by Stephen King
Peter told her about his day and she responded with the right questions. He was a machinist in a large Sanford auto parts firm, the largest auto parts firm north of Boston. He was sixty-four and about to start on his last year of work before retirement. A short year at that, because he had four weeks’ vacation time stockpiled, which he planned to take in September, after the “ijits” went home.
His voice switched from topic to topic, mellow and soothing. Their shadows grew longer, moving up the rows before them. She was lulled by it, as she always had been. She had come here to tell him something, but since earliest childhood she had often come to tell and stayed to listen. He didn’t bore her. So far as she knew, he didn’t bore anyone, except possibly her mother. He was a storyteller, and a good one.
She became aware that he had stopped talking. He was sitting on a rock at the end of his row, tamping his pipe and looking at her.
“What’s on your mind, Frannie?”
She looked at him dumbly for a moment, not sure how she should proceed. She had come out here to tell him, and now she wasn’t sure if she could. The silence hung between them, growing larger, and at last it was a gulf she couldn’t stand. She jumped.
“I’m pregnant,” she said simply.
He stopped filling his pipe and just looked at her. “Pregnant,” he said, as if he had never heard the word before. Then he said: “Oh, Frannie . . . is it a joke? Or a game?”
“No, Daddy.”
“Come over here.”
Obediently, she came up the row and sat next to him. There was a rock wall that divided their land from the town common next door. Beyond the rock wall was a tangled, sweet-smelling hedge that had long ago run wild in the most amiable way. Her head was pounding and she felt a little sick to her stomach.
“For sure?” he asked her.
“For sure,” she said, and then—there was no artifice in it, not a trace, she simply couldn’t help it—she began to cry in great, braying sobs. He held her with one arm for what seemed to be a very long time. When her tears began to taper off, she forced herself to ask the question that troubled her the most.
“Daddy, do you still like me?”
“What?” He looked at her, puzzled. “Yes. I still like you fine, Frannie.”
That made her cry again, but this time he let her tend herself while he got his pipe going. Borkum Riff began to ride slowly off on the faint breeze.
“Are you disappointed?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I never had a pregnant daughter before and am not sure just how I should take it. Was it that Jess?”
She nodded.
“You told him?”
She nodded again.
“What did he say?”
“He said he would marry me. Or pay for an abortion.”
“Marriage or abortion,” Peter Goldsmith said, and drew on his pipe. “He’s a regular two-gun Sam.”
She looked down at her hands, splayed on her jeans. There was dirt in the small creases of the knuckles and dirt under the nails. A lady’s hands proclaim her habits, the mental mother spoke up. A pregnant daughter. I’ll have to resign my membership in the church. A lady’s hands—
Her father said: “I don’t want to get any more personal than I have to, but wasn’t he ... or you . . . being careful?”
“I had birth control pills,” she said. “They didn’t work.”
“Then I can’t put any blame, unless it’s on both of you,” he said, looking at her closely. “And I can’t do that, Frannie. I can’t lay blame. Sixty-four has a way of forgetting what twenty-one was like. So we won’t talk about blame.”
She felt a great relief come over her, and it was a little like swooning.
“Your mother will have plenty to say about blame,” he said, “and I won’t stop her, but I won’t be with her. Do you understand that?” She nodded. Her father never tried to oppose her mother anymore. Not out loud. She had a sharp tongue and when she was opposed it sometimes got out of control, he had told Frannie once. And when it was out of control, she just might take a notion to cut anyone with it and think of sorry too late to do the wounded much good. Frannie had an idea that her father might have faced a choice many years ago: continued opposition resulting in divorce, or surrender. He had chosen surrender—but on his own terms.
She asked quietly: “Are you sure you can stay out of this one, Daddy?”
“You asking me to take your part, Fran?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“With Mom?”
“No. With you, Frannie.”
“I don’t know.”
“Marry him? Two can live as cheap as one, that’s what they say, anyway.”
