Time Will Darken It

by William Maxwell

  There was a time when people talked to poor old Hugh. For three days, various lawyers kept him on the witness stand, trying to find out about the bloodstains that were discovered on the inside of his hack. The questions they asked, he did not feel called upon to answer, and all that the street light revealed now was an old man with a cancerous skin condition and wisps of dry white hair sticking out from under a filthy cap. “You live on Elm Street, don’t you?” he said. “I know. Big white house. The old Stevenson place. You’re married and got a little girl, ain’t you? Pretty little thing. I seen her with your wife. She don’t know me, I expect. I was always interested in you on account of your father. He was a fine man. Nobody ever went to him in trouble that didn’t get help. First he’d give them a lecture, and then he’d reach down in his pocket. He used to think I drank too much and I guess maybe he was right, but we can’t all sit up there, high and mighty, and pass judgment on our fellow men. Some of us poor devils has to be judged. Otherwise your daddy would of been out of a job. I always meant to pay back the money he loaned me, but I never managed to, and he never pressed me for it.… I don’t know what you’re doing out at this time of night, but you take an old man’s advice and go on home. You’d be better off in bed.”

  With a slight weave in his walk, he started on toward the street light at the end of the block, but to the best of Austin’s knowledge he never got there. Somewhere between the jail and the corner Hugh Finders disappeared and his secret vanished with him.

  Austin walked through a park where there were band concerts in the summer-time, and then through the deserted courthouse square. The lighted clock face, so like his father’s gold watch hanging in the sky, told him that it was late and that he would have to begin the next day without enough rest, but clocks have been known to be wrong. There might be no next day.

  He passed the stairs that led up to the office of Holby and King, without taking advantage of the refuge they offered him, without even knowing they were there. Turning right at the corner, he walked one more block, crossed the interurban tracks, and ended up on the brick platform that ran in front of the railway station.

  The through train from St. Louis, due in at 2.87 A.M., was late, and Austin waited on the station platform with his back turned against the icy wind. It was late January, and so the wind was due also, bringing another consignment of winter to the ice-blocked lakes of Wisconsin, the snow-covered cornfields of Illinois. There was a potbellied stove in the station, and Austin went inside, thinking to warm his hands, but the heat and the stale odour made him lightheaded, and so he walked out again immediately. He was in a state of shivering excitement that required air.

  Facing the station was a block of stores. The corner cigar store and Mike Farrell’s saloon were lighted. The rest—Dalton’s grocery, the shoe repair shop, the bicycle shop, and the monument works—were dark. Across the tracks the martin house on a pole—with its porches and round windows, doors, gables, and cupola, a fairly accurate statement of the style of architecture most admired around the year Eighteen-eighty and still surviving along College Avenue—was untenanted. The flower bed that in summer spelled Draperville in marigolds and striped petunias had been erased by heavy frosts. This could have been almost any station anywhere along the line. As Austin passed and repassed the station master’s lighted cage, in an effort to keep warm, he could hear the telegraph clicker and see the ticket agent with a green eye-shade on his forehead.

  The signal lights switched far down the tracks, south of town. The ticket agent came out of the station. His description afterward of what happened that night would in no way have paralleled or corroborated Austin King’s. Number 317 was coming in a little late, one of them would have said. The other would have said Time was cool and flowed softly around me. I didn’t like to put my head down in cold that might not be too clean, and it was hard to swim against the current without doing that, so I drifted downstream toward the monument works and then fought my way back. Twice I tried to crawl out onto the platform but it didn’t work. Each time I lost my hold. The platform, the station, the empty birdhouse, the stars, and Mike Farrell’s saloon fell away from under me and I was swept downstream. The third time I put my head under water and swam straight toward the light. It was easier than I imagined. When I stopped swimming I was well within the wedge made by two parallel steel rails meeting at infinity, and the light was shining right on my face. I tried to stand up but there was no bottom. There was nothing to stand on, and when I came up for air a second I was still inside the wedge. Although I had been swimming much harder than before, I hadn’t got anywhere. I was out of breath and I knew I was somewhere I had no business to be.

