by Larry Watson
“But I was probably too young and dumb to die. I recovered, but I wasn’t too quick about it. For days just climbing those cellar steps was all I could handle. I sort of lost track of time for a while there, and I’m still not sure how long I stayed at the farm. Maybe a couple weeks. I guess I don’t have to tell you I had a reason for staying beyond getting my strength back.”
Here’s a man for you, Beverly thinks. The sheets haven’t even cooled, and he’s yakking about his dead wife. Maybe his silence wasn’t so bad. Yet she wants him to go on. She’s seen more softness in him telling the tale of his scars than when he was braced above her in bed.
“That’s when it happened?” Beverly asks. “You and Pauline?”
Calvin casts a baleful eye in her direction, and Beverly thinks, Oh God, now I’ve done it; I’ve broken the spell. I’m allowed to moan in his ear, but I’m not worthy of speaking her name.
In another moment, however, he continues with his story, though Beverly thinks she detects a slight alteration in his tone: His voice had dropped dangerously close to his heart, and now he lifts it back up again.
“When it came time for me to try to rejoin the troops, a good portion of the Allied army was waiting just over the hill, and the German forces were hightailing it back to their own territory. The war was petering out and soldiers on both sides were running around in every direction. My unit welcomed me back, and it wasn’t long before I was back on the lines, back in the trenches. When officers on each side remembered we were still supposed to be fighting a war, bullets would commence flying and bombs would start falling again.
“When they stopped for good, and when we were told we were no longer soldiers but free men lucky to be alive, I didn’t get on one of the boats headed back to America. Instead, I headed for the village of Nonsard and the Costallat farm.
“By the time I arrived, Pauline’s father and brother had returned as well—the brother with only half the arm he left with—and the two of them welcomed me like they’d known me for years. Le cowboy, le cowboy, oui, le cowboy who lived in the cellar . . . They were a pair, I tell you. Two Frenchmen who liked their wine but wouldn’t turn down a drink of whiskey if the bottle was going around.
“Anyway. The plan was Pauline and I would get married, and we’d stay and help out on the farm until we could find a place of our own. But it was Pauline’s family who spoke against that idea. Stay in France where the best we could hope for was a few acres already plowed up by bombs when we could go to America where I had a brick house and the family business waiting for me? Hell, I had to come around to their reasoning myself. We were in a country that wouldn’t get back on its feet for a while. So back we came. I guess you know the rest.”
Beverly gives out a low whistle. “I know some of it. I remember when the two of you came back to town. That was quite the occasion. Calvin Sidey and his French wife . . . Didn’t the town put together a parade for the two of you?”
He crushes out his cigarette and glowers in her direction, but it has no effect. There must be something about lying naked in the man’s bed that renders her immune to his dark looks.
“I’m not mocking you,” she says. “You must have known you were the closest thing this town had to a celebrity, and with Pauline on your arm—my goodness! What a pair the two of you made.”
“If I’d had my way,” Calvin says, “we would never have come back here.”
“You wanted to stay in France for good?”
“I did. Why—is that so hard to believe?”
“I don’t know. Look at yourself. You belong here.”
Calvin’s laugh reminds her of the sound of her spatula scraping at the frost buildup in her freezer. “Belong here?” he says. “I don’t even live here.”
“But you did.”
He kicks at something invisible on the floor in front of him. “Well, I don’t now.”
Beverly Lodge is not the sort to hold back or bite her tongue just because her inquiries might offend someone. And she doubts she’ll ever have a better opportunity to ask of Calvin Sidey, Was it sorrow or murder that drove you from this town? Yet when she opens her mouth she says, “I’ve never been to France. What was its appeal?”
“Green fields. Trees. Hundreds of years of history everywhere you looked.”
“In other words, it wasn’t Montana.”
He shrugs. “There’s a hell of a lot of world out there that isn’t Montana.”
“So go back to France now. What’s stopping you?”
He doesn’t hesitate before answering. “I don’t belong there either.”
