12 ◆ Charles

CHARLES SEEMED TO RECALL some rule against staining over paint, but he had stain and he didn’t have paint, and he chalked up the rule to paint store propaganda. He enjoyed the fumes and the wood grain and the even strokes required to stain the barn doors. He came up with thoughts that began profoundly but for which he had no ending: In this world you have two choices. No, in this world you have three choices. He dipped the brush into green stain and sloughed off the excess by dragging the bristles over the clotted rim. In a restaurant you may have five choices, but in this world you don’t get that many.

Micah came home from the dog show, interrupting this train of thought, which Charles knew was useless yet found somehow engaging. Wound up, the boy bounced around relaying the events of his afternoon at the theater, most of which served as prelude, in his telling, to his heroic retrieval of the dog trainer’s sunglasses from the street. Then Jerry came over to the barn and Micah ran around the back yard calling “Yai, yai, yai” in a strangled voice. This was something he was compelled to do from time to time to burn off energy.

The goat, which Charles had untied to see if it would stay around when it did not have to, tripped after the boy; it really seemed to understand the concept of play.

“Got another brush?” said Jerry.

Charles found one in a can in the barn. He freed it from a bottom-dwelling pad of congealed turpentine and bent the bristles back and forth, so that flakes of old paint fell on the cuffs of his shirt. The half-brothers worked in silence as the shadows of the trees stretched toward them.

Finally Jerry spoke. “You know, I’ve never had very much in the way of . . .”

Love or money would have been Charles’s guess, but he only nodded his head thoughtfully.

“Well, what?” said Jerry. “Companionship.”

“This is not the postman’s way,” said Charles. “You guys kind of keep to yourselves, until one day some little thing happens and you go off like a roman candle.”

“I expect more from you,” said Jerry.

“And so do I,” said Charles. “So do I. Sometimes I think, Well, I’m just a crumb and so be it. But in this case, I take it back. This is about Octavia, isn’t it? Must be.”

“It’s about Octavia,” said Jerry.

“All the forces of the world are lined up against you,” said Charles. “Knowing that, if you still — or if she, because I think she’s the one who has to . . . Ah, but I don’t know, Jerry, it’s just too —”

“Unconventional,” said Jerry.

“It is that.” Charles slapped a brush full of stain onto the door and smoothed it up and down. “She’s young,” he said. “She’s real young.”

“Past the age of consent.”

“What is that?”

“Sixteen, isn’t it?”

“Did they raise it when they raised the drinking age?”

“I don’t know. I never heard that.”

“You’d better check.”

“You’ve never been conventional,” said Jerry. But in this approach he was playing a losing hand.

“I’ve got the kids,” said Charles.

“Pure luck.”

“It is luck. What else would it be? And Joan.”

“You took a while to marry her.”

“Nevertheless. We went to a justice of the peace. And I’ve been divorced. What could be more conventional than that? And there’s the house.”

He looked around the yard. The goat was carrying the lid of the garbage can like a retriever with a Frisbee. All right, forget the goat as an example. He gestured toward the barn.

“I don’t see the relevance of the barn,” said Jerry.

Charles shrugged. “Evidence of conventionality.”

“Which is about to fall down.”

“There are cracks in the foundation.”

“And for that matter, I have a house and a shed.”

“This is true.” Having said that, Charles had to take a break, for it was a phrase his first wife, Louise, had often used. Thinking of the divorce, he had slipped into her mode of speaking. He and Jerry sat down in the grass.

“You have stain on your eyebrow,” said Jerry.

Charles rubbed the back of his forearm across his brow.

“You’re just pushing it around.”

“Look,” said Charles, “what you have to do is ask yourself what is in Octavia’s best interest. You could ask her, but that begs the question of whether she can make a reasoned judgment, which I’m not sure she can. Now is one thing. Think when she’s forty and you’re some decrepit thing she has to wheel around in a cart.”

“I have thought of that,” said Jerry. “What if it was only a couple years. We sing in the sunshine, she gets her mind together, goes off to college. I wouldn’t complain . . . I’d make that trade in a heartbeat.”

“Why?”

“I get a kick out of her. I like her. Who can say?”

“She wouldn’t be pregnant.”

“No.”

“She has parents.”

“They don’t talk.”

“To each other or to her?”

“To anyone, from what she tells me.”

“What if they put a contract out on your life? Who are they again?”

“Teachers.”

“Right,” said Charles. “That might work in your favor, and it might not.”

He went into the kitchen and got two bottles of Falstaff. On the way back he remembered that he wanted to ask whether Octavia would get a G.E.D., just because it sounded like the kind of star-crossed plan that would inevitably call for a G.E.D. somewhere along the line. Perhaps Jerry and Octavia could get their diplomas together, then go to the sock hop.

