Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  He hesitates, seems about to respond with anger, but then shifts slightly and grins, hanging his head. “Oh, well, all right. I’ll put everything back.”

  “But, seriously, sir,” Fiona says. “Think about it. Do you need these things?”

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  Now he shows some indignation. “No, I don’t. I don’t need one damn bit of it. But I got the money for it and I’m taking it out of here.”

  “Do you know that there are children in this town who go to bed hungry every night?”

  “Yeah? Well, they ain’t mine, though. You know?”

  “A society’s responsible for its children, sir.”

  “Look, I’m sure you’re a nice little old lady, but I’m not in the mood, okay?”

  The woman with the clocks has finished paying and is leaving, hurrying, like someone moving away with stolen goods.

  “Well, but do you ever think of the hungry children?” Fiona says.

  “Excuse us,” says Elizabeth. “Excuse her.”

  “Hey, lady,” the man says to Fiona. “I work hard. I’ve earned everything I’ve got. If I don’t buy this and everybody else doesn’t buy these things, then this big store shuts down and has to close and this big fat terrible corporation has to start laying people off and a lot of innocent children end up going hungry, you know what I’m saying?”

  “That’s a rationalization. And you just said you’ve got one at home.”

  “I’ve got four of them at home. This one’s for the bedroom. It makes five. I’m thinking of getting one for the garage. And if you keep talking this crap to me I just might get one for each of the four bathrooms.

  Kapeesh?”

  “But all this is just running you into debt. You won’t be able to pay it all off. Do you want to owe more money than you can pay in old age?”

  He looks at Elizabeth. “Can you control her or something? God.”

  “There’s no need for you to take the Lord’s name in vain,” Fiona says.

  “Do you know what Jesus did with the money changers in the temple?”

  “This ain’t no temple, lady. And I ain’t no money changer. And you sure ain’t Jesus. This is a Kmart. Where I happen to be buying me a few things. Now shut up and leave me alone.” He turns his back.

  Fiona’s undaunted. She moves a little to one side and reaches for the man in front of him. This one is not so heavy, but he also has a big beard and long hair. “You, sir,” Fiona says. “What about you? Aren’t those Prada shoes?”

  “Pardon me?”

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  “I thought those were only for women,” Elizabeth hears herself say.

  “No, men, too,” says Fiona. “I saw it in the New Yorker. Men, too, and they’re extremely expensive.”

  The man has turned away again.

  “You, there, sir. You can’t afford those shoes. Is that an Armani blazer you’re wearing? You shop at Kmart. You spend money like that on a pair of shoes and look at you, shopping at Kmart.”

  “Are you talking to me?” His incredulousness shows in his face, almost as a kind of admiration: he cannot believe this old lady who now fixes him with her gaze and stands too close, actually leaning into him with a combination of challenge and familiarity; it’s as if they’re old friends and she’s with him in his effort to better himself.

  “You must’ve heard us,” Fiona says. “You’re not deaf, right?” She pronounces the word as deef—as if it’s a joke between them.

  He rests his hands on the back of his cart and regards her, like some sort of phenomenon that he can’t quite believe and yet is entertained by.

  “Why don’t you tell me what it is you want me to do?” he says. “And I’ll see if I can accommodate you.”

  “Well,” Fiona says. “Look at you.”

  Elizabeth says, “Fiona, I swear I’ll leave you standing here.”

  “Hold this,” says Fiona and hands her the bag of charcoal. It’s either take it or let it fall, so Elizabeth takes it. Fiona moves around the first man to this new one, who takes a step back at her approach. “Do you really need all this? Can’t you weed your own garden without using up valuable electricity and taxing the power companies on hot days?

  Do you know how many brownouts there are in this area every summer because of the profligate use of power? And if you shop here, then you probably went into debt to buy those shoes. Look at you—you’ve got your card out. You’re only going to get deeper in debt. They charge twenty-four percent interest every month. In the end it’ll cost you five times what you paid for it and you don’t need the debt.”

