Charlie wouldn’t let Mr. Potter cut the meat up for him, though. He always drove it back to the slaughterhouse and did the work himself. He always took his knives on Wednesdays.
On Wednesday, November 3, 1948, Charlie and Sam headed out to the slaughterhouse, the way they did every week. Sam still recited the names of all the residents of every house, and named every dog in every yard. When they got to the Glass house, there she was again, and Charlie didn’t just slow down, he stopped the truck in the road, outside of the closed gate, just staring up at the woman standing on the porch, smoking a cigarette and leaning against a post. She was dressed this time in one of her fancy movie star outfits, and wearing scarlet lipstick, red even from the road. She wasn’t smiling, or even looking their way; just standing, waiting to be seen, waiting for something, maybe even she didn’t know what.
After a full two minutes of this, they drove on. Charlie cut up the meat while Sam and Jackie Robinson watched from just outside the door, silhouetted in the bright fall air, behind them the trees the color of honey and amber and copper, even the mountains, so blue in summer, now burnt orange.
Then they loaded up. Charlie’s clothes were covered in blood, but he had scrubbed his hands clean as he always did, until they were smooth and clean as a woman’s.
On the way back home, when they got to the Glass house, the gate was open. She was still there, or she was there again, in a soft rose-colored dress, shining in the golden late-afternoon light. Charlie stopped the truck.
“Why are we stopping?”
“Just hush, Sam. Just be still for a minute.”
He let the truck idle for five minutes, just staring, until finally she turned her eyes to his and held his gaze. Then he drove through the open gate, stopped and got out to close it behind him again. Then he drove up the driveway and around to the back of the house. Sylvan came out of the kitchen door and just stood looking at him, saying nothing, not waving or greeting him in any way, as though both he and she belonged where they were, in that moment, the evening coming on, the fall crisping the air to a breakable brittleness that cried out for warmth and comfort.
He turned to the boy. “Wait here, Sam, Okay? Don’t get out of the truck. Just talk to Jackie and wait. I’m going to go in that house and talk to Mrs. Glass for a while. I won’t be long.” He pulled a pack of wintergreen Life Savers out of his pocket and gave it to Sam, knowing his parents didn’t allow it.
“If you bite down real hard, it’ll make a spark in your mouth. Don’t crack your teeth. Your mother will kill me.”
He got out of the truck and walked to the door, speaking out her name softly, over and over, Sylvan, Sylvan, up to the house where she stood waiting, never moving a muscle. They talked for a few minutes, no more than two or three. Charlie put his hand up to her face once, softly, the way Sam’s mother would lay her hand on his cheeks some nights when he was saying his prayers. Sam could see their lips moving, although he couldn’t hear what they said, the windows were rolled up against the chill.
Then they went into the house. There were no lights on, and Sam could see them only vaguely in the slanting light. They had hardly spoken, but something had been agreed to, had been decided.
The light had gone from gold to silver by the time Charlie came out and got back into the truck. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at the boy beside him. He drove down the drive, opened and then shut the gate, bouncing over the cattle guard, and then he drove slowly back toward Brownsburg.
He stopped the truck at the edge of town, and sat and stared at the road for a couple of minutes, looking at the lights of the known houses, the lives of people, dinners getting started, Brownsburg just coming into night. He turned to Sam.
“Make any sparks?”
“I couldn’t see any.”
“Give me one.” He placed the Life Saver carefully between his teeth. “See?”
He bit down suddenly, and a small flash of light went off against his cheek. “Now you.”
Sam put the last Life Saver in his teeth, exactly as Charlie had done, and felt, even if he couldn’t see, the quick spark as he bit down, and Charlie smiled. “See? A trick.” Then he just stared at the road for a while until he spoke again, and this time it was in a different voice, more serious, talking to Sam for the first time like a distant grownup.
“Sam. Pay attention now, son. We’re friends, right?”
“Sure, Beebo.”
“You know what a promise is?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“A promise is a secret that you keep, that you don’t tell anybody, forever and ever. You understand that?”
“Ever and ever.”
“Not even your mother and father. Understand?”
“I think about things sometimes and I don’t tell them.”
“Then don’t tell them this. Don’t ever tell anybody we ever stopped at that house today. Don’t ever say that you saw me talking to Mrs. Glass. It’s important, Sam. Promise me.”
“Course, Beebo. Promise forever and ever.”
“If you ever tell anybody, listen to me, if you ever tell, something really bad is going to happen to me, and maybe to Mrs. Glass.”
“Will you go to jail?”
“Maybe. Maybe worse. Just promise.”
“I promise.”
Charlie started the truck, and they drove back to the shop in silence, while Sam sat and tried to forget the thing he’d promised he’d never tell. By the time he got back into his father’s lap, he almost had.
He never did tell, never said a word until it was too late to matter. But in the hour that he sat in the truck, talking to Jackie Robinson, something had happened, something he didn’t have a place for in his brain yet, and, in the moments before he went to sleep, he thought about it, and he knew that he would remember everything, in every detail, the cold afternoon, the sparks from the Life Saver in Charlie’s mouth, the word wintergreen, the way she laughed as Charlie walked up the yard, calling her name softly, like he was calling Jackie off a possum, gently but with a kind of haste, the far-off sound of the screen door closing behind them on its spring as they went into the darkness of the house. And it made him feel both curious and lonely. Something had happened and he had been both a part of it and shut out of it completely, and it disturbed him and roiled his sleep. And he could not ask or tell. That much he knew.
