Benediction (7 page)

You doing okay, Daddy?

Yeah.

Will you be warm enough out here?

This air feels good. It was too hot today. It doesn’t need to be that hot.

Lorraine watched him and sat down on the swing.

But it always cools off, he said. You can count on that much. He looked out at the
street. Nothing happening. Quiet, he said.

Yes. It’s nice.

They sat for a while, not talking. She took out her cigarettes again.

Let me have one of those things.

You want to smoke?

I like the smell of it. I can still smell it.

She stood and shook out a cigarette from the pack and he took it in his thick fingers
and she bent and lit it for him, his face illuminated now for a moment, pale and thin,
his cheeks drawn in, his eyes sunken. He puffed at the cigarette and blew out and
looked at the end of it. Lorraine sat back down. Mary came out on the porch and stopped,
looking at Dad.

What are you doing?

Nothing.

Oh don’t give him one of those things. He doesn’t need something more to make him
worse.

What can it hurt, Mom? Come sit down.

I’m just holding it, Dad said.

You’re both foolish, Mary said. She seated herself and after a while she and her daughter
began to move the swing.

Do you remember when you caught us smoking in the barn? Lorraine said.

Corrupting your brother, Dad said.

It was my job. I was the big sister.

By three years.

Big enough.

I made you smoke the whole pack afterward.

It was only a couple more cigarettes.

Was it.

But you stood there and made us.

It didn’t do any good. Did it.

No.

How old were you?

I was eleven, Frank was eight. About Alice’s age.

Who’s Alice?

The little girl next door with Berta May.

All right.

Her mother died of breast cancer.

I remember now, Dad said. I know.

Later, when the three of them were still talking, Dad said: You could come back and
run the store. You’re already here. You wouldn’t even have to leave. You could stay
here and run it.

I don’t know if I want to do that, Daddy.

It’s all in the will, he said. It goes to Mom and then to you after
she’s gone. You could learn how. You’re quick and you know how to manage people. You
manage people already.

Just four people in the office.

That’s enough. You wouldn’t have to take care of that many here. There’s Rudy and
Bob and the bookkeeper. They’ve been with me so long they don’t need much managing.

They’re used to you, Lorraine said. They wouldn’t want somebody new coming in and
telling them what to do.

They’d get used to it.

I doubt it.

They’d get used to it. Or else, you’d let them go. You can think about it. Will you
do that?

I don’t know, Daddy. We’ll see. What do you think, Mom?

I think it’d be nice to have you here. You could live with me in the house.

We’d make each other unhappy. You know we would.

Well, I don’t either know that, Mary said. You wouldn’t make me unhappy. But you mean
what I’d do to you.

I didn’t mean anything, Mom. I’ve just been away for so long.

They looked at Dad. He was staring out into the street past the trees and the fence.
Does it hurt you, Daddy, for us to be talking about what will happen after you’re
gone?

I don’t want to know all of that. What I want to know about is the store. I want that
figured out.

But if I took over, what about Frank?

What do you mean? Frank won’t be coming back.

But what about him? How is he mentioned in the will?

He’s not mentioned.

Why isn’t he?

Because he left.

So did I.

But not like he did. We don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. We don’t know nothing
about him no more. We haven’t had contact in years.

I used to hear from him, Lorraine said. He’d call me on the phone at work.

When was this?

When he was still in Denver. Then I didn’t hear from him anymore. I tried to find
him but I couldn’t. We used to meet and go out to a bar and talk.

Honey, we know you did that, Mary said. We thought you were talking about something
different.

He always wanted to meet at a particular bar downtown. He’d come in as he always did,
like he was sick, or hungry. Maybe he was, both. He’d sit down and look around. I’m
paying, I’d tell him. Then I’ll have something good, he’d say. We’d smoke and when
the drinks came he’d take a long swallow and say, Goddamn. Here’s to happier days,
and then he’d start talking.

About what? Dad said.

Oh anything. His work. His friends. What guy he was living with.

We don’t need to hear about that.

I know, Daddy. He was just so sad sometimes and so blue.

He was always sad, Mary said. As he grew older, I mean. Not when he was little.

He’d be drunk by the time we finished for the night. Sometimes he’d get funny too.

What do you mean?

Oh, he could be funny. He had style. He could be really witty. Did you know that?

We never heard much of that here, Dad said.

No. He wouldn’t here. But he could be very funny.

Like how? said Mary.

Oh, just clever. Not telling jokes, I don’t mean that. But talking in a funny entertaining
way about different people. About his life. About his friends and the people he worked
for.

I suppose he said something about us, Dad said.

He talked about you. About both of you.

What about us?

What his life was like here, Daddy. When he and I were growing up here in Holt.

It was all bad, I suppose.

Not all of it. He had some good things to say too.

Well, I don’t know.

I hope he did, Mary said. She got up and went into the house and brought back a blanket
and spread it over Dad. He sat in the chair looking out at the street, the blanket
drawn up to his chest.

The millers were swirling under the porch light and bumping it and dropping to the
floorboards and fluttering upward again. Mary went back and switched off the light
and returned and sat down. The millers still singed themselves against the hot bulb
and fell or fluttered away. From beyond Berta May’s house the corner street lamp cast
long shadows through the trees that moved a little in the night air.

