Out Of The Deep I Cry

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  The chief spoke briefly with Nurse Vigue and then vanished into the examination room. “Now you’re screwed,” Shaun whispered. “He’s had his eye on you ever since he caught us torching tires at the dump.”

  Russ shook his head. “I’m not scared of him,” he said, and it was true. He had seen the chief a few too many times, back before his dad passed away, gently steering the incoherent and maudlin Walter Van Alstyne up the front walk and into the parlor. The chief always said the same thing: “He’s had a few too many, Margy. I guess he needs to sleep it off.” Then he’d look real close into Russ’s mom’s face and ask, “You be all right here with him while he’s like this?”

  And she would get all brisk and efficient and tell him they would make out fine, and then they’d help Dad to his bed and she’d press a cup of coffee-usually refused-on the chief.

  It wasn’t until after his dad was dead that Russ realized what the chief had really been asking his mom, and when he did, it enraged him, that anyone could think his gentle, soft-spoken father would ever harm his mother. But later, he thought about how the chief had always acted as if Walter Van Alstyne’s drunkenness was a onetime thing, and how careful he was of his mom’s pride. And he realized the question wasn’t that far-fetched after all. Because in his own way, his dad had hurt his mom a lot.

  When the chief had caught him drinking Jack Daniel’s and leading a group of seniors in lighting tires on fire and rolling them downhill from the dump, he had hauled Russ behind his cruiser for a talking-to. To the rest of the guys, it must have looked as if Russ had missed getting arrested by the skin of his teeth. But in truth, Liddle hadn’t threatened him with the lockup. Instead, he had looked at Russ as though he had been stealing from a church, and said, “Russell, don’t you think your mother’s been through enough without you grieving her with this kind of foolishness? How are you going to look her in the eye if I have to bring you home…” he didn’t say just like your father. He didn’t have to.

  Russ didn’t have the words to tell this to Shaun, so he just grunted and snapped open a year-old Life magazine. It showed pictures of a massive antiwar demonstration. He shut it again, leaned back against the vinyl seat, and closed his eyes. This was supposed to have been a fun day fishing, one last day when he didn’t have to be anywhere or do anything. Now it was all turned to crap.

  “You boys want to tell me what happened?”

  Russ opened his eyes. Chief Liddle stood in front of them, his thumbs hooked into his gun belt. Russ and Shaun clambered to their feet, and Russ let Shaun rattle on about the fishing and the old woman and the rescue and the resuscitation. He wound it up by explaining how they had driven the old woman’s car to the hospital, then said, “Can I please go and call my mom to come get us? Because I just now realized we need a ride back to the lake to pick up my car.”

  The chief looked at both of them closely. He sniffed. “You two smell like the Dew Drop Inn on a Saturday night.”

  Shaun’s eyes got wide and white.

  “It’s me, sir,” Russ said. “I had a couple beers. But it’s not as bad as it smells-I knocked ’em over when I took my jeans off to go after the old lady. That’s why I stink so bad.”

  The chief shook his head. “Russell-,” he began.

  “Russ is leaving for the army next week,” Shaun blurted. “You know what they say, Chief. ‘If you’re old enough to fight for your country…’”

  “You aren’t going, are you?” Chief Liddle asked Shaun.

  “Ah, no.”

  “Then I suggest you hush up and stay away from booze where I can smell you. Go on, go call your mother.” Shaun didn’t have to be told twice. He took off for the pay phone at the other end of the hall. Liddle looked straight at Russ, and the fact that the chief now had to look up to meet his eyes gave Russ a weird, disoriented feeling, like the time after his dad’s service when Mr. Kilmer, the funeral director, had asked for ‘Mr. Van Alstyne’s signature’ and he had realized that that was him, that he was ‘Mr. Van Alstyne’ now.

  “Is it true?” the chief said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You volunteer, or did your number come up?”

  Russ paused. “My number came up.”

  “And you’re leaving next week?”

  “Wednesday.”

  The chief bit the inside of his cheek. “How’s your mom taking it?”

