Once Beyond a Time (17 page)

“Yes,” she says. “I think you will.”

We rock quietly for a time. It’s pleasant simply to be in her company. I feel remarkably at ease. I say, “Are you busy making wedding plans?”

“Oh my, yes. I guess that’s why I was so fast asleep a minute ago. I was up half the night looking at wedding magazines.” A smile fills her face. Her teeth are white and even, lovely as ivory against her pale brown skin. For a moment, I envy her joy. But I’m afraid for her too, wondering how long this happiness will last.

“I wish I could meet this young man,” I say.

She laughs softly. “At the moment, Cleve is older than you are.”

“Really?”

She nods, laughs again.

“Well,” I continue, “I wish you all the happiness in the world.”

“Thank you.” After a moment, she adds, “Though I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking every bride believes she’s going to be happy, and it seldom works out that way.”

“Hmm, yes.” I find myself nodding. “Although I think it’s possible to
be happy. I think some couples are.”

“Yes,” she agrees. “I know some couples who are happy. Cleve’s not perfect, but then, neither am I. I guess you could say we’re both imperfect but perfectly suited for each other. I think so, anyway. He’s such a good man, Cleve is.”

“Sheldon is … well, he’s a good man too, certainly. And we were happy together for a long time. But then …”

“But then, he went and had an affair,” she finishes for me.

I nod, but I can’t speak for the sudden tightness in my throat. I thought I was done with tears but apparently not. I brush them away and sniff, trying to compose myself.

“I’m sorry,” Celeste says quietly. “I know he betrayed your trust.”

“Yes, he did,” I manage to say. “That changed everything. It effectively brought our marriage to an end.”

She cocks her head. “And yet you’re still together.”

“For now,” I say.

“Are you thinking of leaving?”

“I think of it every day. I just don’t know …”

“Don’t know what?”

“What to do, where to go. How to support myself and the children.”

“I see.” She folds her hands and raises them to her chin. She looks deep in thought. Then, “Did he break it off with the other woman?”

“Yes.”

“And is he sorry?”

“He says he is.”

“Then why don’t you forgive him and move on?”

I turn my gaze from her. How to answer? “I can’t,” I finally say. “I just can’t forgive him.”

“You’re still too angry.”

I nod slowly and look at her again. “Yes. Angry and hurt. Nothing will ever be the same again.”

“No,” she agrees. “I suppose it won’t.”

I take a deep breath. My tears are gone. I say, “Sometimes I want to ask you to find me in the future and find out what I chose. You know, did I leave him. and did I do the right thing?”

She smiles at that. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about the future. It’s simply … not allowed.”

“So there
are
some rules to all of this?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“Are the rules meant to keep us from changing the course of events?”

“No, it’s not that. The events themselves can’t be changed, as such.”

“You mean, the future’s set, the way Calvin always said it was?”

“Well, I don’t know about all that. I only know there’s a limit to what can be revealed between us. If I were to start to tell you something you’re not supposed to know, you or I—one of us—would simply disappear.”

“I don’t understand.”

“And I don’t either, really. But listen, honey, you don’t need to look into the future to know what’s the right thing to do.”

I sigh at that. “You think I should forgive him, don’t you.”

“I don’t think you’ll ever be happy until you do.”

I look at my hands in my lap and shake my head. “I don’t know, Celeste. I’m not sure I can forgive him and mean it.”

“All right then,” she says. “You don’t have to forgive him today, honey. Nor tomorrow. Nor even the day after that. I hope you will eventually, but for right now, maybe what you need is time. Lord knows it takes time for anger to die down and for wounds to heal. My suggestion to you would be to move on down here to Black Mountain and rest yourself awhile.”

I frown at her. “I don’t understand. I
have
moved to Black Mountain.”

Celeste stops rocking and leans forward in the chair. “Honey,” she says, “your body’s here, but your mind’s in Pennsylvania, wrestling with the things of the past. Come on down here and just let yourself rest.” She relaxes back into the chair and begins to rock again gently, as though
to show me what it is I ought to do. In another moment, she closes her eyes and hums a tune. I recognize it as a hymn we sometimes sang when Sheldon was a pastor.
There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole …

I too lean back in my chair and, shutting my eyes, I simply listen.
There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul …

I listen until she fades away, and the room is quiet. I open my eyes. I walk to the front porch and look out over the sloping front lawn, the towering trees, the distant hills. I am here in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Come and rest awhile, she said. It is an invitation to spend time. It is, quite possibly, the loveliest invitation I have ever received.

Wednesday, August 21, 1968

W
HEN
I
SEE
Austin walking up the drive, I get the same feeling I used to get when I saw Brian walking down the hall at school. It’s like, the best thing in the world just happened, and I wouldn’t want to be anyone else, or be any
where
else, or be doing any
thing
else. I just want to be right here with him, wherever he is.

He sits down on the porch steps beside me. “You spend a lot of time here on these steps, don’t you?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say, “I guess I do.”

“You been waiting for me?”

“I guess I was,” I admit.

“Well, that’s good, because I was hoping you’d be here.”

“You were?”

“Yeah.”

We just sit there for a minute saying nothing, but it doesn’t feel weird or awkward. It just feels kind of nice. “Where’ve you been?” I ask.

“At work.”

I realize then that his cheeks are flushed, and his face is shiny with sweat, and his overalls are dirty and dusty. His longish hair, which he usually combs straight back, is hanging down around his ears.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” I say. “If your family’s rich, why do you work?”

