That wan afternoon forward, unsurprisingly, the simple hopes of the Loomises were leveled, every joy vaporized. For them, life was voided of even its most minimal riches, as fast and as completely as the mother lodes in the mines that predated them. The moderately virtuous circle of their outlook turned viciously downward, precipitously bottoming out at a dead low flat line of the deepest bitterness. In time, as the amputation of life numbed them, they reverted to vacuous asceticism, withdrew into the empty patriotism of the Silent Majority. They channeled their accreting despair into the Chronicle, disseminating its recurring pall of increasingly pathological indifference. Day by pointless day, in step with their depot and its history of erosion, as another LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT sticker was pasted on their Rambler, as garish posters of American flags papered the shop walls, they withdrew into a self-enveloping shell of grief gone sour.
But Evan endured the hard eyes. With his growing connections throughout the area, he was able to foster a small but steady trickle of advertising, trade the Loomises had long neglected. With patient, persistent visits, in several days’ time he little by little won Jack’s grudging alliance. The information Evan let drop about the progress of the dam began to revivify the spiritless articles of the Chronicle. He had found an opening the Loomises had forgotten to seal. The old waiting room of the depot, filled with its out of date jerry-rigged presses, began to crank with the sound of new business.
On the first of June, the morning of Graduation Week, Evan arrived at Hell Gate early to pass along more news about recent developments. Jack raised his head from behind an offset type machine where he was spooning dollops of congealed black into the inkwells. Amid the clank of cams and joggers, his greeting was lost, but Evan saw levity in Jack’s hands as he beckoned over his gloom-infused wife. Ruth stepped out from the back, her sullen face enhanced by black-smudged cheeks, and exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke most foul into air already palpable with solvents. No matter how encouraging Evan’s news, Ruth never had happy hands or a good word.
But again, Evan disregarded the carapace of Ruth’s outer disposition; as ever, he knew eventually he would find some kind of inner angels lurking within her. He returned a smile that hadn’t been given as Ruth grudgingly dragged over a large skid of paper stock for him to sit. . .and left.
Joining Jack, Evan pulled a newly minted supplement from under the spurts of drying powder. He carefully reviewed the information he had supplied the day before.
“More news?”
Jack sat on the skid and opened his daybook expectantly.
Evan nodded, considering what best to say and how best to say it, when surprisingly, Ruth returned. Shedding her grimy printer’s apron, she offered him cinnamon donuts and coffee. The coffee with an oily based film on it, the donut a sugar hardened stone a hungry man could be guaranteed to flint a tooth on … but Evan welcomed the unexpected gesture nonetheless. And noticed something like a grain of light in Ruth’s otherwise dead eyes.
“You tell him?” she said to her husband.
The couple exchanged what might have been a smile.
“Yep. Fact is, Mr. Gallantine, we’re planning to go to twice’t a month now. Um hmm.”
Evan was truly floored. “Well, congratulations. That’s great to hear! Bigger news than mine, that’s for sure.”
Ruth raised her palm. “An there’s one thing more.”
“We’re lookin to build a new house,” Jack cut in.
Evan nodded, inwardly rejoicing, that even pillars of salt like Ruth Loomis were not immune to the renewal properties of hope. He dunked his impervious torus of a pastry into his inky coffee and ‘ate’ it with great ceremony, a pantomime of delighted chewing, as though the most delicate of French eclairs, while discretely ejecting the offending morsel from his mouth into his palm to scatter on the greasy floor. But this was not his being deceptive. This was the very reason Evan loved this work. There was as yet not a pinch of earth broken, not a yard of concrete poured, no laborer hired, no blueprints except in draft, and yet the merest possibility of renewed growth had seeped into even the hardest veined Meagherite and taken root.
And so in such high spirits, as he returned to town, he perceived a new vitality whistling the air, a lightness in peoples’ step pervading the street. In the bar, the cafe, outside the bank, passing the statue of Major Thomas F. Meagher. In the people’s visiting, drinking, playing pool, eating. In Arnie Beiber leaving Goosey’s Drug with his two illegitimate sons, each laden with comics and cokes. In the ornery widow Nadine Much gabbing with the staid and female-averse Sheriff McComb. In one couple then another walking hand in hand and arm in arm. Evan imagined inside the homes the hearths rekindled, the husbands’ clean-shaved, the wives’ earrings sparkling.
