Abide With Me
“Tyler would say I can’t take favors from anyone in the parish.”
“Oh, it’s not a favor. It’s a little gift. But if you think Tyler wouldn’t be pleased, then I’ll keep it—that’s okay.”
But Lauren said, holding out her hand, “No, I’d love it. I’ll give it to Katherine someday. Tyler won’t mind, really.” Looking at it carefully again. “It’s so sweet, Carol.”
Carol was always glad that Lauren had taken the ring.
NOT LONG BEFORE little Jeannie was born, Tyler, driving back from church one day, having given a sermon on the parable of “A Thief in the Night”—But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up—ending, as Tyler always did, with the assurance of God’s enduring love, Lauren had turned to him and said easily, “Tyler, do you actually believe that stuff you say?”
A crow suddenly swooped so close to the windshield that Tyler made a slight ducking motion as he turned the wheel. “Lauren—”
“Okay, okay, okay.” She waved a hand. “I don’t want to have any big religious discussion,” she added, as they pulled in to the driveway. “And dear God, here is your mother.”
His mother had brought them a gift for the new baby. “The Jews say it’s bad luck to bring a baby not yet born a gift,” Margaret Caskey said. “But I say, have faith in the Lord, and He will deliver. You weren’t supposed to be born,” she said, nodding toward Tyler. “But you were. The doctors said my nerves couldn’t withstand another pregnancy. But with God’s help, I did it.”
“Yes, you did,” said Lauren, unexpectedly leaning over and kissing her mother-in-law. “You did it.”
Tyler stood back and let the women go into the house, Katherine holding on to her mother’s skirt, chanting, “Mummy’s preg-nut, Mummy’s preg-nut.” He glanced around at the fields; it was autumn and the leaves were starting to glow like a blush emerging from the depths of a young girl’s face.
“Little messy in here—you’ll have to excuse us,” Lauren was saying to his mother.
“Not to worry,” Tyler said. “Jane Watson told me at coffee hour the Ladies’ Aid was going to give us a gift—Connie Hatch as a housekeeper a few mornings a week. Starting soon, so she can get used to it, and then for a few weeks after the baby is born.”
“But I hate housekeepers,” Lauren said. “They snoop.”
“It’s a gift from the church, and you can’t refuse it, Lauren. It would seem very unkind.” Margaret Caskey began putting dishes in the sink before she even took off her coat.
“Leave them, Mother—it’s okay.”
“I don’t want any housekeeper snooping through our drawers,” Lauren cried and, turning to her mother-in-law, said, “And please leave the dishes alone.”
Margaret Caskey walked out of the kitchen.
“Lauren,” said Tyler, “Mother’s just trying to help. And Connie Hatch is not going to go snooping through our drawers.”
“You know what, Tyler?” said his big-stomached, beautiful wife. “You are aggressively naïve.”
Two weeks later, Jeanne Eleanor Caskey was born. Tyler could not believe he had ever wanted a son. “Lauren,” he said, bending to kiss her, “let’s have another one. Let’s have girls, girls, girls.”
A swirl of activity. Connie Hatch came three mornings a week, and still there was chaos throughout the house. Kids and diapers and bottles, and Lauren often snappish. But Tyler felt a maturity swelling around him. He and Lauren weren’t kids anymore. They were in charge of a family, he was in charge of a church. He gave great thanks, tiredly but deeply, to God. The Ladies’ Aid continued the services of Connie for a few more months, and Tyler walked each morning into town, where he prayed first in the sanctuary, and then went downstairs to his office, where Skogie Gowen dropped in sometimes to talk to him about fishing.
And then one morning Lauren called, and didn’t know where she was.
DURING HER ILLNESS, he preached every Sunday. He stood up there in his black robe and spoke of large-heartedness, saying one’s actions should be in the service to others, so believers and nonbelievers could benefit from loving-kindness and live with the love of God brought to us through Jesus Christ. He said God was to be praised, always. He shook hands after the service, thanking those who murmured to him that Lauren was in their prayers. If his congregation had loved him before, they now thought he was remarkable. “Look how he stands there so straight and strong,” they said to one another. “Isn’t that amazing?”
