Benediction Read online

  I don’t think about it anymore. I’ve learned not to think about it. You have to.

  I haven’t yet.

  You will, dear.

  But I don’t want to. I don’t want to be one of those sad old lonely women and not even old but just one who has lost her life and her nerve. I don’t give off any intimation of sex or even the possibility of it anymore.

  Sex.

  Yes. I don’t put anything out anymore for anyone to sense.

  What are you talking about?

  I mean that quality, that condition of being alive and interested and vital and active and passionate in my life. Oh I hate this. I’m going to die and not even have lived yet. It’s so ridiculous. It’s absurd. It’s all so pointless.

  You’ll get better, dear.

  How will I get better?

  It gets better. Everything gets better.

  How?

  You forget after a while. You start paying attention to your aches and pains. You think about a hip replacement. Your eyes fail you. You start thinking about death. You live more narrowly. You stop thinking about next month. You hope you don’t have to linger.

  9

  LORRAINE SAT SMOKING in the evening. Rocking in the porch swing, scarcely moving. There was a little summer night’s breeze. In front of the house the wide street was quiet and empty, at the corner the street lamp shone blue. Then Dad was coming out and she got up to help him through the door, he stepped out carefully and came past the swing to one of the porch chairs and lowered himself and set his cane on the floor.

  You doing okay, Daddy?

  Yeah.

  Will you be warm enough out here?

  This air feels good. It was too hot today. It doesn’t need to be that hot.

  Lorraine watched him and sat down on the swing.

  But it always cools off, he said. You can count on that much. He looked out at the street. Nothing happening. Quiet, he said.

  Yes. It’s nice.

  They sat for a while, not talking. She took out her cigarettes again.

  Let me have one of those things.

  You want to smoke?

  I like the smell of it. I can still smell it.

  She stood and shook out a cigarette from the pack and he took it in his thick fingers and she bent and lit it for him, his face illuminated now for a moment, pale and thin, his cheeks drawn in, his eyes sunken. He puffed at the cigarette and blew out and looked at the end of it. Lorraine sat back down. Mary came out on the porch and stopped, looking at Dad.

  What are you doing?

  Nothing.

  Oh don’t give him one of those things. He doesn’t need something more to make him worse.

  What can it hurt, Mom? Come sit down.

  I’m just holding it, Dad said.

  You’re both foolish, Mary said. She seated herself and after a while she and her daughter began to move the swing.

  Do you remember when you caught us smoking in the barn? Lorraine said.

  Corrupting your brother, Dad said.

  It was my job. I was the big sister.

  By three years.

  Big enough.

  I made you smoke the whole pack afterward.

  It was only a couple more cigarettes.

  Was it.

  But you stood there and made us.

  It didn’t do any good. Did it.

  No.

  How old were you?

  I was eleven, Frank was eight. About Alice’s age.

  Who’s Alice?

  The little girl next door with Berta May.

  All right.

  Her mother died of breast cancer.

  I remember now, Dad said. I know.

  Later, when the three of them were still talking, Dad said: You could come back and run the store. You’re already here. You wouldn’t even have to leave. You could stay here and run it.

  I don’t know if I want to do that, Daddy.

  It’s all in the will, he said. It goes to Mom and then to you after she’s gone. You could learn how. You’re quick and you know how to manage people. You manage people already.

  Just four people in the office.

  That’s enough. You wouldn’t have to take care of that many here. There’s Rudy and Bob and the bookkeeper. They’ve been with me so long they don’t need much managing.

  They’re used to you, Lorraine said. They wouldn’t want somebody new coming in and telling them what to do.

  They’d get used to it.

  I doubt it.

  They’d get used to it. Or else, you’d let them go. You can think about it. Will you do that?

  I don’t know, Daddy. We’ll see. What do you think, Mom?

  I think it’d be nice to have you here. You could live with me in the house.

  We’d make each other unhappy. You know we would.

  Well, I don’t either know that, Mary said. You wouldn’t make me unhappy. But you mean what I’d do to you.

  I didn’t mean anything, Mom. I’ve just been away for so long.

  They looked at Dad. He was staring out into the street past the trees and the fence. Does it hurt you, Daddy, for us to be talking about what will happen after you’re gone?

  I don’t want to know all of that. What I want to know about is the store. I want that figured out.

  But if I took over, what about Frank?

  What do you mean? Frank won’t be coming back.

  But what about him? How is he mentioned in the will?

  He’s not mentioned.

  Why isn’t he?

  Because he left.

  So did I.

  But not like he did. We don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. We don’t know nothing about him no more. We haven’t had contact in years.

  I used to hear from him, Lorraine said. He’d call me on the phone at work.

  When was this?

  When he was still in Denver. Then I didn’t hear from him anymore. I tried to find him but I couldn’t. We used to meet and go out to a bar and talk.

  Honey, we know you did that, Mary said. We thought you were talking about something different.

