Duane's Depressed (37 page)

“I’m pissed off that Dickie fired me,” she informed Duane bluntly, a day or two after Karla’s funeral. “You know why?”

“No, why?” Duane asked.

“Because I miss the gossip,” Ruth said.

“I’d think you’d be tired of gossip,” Duane said. “I know I am.”

“Now you, you’re brokenhearted because your wife’s dead,” Ruth said. “But you’re just going to have to get over it, Duane. You had a nice marriage, and everything ends.”

No one had ever put it quite that way: that he had had a nice marriage, which was certainly true.

“Now look at me,” Ruth went on. “I had ten or twelve boyfriends when I was of courting age, and some of them grew up to be nice men. But I married the worst asshole in the lot. I chose badly and I paid for it in spades. I didn’t have a nice marriage like you had. So who’s the lucky person?

“Most everybody around here gets killed on the roads, sooner or later,” she went on, without giving him time to reply. “I’m lucky I’m past the driving age. I might live another ten years, if I can just stay off the roads.”

After that conversation Duane fell into the habit of dropping by Ruth’s every day or two, to chat a few minutes and fill her in on whatever gossip he might have picked up. She had a
fine sycamore tree in her backyard and liked to sit in its shade, fanning herself, on the long hot evenings when afterglow still lit the sky until nine o’clock or later.

“I’ve been living in this town for nearly ninety years,” she said, one day. “You wouldn’t think a person with brains would get stuck in a hot little hole like this for ninety years, but I did.”

Usually Duane would manage to bring the conversation around to Karla, at some point. He liked to hear other people talk about her—it made him proud, in a way, because neither Ruth nor Mildred-Jean nor Lester nor Bobby Lee had a bad word to say about her now, however much they may have quarreled with her when she was alive.

Also, hearing people talk about Karla meant that she was alive, in a way—alive, at least, in the memory of the town.

“Well, she had that energy,” Ruth said one day. “Most people get sort of ground down, you know. I was ground down myself for about twenty-five years. I didn’t have no zip—I was just going through the motions. Karla never seemed to lose her zip—that’s gotta be good genes.”

“I ran out of it,” Duane commented. “Just getting the kids off to school does me in for most of the day.”

“Yes, and I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” Ruth said.

“About what?” Bullbats were swooping over the pond next door.

“You,” Ruth said. “Why are you raising your grandkids? It’s not your job.”

The comment took him by surprise. Most of his grandkids had lived in or near the big house their whole lives, while their parents got in and out of various kinds of trouble. Karla had just seemed to want it that way; he could not remember that it had ever been discussed. The house was large; there was room for everyone. Having the grandkids there seemed like part of the natural order.

But Ruth was right—it
wasn’t
part of the natural order.

“Your kids ain’t perfect but they’re healthy enough and none of them are morons,” she said. “They
had
those children. It’s their job to raise them, not yours.

“You ain’t a baby-sitter service,” she went on. “You’ll be needing to marry again yourself, and I doubt your bride will want all those grandkids underfoot.”

“I agree that the kids should raise the grandkids,” Duane said. “That
is
their job. But I won’t marry again. I can’t imagine it. Forty years is long enough to be married.”

“I know, I oughtn’t to have said that while you’re still in mourning,” Ruth said. “I ought to have said that next year, or the year after. But I’m an old woman—I may not be around next year or the year after. I have to advise you while I can, even if the advice is a little premature.”

The thought of being married to someone other than Karla was so odd that Duane could scarcely grasp it. The strange thing was that two or three days ago he had overheard Rag say the same thing; she had been talking to Julie. He had just happened to step in the door at the right moment to overhear them. Julie had been insisting that her father would never marry again—even if he wanted to, the kids wouldn’t stand for it, Julie told Rag.

“Yes, but honey, a grown man can’t live on memories forever,” Rag said. “Unless your dad’s dead as a stump he’ll marry again.”

The remark struck him with particular force because he remembered that Karla had said almost the same thing when she was complaining about their lack of a sex life.

“Sweet memories ain’t enough,” she had said.

It was odd that Ruth and Rag, who had no use for each other, would have the same thought about him.

“Ruth, why would you think that?” he asked. “Why would I want to marry again?”

