by Dale Bailey
He held Henry’s gaze for a long moment, and then he looked away.
Emily Wood’s face popped into Henry’s mind. Like somebody flipped a switch, she had said. Like she got old all at once.
“The cancer,” he said.
Ben nodded. “Yeah. The cancer. It’s back.”
Chapter 11
“So what are we doing today?” Emily asked when he picked her up the next morning.
“We’re going to church. I want to check out Dad’s office.”
“Sleuthing?”
He smiled at her. “I suppose.”
“Not much of a first date.”
“When you think about it, it’s hardly our first date.”
He paused at the sidewalk, staring at their cars—his battered Volaré and her rust-eaten GMC Pacer—nosed over the corrugated gray ridges left by the snowplows.
“Who’s driving?” he asked.
“Your heat work?”
“Yeah.”
“You are.”
As he pulled out, she said, “It’s a good thing we’re not going to a class reunion.”
“We could always rent a limo,” he said.
Penny Kohler met them at the church.
“It’s just not the same without your father around,” she said as they settled in the conference room. Though Henry supposed Penny must have changed over the years, he could not recall that she had ever looked otherwise: a diminutive, energetic woman who hovered just this side of fatness. She patted Emily’s hand. “He would have been pleased, Henry.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how I’m going to get along without him.”
“Has the church started the search for a new minister?”
Penny grimaced. “We’re putting a committee together. I don’t know how I’m going to do it.”
“He meant a great deal to you, didn’t he?” Emily asked.
“Oh, honey, I don’t even know how to tell you. I don’t have any family left, you know. But I could always count on Quincy, eight o’clock sharp every morning, Monday through Friday, and always a smile on his face.”
Henry felt a dull tug of resentment. I could never count on him to smile, he thought. I could never count on him for anything.
And now another voice spoke up within him. You never gave him a chance, it told him. You shut him out.
“Henry,” Penny Kohler said. She took a deep breath. “I have a confession to make, Henry.”
“What’s that?”
She paused, as if gathering her courage. “In the last year or so, your father and I became … close. You can disapprove if you want, but it made him happy—it made us both happy, Henry—and I hope you don’t think it defiles the memory of your mother. It wasn’t like that at all. It was very wholesome and I’m glad that we had a chance to be together, if only for a little while.”
“Of course, Penny. I’m glad for you. He was lonely after Mother died.”
“Oh, he was, Henry, terribly lonely. But he never complained. I know things were hard between you, but he always spoke of you. Call him, I used to say, for God’s sake call the boy—I actually said that, and him a minister and all—but he always just said, I don’t want to intrude on Henry’s life. You could see that he wanted to call, but he was stubborn. He was a good man, but stubborn.”
“I could have called, too.”
“Oh, I know, honey. But it’s all water under the bridge now. Don’t you punish yourself.”
Henry said, “Did he seem depressed or anything before he died, Penny? Had his behavior changed?”
A shadow passed across the older woman’s face. “You don’t think he killed himself, do you?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” Henry said.
“Well, I never for one moment believed it,” she said. “Two or three weeks before … before he died, he changed. He wasn’t sleeping well and he … withdrew, if you know what I mean. He was always kind of … to himself, you know. I wish I could find a better way to describe it. He would spend hours in his study. But that all changed—not the time he spent alone, but the way he was … alone.”
“How?”
“Well, it’s hard to explain. He was so independent that you might not have noticed if you didn’t know him well. But I’ve known him for more than thirty years and I noticed it.” She glanced at Henry. “He just went away. If you said anything, he would answer the way he always had, but there was something about his eyes, this faraway look, like his mind was somewhere else. You understand?”
Henry nodded.
“My, this is awkward.” Penny paused. “The night it started, just after Christmas, I was at your father’s house.” She hesitated. “We were watching the news when the doorbell rang. Your father and. I were always very careful—you know how people talk—so I went upstairs. I could hear Asa’s voice, and he knew about us, of course—Asa thought we should get married and to heck with what anyone said—but there was someone else along, so I stayed out of sight.
“A few minutes later, Quincy came up and said he needed to go out for a bit.” She laughed. “I went to the window to watch him leave, and what I saw surprised me some. Asa wasn’t in his truck. They were getting in a little foreign car—”
“Perry Holland’s Jag,” Henry said.
“That’s right,” she said. “How did you know?”
“Cindy Cade. The same thing happened with Asa.”
“Where was he going?” Emily asked.
“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? He wouldn’t say. He was gone for hours. I had slept a little, but I woke up when he came in. I suppose it must have been three o’clock or so. And this is the odd part. He was dirty.”
“What do you mean, dirty?”
“My father used to work in the mines,” she said, “years and years ago, back before old Jeremiah Holland shut them down, and when your father came in that night, he looked just like my daddy looked after a shift. He had black streaks on his hands and face. His clothes were ruined. But that’s not the half of it.”
“What else?” Henry asked.
