Jack Read online

  “A conundrum.”

  They walked on through the deep grass, shoulder to shoulder in the dark, breathing together. Humans, making their slight, bland sounds, breaths and whispery footsteps, while creatures all around them rasped and twittered as if their lives depended on it. He said, “Are you cold?”

  “Not very.”

  “We’re not just wandering. I know where we are. I want to show you something.”

  “Show me? I can hardly see a thing.”

  “Do you have any matches? No, you wouldn’t. Foolish of me to ask. Well, I have a couple.”

  They walked a little farther, and then he said, “Come here,” and took her elbow to help her down a slope. “Come a little closer. Now look at this.” He struck a match, and a chalk-white face appeared in its light, then dimmed and vanished.

  “Who is it?”

  “No idea.” He struck another match, and again the face bloomed out of the darkness, shadows cast up by the flame so the curves of its cheeks darkened the hollows of its eyes. Usually he would touch its plump stone shoulder, long enough to think that the warmth that passed from his hand might equal the cold that passed into it. But Della was there. His little rituals would seem strange to her. It wasn’t comfort that he took from them.

  She said, “A cherub.”

  “That’s the idea, I suppose. The place is full of them. I like this one best. Do you mind walking back again? To the place where you found me? I am a little embarrassed to admit it, but I left a blanket roll there. In case I ended up spending the night. Which does happen. You could wrap up in it. You might find it a little—objectionable. Damp. It’s always damp. You know how that is. Or you don’t. Fair warning. Or I could use it, and you could borrow my jacket, which is probably better. But not as warm. Or we could just keep walking.”

  She said, “Let’s keep walking.”

  “Yes. You’re miserable.”

  “My own fault.”

  “Mine, too. I wanted to show her to you, to see what you’d think. So I took you all that way just to have a look at her.”

  “I wish I knew what to think. I’ve seen prettier babies.”

  He nodded. “That’s all right. She looks a little better by daylight. But the rain hasn’t been kind to her. She’s pretty well lost an ear. She’s been here a long time. Just short of eighty years, according to the inscription. There isn’t a single word for that look of hers, is there. ‘Terrified’ isn’t quite right.”

  “Maybe. ‘Startled’ might be better.”

  “There was moss on her lip a few weeks ago. It enhanced her metaphorical value, but it looked—uncomfortable. I used a toothbrush I brought here with me to clean her up a little.” That gentle hand, lifted away, then resting on his arm again, another considered act. “You might want to add the moss back in, for effect.”

  “You should be the one writing a poem.”

  He shook his head. “Not much rhymes with terror. ‘The Infant and the Armed Man.’ What do you think?”

  “I think ‘terror’ is the wrong word. You said it was yourself.”

  “Yes. Strange. Error is just an equivocation. But you add that t and you have another thing entirely.” She was quiet, so he said, “Sorry, too much time on my hands. I think about things, very trivial things. To pass the time.”

  She nodded. “I do that, too. When I can’t sleep.”

  “Another insomniac!”

  “Not really. I think I would be one if I could walk out at night, under the moon, everything so quiet. I sit out on the porch step sometimes, in the dark.”

  “Well, I could wander by your house one night and find you there and squire you through the city.” He said, “‘Nocturnal.’ I like that word. It sounds like the change there is when the streets are empty and the houses are dark, which is a much deeper thing than just, you know, the absence of light. I could show you. You hear your own footsteps, as if they mattered. I promise I’d have you at your door again when the first bird sings. Owls wouldn’t count.”

  She nodded. “We’ll never do that.”

  He said, “Sad, isn’t it?”

  They walked on for a while. Then she said, “‘The bird of dawning singeth all night long.’ Why is that so pretty?”

  “So blessed is the time.” He said, “Maybe. I know that bird. I don’t consider it a friend. It’s saying, Back to purgatory, Boughton.”

