The Second Coming

I

IT WAS NO TROUBLE handling him until he came to and looked at her. She could do anything if nobody watched her. But the moment a pair of eyes focused on her, she was a beetle stuck on a pin, arms and legs beating the air. There was no purchase. It was an impalement and a derailment.

So it had been in school. Alone at her desk she could do anything, solve any problem, answer any question. But let the teacher look over her shoulder or, horror of horrors, stand her up before the class: she shriveled and curled up like paper under a burning glass.

The lieder of Franz Schubert she knew by heart, backwards and forwards, as well as Franz ever knew them. But when four hundred pairs of eyes focused on her, they bored a hole in her forehead and sucked out the words.

When he landed on the floor of her greenhouse, knocking himself out, he was a problem to be solved, like moving the stove. Problems are for solving. Alone. After the first shock of the crash, which caught her on hands and knees cleaning the floor, her only thought had been to make some sense of it, of him, a man lying on her floor smeared head to toe with a whitish grease like a channel swimmer. As her mind cast about for who or what he might be — new kind of runner? masquerader from country-club party? Halloween trick-or-treater? — she realized she did not yet know the new world well enough to know what to be scared of. Maybe the man falling into her house was one of the things that happened, albeit rarely, like a wood duck flying down the chimney.

But wait. Was he a stranger? Strange as he was, smeared with clay and bent double, there was something about the set of his shoulders, a vulnerability in their strength, that struck in her a sweet smiling pang. She recognized him. No, in a way she knew who he was before she saw him. The dog recognized him. It was the dog, a true creature of the world, who knew when to be affrighted and enraged, e.g., when a man falls on him, who therefore had attacked as before and as before had as quickly stopped and spat out the hand, the furious growl winding down to a little whine of apology. Again the dog was embarrassed.

Perhaps she ought to be an engineer or a nurse of comatose patients. For, from the moment of her gazing down at him, it was only a matter of figuring out how to do what needed to be done, of calculating weights and angles and points of leverage. Since he had crashed through one potting table, the problem was to get him up on the other one. But first make sure he wasn’t dead or badly hurt. It seemed he was neither, though he was covered with bumps and scrapes and blood and clay. He smelled of a freshly dug ditch. A grave. Again her mind cast about. Had he been digging a well for her in secret, knowing her dislike of help? But how does one fall from a well? Perhaps he had found a water supply on the ridge above.

She tried to pick him up. Though she was strong and had grown stronger with her heavy work in the greenhouse and though he was thin, he was heavy. He was slippery. His long slack muscles were like straps on iron. When she lifted part of his body, the rest clove to the earth as if it had taken root. Now sitting propped against the wall, the dog’s anvil head on her thigh, she considered. The block-and-tackle she figured gave her the strength of three men. Better than three men. Three men would have demoralized her. Her double and triple pulleys conferred mastery of energy gains and mechanical advantages. With pulleys and ropes and time to plan, one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldn’t anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time? It was hard to understand why scientists had not long ago solved the problems of the world. Were they, the scientists, serious? How could one not solve any problem, once you put your mind to it, had forty years, and people didn’t bother you? Problems were for solving. Perhaps they the scientists were not serious. For if people solved the problems of cancer and war, what would they do then? Who could she ask about this? She made a note to look it up in the library.

She got him up by first rolling him onto a door from the ruin, then, using a single double-gain pulley, hoisted one end of the door enough to slide the creeper under it, then rolled him to her bunk, devised a rope sling for the door, a two-strand hammock, hoisted door by two double-blocks hooked to the metal frame of the gambrel angle in the roof where the vents opened. The trick was to pull the ropes to both systems, then when the pulleys had come together take both ropes in one hand and stack bricks under the door with the other and start over. When the door was a little higher than the cleared bunk, she eased him over door and all, hoisted one end of the door, the head end, high enough to put three bricks under it so water would run off when she gave him a bath.

The only real trouble was getting his clothes off. Pulleys were no use. Man is pitiful without a tool. It took all her sweating gasping strength to tug the slippery khaki over his hips and to roll him over far enough to yank one elbow clear of a sleeve. Why not cut his clothes off? Then dress him in what? She considered his underwear shorts. She wouldn’t have minded him naked but perhaps, later, he would. She covered him with her sleeping bag while she drew two pots of water, one for him, one for his clothes, the clothes first so they would have time to dry in the sun. No, the sun would take too long. Instead, she hung the shirt and pants on the nickel towel rack of the great stove. Quel pleasure, putting her stove to such good use!

It took all afternoon. She didn’t mind bathing a man. How nice people are, unconscious! They do not glance. Yes, she should be a nurse of comatose patients. Again it was a matter of calculating weights and angles and hefts. The peculiar recalcitrant slack weight of the human body required its own physics. Heaving him over to get at his back, a battleground of cuts and scrapes and caked blood and bruises, she wondered: what had he done, fallen off a mountain? His face! With its week’s growth of beard, a heavy streaked yellow-and-white stubble, and the lump above his jawbone, he looked like a covite with a wad of chewing tobacco. But only when she finished did she stop to gaze down at him. No, not a redneck. Except for the golfer’s tan of his face and arms, his skin was white, with a faint bluish cast. The abdomen dropping away hollow under his ribs, the thin arms and legs with their heavy slack straps of muscle, cold as clay, reminded her of some paintings of the body of Christ taken down from the crucifix, the white flesh gone blue with death. The closed eyes sunk in their sockets and bluish shadow. The cheekbones thrust out like knees. He had lost weight. While his beard grew he had not eaten.

Exhausted, she cooked a supper of oatmeal and made a salad of brook lettuce and small tart apples from the ruined orchard and hickory nuts. Her back felt looks. She turned around. The dog and the man were watching her, the dog with his anvil head between his paws, the man with his cheek resting on his elbow. The looks did not dart or pierce or impale. They did not control her. They were shyer than she and gave way before her, like the light touch of a child’s hand in the dark. The man looked one way, the dog the other, as if she were not there. Was she there?

The man could not sit up to eat. She fed him. He ate heartily but his eyes, like the dog’s, only met hers briefly and went away as he chewed. She put hot oatmeal in the dog’s dry meal from the fifty-pound sack, which she had packed from town by tying it like a blanket roll in the lower flap of the Italian NATO knapsack. Her strength surprised her. She could hoist anything.

2

It wasn’t bad taking care of him. To tell the truth, before he landed in the greenhouse, she had begun to slip a little. It surprised her. She liked her new life. Physically she was healthy and strong. The hard work of cleaning the greenhouse and moving the stove made her hungry and tired. She ate heartily and slept like a log. She gained weight. When she caught sight of herself in the shop windows of Linwood, she did not at first recognize the tan towheaded long-haired youth loping along.

But looks became more impaling. Some people, most Southern people, guard their looks as if they knew what she knew about looks: that they are not like other things. The world is full of two kinds of things, looks and everything else. Some people do not guard their looks. A woman met her eye in an aisle of the supermarket and looked too long. The look made a tunnel. The shelves of cans seemed to curve around the look like the walls of a tunnel. She knew she was not crazy because a can fell off.

Some people use their looks to impale. Once, as she walked down the street, her thighs felt a look. She turned around. A dark stout man perhaps from Florida (most visitors were from Florida), perhaps a Cuban, perhaps South American, was not only looking at her buttocks but had bunched his fingers under his chin and was shaking them and making a sucking noise, not a whistle, through his pursed lips.

Time became separated into good times and bad times. The nights and mornings were good times.

Then along comes late afternoon — four o’clock? five o’clock? she didn’t know because she had no clock and lived by forest time — but a time which she thought of as yellow spent time because if time is to be filled or spent by working, sleeping, eating, what do you do when you finish and there is time left over? The forest becomes still. The singing and clomping of the hikers, the cries of the golfers, the sweet little sock of the Spalding Pro Flites and Dunlop Maxflys, the sociable hum of the electric carts die away and before the cicadas tune up there is nothing but the fluting of the wood thrush as the yellow sunlight goes level between the spokes of the pines. By now the golfers, sweaty and hearty, are in the locker room tinkling ice in glasses of Tanqueray, and Diz Dean briquets are lighting up all over Linwood. Forest time turned back into clock time with time going out ahead of her in a straight line as a measure of her doing something, but she was not doing anything and therefore clock time became a waiting and a length which she thought of as a longens. Only in late afternoon did she miss people.

She said to the dog: This time of day is a longens.

The dog turned his anvil head first one way then the other. What?

In this longitude longens ensues in a longing if not an unbelonging.

What? said the dog.

One way to escape the longens of clock time marching out into the future ahead of her was to curl away from it, going round and down into her dog-star Sirius serious self so there she was curled up under, not on, the potting table. The dog did not like her there. He whined a little and gave her a poke with his muzzle. Okay okay. She got up. No, it wasn’t so bad and not bad at all when it got dark and clock time was rounded off by night. She lit a candle and the soft yellow light made a room in the dark and time went singing along with cicada music and not even the screech owl was sad except that just at dusk there rose in her throat not quite panic but something rising nevertheless. She swallowed it, all but the aftertaste of wondering: tomorrow will it be worse, even a curse?

But in the dark: turn a flowerpot upside down and put the candle on it to read by, the dog now waiting for her signal, which is opening the book, hops up he not she spiraling round and down but always ending with his big anvil head aimed at her, eyes open, tiny flame upside down in each pupil, watching her until she starts reading her book: then down comes his head on her knee heavy as iron. She read from The Trail of the Lonesome Pine:

Hand in hand, Hale and June followed the footsteps of spring from the time June met him at the school-house gate for their first walk in the woods. Hale pointed to some boys playing marbles.

“That’s the first sign,” he said, and with quick understanding June smiled.

Sign of what? Spring?

3

One morning she woke and could not quite remember what she was doing in the greenhouse. But she remembered she had written a note to herself in her notebook for just such an occasion. The note read:

The reason you are living here is to take possession of your property and to make a life for yourself. How to live from one moment to the next: Clean the place up. Decide on a profession. Work at it. What about people? Men? Do you want (1) to live with another person? (2) a man? (3) a woman? (4) no one? (5) Do you want to make love with another person? (6) “Fall in love”? (7) What is “falling in love”? (8) Is it part of making love or different? (9) Do you wish to marry? (10) None of these? (11) Are people necessary? Without people there are no tunneling looks. Brooks don’t look and dogs look away. But late afternoon needs another person.

What do I do if people are the problem? Can I live happily in a world without people? What if four o’clock comes and I need a person? What do you do if you can’t stand people yet need a person?

For some reason when she read this note to herself, she thought of an expression she had not heard since grade school: “Doing it.” Was “doing it” the secret of life? Is this a secret everyone knows but no one talks about?

She “did it” at Nassau with Sarge, the Balfour jewelry salesman, thinking that it might be the secret of life. But even though she and Sarge did everything in the picture book Sarge had, it did not seem to be the secret of life. Had she missed something?

On the days she walked to town she found herself sitting on the bench near The Happy Hiker. One day the marathon runner saw her and sat down on the bench beside her. Again he shook hands with his fibrous monkey hand. Again he asked her to crash with him in the shelter on Sourwood Mountain. Again she said no. Again he loped away, white stripes scissoring.

Another afternoon a hiker asked for a drink of water at the greenhouse. Unshouldering his scarlet backpack, he sat beside her on the floor of the little porch. Though he was young and fair as a mountain youth, his face was dusky and drawn with weariness. When he moved, his heavy clothes were as silent as his skin. He smelled, she imagined, like a soldier, of sweat and leather gear. They were sitting, knees propped up. His arm lay across his knee, the hand suspended above her knees. She looked at the hand. Tendons crossed the boxy wrist, making ridges and swales. A rope of vein ran along the placket of muscle in the web of the thumb. Copper-colored hair turning gold at the tip sprouted from the clear brown skin. The weight of the big slack hand flexed the wrist, causing the tendon to raise the forefinger like Adam’s hand touching God’s.

As she watched, the hand fell off his knee and fell between her knees. She looked at him quickly to see if he had dozed off but he had not. The hand was rubbing her thigh. She frowned: I don’t like this but perhaps I should. Embarrassed for him, she cleared her throat and rose quickly, but the hand tightened on her thigh and pulled her down. Mainly she was embarrassed for him. Oh, this is too bad. Is something wrong with me? The dog growled, his eyes turning red as a bull’s. The man thanked her and left. He too seemed embarrassed.

Was there something she did not know and needed to be told? Perhaps it was a matter of “falling in love.” She knew a great deal about pulleys and hoists but nothing about love. She went to the library to look up love as she had looked up the mechanical advantages of pulleys. Surely great writers and great lovers of the past had written things worth reading. Here were some of the things great writers had written:

Love begets love

Love conquers all things

Love ends with hope

Love is a flame to burn out human ills

Love is all truth

Love is truth and truth is beauty

Love is blind

Love is the best

Love is heaven and heaven is love

Love is love’s reward

“Oh my God,” she said aloud in the library and smacked her head. “What does all that mean? These people are crazier than I am!”

Nowhere could she find a clear explanation of the connection between “being in love” and “doing it.” Was this something everybody knew and so went without saying? or was it a well-kept secret? or was it something no one knew? Was she the only Southern girl who didn’t know? She began to suspect a conspiracy. They, teachers, books, parents, poets, philosophers, psychologists, either did not know what they were talking about, which seemed unlikely, or they were keeping a secret from her.

Was something wrong with her? What did she want? Was she supposed to want to “do it”? If she was supposed to, who was doing the supposing? Was it a matter of “falling in love”? With whom? a man? a woman? She tried to imagine a woman hiker’s hand falling between her knees.

Naargh, she said.

The dog cocked an eyebrow. What?

Is one supposed to do such-and-so with another person in order to be happy? Must one have a plan for the pursuit of happiness? If so, is there a place where one looks up what one is supposed to do or is there perhaps an agency which one consults?

Who says?

Who is doing the supposing?

Why not live alone if it is people who bother me? Why not live in a world of books and brooks but no looks? Going home one evening, she passed Hattie’s Red Barn. Young folk were dancing and drinking and joking. Couples came and went to vans. Someone beckoned to her from the doorway. She did not belong with them. Why not? They were her age. They were making merry, weren’t they? and she would like to make merry, wouldn’t she? They were good sorts, weren’t they? Yes, but not good enough.

You have to have a home to make merry even if you are away from home. She had a home but it was not yet registered. A registrar was needed to come and register her home in the presence of a third party, a witness. Upon the departure of the registrar the third party would look at her and say: Well, this is your home and here we are. She would make sassafras tea. Then they could make merry.

Perhaps she had not sunk deep enough into her Sirius self. If one sinks deep enough there is surely company waiting. Otherwise, if one does not have a home and has not sunk into self, and seeks company, the company is lonesome. Silence takes root, sprouts. Looks dart.

On the other hand, look what happens to home if one is too long at home. Rather than go home to Williamsport, she’d rather live in a stump hole even though her parents’ home was not only registered with the National Registry but restored and written up in Southern Living. Rather than marry and have a life like her mother, she’d rather join the navy and see the world. Why is a home the best place and also the worst? How can the best place become the worst place? What is a home? A home is a place, any place, any building, where one sinks into one’s self and finds company waiting. Company? Who’s company? oneself? somebody else? That’s the problem. The problem is not the house. People are the problem. But it was their problem. She could wait.

4

The man watched her from the bunk but she didn’t mind. His look was not controlling or impaling but son and gray and going away. Her back felt his and the dog’s eyes following her, but when she faced them, their eyes rolled up into their eyebrows. The mornings grew cold. It was a pleasure to rise shivering from her own potting-table bunk and kneel at the Grand Crown stove and start a fat-pine fire for its quick blazing warmth and busy crackle-and-pop which peopled the room. Outside, the great dark rhododendrons dripped and humped in close, still hiding croquet balls knocked “galley west” in 1890 tournaments. This dreary cold clime is not getting me down!

The first morning the man said: “You gave me a bath.”

“Yes. And washed your clothes.” She dropped the clothes on him. “You can put them on.” She was stiff. She had slept with the dog on croker sacks. From the army surplus store she bought two scratchy Italian NATO blankets and made a bed of pine needles on a slatted flat, which she propped on four upended big pots.

They talked about the once cool-feeling now warm-feeling cave air blowing above them. He told her how Judge Kemp had saved the cost of kerosene for the greenhouse but think what you could save. Your overhead is zero. (It made her feel good that her overhead was not over head and pressing down on her but was nought, had gone away.) You could grow produce all winter and sell at one hundred percent profit. Grow what and sell where, she asked. I don’t know, he said, but we can find out — is that what you want to do, make a living here? I don’t know, she said.

One morning when she returned from her woods latrine, a comfortable fork in the chestnut fall, which she used and where she deposited his excretions from a Clorox bottle and a neatly folded packet of newspaper, she found him sitting in the doorway in the morning sun. His swellings had gone down except for the knee, the scrapes had dry scabs, and his eyes were all right, not the inturning Khe Sanh white eyes but gray and clear and focused on the dog. His scruffy yellow beard looked odd against his smooth platinum-and-brown hair. Was he nodding because he knew what he was going to do? He nodded toward the other doorjamb as if it were the chair across his desk. She took it, sat down.

“Now, you’ve done a great deal for me. I would thank you for it but won’t, for fear of upsetting your balance sheet of debits and credits. I know you are particular about owing somebody something, but maybe you will learn that’s not so bad. I don’t mind being in your debt. You won’t mind my saying that I would do the same for you, and take pleasure in it, and furthermore can easily see our positions reversed. What I wish to tell you is that I accept what you’ve done for me and that I have other things to ask of you. I don’t mind asking you. There are things that need to be done and only you can do them. Will you?”

“I will,” she said. I will, she thought, because now he knew exactly what had to be done just as she had known what to do when he lay knocked out on her floor. I’d do anything he asks me, she thought, hoist anything. Why is that?

“Do you have a calendar?” he asked.

She gave him her Gulf card.

He looked at it, looked up at her, smiled. (Smiled!) “Wrong year.” She shrugged. She was afraid to ask what year it was.

“What is today?”

“The fifteenth.”

“Hm. It seems I’ve been gone two weeks.” His gray eyes met hers. She didn’t mind. “How much money do you have?”

“One hundred and eleven dollars and thirty-one cents.”

“What are you going to do when your money runs out?”

She shrugged. “Find employment.”

“Doing what?”

“Hoisting maybe. Also gardening.”

“Hoisting? Hoisting what?”

“Anything.”

“I see. You wouldn’t consider my paying you something, or lending, until you get paid for your ah hoisting.”

“How much money do you have?” she asked.

“On me?”

“On you and off you.”

“About fifty or sixty million.”

“Gollee.”

“That’s enough to employ you.”

“No, that would throw things off-balance and render my Sirius unserious.”

“Why shouldn’t I pay for my room and board?” he asked her.

“To give one reason if not others, you don’t have a dime. I had to go through your pockets before washing your clothes.”

He laughed then winced and put a hand to his side. “I can get some.”

“When you do, there will be time for a consideration of remuneration. The only thing in your pockets was a slip of paper which said Help! With tiger, fifty feet above. I was wondering about the nature of the tiger you were over and above.”

“It doesn’t matter. Could you do the following things for me in town? Do you have pencil and paper?”

She opened her notebook.

“Go to Western Union, which is at the bus station, and send the following telegram to Dr. Sutter Vaught, 2203 Los Flores, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Send this message: Plans changed. Forget about letter. Read it if you like but tear it up. Don’t act on it. Will write. Barrett. Send it straight message.”

“Straight message,” she repeated, hoping he would explain but he didn’t. Probably he meant send it straight to Albuquerque and not roundabout by way of Chicago. “Is that all?”

“No. Go to Dr. Vance Battle’s office. See him alone. Tell him I want to see him. Tell him where I am, tell him I want to see him today and ask him not to tell anybody or bring anybody with him.”

“Anything else?”

“Go by the library and get a book on hydroponic gardening.”

“Okay.”

“Then go behind the bus station and see if my car is still there. A silver Mercedes 450 SEL. My keys are under the seat. Drive it to the country-club parking lot. Park at the far end, which is nearest to here.”

“Okay.” She swallowed. Very well. Drive a car? His car? Very well. If he asked her to drive the car, she could drive the car. “Okay. Why were you in the cave?”

“What? Oh.” Now he was walking up and down the greenhouse not limping badly, shouldering, hands in pockets. Does he notice how clean and smooth the concrete is? She felt the floor with both hands; it was cool and iron-colored and silky as McWhorter’s driveway. She wished he would notice her concrete, the best-cured concrete in North Carolina. “I go down in caves sometimes,” she said. He told her about the tiger.

“But the tiger wasn’t there.”

“No.”

“Then—?”

“Then what?”

“Then there was more than the tiger?”

“Yes.”

“You were trying to find out something besides the tiger.”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I was asking a question to which I resolved to find a yes-or-no answer.”

“Did you find the answer?”

“Yes.”

“Which was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“So you came back up and out.”

“Yes, I came back up and out.”

“Is that good?”

“Good?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. At least I know what I have to do. Don’t worry.”

“About what?”

“About money. I’ll pay you back.”

“I don’t worry about money. Money worry is not instigating.”

“No, it’s not. You’d better go.”

She enjoyed her errands.

Straight to the bus station, where she found the silver Mercedes. Though she wanted to try the keys and practice starting the car, she decided not to. Someone might see her. She would do her errands, wait until dark, and drive to the country club.

Nobody saw her.

What pleasure, obeying instructions! Then is this what people in the world do? This is called “joining the work force.” It is not a bad way to live. One gets a job. There is a task and a task teller (a person who tells you a task), a set of directions, instructions, perhaps a map, a carrying out of the task, a finishing of the task, a return to the task teller to report success, a thanking. A getting paid. An assignment of another task.

She clapped her hands for joy. What a discovery! To get a job, do it well, which is a pleasure, please the employer, which is also a pleasure, and get paid, which is yet another pleasure. What a happy life employees have! How happy it must make them to do their jobs well and please their employers! That was the secret! All this time she had made a mistake. She had thought (and her mother had expected) that she must do something extraordinary, be somebody extraordinary. Whereas the trick lay in leading the most ordinary life imaginable, get an ordinary job, in itself a joy in its very ordinariness, and then be as extraordinary or ordinary as one pleased. That was the secret.

On to Western Union, which was part of the Greyhound bus station. As she wrote the message she tried not to make sense of it. The telegram cost $7.89. When the clerk read the message, she said to him casually but with authority: “Straight message, please!”

“Right,” said the clerk, not raising his eyes.

Victory! She had made it in the world! Not only could she make herself understood. People even understood what she said when she didn’t.

It was a pleasure spending her money for him. Why? she wondered. Ordinarily she hoarded her pennies, ate dandelion-and-dock salad.

She sat on her bench but in a new way. The buildings and the stores were the same but more accessible. She might have business in them. Le Club was still there, its glass bricks sparkling in the sun. A cardboard sign in the window announced a concert by Le Hug, a rock group. What a pleasure to have a job! Smiling, she hugged herself and rocked in the sun. Imagine getting paid for a task by the task teller! Money wherewith to live! And live a life so, years, decades! So that was the system. Quel system!

A real townie she felt like now, bustling past slack-jawed hippies, moony-eyed tourists, blue-haired lady leafers, antiquers, and quilt collectors.

When she went into a building, the dog stayed on the sidewalk paying no attention to anyone until she came out. He showed his pleasure not by wagging his tail but by burying his heavy anvil head in her stomach until his eyes were covered.

There was no way to see Dr. Battle except to sign a clipboard and wait her turn as a patient. She had to wait two hours. She liked him, though he was too busy and groggy from overwork and thought she was a patient despite her telling him otherwise, sizing her up in a fond dazed rush, not listening, eyes straying over her, coming close (was he smelling her?). His hand absently palpated her shoulder, queried the bones, tested the ball joint for its fit and play. Unlike Dr. Duk he didn’t bother to listen, or rather he listened not to your words but your music. He was like a vet, who doesn’t have to listen to his patients. There were other ways of getting at you. He saw so many patients that it was possible for him to have a hunch about you, a good country hunch, the moment you walked in the door. Better still, it was possible for her to subside and see herself through his eyes, so canny and unheeding, sleepy and quick, were they.

Well then, how did she look to him? Is my shoulder human? He cocked an ear for her music. The fond eyes cast about to place her, then placed her. She was classifiable then. She was a piece of the world after all, a member of a class and recognizable as such. I belong here!

