Today he wanted to spend those hours driving. He sat up cautiously — his neck felt frail and thin inside his brace, and his intestines felt as painful and twisted as his toes. “We’ll miss all the traffic,” he told Henry. “The road will be clear, we’ll get to watch the sunrise. We’ll be at the reservoir in time for breakfast, and then we’ll have the whole day. Doesn’t that sound good?”
Henry yawned so widely his jaw cracked. “If it’s what you want. I can drive if I get some coffee in me.” He clipped Bongo to a leash and stepped outside the van with him. In the silence Brendan heard the hiss and splatter as they relieved themselves. “Do you have to go?” Henry asked. “Do you need your cup?”
“No. I can’t.”
“I’ll just say good-bye to Jackson, then.”
“Let him sleep,” Brendan said, thinking how Jackson was just beginning his long journey into solitude. “It’s all he has.”
Henry put on a clean shirt he took from the box at the back of the van, and then he dug out some things from Brendan’s plastic bag and changed Brendan’s shirt and socks for him. The attendants at St. Benedict’s had known how to roll the old socks off and the new ones on, but Henry was astonishingly clumsy. “Didn’t you ever dress Lise and Delia?” Brendan asked.
“They didn’t have feet like this.”
In the dim light from the overhead bulb, Brendan contemplated his twisted toes, which looked like the neat, crushed packets of bones spit up by owls. Henry dabbed at Brendan’s face and hands, and then his own, with a T-shirt moistened with water from the jug he carried for Bongo. Then he slid Brendan off Jackson’s blankets and folded them into a pile on the ground. He lifted Brendan’s chair into the van and, after a good deal of struggling, managed to get Brendan back into his chair and the chair locked back into place. The garage was still dark and there was no sound from Jackson. Henry scribbled a note of thanks on the back of an envelope and wedged it into one of the lawn chairs.
Finally, after Henry gathered up Kitty’s blankets and refolded them in back, and after he settled Bongo and found his Red Wings cap and asked Brendan what time it was and then cursed when he discovered that Brendan didn’t have a watch and that his own was tucked into Jackson’s pocket, he started the van and they eased their way down the rough dirt road. It had been dusk when they arrived and was very dark now. After a minute Henry said, “Hell. I don’t have any idea where we’re going.”
“Just follow your nose,” Brendan said. They banged and rattled through the woods until they came out on a small paved road, which led in turn to a larger road. There, after a few miles, they found an all-night convenience store with a gas pump. Henry bought some gas and some coffee, grumbling about how little money they had left. The sleepy woman who waited on them gave them directions back to their original route.
“Are you awake enough to drive?” Brendan asked. Henry sucked at his coffee as if it were air. Brendan sipped at his — it was fresh and it tasted fine.
“Sure,” Henry said. “I’ll just get something going on the radio here, some chatter to keep us entertained. Then we’ll cruise.”
Brendan had envisioned himself slipping silently through the liquid darkness, alert for the gentle graying that would mark the sun’s arrival, but the talk show Henry settled on was not, after the first shock, so unpleasant after all. It ran from two A.M. until six each day, and as Brendan listened to the various callers, men and women, rational or deranged, opinionated or gentle-voiced or full of rage and confusion, he was touched to think of all these souls looking for answers during the same dark hours in which he and his companions had searched their hearts. Alone in their rooms, connected by telephones and a web of radio waves, they pondered questions and looked for answers in common. Is abortion wrong? the show’s host asked. A flurry of answers followed. Should we educate our children at home? If a burglar enters your home at night, and you shoot him and he has no weapon, is it murder? Some of the talk was foolish, some of it not. Some callers broke into the subject at hand and said, “I want to tell you a story — something that happened to me, that may interest your audience,” and then related the most astonishing tales. Their voices were broken by time and pain; they gave no names. In place of a church, a priest, a confessional, they had the anonymous absolution of strangers.
“This goes on every night?” Brendan asked.
“Every night, all night. There’s one on almost every station.”
“No kidding.”
While Brendan listened, the dark road fell away before their headlights. They passed through Nelliston and Fonda and Amsterdam, East Glenville and Scotia and Niskayuna, and the road was so empty that each new set of headlights startled him. The headlights paled, the sky began to lighten, the Mohawk River appeared beneath a cloak of mist. They crossed the Hudson at Watervliet, just south of where the Mohawk poured in and around the time that a band of gold appeared on the horizon. They saw flocks of birds in Cropseyville and a few more cars and the first movements in diners and houses, and then the show was over and the news came on and then the weather.
“A gorgeous day,” the announcer said. “Clear, bright, highs in the upper seventies.” And then it was day.
The night watch had been painful for Brendan in China — arid, often despairing. His troubles had stuck in his mind like a swarm of bees, and when he sat in silent prayer the bees rose and buzzed between his ears. The sun had streamed into the cold stone church during lauds and illuminated the faces of his Chinese brethren: of Brother Anthony, who had been poisoned, and Brother Seraphim, whose head had been smashed by rocks; of Brothers Camillus and Anselm, who had died of dysentery during the march; of Brother Norbert, who had broken both legs falling off the narrow mountain trail. They were all gone, as were his companions at Our Lady of the Valley, and yet it was day, and he was alive, and he was out on the road and the sky was soft and golden. Behind Henry’s back, he made the hand signs for the names of all the brothers he could remember.
They dropped south through the Berkshire Hills and then drove east on roads that grew smaller and smaller. As they began to head north again, Brendan recognized several small towns he’d visited as a boy. They turned left, right, left again, past new houses, new schools, new shopping centers; old churches and cemeteries; women jogging with dogs who set Bongo barking; small boys tossing balls. They came to a road running, narrow and twisted and pale, like a nerve beside a river. Then, almost without warning, they turned at a stop sign and came upon a shady square that looked much as it had fifty years ago.
“Stop,” Brendan said, his voice shaking with excitement. “Stop here.”
“Is this it?”
“Almost. We’re so close I can smell it. The dam is right here in this town — this is the last one in the valley, the only one that was left. I can’t believe we got this far.”
Henry shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “I can’t either. There’s a coffee shop over there — how about I pull up and get us a little breakfast?”
“Get whatever you want. I’ll wait here with Bongo.”
Henry parked in one of the diagonal spaces fringing the square, under a horse chestnut covered with waxy blossoms. He lowered himself stiffly to the ground. “I’ll be back in five minutes. You’ll be all right?”