Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Sand drifted over Surf Street, and on either side, cottages sat in the dark, their windows boarded. But far at the end of the road, Hayes could see the lights beckoning from “Peace and Quiet,” and as he pulled into his hand-paved driveway, he could hear blasts of a Dixieland blues record. Sneaking around to the porch and crouching there at the window, he watched his half-brother Gates weaving mournfully in front of a full-length mirror propped against the wall; his head was thrown back, his black curls glistening, as he pretended to play a bright gold trumpet pointed at the sky.

  Chapter 17

  Raleigh’s Confession RALEIGH HAYES was nine years older than his half-brother Gates, who had been born approximately two weeks after Raleigh’s father married Roxanne Digges. This gulf of time (Gates had been only nine when our hero left town to go to college, only thirteen when the army sent Raleigh to Germany) was not only deepened by the rift of divorce, it was made unbridgeable by the most profound differences of character. No two men, bound by blood, tied by upbringing, could be more dissimilar. They had nothing in common but a father, blue eyes, and curly hair. They shared nothing but the past. Gates had stopped worshipping Raleigh at four, stopped admiring him at seven, and started hating him at twelve, when his older sibling became to him simply a churlish, niggardly, self-righteous, pompous square object to be maneuveured; a dull, smug beaver to be weaseled into a begrudging loan. For his part, Raleigh had resented Gates at birth, struggled to tolerate him as a toddler, tried to reform him as a teenager, and given him up soon thereafter as an irresponsible, destructive, dishonest, shameless embarrassment; a profligate otter, tumbling avalanches in his careless path. First of all, Gates had always been careless with private property, including Raleigh’s— scratching his records, tearing his books, losing his basketball, breaking his camera, denting his car, stealing his change, his socks, his anything and everything that Gates felt a momentary fancy to own or sell or, most often, wreck and forget. He always said he was sorry, he even added tears to his apologies. “I was just trying to wind up your watch for you, Raleigh, and then it stopped ticking all of a sudden. I guess it wasn’t a very good one. I’m sorry. Okay, I’m sorry,” he would say time after time. And time after time, Raleigh would say, “What good is sorry? Would you please just leave my things alone? Would you please just use your brain?”

  Gates was all that Raleigh wasn’t, and didn’t like. Raleigh couldn’t stand surprises, Gates couldn’t bear familiarity. Raleigh was a saver, Gates a discarder; Raleigh was a husbander, Gates a pirate, looting life and moving on. “Oh, that job. I quit. Man, I was bored out of my gourd, the sameo sameo crud, Jesus, forget it. I’m a flier, Raleigh; stick me on the slow train, it’s loony toons, you know what I mean?” He had always been that way. “Oh, that girl. Oh, that school. Oh, that toy.” Contemptuous of learning, impatient with routine, he started endless grand schemes and great relationships, got frustrated and lost interest, moved on. Everyone agreed that Gates was exceptional; he was most assuredly exceptionally good looking, but also exceptionally bright, exceptionally talented. Everyone said he took after his aunt Lovie (who had more or less tried to raise him), sharing her theatrical flair and her gift for mimicry. But even Earley Hayes—in Raleigh’s opinion, no rock of stability, no temple of moderation himself—urged Gates, in vain, to settle down, to slow up, to take hold. And Raleigh’s own advice as well fell on deaf ears. Raleigh’s advice never changed. It was, “Think.”

  “You just want me to be like you. Well, I’m not,” said Gates. “God knows,” said Raleigh.

  “Why should I be?”

  “Because I’m not the one that got arrested for shoplifting, I’m

  not the one that rolled Daddy’s car and broke my leg, I’m not the one that got thrown out of college my sophomore year.”

  “Well, big whup for you, Raleigh, okay.”

  “I’m not the one standing here in your office trying to borrow money from you to get some girl an illegal abortion, goddammit, am I?”

  “What do you want me to say, hunh, what? I’m sorry? I screwed up? I’m a shit? I never do anything right, and you never do anything wrong? Okay? How’s that? You’re perfect, Raleigh. You’re so perfect, you’re going to lend me this money because rotten as I am, I’m still your brother and you’ve got to come through for me. That’s what it’s going to cost you to keep on being good old perfect old Raleigh. Listen, at least I’m trying to get her an abortion. I could have just told her to get lost. Really, a lot of guys would. Doesn’t that give you a glimmer of hope, Raleigh? Okay, want me to say I’m sorry? Okay, I’m sorry.”

