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Volume 26, Number 1, 2002 reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum and Joyce Corrington* DECORATION DAY John William Corrington I Supper was in the boat. Half a dozen goggle-eyes, and a pair of red-ears running close to three-quarters of a pound. With that much done, I was considering how to spend my evening once the news was past and the sun gone down. I was halfway through Berlioz’ Memoirs and more than half through the sixth volume of Livy. I had in mind reading Berlioz and listening to Les Troyens. On the other hand, I could do any damned thing that pleased me. You see, in those fine autumn days, I was recently retired from the bench. I had had my day and then some. It was my plan to spend the balance of my allotted time in a determined assault, late and early, on the bass and perch in Wallace Lake. No one living had any claim on me, and if I decided later to skip the reading and listening and do some night fishing, I could do that, too. Well, I thought I could. But when I pulled into my little dock on the edge of a patch of punk cypress trees, I could see a car parked up by the house. It seemed to me I knew the car, but I couldn’t place it at first. I took my time tying up the boat, raising the motor, breaking down the fly-rod and packing my tackle box. I wasn’t in any hurry. Maybe whoever it was would get tired of waiting and go away. There was no one I wanted to see. All my bills were paid up. There was nothing I needed, and I couldn’t think of a reason why anybody would drive twenty miles out of Shreveport to come visiting. As I walked up to the house, I reckoned whoever it was could count on one hell of a lot shorter audience than he’d be likely to get with the Pope. But just then Loreen turned the corner of the house and started down toward the water to the east. She reached the grassy bank and stood looking out over the lake. I stood, arms full of fishing gear, looking at her. Loreen Wendell. Wife of my godson, Billy Wendell. Billy had never been what you’d call a ladies’ man, but he had got next to Loreen Shannon in grade school and never looked back. Loreen must have been thirty-five now, but with that late autumn sun playing around her like a glory, shimmering on her light brown hair, she looked a lot closer to eighteen. She still had a girl’s body and dark eyes a man could lose himself in, and she had the troublesome effect on me of bringing to mind that fishing was not the whole purpose of man. Maybe not even of worn-out, broken-down, early-retired man. I had known Loreen from the time Billy brought her home to his twelfth birthday party, but I had never gotten quite used to her. She didn’t mean to be disturbing. She just naturally was. –Hello, honey, I said, walking past her toward the house. –Albert, she answered, and came along with me. –Hardly recognized you, I lied. –Thought it was some young girl come out from town to read law . . . –That’s closer than you think, she said, looking grim, her eyes set dead ahead as if she’d come for some purely unpleasant task and had just as soon not look at me any sooner than the case required. We got inside, and I gutted and scaled and wrapped the fish and threw them in the icebox. There was good chicory coffee in a pot at the back of the stove, and I poured us each a cup. Loreen smoked one cigarette down and lit another off it. –Listen, Albert, she started, –I don’t want to get into anything with you . . . –Aw hell, I said. –When I saw you’d come over by yourself, I thought you and me might . . . –Not funny, she said, and began to cry. When you are nearing sixty years, you have surely had reason to feel like a fool often enough for it not to be a novelty. But watching her, I wondered just what I had said that caused her to cry. Loreen was, by and large, a happy person. Smart enough to value and enjoy the fabric, the texture, of her country life. Not smart enough to go probing, hurting herself on the slivers of anguish that anyone can find just under the surface of the very best kind of life there is. She tried to drink some of the coffee and damned near choked on it when another squall of tears came along just as she was swallowing. I handed her a cup towel. –I don’t expect you to represent me, she finally managed to say, still trying to hold off those gusts of emotion that blew through her every moment or so. –I just want the name of a good lawyer. –A good . . . –I hear tell divorce lawyers are the everlasting pits. They try to lay you when you walk in the door. I don’t need that. And if I was to get that, you’d have to find me a really good lawyer, because I’d murder the first sonofabitch . . . I said something. I can’t remember what. Most likely one of those bromides that every last one of us called to the bar fabricates to keep from accidentally saying anything true or useful, to serve in a hundred situations passably, and never well in one. I must have asked her had she really thought about it–it being obvious that she’d been thinking of nothing else. –Don’t start in. I never came over here to get in it with you. A name. All I want is a name. –Don Lorio . . . –Sounds greasy. He’ll try to lay me. –He’s a Catholic deacon. –He’ll tell me about Jesus while he tries to lay me. –No, Don’s all right. He . . . –Never mind. He’ll have to do if you say so. You wouldn’t send me to a shyster. Thank you. –Loreen . . . She shook her head, threw down her coffee, kissed me on the cheek and left before I could even get up and see her out. As I wiped down the table and threw away fish heads and tails, my mind kept slipping out of gear, and I would find myself thinking of Billy and Loreen. But I let that go. I was not in that line of work any more. I do not give advice, and I am not of counsel. I am not in any line of work at all. I am retired, I thought. Yes indeed, I still hold my Bar membership. Half sentiment and half mistrust in the worth of my investments. You never know. But just then I had no mind to do a damned thing but read Berlioz, listen to whatever struck my fancy when Brahms was done, and maybe stare at the beamed ceiling, planning an arcane legal history that had about one chance in a thousand of ever being written. After all, I was only six or eight months into the enjoyment of having neither kin nor clerk to vex me. I had retired from the bench in good order. Judge Albert Sidney Johnston Finch, First Judicial Court, Parish of Caddo, State of Louisiana. A man some judged to be of taste and refinement, decent reputation and good family. An owner of land south of Shreveport. Not a great deal of land. Only what my father had been able to pull through the wringer of the Depression, and a few more acres added in parcels of ten or twenty when they might come up for sale over that long half-century past. Yes, retired and well out of it. While my former colleagues heard axe-murderers explain why they had no choice and child-molesters argue their right to prepubescent romance, I fished most of every day. While my old friends sat listening to the crumbling of the structure of western civilization, I would sit out on my porch with a gin and tonic and a book and consider the longer view. And when those joys began to pall, I would think about getting down to it, gathering my materials, and writing my designedly impenetrable book. In any case, I was surely and adamantly retired. No more car thieves and pigeon-droppers, chicken-geeks and soft-tissue injuries. I was done with them and they with me. Not another eviction or foreclosure. Never a motion in limine or one more garnishment. If what I had was not the peace that passeth understanding, it would have to do till I was subpoenaed by a Higher Jurisdiction. When the kitchen was at least clean enough to pass Rowena’s muster the next morning, I mixed myself a light bourbon and water and walked out onto the porch to examine the quality of the evening. There is a gallery all around my house. I can choose my exposure–which is a great deal more than I could do as lawyer or judge. I can measure the shifting of the sun through the seasons as the Babylonians did, and seek there one of the great sources of order in the dream of our lives. I can fall asleep if I choose to, and sprawl snoring in my chair alone, untended, unconcerned. At least till the next morning when Rowena arrives to clean up the place and begins to raise hell. I would be rid of Rowena if I could. She is ancient, black, and wrinkled as an iguana. She is testy, impertinent, and armed with a tongue like a chain saw. This manner of hers is no late and sorry side effect of the civil rights debacle. By no means. The surly manner and impudent demeanor Rowena exhibits now was in place fifty years ago when she worked for my mother. Rowena was what she is today when she worked for Victoria and me after my mother died, worked for us through our whole married life. I remember that night years ago when Rowena came to me as I waited for word of the birth of my first child. She told me there was no child–no living child–and that there would be no other forthcoming. That Victoria and I would have to make do with our own love which, Rowena allowed, seemed good enough to her, considering the general state of things. Twenty-five years later, she had closed Victoria’s eyes when I could not raise my hand to do it. I believe Rowena would be shut of me, too, if she could calculate a way to manage it short of poisoning or allowing me to smother in my own refuse. But she cannot, and as she told me one afternoon drunk on kitchen wine after hearing that her grandson had been killed by police in Oakland, California, it is far too late for her to take on some other responsibility. At least with me, she said, all the vices were well known to her and none of such a character that a decent Christian woman could not ignore them. She had spoken favorably that afternoon of the fact that I had neither succumbed to drink nor filled the house with whores after we buried Victoria. And so, you see, Rowena and I are stuck with one another, both fearing what our people would say were either of us to betray that unspoken compact of half a century’s standing. Rowena and I believe in our quaint way that we will be face to face with those people of ours again in Glory, and we would both as soon minimize explanations for shameful conduct and get on with the Great Reunion when that latter day comes upon us. We are not fanatics about this. Rowena has her social security and I have my judicial pension. But the fact of the matter is that we would not know how to part, to say goodbye, to set ourselves on paths where we would never meet again. So we have tacitly decided to go along with one another and see if we can make it a century. Though she despises my habits and my loud music and my long silences, and I cannot bear her constant and exhaustive reports on the state of the parish and the climate of rural black opinion therein, we do the best we can. One may hope that this sort of thing continues down the ages to the judgment–if for no better reason than to set liberals’ teeth on edge. Still, Rowena goes home at night, and I have the run of the place. To read of the travels of itinerant musicians, the metaphysical dreams of the Greeks, the libido dominandi of the Romans. To listen to the living spirits of Haydn and Mozart. And to remember how it was little more than a year ago when Victoria was still alive. And so was I. That evening I was on the porch with my whiskey, a decent sunset, and looming out ahead, a fine empty evening to fill. It was my hope and intention in those days to go forward with the retirement thing until, one bright morning, Rowena would show up grumbling and cursing her aching bones, shut off my stereo, search the premises for me, and find me at last right there in my chair, on my porch, Homer or Ariosto in hand, smiling, and dead as a mackerel. I took considerable pleasure in imagining her chagrin when, checking me over and lifting my cold eyelid, she would be forced to the conclusion that I had beaten her out of this mean world and would be rendering my report to all the Departed before she could get in a word on her own. As I was drinking and idly pondering that conceit, I saw headlights coming up the dirt road toward the house. This is somebody wanting directions, I said to myself, knowing that I was a notorious liar. They have the wrong place, I essayed, and I will direct them on their way, bid them good evening, and then get on inside to Berlioz. Or Livy. –How you doing, Uncle Albert, Billy Wendell asked me, dropping into that other chair that I keep on the porch to save appearances, but regarding which I made a mental note to break up and burn as soon as I could get Billy out of it and gone home in his pickup. I smiled and said I was fine. –Reckon I could have a water-glass of that? Straight? –Sure. You looking for Loreen? –Shit no. And she ain’t looking for me, neither. We walked inside and I poured him a slug of whiskey that might have floored the Demiurge. He drank it down distractedly and set the glass back on the table. Convention dictated that I pour him another. –She come by here, didn’t she? –She did. –Told you all manner of shit about me. –Not a word. You want a chaser? –How come you ask me that? –Because you’re most of the way through a half pint of good whiskey, Billy. Some men would take a little water. How about a beer? –Sorry, Albert. It’s just that . . . that’s what she called me. –What? –A . . . chaser. –Ah . . . –Ah what? Look, I got business with you. I don’t need no hard time. I’m up to my ass in hard times. No reason not to believe him. Billy Wendell is what we call a planter here in North Louisiana. He owns somewhere between four and five thousand acres of prime land good for cotton, soybeans, corn, whatever. Still, there are more hard times than easy when a man lives off the land. It is old family land, and no one in this part of the parish can remember when a Wendell didn’t own it. Rowena reported to my mother years ago that old man Wendell, Billy’s grandfather, had told a local banker that he would blow his head off and follow him to Calcutta to do it if, in those hard times, the banker attempted to foreclose on so much as an acre of Wendell land. I expect that is true. And I expect the old man would have done it, too. Done it and, knowing Caddo Parish juries, walked out of court a free man. Why not blow a banker away? If you let them take your land, there’s nothing left to live for anyhow. Billy and I walked back out on the porch. It was full dark by then and a touch of autumn chill was in the air. Billy carried the bottle with him. –I’m not going to represent you, I told him. Maybe that would end it and I could get on with Berlioz. Or Livy? Not a chance. –You ain’t even heard what it is that . . . –You going to show me pictures of what you’ve been humping on the side? Boy, you work it out with Loreen. You can’t do any better. You all have three children . . . –Look, Billy blurted, a little desperately. –Would you just let that lie? I didn’t even know she was gonna come over here and air all the dirty wash . . . Look at this. He handed me a wrinkled, soiled letter that he must have been carrying stuffed into the springs of his pickup. It was on that peculiar 8 x 10 off-brand stationery that federal agencies like to affect just to spite us helots–or perhaps to show solidarity with their English bureaucratic brethren. It would be interesting to know what size paper they use for official documents in Moscow. It was from some office of a branch of a commission of the Department of Defense and, as you might suppose, it was written in pidgin argot with the consistency of molasses and the density of lead. As a lawyer, I had ruefully to admire it. If making certain that no unambiguous and forthright communication took place was its intent, it ranked with certain writs, petitions, and contracts I had read in which absolutely nothing was revealed. Another reading made probable that the document had some bearing on a military decoration and the Second World War and . . . Then I looked at the heading. It wasn’t addressed to Billy Wendell as I had assumed. –Gaspard Penniwell, I said. –What is this? –Just what it says. It’s to Uncle Gee. I took it over there to him when it turned up in my mailbox. He had me read it to him, then he told me to tell them to stick whatever it was up their ass. We went through the letter a few more times and even without a dictionary I was able to make out that the suboffice, et al., in the person of one civilian administrator named Waring, had discovered that Gaspard Penniwell was entitled to a decoration for gallantry in relation to a certain action which had taken place in Belgium in 1944. He would be given transportation (economy class) to Washington and the presentation would be made in a ceremony at the White House, etc. I put down the letter and poured a little more of my own whiskey. –That sonofabitch phoned me today, Billy said glumly, hopelessly. –Which sonofabitch? –Waring. Said he wanted to talk to Uncle Gee and I had better cut the shit. I told him it was half a mile or more down to Gee’s and that he didn’t walk very good. Then I told him what the old man said, and this here Waring started in on something about civil rights and how he could have the U. S. Attorney all over me and . . . What’s peonage, Uncle Albert? –Never mind. What’d you tell him? –I told him to fuck a stump. Then I hung up. But I think the old man ought to call him. I mean, even if he don’t want the Medal of Honor . . . That stopped me flat. –He said . . . the Medal of Honor? –Wasn’t much he didn’t say. Put it on me I was keeping an old black man from getting his due from his country . . . I don’t know what-all. Made me feel like homemade shit. Billy was slumped in his chair then, the water glass loose in his hand. He rubbed his jaw and shook his head. –Uncle Albert, I don’t need this. I don’t need it any time at all. But specially not now . . . In thirty and some-odd years, I have never known what to do with Billy. I suppose I love him. I know I am supposed to love him. He is my godson, son-in-fact of the best friend I ever had. Who died in a war I somehow lived through, leaving behind a wife to mourn and a son he had never seen. I do love Billy. But he is not his father. Not Will D. Billy does very well with his place. He loves the land, and what the land requires to prosper is almost exactly gauged to what Billy has to give. Not to put too fine a point on it, Billy Wendell is dumber than dogshit. Not stupid. Possibly not even ignorant. But cursed–or blessed–with a narrowness of focus as to the constituents of life that is awesome to behold. If Billy had ever been west of Dallas, north of Memphis, east of Vicksburg or south of New Orleans at that time, he had managed to sneak it past me. Once Loreen suggested that they should go on a visit to New York. Billy looked at her as if she had announced purchase of two first-class fares on the Tau Ceti Galactic Liner. If the problem was weevils or meal worms, leaf-rot or nigger-gone-wild-amongst-the-tenants, Billy was likely to do very well indeed. But his expertise seemed to fall away as he shifted to asphalt road, and to wilt utterly when he came upon a concrete highway. –Look, he said finally from within his slump, –I shouldn’t have come and dumped this mess on you. –You’ve got somebody better to dump it on? –No. But you know how it is with us. I mean we’re like kin. I ought to go on in town and find me some lawyer and . . . Billy was right about the first part, anyhow. We are like kin. My people have owned land next to the Wendells as long as there have been Finches in the parish. I have heard our tribe came south from Tennessee before the Purchase, but who knows? Who can tell? Wendells and Finches are autochthonous in these parts. My father and old man Wendell were good friends–in the old days when good friends might mean the difference between survival and going under. And Will D. had been my best friend–William Dunlop Wendell III. We had gone down to LSU together in the late thirties, he to learn modern agriculture, I to read the law. We had managed to have ourselves as good a time in Baton Rouge as we had had up home. There is no need to go into detail. The moral wretchedness of college men is well established as of old. Will D. had come back home a thoroughly modern farmer. I had come back a lawyer–in itself a vast disappointment to my father. We were landed people, never mind in how small a way. Such folks had no use for advocates who, they thought, generally improved the time sniffing away in musty parish records for the bones of a controversy, hoping to find a flawed title or a questionable succession–thereby to provoke a jactatory action or some other unpleasantness that might put a man in question of his land. Still, I put together a little practice in Shreveport, and since everyone took me to be of the same honesty and decency as my father, I did well. I extracted drunken negroes from the clutches of the Caddo Parish sheriff’s office and returned them to their rightful possessors who required them for planting or cultivating, and who, not only not reconstructed but not even defeudalized, took umbrage at any operation of law claiming power over their people or their land. I conveyed property and wrote up wills, saw to the interdiction of some few who had lost the delicate thread of sanity and had no one trustworthy to tend them, and sullenly processed such divorces as I could not head off by stern gazes or gentle repetitive diplomacy. But Will D. and I had hardly gotten ourselves launched on the waters of life when we were plucked out of our chosen puddles. I was crawling on my belly across the snow-chilled soil of France when Will D. went down over Germany with ten other boys in a burning B-17. I never even knew that he was dead until the same Germans filled my hide with pieces of metal, and sent me home to Caddo Parish. All was changed, changed utterly. Victoria had come down to the railroad station to meet me along with Alethia Wendell, Will D.’s wife–and a tiny sad-eyed boy who had never seen his father, and never would. I was still doped up and the medics were in a hurry to get me from the station to the hospital before whatever they were giving me and had run out of on the train around Little Rock wore off. But when Victoria whispered to me that Will D. was gone, I remember crying out in anguish so loudly that people on the steamy platform turned and stared and wondered at what they doubtless took to be my physical pain. Getting blown up is something you either live through or don’t. But there was no medicine or surgery for the wound that Will D.’s dying left behind. So, yes, I expect as the years went by, I was as near a father as Billy Wendell was ever going to have. We would hunt and fish and raise a little modest hell and buy horses and cattle for his land and mine, and when he came of age to do it, Billy Wendell farmed my land as if it were his own, giving me at the end of the year whatever he thought fair. I never had reason to question him on that. Probity is not at last a function of intelligence; it is an aspect of character. Billy and Loreen and Victoria and I had always been close. When it was clear that Victoria could not last much longer, Billy was desolate. He had gone out fishing alone and gotten drunk and fallen into the winter water and almost drowned. Because he could not stay close by without visiting her and could not stand to go into the room and see her wasting, moving quickly by then to the verge of time, and on like a thin chiseled arrow into eternity itself. It was only in the last year that things had changed between us. I believe I had let things slip after I retired. No, that’s wrong. That sounds as if I had just gone slack when I stepped down from the bench. It wasn’t like that. I had just moved away a little. Supper with Billy and Loreen less often, shorter visits both ways. Perhaps because whenever the three of us were together, there was always implied the presence of some other, and the bare implication was itself a pain and a mourning. Or perhaps even more because getting ready for Glory is mostly a matter of cutting loose, moving away, cleaning out cupboards and closets of the soul, letting things slip away. It is also selfish, isn’t it? Because the least of us matters in some way to hosts of others, and many of those others have claims on us. Don’t they? –The Congressional Medal? Hell, Billy, I didn’t even know Gee was in the war. –Oh yeah. Momma told me they come for him after you and daddy had gone. He come back before you did. –Even so, you reckon they’ve got the wrong man? –That’s what I told Waring. Then he started in on all that crap about how we treat niggers. Gaspard Penniwell. He came back into focus like a genie emerging from a bottle, misty and undefined. We called him Gee. He and his people had worked Wendell land for almost as long as the Wendells had owned it. Rowena, whose recollection is of the style of the Vedic Brahmins, and who has set to memory every rag and scrap and patch of story and tale having to do with anyone in the neighborhood–and who can and will cough it all up upon no provocation at all–maintained that a Penniwell, some white man from Pennsylvania, had come to Frierson, Louisiana, in the wake of the Confederate War to make his fortune on the ruin of the people hereabouts. He lasted long enough to father a child or two on some decent colored girl named Gaspard before he was waylaid and dispatched as was the custom then. I have no idea whether this is legend or fact. Nor, I am sure, does Rowena. Her critical standards for incorporating such material into her memory hoard seem to parallel Aristotle’s desiderata: better a probable impossibility than a possible improbability, and Lord knows the Penniwell story seemed probable enough. –I sort of remember when he came home, Billy went on. –I was just a little tad. They brought him out to the place in one of those brown ambulances from Barksdale field. You ever see his belly and legs? Fearless Fosdick. –What? –Fearless Fosdick. All them holes like he was a piece of Swiss cheese. My momma kept him at the house for the longest. She took care of him herself. Folks talked at the time. Lord, she even bathed him. You never saw anything like it. I tried to pay attention to what Billy was saying, but that genie was rounding off, filling out. Gaspard. Gee. Perhaps ten years older than Will D. and me. Tall, good-looking, strong. One of a handful of blacks that old man Wendell trusted all the way. If I remembered rightly, Gee had become a foreman just before I left for the service. And there was something else, but it wouldn’t come back into focus. Why did I think there was something important buried back there under almost fifty years of memories? Never mind. –All right, I said. –So he went and they shot him all to hell and he came home. Now, after over thirty years, they get in a sweat to give him a medal . . . ? Billy shrugged. –You know how they are, Uncle Albert. Maybe it’s an election coming up. All I know is this Warner or Waring or whatever said he was gonna get on my case. He wanted to know how I was fixed with the IRS and . . . –What exactly did Gee say when you went by with the letter? –You want it word for word? –That would be nice. –He said they could take their medal and put it where the sun don’t shine. Then they could kiss his black ass and bark at the hole. Then he said for me to get off his place or he’d take a stick to me . . . –Mercy . . . –Listen, Uncle Albert, that’s a mean old nigger. He’s as good as gold, honest. Hardworking man. But he’s mean . . . Billy got out of the chair then, as well as he could. He was tired and worried and whiskeyed up a little. I told him I’d see about the government business for him if he wanted me to. –Thanks, Billy said grimly. –That way I can study on going crazy about . . . Uncle Albert . . . ? –What? –Did she say anything else? I mean, besides I was . . . a chaser? –She didn’t even say that, I told him. –She didn’t say anything, and she wouldn’t let me say anything. She just asked for the name of a good divorce lawyer. That broke him down. He stood there wordless, doing whatever it was he did in the way of thinking. Finally he stepped off the porch and walked back to his pickup truck. It took him a little while to find the keys, then he pulled away driving slow. He wasn’t in a hurry to get home. If he was even going home. Then I went inside and found that I was standing around with an empty mind, considering which of the many delightful things I might do–none of which I was in any way obliged to do–that I wanted to do. It was a little unsettling to find that I was not eager to pick up Berlioz where I had left him, or to see what next the Romans did on their way to Imperium. No, Billy’s visit following on Loreen’s and all this business about Gaspard Penniwell had broken me loose from my routine. It wasn’t going to last, of course. I would get done with it as quickly as I could and get back to my books. And if worse came to worst, if I found I couldn’t get shut of involvements here in Caddo Parish, I’d pick up and move down south. St. Tammany Parish was nice. Good fishing and good people. I had set as an interim judge once down there in Covington. But with all that loose clutter passing through my mind, I found that below or behind or above it, I was still thinking of Gee. I could remember a time when he had not been mean. I could squint backward through that mist of time past and see him laughing, hands covered with blood on a cold winter afternoon. And Will D. and I were there, and we were laughing, too. What was it? I had been cold and frightened and exultant and . . . Lord, of course. It had been him, Gaspard Penniwell, who had taught us how to shoot, how to hunt. My first deer. I had shot it and gutted it and cleaned it, and we had eaten venison cooked over a fire of hickory branches in a cotton house on old man Wendell’s place with the November rain driving outside, and Gee telling us stories about the old days when there were still bear in the parish, and maybe even a few wild boar. We had been friends, the three of us. Old man Wendell had deputized Gee to teach us how to hunt, how to live in the woods–and how to minimize the mayhem, the dead cattle and possibly even dead field hands, as we made our uncertain way toward manhood. Gee was older than we were, but not enough older to take it as a chore to see to us when squirrel season came, or when it was time to move out on the big lake and wait for ducks flying south. He loved it all as much as we did, and he was a crack shot. He would let us take the first one, but if we missed, he always managed to do easily what we often could not manage to do at all. It should have been Will D.’s father or mine or both of them who taught us, but even then the old ways, the passing on of knowledge from father to son, were breaking down not from lack of love or interest in us, but because it was hard to keep things going then, most of all a big piece of cotton land when, cleaned and baled, you almost had to give your cotton away. But it had been all right. Gee had accepted the delegation and enjoyed every minute of it, and for a few years there, people were accustomed to seeing the three of us ranging the land from September, when dove season opened, until spring when everything shut down and we had to shoot at bottles or cans until the next fall. The memories kept coming. The time we were in Shreveport buying Will D. a new shotgun and got hungry and wanted to eat, but there was no place in town that would serve the three of us sitting at the same table. At least not until Gee thought of Freeman and Harris’s, a colored restaurant where a young black man and a pair of vouched-for white boys could eat together at a table in the kitchen. Ribs and neckbones, rice and gravy and cornbread. I believe the cooks took it up as a matter of pride to show those white boys what they were missing every day, not being able under Louisiana law to walk in the front door of that place, sit down, and order up any time they decided to do so. Stewed chicken and dumplings, hog lips and field peas with what tasted like cracklings broken up in them, all of it served hot from a stove not ten feet away, laid out on a fresh white tablecloth starched stiff and shining as if held back for certain honored guests like us. At the end of the meal, when the three of us were close to falling away from the table, there had been a sweet potato pie. Yes, we had been friends, the three of us, in that soft gray dawn of young manhood, which is simultaneously the twilight of childhood and possibly the very best time of all. We had been real friends with no hope of gain or advancement or social necessity or simple sycophancy. Before we came to know the intricacies and bland hypocrisy of living as adults. I sat there in the darkness and wondered at the tricks that age and memory and simple repetitive habit can play. Had someone offered me ten thousand dollars for the name of the French town where I had fallen to mortar fire in 1944, I would have had to pass. But I found myself evoking the details of that menu in an obscure black restaurant over forty years ago, and I thought to myself, Perhaps when we are pressed, we remember only the important things. She threatens a lot. For a while after Victoria died, she had taken to threatening to quit. I knew she wouldn’t quit, and she knew I knew it. But what was she to do? She had lost first my mother, who had very nearly raised her–or had they raised one another?