The Garden of Eden, page 19
“I sure do appreciate that,” Junior said with feeling. “It’s terrific how everybody is willing to help out when disaster strikes. Renews my faith.”
“Eden’s a good place,” the fire chief agreed. He held out his hand to Junior. “Sorry we couldn’t do more to help last night.”
“You did the best you could,” Junior assured him. “The fire was just too far along.”
“Nothing worse than a tire fire,” the fireman agreed. “Sure hope they send those firebug Barrow boys back up the river.” With that, he got into his car and drove away.
Finding footprints on a forest floor littered with newly fallen leaves is a tricky business. Even when wet, leaves don’t take footprints well, and new leaves coming down soon cover what marks there are. Still, an experienced fellow with an eye for tracks and a practical knowledge of his fellow man can see things. Sheriff Arleigh Tate had more years of experience than he cared to admit, experience that had given him a rather clear insight into the ways of his Eden-country neighbors.
He idly noted the churned-up mess of the hillside where the firemen had strung their hoses to the farm pond, then moved slowly through the woods, looking.
He thought that if a cautious fellow were going to commit a crime in Junior’s junkyard, he wouldn’t drive up the main road bold as brass, do the deed, then drive out the same way. A fool might—and the Barrow boys were indeed fools—but not a fellow with a lick of sense. No, sir. A reasonable man with arson or larceny on his mind who didn’t want to spend the winter in the county jail would probably park in Skunk Hollow, where there was almost no chance that someone would see his vehicle, then hike up the ridge to the junkyard.
Before he came to the junkyard this morning, Sheriff Tate had driven to Skunk Hollow. He found fresh tire tracks, all right, tracks left since yesterday’s rain. And there were footprints in the mud. He lost the footprints in a briar thicket, so he couldn’t say for sure they came up this ridge. Now he was looking at the other end of the trail.
Despite the shadows and subdued light amid the trees, he finally found what he was looking for: depressions in the leaves at regular intervals. Footprints. He moved to a place where he could get a better view. Yes, someone had descended the hill here, someone moving hurriedly—in several places he had slipped and left muddy slashes in the leaves. The trail went diagonally down the ridge in the direction of Skunk Hollow.
Arleigh Tate lit a cigar as he stood contemplating the tracks and puffed it meditatively. Finally he turned and followed the trail back toward the junkyard. The gentle breeze spread the cigar smoke into gossamer clouds that dissipated slowly.
When the sheriff came out of the woods he saw Junior greasing his front-end loader.
He merely nodded a reply to Junior’s cheery greeting.
A moment later he muttered, “Amazing about those Barrow boys.”
“Whaddaya mean?” Junior said, wiping the grease from his hands with a red mechanic’s rag.
“How many years have they been stealing parts off you?”
“Ever since I opened this junkyard. ’Bout ten years, I guess. Except when they’ve been in jail or prison.”
Arleigh puffed furiously at his cigar, which had been in danger of going out. With the tip glowing nicely, he removed it from his mouth and said, “It doesn’t figure. This junkyard is their pantry. They swipe a starter or alternator, sell it for beer money, then come back next week for another one. They’re like mice.”
“Yeah.”
“Then they burned down the pantry.”
“The Barrows are crazy,” Junior told Sheriff Tate. “Always have been. Like to do meanness when the mood gets on ’em. They enjoy it. And the cars are still here. They’ll be back soon as God gives them a thirst.”
Arleigh Tate leaned forward for a closer look at Junior’s chin. “That’s quite a bruise. Still sore, I bet.”
Junior’s conscience knifed him again. He was guilty, guilty, guilty. And the bruise—he remembered falling, and wasn’t he grabbing at Arch when he passed out? Or was that later? It seemed foggy, as if…
The sheriff got into his car. He flipped a hand at Junior in farewell, fastened his seat belt and got the engine ticking over.