Y
EARS AGO
Alene walked along a wide Denver sidewalk with her arm in a man’s arm. That was in
wintertime. A snowy evening. The snow was falling thickly and it was pleasant under
the lights along the street, walking slowly past the city stores, looking in the windows,
delaying going back to the hotel for the pleasure of being out in the cold air together.
She was a young woman then, just thirty-three, nice-looking and slim and tall and
brown haired and blue eyed. He was a little older, closer to forty, a tall man with
the gray starting to show at the sides of his head. A principal in a school in the
same district as the school she taught in. Which was how and why they met, at a district-wide
school meeting. She had felt something at once. And then she had found a way of saying
something to him. She couldn’t remember what it had been but it’d made him laugh and
then they’d met again at another gathering and he had wanted to know if she would
join him for dinner sometime in Denver. They both understood what he was saying. She
said yes, she’d like that. And that was when it began.

The snow had started to collect on the sidewalk. The cars were beginning to pack it
down out in the street. Going quietly by, quieted by the snow.

At the end of the block they stood waiting for a city bus to pass, the interior illuminated
in the evening, the people in the bus moving past them as in a kind of movie. An old
woman alone in her seat on the bus. An old man wearing a hat. A young girl at the
back looking out the window as the bus passed and went on up the street. They crossed
the street, she held on to his arm so as not to misstep.

Are you ready to go up? he said.

Yes. Are you?

Yes.

They turned in at the lobby of the hotel. It was a block east of the train depot,
an old hotel, one of the oldest in the city, a tall square redbrick building with
an ornate front. She stood near the elevator while he got the key from the desk clerk
and they rode up to the third floor, another man with them, and she felt his now familiar
hand pressing the side of her hip through her coat and that was something she would
remember afterward, the feeling of that and the secret of it, while he and the other
man made conversation about the weather. What about this snow? It might go up to a
foot. Is that right? That’s what they were saying on the news, if you can believe
them, and then the elevator stopped and they got out and walked down the long narrow
hall, following the runner tacked to the floor, she in front, he following, and came
to the room and she stepped aside so he could open the door with the key.

The flowers he had brought her that afternoon were still there on the mirrored buffet.
Their fragrance was in the room. She waited as he locked the door and then he turned
to her and she kissed him, she was full of joy and happiness. Then he undressed her.
The bed was cold and they clung to each other until they were warm and the sheets
were warm.

The room had been rich once, beautiful, with wallpaper that had dark red roses aligned
up and down, and with an elaborate brass light fixture in the ceiling and a tall mirror
on the wall and a narrow door letting into the bathroom, you took a step up to enter,
and inside were the claw-footed bathtub and the free-standing sink with the two porcelain
faucet handles, and an oval mirror with tiny silver cracks around the edges.

She rose above him in the bed and kissed him and looked down into his face. He had
a good face. And brown eyes, looking at her. Oh God, she said.

I know. Don’t think about it.

I’m not thinking. I just was going to say—

I know.

She reached under the sheet and found him and made the adjustment, shifting a little.

Afterward lying in the bed in the old beautiful room, feeling warm and happy, she
said, Don’t go yet.

I have to. You know I do. I still have to drive home. It’ll be late as it is. And
I can’t tell what the roads will be.

Stay here. Stay overnight. Please.

How can I?

Call her. Say you’re snowed in, you can’t leave. You got delayed at the meeting and
didn’t get started when you thought you would.

The meeting was over this afternoon.

Make something up.

I can’t.

Of course you can. You do already. We both do.

I can’t tonight.

When will you? When is it going to be any different? Will it ever be?

Yes.

When?

I don’t know. I can’t say that.

Go on then. Leave if you’re going to. She turned away from him.

Don’t be like this.

You don’t know what it’s like, she said. You have no idea.

She lay in the bed and turned toward him again and watched him dressing in the dim
room, in the winter light from the street coming in at the window, his long legs,
his bare chest and back and arms before he covered them, dressing, and watched how
he stood while he tucked in his shirt, and then he came across the room and sat on
the bed and bent and kissed her and reached under the cover and touched her breast
again.

Are you going to say anything?

No, she said.

He kissed her cheek and went out of the room and she got up quickly and wrapped herself
in the bedcover and stood at the window and saw him far below picking his way across
the street in the darkening car-packed snow and then she watched him walk down the
block in the snow that was still falling and go around the corner out of sight to
his car, to drive home on the icy roads to his wife and children in the town where
he was principal in the high school.

She imagined his arrival at home, his wife’s worry and complaint, and his consoling
her, joking a little, making his excuses and explanations, and she could see them
then in the familiar pretty picture walking arm in arm, looking in at the sleeping
children, and entering their own bedroom, lying in bed with her head resting on his
shoulder and her hair spread out like a fan, and then she saw him kissing her and
doing what he had just done with her, and she realized she was crying again and after
a while she got up and went into the old tiled bathroom to rinse her face.

A
FTER IT WAS
announced at Annual Conference where they would be sent, Lyle drove his family the
two and a half hours from Denver out onto the high plains to look at the town. Main
Street with one traffic light blinking on and off at the corner of Second Street,
the business section of three blocks, the old brick buildings with high false fronts,
the post office with its faded flag, the houses on either side of Main Street, the
streets on the west side named for trees, those to the east named for American cities,
and Highway 34 intersecting Main and running out both directions to the flat country,
the wheat fields and the corn and the native pastures, and beyond the highway the
high school where John Wesley would be going, and far away the blue sandhills in the
hazy distance.

After they had moved to Holt, John Wesley spent the first week up in his room at his
computer writing long letters to his friends in Denver. Then on Sunday he was forced
to attend the morning service since it was the entire family who made up the preacher’s
presence in town and the church expected them all to attend. On the third Sunday he
got a surprise.

There was a girl who attended church who was tall and thin and strange, dressed in
black with bright red lipstick, and with very pale skin. She always sat in the back
pew. She caught up to him after the Sunday service when he was walking away from the
church.