All Mortal Flesh

THIRTY-THREE

He arrived at the cabin just as the last streaks of orange and red were fading from the sky. He had a bag of groceries in each hand, and he balanced his steps carefully as he crunched up the snow-packed drive to the door. Maple and alder and birch trees cast pale violet shadows on the snow. Behind them, the forest thickened into the darkness of hemlock and eastern pine. He paused, one boot on the deck stairs. Above the cabin’s deep-eaved roof, he could see the first star of the evening glimmering through a thin veil of chimney smoke.

She opened the door, spilling golden light. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“What are you doing?” She bent down-slipping something on her feet, he guessed-and stepped onto the deck.

“First star,” he said.

“Did you make a wish?” He could hear, more than see, her smile.

“I don’t know what to ask for.”

“Ah.” No smile now. “That’s the problem, isn’t it.”

He trudged up the steps. “I brought dinner.”

“You didn’t have to do that. I overcompensated and carried a ton of food up here with me.” She opened the door for him. “Trust me, we could be snowed in until spring and we wouldn’t run out.”

He paused in the doorway. Looked down at her. “And isn’t that a tempting thought?”

He could see her cheeks flush before she turned away. She pushed him into the cabin. “C’mon, don’t let all the heat out the door.”

He let her relieve him of the groceries as he took off his boots and parka. “This is nice,” he said. The cabin was one big room, with an assemblage of living room furniture to his left and a dining table to his right. A glowing wood-stove set on a platform of riverstones divided the front of the cabin from the kitchen. Russ followed the line of its broad stone chimney to where it vanished through the roof. “What’s upstairs in the loft?” he asked.

“The bedroom,” Clare said absently, pulling a box of soba noodles and a jar of natural peanut butter from one of the bags. “What were you thinking of?”

What was I thinking of? Bedrooms. Firelight. Skin. Teeth.

“Pad Thai?” she went on, lifting a clove of garlic.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Pad Thai.” He shook himself like a dog emerging from a river. “Mom’s still on the high-protein, low-carbs diet. I need a pasta fix some bad.” He went around the woodstove, shucking his sweater over his head as he did so. There were a pair of spindle chairs pulled up to a small kitchen table, hard against the back of the chimney. He tossed it over the back of one and rolled his sleeves up.

“How is it going? Staying with your mom?”

He grabbed the tray of chicken breasts and ripped off the cling wrap. “It’s okay, I guess. It helps that she got that house after Janet and I had flown the nest. If I were back in the same room I had in high school, I think I’d feel like even more of a failure than I do now. As it is, it’s more like being a houseguest than like moving back home.”

Her hands stilled over the peppers. “Oh, God, Russ. I’m so sorry.”

He wiped his hands on a dishrag and took hold of her shoulders. “Listen. I know we have to talk. When you asked me up here, I knew it wasn’t a date or an invitation to a seduction. But, dammit, before we get to the part where we tear our guts out, I’d like to enjoy a nice meal with you. How many times have we ever had dinner together?”

“Three,” she said.

“Okay.” He shook her gently. “Can we put all that other stuff aside for an hour or two? Can we just put on the radio and talk about our jobs and the weather and the idiots in Washington like a real couple would do?”

She nodded. Slowly, she smiled. God, he loved seeing her smile. “So,” she said. “How ’bout them Patriots?”

She dug up candles in the pantry. Their light reflected in the glass-front bookcase behind the dining table. “I’m worried about Kevin,” he was saying. “He has the potential to be a good officer, but he’s still awfully immature. He needs to broaden his experience. I think the farthest away from Millers Kill he’s ever been was the senior class trip to New York.”

She speared a bite of sauce-soaked chicken. “Is there any way you could get him into a more urban police department for six months? Like a temporary detached duty?”

“Yeah. Except then I’d lose him. You can’t keep ’em down on the farm-”

“Once they’ve seen Paree.”

He poured himself another glass of cranberry juice. “As it is, I give Mark Durkee another year or two, tops, before he jumps ship. The talented ones, the ones with brains and energy, they all go off to bigger and better things. The ones who stay are the ones like Noble, who’d be dogmeat in a larger unit, or like me and Lyle, too old to change anymore.”

She snorted. “Yep, that’s you. Doddering off to the Infirmary. Don’t forget to give my office a call. We’ll put you on the visitation list.”

“Watch it, youngster. We’ll see what you say a few years from now, when your knees have given up the ghost.”