Junior went back to greasing the front-end loader. It would be prudent to load those steel belts on the truck and get them to the landfill before the manager there changed his mind. Yet when the sheriff’s car was out of sight, he forgot about the grease gun. He sat hugging his knees, staring listlessly at the ashy devastation.
TWELVE
The wind blew down the last of the colorful autumn leaves in the Eden country. The temperatures dropped below freezing every night and rose into the fifties during the day. Yet the storms of winter didn’t come; the skies remained clear. Autumn seemed reluctant to leave.
One day Anne Harris went to visit Ed’s mother. She was now in a nursing home, had been for over a year. After her husband died, Ed found someone to stay with her, cook her meals, keep her clean, clean the house. As her condition deteriorated, her needs became too great for one helper to handle, so she was moved to a nursing home. By that time she didn’t seem to care.
On the day they packed her clothes she had sat in the living room of the old house humming vacantly, lost in a world no one else could enter.
She was like that this afternoon, sitting in her room with a blanket arranged around her legs, facing the window, humming tunelessly, mindlessly. Anne sat in the visitor’s chair and studied the older woman’s face, watching how the sun smoothed the wrinkled skin and made her look younger. It was an illusion, of course, minimizing the irreversible damage done by that insidious, merciless villain, Time.
Ah, Time, you great deceiver, with your sweet, extravagant, shameless promises…then you pillage youth, ravage innocence, murder passion, corrupt health, and finally steal life itself, sneak silently and stealthily away with that tarnished bauble in the dead of night after destroying everything that makes it precious.
Ed’s father, Lane, had fought Time, fought with all his strength against the inevitable, until near the end. Near the end he surrendered. He hadn’t surrendered that first day that Ed went up on the mountain after the deer, though.
Oh, no. She went into his bedroom with the soup and medicine that evening, just after dark, before Ed returned.
“He back yet?” the old man asked.
“No.”
She had placed the soup on the stand, helped him with the pills, put pillows behind him so he could eat. Then he couldn’t hold the spoon. She helped him with several bites. He refused more.
“Enough.”
“You must eat.”
“Food is another appetite that I’ve lost.”
She moved the bowl away, straightened the bed. In a few minutes there was nothing else to do, but still she lingered. The old man had no wants, no little requests.
“Is there anything else I can do?” she asked finally, distractedly, her mind on her husband.
“Stop judging me, lady. But perhaps you can’t do that.”
“I’m not judging you, Father Harris.”
“You can’t lie worth a damn, either.”
“Don’t you think perhaps it’s time to make your peace with me? With those of us you are soon to leave behind?”
The old man was in pain, obvious pain. He waited for a spasm to pass, then said, “How should I do that?”
“I don’t know exactly,” she retorted. “It does seem that you must be thinking of many things as you lie there. Thinking back, perhaps.”
“The past is over, finished, dead,” he shot back. “This minute I’m still alive. Hurting like hell, but by God, still alive. Without a future, with a dead past, with just this moment to live in.”
“Is that all there is?”
“Fight it out with the preachers. Somewhere else. You go into the other room now and get on with living. Let me lie here.”
As she was going out the door with the soup bowl, he said, “Send Eddie in when he gets back.”
Ed came in a half hour later, long after the last of the twilight had faded. Snow covered his coat and hat and melted as he stood in the kitchen entry-way warming up. He leaned the rifle in a corner and slowly peeled off his wet outer clothes. He sat down to take off his boots.
“Your father wants to see you.”
“How is he?”
“Alert. Nasty.”
“Did the doctor come today?”
“No. I talked to him by telephone. He’ll be by in the morning after he finishes his hospital rounds.”
“Mom?”
“I don’t think she understands what’s happening.”
“Sis?”
“Sat in a bedroom upstairs and sobbed all day.”
“I’ll go see them in a bit. How about something to eat? Something hot. And a drink of whiskey.”
