Heading Out to Wonderful (3 page)

“Alma?” Will called softly. “Alma, I’ve brought him home for dinner.”

And with just the slightest movement of the warm summer air, just a sigh, there she was, as she was every day at fifteen minutes past twelve, and all she said, looking at Will, was “Darling,” and there is no earthly way to tell you the sweetness of it, the soft accent, schooled, not country, the voice breathless with the anticipation of his company.

She was forty years old, just a year older than Charlie Beale was then, and fourteen years younger than her husband. Her red hair was just beginning to go soft, pale like fall leaves in November, and her pale gray eyes seemed expectant, surprised, as though something wonderful were just about to happen.

She raised herself on her toes to kiss her husband, then knelt on the floor to kiss her son, who wrapped his arms around her neck, hiding his face in her shoulder.

She looked up. “Of course,” she said. “Charlie Beale,” as though she had known him all her life, “you’re here.” As though he already held a place in her heart as one of the many good men and women who filled her days. Then she stood up and held out her hand to shake his, and said, “You’re more than welcome in our house.”

“This is my wife, Alma,” Will said. “She came along and saved my sorry ass from ruin and destruction.”

She laughed. “Oh, Will, don’t be so dire, darling.” Again that word, darling—Charlie felt it and it filled him completely, as tangible and soft as a kiss good night.

“ ‘Ruin and destruction.’ Forgive us, Mr. Beale, but around here we spend so much time in church we talk like preachers quoting scripture.”

She let go of his hand. “Welcome to our house. Those must be our steaks.”

He handed them shyly to her. “Thanks for inviting me in. I was getting awfully tired of sandwiches out there by the river.” He hadn’t talked to a woman in months. He had forgotten how, he realized, forgotten the simple graces. He especially didn’t know how to talk to married women.

He had turned away from his past, his reckless ways, but he hadn’t turned toward anything new except the restless unceasing driving that had taken him all through 1948, ever since the end of the war, really, until it landed him here, in Brownsburg, Virginia, in the sitting room of people he didn’t know, with nothing to say to them at all, no way to say what was in his heart, to say that he had forgotten, forgotten the pleasure of company, the beauty of children, the smell and sense of clean warm hearts in clean bright houses.

He wasn’t used to being welcomed. He wasn’t used to being looked at with anything other than weariness or fear or distrust. Suddenly shy, he felt the blood rush to his face.

She stood close to him, uncomfortably close. She looked into his eyes, her gaze too long, but unexpectedly, too kind. He glanced away.

“Mr. Beale,” she brought him back. He looked into her gray eyes.

“Charlie,” he said. “Please.”

She continued to look at him. “Mr. Beale, are you a Christian?”

“Not really, ma’am. I used to . . . but that’s been a while.”

“But are you a good man?”

“I try. I guess you never know until it’s over.”

She reached up, touched his skin the way a blind mother might explore the face of her only child. Her eyes never left his. He reddened further and his skin felt hot. She must have felt it with her cool hand, like a fever.

“He wants a job,” Will said.

Without breaking her gaze, she said, over her shoulder, “Of course, Will. Of course he’ll do. You could use some help. I don’t know why you needed to ask me.”

She turned away, knelt down to hug the little boy. “Now let’s have our dinner.”

And it was done. Whatever it was, whatever Will had wanted her opinion about, it was over and done with.

And that’s how the story began.

CHAPTER TWO

C
HARLIE STILL STAYED
out by the river, except when it rained, and then he would stay after supper and sleep in the Haisletts’ spare room, next door to the boy, who kept a wary distance. Sometimes, on the nights out by the river, an unexpected storm would roll in in the night, and then he would crawl under the truck, and he would think of Alma’s clean sheets, crisply laid, smelling of laundry soap and sunshine.

He liked it better out by the river. He was used to being alone, and the weight of all those bodies around him gave his sleep an uneasiness that left him tired the next day. Most nights and noons he ate what Alma made for him and was grateful that he wasn’t living on sandwiches and Cokes any more.

