Abide With Me

  Katherine, whose earlier happiness had made her picture somersaulting down long, grassy hills, now sat holding tightly to Jeannie’s hand while she watched her father, whose face she could partly see from where she sat behind her grandmother. Never, ever, had Katherine known that a grown-up man could cry. It was as astonishing as if a tree had suddenly spoken. Little pieces of terror kept pricking her insides.

  Once inside the house, her father stood in the living room, not taking off his coat, his head ducked forward as though the ceiling were too low. “Upstairs, girls. Right now.” Her grandmother snapped her fingers, and they followed her, but as Katherine glanced up at her father, he gave her a funny kind of surprised-looking smile, and she knew things were wrong, but the dark pinches stopped in her stomach. She sat next to Jeannie on the bed and sang to her, quietly, song after song.

  Downstairs, Tyler remained standing. He looked at the couch, the rocking chair, turned and looked into the dining room. He looked at his mother as she came back into the room, shrugging his shoulders and smiling, but her face was gray, her lips had no color. “Mother,” he said, “sit down. Are you all right?”

  Very slowly she sat on the edge of the couch, and he went to sit next to her. “Take your coat off,” she said, almost in a whisper. “For the sake of God in heaven.”

  He took his coat off without standing up. “Mother, what’s wrong?”

  She turned her face to him. Her eyes seemed lashless, naked and pink-rimmed. “What’s wrong?” she said. Again her voice was low. “I have never been so humiliated. Ever. In my entire life.”

  Tyler sat back and gazed down at the ends of his feet, thrust before him; they seemed far away in their black leather shoes. The edges of his shoes were wet. He had left his rubbers in his church office. “To be humbled is a good thing,” he said.

  “Stop it.”

  He saw that her hand was trembling on her knee.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, Tyler Richard Caskey. It is not a good thing to see the last of Susan Bradford. And you have. She was so put off, she could barely look at me, and went straight to her car.”

  Tyler pictured this: Susan getting into her car, putting the blinker on at the end of the parking lot, driving back to Hollywell with distaste all through her. “Okay,” said Tyler. “That’s okay.”

  “Now, you tell me what you intend to do. You’re having a nervous breakdown, Tyler, and it is an appalling thing to see. I don’t know why you couldn’t have come to me earlier, prevented the horror of that scene today.”

  “Am I having a nervous breakdown?” he said.

  “A grown man doesn’t get up there and behave the way you did unless he’s very, very ill.”

  “Why,” he asked, “are you so angry at me?”

  “You’ll have to come back to Shirley Falls with me,” his mother said, and her voice had returned to its normal level. “But I swear to you, Tyler, I can’t have that child in my house for long. And you won’t be fit to care for her. I’ll have to call Belle and see what she can do.”

  “What child?”

  “Katherine, of course.”

  “I’m not coming back to Shirley Falls, Mother. You don’t need either one of us in your house. And in fact I’d like you to leave Jeannie here.”

  His mother stood up. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You really have lost your senses. This is the first time since the death of your father that I have absolutely no idea what to do.”

  Tyler looked around the room. “I don’t think I’m crazy.”

  “Crazy people never do.”

  The old dog, Minnie, got up and slunk over to the far corner of the room, where she curled up, her nose on her paws, and watched with lugubrious eyes.

  “Mother, good heavens. You’re acting as though I’m a murderer.” Tyler looked once again around the room. “Maybe I am,” he murmured, thinking of the pills he left by Lauren’s bed. “Maybe I am.”

  “Okay, that’s it. Get your coat back on. I’m going to call Belle, and we’re leaving.”

  Tyler stood up and went over and sat in one of the dining-room chairs. His mother came and watched him, and he looked at her for a long time before speaking. He spoke quietly. “I’m not leaving right now, Mother. I have to tend to my life and to my children. I do not want you taking Jeannie back with you, and I’m not asking, I’m saying.”

  “I am not leaving that baby with you.”