Charles gave Jerry a beer. He did not know what to tell his older brother. Probably Jerry would do whatever he wanted anyway.

Colette looked at clocks made of walnut, butternut, maple, and oak in the building in which the composer Dvorák once stayed. She especially liked the apostle clock and the Festina church clock, even though she was an agnostic. Dvorák was said to have worked on his “American Quartette” here. Still, Colette could not get the “Ring-Around-the-Rosie Rag” out of her head. A brochure said that the Bily brothers, who had made the clocks, “employed the idle hours of long winter days and evenings with their skills of woodcarving.” The other tourists included a couple with a little girl who walked around in circles, eating small candy bars and dropping the wrappers on the floor. Later Colette saw the couple crossing the street, the father holding the sleeping child in both arms.

This reminded Colette of the time Charles almost died. He and Jerry had been roughhousing and Tiny had hit his head on the corner of a coffee table. They were just kids. Colette held the back of an ashtray to Tiny’s mouth, and no cloud formed on the glass. They had no phone, so she gathered him up in her arms, just as this man now held his sleeping daughter, and carried him out the door. Jerry and Bebe followed, making small sounds of suppressed hysteria. Sunlight fell around them, as though nothing was wrong.

Colette raised her ashen son to the air.

There was no one on the road, and they didn’t have a car. The lilac bush loomed like death’s messenger at the end of their path. The heavy boy began to slip, and she hoisted her arms to renew her purchase. It was this little bump, gathering and lifting, that started him breathing again. He tossed his head and wheezed, and she laid him on the picnic table amid a swarm of mourning cloak butterflies that had been hovering over something sweet on the boards.

After that she felt for many years that Charles had been spared in order to achieve things. Now she wondered what obstacle had kept him from them. The same could be asked vis-à-vis Jerry. If only they’d had woodcarving skills to employ in their idle hours, they might have something to show for themselves. Bebe had done all right, in far-off California. She sometimes sent pictures of her friends by her swimming pool.

Maybe time was the enemy, thought Colette. The Bily brothers never thought so, making all those clocks. But where did time take them? To St. Wenceslaus Cemetery, where, if she hurried, she might see their graves before the light was gone.

The volunteer fire department met every night of the week, but attendance was optional. Given this congenial arrangement, the place often had the feel of a nightclub with trucks. Tonight a new volunteer would be initiated, and when Jerry arrived the lights were low and the running boards of the ladder truck were lined with burning candles. The initiate was a young man barely out of community college. He was no one Jerry knew. The fire chief insisted on the use of the sound system, for its eerie, echoing effects, and Jerry took his place behind the graphic equalizer. He slid the level bars randomly up and back while the fire chief recited a poem to test the speakers.

“‘Last night, she said, a star did fall / From heaven’s ceaseless costume ball. / It lit the night but for a minute, / With gold and blue and silver in it, / My rent, she said, is due tomorrow / But I can only pay in sorrow.’ How’s that?” said the fire chief. He wore a blue flannel shirt, leaned on a cane, and scratched the wiry beard he had grown for the town’s centennial.

“I don’t get it,” said Jerry.

The newcomer was brought forth in full gear: yellow boots, a dun suit circled about the calves and biceps with reflective yellow, a cylinder of compressed air, a red helmet, a breathing apparatus and face mask that suggested space travel. On his chest he wore a round and fluted pressure regulator. He carried a box-end hydrant wrench, and as he staggered into place the other firefighters remembered how disorienting that first time on oxygen had been.

The fire chief read the induction speech slowly, without emphasis. He wanted to stir emotion with the words, not with a dramatic tone. There were references to Prometheus, to the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who discovered oxygen’s role in fire, to the virgins who had tended the fires of the Temple of Vesta. As a speech, it was all over the place. Like the poem, it had been written by the fire chief in his spare time.

“And when it’s cold,” the chief recited, “and when it’s late, and the snow lies roundabout, deep and crisp and even — when you least want the siren to sound — sound it does, oh yes, its mournful cry piercing the night at three a.m. or three-thirty . . .”

The sergeant at arms helped the subject out of his heavy gear, and the ladder master uncorked a bottle of grappa and poured one part liquor and two parts coffee into a wooden bowl known as the friendship cup. Meanwhile the new fireman walked beside the ladder truck, leaning down to pinch out the candles on the runner. As each was extinguished, the firefighters shouted “Hurrah,” according to custom. This was Jerry’s least favorite part of the induction ceremony, few crowds being as self-conscious as the one obliged to shout “Hurrah.” He would have preferred something less painfully traditional, such as Micah’s “Yai, yai, yai.” Then came the drinking from the friendship cup. This had been outfitted with a number of straws emerging from holes in the wood.

