“I was hoping it would snow,” he said. “But I guess with just my cowboy suit, I’m not really prepared for it.”
Uncle Cal came into the living room and asked Ena if he should tip Hanley Paulson’s son. Ena told him that she didn’t see why, but Nick could tell from Uncle Cal’s expression that he intended to do it anyway.
“He wants to know if it’s all right to take a few of the pumpkins,” Uncle Cal said. Before Ena answered, he said: “Of course I told him to help himself.”
“We’re going to play baseball,” Jason shouted, running into the living room. “And I’m first at bat, and you’re first base, and Nick can pitch.”
Olivia came in and sat down, still in her coat, shivering.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Uncle Cal said to Ena. “He’s just taking a few pumpkins we don’t have any use for.”
“Come on,” Jason said, tugging Nick’s arm. “Please.”
“Leave him alone if he doesn’t want to do what you want him to do, Jason,” Elizabeth said. She had just come back into the room.
“Who was that on the phone?” Ena said. She took a drink of bourbon. Nick noticed that she had put a sprig of mint in the glass.
“That person named Richard. He read something from a book called An Exaltation of Larks.” Elizabeth shook her head. “He’s the one you call The Poet, isn’t he, Cal? Wasn’t the man who called two days ago and read that long poem by Donne named Richard?”
“It’s not a practice I’ve ever heard of,” Ena said. “I think it was the same man.”
“Come on,” Jason whined to Elizabeth. “Aren’t you going to come out and play baseball?”
“I wasn’t invited.”
“You’re so touchy,” he said. “You’re invited. Come on.”
Nick and Elizabeth got their coats and walked out the back door into the cold. Benton had found a chewed-up baseball bat in the back of the garage, and a yellow tennis ball. As they got into position to play, Hanley Paulson’s son passed through the game area, carrying an armful of pumpkins. The back hatch of his car was open, and there were already about a dozen pumpkins inside. He closed the hatch and started the car and bumped down the driveway, raising his fist and shaking it from side to side when Uncle Cal waved goodbye.
Looking at his watch, Nick wondered if it could be possible that the boy had stacked all the wood and gathered the pumpkins in only half an hour. It was amazing what could be accomplished in half an hour.
The night before Nick left for L.A., there was a big dinner. Ena cooked it, saying that it was to make up for the Thanksgiving dinner she hadn’t felt like fixing. Everyone said that this dinner was very good and that on Thanksgiving no one had been hungry.
“I would have made a pumpkin pie, but the pumpkins disappeared,” Ena said, looking across the table at Uncle Cal.
“What do you mean?” he said. “The kid took two or three pumpkins. There must be a dozen left out there.”
“He took all the pumpkins,” Ena said.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Uncle Cal said. “Where’s the flashlight? I’ll go out and get you a pumpkin.”
Uncle Cal and Ena were both drunk. She had not wanted to make a pie, and he did not want to go outside in the cold to shine a flashlight into the pumpkin patch.
“I was mistaken,” Ena said finally. “I thought you had given him all the pumpkins.”
“He got them himself,” Uncle Cal said. “I didn’t give him anything. I let him round them up.” He cut into his roast beef. “He was just a kid,” he said.
“Olivia hasn’t touched her roast beef,” Ena said.
“You talk about me as though I’m not here,” Olivia said.
“What does she mean?” Ena said.
“I mean that you don’t address me directly. You talk about me, as though I’m not here.”
“I realize that you are here,” Ena said.
“I’m enjoying this roast beef,” Uncle Cal said. “If Morris could see me now, he’d die. Morris is my decorator. Doesn’t eat meat. Talks about it all the time, though, so that you’d think there were plates of meat all over reminding him about how much meat there was in the world.”
“Your decorator,” Olivia said.
“Yes?” Uncle Cal said.
“Don’t be pissy,” Benton said.
“I don’t think anybody even remembers why we’re here. It seems to me that this is just another family gathering where everybody lolls around by the fireplace and drinks.” Olivia took a sip of her wine. Nick winced, because he had seen her taking Valium in the kitchen before dinner.
“That’s uncivilized,” Ena said.
“This is uncivilized,” Olivia said.
Nick had expected one of them — probably Olivia — to begin crying. But it was Jason who began to cry, and who ran from the table.
Elizabeth had left the table to go after Jason, and Benton had followed her upstairs without saying anything else to Olivia.
“You said what you thought,” Uncle Cal said to Olivia. “Nothing wrong with that.”
Olivia got up and stalked away from the table.
“She did what she felt like doing,” Uncle Cal said to Ena. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“Oh, nothing’s wrong with anything, is it?” Ena said to Cal.
“My heart,” he said. “You should see that last EKG. Looked like an ant’s-eye view of the Himalayas, where there should have been a pretty straight line. Of course you have a straight line, straight as a piece of string, you’re dead. It should have been bumpy, I mean — but not like it was.”
“Then what are you doing yoga for?” Ena said. “You’ll kill yourself twisting into all those stupid positions.”
“Probably going to be dead anyway,” Uncle Cal said, tapping his pocket.
“Stop being morose,” Ena said.
“Might stop being anything,” Cal said.
“Stop worrying about your health,” Ena said. “It’s what’s in the cards. Wesley was a young man, and he drowned.”
“That was an accident,” Uncle Cal said. “An accident.”
“It wasn’t any accident,” Olivia hollered from the living room.
“It was,” Elizabeth said. She had come downstairs again, and she looked like she was about to murder somebody.
“Elizabeth—” Nick said.
Elizabeth sat down and smoothed her skirt and smiled to show that she was all right, calm and all right. Then she began to cry.
Nick got up and put his arm around her, sitting on his heels and crouching by her chair. He said her name again, but it didn’t do any good. It hadn’t done any good the night before, either, in the motel room.
Upstairs, Jason was pretending to be a baby. Benton had gotten him into his pajamas and had taken the sheet from the bed and was holding Jason, sheet thrown around him like a huge poncho, facing the window. Jason was afraid, and he was trying to pretend that it was animals he was afraid of. He wanted to know if there were bears in the woods. “Not around here,” Benton said. Fox, then? Maybe—“but they don’t attack people. Maybe none around here, anyway.” Jason wanted to know where all the animals came from.
“You know where they came from. You know about evolution.”
“I don’t know,” Jason said. “Tell me.”
“Tell you the whole history of evolution? You think I went to school yesterday?”
“Tell me something,” Jason said.
Benton told him this fact of evolution: that one day dinosaurs shook off their scales and sucked in their breath until they became much smaller. This caused the dinosaurs’ brains to pop through their skulls. The brains were called antlers, and the dinosaurs deer. That was why deer had such sad eyes, Benton told Jason — because they were once something else.