Staggerford (7 page)

Imogene said, “Come on, Pruitt.”

They put on their coats and the Stevensons let them out
the front door into a flood of moonlight. The late-rising moon was blossoming over the bare trees, four times its normal size.

“Gracious, look at the moon,” said Mrs. Stevenson. “It’s a real harvest moon.”

“The moon!” said the superintendent, and he retreated to the fire.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Imogene. “The harvest moon was last month. This one’s called the hunter’s moon.”

On the way home, Imogene told Miles that the superintendent’s problem was definitely heart trouble. Mrs. Stevenson had confided in her. It was a bad valve.

“In a case like that,” said Imogene, “he can submit to surgery and the chances are sixty-five percent that it will be successful, or he can learn to live with it and maybe survive another twenty-five years, or maybe expire tomorrow. He has decided to learn to live with it. For a younger man the chances of a successful operation would be eighty percent, but he’s sixty this year—did you know that?—and he’s not particularly robust, so the odds drop to sixty-five percent. I don’t know. It would be a hard decision to make. Bad-valve people who are faced with that decision are split almost down the middle. Fifty percent submit to surgery and fifty percent learn to live with it. Now of the fifty percent who learn to live with it, fifty-eight percent live to the age of sixty-five and forty-two percent don’t, although those percentages vary if you break it down into the various ages the people are when they are faced with the decision. I mean
obviously
, Pruitt, one hundred percent of those who are sixty-five when they are faced with the decision are going to live to be sixty-five because they already
are
sixty-five.”

The moon was the color of a peach.

“Pruitt, what
is
your problem? You keep moving your jaw all the time.”

“I’m afraid it’s my wisdom tooth going bad.”

“Your wisdom tooth! My God, Pruitt, you’re thirty-five. What are you doing with a wisdom tooth? I had my first
two wisdom teeth extracted when I was nineteen and the other two when I was twenty-one. People seldom carry their wisdom teeth into their thirties. I think you’ll find the average age for getting rid of your last wisdom tooth is twenty-three.”

They came to the house that Imogene shared with her mother. The peach moon stood at the edge of the sloping roof and seemed about to roll off.

“The wisdom tooth is an unnecessary tooth,” said Imogene. “It’s a carry-over from our more primitive ancestors in the evolutionary chain.”

Miles grasped Imogene roughly by the shoulders and kissed her hard on the mouth and left her standing at her door. Her surprise was great, but not so great as to leave her speechless. She said to Miles as he walked away, “Goodness, Pruitt, what
are
you thinking of?”

What he was thinking of as he crossed the alley in the moonlight was Thanatopsis Hayworth from St. Paul, whose hair was dark with a tinge of sable, and how he had waited, alas, too long.

When he got home, Miss McGee called to him from her downstairs bedroom: “Is that you, Miles?” She knew that it was, but whenever he came in late she said, “Is that you, Miles?” to indicate that she was awake to receive whatever he might care to tell her about his evening. Tonight he stood at her bedroom door and looked into the darkness and told her that he had kissed Imogene Kite. He told her this because he had never known a woman, whatever her age, who was not delighted by news of a stolen kiss. But he underestimated Miss McGee’s delight. She broke into an uncontrollable laugh. “How dreadful,” she said when she caught her breath. He could still hear her laughing as he climbed the stairs and shut his door.

SATURDAY
 
 
O
CTOBER
31

I
N THE BACKYARD NEAR
the garden stood a basswood tree that held on to its leaves until late autumn and then released them all between the dusk and the dawn of one frosty night. During the night Miss McGee—her bedroom window open an inch—was wakened by the shower of large, leathery leaves and by the wind that sprang up and shuffled them like parchment.

In the morning Miles raked the basswood leaves into a pile as Miss McGee hung the week’s wash on the clothesline. It was another sunny day, unseasonably warm. They heard geese calling and they looked up to see a flock of three dozen Canadas in the western sky. The geese flew over town and disappeared in the east, then returned much higher, heading west. In a few minutes they appeared a third time, flying undecidedly south in a wavering V. They were joined by a dozen more Canadas flying slightly below them and keeping to a V of their own, as if they wished not to merge and lose their identity. The call of the geese was a high-pitched bark, and for some time after they were out of sight Miles heard them on the southeast wind, yapping like a pack of airborne terriers.