“To experience the life and hardships of the working class,” he says, and he sounds like he’s shooting back an answer to the Baltimore Catechism or something. Like it’s something he’s worked hard to memorize, and he can’t wait to recite it.

All I can think of is, oh yeah, we’re back to that mess about the poor working class. Austin seems like a different person when he’s talking like that, and I’d rather he just be the nice hunky guy instead of the intellectual socialist wannabe. “Um,” I say, “so where do you work?”

“The Swannanoa Furniture Manufacturing Company. It’s down by the river between here and Asheville. We make furniture.”

Yeah, I gathered that much on my own. “So, you walk all that way?”

“Naw. A guy named Chester Randolf picks me up and drops me off at the bottom of the drive. He got me the job there. We work the same shift.”

“So, you like it?”

He laughs a little at that, and gives me a look that says I’ve got to be kidding. “No, I don’t
like
it.” He’s mimicking me, and I don’t like
that.
I’m not going to say anything, though. He goes on, “It’s grueling and it’s demeaning, and it’s one more place for the bourgeois to take advantage of the working poor.”

“Oh. Okay.” I can’t even remember what bourgeois means, but I suppose he’s talking about the rich. Gee whiz, Brian never talked like that. He just talked about getting high on weed and drag racing at night in front of the school. Things I could understand.

“It’s just all wrong,” Austin goes on. “Long hours and little pay, and there’s not a man or a woman there who’s considered by the bourgeois owners to be a real human being. They’re just cogs in a wheel, they’re just part of the machine that does nothing for
them
but does everything to make the rich guy richer.”

“Uh huh.” I kind of scrunch up my eyes and try to look like I’m
thinking hard on that one. “Is that how that Chester guy feels about it too?”

Austin’s quiet a minute. Finally, he admits, “He’s never said one way or another. But I’m sure he doesn’t want to be there.”

“How do you know if he’s never said?”

“No one in their right mind would want to be working in a factory. No one with any education, anyway. That’s the problem; Chester’s got no education. He told me himself he dropped out of school in the third grade. That’s why he’s doing what he does. Because he can’t do anything else.”

“So maybe he likes making furniture. Maybe he’s proud of his work. Why don’t you ask him?”

“I don’t need to ask him.”

“Why not?”

Austin looks at me and says, “Listen, you ever heard of Eugene Debs?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe in history class or somewhere.”

For a second, Austin looks cross. “Everyone should know who Eugene Debs is. Someday everyone
will
know who he is. Like George Washington. No, better than that, because Debs is going to change the country. Maybe the whole world.”

“So he’s what, some kind of politician or something?”

“He’s only the leader of the whole Social Democratic Party,” Austin shoots back. “He’s run three times for president on the Socialist ticket. Next time, he’s going to win.”

Yeah, well, I don’t remember learning about any President Debs, but I guess I’m not supposed to spill the beans about stuff like that.

Suddenly, Austin looks at me hard and says, “Listen, I know you know things about the future that I don’t know, and I don’t blame you for that. But 1968 isn’t the end of history. I mean, you don’t know
every
thing. You don’t know what’s going to happen
after
1968.”

I shrug and just kind of sniff, like of course I don’t know what’s going
to happen after 1968 and what’s your point? Criminy, he’s all of a sudden got some sort of chip on his shoulder. I just look at him and say, “So?”

“So no matter what you might tell me about the next fifty years, I’m not going to stop believing in my dream, and my dream is that we’re going to end up living in a socialist society where everybody’s equal and everybody’s taken care of. It’s going to come sometime, whether it’s before 1968 or whether it’s after.”

I shrug. “Well, that’s okay, Austin. I mean, it’s a free country, right? You can believe whatever you want to believe.”

“It’s a free country, yeah, but not in the right way. Until everyone is equal, we’re free in the wrong way. We’re free only for the few. The few rich and the few powerful, and that’s it. Everybody else is in bondage to the system.”

“They are?”

“Yes.”

“Well, my family’s sure not rich, but I’ve never felt like I was in bondage to any system.”

“That’s because you just don’t know.”

“I don’t?”

“You’re just going along with it because you don’t know there can be a better way.”

“I am?”

“Listen, Linda, there’s a new day coming. I don’t know when it’s going to come, but I’m going to help bring it in. That’s what I’m here for. That’s why I’m alive. I can feel it in my bones.”

His talk about a new day coming sounds familiar. That’s what all the hippies are talking about, isn’t it? I mean, this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, right? “Oh, well, you know,” I say, “there are plenty of people today who talk about a new day dawning, stuff like that.”

“There are?”

“Sure. I mean peace and harmony. Brotherhood of man. People say
it’s coming. So, yeah, I guess you could say people are still working on it. People want it, that’s for sure.” I give him one nice big, peace-loving smile.

“Yeah?” he says, smiling back at me. “That’s good. That’s good. That means we’re still moving forward.”

“Sure, I guess so.” I might have just won myself a few points with Austin, even though I don’t believe a word of it.

“You know what it’s going to be like to live in a classless society, Linda?”

“No. I guess I don’t.”

He smiles serenely, closes his eyes, lifts his face a bit higher. “Paradise,” he whispers.

I’m not going to say as much, but he looks like he’s just hit the sawdust trail at a Billy Graham Crusade. I mean, I should know. I’m the daughter of a Baptist preacher who gave an altar call practically every Sunday at church. So I don’t know—I guess whatever your idea of Paradise is, that’s cool.

“Okay,” I say, “so that would be, the world’s going to be perfect someday, right?”