Heading Out to Wonderful (25 page)

Instead of talking, Ned went to the lumberyard, got supplies, and began to fix up Charlie’s house. A warped board on the stairs. A rickety rail on the porch. He moved from room to room, and whatever needed putting right, he did it over. And the work was fine and careful and meant to last for a long time. Nothing has been done to the house since that time, and it’s still sound.

It was his way of saying to his brother there was a future. Ned had nobody, and he needed Charlie, needed a brother, and so he believed and did what he could to see that things turned out all right. Charlie would come home, and he would come back to a house meant to last a long time.

People noticed him coming and going, and he did odd jobs for them, too, good work. Solid structure to give safety and comfort. When he wasn’t working, and Charlie was at the butcher shop, he drank whiskey at the kitchen table and shivered with fear.

When he was at home, Charlie never talked about Sylvan at all. From the day Sheriff Straub appeared and read him the charges, putting him in handcuffs at the ball field where he was coaching boys and girls in the art of baseball, while the twins looked on, then leading him away to spend a night in jail until bail could be set and Will had paid it, he never once mentioned her name.

But in his dreams she devoured him. Night after night she picked at his flesh like a hawk on a deer dead at the side of the road, picking the bones clean. His diary was scrawled still with her name, Sylvan, Sylvan, again and again, but the pictures were no longer of angels descending, but of a vampire who drew his blood, her lovely mouth fanged, dripping crimson, taking him piece by piece until he was a skeletal remembrance of his own body. Gone were the rose and violet he had used to paint her loveliness, the gentle line and the fine hand. Now the drawings were the color of dried blood.

“You have to get a lawyer.”

“I didn’t do anything, Ned.”

“What’s the truth? What really happened?”

“What happened is private. And that means that nobody will ever hear it from me. No matter what, I owe her that. But the thing she says I did, I didn’t do, and that’s the only fact anybody needs to know.”

Charlie had loved her with a violence that had electrified his whole body, and now that love had been flicked off, like a light switch, and he didn’t know what to do with all the love he felt in his heart, and there was nothing to do with the hatred he felt for her. So, he just kept his head down and his mouth shut. He had lost the one true belief he had ever had, that belief that had come to him by the river, so long ago—that the only enduring thing was goodness—and now there was nothing left in him or of him.

Nobody believed her, of course. Behind their doors, where they talked about little else, they said only that it was the biggest lie they’d ever heard, probably cooked up by Boaty, that she wasn’t a bad girl, how could she be, after she’d risked her life pulling that child from the river? She was just a naïve country girl who’d gone funny in the head, running around with that Claudie, her life turned into some movie only she was watching. Maybe she had been unfaithful, but there was a general sense that, if you were married to Boaty Glass, infidelity wasn’t the worst sin in the world.

Until the Sunday when both the Baptist and the Methodist preachers spoke from the pulpit, and told them exactly what they were facing. “ ‘He has become a prisoner of sin,’ ” said one, quoting Scripture. “He has defiled us all,” said the other.

“Let the law do whatever it wants, he will burn in hell,” they said it at almost the same time. “He will burn in hell forever.

“Any man or woman who keeps company with him will go to hell with him. Do not let him into your houses and put him from your heart and from your mind. No man can defile you unless you are ready to be defiled.

“And even if you do it in secret, take him into your house or into your heart, if you give aid or comfort in even the smallest way, the rack and the wrath will be yours, and you will live among the filthy and the degraded and the vile for eternity.”

The two ministers spoke as though they had met and decided what it was they were going to tell their flocks, and they had, and their flocks believed their ministers, even though it broke their hearts to shut their doors and close their hearts to Charlie Beale. Still, they did just that. These were religious people, and they had not forgotten the duties they owed their faith and their pastors.

The husbands said that Charlie Beale had done no more than was natural, and hellfire had nothing to do with it. But the wives were adamant. Their hearts, always soft for Charlie, turned hard and bitter, and their fear ungovernable. The superstitions and moral rigor of their mountain grandmothers ran through their veins, and now it beat in their hearts and in their minds every moment of the day.