“Given it up for the Holy Ghost, more like.” She took a sip of her wine. “I think you may be wrong about Mark Durkee, though. His wife has family here, doesn’t she?”

“Bains. There are dozens of ’em between here and Cossayuharie.”

“And they’ve got a kindergartner, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hard to just up and abandon grandparents and school and all.” Ignoring her manners, she propped an elbow on the table. “It’s Mark you should get a TDD for. He’s got something to come back to.”

“And Kevin?”

She picked up her wineglass again and looked at him over the rim. “He needs to broaden his experience, all right. I suspect that there’s nothing wrong with Kevin Flynn that getting laid wouldn’t cure.”

He nearly choked on his noodles laughing.

They washed the dishes together.

“My parents used to do this when I was a little girl,” Clare said, scrubbing at a sticky spot where the peanut sauce had scorched on. “Mama would wash and Daddy would dry.”

“That’s the natural order of things,” Russ said, putting a final gloss on a plate before replacing it in the cupboard. “Women wash. Men dry.” He picked a glass out of the drainer. He hadn’t done this in years. He and Linda ate a lot of prepared meals, or he would throw something together out of cans if he got home too late or she was working on an order. The dishes would go in the dishwasher, sometimes hours apart. “ ’Tain’t natural the other way round.”

“And why, pray tell, is that?”

“Women have a mystical affinity to water. It’s a tidal thing, you know, the pull of the moon.”

“Uh-huh. And men?”

“Oh, men just like the repetitive motion of rubbing something up and down.”

Fortunately, his glasses protected his eyes when she sprayed water in his face.

They got down to business in the chairs in front of the woodstove. She had blown out the candles and turned off the lights before they sat down. “Sometimes, it’s easier to talk in the dark,” she said.

Of course, it wasn’t dark. They were lit by the leaping red-orange of the fire. But she was right. There was something about the heat of the woodstove, and the shadows dancing off in the corners of the cabin, that unloosened the constraints of the soul. He wondered if there might not be something to the idea of racial memory, if a thousand generations of humans sitting before a fire were making him feel this way: open, balanced, neither dreading nor expecting what was to come. He looked into the face of the woman sitting opposite him.

Or maybe it was Clare.

“What does your marriage counselor say?” she asked.

“What everybody else does. That I need to make up my mind. Except she says ‘I need to discern my inner goals and bring them into congruence with my stated intentions.’ ” He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “What does your spiritual advisor say? Deacon Wigglesworth?”

“Aberforth. Willard Aberforth. He hasn’t been advising me so much as listening to me blather on. It helps to unload some of the garbage that’s been accumulating in my heart.”

“Garbage?”

She smiled humorlessly. “You think I’m so all-forbearing and even-tempered about this. You have no idea. How many times I’ve caught myself thinking, Well, maybe his wife will drop dead of a heart attack or Maybe her plane will go down on the next buying trip.”

He winced.

“I know. It’s awful stuff, and I hate myself for it. The times I literally sit on my hands to keep from calling you and inviting you over to my house and into my bed. The nasty, gut-churning jealousy when I think of the two of you doing the ordinary, stupid things couples get to do. Eating together every night. Watching a video.” Her voice dropped. “Sleeping together. God, when you two went off for the Christmas holidays, I was a wreck. A total wreck. That’s when I knew I had to take this time. I knew I needed to be alone to think and pray.”

“Oh, darlin’.” He sighed. “That was supposed to be a rekindling-the-marriage trip.”

“How did it go?”

“I think it would have worked better if I could have stopped thinking about you for more than five minutes at a time.”

She smiled a little.

“Ever since I told her about us, Linda’s been trying her damndest to reach out to me. First it was shopping bags full of sexy lingerie and silk sheets and massage oils.”

Clare winced.

“Then it was the trip to Montreal, then the marriage counselor. Even kicking me out of the house. I don’t think she’s as interested in exploring the non-marital side of herself, which is what the therapist recommended, as she is in making me see what I’ll be missing.”

Clare was silent for a moment. “And will you be missing her?”

“Yes.” He knew she was half-hoping for a different answer, but he couldn’t be anything less than honest with her. “We’ve got twenty-five years together. Half my life. That’s too much to just walk away from. I stood up in front of my family and friends and promised to stay with her until death. She’s kept her promises. Why should she suffer because I couldn’t?”

“And you love her.”

“And I love her. It’s different than the way I love you, but yes.”