Jerry was one of the last men to take a drink. He and Leo Miner held the bowl and drew on the straws. Leo worked at the door factory. He had long hair, and deep crevices bracketed his mouth.

“Do you have a niece named Lila?” asked Leo as he set the friendship cup on a card table.

“Lyris?”

“Yeah . . . Lyris.”

“Shirttail relation. My brother’s daughter, or half-daughter, I guess you’d say.”

Leo laughed softly and shook his head. “So hard just to keep track of people, it seems like, these days.”

“What about her?”

“Well, it ain’t none of my business, but . . . ” he began, motioning Jerry away from the table. They went over and sat on the front bumper of the water truck. Leo polished the chrome intake cap with his handkerchief. “I run into her over in Martins Woods last night,” he said. “This Follard . . . You know William Follard, they call him Billy sometimes.”

“Yeah.”

“But you know him.”

“Not to say hello, but yeah.”

“Well, and I couldn’t say the whys and wherefores of it, but evidently —” And here his voice grew quiet, and he bent low, forearms on knees, looking not at Jerry but at the floor, as if to suggest it was all in confidence and he would deny saying it if questioned. “’Parently this Follard, from what I understand, and again, none of this comes firsthand, but if you asked me if it sounded true, I would have to say it did.”

“Christ, just say it,” said Jerry, who had adopted the folded posture of his informant.

“That he threw her, threw Lyris —”

“Follard did.”

“Yes, off the bridge,” said Leo. “And now, I’m assuming this would’ve have been the second of the ones they call Four Bridges. I found her in Sprague Heileman’s cabin, up off the North Pin River.”

“What would he do that for?”

“They disagreed,” said Leo. “And what about I will leave to your imagination. Because she didn’t say. She’d been in the water. That much I do know.”

“So she — let me understand — Lyris was . . . well, she got to the cabin somehow.”

“Walked, I guess. And she’s Tiny’s kid?”

“Yeah,” said Jerry, adding, “Charles,” as if Joan were there to correct them.

“He isn’t going to like this.”

“No, he is not.”

“There again, maybe he knows.”

Jerry sat back and rested his arm on the headlight of the truck. He and Leo breathed a little sigh of relief at having moved from the information itself to the logistics of its distribution. “Well, I just came from there, couple hours ago, and if he does, he didn’t say so.”

“But then, you wouldn’t. A person might not.”

“We’re pretty open that way.”

“The thing is, I wouldn’t have told you,” said Leo. “That’s what kills me. I really don’t think I would have, if it hadn’t been that it was Follard. Because to me, and I only speak for myself, a guy like that, with the —”

“History.”

“History, reputation, there are many names for it. A guy like that.”

“Oh, I know it.”

“I heard that one time Follard beat somebody so bad that the next time the person saw him, you know, across the street or however it went, his nose started bleeding on the spot — spontaneously.”

“Yeah?”

“And if you let something slide . . .”

“You can’t let it slide.”

The doors of the water truck opened, the bumper fell as men climbed into the cab, the headlights came on. Jerry and Leo got up and moved out of the way. Some of the firefighters were taking the new kid out for a spin around town. The truck pulled out of the barn with men hanging on to the rails in their rain gear. Jerry had another drink from the friendship cup and went upstairs. He took out his keys and opened the office door. This was the chief’s room, where he wrote his poetry. Jerry stood with his hand on the telephone. No one wanted to bear bad news to Charles. But what choice did Jerry have? His brother’s family was so isolated out there, on that flat road in that open country, not counting the company they gave each other.

He sat down in a green leather chair with brass studs along the arms. The chair must have cost three hundred or more. He thought it odd that although the town was virtually deserted, the volunteer fire department had the latest of all good things. A siren sounded from the far end of town. There was no fire, they were just fooling around with the truck. The kid would be having a good time, with no inkling of the misery and danger he would encounter at fires. Jerry remembered an apartment fire in which a finch had died of smoke inhalation in its cage. He had drawn the unhappy job of carrying the cage out of the building and delivering it to the woman whose bird it was. The finch sat motionless on the perch, head bent and eyes closed.

“Will it be all right?” she asked him.

“It’s hard to say,” said Jerry.

This was a small example — there were many worse ones he could think of — and yet it stayed with him. And he thought he had been cowardly in that moment, not to tell her the truth.

Charles hung up the phone. He had assumed it would be Joan, who should have been long home by now. Supper was over, dishes piled in the sink. He walked through the house, calling for Lyris to come down. She met him on the landing with a blanket around her shoulders. He told her that he had to go out and that she would be in charge of Micah until he got back. The girl’s eyes searched his face. She knew that trouble had come, but not from which direction. Was it about Joan? she asked. Charles said it was not; she would be rolling up at any minute.

