The Solace of Leaving Early (17 page)

“No, not at all,” Amos said, briefly covering Immaculata’s hand with his own. He stood, touched the top of Epiphany’s head. “I never take precedence over dinner.” Beulah stepped in and began putting away the clean dishes in the drainer.

“Stay?” AnnaLee asked, widening her narrow eyes in appeal. “There’s plenty.”

“I can’t. It’s Wednesday already, and my sermon isn’t written.”

“Your sermon is never written by Wednesday.”

“Nonetheless.”

The girls quietly slipped from the table, ghosting past the adults in the narrow kitchen. They would wash their hands for a long time, whispering, then sit perfectly still on their bed until they were called for dinner.

“In movies, grief is so
noisy,
” Amos said, taking a carton of eggs from AnnaLee and putting it in the refrigerator.

“Yes, and in movies everyone is thin and clever. You won’t stay because of Langston.”

“That’s ridiculous. I just have to work, that’s—”

“It’s okay. She’d rather not see you, either.”

Amos stopped moving, a box of seedless raisins dwarfed in his hand. “Pardon? How incredibly rude—”

AnnaLee spun toward him, surprising him. “Don’t imagine for a moment that you’re free to criticize her, Amos. She’s my daughter.”

“Oh,” he said, putting down the raisins and holding up his hands.
No weapons
. “I’m—”

“Amos, it’s okay—I didn’t mean to—”

“I’m grateful she’s helping you, AnnaLee, truly, and . . . What a mess.”

“If you’re grateful, stay for dinner. Take a meal with us.”

Amos looked at AnnaLee a moment. She bargained hard and her posture never faltered. If Amos had to choose one person (he squinted at her trying to determine if he meant this), if he could see just one person approaching him in the dust of a refugee camp, or arriving at the scene of an accident in which he was informed that he’d be leaving his leg behind; if he could take only one person with him into a demilitarized zone to steal orphans . . . He squeezed her shoulder as he headed for the door. “Maybe next week.”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” she said, already beginning to peel carrots. “Coward.”

Amos walked out into the sinking light, bright in the west, distracted. He almost didn’t see Langston sitting at the picnic table, Germane at her feet, waiting for Amos to leave so she could go in and help her mother. He knew he should say something, but his shock at
her
dislike for
him
left him speechless. Sometimes, unable to sleep, he’d imagined himself confronting her, explaining to her why she needed to be nicer to her mother, why she should grow up and go back to school and stop casting a shadow over his life, and in these speeches Amos was, without failure, sanctimonious, and he couldn’t stand the person talking. The inner, sleepless person. She made him . . . he’d never . . . was she reading
Frithjof Schuon
? Langston was looking right at him, he realized, over the top of her book, the look on her face one of supreme amusement.

“Pastor Townsend,” she said, giving him a little Jane Austen nod.

“Mistress Braverman,” he replied. He realized he’d been standing (God only knew how long) on the steps of the mobile home, gripping the iron handrail as if enduring hurricane winds. Where was his dignity?
Where exactly are my feet
? he thought, taking the last steps unsteadily. “Is that, may I ask, are you reading
The Transcendent Unity of Religions
?”

Amos saw Langston bite back her impulse to remark on the connection between the book she was holding in her hand, right in front of Amos, and the book she was, in fact, reading. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Do you, are you enjoying it?”

“Enjoying it? Not especially. But I’m glad I’m reading it. I think his exoteric/esoteric distinction is quite illuminating, and I appreciate the idea of this brilliant light emanating from the Divine Source, transcending and unifying the world’s religions. I’m just now reading the chapter ‘Concerning Forms in Art.’ Do you remember it?”

Amos shook his head. He had a vague sense of it, the way that the intellect was made manifest in the most perfect form available—no, he’d lost it.

“I was just reading this, um,” Langston hummed through some of the text, searching for what interested her, “here:

What is particularly important to note is the fact that the ‘revelation’ is received, not in the mind, but in the body of the being who is commissioned to express the Principle. ‘And the Word was made flesh,’ says the Gospel (‘flesh’ and not ‘mind’) and this is but another way of expressing, under the form proper to the Christian Tradition, the reality that is represented by
laylat al-qadr
in the Islamic tradition.

“Langston, this is really quite extraordinary.”

She looked up at him, tilting her head. “Is it? Are you unfamiliar with the precepts of universality?”

