Ash Wednesday

by Chet Williamson

  Beth's attention paid off, for Terry was a bright, lively, healthy baby whose infectious spirit proved strong enough to reactivate even Jim's grandfather. Although speech never returned to Dan Foster, they were able to work out a simple yes-no code with eye squints.

  When his grandfather died peacefully in his sleep in the nursing home, Jim was in the hospital himself, about to undergo an operation. Beth, although she knew of Grandpa Foster's death, did not tell Jim. He was upset enough. He'd begun coughing in June, three months before. It was a dry phlegmless cough that refused to disappear. Finally he'd gone to Dr. Page in Merridale, who could find nothing wrong. "Give it another week," he told Jim, and gave him some antibiotics. "If it's still bad, call me."

  Four days after the exam he started to cough up small gobbets of dark red blood. The next day he called Dr. Page, who reexamined him and sent him to a throat specialist at Lansford General. At the hospital, Jim went through a battery of tests that revealed a growth on his trachea. The doctor was strangely unsmiling, uncomforting. "We'll have to remove it." he said across a desk top littered with indecipherable papers.

  "Do you have any idea what it is?" Jim asked, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.

  "Not really. There's no way of telling until we remove it for a biopsy."

  "Then it could be cancerous," he ventured.

  The doctor nodded. "There's always that possibility.”

  “What are the chances it is?"

  "I don't give chances. We're not gambling here. Some doctors would say one chance in ten, another one in five, another one in a hundred. Then if it is malignant, the patient feels cheated. Me, the only odds I give are fifty-fifty. Either it is or it isn't."

  "And"—Jim's throat felt thick, lined with heavy velvet—"and what if it is?"

  "Then we treat it. But let's find out first. One step at a time."

  "But do most people . . . I mean, could I survive it?"

  "Every case is different. It depends on a lot of things. But it should be done quickly. The faster we find out, the better chance we've got of doing something about it. Can you come in tomorrow?"

  "So soon?"

  "No point in waiting. It won't go away."

  Jim nodded. "All right. I guess so." Then he started to cry. It was nearly internal, a shaking of the shoulders, a trembling in the chest, the Adam's apple bobbing rhythmically. Tears trickled weakly from his eyes, but there were no audible sobs. The doctor looked down at his desk top and gave Jim instructions on what to bring and do when he entered the hospital.

  When Jim got home he cried again, this time loudly, unashamed, in Beth's arms. "It's all right," she whispered. "It'll be all right. He had to say those things. Just in case. Just to protect himself. But it'll be all right, you'll see. They always get you ready for the worst, the very worst, that's all. You'll see."

  "It's not," he sobbed, "it's not that death scares me. It's just that I don't want to leave you—you and Terry. I just . . . can't . . . bear that."

  "You won't. You won't. Shh . . . shh . . ."

  He kept crying, and didn't cry again when he was finished. The next afternoon he entered the hospital. The tests and preparations left him weary and shaken, and the nurse had to wake him the next morning at 6:00 A.M. to take him to the operating room. He remembered the prick of a needle, a drowsy journey down halls, through elevators, the silver metal of the operating room, and then nothing. His next sensation was that of violent peristalsis, striving to turn his head to let the vomit come up, but being strapped to a table and then nothing once more, and finally slow waking and a pain in his throat as though it were raw and rubbed with salt. Beth beside him, smiling and pale. "They say it's benign," she whispered.

  He tried to talk, to voice a syllable, but it was impossible.

  "They won't know for sure until they do a full biopsy, but the frozen section . . . Well, they say it looks okay."

  It would be all right. He would live. He was not going to die.

  Jim learned of his grandfather's death two days later. He was eating soft solids and was able to speak in a whisper. "He died instead of me," he said quietly when Beth told him the news.

  "Don't say that," she said. "You had nothing to do with it."

  He smiled and nodded then and said she was right, that that was a silly thing for him to say. But he thought to himself over and over again, He died instead of me, and that night he whispered "Thank you" to his grandfather and to God until he only thought the words, and then until he was asleep.

