Mohawk (18 page)

The cemetery was closed, the grounds surrounded by a high iron fence studded with spikes along the top.
Dallas scrambled over with the nimbleness of a reckless drunk. Though when he felt one of the cold iron spikes graze his groin, he came to an important decision. He would end his meaningless existence and join his brother in the grave. If there was no justice, no God to insure that the innocent and the good were not spirited away while the guilty lingered, then he’d show them justice himself. That very night, before he had a chance to sober up and remember he didn’t want to die.

David’s grave was in the new section, but Dallas had climbed the fence at the other end, which meant he’d have to travel from past to present. The path in the old part wound through tall oaks that thrust upward, obscuring the stars, out of the hummocks. The night was clear now and the wind had finally died down. The gravestones angled crazily, two-centuries old, the result of deep restlessness below. Dallas had no desire to read what they said. That was the sort of thing Anne would do. They might have been interesting if the people beneath had done the writing, but the living had nothing worthwhile to say about the dead. As Dallas approached the present, the stones sat straighter and the stars began to peek through the bare branches of the smaller trees. Finally the stones disappeared altogether, victims of changing custom. Lying flat, they were invisible from the path.

Dallas knew where his brother’s was, though, and walked right up to it, the emotion thickening in his throat. There was a fresh bouquet of flowers, which meant that Loraine had visited, probably that afternoon. They had a dusky smell, a little like Loraine herself.
I’d still be welcome in my brother’s house
, Dallas thought.
Even at this time of night, I wouldn’t get turned
away
. This thought was quickly followed by two others—that it was wrong for any man to kill himself when there was a chance he might be welcome somewhere and that a man had obligations toward his brother’s wife, obligations that might just improve his mood. Dallas had promised his brother to look after her and the child. How could he even think of killing himself when David’s house needed so much work, and his sister-in-law a job? He hadn’t really planned to do himself in, but to realize that he wasn’t morally obligated to came as a relief.

The first thing was to go and tell Loraine to rest easy. He’d fix the plumbing, rewire the house, insulate the upstairs, give the whole place a fresh coat of paint. Dallas accomplished all of this in his mind as he hurried back along the path and scrambled over the fence. Since it was at least a mile to his brother’s place, he began to jog. Then he thought of an even better plan and reversed his direction. Fifteen minutes later he arrived at the Grouse home, winded and perspiring, despite the cold. His breath billowed before him as he jogged in place, figuring. Some crushed rock was scattered along the perimeter of the porch, and Dallas grabbed a handful that rattled very loudly against his ex-wife’s upstairs window. In a moment, a light went on and Anne appeared. At the sight of her, Dallas quailed a little. Despite his inner assurance that he was at this very moment turning his life around and that in time she’d come to understand the moment’s significance, her beauty was still terrifying, and he felt afraid, the way he had when they were married, and even after. When she threw up the window, part of the pane of glass he had cracked with the barrage of gravel fell the
two stories and shattered in the drive. “I’m sorry—” he began, startled by the strange sound of his own voice.

“Dinner was yesterday, Dallas. Go away.”

The best thing was to ignore her. “I’ve got everything worked out,” he said excitedly. “I’ll start acting right. Starting today. Right now.”

“Have you been reading Dickens?”

Definitely better to ignore her. Her remarks never made any sense. “Could you give Loraine a job?”

“Loraine who?”

“Sister-in-law, who’d you think?”

“Are you drunk?”

“Exactly. But would you?”

“Dallas—”

“Please. I won’t bother you again. Ever.”

“That’s ridiculous. Of course you will. You bother everyone.”

“If she came to the store, could you find something?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Great,” Dallas turned to go. “Go’night.”

His ex-wife’s voice followed him. “You disappointed your son today.”

Dallas shook his head. “No. He doesn’t care ’bout me. Wish he did.”

“Maybe he’d like the new you better.”

Dallas hadn’t considered this, and was cheered even more.

“In the meantime, you owe my father a new window. Should he put it on your tab?”

“Yes. I mean, I owe one. You’ll never get another husband, you know.”

