He was rubbing his sweating hands on the front of his pantlegs. “I meant something else,” he said.
She squinted at him, but after a minute she let it go. She was used to his seeing things in queer ways, and maybe it didn’t seem worth the trouble of straightening out. “Well, anyways—”
At that moment, upstairs in his bedroom, Jimmy screamed. Henry ran for the stairs, off the kitchen, and Jimmy screamed again.
When Henry reached the bedroom door, Jimmy was sitting bolt upright in bed, shaking like a leaf. Henry scooped him up in his arms, and the child clung to him. “Hurt,” he cried, “hurt!”
“What was it?” Callie cried, behind him.
But Jimmy was relaxed now. It couldn’t be that he was sick.
“Nothing,” Henry said, “a dream. It’s all right now, eh, Jimmy?” Henry’s heart was thudding.
Callie leaned close. “What did you dream, Jimmy?”
Already Jimmy was halfway back to sleep.
“You see, it really was nothing,” Henry said softly. “Kids always start having nightmares around his age. He’s over it already.”
Callie kissed Jimmy’s cheek and patted his back, her eyes troubled, and gently Henry laid him in his crib. Callie stood with her hands on the crib rail, looking down. After a long time she turned to look at Henry, her face white and indistinct in the darkness. She said, “Henry, I’m scared.”
“Of what?” he said, exasperated.
“How do I know?” she said. “I’m just scared, that’s all. Really. Aren’t you?”
He looked past her, out the window at the silhouettes of the pines where they rose out of fog. It was still now, as it always was when the fog came in, as if nothing were left alive. The fog hadn’t gotten to the garden yet. The moon was bright, and if there had been rabbits there he would have seen them.
Well, yes, he thought, yes. He tried to think what it was George Loomis had said. It wasn’t here, it was up outside Utica; they’d driven up to the stock car races. He’d mentioned Jimmy, how he’d felt the time Jimmy had had the convulsions, and George Loomis had said — who lived alone, who kept intact his isolation despite all pressures, finally, and would someday die, in his barn, maybe, and not be discovered for two, three weeks—“You take on a responsibility like that, and you say to yourself you’ll move heaven and earth to protect the kid you love, or the woman, or whoever it happens to be, but the minute you say it you’re forgetting something.”
“What’s that?” Henry had said.
George Loomis stared down into the night, leaning forward over the steering wheel, and he said, “You can’t.”
“It’s what drives you to God,” Henry said with a little laugh.
George too had laughed, like a murderer.
6
That same night, two hours after Jimmy’s cry, Henry sat at his kitchen table, catching up his books. It was long past his bedtime. Normally he was careful to get to bed by ten, doctor’s orders, but he knew it would be no use tonight. By now he felt downright panicky at what he’d done down in Slater. Even without any trimmings whatever, everything plain as plain could be (a thing old Wiegert seemed to find distressing), his bank account would be lighter by six hundred dollars. He couldn’t believe he’d done it, now. Sweat ran down his chest, and the more he tried to think why he’d done it, the wilder it seemed. It would be one thing if he were all alone, no family to think about. He’d often acted on crazy whims before he’d married Callie. Maybe he’d gone un-married too long. It was hard as the devil to change the whole pattern of your life when you got to your forties.
The fog lay all around the house now, sealing it up like a box. At every window he saw his own reflection, but when he let his mind wander he was aware of the others; it was as if he could hear them breathing: Simon just on the other side of that door straight in front of him, Callie and Jimmy just up the stairs that opened onto the kitchen to his right. Outside, nothing moving. A hundred thousand birds would start singing when the sun came up, and in the valley cows would move in from their pastures toward lighted barns. In the fields, mice, woodchucks, rabbits, dogs would run, when dawn came, and the mountainsides would be rife with wild things, from squirrels to foxes — but just now, nothing. But no, that was wrong of course. Fog or no fog, everything was the same as always, animals stalking animals stalking animals in deadly procession, quiet as dreams.
She’d had plans for that money. He’d never agreed to Callie’s plans, but it was settled between them that one of these days they would have it out; he’d had no right to spend six hundred dollars on something insane. Unless maybe that was why he’d done it: not for Simon’s wife but against his own.
(He remembered vividly the way cows would push at the fences on his grandfather’s farm. Even if you pastured them in clover and the other side was barely stubble, still they’d push to get out. He and his father and grandfather would go out in the middle of the night — two fat old men and a fat little boy — and they’d shout at the cows and turn them around with pitchfork handles, and the cows would go anywhere on earth but where you wanted them. When you finally got them to the open gate or the hole in the fence, you had to twist their tails to run them through.)
But that wasn’t all of it. He remembered the way Callie had reached out, finally, and touched Simon Bale when he was crying.
The thought was comforting for a minute, but the next minute he wondered if he would have brought Simon here at all if it weren’t for the others who’d stood above him doing nothing. There was a story about two old brothers named Sprague — a true story, Jim Millet said. They’d lived together in Slater all their lives, and when they were eighty they’d sold their house and moved down to Florida. Nobody knew them there, and the second day one of them killed the other with an axe, just like that, nobody ever learned why. It would never have happened if they’d stayed where they belonged, Jim Millet said. The man had never done a thing to cover up his crime. He’d carried the body to the garage and shut it up, and as soon as it started to smell, the neighbors found it.
The story was puzzling, and Henry leaned on his fists, frowning. He was still thinking about it when he dozed off. When he woke up again — he couldn’t tell how much later — Simon Bale was standing over by the stove, blinking. He had on only his suitcoat and trousers, no shirt or undershirt, no shoes.
“Trouble sleeping?” Henry said.
Simon waved as if to say it was unimportant.
Henry squinted at him, wide awake now, and it was as if, seeing him here in his own kitchen where every pot and pan had its precise meaning, he was seeing Simon clear for the first time. It was like something that came to you early in the morning when you’d first gotten up: Compared to Callie’s light blue apron, not a brute object but the sum of its associations, Simon Bale was old and sallow-faced and strangely bitter, maybe devious. Against the yellow of the walls he was tortuously old-fashioned, grim, as rigid as an angle iron. It made Henry’s skin creep.
Simon stood with his big-knuckled hands at his sides, his belly out, chest caved in, head forward, looking at the coffeepot on the stove. He lifted the lid, saw that the pot was empty, and replaced the lid as if that too were of no importance. He came over and stood with his hands in his side pockets, looking disapprovingly at Henry’s ledger. After a moment he drew out a chair, smiled apologetically, then looked grim again, and sat down.
“The house gets cold, these foggy nights,” Henry said.
Simon nodded and smiled.
For a long time after that neither of them spoke. Henry thought of mentioning the funeral, then thought better of it. Not mentioning it was pure cowardice, he knew: To tell Simon would be, in effect, to tell Callie. But Simon was completely uninterested in her burial, or so he said; as likely as not, he wouldn’t even bother to go when Henry did tell him.