He went to his father’s bedroom carrying his drink in his hand, still wearing his hunting pants, his face still flushed with cold. Anne put the pot of soup on the stove to warm. The refrigerator held the remains of a roast, so she warmed up some of that, too.
Ed spent almost a half hour with the old man. He was still with him when the night nurse arrived, muttering about slick roads. Anne briefed the nurse, who went in to see the patient while Ed was still there. When the nurse returned she took dinner to Mrs. Harris and Ed’s sister, Sarah.
Finally Ed returned to the kitchen. “He wanted a minute-by-minute account,” he told Anne as he sat down to eat.
“He’s crazy,” she said curtly.
Ed drank another slug of whiskey and attacked the food.
“You’re crazy, too, to go along with this. Hunting, for Christ’s sake.”
Ed ate in silence as she busied herself cleaning pots and pans; then he went upstairs to see his mother and sister. When he came back downstairs, Ed put his boots on the hearth to dry and stretched out in his father’s easy chair. By the time Anne and the nurse finished preparing another round of medication for the old man, Ed was asleep.
She put a blanket over him finally, then sat staring into the fire. The wind rattled the single-pane windows and howled around the chimney. Once she crossed the room and spent a few minutes watching snow falling into the tiny circle of light that escaped the window. Occasionally she added logs to the fire.
She was exhausted, but she didn’t think she could get to sleep. She was wound too tightly.
If life is a journey, and it seems to be, why does it have to end here, like this? Answer me that, God.
After all the twisty parts and dry stretches and long hills, you get to the end of the road and find a senile wife, a worthless daughter, and a son who scampers into the forest so he won’t have to watch.
She pitied Lane. And she hated him.
This mess was partly his fault. He raised an incompetent, incapable daughter, he sent Ed away today, and he chose to do his dying here, in this ramshackle old farmhouse on the ragged edge of nowhere, when he should have had the common decency to die in a damned hospital like everyone else.
The old man was going to be a selfish, chauvinistic curmudgeon right to the bitter end.
Finally Anne poured herself a drink and tossed it off. She stretched out on the couch so the night nurse could wake her if she needed help, pulled a blanket around herself, and went to sleep listening to the wind.
When she awoke, the night nurse was washing dishes in the kitchen.
“Where’s Ed?”
“He went out fifteen minutes ago. I fixed him some eggs and toast, and he put some sandwiches in his pocket.”
“What time is it?”
“Six-thirty. Almost dawn. There’s fresh coffee in the pot.”
Although she knew the answer, Anne asked anyway. “Did Ed wear his hunting clothes?”
“Yes.”
She went to the kitchen door and threw it open. She stepped out onto the porch, reeling from the bite of the cold wind. Ed wasn’t in sight. Tracks in the snow led off into the gloom. Damn him!
She went back into the kitchen, closed the door against the cold and stood with her back against it.
“Mr. Harris is sleeping just now,” the nurse said.
“How is he?”
“A day or two. Three, perhaps—I don’t know. Not long, though, I think.”
Anne was in the kitchen washing dishes when the doctor came. He was a big man, in his fifties, with an honest, cheerful face. Half the people in the county called him their doctor, and they called him every time they got the sniffles.
She was still there when he came out of the patient’s bedroom. “I’ll take a little shot of that coffee,” he said.
As he leaned against the counter sipping the beverage, he asked, “So how are you holding up?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Feel like hell?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s Ed?”
“Hunting.”
The doctor nodded and met her eyes, and his features softened. “Lane’s got a lot of pain,” he said, “and we’re medicating all we can. If he wants whiskey in the evening, give him a couple of ounces.”
“He asked for it last night.”
“The danger is that the booze will react with his medication and kill him.” He shrugged. “If he wants it, let him have it.” The doctor finished the coffee and set the cup in the dishwater. “When I get to the office I’ll see about getting a nurse out here in the daytime, too. I think you’ve had enough.”
“Thank you.”
Going out the door he told her, “You know my number. Call me anytime. I can be here in half an hour.”
