Jesus, when was the last time I had a shave? How about a shave? He looked around the room at his family. There were his wife, his two daughters, Claire and Betsy, a smattering of grown-up grandchildren, and his one remaining sister, Marjorie, huffing for air, fitted with a thick neck collar for her latest case of whiplash. The collar was zipped into a sock of tan linen, which matched her pantsuit. Despite lifelong asthma, she smoked long ladies' cigarettes on the back porch, flicking the ash off with her thumb, her arms crossed, her breath coming in sibilant little puffs of blue smoke. She kept her package of cigarettes in a cloth case with a gold-colored clasp. The case was embroidered with tan beads set in fountaining water patterns. She heard her brother as she pitched her cigarette into the rhododendron bushes and came back into the room. The screen door slammed behind her, the bang impious in the dim funereal hush. (The morning George had gone to the hospital, feeling worse than usual, his plan for the day had been a trip to the hardware store to buy a new hydraulic arm for the door; the old arm no longer offered any resistance.)
Why hasn't anybody shaved Georgie? Who is going to shave Georgie? It's terrible. Georgie looks awful. My God, he looks terrible.
One of his grandsons, Samuel, said, Oh, Aunt Margie, you are right; we need to get this old goat looking presentable. I'll shave him. Say your prayers, Gramp, and keep still. He wanted to choke his great-aunt until she died and then smoke all of her cigarettes.
George said, I'm done for.
Sam said, Your turn in the barrel.
George said, I was in the barrel last night.
Sam came back into the room with a bowl of scalding water and a hot towel, shaving cream, and a cheap disposable plastic razor blade his grandmother had found for him in a basket beneath the bathroom sink that was filled with various disused, soap-crusted toiletry. He could not find his grandfather's electric razor and George could not remember where he had put it. No one had the presence of mind to run to the drugstore and buy a new razor. Sam pressed the hot towel to his grandfather's face and wished for a smoke and that he did not have to shave his grandfather in front of such a wrung-out, hysterical audience. George's head shook slightly from Parkinson's disease. The shaking stopped when Sam held George's face. Sam removed the towel and shook the can of shaving cream and pushed the dispenser button. The can was old, excavated along with the razor from the guts of the cabinet under the bathroom sink. Since George usually used an electric razor, he had no need for shaving cream. The can was rusty on the bottom and was a brand no longer even manufactured. The dispenser sputtered and sneezed a gob of white drool into Sam's hand.
Sam said, Never mind the wood, Mother.
George said, Father's coming home with a load.
Sam shook the can again and this time a dollop of something closer to actual shaving cream came out. Sam lathered George's face and neck. He began with George's cheeks, only shaving with the lay of the hair. The cheeks went smoothly. The upper lip was tougher, the lower tougher still.
Marjorie said, Don't cut him.
George's daughters grimaced. Betsy, Sam's mother, said, Be careful, and bared her teeth at Sam to express peril and worry and support.
George's wife, Sam's grandmother said, Get his chin; he always misses his chin.
Sam said, A smoke.
George said, What?
Sam said, Nothing. Keep still, Mr. Kresge.
Mr. Kresge, I got complaint, 'bout how you sell me this cheap red paint!
Then came George's wattle, the loose bag of skin between the underside of his chin and his neck, with short, light strokes. Sam pulled it tight this way and that and gingerly scraped the razor over George's soft skin. The effort drained Sam, and his craving for nicotine led him to shave in a haphazard manner. When he thought he was done and had wiped away the remains of the shaving cream from George's face, he saw that there was a patch of stubble left in a fold of neck skin. Instead of applying more hot water and cream, Sam said, Wait, missed a spot, and pulled the fold taut with his thumb and flicked at the patch with the razor. The razor caught skin and opened a cut.
Shit, said Sam.
George said, What?
Blood! said Marjorie.
The cut was not deep, but it bled impressively, sending a column of red down George's neck, which ran off into several tributaries as it reached various wrinkles and rolls, and stained the top of his white cotton johnny, making necessary the elaborate effort of getting George out of his stained bedclothes and into clean ones, a process more difficult than its simple mechanics because it involved daughters and grandchildren rolling George's blanched, helpless naked body from side to side. Marjorie had to be escorted from the room when this happened.
She saw his bared shoulders and chest and said, This is awful! Somebody do something! Tears welled in her eyes and she groaned.
George had not felt anything. Once the bleeding was stanched and a plastic bandage stuck over the cut, and George was in a new johnny, propped up in bed, Marjorie, along with the other more abashed of the family, returned to the room. Sam handed George a mirror. George looked surprised at his reflection, as if after a lifetime of seeing himself in mirrors and windows and metal and water, now, at the end, suddenly a rude, impatient stranger had shown up in place of himself, someone anxious to get into the picture, although his proper cue was George's exit.
This sent a fresh sense of alarm through the room, and Sam quickly said, Well, what do you think? George looked up, confused. Sam said, About the shave. George looked at his grandson, lost. Sam leaned his face very slightly forward toward his grandfather, holding his stare, and said again, in a quieter voice, What do you think about the shave?
George said, Oh! The shave, you say! Very, very good. I'm so pretty again.
Sam said, Like Little Leroy, the cabin boy. George said, Ah, he was a cautious little nipper!
The rutted road ran between two mild slopes. The trees that grew on the slopes leaned in toward the road, so that their lowest branches brushed the grass. The sun lowered and there was brightness in the treetops and brightness in the long grass, and in between a band of shadows gathered and held in the skirts of the lowest branches. Howard rode along the track and had the sense that once he passed, the shadows leaked out from beneath the edge of the forest, down the incline and out onto the dirt. Behind him also, along with the shadows, animals came to browse in the grass at the verge, and a black-booted red fox darted across the bright road, from darkness to darkness. To Howard, this was the best part of the afternoon, when folds of night mingled with bands of day. He resisted the desire to stop the wagon and give Prince Edward an apple and crawl into the shadows and sit quietly and become a part of the slow freshet of night, or to stop the wagon and simply remain on the bench and watch the shadows approach and pool around the wagon wheels and Prince Edward's hooves and eventually reach the soles of his shoes and then his ankles, until mule, cart, and man were submerged in the flood tide of night, because the secrets gathered in the shadows at the tree line that rustled and waited until he passed, and which made the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end and his scalp tighten when he felt them flooding, invisible, the road around him, were dispelled each time he turned his direct attention to them, scattered to just beyond his sight. The true essence, the secret recipe of the forest and the light and the dark was far too fine and subtle to be observed with my blunt eye-water sac and nerves, miracle itself, fine itself light catcher. But the thing itself is not forest and light and dark, but something else scattered by my coarse gaze, by my dumb intention. The quilt of leaves and light and shadow and ruffling breezes might part and I'd be given a glimpse of what is on the other side; a stitch might work itself loose or be worked loose. The weaver might have made one bad loop in the foliage of a sugar maple by the road and that one loop of whatever the thread might be wound from-light, gravity, dark from stars-had somehow been worked loose by the wind in its constant worrying of white buds and green leaves and blood-and-orange leaves and bare branches and two of the pieces of whatever it is that this world is knit from had come loose from each other and there was maybe just a finger width's hole, which I was lucky enough to spot in the glittering leaves from this wagon of drawers and nimble enough to scale the silver trunk and brave enough to poke my finger into the tear, that might offer to the simple touch a measure of tranquillity or reassurance.