David spent the night in Leah, in his old room with the cobwebby De Oestris moose sternly watching over him. He woke at dawn, feeling a strange mixture of pleasure and dread, and it was a few moments before he remembered that he had to take Tom to the vet’s. It was a thing he had to do, and the pleasure came from that clear task; it would end in the most certain and final way. Tom would be out of his misery, an era would be ended, Tom would be no more. The dread came from that finality too.
He came downstairs before anyone else was up, and knelt by Tom’s washtub. The old gray tiger stirred, looked up with his slit yellow eyes and gave a short rasp of a pun. If a cat could be said to have favorites, David had been that one. When Tom was younger he used to run in front of David and throw himself down with a thud upon his back, wanting his chin and belly scratched. He loved to box then too, and though in his play he sometimes bit hard enough to pinch and hurt, he never unsheathed a single one of his bodkins.
“Thomas,” David said uncertainly. “Old friend, old fellow murderer, I bring sad tidings.”
An evil stench came from the box of sand they had, since his sickness, kept in a corner of the kitchen. Though it caused Tom considerable pain to climb out of his bed and go to the box—pain signified by a muted, furry snarl that had given David a dull pain in his own lower regions—Tom wouldn’t foul his bed. David went to shovel out the half-buried bloody stool and then remembered that they would need the box no more—the washtub could soon go to the cellar or the shed. He felt that loss. Tom had been with them on and off for nearly ten years—nearly half of David’s life.
Outside it was a gray day with mist on the leaves and grass, although the trunks of the maples were dry. He thought of breakfast and decided he wouldn’t make himself any. He didn’t like the vet or the vet’s snitty wife, who had a gushing, patronizing manner toward animals that immediately sent their temperatures up. When they’d first noticed, in June, that Tom had something wrong, they took him to the vet’s and Tom had become absolutely hysterical. He had screamed, arched and turned all into prongs like an animated gray cactus. David had several observable scars left from that visit. Now he had to pay that vet to kill Tom.
Another possibility occurred to him, and for a moment took his breath. He had dealt death competently enough; he had the proper tools. Should he hire out this murder? Tom was his old friend, not the vet’s or the vet’s wife’s with all her flashing dim bicuspids. Shouldn’t this quietus have some dignity about it, he and Tom alone in the woods, Tom trusting and calm even past the final clap of darkness? Suddenly he knew the place, a cathedral-like room of tall pines just above the old sugarhouse. Light filtered down green upon the soft pine needles. There was an old spade at the sugarhouse, and he would dig Tom’s grave deep beneath the needles, just north of the largest white pine. The old cat could sleep there in peace.
This way (he still only considered it) Tom wouldn’t have to ride in the truck—another thing that always brought out his cat apprehension. In a car he lay his ears back and watched for the first possible escape hatch.
There were all sorts of good reasons leading toward that last aim and squeeze. The barrel at the back of the head. Half a breath, and the slow squeeze.
Tom’s neck trembled, and his neat little cat smile disappeared into a great yawn full of teeth, pink pallet and the curled tongue. Dry clicks came from his stretched jaws, then his head closed back down into the demure smile. “Urr,” he said, and neatly licked the roots of his white whiskers. He didn’t stretch because stretching gave him too much pain. The fur at the base of his tail was matted and stringy, like wet feathers. He began to get up, then froze and gave a sudden stare and a low, warning yowl toward his hindquarters.
“All right,” David said. “All right.” He would no longer patronize the cat by speaking to him. He went up to his room by the back way and got his duck-hunting jacket and his Iver Johnson revolver. Six commercially loaded .32 S & W Longs were in the cylinder, but he would need to use only one.
Now wait, he thought. What was he doing? Why had he chosen the revolver rather than the shotgun, which was surer medicine? Did he want to use the revolver because he wanted to feel in his hand that quick push of death? No, he chose the revolver because he could hide it in his jacket pocket and no one would know what he was going to do. Anyway, the S & W .32 Long cartridge, with its 98-grain bullet, was more than adequate to smash the skull of a cat. Who was he arguing with? Wasn’t it better to bloody your own hands and take your medicine than to hire it done?
