Few in town had the dimmest notion as to what Ellsworth was talking about in that obituary, though most thought it grand. That at least was the opinion of Floyd’s wife Edna, she being another who got on passably with the deceased when she was still alive. When Edna and Floyd first moved to town, Winnie and Stu were their nearest friends, the only ones they had that first year really, most folks polite and kind to them in a Christian sort of way, but more like how people treated coloreds nowadays than truly come-on-over, kick-your-shoes-off friendly; Floyd felt it too, saying sometimes it made him almost homesick for truck stops and motels. They had just moved into their first rented house, everything still a sorry sight, no curtains on the windows yet and mice in the stove, when Winnie drove by to invite them over for supper that first time. Except for a cocktail party at John’s house which was more like an arrest than an invitation and where even the hired help made them feel unwashed, it was their first invitation out in donkey ears, since back when Floyd first hit the road really and started up all his troubles — Edna in her excitement found herself all dressed up about two hours before and having to use the clattery old toilet with its stained bowl and chipped wooden seat every ten minutes or so, leaving the door open because there was no light in there, Floyd teasing her and saying: “Hell, he’s seen my old heap, he just wants to sell us a car, that’s all.” But he was pleased and excited, too. Because true or not, it didn’t matter. It meant that for the first time since they could hardly remember they were part of something more than just each other, which sometimes honestly wasn’t all that much, it was almost like getting born again. And Floyd was right, that man did try to sell him a car, didn’t just try, he succeeded, but not without some fun about it, and in friendly accents that took Edna down-home again and almost made her cry for feeling so lost and uprooted. Stu poured some whiskey for him and Floyd after supper, put on some Cajun fiddle music, told some jokes, including one about a rich Texan he said he once knew who was so big he wouldn’t fit in his coffin until they gave the corpse an enema, and then they were able to bury him in a shoebox and had room for his boots as well, which made Edna, who had been constipated ever since she got here (she was bothered somehow by all those motel mirrors), giggle so hard she nearly fell off her chair, Floyd remarking as he sucked a cube that it sounded like the damn guy he was working for, setting her off all the more, God help, even Winnie joining the silly laughter now, and then Stu said he ought to give a Ford product a try. Floyd, winking at Edna, just excusing herself to go use the bathroom for a while, said he only drove General Motors cars on the road, having an old soldier’s respect for rank, but all right, he’d try a used car from him, about five years old, say, and if the results were satisfying, he’d be back later for a trade-in. Which was how they got their deep purple Mercury. Truth to tell, it wasn’t all that grand a car, they hardly drove it away but it needed a new clutch and the brakes relined, but they went on after that, buying all their cars from Stu, even after poor Winnie got killed in a wreck a couple of years later, it seemed like they owed old Stu that much, no matter that his young new wife never had them over anymore.
Edna’s husband Floyd had managed John’s downtown hardware store ever since then, and though he was good at it and made John a pile of money — money John spent on cars and guns and airplanes, and on pussy too no doubt, his wife on clothes, jewelry, and fancy fittings for their big ranch-style house, the one John built — Floyd always had the notion that John was only tolerating him. He should have got promoted out of this junkshop years ago, but he seemed stuck for good and all, like a rusty peg, right where he was at. It was Floyd whose introduction of the do-it-yourself line had completely turned the old museum around, but when John had set up a big new warehouse-style DIY store out at the new mall he had hired another guy to manage it, telling Floyd, after having effectively just pulled the plug on him, that he couldn’t afford to let the Main Street store go down the tubes and needed him there to keep the doors open. Since then, with hard work, smart buying, and a new Hobby Corner line, he had somehow managed to break even, probably mostly on account of his salary was so all-fired low, but in spite of that John had been on his back most of the time. He’d pop in unannounced, complain about the bookshelf kits that weren’t moving or kick at some of the crud littering the aisles or run a grim-faced check on the cash register, snapping at him that he wasn’t doing enough to stop petty theft and why wasn’t the goddamn garden stuff out, it was already the end of February. There was a time, back before the Bible, when Floyd would have stuck a man for talking to him like that. Still could, of course. Eye for an eye, self-defense, and all that, he had his rights, but he was more a New Testament man these days than Old. Or maybe it wasn’t just the Bible, maybe it was something about John himself that held him back. There was the day, for example, when, without any explanation, John had walked into the store, grabbed up an ax, and swung it flat-side against a pillar. Nothing had happened, so he had swung it again and again, ferociously, as like to bring the store down, until finally the handle had cracked. Then he had wanted to know why the hell Floyd was buying such cheap goods for the store. Floyd had been pretty amazed by this act, not to say a little terrified, and he’d felt like a sap for weeks, until finally one day he’d overheard John’s old college bud Waldo at the cafe next door telling a story about John trying to pry open a can with one of those axes on a hunting trip and having to take a lot of razzing from the boys he was with when the handle snapped. Floyd was so anxious to please John, so fearful of a rebuke, that sometimes it made him feel like a damned fairy. Which was partly why he coveted John’s wife, why he wanted to cuckold him, and not just cuckold him, but split his flicking old lady wide open, so the next time John visited that place, if ever he still did, the peckerhead would know a real man had been there before him. Whenever he imagined himself doing this, however, she was not really there. It was more like punching a hole in the universe.
This was a strange thing about John’s wife: a thereness that was not there. She always seemed to be at the very heart of things in town, an endearing and ubiquitous presence, yet few of the town’s citizens, if asked, could have described her, even as she passed before their eyes, or said what made her tick, or if they could or thought they could, would have found few or none who would agree. Coveted object, elusive mystery, beloved ideal, hated rival, princess, saint, or social asset, John’s wife elicited opinions and emotions as varied and numerous as the townsfolk themselves, her unknowability being finally all they could agree upon, and even then with reservations, for some said she was so much herself that she was simply unapproachable (“unreadable,” as Lorraine liked to put it), others that the trouble was that she had no personality at all, so there was nothing to be known. Even fundamental matters were in dispute, her age, the tenor of her voice, the sizes that she wore. Take her eyes, for example. When a woman in New Orleans asked John one night their color, John didn’t know. Nor could Alf, who knew her inside out, have said, though he probably had it written down somewhere. They weren’t alone. Otis, who tended to look away when he talked to her, would have said her eyes were blue, the color of the Virgin’s, though Marge thought them brown, like mud, and Daphne green, the color of her own. Barnaby knew their color, but knew them as the eyes of an innocent child, peering up at him from his knee, and Ellsworth, too, recalling with such clarity the little girl he’d once big-brothered, sometimes found it difficult to see the married woman before his eyes. Indeed, most supposed her younger than she really was, and of those who knew her then some claimed she hadn’t changed since high school, even though she no longer seriously resembled her senior yearbook photo (nor did she at the time, they pointed out, one of the town photographer’s rare failures, as he himself would have, somewhat nonplused, acknowledged). Contrarily, Clarissa thought her ancient and completely out of touch.