  She stopped where she was, quiet for a minute. Then she said, softly, “It’s going to wake me up tomorrow. I have to get to school so early, I might as well just stay awake the rest of the night, anyway. Oh, what am I talking about? I’ll barely have time to go home! I won’t be able to pick up the tests I graded. I’ll be walking home at dawn with my hair all in a mess. My shoes ruined. It’s probably going to rain.”

  “They don’t open the gates at dawn. Maybe half past seven. When the gardeners come.”

  “Walking along the street early in the morning, in the wrong part of town, all in a mess. What’s anybody going to think.”

  “I’ll see you home or wherever. Discreetly. From across the street.”

  “Oh, good. You’re going to protect me.”

  “I’m tougher than I look.”

  “No doubt. Pretty much anybody is.”

  He laughed.

  She said, “I shouldn’t have said that. I know you’re trying to be kind. I’m glad I’m not here by myself, I really am.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That was mean, what I said.”

  “It was a little bit funny, though.”

  “I got myself into this. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”

  “That’s true enough.”

  But she stood there, her hands in her coat pockets and her head lowered. So he said, “We should talk about something. To pass the time.”

  “I thought when I got this job I’d never ask for another thing. Sumner High School.”

  “It’s a handsome building. I’ve walked past it a few times.”

  “I used to have pictures of it that I cut out of magazines. I dreamed about teaching here. When I got that letter, I thought I knew how my whole life would go. And I’ve just thrown it away.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “If they decide to make this into something compromising, I’m finished.”

  “Well,” he said, “we’ve got tonight to get through, in any case. You could slip your shoes off. Keep them a little drier. They’re not doing you any good, anyway, there’s not much to them. A few straps.” She looked at him, so he said, “If that was a rude suggestion, I’m sorry. This is quite a novel situation, even for me.” And he laughed.

  “No, it might be best. Better than walking home barefoot tomorrow.”

  “That was my thought. There are paths through the graves. The acorns haven’t fallen yet. The hickory nuts.”

  She put her hand on a headstone and pulled off her shoes. “Well, there. I guess this will be all right. It’s ridiculous. Ridiculous.”

  I promise I won’t think less of you. That is what he almost said. But he caught himself.

  He laughed. “Sorry. Anyway, I can barely see you at all. You could, you know, take off—”

  “Don’t, please.”

  “Take off your hat. And borrow mine. That’s all I was going to say! Since yours wouldn’t keep off the rain.”

  Silence. All right, then.

  Finally she said, “Did you ever wonder why no one except Hamlet seems sorry that the old King Hamlet is dead? He’s hardly cold in his grave.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t claim to know the play well, Miss Miles. My father cut it up with scissors and taped the pieces into a loose-leaf scrapbook, so we could act it out. So they could. What was left of it didn’t make much sense. It wouldn’t have, anyway. Our Ophelia, my sister Glory, was six or seven. She’d give all her flowers to the ghost— She was always wandering in on the wrong scenes, even after she should have been dead. Sharing out the popcorn. My father wouldn’t say a word to her about it. He said it was a
n improvement. She sang ‘Jesus Loves Me’ in her mad scene because the actual song didn’t survive the scissors. So my sense of it all is likely to be misinformed. I was interested to read the thing whole. That’s why I borrowed your book.”

  Then he said, “I believe this is the kind of conversation you were hoping for? Scenes of domestic life?”

  She said, “It’s strange no one thinks Hamlet should be king. It seems as though there were stories behind the play we only get glimpses of. But nothing is done to hide them, either, I mean the gaps they leave.”

  “Yes, now that you mention it. One time our Ophelia got into the tub with all her clothes on, to rehearse her death scene. My brother Teddy caught her at it, and they talked about the dangers of playing at drowning in a bathtub. He said she didn’t have to rehearse, because no one sees it happen. Otherwise somebody would have told Ophelia to get out of the water, probably her brother. She said, They did see! Somebody just stood there and watched me drown! Mermaid-like to muddy death, you know—she had a point, it would have taken a while. She came down the stairs trailing bathwater, shouting, Who let me drown! They decided it had to have been Gertrude, since she knew all about it. And nothing made sense, anyway, so no harm done.”