He went back to the kitchen and watched Tom’s stiff progress toward his food dish. Tom smelled the canned cat food once and then stood over it, looking at it as though wondering why he didn’t want to eat it. The grainy food smelled like sardines and it had always been Tom’s favorite. He turned toward David, who could have sworn the look was a question. Tom came back to his washtub; David gingerly lifted him into it and pulled a flap of burlap over him like a blanket.
“All right,” David said out loud. With a feeling of at least some relief he took the washtub in his arms and left by the kitchen door, carefully opening and closing the door and screen door with hands he couldn’t see. On the way up the shortcut through the woods, Tom’s face swayed close to his, Tom’s yellow eyes half closed. He seemed unworried by this strange journey. Didn’t he know what was going to happen? He must think it strange to be carried through the woods. But animals had those they trusted as well as those they didn’t trust.
The path had grown up in the last few years, in brush and poplar and gray birch saplings. Occasionally a long red blackberry stalk leaned toward him and scratched its thorns along the washtub. One caught his hand and drew across his fingers. He knew that it made him bleed, but he didn’t stop to look; he didn’t want to tamper with Tom’s strange calmness. A big maple branch, split from its trunk and full of dirt, had fallen across the path, and a small balsam grew from its rich center.
He decided that he would not hesitate, just put Tom down, aim and shoot. There should be no ceremony, no words, nothing but the quick and efficient deed. He might even admit to the family, if they asked, that he had done it himself. He could hear himself explaining: “Tom was my friend—it seemed the honorable thing to do. And you know how he hated the vet’s.”
The sugarhouse still stood, but it seemed much lower, as though the ground were rising up around it—which the ground was, he supposed. Green moss grew on its doorstep, and the rusted spade leaned against the door as if to hold it shut. With some difficulty he took the spade along with him. The tub grew heavier as he climbed into the deep woods. When he came to the place he remembered, he put the washtub on the silent needles. One side of the chamber formed by the pines was a cragged wall of ledge. The light here had a dim, interior look, as though it were allowed to enter only by design, by spaced windows high above.
Moist air, even a wafting of mist, slowly crossed. His legs were wet from the droplets on the brush he had come through. Tom turned his head, then nodded again, and David decided not to remove him from the tub. He would bury him in it. The last thing he did right was to hold the silver revolver behind him to cock it. Three cold clicks as the hammer rose and the cylinder turned and locked. He brought the gun forward and down. He aimed at the gray skull, between the delicately cocked ears, his heart thudded and he fired.
Instantly Tom was out of the tub, all wire and springs, cocked on his spread legs. He stared at David with total knowledge. His scalp was ripped like a tear in a carpet, and one ear hung on that flap. His eyes shone, wide and bright. He looked once, then was gone out of there.
David was in shock. Tom’s monstrous act of escape, that judgment so accurate and instantaneous—was all the truth at once. He almost cried to Tom to stop, to be dead. His knees gave way and he went down into the needles. The bullet had keyholed the side of the washtub; that jagged hole seemed to grow. He crawled for a moment, then got his weak legs under him and staggered across the opening toward the thicket of basswood and witch hobble where the cat had disappeared. His eyes hurt him, as though they burned like searchlights. That gray opinion, that half-life, was somewhere, betrayer and betrayed. He crashed into the thicket, his revolver cocked. He had five shots left.
When Wood hadn’t come downstairs by ten o’clock, Peggy began to feel dread. She had walked up High Street at eight, in the misty light, wanting to see the turrets of the old castle at that hour. Henrietta, Harvey, Kate and Horace were just finishing breakfast, so she had a cup of coffee with them. Horace, who looked exhausted, went upstairs as soon as he finished. She and Kate sat talking at the round table in the gray light that was barely bright enough to do without the electric ones. Kate drank coffee like mad, but after three cups Peggy’s hands were trembling. They talked about school, and she hadn’t realized how unhappy Kate was about going back.
