Robin’s Aunt Fay was in the kitchen frying chicken when he walked in.
Fried chicken, corn on the cob with crock butter, pickled squash and first-crop tomatoes, biscuits as big as a man’s fist—at least the Thirteenth Apostolates believed in eating well, to keep up their strength for prayer meetings, knocking on doors and bracing natives in the bush, and Aunt Fay was the best cook in the Lambeth Sanctuary.
In general their strict religion was kinder to the women, who labored like pioneers but saw the beauty of life reflected in their children; the men, who as wage-earners were more exposed to the wickedness and deceit of the world, often were guarded and humorless, even around each other.
“Did you win?” Fay asked him.
“Uh-huh.” He glanced at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, which was set for dinner. That was his job, but the game had started late. “I’m sorry it took so long.”
“That’s all right, Robin. Ellis called from Washington, he won’t be home before eight. So you have a half hour to get cleaned up and read Scripture.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Robin looked at the right-hand top of the refrigerator where the mail would be, if there was any, specifically one of the tissue-weight light blue airmail envelopes from overseas. It had been nearly two months this time.
“No, nothing today,” Fay Tidrow said with a sympathetic smile.
“That could mean he’s coming home,” Robin said, feeling suddenly jittery with anticipation; this time it was more than just a hunch, or wishful thinking. He had become expert at divining the meaning of non-communication on the part of his father.
Sometimes The Commander was so busy he couldn’t write, or if he had time to write then he was in a part of the world where it took weeks just to get a letter out. Robin’s father had been a naval officer; now he worked as a hydrologist for a government agency, which sent him to places Robin had trouble locating even on the detailed maps of his Rand McNally International Atlas. Water was life, and apparently there was plenty of fresh water to be had in the world. A seven-thousand-year supply less than a mile below the surface of the United States; a prehistoric lake the size of England and Wales combined trapped underneath the Sahara Desert.
Putting all this water to use was his father’s job, and it was important and interesting work. Unfortunately he was able to spend only four or five weeks a year at home. Robin and his father had learned how to make the time count, so that looking forward to The Commander’s return relieved the austere months of church meetings and Bible study and no movies or television.
And his father always needed the closeness and the fun as badly as Robin did; sometimes when he returned he was gaunt from poor food or illness.
Last year Robin had suffered through the longest stretch yet, five months without a word. When at last The Commander arrived Robin was shocked to see him. He was only thirty-seven, but his hair was turning silver. There’d been an accident on the job, followed by weeks in a primitive hospital. He bore, across one set of ribs and down to the small of his back, a rippled bad scar, as if from a stuttering blade.
So they didn’t do anything really strenuous during the Caribbean vacation that followed. In Tortola they chartered a forty-one-foot sloop. The weather held blue and perfect. They explored St. John’s, Virgin Gorda and the Horse Shoe Reefs. Two divers, tank-saddled, awkward as horseless knights before the plunge, performing steeply in the moody blues beneath the maelstrom in the airless eye of heaven. Briny cogitations of brain-coral. Regiments of little checkered flicker-fish. Wrack-ribbed schooner and crusted iron. Dropsical octopus like a leathery leaf blowing across the bottom sand. The Commander made superb conch chowder and cheeseburgers. Robin was active, courteous, good-humored and eager to please. He worked hard to make fatherhood effortless. Even so it was more than a week before all of his father’s strength and his low-key sense of humor returned; gradually the night sweats and tormenting dreams ceased.…
“Robin,” Fay said gently for the third time, finally getting through. Robin gave his head a shake and looked up at her.
“Don’t you want to get started on your bath?”
“I was just thinking about—”
“I know. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he decided to stop traveling, take a less demanding job. But we all have our mission in life, Robin. Think of the lives that have been saved. Hunger. Famine. Pestilence. Drought. Those are your father’s enemies. We can be proud.”
