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  There was a small movement in the darkness below, at the back of the house, and she started and looked down. In the hot gloom Sam Canaday stood looking up at her, his face a white blur in the twilight of the back hall. Mike froze in simple shock.

  “Well,” Sam said slowly. “So. I wondered, of course. You’ve been giving off your own light lately.”

  “What are you doing here?” Mike’s voice was thick and foolish in her throat.

  “Your dad had a bad attack,” Sam Canaday said. “He couldn’t raise you by yelling, so he crawled to the phone and called me. Dr. Gaddis is on his way. You’d better go put some clothes on.”

  “I … have you … how long have you been standing there?”

  “Long enough, Miz Winship-Singer,” he said. “Long enough. Don’t worry, Mike. Your secret is safe with me. I’d rather watch Dynasty. “

  He turned and went back down the hall and into John Winship’s room, and Mike went back into her bedroom and shut the door. She sat for a long time on the edge of her bed, listening to the hum of the air conditioner and thinking nothing at all. Then she dressed and went downstairs to meet the doctor. J.W. Cromie was coming out of her father’s room with a glass and washcloth in his hand, but Sam Canaday was gone. She could hear the tinny, diminishing burr of the Toyota as it turned out of the driveway and disappeared down Pomeroy Street toward town.

  27

  MIKE WAS AT PRISS’S WHEN THE CALL CAME.

  She had waked slowly and luxuriously at eleven that morning, after the longest and deepest sleep she had had since she had come home, and had dressed in a peaceful and perfect envelope of nowness. There was, for the time being, no past that contained an agonizing scene in the dim hall of the Pomeroy Street house, no closed white face looking up at her near-nakedness, no toneless voice saying, “You’d better go put on some clothes,” no battered and vanishing old car. And neither was there a future in which such a scene would have to be dealt with. It was not the bell jar, and it was not Mike’s usual crisis management tool. She did not know what it was, but she was peacefully and abstractly grateful for it.

  Downstairs, Lavinia Lester was knitting and watching something old and English and flickering on the A&E channel. John Winship was not in the kitchen. Dr. Gaddis had given him a powerful sedative by injection the evening before and had phoned in a much stronger painkiller, which had come immediately from the pharmacy, and her father had slept through the night. From past experience, she knew that he would sleep most of the day, as he always did following a bad bout of pain.

  “Let him have the pills whenever he needs them,” the doctor had said. “Let him have the liquor, too. I hope this is the worst it will get before it’s over, but it may not be. It could be ferocious next time. It isn’t going to be long, though, Mike. Let him have and do whatever he wants.”

  Mike had nodded and the doctor had gone away. It was J.W. who had insisted on sitting up beside John Winship as he slept his still and deathlike sleep.

  “I’m off tomorrow, Mike,” he said. “You and Mr. Sam save up for when you need your strength.”

  “Thank you, J.W.,” she had said. “You’re a better friend than we deserve.”

  She had not told Bayard Sewell that Sam Canaday had seen him leaving the upstairs bedroom and she knew somehow that Sam would not. Sam had not called; she knew that he would not do that, either. Mike floated on the moment and waited for what would come.

  In the afternoon she drifted over to Priss’s.

  She was drinking iced coffee and admiring Priss’s new bird feeder when the telephone rang. Priss displaced a dreadfully snoring Walker Pussy and heaved herself up to answer it.

  “Sam, for you,” she said, coming back into the room.

  Mike picked up the telephone. “Sam?” she said.

  “We’ve lost,” he said briefly. His voice was level. “It’s over. They’ve filed a declaration of taking and they’ll be taking title about now. Don’t tell him. I’m coming by tonight and we’ll do it then.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “What is it?” Priss said, searching Mike’s face. “Is it John?”

  “No,” Mike said. “It’s the homeplace. It’s gone, Priss. Sam can’t do anything more.”

  Priss was silent for so long that Mike swiveled her head around to look at her. The big, smooth, Buddhalike face was, astoundingly, crumpled in anguish. Mike had never seen such an expression on Priss’s face, not even on that long-ago evening in her father’s house. Tears slid down her cheeks in the creases bracketing her small, Etruscan mouth.

