The truck was there next to the small house, which had not been painted in so many years it looked washed out, the shingles pale, some missing. The blinds were drawn, as they always were, and Tommy got out of his car and went and knocked on the door. Standing in the sunshine, he thought again of Lucy Barton, how she had been a skinny child, painfully so, and her hair was long and blond, and almost never did she look him in the eye. Once, when she was still so young, he had walked into a classroom after school and found her sitting there reading, and she had jumped—he saw her really jump with fear—when the door opened. He had said to her quickly, “No, no, you’re fine.” But it was that day, seeing the way she jumped, seeing the terror that crossed her face, when he guessed that she must have been beaten at home. She would have to have been, in order to be so scared at the opening of a door. After he realized this, he took more notice of her, and there were days he saw what seemed to be a bruise, yellow or bluish, on her neck or her arms. He told his wife about it, and Shirley said, “What should we do, Tommy?” And he thought about it, and she thought about it, and they decided they would do nothing. But the day they discussed this was the day Tommy told his wife what he had seen Ken Barton, Lucy’s father, do, years before when Tommy had his dairy farm and Ken worked on the machinery at times. Tommy had walked out behind one of the barns and seen Ken Barton with his pants down by his ankles, pulling on himself, swearing—what a thing to have come upon! Tommy said, “None of that out here, Ken,” and the man turned around and got into his truck and drove off, and he did not return to work for a week.
“Tommy, why didn’t you tell me this?” Shirley’s blue eyes looked up at him with horror.
And Tommy said it seemed too awful to repeat.
“Tommy, we need to do something,” his wife said that day. And they talked about it more, and decided once again there was nothing they could do.
—
The blind moved slightly, and then the door opened, and Pete Barton stood there. “Hello, Tommy,” he said. Pete stepped outside into the sunshine, closing the door behind him, and stood next to Tommy, and Tommy understood that Pete didn’t want him inside the house; already a rank odor came to Tommy, maybe coming off Pete himself.
“Just driving by, and I thought I’d see how you were doing.” Tommy said this casually.
“Thanks, I’m okay. Thank you.” In the bright sun Pete’s face looked pale, and his hair was almost all gray now, but it was a pale gray, and it seemed to match the pale shingles of the house he stood in front of.
“You’re working over at the Darr place?” Tommy asked.
Pete said he was, though that job was almost done, but he had another lined up in Hanston.
“Good.” Tommy squinted toward the horizon, all soybean fields in front of him, the bright green of them showing in the brown soil. Right on the horizon was the barn of the Pederson place.
They spoke of different machines then, and also of the wind turbines that had been put up recently between Carlisle and Hanston. “We’ve just got to get used to them, I guess,” said Tommy. And Pete said he guessed Tommy was right about that. The one tree that stood next to the driveway had its little leaves out, and the branches dipped for a moment in the wind.
Pete leaned against Tommy’s car, his arms folded across his chest. He was a tall man, but his chest seemed almost concave, he was that thin. “Were you in the war, Tommy?”
Tommy was surprised at the question. “No,” he said. “No, I was too young, just missed it. My older brother was, though.” Up and down quickly, once, went the branches of the tree, as though it had felt a breeze that Tommy had not.
“Where was he?”
Tommy hesitated. Then he said, “He was assigned to the camps, at the end of the war, he was in the corps that went to the camps in Buchenwald.” Tommy looked up at the sky, reached into his pocket, pulled out his sunglasses and slipped them onto his face. “He was changed after that. I can’t say how, but he was changed.” He walked over and leaned against his car, next to Pete.
After a moment, Pete Barton turned toward Tommy. In a voice without belligerence, even with a touch of apology to it, he said, “Look, Tommy. I’d like it if you didn’t keep coming over here.” Pete’s lips were pale and cracked, and he wet them with his tongue, looking at the ground. For a moment Tommy was not sure he heard right, but as he started to say “I only—” Pete looked at him fleetingly and said, “You do it to torture me, and I think enough time has gone by now.”
