Papa, Rabon said, for a moment the dense flesh of his face was transparent so that Scribner could see a flicker of real pain, then the flesh coalesced into its customary opaque mask and Rabon said again, I’ve got to do all this work.
I don’t see how you can work with your own brother dead in a car wreck, Scribner said.
SOMETIME THAT NIGHT, or another night he went out the screen door onto the back porch, dressed only in his pajama bottoms, the night air cool on his skin. Whippoorwills were tolling out of the dark and a milky blind cat’s eye of a moon hung above the jagged treeline. Out there in the dark patches of velvet, patches of silver where moonlight was scattered through the leaves like coins. The world looked strange yet in some way familiar. Not a world he was seeing, but one he was remembering. He looked down expecting to see a child’s bare feet on the floorboards and saw that he had heard the screen door slap to as a child but had inexplicably become an old man, gnarled feet on thin blue shanks of legs, and the jury-rigged architecture of time itself came undone, warped and ran like melting glass.
NAKED TO THE WAIST Scribner sat on the bed while the nurse wrapped his biceps to take his blood pressure. His body still gleamed from the sponge bath and the room smelled of rubbing alcohol. Curious-looking old man. Heavy chest and shoulders and arms like a weightlifter. The body of a man twenty-five years his junior. The image of the upper torso held until it met the wattled red flesh of his throat, the old man’s head with its caved cheeks and wild gray hair, the head with its young man’s body like a doctored photograph.
Mr. Scribner, this thing will barely go around your arm, she said. I bet you were a pistol when you were a younger man.
I’m still a pistol yet, and cocked to go off anytime, the old man said. You ought to go a round with me.
My boyfriend wouldn’t care for that kind of talk, the nurse said, pumping up the thingamajig until it tightened almost painfully around his arm.
I wasn’t talking to your boyfriend, Scribner said. He takin care of you?
I guess he does the best he can, she said. But I still bet you were something twenty-five years ago.
What was you like twenty-five years ago?
Two years old, she said.
You ought to give up on these younger men, he said, studying the heavy muscles of his forearms, his still-taut belly. Brighten up a old man’s declinin years.
Hush that kind of talk, she said. Taking forty kinds of pills and randy as a billy goat.
Hellfire, you give me a bath. You couldn’t help but notice how I was hung.
She turned quickly, away but not so quickly the old man couldn’t see the grin.
Nasty talk like that is going to get a soapy washrag crammed in your mouth, she said.
WITH HIS WALKING CANE for a snakestick the old man went through a thin stand of half-grown pines down into the hollow and past a herd of plywood cattle to where the hollow flattened out then climbed gently toward the roadbed. The cattle were life-size silhouettes jigsawed from sheets of plywood and affixed to two-by-fours driven in the earth. They were painted gaudily with bovine smiles and curving horns. The old man passed through the herd without even glancing at them, as if in his world all cattle were a half-inch thick and garbed up with bright lacquer. Rabon had once been married to a woman whose hobby this was, but now she was gone, and there was only this hollow full of wooden cattle.
He could have simply taken the driveway to the roadbed but he liked the hot astringent smell of the pines and the deep shade of the hollow. All his life the woods had calmed him, soothed the violence that smoldered just beneath the surface.
When he came onto the cherted roadbed he stopped for a moment, leaning on his stick to catch his breath. He was wearing bedroom slippers and no socks and his ankles were crisscrossed with bleeding scratches from the dewberry briars he’d walked through. He went on up the road as purposefully as a man with a conscious destination though in truth he had no idea where the road led.
It led to a house set back amid ancient oak trees, latticed by shade and light and somehow imbued with mystery to the old man’s eyes, like a cottage forsaken children might come upon in a fairy-tale wood. He stood by the roadside staring at it. It had a vague familiarity, like an image he had dreamed then come upon unexpectedly in the waking world. The house was a one-story brick with fading cornices painted a peeling white. It was obviously unoccupied. The yard was grown with knee-high grass gone to seed and uncurtained windows were opaque with refracted light. Untrimmed tree branches encroached onto the roof and everything was steeped in a deep silence.
A hand raised to shade the sun-drenched glass, the old man peered in the window. No one about, oddments of furniture, a woodstove set against a wall. He climbed onto the porch and sat in a cedar swing for a time, rocking idly, listening to the creak of the chains, the hot sleepy drone of dirt daubers on the August air. There were boxes of junk stacked against the wall, and after a time he began to sort through one of them. There were china cats and dogs, a cookie jar with the shapes of cookies molded and painted onto the ceramic. A picture in a gilt frame that he studied until the edges of things shimmered eerily then came into focus, and he thought: This is my house.
He knew he used to live here with a wife named Ellen and two sons named Alton and Rabon and a daughter named Karen. Alton is dead in a car wreck, he remembered, and he studied Karen’s face intently as if it were a gift that had been handed to him unexpectedly, and images of her and words she had said assailed him in a surrealistic collage so that he could feel her hand in his, a little girl’s hand, see white patent-leather shoes climbing concrete steps into a church, one foot, the other, the sun caught like something alive in her auburn hair.
Then another image surfaced in his mind: his own arm, silver in the moonlight, water pocked with light like hammered metal, something gleaming he threw sinking beneath the surface, then just the empty hand drawing back and the muscular freckled forearm with a chambray work shirt rolled to the biceps. Somewhere upriver a barge, lights arcing over the river like searchlights trying to find him. That was all. Try as he might he could call nothing else to mind. It troubled him because the memory carried some dark undercurrent of menace.
With a worn Case pocketknife he sliced himself a thin sliver of Apple chewing tobacco Rabon didn’t know he’d hoarded, held it in his jaw savoring the taste. He walked about the yard thinking movement might further jar his memory into working. He paused at a silver maple that summer lightning had struck, the raw wound winding in a downward spiral to the earth where the bolt had gone to ground. He stood studying the splintered tree with an old man’s bemusement, as if pondering whether this was something he might fix.
SAY, WHATEVER HAPPENED to that Karen, anyway? he asked Rabon that night. Rabon had dragged an end table next to the old man’s bed and set a plate and a glass of milk on it. Try not to get this all over everything, he said.
Scribner was wearing a ludicrous-looking red-and-white-checked bib Rabon had tied around his neck, and with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other he was eyeing the plate as if it were something he was going to attack.
Your sister, Karen, the old man persisted.
I don’t hear from Karen anymore, Rabon said. I expect she’s still up there around Nashville working for the government.
Workin for the government? What’s she doin?
They hired her to have one baby after another, Rabon said. She draws that government money they pay for them. That AFDC, money for unwed mothers, whatever.
Say she don’t ever call or come around?
I don’t have time for any of that in my life, Rabon said. She liked the bright lights and the big city. Wild times. Drinking all night and laying up with some loafer on food stamps. I doubt it’d do her much good to come around here.