“But I don’t necessarily want to be in Leah, either,” Kate said, shrugging her shoulders. Unhappy or not, Kate glowed in the cool light. She was still the most beautiful girl Peggy had ever seen, anywhere, even in pictures.
“Doesn’t Wood eat breakfast?” she said.
“Usually he does,” Kate said. “He’s usually up by now, anyway.” Kate watched her, and suddenly said, “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m sorry. Was I staring or something?”
“It reminded me of high school,” Kate said. “I’m sorry I startled you, Peggy.”
“I know you’re not happy,” Peggy said. She reached out and touched Kate’s slim hand; Kate’s other hand came over hers, and Kate smiled gratefully, her smile so much like the sun. When they were younger Kate had been her teacher. She’d told Peggy what to read, how to dress, how to straighten a hemline, how to fix a bra strap in an emergency. They had seldom talked of secret things, and always Peggy felt that beautiful Kate was touched by some kind of doom. It shone upon her like a sad summer light. Peggy was the one with the hard common sense.
“I’ll tell you how screwed up I am,” Kate said. “Gordon wants me to marry him and I almost said yes. It seemed like such a relief. I mean to get married and get it all over with.”
“Oh, Kate!”
“Well, you can talk about marrying for love and all that!” Kate said angrily. “Sometimes I wish I could just drop dead and make a ‘beautiful’ corpse.”
“No you don’t!” Peggy said. She held up her hands, they were trembling so much. It was the coffee, and Kate’s unhappiness, and Wood—where was he?
Kate startled her in the middle of that thought. “I know how you feel about Wood. You love him! You shine all over with it!”
Peggy’s skin grew warm.
“You turned all dark,” Kate said.
“I’m going up and see if he’s there.”
“Why, he’s there, Peggy.” Kate looked worried now, and with this recognition of her own dread Peggy jumped up.
“Oh!” she said, trying to get a breath. “Oh! Why am I so worried? What’s the matter?”
“Go up and see. Go on, Peggy. Don’t keep worrying about it.”
“All right. It’s silly, but all of a sudden I’m so scared. Come wifti me.”
“All right,” Kate said. They took the back stairs, up the narrow stairs past Peggy’s old room in the servants’ quarters. She went first and Kate followed. Peggy was almost running. They hurried down the hall, out of the servants’ quarters into the bigger hall, and came to Wood’s door. She stopped, feeling silly. But her dread was there still. She knocked, and they waited, both trembling. The tall heavy door was Wood’s, the big brass knob should turn only at his will. There was no answer. Peggy knocked again, harder.
“Wood?” she said in a tiny, constricted voice. Then, “Wood?” They listened. A clogged, grunting sound came from inside, but that was all. “Wood!” Peggy called. They listened, unbelieving, to that strange sound, and finally Peggy took the cool knob and opened the door. She looked into the room, which all at once was a huge dark box. There was the bed, the desk, the shades pulled over the windows. The bed—she searched the room as though feeling with her hands in a closet. In the middle of the room the grunting came again, from Wood where he lay on his bed. He seemed incomplete, out of focus. Kate ran past her and opened the shades. Wood had no eye on one side, and his face and hands were a dull rose color, as even and smooth as if he had been painted.
“What’s the matter with him?” Kate cried. He breathed too slowly, with that wet sound. Kate ran out, calling for David and her mother.
Wood seemed to be strangling on his own breath, so Peggy got her arm under his broad back and hauled him up into a sitting position. His head fell over her shoulder. She knew what was wrong with him; she saw the empty pillbox, the whiskey bottle. Last semester a girl in her dorm had been found like this. The girl had taken twenty-five sleeping pills and later called the dean so they could discover her and pump out her stomach before it was too late.
“Kate!” she yelled. She shook Wood, trying to wake him up, and miraculously he did partly wake up. His eye opened, nearly all black pupil, and he coughed before going limp again. “Kate!” she yelled again, and both Kate and Henrietta came running in.