  While he recovered in the weeks that followed, his mind took a decidedly mystical bent, and he saw the elements of his life coalesce into an imagined whole of which he had not previously dreamed. It was his near approach to death that had caused this more superstitious view of life, and he began to see meaning where before had been only chaos. Everything was fraught with signs and portents, indications of guidance. He had not died and there was a reason for that, but there was also a reason why he had come so close to death. It was ordained that he should feel the brush of the dark wings. What point was there otherwise to the suffering he had gone through? What point to his grandfather's death on the very night before his operation? It was a warning, a cautionary call that life was short, too short to be wasted.

  Signs and portents.

  The day before he was to go back to Linden he told Beth that he was quitting.

  "Quitting?" she said, only mildly surprised. "For good?" He nodded. "You want to go back to work anyway. And the paper's going well. I'd like to work full-time on it.”

  “What about Terry?"

  "I can do a lot of my work at home. And when I can't, there's my mom, and what about Marty Pierce? She watches the Humphreys' baby."

  "Just tell me—why do you want to quit?"

  He told her about dead ends in life, of the happiness that working on the Messenger had brought him, of the dropped hints by Bill Gingrich that he could use a full-time assistant.

  "It'll be hard," she said. "The money."

  "We can manage."

  They did manage. Beth secured a job at Hatch before Jim quit. It was short notice, but Mary Spruce pushed with all her might to wedge Beth into the as yet nonexistent assistant principal's position. That enrollment was up twelve percent helped, and Beth found herself making a salary of nearly a third again as much as when she had taught. Unfortunately Jim was offered only a bit more than half of what he was earning at Linden. Nevertheless, he accepted Bill Gingrich's offer, and turned in his resignation to Mr. Oakes, who was sincerely sorry to receive it.

  The editorial page of the Messenger contained a new addition the following week: "James Callendar, Assistant Editor."

  "Just goes to show you Horatio Alger was right," Bill Gingrich said wryly when he handed Jim a copy of the paper. "A man can become a legend in his own time."

  Once he began newspaper work full-time, Jim liked it even better than he had before. To his relief, he found that he was able to spend a large part of his time writing and doing layout at home, so he was able to care for Terry with only occasional recourse to his mother or Marty Pierce, a large-boned kindly-eyed woman who lived only a few blocks away. Although he tried at first to do his work during the day, he found that the baby kept him far busier than he had expected, so most of the work was done at night. Gingrich quietly accepted the situation. particularly since Jim was always ahead of schedule on his duties and assignments. Once or twice he would growl, "Man oughta be a bachelor to work on a newspaper," and added, "or a childless widower." But the bantering was good-natured, and the relationship between the two men grew to be almost familial. Gingrich had dinner at the Callendars' every other week, and he and Jim often stopped in at the bar at the Anchor on Wednesday evenings after the weekly edition was in the hands of the printer and Beth was home with Terry.

  So the years went by calmly. Jim was happy and content with his work and his family, and he flowed with the seasons as they passed effortlessly into one another. Beth liked her administrati
ve position as well, and seemed far more relaxed than when she had been in the classroom. The youngest member of the family, Terry, was fulfilling all expectations. He was an active child, afraid of little, self-confident without being overbearing. Jim thought the time that he had spent with the boy was in large part responsible. While other fathers might come home tired and irritable, wanting only to be left alone and finally feeling communicative when it was too late and the kids were in bed, Jim had always made it a point to stop and listen when Terry had something to say. The work would always be there, but his son would not. Before he would even realize it, Jim thought, Terry would be gone. Though it made him immeasurably sad, he thought of the old song about turning around to find your children older, and then finally grown and out the door. He thought of it often, to remind himself of what was truly important, like a Catholic bearing a crucifix with the figure of his dead Lord.

  Later, after the accident, he was almost sorry they had grown so close. It only made the loss that much greater, made him say over and over again, "If only . . . if only . . ."