The contrast between the doctor’s comment and Ed’s blithe odyssey in pursuit of a deer hit her hard. Her stomach felt as if it contained a rock. A large, cold rock.
Ed’s sister, Sarah, came downstairs around ten o’clock and helped herself to toast and coffee. Although she had been named after her grandmother, Anne mused, never were two women more unlike.
Sarah sat next to the fire nibbling on the toast. “Oh, this weather,” she said at last, to break the silence.
Anne grunted.
“You must think me a terrible daughter.”
The temptation to say something polite tripped across Anne’s synapses, which irritated her. Sarah was a miserable human being; everything she did and said rubbed Anne the wrong way. Here she was now, pleading for sympathy! Well, she would get not the tiniest smidgen from her sister-in-law.
Sarah sighed audibly.
Anne got a firm grip on her lower lip with her teeth.
“Oh, I do wish William were here.” William was her husband. Sarah always called him by his Christian name, although everyone else who knew him more than ten minutes called him Bill. “He wanted desperately to come but couldn’t get away.”
“Umm,” Anne managed. She had met Bill on only two occasions, both mercifully short. He was a lost-in-cyberspace technoid, a chubby, bald man with sweaty palms and a florid complexion that hinted at a future of heart disease who had created and sold several computer games to a major manufacturer. He was reputedly rich, about ten million dollars’ worth. Anne idly wondered what grotesque flaw in Bill’s character made Sarah attractive to him. If she was. Perhaps he was having a wild fling in California just now, celebrating a few days’ reprieve from Sarah’s limpid company.
After a while Sarah said, “I suppose I should go to see Father.” She glanced at Anne, who bit so hard on her lower lip that it hurt.
“It’s so difficult,” Sarah explained. “I want to remember Dad as he was, not sick and helpless and—”
“Dying?”
“Dad certainly wouldn’t want us to remember him—”
“You make me want to puke,” Anne snarled. She marched into the kitchen, then decided she had had all of this house she could stand. She threw open the kitchen door and went out into the snow.
Her tears felt like icicles as they slid down her cheeks. She swabbed at them angrily.
The snow had stopped. Patches of blue were visible between dark, ragged clouds. Every now and then a sunbeam hit the snow with a brilliant light that hurt the eyes. The wind was still strong, and cold.
Shivering, her tears stanched, Anne went back inside. Sarah wasn’t in the living room, she noted with relief.
The old man’s voice came through the open bedroom door. “I do not want to talk to a minister. If you get that windbag out here I won’t see him.”
“You are a nasty old man,” Sarah said belligerently.
“Daughter, I do believe that is the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me. Certainly the truest.”
“You should have stayed in the hospital.”
“Perhaps,” Lane Harris said gently. “How is your mother taking all this?”
“She’s very upset.”
“And you?”
“Oh, Daddy, it’s very hard seeing you like this.” The sound of sobs came through the doorway. Anne stepped into the bedroom to catch the performance.
Lane put a stop to it. “I’m tired,” he said. “Take care of your mother, Sarah. And let me get some rest, please.” He closed his eyes.
Sarah went upstairs, still sobbing. Anne checked the patient, then closed the door behind her.
An hour later when she returned to the bedroom with more pills, Lane was awake. His eyes followed her around the room. “Want to tell me what’s on your mind, too?”
“No.”
“Maybe you’d better get it said. There isn’t much time left.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Very few things do. If we only talked about things that mattered, we wouldn’t ever say much.”
“Okay,” she said, making up her mind. “Okay, I’ll say it. You sent Ed to hunt that deer. To shoot it. To kill it. That deer must die because you’re dying. God, that is foul.”
“You don’t understand anyone but yourself, Anne. You never did.”
That comment cut her to the quick.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to hurt you. No call for that.”
She struggled to maintain her composure. “I certainly don’t understand you,” she murmured finally.
