Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  Bright light blinds him from the opposite window. But then his eyes adjust, and here is Mr. Petit, seated at his desk, holding the revolver up, pointing it at him. Brother Fire raises his hands, out of reflex, and Petit shakes his head. “I won’t hurt you. For God’s sake.”

  The priest brings his hands down. They are shaking. He feels as if he should hide them in his cassock. He looks into the little, perfect, round darkness of the gun barrel.

  Perhaps three feet to Petit’s left, sitting on the floor with the bottom of his face buried in his upturned knees, is Calvin Reed, looking at the priest out of red eyes, his skin as white as the papers on Petit’s desk.

  “Okay, Calvin,” says Petit in what is clearly the voice of the assistant principal, “you may go now.”

  The boy doesn’t seem to believe it. He looks at Brother Fire and then back at Mr. Petit and starts to rise, then thinks better of it, pausing, eyeing Mr. Petit.

  “Go on, son.”

  He stands now. Brother Fire cannot believe the size of him. Slowly, and then quickly, he moves past the priest and out the door. The two men hear his lumbering stride down the corridor.

  Mr. Petit sits back with the revolver in his lap. “Shut the door, Father.”

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  The priest does as he’s asked, without thinking. He hears commotion outside, Calvin having walked into the gathering crowd, no doubt.

  More sirens are sounding now. Out the window, there’s just gray sky with washed-looking white clouds scattered amid folds of darker ones, an intricate sky, and the thin snow dust rising in the wind—a peaceful landscape of snowfield and hollow, dips and drifts and ridges, swells; tall, bare, snow-laden branches of trees, all under the threat of more weather.

  “I was thinking that Thanksgiving’s coming,” Mr. Petit says. “I didn’t do anything much other than cruelty to be ashamed of. So I’m thankful for that.”

  “Can we walk out there now?” Brother Fire asks.

  “No.”

  He waits.

  Petit sighs, then lifts the gun and looks at it, turns it slightly in his hands as if to study the finish of it. “I’ve owned this since I was a kid,”

  he says. “Lorraine hated it. I kept it in the attic for a long time.”

  “Let me have it,” Brother Fire says.

  The other shakes his head slightly, then smiles. “Really.”

  “You don’t want to do this, Mr. Petit.”

  “No, but I do, Father. Right now I do. I’ve got such a blistering headache.”

  “There’s medicine for a headache.”

  “True.”

  After a pause, Mr. Petit says, “Remember the joke about the man on the ledge, and the Irish priest trying to talk him down?”

  Brother Fire indicates that he doesn’t know the story.

  “Priest says, ‘Think of your mother.’ And the guy says, ‘I don’t have a mother.’ So the priest says, ‘Think of your father.’ The guy says, ‘I don’t have a father.’ So the priest says, ‘Your brothers and sisters.’ And the guy says, ‘No brothers and sisters.’ And the priest says, ‘Well for the love of God, think about the Blessed Virgin.’ The guy says, ‘Who’s that?’ And the priest says, ‘Go ahead and jump, man, you’re wasting everyone’s time.’”

  Brother Fire nods, smiling, trying to muster a laugh. “Mr. Petit, what should we do now?”

  “You go on, Father. Really. Go on out and tell them all to go home.”

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  “Will you come with me?”

  Petit holds the revolver by its trigger guard and lets it dangle on the index finger of his left hand. “Not this time, Father.”

  “I won’t go out there without you.”

  “You’ll have to.”

  “Come on with me, son. And everything can end up right. Nobody hurt.”

  Petit smiles. “I think I made an impression on Calvin.”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on, Father.” He grips the handle of the gun now and turns it on the priest. “Really.”

  Brother Fire stands there. “You said you’d talk to me.”

  “We’ve talked.”

  “I—I haven’t heard your confession.”

  “Forgive me, Father, I’m intolerably alone.”

  “Loneliness is not a sin.”

  “Open the door, please, and go on out.”

  “You will give me that gun and walk out of here with me.”

  Petit stares at him for a few seconds and seems to be considering.