Tommy pushed himself away from the car and stood straight, looking through his sunglasses at Pete. “Torture you?” Tommy asked. “Pete, I’m not here to torture you.”
A sudden small gust of wind blew up the road then, and the dirt they stood on swirled a tiny bit. Tommy took his sunglasses off so that Pete could see his eyes; he looked at him with great concern.
“Forget I said that, I’m sorry.” Pete’s head ducked down.
“I just like to check on you every so often,” Tommy said. “You know, neighbor to neighbor. You live here all alone. Seems to me a neighbor should check in once in a while.”
Pete looked at Tommy with a wry smile and said, “Well, you’re the only man who ever does that. Or woman.” Pete laughed; it was an uncomfortable sound.
They stood, the two of them, Tommy’s arms unfolded now; he slipped his hands into his pockets, and Pete slipped his hands into his pockets as well. Pete kicked at a stone, then turned to look out over the field. “The Pedersons should take that tree away, I don’t know why they don’t. It was one thing to plow around it when it was standing up straight, but now, sheesh.”
“They’re going to, I heard them talking.” Tommy did not quite know what to do, and this was an odd feeling for him.
Still looking toward the toppled tree, Pete said, “My father was in the war. He got all screwed up.” Now Pete turned and looked at Tommy, his eyes squinting in the sunshine. “When he was dying he told me about it. It was terrible what happened to him, and then—then he shot these two German guys, he knew they weren’t soldiers, they were almost kids, but he told me he felt every day of his life that he should have killed himself in return.”
Tommy listened to this, looking at the boy—the man—without his sunglasses, which he held in his hand in his pocket. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know your father was in the war.”
“My father—” And here Pete unmistakably had tears in his eyes. “My father was a decent man, Tommy.”
Tommy nodded slowly.
“He did things because he couldn’t control himself. And so he—” Pete turned away. In a moment he turned partway back to Tommy and said, “And so he went in and turned on those milking machines that night, and then the place burned down, and I never, ever forgot it, Tommy, it was like I knew he had done it. And I know you know that too.”
Tommy felt his scalp break out into goosebumps. It continued, he felt the bumps crawling across his head. The sun seemed very bright, and yet it seemed it shone in a cone around only him. In a moment he said, “Son”—the word came out involuntarily—“you mustn’t think that.”
“Look,” Pete said, and his face had some color to it now. “He knew the milking machines could cause trouble—he’d talked about it. He’d said it wasn’t a very sophisticated system and they could get overheated in a hurry.”
Tommy said, “He was right about that.”
“He was mad at you. He was always mad at someone, but he was mad at you. I don’t know what happened, but he was working at your place, and then he stopped. I think he went back eventually, but he never liked you after whatever happened had happened.”
Tommy put his sunglasses back on. He said with deliberateness, “I found him playing with himself, Pete, pulling on himself, behind the barns, and I said that was something he couldn’t do there.”
“Oh, man.” Pete wiped at his nose. “Oh, man.” He looked up at the sky. Then he looked at Tommy quickly and said, “Well, he didn’t like you. And the night before the fi
re, he went out—sometimes he would just do that, go out, he wasn’t a drinker, but sometimes he’d just leave the house and go out, and that night he went out and he got back around midnight, I remember because my sister couldn’t sleep, she was too cold, and my mother—” Here Pete stopped, as though to catch his breath. “Well, my mother was up with her, and I remember she said, Lucy go to sleep, it’s midnight! And my father came home. And the next morning when I was at school— Well, we all heard about the fire. And I just knew.”
Tommy steadied himself against the car. He said nothing.
“And you knew too,” Pete finally said. “And that’s why you stop by here, to torture me.”
For many moments, the two men stood there. The breeze had picked up and Tommy felt it ripple the sleeves of his shirt. Then Pete turned to go back inside the house; the door opened with a squeak. “Pete,” Tommy called. “Pete, listen to me. I don’t come here to torture you. And I still don’t know—even with what you just told me—that it’s true.”
