Outer Banks

by Russell Banks

  She decided it was safe to tell him, simply and straightforwardly, that she would be going to the funeral. Whatever ritual he was going through, she knew that it did not include her, at present, in any way, and that she was free to attend the funeral or not. So, as he strolled whistling through the door with an armload of split wood for the kitchen woodbox, his face red and dry from the cold, she told him that she wanted to go to the funeral but had no way to get there.

  “I’ll get you there,” he said cheerfully, clattering the wood into the box next to the large black stove. “What time’s the service?”

  “One.”

  “Well, you’d better hurry. I’ll drop you off on my way to Pittsfield,” he said, as if he were agreeing to drop her off at the library. “I forgot to stop at Maxfield’s this morning for some eightpenny nails and friction tape. By the time I get back from Maxfield’s, you ought to be ready for a ride home, so wait outside the church and I’ll pick you up as I come by,” he instructed her, and then he made another mark in his notebook and walked out to the barn.

  Grateful, though somewhat perplexed, she quickly put on a dark gray, simply cut wool dress, hat and coat. By then it was a quarter to one, so she went out to the barn and presented herself. “I’m ready,” she announced.

  When she came in, he had been filing the points on a circular saw blade, and when he saw her, he quickly put down his file and the blade, strode from the barn, got into his Chrysler, and started the motor. She slipped in next to him and tried to draw herself back and down into the seat. Somehow she felt he was doing a great favor for her, and in spite of his apparent cheerfulness and easy manner, she believed that the less space she took up the better.

  They rode in silence for the mile and a half along the road to town, past the bleak, leafless maples and elms and clustering pines and spruce at the edge of the fields. The day was clouded over again, and everything was cast in shades of gray and tan—the dead grasses, the brush and weeds, the bony branches of the trees, even the houses and barns, trailers and cabins, that huddled in shabby groups alongside the road.

  The First Congregational Church, located at the center of the village and facing the Parade, a square patch of open ground, was shaped like a long barn with a bell tower at one end. Though it was painted white, in the chill light it looked cement-gray and somber, more like a mausoleum than a barn or church. A dozen or so cars and pickup trucks, and a single black hearse, were parked on the road outside the church, and Hamilton had to pull out into the middle of the road to get past. But as he started to slow and stop at the end of the line of cars, a short, stout woman, then a tall, gaunt woman, followed by a thick man and two brittle-looking teen-aged boys, got out of a station wagon with a blue light on top. Hamilton drew in just beyond the car and came to a stop.

  “That group getting out of the cruiser?” he asked her. “That’s Sarah, the short one. Jody and Chub Blount are the others, and their boys, Alfred and Alvin. Twins. If you want to go to the graveyard for the burial, ride out with Sarah and her husband, Mooney. Sam Mooney. He’s probably inside the church, getting set to ring the bell. He’s a deacon.”

  “Is it all right?” She had opened her door and had one foot on the ground.

  “All right? Well, I guess you’ll have to ask them. Sarah and Mooney. They’re the ones to tell you if it’s all right. Not me.”

  She decided to risk it. She had got out of the car completely and was peering in at him through the open door. “Hamilton, I’m sorry, but please, tell me why you aren’t going to the funeral.”

  He gripped the steering wheel with both hands. “Go,” he said stiffly, not looking at her. “Go on. You haven’t imagined being dead, so you go on. It’ll help you keep from imagining it a while longer.” He paused a second and pursed his lips as if he were about to whistle, then went on. “To me, not imagining being dead is like believing in Santa Claus, you ought to do it as long as you can. So go ahead, you deserve it,” he said, suddenly smiling into her puzzled face. “We all do.”

  So she did go, as he instructed, first to the funeral service, which was appropriately somber and brief, and, after the ceremony, she left her seat at the back and paraded with the others past the coffin and looked down, once, at the embalmed, parchmentlike face of the old woman, and then filed out of the church, where she joined the rest of the people at the roadside and where she introduced herself to the stout woman Hamilton had pointed out and who had by then been joined by her husband, also stout and as short as his wife.

