For an instant she knew with a part of her mind that behind the house, motionless, oblivious to the deadly heat, Simon Bale’s ghost sat listening in the dark, solid as granite, hearing all they said and thought and hearing the noise still miles away of something (wind?) bearing vengeance toward them: some change, subtle and terrible. They were caught. She concentrated. It was gone.
2
George Loomis knew well enough that he’d come for nothing. When he looked up at Callie in the doorway — pretty, in a tough-jawed, persecuted-looking way, her face flushed, prepared for wrath — he had a feeling that in Henry’s position he might do the same damn thing.
Henry sat unmoving — as still as the enormous old sleeping dog by the door — huge, like the dog, and spent — huge and dark as the centuries-old pile of boulders and shale and crumbling mortar looking down Crow Mountain at the bottom of the shadow-filled glen. (It was a lookout tower from before the Revolutionary War, his grandfather said, and it was built by one of his ancestors, a Loomis. “Nimrod’s Tower,” his grandfather said. “So much for the pride of man!” And he, ten years old, had looked up at the tower, baffled between pride and inexplicable shame at the pride he felt — like his grandfather.) Henry Soames’ forearm stood straight up, resting on the arm of the davenport, holding the box of gingersnaps, and his arm was so thick (it seemed for that moment) that if the boy were to pass behind it he would vanish from sight as though passing behind a tree. Callie gave George a meaningful look, something she’d learned from TV, he thought, and dropped back into the kitchen, out of sight. There were only two dim bulbs that worked in the gilt, Max Pies Furniture chandelier that hung by a chain from the middle of the ceiling. (That was Callie’s work, he knew. Henry would never have chosen the thing.) He could see one of the bulbs reflected in the picture directly across from him, high on the wall over Henry’s head, above the clock on the mantel, a brownish picture (a gift from Callie’s mother, one of them had told him) of Jesus praying. The Soames’ TV was on, over in what Callie called the music corner — radio, record player, television, sagging homemade shelves of records and old TV Guides—but the sound was turned off and the picture was flipping. It gave you a feeling of endless falling in space.
He said, “What’s eating you, Henry?”
Henry smiled, gloomy. “Oh, I’m all right, George.” He put a gingersnap in his mouth whole and let it dissolve there. “How things with you? Seems like we don’t see you much any more.”
George got out his cigarettes with two fingers, slipped one from the pack, and fitted it between his lips. He got out his matches. “Now don’t change the subject, Henry.” He looked at the matches, considering, and decided on directness. “You quit eating all the time or you’ll kill yourself. You know it.”
The little boy was down on all fours on the rug, running a black and yellow dump truck along the dark outlines of the faded flowers in the pattern. His face was unhealthily red, as his mother’s had been. The line he was on led to his father’s foot and he ran the truck up over his father’s shoe and down again. He looked up at his father, half-smiling, sly. He looked like an elf, the way his bushy blond eyebrows tipped up. Still Henry said nothing.
“How you think Jimmy’s going to feel?” George said.
Henry shook his head and let out a little heave of breath. He sat now with his hands limp in his lap, what there was of his lap — three, four inches, then his knees. His shirt was unbuttoned in two places, showing clammy gray skin and curly gray and black hairs. There were sweat rings under his armpits.
“Damn it all, Henry. I came here to talk with you, and I mean for you to talk. I asked you a question.”
Henry looked anxious. He always looked anxious, because of the way the rolls of fat fell away like the wake of a rowboat from his nose, but now he looked more so. He said, “I’m sorry, George, I’m afraid I’ve forgot what you asked me.
“I said,” George began grimly, hard-jawed — but by now he had forgotten too, and he had to think a minute. “I said, ‘How do you think Jimmy’s going to feel when you’ve killed yourself?’ ”
It sounded in his own ears like something out of Loretta Young. As if out of kindness, Henry said, “I don’t know, George.”
“Well, you’re a damn fool then,” George said, doing his best with a bad start, looking just over Henry’s head. “I mean it. Listen. All you do is stop that blame eating all the time.”
Henry studied the floor, politely not eating the ginger-snap he had now in his hand. George listened to the clock. Outside the open window it was very quiet, bright with moonlight. Nothing moved. At last Henry said, “Maybe that’s the answer, George.”
“Oh, hell,” George said. He felt the way he had felt long ago when his father would ask him, “Where have you been till this hour, young man?” knowing he had been nowhere, as always, had done nothing, as always, had driven his motorcycle around on the mountain roads in the vague hope that something new might happen, that the world might stand suddenly transfigured, transformed to a movie — a gangster picture, a love picture, anything but the tedious ruin it was, a worn-out country (not worn-out enough to be morbidly interesting), worn-out farmers, a worn-out sixteen-year-old boy partly too shy and partly too righteous (all things foul to his dry-rotted mind) even to look through car windows at lovers. He sometimes believed he had known all his life that he’d end up maimed, a brace on one boot, no arm in one sleeve, and no doubt worse yet to come. Once, lately, it had occurred to him that maybe he’d given up his foot and arm voluntarily, sacrificing up pieces of his body like an old-time Delaware to ward off destructions more terrible. It had seemed an interesting idea at first, but thinking about it an instant later he’d seen it for the paltry ruse it was, mere poetry, and, like all poetry, so irrelevant and boring he wanted to smash things.
He came partly awake. A movement of the drape, then stillness. A line from a tedious movie: Maybe that’s the answer, George. Not even patronizing: pure filler. Or it was like the chatter at one of his mother’s old-fashioned teas. Exquisite, they were always saying. Everything was exquisite. (He’d buried his mother in the way she’d wanted to be buried, in an iron casket with a window looking in at her now incorruptible face.) Because Henry knew perfectly well he had come because Callie had asked him, and knew there was nothing to talk about, that either he’d work it out alone or he wouldn’t, and that all the sympathy on earth wouldn’t change it by a hair, because Henry was no moron, after all. He would know without George’s being here that George was pulling for him. (No meaning even in that, really: the prejudice of people who by accidents of place and time were friends.) What more? You had friends, and that was useful to remember, and Henry Soames was not a self-pitying fool who’d forget it, and there it was.
He lit the match, surprised that it worked, since the matchbook cover was soft from the dampness inside his shirt pocket, and raised the match to his cigarette, thinking about cancer. When he’d put the matches away he said, “It’d be easier if you were stupider. Even stupider than you are, I mean.” And now he really did feel a twinge of anger, at nothing specific.
Henry smiled and for a second he was himself again, not working automatically like an old man playing checkers at the GLF.