  You don’t have to have water to drown in. All it requires is that your normal vision be narrowed down to a single point and continue long enough on that point until you begin to remember and to achieve a state of being which is identical with the broadest vision of human life. You can drown in a desert, in the mountain air, in an open car at night with the undersides of the leafy branches washing over you, mile after midnight mile. All you need is a single idea, a point of intense pain, a pin-prick of light growing larger and steadier and more persuasive until the mind and the desire to live are both shattered in starry sensation, leading inevitably toward no sensation whatever.…

  The station master said something that Austin (with the light falling all around him from a great height) did not hear.… He’s right, I guess. He must be right. I’ve known Fred Vercel for years and never knew him to say anything that wasn’t so. If he did call to me, as he says—if he warned me, I probably stepped back, in plenty of time, and the rest is some kind of strange hallucination. But I never had any such feeling before. I know he spoke to me, but the way I remember it, I couldn’t hear what he said. I couldn’t hear anything but the sound of the approaching engine, and even that stopped when I went under. I had never been in a situation I couldn’t get out of, and I held my breath and felt myself being rolled over and over, helpless, on the bottom. My mind, in an orderly fashion, reached one conclusion after another and I knew finally that there wasn’t going to be any more for me. This was all. Here in this place. Now. And I felt the most terrible sadness because it was not the way I expected to die. It was just foolish. I shouldn’t have looked into the light so long. I knew better. And I was not quite ready to die. There were certain things that I still wanted to do. I suppose everybody feels that way when their time comes.

  For a second there was air over me and I opened my eyes. I was still inside the wedge. Using the last strength I had, I called (or thought I called) for help, and saw Fred Vercel’s face stiffen as the giant wheels released clouds of steam. I’m describing the way it happened to me, you understand. If Fred says it happened some other way, you’ll have to decide for yourselves which of us is right. Maybe he’s the one who was having hallucinations. How do I know? This time I couldn’t hold my breath. What came in or went out was beyond my control. I let go, knowing where I was, knowing that gravel touched my forehead, that I was being turned over and over, and that I would never escape from this trap alive. I came to the surface again, without struggling, and saw the two lights on the last car of the train getting smaller and smaller.

  I should have waited for another train, maybe, but I didn’t. I was very tired. I don’t ever remember being as tired as I was that night. I’d been letting myself down. A little bit at a time, over a period of several hours I guess, I’d been letting myself down. I’d been watching what other people do, so I could learn to be more like them, and somehow—maybe because I didn’t understand what I saw or it could have been that I was just too tired—it didn’t seem worth the bother. I don’t know how I got home. I just found myself there, looking through the dining-room window at the thermometer to see how cold it was, turning off the lights, going up the stairs to bed.

  11

  “The waiting room is right down the hall,” the nurse said smiling. “Try not to take it too hard.”

  “I
know where it is,” Austin said.

  This time he wasn’t to have the waiting room all to himself. The man sitting on the wooden bench was bald, heavy set, and decently dressed. His face was familiar but there were a hundred faces like it in the town of Draperville—middle-aged and rather tired with no trace of the earlier, more eager, perhaps even handsome boy’s face from which it had emerged. Its only distinguishing feature was a mole on the left cheek, and this, anywhere but in the waiting room, and by anyone except a man who had all Time’s delight at his disposal, might easily have passed unnoticed.

  Austin sat down and let his head back so that the wall would have the burden of supporting it. There was such an air of uneasiness and of being unwanted about the other man that Austin felt as if he were looking at his own state of mind, and shifted his glance away. The artificial flowers and Sir Galahad reminded him that he had been here the day before, and of what had happened afterward. He tried not to look at them, either. He was conscious of a strange sensation in his mouth, as if his teeth were watering. The rims of his eyelids felt hard and dry.

