It wasn’t until the end of our second summer that my mother agreed to hire a colored housekeeper. My father had been urging her to bring someone in ever since we moved to Alabama more than a year before, but she’d resisted, saying she could never be comfortable ordering a colored woman around, telling her to wash our dirty clothes or clean up our mess. Maybe my father finally wore her down. Or maybe it was just the August heat and the humidity that left our whole house damp and sticky and caused pools of sweat to collect under our legs when we sat for any length of time.
My mother learned of Louetta from Mrs. Edwards, who pulled her aside one Sunday after Mass. In a voice that rose high above the after-church crowd, Mrs. Edwards said, “Your husband told me you were looking for some colored help to come in, Julia. I must say, it’s about time. There’s just so much you can handle on your own. Lucky for you I have just the person you need.” She wrote Louetta’s name and phone number on a piece of paper that she fished from her handbag. “My kitchen is never so clean as when Louetta is there, and I do believe she wouldn’t be fazed by a busload of kids,” she said, pushing the paper into my mother’s hand. “I would just love to box her up and take her with us, but of course I can’t.” She gave my mother’s arm a squeeze then turned to catch another family that was just leaving the church. My mother gave her a tight smile, one that made her look like she’d just gotten a mouthful of sour lemonade, and pushed us down the sidewalk to where my father was waiting with the car.
But still my mother did nothing, even though it was clear even to Todd and Emily and me that she was more tired than usual and could use the help. Sometimes during the afternoons she would pull the shades and sit for hours in the living room after nursing Ben, and after school started we often noticed that her hair was still uncombed when we returned home and her shirt had the same baby food stains as the day before.
Finally at dinner one evening my father asked my mother why she had not tried to reach Louetta. He was leaving the next day on another business trip and had hoped my mother would line someone up before he left. “I don’t understand why you’re so against it, Julia. Everyone here hires colored help.” This was true. On our way to school we often saw the women who worked for our neighbors walking from the bus stop, each dressed in a neat housedress and with a small felt hat pinned to her head.
My mother got up from the table and began clearing the dishes. “You can stop worrying about it, Tom. I am planning to call her tonight.” Her voice was one she used with us children when we’d come close to pushing her too far. My father seemed to know the voice, too, and said no more as my mother brought the dishes to the kitchen. Soon afterward we heard her call Louetta and make arrangements to have her stop by the house the next afternoon.

“I hope Mom doesn’t hire her,” Emily said the next day as we walked the last few blocks home. At nine, Emily was two years younger than me but had a way of saying things that left me feeling she knew more than I ever would. “Lydia Edwards told me Louetta made her clean her room every week. She said her mother liked her fine, but Lydia thought she was too bossy. I think we’re doing okay the way we are.”
“I don’t know,” said Todd. “Maybe having Louetta would make Mom a little happier.” Emily and I looked at him. We had never connected happiness – or the lack of it – with my mother. “I mean,” Todd continued, “it can’t be much fun just being home with Ben all day.”
I shifted my bookbag to my other shoulder. I didn’t see how having Louetta come into our house would make much difference to my mother’s happiness. Two of my friends had colored housekeepers. Cordelia, who worked for Martha’s family, was a big woman who was sweet as sugar to Martha’s mother, but pinched Martha and her brother whenever they started fighting or when they refused to do something Cordelia asked. The Lamberts had Essie, who was quiet as a shadow and spent most of her time in the kitchen or laundry room. I was confident my mother would never hire someone as mean as Cordelia, and I couldn’t see how hiring someone like Essie would make her happier.
When we reached home we found our mother in the kitchen, sitting at the table with Louetta. My mother was wearing a green dress that she often wore when she went out shopping and her hair was brushed so that it was soft and fine around her face. Louetta sat across from her and next to Ben, who was in his high chair eating Cheerios. Louetta’s brown eyes matched my mother’s, but her dark skin stood out against the white of my mother’s arms. Her face was thin and small-boned, though her arms were muscular and her hands were calloused like those of the men who worked at the gas station down the street. One hand rested calmly in her lap while the other held a toy that she shook in front of Ben, who was gurgling and laughing, his eyes fixed on her. “Here are the rest of them now,” my mother said as we walked in. Louetta gazed at us, sizing us up the way someone might check a melon or tomato. My mother introduced each of us by name, and then told us Louetta had agreed to start work the following week.

It took only two weeks for it to feel like Louetta had been with us always. She came to our house three days a week, arriving in the late morning while Emily, Todd, and I were still at school, and staying until we finished dinner and the dishes were cleaned and put away. From the first day, Emily seemed to think it was her job to get to know Louetta and followed her about as she moved from the kitchen to the bedrooms and bathroom, asking Louetta where she lived and how many kids she had and didn’t she think it was hot for October. Louetta seemed happy to answer all her questions, something that took Emily by surprise since we had learned long ago that the only way to get Emily to be quiet was to ignore her, something that Todd and I did quite well. By the end of the first week, Emily announced that Louetta would work out just fine, adding, “Lydia Edwards is a dope.”
Not long after Louetta started, we began to notice small changes in our mother and around the house. In the mornings on the days Louetta was scheduled to work, our mother seemed less apt to snap at us if we spilled our milk or forgot to put our dirty bowls in the sink, and when we came home, she sometimes sat with us as we had a bread and butter snack and asked us about our days and whether anything new had happened at school. The dining room table was no longer piled with clothes to be folded or papers to be put away, the stove no longer had its thin film of grease, and the tub in the bathroom was without its grey ring.
During the afternoons, my mother and Louetta often worked side-by-side in the kitchen, my mother ironing clothes or feeding Ben while Louetta washed dishes or peeled vegetables for dinner. As they worked, they talked – about us, about Louetta’s married son and her daughter who was in high school, or about our new, young president and the troubles in Birmingham. Sometimes one of them would start laughing, and before we knew it the other would join in. Their laughs blended together, Louetta’s deep and husky, my mother’s like silver.
When we got home from school, Todd and Emily and I would bring our books to the dining room table where, separated from our mother and Louetta by the swinging door that connected the two rooms, we pretended to do our homework. We knew my mother would never talk about anything interesting if she knew we were listening, so we sat quiet and hunched over arithmetic worksheets and English notebooks, all the while straining to hear what was being said in the next room.
Before Louetta arrived, we’d rarely heard my mother talk to other grownups, since my father was often away and my mother had not made friends with the ladies in the neighborhood. Other than us, the only person she really spoke with at any length was her sister, who called from Ohio every Sunday evening to talk about her children and ask about the weather down here in the South. My mother’s conversations with Louetta were different. When they talked, my mother told stories about things we’d never heard before – about my grandfather who drank too much and died at 49 when he fell from a ladder, about my aunt who ran with a wild crowd until she met her husband in her last year of high school, and about how my mother missed her family and her friends and how for some reason, she hadn’t had the energy or interest in meeting new people since we’d moved to Lawton.
It was through one of her conversations with Louetta that we learned my mother was going to have another baby. Louetta seemed to know about the baby from the start and brought it up her second week with us. “How are you feeling with that baby you’re carrying?” she asked my mother. “I know when I was pregnant with my Esther I was sick from sunup to sundown for eight weeks. You don’t seem to be bothered a bit.”
“I’m doing fine, Louetta. Just a little tired is all.”
“You be sure to let me know if you need to lay down and take a nap, Mrs. Conrad.” She never called my mother by her first name. It was always Mrs. Conrad or Ma’am. “Me and Benny are good friends now. I could keep him entertained just fine.”
It’s safe to say we were more startled by the easy way Louetta talked about my mother’s pregnancy, a word my mother never used, than by the fact that we were going to have another sister or brother. By bringing it up, Louetta seemed to break some kind of logjam, and soon afterwards my mother began mentioning the baby in conversations with us. Not in a direct way, but by saying things like, “Once the baby is born we’ll have to move Ben into Todd’s room,” and “You children will have to learn to be quiet in the afternoons once the new baby is here.”
“That baby sounds like it’s going to be loads of fun,” Emily muttered to me and Todd one afternoon.
“It’ll be just like having another Ben,” I said. “He’s not so bad now that he’s older.”
“I don’t know,” said Todd. “I was kind of getting used to there being just the four of us.” He wasn’t keen on having to share his bedroom with Ben who still woke up at night and had a baby’s habit of littering the room with small toys and bits of dry cereal and crackers.

There were other ways our lives changed after Louetta arrived. For one thing, we began to eat much better. I had never spent much time thinking about food. My mother made sure we had breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but didn’t seem to worry too much about what she put before us as long as we had some fruit and something green at least once a day. Mashed potatoes and meatloaf flavored with catsup, tuna casserole and jello salad, and a version of spaghetti and meatballs that her Irish mother had taught her to make formed the core of her dinner planning and she cooked each of them at least once a week. Other than birthday cakes that she made from a box mix and cut-out cookies and fudge that she made for Christmas, desserts were a rare event. Cooking wasn’t supposed to be one of the things Louetta did, but once my mother tasted her food and saw the looks on our faces as we ate a meal that Louetta had prepared, she took over all of the ironing so that Louetta could spend more time making dinners. Louetta’s mashed potatoes were nothing like our mother’s. Unlike the dry, grey potatoes our mother served us, Louetta’s were made with cream and had hidden pockets of melted butter and they melted on our tongues, and her roast chicken was covered in a crisp skin that we peeled away in strips and stuffed into our mouths when our mother’s back was turned.
In spite of all she did for us, it didn’t take us long to realize that Louetta was there to help our mother, not to be our friend. It wasn’t that she ignored us or was ever mean. When we arrived home after school, she always made sure we had something to eat and asked each of us how our day had gone. She even remembered when one of us had a test and was sure to ask us how we had done. But she never told us about her own children or her husband or where she lived and what she liked to do. She only told those things to our mother, and we knew of them only from the hours we spent listening behind the dining room door.

As the months wore on and my mother’s belly began to swell, she began mentioning the new baby less often. In her conversations with Louetta, she was often quiet and let Louetta do most of the talking. She seemed to be sliding back to how she was before Louetta had come to work for us, content to just look on and let others do the talking, so I felt a little relieved when Louetta brought the conversation back around to her and the baby one February afternoon. Louetta was fixing chicken and rice for our supper while my mother fed Ben from baby food jars of pureed meat and peas. A chilly rain had fallen through the day, but during the late afternoon the sun had broken through the clouds and cast a pale light on the dining room table where Emily and I sat with our homework. My attention was divided between the essay I had to write for English and the murmured conversation that was only slightly muffled by the kitchen door.
“It looks like Ben will be getting around fine and might even be out of diapers before your next baby comes, Mrs. Conrad,” Louetta said. “That’s a good thing. I know how hard it is on a mama to have two babies pulling on your skirts and crying for attention.” This conversation promised to be more interesting than anything I had to say about Little Women, and I strained to hear my mother’s reply. But the kitchen was quiet until my mother blew her nose and Louetta said, “I’m truly sorry, Ma’am. Lord, I didn’t mean to upset you. Sometimes my mouth takes me where I have no business going.”
“Don’t worry, Louetta,” I heard my mother reply. “I’m all right. I think you just touched a raw nerve. I’ll be fine.” She was quiet a moment, then said in a rush, “It’s just that sometimes I think about having another baby and I just can’t bear it. I’m ashamed at how little I feel like doing for the children I have now, I can’t imagine doing for another one.”
I could hear my mother’s breaths become ragged and then the kitchen was quiet again until a chair scraped against the floor and Louetta spoke, so soft I could barely hear her, “I know how you feel, Ma’am. Sometimes it can feel like all the love has just been drained out and there’s no more to give. Some women I know have got enough for a whole flock of children, but most of us get a little thin after a handful.” She paused as my mother blew her nose again. “Don’t you worry, Mrs. Conrad. Once that baby comes you’ll figure it out. We’ll be fine.”
My mother spoke, a catch in her throat. “I’ve been thinking about what to do, Louetta. I mean after this one comes. I need it to be the last one. I talked to my doctor about how to stop it from happening again, you know, having my tubes tied.” She paused. “I just need to convince Tom. On things like this he tends to pay more attention to the priests than to me.”
“Mmm, hmm. My Henry can be the same, but instead of a priest it’s his boss he always thinks is right. You should have heard some of the conversations we had about our boy and college. Henry was dead set against having him go, but I won out in the end. It’s none of my business, Mrs. Conrad, but I’d say you need to let your husband know what’s in your heart. What you need to do.”
“I know, Louetta. I know.”
I looked up to see Emily staring at me. This was more than either of us wanted to hear, and Emily pushed her chair back and headed into the living room to watch TV. I had no idea what my mother meant about having tubes tied, but I understood the part about having enough of us. I picked up my pencil to continue with my essay, but a cold space had opened up in my belly and I suddenly found I had little to say.

During the last few months before the baby was to arrive, my father went on fewer trips. He needed to spend more time at home, he told us. This didn’t seem to change things much, since he was at work all day and was only with us some evenings and for the hours on the week-end when he didn’t have errands to run or something to take care of at the office. He tried to make it home for dinner most nights, and when he did he used the time to ask us about what we were doing in school and remind us not to talk with our mouths full or argue with one another at the table.
He and my mother rarely talked at dinner. I would often watch the two of them out of the corners of my eyes, hoping they might start in on a real conversation, but there seemed to be some kind of a wall between them and I could tell by the way they looked past each other and kept their attention on us that any real talking between them was unlikely. After we went to bed, it was much the same. Sometimes they sat together in the living room, the darkness lit only by the red tip of my father’s cigarette and the black and white figures that moved ghost-like on the television screen. More often, though, my mother went to bed soon after we did, leaving my father to stay up alone.
For some reason, things between them seemed to get a little better as the time when the baby was to arrive got closer. It was like they’d both suddenly decided to go easier on each other. Occasionally, after we left the table they would sit as my father had a cigarette and talk about his job or about something Ben had done that day or about my mother’s family in Ohio.
Still, we were all more relaxed when my father wasn’t home. Then we would eat in the kitchen rather than the dining room and Louetta would join us at the table. After dinner my mother and Louetta would have a cup of tea before Louetta rose to clear the plates and my mother took Ben to the bathroom to clean him up and get him ready for bed.
One evening while my father was away, dinner was delayed by a bat that flew into the house through the front door. Emily had been on the front porch before dinner and had left the door wide open. The bat swooped in and began to fly around the living and dining rooms in panicked circles. My mother shooed us all into the kitchen and told us to sit at the table, then grabbed a broom and headed back toward the living room when Louetta darted in front of her, blocking her way. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Conrad, but you can’t do that. You give that broom to me.”
“Don’t be silly, Louetta. You stay here with the children and I’ll just chase the bat outside.”
“No, Ma’am. I can’t let you do that. Give it to me and I’ll take care of it.” She took the broom out of my mother’s hand and left the room, closing the kitchen door behind her.
My mother turned back to us. Picking Ben up from the floor, she buckled him into his highchair and then began to dish out our dinner. Once we were all seated she moved back to the door and opened it a crack. From my place at the table, I was just able to spy Louetta standing on the hassock with the broom raised above her head. I watched as she turned slowly, tracking the bat’s path with the broom and occasionally swiping the air as she tried to guide the bat toward one of the open windows or the still-open front door. A breeze blew against her skirt and scattered scraps of colored paper that Emily had peeled from her crayons earlier in the day. Every now and then I would spot the bat as it flew past the door, a flapping rush of wings that rose and dipped wildly. One of its wings seemed to be damaged, which probably accounted for a certain choppiness in its flight, and likely explained why Louetta was finally able to swat it to the ground. When it fell, the bat lay in a tiny heap, motionless except for an occasional flutter of its wings.
Louetta seemed startled that she had actually stopped the bat’s frantic flight, and waited a few moments before stepping off the hassock. Todd and I rose from the table and stood quietly behind our mother as Louetta crossed the living room, the broom held high in front of her. From where we stood, the bat looked like a smudge of brown against the wood floor, like a rag someone had dropped. As Louetta came near, its wings stopped fluttering and its only movement was a small lurching as it struggled for air.
Louetta stooped to inspect the bat more closely and nudged it gently with the broom handle. Then, standing, she placed her shoe over its tiny body and ground the bat firmly into the floor. Todd and I gasped and my mother turned around, angry at first that we were out of our chairs. As she looked at us, her face softened and she said quietly, “She had to do it. It was all but dead. You wouldn’t want it to suffer.”
Louetta came into the kitchen then to get a paper bag. “It was a young one,” she said. “Must have strayed from its flock and gotten lost.”
“Did you catch it, Louetta?” Emily asked. She had been distracted for most of the time, busy tossing Cheerios at Ben and trying to spear the noodles that swam in a pool of butter on her plate. My mother looked at Louetta and shook her head.
“Sure did, honey,” Louetta said. “I caught it and let it go.”
Todd and I said nothing as Louetta left the kitchen with the bag. After a moment we heard her leave the house through the front door and when she came back the bag was gone.
When my father came home that night Todd and I told him about the bat and how Louetta had swatted it from the air and how in the end she had to kill it. At dinner the next night, my father asked my mother if she thought Louetta needed to come so often. Perhaps she could cut back a bit, maybe not stay so long into the evening. My mother put her fork on her plate and gazed at my father and said, “She is the only thing that gets me through the day, Tom. I can’t think why you’d want her gone, but I can tell you I won’t let that happen.”
My father said he was only suggesting Louetta cut back a bit now that he was able to be home more often. But he soon realized my mother wasn’t listening to him and he shifted his attention to Todd, asking him to tell us about the basketball team he planned to try out for. My mother said nothing to my father or to us for the rest of the dinner.

Our mother went into the hospital to have the baby three weeks later. She would be in the hospital an extra day or two, we were told, because she was to have a minor operation after the delivery. She had arranged to have Louetta stay with us during the week she would be away, and shortly after my father took my mother to the hospital, he took us to get Louetta from her home. She lived several miles from us, on a dusty street a little past the center of town and just off the main road. As our car turned onto her road, the pavement suddenly ended and bits of gravel skittered out from under the wheels and pinged against the underside of the car floor. The street was lined with small brown and white houses that sat close to the road and to one another.
A group of colored children were playing kick-the-can in the middle of the road as we drove up. They parted to let us go by and as we did they stared at Todd and Emily and me and eyed our car curiously. My father pulled in front of Louetta’s house and tapped on the horn. It seemed Louetta had been waiting for us, because she quickly opened her front door and stepped out onto the porch, a small suitcase in her hand. Her husband and daughter came out, too, and walked her down to where we waited at the curb.
My father got out to put her suitcase into the trunk. “Hurry on now, Louetta,” he said as he turned to get inside the car. “I need to get back to the hospital.” Louetta nodded. She gave her daughter and husband a hug, then walked around the front of the car and climbed into the front seat next to my father. As soon as she was settled, I leaned forward and handed her Ben, who had started waving his arms and crying, “Lu, Lu” the moment he saw her.
As he drove us back to our house, my father filled Louetta in on how my mother was doing. The doctors thought my mother would deliver the baby in the next few hours, he said, and he planned to stay at the hospital until the baby arrived and my mother was settled. My father was quiet for the rest of the ride. Unlike my mother, he had never been easy around Louetta. When we got home he dropped us at the side door, then quickly backed down the driveway and headed in the direction of the hospital.
Louetta had us all go to bed at the normal time that evening, putting a damper on the excitement we felt from having her there and my mother and father away. When we got up the next morning, my father was at the kitchen table and we learned my mother had had a baby girl named Lila. “She’s a fragile little thing,” my father said. “She was born a few weeks too soon and needs a little oxygen to help her breathe, but otherwise she’s fine.” Our mother was doing fine, too, he added.
“Your mother just needs rest right now,” Louetta said as she put cereal on the table and placed a cup of coffee next to my father’s plate. My father’s face was rough with day old whiskers and he had shadows under his eyes. Although it was a Monday, he was dressed in his weekend clothes and waited calmly as we rushed to finish getting ready for school. After dropping us off, he said, he planned to come back and get cleaned up and then head into his office for the day. He would stop back at the hospital to see my mother and the baby before he came home for dinner.
My father didn’t come home again that night. The baby was having a bit of a hard time, he said, and my mother had asked him to stay with her for a while. The next day my father was still gone, but he telephoned during dinner. Todd answered and my father asked him to put Louetta on the line.
Louetta turned away from us as she took the phone in her hand. She talked quietly and several times we heard her murmur, “Yes, sir.” At the end, she said, “I understand. I’ll leave that to you, Mr. Conrad,” and before she hung up she said, “Please give my best to Mrs. Conrad. Tell her we’re all thinking about her.” When she turned back to the table, her eyes glistened wetly but the first thing she said was, “Miss Emily, you get your feet off that chair and sit right. What would your mother say.” She spooned out the potatoes and placed a pork chop on each of our plates and then said little else during the rest of dinner. Todd and Emily and I ate quietly, careful not to scrape our plates with our forks or to spill anything as we put our dishes into the sink when we were done.
My father came home before we went to bed. He slipped in the back door and went directly into the bathroom where he turned on the shower. Although it was past our bedtime, Louetta did not tell us to go to bed and the three of us sat in the living room with the TV on low, waiting for him to come out.
We all looked up as he entered the living room and bent to turn off the TV. His hair was slick and black from the shower and his face was still damp. He sat in the chair my mother usually used as he told us Lila had died that evening. “She was born too soon, you know, and her lungs weren’t ready,” he said. “She tried and tried, but she just couldn’t get enough air.” He didn’t seem to know where to look. His eyes shifted from one to the other of us and then settled on the blank television screen.
The news was slow to sink in. We hadn’t even seen this new sister and already she was dead. As I looked at my father’s face, I became distracted by a fluttering noise. Quiet at first and then louder and more insistent. I looked around expecting to see another bat circling the room. But the noise came from a branch tapping at the window and soon it stopped, leaving me with the memory of a bat flapping its wings erratically, of its tiny chest heaving as it struggled to breathe.

My mother came home the next afternoon. Todd and Emily and I watched from the living room window as my father opened the car door and helped my mother stand and climb the front steps. Emily rushed to give her a hug as she walked in, but Todd and I hung back until she reached out for us. She held Todd’s hand with one of her own; with the other, she pushed my hair back from my forehead and stroked my cheek, then gave each of us a kiss. I stayed close to her a moment longer, hoping she might just put her arms around me and pull me close.
Louetta was watching from the kitchen doorway. When my mother saw her, she raised a hand toward her and called Louetta’s name and Louetta walked quickly across the room and enfolded my mother in her arms, quietly repeating the word, “Julia.” My mother’s sobs came raw and harsh as she buried her face in Louetta’s shoulder and as Louetta stroked her hair and rocked her back and forth.

Louetta stayed with us until we moved away from Alabama, although as time went on, and my mother was feeling stronger, she came less often, dropping from three days a week to two and then just to one. My mother made one or two friends during the next year, though she never seemed to talk to them the way she talked to Louetta. During the last few months, when we knew we were going to leave Alabama and were just waiting for the school year to end, my mother would make a coffee cake on the mornings Louetta was to arrive. When we came home in the afternoon we often found them at the kitchen table, talking and laughing, sometimes wiping tears from their eyes and occasionally dabbing at the crumbs that remained on their plates.

My father was an enlisted man in World War Two. On the living room wall we have a map of France and Western Germany showing his unit's movements, in dotted red ink, a Third Army patch and his unit insignia superimposed, and a photograph of him in summer khakis and garrison cap.

He told me this story about the war, just after I turned sixteen. He had me learning to drive; he took me down the road a ways and made me keep at it until the gears stopped grinding and I got the hang of it. Then we went to the Dairy Delight in town and he bought me a banana split. I saw him filling up his side of the booth and remembered the photograph of him in the living room, a skinny kid like myself then, and that made me ask him about the war. He said you wouldn't want to know about it. Then he said--here's something I think you should know about--and lit up a Camel and started in.

He had a buddy, Denny Maxwell. He told me what had happened to Denny Maxwell. That was in November of 1944, in the fighting in the Hurtgen Forest. It was cold in the Hurtgen Forest. In the mornings they'd have to thaw out their socks, try doing that in a foxhole. He and Denny were on patrol one morning and up ahead they saw a farm house. There weren't any Germans around. Denny Maxwell was freezing his tail off so he decided he was going to go to that farm house and get warm no matter what. The farm house sat in an open field edged with woods, but that didn't bother Denny Maxwell. "He told me the bullet that had his name on it hadn't been made yet." Denny Maxwell wanted my father to go with him, but my father wasn't about to do that. He said he didn't want to be a target. So Denny Maxwell went out there himself and the Germans opened up on him from the woods. He must have had a dozen bullets in him and every one had his name on it.