  “The what?” says the man. “What the hell? Are you on something?”

  He looks past her at Elizabeth. “Is she on something? This your grandmother, right, and she’s on something?”

  Elizabeth sets the bag down and walks out of the store, away from 84

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  the sound of Fiona explaining. She moves across the parking lot to the car, and waits there, leaning against it, arms folded across her chest over a burning. It’s this kind of stress that she can’t stand anymore, this sense of constantly unfolding confrontation. She can see Fiona and the others through the wide windows next to the door. They all seem now to be engaged in some sort of general chaos. But then the man with the lawn tools and appliances comes out, shaking his head and smiling, and then the heavy man, closely followed by Fiona. They’re laughing and smiling.

  The man actually waves at her as he moves off with his merchandise.

  Fiona lugs the bag of charcoal over and stops. “Where’d you go?” she says.

  “Oh, Fiona, what was that?” Elizabeth says.

  “What was what? We made friends. We had a friendly discussion and we made friends.”

  They say almost nothing on the way home. Elizabeth decides she doesn’t want to hear it. At the house, she walks into the living room, goes to her husband, kisses him on the cheek, and murmurs, “I’m going to bed with a headache, and if you question me about it I’ll scream.”

  “What happened?” he says.

  “I’m sure Fiona will tell you.”

  And, in fact, Fiona is already talking to Holly about the nice men she met at the Kmart and how she opened their eyes to the plight of the hungry children.

  2.

  No one has ever permanently come between the Crazies, through all the years, and they share a measure of pride in this. They like to describe themselves as the world travelers they are. Indeed, they’re a little vain about what they consider to be the sophistication that comes of experience. Sophistication can be founded on many things, but a certain open-ness is required, and there are people whose knowledge of the world is vast but who hold to certain attitudes and restrictions concerning t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  all that knowledge—usually having to do with religion. In the case of Butterfield’s mother and great-aunt, in spite of the religious décor of their house, these restrictions are indeed not overly religious, but they amount to the same thing, since the two ladies would defend them to the death. They are the kind of women who are happy to voice their opinions in all situations, and frequently enough their opinions are far from reasonable.

  Aunt Fiona, for instance, believes that not only are there alien spaceships in Roswell, New Mexico, but that the government has been hoard-ing physical evidence of thousands of visiting interplanetary soldiers, and a battle is being fought for the survival of the species under our very noses. It’s all going to end, this war of species, with human be-ings on the losing side. We’ll all be food, kept in cages, harvested. Her occasional excess with liquid pursuits has always been a feature of life.

  Lately, when she goes too far, she’s apt to say that she’s trying to relax from the expected apocalypse.

  There are people for whom the consumption of alcohol is obviously a sickness, but Aunt Fiona isn’t one of those. She can go for weeks without
a drop, and she can sit at a table and have one half-glass of wine. There is no aspect of addiction in the way she drinks. She’s as moderate as an Amish grandmother in all circumstances except those when she decides, quite willfully, to go over the line. How she squares this behavior with her still daily practiced Catholicism is a source of continual puzzlement to her niece, who has her own set of what Elizabeth gloomily calls deliri-ous notions. Holly, a self-described leftist, believes that TV is a plot by the corporations and the politicians and the medical profession to distract the people from the truth by bombarding them with trivia and false alarms. One passage implicitly berates you for not having the right dish detergent or for buying the wrong deodorant, and the next heats you up with the evil possibilities contained in faulty automobile design, the rape of the wilderness, or the increasing incidence of violence in the cities.

  It’s the paranoia of older people, Elizabeth used to say, trying at first to excuse her. For Elizabeth, the differences seemed generational. At first.

  More recently, she has seen each difference simply in light of the lu-86

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  nacy of the two women.

