Heading Out to Wonderful (26 page)

They took the dog’s rope from his hand, and stood with Jackie and watched Charlie walk sadly back up the street and get in his truck to go out to the river and spend the night alone in the chilling air on the hard ground.

He woke up the next morning and everything hurt, stiff, chilled and sweating, as though he had been drunk all night. He saw the river, grasped its beauty, and thought that he could wade in and bathe, but he didn’t. It was too far. Everything was too much trouble.

“Have some coffee,” Ned said as Charlie walked into the house. “Shave. Change your clothes. One foot in front of the other, that’s all.”

“Fuck you,” said Charlie. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” And the brother just took it, stood there holding out a hot cup of coffee, staring at him the way the dog had, and Charlie felt a wave of love and regret for this brother he didn’t know, a blush of shame at his own behavior.

“Get me a lawyer,” Charlie said, “Could you figure that out for me?”

“Already have,” Ned said. “Just say the word, it’s all set.”

It was closing in around him, all of it, but he changed his shirt the way Ned asked and went off to work, cutting steaks and roasts and chops all day for women who wouldn’t look at him, except for Claudie Wiley, who looked him in the eye and said, as though she knew what the answer might be, “How you doing, Mister Beale.” And “Just fine, Miss Wiley” was all he could think of to say, although he knew that she knew that he was lying and would have said more, would have told her everything, knowing that she knew most of it anyway, but there were limits and laws and “just fine” would have to do for all that there was unspoken and felt between them.

She would tell that woman she had seen him, that woman who never came in the store anymore, or the husband either. They had retreated into wherever couples go when they don’t want the world to see the bruise of their marriage, and they sent Claudie Wiley into the store to get their meat for them, and she would tell the woman that he was fine and that he had on a clean shirt but that he had not shaved his face, and that would be enough of a message. Everything that was going to be done was almost done, and no message from him through her would change any of that. Claudie had seen it all, made drawings in the night she showed Evelyn Hope and nobody else. The drawings frightened her, but a lot of things frightened Evelyn Hope.

Charlie Beale drove out to the slaughterhouse every Wednesday afternoon, as he always did, most often taking the boy, driving past her house without looking or stopping, wanting to say to Sam, don’t ever let this happen to you. Every week, Sam would look out the window and wave, shouting, “Look, Beebo. There’s Mrs. Glass. Look, Beebo.” But Charlie never turned his head to see her there, perfectly dressed, made up, staring down the hill into the road from her wide porch.

Instead, they talked about the World Series just past. The Yankees had won, breaking Sam’s heart, because if the Dodgers lost that meant Jackie Robinson lost personally, although, even if he was listening on the radio, the prospect of the first baseball game played under lights thrilled him and Charlie, both; they could picture the grass lit up to an incandescent green, the white men and Jackie, a black man, now moving in stride with other black men, Newcombe, Campanella, all the men as though in slow motion, shielding their eyes from the unfamiliar glare, the brightness of baseball made brighter by its stark silhouette against the Brooklyn evening. The Fireman, Joe Page, had been named MVP, and Jackie Robinson had gone home to his wife. They had all just gone home, the way they did every October, winners or losers. Sam took this personally.

Charlie and Ned drove over to Lexington after one of those afternoons. Ned had to drive because Charlie was shaking so bad, smoking, drinking a beer in the truck, his shirt still blotched with the blood of animals. They went to see Charlie’s new lawyer, Cully Blake, lean and preened and red-faced, already drunk, having been drunk since ten in the morning, as he always was. Cully Blake was white, clean-shaven, with buffed nails, immaculately starched shirts and drunk to the gills from ten a.m. on every day, which did not put him in an unusual position among Southern men of his time and station, and which didn’t interfere in any way with the performance of his job, which would have been slack under any conditions. Cully was a lazy, well-bred man of intelligence but no consequence, looking at two oddly matched brothers sitting in his office at day’s end and already wondering if his bill would be paid.

