Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  Th a n k s g i v i n g

  N i g h t

  =

  A Novel

  R i c h a r d B a u s c h

  For Robert and Denise and David Bausch

  “No matter what passions compose them, all private worlds are good, they are never vulgar places.”

  — t r u m a n c a p o t e

  “The human heart could never pass the drunk test.”

  — t e n n e s s e e w i l l i a m s

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Part One: August-October

  1

  Crazies

  3

  Brother Fire

  17

  The Comforts Of Home

  28

  Night Hours

  41

  Cost of Living

  66

  Force of Gravity

  70

  Faith and Logic

  90

  Will And The Elizabeths

  98

  Long Division

  116

  Half A Stolen Car

  128

  A Matter Of Small Historical Consequence

  153

  Part Two: October–November

  167

  Incidental Finding 169

  Fault 192

  Perdition 218

  Winter History 241

  Convalescing 277

  Part Three : November 321

  Inclemency 323

  Thanksgiving Night 352

  About the Author

  Other Books by Richard Bausch

  Credits

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Pa r t O n e

  =

  A u g u s t – O c t o b e r

  c r a z i e s

  1.

  From the first overlook of the Sky Line Drive, heading south, you can only see the old part of Point Royal—washed in hazy distance, an intricately laced aggregate of antique houses and white steeples, set among many shades of blue and green and tawny summer. A sleepy, lovely, Virginia country setting.

  Up close there are, of course, the complications of the age.

  Antebellum porches mixed in with two-car garages and fast-food chains; an Internet café in a glass-front, low-slung building within a block of a town hall that is almost two hundred years old—all of this across from a parking lot and a red-brick radio station with flags out front and a skinny seventy-foot tower behind.

  On the radio station lately there’s mostly talk, and the subject is invariably the president and his recent troubles. The call-in shows are full of moral outrage. The news, even now, six months after the Sen-ate’s acquittal, is still full of the names: Starr, Hyde, and the women, Slick Willy’s women, all the way from back when he was governor of Arkansas to the uneasy present, with its rumors of war and the threat of general shutdowns as a result of Y2K. Religionists are growing more 4

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  strident, and there’s apocalyptic zaniness all around, starting with the Hale-Bopp suicide crowd, who expected that there would be a turnstile on the spaceship taking them beyond the stars, and so each one carried a ten-dollar roll of quarters on his person. The news media characterizes these people as intelligent. (One caustic voice on the radio points out that certainly the Hale-Bopp fruitcakes would look intelligent to the media.)

  On the other side of the radio station, on a small, red-clay rise of ground, a strip mall that was built ten years ago languishes in weeds and wild flowers, crabgrass and dandelions; it’s shut down and boarded, with postings advertising commercial space. The postings are wearing away in the weather.

  Beyond the strip mall is a small used-book shop called The Heart’s Ease.

  Take a look at it now: this charmingly derelict-looking place, its windows stacked with the sun-faded spines of volumes, one on top of another as if they had all been arrested in the act of crowding to the openings to breathe. The paint is peeling on the porch, and the color of the trim is the exact shade of old paper. If you were to characterize the store or make a simile out of it, you might say it’s like an elderly man nodding off to sleep. It faces into the sunny lot across the way, the gravel road veering to the left, toward the century-old brick-making factory, with its five house-sized stacks of new red bricks, and its weirdly attendant-seeming next-door neighbor, the ancient clapboard relic of a church, white-steepled Saint Augustine’s. This church is a historic land-mark, and is flanked by a shady lawn dotted with gravestones, carved dates and inscriptions going back to the eighteenth century. beloved mother; with the angels; lost to us.

  It was once said that two people could leave at the same time from main street, one heading for the wildest hollow in the Blue Ridge and the other for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, and both would arrive at their destination at about the same time.

  Now, one travels only minutes to be in what feels like the tatters of the city, and the thin blue roads that wind up into the mountains are lined with apartment complexes.

  The Shenandoah River runs along the town’s western edge, and on t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

  5

  some hot summer days, after a little rain, it’s muddy and so slow-running as to seem calm. Because of the willows dipping their filamental branches at the edge, you can stand on the highway bridge that crosses there and swear, from the look of it, that there is nothing but woods all around. Signs along the bank warn against swimming or fishing.

  On Main Street, just now, the sharp shadows make pretty angles. You feel, gazing upon the scene, that you saw it somewhere in a painting, if only you could remember which one. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.

  The end of August. Stillness. Not even an airplane in the sky. Some ce-lestial creature landing here might think the whole world a quiet place, deserted or abandoned.

  But now a little wind stirs; a scrap of paper rises in the street, and a camp bus full of altar boys from Saint Augustine’s comes rumbling along, followed by an old Ford pickup, covered with dust, which turns off onto a side street. The radio is on loud in the truck, an evangelistic rant, a frantic baritone crying the terrors of a thousand years.

  It’s the dog days of summer nineteen ninety-nine. And God is coming.

  2.