  Will’s father, before he abandoned them for the Navy, was quite prosperous, owned his own real estate company. Will was supposed to be the first of several children. But of course no other children came. Will never really knew the man in the pictures on the upright piano in the parlor: Nine years is so young. Holly has kept the pictures because the man was, after all, the father of her one son. To Will, the person in the photos looks like a corrupt politician, with his black fedora and his double-breasted suit, and the dark circles under his eyes. There’s something vaguely seedy about the whole makeup of the face, it seems, as if the smile is harboring shameful secrets.

  The marriages he saw growing up among the people his parents knew seemed to be bad ones.

  So, he entered his own first one—with Elizabeth Jane—finding it difficult to believe fully in the possibility of long-term love. It seemed to him that these relationships all became antagonistic, though people clung to them, suffering each other out of habit, or some need neither could explain or understand. When Elizabeth Jane went away, she con-firmed his unhappy conviction.

  The second Elizabeth—Elizabeth Marie—has changed all that. When the subject of faith comes up, Butterfield utters the phrase “I believe in love.” Simple as that. Easy as a song title, which it probably is. Except he must admit to himself that it is not quite as easy as it sounds. It’s simple in the same way that virtue is simple, and difficult in that same way, too, requiring from him the same spiritual energy and sometimes seeming as frangible. When the doubts come, they come in the middle of the night, and, as the saying goes, at that hour, they come in battalions.

  3.

  In the middle of this night, Brother Fire awakens from a dream of a snow desert stretching far into a distance, with rising clouds in it, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  blown by wind. The sound of the wind is what wakes him, and then that becomes his cell phone ringing. He thinks he knows who it is.

  He gets out of bed in the chilly room and reaches for the phone on the dresser. The book he was reading—a biography of FDR—falls from his lap and makes a terrible thump on the hardwood floor, bringing a small, shuddering cry from the bottom of his throat. He waits a moment, expecting to hear Father McFadden stirring on the other side of the wall. But there’s only the murmur of his window fan. When he clicks the answer button, he almost says “Fiona?” Instead, he simply murmurs, “Yes?”

  “You said to call, Father.” Mr. Petit’s voice, a whisper, exactly as if he were on the other side of the little screen in the confessional.

  “Oh, yes,” the old priest gets out.

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  “I shouldn’t bother you. I woke you.”

  “What is it, two o’clock in the morning?”

  “You said to call.”

  Brother Fire rubs his eyes, yawns, but then, he hopes, manages to speak clearly, his voice only slightly laced with sleep. “What happened today?” The weird interest again. It makes him momentarily dizzy.

  “Nothing. I went to school. I taught my classes. I kept my thoughts clear. But I had a bad dream tonight.”

  “You can’t commit a sin in your sleep,” he says and realizes that it sounds rather irritable. Softening his tone, he adds, “That’s a mercy, too.”

  “But I can’t stop thinking about the dream.”

  “Dreams can be that way. I’ve got several myself. In one, I’m ice-skating. You tell me.” He has always found that reporting his own idio-syncrasies helps his parishioners forgive themselves for theirs.

  “I never once ever had a homosexual thought, Father. Not ever. I was married for almost twenty years.”

  “Remember that God is merciful, and He loves you.”

  “God is no respecter of persons, Father.”

  “That’s Episcopalian, you know. We don’t believe that. We believe that the hairs of your head are numbered.”

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  “I wish I could touch him.”

  “You can. He’s all around you.”

  “I’m not talking about God!” There’s a strand of impatience in the voice. “God!” A sigh comes now. And then a level tone. “I don’t want to do anything but put my hand on his shoulder without shaking inside.”

  The old priest sits in the chair by his bed and feels the cold wood on the back of his legs, just above his knees. The question rises in his heart, and he can’t keep from asking it, though he knows it is only the infernal curiosity surfacing. “Can you tell me about the dream?” he says.

  “I’m trying not to think about it, Father.”

