Ash Wednesday (18 page)

"They?
They?
Who's this '
they
'?
These
clowns?”

“The town. Merridale."

"Jesus Holy Christ, what do you need to be punished for? You didn't do
anything
wrong."

"I think maybe I did."

"You don't know."

"I don't
remember
. Wouldn't I be more apt to forget what I didn't
want
to remember?"

Gingrich looked at Jim for a long time. "I'm not going to be able to talk to you, am I?"

"What about?"

"The weather, what do you think?"

"Talking about what happened can't change anything.”

“Talking about it could change you."

"I don't want to change. Not now." He looked expectantly at the men at the bar. Their voices were growing louder, the intonations harsh.

"You want to leave?" Gingrich asked.

"No. I want to drink my beer." They sat in silence, Gingrich refusing to leave until Jim was ready to go with him. The men kept talking, kept looking, though none of them spoke directly to Jim. When the beers were gone, Jim and Gingrich left. They did not talk to each other on the short drive back to Jim's house, and Gingrich was both confused and angered by the constant half smile, half smirk on Jim's face. He didn't call Jim again, and he received no more columns.

Jim and Beth still talked. When two people who have been so close for so long suffer a loss, it is mere romanticism for one to assume that a house becomes steeped in tragic silence. There were admittedly more times than before when no words passed, but conversation, if only out of necessity, went on. Smiles were given and accepted, and even an occasional laugh was heard. They had one serious discussion after the hearing, in which Jim told her that he would no longer drive a school bus. Not ever. She accepted it and told Mary Spruce the following day. Mary had seemed so relieved that Beth was certain she'd been about to suggest to
her
that it would be best if Jim no longer drove.

Beth didn't push him when she got home in the evenings, and later she wished she had. He was spending his days reading and watching TV, and when she asked, over the dinner he'd made, if he was working on his columns, he told her that he wanted to take some time off from them to get his head together about a few things. She nodded acceptance, understanding far more than he suspected she did.

She had thought long and hard about the course she would take with him. In a way, his reaction to the accident and her concern for him made her own grief easier to bear. She had loved her son deeply, and his loss had literally stunned her when the policeman had arrived with the news. Terry had been
their
child, enjoying the time he spent with his mother equally as much as the greater time he'd spent with Jim, and at first she had been jealous over what she interpreted as Jim's refusal to share his grief with her. It was only later she realized that it was not grief he was hoarding, but guilt, and that she could not share it.

Her love for her husband forced her own grief into the background. She grieved, but inwardly, her outside energies conserved for the battle it would take to free Jim from his demons. At last she determined that her greatest contribution would be to do as little as possible. She would love him, support him, but would not force him. He was all she had left now, and she could not bear the thought of driving him away. This proscribed inactivity became the most difficult thing she had ever tried to accomplish. Beth was a doer, a mover. She could not sit still. It was difficult for her to read a long book, or watch television without a magazine in her lap. So for her to sit back and watch while her husband sorted out the bits of his life made her want to scream.

It got no better, and a week before Christmas she decided to get rid of Terry's toys. She had already boxed a good many things, but the boxes of the child's clothes and toys still sat in the now bare-walled room next to their own, and she thought it would be best to banish them for good and turn the room into something other than the vacant memorial it now seemed. But when she told Jim of her plans to give the toys and clothing to a child welfare agency in Lansford, his face soured. "Why do we have to give them away?"

Why not? she thought. He's dead. Our boy's dead. But instead she shrugged. "I thought, since it was getting to be Christmas, that maybe the agency could use them. It seems foolish to have them here when someone could be using them."

Jim's mouth straightened and his lips went white. "I don't want to give them away."

"Why not?" In spite of herself, she could feel her anger growing.

"I . . . just don't want to. They're all we have."

"We can't keep them forever. We have our memories." His face puckered like a child's about to cry.

"We can use the room for something else," she went on, giving him no chance to respond. "A sewing room, a little study . . . We could put the desk in the basement in there."

Jim looked away from her and walked out of the room. When he did not return, she loaded the boxes into the trunk of the car and opened the windows of what had been Terry's room, as if the chilling wind could blow away the pain that still remained.

Christmas was miserable. Jim's parents came up from Florida, where they had moved two years before. Both of them wore martyred looks throughout their three day visit, breaking the masks with the required smiles as they opened their presents. Beth got Jim some books he had expressed interest in, and some sweaters. He gave her only one present, a moderately expensive gold wristwatch he'd bought before the accident. She kissed him, put it on, and kept it on.

Finally, in mid-January, Beth began to ask Jim, as diplomatically as possible, what he intended to do with himself. “You write so well. Why don't you write something," she suggested. He nodded and said that maybe he would. When she got back from school the next day, he was sitting at the kitchen table, the typewriter in front of him, a four-year-old
Writer's Market
at his side. He seemed embarrassed.