  Then he raises the gun to his middle and pulls the trigger.

  8.

  A hospital volunteer takes Oliver in a wheelchair down to the hospital lobby. She’s been on the ward before, passing out cards and delivering mail, a nice woman whose children are grown and whose husband is retired and spends too much time, she says, in the house. She’s not used to having him underfoot. She tells Oliver this on the elevator, joking about it. “I really don’t need this wheelchair,” Oliver says.

  “Hospital policy,” she says cheerfully.

  “You like broccoli?” he asks her.

  “Hate it,” she says. “Always have.”

  “You have just made a friend for life,” he tells her. “Pay no attention t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  to the head shaking. I know it looks like I’m saying no. But I’m saying yes. I’m going home today.”

  “Yes you are.”

  It’s a happy moment. The clouds in his soul are breaking up a little.

  When the doors open, here are Holly and Fiona, with Kalie. He sees the alarm in the child’s face at the sight of the wheelchair, and he lifts her up onto his lap to reassure her. “There, baby,” he says. “It’s just how they let you go, here. They like to spoil a person—give him a soft ride out the door.”

  “We’ll take it from here,” Fiona says to the volunteer. “Bless you.”

  Holly explains that Stanley’s working in the house, and the noise has driven them out. They wanted to join Alison on the joyous occasion, and Kalie especially wanted to be here. Alison isn’t in the lobby. Fiona says they’ll all celebrate by going out to dinner, perhaps. Oliver thinks he might even have a glass of cold beer. But then he dismisses the idea; there’s so much to make up for. He’ll make a gift of his abstention without announcing it as a gift—when asked if he would like something to drink, Oliver will say he wants mineral water.

  They wait for nearly half an hour before it sinks in that something is amiss. The sirens are sounding, it seems, all over the city. Kalie cringes, holding onto Fiona, and then climbing into Oliver’s lap again. He holds her, and they all gaze out at the gray day, waiting, watching the traffic out on the road with its piles of smudged snow in front of the hospital.

  It looks like a normal winter day, except for the sirens. Oliver thinks of nights when he heard sirens and knew Alison was out there, and it was always her siren he heard in the confused din of separate wails—there was always the sense that hers was there and that he could distinguish it. “Someone’s getting the help they need,” he would say to Jonathan and Kalie, seeing the anxiety in their faces.

  Now Holly says, “We could all go in the Subaru. I’m sure she’s just working past her shift.”

  “But what if we go,” Oliver says more forcefully than he can help, feeling the rising alarm in the little body on his lap, “and Alison rolls in here five minutes after we leave.” He pats Kalie’s shoulder and kisses the top of her head. “I want us all to be there to celebrate.”

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  Fiona says, “I can wait here.”

  After a moment, Oliver says, “Let’s all wait.”

  So, they wait. The life of the hospital goes on around them where they sit, in the central high-ceilinged lobby with its bright blue futons and its low-slung plastic tables. The feeling of the place is of a tremendous human industry and busyness, all the goings
to and fro and all the concentration in the faces. Two different men come in with very pregnant wives and sit at the desks in remarkable calm to register them. The wives look around the room, their gaze trailing up into the empty spaces near the ceiling. They, too, seem calm. Oliver remembers bringing Mary to the old wing of the hospital and waiting for a nun to come take her into maternity. The Catholics are gone now, having sold the hospital to the state almost twenty years ago. On the central wall over the admitting desks, you can still see the shadow imprint of the large crucifix that used to be there.

  Oliver has a moment of terror at the mutability of everything. It’s unreasonable. These little inward seizures keep hauling him back out of the sense of relief and gladness that he wants to feel going home.

  He straightens himself in the chair and watches Holly unfold part of a newspaper she took from her purse. She opens to the crossword and folds the page. Fiona sits with arms folded, nodding off a little, but then jerk-ing awake and looking at everything and everyone. Kalie clings to Oliver and then falls asleep. Finally, he decides that they should go, mostly because he’s sick of the hospital, tired of the bright light and the too-sweet air coming from the vents and the sourceless Muzak that seems to rain down from the high windows and then to come rising up from the very floor with its blindingly vivid blue carpet.