“Yes. No. Yes, I’m familiar, of course—what’s extraordinary is that just this morning I was struggling over a similar question, and it didn’t occur to me, this aspect, forms in art—although John Cobb addresses it brilliantly in
Christ in a Pluralistic Age
. I just. You know, I behave as if I’m writing my sermons in a vacuum, as if—”

“Everything in Haddington takes place in a vacuum.”

“I don’t know about that, I was just trying to say—”

“What? That you can’t employ arguments by Cobb and Griffin in your sermons? Because no one in your congregation would have a clue what you were saying, apart from my mother? Are you in a crisis?”

Amos shook his head. He knew he’d never be able to reclaim the conversation.

“Because you look like you’re in some sort of crisis.”

“No, no I’m not. But thanks for your concern. I should be going.” Amos headed down Chimney Street trying to look casual, but he wanted to kick the stop sign as he passed it, and just as he was nearly safe, nearly out of Langston’s line of sight, a tree branch hit him in the head, and when he tried to back up, a twig got caught in his hair. He had to wrestle with the whole mess for more than a minute to get free. To make matters worse, maybe just in order to
mortify
himself (as the religious did in days of old), he turned back to see if she was watching, and of course she was sitting there perfectly still, her book on her lap. Watching him. She gave him a small wave, just raised her hand, really, and for a moment, Amos thought he might burst into tears.

Chapter 16

THE HADDINGTON CRIER

Taos, it has been a long time. I’m writing you today because it has been raining for more than a week now; I have mornings to myself and everything adds up. It adds up to what I am about to say. You know I never could abide your love of science fiction; I remember a conversation we had about the metaphorical possibilities of certain scientific principles (the Fibonacci sequence; multiple possible universes theory; something involving quarks). Your position was that there was little more exciting than seeing those theories, employed as metaphor, woven into a thrilling plot; mine was that the Fibonacci sequence
is
a metaphor, and that what it points toward is infinitely more exciting than genre fiction. And also, now that we’re discussing it again, why not—if nonscientists are going to adopt those concepts in the name of art—why not just go directly to literature, and skip the six-headed aliens, or marsupial women or whatever atrocity so moved you about that one book? How you did go
on
. But lately I’ve been thinking, and I need to get this down quickly—I don’t like to be distracted once the girls are awake—that grief splinters, Taos, it splits off into fragments (I think nostalgia does this, too, nostalgia being a very specific manifestation of grief), and that each of those fragments then has a life of its own. Every day is a new way to grieve, and this morning, very early, I was sitting in the attic window watching the rain and I tried to imagine even one of those splinters—could I hold on to even one? could I contain it for a day, an hour?—and it struck me as a story that could be told in science fiction. A woman loses her brother, or her brother is lost, and every moment of every day for more than ten years she rises and begins to grieve, and the grief leaves her body in something like a cloud and goes about its business. Each cloud a particularity. One, for instance, takes the shape of the woman but when she was much younger, fifteen or sixteen years old, and all that girl does, eternally, as if she’s been captured in amber, is stand beneath a hawthorn tree and wait for her brother who said he’d meet her there. Her brother, who is beginning to lose his ability to keep his word. Her brother, who inch by inch is disappearing from her life and she— I don’t know what I was going to say there. But do you see? A story about grief is actually a story about what is possible, multiple universes, up against the finite, or what happens when, as Tillich says, the infinitely removed makes itself felt. (The girl could stand beneath that tree forever, she is there yet today, and what can be known about the tree, the scent of the blossoms rising, their deaths, the limbs, the shade, these have become her occupation.) But really, when I put it like that, it’s just a ghost story, and I never read those either. Because first I was too young to appreciate them, and then it was too late to start.

*

She tore the pages out of the yellow notebook and threw them away. Every day had been the same: she awakened as if in the grip of something—and this was a different way to work for Langston, who believed in not so much inspiration as a steady pace—and there was only one person she could talk to, she felt, and so she tried to write to her brother, as she had thousands of times over the past decade, but the tone of the letters, not to mention the content, seemed foreign to her. She barely recognized herself.

The house was quiet; Walt had already left for work and AnnaLee was gone, too, having left a note: “L. We’re out of coffee—my fault—don’t implode. I’ll pick up more with today’s groceries. Can you make it until this afternoon? You are my Sunny One, good sweet girl, xoxoxo, Mama.”

