Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.The Gospel According to Matthew
At one o’clock on Monday morning, in the dark of her old bedroom, Clara heard him say it.
She had not meant to be listening. She had lain on her side since midnight with the little bedside radio drawn across the floor on its cord, turned low, and the window open an inch to the cold, thinking about nothing, with the deliberate nothing of a woman who has spent two days thinking about everything. At one the voice stopped. The hiss came up. She counted, as she had counted for two decades in other cities on other nights, without once admitting to herself that she was counting, and at the sixth second there was a small sound in the static, a brush of cloth against a microphone, and a man said, so low that it seemed less spoken than breathed:
“I’ve got it.”
She did not move. A moment later she raised her right hand and laid two fingers on her throat, under the angle of the jaw, where the pulse was. She had done it in the church, on the steps, in the last of the light. She had not known until she was doing it that it was a thing her body knew. It was not a decision. It was a reply, in a language that two people had made up in the dark when they were twenty-one and twenty-three and had never been able to stop speaking, and she lay with her fingers on her own heartbeat in the black room, and said to the ceiling, soundlessly, I’m here, and knew that no one on earth could hear it.
She was fairly sure that he knew.
On Tuesday at two o’clock a green van came up the drive.
Clara saw it from the carriage house, where she had set up the Shepherd’s two broken panels on her old oak bench, the vise still clamped to its edge. Now the panels lay on a white sheet, side by side, in the north light from the door. One of them held the Shepherd’s right hand, the long brown fingers curled around the crook of his staff. It had broken across the knuckles.
Nora Ward got out of the van slowly. She had a cane and a green wool scarf and a flat cardboard shoebox clamped against her ribs with her left arm, and she crossed the yard in the thin October sun like a woman crossing ice.
Behind the house, through the kitchen window, Clara could see Mrs. Pruitt at the table with a Bible open and her father in his chair beside her, nodding. Ada Pruitt had arrived at one with a pound cake and a face of perfect, bright innocence. It was the face, Clara thought, of a person who has been told to do something and has no intention of asking why.
“Hello, Clara,” said Nora, in the doorway.
“Hello.”
“May I sit?”
Clara brought her the stool. Nora lowered herself onto it in stages, with the box in her lap and both hands on the lid, and for a time neither of them said anything. Nora looked about her at the vise and the bench and the dusty window. She looked at the panels. Her eyes, which were as large and dark as they had been on a church lawn in 2002, filled and were wiped with one impatient knuckle.
“I’ve practiced this,” she said. “On the drive, in the bathroom mirror, in three different voices. I’m going to say it badly, so I’ll say it fast. I’m dying. It’s the liver, and it’s in the bone. It’s weeks, Clara, not years. I’d have told you that on the telephone if there’d been a way, and there wasn’t, and now there’s this. I’m not asking you for anything. I’d like you to hear it from me and not from a stranger at the back of a church.”
Clara had put one hand out to steady herself on the bench. She found it flat on the old oak, still, and she looked at it.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Nora. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’ve been sorry for twenty years, I’m tired of it, and I’m done. Listen.” She drew a breath that rattled faintly. “The reason you left was a lie. I’m not saying whose. I’ll leave that to you. In September of 2005 I was twenty-two years old and I had Hodgkin’s disease, in my chest. Emory treated me every other Thursday, and Eli drove me up. We stayed at a motel across the street, the cheap one. He’d carry my bag. Some mornings he’d carry me.”
The light moved in the dusty window.
“I weighed ninety-eight pounds,” Nora said. “He lifted me like a child. If anyone saw it, they saw a man carrying a woman out of a motel room at dawn. I wouldn’t have blamed them for what they thought. I’d have worn a sign if I’d known.”
Clara said nothing. She was seeing the interstate ramp outside Macon. She was seeing a white van with a small figure in a scarf, her face turned to the glass. Ask, she had said to herself, in a library, with a trumpet playing, who is in the van. It had been five words. She had not been brave enough for five words.
“He made a promise,” said Nora. “I made him make it. In a parking lot, the first week, with my brand-new scarf on and my chin up. I said if he told one living soul I’d never forgive him. I wanted to be a normal girl at church. I did not want your pity, Clara, or your father’s, or the Ladies’ Circle’s, and God forgive me, I did not want you looking at me the way you’re looking at me now.” She stopped. “That was vanity. That was all it was. It cost both of you your lives. It cost me nothing, and I lived.”
“Nora.”
“He tried to tell you. I know he did. ‘It isn’t mine to tell.’ He said it to you at the spring, didn’t he? He told me. It was the only sentence he could find that wasn’t a lie.” Nora’s mouth shook, and steadied. “He’s the worst liar I ever met. It’s why he’s good on the air.”
“My father told me there was another woman,” Clara said.
She heard how it sounded. It sounded like a child.
“I had a witness. A deacon, a man who’d seen him carry a young woman out of a motel off Clifton Road, twice, at dawn, on the nights he’d said he was working. I was told Elias was at the motel. I was told he’d been seen.” She breathed. “I did not ask him. I could have asked. I got into my car.”
