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that his body was on the mend. He wasn’t in much pain, healing nicely now, the doctors said. He concentrated on the fact that good, hard work remained to be done, finishing the division of the house on Temporary Road. Holly murmured to him that Fiona had been on the roof again.
And she had lunch with Brother Fire, who had said he was going to come see Oliver. Had he?
Not yet.
Holly shrugged. “He’s getting a little dotty, I think. Today at lunch, he didn’t remember that we’d ordered. There’s something on his mind, do you think? It’s hard to realize priests are people, too. But I know this one as a person.”
Oliver said slowly that the priest could have come by while he was sleeping. “I do a lot of drifting off, you know.”
Now, he lies in his convalescent bed, thinking of convalescence as something like a false front. He’s in the hospital. It’s serious. This thing, this trouble, has happened to him. But the real trouble is down in his soul. What he wants more than anything else is to get past this night.
He’s drifting in and out again, wanting so to sleep and not dream.
Rain darkens the window, sheets of it, looking far more severe than it is. It subsides rather quickly, and the window lapses into night. He can’t sleep. In the next bed, Drew snores. His wife didn’t come to see him tonight—probably because of the ridiculous recital of names. Oliver would love to ask him outright: “Listen Drew, what’s the deal? Are these all women you knew intimately?” Through the snoring, here’s the mumbling of names again. “Cassie,” Drew sputters, then sighs. “Irene.
Theresa. Jenny. Oh, Edith.”
“Christ,” Oliver says finally. “Shut up, will you? Will you just shut the fuck up? Or say one—just one goddamn name twice. Jesus.”
“Agnes. Oh, Erin, sweetheart.”
Perhaps he sleeps a little. But then he’s wide awake and something dark is standing over him. He tries to shout in the fright that comes, but can’t, and then the shape moves and he sees that it’s the priest, Brother Fire.
“Hello,” the priest says. “I was almost too late.”
Oliver looks at him, feeling his head shake.
“I mean,” Brother Fire hastens to add, “that visiting hours are almost t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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over.”
“I was—asleep.”
“Holly asked me to come see you. I do not bring religion if you don’t wish it.” He grins. “Just to say hello, and to tell you I’m happy about your progress. The doctors, Holly tells me, say you’re healing nicely.”
“Slowly,” Oliver says.
After a pause, he goes on. “Father, I haven’t been to church in a long time.”
“Don’t worry,” Brother Fire says. “Worry about getting better. Let me worry about that part of things just now.”
Oliver watches the priest sit down and fold his gnarled, spotted hands in his lap. His eyes, deep set in their net of wrinkles, look sad, but he smiles and nods, and asks if the food is as bad as Holly says it is.
“Did Holly ask you to—come visit me?” Oliver asks.
“Well, yes.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“Of course I didn’t have to. I wanted to. I was here the day you came in. Fiona called me and I came right over.”
“Fiona.”
The priest nods.
“A—pair of—interesting—ladies,” Oliver says.
“Yes,” says the priest. And they both take a few minutes stifling the laugh that comes. They do not want to wake Drew.
4.
Alison wonders if Holly and Fiona will come in. They’re all waiting in the car until the rain lets up. Stanley’s going to come by tonight. She wants to be alone with him, and thinks of asking the ladies to take the children home with them, but then decides against it. That fact would announce all sorts of things about her plans for the night, both to the ladies and to Stanley.
One clap of thunder startles her—no one expects it this late in the fall—and the sound she made causes her to laugh. She feels giddy with 292
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anticipation and nervousness, and immediately marks this with a little sour inward tremor of doubt about it all. Courage is necessary for looking forward to something, she decides, and she makes an attempt to find that courage in herself—a feeling that, as a young girl, she simply took for granted.
Holly says, “I used to dive under my bed during thunderstorms.”
“That was me,” Fiona says. “You used to make fun of me for it because I was older. Don’t you remember?”
Another clap of thunder right overhead silences them. Alison tries to think of something neutral to say. The children are watching her.
“I do remember,” Holly says, “how you used to quail and cry.”
“Well, I wasn’t that bad.”
“Nothing but quailing and crying. All the time. Quailing and crying.”
Silence.
Kalie says, “What’s quailing?”
And, smirking gleefully, Holly says, “Whining, sweetie.”
Fiona sits with her arms folded tight, staring out at the rain. Alison sees Kalie look at her and then look away.
“Quailing and crying,” Holly murmurs in a singsong.
“We all got it,” says Fiona.
When the rain lets up, they cross the wet yard and enter the house, shaking the water from their hair.
“That first one really scared me,” Jonathan says.
“It scared everyone,” says Fiona.
Alison says, “Rain always makes me sleepy.” She wishes she were alone, just for tonight.
After Jonathan and Kalie are in bed, she makes tea for the two ladies, fearing that Stanley won’t come and feeling abruptly glad of them anyway, whether he does or not. She likes how vivid she feels in their company. They talk about Oliver coming home soon. And Alison, with her gratitude, worries aloud that there was something in Oliver’s eyes tonight. It’s as though it hasn’t registered until this instant.