–and then she had lost Victoria. All she had left was me. Not counting a daughter who had vanished in the wilds of Southern California and was on her seventh marriage the last time she had written to Rowena some six years ago. Threatening to quit was a form of mourning. Her way of letting go, or perhaps an attempt to stay the velocity with which I was going to seed. Men go to hell without women. Every woman knows that. Rowena knew that. But she was a little panicky because she knew she had not the levers of control that my other women had had, only the same responsibilities. What do you do with a man who only shaves once a week, eats a can of chicken soup on a Sunday, then for three days Ritz crackers and sardines? Then perhaps a week or so of nothing but pork and beans and canned pineapple? One who will not socialize or even keep up the appearance of doing so? One who, spurning all his old associates from the judicial estate, had willfully reduced his life to one which is, praise God, bare bones and the acrid air of old times, of history read and re-read and thought upon? Rowena, forestalled from direct action, too old to do much cooking, and recognizing (I think) some degree of disparity in our tactical abilities, began discussing the obituary columns with me over sacramentally shared morning coffee. Rather than place recent deaths at the back near the classified ads where more traditional criers might, reports of mortality were front page in Rowena’s monologues on the state of the parish. She was partial to stroke, seizure, aphasia, and massive sudden cardiac arrest. She also favored the occasional death-by-drowning-of- drunken-fisherman-falling-from-boat story. She was aware of Billy’s near miss and savored it as a Foreshadowing. She tended to keep especial account of men who died in their middle and late fifties, making of them, whenever she could, cautionary tales steeped in improper diet, alcoholic excess, untoward forms of exercise not intended for older men–and of course bare rumors vague and dank of shameful sexual proclivities which, developing late, were clearly oiled and polished fast lanes to the mortuary awaiting elderly gentlemen who, out of loneliness or from an untoward frivolity, lost their grip on sense and sanity. Beyond all that, Rowena was a mine of information, most of it lurid, tawdry, and nearly always true. Her inclination toward mythology aside, you could generally go for an indictment if Rowena deposed. –Before you get started with the casualty list, I need to know a couple of things, I told her that morning. –Started what? First then, I turned off that rackety record player of yours. I done the dishes already. One dish, a cup, and a soup bowl. Starving yourself like a fool. If I still had my hand in . . . –You’d be cooking all day for one man. It would kill you quick as strychnine, and I’d go off from overeating. Let well enough alone. –What you want to know? –Loreen came by. So damned mad she was past being mad . . . –Well, yes . . . –Yes what? –She’s mad. Ought to get on past it, but she can’t. Poor baby. –Billy’s chasing? Rowena gave me a withering look–as if I’d just asked her my own name. –Ummm . . . –That dumb bastard. –You got to expect it. It’s how they are. Dog’s gonna piss on a pole and scratch grass. Man’s gonna find himself something new now and again. Ain’t no big thing except she think it’s a big thing. Not like he’s fixing to go off or something. He ain’t about to leave that place. That’s all he knows. –You saying their marriage is shot? –Did I say that? If I’d of meant to say that, that’s what you’d of heard. Naw, Loreen just a white girl. She don’t know nothing. Time was ladies wouldn’t even let on they knew. Take your sainted mother . . . –Are you fixing to tell me something I don’t even want to know? –Hush . . . If your daddy had gone catting, your momma would of ignored it. I said if . . . –Well, Loreen’s not going to. –Naw, she gonna run that boy off and then spend her declining years looking for better. Anyhow, Billy simple as salad. It ain’t him. It that Terry Novis . . . –Huh? Judge Wesley’s secretary? –You ought to know. Rowena gave me a look as if to suggest that, in its day, my judicial chambers had been the best little whorehouse in Shreveport. I do not know why Rowena supposes that judges are libertines more than the run of men. But I know better than to try to rear a defense against her. Never do it. She will lay siege and you will be sorry as hell. She is incapable of forgetting or forgiving. Just when you think the matter in dispute is past and done, she will come upon you of a sudden, storm the barricades, and make a pyramid of skulls from your pretensions. Once I told her that garfish wasn’t fit to eat. Weeks–no, months–later at a dinner party Victoria gave, we had set before us from Rowena’s kitchen a fish entree richer, more delicate than anything Antoine’s or Galatoire’s ever conceived. That’s right. I made it a rigorous point thereafter never to observe in front of Rowena that horseshit was unpalatable. –It come out of all that tractor business, Rowena observed. I remembered something about it. A lawsuit in federal court months ago. A diversity action in redhibition. Billy had bought a couple of tractors which were prone to shed their transmissions and went to law. Which, I judged from Rowena’s sneering remark, was where Billy had come across Terry Novis. If you were a man who happened by good fortune or bad to have business in the United States Court for the Western District of Louisiana, and that business took you to Division H, you would most likely run across Terry. You might fall down mute, stone deaf, high gravel blind. But then you might count those afflictions as nothing just for the sight of her. I am a man of mature years, and I have tried to fashion my language as well as my thought in some mold less barbarous than that in which I was reared by other Caddo Parish men. But Terry Novis is a reagent. She dissolves the veneer of civilization with which we clad ourselves the way Strip-Ease cuts varnish from an old chest of drawers. I have heard descriptive phrases used of her that shocked the sensibility. I have heard men casually say what they would do to have one night with her, and their sayings chilled the blood. There are those who claim she took the job at federal court simply because it was the one place in town where she was least likely to have some otherwise harmless passing redneck go stark wild in nature, shred away his clothes and hers, and make the beast with two backs before a thousand witnesses in the courthouse square in front of the Confederate Memorial. Terry has red hair. She is superbly developed, and the sight of her legs breaks something in a man. One would, in a manner of speaking, settle for the legs alone. But there is much more. Feature by feature, one begins to conclude that Terry is the absolute prototype of what a woman should look like. Hands, eyes, lips, skin, and an unforgettable rear end. Yes, she passes down a hallway and heads turn as if they were wired to that fanny of hers. One loves his wife. One does not make concrete plans to kidnap Terry Novis and carry her off to Rio for one splendid week of worshipful continuous violation. But one considers it, in and out of season. –Well, that all you wanted to know? Cause I believe I got it in me to fix up some fried eggs and bacon this morning. What you say? –Would there be biscuits? Rowena nodded in mild disgust. Offer me a dollar and I’ll have your savings account. She went to work and I sat there over cold coffee still thinking about Terry Novis. And Billy. I could not believe it. By what peculiar tracery of fate had Billy gotten far enough along with her to shake the foundations of his family life? I did not have to ask why, just how. It seems one’s capacity to be astonished is never really played out. There is always another revelation around the next bend. Rowena was heating up the oven, slapping out dough, plucking skeins of bacon from a frozen pack. It was painful to watch her. She seemed to move in slow motion. Some small malevolent portion of oneself was always making book on whether she would manage to complete whatever action she was engaged upon. She was eighty-two then and gnarled as a live oak, but I suspected from time to time she exaggerated the weight of her years the better to keep me in my place. If one moves with efficiency and dispatch, demands are likely to be made. If one is not venerable, one is vulnerable. But behind that dark withered face is a mind like a roto-rooter, fast-moving and digging for dirt. In her time she has recounted stories that would gag a maggot. It was from Rowena that I first heard about the Fannin Street Cannibal–before the matter was raised in my court. Proper judicial procedure might have required that I disqualify myself from presiding. But how do you tell your colleagues on the bench that you know the sonofabitch is guilty as Sweeny Todd because your black housekeeper has told you so? –What about Gaspard Penniwell, I asked as casually as I could. –Ugh. Rowena was at the stove with her back to me, and she gave a shake with her shoulders as if I had recommended she take the bacon out of the skillet and substitute rat flanks. –You want to tell me what that means? She turned from the stove, hands on hips, and fixed me with her Now You’ve Gone Too Far look. –One thing in this world hadn’t anyone ought to put up with. A dirty nasty old man. For just the smallest portion of a second, I thought she was talking about me. A tincture of guilt for my thoughts about Terry Novis. –God must love them, I grinned. –He sure made enough of them. –That ugly filthy old nigger. Ought somebody put him out of his misery. –What’s he done? –Nobody cares. Listen, I prays of a Sunday that somebody gonna stand up and say it: this world right here is hell. –Why this is hell, nor are we out of it. For where we are is hell, and where hell is, there must we ever be . . . –What’s all that? Never mind. It’s true. –You going to tell me what hell’s location has to do with Gee? –Gee? Oh yeah, I forget now and again. You and that Will D. Wendell . . . Youall was thick as thieves with that nigger . . . Yes. Some forty years ago. Now time had raddled the fishing gear, and the shotguns and rifles had fallen away in rust. But time had not diminished nor changing custom blurred Rowena’s razor-sharp recollection of us then. She had complained once to my mother that the three of us together constituted a criminal syndicate. Gee was a dubious nigger and only God knew what he would lead Will D. and me to–but when led, we were certain to drink deep of whatever it was. For Will D., Rowena had specifically predicted a disastrous end. He reached too high and reckoned whatever he reached for belonged of right to him. He would fall. I remember thinking of those words I had overheard by chance when, still on a cane, I had first walked over our land after I got home and knew that Will D. was dead. He had been everything Rowena said. And he had fallen. Surely the prediction does not force the event, else our very lives would be theoretical. But I wondered if Rowena had some touch of second sight, if in some archaic manner she lived our deaths and died our lives. I was still mending then. Not only from the passage of shrapnel through my body but from what I had seen on the beaches at Normandy, in the roads and ditches where we had crawled and bled and died and murdered our way across France. I was still shaky and I could not stop dreaming that I was once again under that pale sun, hearing that flat distant vasty wail just as I dove headfirst into a hedgerow before earth and breath and consciousness and I parted ways. I did not want ever to be pierced with steel again, to lie in cold thick mud, a gasping St. Sebastian of alien country roads. I had not lost my guts. That metaphor should be used with surgical precision. I had not lost my guts. But they were still strung out from France to Louisiana, trailing, soiled, quivering. I remembered wondering if Rowena knew that. Or what else she might know. She dished up the eggs and bacon and pushed a plate of biscuits over to me to be buttered. Then she ladled out grits onto my plate and into her bowl and sat down across the table from me. –You might try a biscuit, I said mildly. –One biscuit isn’t going to kill you . . . unless you put rat poison in them. –Eat, she said gruffly, spooning her grits. –Can’t use no butter with this pancreas. Biscuit with no butter . . . ? –I’m still asking about Gee, I said. The food tasted better than it looked. –You’ve got something on your mind. –He got him a little girl over there. –All right. Folks do that nowadays. –Not like him. She just a child. –How old were you when you got married? –I was sixteen, Mr. Smart Alec. I was full-growed. That old man got him a baby . . . She maybe ten . . . eight more like it. Lord know where he got her from. Maybe they rents em nowadays . . . I went on eating. If it was true, it was scandalous. But I wasn’t going to add any fuel to the fire. Then it appeared I didn’t need to. –You know, now you brung it up, I believe I might call the high sheriff myself. Have em take that old devil away. Get that child a home. –I didn’t bring anything like that up. You did. And no, you won’t. Rowena glowered across the table at me. She can tell when I mean business. She can measure millimeters of intent at a glance. When she goes to studying you, watch out. –Still thick, huh? –I haven’t laid eyes on Gaspard Penniwell in over thirty years, I told her. –Uh-huh, but you remember. Never mind what’s right. Old times is worth more than what’s right. I tell you this, Mr. Man, I ain’t sitting in your place come judgment. –Fair enough, I told her. –And I’ll see to it you don’t trip into hell for the sake of a calumny. –A what? –Officious intermeddling. –That don’t help. –Sticking your goddamned nose into business that doesn’t concern you. Even if what you say is true. –Poor little girl. Colored people don’t care. White folks don’t care. Gonna be something else when she throw that old devil’s child and it got two heads and a tail and . . . In the law, we refer to Rowena’s manner of argument as the Parade of Horribles. Next to the Argument from Public Policy, it is regarded as the most contemptible form of expression known to a profession which has, since Cicero, gleefully won its cases on sleazy ad hominem points, and prided itself on sophistry, obfuscation, jesuitical turns and the lower reaches of hook or crook. –I’m going by to see him, I said. –Well, he ain’t going to see you, she said right back. –He don’t see nobody. All he ever do is sit out in that hickory rocker Miz Wendell give him. And watch that poor child play with her puppy. He don’t talk. He don’t pass the time of day. You wave, he look the other way. Rowena left off for a moment. –You do go by, you want to tell him something for me? –I doubt it. –You tell him he gonna fry in hell like Sunday chicken, hear? And not to go howling about being sorry when them wings close down on him. Too late then . . . I was not sure about the wings. Whether they were to be those of the Angel of Death or the Sunday Chicken. Either, I reckoned, would be past bearing. We went our ways then. Rowena to her cleaning and I out to the jeep, wondering just what it was I had to do. As I drove, I found myself trying to nudge that genie, still not yet formed up. I tried to remember what Gee had looked like. He had been big and dark, strong enough to live a black life as it was then, and still pick and choose between whites he loved and whites he hated. I had always expected Gee to have trouble. Not because he was fractious or given to fighting or smart talk, but because he lacked even the appearance of that fine oriental mask of duplicity his people had collectively fabricated over the centuries. Whom he cared for and whom he despised showed always and all too clearly. But Gee did not have trouble. One reason was that W. D. Wendell would have whipped any second-rate white man who thought to ease the discomfort of his status by fooling with Gee. The other, I do believe, was us–Will D. and me. We kept him too busy to find time for trouble. I can imagine the offer and acceptance when W. D. decided Gee was the man to start the two of us on our way. –You want the job or don’t you, W. D. would have asked him, that raw beefsteak face of his absent any expression at all. –I reckon, Gee would have answered quietly. –All right. Get all the ammunition and what-have-you at Fielder’s grocery. Take the little truck when youall go off. Gas it up at Ferds. Take what you need out of the stores. Don’t let em hurt anybody and kick their asses if they don’t mind. –You want they asses kicked? –No, goddamit. I don’t want their asses kicked. But I never seen a boy you could get to straighten up and walk like a man unless you did kick his ass. Them two ain’t going to be any exceptions. –Ummm . . . –Oh, I see what you mean. Don’t worry about that. I’ll tell em. If they ain’t willing to let a grown decent nigger kick their asses, they can go into town and sign up at Mrs. Stovall’s dancing school. A man’s a man, ain’t he? Gee would have nodded and smiled. The deal would have been struck, the three of us inextricably locked together then in that old time and beyond time. In recollection. There was that little thread of a road, and I turned up it for the first time I could remember since 1942. The genie was beginning to sort out now, and the mist was thinning. Out there beyond the cotton stubble was a stand of hardwood, and in the autumn you could hear the fox squirrels barking all the way up to Gee’s house. That piece of woods teemed with game because Gee would throw out grain even in the winter. A bird or a rabbit could find a square meal in those woods even when it snowed. I pulled the jeep over and looked out across the quiet narrow field that sloped toward the woods. In the old days, it was always planted with corn–still was. In the autumn, a portion of the crop was left to fall, and it would draw the doves as they flew south. Some days when we felt mean and full of piss and vinegar, we would shoot over the corn field with #8 shot, then change over to #6 and go for the squirrels down below. Now the field lay naked, covered with broken stalks and rotted husks. It was just short of nine in the morning and the sun was pale and thin, the air dusted with mist. The year was dying all around. I considered that every year was a lifetime. Every autumn when the guns came out of their cases, down from the walls, young men entered the fields for the first time, old men hunted their last. A finger of chill breeze reached through the open side of the jeep whispering about what was past and what remained. I sat there silent, almost seeing the three of us stalking the fields, pulling down birds from the crisp air, moving on wordless, intent on the next rise, each knowing where it would likely come, the precedence of shooting. I could remember the enforced looseness in my arms and shoulders, the hard blade of concentration in my mind as we walked. None of us liked to talk or fool around when we were hunting or fishing. We did not talk nearly so much as, later, the riflemen in my squad talked amidst hunting other men to kill. There, the drumroll of talk was ceaseless whenever it seemed unlikely to get us killed at once. We had all talked, talked against the darkness that lay in wait in the empty streets of the next village or in the invisible trenches and foxholes and ambuscades overlooked by artillery and air and armor. Talked baseball and women and jobs and dreams of escape and return. Talked especially of women, as if speech invoking women, their limbs, their hair, their secret places physical and spiritual, assured us of some further portion of temporality. As if talking on and on about that deepest drive that even the stupidest amongst us held in some way sacred was whole proof and evidence of our ongoing life, of the flat fact that it had not been one of us left behind back there in the last silent and abandoned village, dog tags festooned across the rifle butt, bayonet speared into the harsh rich lumped soil of France. A mist, a fog of aimless conversation, even monologue. Some of us died talking. I walked out into the field and gathered up some fragments of broken cornstalk and soil in my hand. The pieces were stained and bleached gray with tracks of black mold. Scattered piles of shucks lay here and there where ears had been thrown and stripped in the field. They say the old Indians believed there was but one paradigmatic beaver and one ideal possum, a single bear, but one great deer, and that, when Beaver or Possum or Bear or Deer had fed an Indian family, the bones had to be returned to the place where it had been killed. Otherwise, when next they came to hunt, bellies empty, there would be no beaver, possum, bear or deer. I dropped the remnants of that last harvest, seeing already behind the cool sterile autumn sky that next July with stalks tall and tassels rayed out against a new sun, warm and yellow?green, burgeoning, moving fecund toward harvest once more. I walked back to the jeep and made ready to start off again. Somehow I found I was uncomfortable, taken suddenly with a sense of dread. I frowned, my hand arrested on the ignition key. Then I found the root of the feeling. It was a vague inchoate yet absolutely certain sense of bad faith. As if I were on my way to Gee’s place with the intent of lying to him, taking advantage of him. I could penetrate no deeper. The feeling was absurd. I shrugged within myself, started up the jeep, and pulled away. The road dipped down a little farther on. Almost always the dirt there was wet and sometimes, in the spring or after a summer shower, it was impassable. Now it was bone dry, dust spiraling upward in my path, a physical shadow of that genie still swirling, trying to find its proper form, concrete and detailed, in my mind. I remembered when our friendship bad begun to shade away. It had not ended, stopped, come to some discernible conventional halt. It had simply ceased to be convenient, ceased to be in the forefront of those things Will D. and I had in mind. We had gone to the University, down to Baton Rouge. Will D. had spent four years in an extended and debilitating spree at the Deke house. I had started going with Victoria. Gee had kept on doing what he had done since he had come of age–virtually running the Wendell place singlehanded, answerable mostly to Mrs. Wendell since W. D. was lying sick at Schumpert Sanatorium by the time we graduated. And that thought, like a locomotive plunging through a wall of memories dismissed, carried with it a remembrance of W. D.’s death–a day I had as soon not called to mind. It had been cancer, and it had wasted him as if that dread name stood indeed for some pernicious invisible thing that fixes on us, tearing, clawing, shredding away our substance as quickly as we swallow it, leaving us fearsome scarecrows, thin brittle envelopes of skin and bone. Will D. and I had made it a point to visit him separately each day. We were both in service then, waiting to be called to duty. We had asked for time to stay with him, but W. D. would not hear of us waiting to fight until he had done with this, his last. We would bear witness to more than enough of dying as we went along, he told us, and since one dying lay before every man, his only absolute and indisputable debt to the world, there was no sense in making much of it. Treat death as a nuisance to be gotten past. Like jock itch, W. D. had said. But that had nothing to do with our separate visits. We had tried once to go and see him together, but we had found that we could not, for some reason, bear up if we were together. One or the other of us would begin to weep–not cry: no sound would come from us. We knew better than to let that happen. But we could not control our tears, and W. D. would become enraged. We were forbidden to weep for him. –When it’s over and past, youall can snivel for a little while if you can’t find anything better to do with your time. Then I expect you to get back to your purposes, whatever the hell they may be . . . As it happened, we were in Fort Polk when it ended. We rushed back, Will D. to see his mother who was with mine over at our place. I went to the hospital, proposing to make what are called Final Arrangements–just as if I knew what I was doing. When I got there, the room door was open, nurses and attendants moving in and out in the bustle that follows upon death. I thought they might have already sent W. D. over to Wellman’s Funeral Home, but they had not. In there he lay like the most fragile of dolls, his head thrown back, his hands awkwardly folded by someone else, his eyes closed, his mouth partially open as if in a wide and final yawn at the fundamental banality of death–or life. He had lost almost all his hair. What was left was thin and wispy, an iron gray mist hovering over his parchment skull. I fixed my eyes there, on his hair, because I needed at least another moment before I looked down at his face. It was then that I saw a black hand gently brushing that hair down, arranging it as tenderly as a woman might have done for one she loved well. Gee looked up at me as I stood there in my uniform, trying to bring myself to lower my eyes to W. D.’s face, to study it, to confirm beyond question that a fixture of my own life had gone on, to stand as honest witness that the sum of reality itself had been diminished by the measure of this strong jovial hard-driving whit called William Dunlop Wendell II. Then my eyes met Gee’s. His living anguish was worse than the spectacle of death that lay stretched between us. I felt more pity, more compassion for Gee than for W. D., whose travail was done. I wanted to reach out to Gee, put my arms around him and say that the anguish was one that pierced us all three, him, Will D. and me the same. But I did not. I couldn’t. Something had happened. Something had changed in me without my even knowing it. Before, I would have been comforting one of my dearest friends. Now I would be embracing a negro. Just then I knew for the first time that I was, God help me, an adult. I do not have the slightest notion how it happened. It is easy enough to say that the climate of opinion in the parish–indeed, in all the South–took innocent children and made them come to believe that Great Distinction fabricated by their fathers in order to enjoin obedience and enforce dominance at the cost of democracy and equality. There are times when I wish that the churnings of creation were as simple as that. If the world-knot could be unraveled by application of such comic-book formulae, we might all be wise and happy. Mightn’t we? But it is not so, and positivist babblings will not make it so. Standing by the emptied body of an old man I had loved, across from a black man I loved still, I was not confronted with a problem, either social or personal. There was no problem at all. Rather a mystery had befallen me. A mystery as profound and embracing and irreducible as that which wrenched our first parents from their dream when, in their awful new wisdom, they looked and saw that they were naked. I had turned and walked away then, leaving behind, from an appropriate distance, some words neither better nor worse than I might have used in good faith rather than bad. I told myself that Will D. and his mother might need me, and that I must do what had to be done at the funeral parlor as quickly as I could. The war was waiting and we had so little time. I had believed it at that moment, and I had gone on believing it up to that very day I found myself driving toward Gee’s place with Billy Wendell’s business on my mind. Then Gee’s house rose up out of the woods before me on the left, and I promptly put out of my mind for the moment what I had just remembered for the first time in over thirty years. To see the place that way, bands of thin sunlight cutting through the permanent green domes of live oak and magnolia, was a shock. It had not changed. Nothing had been added. Nothing had been taken away. I had been ruminating since the night before on time past, on what had been good and what had been lost. On Victoria and Will D., on old W. D. and my mother–on the very structure of my own life, chipped and cracked and falling away into the abyss of time with each day passing, with each other life impingent on my own moving from this world into the mode of non-existence. Now I sat facing a palpable chunk of my past, glimmering in autumn sunlight as if it had been lifted up, translated, from the mere accidental plane where weather and the worm and the heaviness of time claim, and deposited into a realm in every way identical to that past save for its lastingness. It was a wide shallow rough-planked house of cypress with a long low porch on the front and windows tall enough for a man to walk through. Broad enough to allow a transient breeze into the house on a summer evening. The porch was built of long thick cuts of heart-of-pine and the roof slanted down so that an exceedingly tall man had to bow to avoid its edge. The shingles were cedar. So far as I knew, aside from the shingles, nails, and a metal sink, everything in the house had come from this land. I was parked then, still staring at the house I had helped to build. It took a moment before I realized that the single difference I could make out was the trees. The oaks and magnolias, the sycamores and gums were forty and more years old. Towering now, craggy branches interlocked, a good century of growth and struggle still before the hardiest of them, because two seventeen-year-olds and a twenty-seven-year-old had somehow not realized how large they would become, and had planted them too close. I was stupefied, bewildered, to see what those boys and that man had done so long ago. He came out to the porch then. Walking slowly, carefully, deliberately, as if each step required an infinity of exact calculations. He stopped at the top of the broad pine steps and gazed out at the jeep and at me. I met his gaze as best I could, knowing that I must speak first. I who was breaking this morning’s peace must explain why by breaking the thirty years’ silence between us as well. But I had come unprepared. I had dawdled and dreamed on my way, harking back to the past–all for the sake of the genie who now stood only yards away on a plank porch with substance and form, looking into my eyes noncommittally as if he suspected that I might be a drummer about to alight from his car with a valise full of medicines good for all the ailings of man or beast. But I was a drummer who had not prepared his spiel and who, along his way, had come to wonder if his wares were such to tempt this customer’s trust in the virtue of what he had to offer. I was given a moment longer. From behind the house, a feist came running, yapping, falling and rolling in the dry autumn grass, and after him a little black girl in a blue dress. The dog had but three legs. A clumsy bandage was bound around the stump of one hind leg, but the loss seemed to hamper him not at all. The child’s hair was carefully tied up in those small gatherings clenched with strips of cloth that one used to see more often. She ran past the tumbling dog, waved at the silent presence on the porch, and made off under the oaks down toward a pond from which, ages ago, I had drawn my supper time and again. It was time then, and past. I got down out of the jeep and started toward the porch. It was perhaps thirty yards away, but as I walked, for some reason I became conscious of aches and pains and muscles pulling, all of which had been with me for so long that they were ordinarily no longer even objects of cognition. Anyhow, I strode across the bare yard as quickly as I could. I had no intention of raising my voice, of calling out to Gee from a distance. Perhaps he did not recognize me. I was not even sure that I would have recognized him had I not known that this was his house, were he not standing there now in such a way as to announce wordlessly that he was standing on his property awaiting someone who had chosen to come there, to interrupt his morning and whatever he was accustomed to filling it with. –Gee . . . –Albert Sidney . . . No one had called me that in thirty years. It was what my mother called me when she was displeased. Will D. had called me that because he was saddled with a double name, too. And Gee. I was on the steps of his house then, the brown and white feist having discovered me, squeaking and wheezing from a distance, hysterical in his small way that a stranger had come upon the place and that he, as usual, was not large enough to challenge him. The girl, at a distance, laughed at the dog’s anger, his feints toward me, his rapid backings-away. She paid me no mind at all. As for Gee, he was looking at me with mild disinterest, as if I were a swatch of cloud in an otherwise clear sky or a dust devil in the road stirred by a passing car and sure to fade as quickly as eyes set upon it. I put out my hand and Gee took it, shook it absently in that soft uncommitted grasp that elderly blacks, unaccustomed to being offered white hands, almost invariably use. –Billy come by last night. Said you be along, Gee said, standing in front of his doorway now, offering neither hospitality nor discourtesy. Neither acknowledging nor denying my right to be standing on his land, his porch. His. Not rented or leased or held in a sharecropper’s precarious possession. His. –Well, I said. –We need to sit down and talk. You want to sit out here? That did not recall him to his manners, because he had none. He knew well enough what manners were, had always known, and had eschewed them almost as he had put aside talking. Whatever small obeisance he had made in the direction of such things had vanished long ago. From years, decades, of living alone. –Come on in, he said, and turned slowly to go ahead of me. As he entered the darkness of the house, I paused for a fraction of a moment to look out toward the distant trees where the child was playing with the feist I could not judge her age. She was not the infant Rowena had conjured up, but she was no woman, either. She was surely within the protection of the Statute. I went on inside. There was first and at once the smell of coal oil. I had not smelled anything closer to that scent than diesel fuel in years. Gee was turning up a lamp that barely flickered, and as he leaned over it, I tried to complete the figure of my genie. I saw an elderly black man, hair the color of morning frost. He was deep in his sixties. He looked much older. I could tell that his teeth were mostly gone and the sly indifferent desiccation of age had hollowed his cheeks, rheumed his eyes. Still, when he was done with the lamp, he stood erect, his shoulders squared and strong as if he had just heard something threatening and was about to turn and meet it. His hands were too large for his arms, thin now like those of a boy, muscles gone to twine, the skin wrinkled and puckered and blotchy, insignia of age. –I got coffee or a little bit of handmade liquor. –Whatever. –Mostly I leaves it alone till it comes dark. But today . . . –All right. He went over to a large rough-hewn hutch and took down one of five or six Ball jars, uncapped it, and poured a clear fluid into coffee cups. Then he went over to the sink and pumped two jelly glasses full of well water. While he was at the sink, I looked around the place. It was spare and clean with the feeling of a refectory. There was a long table built of the same heart-of-pine that made up the flooring of the porch. It sat parallel to an enormous fireplace of rough red bricks that was big enough to braise a hog in. Over the hearth there were ranked half a dozen guns. I could make out the bottom piece, an old Browning over-and-under with silver chasing around the receiver and trigger guard. I did not need to read the worn