Be still, and know that I am God.Psalm 46
The telephone rang at 4:38 on Tuesday morning, and he knew who it was before he lifted it, as one knows a step on a stair.
“WKAL.”
For a time there was only the line. He heard the hollow ocean-sound of it, and under that a kitchen: a clock, a refrigerator’s hum, the small wet sound of someone trying to breathe evenly.
“He died,” Clara said. “Ten minutes ago. In the chair by the window. The radio was on.” Her voice was quiet and plain. “I was in the next room. I heard it stop. I mean I heard him stop, I don’t know what I heard. I came in and he had his hand on the sill. I don’t know why I called. I don’t know who else there is.”
“I’m here,” said Elias.
She did not answer at once.
“I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay on the line.”
“You’re on the air.”
“I know that too.” He looked at the board, at the red light pulsing, and put his hand flat over the cue switch, and cut the telephone from the program. In the cans his own voice, on tape, said to the county, Billie Holiday, a little after four. “Nobody can hear us. It’s only the two of us. I’ll stay until you tell me to go.”
She said nothing. He sat in the closet with the receiver against his ear and listened to a woman in a kitchen on a hill sit with her dead. He did not speak. He had learned that. He had learned it twenty-four years ago, in this room, the night she first called and could not speak, when the silence was the only thing he had that was worth giving.
The other silence, the one he had made himself, began on a Friday, the fourteenth of October, 2005. He had come on at midnight with his sleeve still smelling of her, because he had not been able to make himself wash the shirt, and the records had gone out one after another like lamps along a road. He had been happy. That was what he could never get past afterward: for the first hour of that night he had simply been a man at his work, with his shoes off under the console and the county asleep in the palm of his voice, and had thought of nothing worse than how long it was until one.
At one the telephone did not ring.
He watched it. The second hand went round, and he told himself that her father had been restless, that the stairs were not safe, that a woman who has called every night for three years may be allowed one night of sleep. His right hand went out toward the receiver by itself. He stopped it and laid it flat on the console beside the left, both palms down, because if he lifted the phone and heard nothing he would know, and if he did not lift it he would not. His whole life was balanced on the difference.
At a minute past one, because he could not say her name and could not say nothing, he opened the microphone and put the headphones down, and let the dead air run.
Ten seconds. It was against every rule of the trade. He sat in the hiss with his hand on the fader and thought, If she is listening, she will know. He did not know what she would know. He knew only that a hole in the sound was a thing a person in the dark would have to answer, one way or another. His palms had left two damp prints on the metal. Then the telephone had rung, the station’s own, on Walt’s line, and he had picked it up, and Walt’s voice had said, dry and terrible out of a sleep: What in God’s name is wrong with the line?
Nothing, Elias had said.
A long breath at the other end. Walt Dupree had not been born yesterday. Leave it, then, he had said at last, if you have to. And had hung up. And Elias had left it, that night and every night, the one gap in the broadcast that had never once been filled.
Walt had come in at six the next morning. He did not say good morning. He stood in the door of the closet with the night still on his coat and looked at the man at the board, who had not moved in five hours, whose hands lay on the console where they had lain at one. Then he sat down on the stool, and opened the drawer where he kept the things he would not lend, and took out the old steel stopwatch he had used since the nineties to time the news. He wound it. He set it on the console between them, face up, and went on sitting with his chin on his chest until the sun came over the pines. In the log that night, under the hour, in his heavy square capitals, he wrote 0100 — :10 — PAUSE, and every night after, the same. He never asked what the pause was for. He wrote only the number, and the number was always ten.
“Elias,” said Clara, now, at 5:20.
“Yes.”
“Is it very late?”
“It’s early,” he said. “It’s the earliest it gets.”
“He was clear at the end. The last day. Did I tell you? He asked for the Psalm. The twenty-third. He had all of it. He said it to the window.” She drew breath. “And then he said, to the radio, Good night, son. I thought it was the Psalm.”
Elias closed his eyes.
“I think it was for you,” said Clara.
He stayed on the line until six. At six he signed off with the words he always used, and then he sat for some time with the telephone against his ear, in a room going gray at the edges, until a quiet voice said, You can go, and he said, I’m still here, and she said, I know, and neither of them hung up.
