Heading Out to Wonderful

  “Seems like a waste of time,” said his brother. “And a world of heartache.”

  “It’s that anyway, isn’t it? A world of heartbreak, I mean. A whole wide world.”

  So he walked around the town from then on as he did before, in the days when he first arrived: alone, talked about, stared at but not spoken to. The only way he could show his affection for the people of Brownsburg was to leave them completely alone, and to accept the same in return.

  For a few days after the ministers spoke, the women stayed away from the butcher shop, eating chickens out of their own backyards, until their husbands began to complain and ask for a steak, and then they came back to Will’s, but there was a silent understanding that Will would wait on them, that any exchange would be with him, even though they still expected Charlie to be the one who did the actual carving and weighing. His attentions, his extra weight and his fancy butcher’s bows, the way he made every package look like a birthday present, went unremarked, as though he weren’t there. They just could not see him any more. Now he knew what the colored people in the town felt like.

  The Reverend Lewis Shadwell came to see him, sitting in the same stiff way, careful, immaculate, and filled with an anger that rippled across the calm surface of his face.

  “We know the truth,” he said.

  “Who is we, and what truth?” asked Charlie, sitting as stiffly as the preacher, and this time with the same sense of indignation just behind the cool manner.

  “I could answer that in several ways, Mister Beale. I could say that we know that the woman is lying. Or we could say that the town is full of hypocrites. Or we could just say that the world is filled with a meanness of spirit which in no way reflects God’s love for us.”

  “The world is what it is.”

  “A year ago, I told you you weren’t welcome to come to us on Sundays. That was a meanness on my part, and I apologize. You would be welcome now.”

  “I don’t want to come any more. But thank you.”

  “Will you pray with me now? Get down on your knees?

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Why don’t you leave this place?”

  “You forget there’s a trial. I could go to jail. I could be sent to prison in Harrisonburg for a long time. That’s a funny one. Harrison. Burg. Just thought of that.”

  “You didn’t do anything.”

  “As much as anybody, you should know that a lot of people go to jail who didn’t do anything.”

  “People will speak up for you.”

  “Trial’s in Lexington, you know that. Nobody knows me there. Besides, the only person who has to say anything has said it already, and, for all you know, it’s the truth. All kinds of people do all kinds of things.”

  “Not your kind of people, Mister Beale.”

  “Kind of you to say. I’m truly grateful.”

  But the truth is, for Charlie, he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t that kind of people. Maybe what she said was true. He took her that first time because he had to have her, because there was a fire in his blood, and she had said no before she said yes, and she stayed around because she had nowhere else to go. And so maybe it was true, some time, a while back. And maybe some things you don’t get beyond, even if you get to like them later on, live for them, even.

  Even after what had happened, she was still the only thing in his life that meant anything to him, really. He would still die for her, and he wouldn’t die for anybody else, no matter how much they might touch his heart. Even the boy. Even his own brother. So, inside of him, where the object of his love should have lived, there was nobody at home, and so a void was created, and a terrible stillness descended on Charlie Beale, a stillness in which only he could live, in which he couldn’t sleep and felt he could make no sound when he opened his mouth.

  “Reverend, thank you for coming. It’s my dinner time now.”

  “I didn’t want to come, Mister Beale. Now I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  “My brother is here. He keeps me company.”

  “I save souls, Mister Beale. I’ve been doing it since I was ten, in a tent in Memphis. I’ve looked into a thousand eyes, and seen both the grace and the filth that lives behind them. I am looking into your eyes now, Mister Beale. Yours is a clean house.”

  “Not everybody gets saved, Reverend. Even you . . .”

  “Yes. I know, Mister Beale. Even me.”

  “So.”

  “So then we’re done.”

  “Afraid so. But I am grateful to you.” Charlie held out his hand, and they shook.

  “You will rise above, brother. You will rise. So shall we all.”

  Charlie looked into the reverend’s eyes and saw the future of something there, and the reverend looked back into Charlie’s and saw the history of the whole world up to that point.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  NED WORRIED. HE was a fretful boy.

  He had come all this way to help Charlie, because Charlie had said he needed help, but there was nothing to do for him. Charlie wouldn’t get a lawyer, he wouldn’t confess or deny, he just held himself, his body and his talking, in a steel blue stillness that could not be broken. Ned smoked the first quarter of eighty cigarettes a day. He emptied ashtrays and swept butts off the porch from the time he got up to the time he went to bed. Lucky Strikes. They cost fifteen cents a pack. He washed Charlie’s clothes, left wherever they fell when he took them off. Made him change them when they were dirty. He cooked for him, because Charlie didn’t want to burden Will and Alma with his presence any more than he had to.

  Everything irritated Charlie. There was not one thing that didn’t irritate him. The way hot foods burned his tongue and cold drinks made his teeth hurt. The way his clothes fit, the way the cotton lay against his back, the denim on his legs. The way his pillow held his head at night, not sleeping, tossing, until he finally got up and put on his miserable clothes and went out to the river, to his last piece of property, in the dead of night to stare at the voluptuous moon and wait for the first bird song, irritated, enraged.

