THE HOUSE AND THE yard were such messes from my abuse and neglect and from the hurricane that I could not stand the idea of them remaining in that state while all of the other homes and yards of Enon were cleaned and repaired and brought back to their properly cared for conditions; nor could I bear the idea of following along in order not to be noticed and cleaning and repairing the house and yard myself. There was some irony in the fact that I felt certain I could not do the work because I actually knew how to do it and so I knew how much energy it would take, energy I knew I did not have anymore, in my condition. The idea that I neither could leave the house as it was nor fix it made me feel more hopeless than ever. On top of that, I imagined Kate standing at my side, surveying the damage, looking to me for resolve and optimism. Had she been alive, I’d have put my arm around her shoulder and squeezed her against me a couple times and said something like “Piece of cake, babe. We’ll have the farm up and running again in no time flat.” As it was, I sighed and said, “Ah, the hell with it, all of it.” I grabbed a backpack from the front hall and filled an old plastic soda bottle with tap water and started away from the house. When I was almost to the Red Orchard store, I took the backpack off and scratched around in the bottom to see if there was any money. I thought I might buy a pack of cigarettes or a candy bar if there was only a little change. I wanted to see how the store had weathered the hurricane and to say hi to Manny. I hadn’t been to the store in several weeks, maybe a couple months even — longer, in fact, I realized, not since I’d met Manny the first time, or talked with him anyway. I had a spontaneous hope of maybe helping him tape up a broken window and mop up the flooded floor and afterward sitting on milk crates and sipping cold colas and commiserating about all the work we’d accomplished. The store looked fine from the outside, so I stuck my head in the door to say hi and ask Manny how his kids were and to apologize for not having dropped in for a while, although in truth I was sure he couldn’t have cared less that I hadn’t been back in, and might have been glad for it, given the state I’d been in. There was a guy I didn’t recognize at the register, a tall kid with long hair and a bad slouch.
“Oh, hey,” I said.
“Hey,” the kid said.
“Sorry. Is Manny around?”
“Who?”
“Manny. The guy—” I almost said, with the kids. “His full name is Manprasad, I think. Works here every day.”
“Oh, that dude. He split.”
“Split?”
“Moved back to China or something. Couple months ago.”
“No kidding. Well, um, thanks.”
“No thing, man.”
Manny having moved back to India felt tragic, like the end of a sad movie, with me the guy walking away, dismayed and crushed as the credits roll. Damn, crummy little village, I thought. Crummy little footpaths and crummy little sanctuary. It’s all such a bunch of bullshit, and I’m its sorry-ass mascot. The Idiot of Enon. Fuck it.
I walked around for the rest of the day and late into the evening. It seemed I had no possible place left on this earth to go. I could not go back to the house. I did not want to spend the night in the wet, storm-tangled woods. A hotel was out of the question. I stopped walking and looked around. I was near the road across from Mrs. Hale’s estate, where I had spent summer nights stalking through her meadows with Peter Lord and my other friends, and where Kate and I had rested on our way home at dusk and watched the sun set and the beautiful, grand house settle into the dark, and where my grandfather and I had seen the amazing and for all purposes apocryphal orrery, with its ivory planets and moons and brass sun, and I had turned the wooden-handled crank and made the entire arrangement of spheres spin on their axes and around one another and the sun in perfect symphony.
I decided to break into Mrs. Hale’s house and find the orrery. Nothing in the world seemed more important suddenly than turning the crank and feeling the perfectly machined resistance it offered and the perfect ratio of force applied and degrees that the crank turned to the various periods of the celestial bodies, from the almost imperceptible orbits of the outer planets to the smallest little moons, which spun as quickly and neatly as tops. I walked in a straight line across the road and across her meadow, right toward the few lights on in her gigantic house. I made no attempt to conceal myself or to be quiet. I did not think about looking for any drugs. She’s an old Yankee nanny goat anyway, I thought. I bet she’s never even swallowed an aspirin.
“Your old pop may be headed for a stretch in the joint, kid,” I said. “But it’s time, way past time. There’re some things in this place you just have to see.” I thought about the James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson gangster movies we’d watched together, which, unlike the old westerns we’d seen, she had genuinely loved. I drew a deep breath and shook my head and smiled in disgust at myself and said, “Made it, Kate — top of the world. Anyway, what I’m about to show you is something else.”
I walked up to Mrs. Hale’s broad, oak front door, the one my grandfather and I had stood before, what, I thought, twenty years ago, waiting for Mrs. Hale to let us in. I grabbed the brass door handle and pushed down on the leaf-shaped lever with my thumb and it went down all the way and I pushed on the door and it swung open inward and I walked into her front hall. The hall was lit by a single, dim, candle-shaped bulb set in a wall sconce. It was wide and deep and receded into the darkened depths of the house. Dark paintings in gold frames lined the hall. All were portraits of men and women I took to be Mrs. Hale’s ancestors. The floorboards creaked and echoed as I walked down the hall. It turned left at the back of the house and continued lengthwise. I came to a large stairway that rose eight steps to a landing on which stood the Simon Willard tall clock I’d fixed with my grandfather. I peered up at its austere dial.
“Come along. I’m right in here,” a voice barked. I startled and turned to run but remained on the landing. It was Mrs. Hale, and she sounded exactly the same as when she’d told Peter Lord that we sledded like girls and when she’d asked my grandfather what she owed him for fixing her clock. Her voice was clear and strong, her words as composed as if set in sharp, indelible black ink on cold, blue-white paper. I went up the rest of the stairs and crossed a wide landing to an open doorway. If running into Mr. Wallace wandering around his house at night had been like finding a puzzled half-ghost, half-man, fuzzy and vague from fumbling around between realms, Mrs. Hale seemed like the pure concentration of all the light and air and earth and people of Enon, from every lap it had ever taken around the sun, not merely from its relatively brief and no doubt fleeting career as a village of colonists but from its centuries as home to more original souls and a tract of forest, and its millennia under glaciers and at the bottoms of unnamed oceans, all taken in by her ancestral house and focused through the precisely configured windows, aligned and coordinated with the clocks and orrery and rendered into the small, prim, neatly dressed figure sitting on a plain wooden settle beneath an electric candle, in the middle of the room, the temple, the dim penetralia, everything else shrouded in darkness, as if she were an artifact in a museum or a prophet in a pew.
I stood at the door dumbfounded and already abashed to the point of reform, the forthcoming speech I imagined already a formality, already perfunctory if not for the agonizing, extra efficacy of having to hear in full the details of the charges of which I already knew I was guilty. Mrs. Hale sat with her hands folded in her lap, looking straight at me, with perfect poise — with what both of my grandparents unhesitatingly would have called character. I had the impulse to check the bottoms of my shoes to see if I had tracked dirt into the house, to smooth my hair down, to tuck my shirt in. My shame doubled, trebled. It struck me how repulsive it was for me to be inside her house, the outrageousness of it made all the starker by her sitting there with such patience and self-possession that to judge by her it was as if I were prevailing upon her tact in some small matter of manners.