He heard the bell over the door clink behind him, and he glanced around his shoulder. Instantly he felt blood rushing into his head. She stood in the doorway, bending over the child, encouraging him to come in. She had a farmer’s red handkerchief tied around her hair and a sheepskin coat much too large for her. Henry’s, he thought. “Come on, Jimmy,” she was saying, and her voice was beautiful and painful to him. He’d forgotten she had that country whine, a voice no more musical than the rasp of a saw but, for all that, shockingly sweet, at least to him. She’d gotten fatter, and in a single motion of his mind he knew her ugly and beautiful. Her legs were winter-raw and muscular, her arms as hard as the arms of a man; her skirt had been washed too many times, and the slip showed gray. He thought fleetingly, absurdly, of hiding. And then her head came up and she was perfectly still, looking at him. As if without knowing she was doing it, she stepped in front of the child.
“Hi,” Willard said.
“Hello, Willard.” Her voice was cool, countryish, polite, and he knew in a surge of panic that she hated him.
He looked at the child peeking from behind her legs. He was beautiful—blond and dirty-faced, in patched and faded jeans that buttoned between the legs. Tears filled Wil-lard’s eyes, blurring his vision so badly he could only make out the outlines of their figures.
He said, “I’m glad to see you, Callie.”
She could hear the catch in his voice; she knew well enough how it was for him, seeing his own son. She said nothing, merely looking at him. Then, amazingly, she smiled. “It’s nice to see you, too, Willard.”
“Candy!” the child said, rather sternly, fists doubled.
Callie laughed, threw Willard a helpless look. Then she bent down to the child again. “Come on, Jimmy,” she said, “Mommy’s in a hurry.”
Then old man Llewellyn was there, shouting at them, red-faced and white-haired as a Millerite prophet. “Beautiful morning! Step right up, there! What’ll it be this beautiful morning? Satisfaction guaranteed!”
Callie and the child disappeared behind the middle grocery shelf.
“Pack of Old Golds,” he said. “Regular.” His knees were shaky.
When he went out on the porch he saw Henry Soames sitting in his car, the flesh sagging from around his eyes, his skin unhealthy gray. He was huge and old as the mountains, and as patient. Their eyes met, but Henry Soames showed no sign of recognition, merely looked puzzled, reminded of something.
We were friends, Willard thought. We used to talk half the night sometimes. I worked on my goddam jitney in your garage.
He thought of the red-headed policeman, smiling, pretending to listen to nothing he said, and a chill went down his back. He thought of waving, as if noticing Henry only now. But it was too late. He went down the steps and walked across the road, opening the cigarettes as he walked. He could feel the old man’s puzzled eyes on him, watching.
Shit passing in the night, he thought. He lit a cigarette, and it tasted worse than most.
Then, behind him, Henry called, “Willard?”
He froze, scared sick, his knees shaky. As soon as he was able, he dropped the cigarette and turned around. Henry was half out of the car, grinning, calling “Willard, you devil!” Callie and James were on Llewellyn’s porch, watching like small, gentle statues from a church.
With more self-control than he’d have thought he could muster, Willard raised his arm and waved and then, without thinking, smiled at them. And then—who knows why?—he turned his back and began to run, ashamed of doing it even as he did it but also full of crazy joy. They’d forgiven him. Of course! Why shouldn’t they? Wouldn’t even he—even Norma, in fact—have done the same? He kept running, bringing his feet down hard on the road’s packed-tight snow. When he was over the hill and around the bend, protected from Henry Soames’ eyes by trees, he slowed down to a walk and thought, still smiling, “How absurd, all these years! A foolish nightmare, a sad, shoddy dream out of Plato’s cave!” The day was bright, surprisingly warm, and the three-mile walk ahead of him seemed nothing. He crossed the bridge, hardly noticing, hurrying. “I was insane,” he thought, startled. “It’s as simple as that! I must remember, from now on. Whatever happens, I must remember.” It came to him that he’d promised his mother he’d pick up something if he stopped at Llewellyn’s. Was it baking soda?
And now, behind him, he heard Henry Soames’ car coming noisily after him. They’d insist on giving him a ride, of course. There was no escape, nowhere to hide—if he ran for the woods they’d see him and think he was crazy. Willard laughed, blushing till his cheeks were like a girl’s, then turned and flung up his arms in submission. The Ford came beside him, clanking and growling like the hound of heaven.
