Homeplace (41 page)

She looked up. He was staring at her, his eyes brilliant with something … fever, or some sort of importuning. It was a look she could not read.

“Yeah,” Sam Canaday said, and the old jeering, sardonic note was back in his voice, under something that sounded like an anger born of grief. “You still holed up these hot afternoons with that book, Mike?”

Mike looked at him and felt the traitorous heat flood into her chest and neck and up into her face.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m working on the book.”

That night, aching with fatigue and stiff with a kind of promissory dread, she reached into the bottom of the suitcase she had stowed at the back of her closet on the morning after she had come home, and took out a fresh yellow legal pad. She pulled a felt-tip pen out of her desk drawer and uncapped it. She stared at the slick, lined yellow surface of the paper for a long moment, and then she wrote at the top of the first sheet,
Going Back
. After a moment, she added,
by Micah Winship
. Then, in a little rush, she wrote on the paper, “Two months ago, in the summer of my fortieth year, I came back for the first time in a quarter of a century to my father’s house.”

She stared at the words, flung in a strong, slanted backhand across the paper, for a little space of time, and then she dropped her face into her hands.

“Oh, God,” Mike whispered to herself. “Oh, God.”

And then she raised her head and began to write again, and she wrote and wrote, for a long time, far into the night.

“D
ON’T GO YET,”
B
AYARD
S
EWELL SAID, REACHING OUT AND
taking Mike’s arm just above the elbow. His hand was cold, almost shockingly so, in the hot, dim room. His fingers were surprisingly hard on her flesh, biting deep. Mike lay back against the piled pillows and looked at him. She had thought he was asleep.

“I ought to look in on Daddy,” she said. “We’ve been up here for nearly three hours. It’s been four since he got his last pills.”

“I looked in on him when I came in,” he said. “He was cutting Z’s like there was no tomorrow. Relax, Mike. You’re strung as tight as a bow. He’s not going to wake up. You gave him a double dose, didn’t you?”

She nodded, feeling somehow guilty, though the doctor had told her that two pills, or even three, would not be amiss if her father needed them. They would, he had said, only make him sleep more deeply and longer. Bay Sewell had asked her to do it when he had told her that he wanted to come to her that afternoon, and she had agreed with no hesitation. It had been almost a month since they had made love, or even been alone together. And on this of all days, she needed him with a pain that was deeply and pungently physical.

“I just cannot wait any longer,” he had said earlier in the Labor Day weekend just past. “And I want to be with you on the day that they … take the house. I want to be in the house with John, just in case. Can’t you persuade Priss and Canaday to back off just that one day? And can’t you give your dad a little something extra to make sure he sleeps through? It would be better if he just slept the day away, Mike. That way there’d be no chance at all he’d find out. We can tell him when it’s over.”

“Sam was going to do that anyway,” Mike said.

Bay scowled, but said only, “Well, then. Can you fix it?”

“Oh, yes,” she had breathed in relief and anticipation. “I’ll do it right away. Bay, I’m so glad. I didn’t know how I was going to get through that day.”

“Do you all mind if it’s just Daddy and me next Tuesday?” Mike asked Sam and Priss on the Sunday before the bulldozers were scheduled to destroy the homeplace. “I’m going to give him an extra pill and let him sleep through it all, and I’d just as soon be by myself. We can meet for supper and decide then if he’s up to hearing about it.”

“If that’s what you want to do,” Priss said, frowning a little. “I don’t like the idea of doping Scamp to the eyebrows, though. It’s as if we were giving belladonna to a fussy baby.”

It was so like that that Mike flushed and averted her eyes. “I just don’t think I can sit in that room by his bed in some ghastly deathwatch for the homeplace,” she said, and it was true. “I used to think he could read my thoughts, and I’m still not sure he can’t.”

“You
are
a pretty bad liar,” Priss said. “All right, if you’ll promise you won’t sit around moping, and you’ll call me if you get broody.”

“Sam?” Mike said. “Is it okay with you not to be here?” She thought of the tumbled bed that waited for
her upstairs and could not meet his eyes, but she had to make sure he would not come to the house.