“It’s pills!” she said to them. “Tell Dr. Winston what it is!” She gave them the box. “Read him what it says!” Henrietta came to Wood, and though Kate was crying she took the box. At the door she stopped and cried, “I can’t! I can’t!”
“Here! Hold him up and shake him! Slap him!” Peggy made them both hold Wood up, and went down to the telephone herself.
She was surprised that she remembered Dr. Winston’s number, and surprised at the calmness of her voice. Thank God, he was there. “It’s Wood Whipple. He’s taken sleeping pills. Veronal, it says on the box—from the Veterans’ Hospital.”
“He’s home?”
“Yes.”
“How’s his breathing?”
“Slow, and noisy.”
“Will he wake up at all?”
“Yes, a little.”
“All right.” Dr. Winston’s steady voice seemed to reflect her coolness. “Make him sit up. Keep him moving and try to keep him awake. I’ll be right there.”
Harvey had come out on his canes. “What in God’s name?” he said. “Wood what?”
She left him with his mouth open and ran back upstairs to find Horace standing in the hall in pajamas. “What? What?” Horace said in a voice ragged from sleep.
“It’s Wood,” she said. “Come and help.”
Harvey began to yell from the hall. “Somebody tell me what’s going onl What’s with Wood?”
Wood’s head lolled from side to side as Kate and Henrietta pushed and pulled on him, that strange dearth place of an eye gleaming pink. Kate tried to slap his cheek, but couldn’t. “Peggy!” she said desperately.
“Go get a basin of cold water and a washcloth,” Peggy ordered. “Put ice cubes in it.” Kate went to do this and she took Kate’s place. “Horace,” she said, “come help us get him up.” She slapped Wood’s face hard, and his eye opened. His whiskers had stung her hand.
“Yeah-yeah,” he said, sighing sleepily as his eye slowly closed again.
“Is he going to be all right?” Henrietta asked. “Peggy? Peggy?”
“I think so,” she said. “Here, Horace, get under his arm. Get his arm over your neck. Now lift him up.”
Between them they pulled Wood from the bed, one pajama leg waving empty from above the knee. As they moved him to his desk chair the stump of his left leg banged the desk, giving Peggy such a massive twinge of sympathy pain she stumbled. Horace held them both up for a moment before they got Wood into the chair.
“Mmm-yeah,” Wood mumbled.
“What the hell’s going on?” Harvey demanded from the door. He was sweating and shaking from his climb up the stairs.
“He’ll be all right,” Peggy said, shaking Wood’s head back and forth. She could feel the muscles of his neck tense to fight this motion.
“Hey,” Wood said.
“That’s better,” she said. “Stay awake, Wood! You must stay awake!”
Harvey came into the room. The olive-colored box was crushed in his hand against his cane handle. He balanced himself and tossed the box on the desk. “So that’s it,” he said. “My God.”
Henrietta was sitting on the bed, her head in her hands. “Why?” she asked. “I can’t understand anything.”
Wood began to slip out of the chair, but Horace, with a hoarse grunt, leapt back to him and pulled him up straight. “Sit up!” he yelled into Wood’s ear. “Sit up!” His voice was so loud they all looked at him in surprise.
Kate came in, sloshing the ice water. “Here it is, Peggy! There was only one tray of ice cubes!”
Peggy took a handful of Wood’s hair, held his head up and placed the icy cloth against his face. “What’re you doing?” Wood said slowly, exhaustedly.
“See? See? He said something!” Kate said.
Peggy could feel the stronger and more deliberate force of Wood’s neck muscles now, fighting against her constant manipulation of his head. She knew he would wake up. His breathing was quieter and a little faster. “Someone let Dr. Winston in, when he comes,” she said. She held Wood’s head in her hands, her fingers on his ears and in his hair, now on his strong jaws, feeling the smooth muscles underneath the bristly skin. She wanted to stop jerking him back and forth, to put his face against her breast. His hair was glossy and wet, all mussed and young-looking. While the washcloth soaked in the basin she risked one moment of tenderness and moved her fingers over the shiny skin where his eye had been.