  When Dora asked if she could ride with them to the cemetery, it was the man, Mooney, who smiled and said, “Of course,” and when they had driven the three miles out of town to the cemetery on the hillside overlooking the frozen, lead-gray Suncook River, it was the husband, Mooney, who briefly told her what she by then suspected, that Hamilton and the rest of the family had been engaged in a “feud” for over ten years, “maybe even longer, maybe since he was born,” Mooney added. But he hadn’t enough time to tell her much more than that, so in many ways, and in a few new ways, as she got out of Mooney’s car and crossed the narrow cemetery lane to where half a dozen people she recognized from the church and the pallbearers and the minister were gathered around the casket and open grave, she was as confused as she had been back in front of the church when she had first stepped out of Hamilton’s car.

  There was a sharp, steady wind blowing off the river. The mourners had positioned themselves at the head of the grave, behind the waist-high granite gravestone, with their backs to the wind. Dora walked quickly around the grave and the four or five floral arrangements at the foot, noticing as she passed the large fan of white chrysanthemums among them, and took a place at the end of the line, next to Mooney, who, like most of the others in the group, had jammed his hands into his coat pockets and was staring at the ground. One or two of the men had folded their arms over their chests and were staring into the sour sky, but all of them were standing in postures that to Dora seemed more defiant than mournful, more angry than grieving. Mooney’s face was set, his soft chin and cheeks held tightly back, almost as if he were wincing. Next to him Sarah, far from indulging in the expected filial weeping, was scowling darkly down at the bleached-out ground, and beyond her, Jody, too, scowled and worked her lips against her teeth. Chub was one of the men whose thick arms were crossed over their beefy chests and who looked up at the sky and flexed the muscles in their jaws. Even the twin boys, Alfred and Alvin, in their awkward way, stood angrily at the head of their grandmother’s grave and looked as if they were about to have a tantrum.

  Dora didn’t know what to make of this show of apparent anger. She felt as if she had walked into the middle of a play, one of those modern plays where the characters never speak and act in the ways you expect them to speak and act. Even the minister looked angry, standing there at the foot of the grave, his Bible in his hand, glaring down at the gravestone and then scowling into the book as he read the half-dozen sentences that committed Alma Stark’s mortal remains to the earth. Was this how the people of this town expressed their grief? Who were they angry at? It almost seemed they were angry with God Himself for having taken the old woman from them. But she knew that couldn’t be true—surely, Alma had not been that passionately loved a mother and grandmother, that steadfast and selfless a friend and neighbor. Surely, she could not have been so desperately mourned that her survivors would blaspheme the God who had taken her from them.

  The minister, having completed the requisite benediction, gave the signal to the two men from Heywoods’ Funeral Home to lower the casket, and then he spun around and stalked across the roadway to the car, with the others immediately following. As the casket hissed hydraulically into the cold, dark earth, Dora suddenly found herself alone, and she started to rush after Mooney and his wife Sarah, who were already grimly getting into their car. Glancing back at the gravestone as she passed alongside the grave, she saw with mild surprise that the single large stone had been put there to mark two graves, not one. On
the left of the polished face of the stone it read HORACE MOORE STARK, with the dates 1892–1963, and on the right half of the face it read ALMA BRAITHWAITE STARK, with the year of her birth, 1893–and a blank space left for the year of her death, 1973.

  Was there something about this stone, Dora wondered, that had angered them? Why? What was wrong with the stone? It seemed perfectly appropriate to her—the husband, Horace, had died first, in 1963, she could see that, and naturally the wife, knowing she would someday be buried next to him, had placed a single stone to mark both graves, leaving blank the place where the year of her own death would eventually be carved. Dora was sure that many surviving wives and husbands handled the matter precisely in this manner. The alternative, she thought, as she got into the back seat of Mooney’s car, was to employ two separate stones and to leave the selection of each stone and its placement entirely in the hands of the survivors of each partner, which, she reasoned, would probably be a slightly more expensive and complicated way of doing it, but at least it would have the advantage of not trying to anticipate the order in which the various members of a family would die, who would be the survivors and who would not. And one would not, year after year, every time one came out to the cemetery, to pay one’s respects to the memory of one’s dead husband, have to look on one’s own gravestone, with that blank space for the date of one’s death beckoning to one, impatiently reminding one who was next, suggesting by its very incompleteness that one was late, was overdue, urging one to rush, to come down sooner to the earth.

