The Followed Man (15 page)

Their silence was the comment
upon that fact.

Luke finally said, "I'd
like to leave all this stuff here for a few weeks, if you don't mind.
Except for the knife, I guess." He put the knife in his pocket,
then found room in the chest for the shoe box.

"You might as well take the
money," George said. "Ain't no sen­timental value to
it." Luke put the dollar bills next to those that had belonged
to Gracie.

When they went back in the house
they found that Phyllis had gone upstairs to make up a bed for Luke,
which exasperated George, who went up after her. "God damn it,
mother!" Luke heard him say. "It hurts you to lick a goddam
postage stamp, and now ..." A door shut. Luke looked at the book
Phyllis had been reading. It was a novel,
Time Out of Mind,
by
Rachel Field, published a generation ago. He wondered if Rachel Field
were still alive, and what she might have thought if she knew that
her scenes and people lived again in another mind.

Phyllis stayed upstairs, said
good night from the landing, told him about towels and asked what he
wanted for breakfast. George muttered that he'd take care of all
that, and came back downstairs.

"I don't know why she won't
sit still for a goddam minute," he said. "She's in pain
every time she moves."

"But it comes and goes, she
said?"

"Mostly it comes,"
George said. "But let me tell you, she's a fine woman, Luke.
Well. I'm going to have myself a little nightcap and go out on the
steps and smoke my pipe, if you'd care to join me, and then hit the
sack."

The nightcap was blended whiskey
poured over an ice cube in a juice glass. Their glasses tinkled as
they sat on the front steps, sipped the whiskey and looked across the
green square. One streetlight, the only one in town, grew out of its
circle of green and softly brought the white church and the white
town hall out of a darkness roofed by trees. Fireflies made their
dotted lines of greenish yellow as they flew slowly over the grass, a
light Luke knew was cold, not given for him or his purposes. He
wanted to say to George, "Look, from all I know you're a fine
man, too." But that would be a doubtful and demeaning
simplification and would not do. He did say, "I want to thank
you for all you've done, George."

"Weren't nothing,"
George said.

"I mean it, though."

"You paid his taxes for him
and sent him money. It was little enough for me to look in on him
once in a while and do some gro­cery shopping for him."
George puffed on his pipe a few times. "Anyway, I owed Shem.
Maybe you don't know, but I lived with him and Carrie four years,
starting when I was thirteen and my mother went to the lunatic
asylum. Samuel was just a baby then. I done chores a'nd let me tell
you I worked my tailbone off. But they took me in, and no kin of
theirs. My father run off to Manchester, to the mills. He couldn't
handle me."

"No, I didn't know that."

"Shem taught me a lot,"
George said. "He sure wouldn't take no sass, neither. Ouch!"

"He used to scare me a
little when I was a kid," Luke said.

"Nobody screwed around with
Shem Carr. He put them blue eyes on you and your gizzard froze up
solid!" George chuckled and then finished his whiskey, rattled
his ice cube and took the last drop. "Anyways, I owed him,"
he said.

Luke finished his own whiskey,
wishing he had more of it, wish­ing that he didn't want any more
of it. He field-stripped his ciga­rette and put the filter in his
breast pocket. George was watching him, which startled him a little.
Out of the corner of his eye, in the light from the window, he saw
George nod.

"Well," George said,
yawning the words, "I guess I'm going to hit the sack. What time
you want to get up in the morning?"

"Whenever you do."

"You got the room to the
left, head of the stairs. She had it all made up, God bless her."

They said good night. Luke used
the downstairs bathroom, then found his room, the overhead light left
on for him. His bed was old, swaybacked, made of iron. He had slept
on such beds be­fore, at the farm, at Phyllis's—maybe this
very bed.

