Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

Gail has interpreted things to be about her inclusion of Edie. She breathes a tired sigh and says, “I believe it’ll be a wonderful occasion for family and for renewing ourselves as people.”

  “Gail,” says Butterfield, “just when did you decide to live in abstrac-364

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  tions?” He makes the effort of seeming to be joking, but she turns from him and takes Edie by the wrist. “I need a nap every five minutes in this house,” she says.

  “What?” Butterfield says.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” Gail says with a brittle smile.

  “Try not to assume that everything’s always about you,” Elizabeth tells her with the same kind of smile. “Just joking, sweetie.”

  “If you were just joking.”

  “Oh, well—I’m not that complicated, am I?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea what anybody’s talking about,” Mark says. “So I’m going to have some wine and cook this salmon.”

  “I’m talking about having a good Thanksgiving,” Elizabeth says.

  Butterfield studies her face, and now she gazes back at him. They may as well have spoken the words: “Is this us finding a way to get past our trouble?” his eyes say. “I’m gone,” hers say.

  4.

  The rest of the evening is spent in preparation for tomorrow. Mark broils the salmon, and his stepmother works around him, making deviled eggs. Then, finished with his fish, he works on cutting up vegetables, and his older sister, with Edie’s help, makes broccoli casserole. Butterfield wanders through the rooms of his house, his once-happy house.

  Shortly after dark, Holly stops by. She hugs everyone, including Edie, and she and Elizabeth talk for a time about the trouble at the high school, poor Mr. Petit. Elizabeth gives no sign that anything else is wrong. Mark turns on the television and spends an hour channel-surfing, so there’s that noise, too. Holly and Gail and Edie start a game of euchre, and they want Will and Elizabeth to play. Butterfield declines, sits nodding off in his chair while a television special delineates what might be in store if the computer glitch isn’t addressed, the apocalypse to come. It’s all part of the unsettling knowledge of the turn of the century, and the millennium, too.

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  “Remember the great blackout of nineteen sixty-five?” Holly asks. “The whole Eastern seaboard, all the way north and into Canada went black.”

  “I remember,” Butterfield says. “I was fourteen.”

  “Tell what happened to you,” Holly says. “I bet these kids don’t know it, do they?”

  “I shot out a streetlight with a slingshot and everything went out. The streetlight went and in the exact same instant everything else went, too.”

  “We were in Richmond,” Holly says. “Visiting my parents.”

  “Imagine me,” Butterfield says to his daughter, who’s getting into her coat. She and Edie are going to take a walk. “Running home thinking I’d shut the country off.”

  “Talk about guilt,” Mark says.

  “Let’s not,” says Gail, opening the door on the cold night. She and Edie go out, Edie again blocky-looking in her heavy suede coat. There’s a residue of the icy air after the door is shut.

  Elizabeth claims a headache and goes upstairs, without looking at anyone. Holly and Mark sit on the sofa in front of the television.

  Butterfield pretends to drift off, miserable and beginning to understand how Elizabeth will play this weekend out. Mark has wrapped the salmon and put it away, and poured a glass of beer for himself and red wine for his grandmother. They sip their drinks and stare at the roil of colors and images on the TV screen—commercials for a bank, a deodorant, a cleanser, a weight-loss shake, the new Ford Taurus, State Farm Insurance, and the next upcoming episodes of several sitcoms. It’s all as if these appeals are spoken by someone referring to family members, and the voice comes in that infernal whisper: first names for everyone, familiar friends.

  Butterfield rises, makes his way up the stairs, and comes to the entrance of the bedroom. Elizabeth is lying on her back in the bed, with one arm thrown over her eyes.

  “Have you given any thought to where I sleep this weekend?” he asks.

  She sighs but doesn’t move her arm. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

  “What do you think of Edie?”

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  She looks at him, then covers her eyes again. “Are we having a conversation now?”

  “Can we?”

  Silence.

  “You didn’t tell them,” he says softly. “Did you.”