  She said, “My father never had much time to spend at home. He’s sort of a leader in the community, I guess. He gets called away constantly. He spends lots of time with lots of people, trying to sort things out for them. It comes with serving a big church in a city. Especially a colored church, I think. He always made us show him our homework and our report cards, but he says he has a thousand children to look after, and that’s true. We understood that. And then there are always people in the house, uncles and cousins and strangers of one kind and another. It’s not such a peaceful life.”

  “One time my father was late to a funeral because Teddy and I had a game that went into extra innings. The widow dressed him down a little, I guess. He told her and anyone who ever reminded him of it that it was an exceptional game. We almost won.”

  She stopped, her head lowered. “Oh.”

  “Let me guess. Your father’s favorite daughter is wandering the night with a disreputable white man. Barefoot. In a cemetery. If she’s caught at it, the scandal will echo down the ages, into the farthest reaches of Tennessee, all its strange particulars scrutinized. Forever. And he was once so proud of you.”

  “It’s not a joke.”

  “I wasn’t joking.”

  “I’d like to sit down.”

  “We’ll find a bench.”

  “No, here. Just for a minute.” And she sank down on the grass. “Let me think.”

  “There’s not much to think about, except how much worse your clothes are going to look if you keep sitting there in the damp like that. I’m trying to spare you added regret. We lost souls have to wander till the cock crows, nothing to be done. Maybe keep ourselves a little presentable if we can.” He held out his hand to her and she took it and he helped her up. He didn’t hold her hand a second longer than he should have.

  She said, “You shouldn’t call yourself that. ‘Disreputable.’”

  “I’m looking at the situation the way your father would. Loitering at night in a cemetery. Just that one fact would finish me off. Then there’s all the rest. Actual years of it, I’m afraid. Hardly a day goes by.”

  “Well, what would your father say if he saw you here in the middle of the night, arm in arm with a colored gal?”

  “He’d say, Thank God he’s not alone. He’d thank Jesus with his eyes closed. He’s not a man of the world, my father, and he might start fretting about particulars. But that would be his first thought. And we aren’t arm in arm. Not that that would make any difference.”

  “It wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” She put her hand in the crook of his elbow. “Oh!”

  “What?”

  “I forgot my shoes! I left them back there, wherever we were! I’ll probably never find them. Everything just gets worse and worse.”

  “Well, maybe, but I have them right here, your shoes. I picked them up.”

  She shook her head. “I’m walking along barefoot in the dark and you’re carrying my shoes. And I don’t even know you. This is the strangest situation I’ve ever been in in my life. You better give them to me.”

  He did, and then he said, “I’m going to take my shoes off, too. That might make things less awkward, I believe.”

  “Why would it?”

  “We can just try it out. We’ll see. I could be right. There.” He slipped off his shoes, pocketed his socks. His feet, where they showed beyond his trouser cuffs, had a dim lunar pallor even in all that dark. They looked very naked, not quite his and startlingly his. Sometimes he thought of the naked man who lived in his clothes, that bare, forked animal. He had dreamed a thousand times that he was somewhere public, wearing less than decency allowed. That was the feeling. Utter vulnerability. Then again, the cold of the grass was sharp and pleasing, like river water.

  She said, “You were right. This is better.” And laughed, which pleased him. And then they walked for a while, she holding his arm, her head at his shoulder, quiet. They were feeling that same odd cold together, and hearing the same night sounds, stranger to her than to him, he thought. He was introducing her to them, really. It was one thing to hear them from a porch or through a window screen, another to step into darkness itself where they were native and undistracted, making the dark spacious by the here and there of their rasping and chirruping. There was a soft clash of leaves when the wind stirred. Maybe another time when he was benighted he had imagined her walking beside him, more felt than seen, pensive as she was. By turning toward her he might dispel the illusion that she was there in the way of the dream, a soul, perhaps his own soul, in the now untroubled trust of her noiseless steps. The air smelled freshly come from somewhere new, if there was such a place.