initials engraved there. I knew what they were: W. D. W. The other guns were just as fine. Clean, old, worn smooth, each bearing the patina of age and frequent use. Gee came back to the table and set down the cups and the jelly glasses. His eyes met mine and I saw that he had mastered over the years an expression of equanimity that as a young man he had lacked. Now his face was indecipherable. His contempts and his affections, his hopes and plans, if he had any, were not there. Nothing was revealed. He sat down in a chair across the table from me, his face just beyond the steady cone of light thrown by the coal-oil lamp. I took a drink of the whiskey. It was too early for that sort of thing, but Lord it was fine. You could tan a coonskin in it. I wanted to reach for the cold well water, but Gee wasn’t having any. If he wasn’t neither was I. –That letter from the government, huh? –They’ve been calling down here, worrying Billy. –They got no cause to trouble him. It ain’t got anything to do with him. If they got to fret somebody, they ought to be talking to me. –I expect they will be. One way or another. Gee drank more of his whiskey and stared out the door. The cur was going for an ancient guinea hen out near the road. It would not catch the bird. The girl was watching the chase, showing neither concern nor disinterest. –Reckon you could just cut em off? I don’t need em and I don’t want em. They ain’t got nothing for me. If it cost something, I’ll pay you. –Gee, it’s not going to work that way. They think Billy’s doing you something. –Shit, he said after a moment. –Them lowdown sonsabitches. –Look, all you’ve got to do to get shut of them is take some medal they want to give you . . . They’ll pay your way up to Washington city, and . . . He almost jumped to his feet. I must have flinched in surprise to see him move so quickly. He paced back and forth, up and down the length of the room. I could see why he had moved with such measure and deliberation before. As he paced so rapidly, he staggered, swaying from side to side, each step appearing to be the last before he sprawled on the floor. I started out of my chair to keep him from falling, but his voice kept me in my seat. –Sonsabitches. I hadn’t ought to of gone when they sent for me. I knew it then. I knew I hadn’t ought to of gone. I could of made off in them woods and they’d never of found me . . . –Well . . . –I knew it. Just as sure as I set my foot out of this parish, it was gonna go bad and get worse. Long as I was here, it was all right . . . –You want to tell me what . . . – . . . but Will D. was gone, and you was gone. Everybody I knew was gone. Your daddy was passed on and Mr. W. D. had went and died on me, and it was all that talk about the Germans and the Japs . . . seemed wrong to just hang around. –I know . . . –No you don’t. It wasn’t no war of mine. Hell, it wasn’t even yours and Will D.’s I didn’t give a shit what them Germans did to them Frenches. I don’t know that I even cared . . . His voice trailed off, but I could finish the thought. He wasn’t sure he gave a damn about the U.S., either. It was Egypt. It had always been Egypt for a black man. The place where he was, where he had come to himself, where he had been born and would most surely die. But not his place. At least not a millimeter beyond these acres, this parish–if he could even stretch it that far. I could understand that. – . . . but youall was out there in it, and it didn’t seem right to . . . –I never asked you what happened over there. He looked at me as if he couldn’t believe the question. –That’s right. You never did, he said at last. –What happen over there? I tell you what happen. They kill Will D., they hurt you, and they did for me. That’s what happen over there. Now the velocity of his pacing had increased. He would reach the end of a circuit down at the far end of the dark room, beyond the reach of the light. Then he would stumble forward into the light again, off balance, failing to sprawl only because he was falling in all possible directions at once. –Did for you? I asked. –What . . . ? –Sure, he grated. –Maybe you could just write it up and send it off to that sonofabitch in Washington city. Listen, Albert Sidney, you write that motherfucker to stay clear of me . . . I ain’t killed a man in over thirty years. But he hadn’t ought to try me, hear? I said nothing, and he made one more circuit and sat down. He was tired, sweating even in the cool autumn morning. He finished his whiskey and poured us both some more. –I don’t want to see em. I don’t want to talk to em. Can you see to that for me, Albert Sidney . . . ? –I don’t know, I said honestly. –They seem uncommonly anxious . . . Billy said they were talking about the Congressional Medal. Gee, what the hell did you do over there? What happened? Even with all this civil rights horseshit, they’re not going to reach down into Caddo Parish and hand that medal out to the first . . . – . . . first nigger they set eyes on? Bet your ass they ain’t. Not this nigger. He was calmer then. He leaned back in his chair, his ice-white brows knitted as if he were trying to discern something that lay in the darkness behind me, something that I could not have seen even if I had turned–something I could not even have guessed at. It occurred to me that I had seen his eyes, his face like that before, searching the barren branches of winter trees, scrutinizing a cut-over field of grain. He had always seen the game before Will D. or me. Not usually. Always. I wondered at that moment what the game might be. Gee began talking then. Not especially, not even necessarily to me. I believe he was reciting it all to himself again for the thousandth time just to refuel the anger, the fury. To justify once more his isolation, his turning away from the course of ordinary life. He wanted to feel again that tincture of acid in the blood that he had held–or that had held him–imprisoned for so long. Or perhaps he was telling it aloud this time as he had told it voiceless over and over before, no Will D. or Albert Sidney to hear it. Telling it loud and clear enough then for Will D. to hear it amidst that long slumber from which only Christ Jesus will awaken us; declaiming it so fiercely that even a sleepwalker such as I had to hear it amidst my living slumber. –They took me in and we done all that basic. Running around and climbing up walls and marching up and down. It was all of us colored in the company, see, and after they had done run us to death, they let us shoot. I come up expert first time out. I could of done it with a rag tied over my eyes. Highest score in regiment. So they called down the captain and I done it again. And twice more. Captain asked me, Boy, where did you learn to shoot like that? Louisiana, I told him. Caddo Parish. Shit, he said, and walked off. I reckon it was gonna be a rifle company for me. Maybe even a sharpshooter, sniper. He sipped some more whiskey and laughed. –Yeah, well, so they go and put me in commissary. They got me cutting open boxes of pears and stacking cans of cling peaches and lima beans. Shot every white boy at Fort Benning out of the box, and they go and set me to keeping stores. He got up and walked to one of the tall windows and threw back the heavy canvas he used for drapery. –I was a shot, he said musingly. –It wasn’t anything I couldn’t do with a gun, was it? –No. –And they go and put me on as help. You hear? Help. Niggers cook and clean up. White men shoot. You don’t want to trust no nigger with a gun, and if you was to, he shoot off his own foot either to get out of service or cause he couldn’t help it. Ain’t that so? –You’re not asking me that. –No, Gee said. –I ain’t asking you. But I thought about it all the time. Couldn’t get it off my mind. Till we come into Belgium. I done thought over it on the boat. Let them bastards do what they want. Send all the white boys out there to get blowed up and gunned down. It was a favor to me. I was in the rear eating good and cleaning up and serving an officer’s mess. I wasn’t no soldier. I was help. Yessir, some more coffee? No sir, I don’t believe we got no Antony and Cleopatra. How about a Dutch Master? Wasn’t nothing I could do about it. If they was gonna hand me a white jacket and a long-handled spoon instead of a rifle, it was their army. Surely wasn’t mine. There was a sound at the door then. It was the girl. She came in with some kind of tray. There were plates on it covered with foil. –Miz Loreen say youall be talking the whole day away and ain’t put nothing on the stove. Gee nodded. –Miz Loreen sends something down most days. You go ahead, baby, he said to the girl. –Fix you something off that tray and go eat on the porch. Judge Finch and me got to talk. Did you want a bite of that food, Albert Sidney? –No, but you better haul down another one of those fruit jars, I told him. –You like that? Imported. Lee Polk’s stuff. Come from over by Mississippi. Couldn’t do better myself I know. I used to try. –Compliments to Mr. Polk. –Best pain killer in the world. I know about that, too. He brought over another jar. This time he didn’t bother about the water. Outside, the sun was well past noon, beginning its long fall toward east Texas. Gee drank, and his eyes drifted away. –I got myself up early that day, he said, still talking as much to himself as to me. –They had me on the breakfast shift, and I had chipped beef going. You remember chipped beef? –Shit on a shingle . . . –Nicest thing they called it. I been trying to come up with some kind of a sauce for it. Standing out at the flap of the tent thinking about it. Snow coming down like you never seen it around here. Lord, cold and dark. Right outside Losheim, where it was. Losheim . . . I ain’t thought of it in thirty years. It was maybe six o’clock in the morning and the other help was coming in and somebody seen we done run out of powdered eggs, so the beef was it, and when the troops started coming in, it was gonna be hell. But I had got this barbecue sauce in mind and I went back inside and reached up for a big bottle of Tabasco. –Which is when the first shell landed out in the mess area of this great big tent we was in. Blowed all the tables and benches to hell. People was trying to climb under the stove, metal racks full of canned goods and all was falling over on top of folks. Somebody tump over a forty-gallon can of hot cooking oil and one of em who’d crawl under the stove come up with his shirt and hair on fire. Then the next round come down over by the motor pool, and after that here come one after another about every thirty seconds or so. All of us kitchen help run outside, and here come all these white boys hauling ass as fast as they could from the lines to the east. Said the whole damn German army coming right behind em. Said it was old Rumstead with all the panzers you ever saw, coming down full tilt and loaded for bear . . . He was grinning then, remembering those broken rifle companies running across the snow, terrified by the sudden resurrection of an army supposedly too far gone to mount an offensive, presumed to be hardly more than a wrecked hulk bled white by casualties and troops sent to the eastern front. Gee had not been good enough for one of those American rifle companies, and now there they came, running past him in terror and disarray. –I thought they was bullshitting. You know how they was about a little artillery. Except here come another shell right in on top of us. Hit the CP. And it wasn’t no .88 neither. It was a tank round. Then all of a sudden it got real quiet. You could hear the snow falling in them tall larch trees, branches breaking under the weight of the snow falling. The big stuff had stopped coming in, and them fine front line boys had passed on by us. All you could hear was a moan or a cry from where them shells had landed. –Then you could hear em coming. Them big treads rattling, them engines. Out on the edge of Losheim. Lord, it was a panzer brigade coming right at us with infantry behind. You could look down the slope from where we was and see the snow covered with em. I counted sixty, maybe eighty tanks. Sweet Jesus, I thought. It ain’t no brigade. It’s a armored division. Lord knows how many troops, but I know they darkened the snow. And I recollect thinking to myself, Here I am nothing but help and they gonna send the whole entire German army right down the pipe at me. So I look around and everybody had done cut out by then. There wasn’t nothing left in the motor pool. What the help hadn’t made off with, the white boys had stole. Everybody was on the road to Malmédy, and there wasn’t no officers could do anything to slow em down. Them white boys done seen the Wehrmacht up close, and they was convinced. They was what did they say? –withdrawing to a more easy to defend line. Hell, running like sonsabitches what they was doing. –I watched the last of em go, and I said, Well, son, you purely on your own now. You can run, but it ain’t no place to hide. They gonna go through what’s left of this regiment like shit through a goose. Wasn’t no sense to stand there, so I reckoned to light out for the woods behind. Them panzers wasn’t going through there, and maybe that meant the infantry would kind of ease past em too. Then, about half-way out, it come to me I didn’t have no rifle. They hadn’t issued us no rifles over there. Reckoned we wasn’t gonna fight, and how you gonna carry a M-1 when they got you stacking cans and mixing sauces? Next thing you know, I was back by the CP where one of the .88’s had landed. Tent shredded, snow red and pink and black, bodies all over. I could still see some of our folks running in the distance ahead of the first wave of panzers. I could see some of em dropping, too. Them tanks was maybe a half a mile away and coming on like a grass fire. And there I was. With a long-handled spoon in one hand and that damned bottle of Tabasco in the other. –Up shit’s creek, I said. –With a long-handled spoon. He couldn’t help laughing, shaking his head at that old-time predicament of his. For a moment it was as if we had been enjoying days like this for all the years past. Then that damned dismal feeling of bad faith closed in again and I drank some whiskey to push it away. –That CP looked like chipped beef, Gee said slowly. –I knew some of em had worked in there. Couldn’t see nothing I recognized. Looked like chili sauce. Blood with lumps in it. One radio receiver blowed all to hell but still running on. Traffic from down around Echternach all the way north to Monschau about fifteen miles away. Some fool captain had got hold of the mike somewhere and kept asking wasn’t it a local feint, could they get some armor over there to turn it? While I was listening, I believe it come to em this wasn’t no kind of feint at all. Them Germans was betting it all on one throw, and they had done put our asses in a sling. –Lord, I said. –What? –You were smack in the middle of the Bulge. Battle of the Ardennes. Close to Christmas, 1944. –I was sure as hell in the middle of something. I didn’t know they had give it a name. I pitched around that CP, trying not to step on the dead, looking for any damn kind of gun to carry off to them woods. And back of a desk with a dead man lying across it, I come on a BAR. Lord knows what it was doing there. Maybe some poor bastard out of a weapons company had wanted him a cup of coffee with a buddy at CP. Nice safe place. Whoever got hisself killed in a regimental CP? Never mind. I had me a BAR then and a bag of ammunition. Did wonders for my spirit. Piss on them Germans. After so long a time in the army, I had me a gun. I was all right. Now all I had was to pick me out a nice place to die. Gee leaned back, his eyes closed, his hands on the edge of the plank table as if the effort of recollection itself was draining him. But after a moment, his voice came back, warm and strong. –I had done give up on them woods. The tanks was down in the streets of the town, and I couldn’t make it halfway. And that was all right, fine. Cause the worst was past. I wasn’t gonna die like no damned help. You know what I mean? –Yes. –So I come out of that wrecked tent and it was strange. The snow had started in again and it was already filling up the shell holes and covering the blood. Wasn’t a soul around. Nobody. Where I was, I could look right down into the streets of that town. Here come a Tiger with troops all around it, some riding on it, all of em going like they had to make up time. Quick marching through the town square, some moving right, some going left. Not a voice to be heard. Just them tank motors and treads and them jackboots hitting cobbles. Maybe twelve tanks down there now. The rest had cut north and gone around to cut off and catch whatever was running and walking and crawling up that Malmédy road. Then six or seven of them tanks went south and some angled off toward the northwest. And I saw what was gonna happen. One Tiger tank and a couple of squads bearing right up the slope at me. It was gonna be that tank there and them troops. And me. You know what I thought? Right then I thought, These is long odds. But if Will D. and Albert Sidney was along . . . I remember nausea sweeping through me, but the whiskey held it down. I got up casually and stretched, bemused at the hollowness of my own voice. –You reckon we could have done em? –Hell, done em and walked away. I done em by myself. I just . . . didn’t walk away. Then Gee paused, looked up at me past the soft light of the coal-oil lamp. –Now I think about it, I don’t know. I reckon you better hear the rest of it. Then you can decide. –Decide what? –You’ll see. I nodded and let it pass. I had surely not come over here expecting to spend the day, but that was what it was coming to, and that was all right. It was thirty years late, but it would have to do. And anyhow, I was a retired man. I could go where I pleased and stay just as long as I liked. –Fore them Germans come in, I had done gone over every foot of that place. Looking for a hide-out, looking for something that would do a tank. Truth is, I didn’t know what would do a tank. They hadn’t taught us nothing. This here was regiment. Cook house, communications, motor pool, and operations. All of it blasted to hell. Radio men, mechanics and cook-house niggers, and what wasn’t dead had done run off. –I believe I would have got me a bed sheet for camouflage and made out for those woods. Gee laughed at that. I wondered afterward if he was laughing because he knew better–or at the notion of me under a white sheet. –Forget it. Time I’m talking now. They was in the perimeter. Point men with them Tommy guns of theirs looking this way and that, then that panzer come rolling right on in, parked next to the CP. Me, I’d found me a blowed-up half-ton truck and slid under it with my BAR. Wait and see. Well, they poked all around till it come broad daylight. Then I guess it was tea time or whatever Germans have, cause they come up with boxes of C-rations and stuff out of what was left of the cook tent and lit em a fire and sat down to breakfast. Seemed like the tank commander was in charge and he wasn’t nothing but a sergeant. He was loafing around, taking the air, watching em brew up our coffee. –You mean the tank crew had . . . –You got it. Unzipped and stepped out. Just like snails out of the shell. Didn’t even post no guards. They reckoned the Amis had high-tailed it and was halfway to Malmédy by then. –I’ll be damned. –You ain’t heard nothing. They had got hold of my big pot of chipped beef and put it over a fire, and they was dishing it out and slopping it down like it was prime gumbo. Wasn’t nobody complaining, neither. I just laid in the snow under that truck watching em put away my breakfast. I thought, Hell, if I was out to be a damned cook, I’d go on over and switch armies. Maybe I could get some appreciation. But then I come to think, Well, they white, too, and I can’t even understand a word they saying, and if they was fixing to do me something ugly, I wouldn’t know it. He paused then and looked past me out of the door. In a few minutes the sun would be far enough down to illuminate the interior of the cabin. The space around us was already beginning to glow and the shadows were separating out, revealing themselves as presences. A photo on the pine mantle of an anonymous old black couple–Gee’s parents, I supposed–and another one of Gee, young and strong, standing behind, above, two boys whose expressions suggested some part of the delirium they must have been feeling at that moment as between them they held up the head and rack of a twelve-point buck. One of the boys was Will D. The other, it seemed, was me. There were the three of us posing beside a biplane, an old crop-duster Will D. had bought and learned to fly. In the picture, we have just come back from our first flight over Caddo Parish. I am exultant. Gee looks amazed, bewildered. At a corner of the mantle, framed in a five-by-seven world, we stood almost lost amidst the stringers of perch we had caught nesting in the shallows of Wallace Lake. And the largest photo of all: we sit around this very table plucking doves. My fingers sought and found in the table’s smooth worn surface the initials we had all carved in it that same day. But Gee wasn’t feeling nostalgic. His jaw was hard and his eyes stared unblinking out into the glow of the falling sun. –Way it turned out, maybe that’s what I should of done. Just walked out and yelled Kamerad and seen what would of happened . . . That irked me. –I expect I can tell you what would have happened. What happened that same day to a hundred paratroopers who surrendered on the road to Malmédy . . . Gee raised his hand. –Don’t say too much. Wait till you see the bottom of the bowl fore you go to praising the soup. I shut up. It was his story. I had waited too long for the hearing to go glossing it along the way. –I didn’t mess around. Them panzer boys looked nervous out of their box, and I figured they was going back in just as soon as they got done with my chipped beef. So I come out from behind that truck and run real quiet over to where they had some broke-down troop carriers. Been waiting out by the motor pool for a week for new parts. Thing was, they had a little armor on em and a firing slit here and there. One of em was broadside to that tank, maybe fifty, sixty yards away. Too far to chunk grenades, but close enough. Yes Lord, close enough for that big heavy clumsy BAR. I could see what he saw then. I could see that hulk of gray-green steel with a white-trimmed black cross on the turret. I could see the crew and infantry outlined against the vast silent woods behind, squatting around the fire, watching the failing snowflakes melt in the air above it. I could even see Gee climbing into the troop carrier inch by inch with cold numb hands, hefting the BAR with surgical care lest metal touch metal and he be discovered. I could feel the chill inside the carrier, see the old brittle snow drifted up in its corners, initials scratched into its brown paint, initials of men who had died or been wounded weeks, months ago in our murderous grand tour across Europe. I seemed to be sitting in that powerless ruin staring out at the little gathering of enemy troops, thinking, There must be a hundred and eleven good reasons to let them pass unhindered and then hit out for the woods and search for an American unit. Gee smiled at my sigh. Now his face was illuminated by the evening sun. For a moment, he looked much younger. –Wisht you been there, huh? When I got up in that carrier and threw down on them chumps eating my beef, I thought, Well, it took all kinds of particular hell, but here I am finally got to be a soldier. I wasn’t help no more. He fell silent then, still savoring it. Even at this remove, it still belonged to him: a memory entered into the flesh, carried to the heart to lodge there in its fullness as deeply and as permanently as love or hope or the dubious certainty of glory, salvation, itself. –I took out the panzer crew first. See, I had it all figured out. The troops were in them white winter coveralls and them tankers stood out like squirrels in an empty tree. Black Panzer Grenadier uniforms. Real pretty. First burst took all three of em down and holed that big pot of chipped beef. Rest of em froze for just a second, but I didn’t. I had waited too damn long to be a soldier to go wasting time. I just emptied that first magazine across em. Took down eight to ten. You know that BAR. Man hated to carry it, but when push come to shove, there he was: a one?man army. The rest of em took to running behind the tank except for one big old boy who come right at me. I blew him on back across the fire, and then I watched that tank turret. They had em a machine gun mounted on it, and if any of em got to it, I reckoned them slugs would go through the troop carrier like a hot knife through butter. But it stayed quiet awhile. I wasn’t in no hurry. Where was I gonna go? And they didn’t have no idea how many of me there was. Sure enough, just waiting, I got me two more. He was excited then, evoking that long-gone winter day that was slipping away from us at unimaginable velocity to join with all the other distant conflicts that we glorify simply because we have survived them and because to remember them as anything but heroic would make the remembrance of freezing cold and death and mutilation too awful to bear even at this distance, even when their last echoes sounding across the foreshortening of history place them nearer to Fredericksburg or the Somme or the retreat of the Grand Army from Moscow than to us. As I watched, that damned gift of the hormones that makes us men and makes us do what men all yearn to do whether we are honest and introspective enough to admit it or not, transfigured the old man they called Uncle Gee. That careful distracted distant oriental expression of his was gone, and all the rest–gray hair, stoop, wrinkles–seemed mere accretions, accidents generally put upon old men. For our injustice. According to the ordinance of time. As if still, even now in the midst of this glowing autumn of our lives, our reality, what was real about us, remained our youth, our courage, our willingness to make payment of our puny uncertain lives in advance if only we could believe, imagine, that the prize we would never see would have been worth it. –From then on, old son, it come to be root hog or die. I whacked me one behind the CP tent and right about then another one got me in the leg from behind. I kind of dropped like in the movie shows, twisted around in the snow and caught him coming in to finish me. Blowed off his white hood and his head sprayed all over the snow. I had to roll then, cause another one was shooting from the front of the tank. I got in close and put the BAR under the tank, and when I seen his legs, I cut em off and gave him a couple more when he fell. Then I thought it was done and like a fool I stood up to see just what I had got done. One of em hit me in the back from all the way to the woodsline. I believe I got him too. I had got fifteen, maybe twenty of em, and the rest lit out. So I leaned up against that tank to see what they’d done me. –Much pain? –Naw. More scared than hurting. You know how it is. When you really hurt, you don’t feel nothing for a while. I was bleeding, but the blood froze as quick as it run. The one in the back worried me. It had come out under my arm, and I couldn’t hardly move it. I thought, That’s all right. I done what I was supposed to do, what they wouldn’t let me do before. It’s over now. Army’s gonna come back and they’ll fix me up and I’m gonna be dishing chipped beef again. But, Lord, I did have my day. I leaned back and sipped some whiskey. Somehow I had thought it would be worse. Gee had the medal coming. Men had gotten it for less. It was absurd that he had had to wait so long but, as he said, he had been help. Maybe it had required the passage of time and some form of general enlightenment for the country to recognize what help could do when the kitchen was blown away. The whole thing was simple. I would counsel Gee to put aside his resentment and fear, go to Washington, accept the medal and whatever belated fustian and panoply might go with it. It was surely his due, however late. I could make no correlation between a bit of bronze hanging on a ribbon and twenty German lives on a freezing winter morning in Belgium over thirty years ago, but it is what we have always done and I suppose it is all right. It seemed I was going to be able to do a service for him and for Billy as well, and send the bureaucrats back to their musty files to determine who else they had lost in the course of the years. But I made a mistake. I said: –You didn’t come out too bad. I’ve got a skinful of good Krupp steel myself . . . Maybe it was what I said. Maybe it was my tone of voice. –Haw, Gee rasped, the failing sun shining back at me out of his crimson eyes. The humor, the youth had vanished utterly. His face was that of an old man again. Not that of a careful distracted old man already studying on his last end. Rather that of an old man bereft not only of youth and strength and future, but of hope, belief, any kind of faith at all. It was the face of an old man shot through with fury and hatred as adamantine and unalterable as that ordinance of time that brings us here and takes us hence. It was a face to fear and turn from. But I couldn’t turn, you see. Not then. Not again. I had turned from him once in that hospital beside that bed that had borne the poor remains of one we had both loved. I had turned then and left him there with the dead. To have done it once was an infamy; to do it twice I reckoned must be the death of the soul. –Haw, he laughed again harshly, dragging himself to his feet as if in the next instant he would throw himself across the table at me. But instead he turned up the wick of the lamp to its fullest even though the fading sun still filled the room. –You want to see? I’ll show you. I’m gonna show you . . . He stood up straight and began to unbuckle his belt. He unfastened his trousers and let them down slowly, turned a little to the side as if he were determined not to let me see what he had to show bit by bit. Then, trousers on the floor, he opened his shirt and turned back into the unrelenting shameless light. –Christ, I heard myself say. There was nothing more to say and, if there had been, I could not have choked it out. There before me pitted and scarred, puckered and broken and poorly sewn, was the body of a man who had no business being alive, much less walking, functioning like the rest of us. His belly was warped and twisted, ribs broken and badly healed, the dark flesh indented, gouged out and piled like refuse from craters on the shadowed side of an alien moon. Not a single hole turned glossy and given the patina of years, but ten, twelve, maybe more–any one of them seeming surely a death to nature. And that was the least of it. His thighs were barely thicker than the bones encased in that riddled skin and torn muscle. Whole chunks of flesh were gone. There were obvious grafts and overgrafts, results of countless operations. There were stitches, tiny light patterns like the delicate bones of small fish running in rich profusion line by line, line over line, across skin of no certain color rendered an awful simulacrum of pale pink healthy tissue by the glow of the lamp, the faltering light of the setting sun. There were patches, lumps, hillocks, and ridges of bright purple, veins and arteries erupting toward the surface of that tortured skin, making along with the rest an explicit relief map of agony so detailed that it numbed the senses more surely than Roy Polk’s whiskey. I must have uttered some sound, some mumbled word of compassion. –Hold up, Gee cut me off, his voice cold and ancient and metallic. –Hold up. We wasn’t raised to be soft. We killed in our time. And cleaned what we killed and looked straight at it, huh? That’s what kind of people we been. Then, before I was even able to manage what I had seen, bring myself back within the ambit of that control Gee was demanding, requiring of me, he lowered his shorts. I looked, because I had no choice. As he said, That’s what kind of people we’ve been. And when, in the streaming golden light of that October sun, I had done my duty, looked upon what he insisted I see, I fainted. –I’m sorry, I heard Gee saying from a long way off. –I just got myself carried away. It wasn’t no excuse for visiting it on you . . . You didn’t . . . I was back in the room then, lying on Gee’s bed. The bed he had been lying on night after night for thirty years and more. He was dressed and leaning over me with a wet cloth in his hand. –Listen, he was saying, anxiety, some tincture of guilty fear in his eyes, –You ain’t got no trouble with your heart, do you? I can walk up to Billy’s and use the phone and . . . I sat up, staring at him. –No, I said. –Nothing that I know about. Nothing yet. You walk up to the Wendell house? What I want to know is how in Christ’s name you got me onto this bed. –Carried you, he said frowning. –I ain’t no cripple. I stood up and found my way back to the table. As I did so, I saw the child lying asleep on an old cot or rollaway bed in the corner, the feist curled at her feet. I poured some whiskey and sat down, not looking at Gee, feeling the liquor so full and strong that I had to speak slowly and carefully in order to speak at all. –I’ll tell you this, I said, abashed by my voice’s quaver. –If they want to give you the goddamned capitol building and Fort Knox, I’m going to see you take them. I’m going up there with you, hear? And Billy’s going too because if he didn’t Will D. would whip his ass. And everybody with eyes and ears in Caddo Parish is going to know . . . –No, Gee said evenly. Not loudly or even argumentatively, just commandingly, finally. –You ain’t going to do anything like that. Not just because I say no, but because you ain’t gonna want to. You still ain’t seen the bottom of the bowl. I stared at him, my hand bearing the cup of whiskey still shaking. What else could there be? What else could he have to tell me? –See, it wasn’t the Germans done me this. –What, I started. –You said . . . –I said one in the leg and one in the back. The rest of it an American done . . . I turned off my key and shivered a little. I would have put the cloth top on the jeep had I expected to be out driving in the hours before dawn. But sensible older men are asleep then, not out on empty autumn roads half-drunk and despondent and cold. I could see a light on down at the far end of the house where the kitchen was. Loreen would be up already fixing breakfast for the children. I took a deep breath that seared my lungs. Chill fall air. The somber trees and vast vacant harvested fields were darkest gray. Some