She leans toward him, still clutching the sheet to her body, although not as tightly as before. “Is it permitted for me to say I for one am glad you’re here?”
At this he says nothing but grunts softly. He picks up his tobacco and papers as though he’s about to roll himself another cigarette, but then he seems to think better of it. “Can I get your opinion on something that happened last night?”
Asking that question probably cost him more than taking off his pants in front of her. “Fire away,” she says.
“I don’t sleep so good as I once did and last night was one of those nights. So I was sitting up late when Miss Ann came sneaking down the stairs. She sure as hell didn’t expect to see me, and I suspect I fouled up some plans she might have had. There was a car parked in the alley and likely she was going out to meet someone. This seem possible to you?”
Beverly shrugs. “She’s a teenager. So certainly it’s possible. But I’ll tell you something about that girl, if you haven’t noticed already. As pretty as she is? She’s got a character every bit as good.”
Calvin nods in agreement. “She didn’t make much fuss.”
“Of course, if she’s in love—”
“And then while I’m staring out the window I remember another summer night when something just like that happened. Back then I likely had a glass of whiskey in my hand and it was Bill I saw sneaking across the backyard. I had a pretty good idea where he was going. He’d been keeping company with those no-good Ballard boys and he was probably going out to raise some kind of hell with them. I could have stopped him; I didn’t. Instead, I told myself he was old enough to take care of himself. Now I look at Will. Not much younger than Bill was then. A boy that age—take care of himself? About the only thing they can manage on their own is getting into trouble. But I had my hands full with being a widower, or so I thought. Took that on as my full time occupation. And I let my boy go. Take care of himself? Jesus. I might as well have let the coyotes raise my kids.”
“It was a different world back then,” Beverly says. “We could let the rope out a little because the whole town looked out for our children. Any adult could tell any child to mind his p’s and q’s.”
Calvin shakes his head as if to reject any attempt to absolve him. “Well, there must have been a hell of a lot of them telling my son how to behave. He turned out fine, no thanks to me.”
He stands, takes his shirt off the chair, and something in the way he thrusts his arm into a sleeve says their conversation, and probably their time together, has come to a close.
“My, my, Mr. Sidey. Is that a cotton shirt you’re wearing? Or a hair shirt?” Beverly sticks a bare leg out from under the covers and puts a foot on the cool floor. “You might as well hand me my clothes. And turn your back or cover your eyes.”
He lifts her clothes from the chair and hands them to her. “I’ve seen all there is to see,” he says.
“But you’re looking at me with different eyes now.”
SEVENTEEN
No matter what the condition of your family member or friend, you are not allowed to stay beyond visiting hours at Missoula’s Good Samaritan Hospital. Bill Sidey, however, has found a way to work around this regulation. The surgical waiting room, where he and Carole spent so many hours earlier, is empty at night, and this is where Bill is hiding out, although he’s not sure why he’s here. If there’s any change in Marjorie’s cond
ition, the call will go to Carole and Milo’s home. But Bill has the hopeful, irrational belief that if Marjorie wakes up, he’ll somehow know it, or she’ll know that he’s nearby and . . . and what? Call out for him? Oh, none of it makes any sense. But Bill feels as though he’s doing something by sitting here, rather than doing nothing at Carole and Milo’s.
Shortly after ten o’clock, an elderly nun enters the room. The room is dark but for one small lamp on the table next to the overstuffed chair where Bill is sitting, and when the nun notices him, Bill stands and says, “I’m sorry. I was just—”
“Oh, pssht,” she says, waving him back down. “Sit. I’m not the night watchman.”
Bill guesses she must be at least eighty, her large-jawed masculine face creased with wrinkles that, in the dim light, seem carved by shadows.
“If I turn on the television, will I disturb you?” Her accent is faintly Germanic.
“Not at all.” He drops back into his chair.
She switches on the set, fiddles with the rabbit ears to sharpen the picture, and sits down one chair away from Bill. “I sneak in here every night for the sports. Just to see what the Red Sox have done.”
