He waited for the pipe to grow cool in his hand, then got up, stiff from sitting so long, his rear end numb, and went over to the burdocks growing by the side of the tractor-shed. He picked four leaves and laid them out inside his hat, with excessive care, then he put on the hat and started home.
That night he went up to George Loomis’s place again, not walking this time but driving his truck. He wore the same clothes he always wore, bib overalls, frock, the disintegrating straw hat, his pipe in his teeth. The lights were all out, as usual, but in the high, rounded kitchen windows he could see the flicker of the television. Old Man Judkins knocked, then leaned one hand on the cool brick of the wall and waited. The air around him was breathless and muggy, and the music from the TV sounded unnaturally loud, like water rushing down a gorge. “You’d better sit down for this,” a man’s voice said, and then a woman’s voice: “Something’s happened to Walter! Oh, please! You’ve got to tell me!” Old Man Judkins knocked again and, abruptly, the sound went off but not the picture.
George Loomis called from the middle of the room, “Who is it?”
“Fred Judkins,” he said. He took his pipe from between his teeth in case he should need to say it again, more clearly. But he heard the clump of George Loomis’s boot-brace coming. The door opened.
“ ’Mon in,” George said.
Old Man Judkins took off his hat.
For maybe fifteen seconds they looked at each other in the near darkness as if George had been expecting him; then Old Man Judkins went past him and over to the table. There was only one chair that looked safe to sit on, the wired-up, straight-backed chair facing the television, and George went into the living room for another, one of his mother’s antiques, spindly and black, with flowers and birds painted on it. When he came back he said, “Whiskey?” He had a glass of his own on the table.
“No thanks,” Old Man Judkins said. “Milk, mebby, if you got it.”
George went over to the icebox, carried the pewter milkpitcher over to the sink and took a peanut butter glass from the drain-rack. He brought over cottage cheese and jam and two china dishes and two paper-thin, tarnished spoons. Then, formally, they both sat down.
“Long time since you come up here,” George said.
“Yes it is.”
They looked at the table between them. They’d traded work in the old days — not George and Fred Judkins but Fred Judkins and George’s father. Old Man Judkins could remember when George Loomis was no bigger than Henry’s boy was now — and exactly as much like an elf or an angel or any other natural thing — crawling around on the floor while his mother worked bread dough right here at this table. Long time, he thought, and nodded. In the corner of the living room that he could see from where he sat, he could make out the shiny arm of an elephantine, old-fashioned couch, a table with a bird cage on it, and a lamp with Tiffany glass.
“How have you been?” George said.
“I still get around,” he said.
Their faces were white, with no light but the flicker of the television. They looked like dead men returned after a long time to an empty house to say some trifling, insignificant thing they’d forgotten to say in time. But they didn’t say it. Old Man Judkins relit his pipe, and George Loomis said, “Still living there with your daughter, Jud?”
“No, didn’t work out. Got a room over Bill Llewellyn’s now. Better all ’round.”
“I bet you miss the old farm, eh?” He lifted his glass and waited, respectful.
Old Man Judkins nodded. “ ’Deed I do.”
George grinned. “You give me about three dollars and you can have this place.” He drank.
“Ain’t worth it, George.”
“That’s the truth.”
The pipe had gone out again and Old Man Judkins lit another match, but he forgot to hold it over the bowl; he was watching the silent television — a man in a cavalry uniform looking through field glasses at a hill. George looked over too.
The quiet made Old Man Judkins remember something, but for a long time he couldn’t think what it was. Then at last it came to him. Steam. The old black steam tractor made no sound at all, sitting there opposite the thrashing machine, headed up. When they threw in the pulley the thrashing machine would begin to move, slowly at first, like something alive just beginning to wake up, the feeders rising and falling in a kind of sawing motion, utterly soundless, and then the team would bring the wagon over, that too almost soundless — the click of harness buckles, the creak of a wheel — and by now the feeders would be moving fast, a kind of whir like a ball on a string, and the crew would start working, a man on the bagger and one on the platform, two more men up on the wagon, pitching, a couple of boys hauling the grain off and bringing up new bags, no sound but from time to time the not-loud shouts of the men telling stories, joking while they worked, and the steady whir and the feeders catching the unthrashed wheat with a chìg-uff, chig-uff, chig-uff.
“I ought to come see you sooner,” Old Man Judkins said. “Folks get out of touch.”
“My fault as much as yours,” George said.
Not speculating, on principle, raising no questions, making no suggestions, Old Man Judkins watched the picture on the television, wondered vaguely what was happening, and finished his glass of milk. Out of a clean, cool waterfall came a pack of cigarettes. At last he stood up. “Long time, George,” he said.
“Too long,” George said. He stretched out his hand and the old man took it.
Then Fred Judkins went home.
In his room, sitting down in front of his turned-off coal-oil heater, the window-fan roaring, Old Man Judkins got out his pipe, cleaned it, stoked it. He knew that from time to time he would wonder again why the Goat Lady’s cart was up in George’s shed; he knew that despite his principles he’d be molested from time to time by doubts. Maybe the answer would come up some time in a conversation, or maybe someone else would stumble onto it, some loudmouth gossip or righteous fool from town, and he would find out. But probably not. No matter.
After a time he said, pointing his pipe at the reflection of himself looking in, dubious, through the nearer window, “Maybe there’s such a thing as a heaven and hell. If there is, a man has a right to go where he’s contracted for. I wouldn’t mind going to hell if I thought I’d earned it. Better than getting a last-minute pardon, as if everything you did was no account, any more than a joke.”
He glanced over his shoulder as if thinking he might have been overheard. The room was empty. “There is no heaven or hell,” he said. “That’s a scientific fact, and there’s the end of it.”
He set his teeth down firmly on the pipe stem.
7
He lay in bed on his back in the muggy night heat, his hand under his head, smoking without ever touching the cigarette except to change it for a new one, the radio on the commode playing the American Airlines all-night concert, far away and tinny, interrupted once every hour for news, the same news over and over, the same voice: Albany. Tonight eight counties have been officially declared disaster areas. In his press conference this evening, Governor Harriman said—
There were flies in the room, the screens all shot. Beside the radio, a stack of paperback books, the loaded ash tray.