He looked at her boots. “You just off the trail?”

“Well no, though I’ve been walking quite a bit.”

“And you’re feeling a little spacy.”

“A little what?”

“Spaced out.”

“What’s that?”

“Are you on something or coming off something?”

“What?”

He didn’t seem impatient with her dumbness. “Okay,” he said, counting off the questions on his fingers. “Are you taking a drug? Are you taking the pill? Are you coming off the pill? Are you pregnant?”

“No to one and all.” How would he treat her madness? ignore it, palpate her shoulder and tell her to lead her life? Would she?

“Okay, what’s the trouble, little lady?”

“I’m fine. What I was trying to tell you was—”

“You look healthy as a hawg to me.”

“—was to give you a message from—” She wanted to say “from him.” What to call him? Mr. Barrett? Mr. Will? Will Barrett? Bill Barrett? Williston Bibb Barrett? None of the names fit. A name would give him form once and for all. He would flow into its syllables and junctures and there take shape forever. She didn’t want him named.

Sluggishly, like a boat righting itself in a heavy sea, Dr. Battle was coming round to her. He began to listen.

“From who?”

“Your friend Barrett,” she mumbled. The surname was neutral, the way an Englishman speaks of other Englishmen.

“Who? Will Barrett? Will Barrett’s out of town,” he said as if he were answering her questions.

“Yes.”

This time his eyes snapped open, click. “What about Will Barrett?”

“You are to come see him this afternoon when you finish here.”

“What’s the matter with him? Is that rascal sick?”

Rascal. The word had peculiar radiations but mainly fondness.

“No. That is, I think he is all right now. He is scratched up and bruised and his leg is hurt but he can walk. This is in confidence. He doesn’t want anyone to know about this message.” It was a pleasure to talk to another person about him.

“In confidence?” For a second the eye went cold and flashed like a beacon.

“I have not kidnapped him,” she said.

He laughed. “All right. Where is he?”

“He is at my—” My what? “—place.”

“Oh. So.” He cocked his head and regarded her. It was possible for her to go around behind his eyes and see her and Will at her place. “Well, I’ll be dog. How about that? Okay. What’s with Will? Has he got his tail in some kind of crack?”

She frowned and folded her arms. “He went down into Lost Cove cave, got lost, came back up, and fell into my place.”

Though it was true, it sounded odd, even to her.

“Fell?” he said.

“That’s what I said. Fell. Flat fell down into my place.”

“He fell into your place from a cave,” said the doctor.

“That’s right.”

The doctor nodded. “Okay.” Then he shook his head. “He shouldn’t be doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“He doesn’t take care of himself. With his brain lesion he won’t—” His eyes opened. “All right. This is as good a chance as any to throw him down and look at him. Where is your place?”

“You know the old Kemp place?”

“Yes. Near there?”

“There. That’s my place.”

“There is nothing left there.”

“A greenhouse is left.”

“You live in the greenhouse?”

“Yes.”

“Will is staying in your greenhouse?”

“Yes. He fell into the greenhouse from the cave.”

“He fell into your greenhouse. From the cave. Okay.”

It pleased her that Dr. Vance Battle did not seem to find it remarkable that the two of them, who? Will and who? Allie, Will and Allie, should be staying in the greenhouse. Only once did he cock his head and look at her along his cheekbone. Will and Allie? Williston and Allison? Willie and Allie?

“It is a matter in confidence,” she said. In confidence? Of confidence? To be held in confidence? Her rehearsed language had run out. She didn’t know where to put ofs and ins. It was time to leave.

“Right. Tell that rascal I’ll be out this afternoon. We’ll throw him down and have a look at him.”

Right, she repeated to herself as she left. I will tell that rascal.

5

Why does the sun feel so good on my back, she thought as she sat on the bench counting her money.

Why am I spending all my money, she wondered at the A & P as she paid $44.89 for two rib-eye steaks, horse meat for the dog, two folding aluminum chairs with green plastic webbing, and a cold six-pack of beer. What am I celebrating? His leaving? He’s leaving. Is he leaving?

What would she do when her money ran out? Shelter and heat were free, but what about food? She could hoard hickory nuts like a squirrel and perhaps even catch the squirrels and eat them. No, she needed money.

It was necessary to get a job.

“Excuse me,” she said to the fat friendly pretty checkout girl after waiting for the right moment to insert the question, the moment between getting her change and being handed the bag. She had rehearsed the question. “What are job opportunities here or elsewhere?” She had watched the checker and noticed that she was the sort who would as soon answer one question as another.

“I don’t know, hon. I’m losing my job here at Thanksgiving when the season’s over and going back to Georgia and see if I can get my old job at Martin Marietta. Then you know what I’m going to do?”

“No.”

“I’m going to grab my sweet little honey man of a preacher, praise the good Lord every Sunday, and not turn him loose till Christmas. He’s no good but he’s as sweet as he can be.” The other checkers laughed. She noticed that her checker had raised her voice so the others could hear her. Her checker was a card. Yet she saw too that her checker was good-natured. “Why don’t you go back to school, hon?” the checker asked her. “You a school girl, ain’t you?”

“Ah, no, I—” Then that is what people do, get a job, go to church, get a sweet honey man. All those years of dreaming in childhood, of going to school, singing Schubert, developing her talent as her mother used to say, she had not noticed this.

“What can you do hon?” the checker asked her.

“I can do two things,” she said without hesitation. “Sing and hoist.”

“Hoist?”

“With block-and-tackle, differential gears, endless-chain gears, double and triple blocks. I can hoist anything if I have a fixed point and time to figure.”

“Honey, you come on down to Marietta with me. I’ll get you a job. They always need hoisters.”

She saw that the checker meant it. Then there was such a thing as a hoister. Then why not consider it: hoisting great B-52 bomber wings to just the right position to be bolted to the fuselage. (People were friendly!)

“You think it over, hon.”

“I will. Thank you.”

How good life must be once you got the hang of it, she thought, striding along, grocery bag in her arm, folded chairs hooked over her shoulder.

Consulting her list — I have a list! — she went to the library and, sure enough, found a book on hydroponic gardening. List completed!

Though it was not dark, she walked straight to the Mercedes, unlocked the door, pitched groceries and chairs inside, and drove off as easily as a lady leafer headed for the Holiday Inn.

The tape player came on, playing Schubert’s Trout Quintet. Her eyes widened. The sound came from all around her. It was like sitting in the middle of the musicians. The music, the progress of the trout, matched her own happy progress. I’m going along now, I’m going along now, went the happy little chord. It was as if she had never left the world of music and the world of cars, hopping in your own car and tooling off like Schubert’s trout. What a way to live, zipping through old Carolina in a perfect fragrant German car listening to Schubert on perfect Telefunken tape better than Schubert in the flesh. How lovely was the old world she had left! Hm, there must have been something wrong with it, what? Why had she gone nuts?

Because he wasn’t there? No, it wasn’t so simple. She could make it now, with him or without him. But think of life with him there beside her in the Mercedes! Or in her greenhouse. He would remember for her if she forgot. She would hoist him if he fell. Now she knew what she did not want: not being with him. I do not want him not being here.

But what if he left?

She parked the car at the country club and dove into the woods before some official questioned her.

Why was she so happy now? Because like the checker she hoped for a sweet honey man? No. Because she hoped to get married? No. Married. The word made her think of the married leafers up here, mooning around, fed up with the red leaves and each other. What if they married? Married. The word was a flattening out, a lightening, and a rolling up. Rolled up tight in a light-colored rug. And a winding up and a polishing off. In short, stuck like her mother and father. On the other hand, the thought of marrying him made her grin and skip like a schoolgirl. Marrying. What an odd expression. Marrying. Is it merry to marry or marred? What if we marry? What if we marry? — she sang to the music of Schubert’s Trout. She’d not forget these words. Other marriages might get screwed up but not theirs. Hm. Look at these old couples gazing at the lovely scarlet Smokies with the same glum expression. She? She could look at a doodlebug with him and be happy. With him, silence didn’t sprout and looks didn’t dart. What happened after you got married? Do you look at each other and say: Well, here we are, me and you, what’ll we do, tea for two? Then was she happy because she was going to surprise him with a steak dinner? Not exactly. Then was she happy because it is a pleasure to carry out a task assigned by a task assigner? Yes, in a way. She looked forward to reporting to him everything she had done. While the doctor examined him, she could cook the steaks, put the beer under the waterfall to keep cold, fix avocado salad with Plagniol (goodbye dandelion-and-dock), unfold the chairs, upend two big pots for tables, open the mica door of the firebox to see the wood fire. What about wild shallots with the avocados? Should she invite the doctor for supper? No.

She was planning her supper like any other housewife.

6

But he was gone. The potting room was empty. Leaning over, she felt for him in all parts of the sleeping bag as if he might have shrunk. Her stomach hurt where the rail of the bunk hit her. When she straightened up, she felt dizzy and nauseated. How could his not being there make her sick?

Yet even as she searched, uncovering pots, looking behind creeper, she could feel her eyes narrow, her lips begin to curl as her searching self turned round and went down into her Sirius self until she stood now, arms folded, in the corner next to the stove from where she could see all of the potting room and through the door into the greenhouse. She eyed the vent in the eave where the cave air entered and blew across the room and through the space above the partition. Not much warm air came down. The room was cold.

The room had the look of his not coming back.

She shrugged. Very well, then. She drummed her fingers on her thigh. Why did the room suddenly feel cold? The warm air blowing in from the cave needed to come down. There must have been a system of ducts here earlier, probably of wood which had rotted. It would be possible to make new ducts out of — there were piles of cardboard boxes behind the A & P, many of the same size perhaps for standard-size cans like Campbell’s soup. One could cut out the ends and connect them. The only expense would be paper tape and wire to suspend them from the ceiling. It would be an interesting problem to make branches in the duct system, cut boxes at the proper angle to deflect air to the proper places. How to transport the boxes? Flatten them out, load them on the creeper, and drag them from town?

She was nodding and chewing her lip when she caught sight of the steaks on the stove, still wrapped in white butcher paper. Wet pink spots stained the paper. What to do with them? All at once her mouth spurted with juices. Eat them. She couldn’t remember the last time she ate red meat.

Feeling sick about him is all right, but not all night.

After starting a fire of fat pine in the Grand Crown, she went with her Clorox bottle to the waterfall, drumming her fingers to the running chords of the Trout. It was almost dark—

— and there he was in the path as if he had just fallen down and was trying to get up, hand propped under him in the very act of pushing himself up, but he didn’t. He couldn’t get up. When she knelt beside him (her stomach was hurting again), his one-eyed profile gazed not at her but at the wet cold earth inches away. The eye bulged in the terrific concentration of pushing the earth away. He didn’t move. The eye didn’t blink. Was he dead? Not knowing that she did so, she both lay on him and pulled him up, hands locked around his waist, then stopped still to see if he lived, because he was so cold, lying on him long enough to feel the onset of the rigor, which started like an earthquake tremor then shook him till his teeth rattled.

Then what will love be in the future, she wondered, lying on him cheek pressed against his, a dancing with him in the Carolina moonlight with the old world and time before you, or a cleaving to him at the world’s end, and which is better?

“Don’t worry. I’ll get you back.”

Straddling him and trying his pelvis for heft, she looked around, gauging trees and limbs for hoist points. But he could move, enough so that by rolling him and getting herself almost under him with his arm around her neck, he could help her push them up and, leaning heavily on her, walk. Staggering though she was, her eye for angles was good enough to bend at the right moment and lever him onto the bunk without hurting him. He shook like a leaf. There was nothing for her to do now but, spent, gasping, trembling, use her last strength and climb over him, cover them with the sleeping bag and hold him until she got stronger and he stopped shivering. Somehow she, they, got them undressed, his wet clothes her dry clothes off, her warm body curled around his lard-cold muscle straps and bones, spoon-nesting him, her knees coming up behind him until he was shivering less and, signaling a turn, he nested her, encircled her as if he were her cold dead planet and she his sun’s warmth.

It was dark. There was no firelight from the stove. Flexed and enfolded she lay still, waiting for him to get warm, blinking in the dark but not thinking. Her arm went to sleep. She began to worry, about the doctor, that he might not come or that he might and find them so and that the stove fire of fat pine might go out.

Presently he stopped shivering and went slack around her. “Ah,” he said quite himself. “You undressed me again.”

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m getting up to fix the fire. The doctor is coming.”

“He came.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. He said my leg wasn’t bad, didn’t need a cast. He smelled me, looked in my eye, shook his head, and told me to come in tomorrow for a checkup.”

“Is there something wrong with you?”

“No.”

“Then what were you doing out there on the ground?”

“I went out to get some water and fell down.”

“Why didn’t you get up?”

He was silent.

“I mean either I am not understanding something or something is not understandable.”

“I blacked out.”

“Is there something serious wrong with you?”

“No. Except I tend to fall down.”

“I am a good hoister.”

“I know.”

“When you fall down, I’ll pick you up.”

“I know.”

“I have to fix the fire.”

She got up naked but not shivering. The pine had gone out, but it was so fat, a new fire could be started with a match. Atop the blazing kindling she laid two short green maple logs and a heavy hunk of chestnut to press them down. She left the door to the firebox open. When she started to climb over him, she discovered that he had moved to make room. As she turned to nest again, he held her shoulder and she came down facing him. But he was bent a little away from her. She bent too. They seemed to be looking at each other through their eyebrows. The wind picked up and pressed against the greenhouse. The metal frame creaked. There was a fine sifting against the glass. At first she thought it was blown pine needles. The sound grew heavier. It was sleet.

Winter had come.

His hand was in the hollow of her back, pressing her against him. She came against him, willingly. It was a marvel to her this yielding and flowing against him, amazing that I was made so and is this it then (whatever it is) and what will happen to myself (do I altogether like the yielding despite myself and the smiling at it like smiling when your knee jerks when Dr. Duk hits it with his rubber hammer) and will I for the first time in my life get away from my everlasting self sick of itself to be with another self and is that what it is and if not then what? He kissed her on the lips. Ah then it is that too after all, the dancing adream in the Carolina moonlight except that it was sleeting and it was firelight not moonlight on the glass.

“Oh my,” she said. “Imagine.”

“Imagine what?”

“Imagine having you around at four o’clock in the afternoon.”

He laughed. “What’s wrong with night? What’s wrong with now?”

“Nothing. But—”

She was moving against him, enclosing him, wrapping her arms and legs around him, as if her body had at last found the center of itself outside itself. But he stopped her or rather took her face in his hands and looked she thought at her, the firelight making his eye sockets deeper and darker than they were.

“There is something I must tell you.”

“Yes, but—” she said.

“Yes, but what?”

Yes, but not now. Yes, but why did you stop? Keep on.

“What?” he asked her.

“I said why did you stop. I mean I meant to say ‘it.’ Why did you stop? I think this is ‘it.’”

“I have to leave,” he said.

“When?”

“Now.”

“Is the leaving—”

“I’ll be back.”

“When?”

“Soon. There are some things I must do.”

“What about this? It? That is, us.”

“What about us?”

“Is there anything entailed?”

“Is anything entailed between us?”

“Yes.”

“What is the entailment?”

He lay back, his hand behind his head. The wind shifted to the south. The sleet turned to rain. Some of the drops on the glass beyond his head didn’t run. In the big drops the open firebox was reflected in a bright curved stripe like a cat’s eye. With his hand behind his head, his shoulders and chest bare, the firelight showing the line of his cheek and the notch of his eye, with my hair falling across my arm and touching his arm, we are like lovers in the movies. Men never wear pajamas in the movies. So Sarge didn’t wear pajamas. My father always wore pajamas.

“There is something you need to know,” he said.

Yeah, she thought, there is something I needed to know and I think I know. What I need to know and think I know is, is loving you the secret, the be-all not end-all but starting point of my very life, or is it just one of the things creatures do like eating and drinking and therefore nothing special and therefore nothing to dream about? Is loving a filling of the four o’clock gap or is it more? Either way would be okay but I need to know and think I know. It might be the secret because a minute ago when you held me and I came against you, there were signs of coming close, to it, for the first time, like the signs you recognize when you are getting near the ocean for the first time. Even though you’ve never seen the ocean before, you recognize it, the sense of an opening out ahead and a putting behind of the old rickrack bird-chirp town and countryside, something tasting new in the air, the dirt getting sandier, even the shacks and weeds looking different, and something else, a quality of sound, a penultimate hush marking the beginning of the end of land and the beginning of the old uproar and the going away of the endless sea.

Then why had he stopped and would she ever know the secret or if there was a secret?

“This is like running around at the Dunes Exxon a mile from the beach and going back to town,” she said.

“What’s that?” he asked quickly. He looked at her. “You mean the ocean, getting near the ocean.”

“How did you know that?”

“Perhaps that is what I want,” he said absently.

“The ocean?”

“Something like that. Now may I tell you something?”

“Okay.”

He turned to face her. Her cheek was on his arm.

“How are you?” he asked her.

“I’m all right now.”

“But not before?”

“I’m all right because you are doing the instigating and you seem to know what you are doing. I was a good dancer.”

“So if I do the instigating you’ll do the cooperating?” he asked.

“Ha ha. Very funny.”

“Very well. I am going to tell you what has happened concerning you because you are entitled to know. I’m also going to tell you what I have learned because, for one reason, you may be the only person who would understand it.”

“All right.”

“First, your mother and I are old friends. That is, I used to know her a long time ago.”

“You and my mother?”

“Yes.”

“How about that?” she said in her mother’s voice, using an expression her mother liked to use. “Did you and she—?”

“Hardly.”

“Does hardly mean yes or no?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Could you be my father?”

“Hardly.”

“Remind me to look up hardly.”

“Okay.”

“How do you know you’re not my father?”

“If I were, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Then why is it I seem to have known you before I knew you. We are different but also the same.”

“I know. I don’t know.”

“Then why does it seem I am not only I but also you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could I have known you in another life? Kelso believes in that.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then why is it that I live this life as if it were a dream and as if any minute I might wake up and find myself in my real life?”

“I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t that mean that I had a real life once and that I might have again?”

“I don’t know. Could I tell you what I want to tell you?”

“All right.” He thought: She says all right the same odd non-signifying way as Jane Ace in Easy Aces.

“Because your mother and I are old friends, among other reasons, she has asked me if I will be your legal guardian — God, I hate this beard, I meant to ask you to buy me a razor.”

“I bought one.”

“You did? Why?”

“It pleases me to please you. It is also joyful.”

“I see. Your mother does not know that you are here and she doesn’t know that I know you.”

“Legal guardian. What is there to guard?”

“Your real and personal property.”

“My property. I own fifty-eight dollars and fifty-three cents.”

“Your real estate. This property and the island you inherited. They are quite valuable. Your parents believe it is in your interest to be declared legally incompetent and for me to be appointed your guardian since the court will not appoint them.”

“What do you believe?”

“In my opinion you are not incompetent in the legal sense or the medical sense. I think you are quite capable of taking care of your own affairs.”

“Aren’t you a lawyer?”

“Yes.”

“What is your preference in this matter?”

“I’d as soon not be your guardian, though I’d be glad to help you any way I can. However, if your parents can get your doctor to go along they can probably succeed in having the court declare you legally incompetent. In that case, you might be better off having me as your guardian than, say, your aunt.”

“Oh my stars yes,” she said, using Aunt Grace’s expression. “Tell me this please.”

“All right.”

“Are my parents out to screw me?”

“What an expression.”

“That’s Kelso’s.” I can talk like anybody but me, she thought. “Her parents never came to see her. Mine came twice — until Miss Sally died. Kelso said my parents are out to screw me.”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“How would you put it?”

“That your parents are not out to screw you. Perhaps they are trying to help you. They have a right to be concerned. And they can be a big help to you. Anyhow, you think about it and tell me later.”

“All right.”

“There is something else I want to tell you. About me.”

“All right.”

“It’s what I learned in the cave and what I am going to do.”

But he fell silent and turned away to watch the raindrops.

“What did you learn?”

He turned back. Their foreheads touched. Their bodies made a diamond. “As you can see, I don’t know much. You are always asking questions to which I have no answers. By the way, did you always ask so many questions?”

When he began to talk she found that she could not hear his words for listening to the way he said them. She cast about for his drift. Was he saying the words for the words themselves, for what they meant, or for what they could do to her? There was something about the way he talked that reminded her of her own rehearsed sentences. Was she a jury he was addressing? Though he hardly touched her, his words seemed to flow across all parts of her body. Were they meant to? A pleasure she had never known before bloomed deep in her body. Was this a way of making love?

He was using words like “my shameful secret of success as a lawyer,” “phony,” “radar,” “our new language,” “this gift of yours and mine,” “ours” (this was her favorite), “being above things,” “not being able to get back down to things” (!), “how to reenter the world” (?), “by God?” “by her?” (!!!!!), “your forgetting and my remembering,” “Sutter,” “Sutter was right,” “Sutter was wrong,” “Sutter Vaught.”

“My Uncle Sutter? I remember him.”

“You do?”

“What about him?”

“Nothing much.”

“Did you know him?”

“Yes.”

“Was he crazy and no good like they said?”

“No. What happened to your sister Val?”

“She became a nun.”

“I know that. Is she still a nun?”

“Yes. The last I heard, which was two or five years ago.”

“Two or five. I see. Where is she, still in South Alabama?”

“No, she’s not there.”

“Where is she?” He was watching her closely.

“She’s teaching at a parochial school at Pass Christian on the Gulf Coast. The school is run by the Little Eucharistic Sisters of St. Dominic.”

He was silent for a long time. He seemed to be watching the rain. He put his hand in the small of her back. Oh my, she thought. Lightning flickered. At last he smiled in the lightning.

“What?” she said.

“You remembered it,” he said.

“What?”

“That outrageous name. The Little Sisters of what?”

“The Little Eucharistic Sisters of St. Dominic.” She clapped her hands. “I did. I remember all about Val. She came to see me when I first got sick. In her old black nun clothes. She put her hands on my head and told me I was going to be fine.”

“She was right.”

“Maybe. No, not maybe. I’m fine. You feel so good. Me too. The good is all over me, starting with my back. Now I understand how the two work together.”

“What two?”

“The it and the doing, the noun and the verb, sweet sweet love and a putting it to you, loving and hating, you and I.”

He laughed. “You do, don’t you? What happens to the two?”

“They become one but not in the sappy way of the saying?”

“What way, then?”

“One plus one equals one and oh boy almond joy.”

He was laughing. “You’re Sutter turned happy.”

“I want you to be my guardian,” she said. Even though he was not touching her, his words were a kind of touching. Did he intend them so? When he didn’t answer, she went back over his words for the sense of them. “Will you be my guardian?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you go down in the cave?” Now his hand was in the small of her back again, with a light firm pressure as if they were dancing.

“What?” he said, knitting his brows as if he were trying to remember something.

“I do that,” she said, “I go round and down to get down to myself.”

“I went down and around to get out of myself.”

“Did you?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember. Curious. Now that your memory is better, mine is. . Anyhow, that’s over and done with. The future is what concerns us.”

“You seem different. Before, when you climbed through the fence and I saw you, you were standing still a long time as if you were listening. Now you seem to know what to do. Was it the cave?”

“The cave,” he said. She could hardly hear him over the rising din of the storm. Lightning forked directly overhead and a sharp crack came hard upon it. The dog, discomfited and frowning, got up and walked around stiff-legged. It was an electrical storm. Soon the lightning was almost continuous, ripping and cracking in the woods around them. Facets of glass flashed blue and white. It was like living inside a diamond. He seemed not to notice her or the storm. His eyes were open and unblinking. The hand behind his head was open, the middle finger touched her shoulder, which she bent close to him, still warming him, now a touch, now a jab, but he could have been poking his own knee. The finger moved as if it were conducting music she couldn’t hear. Nor could she hear what he said in the racket. He was talking in a low voice. She strained against him. Was he talking to her?

“The fence. . the cave. .” His voice seemed to be inside her head.

The finger stopped touching and the hand opened wide, palm up, like a man shrugging. The lightning was getting louder and she was thinking, is it good or bad that the greenhouse has a metal frame? Perhaps good what with the finials sticking up like lightning rods when crackOW it hit. A ball of light rolled toward them down the center aisle of the greenhouse as lazily as a ball of yarn. The dog, lip hung on his tooth, eyed it in outrage and walked stiffly away. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “Let’s—” And hushed because he wasn’t listening.

