The Lesson (9 page)

Someone was there and speaking to her.

—Are you all right?

—Oh, she said. Oh, I'm okay. I just…

Three young men stood there.

—You don't look all right, said one.

—She looks like she just collapsed on that wall.

—Not just, said the third. I expect she's been there for a while.

And she had, she had been there for about an hour, trying to recover.

—I'm all right, said Loring weakly.

—Well, said the first one, it won't do unless we help her out. Where do you need to go? he asked her.

—I am all right, she said. You don't have to help me.

—He's going to help you, said the third. I am also. So's he.

Loring saw this was going nowhere. She might as well accept their help. Of course, it was quite clear that she needed it anyway.

—Over that way, she said, vaguely waving her arm.

—You really shouldn't go out so far alone, said the youngest one.

He must have been about twenty. They were all three wearing the same sort of work suit and appeared quite recently to have been mending something.

—Here, let me help you.

The three hoisted her up and so along they went, with them practically carrying her. Of course, being carried a long distance is not always the most comfortable experience, so the three cheerfully gave her an opportunity to rest here and there, peppering her all the while with gentle questions to distract her from the task at hand, and reassuring her with pleasant sounds and the occasional hearty song.

In such a style, they arrived back at Loring's house, where the young men saw her over her doorstep and went away, promising to return for a supper of some sort which Loring assured them she would make out of gratitude. Although, they did say, they often skipped supper to go to the dance hall in the next town.

There is just enough time, one explained, to get there and back if we leave the minute work stops
.

Loring made her way slowly to the chair in the parlor and sank into it. She was not embarrassed by what had happened, but she did feel foolish. Her hands were feathered with little cuts. Her legs hurt terribly, especially by her ankles.

Keep working, she told them. There's much left for you to do.

Ezra had told her once that speaking to things was never useless. This is not the same thing as believing her legs could hear her. Do you see what I mean?

Why did I begin to cry earlier? thought Loring.

At the same time, she thought: the box is upstairs, sitting in its new place closer to the edge of the table.

At the same time, she thought: the boy does not actually seem to be able to play chess at all. What a silly idea that was—that he might have anything to do with Ezra.

And yet, it might come and go. This is something the old often have faith in—that things come and go. People used to believe such things. A statue in the center of a town: sometimes is a god, and other times, it is something upon which to hang laundry. Anthropologists rack their brains for the way this works, but it is in plain sight. Life's daily routines can be a cycle like the moon's phases; when the moon is full, things are different, baldly different, than when the moon is new. Why should a statue not be just the same? Or a boy? Or anything, anything at all.

The next morning early, Loring woke up, ate one piece of toast with the tiniest bit of butter and jam, drank one cup of tea, and set out for the cemetery. She
was
getting older. She had now, in fact, outlived her husband by five years. It was not clear that she would continue living, or that she would keep her health. Yet to Loring, there was simply the ongoing process of days, the rituals she had made and kept. She loved her husband. He had died. His body was there, in the cemetery, and so she would go there. She would. As much as she might be permitted, she would be close to him. That she was embarked on this idea, regarding the boy, quite literally the way one embarks upon the sea in a coracle, made no difference. She visited her husband in his death in the grass, and sat by the tree day in day out. She had learned the shape of the bark on the near trees. Even the clouds that came and went there, they were familiar to her, and she might have greeted them by name, if she had cared to. Of course, she did no such thing.

Out of the house, she went, taking with her a stick, an old Basque stick. Although Loring did not know it, the end would unscrew to provide a defensive point. Basque shepherds used them for, well, I have never heard a truly good reason why Basque shepherds needed a fancy sword-cane. I suppose it enlivened things, up there in the high pastures. With this accoutrement, Loring set forth.

Someone had put a thin wooden taper with the head of a horse into the ground by Ezra's grave. Such things existed in the world. Gerard had heard of them soon after Ezra's death, and thinking that there might be people flocking to the graveyard to pay their respects (a thing that never actually happened), he purchased a store of these horse-head chess-themed tapers, which he kept on sale in a little gift shop which adjoined the house which adjoined the gate which adjoined the cemetery, or which, as we have previously said, was within the cemetery. All of it was within the cemetery.

And so someone had come and bought one, and having bought it, had set it there, but having set it there, had not lit it.

Loring mused on the matter and, after a while, forgot what she was thinking about. At that point it even become possible for her to look at the taper and not see it, to look at it and not think anything at all. Aren't our minds fragile and terrible? Anything can escape us—no matter how large, how small.

The sky was wonderfully clear of obstacles. No planes, no balloons, no dirigibles, if ever such things came and went thereabouts.

But in the distance it appeared a lone kite was flying, or being flown. Loring's sharp eyes picked it out. It was a red kite and it moved speedily here and there, darting like a fish.

Where Loring was, there was no wind. All the wind had gone elsewhere, to the kite perhaps. Could it be that kites draw wind to them? Is that why the owners of windmills embrace the pastime of kiting? Or do they despise it? It must be one or the other.

On the way back, unfortunately, Loring was laughed at by a pair of young women. How it happened was this:

She went out the main gate of the cemetery and continued up the boulevard to the place where one branching street would lead to another and to her own eventually at the base of the hill on which sat her house. As she passed by a high house, she saw two girls leaning on the wall, dressed well.