  Tyler nodded slowly. “You are. There’s no need here for Solomon’s ruling to cut the baby in half.”

  Mrs. Caskey reached for her pocketbook, buttoned her coat furiously. “And just what are you going to do, may I ask?”

  “I don’t know,” Tyler said. “I really don’t.”

  TELEPHONES DID NOT RING from house to house that day, or even in the days that followed. People sitting down for their Sunday meal were quiet, except to direct their children to use a napkin, or to help clear the table. It was as though a death had occurred that could not be absorbed, and a New England reticence took hold, a sense of respectful silence—mixed with some level of guilt—regarding what had been witnessed.

  Uneasiness took hold of many, and by the time darkness fell, a number of women had spoken quietly to their husbands, asking that they call the farmhouse to make sure Tyler was all right. “Where will he go?” they asked their husbands. “Tell him we don’t want him to go.” And when Fred Chase, and Skogie Gowen, and Charlie all telephoned, they were surprised to find that Tyler himself answered. Tyler said he was on his way to Brockmorton to arrange for a student minister until more permanent arrangements could be made. He seemed surprised when he was told they didn’t want him to go.

  And so people prepared for Thanksgiving with little enthusiasm. Silver did not get polished in some houses, the way it usually did. Walter Wilcox was said to be found sleeping in the church once more. People waited with a sorrow in their hearts, and, bumping into one another in the grocery store, the women did not speak of Tyler as the week went by. They spoke of the scandal of the quiz shows on TV, how it seemed nothing in the world could be trusted anymore. They did not speak of Connie Hatch, who, according to the newspaper, was still being held in the county jail, until investigators and the district attorney determined whether the bodies should be exhumed. On Sunday a student pastor arrived, a thick-faced man with dark eyebrows and a stutter. “M-m-may the m-m-ercy of the Lord b-b-be with us all.” It was communion Sunday, but Doris did not sing a solo. “The Lord said, ‘This is my bl-bl-blood, and dr-dr-drink of me.’ “

  Mary Ingersoll moved about the classroom slowly, as though she had added ten years to her life. A feeling of shame prevented her from speaking to Rhonda or Mr. Waterbury about what had happened, and they volunteered nothing themselves. Mr. Waterbury only said kindly, “Just carry on, Mary. We don’t know yet if the child will be back.”

  Mary wanted him to say, “You did the best you could,” but he didn’t say that, and she didn’t know if she deserved it. The minute she had seen Tyler Caskey begin to weep, she understood without words forming inside her that her angry thoughts and assumptions about his character had simply not been true. He was a man grieving, and she was ashamed at the kind of pleasure she had experienced in excoriating him to her friends and husband.

  And then the Monday after Thanksgiving, the phones began to ring again.

  ELEVEN

  He had been staying with George Atwood. After his mother had left on that strange, strange day, Tyler had tucked the children in the car with a quilt and a pillow, and they slept as he drove up the turnpike through the dark, the snow shining a pale light in the night, the sweeps of fields as he passed by, and then the tall evergreens, darker even than the sky, gave way to the small streets of the town as he wound his way up the hill and pulled up in front of the Atwoods’ house. Tyler had called ahead, so they were expecting him. A light was on in the living room. George opened the door almost immediately. “Come in, Tyler,” he said. “Come in.”

  Hilda Atwood put the sleeping ch
ildren to bed upstairs, and left the men to talk in George’s study. Tyler, looking around him, remembered how he had sat there as a student, thinking what a sterile life this couple must have. Now the place seemed as warm and safe as a Norman Rockwell painting. “Oh, boy,” he said, and George nodded. He told George what had been happening, and nothing in George’s expression showed any surprise. Occasionally George asked a question, and when Tyler reached the part about breaking down in front of his congregation, having Charlie Austin come up to the pulpit to rescue him, George nodded slowly. Tyler sat back, exhausted.

  “Stay there,” George said. “I’m going to make a pot of strong tea.”

