Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series)

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  When Judah finishes he pulls the barn door to. It squeaks and complains, and he tells himself the rollers should be oiled. The struts in the barn rainbow out. There are springs beneath it, and he’d cursed the siting often. They should have built above. There are springs that fill the gutter every time he cleans it, and one of them is strong and pure enough to bubble up above the rim; he’s lost more lambs to water than disease. They’d cleared the barn of stock when he quit his serious farming, and now it holds only hay.

  So be imagines himself in the gloom in the hay barn, with Maggie beneath. He would have baled and stacked three hundred bales that afternoon, and they would fill the top loft full, leaving only the drop-chute uncovered. There are tree trunks shoring up the barn with the bark still on them, and the braces and crossties are two foot across. The men would leave but his wife would be waiting, expectant, with wine and soft words and balm that beat horse liniment to stir the warmth in him.

  That afternoon the sun would angle through the barn boards, roseate. She would fall on her back in the third rank of hay, in a level space he’d made when stacking, and where the sun illuminated air motes and her hair’s wheat sheen. He, Judah, lowered himself. She spread and murmured “Husband,” to the rhythm of his strokes, and there was pain and pleasure intermingled, fused, or more like cream and milk suspended in one rich solution, and he bent his head to kiss her and kissed the hay chaff and sneezed.There was a profusion of barn swallows; he counted six, then ceased.

  Now Judah wads up newspaper and spreads it from his pallet to the wall. Hattie made what she called Rutland Herald logs. She twisted the paper tightly and tied it in three places and soaked it in the bath, then let the whole thing dry. She piled her paper logs in the corner of her closet, saying this will always burn and what else is it used for once you eat the headlines up. He should read in a mannerly fashion, and let the news digest.

  The barn cats play about him, and the pigeons settle back. Chaff dances in the light; the air is wet but warm. He inhales it lazily. Maggie sleeps. She is his dream of consummation, light in the heart of the house. He throws his head back to study the vaulting and hears himself half singing, making noise in his throat. This is it, he tells himself. This is as close as man need ever get to where he’s going, and still call it worth it, and still have a handhold on joy. This is more than most.

  “Let there be chestnut and butternut wood; let the mantel be oaken, and every door be walnut of the House. Let there be Chinese Porcelains and statuary abounding, and fluted columns of the Doric Mode. I wish Lamps to be ceaselessly burning, in Continual Remembrance of the wakeful Husband that is Christ. Let there be four large rings and additional Cross Braces; let there be protective Skyworks to harbor the design from weather and Wind . . .”

  He unscrews the kerosene cap and sluices his pallet of straw. Then Judah walks—the kerosene not racing out but not just trickling either, a stream he can control with his thumb on the air hole, a rivulet corkscrewing over the hay, a reservoir he dams and then, swinging, unplugs. He likes the smell. He likes the odor of resin, syrup, creosote, and the patterned wetness of the hay. He splashes his initials, then hers. He splashes a cross, then triangle, then circle, then paces the floor’s dark perimeter until the can is empty. He wipes his hands.

  (“J.P. Hiya, how’s my girl.”

  “Son of a son of a son of a bitch.”

  “They’s dead in the ditches of France. Come here till I tell you, mister. Count to one one hundred. Two one hundred. Three.”)

  Such voices natter at him, dying, like casement flies in the window in winter: a black swarm falling as they rise. It wouldn’t be so bad, he tells himself, if there were instruction in the prattle; Judah sits. They breed in the corners by the thousands. They live in his refracted heat and cannot be expunged. He works his toes in the boots. He loosens the laces, then removes them from the top eyelets and lets the ends hang free.

  “Hiding in the pine lot. Hiding in the tack room. Hiding up under the roof.”

  “Ready or not,” she repeated—and he was tenderfooted, naked, picking his way through underbrush. The leaves were wet. She hung her skirt and sweater on a low extended birch branch, so as not to soil them. She wore a yellow skirt. But he has lain with Abishag and shaken off the fleshly envelope and he knew her not. There is no luxury remaining; he has put back childish things.