  He asks Holly to go get the Subaru, and she obliges, Fiona following her, the two women finding something to argue about as they go, rattling back and forth at each other, crossing in front of the high windows toward the visitors parking lot. Oliver waits in the chair, with Kalie sleeping on his lap. But then she stirs and seems frightened, looking around. She wants down. Oliver lets her stand between his knees. Then he comes to his feet, and pushes the chair away. “Come on, sweetie,” he says, and walks with his granddaughter out the double glass-doors to t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  the entrance drive. The air is frosty; there’s an icy breeze. He shivers, wraps his arms around himself, then reaches to gather the little girl to his side. She’s wide-eyed. She doesn’t like any of this. It’s in the way she hunches her little shoulders and buries her chin in the cloth of her coat collar. And now Oliver sees, in the next drive over, at the emergency entrance, an ambulance with its roof lights flashing. He thinks he catches a glimpse of Alison, moving from the open back of it into the building.

  Was that his daughter?

  Fiona pulls into the drive in the Subaru, with Holly in the back seat.

  Oliver helps Kalie get in and then leans in to look at Fiona. “I think I saw her. Can you wait?”

  “Sure.”

  He closes the door and walks to the expanse of snow-covered lawn and across it to the emergency driveway, the entrance there.

  Alison is at the admitting desk, filling out a form. He walks into the room and crosses to stand at her side. When she realizes he’s there, she gives forth a sound very much of the same timbre and length as Kalie’s earlier—it sounds so much like Kalie that Oliver can’t help but say, “It’s all right, little girl.”

  “Oh, look at you standing here,” she says, kissing the side of his face.

  She’s near crying.

  “What’s happened?” he asks.

  “Poor Mr. Petit, at the school. He shot himself. They just admitted him.”

  “Alive?” Oliver says.

  “He’ll make it. But it’s a felony, so I have to fill out a few forms.”

  “Whud he do—he miss?”

  “Oh, he didn’t miss. A twenty-two slug in his abdomen. They took him to surgery. Brother Fire is with him.”

  “Lord,” Oliver says.

  She looks beyond him.

  “They’re waiting for me,” Oliver says. “Holly and Fiona and Kalie.

  We’ll see you at the house?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes. Oh, you look so good, Dad. You do.” She embraces him, holds tight. Oliver does, too.

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  Stanley works the first two days of Thanksgiving week simply getting the living room ready for the gathering. All progress on dividing the house is at a happy standstill. Holly’s will be done, he says cheerfully.

  He fashions a long table out of boards, sawhorses, and boxes, and covers the freshly plaster-boarded and partly open-framed walls with sheets of brown paper from a big roll, fastening it all with a stapling gun. The room looks like the inside of a package, until, with Alison, he brings Jonathan and Kalie over in the afternoon to paint and draw. Jonathan makes it a project, and Kalie follows his direction with surprising ab-sorption and enthusiasm.

  More snow falls that Tuesday, and the schools close again. They work all day on the room. By Wednesday, the walls are crowded with images of knights on horseback, wild animals—lions, mostly—quite well drawn, and mustangs with big black patches and flaring nostrils. And, of course, there are carefully rendered pilgrims, turkeys, Indians, a few cowboys, one unicorn, and a series of more abstract images (Kalie’s) of houses whose front doors go all the way to the roof, whose windows contain round, threatening faces, even though they seem to be smiling.

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  Alison is kept very busy with work—has to take an extra shift because of the snow and because of poor Mr. Petit’s failed attempt at self-slaughter. The bullet missed the abdominal aorta but did puncture the large intestine, causing leakage of fecal matter into his peritoneal cavity.

  And so there has been worry about septic trouble along with the wound itself, which was the occasion of serious blood loss and shock. Brother Fire has been spending most afternoons sitting by his bedside.

  So, someone else is in the hospital.