“Willard, you old son-of-a-gun,” said Henry Soames.
VIII
THE GRAVE
1
All morning there had been a gray truck parked in the cemetery on the mountainside across and a little down from where they hunted, and fifteen feet this side of the truck two men were digging a grave. Henry Soames wondered about it from time to time, when he sat resting for a minute on a rock or when he stood helping his boy with the rifle. They were burying someone he knew, most likely—only people from close around used the cemetery—but he couldn’t think who it would be. Henry was always one of the first to hear about births and deaths, partly because of his running the diner (as he still sometimes called it, though the big sign in front of the new building said RESTAURANT, and it was no longer the Stop-Off but The Maples, which was more elegant, Callie said), but mainly because Henry Soames was the kind of man he was, interested as a spinster aunt in the life of the whole county and a partisan. Maybe it was Charley Benson’s mother, it came to him after a while, and, not realizing he was doing it, he took off his cap and held it over his stomach a minute, thinking and looking at the ground. She was ninety-seven, and likely to go at any time. But it was odd that he hadn’t heard. Maybe on the way back home he and Jimmy would cross over to where they were digging and find out for sure.
They were regular, hired grave-diggers, not relatives or friends of the family: They had a shade-canvas up, and they worked slowly and steadily. Over their heads the sky was bright blue, like the middle of summer, with a long, pale mare’s-tail off to the west, and the maples, exploding to red now, were as motionless as trees in a dream. The shade under the trees looked cool and comfortable (here in the open it was hot as a day in the middle of August) and he thought of the creek over there, out of sight from where he stood, and the thought made him thirsty. The tombstones would be smooth and comfortable, some of them, for sitting on.
Jimmy seemed not to have noticed the truck, or at any rate he hadn’t grown curious yet. A boy’s curiosity took time to move out from wherever he happened to be standing, if where he was was unfamiliar. He wanted to know why the old barbwire fence was here, where as far as a four-year-old boy could see there had never been anything but stiff gray weeds and berry bushes and big rounded rocks. (There’d been a house here, years ago, a place where three old-maid sisters had lived, named Riddle. You could still find the chimney, down under the woodbine and burdocks, if you looked, and you could see where the road had been, and three of the stone supports of the smokehouse. There was one old pear tree, dead and white and brittle as bone, standing all by itself in the brambles like a stubborn old Baptist waiting for the Judgment.) The boy wanted to turn over every old stick or flat stone they found to squat down with his arms on his knees and study the crawling things underneath. Henry would stand patiently or would sit, if there was a stump handy, giving his son his way. It was good for a boy to look things over. And then, too, Henry could use the rests. As it was he was farther from home than Doc Cathey approved of his going. He could look behind him and see his house and restaurant a half-mile down, way to the right of the cemetery, over by the highway: the house a little white box in the shade of maples and three pine trees scraggly with age, no grass around it to speak of, cinders instead for the trucks
to park on—in front of the house and off to the left the red walls and the black roof of the restaurant. There was only one car there now, a Volkswagen; no one he knew. He looked over at the grave-diggers again and shook his head.
Then Henry forgot about the cemetery for a while. In spite of the noise they’d been making shooting at cans and sticks, earlier, a rabbit walked right out in front of them, and Henry fired at it. The rabbit flipped when the bullet hit and flopped around in a half-circle, dead already, and lay still. They went to pick it up.
2
Any other time he might have picked it up at once, almost without looking at it, and might have stuffed it into his canvas bag and might have forgotten about it. But the boy hadn’t seen a dead rabbit before—hadn’t seen anything dead, in fact, as far as Henry Soames knew, except maybe flies—and so Henry stood with the rifle clamped tightly under his right elbow, barrel out, pointing off to the right, away from the boy, and held the rabbit on his open left hand for the boy to see and touch. He watched the boy’s face and for an instant he felt himself slipping away again into that sense that he stood outside time, involved and yet dispassionate, like a man looking at far-off mountains, or like Henry Soames’ father sitting motionless and huge on a broad stump, watching chipmunks or listening to the brook move down through the glen, rattling away forever, down and down. Or as Henry himself sat nowadays, more and more, thinking thoughts that had never before occurred to him, surprised and bemused at the way things fit together. He saw the boy’s face as though it had nothing to do with himself, a face in an old, old photograph. His hair was the color of clean old straw, white almost, but with yellow glints and dust-gray shadows. It needed cutting; that was the way his mother liked it. His blue eyes had a pink cast, as they always did when the light was strong, and his eyebrows, white against the flush of his face, lifted up and out like wings. He stood bent forward, his trousers halfway down his hips, his hands behind his back in one of those old-man poses he was always getting into, and he looked at the rabbit with curiosity and no distaste. For him, too, the sun had momentarily paused, if it ever noticeably moved in a four-year-old’s world. At last, tentatively, he touched the soft, short fur on the back, gray-brown fur speckled with a pure white (the rabbit was young), and stroked from the tips of the ears to the turned-down tail. The bullet had hit in the neck, snapping it clean, and the head lay now at an angle not natural in life, as though the back of the head rose straight from the shoulders, as if in ecstasy. There was very little blood: a stain around what seemed the insignificant wound on the side of the neck.