  So lying there he thinks the straw shape beside him is hers, the cold indistinguishable from that pervasive chill they’d known by the Walloomsack in their second marriage-winter, sleeping out. Wild nights, he tells himself and remembers how he wrestled with “Bear” Starkey, not losing. He tries his memory trick. It is April seventh, and he remembers that day a decade previous, then a score, then thirty years. He remembers forty years previous but only inexactly; he knows, of course, that he was living in the Big House even then, that there were hard times because Roosevelt knew nothing about orchards, and what he did know he forgot in order to build roads.

  Judah remembers running from his mother’s sickbed’s side. Nose clamped against the smell of it, mouth full with air gone rancid, unable to swallow, he left the elevator’s close enclosure and bounded down the steps; there on the portico breathing, there across the trellis with his lungs commencing to clear, there quicker than it takes to tell it in the tack room, taking his saddle and bridle and breathing in the smell of horse, out of this barn and already at a canter as he passed the gate. It had been he, of course, who found Lavinia Sherbrooke—hands crossed as though to save them the trouble, eyes shut, with only her tongue hanging out to instruct him, and nothing moving in the room except the long-fluked fan.

  He tries the fifty states. He tries their capitals. Once he knew all the states and capitals and state flowers and could fit them lickety-split together for Ian’s jigsaw puzzle. He knew the boundaries of Arkansas the way he knows the Shed field’s perimeter, and remembers North and South Dakota, and North and South Carolina, but has the nagging sense that there are other pairings; New Mexico, New Jersey and New Hampshire aren’t the only states, for instance, with the label “New.”

  There are other games to play. There is tick-tack-toe. He’d played leap-frog and Scramble and football in his time. Later he played hide-and-seek and Fuck the Upstairs Maid and then The Neighborhood Virgins and then Your Neighbor’s Wife. My Lord, Judah thinks, there was gaming. Cards and horses and baseball and dogs and fighting cocks and you name it, he’d place a bet; given odds enough, he’d have bet against the dawn. Or at least that it was visible, or at least that it was visible past ten o’clock, and to a blind or sleeping man. He’d have bet his bottom dollar things would bottom out, that Roosevelt would get us into war and guns and profit and he, Judah, would do best by letting well enough alone.

  “Let there be fifteen-hundred and forty component parts in the Stain Glass design. It was in the year Fifteen-hundred and forty that the descendants of Canute, the lineal cadet inheritors of that Excellent King Alfred, first considered travel from the Sherbrooke Seat. The actuall Pilgrim entrusts himself to ill-favored or favoring winds. The actuall Voyager will think of his body as a Boat and entrust it to the Isthmus as I myself have done, for what was lost is always found in Christ’s pocket, and the accounting kept Completely in his ledger-book, if one might write of a pocket and ledger-book in this Connection. Then let us think of Him as a clerk of all souls, as an Adding Instrument that never makes mistakes.”

  Judah strikes a match. He does so negligently, not cupping his hands. The matchbook is damp, and the flame sputters out. He tries again. This time the match fails to take; he watches the sulfur-head disintegrate. His third match takes, however, and he protects it and tries to kneel. His body has gone clumsy, and as he shifts position the match is extinguished. He wonders, does that signify reprieve? He wonders, does it mean she seeks and yearns for him in their shared bed? His fourth match fails; his hands are shaking; he is an idiot, he tells himself, to have brought no lighter. The fifth match breaks in his fingers and the s
ixth shreds; the last has no sulfur-head.

  Therefore he tells himself that he must ferret Ian out; he’ll follow his son west. He turns. He stands and sets out from the barn, following the track from the sugarhouse to the garage and stealthily past the Big House porch and past the Toy House to the entrance gate. The moon is gone. He knows the path so well, however, he could walk it blind. He steps out unburdened, his bootlaces flapping. The iron gate is open; he closes it behind him. This takes some doing; he puts his shoulder in it, and the thing clatters clangingly shut. There are stone entrance pillars; they recede. The road is tarmac now; he sees the night lights of the village beneath him and starts down the hill. His neighbor, Willis Reed, sold farm-fresh eggs but never kept a chicken. He had a fifteen-foot-high elm sprouting in front of the house; nobody planted elms these days, but Reed’s kept right on growing. He kept his hat on, always, and Judah knew the man was bald as billiards—Hattie said he wasn’t human, with no eyebrow hair.

