Nickel Mountain

1

Simon Bale was a Jehovah’s Witness. He would appear one Sunday morning in the dead of winter, early, standing on your porch, smiling foolishly and breathing out steam, his head tipped and drawn back a little, like a cowardly dog’s, even his knees slightly bent, his Bible carefully out of sight inside his ragged winter coat, and his son Bradley would be standing behind him, as timid as his father but subtly different from his father — not so perfectly hiding his readiness to shift from fawning to the kind of unholy fury that was going to be his whole character later — and neither Simon Bale nor his son would seem a particularly serious threat — especially on a bright December morning with a smell of January thaw in the wind and churchbells ringing far in the distance, the blue-white mountains falling away like Time. All it took to get rid of the two was the closing of a door.

Until his fifty-fourth year, Simon Bale worked as a night clerk at the Grant Hotel in Slater. It was a four-storey, blackish red-brick building as square as a box, flat, stale, manifestly unprofitable, stained with rust from the eaves that hadn’t held in their water for longer than anyone in Slater could remember. The lobby was the size of an ordinary country parlor, a faded and threadbare rug on the floor like the rugs you find in the Sunday school rooms of country churches, the pattern no longer distinguishable, vaguely floral. On the rug stood an old, sprung davenport, a couple of squarish armchairs from the forties, a rickety checker table over against the wall, piled high now with magazines, a television in the corner. Old men lived there, and a couple of women whose business Simon quietly and patiently endured. It was not a proof of remarkable broad-mindedness in Simon, that quiet endurance of what he himself called harlotry, and no proof that he was a hypocrite, either. Their wickedness was one with the general corruption of the times, one of many signs that the end was at hand. They would burn for eternity, it went without saying, but so would most of the rest of mankind — for pride, for covetousness, for forgetting the Sabbath, for believing the devil to be dead. Confronted by evils so overwhelming, a man could only look to the state of his own soul and, on Sunday mornings, go out on his futile, stubbornly persistent rounds, giving the warning — to whole families, if possible; to the husband alone, if only the husband would listen; or to only the wife; or to the child alone in the yard.

He kept leaflets on his desk, tucked inconspicuously beside the register. No one ever took one. Sometimes when the spirit moved him — when he glimpsed in the eyes of some guest a flicker of humanity answerable to his own — Simon would timidly press one of the leaflets into the hand reaching out for keys. He would even sometimes venture a joke, though humor was perilous: “Here are your keys,” he would say, smiling horribly, like a man with some disease of the nervous system. When there was no work to do he would read, never any book but one. He would run his square, black fingertip along under the words and would move his lips, not merely because he was an ignorant man or only half-literate but also because he read with intense concentration. He read the Daily News in the same way, systematically, beginning with the front page and moving to the back, column by column, skipping nothing, even when he came to the advertisements or the two comics the Daily News carried, Major Hoople and Scorchy Smith. How much he understood of what he read, and in what queer mystical fashion he understood, God only knows. Since he never read the page four continuation of a front-page story until he happened to come to it in his methodical, column-by-column way, it seems unlikely that he read with intense curiosity. Nevertheless, he read his paper every day for some forty years, which is proof, at least, of the regularity of his habits, no mean virtue. His mouth would sometimes snap shut or twitch as he read — his obsequious smile had by this time become a nervous tic — and it seems very likely it twitched because Simon was angry, or, anyway, impatient. (One thinks of the way George Loomis used to read, twenty years younger than Simon was but more like Simon than either of them would have cared to admit. He too — late at night, in his big, lonely house — read column by column, except that he never bothered about the continuations or the advertisements or, above all, the comics — except for Scorchy Smith’s half-naked women — and all the time he read (his left leg balanced on his right knee, the paper on the leg, the thumb of his left and only hand flickering nervously at his cigarette) he would wince, outraged by all that hit his eye from the machinations of Democrats and Russians to the stupidity of typesetters. Compare, on the other hand, Henry Soames, reading when he had no customers to talk to at the Stop-Off. He would lay his paper out on a table — a cup of black coffee on the top left corner of the paper, tacking it down because of the breeze from the fan on the shelf in the corner — and he would spread his arms out to left and right to lean on the table as he bent his huge bulk toward the news, and he would glance over all the headlines, moving his up-tilted head like a man hunting for the piece he needed for a jigsaw puzzle, and he’d work out in his mind what he wanted to look into first. Then he’d start, and he’d go straight to the continuation, and sometimes he’d smile or he’d murmur “Hmm,” and sometimes he’d call, “Callie, listen to this!” and would read to her aloud (which Callie Soames hated). If world events were upsetting or baffling, he’d mention the trouble to every man that came into the diner or stopped for gas, and his premise, deeper than judgment, something in his blood by now, was that somehow even the most outrageous behavior of Russians or Democrats or the Farm Bureau must make some kind of reasonable, human sense. He’d work that sense out, eventually, finding good even in the most unthinkable points of view (very often by logic that only Henry and God could fathom, and frequently only God), and from then on Henry would be nearly as moved by pronouncements made from that point of view, however Henry might disagree, as a country woman would be by her “Search for Tomorrow” on TV. “You’re a damn fool,” George Loomis would say. “You forget the whole secret of human progress, pure meanness.” “I don’t believe there is such a thing as pure meanness,” Henry would say, “or pure anything else.” “Well you got to have faith in something,” George would say. As for old Doc Cathey (hunchbacked, sly, infernally testy), he never read the papers at all. He never read anything, in fact, and profoundly distrusted any man who did.)

When he finished at the Grant Hotel, at seven in the morning, Simon Bale would put on his old brownish coat and nod goodbye to Bill Hough, who clerked days, and go out to his old gray Chevy and drive himself the half-mile home to his black-shingle house just beyond the city limits. His wife would have his toast and eggs ready, and he’d eat his breakfast without a word, leaning far down over his plate and sliding in the food with his fork turned upside down, and then he’d shave himself with his electric razor and take off all but his underwear (loose jockey shorts and an undershirt with straps which he changed not more than once a month) and go to bed. He’d sleep five hours, then get up and go out on the porch with his Bible, and he’d sit there reading or meditating or dozing, or maybe watching crows making circles high above him, bringing to mind the circle in the fire, or he’d look at the mountain that rose up, awesome as Judgment Day, at the end of the valley, or at the oak tree in his yard. In August he would watch Ed Dart and his boys across the road combining wheat, which reminded Simon Bale of Christ, as did they, who were in a sense Plowmen, or Harvesters of the First Fruit, and he would smell the sweetness of the air, which bespoke in Simon’s hairy nostrils the boundless mercy of God. Around his yard there was a weathered snow fence and there were chickens in the yard, and in these too there were lessons. It was this way of seeing, above all, that made his mission hopeless. Going out on his calls on Sunday morning (his son, before the time of this story, sitting humble and surly in the car beside him, Simon himself a little on edge for lack of sleep), Simon might as well have talked ancient Hebrew to the people he called on. In a sense, he did.

One night, long after his daughter Sarah had run off (had married a Trail ways bus driver who’d gotten her pregnant, not without coaxing on her part, a girl of fifteen with the figure of a full-grown woman and a mind arrested at seven or eight, a face as long and blank as a cannister, given to hallucinations, pursued by demons, fond to the point of lunacy of charm bracelets, pins, brooches, anklets, dime-store rings) and a short while after his son Bradley had moved out to run, with monstrous tyranny, a household of his own, Simon Bale (his thin, brownish hair now beginning to turn gray around his ears) got a phone call at the Grant Hotel. Old Chester Kittle was there and saw it all. Simon stood very still, the Bible open on the counter, the dirty red ribbon dangling out over the edge, and the tic-smile came and went again and again, in shadow now, because the dim lamp over the desk stood diagonally behind him. He looked like a man being scolded harshly — for the leaflets on the counter, perhaps, or for a pious message left by some prankster on one of the old iron beds. No one would have thought it could be anything more; nothing of much significance could be expected to happen in the life of Simon Bale. But appearances fail us. Simon Bale’s house was on fire (someone had set it, but the troopers didn’t know that yet), and his wife was in the hospital probably dying. Simon hung up the telephone and turned to the Bible and hung onto it with both hands as if it was the only thing steady in the whole dark room. Still smiling — on, off, like a face in the funhouse at the county fair — Simon started to cry, a kind of howling noise that didn’t sound like crying or laughing either but was the kind of noise a hound might make, and old Chester jumped up and went over to him, his heart and brains in a turmoil.

2

Simon Bale had no friends. He was not only an idealist but an ascetic as well, both by conviction and by temperament, and the death of his wife (she died early the following morning) meant the end of all ordinary contact with humanity — or would have except for Henry Soames.

Simon was at her bedside when she died. He’d gone there at once (abandoning his desk to old Chester Kittle, who after ten minutes’ wine-befogged consideration locked the door and went to bed) and he’d sat there all night long wringing his hands and praying and weeping, in his heart knowing her lost already because of the bandages covering most of her head and because of, worse, the tubes taped to her body and rising, at the foot of the bed, to a glass bottle hanging upside down. When the doctor told him she was dead, Simon was through for now with his weeping, though not through with his grief, and he merely nodded and stood up and went out, none of them knew where. He stood on the front steps of the hospital for a long time, his hat dangling from the end of his right arm (it was spring, and the trees were green with new leaves) and then like a man in a daze he wandered across the lawn in the general direction of where his car was parked. He wandered up and down the sidewalk, still quiet and empty at six in the morning, passing and repassing the car, maybe unwilling to leave the place, maybe simply in a mental fog, unable to recognize his car when he saw it. He stopped right beside the car, at last, and stared at it for a long time, his face as white and soft as bread dough, his mouth collapsed like the mouth of a dime-store goldfish, and finally he went over to it and got in and drove back to the hotel. He let himself in by the door at the side and went to the first empty room he found and stretched out on the bed and slept. For hours he slept like a dead man. Then he dreamed his wife was alive, sewed up from one end to the other with green thread, and tranquilly glad to see him, and he woke up. It was late afternoon.

He didn’t notice he was hungry and unshaven. He drove to the remains of his house, where everything he owned was now smoke and ashes, including his money, since Simon had never trusted banks, and he stood beside what was left of the snow fence as he’d stood this morning in front of the hospital, looking at the place as the others did — curiosity seekers, neighbors, farmers who’d happened along on their way into town to the movies or the Silver Slipper. Finally somebody recognized him and they all gathered around him to console him and ask him questions and, in general, torment him, all of which he met with a lunatic, apologetic-looking smile that made people wonder (not for the first time) if he’d set it himself. Now and then he’d bring out a stammered word that only those nearest to him caught (“Forgive,” he was saying, “Lord forgive”) and then, suddenly, he sank to his knees and fainted. They called the police. But it was not there that the troopers found him; they found him at Henry Soames’.