“He’s killed, isn’t he?” Jimmy said.
Henry nodded.
“Are you going to shoot him again?” Now a hint of distaste did come, but mainly the boy was curious.
“No point in shooting things after they’re dead,” Henry said.
The boy continued to move his hand very gently on the fur, his question not fully answered, Henry knew, because really it had nothing to do with shooting: a question about what death was, how a thing so unreasonable could be tamed, made to fit in a world of waterbugs, trees, mountains, customers at the restaurant. He said, “Why?”
“A thing can only die once,” Henry said. “Things live and then they die.”
He looked past the boy at the pine woods that began some fifty feet up the slope from where they stood, beyond where the Riddle place used to stand before it burned. It was utterly still in there and dark as a church. Needles on the ground kept out all growth, and wherever one entered, long, gloomy aisles radiated out straight and clean. The CCC boys had planted the trees in 1935 or so. He could remember coming here with his father to watch them work. The Riddles’ place had been gone even then. His father would sit on a rock biting the sweet white tips off timothy shoots and he would chirp at sparrows or meadowlarks as though he were one of them and fond of gossip. Henry had come here two, three times when he’d first found out he was going to die. Self-consciously, sentimentally (as he’d come to see), he would slip into his father’s poses: He would lean his gun against a stump and lower his great, loose body down beside the gun, plant his elbows on his knees, tip his cap back and stare in at the gloomy aisles that led away to the darkness farther in. But he’d gone on living, taking his pills when he needed them, and gradually he’d gotten used to it, and it had come to him that it wasn’t the same. The gloomy aisles weren’t there yet when his father had come, it was spindly new trees he’d looked at, and blowing grasses and birds. If he looked he could see the cemetery, across from here, the narrow gray stones in the shade of the maples and beeches there, but it wasn’t that that had drawn his attention. If he ever looked there, he saw it with the same calm, like a man who’d been married to all that for fifty years. Though Henry couldn’t have predicted it—you had to get to that point yourself to know that somebody else had been there—he saw now that that was inevitable. Everything passes, the carved-out rocks by the brook proved it, and the excitement of fear was no more enduring than anything else. A bad heart was the beginning of wisdom.
“Look at his eyes,” Jimmy said.
He nodded.
“They sort of squint, don’t they? Why do they squint?”
“Because he’s dead,” he said.
(Callie’s mother had said, “What do you get out of it, shooting defenseless rabbits?”
He’d shrugged, and Callie had said, “Now, Mother, don’t you go butting into Henry’s business.”
“It keeps him from shooting Baptists,” Callie’s father had said. “He, he, he!” And Henry had said, a little righteously, as it seemed to him later, “I don’t want to shoot Baptists. It’s not that at all.”
“Well, then you’re a goddamn fool,” Callie’s father had said. He kept beer in the refrigerator, purely as an affront to her, and he could swear like a trooper. He was her cross, she said. But he’d prayed, the time Jimmy had gone into convulsions, and Henry had understood it, whether Callie could or not. There’d been nothing they could do, once they got him to the hospital. Jimmy had been not quite two. At first he’d had a crazy look in his eyes, a clouded look, like the look of an animal dying. Henry had reached into the crib for him, Callie’s father looking over his shoulder (it was up at their place it had happened), and there’d been that look in Jimmy’s eyes, his face white in the dark room, and Jimmy had drawn back in terror, not knowing his own father; and then when Henry had him in his arms, Jimmy’s eyes had rolled up and he’d gone stiff all over, and Callie’s father had said “Holy God!” and on the way to the hospital he’d started to pray, with Callie’s mother sitting stiff as a board beside him, holding the baby, keeping his teeth apart with her bare fingers, and Callie was glaring through the windshield like a madwoman, almost more furious at her father than scared for Jimmy—and that too was natural, it seemed to Henry, even good; yes. He’d driven like hell was after them and it was a wonder they’d any of them made it.)