  And she looks at him again. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Are you waiting for me to tell them?”

  She puts her arm back once more. “I have a headache. I’m exhausted.

  You figure it out and then let me know.”

  “Elizabeth, are you staying through the weekend?”

  “I guess.” This is uttered without conviction, with a sigh of exhaus-tion.

  “You want me to go,” he says.

  “I want you to go just now, and let me sleep.”

  “Thank you for that—downstairs—” He himself isn’t even certain how he means it. He stands there watching her. “I’m so sorry, Elizabeth.”

  She doesn’t move, doesn’t seem to have heard him; perhaps, she has drifted off to sleep. He waits another second or two, then sighs loud enough for her to hear him if she’s awake, and takes himself downstairs.

  Holly’s in the kitchen, talking on the telephone. Mark’s staring at the TV, though there’s a magazine open on his lap. Butterfield takes his seat in the armchair and puts his hands over his eyes for a moment. Then he sits back and crosses his legs, hearing his mother going on about the ham she and Fiona are cooking along with the turkey—and how Mark has complicated things with his big piece of fish. Then it’s quiet again, and there’s just the television.

  “What the hell is happening, Dad?” Mark says suddenly.

  “Sounds like Holly doesn’t know what to do about your salmon.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. Come on.”

  Will Butterfield looks at his son. “When I know what’s happening,”

  he says, “I’ll let you know.”

  Holly comes into the room with a glass of wine and a bottle of Bor-deaux. She sits across from Mark, placing the bottle on the coffee table, on a coaster. She sips the wine. “Fiona’s busy making the dinner,” she says. “She’s got her little mind made up.”

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  “You’re staying out of her way,” says Mark.

  “I wish we all could. God knows what Fiona will end up saying tomorrow when she gets a load of—when she sees Edie. Who seems like a nice person, by the way.”

  Butterfield reaches for the bottle and starts into the kitchen for a glass.

  “Will?” Holly says.

  “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” he says.

  In the kitchen, he sees his own reflection in the dark window over the sink and looks away, as if having come face-to-face with a ghost. He pours a glass of wine and drinks it down, then pours another. Where will he go to sleep? He has more of the wine, finishes the bottle, then steels himself and heads out into the living room again. Holly has finished her glass and asks for another.

  “Bottle’s empty,” he says.

  “Open another one.”

  “Sure.”

  He goes into the dining room, retrieves another bottle from the rack, then walks into the kitchen, under the bright light, to open it.

  He’s aware of the blankness of the dark window over the sink, as if it still contains his image. There’s something almost spooky about it. The room is quiet; the house is quiet. Holly laughs at something Mark said.

  Butterfield can’t go in there just now. He pours his wine and drinks it down without really tasting it. The walls of the house seem too close; he goes
to the back door and out into the chill, and across the crust of snow to the other house, which is dark now and looks abandoned once more, though Shostakovich and wife are only away. When the two of them were packing the car, Elizabeth stood in the upstairs bedroom window and watched them. He saw her there and tried to find something to say. Elizabeth stood quite still, staring out. She was aware of him, too, because, finally, she sighed and said, “She’s very pretty.”

  “You’re the most lovely woman I ever saw,” he said. Then: “He was worried she wouldn’t be able to go with him.”

  Elizabeth said nothing to this.

  Now, in the dark, he tramps around it, a man stupid with grief.