“His eyes,” Penny Kohler said. “He looked like he was in shock. I asked what happened, where he had been, but he wouldn’t say. I thought maybe there had been an accident up in Copperhead—they call in ministers, you know, to help with the families—but he would have told me, wouldn’t he? And it would have been in the paper.” She leaned over the table. “So he had to have been up at the old Holland mines. That’s why Perry Holland was along that night. That’s what I think.”
And Henry, thinking now of the labyrinth of his dreams, said, “I think you’re right.”
“Well.” Penny Kohler stood, rubbing her palms together briskly as though she had dispensed with some necessary but unpleasant task. “You wanted to see his office?”
Henry had few memories of the office.
In the years before his mother had died, he had rarely come here. In the years after, he had never wanted to—had never wanted to come to the church at all, in fact, and once he grew old enough to assert his will, never did.
“I’d like to see you there occasionally,” Quincy Sleep had told him the summer after Henry had finished his master’s.
“I’m not sure I believe in all that anymore,” Henry had replied.
But if God was not here, Henry thought now, his father wasn’t either. Despite the photo on the desk—a snapshot of Henry and his mother taken when Henry was seven—the room exuded a brand of impersonal luxury Henry associated with college deans, all plush carpets and upholstered furniture. A computer on a walnut table cycled patiently through a screen saver. Books lined two walls; file cabinets stood on a third, under a portrait of Alexander Campbell.
“So what are we looking for?”
“I’m not really sure. Anything unusual, I guess.”
“And that would be?”
“I’m hoping we’ll know it when we see it.”
If it was there, they didn’t. An hour and a half of receipts and old sermons later, Henry stood and
stretched. Emily looked up from the desk.
“You want a Coke?” he said.
“Diet.”
“Back in a minute.”
The machine was in the basement. On the way, Henry glanced into the sanctuary, dim in a wash of bloodless January light.
He stepped inside. What beauty the church possessed lay here, in the tall stained-glass windows and the towering ceiling of burled walnut, ribbed with great beams like the underside of a hull-shot galleon, ancient and threaded by tides. Indeed, something oceanic haunted the room, something vast and still and endlessly patient. Numinous, that was the word. A line from Dickinson came to him—the bit about a certain slant of light on winter afternoons.
Henry knew that slant of light. He knew it well.
If his father lingered, it was here. As he sank into a velvet-cushioned pew, Henry could almost hear his honeyed tenor.
What happened? he asked the air. What happened to your faith?
And whom he was addressing—his father or himself—he could not say.
Emily found him there.
“Good thing I wasn’t dying of thirst,” she said.
“Sorry.” Then: “You find anything?”
“Church business. That’s all.”
She slid into the row behind him and crossed her arms on the back of his pew, making a pillow for her chin.
“That’s what I expected,” he said. “Anything important he always kept at home.”
“Important?”
“Anything he valued for his own interest. The church office was for church business—counseling, correspondence, whatever.”
“You’ve been through the stuff at home?”
“Some of it,” he said. “There’s a lot there.”
They were silent for a moment.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Pascal’s Wager. You know Pascal?”
“He’s a philosopher, right?”
“French. Seventeenth, maybe eighteenth century. The date doesn’t matter, I guess. Anyway, given the choice between belief and nonbelief, Pascal said the wise man wagers that God exists. If he wins, he wins eternal life. If he loses, he’s lost nothing but two or three hours on Sunday mornings.”
“Kind of underestimates God, doesn’t it?”
“How so?”
“God can’t tell the difference between mock faith and the real deal?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Dad used to say faith and doubt were facing sides of the same coin. You can’t have faith unless you have doubt.”
“What do you mean?”
“Faith is trust in something you can’t see, something you can’t know for sure. If you know, then you don’t have faith, you have knowledge.” He paused. “You remember Mrs. Traven?”
“Fifth grade? How could I forget?”
“Dad first mentioned Pascal to me when Mrs. Traven went over evolution. I remember him saying that evolution was a fact, while the Bible—a lot of it anyway—worked through metaphor. I’ll never forget what he said: ‘Facts and truths are very different things, Henry. Metaphors can be truer than anything else.’ It didn’t make any sense to me then.”
“Does it now?”
“Yeah, actually. But it’s pretty cold comfort at times like this.” He laughed. “You know, that’s the only kind of conversation Dad and I were capable of. I keep thinking that I never knew him at all, and now I never will.”
“What do you mean?”
“He lived this whole secret life I knew nothing about. He missed me.” He said again, “He missed me.”
“Did you miss him?”
“I guess I did,” he said, “but I didn’t even realize I did. I hated him so much. I was so angry at him.”
“Why?”
“I thought he—” He broke the sentence off.
“You thought he what?”
“After mom died, I had this fear that they would come and take him away. And now it looks like someone did.” He laughed. “It’s all so crazy. Maybe he did commit suicide.”
“Do you believe that?” she asked.
“No. What do you think?”
“I’m keeping an open mind,” she said.
“Maybe that’s a good idea.”
Something stirred at the door to the sanctuary. Henry looked up. Penny Kohler stood there, backlit by the hall light.