Tuesday was his night off. It had been Nora’s to cover until the spring and Walt’s since, and with no show to carry him toward the evening, the question of where to put himself when the light went was one he had to answer alone.
He answered it with Fenner Street. The hospital bed Walt had set up on Monday stood in the front room where the recliner used to be, with its rails and its crank and its rented gray blanket, and Nora, who had named it the hearse with rails, lay in it propped against two pillows with the afghan to her chin and her face turned to the window. The feeder was empty. He filled it, and stood at the glass watching the sparrows find out.
He made toast she did not eat, and tea. He washed the two cups and put them where they went, while the little radio on the sill talked to itself in Walt’s voice about the temperature, and then went to a Ben Webster, and he stood with a towel in his hands and listened to a saxophone breathing as if it had all the time in the world.
“You’ve put the cups in the wrong cupboard,” Nora said, from the bed.
“They’re in the cupboard they were in.”
“They were in the wrong cupboard. I’ve been meaning to say for years.” She turned her head on the pillow. She was, he saw, much clearer than she had been at noon, in the way the sick are sometimes clear at dusk, as though the day had taken what it wanted and left the rest. “Go to her.”
He folded the towel. “I wasn’t asked.”
“I know you weren’t.”
“It’s her father’s house. It’s the first night. There’s a husband on his way, and I’d be standing on a porch in my coat like—” He stopped, because there was no end to that sentence that he cared to hear.
“Then be useful,” said his sister, “and wait.”
It was the cruelest thing she could have said, and the kindest, and it took him until the tea was cold to see that it was also an instruction. He sat down with his hands between his knees. Out in the street the lamps came on. Up on the hill there would be a light in the parsonage kitchen, and a kettle, and a woman sitting still; and he made a rule, as he had made other rules in other years, and kept it like the others, to the letter. He would not drive up the hill. He had not been asked to the parsonage and so he did not go, and he found that not going was an act, with weight and edges, and that it took all of a Tuesday to carry.
On Wednesday morning the nurse at the walk-in clinic in Macon took out his stitches.
It was the same nurse. She did not say so, and neither did he, but she had the same small scissors, and she took his hand in her dry one and turned it palm up under the lamp and counted, in the voice of a woman marking a hymn board, five. Eleven days. The skin had closed along the heel of the palm in a raised pink seam like a line drawn with a ruler. She cut and drew them out one at a time, small black knots, and laid each in the steel dish with a tick, and he watched them go, and felt, absurdly, a little bereft.
When she reached across him for the gauze, his jacket fell open on the chair, and a corner of faded blue showed at the edge of the pocket. She saw it. Her hand stopped for the width of a breath over the dish, and he waited for the question. She only taped the dressing, and said, “Keep it out of the dishwater a few days. Come back if it weeps,” and went out with the dish. At the door she did not look back.
At the station he went straight to the little kitchen at the back, where Walt kept a hot plate and a coffee can of spoons, and took the cloth out of his pocket. It was stiff as a board and the color of old rust. For ten days it had lain on his radiator and then in his coat, against his ribs, and he had told himself that he did not know why. He ran the tap in the cracked white sink until the water came cold and worked the cloth under it with his thumbs, and the water ran brown, and then pink, and then, a good while after he had stopped believing in it, clear. It came up from the sink a smaller thing than he remembered, a square of cotton gone soft with age, thin at one corner where for years a girl’s hair had worked against it, and there was nothing in it now that was his. He wrung it. He pressed it flat between his hands, and then, because there was nothing else to be done with a thing like that, he folded it in half, and in half again, until it was a square no bigger than a deck of cards.
He did not know what it was now. A debt, perhaps. Evidence. He could not give it back, because she had not asked for it, and he could not throw it away. He put it in the inside pocket of his coat, against his ribs, and went on carrying it, as one carries an answer to a question that has not yet been put.
Walt was waiting in the front office when Elias came in that night, in his Sunday coat, with something folded over his arm. He had put on a clean shirt and shaved badly, and he looked over Elias’s head at the window in a way that meant he had rehearsed a speech in the truck and lost it. “Your sister,” said Walt, “says that the thing you wear round your neck on a Sunday looks like something you’d strangle a goat with.”
“She would.”
