The Tin Can Tree

'She wasn't watching,' he told Mrs Pike.

'She wasn't,' she agreed, and went on looking calmly out the window.

James knew where he was heading, but he was hoping he didn't have to go there. So he drove down Main Street very slowly, looking right and left, peering into the windows of restaurants and soda shops and scanning the faces of people out for evening walks. Several times he saw people he knew. Seen through the truck window, walking in half-dark, six years older and unexpected in new clothes that James had never known, they looked worn and sad to him. He would look after them a minute with a feeling of bewilderment, almost forgetting Simon until Mrs Pike touched him on the arm. Then he would drive on.

Mrs Pike didn't ask what he was doing when he turned off Main Street. She seemed to think that this was part of a tour around Caraway that anyone might follow, and she gazed in tourist-like respect at a three-foot high statue of Major John Caraway. ('This is Major Caraway,' James's father always explained to them. 'He fought in the Big War.' Meaning the Civil War, though there'd been others since. 'He certainly was a small man,' said their mother. Their father never answered that.) Even when they turned down Hampden Street, where there were no statues and only private houses, Mrs Pike said nothing. She kept on searching the sides of the road, poking her nose toward the window so that the skin between her chin and the base of her throat made one slanted line. James drove more and more slowly. He turned left on Winton Lane and then drew to a stop, letting the truck roll into the grass at the side of the road. They were in front of an old grey house with a great many gables, its yard sprinkled with the feather-white skeletons of dandelions. No one was on the porch. For a while James sat silent, tapping the steering wheel with one finger. Then he looked over at Mrs Pike. She was still searching out the window, almost as if she thought they were still moving. 'I'll be back,' he told her.

'All right.'

He opened the truck door and climbed out stiffly, careful not to make too much noise. But no dog barked. In his mind, he saw now, he had pictured the dog's barking first. He had imagined that everyone would come to the doer to investigate, long before he had reached the front steps; he had seen the long rectangle of yellow light from the doorway and the silhouettes of many people, watching as he' walked awkwardly through the dandelions. Yet he came to the door in utter silence, with no one noticing. He opened the screen, which creaked, and knocked several times on the weatherbeaten wooden door and waited. For a while no one came. Then there were footsteps, and he stepped back a pace. He fixed his eyes on a point just a little above his own eye level, where he would see that hard white face as soon as the door opened.

But when the door did open, he had to look lower than that. He had to look down to the level of his shoulders, much lower than he had remembered, into the old man's small lined face and his eyes in their pockets of bone. His hair was all white now, gleamingly clean. He wore suspenders, snapped over a frayed white collarless shirt which was only folded shut, without buttons. And his trousers bagged at the knees.

The dog didn't bark,' said James.

'She died,' his father said, and stepped back a step to let him into the house.

14

The first thing Simon said was, 'if I'd known you were coming, I'd of hitched a ride with you.' He was sitting in old Mr Green's platform rocker, with his elbows resting lightly on the arms of it and his fingers laced in front of him. 'Did you just leave home and not tell anyone?' he asked.

'I told everyone,' said James, and looked straight across at the others. They stood in a line behind Simon, the three of them – his father, Claude, and Clara, the one brother and sister still at home. They were standing very still, all three of them in almost exactly the same position, with their eyes on James. When James looked at them Simon turned around and looked too, and just in that one turn of his head, with his chin pointed upwards and the shock of hair falling back off his forehead, he seemed to be claiming them somehow marking them as his own. James's father looked down at him soberly, and Clara smiled, but by then Simon had turned to James again and couldn't see her. 'I came on a bus,' he said.

'I guessed you had.'

'I found them in a telephone book.'

Clara said, 'James, will you sit down?'

'Oh, I guess not,' said James. 'Did you call the police?'

'I don't hold with police,' his father said.

'I forgot.'

'We figured you'd come after him. We didn't call no one.'

'I see,' James said. He folded his arms and stared down at one shoe. 'His mother was wondering where he was.

'Well, now she'll know,' said his father. 'Your mother used to wonder.'

'Sir?'

'What did she say?' Simon asked. 'Did she see I was gone? What did she say about it?'

Instead of answering, James turned around and looked out the open door. There was Mrs Pike, picking her way through the dandelions and toward that rectangle of light across the porch. She had come unasked, having waited long enough in the pickup, and because she didn't know whose house this was or what she was doing here her face had a puckered look. She stumbled a little on the porch and then came forward, her eyes squinting against the light. 'James -' she began, and then saw Simon and stopped. 'Is that Simon?' she asked. Her finger began plucking at her skirt, and she stayed poised there on the porch.

Simon stood up and looked at James, but he didn't say anything.

'Simon, is that you?' his mother asked.

'Yes.’

'Where did you go?' She called this into the room from her place on the porch; she didn't seem able to step inside. 'Why did you leave?'

'Oh, well,' Simon said uncertainly. He looked over at James's family, as if they might tell him what was going on here, but they were all staring at Mrs Pike. 'I just came to see these people,' he said.

'Oh,' said his mother. She looked down at her skirt. The longer she stood there the more distant she seemed to become, so that now James couldn't imagine her ever walking in of her own accord. He said, 'Mrs Pike, will you come in?' and then Clara, who had been gazing open-mouthed, came to life and said, 'Oh. Yes, please come in.'

Mrs Pike took a few steps, just enough to get her safely into the room, without moving her eyes from Simon. 'What happened to your hair?' she asked him.

'What hair?'

'I wish you'd have a seat,' Clara said.

'Simon, were you not going to come back?'

'Well, I don't know,' said Simon. 'I just came away, I guess.'

'Oh,' Mrs Pike said. She wet her lips and said, 'Will you come back now?’ not looking at Simon any more but at James, as if he were the one she was asking.

'What for?' Simon asked.

'Why-just to be back.'

Whatever Simon was thinking, he didn't show it. He began walking in those small circles of his, with his eyes on his boots. And James suddenly thought, what if he won't come back? The same idea must have hit Mrs Pike. She said, 'Don't you want to come?'

'Well, 'Simon said.

'You can't stay here.'

'How did you happen to come by?' he asked.

'James thought of it.'

'I mean, what for? Did you just go off driving?'

Mrs Pike frowned at him, not understanding. ‘James thought of it,' she said. 'He thought you'd be in Caraway.'

'You mean you came specially?'

'Well, yes,' said Mrs Pike. 'What did you think?'

'Oh,' Simon said, and the sudden clear look that came across his face made James feel light inside and relieved. It was that simple, he thought; Simon didn't know they had come just for him. 'You mean you're here on account of my going off,' he said.