“I don’t think I can do that. I think I’ve fallen out of love with him, if I was ever in.”
“The baby?” His pipe was drawing well now, and the smoke was sweet on the summer air. Shadows were gathering in the garden’s hollows, and the crickets were beginning to hum.
“No, the baby isn’t the reason why. It was happening anyway. Jessie is . . She trailed off, trying to put her finger on what was wrong with Jessie, the thing that could be overlooked by the rush the baby was putting on her. The thing that could be buried now but would nonetheless rest unquiet for six months, sixteen months, or twenty-six, only to rise finally from its grave and attack them both. Marry in haste, repent in leisure. One of her mother’s favorite sayings. “He’s weak,” she said. “I can’t explain better than that.”
“You don’t really trust him to do right by you, do you, Frannie?” “No,” she said, thinking that her father had just gotten closer to the root of it than she had. She didn’t trust Jessie, who came from money and wore blue chambray workshirts.
“Don’t let your mother change your mind, then.”
She closed her eyes, her relief even greater this time. He had understood. By some miracle.
“What do you think of me getting an abortion?” she asked after a while.
“Listen,” he said, and then fell paradoxically silent. But she was listening and she heard a sparrow, crickets, the far high hum of a plane, someone calling for Jackie to come on in now, a power mower, a car with a glasspack muffler accelerating down US 1.
She was just about to ask him if he was all right when he took her hand and spoke.
“Frannie, you’ve no business having such an old man for a father, but I can’t help it. I never married until 1941, just before I went into the war. I was a little older than some of the others that went after Pearl Harbor. Some of them called me Pop. Your mother and I didn’t get much chance for baby-making before I was shipped away. I got a two-day pass in October of 1942 and didn’t see her again until the war was over. When it was all over I got my good job over in Sanford and we . . . well, we settled down.”
He looked at her thoughtfully in the dusklight.
“Carla was different in those days. She didn’t change until your brother Freddy died. Until then, she was young. She stopped growing after Freddy died. She slapped three coats of lacquer and one of quick-dry cement on her way of looking at things and called it good. Now she’s like a guard in a museum of ideas, and if she sees anyone tampering with the exhibits, she gives them a lot of look-out-below. But she wasn’t always like that.”
“What was she like, Daddy?”
“Why . . .’’He looked vaguely out across the garden. “She was a lot like you, Frannie. She got the giggles. We used to go down to Boston to see the Red Sox play and during the seventh-inning stretch she’d go out with me to the concession and have a beer.”
“Mamma . . . drank beer?”
“Yes, she did. And she’d spend most of the ninth in the ladies’ and come out cussing me for making her miss the best part of the game.”
Frannie tried to imagine her mother with a cup of Narragansett beer in one hand, looking up at her father and laughing, like a girl on a date. She simply couldn’t do it.
“We tried for a lo
ng time to make a baby. Then, in ’52, there came your brother Fred. She just about loved that boy to death, Fran. She had a miscarriage in ’55 and we both figured that was the end. Then you came along in ’59, a month early but just fine. And I just about loved you to death. We each had one of our own. But she lost hers.”
He fell silent, brooding. Fred Goldsmith had died in 1965. He had been thirteen, Frannie six. The man who hit Fred had been drunk. He had a long list of traffic violations, including speeding, driving so as to endanger, and driving under the influence. Fred had lived seven days.
“I think abortion’s too clean a name for it,” Peter Goldsmith said. “I told you I was an old man.”
“You’re not old, Daddy,” she murmured.
