An Annie Dillard Reader (10 page)

Clare closed the door. He heard Obenchain's heavy tread descend the steps.

He had been so young, ever since he could remember—so young, and so full of ideas.

Clare extinguished the dining-room lamp and the parlor lamp; he smelled the heavy coal oil. He found a doll in his hand. He replaced it on the sofa. He fetched a log from the back porch and jammed it into the stove.

Obenchain sounded as if he meant to kill him that very
night, or on Christmas tomorrow, or the next day. What about the sewing machine? Ada knew where he had hidden it in the cowshed. Who would show his pupils the three acids in brown bottles and their properties, or how to run the ripsaw? He had planned these projects for the dark of winter. One of his classes had yet to cover electromagnetism, a “daisy topic,” as he put it to himself, which he purely enjoyed.

In another eight years he and June would own this house. They could own it now—June could own it if he got himself killed—but the capital was doing more good on the loose. Their money was no longer tied to real estate; prices were going up so fast that professionals had taken over, and Clare had withdrawn. June possessed a legacy of $35,000, to which he had just added another two or so thousands from the land sale. He had tucked it in a spread of “copper-bottomed,” solid things—bank certificates, the gas company, national railroads—for which prudence he was now grateful.

 

The Lummi Indians called him Sma-Hahl-Ton, the long one. He was taller than all the men in the settlement when he was just fourteen. He was so thin, Iron Mike said, “you couldn't hit him with a handful of dried peas.” He himself told people he took his bath in a shotgun barrel. He could hold his own, though, and did. He flew out and gave thrashings and tannings to other boys when he felt he had to, a bang on the nose here and there with heedless gaiety. He was, in the words of Iron Mike, “a fine broth of a boy.”

He enrolled halfheartedly at the Goshen Normal School and qualified himself as a schoolteacher in science. He met June the following September, when he was thirty-five; he was building a house. She roused and flashed wonderfully easy, and the skin on her face colored up. Her dark eyes struck around alertly. She spoke so softly a man could hardly hear her, and so sharply he could be sorry he tried. Her physique was scaled down. A Maryland lady, gently reared, she possessed five or six accomplishments, more than any woman he ever saw. Her stranger's glance included him in some particular joke, the details of
which he had been eager to learn. He delighted, in those days, in the startling fixity of her opinions; he taught her, bit by bit, what she needed to know about the country.

When he married, Clare set his net and it held. Good things accumulated; their life grew and spread. Languid Mabel arrived, and a son who did not live. He and June had added a front porch to the house, and a cowshed; they had dug a garden, to which they added a new row every year. Chance had added to them an aggrieved terrier and a bobtail cat. When his stepfather died, his mother came; she and June ran the house. They bought an organ for the parlor, on which June banged out ballads and hymns so fiercely her hair came down and her face flushed up. He planted cottonwoods front and back, and a row of poplars. In the shop he fashioned cherry frames for two watercolor prints of Niagara Falls; June hung the pictures in the kitchen. He refinished the chairs; he made windfall-apple cider; he painted the house blue. Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets. Every month June reminded him to pay the mortgage.

Everything was his idea of a good time. He would do any favor for anyone who asked. He never answered letters. Once he walked fifteen miles to save half a bit on twenty pounds of potatoes. He never deliberately told a lie, and he never happened to keep a promise. June told him one night that when she met him, he looked like “a boy burnt out from playing,” and said she loved him for his undiscriminating enthusiasm for all things equally, for snow or no snow, and for whatever he was doing at any moment, for planing a plank or reading the paper. He told people he hated schedules, appointments, finances—anything fussy or detailed. He enjoyed enjoyment. It was fine to have a drink, and almighty fine to have a family, and damned fine to have it rain the day he said he would fix the roof. He was a high-school physical science and manual-training teacher.

He sought deeds and found tasks. He was a giant in joy, racing and thoughtless, suggestible, a bountiful child. He whistled in bed every morning and fell asleep every night after tea. He took his sweet time. He was late for work and late for supper. His wife
laughed at his jokes; his mother waited on him; his daughter rode on his shoulders and bounced her heels in his heart.

