out of town. So I had virtually no choice but to send Richard to town in the car.
When I presented the problem to him he was eager to go and as flattered this time that I’d trust him with the car as he was the first time I sent him. He seemed oblivious to the fact that the task held certain dangers. He was like a young boy entrusted with the keys to his father’s car.
When he emerged from his room prior to departure, I noted that he’d washed, changed into his suit, and combed back from his forehead the great long flowing locks.
Standing out in the driveway I handed him the keys and registration, as well as money to pay for the drugs.
“Now, Richard, don’t spend a minute more in town than you have to. Just get the prescription filled and come right home. Mrs. Graves needs those pills as soon as possible.”
He nodded his head, and from the way he looked at me I could tell that he knew my concern went a good deal deeper than Mrs. Graves’s needs.
We waited anxiously for him to return, and after two hours had passed, I sensed trouble. I called the pharmacist at the drugstore and was informed that Richard had left with the medicine an hour before. The drive out from town was approximately forty minutes—a half-hour if you sped. Twenty minutes overdue was nothing to be alarmed about. So I went back up to the bedroom, where Alice had dozed off, and sat in a chair beside her bed in the gathering dusk of afternoon. In another half-hour a car pulled into the driveway. Alice was still dozing when I rose and tiptoed from the room.
The first glimpse I got of him was in the kitchen. I imagine I moved toward him smiling, feeling all kinds of gratitude and relief. At first I didn’t even notice the blood. Most of it had clotted and faded into the wild entanglement of his beard. As I say, it was dusk and the light was poor. But then suddenly I was up close beside him and peering into a barely recognizable battered face—blood oozing from the nose and a cut on his lip. He had a nasty bruise over the eye which had started to swell and turn a yellowish violet. The worst of it was the bleeding and the clotted gore which he kept wiping away with the sleeve of his jacket.
“What in God’s name—”
“It’s okay,” he said and thrust the vial of tablets toward me. “How’s Missus?”
Later, when I’d washed him and dressed his cuts, he was still unwilling to talk about it. But gradually I was able to extract from him the major details of the story.
Richard had got to town and had the prescription filled without incident. When he got back to the car, he found an automobile parked directly behind ours. In it were three of ‘the young local toughs. If you’ve ever spent any time in a small town, you know the type very well. Teenagers or in their early twenties—shiftless and surly. Most of the time you find them squatting on the steps of the Post Office or the drugstore, ogling girls, spitting on the pavement, and drinking from quart bottles of beer which, for some curious reason, they keep in paper bags.
At any rate, three of these fellows followed Richard out of town in their car. When he finally got out on the Bog Road, which is a nearly always deserted ten-mile strip of badly chewed-up tar, they forced him to the side of the road, dragged him from the car, and proceeded to beat him. They also took whatever change he had left from the money I gave him for the drugs. It was an insignificant sum of three or four dollars.
“Don’t worry,” said Richard when he’d finished his story. “I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t bother. It’s not important. The important thing is that you’re all right.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “But they won’t be when I get finished.”
The remark made in that flat, dull emotionless way of his made my blood run cold. It was precisely the kind of thing he had said after his encounter with Petrie’s clerks.
“Now, Richard, I don’t want you to do a thing about this. I’ll take care of it in my way.”
He looked at me oddly. There was nothing mocking or impudent about it. It was more like a skepticism that I saw in his glance—a distrust born, no doubt, of the meek manner in which I accepted the Petrie business. The skepticism and distrust goaded me.
“I promise you, Richard,” I said more forcefully than ever, “Now I want you to promise me that you won’t go off and do something foolish—”
For a moment I thought I saw the trace of a smirk on his lips.
“Like taking the law into your own hands again,” I went on.
He looked at me, oddly surprised for a moment, then shrugged.
“Sure.” He said it with a kind of carefree indifference that made me feel foolish. As if he were saying, “If it means so much to you—”
“Good,” I said, full of false satisfaction, not certain whether or not we’d reached any kind of an understanding.
Something flickered in his eye again, lasting for only a moment. Then it was gone and he seemed more himself. “Missus feeling any better now?”
“Fever’s gone and she’s resting comfortably.”
“Can I go up and see her?”
I looked at the mauled, purple thing that was his face. “Let’s wait till she’s a bit stronger.”
He accepted that easily and smiled his wry, twisted little smile. “I’ll go make her some soup now,” he said. And then he was gone.
The following morning at the stroke of nine I was at Birge’s office in the county courthouse. He was already there at his desk in his shirt sleeves having a doughnut and a cup of coffee from a paper container. When I arrived, he cleaned off the desk top, leaned back in his swivel chair, and threw his booted feet up on the desk.
“Have a seat, Albert,” he said with all that bogus amiability of his.
It was the first time I’d come to see Birge in a professional capacity. I confess I was rattled. I told him the story with emotion and a great deal of unevenness. There were gaps in the narrative, and after I’d told it once, he made me go over it again and fill in for continuity.
“Is the boy all right?” Birge asked when I’d finished. “He’s pretty badly banged up. His face—”
“Any broken bones? Anything requiring the attention of a doctor?” He’d taken out a pad and started scribbling on it.
