An Annie Dillard Reader (9 page)

There was no light, human or inhuman, up or down the beach, or out on the invisible islands, or up in the forest, or anywhere on earth or in heaven, except a chill and fantastical sheen on the unstable dark of the sea. What, Obenchain speculated, would become of this man's former, heedless life? To what category of being belongs a dead life whose body lives on? Obenchain had known Clare Fishburn four years ago, in the high school shop. Professor Fishburn, as people called him, directed the high school manual-training course. At that time he had a wife who was expecting, a dead-end job, a house on a hill, and a head full of nothing. Should someone hold a funeral for this dead life? Clare's body would live long after Clare's real life was over. This was the dead opposite of murder; it was birth, or conception. Obenchain thought—and sentimental tears rose in his eyes—that in many long years, when the body called Clare Fishburn should die of natural causes, he, Obenchain, would attend the funeral apparently as a townsman but in fact as the father of a dead only son.

He would call on Clare Fishburn after supper. Now he was bound for his house in the forest—the roofed-over hollow cedar stump. He could light a bucketful of folded papers in the stove, fire up some wet alder, and dry his trousers.

He passed the dripping shark carcass and distinguished, among the multiple textures of blackness, the dull path through trees up the sandstone cliff. The mudflat held more light than the land; the forest blotted it out. When he gained the clifftop, Obenchain walked south, seeing nothing, and felt with his feet for the tracks.

 

Clare Fishburn, with a spoon in one hand and a daughter in the other, ate apple pudding. He was at home, in the tall house on Lambert Street. He wore a gabardine vest and a blue shirt. He leaned in and out of the lamplight; he was telling a story in the dining room, between the kitchen and the front parlor, and he was waving his spoon. “It was almighty fine,” he said, about an initiation prank his lodge had played. “It was really woolly.” His nose was long, his forehead was long, and his jaw was long. He was so loose-jointed, tall, and shambly, that even sitting he
resembled the stick doll that dances on a slat. His lively motions kept the effect constant; he shifted his legs, jerked his arms, swiveled his neck.

His wife, June, listened, smiling, without looking at him; instead, as if against her will, she followed his apple-pudding spoon as it wagged over the blue tablecloth, as it wagged over Mabel's fair head and good dress, and over Clare's own shirt-front. June was short and round-headed, thin. Under her green apron she wore a pinch-waisted dress of blotchy dark linsey-woolsey, ribboned in rows and creased at random. She had grown up in Baltimore; her father was a senator.

Clare's mother, Ada, was clearing the table. Ada was no taller standing than Clare sitting. On top of her head was a small white roll of hair, the size of a corn dodger. Her bow-shaped mouth and expressive, keen eyes had made her striking in her youth. Now age had pulled down her round face and narrowed it, taken half her teeth, and thinned the brows on her clear forehead, so her eyes looked even bigger and blacker than they had when she was young, when they blazed out from a bonnet deep as a bucket.

“Come sit down,” Clare told her. “You look baked.”

“If there are any more lodge initiations to tell,” Ada said, “you will spill not only the pudding, but the child as well.”

Mabel slid lower on Clare's lap. She was an India-rubbery-looking person even when awake. Her moist child's face shifted from one half-formed expression to another; even while she climbed things, even while she marched boisterously about the house, she retained a limp, sleepy look. She had fine, reddish hair and skin pale as putty; her round limbs looked jointless and unmuscled. She was a jot shy of four years old—born on Christmas. If she heard her father's exalted voice at all, it was through a bright fog of sleep.

On the back porch the door banged, and banged again: old Ada was throwing salmon scraps to the dog, the dog that had been crying pitiably since sunset, as though it had never in the length of its life so much as seen a morsel of food, yet knew, with its dying breath, that there was such a thing, inexplicably denied to it of all creatures alone.

Clare met June's ironic gaze. Her high brows outlined the rim of bone under which her eyes were deep as wells. He loved to know her opinion of things. There was not a bill in the House of Representatives or a bulb in the garden of which he did not consider his wife's probable opinion before he framed his own, if any. Now she was looking at him in the precise way she had; he did not know why. He gave Mabel a squeeze and shifted his legs.