bird muttered in a nearby pin oak, and a ragged breeze picked up from the east. I climbed out of the jeep slowly and found myself walking across the empty fields as if I were on my way to meet Will D. and Gee before sunup on a hunt morning. Then I recalled myself, my time, my situation. I doubt I will ever be that tired again–until just before I will be tired no more. For some reason it occurred to me that Rowena would find I had not been home and would worry. Despite all, I did not want that. I made a note to call her. I did not want anyone, least of all someone entitled to my best love, to feel the isolation, the fear, the sorrow with which I had spent the long night. –Good Lord, Loreen said. –Youall have talked all day and all night too. Maybe you better not wait so long for the next visit. She kissed me and sat me down at her table and poured good hot fresh coffee. The children were not yet up and Loreen, in a blue terry cloth robe, went about her routine. She seemed neither happy nor sad. She was doing what she always did. –Is it all that serious? she asked me after a while. –What’s that, honey? I asked, trying to focus my attention. Loreen turned from the big eight-burner stove Billy had bought her years ago. It was enormous, but nearly lost in that cavernous kitchen that you almost had to yell across. She looked suddenly exhausted, and I noticed her robe hung on her as if she had lost weight. I believe I had never given serious thought to their marriage before that moment. A marriage in my time was like the weather. Within bounds, it might shift and change. It might be better or worse from time to time. But it was a fixture, a foundation for the lives of all of us. I had not known of a divorce among the men and women of my generation. No, that’s wrong, there had been one. An old friend at the bar who had, it seemed, lost self-control and given way to some strong strange passion. He had left his family, divorced his wife, and married his first cousin. After that, no one knew him, and his wife was treated with great tenderness and respect as a widow, one whose husband had passed away under a cloud. As I recall, he had moved to Gladewater across the Texas border where no one had heard of what he had done, where he might live something like a life. Billy’s and Loreen’s marriage was one of those that everyone took for granted. They had always made it seem as if neither of them would ever consider setting it down on some lawyer’s desk and walking away. They knew the cost of such a thing. There were the children, and deep habit too. They surely loved each other well enough. They fished together and went down to LSU football games with their friends and tended the place they both loved, and that was what their life was about. I say life–not lives. But not anymore. Now it seemed Billy Wendell had something else in view. And even professed to an orderly life, a sense of country decorum, the thirst for a predictable and decent way of doing things myself, I could not quite bring myself to damn him for looking at Terry Novis. Perhaps Loreen knew that, and it was such knowledge that had her drinking before dawn. She saw my eyes on the glass. Her smile was tired but girlish, almost conspiratorial. –You don’t tell on me, and I won’t tell on you, she said. It occurred to me to wonder if, had he lived, Will D. might not have done finally much the same as Billy. When, as he, we fall away into that great depth at a propitious moment, in a heroic way, those left living, teetering for the balance of their time at the edge of the common grave, will tend to think the best of what our ongoing might have been. They will fix us in our final gesture as if in amber, spare us–and themselves–those possible, no: those probable years that would have played-out our meanness, our selfishness, our improbity, our foolish unconcern. None of that for Will D. He remained among us young and brave and careless of the life he had to lose, a static bright single frame from a grainy film that runs on and on, to eternity, or nowhere. Loreen finished her drink, poured herself some coffee and sat down with me. She was still a fine-looking woman. I wanted to tell her something, say something light and loving that would send the pain away if only for a moment or two. But nothing came. I had experienced enough pain all yesterday and through the night to loose a frozen cataract of sympathy and love and compassion. But nothing came. I felt like a priest bereft of faculties, one who stood at the shore of a slow-moving ocean of pain, tide coming in, still water strewn with the wreckage of human hopes and dreams. Mute. I took her hand but she moved it away to take up her coffee cup. Her eyes blinked and the anguish seemed to ebb. She smiled a weak morning smile. –Is it serious? she asked again. –What? The government business? –Uh-huh. –Nothing to it. It’s got nothing to do with Billy. Put it out of mind. I’ll see to it. –They can give folks a lot of trouble, Loreen said dubiously as she made to sip her coffee. –If they can’t get you one way, they’ll come back at you on something else. –Not this time. –What about that little girl over there? Albert, I don’t want that old man hurt, arrested. If you knew what he’s been through . . . But still, that child . . . –I know, I told her. –It’s not what youall think. That’s something else you don’t have to worry about. –All right. If you say so. I looked at my watch. Down the hall, I could hear the children rising, dressing, storming into and out of the bathroom, their shrill laughter seeming to awaken the house itself. –When will he be up? I asked Loreen. –I want to talk to him. –Up, Loreen laughed bitterly. –Albert, I just wouldn’t have any idea. –Is he sick? –I don’t know if he’s sick or drunk or dead. He didn’t sleep here last night. –Well, I reckon you seen him . . . That is, before you . . . –I saw him. – . . . seen what he’s up to . . . – . . . up to? –That child. That little bitty girl. –Rowena . . . –Don’t start. I still got respect for you cause I can pretend I don’t even know where you was last night, since I don’t. But don’t say it’s all right about that old devil and that poor baby, cause I can’t get used to that. I go so far, but I don’t go no further . . . –Rowena, it’s all right. An unfortunate choice of words. I was not drunk, but my head was spinning and my judicial temperament, always maintained at considerable expense of spirit, was shot to hell. Rowena put down her spoon and stared at me, as if she saw my tart seated naked in my lap, was watching me drink my coffee from her high-heeled pump. –All right? My Lord, and folks had you up there on the bench handing down judgment . . . I don’t wonder that this world is . . . –You can stop wondering. It’s not that way. It’s not like anyone thinks. Goddamnit to hell, just let it lay. When you’re supposed to know anything, you will. Gee’s not debauching that child. Even if . . . My voice trailed off. I was going to be damned before I took to defending Gee to her. Rowena had certain privileges–no, rights–when it came to me and my affairs, sluts or no. But not with him. No one had any rights as far as Gee’s business was concerned. If a man has debts to the society that rears him, no matter in what fashion or from what motive, Gee’s debts had been cancelled, paid in full. At the edge of the Ardennes. December, 1944. –I don’t want you low-rating Gee, I said in as even a voice as I could muster. –I don’t want to hear anything against him, Rowena. Not anything at all. You understand me? Yes, she did. She knows me as a concertmaster knows his violin. It is nothing to say that she knows me better than I know myself because, for better or worse, I have never quite had the heart to begin a self-examination that, for me if not for all of us, must end in disillusion. I am not that old yet. I am not quite so much retired. –All right, she answered in an equally even tone and turned away from me back to her work. When at last I was done with my eggs and grits and biscuits and ham and redeye gravy, when I had managed to get back to my room, sleep did not come. I was not surprised. Why should it? How could it? I lay there in my own bed, eyes on the ceiling, going over it again and again, seeking some kind of answer, some kind of understanding that would not do violence to that diminishing hoard of things I still believed in and held to be enduring and inviolate. It occurred to me that I had felt the same way when Victoria died. I could remember standing down by Wallace Lake, staring out over the placid cold gray February water, thinking that actuarially she was supposed to have outlived me. Every statistic had me under ground years before her. I realized that I had always counted on that, had acted out my own dying in my mind, ashamed of my joy that I was the one escaping, that I would not have to bear her dying before me. But I had had to bear it. I had had to learn to live without her laughter, her smile, her touch. I was living that way now. It had been like losing one’s religious faith, looking out on a world without a soul, seeing with desperate clarity for the first time the crude machinery of reality rasping and clattering. Something had been taken out of the world and now there was no savor in it. One occupied oneself, or one considered ending all occupations. One decided finally that only the will of God might elicit such a conclusion. One quietly and without hope prayed to God for such release. And for something more: that one might be rejoined with that savor, that laughter, that smile, that touch–if in no way more sensible than ignorant atoms spinning together forever, embraced in an orbit all their own. I raised my hands into a pale shaft of light that penetrated the bedroom curtains from outside. For all the marks of age, they were hands of a living man. A man now drawn into human maelstroms not of his design. But that of course had nothing to do with it. Not to have achieved transcendence, to stand on the earth, simply to take up room in space and time drives us to playing out a destiny. I was beginning to drift a bit, and as I did I could not help but remember the end of Gee’s story. Or perhaps it was some part of my singular destiny to live it then at the very edge of dreaming, cast backward in his place to that iron–gray December day in an alien place, dying his life, living his death, feeling the fresh cold snow falling on my dark face. He had been sitting on the ground amidst the dead Germans trying to tighten a tourniquet around his leg. He was using a belt from one of the dead men. The buckle said Gott Mit Uns. The leg had stopped bleeding by then, but Gee had said he couldn’t get his mind off my namesake. Genl. Albert Sidney Johnston, who had bled to death in the saddle at Shiloh from a wound no worse than Gee’s. He had gotten the belt cinched up and was about to eat some of his own chipped beef that still simmered over the fire, fat dripping from bullet holes in the pot, when he heard in the distance, coming from the west, from the direction in which the panzer units had gone, the sound of a single engine. He was on his feet then, hopping over to the tank. He knew he couldn’t drive the thing, but he could use the machine gun mounted on the turret. He was trying to drag himself up onto the prow of the tank, but it was slippery with freezing blood. He was still clawing and scrabbling when whatever it was pulled up in front of the blasted CP. He was too cold, too slow, too clumsy, he thought. If it was more Germans, it wouldn’t even be a fight. He lay there spread?eagled across the scarlet and gray prow of the tank, already feeling the blast of gunfire that would carry him across the bourne to join Will D. whom he did not even know was dead three weeks ahead of him. But the fusillade had not come. Not yet. Not just yet. –Hey, Joe, he heard from behind. And turning, saw the jeep with four GI’s in it. In the front seat, next to the driver, was a young lieutenant, helmet off, submachine gun in hand. He was blond, crewcut, handsome, expressionless. He looked very tired. He surveyed the German dead who lay sprawled in the attitudes that death had brought to them. One lay on his back, the smallest of smiles on his lips, one hand fallen insouciantly into the fire. It was burned away to the wrist. Another sat, the mess?kit in his lap filled with chipped beef, his own brains, icy blood and drifted snow. One of the tankers lay propped against the drive wheels of the panzer, a look of utter and unrelieved astonishment on his face, from which most of the lower jaw was missing. The lieutenant had watched Gee slide down the smooth prow of the tank, landing on his feet but falling, his wounded leg no longer able to support him. Gee’s eyes and the lieutenant’s eyes had met, held. The lieutenant’s face was flushed, still expressionless but red. He gestured with the barrel of the submachine gun. –You . . . made all this? he asked softly, his accent not one from any Southern state. –Yeah, Gee had told him. –Wasn’t anybody else. They all took off. Listen, I need help . . . –Help, the lieutenant had repeated almost in a whisper, gazing one last time over the killing ground. –Yes, of course. And Gee, still twisting on that belt to keep what was left of his blood inside where it belonged, saw the lieutenant lift his submachine gun almost casually, aim it at him, and pull the trigger. –Here’s your help, nigger. Welcome to Germany . . . Afterward, lying tranced in that deep white silence, immersed, covered, annihilated by the falling snow that filled the already overburdened trees, covered the dark mass of the tank, shrouded the scattered stiffening bodies including his own, it seemed to him that all the universe had become that neutral spectral color of death. The pale tint of great age, ashes, bone, of the face of an American officer who had riddled him, torn him to pieces from his waist down to the ground and left him bleeding in the snow. He could even remember in that delirium, that transport, the faces of the other three Americans who had stayed in the jeep watching impassive as their lieutenant cut him down. The last thing he remembered before he lost consciousness completely was the strange discordant sight of his own dark hand raised, denying, trying to hold back that cover of white that sighed and groaned from the trees beyond the windless clearing and kept failing on him out of a dead-white sky. He had done with the telling then, and I sat staring down at the rough table top. Gee had come over close to me. His face was covered with sweat. His voice was small and exhausted and dead. –You don’t believe me, he said tonelessly. –Of course I . . . believe you. –No you don’t. You don’t believe they ever made a white man could do that. I know you don’t believe it, ’cause I didn’t believe it. Lying there, knowing I was dead, listening to that jeep driving off in the snow, I didn’t believe it . . . He had walked away to the door of the cabin. Outside the sky was lowering. Once more it was delicate, soft, abstract as it had been at dawn. Pink and faded gold, gray and close to purple. Night was coming. I stood up and over to look out on the cold fields from beside him. –Wasn’t nobody said they had to love me. They didn’t even have to help me . . . It was the cold that saved him. It had congealed the blood in his wounds, numbed the pain till a shaken nervous squad of Americans had come across him on their way through German lines back into allied territory. He had been taken to a field hospital. Screaming. The battle of the Ardennes was still in doubt and there was no more morphine and there wasn’t going to be any until January. Gee was in Bastogne. Besieged, surrounded, the sound of artillery and small arms going on all day and all night had not bothered him at all because he hardly ever heard it above his own screaming. He had been afraid to let any of the medical personnel touch him except for one black orderly from somewhere in Minnesota, who decided early on that Gee’s wounds had driven him crazy and that, racial solidarity aside, Gee was one dangerous nigger. The orderly had spread his tale, observing that Southern country blacks are very different from the rest of us, and had demanded an armed MP to observe from the doorway when he was required to minister to Gee. Gee’s foul reputation had served him, though, because when Patton’s Third Army broke through, he was the first man in the hospital to get morphine. To shut him up, he said. Not so much to kill the pain. To keep the white men in the ward, driven near to frenzy by his ravings, from finishing up what one white man had started, tried his level best to do out in the Ardennes, out in the cold white snow. He had told me the rest: about the suicide attempts when he had come to himself at last back in a hospital in England and realized the extent of what had been done to him. How he had made the mistake of telling an intelligence officer what had happened. That had resulted in a visit from a ranking division officer with cold eyes and gray-blond hair. Gee had imagined him the father of the lieutenant in the jeep. The officer told Gee that he was obviously fantasizing out of a deep-seated hatred of whites and that, if he told the story around, it would be court-martial talk. The colonel told Gee he could assure him two years in the stockade–about a year and nine months more than a man in his condition could possibly survive. No one in the army would question such a sentence. Not for a moment. After that, Gee had gotten smart and gotten quiet. He came to a single obsessive thought: if he could get back to Caddo Parish, back to the land W. D. had given him, he would be safe. Not whole. Not well. He was never going to be either of those again. But safe. They had put him on a ship and sent him back the way he had come, except this time he was flat on his back in the hospital section. He had tried to stay awake as much as he could, fearing that they would try to do him while he slept. But nobody paid him any mind, and at last he was home. No parade, no cheers, no grateful countrymen eager to shake his hand–which was just as well, since even the thought of being crowded, mobbed, surrounded by a mass of white men would likely have driven him over the brink. Simply a brown dusty ambulance from Barksdale Air Base out to the Wendell place with Mrs. Wendell riding beside him, holding his hand in hers, crying not for his condition, which she did not yet know about in any detail, but for what she must tell him, waiting in dread for the moment when he would ask. On the way home, through the sweet mild North Louisiana spring, a light rain falling, laying the dust on Ellerbe Road, he had asked and she had told him about Will D., who had fallen out of the sky. They had cried together the rest of the way. Mrs. Wendell had kept him at the house for almost a year. Until she was absolutely sure he could shift for himself. Gee did not say and I did not ask, but considering his character and hers, I knew he had never told her anything about that day in the Ardennes, in the white snow. He had passed the time with Billy, teaching him to remember his father, telling the little boy who could barely understand about the old days when the three of us were together and the world was young and bold. I looked away from the ceiling then because I did not want to remember the rest of it. I wished, lying there sleepless, that Billy had never come by my house with his damned silly problem. I wished that Loreen had known some jake-leg lawyer and had had nothing to ask me. I especially wished that I had not gone over to Gee’s place. Because now that I had, the genie had taken full and final form, its scarred broken flesh as real, as undeniable as my own. It had beckoned me into the shadows and spoken to me. It had grown titanic, huge enough to beggar my something like a life and to make that certain feeling of bad faith take up permanent residence in my heart. I will not lie, and it is much too late to equivocate. But I wish I had been raised able to do either the one or the other. The rest of what he told me was this: when he had heard I was wounded in France, but that I would live, he had gotten down on his ruined knees and thanked God Almighty that I had not been taken from him, too. And then he had waited. He knew when I got home. Mrs. Wendell had told him, expecting in her own decency that my first trip out from town would be back to them, to those who had reared me, who had first claim on my affections. And at last I had come. To see her. But Gee was on his own place by then and didn’t know. Anyhow, he had not yet taught himself to walk again. It was the next day when he heard of my visit. He reckoned that I had to have a reason, so he had just waited again. He had been waiting for over thirty years. It was no use. I wasn’t going to sleep. I had just as well rise and use up the rest of the day. Anyhow, it was best I didn’t sleep then–only to awaken deep in the night rested, thinking. I didn’t want that. The last thing I wanted on God’s sweet earth just then was the time and the isolation to look inside myself. What I wanted was a long blistering day on the bench with recalcitrant attorneys not afraid to risk contempt. But I couldn’t have that. I had handed it over. Anyhow, it was not the substance of that old life that I wanted–only the concentration required to assure against mistrial or reversal, only the clean fatigue that followed. Failing that, I tried to decide what I had to do and how to do it. I took coffee out on the porch and watched leaves failing for a long time in silence. Then I began to get something like an idea. Not a solution, but an approach. To one of my problems anyhow. That was a start. Ask any lawyer–the first thing you need, facts aside, is a theory of the case. I used to suppose that every man and woman must have a special feeling for the place where they were raised up, the place they first called home, and even now I am convinced that once they did. No more. There is something in the modern temper contemptuous of the past, of that which stands. It is as if all our collective yesterdays have suffered Nietzsche’s special curse: the transvaluation of all values. What our fathers thought of as good, what our mothers treasured, we reject, repudiate, put aside. Lord, even the popular songsters know it. Anything goes. We seem to be passing through one of those vast sea-changes of the human spirit that take place from time to time. I recall as a young man taking a history of art course at LSU. I sat and watched as western art moved from the ideal stasis of Phidias and Praxiteles through the stark realism of the Hellenistic, past the age of Roman copyists, and on into the disintegrating nightmare of Byzantine mosaic where the human image was shattered into a wilderness of glass chips, gold leaf, gestures laden with a spiritual meaning we have not understood for a thousand years–glories, halos, ikons, images, symbols–the classical logos sublimed away in hysterias of faith. I was thinking of our lost humanity–especially of my own–as I walked, wondering why we seemed nowadays to be moving away from ourselves once more, and the thought sent me on a circuitous route around downtown. I walked up to the foot of the Texas Street Bridge and looked down on the Red River which flows from the Texas-Oklahoma border past Shreveport down to join the Mississippi near Angola where the state penitentiary is, where I had sent a man or two in my time. Here, along this slow sinuous reach of muddy water, Captain Henry Miller Shreve had cleared a great logjam and opened the river to commerce a hundred and fifty years ago. I walked over to Spring Street and Milam, a quiet corner now, at the top of what they once called Insurance Row. Only a flicker of time ago, the headquarters of Genl. Edmund Kirby-Smith, Commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Army of the Confederate States of America, had stood there. A moment later, Will D. and I had walked this street up and down looking for some insurance firm foolish enough or assured enough to issue a policy on that damned biplane which Will D. had ended up crashing into the back yard of a forgotten girl he had fancied one summer. Lord, I thought, how can there be people who don’t love their own place, who hope and seek something better, something more lasting? I paced up and down in my shadow town, and to and fro in it until I had had enough. Then I went over to the U.S. courthouse and found my way to George Wesley’s chambers. It was lunchtime by then and as I walked the quiet corridors, I realized I had not been into town, made the rounds, since my retirement had begun. –Well, you stayed out there a lot longer than I thought you would, George said. –Fished out? Looking for work? –Lord no, I answered. –That lake is pure joy in the fall. You know that. He nodded. He did know that. He had a place a few miles down along the shore from me. But U. S. district judges do not have much time for such things as afternoons on a quiet lake. –You’re getting restless. I can tell. –No. You’re hoping I’m getting restless so you can say I told you so. George laughed. He and I have been friends since law school. Not what you would call close friends since we see the world from different angles. But George is especially partial to me because when a district judgeship fell vacant, I took my name out of contention and supported him. He could not understand why I did not want the job. When I told him I was not anxious to execute the laws of the United States as they were presently interpreted, he was aghast. It was beyond him to conceive of a lawyer who had no interest in playing that game as the rules dictated. Any rules at all. It was the only game worth playing in the whole damned country, George told me. I let that pass and supported him anyhow. George is a fine technician and an honest man. We cannot wait for the emergence of philosophers to man the federal bench, and if we did we might end up with Robespierre or Plekhanov, or Hugh Hefner–philosophers all, some would say. –You want to borrow my secretary, George grinned in answer to my request. –You and every lecher in North Louisiana. I trust you know the Mann Act is still in force . . . I grinned right back. –What I have in mind I can do right here. I don’t have to take the girl across a state line. –Why is it I don’t feel reassured? George asked. We both laughed shamelessly and I told George as much as I wanted to tell him. If Terry had a little spare time, I needed some secretarial help with a petition and so on. He looked at me in silence for a moment. I tried to return his gaze as innocently as I could, but it seemed that every way I turned lately that feeling of bad faith kept creeping up on me. –She’s going to have some spare time all right. I’m going to take off a few days. I’m going out there by your place and see if I can chase down some of those damned squirrels before they eat up the parish. I was planning to give you a call, see if I could talk you out of an afternoon with Tacitus or Herodotus or whoever and into a general assault on those rodents. We walked over to the Caddo Coffee Shop and ordered roast beef sandwiches. It was old home week there. Insurance people and lawyers, oil men, court reporters, men I had grown up with, men whose suits I had urged, others I had heard, stopped by our table to say hello. The oil business was booming, the court dockets were full, everybody seemed to need insurance and real estate prices were going sky-high. The old exuberance was still there, and it was good just for a little while to feel it pulsing around me again. George pressed and I responded. I needed Terry to help me draft up a little matter in re Gaspard Penniwell. He pressed a little harder–which was what I hoped and expected he would do–so I told him what was going on. He sat over his coffee in silence for a while. –Why don’t you save the legal paper and call the man up in Washington? Talk to him. Tell him what happened. My Lord, Al, maybe this is the government’s way of trying to make up for . . . –George, you’re doing a commercial. We both know who signs your paycheck. I don’t think the U. S. Government knows what happened to Gee and I don’t think they’d give a good goddamn if they did. You reckon they’re going to play Simon Wiesenthal and hunt down the miserable sonofabitch who did it, and who by now, if he’s even still alive, if he made it through the war and all the years since, is a respectable broker or banker or–God help us–a federal judge? That got to George. He is thoroughly reconstructed–a sorry attitude for a Southerner, but one common among those who have a short memory, poor concentration, and deep pockets. When I allude to his New South credentials, he tends to sulk. –Then what the hell do you intend to do? he asked. –There’s no future in suing the government. They’ll blow you out of court on laches, failure to state a claim upon . . . –You’re missing it, I said. –We . . . Gee doesn’t want their damned money any more than he wants their medals. I’m going to ask for an injunction. He chewed on that. –You’re going to ask injunctive relief against the U.S. on the ground that they’re harassing your man, trying to give him the Congressional Medal of Honor? Jesus, Albert . . . –If he doesn’t want it and they go to threatening his friends and raising hell, what would you call it? Remember that wonderful liberal right to be let alone? You and I know it’s all a black man’s life is worth to tiptoe around south of Cincinnati, but this here crazy old nigger’s just bound to do it. And there are some zany white folks who have managed to hold their bloodthirsty appetites in check and do him no harm for nearly seventy years . . . George waved me quiet. He knows I am a past master not of the cheap shot, but of the absolutely free shot. I believe–I hope–that I have never missed a chance to nudge him in regard to some of the pompous imbecilities he serves in the name of the United States. –You can use Terry while I’m off. If you pay her right. I just hope to hell this thing doesn’t land on my docket. I’d rather let Phil Winwood or one of his rebel confreres handle it. Shit, what’s the country coming to when a man not only refuses the Medal of Honor but files an injunction to keep them from forcing it on him? –December, 1944. Near Losheim. Cold and snowing, and Troy Middleton’s 8th Corps caving in like a wet paper bag, getting hell kicked out of it. Right then and there the country had already come to whatever you’re going on about. That particular turn of the screw canceled every debt. George didn’t say anything. I believe he did not see that as a cheap shot. I paid the check and we left. She was bent over her typewriter–no, that’s not so. She was sitting behind her typewriter, keeping its keys moving at an incredible rate, knocking out some lengthy and complex judgment that another secretary might have made hash of. I stood in the door for a moment watching. Her hair was like a red gold halo around a face that seemed wise and innocent at once. A secret room in my heart opened again, the one where Victoria and I had lived together once. It had never been dismantled, only closed up, still stacked with dusty emotional furniture no longer in use because one of the residents had moved on and the other could not find courage enough to remain there alone–much less let it to someone else. You old bastard, I thought to myself, can it be that room in the heart is finally and simply dedicated to feminine beauty, to the sheer miracle of the single thing in the world that can disorient and disarm you? I believe I said yes to myself. Just then, Terry glanced up and her smile was more than the courtesy paid former jurists who drop by. Or so I imagined. –Judge Finch, she said, the smile widening. –Hi. Have you decided to go back to work? –It feels like I’ve never been away, Terry. How are you? –Fine. I just got Judge Wesley’s note. What can I do for you? –I ought to let you catch up while he’s out defending us against the squirrel population. –No, really. We never catch up. They file quicker than we can dispose. I’ve given up. A judge’s work is never done. She got up and cleared files off a chair for me. To watch her move was a revelation. The bodies of certain women possess a kinetic force, a richness and joy of presence which make the very space around them move and sing and vibrate with life. Some men would like to close their eyes at last on a lovely sunset. Others overlooking a great range of mountains. If I were to be given the choice of some natural wonder to contemplate as the last breath flees my lungs, I would ask for an unclothed woman who need pay me no heed at all but simply go about whatever business she might be on in that condition, and ignore the last great sigh she would hear issuing from nothing more than a scattering of leaves and twigs stirred by the wind, only the wind. You see? Terry Novis drives me to indirection. Moses was blinded for three days seeing only the hinder parts of the Lord. Seeing the same portion of Terry made me blink at least. –We’ve missed you, she was saying, and having spent years judging the credibility of witnesses, I believed she meant it. –Everybody over in state court says your being gone is like . . . losing their iron pills, she said. I laughed. –I guess it’s nice to be missed. But they don’t need me for metal. Judge Putnam’s a hanging judge . . . –It’s not that. I’ve read some of your opinions. They . . . always go beyond the case. –Sounds bad. I always tried to keep em tight. –I’m not saying it right. I read Leavis v. Snow . . . and I could see that lady, old Mrs. Snow . . . about to lose everything . . . and you said . . . – . . . we have here no contract, whatever appearances might suggest. This case sounds in quasi-contract, moved by facts rather than a flood tide of contrived paper . . . We smiled together and she went on. –The conscience of this court may not stand as self-appointed chancellor. Yet neither shall it suffer manifest self-interest to make use of the instruments of justice to work injustice . . . She nodded. –It was . . . right. It’s . . . what all of us want, isn’t it? –I hope so. You know what happened? Her face fell. –You mean with the case? Please, judge, don’t tell me they reversed you . . . –Yes and no. They reversed on the reasoning with a mean little instruction to the effect that we don’t do equity in Louisiana. But they kept the result on other grounds they managed to invent . . . and Mrs. Snow kept her house . . . Terry clapped her hands. –See? They had to. You made them do it . . . You make the law live. Her eyes dropped and she pulled up short as if she were embarrassed. –I guess that sounds like something they’d say in a retirement speech or an obituary, doesn’t it? I