  “You’re Austin King, aren’t you?” the man asked. “I’m George Diehl. I work in the lumber yard.”

  “I remember you now,” Austin said, nodding.

  “Your first kid?”

  “Second.”

  “You’ve been through this before, then?”

  “Not here,” Austin said. “The other child was born at home.” Because of this man eyeing him as if possibly they ought to become better acquainted, he would have no privacy. His worry and exhaustion would both be exposed to the public gaze.

  “Misery loves company. Have a cigar?”

  “No, thanks,” Austin said. Having recognized George Diehl, Austin set out to ignore him. There is a misery that loves company and another kind that would rather be alone.

  In the confusion of dressing and breakfast and getting a suitcase packed for Ab and delivering her at the Danforths’ front door, Austin had left his gold watch under his pillow. He got up and went out into the hall. What had seemed like half an hour had actually been two and a half minutes. This error in calculation was destined to repeat itself at varying intervals all through the day.

  12

  With her nose pressed to the window pane and her forlorn back reflected in Mrs. Danforth’s silver gazing globe, Abbey King looked out on the same perspective that she was accustomed to seeing from the window in the front hall and the front living-room window at home. The only difference was that she could see one more house to the left and one less house to the right. No one came in or went out of or walked by the houses. The ground was bare, the trees and shrubbery appeared to have given up forever the idea and intention of producing green leaves. With shreds of brown attached to it, a lateral shoot of the pink rambler trained to grow up the trellis on the east side of the Danforths’ house was bowing and trembling in the wind, a few inches from Ab’s face. If there is no such place as Purgatory, there is at least Elm Street on a grey day in January.

  “Would you like to put on your things and go outside and play?” Mrs. Danforth asked.

  “I don’t care,” Ab said.

  “We’ll bundle up warmly, and if you get cold, tell me and we’ll come in.”

  Entrusting her mittened hand to Mrs. Danforth’s gloved one, Ab made a tour of the yard, and Mrs. Danforth lifted her up so that Ab could look in the window of the playhouse, made of two piano boxes. The key to the playhouse was lost and no one had been in it for many years. Ab saw a school desk, a blackboard, and some dusty paper dolls, and was satisfied that the playhouse, like the flower garden, was finished for a while. Occasionally, her eyes turned to the house next door. She knew that her mother was not there. Whether anyone else was, and what they were doing, the house did not say, and Ab, in exile, did not ask.

  A dray went past the Danforths’ house, past the Kings’ and stopped in front of the Beaches’. A man got down from the driver’s seat, and immediately, as if by some prearranged signal, a pack of children appeared around the corner of the house across the street, crossed over, and gathered on the sidewalk.

  “You want to join them?” Mrs. Danforth asked.

  Ab stood timidly pushing her hands further into her mittens. She was not allowed to go beyond the confines of her own yard, but then she wasn’t at home now and the Danforths’ yard had no fence but was open to the street.

  “It’s all right,” Mrs. Danforth said. “I’ll stay here and watch you.”

  The sight of the blue kindergarten chairs and the children’s excited comments were enough to break the thread (slight in any case) that bound Ab’s right mitten to Mrs. Danforth’s left glove. She started slowly off down the sidewalk, broke into a run as she passed her own house, and then slowed down again to a walk. The children, boys and girls of all ages, paid no attention to her and there was no Miss Lucy or Miss Alice to coax Ab into the group. She stood on the outskirts, ignored by the others, who left her standing there and went from the sidewalk down into the street, that most dangerous of all places. Ab looked back. Mrs. Danforth nodded. Taking her life in her hands, Ab pressed through the group until she was able to look into the back end of the dray.

  “Look out,” a boy in a plaid mackinaw said to her. “You’ll get conked on the head if you aren’t careful.”