Robin dawdled in the bathroom, soaping and scrubbing only when he heard the door of Ellis Tidrow’s junker car slam, and he was late getting to the table; a couple of beads of water slid along the angle of his jaw as he unfolded his napkin and bowed his head. Ellis Tidrow looked at him with glum forbearance, recited Scripture at length and added his own prayers.
Tidrow was a long shy nervous man who talked with downcast eyes, often rubbing his high forehead in distraction if the conversation went on too long. He regarded even the ordinary occurrences of daily life as a series of curses. “We’re cursed with a rainy day,” he would remark upon arising and looking out. Or, “We’re cursed with that dog again,” when the neighbors’ Collie came around to see what Robin was up to. He handled finances for Thirteenth Apostolate missions, working out of the church’s international headquarters, which were located on the edge of a Washington slum. But he yearned to be in the field, preaching to the heathen.
Dinner wasn’t over when Fran Marshall appeared at the back screen, fluttering there like a giant moth. Fay invited her in.
Fran was tense and pale; her eyes went to Robin and stayed on him.
“I hate to bother y’all like this, but we’re havin’ just a awful time with Brian, and maybe if Robin could talk to him like he did those other times—”
“We have Vigil tonight,” Ellis Tidrow said firmly.
“It isn’t strictly necessary for the children to attend,” Fay reminded him. “And if Robin can be of any help to that poor little child—”
“Sure,” Robin said eagerly.
“Prayer is the only answer for a child like that,” Tidrow explained, reasonably he thought, while Fran stood on one foot and then the other, embarrassed.
She was a tall Blue Ridge Mountain girl with blonde hair so lank it looked runny. Just eighteen, already she had two children, the oldest of whom was the autistic Brian, and she was at least five months pregnant again, showing up big in the homely summer dress she wore. She might at least have taken the trouble to put on some underwear before rushing into his house, Tidrow thought.
He looked at Robin, again trying to evaluate the mysterious quality that attracted people to him. Jehovah had denied Ellis Tidrow children of his own, then further frustrated him by placing in his care a boy who was reckless, troublesome and headstrong. Tidrow had good reason to believe that, if Robin was not totally godless yet, he was a budding heretic. Perhaps it was a blessing that Robin seemed to have some influence over Brian Marshall, but Tidrow was prey to doubts. He was terrified of any kind of mental illness. There were Dark Legions at work in the afflicted; our state hospitals were piled high with the victims of Satan’s whims. You who would heal, read your Bible and know the truth! If Robin so easily communicated with the otherwise unreachable Brian, it could be devil’s work. And Robin did have red hair, a most mournful sign.
Tidrow sometimes dreamed uneasy dreams about his red-haired charge; once he had awakened with a taut erection and an outpouring, even though he’d never been able to sustain an erection long enough to impregnate his wife. Devil’s guile … and devil’s laughter in the bare orderly rooms of his mind. Prayer was his salvation. Intense, scouring prayer.
He yielded to the silent pleading of the women and gave a quick nod in Robin’s direction. Robin, grateful to escape the grinding repetition of Wednesday night Vigil, hopped up and was out the door just behind Franny.
For a woman with her center of gravity distended, Fran was light-footed; Robin caught up to her only after they crossed the road. They walked the rest of the way side
by side, Fran breathing hard and trying not to get off on a crying binge.
Robin didn’t know what to say, so he took her hand. She held him very tightly.
The Marshalls owned six acres of woodlot and boggy meadow. They lived on a grassless plot under shade trees, the crowns of which looked high as clouds in the night sky. The house, from the outside, was a twin of the house in which the Tidrows lived, but without the Italianate lean. Inside there were treasures. Both Fran and her husband Whit were descendants of mountain people who had sold their heritage for fifty cents an acre to coal and timber interests, but they had passed on a love of craft to their offspring.