But Tyler didn’t think Lauren would die.
He should have. His mother knew, her parents knew, the doctors knew. Lauren knew. She made such sounds of wailing that he gave her the sedatives at night that the doctor had provided. But he told her again and again that she would not die. Just because you don’t want me to? She bit his arm, she grabbed the bottle of pills and tried to swallow them all, and he had to hold her down, push his fingers back over her gums while she tried to bite him. When she became quiet, he bathed her with a facecloth, and sat next to her while she was sleeping, the August light falling through the window. He was filled with The Feeling. God was in the room.
When she woke, she watched him.
If there were people in town who were picturing the minister holding his beautiful wife, whispering final love whispers, they had the picture wrong. Lauren turned away at the sight of him, saying things he would never forget. Her parents came and she told them to go away. She told his mother to stay out of the room. Connie Hatch was sent home. Belle came to take the children away. He sat by her bed, and when she rested, his gratitude was immense, but when she woke and started picking at the bedclothes, it was agony. She seemed to get better; she could sit up again, and speak. Her fierce words to him: You’re such a coward, you know. And then the unthinkable, unimaginable thing that he did: He left the bottle of pills by her side while she slept. He went downstairs to sit with his mother, listening for any motion above. In a few hours he walked slowly, slowly up the carpeted stairs. His young wife was dead.
Have mercy, my sin is ever before me. Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am in trouble: Mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my belly. He had waited that first year for winter to come, but when it came, he saw it made no difference; she inhabited winter as well. By the time the snows came, he had signed up for many committees and his days were spent driving the child to different babysitters, driving to different outlying towns. Sometimes he arrived for a meeting that had taken place the day before; he mailed a letter and forgot to put on a postage stamp, and when it was returned he went into the barn and threw a hammer against the wall, and then struck the side of his head with his hand so hard that he saw stars. At night, when the child was in bed, he would put on his overcoat and step out onto the porch to smoke his pipe. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble . . . for I have eaten ashes like bread.
Spring arrived, summer, then fall. These changes took place far away.
Friends from college, from seminary, invited him to dinner. His parishioners invited him to their homes. But it was difficult for him to be anywhere for long, and he used Katherine as an excuse to get home. It was not until his mother said, “Tyler, that child doesn’t talk anymore,” that he realized this was true. So he began reading to the child, and asking her questions, but she didn’t say much, except for the Lord’s Prayer, when he said it with her at bedtime. Belle showed up and bought her new shoes, and Tyler and his mother and Belle all tried making a fuss about that. “Red shoes, Katherine. How wonderful. Haven’t you always wanted red shoes?” But she hid her face in her father’s lap, even when her grandmother admonished, “You might at least say thank you to Aunt Belle.”
He had expected an easing of his grief after that first year, but this was not the case. When Doris Austin’s desire for a new organ became known to him—the church treasurer, the board, even a deacon had spoken to him on her behalf—it seemed
like an ant in the far corner of a room that people were pointing to, while for him the room was spinning. When Mrs. Ingersoll called him in for a conference, saying Rhonda Skillings was ready to apply psychology to Katherine’s trauma, a different kind of darkness, fierce and almost welcome, planted itself inside him.
It was only in the presence of Connie Hatch that he seemed to remember some shadow of his previous self. When she told him about Jerry, about Becky, about her own disappointments, when she laughed suddenly at a common agreement about some small difficulty of life, so that her green eyes moistened with merriment, he would recall it all later when she went home, and think: Thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness.
