“You were hungry,” said Jeptha, as though this was the worst accusation he could make.
And who’s to say that Jeptha Arrison had it wrong? If Doctor Sprague had had one wish in the world, what would it have been? To die, not quietly, but in a way that let everyone know: I loved a woman so and grieved a woman so that I burst into flames. All anyone ever wants is evidence. She had not written him a single love letter and she had not saved his. By god the woman hated words.
There he is at his table. The bowlers think he has given up. They think he isn’t doing a damned thing except drinking and scrawling notes on jagged scraps of paper. (The man can afford more than scraps. Why must he be so perverse?) The women bowlers think he might at any moment turn the boat of his grief back to shore. Right now he’s drifting; soon he’ll find some purpose; he’ll remember his daughter, or the memory of his wife will be one he wishes to honor with good deeds and happiness and responsible fatherhood. But the men think otherwise: a certain dead-eyed look in a drunkard means he’s done for good, and no legislation or temperance Mary will save him. Both men and women think: there’s a clock wound down. They only disagree over whether his gears are jammed for good.
But we know: grief looks like nothing from the outside, it looks like surrender, but in fact it is the most terrible struggle. It is friction. It is a spiritual grinding, and who’s to say it cannot produce a spark and heat that, given fuel, could burn a good man to the ground?
Almost Done
Ads were taken out in newspapers all over New England—Orono, Maine; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Mystic, Connecticut; Boston, Worcester, Providence. Nahum Truitt was not flushed from any of these places. Joe Wear ran the alleys. He oversaw the rebuilding of the first lane, though it did not take much: new bench, new floor beneath, new table. Time and smoke and the greasy clothing of bowlers would take a while to shellac the new wood: there was a halo there. Joe Wear thought about what he might do, if the alley were his: rip out the bar, which had buckled and which since Prohibition they did not really use, add two more lanes. Meanwhile he hired pinboys, paid their salaries, paid his own, took the profits to the bank, and awaited the appearance of Bertha Truitt’s son. No will existed for Bertha Truitt, but Leviticus Sprague had been more thorough. All he owned to Minna, except the alley, which he left to any close relatives of Bertha Truitt who weren’t Minna Sprague. From the bowling alley she was disowned. It was Jeptha Arrison who offered up the name Nahum.
What had happened to the leg? Buried by itself in a coffin, cremated to match the rest, filed as evidence at the police station.
“You reckon he’s haunting us?” said Jeptha, as though he were a girl wanting to be asked to dance. “I always wanted to meet a ghost. I mean, of a fellow I knew already.”
“No such thing,” said Joe. “No such person.” Though he wondered. Objects in the alley had found their voices: the toilets sang in the middle of the night, the radiators shook their chains and hissed. Since the fire he felt widowed, or married. The only way two men could marry, thought Joe Wear, is if one were a ghost.
Jeptha closed his eyes. He said, “I been waiting for a ghost all my life. I’ll be one, if I’m allowed.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was born here, and I’ll die here,” said Jeptha Arrison. “That’s what I mean.”
But he had his own parents, a pair of doting old Yankees who liked to watch their Jeptha set pins. Mother Arrison, stout and sharp nosed, stood by the front door, holding her pocketbook up near her face to ward off the smoke.
“Mrs. Arrison!” said Joe Wear. “It’s a pleasure. Tell me—” He tried to come up with a question. He landed on, “Where was Jeptha born?”
“We live in Attleboro,” said Mrs. Arrison coldly. “We have always lived in Attleboro.”
Joe tried to decide if that was an answer.
“Oh, look at him,” said Mrs. Arrison. Her voice had been ice but now it was edged with melt. She would have been in her sixties then, and Jep a man of forty. There he was at the end of lane eight, as though on a stage, setting the pins. The smoke and distance made him black and white; the noise of the alley made him silent. He stood on one leg, Buster Keaton among the pins, humming his own accompaniment. Pure grace doing a dumb job. Pure love, too. He set the pins down as though they were sleeping children. He looked at them as though they were works of art.
“We almost died, Mr. Wear,” said Mrs. Arrison. “Both of us. When he was born. Now there he is. He loves it here. We thought she might leave him something in her will. Not the whole alley, but mention it, mention he should be here always, no matter.” Mrs. Arrison’s eyes were damp as oysters, as salty gray. Then, as though she trusted Joe: “Whatever happens, you must keep him here. I believe he’d die if he had to go.”