“The problem is that you’re too smart. I told Ed you were too smart before he married you. He did it anyway. Guess I knew he would.”
“Eden’s a good place,” the fire chief agreed. He held out his hand to Junior. “Sorry we couldn’t do more to help last night.”
“You did the best you could,” Junior assured him. “The fire was just too far along.”
“Nothing worse than a tire fire,” the fireman agreed. “Sure hope they send those firebug Barrow boys back up the river.” With that, he got into his car and drove away.
Finding footprints on a forest floor littered with newly fallen leaves is a tricky business. Even when wet, leaves don’t take footprints well, and new leaves coming down soon cover what marks there are. Still, an experienced fellow with an eye for tracks and a practical knowledge of his fellow man can see things. Sheriff Arleigh Tate had more years of experience than he cared to admit, experience that had given him a rather clear insight into the ways of his Eden-country neighbors.
He idly noted the churned-up mess of the hillside where the firemen had strung their hoses to the farm pond, then moved slowly through the woods, looking.
He thought that if a cautious fellow were going to commit a crime in Junior’s junkyard, he wouldn’t drive up the main road bold as brass, do the deed, then drive out the same way. A fool might—and the Barrow boys were indeed fools—but not a fellow with a lick of sense. No, sir. A reasonable man with arson or larceny on his mind who didn’t want to spend the winter in the county jail would probably park in Skunk Hollow, where there was almost no chance that someone would see his vehicle, then hike up the ridge to the junkyard.
Before he came to the junkyard this morning, Sheriff Tate had driven to Skunk Hollow. He found fresh tire tracks, all right, tracks left since yesterday’s rain. And there were footprints in the mud. He lost the footprints in a briar thicket, so he couldn’t say for sure they came up this ridge. Now he was looking at the other end of the trail.
Despite the shadows and subdued light amid the trees, he finally found what he was looking for: depressions in the leaves at regular intervals. Footprints. He moved to a place where he could get a better view. Yes, someone had descended the hill here, someone moving hurriedly—in several places he had slipped and left muddy slashes in the leaves. The trail went diagonally down the ridge in the direction of Skunk Hollow.
Arleigh Tate lit a cigar as he stood contemplating the tracks and puffed it meditatively. Finally he turned and followed the trail back toward the junkyard. The gentle breeze spread the cigar smoke into gossamer clouds that dissipated slowly.
When the sheriff came out of the woods he saw Junior greasing his front-end loader.
He merely nodded a reply to Junior’s cheery greeting.
A moment later he muttered, “Amazing about those Barrow boys.”
“Whaddaya mean?” Junior said, wiping the grease from his hands with a red mechanic’s rag.
“How many years have they been stealing parts off you?”
“Ever since I opened this junkyard. ’Bout ten years, I guess. Except when they’ve been in jail or prison.”
Arleigh puffed furiously at his cigar, which had been in danger of going out. With the tip glowing nicely, he removed it from his mouth and said, “It doesn’t figure. This junkyard is their pantry. They swipe a starter or alternator, sell it for beer money, then come back next week for another one. They’re like mice.”
“Yeah.”
“Then they burned down the pantry.”
“The Barrows are crazy,” Junior told Sheriff Tate. “Always have been. Like to do meanness when the mood gets on ’em. They enjoy it. And the cars are still here. They’ll be back soon as God gives them a thirst.”
Arleigh Tate leaned forward for a closer look at Junior’s chin. “That’s quite a bruise. Still sore, I bet.”
Junior’s conscience knifed him again. He was guilty, guilty, guilty. And the bruise—he remembered falling, and wasn’t he grabbing at Arch when he passed out? Or was that later? It seemed foggy, as if…
The sheriff got into his car. He flipped a hand at Junior in farewell, fastened his seat belt and got the engine ticking over.
Junior went back to greasing the front-end loader. It would be prudent to load those steel belts on the truck and get them to the landfill before the manager there changed his mind. Yet when the sheriff’s car was out of sight, he forgot about the grease gun. He sat hugging his knees, staring listlessly at the ashy devastation.