  He always wanted to meet at a particular bar downtown. He’d come in as he always did, like he was sick, or hungry. Maybe he was, both. He’d sit down and look around. I’m paying, I’d tell him. Then I’ll have something good, he’d say. We’d smoke and when the drinks came he’d take a long swallow and say, Goddamn. Here’s to happier days, and then he’d start talking.

  About what? Dad said.

  Oh anything. His work. His friends. What guy he was living with.

  We don’t need to hear about that.

  I know, Daddy. He was just so sad sometimes and so blue.

  He was always sad, Mary said. As he grew older, I mean. Not when he was little.

  He’d be drunk by the time we finished for the night. Sometimes he’d get funny too.

  What do you mean?

  Oh, he could be funny. He had style. He could be really witty. Did you know that?

  We never heard much of that here, Dad said.

  No. He wouldn’t here. But he could be very funny.

  Like how? said Mary.

  Oh, just clever. Not telling jokes, I don’t mean that. But talking in a funny entertaining way about different people. About his life. About his friends and the people he worked for.

  I suppose he said something about us, Dad said.

  He talked about you. About both of you.

  What about us?

  What his life was like here, Daddy. When he and I were growing up here in Holt.

  It was all bad, I suppose.

  Not all of it. He had some good things to say too.

  Well, I don’t know.

  I hope he did, Mary said. She got up and went into the house and brought back a blanket and spread it over Dad. He sat in the chair looking out at the street, the blanket drawn up to his chest.

  The millers were swirling under the porch light and bumping it and dropping to the floorboards and fl
uttering upward again. Mary went back and switched off the light and returned and sat down. The millers still singed themselves against the hot bulb and fell or fluttered away. From beyond Berta May’s house the corner street lamp cast long shadows through the trees that moved a little in the night air.

  10

  YEARS AGO Alene walked along a wide Denver sidewalk with her arm in a man’s arm. That was in wintertime. A snowy evening. The snow was falling thickly and it was pleasant under the lights along the street, walking slowly past the city stores, looking in the windows, delaying going back to the hotel for the pleasure of being out in the cold air together. She was a young woman then, just thirty-three, nice-looking and slim and tall and brown haired and blue eyed. He was a little older, closer to forty, a tall man with the gray starting to show at the sides of his head. A principal in a school in the same district as the school she taught in. Which was how and why they met, at a district-wide school meeting. She had felt something at once. And then she had found a way of saying something to him. She couldn’t remember what it had been but it’d made him laugh and then they’d met again at another gathering and he had wanted to know if she would join him for dinner sometime in Denver. They both understood what he was saying. She said yes, she’d like that. And that was when it began.

  The snow had started to collect on the sidewalk. The cars were beginning to pack it down out in the street. Going quietly by, quieted by the snow.

  At the end of the block they stood waiting for a city bus to pass, the interior illuminated in the evening, the people in the bus moving past them as in a kind of movie. An old woman alone in her seat on the bus. An old man wearing a hat. A young girl at the back looking out the window as the bus passed and went on up the street. They crossed the street, she held on to his arm so as not to misstep.

  Are you ready to go up? he said.

  Yes. Are you?

  Yes.

  They turned in at the lobby of the hotel. It was a block east of the train depot, an old hotel, one of the oldest in the city, a tall square redbrick building with an ornate front. She stood near the elevator while he got the key from the desk clerk and they rode up to the third floor, another man with them, and she felt his now familiar hand pressing the side of her hip through her coat and that was something she would remember afterward, the feeling of that and the secret of it, while he and the other man made conversation about the weather. What about this snow? It might go up to a foot. Is that right? That’s what they were saying on the news, if you can believe them, and then the elevator stopped and they got out and walked down the long narrow hall, following the runner tacked to the floor, she in front, he following, and came to the room and she stepped aside so he could open the door with the key.

  The flowers he had brought her that afternoon were still there on the mirrored buffet. Their fragrance was in the room. She waited as he locked the door and then he turned to her and she kissed him, she was full of joy and happiness. Then he undressed her. The bed was cold and they clung to each other until they were warm and the sheets were warm.

  The room had been rich once, beautiful, with wallpaper that had dark red roses aligned up and down, and with an elaborate brass light fixture in the ceiling and a tall mirror on the wall and a narrow door letting into the bathroom, you took a step up to enter, and inside were the claw-footed bathtub and the free-standing sink with the two porcelain faucet handles, and an oval mirror with tiny silver cracks around the edges.

  She rose above him in the bed and kissed him and looked down into his face. He had a good face. And brown eyes, looking at her. Oh God, she said.

  I know. Don’t think about it.

  I’m not thinking. I just was going to say—

  I know.

  She reached under the sheet and found him and made the adjustment, shifting a little.

  Afterward lying in the bed in the old beautiful room, feeling warm and happy, she said, Don’t go yet.

  I have to. You know I do. I still have to drive home. It’ll be late as it is. And I can’t tell what the roads will be.

  Stay here. Stay overnight. Please.