“No,” I said and our eyes locked for the first time. “What do you propose to do?”
He leaned back in his chair and clasped his raw, red paws behind his head. “What do you propose I do?”
“Find those boys.”
“I don’t have to. I know who they are.”
“Then you’ve heard about this thing already?”
“Heard somethin’.”
“And you haven’t done anything about it?”
“Been intendin’ to,” he said, and studied his fingernails.
“Well, I want to press charges.”
“Charges?”
I had the feeling he was laughing at me. “I want those boys brought in. I’m going to press charges of assault and battery.”
Slowly he uncrossed his legs and lifted them from the desk top. “Oh, you don’t wanna do that.”
“I most certainly do.”
“Only make things worse.”
“Things?” I said, growing a little furious. “What things?”
“The situation, Mr. Graves.”
I’d started off as Albert, and now we were back to Mr. Graves again. “You know,” he went on in his cajoling way, “people ’round here are fond of you and Miz Graves. And you’re as welcome as ever. But—I must say—this boy you got stayin’ up there with you—Why, only the other night Darlene was saying—” I assumed Darlene was Mrs. Birge. It was hard to think of her as having a first name, and Darlene, at that.
“We’ve had some ugly experiences here with drifters and hoboes,” Birge went droning on. “I don’t mind tellin’ you—we don’t countenance ’em. Ordinarily, we run ’em out soon as they come in.”
“The boy’s no drifter or hobo. He worked for the fuel
company before he came to me. He’s worked for Washburn. No one’s had a bad word to say about him. Go talk to Washburn.” Birge seemed scarcely to be listening. “He’s proved to be an invaluable help to me,” I went on doggedly.
“Oughtn’t to be in your house.”
“Whom I choose to take into my house is my business.”
“You don’t know nothin’ about him—”
“I know everything I have to know!” I snapped. “Now I want those boys brought in.”
“You don’t wanna press charges,” Birge drawled and crossed his legs again.
“I certainly do. I fully intend to press charges.”
Just then someone stepped into the outer office and waved at Birge through the open door.
“Mawnin’, Darrel.” Birge waved back, and they chatted there for a moment while I slumped in my chair and fumed.
“I have every intention of pressing charges,” I said again when the person had left.
The grin that had been on his face during the brief exchange of a moment before still lingered there. Now it seemed that my words were coming slowly through to him.
“These boys,” he said, “are just a pack of young fools and hotheads. But if you was to press charges against them, there’s some round here who’d take it poorly.”
“I don’t care how they take it!” I was on my feet and thumping his desk. “I want those boys prosecuted. I want justice.”
“Now don’t get yourself all lathered, Albert.” He made a quieting gesture with his hand. “I intend to see you get justice.”
I stood there hunched above him, glowering, my knuckles white and mashed down on the rim of the desk. “How?” I said, full of skepticism.
He lit a vile little stump of a cigar and tossed the match into the paper coffee container. “We don’t wanna go through the business of formal charges, do we?” I watched him as he sucked on the cigar, generating enormous quantities of smoke around himself. “Lemme take these boys aside and put the fear of God in ’em.” He spoke out of the side of his mouth, giving the illusion that he was talking to me in the strictest confidence.
“The fear of God?” I said eagerly. There was something in me that wanted to succumb to him.
“How will you put the fear of God in them?”
Birge puffed deeply on the cigar. “I have my ways.”
“Your ways?”
Birge nodded.
“What ways?” I asked, beginning to yield.
“Never you mind. Just leave this to me.”
And so we left it.
Later, when I’d left Birge and was standing in the street outside his office, I knew that very little would be done to redress -the wrongs. But then, I wanted so much to wash my hands of the whole unpleasant business. I started to think about my health and worried about what excitement could do to it. I told myself that I believed Birge even when I knew I didn’t. Aiid my greatest concern that morning was whether or not I could get Richard to believe Birge. And even if Birge were telling the truth, I wasn’t certain that Richard’s acute sense of justice would consider a tepid reprimand from a conniving small-town law official fair exchange for the gratuitous beating he’d taken on the Bog Road the day before.
Early on, I said that you would get to loathe me. It was just this sort of flabbiness of character that I had in mind.
Chapter Twelve
There’s a month of the year I hold most bitter and most sweet, and that month is April. I claim no great originality here. At least a dozen poets and sensitive types in general have noted the peculiar melancholy of that month. By that time the birds are all back from wherever they’ve gone, and the old brown earth has turned full green again. There’s not a bare branch around, and the heady scent of lilac and honeysuckle hangs heavy over the dreamy, lengthening days. It’s a time of renewal, and yet the bitter taste of winter and death lingers on in our heads.
It’s time made doubly melancholy for me because the anniversary of my father’s death falls in that month, and since that day in April nearly forty years ago, I’ve celebrated the anniversary of his death by his graveside.
It’s a peculiar and barbarous custom, I know, and yet I yield to it annually, almost unwillingly, like a reflex action you have no control over.
When you think about it, it’s almost comical. You go forth to confront old ghosts and commune with old guilts. You hope to exorcise old griefs and leave some awful burden there, like a bundle of dirty laundry, beside a mouldering stone.
