Homeplace (39 page)

“All right,” he said. “I’m sorry. For now I’ll let it go. Just for now, though, Mike.”

He got out of bed and washed and dressed in the green dimness of the bathroom. Mike listened to the splash of water and drifted slowly and deeply down toward sleep. He came back into the room as fresh and cool in his seersucker suit as if he had just dressed that morning. Mike thought again how impossibly, almost laughably handsome he was.

“You’re too beautiful to be a guy,” she said drowsily.

“You’d be in deep shit trouble if I was anything
else,” he said. “Should I go knock on your dad’s door, do you think? He wasn’t tracking too well when I talked to him Saturday. I don’t want him to think I’ve abandoned him, but if he’s sleeping well these days, I want to let him do it.”

“Oh, he’s sleeping well,” Mike said. “Booze is the answer, apparently. Let it go until tomorrow, why don’t you? He’s seemed tireder than usual lately. I really ought to try and cut him down on this letter-writing business. I’m not so sure this delaying stuff is such a good idea anymore …”

“What delaying stuff, Mike?”

His face was still, and his voice was different, somehow. Sharper, lighter, dryer.

“Well,” Mike said, reluctant without knowing why, “that’s what Sam’s doing with the price negotiations on the homeplace. That’s about all he thinks he can do, really …”

“Tell me, Mike.”

Mike told him.

She watched as his face paled underneath its tan and then darkened again, as if he had been slapped. His teeth clenched so hard that the muscles around his mouth stood out in hard white ridges. His hands, jammed into his jacket pockets, clenched, too.

“I ought to have that bloody goddamned fool put in jail for what he’s doing to your father,” he whispered, and the sound frightened her in its reptilian sibilance. “It’s worse than criminal, and by God, he’s not going to do it anymore.”

He was across the room and at the door before Mike could gather her wits. She bounded off the bed and dashed after him. Why on earth was he so angry? As Sam had said before, her father seemed to be thriving on the course he had charted with the Department of Transportation.

“Bay, wait a minute,” she cried. “It isn’t hurting anything! Sam wouldn’t hurt Daddy …”

“You’re goddamned right he won’t,” he said, almost exultantly, and jerked the door open and slammed it behind him, and was gone down the stairs before she even reached it. She heard the front door slam, and then silence.

She trotted out onto the landing in bewilderment, looking down from the head of the stairs toward the empty downstairs hall and the closed front door. The noise of its slamming seemed to vibrate endlessly in the still, hot air. Outside her bedroom, the stored heat of the day was fierce. Mike wore nothing but her pants and bra, but her body was already wet with perspiration.

There was a small movement in the darkness below, at the back of the house, and she started and looked down. In the hot gloom Sam Canaday stood looking up at her, his face a white blur in the twilight of the back hall. Mike froze in simple shock.

“Well,” Sam said slowly. “So. I wondered, of course. You’ve been giving off your own light lately.”

“What are you doing here?” Mike’s voice was thick and foolish in her throat.

“Your dad had a bad attack,” Sam Canaday said. “He couldn’t raise you by yelling, so he crawled to the phone and called me. Dr. Gaddis is on his way. You’d better go put some clothes on.”

“I … have you … how long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough, Miz Winship-Singer,” he said. “Long enough. Don’t worry, Mike. Your secret is safe with me. I’d rather watch
Dynasty. “

He turned and went back down the hall and into John Winship’s room, and Mike went back into her bedroom and shut the door. She sat for a long time on the edge of her bed, listening to the hum of the air conditioner
and thinking nothing at all. Then she dressed and went downstairs to meet the doctor. J.W. Cromie was coming out of her father’s room with a glass and washcloth in his hand, but Sam Canaday was gone. She could hear the tinny, diminishing burr of the Toyota as it turned out of the driveway and disappeared down Pomeroy Street toward town.

M
IKE WAS AT
P
RISS’S WHEN THE CALL CAME
.

She had waked slowly and luxuriously at eleven that morning, after the longest and deepest sleep she had had since she had come home, and had dressed in a peaceful and perfect envelope of nowness. There was, for the time being, no past that contained an agonizing scene in the dim hall of the Pomeroy Street house, no closed white face looking up at her near-nakedness, no toneless voice saying, “You’d better go put on some clothes,” no battered and vanishing old car. And neither was there a future in which such a scene would have to be dealt with. It was not the bell jar, and it was not Mike’s usual crisis management tool. She did not know what it was, but she was peacefully and abstractly grateful for it.