Yes. Childhood is the most dangerous place of all. If we had to live there forever, we wouldn’t live very long.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THIS IS HERE, he thinks. This is the only thing. This. This violence in the mind, this gentleness in his strong hands, moving slowly over her body, the kindness in her skin, the gratitude in his heart. That she would let him touch her, would open herself for him. Only this, the tremor in his skin, like wind across a pond, silver-scaled, a shimmering of nerve, a reddening of flesh, a slickness everywhere spreading from his shoulders, gathering in the small of his back, where her hands lie, still as a child’s.
Sixty years ago this bed, this place, this hour with the sun going down, cresting to redness and fading to lavender and then to blue, but here and now, never changing, never forgotten, never to be recreated. Always a making of something wholly new, always a loss of something valued, built up, kept to be given, a giving beyond money or work, a taking beyond greed or theft.
This chenille bedspread, these pillows beneath her head, encased in flowered cotton, her blonde hair fanning out like golden angels’ wings in a white garden, the down on her earlobes, her crimson lipstick smearing his mouth, his shoulder, his chest. Only this, and nothing else.
This secret coupling. These secret hearts and bodies, the child waiting in the truck, with the brindled beagle named Jackie Robinson. That would be the photograph of this moment in time, sixty years ago, if one had been taken, if one existed.
Nothing else. Only this stopping of hearts, and its opposite, that, too, the speed of the having, so waited for, so unexpected when it comes, then this rushing, rush
ing everywhere. He cannot have enough of her, cannot take enough of her skin at one kiss. His tongue tastes her perfume and her own skin beneath, washed clean, over and over, by his kiss, as she twists and churns beneath him like water, her breath sweet in his ear, choking him with desire, with the urgency of telling her everything, everything about his life and his heart and his memory, telling her not with words but with his body, with every inch of his skin, offered up to her with such hopefulness, with what he hopes is kindness but knows to be a kind of selfishness. Because she is, at this minute, in the chill, the only one, the only woman who ever lived, the only one he has ever touched, has ever told with his body all the secrets that were alive in his heart every day, the things he remembers, the things he has long since forgotten.
But this is here, this is now. This is the only thing, and she is not the first but she is the only, the only one, and every taste of her flesh is something new in his mouth, and every breath from her mouth a kindness he never expected and does not deserve. Right here, in this bed, on this chenille, in this sunset, these flowered pillows and her blonde, blonde body, the wilderness of his general desire becomes specific, the path becoming clear until it leads only to her, to here, to the two of them, wholly wanted and wholly belonging only here and only only now.
He is beautiful, now, like an animal in the wild. She is beautiful and wholly known and wholly foreign, and her voice is a new voice, and her breath is a strong wind that could blow him over, and her mouth is a new thing, her lipstick gone. How her eyes look into his eyes, dark as deep pools, the blue gone black, the depth unknowable, to ask, is this all right? Is this what you want?
Because her desire, her wanting, has waited, too. Because she is what she has always been, since she was a little child in a shack out in that valley, she is what she has been since before she was a woman. She is ready. For this, for him, for her movie star to come riding in the sunset, to her, to here, the smell of his sweat as sweet as rainwater, his hands smelling of blood, the sheen of his skin lit by the red of the sun and by his own blood rushing just under the surface, her Montgomery Clift, her Gable.
Now his arms are around her, his hands on her, his legs pinning her legs and she is Hayworth, she is Grable, the face and body a million boys took to war and dreamed about. She knows who she is, finally, because he knew from the first glance who she was and what he wanted her to be, and so she becomes that thing, here, his hands, his tongue, creating her out of whole cloth, the way Claudie’s deft hands made a dress from the flat of the fabric, she becomes something flared and ruffled and flounced and shimmering and feathered and winged, something silken that he can cool his skin against, that trails out behind her like the train of a bridal gown she has never worn, something made only for him and only for now.
All she can say is now, and now again and again, until he comes back from where he was and hears her, and finally allows himself to take what she offers, to take it shyly, to take it with a force that causes no pain, to take it with the kindness and the gratitude he feels in his heart that any woman so beautiful would let him come near her. Each has become for the other, Charlie to Sylvan and Sylvan to Charlie, both the only thing there is and nothing at all. They are joined, they are alone, each needing the other to create that solitude they have lived to find, each needing the war of the other’s body to create that wholeness that seems the only place it is possible to live, for now, and now, and for the moment after that.
Every moment would last forever. Every moment would end in a split second. In the end, they wake with a flash to find that they are still who they had always been, that even this now comes to an end, and even this here has a boundary they cross at breakneck speed, cross with regret, cross with gratitude because the body knows even after the mind forgets that there are some countries in which you cannot live forever, some countries that would kill you if you stayed too long.