  How can I?

  Call her. Say you’re snowed in, you can’t leave. You got delayed at the meeting and didn’t get started when you thought you would.

  The meeting was over this afternoon.

  Make something up.

  I can’t.

  Of course you can. You do already. We both do.

  I can’t tonight.

  When will you? When is it going to be any different? Will it ever be?

  Yes.

  When?

  I don’t know. I can’t say that.

  Go on then. Leave if you’re going to. She turned away from him.

  Don’t be like this.

  You don’t know what it’s like, she said. You have no idea.

  She lay in the bed and turned toward him again and watched him dressing in the dim room, in the winter light from the street coming in at the window, his long legs, his bare chest and back and arms before he covered them, dressing, and watched how he stood while he tucked in his shirt, and then he came across the room and sat on the bed and bent and kissed her and reached under the cover and touched her breast again.

  Are you going to say anything?

  No, she said.

  He kissed her cheek and went out of the room and she got up quickly and wrapped herself in the bedcover and stood at the window and saw him far below picking his way across the street in the darkening car-packed snow and then she watched him walk down the block in the snow that was still falling and go around the corner out of sight to his car, to drive home on the icy roads to his wife and children in the town where he was principal in the high school.

  She imagined his arrival at home, his wife’s worry and complaint, and his consoling her, joking a little, making his excuses and explanations, and she could see them then in the familiar pretty picture walking arm in arm, looking in at the sleeping children, and entering their own bedroom, lying in bed with her head resting on his shoulder and her hair spread out like a fan, and then she saw him kissing her and doing what he had just done with her, and she realized she was crying again and after a while she got up and went into the old tiled bathroom to rinse her face.

  11

  AFTER IT WAS announced at Annual Conference where they would be sent, Lyle drove his family the two and a half hours from Denver out onto the high plains to look at the town. Main Street with one traffic light blinking on and off at the corner of Second Street, the business section of three blocks, the old brick buildings with high false fronts, the post office with its faded flag, the houses on either side of Main Street, the streets on the west side named for trees, those to the east named for American cities, and Highway 34 intersecting Main and running out both directions to the flat country, the wheat fields and the corn and the native pastures, and beyond the highway the high school where John Wesley would be going, and far away the blue sandhills in the hazy distance.

  After they had moved to Holt, John Wesley spent the first week up in his room at his computer writing long letters to his friends in Denver. Then on Sunday he was forced to attend the morning service since it was the entire family who made up the preacher’s presence in town and the church expected them all to attend. On the third Sunday he got a surprise.

  There was a girl who attended church who was tall and thin and strange, dressed in black with bright red lipstick, and with very pale skin. She always sat in the back pew. She caught up to him after the Sunday service when he was walking away from the church.

  Wait, she said. Are you trying to escape from me?

  He stopped and turned toward her.

  They told me about you. You’re going to be a sophomore in high school. It’s too bad you’re not still a freshman, I could initiate you. Well I can anyway.

  She had her own car and they went out at night driving all over the town and out into the country on the gravel roads as far south as Highway 36 and
as far north as Interstate 76, John Wesley in the seat beside her, the windows open, the cassette player playing her music, the two of them talking, and then they would pull off the road onto a farm track or an unused side road and she would move him into the backseat and unbutton him and teach him what she knew, and afterward sweaty and red-faced they would get back in the front to drive some more. The air would be coming in cool and fresh and the dust boiling up behind them on the county roads, with rabbits and coyotes and red foxes and raccoons all out at night on the road, and once suddenly the great white shape of a Charolais cow broadside in the headlights together with its pale calf, and occasionally they’d stop again for another time in the backseat. She was on birth-control pills. Are you stupid? she said. I thought you city boys knew something. I’m not going to get pregnant and fuck everything up. Don’t worry about it. Come on, preacher’s boy. Don’t you want to go again.

  Then he’d return home. She’d drop him off in front of the parsonage and drive away and he’d walk up onto the porch and enter the dark quiet house. His father and his mother would be asleep in their bedroom upstairs, and he’d go back to the kitchen and make something to eat, and take the food up to his room, and enter the bathroom and lower his trousers and inspect himself and soothe his soreness with hand salve and return to his bedroom and turn on the computer and eat the food he’d brought upstairs and read his messages.

  It went on for most of a month this way. He and this older girl, Genevieve Larsen, out in the country in the dark in Holt County driving and stopping and climbing into the backseat. And then starting the car again and turning back out onto the gravel roads and always the dust swirling and rising up behind them.

  You should have known me in Denver, he said. It was different in Denver. I had friends there. I was known there.

  What’d you do? Sit around and play with your computer?

  No. We had fun. It was interesting.

  Doing what?

  It was different. There’s so much to do. We went out at night and talked and saw people. Ate in the cafés. We laughed and laughed. We hung out at the malls.

  We’re out at night. We’re talking. Don’t you like this?

  Yes. Of course.

  You didn’t have somebody like me there, did you?