“She has a point. It’s a disgrace.” He held out what he was carrying. It was a tie, a dark green silk gone matte with years, with a pattern of small gold crests on it that had been fashionable in the nineteen-nineties, and it lay across his big spotted hand as lightly as a snake. “Ruth bought it. For me, for the dedication of the new tower, back in ’96, because she said I looked like I sold used boats. I wore it to bury her mother. I wore it to bury her.” The mustache moved. “It still knots.”
Elias took it. The silk was cool. It smelled faintly of cedar and, much further down, of a house with a woman in it, a retired school nurse with a laugh like a cough, who had sat with his sister on the sick days of the worst autumn of their lives, and had asked for nothing, and had been dead twelve years.
“Walt, I can’t—”
“You’ll wear it Friday,” said Walt, “or I’ll know.” And that was all of it. He carried the stool from the corner to the open door of the closet and sat down in it with his hat on his knee and his back against the frame, where he could see the board and the red light and the man at the microphone, and he stayed there through the Mingus and the Webster and the Sarah Vaughan. He did not talk. He did not drink the coffee Elias brought him.
At midnight the cream-colored telephone rang, and he lifted it with his heart in his teeth. It was Mrs. Pruitt. She did not say good evening. She said, in the voice of a woman reading a statement to a magistrate, “I thought you would want to know, and I wish it understood that I am not telling you. She has not been out of the house since morning. She has hardly eaten, so far as I can find. Wade has left a dish on the step three times, and three times it has been taken in.” A pause, in which he heard her breathing. “That is all. I am not telling you.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“I have not been telephoned,” said Mrs. Pruitt, and hung up.
At a quarter to one Walt took something out of his waistcoat pocket and held it in his closed hand. Elias did not look at it. He knew by the weight of the quiet what it was.
At one o’clock he opened the microphone.
One. Tonight he thought of the man in the door. Walt Dupree, who had said in 2009 that a hole in the air was a hole in the air, and in 2014, with a drink in his hand, that it would be the death of the license, and in 2019 that it was a damned sentimental thing for a grown man to do to a transmitter, and who in two decades of grumbling had never once lifted a finger to the fader. Five. Six. Behind Elias there was no sound but the hiss in the cans and, faintly, the click of a steel lid. Eight.
Walt said nothing. At the count of ten Elias closed the microphone and the Webster came back on, and he did not turn his head, and there came a sound behind him of a throat being cleared of something that would not clear, and then nothing, and then the scrape of the stool being drawn a little nearer the board.
On Thursday afternoon Mrs. Pruitt was at Nora’s door in her good hat, with another Pyrex dish held out at arm’s length, and she did not come in. She looked at the bed, and at the sunlit feeder, and at Elias in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, and said, in the tone she used for the weather, “The husband has come.”
He did not move.
“This morning, at seven, in a gray car. He has been out since nine with Wade’s mower. He did the lawn. He has done the path up the hill. He asked Wade before he touched the hedge, and again before he touched the graves, and was told to leave the plot long, which he has done, and he is on his knees now with a rake, getting the pecans off the stones by hand.” She considered this. “He is a thorough man. He was not asked to do any of it, and I should say that is why he is doing it so well.”
The dish was warm in his hands, a glass dish with a blue band and a lid of foil. He looked down at it, and felt come up through him, slow and cold, the thing he had not been willing to call by its name. It was not jealousy. He had had that, and knew its taste. It was plain, steady, unflattering shame, and he could not remember having felt it so pure before. He had stood in a closet a week ago with a man’s hand in his own and had thought, God forgive him, a decent man, and no obstacle at all. And the decent man had driven two hours in the dark and was kneeling on a hill in November with a borrowed rake, tending the plot of a father-in-law whose crime he knew better than anyone alive, while Elias Ward sat in a kitchen on Fenner Street rehearsing his patience like a hymn.
“Thank you, Mrs. Pruitt.”
“Friday at noon,” she said. “Wear a coat.”
They buried Thomas Rourke on Friday in a cold bright noon, in the long grass on the hill behind the church. The whole of the county came. It filled the nave and the vestibule and the steps. He had walked up from the bottom of the hill in his one dark suit, with Ruth Dupree’s green tie knotted flat under his chin and, in the inside pocket of the coat, against his ribs, the folded blue square, where one carries what one does not mean to use. Wade Bascomb stood at the vestibule door with a stack of programs, and put one into Elias’s hand without meeting his eye. “Mr. Ward,” he said. “Take any pew you like.” It was a heavy, decent, exhausted sentence, and it had cost him something to say it, and it was meant.