They were running late. Clare himself had begun fixing the pudding long after dark. He peeled the newspapers from the apples in their carton and chopped them—red-and-white Kings, green-and-white Gravensteins—into a yellow bowl. He shunted the stove's heat into its oven, where eventually the king salmon baked, split by its stuffing, and five brown potatoes baked, and the dark pudding frothed down the sides of the yellow bowl. Now it was after eleven. Old Ada was shuffling her feet; he and June were starting to stare, and the child was asleep, her loose mouth tidily shut. His must be a slatted sort of lap, Clare thought, but Mabel had a way of softening to fit any occasion, as though she had no bones. The skin on her hands was hot; her hair gave off a sour steam as she slept.

Clare scraped hardened brown sugar and butter from the yellow bowl's side; he offered it to June, who smiled her ironic smile, and ate it himself. He meant to pick up some sherry; he wished they had a boat. They could get a rowboat, at least, for Mabel. Tomorrow he would surprise June with an electric sewing machine. He made only sixty dollars a month teaching shop and science at the high school, but he recently sold some building lots he had bought with June's legacy two years ago, and realized a 400 percent return. The way business was swelling and his investments were boiling up, he fancied getting a horse and carriage—a high-seated victoria, and a certain beautiful, freckled mare with a high, long action, which Jim O'Shippy might sell. They could build a carriage house by the cowshed.

Clare grew up with the boisterous new country and boasted of its youth; he shared its glory's rise as its trees fell. His family had crossed the plains in an emigrant train of wagons, and
joined in a raw settlement on Bellingham Bay. He saw the firs rise straight from the water's edge a hundred feet without branching, and he cricked his neck to see their tops another hundred feet higher. He saw Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where Pacific water, deep and sheltered, made an inland sea. He saw the settlement called Whatcom spring up urgent to do business by cutting, floating, milling, and selling fir timber. Capitalizers drew into town and plunked down money. Their bold enterprises platted building lots, chopped trails through the forest, and flung out wharves.

Now Whatcom County spread from the glaciated North Cascades to the inland sea. The state of Washington was three years old, bigger than all New England, and the coming magnificence of its Puget Sound harbors was plain to any man. Clare felt himself as immortal as the nation whose destiny, as he put it to himself, he shared; no moss grew under his feet. His was the first generation to rise in this wilderness, and some magnificence lay in store for it, and some unnameable heroism would be his. He would achieve, he would do, succor, conquer, succeed.

He would enclose the front porch, extend another porch beyond it over the lilacs, and root more lilacs farther out. He and June would add to the family. They could pick up some beachfront land in the islands this summer, roll up a cabin, build a rowboat or buy a sloop, tour the islands, maybe keep bees.

June lifted Mabel from Clare's lap, balanced her on her legs, and led her upstairs. Ada soused the dishes. Clare sat at the dining-room table, alone. His vest hung open. Honor had come to him, and distinction, in a modest way, as it had come to the expanding town. He had served as county clerk, as city assessor. When he won the county clerkship, he passed out cigars. He purchased a topper. He knew that June regarded these honorable posts as thankless.

There was sawdust, fine as powder, on his bare neck and sleeves. His thick dark hair rose every which way, and added two inches to his already exaggerated height. He disdained to comb, ever, this hair, for his mother had combed it too much when he was a boy. Every morning he parted his hair with his
fingers and pressed it down. By day he put on and took off his bicycle cap a hundred times, and by evening his hair stuck up.

Clare could see, reflected in the dark window across the table, the yellow gas lamp floating and globular like a planet or star. Beneath it, and also floating over the outside dark, were reflections from the kitchen window behind him—which contained again, golden, the gas lamp, and his wife's round head in motion—and Mabel near and spread pale along the darkness, and a cluster of vaporous teacups on the table, and a cold bottle of milk.

 

Clare heard the doorbell and walked through the parlor to answer it, surprised, thinking, “It must be midnight.”

The big man, whom Clare recognized, ducked under the doorway to enter. He pushed into the parlor, blinked in the lamplight, and stopped abruptly in the middle of the room. The dark parlor furniture shrank; did Clare himself so occupy a room? Under his curved hat brim, Obenchain's soft eyes looked muddy about the skin. Clare had no idea what Obenchain would do.