He held her close. Again as her body came against him, she felt her eyes smiling and going away. Ha, she said to herself, maybe he didn’t find what he was looking for but I did. Ha. Maybe I ‘m nuts and he’s not but I know now what I want. Ha. Kelso, guess what. I did it like you said. I broke out and found my place and “fell in love” and inherited a million dollars. Maybe sixty million, and I don’t care if it’s sixty cents. Guess what. I am in love. Ah ha, so this is what it is, this “being in love.” This is what I want. This him. Him. The money is nice but love is above. Yes yes. Kelso honey, I’m coming back for you. You are going to help me raise hydroponic beans.

Lightning struck again. The glass house glittered like a diamond trapping light. Jesus, she thought, doesn’t he know we could get killed? But he was humming a tune — the Trout? — and keeping time with his finger on her shoulder.

The lightning was going away. “What’s going to happen now?” she asked him.

“Now? I’m going home now.”

“What are you going to do, then?”

“What is expected of me. Take care of people who need taking care of. I have to see how my daughter is. I have an obligation to her. I have not been a good father. Then we’ll see.

“Am I one of those people you’re going to take care of?”

“Yes.” He sat up. “I’m hungry.”

“Me too.” Juices spurted in her mouth. “I bought some steaks.”

He didn’t seem surprised. She put her marine jacket on. He lay quietly, watching her while she cooked. She didn’t mind feeling his eyes on her back and her bare legs. She went outside, to get the beer. It didn’t matter that it was cold and raining and she was barefoot.

The steaks were good. But he ate absently, as if they were in a restaurant and the steaks were no more or less than he expected. The rain stopped. It was still dark when he left. She didn’t know what time it was.

She could not have said how long she stood in the doorway thinking of nothing, listening to the dripping rhododendrons, which were like large brooding presences stooping toward her — when he came back.

He was different. They stood, the candle between them. She didn’t want to look at him.

“I forgot to tell you something. I will be your legal guardian if that is what you and your parents want. That will involve a fiduciary relationship which I will discharge faithfully, in your interest and to the best of my ability.”

“Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Is it enough for you?”

“Me?”

“Why do you sound so tired?”

“Me? It is not an interesting subject. At least not to me. The subject is closed, if not disclosed,” he said, smiling.

“Ha.”

“Thank you for taking care of me.” He held out his hand. She did not take it. She hung her head like a mountain girl.

She did not seem to notice his leaving and stood thinking of nothing until it occurred to her that the dog hadn’t been fed. It was pleasant to think of the dog’s pleasure as she gathered up the steak scraps.

II

THE RAIN HAD STOPPED but it was still dark when he reached the Mercedes. He did not realize he was cold until he tried to unlock the door. His hand began to shake. Then, as if it had been given permission, his whole body began to shake. He opened the door. The courtesy lights came on. He looked at his watch. It was four o’clock. After he got under the wheel and closed the door, he waited for the lights to go out. The courtesy lights stayed on long enough to allow the driver to insert his key in the ignition. While the light was on, he was aware of a slight compulsion to do what the German light expected him to do, start the engine. The Mercedes was waiting for him.

But he did not start the engine. He sat shaking and smelling the car. It smelled of leather and wax and car newness. The shaking came in waves but he paid no attention. Three hundred yards away a naked yellow light bulb shone in the gable of a shed where electric carts were stored, each parked in its stall, plugged in and recharging. The shed hummed. A stray cart had been abandoned in the woods. Its roof supports were tilted at an angle but an empty Coke bottle hung vertically in its gimbel. The shaking stopped. Suddenly he became sleepy. It is possible, he thought, to drive home now, go straight up to the bedroom from the garage, sleep until eight, bathe, shave, dress, and appear for breakfast as usual in the sun parlor. In good weather the morning sun flashed on the polished silver and the soft white napery. Yamaiuchi’s hand came twirling down with a melon, orange juice, shirred egg.

On the other hand, he was sleepy, as sleepy as he had ever been in his life. Sleep came down around his ears like an iron hat.

Now sitting on the back seat, he felt for Marion’s lap robe. It was thick, gray, heavy as a rug, smooth on one side and curly with lamb’s wool on the other. It was the “cheap” lap robe, he remembered, which Marion had chosen rather than use the fur robe from the Rolls. Something winked in the feeble yellow light. It was the miniature bar fitted into the back of the front seat. She had given him the “little” Mercedes for their own outings. As she saw it, and as it pleased him to see her seeing it, in the Mercedes they were more or less like other Carolina couples in their Plymouths and Fords, which for a fact did look more and more like a Mercedes. No Rolls, no chauffeur, no fuss. Zip they went up the Blue Ridge Parkway, down to town for shopping, into Asheville to see her attorneys, over to Charlotte, Chapel Hill, and Durham for football and basketball games. What a pleasure for her and him, as much a pleasure for him to show her how the pleasure could be taken as to take it for himself, to set out on a fine football Saturday morning, meet the McKeons and Battles for a picnic at an interstate rest area, swing Marion into her wheelchair, tuck her legs in with the “cheap” lap robe, stand around drinks in hand, hampers open on tailgates, and with that festive fondness and the special dispensation conferred by the kickoff two hours away — and the extra pleasure too of the very publicness of the place, their own sector of clean public concrete staked out amidst the sleeping eighteen-wheelers and Florida-bound Airstreams, we taking pleasure from them, we on our way to the game, they coming and going in the old unheeding public world — tend the tiny bar, pour whiskey into gold-lined silver jiggers, and finally simply stand in the wine-colored Carolina sunlight sleepy and smiling and look at the colors of the leaves and of the bourbon whiskey against gold.

Now sitting in the back seat in the dark, he switched on the light and opened the bar and lifted the silver flask. It was full. He poured a drink and set it on the rectangle of polished walnut. His hand began to shake again.

There he sat in the same Mercedes, a 450 SEL 6.9-liter sedan, a badly flawed frazzled shaky American, as hollow-eyed as a Dachau survivor, still smelling of cave crud, in a perfect German machine redolent of leather, polished wood, and fine oil on steel.

The bar light was still on. By moving over to the right corner, he could see himself in the rearview mirror. How do I look in the face? Like General J. E. B. Stuart, whose last words were: How do I look in the face? Except for the beard, not different from the way I always looked, the same veiled eyes as dark and uncandid as Andrea del Sarto, the same curve of lip, the same sly uptilt of head showing nostril.

So he had looked thirteen years old when he had driven West with his father in a new Buick convertible. It took a week. It was the summer after the “hunting accident,” as it became known. His father wanted them to be pals. But there was nothing to talk about. He didn’t want to be anybody’s pal. His father put the top down and drove faster and faster. The hot desert air roared in their ears. All day every day they drove in silence watching the center stripe on Texas highways and out old U.S. 66 for a thousand miles, two thousand miles, in silence while the boy watched girls in lonesome towns like Kingman and Barstow and squeezed his legs tight for the good feeling and speculated in amazement and hope that it would come to pass that there was a connection between girls and the good feeling. What wonders the future held in store! In silence they watched the bats fly out of Carlsbad Caverns at dusk and in silence rode the mules down into the Grand Canyon from Bright Angel Lodge. While the father drove ten, twelve hours a day, he slept on the back seat and between times sat up and gazed at the girls in Holbrook and Winslow and in the desert gazed at himself in the mirror. What a sly handsome lad you are. What the world must hold in store for you. What? Anything you want. Girls, money, God, fame, whatever you want. On they drove, faster and faster, roaring at ninety miles an hour through Needles, Arizona, where the heat lay puddled like mercury on the pavement. For a week he slept and gazed. His bowels did not move. In Los Angeles they did not see Chester Morris wearing a straw hat and driving down Hollywood Boulevard in a Packard convertible. Ross Alexander was dead. Groucho Marx was alive. Back East they roared in silence, the hot air singing in their ears, the man’s gaze fixed on the highway, the boy’s on girls or the face in the mirror then as now betrayed and victorious and sly. Even the man knew now they couldn’t be pals.

Well then, does anything really change in a lifetime, he asked the sly sidelong-looking Andrea del Sarto in the Mercedes mirror? No, you are the same person with whom I struck the pact roaring out old U.S. 66 through the lonesome towns and the empty desert. You don’t ever really learn anything you didn’t know when you were thirteen.

And what was that?

All I knew for sure then and now was that after what happened to me nothing could ever defeat me, no matter what else happened in this bloody century. If you didn’t defeat me, old mole, loving father and death-dealer, nothing can, not wars, not this century, not the Germans. We beat the Germans, nutty as we are, and now drive perfect German cars, we somewhat frazzled it is true, and shaky, but victorious nevertheless.

Ah, but what if the death is not in the century but in your own genes, that you of all men are a child of the century because you are as death-bound by your own hand as the century is and you of all men should be most at home now, as bred for death as surely as a pointer bitch to point, that death your own death is what you really love and won’t be happy till you have, what then?

Then we’ll know, won’t we?

Grinning and shivering on the back seat thirty years later, teeth clacking, this raddled middle-aged American sat in his German car in the mountains of North Carolina hugging himself and making shoulder movements like a man giving body English to a pinball machine except that he was thinking about J. E. B. Stuart and Baron von Richthofen and World War II and fighting the Germans, which he had not done. Instead, he took two quick drinks from the gold-lined silver jigger and waited until the warmth bloomed under his ribs and the shaking stopped.

Something occurred to him. Excitedly he jumped out of the car and, paying no attention to the cold drizzle which had started up again, paced back and forth beside the silver Mercedes, smacking his arms around his body and now and then kicking the Michelin radials. If the girl in the greenhouse a few hundred yards away could have seen him, she would have shaken her head. Though it was she who had been the mental patient and he the solidest citizen of the community, early retiree, philanthropist, president of United Way, six-handicap golfer, surely it was he not she who was deranged now, who, after holing up in a cave for two weeks, now paced up and down the parking lot of the Linwood Country Club in the predawn darkness, kicking a German car, while sane folk snored in their beds. Now he snapped his fingers and nodded to himself, for all the world like a man who has hit upon the solution to a problem which had vexed him for years.

Ha, there is a secret after all, he said. But to know the secret answer, you must first know the secret question. The question is, who is the enemy?

Not to know the name of the enemy is already to have been killed by him.

Ha, he said, dancing, snapping his fingers and laughing and hooting ha hoo hee, jumping up and down and socking himself, but I do know. I know. I know the name of the enemy.

The name of the enemy is death, he said, grinning and shoving his hands in his pockets. Not the death of dying but the living death.

The name of this century is the Century of the Love of Death. Death in this century is not the death people die but the death people live. Men love death because real death is better than the living death. That’s why men like wars, of course. Bad as wars are and maybe because they are so bad, thinking of peace during war is better than peace. War is what makes peace desirable. But peace without war is intolerable. Why do men settle so easily for lives which are living deaths? Men either kill each other in war, or in peace walk as docilely into living death as sheep into a slaughterhouse.

Why do men walk like sheep straight into the slaughterhouse? Why are people content to stand helpless while their lifeblood is drained away?

Men in this century are no different from the Jews at Buchenwald who did not give themselves leave to resist death.

I know your name at last, he said, laughing and hooting hee hee hooooee like a pig-caller and kicking the tires, and you are not going to prevail over me.

Old father of lies, that’s what you are, the devil himself, for only the devil could have thought up all the deceits and guises under which death masquerades. But I know all your names.

Here are the names of death, which shall not prevail over me because I know the names.

Death in the guise of love shall not prevail over me. You, old father old mole, loved me but loved death better and in the name of love sought death for both of us. You only kissed me once and it was the kiss of death. True, death is a way out of a life-which-is-a-living-death. War and shooting is better than such a peace. But what if there is life?

Everybody has given up. Everybody thinks that there are only two things: war which is a kind of life in death, and peace which is a kind of death in life. But what if there should be a third thing, life?

Death in the guise of Christianity is not going to prevail over me. If Christ brought life, why do the churches smell of death?

Death in the guise of old Christendom in Carolina is not going to prevail over me. The old churches are houses of death.

Death in the form of the new Christendom in Carolina is not going to prevail over me. If the born-again are the twice born, I’m holding out for a third go-round.

Death in the guise of God and America and the happy life of home and family and friends is not going to prevail over me. America is in fact almost as dead as Europe. It might still be possible to live in America, said the nutty American dancing in place in old Carolina.

Death in the guise of belief is not going to prevail over me, for believers now believe anything and everything and do not love the truth, are in fact in despair of the truth, and that is death.

Death in the guise of unbelief is not going to prevail over me, for unbelievers believe nothing, not because truth does not exist but because they have already chosen not to believe, and would not believe, cannot believe, even if the living truth stood before them, and that is death.

Death in the guise of the new life in California is not going to prevail over me. Marin County and the Cupps are not going to prevail over me. But what if the Cupps and Marin County should prevail? Then the Germans and my father are right and war is better than peace, true death better than the living death. But it will not prevail over me because I know the names of death.

Death in the form of isms and asms shall not prevail over me, orgasm, enthusiasm, liberalism, conservatism, Communism, Buddhism, Americanism, for an ism is only another way of despairing of the truth.

Death in the guise of marriage and family and children is not going to prevail over me. What happened to marriage and family that it should have become a travail and a sadness, marriage till death do us part yes but long dead before the parting, home and fireside and kiddies such a travail and a deadliness as to make a man run out into the night with his hands over his head? Show me that Norman Rockwell picture of the American family at Thanksgiving dinner and I’ll show you the first faint outline of the death’s-head.

God may be good, family and marriage and children and home may be good, grandma and grandpa may act wise, the Thanksgiving table may be groaning with God’s goodness and bounty, all the folks healthy and happy, but something is missing. What is this sadness here? Why do the folks put up with it? The truth seeker does not. Instead of joining hands with the folks and bowing his head in prayer, the truth seeker sits in an empty chair as invisible as Banquo’s ghost, yelling at the top of his voice: Where is it? What is missing? Where did it go? I won’t have it! I won’t have it! Why this sadness here? Don’t stand for it! Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you’ve found the thief who is robbing you. But at least protest. Stop, thief. What is missing? God? Find him!

Ross Alexander left his happy home in Beverly Hills, saying: I’m going outside and shoot a duck.

You gave in to death, old mole, but I will not have it so. It is a matter of knowing and choosing. To know the many names of death is also to know there is life. I choose life. Hee hoo hee heee hooeee. He was shivering and dancing in place, hands in pockets like an Irishman doing a jig. Is it possible that a man in the last half of his life can actually learn something he didn’t know before? Yes! Ha hee hooee.

Death in the form of death genes shall not prevail over me, for death genes are one thing but it is something else to name the death genes and know them and stand over against them and dare them. I am different from my death genes and therefore not subject to them. My father had the same death genes but he feared them and did not name them and thought he could roar out old Route 66 and stay ahead of them or grab me and be pals or play Brahms and keep them, the death genes, happy, so he fell prey to them.

Death in none of its guises shall prevail over me, because I know all the names of death.

Having pronounced this peculiar litany, he hopped into the car, lay down on the back seat, covered himself with the lap robe, stuck his nose in a fragrant crease of leather, and went to sleep.

This is what is going to happen.

In the very moment of sinking into a deep sleep he had, not a dream or a flight of fancy, but a swift sure unsurprised presentiment of what lay in store.

Thirty years earlier the child knew that something was going to happen, and that the something was all he ever wanted or needed to know, and that it only remained for him to wait for it to happen and to settle for nothing less until it did.

What was the something? Women? War? Or victory in life? Death?

Thirty years passed. He had women, war, and victory in life.

But nothing changed. Thirty years later he knew no more than he knew in Dalhart, Texas, squeezing his legs together and looking at girls.

Yes, but you have just discovered again what you knew all along, that something is going to happen.

This is what is going to happen. All at once he knew what had happened and what was going to happen.

He found himself in a certain place. It was a desert place. Weeds grew in the sand. Vines sprouted in the rocks. The place was a real place. Its exact location could be determined within inches by map coordinates, ninety-one degrees so many minutes so many seconds longitude west, thirty-three degrees so many minutes so many seconds latitude north. He had been there forty years earlier. Then the place had not been deserted. It was a spot near a stream which ran through a meadow. The spot was in a springhouse on the stream where crocks of milk and sweet butter used to be stored. D’Lo still liked to keep her own buttermilk there because it was not far from her house, which had no refrigerator, and she could pick it up on the way home. She found him there in the cool darkness watching reflections of light play against the damp masonry. Boy, what you are doing down here? I been looking all over for you, it’s your dinnertime. (He didn’t answer.) Now you come on up and eat with D’Lo. (He didn’t answer.) Don’t you remember how you always used to sit with D’Lo in the kitchen while they ate in the dining room? And when you had your spells, you’d come running in the kitchen and jump up in my lap and put your head right here? Sometimes I’d hold you all day. (No, I don’t remember.) You come on here, boy, and let D’Lo hug you. You po little old white boy. (She hugged him but he didn’t feel anything except that he was being hugged by a big black woman. What’s this about big black loving mammies?) You poor little old boy, you all alone in the world. Your mama dead, your daddy dead, and ain’t nobody left in the house but you and me. (That’s not bad. He thought of the novelty of walking home from school in the afternoons to the big house empty except for D’Lo shuffling around in her flattened-out mules. Strange! But not bad.) Sweet Jesus, what we gon do? (One thing we gon do, D’Lo, is you gon turn me loose.) He stiffened. She was angry. He knew she would be. He already knew enough about people to know what displeased them. He knew how to please people, even black people. He was everybody’s nigger. He was even the niggers’ nigger. (Her lower lip ran out. There came across her face the new peevish black-vs.-white expression — for a second he saw that she wasn’t sure he hadn’t stiffened because of the new white-vs.-black business. She let go.) You poor little old boy, you don’t know nothing. You don’t even know what you need to know. You don’t even know enough to know what you ain’t got. (She wasn’t angry now. He knew she wouldn’t be.) But don’t you worry, honey. You all alone in the world and you gon be alone a long time but the good Lawd got something special in mind for you. (He has?) Sho he has. (How do you know that?) Because he got the whole world in his hand, even a mean little old boy like you. (How do you know that?) Because, bless God, I know. You laughing at me, boy? (No, D’Lo.) You full of devilment but you messing with the wrong one this time. Now you get on up to the kitchen and we gon have us some pork chops and butter beans and then we gon set down on the back porch and listen to the radio. (Well, it beats sitting on the front porch and listening to Brahms.) What you say, boy? (Nothing.)

Then the spot became part of a country club, the exact patch of grass in the concavity of a kidney-shaped bunker on number-six fairway. For twenty years winter and summer thousands of golf balls, cart tires, spiked shoes crossed the spot.

After twenty years the country club became a subdivision. The spot was the corner of a lot where a ranch-style house was built for a dentist named Sam Gold. Weeds grew in the fence corner where not even the Yazoo Master mower could reach and covered an iron horseshoe for ten years. Though Sam Gold was a Jew, places meant nothing to him. One place, even Jerusalem, was like any other place. Why did he, Will Barrett, who was not a Jew, miss the Jerusalem he had never had and which meant nothing to Sam Gold, who was a Jew?

After twenty-five years the subdivision became a shopping center, with a paved parking lot of forty acres. The spot was now located in the mall between the Orange Julius stand and the entrances to H&R Block. The mall was crowded with shoppers for twenty years.

Now it was deserted. When he came to years from now, he was lying on the spot. The skylight of the mall was broken. The terrazzo was cracked. Grass sprouted. Somewhere close, water ran. Old tax forms blew out of H&R Block. A raccoon lived in the Orange Julius stand. No one was there. Yet something moved and someone spoke. Maybe it was D’Lo. No. Was it Allie? No, nobody. No, somebody was there all right. Someone spoke: Very well, since you’ve insisted on it, here it is, the green-stick Rosebud gold-bug matador, the great distinguished thing.

The ocean was not far away.

As he turned to see who said it and who it was, there was a flash of light then darkness then light again.

III

SUNLIGHT SHONE IN his eyes, then someone came between, then sunlight shone in his eyes again.

“Could it be? It is. Is that you, Will?”

“Yes,” he said, instantly awake, a thousand miles from his dreams, as unsurprised as if he were back in his office again. “Who—?” Holding a hand against the sun, he tried to make out the dark eclipsed face inside its bright corona of hair. What he recognized was the Alabama quirky-lilting voice and the way the round bare shoulder hitched up a little. “Kitty.” He sat up.

“You stood me up, you dog. You no good scoun’l beast. Look at you. You’re a mess! Happy birthday yesterday.”

“What? Oh.”

“We had a date in your summerhouse. Don’t you remember?”

He smiled. “What day was that?” What year was that? It pleased him that she was no more than mildly outraged and evidently found nothing remarkable in his absence or his appearance or finding him asleep in a car and looking like Ben Gunn. “I was called away suddenly,” he said. “I only just got back.”

“So I notice,” said Kitty absently, gazing at him. How, in what manner, was she gazing at him?

“Come around to the other side so I can see you.”

Instead, Kitty got in the front seat and turned around to face him. The sun shone on the tiny beads of sweat on the down of her upper lip. She smelled of “prespiration,” which is the name we used to give lady sweat, which is a good name for it because it smells like prespiration, which smells more Presbyterian than perspiration. He smiled: I’m beginning to think like Allie.

“Who are you going to play golf with? Walter?”

“I already played eighteen holes, and not with Walter.” Her strong brown arm hugged the leather seat. The hand swung free just above his belt buckle.

Then it was afternoon. The sun had not cleared the cart shed rising; it had cleared the Mercedes roof setting.

It was odd seeing Allie in her, not just the upper lip drawn short by its double tendon but the quick economical stooping movements, the bowing of neck which caused the vertebra to surface in the smooth flesh, the risible watchfulness of the eyes searching his face. Yet somehow the liveliness which in Allie was graceful and shy became in Kitty rowdy and jostling. The hand in its pendulum arc touched his belt. The same become opposites in mother and daughter yet still remain the same. Chromosomes cast inverted but recognizable shadows of themselves

“How do you feel, Will?”

“Fine. I slept all day.”

“Lewis is here. Do you want to see him?”

“Lewis Peckham?”

She nodded. He wondered if when the fingers touched him it would leave a welt like a pendulum. “He was in the foursome.”

“With Walter and—?”

“Not with Walter. Walter is long gone.”

“Gone?”

“I mean he’s gone. Took off. All we have in common now is this business with Allie.”

“I see. How did you find me?”

“That’s my car. I parked next to you this morning.”

“You mean you saw me this morning?”

“Yes.”

He pondered the fact that Kitty had seen him, recognized him, and played eighteen holes of golf.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“You were sleeping very soundly and dreaming. Your lips and eyes were moving.”

“I see.”

“I did call your daughter Leslie, though. She’s been terribly concerned about you.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Only that you’d be coming home when you woke up. Will you?”

“Yes. You mean she’s back from her honeymoon?”

“She doesn’t believe in honeymoons. She and Jason stayed here. She’s discovered backwoods churches where people speak in tongues. She and Jack Curl have gotten very close.”

“Jack Curl?”

“Yes. It seems they have great plans for the Peabody Foundation.” She looked at him.

“There is no Peabody Foundation — yet.”

“Well, they are planning one.”

“I see.”

“Are you sure you feel well?”

“Yes.”

“We missed you at the wedding.”

“Wedding. Oh yes.”

“Same old Will. Same old Huck Finn lighting out for the territory. You know we’ve always been two of a kind.”

“We have? How?”

“Both of us can only stand the rat race for so long. Then bye-bye, folks.”

“Was Leslie’s wedding all right?”

“Sure. Leslie read from the Bible and Jason read from The Prophet. It was very casual. Nobody blamed you for ducking out. Leslie and Jason said they would do the same in your place. In fact, both of them think you’re like them. Unstructured.”

“I am?”

“Leslie understands you better than you think, Will.”

“She does?”

“Please try to understand her.”

“Okay.”

“Poor Will.” She clucked and shook her head.

“Why poor Will?”

“What are you going to do now, Will?”

“Go home. I want to see Leslie.”

“She’s not there.”

“Where is she?”

“She and Jason have moved into a community down in the cove.”

“A community?”

“A love-and-faith community. That’s what she and Jack want to use the Peabody Foundation for, to found such communities around the world, communities for all ages. Maybe the kids know something we don’t know, Will.”

“Yes.”

“Anyhow, she’s closed the house, but she knows you are coming there.”

“I see.”

Kitty’s hand came to rest on his thigh. His thigh swelled. “Now listen, Will. This is important.”

“Okay.”

“I think I know where Allie is.”

“Allie.”