“I am, I am!” he said roughly. “I’m an old man trying to give a young daughter advice, and it’s like a monkey trying to teach table manners to a bear. A drunk driver took my son’s life fifteen years ago and my wife has never been the same since. I’ve always seen the question of abortion in terms of Fred. I seem to be helpless to see it any other way. Your mother would argue against it for all the standard reasons. Morality, she’d say. A morality that goes back two thousand years. The right to life. All our Western morality is based on that idea. I’ve read the philosophers. I range up and down them like a housewife with a dividend check in the Sears and Roebuck store. Your mother sticks with the Reader’s Digest, but it’s me that ends up arguing from feeling and her from the codes of morality. I just see Fred. He was destroyed inside. There was no chance for him. These right-to-life biddies hold up their pictures of babies drowned in salt, of arms and legs scraped out onto a steel table, so what? The end of a life is never pretty. I just see Fred, lying in that bed for seven days, everything that was ruined pasted over with bandages. Life is cheap, abortion makes it cheaper. Not much help, huh?”
“I don’t want an abortion,” she said quietly. “For my-own reasons.”
“What are they?”
“It’s partly me,” she said, lifting her chin slightly.
“Will you give it up, Frannie?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to?”
“No. I want to keep it.”
He was silent. She thought she felt his disapproval.
“You’re thinking of school, aren’t you?” she asked.
“No,” he said, standing up. He put his hands in the small of his back and grimaced pleasurably as his spine crackled. “I was thinking we’ve talked enough. And that you don’t have to make that decision just yet.”
“Mom’s home,” she said.
He turned to follow her gaze as the station wagon turned into the drive, the chrome winking in the day’s last light. Carla saw them, beeped the horn, and waved cheerily.
“I have to tell her,” Frannie said.
“Yes. But give it a day or two, Frannie.”
“All right.”
She helped him pick up the gardening tools and then they walked up toward the station wagon together.
Chapter 7
“Just roll up your sleeve, Mr. Redman,” the pretty nurse with the dark hair said. “This won’t take a minute.” She was holding the blood pressure cuff in two gloved hands. Behind the plastic face mask she was smiling as if they shared an amusing secret.
“No,” Stu said.
The smile faltered a little. “It’s only your blood pressure. It won’t take a minute.”
“No.”
“Doctor’s orders,” she said, becoming businesslike. “Please.”
“If it’s doctor’s orders, let me talk to the doctor.”
“I’m afraid he’s busy right now. If you’ll just—”
“I’ll wait,” Stu said equably, making no move to unbutton his cuff.
“This is only my job. You don’t want me to get in trouble, do you?” This time she gave him a charming-waif smile. “If you’ll only let me—”
“I won’t,” Stu said. “Go back and tell them. They’ll send somebody.”
Looking troubled, the nurse went across to the steel door and turned a square key in a lockplate. The pump kicked on, the door shooshed open, and she stepped through. As it closed, she gave Stu a final reproachful look. Stu gazed back blandly.
When the door was closed, he got up and went restlessly to the window—double-paned glass and barred on the outside—but it was full dark now and there was nothing to see. He went back and sat down. He was wearing faded jeans and a checked shirt and his brown boots with the stitching beginning to bulge up the sides. He ran a hand up the side of his face and winced disapprovingly at the prickle. They wouldn’t let him shave, and he haired up fast.
He had no objection to the tests themselves. What he objected to was being kept in the dark, kept scared. He wasn’t sick, at least not yet, but scared plenty. There was some sort of snow job going on here, and he wasn’t going to be a party to it anymore until somebody told him something about what had happened in Arnette and what that fellow Campion had to do with it. At least then he could base his fears on something solid.
They had expected him to ask before now, he could read it in their eyes. They have certain ways of keeping things from you in hospitals. Four years ago his wife had died of cancer at the age of twenty-seven, it had started in her womb and then just raced up through her like wildfire, and Stu had observed the way they got around her questions, either by changing the subject or giving her information in large, technical lumps. So he simply hadn’t asked, and he could see it had worried them. Now it was time to ask, and he would get some answers. In words of one syllable.
He could fill in some of the blank spots on his own. Campion and his wife and child had something pretty bad. It hit you like the flu or a summer cold, only it kept on getting worse, presumably until you choked to death on your own phlegm or until the fever burned you down. It was highly contagious.