TWELVE
The wind blew down the last of the colorful autumn leaves in the Eden country. The temperatures dropped below freezing every night and rose into the fifties during the day. Yet the storms of winter didn’t come; the skies remained clear. Autumn seemed reluctant to leave.
One day Anne Harris went to visit Ed’s mother. She was now in a nursing home, had been for over a year. After her husband died, Ed found someone to stay with her, cook her meals, keep her clean, clean the house. As her condition deteriorated, her needs became too great for one helper to handle, so she was moved to a nursing home. By that time she didn’t seem to care.
On the day they packed her clothes she had sat in the living room of the old house humming vacantly, lost in a world no one else could enter.
She was like that this afternoon, sitting in her room with a blanket arranged around her legs, facing the window, humming tunelessly, mindlessly. Anne sat in the visitor’s chair and studied the older woman’s face, watching how the sun smoothed the wrinkled skin and made her look younger. It was an illusion, of course, minimizing the irreversible damage done by that insidious, merciless villain, Time.
Ah, Time, you great deceiver, with your sweet, extravagant, shameless promises…then you pillage youth, ravage innocence, murder passion, corrupt health, and finally steal life itself, sneak silently and stealthily away with that tarnished bauble in the dead of night after destroying everything that makes it precious.
Ed’s father, Lane, had fought Time, fought with all his strength against the inevitable, until near the end. Near the end he surrendered. He hadn’t surrendered that first day that Ed went up on the mountain after the deer, though.
Oh, no. She went into his bedroom with the soup and medicine that evening, just after dark, before Ed returned.
“He back yet?” the old man asked.
“No.”
She had placed the soup on the stand, helped him with the pills, put pillows behind him so he could eat. Then he couldn’t hold the spoon. She helped him with several bites. He refused more.
“Enough.”
“You must eat.”
“Food is another appetite that I’ve lost.”
She moved the bowl away, straightened the bed. In a few minutes there was nothing else to do, but still she lingered. The old man had no wants, no little requests.
“Is there anything else I can do?” she asked finally, distractedly, her mind on her husband.
“Stop judging me, lady. But perhaps you can’t do that.”
“I’m not judging you, Father Harris.”
“You can’t lie worth a damn, either.”
“Don’t you think perhaps it’s time to make your peace with me? With those of us you are soon to leave behind?”
The old man was in pain, obvious pain. He waited for a spasm to pass, then said, “How should I do that?”
“I don’t know exactly,” she retorted. “It does seem that you must be thinking of many things as you lie there. Thinking back, perhaps.”
“The past is over, finished, dead,” he shot back. “This minute I’m still alive. Hurting like hell, but by God, still alive. Without a future, with a dead past, with just this moment to live in.”
“Is that all there is?”
“Fight it out with the preachers. Somewhere else. You go into the other room now and get on with living. Let me lie here.”
As she was going out the door with the soup bowl, he said, “Send Eddie in when he gets back.”
Ed came in a half hour later, long after the last of the twilight had faded. Snow covered his coat and hat and melted as he stood in the kitchen entry-way warming up. He leaned the rifle in a corner and slowly peeled off his wet outer clothes. He sat down to take off his boots.
“Your father wants to see you.”
“How is he?”
“Alert. Nasty.”
“Did the doctor come today?”
“No. I talked to him by telephone. He’ll be by in the morning after he finishes his hospital rounds.”
“Mom?”
“I don’t think she understands what’s happening.”
“Sis?”
“Sat in a bedroom upstairs and sobbed all day.”
“I’ll go see them in a bit. How about something to eat? Something hot. And a drink of whiskey.”
He went to his father’s bedroom carrying his drink in his hand, still wearing his hunting pants, his face still flushed with cold. Anne put the pot of soup on the stove to warm. The refrigerator held the remains of a roast, so she warmed up some of that, too.
