Searching for Caleb (16 page)

   "You do, do you."

   "It's been six weeks, you know. And they say that Mama is-"

   "You don't have to keep harping on it, we'll go."

   But in bed that night, when he had just stretched out alongside her and taken her head in his hands, the phone rang again and he said, "Bull's-eye."

   "I'll get it," she said.

   "Oh, your mother and her X-ray vision. She's worked on this, she's got it timed. She couldn't call when you were just reading Woman's Day, no-"

   "Let me up, I'll answer," said Justine.

   "No, don't. We'll ignore it." But then he said, "How can we ignore a thing like that? Nine rings. Ten."

   "I'll only be a minute."

   "Eleven," Duncan said. He had laid one arm across her to hold her down but he kept his head raised and his eyes on the black shine of the telephone. "We'll go out and sleep in the field," he told her.

   "The field, Duncan!"

   "Where else? If we answer, she wins. If we lie here and listen she wins.

   Hear that? Four-letter rings. Come on, Justine."

   "Well, just let me get a blanket."

   "Here's a blanket."

   "I'll need a bathrobe."

   "What for?"

   "Do you want your pillow?"

   "No I don't want my pillow."

   "And insect repellent."

   "Oh, for-"

   Then he was off the bed and out of the room. "Duncan?" she said. "Duncan, have you changed your mind?" But before she could follow him he was back, waving the huge iron clippers he used for trimming the goats' hooves. Justine heard a single click. The phone gave a whimper and died.

   "Oh, Duncan," Justine said, but she was laughing when she lay back down.

   All the next morning the telephone sat silent on the bureau with its comical stub of a tail sticking out. In the afternoon, when they were leaving to do some shopping in town, Duncan locked the front door so that no repairman could come while they were gone. "You know the family is going to let them hear about this," he said. "They'll be sending undercover men with their little bags of tools." And sure enough, when they got back there was a card hanging from the doorknob. "What a pity, our telephone representative has been and gone," he said. Still, Justine only laughed.

   But in the evening, when they were sitting on the porch, something stopped her rocking. She straightened suddenly and frowned. "Duncan," she said.

   "Hmm?"

   "I have this funny feeling."

   Duncan had been reading a book on how to start a chicken farm, sliding a flashlight down the page because it was already dark. He raised the flashlight now and shone it into her face.

   "Something terrible is going on at home," she told him.

   "Something terrible's always going on at home."

   "I mean it. This is serious. I really mean it."

   "What, have you turned psychic?"

   "No, but I can tell if there's going to be a change of some kind."

   He rocked and waited.

   "We have to go there," she said.

   The flashlight clicked off.

   "I'm sorry, Duncan. I'll go alone if you'd rather. But I just feel I-"

   "All right, all right."

   While she packed an overnight case, he drove up the hill to ask Junior Jordan to tend the goats. They could have done that weeks ago! But then, Justine knew that as well as Duncan. She waited on the porch, clutching her case, shivering a little although the night was warm. When she saw his close-set headlights bobbing toward her, she ran down the steps and opened the car door. "It's all set," Duncan told her. "Climb in."

   The car seemed to be drawn down the road by two long yellow cones.

   Justine was reminded of other trips, before they were married, rushing home to beat a curfew. All through that silent drive she had the feeling that she was some younger, smaller self, anxiously chewing the ribbons of her hat while she wondered if she would be scolded for staying out so late.

   In Guilford, at eight o'clock that morning, Sam Mayhew's cleaning lady had found him dead in his kitchen. He was wearing a bathrobe and there was a roll of Turns on the floor beside him. Apparently he had suffered a heart attack. By ten o'clock old Mr. Mayhew had called the Pecks, but at five o'clock that evening Caroline still knew nothing about it. Nobody wanted to tell her. Instead they huddled in small groups downstairs in Great-Grandma's house, whispering bulletins back and forth. "She's in her bed eating the chocolates Marcus brought her." "She's watching a program on flower arranging." "She's trying to get Justine on the telephone again." "Oh, if only we could just never tell her and this would all blow over!"