When she had first entered the room and heard that sick rattle of breath it seemed as though her whole life with the Whipples had been a kind of dull green cone, a corridor of time she’d traveled slowly through to reach this dreadful apex, everything leading down smaller and more vivid to this rendezvous. The Whipples sat and stood around her now, watching her authority with some awe in spite of their apprehension. Death had touched all their faces and made them gray.
No one had to let Dr. Winston in. He was already there, a tall, stooped man in his fifties who always spoke calmly and always seemed in memory to be moving forward; they had all seen his gaunt face loom toward their beds as he raised his black gladstone bag toward a table or a chair. “Ah,” he said, looking at the crushed green box. Peggy saw him notice the whiskey bottle beneath the bed, next to the straps and hinges of the artificial leg. He looked then at Wood, tapped Wood’s jaw sharply and nodded at the flash of consciousness it caused.
“Who was it called me?” he asked.
“I did,” Peggy said.
He nodded, seeming pleased with her. He looked carefully at the others. “Horace, help me get him to the bathroom. Margaret Mudd, take my bag. The rest of you might as well stay out. We’ve got to wash him out inside and that won’t be pleasant. Henrietta, you make some strong coffee.”
“Is he going to be all right?” Henrietta asked.
“Why, yes, I think so, Henrietta. There might be a chance of pneumonia, but we can take care of that if the time comes. My guess is he took the Veronal quite a few hours back, you see. If it had a mind to kill him, it would have by now.”
Henrietta shuddered as she drew a breath.
“Now, now, Henrietta,” he said, “and Harvey. It very well could have been an accident. ‘An accidental overdose,’ we’ll call it for the time being. You understand?”
Henrietta nodded, shaking her head at the same time. A small squeak of fear escaped her, and she cleared her throat to try to hide it.
At the foot of Wood’s rumpled bed, Harvey leaned on his canes and stared at the doctor’s face.
He was wet all through, and bled from a lacework of pricks and scratches across his hands and face. The water, coming from leaves and stalks, stung like acid. Now he crept over the top of a granite outcropping, just above the prickly brush that surrounded it. He had seen Tom twice in the last hour or so—a quick sliding of gray once; the other time what he’d taken for a piece of stone had been carefully watching him until it slid away. In desperation he’d even tried calling to Tom, as though the cat were so stupid he would come toward his betrayer and ask for death. In near-hysteria he’d plunged after the cat, and a maple sapling just too big to swing out of the way had caught him like a club on the forehead, unhinging his knees. Soon after he slipped on a mossy ledge and fell on his knee. A hollow throb worked there, predicting later pain.
He could see down into the blackberries here. Their leaves were old and slightly shriveled, and the shiny berries were almost ripe. His eyes moved so quickly, in such a frenzy of search he felt their tired muscles pull. Where was the cat? Tom, his old friend—he must shut off that judging brain. Wasn’t it a favor he was doing? Tom had made a terrible misinterpretation.
If he didn’t calm himself he wouldn’t be able to hit anything with the pistol. When he held it out in front of him, the narrow sights wavered so badly he could hardly find the front blade in the grooves. Deep breaths, he told himself. Now wait awhile and try to listen. The old pistol was inaccurate under the best conditions. There was a tick, and another down in the fuzz of stalks, beneath the gray-green leaves somewhere. He held his breath, feeling movement down there. Something crept, about ten feet away, just barely out of sight. He found a piece of gray next to what must have been an old stump with a white mushroom tray on its side, and tried to find an open corridor in the interstices of stalks and branches. He knew better than to shoot at hair; he should see the whole animal and know what he aimed at, what part he aimed at, but this was the first time he had a chance to shoot at all, so he held the pistol in both hands, steady against the moss, found the blade against that wisp of gray and fired.