“All right.”
“I mean it,” said Mrs. Arrison.
“Mothers always mean it,” said Joe Wear, who had little experience of mothers.
Across the city of Salford, like the drifting ash he might have turned to, the particulate Dr. Sprague entered dreams. He ran up walls. He alphabetized canned goods. He cured two headaches. Twenty different people heard him warble “Somewhere a Voice Is Calling,” though in real life nobody had ever heard him sing a note. He kept Jeptha Arrison company and he came to Joe Wear and said, Thank you for staying, Mr. Wear, I know you’ll regret it. You mean I won’t regret it. Did you not hear me the first time.
Hazel Forest dreamt that he appeared and parted his shirt and then his stomach to show a weeping wound, and parted the wound to show a dripping cauldron. He said, You’re a nurse, you should have known. But you’re a doctor! she told him. Yes, he said.
Mary Gearhart came down to breakfast to find him there, explaining that he was actually a wax figure from the museum: why he went up in flames like that.
LuEtta Mood dreamt that Dr. Sprague met her at the public library, in front of the dioramas (Salford in the Time of the Pilgrims; Shakespeare’s Globe; Salford, Like Rome, Is Built on Seven Hills; Salford in the Time of the Revolution). He said to her, You’re pregnant. She could hear her mother’s voice calling down a dream hallway, Where’s Edith, where is she? though in real life she never said Edith’s name aloud. I’m not, LuEtta said to the dream doctor, and then, when she woke up, she did the addition in her head—weeks, symptoms—and it seemed a bewitchment. She was old to have another child, in her late thirties, though younger than Truitt had been.
Not sorcery. Not a miracle. As with most unbelievable things, it was mere and shocking biology.
Why not be Nahum Truitt? The ads had been placed. The lawyers were waiting. He was the right age.
“I am Nahum Truitt,” said Joe Wear. He was alone in the rooms above the alley. But if he owned them! Not such a grim place. The windows were big and showed the blue of the sky over the grocery store roof. The rough brick walls reminded Joe of beloved lost roughness. “Mother was ashamed,” he said, and that he couldn’t believe. “Ma Truitt.”
So what if Bertha Truitt had never shown him any motherkindness while she fussed over Jeptha? That was her, he practiced saying, that was mother: not one to spoil.
He had never really owned anything. He knew he still did not. He looked at the hissing stove upon which he heated canned soup, the tiny icebox he never stocked with ice. The furniture had been bought by Bertha, and there you could see some affection very much like Bertha herself: horsehair heart and velvet skin. Well-made furniture. Through the closet behind the toilet was a ladder that led to the roof, where Joe Wear liked to smoke. He went there now.
He sat down on the tar of the roof. “I am Nahum Truitt,” he said again. He tried through the seat of his pants to feel in possession of all that was beneath him. “I once was Nahum Truitt. Nahum Truitt is my name by birth.”
He had never thought himself the hero of any story. He was the janitor, the handyman, a mechanical. Perhaps it was a matter of assuming the center of the story. You cannot smash your life around the way you like it but
you might step into somebody else’s carefully made life. Step into it, like a pair of pants.
Unlike Jeptha he had no inconvenient parents to disprove him. Joe Wear’s folks has crossed the ocean with their baby, caught TB, and died in Boston Harbor, or so he’d been told. He had once seen photos. His so-called parents were a pair of playing cards in his memory, visible only from one angle, and even then outlandish. A man who looked twelve years old, bad freckled, with burnt eyes; a woman apparently fifty, ruined by life, with a crude hairdo that seemed carved of wood. They had died long ago, they had been born in a country Joe didn’t remember. Perhaps they had been the frauds. Perhaps he himself had never drawn breath in Ireland.
What he knew: he had been raised in the Dolbeer Home for Destitute Children. He’d been lonely all his remembered life. He had an aunt Rose—but maybe she was no relative, which was why she so easily renounced him once she had a family of her own. (He thought in a searing moment: What if he was on the right track but the wrong pony? Who was that lady who said he was his aunt? She could be—
—No, Joe. Claim one woman at a time. But he knew, and the pain it caused him made him believe he deserved anything he claimed.)