"You remember Denny Maxwell, Wayne," my father said to me, grinding his Camel out in a Dairy Delight ashtray, "when you're about to do something stupid."

I've been married to Sandy for seventeen years. We've had a pretty good life together. We have a teen-age son, Wayne Jr., who so far has stayed out of trouble. We have good jobs, a good income between us. I'm still parts manager at Fuller Ford and Sandy's still teaching English at Beauregard High.

My father worked at Uniroyal for thirty years. Before that he worked at the mill hauling cotton bales on a fork lift. He got laid off when the mill closed down, but lucky for him--lucky for me he'd say--he got on at Uniroyal. At Uniroyal, he had job security, and benefits, a pension, a group medical plan, the only bad thing about his job was, toward the end anyway, before he retired, they kept changing shifts on him. He'd work day shift part of the week, then they'd switch him over to the swing shift. That, he used to tell us, can get old pretty quick. He'd tell Mama he ought to quit, take a little less in his retirement package.

I remember him in his blue suit, Mama unfolding her napkin, laying it primly in her lap, her hair gray even then. There'd be this silence when my father said he wanted to quit, fried chicken, fried catfish in front of us, yams, black eyed peas put on hold while my father studied Mama's dubious face, knowing always what answer he was going to get yet acting as if he didn't. As soon as Mama got her napkin arranged, stirred sugar into her iced tea, she'd say "I hear what you're saying, Pauley, but what would you do if you did retire?" And my father would say "I'd go fishing."


After church my father used to tell Marleah Willis how much he enjoyed her hymn singing. Marleah was married to Buddy Willis at the time. Buddy used to sell Chevrolets, but after the two of them split up he moved to Columbus and started his own used car business.

Marleah Willis could really sing high and sweet, and when she did a solo for the congregation, my father would lift his head up and close his eyes, her voice taking him where he wanted to go. He'd sit on the end of the pew so he could get out quick when Marleah came our way. When he complimented Marleah on her singing, heads turned, people noticed it. He wasn't tall but he was broad in the shoulders He had a gut on him then. He could put away steak and potatoes and corn on the cob, fried okra, a dozen catfish, so he took up a lot of space in the aisle. He'd be pointed one way, toward the altar, and Marleah she was on her way out of the church, the traffic backed up behind her, Marleah trying to get past him, knowing she had to say something back. She’d say, “It's sweet of you to say that, Mr. Creel.”

Every Sunday it's sweet of him, Sandy would say, and Mama she'd snap her pocket book shut and shove her hymnal back in the rack.

Mama had talked to Marleah after church because my father, he wanted Marleah to sing a hymn for him, and Marleah said she would come over in the afternoon. She didn't want to, that was clear. Marleah scooted the piano bench under the piano, closed up the hymnal, and looked the other way from Mama. She looked at me once, me with Sandy, like I’d better be just another married man. Then she went over to Reverend Hatcher. Smoothing out the lumps out in her sky blue dress, Mama headed up the aisle toward the pulpit.

That Sunday Mama talked to Marleah in church, I was still thinking about what had happened at Jack Lazenby's annual Fourth of July barbecue. Jack held it behind his house, which was half a mile down the road from the convenience store he owned and ran, The Lazy Bee--Lay-Z and a striped bumblebee Sandy tells me is called a rebus.

We were sitting around Jack's barbecue pit, the chigger patch Sandy called it, digesting barbecued pork--y'all come but bring your own lawn chairs and Chigger-Red--that was Sandy's view of Lazenby hospitality. Marleah was sitting next to me. She was telling me about life without Buddy. They'd been divorced for nearly a year now. She’d had to haul the garbage to the garbage pit down the road, wasn't that fun, and keep the lawn mowed. Buddy wasn't making cigarette runs for her Winston One Hundred Lights and his Marlboro One Hundreds.

Big Jack was shooting off bottle rockets. Fire one, he'd boom out, fire two! I heard them whooshing out in the dark, popping over the pines. Marleah shook her last cigarette out and crumpled the pack. "I'm thinking that's my last Winston, Wayne.”

I'd smoked my last panatela, but I wasn't about to be her errand boy. I said I wasn't used to making cigarette runs. She tweaked my shirt below the elbow and said she would go with me. Sandy had gone to the bathroom. We might be back before she missed us.

I decided to stop at the Lazy Bee. Marleah went in with me. We both used the restrooms. Then Marleah bought two packs of Winston One Hundred Lights. I bought a five-pack of Phillies Panatelas.

After I parked at Big Jack's place, Marleah said she didn't want to go back to the party right away. We could hear fire crackers popping and crackling down the road. Marleah moved closer to me, and I heard her catch her breath. I put my arm around her, stroked the back of her neck. She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth, and then she put her head on my shoulder. Having her close to me, I wanted that to last.

We kissed again, this time tonguing, then I was biting her lower lip. She pulled away from me, I knew I’d gone too far. I hadn’t known when to put the brakes on. She smoothed her skirt out. “I hope you didn’t get the wrong idea."

I pitched my voice into casual. “Far as I’m concerned, nothing happened.”

Marleah said, “Something did happen, Wayne. You got carried away. So let’s get back to the party.”

Once we got back Marleah went right over to Dottie Lazenby. She listened to Dottie talk about their trip to Disney world and Epcott Center. Sandy said to me, "You missed the bottle rockets."


A week went by. I couldn’t get Marleah out of my mind. I even called her house from the parts department, but all I got was her voice on the answering machine. That same day after I got off work Sandy told me she couldn’t sit with my father this evening. She asked me if I would sit with him. She was taking Mama to Wal-mart to stock up on trash and garbage bags, laundry and dishwashing detergent, a long list of household items substantially cheaper at Wal-mart than they are at Winn-Dixie, Sandy said, when I asked her why go across town to Wal-mart when Winn-Dixie was two miles down the road. I was wishing Sandy didn't have the summer off from teaching, that way Sandy would have been been at Beauregard High, not here asking me to sit with my father while she took Mama shopping on her day to sit with him. I took six garbage bags out to the car and opened the trunk and stashed them.

I brought the radio to the bedroom and plugged it in. We got a rundown on the ball games that afternoon and some stuff on the Braves game coming up, then some call-ins, then gospel. It wasn't long before we were playing the leg game. My father’s left leg would fall off the bed. I'd intercept his foot, taking care to avoid his toenails, catch his ankle, and hoist the leg back up onto the bed. He would lower it and I would raise it again. Through the bedroom window, across the road, I saw Wyatt Kirkpatrick's wife, Stephanie, come around their house driving a lawn tractor. She was wearing a halter and loose fitting shorts. She raised her hand once and patted her hair. The next time I tried to lift up my father’s leg he wouldn't let me. "Leave it be. Wayne." So I let it be.

On Saturday I drove by Marleah's house. She was outside moving a lawn sprinkler away from the mailbox. She gave me a fluttery hand wave and smiled. I waved back but I didn't stop. I drove on over to the Lazy Bee and picked up a six pack of Diet Coke. There was a telephone outside the Lazy Bee. I thought of calling up Marleah then and there, why not, hey Marleah it's Wayne, I'm down here at the Lazy Bee and thought you might be out of Winston One Hundred Lights. On another Saturday, I might have done it. But on this one I was scheduled to sit with my father.

Mama was outside weeding her marigold bed, and she looked up when I came up the front steps, my feet crunching down on the welcome mat, and she said Wayne Junior's in there with him, Wayne.

My father was sitting on the side of the bed. He had Wayne Junior's Walk-Man on. He had his legs spread and his hands on his butt, tapping one foot on the carpet. When Wayne Jr. saw me coming, he slipped the earphones off my father’s ears, trying not to upset him too much. Wayne Jr. put the earphones over his own tender ears, waiting for me to start in on him.

His voice was going, “Gimmee that, Wayne.” Wayne Jr. looked at me for direction and I told him to turn the damn thing off.

My father’s hands weren't on his hips anymore, he was on his feet, he was doing this ballerina twinkle toe step across the bedroom and out the door. We caught up with him in front of the TV set, channel surfing with the remote.

After Mama talked to Marleah after church, Marleah came over to do what she promised she would do, sing a hymn for my father, whatever hymn he wanted to hear. My father wasn’t wearing a diaper. He had a T-shirt on, khaki pants. Mama had cut his toenails.

While Mama went on back to the bedroom, to tell my father Marleah was here, I was talking to Mama, in my head--why does this have to happen, how sad can this get? Don't you understand, Mama came back in my head, he just wants to hear her sing.

Marleah was standing in front of my father's unit map. It was just us, in the living room. "I'm really not sure I should do this."

"Do what?” I chanced it. "See me again?"

"I told your mama I'd sing for your daddy. I didn't think you'd be here, Wayne."

Marleah was smoothing her skirt out again. The skinny soldier my father used to be was where he usually was, tacked to the unit map. Then Mama was back. She said we could see him now.

Mama went in first, Marleah next. My father was sitting up in the bed. His hands were folded over his belly. Mama sat near the foot of the bed, Marleah stood next to the dresser. When Mama called her over, she came. She let herself down in the ladder back like my father was holding the chair for her. Leaning forward inches away from him, she took his right hand in one of hers. "How you feelin', Mister Creel?"

"He's doing real well,” I had to say. Paul Creel in his blue suit, the man in the photograph, what if he were here in his in his Sunday suit, would his left hand be flopping like a fish? But he couldn’t fit into that suit anymore.

"Mister Creel?" Marleah raised her voice. "Mister Creel, I came here to sing a hymn for you. What hymn would you like me to sing, Mister Creel?"

"You sing whatever you feel like singing,” Mama said.

My father’s left hand flopped like a fish. I couldn't allow him to go on this way. I grabbed his left hand and stopped it. I dragged his right hand loose from Marleah's. My father gave me a look I’ll never forget. He yanked his hands away like I was contaminated. “Leave, Wayne! You hear me? Leave!”

The air came on with a rush. Nobody said anything. Finally Mama signaled us to leave the room. We left my father glaring out the window at the front yard, the mimosa out by the mailbox, the bird bath, Marleah's white Honda Civic, Wyatt Kirkpatrick's place across the road. He had his chin in his hand, his feet stretched out like he wanted to float away somewhere with Marleah floating with him. But she was walking out with me. We walked on out to Mama's marigold bed. It was hot outside. Marleah's frilly white blouse was damp. Sweat streaked her layer of face powder. A butterfly flickered behind her. I heard a mocking bird going--joodeejoodeejoodee. I heard a car down the road somewhere. Marleah looked at me hard when we got to her car.

"I only came because your mother asked me to. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

"Next time you come I'll make sure I'm somewhere else."

“There won’t be a next time,” Marleah said.

Marleah got in her Honda and drove away. Across the road Wyatt Kirkpatrick's underground lawn sprinklers poked their heads up into Wyatt’s front yard, hissing, squirting out water. I could cross the road, keep going, get wet, plant my feet in Wyatt’s water soaked grass. If I did that, would my father be watching me through the window he had on the world? What would he say if I trekked past Wyatt’s barbecue pit, the swing set for Wyatt’s two sons, if I kept on going, the hissing sprinklers behind me now, along with Wyatt, and Stephanie Kirkpatrick, Mama too, Sandy, Wayne Junior, if I climbed over Wyatt’s chicken wire back fence, on my way to the woods, the deep woods, the tall pines that would grow taller as more years ticked off my short life. If I were to do that, and, I told myself, I still might, would I be doing what Denny Maxwell had done, would I, in my father’s view, be doing something stupid? Or would I be doing what would please him most?

It’s just a truck trailer on wheels, the kind that can be pulled behind a big rig. But then the two ends fold out to make an entrance and exit, and vents in the roof slide open. Set up the plywood stand for the talker out front and you’re all set to start bringing in the marks. The metal skin of the trailer is painted in bright colors, all yellows and reds. SEE THE AMAZING BEASTMAN, it says in big red letters, and there’s a painting on the side that looks kind of like Lon Chaney crossed with a Sasquatch. The flesh tones are way off, the facial structure is all wrong, and it doesn’t really look like me at all. Speakers mounted on the corners of the trailer sound the spiel in a continuous tape loop, so Dr. Vanderheiden doesn’t have to squawk all day.

“Found wandering in the aftermath of the tsunami! His brain turned off by drugs! Turned into an animal by science! The Beastman! You won’t believe it! Exclusive showing for a short time only!”

The spiel doesn’t make any sense, but that’s OK. People know there’s not really a half-man-half-beast on display inside the trailer, but that doesn’t stop them from tearing off five tickets to see what’s inside. Some of the posing shows are for real; Little Nell really is a little tiny woman; she’s nice but doesn’t say much. The World’s Smallest Horse (Alive and Real) maybe isn’t actually the smallest horse in the world, but it neighs and smells like a horse and craps the world’s smallest road-apples in little piles in its pen. Dr. Vanderheiden said the show once had an honest-to-god Alligator Man until he got sick and had to quit traveling. The Alligator Lady we have now is a gaff, with fake rubber scales and spots drawn on with a Sharpie. But the marks really don’t care if the show is gaffed—they’re in on the joke now and just want to see how it’s done, to have a good laugh, to see what’s inside.

Inside The Beastman’s Lair it doesn’t look too different from an animal’s trailer from a circus. Judging by the smell, it might have been one at one time. There’s hay everywhere on the floor, and floor-to-ceiling bars separating me from the marks. In one corner there’s a stack of hay bales with a piss bucket stashed behind. It’s a fully-functional piss bucket and it stinks. Sometimes I like to think it adds to the Beastman ambiance, but usually I just think it stinks. One time I tossed one of those urinal cakes in there, but it didn’t really help the smell. Besides the pissbucket and old animal smell there’s also the smell of the midway, which I kinda like. It’s a combination of diesel exhaust, frying food, and dumpsters. It’s pretty pungent but it smells like good times.

There’s a door in the side of the trailer, which I use when I need to run to the shitter or take a break. The air in here gets so humid sometimes, on days when it’s hot and crowded, that I open it up when there aren’t any marks coming through. Depending on the way we’re set up on the lot, sometimes I can watch people go by on the Wheel of Death or the Tilt-a-Whirl. I dig just watching the people, people I don’t even know, pretty girls, kids laughing, teenagers trying to be cool. It’s what makes this gig bearable.

Dr. Vanderheiden keeps the lights dim and pushes the marks through pretty quick so no one really gets a good look at me. There’s a low-wattage light bulb at the entrance and exit, but mostly I stay out of the pool of light. On bright days outside there’s some indirect light from the roof vents; on rainy days it can get pretty dark, and when the rain comes hard it makes a helluva racket on the roof. I don’t mind though—it’s kinda soothing and plus the rain keeps the crowds down. On quiet days like that I can stash a book behind the bales by the piss bucket, and read a few pages in the dim light between marks. I just have to be ready when I hear Dr. Vanderheiden launch into his come-along spiel, so I can jump up and slam into the bars and howl and try to grab at the marks. But mostly Dr. Vanderheiden stands under the In-door awning cursing at the rain, counting the day’s few tickets over and over, as if that extra miscounted ticket will make his lot payment for the week.

The Beastman and The Lady.

It’s one of those days, somewhere in Tidewater Virginia in a town where something happened once back in the Civil War, and a forecast for rain has kept the people away, but the rain that falls is half-assed and hardly even muddies the unpaved parts of the midway. Dr. Vanderheiden has switched off the tape loop and is doing all the spieling himself, which he says he does “just to keep in practice,” as if the day will come again when a carny talker with the skill to steer marks into a gaffed show or ten-in-one will be afforded wealth and status like in the old days. I hear him go into “just-five-small-tickets, thank-you-very-much-young-lady, now-prePARE-yourself, for-the-SPECtacle…” and I put my book down by the piss bucket and pick some loose straw out of my fur. I hear footsteps on the stoop and I know before the curtains part that it’s just one person—maximal effort for minimal return.

I let out a yowl that’s part Chewbacca, part Tasmanian Devil and strike a Who-Dares-Awaken-Mighty-Kong pose with my back to the door. As soon as I hear the footsteps come close, I whirl around and charge the bars, slamming into them and reaching and pawing through them at the mark, who jumps about a foot straight up and retreats against the wall, laughing. She’s a woman alone, which almost certainly means she has friends waiting outside for her to report back before they spend their five tickets. Cheapskates.

I turn my face to the light and bare my prosthetic fangs, letting out the gurgling howl that is my tribute to both Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Mushmouth from Fat Albert. The mark is gaping now, entranced. Hopefully she’ll bring her friends in as well.

“My God… Gordon? Is that you?”

I haven’t heard my real name since the day I walked on the show, and it stops me dead. For a second I don’t recognize her. She’s put on a bit of weight; I used to tease her that she’d hit thirty like a brick wall, and apparently she has. Her hips have gotten big just like her mother’s, and in her rain jacket and fleece sweatshirt she looks like she’s just back from Junior’s soccer practice.

“Oh. Hey. Hey, how are you?” I try to say, but it comes out Urharhharrrarugh. I spit out my fangs into my hand and try again. “How are you doing?”

“Good, good… I can’t believe it’s you.”

“I know. How weird is that? Do you live around here now?”

“Yeah, down the river near Williamsburg. We’ve been here three or four years now.”

“We? You’re married?”

“Yeah.” She still had that smile, the one that had turned my bones into cream cheese all those years ago. “He’s a nice guy. You’d like him.”

“He didn’t want to come in?”

“He sent me in to check it out first. We got burned on the Giant Man-Eating Chicken.” We hit that point in the conversation when you have to decide if it’s going to be a real conversation or just an exchange of pleasantries. She forged ahead. “Have you been doing…this…long?”

“No, this is my first season with the show. And I was doing caricatures on the midway until a couple months ago.”

“So you’re still painting?”

“Not really, no.” I leaned on the bars. “It’s hard to find time, and I don’t really have the space, either. Plus at the end of a long day, you know…”

“Yeah, I know. My life’s pretty different now, too.”

Dr. Vanderheiden’s voice is suddenly loud outside: Are-you-prePARed, for-the-unbeLIEveable-SPECtacle, the-mighty-BEASTman-in-his-LAIR…

“Hey, I gotta work.”

“Oh, OK. Listen, it was good seeing you.”

“Yeah, I know.” I jam my fangs back in my mouth.

“Really. You take care of yourself, Gordon.”

“Ur ruggh. Yur turghh.”

Then she’s gone and the next batch of marks is in the door. They’re mostly kids, and they scream and holler and run around so much it makes my job easy. When they’re gone, I go straight to the back door, open it a crack, and listen for her voice. She’s got to be telling her husband You will NOT believe who I just saw in there. But there are only the screams from the Tilt-A-Whirl, the shouts from the midway, and the slow drumming of rain on the aluminum roof of the trailer.

All day I read the marks that come in. Which one is he? I look for wedding bands on the men who come in alone, and reject those who are not her type. She has to have told him to come in and look at me. Gaze upon the spectacle! The former love of her life, covered in fake hair and tattered clothes. Still life with piss bucket. She has to have told him so many things. There were so many stories, ones I still tell. Backpacking in Italy. The tornado on the night of our Senior Prom. Her weird uncle with the herd of goats grazing among the junk cars in his yard. Stories she can tell the kids we’ll never have. We had even picked out their names. I can’t believe I’m even thinking like this after all this time. Loser.

The Beastman in Repose.

The lights finally go out on the Wheel. Dr. Vanderheiden comes in, rubbing his eye. His monocle bounces on its gold chain against his satin vest. Pawing through the day’s take in his ticket poke, he shakes his head. “Not too good. This damned rain.” He sighs. “We’ll do a lot better next week down in Fayetteville.” His German accent seems to disappear every night as soon as the Wheel goes dark.

I reach through the bars and let myself out. “Don’t forget your bucket,” he says. “I’ll close up tonight, but remember we’ve got tear-down tomorrow night. So get some sleep.”

“OK, thanks.” I pick up the bucket gingerly, being careful not to slosh. The night is cool as I step down to the midway, and the grass is wet under my bare feet. I keep forgetting to bring sandals for the walk back at night. Around me the other showmen, ride jocks, gamesmen, geeks, and grifters walk in silence, heads down, reading the midway for ground score--dropped change, tickets, jewelry, cell phones, cigarettes. The Giant Man Eating Chicken lopes by, at over seven feet unmistakable even in the dim light from the chow wagons. He balls up the day’s KFC bucket in one massive hand and stuffs it in an overflowing trash can. I reach the porta-jons and open one with my elbow, keeping my bare feet outside while I tip in the contents of the bucket at arm’s length to avoid backsplash.

“What up, Beast?” It’s Tree, the cherry of his cigarette reflecting off the dark shades he never takes off, even at night.

“Hey, Tree, how ya livin’?” I slap him a low five with my non-bucket hand.

“Large and in charge, like El De Barge.” He grins the grin of someone who’s lost a lot of teeth and doesn’t care a bit.

“Good day at the Pirate Ship?”

“Kinda slow, Beast, kinda slow. Had to make for some bumpy rides to pick up a little extra something.” He pulls a digital camera from the pocket of his fatigue jacket. “Check it: S-O-N-Y. The flash got broke when it hit the ground, but it’s all good.” We walk together down the midway toward the back lot.

“It’ll pick up. I hear it’s military payday down in Fayetteville where we’re going.”

“Awww, shit, Beast, you know it. We fixin’ to get paid in the Escalade.” Military paydays mean huge crowds of drunk soldiers with pockets full of extra cash who don’t care where it goes. The local five-o are too busy breaking up fights to notice if Madame Crumpet The Midget Strumpet’s hoochie show is working blue, or if the ticket men aren’t tearing straight, or if the Hoop-It-Up basketball hoops aren’t quite circular.

“Hey, Tree. You ever see anybody you knew from outside come on your ride?”

“All the time, baby. Everybody knows the Tree. Everybody.”

“No, really.”

Tree stops walking and looks over his shades at me. “You ain’t down by law, are you? Tree can’t help you with that, my brother.”

“Naw, Tree, it’s not that. It’s a girl.”

“I feel ya.” He drags on his cigarette. “And she’s not down with you being a showman?”

“You got it. But I don’t know why I even care. She’s an ex. From a long time ago.”

“Listen, Beast. Everybody with the show, they’re either running from something, or waiting to get to something. You got to figure out which one of those you are. Then you got to figure out if the show’s helping you with that. Some people ain’t meant to be travelers, Beast. Ain’t meant to be. But I think you got it in you.”

“I hear ya, Tree.” We stop outside the bunkhouse, the long trailer where newcomers and first-of-Mays rent a few square feet of sleeping space before they get enough money for a trailer of their own. A row of doors on each side conceal tiny cabins with little more than a fold-down cot, a chest of drawers, and a hot plate. I count four doors from the front and unlock my door.

“Hey, Beast, you got what you need?” I think that’s a pretty heavy question, and I’m pondering it when I realize he’s asking if I want to buy any dope.

“Naw, Tree. I’m good. But thanks.” Tree’s Mexican ditch weed always gives me a headache. “Thanks a lot.”

“A’ight, Beast. And if that girl needs some straightening out, tell her come see the Tree. I’ll set her right, for a fact.” He ambles off into the darkness of the back lot. A knot of ride jocks call out to him, and fives are slapped, and a bottle goes round. I let the door bang shut and sit on my cot. The bunkhouse vibrates gently with the thrum of the massive diesel generators on the genny truck next door. The tiny cabin fills with the sharp smell of spirit gum remover as I pull the hair off my face, clump by clump.

The Lady Touched by the Beastman’s Plight.

The knock against the window set in the bunkhouse cabin door stirs me from half-sleep. I know before I even look at the shape though the milky glass that it must be her. This has happened before, except in a dream. I let her in, and as she steps into the tiny space the smell of her is so instantly familiar that my head spins. But I have learned to both hate and pity her over these years, I remind myself.

“Sit down. How did you find me?”

“It wasn’t too hard,” she says, sitting on the edge of the cot, her knees almost touching the front of the dresser. “A nice midget lady helped me out.”

“Madame Crumpet? You’re lucky she didn’t offer you a job.”

“Actually, I think she did. Something about thousands of dollars to work in Fayetteville next week.” She glances around the cabin, probably wondering where my thousands of dollars are going. A few paperbacks, a cheap transistor radio, a NASCAR ashtray, a half-drained jug of red wine, a battery-powered lamp.