Book Three
SEVEN
November arrived, days passed by, and there was no word about Connie. She had been missing now for almost three weeks. Tyler called Adrian Hatch, and every time the news was the same: There was none. The farmhouse seemed huge in its silence once Katherine went off to school, and Tyler waited, to see if Connie might arrive. But there was only the quiet, save for a dripping faucet in the kitchen that had begun to leak. Trying to change its washer, Tyler’s hands trembled, and he had to leave it unfixed. His hand shook as he wrote out the grocery list. His mother was right—men didn’t know how much it took to take care of a child; sometimes Katherine was sent off to school in the same clothes she had worn the day before. At night he heated a can of beef stew, while Katherine sat with a bowl of Alpha-Bits cereal before her, and he would eat the beef stew straight from the pan, standing by the stove while she swung her feet, watching him.
“Don’t worry,” he said to her one night. “Mrs. Hatch will be back.”
Katherine’s feet swung faster, and something crossed her face—was it worry?—that made him go and kneel by her chair. He put his arms around her and hugged her to him, but he sensed in her smallness, a hesitancy. He placed his hand over the back of her head, feeling the snarl in her hair, and while she allowed her head to be pressed to his shoulder, still there was some unyeildingness. “Say,” he said, standing up. “I just remembered.”
He went and got from his desk drawer the small gold ring with its tiny red stone that Connie had presented to him.
“Look,” he said to Katherine, who was watching him now with her mouth partly open in an expression of slight hopefulness. “Have you seen this before?”
Katherine stared at the ring; she thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
“Mrs. Hatch found it.”
Katherine turned her face away, swinging her feet so hard her shoes touched the table underneath.
“Katherine?”
She looked back at the table and with her small hand, pushed the bowl of cereal with such force that milk slipped over its edge.
“Don’t you like the ring?”
She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.
The next morning Carol Meadows called to see if there was anything she could do. “Bring Katherine over whenever you need to,” she said.
Her kindness made him realize that no other church member had called; the Ladies’ Aid remained silent—no offer of another housekeeper, and no mention from the board that he could use a raise. Even Ora Kendall did not call, and he could think of no excuse to call her. Thy fierce wrath goeth over me; thy terrors have cut me off.
It rained, and the rain froze. It snowed, and the snow became granular and gritty, and then it rained again. Torrents of the stuff poured from a sky as dark as dusk. Oak leaves were ripped from the trees by the wind, smashed in shreds against the wet, slushy roads, stuck against the windshields of parked cars, tucked into soggy corners of porches up and down the river. The wind shifted, shifted again, blowing the rain in all directions. Umbrellas popped inside out, their skeletons exposed, some squashed into a public trash can, looking like dead bats with broken wings. Women ducking across a parking lot had their coats drenched by the time they stepped inside a grocery store.
(Alison Chase sat in her messy kitchen on the phone to Irma Rand, telling her that she wanted to quit teaching Sunday school. She didn’t have the oomph for it anymore. She didn’t have the oomph for anything. “Talk to Tyler about it,” Irma said, but Alison didn’t want to. She hung up, and went back to bed, sleeping so soundly with the quilt over her head that when she woke, she had to lie motionless for many moments remembering where she was. “In less than two months the days will get longer,” Jane Watson said, talking to Alison on the phone while she ironed her husband’s shirts with a new spray-on starch she had seen advertised on TV. “Perk up.” Bertha Babcock, in her house down by the river, wrote a list of refreshments needed for the Historical Society meeting, and then got the Pilgrim costume from the back of the closet; every Thanksgiving she and her husband dressed like Pilgrims and went to schools around the state giving talks on the history of their forefathers. Doris Austin put together facts and figures regarding church organs, typing them up to be presented to the church board. Rhonda Skillings sat in the upholstered wing chair of her living room, reading and taking notes on Wilhelm Reich—infants did not play in order to survive, but to engage. Katherine Caskey did not engage. Rhonda wrote and read, wrote some more.)
IN A FEW DAYS, the rain lightened up, but the sky remained gray, and the temperature rose enough to melt the ice and snow so that water ran in dirty streams down gutters; cars driving by left a spray of filth on windshields or coats of passersby. Roofs leaked, and in some places water seeped through the eaves, staining wallpaper stained before. Then a cold snap came and stayed, settling in so that the lakes froze clear, and there was ice along the edge of the river.