In the middle of the night he
woke up in the deep woods, in ab­solute darkness, where he'd made
his bed in a gulley overhung with branches. Water was coming, which
would flood him out un­less he climbed out of the gulley through
the thick brush. The sides were steep, and he gathered up his sheets,
blanket and pil­low and tried to climb out, reaching up for
purchase with his right hand, which grasped a string and pulled it.
The overhead light came on and he was standing in the middle of the
swaybacked old bed in Phyllis Bateman's house in Cascom, with all the
bedclothes clutched to him. The unnerving recognition of the dream
came first, but then it was all pleasant. He had to go to the
bathroom, yes, and perhaps that was the water part of it, but it
seemed such a
beautiful adventure, one to be remembered and
treasured. He
put the sheets back on the bed, went to the
bathroom down the hall, and came back to the bed that was now so safe
and old that he melted down into it.

In the morning Phyllis was so
painfully stiff George had to help her into the bathroom and Luke and
George had to help her down the stairs to the breakfast table in the
kitchen. She wore an old blue bathrobe, frayed at its cuffs and
seams, and men's leather slippers with elastic at the sides.

"I don't like to be
helped," she said. "I never liked to be helped and I never
will and that's a great disadvantage in your old age."

"Hell, you're only sixty,"
George said. "You ain't even at retire­ment age yet."

George made coffee and toast and
fried eggs on the bottled gas stove, while Luke set the table under
Phyllis's supervision.

After they had eaten they had
more coffee, and as they sat there Phyllis had that secretive, yet
slightly avid look that meant she was having plans for Luke. Even
when he was a little boy he knew she wasn't good at secrets.

"When you sell your house
are you going to come back to Cascom sometimes?" she asked.

"I'll come back and visit,"
he said.

"There's some awful
interesting new people in town you ought to meet."

"You going to look after
the land at all?" George said, changing the subject. "There's
some timber. Yellow birch, white birch, ma­ple—veneer logs
in there worth a lot of money. Hemlock, pine—not so
many—spruce, beech, ash. You got seventy acres of woods ain't
been logged in thirty years. You should ought to do some thinning."

"I was thinking when I was
there yesterday I'd like to clear the old pastures."

"Ayuh," George said,
nodding. "It's a damn shame to let it all close in like that.
Ain't good for much but red squirrels and por­cupines once the
brush grows up in trees."

"Maybe I will sometime,"
Luke said.

George looked at him
skeptically, his gray eyes just visible, like little glints of washed
metal in the complicated folds of his old eye­lids. "Naw,
you won't," he said.

Luke felt heat in his cheeks, as
if he'd been accused, correctly, of lying. He wanted to deny it. He
thought of the dream last night of the black woods. There had been
other dreams last night, too; they reached for his mind as if with
hands, but he could not quite remember them.

The farm had been a place where
he was before he was a hus­band and father. Cascom was like that
too, the weight of his ear­lier past seeming heavier here.

"Did you swim in the brook
when you were a kid?" he asked George.

"I'd go down to fetch the
cows in the lower pasture on a hot day, you can bet I was out of my
overalls quick as a wink and down the chute. That was the coldest
water! I swear it was almost too cold to drink!"

"I took a short dip there
yesterday. I thought I was paralyzed for a minute."

"I got a great affection
for that place up there," George said. "I hate to see it go
back, but I guess that's what's happening to all the old farms.
Sometimes you wonder how any of 'em ever made half a living, but what
I seem to recall is plenty of good company and good food. Weren't
much cash money, but in them days a man could pretty near fix
anything that broke, doctor his animals, build what he wanted and
shoot the varmints." He shook his head once, a jerk of his
bristly chin to the right and back. "Now it does feel a long
time ago."

Phyllis said, "When you
come back, maybe I'll be up and around and we can have some people in
for supper."

"That would be nice,"
Luke said with something like dread—a minor form of dread.

Before he left he made George
call around and find out how much Shem's stone had cost altogether,
then made a check out to George for it. Phyllis made him promise
again to come back soon, and George said he was always welcome.
Suddenly without think­ing much about it, because if he had he
would have seen how com­plicated it was, he told George he wanted
to give him the .22 cali­ber pistol on the .45 frame.

George was startled and not
exactly pleased. "That's a matched pair!" he said.

"It'll match your .45 as
well as Shem's," Luke said. "I'll keep the .45 and the
holster, but I want you to have the .22 and whatever tools go with
it."

"Naw!" George said.

"Yes," Luke said.
"We'll go shoot rats with it at the dump when I come back. It's
yours, George, I mean it."