“Oh, Will, I need your help, but just look at you. You’re a mess!” Suddenly leaning over, she took hold of a handful of his flank and gave him a great friendly tweak. “Listen, Will, I need to talk to you.” But even as she said this, her mind seemed to wander. Her eyes went away. “You see that car.”

“What car?”

“My car. Right there. What does it remind you of?”

He looked at the car. It was a black Continental. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t you remember Daddy’s Lincoln?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the last time?”

“The last time?”

“After you came back from Santa Fe. Before you took off for good?”

“Ah—”

“When we parked behind the golf course like this?”

“Ah—”

“Ho ho ho you remember all right. Now, Will, listen to me.”

“All right.”

“We need to talk. About Allie, for one thing. I need to see you. Go home. Get cleaned up. Shave. My God, where have you been, laying in some gutter? Tomcattin’?” She gave him a poke. “All this time you could have been at Dun Romin’ with me taking care of you. After you get settled, come over to my villa. We need to talk about Allie. I’m right over there in number six, Dun Romin’—don’t you like that?”

“Very well, but if it’s about Allison, I’ll need to talk to Walter too.”

“Honey, I done told you. Friend Walter has split.”

“Split.”

“Checked out. Long gone. Headed for the islands, or rather the island. Come to Dun Romin’ and I’ll tell you all about it.” She hooked three fingers inside his belt and gave him a tug.

“I see.” He mused: Did Kitty’s special boldness come from a special sadness? Or do women grow more lustful as they grow older? “You and Walter are separated?”

“I told you things have been popping around here!” Now swinging around merrily, she knelt as if she were in a pew, arms on the back of the seat. Was she merry or sad? “No, seriously. It’s been in the cards for years. It’s not that Walter has this thing for his little receptionists — the older he gets, the younger they get — I couldn’t care less. What it is is there’s nothing between us. Nothing. Maybe there never was. So we’ve split. And we’ve agreed. He gets the Georgia island. I get the mountain here.”

“Don’t they belong to Allie?” He was watching her eyes, which were rounded and merry but also going away.

“Did I tell you I think I found out where Allie is?”

“No.”

“She’s here!”

“Here?”

“Not a mile from this spot. Lewis told me without knowing he was telling me. He thinks the world of you, thinks you’re the solidest citizen around. I didn’t tell him otherwise, that you’re the original flake and we’re two of a kind, the original misfits. Oh, Will, you’re the raunchiest loveliest mess I ever saw, let’s get in the Lincoln — no, I’m kidding. Lewis just happened to mention that a girl’s been living out at the old Kemp place, a shy blond little woods creature. She called it her place. Who else could it be? All he had to say was that she comes to town once a week, goes to the A & P, buys oatmeal, talks funny, says no more than three words, and I knew. It’s Allie. I’m going to see her now. Lewis drew me a map. Want to come? No, you go home.”

“What do you and Walter want to do with Allie?”

“Just me. Walter has copped out. He’s agreeable to anything. All he can think about are what he calls his Ayrabs. He and his Ayrabs, as he calls them, are going to turn the island into a 144-hole golf course with an airport big enough to take 727s from Kuwait.”

“Very well. What do you want to do with Allie?”

“Allie.” For the first time the merry Polly Bergen wrinkles at the corners of her eyes ironed out, showing white. Her eyes went fond and far away. “Allie Allie Allie. What to do with Allie?” Her eyes came back. “Let’s face it, Will.”

“Okay.”

“Alistair’s been telling me this for years but I couldn’t or wouldn’t believe him.”

“Alistair?”

“Dr. Duk.”

“What’s he been telling you?”

“Will,” said Kitty and in her voice he recognized the sweet timbre, the old authentic Alabama thrill of bad news. “Will, Allie can’t make it. Allie is not going to make it, Will. She can’t live in this world. No way.”

“Me neither.”

“What?” said Kitty dreamily.

“Nothing. How do you know she can’t make it?” On the contrary, he thought. She may be the only one who can make it.

“Because Alistair told me. And because I know her and I know what happens when she tries. Do I ever know.”

“What happens when she tries?”

“At first she’s bright as can be. Too bright. Everything is Christmas morning. And that’s the trouble. She can only live if every day is Christmas morning. But she doesn’t know how to live from one Christmas to the next.”

“What happens when she tries?”

“She can’t cope.”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean that she literally does not know how to live. She can’t talk, she can’t sleep, she can’t work. So she crawls into a hole and pulls it in after her. Twice I’ve saved her from starvation. I can’t take that responsibility any more.”

“What do you want to do with her?”

“What is best for her. The best-structured environment money can buy, and all the freedom she can handle.”

“You mean you want to commit her.”

“I’ve talked it over again with Alistair. She can have her own cottage. She can do anything that you or I can do. The only difference is that I intend to make sure she will not injure herself. She will be around people who understand her and with whom she can talk or not talk as she chooses. She will have everything you and I have — books, music, art, companionship, you name it. And you and I will be here if she needs us.”

He must have fallen silent for some time because the next thing he knew she was poking him in her old style.

“What?” he said with a start.

“Wake up. I was talking about Allie.”

“I know.”

“Tell me something, Will.”

“Okay.”

“Does Allie’s life make sense to you?”

“Well I don’t—” he began.

“It’s like Ludean said. Ludean, Grace’s wonderful old Nigra cook. You know what she told me? She said: That chile don’t belong in this world, Miss Kitty.”

He was silent. He was thinking about firelight on Allie’s face and arms and breasts as she knelt to feed logs into the iron stove.

“You know what she meant, don’t you?”

“No.”

“In her own way she was expressing the wisdom of the ages. I’m sure Ludean never heard of reincarnation, but what she was saying in her own way was that Allie had come from another life but had not quite made it all the way. That does happen, you know. I can’t find much written on the subject but it seems quite reasonable to me that some incarnations are more successful than others, that some, like Allie’s, don’t take. That’s why we use expressions like she’s not all there. Though I would say she’s not all here. You ought to see her eyes. She’s seeing something we don’t see.”

He thought of Allie’s eyes, the quick lively look she gave him, lips pressed tight, after she hoisted him onto the bunk, her hands busy with him like a child bedding down a big doll.

“There is no other explanation for it, Will. If I didn’t know what I know, I couldn’t stand it. As it is, it is so simple, so obvious.”

For a fact, she did seem to know something. There was in her eyes just above the Mercedes seat the liveliness (so like Allie yet unlike) of someone who knows a secret you haven’t caught on to. “Don’t you see it, you dummy, or do I have to tell you?”

“What is it you know?”

“Allie did have another life. Unlike most of us, you and me for instance, her karma is so strong she almost remembers it. Sometimes I think she does. In fact, after one session with Ray at Virginia Beach, she did remember it.”

“Ray?”

“A true mystic — and you know how hardheaded I am about such things. Well, I can tell you there was no humbug here. After trance and regression, first Ray’s trance without Allie present, then Allie’s regression, both wrote down what they saw. I was there, I took the papers, I read them. It’s scientific proof. The particulars differ but there is enough to know what sort of life Allie had and the explanation of what she’s going through now. The upshot is that our duty is to protect her and take care of her while she works it out.”

“Works what out?”

“The karma of that life. Or lives.”

“Lives?”

“They described two lives but essentially they were the same. Allie’s version was that she had been a camp follower of the Union Army before the battle of Chancellorsville. Now here’s the fascinating part. When Allie would get down on herself and crawl into her hole, she would say over and over again: I’m no good, I’m a liar, I’m the original hooker. Over and over again she would say, I’m the original hooker. Now, that’s not Allie’s style — I doubt if she ever even heard that word. But we look up the word and guess what. It turns out that the word hooker was first applied to camp followers of General Hooker’s army who fought — guess where? — at the battle of Chancellorsville. So when she said I’m the original hooker she was telling the literal truth. Those that have ears—?

“What was the other version?”

“Okay. Here’s what Ray had written after his trance. Allie had been not a hooker but a courtesan spy for the North in Richmond, where she was known as a great Southern belle who charmed many officers with her wit and conversation. Later we figured out that they might both be right. There had been a famous Union spy in Richmond who had been a prostitute, a hooker. Isn’t that fascinating? But of course what really matters is how it explains her present life.”

“How?”

“Don’t you see? Then she was too much of this world, she knew too many men, talked too much, lied too much, and abused her body. So now she is not of this world, knows nobody, can’t talk enough to lie, doesn’t use her body at all. Or as she would put it: my body doesn’t work — implying that, before, her body worked.”

Kitty went on smoothly from Allie to herself and her karma and to him and his Scorpio tenacity: “Oh, I could have told you twenty years ago if you’d asked me, that you would have to undergo trial and exile before you finally won, like Napoleon and Lenin and Robert Bruce. Your destiny is the Return.”

“Napoleon didn’t win,” he said.

Her belief in such matters was both absolute and perfunctory. There was a plausibility to it. Things fell into place. Mysteries were revealed. Why could he not be a believer? Who were the believers now? Everyone. Everyone believed everything. We’re all from California now. Yet we believe with a kind of perfunctoriness. Even now Kitty was inattentive, eyes drifting as she talked. In the very act of uttering her ultimate truths, she was too bored to listen.

“Ah, I’ve got to go,” he said suddenly, getting out of the car stiffly and setting one foot toward the woods.

“Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“Why don’t you drive?” asked Kitty, laughing.

“Right,” he said, frowning and fumbling for the keys.

“Now, you’re coming to see me after you’ve talked to Leslie?”

“Sure,” he said, feeling his face. Suddenly he wanted a shave, a bath, a drink.

“Just remember. Villa number six. Dun Romin’.”

“Right,” he said absently. “Dun Romin’.”

2

Things began to happen fast. For one thing, he noticed, the days were ending much sooner. The sun, smaller and colder, dropped quickly behind a mountain. Events speeded up. A general law of acceleration prevailed. His Mercedes fairly zipped along the highway yet other cars honked and passed him.

The house was dark and silent when be stopped in the driveway. The sun seemed to be setting in the gorge. The stunted maple which looked like a post oak was nearly stripped of its leaves.

He frowned and drove into the garage. The garage was empty. Both the Rolls and Yamaiuchi’s Datsun were gone. Hm.

The house above him did not tick and settle like a lived-in house cooling off. There was a sense in its silence of people having moved away. The house did not breathe. It was unlived-in. How long had he been gone?

He was standing against the inner wall of the garage watching the oblong of eastern sky. It seemed to turn violet. A small rainbow formed. There was no cloud. He shut one eye. The rainbow went away. He opened the eye. The rainbow came back. He walked to the door. There seemed to be two doors where once there was one. He walked into the wall. He closed his left eye. One door went away.

The door was unlocked. He climbed the rear stairs to his bedroom. The sun rested on the rim of the gorge like a copper plate on a shelf. The room was filled with a rosy light. He walked around, hands in pockets. The bed had been stripped. The closet was empty. No, the Greener shotgun was still there in its case. The Luger in its holster hung from a hook. Head cocked, he gazed at the room. There was something he didn’t like about the light of the setting sun filling the empty room. The room seemed to have an emotion of its own. Was it the feeling of someone present or someone absent? He frowned again and turned quickly toward the bathroom. No, rooms do not have emotions. Rooms are only rooms. How he hated the fake sadness of things. As he turned, he fell. Christ, I’m weak from hunger, he drought. But it’s not bad to be down here on the floor. Above him the bar of sunlight stretched out straight as a plank. Motes drifted aimlessly in and out of the light. The bar of sunlight seemed significant. He sat up and shook his head. No, things do not have significances. The laser beam was nothing more than light reflected from motes he had stirred up. It was not “stark.” One place is like any other place.

A sudden sharp smell came to his nostrils. It was the smell of a Negro cabin in winter, a clean complex smell of newspapers, flour paste, coal oil, and Octagon soap. How is such a thing possible? he said, smiling, and stood up. Goodbye, Georgia.

No, the closet was not empty. A single hanger held a pair of slacks and a clean shirt he recognized and a tan cardigan sweater he did not recognize. Neatly folded on the top shelf were a T-shirt and shorts and on the shoe rack with a rolled-up sock tucked neatly in each a pair of new loafers. The gun case stood in the corner. Strange. He had never worn loafers or a cardigan sweater. Then Leslie had closed the house. She has moved me out. But she has bought me a new outfit. She has plans for me.

The bathroom was empty except for a towel, soap, comb, and his Sunbeam razor. When he saw the figure in the doorway he did not give a start but he felt his face prepare itself to address a stranger. But the stranger was his reflection in the full-length mirror fixed to the door. It was then that he saw that the expression on his face was the agreeable but slightly fearful smile one might assume with an interloper. What can I do for you? He looked like a drunk bearded mountaineer or a soldier who had fought and marched for days and slept in his clothes. The cloth of his shirt and pants felt like skin.

He ran a hot full tub. When he let himself aching and cold down into the steaming water, he groaned and laughed out loud. Oh my God, how can a simple thing like a hot bath be this good, and since it is, is happiness no more than having something you’ve done without for a long time and aaah does it matter?

He bathed for a long time, shaved carefully, combed his hair, and dressed. He looked at himself. He was thin, he felt weak, hungry, lightheaded, but fit enough. Something was odd, however. It was the cardigan sweater and loafers. They made him look like an agreeable youngish old man, like a young Dr. Marcus Welby. All he needed was a pipe. He found a new pipe on the dresser! And a Bible.

He went into the hall and down the front stairs and turned on the lights. It was only then that he found the two notes on the refectory table in the foyer. They were in envelopes addressed to him. One, in Leslie’s hand, said Poppy. The other in Bertie’s hand said Willie and below and underlined: Urgent!

Bertie’s note read:

Please call me, Willie. Urgent.

Leslie’s letter read:

Dearest Poppy:

Kitty just told me where you are. I did not want to wake you so I’m leaving this note for you, knowing you’re coming here.

I’ve forgiven you everything. I did not mind your doing your usual number and splitting for parts unknown before the wedding, but I admit it did hurt a little to learn you had spent the past week shacked up in the woods with a little forest sprite not two miles away. But we always can have the forgiveness of sins through the riches of his grace (Eph. 1:7). Anyhow, I acted like a pill myself.

But everything is different now! My joy is fulfilled (John 3:29).

Dr. Battle told me of your whereabouts during the past week. He felt consideration for your health outweighed doctor-patient confidence.

Jack Curl and Jason and I have some wonderful ideas for the love-and-faith community you and Jack are planning. What you and your little sprite do is your business, but before you make any radical decisions, lets sit down with Lewis and Jack and finalize the Marion Peabody Foundation, which was Mother’s dream.

We’ll be at Jack Curl’s house waiting for you. I laid out some clothes for you. Closed house. Will tell you more. Can’t wait to see ya.

Devotedly,

Yours in the Lord,

Leslie

Dearest? Ya? Devotedly? What’s cooking here, Leslie? The slanginess was not like her. The friendliness was ominous. The “devotedly” was somewhere north of love and south of sincerely. He liked her old sour self better.

What was she up to? He felt a faint prickle of interest under the unfamiliar cashmere of the cardigan. Dr. Marcus Welby chuckled and tapped out his empty pipe. Was she afraid he was going to marry Allie and blow the Peabody millions? Then what would happen to hers and Jack Curl’s love-and-faith community? Kelso would say they’re out to screw you. But Kelso was crazy. He shrugged. Did it matter?

He telephoned Bertie.

“Willie, I’m delighted heh heh,” said Bertie, coming as close as he could to a laugh, a hollow Hampton chortle, a whuffing sound. “Happy birthday.”

“What’s that?” he asked quickly. “Oh, yes. I forgot. Thank you.”

“This is not just your ordinary birthday,” said Bertie. Bertie’s horserace, he knew, would be slanted and keen about the nostrils.

“It isn’t?”

“Don’t you know what this means, Willie?” Bertie’s voice lowered. He sounded as if he were covering the receiver with both hands like a spy in a phone booth.

“No, what?”

“As of yesterday, you are eligible for the Seniors, a young fellow like you! They changed the rules last year.”

“The Seniors,” he said, musing.

“Yes. Your birthday was yesterday, which makes you eligible. First the tournament here this weekend. After that, the tour. We can do Hilton Head and Sea Island before Thanksgiving. Willie, we got them by the short and curlies heh heh hough.”

“We have?”

“Figure the arithmetic. You’re at least six strokes better than your new handicap of twelve which was posted last week and which was due to your slice which you can correct easily if you put your mind to it — you couldn’t have planned it better, in fact. I’m ten strokes better than my twenty-five — I sneaked out yesterday and carded a ninety-four. We’ll sandbag ever’ sucker between here and Augusta,” said Bertie, trying to talk Southern, but it still came out hollow-throat Hampton. “We’ll clean up on them.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Willie—”

“Yes.”

“Could we at least sign up for the Seniors here?”

“Why not?”

“I’ve been thinking about your slice.”

“Yes?”

“I think I can straighten you out. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“That’s my boy. No, seriously. In my opinion, and Lewis agrees, you haven’t begun to realize your potential. If you put your mind to it, you could knock off Snead and Hogan.”

An eighty-year-old Gene Sarazen. Why not?

Why not play golf with hale and ruddy Seniors for the next thirty years? He’d be the youngest on the tour, the Golden Bear among the old grizzlies.

When he drove the Mercedes back to town in the dark, a light flew behind the bushes at the corner of his eye as if a runner with a lantern were keeping pace. The road ran along the ridge, which fell away on both sides. He saw two roads instead of one, and thinking himself to be on an interstate, took the passing lane, until he saw headlights coming straight at him. He spun the wheel. As he was crossing the shoulder of the highway and the car which almost hit him was still blowing its horn in an outraged Doppler downbeat eeeoooo, he had time to wonder how shallow the ditch was and how steep the drop-off beyond it. Saplings lashed at the windows as if his car were still and a storm raged. The Mercedes, riding trees, airborne, rose and hit something hard but at an angle which bore him up even higher.

His head struck the windshield.

The car was propped at a queer angle. Though he had slid against the door and was comfortable enough, head propped against the post like a motorist taking a nap, he noticed that the window did not let onto leaves or earth as might be expected but deep empty dark. Perhaps it would be better to wait until daylight before climbing out, he thought, dozing. He thought about the Greener and the Luger he had locked in the trunk.

3

He was walking along the highway, hands in pockets. The November sun was warm on his back. Jewelweed still bloomed in the ditches. Bright yellow birds fluttered in the trees. Cars and trucks roared past him in a hurry to leave somewhere or arrive somewhere. The drivers gazed straight ahead, swerving only slightly to miss him. Their faces showed a strong sense of purpose. Most of the cars, he noticed, had North Carolina plates. North Carolina. What am I doing here? he wondered. A Mazda passed with a bumper sticker which read: YOUR GOD MAY BE DEAD BUT I TALKED TO MINE THIS MORNING.

Behind him the Mercedes was wedged securely in the crotch of a maple not high above a ravine. He had not been in danger. It was an easy matter to open a door on the high side, climb out, and drop the few feet to the soft earth.

When he thrust his hands in his pockets he found a roll of bills. He sat in the sunny dry ditch and counted them. Five hundred dollars in fifties. He smiled and nodded, put the money back in his pocket, and resumed walking. With one part of his mind he knew where the money came from. But if someone had asked him, he might not have been able to answer. Leslie has staked me, he said to himself. Leslie has a plan. He felt himself in good hands.

In the bus-station restaurant, he ate a breakfast of three fried eggs, a plate of grits and bacon, two pieces of buttered toast, and two cups of coffee. He felt fine but somewhat abstracted, like a man who is looking at something without seeing it yet cannot bring himself to tear his eyes away. A man sitting next to him at the counter began to speak to him and he nodded agreeably but didn’t listen. The man was talking about Georgia.

After he paid his check, he found a tall man walking beside him. The man was talking to him. It was the same man. He looked at him. Though the tall man stood reared back, feet apart, as if he had a big belly, he did not. Actually he was thin and seemed infirm. His rimless glasses flashed. His cheeks were pale and withered but his lips curved richly as if they belonged to a hearty man.

Now they were standing more or less in line at the ticket window. The tall man was explaining something. Suddenly he made a fist of one hand and thrust it into the other open hand and pushed with all his might. The man’s pale face grew red and his elbows trembled.

He began to listen.

“This is how I stay fit,” said the tall man. “Even though I set at a desk ten hours a day. Sat, that is.” Then, instead of pushing, he hooked his fingers together and began to pull so hard his face grew red again.

“What do you do?” he asked the tall man curiously.

“You mean what did I do?”

“Yes, what did you do?”

“I was with the Associates.”

“Associates? You were associated with—?”

“No, it’s a loan company. The Associates. I’m going back to settle some unfinished business. Then I’m set.”

The man was returning to Georgia to sell his house. He and his wife had bought a garden home in Emerald Isle Estates. He explained the difference between a villa, a condominium, a mountain home, and a garden home. A garden home had the privacy of a villa and the maintenance services of a condominium and more land than a mountain home. Though he had lived and worked in Atlanta twenty years as an Associate, he was returning to Valdosta to sell his family home. It had once been a farm.

“Do you play golf?” he asked the tall man. Emerald Isle Estates was nothing but a raw new golf course surrounding a small new lake with eroded red banks which looked like a Georgia cattle pond.

“No, I never. But I don’t have to to keep in shape. In Atlanta I walked to work twenty blocks down West Peachtree every day.”

The tall man had come close and now took his arm in a freckled hand as if he were going to tell him a joke or say something about the Negroes in Atlanta, but he didn’t lower his head but stood reared, head high, lips curved in a smile, rimless glasses flashing in the fluorescent light.

When he tried to move his arm, the man’s grip tightened. He must have something else to say. What would the tall man do in Emerald Isle Estates if he didn’t play golf? walk on the highway? watch TV? do isometrics? Who would he talk to?

“What about you?” the man said.

“What?”

“You got unfinished business in Georgia too?”

“In Georgia?”

“There’s the Atlanta bus pulling in.”

“Yes,” he heard himself say. “I have unfinished business in Georgia.” And having said it, if only to answer the man’s question, he suddenly knew that he meant it. Georgia, the man had said, and the word came to him like a sign. Georgia! That was the place!

At any rate, it was enough to say it aloud to know what he would do.

“Whereabouts in Georgia?” asked the tall man.

“Thomasville.”

“Thomasville! Well, I’ll be. You selling out too?”

“No, I’m buying in.”

“You going back?” the tall man asked him.

“You could say.”

“What are you buying, a farm?”

“You could say.”

“You retiring?”

“You might say.”

“A young fellow like you? That could be a mistake.”

“I don’t think so.”

But the tall man wasn’t really listening. He was doing an exercise with his legs, resting his weight first on the ball of one foot, then the other.

“Do you know Ike Nunally’s place?” the tall man asked.

“That’s where I’m headed. I used to hunt there.”

“Is that so? I did too. Many a time. So you going to buy a piece of the Nunally place.”

“Yes.”

“Which part?”

“A parcel of swamp.”

“Oh, for the hunting. You must be a hunter.”

“Of a sort.” But bigger game than you think.

“You must be one of these rich Northern folks who’ve bought up everything around here and down there too.”

“No. That is, I’m rich, but not Northern.”

“But they’re as nice as they can be, the ones I’ve met,” said the tall man agreeably and inattentively, glasses flashing as he sprang gently on one foot then the other to exercise his calves.

“Yes they are.”

“Now isn’t that something. What a small world. We better get our tickets. You go ahead.”

“After you.”

“What?”

“You’re catching the Georgia bus, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“But what?”

But I’ve forgotten something. What? He felt like a man who has lost his wallet. He slapped his pocket. It was there with the five hundred dollars.

The bus swung up the ramp through sunlight and shade and onto the Blue Ridge Parkway. The two men sat side by side, hands on their knees. Will Barrett inclined his head attentively. Between them, like a silent child beckoning to them, sat the burden of the conversation to come.

“Now isn’t that something,” said the Associate. “Both of us going back to Georgia to make the deal of our lives. I’m selling a farm and you’re buying one.”