Nora did not move.
“Your father told you that,” she said. It was not a question. “Those words.”
“Those words.”
“I don’t doubt there was a witness,” said Nora. She said it gently. She did not look at Clara. She was looking at the shoebox, and at the lid of it, and her thumb was moving back and forth along its edge. “I’m not going to say any more than that. I’m not here to put anyone in a courtroom. You’ve got your father in that kitchen, and the Lord alone knows what he is any more, and I will not be the one to make you hate a man who can’t remember what he did.” She drew a long breath. “But I’m going to put this in your hands.”
It had been July, the third summer, the long summer of 2004, and for three days he had been her husband.
Walt Dupree had a cabin on Lake Blue Ridge that he used four times a year, for trout, and one weekend in July he had pressed the key into Elias’s hand without a word and without looking at him. It was a pine cabin on stilts above the water, with a screened porch and a woodstove that nobody lit and one bedroom with an iron bed. She told her mother she was driving to Atlanta to see Mr. Lorenz about a commission. It was a lie she had never told before, and it went out of her mouth as lightly as breath, and she stood in the kitchen with the gas station map folded in her fist and thought that she was a worse person than she had known, and was glad.
On the first night they did not sleep. She remembered it as a slow burning, as if a lamp had been carried a long way through a dark house and had finally been set down in the room where it was meant to be. She remembered the sound of the lake on the pilings. The screen door slapping. A whippoorwill. Her own surprise at the size of her wanting, which came up in her like water in a well and which he met, not as men in books met it, with hunger, but with dazzled, reverent attention, as though he were a man who had been given a language and was learning to read it by touch. She remembered his mouth at the inside of her wrist. She remembered the lamp, and then the dark, and then the gray light coming up over the water and the long clean line of his back where the sheet had slipped, and how she had put her hand flat between his shoulder blades and felt him breathe.
On the second night they swam. The lake was as black and warm as oil. They went in without a stitch on at two in the morning, and he held her up in the dark with the stars wheeling overhead and the mist coming off the water, and she put her mouth against his ear and laughed, and he said, in a voice she had not heard before, quiet and sure:
“I would follow you anywhere.”
She had thought it was the happiest moment of her life. And so it was. And in the same breath, as she floated in his arms, with the cold of the deep water moving under her like a held note, she felt the first small clean chill of something she could not name. She had said nothing. She had kissed him.
On the last morning, while he was down at the dock, she went through his duffel looking for a comb, and found a shoebox.
It was an ordinary shoebox. A Florsheim, tan, size eleven, with a corner gone soft. She knew she should leave it. She lifted the lid. It held, she saw, a small collection of unremarkable things. A peach pit. A pressed dogwood blossom, brown now, folded in a sheet of station paper. A strip of lead came from the Shepherd’s robe, which she had given him in 2002 to prove she was a person who could be trusted with a window. A ticket stub. A shell. A card she had written him in the spring, which began, To the voice in the dark.
She stood with the lid in her hand and her heart going slow and heavy in her chest. She understood that she was looking at an altar. It was a small one. It did not have a candle. But it was the thing a man builds when he has no church, and she was the saint on it, and he did not even know that she knew.
She put the lid on. She went out to the dock and sat down beside him, and he put his arm around her, and she said nothing.
“I want you to understand what this is,” said Nora. “It isn’t proof. I don’t have any proof. I’m not going to tell you what to do with it. He didn’t ask me to come.”
She held it out.
Clara did not take it at once. She was looking at the corner of the lid, which was gone soft. It was a Florsheim, tan, size eleven. She would have known it in a hundred thousand. For an instant the carriage house was a pine cabin on stilts above black water, and a man was sitting on a dock with his feet in the lake, and she was holding in her hands a lid that she was afraid to put down.
“That’s the box,” she said.
“It’s the same box. He emptied it in the autumn of 2005. He put the other things in a drawer.”
“What is in it?”
“Forty-one letters.” Nora said it quietly. “He wrote you every Sunday and Wednesday for five months. He sent them here, care of the parsonage. Your mother told him to. She said she’d see that you got them.”
“My mother.”
“That’s what he told me. I never knew her.” Nora held out the box. “I only know that’s the address.”
Clara took the box.
It was lighter than she had expected. She had braced for a weight, and what she felt in her hands was an ordinary cardboard lightness, a few ounces of paper. She stood with it against her apron and did not lift the lid. She did not need to. She had already seen, through the crack where the lid had never quite met the box, the long white edge of an envelope, and the beginning of a word in black ink, slantwise, across the front.
It was a tall upright hand, patient and handsome and unhurried. She had seen it on a thousand things. On school permission slips. On birthday cards in an Atlanta mailbox, To Clara-bell, with love from Daddy. On the board in front of the church, in white press-on letters, announcing a sermon. She had learned to write by copying it.
She lifted the lid.
The envelope on the top was addressed in capitals, with a hard blue ballpoint, to Clara Rourke, The Parsonage. A strip of clear tape ran across the flap, smooth and whole and yellow with age. And across the front, from the top left to the bottom right, in black, in her father’s upright hand, were two words.