“Take care of your brother,” he said.

The night was cold and rainy. He hoped that the stained doors would not streak. The wipers on the van barely skimmed the windshield, and the headlights of oncoming traffic slid and surged on the watery glass. He drove up to Stone City and parked in the driveway of Follard’s house. Then, on second thought, he backed the van into the street and pulled onto the grass, stopping short of the front door, where a porch light was on.

He knocked. “Come in,” said a small reed of a voice.

He opened the door and stepped into a hallway. The wallpaper was purple, dark, printed with grapes. There wasn’t much light. Incense burned in a porcelain cup on a table. It took him a minute to see into the gloom, but eventually he made out the woman who had invited him in. She was a little old thing wearing an Iowa State sweatshirt.

“I’m looking for William Follard,” said Charles.

“Is something wrong?” she said, busy polishing the handle of a fireplace poker. “I’m his aunt. I live next door. If it’s about a jackhammer, I can tell you that I’ve never seen it, and I think it would be a very tricky thing to hide.”

“It would be,” said Charles. “But I didn’t come for a jackhammer. William put in an application, and it looks like I’m hiring.”

She worked the fireplace tool over with a cloth. “What sort of work? He has a job.”

“I’m a plumber,” said Charles. He opened the front door. “This is my van.”

“You mustn’t drive on Billy’s yard.”

“I’ll only be a minute,” said Charles.

She wrapped her fingers around the banister and called up the stairs. “Billy,” she said. “Billy, come down.”

Something knocked against the floor above. Then Charles heard Follard’s voice, but he could not get what he was saying.

“There’s a man here,” said the aunt. “There’s a plumber. Come down. He’s in the house right now. It’s something about a job.”

“I didn’t call a plumber,” said Follard.

She smiled patiently. “Come down and talk to him. Don’t stand up there all night long.”

The aunt looked at Charles. “Billy’s a bachelor, and he never takes time to think of the hospitality that makes a house a home. I’ve been like a mother to him. That’s what my friends tell me. That I mother him and mother him, try to do it all, never taking time to think of myself.”

“Do you live here?”

“Oh my, no. I live next door.”

Charles took the fireplace tool from the woman and urged her to leave, as the business he had to talk over with William would be of no interest to anyone but William and himself.

“Go on home and have yourself a nightcap,” he said, and nodded, as if it were her thought instead of his.

She put on a belted wool coat and left reluctantly. The door closed and opened, and she peeked in. “Tell him I’m leaving.”

“Follard,” Charles yelled. “Your aunt is leaving now.”

When she was gone, Charles locked the door. He threw the poker down a stairwell to the cellar.

“Who are you?” said Follard, ambling down the steps, buttoning a white shirt. He was tall but with no weight to speak of.

“My name is Tiny Darling. I’m Lyris’s father and I know what happened last night.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then it will all come as a great mystery to you.”

“Get out of here, old-timer,” said Follard. His eyes seemed drowsy and aimless. “Get out before I hurt you.”

Follard jumped the banister and came sailing down. Charles turned his back and Follard landed on it. Charles was struck less by the impact than by the strangeness of the tactic. When you were on someone’s back, you had very little control of the field. But if this was his approach, then let it be. Follard clamped an arm around Charles’s windpipe and dug his fingers into Charles’s eyes. Charles could have fought this kid blind, he really thought so. Yet he was having trouble breath- ing, and felt a sharpness in his neck. He crouched and staggered, gripping Follard’s arms as if they were a muffler that he was wearing on a winter’s day. Follard held on tight, until Charles could no longer think clearly. Fragments of memory ran through his mind in no order he could understand. This couldn’t go on much longer. Through a film of tears, Charles saw the newel post. He rolled his shoulders and swung Follard into the column. Then he stepped into the front room and dropped the young man on the floor.

“My ribs,” said Follard.

“I’ll bet they hurt.”

Charles set the toe of his boot on Follard’s sternum and put a little weight there. Now it was Follard who couldn’t breathe.

“If you ever . . .” Charles began. “But why put limits on it? You know what I mean.”

Charles left the house and walked through the rain to his van. He clasped his hands around his neck, turned his head from side to side. Something was stuck in there. He removed it, looked at it in the light: a jackknife with a pheasant on it. Charles wiped the blade on his coat, closed the knife, and put it in his pocket. Behind the wheel again, he pushed a blue handkerchief down between his collar and the wound. Heart racing, he lowered his forehead to the steering wheel. He was not hurt much. Fighting always did this to him.