 

As soon as he blew out the parlor lamp, the yellow cat cried at the door. Clare opened the door to let it out. He looked into the night.

Obenchain was still there. He was standing still as a boulder in the mud lot below the house, barely visible in silhouette against the distant water. He was facing the house, a wrathful shouldered hump in a hat. Clare did not know if Obenchain could see him; the house was dark.

“Go away,” Clare called out. “Go home. Go away!”

 

Clare lay in bed under the cold window. His sharp feet poked the blankets up; his sharp nose poked into the air. When June asked what Obenchain had said, he answered that he only wanted to use the old steam lathe at the shop. When June asked who he was shouting at, Clare said it was a stray cat hissing at their cat. These were just about the first cold-blooded lies he ever told her. Now she was asleep. Clare knew Obenchain had no reason to wish him dead. Obenchain liked reasons; he had a bucketful of reasons for everything he did, which he would explain to anyone who could understand them.

Obenchain understood his own reasons, however, and Obenchain believed himself. He was unpredictable, he was perhaps drunk, or having a spell of nervous excitement, or cold-out crazy; he was perhaps acting on someone else's orders—but for all that, he was not kidding; he was earnest. Clare had seen his meager eyebrows draw together in a bulge under his hat brim, from the effort of explaining; he saw the incongruous, imploring smile. Clare's life had become important to Obenchain. And so, even while he lay in bed that first night, Clare began the process of believing him. Who was he not to believe Obenchain, when Obenchain believed himself? People do what they believe they will do. If a man believes he will plant peonies, Clare thought, then he will probably plant peonies, and he will not if he does not believe. If a man believes that your death fits his plans, however obscure, then your death fits his plans, how
ever obscure, and he is the one with the gun. Clare could try to kill him first, or he could take his family and leave, or he could try to get him locked up. For how long? What would Obenchain do? When?

In the high school shop, Obenchain would do anything. Once he shouted suddenly, addressing the class. He knew what power turned the big saws; he knew the limits of cold chisels, the ontology of gases, the secrets of numbers on the rule. The sweat on his white forehead shone in the basement windows' light. People swindled him, he confided to Clare, whispering; they tried to take advantage of his honesty. His mind was quick and his hands were sure. One-fifth of Clare's students failed manual training; Obenchain led the class. Sometimes he wandered away, wounded, when Clare was talking to him. He loomed over the schoolboys, head and shoulders. He quit his first term of algebra; he could not stick it. Clare found him once in the hall standing still, with his jaws open like a seal. His lips stretched down like the lips on a cedar mask. His pants were wet; his eyes were wide and astonished; his skin was red and wet with tears.

Obenchain mastered his nervous weakness, Clare knew, more every year. His vehemence took on the force of coherence, the force of a large and balanced battery of ideas aimed at a single point. He possessed skills. Once at the livery stable Clare had seen Obenchain pinch the eyelid of a skittery horse, to hold it still for haltering; he seemed to have the eyelid by his fingernails. The tormenting trick worked; the horse held its very breath. Obenchain was erratic, but his wrath and distrust were steady. Most people were afraid of him. Respectable families multiplied in the town, and the south-side roughs and criminals—hoboes and cardsharks, old buffalo hunters, train robbers, bounty hunters, deserters, and murderers—had diminished in numbers and notice, while ordinary hermits abounded. People said that Obenchain could read Greek. They said he was a genius who would make the town famous. They said a falling tree had cracked his head when he was a boy on the island, and one of its branches jabbed into his brain. They said he ate cloudberries, which are poisonous; they said he ate soap. They
said he swam in the bay at night trailing eelgrass, and lay stark naked on the rocks. They said he had a hand in tying the Chinese fellow under the old wharf at low tide. People said every sort of thing.