“Yes,” he said, watching a low ridge which ran just above the tree line like a levee. The Associate was right. This journey would settle it for both of them. One was going back to Georgia to be rid of it forever, to get shut of the old house with its heavy Valdosta-style gable returns, and begin a new life in his garden home in Emerald Isle Estates, watch Monday-night football, do isometrics in the family room, drive to Highlands with his wife to attend Miami-style auctions. The Jews hadn’t left! The other was going back to Georgia to find something he had left there, to find a place where something had happened to him. Or rather hadn’t happened to him. All these years he had thought he was in luck that it didn’t happen and that he had escaped with his life and a triumphant life at that. But it was something else he had escaped with, not his life. His life — or was it his death? — he had left behind in the Thomasville swamp, where it still waited for him. With a kind of sweet certainty he knew now that it was there that he would find it. Finding the post oak — he knew he could walk straight to it — and not coming out of the swamp at all was better man thrashing around these pretty mountains, playing in Scotch foursomes, crawling into caves, calling on God, Jews, and tigers. No, it was in Georgia that he would find it. And it was in Georgia that he would do it.

But as he listened to the Associate talk about his work — talk with pleasure! he enjoyed his work! he enjoyed walking twenty blocks down West Peachtree, sitting behind his desk for ten hours, making loans, good loans! good for lender and lendee, doing isometrics between appointments, he was no loan shark! — his eye traveled along the ridge and came to a notch where in the darkness of the pine and spruce there grew a single gold poplar which caught the sun like a yellow-haired girl coming out of a dark forest. Once again his heart was flooded with sweetness but a sweetness of a different sort, a sharp sweet urgency, a need to act, to run and catch. He was losing something. Something of his as solid and heavy and sweet as a pot of honey in his lap was being taken away.

“I’m not going back to Georgia,” he said, rising.

“What’s that?” said the Associate quickly and in a changed voice (something was up) but making room for him with his knees.

Already at the front of the bus — how did he get there? — he was tapping the driver’s shoulder, the driver a heavy uniformed man who looked like an aging airline pilot except that his fingernails were dirty and his face was sullen. His tanned neck had deep sharp hieroglyphs carved in it.

“Excuse me, driver, but I want to get out.”

“What’s that?”

“Stop the bus. I want to get off.”

“This is an express, Mac. Next stop, Asheville.”

“I said goddamn it stop the bus and let me off.”

The driver went on driving the bus as if he weren’t there. Angry at the beginning, his face dark with blood, the driver seemed to grow angrier still. What was he angry about? Working conditions? Life at home?

He leaned close to the driver. They both watched the pleasant road spinning under them. “If you don’t stop this fucking bus right now, I’m grabbing your ass out of that seat and stopping it for you.”

The driver slowed. Well, he’s going to let me out, he thought. But no, it was in order to reach for a rack on the dash in front of him, and take out cards and pass them to the passengers behind him. “Please pass these along and fill them out. You are witnesses to a crime. This is a hijacking.”

He looked at the four passengers on the front row of seats. They gazed straight ahead, faces like stone. Something is happening, their stricken expressions said, but it is happening too close. We do not know what to do. It was better not to look. But they took the cards dutifully and gazed at the scenery, not daring even to look at the cards.

The bus was still going slow.

“Let the man out. The man wants out.” It was the Associate, standing tall and reared, glasses flashing. He was not smiling. “You heard the man. He wants out.”

“I’ll let him out all right,” said the driver, who in his rage had gone stupid and sought now only the ultimate gesture, the last one-up face-saver, to prove himself to himself and to the passengers, who watched stone-faced holding their legal cards as dutifully as TV game players. The door opened while the bus was still moving and in the moment of his stepping down the driver slammed on the brakes, slamming him forward into metal jamb, then started up rhhhooom, slamming him back into the other jamb not squarely but glancingly so that he was bounced out, which would not have been serious except that the door, itself now part of the driver’s stupidity and rage, was already closing and caught his foot, levering him down hard enough so that the next thing he knew, the pebbles of tar and craters of pavement were coming up at him like a moon landing fast and silent yet slow enough for him to say to himself: right, it’s not going to end like this or in a Georgia swamp either because I won’t stand for it and don’t have to. Then the Eagle landed and the moon went dark.

4

The room was dark.

The table he was strapped to began to move. It slanted up at the foot, then slanted down, rolled over on one side, stood on end. Quick sure woman’s hands moved his body, straightening it. Someone measured his head with a ruler and marked it. There was the sense of conforming his body, its warm wayward flesh and bone, to the simple cold geometry of straight metal edges. A motor went on and off. There was a hum.

When he and the table were stood on end like a mummy case, he saw stars. A window directly in front of him seemed to open into deep space. There twinkling in a thousand, a million points of light was a distant galaxy. But it was not a window, not deep space, not a galaxy, but a brain. The fore part of the brain crouched between two lobes like a sphinx.

He turned his head. The sphinx turned. He turned his head the other way. The sphinx turned the other way.

It was his own brain.

Later the same quick hands unstrapped him and led him into a brightly lit examining room. There were Leslie and Jack Curl and Vance Battle and another man, no doubt a doctor, wearing a long white coat with a rubber hammer sticking out of his pocket. Leslie and Jack were smiling at him.

“What are you grinning about?” he asked Leslie crossly. Uh oh, he thought. Something is wrong for sure. Leslie never smiles unless somebody dies or the Holy Spirit descends. What had happened to her inverted-U frown?

“Credit friend Jack here,” she said, giving him a pat. Ah, they had become friends. What was up? “There is nothing like the power of prayer.”

“There you go,” said Jack absently, dancing a little.

“Power of prayer to do what?” asked Will Barrett.

“To find you and get you here at Duke!” said Leslie, giving him a hug. “Oh, Poppy, you’re a mess!”

Vance and the other man were holding their arms and talking, their heads down. The other man must be a doctor because he was talking to Vance both seriously and casually. He didn’t have to smile. A courtesy was being extended Vance. They did not seem to be exchanging medical information as doctors do, but rather reaching an agreement, as lawyers do. They traced designs on the floor with the toes of their shoes. An agreement was reached. Both men nodded. The other doctor left.

Leslie and Jack Curl were smiling and shaking their heads. Vance winked. With so much cheerfulness — Leslie smiling and soft-eyed! — the news must be bad.

“Son, we had a time catching up with you and throwing you down,” said Vance, talking more country man usual. Bad! He turned to Leslie. “What this old boy needs is some strong-arm tactics, and this little lady is just the one to do it.”

“There you go,” said Jack Curl, doing a turn and bumping into Leslie. There occurred between them some kind of comic Christian jostle.

He was looking down at his short hospital smock. It was tied loosely in the back. A draft blew up under the flap. There was lettering on the front. He tried to read it.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“You’re at Duke, Poppy,” said Leslie and sure enough took him by a strong hand. “The Duke hospital.”

“Sit down, Tiger, before you fall down,” said Vance.

“I feel fine,” he said. He did. Except for a lightness in the head and a throbbing above one eye, he felt strong. He was hungry. “How long have I been here?”

“Twelve hours,” said Vance. “And I’m here to tell you one damn thing. Out of your head you’re a lot easier to get along with. You’re not a bad patient. You actually hold still when I tell you.”

“How did I get here from the bus?”

The three looked at each other and laughed.

Jack Curl did a turn and addressed the others, with Will Barrett as listener-in. “I don’t know what friend Will here told that bus driver, but that sucker turned that bus around and delivered him straight to Linwood Hospital.”

He looked at them. Their smiles and winks and jokes bore him along as skillfully as the swift hands on the X-ray table. “What am I doing here?”

Vance’s eyes gazed unfocused into his. “I thought there might be a little sumpn wrong with you.”

“Was there?”

“Not what I was afraid of. Actually I was right all along. It looked to me like you were having little petty-mall seizures, but when you took to falling down and acting even meaner than usual, I was afraid it might be something more serious. As it is, they even got a pill for what ails you. You won’t even have to stay in a hospital. A convalescent home for a spell is all you need, long enough for me to get you regulated. Let’s go back to the mountain, boy. At least I know now what was causing your slice. What a relief. I thought for a while your golf game was shot.”

“Poppy,” said Leslie, coming close and straightening his smock, giving it firm tugs and pats like a mother. “Vance and Dr. Ellis want to have a little powwow with you. Jack and I will be waiting in the hall. When the scientists get through with you, we want a piece of you. Jack, Vance, and I have cooked up something special for the four of us. But that can wait.”

Jack Curl took his hand too and squeezed it with both of his in a special way like a fraternity grip. Jack seemed more English than before. His hair flew off unbrushed to one side. He didn’t use deodorant.

They went into another room. Dr. Ellis was standing there, doing nothing, not smiling, not frowning.

When the door closed, Vance turned on the light of a shadow box, another box, then another. There was the galaxy again, not swimming in deep space now but its poor pale image, an X-ray. Next to it a pelvis connected legbones to backbone as simply and comically as a Halloween skeleton. Next, a bigger woman-size pelvis had something new cradled in its womb, a puddle of white. What was hatching here?

The two doctors lined up alongside him as if he were a colleague, a man among men. The women and priests were gone and they could talk.

“Boy, you some lucky,” said Vance. “You want to know what I thought you had until Dr. Ellis here talked me out of it. You know I went to Chapel Hill and we know all about Duke assholes but this is one more smart asshole.”

Dr. Ellis nodded and pressed his lips together in a faint smile. Will Barrett wished Vance would not try to be funny. Dr. Ellis was not the sort of person to be called an asshole. Vance went down the bank of X-rays, snapping his fingernail against the heavy celluloid. “I thought you had a prostatic growth here—” pow “—with metastases here—” pow “—here in the brain—” pow “I’d have given you three months. But you’re some lucky. What you got I barely heard of and Dr. Ellis has written a paper about. He even invented a test for it. Frankly I think he invented the disease. And that ain’t all. They can’t cure it but they got a drug for it and we can control it. Ain’t that right, Doctor?”

Dr. Ellis went on with his nodding and faint smile. The two doctors fell back, folded their arms, and examined the X-rays as if they were a wall of Rembrandts. He saw that they were using the X-rays as stage props, something to look at so they could talk to him.

“I’m afraid Dr. Battle is doing himself an injustice,” said Dr. Ellis dryly, his eyes drifting along the X-rays. He saw that Dr. Ellis had a way of feigning inattention which in fact allowed him to pay strict attention. “He suggested all along that you had a petit-mal epilepsy, which in fact you do, a rare form, so rare it bears the name of its discoverer. It’s called Hausmann’s Syndrome. It is in fact a petit-mal temporal-lobe epilepsy which is characterized by typical symptoms. It is not too well controlled by Dilantin but there’s a new drug which works very well. That is to say, it clears up the symptoms. What we have to do is rule out a lesion in the temporal lobe. Dr. Battle favors that. I don’t. The odd thing about the treatment is—”

“What are the symptoms?” asked Will Barrett.

Dr. Ellis shrugged. “As I recalled, Dr. Hausmann listed such items as depression, fugues, certain delusions, sexual dysfunction alternating between impotence and satyriasis, hypertension, and what he called wahnsinnige Sehnsucht—I rather like that. It means inappropriate longing.”

It ought to be called Housmann not Hausmann, he thought, the disorder suffered by the poet who mourned dead Shropshire lads and rose-lipt maids and his own lost youth.

“As I was saying, the odd thing is that the drug is the simplest of all substances, so simple that no one would think of it — in fact, it was discovered by accident. It is nothing other than the hydrogen ion, a single nucleus of one proton, not even an electron. Isn’t that intriguing? that the most complex symptoms, wahnsinnige Sehnsucht, inappropriate longings, depression and such, can be cured by a single proton? Apparently it all comes down to pH. I’ve had a series of six cases, and in each one you have petit-mal seizures plus an unstable pH which fluctuates between a mild alkalosis and acidosis. It is apparently a high sensitivity to pH changes which causes the symptoms. For instance, this morning your pH ran seven point seven. The treatment is simple but pesky. It means checking your pH every couple of hours and calibrating the medication accordingly. Anyone can pass out from alkalosis — I could put Vance out just by having him hyperventilate — but you’re much more sensitive and therefore your pH must be monitored all the time. All my patients are doing well but have to be maintained under the most carefully controlled conditions.”

“What does that mean?” asked Will Barrett, taking note of the not unpleasant sensation of being caught up, diagnosed, recognized, planned for, of the prospect of one’s life being ordered henceforward, like joining the army.

“I’ve got this one case of Hausmann’s in the math department here at Duke. Instead of showing up for class he’d be found sitting in the stadium alone. Once he went to Kitty Hawk and lived in the dunes and nearly starved.”

The dunes? Yes.

“Now, under treatment, he meets his classes and publishes voluminously. Except for living in our convalescent wing, he has a normal life.”

“Here? He lives here in the hospital?”

“We have to monitor his blood pH every hour. One spoon of vinegar salad dressing and he’s in the depths. One Alka-Seltzer and he’s off for the dunes with two coeds. Heh heh. We don’t know whether it’s your internal governor on the blink or whether your limbic system is abnormally sensitive. Or whether you have a temporal-lobe lesion, though”—he snapped an X-ray—“I see no sign of it. Remarkable, don’t you think, that a few protons, plus or minus, can cause such complicated moods? Lithium, the simplest metal, controls depression. Hydrogen, the simplest atom, controls wahnsinnige Sehnsucht.”

“How about that?” said Vance.

The two doctors could have been enlisting him as a colleague. Will Barrett saw that it was his, Dr. Ellis’s, way of telling him good news, and a very good way it was, giving him a new lease on life as offhandedly as making an appointment. What a good fellow Dr. Ellis was!

Leslie came in, all smiles and melts, Jack Curl dancing behind her.

“Let’s head for the hills, Poppy.”

He looked at Dr. Ellis.

“Vance can monitor your pH as well as I. If he finds any sign of a lesion he can bring you back.”

“And here’s the bottom line,” said Jack Curl, coming too close. “Bertie’s got you signed up for the Seniors tournament next month and these two docs say you can make it. If—”

“If?”

“If you put up at my place so Vance can check your blood. You can start out on St. Mark’s putting green.”

He looked at Vance.

“You heard the man. Now let’s get out of here, old buddy. I got sick people to tend to. I can only add one item to Dr. Ellis’s diagnosis — incidentally, I concur with him now. I’ll make you a press bet that the hydrogen ion will correct your slice — that may be my contribution to medical literature: the correlation of blood pH and the golf slice. Who knows?” He gave him a wink. “The hydrogen ion may even solve the Jewish question. As a matter of fact, why don’t we try it for size — you’re on hydrogen now, your blood pH is exactly seven point four, normal. Is Groucho Marx dead or alive?”

“Dead.”

“Right. Now what happened to the Jews in North Carolina?”

“The Jews?” he said, frowning.

“Yes, the Jews.”

“Why, nothing. They’re going about their business as usual, I suppose.”

“Right. And what about that Jewish girl in high school you were raving about last night?”

“What Jewish girl?”

“What about the Jewish exodus?”

“What exodus?”

“What about your business in Georgia?”

“What business?”

“You were talking about some unfinished business in a Georgia swamp.”

“What swamp?”

“Let’s head for the hills, son.”

“From whence cometh our help,” said Leslie.

“Okay,” he said agreeably, blinking. Yes, he felt exactly as he felt when he was drafted in the army, a dazed content and a mild curiosity. His life was out of his hands.

IV

THANKSGIVING FOUND HIM COMFORTABLY installed in St. Mark’s Convalescent Home taking pills and shots and having blood drawn every hour. Jack had put him in the penthouse suite overlooking the gorge. Leslie moved in his new clothes, cardigans, pipes, stereo, Bible, everything but the Greener and Luger. She had even retrieved the Mercedes from the maple tree, had it repaired and parked outside. With a significant look she handed the keys to him. Perhaps it was an act of faith in him.

For a long time he stood twiddling the keys and looking at the Mercedes. He opened the trunk. There lay the Greener in its case and the Luger in its holster. He stood, foot on bumper, thinking.

Vance came by twice a day to give him his “acid” and to take blood to test his pH. He came close as a lover, breath strong and sweet, sniffed at him, looked into his eyeballs. He told his patient he smelled healthy, his pressure was down, and the arteries in his eyegrounds were as supple as snakes.

Not only did Will Barrett tolerate the drug, he seemed in a queer way to prosper. A smell of pesticide hung in his nostrils. He smelled like a house sprayed for termites. A chemical exuberance took hold of him. The simplest of all atoms gave him a complex sense of well-being. If the treatment was dangerous, he felt as safe as a knife thrower’s girl. Friendly knives zipped past his head, between his legs, fanned his ears, went zoing straight to their malignant target. A cool Carolina Salk rattling his test tubes at Duke had saved his life. How odd to be rescued, salvaged, converted by the hydrogen ion! a proton as simple as a billiard ball! Did it all come down to chemistry after all? Had he fallen down in a bunker, pounded the sand with his fist in a rage of longing for Ethel Rosenblum because his pH was 7.6? A quirky energy flowed into his muscles. He couldn’t sleep but didn’t mind. He rose at all hours, dressed carefully, prowled the halls, explored the grounds, even drove the Mercedes. He wanted to see Allie. He forgot about Jews but not Allie. Had his longing for her been a hydrogen-ion deficiency, a wahnsinnige Sehnsucht? No, hydrogen or no hydrogen, he wanted to see her face. Would the protons now coursing through his brain and eyegrounds make her look different? Why hadn’t she come to see him? He headed for the club, but a twisting in his head caused him to turn the Mercedes to correct the twist. Again the Mercedes took to the woods. Maybe he’d better drive around the block at first.

Then why not walk? But when he struck out through the woods, he found himself turning against the gyroscope in his head and went round in a circle. He had to stick to the sidewalks like ordinary folk.

Things increased in density and stood apart. He could see around trees. But time ran together. Was it Wednesday or Sunday? He bought a calendar Timex watch. Things increased in value. As he drove the Mercedes his attention was transfixed by the luminous turquoise of a traffic light. It glowed like a huge valuable jewel! He stopped and gazed until it turned into a great hot ruby. Surely red meant go, not stop. He went. A woman in a Dodge pickup cursed him.

He stopped driving and took up golf.

“You want to putt a round?” he asked Jack Curl.

“You got to be kidding. Get Vance or Slocum.”

He got Slocum. Slocum too seemed to like him better. Everybody was relieved that he was sick not crazy, that he was being treated and was getting better. Being sick made him feel better too.

His driving and walking were peculiar, but his putting was deadly. The little hydrogen ions had odd effects. The gyroscope spinning in his head hurt his driving the Mercedes but helped his putting. All he had to do was settle over a putt, wait till the gyroscope steadied and the twisting stopped and zing, the ball flew straight for the cup like a missile locked on target.

Bertie came by. Will Barrett beat him seventeen up on eighteen holes. Bertie looked left and right. “You don’t have to turn in a scorecard here, do you?” “No.” “Thank God. It won’t affect your handicap.” “That’s right.” Bertie winked. “We missed the Seniors here but we’re signed up for Hilton Head and the whole Southern tour. We can’t miss.”

2

A wiry old man was watering a young pine with a bucket.

Will Barrett watched him for a while. At first the old man appeared as part of the scenery and therefore of no particular moment, old-man-watering-tree-in-front-of-old-folks’-home. Then it occurred to him to wonder. Why would anyone want to water a pine tree with a bucket?

Standing on the porch, he asked him.

The old man frowned and went on watering but presently he replied: “They planted these seedlings too early. They should have waited till the winter months when there is plenty of rain.”

“Seedlings? Those are not seedlings. They’re two years old. I know because my wife had them planted.”

“They still need water,” said the old man, not raising his eyes from the pine.

“You know about plants?”

Yes, he did. His name was Lionel Eberhart, born in Kingsport, Tennessee. He had started out as a gardener in Asheville with one old truck, hiring out himself and wife and two sons and one daughter to tend lawns. They weren’t afraid of work. He started his own nursery. Before he retired he was wholesaling lots of one hundred thousand rhododendron and laurel to Sears, Roebuck.

“Why did you retire?”

“My wife died. I had three heart attacks. My two sons wanted to put me here. My daughter wanted me to live with her but her husband didn’t. So the doctor put me here. But that’s all right! They all right! I wouldn’t want to live with them! So.” He went to fill his bucket.

“Is that all you can find to do around here, water a pine tree?”

“They got a gardener. Your wife took care of everything. She surely was a nice lady. They got ever’ thing around here a fellow would need.” Still, he did not raise his eyes from the small wet pine.

He gazed down at the old man. Quick and wiry, an East Tennessee Yankee, yes, he’d drive his wife, sons, daughter crazy with his puttering. Yes, of course he’d seen the old man before, always outside, walking with his quick stoop, raking leaves, watering trees, pestering the gardener. He’d live another thirty years.

3

Jack Curl was leaving for Hilton Head and an ecumenical meeting between a Greek Orthodox archimandrite, a Maronite patriarch, and the Episcopal bishop of North Carolina, a meeting suggested in fact by Jack Curl. Could Jack Curl reunite Christendom? He laughed, socked himself, and did a turn. Why not? Isn’t it just the sort of damn fool thing God might favor? Actually Marion had conceived the idea before she died and even provided the funds.

“You mean that’s the sort of thing the Peabody Trust would undertake?” he asked Jack.

“You got it, Will,” said Jack, his laughter turning off like a light.

“And you want me to put Marion’s money in a trust to be administered by you.”

“Or Leslie. Or both.”

“Well, which?”

“Take your pick. Then we’ll run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it.”

“What does that mean?”

Jack Curl shrugged and looked vague. “You’re the lawyer. Check it out with Slocum. It comes down to naming a trustee or co-trustees. I’m glad to serve.”

Jack Curl showed him around St. Mark’s before he left, even though Jack must have known that he used to pilot Marion through once a week in her wheelchair. The dining room was pretty and the food good, tables for four, ladies in dresses and hairdos, gents in coats and ties, grace before meals.

“Now,” said Jack, “I’m going to show you something that’s going to blow your mind. Not even Marion knew about it. It’s strictly off limits to the ladies. Okay. I’m going to show you a bunch of guys having a ball. I spend a little time here myself. A little, ha.”

They climbed steep steps. A door opened into a spacious attic. Tracks and trains ran everywhere through a waist-high landscape. Not children’s toy trains but good-sized Pennsylvania diesels, an L & N steam locomotive, a Southern Pacific freight, a Twentieth Century Limited, crossed trestles, ran through tunnels, stopped at stations, switched onto sidings, off-loaded bales of cotton, took on soybean oil. Bars came down at crossings. Bells donged. A mechanical darky on a mule doffed his cap. Lonesome whistles blew. Half a dozen men, old men, operated control panels, switches, water towers, roundhouse turnarounds. Most of the men wore railroader’s caps.

“Talk about a nostalgia trip,” whispered Jack Curl.

“Yes,” he said and for some reason thought about Allison standing in the sunlight.

“Highball it, Shorty!” cried Jack Curl to a man wearing a railroader’s cap but with a false note in his voice and Shorty did not reply. “Shorty was president of First National of Georgia,” whispered Jack. “You see that guy on the roundhouse? That’s Orin Henderson of Henderson Textiles. They’re great guys. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

“Later.” He looked at his watch. What was Allie doing? It was four-thirty. The sunlight was yellow. Was she going down into herself? Was the dog worrying about her?

“Who knows, Will, you might take up railroading. You could do worse,” said Jack Curl, his eyes not quite coming round to him.

“No thanks.”

“Why not?”

“I’m taking up senior golf.”

“All right!” said Jack.

“Yes.”

“You remember Father Weatherbee, also a known train nut. You’ll be in his hands while I’m gone. And damn good hands they are, better than Allstate. Father spent fifty years in the Philippines.”

Father Weatherbee was the ancient emaciated priest whose clerical collar and lower eyelid drooped. One eye had a white rim and spun like a wheel. Smiling, he took Barrett’s hand in both of his, two dry hot whispering banyan leaves. He shrugged at Jack Curl. Will Barrett saw something in his eyes.

“Father was an old highballer from Raleigh before he took to persecuting the saints,” said Jack, absently socking fist into palm. “He used to ride the old Seaboard Air Line and never got over it. Right, Father?”

Father Weatherbee said something.

“What’s that, Father?” asked Will Barrett, leaning toward him.

“Father Weatherbee has two unusual interests,” said Jack Curl, looking at his wristwatch. “Oh my, I’ve got to see Leslie before—” He took Will Barrett’s hand as if he meant to say goodbye. In the handshake he felt himself being steered closer to the old priest. “Father here believes in two things in this world. One is the Seaboard Air Line Railroad and the other is Apostolic Succession. Right, Padre? Frankly, it sounds more like the ancestor worship of his Mindanao tribesmen, but I don’t argue with him. After all, I also get along with Leslie, who has no use for any priests, let alone a succession of priests. So what? You pays your money and you takes your choice.”