“Did your husband know you were coming here?” Suddenly I fear her motive. I know that if she so much as puts a hand on my knee I will burst into flames. The shape of her face is different now, rounder; the mouth fuller. But the eyes are the same.

“Actually, yes. We discussed it. At some length.”

“I see.” I don’t. If she’s not here for hot ex-sex, then why? Surely not to taunt me. She was never cruel, only misguided.

“Gordon, I came here because I’m worried about you. I wanted to make sure you’re OK.”

“Of course I’m OK. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Look, I know you took things pretty hard…”

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself.”

“Seriously, Gordon. I know I did. I know I thought you were the one. You probably did, too. We had it all planned out, remember?” I couldn’t have forgotten. We’d talked about it a hundred times—the wedding in the old church at St. Andrew’s, the house in the country, the two kids, the retirement, even. It seems even more ridiculous now than then.

“Sure. But you moved on. So did I.”

“Moved on? Gordon, look at you. You’re a carny, for chrissake.”

“Showman.”

“Excuse me?”

“Showman. ‘Carny’ is an outdated pejorative.”

“Whatever. The point is, you work in a freak show, you live in a damn horse trailer, and you dress up in some kind of monkey suit for a living. In spite of everything that happened between us, maybe because of everything that happened between us, I still think you’re better than that.”

I look at the floor and say nothing. The diesel thrum from the genny truck abruptly stops, and the silence is sudden. The single light fixture dims, then dies. I reach over and snap on the battery-powered lantern. “Sorry. Eleven o’clock. They shut down the generators to save money.” Outside, the backlot and the midway fade into darkness.

Johnny Cash Beset By Darkness.

We talk for a while. Some about old times, some catching up to today. About her husband and about where I’ve been. About people we knew and where they are now. She bums a smoke even though she says she quit. I pour her some jug wine into a coffee cup, and it’s almost like old times. Almost.

I show her the last thing I painted. It was a long time ago, years ago even, not long after the breakup, but I don’t tell her that. She’d get the wrong impression, because the piece is really dark. In fact I haven’t shown it to many people, because everyone gets the wrong impression, and I got tired of explaining it. It’s a pretty small canvas, about 20 by 30, and it’s all in shades of black, with some gloss, some flat, a little more texture here and there. It’s oppressive and heavy, or at least that was what I was going for. I call it “Johnny Cash Beset By Darkness,” and that’s where everybody gets it wrong. Oh I get it. The Man in Black, ha-ha. But that’s not it at all.

In 1967, Johnny Cash, strung out on pills, in trouble with the law, and troubled by the dissolution of his marriage, climbed into Nickajack Cave to die. He walked straight back into that cave, through untold passageways and twists and turns, for hours, until his flashlight batteries gave out. Then, hopelessly lost, in a darkness that must have been overwhelming, with a million billion tons of rock over his head, he just lay down and waited to die. But something made him get up and start walking again, in darkness, hands out in front of him. Hours later, amazingly, he felt a breeze across his face, and followed it out of the cave and into the sunlight. That story’s in his book Cash: The Autobiography of Johnny Cash, by Johnny Cash, and when I read it, it stuck with me. I understand that a lot of Christians like to point to that as an instance of God speaking to somebody, but Johnny himself said he knew it wasn’t God talking to him. He said he just suddenly knew that life wasn’t his to just throw away.

“I want to buy this from you,” she says, holding the canvas by the wood framing and tilting it so the gloss-black streaks catch the dim light from the lantern. “I came here with some money. I was going to offer it to you so you could get out of here, get out of this life. But I was also pretty sure you wouldn’t take it.”

“You’re damned straight. But the painting’s not for sale, either.”

She nods. “I understand. But if you change your mind…here’s my number. And if you need a job, my husband is friends with a guy who owns a tavern in Williamsburg, and he can give you a job waiting tables or something. You’d have to wear a costume, but I guess…” She starts to laugh.

“Yeah, I’m used to that,” I say. “I won’t be calling you for a job, but thanks anyway. I appreciate the offer.” And I do. But I don’t want to be a charity case for my ex-girl and her new man. There must be a limit to how much accumulated humiliation one can bear in a lifetime. “But hey, if you want a job, I’m sure I could get you on the show.”

“Oh my God.”

“We could use a new Spiderella The Arachno-Girl.”

“How about the Fat Lady? That’s what I feel like I’m turning into sometimes.”

“Gabba gabba, we accept you! One of us! One of us!”

“Stop it. You know that movie gave me nightmares.” There is a kiss on the cheek, fraught with peril and drenched in memory, and then she’s gone, picking her way across the dark backlot in the direction of town, a glow on the edge of the dark sky.

The Beastman Afoot.

Morning comes early to the carnival, and I awaken to the sound of a ride jock puking outside the bunkhouse. The sky has cleared, and the golden dawn illuminates the top of the Wheel, its reflectors shining in gold and purple. My shoes leave trails in the dewy grass. Dr. Vanderheiden is startled to see me without my makeup and costume, but when I give him the news he doesn’t seem all that surprised, and he offers me a raise only half-heartedly. I know he’ll probably have another Beastman by the time the state Ride Inspectors show up in Fayetteville.

Tree only nods sagely. “Beastman’s gotta do what a Beastman’s gotta do.” Then he gives me the one-sided man-hug so as not to knock the ash off his cigarette. “You know you got family on the show, Beast. Any old time.” He swings himself up into the control seat of the Pirate Ship to run through his morning checklist.

“It’s Gordon.”

“What say, dog?” He peers over his shades at me.

“My name’s Gordon.”

He looks off into the distance and nods. “Gordon. All right now. All right.”

It’s a long hike to the bus station in town, but my backpack is light, with only my few things and a rolled-up canvas. The traffic begins to stream out to the fairgrounds, and the passing cars throw a nice breeze in my face.

He parked his SUV at the end of the road next to a wooden barrier where a greenbrier vine wrapped its naked limbs around the planks. A gravel driveway led to the house on 720 Mimosa, a white 1950’s bungalow. He had learned not to judge a man’s collection of arms by the size of his house. Thomas, an appraiser and buyer for Mitchum’s Antiquity Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, made his living deciding the value of things. Many of his best pieces were found in unassuming homes of hard working American men. Still, with all of his experience and all of his contacts and all of his research, he never knew how he would be received by the widow. Often, he felt like a personal injury lawyer chasing ambulances, or, in his case, hearses, obituaries, tips from gun clubs and other collectors, and, as always, he hoped his services were welcomed.

A petite, twenty-something woman opened the door and ushered him inside.

“My mom’s sleeping,” she said. He followed her through the living room where the remnants of Christmas lingered. Removing his gloves, he handed the woman his business card.

“It’s all in here,” she said, opening the closet door in one of the bedrooms. “Mr. Gorham said you’d be fair.”

“I am fair,” he said, and then, immediately spotting a replica field offer’s sword leaned against a suitcase, its shinny newness so apparent it could have been purchased from a catalogue last week, he added, “but I can’t promise anything until I examine the collection.”

“Have at it, Mr. Askin,” she said and left him alone in the room.

He moved the collection from the closet to the bed. The various weapons included: pistols, rifles, three swords, and a few daggers. Most of the collection was not all Civil War era, as he had been told, and only two infantry rifles interested him. He examined another sword, and, seeing that it had a replacement blade and two dings in the grip, he put it back on the bed. It was then that his cell phone began to vibrate. He reached for the phone clamped to his belt but stopped. He knew who was calling—his wife—and he knew what she wanted—sex.

He and Heather were trying to have a baby. He and Heather had been trying to get pregnant for over a year. He and Heather were going at it day and night until Heather put a stop to their sex-fest and decided to take a more scientific approach to copulation. So, for the last six months, she limited their intercourse to key conception periods, which he soon realized were a few days a month. This meant saving his sperm for just the right moment; it meant little green pills and ovulation tests and basal thermometers, fertility pillows, herbal rubs, non-toxic lube, boxers not briefs, and fertility tracking software. It also meant urgent calls to his cell phone demanding sex. Sex on demand wasn’t such a bad thing, at first.

“Who are you?”

He turned to find an elderly woman standing in the doorway. She wore a white, cotton nighty and a terry-cloth robe.

“I’m Mr. Askin.”

“You’re here to buy Walter’s things, aren’t you?”

“Is that okay?” he asked, dreading the answer.

“Well, that’s a bunch of crap.”

“Ma’am, I think you should talk to your daughter.”

“No,” she said, “I mean the stuff on the bed. It’s all crap.”

He paused, and then said, “It’s not all bad.”

“Yes, it is. But do you want to see something special?”

“Like what?” he asked.

“Look under there.” She pointed to the bed.

He pulled up the bedspread—a pair of old leather slippers sat on the floor.

“Under the mattress,” she instructed him.

He lifted the mattress and reached underneath and pulled out a sword—a sword with a brass lion’s head on the butt of a spiral grip and a long flat, double edge blade. It was not from the Civil War.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked. “This is English, 1770’s.” But he knew he wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know.

“It was his pride and joy,” she said. “He slept with it under he’s bed for over twenty years.”

Her distant gaze cautioned him against asking why.

“Let me show you something else,” she said.

He followed her into her bedroom, a smaller room with vibrant colored curtains, teal blankets, and a fuchsia boa tossed over the bedpost, which further complicated his image of her. She went to her nightstand and took out a knife.

“It’s a dagger. Double edge, spear point,” he said.

“Oh, I know it’s not worth much. But it was Walter’s first. Do you remember your first?”

“Sure,” he said.

She clutched the dagger in a semi-threatening way, pointed at him. “We moved into this house in the sixties. It was supposed to be temporary. Walter promised a bigger house as soon as . . . well, I don’t remember the why of things. But, after my youngest was born, she’s the one that let you in, Walter added two bedrooms to this place. Anyway, he found this in the dirt out back and was hooked.”

He moved closer to the door, acting casual, but wished for a polite way to end their conversation. He had seen everything he needed to see and expected his cell phone to begin vibrating again. His attention narrowed to the perfume on her dresser, and he picked up a glass bottle.

“What hooked you, Mr. Askin?”

“This is crystal, Czech, 1930’s or 40’s.” He picked up an atomizer with silver filigree and squeezed the bulb. “Honeysuckle,” he said as he evaluated the sweet fragrance.

“Well, for a man who deals in guns and knives, you know a lot about perfume.”

“I like, I mean, I buy…” He hunted for the right words as he set the atomizer back on the dresser. “I collect antique perfume bottles for my wife. My mother had ones like these,” he finally said. He expected her to say something. He sensed a question forming in her mind, but he changed the subject to money and made her an offer for the two guns and the sword. She seemed pleased, even surprised at the amount. He was being generous, but the daughter thought otherwise.

The daughter tried to convince him to take everything, saying the rest must be worth something. He explained she would get more if she sold them individually, saying the pieces were marginal. This angered her, and he might have walked away from the deal if not for the sword. The mother interrupted them by reminding her daughter about manners and scolding her for not offering him a drink, saying something about “guests in her house”. That quieted the daughter, and he wrote the check, thinking he was done, but just as he began to leave, the woman invited him to stay for lunch. An exchange of polite insistences followed as she would say, “It’s the least we can do,” and he would reply, “I really couldn’t,” until he accepted a sandwich and a thermos of coffee for the road.

By the time Thomas Askin reached I-81, his phone was pulsing in short vibrations, reminding him of the missed call. He removed the phone from his belt and put it in the center console along with the sandwich and thermos of coffee. He’d met Heather six years ago. She cashiered in the gift shop at the Confederacy Museum where he worked and even though she wasn’t the type of woman he dated, they went out for drinks. He tried not to reveal his true intentions and, for the first few dates, let her talk about life, her dreams, or anything she wanted to talk about as long as she kept stroking her hair in a flirtatious manner and wore low-cut blouses. He could appreciate the big tease, the tension; it kept him coming back.

Then, after five years of marriage, they began trying to have a baby and it was then that Heather revealed an aggressive side he did not know existed. She would meet him at the door, grab his hand, and, if they made it to the bedroom, she would strip him and use him for her own pleasure, demanding he make his deposit. It felt good to be desired, and this forceful play went on for some time, until their failure to produce could not be ignored, and then she became passive, lying in bed, waiting for him to perform the act that would return meaning to her life.

As he drove, he thought about the sword and how pleased Mr. Mitchum would be with the find because a Revolutionary era officer’s sword was highly prized among collectors. He would have to thank Mr. Gorham, a local gun dealer, with a finder’s fee. And without being too aware, his thoughts wandered back to the question the old woman had asked; “What hooked you?” He thought about his father, a history professor, and his mother, a housewife, and their many trips to battlefields and historical sights. Then, he pulled off the interstate and on to one of the secondary roads that branched like veins through Virginia’s heartland. He had just added an hour to his trip. A surge of freedom hit him as he crossed the Blue Ridge Parkway and took a road to Lynchburg where, as a boy, he’d held his mother’s hand as they watched a battle reenactment. He passed through the rolling greenery of the Shenandoah Valley, through small towns unchanged through the years. He drove past Appomattox, remembering how he had stood in the courthouse where Lee surrendered to Grant. And when he reached Farmville, near the last major battle of the war, he turned north and followed a country road to a village lost to tourists and known only to serious historians like his father.

The General Store was located on a dusty street between other merchant buildings. The red letters on the store’s window were hand-painted, a loopy script, and had flaked from years of neglect. The front door seemed smaller than he remembered, but as he pulled it open, he imagined entering a time when the world seemed greater than he was, and the motto was “if it feels good, do it.” The jingling of sleigh bells rang out from behind the door and announced his arrival to a teenage boy who sat behind the counter reading a comic book. The teen looked at him and returned to his comic. Thomas walked down an aisle of canned food to the back of the store. There, the ceiling lowered and the light dimmed as he stepped into an old storage room. Two tables divided the space, and they were littered with junk. Boxes of odds-and-ends sat on the floor. He picked through the first table. Most items were marked with an orange circular sticker and the price written in black ink—some written in the same loopy handwriting as on the window. The second table had china and various kitchen items spread across its surface, and the boxes below housed a collection of musty books—page worn romances. As a child, this had been a treasure trove; but now, it created an empty feeling in his gut. He tried to remember what she had said, but he could only bring to mind an image—a slender figure walking away, down the aisle, her blue tunic catching the breeze, her skirt rubbing the back of her legs, her clogs slapping the bottom of her feet. That’s what hooked him. After his father had found a collection of Civil War photographs, Thomas found a bottle of perfume on the table. The bottle, half full, had a black t-shaped stopper and a golden label with a picture of a mother and child. He dug through his pockets and counted his change at the counter. He was nine pennies short, but the owner sold him the bottle. That was the beginning of his collection; he would buy the bottles for her birthday, for Mother’s Day, and for Christmas.

The room felt hot. He removed his gloves, stuffing them in his coat pocket. It was then he noticed the box on the floor near the doorway; a soft fragrance came from inside. He dug through it and found two pink atomizers, but they did not match the powdery floral scent. He dug deeper and tipped the box on its side until he found the glass bottle with the black stopper. He held it up; a small amount of yellow liquid splashed inside, and he tried to find the light to read the label—Spanish Geranium. He laughed realizing it had been the perfume, her smell, which had triggered the memory of his mother.

He set the bottle on the counter. The teen hardly looked at Thomas as he continued to read.

“I’m buying this,” Thomas said.

“You can’t,” the teen said.

“Why not?”

“No sticker.”

“It probably fell off in the box,” he said.

“No,” the teen replied. “That’s from Miss Kelly’s box and Miss Kelly comes in and sells on Monday, so none of that stuff is marked yet.”

Thomas remained in front of the counter, tapping his foot, until he pulled out a business card.

“The bottle’s not worth more than thirty dollars,” he said with authority.

The teen used Thomas’s business card as a bookmarker and closed the comic. He handed Thomas a business card for The General Store as if he were following some rule that he didn’t fully understand. “Any thing else?” the teen asked.

“I want the bottle.”

“No.”

“Fifty dollars,” Thomas said. “That’s more than fair.”

“Look, Mister, I don’t care about your money or your fancy business card. You don’t pay me, so I don’t listen to you.”

“Then who’s in charge?”

“My grandfather.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“No.”

“And why not?”

“He won’t come in until four o’clock.”

“One hundred. That’s my last offer. You’re grandfather will be proud.”

The teen looked away for a moment, as if he were considering what Thomas had said, but when he turned back, he said, “I’m not going to chance it.”

“But I can’t wait.”

“Well, I can’t sell it without a sticker.” He moved the perfume bottle from the counter to the shelf behind him. “I’ll keep it there for you,” he said and returned to his comic.

Thomas left the store and sat in his SUV. He wasn’t leaving. He figured he had an hour and forty minutes until the grandfather showed up. He could wait. He’d tell her that he got stuck in traffic, there was a bad accident. He couldn’t get home. Still, he would not call her and force the issue, preferring the one lie to several exchanges for the next few hours, giving her time to check the road reports.

“I need you,” he could imagine her saying. She would have taken her temperature just after he left, recording it on her graph with a black dot. Then, she would study the dots on the graph, most of them plotted along the 98 degrees line until that morning when she would plot a higher temperature. She would compare it with her past charts and log the information in the computer, and if those results were promising, she would break open an ovulation test. She would spend the day cleaning the house with a nervous energy so focused that, in the end, every corner would be dusted, the furniture show-room arranged, and a plate of cookies waiting for him. She had become the perfect wife, and he loved her. He loved her in ways he could not express. She took care of him, created a home for him, and, someday, would give him children. However, it was her domestic perfection that made him aware of his failings as a man.

He grabbed the sandwich and thermos and left his SUV. The chilly air felt good against his face. He walked along a path that led to a small campsite. He sat at a picnic table and poured coffee in the thermos lid. The campsite had changed, fewer trees, thinner brush, but the quiet remained. Long ago, the land served both Union and Confederate troops. When he was a child, his father told stories in front of a camp fire about how they were following the steps of men who sacrificed everything for their beliefs. During the day, his mother would take him on nature walks where they studied trees and birds and collected leaves—leaves that he imagined had once been stained with the blood of the fallen men. A half-mile west, a creek became their private water park; his mother and father swam naked in the rushing water while he tried to catch fish with a make-shift stick and string pole. She wore his perfume everyday.

As Thomas peeled the cellophane from the sandwich, mayo stuck to his fingers. He wiped them on the top of the white bread and then took a bite of the sandwich. He chewed a thick-cut piece of ham. The old woman probably made it extra thick, thinking she was being generous. But as he looked for another bite, he saw how uneven the slice was and sunk his teeth into the thinner section. He knew he needed to eat, and he wondered if he might have dealt differently with the teen if his blood sugar wasn’t so low. Then, just as he was about to swallow, the thought occurred to him—this was Christmas ham, leftovers from Walter’s last meal. He instantly spat the chewed wad of meat to the ground and reached for the coffee but stopped when he saw the monogrammed WJM carved on the face of the thermos. He shuddered and lost control for a moment as he dry-heaved. He stumbled down the path towards the main street and hurried back to the warmth of his SUV. With shaky hands, he searched the glove compartment for gum, a mint, or anything to counter the taste of the death pork. There were no mints; she kept them in her purse. He stared at The General Store for several minutes, and then he made his move.

He burst through the door, knocking the sleigh bells to the floor. He walked up to the counter and said, “I need to see the bottle.”

The teen seemed uneasy as he stood behind the counter, refusing to let Thomas have the bottle.

“Let me see it.”

Thomas paced twice and then came around to the other side of the counter.

“Hey, you can’t come back here.”

Thomas dug through his wallet and pulled out several bills and waved them around, saying, “This is more than fair.” He tossed the money at the teen and snatched the bottle off the shelf. The teen seemed frozen, as if he had no rule for what Thomas was doing. As Thomas headed out the door, he stopped at a candy display and took several packs of cinnamon gum.

He sped away in his SUV, chewing as many pieces of gum as he could fit in his mouth. He followed the country road back to the secondary and half expected a cop to be waiting at the crossroad, but there was no one to stop him. After traveling awhile, he merged on to a main artery of Richmond, and then he found his way to his street, his driveway, his home.

The lights were off in the living room and, in the fading daylight, colors waned and gray transfused the space. He found her in the kitchen. There were no cookies. Her graphs were arranged on the table: the days plotted, the weeks a collection of dots that formed the shape of their lives. She looked disappointed. He was prepared to answer her questions, but she asked none. He knew it was down-hill-dots from that moment on. She told him to meet her in the bedroom but before she could leave, he took the perfume bottle from his pocket and offered it to her as an apology. She took the bottle and examined its simple form. As she removed the stopper, he thought she might dab her finger in the lip of the bottle and rub the perfume on her skin. That thought both frightened and excited him. But when the heady mix of Aldehydic and Bergamot reached her nose, she winced and said, “That’s foul.” She immediately turned to the sink and poured out the yellow liquid.

“What are you doing?” He reached for the bottle, grabbing it from her, but it was too late.

“It’s awful, Tom.”

“You didn’t give it a chance,” he said, trying to stop his feelings of contempt, but it was too late for that, too.

In bed, they both stared at the ceiling, the covers pulled over their naked bodies.

“You know what to do,” Heather said.

He reached his hand under the sheet.

The only light in the room came from the green glow of the digital alarm clock. Soon, he would have to go back to his position at the museum, to stay close to home. The road would become a part of some other life, and then he understood why Walter kept the sword between the mattress and box spring. He imagined it was under his bed, the metal blade lying flat, suffocating under his weight.

“Deeper,” she said.

He smelled her scent on his fingers as he gripped her shoulder.

“You know what to do,” she said.

He closed his eyes.

“There’s no blood in the forest,” she said.

His eyes opened, but he could not see.

“Deeper,” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“That’s why I’m telling you.”

“I can’t.”

“But no one will love you like I do.”

It looked to Vernon like a win-win proposition, this community theatre thing, his part in it. Not at first, not back in May when Conway LaRue, Jr., the show's director and an Associate Professor of Communication at Piney Woods C.C. first clapped him on the shoulder in the faculty processional and asked whether he'd be around to do Shakespeare this summer. Back then, in May, broiling under his academic gown and with his whole summer stretching before him, unparceled, uncommitted, Vernon had tried to appear polite but disinterested, and Conway LaRue, Jr. had not pushed. That was mid-May.

The first Monday after Memorial Day, Vernon was scheduled for his end-of-year interview with Dr. Costello, his Dean. Mrs. Quigly, the Dean's secretary, greeted him by name, taking off her glasses. "I'll just see if Dean Costello's ready." She buzzed him. Smiled again at Vernon. "Yes, go right in. Can I get you coffee?"

Costello, Vernon noticed, was dressed in shorts and polo shirt. Vernon was sorry now he'd worn a tie, thankful that he hadn't put his sports coat on. "Good morning, Dr. B!" Dean Costello was a small, square, bespectacled man with a booming voice, a business management professor who had risen through the ranks. "How're you today? Becky offer you a cuppa joe? All righty then." Dean Costello typically opened these annual meetings by reviewing his evaluation check-list, ranking the probational faculty member one-to-five in various areas. Over the years, Vernon had become comfortable both with these chat-sessions and his own reliable "fours." Vernon took a seat on the paisley couch that matched Costello's wingback chair. Some papers and folders lay on the coffee table between them. Vernon had already read his student course evaluations for the year. A kind teacher. . . I like it when he reads aloud. . . He showed us how to write proffesionally. Now he primed his ears for Dean Costello's numbers. "Well, Vern. Here we are. It's been quite a year, I reckon. And I just want to say I'm sorry. For all of it, I'm sorry." (Why, Vernon wondered, thrown off-course. It wasn’t Dean Costello’s fault.) "To lose your Mom over Christmas Break… Then, well, Lydia… You know, research shows divorce is harder--I'm speaking psychically--on husbands than on wives. So how you doin', buddy?"

"Okay, Charles. Thanks. Neither was, you know, much of a shock." He had a quick and painful mental glimpse of Mama, long months dying, fettered to a respirator. Another quick and painful glimpse of Lydia as she must have looked while posing for Buck Arnold's night class in "Life Studies." He'd seen a sample in the student exhibition: Lydia, nude, staring at him from across the college cafeteria. This was in April, two months after she'd moved out. Struck nearly faint and nauseous, Vernon had to leave the lunch line.

"Well, Vernon, I must say you kept your head up through it all. Teaching classes, grading all those goddamn papers--I swear I don't know how you English people do it. Plus you proofed the college catalogue. And I just want to say we're grateful here. You're a real survivor."