He stood where he had stood on a hundred other mornings, in the third pew from the door on the left, and through a gap in the shoulders he could see, forty feet off, at the head of the long nave and under the dark west window, the back of a woman’s neck above a black collar, the gray at her temple, and the long straight back of the man beside her, whose hand lay on the pew between them, open, a little apart.
Daniel had come on Thursday. He had taken the front pew with her and said nothing to anyone. Elias had watched them walk up the aisle, side by side, not touching, a decent man and a woman in grief, and had felt nothing that he could name but a sort of immense, grave respect, as for a house in which the lamps are lit and some other family lives. The hand on the pew was not waiting for anything. It was only there, as a door is there, and that was what the respect was for.
Wade Bascomb said the prayer. His voice cracked on comfort and he went on over the crack. Mrs. Pruitt, in her hat, sang the first verse of the hymn alone, in a voice like a cracked bell, and went through to the end of it with her chin up. Opal Henley sat at the end of the fifth pew in a black coat with her handbag on her knee and her eyes on the floor.
The Shepherd was whole in the west window. At noon it was only a dark blue plain with nothing behind it, for the sun stood too high and too far south to reach it, and it would not wake until the end of the day. Elias looked at it through the whole of the service, and thought of an old man who had sat under that glass on Sunday with a wet face and a quiet hand. The light first, and then the box. It was the right order of things.
They carried him out under the pecans and up the hill, and Elias stood at the back with the rest of the county, among the Bascombs and the men from the feed store. The grass at the top was long and silver, still white with frost where the shade lay. The mown path went to the lip of the plot and stopped, as neatly as a ruled line, and the pecans had been lifted off every stone. Wade read the committal in a voice that kept catching on its last syllables, and the box went down on its straps, and Clara stood at the lip with a handful of earth she did not seem to know she held, until Daniel, without a word, put his hand under hers, and she let it fall.
The fellowship hall smelled of coffee and ham and wet wool. He had set a paper plate down by the urn, untouched, and was standing with a paper cup he was not drinking when she found him. He felt her before he saw her. She came across the linoleum, a heavy gray woman in a black coat, holding in both hands a yellow legal pad with the top sheet torn away.
“Mr. Ward,” said Opal.
“Mrs. Henley.”
She had kept the books of First Baptist for thirty-one years. In the winter of 2005, with her eyes on her blotter, she had told him that the pastor was not in, when the pastor was in his study with the door shut, and they had both known it. He remembered a coffee spoon ringing on the floor of the nave two weeks ago, a small bright sound like a coin spent. She had not looked at him since. She was looking at him now, with her mouth working.
“I found it in his desk drawer. The morning after. I’d gone to see to the study.” She held it out an inch, and drew it back. “It isn’t for you. It’s for her. It’s the pad he kept. I read it, and I wish I hadn’t, and I can’t be the one.” Her mouth shook. “I dropped a spoon, in the church. I’ve wanted to say that I’m sorry for twenty years. For the spoon, and for the rest.”
He looked at her. Behind her, across the hall, among the folding tables and the ham, Clara stood with a plate she was not eating from, speaking to the Pruitts, her face composed and pale. She had taken off her gloves. He could see her hands.
“Give it to her yourself,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“You can.” He said it as gently as he had ever said anything. It was true, and he had needed someone to say it to him for twenty years. “You can walk across a room, Mrs. Henley. I know. I watched you do it just now.”
She stood a moment. Then she went.
He watched it from the urn, over the paper cup, the whole of it: the heavy woman crossing the floor, the gray head bent, the hand held out. Clara turned. She took the pad, and read the first page standing, with her lips a little apart, and he saw the muscle move at the corner of her jaw, and knew how far down the page she had got. He saw her lift her eyes. She looked across the hall at him. It was not the look from the church, the one that had asked, and been given nothing. This one had a whole afternoon in it, a lifetime of Tuesdays, patient and unsparing, and it did not ask him for anything. It only held him in the light, as she might have held a piece of glass, to see what was there. She held it for the length of a breath, and then put out her free hand, slowly, and laid it on Opal Henley’s arm.
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