Driving back to the river, in the dark, he would smoke and watch for animals. He liked to fling the burning end of his cigarette out the window and watch as it hit the road behind him, sending up a meteor shower of sparks receding in the distance, a sudden orange flare in all that racing blackness, the flint striking steel, momentary but staying in his eyes long after the speeding truck had left the sparks behind. Such magic in the rearview mirror, his eyes, the speeding road, the sparks of a Lucky in the dark.

One time he was letting go of his cigarette just as his headlights lit up the still body of a deer, a big doe, hit by a car, dead on the roadside, its eyes frozen in a fixed shock of terror. After that, every time he saw the shower of sparks, he thought of that dead deer, and of the permanence of fear, of how, once it got into you, it never let go. He hoped it never got into him.

He thought of his brother Ned, who always had that look of a deer frozen in the headlights, stunned. He hadn’t seen Ned since right after the war, but now his face came back so clear and true he might have reached out and touched it. Now every night when he threw the cigarette out the window and watched the display vanishing behind him, he said his brother’s name to himself, and the shower of sparks became inextricably linked to his brother’s face and name. One day, he would think, I’ll see what he looks like now, grown. But then the sparks would be gone, and Ned would be gone, too, until the next night, the next Lucky on the blacktop.

By the river, on his own land, he woke up every morning before the sunrise, warm in his quilt and the rising heat and his usually pleasant dreams. The days seemed like good ones, mostly, and he rinsed his face and shaved in the river with a light heart.

He was at the butcher shop when it was just light. The thing he liked about being alone was that you could have things exactly the way you wanted them, with nobody looking over your shoulder.

He used the hour before Will appeared to clean the shop, sweeping the wood floor and laying down fresh sawdust, every morning. He sprinkled salt on the butcher block, and scrubbed it down with a steel brush, scrubbing away yesterday’s steaks and chops and roasts, yesterday’s blood. He washed the marble counter with bleach and warm water. He checked in the cold locker to see what was there, what was needed, what was selling and what wasn’t.

It was too early for the radio. The distant, staticky station didn’t come on until nine, so Charlie hummed to himself as he got everything ready, old songs he remembered his grandmother singing to him, and songs he had heard just yesterday on the radio, new songs out of Nashville.

All this country music was new to him, and he liked it. It felt like home, the thin, high mountain voices singing about heaven and hell and betrayal and loss. There were songs about love and murder. Something about these songs made Charlie remember what it was like to be in love, made him want to feel that way again.

He laid out the thick strips of country bacon in neat rows, bacon Will had smoked himself, so rich, so salty, and put sprigs of parsley around the cuts left over from yesterday. He made clean butcher’s bows to put on yesterday’s chops, flipped the steaks and roasts so they looked fresh, as though they’d just been cut. Will tried not to have a lot left over at the end of the day, but whatever was left, Charlie made it look brand new.

Just as the other shops were beginning to open, Charlie uncurled the hose from the side of the building and washed down the sidewalk outside the store, the bricks turning from dusty rose to deep bloodred and drying in the sun to an ancient pink, the same color as most of the houses that lined the streets of the town.

When Will appeared, always with the boy, he brought Charlie a fried egg sandwich and a few strips of bacon, wrapped in wax paper, and Charlie sat in the one chair and ate his breakfast while Will went over the figures, called the slaughterhouse, counted the money in the cash register, sometimes taking a huge roll of cash out of his pocket and either adding some to it from the cash register, or peeling off some of his own to add to the drawer. Then he filled out his bank deposit slip and went across the street, leaving Charlie to eat in peace, while the boy sat on the floor, still in his summer shorts and T-shirt, drawing faces in the sawdust.

Will always brought two sparkling white butcher’s aprons—he said Alma could get blood out of anything—and Charlie would be just slipping his on when Will came back from the bank, and the first customers opened the screen door, tinkling the bell.