  Hilda came in to say the children were sleeping. “Gosh,” said Tyler. “I forgot to tell you. Katherine might wet the bed.”

  “I know how to wash sheets,” Hilda said.

  When George returned with the tea, she left the room again.

  “I told Mother it was a good thing to be humbled,” Tyler said.

  “It is, indeed.”

  “Well, now I’m simply scared.”

  “Of what?”

  Tyler sipped from the teacup George handed him, and sat back. “I guess of not having a center of gravity. The way Bonhoeffer says a grown man has.”

  George rubbed a white eyebrow slowly, gazed at his hand, spreading his fingers on his trouser leg, looked back at Tyler. “I’m not sure I have a center of gravity.” He didn’t seem bothered by this.

  “Really?” Tyler asked. “But you must.”

  “Why?” George took off his glasses, held them toward the light. “As a matter of fact, I could argue that none of us has a center of gravity. That we’re tugged and pulled by competing forces every minute and we hold on as best we can.” He cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief. “I could make that argument,” he said, tucking his handkerchief back in his pocket, “if I were so inclined.” He put his glasses back on.

  Tyler looked at the old man’s well-proportioned hands resting on the wooden arms of the chair he sat in. The fingernails were clean and flat, the faintest pink coloring the fingertips. Tyler could have leaned forward, taken the hand. “It’s a relief to hear you say that,” he admitted. “You know, sometimes Bonhoeffer has this tone. This—” Tyler held his hand out in frustration. “This tone like he knows everything.”

  “He knew a great deal,” said George. “But I suspect if he was concerned about his center of gravity it’s because his center felt pretty wobbly at times.”

  “I suppose that’s true. But you know what I realized recently? And I admit it riled me a bit.” Tyler picked up his teacup again. “He chose a seventeen-year-old girl to love—because she would adore him. She’d lost her father and brother in the war, you know, so Bonhoeffer became both to her.”

  “Does that make what she felt not love?”

  “But for whom? For Bonhoeffer? She barely knew the man. It was love for her father and her brother she was feeling.”

  “Tyler,” said George, slowly stretching his legs out in front of him, “are you irritated with the man because he was human? Because he wrote about courage, but experienced fear? What was it you’d have liked him to do, Tyler? Stayed alive and faced the prison of domestic drudgery where no one would hail him as a hero? Lived long enough for the seventeen-year-old to become a middle-aged wife who was tired of attending to the laundry and meals, who no longer lit up like a Christmas tree every time he walked through the door? Would you prefer he not be marched out naked to be hanged in the woods, but live to face the horrors of old age, to have his wife die, his children move away?”

  “Goodness,” Tyler said. He put down the teacup and loosened his tie. “Well, both scenarios require a great deal of courage, I think.”

  George smiled with his mouth closed, but his old eyes were kind as they rested on Tyler. “Most scenarios do.”

  Tyler closed his eyes, hearing the small hiss from the radiator. He sighed deeply. Finally he opened his eyes, staring at the white painted wainscoting. “I wonder if there’s a job here in the library, George. There must be some student apartment I could live in with the girls for a while.”

  “You indicated on the phone that the deacons and board members don’t want you to leave.”

  Tyler shook his head. “I can’t imagine climbing back up behind that pulpit.”

  “No one ever said being a minister was an easy job.”

  Tyler looked over at George with earnestness. “It’s a very hard job, George. Good Lord, it is a hard job.”

  Behind the gold-rimmed glasses, George’s small eyes watched him. “Why do you think I teach?”

  Tyler picked up his teacup. “I couldn’t teach.”

  “I suspect you could.” George slowly uncrossed his legs, crossed them back the other way. “But I think you’re a minister, Tyler. You have a job waiting for you, I imagine, in West Annett. After a few years you’ll find another church and your life will move on, because lives do. But right now—”

  “I need to go back?”

  “If your congregation wants you, I think you need to go back.”

