Also, Jiggs was such an offhand name. I might as easily have called him Butch, or Buster or Punkin or Pee Wee. Anything that showed how lightly I would give him back when his mother came to claim him.
We sat him in a pile of blocks in my studio whenever I was working. Linus built him teetering cities, Selinda drew crayon horses for him to ponder. I would talk to him continuously as I moved the lamps around. "Is he yours?" a customer might ask, and I would say "Oh no, that's Jiggs."
"Ah." And I would photograph their polite, baffled faces.
For I was still taking pictures, but just because people happened to stop by. And only on a day-to-day basis. And I had lost, somewhere along the line, my father's formal composition. During the years stray props had moved it: flowers, swords, Ping-Pong paddles, overflow from Alberta's clutter. People had a way of picking up odd objects when they entered, and then they got attached to them.
They would sit down still holding them, absent-mindedly, and half the time I never even noticed. I wasn't a chatty, personal kind of photographer. I would be occupied judging the light, struggling with the camera that had grown more crotchety than ever. Its bellows were all patched with little squares of electrical tape. Its cloth was so frayed and dusty I got sneezing fits. Often I would have gone as far as printing up a negative before I really saw what I had taken. "Why," I would say to Linus. "What on earth…?" Then Linus would set the baby aside and the two of us would study my photo: some high school girl in Alberta's sequined shawl, strung with loops of curtain-beads, holding a plume of peacock feathers and giving us a dazed, proud, beautiful smile, as if she knew how she had managed to astonish us.
In the fall of 19xx, Alberta died. We got a telegram from her father-in-law.
YOUB MOTHEK DEAD OF HEART FAILURE FUNERAL A. M. WEDNESDAY. When he read it, Saul turned grim but said nothing. Later he called Linus and Julian into the sunporch and they held a conference with the doors closed. I hung around outside, fiddling with strands of my hair. When it came to matters of importance, I thought, I was not remotely a part of that family. Here I assumed I had broken into their circle, found myself some niche in the shelter of Alberta's shadow, but it turned out the Emorys were as shut away as ever and Alberta had gone and died. Underneath I had always expected her back, I believe. I wanted her approval; she was so much braver, freer, stronger than I had turned out to be.
There were a thousand things I had planned on holding up for her to pass judgment on. Now it seemed that these things had no point any more, and I thought of them all-even the children- with a certain flat dislike.
I went to find my mother, who was knitting in front of the TV. "Alberta has died," I told her.
"Oh, my soul," said Mama, not missing a stitch. But then she never had thought much of her. "Well, I suppose the men will be going to the funeral." But they didn't, as it happened. That was the subject of the conference. Saul had told them he wasn't going, and he didn't think they should either, but that was up to them. They discussed it carefully, examining all the issues. This was what they'd come to: her gloriously ~wicked sons, now aging and balding and troubled by pathetic, minor errors. In her absence, their colors had faded. People are only reflections in other people's eyes, it turns out. In Alberta's absence her house had crumbled and vanished, her belongings had taken on a rusty smell. (She told me once that the Emorys had always been killed by horses; that was their mode of dying. But in her absence it emerged that only one had been: a distant uncle. The others had passed away in their beds, puny deaths they would have been spared if Alberta had only stayed around.) Julian said he wouldn't attend the funeral either. That left Linus, the only one who might have liked to go, but everybody knew that he wouldn't defy his brothers. (Linus had a beard because he never had shaved, not ever, since the day his first whiskers grew in.
That was how little he fought things.) "Ill just stay at home and say a prayer for her in my mind," he told Saul.
"Whatever you like," Saul said.
It was Linus I heard this from, of course. Never Saul. Linus sat on a kitchen chair later, sanding a piece of wood the size of a postage stamp. For a couple of years now, he had been building doflhouse furniture. I don't know why.
And all of a sudden he said to me, "In my opinion, he should forgive her."
"What?"
"Saul," said Linus, "should forgive our mother."
"Oh well, let Turn have one sin."
"On the sunporch he said, 'What makes me laugh is, that crazy old man outlived her after all.' Grandpa, he meant. Then he really did laugh. Threw back his head and laughed out loud. What do you make of that?"
"Nothing," I said. "I don't even try. Leave him alone." So Linus blew a speck of sawdust away, and wiped his forehead with one veiny brown arm and fell silent He was used to my protecting him, not Saul. He didn't guess how often I had asked myself the same question: What do you make of Saul?
Saul had become a man of blacks and whites. In the pulpit, looming black robe with a wide white neckband; the rest of the time, cheap black suit and white shirt. Often, while buying groceries or walking with the children, I would catch sight of him striding through the town on some wild mission-larger than life, with his unbuttoned suit coat billowing out behind him, trouser cuffs flapping, tie fluttering, strings of neglected hair feathering over his collar.
He carried a Bible, always, and wore a dark, intense expression, as if narrowing in on something. Most of the time, he didn't even see us.
Was he just a fanatical preacher, bent on converting the world?
But sometimes when giving his sermons he stumbled and halted, and appeared to be considering the words he had just spoken. Then I would have to consider them myself, trying to discover what truth might lie within them. Sometimes, while lashing out against the same old evils, he would stop in mid-sentence and sag and shake his head and walk away, forgetting to say the benediction. Then his bewildered, ever smaller flock would rustle in their pews, and I would sit gripping my gloves. Should I run after him?
Should I let him be? I pictured some great substructure shifting and creaking inside him. I felt my own jagged edges grinding together as they settled into new positions. At night, I often woke with a start and pressed my face against his damp, matted chest. Even his heartbeat seemed muffled and secret. I never was able to imagine what he dreamed.
I was moving around the kitchen one day in the spring of, serving up breakfast to a man from the mourners' bench. Dr. Sisk. I was trying to hurry Jiggs along because it was nearly time for kindergarten and he was just sitting there with one sock on and nothing else. I was tripping over the dog, this terrible dog that Belinda had brought home from Girl Scouts. It wasn't one of my quieter times, in other words. So it took me a minute to notice what I assumed to be Saul from another age, leaning in the doorway-the Saul I married, with a calmer face and no lines around his mouth, a little more hair on top, easier and looser and less preoccupied. He wore faded, tattered jeans and carried an Army surplus knapsack. He watched me with a kind of wry amusement that Saul had long ago lost. Well, I wasn't so very surprised. In fact I'd already thought of an explanation for it (some simple time warp, nothing to get alarmed about) when he spoke. "I knocked but nobody answered," he said.
It wasn't Saul's voice at all, and never had been; didn't have that echo behind it. I said, "AmosI"
"How you doing, Charlotte?" He straightened up and came to offer me his hand. By now I was so used to various people wandering in it didn't occur to me to ask why he was here. (I'd been expecting him for years, to tell the truth. Wondered what was keeping him.) But Amos seemed to think he had to tell me. "Hear Clarion High School is looting for a music teacher," he said. "I thought I might apply. I guess I should've dropped a line ahead of time but I'm not too much of a letter writer." He had sent us fifteen letters in all the time we'd been married-if you count a Hallmark wedding card and about fourteen of those printed change-of-address notices that you pick up free from the post office. But that's the way the Emorys did things. I said, "Never mind, have some breakfast. Meet Jiggs and Dr. Sisk." Jiggs stood up in his one striped sock and shook hands. He was always a dignified child, even naked, and looked like a kindly little old man in his stodgy glasses. I was proud to show him off.