He nodded, but said nothing. He did not look at her either. Mike thought that he looked almost ill; gray-faced under the tan, and much older. Soon after that he went in and said good night to John Winship, and left, and Priss followed him. She did not go in to see John.

“I’ll be here whenever he’s awake, if he wants me,” she had told Mike after the terrible attack of pain, when the doctor increased the sedatives and painkillers so drastically. “But I’m not going in there and stare at him while he’s knocked out. Scamp sets great store by his dignity. He’d never forgive me.”

“He had to have the medicine,” Mike said pleadingly. The implied criticism stung, and she herself hated keeping her father in the eerie twilight sleep in which he had lived for the past few days. “You didn’t hear him screaming; you didn’t see him. He can’t go through that again.”

“I know he can’t,” Priss said, and tears stood again in her clear green eyes. “And I can’t look at him drugged up. I’ll see him when he surfaces.”

And he did surface, once or twice a day, usually in the early morning and again toward evening. When he did, he was peaceful and lucid and actually smiled at them, a very different smile from the fierce rictus that Mike had seen since she had returned home. It was almost a gentle smile, if skewed, and a totally knowing and full-dimensioned one. There was no question but that he was fully with them at those times, and free, now at the last, from the rage and tension that had ridden him, furylike, for so long. He was, in those moments, a man Mike did not know; had never known, and she was not sure how to deal with him.

He had been awake when she took in his two o’clock medicine earlier, and had been lying peacefully, listening to his television set but not looking at it, regarding
the ceiling of the curtained room with interest. Mike had sent Lavinia Lester home early and brought a glass of chocolate milk with the pills. It was one of the few things John Winship could still tolerate. He was growing thinner and more transparent daily; it seemed impossible that life could pulse so stubbornly in his wasted body. But his voice was strong and his color distinctly visible, if faint. “Two pills?” he said.

“Can you manage two?” Mike said, turning down the volume on the television set. “Lavinia’s gone for the day, and Sam and Priss aren’t coming until after supper. I thought you might like a chance to get some extra sleep.”

“Fine, if you’ll get some, too,” he said. “You look tired. I’m afraid it’s been hard on you, baby-sitting me.”

“Not a bit of it,” Mike said. For some reason a great knot of aching, unshed tears had gathered in her chest, just at the base of her throat, and it was difficult to speak. He seemed, there in the monastic white bed, hardly even to make a rise in the covers. He was very still. She could actually see the light through his old, curled hands. She remembered that when she was a small child, his forearms had seemed to her as strong and knotted as the limbs of a tree. She adjusted the curtains, closed the
Venetian
blinds, and stopped to raise his head so that he could swallow the pills.

“Just leave ‘em,” he said. “I’ll take ‘em directly. I sort of want to hear the end of
Perry Mason
. If Sam Canaday was that good a lawyer he’d be rich.”

Mike smiled around the salty knot and walked to the door of the room.

“You take them after the program is over, though,” she said.

“I will,” he said. And then, “Micah?”

“Yes?”

“You’ve turned out to be a real pretty girl. Real pretty girl. Ought to have told you before,” he said.

“Thank you, Daddy,” Mike said, and fled up the stairs to her bedroom before the tears could spill over her bottom lashes. But once there she did not cry; could not.

Bayard Sewell had come an hour later, at three, rapping softly at her door and coming quietly into the room on the soft soles of his Topsiders when she called out, “Come in.” She wore a simple white column of charmeuse night dress that he especially liked, and had brushed her hair to drifting gilt, and sprayed on a gust of the Giorgio that he had brought her from Boston. She did not like the musky, insinuating perfume, but he claimed that it was a powerful aphrodisiac, and it had become a sort of joking symbol between them. Whenever Mike wore it, she meant to be taken hard and with roughness.

He had smiled today when he smelled it and had laid her back with haste and hard hands and had gone quickly into her, without the teasing, indolent ritual of foreplay that they sometimes prolonged almost past endurance, and she had arched her back and set her hips in preparation for him, but almost immediately she had known it was going to be no good. She was tight and dry, and after the first great swollen thrust or two he went suddenly flaccid and spilled out of her. They tried again, intent and sweating, but he could not stay erect. Finally, flushed and disheveled from laboring under him, she rolled aside and hugged him to her and buried her face in his damp neck.