  And Raleigh, red with anger, would snarl, “I just want you to think! I want you to use your head for once in your life. I just want you to sit down and talk to yourself and ask yourself why you keep acting this way.”

  “Why should I talk to myself? I’ve got you and Daddy and everybody else talking to me every other minute! Why don’t you talk to yourself? Why don’t you go sit down and ask yourself why you don’t get off my back?”

  “I talk to myself all the time, Gates. I think before I act. That’s one difference between us.”

  “Well, hooray for you,” Gates would say and slam the door.

  It was true. Most of our hero’s waking time was spent in conversation with himself, and—analysts would have us believe—at night, his dreams simply made an allegory of the day’s internal monologue. He was never not thinking. As he ate, bathed, ran, drove, worked, even as he listened to the conversations of others, he was carrying on, within, a critical commentary whose purpose was to query, clarify, and otherwise explicate that soliloquy entitled “Raleigh W. Hayes.” This continual checking of his mental temperature so preoccupied Hayes that he had been known to walk past friends without a word, to hang up phones without good-bye, to overlook clothes, food, holidays, and weather; the very seasons wheeled above, dropping leaves or snows or showers on his busy, disinterested head. And while he lived inside himself with the blinds drawn, Life walked noisily by the windows, unheard. Had Hayes been allowed to tell his own story, this would have been a very different narrative indeed, and, doubtless, a much more modern one, with scarcely any characters and very little plot. It would have been one long stream of consciousness. It would have been, in other words, a confession.

  Now, in its common usage, the word confession did not at all appeal to our hero. It had the suggestive prurient sound of priests and Catholic adolescents hidden in high shadowed concupiscent corners, titillating each other through musty curtains with graphic whisperings about forbidden sex. More personally, the word confession implied an admission of fault, and, as we know, Raleigh with good reason considered himself (comparatively) unflawed. Try as he might during church services, he honestly could not think of any manifold sins and wickednesses that he needed to repent. He honestly did not see why, in all fairness, he should have provoked God’s wrath and indignation when there were so many really provoking people (like his father, like Gates) out there getting off scot-free; nor did he see why he should feel guilty and responsible and worried and all the things he had to confess he did feel, when the truly guilty appeared not to have a care in the world; nor did he see why he should keep begging God for mercy, when all he wanted, from God and everybody else, was justice, if he could ever get it, which he couldn’t, so wretchedly unfair were the blithe, if not downright cynical, ways of the Creator.

  By the time Raleigh was old enough to understand the drift of the General Confession, stumbled through together by the small congregation of Thermopylae’s Episcopalians, his father had already been dismissed by his parish, left by his wife, and was living across town in a little stucco house with the pregnant Roxanne Digges. While the bishop had not defrocked Earley Hayes, he had declined to give him another church, and so, a priest without a pulpit, Earley (to everyone’s astonishment) took a teaching position at a small Negro college in the nearby textile town of Hillston. He taught (of all things, thought Raleigh) the history of religion and moral philosoph
y. And as if this weren’t embarrassing enough, he eventually became the director of the college’s marching band, actually appearing—to the horrified disgust of many of his former parishioners—every Fourth of July on the streets of Thermopylae at the head of a procession of high-stepping young black musicians in gold and red uniforms. Raleigh resigned his position as first trumpet of the Thermopylae Junior High School band. “I don’t have time to practice, not if I’m going to play basketball,” he explained, but everyone assumed that he was simply too mortified to march past crowds gawking at his father as he paraded through town with Negroes. “At least,” said Mrs. PeeWee Jimson, “Earley has the decency never to set foot inside our church again!”