But Ruth, embarrassed, refused to discuss it further.

“You’ll know when the time comes,” she said.

4

I
N THE NEXT FEW DAYS
Duane learned that Ruth and Rag were not alone in their speculations about his future. Everyone in town seemed to be of the same opinion, which was that in a year or two—if not sooner—he would marry again. Mildred-Jean admitted as much the next day, while she was giving him a haircut.

“Yep, there ain’t been no messy divorces lately, so you’re the main topic of conversation,” Mildred-Jean said. “Some people think you’ve got a girlfriend already.”

“They better not think it out loud in my hearing,” he told her. “Karla’s just been dead three months. What kind of man do they think I am?”

Duane was disgusted by such talk. He had been married forty years, and had loved his wife to the end, even if he had wandered off and pursued a lonely lifestyle at the end. Did they think he held her memory so cheap that he would just turn around and get married? Every day now he felt the urge to talk to Karla. Though she was dead, in some way he felt more married to her than he had when she was alive. The thought of being with another woman didn’t appeal to him at all—in fact, it repelled him. Karla was a dead wife, the only one he had ever had, the only one, he felt sure, that he would ever need.

The local speculation troubled him so much that he even managed to convene three out of his four children, in order to
reassure them on that score. He didn’t want them to listen to the talk and get any silly ideas.

“People are talking about me getting married,” he said, to Dickie, Julie, and Nellie. There had been no solid reports of Jack’s whereabouts, but rumor had it that he was in South America, trying to canoe down the Amazon.

“This talk is just silly gossip,” he said. “I’m not going to get married.”

To his annoyance all his children avoided his eye. He saw that not one of them believed him, which annoyed him even more.

“We just want you to do what’s best for you, Daddy,” Nellie said.

“If you find someone you love we don’t want to stand in your way,” Julie said.

“Hell, why should you have a lonely old age just because Mom hit the milk truck?”

“What did I just say?” Duane said. “I said I wasn’t getting married. I’ve got nine grandkids and a few good friends. Why should I be worried about a lonely old age?”

No one spoke, but he saw that his children were as convinced as everyone else that he meant to marry again.

“Okay, think what you want, but from now on I’m going to be staying in the cabin at night,” he said. “You’ll have to figure out a way to raise your own kids.”

With that he left, leaving the children looking stunned. That night he sat late in front of his cabin, feeling the heat rise up from the ground. When he thought about it more calmly he realized that the speculation about his future was probably normal. For most of those doing the speculating, marriage was the norm by which all activity was measured. Just as nature abhorred a vacuum, society—at least as it was constituted in Thalia—abhorred the odd man out. Bad enough that he had given up pickups, but that one eccentricity the people might eventually accept. Giving up pickups while remaining single was more than the home folks were prepared to cope with. They needed to
think
Duane was going to marry again, even if in the end he never did.

The next morning Bobby Lee showed up at the cabin just as
Duane was scrambling some eggs—Duane scrambled a couple more and set his visitor a plate.

“I guess you’ve come to talk to me about my forthcoming marriage,” Duane said.

Bobby Lee looked blank. He proceeded to empty about half the pepper shaker onto his eggs.

“I like visible pepper,” he explained, when Duane raised an eyebrow. “I like visible salt too, but I’ve had to go light on the salt since I lost my ball.”

“Yes, they say a low-salt diet is good for people with one ball,” Duane said, nodding gravely.

“What’s this about getting married?” Bobby Lee asked.

“It’s the talk of the town,” Duane said. “I don’t know who I’m supposed to be marrying. I thought you might know.”

“I close my ears when there’s gossip being said,” Bobby Lee said. “I don’t care whether you marry or don’t marry—I got my own problems.”

“Good, I’m glad somebody’s neutral,” Duane said.

“If there was another room on this cabin I might just move in with you,” Bobby Lee said. “I’m sick of human society—all it does is make fun of my condition.”

“That’s the main reason I don’t have but one room—so you can’t move in,” Duane said.

“Wait a minute—something ain’t right about this situation,” Bobby Lee said. “Where’s Shorty?”

“I gave him away—he couldn’t tolerate the travel,” Duane said.

