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  21

  “HAVE YOU EVER HAD A MARRIED MAN BEFORE?” BAYARD Sewell asked her, his words blurred with the rasp of his breathing and the guttural sulk of thunder behind the drone of the air conditioner. The storm that had broken the heat earlier in the week had repeated itself every day since, but it was not until the third afternoon of rain and tumult that he had finally been able to come to her. The pent force of the wait had all but blown Mike apart at the moment of her climax, and Bayard, who was normally silent, had shouted hoarsely when his moment came. They lay now, wet and panting in the rain-swimming room. Mike felt as though the center of her body was missing, cold and hollow and ebbing and light. It occurred to her that it might feel this way to die.

  “Of course not,” she said, profoundly surprised, almost shocked, at the question. “I wouldn’t do that. I don’t believe in that.”

  And then she laughed, because, of course, she was doing it, and intended to continue. He laughed, too.

  “Why do you ask? Is it bothering you?” she said, turning over to look at him.

  “No. I just wondered if you had, and if it was as good with him as it is with me,” he said, yawning hugely. “Do I look like it’s bothering me?”

  He didn’t. He looked wonderful. He looked rested and loosened and ten years younger, like an indolent big cat in the first year of its prime. The deep, dry lines of pain in his face had somehow softened and faded, and there was a new fullness to his cheeks and the skin under his neck, as if they had been plumped slightly with air.

  “No,” Mike said. “I don’t think it’s bothering you in the least.”

  “I think it is you, a little, though. You look beat,” he said, sitting up and reaching for the sheet, to draw it over their sweat-slick bodies. The sound-muffling air conditioner was invariably cold after their sex. She noticed that he had the small, purselike beginning of a pot to his belly; it had been flat to gauntness before. She smiled indulgently at the soft little bag of flesh. It seemed a totem of content.

  “No. Not at all. I’m just sort of worried about my father, to tell you the truth. He’s been having a lot of pain, and the doctor says it’s going to get worse. I guess just sitting around waiting for him to start hurting is getting to me.”

  He sat up straighter, all languor gone.

  “Tell me,” he said. She did, about the visit to the doctor, and the pain, and the fervent letter-writing campaign on which her father had embarked. He was silent for a little space after she stopped talking, whistling very softly through his teeth and staring into middle distance.

  “When is he going to … leave us?” he said, finally. “Soon? Did the doctor say?”

  “No. He really couldn’t tell. Maybe not for a long time. Bay, I want to ask you something,” Mike said.

  “Shoot.”

  “Well, when I suggested that he ask you to let some of your people help him with his silly letters, he … I don’t know. Kind of blew me off. Muttered something about not wanting to bother you. Wouldn’t look at me. And he doesn’t talk about you, or even talk much to you, when you’re with him. I know you’ve noticed. It isn’t like him. Do you think … he suspects about us?”

  “No,” he said. “No. I’m sure he doesn’t. He doesn’t even seem to know I’m here half the time.”

  “He knows,” Mike said. “He always remembers when you’ve been here. And he sure does know I come up here every afternoon and shut the door. He’s known that from the start. Bay, why on earth did you tell him I was writing?”

  “Why not?” he said. “It covers our tracks perfectly. I thought it was a small inspiration, myself.”

  “I don’t like to lie,” she said. “I don’t think you had to tell him anything. I don’t think it would have come up.”

  “Maybe not yet, but sooner or later he might have begun to wonder, and now there’s the perfect answer for him,” Bay Sewell said. “Relax, Mike. I don’t like to lie, either, unless I have to, but I sure will, for us. It seems a little … picky to screw a married man every afternoon and then balk at a little lie.”

  Mike’s face burned.

  “Is that how you think of this?” she said.

  “No. I just don’t like to be jumped on,” he said briefly. There was the barest hint of remoteness in his voice.

  “I wasn’t jumping on you. I just hate to see him … shut you out, after you’ve been so close all these years. I was afraid it was this.”