Robin heard Brian long before they got to the house; tonight it was the peculiar chanting cry which usually accompanied his “rounds.” He would walk a very nearly perfect circle, exactly six and a half feet in diameter (Whit had measured), speeding up the walk at intervals with a kind of jog-step-skip. He was capable of maintaining the ritual for hours, until he fell over gray and soggy from exhaustion, as exhausted as his bewildered parents.
He was on the long back porch which Whit had shored up and glassed in to take advantage of sunny winter days. Whit and Fran kept their workbenches on the porch, along with an assortment of broken-down antiques, odds and ends of junk and barrels of discarded clothing, all of which they turned into dazzling artifacts. Whit made tables and chairs and hourglass dulcimers and open-back banjos. Fran made sweaters from Collie dog hair spun on her ancient flax wheel, Star-of-Bethlehem quilts that brought three hundred dollars apiece in the cities, and such traditional mountain items as artificial flowers from wood shavings and maple-split baskets colored with dyes boiled from walnut or pulcoon root.
Robin was always happy to hang around the porch, and he’d learned to make a few things himself, such as gourd birdhouses and corncob pigs; Whit had promised to show him how to construct a whimmydiddle. But that was a complicated toy, and what with teaching at a college across the border in Maryland and trying to find medical help for Brian, Whit had very little free time any more.
The baby, Bernice, was crying in her cradle in another room. Fran looked despairingly at Brian and went to pick up Bernice. Whit tugged at his vast beard and rocked and stared at Robin with drowned blue eyes. Whit was having a few beers to help him manage his distress.
“Brian was making good progress,” Whit muttered. “He really was.”
Robin didn’t say anything. He sat cross-legged on the floor near Brian. Obviously Brian had done it in his pants again. For a while there he hadn’t been doing it in his pants, and responding to simple verbal commands. Now he was back to a familiar pattern and crying out helplessly.
Robin felt sad because Brian was sane and bright and beautiful, and because he knew what Brian himself knew, that Brian was doomed. And that was the reason for the frantic making of rounds, the slamming of the same door over and over again, or the repetitious clenching and unclenching of hands while he sat with his back to a wall, ignoring all attempts to distract him. These were Brian’s methods of trying to solve the enormous riddle of the inside self and the outside self, his attempts to push the right buttons as Whit pushed buttons on his typewriter and produced something coherent from the mental and physical collaboration. But Brian would never never be able to do it.
During his Visits Robin could perform simple tasks for him. When Robin took control Brian dressed and undressed skillfully, bathed or fed himself. But after the Visit ended and Robin withdrew, Brian was as perplexed as ever. He could imitate the Robin-self for a while, but always something went wrong: as the cells of the body eventually lose their ability to duplicate themselves perfectly, Brian’s brain soon produced only the most bizarre examples of rote. He could not easily feed himself, or remember to take down his pants at toilet time, but he could go around and around in monotonously exact circles.
Robin could not have told anyone how he managed a Visit. Of course separation was easier in his own bed at the end of a tiring day, just as he felt himself drifting off to sleep. In that state he could Visit almost anywhere. Fully awake he’d never been able to do it so completely with anyone but Brian, who lacked defenses of any kind, and absorbed much more stimuli than he could cope with. Robin’s technique for projection was to mold thought into thought-force and then mentally pitch it; when he really wanted to he could make an impression on even the most rigid mind, just as if he were lobbing a rubber ball dipped in paint against a concrete wall. With more receptive people it was like throwing his thought-ball at a picket fence, occasionally having it sail between the pickets. When that happened Robin often got startled looks that made him grin.
For a few minutes Brian didn’t acknowledge him at all as he made his rounds, but Robin patiently kept bouncing the ball his way, and after several returns he cleanly entered Brian’s mind.
As usual he was nearly swamped by the violent wave energy, the drowning boy attempting to smother his rescuer, but he’d become adept at holding Brian off until he had the chance to harmonize all that dissonance and disengage Brian from the rounding impulse. That took time and effort, and meanwhile the body continued to skip and jog and the voice chanted hoarsely.
