The boy said, “What are they doing over there?”
Henry looked over where the boy was pointing. There was a car parked in back of the truck now, and a woman stood watching the grave-diggers. They were strangers, city people from their looks. The man had on a suit and hat, and the woman had on a gray coat and a hat with flowers in it. Both of them were old.
“They’re digging a grave,” Henry said, taking off his cap again, as if absentmindedly.
“No they’re not,” Jimmy said, “they’re digging somebody up.”
“Mmm,” Henry said. Hardly noticing, he pulled up Jimmy’s trousers and tightened the belt. After a minute he took the boy’s hand and they started down.
“There’s four of them,” Jimmy said. “One, two, three, four.”
“Mmm,” Henry said. He stopped a minute to rest, then began again.
3
The world had changed for Henry Soames because little by little he had come to see it less as a yarn told after dinner, with all the relatives sitting around, and more as a kind of church service — communion, say, or a wedding. The change had in a way begun when they’d built The Maples. He’d felt a kind of awe, watching the place go up: not only awe at the looks of it (a gabled building like an old-fashioned Catskills barn, twice the size of Henry’s old diner, with planter-boxes inside and out, and twelve tables, and a fireplace at one end), but awe, too, at what his wife had done to him, scooping up his old life like wet clay and making it over into her own image, and awe at how easily she managed it all and how easily, even gladly, he had accepted it, in the end. It was as if it was something he’d been thinking all along and had never quite dared — though God knew it wasn’t. Her ideas had given him the willies, set in his ways as he’d been by then, and they’d probably have given him the willies even if she’d caught him younger; but he’d found there was no stopping her: She was hard as nails and mean as her mother when there was something she had to have. So he’d given in, and when he’d done it, not just in words but totally, freely choosing what he couldn’t prevent, he’d felt a sudden joy, as though the room had grown wider all at once (which by that time as a matter of fact it had), or as if he’d finally shoved in the clutch on the way down a long straight hill it was no use resisting. He’d stood out by the road with Jimmy, watching the carpenters work and after that the nurserymen and the painters (all this a year ago now), and he’d given up all thought of the mortgage and whether the truckers would still pull in, and he’d mused like a man only half-awake on how it had all come about, the long train of trivial accidents, affirmed one by one, that made a man’s life what it happened to become. It was a good life, he had to admit it, now that he could look at it, with nothing to do from morning to night but keep an eye on little Jimmy and from time to time catch up their books. (Callie was no good at the bookkeeping. The figures had a will as stubborn as her own: Twos, fours, sixes were as intransigently twos, fours, and sixes as stones were stones. She could no more juggle the bills than juggle dead tamaracks, and she would cry, and Henry would take over, and he’d have it all straightened out — as well as it could be — in no time.) He’d grown mystical, or, as Callie said, odd. He had no words for his thoughts; the very separateness of words was contrary to what he seemed to know. It began, perhaps, with his thought of what marrying Callie had done to him; if she’d made him into her own image it was nevertheless her own image discovered — for the first time to her as well as to him — in him: Henry Soames as he might, through her, become. Once he had fairly tested it, he knew beyond any shadow of doubt that the new life she had shaped was his own, it fit him the way his father’s old coat had one day, to his surprise, fit him, and from that moment on he didn’t just wear the new life, he owned it. He felt like a man who’d been born again, made into something entirely new, and the idea that such a thing could happen had startled him, and he’d seized on it, turning it over and over in his mind the way you turn over a hundred-dollar bill. But the new life he’d found in himself had no settled meaning yet: It was all a-shimmer and vague, like a dream. It lacked the solid reality that would come when he’d lived it long enough to know it had something in common with the old — long tedious hours in the middle of winter when no one came in, days when Callie was short-tempered and Jimmy had a devil in him.
With the passing of time he became in reality what he was, his vision not something apart from the world but the world itself transmuted. He’d hired Billy Hartman by this time, so he could rest himself more, at Doc Cathey’s insistence, and he never served customers himself now except on special occasions — a birthday, say, or a wedding. His new detachment encouraged the mystical drift of his thoughts. He would sit with Jimmy eating supper and watching Callie at the cash register, everything around her a-glitter — the glass on the counter, the green and silver mint wrappers, the cellophane on the twenty-five-cent cigars, the glossy knotty pine wall behind her, with the picture of the pheasant on it — and Callie there in the center of it all like a candle — and he would be so moved, all at once, his eyes would fill. He was proud of her, and had a right to be proud, because she too had been changed. She would have been beautiful in any case, one way or another, Henry knew, but marrying him she had found out possibilities not only in him but in herself as well that she might never have found some other way. She never spoke of loving him but sometimes when they locked up the restaurant together she would hold his hand, or when he sat holding Jimmy, reading to him, she would pat the bald spot on his head. And so like a man half-asleep he thought about marriage, which was the same thing as love or magic or anything else he could think of (he could no more distinguish between what was happening from day to day between Callie and himself and what happened between himself and his son than he could tell the difference, except in degrees, between those and the way the restaurant changed him and he, in turn, the restaurant), and he knew, not in words, that it was true, as Emmet Slocum had said once, that people sometimes killed themselves because of the weather but nevertheless they killed themselves by choice.
So it was that Henry Soames had discovered the holiness of things (his father’s phrase), the idea of magical change. And listening to Callie’s mother talk he began to see, he thought, why people were religious. She seemed to know nothing of holiness, Callie’s mother, no more than the preacher at Salem Baptist seemed to know; but listening to her it came to him that the words she bandied about made a kind of sense. She would sit at the piano, up at her place on a Sunday afternoon, and would sing old hymns in her shrill, hard voice, and Henry would sit over by the window in the corner, staring vaguely at the African violets by the lace curtains on the window seat, patting the knee of the child in his lap, and it would come to him that the whole thing might be true. In whisp’ring grass 1 hear him pass. Maybe he’d been wrong; maybe they’d discovered the same thing he’d discovered, and differed from him only in trying to talk about it: a vision of dust succinct with spirit, God inside wasps, oak trees, people, chickens walking in the yard. Maybe like him they had come to feel kindly toward old clothes, farmwomen’s wrinkled elbows, the foolishness of young people, expensive suits, even the endless political talk at the GLF down in Slater. And if he was wrong, he was wrong too to keep himself apart from them: What religion was was a kind of formal acting-out of what every human being felt, vague fears over things he could do nothing about, vague joys over things only partly his doing — the idea of holiness. So one day he had taken Jimmy to the Presbyterian Church in Slater.