Heading Out to Wonderful (28 page)

Why wasn’t everything the way it was in the movies? Why had the screen gone dark? When she made up the character she had played, her face flickering with the luminosity of the silver screen in her shining eyes, who was it she was supposed to be? The flames told her nothing. She was an unschooled country girl who had learned everything she knew from people who were not real, and she had loved Charlie Beale, that much was sure. And she had known, briefly, blindly, the moment she had waited for, in the dark.

There ain’t nothing after this, she thought. There is no after.

He had been her whole movie, her movie star, but had she loved him? She had loved the way he looked, his posture, the way he moved, the way he laughed quietly with the boy over some man’s foolishness, fish or bird or rock, she had loved him before he ever came to her that first time, but then he had come, and he was no longer the flickering brightness she saw behind her lids when she closed her eyes at night and let in the dark, let him in to steal her heart and her soul, in the dark, in her dreams. When he had come, he had been smells, and skin, and a mouth that was all over her, and his weight scared her, his hands, his body, so real, so tight and muscled, smaller than her own, but coiled with power and need, need of her and for her, an endless need that was not a dream, that did not flicker, that was never-ending, and she couldn’t have that, couldn’t accept it, couldn’t endure it, and so she had shut the door in his face, had turned out the lights and sat in the dark, every inch of her skin wanting every inch of his skin, just like in the movie, shutting him out, the only natural man she’d ever known, the fullest, richest being who had ever come to her, and she just couldn’t take it.

She told herself that she had acted to save her parents the misery of loss, to pay back a debt of care that was owed. She told herself that she did it because Boaty would have killed him. But she dimly knew somehow that she did it because she preferred the fantasy of the movie in her mind to the reality of Charlie Beale.

So now she wandered her husband’s property in her plain housecoat, widowed but still married, in mourning for a man she had never really known. She crawled into thickets and lay down in the cool damp of the autumn woods and touched herself, remembering his hands on her, feeling the waves of pleasure, imagining him again, but this time as a shadow without weight or breath, without smell or sound or a hunger that surpassed her own.

She knew that she had ruined his life. She was not unaware. But men recover. They go on. He was forty years old, and filled with a desire and a craziness for love that was too big, too desperate. She was pretty sure that his heart had been broken before, and hadn’t he come to her anyway?

The leaves fell around her in the woods, the birds flew south, as she sat with her skirt hiked up around her waist and tried to play in her head the movie in which she could live out the rest of her life, the never-ending reel of her fantasy.

She called Boaty Mister Glass, now, when she was with him. He called her nothing, slept apart, wouldn’t touch her or come near her. He seemed to be figuring out what to do with her. Throw her out, yes, but she’d cost a lot of money, and you don’t throw good equipment away. She made his supper, and behaved herself, as far as he could tell, and she’d taken down those foolish pictures and burned up her embarrassing clothes, and stopped her damned talk of Hedy Lamarr and such, so, for now, he’d just wait and see how she turned out.

He was older. He’d never been attractive. He just didn’t have the taste for the hunt right now. Besides, the horse was already out of the barn. He saw the looks in people’s faces, felt their eyes on his back when he walked away. A man whose wife had cheated on him. They’d been snickering at him all his grown life, so what if they snickered now?

Besides, now that the truth was out, or whatever version of it people took to be the truth, he was freed from the awful burden of having to touch her, visit her in the night, and all that mess was behind him. No more romancing. Better his own hands, his magazines, in his mother’s bed, in the dark, and breakfast on the table.

He couldn’t stand her now, couldn’t take the sight of her for very long, but, as long as his house was clean and his food was on the table, why look for more trouble? She belonged to him, bought with good money, and he didn’t feel much like throwing out good property.

