In the Night Season (2 page)

He almost refrained from telling her.

“What is it?” she said. “Come on, Edward—something’s bothering you.”

“I’ve been getting hate mail,” he said. “About coming over here.”

It was clear from her expression that the boy had said nothing to her about it. She looked puzzled, then frightened.

“I got the first one more than a week ago.”

“I don’t understand.” Her name was Nora. She was young enough to be his daughter. He sat down with an arthritic slowness across from her, at the small kitchen table.

“Somebody’s decided to warn me away from you,” he said. “Some—group.”

“Who?”

“The police don’t know who they are, yet. They call themselves the Virginia Front.”

She sat there, considering. It hadn’t quite sunk in yet, he could see. Finally, she stood and went to the window in the door, then turned and began wringing her hands. “Are you going to stop, then?”

“If you want me to,” he said.

“I don’t want you to.”

“You’re sure.”

She walked over and put one hand on his shoulder. “You’ve been my friend.”

“I am that.”

Bishop, who was often lonely, had admitted to himself that in fact he was a little in love with her. He would never act on it. He had felt this way about dozens of women in his life, black and white, to whom he had doubtless seemed only a quiet, honest, friendly ally. He might have sought excuses to be in their company, but he had always been a gentleman. In the present case, he had decided that it would’ve been monstrous to reach out and put his arms around her as he wanted to, desired to. It was often an impulse stemming from the perception that this was what
she
longed for—not a sexual embrace, but simply for someone to hold her, to help stop the shaking. Most of the time, he felt fatherly toward her. That was true. His natural gentleness played tricks on him. But he thought about her all the time, and he had wondered at times if his feelings were not evident.

He went home that evening and once again was sleepless, and the cats made their ruckus on the porch. At one point he went out in the cold, in his stocking feet, and threw stones at the wooden latticework bordering the crawl space, in hopes of scaring them away for a time. And when he was back inside again, he felt the need for sound—music, or the television. He was awake into the early hours, and he left lights burning through the night.

He had developed a nearly compulsive passion for order.

By three o’clock every day, things must be straight: everything in its place, all surfaces dusted, papers put away. A plastic covering lying over whatever he was working on. His house immaculate. He waited until then to look into his mailbox. There were no more communications from the Front. He still saw the police car go by in the mornings, and once he stood outside and waved it down. A stooped, angular, boylike young woman got out of the car and walked over to him.

“Anything I can help you with?” she said.

“I wondered if there was any progress finding out who’s responsible for all the hate mail.”

“Hate mail?” she said.

Three o’clock. There was something about the hour itself now: middle afternoon, the ripened day, the hour when he used to feel the pull of something to do, his visit to the neighboring house, and the pleasurable anticipation of it. That was gone, and he dreaded going over there. Dreaded it because she was more and more uncomfortable, had grown nervous and watchful, worried for her son. She had already lost her husband. Twice he asked if she would rather he stay home; twice she had refused to hear of it. But she was clearly relieved whenever he decided not to stay for dinner. He could read the gladness in her hazel eyes when, politely refusing her offer of something to eat, he got up to leave.

It was ridiculous for anyone—even a social paranoid neo-Nazi—to suppose that he meant anything to her but exactly what he had been: a helpful neighbor. At least in his own estimation of himself, he was not a young fifty-six. It always struck him as odd when people told him he looked younger. He felt seventy, he would say. There was constant misery in his back; there were aches in his shoulders, sharp pains in his knees and in the place in his lower shinbone where the piece of metal had lodged all those years ago, in Vietnam. He had been perpetually worried about his health. One of the women he dated briefly, a couple of years ago, had said to him, “Eddie Bishop, you know your trouble? You think like a ol’ man.”

“I
am
an old man,” he told her.

