In the bedroom, he paused. He reached back and pulled open the drawer in the box’s base.
Right away, he knew he’d hit on something. The contents were so tidy: flattened papers stacked in order of size, and on top of them a few pieces of jewelry, no less junky than those in the main compartment but obviously dating from an earlier time. He pushed the jewelry aside and removed the papers.
A savings booklet from Mercantile Safe Deposit and Trust, showing a balance of $123.08. The title to a Chevrolet owned by Daniel C. Bedloe. A receipt from Morehead TV Repair guaranteeing all replacement parts for thirty days. A marriage certificate for Daniel Craig Bedloe and Lucy Ann Dean. (Ian paused a moment over that one. Was there any remote possibility that Ann could be a last name?) A birth certificate for Daphne Marie Bedloe. A pamphlet of instructions for filing health insurance claims. A birth certificate for Agatha Lynn Dulsimore and then one for Thomas. A receipt for—
Agatha who?
Agatha Lynn Dulsimore, born April 4, 1959. Father’s full name: Thomas Robert Dulsimore. Mother’s maiden name: Lucy Ann Dean. And Thomas Robert Dulsimore, Junior; same parents.
Why, Dean was not Lucy’s married name but her maiden name. She must have changed back to Dean after the divorce, and changed her children’s names too—at least by implication. All this time, the Bedloes had been hunting a man who didn’t exist.
Ian sifted through the few remaining papers—a hazy, unflattering photo of Lucy and the older two children, an auto insurance policy, a recipe for banana bread—but the birth certificates were the only items that told him anything. Both listed the parents’ home address as Portia, Maryland. Both carried definite dates, and a doctor’s name, and a hospital’s name in a town called Marcy, which if Ian recollected right lay not far from Portia, just below the Pennsylvania line. He had enough to track a man down by, provided a person was halfway skilled at tracking.
He slipped the papers inside his shirt and went off to see Eli Everjohn.
“Have some mashed potato. Honeybunch,” Daphne said. She held her spoon out to the little cat, who was sitting on Daphne’s lap with her front paws folded primly beneath her. First the cat peered into Daphne’s eyes, as if checking to make sure she really meant it, and then she leaned forward and lapped daintily. When she was finished, the spoon gleamed. She sat up to wash her face. “Good girl,” Daphne said, and she dipped the spoon back in her plate and took a mouthful for herself.
“Ooh, revolting!” Agatha said. “Ian, did you see what she did?”
“What? What’d I do?” Daphne asked.
“You ate from a spoon the cat licked!”
At the other end of the table, Thomas gave an elderly cough. “Well, actually,” he said, “the cat’s the one who should worry. Mr. Pratt says human spit carries more germs than any other animal’s, because humans have these fingers they keep putting in their mouths.”
Ian laughed. The others looked at him.
“I was just, ah, thinking,” he told them.
They looked away again.
You could never call it a penance, to have to take care of these three. They were all that gave his life color, and energy, and … well, life.
What he would do was, once he got Eli’s report he would file it in a drawer someplace. Then when they grew up and started wondering about their origins he would hand it over to them; that was all. He would certainly not use the information himself in any way.
People needed to know their genetic backgrounds—what diseases ran in their families and so forth. Also this would help him apply for guardianship. Social Security. That sort of thing.
He rose and started clearing the table. It was a relief to have all that settled. He was glad he hadn’t told anyone what he was doing.
But at work the next day, he did tell someone. He told Jeannie. He was teaching her how to select the right grain of wood and she asked if he’d like to go to a movie that night at the Charles. “I can’t,” he said.
“What, are movies against your religion?”
“No, it’s my turn to car-pool for Brownies.”
“Hey,” she said. “Ian. How long you going to go on living like this, anyway?”
So he told her about Eli. He didn’t know why, exactly. It wasn’t as if finding Thomas Dulsimore would change his situation. Maybe he just hoped to prove he wasn’t as passive as she supposed. And she did seem gratifyingly interested. When he mentioned the stationery box she said, “Naw! Go on!” She asked, “What-all was in it?” and she even wanted to know about the jewelry.
“It wasn’t the kind of jewelry that would give you any clues,” he said. “I honestly didn’t pay much attention.”
“And the photo?”
“Oh, well, that was … well, the detective was glad to see it, of course, so’s he’d know more or less what she looked like, but it didn’t show a street sign or a license plate or anything like that. Just Lucy.”
“Was she pretty?”
“Sure, I guess so.”
For some reason, he didn’t want to tell her how pretty.
Lucy’s image swam into his mind—not the real-life version but the version in the snapshot: out of focus, too young, still unformed, nowhere near as finely chiseled as she had seemed later. One hip was slung out gracelessly to support Thomas’s weight, and one hand was reaching blurrily to gather Agatha closer. Against all logic (he knew he was being ridiculous), he started resenting Agatha’s disloyalty in keeping her mother’s likeness. There you are: you give up school, you sacrifice everything for these children, and what do they do? They secretly hoard their mother’s photo and cling to her and prefer her. She hadn’t even taken proper care of them, willfully dying and leaving them as she did; but evidently blood motherhood won over everything.