"Well, God damn it, I'll
think about it!"

"All right!"

George wouldn't quite smile.
Luke knew how the pistol fascinat­ed him, but he also knew that
the gift of such an elaborate and ex­pensive object would seem
beyond the pale to George, an act of ir­responsibility, and
somehow suspect. But George wanted to play with the pistol, and shoot
it, and now he would have permission in his own mind to do that much,
anyway.

That afternoon Luke turned into
the shaded driveway of his house in Wellesley and stopped behind the
Hornet, which pro­truded slightly from the garage because of
bicycles and other gear. The other half of the garage was full of
lawn furniture and other summer things he hadn't taken out.

He
didn't want to open the car door. The magnitude of the tasks before
him was too great. He wondered, even began to cal­culate, the
expense of shame and general self-hatred and disgust it would cost
him to just stop functioning in any responsible way. Let everything
go, let everything rot. He didn't want to sell any­thing, store
anything, have anything, except maybe a drink.

The engine creaked, cooling. His
hands on the steering wheel looked craggy and old. You could always
tell the true age by the hands, someone once told him, but who cared.
He looked at his hands and discovered the slivers from the old wooden
chest, deep and turning the skin around them red. They looked like a
flight of little arrows embedded in his flesh. He needed a tool, and
there was Shem's jackknife in his pocket, so he took it out and
opened the longest, or clip, blade, which had a sharp point.
John Fredericton Knives, Stamford, Conn,
was etched in tiny letters
on the han­dle. It was a fine knife, a fine thing, perfect in its
detailing, fit for a man to carry all his life and leave to his
descendants. Without bothering to sterilize the tip he sternly and
efficiently dug out each sliver. The pain seemed to come from far
away, diminished by travel. He licked the salty blood from the blade,
wiped it well on his dungarees, clicked (walked or talked) it back
into the handle and slid the knife into his right front pants pocket,
where it had made a shape for itself and seemed to belong.

In the house he would find
antiseptic and a couple of adhesive bandages. The surgery seemed to
bring him back into the world, so he got out of the car and out of
habit went to the mailbox, brought the mail into the kitchen and let
it fall onto the counter. There was no letter from the Avenger. Two
windowed envelopes looked like bills and the rest were ads and
solicitations, tabloids full of exclamations and coupons. Helen used
to clip the coupons out and use them while shopping; he couldn't
imagine ever doing that.

In the bathroom he found himself
brushing his teeth. A grainy feeling discovered by his tongue had
resulted in this action direct­ly, involuntarily—part of
the sympathetic nervous system, no doubt. Also, he would shave, and
did. He had a few hours before he was supposed to be at the Joneses,
so he collected trunks and boxes from the various storage places and
began to pack those possessions he would put into storage.

How many souvenirs of his
family, if any, did a man need? There must be some system here. He
must make choices based upon some reading of intensity. What did he
want to remember? What would he use each object for? Would he in his
old age sit in a room in softly nostalgic light and muse fondly upon
the me­mentoes of his lost son and daughter? His old age wasn't
that far away and he foresaw no such room or mood. His wife, whose
companionable body and soul he knew, mole and freckle, wound and
phobia, irrationality and loyalty—what
souvenirs
would
he keep of her?

There must be four categories:
1. Those things he would keep with him. 2. Those things he would
store for possible later use. 3. Those things that might be useful to
such an organization as the Salvation Army. 4. Those things that
would go to the dump.
Use
seemed the principle here.

He would keep: photographs and
letters. Naturally; no thought involved there. He did not want to
look at them but there were al­bums and drawers full of loose
photographs and envelopes of negatives. There were albums of his
babyhood and youth, albums of Helen's babyhood and youth, albums
belonging to Johnny and Gracie, albums that he'd forgotten about. He
stopped in the up­stairs hallway and put down a cardboard box
full of albums and loose photographs. He could not do it this way. If
he went into each room and removed one category of objects from each,
he would never finish. He must do this in terms of space, cubic feet,
not categories. He had never been good at any category except
miscellaneous; categories overlapped and slid together like a
shuffled deck of cards.