Clare was looking at the window beside the bed; it revealed nothing and reflected nothing, for the sky and house were dark. June, he wanted to think: June with her deep-arched eyes, and limp Mabel, and his straddle-legged mother, carrying on in the house without him, as if he were late forever, and they were holding dinner. For a moment he saw June and Mabel stiff and blurred and bewildered. He could not, however, keep them in mind. If he died now, his life would have been a brief, passing thing like a hard shower. If he died later, having done more, it would be no different.

Clare liked “to keep abreast,” he said, “of what is afoot.” Just knowing all the news was a job. Every day things happened. Today he had raced through a full day; he always did. He knew he blazed with health and abounded in the goodwill of men. He was what his mother called a crackerjack, and all possibility. He lived at gale force; he moved between activities at railway speed; he had to. Everybody did. The town of Whatcom was “a comer,” as people said. Its new high school was “a hummer.” Now, as streamers of colored fog began to advance on the black clearness of Clare's thoughts, he found he could not recollect why he had been so all-fired busy all these years, congratulating himself, like everyone else; no wonder people were so astonished to die.

Every night, Mabel centered herself on her feather bed to sleep, and never extended a finger or toe, for she believed herself to be surrounded by sharks and black death. She was right. She was surrounded by sharks and black death. He used to know that too, when he was a boy, but it had slipped his mind.

II

Spring came to Puget Sound and to the Nooksack plain and the mountains. The earth rolled belly-up to the light, and the light battered it. Clare Fishburn was still alive, was still walking
abroad in the daylight where everything changes, and holding tight to the nights as they rolled.

Spring came to the northern coast, and the daylight widened. Daylight stuck a wedge into darkness and split it open like a log. Winter was lost and irretrievable before Clare caught up with it. He had thought the seasons were longer. He had thought he was younger. Now things were unhinged and floating away. Every day, people moved from their houses. Every hour, the sea ducks of winter vanished from the water, the harlequin ducks and the brant. The trees were going. All winter Clare had learned his own trees' hard branches, how they grew and twigged: the lilac bush by the porch with the sky behind it, the alder saplings, the cottonwood in the yard. Now those dark lines were vanishing into leaf and disappearing before his eyes. The strong roads softened under his bicycle tires. Through the parlor window he saw the snow on the ridge diminish and disappear.

Every day was a day in which Clare expected to die. When he woke one Sunday morning in the last week of March, he regarded his sleeping wife gravely. Her head lay lightly on the mattress and smoothly, flush, as a clam rests on its shell. There was perfection and composure in her small face. He admired the supple and irrigated quality of her skin; it took a shine to the coming day. Light masses shone on her cheek and brow, and passed subtly to shadow in the soft, expressive hollow over her eyes. He had looked at June's face so often, for so long, that he half believed it was his own face.

He was aware that common wisdom counseled that love was a malady that blinded lovers' eyes like acid. Love's skewed sight made hard features appear harmonious, and sinners appear saints, and cowards appear heroes. Clare was by no means an original thinker, but on this one point he had recently reached an opposing view: that lovers alone see what is real. When he courted June he thought it a privilege to wash dishes with her in river sand. He thought it a privilege to hold her cutaway coat, to look at Mount Baker from her side; he thought it a privilege to hear her family's stories over tea and watch her eyebrows rise and fall. Now, he knew it was.

At breakfast Clare considered his mother. She was perky in the mornings, as if the day might offer her something. She had been just twenty when she and Clare's father had crossed the plains in a wagon train from Illinois. Now she was shrinking perceptibly, and her skin was softening for death. Her dark skirt was shiny at the seat; her bun of white hair was no bigger than a button. Her skull was starting to show, yellow, through her forehead. He could not remember how she looked when she was young. She was strong, too, and able; she could split a cedar shake bolt with a tenpenny nail. It was a trick everyone had seen. He had not done right by her, and now there was nothing he could do. He could let her talk to him more.

His mother believed, Clare thought, that dead people left here for somewhere else. She would be happy to leave plates. Now he would die first. He would go and prepare a place for her, if there were places to be had. If there were places to be had, he would set a table for her, and bid her sit and eat. But there would be no tables, and no plates, and strictly nothing to eat. It was hard to imagine a place without any sort of plates.