When Miss McGee finished hanging out the wash, she held open a large plastic bag and Miles filled it with basswood leaves. She said it was going to rain.

Miles looked at the sky. A flock of blackbirds was now crossing overhead.

“It’s a clear day, Agatha. Not a cloud.”

“But the wind is swinging to the east, and that means moisture. Goodness, Miles, look at the perspiration on your face. You really must try to get more exercise and reduce your weight. Are you between six two and six three? I would judge six three. Our health text says that a man of six three should weigh two hundred and five pounds. I daresay you’re much heavier than that, Miles. Wayne Workman is your height, and I’m sure he’s at least twenty pounds lighter than you.”

“Wayne Workman is light of brain.”

“Oh shush. You never have a good word to say about Wayne Workman. The Workmans are fine people.”

“I like Thanatopsis.”

Miss McGee giggled. “You and your nicknames. Do you call her Thanatopsis to her face?”

“I’ve called her nothing but Thanatopsis since she moved to town. The first few times I met her I kept forgetting what her real name was, and all I could remember was that it had a lot of vowels and
t-h’s
in it, and the word Thanatopsis always came to mind.”

“Her name is Anna Thea.”

“I know that now. But I like Thanatopsis better. It fits her.”

“It does not fit her. Thanatopsis is Greek for ‘view of death.’ ”

“I know what it’s Greek for.”

“Well, there’s nothing fitting about it. Anna Thea Workman is young, and she has a lot of vitality. It’s a dreadful name to call anyone. Sometimes I think, Miles, that you are careless where other people’s feelings are concerned.”

Lillian Kite came across the alley, carrying in one hand her bag of yarn and in the other a man’s suit on a hanger.
Lillian Kite, Imogene’s mother, was a tall woman in her late sixties. She had a red face and white hair. She was the widow of Lyle Kite, who had been a ranger in the National Park Service, and the suit she carried was one of Lyle’s uniforms. She handed it to Miles, who had asked to borrow it for tonight’s Halloween party at the Workmans’.

“Isn’t there a hat that goes with it?” he asked.

“Yes, there’s a hat, but I had my hands full. You can pick up the hat tonight when you come to pick up Imogene.”

“She goes with the uniform?”

“Well, aren’t you planning to pick her up for the party? She has an invitation, too, you know. Don’t tell me you’re going with somebody else—not after what happened last night. She told me what happened, what you did. You romanced her. Agatha, did you know that Miles romanced Imogene last night?”

“Yes, I did. Here, sit down. I’m going in and put on the coffeepot.”

Lillian Kite pulled a lawn chair out from the shade of the house and sat in the sunshine. Miles pulled another chair into the sun for Miss McGee and the chaise longue for himself. It was a flimsy chaise longue and it squeaked and teetered as he carefully lowered his weight onto it.

Lillian Kite began to knit. She was a constant knitter. She never sat down without taking up her needles. She had begun knitting seriously when her husband died—not after the funeral when time hung heavy on her hands, but immediately upon finding him dead. She had gotten up to make breakfast that morning several years ago and when she went back to the bedroom she found her husband tangled up in the bedclothes with a horrible expression on his face—his lower lip protruding and his eyes open. She called the doctor and the minister and the undertaker, and she picked up her needles and a ball of yarn and she went to work at high speed. When one by one the doctor and the minister and the undertaker came to the front door, she did not rise from her chair but said merely, “He’s in there,”
pointing at the bedroom with her right-hand needle. She had been knitting ever since.

“Such weather, Miles, for this late in the year.”

“Is that so? Then it’s going to rain. I don’t know how she can tell, but she’s always right about rain. She’s very rain-conscious.”

“She can tell by the wind.”

“Miles, have you ever watched ‘The Turning of Our Lives’?”

“No, I’m in school when it’s on.”