It was still early, a little after eight. Henry’s little boy Jimmy was in bed; Henry’s wife was in the diner taking care of the last of the supper customers, and Henry stood in the living room in the house jutting out behind the diner, the room almost dark, only the floorlamp in the corner turned on, Simon Bale in the armchair below it, staring at the carpet as if in a daze. Standing enormous and solemn at the living room window, Henry looked out past the end of the diner at the highway and the woods beyond. He could see, past where the woods dropped away, the crests of the mountains on the far side of the valley. It was a time of day he especially liked. The mountains looked closer when the light was dimming from the sky and the clouds were red, and sounds were clearer now than they were at other times — milking machine compressors in the valley, cows mooing, a rooster’s call, a semi coming down the hill to the right with its lights on. It was as if one had slipped back into the comfortable world pictured in old engravings — in old geography books, say, or old books of maps in a law office. (The world would seem small and close when dark came, too — sounds would seem to come from close at hand and the mountains ten miles away seemed almost on top of you — but in the dark he would not feel himself a part of it; the trees and hills were like something alive, not threatening, exactly, because Henry had known them all his life, but not friendly, either: hostile, but not in any hurry, conscious that time was on their side: they would bury him, for all his size and for all his undeniable harmlessness, and even his own troublesome, alien kind would soon forget him, and the mountains would bury them too.) In his present mood, watching sunset come on, he felt at one with the blue-treed mountains, and at one, equally, with the man in the dimness behind him. He saw again in his mind the charred boards, ashes, dirty bubbles of melted glass, and he recalled the intense acrid smell that had filled the air for a mile around. Poor devil, he thought. He had never known Simon Bale, had hardly seen him before, but at a time like this that was hardly important. A man did what he could.

Perhaps it was the way the light slanted in, or the way the long silver truck rolled past and went out of his hearing: Something came to him. He knew as if by inspiration how it was that a man like Bale saw the world. For an instant he too saw it: dark trees, a luminous sky, three swallows flying, all portentous. Henry half-turned, covering his mouth with his hand, and studied the man. The brown shoelace on Simon’s black right shoe (directly in the floorlamp’s beam) had been broken and knotted together again in twenty places.

Then the troopers came. Henry wouldn’t hear of their talking to Simon until the following day, after he’d rested a little and pulled himself together. They might have insisted, but Doc Cathey came in while they were talking and took one look at Simon Bale and said, “This man’s in shock,” and, soon after, the troopers left. Henry put Simon in the bedroom off the kitchen, and Doc Cathey stayed with him a while, fussing and muttering to himself, and then Doc came out and closed the door and they sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Callie was with them by now.

“What in hell do they want to be pestering him for, in his condition?” Henry said. Putting the question in words made him feel an indignation he hadn’t felt until this moment.

“Because they think somebody set the fire on purpose,” Doc said, “and most likely they’re right.”

“But what would Simon know about it?” Callie said. She asked it a little too calmly, with too much detachment. Henry didn’t notice it, but Doc Cathey did.

“He’d know if he set it himself,” Doc said, and he laughed, as sharp as acid.

“That’s crazy,” Henry said. His hands started shaking. He said, “His wife died in that fire. It’s right in the paper.”

“You don’t know these people,” Doc Cathey said. “I do. You watch.”

Henry leaned over the table toward him, and his face went dark red. “You’re a vicious old fool,” he said. “I could—” But he couldn’t think what it was he could do, or rather he knew all too well what he could do — he could knock Doc Cathey through a wall — and his realization of how angry he was checked him.

Doc Cathey clamped his mouth shut and got hold of himself. “We’ll see,” he said. “Don’t you go havin’ a heart attack over him.”

It was then that Callie Soames stood up, and both of them looked at her. “I don’t want him in my house,” she said. “I want him out, tonight.”

Henry went as red as before. He fumbled for the pills in the bottle in his shirt pocket, and he took one out and went over to the sink for water. He stood motionless for a long time after he’d drunk, leaning on the sink, and his wife and old Doc Cathey were as quiet as rocks. Henry said, “He’s staying.”

She said very quietly, “Then I’m leaving.”

“Go on,” he said.

Her look clouded a little, and she didn’t move.

3

Henry Soames was up at dawn. It was like Easter morning: The sun hit the late May dew like music, and the trees across the road were all silver and gold, still and breathless. He stood at the open kitchen window breathing in the cool, clean air, and all his body seemed more awake than it had ever felt before. He could hear farmers’ milkers running, infinitely far away in the valley, and he heard a truck start up, the milk truck, probably, down around Lou or Jim Millet’s. The thought of Simon came into his mind and partly saddened him, partly made him nervous. Callie hadn’t said another word last night, and, even though he knew he was right, Henry had felt and still felt guilty. He thought of putting breakfast on, but there was no way of knowing when the others would wake up, so he let it go. He put on his wool-lined frock, frowning, and went out in back to look at the garden. He saw at once that more of the lettuce shoots had been nibbled off even with the ground. Then he saw there were three young rabbits on the grass to the left of the garden, lying with their legs out behind them like dogs. “Shoo!” he said, waving but keeping his voice down, letting the house behind him sleep on. The rabbits jumped up and bounded off like deer. Henry stood still again, slipping his hands into the pockets in the sides of his frock. It was colder than he’d thought. The ground was soft under his feet and clung to his shoes. He ought to shoot those rabbits probably; but he probably wouldn’t do it, because of Jimmy. There was a good deal a man with a family couldn’t do — Jimmy, Callie, Callie’s folks. It was lucky it was more or less worth it.

It was a good little garden. He’d put in most of the vegetables only this past two weeks, three-foot rows of amazingly delicate-looking radishes and beets and garden lettuce and onions. To the right of those, toward the mountainside and the trees, was the rectangular patch where he planned to put in tomatoes and pumpkins and corn. Beyond the rows and curving out to the left a little lay the square he’d put in, mostly last year, mainly flowers, the crocuses and the tulips around the birdbath already in bloom — yellow, red, blue. He had three rose bushes and, around the border, honeysuckle, already in leaf, and to the right, where the mountain began to climb, a lilac bush. They would sit there on the white-painted bench, evenings last summer, he and sometimes Callie too, when Callie’s mother ran the diner for them, and they’d watch little Jimmy crawl around in the dirt, drooling and laughing and talking to himself. It was heaven out there on a cool summer evening. Sometimes they wouldn’t go in till long after dark.

He straightened up and, after a moment, went over to the slat and iron bench to sit down. In two minutes he was asleep, sitting with his head tipped down and his hands over his belly like a bear in clothes.

He didn’t wake up when Jimmy called to be gotten out of bed. Callie went to him, throwing on her bathrobe first, remembering from the first instant she opened her eyes that something unpleasant was in the house, and she seated Jimmy backwards on the toilet (it would take him forever to be sure he was through) and went down to put on breakfast. The bacon hadn’t been sizzling two minutes before sounds began to come from the room off the kitchen. She stood still, glaring at the top of the stove, listening; then she went to look out where she knew her husband would be sitting asleep and called, “Henry, come in here.” He looked up with that stupid, lambish look he always had when he wasn’t quite awake, and with all the venom she could muster she said, “Come see to your friend.”

She slammed the door and went back to her bacon. Jimmy came into the room, naked as a needle, and she pointed at him and sent him back for his clothes.

“No clothes,” he said.

She said, “Jimmy Soames, you get your clothes or I’ll give you a whipping you’ll never forget.” The two-year-old turned vaguely toward the stairs, not obeying, merely baffled, working up tears, and she said, “Stop it!” She laid out paper towels to dry the bacon on, and she heard him going up, very slowly, crying. She knew he wouldn’t get them, of course. He’d forget what he was after in about three seconds, or he’d come across a doll or a fire truck, or — most likely — he’d go to bed and sob. She’d have to go get him and make up to him, and she’d have to hunt up the clothes herself and dress him. She wished to hell Henry would get in here, and at that moment Henry came in. She said fiercely, “I’m sorry to be so crabby. I don’t feel good.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “Let me help you.” He took the spatula.

“Henry, you smell,” she said. “When did you last take a bath?”

Just then from the bedroom off the kitchen there came a crash, and both of them jumped. Henry stood staring at the floor, pulling at his mouth. Callie took a deep breath. “Your mother’s old water pitcher,” she said. He nodded. Callie said wearily. “Well, see if he wants to eat.”

Jimmy, for one, had no intention of eating. He sat in his high chair stirring the yolk of his egg with his spoon and watching Simon Bale. Henry sat solemn and uncomfortable, erect, so expressionless in his steel-rimmed glasses you might have thought him lost in troubled thought; but he couldn’t help seeing how Simon ate, and couldn’t help knowing why Callie suddenly put down her fork and got up to fuss needlessly with the coffee. Simon sat bent almost double, unshaven, his mouth almost level with the plate, scooping his egg in with his fork turned over, trapping it when he needed to against the side of his cracked finger. Sometimes, as if he knew there was something wrong but had no idea what, he would roll his eyes up toward Henry or Jimmy and would smile as if in panic, but he said not a word, and for minutes at a time he would seem to forget they were there. Henry hovered between pity and revulsion. Tears would come suddenly to Simon Bale’s eyes, and he would draw out his stiffly wrinkled, unbelievably filthy handkerchief and blow his nose with a sound so like that of a man unashamedly breaking wind that, each time he did it, Callie would turn, behind him, and stare. When she slid his coffee across to him, keeping back from him as from anthrax, Callie said, “Would you want some more eggs?”

None of them was prepared for what it set off. He looked up with grotesque anguish and said, “Forgive—” and then, abruptly, began to cry. Callie’s eyebrows lifted, and she stood balanced a minute, then came around the corner of the table to his side and stretched out her hand as if to touch him, but on second thought drew it back. “Here now,” she said, almost gently.

Jimmy said, “Man is crying.”

“Hush,” Henry said.

“My wife,” Simon Bale sobbed, “God grant—”

She put her hand on his back and said, “Shh, shh!” as she would to a child, but her touch opened all the rivers of Simon’s heart, and he began to whoop. Quite suddenly Jimmy began to cry too, as if his heart would break; and as if hardly knowing he was doing it, Simon reached over blindly and patted at the high chair tray, mumbling “Bless … no importance …,” getting his fingertips in egg yolk, and at that Henry too began to cry.

“It’s all right,” Callie said as if indignantly, tears running down her cheeks, the look of surprise still there on her face, “we’ll take care of you, Simon, it’s all right; now stop.”

The room was full of sunlight and the smell of coffee like heaven’s love, and Simon blew his nose. Henry pulled off his glasses and thought of asking for the handkerchief but changed his mind and got up for a Kleenex and used it and offered the unused part to Callie, who reached out, then hesitated, and decided to get one of her own.

“Simon,” Callie said, “you must see Henry’s garden!”

“Me too!” Jimmy said. He prepared his face for outrage in case they shouldn’t let him.

They laughed, even Simon (but horribly, Callie thought — forgiving him, though with some reservations, even as she thought it), and Henry got up and said, “Jimmy, you show Simon our rabbit tracks.”

Henry got Jimmy down out of his chair, and Callie helped Simon up and led him, as though he were an old, old man, toward the door. “Thank you,” Simon said. “Forgive—” He blew his nose, then straightened a little, flashing his idiotic smile, and looked out at the green morning. He nodded. “Praise,” he said. The cracks in the back of his neck were grimy, and his hair needed cutting.

“You want to take Simon’s hand, Jimmy?” Callie said.

Jimmy thought about it, looking at the man, and Simon leered at the little boy and held out his hand, a limp, raised claw, and waited as if in terror. Abruptly, Jimmy reached up for the hand. Henry laughed, and Callie, after a moment’s hesitation, laughed too.