No, he would keep her, keep her like Rapunzel in her tower, knowing that no prince would come near her, ever again. He would put up with the stares and the snide grins, knowing that they’d go away, in time. He’d even put up with having to see Charlie Beale every now and then, as long as the man didn’t open his mouth or look at him in any way. Truth is, Boaty was both lazy and a coward, and he knew that confronting Charlie would take a whole lot of doing, and that Charlie would probably kill him if he tried any funny stuff on him. If the man had any sense, he’d just go away, the same way he’d come, back to wherever he came from, or onto the next new place and the next man’s wife.

One day Sylvan took the car keys from where she knew Boaty had hidden them—he wasn’t that complicated—and she drove into town to see Claudie Wiley, but Claudie, even though her car was parked right in front of her house, wouldn’t open the door when she knocked, again and again. Finally she drew back the blind on the glass-paned door—because she was in business and maybe it was a customer with a hem or an alteration—and stared straight at Sylvan for a full minute, before she let the curtain drop and disappeared back into the silence of her house, her life measured out in stitches. Claudie would never open the door to her again. She’d open it to any other woman with a bolt of cloth and a dream, but not to her.

Sylvan drove into Lexington and walked into the State Theater one more time, not even looking up to see what was on the marquee. She sat herself down in her usual seat, thinking for a second of Claudie upstairs in the Negro balcony with her sketch pad, thinking of the days when that had been good and possible, and then she drew a breath as the lights went down and the picture began to roll on the screen. The same silver light, the same bright faces with their handsome, big features that seemed to throw off light into a darkened world, but there was nothing there for her. Not any more. She left the theater, walking out into the blinding fall sunshine of Nelson Street, searching for her car keys in her purse, trying to see her way through the blinding, chilly brightness, back to her car, back to her life, back to her self. Back to being a country girl she did not know and had never known.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

T
HE FIRST WEDNESDAY
in December that year came on the seventh. It was Pearl Harbor Day and the flags were out, there would be services in every church in the afternoon to honor the almost five thousand who were killed or injured on that awful day only eight years before, every man and woman in town wore a little rosette to mourn the tragedy, so fresh in their minds, that day of infamy, as they all thought. But it was getting on toward Christmas, so there were also Christmas decorations hanging along with the flags, and there was a lot of butchering and planning to be done. Things went on in the world; Chiang Kai-shek fled China for Taiwan, but hardly anybody in Brownsburg noticed. The fate of millions of Chinese people didn’t matter nearly as much as the fate of the souls they lived beside every day. The rich soil of the undulating, stony county lay still and mute, cold but not frozen yet. The land, rocky as it was, had been kind to its people, and they were pretty generally kind to one another in return. Maybe that was something that the land whispered, maybe that was the message—there is kindness. There is kindness everywhere. Hard won, long remembered and rarely noticed, but there. There forever.

Charlie Beale woke up in despair, as he did, as he did every morning now. At least he woke up in his bed this time, and not on the sofa or the kitchen floor, where he had found himself too many mornings since that morning, that morning she had walked from the court and out of his life, changing the course of that life beyond recognition.

Even though he looked the same to the people he passed, the people who now both loved and shunned him, he was unrecognizable to himself. It took an hour every morning for him to take a familiar shape again, eyewash to clear his eyes, a hot bath to wash away the night sweats, the slick sheen of fear and rage that covered his body in the night. His body, thinner now but somehow stronger still, lay inert in the bath, and all the night terrors gradually were rinsed away, dissipated in the water as the water cooled, and when he felt, even for a moment, at peace, he rose dripping from the water as he had from the river—so long ago, that—and he dressed, and crept past the door to the room where his brother slept, whiskey and sawdust, that wiry boy who had come and showed no signs of leaving, as though he knew beyond knowing that Charlie Beale could not live alone now, could not feed himself or ask for the help he needed, had to get it from somewhere and that somewhere might as well be his own flesh and blood, at least that comfort.

