Earthly Possessions

Sixteen

The police never did recapture Jake Simms. As far as I know, they've given up the search. I told them he was going to Texas, anyway.

There is somebody new in Mama's old room: a drunk from the mourners' bench who used to be an opera singer. His name is Mr. Bentham. On good days his voice is beautiful. And Miss Feather is with us the same as always, though Dr. Sisk has moved away. He married a woman from the church last July and lives in a ranch house on the other side of town.

Julian still works at the radio shop, in between his lapses; Selinda still floats in and out of our lives, and no one has yet come for Jiggs. But Onus has stopped building dollhouse furniture and moved on to the dolls themselves: diminutive wooden people, fully jointed. Their joints are little fragments of straight pins. Their faces are drawn with a needle dipped in ink. They have distinctive features, coloring, and clothes, but share an expression of surprise, as if wondering how they got here.

And I still wheel my camera around, recording up- side-down people in unexpected costumes. But I've come to believe that their borrowed medals may tell more truths than they hide. While Saul grips his pulpit as firmly as always, and studies his congregation. No doubt they are suspended in a lens of his own, equally truthful, equally flawed.

Sometimes, when Saul can't sleep, he turns his head on the pillow and asks if I'm awake. We may have had a hard time that day: disagreed, misunderstood, come to one more invisible parting or tiny, jarring rearrangement of ourselves.

He lies on his back in the old sleigh bed and starts to wonder: will everything work out? Is he all right, am I all right, are we happy, at least in some limited way? Maybe we ought to take a trip, he says. Didn't I use to want to?

But I tell him no. I don't see the need, I say. We have been traveling for years, traveled all our lives, we are traveling still. We couldn't stay in one place if we tried. Go to sleep, I say.

And he does.

The End