“Oh, fabulous,” Langston said, rummaging through the freezer, which was full of unidentified meats in butcher paper, stacked on top of those silver ice cube trays that stick to the human hand and yield not a single cube. The trays had been in the freezer so long unattended that the ice had shrunk; a sad sight. The spot in the freezer door where Langston kept her coffee was conspicuously bare, the only available place for the venison, or whatever it was, to migrate. She closed the freezer door and leaned her head against it, aggrieved. Just this one thing she continued to demand of the day, this one salvific thing, and she was to be denied it. Imagining the hours until late afternoon when her mother would breeze into Beulah’s, averting her eyes from the children and generally making Langston nervous, Langston’s head began to ache, just a dull whisper behind her eyes, a warning.

And where
was
her mother? she wondered, peeking through the living room curtains. The car was still parked in front, and Langston was filled with unease, imagining AnnaLee traipsing about town under her old umbrella, as she was wont to do, with her basket over her arm, barefoot. AnnaLee loved the Old Women, and nearly every day she baked something to carry to them the next morning.

“She’s like a little gerbil on a wheel,” Langston said to Germane, exasperated. They climbed the stairs to the second floor, and then on back up to the attic, where Langston changed from her nightgown into jeans and a T-shirt. She was able to locate her yellow raincoat in a box still packed from her apartment. She slipped the Schuon in the large front pocket, looked through her top desk drawer until she found the twenty-dollar bill her grandmother had given her, then gathered up her pocket watch and a pencil.

As soon as they stepped out on the front porch Langston realized what she was up against; the rain was falling steady and straight down, no wind, as it had been for days. The air was so warm and sodden Langston felt she was trying to breathe in bathwater. Oh, yes. This was just her mother’s favorite strolling-around-barefoot sort of weather. By noon nothing, no twig, no chopstick, no tree limb would be able to hold AnnaLee’s hair, and she would arrive home looking like someone escaped from a Pre-Raphaelite Home for the Deranged.

Langston patted her own hair, which was neatly gathered into her braid, then pulled up the hood of her raincoat for good measure, opened her umbrella, and started off, Germane trotting by her side through puddles that completely covered his feet. He didn’t seem bothered at all.

*

At the diner Germane lay down on the front step, under the awning. Langston stepped inside and was shocked to discover the place nearly full. The air around her was humid and full of conversation, the air conditioner silent. She looked at her pocket watch and discovered it was only seven-thirty, and the place was bustling. There were all the old farmers and their sidekicks; Langston noted with alarm that nearly every man was missing at least a digit, and some, whole hands.

She added her umbrella to the four or five standing next to the door like a line of soldiers and slipped her hood off, looking for a place to sit. A number of voices said “Hey, Langston,” and “Morning, Langston,” and she glanced around to see who had spoken but no one looked directly at her.

“Hello. Everyone,” she said, then noticed her daddy sitting at the booth in the back corner, alone.

“Is this seat taken?” Langston took off her jacket and slid it across the cracked and wavy vinyl seat of the booth, as Walt looked up from the newspaper he had spread across the table.

“Hey,” he said, smiling at her. “We’re out of coffee.”

“Yes, we are. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“Never seen you here before.” Walt folded the paper back into its original shape, all five or six pages of it.

“That’s correct. I haven’t taken a seat in this diner for, let’s see, probably twenty years? We used to come here for ice-cream sodas. Does Lu still make them, those ice creams with soda poured over?”

Walt nodded.

“Really, this place is,” Langston began, looking around, “
exactly the same
. How is that possible? Nothing at all has changed. You didn’t eat that, did you?”

“What?” Walt looked down at his plate.

“It looks to me like corned-beef hash, eggs, and biscuits and gravy. That stuff is terrible for you.”

“Tasted good.”

“Not my point.”

“I reckon not.”

Selma Sue appeared at the table with a coffee pot, a cup and saucer, and a little bowl of nondairy creamers, which she placed in front of Langston with great speed and recklessness, such that coffee was spilled on the table, in the saucer, and all over the front of the plastic menu. Langston had just enough time, before Selma swiveled and walked away, to read her button for the day: You Call Me A Bitch As If That’s A Bad Thing.

“Well,” Walt said, taking a last drink of coffee. “I need to get to work.”

Langston felt a wave of disappointment. “Do you have to? Right now?”

He nodded, stacking his dishes and moving them toward the edge of the table. “I stay here any longer I’ll be late.”

“Is that, can’t you just—”

“I’ve never been late to work. Not in thirty-five years.”

“Never? Not even—”

“I’ve been sick, but I’ve never been late.” He stood, stretching a little, then left three dollars for Selma on the table. He bent over and kissed the top of Langston’s head. “Want me to leave you this paper?”

“Heavens no. Wait, yes, do. I’ll use it to soak up this coffee.”