"I was looking through this," he said, "just flipping through, and I saw this section on greeting cards." He laughed, and she laughed too, not sure why but glad to see him
doing
something. "And I thought, hell, I
hate
greeting cards, but it was always because I thought any idiot could write them, and
then
I thought well then why couldn't
I?
"

"So did you?"

He chuckled again, self-disparagingly. "Yeah. Nine of them."

"Nine?"

"Uh-huh. Four birthday, two Mother's Day, three Christmas."

"Are they good?"

"Of course not. They stink. After all, I want to sell them."

"Well, can I hear them?"

His smile faded slowly. "You really want to?" She nodded. "Okay, then." He picked up a sheet of yellow tablet paper, handwritten, with numerous strikeouts. "Here's . . . uh . . . a birthday one." He read it. It was a short verse, sing-song yet clever, and she was smiling when he looked back up at her.

"Pretty terrible, right?"

"No," she said quickly. "I've read a lot worse." And some better, she thought. But he seemed for the first time in weeks to be actually enjoying himself, and she would not allow herself to dampen that. "Actually, I thought it was pretty good."

"Well''—he smirked—"thanks for the compliment. But it doesn't
have
to be good—it just has to sell."

"You're going to submit it?"

"What the hell. All it costs is eighteen cents, right? And they pay up to twenty-five bucks for them. Not bad for a ten or fifteen minute poem."

Beth encouraged him to send them in, not worrying what would happen when they came back, as she had no doubt they would. It was enough that he had regained interest in something—
anything
—again, and she would do all she could to foster that involvement. To her surprise, however, four of the ideas sold the first time out, for a $65 total. In the meantime Jim had been writing more, spending more time on the ideas and on the verses themselves, turning out four or five a day.
Tru
-Line Cards began to buy nearly everything he sent them, and he began submitting what he thought were his better efforts to Hallmark and Gibson, who slowly began to accept his material, and eventually to ask for specific subjects.

So the months went by, Jim stayed at home, and soon the financial concerns that Beth had had were resolved. Jim was making close to $800 a month writing greeting cards, and some weeks his income actually exceeded her own. The next winter, when he figured it out, he found that he was able to sell four fifths of what he wrote.

But although the cards kept him busy and kept them financially secure, his reclusiveness increased. He had occasionally accompanied Beth to school functions, but he'd seemed so self-conscious and the parents had been so obviously ill at ease in his presence that she no longer pressured him to come. When they
did
go out, it was to a restaurant in Lansford, where few people knew them. The only public place in Merridale that Jim was willing to frequent was the Anchor, where he would sit alone and drink two or three beers after his daily writing was done at 2:30 or 3:00. Beth didn't realize it at first, and discovered it one day when school was dismissed early, and there was no Jim to greet her at home. "Well, who do you know there?" she asked him when he told her he went there almost daily.

"Nobody. To talk to."

"You just sit and drink alone?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"I have to."

"I don't—"

"Some of the factories—they let out at three or so. And . . . the guys who work there, they know who I am."

"I still don't see," she said, but she was afraid she was starting to.

"They know about what happened."

"And that's why you go there?" He can't be saying this, she thought.

"Yeah."

She could feel her lip trembling. "I don't understand, Jim," she said. "I just don't understand."

"I don't really know if I do either," he said, shaking his head and smiling apologetically.

She turned and went into the kitchen, where she stood shaking. It had been too easy, she thought. The way she had changed the house, had so slowly and methodically covered the traces of Terry's existence. Every week, every day, she had made something else disappear—into the attic, the cellar, the garbage, out of the house. Only the photographs remained, the big hand-tinted 12" by 24" over the piano, the smaller 8" by 10"s in the hall, the family portrait they'd had taken when
Terry'd
turned six. She had thought she'd been storing the memories away too, and with them the guilt.

But she'd been wrong. The house they lived in was haunted, and the ghost would always be there no matter what she did, what she said, because Jim wanted it there. He would remember Terry, and would remember what he thought he'd done to him his whole life. But the memory would not be as other bereaved parents remembered children they'd lost. Remembering Terry would be bitter, not sweet. Remembering Terry would mean remembering Terry's death. Remembering Terry would always mean remembering a nightmare.

Remembering Terry . . .

Jim Callendar lay in his bed staring into darkness, reliving what he could not forget. He turned his head when he heard Beth cough from somewhere in the house, and then he sat up, listening to the dogs barking, barking incessantly. Rising, he walked to the window and pulled back the curtains once more.

A gray tinged with crimson was beginning to lighten the sky, but the blue lights were still there, shining more faintly with the approach of dawn. With the binoculars he could make them out as human figures, men and women, naked. He tried to call Bill Gingrich again.