But now the boy had lost all interest in the rabbit, and Henry thought, Well, all right, then; everything in its time. He dropped the rabbit in the bag.
The boy said, “What are they doing over there?”
Henry looked over where the boy was pointing. There was a car parked in back of the truck now, and a woman stood watching the grave-diggers. They were strangers, city people from their looks. The man had on a suit and hat, and the woman had on a gray coat and a hat with flowers in it. Both of them were old.
“They’re digging a grave,” Henry said, taking off his cap again, as if absentmindedly.
“No they’re not,” Jimmy said, “they’re digging somebody up.”
“Mmm,” Henry said. Hardly noticing, he pulled up Jimmy’s trousers and tightened the belt. After a minute he took the boy’s hand and they started down.
“There’s four of them,” Jimmy said. “One, two, three, four.”
“Mmm,” Henry said. He stopped a minute to rest, then began again.
3
The world had changed for Henry Soames because litt
le by little he had come to see it less as a yarn told after dinner, with all the relatives sitting around, and more as a kind of church service—communion, say, or a wedding. The change had in a way begun when they’d built The Maples. He’d felt a kind of awe, watching the place go up: not only awe at the looks of it (a gabled building like an old-fashioned Catskills barn, twice the size of Henry’s old diner, with planter-boxes inside and out, and twelve tables, and a fireplace at one end), but awe, too, at what his wife had done to him, scooping up his old life like wet clay and making it over into her own image, and awe at how easily she managed it all and how easily, even gladly, he had accepted it, in the end. It was as if it was something he’d been thinking all along and had never quite dared—though God knew it wasn’t. Her ideas had given him the willies, set in his ways as he’d been by then, and they’d probably have given him the willies even if she’d caught him younger; but he’d found there was no stopping her: She was hard as nails and mean as her mother when there was something she had to have. So he’d given in, and when he’d done it, not just in words but totally, freely choosing what he couldn’t prevent, he’d felt a sudden joy, as though the room had grown wider all at once (which by that time as a matter of fact it had), or as if he’d finally shoved in the clutch on the way down a long straight hill it was no use resisting. He’d stood out by the road with Jimmy, watching the carpenters work and after that the nurserymen and the painters (all this a year ago now), and he’d given up all thought of the mortgage and whether the truckers would still pull in, and he’d mused like a man only half-awake on how it had all come about, the long train of trivial accidents, affirmed one by one, that made a man’s life what it happened to become. It was a good life, he had to admit it, now that he could look at it, with nothing to do from morning to night but keep an eye on little Jimmy and from time to time catch up their books. (Callie was no good at the bookkeeping. The figures had a will as stubborn as her own: Twos, fours, sixes were as intransigently twos, fours, and sixes as stones were stones. She could no more juggle the bills than juggle dead tamaracks, and she would cry, and Henry would take over, and he’d have it all straightened out—as well as it could be—in no time.) He’d grown mystical, or, as Callie said, odd. He had no words for his thoughts; the very separateness of words was contrary to what he seemed to know. It began, perhaps, with his thought of what marrying Callie had done to him; if she’d made him into her own image it was nevertheless her own image discovered—for the first time to her as well as to him—in him: Henry Soames as he might, through her, become. Once he had fairly tested it, he knew beyond any shadow of doubt that the new life she had shaped was his own, it fit him the way his father’s old coat had one day, to his surprise, fit him, and from that moment on he didn’t just wear the new life, he owned it. He felt like a man who’d been born again, made into something entirely new, and the idea that such a thing could happen had startled him, and he’d seized on it, turning it over and over in his mind the way you turn over a hundred-dollar bill. But the new life he’d found in himself had no settled meaning yet: It was all a-shimmer and vague, like a dream. It lacked the solid reality that would come when he’d lived it long enough to know it had something in common with the old—long tedious hours in the middle of winter when no one came in, days when Callie was short-tempered and Jimmy had a devil in him.