shrugged. –Nobody at the testimonial was quite that eloquent. I think they were afraid I’d change my mind and stay . . . As for the obituary, if you’re going to go on like that about me, I’ll give you the job of writing it. Terry didn’t smile. For a moment I thought she felt she’d made an unkind comment on my age. I had not taken it so. Mortality and the path to it are no more indelicate than birth. Why, I wondered, should she be pained to raise that thought which I have never ceased to ponder since one pale sunlit afternoon in the French countryside near a town whose name I refuse to remember? Then, for some reason that I do not recall, because it was no reason at all but the tug of mystery, and almost in spite of her long sleeves, I caught a glimpse of the pale underside of her left wrist. The scars were slight, but they were there. I recollected an extended vacation Terry had taken a while back. My eyes rose and met hers. If my own death, which dwells with me like a troublesome and insistent neighbor who irritates me, but to whom I will not yield in fear until he comes to claim from In Here or Out There, is not a matter for concealment, neither is any other nor the threat of it either. –You don’t have to roll paper into that typewriter of yours just yet, I told her. –The retirement is past, and I don’t expect to need the obituary yet awhile. Her smile returned then. I must have said some right thing. The mystery flowed on. –I know you don’t she said. –They used to call you Old Ironass around the courts. I guess you knew . . . I knew without knowing. I had never heard the name spoken by some clerk or court reporter unaware. I think it was Victoria who had mentioned it, laughing, enjoying it immensely. My wife, my love, had been hard on pretensions–even on harmless mannerisms that in her opinion might open the floodgates of latent pomposity. You love the past and its forms and decent ceremony too much, she had told me. You will maintain those old things even if doing so hurts you, even if it lessens you, she had said. Let me decide about that, I had told her. Oh no, she had said, that effervescent laughter shaping in her throat. Oh no. Because I have to live with you, and you’re already worse than Cromwell. If I had a drop of Irish blood, you’d scare me to death. I put all that away, thinking she who had laughingly called my attention to it was now part of that past I loved. –I expect they called me that because I set off airport alarms with the load of German steel I carry around with me. –I’m sorry, Terry said. I didn’t think about . . . –Honey, neither do I. Except when the weather changes. Then I feel as if somebody had shot me full of popsicles. My little joke didn’t appear to make her feel any better. It seemed Terry was full of a great sadness. Given the choice of seeing the raucous absurdity or the dark melancholy in a situation, she would strike out to hide in the clouded dismal forest as surely as I would seek the brightest mountain peak from which to look down, observe, and laugh. I made a note to be careful with her, not to press her on anything. I had never done more before than look at her, pass the time of day with her for a moment or two as I waited for George Wesley to clear the decks for lunch. It crossed my mind to wonder how many of the men who stared at her, who desired her, had done more. Because I had never heard from any of them I knew, in the midst of idle conversation, that Terry Novis was a young woman on the edge of an abyss–one whose spirit hovered above the darkness as certainly as the Lord’s had on that first morning, but with destruction, not creation, in mind. This new insight into Terry troubled me. I am not much inclined toward delicate women. I have no use for them. They are a poor breed, miserable unto themselves and a caution to others. They bring weak sons and demanding daughters into the world and God knows we have enough of both. That is what I was thinking just then, and thinking too that Victoria would have let me get away with none of it. You have a great capacity for pain, she used to tell me. And you use that capacity on others like a club. It isn’t fair. And I recalled that I had smiled to myself even as she spoke. Yes, the capacity for pain. Goddamn it, I paid the price for it. I paid and I won’t have it taken away from me or talked away, either. Not now. Not ever. Nor will I have the value of that capacity lessened or maligned or even questioned. It is what I am. Cromwell? Surely. And more. Savonarola, Pym, Calvin . . . even St. Just? All of which Victoria had read in my eyes without even bothering to comment, saying only, Your damned capacity to bear it makes you willing to give it too easily. Don’t you see? What you barely notice devastates others. You have to stop it. I demand you stop it. Do you hear? I heard. In my own way, I heard. –Look, I said to Terry at last, –We’ve got some hard work to do. I want you to feel at ease with me. No reason you shouldn’t. If the Germans had been a little handier with that mortar, they’d have set me up for that obituary over thirty years ago. As it is, given that iron ass of mine, it could be another thirty. This time the smile was real. Lord, she was lovely. Maybe a weak woman could be of some use. After all, the time had passed for me to search out my own Alamo. Perhaps what was called for now was a rose garden where no one need feel threatened and pain was a word without a referent? I put that out of mind. I was retired. It was just that I had a few matters to put behind me and I would be back with Livy and Berlioz and all the bass I could lay a hook into. I didn’t need it any other way. I didn’t want it any other way. I took some notes out of my briefcase and set them down on Terry’s desk. –What’s it going to be? she asked. –Petition for a temporary restraining order and permanent injunction to the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana. Penniwell v. The United States of America . . . dry recital of Gee’s injuries, I kept my eyes on the papers before me, hearing her sharp intake of breath, trying to ignore it. Sadness had emptied her face of that animation that was part of her beauty. –That poor old man, she said softly –He’s a man, I told her. –And he’s old. But not poor. Not in any sense at all. I guess you’d need to meet him, know him. –But . . . all his life . . . like that. I shrugged. It was the image of a stoicism I didn’t feel. –He and I were raised to bear things, I said. –He’s borne that–and more. We can likely bear anything if we decide to. –Is he . . . religious? –Religious? Well, he has his place, his land. He hires a couple of boys off Billy’s and farms a little. He’s all right, Terry. –Billy . . . ? –Billy Wendell, I said. And only at that moment realized that in the course of the afternoon I had forgotten what I was actually there for to begin with and would not have called it to mind had Billy’s name not come up by accident. –Gee was his granddaddy’s foreman. Will D., Billy’s father, and Gee and I were . . . friends. A long time ago . . . the very best of friends. She didn’t even seem surprised. I was looking at her closely then, recalled to my reason for choosing her to do the petition in the first place. I wondered if perhaps she already knew of my relation to Billy, if in the nights they had spent together, all that long common past had risen up to be spoken of. After all, I was not the only man walking Caddo Parish with a genie punishing his spirit, bad faith rotting his soul. I seemed to remember that Terry was from Plain Dealing, a town north of Shreveport toward the Arkansas border. She would understand how time in a place like this slowly winds together the lifelines of people, of families, like tendrils and creepers of morning glory. If there is someone of long residence in Shreveport that I do not know, then I know his cousin or his sister’s husband or his broker or his barber or his high school algebra teacher. Terry would understand–whether she wanted to or not. She stared down at the completed petition and said nothing. –Billy and Loreen have always kept an eye on Gee, I said, to fill the silence, to press my purpose a little farther. –They’re good people. No, Gee’s not poor. He’s all right. What he’s got, he won’t be losing . . . I asked if she’d have some supper then. She simply nodded. We walked over to Fannin Street to pick up the jeep in the crisp autumn twilight. It occurred to me that I had not walked with a lovely woman on my way to a meal since Victoria died. I suppose I had never thought to again. That sense of order and form that Victoria had found too strong, too overbearing in me had led me to suppose that life was done. What does a man do when the one woman he has loved goes on before him? He cannot forget; it is not permissible that he rush to join her. It is not possible that, as the soap operas put it, he simply go on with his life. All I had been able to figure out was to retire. Which, I thought, as I walked down Fannin Street with the loveliest woman in town, was my way of standing aside, waiting for nature or misadventure to supply what the Christian religion and my rearing forbade I take care of myself We drove out to Brocato’s in the jeep. It seemed to cheer her up. Surely it did wonders for her complexion. The evening air had a tang in it, almost chill but not quite. It made me remember driving out years ago, before the war, on a date with Victoria, the scent of winter’s coming in the air. I put that out of mind, thinking as I did how many things we seem to collect over the span of our lives that we had best not think about, that must be placed in a locked and hidden room somewhere within–lest we view them too often and suddenly, inexplicably burst into tears amidst strangers or neighbors or kin. We talked over supper and drinks. Terry had been a music major studying voice at Centenary College. But her father had died and the International Harvester agency he had owned had gone to someone else. There had been no money so she dropped out of school and attended Meadows-Draughon Business College. She had found she was very good at those skills that make a secretary more than competent, and her first job out of school had been with the federal district court. She liked the work and the quiet somber air of the place. In nine years she had never moved on. I got the feeling as she talked that she was where she reckoned to spend the rest of her life. It was true that once she had imagined herself on the stage at the Metropolitan, but her father’s dying had taken that from her. Most likely, she said, that had been an unreal kind of hope anyhow. For every hundred girls who imagine themselves singing Violetta perhaps one manages to do something in a provincial house somewhere. All in all, hers was a good life and she had few complaints. –Maybe one. One little one. –What’s that? –I . . . wanted to work for you. When the division Judge Wesley was appointed to came open, I thought you’d . . . –That’s quite a compliment, I said. –I guess I just didn’t have the temperament for that kind of judging. –One morning early, I was over at First Judicial Court. To deliver an order from federal court. It was some kind of civil rights mess, and there were attorneys sitting around in shirt sleeves and hunting jackets, called in from all over because of whatever it was, and everyone was angry and no one had had any sleep. I think it was a Sunday, and you could feel the tension. They all just stared at me . . . I remembered those days. When Federal Wisdom had come to supplant anything I understand as law and only the result mattered. –You’d never had men look at you like that, had you? –Not ever. They looked like . . . they hated me. –You know better. –I knew better then but it didn’t help. I walked out of the courtroom and down the corridor just wanting to be away from there. Then down that dark hall, from your office, I heard Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto. I was so unhappy, I just sat down and listened all the way through, wondering what kind of person would be working at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning, listening to that. Then, when it was done and I was about to leave, there was a Mozart quartet. It must have been almost nine before I got out of the courthouse. But I was all right then. Maybe I didn’t even remember all the tension and hatred in that courtroom. Just the music . . . I could almost remember that morning myself. One Sunday between the time Victoria had died and I had decided on retirement. I worked all hours then. I had to. Sometimes on weekends I would go to my office and redraft work already done. And drink and watch football on television–anything not to remember. I had tried hard to abstract myself from that life I had lived and could live no more. I had wanted desperately to be someone else. One morning I had placed a sheet of paper in my typewriter and had written on it: –Another morning I came by court and passed your office, Terry said. –It was Borodin. I almost came in and asked for a job. I knew you had to be special. I thought perhaps I could even tell your mood . . . –I wish you had, I said. –I believe if you’d asked me for a job, I might still be on the bench. That embarrassed her a little and I thought that I had best keep my mind on what it was that I was supposed to be doing. –It seemed so . . . serene there, where you were, Terry said. I almost laughed at that. The impressions we derive and the realities behind them are rarely congruent. Had she come into my office in those days, she would have found a ravaged man down near the end of his string, trying to do his duty for no better reason than the peculiar fancy that it was expected of him in certain quarters–mostly inhabited by the dead who, arguably, expect nothing of us at all. Brahms and Borodin aside, she would not have wanted that job. Whatever had once pushed her even closer to the stark edge of things than I had been would have reacted badly to what I was just then–before I resigned, retired, retreated, decided not to even attempt to live as other people do. I took her home afterward. She lived in that warren of apartments between Fairfield and Southern Avenues that had been open land when I was young. I wondered how a girl from a small town could survive in that maze of efficiencies and one-bedroom cells. But then perhaps this generation glories in its closeness even as we loved the open space, acre after rolling acre with water and trees and no one within hearing of a shout. I climbed out of the jeep and started to see her to the door. –You don’t have to, really. –All right, I said uncomfortably, trying to adapt myself to this new dispensation wherein the manners insisted upon by those women who were our mothers are despised by those who might be our daughters. After we said goodnight, I watched until she disappeared from view down a little fake?brick alleyway that must have run between the stamp-sized swimming pool and the combination recreation and laundry room. I almost fell asleep on the way home but the wind was cold by then, and to the west I could see storm clouds building. I managed to get myself home, inside the house, one small drink poured, and Mozart’s Fortieth on the stereo. I even reached for the damned Livy, but I knew the words would run in front of my eyes. So I took my drink and went back to the bedroom and stared at the ceiling thinking nothing at all until finally sleep came. as April. I took that as an omen. I like omens. Over the long haul, they are not worth a damn, but short term they can do wonders for your morale. I undressed, showered, put on fresh clothes and fixed myself a cup of hot coffee. The place was silent. I wondered if Rowena had been there and gone. More likely, considering our last passage at arms, she was angry and would stay that way for up to a week, contemplating during her enforced leisure the wretched spectacle of me drowning in my own waste. Then, at what she judged to be the last possible moment, she would return, clean up the hoard of dirty dishes and shirts and underwear and coffee cups that had accumulated since we had had Words. She would be cheerful as a robin and nothing would be said. Rowena did not keep grudges and neither did I. They are a great pleasure and a solace to the mistreated soul, but wholly impractical in relations that have gone on for fifty years and more. I finished my coffee and drove into town. That put me inside Shreveport two days in a row. A record since The Retirement. But I needed to look over Terry’s fair copy of the pleadings for Gee, get them filed and a copy in the mail to that cretinous troglodyte at the Pentagon who was determined to peddle his medals whether they were wanted or not. She was sitting at her typewriter as I came through the door from the narrow corridor that led into chambers. She looked up, eyes widening, as if she were about to call out a warning–or as if she had just as soon I left before I even arrived. I wondered if somehow, recollected in tranquillity, the evening before had been less splendid for her than for me. No matter, I thought. I need that petition, and I am by now surely proof against the slings and arrows of outrageous young women. But before I could round out that period in my mind, I realized that it did matter. I didn’t get time to think about it just then. I was already in the office, almost to Terry’s desk, when I saw that one of the waiting room chairs was occupied. –This, Terry faltered, –this is . . . Mr. Waring . . . from Washington. He’s been waiting for you. His eyes caught mine and held. He was the far side of thirty, built like a running back, dressed like a Boston lawyer with glistening hair and a moustache so fine that it was more an indication than a fact. His eyes were dark and hard and he was sizing up the competition faster than a mainframe computer. He looked like a man who could give you a long mean afternoon in court. And he was black as the ace of spades. I couldn’t help smiling. Because while I was seeing him, he was seeing me, and I knew just what he was seeing. A hard-eyed redneck in pressed khaki workclothes, boots ten years old, and a Stetson so abashed and degraded by the ravages of rain and sun that it lacked color and form altogether. A hick, a pushover, a mean dumb remnant of the past that it was his duty to waste along the way to the apotheosis of some equally dumb old black who possessed only the virtue of not being able to avoid his ignorance, chained as he was in this living, thriving, burgeoning center of crackerdom. I couldn’t have planned things better if I’d known Mr. Waring was on his way. He went on staring at me wearing an expression somewhere between condescension and contempt. I had no idea what my face was revealing. I tried to call up Victoria’s admonition regarding humility and charity but I knew it wasn’t going to work. I was going to go through this bastard like a dose of salts. Terry couldn’t take her eyes off us. She looked something more than ill at ease. She looked almost frightened. –You’re . . . the lawyer, Mr. Waring said. His voice was deep, flat, noncommittal. –I’m a member of the Louisiana bar, I answered. –And you’d be . . . the bureaucrat . . . –I’m Michael Waring. Department of Defense, office of . . . –I’ve read your letterhead. At least the first six or eight lines. Nice trip down? Change of pace. Southern hospitality. It put him off balance. He rose then, standing, not posing. just on his feet, ready to start in on it as soon as he could make out whether this old farmer could do much better than read and write. Or perhaps he wasn’t sure the Louisiana bar required even that much of its members. It took him a moment to decide whether or not to hazard an exchange of pleasantries. He determined, whether he realized it or not, that he could not afford the risk. –Wendell says you represent him, that I should talk to you . . . –I do represent him, I said. –Then we’d better get a few things straight right up front . . . –I also represent Gaspard Penniwell, I cut in. Why not? I had better things to do than fool around with him. Drop it all right in the pot and see what he’d do. If he was very bright, it might occur to him that there were a few things he needed to get straight. The sooner I could put him in the right frame of mind, the faster we could get the business done. He stared at me for a second or two, that ingrained hostility he had carried onto the plane and into economy class revving in his veins. –That’s a clear conflict of interest, he said at last. I grinned. Mr. Waring’s emotions had made a patsy of him. –You think so? –I know so. You’ve got one client oppressing the other, and it’s easy to see whose side you’re on . . . –Terry, I asked, –have you got that petition typed up, honey? –Yes sir . . . She handed me a file folder with the smallest of grins. She already saw how it was going to go. She wasn’t nervous or fearful any more. I looked through the petition and affidavit while Waring rattled on with some talk about the U.S. attorney, and allowing that even the Louisiana bar must have something like a committee on professional responsibility. I handed him the folder. –Before you make a complete ass of yourself, you might want to look at that, I said, deriving indecent pleasure from every syllable. He looked at the caption and frowned. Then, like a good lawyer, he riffled through the pages to the Prayer. Then he looked up at me, his dark eyes smoldering. –This is . . . insane. You really think you can get away with this? I was trying not to smile any more. At my age, you should be past hot blood, all that sort of thing. –Read it through, I said. –Because I’m fixing to go down to the clerk’s office and file it in about ten minutes . . . –I don’t have to read this . . . this rubbish . . . –No, you sure as hell don’t. Not till they serve it on you and you have to drag ass back down here to try the rule, lose, and then go back north and explain to your betters how they’ll have to start hiring a smarter class of lackeys . . . He looked less sure then. I cannot read minds, but I believe he was beginning to realize that, whatever else, Shreveport wasn’t Dogpatch, and maybe he’d better read that petition after all. –He might be looking for you, she said distantly. –That’s true. –Don’t you think . . . –I don’t want to make it easy for him. I don’t like him. I don’t like the way his mind works. He doesn’t give a damn about Gee. He came down here looking for revenge for something that never happened to him. Terry stared down at her cup. –Something has happened . . . to all of us, she said softly. –That’s so. And we have to bear it. We have to stand whatever it is. –Some of us . . . can’t. We try, but we just . . . can’t. –Yes we can. We can bear what’s happened to us, what’s going to happen to us. We can even learn to bear what’s happened to other people . . . what’s happening to them right now. Her eyes raised from the table top. Her face was flushed and she had the look of a stricken animal. I could hear Victoria saying out of the dustless empty room in my heart, Now you’ve done it, see? –It . . . isn’t what you think, Terry almost whispered. I used to suppose I was rather good at transitions of thought, a leap from one plane to another by way of metaphor. Perhaps once when I was young and still reading Keats and Browning, I had been. But the law doesn’t traffic with intuitive transitions, and one learns to stay on the main road, moving slowly, stolidly from one clear stand to the next. I missed her point completely even though I had been looking for it, hoping it would rise between us. –I’m surprised you care about Waring, I said ignorantly. –And it is what I think. He’s come down here to use us all. Gee knows it, and I know it. I expect Billy knows it too. But he’s not going to bring it off. I’m going to send that bastard home with a broken civil service rating . . . –I wasn’t talking about him. I was . . . –I’m sorry. What then? –Billy and me. It’s not what you think. It’s not . . . I amazed myself. –It’s not my business, is it, I said almost harshly. Not because it was not my business since God knows I had tried to make it my business, had come to her to have a job of typing done that any steno in any law office in town would have been happy to do–that I could have done myself in an hour. Because, I realized in my amazement, now that I was in it up to my ears, I did not want it to be my business, did not even want it to be true. No longer because of Billy and Loreen and the children but because in the luxurious absurdity of my latter days I could still respond to beauty and to a woman. Perhaps even more richly, more fully than before. I fell silent then, tranced by the revelation. Christ in heaven, if I were a young man, if the road ahead were long and wide and open, I might have supposed that what I felt for Terry Novis was love. No wiser, no better informed than any other love, but love still. I looked away. I think I was embarrassed. Or pained. –It is. It has to be your business . . . because I don’t think I can manage it much longer. I don’t think I can bear it alone. I looked back at her like an injured suitor who has suddenly been told that there is Another. –Then tell him to go back home where he belongs, I said, trying to soften the words, trying at least not to let my own freshly discovered feelings about her supercharge what I would have said in any case. –I can’t. I can’t do that. You don’t understand. He hasn’t told you anything, has he? –No, I said. –I wouldn’t expect him to . . . talk about it. Would you? She didn’t answer at once. I could feel her drawing away from me as tender flesh moves from the honed edge of a saber. She had admired that touch of steel in me on the bench. Up close, directed at her, it was another thing altogether. Cold, ancient as Nordic ice, unyielding. Even under fire, should it melt and run, it would freeze once more in the climate of its own rectitude. –You’d better talk to him, she said dully, her eyes lightless. –I really think you’d better. –I can’t see pulling him into his own barn and asking for details of . . . I broke off and tried again. –I don’t have any power over Billy Wendell, I said. –We’re not even blood kin. There’s nothing but old times and long convention between us, Terry. If you’ve had enough and want shut of him . . . I broke off once more. The pain in her face was too sharp to be feigned. But if she didn’t want rid of Billy, if that wasn’t it, what the hell was going on? It appeared I had not only lost such facility with transitions as once I might have had–I couldn’t even draw logical conclusions any more. –If his father were alive, I finished lamely. –That’s how he thinks of you. He’s told me. I know he wants to talk to you, but . . . I stood up. Whatever this business between them was about, it had got somehow tangled in an endless loop of nuance and inference that was doing neither of us nor Billy any good. If he wanted to talk to me, he had surely not lost his recollection of how to find my house. What were we to talk about? The games people play? How to sanitize a divorce and make it painless? What to tell the children? How to manage community property so as to preserve the land? Or maybe Billy Wendell just wanted an invitation to whimper–perhaps even have someone tell him what to do, how to decide. Someone maybe, but not me. I had already figured out what he was going to do in the end and so had he. Judging from this conversation, from the expression on her face, so had Terry. Or was I misreading that expression? I couldn’t be sure. Was it her own realization that Billy would sooner or later, by hook or crook, end up going home? Or was it something else? Something more, something deeper? But what is deeper to a woman than possession of the man she loves? La Traviata aside, women do not hand over men they love–not even to their wives. Whatever she was feeling, she felt it deeply. I could tell that much for sure. I knew her that well at least. But what was she feeling? And what had I to do with it? I seemed to be wading up to my neck in emotional riptides I couldn’t begin to read. I wondered for a frantic moment why the hell I’d started coming into town again. Then I looked at her with eyes I hadn’t had in almost forty years and remembered what, besides duty, had brought me away from the lake, Berlioz, and the numberless pages of Livy. I held out my hand to her. –Come on, I said softly. –We’ve got us a bureaucrat upstairs to observe. That was one way to look at it, I thought with amusement. Waring could believe it or not. Either way, he was in a tight dark corner. All by himself. –I’m glad you feel so upbeat about white America in 1944, I said with a shark’s grin. –In other words, all that blather about racism is just politics with you people. You can’t imagine a white officer shooting down a black soldier the way Gee says it happened . . . So the old man is a liar, right? But then they’re all liars, aren’t they? Waring looked like an inch and a half and one deep breath from apoplexy. He had flown down from Fairyland, D.C., to strike the fear of God into a rabble of rednecks and now, in a single hour, his whole mythological kingdom was collapsing around him. He could either believe or not believe. If he believed, he would, by the very nature of the case, have to go to the Justice Department or some branch of military intelligence and demand an investigation. The newspapers would surely get hold of it, and it would be like whirling a sack of manure with a hole in it around his head. Everyone would get hit with some. No one would thank him for it. And, nine chances out of ten, the investigation would come to nothing. All that bad publicity and no resolution. No justice done? The army given the worst possible kind of publicity for nothing? Too bad for Waring. On the other hand, just suppose that by some miracle of ratiocination there should be discovered a slender track of evidence left over, uneffaced after more than thirty years? Suppose that anonymous lieutenant should be found out? Portly, gray, a deacon in the church, president of the local bank, Rotary International, town council, grandchildren in college–hoicked suddenly out of his comfortable ordinary American life to face an incredible charge before an international spotlight. For what? Could he be tried? By whom? Where? By court martial? For what crime? On the third hand, Waring could simply write off Gee as a crazed old man who had suffered horribly in a whirling churning confusing battle in which thousands had suffered even worse. That, I was betting, was where he would come down. It was much the easier course and bureaucrats, when not obsessed with covering their miserable worthless asses, will as invariably leap for the easy way as a hog runs to slop. My smile held as I watched Waring’s belligerence begin to sway, to totter. He wasn’t stupid. He saw approximately the same gritty future for his endeavors as I did. And no gain for himself at all. Loss of one sort or another on every band. Even the price of his plane ticket down here would be held against him on the third hand. I was pleased mightily. –We’ve got to think about this, he said quietly. –No, I said. –I don’t have to think about it at all. You do. You’re the one who started threatening one of my clients because he wouldn’t pester my other client about accepting some piece of tin you were bound and determined to force on him whether he wanted it or not. I don’t have to think about a damned thing. All I have to do is file that petition and watch you squirm . . . His face was angry, very angry indeed. I wondered if he was up to making the terminal error of swinging at me. –The Congressional Medal of Honor isn’t . . . a piece of tin, he said coldly, evenly. –All right. I’ll give you that. But Gee doesn’t want it. And that’s the end of it for me. We were sitting in the federal court library. Panelled walnut and thick carpets, row after row of uniform tan volumes containing between their buckram covers a serial dumb show of human folly and greed and cruelty, stupidity, suffering, madness, pettiness. The Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement, Supreme Court Reports. Two hundred years of our collective disagreements and wranglings from Jay and Marshall through Taney and Holmes to Black and Frankfurter–the pathetic often ill-conceived attempts to resolve what we have done to one another. Rowena could have done better without a clerk. I swear she could. I turned my eyes back to Waring. His hands rested on the conference table top, his fingers tightly woven together. He possessed that tense tight nasal Yankee accent that I find especially disconcerting in a black. He was staring down at the table the way Terry had done in the cafeteria. He looked as if he had an awful admission to make. Sure enough, he did. –All right, goddamnit, if it gives you any satisfaction, he began. –Well, I’ll be damned . . . –I hope so. I don’t believe it happened. I don’t know why Mr. Penniwell is saying it, but I don’t believe it. And I guess I don’t believe you’re dumb enough to file that petition unless you have it all down cold as last week’s pork roast . . . –You’re not from up there, I said with surprise. –Are you? –My people come from Tennessee, he said, his mind still on his problem. –I still get home now and again . . . I know you think I’m taking the easy way, but I truly don’t believe it. I just can’t . . . I expect I am a patsy for repentance. All of a sudden I was beginning not to loathe Waring quite so much. When you shoved as hard as you could shove, backed him up as far as he could be backed, he still believed somehow in the decency of his fellows. Even the white ones. All things considered, that is not an attitude to discourage. –Neither do I, I admitted after a moment. –But my problem is a little more complicated than yours. It runs deeper. Gee Penniwell doesn’t lie. I’ve known him fifty years. He doesn’t lie . . . Waring couldn’t let it pass. –That’s quite an encomium, he smiled ironically. –Isn’t it? Beggars the imagination. An honest nigger, and a redneck to vouch for it. He stiffened, his jaw going hard. Then, just as suddenly, he relaxed and smiled ruefully. –You are a mean old geezer, he said with something like delight. –Don’t go soft on me, I said. –You may end up meaner than you came before we close this thing down. It could have happened . . . –I thought you said . . . –I know what I said. I don’t believe it. But things happen all the time I don’t believe. More now than five years ago. More then than twenty-five. What you and I believe isn’t good enough. There are loons out there who’ll do anything. Put a gun in their hands and . . . It was that way in 1944. Or 1844. It’s that way now. You know it and I know it. –But . . . not like that. Not in the