Anything Is Possible(4)

“Tommy, why didn’t you tell me this?” Shirley’s blue eyes looked up at him with horror.

And Tommy said it seemed too awful to repeat.

“Tommy, we need to do something,” his wife said that day. And they talked about it more, and decided once again there was nothing they could do.

—

The blind moved slightly, and then the door opened, and Pete Barton stood there. “Hello, Tommy,” he said. Pete stepped outside into the sunshine, closing the door behind him, and stood next to Tommy, and Tommy understood that Pete didn’t want him inside the house; already a rank odor came to Tommy, maybe coming off Pete himself.

“Just driving by, and I thought I’d see how you were doing.” Tommy said this casually.

“Thanks, I’m okay. Thank you.” In the bright sun Pete’s face looked pale, and his hair was almost all gray now, but it was a pale gray, and it seemed to match the pale shingles of the house he stood in front of.

“You’re working over at the Darr place?” Tommy asked.

Pete said he was, though that job was almost done, but he had another lined up in Hanston.

“Good.” Tommy squinted toward the horizon, all soybean fields in front of him, the bright green of them showing in the brown soil. Right on the horizon was the barn of the Pederson place.

They spoke of different machines then, and also of the wind turbines that had been put up recently between Carlisle and Hanston. “We’ve just got to get used to them, I guess,” said Tommy. And Pete said he guessed Tommy was right about that. The one tree that stood next to the driveway had its little leaves out, and the branches dipped for a moment in the wind.

Pete leaned against Tommy’s car, his arms folded across his chest. He was a tall man, but his chest seemed almost concave, he was that thin. “Were you in the war, Tommy?”

Tommy was surprised at the question. “No,” he said. “No, I was too young, just missed it. My older brother was, though.” Up and down quickly, once, went the branches of the tree, as though it had felt a breeze that Tommy had not.

“Where was he?”

Tommy hesitated. Then he said, “He was assigned to the camps, at the end of the war, he was in the corps that went to the camps in Buchenwald.” Tommy looked up at the sky, reached into his pocket, pulled out his sunglasses and slipped them onto his face. “He was changed after that. I can’t say how, but he was changed.” He walked over and leaned against his car, next to Pete.

After a moment, Pete Barton turned toward Tommy. In a voice without belligerence, even with a touch of apology to it, he said, “Look, Tommy. I’d like it if you didn’t keep coming over here.” Pete’s lips were pale and cracked, and he wet them with his tongue, looking at the ground. For a moment Tommy was not sure he heard right, but as he started to say “I only—” Pete looked at him fleetingly and said, “You do it to torture me, and I think enough time has gone by now.”

Tommy pushed himself away from the car and stood straight, looking through his sunglasses at Pete. “Torture you?” Tommy asked. “Pete, I’m not here to torture you.”

A sudden small gust of wind blew up the road then, and the dirt they stood on swirled a tiny bit. Tommy took his sunglasses off so that Pete could see his eyes; he looked at him with great concern.

“Forget I said that, I’m sorry.” Pete’s head ducked down.

“I just like to check on you every so often,” Tommy said. “You know, neighbor to neighbor. You live here all alone. Seems to me a neighbor should check in once in a while.”

Pete looked at Tommy with a wry smile and said, “Well, you’re the only man who ever does that. Or woman.” Pete laughed; it was an uncomfortable sound.

They stood, the two of them, Tommy’s arms unfolded now; he slipped his hands into his pockets, and Pete slipped his hands into his pockets as well. Pete kicked at a stone, then turned to look out over the field. “The Pedersons should take that tree away, I don’t know why they don’t. It was one thing to plow around it when it was standing up straight, but now, sheesh.”

“They’re going to, I heard them talking.” Tommy did not quite know what to do, and this was an odd feeling for him.

Still looking toward the toppled tree, Pete said, “My father was in the war. He got all screwed up.” Now Pete turned and looked at Tommy, his eyes squinting in the sunshine. “When he was dying he told me about it. It was terrible what happened to him, and then—then he shot these two German guys, he knew they weren’t soldiers, they were almost kids, but he told me he felt every day of his life that he should have killed himself in return.”

Tommy listened to this, looking at the boy—the man—without his sunglasses, which he held in his hand in his pocket. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know your father was in the war.”

“My father—” And here Pete unmistakably had tears in his eyes. “My father was a decent man, Tommy.”

Tommy nodded slowly.

“He did things because he couldn’t control himself. And so he—” Pete turned away. In a moment he turned partway back to Tommy and said, “And so he went in and turned on those milking machines that night, and then the place burned down, and I never, ever forgot it, Tommy, it was like I knew he had done it. And I know you know that too.”