“Well, if you ever get a chance to see it, don’t miss it. I tell you it’s life to a T.”

“Is that so?”

“I mean it’s a story you’ll never forget. It’s so lifelike it makes you want to cry. And laugh too, of course, but mostly cry. This week in one installment—Wednesday, I think it was—they had a pregnant virgin and a recovery from epilepsy.”

“Our coffee will be ready in a minute,” said Miss McGee, coming out from the kitchen. She had put on a fresh apron and tied, against the breeze, a gauzy scarf under her chin.

“Agatha, I was telling Miles about ‘The Turning of Our Lives.’ On Wednesday they had a pregnant virgin and a recovery from epilepsy.”

“Oh shush, Lillian. That’s a program for idiots. The only thing on TV I ever cared for, besides the news, was Perry Como. Miles, who will be at the Workmans’ party tonight?”

“The same old faces. The Stevensons, the Gibbons—mostly faculty.”

Lillian Kite said, “Superintendent Stevenson is knocking on death’s door. Imogene says it’s a bad valve in his heart. She told me the percentage of people who the of it. I forget, but it’s a great many.”

“Poor man,” said Miss McGee.

“And the Gibbons! You know what they’re saying about Stella Gibbon, don’t you? Well, I guess it’s more than rumor. Imogene says it’s out and out infidelity. Doc Oppegaard
is the one. Stella Gibbon is Doc Oppegaard’s assistant, you know, and they say it’s so
open
. What does Mr. Gibbon think, I wonder.”

“Poor man,” said Miss McGee.

A party of robins on their way south descended into the back yard and hopped about for a minute, then flew away.

With coffee, Miss McGee served cake and chokecherry jelly. It was noon before Lillian Kite went home and Miles carried the ranger uniform upstairs to his room.

Saturday afternoons Miles went walking. He called it hiking but it was not hiking. For one thing the figure he cut was not that of a hiker. He was an awkward man, pale and tall and tending to corpulence, and he owned no boots. For another thing, he walked not for the sake of getting somewhere but because walking helped him think. Long ago he had discovered that the gears of his memory and imagination were set in motion by putting one foot in front of the other, and the gears were slowed by sitting down or standing still. This explained why in the classroom he was more often on his feet than behind his desk, and it explained why he was so often seen strolling, strutting, trudging, stalking, or skimming the streets of Staggerford—the shape of his thoughts dictating the shape of his walk. Miles owned a car, an old Plymouth with a cracked windshield, but he never used it unless traveling out of town. During the past five summers he had driven the Plymouth to the Grand Canyon, to the Ozarks, to New York City, to Banff, and to graduate school in Colorado, but during the school year it was seldom out of Miss McGee’s garage.

Today as he walked, his thoughts were on school, and because he could visualize his lesson plans as far ahead as Christmas, his walk was a glide. A week of book reports, two weeks of
Othello
, a week of Robert Frost, two weeks of composition, then Christmas. In his old tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches he glided down Main Street and into the Hub Cafe, where he sat on a stool and told
Beverly Bingham he wanted a cup of coffee with cream and a piece of blueberry pie.

Beverly said, “God, Mr. Pruitt, I was just thinking about you. I’ve got something to tell you.”

Until his conversation with Miss McGee last night, Miles had not realized that Beverly was part Indian; but now in the Hub he studied her for vestiges of the Chippewa nation and he found them in her hair, her complexion, her voice, and in the shape of her face. But in Beverly each Indian trait seemed to have been softened, modified, improved upon. Her long hair was almost black and almost straight, but not quite. It came together under her chin and framed her oval face. The rose tinge in her cheeks, which Miles had assumed was a perpetual blush, was actually a hint of the copper complexion so common in Sandhill. Miles had long been fascinated by Indians’ voices, which despite their high and even pitch seemed to be emanating from someplace farther back in the throat and deeper in the soul than other people’s voices. Why, when an Indian spoke, did he sound farther away than he actually was? Beverly’s voice, too, had that high-pitched, distant quality, but it carried more expression than the typical monotone of the reservation.