He’d keep Jeptha if it suited him, Mother Arrison.
After seven months a man who said he was Nahum Truitt arrived in Salford, holding on to an old newspaper as though it were proof of identity. The Providence Journal, not the Orono Messenger. “Live on Vinalhaven, you hear of it?” the man said. “Island off Rockland. How this thing got over there I do not know. Ferry? In the belly of a whale? I minister at the Church of the Woods. You hear of it? Not all my life. I were a fisher of fish before I were a fisher of men. How I ended up on the island. The real fish drew me there. But then I had an experience. You see? Came to know. Came to understand. I can see as I look at you,” he said, “you’ve had some hard times your ownself.”
“Listen,” said Joe Wear. “How—do you mind—how old a man are you?”
“Not so young as you think. The salt air’s preserved me!”
Preserved, thought Joe Wear, in the way of beef jerky. He was a tall gray-bearded fellow in a minister’s collar, weathered as old clapboard. A feral man, as though he’d been found in the woods and cleaned up, beard pruned, burrs combed from his sideburns, forced into a suit and pushed into society. He blinked like a circus bear; his hands were brown as paws. The only youthful thing about him was the pure density of his gray hair.
The godliness was beyond belief, but not so beyond as everything else: his height, his tiny yellow brown eyes, the pink beneath the leather of his cheeks, and the fact—so far as Joe Wear could tell—that he was a good ten years older than Bertha Truitt. One thing for sure: Dr. Sprague was not his father. He was a big unruly white man.
“You got kids?” the man who said he was Nahum Truitt asked Joe Wear.
“Bachelor. You?”
“Grown and gone, much to the unhappiness of their ma.”
“Who raised you?”
“My ma.”
“And—well, who was that?”
Nahum quirked his head. “Your lady employer. Bertha Truitt. Till I were grown. Well, I thought so. We had an argument. Had I been less stubborn we would have spent our lives together. Had she been less stubborn. She would have known the love of her grandchildren, and the love of a daughter in the form of my wife. But I were fifteen and thought I could look after myself. And you know what?”
“Tell me,” said Joe Wear.
“I could! More’s the sorrow. I regret it, I do. I regret the reason.” He leaned across the wood of the counter. “The Negro,” he said. “She intended to marry him. She said, ‘He will be your father.’ Well, sir, my mother herself raised me without a bit of God. She raised me hard-hearted and hardheaded and hateful, may she rest in her peace. I found the family Bible propping open a window and I took it out of spite. So I were a sinner when I walked away and I am now as you find me.” He touched his collar. “Now I would forgive her. I do forgive her. God has forgiven her, too.”
“He was a fine man,” said Joe Wear, who felt grieved to realize this was true. “None better.” That might not have been. Joe himself: he was not a good man, he was looking in a mirror and it was awful.
“Drank,” said Nahum.
“Well.”
“I partook myself before I found my way. I forgive him for that. I realize now indeed the brotherhood of all men, and that it is a sin to despise a person for the color of his skin. God made us all. Nossir, I realize now, I disliked that fellow for other reasons entire.”
“What about your father?”
The man was silent. Finally he said, “I’ll leave Our Lord God to judge him. Bertha Truitt raised me, named me Nahum. About a year in there she thought she were a Mormon.”
“Truitt did?”
“Our Bertha. Had me baptized through a hole in the ice in Joeson City, Michigan. Plunged in herself right after. Didn’t take except I do believe the cold got in my veins. Therefore Maine. You’ve been to the state of Maine?”
“You have a sister,” said Joe Wear.
“Been told so,” said Nahum, narrowing his narrow eyes. “But I don’t know about that. I am here to know our Bertha. I am here to know who she knew, to shake the hands she shook. I come down to give the place a lookover before we decide to up and move. See if this place needs Nahum Truitt, you understand.”
Joe Wear was doing the math and it didn’t seem possible, not any of it. He picked up a pencil; he didn’t write the numbers down but it helped to doodle as he added in his head. Minna was fifteen now, or thereabouts. No, not possible that she and this fellow had the same mother. There had to be forty years between them.