  She said, “Maybe everything else is strange.”

  Well, this happened to be a thing his soul had said to him any number of times, wordlessly, it was true, but with a similar inflection, like an echo, like the shadow of a sound. She, the actual Della, might not have spoken at all, since the thought was so familiar to him. So he did look at her, her head lowered pensively, and he asked her what she had said. “Your voice is very soft.”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  That meant she chose not to say it again, whatever it was. “Nothing” was a finger to the lips, a confidence she had thought better of. A confidence. Then she realized she should not be so much at ease with him. She decided to be reticent about the kinds of thoughts she didn’t usually allow herself, after almost speaking them. If she had said those words, it meant she liked the night well enough, and he felt a tentative kind of pride in the thought. The night and the place were his own, more or less, and she was his guest in them, now that she had begun to seem a little more at ease.

  She said, “It just seems to me sometimes as though—if we were the only ones left after the world ended, and we made the rules—they might work just as well—”

  He laughed. “There’s a thought. Jack Boughton makes the rules! Too bad there wouldn’t be a few other people around to, you know, feel their force. Not that I carry grudges. Still. The first rule would be that everyone had to mind me. And the second would be that they could not hide their chagrin.”

  Silence.

  She meant to be taken seriously. He’d known that, and still, he’d made his joke. So he said, “An interesting idea, certainly.” They were strangers killing time. Remember that. Somehow he had been imagining something else, an almost wordless peace between them, a night like a ghostly presence witnessing this most improbable meeting, quiet and more quiet until she was gone and he had days to himself to remember her and nothing to regret. But she was serious, no doubt to keep their circumstance from taking on another character than detachment, from sliding into distrust or old anger. Might as well make the most of it.

  She said, “I didn’t mean you and me. I meant
any two strangers.”

  “So long as one of them wasn’t Rasputin. I’m sorry. You mean strangers in the abstract. I’m sure they exist somewhere, for purposes of argument. None in my immediate acquaintance. Strangers in the abstract always turn out to be fairly drearily particular on acquaintance. Under the slightest scrutiny, really. A glance will destroy the illusion. In my experience.”

  She shook her head, and said nothing. And why would she bother, when he kept on talking, and seemed to want to make a joke out of everything, and make the same sort of display of himself he made even when he was alone, toying with words, a sort of fidgeting of the brain. When her very hand on his arm meant that he could know a few of her thoughts if he were calm and a little tactful. “Sorry.”

  “No. That’s all right. I understand what you mean about people. But they see more and know more and think about more than they would ever have any practical use for. I see that all the time. Even in children. They have their ideas about what is true or fair. About what matters. In the abstract.”

  “Agreed. Yes. But could we have a slightly larger population left after Doomsday? If there could be two, there could be two dozen, I suppose. I know I’m being literal-minded. But I try to imagine these two castaways absorbing the terrible fact, and then one of them saying to the other one, in this void, in this empty world—You know what we need around here? Some rules! When they had completely outlived any need for them? The one good thing about it all. Emily Post, Deuteronomy, the entire regime gone. It’s not as if they’d want to murder, being just the two of them. They wouldn’t need to steal, since there’d be no one around to own anything. They could forget about adultery.”

  “I think they’d talk about how things should have been. While there was still a chance. That’s what I mean.”

  He nodded. “Interesting. But—sorry to be so literal—shouldn’t we know how the world ended? That would be on their minds, I think.”

  “All right. It was struck by a meteor.”

  “Not our fault, then.”

  “No and yes. Like the Flood.”

  “Hmm. I see. So it’s still that kind of universe.”