“Apostolic Succession?” said Will Barrett, looking from one to the other.

“A laying on of hands which goes back to the Apostles,” said Jack Curl, smiling and nodding at the highballers.

“It occurred,” said Father Weatherbee in a dry hoarse voice. When he spoke, a red bleb formed at the corner of his mouth like a bubble-gum bubble.

“There you go,” said Jack Curl.

Father Weatherbee said something.

“What’s that?” asked Will Barrett, cocking his good ear.

“I said he reminds me of a kumongakvaikvai,” said Father Weatherbee, nodding at Jack and blowing out a bleb.

“What’s a kumongakvaikvai?”

“It’s the dung bird of southern Mindanao. It follows herds of Kumonga cattle and eats dung like your cattle egret. Characteristically the bird perches on the backs of the beasts and utters its cry kvai kvai." And Father Weatherbee uttered a sound which could only have been the cry of the bird.

“Ha ha,” laughed Jack Curl, giving Will Barrett the elbow. “I told you they’re all characters up here.”

4

“What do you think of these great John Kennedy rockers?” Jack Curl called out on the front porch. “You know I slipped a disc last year and instead of surgery I rocked. I mean really rocked. Do you know you can get a workout in one of these?”

There were at least fifty rocking chairs, damp from the fog, none occupied.

After supper he sat in a rocker and watched a cloud rise from the valley floor. To the left, where the valley narrowed, the cloud seemed to boom and echo against the sides of the gorge.

Suddenly he jumped up, remembering something he meant to ask Jack Curl, even though Jack had left hours ago. Instead, he called Vance.

“Vance, I just thought of something.”

“What’s that, buddy?”

“It just occurred to me that Leslie moved all my stuff here before she found out I was sick.”

“Ahmmm.” Vance cleared his throat. “Well, we all knew something was wrong. You were sick. It was only a matter of diagnosis. As a matter of fact, I was me only one who didn’t think you were crazy. As for what you got, we going to lick that mother, right? How’re you feeling?”

“Fine. But she moved me out before I came back. What did she have in mind?”

“Let me tell you something, Will.”

“All right.”

“Leslie is much woman.”

“Yes.”

“She is some kind of woman, a fine Christian woman.”

“Right. But—”

“You know what she’s going to do with St. Mark’s?”

“No.”

“Well, she’s transferring the convalescents to the new community Marion had planned over on Sourwood Mountain — as soon as we can get it built. And we’ll use the present St. Mark’s as a hospital with a new wing for radiation patients complete with a new beta cyclotron. I’m sure you’d rather live in the Peabody community. There’s no reason for you to have to live in a hospital.”

“The love-and-faith community.”

“Right.”

“I see. Where is the money for all this coming from?”

Vance coughed. “I thought you and Leslie and Slocum had worked that out. Christ, you’re a lawyer.”

“You’re talking about the Peabody Trust?”

“Yes.”

“There is no Peabody Trust. I am Marion’s sole beneficiary.”

“I know, but Leslie had given me to understand that you wanted to carry out Marion’s wishes in this — let alone considerations of your own health.”

“What about my health?”

He could feel the shrug through the telephone. “You’re going to be following a strict regime from here on out — and you’re going to be fine! But let’s face it. We don’t know a damn thing about Hausmann’s Syndrome except how to maintain a patient.”

“Are you talking about maintaining me or committing me?”

“Ha ha. As long as your pH doesn’t get over seven point four, you’re right as rain. In fact—”

“Yes?”

“We were wondering if you might not run the Peabody community, since you’re going to be out there anyway.”

“We?”

“Talk to Leslie. She’s another Marion.”

“I see.”

He went up to his room and turned on the stereo. Leslie had even popped in a tape. It was Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder, which used to be one of his favorites.

Earlier Jack Curl had introduced him to Warren East, formerly with Texas Instruments, who was also a music lover and had in his suite a digital sound system. “You two guys got it made,” said Jack, reaching deep in his jump-suit pockets. “You can either swap tapes or get together. Warren’s got everything that Victor Herbert ever composed.” Again the handshake steering him against Warren East.

He looked at Warren East. Warren East did not look at him.

Leslie had put a book next to his favorite chair. It was the Bible. He picked it up. It opened to a bookmark. He read: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” Leslie had made a note in the margin: And what lovely hills!

Overhead in the attic the Wabash Cannonball rambled along with a rustle and a roar.

Closing the Bible, he got up fast, causing the gyroscope in his head to twist. He went by arcs down to the porch and sat in a John Kennedy rocker. It was damp. The porch was deserted. The cloud had come out of the valley. Everything beyond the banister rail was whited out. Through a window he caught sight of half of a giant TV screen in the recreation room. Lawrence Welk, still holding his baton, was dancing a waltz with a pretty young blonde.

Presently Kojak came on.

He felt an urge to get away from the silent white enveloping cloud and to go inside to the cheerful living room with its screen of lively sparkling colors and watch the doings of Kojak.

He rose carefully, taking care not to excite the gyroscope inside his head, then sat down with a thump.

Jesus Christ, he thought. I’m in the old folks’ home.

5

The friendly atmosphere of St. Mark’s was marred by two fights which occurred within the space of half an hour. He found himself embroiled in both of them. Remarkable! It had been years since he’d been in a fight or even seen a fight.

Kitty came to St. Mark’s and assaulted him. Then Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ryan, his roommate for two years, got in a fistfight. Kitty must have found his suite empty and tracked him all over St. Mark’s because she burst into the small room where he was visiting the two old men. It was clear when she came through the door that her rage had already carried her past caring who heard or saw her.

“You bastard,” she said. Her eyes showed white all around like a wild pony’s. “You—” She broke off.

“What?” he asked, noticing that he felt scared, and wondered if this natural emotion were not another sign of his return to health.

“What my butt,” she said. “Now I know why—” she said and again her voice broke off, with a sob. Then with a grunt of effort as if she had to fling down a burden, she raised her woman’s fists, thumbs straight along the knuckle, and, leaning across Mr. Ryan, began to beat him on the chest.

Later Mr. Ryan told him, “It looked like that lady was put out with you about something.”

“Now I know why you didn’t come to Dun Romin’ or the summerhouse or anywhere at all, you—” Again her breath caught as she shoved past Mr. Ryan’s bad knee to get at him. “You — you dirty old man!”

“Why?”

“Because you were shacked up in the woods with Allison, you—”

Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ryan were lying in bed and watching Hollywood Squares as if nothing unusual were going on three feet above them.

“Shacked up?”

“You — snake in the grass! Taking advantage of a psychotic girl. You — you—”

“Dirty old man?” said Mr. Ryan, looking up for the first time.

“You shut your mouth, you old asshole,” said Kitty, without looking down.

“Yes ma’am,” said Mr. Ryan.

“Well, I’m here to tell you one damn thing, old pal. I hope to God you’re pleased with yourself. She is now hopelessly regressed. She won’t say a word. And I’ll tell you something else. I’m fixing it so you’ll never get your filthy hands on her again, you — snake in the grass. That’s exactly what you are, a snake in the grass!”

“You mean she won’t talk to you?” he asked her.

“I mean she won’t talk period, won’t eat period, won’t live period — unless I do something about it. You bastard,” she said softly. “You knew where she was all along.”

He had spied Mr. Arnold in the hall hopping along on his crutch. There was no mistaking that peeled-onion head and the one bright eye in his shutdown face. Then, after Kitty left, flung out, jammed her fist into her side and flounced her hip with it — it’s amazing, he reflected, how trite rage is: enraged people in life act exactly like enraged people in comic books: there were stars and comets and zaps over Kitty’s head — then Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ryan had a fight.

Mr. Arnold was sitting on the foot of his bed, fisted hand cradled like a baby in his good arm. Though it was his bed and his right to sit there, he was blocking Mr. Ryan’s view of Hollywood Squares. Mr. Ryan began shifting his head back and forth in an exaggerated way to see around Mr. Arnold. He asked him to move but Mr. Arnold either didn’t hear or pretended not to hear.

“You may be a pane, Erroll,” he said to Mr. Arnold with an angry laugh, “but I can’t see through you.”

Mr. Ryan had a neat white crewcut, a youthful face, its skin smooth and pink-creased like a baby waking up. But his eye had a cast in it. One leg was gone from the hip and the other freshly amputated and bandaged below the knee. Diabetes and arteriosclerosis, he explained, watching Will with a keen and lively eye to see how he would take it, and apparently was satisfied, for he, Will, took it as he took everything else, attentively and without surprise. They had got the infection in time, Mr. Ryan said, and this time he could keep his knee. He explained, watching Will Barrett closely, that it was better to chop off a good piece the first time than nibble away as they had done with the other leg. I could have told them from the beginning, he said, that it’s exactly like pruning back boxwood with the blight.

Mr. Ryan was lying on top of the bedclothes. He pulled up his hospital gown to show his stump. “Ain’t that a pistol?” His thigh too had the same pink and white baby skin.

The watchful, almost angry look, he saw, was Mr. Ryan’s way of asking him if he thought he would keep his knee. Is it such a bad thing, he mused chin in hand over Mr. Ryan’s remaining knee, to have a knee to think about day in and day out? Even if both knees were well and all was well, what would you do here? “They going to keep chopping on me till I’ll fit on a skateboard,” said Mr. Ryan, watching him.

“It looks very healthy,” he said. “It looks fine to me.”

“Yes, it does,” said Mr. Ryan instantly. “I believe they got it this time. We can’t see the show, Erroll,” he said to Mr. Arnold.

But Mr. Arnold didn’t move.

After a while Mr. Ryan said, “Like I said, Erroll, you may be a pane but we can’t see through you.”

Still Mr. Arnold didn’t move.

“You want to know what Erroll does?” Mr. Ryan asked Will Barrett with a smile, but his eyes were glittering.

“What?”

“He knows I can’t move yet he sits his ass right there on the end of his bed between me and the TV, Erroll you shit!” said Mr. Ryan, laughing, then with a sob but still laughing lunged out between the two beds and, propping himself on the floor with one hand, grabbed Mr. Arnold’s crutch with the other. When, with difficulty, veins pounding in his neck, glossy eye bulging, he got himself back in place, it appeared he meant only to steal Mr. Arnold’s crutch, but no. Gripping the crutch at the small end in both hands like a baseball bat and giving himself what purchase he could by gathering his knee stump under him, he swung the crutch with all his might and caught Mr. Arnold a heavy glancing blow on his onion dome, cursing all the while.

“You no-good peckerwood son of a bitch!” he cried, his voice going suddenly hoarse.

Mr. Arnold, suddenly on the move, turned, his good eye winking at Barrett, grabbed the crossbar of the crutch with his good hand, yanked it, and kicked out at Mr. Ryan with his good leg, but fell off the bed. Mr. Ryan flew through the air like a doll and fell on top of him. Three fists rose and fell.

“You covite cocksucker,” said Mr. Ryan.

“Cornholer,” said Mr. Arnold clearly. He had got on top, and though he could only use one arm, the curtain of his face had been lifted by rage. His whole mouth formed curses. Cursing cures paralysis.

“Wait, hold it, okay okay,” said Will Barrett, jumping clean across the bed and landing astraddle the roommates in time to catch the crutch on his shin. “Shit,” he said. The two old men were grunting and embracing and cursing like lovers. “I mean for God’s sake stop it!” Picking up Mr. Ryan, who, truncated, was no bigger than a chunky child, he set him in place on his pillows. Mr. Arnold was already back on his perch at the foot of the bed, once again blocking Mr. Ryan’s view of Hollywood Squares. The fight might never have occurred. Instead of moving Mr. Arnold, Will Barrett moved the TV arm so Mr. Ryan’s view could not be blocked. He looked at them. They were gazing at Paul Lynde in the middle square as if nothing had happened.

“How often does this happen?” he asked them.

“Ever’ damn time they chop me down to size, Erroll sits his bony ass right where I can’t see the TV,” said Mr. Ryan.

“It’s the onliest place I can see it good,” said Mr. Arnold. “It’s too little to see from back there.”

“You speak very well,” Will Barrett told Mr. Arnold. “The last time I saw you at my house, you didn’t have much to say.”

“There wasn’t much to say.”

“He’s too damn mean to talk,” said Mr. Ryan. “But knock him upside the head like a mule and he’ll talk your ear off.”

“How long have you been here?” Will Barrett asked Mr. Ryan.

“Two years.”

“How about Mr. Arnold?”

“Ask him.”

“Three years,” said Mr. Arnold clearly. The curtain of his face had not yet shut down.

Strange: even during their rages they seemed to be watching him with a mute smiling appeal. They wanted to be told that no matter what happened, things would turn out well — and they believed him.

He discovered that it was possible to talk to them and even for them to talk to each other, if all three watched TV. The TV was like a fourth at bridge, the dummy partner they could all watch.

Mr. Ryan was a contractor from Charlotte who had moved to Linwood to build condominiums and villas for Mountainview Homes until diabetes and arteriosclerosis had “cut him down to size.”

“Their joists are two foot on centers, the nails are cheap, and the floorboards bounce clean off in two years,” said Mr. Arnold to Peter Marshall of Hollywood Squares. How could anger raise the curtain of his face?

“You want to know what he wants to do?” Mr. Ryan asked Jonathan Winters. “Use locust pegs and hand-split shingles for the roof. So a locust peg lasts two hundred years. He still thinks labor is thirty cents an hour.”

“Are you a builder?” Will Barrett asked Mr. Arnold.

“He once built a log cabin,” said Mr. Ryan. “But now by the time he finished the cabin the owners would have passed.”

“Anybody can go round up a bunch of hippies and knock up a chicken shack that won’t last ten years,” said Mr. Arnold. “What they do is punch on their little bitty machine and figure it out so the house will fall down same time as the people.”

He looked at the two old men curiously. “You can get hippies to work for you?” he asked Mr. Ryan.

“Sure you can. If you know which ones to pick. Some of them are tired of sitting around. I got me a real good gang. They work better than niggers.”

“You build log cabins?” he asked Mr. Arnold.

“I can notch up a house for you,” said Mr. Arnold to Rose Marie holding her rose.

“If you live long enough,” said Mr. Ryan. They all watched TV in silence.

“You give me my auger,” said Mr. Arnold suddenly and in a strong voice, “my ax, saw, froe, maul, mallet, and board brake and I’ll notch you up a house that’ll be here when this whole building’s fallen down — though you and your wife done real good to pay for it, otherwise we wouldn’t have nothing.”

“Tell him about using hog blood and horsehair in the red-clay chinking,” said Mr. Ryan.

“How much can you build a cabin for?” he asked Mr. Arnold.

“I built a four-room house with a creek-rock chimley for Roy Price down in Rabun County for two hundred and fifty dollars.”

“That was in nineteen-thirty for Christ’s sake,” said Mr. Ryan.

“It had overhanging dovetailing. I don’t use no hogpen notch, they’ll go out on you. I ain’t never made a chimley that never drawed. It’s all in how you make the scotch-back.”

For a long time he sat blinking between the two beds, hands stretched out to the two men as if it were still necessary to keep them apart. Then he rose suddenly, too suddenly, for his brain twisted and he almost fell down.

“Look out, potner,” said Mr. Arnold, grabbing him with his good hand, which was surprisingly strong.

“You all right, Mr. Barrett?” said Mr. Ryan.

“I’m fine.”

“Sure you are. You gon be out of here in no time, ain’t he, Erroll?”

“Sho,” said Mr. Arnold. “He’s a young feller. And he’s rich too.”

They both laughed loudly and looked at each other as if they had a secret.

“Yeah,” he said and left.

He was in the corridor, leaning against the wall. His head was clear but there was a sharp sweet something under his heart, a sense of loss, a going away.

He smiled to himself. It no longer mattered that he couldn’t remember everything.

Later that night he heard Tom Snyder ask someone: “What is your sexual preference?”

While he leaned against the wall, Kitty assaulted him again. Either she had been waiting for him, or she had left and thought of something else she had wanted to say and had come back.

“I just wanted to be sure you got one thing straight, big buddy.” She swung a purse, a kind of shoulder bag with a short strap. Had she had it earlier? Did she intend to hit him with it?

“What?” he said. From nearby rooms came the soft babble of TV sets tuned to different channels.

“When Allison goes back to Valleyhead, you are not to visit her. Do — you — understand — me?” With each word she jabbed him in the ribs with two fingers. There was a conjugal familiarity between them. He felt as if they had been married and divorced.

“Yes.”

“I know all about you and what’s wrong with you. You ought to be grateful you’re alive. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to get your hands on my little girl or her property. And I don’t mind telling you I’m grateful they’re keeping you here.”

“They are?”

“Now hear this, mister. I’m making it my business to see to it that that child doesn’t spend another night in that dump of a greenhouse. Alistair will be here late this afternoon. He and I are going to pick her up. If she won’t go, the sheriff says all we got to do is call him and he’ll deliver her to Valleyhead. And you better believe for her sake I’d do it.”

“Alistair?”

“Dr. Duk.”

“Oh yes. Dr. Duk.”

“You know him? Isn’t he wonderful?”

He was silent.

“You’re going to pick her up this afternoon?” he asked her.

“You got it, buster.” She blinked and, relenting a little, leaned toward him. “Now don’t look so — everything’s going to be fine. Now we got that straight. Now let’s get you straight. Listen to me, Will.”

“Okay.”

“Leslie knows what she is doing, as usual. You’re in the right place. You just stay here and take care of yourself, take your medicine and you’ll be all right. Take care of these old folks — I understand you’re going to be in charge here.”

“I am?” There was the not unpleasant sense of great plans being made for him.

“You’ll do just fine. And we’re not exactly spring chickens ourselves.” She softened and gave him a different kind of poke in the ribs. “When you feel better, come take me for a ride. No, I’ll take you. We’ll park at the golf course and you can hug me up, remember?”

“Remember what?”

“Hugging me up on the golf course.”

“Ah — no.”

He looked at his watch. If he could get away from Kitty, there was time to catch the beginning of the Morning Movie, which this morning was King Solomon’s Mines, which was no great movie, true, but whose beginning, with Deborah Kerr and a saturnine Allan Quartermain played by Stewart Granger, he savored somewhat nevertheless. Deborah was trying to talk him into helping her find her husband in a remote unexplored country.

Strange. He had not spent a week at St. Mark’s and already he was looking forward to the Morning Movie.

V

A PRINCELY BLACK WATUSI who looked seven feet tall stood on a rock holding a staff and gazing to the north. Somewhere beyond lay the treasures of King Solomon.

On one side of him sat Mr. Ryan, on the other Mr. Arnold. There had been time to prop Mr. Ryan in a wheelchair and push him to the game room with its forty-five-inch giant-screen Sony projector TV. He had invited Mr. Arnold to come along. Mr. Arnold had said nothing but trudged dutifully alongside Mr. Ryan’s chair after tucking a blanket around him lest he topple forward.

“That’s the biggest nigger I ever saw,” said Mr. Ryan, gazing at the majestic Watusi. “But I can tell you one thing. That ain’t no African chief. That’s a blue-gum nigger from Mississippi. I’d know them anywhere. I had them working for me in crews building condos from Point Clear to Sea Island. They used to be good workers till Roosevelt ruined them.”

Mr. Arnold stirred in his chair. The curtain of his face lifted a little. Leaning out and looking back, good eye winking, he spoke not to Mr. Ryan but to Barrett in the middle. “I’m here to tell you that Roosevelt was the onliest one ever done anything for us pore folks up in the hills.”

The old men began to argue about Roosevelt, who had been dead for thirty-five years.

“Okay, hold it,” he said and the two men subsided in good part to watch the movie.

All I have to do is tell them, he thought.

South Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, he thought, watching the great Watusi prince. And my father and his near death in the Georgia swamp and my near death and later his death in Mississippi and my being at his death and his wanting me to be there, his wanting me to see his brain exploded, expanding like the universe and plastering the attic with neurones like stars in the night sky. Why did he want me to be there? To show me what? Now I know. To show me the one sure sweet exodus. Yes, that’s it, that’s what he was first giving me in Georgia, then telling me and finally showing me, and now at last I know.

Even D’Lo knew. You po little old boy, what you going to do now? What chance you got in this world? Your daddy done kilt hisself and your mama dead and gone and here you come, po little Willie, what chance you got? She shaking her head and socking down the grits spoon, as he watched her narrow-eyed and even smiling a little, knowing she was wrong. Because he was he and they were they and here he was, free and sure and alert and sly. Nothing, no one, would ever surprise him again. Not they. They least of all. He was free of them.

His father had shot twice in the Georgia swamp, reloaded the Greener, and shot again. But the second shot was a double shot aimed at him. I thought he missed me and he did, almost, and I thought I survived and I did, almost. But now I have learned something and been surprised by it after all. Learned what? That he didn’t miss me after all, that I thought I survived and I did but I’ve been dead of something ever since and didn’t know it until now. What a surprise. They were right after all. He was right. D’Lo was right. What a surprise. But is it not also a surprise that discovering you’ve been dead all these years, you should now feel somewhat alive?

He killed me then and I did not know it. I even thought he had missed me. I have been living, yes, but it is a living death because I knew he wanted me dead. Am I entitled to live? I am alive by a fluke like the sole survivor of Treblinka, who lived by a fluke, but did not really feel entitled to live.

Ah, but there is a difference between feeling dead and not knowing it, and feeling dead and knowing it. Knowing it means there is a possibility of feeling alive though dead.

Very well, he was right, they were right, and I’ve learned at last that I am one of them. But I’m improving on them, am I not? I’ve found a better way than swallowing gun barrels: in short, I can shuffle off among friends and in comfort and Episcopal decorum and with good Christian folk to look after every need. Dear good Christian blacks eased me into this world, changed my diapers, and here they are again to change my diapers and ease me out, right?

Wrong.

So here is the giant-screen Sony projector TV and CBS day and night and some of the programs not half bad either, some of the programs in fact well done and amusing, yes, especially the sports and documentaries, yes? M*A*S*H ain’t bad. No?

No.

There was something he had to do. Getting up so quickly that his head spun and he staggered, he found himself caught by strong hands on both sides, Mr. Arnold’s good hand and both of Mr. Ryan’s hands. “You all right, Will?” one asked quickly and as quickly let go and looked away. They were his friends. What delicacy and gentleness they had!

“I’m fine. I have to go now.”

“You come back to visit us,” Mr. Ryan said. Mr. Arnold nodded.

Stooping he looked into their faces. Who said anything about leaving for good? How did they know when he had not quite known it himself?

He stood for a moment gazing at a tarantula in Deborah Kerr’s tent. Was there a whole world of meaning, of talking and listening, which took place everywhere and all the time and which no one paid attention to, at least not he?

He looked down at the new navy-blue wool dressing gown Leslie had bought for him and the Brooks Bros, pajamas and the Bean’s moose-hide slippers Marion had given him one Christmas.

“Yes. I’ll be back.”

Thirty minutes later he had changed into street clothes, walked to his Mercedes, and was spinning down the highway. The car drove better than ever and he did not see double. Carefully yet absently, without thinking that he did so, he had dressed for the first time in months in suit, shirt, and tie, laced up the plain-toed Florsheims he hadn’t worn since he left New York.

A pang struck suddenly at his heart. He had not taken his acid for twelve hours! What with the two fights and the movie, he had forgotten to go to the lab. His pH was up and the old heavy molecules were on the move again. Again the past rose to haunt him and the future rose to beckon to him. Things took on significance.

Parking at the club, he walked hands in pockets down the eighteenth fairway, feeling odd in his city clothes, kicking leaves like a businessman walking home across the Great Meadow in Central Park on a fine fall day. The soft-buttoned collar felt snug around his neck but he felt the cold through his thin socks. The fresh cold air felt good in his face.

When he came to the fence, he stretched up the top strand of wire to hear the guitar sound. He let it go slack, stretched it again harder, cocked an ear. The wire sang again, creaked, and popped against the musical bridge of the post. He let go. It sounded like a wire stretching against a fence post, no more. The near post was rotten. It broke and swayed toward him. He kicked it down and walked over the fence.

The girl and the dog were sitting on the stoop of the copper-roofed porch. The girl, holding her hand against the sun, didn’t recognize him at first, but the dog did. Over he came grinning, broad tail swinging his body like an alligator. The dog grinned, swallowed, his lip caught high on a tooth embarrassing him. He looked away. The girl touched her cheek with her fingers as he looked down at her. She was thin and sallow. Perhaps it was the man’s olive-drab parka she wore which looked as if it had been worn in the Aleutians in World War II.