  They were almost back to the church, and none of the three in the car had said a word. Then, in a low, frightened voice, Dora asked, “Did Hamilton have that gravestone installed on his own?” knowing that the answer would be yes, and knowing that he had done it without ever having mentioned it to any of them, not to his mother and not to either of his sisters, and knowing, too, that they had discovered its presence one afternoon, doubtless one Memorial Day, when they all had gone out to the cemetery with Alma to place flowers on the old man’s grave, which up to then had probably been marked by a modest brass plaque laid flat in the ground, the conventional way for survivors to put off the expense and the usually painful negotiations with one another that accompany the selection and purchase of a large, permanent, granite marker.

  Mooney stopped in front of the church. Hamilton’s green Chrysler was slightly ahead of him and on the other side of the road. Dora had reached for the handle to open the door when suddenly Sarah spun in her seat and faced her. Her wide face was torn unexpectedly with furious weeping and she bellowed into Dora’s shocked face, “You fool! You fool! I don’t even feel sorry for you!” Then she began to sob and turned away, burying her face in her hands. Her husband said nothing. He reached one hand across and patted his wife’s knee; it was a practiced gesture, a fruitless one, but one he could not let himself forgo.

  Slowly, silently, Dora got out of the car, crossed the road, and started to walk to Hamilton’s car. She knew the woman was right, Sarah, her husband’s own sister. For she was a fool, a pathetic, middle-aged, solitary fool, and she deserved no pity for it, none at all. Opening the heavy door of the car and holding it open for a second, she looked in at her husband, the man whose name a week ago in a dark haze she had attached to her own, and she decided, as she got into the warm interior of the car and closed the door behind her, that she would leave him, she would flee this man as soon as she dared, as soon as she no longer feared he would kill her for it.

  THE RINGING OF the telephone next to my bed clanged into my dream and woke me. I groped for a second, half-blind in the semidarkness, and found the receiver and finally stopped the ringing. As I drew the receiver to my ear I checked my watch—Was it morning or evening? What day? What night? As if by answering these questions one might know who would be calling and breaking so unexpectedly into one’s sleep. And while my eyes, fixed on the luminous face of my watch, told me that it was 6:25 A.M. and that the day was Monday, February 5, and that the year was 1975, my ear, pressed to the cool, smooth, plastic face of the receiver, told me that it was my friend C. who was calling me at this early hour, still a half-hour before sunrise.

  He spoke sharply, before I myself had said a word. “Did I wake you?”

  My mouth felt sourly dry—too much cognac and too many cigars the night before. “Well, yes, but it was time to get up anyhow. I was up late last night,” I said, as explanation for my still being in bed a half-hour before sunrise. (C. sleeps almost not at all, or rather, never for longer than two or three hours at a time; over a period of twenty-four hours, however, he probably averages eight full hours of deep sleep—but as a result, he has lost touch with normal, if not exactly “natural,” sleeping habits, and thus I never know when he will call me and I never know when not to call him.) “Working,” I added guiltily.

  “Ah, yes. On your novel.”

  There was no point in my denying it, so I said nothing. The room was filled with soft, dark shadows, as if it were under water, and I sensed a snowstorm coming.

  “Well, I wanted to know if she’s all right.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, sorry! Dora. Or the one you call Dora. I’ve been reading your Chapter Ten and sitting here pondering her fate, and I must confess it, you’ve given me cause for concern, even alarm.”

  “Alarm?” This surprised me. “For whom?”

  “Why, for Dora. Or whoever she is—A.’s fifth ex-wife. Is she all right?”

  “All right? Well, yes, yes… I mean, I suppose so. She left him over a year ago, you know. Why, what’s wrong?”

  “Is she back with her husband, the haberdasher?” he asked nervously.