4

Callie’s mother came down that afternoon to help out at the diner. She was a heavyish, determined little woman with iron-gray hair, a pretty face, dimpled elbows; “artistic,” she liked to say: She played the piano and organ at the church. She enjoyed working at the diner, which she tended to think of as Callie’s, not Henry’s. Certainly the place was greatly changed since Henry Soames had married Callie: new paint, clean linoleum, bright artificial flowers on the tables. Callie too had an artistic streak; no doubt she was a throwback to Uncle Al — Callie’s mother’s Uncle Al who’d done oil paintings of imaginary country scenes … among others, the picture in Callie’s dining room, called “Summer Evening.” Eleanor Wells had never thought highly of waitresses, but it was different now, in her own daughter’s place, her own grandchild running about, solemn-faced, his right arm sawing across the front of him as he ran. It was a family diner, as she liked to say, a place people brought their whole families to, and one of these days, who knew? they might expand it and make it a truly first-class restaurant, like the Chicken Pot, down in Slater. She’d gone so far as to mention it once or twice to Callie, and though Callie hadn’t said one word back, she’d listened, and she would think about it, you could see. After that Ellie Wells had taken to wearing her black hostess’s dress when she came to help out at the Stop-Off, with a little white apron she’d bought especially, and all she did she did with elegance. Her Frank would say (with a half-dozen curse-words she wouldn’t repeat), “No wonder men hate their mother-in-laws,” but he didn’t know a thing about it. Frank couldn’t understand Henry Soames like she could. Henry appreciated her help, and he respected her, he truly did. He would listen to anything she had to say with all the patience in the world (he was a good man, he truly was), and almost always, when he’d thought about it, he would come around to her way of thinking (something her Frank never did). That, as a matter of fact, was why she’d come here today.

She said nothing, however. She could tell from the minute she came in that there was something in the air, the way they pussyfooted, her daughter and Henry, but for the life of her she couldn’t make out if they were mad at each other or what. Jimmy was out in the garden with that man, and it was all Ellie Wells could do to shut her teeth and ignore it. She peeked out at them from time to time, when Henry and Callie were out of the room, and as far as she could see it was still all right. Just the same, it made her heart beat fast that he was there. Callie was just too innocent. “Just like a baby,” she thought. (It was just like that time at church camp, when she’d let that town man, a perfect stranger, comb out her hair, down by the lake. Or like the time she’d left her purse with that lady at the bus depot.) But Ellie polished the napkin holders and pursed her lips and waited.

The man just sat on the bench like a tramp. He had stubble on his chin and filthy-dirty clothes and a queer way of sitting with his knees and toes together and his heels thrown out to the sides. He had his hands on his knees and his calf-eyes riveted to the ground. Jimmy would talk to him sometimes, and the man would tip his head and smile and maybe pat him on the back and say a few words (she’d have given a half-dollar to hear what they were saying), and then he’d fall back into his staring fit, and, to Ellie Wells’ enormous relief, Jimmy would wander away.

Toward mid-afternoon, when she and Callie were alone in the diner, she said, “Where does Henry know him from, Callie?” As if it had just now happened to come into her mind.

“Know who, Mother?” Callie said. (Callie had always been like that, never letting on when things were bothering her. It had always made it hard, even when Callie was a little girl. It put you in the wrong when all you intended was truly her own good.)

“Why, your company,” she said, not quite as lightly as she’d intended.

(“Now damn you, Ellie, you leave them alone,” her Frank would say. “You keep away from there and mind your own business,” and he would bang his fist on his leg like a little boy having a tantrum. And, oh yes, that was fine to say, “mind your own business.” He’d minded his own business for fifty years, even when Callie was in trouble and no place to turn but Henry Soames. “They’re like children,” she’d said — that was this morning, before she’d come down. “They don’t know about people like that.” “Like what?” he’d said. Well she didn’t know, she would admit it, and maybe she was being a worry-wart, she’d admit that too, but what was she supposed to do, Henry Soames being the kind of man he was, and Callie even worse? It was so hard, trying to do the right thing. Why was that? Why couldn’t they be grateful?)

“Oh, you mean Simon Bale,” Callie said. “Simon’s an old, old friend of ours. He stops in all the time.”

Ellie Wells tipped her head and pretended to be satisfied. She rearranged the pies in the rack and dusted her hands and went over to see how the sugar dispensers were. She’d bet fifteen dollars that man had never been here in all his life. She made a clucking sound.

“It’s a terrible time for him,” Callie said. There was a hint of reproach in her voice. “His house burned down, you know, and he lost his wife in the fire. It’s really just terrible.”

“The poor thing,” Ellie said. There she was, put in the wrong as usual. She’d never said it wasn’t terrible.

“Didn’t you know?” Callie said. She looked straight at her, as if daring her to lie.

“Why, no,” Ellie said, “I hadn’t heard.” She did feel sorry for him, she truly did, but she didn’t have to like it that he was here. A man like that might do something crazy at a time like this. It was just one of those things. She said, “How long is he staying?”

“Oh, just a day or so, I think,” Callie said. She bit her lip as if she’d like to be able to take back that “I think.”

Ellie met her daughter’s eyes just long enough to let her know she had her own opinions. Then she said, “Poor man.” Then: “And poor Henry. He’s so good to people.” She dropped it casually, as if it meant nothing whatever (what it did mean, as a matter of fact, was vague in her mind). She had all the sugar dispenser tops off now. She went back to the kitchen for the sugar jar, and again, in misery, she began to cluck.

Doc Cathey came in a little after that and asked where Simon Bale was (straight to the point, as usual; no “How do you do” or “Nice weather we’re having”—nothing), and when she pointed to the bench in the garden Doc Cathey nodded, scowling, and went out to him. The next time she looked out the window Doc Cathey and Simon and Jimmy were all gone from sight. They’d gone on into the house, most likely. She wondered what Doc Cathey was doing here — up to no good, she was pretty sure — and it so puzzled her she forgot to smile at the customers for maybe five full minutes. She forgot, too, to listen to what the customers were saying among themselves, until finally it came to her that all they could seem to talk about, at least the people who lived around here, was the fire. Someone said, “They say he set it himself,” and she was so startled she nearly dropped her tray of salt shakers. It’s possible, she thought, and it was as if it had been in her mind all the while: It truly is possible. All at once she was so frightened that she had to sit down a minute till she’d caught her breath.

5

It was Doc Cathey who brought up the question of funeral arrangements. When he’d finished looking Simon over he sat with his hands on his knees, opposite his patient, looking at the floor between their two chairs as if crossly, his glasses far down his gray beak of a nose (Callie over by the window, with her hands folded; Henry standing against the refrigerator; little Jimmy playing, oblivious to it all, on the floor). Doc said: “You thought at all about the funeral, Simon?”

Simon went pale, and his hands, busy buttoning his shirt, stopped moving. He had a wart on the knuckle of his middle finger, and Callie couldn’t help but wonder if it came from his never getting clean. He smiled, just a flicker, as if in fright, and said, “The Lord will provide.”

“The hell he will,” Doc Cathey said.

“Now, Doc,” Henry said.

“Well she can’t stay there in the hospital morgue,” Doc said. “One way or another she’ll have to be buried. What kind of fun’ral do you people normally put on?”

Simon looked as if his mind had stopped. “The Lord—” he said. Then he said, suddenly awake for an instant, “Every nickel we had—” He looked at Callie, as if in panic, then over at Henry.

“You mean to say you let it burn?” Doc said. His face squeezed shut with fury and he shook his head. He fumbled with the hearing-aid button on his vest.

“Simon, don’t you have any friends you can turn to?” Callie said.

He looked smaller than ever, as it seemed to Henry. Like a woodchuck beset by dogs. He folded his hands and sat thinking, or daydreaming, perhaps, the frightened smile playing on his face, on and off. At last he said, and this time he knew what he was saying — there was no question of it now—“The Lord will provide.”

“Faddle,” Doc Cathey said. He reached for the bag by his foot.

But Simon looked up sharply, his mouth open, raising his clasped hands a little, like a man with handcuffs on, the muscles of his face tense, and the brightness that had come into Simon’s eyes made even Doc Cathey stop and wince and listen.

“Or ever the silver cord be loosed,” Simon said, “or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”

Doc Cathey leered as if with some sort of vicious triumph. “Much study is a weariness of the flesh,” he said. “Who pays the mortician?”

“It’s of no importance,” Simon said. “Dust to dust.”

“What?” Doc said. He leaned closer, turning his hearing aid toward Simon.

“Of no importance,” Simon said again.

They were like a couple of old witches, the two little men sitting knee to knee, bright-eyed as a couple of hawks. Doc Cathey said, “I believe you’d just roll her in a ditch and leave her lay!”

“Stop it,” Callie said, startled.

But Doc Cathey had understood.

“A living dog is better than a dead lion,” Simon said, “for the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.”

“Now Simon, you don’t know what you’re saying,” Henry said, and Callie felt a flush of pleasure, as if he’d defended her.

But Doc Cathey lifted his hand to hush him. “Yes, he does,” he said, looking at Simon for the first time as though he were in some sense human, not actually human, maybe, but related. “He’s saying the body in the morgue has nothing to do with his wife, let the County take it. And maybe he’s right, at that.”

“That wouldn’t be decent,” Henry said, but Callie said, “If that’s what Simon wants—”

Simon said, “I will rejoice. I will divide Shechem, and mete out the valley of Succoth.” Then, abruptly, as though it had been coming for a long time, waiting for the magic word Succoth, Simon began to cry as he’d cried this morning, but not so violently now. Jimmy had paid no attention to their talk, but he turned quickly, when Simon started crying, and looked up.

“Well somebody better see to some kind of arrangement,” Doc Cathey said. He stood up.

Henry looked at the floor, upset. “I’ll drive down tonight and see what needs to be done,” he said.

Simon continued to cry, but without a sound, wiping his eyes with his knuckles.

Jimmy said, forgetting all about him, “Go to the store with Daddy!”

“Hush,” Henry said. “Nobody’s going to the store.”

Callie said, “Simon, why don’t you come into the diner and have some supper.” He didn’t answer, made only a confused sign with his head, something between a headshake and a nod. She came over and stood beside him, but she made no move to touch him. When she saw that he was about to reach in his pocket for his handkerchief, she crossed over to the cupboard above the sink and brought back the Kleenex. Simon blew his nose.

Henry walked out on the front-door steps with Doc Cathey and closed the door behind him. There Doc Cathey paused and got out his vestpocket watch and opened it and looked longer than he needed to at the time. He said at last, “They’re funny damn people.” He shook his head.

Henry looked past him at the diner and the valley and the hills beyond, but he was seeing none of it. He saw, instead, Simon Bale as he’d sat nearly all day on the bench in the garden, like a man in a daze, with Jimmy at his feet. He walked down the steps with Doc Cathey and slowly along the gravel walk that led around the diner to the front, where Doc had his car. He said at last: “You don’t still think he set that fire himself?”

“I dunno,” Doc Cathey said. “I suppose I don’t.”

“You wouldn’t if you’d seen him this morning,” Henry said. He opened the car door and Doc Cathey got in, very slowly, pulling himself up in with one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the seat back, and drew the door shut behind him and hunted in his coat pocket for his key ring.

“Likely not,” Doc Cathey said at last. Then for a minute he stopped hunting for his keys and sat perfectly still, thinking. He tilted his head and looked over his glasses at Henry. “You be careful,” he said. It wasn’t as if he knew something more than he cared to say or even as if he had an uneasy hunch. It was some kind of half-pitiful, half-revolting plea, an old man pretending the years brought wisdom they hadn’t brought, wanting to be first to have given the warning if anything bad should come of all this, but wanting it without the faintest notion of whether what was coming would be bad or good.

“Oh, don’t worry, Doc,” Henry said. He slapped the old man’s shoulder.

Doc Cathey went back to hunting for his keys and found them at last and started up the car. Oil smoke bloomed up from underneath as if the car had caught fire. Henry stood with his arms folded, watching the old man pull away. Then, taking his time, brooding, he went back to the diner. He’d no sooner closed the door than the bell rang, calling him back to the pumps.

