Searching for Caleb (31 page)

   Arthur is not terribly strong, you see. He's allergic to so much. And he has these headaches."

   "But I thought you were a healer," Duncan said.

   "A healer, yes! I have a little group that meets on Sunday evenings.

   Anyone can come. I inherited the gift from my father, who once gave sight to a blind man."

   "But your father was deaf."

   "He still had the gift, Mr. Peck."

   "I meant-"

   "Of course the gift must be kept alive by prayer and faith, it has to be nurtured along. That's what I tell Arthur. I feel that Arthur very definitely has the gift. I am working with him on it now. So far there has seemed to be some-I don't know, some sort of resistance, I'm just not-but we're working, I'm sure we'll get there."

   "How about Grandfather here?" Duncan asked. "He could use some help."

   She hesitated.

   "Think you could just clap a couple of hands on his ears to oblige us?"

   "Well, I'm not-is it nerve deafness, or what?"

   "Oh, if faith only heals certain kinds," said Duncan.

   Both Meg and Justine stirred, uneasily. Duncan gave them a wide, innocent smile that did not reassure them. "But never mind," he said, "my real interest was headaches."

   "Headaches, Mr. Peck? Do you suffer from headaches?"

   "No, your son does."

   "My son."

   "Arthur."

   "Oh, Arthur," she said blankly.

   "Didn't you say that Arthur got headaches?"

   "Why, yes."

   Duncan looked at her for a moment, honestly puzzled. "But then," he said, "why can't you heal him?"

   Mrs. Milsom clasped her hands tightly. Her mouth became blurred and her eyes filled with what must surely be black tears; but no, when they spilled over they were clear and they made white tracks down her hollow white cheeks.

   "Oh, Duncan," Justine said. But what had he done, after all? Nobody understood, except perhaps Meg, who quickly buried her nose in her tea glass. Then Mrs. Milsom straightened and darted an index finger beneath each eye, quick as a frog's tongue. "Well!" she said. "Haven't we had nice weather for August?"

   "It's been very nice," Duncan told her gently. And he must have been planning to stay that way to the end, sober and courteous; he would never willingly hurt anybody. Except that Justine chose that moment to reach toward the green glass shoe on the coffee table- sourballs! right under her nose!-and choose a lemony yellow globe and pop it into her mouth, where she instantly discovered that she had eaten a marble. While everyone watched in silence she plucked it out delicately between thumb and forefinger and replaced it, only a little shinier than before, in the green glass shoe. "I thought we could have used more rain," she told the ring of faces.

   Duncan made a peculiar sound. So he was going to have a silly tat after all. Justine had to sit as straight as a statue, dignified enough for the two of them, while at intervals Duncan steamed and chortled like an electric percolator on the couch beside her.

   When Arthur was up (pale and rumpled, inadequate-looking in a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt) they moved out to the back yard to admire Mrs.

   Milsom's flowerbeds, then over to the church to see the new red carpet\just recently installed in the aisles. They tiptoed through the vaulted, echoing nave with their faces very serious. They were all particularly careful of one another, if you didn't count Duncan's pinching Justine when he didn't know Mrs. Milsom was looking. They were so appreciative, so soft-voiced and attentive, that by the time they had assembled beside the Ford to say their goodbyes everyone was exhausted.

   But Mrs. Milsom held out both hands bravely for the sack of sun-baked corn, and Arthur insisted on taking the entire burden of wedding silver from the trunk. He staggered off, stringy-armed, swaybacked beneath his load. Meg remained beside the car with her pile of shirtwaist dresses. "Well," said Justine, "I suppose we'll be seeing you soon." She felt bruised by disappointment. She had imagined that this visit might, in some way, wrap things up-that whatever had gone wrong in their family might finally be straightened out, or at least understood; and that having seen Meg settled and happy she could let her go at last.

   She had supposed that care and responsibility could be shucked like old skin, leaving her cool and smooth and lightweight. But Meg's face was screwed so tight it made her ache, and she would never be free of Meg's old, anxious eyes. "Meggie, is there anything you need?" she asked. "I mean, if you think of something, anything at all-"

   "I'm sorry about the tea," Meg said.

   "Tea?"