Return to Sender.
“They all came back,” said Nora. “Unopened. Eli thought it was you. He thought you’d asked him to.”
The carriage house was quiet. A wasp walked the window pane. Clara stood with the lid in one hand and the box in the other, and she was aware of a great, calm, enormous stillness that rose in her from the soles of her feet, the stillness of a river just before it freezes, and in the center of it, small and clear, one thought:
I never saw one.
“I never saw one,” she said.
“I believe you,” Nora said.
“Not one. I would have—” She heard her voice crack, and let it. “I’d have come. If I had known he was sick. If I had known you were. I’d have driven back that night, Nora. I swear to God.”
“I know you would.”
“Then why did he—”
“I don’t know,” said Nora. “I truly don’t. I know what it looks like. But I’ve been in this town for forty-three years, and I have never once known a man to be one thing. I’m not going to tell you what your father is.” She had risen, in stages, with the cane. She put out her hand and, for the first time in two decades, touched Clara’s cheek, with fingers as light as paper. “Read them or don’t. Burn them if you want to. They’re yours. They always were.”
She stopped at the door.
“He kept the tape on,” she said. “Every one. He sealed them so that if anyone opened one, he’d know. I think he thought it was the only way to tell you he had never lied.”
Clara did not remember crossing the yard.
She remembered the green van going down the drive and Nora’s hand lifted from the window, once, not waving. She remembered the kitchen door. The light in the kitchen was a late amber, laid flat across the oilcloth, and Mrs. Pruitt had gone to put on the kettle and had stopped, with the kettle in her hand, and looked at the box, and put the kettle down on the counter quietly without turning on the gas.
Her father sat in the chair by the window.
He was in his cardigan, with a rug across his knees, and the radio on the sill beside him was dark. He looked up when she came in. His face was clear. She saw that at once, and her heart went cold: it was clear, and the great fine bones of it were in order, and the pale blue eyes were fixed on her with a perfect, courteous, ordinary attention, as they had been fixed on a thousand parishioners at the door. For a moment he was himself.
“Clara-bell,” he said. “You look as though you’ve been out in the weather.”
She crossed the room and set the shoebox on his knees.
He did not touch it. He looked down at it for a long moment, at the soft corner and the tan lid, which she had lifted off and which lay beside it, and the white envelope on top with the tape across it. She saw his eyes move, left to right, across the black upright script. She saw that his hand, which lay on the arm of the chair and had trembled constantly since the spring, was still.
“I sent them back,” said Thomas Rourke.
He said it simply. There was no confession in it, no defense, no particular regret. It was the voice of a man reading aloud from a page. He said it as one might say I closed the window, or I locked up. And then his gaze came up, and went past her shoulder, to the stove, to the window, to the dusk coming down the yard, and she watched it go, the clearness, like a tide running out across a flat of sand, and leave behind it only a tall, gentle, faintly puzzled old man in a cardigan.
“Evelyn,” he said. “Is it Tuesday? Clara’s at the spring. I used to count.”
“Daddy.”
“She’ll be wet through,” said her father. “Put the towel by the stove.”
Mrs. Pruitt had come to stand in the doorway, with her hands wound in her apron. She did not say a word. She had known Thomas Rourke for sixty years, and had sat in the front pew with her hat on for most of them, and had kept his radio tuned where he wanted it. And she looked now, across the kitchen, not at him but at Clara, and her old eyes were bright and steady, and Clara understood that Ada Pruitt had known, for some time, that something of the kind was in the house.
She lifted the box from his knees.
He let her. His hands, which had been still, came together slowly in his lap, like the hands of a child in a pew. She stood a moment looking at him. She had thought that if this ever came she would scream, or weep, or strike the table with her palm, and she found that she did none of those things. She stood in her mother’s kitchen with a box of forty-one unopened letters against her chest, in the amber light, and felt only that something old and large had at last turned over in the dark and shown her its face.
“I’m going to go up now,” she said. “Mrs. Pruitt will stay with you.”
“Of course, dear,” said Mrs. Pruitt.
On the stairs she thought of her mother, with a dish towel in her hands and her cardigan buttoned wrong, saying You haven’t eaten. She stopped at the third step. She stood for a moment with her weight on the wall side. Then she put her foot down in the middle, and let it groan.
At one in the morning, she lay in the dark with the box on the bed beside her, unopened, and the radio turned low on the floor. She had not slept. She had taken the lid off and put it on again three times. She did not read. She had a feeling that if she began, there would be no stopping, and that something in her house, in her blood, in the plain white shape of the pillow, would be changed forever, and she was not ready.
The voice stopped. The hiss rose. She counted.
At the sixth second she raised her hand to her throat.
At the tenth the music came back, Ellington, a slow one, with the clarinets low in it, and she lay with the box under her palm and her fingers still against her throat. She had spent twenty-one years being the one who left. It came to her that for the first time in her life she was being waited for, and that this was not at all the same as being worshipped, and that she did not yet know the difference, only that it was there.
She did not read them. Not that night.
Leave a Reply