But in the dying, both know for the first time that each will be a citizen in the other’s country until the last breath is drawn. The women he had known before her lived in another country, far off. The feeling of being at home in them had been, every time, a lie and a heartbreak, even though he remembered every face, every detail of every body. But this, she, her, here, now, this is the truth he had imagined as a boy, something that, once known, can never be lost.
And for her, for Sylvan, he is Hollywood.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IN BROWNSBURG, EVERYBODY went to church, everybody except a few old men and one woman, who were still too drunk on Sunday morning to go much of anywhere. So Alma said Charlie had to go, too. He complained, politely, that Sunday was his day off, that he didn’t want to leave Jackie Robinson alone, but in her gentle way Alma won out, saying it was the thing to do, it was expected. And so he agreed, and he went.
There were five churches in town—an Episcopalian church, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist for the white people, and a Colored Methodist Episcopal Church for the black citizens. The CME wasn’t actually a church, or at least it didn’t look like one. They met—less than two dozen people in all, including babies and a traveling preacher, the Reverend Mr. Shadwell, who only came every other week—in a storefront at the far end of Main Street, right close to where they all lived. They didn’t even have to walk into the main part of town to get to it.
Alma and Will were Presbyterians and, while Charlie hadn’t been raised one, he figured he might as well go along and worship with the people he knew best. The first Sunday in November, four days after he had first stopped his truck in front of the Glass house, he woke up at dawn, as he always did, and ironed a clean white shirt while he drank his first strong cup of coffee. He didn’t know how he felt about going to church; it had been so long he could hardly remember it.
He didn’t have a suit or a tie, so he borrowed a tie from Will, but he worried. Alma said it didn’t matter, nobody would notice.
But it did matter, at least to Charlie. He was the only man in church who wasn’t wearing a suit, even though you could tell nobody else wore one, either, except on Sunday mornings, or to a wedding or a funeral. Most of the suits were brown and old, some shiny; a lot were too small, as though they had been bought before the men gained that last twenty pounds or so. But the women looked nice. Plain, clean dresses, a lot of them made by Claudie Wiley, and every woman wore a hat; Alma even wore short white gloves, which she pulled onto her small hands and buttoned at the wrist as they walked down to the church after Charlie had joined them, waiting on their porch. Even Sam had a suit, and it was brown, like everybody else’s.
Of course she was there. When Charlie and the Haisletts walked into the church and took their seats with the assurance of people who sat in the same pew every week, Boaty and Sylvan Glass were already seated three rows in front of them.
Sylvan was the only woman in black, a black wool suit, from what Charlie could see of her, which was only from the shoulder blades up, her hair swept up tightly under a fitted black hat with a feather on it. She never turned, never greeted another parishioner, and Charlie spent the few minutes before the processional just staring at the back of her head. She wore black jet earrings, the only woman in church who was wearing any jewelry.
George McLaughlin started up the pedal organ, and a boy with a wooden cross led a small, straggly choir up the aisle, followed by Reverend Morgan, all of them staring at their hymnals so intensely they walked like blind people. They sang “Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of the Morning,” and Charlie was surprised that he knew it, knew the melody, and he sang along, although so softly that even Sam could hardly hear him.
Fair is the sunshine, fairer still the moonlight,
and all the twinkling starry host:
Jesus shines brighter, Jesus shines purer
than all the angels heaven can boast.
Charlie had thought it wouldn’t be so bad, going to church, and it wasn’t. Everybody looked so clean and sweet, the men bored, the women attentive, the children squirming but quiet. He stared at the b
ack of Sylvan’s head, through the singing, through the morning prayers, praying to the Lord only that she would turn around, look at him, even turn to look at one of the Victorian stained glass windows of the saints, so he could see just the side of her face. But she never moved. He counted the days until Wednesday, the hours, the minutes.
Reverend Morgan was tall and thin, at least seventy-five, and he’d been the preacher there for thirty years, so everybody had heard him say the same prayers every Sunday for hundreds of Sundays, and it gave them comfort, the sameness of it all, every word unchanging, every movement preordained, the kneeling, the standing, the full-sleeved whiteness of the starched cotta against the black of his robe.
So, not so bad. Until the sermon, at least. Before they sat for the sermon, they sang “Lord Jesus Think on Me,” and Charlie started to feel uneasy. It reminded him right away of why he didn’t go to church any more.
Lord Jesus think on me
And purge away my sin;
From earth-borne passions set me free
And make me pure within.
Charlie didn’t feel impure. And he didn’t want to hear about sin. The sight of Sylvan’s golden hair was the only brightness in the room.
Nobody seemed to mind. They sang just as heartily as they sang the first hymn, about redeeming themselves from the sin that corrupted their minds and lives, every day, in every action. And, as they sang, they dug into their purses and wallets for coins or bills to put into the passing baskets. Charlie put in a dollar.
Lord Jesus think on me
Nor let me go astray;
Through darkness and perplexity
Point thou the heavenly way.
They sang as if they believed in going astray more than they believed in the brightness of the morning. They sang as if their lives depended on it, until the verses of the hymn led them finally through the maze of sin and into the arms of redemption and heaven.