A couple of times Robin glanced at himself, sitting outside the circle Indian-fashion with his head down and his eyes closed, lips a white line, perspiration rolling down his brindle cheeks, but he was too busy to pay much attention to the physical body, and it was no longer a novelty to gaze upon himself from a distance. He began to tune and regulate the intensely disorganized brainwave patterns, imposing his own quieter and slower rhythms on the overburdened thalamus.
Before long Brian slowed to a trudge. The chanting stopped and was replaced by a low cry.
“Daz!” Brian said over and over, meaning: Dad. Robin aimed Brian at his father, where he clung to Whit’s knee perhaps too tenaciously, almost paralyzed. But it was better than making rounds.
Robin regretfully withdrew as Franny came back with the baby on her hip.
She glanced at Brian and bent to kiss Robin’s wet forehead. He looked up at her, dazed.
“I just don’t know how you do it,” she said.
Whit took the newly docile Brian off to bathe and change him for bed, although he was at the point in his drinking where he needed a little help himself.
Fran yawned and turned off lights, making the porch dark; she smiled sweetly and distantly at Robin. Robin excused himself and left.
But he lingered in the woodlot for several minutes, staying to hear Fran sing softly to Bernice as she rocked the baby in her arms. He perceived her, as if reflected in the eyelight of his torrid devotion, moving slowly within the glass, hair twisting down her back and pale as the pith of a tree struck by lightning.
Robin was astonished to find that the Tidrows had been to Vigil and returned, which meant he had spent nearly two hours with Brian. No wonder he could barely keep his eyes open. His aunt was scrubbing the kitchen floor, cheerful despite the fumes. She had saved two biscuits from dinner, and Robin devoured them with generous helpings of plum preserves. He explained that Brian was doing better now. Fay nodded and beamed at him. Her hands were redder than his sunburned nose. Robin wished she wasn’t down on her knees doing a floor that didn’t need doing very badly anyway, and he felt a pang of remorse.
Fay caught a flash of this emotion and looked up again.
“I’ll finish it for you in the morning,” he offered, but Fay said no, it was her work, thank you, Robin.
He wondered how she could go on living with and drudging for a man who offered so little in return. Robin, who knew a lot of things without having to be told, understood why they didn’t have children.
What always happened to him when he played with his prick in the tub or in bed almost never happened to Ellis Tidrow. He didn’t know what the problem was, but there was deep shame in it for a man. But Fay generously accepted this failing, and did without her brood, and tried not to overwhelm Robin with all the love she was meant to lavish on a houseful of ki
ds. Her religion truly meant something to her, and she was ennobled by it. Her husband, on the other hand, dug into his Bible like a cave, burrowing away from life, which he hated. He wanted only one thing from life, and that was his Heavenly reward for having endured it.
Robin had once tried to have a sensible conversation with Tidrow on a subject that Robin found complex and fascinating. He framed a metaphor that wasn’t bad for someone his age. I put on my uniform, he said, and I go down to the Little League park and I play a game, and for six innings I don’t think about anything much except the game and how it comes out. It’s my whole life, I’m really serious about it. Then we win or lose, and I make a couple of dumb mistakes I hate myself for and need time to think about, but the game is over, and all I can do is take off the uniform and wait. There’ll be another game any time I want to play, and next time I know I’ll do better.
So what if, Robin said, I’m sitting here and talking to you, and this is what we think is life, but it isn’t, really, it’s just that we’re wearing these bodies because it’s part of the equipment we need to play a certain kind of game, one you have to make up as you go along. But some day this game will be over, and when it is we’ll take off our bodies and rest a while, maybe talk it over, with some friends who have been there too. Then after we’ve had, like, a good night’s sleep, only it could last a hundred years, we’ll leave wherever we are and find another body so we can play again. We won’t remember anything about the last game we were in or the one before it, and we won’t think about all the games we have left to—
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