  Alison keeps reminding herself that her father’s home in time for the holiday, and there’s plenty for which to be thankful. This week, there’s been some mildly unpleasant news for her: Teddy called to say that he’s getting married again. This is not surprising, though it hurts, in its way.

  It’s a cloud over the hours. Alison recognizes her feeling as bruised ego, and turns her attention to the good things around her, including Stanley.

  And then there’s so much to do, finally, at work—what with the twelve storm-related accidents in the county. On the radio, some movie star-let says, with heavy seriousness, that the world is spinning at tremendous speed through space and it’s a wonder the trees aren’t lying flat.

  For Alison, even recognizing the shopworn nature of the observation, it feels true enough. In the nights, now, lying in Stanley’s strong arms, she feels frightened of where everything is headed and can’t visualize the days going by without breakage of some kind—can’t imagine that what is presently happening to her won’t end in heartbreak. She tells herself—and it is exactly like a murmured secret—that for this happiness, this calm, she’ll find some way to weather whatever it does lead to.

  And just maybe it will lead to happiness. She hasn’t mentioned Stanley’s new status in her life to Oliver, and, since Oliver’s return from the hospital, Stanley has stayed away some, wanting to give Oliver time to get used to things. The children seem to understand the whole situation—enough to keep to themselves what they do know. The fact is, they like Stanley, and, while for Jonathan there’s been a certain edgy period of adjusting to the change, Kalie seems to accept everything as the natural flow of her young, changed life. The child feels at home. Oliver’s back. Everyone’s safe. The world looks mostly like itself again. Alison observes a kind of settled gladness in the little girl’s eyes, and, drinking 354

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  from those dark pools, she feels her own uncertain mood change for the better. The holiday, her favorite holiday, is here.

  “I want to tell Oliver about us,” she says to Stanley, who comes to have coffee with her on a break Wednesday afternoon.

  “Not yet,” he says.

  “Aren’t you sure?”

  “Are you?” he says.

  “I�
��d like to be.”

  “Me, too.” He smiles.

  It dawns on her that she likes his smile more than she can say. It’s such a sweetly confiding expression, his eyes narrowing, and those white teeth.

  “I don’t want to upset him so soon after coming home.”

  “Do you think we’ll upset him?” Alison asks.

  “Maybe.”

  “Oliver likes you.”

  “Well—but this would be more than liking me. This would be sonin-law.”

  Alison puts her coffee down and looks at him. “Really,” she says.

  He seems to have become aware of what he has said. He considers for a brief moment, and then frowns, as though trying to solve some mystery about himself. “Am I proposing?” he asks.

  2.

  Brother Fire, attending to Mr. Petit, has discovered that aspects of his pastoral life are taking on the old urgency. It’s as if the new purpose—helping this one unfortunate man in his journey back from the brink—has cleansed him in ways he could never have presumed or hoped for. But he tries not to think about it, doesn’t want to indulge himself. Something has changed for the good. Life has the old flavor of work to do, and the hours are free of the monstrous appetite for secrets.

  At night, he recites the Lord’s Prayer and remembers again that there t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  are no real secrets in the Kingdom of God. He can pray now. The quiet is like honey poured into his soul.

  Father McFadden decides not to stay for the Sodality Thanksgiving dinner, but to go visit his father in Florida, where he now lives. He tells the old priest this on Wednesday morning, while packing his bag.

  Mostly books. He’ll drive all afternoon and most of the night. Brother Fire stands in the entrance of the kitchen while the younger priest prepares sandwiches for the road trip. “There’s some fresh fruit in the refrigerator,” he says. “Do you want me to put it in a plastic bag for you?”

  “I won’t eat it,” the curate says. He sighs. “I always mean to. But I end up throwing it away.”

  “I do that, too,” says Brother Fire.

  They’re quiet for a spell. The curate finishes making the sandwiches—peanut butter and jelly, ham and Swiss cheese—and puts them in a plastic bag. The old priest helps him put the mustard and mayon-naise, the cheese and peanut butter and jelly away.