Pete turned back; after a moment he closed the door behind him and walked back to Tommy. His eyes were moist, either from the wind that was whipping up or from tears, Tommy didn’t know. Pete spoke almost tiredly. “I’m just telling you, Tommy. He wasn’t supposed to go and do those things in the war that he had to do. People aren’t supposed to murder people. And he did, and he did awful things, and awful things happened to him, and he couldn’t live inside himself, Tommy. That’s what I’m trying to say. Other men could do it, but he couldn’t, it ruined him, and—”
“What about your mother?” Tommy asked suddenly.
Pete’s face changed; a blankness of expression came to it. “What about her?” he asked.
“How did she take all this?”
Pete seemed defeated by this question. He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what my mother was like.”
“I never really knew her myself,” Tommy said. “Just saw her out and about once in a while.” But it came to him now: He had never seen the woman smile.
Pete was gazing at the ground. He shrugged and said, “I don’t know about my mother.”
Tommy’s mind, which had been spinning, rearranged itself; he felt himself again. “Now listen, Pete. I’m glad you told me about your father being in the war. I heard what you said. You said he was a decent man, and I believe you.”
“But he was!” Pete almost wailed this, looking at Tommy with his pale eyes. “Whenever he did something, he felt terrible about it later, and after your fire he was so—so agitated, Tommy, for weeks and weeks he was worse than ever.”
“It’s okay, Pete.”
“But it’s not.”
“But it is.” Tommy said this firmly. He walked over to the man and put his hand on Pete’s arm for a moment. Then he added, “And I don’t think he did it, anyway. I think I forgot to turn the machines off that night, and your father was mad at me, and he probably felt bad about what happened. He never told you he did it, am I right? When he was dying, and told you about killing those men in the war, he never confessed to burning my barns down. Did he?”
Pete shook his head.
“Then I suggest you let it go, Pete. You’ve had enough to contend with.”
Pete ran a hand over his hair, a piece of it stood up briefly. With some confusion he said, “Contend with?”
“I saw how you were treated by the town, Pete. And your sisters, too. I saw that when I was a janitor.” Tommy felt slightly winded.
Pete gave a small shrug. He still seemed vaguely confused. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, then.”
They stood a few more moments in the breeze and then Tommy said he was going to get going. “Hold on,” said Pete. “Let me drive down the road with you. It’s time I got rid of that sign of my mother’s. I’ve been meaning to do that, and I’ll do it now. Hold on,” he said again. Tommy waited by the car while Pete went inside the house, and very soon Pete came back out, holding a sledgehammer. Tommy got in the driver’s seat, and Pete got in on the passenger’s side, and together they drove down the road; the rank odor Tommy had smelled before was stronger now with the man next to him. As he drove, Tommy suddenly remembered how one time he had put a quarter near the desk where Lucy would sit when she was in junior high school. She always went to Mr. Haley’s room; the man taught Social Studies for a year, then went into the service, but he must have been kind to Lucy because that was the room, even when it later became the science room, that Lucy preferred to be in. And so one day Tommy left a quarter near the desk he knew she sat at. The school had just gotten a vending machine and there were ice cream sandwiches you could buy for a quarter, so he left the quarter there where Lucy could see it. That night, after she had gone home, Tommy went into the room and the quarter was still there, exactly where he had left it.
He almost asked Pete, then, about Lucy, if they were in touch, but he had already pulled up next to the sign that said SEWING AND ALTERATIONS and so he just said, “Here you go, Pete. You be well.” And Pete thanked him and got out of the car.