“My God, you are a lost soul,” Bobby Lee said. “I didn’t know you was so far gone that you’d give your only dog away.”

“I gave him to a whore and a black lady,” Duane admitted. “I saw him yesterday, though—he was in fine spirits.”

“Shorty may be, but Sonny Crawford ain’t,” Bobby Lee said. “They hauled him off to the hospital last night.”

“The crazy hospital, or the regular hospital?” Duane asked.

“The regular hospital,” Bobby Lee said. “They’re thinking of cutting both his feet off.

“They’re black as oil,” he added. “Sonny don’t move around much and I guess his circulation just finally gave out.”

“You mean he’s got gangrene?” Duane asked.

“Well, his feet are black as oil, they say,” Bobby Lee said. “It might be gangrene. Whatever it means, his dancing days are over.”

“They were over anyway—I haven’t seen Sonny at a dance in twenty years,” Duane said.

The news sobered him—the thought of Sonny sitting there, year after year in his little convenience store, hardly moving, hardly walking, until his feet began to rot, was not a pleasant thing to contemplate.

“You ought to go see him, Duane,” Bobby Lee said. “You and him was best friends once. If they cut off both his feet he’s going to be pretty depressed.”

Bobby Lee left and Duane washed the dishes. He liked everything in the cabin to be clean and in its ordered place. It was so peaceful not being in the big house, with Rag ranting and the children bickering and the TV blaring, that he had looked forward to a day of doing not much other than sitting in his lawn chair and looking off the hill. It was mainly when he was alone that he could think about Karla almost in a tranquil way, letting incidents from their life together sort of rise out of his memory and sink back into it. It was utterly still, not a breath of breeze even on his hilltop; the temperature was rapidly climbing toward one hundred. The distant horizon, which had been clear and sharp at sunrise, was already hazy from heat. He had the Thoreau book with him and looked through it idly now and then, but could not really get up enough momentum to read it straight through. There was one sentence he liked so much that he had underlined it and stuck a little piece of paper in the book to mark the place. “I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” the sentence read, “and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Duane read that sentence over and over again, forty or fifty times; it was that sentence that explained exactly what he himself was trying to do—explained it so clearly that he didn’t really want to read the rest of
Walden
. He had parked his pickup, left
his family, and settled in the cabin to attempt to learn about life and not feel that he was just plodding through it. He knew most of his acquaintances would consider such an ambition puzzling and unnecessary. He had had a long marriage, four children, and nine grandchildren. How could he possibly think he hadn’t really lived?

It was a question Duane couldn’t easily answer himself. All he knew was that in his fifties he had begun to lose his sense of purpose and had merely gone on for several years, going through the motions, until finally he couldn’t do that anymore—so he had stopped and was attempting to start a life that—detail by detail—meant something. He wanted to feel that at least some of what he did was worthwhile, in and of itself—even if it was nothing more than cleaning the trash out from under one bridge. Indeed, he felt that the smaller and more local the attempt, the better chance he had of accomplishing an action that had value. He didn’t know enough to change anything large. Whatever he worked on had to be small, and within the sphere of his competence.

Already, it seemed to him, he had let his confusion and depression deflect him from even that modest goal. He had begun seeing the doctor, which had turned out to be unexpectedly tiring. Then, just as it promised to become less tiring, Karla smacked into the milk truck and three months had been sucked into the attempt to keep his family’s head above water. Ruth Popper had done him a very good turn when she reminded him that his children were grown and should be expected to be the hands-on parents of their own offspring. His wife was dead—giving up his new life, or at least his attempt to make a life that had some purpose, would not bring her back. He was not going to forget Karla, not ever, but being a widower was not a profession. He didn’t intend to marry—didn’t want to—but, as he thought about it, he became more and more sympathetic to the town’s hope that he would marry. In gossiping about his next wife the townspeople were just saying, in effect, what he had threatened to strangle Rag for saying: that life goes on. Though it seemed disloyal to think that his life would eventually go on completely out of relation to Karla, or her memory, the likelihood was that it
would. When he had been young his mother had sung him a song, popular in that day, called “Time Changes Everything.” As he sat in his lawn chair, letting the heat soak into him, he realized as never before what a powerful truth that was.