  “About as well as you’d expect.”

  “I’ll make sure to drop in on her now and again. To keep an eye on things.”

  To do Russ’s job for him. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.”

  The chief looked as if he were going to say something else, but he merely extended his hand. “Good luck to you, then.” They shook. “I don’t need you to make a statement. You can go.”

  “Sir?”

  The chief cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “Who is that old lady? And why was she going into the reservoir like that?”

  The deep lines around the chief’s eyes crinkled faintly. “Curious, are you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Liddle glanced toward the emergency-room doors. “That’s Mrs. Ketchem.”

  “Ketchem? Like the clinic? And the dairy?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “But she must be rich!”

  The chief smiled at him. “If she is, you can’t prove it by me. Rich or poor, all folks have troubles, Russell.”

  “Was that why she was trying to, you know, kill herself?”

  The chief stopped smiling. “I’m going to call that an accident. She’s an old woman, working out in the sun, getting up and down… it’s natural she became disoriented. Her daughter and son-in-law moved back to the area recently. I’ll have a talk with them. Maybe we can persuade Mrs. Ketchem that it’s time to give up her house and move in with them.”

  “But she wasn’t disoriented. She was walking into that water like you’d walk into the men’s room. She knew exactly what she was doing.”

  Chief Liddle gave him a look that somehow made him draw closer. “Attempted suicide is a crime, Russell. It might require a competency hearing and an involuntary committal at the Infirmary. Now, as long as she has family to take charge of her, I don’t think she needs to go through that, do you?”

  “But what if she’s… I don’t know, sick in the head or something?”

  Liddle shook his head. “She’s not going off her rocker. She’s just old and tired. Even her sorrows are older than most of the folks around her these days. Sometimes, the weight of all that living just presses down on a person and sort of squashes them flat.”

  Russ thought that if that’s what old age brought, he’d rather go out young in a blaze of glory. His feeling must have shown on his face, because the chief smiled at him again. “Not that it’s anything you have to worry about.” He shook his hand again. “Go on with your friend there. It looks like he’s done with his phone call. And keep your head down when you’re over there. We want you to come home safe.”

  And that ended his day’s adventure. At least until that night, when he woke up his mother, yelling, from the first nightmare he could remember since he was ten. And in later years, even after he had walked, awake, through nightmares of men blown to a pulp and helicopters falling out of the sky, he still sometimes remembered the sensation of sinking into the cool, dark water. The pale, withered face. The black, black eyes. And he would shiver.

  Chapter 2

  NOW

  Ash Wednesday, March 8, a Day of Penance

  The rector of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, town of Millers Kill, diocese of Albany, spread her arms in an old gesture of welcome. Her chasuble, dark purple embroidered with gold, opened like penitential wings. “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent,” she said, “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.” Her voice echoed off the stone walls of the church and was swallowed up in corners left
dark by the antiquated lighting system and the heavy, gray day outside. “And, to make a right beginning of repentance and as a mark of our mortal nature, let us now kneel before the Lord, our maker and redeemer.”

  She turned toward the low altar and knelt. There was a thick woolen rustling as the twenty or so persons who had risked a late arrival at the office to attend the 7:00 A.M. Imposition of Ashes knelt behind her. A vast and somber silence settled around them as they all considered the sobering idea of their mortal nature. At least, Clare hoped they were all considering it. Undoubtedly, some were worried about the imminent storm, promising ice and freezing rain, while others were already thinking about what awaited them at work or contemplating the pain in their knees. There was a lot of kneeling in Lent. It was hard on the knees.

  Clare rose. She took the silver bowl containing the ashes and turned back to the people. She cupped the bowl between her hands. “Almighty God, you have created us out of the dust of the earth; grant that these ashes may be to us a sign of our mortality and penitence, that we may remember that it is only by your gracious gift that we are given everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Savior.” They said “Amen” in unison.