Had there been a choice? Living alone now in a two-bedroom apartment, a few worn pieces of his mother's furniture for company; finding himself an object of embarrassment and pity, somehow, to those few couples he and Lydia once socialized with, what did he have to occupy his time but work?

Dean Costello raised his coffee cup. "Here's hoping next year's much, much better for you, Vern."

"Yessir. I'll drink to that."

Costello took a sip. "All right." He traded his coffee cup for the folder lying between them on the coffee table. "Let's talk about this tenure thing."

The world has come alive once more and waits for Caliban to enter. "Ban, Ban, Cal-i-ban," he chants sotto voce. He's beyond the edge of the parking lot now, where a pair of bats swoop for night bugs, and coming through the trees into the meadow where cast and crew park their cars and pickup trucks. He does a kind of dance-in-place, hunched over, shaking both his hairy wrists down at the level of his knees. He raises his brown-stained throat up to the moon. "There's wood enough within, " he rasps. "There's wood enough within." He rolls his head from side to side. The moon rattles across the sky, sinking into a purple cloud, and the gristle in his neck cracks softly. Then Caliban goes limp, falling forward until he feels his chin touch down upon his necklace of bone, and his fingers dangle at his ankles. He hangs there motionless, as Ariel must have hung while trapped in that enchanted pine. Relaxed, he is working once more to shuck his old life, its sorrows and its fetters: Lydia's betrayal, the close of show, the summer's end, rain in the immediate forecast, Miranda's disregard, the extra weight he's picked up somewhere in his thirties, the death of Sycorax his mother. He is falling into character now. Caliban breathes deeply, in through the nostrils and out through the mouth, getting the kind of deep chest and diaphragm action that makes his director, Conway LaRue, Jr., a satisfied man. The air tastes of August heat, of woods and wet.

By now, he knows, the old man and his daughter will be on stage, expositing their royal woe. "There's wood enough within." One-handed, Caliban snatches a firefly from the air before his face. He shakes his hairy fist at the hide-and-seek full moon, then liberates the bug into the dark, pats his snout's green scales, and slinks back to the island, where he slips into his stony lair. Stageside, a burlap curtain hides him from the audience. He peeks through its rough weave, squinting at the circle of light that defines this island world. What he sees, unseen, is like a warm, recurring dream. Winged Ariel bobs and genuflects to Prospero's hoary threats. Miranda sleeps downstage, pillowed by her arm. The gentle curve her rump makes through her russet island shift, the way the grains of sand glint back at Caliban from the bottom of her ivory foot-- his rocky lair must surely be the best seat in the house. This vision soothes his jitters every night. Crouched inside his chicken-wire monster's den he flexes all his fingers. He wets his lips, coughs clear his throat, sets himself to answer Prospero's call for firewood.

Tenure. Yes, why not. Because they had a way of sneaking up on him, fait accompli, Vernon was accustomed to rolling with the punches, acquiescing to the major milestones in his life: his parents' divorce when he was fourteen, his various matriculations and birthdays, his courtship and marriage to Lydia, bagging (on the advice of his advisor) Herman Melville for a specialty in technical rhetoric, snagging the job at Piney Woods--just twenty miles from Mama's nursing home--his mother's death last winter, Lydia's new passion for the arts. Vernon liked to think himself unselfish. A team player. As teams go, Piney Woods C.C. was triple-A, but over six years Vernon had grown used to being on the roster.

"Are you sure you'd want it, Son?" Costello asked, fixing Vernon with his owlish eyes. "I'd understand completely if you want to look around. The four-year colleges pay more, of course. I don't see much chance P.W.C.C. will grow its offerings in your field, Vernon--not when the Trustees get their rocks off with new programs in truck driving and--what's that other thing?--nurse-midwifery. Man-to-man, would you be comfortable teaching on this campus? Buck Arnold's tenured, Son. So long as we've got FTE's in fashion merchandising--and we got 'em--I can't touch those long-hairs in the art department."

"I can live with that. I appreciate your shooting straight with me. But overall, you know, I'm happy here."

Dean Costello sighed. "Okay then. Had to ask. Let's see how things stack up." Flipping now through Vernon's annual reports. Murmuring. "Can't predict, you understand, how the tenure and review committee's going to act in any given year… Criteria-wise, looks like your major ducks are in a row…" In a nutshell, Dean Costello's favorite mode of discourse, Vernon's course evaluations, syllabi, grading distributions looked okay. His annotations for the teacher's copy of Business Writing for the New Millennium, his freelance authorship of J. J. Wilfong Sawmill's human resource manual should count as scholarship. "Hell, this isn't Vanderbilt," Costello chuckled. Plus editing the college catalogue, three years running. Though that might count for College Service. Positive rec's from his colleagues in the Language Arts.

Community Service. Here Costello frowned, studying Vernon's most recent report and tapping his mechanical pencil against the page. Yes, there might be some question of that. Not that it was an emphasis, of course. Not here, where one taught four to five courses a semester. Plus a night course here and there. The occasional faculty workshop and in-service gig. Still, just playing devil's advocate, Costello mused, abiding by the criteria as they're listed in the faculty handbook, had Vernon anything to show by way of community involvement? Surely he could dig up something. Any number of things in Vernon's life might qualify: activities and associations he probably took for granted. He might be a Lion or an Elk. A walk or run-a-thoner. A volunteer for Meals on Wheels. "Give this some thought," Costello urged. "Look at your kitchen calendar, remind yourself of where you spend your evenings. Make sure the t & e committee gets a sense of where your passion lies, extra-curricularly speaking. Because you have the summer off, you should use this time to strengthen your tenure case, criteria-wise. Update the vita. Let's see," Costello counseled, "what you can dig up."

And for a week or two, Vernon dug. He re-enrolled in a couple of professional associations whose memberships he'd let lapse after getting the job at Piney Woods. He wandered through his files until he'd found a copy of his three-page "Guidelines for Effective Memoranda," commissioned by the local city council via MarJane Goss, who was a councilwoman besides being a financial aid director at P.W.C.C. Vernon found a copy of the talk he gave his mother's chapter of the Association of University Women, three years back: sexism in language. And then, browsing through the two tech writing journals in the college library, looking for a "Call for Papers," he'd run into a former student, Brandi Lockhart. Brandi was perched on a stool behind the desk in Periodicals, her long hair clipped behind her head the way young mothers wore theirs lounging poolside outside the window of his bachelor's apartment. She hailed him first ("Hey! Dr. B!"). She asked if he was coming to auditions for Conway's summer show.

"Hmmm? Say what?"

"The Tempest? I thought you knew. Not the Piney Woods Playhouse but The Allegheny Players? Their fourth and final show? LaRue's directing? I could have sworn he said you were a faculty recruit." She smiled at him. "It might be cool to do another play together, don't you think?"

Vernon had carried small parts in campus productions over the last couple of years, is what she meant. Howie Newsom in Our Town. A telephone repairman in Barefoot in the Park. Something to get him out of the house nights after Lydia started taking art classes. Cameos, really, that Vernon took as favors to Conway, who had trouble scrounging male actors on a campus where business courses and a truck-driving academy held the highest enrollment and many of the students worked full-time jobs. Brandi, he recalled, was a communication major with a theatre emphasis.

"I guess he did say something about it," Vernon said. "A possible part. You gonna be there?"

"Well, yeah," she said, dropping her gaze, touching the pages of her open novel with just her fingertips, spinning it in lazy circles on the counter. "Mostly just to see who all comes out. To read with different, you know, Ferdinands. I probably shouldn't tell," she said. And although the PWCC periodicals room was empty but for them, she cupped her hands around her mouth and converted her voice into a stage whisper. "I'm kind of, you know, pre-cast. Don't tell I told you, Vernon."

So he'd gone to the audition. By close of June it looked to be a win-win proposition. Because a role in summer theatre ought to count for something tenure-wise. Not just as community service, but because Conway LaRue, Jr. himself served on the faculty tenure committee. And it was Shakespeare--didn't he teach English, after all, even if it was tech writing? And finally because by conversation's end the black-haired library girl had called him Vernon, and not Dr. B.

During Intermission, Prospero lies rigid on a bench, his magic cape draped across his face. Trinculo and Stephano sit cross-legged on a picnic bench, playing poker. Conway LaRue, Jr. (even though it's August, he wears his signature fedora and a scarf) appears to be in heavy conference with the kid who runs the light board, Artie Lester. And where's Miranda? Dressed in white for her next entrance, in ACT III, she smokes a cigarette and laughs at Ariel, who cuts a caper, mincing air with someone's sword. Ariel's a travel agent in real life. During read-through, four weeks back at Conway's house, he'd draped an arm 'round Caliban and offered his interpretation of their characters. "We're kinda brothers, don't you think? Slave and spirit, frick and frack. Twin freaks of man's oppression, see?" Vernon can't tell whether Ariel is gay or merely artsy.

The other spirits form their own society. They squeal and hop in place around the Coke machine. Two of the older kids live in his same apartment complex. They think it's funny Vernon's in the show. Now when they see him at the pool they call him "Mr. Mooncalf." He tries hard to avoid them. They break his concentration; they blunt his sense of sexiness and danger.

Conway's coming over. He lays an arm across Cal's furry shoulder. "Monster lad! Great show so far! Let's keep the pace way up tonight, okay?" He points his showman's finger skyward. Caliban's already felt the cooling of the air, the shift in wind. "It's already pouring down to Stoneypike. Second half will be a race against the rain. So tempo up. Better spread the word."

He'd like to wish Miranda luck, tell her how much he likes the way she says, "O brave new world" in that last scene, as if she really feels it. But he can see she's busy, holding hands with Ferdinand, that high school boy. They're practicing the dance they do together in Act IV. (The dance is Conway's substitute for all that junk with Juno and the other gods, come down to bless the royal kids.) Watching, Caliban recalls the way her fingers felt upon his neck, behind his ears, an hour and a half ago when she was rubbing in his monster's stain. And at the party after Friday's show, she offered him a bite of her roast beef. For maybe half an hour she sat close to him on Conway's couch, soliciting his thoughts about her future major as a transfer student (journalism, theatre, or pre-law?). She asked him if he ever played b-ball in college. The women in the cast, she whispered in his ear, have voted. Ariel and Caliban have tied for cutest buns. In what way should he build upon these small flirtations, these intimacies? Tonight's the final show. This fall she'll be a junior at Virginia Wesleyan.

Vernon had stood with others in the high school gym, reading bits of dialogue for Prospero and Caliban, Antonio, Francisco and the Boatswain. Conway LaRue seemed friendlier than usual. When she wasn't reading for Miranda, Brandi Lockhart sometimes perched beside him on the bleacher, sharing inside info. Her long black hair was like a curtain or a cave, her animated face--uncovered when she flopped her tresses to the side--a sort of shining, hidden hearth. "LaRue's a little worried about making cast," she whispered. "His is, you know, the last show of the season and Oklahoma's snatched a lot of regulars. The musicals are like that."

No wonder then it seemed a little strange how Conway tried to "sell" Vernon the part the night he called. "Your height, your husky voice. I need you for the monster, man. I've got a high school kid for Ferdinand, Marv Johnson makes a great Antonio. So how about it? Caliban! A few less lines than Prospero, but what a kick. You get to be a wild man, Vern. You get to beat your chest and howl. Cuss other folks in perfect meter. Just between the two of us, Prospero comes off as a tight-ass, right? Look how poor Gonzalo's made to suffer with the rest. Prospero's just, deep down, this vengeance-happy despot. Then it's like, who knows, he gets Alzheimer's at the end, forgiving all the shit that's gone before. At any rate, Bill Shiflett's got the perfect beard for Prospero. You see him last year in The Man Who Came? Okay then, Vernon. Vern my man. How about it? Caliban!"

Ironically, for all the win-win look of it, he almost didn't want the part once he'd heard Conway's pep talk. Conway made the monster out to be a clown, some kind of hairy jungle dork. Was that the sort of role he fit? Could it be possible that this is how the other teachers, his Dean, his ex, maybe even students, think of him? Nonetheless. He said okay. A part of him just feared he might look foolish backing out. After all, he had auditioned. He is thirty-nine years old, newly divorced. It's summer time. He's been invited to portray a would-be rapist, a Renaissance Neanderthal. Picked specially by Conway and--it even seems--by Brandi Lockhart. It's not that theatre folk are libertines, Vernon knows that in his heart. But between his Mama's death, the break-up of his marriage, and now his tenure application, part of him is crusting over. He needs somebody who will grab and shake him, help him feel joy's pain in hidden places. He's taken on a couple roles successfully: Howie Newsom, that unremarkable milkman of Our Town, the college show in which Brandi played the lead. He'd pull an invisible horse behind him, what the hell. He'd even paste fake fur upon his hands and feet. Good sport, team player, he'd pay whatever dues love might demand.

And in just a couple weeks he'd grown much closer to the part, to Caliban, the moon calf. Stretched out beside the pool at his apartment complex, sipping beer and studying his lines, he tried to get a fix on Caliban's true character, his motivation and his geist. Conway LaRue was right, he figured. Caliban would be the perfect part. The ultimate lone wolf. A mean and dangerous dude. (At random moments, guilty in his leisure, he practiced framing catchy titles for the summer monograph he hoped to somehow find the time to pen and tuck away among his tenure stuff: Caliban: Insult as Topos . . . "This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine": Tech Writing as the Bastard Child of Language Arts. ) And so what if Piney Woods chose to reject him, after all? He'd kept his light--the one his mother praised him for, the one his dissertation doc fanned forth--under a basket here so long it had, he reckoned, almost flickered out. Maybe it was time he looked for greener pastures anyway.

By mid-July, rehearsing nightly, Vernon felt the part speak out to him in unexpected ways. It sucked from buried reservoirs of randiness, of bitterness and ire, called forth a love of language that he'd managed to repress those long, dry years of teaching precis-writing, business English. Plus Conway wanted him to grow his whiskers out. Vernon's stubble had a reddish tint. Rubbing it, he kind of liked the scratchy feel. Vernon thought he might just grow it out for fall, a full-fledged beard. Let Dean Costello and his colleagues in the Language Arts do double-takes, maybe he'll send Lydia and Buck Arnold his own comp tickets to the show, there's sides to him folks haven't seen before. Vernon thought he might be going through a metamorphosis. Caliban, he came to see, was Esau tricked of his birthright. He was Grendel, he was Kong, one of the mighty losers who leave a strong impression; a tragic hunk who--on any island Vernon knew--would mist the ladies' eyes. As opening night approached, he sometimes fantasized how Lydia, his ex, sans her sandal-wearing beau Buck Arnold, would sit enraptured through the play. Then afterwards, her wet eyes gazing up at him, she’d stutter her apology. Vern, I didn’t know how much. . . I never recognized . . . I wish. . . I mean I’m sorry . . . Besides, just look how willing Brandi Lockhart was to lead him down the secret, pine needled path that led the actors exiting SR through groves of trees, out along a farmer's fence line, then back to stage, SL. Early on, she'd shared with him some warm-ups and tongue-twisters that she'd learned in Conway's oral interp classes. "Tin-tops-and-tent-tops-and-ten-dented-tent-tops," they had chanted together, their lips exaggerating the words' precise articulation. That first muggy night of tech rehearsal, he'd let her use his own insect repellent on her neck and arms. And opening night, backstage, when all the hugs, the break-a-legs were getting passed around, she'd stood on tip-toe to embrace him, gingerly, so's not to muss his monster garb.

The lights have flashed. The intermission's over. Trinculo gives Caliban a victory sign. "Beach-ward ho, my hairy fish!"

"You betcha," Vernon says, and lumbers on alone into the trees, waiting for II.ii where he will play the fool and plot his master's murder. The frogs are singing loud tonight. They help to mask his footfall. Crossing near the parking lot he hears a woman's quiet laugh, so close it startles him. And for a second, he enjoys a fantasy of run-away: loping like some strong, dark spirit through the woods, away from stage, away from school and town. Lydia, Buck Arnold, Mama, Dean Costello, his shabby bachelor's den, secret disappointments and ambitions reduced to shades of memory. Ban, ban, Ca-Caliban, has a new master. Get a new man. For the first time this summer he feels a hint of autumn's presence just a couple weeks away.

On stage, beneath the burlap sack, cringing from the drunken clowns, he tries to separate the tape-recorded thunder from the real. There's never been a problem with his lines, but still, tonight, somehow distracted, Caliban drops comic bits with Trinculo. Stephano's wine, which trickles down his bare brown chest, feels icier than usual. Thankfully, he's back in character again, able to lose himself in servitude when he delivers his "I-prithee let-me-bring-thee-where-crabs-grow,-and-I-with-my-long-nails-will-dig-thee-pignuts" speech. But then he feels a couple drops of moisture on his head, and as he starts his freedom chant to lead the actors off, his voice takes on a strain and ratchet in his throat.

By the middle of Act III the rain pours down in earnest. Although some members of the audience have brought umbrellas, the house has been reduced by half. Gonzalo stumbles on the rain-slicked stage. From where he huddles in the woods (it's really not so wet beneath the pines), Caliban hears raindrops bullet the tin roof over the actors’ green room. Artie Lester in the treehouse light booth overhead is hissing through his headset, "Conway, would you please for christ's sake call the show?" So this is how it ends. Without the drama's denouement, there's no forgiveness, no reconciliation between Duke and brother. There won't be any curtain call, no post-show kiss from Brandi Lockhart in the woods. They'll even come to strike the set another night, half-force and in civilian dress.

Where is Miranda now? He crouches, squints against the rain, tries hard to pick her out among the scurrying, bent figures. Although he hasn't changed his clothes, he trots out to the meadow where the cast and crew are asked to park. He lopes along the line of cars. Some honk, some blind him as they switch their headlights on. He sees Miranda's Cougar there, but empty. So he crouches down beside his own Plymouth Reliant (locked), and waits for her. He runs whatever lines remain to him, the ones he'll never get to say. “Do that good mischief which will make this island thine own forever, and I, thy Caliban, for aye thy foot-licker," and "We shall lose our time and all be turned to barnacles, or to apes with foreheads villainous low." Hopelessly he conjures her. Her, or is it Lydia? Which woman does he picture in his rocky lair, her island shift stuck wet against her body, her hair a long black cord that chokes his heart? He feels his scaly snout collapse upon his face.

"Hey Vernon, you okay?" It's Stephano, dressed in jeans and shirt. He holds a dripping program up against his forehead, tries to keep his glasses somewhat clear. "You better change your clothes!"

"Yeah, right," he answers. "Anybody left?"

"A few. Art and Brian. Jill, Delores. . . Hey, Mrs. Arbogast, the makeup lady, she was hoping you could give two little nymphs a lift. Dude, are you okay?"

"Yeah, yeah. You seen Miranda?" He tries to ask it calmly, even though he almost has to shout, even though the wind is rattling the bones against his chest.

"Who, Brandi? She and Conway they flew off together, right quick soon as the rain got bad. Shit, it's wet!" Stephano gives a final wave and puddle jumps to his Ford pickup some yards down. Vernon's skimpy costume is soaked through. Struck suddenly by someone's headlight, Vernon wonders how he looks to this new audience. And in those seconds that he contemplates the picture he must make, it suddenly occurs to him-- ex machina, like Prospero's own thunderbolt--his tenure's in the bag. He feels some of the same calm certainty about his future stretch of bachelorhood, his lack of real advancement much beyond the life he's living now. He'll never be a Prospero, he'll never see the big design or know the magic words but plug along regardless, win-win in his own way. Is this what Lydia rejected? Are these the very qualities that Conway recognized in him? And Dean Costello, too? A passion for mere competence? A secret comfort with factotumship and mediocrity?

The play is over, time to flee the forest and the storm. His hair lies thin and flat against his monster skull. (At least the play's lush poetry is safe inside.) A line of cars that wait to leave the meadow wash him in their light. A droopy mess of feather, flesh, and bone, he shakes an angry fist and scowls. Then before he turns and slips and lurches back toward the shelter where those kiddies wait for him, their ride to town, Vernon shuts his eyes against the rain and howls.

“I want to taste black pork again,” Big Pop said. “Congo cut. Nigger meat. I want to feel big.” Big Pop’s mouth slid down his grandson’s ear and he kissed the boy deep on his neck, on the trail of hair the barber shaved every other Thursday. Branch nudged the old man away. Then he reached down and squeezed his grandfather’s hand.

“What you whispering, Big Pop?” Ruby-Anne asked. She sat in the backseat, working her needles through a baby sweater. The piece had just taken the shape of an arm, and she knitted it steady, nodding her head as she counted stitches, only looking down when it was time to cross over. She was fifteen years old.

Branch squeezed his grandfather’s hand tighter, warning him. “Nothing,” Branch said. “Big Pop ain’t saying nothing.”

“You telling him something about me, Big Pop?” she asked.

“Just the truth,” Big Pop said. “Better not let a girl like you slip away. Not many can knit and throw a baseball, both.”

Branch turned the ignition, steered the car onto 34, toward Faircloth.

“That doctor give you some kind of medicine?” Branch said. “You’re talking crazy, Big Pop.”

Ruby-Anne glanced down, checked her needles, then looked up at the white men in the seat in front of her.

“He’s worried about my feelings, Big Pop. He thinks he’s protecting me.”

“Protecting hisself,” Big Pop said. “You’re the one who’s the kid, Branch.”

“I know what I am,” Branch said. “And I know what she is. I know both of those things.”

Three times in the week previous, Branch found notes in his mailbox. They were written on the stationery of a local college. The notes all said about the same thing. “Those days are history, asshole. No more white men chasing down black girls just because they can. There are laws now, and there are people who will make sure those laws get enforced, until assholes and statutory rapists like you are history.”

Three letters, on the cream-colored college stationery, written in purple ink with a woman’s careful hand. No signature, but he knew they were from Lanie Laurence, the woman professor who’d bought the Meyers place up the hill. She was the owner, also, of the two old sharecropper cabins down the hill, the one that Big Pop and Branch rented, and the one that Ruby-Anne and her mother Marie Claire lived in. Nobody knew where the professor was from, so people said she was from New York City. Branch didn’t touch Ruby-Anne, of course, but not because of the notes. He had other reasons for that.

Six months ago, when he came home from that one awful season in Davenport, Iowa, Branch was ashamed to face Big Pop and Marie Claire. He drove up to the cabins, and he sat in the driver’s seat of his Ford Tempo, listening to the Mellencamp song on the radio. Marie Claire was over to his left, drinking lemonade at the picnic table behind her cabin. And Big Pop was to his right, chewing on a sandwich. After a while, Marie Claire got up from her table and walked over to Big Pop and gave him her hand. Big Pop took it, and the old white man and the middle-aged black woman walked over together toward him. Branch rolled down his window. He knew he had disappointed them twice, by not being a better pitcher than he was, and by not taking the team’s offer to bring him the next year. They had hopes for him, Marie Claire and Big Pop, both, and Branch had broken those hopes. Big Pop surprised him by leaning through the window and kissing him on the lips, something Big Pop had never done before.

“It’s my boy,” Big Pop said. “Couldn’t stay away from home cooking for long.”

“Look at you,” Marie Claire said. “You grew up and got sad on us.” She kissed him on the cheek, then led Big Pop back to his picnic table. Branch was so relieved that he didn’t even notice how slowly Big Pop was walking. He got his suitcases from the trunk.

Ruby-Anne pretended to be mad at him.

“And who are you supposed to be?” she said. Ruby-Anne was taller, up to his chin. That was the first thing that told him she had changed.

“Well, I ain’t Nolan Ryan.”

“Don’t you leave me no more. I don’t like it one bit.”

Branch used to hug her every night, before bed, the way a brother would. But now he was frightened to touch her. He looked down at the glove in her hand.

“Want to throw?” he said.

“Think you can still catch me? After all that time sitting on the bench in Davenport, Iowa?” Ruby-Anne could throw much harder now than she could four months earlier. That was another difference.

On Tuesday, Big Pop wanted to go out to eat after his doctor visit. But he couldn’t keep anything down, just brushed his food across the plate. The waitress wrapped his steak in aluminum foil.

“You don’t usually leave anything for the dogs, Mr. Russell,” she said.

Big Pop looked toward the women’s bathroom. Ruby-Anne was in there, washing up.

“I ain’t hungry for this white food,” he whispered. “I’m hungry for black pork. Nigger meat.”

The waitress dropped the bag on the table. “I don’t think that’s on our menu.”

Branch gave money to the waitress, so she’d go away.

