“But I knew it then,” she said. “Nancy was crying at me from the end of the rope. I kept hearing her all evening — or thought I did. And I wanted to release her, I wanted to let her go, Sandy. But I didn’t. I went back to the house and shut the door.”
So there was really only one thing more for Edith Goodnough to do before she put supper on the table. She wanted to iron Lyman’s shirt. And she did that then, while the potatoes and green beans boiled, pressed his best white shirt out neat and clean on the ironing board so that he would appear gentlemanly. When she was satisfied she took it in to him where he still sat in the parlor, fumbling with faded pictures of Memphis and Mobile, New York and Boise, and somehow persuaded him to not only put on a different shirt than the one he’d been wearing all day but to also get into a blue suit jacket that matched his dark pants. He didn’t know why. It didn’t matter. I suppose all he understood was that it was an imposition, a damn bother, but like I’ve already said, she managed that too, somehow. And afterwards, when he was dressed to her satisfaction, she herself changed clothes, put on a fine dark skirt and pink blouse and brushed her hair. So they were ready for supper now. They sat down in the kitchen across the table from one another, looking, I fully believe, as if they were contented, even happy.
They didn’t talk much. Edith said she hadn’t expected that they would. It was enough to be dressed up, to be seated at a table with red candles flickering, to be eating a satisfactory supper of baked chicken and pumpkin pie. The only thing she remembers saying was, “I’m still glad you came home, Lyman.”
Lyman was nodding in his chair, almost asleep.
“I know you don’t understand. But I am glad you came home when you did. It was worth the wait. Can you remember all we’ve done?”
“I’m too tired,” he said.
“You want to lie down now, don’t you?”
“I want to sleep.”
“Yes, it’s been a long day. Come on then, I’ll help you.”
She lifted under his arm to help him rise from the chair, and together they walked into the living room. She laid him down on his bed in his suit clothes, took his slippers off. When she pulled a blanket up over his long quiet body she saw that he was already asleep, the blue veins and age spots at his temple showing dimly in the fading light, his chin fallen onto his bow tie. She ran her hand over his forehead once and bent to kiss him, then she went back to the kitchen and put the candles out with moistened fingers and locked the back-porch door. She had thought she would clear the table, put things away, but that seemed excessive now, and so she returned to the living room, where she locked that door too, that outside door that opened formally into the house but was never used, and finally she sat down in the rocking chair between the two beds. Rocking a little, she watched the dark collect in the room while she waited for the moment when she knew she would rise again and strike a match to the old dust coated travel papers on the stairway, which her brother and my daughter had allowed her to store there on the steps in the past years. But that moment hadn’t arrived yet. For a time, for a while longer, she was content to sit and rock quietly, with the matches in her lap. She looked past her brother and out through that south window toward the elm trees that stood in the yard, bare and clean and dark, against a sky that was lighter only by comparison to the dark trees. Still she waited, thinking: In a minute now. Soon, soon I’ll stand up.
IT WAS a dog’s barking, something as simple and ordinary and yet as unpredictable as that — that’s all it was— just the loud and persistent barking of a neighbor’s dog that prevented Edith Goodnough’s plans.
“What the hell’s got into Jack?” I said.
Mavis and I were upstairs in our bedroom getting ready to go out for the night and Rena was already downstairs with her coat on, waiting by the front door for us to take her to Sheila Garfield’s house. Then Jack, our blue heeler, started barking. His nose was raised into the night, and he was howling.
“There must be something in the yard,” Mavis said.
She looked out the east window.
“Come here,” she said.
“What? Is it another skunk?”
“No.”
“It better not be a calf out, not tonight.”
“Will you just come here and look?”
So I looked.
“Good Christ,” I said. “Call town. I’m going over there.”
I ran downstairs and on outside and jumped into the pickup, spraying gravel out hard behind me entering the road. As I raced on toward the Goodnough place, I began to see bright flames through the second-story windows, where fire was already burning the old dry wallpaper in the empty bedrooms. Above the house there was yellow smoke rising in the updraft, and the whole place was lit up in that strange flicker of light so that the trees and the picket fence seemed to waltz on the brown grass. I braked the pickup beside the gate and ran up onto the back porch. Only of course the door was locked. Except I didn’t know that. They never lock their doors. What in Christ’s going on here? I ran off the porch around to the side to try that other door that opened onto the living room and found it locked too, solid and brick hard, one of those old-fashioned oak doors made before anyone heard of constructing doors with hollow cores. What in hell is this? So I was going to break the window, that south window in the living room, smash it in, and enter that way. And then I saw Edith.
Beyond the window Edith was sitting in the rocking chair. She was looking at me, sitting bolt upright and staring at me as if I had startled her, as if she thought I meant to cause her harm. I could see her eyes, her white face, and white hair. And then, while I stood there peering through the window, she did something that I will never forget, something that stopped me from kicking that window in and that — if you think about it — has altered everything else: she raised one hand from the arm of the rocking chair. That’s all she did. But do you understand what I’m saying? She lifted one pale blue-veined hand up from the rocking-chair arm, not to motion at me for help or even to show that I should hurry, but to warn me, to stop me. It was as if by that one open-faced hand, lifted so I could see it, that she was telling me to stay away. She didn’t want my help. She desired that I do. . nothing.
And just then I understood that. I understood too, all at once, why the doors were locked when in eighty years they had no doubt never been locked before. It all came together for me as I stood there on that side porch watching her through the window. Gradually she relaxed back into the rocking chair; she lowered her hand and shut her eyes. Then I saw that Lyman was asleep on the bed just below me, his face turned toward the window, pale and speckled, and his bow tie dark against the white of his best shirt. So I stood there. I stood listening to my neighbors begin to cough while their living room filled with the smoke that was curling in past the closed stairway door and while the rooms over their heads burned on. And you can think what you will. Perhaps you would have been able to break that window and to drag those two people out into the yard, but I couldn’t. I didn’t. I had seen Edith Goodnough raise her hand. That’s all.