It was after six when Henry drove down to the hospital in Slater. He drove slowly, ponderously erect in the seat, as always, the steering wheel rubbing against his belly, and all the way down the winding road he wondered what the devil he was going to do. It wasn’t right that the woman should be shoveled away into a pauper’s grave and forgotten: Sooner throw her on a manure spreader like the carcass of a calf and haul her away to some gulley. He’d said to Callie’s mother, “What do you think? Would the Church have money for that sort of thing?” and she’d said, “The Baptist Church?” He’d pursed his lips and drummed on the tabletop. “No, I guess they wouldn’t,” he’d said. “The County handles hundreds of cases like that,” Callie’s mother had said. “It’s no shame, these days. Since buryings have gotten to be so expensive, some people get the County to do it even when they truly don’t need to. Some people think it’s a shame to spend money on the dead instead of the living. You should hear Frank talk about that!” Henry had nodded. He’d heard. There wasn’t anybody in this half of the state that hadn’t heard Frank Wells on funerals. But you could bet your bottom dollar old Frank would go in style: She’d see to it for spite.

The white guard posts curved down and down, on his right, and he could look off and see the whole valley like a painting, the river smooth and silent as mercury, reflecting the trees. This side of the trees there were flat acres of winter wheat and peas and hay and stretches of new-plowed ground. It was like a garden, in the gold light of late afternoon; it was exactly what Paradise ought to be like: a tractor humming along, far below him, small, on the seat a boy with a wide straw hat; to the right of the tractor, red and white cows moving slowly down the lane to a big gray barn with clean white trim. With a little imagination a man could put angels in the sky, the kind in Bible illustrations, and great golden clouds like those. Except of course that eternity wasn’t going to be like that. No tractors, in any case, or trees, or fields. Whatever good you might say of the spirit, you had to give the things of earth their due — silver cords and golden bowls and whatever else it was. He thought all at once of the old country cemetery up on the hillside behind his house, where his father and mother were buried. There’d been a road through there twenty, twenty-five years ago, but they’d moved the highway now and the place was isolated, you couldn’t reach it in a car except by driving down a two-rut lane like a cowpath through overgrown meadow. He would see it sometimes when he went up onto the ridge to hunt, and each time — especially in late afternoon, when the light was queerly charged, the way it was now — it would be as if he were discovering the place for the first time: a natural garden that had been the same for a thousand thousand years. All at once he said to himself, startled, “Why not?” The reasons why not rushed over him like August rain, and he put the thought out of his head and kept it out until he stepped into the long, tiled hall in the basement of the Enloe Memorial Hospital, where the smell of formaldehyde made his stomach turn, and the girl in white and blue beside him — she couldn’t be more than seventeen, no more than a baby — said, “You think this is bad, you should watch them do an autopsy! Glaagh!” He looked at her in alarm. “Have you seen an autopsy?” he said. She shrugged. “Dozens of times. They take this saw—” she drew a line around her forehead from ear to ear “—and they lift off the top of the head like a bottlecap.”

They showed him the body. Henry Soames stood huge and sagging, his skin gray, and stared in disbelief at the woman’s indignity. Her burnt flesh smelled like hoof rot. The doctor or attendant (he couldn’t tell which) at the desk said, “Who’ll be handling the funeral?”

“Wiegerts’ Funeral Home,” he said. The words came out calm and flat, but his heart was racing and the skin of his neck tingled.

“You a relative?” the man asked.

“No, a friend,” Henry said. “But I’m to take charge of it.”

The man got out papers, and Henry thought again of Callie and, worse, of Callie’s mother, and he shut his eyes for a quick, dead serious prayer to whatever might be up there to watch over fools and children.

It wasn’t until he faced his wife, two hours later — he’d stopped at Wiegerts’ before coming home — that he fully realized the magnitude of what he’d done. “Callie,” he said at once, bravely, but his knees went weak underneath him, and he said only, “how is he by now?”

“All right, I guess,” she said. “I really can’t tell.”

She was in the dining room, sewing. Scraps were spread from one end of the room to the other. “He surely is good with Jimmy, I’ll have to hand it to him.” She pressed on the sewing machine pedal, and Henry waited for the noise to finish.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know,” she said, “just the way Jimmy’s taken to him. You never have to wonder where Jimmy is at all. It’s like having a full-time baby-sitter.”

Henry laughed, but hollowly, his heart sinking with the returning thought of the money Callie believed they still had sitting in the bank. He swallowed.

She said, “But I can’t say Mom’s very happy about it.”

He thought with a sudden leap of excitement that he still might stop the check. At least he could have paid on “time.” He was sweating. “Well, good,” he said. He smiled, white.

“Good?” She looked up. “—That Mom’s not happy?”

He was rubbing his sweating hands on the front of his pantlegs. “I meant something else,” he said.

She squinted at him, but after a minute she let it go. She was used to his seeing things in queer ways, and maybe it didn’t seem worth the trouble of straightening out. “Well, anyways—”

At that moment, upstairs in his bedroom, Jimmy screamed. Henry ran for the stairs, off the kitchen, and Jimmy screamed again.

When Henry reached the bedroom door, Jimmy was sitting bolt upright in bed, shaking like a leaf. Henry scooped him up in his arms, and the child clung to him. “Hurt,” he cried, “hurt!”

“What was it?” Callie cried, behind him.

But Jimmy was relaxed now. It couldn’t be that he was sick.

“Nothing,” Henry said, “a dream. It’s all right now, eh, Jimmy?” Henry’s heart was thudding.

Callie leaned close. “What did you dream, Jimmy?”

Already Jimmy was halfway back to sleep.

“You see, it really was nothing,” Henry said softly. “Kids always start having nightmares around his age. He’s over it already.”

Callie kissed Jimmy’s cheek and patted his back, her eyes troubled, and gently Henry laid him in his crib. Callie stood with her hands on the crib rail, looking down. After a long time she turned to look at Henry, her face white and indistinct in the darkness. She said, “Henry, I’m scared.”

“Of what?” he said, exasperated.

“How do I know?” she said. “I’m just scared, that’s all. Really. Aren’t you?”

He looked past her, out the window at the silhouettes of the pines where they rose out of fog. It was still now, as it always was when the fog came in, as if nothing were left alive. The fog hadn’t gotten to the garden yet. The moon was bright, and if there had been rabbits there he would have seen them.

Well, yes, he thought, yes. He tried to think what it was George Loomis had said. It wasn’t here, it was up outside Utica; they’d driven up to the stock car races. He’d mentioned Jimmy, how he’d felt the time Jimmy had had the convulsions, and George Loomis had said — who lived alone, who kept intact his isolation despite all pressures, finally, and would someday die, in his barn, maybe, and not be discovered for two, three weeks—“You take on a responsibility like that, and you say to yourself you’ll move heaven and earth to protect the kid you love, or the woman, or whoever it happens to be, but the minute you say it you’re forgetting something.”

“What’s that?” Henry had said.

George Loomis stared down into the night, leaning forward over the steering wheel, and he said, “You can’t.”

“It’s what drives you to God,” Henry said with a little laugh.

George too had laughed, like a murderer.

6

That same night, two hours after Jimmy’s cry, Henry sat at his kitchen table, catching up his books. It was long past his bedtime. Normally he was careful to get to bed by ten, doctor’s orders, but he knew it would be no use tonight. By now he felt downright panicky at what he’d done down in Slater. Even without any trimmings whatever, everything plain as plain could be (a thing old Wiegert seemed to find distressing), his bank account would be lighter by six hundred dollars. He couldn’t believe he’d done it, now. Sweat ran down his chest, and the more he tried to think why he’d done it, the wilder it seemed. It would be one thing if he were all alone, no family to think about. He’d often acted on crazy whims before he’d married Callie. Maybe he’d gone un-married too long. It was hard as the devil to change the whole pattern of your life when you got to your forties.

The fog lay all around the house now, sealing it up like a box. At every window he saw his own reflection, but when he let his mind wander he was aware of the others; it was as if he could hear them breathing: Simon just on the other side of that door straight in front of him, Callie and Jimmy just up the stairs that opened onto the kitchen to his right. Outside, nothing moving. A hundred thousand birds would start singing when the sun came up, and in the valley cows would move in from their pastures toward lighted barns. In the fields, mice, woodchucks, rabbits, dogs would run, when dawn came, and the mountainsides would be rife with wild things, from squirrels to foxes — but just now, nothing. But no, that was wrong of course. Fog or no fog, everything was the same as always, animals stalking animals stalking animals in deadly procession, quiet as dreams.

She’d had plans for that money. He’d never agreed to Callie’s plans, but it was settled between them that one of these days they would have it out; he’d had no right to spend six hundred dollars on something insane. Unless maybe that was why he’d done it: not for Simon’s wife but against his own.

(He remembered vividly the way cows would push at the fences on his grandfather’s farm. Even if you pastured them in clover and the other side was barely stubble, still they’d push to get out. He and his father and grandfather would go out in the middle of the night — two fat old men and a fat little boy — and they’d shout at the cows and turn them around with pitchfork handles, and the cows would go anywhere on earth but where you wanted them. When you finally got them to the open gate or the hole in the fence, you had to twist their tails to run them through.)

But that wasn’t all of it. He remembered the way Callie had reached out, finally, and touched Simon Bale when he was crying.

The thought was comforting for a minute, but the next minute he wondered if he would have brought Simon here at all if it weren’t for the others who’d stood above him doing nothing. There was a story about two old brothers named Sprague — a true story, Jim Millet said. They’d lived together in Slater all their lives, and when they were eighty they’d sold their house and moved down to Florida. Nobody knew them there, and the second day one of them killed the other with an axe, just like that, nobody ever learned why. It would never have happened if they’d stayed where they belonged, Jim Millet said. The man had never done a thing to cover up his crime. He’d carried the body to the garage and shut it up, and as soon as it started to smell, the neighbors found it.

The story was puzzling, and Henry leaned on his fists, frowning. He was still thinking about it when he dozed off. When he woke up again — he couldn’t tell how much later — Simon Bale was standing over by the stove, blinking. He had on only his suitcoat and trousers, no shirt or undershirt, no shoes.

“Trouble sleeping?” Henry said.

Simon waved as if to say it was unimportant.

Henry squinted at him, wide awake now, and it was as if, seeing him here in his own kitchen where every pot and pan had its precise meaning, he was seeing Simon clear for the first time. It was like something that came to you early in the morning when you’d first gotten up: Compared to Callie’s light blue apron, not a brute object but the sum of its associations, Simon Bale was old and sallow-faced and strangely bitter, maybe devious. Against the yellow of the walls he was tortuously old-fashioned, grim, as rigid as an angle iron. It made Henry’s skin creep.

Simon stood with his big-knuckled hands at his sides, his belly out, chest caved in, head forward, looking at the coffeepot on the stove. He lifted the lid, saw that the pot was empty, and replaced the lid as if that too were of no importance. He came over and stood with his hands in his side pockets, looking disapprovingly at Henry’s ledger. After a moment he drew out a chair, smiled apologetically, then looked grim again, and sat down.

“The house gets cold, these foggy nights,” Henry said.

Simon nodded and smiled.

For a long time after that neither of them spoke. Henry thought of mentioning the funeral, then thought better of it. Not mentioning it was pure cowardice, he knew: To tell Simon would be, in effect, to tell Callie. But Simon was completely uninterested in her burial, or so he said; as likely as not, he wouldn’t even bother to go when Henry did tell him.