  She nodded to Willem Ellis, who had cheerfully agreed to act as the acolyte for the early-morning service if it got him a note excusing him from homeroom and first-period geometry at school. He hopped down the steps from the altar and drew a kneeler across the bare stone before swinging the mahogany altar rail shut. Clare waited while the penitents slid out of the pews and made their way up to the rail. As one coat-muffled form after another sank down onto the overstuffed velvet kneeler, she stepped forward. “Remember that you are dust,” she said, dipping her thumb into the ashes and firmly crossing Nathan Andernach’s forehead. “And to dust you shall return.” She made a sooty cross beneath Judy Morrison’s heavily teased bangs. Down the row, again and again. “Remember that you are dust. And to dust you shall return.” The black crosses emerged beneath her thumb. “Remember that you are dust. And to dust you shall return.” Finally, she turned to Willem, who helpfully scraped his bangs off his face to bare his forehead. She almost smiled. No sixteen-year-old ever remembered he was dust.

  She turned back to the altar and, bowing slightly, dipped her thumb into the ashes one last time. She crossed her own forehead, feeling the grit of it pressing into her, marking her skin. “Remember that you are dust,” she whispered.

  The ice storm everyone was expecting had arrived by the end of the service. Clare shook hands and said farewells near the inner narthex door, in a spot strategically chosen for its relative lack of drafts. As members of the congregation opened and closed the doors, she could see glimpses of the hammered-steel sky and hear the ticks and splatters of sleet and freezing rain.

  Dr. Anne Vining-Ellis paused in front of Clare to wrap a muffler around her throat. “I’m glad I insisted on bringing Will this morning,” she said. “This is nasty weather for an inexperienced driver to be out in.”

  Clare waved to a departing parka-clad back and shivered as a cold wind speared through the doorway. “Amen to that,” she said.

  “I don’t suppose I can suggest you stay close to home today.”

  “I’m never going to live down my winter driving reputation, am I?” Anne-universally called Dr. Anne-was the closest thing Clare had to a good friend among her parishioners. She was willing to let her fuss a little. “Don’t worry, I’m not planning on making any home visits today. I’ve got two more Impositions scheduled, at noon and five-thirty. Those will keep me plenty busy.”

  The emergency-room doctor glanced up at the shadowy rafters. “It’s Wednesday. You always go to the Kreemy Kakes Diner on Wednesdays.”

  Clare pressed her lips together in what she hoped was a smile. “Well, you see then? That’s right in the middle of town.”

  “I’m not the only one who’s made mention of your habit, Clare.” Dr. Anne looked at her. “You know I’m not a gossip. I just think you ought to be aware that the fact you have lunch every week with a married man hasn’t gone unnoticed.” Clare opened her mouth. Dr. Anne cut her off. “And I know it’s all perfectly innocent. You don’t have to tell me that.”

  Clare rolled her eyes. “If having lunch once a week in a public diner is going to start stories, I can’t imagine what I could do to stop them from circulating. Have the man over to my house where no one will see us together?”

  Dr. Anne shook her head. “Take it as a friendly FYI.” She laid a gloved hand on Clare’s arm. “There are still some people in this church who aren’t too keen on the idea of a female priest. Don’t give them any ammunition, okay?”

  “I’ll try to be a credit to my gender,” Clare said.

  Dr. Anne laughed. “Good enough. Hey, where’s that rotten kid of mine? Willem?”

  The boy’s voice came from the far side of the church. “Mom! Reverend Clare! Take a look at this!”

  Dr. Anne looked questioningly at Clare, then set off toward her son. Clare followed, pulling her chasuble over her head as she walked. Willem was standing near the halfway point of the north wall of the church. As Clare and his mother approached, he pointed to the deeply embrasured window there, a stained-glass depiction of stately angels leading a group of children to the Throne of Glory. It had always been an odd window to Clare’s thinking-it was obviously a recent addition, done in a modern mosaic style favored in the 1970s. And the inscription wasn’t, as one might expect of such a scene, “Suffer the little children to come unto me” or “Unless ye be as little children.” Instead, two of the angels faced the viewer, holding shields with a verse from Lamentations: “But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men.”