And in the Grand.
Going inside, Evan remembered it was the first day of Graduation Week. The establishment had become, by some unvoiced decree, a hub of spectators brimming with anticipation for the annual parade. Person after person greeted him with nods and monosyllabic murmurs, howyadoins and nicetoseeyas. A white-haired couple danced to invisible music. Steaks sizzled in the kitchen. Balls clacked on the pool table.
Joe Meeks nowhere to be seen.
AVOIDING THE HUBBUB, Marly kept to her room, as had been her wont more often, of late. With Squash working full time now, she had less cooking and waitressing, cleaning and bartending, to tie up her time. And with more idle time she had begun to spend more time idling through décor and design magazines, pouring over architecture and remodeling digests, pondering and revising her many expansive plans for renovation. Along with and in darker counterpoint to that, she found in her new down time old ways to worry, more and more finding folly in an idea as soon as it came to her, uncovering two reasons why not for every reason why, each day lending credence to a more colossal fear coalescing in her imaginations: That, one way or another, the tidal wave of change coming at her from all around would surge and swell and in some as yet unknown way sweep everything away from her, unless—if she could only think how!—she could find a way to hold on.
It was all the worse for feeling left alone with these worries. Marly was also becoming increasingly apprehensive about her daughter, about her clothes soaking in softeners in the sink, her new shirts hung and drying on window sills, her work boots resoled and re-heeled. Marly could not see these welcome signs of Anne’s budding self-image without feeling the anxiety of losing her own. A new strand of gray, a slow sag in her breasts, an intermittent presence of lines when—more like if—she smiled. At breakfast, with orders of lamb’s liver frying on the stove, the meat sweating, the blood sizzling, inadvertently burning her fingers seeing Anne about to leave for her job, Marly volubly sighing, “Whoo boy, I don’t see how I’ll keep up much longer,” Anne left without a word. Late evening, rubbing the blistered backs of her hands, leaving the bar crowd’s laughing and drinking and North Dakota jokes to trail Anne half way up the stairs to her room, Marly advising, “Honey, just make sure not to put this surveyin job ahead of your future,” Anne wordlessly nodding and quickly shutting her door. At night, Anne on the lobby davenport buried in her books—surveying books!—Marly twisting knots into her red hair, speculating almost woefully, “Honey, you know I just can’t help look around and feel so happy that you have so much I never had,” Anne slapping shut her books and straight up to her bedroom.
During the night, Anne woke. Something in the dark. Sitting on the edge of the bed.
There was a long silence until Marly spoke.
“I don’t know, Annie, I really don’t understand. When there’s so much for you here.”
“Like what, mom? Waitressin and changin sheets?”
“No, no no. We’ll have help for that.” Marly staring into the dark as her vision began to play on its screen. “You know, there’s talk of a summer theater here. There’ll be actors, and actresses, and audiences.” Straightening the comforter over Anne despite the summer night’s heat. “We’ll have gourmet dinner theater, Anne. Such
fancy candlelight meals, oh, it’ll be. . .it’ll be so . . .”
“Yeah Mom; I get it. It’ll be nice, for you, to finally have what you want.”
Hearing Anne’s quiet brush off, Marly’s chest fell. It’s come to this? Anne not even bothering to pitch a fit?
“Honey, I don’t get it. Why don’t you want to be happy?”
“Mom, you think I don’t? You think I don’t want that more than anything?” She turned over, murmured into her pillow. “Maybe it’s more the other way around, an you’re the one that don’t want to be happy.”
As she rose to leave, Marly noticed new curtains hung on Anne’s windows. She could not tell what pattern, or see what color.
AND INCREASINGLY AS well, Marly was angry, angry that she was angry at Joe. Angry that she could not stop finding reasons, every day, that all the good fortune coming her way would be lost and would be all because of Joe. Would be all his doing. Again! And after all these years! Fool me once, she chanted in her mind as it fell into restless sleep.