  At an angle from the corner of the only intersecting street of this part of town is a small, white house, with a little porch, flanked by other houses of the same stripe, all of them built in nineteen fifty-nine and nineteen-sixty, when the country was not even ten years out of one undeclared war and already at the beginning of a new one. In the small window of the east-facing bedroom, an elderly woman sits turning the pages of a magazine with a sharp, swiping motion, as if each page contributes to a growing sense of an affront to her sensibilities.

  Behind her, another woman, also elderly, stands and folds laundry that she absently lifts from a basket in a chair. She puts the laundry on the bed. There’s something about her apparent nonchalance that seems studied, done for effect—now and again, she monitors the page-6

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  turning of the other. She’s dressed to go out. The other wears a blue bathrobe.

  These two are surrounded by emblems of religion that seem to exist in an atmosphere of neglect, like bric-a-brac: Christ praying in the garden on one wall, and facing out, with radiating heart, on another; a rosary lying on the polished surface of the bureau; a crucifix on the wall above the door. One picture on the dresser sits propped upside down against a makeup box: two girls in sepia light, posing coquettishly before the gate of a white picket fence, clad in the fashionable attire of nineteen forty-two.

  On the polished wooden floor under the side table in the room beyond this, in a pool of warm, dust-m
oted sunlight, the bottom part of a water glass lies in a scintillating circle of its shattered upper half. Several larger pieces, reflecting the light, are scattered along the baseboard.

  The radio is on here, too. News, worries about computer glitches, power failures.

  The pickup truck stops in front of this house, and the driver gets out—a blocky, heavy-jawed, muscular man with hundreds of tiny freckles all over him, though his hair is dark brown, graying at the sides, and he has a deep-lined, clay-colored face. His name is Oliver Ward, and he’s of that generation of Americans that came of age in the tumult of far-reaching material advances and civil unrest that was the sixties.

  War amid unprecedented bounty. Stupendous feats of technology involving everything from electron microscopy to journeys away from the Earth—coupled with appalling failures of spirit, the numbing repetition of burning cities and assassinations. He served in Vietnam, and was wounded in a firefight only two months after arriving in country. Two pieces of shrapnel hit him; one in his neck, injuring a nerve in his upper spine, and one in his upper leg, missing the femoral artery by a sixteenth of an inch. He spent the rest of his tour recuperating at the air-base hospital at Da Nang, typing orders for troop shipments home.

  He felt happy there, sending men home, alive, most of them unharmed.

  It was someone else’s job to type out the other orders.

  But his life has been taxing enough. He’s a widower. He looks older than fifty-five: heavy skin drooping under the eyes; deep lines and a settled look about the face. One of the aftereffects of his neck injury is that t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  he’s continually shaking his head “no.” It’s a back-and-forth motion exactly like denial, and when he’s nervous, it becomes more pronounced.

  He’s had to spend a lot of time retracting imagined rebuffs and refuta-tions.

  Now he reaches slowly back into the truck, making allowances for his arthritic shoulders and the old leg-wound, which still aches with the dull ache of memory. Bringing out a clipboard, he holds it before him like a hat, and approaches the house. As usual in such circumstances he feels as if someone is watching from the windows. Next to the door is a darkly smudged white button. He presses it and waits, and then presses again. Nothing. Listening at the door, he’s poised to press the button one last time when the door opens suddenly, and an old woman strides quickly toward him. She looks to be about eighty, and is wearing a bathrobe. Hair white as pearls. She has a purse draped over her shoulder as if she’s completely unaware that she isn’t dressed for the outside.

  Oliver’s so startled by this sight that he can’t unplant his feet; he rears back, chin tucked into his chest. She stops, having nearly run into him, and says, “Oh.” It’s almost a cry of alarm. And then she gives forth exactly that: “Ah!”

  Oliver Ward says, “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’ve been ringing.”

  She stares for a moment. “That thing doesn’t work. What do you want? I’m on my way out. I’m getting the hell out of here.”

  He stands there, dumbstruck.

  She stares. “Well?”

  “I rang the bell, ma’am.” In moments of stress, his head-tic is more pronounced.

  “Did you or didn’t you?” she demands.

  “I did,” he tells her, and hurries to say, “I have a tic. Pay no attention to this.” He points to his shaking head.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” she says impatiently, one hand held over her chest.

  There’s nothing for him to do but explain: “Somebody called me to talk about doing some work here. I could leave a card. I have an old shrapnel wound in my neck. It makes my head do this.”

  “You don’t want to talk to me,” she says, with a look of incredulity.

  Oliver waits, still stunned. But then he says, “Pardon?”

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  “Holly!” the woman shouts, without taking her eyes from him. The voice is piercing.

  Startled again, he takes a step back, raising one arm.

  “You want to talk to my insane niece.”

  He glances beyond her. The words are only now registering.

  “How old are you?” she asks.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Never mind.” And she shouts again: “Holly!”

  He stares.

  “My appalling niece,” she says.

  “Someone called—”

  She raises a hand, nearly places it on his chest. “Hold your horses,”

  she says. Then she shouts: “Holly!”