“I’m going to lock up now, Henry,” she said. “Are you all done?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, we’re done.”
Chapter 12
No matter how far you run, the past reaches out for you, if only in your dreams.
You thought he what? Emily had asked.
Yet she must have heard the rumors.
Henry had heard them himself, in whispered taunts on the playground the fall after his mother had died. He’d sensed them in the veiled glances of strangers, in the weighted silence that fell when his father came into a room. But even before that—before the rumors, before the long years of listening to his father pace the midnight house—in the days just after his mother’s death, the terrible suspicion had blossomed inside Henry’s head.
Seventeen years of living with it, seventeen years of never speaking it aloud.
I thought—I thought—
He got home at dusk. Snow spat from an overcast sky, wind-driven flakes of grit, like particles of sand against his face. The lock surrendered to his key. Inside, the house was still and cold.
He climbed the steps. When he reached the landing, the furnace cleared its throat, but the cold did not retreat. It seemed to radiate from the spare bedroom, the room his mother had died in. He had a sense of skating over thin ice, slipping through into the black waters underneath. A flood of almost physical memories enveloped him: the medicinal stench of the sickroom; his father’s voice raised in anger; the rain. The endless, all-encompassing, omnipresent rain.
He opened the door, flipped on the light.
Dust and abandonment, seventeen years of silence.
Everything else had remained the same: the narrow bed, rails raised on one side, crisp linen turning the color of ivory; the skeletal I.V. pole and the locked drug cabinet; the roll-away table and the crystal vase where his father had every day placed a single perfect rose.
He took a long breath.
He crossed the room and sat in the armchair.
Nothing had changed. Dear God, nothing had changed.
Where the fear had begun, where it faded into guilt, he could not say.
It had grown inside him, cancerous as the seeds that had germinated in his mother’s bones. No one had ever told him that his mother was dying. Awareness took hold of him slowly, derived from the gradual accumulation of evidence: the endless conferences his parents held with Asa, emerging from the study with numb faces; the countless visits to doctors; the frantic gaiety in his mother’s voice, the heat when she embraced him.
In her final months, her eyes retreated into hollow sockets. Her glossy hair grew greasy and matted, and she forced his father to hack it off. Her flesh melted, unveiling the skeleton underneath. Her room stank; her moans pierced his sleep.
Asa and his father were arguing in the study.
“She has to go to the hospital, Quincy. I can do something for her pain there.”
“She’ll stay here, in her house.”
“Quincy, please—”
“She doesn’t want to go, and I don’t want her to.”
“Hire a nurse, then. At least hire a nurse.”
“We’ll take care of her! You and I and Henry!”
That had been the end of it.
Henry had watched in silence as Asa demonstrated how to inject the IV and clear the line of air bubbles; he looked on from the door as Asa counted out ampoules of morphine and locked them away in the cabinet. Asa explained the dosages, demonstrated how to fill the hypodermic, pointed out the port for the IV push. If something passed between the two men then, Henry did not recognize it.
His mother worsened, fought
bedsores, fouled herself.
When his father napped, Henry prayed that she would not call for him. When she did he dragged himself to the door, then performed the requested task—fetched her a glass of water or held the rose close so she could smell it—as swiftly as possible. Most days he sneaked away to explore the woods and streams with Perry, to skip stones across the placid surface of Stoney Gap Lake.
One afternoon, she summoned him. He stared at her, her eyes burning in shadowy pits.
“The key, Henry,” she whispered, extending a palsied finger at the locked drug cabinet. “Please.”
“I can’t. I don’t have the key.”
“You know where it is.”
“Dad has it.” But he had hesitated a moment too long; she saw the lie in his eyes.
“Bring it to me, Henry.”
“I can’t. Dad said never to touch the IV.”
He shook his head. He stepped away from the bed.
Tears slid down her face. “Please.”
“No. I can’t.”
“I am your mother, Henry! You will obey me!”
“I can’t!”
“I’ll do it myself then.”
“Fine!” he had screamed. “Go ahead! Do it! I wish you’d die, anyway!”
That night his father didn’t come down to dinner. Henry ate alone and went to bed.
She died the next week.
When Henry returned to the house that day, his clothes splotched with mud and coal dust and his bicycle wedged in the trunk of Harold Crawford’s police cruiser, a bleak, steady rain was coming down.
Asa Cade was drinking whiskey in the kitchen.
“Where’s Dad?”
“Upstairs.”
Henry slipped out of his muddy shoes.
“Henry—” Asa paused. Henry listened to the rain batter the roof and windows. “Your mother—”
“I know.”
He went on along the hall then, pulling up the cuffs of his jeans so as not to track mud on—
—Mother’s—
—Persian runner. He mounted the stairs in silence.
The door to the sickroom stood ajar.
His father slumped in the armchair, his face cradled in his open hands. His mother lay on the bed, her hands upturned atop the sheet. Her face was gray, the terrible pallor of soggy newsprint.