“Good for cleaning windows, too.”

Langston watched him make his way around the tables. It seemed every man he passed spoke to Walt, and Walt raised his hand in return, but none of them made eye contact.

“Ready to order?”

“Oh, oh, wait, I forgot—” Langston opened the menu, causing the coffee on the cover to stream into the booth next to her. Selma pulled a gray cloth seemingly from nowhere and swiped at the seat, raising a cloud of bleach that made Langston’s eyes water. “Do you have, let’s see, what sort of bread do you have?”

“White.”

“Do you have waffles, by any chance?”

“Frozen. We toast them.” Selma didn’t look up from her order pad.

“No, that won’t—”

“We’ve got pancakes.”

“Too heavy. Pancakes make me sleepy. Is there anything you’d recommend?”

Selma glanced up. “Eggs bacon toast and juice is what I’d recommend. You look like a stick.”

“Oh, well this is just my natural—and actually, I don’t eat eggs or bacon, or bread if the flour was bleached. Or pasteurized juices.”

“Really.”

“No. Do you have cottage cheese, by any chance?”

“Not for breakfast.”

“There are rules?”

“Lu says so.”

“Well, then. I’ll just have this coffee. You wouldn’t happen to have any organic milk or cream, would you?”

“I wouldn’t happen to.”

Langston wrapped her hands around the cup. “Just black is fine.”

Selma turned and walked away. As she passed the next table of men she poured coffee into each of their cups without breaking stride. Langston took out her copy of
The Transcendent Unity of Religions,
which was damp, and her pencil, and laid them on the table next to her coffee cup. On impulse she opened the Haddington
Crier;
it, too, remained exactly the same as when she was growing up. The first and second pages were devoted to local news and the farm report, the third and fourth pages were local sports and obituaries, the fifth page was Ann Landers, Dear Abby, a horoscope, a knitting pattern, and a few comic strips, and the back page was The Courthouse. The residents of Hopwood County took far too great an interest in the news of the jurisprudence, in Langston’s opinion. Who needed to know, for instance, that all of these people had filed bankruptcy? She read through the list but didn’t recognize many of the names. Six couples had divorced; four had applied for marriage licenses. Seven babies had been born at the local hospital, three of whom had no father. A miracle, Langston thought. Ollie Sproyland had been arrested for the third time in two years and charged with drunken driving, driving with a suspended license, driving an uninsured vehicle, and a long list of other offenses, including passing another car in an intersection. Langston had gone to school with some Sproylands, and she tried to recall them individually, but could not. There were many, and they did seem especially prone to skirmishes with the law. She read: “The judge, after having granted two continuances because of Mr. Sproyland’s bad back, finally demanded that he appear to answer charges. His lawyer answered that the only way Ollie Sproyland would be coming to court would be on a stretcher, and the judge replied, ‘Bring him in on a stretcher then.’ The following week Mr. Sproyland appeared with seventeen family members, wheeled in on a hospital bed which caused great consternation among the metal detectors. The judge . . .”

“Is this seat taken?”

Langston jumped and dropped the paper. A corner fell into her coffee and began to absorb it with surprising speed. Amos Townsend towered over the table, his black raincoat dripping. There was a drop of water on the end of his nose.

“No, no,” Langston said, still alarmed. He had seen her reading the Haddington paper. She blushed, and tried to cover her embarrassment by pressing her hands against her cheeks, then removed them and tried to fold and hide the newspaper before he could comment on it.

Amos took off his jacket, draping it over the back of the booth, then mopped his face with a handkerchief. When he slid into the booth his knees hit the underside of the table, causing more of Langston’s coffee to slosh out into the saucer.

“Million-dollar rain,” he said, smiling broadly.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s an expression I used to hear growing up. Million-dollar rain. It means a good rain coming at a good time, not so close to planting as to wash away seeds, not too hard or too long, it’ll get right down into the groundwater and keep the roots happy until harvest time.”

Langston said, “And are all those variables at work here?”

Amos waved away the question. “I don’t know. I’m not a farmer. But it sure
feels
like a million dollars. My garden will be happy. You were reading about Ollie Sproyland?”

“Oh,” Langston looked down, busying herself with her coffee-stained napkin. “Not really. Daddy just left the paper and I was—”

“Did you get to the end? Because the best part is when the judge says, ‘Mr. Sproyland, you are forthwith forbidden to pilot anything with wheels. If I catch you out on that
hospital bed
I’ll put you in jail.’ She always gets the best lines, Judge Latham does.”