“Stop that big talking,” Branch said. “Before you hurt somebody, saying something you don’t mean.”

Big Pop drew his tongue across his lip. “But I want to feel big,” he said.

The whole drive home, Branch talked, to keep Big Pop quiet, to protect Ruby-Anne from hearing something she shouldn’t have to hear.

Big Pop was born across the river, in Kentucky. His parents died from the flu when he was four years old, both of them, and his uncle and aunt took him in. They lived in a few cabins on one side of a tobacco plantation, with some other white hands. The colored lived on the other side of the fields. Though they all worked the same damn tobacco plants, they kept to themselves, the white and the colored. One spring when he was a teenager, Big Pop’s uncle got tired of feeding him, drove him across the river to Faircloth, Ohio, and got him a job sweeping floors at the sporting goods store, the same one where Branch worked now, selling equipment to high school teams.

That wasn’t the story Big Pop told, though. This was the story he told. The Christmas he was fifteen, just before his family sent him to Ohio, the colored families dug a big pit and dropped rocks in boiling water and lifted them out with tongs and carried them to the pit. Then they piled wood and set it to fire. When it was burned to ashes, the colored lay the pork shoulder on top and then they buried the whole mess. Two of the men standing guard over it, and the smoke rising up through the fissures in the ground. When they dug it up, late the next day, a woman and a girl carried over a plateful to Big Pop’s uncle.

“For the holiday,” the mother said. Big Pop pinched off a piece and stuck it in his mouth. The grease coated his tongue. It was like eating oil and smoke.

But his uncle gave the colored the back of his hand, told them to stay where they belonged. “We folks can provide for ourselves,” he said.

As the woman and her daughter walked away, Big Pop’s uncle said, “Damn niggers. Let their toe in, and they’ll stick their whole damn foot. But you didn’t say no, did you, boy?”

The taste in his mouth, the sight of them walking away, those were things Big Pop talked about. But only late at night, after Ruby-Anne had gone back to her mother’s house.

Tuesday evening, Ruby-Anne came over to watch the television with Big Pop. Big Pop was just like ever, whistling at the pretty girls on the television, sassing back to the “boss men.” But Branch couldn’t relax around his grandfather. He got his glove, went outside to the backstop he and Big Pop put up years ago. They painted the strike zone with yellow road paint they got from the state highway crew. Nailed sponges to the front, in the strike zone, so a strike sounded different than a ball. Branch took a ball from the bucket, threw it, waited for the wood to tell him what he had thrown. A strike made a soft thump.

Marie Claire carried her pitcher of lemonade out from her house to the picnic table. “Kick high,” she hollered, her voice hoarse from screaming. After a few weeks of softball, she’d be reduced to whispering. Even in the dark, Marie Claire could tell when Branch threw lazy. He went over, sat down across the table from her. Marie Claire poured lemonade into the glass she brought out for him. “It’s strong tonight,” she said. “Had to be, the way those damn fool girls practiced.”

The lemonade was spiked, always had been, though Branch did not know it when he was in high school. Marie Claire liked to talk about her people, who worked the shipyards in Chester, Pennsylvania. She went through the college here on softball scholarship and then she got pregnant with Ruby-Anne and took a job coaching softball at Faircloth High, and she had never left. “Which is all right,” she’d say. “Cause Chester, Pennsylvania, sounds better in pictures than it does in living color. I’ll tell you that.”

“Season starts Saturday,” Branch said.

“Not that we’re ready for it.” Marie Claire tapped a cigarette from her pack and lit it. “Least I got Ruby-Anne. She’ll be ready. Those other girls nothing but fools. Children.”

“Ruby-Anne’s arm is livelier than a fucking firecracker,” Branch said. “She’s going to make them little high school girls look stupid.”

“A fucking firecracker.” She smiled around her cigarette. “Didn’t talk that way before you went to Davenport, Iowa.”

Liquor, yes, but she wouldn’t let him touch her cigarettes.

“It was Ruby-Anne’s father got me started, and look now, he ain’t around but the Marlboros still are.” She puffed, the red ring at the tip flickering and then quieting down.

“He was a fast-foot man. In your door and then out the window. He probably don’t even smoke Marlboros no more. He probably isn’t even faithful to his habits.” She poured him another class of lemonade. Before, in high school, she used to lecture him at night, but now she talked story to him, like he was her friend.

“Me,” she said. “I’ve always been a faithful one. Fall in love once and stick with it.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the wooden table. “And Ruby-Anne’s the same way. Any fool can see that.”

The lemonade caught deep in Branch’s throat and started him coughing. Marie Claire slapped him on the back. Ruby-Anne came out of Big Pop’s house to check on the noise.

“He need mouth to mouth?” she said.

“I know you need to give it to him.” Marie Claire slapped Branch’s wrist. “Look, you’re making him blush, and you just a little girl.”

Ruby-Anne went back inside Big Pop’s house to watch the television. Branch stayed outside with Marie Claire. The kids passed back and forth between the two homes all the time, but Big Pop and Marie Claire only went inside each other’s house twice a year, to Marie Claire’s at Thanksgiving and to Big Pop’s at Christmas.

On Wednesday, Marie Claire kicked the varsity out of practice, and hollered at the jayvee, who at least would listen. Ruby-Anne called Branch at the sporting goods store, and he drove over to pick her up as soon as he finished. The other varsity girls were standing on the sidewalk, giggling. “That’s Ruby-Anne’s boyfriend,” one of the girls said. “He’s got a car.”

Big Pop was asleep, so the two of them were alone, unless that professor Laurence was staring down the hill at them. From the second-floor windows, that professor could probably see the whole compound, their little lives opened before her like one of her books.

Ruby-Anne waited for him to open her door. That was something else that had changed when he came back from Davenport, Iowa. She expected to be treated like a lady.

“Let’s go for a stroll,” Branch said. Being alone with her made him nervous, these days.

They walked the old furrow, left over from the corn days. Now that the lady professor didn’t farm it, the land was mostly heather and ragweed. They went far into the fields, all the way to Red Creek. There, Branch stepped onto the flat rock in the middle of the stream and turned back and gave her his hand. Ruby-Anne didn’t let go, even when they reached the other side. Her fingers were strong, from all the baseball they had thrown. In season, he made her stick to softball, since there wasn’t any baseball for girls, once you got to high school.

“You worried about falling?” he said. “That why you holding so tight?”

“Maybe I already fell.”

“You shouldn’t talk like that.”

“You should let me kiss you, Branch. It wouldn’t hurt you none. You should want to make other people happy.”

“I ain’t going to make you happy. I’m going make you sad, Ruby-Anne.”

“You’re just making yourself sad right now, Branch. Not letting yourself kiss this black woman who loves you.”

“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to shake your hand loose.”

“I’ll just catch hold again. You know I got strong fingers.”

But she stopped talking about kissing him. On their way back, Ruby-Anne described the game coming up against Consolidated. The way she would pitch the first inning.

“Think, don’t just throw,” he said. “That was my problem. I was an arm, not a head.”

“You ain’t going to have no problems, Branch.” She lifted his hand to her lips and kissed his index finger once, quickly.

“Be careful but don’t walk nobody. Throw strikes but not too good ones.”

He let her hold his hand the rest of the way home. The truth was he didn’t mind holding hands with her. The truth was he didn’t mind anything he did with her. It was just that she had become pushy, these last few months, and he feared the next things coming, when they might do something he couldn’t ever take back. He had come home from that Iowa baseball team because he liked his old life, not so he could mess it up. Didn’t he have enough to worry about, with Big Pop acting so strange? As they came out from the fields, Branch shook her hand free, and this time she didn’t fight him.

Wednesday night, Branch found a new note in the mailbox. An article about Neanderthals copied from the Encyclopedia Britannica. The professor Lanie Laurence had written two sentences across the bottom, with her purple pen.

“See any creatures like that anymore? They’re extinct, and you will be too if you don’t keep your hands off that poor girl.”

The picture showed a hunched-over man with a scraggly beard. Branch had seen a hundred men who looked like that in the stands of his baseball games, here and in Iowa, both. He threw the paper into the trash can.

Big Pop could snore like a champ. He’d lie on his back, twitching his head as the breath tore through his throat and the back of his mouth. Sometimes it got so bad that Branch would walk out to the couch, where Big Pop slept, and punch him on the arm to quiet him. Big Pop never got angry. He’d rub his arm and apologize. “I’ll stop it, I promise.” Of course he didn’t. But Branch was used to it. Most days it didn’t bother him.

Late Wednesday night, Branch woke up to silence. No snoring. He jumped out of bed naked and ran to the living room. He was scared without admitting why. But the couch was empty, the blankets in a heap on the carpet. The bathroom was empty, and the kitchen, too. He put on his shorts and walked outside.

“Big Pop?” The night was dark and he walked to the edge of the yard, up past the pitcher’s mound, and he called again. Marie Claire came out from her house.

“Is Big Pop over with you?” Branch asked.

“Course he isn’t.”

“Ruby-Anne sleep?”

“She ain’t on the telephone, and she ain’t throwing softball, and she ain’t chasing you, apparently, so sleep must be about the only option left.” Marie Claire turned on the light. She was wearing her shimmering green sweat suit, the one she wore all day at school. “Let’s go find him.” Marie Claire zipped up her jacket.

They walked up the road toward the Meyers house, where Big Pop was standing on the porch, pounding on the door. Big Pop had been friendly with Mrs. Meyers, before she died, but he had not been up to the house since that professor Lanie Laurence bought it.

“I just want some black pork, Mrs. Meyers,” he said. “Nigger meat. I remember you used to get some.”

From inside, a woman’s voice, Professor Laurence, called out to him. “You go away, right now. I won’t have any man talking that way around me. You understand?”

Branch hollered his grandfather’s name. Big Pop didn’t seem surprised to see him.

“Sometimes Mrs. Meyers used to come back from her cousins in Kentucky and bring some with them,” Big Pop said to Branch. “Mrs. Meyers would always save me a little, but now she won’t give me none.”

“Miss Marie Claire’s with me,” he said.

Big Pop slouched down, stuffed his hands into his pockets.

“Hi, there, honey,” he said. Marie Claire slid her hand through his elbow, leading him to the steps.

“Why don’t we take you home?” she said.

“Mrs. Turner?” It was Professor Laurence, from inside. “You alright out there? I’m already calling the police. There are laws against racism in this country.”

“I don’t need no protection from Russell here,” she said. “He’s just confused.”

“I’d call it bigotry.” Professor Laurence opened the door. She was a thin, dark-haired woman with nervous eyes and the most enormous red-framed glasses. “Mrs. Turner, I need to tell the police about the way his grandson is chasing your daughter. I saw him kissing her down in the field today.”

“I bet she was kissing him back,” Marie Claire said. “If I know my daughter.”

Marie Claire steered Big Pop down the steps. The old man had been thinking deeply, and finally he said, “That Mrs. Meyers ain’t look the same, is she?”

“No, she doesn’t,” Marie Claire said.

“I didn’t never kiss her,” Branch said to Marie Claire. “I did hold her hand a little, cause she wanted to, but I didn’t let her kiss me.”

“You say it like it makes a difference,” Marie Claire said. She led Big Pop down the steps, and they walked down the hillside to their cabins.

Thursday evening, Big Pop forked the roast beef into the trash. He hadn’t eaten anything solid since his appointment at the clinic.

“You got to eat,” Branch said. “You were the one said you wanted to be big.”

“Whyn’t you throw the ball again?” Big Pop said. “It’d make me feel a little lighter, watching you.”

Branch took the plate from his grandfather and ran it under the faucet. He waited for the water to take the last of the gravy, and then he wiped the plate with the sponge.

“I’m a catcher, these days,” Branch said. “It’s Ruby-Anne who’s got the games ahead of her.”

“I been knowing that. I just know I want to see you again. You threw the ball so beautiful. Like it sprouted from your fingers.”

“They didn’t think so in Davenport, Iowa.” His first two weeks there, Branch started three times. Lost all three. And then didn’t pitch again for two months. No one would tell him why he was stuck on the bench. At the end of the season, they offered him another year, since he was a lefty, to see if he could fill out, grow into his arm. But he didn’t want to go back. He wanted to be nowhere near that life again.

“They don’t know shit in Davenport, Iowa,” Big Pop said. “I know what I saw.”

So Branch got the glove from the hook by the door and walked out to the mound. There was a bucket of balls in the kitchen, lumpy and scuffed from use. Why warm up? No reason to save his arm. He kicked his leg high, Dizzy Dean-style, the way Big Pop taught him and then he let himself fall into the pitch, his toe diving toward the plate. The coaches at Davenport wanted to shorten his motion, take a little off the fastball, gain some on the control. Be a pitcher, not a thrower. But he loved to throw. He threw fastball, fastball, fastball. Who needed a curve in the dark? Who needed anything except the thump of the ball striking the sponges? Sometimes he missed low, just so he could hear the crack when it landed outside the strike zone, ball on wood.

“Look at my boy,” Big Pop said. “Better than any symphony I ever heard.”

Big Pop was sitting on the picnic table in back of their house, resting his hands on his belly. Across the driveway, Marie Claire was watching from her table. Ruby-Anne looked out from her window; she was talking on the telephone, nodding her head as she watched Branch throw. He leaned back again, hesitating the way Luis Tiant used to do in the Saturday afternoon games they showed on the television. He held himself, his knee tucked against his stomach, waiting until he felt like pitching. No umps here, no coaches, nothing but his world. Then he kicked his leg up high and began to fall forward. The ball thumped against the backstop.

“Beautiful,” Big Pop said.

“Kick high,” Marie Claire said. “An inch up there makes the whole difference.”

“He looked good to me, honey.”

“He did look good. I’m just saying he needs to look great. Cause he can, when he remembers.”

Big Pop loving Branch the way he was, Marie Claire pushing him to be better. The same as it had been before, when he was still in high school and had the draft ahead of him and didn’t know anything at all about Davenport, Iowa. After a while, Ruby-Anne came out, and she turned on the headlights of the cars so they could see, and squatted to catch for him.

“Unhittable is what that is,” Ruby-Anne said.

“Oh, it’s hittable,” he said. “Those bastards from Cedar Rapids hit it like it was on a tee.”

“I don’t care nothing about Cedar Rapids,” she said. “That is a first-class fastball.”

After a few pitches, he got a softball, and he warmed her up slow. Tossing from close in, backing her off as her arm woke. Twenty, thirty minutes of soft tossing before he let her unleash. She had the game in two days, and he didn’t intend to interfere with that. She was the best softball pitcher anybody in the county had ever seen, dismissing batters like insults.

“Ain’t nobody in Davenport or Cedar Rapids, either one, can hit that ball,” he said. “I’ll tell you that.”

“That’s cause softball’s for girls.”

“And you’re a girl. Perfect fit.”

Ruby-Anne whipped her arm and fired. The pitch rode a little high, and Branch was slow raising his glove. The ball tipped off the glove’s edge and smacked him on the forehead. Actually, it didn’t hurt; it just made him feel funny. Branch rolled backward onto the dirt and lay flat, the sky dark and open above him, until Ruby-Anne’s face filled it. She knelt over him, running her fingers across his cheek.

“I killed him,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

He blinked his eyes. “No, you didn’t. Not yet.”

Ruby-Anne bent down to kiss him. Branch felt it without feeling like it was happening to him. He lay there and let it happen. She held her tongue on his lip, then she pulled away.

“I was just checking his breath,” she said. “He ain’t dead, yet.”

“That goes for all of us,” Marie Claire said, and Big Pop laughed. If they saw the kiss, they didn’t say anything.

Friday morning, Branch found a folded sheet of paper under his windshield wiper. A pen-and-ink drawing of a bird and above it the words “Carolina Parakeet.” The professor—he recognized the tight curves of her vowels—wrote beneath it, “They used to be everywhere, and they used to think they were beautiful, and now they’re gone. Good-looking things go away, and so will you if you keep climbing on top of that girl. You’re history.”

Branch crumpled the paper into his pocket. He never thought of himself as good-looking, particularly. When he was pitching on the mound, maybe, but not just standing around in his T-shirt and his Wranglers. In regular clothes, he looked just like everybody else.

Friday night, Ruby-Anne tossed a few slow ones to Branch, just to calm herself. Then she said she needed to rest up for the next day. Branch placed her glove in the passenger seat of his car, so she wouldn’t leave it behind in the morning. Game days, Ruby-Anne was so nervous she’d forget anything. Ruby-Anne followed him to the car. When he turned around, she was so close he could smell her, swampy from sweat. A year ago, her sweat didn’t stink. She was changing.

“Give me a kiss for luck?” she said.

“I can’t.” He could feel Professor Laurence’s crazy, nervous eyes reading him the way a psychic read a palm. Seeing his little acts and predicting his future. He hadn’t told anybody about those notes.

“I know you want to.”

“Once you can’t, you don’t even ask if you want to.”

Ruby-Anne bit her bottom lip under her teeth. A year ago, before he left for Iowa, all her facial expressions had been big. Happiness and fury and hurt and curiosity and confusion. But now, she had a whole slew of stifled looks, masking her feelings. Like she had gone from comedy to drama in just those few months he was gone. During the months he was in Davenport, Iowa, Ruby-Anne wrote him a postcard almost every day. The cards didn’t say much, but beneath her signature she’d draw a circle and write there the number of days left until he came home. Branch wrote her back, every Sunday, and he signed his letters “love,” even though that wasn’t exactly what he meant.

“I’ve got to have my luck,” Ruby-Anne said. “So you’re either going to have to kiss me now or in the morning, at the ball field, in front of everybody. If that’s what you’d rather, that’s your choice, though.”

Her forehead was even to his chin, a final growth spurt that happened while he was gone, and that warned of what came next, her body swelling and thickening and curving out of its childhood. He bent down to kiss her on the forehead. She tilted her head into him, met his lips with her own.

“Good luck,” he said.

“I don’t need luck, you big dummy.”

After Branch put Big Pop to bed, he sat down with Marie Claire at her picnic table. Behind her, the house was dark. Right now, Ruby-Anne was knitting in her room, waiting for the sleep to take her. Marie Claire poured a glass of lemonade for him. The first sip made him wince. Even stronger than usual.

“You nervous about tomorrow?” he said. Sometimes, Marie Claire walked the fields before games, blowing her whistle at the birds, trying to calm herself.

“It’s not like she’s going to lose,” she said. “I mean, let’s talk straight here. No girl can hit Ruby-Anne from forty-five feet. It’s a travesty.”

Branch drank from the lemonade. When he coughed, she reached over and slapped his back. Her polyester warm-up suit whistled as she swung her arm.

“Russell looks bad,” she said. He coughed again. “You going to tell your mother?”

“Why?”

“It’s her father.”

“She’ll find out someday,” he said. “I wouldn’t even know where to start looking, anymore.”

“You got that Christmas card.”

“Two years ago, now.”

Marie Claire drummed her fingers against the picnic table. Branch watched them, and then, without knowing exactly why, he reached out and put his hand over hers. She slipped her hand over the top of his. Squeezed once and let go.

“When I was your age, I used to feel like the only thing that could happen to the world was for it to get better,” she said. “Not the globe world, the one on the news, but my world. Like if I threw everything up in the air, it’d come down in the right order. In a perfect row. Better than it had been before. Then she happened.” She pointed her thumb behind her, at the house, at Ruby-Anne’s room.

“Now I sit out here, and I just thank God that things haven’t got any worse.” She lifted the cup and drank from it. “You know what I mean. Now, you do. A year ago, before Iowa, you didn’t.”

Branch was proud to be talked to this way, by Marie Claire. He didn’t feel like she’d rejected him; he felt like she’d understood what he really wanted.

“The world can break,” she said. “It can land on the ground and bust into a million pieces. Maybe all we can do is cradle it in our arms and try not to drop it. Is that so bad?”

“I don’t think so.”

She pointed her thumb behind her, again.

“And, Branch, what if that girl’s love for you is big as she thinks it is?”

“It’s a crush, is all.”

“She’s a mix of girl and woman. The phone calls and the stupid torn blue jeans, those are girl things, right? And the knitting and the serious way she takes to the pitching now, like it’s a duty, those are woman things, aren’t they? What if her love for you isn’t a girl thing at all? What if it’s the first rock of her woman, cracking through the little surface of her girl? What if it’s the most real and lasting thing about her?”

“Then it’s too bad she got it too young to do anything about.”

“The hell with everybody else,” she said.

Across the driveway, they heard a cough, a weak, giving sound, and then the back door opened, and Big Pop walked out. He was wearing an old porkpie hat, a white undershirt, and some blue gym shorts he must have found in Branch’s dresser.

“You best go inside, Marie Claire. Big Pop’s not right. He’s talking crazy.”

This time, she reached out to squeeze his hand. “Branch,” she said. “You don’t have to worry none about protecting me.”

Big Pop walked slowly across the driveway, bracing his fingers on the hoods of their cars. “Oh, me,” he said. “Oh, me.”

“You alright?” Branch said. Big Pop didn’t answer. He was staring at Marie Claire with an intensity that Branch had never seen in the old man. His mouth was raised to a pained smile, his eyes narrow and hard.

“I want black pork,” he said. “I want to go back to Kentucky and get me some of that nigger meat.”

“Big Pop,” Branch said. “Don’t say that to her. You love Miss Marie Claire.”

“But I want to feel big.” He coughed, and the force of it shook his cheeks and closed his eyes. He sat down at the picnic table.

“Russell?” Marie Claire said. “You alright in there? You recognize me? You recognize your boy here?”

“I’m so empty,” he said. “My stomach is burning itself up looking for food.”

“Shut up,” Branch said. Marie Claire tugged at Branch’s arm, pulling him into the kitchen. “I’m only shutting him up cause he’d want me to,” Branch said. “You know that isn’t who he is, not when he’s in his right mind.”

“It isn’t who he is,” Marie Claire said. “But he does mean it. Both things are true.”

At the sink, Marie Claire poured some water from the tap and gave it to Branch to drink. “He showed me his doctor’s letters,” she said.

“I never saw no letters.”

“He didn’t want you to worry. Made me promise not to say. But I wouldn’t be in no rush to get him to the hospital.”

“Cause he’s alright?”

Marie Claire shook her head, and he understood. He lifted himself onto the counter and sat there, staring at his toes. Branch had known all along, without admitting it.

“I want to do something for him,” she said. “I want to make him feel big.”

Branch tossed the remainder of the water into the sink.

“I want to fix him supper,” she said. “I want to let his mouth lead him back home. I ain’t got no pork. Just chicken. But it isn’t the color of the meat he’s worried about.”

“I should do it. All he’s done for me.”

“What you should do is get Ruby-Anne out from the house. She hadn’t ever seen me serve anybody before, and I don’t want her to now.”

“It’s a game night.”

“I thought you outgrew games,” Marie Claire said. At the kitchen door, she turned back to him.

“If I thought it was something Ruby-Anne could control. If I thought I could just stamp it down and have it go away, like the time she wanted to buy stickers, don’t you think I’d already have done it? It’s who she is, Branch.”

In her bedroom, Ruby-Anne was knitting in the dark; he heard her counting the stitches.

“You can sit down at the foot, if you think I’m going to bite,” she said. There had been times when he sat on her bed with her, but that had been a year ago, before Iowa.

“I want to get out of here a while. Just put on your shoes.”

“The game’s tomorrow.”

“I want you to come with me. You don’t want to come, that’s your call.”

Branch went into the kitchen. From the sink, he could see Big Pop at the picnic table, his elbows resting on the wood, his chin sitting on his hands, waiting like he had done a thousand times, at ballgames or in restaurants. Most of what people called parenting was just waiting, it seemed like, and waiting was something Big Pop could do as well as anybody. Was, in fact, something Big Pop could do much better than Branch’s own parents. And now Big Pop was waiting for something else, something Branch could not understand, or maybe even forgive. He closed his eyes.

Ruby-Anne’s fingers slid over his belly, coming from behind him.

“It’s just me,” she said.

He turned, into her, felt her milky night breath, sour and weak. They were standing like that when Marie Claire walked into the kitchen. She was carrying a bag of frozen chicken legs.

“This fool wants me to go for a walk on a game night,” Ruby-Anne said.