Anticipating that, Charlie pulled five hundred dollars in cash from his pocket and laid it on the table. “Think that’ll be enough, Mr. Blake?” he asked, and Cully knew it would, without even counting it. He’d seen piles of money before.

“Tell me what happened, Charlie. You don’t mind if I call you Charlie?”

“I do. That’s my money on the table, Mr. Blake.”

“Mr. Beale. Then. Sir. Tell me what happened.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“What did you do? Usually in this kind of case, a man has done something, even if he hasn’t done what the woman says he’s done.”

“I didn’t do anything. And I’m not going to talk about it.”

“Mrs. Glass says . . .”

“Don’t ever mention her name to me again.”

“That’s going to be a little difficult.”

“Hard or easy, that’s the way it is.”

“She’ll say things in court. Things you don’t want to have said in public.”

“Whatever she says, that’s what happened.”

“You look guilty, Mister Beale.” Blake said, thinking now only of his next drink of whiskey. “You have the look of a guilty man.”

“That could be. Every man has done something. I‘ve done things. Plenty of things. I just didn’t do this. I didn’t do this thing. Good evening, Mister Blake. Let me know when to be in court.”

They drove home in the autumn dark without talking. Charlie, drinking another beer, thought, How can you give so much of yourself without love? How can you do that thing with your body, your lips and breasts and tongue, and not feel some trace of love in your heart? Confused, troubled, and not less confused as he drank beer after beer, he who rarely touched alcohol, now on his way to being solidly drunk for the first time in a long time.

They sat up late, drinking in the near dark of Charlie’s kitchen, Ned talking softly from time to time. Charlie crying, sometimes just tears running down his face in horrible, flowing silence, sometimes huge, heaving sobs.

And all he said, with the vehement enunciation of the totally drunk, before he lurched up to bed, was, “I dint do anything. Did. Dent.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

N
O SIR.”

A six-year-old boy in a scratchy new wool suit and an immaculate white shirt to which is affixed a clip-on bow tie, all of it from Mr. Swink’s in Lexington, this little boy sits on a hard wooden chair in an almost empty courtroom in Lexington, the county seat of Rockbridge County in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and he perjures himself, he lies and lies over and over again until they just stop asking him questions, knowing that he is going to hell for telling a lie, and knowing that telling twenty is no worse than telling one, he lies because he knows that the thing they’re asking is part of the bargain he made with Charlie long ago never to speak to anybody of certain things, and knowing that if he does speak of these things, that something terrible will happen to Charlie that is far worse than the fires of the hell he knows are waiting for him.

Be a good boy, his mother had told him; just tell the truth. But he knew he couldn’t do that, he didn’t know what it was that would happen if he did tell, Charlie had never told him, but he knew it would be something worse than any pain he had known, worse than gasping for breath in the gray river water, losing his sight, his breath, until he finally gave in and just sank. Worse than that.

When he made his promise to Charlie, in the truck on that cold fall day a year ago, it really hadn’t occurred to him to question what such a promise might mean, or how he was to carry it out when the time came. He had been raised to tell the truth, and he did, and he answered the questions that came at him in the same way. Yes, he threw the rock that broke the window. No, he hadn’t done his homework. His mother said that it was so much easier telling the truth because then you didn’t have to remember what you said; if the question was asked again, you’d naturally answer in the same way.

The first lie was the hardest, because it was his mother who was doing the asking, and he loved her, and he knew she didn’t want to see him in hell, and he knew that she didn’t deserve this, not from him or from anybody, and he understood instantly that she knew he was lying, that every time he lied, the lie would be as clear and hard as a glass windowpane before the rock went through it.

Things are so easily shattered, and once they’re broken, certain things are broken forever. They don’t heal. They don’t come back.