midst of battle . . . You lose that shit in battle. My God, I remember . . . it was us against them . . . He sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about. –You were in Vietnam? –Three tours. They damned near shot my legs off. A white guy brought me to the chopper. I still don’t believe it, you hear? –All right, fine. Let’s see where we stand. You don’t believe it and I don’t believe it. Gee never lies. And white men have been known to shoot blacks for no damned reason better than the humidity in deep August . . . We both lapsed into silence. Finally he looked over at me, not challengingly. Sincerely. –Will Mr. Penniwell testify? he asked. –He will. He doesn’t want to. He probably hasn’t been inside the Shreveport city limits in thirty years. But if I file this petition he will . . . No judge in this district would grant an order like this without giving the U.S. a chance to cross. –About that filing, Waring said slowly, unable to hide his chagrin at having to ask, –could you hold off a day or so? I need to check this out . . . He surely did. Even the Shreveport papers have courthouse reporters, stringers for national news services who look over the daily court filings, who have friends in the clerk’s office to flag an interesting suit. Gee’s petition would be, to say the least, newsworthy. –I don’t know, I said. And I suppose I didn’t. I had come loaded for bear, ready to drop that petition in the hopper and watch the fireworks–not knowing that Waring was in town with some fireworks of his own in mind. Now I had him square in the bull’s-eye. If I filed, he was in trouble no matter what the upshot of the hearing. Why not file? It wasn’t going to cost Gee or Billy any money. I was going to pay the costs myself. With glee. –I need two, three days, he went on. –And you have an obligation to your clients, don’t you? –Yes, I said. –Gee wouldn’t like a bunch of strangers asking him questions, tramping through his yard. And the media sure as hell couldn’t use any of his answers. –Three days? I’d appreciate it. I really would. Waring smiled then, and it occurred to me that Michael Waring was a handsome man. It seemed even his accent had softened. A trick he had learned down home in Tennessee? –I don’t think any of us want to hear his answers, do we? Three days? I smiled back despite myself. Michael Waring wasn’t that damned alien infernal machine we call a government. He wasn’t even a sufficient symbol of it. He was just like the rest of us, trapped in one illusion or another, condemned to living with our own opinions, however inadequate. –I believe we can do business, Mr. Waring, I heard myself say. –Three days. –You didn’t come back through my office. –I thought you’d be busy. I’ve taken up a lot of your time . . . She looked at me as if she were trying to read my mind. Don’t bother, I thought. Give it up. Whatever I’m thinking is coming out in cuneiform. I don’t even know what I’m thinking. If I did, I’d probably try to stop. I have no idea what she read in my expression, but her eyes clouded and there was no light in them at all. –Billy wants to know if you’ll meet him . . . –What? –He’ll be at the Cub. Around four-thirty. I must have looked as if it was one of the world’s worst ideas. It was. I was in a retiring mood. I wanted to go home and let the emotions and problems, the old anguish and the new, drain away. I wanted to fish a little and read a little and go to bed early and not dream at all. Which, when I considered, was a fine and intricate circumlocution for the fact that I didn’t want to think of her with Billy, and I sure as hell didn’t want to talk to him about it. I had as soon go out to the country club and bruit her name around the locker room. I understand the new attitudes toward sex. If I were twenty years younger, I might even approve of them in a seedy silent underhanded way. What man ever had his fill of commerce with the bodies of lovely women? But I was not twenty years younger, and there seemed to me to be a certain desperation about the new morality–as if its practitioners were keeping score, telling one another what a fine time they were having, and that so long as they managed to avoid the two abysses of conception and love, they surely had it made. My own sort of desperation was constructed after an older pattern. It was, if you will, metaphysical. And preposterous and utterly out of style. I was jealous of Billy Wendell whether just then I realized it or not. –You’ll go talk to him . . . ? I didn’t say anything. If I did, it was going to come out mean and testy. I stood there giving, I hope, the appearance of one lost in thought, considering, weighing. I believe I was trying to figure out a rock-solid excuse for not meeting Billy, not talking to him. Because if I felt cross toward Terry, I was feeling downright hostile toward my godson. All the anger that I had meant to turn loose on Michael Waring, which his sudden turn had averted, was still in store. If I went to meet Billy, he was going to have a long wretched guilt-ridden judgmental autumn afternoon. –Judge, please . . . It’s important. There’s no one else. I tried to talk to him last night . . . –He was waiting for you when I brought you home? –No . . . yes . . . Oh, what difference does it make? –None. None at all . . . –He finally agreed he’d talk to you . . . Don’t let him down . . . please . . . Let him down? I may knock him down. And stomp him afterward. –All right, Terry, I said. –It’s a bad idea, but I’m not going to leave him on a barstool feeling sorry for himself . . . She gave me a peculiar stricken look. I would understand that look better in a little while. Then she put out her hand awkwardly for me to shake. Her smile, such as it was, seemed to be the best that she could muster. –Thank you . . . and it was fun working with you . . . even for one day . . . She walked back toward the elevators then and I seemed to be able to feel her warmth departing after her like the odor of her perfume. Was it perfume or the scent of her body? That, I thought, is that. One more fantasy to be retired. Who knows? Maybe the very last. How we do go on. I looked at my watch. It was just after four. The bass were home free for this evening. I wished I could say as much for myself. As such places go, it is pleasant enough. Older people walk to it from the nearby streets of Broadmoor and delivery men and truck drivers and merchants who own or work at the small businesses along Kings Highway tend to drop by in the afternoons for a draught beer or a quick glass of whiskey before they vanish into the suburbs for the night. I pulled up out front and parked under an enormous sycamore tree that has not grown perceptibly since I first drank beer at the Cub. Next to me, some college boys and girls sat in a van drinking and listening to what passes amongst them for music. Instead of getting out of the jeep, I sat awhile thinking. Not about Billy and Loreen. Their troubles seemed small enough and now that I was out of Terry’s sight I expected I could likely do my duty and shame Billy into doing what was right. From what Terry had been saying, I reckoned his bad faith had caught up with him and all it would take to send him home with his tail between his legs was a harsh look and some sharp words on the topic of what sort of man runs off from his family with a woman little more than half his age. Yes, I could say that to him with a straight face. At least I reckoned I could. After all, I wasn’t running off with her. I only wished I could. But that wasn’t foremost in my mind. No, I sat there thinking on that other, more impenetrable triangle: Gee, Michael Waring, and me. It was an impasse. Either a white officer had shot down an heroic black soldier in the presence of the enemy or Gee Penniwell was an unconscionable liar. Now Waring had been drawn into it almost as deeply, as personally, as I was. Neither of us could believe the first possibility, and there was no way I was going to believe the second. What I was fumbling for was some third alternative, something that would in one way or another save the appearances. All I wanted was that the lieutenant had not done it, and that Gee was telling the truth. I have been given to understand that both limbs of a paradox cannot be true. That is inconvenient. I would have to think some more. The answer had to be there. Gee had been in shock, bleeding and confused. Perhaps all his injuries had been caused in the fire fight with the German tank crew and infantry. He had been delirious after that, had dreamed the rest, his unconscious drawing up that archaic horror that every black man has always harbored as he passed even a sober peaceful group of white men around the courthouse on Texas Street on a Saturday afternoon. I shook my head. It was horseshit. Cheap psychological rubbish of the kind I would have ruled out of court when I was on the bench. Gee had seen what he had seen. There had been done to him what had been done. Surely there had been nightmares afterward. God only knows how many times he had awakened in terror down the years seeing before him those cold eyes in a white face above that Thompson submachine gun, heard that apocalyptic question: You made . . . all this? Just then something rattled in the junkroom of my memory. There might be a third alternative. I already knew something important from a winter long past when snow had begun to fall in the hedgerows and across the fields and on the small empty villages. Something I had heard long ago. Something I had been told. But I could not draw it up into the light of consciousness. –Mister, you all right? one of the college boys in the van called out to me. I snapped back out of history into the present. The snow vanished. That high distant lethal whistle of a mortar round coming in was cut off miraculously in mid-flight. I looked across at the boy. He was slender and blond with cool eyes, his face tanned and mildly concerned. I believe he thought I might have had a stroke as I sat motionless, tranced by a memory I could not quite touch amidst the welter of days and snowfalls, terror, boredom, loss and sorrow and pain that had been my war. –I’m fine, son. But thanks for asking, I answered as I climbed down out of the jeep and started inside. In there it was dark and cool. They had a Miller’s High Life sign blinking behind the bar, no jukebox at all, and no electronic games. The Cub was where you went to drink and talk. They had even taken out the shuffleboard game after there had been a shooting over a bet on it one night nine years ago. A cluster of men were strung along the bar, anonymous, ageless, mostly dressed much as I was. They talked to one another softly and watched a television with the volume turned down. There, a silent baseball game was underway, and now and again the watchers would mumble approbation or groan disapproval as a batter swung or an infielder made his play. Lord, I thought, it’s either the playoffs or the series, and I’m so retired I don’t even know who’s playing. I don’t even recognize the uniforms. He was already there, sprawled out in a booth in back with his boots up on the seat opposite and a double shot of something alongside a draft beer sitting in front of him. I don’t think he saw me coming as he poured the whiskey into the beer and took a long pull on the mixture. I paused a moment and looked at him. Loreen was right. He had lost weight in the last few months. A man living two or more lives will tend to do that. Or a man determined to look young and feel young for the sake of a beautiful woman. Or a man caught up in the swells and straits of profound bad faith. His face was expressionless, dark from the past summer’s sun up to where his Stetson had blocked it. Just below the hairline, a circle of white stood out like a white sweatband tied around his forehead. He looked pensive, tired, distracted, and I could not for the life of me see so much as a trace of old man Wendell or Will D. or Alethia either in him. He could as well have been Victoria’s son and mine and, considering that, I wished I knew more certainly what I should say to him when it came down to the issue at hand. –Billy, I said for openers. –Uncle Albert, he replied, pulling his boots off the seat across from him, hardly looking up from his boilermaker. –Sit down. What are you drinking? –I believe I could do with a draft. –You want a little something to sweeten it? –I don’t think so. I only drink whiskey at home nowadays. If I fall out, it’s on my own floor. Billy tried to smile and gestured to the bartender who had watched my progress from the front door to the back booth as if he had some stake in my arrival. Billy pointed at his beer, then at me. The bartender nodded, then moved out of my line of sight. I turned back to Billy. I could tell by his speech that he’d been at it a while. He was not drunk, but he was, as you might say, quite comfortable. Boilermakers ease things. Like good martinis or vodka in orange juice, by the time you feel them, it is too late. –You’ve been waiting for me, I said. He tried that smile again. No luck. –Yeah, he said. –I got here when they opened. I helped Edgar take the chairs off the tables and knock down the cardboard boxes after we restocked the bar . . . I’m cheap help . . . –That’s a long time. –Not fucking long enough, he answered, keeping his eyes away from mine. –I thought when I left Terry’s it would be long enough, but . . . His voice trailed off and for no reason I could think of, it occurred to me that quite possibly Will D., had he lived, would not have been enraged at Billy’s conduct at all. Lord knows he had loved women and hankered after them, searched out the local beauties and brought them to ground when he could. I had no idea whether Will D. had run around on Alethia or not. We would not have talked about that kind of thing. Anyhow, he hardly had time considering that our war had called before either of us had had a chance to settle down, to discover whether the ladies of our choice were the right ones, or whether we would end up bored, sorry, restless, and prone to rove for the balance of our days. Never mind that. It seemed in memory I had cast Will D. in bronze, making him over somehow in the image of his father, W. D., the patriarch. A man who died for his country or his pride or for the sheer untrammeled love of a hunt in which the game might turn and kill you deserved better than that. And perhaps Billy deserved better than to be beaten around the head and ears with a fake bronze statue of his father by his bloodless, retired, no-kin godfather uncle, too. I was almost pleased with myself for the insight until I realized that I had had no insight: not me, but Victoria dwelling, working in me. Fair enough. Let her come back to me in that way. Any way at all. So long as she visits, for that long I can stay my hand and bite my tongue and live in the decent imitation of a compassionate man (retired). –Well, I said, –Terry told me you wanted to talk. Billy shrugged as the beer came. –I need another double rye and a draught, he said. The bartender hesitated just the least fraction of a second, but it was long enough for Billy to look up at him, a challenge in his eyes. –This here is my uncle Albert Finch. He’ll see me home, Edgar . . . The bartender looked me over, nodded, and departed. –No, Billy said. –Terry got it wrong. I don’t want to talk . . . That made it simple. I took a drink of my beer and started to slide back out of the booth. –Then why don’t you just kill that last order and I’ll drive you out home . . . –I got to talk. I got no choice . . . It’s gone too far . . . That made it complicated again. I sat back down. Billy looked more miserable than drunk. In fact he looked almost frightened. –I left Terry’s this morning. After she went to work. My stuff is out in the truck. –All right. Whenever you’re done talking, we’ll drive out in the truck. I’ll catch a lift in with one of your boys in the morning and pick up the jeep . . . –I’m not going home. I can’t . . . –I see what you’re saying, but I expect Loreen will let you in. At least long enough to pick up some clothes, and if you talk fast . . . Anyhow, she’ll want to tell you what kind of rotten sonofabitch you are. No woman could pass up a chance to do that . . . –You reckon she wants to cuss me? No need for her to bother . . . –It won’t be any bother. He shook his head dully. –I can’t go home cause if I go, I’ll have to talk to her, and if I talk to her I’m bound to tell her. Which is why I stayed over at Terry’s anyhow. I’d rather . . . –I don’t believe she wants a blow-by-blow description, Billy. Generally they don’t. I think she’d like to find out if youall have anything left to hold on to . . . –No . . . I can’t talk to her ’cause . . . That made me mad. I cut him off. –Well, I sure as hell don’t mean to tell her that, so you better get yourself a lawyer and then your lawyer can tell her lawyer and he’ll tell Loreen and youall can figure out how you want to divide up the place and divide up the kids and divide up your lives. It’ll come to the same thing, one way or the other, but some lawyers are going to make a few dollars and you’re going to end up doing the next thing to cropping shares . . . I thought that reference to the land was my hide-out punch. It should have dropped him like pig iron, but he never changed expression. It continued a strong nine on the misery scale. The low bastard hasn’t got the guts to go home and face his wife, I thought. He’d rather lose his land than own up to her. I had been mistaken. That insight of mine, wherever it had come from, was wrong, too. If Will D. was there, he’d whip the shit out of Billy. It is surely one thing to indulge the glands against duty, against vows, but it is another thing altogether to stand away from the consequences, from the payment due for the indulgence. The man does not live and walk and breathe who has not at least contemplated the first; I am persuaded there remain those who are not guilty of the second. So it appeared things were simple again. I was not obliged to sit and listen to this man tell me he could not face the wife he had wronged to tell her that he regretted the wrong of it–if not the act itself–not even to save his land, his home place, and the tatters of his marriage. I shrugged, got up, leaving my beer unfinished. I could retire again. At least from the problems of Billy Wendell. –We’d better get moving, I said coldly. –You want me to drive your truck back over to Terry’s? Or did you have some other plans? Or any plans at all for when Edgar there closes up and puts you out in the street? He looked up at me. There were tears in his eyes and something akin to terror on his face. And nothing, nothing of Will D. at all. I could feel contempt welling up inside me, but something held it at bay. –I’ll do whatever you want, he said woodenly, his voice steadier, more resonant than before. –I’ll even go home. But I can’t tell her, Uncle Albert. It’ll wreck her. She won’t be able to manage . . . –She seemed to be doing all right the last time I saw her, I lied wryly. –I expect somehow she’ll pull through . . . It’s a common enough disease in this society . . . He looked up at me sharply, his expression changed utterly. –She told you . . . Goddamnit, she told you, didn’t she? –Who? Told me what? He looked away from me then and somehow, at least for a moment, I was put in mind of Victoria at the train station so long ago when she had bent down to tell me that Will D. was dead, her eyes averted because, though she must be the messenger, she was not obliged by duty or custom to look me in the eyes as she broke my heart. –Terry . . . She said it was up to me, but she told you . . . It’s all right. I’m glad. And if you can stand it all that well, I reckon Loreen can too. And if she can, I can . . . –What the hell . . . –It’s true, Uncle Albert . . . I’m dying. It was going to be a fine day. The air was cool and crisp, somewhere in the low sixties. I did not notice. I walked down by the water watching a swirl, an eddy where bass and perch were beginning to pool, looking for minnows or an odd fallen insect dying out of season. I had not shed a tear. Surely not in front of Billy who would have been amazed and disheartened–who had, it seems, grown up supposing that virtue and emotional expression had nothing whatsoever to do, one with the other. I expect I was to blame for that. I hoped it would at least stand him in good stead for what lay ahead. My boat stood empty on the water. It was the same boat Billy had fallen out of drunk. I almost smiled. Then I did smile. If I was not to cry, then that. The boat swayed, shivered slightly as if it were waiting to be loosened, boarded. Out toward where the sun was rising from behind tall trees, up from the dark voiceless waters, I could hear someone firing a motor, trying to make it catch and run after the long chill night. It was leukemia of some sort or another. Billy had known about it for over a year, had borne the knowing alone, and the treatments. He had hoped for a remission but now the destruction of his blood was thundering onward at a pace that left no hope at all. He would soon have to begin a regimen that could not be concealed, managed in a day or two a week away from the place. He had lost weight, but that perennial suntan had kept him from appearing as weak as he really was. At first, the doctors had told him he had a year or so. Now they were saying months. At the start there had been an altercation between Billy and his doctors. They had demanded that he tell his wife, his people–draw them into the struggle. Billy had told them no. He would manage on his own. Maybe things would get better. But even if they didn’t, he was determined that Loreen know nothing until things were so bad that she could not help but know. He could not eradicate the pain for her but he could ward it off, hold it at bay, buy her months of some kind of peace against the nightmare that was coming on for them both. Doctors had removed themselves from the case. Others had shaken their heads. Billy shouldn’t insist on doing his dying alone, they had said. How the hell do you reckon I’m gonna die, Billy had retorted. Did youall plan to come along? Is the whole goddamned parish gonna up and die with me? He told me he had thought of his father, and that had strengthened him. He would close his eyes and evoke that bitter cold at twelve thousand feet, the distant soundless gun-chatter of an ME-109F or an FW-190 as it sent lines of angry fireflies arching toward the lumbering B-17 and chopped the fuselage to bits, the engines to shreds. He had always supposed his father was still alive as the Flying Fortress slowly spiraled and then began to cartwheel down toward the tiny pitiless enemy earth below. Billy imagined that his father had known it was coming, made it up inside himself, and just tried to keep his eyes on the ground until it ended. Is that possible, Uncle Albert? Could a man do that? Yes, I told him. A man could do that. And I knew it was so. I had once heard in litigation a tape made of a test pilot reading off his instruments calmly, coolly, as his X-15 broke up and plunged into the ground. His voice had been level, smooth, almost ethereal, until the sound stopped altogether. I remember asking the Lord for that grace above all other, that strength, that character, that terminal sense of Self that was larger than self, that made one proud and humble to be a man. Will D. could have done that. Gee could have. I had not the least idea about myself. I had driven his pickup out to my place with Billy half conscious in the passenger seat. I had said nothing, too lost in my thoughts and hoping that the liquor would put him to sleep. It didn’t. He was not only awake when we reached my house, he was almost sober. –Uncle Albert, can I sleep over here? I can’t go busting in over home at this hour. I got to think . . . –If that’s what you want. –Shit, nothing’s what I want. It isn’t ever again going to be anything I want. I’m fixing to . . . His voice trailed off. I expect I was too ashamed of what I had been thinking all afternoon to make conversation. No, not ashamed. Regretful. Had the circumstances been as I supposed, my feelings would have been right enough. Of course, I could hear Victoria whispering. You are a lovely man, but a mean person. Of course, I answered her back. Bear with me, my love. This generation of men is fading; after us there will be no other. Nothing but sheep. Everyone’s consciousness will be raised; everyone will be warm and caring–to conceal being vacant and gutless. As for me, I mean to approach that good night with a tire iron behind my back and a blistering vulgarism on my lips. By way of experiment, Victoria, my darling. Just then all I could do was listen. Later, when he had said it all, talked it through, recreated it outside himself so that the two of us could look at it, then perhaps there would be something more. Some non- canonical rite to be observed, some benediction to bestow–if I could find a worthy one amongst the rags and tatters of my own bad faith. I could do that, I thought. I could absolve Billy of anything. That question was resolved long ago in another forum. Even a sinful priest, even a priest lost in doubt and bad faith can absolve. He must be able to, or every one of us would have to wait upon His returning once again to be relieved. But we can’t wait. Some of us are impatient. Others of us have hardly any time at all. We were drinking coffee by then. The alcohol had not done him much good. It seemed, he said, that he could not hold enough down to knock himself out, to pass from unconsciousness to sleep. –See, I just never thought of this, Billy said. –Shit, I’m thirty-eight years old and strong as a damned ox. I can tote hundred-pound feed sacks from can’t see to can’t see. I got a place and a woman and kids and money put back to see em through as much school as they can use. I got it made. I’ll think about that other later on . . . Maybe when you get older, religion just kind of comes over you, and maybe you’re ready . . . –No, I told him. –Religion goes away. Something else comes . . . –Yeah, Billy nodded, misunderstanding, looking worn-out and used up. –It’s coming for me . . . –That too, I said. –Billy, you’ve got to go home. –Not now, Uncle Albert. You said . . . He sounded like a little boy told he can forget the church picnic on account of some transgression. –Not now, I said, –but soon. You can’t camp out over here and let this go on. It’s not that you need Loreen, I lied stoutly. –She needs you . . . He had been doing all right until he called her to mind again. It seemed to break him every time. He shook his head, buried his face in his hands. –I can’t . . . I just can’t do it to her . . . –You’ve been doing something to her. He stared at me in astonishment. –Don’t you reckon she’d rather think I was fooling around on her than know I was gonna . . . He couldn’t quite bring himself to say it again. That was all right. You get used to the words. I saw that piece of paper in my typewriter again. Just to remind myself, I let the words pass across my mind once more. I have lost my wife. There you are. See? Still, I saw what he was getting at. Saying it to himself was hard; saying it to a woman he had loved since grade school was almost past bearing. Yes, Loreen would likely rather see Billy collect a harem of harlots, install every bimbo and drab off the Bossier City strip in their barn than hear what he was going to have to tell her. She might not know it, but it was so. –Hell, Billy said, getting up and walking over to the kitchen window, staring out into the darkness. –We come in and we go out and we don’t know a damned thing more going than coming. Except nothing lasts. When I was down to the university, this geology professor told us . . . –I know what he told you, I said shortly. –He was a goddamned liar. They don’t hire them to teach any more if they’re not liars. –No, Billy said softly as if he already knew something. –Even this land is gonna go one day . . . –That’s crap, I said louder than I meant to. –The land isn’t going anywhere . . . He shrugged, tried a smile again. –All right, have it your way. But I’m going and Lord I surely do hate it . . . –What are you going to do? –Hell, I’m gonna . . . I don’t know. I had this idea last year when they first told me. I thought I might just kind of drop out of sight, drift over to Texas. I got a cousin or something on my momma’s side over there. Works for a TV station. He’s got a little place outside Carthage. He said I could stay there till . . . He looked at me expectantly. I didn’t say anything. He nodded. –Yeah, that’s what I decided, too. Look, tell you what . . . I’ll get good and loaded this afternoon and go over home and . . . –If you come in drunk, she’ll hit you with a skillet and call the sheriff. He laughed. –Yeah. She would. Well, I can’t see just strolling up cold sober and saying, Listen, baby, you’re gonna have a hard time believing this and a worse time when you do, but . . . I am not stone deaf. Only high-gravel deaf. I knew what he wanted. Reparation time seemed to be at hand. Beyond listening. That word to be spoken. Now I had a fairly clear handle on who I would be speaking it to. –All right. You go on back and sleep in the spare room . . . –You’ll . . . –What the hell choice have I got? –It’s a kindness, Billy said. –If you’ll just kind of get her ready . . . –By the time she’s ready, she’s going to know all there is to know. –Yeah. I guess she will . . . He had gone back and gotten himself some sleep then and I had walked outside to consider my commission, my message, and the manner of its deliverance. Then it occurred to me that I had let him go to bed before he had told me enough. I had no better idea of what had passed, what there was between Terry and him, than I had had before. Which, somewhere along the line, impending death and loss aside, Loreen might want to know. And so did I. I was so tired by then that I was lightheaded. And so lightheaded that I considered getting my spinning gear and fishing for an hour or two. I do not understand why fishing calms the nerves and gives one an enormous sense of well-being, but it is so. When Victoria died, I fished for weeks on end, from dawn deep into the night. As if, with an abundance of fortune, I might draw her back up like a mermaid from those great depths. The waters below resonate with the waters above, I suspect. They are different and non-different. The truth lies amidst the waters and every catch is an astonishment, a revelation. We know already what we cannot say. There is some kind of knowing unfitted for words which words attempt and approximate and lose again like a lover’s whisper vanished in the wind, a beloved’s name scrawled on the water. But I didn’t go out. I sat on a cypress stump and watched the sun come up in the distance like a bronze lantern left over from long night’s frolic. It was good to feel lightheaded. It distanced me from what I had just heard, a rumor of mortality, that haunting chorus that sounds more and more frequently as the years bunch up behind, thin out ahead–that rot-strewn suspicion that beginnings begin in the world. And endings end here, too. But gone without food, bereft of sleep, having given the bodily creature nothing it requires to stand forth in the light, the rumor, the chorus, that mere suspicion seemed of no consequence at all. Standing there, brooding over the water, it was as if the scroll of time rolled open before me, backward into darkness, forward into light–or was it the other way around? Mortality seemed to mean no more than that oak leaf, exhausted and dry, meant turning and turning through the chill autumn morning air, falling at last to the rich winecolored water where it would float and sink and disintegrate and find itself again in some other form, some other time. I have no idea how long I sat there watching the sun rise, the pattern of light and shadow on the water change. It was long enough for that lightheadedness to fail me, all my visions of eternity to crumble and the weight of mortality shared to return with a vengeance. My godson was going to lose his life. He was about to journey into those distances where all our fathers and mothers, physical and spiritual, had gone on before. Then Rowena was standing beside me. She was wearing an electric-blue sweater I had given her the Christmas before, and a knit cap pulled down over her ears. I noticed how incredibly delicate she looked, how her skin was stretched taut across the bones of her face and how her iron gray hair protruded in sprigs from under the cap. –I done turned off that damned record player and it’s coffee and some breakfast ready. –That’s good of you. –Lord, you notice how early it’s getting cold? Didn’t used to. When I was a chick we swum in Bayou Pierre till November . . . –It’s not that cold. –Yes, it is. We walked back up to the house together. I ate my biscuits and eggs, grits and ham in silence. –Reckon I ought to wake him up and feed him? Rowena asked with elaborate casualness. –Course I don’t know what he can eat . . . An alarm bell rang amidst the jumble of my thoughts but I ignored it. By and large, I am rational. Let the record reflect that I set no store by second sight, telepathy, conjuring and such. –No, I said, –let him sleep. We talked late. As far as what he can eat, I expect he can manage anything you fix. –Oh . . . You reckon? I put down my coffee and stared across the table at her. Good Christ, I thought, she knows. She does know. Either by reading it in my mind or feeling it in the walls of this place or by raising some archaic African familiar of hers that tells her everything she wants to know, and who specializes in white people. Her eyes held mine and we must have sat like that for thirty seconds. She wasn’t going to say a damned thing more and I wasn’t going to ask her, much less volunteer anything at all. Lord, aren’t things cluttered and scary enough without finding out that ancient black women can reach out, get hold of the nape of reality and shake it till the one small inconsequential fact they want to know tumbles out of the Manifold like a possum out of a tree? I would go on suspecting whatever I was bound to suspect, but I would be damned three times on a Saturday night if I would take judicial notice of it. –You fixing to go over and see Loreen? Or was you gonna wait a day or so and kind of get up for it? I put down my cup so quickly that it almost cracked the saucer. –Why would I be going to see Loreen, I asked her, my voice tight, fooling no one, not even me–much less Rowena. –She got to know, and he put you up to telling her, right? –Goddamnit to hell . . . –That’s right. I know how you feel. Me too. But it don’t change nothing. Maybe you ought to go out on the water like you was thinking about when I come got you for breakfast. You go on and whip up on them fish today. Tomorrow be just as good for Loreen and . . . For some reason, probably because I had turned my head away from Rowena in hopes that I might thereby give away something less than everything, I noticed that she had brought a bundle of clothing with her, including an umbrella and a heavy man’s overcoat I had tried to get her to throw away until I realized it was one of my father’s, given her after his death by my mother. She is going to stay somewhere other than her own place, I thought. She had not done that since Victoria’s dying time. –All right. How did you find out? Lodestone? Toad guts? High John the Conqueror Root? Rowena fixed me with a contemptuous stare. –You given to superstitions in your waning years, ain’t you? –What have you got? A crow? I know you can’t stand cats. It must be a black dog from down amongst those damned Creoles . . . She shook her head, doing her best to look embarrassed for a grown man who had truck with that kind of nonsense. –Remember Helen Lane? –Yes. She used to clean chicken and fish at Fielder’s grocery on Fairfield . . . –Right. Died last year in the spring. Very nice service at the Free Will and Christ Rising Baptist Church. – . . . now you’ve got hold of her soul, and she’s coming back on weekends and telling you . . . –If I was to commune with some spirit, Rowena said, haughtily, –I believe I’d likely have a message for you. And you know who from. No, I ain’t communing. Helen’s daughter a nurse out to P and S Clinic. Still comes to church. Said she saw Billy and found out and didn’t tell nobody but me cause I was close with the family and maybe they was going to have need . . . So much for mysticism. But the reality carried with it a mystique all its own. Word passes. Lord, is it so? Are we ourselves the revelation? –What did she say? Is it as bad as Billy makes out? –Who knows? Them doctors’ mouths ain’t no prayer books. I know a man at Free Will was told he had to die in June of 1947, and that man is . . . –What do you think, I asked as sincerely as if I had paid for a return fare to Delphi. –I thought him and Loreen might want some time, she said obliquely.