“And so do I,” Marie Claire said. Ruby-Anne looked out the window, where Big Pop was sitting at the picnic table. She thought a minute, then she took Branch’s hand, led him to the front door, where Big Pop would not see them. They went into the fields behind the houses, moving through the dark and overgrown land. After a while, Ruby-Anne slid her fingers into his hand, and he didn’t push her away. They were walking toward the creek, both of them, and they didn’t need to say so aloud. When they came to the fence, he ducked under, held the barbs up for her. The water dallied beneath them, and they took off their shoes and let their feet cool. Ruby-Anne was the first one to lie down, looking at the top branches of the trees. Branch didn’t lie down, though. He knew it was a silly difference, but he wanted to hold to it.

“Don’t you feel like all this has already happened?” she said.

“All what?”

“Us,” she said. “The things we’re going to do. I just feel like I can’t get too excited about whether we do them now or six months from now or a year. Because it’s like in my head, it’s already done, and I’m just waiting for our life here to catch up.”

Branch could also see the future, but it wasn’t the same one Ruby-Anne saw. There would be a note waiting for him. The college stationery, the purple ink, the tight vowels. What would that professor Lanie Laurence write? She had covered Neanderthals and Carolina Parakeets, and maybe now she would describe the dinosaurs or the dodo birds or all the other things that had once lived and now were extinct. Or maybe this time she would call the police.

“You don’t know what’s coming. You’re just a kid.”

“Not when I look at things like that, I’m not. I’m an old, old woman.” Ruby-Anne pulled him down to his back. Her fingers were strong, and he didn’t feel like resisting, much. “Don’t you ever feel like, on the mound, like you can see what you’re going to do three batters ahead. Before they’re even up to the plate? Like it’s done, already? Don’t you feel that?”

“I did,” he said. “When I pitched here. Out in Davenport, Iowa, I didn’t know the next pitch from Manuel Noriega.”

“I feel it,” she said. “I feel like the future’s already happened, and all I have to do is keep from messing it up.”

“It’s already done messed up,” he said. “You’ll go on off to college on your scholarship. You won’t need no backstops or picnic tables or pitching partners. You’ll be the best pitcher the Big Ten ever saw. You’ll be spreading your wings wide as the sky. That’s what I know.”

“Then you’ll come with me,” she said.

“You can love something and still not be able to keep it alive. You don’t know that yet.” Branch held out his left arm, his pitching arm. It wasn’t like the rest of his body. It was muscular, for one thing. And it had its own life, separate from his. It had been born and it grew and now it was dying, becoming just like the rest of him.

“Big Pop didn’t want no boy better than you,” Ruby-Anne said. “There isn’t nothing more you could do for that man.” Branch turned away from her. He had not been thinking of Big Pop, and that shamed him. “He made me promise to take care of you,” she said. “He’d told me you’d need somebody to protect you.”

She put her hand on his cheek, and he kissed her. At first he just wanted to keep her from saying anything, from hurting him any more. But then his own wants budded open inside of him, and he could feel the desire branching through his fingers, his toes, the back of his knees, the other places. A small popping sound slid from their lips. Ruby-Anne nodded, serious and old.

“And now every second’s big as a basket.” Ruby-Anne slid her fingers softly over his cheeks. Too solemn, trying too hard to hold the moment in her hands, as if a moment could be held. Branch rode his left hand up her back, lifting her body to him. He bit her lip, rubbed his teeth against her chin. He kissed her shoulder and tasted something on his tongue, something strange and dark and salty. Sliding down her neck, he sucked hard on her skin, until dried sweat coated his tongue, until he made her gasp.

She slides the door closed and switches on the light. Thinning, auburn hair, her father’s high, intelligent forehead, her mother’s wattle. Her insomniac’s blue eyes stare back at her from the mirror, wide and glassy. Horrified, she turns away, and there are her pills, on top of the toilet, on top of Norman’s latest issue of Success magazine. She lets out a tiny O as she fiddles with the cap. And under her breath, she curses the young, ambitious do-gooders in Ohio or wherever they are—“Damn them and their childproof lids,” she says. She composes a nasty letter in her head as she abandons the pills and climbs back into bed.

In five hours, Cliff’s plane will touch down and the weekend will be set in motion. The weekend of the unveiling of Daniel’s tombstone. She flexes her hands, and winces. A year ago, I opened the toughest bottles. A year ago, I went speed-walking around the neighborhood, she thinks. She shuts her eyes against the sight of her hands, and tries not to cry.

Ruth opens her eyes as the sun dips into the room and falls across the furniture. For a moment, she has no idea where she is.

“I feel claustrophobic,” she says to Norman, already awake. “Move the furniture back.”

“But, Ruth,” he says, drawing himself out of bed. “You said it made the room look bigger.”

“I never said any such thing,” she says.

She seems to remember thinking at one time the room needed to be opened up. Still, knowing this doesn’t account for much. She loses things somewhere between the last few seconds of day and the first seconds of sunlight.

“Are you all right?” Norman asks from the bathroom. “Do you want me to call Dr. Murphy?”

“I’m fine,” she says, slipping into her robe.

Her hands are barely moveable; her knees swollen like cantaloupe. Any other day, she might stay in bed but today this is impossible. She escapes into Daniel’s room to finish tidying it up.

When Daniel went away to New York, the Blums replaced the bed with a futon, one of those metal-framed numbers with an expensive mattress cover and throw pillows. They sold the teak desk and nightstand and bought a couple of filing cabinets. Against one wall is a bookcase, full of dusty cookbooks and even dustier home-repair manuals. For a while, Norman planned on adding an extension to the house but hasn’t gotten around to it. Something Ruth has had a hard time forgiving him for, since it would make living there more bearable. She hates their house, with its faux wood paneling and dark brown carpet. She’s tried over the years to talk Norman into moving but he simply shrugs her off.

“When your pension kicks in,” he usually says, “then we’ll think about it.”

Ruth teaches geometry to sophomores at the local high school. And though she loves the sense of order it brings to her rather disorderly life, she can’t imagine ever going back there. Since Daniel’s death, the thought of standing up in front of a classroom terrifies her. She has three long summer months to decide what to do. One more box to pack up and I’m done, she thinks, running a finger along a shelf devoted to books on grieving. Elaine gave them to her, when her own daughter died of leukemia, and said, “These really helped me through the worst of it.”

Out in the kitchen, Norman says, “Do you want me to come with you to the airport?”

The open pill bottle sits beside her bowl.

“No, I don’t,” she says, counting out three pills. “And while I’m gone, how about trimming the ivy away from the trees like you promised?”

Norman looks up at her, sprinkles a handful of cheddar cheese over his grits, and says, “Yes, dear.”

A year ago. A strange man on the other end of the telephone telling her in-between sobs the news about Daniel. The voice kept repeating her name, Ruth Blum, as though he weren’t sure he’d dialed the right number. Everything he said ended with a question mark so that even she felt he’d made a mistake. Hadn’t he?

Ruth still hasn’t gotten over the way she handled the news, as if it were happening to someone else entirely. She expected to react differently, to run through the house screaming, to chop off all her hair, to set fire to the backyard. But she isn’t this kind of woman. She’s more like her mother than she cares to admit.

She recalls her mother’s absolutely bizarre behavior after her father died of a massive coronary. For many months, she condemned her mother’s gunshot wedding. She refused to speak to her when she called; she made excuses not to visit. No wedding gift was sent, no note of kindness or congratulation.

She summed it up for Elaine: “Fifty-seven years of marriage, escaping Hitler, building a life together in America mean nothing to her. Well, it means something to me. Where is her loyalty, I ask you?”

Almost ten years ago, the cruelty of silence was a part of her youth. She regrets those months, wishes she could have seen past the loneliness, past the arbitrariness of marrying a man half her age. When she finally spoke to her mother again, things between them were strained. She didn’t recognize this other woman or what she was saying about her father and it frightened her.

“I loved your father,” her mother said, “but I never should’ve married him. Frank makes me feel like a teenager. We went dancing last night, Ruth. And then we stayed up to watch the sunrise. It was the most romantic evening I’ve ever had.”

“You’re in shock, mother,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“If this is shock, darling, then I’m loving it,” her mother replied.

Ruth imagined that beneath the glibness, the giddiness, lurked the mother she had always known. Teutonic, cold, brutal. They spoke every Sunday and each time they did, she expected the same thing—this other woman to emerge. But she never did.

Feelings haunt her, especially the feelings of not having done enough when her mother was alive. That if she’d been a better daughter, she might have made a better mother. This same principal she applies to Daniel as well. If I’d been a better mother, she thinks, he might still be alive.

Ruth grips the steering wheel tightly in her fingers. Everyone handles grief differently, she thinks, easing the window down to grab the short-term parking ticket. She hears her heart, like rain against glass. She catches her face in the rearview mirror and gasps. When she left the house, Ruth was sure she’d put on some makeup, a little lipstick at least. Now, the face staring back at her is blank as any note she might have found among Daniel’s possessions. If only he’d left a note, she thinks. There wasn’t any note, not even a goodbye.

At the gate, passengers pour off the gangway, bewildered, arms loaded down with bags. She looks for Daniel among them, always looks for him in a crowd, as if the last year were nothing more than a magic trick. Sometimes, she convinces herself that it is and any day, Daniel will call and say, “Come to New York, mom. We’ll take in a show.”

All around her, sons and mothers are reunited. She watches them in horror, seeing how easily they take this singular, beautiful moment for granted. Just like Ruth used to do. Pain is hearing the word mother in an airport on a bright and sunny summer day, she thinks.

While she looks through her purse for her lipstick, a hand touches her shoulder and she jumps.

“Ruth Blum?” the man says gingerly. She wheels around slowly and faces him. She’s carried around a picture of Cliff in her mind, which barely matches the man before her. For one thing, this man is tall and thin and black. For another, he’s strangely familiar-looking. She recognizes something in his eyes, set diligently into his wide face. The full lips, the angular jaw. “Cliff Williams, pleased to meet you.”

“Oh, yes, well, we—me and my husband—we’re so pleased you could make it. It means so much to us that you’re here,” she says, though she never expected Cliff to come in the first place. In fact, when he’d called last month to ask if he could stay, she’d done her best to talk him out of it.

It was Norman who’d said, “It’s not like we don’t have the room, Ruth. Three days go fast. You’ll see.”

In the car, Ruth thinks about the last PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) meeting she went to months ago. Many years later and she still blames herself, as any mother might, for Daniel’s homosexuality. Elaine, who runs the biweekly meetings, told her that getting used to it was like getting used to an amputated limb. But for Ruth it’s more like getting over the surprising idea that she never knew her own son. Like when she accidentally found, while cleaning up Daniel’s room one afternoon, a stash of magazines: Playgirl, Hustler, Cherry, Swank, Kandi, Lick. She counted over a hundred of them scattered under his bed. She didn’t wonder how or where or why he’d gotten them. He was a teenager, awkward and gaunt, he spent hours in the bathroom, lighting candles and listening to Bauhaus. He wore a lot of black.

On the way home, Cliff says, “I hope you don’t mind but I took it upon myself to invite the cast of Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My.”

This was Daniel’s last Broadway show, an all-male revue, in which he played The Great and Powerful Oz. The show was a tell-all, told from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. Cliff played the Wicked Witch.

“No, not at all,” Ruth says, though she can’t imagine what sort of people might show up.

“Daniel was quite an Oz,” Cliff says. “A wonderful wizard.”

“Yes, we read a review of the show,” she says. “I wish we could’ve seen it.”

“Luckily, we’re starting the road-show in about a month,” Cliff says. “I’ll get you tickets.”

“Splendid,” Ruth says. “I’ve always thought the witch got the short end of the stick. It’s about time someone shined a little light on her suffering, too.”

Cliff says, “Well, I’m glad you see it that way. A lot of folks think that what we’re doing sort of goes against everything L. Frank Baum stood for. The guy was a communist, did you know that?”

“No, I did not,” Ruth says as she pulls into the parking lot of Winston Churchill High School. Mid afternoon and the sun is beginning its slow descent. Ruth smells Cliff beside her, his aftershave, which Daniel might have given him. She wrings her hands.

“I have to run inside quickly,” she says, “to pick up a box of stuff. I’ll only be a minute.”

“I’ll wait here, I guess,” Cliff says, lighting a cigarette while rolling down his window.

Ruth wanders into the building, startled by its disquietude. Men wax the floors as other men paint the lockers. One black, one red; the school colors. Someone’s screwed up this arrangement: three black lockers in a row. She wants to point out this snafu but doesn’t. She isn’t there to instruct; she’s there to get her box and go home. But she can’t help linger in the hall. Something undeniably lovely about being in school when school isn’t going on around her. Almost beautiful, this afternoon before the halls fill up for the summer.

After explaining to her boss, Principal Burkehardt, that she needed the summer off, she broke down and told him about Norman and Elaine. She hadn’t meant to say anything; it just slipped out. Principal Burkehardt told her to take as much time as she needed; he said he understood, since his own wife had left him for a mechanic.

Ruth looks out her classroom window. In the parking lot, she notices the grit and grime on the roof of her car and a message etched into the dust of the rear window: I love you!

She gathers up the box. Files, folders, her “Teacher of the Year” award, rulers, graph paper, protractors, all the things that mean so much less now that they are crammed in a box. Before she leaves, Ruth goes to the bathroom at the end of the hall. And catches sight of Cliff strolling toward the football field. She applies some lipstick, and, box in arms, hurries to the car.

The trunk overflows with junk: some of Norman’s old shirts she’s been meaning to give to Goodwill, an unusable spare tire, a stack of newspapers, a box of Daniel’s full of what she doesn’t recollect. She places her box in the backseat and then pulls this smaller box out. Using one of Norman’s shirts, she smears I love you! off the rear window and heads toward the bleachers.

Cliff sits on the risers, smoking a cigarette. He waves at her from across the field, a curl of smoke escaping out his mouth.

He calls, “Are you ready to go?”

“Not quite,” she says, rearranging the box in her arms.

Far heavier than she anticipated, she wonders what part of Daniel’s life is inside of it. She wants to open it but is afraid of what she may find. More magazines, hateful letters to her he never sent? Some things are better left unknown.

She’s not too sure how Cliff will react when he sees what she is about to do. If he wants an explanation, she thinks, I’ll simply say that compulsivity often accompanies grief.

In the center of the overgrown field, she lowers the box down. She extracts the lighter fluid and matches from her purse. For a moment, she realizes how crazy this must seem but she doesn’t care; grief is crazy.

“Mrs. Blum, are you all right?” he says.

“Don’t tell Norman,” she says, as the wind blows out match after match. “I read about this in a book.”

Cliff takes another drag off his cigarette.

“Isn’t this against the law?” he says. “I mean, public fires.”

“This is Texas,” she says. “Everything’s against the law.”

This isn’t the first time Ruth’s set fire to a box of Daniel’s things. The first week after his suicide, she packed up a box of his books and burned it in Goodwill’s parking lot.

“I don’t know what this means to you,” he says, “but I guess it’s really important.”

“Yes, it is,” she says. She opens her hand and Cliff places his lighter in it. “Thank you.”

Ruth, thumb poised on the lighter, looks around her. No one, nothing.

The box catches instantly.

The sun hangs low in the sky, shadowing the field and the school. Soon, the fireflies and June bugs will come out and the air will fill with a different kind of light. Ruth looks forward to this light as things lose their angles and softly fade. When she can look at Norman and feel something stir, something besides regret.

In a matter of minutes, the box is a smoldering pile. Ruth stamps out the last of the remaining embers and then the two head back to the car.

At the house, Ruth shows Cliff to Daniel’s room and says, “If you need anything, I’ll be in the kitchen. There are towels in the bathroom. The knobs are funny. You have to play with them. Norman should be home soon. We like to eat at six sharp.”

Cliff stands with his back to her, his face folded in shadows. From this angle, he seems much smaller to her; his suit hangs off him like a drape. But maybe this is simply an illusion. Men carry their grief differently, she read, shrinking into it rather than expanding away from it. While a woman’s grief is lodged inside her body, a man’s is a reflection of posture, his clothing. She senses this about Cliff as she closes the door behind her.

Halfway down the hall, she hears Elaine and Norman.

“Ruth,” Norman calls, “are you home?”

She stops short of the doorway. Behind her, sunlight falls from the window, catching the multitude of stains in the brown shag carpet. An urge comes over her to get on her hands and knees with a sponge; instead, she’ll call a cleaning service later. And yet every time she goes to the Yellow Pages, she has trouble remembering why. As if between thought and action, she has slipped into another universe. She can’t explain it.

“Here I am,” she says, smiling, “What’s all the fuss about, Norman? Oh, hello, Elaine.”

Norman rises and greets her warmly with a kiss on the cheek. Ruth watches Elaine watching them and a momentary scowl slips nearly unnoticed across Elaine’s tanned face. She’s a handsome woman, with frosted blond hair and large cat eyes. Always smelling of expensive perfumes, Elaine works at a department store, selling specialty soaps.

“We ran into each other in the mall,” Norman says, holding a bouquet of flowers out for her. “Where’s Cliff?”

Ruth says, “I think he’s taking a nap. Did you know, dear, that Cliff is an actor on Broadway?”

“I just think it’s marvelous that you invited him this weekend,” Elaine says perkily. “It really shows how far you’ve come.”

“Yes, well, I don’t know about how far we’ve come,” Ruth says, going into the kitchen. “But I do know how far I’d like to go.”

To Elaine, Norman says uncomfortably, “Let me walk you to your car.”

“Yes,” Elaine says, rising, though it is Ruth who takes her by the arm. “We really did run into each other at the mall, Ruth.”

Ruth says, squeezing Elaine’s arm until she feels bone, “I’ll have those books back to you next week,” and sort of half-hurls Elaine out the front door.

I’ll leave her a little present in her front yard, Ruth thinks.

Norman puts on the TV. Ruth takes a seat at the opposite end of the couch. The flowers sit in a vase on the kitchen table, already wilted. Even from where she sits, she feels the heat of Norman’s body. It makes her aware of how cold she’s been the entire day. Suddenly, she wants to kiss him, the way they used to when Daniel was asleep and they had the house to themselves.

Norman says, “I have to check on the stocks,” and leaves her to the TV. She follows him into his study, a place usually off-limits to her. The chime of the computer and she knows she’s lost him again. He will sit for hours, charting his portfolios and retirement funds.

“Are you planning on mowing the yard?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says. “Are you planning on using that tone of voice with me for the rest of our lives?”

“What tone is that?”

“Ruth, one day we’re going to have to talk about—”

“No,” she says. “No, we don’t have to talk about anything, Norman. I just want to get through the next couple of days.”

“Okay,” he says. “But you can’t tell me that I haven’t tried.”

She watches the screen come to life with flashing boxes and dollar signs. She rests her hands on Norman’s chair. She almost kisses the back of his neck.

After dinner, Norman and Cliff sit outside on the patio, discussing the stock market. It seems that Norman has found an ally and this helps her relax. Though she finds this hobby of his—gambling with their life savings—somewhat horrifying. She remembers that day in 1987, Black Tuesday, when their IBM stock fell fifty-six points and they lost half a million dollars. They took a second mortgage out on the house. The money was not the issue—not to Ruth anyway. The issue was funding Daniel’s college education.

She remembers the afternoon he came home from high school after track practice. She was finishing up dinner and as he came through the door, she said, “Danny, we have to have a talk.”

She wanted to bear his anger and disappointment because she was his mother, because they were closer.

“We can’t afford Cornell,” she said. “You’re going to have to make other arrangements.”

“What are you talking about, mom?” he said.

“We were a bit reckless,” she said.

“I understand,” he said.

She was surprised by his reaction, more grownup than she had thought he’d be, more resigned than she had hoped for.

“If it’s important to you, I’m sure you’ll find a way,” she said offhandedly.

On the wall of his bedroom, she looks for the missing diploma, the graduation pictures never taken. She hates herself for not being the kind of woman strong enough to handle her husband. Daniel might still be alive, she thinks, if you’d been a different kind of woman.

She shuts the door, lays on the futon face-first, and screams into the pillow. She screams and screams, pushing her voice down into every fiber of the pillow, the mattress, the carpet beneath. She screams for five minutes straight without stopping, just one long continuous scream that burns her throat, shakes her teeth.

When she is done, she gets up, straightens the futon, and then, suddenly, she goes to the closet. Her joints ache as she reaches up and takes down a box marked taxes, 1985. She pulls the dusty, cardboard lid off and peers down at Daniel’s bright and glossy magazines.

She sees what Daniel must have: the candy-eyed girls with large lips, the men with smooth unadulterated skin. She comes to Playgirl. On the cover, a man who resembles Cliff. Ten years younger, the exposé speaks of Cliff’s likes and dislikes when it comes to women. He likes a girl who reads Shakespeare; he dislikes a girl without a sense of humor. The pictures of Cliff reveal ridges of muscle and a navel ring. Ruth runs a crooked finger over Cliff’s face and thinks, The world is a strange place and I’m a stranger in it. My best friend sleeps with my husband and my child jumps off a forty-story building.

She lugs the box into the den and, on one of the shelves above the Encyclopedia Britannica, Ruth locates the bowl of matches. She’s never understood why Norman collects matches since neither of them smoke. Since they have no fireplace. People collect all sorts of stupid things, she thinks, passing the bay window.

The moon through the trees lights up the men’s faces. Norman sits in his discussion posture, feet extended in front of him, one curled over the other. Cliff raises a hand across his face to bat away a mosquito. They discuss. Their faces are serious, potent. Ruth tries to read Norman’s lips and, catching random words—sick, marriage, wife—decides that she can’t despise him for his affair with Elaine any more than she can despise herself for allowing it to happen.

She walks past Norman and Cliff with the box and out into the yard.

Norman says, “Ruth, Jesus, not again.”

This is the sixth box in a year.

“Why don’t you just set the whole house on fire?” Norman says.

“Why don’t I just set you on fire,” she replies.

Cliff stares up into the trees, shifting uncomfortably. He lights a cigarette. Ruth sets the box down on the spot where the pecan tree used to be.

“Think about the neighbors,” Norman calls. “They aren’t going to like this.”

“So who cares. We don’t like our neighbors, Norman,” she calls back. “Besides, this is half of my property.”

“Thirty-seven years of marriage and this is what I have to show for it,” she says to the box. “Half an acre of land, a husband who cheats on me, a house I hate, a dead son, and the Wicked Witch of the West on my patio.”

The box catches on her first try.

She turns to face Norman, who now wields the garden hose.

“Step away from the box,” he says.

“You bastard,” she says.

“Get away from the box, Ruth,” he says. “Don’t make me do it.”

Ruth digs her bare feet into the soft, cool grass. “Blast away,” she says.

A stream of water hits her in the face. Behind her, the box burns steadily; she feels its heat on her neck and arms.

“You’ll have to do better than that, old man,” she says.

Cigarette in hand, Cliff makes his way between the Blums. He closes his eyes and draws a hand across his face, which becomes, when his hand lowers, the face of the Wicked Witch of the West. As he draws on his cigarette, Cliff sings, “Those ruby red slippers/they hold me in their thrall/I am nothing without them/no, nothing at all.”

His countertenor’s voice rises as he runs his hands over a pretend crystal ball. He scrunches up one shoulder. Norman increases the water pressure.

“Listen, Cliff, no offense but I’m kind of having a fight with my wife,” he says. Then, to Ruth, “This isn’t funny anymore. What if one of those sparks ignites the fence? Who’s going to pay? Who?”

Cliff stops singing and turns to Ruth. “Mrs. Blum, he’s right you know. This is sort of dangerous. The wind and all. Who knows what could happen?”

In the distance, the sound of sirens as Ruth thinks about the manila envelope in her drawer, the pictures of Elaine and Norman.

When Norman accidentally hits Cliff with the water, Ruth says, “Norman, you idiot.”

Cliff raises a hand up to his face again, either to wipe away the water or prevent another attack.

“Not a problem,” he says and disappears into the house.

Norman sprays Ruth until she can no longer tell the difference between the water on her face and her own tears. She turns to the box, and he shoots her back. The fire warms her, the smoke curling into the air. The ink in the magazines colors the flames blue and green and pink.

“This is no way for a grown woman to act,” Norman shouts.

“I could say the same for a friend of yours,” Ruth shouts back.

Norman finally turns off the hose, says, “I’m calling the fire department,” and leaves.

Ruth, slightly chilly, stands above the box and waits until the last embers die.

•••••

That night, her arthritis unbearable, Ruth climbs out of bed and instead of the pills, she pours herself a jigger of brandy. It’s the same bottle they’ve had on the shelf at the back of the cupboard for years. The same one they shared the first night they spent in the house. She drinks it down and then refills it. Drinks this down, too. She stares out the bay window at the ivy snaking its way up into the trees. She’s angry and tired and her body hurts as if God himself has taken a mallet to it.