  It was not the singular artwork or the gloomy verse that had caught Willem Ellis’s attention, though. It was water. Seeping from the top of the embrasure, running down the edges of the window, puddling at the deep sill, and making ugly brown tracks along the pale stone wall.

  “Oh my Lord,” Dr. Anne said.

  St. Alban’s had been built along traditional Gothic Revival lines, with the long walls to the north and south jutting away from the lofty-ceilinged central nave. These north and south aisles were sheltered under roofs a mere ten or twelve feet high, so that when Clare looked up, she could easily see the warmly stained pine boards, carefully lapped like ship’s planking. And although the storm darkness outside leached away much of the light that normally spilled through the stained-glass windows, Clare could also see the blotches spreading along the boards’ joints, giving the interior roof the brackish, mottled look of something old and unpleasantly moldy.

  Clare’s silence made Dr. Anne and Willem look up, too. As they watched, a fat droplet squeezed from one of the patches and fell with a splat onto the polished wooden pew below.

  “This is not good,” Clare said.

  So what did you do?” Millers Kill’s chief of police dipped a steak fry into a paper tub of ketchup and popped it into his mouth.

  Clare leaned back against the crimson vinyl seat and looked out the wide window of the Kreemy Kakes Diner. Icy rain splattered the passing cars and clung to the trees, bending their branches low to the sidewalk. Across the street, the Farmers and Merchants Bank had fluorescent orange warning cones on its granite steps, which were so slick that entering to make a deposit was an exercise in ice climbing.

  “What could I do? I put pails underneath the drips and roped off the area. And asked Lois to call the vestry members for an emergency meeting.” She turned back to her lunch companion. “We’re hauling out the last roofing engineer’s report, from two years ago. They’ve been going round Robin’s barn about fixing the thing ever since I arrived, and I suspect they’d been debating it for some years before. Probably what finished off the late, much-lamented Father Hames.” She stirred a strand of melted cheese into her chili. “Now, of course, they’ll have to make decisions. Unfortunately, they�
��re going to be based on expediency instead of careful consideration.”

  Russ Van Alstyne pointed to her onion rings. “Are you going to finish those?” She waved him to help himself. “You ought to set that janitor of yours on it. I thought he was supposed to keep things running around there.”

  “The sexton,” she stressed Mr. Hadley’s title, “is unbolting the pew from the floor and putting it in storage.”

  “I hear a but coming.”

  “But he’s in his seventies and he’s not exactly in the best of health. I already have to do some fancy footwork to keep him from lugging heavy objects and climbing up the extension ladder to replace bulbs. I can just picture him clambering around an icy pitched roof trying to figure out what’s wrong. He might survive, but I’d probably have a heart attack.”

  Russ laughed. “You young whippersnappers underestimate us geezers. I do my own roofing repairs. And my farmhouse is a good half century older than your church.”

  “You”-she pointed her spoon at him-“are forty-nine, not seventy-three. And I’m going to assume you aren’t repairing the roof in this kind of weather.” She looked back out the window and shuddered. “I can’t believe it’s Ash Wednesday and we’re still stuck in full-blown winter. Do you know what the temperature was at my parents’ when I called them last Sunday? Fifty-seven degrees.”

  “You’re the one who thought it was a good idea to move from southern Virginia to the Adirondack Mountains. Quit your complaining, spring is coming.”

  “Two weeks in May. Some spring.”

  “This is your second March here. You ought to be prepared for it this time around.”

  “I was hoping last year’s weather was a fluke.” She ate a spoonful of chili and watched Russ as he deftly prevented a glob of ketchup from landing on his uniform sleeve. They were always in uniform during their Wednesday lunches, black clericals and brown cop gear. They always met on their lunch hours, so that they couldn’t linger. They always met at the diner, smack-dab in the middle of busy South Street, and sat, whenever possible, at one of the window booths, where God and everybody could see. As she had told Dr. Anne, everything innocent and aboveboard.