Clare looked away from the fire. She was quiet for a long time. Finally she said, “I think what you have with her is love. What you have with me is novelty. I’m new and different, and we’ve been catching bits and pieces of each other over the past two years.” He had never known her to sound so bitter. “I expect that if we ever spent any real time together, the infatuation would wear off pretty damn quick.”

“Clare.” He pushed out of his chair and knelt on the rag rug before her, pinning her in place. “Don’t say that.” Pain and frustration roughened his voice. “Say what’s true. You know things about me that no one else ever will, not in twenty-five years, not in fifty. You know me. Goddammit, if I was just looking for a quick thrill, don’t you think I would have ended it by now? Do you think I like making my wife cry? Do you think I like lying awake at night, caught between destroying her and destroying myself? ’Cause that’s what it feels like when I think about never being with you again. Like I might as well walk up into the mountains and lie down and let the snow take me.”

She was shaking beneath his hands, and he realized she was crying. He pulled her against him, tumbling her out of her chair, and they rocked together in front of the hissing fire. “Christ, Clare,” he said. “Christ. Tell me what to do. I can’t leave her and I can’t leave you. For God’s sake, tell me what to do.”

She was standing by one of the windows, looking out. It was snowing, softly, fat flakes that looked like the paper-and-scissors ones his nieces taped to their windows all winter long. He had gone out to the shed and brought in more wood, triggering the sensor light over the deck, and the snow pinwheeled through the brightness and vanished into the dark.

“We have to end it,” she said.

“No.” He was sitting on the polished wooden floor, his back to the wall. It seemed appropriate.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m not willing to buy my happiness with your marriage. And neither are you.”

“I love you,” he said. His voice sounded bewildered in his own ears. “Am I just supposed to stop loving you?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. I wish it did. Then I wouldn’t feel as if someone put a stake through my sternum. No. We just… go on.”

“That sounds like that idiotic Céline Dion song.”

“Yeah.” She stared at the falling snow. “You know it’s a bad sign when the theme song from Titanic describes your relationship.”

She had taken his seat on the floor, back to the wall, legs stretched out in front of her. He was sitting on the second-from-bottom tread of the stairs leading to the loft. “No lunches at the Kreemy Kakes Diner anymore,” he said.

“No,” she said.

“I won’t drive by the rectory to check things out anymore.”

“No.”

“But it’s a small town. We’ll wind up seeing each other. We won’t be able to help it!” He suddenly felt wildly, irrationally angry with her. It was his town, dammit. He was here first. She should go. He was happy before she came.

Happy like the dead in their well-loved graves. Unknowing, unseeing, unfeeling.

“How often do you run into Dr. McFeely, the Presbyterian minister?”

“Uh… I don’t know. Once in a while I bump into him at the post office or the IGA. I’ve seen him at the hospital a couple times.”

“It’ll be the same with me, then. Less. I’ll start shopping over in Glens Falls.”

“You don’t want to make that drive in bad weather,” he said automatically.

“I don’t care!” Her voice cracked. “If it means I won’t be coming face-to-face with you buying groceries or mailing letters, I’ll do it!” She took several short, jerky breaths, then a deep one. “With luck, we won’t see one another more than once a month or so. I signed another one-year contract with my parish in December. Next year, I’ll tender my resignation and ask the bishop to reassign me. Or maybe I’ll just go home to Virginia.” She knocked the back of her head against the wall. “I’m such a screwup as a priest. I should never have left the army.”

He wanted to tell her no, she was a wonderful priest, and if he could ever believe in a God, it was when he saw Him shining out of her, but the words were stopped in his throat by the realization that she would be going away. In a year or less. And he would never see her again.

He would get back into his coffin. He would pull the lid down himself. He supposed, after a few years, he might even grow to like it again.

There was an old hi-fi near the sofa and chairs, the kind with a stacking bar so you could put on four or five records in a row. They had turned on the lights in the kitchen and one of the lamps, so she could make coffee while he riffled through the albums. Some of them were probably old enough to qualify as antiques. Lots of mellow fifties jazz and classic American pop. He put on Louis Armstrong.

“Here you go.” She handed him a mug. “Hot and sweet, just the way you like it.”

“Except I’m usually not drinking it at eleven o’clock at night.” He put the mug on the coffee table. “Dance with me.”

She smiled a little. Put her own coffee down. Went into his arms. Her head fit neatly beneath his chin.

“Give me a kiss to build a dream on,” Louis sang as they swayed back and forth, “and my imagination will thrive upon that kiss.”