She rarely saw him now. He no longer stopped in the Mint at night. He didn’t come when she left word about dinner specials she knew he’d like. What she did see of him was when, late in the day, Anne dropped him out front on her return home. She noted they sat in the cab before he got out; she timed how long the pickup idled before Anne pulled it around back. She noticed Joe’s slow walk and how he turned to look back. She detected how Joe was in Anne’s thoughts when she stopped by to look in on her, knowing how a mother knows that her child, despite the feint of not answering, was not asleep.
Marly went to bed, eventually to sleep, in fits, arm clutching her pillow. She felt alone when she had never felt alone in all the years before. So many years, so comfortably, and now, so much inexplicable dread. What could cause such anguish when before there was none? What but Joe Meeks?
One day, leaving Squash all in charge, Marly wandered into Joe’s room. His mattress was crooked, his sheets in tangles, and she felt a bit better knowing his night was as fitful as her own. She sat on sheets still warm with his heat, spread her hands on the contour of his sleep. Her breasts ached like they hadn’t since Anne was born, reminding her of the insatiable longing she felt then, nursing this infant, this newborn, this living creature suckling her breast, utterly trusting and dependent, as Marly had never been allowed to be.
Ah Christ what’s happening to me, she moaned, and laughed, and rose to go. She noticed, on the floor, a photograph. She picked it up and stared at it, into it, beyond it, its image of a windy-haired laughing girl in the arms of a laughing sandy-haired boy, slow to reconstitute her memory. She felt it though, her detachment, like when you touch fire, the feeling delayed. For an instant she felt such joy, remembering.
Then joy became anger, realizing the photograph was only here because Anne brought it here. Dropped it here as she sat with it here, Marly held her breath as it dawned on her, what was happening, to her daughter. With, of all people, Joe Meeks. And what a mistake it would be, such a big mistake, and worse? Her mother was the last person Anne would ever want to hear it from. The last one she’d ever believe.
The woman who knew it best.
TO TAKE FULL advantage of the impending Graduation Week celebrations, Father Sterling planned a major service for that Sunday morning. He hoped for heavy attendance, and with good reason. It had not escaped attention that, soon after his arrival, on the mere occasion of his making an insignificant inquiry about how he might best procure a source of cheap ready red wine for the Eucharist, how word of it spread like prairie fire. Now here was a man with the auspices to sanction the consumption of alcohol on Sunday. The full import of what this meant came in lightning-like epiphany: No person in Meagher would ever fail to give full unqualified trust and support to a such man. And whatever such a man were to proclaim and hold forth, they would believe to their bitter end.
Already, come that Sunday dawn, he was witness to even more than his most optimistic expectations: throngs of young and old and men and women filing into the black granite church. By ten o’clock, there was not an empty pew in the house.
In preparation for this particular special occasion, Father Sterling had enlisted Wade as an acolyte. And, initially, Wade was very enthused. They rehearsed the ceremony day after day in the week before the service. During that time as they enrobed in the vestry, Father Sterling took advantage of the young ears at his side, and mused at great length upon his past. He recounted, glowingly so for Wade, the halcyon years in the seminary, where as a philosophy wunderkind he first acquired his passion for Kierkegaard. He spoke, if not miserably, then somewhat less glowingly, of the dark ages thereafter, when life devolved into an endless ministry of frustration. It was more than a pastor, none more than he, could bear, that otherwise ardent and devoted Christians would refuse to open their souls’ minds (as he had opened his own) to the apotheosis of philosophical achievement that Kierkegaard had attained, that no matter how much his own ardor consumed him, his laity asked meekly, again and again, for those parochial words of God they were used to. As parish after tiny parish proclaimed itself at wit’s end, seeking simply enlightenment and salvation, not deeper understanding, Father Sterling earned a reputation such that no parish, no matter how small, would accept him. Finally he had no other choice: he accepted the final offer from the bishop and volunteered for Meagher, where for years the diocese had been unable to find a clergyman willing to establish a congregation where none had ever before been able to find purchase.