But nothing like that ever really happens. You simply place a small nosegay of flowers by an old stone, mumble a few silly endearing words, or a formal incantation (which is even sillier), and shuffle off through the neat little aisles of stones and ghastly funeral statuary.
Afterwards you go to some restaurant and eat a bad meal. But by then the thing is safely out of your head for another year. I’ve long since given up trying to understand the whole silly business. It’s grist for the mills of psychologists and anthropologists who’ve been enterprising enough to turn that sort of thing into a thriving industry.
My father is buried in a large city due north of here, about a day’s drive on one of the great, ugly turnpikes of the nation.
Alice and I have always celebrated the day in precisely the way I’ve described it. Only, now that we were living in a rural region, we took the opportunity of tinning the trip of grief into a small spree. Like bumpkins, we’d fly to the city wide-eyed and innocent, with some extra money in our pockets, and as soon as the period of lamentations was safely out of the way, we’d doff our sackcloth and ashes and dash off to the shopping districts. Antique shops and clothing boutiques were our chief targets. At night there’d be a play or a good foreign film. Then supper at a French restaurant. I suppose the pattern is common enough to most suburban couples who’ve transplanted themselves from large cities. Most of us are even able to be a little humorous and self-mocking about it.
At any rate, the anniversary I’ve spoken about came upon us in this year as a complete surprise. I suppose our forgetting the date had something to do with the presence of Richard Atlee in our house. But lo, the date was upon us before we knew it, and it was late afternoon before we realized the oversight. I fumed about it for a while and carried on, But I reasoned if we were to drive all night, there’d be time enough to reach our destination early in the morning, go directly to the gravesite, have our day in the city, our night in town, sleep in a hotel, and leave early the following morning in time to reach home late that afternoon.
Such a situation before would’ve presented no great problem, but now there was Richard, and what troubled us was the fact that he was away from the house for the day and couldn’t be found in any of the usual places in order to tell him we were leaving. It occurred to me that he was at the cave, where I was certain he’d been spending increasing amounts of time. If that was the case, then I was sure I couldn’t locate him, because I could never have found that cave without him, although I knew in which direction it lay and the general vicinity of it.
It wasn’t our intention to take him with us. We simply wanted to tell him we were going and when he could expect us back. There were also a few elementary instructions about the running of the house in our absence—dreary little matters about the hot water heater and the oven, and some instructions Alice wanted to convey about the watering of the lawn—all things, knowing Richard, which he would have taken care of automatically anyway.
At any rate, we finally settled on writing a small list of instructions, told him where we were going, where we could be reached in the event of emergency, and when we’d be back. We urged him to take full advantage of the house and the larder and gave him our best. Then we were off.
We had our day in the big city and did everything we ordinarily do when we go on such junkets. We had supper at a French restaurant. It was neither memorable nor gracious, but it was good just being there—in the din and clatter of that hot little place—watching the waiters and the people i
n all that happy turmoil of activity. Afterwards we saw a comedy at the theater and laughed a lot and suddenly realized how long it’d been since we’d had a good laugh. We even managed to buy a full complement of Chinese vegetables and condiments, and a wonderful cast-iron wok, just as Alice had said we would on Christmas Eve when I gave her the Chinese cookbook.
It all seemed perfectly harmless and we laughed most of the way back, with the packages of food and vegetables and the large, improbable wok, all rattling in their wrappings on the back seat. It was a good trip, highly therapeutic, and driving home that day we were very pleased with ourselves.
It was only a matter of two nights that we were away—slightly more than forty-eight hours in all, but driving up the gravel path, the place already had a foreboding look about it. I shouldn’t say that. There was really nothing terribly untoward about the way the house looked. It was rather more something in the mind of a person given to sinister premonitions. I knew something was wrong even as we were coming up the drive. Maybe it had something to do with the way the light of late afternoon fell over the place.
The air was sultry, and there was an imminence of rain. A curiously unnatural quiet hovered over the grounds—a hush born of the absence of customary bird chatter and insect buzzing. The place too had a vaguely unpleasant air about it—the way a house looks when someone has died in it under violent and rather shadowy circumstances. There was a kind of sullenness about it now—a jarring and uncharacteristic inhospitality. And the way the sun’s rays slanted on the windows, its brilliant orange light imprisoned in the leaded panes, gave the casements a vacant look, like the eyeless sockets of a skull.
What we found inside was not that immediately remarkable. What I most recall, going from room to room, was the uneasy stillness of everything, and the thick, oppressive mustiness, as if the place had been shut up for years. At every corner I turned I expected to find something grisly or horrible. But everything in the house appeared to be just as we’d left it.
I was about to laugh at myself and scoff at my suspicious nature, when Alice, who’d wandered up ahead, called me from the kitchen. I went there immediately and found her staring at the floor. What her eyes had fastened on I didn’t see immediately. But then, suddenly, I was staring at the jagged shard of a shattered coffee cup just beside the sink. Then it seemed dozens of other pieces from the same cup, strewn all about in different corners of the room, came slowly into view.
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