  “Well, put your mind at rest. Canaday’s behind it, if anybody is. It’s obvious he doesn’t want me to know what he’s up to with your dad. I haven’t brought it up again, Mike, because it seemed to upset you so much the only time I did … but I really need you to be my eyes and ears with John. I want to look after his interests, and the only way I have of knowing what’s going on with the DOT is you. Will you tell me? I want to keep a finger on this.”

  “I truly do not know what’s going on,” Mike said. She did not know why she was so reluctant to talk with him about her father and Sam Canaday and the action involving the homeplace. “I’ve told them both I didn’t want to know.”

  “Well, I want you to find out. And I want you to tell me. I’m serious, Mike. If he’s getting worse, if the pain is getting bad and they’re increasing his medication, the day might come when he can’t look out for himself. Somebody else besides Canaday needs to know what’s what.”

  “Oh … all right. I’ll ask Sam and let you know.”

  “When?”

  “Oh, Bay … soon. When I get a chance. When the time seems right. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Bayard Sewell said. “Okay.”

  John Winship’s pain returned the following night.

  Sam Canaday had come by after supper with copies of the first few letters that Ouida Quigley had typed for him, and the old man had been fiercely jubilant at seeing his words in print. He had read them off to Sam and Mike in a thin, savage old falcon’s shriek, and Mike, unable to leave the kitchen without seeming intolerably rude, had busied herself at the sink so that he could not see her face. The words were puerile and clotted with weak rage, and the abuse was that of a breath-holding child in a tantrum. The thought of anyone in the news media seeing the letters made her teeth clench with embarrassment. She could not imagine that any responsible editor would respond. Sam Canaday nodded occasionally, his face sober and thoughtful, and once or twice said, “Good point, Colonel.” Mike wondered if he could see the contempt that stiffened her shoulders and back.

  Midway through one of the letters her father drew a sharp, shallow breath and broke off his words. Mike waited for the droning diatribe to continue, but it did not, and when she turned to the pair of them it was to see her father rigid in his chair, his face turned the color of tallow, his eyes rolled nearly back into the sunken sockets. There were stark white lines around his tight-clamped lips, and his nostrils whitened as she stared at him. A thin, mewling, almost electronic sound, a keening hum, swelled gradually in the kitchen, and she started to look about for it until she realized, stupidly, that it was coming from between his clenched teeth. Sweat sheeted his sunken face.

  She stood still, rooted to the rug in front of the sink, staring. There was nothing at all in her mind except the word “stroke,” hanging as perfect and palpable in the thrumming air before her as if it had been on a dictionary page. The keening went on and on.

  “… the doctor, for God’s sake, Mike, right now! MOVE!” Sam Canaday’s voice cut through the dreadful whine and penetrated the thickness around her, and she saw that he was kneeling before her father with his fingers on his pulse.

  “I … where’s the book …”

  The sound stopped as if a switch had been thrown, and John Winship took a great, rattling gulp of air, and his rigid body slowly relaxed and slumped low into the wheelchair. His terrible eyes focused on Sam Canaday, and he struggled to push words out on the laboring breath.

  “No … doctor. Better now. No doctor.”

  “The hell you say, Colonel. Mike, look on the
wall by the phone, the number’s there …”

  “No, doctor!” The cry was so hoarse and guttural and strong that Mike actually dropped the telephone she was dialing. She turned wildly to her father, and then to Sam. He was looking keenly at her father, who stared back at him with a fiercely focused, milky glare. A wash of color so faint that she could hardly be sure she saw it was creeping into John Winship’s cheeks, and the cords and ridges of whitened flesh beside his mouth relaxed. Sam sat back on his heels.

  “Okay. No doctor for right now,” he said, in a normal voice. “What was it, Colonel? Pain?”

  “A twinge,” her father said, the momentary substance draining from his voice. “Just another goddamned gas twinge. You call the doctor every time I have one of those, and you’ll be on the phone right much.”

  “It wasn’t a gas pain, and you know it,” Sam said. “You know what it was. You’ve known right along. And you know it’s probably going to come back, maybe tonight, and that it’s probably going to be worse next time. I’m going to make a deal with you. You’re going to go to bed and take some of that medicine Dr. French gave you … and take enough of the goddamned stuff, and take it without saying a single word … and I won’t call the doctor until I’ve seen how you are in the morning. But give me one word of crap and I’m getting on the phone that second. Take it or leave it.”

