Pew(28)

One of her daughters looks so much like my late wife that it’s … startling. I know my granddaughters are all their own people, of course—people don’t repeat—but it’s natural to go looking for the dead in new faces. But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become—what kind of grief is that?
I shook my head. Mr. Kercher shook his, too.
It has only been recently that I started to ask Ava about the questions she used to debate so tirelessly with me, and we hardly ever agreed about everything—in fact it seems we never completely agreed about anything. She was the one who claimed atheism, which led me to put forth the idea, perhaps, that some mysteries in nature made me wonder if there was some sort of … larger consciousness … something beyond human consciousness … well, she would become so impassioned in rebutting this idea. Reason, reason, reason, she’d say. She had no patience, she said, for the waffling agnostics or those blindly seduced by deism. Her words! I won’t repeat them to her now …
Recently she said to me—she said—God spoke to me, and now I don’t question it. That put an end to our discussion … she put an end to it. She didn’t want to be questioned. When someone says they heard something you did not hear, and they know you did not hear it, then you cannot tell them they did not hear what they believe they heard. They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest. It is the loudest and most confounding emotion—wanting.
Mr. Kercher’s voice disappeared into the pines, the creek, the soil and stones. His hands were palm up on each knee and his face tilted up. His mouth hung slack awhile, then shut.
It’s always seemed to me—and as I get older, I feel this even more intensely—that kindness to other people comes with its own reward. It can be immediately felt. And the only thing I can see that a belief in divinity makes possible in this world is a right toward cruelty—the belief in an afterlife being the real life … not here. People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others … to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that. It creates the reins for cruelty …
Mr. Kercher stood up then and looked around him, as if he’d just remembered where he was. All his crying was gone then. I’m so sorry to take up all this time. He smiled and looked around as if suddenly lost. I don’t usually say so much. He put his hands in his pockets and removed them. There’s really so little to say.



HILDA WAS ON THE PORCH when Mr. Kercher and I approached. The air was already heavy. Somewhere in the neighborhood, a lawn mower purred.
I wish there was something else I could do, he said. I wish there was anything I could do to help. He shook his head a little, but I wasn’t sure why.
Did you have a nice little walk? Hilda asked.
She squinted across the street, waved her whole arm at Mr. Kercher, who was looking back toward us.
Thank you, Mr. Kercher! she shouted. Have a good day now, you hear?
Yes. And you.
Will I see you at Butch and Kitty’s later on?
Mr. Kercher stood still a moment, looked to his feet. I don’t believe so.
All right, well, you have a good day now. Hilda’s voice was loud and firm, a stone.
Yes.



IN THE DAYLIGHT that large house looked even larger, like a courthouse. Several cars and trucks were parked on both sides of the street. We walked beside the house, passed through a side gate, down a stone-paved path, past one of those trees that tried to grasp the sky, past flowers gasping in the heat.
Hilda knocked on a glass door and Kitty came to let us in. Inside, the house was thick with voices and noise. Kitty spoke to Hilda awhile, then turned to me—
Now I wish Nelson could be here to keep you company but he’s in school and I couldn’t get him out of school without upsetting the other kids—you know, we try not to favor him over the others or give him anything different or special. We try to treat them all equal.
I was given a glass of ice tea and a little chair in the corner of the kitchen. Several women were moving things in and out of ovens, arranging things on wide platters, slicing things with knives. The one that had spoken to me last time was there, too, her white apron stiff and clean, and her dark hair still pulled back tight, as if nothing at all had happened or changed since I’d last seen her. She fled the kitchen through swinging doors and I heard a wave of voices come toward us from the next room.
Why does this feel so much like a funeral? I heard one of the women ask another.
I know what you mean. People are in that mood. I guess it’s just … well, people do sort of get like that right before the festival, don’t they?
Jimmie Lee’s car got broken into last night and someone stole the Karlton children’s bikes right out of their garage this week, a woman said as she layered ham on a platter.
Is that so? Hilda asked.
Four whole bicycles. I keep forgetting the festival’s Saturday, the woman said, speaking as if to that platter of meat.
Across the kitchen a child in a clean pink dress and white bow was busying herself in a toy kitchen—moving things into and out of the little oven, arranging plastic foods on plastic platters. A small television in the other corner spoke muffled words to the room.
Sometimes, Kitty said, loudly enough to address the entire room, I feel like—if I just keep that television on all day, then nothing bad can happen, you know what I mean? Like a watched pot, like that kind of thing. Then other times it’s almost the other way around—like I know something is going to go wrong eventually and I don’t want to be the last to know.