  Raleigh’s mother, the divorced Sarah Ainsworth Hayes, continued, however, to attend St. Thomas’s, to chair the vestry, to arrange the altar flowers, and to advise the new rector, a vague, mumbling bachelor who typed out perfect copies of sermons on such unenthusiastic topics as the Synod of Whitby or the Hebrew etymology of anointed, and then read them to the drowsy pews in a stammer of shyness. The former Mrs. Hayes, dressed in black, like a young widowed dowager, continued to sit in the first pew on the right, from which vantage she led everyone behind her in the liturgical ballet of standing, kneeling, bowing, and responding that served to keep the faithful awake. In a succession of blue suits and clip-on bow ties, Raleigh sat for years beside her. He memorized creeds and prayers in the cool rhythm of her Northern voice. But during the Confession, Mrs. Hayes said not a word aloud, except an occasional phrase like “the burden of them is intolerable.” To the son, glancing up at her clear, motionless profile behind the net of her hat, her dark eyes seemed to be looking into some remote place that made her either sad or angry, he could never decide which. What he did decide was that the Confession was too easy a way out for people like his father who had committed grievous offenses. Was it enough for them to say they were heartily sorry, if they then danced off, forgiven, into that newness of life the rector handed out with an embarrassed wave of his hand? No, it wasn’t enough. The sorrow of the offender was no satisfaction at all. “I’m real sorry you’re hurting, Little Fellow,” his father kept saying. “I’m sorry I’ve caused you even a minute of hurt.” But what good was that? Absolutely none. It didn’t change the past. Not even God could wave His hand and wipe away the past.

  For seven years following the divorce, Raleigh lived alone with his mother in the large brick house near St. Thomas Church, the house out of which his father had suddenly one day moved his clothes, his records, and his rumpled easy chair. When he left, Earley Hayes had taken with him, too, all the noise; for while the Hayes family refused to give Sarah up—persisting until she left Thermopylae in unannounced visits and undeterred party invitations—and while Sarah insisted that Raleigh spend time not only with his father but with his father’s family, still, things were naturally never the same, and as Raleigh grew older, the handsome house seemed to shrink and to fade and to grow quieter and quieter. Raleigh and his mother ate breakfast together in the meticulous kitchen and ate dinner together in the formal dining room, and while on those occasions they chatted together and bantered mild sarcasms with a quiet affection, they otherwise went their own ways, off to their own work and their own rooms. They each had two private rooms, a bedroom and a study. Neither entered the other’s without knocking, and only then for a significant reason. Raleigh spent a great deal of those seven years in the room he called his workroom.

  He was a serious boy; he took his schoolwork seriously and was a diligent student, copying his homework into thick neat notebooks with colored dividers. He took his responsibilities seriously and not only proudly did more chores around the house than his mother thought to request, but sought odd jobs around the town (cutting lawns, delivering papers, bagging groceries, loading crates at Carolina Pottery) in order to earn himself the pocket money his mother would have given him had he asked, so that he could buy what he would not accept from his father as a gift. He took his hobbies seriously and labored hour after hour alone in his workroom, painstakingly bolting together erector sets and gluing together model airplanes and scrutinizing with a magnifying glass the foreign stamps Aunt Victoria sent him and dutifully practicing his trumpet, and carefully labeling his posterboards of minerals, butterflies, arrowheads, classic fishing flies. The years went by, unnoticed, while the boy with a frowning absorption built, from kits he’d bought himself, a crystal radio, an ant farm, a darkroom, a stereo system.

  The years went by, while his arms and legs pushed out like flower stalks from the cuffs of pants and shirts, while he scrubbed at his face and lifted barbells and struggled with his voice, his moods, his appetite, his desires. The years went by, while, at his mother’s request (and only, he insisted, at her request), he spent his summers and his holidays in the small noisy stucco house with his father, Roxanne, and Gates, and a crowd of Hayes family and Hayes friends. Sometimes (especially in the years after Roxanne had abruptly left Thermopylae, leaving the five-year-old Gates behind), sometimes, at a picnic playing baseball or over at Lovie’s house listening to everybody singing around the piano, Raleigh would forget to be angry at the injustice done his mother; he’d forget that he disapproved of his father and didn’t like spending time with him. Then guilt would rush over him and send him sullen off by himself. And later he’d ask permission to return home early to the quiet brick house. He’d say he was worried about his mother. “There’s nothing to worry about, Raleigh,” she’d tell him when he hurried up the stairs to her room. “I’m absolutely fine.” And that seemed to be true.