The muscles of Simon’s face were working, and he had his eyes fixed on Henry’s forehead. After a moment, with a darting motion, he drew a stack of small, white leaflets from his inside coatpocket. He leered and slid them across the table toward Henry, watch and wait! the top one said. The next said, who shall be saved? Under the title there were words in italics: But why dost thou judge thy brother? or why dost thou set at nought thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. (Rom. 14:10) It was not what Henry would have expected; he would have expected, well, something about God’s wrath, say, or the seven angels of doom. “Is this what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe?” Henry said.

However mild the text, there was a spark of anger in Simon’s eyes. “Not what we believe,” he said, “the truth!”

“Yes, of course,” Henry said, looking down.

“Do you dare to deny the Judgment of the Lord?” Simon said. He was leaning forward now, his lower lip trembling. His fury seemed to Henry inexplicable, unwarranted by anything Henry had said.

“I don’t deny anything,” Henry said.

“But there is evil,” Simon said. “Woe to that man—”

“Perhaps so,” Henry said sharply, cutting him off.

Simon looked at him for a long time, then at last bowed his head. “You have been kind to me, within the bounds of your understanding.” After another moment: “I am deeply grateful. May the Lord keep you, Mr. — ” He seemed to cast about for Henry’s name.

Henry winced, watching him closely, at once repelled and fascinated, like a man watching a rattlesnake behind glass.

“I accept your hospitality,” Simon said, suddenly smiling grotesquely, tears in his eyes. “God’s will be done.”

7

The troopers came in the next afternoon and casually asked to speak with Simon. Behind the counter, Henry Soames stood thinking a moment, the lenses of his glasses blanking out his eyes. “I’ll see if I can locate him,” he said. He rubbed the side of his nose, still thinking, and then, reluctantly, he left the diner to look.

He was a little on edge to start with, as he frequently was when Callie’s mother decided to come down and help out. She’d been here most of the day again, busying herself when there was nothing to do, mopping the floor when it was perfectly all right, bending the old gray spoons back into shape, criticizing the electric potato peeler for eating up three-fourths of every potato. He wished she’d get down to what she’d come here to say, but she didn’t, and gradually Henry was beginning to believe she had no intention of getting down to it. Maybe she figured she would drive out Simon Bale by just hanging around. Well, she figured wrong. When Henry asked her, “You seen Simon, Ellie?” she had looked surprised, as if she hadn’t heard what the troopers had said, five feet from where she’d been careful to be standing, and she’d said, “Why, no, Henry, I been too busy. Does somebody want him?” Henry had nodded and hurried on by her.

Simon wasn’t in the garden, this time, and when Henry called into the house he found he wasn’t there either. “Why do you want him?” Callie called back, but Henry ignored her too. He started for the garage.

He didn’t know what to think by now. Not just about the money, about the whole damn business, from the minute he’d first seen Simon Bale slumped down on the ground by his snow fence, and the people around him not moving a muscle. There was something he’d read, about a week ago: Some old man had been stabbed in New York City, it said in the paper, and there were fifteen people standing around and even when he asked them to, they never even called the police. It was hard to believe they’d all just stand there, fifteen of them, and not even one of them lift one finger, and he’d thought and thought about it. It didn’t seem natural, and he’d tried to see it from their side, because if there was any way on earth to explain it, the secret had to be in those people’s feelings. He could understand their not helping: afraid of the fellow with the knife. But to merely stand there like a herd of cows — it was past all comprehending. A man could turn into an animal, then. It was something about living in the city, that was all he could figure. And he could understand that, it came to him. He’d felt it himself one time in Utica. He’d never have believed there were that many people in all this world, especially that many poor people, burnt-out-looking; and walking in that crowd, looking at faces that stared right through him (no two faces in all that city exactly alike, each one marked by its own single lifetime of weathers, suppers, accidents, opinions), he’d felt a sudden disgust — or not even that, a calm disinterest, as though he were seeing it all with the eves of a thinking stone to whom all human life was nothing, to whom even his own life was nothing. If there were millions and millions of people in the world, they were nothing compared with the billions and billions already dead. But then he’d seen a man he knew, and he could hardly recapture, when he’d thought back to it later, that vision of people as meaningless motion, a stream of humanity down through time, no more significant than the rocks in a mountain slide. It was different in the country, where a man’s life or a family’s past was not so quickly swallowed up, where the ordinariness of thinking creatures was obvious only when you thought a minute, not an inescapable conclusion that crushed the soul the way pavement shattered men’s arches. And so they had stopped being human. It was outrageous that it could happen, but maybe it did, and, worse, maybe it was the people in New York City that were right. What was pleasant to believe was not necessarily true. Elves, for instance, or Santa Claus, or what he’d never have doubted once, the idea that Henry Soames would live practically forever. He thought: Or angels. He could remember — it seemed like centuries ago, when he was four or five — lying in bed with his grandmother, looking at pictures in the Christian Herald. It was in an upstairs room in the big old house where his parents had lived, and outside the window there were pines moaning and creaking in the summer wind. She had told him about angels, and there had seemed no possible question of its not being true. Once, standing on a hillside watching the northern lights, he had seen an angel with absolute clarity — as clearly as, another time, he’d seen a great, round frying pan in the sky when he was looking for the Big Dipper. But then the evidence against them came in, piece by piece, fact after fact, until by sheer bulk the facts overwhelmed them, and what was good to believe — for the world was vastly more beautiful with angels than it was without — was incredible. He’d been right, then, at least in this: He wasn’t acting for but against—Callie, Callie’s mother, the people who said on no earthly grounds but animal distrust that Simon had burned his own house. And maybe he had, who knew? How far would Henry Soames go on what George Loomis would call pure meanness? He thought of the money and the sinking feeling returned. He was sweating again.

He found them behind the garage. He stopped when he saw them, and neither Simon nor Jimmy looked up. Simon was sitting on a tipped-over oil drum, writing something with a pencil on a piece of wood, and Jimmy was standing at his elbow watching. Henry stopped and it came to him that, close he was, they didn’t realize yet that he was there. Jimmy was saying, “Why?” and Simon said, “Because he loves all little children, if they repent.” He spoke softly, insistently. Henry went cold all over. Jimmy said, “Who is God?” Henry said sharply, “Simon!”

The man jumped a foot, then instantly went into his obsequious cowering. He said, “H’lo.”

Henry said nothing. A muscle was jumping in his jaw, and his chest was churning so badly he could hardly get his wind. Jimmy looked up as if caught at something. At last Henry said, “The troopers would like to talk to you, Simon. In the diner.”

For a moment Simon seemed unable to make sense of the words, but then their meaning came through, and he stood up.

Henry waited with his hands behind his back, keeping his fury inside, and when Simon reached him, he turned and walked with him toward the diner. Jimmy started to follow, and Henry said, “You go back to the house.” The child opened his mouth to protest, but Henry pointed toward the house angrily and Jimmy started across the grass. By the time he reached the door he was crying.

“What were you making?” Henry asked abruptly.

Simon blushed like a child and held out the piece of wood. The letters were cut deep, like the writing on a schoolroom desk: GOD IS LOVE. Around the writing there were curlicues.

Henry said nothing. They reached the back door of the diner and Henry reached ahead of Simon to push the door open. Simon hesitated a moment, looking up at him as if in fright, and the tic played on his face; then he went in. Callie’s mother stood fussing with the mustard pots at the end of the counter.

The younger trooper had a clean-cut, Italian look. The other one was maybe fifty, a large belly but a small, lean face. They had their hats off. Simon went over to stand beside them, leaning on the counter, his suitcoat hanging down limp, the crotch of his baggy trousers low, and he waited. He looked very small, to Henry, and he stood like an old man, bent forward a little, his knees turned slightly inward. The trooper closest to him, the younger one, said, “Sit down, Simon.” Simon got up on the stool.

Henry went to the near end of the counter and stood with his arms folded, looking at the floor. His anger began to cool a little now. He’d been unfair, in a way; there was no doubt of it. It was ridiculous to fly into a rage at an old man’s teaching a child that God was Love. It was the word “repent,” maybe, that had set him off. But if so, that was more ridiculous yet. What did “repent” mean to a boy two years old? Or maybe what had done it was his finding them out there behind the garage. But he couldn’t blame Simon for that, after all. Jimmy followed him everywhere, and in fact they themselves, he and Callie, had encouraged it. Even now he felt angry, but he felt, at the same time, ashamed. Then what the trooper was saying caught his attention:

“What happened before you went to work the night of the fire?”

“Why?” Simon said. It was as if he wanted assurance that the question was important before he would trouble to remember.

“Just tell us what happened,” the other trooper said.

Simon touched his forehead with the back of his hand. “I had supper,” he said.

The younger trooper said impatiently, “We understand you had a disagreement with your wife.”

Simon looked at the man in surprise, then over at Henry. “Why, no,” he said, “no.” His smile came. Callie’s mother was standing motionless, looking out the window, and Henry felt a clutch of fear.

“Did you ever have arguments with your wife?”

Simon seemed baffled, and the older trooper said, “How did you and your wife get along, Simon?”

Simon said, “We never had any trouble.”

“We’ve talked to your son Bradley,” the younger trooper said. Then, casually: “We understand you used to beat him some, with your fists.”

Simon flushed and said nothing. He leaned his elbows on the counter and began folding and unfolding his hands.

“Is it true?” the trooper asked.

Henry’s hands were sweating. He began to doubt things he’d have sworn to five minutes before. Why were they questioning him here, in front of strangers?

“He’d sinned,” Simon said. It was almost too soft to hear, and he cleared his throat and said it louder.

“Sinned?” It was as if it were the first time the trooper had heard the expression.

Simon said nothing, and the trooper said with distaste, “Let’s talk about your daughter, Simon. Your son tells us you used to lock her in the shed for days.” He waited. “Is that true?”

“Not days,” Simon said in a whisper. He went on folding and unfolding his hands.

“But you locked her in the shed.”

He said nothing.

“Did she cry, Simon?” It was faintly ironic. After a moment: “Did she scream sometimes — for hours?”

“God forgive—” he began vaguely. No one spoke for a minute.

The younger trooper sat watching Simon’s hands. “What was the argument with your wife that night?”

He shook his head. “We didn’t argue.”

“Your neighbors say—”

“False witnesses!” For an instant anger flared up in his look, but he stopped it.

The older one said, “What was her sin, Simon?”

Again he shook his head. He was pale, and he was wringing his hands as if in anguish, but his jaw was set.

“Why would they lie — your son, your neighbors?” the younger one said. “What difference would it make to them?”

Henry pulled at his lip. He kept from breaking in, but he knew he wouldn’t keep still much longer. His anger was confused now, aimed at all of them. Strange to say, he was angriest of all at Callie’s mother, who had nothing to do with it. Her face was turned away and he couldn’t read her expression. But he could see the eavesdropping tilt of her head, the tense, righteous indignation in every muscle and bone.

“Mr. Bale,” the trooper said, “the fire at your house was arson, set with burlap and gas from your own shed. Who had any reason to set it? Who knew you had the makings right there?” And after a second: “Besides you.”