In Loring then the feeling that we sometimes have—to speak to someone and be joined with them for a moment. These girls reminded her somehow of her own youth, or perhaps it was not so—perhaps she simply wanted to know the time. In any case, she to them:

—Do you know the time?

One girl laughed, a short hoarse bark. The other sneered.

—Do you know the time? she parroted, in a nasty imitation of Loring voice.

—Do you know the time? the nasty girl said again.

—Oh, said Loring, slightly distressed.

—What a moron, said the second girl. As if the clock weren't right there on the church. As if the clock didn't ring less than a minute ago. As if she herself were not wearing a watch. What a moron.

—What a god-given fool, said the first girl.

They both laughed that short hoarse barking laugh again, and looked closely at Loring.

—Come over here, they said.

—No, said Loring. Leave me alone.

One actually laid a hand on her and drew her over to the house.

—Come here, aren't you Loring Wesley? I think my mother knew you. Is this what you look like now?

—Can you see this dress she's wearing? It isn't fit to take a shit in. And this scarf, why it's filth all over. Oh, no, no, you can't go out like that. Don't you have anyone to look after you?

At this point the mother of one of the two girls came out of the house.

Loring tried to get away.

—Mother, do you know this old woman?

The mother looked at Loring, pushed her spectacles down and looked again.

—Why, Loring, she said. Loring Wesley. What are you doing out and about?

—Just back from the, back from the cemetery, Lisa.

Loring felt that invoking her loss might make them lose interest, or give her credit, or something, and allow her to go.

—Oh, still on about that, said Lisa. Girls, why don't you go inside.

—Just look at her clothes, Mother. She shouldn't be allowed, not like that, she just shouldn't be allowed.

—Leave off! Inside, girls.

The girls went off snickering in all their youthful beauty.

Meanwhile, Loring was leaning on the wall, her back partly turned to the woman, Lisa.

—Loring, dear, you mustn't listen to them.

But then,

—You do look in a bad way. Can I…

—No, no, said Loring. I just fell. This dress was fine when I went out this morning, I just, I…I was attacked by dogs.

—Oh, I just knew something vile had happened. Well, let me walk you home.

—Oh, no, no.

—Well, if you won't let me, you will at least let my son.

She went to the door of her house and called up.

—Claude! Claude Patrick!

Her son soon came.

—Claude, I want you to help Loring here back to her house. She is an old friend of ours.

Beneath her breath she said, She and her husband were once the most famous people in the town.

The woman went back inside.

—Goodbye, Loring. Goodbye.

This was a most helpful young man. He behaved himself on the walk like a true friend, saying comforting things, and inquiring about this or that. He seemed to have paid no attention to whatever cruel things his sisters had said, and in fact, demonstrated complete ignorance even of their existence.

—Sisters? said he. Those are just my half-sisters. My father has nothing to do with them and neither do I. Spiteful creatures. Do you know what I caught them doing the other day? They had been denied money for one reason or another and so they were angry. They went together into that field by the house and found a turtle and when I saw them they had cracked open its shell with a hammer. They were removing the turtle completely from its shell and it was crying out in pain. It sounded like a cat being squeezed to death. I will never forget it.

Loring stared at Claude with an appalled look on her face.

—What did you do then?

—I cuffed them about a bit, and used a shovel to put the turtle out of its misery.

He wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

—Anyway, he said. You can see you got off easy if they were mean to you. That's the least they can do.

in the chair in the parlor for a very long time. She ached all over, and thought often about going up the stairs to the bed and lying down, yet she could not do it. So, she sat, painfully on the chair, and retreated into herself, and remembered watching while the boy slept. Again she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, and again he vanished.

It was nine o'clock in the morning. A brilliant sun overcame the town. Everything could at last be properly seen. The fifth visit was shortly to begin. Let us look through the house and see what such a light can do.

In the front room:

And then into the hall, where book shelves are drawn up like curtains, close enough by that they are no use to anyone. One must press ones back against one in order to have sufficient distance to see the other. There is hardly any light at all, even now, in the hallway, and the bookshelves defeat us.

Into the pantry then, where various goods are stacked: tins of every conceivable kind. What did they previously contain? Why, toffee, cookies, sweetmeats, crackers, cured sausages, cheeses, and more. Plates, there too, and serving dishes. A rack of old knives, some worn down to be like the last sliver of a moon, just by sharpening. Years of sharpening. And the sharpening wheel, of course. Someone said to someone else, this: Ezra sharpened all their knives. He would sharpen things even that didn't need sharpening, just to sharpen them, and when he was done, he would sharpen them some more. He took a ball-peen hammer and sharpened it until it was a hatchet. Such a thing: it's not even possible, is it?

Then the kitchen, where we have sometimes been.

Oh, but the door has opened.

The front door opened, and Loring was there, holding it. Before her, the boy and his mother. One nodding to the other, the other nodding back, Stan stepping up from the stoop into the house and past Loring. He, continuing past her again, into the parlor.

The mother handed Loring an envelope with some money in it. The fifth visit began.