After a few moments, Tommy glanced in his rearview mirror, and what he saw was Pete Barton hitting the sign with the sledgehammer. Something about the way he hit it—the force—made Tommy watch carefully as he drove down the road. He saw the boy—the man—hit the sign again and again with what seemed to be increasing force, and as Tommy’s car dipped down just slightly, losing sight for a moment, he thought: Wait. And when his car came back up he looked again in the rearview mirror and he saw again this boy-man hitting that sign with rage, with a ferocity that astonished Tommy, it was astonishing, the rage with which that man was hitting that sign. It seemed indecent to Tommy that he was witnessing it, for it felt as private in its anguish as what the boy’s father had been doing out behind Tommy’s barns that day. And then as Tommy drove he realized: Oh, it was the mother. It was the mother. She must have been the really dangerous one.
He slowed the car, then turned it around. As he drove back, he saw that Pete had stopped smashing the sign, and was now kicking at the pieces with a tired dejection. Pete looked up, surprise showing on his face, as Tommy approached. Tommy leaned to unroll the passenger’s window and said, “Pete, get in.” The man hesitated, sweat on his face now. “Get in,” Tommy said again.
Pete got back into the car and Tommy drove down the road, back to the Barton home. He turned the car engine off. “Pete, I want you to listen to me very, very carefully.”
A look of fear passed over Pete’s face, and Tommy put his hand briefly on the man’s knee. It was the look of terror that had passed over Lucy’s face when he surprised her in the classroom. “I want to tell you something I had never in my life planned on telling anyone. But on the night of the fire—” And Tommy told him then, in detail, how he had felt God come to him, and how God had let Tommy know it was all okay. When he was done, Pete, who had listened intently, sometimes looking down, sometimes looking at Tommy, now looked at Tommy with wonder on his face.
“So you believe that?” Pete asked.
“I don’t believe it,” Tommy said. “I know it.”
“And you never even told your wife?”
“I never did, no.”
“But why not?”
“I guess there are some things in life we don’t tell others.”
Pete looked down at his hands, and Tommy looked at the man’s hands as well. He was surprised by them, they were strong-fingered, large; they were a grown man’s hands.
“So you’re saying my father was doing God’s work.” Pete shook his head slowly.
“No, I’m telling you what happened to me that night.”
“I know. I hear what you’re telling me.” Pete gazed through the windshield. “I just don’t know what to make of it.”
Tommy looked at the truck that sat next to the house; its fender glinted in the sunlight. The truck was old and gray-brown. It almost matched the color of the house. It seemed to Tommy that he sat there for many minutes looking at that truck
and how it matched the house.
“Tell me how Lucy is,” said Tommy then, moving his feet, hearing them scrape over the grit on the floor of the car. “I saw she’s got a new book.”
“She’s good,” said Pete, and his face lit up. “She’s good, and it’s a good book, she sent me an early copy. I’m really proud of her.”
Tommy said, “You know, she wouldn’t even take a quarter I left her once,” and he told Pete about leaving the quarter and finding it later.
“No, Lucy wouldn’t have taken a penny that wasn’t hers,” Pete said. He added, “My sister Vicky, well, she’s another story. I bet she would have taken the quarter and then asked for more.” He glanced at Tommy. “Yeah. She’d have taken it.”
“Well, I guess there’s always that struggle between what to do and what not to do,” Tommy said, attempting to be jocular.
Pete said, “What?” And Tommy repeated it.
“That’s interesting,” said Pete, and Tommy was struck with a sense of being with a child, not a grown man, and he looked again at Pete’s hands.
The car engine made a few clicking sounds as they sat in silence. “You asked about my mother,” Pete said after a few moments. “Nobody has ever asked me about my mother. But the truth is, I don’t know if my mother loved us or not. I don’t know about her in some big way.” He looked at Tommy, and Tommy nodded. “But my father loved us,” Pete said. “I know he did. He was troubled, oh, man, was he troubled. But he loved us.”
Tommy nodded his head again.
“Tell me more about what you just said,” Pete asked.
“About what? What was I just saying?”
“The—struggle, did you say that? Between doing what we should and what we shouldn’t do.”