A high yowl of pain and anger proved the gray to be alive. Screaming, Tom rolled out into clear sight. He fought his rear legs, clawing and biting so fiercely he seemed to be two cats at once. Then, as though he’d met a stronger cat and knew it, he tried to escape the force that hurt him. One haunch, pierced and broken, dragged at a splayed, impossible angle. Blood appeared upon the old leaves. When Tom stopped and tried again to fight whatever had him in its jaws, David fired into that gray tangle, knowing all the time he should have waited. He hurt Tom again; the yowl wavered and became lower, more intense, closer, as though it came from David’s own head. The gray bundle convulsed, appeared catlike and then became a ball of ragged blood and hair. David fired again, knowing immediately he’d missed, and again, knowing he’d missed by more than a foot. Did he have another unspent cartridge in the cylinder? It occurred to him that he might have shot Tom through his sick place, through the cancer, and with this horror he jumped and slid down the jagged ledge into the brush. A branch whipped his face and blinded him, then his eyes opened onto glittery tears and prisms. He hadn’t stopped running and was afraid he’d gone past Tom, but there Tom was, trying to get enough of his legs under him to run away, to drag himself away from David. He cast a yellow glance over his shoulder, knowing from whom he tried to escape. David reached as close as he could, as he dared, and fired into Tom’s body, hurting him badly. A loop of putty-colored intestine picked up dirt and shreds of matter from the ground. The next shot was a heartless empty click, and David fought through the branches, fell to one knee and was forced back by their combined resilient push before he got through to stamp Tom’s head into the punky dirt. He stamped and heel-pounded the head until it was dirty and shapeless. The torn skin slipped off the eyes and jaws. Some time later the cat was dead.
Dull-witted and sick, he staggered back down through the woods toward the house. His face and hands stung, laced as they were with thorn scratches and punctures. Pale reddish water and seeds were on his palms. His wet pants clung heavily, and he fell over a branch he could easily have avoided. He lay with his face in the rotten leaves, feeling the sticky, sickish water on his thighs. He might as well stay here for a while, one foot hung over the branch that tripped him, shin in pain—the disorganized posture of a corpse. Tom’s body had been splayed thus, horribly out of character for a cat, filthy, ragged and unnatural.
Let the grubs and newts crawl up his nose and out his ears. The hell with it. The cellar odor of rotting leaves was deep, buried, but contained the peppery bite of toadstool. Fragrant rot. For one thing, he would make a vow: never again consider David Abbott Whipple of adequate talent in the matter of death. Certain decisions simply are not David Abbott Whipple’s to make. Let him flit charmingly among the women, saying clever things and dipping his little wick in the honey, but let him eschew death. Eschew it. Gesundheit. Ave atque vale. He would never consider that subject again.
He lay there until he grew cold, past shivering. Something walked six- or eight-legged over the back of his neck, and when he moved to brush it off he became aware that he was hungry. He got up, the oil in his joints gummy with cold. His knee throbbed as he trudged out of the woods.
No one was in the kitchen, so he sneaked up the back stairs and made it to his room without being seen. He put his revolver on his desk; why hadn’t he considered burying it with the cat? Was his oath a lie, then? The fact was, he wanted the revolver. He still wanted that instrument of murder. He would let it lie there in its own darkness, to be considered later.
He toweled himself off with a dirty shirt and had just changed into dry pants when Kate opened his door without knocking and came running in. “Davy!” she said. “Where have you been all this time?”
Murdering, he thought, then saw that she had been crying. She came up as if to touch him, then shied back. He put on a clean shirt, and she began to cry. “Wood,” she said in a weak, hilly voice. She was all shiny and disorganized; something odd had happened to the symmetry of her face.
“What? Wood what?” he said, badly frightened now.
“He tried…tried to commit suicide.”
“Tried to?”
“With pills but they didn’t work, and Peggy got worried so we went up and found him. Dr. Winston came, and oh, goodness, Davy! Everything’s gone wrong!”
“Is Wood all right now?”