Holly clears her throat and then recalls aloud the cold mists in the morning in Scotland, how it could look, at first light, exactly like an enormous flock of ghost sheep, sheep without legs, drifting across the t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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high grass.
“I was always cold in Scotland,” Fiona says.
“It is a different chill there,” says Holly. “Goes right to the bone with those cold, cold breezes off the sea. But I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say that appearances aren’t always what they seem.”
Fiona announces suddenly that she’s tired and wants to go home. She gives Holly a look, which Holly doesn’t acknowledge. “Holly?” she says.
Holly looks at Alison. “Are you all right now, dear? Do you need anything?”
“I’m fine. Really.”
“I’m exhausted,” says Fiona.
“Well, I want to stop by and see how Will and Elizabeth are.”
“Now,” says Fiona.
The two old ladies get up to leave and then can’t, because of the rain: the clouds seem to be tumbling down the sky in windblown curtains of it. Stanley arrives, comes running to them from Oliver’s truck, holding newspapers over his head. They all stand at the door and watch the storm, another lightning show. The wind sweeps the lines of rain side-ways, and the rain can’t seem to fall fast enough.
Alison offers more tea, and they accept. Stanley asks for a beer, and then Fiona wonders aloud if there’s any wine. There is. A cabernet Alison bought for herself more than a month ago and hasn’t opened. Stanley opens it and pours two glasses. Alison looks at the fluid muscles of his forearms, the way they ripple smoothly into his wrists. He has wide wrists, strong wrists, and his hands are big. He offers her a glass and hands the other to Fiona, then picks up his beer and twists it open, and takes a long drink of it. Alison can’t believe how completely everything about him sinks down into her. It frightens
her a little, and yet she keeps taking the opportunity to watch him move and talk, Stanley, with his brown eyes and sandy hair, his wide, boyish face, his thin lips and white, white teeth.
As they all sit down in the living room, Jonathan walks in from the hall, bleary-eyed, sleepwalking. In the silence that follows, Alison steers him back to his room. He begins to cry. It’s an excruciating thing, watching a boy that age cry. Alison, afraid and heartsore—and puzzlingly guilty—gets him to lie down, moving him, really, without quite waking 294
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him. But then he awakens on his own and stares at her in the half-dark.
“Mom?” he says.
“It’s okay,” she tells him. “You were sleepwalking.”
“Are they still here?”
“Yes. It’s a storm.”
He turns in the bed, so his back is to her, and he shudders.
“What is it?” she asks him.
“Nothing.”
“Granddad’s coming home. Things will get back to normal.”
“Can I stay home from school tomorrow?”
“Jonathan.”
“I don’t want to go anymore.”
“You’re being silly.”
“I don’t want to go to Mr. Petit’s class anymore.”
“I said I’d talk to him for you.”
“He keeps picking on me.”
“How?”
The boy is silent.
“Jonathan, tell me how.”
“I don’t know.”
“Talk to me,” Alison says.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to go anymore.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
The boy turns suddenly and seems almost alarmed. “No,” he says.
“Well, what then? You can’t stop going to school.”
Again, he turns away.
“Tell me how he’s picking on you, Jonathan.”
“He’s just not friendly like he was. He treats me like I’m—like I’m not there.”
“Well, maybe he’s got something on his mind. People—teachers have their own lives. They don’t just come into being when you get to school.”
The boy says nothing, lying there in the bed with his back to her, the blanket pulled high over his shoulder.
“Jonathan?” she says.
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“I know. I’m quite aware of that fact.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, will you just talk to me as yourself and leave the high rhetoric behind?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know I was doing it.”
“It’s impressive, Son—it’s even charming. But not now.”
“I said I didn’t know I was doing it.”
“All right.”
He takes a deep breath. Then: “I’ll go to school. Forget it.”
She puts her hand on his shoulder and pats it softly, twice. “I realize you want to handle this yourself, Son. But you can’t take care of it by staying away from school.”
His voice is thin with annoyance now. “I said forget it. I’ll go.”
She waits, her hand still on his shoulder, still patting him. For a few seconds, it’s like all those times when she sat with him and soothed him to sleep.
“I wish Granddad was home.”
This stings a little. She rises. “Well, he’s coming home. And you’re going to school, like a strong young man. Right?”
“Okay,” he says in the tone of someone who has been badgered into it.
“I’m just telling you what you already know,” Alison says.
Silence.
“Good night, Son.”
When he doesn’t answer, she reaches for his shoulder and turns him toward her. His eyes are shut. He looks like Teddy, mouth in a stubborn, narrow line, that crease in his brow, that expression of renunciation and refusal. She makes herself lean down to kiss his cheek. “Poor boy,” she says. Then she leaves the room, weighted down, as always, with worry.
5.
Brother Fire decides after the hospital, to go home for a time. There are several visits to make, but he determines that they can wait a day. He’s 296
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tired. Poor Oliver Ward had to work to entertain him, and the priest’s help-call ended up being an indulgence. He likes Ward, likes his practical goodness of heart, and he understands that a part of the younger man’s attention to him was born of the simple wish not to have him feel ill at ease: the sick man reassuring the healthy one. Brother Fire feels put to shame, and he accepts the feeling as a form of justice.