   "I told her you didn't drink it sweetened."

   "Oh, that's all right, honey."

   "She was making it after lunch and I said, 'Don't put sugar in it, Mama likes hers with just lemon.' But she said, 'Oh, everybody likes their tea with sugar, it's so refreshing.' I said, 'But-'"

   "Meg, I don't care," said Justine.

   "I said I would mix a separate glass then," Meg told Duncan, "but she doesn't really like me in her kitchen."

   Duncan studied her. Grandfather Peck stroked his chin.

   "She does everything, even makes our bed up. She says I don't know hospital corners. You never taught me about hospital corners, Mama."

   "I'm sorry, honey."

   "I wanted to have you for lunch today, I said I would cook it myself. You know I can cook. Simple things, at least. Fannie Farmer,. But she said it wasn't possible because her group was coming over for supper, these people in her healing group. She had to have the kitchen to herself. The people in her healing group are all old and strange, they have chronic illnesses and they think she helps, and then sometimes they bring her someone new and they all pray together holding hands."

   "Does it work?" Justine asked.

   "What? No. I don't know. I thought when I got married we would be so-regular. I thought finally we-I didn't know all this would be going on.

   When I met her she was like anybody else. Except for Rearing white. She did wear white all the time. But I didn't know the about this healing.

   She wants Arthur to learn healing too and she even wanted to look at my hands, she wondered if I have the gift."

   "Do you?" Justine asked.

   "Mama! I wouldn't go along with a thing like that."

   "Well, I don't know, at least it would be a new experience."

   "I don't want new experiences, I want a normal happy life. But Arthur just won't stand up to her, really he-and now she wants him to develop his gift because hers is going. She thinks it's because of her age. At the meetings they pray and cry, you can hear them everywhere in the house. She reminds God of what she used to accomplish: once she stopped a man in the middle of a heart attack."

   "She did?"

   "She says she has so much left to do, she should be allowed to keep her gift. She says it's unjust. There are people sick just everywhere, she says, and blind and crippled and suffering pain, and here she is powerless and she can't even stop her own son's headaches any more. She goes on and on about it, calling out so everyone can hear: just because a little time has passed, she says, that's no reason to let her dwindle down this way."

   "Well, I should say not," said Justine.

   Meg paused and gave her a look. "Are you listening?" she asked.

   "Certainly I'm listening."

   "I live among crazy people!"

   "You should leave," Duncan told her.

   "Oh, Duncan," said Justine. She turned to Meg. "Meggie darling, maybe you could just-or look at it this way. Imagine you were handed a stack of instructions. Things that you should undertake. Blind errands, peculiar invitations . . . things you're supposed to go through, and come out different on the other side. Living with a faith healer. 1 never got to live with a faith healer."

   "That's what you're going to tell your daughter?" Duncan said. "Just accept whatever comes along? Endure? Adapt?"

   "Well-"

   "And how would people end up if they all did that?"

   Justine hesitated.

   "Never mind, Mama," Meg told her. "I didn't mean to mention it, anyway."

   So Justine got into the car, but; untidily and with backward glances because so much seemed still unsettled. The troubled feeling was nagging at her mind again. She couldn't quite put her finger on it. She felt as if she had mislaid an object somewhere, something important that would thread through all her thoughts until she found it. But she sat forward briskly and called out the window, "Meggie darling!"

   "What is it?"

   "If you do have to do bazaar work, you know, if you need any help, I'll be happy to drive down any time and tell fortunes."

   "Thank you, Mama."

   "You know I have a lot of steady clients here."

   "Well, that's very nice of you, Mama," Meg said. But Justine could tell that she had made a mistake. She should have offered something plainer and sturdier-anything but more gifts from heaven.

   By the time they reached Caro Mill it was night, and the streets had a dismal abandoned look. The only place open was the diner, eerily lit and vacant except for Black Emma swabbing the counter. "Maybe we could stop for coffee," said Justine. But the car slid by, and neither Duncan nor her grandfather answered. (They had not spoken all the way home, either one of them. Only Justine had chattered on and on until she wondered herself when she would shut up.) "Duncan?" she said. "Couldn't we stop for coffee?"

   "We have coffee at home."