There was another communication in his mailbox on a Monday in late January. Someone had to have dropped it there in the middle of the night. The morning paper had crumpled it into the back of the mailbox, a single sheet of paper, folded as in a business letter, like the others; the drawing this time was a wolf’s head, snarling white teeth, under a swastika dripping blood:

He lighted a match to it and stood with it burning in his hand, turning in a slow circle, holding it high. The wind put the flame out, and he worked to light it again. The wind bit at his face and stung his eyes. He got the flame going again and reached up with it, a man holding a torch, until it had almost reached his fingers. Then he dropped it, stamped the flame out, and walked back inside.

He had lived in this house all his life, a sharecropper’s house. He owned it now. The sharecropper was his great-grandfather, whose own grandfather had been a freed slave. These acres of grassy hills once made up the central parcel of a large tobacco plantation. The plantation house itself, a restored, antebellum mansion, was now an inn and restaurant that the wealthy and famous drove out from Washington or up from Charlottesville to patronize. Most of the land around it had been bought up during the Great Depression by a retired army general, who wanted to raise cattle. The descendants of those cattle still grazed in the east pasture beyond Edward Bishop’s fence, looking attached by their muzzles to the brown grass, though the general’s cattle farm was long gone, sold piecemeal over the years of the general’s decline.

The last, large, horseshoe-shaped section remained, still tended by the seventy-year-old son and his wife, people with whom one simply didn’t form a friendship (they had come once to offer to buy the sharecropper’s house and the surrounding five acres; Bishop graciously offered them coffee, showed them his collection of deer rifles, and then said no, he intended to live out his life here; they never spoke to him again).

The fact was that until his involvement with Nora and her son, he’d been keeping as much as possible to himself. There were blacks living in Point Royal, of course, and in the old town part of Steel Run, but he was the only one in this part of the county. He had never given this much thought, and he had never felt any particular need to seek anybody out merely because he or she was the same color. The men he hunted with every fall were mostly white. The older of the two sisters who lived up the hill from him had gone to school with him and once made love to him in the backseat of a ’58
Plymouth. She had been wild and drunk—as wild and drunk then as she was sober and religious now—and she wanted to know, she had told him drunkenly, how it felt with a colored man. He was seventeen and reckless, and more than willing to oblige, even as he understood the insult in it. Afterward, she wept and blamed him, and until he came to understand that it was her racism that would keep her from telling the world what she had done, he’d lived in exactly the kind of dread that he was living in now.

He was old enough to remember that certain establishments in this very county had once sworn blood oaths to resist the inevitable and had fought tooth and nail to keep the degrading status quo; he had somehow managed to quell the passions in his blood and made it through all the changes in the same quiet, steady fashion, developing his business with televisions, and then later teaching himself the VCRs. It was the world, and he had made his way through it and even managed to prosper. In his own country he had gone from being a black boy to being a colored man, to being a black man, to insisting, at least most of the time, on being Edward Bishop, and he had decided to try stopping there. People seemed friendly enough when he went out in the area.

But he found that he couldn’t quite believe in their friendliness now. He thought he saw something in their faces, and then wasn’t sure, and finally he began to believe they were watching him, waiting for him to react. He couldn’t trust anyone.

A man alone, if he kept at himself, could make all kinds of trouble. It was true that anyway he had always been rather morbid. His mother used to say to him, “You know, Edward, you could turn the brightest hour of the day into something to mourn about.”

And he
had
mourned, all the time. The time itself, rushing past him. It was true, from the time he was a little boy. Yet he tried not to dwell on it, or let it stop him from moving through the days with some sense of gratitude. That was all ruined now.

One evening, two weeks later, Nora brought it up to him. She said, “You’re feeling it, aren’t you? What they want you to feel.”

“You mean hunted?” he said.

She said, “Scared.”

“Jumpy,” he told her. “Yeah.”

“That’s no way to live.”

“No.”

She appeared to steel herself for something. She took a breath. “I understand if you want to stop coming over.”

“You want me to stop coming over?”