“No, ma’am,” he said, he had never seen Charlie and Mrs. Glass together, and his mother looked at him in a certain way, with a slight hesitation before her eyes blinked again, and he knew that she would never look at him again any other way but that, never look at him as she always had. She looked sad, broken, somehow, broken in a way that she would have to go on living with.

“Are you sure? Never?”

“No, ma’am. Never. I’m sure.”

“Not once?”

“She came into Daddy’s store. I guess . . .” He looked her straight in the eye. It was horrible, and it hurt his heart like a knife. It was a pain in his blood.

“I mean, outside the store. Alone.”

“No, ma’am. Never alone.”

Which was almost true. Because, except for that first time, when he waited in the truck, he was always there, he was with them, and so they couldn’t have been alone in the way she meant. Jackie Robinson had been there, too, and even a dog counted for something, didn’t he?

“Remember something, Sam. Always remember this. If you behave badly, or make a mistake, you can act better or do it over and nobody will mind. But if you tell one lie, just one, you will be a liar forever. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Every lie like a stab in his heart, but easier every time, the pain lessening, his brain hardening around the fact that he had become a person who did not, who would not, tell the truth.

He didn’t tell Beebo about the lies, about the questions. Beebo knew, and he seemed to treat the boy with a new respect, a greater kindness than ever before. There was no need for them to talk about it. It was just a fact, and now everybody was keeping secrets, and everybody was lying. Lying about what they knew. Lying about who they were.

They went fishing again, just the two of them, with the dog. They went to look for eagles on the top of House Mountain. Sam had never seen the world from so high up. The carpet of the valley lay spread out far beneath him, and he asked a thousand questions, and Charlie answered every one of them, patiently, and with such enormous gentleness, pointing out where their town lay, Sam’s house, a tiny dot among a thousand other tiny dots. Charlie pointed out, as well, the farms and rivers and waterfall that had once belonged to him.

Their companionship was closer and more constant than ever, but there was a kind of farewell feeling in it, too. Sam learned for the first time that you didn’t say everything that came into your mind, that most things that came into your mind, in fact, went unsaid, unremarked, left there to wonder at and be troubled by. He didn’t even know what it was Charlie was supposed to have done, but he knew enough not to ask.

In the weeks before the trial, Charlie seemed nervous all the time. He tried to make Sam feel better, even though they never discussed what it was that was making Sam feel bad. He just knew, and he seemed sometimes to be close to crying about it, but they never talked about that, just other things, but those other things in such a way that Sam knew Charlie was trying to give him all his strength and courage.

Charlie drove the boy all the way into Lexington to have soft ice cream, and to see a movie, just the two of them. They saw Red River, and even Sam could see that Charlie looked like that actor in the picture. One night, Charlie pointed to the sky and named a star after Sam Haislett, but the boy couldn’t find it the next night or the next, or ever.

Now, on a very warm October day with all the courtroom windows wide open, Sam was doing the thing he knew was right, even if he also knew it was wrong. He was saying nothing.

There were very few people in the courtroom, other than the judge, the lawyers, and the officers of the court. There was a policeman who never took his eyes off Sam. His mother and father. Claudie Wiley. The man who was asking him questions. Charlie and his lawyer, Charlie dressed in a brand new suit from J. Ed Deaver’s on Main Street, the tie knotted too tight at his neck. His brother, Ned, was there, looking like death warmed over. The only people from the town who had come were the twins, and they sat right behind Charlie. They were too old to care about what their minister said about not going to the trial, they figured they were so old they were either going to hell or they weren’t, probably weren’t, and one day in court just to sit and show Charlie Beale that he did have a friend in the world wasn’t going to make a damned bit of difference in their fate for eternity.

And, of course, sitting at the other table was Mrs. Glass, all in black, with a hat and white short gloves, and, behind her, her husband, smooth as silk, so calm you might have thought he was asleep, except that his black Boatwright eyes stared at Sam, and even he knew Sam was lying every time he opened his mouth.