  “I was going to resign.”

  “So you said. Is it because you feel exposed, lost your manliness up there?”

  “I think I showed them I wasn’t up to the job.”

  “Don’t you think you should let them decide?”

  Tyler didn’t answer. He had not really thought it possible to preach in West Annett again.

  “We’ll arrange for a student pastor to go down for the next couple of weeks. That’s no problem. And you can stay here with the children as long as you like. Hilda would love to have the girls around. But you need to speak to your parishioners as soon as you’re ready. And I think you’re up to it.”

  “You do?”

  George shrugged. “You just stood up to your mother, Tyler. I should think now you could take on the world.”

  ANYONE WHO HAS EVER GRIEVED knows that grieving carries with it a tremendous wear and tear to the body itself, never mind the soul. Loss is an assault; a certain exhaustion, as strong as the pull of the moon on the tides, needs to be allowed for eventually. And Tyler, during the ten days he stayed with the Atwoods, spent an astonishing amount of time sleeping. Waking at daylight, he would feel sleep roll up to him again, almost immediately, and always with the force of anesthesia. When he finally staggered from the bedroom, embarrassed by what he felt was slothfulness, it was Hilda Atwood who said firmly, “Right back in there, Tyler. This is exactly what you need.”

  Back to bed he went, his body so heavy with weariness it felt as though his weight would push straight through the mattress to the floorboards below. His sleep was deep and dreamless, and, waking again, he would not know where he was right away, but, hearing the children’s voices downstairs, he was reassured, and would lie motionless, as though in traction in a hospital. But he was not in a hospital, and his limbs moved, and as he shaved in the bathroom mirror, he gave great thanks.

  Every afternoon he went across the street and prayed in the church in which he had been ordained and married, and where he had sat through the funeral of his wife. He prayed now in the front pew, while the sun came through the stained-glass window that said WORSHIP THE LORD IN THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS. He thought of the translators who, just a few years before, doing the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, had changed the first line, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,” and he thought how beautiful that was, that addition of the word “when,” to show what they felt the original Hebrew word had shown—God existed before the beginning; how beautiful it was to glimpse the timelessness of God, and he thought when Katherine was older, he would explain this to her.

  Meanwhile, he took the girls sledding, and in the Atwoods’ backyard helped build a snowman with them.

  Katherine, remembering Mrs. Meadows, tucked Jeannie’s blond curls under a hat carefully, patted her on the head, and said, “You’re a very pretty girl.” When Jeannie lost a mitten, Katherine ran after her.
“Don’t get cold, honey,” she called.

  Hilda Atwood said, “You have nice children, Tyler.”

  He made sure to tell Katherine that night: “Mrs. Atwood said I have nice children.”

  In George’s study the men talked. Tyler spoke of his visit to Connie in the county jail. He told George he did not wish to ever go back, but that he had to.

  George nodded. “It’s not pleasant, but I think you are obliged to go.”

  What Tyler did not say was that seeing Connie in jail made him feel he belonged there as well, for he had left the bottle of pills by the bedside for Lauren. Tyler thought a great deal about this, awake in the Atwoods’ guest room. Over and over he played it out in his mind—the image of Lauren’s suffering those final days—and picturing this, he felt that if he’d had the wherewithal and means, he might have slipped a needle into her so that she need not wake up and learn all over again that she was sick and had to leave her babies. He would have ended her life, if he had dared. She had dared. He thought about this often. It even came to seem to him that it was their last act of intimacy, his leaving the bottle of pills for her.

  It was wrong, but he would do it again. For this reason he never spoke of it; it was their final, private deed. The complexities of this, and of Connie and what she said she’d done, seemed more than he could understand, and he suspected he would never understand, and that he would have to accept this.

  But he did say to George one night, “Lauren was not happy being a minister’s wife.”

  “Well,” said George, stretching his legs, “it’s worse than being a minister.”

  “No, I’m serious.”