   Then the grandfather arrived from work. He was forcibly retired now but he liked to prowl around his sons' offices, checking up. "What's this?"

   he said, seeing clusters of women everywhere. When they told him he shook his head sharply, as if getting rid of a fly. "What? But how old was he?

   Not even out of his forties! And had a heart attack? What kind of stock did the man come from, for God's sake?"

   Then he went to break the news to Caroline. The others stood around downstairs, pretending to talk but trailing off in the middle of sentences. One by one the uncles came to find out where everybody was, and they had to be told too. Richard arrived with a girlfriend who was asked politely to leave, as there had been an unfortunate occurrence.

   Aunt Lucy, who had double-dated with Sam and Caroline when they were young, became a little upset and kept hanging onto her husband's arm until Laura May suggested that she fetch her afghan squares to get her mind off things. Then down came the grandfather, sober and dignified, checking his flip-top watch. "Well?" they asked. "How'd she take it?"

   "Took it fine."

   "What'd she say?"

   "Didn't say anything."

   "Shall we go up now?"

   "Do what you like," he said, and then he went off to his own house, taking Esther with him to fix his supper.

   The others tiptoed up the stairs. Caroline was sitting in her bed against stacks of pillows. When they came in she leaned over to lower the volume slightly on the television set. "Caroline, we're so sorry," they said, and Caroline said, "Why, thank you. It's so nice of you to take an interest."

   "If there's anything we could be doing now-"

   "I can't think of a thing! But I do appreciate your asking."

   "Would you like to go over to the funeral home? Of course it's not as if you had still been together or anything, I'm not quite sure what is customary in this case but if you feel you-"

   "Why, later, perhaps. Not just now."

   "It's probably not customary anyway."

   "No."

   "Well, if you want us, then-"

   "Oh, certainly! I'll let you know first thing."

   They tiptoed down again. Although they should be going to their homes for supper, they seemed inclined to churn about in Great-Grandma's living room instead. They weren't quite sure just how they should behave. The last death in the family had been in 1912, too long ago for most of them to remember. "Yet after all," Aunt Sarah said finally, "it's not as if Sam Mayhew were really-"

   "No. No."

   "And after all, he did actually-"

   "Oh, he acted like a man possessed."

   "Always trying to turn her against us."

   "Making no effort to understand her."

   "And Caroline's so sensitive. It's the way she is."

   "Refusing to give his own daughter away."

   "But still," said Aunt Lucy, who sometimes grew overemotional, "Caroline loved him! I know she did, she must have, you could tell she was just torn. And now he's dead. Oh, what will she do now?"

   "Lucy," her husband said. "About time to feed me my supper, don't you think?"

   "Well, all right."

   "We'll try to call Justine from our house, Grandma. If the phone's not fixed, I'll drive out there in the morning."

   "Oh, think of Justine. How will she ever forgive herself?"

   Upstairs, cowboys sang lonesome songs around a campfire and the wind rolled tumbleweed across the desert with a howling sound.

   At nine o'clock that evening, Caroline rose up in her pink silk gown and put on her feathered slippers. Before leaving the room she turned off the television set. She descended the stairs, stately and flowing; she crossed the front hall and went out the door. She drifted across the lawn and then onto the road, where she proceeded down the center with her arms out and her steps mincing and careful like a tightrope walker. To the first car that came, she appeared as monstrous and unexpected as a wad of pink bubble gum. The driver gasped and swerved at the last moment. The second driver was harder to surprise. "Do your drinking at home, lady!"

   he shouted out the window, and then he slid smoothly past.

   She had to wait for six cars, all told, before she found one that would run her down.

   Duncan brought Justine a cup of beef broth and a silver spoon and a linen napkin. He found her sitting in the living room of Great-Grandma's house, all alone, staring into space. "Oh. Thank you," she said. She set the cup on the coffee table.

   "I made it myself."

   "Thank you."

   "Ma said coffee, but coffee has no food value."

   She smoothed her dress.