And at that Henry did break in, no more knowing now than he would know later why he did it. “That’s not fair, officer.” He went over to stand bent toward them, in front of them, the blood stinging in his face, and Callie’s mother, behind them, looked up at him, wide-eyed. “Any tramp could have come onto the gas and rags. And the neighbors — anybody in the county, for that matter — maybe they took it into their heads to hate him. It would be natural. No, let me finish. He does what he believes in, he even sneaks around trying to convert your children behind your back. It’s natural it would make people mad — maybe so mad they tell lies about him, or imagine things. You can’t take a man to jail because people don’t like him.” In his excitement Henry didn’t see George Loomis’s pickup truck pull in in front of the diner, and, though he saw the door open, he paid no attention. “People don’t believe in Simon’s God, the end of the world anyday now, things like that. They think a man that believes such things has to be crazy, and crazy people burn houses, so Simon must have burned his own house down. Pretty soon they remember a fight they never heard, and it fits in with everything they know and pretty soon it’s not even remembered any more, it’s predestined fact. People think—”

“Simon,” the younger trooper said, getting the floor from Henry without ever raising his voice, “have you ever seen the devil?”

Henry waited, checked, not sure what the man was driving at but thrown off balance, frightened again.

Simon nodded.

“Many times?” the trooper said, as if innocently, as if strictly from curiosity.

Simon nodded again.

The trooper looked at Henry, and there was no triumph in the look; a kind of helplessness. “How can you know if he’s sane, a man like that?”

George Loomis was leaning against the doorpost. He said heartily, “What the hell! Of course he’s sane. Lots of people see the devil. Happens all the time. You ever see the Watkins Man? I do. I believe in him. The Watkins Man is good.”

“Don’t clown, George,” Henry said.

George came over to the counter, the brace on his boot clumping on the linoleum, the empty sleeve dangling. To Simon Bale he might have been, even then, the devil himself: triangle-faced, maimed, a cynic, waspish in his irony; but Simon was grinning apologetically, his mouth trembling, ducking his head away from George Loomis as if afraid George might strike at him.

George said, “What’s going on around here, Ellie?”

Ellie said, tight-lipped, “They think Simon—” All at once she was in tears, and George looked startled. Henry hurried around to her, furious, and furious at Simon Bale and himself as well. “It’s all right,” he said. “Here now, after all—”

The two troopers sat relaxed and patient, watching, looking vaguely interfered-with but mainly just patient.

“Look, you guys leave Henry alone,” George said.

Henry said, “They’re just doing their job.” He felt furious at the troopers now, too. “I’m sorry I lost my temper,” he said. He went on awkwardly patting Callie’s mother’s shoulder. She cried into her apron as well as she could; it was too short to get up to her eyes. A little peeping noise came out as she cried, and she said, “I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry.”

The troopers looked at each other, and at last the younger one shook his head. “Well, thanks for your time,” he said. He looked over at the older one again, and they both stood up. The older one put two dimes on the counter, and then they walked over to the door. The older one said, nodding toward Simon but looking at Henry, “He’ll be here if we need him?”

After a second, Henry nodded.

Simon said all at once, earnestly, “I’m sorry.”

They looked at him as one might look at a sideshow freak — mildly curious, mildly embarrassed. The younger one smiled at Henry and shook his head; then they went out to their car. Henry and George watched them pull away. When they were out of sight, over the crest of the hill to the south, Henry wiped his forehead on his sleeve. Callie’s mother blew her nose on a paper napkin and went over, sniffing, to refill the matchbook box by the cash register. “I don’t know what came over me,” she said.

“Now, just don’t you think about it,” Henry said.

George Loomis slid onto the stool beside Simon and bent down to look into his eyes. “What does the devil look like, exactly, Simon?” he asked.

“Now that’s enough, George,” Henry said.

8

Henry had not defended Simon Bale in order to win his love or praise; nothing of the kind. But he was shocked to find how little it meant to Simon. When he said, as he was getting George Loomis his coffee, “Don’t you worry, Simon, we won’t let them go after you that way again,” Simon merely waved, his face falling into that idiot’s smile, and said, “Oh, no importance.” His hands were folded and quiet now. Henry said, “No importance if they put you in jail?” “Ah, well,” Simon said. He looked up at the ceiling.

George Loomis said, “If you think it’s God’s will that you’re sitting here, mister, you’re mistaken. God and the devil are out watching the sparrow, and all you got to look to is that man right there.” He pointed at Henry.

Simon studied George exactly as the troopers had looked, a few minutes ago, at Simon.

George ignored him at first. He got out his cigarettes and shook one out on the counter, put the crumpled pack away in his jeans again, and got out his matches. When Simon continued to stare, George turned irritably and said, “Come on off it now, Simon. We’re all friends here. No point you sitting there spreading the crap about God and all his legions.” He lit the cigarette.

“Now I mean it, leave him alone, George,” Henry said.

“Why? Does Simon Bale leave people alone? Simon Bale, I bring you Good News.” He drew on the cigarette and blew a huge cloud of smoke at the ceiling. Simon looked up at it. “Simon—” He leaned toward him. “There is no God. You got that? Absolute truth, and people that say there’s a God only do it for one of two reasons — because they’re fools or because they’re vicious. Clap your hands twice if you understand.”

Callie’s mother was looking outraged again: It was as if she’d explode any minute. It might have seemed funny to Henry another time, but right now he was sorry for her; she was in the right. He said, “George, shut up. Have a little consideration.”

“Why?” He looked up, and he saw Henry nod toward Callie’s mother, and he looked down again in disgust and swung around toward the counter and scowled at his coffee. “Hell,” he said, “Ellie knows I’m kidding.”

“God forgive you for your blaspheming,” Simon said softly, as if absentmindedly, watching the smoke go up from George’s cigarette.

Suddenly, after thinking about it first, George Loomis hit the counter with his fist and said, “Shit! If you don’t have to listen to the truth from me, I don’t have to listen to your crackpot drivel. Now shut your goddamn teeth.”

Henry caught his breath.

Callie’s mother said, “He’s kidding, he says. You’re truly a card, George.”

Two men came in behind George and Simon. They were laughing as they came through the door, and they seemed not to notice that anything was wrong as they glanced at the four of them and walked past them to the booth at the end. Ellie went over to them, her lips drawn taut. “Just like summer out,” one of them said. She smiled grimly.

“What I want to know,” George said quietly, “is how come you put up with all this crap from him.” He looked up at Henry, then down again. “I’ll tell you why you do. It’s because you think he’s a moron. If you thought he had the same brains as anybody else you’d try to talk sense into him, but you don’t. Or her,” he said still more softly, jerking his thumb toward Ellie, over by the customers. He dropped almost to a whisper. “She’s as cracked as Simon, and you know it damn well, with all her hymn singing an’ carrying on. And if she’s better than Simon it’s only because she’s worse. He goes around trying to save people in his crackpot way; she believes they’re all damned, and she figures, ‘Ah, screw ’em.’” She came around to the grill and he shut up.

“What’s the matter with you, George,” Henry said. “I never saw you like this. You must’ve been mad already before you got here. There’s nothing here could get you as worked-up as that.”

“The hell,” he said. “Nobody ever says anything because he believes it, is that it? If I come out against burning Jews it’s because I’ve got gallstones.”

“Simon’s no Nazi,” Henry said.

George thought about it, his shoulders hunched, head slung forward. He said, not turning toward Simon, “You know what the Jews say about Jesus, Simon? They say he was a fraud. There’s a word for him, they say. Megalomaniac. He may have said lots of good things, I don’t know, but when a plain ordinary human being thinks he’s God, the fact is he’s a nut. That’s what the Jews say. Or do you think maybe he was just pretending — for the good of mankind, because philosophy goes over better if you salt it with superstition?”

Simon said nothing, watching the smoke.

“You say he was a human being, George,” Henry said.

“Sure. And Simon would burn me too. But were you there? Do you really know?” He remembered his coffee and drank it down at once, hot as it was.

“That’s nothing to do with it. Nobody knows.” He was going to say more, but George said:

“That’s right. And yet a man that’ll burn you over something nobody in all this world knows and most people think is a whole lot of crap—”

“Yet you’d do the same on the opposite side! What’s the difference?”

“You’re right, yes I would.” He pushed his cup away. “I’d burn up all the holy bigots on earth, all the death-wishers that ever lived, if you can call it living. There’s not one in a million of ’em that’s honest. Not one! You think anybody in this world’s so stupid he can honestly believe in the man with the beard in the sky? What does it mean? Heretic fires and Jew fires and scientist fires, noble wars against conveniently rich pagans. Pah!”

Simon Bale said, “The desire of the wicked shall perish. Thus saith the Lord.”

“And I say, ‘Pah,’ ” George said.

Callie came in the back door with Jimmy and started over to the booth to the right of the door with him, to give him his supper. She looked over at George, then kept on walking, holding Jimmy’s hand. Her mother went over to her and they started to talk in low voices, never looking in the direction of the counter. Jimmy peeked around behind his grandmother’s back. George went on ranting, his voice low and brimming with disgust, but Henry could listen with only half his mind. He wanted to concentrate on the argument — there was something important that wasn’t getting said, he couldn’t just yet say what, though he knew it was there — but more customers had come in now: a family, people on a trip of some kind, the man stocky and tired-looking, wearing sunglasses, a blue short-sleeved shirt; the woman fat and blonde, a light green dress with white circles on it, brown and white shoes; the little boy (seven or eight) in jeans and a T-shirt and a New York Yankees baseball cap. Henry filled water glasses and went over to them. “Evening,” he said. (George was saying behind him: “Religion’s strictly a gimmick people use to get power over other people. You want to know who says ‘God’ more often than a minister? A politician. Fact.”)

“Beautiful country you got here,” the man said. He had reddish hair, almost all of it gone from the top of his head, and where he was bald he had freckles.

“Yes, sir,” Henry said. “Best country I ever saw.” They laughed, even if the joke was not very clear. “Only country I ever saw. Ha, ha,” he added, too late. They laughed again.

“Hope you’ve got cooking like your scenery,” the woman said, “I’m famished.”

Henry said, wide-eyed, faintly excited as he always was when he became the spokesman for all the region, “I never heard of anybody leaving the Catskills hungry!”

They laughed joyfully; he could have reached out for their hands. The boy said: “You got hamburgers?”

“House specialty,” Henry said. They laughed.

George Loomis was saying: “If I was your kid and I took up smoking, would you whip me for it, Simon? Is it a sin, smoking? It gives you cancer, yes, everybody knows that — though on the other hand it can sometimes save you a nervous breakdown — but is it a sin?”

Simon said, “I will praise the Lord with my whole heart, in the assembly of the upright, and in the congregation.”

“Fuck the congregation’s bloody cunt,” George Loomis said. He stuck out his lower lip and chin, like a child gone insane.

Henry left the tourists looking over the menu, because the woman was one that would take a long time, he knew the type. When he got back to the counter the truckers were ready to pay up. Callie’s mother was sitting across from Callie and Jimmy, and they were leaning toward each other like gossips. Jimmy was watching George, paying no attention to his supper. One of the truckers said, “Boy they really go at it, eh, Slim?”

Henry shook his head, smiling (but he felt frustrated, cross. There were things that weren’t getting said. He wanted to make them shut up and think a minute, talk sense). He rang up the truckers’ checks.

“Henry,” George shouted over to him, “I ask you man to man if it’s not a fact that there isn’t any devil and there isn’t any God, and even if there is, a man who doesn’t believe in God lives a better life than a man who does. Now I want you to tell me the truth.” Henry started to answer, but George said: “A man that thinks he’s righteous is deadly, you know it. He takes credit for things he’s got nothing to do with — accidents like his living where he happens to live and knowing exactly the people he knows. He thinks he’s Jesus H. Christ and it makes him arrogant.”