The black women came first, ages nineteen to eighty, in their thin dresses smelling of hand soap and galvanized washing boards, as though they wanted to get their business out of the way before the white women stirred from their houses. Sometimes they had extra shopping to do for the white women they worked for. They rarely came alone, usually with a friend or a cousin or an aunt, and some mornings, they were all there at once, at the door before the sidewalk dried, and gone just as quickly, their neatly wrapped bundles in their hands. Sometimes they came with children, children who stared at Sam and didn’t speak or say hello.

They ordered as much, if not more, than any of the white women, and Charlie treated them all with the same respect, although he never learned any of their names, and they didn’t ask his.

He looked at their hands, looking for wedding rings, and he called them Miss, or Ma’am, depending on how he figured it. They never smiled, and he never smiled back, just looked at them with his honest eyes, and treated the exchange as seriously as they did, watching as they counted out the money for Will, sometimes in bills, sometimes in coins.

Usually they were gone by the time the first white women came, and if they weren’t, they stepped aside and looked away as the white women entered, then left quickly, silently.

Fanning themselves with paper fans from the funeral parlor or the Methodist church, the women of the town came. It wasn’t that there were more customers since Charlie had started working at the butcher shop, since the customers were basically every woman who lived in the town, along with the few single men, but their visits seemed more social, and they started to buy just for the day, or just for their midday meal, so they could come back tomorrow or even later in the afternoon. Most of the women had electric refrigerators now, so they could have shopped for a whole week, but they chose not to. There were some, a few, not many and mostly Negro, who had iceboxes. And there was still an ice man who made his dwindling round of the town every two days, hefting a massive block of ice with pincers, the sweat showing between the shoulders of his shirt even as he stepped out of the frigid air of the back of the truck, his huge forearms glistening as he carried the blocks into the houses, to put them into the bottoms of the oak boxes lined with tin.

One man came in every day, a fat man Will called Boaty, although anybody else who was in the shop at the time called him Harrison or even Mr. Glass. He was about the same age as Will, although it’s hard to tell with fat people, and they treated each other the way men do who have grown up together all their lives, watching as their lives, once so identical, changed paths and led one this way, that one another.

“Charlie Beale. This is Boaty Glass. Sorry. Harrison. Harrison Boatwright Glass.”

“Morning, Mr. Glass. Good to meet you.”

“Harrison and I were babies in the cradle together.”

“We were that,” said the fat man. “We did a lot of adventuring, back in the day.”

“Boaty doesn’t trust his own wife to pick out his supper for him.”

“My wife can cook anything, but she’s not exactly what you’d call an early riser. And then it takes her about two hours to get ready to come into town, and by then all the good stuff might be gone.”

“You always thought ahead, Boaty. Admirable quality. Always give Mr. Glass the best there is, Charlie. He worked hard for it. And he deserves it.” Will couldn’t help himself. “And, obviously, he deserves a lot of it.”

“Bastard,” said Harrison Glass. “You always had a mean streak, Will.”

“Not a mean bone in my body, Boaty. You’ve got the appetite a man your size ought to have. That’s just a fact. Not an unkind thought in my head.”

Boaty Glass did get the best, and he didn’t pay, just watched as Will wrote down his purchases in a book, and, because he bought a lot, Will always gave him a little off, although Boaty Glass didn’t look like he needed any kind of discount on the things he paid for.

Boaty Glass was the kind of man who told jokes, like a nervous tic. Often vulgar, but, in mixed company, usually just dumb old country jokes he’d heard on the Opry or read in the Grit paper.

“So old Torkle McCorkle walks into Manley Brown’s blacksmith shop the other day, and Manley’s just finished pulling a red hot horseshoe out of the fire and laid it on the anvil. This fella walks over to the anvil, picks up the horseshoe in his bare hand, then puts it right back down again. “ ‘Burned you, didn’t it?’ says Manley. ‘Nope,’ says Torkle, ‘just don’t take me very long to look at a horseshoe.’ ”