  But nothing irritated him as much as Jackie Robinson, who brought stinging tears of love to Charlie’s eyes, followed by an immediate urge for cruelty. He hated the way the dog looked at him with such pathetic faith, gave himself wholly to Charlie, even in Charlie’s neglect of him. There’s something about helplessness that makes us despise the helpless. There’s something about despair that makes us unable to abide affection. When Charlie paced from room to room, the dog followed him everywhere, nose at his heel, sometimes touching, the hard clack of Charlie’s heels on the wood floor, the soft pad of Jackie Robinson. Irritating, relentless.

  Sometimes, he would hold the dog in his arms, softly, gently, and lay his head on Jackie’s back, just resting there, knowing that the dog would cradle him. And, almost immediately, he would want nothing more than to be rid of him, just because Jackie squirmed, because Jackie wanted to lick his face, to take his wrist gently in his mouth, to love him, for god’s sake, and that could not be allowed to happen. He thought that dog would make him crazy.

  Jackie Robinson, frightened now, confused by signals he did not grasp, misbehaved, barked, raised his leg in the house, until Charlie got up, grabbed him, and smacked him on the head, something he’d never done before, something he regretted immediately, and saw at that moment that it had gone too far, that whatever had gone wrong between him and the dog was irreversible and would get worse. He grabbed a length of rope, and tied it to Jackie’s neck, and led him down the street and forced Alma and Will to take him. He said, “I can’t do this. I can’t have him any more,” and they knew he was telling the truth, and took him in, in the night, not knowing how they were going to keep him, with them gone all day. They could see from Charlie’s face that it had become an impossibility.

  They took the dog’s rope from his hand, and stood with Jackie and watched Charlie walk sadly back up the street and get in his truck to go out to the river and spend the night a
lone in the chilling air on the hard ground.

  He woke up the next morning and everything hurt, stiff, chilled and sweating, as though he had been drunk all night. He saw the river, grasped its beauty, and thought that he could wade in and bathe, but he didn’t. It was too far. Everything was too much trouble.

  “Have some coffee,” Ned said as Charlie walked into the house. “Shave. Change your clothes. One foot in front of the other, that’s all.”

  “Fuck you,” said Charlie. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” And the brother just took it, stood there holding out a hot cup of coffee, staring at him the way the dog had, and Charlie felt a wave of love and regret for this brother he didn’t know, a blush of shame at his own behavior.

  “Get me a lawyer,” Charlie said, “Could you figure that out for me?”

  “Already have,” Ned said. “Just say the word, it’s all set.”

  It was closing in around him, all of it, but he changed his shirt the way Ned asked and went off to work, cutting steaks and roasts and chops all day for women who wouldn’t look at him, except for Claudie Wiley, who looked him in the eye and said, as though she knew what the answer might be, “How you doing, Mister Beale.” And “Just fine, Miss Wiley” was all he could think of to say, although he knew that she knew that he was lying and would have said more, would have told her everything, knowing that she knew most of it anyway, but there were limits and laws and “just fine” would have to do for all that there was unspoken and felt between them.

  She would tell that woman she had seen him, that woman who never came in the store anymore, or the husband either. They had retreated into wherever couples go when they don’t want the world to see the bruise of their marriage, and they sent Claudie Wiley into the store to get their meat for them, and she would tell the woman that he was fine and that he had on a clean shirt but that he had not shaved his face, and that would be enough of a message. Everything that was going to be done was almost done, and no message from him through her would change any of that. Claudie had seen it all, made drawings in the night she showed Evelyn Hope and nobody else. The drawings frightened her, but a lot of things frightened Evelyn Hope.

  Charlie Beale drove out to the slaughterhouse every Wednesday afternoon, as he always did, most often taking the boy, driving past her house without looking or stopping, wanting to say to Sam, don’t ever let this happen to you. Every week, Sam would look out the window and wave, shouting, “Look, Beebo. There’s Mrs. Glass. Look, Beebo.” But Charlie never turned his head to see her there, perfectly dressed, made up, staring down the hill into the road from her wide porch.

  Instead, they talked about the World Series just past. The Yankees had won, breaking Sam’s heart, because if the Dodgers lost that meant Jackie Robinson lost personally, although, even if he was listening on the radio, the prospect of the first baseball game played under lights thrilled him and Charlie, both; they could picture the grass lit up to an incandescent green, the white men and Jackie, a black man, now moving in stride with other black men, Newcombe, Campanella, all the men as though in slow motion, shielding their eyes from the unfamiliar glare, the brightness of baseball made brighter by its stark silhouette against the Brooklyn evening. The Fireman, Joe Page, had been named MVP, and Jackie Robinson had gone home to his wife. They had all just gone home, the way they did every October, winners or losers. Sam took this personally.

  Charlie and Ned drove over to Lexington after one of those afternoons. Ned had to drive because Charlie was shaking so bad, smoking, drinking a beer in the truck, his shirt still blotched with the blood of animals. They went to see Charlie’s new lawyer, Cully Blake, lean and preened and red-faced, already drunk, having been drunk since ten in the morning, as he always was. Cully Blake was white, clean-shaven, with buffed nails, immaculately starched shirts and drunk to the gills from ten a.m. on every day, which did not put him in an unusual position among Southern men of his time and station, and which didn’t interfere in any way with the performance of his job, which would have been slack under any conditions. Cully was a lazy, well-bred man of intelligence but no consequence, looking at two oddly matched brothers sitting in his office at day’s end and already wondering if his bill would be paid.