It’s still spitting rain, but, far off, there are openings in the clouds.
He is weary of not sleeping, and of being in this strange, gloomy state of mind. He drives to the rectory and calls Mr. Petit’s number. Too early, perhaps—he could well be out having dinner. So, he busies himself with the room and daily prayers, kneeling on the hard wooden floor to say a Rosary and discovering himself unable to concentrate on the words, on the fact of it as prayer. It’s just words, sounds. He keeps trying. Words, words, words.
Finally, he calls a physician’s referral service and gets the number of a psychologist with whom he and Holly briefly worked last year.
He writes the number down, then gets in his bed, lies with his hands crossed over his chest, and drifts off to sleep for a time.
Later, he’s up and moving stealthily through the house. Father McFadden and Sean are probably still in the mountains, but he’s taking no chances. There’s another poem on the kitchen table, awaiting him. He missed it, coming home earlier. He picks it up out of a sense of obliga-tion and also out of desire to be ready should the younger priest quiz him about it.
The Lord is in the moon
And the trains when they moan,
In the cabs, too, and the loon
And the grass and the tune
You hear in the rains when they swoon
And drop like coins upon the stone.
The Lord is in so many things
The diamonds on the lady’s rings
The robes they put on the royal kings
Just all there is in the world of things The Lord indeed himself is in
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Except where there is evil and sin.
He puts the paper down in its place and thinks about having to read this kind of thing every day for the next three or four years. He will have to say something. There isn’t any use putting it off. Perhaps he can feign a dislike of poetry itself—so many people in America do dislike it.
That’s true.
Outside, he hurries to the car, not wanting to be caught by the return of the curate, but also mindful of the bad storm still roiling all around the valley and over the mountains. He drives to Mr. Petit’s place of residence—a small bungalow flanked by tall trees and surrounded by shrubs that have grown far past their once-clipped shapes. The house looks as though it is sinking back into the foliage, branches hovering over the walkway—you have to part them to approach the door. He has said he might stop by this early evening, and so he believes he’s expected.
Yet he hesitates. It’s very quiet. Nothing stirring. It’s full dark now.
He knocks on the door and waits. Nothing. He knocks louder and waits again. He thinks he hears something on the other side, and he puts his ear against the wood, listening. Abruptly, the door opens, and Mr. Petit is standing there in an undershirt and slacks, without shoes or socks, holding a drink. “Oh,” he says. “It’s you. Come in.” He walks away from the door.
The priest follows him. The room is surprisingly spacious for the appearance of the house from the street; it’s full of clutter: books, papers, clothes, CDs, old newspapers. Petit shoves some of these off the low-slung sofa and flops down. The upholstery is of that cracked-leather kind that protests every movement upon its surface. “I usually stay pretty close to the bedroom these days,” he says, indicating a doorway in the lef
t wall.
Brother Fire leans slightly, out of reflex, to look in there. It seems from here to be much better kept than this room, though the bed is rumpled, unmade. “Were you sleeping?”
“No.”
There’s a flash of lightning and a bad clap of thunder. Both men jump.
“Thunderstorm, this late. Damn,” Petit says. “Any talk from church 298
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people about the end times, Father? We are coming up on the millennium. Think of it. Could this be the last Thanksgiving?”
“I think it’s probably better to worry about one’s own individual end-of-the-world, don’t you?”
“Been doing that, too, yeah—thinking about that, too.”
“That way, one is, how do I put it, covered.” He smiles at the other man, and experiences a sudden stir of concern, believing that he has said the wrong thing, misunderstood him altogether. “This isn’t the end of everything,” he goes on, feeling thick-headed and inadequate.
Petit indicates the chair to his left, also leather. “Sit down, why don’t you?”
Brother Fire does so. Now, they are face-to-face in the sound of the rain and wind at the windows.
“I was going to straighten up,” Mr. Petit says. “On the chance that you might show.”
Brother Fire stirs and looks around the room, at the pictures on the walls—prints of Sargent, Vermeer, Homer, and other beautifully representational painters.
“You want something to drink?”
“What are you having?”
“Vermouth on the rocks.”
“I’d like that.”
Petit has some trouble rising. Evidently, he’s already had several.
He moves unsteadily to the sideboard, retrieves a glass, reaches into an ice bucket, the contents of which slosh with the melting that has taken place, brings out several half-sized ice cubes, and drops them in the glass. This is all done with a stagy carefulness, as if it were all very frag-ile. He pours the vermouth and brings it precariously over. Brother Fire takes it from him and raises it slightly, as if to offer a toast. The other man gives forth a little smirking laugh and clinks the glasses. He’s still standing, and he drains his own glass, putting his head far back. He takes a couple of the nearly melted ice cubes in his mouth and chews them, moving back to the sideboard. “I had a problem student today, big as a horse. Green hair. I suspended him. Sent him home. I was less than professional in that there really wasn’t a reason except that he’s lazy t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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