But the family in the booth was ready now. “Some other time,” Henry said. He went over to the family in the booth.

The man said, “I guess I’ll try that beef sandwich, Slim.”

Henry got out his checkpad.

By the time Henry had their orders ready, more people had come. It was the busy time, and he saw there was no hope now of his getting back to the argument. Callie and Jimmy had finished eating, and Callie left Jimmy sitting in the corner with a couple of toy trucks while she and her mother helped Henry keep up. George and Simon, the next time Henry got back to them, were gulping down food, still arguing — or rather, George still arguing, Simon still sitting tense and silent for long stretches, then suddenly breaking in angrily with some long quotation from the Bible. Then Doc Cathey was there, standing with his hands in his suitcoat pockets and his glasses down his nose, picking his teeth with his tongue and looking mad as the devil. He said, “You sound like a Commie, George.” “Damn right I do,” George said. “Fine, that’s the spirit,” Doc Cathey said. “You turn over half your farm to Simon Bale and I’ll believe you. But till then I’ll tell you right out it’s nothing but lies.” They were shouting, all three of them now, Simon saying, “Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil.” But nobody especially noticed the shouting. The diner was full now — four truckers laughing loudly about a story of another trucker in Pennsylvania who’d fixed a cop that was tailing him too close, Jim Millet telling about a fellow he’d fixed a tire for last night on 99, Nick Blue and Walt Forrest’s hired man talking about the new houses going up this side of New Carthage, two men in business suits, salesmen maybe, talking about how some Chevy place gave away free flowers every time a lady bought a new Corvette. It was a time of day Henry normally liked, the supper hour when the whole room began to hum and the walls when you put your fingertips on them shivered like the top of the piano when somebody was playing it. He would sink down into that bustle the way he would sink down into warm river water, and he would be sorry for people who weren’t caught up, as he was, in the buzzing, blooming confusion. But tonight he was eager for the time to be over. There were a hundred things he wanted to say, and every few minutes he would glance over where George and Simon and Doc Cathey were, to see if they were still there. (Doc Cathey was saying: “All Reds are liars. That’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of fact. You take a man that’s spent years breeding coonhounds. You tell that man he’s got to pass his hounds around among people that don’t know a hound from a cow, and that man will cave your head in, and rightly so.”)

Callie said, “Henry, why don’t you break them up?”

“How can I?” Henry said.

She said, “They’re bothering the others. I mean it. They’re yelling like a bunch of drunkards.”

But then Callie’s mother came and told him the dishwasher had quit, and he had to hand over his counter checks to Callie and go fix it. It was the usual trouble, the belt underneath, and as usual it took him half an hour to get it fixed. When he got back, Doc Cathey was gone. Most of the others were gone, too; there were only six people left, four of them people who’d been there before he went in to the dishwasher, two of them truckers who’d just come in. George was saying, letting smoke out with the words, “I can’t talk to you. You’re cracked.” Simon sat with his shoulders pulled in like a man wrapped tightly in rope, his fists under his chin. It was dusk outside, almost dark. George got up and paid his check, and Henry walked over to the door with him.

George said, “What in hell did you bring him here for? Boy, I just can’t make you out.”

“He didn’t have anywheres to go,” Henry said.

“Crap.” He pushed open the screen a crack and spat. “You bring home every rattler you find in the weeds?”

“I don’t shoot at everything that moves on the theory it might be a rattler.”

George Loomis looked out at the road. “I guess that makes you Jesus, don’t it.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, George,” Henry said.

George nodded, then shook his head.

“Don’t go away mad, George,” Henry said. He gave a little laugh.

“Let me ask you just one thing,” he said. “Does it make you feel righteous, taking him in out of the cold like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“The hell you don’t.”

Henry held fire a second, then he let go. “It’s a question nobody in his right mind would bother to answer,” he said. “You, now, you can feel righteous all right, but anybody else it’s a dirty word. If I feel righteous for taking him in I’m a bastard, and if I don’t I’m a fool, because there’s no reason for taking him in except to give myself the thrill of righteousness, according to you.”

George said, smiling but hissing it at him, “And why did you take him in?”

“Get out,” Henry said. “I mean it. Get out of here.”

George put his hat on.

“He’s the devil,” Simon Bale said, right at Henry’s elbow. “The devil is in him.” Bale’s eyes were fire. Henry looked furiously past him. “May the devil have no power in this house,” Simon said. He was in deadly earnest.

Henry said, “Damn you, Simon, shut up before—”

“You tell ’im, Lord,” George said. He left.

9

Henry Soames was less and less sure, as the days passed, why it was he’d taken on the role of friend and protector to Simon Bale. His mother-in-law appeared day after day, saying nothing, butting in on his affairs and condemning him for his own mismanagement only by her presence. Because of the way he’d let the thing drag on, Callie scarcely spoke to him now from morning to night. Once when Doc Cathey came in and made some stupid remark (Henry could no longer remember it) and Henry had blown up at him, Callie had said with quiet rage, “Are you satisfied? Henry, when are you going to have had enough?” On Sunday morning, the second week of his stay, Simon Bale went out on his calls, and Henry was so angry he felt sick — angry at something he couldn’t even name: not the people who would be thinking, He comes from Henry’s place, glides down from his cool tranquility to our poor ordinary mortal domain where you earn your keep by the sweat of your fucking brow; not angry at Simon, exactly, either, whose materialization on some country porch carried, inevitably, the sanction Henry had never given and whose preaching was, insidiously, the word from Henry Soames; not angry, even, at himself, because what he had done was beyond stupidity or wisdom, it was what it was, pure and simple, old clothes on a clothesline, neither bad nor good, merely there, the inevitable and inexorable law of Henry’s constitution. Seeing Simon slumped down again, accused and no more able to answer than a fat, stupid sheep could answer his butcher, Henry would do it all again, this time knowing even as he did it the complete absurdity of what he did; and seeing the woman’s blistered, naked body in the morgue, in the gloom and the inexhaustible stench of the hospital’s bowels, he’d react to even that as he’d done before, would raise her up at his own incredibly excessive expense, and would feel the same useless irrelevant remorse at having done what it was impossible for him not to do, and, as before, he’d no doubt by the very necessity of his nature keep the thing as secret as he could, revealing it only in the form of cryptic red entries in his books.

So that if Henry had no reasons for having taken Simon in, he nevertheless accepted the fact that he’d done it and couldn’t get out of it now, come hell or high water — and they would. George Loomis and Doc Cathey still came in from time to time, but between them and Henry there was a coolness now that none of them could dispel. Ironically — as Henry saw — George Loomis’s anger was partly at what Henry was doing to himself, letting Simon Bale take over his house, pervert his natural feeling for justice to a sick kind of pity, turn his diner into a beggar’s banquet, rob him of all he had ever saved, all he had every right to call his own. And partly, of course, George’s anger was the effect of just and reasonable envy. The two of them had been close once, and it was unforgivable that Simon should have Henry’s ear, should be free to talk nonsense without fear of contradiction or reproach, and George Loomis not. What right had Simon Bale to dawdle in Henry Soames’ garden or dispossess him of his bench? But he was there, apparently settled there more or less permanently; he showed no sign of going down again to the Grant Hotel. Thinking about that gulf yawning wider and wider between himself and George, Henry Soames would clench his fists in anger. He would rather have George to talk to, late at night; there was no question about that. George was brighter, even if he was sometimes irascible and overbearing; and he’d been around longer — though by now Simon Bale seemed to have been here, not only inside Henry’s house but inside his skin, forever. And George was not, like Simon, a bore. They would fight far into the night, in the old days, battling over nothing at all with splendid thrusts and sallies and glorious alarums, never knowing for sure who was winning or who was losing and not caring much, since nobody ever really lost in those airy wars. But it was different now. Though they still talked, they talked as if from opposite ends of an expanding universe: because one of them no longer talked with his own voice or defended what he could honestly consider his own kingdom.

As for Doc Cathey, he came and went like a shadow no longer of any great significance. Sometimes in the past he had been for Henry an older and wiser spirit, someone to lean on, likely to come up with outrageous opinions but nevertheless sure to come up with opinions that, one way or another, would be of use. But he had nothing whatever to say, now. If he approved Henry’s course he gave no sign. He would laugh sometimes, as if at nothing, but he left in his wake nothing solid to catch hold of, only the nameless turbulence of his indefinite, violent moods.

Most of the time Simon Bale would sit there in the sun, watching Jimmy play, telling him stories, or sleeping. At other times they would find Simon crying in his room. Both the sitting and the familiar grief, by now an old friend to Simon, were disgusting to Henry, and he would be tempted to lash out at the man with all the thunder of his indignation. He didn’t, though, and in fact couldn’t, because the fact was that Simon had every right to his grief, and it was his grief that lay both behind his dawdling, day after day, and his mourning alone in his room.

But idleness and crying weren’t enough for him. He went further: He began to appear in the diner with his pamphlets (he was shaving again now; that much could be said; but on the other hand he’d given up taking off his suit when he went to sleep). He would get into conversation with the customers, smiling his idiotic smile or standing there with his mouth hanging open, rolling his eyes, craning his dirty, wrinkled neck.

Callie said, “Henry, do something!”

And so Henry said, “Simon, this is a diner. You go do your preaching somewheres else.”

“The Lord’s work—” Simon said, lifting his eyebrows.

“Not while they eat,” Henry said. “Go someplace else.”

Simon did not like it. He had no natural feeling for ordinary requirements of Nature. But he accepted it. After that Simon would meet them at the door as they were leaving, and he would press his pamphlets on them and writhe along with them as they went to their cars, Simon smiling and hissing about Kingdom Come. Callie compressed her lips and said nothing, and Henry, despairing, pretended not to see. George Loomis said once, coming into the diner, jerking his thumb toward the gas pumps where Simon ministered, “You know what that bastard’s telling them? He’s telling them they’re going to hell. You ought to trade him in on a goat or something.” Henry clenched his jaw and tried to think, then at last went over to the door and pushed it open and stuck his head out. “Simon!” he said.

Simon looked up, his head far forward, like a buzzard’s, his tie hanging outside the front of his suitcoat. At last he came over.

“I don’t mean just the diner,” he said, “I mean noplace in my sight. Leave the customers alone. You hear?”

“God forgive you,” Simon Bale said.

Henry clenched his jaw tighter yet and pulled his head in and let the door slam shut behind him. He started back toward the counter, then on second thought turned and ducked down to peer darkly through the glass. Simon was heading straight back to the people he’d been talking to, but he didn’t disobey — at least not yet. The car started up and swerved out onto the highway and escaped.

“Damn it, Henry,” George Loomis said, “that man’s crazy.”

“Maybe so,” Henry said. “How can I say?”

But he was thinking: Those fifteen people in New York City might be right in the end, but you had to act, and beyond that you had to assert that they were wrong, wrong for all time, whatever the truth might be. And it was the same even if you only thought you saw an old man being stabbed: You ran to the center of the illusion and you jumped the illusory man with the knife, and if it was empty, sunlit sidewalk you hit, too bad, you had to put up with the laughter, and nevertheless do it again the next time and again and again. So Simon. It wasn’t true that the world was about to end or that sinners were going to torment, but all the same he was right to go out with his crackpot pamphlets: Henry Soames would try to persuade him, but he wasn’t going to stop him — except in the diner, because the diner, at least, was still his own.