  Anticipating that, Charlie pulled five hundred dollars in cash from his pocket and laid it on the table. “Think that’ll be enough, Mr. Blake?” he asked, and Cully knew it would, without even counting it. He’d seen piles of money before.

  “Tell me what happened, Charlie. You don’t mind if I call you Charlie?”

  “I do. That’s my money on the table, Mr. Blake.”

  “Mr. Beale. Then. Sir. Tell me what happened.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “What did you do? Usually in this kind of case, a man has done something, even if he hasn’t done what the woman says he’s done.”

  “I didn’t do anything. And I’m not going to talk about it.”

  “Mrs. Glass says . . .”

  “Don’t ever mention her name to me again.”

  “That’s going to be a little difficult.”

  “Hard or easy, that’s the way it is.”

  “She’ll say things in court. Things you don’t want to have said in public.”

  “Whatever she says, that’s what happened.”

  “You look guilty, Mister Beale.” Blake said, thinking now only of his next drink of whiskey. “You have the look of a guilty man.”

  “That could be. Every man has done something. I‘ve done things. Plenty of things. I just didn’t do this. I didn’t do this thing. Good evening, Mister Blake. Let me know when to be in court.”

  They drove home in the autumn dark without talking. Charlie, drinking another beer, thought, How can you give so much of yourself without love? How can you do that thing with your body, your lips and breasts and tongue, and not feel some trace of love in your heart? Confused, troubled, and not less confused as he drank beer after beer, he who rarely touched alcohol, now on his way to being solidly drunk for the first time in a long time.

  They sat up late, drinking in the near dark of Charlie’s kitchen, Ned talking softly from time to time. Charlie crying, sometimes just tears running down his face in horrible, flowing silence, sometimes huge, heaving sobs.

  And all he said, with the vehement enunciation of the totally drunk, before he lurched up to bed, was, “I dint do anything. Did. Dent.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  NO SIR.”

  A six-year-old boy in a scratchy new wool suit and an immaculate white shirt to which is affixed a clip-on bow tie, all of it from Mr. Swink’s in Lexington, this little boy sits on a hard wooden chair in an almost empty courtroom in Lexington, the county seat of Rockbridge County in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and he perjures himself, he lies and lies over and over again until they just stop asking him questions, knowing that he is going to hell for telling a lie, and knowing that telling twenty is no worse than telling one, he lies because he knows that the thing they’re asking is part of the bargain he made with Charlie long ago never to speak to anybody of certain things, and knowing that if he does speak of these things, that something terrible will happen to Charlie that is far worse than the fires of the hell he knows are waiting for him.

  Be a good boy, his mother had told him; just tell the truth. But he knew he couldn’t do that, he didn’t know what it was that would happen if he did tell, Charlie had never told him, but he knew it would be something worse than any pain he had known, worse than gasping for breath in the gray river water, losing his sight, his breath, until he finally gave in and just sank. Worse than that.

  When he made his promise to Charlie, in the truck on that cold fall day a year ago, it really hadn’t occurred to him to question what such a promise might mean, or how he was to carry it out when the time came. He had been raised to tell the truth, and he did, and he answered the questions that came at him in the same way. Yes, he threw the rock that broke the window. No, he hadn’t done his homework. His mothe
r said that it was so much easier telling the truth because then you didn’t have to remember what you said; if the question was asked again, you’d naturally answer in the same way.

  The first lie was the hardest, because it was his mother who was doing the asking, and he loved her, and he knew she didn’t want to see him in hell, and he knew that she didn’t deserve this, not from him or from anybody, and he understood instantly that she knew he was lying, that every time he lied, the lie would be as clear and hard as a glass windowpane before the rock went through it.

  Things are so easily shattered, and once they’re broken, certain things are broken forever. They don’t heal. They don’t come back.

  “No, ma’am,” he said, he had never seen Charlie and Mrs. Glass together, and his mother looked at him in a certain way, with a slight hesitation before her eyes blinked again, and he knew that she would never look at him again any other way but that, never look at him as she always had. She looked sad, broken, somehow, broken in a way that she would have to go on living with.

  “Are you sure? Never?”

  “No, ma’am. Never. I’m sure.”

  “Not once?”

  “She came into Daddy’s store. I guess . . .” He looked her straight in the eye. It was horrible, and it hurt his heart like a knife. It was a pain in his blood.

  “I mean, outside the store. Alone.”

  “No, ma’am. Never alone.”

  Which was almost true. Because, except for that first time, when he waited in the truck, he was always there, he was with them, and so they couldn’t have been alone in the way she meant. Jackie Robinson had been there, too, and even a dog counted for something, didn’t he?

  “Remember something, Sam. Always remember this. If you behave badly, or make a mistake, you can act better or do it over and nobody will mind. But if you tell one lie, just one, you will be a liar forever. Do you understand that?”