Ed spent almost a half hour with the old man. He was still with him when the night nurse arrived, muttering about slick roads. Anne briefed the nurse, who went in to see the patient while Ed was still there. When the nurse returned she took dinner to Mrs. Harris and Ed’s sister, Sarah.
Finally Ed returned to the kitchen. “He wanted a minute-by-minute account,” he told Anne as he sat down to eat.
“He’s crazy,” she said curtly.
Ed drank another slug of whiskey and attacked the food.
“You’re crazy, too, to go along with this. Hunting, for Christ’s sake.”
Ed ate in silence as she busied herself cleaning pots and pans; then he went upstairs to see his mother and sister. When he came back downstairs, Ed put his boots on the hearth to dry and stretched out in his father’s easy chair. By the time Anne and the nurse finished preparing another round of medication for the old man, Ed was asleep.
She put a blanket over him finally, then sat staring into the fire. The wind rattled the single-pane windows and howled around the chimney. Once she crossed the room and spent a few minutes watching snow falling into the tiny circle of light that escaped the window. Occasionally she added logs to the fire.
She was exhausted, but she didn’t think she could get to sleep. She was wound too tightly.
If life is a journey, and it seems to be, why does it have to end here, like this? Answer me that, God.
After all the twisty parts and dry stretches and long hills, you get to the end of the road and find a senile wife, a worthless daughter, and a son who scampers into the forest so he won’t have to watch.
She pitied Lane. And she hated him.
This mess was partly his fault. He raised an incompetent, incapable daughter, he sent Ed away today, and he chose to do his dying here, in this ramshackle old farmhouse on the ragged edge of nowhere, when he should have had the common decency to die in a damned hospital like everyone else.
The old man was going to be a selfish, chauvinistic curmudgeon right to the bitter end.
Finally Anne poured herself a drink and tossed it off. She stretched out on the couch so the night nurse could wake her if she needed help, pulled a blanket around herself, and went to sleep listening to the wind.
When she awoke, the night nurse was washing dishes in the kitchen.
“Where’s Ed?”
“He went out fifteen minutes ago. I fixed him some eggs and toast, and he put some sandwiches in his pocket.”
“What time is it?”
“Six-thirty. Almost dawn. There’s fresh coffee in the pot.”
Although she knew the answer, Anne asked anyway. “Did Ed wear his hunting clothes?”
“Yes.”
She went to the kitchen door and threw it open. She stepped out onto the porch, reeling from the bite of the cold wind. Ed wasn’t in sight. Tracks in the snow led off into the gloom. Damn him!
She went back into the kitchen, closed the door against the cold and stood with her back against it.
“Mr. Harris is sleeping just now,” the nurse said.
“How is he?”
“A day or two. Three, perhaps—I don’t know. Not long, though, I think.”
Anne was in the kitchen washing dishes when the doctor came. He was a big man, in his fifties, with an honest, cheerful face. Half the people in the county called him their doctor, and they called him every time they got the sniffles.
She was still there when he came out of the patient’s bedroom. “I’ll take a little shot of that coffee,” he said.
As he leaned against the counter sipping the beverage, he asked, “So how are you holding up?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Feel like hell?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s Ed?”
“Hunting.”
The doctor nodded and met her eyes, and his features softened. “Lane’s got a lot of pain,” he said, “and we’re medicating all we can. If he wants whiskey in the evening, give him a couple of ounces.”
“He asked for it last night.”
“The danger is that the booze will react with his medication and kill him.” He shrugged. “If he wants it, let him have it.” The doctor finished the coffee and set the cup in the dishwater. “When I get to the office I’ll see about getting a nurse out here in the daytime, too. I think you’ve had enough.”
“Thank you.”
Going out the door he told her, “You know my number. Call me anytime. I can be here in half an hour.”
