Ash Wednesday (14 page)

"Do you have any idea what it is?" Jim asked, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.

"Not really. There's no way of telling until we remove it for a biopsy."

"Then it could be cancerous," he ventured.

The doctor nodded. "There's always that possibility.”

“What are the chances it is?"

"I don't give chances. We're not gambling here. Some doctors would say one chance in ten, another one in five, another one in a hundred. Then if it is malignant, the patient feels cheated. Me, the only odds I give are fifty-fifty. Either it is or it isn't."

"And"—Jim's throat felt thick, lined with heavy velvet—"and what if it is?"

"Then we treat it. But let's find out first. One step at a time."

"But do most people . . . I mean, could I survive it?"

"Every case is different. It depends on a lot of things. But it should be done quickly. The faster we find out, the better chance we've got of doing something about it. Can you come in tomorrow?"

"So soon?"

"No point in waiting. It won't go away."

Jim nodded. "All right. I guess so." Then he started to cry. It was nearly internal, a shaking of the shoulders, a trembling in the chest, the Adam's apple bobbing rhythmically. Tears trickled weakly from his eyes, but there were no audible sobs. The doctor looked down at his desk top and gave Jim instructions on what to bring and do when he entered the hospital.

When Jim got home he cried again, this time loudly, unashamed, in Beth's arms. "It's all right," she whispered. "It'll be all right. He
had
to say those things. Just in case. Just to protect himself. But it'll be all right, you'll see. They always get you ready for the worst, the very worst, that's all. You'll see."

"It's not," he sobbed, "it's not that death scares me. It's just that I don't want to
leave
you—you and Terry. I just . . . can't . . .
bear
that."

"You won't. You won't.
Shh
. . .
shh
. . ."

He kept crying, and didn't cry again when he was finished. The next afternoon he entered the hospital. The tests and preparations left him weary and shaken, and the nurse had to wake him the next morning at 6:00 A.M. to take him to the operating room. He remembered the prick of a needle, a drowsy journey down halls, through elevators, the silver metal of the operating room, and then nothing. His next sensation was that of violent peristalsis, striving to turn his head to let the vomit come up, but being strapped to a table and then nothing once more, and finally slow waking and a pain in his throat as though it were raw and rubbed with salt. Beth beside him, smiling and pale. "They say it's benign," she whispered.

He tried to talk, to voice a syllable, but it was impossible.

"They won't know for sure until they do a full biopsy, but the frozen section . . . Well, they say it looks okay."

It would be all right. He would live. He was not going to die.

Jim learned of his grandfather's death two days later. He was eating soft solids and was able to speak in a whisper. "He died instead of me," he said quietly when Beth told him the news.

"Don't say that," she said. "You had nothing to do with it."

He smiled and nodded then and said she was right, that that was a silly thing for him to say. But he thought to himself over and over again, He died instead of me, and that night he whispered "Thank you" to his grandfather and to God until he only thought the words, and then until he was asleep.

While he recovered in the weeks that followed, his mind took a decidedly mystical bent, and he saw the elements of his life coalesce into an imagined whole of which he had not previously dreamed. It was his near approach to death that had caused this more superstitious view of life, and he began to see meaning where before had been only chaos. Everything was fraught with signs and portents, indications of guidance. He had
not
died and there was a reason for that, but there was also a reason why he had come so
close
to death. It was
ordained
that he should feel the brush of the dark wings. What point was there otherwise to the suffering he had gone through? What point to his grandfather's death on the very night before his operation? It was a warning, a cautionary call that life was short, too short to be wasted.

Signs and portents.

The day before he was to go back to Linden he told Beth that he was quitting.

"Quitting?" she said, only mildly surprised. "For good?" He nodded. "You want to go back to work anyway. And the paper's going well. I'd like to work full-time on it.”

“What about Terry?"

"I can do a lot of my work at home. And when I can't, there's my mom, and what about Marty Pierce? She watches the Humphreys' baby."

"Just tell me—
why
do you want to quit?"

He told her about dead ends in life, of the happiness that working on the
Messenger
had brought him, of the dropped hints by Bill Gingrich that he could use a full-time assistant.

"It'll be hard," she said. "The money."

"We can manage."

They did manage. Beth secured a job at Hatch before Jim quit. It was short notice, but Mary Spruce pushed with all her might to wedge Beth into the as yet nonexistent assistant principal's position. That enrollment was up twelve percent helped, and Beth found herself making a salary of nearly a third again as much as when she had taught. Unfortunately Jim was offered only a bit more than half of what he was earning at Linden. Nevertheless, he accepted Bill Gingrich's offer, and turned in his resignation to Mr. Oakes, who was sincerely sorry to receive it.

The editorial page of the
Messenger
contained a new addition the following week: "James Callendar, Assistant Editor."

"Just goes to show you Horatio Alger was right," Bill Gingrich said wryly when he handed Jim a copy of the paper. "A man
can
become a legend in his own time."