  If only things had not happened as they had. But it was of no use to contemplate. It had happened, all of it, one event leading inexorably to the next.

  They could have done without the money. Had he known, had he even suspected, had a voice said to him, "There is a risk factor here of a thousand to one," he never would have gotten behind the wheel. But there was no one to whisper or warn; there was only the promise of five dollars an hour to drive the school bus.

  It was not a great amount for a college graduate to be paid in 1981, but 1981 was not a great year. Everyone was feeling the pinch, especially the small-town merchants whose goods were going unsold because few people had enough money to pay full retail price, and those who did also chose to conserve by buying what they could at the recently opened K-Mart, or at the Jewelcor in Lansford. Lower sales meant lower profits, and the burghers of Merridale decided independently, yet en masse, that advertising would be the least painful thing to let slip by the roadside. Their motivations were for the most part humanitarian, although Bill Gingrich didn't see it that way.

  "Damn fools are gonna kill themselves—and us," he said over the first of their Wednesday evening beers. "Don't know why they can't see it. Oh, sure, they'll keep most of their people on and cut out their advertising when they need it the most. `Do anything I can to keep from letting my clerks go,' Matt Sheller—hell, you heard him."

  "You can't blame them, Bill," Jim said, nursing his beer. "Most of his people've been there for years. I remember Mike and Pete from when I was in high school."

  "I'm not blaming them," Gingrich said, his temper rising. "Sheller doesn't have to fire anybody. If he and the other clowns in this town made their prices competitive with the chains, they'd do fine and they could still buy advertising."

  "Can they really compete?"

  "Hell, yes. Matt Sheller might have to start driving a Volkswagen instead of his yearly New Yorker, but what he'd lose at first in profit he'd make up eventually in volume."

  "If it's that simple, why haven't they done it already?"

  Gingrich looked at Jim and smiled slightly. "This, in case you hadn't noticed, is Merridale, my boy. You've been on the paper seven years, you oughta know by now. Things are done here as they've been done for two hundred years. One neither stands up in the boat nor rattles the oars, or one will find one's ass pitched overboard." He held up a finger for another beer. “Tell me, what do you think would happen to the first Merridale merchant to change his store's name to 'Discount City'?"

  Jim frowned. "I'm not sure. But he'd probably do well."

  "I beg to differ. In my scenario he would be shunned by his fellows, his wife would be ignored at Thursday morning Bible study, and his kid might get the shit kicked out of him at school. The few customers he had had would desert him, and he would go bankrupt, followed by an early death and a pauper's grave, leaving his widow and orphans to the mercies of the Reagan non-welfare state."

  "Come on, Bill." Jim laughed. "You're not serious."

  "Bet me." His smile vanished. "Some outsider comes in and builds a K-Mart or a Thrift Drugs on the outskirts, and there's a little bitching and moaning, but before you know it everybody's out there snuffling up dish towels three for a dollar. But let one of our own turn traitor, and spider webs will form on his door real fast." Gingrich took a long draft of beer and stifled a belch. "Nope, they're content to go along doing what they've always done and what their daddies always did. Wouldn't know a good marketing idea if it bit 'em in the ass. And when they need to advertise the most—sell their small-town friendly service if they can't sell price—they don't advertise. No, they only advertise when they don't really need to. Dim bulbs. All of 'em. Just dim bulbs." He shook his head and gnawed his lower lip. "We're hurtin', Jim."

  "That had, huh?"

  "That had."

  "Hell. Bill, I've tried to get them to buy."

  "I know you have. I'm not blaming you at all. But goddammit . . .” Gingrich paused. and Jim sensed a frustration and a self-hatred that was alien to the man. When he spoke again, the words came slowly, painstakingly, an apology in each syllable. "I didn't know how I was going to tell you. I guess there's no easy way." He turned and looked Jim full in the face. "I'm not going to be able to keep you full-time anymore. Jim. I just can't afford it."