  Sarah Hayes was as serious as her son. She read thoughtfully, she gardened assiduously, she volunteered a reasonable amount of her time to the church and to town services, she drove daily to the state capital to work as a bookkeeper for the Bureau of Taxes—not because she needed the income, but because it seemed appropriate to her that a healthy, intelligent woman should have a job. In the evenings, she sat by the radio or her record player, listening to music, while she worked at her hobby: she made flowers from glass, fusing with a flame small colored fragments into beautiful, botanically perfect replicas; these she gave away as Christmas presents, although Raleigh often advised her to keep the collection together and offer it to a museum. “I just like to make them,” she’d say. “I don’t want to keep them.”

  As for her personal life, Sarah Hayes neither avoided company nor particularly sought it out, neither insisted that acquaintances stop trying to find “a new man” for her, nor ever involved herself with any of the men they found. She appeared to require little of life. In her dress, in her conversation, in her habits, in her relations, she was consistent and reasonable and temperate, and to the Thermopyleans who puzzled about her, the unanswered mystery of Sarah Ainsworth Hayes was why in the world she had ever married—and married so precipitously, and stayed married to for nine years—an immoderate, impractical, improvident fool like Earley Hayes. Once, when he was in high school, Raleigh asked her why. She answered, “I loved him.”

  “But you don’t still. After what he did, I don’t see why you make me go over there, why I have to spend the whole stupid summer over there. After what he did to you.”

  She answered, “There were mitigating circumstances.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” And Raleigh, one arm through the sleeve of his basketball jacket, one hand fiddling with the strap that held on his glasses, added, “See you later, Mama, I’m late,” and left. In fact, although he wouldn’t have thought so, he didn’t want there to be any mitigating circumstances.

  Years went by; Raleigh carefully packed up his childhood to store in the attic, and, leaving his room neatly arranged, he drove away to college. There he made a schedule of the courses he would take over four years. He took the courses, he graduated, he flew to Germany, and at the army’s request diligently practiced driving a tank around the countryside. He kept his tank as orderly as his stamp collection, as neat as his college desk. One day Raleigh was ca
lled to the overseas operator and told by his father’s faint crackling voice that his mother had suddenly, surprisingly, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. “I don’t believe it,” said Raleigh. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  All his life, he’d clung to reason like a parachute. What didn’t make sense couldn’t be true. Had he heard that another Hayes had died, that would have been different. Hayeses died. And grandparents died, aunts and uncles died. But Sarah Ainsworth, who wasn’t very old and didn’t smoke or drink or stuff herself with gallons of sugary tea and platters of fried chicken, how could she be dead?

  And then the second shock. How could Sarah Ainsworth, who, humiliated by betrayal, had more than a decade ago asked her husband to leave their home, who had often said to and of that husband that he appeared to be constitutionally incapable of understanding the value of money—how could Sarah Ainsworth, a bookkeeper, even had she been foolish enough ever to make a will leaving $260,000 to Earley Hayes in the first place, how could she have forgotten to change that will after the divorce?! It wasn’t the money. Raleigh, of course, had inherited the bulk of her estate: the house, the insurance settlement, and $260,000 of his own. No, it wasn’t the money. It was the principle. Earley didn’t deserve a cent, as even he had admitted himself, right there in the lawyer’s office, the afternoon before Raleigh flew bewildered back to Germany.

  His first night of leave after his return, he walked fifteen miles in snow from the Freiburg base to a little Rhine village, turned around and walked back in worse snow. He spent the next month in the army infirmary, fevered with bronchitis, and then pneumonia. Most of the time he slept, the rest of the time he criticized Christ in the hospital’s bedside Bible—a liberty for which he was taken to task by a nurse, who ordered him to erase his marginalia. And all this while, and quite despite his lifelong habit of talking to himself and thinking about himself, Raleigh did not realize that the shock of an unreasonable, unacceptable loss, the perplexity of all these now unanswerable mysteries about his mother—all the now irretrievable loose ends: why the money, why the love, why the mitigating circumstances?— had made him not only dangerously ill, but so furious with God that he’d challenged His Son to a debate; challenged Him, and in Raleigh’s opinion, settled things once and for all to his own satisfaction. God was a bastard and Christ was a fool.