But the whole point of Jacob’s dream, as I now understand it, is that it’s a dream. The door between this world and the spiritual world has closed, I have come to believe, and will remain so until heaven and earth shall be made new. This is where I part company not just with the Wylies of the world, but with the John Millikens. I soon shied away from the so-called spirit-filled church he brought me to that morning, where grown men and women stood blinking and babbling in no language, and he and I lost touch. He must be an old man now. I ended up with the Baptists — imagine what Great Grandfather Coley would say to that! — and have mostly felt at home there. With the doctrine if not always with the people.
Of course, there are Baptists and there are Baptists. The fellow up here, for instance, turned out to be — not a modernizer, exactly, but more missionary than pastor. Collecting cans of food is all well and good, but need we congratulate ourselves by stacking the cartons right there in the sanctuary? And where, meanwhile, was the spiritual food? Alice and I hardly need sermons against the metal music, I told him straight out, I said I’d sooner sit home and read God’s word. His answer to that was that it was a changing world. “Well, there you go,” I said. “Isn’t that all the more reason?” Like talking to a wall. He’s a young man, with the same haircut as the television people and a suit that’s too tight on him; he shaves so close his jowls gleam. He was probably glad to see the back of me. He probably said to himself, Like talking to a wall.
So that was more or less the end of our churchgoing, except for Easter Sunday, when you still stand a fighting chance of hearing a sermon instead of a public-service message. Easter falls early this year; we’ll still be in Seattle. (God willing.) I wonder if Wylie couldn’t be talked into going to services with us. How she used to plead, when she was a teenager, to be left at home: what if her friends saw her! I sometimes fought down a mean impulse to tell her it was like going to a bar where sailors met businessmen: anybody who saw you there had a guilty secret, too.
But that secret was mine, to live with as best I could. They’ll never convince me I was wrong not to have burdened Alice with details of the danger I’d been in. Bring it to the Lord in prayer, the song says. It doesn’t say, Bring it to your wife in guilt. Very much out of fashion, I know, the idea that certain things are between you and the Lord, period. And yes: that morning, in Everett, Massachusetts, in that shabby wainscoted church — the church smell comes back to me, the smell of varnish, the smell of musty hymnals — I made confession. But before a crowd of strangers, whose care was for a soul that could have been anybody’s.
It’s Wednesday morning, and we’re about ready to be on our way. Alice has locked the cellar door and the toolshed, carried her gloxinias to the bathtub, plugged the reading lamp into the timer, set the thermostats (except in the bathroom) down to fifty. And I’ve spent the morning trying to compose a letter. It may be the last piece of business I’ll do, formally handing down to my daughter what remains, and I chose to do this last thing without Alice’s help. It may also be foolishness — our plane will probably not go down, I will probably live on until the cost of my care eats up all our money — but I felt the need.
Dearest Wylie,
Airplanes I think are not so dangers but I am put in this today what you need to know and send by itself. Our lawyer Mr. Plankey who can explain. He is our will and his card you put away when you need it.
A day goes by with you and my prayers. When you look after your own child you remember He died and still looks after.
Loving father,
Lewis Coley
Oh, this is all wrong, preaching away as I’ve sworn a hundred times not to do. But too late now; let it stand. I seal the envelope — even pulling an envelope across the tongue, and at the same time moving my head in the opposite direction, takes analytic thinking — and put it with the bills to be left in the mailbox.
In our forty years of marriage, Alice has always done our packing, but never before has she handled the bags. I sit at the kitchen table and watch her out the window, struggling, dragging her right leg along in tandem with the avocado green Samsonite suitcase braced against her calf, head bowed to avoid the branches of the little cherry tree. Which I ought to have pruned last year. I must have assumed there would be time.
And, again, I find that I’m weeping. It’s the sight of her walking away from me. I hear the car trunk slam; I must stop this before she comes back in to get me, though I don’t know how to stop. A lovely beginning for our trip.
She pulls the car up onto the grass by the back door, but lets me do the steps by myself. There are more steps here than at the front door, but these are easier; a couple of years ago, I had a fellow come around and put up a railing. Nothing fancy, just pressure-treated two-by-fours. Back when breaking a hip in icy weather was my worst imagining. Gripping the rail with my good hand and hanging the cane from the crook of my arm like some antique gentleman, I make it down the steps all right. But by the time I’ve gotten myself into the car and the door closed, I’m done in. Enough and more than enough. And now there’s the ride all the way down to Logan yet to do, and after that whatever’s involved in getting a crippled man through a busy terminal, and after that the hours in the air and after that the journey’s unimaginable other end.
We start down the driveway, Alice keeping one wheel up on the strip of grass between the muddy wheel ruts and the other wheel on the lawn.
“Forget the mailbox,” I say, meaning Don’t. I’m making a joke on myself, the joke being that I’m an old fussbudget.
Alice just fetches a sigh. So I sigh too and look out the window, tapping the fingers of my good hand on my good knee, for all the world like a stroke patient. Though deep down I can’t believe it, I remind myself that this may be the last time I’ll see this lawn, such as it is, with its untrimmed shrubs and the rocks I used to hit with the lawnmower. I try to give it the looking-at it deserves. And fall short, as always. This was what we had worked toward, and we came here too late to love it.
“Why don’t I pull over close to the mailbox,” Alice says, “and you just put down your window and pop the things in.”
“Get stuck,” I say.
“Good heavens,” she says, “Mrs. Laffond goes in and out of here every day.”
She gets the car over so that my mirror almost scrapes the mailbox, and I feel my whole side of the car go down. Oh, brother: I roll down my window as if nothing were wrong (trying to work magic, in spite of all I know and believe), pull open the mailbox, stick the envelopes in, push the thing shut and flip up the flag. As I roll the window back up, I look over at Alice, who looks at her watch and then at the dashboard clock. Her mouth is twitching. She steps on the gas: the wheels just whine and spin. She cuts the steering hard to the left, guns the motor and we sink deeper.