They had come and got him on the afternoon of the seventeenth, two days ago. Four army men and a doctor. Polite but firm. There was no question of declining; all four of the army men had been wearing sidearms. That was when Stu Redman started being seriously scared.
There had been a regular caravan going out of Arnette and over to the airstrip in Braintree. Stu had been riding with Vic Palfrey, Hap, the Bruetts, Hank Carmichael and his wife, and two army officers. They were all crammed into an army station wagon, and the army guys wouldn’t say boo no matter how hysterical Lila Bruett got.
The other wagons were crammed, too. Stu hadn’t seen all the people in them, but he had seen all five of the Hodges family, and Chris Ortega, brother of Carlos, the volunteer ambulance driver. Chris was the bartender down at the Indian Head. He had seen Parker Nason and his wife, the elderly people from the trailer park near Stu’s house. Stu guessed that they had netted up everyone who had been in the gas station and everyone that the people from the gas station said they’d talked to since Campion crashed into the pumps.
At the town limits there had been two olive-green trucks blocking the road. Stu guessed the other roads going into Amette might be blocked off, too. They were stringing barbed wire, and when they had the town fenced off they would probably post sentries.
So it was serious. Deadly serious.
He sat patiently in the chair by the hospital bed he hadn’t had to use, waiting for the nurse to bring someone. The someone would try giving him the runaround first. Maybe by morning they would finally bring him a someone who would have enough authority to tell him the things he needed to know. He was a patient man.
For something to do, he began to tick over the conditions of the people who had ridden to the airstrip with him. Norm had been the only obvious sick one. Coughing, bringing up phlegm, feverish. The rest of them seemed to be suffering to a greater or lesser degree from the common cold. Luke Bruett was sneezing. Lila and Vic Palfrey had mild coughs. Hap had the sniffles and kept blowing his nose. They hadn’t sounded much different from the first-and second-grade classes Stu remembered attending as a little boy, w
hen at least two thirds of the kids present seemed to have some kind of a bug.
But the thing that scared him most of all—and maybe it was only coincidence—was what had happened just as they were turning onto the airstrip. The army driver had let out three sudden bellowing sneezes. Probably just coincidence. June was a bad time in east-central Texas for people with allergies. Or maybe the driver was just coming down with a common, garden-variety cold. Because something that could jump from one person to another that quickly . . .
Their army escort had boarded the plane with them. They rode stolidly, refusing to answer any questions except as to destination. They were going to Atlanta. They would be told more there (a baldfaced lie). Beyond that, the army men refused to say.
Hap had been sitting next to Stu on the flight, and he was pretty well sloshed. The plane was army too, strictly functional, but the booze and the food had been first-class airline stuff. Of course, instead of being served by a pretty stewardess, a plank-faced sergeant took your order, but if you could overlook that, you could get along pretty well. Even Lila Bruett had calmed down with a couple of grasshoppers in her.
Hap leaned close, bathing Stu in a warm mist of scotch fumes. “This is a pretty funny bunch of ole boys, Stuart. Ain’t a one of em under fifty, nor one with a weddin ring. Career boys, low rank.”
About half an hour before they touched down, Norm Bruett had some kind of a fainting spell and Lila Bruett began to scream. Two of the hard-faced stewards bundled Norm into a blanket and brought him around in fairly short order. Lila, no longer calm, continued to scream. After a while she threw up her grasshoppers and the chicken salad sandwich she had eaten. Two of the good ole boys went expressionlessly about the job of cleaning it up.
“What is all this?” Lila screamed. “What’s wrong with my man? Are we going to die? Are my babies going to die?” She had one “baby” in a headlock under each arm, their heads digging into her plentiful breasts. Luke and Bobby looked frightened and uncomfortable and rather embarrassed at the fuss she was making.