   "Broth has protein," Duncan told her. "You can go without protein for months and feel just fine, never notice, but underneath it's doing you harm that can never be repaired. Protein is made up of amino acids, the building blocks of the-"

   "Duncan, I can't believe you're saying all this."

   "I can't either," he told her.

   He waited for her to try the broth. She didn't. He squatted beside her.

   "Justine-" he said.

   But no, too late, the aunts had tracked them down again. "Justine? You mustn't sit like this, dear heart-"

   They reminded him of ships. They traveled in fleets. Their wide summer skirts billowed and collapsed as they settled all around him, edging him out. But he didn't give in so easily. "We were just talking," he told them.

   "She should be in bed."

   "What for?"

   "She doesn't look at all well."

   She didn't. Even her hair seemed changed, hanging lank and lifeless around her face. In just four days she had developed a new deep hollow between her collarbones. She was already losing her country tan. If he could just carry her home, to the sunlit fields and their little house with its ridiculous damask curtains! But the aunts rustled and resettled, inching closer. "She ought to be left with us a while, Duncan. She just feels so sorry, you see. She's acting just like her poor dear mother did.

   You can't take her back to sit all alone in the middle of nowhere."

   "Alone?"

   "She needs looking after."

   "/ look after her," Duncan told them.

   "Yes, but-and she could have her old room again, or maybe yours if hers would bring memories. You could go back to your cows or whatever and we would take good-Justine, do you like Duncan's room?"

   "Duncan's? Yes."

   "There, see?"

   "Or she could come to us," Aunt Bea said. "At our house, you see, we have so much excitement, Esther and Richard rushing around and the twins so talkative, she'd just come out of herself in no time."

   "Maybe she doesn't want to come out of herself," Duncan said.

   "Oh, it helps to have a little company! All those young people making merry. Justine?"

   Justine sat like a stone. The old secret, tucked-in smile she used to flash Duncan seemed gone forever. When he rose she didn't even look his way, and it seemed unlikely that she noticed when he left the room.

   Now as she cruised through the darkening house she was aware of how everything here was attached to everything else. There was no such thing as a simple, meaningless teacup, even. It was always given by someone dear, commemorating some happy occasion, chipped during some moment of shock, the roses worn transparent by Sulie's scrubbing, a blond stain inside from tea that Sam Mayhew had once drunk, a crack where Caroline, trembling with a headache, had set it down too hard upon the saucer.

   She went out the front door that was dented by Justin Peck's invalid's bed in the fall of 1905. She passed her grandfather's front porch, where Maggie Rose stood in the twilight waiting for a Model T. She climbed Uncle Two's front steps, surrounded by ghostly whispers and murmurs of love and scoldings and reproaches and laughter. Upstairs she found Duncan in his room among Erector Set machines he had built when he was twelve, a full-color poster of Princess Pet in the Land of the Ice Cream Star, the Monopoly board in which all seven cousins had played a thirty-eight-hour world series in the spring of 1944. But Duncan-oh, forever in the present!-was whistling "The Wabash Cannonball" and fiddling with a rectangle of lead-colored metal.

   She didn't know how he could whistle.

   When she came in the room he stopped. "Do you want to lie down?" he asked her. He began clearing his bed of everything on it, a jungle of wires and soldering irons, tubes of flux, glue, and paint. She sat on the edge of the mattress, but she didn't want to stretch out. It was barely eight o'clock. If she slept now she would lie awake for hours later on, as she had last night and the night before.

   "Anything you wanted to say?" Duncan asked.

   "No."

   "I thought you might have come to tell me something."

   "No."

   "Well." He went back to whatever he was doing, but he didn't whistle any more. "This is a wire-bending jig," he told her.

   She didn't comment.

   "These pegs can be moved, see? Then you bend the wire around them any way you want. There are all kinds of curves and angles. I could make you a bracelet. Want a bracelet? Or a necklace, if you like."

   She laid her fingers across her eyes, cooling them.

   "I've got it," he said. "A nose ring. Want a nose ring?"

   When she opened her eyes she found a curve of wire nearly touching her nose, giving off a gray smell, sharp at one end. She batted it away.