Some of the men approached Charlie at the filling station, while he was putting gas in the truck he didn’t have anyplace to drive to any more. “We don’t know how to tell you this,“ one of the men began, taking Charlie’s hand in a handshake that was more good-bye than hello.

“No need,” said Charlie, “I heard. You know who I am. You know how I feel.”

And they all shook his hand and then stood for an awkward minute until Charlie’s tank was full, looking anywhere but at him, and then it was over. Charlie screwed the cap back on, got in the cab of his truck, and drove slowly off, raising one open hand out the open window in farewell.

He left them all alone, then, after that. He didn’t offer to rake their leaves, or help fix their roofs, or wash their cars, or teach their children how to drive or throw a curveball. He loved these people. He didn’t want to embarrass them. He didn’t believe in hell, but he didn’t want them to go there.

“They sure don’t seem to like you much any more,” said Ned one night, when Charlie was trying to explain it.

“Not the point. You’re not seeing it. They don’t have to love me back. Sometimes it’s just important to remember that you can feel something for other people, even if they don’t feel anything for you.”

“Seems like a waste of time,” said his brother. “And a world of heartache.”

“It’s that anyway, isn’t it? A world of heartbreak, I mean. A whole wide world.”

So he walked around the town from then on as he did before, in the days when he first arrived: alone, talked about, stared at but not spoken to. The only way he could show his affection for the people of Brownsburg was to leave them completely alone, and to accept the same in return.

For a few days after the ministers spoke, the women stayed away from the butcher shop, eating chickens out of their own backyards, until their husbands began to complain and ask for a steak, and then they came back to Will’s, but there was a silent understanding that Will would wait on them, that any exchange would be with him, even though they still expected Charlie to be the one who did the actual carving and weighing. His attentions, his extra weight and his fancy butcher’s bows, the way he made every package look like a birthday present, went unremarked, as though he weren’t there. They just could not see him any more. Now he knew what the colored people in the town felt like.

The Reverend Lewis Shadwell came to see him, sitting in the same stiff way, careful, immaculate, and filled with an anger that rippled across the calm surface of his face.

“We know the truth,” he said.

“Who is we, and what truth?” asked Charlie, sitting as stiffly as the preacher, and this time with the same sense of indignation just behind the cool manner.

“I could answer that in several ways, Mister Beale. I could say that we know that the woman is lying. Or we could say that the town is full of hypocrites. Or we could just say that the world is filled with a meanness of spirit which in no way reflects God’s love for us.”

“The world is what it is.”

“A year ago, I told you you weren’t welcome to come to us on Sundays. That was a meanness on my part, and I apologize. You would be welcome now.”

“I don’t want to come any more. But thank you.”

“Will you pray with me now? Get down on your knees?

“No. Thank you.”

“Why don’t you leave this place?”

“You forget there’s a trial. I could go to jail. I could be sent to prison in Harrisonburg for a long time. That’s a funny one. Harrison. Burg. Just thought of that.”

“You didn’t do anything.”

“As much as anybody, you should know that a lot of people go to jail who didn’t do anything.”

“People will speak up for you.”

“Trial’s in Lexington, you know that. Nobody knows me there. Besides, the only person who has to say anything has said it already, and, for all you know, it’s the truth. All kinds of people do all kinds of things.”

“Not your kind of people, Mister Beale.”

“Kind of you to say. I’m truly grateful.”

But the truth is, for Charlie, he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t that kind of people. Maybe what she said was true. He took her that first time because he had to have her, because there was a fire in his blood, and she had said no before she said yes, and she stayed around because she had nowhere else to go. And so maybe it was true, some time, a while back. And maybe some things you don’t get beyond, even if you get to like them later on, live for them, even.