Downstairs, Lavinia Lester was knitting and watching something old and English and flickering on the A&E channel. John Winship was not in the kitchen. Dr. Gaddis had given him a powerful sedative by injection the evening before and had phoned in a much stronger painkiller, which had come immediately from the pharmacy, and her father had slept through the night. From
past experience, she knew that he would sleep most of the day, as he always did following a bad bout of pain.

“Let him have the pills whenever he needs them,” the doctor had said. “Let him have the liquor, too. I hope this is the worst it will get before it’s over, but it may not be. It could be ferocious next time. It isn’t going to be long, though, Mike. Let him have and do whatever he wants.”

Mike had nodded and the doctor had gone away. It was J.W. who had insisted on sitting up beside John Winship as he slept his still and deathlike sleep.

“I’m off tomorrow, Mike,” he said. “You and Mr. Sam save up for when you need your strength.”

“Thank you, J.W.,” she had said. “You’re a better friend than we deserve.”

She had not told Bayard Sewell that Sam Canaday had seen him leaving the upstairs bedroom and she knew somehow that Sam would not. Sam had not called; she knew that he would not do that, either. Mike floated on the moment and waited for what would come.

In the afternoon she drifted over to Priss’s.

She was drinking iced coffee and admiring Priss’s new bird feeder when the telephone rang. Priss displaced a dreadfully snoring Walker Pussy and heaved herself up to answer it.

“Sam, for you,” she said, coming back into the room.

Mike picked up the telephone. “Sam?” she said.

“We’ve lost,” he said briefly. His voice was level. “It’s over. They’ve filed a declaration of taking and they’ll be taking title about now. Don’t tell him. I’m coming by tonight and we’ll do it then.”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

“What is it?” Priss said, searching Mike’s face. “Is it John?”

“No,” Mike said. “It’s the homeplace. It’s gone, Priss. Sam can’t do anything more.”

Priss was silent for so long that Mike swiveled her head around to look at her. The big, smooth, Buddhalike face was, astoundingly, crumpled in anguish. Mike had never seen such an expression on Priss’s face, not even on that long-ago evening in her father’s house. Tears slid down her cheeks in the creases bracketing her small, Etruscan mouth.

“Oh, poor Win,” she whispered. “Oh, poor Scamp.”

“Scamp?” Mike parroted, whispering also, though she could not have said why. She did not know which was more unbelievable, Priss’s tears or the roguish, old-fashioned epithet. It fit neither the remote dream-father of her childhood nor the present wreckage of that man.

“I called him Scamp when he was a boy. We all did, all through high school.” A small, tremulous smile played around Priss’s mouth, and her eyes were far away in memory. “He was a real devil, a kind of perpetual cheeky bad boy, always into something, always laughing. And handsome! You wouldn’t believe how handsome he was. I’ll never forget how he looked the night of our senior party, in his first real suit, that he worked after school all year for, with one of Miss Daisy’s sweetheart roses in his buttonhole …”

She drew a long, shuddering breath and took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.

“I’ll come on by tomorrow after Sam’s told him and he’s slept on it,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she were in and out of the Pomeroy Street house several times a day. “Maybe I can take his mind off it a little. I always used to be able to make Scamp laugh.”

Mike stared at her. Fragments flew into place.

“You were in love with him, weren’t you?” Mike said.

Priss did not reply.

“You still are, aren’t you, Priss? After all these years? After what he did, what he turned into?”

“Love is a policy, Mike,” Priss Comfort said heavily. “It’s not a feeling. Time you learned that.”

The words had a strange resonance, as if they were an echo of something far away.

“J.W. said something like that a while ago,” she said.

“I’m not surprised,” Priss said. “J.W. formed his policies a long time back.”

Mike left the little stone house and drove, not to the sanctuary of her room to telephone Bay Sewell, as she had planned, but, seemingly by remote control, to Sam Canaday’s office. Lytton’s main street was
all
but deserted as she parked the car in front of the peeling old building and got out. Only a town police car was moving, idling lazily through town like a planing hawk. Mike’s skirt stuck to the back of her bare legs. It was very still and hot, and no time at all.