  “Screw you, Canaday,” John Winship said, but he nodded his skull’s head. His voice had faded almost to nothing, and his wasted hands and arms were limp in his lap. The cold, oily moisture still sheened his face. A slow paling of the mouth and nose skin told Mike that the pain was starting again.

  She moved forward to push the chair into his bedroom, and without turning to look at her or opening the closed old dead fowl’s eyes, he said, “Get away from me, Micah. I don’t want you near me. Don’t want you in my room. Don’t even want you in the house with me. Wish you’d just suck on back to where you came from.”

  Mike drew in her breath as sharply as if he had struck her. Her face burned and ridiculous tears stung her nose. She wheeled and put her arms back into the cooling dishwater, fighting back the old rage and pain that she remembered as if she had felt them only the day before.

  Sam Canaday said only, “Come on, Colonel. Let’s roll.”

  When he came back into the kitchen, Mike was sitting at the table, her face stiff with hard-won control. She wanted desperately to be away from them, shut into the silence and sanctuary of her room, but she needed to know that her father was asleep or at least resting and unlikely to need attention that evening before she felt free to flee to it. She thought no further than the refrain that echoed in her ringing head: I’m going to leave this house tomorrow. I’m not going to stay here one minute longer. Nobody and nothing can make me.

  “He’s asleep,” Sam said, dropping into the chair opposite her and scrubbing at his eyes with his fist. “I gave him enough Demerol to stun a mule. I doubt if he’ll wake till morning. But we’re going to have to do something about this pain then. Get him stronger stuff, or have a nurse come in for injections, or something. Much more like that will kill him. I’ll call French first thing tomorrow.”

  Mike said nothing.

  “I’m sorry he popped off at you,” Sam said. “He didn’t mean it, of course. He didn’t want you to see him in pain, is all. He can’t handle your having to watch his weakness or tend to him when the pain and the mess get bad. So he strikes out. You’re going to have to get used to that kind of thing from here on out.”

  “There’s not going to be any here on out,” Mike said. Her voice shook very slightly. “I’m not staying. He doesn’t want me here; it’s obvious he never did. DeeDee was lying to me. Good Christ, he acts like I wanted to come home, like he was doing me a big favor, letting me come. Some damn favor. When in hell has he ever done me a favor?”

  He was silent for a while, and then he said, mildly, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth.”

  Her head went up. “Why should I be grateful to him? What did he ever do for me that he didn’t absolutely have to do? You don’t know, you can’t know … he never just gave me anything. Not ever. I remember when I was little, I wanted two things more than anything I’ve ever wanted in the world. Just two things, little things. I wanted a catcher’s mitt and I wanted a live rabbit for Easter. I begged him for them. And he said I was too irresponsible for the rabbit and that girls didn’t get catcher’s mitts. He’d buy me things that somebody told him I needed … Priss or Rusky or Dee or my teachers … but he never just gave me anything in his life. You tell me one thing I ought to be grateful to him for.”

  “More than you may ever know,” he said. “Why are you so cold and distant with him? I know what happened when you were a kid, about the sit-ins and all. It’s too bad. But it was twenty-two years ago, and you’ve done very well for yourself. And he doesn’t have much time left, and what he does have is going to be more and more like tonight. He needs to be close to his daughter now.”

  “He has DeeDee. She’s all he ever wanted, except Mother and the homeplace.”

  “No,” Sam said. “She’s not all. He wants you. Why else would he call you home?”

  “He didn’t,” Mike said. “A fool could see after tonight that he didn’t.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. He might never be able to say it, but he needs you now, in a lot of ways you don’t even suspect.”

  “He has a funny way of showing it. He’s the one who built the wall between us.”

  “But you built it up twice as high. Watch out, Mike,” Sam Canaday said. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

  “Not bad, a redneck quoting Frost.”

  “Oh, well, it’s the one single thing I learned at college besides how to drink warm bourbon and Coke out of Dixie cups and make water balloons out of Trojans.” He smiled at her, a worn, brief phantom grin.