No God, Mormon God: he couldn’t even keep his story straight. Some con man come down from Maine in a fake dog collar to seem respectable. Saw the ad. Figured there was money in it. Amazing, really, there was only one fraud.
There had almost been two, Joe reminded himself.
“She were terrible young, she had me,” said Nahum. “If you’re doing the math. She were fifteen and a sinner. God has forgiven her. And as I am now fifty years of age, she were sixty-four at her untimely demise three years ago.”
“She never was,” said Joe Wear.
“But she were,” said Nahum.
He pulled from some drawer or cabinet in his greatcoat a book clad in dark green leather, gilt at the edges. “Look here.” HOLY BIBLE said the cover. Joe Wear had always thought the actual title must be something longer, and HOLY BIBLE just a nickname, but there it was. Nahum opened the cover. There, in Truitt’s inimitable handwriting, was her own name. Flourishes and serifs, a rehearsed signature, ready for contracts and admirers. Bertha Truitt, born 1855 at—
But the place of her birth had been scratched out. Indeed, the entire family tree had been bowdlerized. That she had parents was inarguable, but they were listed only as Mother and Daddy. Daddy had died in 1861. Neither had birth dates. Beneath the blue of Bertha’s pen you could see the faded loops of somebody else’s. Joe took the book and flipped through, to see whether Bertha had likewise corrected the Bible, or had inserted herself into some of the more thrilling stories, but she hadn’t.
“Where’s your name?” Joe asked, looking again at the back, Bertha Truitt, a few other names at the edges of the family tree, Sissy and Bachman and Anthony. A forgery? No, nobody else could draw such a B, with such vigorous ringlets.
“Lost interest,” said Nahum Truitt. “Far as I know she never did read the good book. Propping up a window, as I said. Luckiest break I ever got. So,” he said. “I am most ignorant of bowling. You’ll enlighten me?”
At night Joe sat at the kitchen table and let the black-and-white cat pace the top, butting up against him. What was at the corner of a cat’s mouth, that they needed so much affection focused there? Never mind. He did not think the cat was the ghost of Leviticus Sprague, as some of the bowlers suggested, but he did believe the spirits were acquainted.
The man who
said he was Nahum Truitt had no interest in The Game, not the business side nor the playing of it. He would say, when Joe Wear explained something to him, “I understand only the souls of men.” Sometimes he’d watch the bowlers and examine their movements with such intensity he ruined the game. You almost thought he was studying how to be a human man. He took a room at the YMCA down the street, though Joe Wear offered the apartment. “You pay rent?” asked Nahum. After a moment, Joe said, “Part of my wages.” “Well then, no need,” said Nahum, “moreover: the place has a case of cats.”
“This is till we get settled elsewhere,” he said sometimes, or “Till we decide for sure concerning the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” He referred, always, to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the State of Maine. Either he felt there was a strong distinction, or he just liked the lard of extra words. We was royal, or referred to him and his wife back in Maine, or the partnership of Nahum Truitt and God: there was no telling. His beard thickened. The stand of his hair seemed to be cut daily, but from a distance. He gave up his minister’s collar and took to wearing dark pants and a vest striped like mattress ticking. He drew no salary from Truitt’s Alleys.
“That’s all right, boss,” he’d say to Joe Wear. “You just put it in the bank.”
He’d vanish for weeks then show back up, sometimes wilder and sometimes barbered. “A great success!” he’d tell Joe Wear. “Our revival. We saved dozens of souls up in the State of Maine. Oh, at first they resisted, at first they clung to their bottles and their gambling, to their sin, to their darkness—isn’t that a terrible thing, Joe Wear, how the darkness fools you into thinking it’s a boon, fools you into thinking it’s interesting—but they come to us eventual! Hundreds!”
“I thought you said dozens.”
“I reckon hundreds,” said Nahum Truitt.
At any moment, Nahum Truitt might drift away, end up on a boat or in the belly of a whale, go back to the Church of the Woods and his Wife of the Woods and whatever else (children, grandchildren, a lobster farm) was in the Goddamn Woods. Nobody believed that this so-called Nahum Truitt was a child of Bertha’s. The height of him, the denunciations, the way he talked. You could die of boredom. You longed to. They imagined Nahum Truitt would close the bowling alley and convert it to a storefront church, or a mission.
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