She went up the dusty wooden steps to the second floor, her soft espadrilles soundless on the dust-felted tread. The stairs and corridor smelt not unpleasantly of old linseed oil and time. She walked down the long, dim corridor. On either side, dark oak doors with square, white-frosted panes stood closed. The black-painted letters on most of them were flaking off, half gone. Mike supposed most businesses had moved to one of the new shopping and professional centers on the outskirts of town. The last door on the right, though closed like its neighbors, had newly painted black lettering:
SAMUEL F. CANADAY, ATTORNEY AT LAW
. The brass doorknob was brightly polished.

Mike put her hand on to rap on the glass, hesitated, and then pushed the door softly, and it swung open. The room was in darkness; the only light source was the bright tiger stripes that escaped from between the old-fashioned wooden
Venetian
blinds and lay over the
huge, empty mahogany desk in front of the arched double windows. The only sound was the familiar laboring of the air conditioner. At first Mike could see nothing in the old-smelling gloom, but then she saw that Sam Canaday was sitting at the desk with his head in his hands. His hair was bright in the dark room. On his face, through the laced, scarred fingers, she could see the gleam of wetness, but she did not know if it was tears or perspiration. The room, despite the air conditioner, was powerfully and thickly hot.

Mike stood in the doorway for what seemed a long moment, and then walked across the room and around his chair and put her arms around him from behind. He did not move, and then he covered her hands with one of his. She could feel the ridges of the scars against her fingers. She rested her chin briefly on the top of his head. His hair smelled of the sun’s lingering dry heat.

“I’m sorry,” Mike said presently.

“I’m sorry, too,” Sam Canaday said.

He came by that evening, after her father finally woke from his long sleep, feeling better, though obviously weakened by the pain and the drug. Sam pushed him in his chair out onto the porch and around to the wisteria bower and made them all a whiskey and water, and Mike stretched herself bonelessly on the canvas glider where she and Bay Sewell had first made love, all those weeks ago. It seemed, dimly, like years.

Leaning forward with his burnt hands on his knees, Sam told the old man that they had lost their fight. It was not a long account, and he told it clearly and sparely.

“Well,” John Winship said. “What do you know? It was a good fight, though, Sam. Wasn’t it a good fight, Mike?”

“The best, Daddy,” Mike said. There was a huge, swollen lump in her throat. Her chest ached.

“It doesn’t have to be over quite yet, Colonel,” Sam said. “I can always appeal …”

John Winship waved his transparent hand. “No. Doesn’t matter. The fight mattered, and I’m not ashamed of that, not one bit. No, sir. Let it go. One thing, though … you aren’t going to stop coming by here in the evening, are you? Got so I’m used to you. Used to her, too.” He jerked his chin at Mike, but did not look at her.

“I’ll come as long as you’ll have me,” Sam Canaday said.

“Mike’ll be leaving us pretty soon, I guess,” her father said, still not quite looking at her. “Go on back up north and write some more bleeding heart stuff …”

“I don’t have any firm plans yet, Daddy,” Mike said, surprising herself. She was grateful that the news about the homeplace did not seem to have devastated him as she had feared. It was a moment she had dreaded. She heard herself going on:

“I thought I might get serious about … you know, this book thing. I guess I could do that here as well as anywhere.”

What am I
doing?
she thought.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “The book. Well, now. That would be something. I’d kind of like to see ‘Winship’ on a book. A book’ll last longer than any of us. You gon’ put me in that book?”

Sam shot Mike a look. She gave it back to him.

“Why not?” she said, turning to her father. “Shakespeare had Iago. Peck had a bad boy.”

John Winship smiled, but he hid it behind his hand.

“Well, how long before they tear the son of a bitch down, Sam?” he said.

“Not any time soon, I don’t think,” Sam said.
“They’ll let me know, but I suspect it’ll be a right long time yet.”

“Long enough?”

“I’d say so, Colonel.”

“Well, good,” John Winship said.

A
FTER THAT, NOTHING WAS CHANGED, AND EVERYTHING. ALL
through August it seemed as though no conclusion had been reached on the homeplace, no struggle lost, no hearts broken, no great rent in the tapestry of days that Mike and John Winship and Sam Canaday had constructed. By tacit agreement, no one spoke of the declaration of taking and the ponderous legal machinery that must be grinding along its appointed path in the Fulton County Courthouse, twenty miles to the north. Mike had asked her father if he wanted to go on with the letters that were their morning routine; he had said he did not.