They were sitting on the sofa staring at the fire across the room. The fifth album was playing quietly. Mel Tormé.

“Your turn,” he said.

“Okay. Um… sometimes I floss my teeth while watching TV.”

“Everybody does that.”

“Really? Huh. Well, it still counts as something you didn’t know about me. Your turn.”

“Okay. I once had jungle rot on my feet.”

“Eugh! Gross! I don’t want to know that about you. When?”

“In Nam. I went for five weeks without a change of socks in the rainy season. To this day I still compulsively sprinkle Gold Bond powder before I put anything on my feet.”

“You were right. This is true love.”

“Hmm? Why?”

“Because even with that disgusting image in my head, I still find you irresistible.”

They were spooned on the sofa, her back on his chest, his arm around her. The lights were off again. The music had ended. He could hear the hiss of the fire in the woodstove and the silence of falling snow all around them.

“I want to tell you something I’ve never told anyone,” he said.

“All right.”

“You know how I said I was drafted? I wasn’t. I enlisted.”

“What?” She shifted around so they were facing each other. “You’re pulling my leg.”

“I swear.”

“In 1970? You enlisted during the height of the Vietnam War? And then lied about it?”

“Technically, 1968 was the height of the war-”

She laid a finger across his lips. “Russ.”

“I was desperate to get away from home, but I felt like my mom needed me to be the man of the house after my dad died.” He rubbed his fingers along the curve of her waist. “I was eighteen years old, and I could see my whole life playing out in front of me. A job at the mill. Living with my mother until I married one of the girls from my class and then moving next door. Going to the Dew Drop Inn every Friday and to Mom’s for dinner ever Sunday. I thought I’d rather go out in a blaze of glory than that.” He smiled, fond and rueful of the idiot kid he had been.

“But-the Selective Service office-there must have been a paper trail! How did you keep it a secret?”

“More by luck than design. I paid a visit to the local draft board president. Old Harry McNeil. Used to be the chief of police in my grandparents’ day, if you can believe that. Looking back, I’m amazed he went along with it. He did ask me, at one point, if I was sure I’d rather face the VC than my mother.” He grinned.

“I know your mother. That’s a tough call.”

“I guess he sympathized with a young man who wanted to get as far away from Millers Kill as he could. He gave me an official notice to show my mom-they were just form letters, with the info typed in-and I took the bus to Saratoga and enlisted the same day.”

“And no one ever found out?”

“Mr. McNeil died before I left. My mother didn’t start kicking up until after I was through basic and got my orders. If anybody else from the draft board ever checked the records, I guess they must have assumed old Mr. McNeil’s mind had wandered and he had misplaced my paperwork.”

“That draft notice turned your mom into an activist. You changed her whole life.”

“That’s one of the reasons I’ve never told anybody before. Who wants to find out her reason for living was based on a lie?”

She traced the outlines of his face with her thumb. “I’m glad you told me.”

He measured himself. He felt… lighter. And why not? She was helping him carry the secret now.

The fire was low. No words now. He framed her face in his hands, stroking her hair, her cheekbones, the line of her jaw. If he were a young man, he might believe he would never forget her skin, or her smile, or the strength of her. But he had learned that the mind didn’t always hold on to what the heart demanded. Remember, he told his hands. Remember this.

He woke up at some point. The embers in the woodstove were a smudge of orange. He lifted himself up on one elbow, careful not to disturb Clare, and looked out the window. The snow had stopped. The stars were blazing with the fierce light that only comes in the hour before dawn. Part of him knew he should go, but then Clare gave a little snore and burrowed closer against him. He drew the knitted afghan from the back of the sofa and tucked it around them. He lay awake for a long time, watching her sleep.

Bright sunlight streamed through the windows when he woke the second time. He was alone, covered in the afghan. The cabin was warm again. He sat up, fumbled for his glasses on the coffee table. The first thing he saw was the woodstove, stuffed with logs, heat rolling off it in waves. The second thing he saw was the note on the coffee table. My dearest Russ, it read, I’m sorry, but I can’t say any more good-byes to you. I’m taking my snowshoes and my lunch and I’m going, like Thoreau, to be alone in the woods. He almost wanted to smile. How many guys got Thoreau quoted at them in a Dear John letter? “Only you, Clare,” he said to the empty room. “Only you.”

He threw the note into the woodstove. Then he left, to start the rest of his life without her.