After a while, Ruth doesn’t feel angry or tired or hurt. She’s drunk. For the first time in years. She goes into the living room, where Norman’s hi-fi, a relic from the 1970s, sits against the wall. Ruth rifles through the albums. She puts on “Pink Moon” and sings along. She drinks straight from the bottle of brandy. She thinks nothing of Daniel or Norman or Cliff, nothing of the cemetery, the mourners, the prayer for the dead. Nick Drake croons and she loves him. The rich warmth of his voice, the smooth texture in her ears. She drinks. And dances.

She imagines the parties never thrown and the wine never spilled. The trips never taken and the houses never built. She dreams of another boy, the real love of her life, Steven Melman. And dances with him around the room until the album ends and she is dizzy and giddy and sad. She drops the bottle to the carpet.

Before going back to bed, she stops at Cliff’s door. She presses an ear up against it. The house shifts under her—the foundation, the floor, everything unsettling. She loses her balance, plants a hand on the wall. Her throat burns. She burps. In her haze, the phone rings and it is Daniel thanking her for showing him how to be The Great and Powerful Oz.

Opening the door, she wobbles into the room. His damp face cut by moonlight, Cliff mumbles something incoherent. Lines from the play. Lines from his life. She remembers his voice over the phone last year, three thousand miles away. She remembers him saying, “I would’ve called sooner but Daniel told me his parents were dead.”

Ruth thinks about jumping, as she moves silently to the bed. She leans over Cliff. She says his name. She says it again. She bends even closer to him. He opens his eyes and stares at her, surprised to find her there. Ruth reaches out and touches his face, her bony fingers painful.

She says, “I couldn’t wait to get away from my horrible mother and Daniel couldn’t wait to get away from me.” She pauses. “I don’t know what happened here, in this house. I can’t explain it.” She sits down on the edge of the bed.

“Mrs. Blum, you should get some sleep,” Cliff says.

“I loved a boy once. It was devastating.” As soon as she says it, she feels funny, a tingling. “I was still getting over Steven when I met Norman in the elevator of the Time-Life Building. He lavished me with expensive dinners and chocolates and flowers. Unnecessary things. And he did something no one had ever been able to do,” she says. “He used to finish my sentences.”

Cliff says, “You have any more scotch?”

Ruth shakes her head. “There’s some wine for tomorrow.” The clock by the bed registers four-thirty. “Oh, my. It’s . . . very late.”

“I’m usually up at this time,” Cliff says. “I go for a run in Central Park, before all the annoying people get there.” He puts on a pair of sweatpants over his boxers and laces up his Nikes. “I’m going for a jog.”

“If you wait, I’ll drive you up to the school,” she says.

“No, that’s all right,” he says. “But if I’m not back in an hour, send out a search party.”

There is a moment, just before he disappears, that she wants to ask him: why did Daniel jump? And yet she feels that anything he says won’t be enough. There aren’t any words to make sense of what she’s going through. This bewildering, which shifts furniture around in the middle of the night, makes people feel things that probably aren’t even there.

Cliff opens the front door and wanders outside. She can almost hear him in the grass. She steps into their bedroom, closes the door, clicks on the light.

“Jesus, Ruth, what is it?” Norman says, rising up onto his elbows and rubbing his eyes. “Do you need your pills?”

“You blame me for Daniel’s death,” she says.

“Don’t be absurd,” Norman says. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I blame you,” she says. “Someone’s got to take some responsibility, Norman. I can’t do it any more.”

Ruth opens a drawer in her nightstand and pulls out the manila envelope. She dumps the contents out on the bed and spreads the photos across the sheets. Pictures of Norman and Elaine, pictures she’s gone over a thousand times. When the man who took the photographs delivered them to her, he said, “Prepare yourself.”

Norman reaches out to touch her and she withdraws.

“Ruth, please,” he says. “This isn’t what it looks like.”

“Don’t patronize me,” she says and flexes her burning fingers. She reaches down for one picture in particular. Norman and Elaine lying on a grassy lawn with the University of Texas’s Main Building in the background. The Spanish tiled roof glimmers in the sunlight, and all around them hangs the spiny fruit of Mesquite trees.

“The three of us used to go there all the time,” she says. “God, I feel like an idiot.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Norman says. “Listen to me—”

“I’ve been listening to you for years,” she says and gathers the photos in her hands. “We’ve never been happy together.”

She replaces the photos in the envelope, dresses, and then walks out the door.

Envelope in hand, Ruth moves slowly through the field to the bleachers. She marvels at how everything is exactly as it was when Daniel used to run here. She remembers coming to watch him jump the hurdles, the way he flew from one to the other. His speed was uncanny and she wondered where he’d gotten it.

She pulls out a picture of Norman, his face full of an _expression—happiness, relief, joy—she hasn’t seen in ages. The same _expression when she told him he was going to be a father. Having a baby was supposed to hold us together, she thinks, taking out the matches. But then, with bloated fingers, she begins to fold the picture, first one corner then another. There is something in the folding, turning something flat and square into an object of dimension and depth. And she realizes that this is what loss really is: sharp corners, hard edges, unknowable quantities. For a moment, she cradles this odd arrangement of paper in her hands. Then, she stands up and sails it into the air, where it catches briefly, soaring.

Dr. Parek? Oh, hello Dr. Parek. You know we need to run to the store for milk and after that we need gas, but I wondered if it would be all right for me to call you back around noon because we're a little worried about our mother. This is Beverly, her daughter. Or you could call us. Thanks.

So, message one concerned Mrs. Wilkens, on whom Jay had operated that very morning. He readied his pen for message two.

Hello? Hello? This is Beverly Wilkens again. Wanted to let you know that I can't call you at noon, like I wanted to, because the electrician is coming, but let me leave you my number. Can you call me back this afternoon? You just say when and I'll be right by the phone.

Jay had to search his patient database, because she didn't leave the number on the machine. He punched it in. But his temples were pulsing and without intending to, he hung up after three rings. Her calls were from earlier, when he was in surgery, so he presumed the problem had resolved itself. He cycled through the queue of messages.

Hey Edward, can you get the baby to stop crying? I'm going to tell the doctor. We want our mother to reach her one hundredth birthday. Hello? Dr. Parek? It's 3:00. I'm going to call the hospital. This is Beverly Wilkens. Mama isn't feeling very good. Dizzy.

He recalled this woman from a pre-op interview. She was chatty and not well informed about her mother's condition. There were five other brothers and sisters—a middle-class black family with good insurance.

Dr. Parek? Hi, it's Connie Ardennes. I'm having a terrible spasm in my back this morning. It's my birthday, too. Can you send me some pills?

This office, Jay thought, needs an aquarium. Little red and yellow fish. Whirls of seaweed. He patted down his thick black hair and straightened his glasses, gulped Evian. He liked the flesh and intensity of surgery, the nurses, monitors, and instruments, and took inherent pleasure in meticulous execution of a task. All this led to amazed gratitude, something he took for granted, from patients who would wake up with restored digestion or a clear throat. The operating room was the closest thing to a home he'd encountered in America: a den where you lock arms with good men and women and work along, riveted on each other's every gesture. But the daily riff of sick people was not his best arena; the phone calls, consultations, and small talk with patients wearied him. Often he'd let his machine take a message on purpose so he could avoid yakking with someone.

Connie was a young mother and a chemistry graduate student, and he hated for her to be in pain on her birthday. He rang back, got her recorder.

Mrs. Ardennes, this is Dr. Parek. I suppose this pain is similar to the spasms you've had before? Along the shoulder blade? I'm going to call in a prescription; it should relax you and reduce the pain. Call me back if you need anything else.

He tried the Wilkens family again; after twelve rings an answering machine clicked on: We're so sorry to miss your call. Please leave a message and have a wonderful day.

To which Jay replied: I understand your mother is not quite well. I hope she's feeling better. Please call me if you have more problems. Good luck.

He picked up his briefcase and empty lunch box, headed to a dentist's appointment, after which he'd go home, a one-bedroom condo four blocks away, where he'd lived alone since he began his residency. He hadn't had a single live conversation all afternoon and felt a hint of despondency. He flashed to the beauty of the backwaters and his home in Kerala, where paths wound through serene palm groves among friendly houses. He knew every man and woman, boy and girl, in the village; as a child he drank tea in their kitchens, did homework on their porches, fished from their docks.

But as he grew older, he'd been driven mad for a chance to be alone once in a while. Every dinner at home included more neighbors and cousins than he could count; his mother would tend people with extra dal, rice, and chapatis, and there were always mangoes and good tea. He couldn't sit down with a book without being interrupted a dozen times by five-year olds, fifteen-year olds, seventy-year olds. And now here he was in Galveston, close to the ocean, relieved in a way of the crowds in India, but in another way, unsettled by a viral silence that beset him after a day of e-mail, voicemail, and memos. The desire for solitude competed constantly with his loneliness; he was surrounded by perfectly nice people, friendly people. Yet, he was aware that he came across as too clinical, even impatient. Well, he was just all screwed up, rudderless on the hot gulf coast of America.

"Wow,” Janet exclaimed, her two thumbs positioned on his lower front gum. "Great graft!"

"Mmmmm," responded Jay.

"Sonia! Can you come in here for a second? Look here! See how fine the scar line is. That surface is perfectly flat."

"Where?" She pinched his lower lip with her index finger and thumb, so that now three hands were tugging at Jay's mouth. "Oh, yeah. Great!" Sonia looked genuinely pleased as though she'd just solved the crossword and won a mug.

"Dr. Young did it. Four years ago. He'd have lost that tooth otherwise. Any trouble with the flap, Jay?"

To the best of his ability, Jay shook his head no. Sonia let his lip loose and turned to x-rays. Janet rambled on.

"You know, Sonia, Jay here took a trip to New Orleans this spring. Have you ever been?"

"Not yet. It's on my list. I heard about New Orleans back in Macedonia. Famous place." Sonia spoke in heavily accented English.

Jay's mouth remained winched open by Janet's formidable hands, and she continued to stab his soft tissues with sharp instruments. Several minutes went by, punctuated by wincing from Jay, as the two women conversed about Mardi Gras.

Suddenly Janet retracted her hands and swiveled backwards to study a folder. "You have a crown, don't you? Dr. Young's?"

Finally able to speak, Jay answered: "Yes. From two years ago."

Without explanation, Janet left the room for about five minutes. She then resumed probing and scraping at Jay's teeth and gums, amid talk of family car trips and praise for the American highway system.

"What are you doing tomorrow?" she asked warmly. Tomorrow was the Fourth of July, and Jay planned to take a picnic to the beach and enjoy fireworks. In fact, he wanted to get blasted. But with his mouth immobilized, he could not explain this. Sonia beckoned to Diego, a hygienist in training. Now everyone grabbed Jay's lips to again admire the dentist's craftsmanship. Jay had been prostrate in the chair for forty-five minutes, and the hygiene seemed only now to be commencing. He wasn't in a hurry, really, but he felt mildly annoyed. How much did these people accomplish in a day? Was Janet doing a professional job or was she distracted and slow? When she finally finished polishing his enamels, still perky, still ruminating aloud about Independence Day, he paid with a credit card and escaped to his condo.

Gulf of Mexico had in Jay's loneliness sounded almost as seductive as Malabar Coast, and though Galveston island didn't have cashew trees or rice paddies, it possessed a medical school, and its wide beaches, burly heat, abundant oleanders, and rowdy tourists gave Jay a certain rough succor. He sometimes missed dwelling among Hindus, and so, though he wasn't a believer, he made a point on holidays to fashion offerings to a small Ganesha: marigolds, caladiums, pine cones, candles; whatever was handy here in Texas. On American Independence Day, at ease in his breakfast nook, he smiled and prepared a shrine with strawberries, white oleander petals, and blueberries. And jasmine incense.

On this first Fourth of the third millennium of the common era, Jay hit the beach, with his state-of-the-art Gortex backpack, filled with peanut butter, samosas, coriander chutney, bhel puri, and Kingfisher beer. He settled his yellow chair low to the ground and close to the water, so that waves swept under his bottom, bathing his feet and spraying his contented legs. Good humored masses of people were streaming north, south, east, and west—girls in red, white, and blue bikinis hovered and swished past, like patriotic butterflies. People spread mats over the sand and set up wind breaks and umbrellas amid a convergence of plastic plates, coolers, volley balls, soaring kites, and icy beer. Squealing children dashed in and out of the surf. Every brand of picnic sprouted forth: fat-free veggie chips, kiwi fruit, and spring water served on recycled paper; jalapeno poppers, fish sticks, and burritos on Styrofoam. A couple slathered each other's backs with suntan lotion, then giggling, lay down on their blanket propped up on elbows. They passed an egg roll back and forth; he bit off his end and conveyed it by mouth to his girlfriend; she bit her end, passed it back. They split the last morsel and kissed. Jay caught himself staring, even smiling, rather too obviously; the pang of envy surprised him.

Around eight p.m. there came awesome, drenching rain. Ten minute downpours followed by slight clearing and wet wind, quickly interrupted by another ten minutes of pounding thunder and more thrilling rain. Within minutes the beach had metamorphosed into a carnival of blue tarps and gay umbrellas--everybody soaked and huddling under makeshift shelters and still in good humor. Jay decided to pick up and struggle through the crowd toward the huge performance stage, which had been erected near a beautiful pier that stretched like a wing out over the sea. Latin superstar Ricky Martin was prancing and singing under a giant canopy, to the utter delight of the crowd. Britney Spears, idol of millions of eleven year olds, was holding up her own umbrella—wow! The Texas A & M marching band elected not to march through the storm, but pounded out Sousa tunes from their metal folding chairs beneath the canopy. The rain was a nuisance, but the adversity energized and entertained an already jovial crowd and spirits stayed high. For a couple of hours roaring showers and crazy wind were interrupted by brief quiet breezes, during which respite gangs of people would scurry from shelter to shelter.

Under an overhang by the stage, Jay found himself mashed, beer in hand, up against two old ladies in wheelchairs. Each had short, white, curly hair and big glasses; each wore a tee shirt and khaki slacks, Nike walking shoes, and thick socks. Both were covered head to toe in what appeared to be a year's supply of plastic. Old lady number one sported an umbrella-shaped cap—it perched on top of her head and spread its red, white, and blue crown widely enough to keep rain off her hair. Old lady number two wore a clear plastic shower cap, just the thing for wet weather. Her American flag earrings dangled below the elastic edge of the cap. A poncho tumbled over her shoulders and bunched into her lap; more sheets of plastic were wrapped around and around her legs. She resembled a whole sheep, ready for the freezer, and also prepared if necessary, to rev up her wheelchair and storm into the eye of a hurricane. Dr. Jay, sometimes bored by old people in his practice, was amused.

Suddenly lady number one sneezed passionately and seemed unable to stop. Dr. Jay Parek, barely protected from the elements in shorts and sandals, felt mildly alarmed. He adjusted his pack.

"Good madam, are you all right?"

The sneezer paused. "Oh, yes. This happens in weather."

"Well, you certainly look protected against the rain."

The two old ladies laughed. "Peggy, there, my daughter, wrapped us.”

"Are you sisters?"

"Friends! I'm Evelyn and she's Betty. We worked together for thirty years."

"Phone company," added Betty.

"We've been retired for twenty," Evelyn said.

"Came for the fireworks," confirmed Betty.

They dissolved into a long, infectious bout of laughter.

"What?"

"I don't know, " Betty answered, dabbing her eyes.

"We get like this some times," Evelyn gasped, trying to find her breath. "Get each other started. On a jag. Can't stop."

By now daughter Peggy and the inquiring doctor were also grinning.

"Where are you from? said Betty.

"I come from India."

"I look awfully pale next to you. I should get out more."

"In my country we have seasons of rain like this every year."

"Oh those terrible cyclones."

"Occasionally. But the regular monsoon rains can be very heavy."

"Monsoons. Palm trees bent double. Software deliveries delayed. I've heard!" More laughter.

"Good luck with the fireworks."

"Do you think they'll cancel them?" asked Betty.

"Oh no. They can shoot them no matter what the weather."

"Hope so," said Evelyn.

"Hope so," said Betty. "We drove two hundred miles just to see 'em."

In that minute, the sky exploded: yellow pinwheels, green starbursts, and red and white girandoles shot up through the drizzle and bloomed above the cloud bank. The crowd sang out its approval and Jay and Peggy and the old ladies applauded, their spirits borne aloft by the rough exalted voice of Ray Charles oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties from sea to shining sea.

Hello Jay, it's Robert. Evidently Beverly Wilkens couldn't get you on the phone. Jay, there's a problem regarding this family. Please call me right away, ok? If I don't hear from you in a half hour, I'll stop by your office.

Jay checked his watch. It was ten o'clock, and the message was a half-hour old. Sure enough, an impatient knock rattled the door.

"Jay, how are you?"

"I'm well. You?"

"Okay, I guess. Listen, you performed an exploratory day before yesterday on Mrs. Wilkens, the elderly African-American woman with stomach cancer?"

"Yes. To check the intestine." Jay felt his diaphragm tighten. He tended his cuffs, arranged his clipboard so it was perpendicular to the edge of the desk.

"Apparently Mrs. Wilkens seemed fine until she got home. Collapsed on the way from the car to the house, and her daughter managed to get her to bed. She was conscious by then and said she was dizzy and wanted to rest. So they let her sleep. Said they left you a message, but didn't hear back. About four o'clock they called 911 because she was incoherent."

"I did call back. I left a message."

Dr. Robert Bentley had been leaning against the door jamb with his arms crossed. Now he took a chair, proceeding in a softer tone. Dr. Bentley had clear blue eyes and white hair, had been chief of gastroenterology for twenty-five years. Dr. Parek had graduated in the top ten percent of his med school class, but had been practicing for only five years. Dr. Bentley had performed two surgeries on the old woman; for the exploratory procedure, which involved a small incision in the stomach wall, the family had requested Dr. Bentley—We want the best doctor—but he was unavailable.

I'm sure you're very good but we had gotten used to Dr. Bentley and I guess if he says you can do the procedure it will be fine but we wanted to meet you first.

"So the stomach wall was compromised?" Jay took pride in mastery of the latest techniques, but now his breath was short. The details were hailing down on him like pellets of ice.

On the way into the operating room, the nurse and anesthesiologist in their scrubs had fitted the ninety-nine-year-old Patti Ann Wilkens with a plastic cap and I.V. and joked with her. "How do you like your chapeau?" Mrs. Wilkens was stable, alert, and chuckling. "But of course! I look good in hats. Can I hold somebody's hand, though? I'm so damned old."

"Exactly. The medics brought her into emergency. There was an outcry from the family that they don't know how they got you in the first place and to please call Dr. Bentley. I went in and cauterized the incision. The old woman had to be awake for a good part of it. It was hard going; she's so elderly and already very sick. She was woozy but pulled my head down to her and whispered that it meant something to the family for her to hang on. "

"So I didn't close the wound?"

"Right."

"I've never made that mistake before. Are you sure the disorientation was caused by the procedure?"

Mrs. Patti Ann was the first black woman in Galveston to cast a vote.

"Absolutely. Anyway, I did what I could and told the family their mother was in danger, but after rest, she might rebound. Two of the sisters were crying. I think she has a slight chance to pull through but she lost a lot of blood. Of course, she also has incurable stomach cancer that'll get her in a few months. You were off yesterday for the Fourth, and I was glad to watch her. But she's not doing well."

"I'll go see her later this morning. If they knew what her insides look like, they wouldn't be so anxious to keep her going."

"The family is insisting that you stay off the case."

"I see. They refuse to acknowledge that these procedures have risks."

The ancient, amazing Mrs. Wilkens had a web site, selling caladiums on-line.

"They say you didn't explain, and there was no form to sign. But also that you always seemed impatient and distracted, like you were thinking of anything but their mother."

Our mother raised us kids on her own through the Depression and war, and two went to college in the 1950s. Guess which one of us knows Chinese. South Texas black kids.

"Since she had an endoscopy recently, I didn't think it was necessary to go over it all again."

"But you need to remind people. They're not going to remember that stuff four months later. I told them you were conscientious and had quite a few patients, so you might seem hurried. But you know how important it is in this hospital to treat people with respect. Like you have all the time in the world; we give them potted plants to take home. We recommend a fertilizer. "

Ms. Beverly Wilkens, her three brothers and two sisters, assorted spouses, and several small children had marched into Jay's office, talking nonstop. Almost completely silver gray, the hair of one sister was fixed in cornrows and little braids and red and yellow bows. Silly, at her age. She was managing twins, about five years old. "Doctor, this is April and this is May. Born at midnight on April 30. They did my hair; I decided to leave the bows in; it tickles the kids."

"My accent bothers people some times."

"This has nothing to do with your accent. It has to do with their mother dying." Dr. Bentley left abruptly, not bothering to pull the door closed behind him. Jay had always admired Dr. Bentley's honesty and was stung now by his attitude. An amorphous loneliness overcame him, like a muddy wave. It was true—he tended to just see a patient's ailment, snipped away from its effect on loved ones.

Our mother Patti Ann Wilkens is 99 years old. She was a miracle, born on Sunday, September 9, 1900, the day after the great hurricane in Galveston.

He walked home, flicked on his air conditioning, made a cup of tea. He had no wife or children; and he had chosen to live a world away from his family. He clung to the admiration of his colleagues; it connected him to them, to something; now he found himself rummaging for a phone number.

It was seven in the morning in Kerala. His father answered.

"Oh hello, Jay! I am just out of bed. How are you? It's not my birthday, is it?"

"No, no, I just wanted to see how you are. "

"We're fine. Your mother's gone for a walk; you know she loves early morning. Your sister and the kids are staying here for a month. It's warm, but in paradise the heat doesn't bother you. I know it bothered you, sometimes."

"It's plenty hot here."

"I know, I know. I'm rubbing it in. What are you reading lately?"

"Oh, medical journals. Sometimes a mystery story. What about you?"

"I'm deep into the newspaper. That's about it for me these days."

"What about your fishing? You still like it, don't you?"

"Yes, I do. I go on Tuesdays and Thursdays."

"Tell everybody hello for me, will you?"

"I will do it. Take care of yourself, son."

Next morning, at seven-thirty a.m. Jay checked his sort-of shrine. He lit a candle and a stick of cranberry incense and dusted off his Shivas, as though his race memory was telling him to summon the help of the gods. The thought of his father, calling him "son," warmed him.

When he reached the hospital, the nurse greeted him. "Why hello Dr. Parek. How are you today?"

"Tired. How are you?"

"I have to tell you that Mrs.Wilkens died an hour ago. The family's in the room with her."

The unkind thoughts he'd had about the Wilkens family suffused his mind and body, and his skin went hot and soft in shame. One afternoon, after a bunch of them had vacated his office, he'd pictured brown pelicans, beaks in constant motion with ungainly wingspans, bumping into his bottled water, kicking his sticks of incense, threatening his striped yellow-tails from Baja, and he didn't even have an aquarium. They had not, of course, touched a thing. Did they remind him of mobs at his mother's house? He thought of his grandmother who died at the age of fifty-five, so young, and her funeral pyre. The fire had frightened him and the sight of the ashes ascending made him sick. He felt his cheeks again damp, as when he had cried for her, the one person who always whispered to him as if he were the only boy on earth. It didn't matter to her children how lucky Mrs. Wilkens had already been, to live so long, or how merciful a quick death might seem to some doctor.

He peered through the high window in the patient's door. The room was dim, crowded. Tall candles and vases of roses and calla lilies were arranged on the side table. Mrs. Wilkens stretched the length of the bed with her arms folded over her chest. Her head was propped on a pillow, hair nicely combed, the picture of serenity and grace. But the rest of the sad room was grayed out, homeless.

Beverly's head lay in her dead mother's lap. April and May were silent; each held one of Patti Ann's hands. Edward held her feet, rubbing them. A son and daughter, Ben and Serena, were sitting on the side of the bed, sobbing. Her daughter Charlotte had covered her own face with a handkerchief; a son 's arm encircled her. Patti Ann Wilkens, her stomach riddled with nodules of cancer, had stopped breathing. Her hair was thin; her flesh spotted and pocked and wrinkled. She'd told the nurse that when she looked in the mirror she saw someone else, an alien, not the healthy eighteen-year-old who lived inside.