“I’m afraid,” Bill says, “I’ve lost track of the standings. How are they doing?”
She shrugs. “Not well. It will be the Yankees again. As usual.”
Bill crushed out a cigarette just a few minutes before the nun walked in, but since he feels that he shouldn’t light up in front of her, he suddenly craves another.
“Are you a baseball fan?” she asks.
“Halfhearted. Not like when I was a boy. Then I could name every team’s lineup. The Tigers were my team, and Charlie Gehringer was my favorite player.”
“The Mechanical Man,” the nun says with a smile.
The sports announcer appears on the screen, and they both watch until the baseball scores are concluded. Both the Red Sox and the Twins, the team that Bill tries to follow, have lost. The nun rises stiffly and goes back to the television. “Or should I leave it on?” she asks Bill.
“You can turn it off,” he answers.
They both watch the picture dwindle to a tiny silver dot, and once that too is pinched into darkness, the nun speaks.
“Your wife? Am I remembering right?”
“My wife,” Bill said. “That’s correct.”
“She is not doing well?” Bill wonders if it’s nothing more than his late-night presence that allows the nun to guess this truth, or if there is something in his face, his voice, his posture, that reveals how worried he is.
“She’s in a coma.”
“A coma. My. I hadn’t heard we had a patient in such a condition.”
“They won’t use the word, but that’s what it is. A coma.” Bill’s remark sounds as though it could have come from his sister-in-law’s mouth.
“This is an excellent hospital,” the nun says. “Everything will be done for your wife that can be. You mustn’t lose hope.”
This is very similar to the counsel Bill gave Carole in this very room. Now that he is in the presence of a person of faith he finally feels free to express his own pessimism. He wishes she could talk him out of his despair.
“I’m a hopeful man, Sister. But it can be a struggle.”
“Prayer helps us in that,” she says. “But when that doesn’t seem quite enough, it doesn’t hurt to remind oneself that strong young women such as your wife generally don’t die before their time.”
But when they do, Bill thinks but doesn’t say, they do it in places like this. Instead, he says, “I’ve never prayed so much in my life as I have today.”
She nods in approval. “Do you have children?”
“A boy and a girl.”
“They must be worried about their mother. Your strength will be necessary to help them.”
Is this why he has not yet informed Ann and Will about their mother’s condition—so he won’t have to be strong for them?
“They’re such good kids.” As he says this, Bill feels his eyes sting as they do when tears are close. “I wish there was a way to make life easier for them.”
The nun nods knowingly again. “For the good, life is sometimes harder.”
The nun is moving toward the door, but Bill doesn’t want her to go, not yet. He finds her company quietly comforting—this old woman spends her days and nights amid illness, calamity, and heartache, yet she seems unperturbed in the presence of it all. A heart attack or a gallbladder surgery is as commonplace to her as a Red Sox loss. Bill gropes desperately for another reason to make her stay. “Before you go, Sister”—is he entitled to refer to her this way, or is this a term reserved for Catholics?—“can I get your opinion on another matter?”
She inclines her head slightly as if to say, of course.
“If a person . . . if someone has a bad deed in his past, something he did long ago, does that automatically mean his soul is in jeopardy?” Then, to make sure there’s no misunderstanding, Bill adds, “His soul. His. I’m not talking about my wife. She’s a good woman. I’m worried about her fate in this life, not the next.”
The nun looks down at her hands and taps her fingertips together, but she doesn’t say anything. “And it’s not me either,” he further adds.
The nun nods. “This is a good man we’re talking about?”
“More or less. But as I said, with something bad in his past.”
“The bad deed is—?”
Bill doesn’t answer right away, and the nun raises her hand. “You don’t have to say. He has or has not repented for what he did?”
The nun has misunderstood Bill’s hesitation. It’s not that he’s reluctant to speak of his father’s deed but that suddenly Bill is unsure himself what he’s been referring to—murder or abandonment? A crime that requires God’s forgiveness or a son’s?
