“How was the levee?” she said.
“I wouldn’t know where to start,” I said. I had sobered up some on the ride home, so I didn’t say anything foolish like You should have been there. “Bullock served hamburgers before everybody left for home. Real ones on real buns.”
“That’s nice,” Britney said.
“I brought one back for you.”
It was not easy to extract the thing from my pocket. When I did, it was all compacted into the bun, a soggy mess with a deal of pocket lint around the edge. I tried to clean it off as I held it out for her.
“That’s all right.”
“There was nothing to wrap it up in.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“No tin foil or plastic wrap. Not even a paper napkin.”
“I understand,” she said.
I put the squashed, linty hamburger on the table beside her. The clock on the mantelpiece said ten after three.
“What are you doing up so late?” I said.
She seemed to shudder in the dim light but didn’t reply.
“Are you okay?” I said.
She drew her knees up under the blanket to make herself look even smaller than she actually was. I went over and stooped down beside her chair.
“What’s wrong.”
“Those men from the general were here,” she said. Her voice quavered.
“Who was?”
“Wayne Karp and two others.”
“They came in here? Inside this house?”
“Yes.”
“You let them in?”
“They let themselves in.”
“What’d they want?”
“I think they were looking to steal things. I surprised them. Just being here.”
“What happened?”
Britney sighed and made a choked sound like a sob that couldn’t quite come out.
“Tell me,” I said.
“They demanded `refreshments.’ That very word.”
“What’d you do?”
“I told them there was some milk and leftover corn bread. They went out to the kitchen on their own and rooted around and found some of your apple jack.”
“Did they take anything else?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Is that all?”
“No.”
“What else?”
“They touched me.”
“Touched you?”
in my personal places.”
“What do you mean by `touching’?”
“I mean touching.”
“Nothing more?”
Britney looked into her lap and shook her head. “They talked about coming back another time for more `refreshments.’ They like that word.”
All kinds of blustery phrases echoed through my head. Ifthey set foot in here again, I’ll kill ’em, and things like that which I had probably heard on TV years ago. I didn’t say any of them. I was sober enough to know that they sounded stupid.
“Where was Sarah?” I said.
“She was upstairs. Asleep, I think.”
“Look, forgive me for asking, but I want to make sure I understand-they didn’t force you to have sex?”
“No, they didn’t rape me.”
“Look at me. Listen. Two things: I’ll make sure you’re not left in this position again. And these guys will pay some kind of price for what they did.”
She nodded.
“I don’t think this is the only house they went into,” she said.
She didn’t especially want to move out of that chair, but I persuaded Britney to come upstairs, and I literally tucked her into her bed. Her room was Daniel’s-my son’s-old room. His collection of birds’ nests was arrayed along a narrow shelf that I had built for that purpose high up along one wall. There was a large map of the world salvaged from the final days of the high school. On it, the great pink amoeba of Russia was still called the Soviet Union and Germany was divided in two. Britney had no belongings of her own to speak of, everything she owned having been consumed in the fire that destroyed her house. Some of the other women in town had given her a few items of clothing, a comb, a pin cushion, and sewing implements.
“We can find a place to store Daniel’s things if you like,” I said, “so you could make it more like your own room.”
She nodded. The sadness she carried was a palpable force, like gravity doubled. I wondered, if someone tried to lift her up now, would she weigh two hundred pounds?
As I sat there on the bed, her hand searched along the thin summer covers until it found mine. I held it a moment, then joined my other hand, and she hers, and we held each other’s hands for a while.
“The world has become such a wicked place,” she said quietly, just a statement of fact.
“There’s goodness here too.”
“Where is it?”
“In all the abiding virtues. Love, bravery, patience, honesty, justice, generosity, kindness. Beauty too. Mostly love.”
“I’m afraid sometimes that we drove those things out of existence.”
“No, we carry them in our hearts. They’re always with us.”
“I don’t know what’s in my heart anymore. It’s too dark to see.”
“Light follows darkness.”
“Thank you for saying so,” she said, and let go of my hands. She rolled over on her side and I left her there.
I looked in on Sarah before I went to bed. She was in what had been Genna’s room, full of the little wooden dolls and puppets I had made over the years, with doll and puppet clothing made by Sandy. Sarah was fast asleep, small, innocent, and perfect.
Forty-seven
Larry Prager was out in the extensive garden behind his house (and dentistry practice), on Locust Street, on the northeast side of town, not far from the defunct Wayland-Union Mill. I liked to come over to his place because he was one of the few people in town who still had a dog. Bogie was some kind of a retriever-terrier mix, about fifty pounds with a terrier beard. He was a playful, happy dog, and he met me as I came around back of the house.
Larry’s garden was among the most beautiful and productive in town, a half acre of well-established raised beds with bluestone paths between them and a twelve-foot-high south-facing brick wall with pear and plum trees espaliered against it, and a full complement of berry bushes in disciplined ranks on the other three sides. He cultivated intensively, getting several crops of different things out of some beds in a season. When I came along that morning, he was tying up tomato vines to their stakes. He watched me come through the garden gate-which I had reconstructed for him the year before-with Bogie jumping up at my side. The dog let me rub his belly as I stooped down to talk to Larry.
“They love this heat,” Larry said of his tomatoes.
“It looks like they’re really taking off. Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t been able to get back to the job here,” I said.
Their garage had originally started out as a carriage barn when the place was first built in the 1870s. It was upgraded to a garage sometime in the 1920s, and the original cupola was removed. I was converting it back to a barn now. It required a new cupola because the hayloft needed to be well ventilated. Larry and Sharon had plans to acquire a horse of their own. Larry bartered with most of his patients. I was one of his patients, of course. Sometimes he paid me in dental work and sometimes in cash money. Under the circumstances, they lived well.
“I’ve heard about your recent exploits, Robert,” he said, “so there’s no pressure at this end. And it’s nice to have the water back on again too, thank you very much.”
“You can thank New Faith. And Bullock for making the pipe. I just came by to check in, let you know you were not forgotten.”
I stood there watching him tie off some more vines. Something seemed wrong because usually Larry was a much more voluble person, always ready to palaver.
“We missed you over at the levee last night,” I said.