   "I don't want to go home," she said. "I have this peculiar feeling. I wouldn't mind staying the night somewhere, even. Duncan?"

   But he said, "Endure," and turned sharply down Watchmaker Street. She blinked and looked at him.

   In front of their house, when the engine had died and the headlights had faded, the three of them sat motionless for a moment gazing through the windshield, as if being borne along on some darker, more silent journey.

   Then Justine touched her grandfather's arm. "Here we are," she said.

   "Eh?"

   He stumbled out, latching the door inconclusively behind him, and Justine slid after Duncan out the driver's side. They went single file up the walk between looming rustling cornstalks. At the porch, they stopped short. A shadow unfolded itself from the steps. "Eli!" Justine said.

   "Eh?" said her grandfather.

   And Duncan said, "Well, Eli. What have you found for us?"

   "Caleb Peck," said Eli.

   13

   Eli Everjohn drank his coffee white, preferred Jane Parker angel food cake to taco chips, and was perfectly comfortable sitting on a chrome-legged chair in the kitchen. He had to make all that clear before they would let him get on with his report. "Listen here," he kept saying.

   "Listen. It struck me right off-" But Justine would interrupt to ask, couldn't she take his hat? wouldn't he be cooler in his shirtsleeves? And old Mr. Peck trudged around and around him, thinking hard, occasionally offering interruptions of his own. "I believe I ought to fetch my notebook, Justine."

   "Yes, Grandfather, I would do that."

   "I believe that windowscreen is torn. Where else would these mosquitoes be coming from?"

   "I'll find the swatter."

   "Oh, leave it, leave it. Mr. Everjohn here has something he wants to say to us."

   But when Eli took a breath Justine halted him. "Wait, I've been wanting something sour all day. Don't start without me."

   "Justine-" Duncan said.

   Eli Everjohn was a patient man. (In his business, he had to be.) Still, he had been dreaming of this moment for a good long time now. He had come over on a Sunday evening expressly to bring this news, which he thought might cause him to burst if he left it till Monday, in just under three months, he had accomplished what a whole family could not do in sixty-one years. He had performed a spectacular piece of deduction, and now he wanted to tell about it in his own slantwise, gradual way so that everyone could admire how one clue had built upon another, one path led to the next, with sudden inspired leaps of the imagination to bridge them. True detective work was an art. Finding was an art. He was grateful to the Peck family for handing him this assignment. (How could he ever again settle for guarding anniversary gifts or pretending to read Newsweek in front of beauty parlors?) So he cleared his throat, and pushed his coffee cup a certain distance away, and plaited his long fingers on the table before him and began as he had planned. "It struck me right off," he said, "that there was one thing the same in all accounts of Caleb Peck."

   "You'll have to speak up," said the old man.

   "Oh. Sorry. It struck me-"

   "Justine, I think my battery's going."

   "Will you let the man speak?" Duncan said.

   So that Eli, with the last of his patience worn away, ended up blurting it out after all and ruining the moment he had planned for so long. "Mr.

   Caleb Peck," he said, "is in Box Hill, Louisiana, alive and well."

   It had struck Eli right off that there was one thing the same in all accounts of Caleb Peck: he was a musical man. To his family that was only a detail, like the color of his eyes or his tendency to wear a Panama hat just a little past the season. But to Caleb, wasn't it more? Eli pondered, sifting what he had heard and endlessly rearranging it. He traveled a few blind alleys. He scanned the alumni lists of several well-known music schools, including Baltimore's Peabody Institute. He checked the family's old phonograph records for performers whom

   Caleb might have been moved to seek out. He inquired as to Caleb's piano teacher-someone young and pretty, maybe? Someone inspirational, to teach him those Czerny exercises he found crumbling away on top of the piano in old Mr. Peck's Baltimore parlor? But no, the Czerny was Margaret Rose's, said Mr. Peck. Caleb had not liked Czerny. He was not, to tell the truth, very fond of the classical mode. And he had never had a music teacher of any kind. Only little Billy Pope passing on his fiddle lessons, and a leatherbound book telling how to play the woodwinds (which in those days were really made of wood- see the ebony flute in Caleb's old bedroom?) and for the piano, Lafleur Boudrault, who taught him ragtime.