  The snow gets into his shoes; his bones ache from the cold. It’s a dreary 368

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  night, lowering clouds. There’s something primal-feeling about it, as if the planet had been through some nuclear storm and has come to rest this way, empty, silent, with just the wind tolling across the sloping, rounded, smoothed surfaces. The houses look abandoned, dead. No light anywhere. There isn’t even the sound of distant traffic now, and the chasms of air above him are eerily devoid of airplane sounds. Off in the soundless dark, his daughter and her lover are walking. The ice bordering the sidewalk is melting, and so the temperature has at last climbed above freezing. He can’t even say why he’s out here. The wind tears at him. He feels it as something inimical, searching him out, getting into the folds and crevices of his clothing, leeching the warmth from his flesh. Holding his arms around himself, he looks at the windows of his house, the one lighted upstairs window where Elizabeth sleeps or broods. All of what he must bring himself to do in this holiday seems impossible and unlivable. Vast distances beyond him. He puts one foot in front of the other, moves across the rhomboid of light from the living-room windows, around to the back door again, and in. He takes his shoes off, knocks the snow from the soles, then pads into the living room with the bottle, shivering. Holly gives him a look.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Just stepped out for some air.” He doesn’t see Mark.

  “You want to tell me what the hell’s going on between you and Elizabeth?”

  “No,” he says.

  She lifts her glass. “Give me some of that.”

  He pours it for her. “I’m taking a page from Fiona tonight. I might just walk home.”

  “I’ll walk you,” Mark says, coming back from the bathroom. “I’d like a little walk.”

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  5.

  When the blast of the pistol shook through the little room, Brother Fire stepped back into a chair and sat down, and the chair was on wheels, so it moved a few feet, as though he were trying to scoot away from the sound, from the catastrophe, Mr. Petit going down behind the desk with an enormous thud and shattering, one awful sound—the shot and the fall and glass breaking. And then there was the terrifying pause, the muffled-seeming aftershock of that sound, a stillness like no other on earth, the old priest hauling himself with some difficulty out of the moving chair and to his feet, lurching toward the other man where he lay on the floor in blood, a lot of blood, and Brother Fire had never seen anything like this, never anything remotely as dreadful, something so much itself that it took everything else and made it marginal, second-ary in some way, the world outside the window and the sunny cold and the people, all of it gone, and there was just the solidness of Mr. Petit’s arms, the bones in them under the skin, and the bleeding around his soft middle, the mess.

  Brother Fire remembers crying out for help and scrabbling finally on his brittle-feeling knees across the hard floor, to the door, and opening it, or someone pushing it open on him, and his own voice saying please.

  Please.

  Now he’s unable to sleep, contemplating the dinner tomorrow. This holiday, above all, is the one that makes him long for a family, someone—

  brother, sister, cousin—to feel the necessity of visiting or calling. But he won’t, won’t, won’t allow such thoughts. He dismisses the housekeeper so she can prepare the holiday dinner for her family. He hears confessions for two hours, concentrating on the miracle of forgiveness, and then he walks over to the rectory and makes himself a modest supper of canned chili and a glass of very cold beer. No one calls. He sits by the phone in case he’s needed, and reads Aquinas’s book. Such reasoned, calm determinations! It’s restorative. And when the picture of Mr. Petit falling from the chair behind the desk goes through his mind, he strives 370

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  to put it away—or, more accurately, he strives to dismiss the feeling that comes, the sense of an unspeakable futility. His failure with Mr. Petit is essentially a failure to see beyond his own despair—or even to recognize it as despair—and all of this constitutes a faltering, somehow, a subtle loss of faith itself. He’s aware of this now, and now, when he prays, he asks for help with that, once more uttering the one prayer, over and over again: “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”

  Father McFadden calls at nine o’clock with his poem. He wants to read it aloud.

  “Of course,” says Brother Fire. “Please.”

  “Nothing so tempting as hopelessness,” the younger priest reads.

  “Nothing so happy as faith. Nothing so great as the sense of thankfulness. Not even Henry the Eighth, with all his earthly power and might, could ruin my glad tiding tonight, of Thanksgiving’s happiness.”

  Brother Fire waits for more, and, when it doesn’t come, forces a murmur of satisfaction. “I like that,” he says. And, quite extraordinarily, in the instant that he says it, lying, it becomes true. He does like it; he admires it for its strapping, good-hearted conviction and trust.

  “I had trouble finding a rhyme for faith,” Father McFadden says.

  “Well, it’s a good one.”