And yet he felt no quiet. The truth was that there was something Henry was afraid of, something as undefined in his mind as the substance of his child’s nightmares, but real, for all its ghostliness: some possibility that became increasingly troublesome. He thought of the money he still hadn’t said one word about to Callie or to Simon either, though the woman was buried now, with no one at the graveside at all, and he felt sick for a minute, but that fear was different, because Callie’s finding out was inevitable, the only question was whether he could somehow cover the loss, make it back again or anyway make some of it back so the shock to her wouldn’t be so great when it came. What troubled him was something else. He remembered something very strange, though this wasn’t what was the matter either, though somehow it seemed related:

One night almost a year ago he’d been sleeping on the floor in Jimmy’s room (he couldn’t remember why anymore; maybe he’d just fallen asleep there, or maybe they’d had company that night and the beds were in use; it didn’t matter). Jimmy was asleep on the floor beside him. Jimmy had moved, or had said something, and Henry had sat up and opened his eyes without quite waking up. He’d thought there was some kind of animal in the room, and, thinking of Jimmy (vaguely identifying the voice, perhaps), he’d lunged at the animal, and it had run, the legs moving fast — a kind of blur, very much the way a rabbit would run — out into the hallway where the light was on, and Henry had caught it and lifted it up with a shout and then he’d come wide awake and he was holding Jimmy by the waist and Jimmy was screaming. Henry had calmed him almost at once, and Jimmy had seemed never to remember it, but for Henry the memory of that night was like a wound that would never heal. He would wonder, again and again, later, at odd moments when it all rose up in his mind more real than the diner or the dim-lit kitchen around him, what would have happened if he hadn’t awakened just that instant. And he couldn’t answer it. Then something else: He began to wonder if it had ever happened at all. There was no way of finding out.

Then one afternoon the troopers called. Callie answered the phone. She came running into the diner, carrying Jimmy (he had to be with someone constantly, these days; Simon’s attentions had spoiled him). As soon as she was inside the door, she called, “Henry, that was the troopers. They think they may have found who set the fire.”

Henry went cold. He hadn’t realized until this moment how far his trust was removed from his rational judgment. “Who did it?” he said.

“They think it was a couple of kids,” she said. She hiked Jimmy up a little, getting a better hold on him. “They don’t know, you understand, they just think. Two teen-agers. The troopers are on their way up here with them now. They want them to see Simon face to face.”

Henry thought: Thank God he didn’t do it! But carefully he cut God from what he said. “Then he didn’t do it.”

“It’s not sure, but they think not.”

Then: “Where is he? I’ll go tell him the news.”

“I don’t know,” Henry said. “In back, I guess.”

She left, still carrying Jimmy.

Henry’s legs went weak. He went over to the corner booth and sat down. He leaned his forehead on his fists and breathed deeply, and it was as if all his stomach had turned to jelly. He was still there when Callie came back, walking slowly, Jimmy walking beside her. Henry looked up. “What did he say?”

For what seemed half-a-minute she didn’t answer. At last she said with a despairing look, “If they did it, he forgives them.”

“The boys?” Henry waited.

She said, “Love thine enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you. Thus saith Simon Bale.”

Henry snorted. “He’ll change his mind when he sees them.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“The fire killed his wife,” Henry said.

“It won’t make any difference,” she said. “I’m telling you, Henry. He’s strange, really strange.”

Her prediction turned out to be right, but Simon’s behavior was, as Simon would have said, of no importance. The law was still the law.

10

The nightmares were nothing to worry about, Doc Cathey said. All children had occasional spells of that sort, some children longer spells than others; in any case, he’d grow out of them. He made them a list of foods they shouldn’t give him within two hours of bedtime, and he warned them of scolding him too severely. Aside from that, there was nothing to do but wait. There was no question of there being any deep psychological disturbance, he said. He was sunny-dispositioned, placid, in a word, healthy.

They were relieved. Nevertheless it was a terrible moment when that scream would come, jerking them out of their sleep like a wire. It happened every two, three nights, sometimes twice in a single night. Henry would bound to Jimmy’s bedside and scoop him up and say, “What’s the matter? Bad dream?” They would never get out of him what it was he was dreaming about. It was hard enough to get the most ordinary information out of a two-year-old. Jimmy could talk well enough when he wanted to — in long, fairly complicated sentences, his eyes large and watchful, scrutinizing Henry’s face for the first sign that the sentence had gone wrong. But it wasn’t easy to make him advance information. He preferred to copy sentences he’d heard (in the morning they’d hear him practicing for half an hour at a time in his room, new expressions, new tones of voice). So what it was he was dreaming they never learned. Perhaps he forgot it all instantly, the minute he awakened. That was Henry’s theory, because often Jimmy would go back to sleep at once, the minute Henry scooped him up, and sometimes he’d be asleep again even when Henry reached his bedside. At the end of the second week the spell seemed to be over. He went five nights in a row without crying out (it was Callie who kept track), and they began to breathe more easily.

They had another reason, too, for beginning to feel hopeful. On the Monday night a month and three days after Simon’s first coming, Simon packed himself a lunch and drove down the mountain to the Grant Hotel. Henry and Callie had no idea when or how he’d gotten in touch with the man who owned the place to tell him he was coming back; in fact, until Simon got home, at seven-thirty the following morning, they had no idea where he’d gone. He left again the next night, and Henry said to Callie’s mother, when they were standing in the diner with nothing to do (it was ten-thirty, always the slackest time of day), “Well, Ellie, Simon’s started working again. He’ll be on his feet in no time now. We’ll soon see the last of him.”

“I imagine Callie’s pleased about that,” she said. Henry smiled at her restraint. But she could not help adding, “I wonder how they feel about it at the Grant.”

And when George Loomis came in that night, Henry said, “Well, he’s gone back down to work, George. Must mean it won’t be much longer.”

“Maybe,” George said.

Henry laughed at George’s skepticism. He went on chuckling, wiping off the counter; but something unpleasant began to nag at the back of his mind, and he could neither shake it nor make out what it was.

Again, Wednesday night, Simon went down to the hotel.

Doc Cathey said, “He’s a different man when he’s working. And you’re a different man too, I’ll say that.”

“Different how?” Henry said. “Simon, I mean.”

Doc Cathey shrugged, then tipped his head and thought about it, chewing the inside of his cheek. “Oh, tougher, I guess. More sure what he’s about. I’ve noticed it before. You take a man that’s different from everybody else around him and when he’s holding down a job he’ll do things he’d never even think of some other time.”

Henry considered it. “It may be,” he said. “I hadn’t noticed it. Maybe so. I’m glad to see him pulling his life back together, just the same. You have to hand it to him, man fifty-four years old that’s gone through what Simon has.”

Doc Cathey went on chewing his cheek. Henry went over to clean the booth where Nick Blue had had his supper, and as he stacked the dishes he began to whistle under his breath. But it wasn’t good spirits pure and simple.

Again on Thursday night Simon Bale went down to the Grant. He returned at seven-thirty the next morning, and Callie fixed him toast and eggs. When he’d eaten he went into his room and shaved with his electric razor, then took off all but his dirty underwear and went to bed. He got up around two in the afternoon and went out to sit in the garden, reading his Bible. (It had rained that morning. The garden was muddy and the bench soaking wet, but Simon seemed not to notice.) Jimmy wandered around looking for him, as soon as he discovered that Simon wasn’t in bed, and finally, smiling, shaking her head at the thought of the mess she would have to clean up when the mud got him, Callie led him out the back door. He ran-slid along between the glittering lettuce and beets to the rose bushes and between the bushes to the bench where Simon sat. Callie smiled again, thinking how hard they’d all been on Simon, after all: However crazy he might be, some ways, there was something good in him or Jimmy wouldn’t hang on him that way. After that she called into the diner to Henry to ask him if he’d remembered to bring in the mail, and when he said no, he was sorry, he’d forgotten, she went around to the mailbox out in front. There was nothing much — something from Farmers’ Insurance, one of those Occupant circulars, the monthly statement from the bank. She opened the statement, without much interest, as she started back to the house.

He saw the canceled check to Wiegerts’ lying alone in the middle of the kitchen table, and his breath went out of him. He got the bottle of pills in the pocket of his shirt. Callie wasn’t in the house, and she wasn’t in the diner either. I’m sorry, he thought. It was all I could do. But that was no good and he didn’t want it. He’d done it and he would take whatever fury or grief was coming, because though it was all he could do he’d nevertheless chosen to do it, and it was as though the act were not his fate’s but his own. It came to him then where she would be, out on the highway crying and walking off her rage or, no, fear — that sensation like falling through endless space, the feeling she’d learned from sixteen years of living through the battles of her mother and father. He thought of driving out to hunt for her, but then he couldn’t make out whether he ought to or not: Maybe she was better off getting through it on her own. She knew he was not her father, or anyway that his foolishness was a different kind of foolishness (except that he was not going to admit for a minute that what he had done was foolishness, finally, and maybe Callie would make out even that, he didn’t know). He decided to see if she was back in half-an-hour, and if not, to go look for her.

It came to him that she wouldn’t have taken Jimmy with her. No doubt he’d be in the garden with Simon, if Simon hadn’t left yet, but he’d better go make sure. He went down the steps and around the corner of the house. Simon was asleep on the bench, and he was alone. Henry went back into the house and through the downstairs rooms, calling. He called up the stairs, but there was still no answer. He went up the stairs, pulling himself up on the railing and puffing like an old woman. He’d just reached the top when Jimmy screamed. Henry’s heart banged in his chest as if to split it. When he got to the door and looked in, Jimmy was crouching on the floor by his crib, clinging to the railing and staring into the shadows in the corner of the room.

“What’s the matter?” Henry roared.

“It’s the devil!” Jimmy screamed, coming across to him now on all fours, as if he’d forgotten how to run, “Daddy! Daddy! It’s the devil!”

And then Simon Bale was standing there too, behind him in the hallway, panting from his sprint from where he’d heard the screams in the garden. When he saw Henry’s face he went back two steps, smiling as if in horror, ducking his head quickly down and to the left and whispering, “Forgive—”

“You!” Henry yelled, and it came out as much like awe as like rage. His rage came slowly — or so it seemed to Henry’s suddenly racing mind — but when it hit it was like a mountain falling. He might have killed him if he could have done it (so Henry Soames would say later, dead calm, at the coroner’s inquiry), but he couldn’t even hit him because he was holding Jimmy in his arms; he could only advance on him, howling in his fury, feeling his neck puffing up and throbbing. The room around him was red and his lips felt thick. Simon was whispering, “Forgive, forgive,” again and again and smiling as if his brain had stopped running (which perhaps it had, recalling like motionless, final judgments when Time was over and what was was — pictures standing out from the newsprint around them — his son Bradley Bale with a sign niggers and something more that was out of sight, his daughter Sarah looking out with a thousand centuries of icy, prophetic eyes) and suddenly he turned and bolted toward the stairs. Henry shrieked, driving, as the man reached the top. He did not seem to step down but to leap, looking over his shoulder with a fierce grin, as though he thought he could fly, and Henry rushed toward him in alarm and hate or was rushing toward him already by that time. (He would wonder later which came first, the scene rising up in his mind undiminished; and he would wring his hands). He saw him hit halfway down and tumble and fly out in all directions, reaching. At the bottom he lay still a minute, upside down, his arms flung out and one knee bent, the light from the kitchen door like a halo on his murderous face, and then his body jerked, and quickly Henry turned his back so that Jimmy wouldn’t see.

He sat on the toybox in the child’s room, holding him, shaking his head and groaning, seeing it again and knowing Simon was still lying there staring toward heaven, waiting. It began to get dark — he could feel the mountains closing in. He wished Callie would come home and tell him what to do.