  “Oh, yes, certainly. They were married again, the day her divorce from Hamilton, A., came through. Sometime early this winter, as I recall. No. C., Dora’s fine now, fine. She’s even gone back to her old job at the typesetting company. I imagine her time with Hamilton, I mean A., seems like a bad dream to her now. Which, of course, is a shame.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Eh? A shame. I said it’s a shame that she considers her few months with A. as she would a bad dream.”

  “Well, if you asked me, and I’m beginning to think that you wouldn’t, but if you asked me, I’d tell you that I think she’s damned fortunate to be able to think of it as a bad dream. She’s lucky to be able to think at all!”

  “Wha…?”

  “The man’s dangerous. And surely you see that,” he said, his voice suddenly lowered.

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” I laughed. “Dangerous? Perplexing, yes. Frustrating, certainly. But dangerous? No, my dear friend, I think not.”

  “You sound irrational, man,” he informed me quietly. Was there a tainting touch of condescension in his voice? I couldn’t tell. Perhaps he actually believed what he was saying, perhaps to him I did sound irrational. But to me, his assertion that Hamilton was dangerous, and was dangerous specifically to Dora, his ex-wife, was, well, hysterical. No, if anyone sounded irrational this gray predawn, it was my old friend C., the man I was accustomed to regard as an almost pure thinker.

  “C.,” I said calmly, “what’s got you off on this ‘dangerous’ tangent? If you’re afraid for Dora’s welfare, for heaven’s sake, or her physical safety, you might as well be afraid for mine as well,” I said.

  “Indeed.” His voice was still low, and then very carefully he began to try to “reason” with me, as he put it, though I must say right here and now that what he had to say did not sound particularly reasonable at all. I will concede that he was sincere, however, and that he was not condescending to me. And I do believe that the man was genuinely afraid that Dora, and possibly I myself, were in danger of being killed by Hamilton Stark. Yes, that’s right, killed. By Hamilton, my Hamilton, good old Ham Stark. My hero, for God’s sake!

  The way C. saw it, he told me, the very inability of practically every intelligent or sensitive person who came into close contact with Hamilton to determine with confidence whether the
man’s behavior was deliberate and intentional or out of control and compulsive—that very inability made the question of whether Hamilton was dangerous or not a very real question, one that any responsible person, as well as any other kind of person who chose to associate with Hamilton, had to try to answer. Then C. went down a quick list of people who, close to Hamilton in various ways, had been unable to determine whether his behavior was intentional or compulsive—Rochelle, who tried so hard for so long, and for all I know may still be trying as she reads this, and Rochelle’s mother, and Annie, Hamilton’s second wife, and probably Alma, his mother, although, from the evidence, one couldn’t be sure, and Dora, and then, of course, me. On the other hand, people like Jody and Chub Blount, probably Sarah and her husband, Sam Mooney, too, and Hamilton’s third and fourth wives, Jenny the nurse and Maureen the waif, and most of the townspeople who knew Hamilton considerably less than intimately—these people all were convinced that the man was stark raving mad, out of control, dangerous. They had no doubts. Whether they could come up with a sure diagnosis or not didn’t matter; they believed he was ill and that the nature of his illness put them in various kinds of danger.

  The rest of us, according to C., couldn’t decide whether the man was ill or transcendently healthy. We were attracted to him quite as much as we were repelled. And that, according to C., made the question of his potential danger a real one. He went on briefly to cite a few famous cases that he thought were historical parallels—Juan Perón, Howard Hughes, Mary Baker Eddy, and several others I’ve forgotten. In all these cases, C. insisted, the very thing one person used as evidence of the hero’s madness, his illness, another person cited as evidence of his genius, his transcendent good health. Usually, this produces a stand-off, a static situation, which no responsible person should abide. (I thought C. did sound a bit self-righteous there, but basically I agreed with him.) At which point, according to C., the person recognizes that he or she is faced with the choice of either becoming one who follows the hero or one who flees from him, and because of the nature of genius on the one hand and this particular type of illness on the other, one is forced to forgo one’s reason, one’s reliance on objectively considered evidence, and rely instead soley on one’s intuition, which, C. said, was precisely what all of us—Rochelle, her mother, Annie, Dora, and I—had attempted to do.