It doesn’t matter. Either way, Bill can speak with confidence of his father’s attitude. “Has not.”
“Repentance is necessary. He’s not a Catholic?”
“No. And I’m not either. I’m a Lutheran.” Bill has never asked, but he doubts that his father has any religious convictions.
She shakes her head as if to say that this confession is of no consequence. “But you should speak to your minister about this matter.”
“I have a pretty good idea what he’d say. I just thought I’d get your opinion.”
The nun raises her hands helplessly. “We can still pray for them . . .” She says this as though she knows prayer can do no more for an unrepentant soul than Bill believes it can for a wife who will not wake up.
EIGHTEEN
Beverly has a recipe for a hot dish that everyone seems to like. She browns ground beef and chopped onion in her big cast-iron skillet, pours in tomato soup and canned corn, dumps the mixture into a deep Pyrex dish, spreads mashed potatoes over the top, and then bakes it at 350 degrees. That morning, before the day got too hot, she doubled the ingredients and fixed two casseroles, one for her and Adam and the other for the Sideys.
The dish is cooling on her cupboard and it’s almost midday, yet Beverly is still waiting for the right moment to carry it next door. Will Sidey pedaled off around eleven o’clock with a baseball glove looped on his handlebars, and he won’t return until midafternoon. Ann will soon walk down Fourth Street for her afternoon shift at Penney’s, and then after she departs Beverly will knock on the Sideys’ door with the reasonable expectation that Calvin will be alone in the house.
The casserole is not the only preparation she has made. Last night when Calvin led her down to his basement lair Beverly wasn’t sure what might happen, but today she’s ready. She shaved her legs and under her arms, and she searched through her underwear drawer for a bra whose once-white straps didn’t look gray and a pair of underpants where the tendrils of elastic hadn’t sprung loose. She put on a sleeveless floral-print dress that she’d worn in the classroom on the warmest days of spring and fall, and for the first time she pulled the stopper on the bott
le of Prince Matchabelli perfume that Adam gave her the previous Christmas. She dabbed a little scent on her wrists and between her breasts, in imitation of a woman she once read about in a novel. After all this primping, she looked at herself in the mirror and laughed: To think she was going through all this for an old man who probably hadn’t been with a woman for so long the last thing he cared about was how she smelled! With a washcloth she scrubbed between her breasts until the scent was gone.
Beverly watches Ann Sidey walk past the house, then picks up the casserole and heads out the door.
After there’s no answer to her second knock, Beverly opens the screen door and steps into the Sidey kitchen. “Hello! Anyone home?” She sets the warm dish on the counter. “It’s your neighbor!” Her hearing isn’t what it once was, and she has to cock her head to the side to listen for a response that might be coming from another corner of the house, the basement perhaps. She has just stepped toward the dining room when someone bangs on the screen door.
Beverly, startled, turns quickly and sees a dark form filling the frame. It’s a wide-bodied, big-hatted man with his fist raised. He must have seen her at the same time, and the sight of her keeps him from striking the door again.
Yes, he sees her all right, but he misidentifies her because he shouts, “You tell that goddamn husband of yours he sends another fucking letter like this he’s going to be sorry!”
Because the light is coming from behind the man and she’s looking at him through the screen, Beverly thinks, but can’t be sure, that he’s an Indian. His rage, however, she recognizes immediately. Burt dealt with more than a few men like this one—deadbeats and abusive husbands, for example—and they sometimes came to the house—drunk, usually—to demand that he stop threatening garnishment or an injunction against them. Beverly quells the impulse to explain, My husband’s dead, and instead stammers, “I’m not—”
But before she can finish, he pulls open the door and hurls a crumpled ball of paper in Beverly’s direction, which falls to the floor. She flinches nonetheless. She immediately wants to retrieve the paper—perhaps it can solve the mystery of this confrontation—yet she knows not to take her eyes from this man.