Jay remembered sideswiping a car in Madras. He scratched the passenger door and had knocked off the side mirror. He'd left a note and phone number: "So sorry. I swerved and nicked your car. Please call me and I will make amends." He wished he could do that now: "So sorry, I cut into your mother and she died. I am very very sorry."

He knocked, opened the door slightly, not going into the room.

"I am so sorry for your loss. Mrs. Wilkens was a fine person, a friendly woman, and I know how hard this must be."

The family fell completely quiet, astonished to see him. No one spoke or moved.

"Do you know?" said Beverly, at last. "Really?"

"I may have made a mistake during the procedure. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. " His eyes filled.

"Well, can you fix it? " That was little April.

Edward came over to him. "You seem upset and we appreciate your words."

"We're not going to sue you, doctor. She's been spared a lot of suffering. It's just that we all wanted her to get to be 100. And we didn't want to let her go," said Charlotte.

"If I can do anything to help, please let me. I'm so sorry." Jay backed out of the room, pulled the door. He went to the staff cafeteria for a cup of tea but in a few minutes was hurrying back to that corridor.

The blind on the Wilkens' high window was not quite closed, so that he might look in without the family noticing. He forgot about the nurses and visitors traversing the hall, who would wonder why a doctor was outside a sick chamber, staring in.

Yes, he could see inside, a sliver of the room. Charlotte was lighting candles; hints of flame flickered off the dark blue stone on her ring. Brothers and sisters and grandchildren were holding hands, in twos and threes, and the little girls were whimpering. Patti Ann Wilkens, almost one hundred years old, washed in pure love.

He had no place to go, except an office that had no bright fish. An apartment and its wilted shrines. He could not leave her window yet. He wanted to stay a while longer, he wanted to find tears.

Hmmm, I’m thinking, that must make me like an ancient Greek god or something. I argue the point with Casey and have so argued for over a decade . . . to no avail. I have noticed with the passage of time that just about everything is to no avail, including the lowliest of household duties, say, changing light bulbs. They blow and blow and blow; you waltz around like a dutiful Toby, change one, the next one dies, and by the time you get around to each one in the house, the first needs changing again.

“My chromosomes got lost in the deal,” Casey always says. “Where do lost chromosomes go? The old chromosomes home?”

“Maybe you don’t have any chromosomes, Cas, you know, like those people who don’t have brains but only cerebral fluid. They get by, make B’s in college, start families, watch tv, do cross-words. Instead of discrete little chromosomal packets, maybe you have some kind of protoplasmic smear in your system.”

“The old smear in the machine, eh? But that’s not the point. You went Italian in front of the girls. You’ve been very good about it, I agree, but how do you think they’ll absorb such a model? And at Christmas time, too. You ought to be ashamed and do penance. Like your hero Martin Luther, you ought to walk across a piazza of ragged bricks on your knees.”

I am ashamed and will do penance, but I don’t mention the occasional explosions of Casey herself, the usual paragon of calm. A slim Buddha she is, usually. But I know after all these fleeting years that no one can or will ever admit to their own lapses or defects. Or even change their minds when presented with incontrovertible evidence that, say, their entire worldview is wrong. Dare I add, especially women? They’ll fight you to the death first. The Martin Luther thing for instance. For reasons unknown, Casey chooses to believe that the monk is a hero of mine. The truth is I have no use for Martin Luther whatever, nor the entire Reformation, which, in my opinion, introduced boredom into the world.

And yet even I, who generously confess to my two recent outbursts, do so only to keep the peace, and because I know I should have spared my children. I should have locked myself in a closet or the bathroom or basement and thrown a full-fledged, calamitous tantrum. Yes, even in this merriest of seasons, as the snowflakes outside gently pirouette in the air, sashay, spiral and then sink to earth; even as chimes and bells and Christmas ditties reverberate throughout the house from every radio and television; even as we all feel a little uplifted (and totally depressed, of course) that the birth of the Savior approaches . . .

. . . yes, all too easy to fly off the handle in the seasonal commotion and bustle, when all you crave is to relax on the sofa with a rosy mug of egg nog topped with flecks of nutmeg and lightly spiked with brandy. And watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” with the family . . . again. And savor the twinkling lights of the tree, trek outside in sub-Arctic wind gusts to fetch another log for the back room wood stove, listen with gladness to the roar of warm forced air through the ducts as well as the popping and crackle of logs as they prepare to combust.

And I know why I succumbed so easily last night. Around noon we had gone over to pick out a tree at Ye Olde Yuletide Christmas Tree lot, off Price’s Fork road, where you get hot cider with the deal. Lots of roads in this neck of the woods with the word “fork” in them. I’ve never got used to it. Where I was born and raised they named streets after Catholic saints and the seven deadly sins and colonial governors with names like Alexjando O’Reilly. The deepest South, an exotic creole port, where anything below thirty-two degrees incites collective fear of the next Ice Age. And last week the accursed Jet Stream had dipped to encompass the mountainous region of Virginia where we live. The wind chill registered in single digits, and the wind itself chewed through your multi-layered apparel like spiteful rodents. I was miserable. My toes felt frozen. The hot cider lost its caloric advantage within minutes. But Casey and the children waded merrily among the aromatic trees and finally chose THE one.

The attendant, a gruff young man who wore only a sweat shirt and dungarees—he didn’t even have on socks beneath his ankle boots!—yanked the tree from its stand and was about to haul it off to be bagged. “Wait,” I said, “let me take a look at that trunk.” After one too many a flawed trunk, you notice such things. You take pains, make scenes, anything to avoid another bit of trouble. Casey and the girls frowned and moaned. “We’ll have a time with this trunk,” I said. The bottom branches are too low. It won’t fit in the stand.”

“Can’t he just trim the trunk?” Casey asked, as if the guy weren’t standing right before us holding a tree.

“Can you just trim the trunk?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said in a faintly pissed-off way. I stress faintly only because I would have been pissed off holding a tree on such a day and then having someone request that I thin out the trunk with a chain-saw. It’s his job, I assuaged myself. Everybody asks him. Except, of course, the rugged lumberjacks who do it themselves with their own chain-saws. I own a chain-saw but it terrifies me. Too many grade-B movies on the subject. Besides, the chain loosened up last year when Casey and I spent hours on the roof during an ice storm cutting to bits a thick, dense pine limb that had cracked and landed squarely on our shingles. I have no idea how to tighten a chain and have no intention of reading the manual for instructions. For better or worse, I’ve given up on instruction booklets. Our chain saw may as well lie rusted solid at the bottom of the sea. The Titanic of chain saws.

The tree guy shaved the trunk a bit, then he and his co-worker or assistant inserted it into a funnel-like contraption; it shot out the other side bagged with plastic mesh and ready to be tied onto the roof rack of our SUV. Both attendants and I exchanged glances.

“Want us to tie it up there for you?” they almost asked in unison.

What the hell? So I’m not good with twine. “Sure, if you don’t mind,” I said.

By this point Casey and the girls had been back in the warm car for nearly fifteen minutes with fresh cups of cider. I figured the least I could do, what with two guys preparing to bind a tree atop the vehicle, was stand out in the cold with them, you know, macho camaraderie, shuffle around a bit, make a wisecrack or two, spit on the ground, show some support—I who would prefer certain diseases to coldness. The unwritten manly code requires that we males endure a lot of spurious suffering for no good reason, so I comply to a limited extent; but, as a poet once said, there is some shit I will not eat.

I’ll stand out in the ice and wind chill, shrivel in the Jet Stream for a while, but after that you can take the manly code and shove it up some burro’s arse. My manliness for a heating pad! Endurance implies misery, unhappiness, stalwart fortitude; you don’t find anyone exhorting you to endure too much rapture, too many orgasms, bliss or peace of mind, do you? So I’ve had it with endurance. Does this make me suspect, a ninny, what my grandfather used to call a “fruit man”? If so, voila, behold the supreme suspect, ninny and fruit man. The only coldness I accept at this point is a plastic bag of ice cubes in the freezer; and I won’t get too close to them either. Ice cubes are to be looked upon with suspicion. Don’t they accrue by a mysterious process called crystallization? Suppose it gets out of hand? So do with me as you will. I have transcended endurance and chosen comfort, warmth, hot cider and heat ducts. Go wrestle the Jet Stream if that’s your trip. Jet Stream, Martin Luther . . . what’s the difference?

So we got home and decided it best to leave the tree confined within its mesh while working it into the stand. Last year’s stand had disappeared from the face of the earth (another recurrent phenomenon in our house—things disappearing off the face of the earth.) We searched from attic no basement, no stand; so off to Walmart we drove to shell out still more money for a new one. Casey picked it out, and I went along, because it’s so much easier to go along. But I had my doubts. “Hmmm,” I said, “think it’s a little too large?”

“The tree’s got bulk,” she said. Which was true. We don’t go in for redwoods or sequoias. Just nice, tidy, you might say, cute medium-sized trees.

When we returned I could see right away that the four inches of trunk would never reach the bottom of the stand, but figured, what the hell, maybe I’ll luck out, and started to twist the screws into place. After a while, of course, you need a pair of pliers. And you’re down, flat on the floor in unbelievably contorted positions, stretching sinews that have been ignored since the previous Christmas. What with my bad knee and lower back, I could think of a lot of things I’d rather be doing: like lying in a hammock on some Caribbean beach, for example. But no big deal, really, I mean, screwing in four tighteners with a pliers. Not like digging ditches or lifting boulders. Casey held the tree in place as I tightened, and then, when all seemed secure, I asked her to let go. Here’s where basic faith comes in. For that split second or so when you imagine both the best and worst. And, ah, the tree actually stood in its rickety stand, a bit wobbly maybe but stand it did on its own. “Ok,” I said, “let’s cut this mesh off and see what happens when the branches flare out.”

Of what kind of infernal plastic is Christmas tree mesh composed? It required a wire cutter, and then snipping just about every quarter-sized loop from top to bottom. I’ve noticed that over the years plastic has taken a quite sinister turn. Once tearable with the bare fingers, now you need heavy duty equipment to get through it. Soon it will be blow torches. Anyway, I cut through all the loops, pulled the netting up and over the top, the branches flew out everywhere, and—evil tidings!—down it came, right on top of me. “Pull it off, Casey!” I cried, which she did, but only after a moment or so, I noted. Wait until a tree falls on her! (Actually, a tree has never fallen on her, but about a month or so ago when we were out walking, something whipped out of the sky and smacked her in the forehead. An acorn! Beware of acorns dropping at high velocities. They accelerate and cause pain, not to mention bruises. We took it as a very bad sign indeed that a lone acorn chose to boomerang off Casey’s forehead.)

When I raised myself from the floor—here’s where the first fit occurs, an almost subliminal iota in spacetime between my rising and taking one step toward the kitchen—my foot, clad in an old ragged Nike, happened to get entangled in the wretched netting that I had previously tossed onto the floor. One tends to forget all about plastic netting tossed upon the floor. We have hardwood, not carpeting, so my shoe, with worn-out, glistening, slippery soles, started to gain momentum vertically, started, that is, to launch itself above ground level, whereupon I began to slip backwards; luckily, I saved myself by some adroit maneuvering with the other foot. But that first foot refused to come free of the netting, no matter how much I shook it. And shake I did until the frenzy of shaking inspired the mesh to wind itself around my ankle as well as my shoe, and it seemed at the moment that it was possessed by demons intent upon subduing me and sending me straight to hell. Whereupon I lost it, screamed “Satan!” shook the netting even more ferociously and tore at it with both hands, in effect hopping around the floor on one unsteady foot while trying to extricate myself from pure evil.

And it is this sight that my two lovely daughters beheld: their father going berserk over a shroud of stinking plastic, a gridwork really, of mostly octagonal holes, yet solid enough to defeat anyone stupid enough to wear a pair of slippery shoes when putting up a tree, i.e., myself. Lea dropped her jaw, her younger sister Bee dropped an ornament which shattered upon the selfsame hardwood floor, and Casey looked upon the scenario with a look I know well, the, he’s done it again look. Then they all burst into nervous laughter, and Lea, no stranger to the state of being overwrought, cried, “Daddy’s having a fit!”

“Had,” I corrected, seriously, solemnly, for by this point my tribulation was history. I had managed to pull off the netting, wad it into a detestable ball and toss it into the trash can in the kitchen, where I had been heading in the first place. No one heard me whisper the second “Satan!” as I dumped the plastic, but if they had, they would have used it against me, just as I knew in my most primitive blood that I would not hear the end of this ephemeral saga until my dying day. Problem with fits, public fits anyway, is that you lose your leverage. No more could I chastise Lea, or Bee or even Casey for future tantrums or seizures of fits of their own. Like a sanctimonious minister caught with his finger in whatever pie you choose to bake, I had abruptly lost credibility. I could always wait a few months and hope they’d forgot about it, but not likely; it’s always our weakest points, when we’re in our throes, that people most vividly remember. No one notices the elastic until it snaps.

I was soon out returning the over-sized stand to Walmart and scouting around for something more suitable, after having unscrewed and cursed the hooks, shoved the entire apparatus into its box and somehow found the missing receipt (it hadn’t disappeared off the face of the earth yet). To be brief, I found another stand, drove home in howling wind and some atmospheric trauma I guess you could call sleet, repeated all of my hitherto motions, and got the tree up free-standing on its own. But by then it was too late to decorate and the little girls went to bed frustrated and disappointed. Casey did manage to string the lights, however, and afterwards we both sat on the sofa, in the dark, and enjoyed the little glowing dots of white. We almost fell asleep then and there, but things to do, things to do, so many things to do before retiring for the night in kerchief and cap.

The next day, the last day of school before the holidays, I led the girls out of the door, and we carefully descended the two sets of steps, both coated with frost, only to find that the entire car was smeared, glazed, enameled with ice. The usual scraper kept in the trunk had disappeared, and I had nothing to wipe the windshield with. We were already late. I tried Kleenex but the tissues simply disintegrated. I used the edge of an old styrofoam coffee cup to dig in. I hacked at it with my car key. I tried my fingernails, even my elbows. The ice seemed invincible. Credit card! It cleared a portion of the glass so I could drive, and I also managed to create view-holes in the two side windows. School wasn’t far away, so I figured I would drop the girls off in time, creep back home and ransack the back shed in search of the official scraper that had vanished.

And thus commenced my second fit of the season. I had indeed cleared three peepholes, enough, if I drove carefully, to get us to school. I do not understand the physics of condensation or caloric exchange or temperature differentials or even the properties of glass; all I know is that within seconds after starting the ignition, the peepholes fogged over both inside and outside the car. I flooded the windshield with wiper fluid but it transformed instantly into a kind of plasmic membrane. Two feet up the road and I couldn’t see a thing. I pulled to the curb, scraped again with the credit card, made new peepholes, got back into the car . . . and the same thing happened all over again. You’re in the middle of the road, inching along at one mile per hour, and you’re totally blinded by the shenanigans of frost and ice. You don’t like it; you have two little girls in the car. I crept along to the corner, turned, straining my head in every possible direction for a view, and suddenly, of all things, the sun blasts through the windshield and truly blinds me. My eyes are painfully sensitive to light.

“I can’t see!” I screamed. “What’s this shit all over the windshield. The sun! The sun! I’m blind. We’ll crash! I can’t see!”

Then I heard Lea whisper to Bee, “Daddy’s having another fit.” Bee giggled. What innocence! Not to gauge the danger in driving blind!

“Stinking ice!” I cried. “Nothing like this where I come from. We have hurricanes. Give me a hurricane any day; they’re warm. Ice, you can’t deal with ice! It knows no mercy!”

I hear the girls titter again.

“It’s not funny,” I declared. “This is how wrecks happen. I’m pulling over to the side and we’ll just have to wait until everything melts, IF it melts.”

“We’ll be late, Daddy,” Bee said with sudden concern.

“Blame the ice! And the sun! Imagine, contradictions—ice and sun—skewering you at the same freaking moment!”

By this point the defroster was cutting through the inner glaze a bit and if I hunched way down with my eyes peering only an inch or so above the wheel, I could actually see. So I pulled out and proceeded again; we turned a corner; the sun returned full blast! Blind again. “I can’t drive if I’m blind!” I nearly howled. Back to the curb after flapping the visors every which way. Then I notice a plastic shovel on the sidewalk beside us. It’s handle had broken off, but I didn’t need the handle. I jumped out of the car, snatched up the shovel and began grinding it across the windshield. I pushed with a vengeance. And, lo, much of the ice and muck simply fell away.

Back in the car, I wiped the inside condensation with tissues and, get this, my sleeve. The windshield was actually clearing, but I didn’t dare shoot it again with wiper fluid. And thus after three or so minutes we were creeping along the road again, the sun dark behind a cloudbank for the moment, and all seemed slightly normal. Things got better as we proceeded, until, finally, I managed to drop off both girls, only modestly late, and head back home, determined to raid Advance Auto Parts for some kind of chemical that would destroy ice instantly and permanently, and buy some dark, dark sunglasses to block out the potent early morning sun. What I wanted to do was crawl back into bed and plunge into the bliss of unconscious darkness, but . . . Yuletide, many last minute gifts to buy, packaged bows for presents, gift bags, much to take care of, the merriest of seasons.

Casey picked the girls up that afternoon, and the first thing they told her was about my new fit. “Daddy hates ice!” little Bee exclaimed. Of course they were intent on reading Casey’s reaction, hoping she would chastise me, I suppose because they themselves had been chastised so often for one fit or another. Since misery loves company, I plunged once more into shame and contrition.

“Well?” Casey said. That’s all. Amazing how many distinct flavors the word “well” can take, the countless permutations.

“Well,” I said.

“The sad thing,” she sighed, “is that you have nothing to complain about. Think if you’d been blown apart in Iraq and came back with no limbs. Or suppose you were a victim of the Taliban, and who knows what those people do to the genitals of their enemies. Hell, look what we’ve done to them! What if you lived in the Sudan and were exterminated? Had a dread disease?”

I tried to remind her of Freud’s explorations in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. I cited the latest research on stress-induced maladies: it’s the accumulation of minor crap that counts, not the Apocalypse. I reminded her of a former Surgeon General’s report that any movement at all damages the system, the implication of which is that we should become trees.

“Trees sway in the wind,” she sighed. “Imagine how stressful that must be.”

“Yeah,” I said, “or being a tree in an ice storm. Can’t even run for it. Forget trees.”

Casey didn’t make much of a deal over the second fit, which disappointed the girls, but I, I wallowed in guilt. And the girls taunted me all day. “Remember your fit this morning, Daddy?” they would chirp, ambushing me as I puttered about the house. Oh, how children are so eager to torture.

That evening I gathered Casey and the girls together in the living room and informed them that atonement was in order, that my remorse over losing control felt like a set of sharp teeth pecking at my heart. I needed negative reinforcement, I explained, some painful lesson that would keep me in line. Like a flagellant of old (except that I was physically incapable of whipping myself with switches of barbed wire). “If you send a jolt of voltage through an earthworm traveling through a maze,” I said, “the earthworm will soon learn that one path leads to pain and suffering, while the other, voltage free, leads to equanimity. This is science, not me talking. If it works for earthworms, well . . . .”

“So what exactly is the point?” Casey asked guardedly.

“I know this will sound bizarre,” I said, “but I want you, my beloved family, the three people I cherish most in the world, whom I would die for . . . I want you to, well, how can I put this delicately? I want the three of you to beat the living shit out of me. I mean it. Not just horsing around. Be the Taliban. You caught me. I’m suspect. I’m a spy. Now I’m in your hands. See what I mean?”

Casey, Bee and Lea looked at me as they might a cactus.

“Are you all right, Daddy?” Lea asked.

“I will be,” I smiled, ever more enthusiastic.

“Why don’t you just hire that guy on Ebay who for the highest bid will come over and thrash you to a pulp?” Casey asked.

“No, it has to be the people I love and who love me. If some stranger shows up and lays you low, what’s the lesson? You take it as ultra bad luck and wind up looking over your shoulder every moment. You start packing a rod wherever you go. It’s not the same. But just think, if your loved ones really punished you, you might just reform.”

“You really believe this garbage?” Casey asked.

“Daddy wants us to beat him up,” the girls laughed.

“Yes, like I believe that the moon revolves around the planet and that the planet revolves around the sun. I can’t prove it. I just believe it.”

“I don’t know,” Casey shook her head.

“But I do!” I said.

“You want the three of us to beat the shit out of you.”

“Yes, it’s the only way.”

“Not a game, I mean, really hurt you.”

“Yes.”

“With our hands or with weapons? You know, like clubs.”

“Soft weapons would do. No hammers or swords or brass knuckles. I mean, I don’t want to die.”

“Like, say, yardsticks or rolled up magazines or shoes?”

“Well, moccasins maybe. No steel-studded boots, though. Come on, you know what I mean.”

“Well, girls, what do you think?” Casey said.

“Let’s beat him up!” Lea cried.

Casey gathered them in her arms. “Girls, Daddy is serious. He thinks this will help him. It’s not like when we play around with the empty paper towel roll. This time, we pretend Daddy is a really bad man, a burglar, a criminal, a monster, and we beat him up good. No holding back. You know, he may be right. We’ll cure him of fits. What do you think, girls?”

The girls looked at each other, raised their eyebrows. Sweet little things, they had their doubts.

“Bee, Lea,” I assured them, “Don’t think of it as being mean or hurting me. You’ll be doing me a wonderful favor.”

They nodded sadly.

“Don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t be sad. This will be a very good thing. You’ll be helping me.”

“Can we kick you too?” Lea asked.

“Sure,” I laughed, “break a few ribs.”

“No, Daddy!” Bee cried, Bee, the sweetest of the sweet, yet a regular cannon ball once set in motion.

“Bee, this is for my own good. I’ve got to stop having fits over nothing. I have a fantastic life, a wonderful family . . . not much money, but enough. I should thank God every day for what I’ve got, but what do I do? I whine, complain, have fits. Do you understand, little girl?”

Bee nodded.

“Does she understand?” I asked Casey.

“She says she does. Are you sure this is what you want? Because let’s just get it over with, ok? And don’t come crying to me over bruises and lacerations. Maybe a concussion.”

“I’m ready,” I declared, “I ask only that you spare my eyes. What good would I be begging on the streets with an accordion and tin cup?”

“You’re sure?” Casey asked with tentative finality, offering me one last exit.

“I’m sure. If you don’t, I’ll have fits every single day. I feel one coming on as I speak.”

“Ok, girls,” she said, “let’s give your daddy the beating of his life.”

I arose from the sofa, walked to the middle of the room and sank to my knees like an ancient supplicant.

“When I close my eyes,” I said. “That’s the signal. And please spare my eyes.”

For a long, tense moment nothing happened. Then I heard shuffling; they were positioning themselves. And suddenly they came at me, my daughters, my wife, my beloveds . . . like wolves. The first blow, a jab to the back of my head, a slap; then a rather gentle jab at the kidneys, someone’s foot I believe, followed by whacks to my already enfeebled spine, my chest, forearms. They kicked and punched, bashed me with soft implements, bit me, pulled out some hair, they just about knocked me over. As I collapsed to the floor, I knew I would have wounds—bruises, scratches, a minor laceration here or there. All the same, they had restrained themselves, let me off easy, could not go for the jugular. They could not bring themselves to injure me beyond the mere formality of my request. Which meant I would have more fits. Which meant that they loved me despite my fits. I could have burst into tears when Bee asked, “Are you all right, Daddy?” I rolled over on my back and saw them towering above me, cardboard tubes from rolls of paper towels clutched in their hands.

“Torquemada would not have used cardboard tubes,” I said.

Casey laughed; the girls took her cue and also laughed. A merry moment in the homestead, a private, happy, ephemeral deliverance.

“Did we beat you up good?” Casey asked.

“Nah,” I said, “but maybe that’s the better lesson. Now if I verge on a fit maybe I’ll feel too guilty to let it get out of hand. Maybe mercy is greater than punishment after all. But guess what. You’d all better run fast because now I’m coming to beat you up. Give me those tubes!”

As I arose from the floor, they scattered, screeching and squealing and laughing, into different rooms. I picked up the fattest tube and beat it steadily into the palm of my free hand.

“I’m coming!” I growled. “Do unto others! Prepare to suffer!”

They were hiding, giggling, but I would find them, smack them on the head a few times, then hug and cling to them as if my life depended on it. For I know the time is short. Time is always short. Just yesterday the girls were infants in bassinets, and Casey, ah so young, and I, well, younger anyway. ‘Tis not the season for fits, for dismay and howling. That season may come, but by then it will be too late and the light we saw yesterday will have streaked across another universe.