  “And you are taken care of tomorrow, Father?”

  “Yes. I’ll say the two masses, and I’m having dinner with Holly Grey and her family.”

  “That’s wonderful. And things are all right there?”

  Brother Fire decides not to say anything about Mr. Petit. “Things are okay, yes.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful. And you—you like the poem.”

  “Very much.” It’s possible, the old priest tells himself without words, to love the thought for itself, separate from the expression.

  “I’m so glad, Father. It’s been a wonderful year, serving with you.

  We’ll look forward to more good works together.”

  “Yes,” Brother Fire says.

  “Bless you,” says the younger priest. “I’ll call again, see how your day went.”

  “Thank you, it’s not necessary.”

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  “God be with you,” Father McFadden says.

  “And with you.”

  After he hangs up, Brother Fire finds that he can’t read. The quiet house creaks; there are sounds out in the winter night, the barking of a dog, a lone car horn, and then the combustive groan of several helicop-ters going over, doubtless the escort and lead chopper of the beleaguered president, on his way back to the White House from Camp David. The old priest kneels by his bed and prays for light, for warmth, for goodness, and for trust in God.

  6.

  In the middle of the night, Elizabeth wakes from a dejected, vaguely bad-dreaming sleep with a burning under her breastbone. She swallows several times, thinks of rising to take medicine, but is too sleepy, too exhausted and depleted; the image of herself getting out of bed is replaced by a strange, summer-calm light, beautiful but playing out in a kind of foreground over a blank screen of gloom; she hears, or dreams she hears, the trickle of water over stones, and now she sees flowers moving in breezes; it’s all some lost picnic, and she has an overwhelming sense that she must open her eyes wide enough to take everything in, but then she receives another throbbing realization of the pain at her middle, another stream of
intention to get up . . . and slips once more off the ledge of consciousness and is gone. An unknowable amount of time passes before she comes to with a shudder, experiencing still the pain under her heart—and her heart’s pain.

  She turns to her side and looks at the faint striations of moving shadow in the window, the shifting illuminations of the street, cars going by, and the clouds gathering and unraveling, breaking up in silver traces of lunar light, in glacial-slow procession across the wide midnight sky. She hears voices downstairs, or thinks she does. She sits up and sees that Will has settled in the chair on the other side of the room, a light-372

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  colored blanket over him—the tan one, she remembers, from the beach two years ago, Marco Island, Florida, and that morning they had wandered miles down the soft coast and filled a plastic bag with sand dollars, and, later, a man had sold them the blanket from a basket of them in a street market. How happy they were then. How good they felt to be walking alone on the shore of the gulf, as if they were on the first shore of the new world, before time and the thousands of years.

  Will sleeps with one hand over his face, fingers spread, looking like someone fallen there in the middle of disaster; the hand covers the face in an aspect of surrender to some fate.

  She sees herself rise and walk the four paces to where he is, imagines herself kneeling, reaching to take him into her arms, imagines his waking in the fright that he seems to express now, moaning softly and urgently in his sleep, stirring in little nerve-impulses, dreaming whatever he’s dreaming. She loves him—loves even his failures. The thought comes to her and she rejects it, turns from it in her mind like someone refusing to attend to a pleading voice.

  She gets out of the bed and moves soundlessly downstairs, to the kitchen, where she’s startled—and dismayed—to find Edie, sitting with coffee in the breakfast nook. Edie seems discomfited to be caught here, seems to sense immediately that Elizabeth came down here thinking she could fix herself something in her own house in the middle of the night.

  For a little space, neither of them knows quite what to do. Finally, Elizabeth moves to the counter, acknowledging the other with a small, polite wave of the hand. Edie’s in flannel pajamas, a flower-print terry-cloth robe, and slippers. She has glasses on, with those retro fifties frames everyone has been wearing. Her eyes are magnified to twice their normal size by the lenses; this gives her a mournful, overly expectant look—the look of someone who has suffered blows and believes more are coming.