  “Oh, poor Win,” she whispered. “Oh, poor Scamp.”

  “Scamp?” Mike parroted, whispering also, though she could not have said why. She did not know which was more unbelievable, Priss’s tears or the roguish, old-fashioned epithet. It fit neither the remote dream-father of her childhood nor the present wreckage of that man.

  “I called him Scamp when he was a boy. We all did, all through high school.” A small, tremulous smile played around Priss’s mouth, and her eyes were far away in memory. “He was a real devil, a kind of perpetual cheeky bad boy, always into something, always laughing. And handsome! You wouldn’t believe how handsome he was. I’ll never forget how he looked the night of our senior party, in his first real suit, that he worked after school all year for, with one of Miss Daisy’s sweetheart roses in his buttonhole …”

  She drew a long, shuddering breath and took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.

  “I’ll come on by tomorrow after Sam’s told him and he’s slept on it,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she were in and out of the Pomeroy Street house several times a day. “Maybe I can take his mind off it a little. I always used to be able to make Scamp laugh.”

  Mike stared at her. Fragments flew into place.

  “You were in love with him, weren’t you?” Mike said.

  Priss did not reply.

  “You still are, aren’t you, Priss? After all these years? After what he did, what he turned into?”

  “Love is a policy, Mike,” Priss Comfort said heavily. “It’s not a feeling. Time you learned that.”

  The words had a strange resonance, as if they were an echo of something far away.

  “J.W. said something like that a while ago,” she said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Priss said. “J.W. formed his policies a long time back.”

  Mike left the little stone house and drove, not to the sanctuary of her room to telephone Bay Sewell, as she had planned, but, seemingly by remote control, to Sam Canaday’s office. Lytton’s main street was all but deserted as she parked the car in front of the peeling old building and got out. Only a town police car was moving, idling lazily through town like a planing hawk. Mike’s skirt stuck to the back of her bare legs. It was very still and hot, and no time at all.

  She went up the dusty wooden steps to the second floor, her soft espadrilles soundless on the dust-felted tread. The stairs and corridor smelt not unpleasantly of old linseed oil and time. She walked down the long, dim corridor. On either side, dark oak doors with square, white-frosted panes stood closed. The black-painted letters on most of them were flaking off, half gone. Mike supposed most businesses had moved to one of the new shopping and professional centers on the outskirts of town. The last door on the right, though closed like its neighbors, had newly painted black lettering: SAMUEL F. CANADAY, ATTORNEY AT LAW. The brass doorknob was brightly polished.

  Mike put her hand on to rap on the glass, hesitated, and then pushed the door softly, and it swung open. The room was in darkness; the only light source was the bright tiger stripes that escaped from between the old-fashioned wooden Venetian blinds and lay over the huge, empty mahogany desk in front of the arched double windows. The only sound was the familiar laboring of the air conditioner. At first Mike could see nothing in the old-smelling gloom, but then she saw that Sam Canaday was sitting at the desk with his head in his hands. His hair was bright in the dark room. On his face, through the lac
ed, scarred fingers, she could see the gleam of wetness, but she did not know if it was tears or perspiration. The room, despite the air conditioner, was powerfully and thickly hot.

  Mike stood in the doorway for what seemed a long moment, and then walked across the room and around his chair and put her arms around him from behind. He did not move, and then he covered her hands with one of his. She could feel the ridges of the scars against her fingers. She rested her chin briefly on the top of his head. His hair smelled of the sun’s lingering dry heat.

  “I’m sorry,” Mike said presently.

  “I’m sorry, too,” Sam Canaday said.

  He came by that evening, after her father finally woke from his long sleep, feeling better, though obviously weakened by the pain and the drug. Sam pushed him in his chair out onto the porch and around to the wisteria bower and made them all a whiskey and water, and Mike stretched herself bonelessly on the canvas glider where she and Bay Sewell had first made love, all those weeks ago. It seemed, dimly, like years.

  Leaning forward with his burnt hands on his knees, Sam told the old man that they had lost their fight. It was not a long account, and he told it clearly and sparely.

  “Well,” John Winship said. “What do you know? It was a good fight, though, Sam. Wasn’t it a good fight, Mike?”