  “Why did you take this case?” Mike asked. Fatigue to match his was curling stealthily through her veins, and she did not think she could stand up to leave the kitchen. “Why are you spending so much time on it? He can’t be paying you that much; he doesn’t have anything but that damned old house and that little bit of land.”

  “I don’t have all that much business, either,” he said. “The stench of coal smoke and steel mills lingers about me; it offends Lytton’s delicate nostrils. I guess I took the case because of the land. Because of what it means to him. Family, roots, identity. I never had any of that. Roots don’t go very deep in Birmingham. The land, though … it’s always seemed to me that the land is a person’s place. Not just something he owns, but a context. It’s where he belongs in the order of things. And consequently, it’s who he is.”

  “My work is who I am,” Mike said.

  “No. That’s what you’ve done. The land is who, where, and when you are. I guess it’s why, too.”

  “You’re the right person for this ridiculous case, then,” Mike snapped. “You sound just like him.”

  “I happen to like your father,” Sam Canaday said. “He’s good for me. He’s good for the South. The South is being gobbled up by asphalt and concrete just like it once was by kudzu. This Sunbelt shit is changing everything that matters to me. It’s changing Southerners, too. We used to have men like your father, men who knew what was important and where they stood on things. Now we have men like your brother-in-law. And of course, your old friend Bayard Everett Sewell. Mr. South Fulton County.”

  Mike let it slide. She must not leap to defend Bay.

  “You make my father sound like Robert E. Lee,” she said. “But you must know what a bigot he is; you hear him every night.”

  “That’s not important. That doesn’t mean anything. It’s not the blacks he’s mad at, it’s the loss. Your mother. The life he thought he was going to have. You. The homeplace. He has to be mad at somebody. It just isn’t important. The point is, he knows what is important. And he knows it’s worth a fight. He’s not paying me one red cent, incidentally; this is a profe
ssional courtesy between attorneys. Lord, lord. He’s still a burr under your saddle, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t think much about it anymore.”

  “The hell you don’t,” he said.

  She sat in silence for a while, wondering if she would ever be able to get up unaided from the chair in which she sat. Presently she said, slowly, “It’s very strange. I’m not, right at this minute and in this house, anything in particular. Nothing I used to be. I don’t feel like a writer or a mother or a wife, or much of a woman, even. I may be all those things again sometime, but right now I’m some kind of … emotional gelding.”

  “Well,” he said companionably, “you are a daughter, you know.”

  Mike laughed harshly. “I haven’t been that in more than twenty years.”

  “Then why do you stay on in this house, if his whole thrust, his impetus, the thing that’s keeping him going, touches you so little? If you’re not his daughter, why did you really come in the first place?”

  In her fatigue and the ebbing of the alarm at her father’s seizure, Mike came close to telling him about the lost assignment and book and apartment, and about Rachel’s and Derek Blessing’s betrayals. The words flooded her throat like bile. But instead, she said, “They needed me here. DeeDee put it to me so that I couldn’t refuse her. It was a choice I made. You have to choose; I chose. But I don’t have to participate in all the rest of it, or pitch in to save the damned farm. My being here is keeping him from having to go to an institution. What more do you want me to say, Sam? What more do you think he wants?”

  “More than you’ve got to give, I guess,” Sam Canaday said, stretching bonelessly. “Just don’t kid yourself that you made a choice. From what I hear, you’ve never really made any choices except one … to go to Atlanta when you were a teenager and play with the big guys in the sit-ins, and you did that more to get at your father than to make a stand or a statement. Good choice, though, by the way. But after that you ran. And you’ve been running ever since like a bowling ball down an alley, unless I miss my guess. Not much choice for a bowling ball. And then you came home again … because you had no choice. Oh, come on, Mike, I know about your job and your daughter and your apartment; Priss told me, of course. Sorry if it bothers you, but there it is. You ran out of everything, including bucks, and so you came home. I don’t blame you; so would I. But you don’t know about choices. Not the hard choices that hurt to make and cost you plenty. You haven’t made any since 1964.”