It was hard for Charlie, now, to face Alma. It was her warmth he couldn’t take, because he knew it was a warmth mixed with disapproval, and rightly so—her disapproval of what his lust had led him to. She was never less than kind, but now she was afraid, too, afraid for him and, of course, afraid for her boy. She and Will had talked the night before. The outings had to stop, they agreed, some way had to be found to separate the man from the boy, even though Sam seemed to be Charlie’s only comfort now, and it broke Alma’s heart even to think it, but it had to be done. Sam spent half the day in school now, and he should be playing with boys his own age, other first-graders. At least that was the reason she gave, while Sam listened from the top step.

She was just putting on the coffee pot when she saw Charlie pass on his way to open the shop. He wasn’t wearing a coat, and his cuffs were unbuttoned. Alma thought that both of these things were a sure sign of mental disturbance. Crazy people didn’t wear enough clothes in the winter, and they wore too many in the summer. He seemed, to her, not to know where he was, although he walked steadily and directly toward the butcher shop. Before—when it was before—he might have stopped in for a cup of her coffee and one of her biscuits. He hadn’t done that since then, since that day in October. A man who was innocent, but who had sinned. Now a prisoner of sin, as the good book said. She measured out the coffee and wondered what to do. So much happens, she thought, when you’ve got biscuits in the oven. Her heart went out to him, but she didn’t call out or wave. She didn’t know what she would have said if he had come in, which he wouldn’t have done anyway. Not now.

Charlie made his way down the street in the new light of a December day, and opened the shop and flipped on the lights. He went through the familiar routines of sweeping the floor, checking the freezer, washing down the butcher block. Everything seemed tender to him, everything fragile. The sad, cold beef in the locker, the coarse salt and steel brush on the wood, the bleach on the marble counter. His own hands doing these things, sweeping, scrubbing, making ready for the day, the day he could not envision or enter, although he was there, he was doing these things, he was making do. Just don’t ask any questions, he silently begged Will, who was still at the breakfast table. At the last, he raised the flag on the pole outside the shop, to honor the dead and the day.

When Will came in at nine, everything was in perfect order, the slicer and the grinder shining, the knives whetted into razor sharpness, the goods, the chops and ground meat laid out in the case. “Pearl Harbor Day,” said Will, handing Charlie a brown paper bag that had, he knew, an egg and bacon sandwich that they both knew he would not eat. “Sad.”

“Yes, sir,” said Charlie.

“Lose anybody?”

“Not there.”

“No. Me neither. Still.”

“Yes.”

“A lot of boys.”

The morning began, the black women coming in first, as always, counting out their money in quarters and nickels, speaking little. Then came the parade of white women, all of them talking only to Will while Charlie waited on them, each wishing in her heart that she might be the one to save the man who had saved the boy, and each knowing that it was not she, if any such person existed, with the power to bring him back into the fold. Once done, it was done forever, beyond amelioration or exoneration, or even acceptance. If they ever forgot that fact for a moment, their preachers had reminded them every Sunday, and their faith kept that truth in their hearts, as much as it saddened them.

If he knelt among them and begged for salvation, as Sylvan had done, if the preacher laid on the hands and made him whole, it might be different. But that, Charlie wouldn’t do, and so it was the way it was.

They all wished something else, something they could not say even to themselves. Each wished she had been the one, the woman. There was not one among them who would not have gone to hell with him, just like that Glass girl did, not one who would not have opened her door to him, whatever the ferocity of her belief.

But they just told Will what they needed for the day, and took the packages from Charlie without a word, noticing, as they did, how thin he’d grown, how sad, how marked by his own infamous sin. Yes, he had saved the boy, but, still, the mighty are often fallen and even the divine are sometimes damned. They were kind, or thought themselves so, but they were not forgiving. Perhaps God would be—they were certain of it—but not them.

By noon, most of the ladies had come and gone, and Sam ran in from school. A boy had peed on the floor and the teacher had called him a baby and made him sit in a high chair for the rest of the day. That was the most exciting thing pretty much ever at school, and Sam was just glad it wasn’t him.