“He’s all jittery because of the hypodermic and black coffee and all that.” She cried and hiccuped into her hands. She seemed to be blind with her tears, so he led her to his easy chair and pushed her down into it. Finally she got hold of herself and could speak. “Give me a Kleenex or something.”
He gave her a clean handkerchief and she wiped her face. “I knew you were here because your truck was here, Davy.”
“How is he now? Is he home?”
“He’s in his room. He has to sit up, because of his lungs or something. Peggy’s taking care of him. Davy, when we found him he was all pink! My God!”
“Should I go see him?” David said.
“What good is anything if he wants to die?”
“I guess I’d better go see him.”
“You don’t have to now, Davy. You can wait until he’s better. He’s really shaking now. It hurts to look at him.”
“Okay, I’ll wait awhile,” he said with shame and relief. He tried to imagine Wood wanting to die, choosing to die. Wood! They all knew he was unhappy. There were the conventional explanations about returning combat veterans and all that, but they didn’t seem to apply. His disfigurements? No, that couldn’t be it, not with Wood. But you never knew what got to people. He wished, suddenly, with a real force that surprised him, that he and Wood could divide those wounds. He’d take either the leg or the eye, whichever bothered Wood the most. Yes, he would, right now. His eyes grew moist, but at what part of that thought? His love and sorrow for his brother, or his own nobility? Both? Every emotion he ever had was just slightly infected.
“How’s mother taking it?” he said.
“Quietly. She sort of chirped and then she was quiet.”
“Dad?”
“I don’t know. He came upstairs on his canes and now he’s back downstairs. Horace helped carry Wood around, but Peggy really took charge of the whole thing until Dr. Winston got here.”
“She would,” he said. “I can see that.”
“I don’t think he even sees her,” Kate said.
“Sees her?”
“I mean she loves him so much.”
“What’s bothering him, anyway? Have you got any idea, Katie? Is it his leg and eye? I can’t understand it if it’s that.”
“I don’t know. He’s so unhappy. Nobody knows. Even Dad asked me if I knew.” She looked at him as though her eyes had focused for the first time since she’d entered the room. “Davy? What are all those scratches all over your face?”
He thought, perhaps too long. “I was hunting and I got caught in a blackberry patch.”
“Oh,” she said. “Hunting.”
“I better go see him, Katie. You know I have to.”
“Yes.” She lay back in the chair, looking exhausted and small. She wore her faded dungarees and an old blue dress shirt he’d given her at the beginning of the summer. Her pretty arms, coming out of the rolled sleeves of his old shirt, showed how slender she really was, compared to him.
“Hey, kid,” he said. “I bet we’ll get all this straightened out.”
She stared up toward the moose, but not as though she saw it. “Davy, I thought you were going to show up at the dance last night.”
“I couldn’t find a clean shirt. They’re all out at the cabin.”
“Oh.”
“Did you have a good time?”
She looked at him, frowning unhappily. “I don’t know. Davy, come back and talk to me, will you? After you see Wood? Can I stay here and wait for you?”
“Of course you can,” he said, but he thought: Oh, God, what did that shit do to her? He felt sick and responsible. In a way, he didn’t want to hear, just as in one way he didn’t want to have to see Wood.
He left her in his room and went to the bathroom to see how scratched up he really was. He washed off a few crusty lines of dried blood, but he’d still have explanations (lies) to make if anyone looked at him closely. Then he remembered that he hadn’t taken Tom’s sandbox out. He must get rid of any evidence that there had ever been a cat. Yes, quickly. He went down the back stairs to the kitchen, took the stinking box in his arms, lugged it out across the driveway and dumped the sand in the underbrush. The box he stamped flat and jammed into one of the trash cans. There.
But his mother was waiting for him in the kitchen, looking as though she knew something. “David, you’ve got to help us,” she said.
He was relieved, first, then a little frightened and wary. He thought of saying, “I don’t live here, you know. Just visiting, sort of.”