“I don’t want to cause you any more trouble.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Have
you
heard from them?”

She stood and walked to the counter, reached into her purse, and brought out a slip of paper. She opened it and held it out to him. He didn’t have to take it to see what it said. He folded it and put it in his shirt pocket. “When?” he asked her.

“In the mailbox. Today, when I got home. I wasn’t going to tell you about it.”

His heart was beating in his face and neck. She walked into his arms and stood there. It was as though they were both standing in a freezing wind. When she stepped back from him, she was dry-eyed. “I’ll do whatever you want me to,” he told her.

“I’m just so tired of everything.”

“You don’t need this,” he said.

She seemed at a loss for words. But then she sighed. “It’s just some sick—” She halted.

“Do you want me to stay away for a while?”

“I don’t want my son coming home by himself.”

“But I can—I can leave as soon as you come in, if you’d like.”

She said nothing for a moment. Then: “I don’t know. Then—then they win, right? Besides, I don’t think it’ll matter. If you’re here, you’re here. I hate letting them win.”

“They do sometimes,” Bishop said. “Sometimes, hard as it is to admit, they do win.”

This occasioned a long silence.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think we should pay the slightest attention to it.”

“You won’t hurt my feelings, Nora.”

“I know.” Her gaze was direct and apparently calm.

“Well,” he said. “Guess I’ll be leaving.”

She let him out and stood at the door as he walked to the road and turned toward his own property. “You’re fifty-six,” he murmured to himself, waving at her as she shut the door. “Your back’s killing you. She’s a friend. Don’t be a damn fool.”

A car roared over the hill up the road, and its high beams came on, freezing him for an instant. It went speeding by, no one he recognized, a face looking at him out the back window, receding into the dark. He went home, reached into his own mailbox, and found another hate page, this one filled with close text, a frantic shriek of racist venom. He went into the house and took one of the deer rifles out of the cabinet, cleaned it, sitting in the firelight in the living room, trying not to think about anything at all. He stayed in the chair by the front window with the rifle across his lap, dozing fitfully, dreaming of running among oblivious people in a public place whose precise delineations he couldn’t make out. He woke feeling sore, stiff, quietly enraged. There was nothing in the mailbox. He tried to work and couldn’t. He called Detective Shaw, who, this time, did call him back. There was nothing to report, Shaw said. He was proceeding with the investigation. Others had brought in hate letters: the rabbi at the Temple Israel; a judge in the county, who happened to be female; the Catholic pastor at Saint Anthony’s. Stylistically, the writing was similar in all cases; the same graphics were being used, the same printer.

“I guess I’m in good company, then,” Edward Bishop said.

“Everybody’s in good company,” said Shaw.

Mr. Bishop thanked him and hung up, and then realized that he had not told Shaw about the latest messages, nor about the fact that Nora Michaelson was getting them, too, now. When he called back, the other had stepped out, so he left his name.

His one marriage had ended in divorce, eighteen years ago. Irreconcilable differences, but the truth was that Dorothy wanted to go home to Georgia, to live in the town where she wouldn’t have to be alone all the time. She felt that way, she said, married to Bishop. “You were meant to live alone, Eddie,” she told him. “You do anyway, even when you’re with people. And I’m tired of trying to find you. You hate it, too. That’s the weird thing about it.”

He suspected it was true.

He slept badly, again. In the morning, he walked out to the mailbox and looked in. He remembered the face staring at him out the back window of the speeding car. It was a freezing morning. He went inside and tried to work. There were four VCRs in various stages of disassembly on the table by the living room window. He worked all morning, watching for the police car, but none came. There wasn’t any traffic at all. At noon he made something to eat for himself and sat in the kitchen, in the quiet. Finally he went upstairs, to his office, and put some music on. Benny Goodman. Cheerful, unintellectual music, purely delightful, and sunny. He left the record brace up, so the arm would keep returning to the beginning of the recording, and he let it play into the afternoon.