“Thanks for the advice.” The window slammed shut,
the rest of the broken glass falling around him before the light went out.

The remainder of the broken glass fell around him. Dallas was still excited, but the euphoria of alcohol was beginning to wear off so he alternated jogging and walking all the way to Loraine’s. Despite the time, now nearly four in the morning, a light was on in the living room. Actually, it was just the television, all snow. Loraine answered the door right away and didn’t seem at all surprised. “Come in,” she said. “I guess Thanksgiving lasted a little longer than I planned.”

For a moment Dallas took her literally. Her hair was fixed and she was dressed in a ruffled blouse, skirt and heels. She was a little wobbly. But there was no one else there and just the one glass beside the bottle on the old, ringed coffee table. All this he ignored. “I’ve got everything figured,” he said.

“Then keep it to yourself,” Loraine said. “I’m still figuring. Stuck at the beginning. Don’t take all the fun out of it.”

Did it always have to be this way with women, Dallas wondered. Didn’t they ever want to listen? Did they always have to say things nobody could make any sense out of? “Just let me—” he began.

But he didn’t get any farther. Loraine did the strangest thing any strange woman had ever done to him. Instead of letting him help her, instead of letting him tell her about it, she slapped him in the face. Hard, too, so hard it cleared his head.

“I feel like hell, Dallas. Can’t you see I feel like hell?”

“I wanted to give you some good news,” Dallas said weakly, now unsure that
any
news of his was likely to
be good. Anne had been right. It was his destiny to bother people. If he’d learned anything in all the years, he should have learned to pay attention to Anne when she said things like that.

“I don’t want any part of good news,” she said. “I want to feel like hell. Can’t you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You’re just saying that. You aren’t smart enough to feel like hell yourself, or even understand when somebody else does.”

This struck Dallas as unfair, especially in view of the fact that he himself had been feeling like hell so recently. Apropos of feeling miserable, he said “I saw the flowers—” but then, for a moment, thought Loraine was going to hit him again.

“Just shut up,” she said quietly. “For once in your stupid life, don’t be stupid. David adored you, but he was right. About most things you’re dumb as hell.”

Which sounded like the sort of thing Anne would say, and Dallas guessed Loraine was probably right. But he was confused, just the same. Not by what she said, but the way she said it, her voice soft and sad. He didn’t understand until she came close. “Don’t be dumb for once,” she said, her breath musky like the flowers on her husband’s grave. “Just be kind.”

He was too surprised and scared to kiss back when she kissed him. But he knew that he wasn’t supposed to step away. He might not be smart, but he was certain of that much. As usual, he thought, just when I’ve got everything figured, it turns out I had it all wrong. Like cards, there was always something you didn’t count on. Usually something bad. Good things you didn’t count on were something new. If this
was
a good thing. The more she kissed him, the more he wondered if it might
just be. Anyway, it didn’t mean he couldn’t paint the house and fix the plumbing if he wanted to. He would tell her about his plans later. “Scrooge!” he thought to himself suddenly, as the drift of his ex-wife’s earlier remark became clear. Catching on, even belatedly, was pleasant.

Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, Anne Grouse informed her mother that she would not be going to church. “Why not?” Mrs. Grouse said. When her daughter made a point of not answering, Mrs. Grouse retreated, rhetorically, half a step. “I mean, if you’re ill—”

“I know what you meant, Mother. I’m not ill. I’ll drive you and Randall.”

“No you won’t. You’ll go right back to your warm bed if you—”

“It’s forty degrees out.”

“Pooh. A few short blocks.”

As they waltzed around the subject a little longer, Mrs. Grouse refused to surrender the notion that her daughter was ill, at least for the sake of public discussion. Privately, she knew better. Her daughter had been an infidel always. She went to services only for the benefit of the boy, who was beginning, Mrs. Grouse feared, to show many of the disturbing traits her daughter had manifested at the same age. More than once he had observed that the sermon made no sense. Mrs. Grouse was enormously fond of her grandson, but she was of the opinion that he was getting too big for his britches, and his mother remained living testimony to
what could happen when such impulses were not nipped.