“It’s about Wood. Your father and I can’t…”
She was so upset. Her magnified eyes swiveled back and forth in her lenses.
“I know,” he said. “I’m going to see him now.”
“See your father too, Davy. Oh!”
“Don’t cry, now, Hank,” he said. “You just wait and see if we don’t get this all straightened out.” Liar, coward. He patted her shoulder, an easy gesture, and went through the dining room. Strange, knowing what he knew, that he yearned to have his father tell him what to do about Wood.
His father sat at his oak table, pale and overweight, a glaze of sweat on his forehead. He seemed at first to be reading the newspaper that lay on the table before him, but David saw that his eyes were distant and still.
“Dave,” he said. His eyes had flicked over and gone back. “God knows you must be closer to him than I ever was. What’s eating him?” When he turned his head he looked old. His hair was sparse, darker and thinner than David had ever noticed before. His eyes were gummy in the whites, with brownish striations radiating out of the irises, as though the irises were slowly melting with age. When David looked away he saw in his mind a different picture of his father—in fact two different pictures, one fatter but more fierce and powerful, one a younger man startlingly like himself. It was the first time he’d ever considered himself to be what his father once was, and the cold hand of age and death brushed over them both.
“I don’t know, unless it’s his leg and all that.”
“But Christ, don’t you think I know what it’s like to be a cripple? Whipple the Cripple. For God knows how many years I was in pain all the time and I never tried to scrag myself!”
“Maybe it’s something else,” David said.
“Jesus. Don’t you kids think we ever loved you?”
“Yes, I guess so,” David said. His father seemed a little gross in his looseness of skin and emotion. Long curly hairs grew out of his nose.
“Of course we did!” his father said. “There was always a lot of yelling and screaming around our house, but when the chips were down, you goddam well knew your mother and I loved you!”
Was his father talking to Wood? “Maybe that isn’t it either,” David said.
“What? Well, what is it? Why? Was it Lois Potter giving him the old heave-ho?”
“I think he more or less gave her the old heave-ho,” David said, regretting his repetition of those words.
“What? He did?” His father looked at him with real curiosity. “Lois Potter? Why, she’s so pretty she’d give asthma to a brass monkey. You mean to say he broke it off?”
“That’s what I think. She cried on my shoulder about it, anyway. Once she got over the shock of the leg and eye, she wanted him back. I think she was telling the truth about it. Maybe she just felt guilty, I don’t know.” That had been a strange session, because at the same time he had been feeling genuinely sorry for Lois and patting her on the back, a sweet push of desire had come over him and he sneezed on her neck.
“I can’t figure anything,” his father said.
“Me either.”
“Try to find out, Dave, will you? Christ, sometimes I don’t think I have the right to feel so bad about it, I’m such a selfish son of a bitch. But I love that boy!” His father’s voice broke and he turned his head directly away from David—an awkward, strained position. It was all wrong. There must still be power in this thronelike center of the great hall. When he thought of home, no matter where he was, it was first the man sitting tensely here, powerful and exciting, and then the other rooms and towers, all held together by the father at his broad oak table. He could laugh at him, and sometimes even half despise him, but the power had always been there.
“All right,” he said. Not wanting to look at his father any longer, he turned to go.
“Oh, Dave,” his father said.
“Yes?” His father’s tone meant a change of subject.
“I meant to tell you about Ben Caswell.”
“What?”
His father turned the Free Press around on the table so he could see the short notice. After five years in a coma, Benjamin R. Caswell, twenty-one, had died of pneumonia.
“I guess it was a good thing,” his father said. “Their medical expenses must have been out of sight.”
“Good thing?” David said. He felt numb, really. He hadn’t thought—not a trace of a thought—of Ben for a long time. It was as if the dead friend had risen from the grave for a last look into his concern before passing away. It had happened, Ben’s accident, so long ago. So many things had happened since, things that Ben had never heard about.
“About Wood, Dave. We’ll get this straightened out,” his father said.
Those words haunted David up the stairs.