“Truce, darling,” she said. “It’s just not the day for it.”

His face was dark with blood; he looked almost angry.

“That’s never happened to me before,” he said tightly.

“Well, it certainly doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “And it’s no wonder, both of us lying here and knowing what’s going on down at the homeplace. Do you think that it’s … you know, down yet?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “If it’s not, it will be soon.”

“What will they do with the …” She had been going to say “remains,” and changed the word to “wreckage.”

“Burn it, probably,” he said. “Those old places go up like tinder. It’s the cleanest and fastest thing. Don’t want to leave debris lying around indefinitely.”

“No,” Mike said, shivering involuntarily. “That would be awful.”

She thought he would leave her after his accustomed hour, but he did not.

“I’ve cleared the deck for the rest of the afternoon,” he said. “I meant it when I said I wanted to be with you and John.” But he did not seem glad to be with her in the humming, time-stopped room. He was abrupt, edgy, harrowed-looking, and yet there was a kind of wildfire exhilaration to him, too, that reminded her of the first night they had made love on the old glider in the wisteria arbor, a kind of interior humming. He could not seem to keep still.

“Would you like something to eat?” she said inanely, finally, after he had gotten up off the bed and prowled to the window and lifted the blind for the third time, looking out at the hot, still afternoon. He grinned sheepishly and boyishly, and came back to the bed.

“I just can’t get it out of my mind,” he said. “I almost wish I’d gone down there and watched.”

“I know. It’s sort of like letting a relative die alone, isn’t it?” Mike said. “I’ve been in a terrible state all day.”

He looked at her keenly, his blue eyes almost white in the semidark.

“You went over to the other side there at the end, didn’t you?” he said.

“Not really,” Mike said. “I could always see the wisdom in just letting the damned old thing go. But it’s been so awful to watch him go through it …”

“I know. I wish it could have been prevented. But it’s going to be better now, Mike, for everybody. You just don’t know. And with the house gone, the land will be the saving of DeeDee. You want that for her, don’t you? That edge?”

“But after he’s gone, Bay! Not now! He’s not dead yet!” Her voice rose shrilly, and she dropped it. “Don’t bury him yet.”

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “You know I didn’t mean that.”

After a time he slept. Mike lay on her back, listening to the drone of the air conditioner, which after a time began to sound like a long and gentle rain. She looked over at him. Even in sleep, he was not relaxed; a small tic jumped, rodentlike, in his eyelid, and his mouth twitched occasionally. He looked, as ever, almost ludicrously handsome in the gloom, but, like Sam Canaday, older on this day, tired. She wondered if Sam sat silently at the empty desk in the darkened office, or if he had made business for himself in the city and gone away for the space of the day. She wondered if DeeDee and Duck had somehow found out about the demolition of the homeplace and gone to watch it. She hoped not; she knew that Sam had not told them, and she had not. She did not, somehow, like to think of them there in the hot afternoon, watching the old house come to its knees. She wriggled restlessly in the bed and then lay still so as not to wake Bay Sewell. The sweat had dried on her body, and she felt sheeted with cold stickiness. She moved again, the heaviness in her chest almost stopping her breath. She wished for night, an end to this endless day. This day divided time. After it, she felt
that a great gear would creak rustily and ponderously into place and grind forward, and some huge business, some large thing, would be set into implacable motion. She did not know what. Whatever, the lovely, iridescent, motionless bubble of the summer would be gone and another sort of life would resume itself. She did not feel ready to move with it.

Mike got up and padded into the bathroom and looked at herself in the greenish, underwater light of the mirror. She remembered Priss’s words at the beginning of the summer: “You look about fourteen. An Ethiopian fourteen.” She did not look fourteen now; was a child no longer, but inalterably a woman, with a woman’s lined face and used eyes.

“Hello,” Mike whispered to the green, underwater woman.

She got back onto the bed and drew the sheet up over her and, finally, drifted into a fugue of half-sleep. Rachel’s face swam before her, Rachel when she was younger, about six or seven, laughing in her dark delight. In half-sleep, Mike smiled too.