  “The best, Daddy,” Mike said. There was a huge, swollen lump in her throat. Her chest ached.

  “It doesn’t have to be over quite yet, Colonel,” Sam said. “I can always appeal …”

  John Winship waved his transparent hand. “No. Doesn’t matter. The fight mattered, and I’m not ashamed of that, not one bit. No, sir. Let it go. One thing, though … you aren’t going to stop coming by here in the evening, are you? Got so I’m used to you. Used to her, too.” He jerked his chin at Mike, but did not look at her.

  “I’ll come as long as you’ll have me,” Sam Canaday said.

  “Mike’ll be leaving us pretty soon, I guess,” her father said, still not quite looking at her. “Go on back up north and write some more bleeding heart stuff …”

  “I don’t have any firm plans yet, Daddy,” Mike said, surprising herself. She was grateful that the news about the homeplace did not seem to have devastated him as she had feared. It was a moment she had dreaded. She heard herself going on:

  “I thought I might get serious about … you know, this book thing. I guess I could do that here as well as anywhere.”

  What am I doing? she thought.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The book. Well, now. That would be something. I’d kind of like to see ‘Winship’ on a book. A book’ll last longer than any of us. You gon’ put me in that book?”

  Sam shot Mike a look. She gave it back to him.

  “Why not?” she said, turning to her father. “Shakespeare had Iago. Peck had a bad boy.”

  John Winship smiled, but he hid it behind his hand.

  “Well, how long before they tear the son of a bitch down, Sam?” he said.

  “Not any time soon, I don’t think,” Sam said. “They’ll let me know, but I suspect it’ll be a right long time yet.”

  “Long enough?”

  “I’d say so, Colonel.”

  “Well, good,” John Winship said.

  28

  AFTER THAT, NOTHING WAS CHANGED, AND EVERYTHING. ALL through August it seemed as though no conclusion had been reached on the homeplace, no struggle lost, no hearts broken, no great rent in the tapestry of days that Mike and John Winship and Sam Canaday had constructed. By tacit agreement, no one spoke of the declaration of taking and the ponderous legal machinery that must be grinding along its appointed path in the Fulton County Courthouse, twenty miles to the north. Mike had asked her father if he wanted to go on with the letters that were their morning routine; he had said he did not.

  “Not for now, Micah. Maybe after a while. Think I’ll take a little vacation and let you get on with that book thing. Don’t want to be wearing the famous author out beating a dead horse.”

  “It’s no trouble,” she said. “And it wouldn’t hurt to let everybody know what happened about the house. Maybe we can’t change anything, but we might be able to help somebody else stop it happening to them. At least show the DOT up for what they are. I hate to see you giving up.”

  “Not giving up,” he said. “Just taking a breather. I’ll show the sons of bitches up when the time comes. Don’t nag at me, Micah. Pour me some of that whiskey and get on out of here and let me watch my goddamn game shows. I know you hate ‘em.”

  She poured out the whiskey and put the glass and the bottle on the table next to his wheelchair. He drank steadily all day and into the evenings now, and no one made a move to prevent it. Even DeeDee had stopped her railing after Dr. Gaddis had told her to let her father have his liquor in peace.

  “It stops the pain better than anything we’ve found so far, Daisy,” he had said when DeeDee called him in a blind rage after she had found Mike giving John Winship whiskey in the middle of the morning. “And that’s keeping him alive. It’s not the cancer that’s going to kill him; his heart is going to go before that. It’s pretty weak. Anything … bad pain, any kind of shock … could do it. Keep him calm and let him drink.” And so DeeDee did, reluctantly. And for the moment, John Winship seemed better than he had all summer.

  Priss was as good as her word. The day after Sam Canaday called with the news about the declaration of taking, she appeared in the kitchen of the Pomeroy Street house bearing a lemon cheese cake going plushy in the heat, and pulled a kitchen chair up to the table at which John Winship sat, and sat down herself heavily.

  “Well, Scamp, you look like you’ve been whupped through hell with a buzzard gut,” she said, and he stared at her, loose-wattled like an old turkey, and then laughed aloud. It was by far the most robust sound Mike had heard him make in all the weeks she had been home. He laughed until the pallid tears ran on his shocking-white skull’s face, and when he finally stopped, there was color in his cheeks. Priss grinned at him evilly. Her green eyes swam with unshed tears.