Once he began newspaper work full-time, Jim liked it even better than he had before. To his relief, he found that he was able to spend a large part of his time writing and doing layout at home, so he was able to care for Terry with only occasional recourse to his mother or Marty Pierce, a large-boned kindly-eyed woman who lived only a few blocks away. Although he tried at first to do his work during the day, he found that the baby kept him far busier than he had expected, so most of the work was done at night. Gingrich quietly accepted the situation. particularly since Jim was always ahead of schedule on his duties and assignments. Once or twice he would
growl
, "Man
oughta
be a bachelor to work on a newspaper," and added, "or a childless widower." But the bantering was good-natured, and the relationship between the two men grew to be almost familial. Gingrich had dinner at the
Callendars
' every other week, and he and Jim often stopped in at the bar at the Anchor on Wednesday evenings after the weekly edition was in the hands of the printer and Beth was home with Terry.

So the years went by calmly. Jim was happy and content with his work and his family, and he flowed with the seasons as they passed effortlessly into one another. Beth liked her administrative position as well, and seemed far more relaxed than when she had been in the classroom. The youngest member of the family, Terry, was fulfilling all expectations. He was an active child, afraid of little, self-confident without being overbearing. Jim thought the time that he had spent with the boy was in large part responsible. While other fathers might come home tired and irritable, wanting only to be left alone and finally feeling communicative when it was too late and the kids were in bed, Jim had always made it a point to stop and listen when Terry had something to say. The work would always be there, but his son would not. Before he would even realize it, Jim thought, Terry would be gone. Though it made him immeasurably sad, he thought of the old song about turning around to find your children older, and then finally grown and out the door. He thought of it often, to remind himself of what was truly important, like a Catholic bearing a crucifix with the figure of his dead Lord.

Later, after the accident, he was almost sorry they had grown so close. It only made the loss that much greater, made him say over and over again, "If only . . . if only . . ."

If only things had not happened as they had. But it was of no use to contemplate. It
had
happened, all of it, one event leading inexorably to the next.

They could have done without the money. Had he known, had he even suspected, had a voice said to him, "There is a risk factor here of a thousand to one," he never would have gotten behind the wheel. But there was no one to whisper or warn; there was only the promise of five dollars an hour to drive the school bus.

It was not a great amount for a college graduate to be paid in 1981, but 1981 was not a great year. Everyone was feeling the pinch, especially the small-town merchants whose goods were going unsold because few people had enough money to pay full retail price, and those who did also chose to conserve by buying what they could at the recently opened K-Mart, or at the Jewelcor in Lansford. Lower sales meant lower profits, and the burghers of Merridale decided independently, yet
en masse
, that advertising would be the least painful thing to let slip by the roadside. Their motivations were for the most part humanitarian, although Bill Gingrich didn't see it that way.

"Damn fools are gonna kill themselves—and
us
," he said over the first of their Wednesday evening beers. "Don't know why they can't see it. Oh, sure, they'll keep most of their people on and cut out their advertising when they need it the most. `Do anything I can to keep from letting my clerks go,' Matt Sheller—hell, you heard him."

"You can't blame them, Bill," Jim said, nursing his beer. "Most of his
people've
been there for years. I remember Mike and Pete from when I was in high school."

"I'm not blaming them," Gingrich said, his temper rising. "Sheller doesn't have to fire
anybody
. If he and the other clowns in this town made their prices competitive with the chains, they'd do fine and they could
still
buy advertising."

"Can they really compete?"

"Hell, yes. Matt Sheller might have to start driving a Volkswagen instead of his yearly New Yorker, but what he'd lose at first in profit he'd make up eventually in volume."

"If it's that simple, why haven't they done it already?"

Gingrich looked at Jim and smiled slightly. "This, in case you hadn't noticed, is
Merridale
, my boy. You've been on the paper seven years, you
oughta
know by now. Things are done here as they've been done for two hundred years. One neither stands up in the boat nor rattles the oars, or one will find one's ass pitched overboard." He held up a finger for another beer.
 
“Tell me, what do you think would happen to the first Merridale merchant to change his store's name to 'Discount City'?"

Jim frowned. "I'm not sure. But he'd probably do well."

"I beg to differ. In
my
scenario he would be shunned by his fellows, his wife would be ignored at Thursday morning Bible study, and his kid might get the shit kicked out of him at school. The few customers he had had would desert him, and he would go bankrupt, followed by an early death and a pauper's grave, leaving his widow and orphans to the mercies of the Reagan non-welfare state."

"Come on, Bill." Jim laughed. "You're not serious."

"Bet me." His smile vanished. "Some outsider comes in and builds a K-Mart or a Thrift Drugs on the outskirts, and there's a little bitching and moaning, but before you know it everybody's out there snuffling up dish towels three for a dollar. But let one of our
own
turn traitor, and spider webs will form on his door real fast." Gingrich took a long draft of beer and stifled a belch. "Nope, they're content to go along doing what they've always done and what their daddies always did. Wouldn't know a good marketing idea if it bit 'em in the ass. And when they
need
to advertise the most—sell their small-town friendly service if they can't sell price—they don't advertise. No,
they
only advertise when they don't really need to. Dim bulbs. All of 'em. Just dim bulbs." He shook his head and gnawed his lower lip. "We're
hurtin
', Jim."