–He can still move around, can’t he? I mean if he give over the whiskey and stop pouting. Kids too small to know anything. I believe him and Loreen ought to go off somewhere . . . The best idea, I thought. The very best idea anyone could have. Billy’s place ran itself in winter. Nothing to do. Florida, the Greek Isles, Tahiti, a world cruise. Anything at all but sitting here in the dead of winter. Waiting. Anything at all. –I know them little ones. They’ll mind me. You tell Loreen I be over directly. That is, if you going now . . . I said nothing. I was as ready to go now with a full belly and a clear head as I was going to be whether I waited one day or ten years. But I still didn’t know enough. If I had to tell Loreen the worst, I had just as soon tell her all of it, whatever all of it might be. But I couldn’t because each time I brought it to mind, turned it over and over, I realized all the questions I hadn’t asked. I could hear Terry saying, It isn’t the way you think . . . That much was certain. Whatever had passed between them had moved under the shadow of doom, a privileged questionless place where the doings of people are surely, inevitably, other than their wont–no questions asked by the wise, none answered by the bereaved–whatever one takes that word to mean. Still, how had they met and where? During that damned lawsuit of his, I reckoned. But how had they gotten so close that he had come to tell her what he could not bring himself to tell Loreen, had not even told me until circumstances had pressed him past bearing? Maybe the oracle had information on that, too. I thought. Maybe I needed neither to go off to Loreen unready nor wait for Billy to awaken. –What do you know about Billy and Terry Novis? I asked Rowena. Rowena went on drinking her coffee –You know something, I told her. –You knew they were together, but you hadn’t talked to Helen Lane’s daughter then. What else did you find out? Rowena put down her cup and looked positively evasive. I had thought I knew every mood, every variant of expression she possessed. I had seen them all already, seen them all in the span of half a century. Or so I thought–forgetting, it seems, that if age had not dimmed her, as indeed it had not, she maintained as well that infinite variety that goes simply with being a woman–if a woman is smart enough to find it out and use it. Here was a brand new expression. Oh, she had an armory of looks, gazes, stares, grins, smirks, frowns, and what–not to turn away questions, interrogatories, entreaties and demands. Her best and most useful was what I had inventoried as her Indian Stoic gaze. It was a neat blend of Epictetus and Patanjali hiked into position when you required the answer to what she regarded as a particularly inexpedient question. Rowena would simply depart. Her spirit would absent itself, leaving you to inquisite the frail bodily husk she had vacated for the duration of your tedious enquiry. It was amazing how long she could remain thus distanced, eyes fixed on some invisible horizon. But it was not her Indian Stoic gaze I encountered then. It was more Evasive Bad Faith with a Vengeance. She knew something, all right. Something she knew I had a need to know, something at least I thought I had a need to know. Something she was not going to tell me. And I could not figure out why not. –Nothing, she said at last, wearying of that unaccustomed expression of hers. –I mind my business. –Good God Almighty, I roared –You? Mind your business? I reckon you do if you count your business as the general and unlimited affairs and goings?ons of this parish since 1920 . . . –I never said I didn’t hear things. What am I suppose to do? Stuff cotton seeds in my ears? –What you are supposed to do right now is tell me what I need to know before I have to go over and tell a woman she’s going to lose her husband all right, but not the way she thinks she is. That’s what you’re supposed to do. I believed I could see the onset of the Indian Stoic gaze. –No you don’t, I said quickly, before she could establish it. –You go off on me this time and I’m going to Colorado to fish this afternoon. And you can stay here yourself and tell Loreen Wendell what somebody has got to tell her . . . It was a weak and sorry sally but it was the best I could come up with just then. Rowena came on back, frowned, and poured us both some more coffee. –It ain’t my place . . . –Your place is whatever you decide it is. You just don’t want to have to do it. You’re just like Billy. You want to wish it off on me, and that’s all right, fine. Somewhere along the line of succession to bitter tasks and awful visitations my name has got to come up and I’m not going to argue with you for pride of place. But if I’m going to tell her, I’m going to be able to answer whatever she asks, you hear? –Sure I hear. You yelling like that. You know what you need to know whether you think you do or not. It wasn’t like they was shacked up or nothing. It wasn’t no romance . . . –Are you telling me you know whether the two of them . . . –I never said I knew nothing. You doing all the talking. I don’t know what they done, but I do know what it meant. If strangers is freezing in the woods, they gonna move close together . . . Ain’t they? Indeed they are. Which was probably good enough to go to Loreen with, since it had to be, because I could not see myself probing Billy any deeper for details even if he had been awake. But not good enough for me with my own need to know, outrunning duty and obligation, telling me I had not quelled that fantasy. Not yet. Not quite yet. –All right. But how did they meet? How did whatever it was get started? Rowena shook her head. –Never mind. Loreen ain’t gonna ask that. –I’m asking . . . –Ah, Rowena said, and spoke no more. Loreen was alone when I got there. She had been drinking a little, but it was still early and she had just gotten done with the kids so she was not pie-eyed. She had not even yet turned on the TV to search for some serial telling a story exactly like hers. She had had just enough liquor to take the bare edge off a terrible pain–as when you have suffered a great injury or made an awful mistake or lost somebody who was your whole world. On each count, I knew precisely how she must feel. I got her up and moving and we walked out over the barren fields amidst cotton stubble and soybean roots left drying in the autumn sun. She listened without a word as I told her what I had to tell her. We went on walking down to a little bayou that drained the place and fed into the lake. An old black man from one of the places nearby sat on the far bank fishing with a cane pole and worms, looking as if he had been sitting there when the land and the water, the sky and the trees had been made. He smiled and waved to us, the early sun glinting off his sweating forehead. We waved back. There were still a few leaves on the trees, a bee or two flying sluggishly between late flowering weeds, and the slow water was hazed with pollen and dust from the harvest just past –Where is he? Loreen asked, her voice hopeless and lost and dead. –He’s still with her, isn’t he? –No, I told her. –He’s over at my place. He was asleep when I left. –What about her? –I don’t know what you’re asking me. What is it you want to know? –You know her, don’t you? –Some. She works for a friend of mine. –Then you have to know why he went to her when he found out. Instead of coming home to me. It was not a question. It was a statement of fact. A mistaken statement of fact but a statement still. I knew it was going to come to that, had known it going in. Perhaps because I knew Loreen or because, being some kind of lawyer, whatever else, I knew that the one question, the single issue certain to be raised by the other side, was the one you had not prepared for. I had never seen it fail. It is a cardinal rule of the game. What game? You name it. –No, I said pausing, reaching down to draw up a handful of that rich soil that had sustained us and all our forebears for a hundred and fifty years and more. –No, I don’t know that. I know why he didn’t-couldn’t-talk to you. I don’t know why he picked her. Maybe because he hadn’t gone to grade school and high school and college with her, married her and made love for the first time with her, watched her children grow. Maybe because be didn’t love her at all . . . We walked on. There were cattle grazing up against a levee that was supposed to protect the land from the Red River that almost never threatened. A line of denuded cottonwoods shivered in a sudden distant burst of wind that neither of us could feel. –It doesn’t matter, does it, Loreen said. That wasn’t a question either. I relaxed a little and shook my head. I doubt she could sense my relief. She was paying me no mind by then. The messenger ceases to be of interest when the horror of his telling is absorbed, carried stinging to the heart. –Rowena thinks youall should go off somewhere for a little, I said. –She’s coming over to see to the children anyhow . . . Loreen nodded. –Why don’t you come over to my place to see him, I said. –It might be easier . . . –You’re not going to be home? she asked matter-of-factly. –No, I’ve got business in town. –Gee? she asked, her mind not on the question. –That’s coming along. There’s nothing to worry about. Loreen smiled. She did not especially appreciate ironies. She simply recognized them. –Nothing to worry about. That’s good, she said. –You going back by the house first? –I can. –No. Never mind. I’ll go. No need sending notes back and forth the way we used to do in the fifth grade when we first . . . Without any warning, she burst into tears. She began weeping as if her life had been torn to shreds and handed back to her piece by piece so that she could examine all the years, each day, every hour the two of them had spent together and see that none of them had meant what she supposed they did, that each and every one of them had been pointed like a black-feathered shaft toward this enormous bull’s-eye just arrived. With zero at the center. I held her, trying not to think of anything, least of all this living sobbing target of anguish in my arms. After a few minutes she drew back, made use of my handkerchief. –I guess I’ll have to cry for the sixth grade and the seventh, the eighth, the ninth . . . Lord God, do you know how many days and nights I’ve got to mourn for . . . –Yes, I said. –I have an idea. She kissed me quickly. –Of course you do, she said, and started back across toward the house walking quickly, not meaning for me to follow. Either because she was in a hurry to go to Billy, to collect even more hours and days to mourn–or because she did not want to visit upon me the next gust of pain when it came, as surely it would, as hard and wrenching as the first. On the far side there was a fisherman in a wooden bateau moving slowly through pools of sun and shade, paddling with one hand from beside a fallen tree to a patch of hyacinth leaves floating clustered in the shadows, bunched close to shore. He was silent in his work, casting a lure out to tremble on the motionless surface, to twitch a time or two, then dive and run beneath the tiny waves farther out where wind chopped the deeper water, the vexed reflecting darkness, sending across to me a thousand splinters of mirrored sunlight. What I wanted out of the afternoon was a sign. I wanted to see in that nameless distant fisherman whom I could not recognize but doubtless knew, some fusion of us all–my people, myself, old W. D., Will D. and Alethia, Billy, Loreen, Gee. Victoria. I wanted to want nothing but the assurance that no matter who of us came or went, the land, the water, the sun and trees would stand forever with one–any One–to perceive them, to treasure them above the distant sweating cacophonous self-betrayed bricked and girdered and asphalted other anonymity that could not possibly stand. So I reckoned. But in fact I wanted more. I could sense how the spinning rig would feel under my hand, the smooth gliding boat beneath me. I could feel the small minnow dancing at the end of my line and the power deep in the water that might reach suddenly up into the light, take down the minnow and begin the soundless struggle again. He’s not doing it right, I heard myself whispering to myself. Damn it, you’ve got to get in close, you have to brush the shore, risk the bait. You can’t just stand off and throw . . . You see? I was not so retired, so withdrawn as I had thought. Even that elegant empty room within begged for occupancy, for music, for laughter and voices, the sound of wine being poured, a sigh, a smile. I walked back up to the jeep and sat there in the sun for a long time like a turtle on a stump. I could not make out whether I was confused or ashamed. Most likely both. Or was it in some sense neither. I was surely coming to doubt the possibility of moving aside and watching the world and time go on as I stood by. Observing. Something Einstein had proved with the special theory: there are no privileged observers. The observer is part of the observation. Not because he wishes to be or chooses to be: because he must be. Because he is the observation. Observation? Revelation? Such thinking did not help and it occurred to me that if that college boy in the van should happen upon me now, he would surely think once more that I was in need of help. And this time he would be right. It was close to sundown when I headed into town. The air was beginning to cool, that incipient chill flowing out from the shadows to usurp those territories given over by the sun. I was wearing an old and shaggy flight jacket Alethia had given me years before. It had belonged to Will D. He had forgotten it in the rush of departure at the end of his last furlough. She had sent it on to him, but it had arrived too late. They had sent it back with the rest of his things. I made a mental note to give it to Billy if he and Loreen decided to take a trip. After all, it had proven luckier than its owner. When I reached the apartment complex it was already dark and the wind was rising. A voice on the jeep radio said a new cold front was on the way, that the fine weather was over and that a line of rain and thunderstorms would be coming in from the northwest again. I believed it was so. You could smell the moisture in the air. That was all right. I didn’t mind the prospect of driving back to the country in the rain. I almost welcomed it. Rowena would go hog-wild at the very prospect, but a finely wrought martini and a warm fire would take care of me. Rain or no rain, I expected I would be able to use both of those by the time I got back home. Rowena was too careful of me. If you are that careful, you may get your own unspoken wish. You may live for a long long time. It took some walking to find Terry’s apartment. It was a little cubbyhole of a place under a stairway, but the single front window was large and looked out on a pint-sized swimming pool in the courtyard. The pool was lit from under the water, and I could tell that it was heated by the swirls of mist that rose from the water and shimmered away. In a week or so they would turn off the heat, let the water cool. It would be too cold to swim then, even on sunny afternoons. When I found her door, I paused. I reckon I always pause at such times. If I have no insight into human frailty as Victoria accused, at least I have a sense of epoch, I know when things are about to change. No, that’s wrong. I do not know. I am already in some sense on the far side of the change looking backward, seeing the future as history, imbibed, ingested, lived with, grasped, reduced to a utensil of the mind, even though I cannot specify a detail of its contents. It doesn’t take a weatherman. I began my retirement in spirit the day Victoria’s tests came back from the laboratory. Now something else was happening, about to happen. I could not yet say what it was, could not even speculate on the destiny buried in that future. But if I knocked, it would be opened to me, I was convinced, and nothing would be the same again. I had brought myself to that blank door pretending I needed still to know more of what had passed between her and Billy. As if I were still confronted with the task of explaining to Loreen why she had been suffering for months past. As if, failing to know all, I could say nothing. Which had never been true and now was not even a theoretical need since the task of explaining was behind me and by now Billy and Loreen were back together demanding nothing of one another, such demands as they yet might have directed toward a tenuous future they must face together–of which nothing can be demanded at all. So I had not come in pursuance of some avuncular duty to Billy and Loreen. I had come for myself. If there remained a need to know, it was my need, not theirs. Thus I paused to think on my need, to judge, if I could, whether it was a need that should be responded to or simply one more appetite to be set aside. Nothing was revealed as I stood there. I smiled to myself. Why should the messenger stand awaiting a message of his own? From that room somewhere inside me, hidden in the jumble of years, there came nothing but silence. Even my appetites stilled themselves, paused hushed with me. Waiting. Listening. Then my hand was raised and I had crossed over the boundary of that epoch, knocking on a door I had never stood before, wondering whence came the power for the raising, the knocking. In the wake of the knock, there was nothing but silence. I knocked again. The same. I found myself blushing and forlorn to have made so much of a single visit to a young lady who might be supposed to be lonely and thoughtful this night, a closer than close friend having been called back to his own particular destiny. My hand was raised to knock a third time. Poised but not knocking. I had no need of an epoch in my life, did I? I had need of quietude and the lake, long evenings involved in shadow and music, reaching out to touch every past except my own. But as I started to turn away, I heard from somewhere a voice that in the absence of anyone else nearby, must be directed at me. –She’s not there. She’s . . . gone away. On a long trip . . . I don’t think she’s coming back . . . I turned to look for the source of the voice. The courtyard was dark. Only the light from the pool itself welled up to illuminate the blank walls of the surrounding buildings thick with ivy, broken in their monotony here and there by a lighted window behind which nothing could be seen. –Are you referring to Miss Novis? I asked no one. The silence went on so long I wondered if I had actually heard anything before. I was dog-tired, a little lightheaded again, breakfast long since drained of its strengthening power. Perhaps that voice had risen from within me. Perhaps it had been the message I had sought, expected, all day long. –Oh, the voice came at last. –It’s . . . you . . . I managed to fix its origin that time and walked toward a huddle of lawn chairs and recliners near the deep end of the pool. She was hunched in one of the chairs turned away from her apartment as if indeed she had already begun a journey. The glow of the pool was on her face, pearly, lurid, shaking as the autumn breeze thrilled the water. She did not look up when I walked over but continued to stare into the pool, trying to discern the source of the light down there. –He’s home now, she said quietly, her voice distanced, choral in sound, as if it were disembodied, too. –Yes. No, he’s at my place. Loreen is with him. They needed to be alone. –Alone, she repeated. –Is that what people need? –I don’t know. I used to think . . . – . . . you needed to be alone? You were right. That’s what we need. If we’re alone long enough everything will be fine . . . I sat down on one of the loungers. I did not look at the pool. It seemed in that surrounding darkness to be hypnotic. Across the way, amidst the curled and knotted ivy, one of the windows was dark. There must be people behind such windows, I thought. People together, people alone. I almost wanted to think about them, but I was thinking of her. –I am going away, you know, Terry said after a while. –I wrote a letter to the judge . . . –Where would you go? I asked her. –Back to Plain Dealing? She shuddered, shook her head. –No. There’s no one back there. Everyone knows me and it doesn’t matter. My folks are gone. They stay out in the Shady Grove cemetery now . . . The boy I used to go with married somebody from El Dorado, and they live in Corpus Christi . . . In the distance I heard thunder. The wind rose a little more, and the water of the pool shivered, its luminosity shaking across her features, making her look as if she were about to cry. –It’s hard to find a place to go . . . –I think you should stay. –Why? You know, I started to leave a while back . . . I really did. I almost left. Then Billy . . . She stopped talking, and I couldn’t start. I felt as I had standing before her door, waiting to see if my hand would raise, my knuckles move forward to knock. A long time ago, I had simply done things. Now it seemed I waited. Perhaps I had forgotten in my loneliness how to do things, say things of any consequence. Or perhaps I had come, even as a judge, before my retirement, to realize the immutability, the gravity of things done and said. You made . . . all this, I thought, looking not at Terry but at the opposite blank shadowed wall crazed with patterns of ivy. Only one lighted window remained and the sound of the thunder was close then and of differing pitch like that of tuned tympanies. Terry looked up at the dark sky. –Is it going to rain? Did they say anything about rain? –I believe so. –And you’ve got that silly jeep . . . –It doesn’t matter. –Of course it matters. Don’t you see? You shouldn’t get wet and cold . . . you could . . . I didn’t look away then. My eyes caught hers and I could tell it was not the dappled pattern of the pool that made her appear to be crying. I saw that she was wearing only a thin summer robe pulled tight around her, arms locked across her chest. Her legs were bare far up her thighs, her feet curled under her. I noticed how her legs seemed to glow in the diffused light from the pool. I realized that she must be cold. I took off the old Army Air Corps jacket and put it around her shoulders as one might do for any lovely young woman in such a circumstance. But then I realized that I wasn’t doing it for a nameless cold young woman and it was all I could do to keep from taking her up into my arms, caressing her luminous thighs, telling her what had been happening to me in my loneliness and what I had been waiting impatiently for. But, ever the counselor, I compromised. –I wish you wouldn’t leave, I said as diffidently as I could. But the night wind and the moisture in the air had filled my throat and the words did not sound diffident, commonplace at all. Just then I felt a drop of rain on my forehead and saw another drop fall like a tear on Terry’s thigh. Before either of us could move, the storm had arrived and the surface of the pool seemed to turn into a translucent cauldron, bubbling, steaming, flaring as icy rain spattered down into the warm water. I pulled her up from the lawn chair, drew her close, and then we were running for cover together, out of the storm. –You’re soaked, she said. –You have to dry those clothes. Take them off. I have a robe you can . . . –I’m not on furlough from an old folks’ home, I told her testily. –And I don’t need his goddamned robe . . . I think she smiled then. Her back was to the wall heater and all I could see was the remarkable silhouette of someone with long auburn hair in a flight jacket with a frowsy fur collar and what looked like a skirt that almost reached the floor. Her hand was still outstretched and she took the shirt I handed her and put it on the back of a chair near the wall heater. She leaned down toward that warm glow as she arranged the khaki shirt so it would dry, and her face and hair were for an instant a composition done by some anonymous Flemish master, a perfect profile shining in dark tones that of right should not shine at all. Then she turned toward me and there was still glow enough to see that she was smiling for sure. –I’ll have the pants now, she said. She made coffee and we drank it sitting near the warm dark light of the heater. The storm had not eased and it was so cold outside now that we had closed the door and raised the single wide front window just enough so that we could hear the rain falling. I was wrapped in a loathsome plaid robe bought at Penney’s or Sears, pulled off a rack for utility’s sake, God knows, and not for love. –I don’t want you to leave, I said again when we had settled down. I was in a chair. She had found herself a place on the floor just outside the range of the heater’s glow. I could see her there, even make out her face, but nuances of expression were hazed, indecipherable. Her face was in shadow. I expect she knew that. –Have you got more work for me? she asked. It sounded like a sensible question the way she asked it. I almost answered, but then something came to mind. Perhaps it was that luscious pink glow on her long legs. I rose, took a step or two toward her, and lifted her into the light. –Don’t make me say any more than I’m ready to say right now, I told her. –And don’t pretend you’ve got any place to go. You didn’t put a letter on George Wesley’s desk and you weren’t going to mail him one, either. You were going to let them find it . . . I couldn’t believe what I was saying. No, that’s wrong. I believed it all right. I was mortally certain of it. I just couldn’t believe I was saying it. Her head snapped away as if I had slapped her. If I had harbored any doubt about the nature of her travel plans, it vanished then like steam from the surface of the pool. –Judge, please . . . –My name is Al, and I’m not a judge any more. If I didn’t stop when Victoria died, I did when I stepped through the door of Gee’s cabin. I impeached myself right then. When I came out, I was an advocate again. Right now I’m not even that. I’m not judging, and I’m not lawyering. I think I’m . . . trying to save two lives. –There’s nothing to save, Terry said softly. She might have used the same tone to say I love you. –Yes there is. I don’t mean keep from dying. Nobody can do that. I meant . . . save life. Make something of it while it’s here. Nobody ought to die until they’re . . . – . . . dead. –That’s right, I said, and drew her to me and kissed her, trying to send across the barriers of years and situation and even flesh itself what I was feeling for the first time. The first time in years? No. Because it is never the same and whatever you may have felt you will not feel again for better or worse. For the very first time. Which is what I had not realized and which was blowing open the pain-barred doors of that room, that conservatory within, with no hesitation, no possibility of profanation at all because this was, once more, the very first time. She kissed me, too. But it was like a feeble ray tossed from a distant star. By the time it reached me, only the form remained. It was not nearly enough to preserve life. Either she had not heard me, I thought, or had not cared. She turned in my arms slowly, her face averted from the heater’s glow. –Wasn’t there anything you wanted to ask me? –Was there supposed to be something? I answered, pressing down the guilt, the bad faith. –Didn’t you come . . . wanting to know about Billy and me? –I didn’t ask you, did I? –I think you got . . . put off. I could tell when you said what you said . . . about his robe. –That was stupid and I didn’t mean it, and it hasn’t got anything to do with . . . –Yes it does. You want to know how we met and . . . –He had some suit about tractors in federal court . . . –We met at the P&S Clinic . . . –All right, I said, my voice not faltering at all, –so it was the clinic instead of court . . . But I was seeing Rowena’s face before me, that utterly unfamiliar expression on it. I could hear her again not telling me anything. –We . . . had the same doctor. I almost answered again. As in the hedgerows and lonely snow-filled country roads of France, we talked and talked to push away what we feared most. But she turned back to face me then, her eyes hard and glittering, and before she could say anything else, I already knew more than I wanted to know. Almost more than I could bear. Rowena had done right. I could hear the rain still failing outside. I could even hear the element in the wall heater crackling as it took the current, transformed it, and sent forth its mechanical warmth. I could hear her breathing and mine. –He was standing in the hall outside Dr. Tom Smith’s office. He was . . . crying. I thought, Oh God, it’s got him too. He’s so big and strong. Nothing like this has ever happened to him before. If someone doesn’t . . . he might . . . She drank cold coffee from the cup. Outside the rain faltered, slackened. It made her voice seem louder. –So I spoke to him and we had supper, and I told him what . . . what it had done to me . . . She broke off, hand trembling, to take another sip she didn’t want. Then she laughed. Not a bitter laugh. Only distant and emotionless, another garbled transmission from a nameless star. –So he came home with me and we talked all night and I told him what you just said. I told him we should live . . . until we die. She put down the cup so hard I recoiled from the harsh hollow clatter. –Then we saw each other a lot. Sometimes, if it got too late, he’d spend the night there on the sofa . . . He needed me so much, I . . . I changed my travel plans . . . She walked to the window then and stared out toward the pool which had grown almost calm as the rain tapered off. Even as she stood there, the lights in the pool went out, quenched by some unseen hand or a timing device equally invisible. –And that’s how we . . . made love. Some kind of love. The ruined helping the dying. The mutilated caring for the doomed. Oh hell, the dead burying the dead . . . She began to cry softly then, and it may be that I did too. That is the risk Cromwell runs when he steps down from the bench, no longer demanding penances when the appearances are not, cannot possibly be, saved. –She didn’t have very much to be jealous about, Terry said finally. –Not much at all. Or to be jealous of, either . . . –Terry . . . –Please, Judge . . . Al . . . There isn’t anything else. I did what I could and he’s going to be . . . what? –All right, I said. –All right. She can do for him now. But . . . I tried to draw her to me, but she pulled away. –No, I can’t. It was . . . They took everything, everything . . . She turned and her arms dropped to her sides. For the first time I realized that her robe lay across her chest as Billy’s did across mine. –There’s nothing left, don’t you see? Billy wanted to . . . He . . . I don’t have anything left. If there was . . . –Christ Jesus, do you think that matters? –I know it does. It matters a lot. It’s been months and nothing’s happened. But it could. They might have to come back and take . . . They could take a little more time after time . . . She shuddered, supporting herself against the window casement. Behind her, in the strengthless pale light from outside, the steam still eddied up from the darkened pool, vanished in the cold night. –I should have made that trip a long time ago . . . –Don’t you reckon there’s always time enough for that? She shrugged, walked back toward the heater a little unsteadily. –I’m very very tired, Al. It’s late. Would you like to stay the night? For the shortest of moments I thought we had reached ground, that at least there was some chance, that perhaps in her very desperation she would move toward me as a kind of hopeless bitter experiment to prove to herself that her worst and most destructive suppositions were true. That would be enough. I could override that, wipe it out of her mind once and for all. There was nothing she could reveal worse than I had seen. Along distant rainy village streets where water and blood, not Christ’s but that of his children, ran into the careless gutters. At a graves registration post close to the lines, on a small road just inside a tangled hedgerow. And much more recently. But she stepped past me and started toward her bedroom. –I’ll bring you a blanket. It’s a foldout couch. –I’d rather we stay together. –No, you don’t. You really wouldn’t. It would . . . make you feel the way it does me. She brought a blanket and stood for a moment looking at me. –I just want to say . . . If there was anyone, she began awkwardly. –But there isn’t . . . Goodnight . . . No, none of that. Rather I was in dark woods with the snow falling. Before dawn or after twilight, I could not tell. Down the ridge to my right I could hear firing. Not a shotgun or even a deer rifle but automatic weapons fire. I realized that these were not my woods at all, that the looming trees were larch and some odd kind of fir, birches and lindens and elms. Down there I could see smoke and tiny wrecked vehicles and the brief red spatter of muzzle blasts. As I came off the ridge and drew closer, I thought I could hear the deep bass of a Browning Automatic Rifle, but when I came to the final precipitous slope, all the firing stopped and it became so quiet that after a few moments I could hear the snow whispering into the laden branches above, a branch somewhere cracking suddenly under the weight of the collected fall and the burden of snow crashing through lower branches as it fell downward to the ground. In my dream, I had reached the bottom of the ridge by then. I was running and the freezing air was almost past bearing in my lungs, but there was something I had to stop, keep from happening. Something that had not happened yet–that might not happen at all if I could run fast enough, if I was true enough to what I knew, to what I believed, to what I had always supposed I was. Just ahead there was a burned-out truck, tents blasted into ribbons, bodies in army winter brown fallen in the posture of their last moment, thrown out of the world as unconscionably as they had been flung into it. A lone man stood unsteadily at the front of an enormous silent tank marked by a black cross outlined in eerie white. He was surrounded by bodies in the black blood-soaked uniforms of SS Panzer Grenadiers. He was breathing hard, leaning over trying to stanch a steady flow of blood from his leg even though the blood was steaming and beginning to freeze as he labored. He looked up as I came near and smiled. I was kneeling beside him, winding the tourniquet tight when we heard the sound of a motor approaching. I knew who was coming, who had been coming for thirty years. I knew what was going to happen. I pulled Gee away from the tank and tried to get him moving back toward the ridge, back up into the forest. He told me he was tired, that we should wait for help, but I told him there was no help. We had only each other. I told him I had to hurry because I would not be done even if by some miracle I should interrupt history on this snow-filled afternoon. Somewhere, somewhen above those leaden clouds there was a B-17 that had already fallen that I must try to find before it fell. But Gee was drifting. He could not focus his attention or walk properly, and we staggered on. The sound of the motor grew louder until it seemed I could hear the very sequence of each piston firing. I had Gee’s arm over my shoulder and I was struggling upward though the thigh-deep snow. But I already knew that it was no use, that history is not to be defeated and that even some outrageous intervention such as this would be incorporated into its fabric as if it had never taken place outside Gee’s fevered dreams. All right, I thought, let it be. Perhaps now I know why Victoria and I had no children. Because I never got back. Because I vanished from my unit in France and died in the snow somewhere in Belgium fighting, not for a packet of slogans mouthed by advertising men in uniforms, but for my own people. One of them at least. Then ahead of us, out of the falling snow, I saw my own jeep materialize. It cut us off from the ridge, from the forest where no one could find us. I tried to run but Gee could not keep up. If I was to escape, I would have to leave him and there had already been too much of that. Not this time. Not now. From out of the jeep stepped a young officer in an American uniform, a submachine gun cradled in his arms. Even in the lengthening shadows, through the failing snow, I could see that it was the college boy who had been in the van under that sycamore outside the Cub half a world and more away. He looked at the two of us, glanced all around, waved one hand in an encompassing gesture that seemed to include the towering woods and the wrecked vehicles, the lately dead and the falling snow, the past and the present, the bubbling cells within and the hissing galaxies beyond. –Machen Sie das alles? he asked in awe and anger. –You made all this? With only Gee’s weight to hold me there, I was bound to that truth which we avoid until the last instant if we are wise–and then disclaim no longer. –Yes, I shouted back at him, pushing Gee away from me as if I could somehow spare him what had already befallen, draw the wrath to myself who, after all, had retired. –Yes, I called out into the long darkness and the falling snow as the submachine gun rose from the vertical to exact penalty for my injustice. According to the ordinance of time. –It’s ours, every grain, every atom . . . We made it all . . . I awoke sitting up as the bullets fell on me like rain, their sound muffled and distant, that icy tingling piercing my spine once more. I was on the sofa, eyes wide, covered with sweat gone cold. The wall heater had cut off and outside the drip of rain off the roof thudded into the soil with the regular staccato pulse of bullets finding some soft target. –Machen Sie das alles, I called out hoarsely, and in the very depth of my horror, if history was not repealed, annulled, defeated, at least it was resolved. Steam still rose from the pool but the glow was gone. On the walls ivy grew thick and rich, abundant and deepest green against the dark bricks. Drops of water quivered on the shimmering leaves. The air was astringent, sharp against my face as I moved through the semi-darkness. At last I saw a single frame of light snap on in a window as a riser, not quite so early as I, came to himself and began preparing for the new shape of the world he was about to encounter–and create. In that early twilight even the scattered bulk of the apartment buildings appeared to offer some legend of mystery as if they were peopled by souls gestating, musing, waiting to return with the new day to do better than before. But the sun rose in its time and dispelled such fictions. A garbage truck grunted up the alley behind, wrecked the silence as it absorbed yesterday’s waste. A boy on a bicycle with huge baskets before and behind whisked silently down the cement walks tossing papers onto the shallow porches, dodging puddles of rainwater, slapping screen doors every time. At six thirty I went back. Terry was up and dressed. The wall heater purred and a rush of fresh chill air accompanied me inside. The tiny table at one side of the kitchen was set for two. –I knew you’d be back, she said. –You wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. –No, I wouldn’t I said. –I wouldn’t leave at all if it weren’t for . . . –It’s the third day. –Yes. It’s the third day. And it’s over with. –You won’t be filing the petition. –No need. Every puzzle unravels, every game concludes. Every lie and illusion runs out of steam. Terry laughed quietly. –You sound as if you’re threatening the very constitution of the world. What would be left if there were nothing but . . . truth? –Enough . . . –Or less . . . She sat drinking her coffee, eating a slice of toast. She was dressed in a black clinging wool suit with a lamb collar. Her complexion was fresh and clear and the dewiness around her eyes seemed only to enhance their depth, their beauty. It seemed she had put off the night, taken on the new day. –I think I really will go away, she said lightly. –I have a cousin in Baton Rouge . . . –Billy has one in Carthage. –Another place, a different world . . . I got up and started for the door. It appeared the brand-new epoch was ending. I pulled on the flight jacket again, feeling much older than I had two days before. Even with the solution of some part of our collective sorrow in hand, it seemed to me that I was doomed now to go through certain motions for an undisclosed length of time, no longer even able to claim that they were motions I had chosen, that whatever the time’s length, it suited me well enough. I would see Waring, visit with Billy and Loreen when they got back, go out and spend time with Gee, and retire once more. I did not dread it. I was only sorry for it. –It’s the same world, Terry, I said. –And I’m not even sure there’s more than two of us in it. She came to the door after me and I kissed her as easily, as warmly, as unself-consciously as if we had lived together for eons, as if she had always been the one, the only one. As if, in a few hours, I would return and she would be there. –Thank you, she said, her hand cool on my cheek. –If I could, it would be . . . you. It would have always been you . . . since that morning when I heard the music . . . –The music is still playing, I told her, and turned and walked down the drying concrete path to my jeep. I walked upstairs into the Federal Building realizing that I felt, despite everything, if not renewed at least justified. I believed I had found the solution to Gee’s recollection–that third possibility, and I expected I’d likely be able to convince Waring of it. As to Gee, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. We had made no agreement as to where or even when to meet, but I headed toward the court library as if I might be running late for a conference neither of us agreed to. Sure enough, Michael Waring was waiting, glancing at his watch as if he had expected me twenty minutes before. Then he saw me and his grin was mischievous, triumphant and warm all at once. –Otto Skorzeny, we both said simultaneously. –Well, I’ll be damned, he said next, a little disappointed. –You’ve got buddies in the historical section of Army Intelligence. –No, I answered, trying to hold my own exultation within bounds. –I had a dream . . . For the next two hours we went through the materials that had been couriered down from Washington. It was incredible the amount of detail that had been brought together in connection with that scarcely remembered episode of an ancient war. Far more than we had need of. There was even a book about Otto Skorzeny, SS Lieutenant Colonel, who had led paratroopers to free Mussolini–and who had then been given the task of putting together a unit of SS troops whose knowledge of English and of American ways was such that, in American uniforms, they would be able to infiltrate our positions just prior to Von Rundstedt’s great offensive of 16 December 1944 and play havoc behind the lines. And they had. Not enough to make the attack successful. That had probably been impossible from the start. But enough to wreck communications, to make American units shoot at one another. Enough to send Gaspard Penniwell into a pit of hatred and mistrust from which he had never emerged. –What happened to them when they were captured? Waring shrugged. –Some they took prisoner and sent back to G-2. Some they shot. You have to understand . . . there were two hundred and fifty thousand armed men wandering around in the Ardennes. No one on our side knew what was going on for certain. Skorzeny’s boys were the frosting on the cake, and Mr. Penniwell had the bad luck to run smack into a squad of them . . . –Gee remembered exactly what the lieutenant said . . . Waring’s eyes widened when I told him. –You’re right. No American would say it that way. He couldn’t . . . –No, I said. –He just couldn’t . . . We sat there staring at the pile of photostats and reports spread out in front of us. –Well, Waring said, –maybe the sonofabitch is in there somewhere . . . It doesn’t matter, does it? We can’t find him because we wouldn’t know it if we did find him. –That’s true, I said. –Whoever he was, his tracks are covered. Waring frowned for a moment. Then he began assembling the documents. –You want to take all this stuff out to Mr. Penniwell? he asked. –I reckon. He’s not going to read it, but it looks official, like somebody worked hard. –You have to work hard to stay even with a dream, Waring laughed. Then he turned serious. –Do you think I could go out with you? I mean, to see Mr. Penniwell? –Sure, I said, taking the petition out of my briefcase, tearing it in two and handing him the halves. –What the hell? The worst he’s likely to do is shoot us both for trespassing . . . But you’d better follow me out in your rent-car or whatever you’ve got. I won’t be coming back to town. I may not ever come into town again. Michael Waring looked at me curiously as he finished tearing the halves I had handed him into smaller pieces and sifted them into a wastebasket. –I’m retired, I told him. –I don’t have any business in town. –There’s more than that, he said. –You’re not really convinced about the German infiltrators doing it to Mr. Penniwell, are you? I sat back down and spread my hands on the conference tabletop. –It’s a fine solution, I said slowly. –It forces, coerces history into making sense. It’s an ending you could put on a war movie . . . –Well then . . . ah, and you don’t believe things work that way? –My experience has been otherwise, I said bleakly. –I know my own treasons and shames. Goddamnit, there’s an SS man lurking in all of us, waiting for . . . his time . . . –So you still believe it was an American? –No, I said, thinking of the blond young college boy who had filled in for the lieutenant in my dream. –I just believe it . . . could have been. –But what he said, that phrase . . . Machen Sie . . . –What if Gee missed the last word? –Huh? –What if that lieutenant really said, You made all this mess? Something like that? Waring stared at me in silence. Then he hit the table with his fist in frustration. –All right, all right. Yes, an American might have said that. But that’s not what Mr. Penniwell heard, is it? I shook my head. –I only wish I could rule out every answer but the SS. Michael Waring suddenly reached across the table and touched my hand. I couldn’t figure out why he was smiling so angelically. –If that’s what you need, then it’s all right, he said. –You can. –Can what? –Whoever did it was . . . an SS man. Most likely German. I saw what he meant and smiled back at him. –Theirs or ours . . . an SS man. We both stood up then, impulsively shaking hands, beaming as if we two lawyers had accomplished some great settlement between us. –Have we got our story together? Are we ready to go see Mr. Penniwell? Michael asked. –I believe we do, I answered, –I believe we are, and we walked out of the library side by side. –Uh-huh, Gee would put in every now and then, his thin fingers shuffling aimlessly through the documents laid out on the old table. Michael Waring, being a professional, could sense how mild Gee’s interest was. Even I was surprised. Once, as Waring was trying to show him on a map the areas of penetration of Skorzeny’s counterfeit Americans, Gee rose, wandered over to his cupboard, and brought back a jar of whiskey and three jelly glasses. He poured us drinks, still politely listening. Outside in the sun the little girl, warmly dressed in an electric blue sweater so outsize that it hung down almost to the ground, was chasing the feist, rolling in the pine needles. –You better have a sip, Gee told Waring. –You must be dry by now. Michael, trying to oblige, his mind locked on his matter, tossed off the half glass of liquor in one draft. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Michael was sitting silent, eyes wide, as if it had come to him that he had not really mastered that welter of material spread before us, that he had yet to contemplate it all in the light of larger meanings. –Well, I picked up for him, not wanting the effect, such as it was, to be diminished by Michael’s enforced silence, –you know what we know. It wasn’t an American who did it. It was an SS trooper. –Uh-huh . . . –By his lights, he was doing his duty. When he saw all those German soldiers you’d cut down . . . –Yeah . . . –So it’s over and done with, I said like a fool. –It wasn’t one of us . . . Gee smiled, reached over and patted my shoulder. –This is nice, he said softly. –I mean youall going to all this trouble . . . –No trouble, Mr. Penniwell, Michael choked out at last, giving me an evil stare for not warning him about Gee’s whiskey. –You had it coming. An explanation . . . Gee nodded. –Mostly, that’s how you get stuff explained. Afterward. Folks don’t explain nothing. They just do what they do . . . and leave it with you. I know I blushed in that dim light. As Gee looked to me for confirmation, I nodded, eyes averted. Who would know that better than I? I could see once more W. D. Wendell dead on a hospital bed between us, I in my bright uniform turning away. Perhaps it had not been an American who shot Gee. But an American betrayed him, stepped away from him, long before the snows fell on that dark forest in which SS men pretended to be Americans. –It was over and done with that very day, Gee said dreamily. –Over and done with . . . I see that now. He rose and walked to the door. There in the shadow cast by the porch roof, it was cool. That sweet Indian summer had run its course. It would be winter soon. The winds would blow from the northwest, the leaves would fly, the grass fade, go yellow and brittle, the days shorten, the nights grow interminable. All of it whirling away in the waning of another year: those old days before the war, the men and women who had shaped our lives, the friends, the enemies. I stood beside Gee thinking how cold history is, how our memories lie to us of warm remembrance and tender days. All at last to be covered, blurred by a snow-filled night without end called history. But Gee was having no such thoughts. He was watching the little girl. She was his niece, he told Michael. From over near Gladewater in East Texas. Her whole family had been killed in a highway crash with a cotton truck. Only the damned feist had survived. Gee was all the people she had. She was up in the low branches of an almost leafless gum tree then. Down below, the feist yapped desperately for his friend, abandoned, wanting to be lifted up. –You know, Gee said after a while, –I ain’t surprised. –What? –I mean, it being a German. Looking back on it, it couldn’t of been no American. I mean, I should of known. Coming up with you and Will D., what with old man W. D. making me his foreman and giving me this land . . . I ought to be ashamed being a fool all those years . . . I said nothing. Michael was on his feet coming toward us and that gave me an excuse to step back inside and pour myself one more drink. In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good, I heard welling up out of the cold and motionless images of our drastic past like a single flower in the soil of the moon. Who had said it to me? Not Victoria, who was too cool and wise to suppose people were good when she had had to contend with her own beloved Cromwell and the vicious lunatics trooping through his court who made his ironsides temperament a necessity. Not, God knows, Rowena who not only knew, intuited, suspected at all times the basest possibilities of the species and might even derive some dire and shameless glee from the awful exactitude of her predictions. I could not recall where I had heard it. Before Michael Waring and Gee. –No, Gee was telling Waring as I downed my drink and shivered. –No, I don’t believe. I got stuff to do. I got land to tend to. We got a squirrel season coming up, second half of the dove season right on us. I know you folks up there don’t believe it, but we got stuff to do down here . . . –I’m sorry, he was saying over a chilled martini that was more his style than Gee’s corn. –I guess I had to go out there and hear him say it . . . I just couldn’t believe it. I thought you people were leaning on him. –There’s a lot of misunderstanding, I said drily. –I guess there is. Still, can’t he see what this would mean? –I don’t think Gee has a lot of interest in public relations. –But damnit, the Movement . . . he ought to think of his people . . . –I don’t know that he ever heard of your Movement, I said, trying to keep my voice level, free of antagonism. –And we’re his people. Whatever we’ve done to one another, for one another. No matter what the politicians and the lunatics want to make of it . . . He sat silent, sipping his drink. –I guess what we have here is a special case. –Too bad you think so. That means the rest of youall are exiles. Black, white . . . a political gang isn’t a people. Is it? He looked sullen. –That’s how it’s done. It’s always been that way. Power is . . . –Piss-poor way. I think I’ll stick with Gee . . . which I’d have to do whether I wanted to or not. –You really love that old man, don’t you. I thought about that. Is there some bare minimum standard you have to live up to before you can even claim to love somebody else? The answer came back almost before the question was formulated: No. Because if there were, no one would and even if someone did, you would have reason to believe the motive was not love itself but the barren self aggrandizing urge to prove you were worthy of loving whether you were worthy or not. Hadn’t I already thought about that? A bad priest can give absolution, can consecrate, can administer the sacrament. A judge who has hunted injustice as if it were a fourteen-point buck to shoot and flay and consume, corrupt in his very incorruptibility, can lay claim to love by virtue of his mere humanity–which humanity is patent, made manifest and undeniable by the very character of that corruption, that hardness, that rigor that must turn inward, retire, before it acknowledges itself at last as simple anguished mistrust, the profound and immitigable conviction that we are not good, have never been good, and never shall be. World without end. Amen. –Yes, I said. –I love him. I even believe he loves me. But you shouldn’t make too much of that. We’re pieces of one another. We created one another. Day by day, together and apart . . . we made all this. Michael nodded, put down his glass. I walked him out to the porch and we shook hands. He looked very young in the afternoon light, very earnest. –I’m going to do the very best I can for him, he said. –Without the White House presentation, it’ll be . . . Never mind, let’s just see what happens . . . –It doesn’t matter, I called after him as he walked out to his car. –He’s got the little girl and me, the Wendells . . . In a week or so he’ll be taking doves home for supper. It really doesn’t matter at all . . . I thought perhaps he had not heard me. But as he reached his car, already halfway back to Washington in his mind, he turned frowning, his dark face illuminated by the sun of the late autumn afternoon. –Yes it does matter, he shouted back at me. –Yes, it sure as hell does . . . I tried Shostakovich’s string quartets and then put them away in a lower shelf alongside Schoenberg and Creston. I thought I would give them to a college music library, take a charitable deduction, and use the savings to buy Rossini or Donizetti. Surely nothing I had done was such that proper penance required a full hearing of any one of them. If I was not good, I had never worked affirmatively for wickedness. Anyhow, I knew what my punishment was to be. I understood it fully. Consecutive terms until death. Doing exactly what I wished to do. Alone. Rowena was staying at Billy and Loreen’s place. She would come over in the mornings after the children had gone to school. She would switch off the stereo, glare at me, and we would have our coffee. As the days went on, it would be darker and darker when she arrived, though the time on the clock never changed. Often she would bring along a postcard addressed to both of us. Billy and Loreen had gone to the Pacific coast of Mexico. It had been warm and dreamy and pleasant. But then, even as they nibbled on lotuses, something had come over them both. Something never spoken in the brief postcards but obvious from some subtle change in their tone, and from the fact that the latest in the series was postmarked Houston where Loreen wrote that Billy had entered M. D. Anderson Hospital for experimental treatment. Rowena and I did not discuss that. I expect it was no surprise to either of us. It was bound to happen if Billy and Loreen found anything left between them worth keeping, holding fast until the light was finally, inexorably spent. Whatever they had found, it seemed, was something worth fighting for. –That little girl is his niece, I told Rowena one morning, barely awake, holding my cup with both hands lest it spill over. –I been knowing that . . . –I guess you’ve been ashamed, too . . . –No, I ain’t. Not on your life. Not that I ain’t been ashamed before . . . but not about no little chickenshit something like that . . . –The way you low-rated Gee . . . –Listen, he ought to of let folks know. You keep to yourself that way, you got to pay. You don’t let folks know, they gonna take what they see for true . . . I just stared at her. There sat Rowena reciting her own version of Lord Mansfield’s dictum: It is not enough that justice be done. It must be seen to be done. No matter. Sooner or later, when circumstances required, I had no doubt she would enunciate for my delectation the Twelve Tables and Justinian’s Institutes. It may have been that same evening that Gee came by. I was sitting on my porch in my Air Corps jacket, taking the air and watching the sun go down. It was one of those days when cold air and distant sun seem to strike a decent compromise. With a warm government-issue jacket and a hot mug of good chicory coffee, it was fine to sit outside. Well, not fine, but good. Then I saw him coming up the road, the lowering sun behind him, the girl running ahead, and the feist out in front of both of them doing well enough with such limbs as fate had left it. He handed me a quart jar of that prime whiskey and sat down in the other chair which for one reason or another I had neglected to destroy. We talked about the weather and made plans for the squirrels. Gee told me his pasture and the old woods at the bottoms were thick with rabbits. He could use some help thinning them out. It seemed Rowena had told him she would cook whatever we managed to bring in if, indeed, men of our years and condition could be expected to bring home anything at all. I was not surprised to hear that Rowena had taken to going by Gee’s on a Friday, picking up the little girl, and keeping her till Monday. Not, she had told Gee, to free him from a task no man elderly or otherwise is even marginally fit for but because if his niece was to have any future at all, she would require the company of women and Sundays at the Free Will and Christ Rising Baptist Church, a place foreign to Gee and he a stranger to it. Then he took a small box from his pocket and handed it to me. There was a note attached with my name on it. It was from Michael Waring. It said he had done his best, had made some enemies he had not needed to make–or maybe not. Maybe he had needed to make them. He said a number of insulting and vulgar things about the bureaucracy and indicated that he was looking for a place to practice law. Shelby County, Tennessee, would be just fine, he thought. He signed the note, Affectionately, Mike. –You tell him we think kindly of him when you write, Gee said. –What makes you think I’ll write him? –You will . . . Inside the box was a military decoration. Not the Congressional Medal of Honor or the DSC or even a Silver Star. It was the Purple Heart, that beautiful decoration that bears witness to the fact that you have been wounded in battle, your blood shed for your people. –Pretty, huh? –Yes, it is . . . –You ever get one? –I can’t remember. They sent me home pretty quick. –Well, that there’s yours, Gee smiled. –Mike looked it up. Said you had one coming. Said so in the note he sent me. –But . . . what about you . . . ? –Gee pointed, and I could see pinned to the electric blue sweater of the girl another purple and gold medal like the one in my hand. I stared at the bit of metal and enamel and ribbon. –Maybe there ought to be a ceremony, I said shakily. –We’d each give one to one another. Everybody in the country . . . in the whole damned world . . . Gee laughed and rose from his chair. –Now that some idea. You write Mike about that. I believe I’d even go north to see that . . . He told me to come by when I had a mind to. The weekends were especially good. Bring my shotgun and myself. Everything else would be provided. He pulled the little girl out of a leafless mulberry tree and the feist out of some dead blackberry vines in which it had become entangled. They walked away down the dirt road that was suffused, stained deep gold by the setting sun as it sifted through gray and purple clouds. I sat in my chair for a long while and, when there was no longer any light at all and the night chill was setting in, I got up to go inside. The medal, forgotten in my lap, fell to the planking of the porch and I had to fumble for it in the dark. As I paced up and down the long booklined living room, Don Giovanni was booming on the stereo, filling the house, overflowing the world. Finally came those great chords that introduce the catastrophe: Don Giovanni, a cenar teco . . . The Commendatore is returned. The stone guest has come to claim its own, stone demanding stone, an epoch grinding to a close. Nothing, no one can stand adamant forever . . . Paint me as I am, warts and all . . . I found my flight jacket, went out, climbed into the jeep and drove into town. It was alien cold and the old German steel that had been added to my back and spine tingled as I drove. The sky was naked of cloud, each distant star hard and cold and flashing like a gem illuminated from behind. But I knew better. It was an appearance, no more. The truth of stars is that they burn, their lives tumult. Fire, a passion for fusion, consumes them. Whatever their influence may be, it is not toward judgment. Their awesome gravity draws every passing fleck of dust toward their flaming center. To be transmuted, changed, changed utterly. According to the ordinance of Time. When I reached the door of her apartment, I did not knock. No lights were on but there was a glow coming from inside. I tried to see through the door, to reach within and draw her through its cheap hollow core out into the night. But I am no star and there was nothing but silence. So I placed in her mail slot what I had come to bring and walked quickly away along the twisted concrete paths through the darkness. As I climbed back into the jeep, I noticed that the hood and windshield glittered, were covered with infinitesimal crystals of frost. We were all approaching the very bottom of the year, fires banked, sap down, life swooned and unrenewed. Then I drove back into the country, the wind on my face no colder than the breath within. I believe by then, in my own solitude, I had given over facticity once and for all. Perhaps I would not go on to Polybius and Proclus. Perhaps I would leave history behind and follow the myriad progeny of Okeanos, from whom the gods are sprung. I was thinking then that we do not keep all the promises we make ourselves, and that is likely for the best. Once long ago I had supposed I would find the very heart of justice, pluck it out and rear it up, a very gorgon’s head, to afflict the violent, the unruly, the self-indulgent, the liar, the fraud. Had I stared upon that blank face too long? Had I become one with the awful Commendatore, eyes of polished marble, heart of stone? Once long ago I had supposed that as we fish the waters, we are fished for, too–to be drawn once more into the eternity from which we emanate for reasons none of us could ever grasp. I had lost that feeling when death had undone the sutures of my life. If there is in each of us a theogony, there is as well a twilight of the gods. I put aside the book and closed my eyes and sought to evoke the waters below and the waters above in that tense instant before there were instants, when the Word was spoken by Yahweh or Ptah–or as the Veda and old Hesiod have it, before Eros arose. On the stereo, a tape of miscellaneous pieces was playing and suddenly I was hearing that distant alien sweetness that swears death is a blessing and only our nostalgia holds us here. Pavane for a Dead Princess. It struck through me like fragments of a mortar shell left over that had taken thirty years and more to find their target. I rose irritably to turn it off. I wanted shut of memories ancient and recent, remembrances that held me trapped in that frieze, that static panel called history to which I had become closer kin than to the flesh that I bore wrapped around me like a cheap and dispensable garment not my style which I would soon replace with either darkness or light–whichever, as it happened, the Manufacturer was supplying at the time. The doorbell rang before I could cut off the music. I tried to think who it might be on a dark cold night. Gee would be sleeping dreamless now. Rowena would be putting the children to bed. Billy and Loreen would be fighting side by side–instead of face to face–in Houston. Everyone else was somewhere caught in history. Weren’t they? –Is it too late? she asked when I opened the door. –Just in time, I answered, taking her into my arms as if, moments ago, we had had the silliest of quarrels and she had stalked out onto the porch, thought better of it, and turned again, knocking for admittance at our own door. I held her away from me for a moment, determined that in all the long years ahead I would never forget how she had looked this night. Then I noticed on the shoulder of her blouse that bit of metal, enamel, and ribbon–and the boyish flatness just beneath. –I mean . . . –I know what you mean . . . We kissed and the story of the birth of the gods from Eros fell from my hand. Terry started to lean down and retrieve it. –Leave it, I said. –I’ll pick it up later. We were still standing there in each other’s arms kissing and kissing again, astonished that we had come so far, when Rowena walked up onto the porch and stood in silence watching. She was wearing that old overcoat my mother had given her and her eyes shone from the light inside. I was too flustered, too taken out of myself, to read that new expression of hers. This time, I thought, she’s got you dead to rights. Her wildest fantasy in living color and captioned for the deaf. A tale to carry right across the ramparts of infinity itself into that good morning that is always only seconds away. –’Scuse me, she said in the sweetest, most complaisant of voices. –I just come from putting the children down. Billy and Loreen’s back. He doing good. Gee say he gonna see you Saturday at first light and I be by to fix some breakfast in the morning. And don’t forget to turn off that music player when youall retires . . . New Orleans, Louisiana
December 1976–April 1983 |