The people of West Annett were used to this: the earth and its seasons revolving together, and if the elements of weather made life difficult—well, that’s how it was, is all. People kept right on doing what they had always done. And they were not idle. Women’s hands were busy knitting for next month’s Christmas bazaar, baking pies for a grange-hall bake sale, getting refreshments for the square-dancing club, washing clothes and ironing, always lots of ironing. And the men, after working all day at their jobs, came home to fix things around the house, for there is always something that needs fixing in a house, and these men were handy, as their fathers had been. The disappearance of Connie Hatch caused confusion and discussion, that for some was faintly delicious, it’s true, but it did not cause anyone to become idle.
Except for Tyler Caskey.
Tyler’s restiveness increased; his days were long and shapeless. When Katherine left the house for school, he found he had to leave the house, too. Its silence, its emptiness, made him afraid.
And then, praying one morning in the sanctuary, sitting in the back pew—Lord, I have called daily upon thee, I have stretched out my hands unto thee—Tyler smelled an odd, rank odor beneath him, and realized it came from the folded blanket he had placed there weeks ago. He put on his gloves before taking hold of it, then found his keys in his pocket, and drove over to Walter Wilcox’s house.
The old man shuffled about the kitchen in a pair of pants held up by a belt of clothesline rope. “I was married for fifty-one years,” Walter said, placing a wet tea bag onto the counter. “And for the last twenty, we barely spoke. Run out of things to say, I guess.”
Tyler took the tea and sipped from it. The place smelled of cat urine, which must be the smell of the blanket that Tyler had put into the trunk of his car.
Walter opened the top of the woodstove, poked at its insides with a stick, then sat in a rocking chair nearby. “We’d still get mad at each other, though.” He rocked slowly. “What I hated—what I hated to the heavens—was she’d put a wet spoon into the sugar bowl.” Walter rocked awhile longer. “And how she sneezed. Sneezed like a cat.” The old man shook his head. “What I found out when she died,” and he looked up at Tyler, taking his glasses off, wiping at his eyes with the side of his hand, “is that it don’t matter what you hate. You live with someone all that time, you think sometimes, I wis
h I’d married someone different, and then all the things you hated don’t matter a tinker’s damn. If I’d known, you see—” He wiped his eyes again, put his glasses back on.
“We all just do the best we can,” Tyler said.
“I didn’t. I was a hellion till I got too old. I lie awake in that bed upstairs every night, going over in my mind the things I did. But memory’s a funny thing. I think, did I do that? She hated me.” Walter nodded. “I think she did. What happened to Connie Hatch?”
“Walter. I’m sure your wife didn’t hate you.”
“You get to be my age, Tyler, and you realize something. People hate to hear the truth. They hate it.” The old man shook his head. “So, you don’t know what happened to Connie?”
“No. But she didn’t steal anything, I’m sure.”
“It’s hard to know about people. I heard it on the radio. She stole some jewelry and embezzled from the business office over there at the county farm.”
“I’m sure she didn’t. They wanted to question her, and I suspect she got scared.”
“You don’t run if you’re not guilty,” Walter said. He waved a hand. “But who’s not guilty, I guess.”
AT SCHOOL, KATHERINE was drawing pictures. She drew pictures of women with their heads cut off, big red drops of blood spurting out. She drew a picture of a woman in a red dress with a spiked high heel stabbed into her stomach. “My goodness. Who is that?” Mary Ingersoll asked, bending over the little table.
In a clear voice, the child said, “You.”
And then, even more amazing, the child looked Mary straight in the eye. What a look it was! As though the child were not five years old at all, but, rather, thirty-five, and full of knowledge of every thought Mary’d ever had that was not beneficent.
“She’s evil,” Mary said later to Mr. Waterbury, the principal. “I bet you think I’m overreacting, but you know how much I love my kids.” Mary gave the man a look that stirred something in him.