He offered him some tea. “I'm sorry we're plumb out of sherry.” As Clare spoke he shooed the yellow cat from the fringed sofa and picked up a doll, a painted doll, which had been standing on a flowered cushion. Clare started to seat himself to put his guest at ease, but rose again, uncertain, and stepped forward. He had seen a long-barreled revolver tucked in Obenchain's pants.

“What do you want?”

Obenchain told him. He said, looking sideways at Clare and then idly at the tops of the lace parlor curtains, “I am going to kill you…as it happens.” Both men stood in the decorated parlor, their arms tense at their sides. Obenchain, coiled in his loose stained clothes, pressed his jaws together. Clare held himself still.

“I am going to kill you, shortly…for my own reasons…with which you need not concern yourself.” His voice was a pressured baritone; it filled the small, still parlor the way the brocade-draped organ's noise filled it when June pumped it and
played, panting, and her shoes knocked on the pedals and the whining notes swelled.

“…concern yourself,” Clare thought.

Obenchain's white forehead rumpled. “You might view it in this light: you have not much longer to live.” When he lifted his head, Clare saw that his eyes, set close in the moist skin, were glassy; they caught the lamplight and reflected it in gleams. Clare had never been truly fond of the fellow.

“What are you saying, man?”

“I have considered it a part of…justice to impart this knowledge to you.”

Obenchain was earnest, frightened, and arrogant; he rarely looked at Clare. The men were standing within a foot of each other. Clare crossed his arms. He wondered if Obenchain always packed a revolver. He heard June climbing the back stairs.

“I was going to mend this doll's head,” he thought. He understood that Obenchain did not expect him to speak or respond in any way; his role was to listen until the speech wore itself out. “The topic of justice,” Obenchain said, “has long interested me.”

He raised his thin hands upward, to the height of his shoulders. “Your life, Mr…. Fishburn, is in my hands.” His lips spread, and he looked, Clare thought, right tickled with himself. The man read too much. Everyone knew that.

Clare tried to concentrate on what Obenchain was saying; he wanted to learn his place in this scheme. He could not, however, follow it. “…always by your side,” he was saying, “waking and sleeping, early and late.” His dark lips were askew, and his voice was urgent.

“It need not, of course, have been you, but it…was you, delivered up to me this evening, you”—Obenchain's voice surged and fell, his high-crowned derby bobbed—“whose life I hereby…take.” Clare could see only that Obenchain believed himself. He was uttering a creed. Clare hoped to get him out of the house—mighty carefully—so he could think, or sleep on it. How long had it been since he had faced someone his own height? Obenchain was burly and wide—twice the man Clare was. Obenchain's agitated face seemed to loom above him
closely, as if the moon had inched up on the earth, causing people who noticed it near on the horizon to look away, embarrassed.

Obenchain broke off. He held himself in control. Was this the young man Clare knew from the high school shop, Beal Obenchain who finished his work early—he made his birdhouse, cookie cutter, bookshelf, doorbell—and read books in a corner, licking his fingertips? Now with his head cocked back he was examining Clare as if he were an unusual binding on a book. He flashed his wide smile and confided, “I picked your name at random from a…cedar bucket.”

Clare wondered what June would say. Would he tell her? The weather would be clearing any day now; it would be a shame, if Obenchain killed him, to miss a fine northeaster, when he had waited so long, without grousing, for a clear day. What would the sheriff say? He had seen Obenchain and the sheriff together in the Lone Joe Saloon, playing chess. Perhaps the new doctor could declare Obenchain unfit, and send him away. A weariness overcame Clare, and intolerance, and a wish to sleep by his wife in their bed.

“You will excuse me now,” he said. “I was just going upstairs.” Clare was ready to turn his back on him and start mounting the stairs. If Obenchain drew his revolver, he would hear it, and kick back with full force.

Obenchain, however, was leaving. He had never taken off his hat. He found the door and was ducking out, and saying cordially, “Forgive the lateness of the occasion. One must strike…”