  Jim Callendar felt as if he'd suddenly swallowed a lump of ice, but he said nothing.

  "Maybe," Gingrich went on, "maybe if I kept you on and the economy got better real fast, I could make it. But that's a pretty big maybe." He put his hand on Jim's arm, the only time other than a handshake that they had ever touched. "It's not you, okay? I mean you've done a wonderful job, and you deserve a helluva lot better than this. But I just . . . have no choice. I've been working on the Messenger for forty-one years, Jim—"

  "No, look, I understand." He didn't want to hear a speech, not now. He was angry, hurt, bitter, and though he was also displeased with himself for feeling that way, he could not help it. Gingrich still had his paper; Jim had nothing.

  "Forty-one years," Gingrich pressed. "I can't risk losing that."

  "You don't have to justify it, Bill," Jim said, snappishly enough to make Gingrich draw back. Jim added, more gently, "I understand. Really I do."

  They sat in silence for a time, watching the foam dry into moist, white webs on the insides of their beer glasses.

  "If you could," Gingrich finally said, "I'd like you to keep doing your own column and 'Around the Square.' "

  "Look, you don't have to—"

  "I didn't just think of that," said Gingrich, the old spark returning. "I'd intended to ask you all along, okay?"

  Jim stared at him, then nodded. "Okay. Until I find something else." Gingrich nodded back. "How much?" Jim asked. ,

  Gingrich pursed his lips, but his eyes relaxed, as though he were once more on familiar ground. "Fifty for the 'Square,' Thirty for yours."

  Jim shrugged. "All right."

  "And one more thing," Gingrich said. "As soon as I can afford to hire you back, I want you back."

  "We'll see."

  "Goddammit, I'm sorry." The word was so loud that even the regulars turned. Gingrich noticed and returned his tone to normal. "You are the only guy except for me who has ever liked both newspaper work and this fucking blindered town enough to maybe be able to make a go of the Messenger. Now someday I am going to die—"

  "Aw, come on, Bill—"

  "I'm serious. I've got no family, nobody I can trust this rag to. . . . All I've got is Thelma for the secretary stuff and Clarence for the shit work, and they're both two years older'n dirt and not much brighter. So where does that leave me? You may not be much, kid, but you're all I've got."

  "All you had, you mean."

  "I can't apologize forever. You gonna let me talk? Okay, then, what I'm saying is that you stick with me and the paper's yours someday. That simple. If you want it."

  "Jesus Christ, Bill, you just fi
red me. Now to make up for it you're leaving me the paper?"

  Gingrich looked puzzled, as if he hadn't seen it in that light. "Yeah," he said. "I guess that's what I'm doing."

  Jim shook his head. "I'm sorry, I can't deal with this right now. You do whatever the hell you want. It's your paper. I'm going home." He put the money for his beer on the bar. Gingrich tried to return it to him, but he wouldn't take it. "You'll have my columns on time," he said, and left.

  Beth was reading TIME and Terry was watching The Muppet Show when Jim came into the rec room. He dutifully kissed them both, but Beth sensed the tension inside him. "Get it put to bed?" she asked.

  "Yeah," he answered. "Did I ever." She looked at him, and he gestured upstairs. A minute later, at the kitchen table, he told her about losing his job. She stood, came around the table to where he sat, and embraced him from behind.

  "It's okay," she said, stroking his hair as though he were crying. But he was nowhere near tears. The feeling was too empty for that. It was as though someone had taken a freezing metal scoop and dug pieces out of his stomach, and the places where the chunks had come out were now cauterized, not by fire, but by ice. "We'll be all right."

  Dully, he told her about the eighty dollars a week his columns would bring, and she brightened. "Maybe if you don't find anything right away you could get something part-time." He listened while she rattled off several possibilities, praying that she would not suggest trying to return to Linden and loving her when she did not.

  It was not until much later, when they were both in bed, that she thought of it. "Buses . . ." she said, propping herself on an elbow.

  "Hmmm?"

  "I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Otto Floyd is retiring soon."