  “Talk to me, then. Tell me what’s in your heart.”

  “I’m afraid of what’s there, Father. It terrifies me.”

  “You’ve come this far.”

  “No.”

  “But you have.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “You’re not listening,” says the priest.

  “I don’t want to argue.”

  There’s a silence.

  “I’m sorry I woke you, Father,” Mr. Petit says and seems about to hang up.

  “Tell me about your wife.”

  Again, silence. A sigh on the other end. “Maybe later, Father. She was a nice woman. A sweet woman. I made her mostly happy. We made each other mostly happy. It wasn’t all that much fire in the heart, though. It was friendly.”

  “Yes.”

  “I never even thought about boys. Men.”

  “No.”

  “Good night, Father.”

  “Don’t go,” Brother Fire says. But the connection is broken.

  He gets up, dresses for the day, though the day is still hours from now, and goes quietly downstairs, to make coffee. Father McFadden is in the kitchen, writing under the one lamp at the kitchen table. He looks up, his eyes made sad-looking by the glasses he’s wearing. “Oh, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  I’ll make more coffee.”

  “No, never mind.”

  “It’s no trouble at all, Father. Really.”

  The old priest prevails on the younger one to keep his place, and he makes the coffee himself. Father McFadden is writing furiously in his notebook, and it becomes a sort of unspoken race, a race only the Monsignor is aware of as such—to get his coffee made and himself back in his room before his curate finishes his latest literary effort.

  “Almost finished with this one,” the younger man says as Brother Fire starts upstairs with his coffee.

  “Well, I’ve got to use the bathroom,” says the old priest. A lie, for which he’s immediately sorry, asking inwardly for God’s pardon. But, while making the coffee, he saw the phrase “warm bags” in the frantic lines the curate is scribbling, and he knows he will not be able to sit for this one, whatever it is. “Later,” he says with t
he definiteness of authority. And he makes his escape.

  He drinks the coffee for a time alone in his room. Then, remembering his lie, he flushes the upstairs toilet and closes the door to his room.

  He won’t be able to go back to sleep, though he’s tired, weary down in his bones. He sits at his desk, composing letters: to Fiona, to Mr. Petit, and, finally, to Father McFadden, saying that, unfortunately, talent is far from him—oh, many distant light-years from him—as a poet, but that he can still be a fine priest. He folds this letter up and puts it far in the back of the top drawer of his desk. It’s going to be a long, sleepless end of the night, cooped up here. With a kind of disconsolate tentativeness, he picks among the books on the small shelf across from his bed, looking for something to take him away and perhaps to make him sleepy.

  Tomorrow, Labor Day, he can get away early, and there’s an invitation, which he’s accepted, to go to dinner with Holly and Fiona.

  f a i t h a n d l o g i c

  1.

  For Elizabeth Butterfield, waking each morning is complicated by the sense of crisis engendered by the Crazies. Everything’s in question now.

  She has dreams, busy dreams, that are dissimilar on the surface—that is, they are lived in different places, in odd circumstances, in wildly disparate weathers—but in all of them she’s searching for something, rummaging through tangles of clothes, among objects, bric-a-brac, books, papers, for something ineffably important, for which she has no name and no sense of its shape or texture. These dreams wake her, and the aftereffects leave her restless and scared. Lately, she has no appetite. Anxieties plague her. It’s all so wearisome. And now school has begun.

  Gail and Mark arrive late Friday afternoon. Mark flew to Philadelphia from Indiana, and the two of them drove down in Gail’s ratty little green Honda with the rusted undercarriage and the duct-taped right rear window. It’s a hot, sticky, windless day. Gail wears a tank top, no bra; she’s stopped shaving under her arms. There’s a mannish sort of abruptness about her now, a kind of studied, unfeminine pitch in her talk. She’s bigger about the hips, and her face, always her best feature as a child, with its soft, oval sweep and the round eyes, has flattened and squared, the t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t