  The slope is considerable. Judah picks up speed but steps in a pothole and buckles, nearly falls. There is no pain but he continues slowly now, favoring his ankle. The brick bulk of the Library is to his left and Morrisey’s ahead of him, and as he hits the crossroads he sees cars. There is mud on the road. The curb is a perilous height. He wears his walking boots. He will shave this afternoon. The cars that idle at the light send smoke at him and at the mountain ash trees in the traffic island. There are, in that one engine, three hundred fifty horses shitting smoke.

  Judah stops. He considers how best to head west. Hattie thought that west was always a left turn and north was straight ahead, since that’s the way the map looked. He had tried to show her how west changed. “Nonsense,” Hattie said. “The needle’s broken. Every time you walk ahead you’re walking straight ahead.”

  “What about south?” he asked her. “Does that mean you have to go backward?”

  “How should I know?” she countered. “You’ve never taken me south.”

  “It wouldn’t be backward.”

  “Turn right,” she said, “and straight ahead you’ll find New Hampshire and then Massachusetts and the sea. I know that much; it’s east.”

  So he elects Route 7 where there’s traffic. Ian might be in the bar, or driving past, or paying a courtesy call on Lucy Gregory and Elvirah Hayes. He remembers that you make a fist and put your thumb up for thumbing a ride. He wonders, should he hitch? West is New York State, then maybe he’d dip south and go through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. A white car corners on two wheels and speeds off, blatting its horn.

  And now he asks himself why ever he let Ian leave. The boy went off to college, and Judah could have driven there, could have shown up for the football games or plays or weekends Ian mentioned in his first few postcards home. You could fetch him for vacations, Hattie urged. You teach a dog to fetch, said Judah; a son comes home if he wants to and shouldn’t be begged. It isn’t a question of begging, Hattie said, and Judah agreed that that wasn’t the question and let’s not discuss it anymore. All right? he asked. All right, she said, but started in at dinner till he laid it down as final that he’d neither fetch or visit unless Ian asked.

  The boy was headstrong; he’d not deny that. Judah’d figured to outlast him and that Ian would come running back for his first college summer—or the second when the first went by with only a postcard from Boston and then one from a place called Elk in what the postmark showed was California. Then he instructed Finney not to forward college bills, but simply to pay them and leave it at that.

  Some months later—four years back, he figures now—Judah got a bottle in the mail. He knew it on the instant for a liquor bottle, since it had the heft and shape. He unwrapped it carelessly, tearing at the thick brown paper that had been torn in the sending already, then tossing the cardboard and paper both into the fire behind him. It flamed. Only when he’d read the bottle’s label, Sherbrook Whiskey, and broken the seal and tasted it right then and there, not liking it much, telling Finney who’d been there for supper that the family improved with “e,” that the bottom of the silo tasted a sight better and twice as strong—only then, as the carton adhered to itself in its own ash shape behind him did he recognize what he had burned, or believe the clumsy fold and printing (in block letters, underlined, with blue-black ink and no return address he’d noticed) had been Ian’s hand. He put his own in the fire to find it, but the form collapsed.

  Now Judah imagines his son. He tracks him to some nightly revel, where redheaded women are dancing. They are drinking, wearing only sequins and anointed with perfume. He imagines Ian in prison or board meetings or the Blueridge Mountains that he’d sent a card from, once. He imagines him in concert halls, with his mother applauding from the second row. He gives Ian a moustache. Then Ian shaves it and he gives him shoulder-length hair and a beard and shaves it all off finally and has him in a raincoat, army coat, denim work coat, sports coat, and then what Sherman Adams got, vicuña, and sporting a cigar. He takes his hand; he takes his money and a kidney out of him for transplants; he has him dead in Vietnam and Memphis and then, miraculously, as he had done a quarter of a century before, gives Ian life. They hold conversations. They laugh. Bygones are bygones, and spilt milk is under the bridge. He will not, can he help it, die a wheezing, slack-mouthed fool. He will break his life off when the time comes like a piece of brittle, and the edges will be trim. “Let’s neaten up the edge,” Hattie says. “Just before we put it back”—and would take her knife and pare through pie or brittle or cake—“Just one more little bite.” He tracks Ian to his mother’s apartment on the edge of the East River where the sun rises and ignites them and they are drinking coffee on the balcony together, steam rising out of their cups.