  This offhand admonition, neither friendly nor unfriendly, was very important. First of all, it recognized her existence, a fact that would otherwise have remained in doubt. Second, it conferred citizenship papers on her. From now on she was free to come and go in a commonwealth where the games were sometimes rough and where the older inhabitants sometimes picked on the younger ones, but nobody ever had to deal with or try to understand emotions and ideas that were thirty years too old for them. Abbey King attached herself to the hero in the plaid mackinaw, followed him from the street to the sidewalk and back again, and with her eyes on his dirty, tough, young face, waited to see what remarkable words, what brave acts, he would spontaneously produce.

  Satisfied that Ab no longer needed watching, Mrs. Danforth turned and went back into the house that invited day-dreaming, that was dark, cavelike, and full of objects which had demonstrated conclusively how often things survive and people do not.

  13

  When the dray loaded with kindergarten furniture drew up before the Beaches’ house, Alice propped the storm door open wide, with a brick covered with carpet from the house in St. Paul, and then went back inside. As she peered out through the front window, the expression on her face was of relief, almost of happiness. The chairs were scattered over the frozen lawn, and the children sat down on them as if they had been invited to a party. The two movingmen started up the walk, carrying a table between them. Except that they held it by the ends instead of by silver handles at the side, the effect was that of pallbearers carrying a coffin. The box of coloured yarn which they had set on top of the table might so easily have been flowers sent by some close friend of the family. When they reached the steps, Alice opened the door again. The man in front put his end down for a moment, tipped his hat, and said, “Where do you want it, lady?”

  He was short and stocky, his face so capable and kind that she was tempted to tell him everything, but the other man was still holding his end of the table, so she said timidly, “In the attic, please.” She was prepared, if the two men exchanged a glance, not to notice it, but no such unpleasantness occurred. Tracking soot in after them, they headed for the stairs. “Easy,” the man in front said. “Watch the newel post.” The man at the back was enormous, loose-limbed, open-mouthed, and entirely at the mercy of the mind that directed his strength. At the turn of the stairs, he managed to leave a cruel scratch that no amount of furniture polish would ever remove from the banister.

  Halfway down the upstairs hall, the attic door stood open. On the wall beside it, a glass knob the size of a dollar shone red, an indication that the light was on in the attic. The hall was narrow and the table had to be turned gradually and carefully o
n end before it would go through the door and up the steep attic stairs. Lucy stood waiting for them by the chimney, with a man’s heavy sweater on over her cotton dress. She had cleared a space for the kindergarten equipment from the accumulation and welter of years—suitboxes, trunks, old furniture, lampshades, riding boots, books and magazines stacked in piles, boxes that were not always marked as to their contents and might contain Christmas tree ornaments or Mr. Beach’s clothes. The men made five trips in all, and Alice went with them each time in an effort to prevent further damage to the stairs.

  Lucy remained in the attic, where the kindergarten equipment looked strangely bright and fresh; too bright and too fresh to be what it really was, the death of all her hopes. Why is it we never give anything away? she wondered. Other people discard and dispose of things and start afresh with only what they need and can use, but everything we ever had is here, ready to speak out against us on the Day of Judgment.… She pushed the chairs closer together so that the kindergarten equipment took up less room, and rearranged the coloured paper, the yarns, and the boxes of scissors in a neat pile.

  “Are you still up there?” Alice called from below, and, receiving an answer, came up the attic stairs.

  “It doesn’t look like very much, does it?” she said, staring at the tables and chairs.

  “Well, it’s paid for,” Lucy said. “That’s the main thing. Maybe we can sell it some time.”

  “Or maybe we can use it ourselves,” Alice said, “after people have forgotten.”

  “No,” Lucy said. “It’s done for. I don’t know why we keep it. We’ll never have any use for it, and we’ll never sell it. It’s just going to stay up here, with the trunks and the Baedekers.” Her eyes wandered to the suitcases in the corner, with faded cracked labels—Lake Como, Grand Hotel, Nice, Roma, Firenze, and Compagnie Générale Transatlantique.