Wade, completely enthralled with Father Sterling leading up to that service, was miserable when it came to pass. Like in a bizarre dream, Father Sterling transubstantiated from a soft-spoken philosophical oddball into a furnace fusing manic apprehension into a fiery cold sweat. His droning of the liturgy reduced into a stew of incantations, the frenetic orator spewing forth more and more spittle as again and again, he forgot his place, and covering himself in a swoon of redoubled jabber, intoned a vehement mix of Saint James English and bastardized Latin salted with pidgin Greek. He rushed into the ritual blessing of the wine, his hands quavering so violently Wade couldn’t help but slosh the wine as he valiantly tried to pour from the silver urn into the jittery chalice. Less than half full, Father Sterling maniacally clutched the sacred cup and gulped it down in one vast open-throated swallow, while Wade tried to remember which sacred cloth to drape over his left arm and which over the right. It was all too much, and that was even before the reeling minister pivoted abruptly, to raise the holy cup to the high cross, when his entire holy raiment swept around, knocking both the tray of wafers and the wine from each of Wade’s hands before they could transform into the blessed Body and Blood. Father Sterling, aghast, peppered Wade with a farrago of profanities, beseeching him to run quick to the sacristy for more, forgetting that he himself, with Sheriff McComb, had finished the entire supply the night before.
So informed, Father Sterling turned to the congregation, facing what was by now a scudding sea of rough faces and thirsty throats. He majestically raised his pastoral arms, a gesture of calm to mask his predicament, and only Wade could observe his small frantic eyes roll in circles, only Wade could hear the hissing plaint to God beseeching Him to magically turn something, anything, into more wine.
Wade, desperate to end the frenzy, whispered a sudden proposal to use gin instead—he had seen an ample supply in the cabinet—but Father Sterling decried the suggestion. It would be a travesty of celestial scale, and besides, he could hardly pass off juniper based swill as the blood of the Lord. So Wade expanded his solution, and dashed without approval over to the Mint, where he obtained a jar of sheep’s blood which he knew Squash was using to experiment with sauces. A quick addition of a few drops to the gin made it swirl into an oily liquid, that was not unlike red wine. Father Sterling, taking hope, seized it and drank heartily. His eyes slammed shut then sprang open; his neck swelled and chest heaved. He coughed, gagged, then, miraculously, drank another. Dabbing his lips with Wade’s frock, he n
odded and quickly took point in the sanctuary, where he snapped into a posture of utter divinity, turning to the congregation and beckoning them forward. While Wade mixed, the aisles of supplicants came a second, a third, a fourth time to his altar.
Soon Father Sterling was trembling in joy. After years of failures, this was clearly far and away his most successful service ever. As the multitudes sat gabbing and chatting in the nave, Father Sterling extolled upon ethics and angst and existentialist faith and the subjective relationship between the individual and the God-man Jesus in an articulately abstruse mashup of a sermon.
At noon, after everyone had stumbled out into the sunlight, after Father Sterling had passed out in the vestry, swaddled in his robes, Wade shucked his gown and vowed never to acolyte again, no matter how desperate Father Sterling became.
YEARS BEFORE, WHEN automobiles began to be generally available to the young, a phenomenon not uncommon to many of the state’s towns began to occur in Meagher, and became a sinister ritual of its youth, who, on the wavery cusp of adulthood, and like the generations before them never shy about spiking their juvenile bodily vessels with a toxic brew of Lemon Hart 151 and sloe gin, began lemming-like running those 4-wheeled parental hand-me-downs headlong over rocky embankments or piling them into one of the many dangerous curves of the Upper Hellwater road. Statewide, each successive class was yielding a greater number of celebrational high-speed car crashes, one more gruesome than the previous; the roadside markers that tallied each fatality at the location of these wrecks grew thick with the accumulating leaves of white cut-metal crosses. Finally, to bring a halt to the deadly rising parabola of such incidents, one wizened Meagher old-timer put forward a motion to the Chamber of Commerce (which briefly existed at the time) that, to thwart the efforts of the local young to die that way—young—the town would sponsor a week-long stay-put all expenses paid drunk, with all graduating seniors taking up residence at the abandoned state hatchery on Castle Creek, where all during their bacchanalian revelry they could be corralled and contained and, most especially, kept off the roads.