  A second car avoids him, honking. A mail truck speeds past. Judah has no money and no matches and not enough warm clothes. His ankle aches; his boots are loose. His estate is settled; he turns to see the cupola and wonders is that backward, is it south? He lifts his hands and opens and closes his fists. The palms are white. He peers at them. With a queer final fluttering, he drops his hands and puts them in his pockets and climbs back up the hill. The elms are black. The gate is too heavy; he skirts it and follows the wall. He clambers across where the rocks seem to dip and, negotiating purchase, jumps and tumbles back inside. He lies there for some time.

  SHERBROOKES

  I

  When Ian returns to the Big House, it is for the first time in years. He does so as if by chance. Half his life ago, at thirteen, he followed Maggie to New York. She had offered him his choice, of course, but in a way that left him none: she was his mother and needy and fleeing Vermont for his sake.

  Their visits to Judah thereafter were brief. They’d take the bus on holidays, or trains, or the limousine he’d send (refusing to drive or collect them—“It’s fetch and carry,” Judah would say, “I teach it to the dogs”). Then even that sham union shattered, and they stayed away. Since the Sherbrookes believed in plain speaking, said Judah, why not acknowledge their mistake and call a spade a spade: weekend families don’t work.

  Nor has he seen his mother since she elected this version of home. Maggie ensconced herself in the Big House as if they’d never left—as if such wounds might heal. Judah died soon after that. Ian knows; he’s kept in touch, if only by message or letter and always at a remove. His absence, he intends to claim, was as accidental as his presence now—the logic of geography, not love.

  He had not attended his father’s funeral. He heard about it, however; Samson Finney reached him in Chicago.

  “Thank God I’ve found you,” Finney said. “We’ve been looking all week long.”

  “It’s only Tuesday,” Ian told the lawyer. “I wasn’t hiding. Why?”

  “It’s me who’s calling because—well, because your mother isn’t up to it. She tried you in New York, and then we called around. I’ve been making the arrangements.”

  “Mr. Finney, you needn’t apologize. We don’t talk all that often.”


  “It’s been a long while, hasn’t it? Years.”

  “I recognize the voice.”

  “You should call me Samson,” Finney said. “I hope you’ll think of me as at your service, Ian. Should you require it. Not in business matters, I didn’t mean that, though in the legal context also, if you want.”

  So it had come as no surprise when the lawyer said at last, “Your father. Judah’s dead.”

  In the ensuing silence, Ian thought several things. He thought, That’s that: seventy-six. He wondered how Finney had tracked him and how his mother was feeling and why she hadn’t called. He thought about telephone static, how the crackle made it sound as though there were birds on the wire, poised, scratching.

  Then he thought that Finney was not only an informant, but his father’s friend who wanted consolation. The impulse to offer comfort displaced the need to receive it, and Ian cradled the pink lightweight phone and swung his legs out of the bed. “Passata la commedia,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s Italian. It means things are over.”

  “The funeral’s tomorrow,” Finney said. “I’m calling to inform you.”

  He drew in breath. It whistled.

  “Ian? You all right?”

  He wasn’t sure which way to answer, therefore said nothing and, sitting, crossed his ankles. It was—he consulted his watch—five o’clock.

  “He died quickly,” Finney said. “Peacefully. You couldn’t have known.”

  “His heart?”

  “Mm-mn.”

  “I knew about that. I did know.”

  “Angina pectoris,” said Finney. “Your mother was with him. His sister, too.”

  “Hattie. How’s she taking it?”

  “About as you’d expect,” said Finney.