  They wait. Oliver actually thinks of turning and running away. He’s still feeling the startlement traveling along his nerves. Finally, the niece comes from one of the rooms of the house, and she’s in a pantsuit. She looks scarily the same age as the first woman. Except she has dark hair in a tight little knot on top of her head, and cheeks the color of violets.

  “What?” she says. Blue eyes, a wide mouth, perfect, very white teeth.

  When she sees Oliver, she smiles, then seems to recall something unpleasant, frowning.

  “I’ll come back later,” says Oliver. “Forgive me, ladies.”

  “You called this guy, didn’t you?” says the white-haired woman.

  He leans in to explain further. “You—somebody said you-all needed some work done around the house? Is this—” he steps back to look at the number next to the door, “Three-eleven? Yes. Temporary Road. This is—”

  Now both women stare.

  “I’ll come back, you know, if there’s—if you—if the time’s not right.

  I’ll come back.”

  “I did the work,” says the niece, turning to her housemate. “And I didn’t make the call, Fiona. You did. You nagged me about it and then you called this poor man, purely to get at me, and I did the work already—” She halts, and then addresses Oliver: “Really. She did. I know it sounds incredible but it’s true. It was a simple matter of a fau-t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

  9

  cet needing to be replaced, and you’ll have to forgive this. I already did it. I did.”

  “I made no such call,” says Fiona.

  “Yes she did,” Holly says to Oliver, shouldering past the other woman and stepping out onto the porch. Then she turns and stares at her. “What’re you gonna do now, Fiona, walk out of here in a fucking bathrobe and slippers?”

  “Please excuse her language,” Fiona says to Oliver. “She’s an apostate.”

  “I’d be happy to make some kind of payment for your time coming out here,” says Holly. “But we really don’t have a thing that needs doing. Really,” she goes on, staring at him. “We don’t. Unless you feel like cleaning up broken glass, because I’m certainly not going to touch it.”

  He says, “Broken glass?”

  “We don’t have a thing that needs doing, honest. Sorry for your trouble.”

  Oliver feels his blood rise a little. These women involved him in whatever squabble they’re having, and he has driven out here, and been frightened, for nothing. He says, “Well, ma’am, I did say on the phone that there’s a sixty-dollar minimum charge.”

  “You did not say that,” Fiona says.

  “Well, if I didn’t, I meant to. And I’m pretty sure I did. It’s my policy.”

  Holly turns and glares at Fiona, giving forth a small exasperated sigh. Then she faces him again. “Do you cut grass?”

  “I don’t want to do make-work either if it’s all the same to you. I’ve got other accounts. I paint houses, and do carpentry, mostly. Some drywall and electric. You-all don’t need anything like that done?”

  “The place needs painting,” Fiona says. “But you think she’d do anything about it.”

  “Well, I do good work, painting.” Now he has the thought that this might turn out. He can paint for them, and keep to himself in the work, as is his habit anyway. He can keep far from them in the work.

  “The house does not need painting,” Holly says.


  “Then I guess—well, I guess that’s that. I wish you ladies would clear things with each other before involving the rest of the community.”

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  “What the hell is that supposed to mean,” says Fiona. “We’re not paying you for doing nothing.”

  “I got a request to come out here,” Oliver says. “One of you gave me directions on the telephone.” He’s feeling anger now. He’s about to begin shouting, though he will also back down from the porch as he does so. These days, one can never tell. The white-haired lady might have a Glock 9 mm in her purse.

  “My aunt is the one who gave you directions,” says Holly, with a motion like waving something bothersome away from herself. “You poor man.”

  “I made the call,” Fiona says proudly.

  “Well, and I was pretty clear about the minimum charge,” Oliver says. He half believes it himself now.

  “You ever read Shakespeare?” Fiona says.

  For a beat, he’s simply too flabbergasted to speak. “I know who he was.”

  “Name one play. My niece here thinks he’s only for elitists.”

  “Sixty dollars, ladies.”

  For a tense few seconds, they’re all staring at each other, Oliver looking from Fiona to Holly and back again. He’ll stand his ground now.

  He’s decided, by God, he won’t budge. He remains where he is, feeling his head make the repeated refutation, so pronounced now that they seem to be taking it as intended. The younger of the two ladies shakes her own head and looks down, and he sees something like sorrow in her face. Is she about to cry? He wants to go back in his mind and replay everything in an attempt to decide how to proceed.

  “Look. Let’s start over,” he says. “I’m Oliver Ward. I guess it’s on the card. Oliver’s General Contracting. I do excellent work. General contracting work. Carpentry and house painting mostly. A little drywall and electric. I live with my daughter, who is a policewoman and someone I’m awful proud of, and her two children over on Drake Avenue. A mile or so that way.” He points east. “I’m glad to make your acquaintance.” When the two women do not react, he goes on. “Oliver’s General Contracting, that’s me. Carpentry. Drywall. Electric. House painting.”

  He waits another moment. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he says.

  “Excuse me?” says Holly.