The more she thought about her daughter’s sudden refusal to attend services, the more certain she was that Anne intended to corner her father and broach some proscribed subject. Mrs. Grouse had redoubled her vigilance of late, always guarding against upset. She took special care to insure that Anne was never left alone with Mather Grouse, lest she harp on the subject of the oxygen tank or introduce another one conducive to excessive enthusiasm on her husband’s part. This latest tactic on Anne’s part was unfair, for it invited Mrs. Grouse to shunt her Christian duty in order to protect her home.

In the car she smoothed her white gloves savagely and tilted her jaw in a fashion that suggested life’s unfairness and a good deal more. “Your father had another bad night,” she said when Anne slowed down. The traffic always bottled up in front of the church while elderly parishioners were extracted from cars and bundled across the street. “Neither of us had a wink of sleep.”

Anne put the car in neutral to wait for an old woman who, suddenly disoriented, darted off in the wrong direction, was retrieved, then pointed in the right.

“The fourth night in a row,” her mother continued. “Maybe he’ll be able to doze while we’re away.”

Anne murmured in agreement, but Mrs. Grouse knew nothing was promissory in it.

“It’s his time alone …” she ventured. By now they were at the crosswalk. Randall got out and held the door for her, but Mrs. Grouse lingered. Far back in the line of cars, someone honked.

“I’ll pick you up in an hour,” Anne said.

“Maybe we’ll just walk.”

“I’ll pick you up.”

“Why not come in. You’re right here and all—”

“No thank you, Mother.”

There was nothing to do but get out, so Mrs. Grouse did. “We’ll say a prayer for her,” she said to her grandson. “Won’t we?”

“Sure,” Randall agreed. “Why not.”

Mather Grouse was indeed dozing when Anne returned, but he started awake guiltily. The television evangelist was gesticulating at him, but the sound was inaudible. To Anne her father had aged a great deal during the last year, even since October. His chest had become concave, and inactivity had added slack flesh to his middle. He looked more like a man deep in his seventies than one in his midsixties. The skin along his throat was pale and translucent.

“Go back to sleep,” she urged softly, her mother’s version of things suddenly too real and accurate to be ignored. Her father was a sick man, and she ought not to bother him.

“No,” he said flatly. “Sleep is overrated. Have you ever noticed how it’s always recommended to people anybody with half a brain can see need to wake up?”

Anne smiled, and remembered him always saying things like that when she was a girl. Long before she was able to figure them out, she had admired the way they sounded and her father’s ability to say them when nobody else she knew could.

Mather Grouse apparently appreciated this one himself. “I wonder if I read that someplace or if I thought it up myself. I should write it down, just in case it was me.”

“It sounds like you.”

“I don’t know. I’m suspicious.”

Now that he was awake, she could see he was in a good mood, so she sat down. “It’s nice to talk, just the two of us. Why don’t we, ever?”

“It isn’t permitted.”

Anne frowned. True, she often blamed her mother in much the same manner, but her father’s explicit criticism seemed unfair. He allowed himself to be badgered by his wife a good deal, but he always let her know when he’d had enough. And once the signal was given, she stopped. “It’s not fair to blame Mother. We could if we wanted to.”

“I guess we stopped somewhere along the line and just never started again.”

“Let’s. Now. If we didn’t need a reason to stop, we don’t need one to resume.”

Her father looked dubious but did not object.

“Can we turn our friend off,” she asked, getting up from the sofa and pushing the button. The reverend’s face grew terribly thin for an instant, then disappeared, leaving father and daughter so alone that both wished him back immediately. “We’re opening a new store,” she said, trying for a simple, conversational tone.

Mather Grouse nodded, way ahead of her. “New York again?”

“The suburbs. Connecticut, actually. They’re going to do a lot of hiring.”

“You’d be better off.”

“There’s a lot more money. They want me to open the store at least. Then I can stay on if I choose. I’m wasted here.”

“I seem to recall telling you that when you were fourteen.”

“I guess I still have reservations. Different ones. But I’m afraid not to go. They’ve been patient, but I know how the company works. In the long run they’d rather ax you than not be able to tell you what to do.”