“It’s you irregardless of who,” she said.

He laughed. “Irregardless of who what?”

“Of who I thought you were.”

“Who did you think I was?”

“That you were an Atlantean but taller, yet I also knew you by the glancing way, you know, of your face here.” She touched her temple.

“Atlantean or Atlantan?”

“Both. Atlantan businesswise with your suit, as I once saw Sarge come down the bullet in the Hyatt with attaché case and suit like that. But Atlantean also because of the way you came through the woods like you were coming from elsewhere not there.”

“Not where?”

“There. The golf links and the players. You were not one of them, you never were. I mean it is a question of where you are coming from, a consideration of the reality of it.”

“You mean where I actually came from this morning, don’t you?” He laughed and she nodded. He laughed because he knew this was her own expression even though it sounded like local gypsy talk: like man, where are you coming from? “I came here from the hospital.”

She stood up and touched his forehead like a mother checking a child for fever. “You seem fine. Are you?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“Yes. But I’m going back and down again, I think, but that’s all right.”

“No, it’s not. I want a good look at you.” He took off her Aleutian parka and stood her in the sunny warm corner of the porch.

For a while she gazed straight ahead at his necktie like a child. Then not like a child she put her head to one side in order to see his eyes from the corner of hers.

“I’m so—” she said, shaking her head. Nothing else moved about her except her hands at her side, which turned out like the beginning of a shrug.

“Yes,” he said and he was kissing her mouth, she flying up at him and cleaving to him, leaving the ground surely.

“There is something I need,” he told her.

“Moi aussi,” she said. “Entirely apart from the needs of society and the family as a unit, or the group.”

“Yes, apart from that.”

“The truth is,” he said when they were sitting together in the sun, “I wish to speak to you of several things. To begin with, my pH has been corrected and I feel fine. Secondly, I am in love, I think.”

“Me too.”

They kissed again. Her mouth was sweet and tart. His tongue went in her. Her tongue, surprised, was taken aback, then ventured forward, parting his lips shyly. Kissing her was like entering a new and happy land.

“What have you been eating?” he asked her.

“Pawpaws. They’re best after a frost.”

“Let me taste.”

They kissed again. They were sitting now. He noticed that no matter how they kissed, standing or sitting, her body somehow fronted and flew against him.

“Kissing you is a delight but not a rounded and closed-off delight,” she said.

“No?”

“No, it is an opening-out delight and a wanting. Kissing is like now fine, more is better, and what about it?”

“I know.”

“Your tongue is welcome but you, that is, the salient you, would be even more so.”

“I know, I know.”

“Was there ever such a wanting?” she asked.

“Not that I remember.”

“For true?”

“For true.”

“Oh say so.”

“I want you.”

“Oh fine. The word is go. It is, that is, yes I’m saying.”

“I understand.”

“Ah ha, it is more than evident you do,” she said.

“I know, I know.”

“Are you fond of me besides?” she asked.

“Yes, yes. I must be sure you’re all right. Are you?”

“Similarly and moreover. Do you feel a smiling ease with me as well as a sweetness for me in the deep regions?”

“Yes, in the deep regions, a sweetness, as well as the smiling ease.”

“Is it possible that there is such a life?”

“As what?”

“As a life of smiling ease with someone else and the sweetness for you deep in me and play and frolic and dear sweet love the livelong day, even at four o’clock in the afternoon turning the old yellow green-glade lonesomeness into a being with you at ease not a being with you at unease?”

“Yes, it’s possible.”

“Could such a thing be? What a miracle, and we haven’t even mentioned the nights.”

“No, we haven’t.”

“Imagine ten hours of darkness every night!”

“Yes, imagine.”

“What will we do?”

“Whatever you like.”

“Then you are fond of me?”

“Yes.”

“Let us not speak of love yet, I’m not sure of the word.”

“No, we won’t speak of love, though I feel that in the future we might.”

“Similarly and moreover.”

“Moreover what?”

“Moreover a continuity is beginning for the first time but it is not climbing on me.”

“Me either. Something else is also clear to me.”

“Over and beyond.”

“Yes, over and beyond. It is this. We need each other for different things.”

“What is the manifestation of the difference?”

“I need you for hoisting and you need me for interpretation.”

“Say what?”

“I fall down from time to time and you are very good at hoisting. It would be pleasant to have you around to give me a hand,” he said.

“The pleasure would be mine. In short, I’ll do it. I am so happy about your pH.”

“By the same token, I remember everything and you forget most things. I’ll be your memory. Then too, your language is somewhat unusual. But I understand it. In fact, it means more than other people’s. Thus, I could both remember for you and interpret for you.”

“Our lapses are not due to synapses.”

“No, they are as they should be.”

“The implication of your consideration is that people think I’m crazy.”

“That is correct. Moreover, for this very reason they are coming for you this afternoon.”

“And you don’t.”

“Don’t think you’re crazy? No. Now.”

“Yes?”

“Let’s sit here by the dog. There are some things which I think you must do. Moreover, it is a pleasure to sit here beside you. Dear sweet Lord, what a pleasure. There are many things I don’t know. But certain things have become clear to me as far as you are concerned. Therefore, I am taking it upon myself to do what I seldom do, even in the practice of law: tell somebody what to do. I also think you are ready to be told.”

“The feeling is reciprocal. I am listening.”

“The pawpaws are very good.”

“Yes.”

“However, the taste of them in your mouth is even better.”

“The pleasure is mine.”

“For true?”

“For true.”

He kissed her again. Again she flew against him, from the side which was not possible, yet with no trouble at all.

“Now here is what you must do.”

“Yes?”

“Do you wish to go back to Valleyhead?”

“No. Assuredly not. Not ever. Never.”

“Very well. You don’t have to. Dr. Duk and your mother and possibly the sheriff are coming for you later this afternoon, but you don’t have to go.”

“I don’t?”

“No.”

“Who says?”

“I say.”

“Let’s leave now.” She buried her face in his shirt. “The cave! Let’s go in the cave!”

He laughed. “No. We don’t have to go in the cave. The cave is over and done with. We can live up here. How would you like to begin your life?”

“It is time. How would you like to begin yours?”

“I would like to.”

“It’s about time.”

“Yes.”

“Is it possible for you?”

“Yes. Now listen to me.”

“I am.”

“Pack a few things.”

“I only have a few things.”

“Don’t worry, we can buy some more clothes later. There will be plenty of time but I want you to leave here within ten minutes. The sheriff’s coming for you. Don’t worry, this is your property and you can come back and live here if you want to. So is the island. But go get ready. I’m taking you to the Holiday Inn for a few days.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let me get my NATO knapsack. Do you recall how Perry Mason would stash away a client in an obscure hotel under a false name for a few days?”

“Yes.”

“I read two hundred Perry Masons at Valleyhead. It was beguiling to think of the client living there with Delia Street in the Beverly Arms on Sepulveda.”

“Yes, but never mind that. Let’s get out of here. I want to get you some hot food, a hot bath, and some clean clothes. You’re too thin.”

“Do I also smell bad?”

“You smell like peat moss and army clothes. I think I’ll buy you a dress. Imagine you in a dress! While you take your bath, I’ll get a hot plate from the Holiday Inn buffet. They close at three, so hurry up. Then while you eat, I have a short errand to run. Then I will have something to tell you.”

“How about my dog?”

“Leave him here with some food. We’ll come back for him. He’ll discourage visitors. He knows you’ll be back, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. Let’s go.”

2

The room at the Holiday Inn was second floor rear. It was warm from the afternoon sunlight. The balcony overlooked a parking lot, a strip of grass, a chain-link fence, a meadow to the west where Holstein cows grazed, and beyond, the violet hulk of the Smokies, tall and dim enough to be a cloud.

While she bathed, he fetched two plates from the buffet, Tennessee pork sausage, sweet potatoes, butter beans, corn on the cob, ten pats of butter, corn bread, buttermilk, and apple pie. This was no ordinary Holiday Inn. When she came out of the bathroom in her pajamas, the very pajamas she had worn in her escape from Valleyhead, places were set at the round black woodlike table next to the drape, which was drawn enough to show a strip of sunlit meadow.

She began to eat. She ate fast and ate it all, gazing dry-eyed at the slot of meadow, sky, and violet mountain.

“I have an errand to run,” he told her, standing and gazing down at her, hands in pockets. “I have to see Slocum about something. I’ll be back in an hour.”

She nodded as she finished her apple pie.

“Take a nap.”

She nodded.

At the door he turned to look at her.

“I just realized something,” he said. “I don’t have an address. I don’t live anywhere.”

She smiled. “Do not trouble yourself unnecessarily. That is not necessarily unfavorable. Many people have addresses, yet observe them.”

“Right.”

“However, I should like eventually to have an address.”

“Yes.”

“Could we live together?” she asked.

“I think so, yes. At an address.”

“What joy.”

“Yes.”

3

It took half an hour.

He asked only two questions, and though they were unusual, Slocum blinked only once and answered them readily, looking at him closely only when he walked in, registering his dark suit with a nod and motioning him to a chair.

They sat in a pleasant office smelling of law books and balsam. A big window let onto a view of the mountain with its skewed face and one eye out of place.

“You’ve left the hospital,” said Slocum.

“Yeah.”

“You okay?”

“I think so.”

“Okay. What’s up?”

Did I once practice law, he wondered, and he remembered that he had, not so much from the smell of the books as from Slocum’s practiced coolness and his resolve not to be surprised. He smiled. He had been observing doctors and lawyers lately. Both were good at keeping their own counsel and seeming to know something. He hoped Slocum did.

“Two things. First thing: are you familiar with the North Carolina Revised Statutes relating to the rights of patients pursuant to involuntary admissions under the new Mental Health Law?”

“More or less, counselor.” Slocum’s voice took on the familiar ironic gravity of talk among lawyers and his eyes shifted slightly, lining up with his, taking in the view with him.

“I take it that no director of a treatment facility shall prohibit any mentally ill person from applying for conversion of involuntary admission status to a voluntary admission status.”

“That is correct.”

They both gazed at the mountain, which with its bare trees looked like a moonfaced man with a stubble.

“I wish you to prepare an application for an injunction from old Judge Jenkins enjoining said director, a Dr. Alistair Duk, from detaining the person in question whose name I shall presently give you. As a precautionary measure I wish you also to apply for a writ of habeas corpus for the same person in the event of involuntary detention, say by Dr. Duk with the assistance of the sheriff — though I think such an eventuality highly unlikely. Finally, I wish you to represent the same person in a hearing to establish her mental and legal competence. Vance will bring in a psychiatrist from Duke.”

“No problem. Is that it?” Slocum asked the pied face of the mountain.

“No, that’s not it.”

“All right.”

“As you must know, I am not a member of the North Carolina bar.”

“I am aware of that. Not even an illustrious member of the New York bar can apply for a writ here. You got to use the local yokels.”

“That’s true. But that is not why I mentioned it.”

“Why did you mention it?”

“I intend to take the North Carolina bar examination.”

“Ah.” Slocum’s head turned but not enough for their eyes to meet. “You going to run me out of business?”

“No. I’m going to bring you in some business. How would you like the Peabody business?”

“I would like that.”

“You can have it. There is something I want.”

“I gathered there was.”

“I want to work with you. You’ve often asked me to. Very well, I will, but not as a partner. I’ve forgotten too much. As a clerk. At first.”

Now Slocum did look at him. “Why?”

“I want to.”

“I see that. I had figured you figured you quit too early. But aren’t you a little overqualified for this two-bit practice?”

“I’m just telling you what I want. You just tell me whether you will go with it. I shall be very pleased to trace titles, file petitions, pass acts of sale, do courthouse runs. If you don’t employ me, I’ll open up next door and close you down.”

“I do believe you would sandbag me, just like you did in golf.”

“What do you say?”

“You want me to give you an answer now?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. My answer is that if you really do get around to taking the bar exam and—”

“—and pass?”

“And pass. And then if you feel up to it—”

“—if I’m still alive?”

“If you’re still alive and kicking—”

“Yes?”

“You’re on.”

“Okay.”

Slocum did not move when he rose. “You know something,” he said to the mountain. “I always did want a Wall Street lawyer to shelve my books and do courthouse runs for me.”

“You got one.”

4

She was asleep when he returned, no sign of her but a tousle of hair and a curve of hip under the motel chenille. The sinking sun made a yellow stripe up the burlap wallpaper.

Her plate was clean. Her NATO knapsack hung from a hook in the alcove. He walked around the bed to see her. He stood looking down at her, hands in pockets. She slept like a child, face turned into the pillow, lips mashed open and making a wet spot on the cotton.

Suddenly he was tired, as tired as he had ever been in his life. Could it be that all these years he had not really slept or slept as lightly as a soldier on patrol? Could it be that not having an address, not living anywhere, meant that one was free to sleep?

Taking off his jacket, and even as he hung it up, he was, alertly he thought and casting ahead as was his wont, looking around for his suitcase, which must have his pajamas, when he realized that he had no suitcase and therefore no pajamas. Where do I go when I leave here? he wondered, yawning and turning. The gyroscope in his head resisted the turn but not unpleasantly. His pH was up. Great haunted molecules boomed around in his brain. A smell of old newspapers and flour paste and Octagon soap rose in his nostrils. Was this Georgia?

Though it was not late, the sun had already touched the top of the violet mountains. It glittered as if it had struck sparks from rock. The slot in the drapes showed a corner of the Holiday Inn property. The corner was empty, no pool, no lounges, no tables, no cars, no children’s playground. Yet the grass was well trimmed up to the fence separating it from the pasture. He wondered how many people had set foot in this empty corner over the years. Perhaps none.

Yawning and moving slowly against his gyroscope, he undressed to his underwear shorts, closed the drapes on the sunset, and got into bed. Allison was in the middle of the bed and so inert and heavy with sleep that there was no ready means of making himself comfortable except by fitting himself around her.

Suddenly bethinking himself, he jumped up and turning slowly like a ship heading up in a gale found the Do Not Disturb sign next to the Gideon Bible and hung it outside. He hooked up the chain and shot the dead bolt.

Inert or not, she was not so unyielding that he could not put his arms around her and hold her cupped like a child in his sideways lap. Smiling in her neck, he gave her some hugs. What made him happy was the thought of her sleeping so soundly, having eaten so well, resting and digesting and fattening and restoring herself even as he held her. Already the corn bread was sticking to her ribs. Her warm breath blew regularly against his arm.

5

You packed the guns in the trunk of the car, remember?

Yes. No. Leslie did.

Go get them.

No.

Come, it’s the only way, the one quick sure exit of grace and violence and beauty. Come, believe me, it’s the ultimate come, not the first come which we all grow up dreaming about and which is never what we hoped, is it, but near enough to know there is something better, isn’t it, the second, last and ultimate come to end all comes.

No.

Come, what else is there? What other end if you don’t make the end? Make your own bright end in the darkness of this dying world, this foul and feckless place, where you know as well as I that nothing ever really works, that you were never once yourself and never will be or he himself or she herself and certainly never once we ourselves together. Come, close it out before it closes you out because believe me life does no better job with dying than with living. Close it out. At least you can do that, not only not lose but win, with one last splendid gesture defeat the whole foul feckless world. You’ll do better than I, you’re already in a better place, you a placeless person in a placeless place, a motel surely a better place for taking off than a swamp or an attic, yes.

No.

Go like a man, for Christ’s sake, a Roman, here’s your sword.

No.

Very well. Then it will close you out, since you’re already impregnated with death, a slight case of sickness in the head making you crazier even than you are, smelling the past, nigger cabins, pin-oak flats, not even knowing where you are, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, without looking out the window to check the mountain, and from here on out nowhere to go but down.

No.

Very well, let it close you out with the drools and the shakes and your mouth fallen open, head nodding away and both hands rolling pills. But you’ll never even get that far because you’ve got my genes and you know better.

Yes.

Then get up and go out to the car and get it and go to the empty corner of grass and fence where nobody’s been. We like desert places.

All right.

It was dark.

His head as he turned to rise seemed to shift on its axis like the great world itself.

He rose and dressed in the dark, walked out to the Mercedes, unlocked the trunk, took out the leather case containing the Greener and the holster containing the Luger. It was a cold starry night. The mists of summer and fall had all blown away. He walked down the highway holding the Greener like a businessman with a briefcase. When he reached the overlook the Holiday Inn looked over, he did not even pause but swung the case like a discus, the throw turning him around and heading him back. He did not hear the Greener hit bottom. As an afterthought, he pitched the Luger back over his shoulder and went away without listening.

6

It was light.

“Wake up. What’s wrong? What is it?”

“What is what?” Instantly he was awake and unsurprised.

“Who were you talking to? What were you saying about Georgia? Why do you want to go to Georgia? Where did you go?”

“Outside for a walk.”

She must have gotten up. The drapes were open a little. The morning light poured in. The Holsteins were grazing beyond the chain-link fence. There was something pleasant about the unused ungrazed Holiday Inn corner. Her pajamas hung in the alcove.

“Come here,” he said.

“I’m here,” she said. “In the bed. By you.”

“Come here.”

“Well, you’ll have to straighten up. You were all bent over, covering your head with your arms like somebody was after you. Were they?”

“No. I don’t know. Now.”

“Yes. That’s better. Now.”

“Yes, it is.” Her skin was like silk against him.

“There you are,” she said.

“Yes.”

“It’s you.”

“Yes.”

“You against me, yet not really opposed.”

“Yes. That is, no.”

“Put your arms around me in addition.”

“They are around you.”

“They sure are.”

When she came against him from the side, it was with the effect of flying up to him from below like a little cave bat and clinging to him with every part of her.

They were lying on their sides facing each other.

“Come here,” he said.

“I’m here.”

“Now.”

“Yes.”

There was an angle but it did not make trouble. Entering her was like turning a corner and coming home.

“Oh my,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That’s you for true.”

“Yes.”

“This was not in the book.”

“What book?”

“No books, no running brooks, just you.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe this,” she said. “I don’t, I don’t.”

“It’s true,” he said.

“Oh my, what is happening? I think I’m going to have a fit.”

“Yes.”

“What is going to happen?”

“You’re going to have a fit.”

When he woke up, she was gazing at him. “Were you having a dream?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were talking about — loving.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Was it love like this?”

“No, not like this. I’ll take this.”

“Don’t ever let me go,” she said. “Now I know what it is I wanted. Before I only wanted.”

“I won’t let you go.”

“Ah, do you want to know what it is?”

“What is it?”

“It is a needfulness that I didn’t know until this moment that I needed. What a mystification.”

“Yes, it is a mystification.”

“Don’t you think you better get up and close the curtain?”

“Not necessarily. The consequences of not closing the curtain are neither here nor there and in any case not direful.”

“Are you making fun of me?” she said.

“Yes.”

They laughed. It was the first time he had heard her laugh so, a tickled hooting laugh, the way a girl laughs with other girls.

“Oh my,” she said after a while. “Perhaps that was it, after all.”

“It?”

“Yes, you know, it.”

“Yes.”

“Would you have ever believed?” she asked someone, perhaps herself, absently.

“Yes, I would have believed,” he said.

“Oh my,” she said again presently. “It is now evident that whatever was wrong with me is now largely cured. Quel mystery.”

“I have an idea,” he said after a while.

“What?”

“Let’s stay together. I do not wish to leave you again.”

“Me neither. I, that is, you.”

“Me too.”

“Well well,” she said later. Her back and legs were strong as a man’s. “That was not in the book either.”

“What book?”

“The pine-tree book. Or the picture book.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“I’ll tell you what let’s do,” he said.

“What?”

“Let’s get a house and live in it.”

“Okay. Can we make love like that much of the time?”

“As much as you like.”

“For true?”

“For true. Would you like to marry?”

“Uh, to marry might be to miscarry.”

“Not necessarily. I’ll practice law. You grow things in your greenhouse. We can meet after work, have supper. We can walk the Long Trail or go to the beach on your island. Then go to bed irregardless.”

“Perhaps crash in a shelter?”

“What?” he said, laughing. “Crash?”

“Sure.”

“Okay.”

“It is a good regime. Perhaps with you to marry would not miscarry. Is it legal to do this at four o’clock in the afternoon?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Now I know what was wrong with four o’clock in the afternoon.”

“It would be nice to have two children and walk to school with them in the morning.”

“Yes,” she said.

They stayed in bed all day and all night except for meals, loving and laughing, frolicking, exchanging many a kiss and smacks on the ass while carts creaked outside and maids tapped on doors with keys. Frowning, she peered closely at his cheek and squeezed a blackhead. He straddled her thighs and rubbed her back, sore from hoisting, pressed his thumbs in the two dips at the bottom of her spine, marveling at how she was made. Each tended to the other, kneading and poking sore places. She examined him like a mother examining a child, close, stretching skin, her mouth open, grabbing hair to pull his head over to see his neck, her eyes slightly abulge with concentration, checking his cave wounds, picking at scabs. When her eyes happened to meet him, they softened and went deep. Eyes examining are different from eyes meeting eyes. As she would say, a look at a book is not a look into a look. Then she smiled and flew against him again. Her supple bent-back strength and coverage astounded him.

7

She had brought his razor from the greenhouse. It felt good to shave.

After they dressed, they ate a huge breakfast of grits and bacon and scrambled eggs in the Buccaneer Tavern, came back to the room and opened the drapes to the morning and the Smoky Mountains, which humped up like a blue whale in the clear sky. He sat her down across the round black woodlike table.

“Let’s get down to business.”

“Oh, look at you in your dark suit.”

“Yes?”

“You look nice around the neck and head.”

“Thank you. You look good all over.”

“Come here,” she said.

“I’m here.”

“You’re nice here around the ears, too.”

“Thank you.”

“Let’s go to bed.”

“But we’re dressed.”

“Undress.”

“Okay.”

Afterwards she said: “Good gosh.”

“Yes.”

Again at the table he said: “Now ah—”

“The business.”

“Yes. Let us speak of one or two things.”

“Right.”

It had come to pass, for reasons which neither could have said, that he now knew what needed to be done and could say so and she could heed him, head slightly cocked, listening carefully. She looked like a survivor on the mend. Could it be that her thin face was already fuller?

“Here is what I intend to do,” he told her, “and what I hope you will wish to do. If you do not wish to do so, will you tell me?”

“Assuredly.”

“I propose that we marry. Wait. I don’t think I am saying this right.”

“No.”

“Perhaps I’d better ask you.”

“Very well.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

“It is possible that though marriage in these times seems for some reason to be a troubled, often fatal, arrangement, we might not only survive it but revive it.”

“Yes, we could survive and revive it.”

“I presently have very little income of my own. I’m not counting Marion’s estate, which I inherited from Marion but which I won’t use. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it — figure out what Marion would want — something. Therefore, I shall be working. You own valuable property. I propose that for the present we rent or buy a garden home. They are somewhat like motels but not unpleasantly so. You need to get out of that greenhouse and eat better. Garden homes are convenient and have pleasant views. We shall need a place to live until we build a house. I’ll look up the Associate at Emerald Isles and give him a job making home loans. He’ll be sick of isometrics and TV.”

“What’s wrong with staying here?”

“Nothing. But we might need more than one room eventually.”

“That’s true. Let’s come back here every weekend.”

“Okay. Now you might wish to finish your greenhouse and develop your property here or on the island — perhaps build log cabins on ten- or twelve-acre plots. I have two friends, one a contractor, the other a cabin notcher, who though old and maimed can still do excellent work, I think. It would be a pleasant business.”

“Yes. I think I want to finish my greenhouse and perhaps build others against the same ridge and make use of the same warm cave air.”

“A good idea. It could be an excellent business.”

“If I could find enough men to work for me, any men who are willing, old men. But that’s impossible.”

“No, I know some good men. Old men but good.”

“Do you know what a head of lettuce costs at the A & P?” she asked him.

“No.”

“A dollar and fifty cents.”

“Is that a lot?”

She looked at him. “Yes, and three small tomatoes cost a dollar. I could make money.”

“Yes. I also have another friend who is an excellent gardener but has nothing to do but water pine trees.”

“Hire him. I have a friend at Valleyhead I would like to get out. She would be glad to work for someone who can tell her what to do. She needs that. Moreover, she’s a good bookkeeper.”

“Can you tell her what to do?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. As for myself, I think I’ll resume the practice of law in a small way if my health will permit it. I have an incurable mental condition but it can be controlled as long as my pH is okay.”

“How is your pH now?”

“Fine.”