Even after what had happened, she was still the only thing in his life that meant anything to him, really. He would still die for her, and he wouldn’t die for anybody else, no matter how much they might touch his heart. Even the boy. Even his own brother. So, inside of him, where the object of his love should have lived, there was nobody at home, and so a void was created, and a terrible stillness descended on Charlie Beale, a stillness in which only he could live, in which he couldn’t sleep and felt he could make no sound when he opened his mouth.

“Reverend, thank you for coming. It’s my dinner time now.”

“I didn’t want to come, Mister Beale. Now I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“My brother is here. He keeps me company.”

“I save souls, Mister Beale. I’ve been doing it since I was ten, in a tent in Memphis. I’ve looked into a thousand eyes, and seen both the grace and the filth that lives behind them. I am looking into your eyes now, Mister Beale. Yours is a clean house.”

“Not everybody gets saved, Reverend. Even you . . .”

“Yes. I know, Mister Beale. Even me.”

“So.”

“So then we’re done.”

“Afraid so. But I am grateful to you.” Charlie held out his hand, and they shook.

“You will rise above, brother. You will rise. So shall we all.”

Charlie looked into the reverend’s eyes and saw the future of something there, and the reverend looked back into Charlie’s and saw the history of the whole world up to that point.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

N
ED WORRIED. HE
was a fretful boy.

He had come all this way to help Charlie, because Charlie had said he needed help, but there was nothing to do for him. Charlie wouldn’t get a lawyer, he wouldn’t confess or deny, he just held himself, his body and his talking, in a steel blue stillness that could not be broken. Ned smoked the first quarter of eighty cigarettes a day. He emptied ashtrays and swept butts off the porch from the time he got up to the time he went to bed. Lucky Strikes. They cost fifteen cents a pack. He washed Charlie’s clothes, left wherever they fell when he took them off. Made him change them when they were dirty. He cooked for him, because Charlie didn’t want to burden Will and Alma with his presence any more than he had to.

Everything irritated Charlie. There was not one thing that didn’t irritate him. The way hot foods burned his tongue and cold drinks made his teeth hurt. The way his clothes fit, the way the cotton lay against his back, the denim on his legs. The way his pillow held his head at night, not sleeping, tossing, until he finally got up and put on his miserable clothes and went out to the river, to his last piece of property, in the dead of night to stare at the voluptuous moon and wait for the first bird song, irritated, enraged.

But nothing irritated him as much as Jackie Robinson, who brought stinging tears of love to Charlie’s eyes, followed by an immediate urge for cruelty. He hated the way the dog looked at him with such pathetic faith, gave himself wholly to Charlie, even in Charlie’s neglect of him. There’s something about helplessness that makes us despise the helpless. There’s something about despair that makes us unable to abide affection. When Charlie paced from room to room, the dog followed him everywhere, nose at his heel, sometimes touching, the hard clack of Charlie’s heels on the wood floor, the soft pad of Jackie Robinson. Irritating, relentless.

Sometimes, he would hold the dog in his arms, softly, gently, and lay his head on Jackie’s back, just resting there, knowing that the dog would cradle him. And, almost immediately, he would want nothing more than to be rid of him, just because Jackie squirmed, because Jackie wanted to lick his face, to take his wrist gently in his mouth, to love him, for god’s sake, and that could not be allowed to happen. He thought that dog would make him crazy.

Jackie Robinson, frightened now, confused by signals he did not grasp, misbehaved, barked, raised his leg in the house, until Charlie got up, grabbed him, and smacked him on the head, something he’d never done before, something he regretted immediately, and saw at that moment that it had gone too far, that whatever had gone wrong between him and the dog was irreversible and would get worse. He grabbed a length of rope, and tied it to Jackie’s neck, and led him down the street and forced Alma and Will to take him. He said, “I can’t do this. I can’t have him any more,” and they knew he was telling the truth, and took him in, in the night, not knowing how they were going to keep him, with them gone all day. They could see from Charlie’s face that it had become an impossibility.