The contrast between the doctor’s comment and Ed’s blithe odyssey in pursuit of a deer hit her hard. Her stomach felt as if it contained a rock. A large, cold rock.
Ed’s sister, Sarah, came downstairs around ten o’clock and helped herself to toast and coffee. Although she had been named after her grandmother, Anne mused, never were two women more unlike.
Sarah sat next to the fire nibbling on the toast. “Oh, this weather,” she said at last, to break the silence.
Anne grunted.
“You must think me a terrible daughter.”
The temptation to say something polite tripped across Anne’s synapses, which irritated her. Sarah was a miserable human being; everything she did and said rubbed Anne the wrong way. Here she was now, pleading for sympathy! Well, she would get not the tiniest smidgen from her sister-in-law.
Sarah sighed audibly.
Anne got a firm grip on her lower lip with her teeth.
“Oh, I do wish William were here.” William was her husband. Sarah always called him by his Christian name, although everyone else who knew him more than ten minutes called him Bill. “He wanted desperately to come but couldn’t get away.”
“Umm,” Anne managed. She had met Bill on only two occasions, both mercifully short. He was a lost-in-cyberspace technoid, a chubby, bald man with sweaty palms and a florid complexion that hinted at a future of heart disease who had created and sold several computer games to a major manufacturer. He was reputedly rich, about ten million dollars’ worth. Anne idly wondered what grotesque flaw in Bill’s character made Sarah attractive to him. If she was. Perhaps he was having a wild fling in California just now, celebrating a few days’ reprieve from Sarah’s limpid company.
After a while Sarah said, “I suppose I should go to see Father.” She glanced at Anne, who bit so hard on her lower lip that it hurt.
“It’s so difficult,” Sarah explained. “I want to remember Dad as he was, not sick and helpless and—”
“Dying?”
“Dad certainly wouldn’t want us to remember him—”
“You make me want to puke,” Anne snarled. She marched into the kitchen, then decided she had had all of this house she could stand. She threw open the kitchen door and went out into the snow.
Her tears felt like icicles as they slid down her cheeks. She swabbed at them angrily.
The snow had stopped. Patches of blue were visible between dark, ragged clouds. Every now and then a sunbeam hit the snow with a brilliant light that hurt the eyes. The wind was still strong, and cold.
Shivering, her tears stanched, Anne went back inside. Sarah wasn’t in the living room, she noted with relief.
The old man’s voice came through the open bedroom door. “I do not want to talk to a minister. If you get that windbag out here I won’t see him.”
“You are a nasty old man,” Sarah said belligerently.
“Daughter, I do believe that is the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me. Certainly the truest.”
“You should have stayed in the hospital.”
“Perhaps,” Lane Harris said gently. “How is your mother taking all this?”
“She’s very upset.”
“And you?”
“Oh, Daddy, it’s very hard seeing you like this.” The sound of sobs came through the doorway. Anne stepped into the bedroom to catch the performance.
Lane put a stop to it. “I’m tired,” he said. “Take care of your mother, Sarah. And let me get some rest, please.” He closed his eyes.
Sarah went upstairs, still sobbing. Anne checked the patient, then closed the door behind her.
An hour later when she returned to the bedroom with more pills, Lane was awake. His eyes followed her around the room. “Want to tell me what’s on your mind, too?”
“No.”
“Maybe you’d better get it said. There isn’t much time left.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Very few things do. If we only talked about things that mattered, we wouldn’t ever say much.”
“Okay,” she said, making up her mind. “Okay, I’ll say it. You sent Ed to hunt that deer. To shoot it. To kill it. That deer must die because you’re dying. God, that is foul.”
“You don’t understand anyone but yourself, Anne. You never did.”
That comment cut her to the quick.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to hurt you. No call for that.”
She struggled to maintain her composure. “I certainly don’t understand you,” she murmured finally.
“The problem is that you’re too smart. I told Ed you were too smart before he married you. He did it anyway. Guess I knew he would.”