Actually, his pH was up again. Fewer hydrogen ions were zipping around the heavy alkaline molecules sweet with memory and desire. Perhaps a slight case of Hausmann’s Syndrome was better than none at all.

“I am sure of it. There is nothing serious wrong with you.” Frowning, she leaned over and took hold of his flank in her rough holster’s hand. It was odd how she was like and unlike Kitty. “Our cases are similar. Nowadays many psychosomatic conditions can be cured. I was reading in the National Observer at the A & P about the supremacy of mental attitude over physical conditions.”

“Yes. Whatever it is, I think it is under control. I can feel it going away.”

He did feel good. The twisting in his head now felt like a scar contracting. Did he imagine it, or wasn’t his brain lesion shriveling like a crab in acid? There was a feint smell of smoke high in his nostrils and the sinuses in front of his brain.

“Another thing,” he said. “What do you think of our having a child and enrolling him or her in the Linwood elementary school?”

“I think well of that.”

“I could drive him to school every morning and he could ride the school bus home.”

“Or she, as the case may be. I thought you wanted two.”

“Oh yes. I had forgotten. Could it be that now you’re doing the remembering?”

“Could be.”

“Now let’s go to town and do some shopping. You need some clothes. I have to go to St. Mark’s.”

“To get your stuff?”

“Yes. Then we’ll find a villa or condo or a garden home. And I need to talk to someone.”

“All right. I’m going back to the greenhouse.”

“Why?”

“I have to get my dog.”

“Very well. I think it’s safe. I don’t think they will be looking for you now. We’ve been here for two days, haven’t we?”

“Or one long night. Or both. I’m not sure.”

“Very well. But don’t stay long.”

“All right.”

She wet her thumbs with her tongue and smoothed his eyebrows. He was going to town.

8

Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ryan were lying in bed watching Search for Tomorrow. A curtain was drawn around the third bed. It seemed best to wait for a commercial break before putting his question. When it came, he turned down the volume and spoke fast.

“Excuse me, but this is important.”

The two men gazed at him.

“YOU fellows want a job?”

They gazed at each other.

“I have some property and I want it developed right,” he said, talking fast, so he wouldn’t interfere with Search for Tomorrow. “I want well-built log cabins, enough land for privacy, and gardens, and at a price young couples, singles, and retired couples can afford. Not two hundred and fifty dollars maybe but less than twenty-five thousand. Mr. Ryan here has the know-how about financing, subdividing, contracting, and so forth. And he has the crew. Mr. Arnold has the building technique. What I want is for Mr. Arnold to work with Mr. Ryan’s crew and teach them how to notch up a cabin, perhaps with more modern methods. I have plenty of timber, creek rocks, and flagstone. I’ll handle the legal work. I figure we can build and sell cabins on ten acres of land and come out fine at twenty-five thousand.” The commercial was almost over. “What do you say?”

The two old men looked at each other.

“Whereabouts we going to live?” asked Mr. Arnold.

“Wherever you like. Here. Or Mr. Arnold could notch up a cabin for the two of you.”

“What, me live with that old peckerwood?” said Mr. Ryan.

“Hail fire,” said Mr. Arnold.

“Look, I don’t care where you live. I’m making you a proposition. This is a good deal all around. We’ll incorporate — that’s one thing I know how to do — and share the profits. What do you say? Mr. Ryan, can you still get a crew?”

“Slick, Tex, Tomás, and Vishnu came by to see me last week. All of them said they wished they still worked for me.”

“Two of them looked like gypsies, the other two looked like women,” said Mr. Arnold.

“They may look funny,” said Mr. Ryan, “but they can outwork niggers. How am I going to get around?” He slapped the flat sheet where his leg should have been. “I’m missing two feet and one leg.”

“Any way you can. You figure it out.”

“They make cars now you can drive with your hands,” said Mr. Ryan, answering his own question.

“There you go. The corporation can afford one,” said Will Barrett. “Mr. Arnold, are you willing to teach this crew what to do?”

“All they got to do is watch me and keep out of my way. What land we talking about?”

“The Kemp property, over by the country club.”

“There’s plenty of good timber there. All you got to do is keep me in logs — and somebody to pick up on one end.”

“You willing to use cement chinking instead of river clay and hog blood?” Mr. Ryan asked the silent TV screen. Neither of the men seemed to notice that Search for Tomorrow was playing without sound.

“I chinked a house on Dog Mountain with cement. Ain’t nothing wrong with cement. You just bring your boys and keep me in straight logs. We going to need some boys to get the roof up. It takes several to mortise and peg the peaks. I can’t climb no roof but I can show them how to split shingles and put the sap sides together. You going to need a forty-five-degree angle on your roof and a halfway lap to keep out leaks.”

“Your roof? Whose roof?” asked Mr. Ryan. “I’ll show you some composition roofing that comes by the roll,” Mr. Ryan told the TV, “but it looks real good. I think you’ll like it. It saves labor. You’re talking about splitting shingles by hand, I mean Jesus Christ.”

“It sounds like tar paper but I’ll look at it.”

It was a good time to leave. He turned up the volume on Search for Tomorrow.

There was a commotion around the third bed. The curtain was pulled back. Two orderlies were trying to get an old woman onto a hospital stretcher. The woman was sitting on the edge of the bed and crying. She was no larger than a child but her ankles, clad in men’s socks, were as thick as small trees. A great vessel moved in her neck in a complex out-of-sync throbbing. Her eyes were glossy and unblinking in her round heavy face. Tears ran down her cheek and caught in the dark down of her lip.

“Oh, I’m so afraid,” she said loudly with a little smile and a shrug. She pronounced afraid afred, like ladies in Memphis and Vicksburg.

“What you scared of, honey?” asked one orderly, a giant black woman big as an old black mammy but young.

“I’m afraid I’m never going to leave the hospital. Oh, I’m so afraid.”

“You be all right, honey,” said the black woman, her eyes absentminded, and put a black-and-pink hand on the patient’s swollen leg. “You gon be fine, bless Jesus.”

Will Barrett was standing at the foot of the bed.

“Oh, hello, Will,” said the patient with the same smile and shrug. “Oh, Will, I hate to leave here!”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “I—” Oh Lord, I am supposed to know her. Was she an aunt? No, but she was one of ten or twelve ladies from Memphis or Mississippi he should have recognized. He made as if to give the orderlies a hand.

As he came close to her, he could hear her heart, which raced and rumbled so hard it shook her thick body.

He took her arm. It was not necessary. The other orderly, a sorrel-colored man who wore his mustache and short-sleeved smock like Sugar Ray Robinson, picked up the woman and in one swift gentle movement swung her onto the stretcher. He was an old-style dude who still wore a conk! He chewed gum like Sugar Ray. Where did he come from? Beale Street twenty years ago? After he centered the woman on the stretcher (ah, I know what that feels like, to be taken care of by strong quick sure hands at one’s hips) and buckled the straps, Sugar Ray leaned close to her.

“Listen, lady, I’m gerng to tell you something.” (That was the difference between them, the two orderlies, that gerng, his slightly self-conscious uptown correction of the black woman.) “The doctors know what they know, but I have noticed something too. I can tell about people and I’m gerng to tell you. We taking you to the hospital in Asheville and we coming to get you Tuesday and bringing you back here and that’s the truth, ain’t that right, Rosie?” And he smiled, a brilliant white-and-gold Sugar Ray smile, yet his eyes had not changed because they didn’t have to. The patient couldn’t see his eyes.

“Sho,” said Rosie, her eye not quite meeting Sugar Ray’s eye and not quite winking. “You gon be fine, honey.”

“Ah,” said the patient and, closing her eyes, slumped against the straps like a baby in its harness.

Then how does it add up in the economy of giving and getting, he wondered, that the two orderlies cared nothing (or did they?) for the old woman, that even in the very act of their offhand reassurances to her they were probably cooking up something between themselves, that they, the orderlies, who had no reason to give her anything at all, gave it because it was so little to give and so much for her to get? 2¢ = $5? How?

Does goodness come tricked out so as fakery and fondness and carrying on and is God himself as sly?

In the hall he stood gazing after the three of them. Young big black mammy, Sugar Ray, and the sick woman, the great machinery of her heart socking away so hard at her neck, it made her nod perceptibly as if she understood and agreed, yes, yes, yes.

9

Mr. Eberhart was watering small pine trees with a green plastic mop pail. He walked in a fast limping stoop from tree to tree. Standing with one leg crooked and with his long-billed cap fitting tightly on his head, he looked like a heron.

“Why are you watering these pine trees? It rained yesterday.”

“It didn’t rain enough. They planted these seedlings too early. The rains don’t come till after Christmas.”

“Didn’t you used to run a nursery in Asheville?”

“Atlanta and Asheville. For forty years.”

“How would you like to run a greenhouse now? Perhaps several greenhouses.”

“What kind of greenhouse?” He had not yet looked up.

“An old kind. About fifty by twenty-five feet. No fans, no automatic ventilation, no thermostats.”

“That’s the kind I started with. You cain’t build them like that now. What kind of heat? That’s what put me out of business. My gas bill was nine hundred dollars a month in the winter.”

“No gas bill. No electric bill. No utilities. It runs on cave air.”

“Cave air,” said Mr. Eberhart, watching water disappear into the sandy soil. Now he looked up.

“That’s right. Cave air. A steady flow winter and summer. A steady sixty degrees. Is that too cold?”

“Cave air. I’ve heard of that around here.”

“Is that too cold?”

“Not for lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, or parsley. Or some orchids. What is your monthly utility cost?”

“Zero. Unless you want to live there and turn on the lights.”

“Cave air.” He couldn’t get it through his head.

“Did you say orchids?”

“Sure.” He put down the can, adjusted his cap, picked up a handful of soil. Standing alongside Barrett, he spoke quickly in an East Tennessee accent. He gave his long-billed cap a tug. They could have been a couple of umpires.

“You can grow your cymbidium cooler than that, or laelia. But you don’t want to repot your cymbidium.”

“Okay.”

“I got my own way of growing vanda — that’s what you call Hawaiian orchid. Don’t nobody know about it. I’ve applied for a patent. You’re a lawyer. You want to know what it is?”

“Sure.”

Mr. Eberhart moved closer. “I use chestnut chips and a steady temperature. Most people think they got to have seventy to eighty degrees. But what vanda don’t like and you got to watch is your sudden temperature change. And up here you can give them full sunlight.”

“We got plenty of both, chestnut and steady temperature.”

“That’s where your money is.”

“Where’s that?” Arms folded, they gazed out over the St. Mark’s putting green.

“In orchids.”

“Is that right?”

“You want to know who buys orchids now?”

“Yes.”

“The colored. I sold five hundred corsages to one colored-debutante ball.”

“You want the job? I can get you some help.”

“Sure. When do I start?”

“Next week.”

“Okay.” He went back to watering the pines but called after him. “I’ll tell you where else the money is.”

“Where?”

“Lettuce. If we got the room.”

“We got the room. Do you know what a head of lettuce costs you up here?”

“No.”

“A dollar and a half.”

Mr. Eberhart blinked. “Did you say cave air?”

“Yes.”

“I got to see that.”

10

Before he found Father Weatherbee in the attic, watching trains, he was stopped by a big florid fellow wearing an L & N engineer’s cap. The man had a nose like J. P. Morgan — there were noses on his nose — and wore a double-breasted blue blazer with brass buttons.

“Aren’t you Will Barrett?”

“Yes sir.”

“Boykin Ramsay of Winston-Salem. Reynolds Tobacco.”

“Yes sir.”

“You own this place.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t charge enough.”

“Is that right?”

“I understand you’re going to start a Council on Aging here.”

“I hadn’t heard of it. It sounds like my daughter’s idea — I was thinking of starting something else — farming in cave air.”

“I’m eighty-five years old and I’m here to tell you I don’t need any goddamn Council on Aging.”

“I see.”

Mr. Ramsay grabbed him around the shoulders and pulled him close. “Come here, Will,” he said with a heavy but not unpleasant bourbon breath. “I want to tell you something.”

“Okay. I’m here.”

“I’m going to tell you the secret of getting old.”

“Okay.”

“Money.”

“Money?”

“Making money and keeping it. If you work hard and make money and keep it, I’m here to tell you you don’t need any goddamn Council on Aging or educating the public and all that shit. That’s how come the Chinese were right or used to be. They kept their money and kept the respect of their families. That’s the secret.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I’m married to the sorriest damn woman in North Carolina and I got three sons who the only reason they are working is I won’t support them. They’re all waiting for me to die and I’m just mean enough not to. I came up here to take care of myself. Will, you be a mean old son of a bitch like me and you’ll have a long happy life.”

“Is that right?”

“And I’m also up here to play golf. I hear you’re a real sandbagger.”

“Well—”

“Let me tell you something, Will.”

“All right.”

“I’m eighty-five years old and I play eighteen holes of golf every day. I line up nine mini-bottles of square Black Jack Daniel’s on the tray of the golf cart when I start out and knock back one on every other tee and I break ninety. Council on Aging my ass. How you going to counsel me?”

“Well, I wasn’t.”

“Come on down to my room and I’ll counsel you. I got some Wild Turkey.”

He looked at his watch. It was three-thirty. She might still be at the greenhouse. Suppose she went back to the greenhouse and forgot about time and got becalmed by her four o’clock feeling. Suppose they came to get her. What would he do if they took her away?

“I just thought of something. I have to go out for a while.”

Mr. Ramsay pulled him close. “Just remember one thing.”

“Okay.”

“Hang on to your money.”

“Okay.”

He was backing away. He had to find her. His need of her was as simple and urgent as drawing the next breath.

11

Bars of yellow sunlight broke through the clouds and leveled between the spokes of the pines. She was singing and planting avocado pits. They had sprouted, tiny spiky Mesozoic ferns.

He had heard her from a distance, standing still in the cold dripping woods, and did not recognize her. The voice was unlike her speaking voice, bell-like, lower-pitched, and plangent. It was as if she were playing an instrument. Now as he stood close to her in the potting shed, the voice had a throaty foreign sound.

The dog watched him but she did not know he was there until he stood behind her and touched her. Unsurprised, she blushed and fell back against him, crossing her arms to touch his.

“Look!” she cried. “It’s my first crop! They’re already sprouting!”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” he said.

“Transplant?”

“No. Sing.”

“I was a singer.”

“What was that song?”

“It is called Liebesbotschaft. Love’s Message.”

“What does it say?”

“The lover is asking a brook to carry his message of love to a maiden.”

“I never heard you sing before.”

“I didn’t feel like it. I stopped.”

“Why did you stop?”

“Because I thought I had to sing.”

“Do you think you’ll sing in the future?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t have to. There is no reason not to. I think I can sing for people if you think it will give them pleasure. Do you?”

“Yes.”

She turned to face him. “Why did you come?”

“What? Oh. I was talking to a man at St. Mark’s and all of a sudden I realized it was almost four o’clock and I wanted to see you.”

“You wanted to see me because you know how I feel at four o’clock in the afternoon?”

“That and more.”

“What is the more?”

“I wanted badly to uh see you.”

“Is that all?”

“Not quite.”

She clapped her hands. “What luck.”

“Luck?”

“That we both want the same, that is, the obverse of the same. The one wanting the other and vice versa. What luck. Imagine.”

“Yes.”

“To rule out a possible misunderstanding, what is it you want?”

“To lie down here by the Grand Crown where it is warm and put my arms around you.”

“What luck. Here we are. Hold me.”

“I am.”

“Oh, I think you have something for me.”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Love. I love you,” he said. “I love you now and until the day I die.”

“Oh, hold me. And tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Is what you’re saying part and parcel of what you’re doing?”

“Part and parcel.”

They were lying on the dog’s croker sacks next to the glowing amber lights of the firebox.

“Tell me the single truth, not two or more separate truths, unless separate truths are subtruths of the single truth. Is there one truth or several separate truths?”

“Both.”

“How both?”

“The single truth is I love you. The several subtruths are: I love your dearest heart. I also love your dear ass, which is the loveliest in all of Carolina. I want your ass, it and no other, and you for the rest of my life, you and no other. I also love to see you by firelight. I will always come to see you at four o’clock every afternoon if only to sit with you if it does not please you to make love—”

“It pleases me. How about now?”

“—because I love to sit by you and watch your eyes, which see everything exactly as it is. And to watch the line of your cheek. These are separate truths but are also subtruths of the single truth, I love you.”

“Yes, they are and it is. I have a separate truth.”

“What?”

“I love your mouth. Give it to me.”

“All right.”

When they sat up, he said worriedly: “I forgot to take my acid today. I wonder what my pH is.”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but please ascertain it and maintain at the present level, high or low, whichever the case may be.”

“Right,” he said absently. “Is the dog ready?”

“Sure. I have packed his food. He can stay in the motel, can’t he?”

“Sure.” They looked at the dog. “Let’s go to the car. I’ll drop you and the dog at the motel. Then I have one errand to run. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Very good.”

The dog knew he was to go with them and followed without being called.

12

Father Weatherbee sat behind Jack Curl’s mahogany desk with its collection of Russian ikons and bleeding Mexican crucifixes. Perched nervously on the edge of his chair, he looked like a timid missionary summoned by his bishop. His eyelid, lip, and collar drooped.

“Yes, Mr. Barrett?”

“Father Weatherbee, I know you’re a busy man, so I’ll get right to the point.”

“Fine,” said Father Weatherbee, who in fact seemed anxious to get back to the attic and the Seaboard Air Line.

“I intend to be married.”

“Very good! My congratulations!” Father Weatherbee half rose from his chair, perhaps intending to shake hands, then changed his mind, sat down.

“I want you to perform the ceremony.”

“Very good!” Father Weatherbee rose again, sat down. His lip blew a bubble. “Yes, indeed! Well! Father Curl will be back from his ecumenical council next week and I’m sure he’d be pleased to do the ah honors.”

“I want you.”

“Oh dear,” said the old priest, leaning in his chair as if he were figuring how to get past him and out. The bleb blew up again. (Was he afraid of taking on the job just as I am afraid of taking a deposition or passing an act of sale?) “Well, let’s see. Are you a member of St. John’s congregation?” he asked, looking for a way out.

“No, not of St. John’s nor of the Episcopal Church.”

“Oh,” said Father Weatherbee, brightening for the first time, relieved. Here was his loophole. “And your fiancée?”

“No, she’s not a member of this or any church.”

“Ah,” said Father Weatherbee, smiling for the first time, off the hook for sure. “Perhaps the thing to do is for one or both of you to take instruction first, and Father Curl is your man for that.”

“No. I am not a believer and do not wish to enter the church.”

“I see.” The old priest pressed the bleb back and pushed his finger up into his gum. He screwed up one bloodshot eye as if he might yet make sense of this madman. The trouble was catching on to the madness, the madness of the new church, the madness of America, and telling one from the other. “Excuse me, but I don’t seem quite to—”

“The Jews may or may not be a sign,” said Will Barrett earnestly, leaning halfway across the desk. His pH was rising. When his speedy hydrogen ions departed, so did the Jews. Later, Dr. Ellis would write a scientific article on the subject, entitled: “A Correlation of Plasma pH with Certain Religious Delusions in a Case of Hausmann’s Syndrome.”

“How’s that again?” asked Father Weatherbee, cupping an ear. Did he say Jews?

“It may be true that they have not left North Carolina altogether as I had supposed. Yet their numbers are decreasing. In any event, the historical phenomenon of the Jews cannot be accounted for by historical or sociological theory. Accordingly, they may be said to be in some fashion or other a sign. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“The Jews?” repeated Father Weatherbee, turning his other ear.

“My own hunch,” said Will Barrett, hitching his chair even closer to the desk while Father Weatherbee rolled his chair back, “is that the Apostolic Succession involved a laying on of hands, right? This goes back to Christ himself, a Jew, a unique historical phenomenon, as unique as the Jews. Present-day Jews, whether or not they have departed North Carolina for Israel, similarly trace their origins to the same place and to kinsmen of Jesus, right? Modern historians agree there is no scientific explanation for the strange history of the Jews—”

He paused, frowning, wondering where he had gotten such an idea. Who were these “modern historians”? He couldn’t think of a one. “Excuse me, Father, please bear with me a moment.” (Father? Perhaps he didn’t like to be called Father? Reverend? Mister? Sir?) “What I am suggesting is that though I am an unbeliever, it does not follow that your belief, the belief of the church, is untrue, that in fact it may be true, and if it is, the Jews may be the clue. Doesn’t Scripture tell us that salvation comes from the Jews? At any rate, the Jews are the common denominator between us. That is to say, I am not a believer but I believe I am on the track of something. I may also tell you that I have the gift of discerning people and can tell when they know something I don’t know. Accordingly, I am willing to be told whatever it is you seem to know and I will attend carefully to what you say. It is on these grounds that I ask you to perform the ceremony. In fact, I demand it — ha ha — if that is what it takes. You can’t turn down a penitent, can you? We are also willing to take instructions, as long as you recognize I cannot and will not accept all of your dogmas. Unless of course you have the authority to tell me something I don’t know. Do you?” Will Barrett was leaning halfway across the desk.

Father Weatherbee’s chair had rolled back until it hit the wall. His white eye spun. His good bloodshot eye looked past his nose bridge at Will Barrett as if he were a cobra swaying atop his desk.

“Oh dear,” he sighed. “Surely it would seem that Father Curl is your man — though of course I should be glad to be of any assistance I can.”

“No, you’re my man. I perceive that you seem to know something — and that by the same token Jack Curl does not.”

“Oh dear,” said Father Weatherbee and, sinking in his chair, appeared to be muttering to himself. He looked around vaguely and spoke so softly that Will Barrett had to cup his good ear. “It seems I understand simple foreign folk better than my own people. It seems I understand every country in the world better than my own country.” He craned up his neck like a Philippine bird and looked in every direction except Will Barrett’s. “How can we be the best dearest most generous people on earth, and at the same time so unhappy? How harsh everyone is here! How restless! How impatient! How worried! How sarcastic! How unhappy! How hateful! How pleasure-loving! How lascivious! Above all, how selfish! Why is it that we have more than any other people, are more generous with what we have, and yet are so selfish and unhappy? Why do we think of nothing but our own pleasure? I cannot believe my eyes at what I see on television. It makes me blush with shame. Did you know that pleasure-seeking leads to cruelty? That is why more and more people beat their children. Children interfere with pleasure. Do you hate children? Why can’t we be grateful for our great blessings and thank God?” As he gazed down at the desk, he seemed to have forgotten Will Barrett. His voice sank to a whisper. “Why is it that Americans who are the best dearest most generous people on earth are so unhappy?” He shook his head. “I don’t—”

“Yes! Right!” said Will Barrett excitedly and leaned even closer. “That is why I say it is so important to recognize a sign when you—”

But the old priest did not seem to be listening. “There is a tiny village in Mindanao near Naga-Naga on the coast which I was able to visit only once a year. They are as poor as any people on earth, yet how kind and gentle and loving they are to each other! And happy! When I would come to the village little children would run out laughing with joy to see me, take me by the hand and lead me around the village to visit the old and the sick and the blind — and they were even happier to see me than the children! They believed me! They believed the Gospel whole and entire, and the teachings of the church. They said that if I told them, then it must be true or I would not have gone to so much trouble. During my absence betrothed couples remained continent and cheerful of their own volition.” He sat back and looked up timidly. The bleb on his lip inflated.

“Right!” cried Will Barrett. In his excitement he had risen from his chair and started around the desk. “Tell me something, Father. Do you believe that Christ will come again and that in fact there are certain unmistakable signs of his coming in these very times?”

By now Father Weatherbee had also risen and had sidled past, keeping the desk between them, nodding and smiling. If only he could get back to the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe and the lonesome whistle of the Seaboard Air Line, the only things in all of America he recognized.

Will Barrett stopped the old priest at the door and gazed into his face. The bad eye spun and the good eye looked back at him fearfully: What do you want of me? What do I want of him, mused Will Barrett, and suddenly realized he had gripped the old man’s wrists as if he were a child. The bones were like dry sticks. He let go and fell back. For some reason the old man did not move but looked at him with a new odd expression. Will Barrett thought about Allie in her greenhouse, her wide gray eyes, her lean muscled boy’s arms, her strong quick hands. His heart leapt with a secret joy. What is it I want from her and him, he wondered, not only want but must have? Is she a gift and therefore a sign of a giver? Could it be that the Lord is here, masquerading behind this simple silly holy face? Am I crazy to want both, her and Him? No, not want, must have. And will have.