Jack (Gilead #4)(71)

She’d gone to her father, crying, and he had said comforting things to her. She had so much to be thankful for, the Lord wouldn’t want her to be crying over Wyoming, of all things, which might as well be another planet for all it had to do with her life. Then he went off to talk to that man about what it was useful or appropriate to say to children, what it was kind to say to them.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she told Jack, her eyes mild in the candlelight. “My Wyoming was all wind in the grass and mountains off in the distance and nobody to say, You don’t belong here. It was like stepping off this world, the way I dreamed of it.”

He almost said, That’s a little like Iowa. No mountains, of course. He had often thought of walking with her among those fields, undulant as dunes, and the vast, reaching oaks, and the flickering cottonwoods shadowing the rivers. A modest, open, sunny place, at peace with itself. So many bird songs, such a thrum of crickets. It could be that no one would put those hard questions, that no great eye of custom and expectation would find the two of them on some nameless road through endless country and ask, even silently, Why are they here? Should they be walking along together, arm in arm? He couldn’t tell her he had dreams of Iowa, that shining star. People might say, Did you hear about what Jack Boughton has done now? About the wife he brought home to his poor old father? Always up to no good. He had a history, nothing to be done about it.

He walked and walked, and ended up at Eads Bridge. He had dressed for church that morning, but tilt his hat a little, hang a cigarette from his lip and he was Slick. Who was he kidding, he was always Slick. He could lean against the wall and smile too wide if some pretty colored woman passed, maybe tip his hat to get a laugh. The usual effrontery nobody noticed. He thought of her seeing him there, fossils constellated around him in those great stones, the lore of the place a secret between them. And then it was evening and he walked back to the rooming house, back to his room.





* * *





The next day a note arrived from Della. “Come by my house tomorrow evening. My sister is here for a visit. She wants to meet you. She isn’t as nice as Aunt Delia, but it should be all right. It has to happen sooner or later, anyway, and it will give me a chance to see your dear face. (I haven’t mentioned anything to her about marriage. So—discretion.)” He actually checked his shaving mirror to see what about his face, its off-center aquilinity, its blue jaw, might be called dear. He attempted a smile. Then he thanked the Lord for the eye of the beholder, that perjured witness. His existence had begun to take on some qualities of a life. This is a well-known effect of marriage, not the most attractive feature of it. He could be very nice to the sister-in-law, who was not herself very nice. He would put the little volume of Frost in his pocket—“I have been one acquainted with the night. / I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.” An honest account of himself, yet somehow romantic. Poetry does that, another perjured witness. Maybe he liked poetry because it also could not help lying. Oh well. There would be that moment when he stepped through her door, when he would study her face, if he let himself, to see how welcome he was, preparing always for some sad shock. He would not conclude anything from her formality and distance. Memphis has sent a chaperone, an informant. He would not watch for signs that she had been half persuaded of the foolishness of putting so much at risk for mere him. If he did see a sign, he would leave. There would be no recovery if she once began to doubt.

On the way to work he bought a pad of stationery, some envelopes, and a pencil. He spent the afternoon waltzing abstractedly, forgetting to accommodate his long stride to a short lady until she began gasping a little. Aside from that, his employment was far from his thoughts. His boss glanced at him twice at least, as if to remind him that there are such things as expectations. Point taken. He waltzed the last lady to the bench where she had left her purse, sat down with the pad of stationery on his knee, and wrote, “Dear Reverend Hutchins, Thank you again for your time and insight, and your candor. Sincerely, John A. Boughton (Jack),” and slipped it into an envelope. This was a pretext for going by the church, saving himself a stamp, giving himself a chance to lay the flat of his hand against a shingled wall of the place to feel its solidity. The paint was parched, and some of it would come away on his hand, but there would be no tremors yet, no colossal impact of metal against old wood, no splintering yet. Sweet savors, of popcorn, baked beans, peach cobbler, could still rise to the heavens from that corner for a little while, or a long while, condemnation idling in another street, coming when it would.

There were times in his youth when his imaginations of destruction were so powerful that the deed itself seemed as bad as done. So he did it. It was as if the force of the idea were strong enough that his collaboration in it was trivial. These impulses—they were not temptations—had quieted over the years. But the realization startled him when he recognized the fantasy he had allowed himself was actually identical with the desolation intended for this swath of city. He was a man of no influence, and he took comfort from the fact. But what if the particulars of his life were only flotsam, so to speak, drowned necktie, drowned wing tips, and he was sunk in that dark flood of unstoppable harm, somehow adding to its appalling weight, lost in it, even while its great shoulder pressed into the age-brittled side of that old sanctuary, that tabernacle raised to the glory of God Almighty, for heaven’s sake? Some thoughts scared him more than others. He might have awakened to the explanation for many things, arrived abruptly at that insight into his own character and motives his father had urged on him, as if any good could come from it.