  “Some kind of talk for a schoolteacher,” John Winship said. “Always did have the meanest mouth in Fulton County on you. Look at you, old woman. You look like the hind axle of bad management yourself.” His own eyes shone wetly and he blinked several times, turtlelike. He reached out slowly and covered Priss’s hand with his splotched mummy’s claw.

  Sam Canaday, coming into the kitchen hours later in the hot twilight, found them still laughing together and talking as if twenty-odd years of bitter silence had never lain between them. John Winship was down near the bottom of the whiskey bottle and Priss and Mike had eaten more than half of the cake, and the kitchen of the Pomeroy Street house was, at that moment, a better place to be than it had ever been before Mike had gone away.

  “About damn time, Colonel,” Sam said matter-of-factly, and dropped a kiss on Priss’s red head. He said nothing else about the reunion, but poured himself a drink and cut a slice of cake and settled down at the table with them.

  “Mike,” he said, nodding affably at her.

  “Sam,” she said.

  She knew that he would say no more. The old distance and formality was back between them, without the undercurrent of faintly admiring mockery that had been there at the first, and she knew that he would not stay long. Bay Sewell had said that he would drop by that evening, to try and cheer her father up, and Mike knew without knowing how she did that Sam Canaday would not be in this house again while there was a chance that he would meet Bayard Sewell here. Priss and John Winship looked keenly at the two of them and then at each other, but said nothing, and soon the rough, foolish talk spun on again like a river eddying around a rock. Sam did indeed leave before Bay arrived, but for a time the sunset kitchen was easy and comfortable and full of laughter and Mike thought that forever after, when she heard the word “home,” this was what she would think of.

  After that, for a bright and seemingly endless span of days, Priss Comfort came every afternoon
to the house, and Sam came in the evenings, and between the two of them, they seemed almost physically to hold John Winship’s illness at bay. He sipped and nodded through the mornings in the kitchen, while Lavinia Lester pottered tidily about and Mike dozed and daydreamed and read in her room upstairs, but when the screened door banged in the afternoons and Priss came into the room, his palsied head came up and the color flooded back into his dead face, and life and vigor thrummed in the house like the beating of a great heart. The well-being lasted until Sam came and went, and then her father was often ready to be slipped into his bed by Mike and Priss like a drying feather, and was usually asleep before they turned off his lights. In those long, timeless days, he took very few pain pills and no sleeping tablets. Defeat and the ruin of old dreams seemed never to have happened. Nothing much at all seemed to have happened.

  Nevertheless, things were different. Because Priss was there in the afternoons now, Mike could not meet Bayard Sewell in the upstairs bedroom, and both of them grew edged and sharpened and famished for each other. He came by once or twice to see her father after Sam and Priss had left, but John Winship was drifting far out on his whiskey sea and could not or did not respond to him, and Bay could not stay until the old man fell asleep so that he could take Mike up the dark stairs and slake himself at her body. Sally and the old nurse waited at home; Sally eddied now in a poisoned sea of her own. There were frantic, starved kisses in the darkening foyer, and frenzied hands on each other’s body, and gasps and hot, wild words torn out of laboring chests, but there was for them no surcease and no release. Once, when John Winship slept through a morning of darkness and thunder and Lavinia Lester was at the dentist, he came hurriedly into the house and up the stairs and they took each other standing up in the upstairs hall, braced against the wall, silently and savagely and so quickly that they did not even remove their clothes, their ears straining even through their sobbing breath for any sound from the old man below. It was wrenching and emptying and awful, and he was gone in less than ten minutes, and they did not attempt it again. He became grim-faced and so tense that even a small noise would make him start, and Mike was consumed with a prickling restlessness that was more than sexual, and prowled the house through the empty hours. A relentless and ungovernable motor seemed to have started up within her, throbbing sturdily and steadily through the heat-jellied nights and days, and it neither roused her to any action nor left her any peace. It was not a return of the early summer’s terror, but more a kind of pulsing waiting, a sense of slow and inexorable gathering. Something was growing, something was deepening, something was coming.