Jeannie said, “I’m really glad to hear you’re doing this, Ian.”
“Well, it’s only so we can get straight,” he told her. “I certainly don’t plan to hand the three of them over to strangers or anything like that.”
“What are you, crazy?” she asked. “You’ve got a life to live! You can’t drag them around with you forever.”
“But I’m responsible for them. I worry I’d be, um, sinning, so to speak, to walk away from them.”
“You want to know what I think?” Jeannie asked. She leaned forward. Her face seemed sharper now, more pointed. The hollow between her collarbones could have held a teaspoon of salt. “I think you’re sinning not to walk away,” she said.
“How do you figure that?”
“I think we’re each allowed one single life to live on this planet. We’ll never get another chance in all eternity,” she said. “And if you let it go to waste—now, that is sinning.”
“Yes,” he said, “but what if I’m honor bound to waste it? What if I have an obligation?”
He worried she would make him explain, but she was too caught up in proving her point. “Even then!” she said triumphantly. “You put your regrets behind you. You move on past them. You do not commit the sin of squandering your only life.”
“Well, it sounds good,” he said.
It did sound good. He really had no argument to offer against it.
At Prayer Meeting the following night he looked for Eli Everjohn but didn’t find him, or the strawberry blonde either. He spotted Sister Bertha’s dark red pompadour and he sat down next to her and asked, “Where’s your daughter this evening?”
“She went home.”
“Home?”
“Her and Eli both, home to Caro Mill. Eli said to give you a message, though. What was it now he said? He said not to think you had slipped his mind and he would be in touch.”
“Thanks,” Ian told her.
Then Reverend Emmett announced the opening hymn: “Work for the Night Is Coming.”
Every time Ian attended Prayer Meeting, he thought of his first visit here. He remembered how he had felt welcomed by the loving voices of the singers; he remembered the sensation of prayers flowing heavenward. Coming here h
ad saved him, he knew. Without the Church of the Second Chance he would have struggled alone forever, sunk in hopelessness.
So when Prayer Meeting seemed long-winded or inconsequential, when the petitions had to do with minor health complaints and personal disputes, he controlled his impatience. Tonight he prayed for Brother Kenneth’s colon to grow less irritable, for Sister Myra’s husband to appreciate her more fully. He listened to a recitation from Sister Nell that seemed not so much a request for prayers as an autobiography. “I learned to stop blaming myself for everything that went wrong,” one of her paragraphs went. “I had all the time been blaming myself. But really, you know, when you think about it, mostly it’s other people to blame, the godless and the self-centered, and so I said to this gal on my shift, I said, ‘Now listen here, Miss Maggie. You may think I was the one in charge of the …’ ”
Till Reverend Emmett broke in. “Ah, Sister Nell?”
“What?”
“What would you like us to pray for, exactly?”
“Pray for me to have strength,” she said, “in the face of fools and sinners.”
Ian prayed for Sister Nell to have strength.
The closing hymn was “Softly and Tenderly,” and when they sang, “Come home! Come home!” Ian felt he was the one they were calling.
“Go ye now into the world and bear witness to His teachings,” Reverend Emmett said, raising his arms. Almost before his “Amen,” people were stirring and preparing to leave. Several spoke to Ian as they passed. “Good to see you, Brother Ian.” “How’re the kids?” “Coming to paint with us Saturday?” They filed out. Ian hung behind.
Often it seemed to him that this room itself was his source of peace. Even the flicker of the fluorescent lights heartened him, and the faint chemical smell left over from when the place had been a dry cleaner’s. He found reasons to loiter, first collecting the hymn pamphlets and then stacking them just so on the counter. He paused at the edges of a conversation between Reverend Emmett and Brother Kenneth, who was offering further details about his colon. He rolled down his shirtsleeves and carefully buttoned his cuffs before, at long last, stepping out the door.
Then behind him, Reverend Emmett said, “Brother Ian? Mind if I walk partway with you?”
Ian felt his shoulders loosen. Possibly, this was what he’d been hoping for all along.
They walked north on York Road through a summer-like night, Reverend Emmett swinging his Bible. He was taller than Ian and took longer strides, although he kept trying to slow down. Occasionally he hummed a few notes beneath his breath—“Softly and Tenderly” again. Ian thought of an evening back in his Boy Scout days, when the scoutmaster (a young, athletic man, a former basketball star) had given him a ride home, filling him with a mixture of joy and self-consciousness. He knew Reverend Emmett merely acted as God’s steward, and that for someone who was the church’s founder and its sole leader he seemed remarkably unimpressed with his own importance. Still, Ian always felt tongue-tied around him. Tonight he considered discussing the weather but decided that was too mundane, and then when the silence stretched on too long he wished he had discussed the weather, but if he brought it up now it would seem strained. So he kept quiet, and it was Reverend Emmett who finally spoke.
“Some Prayer Meetings,” he said, “are like cleaning out a closet. Clearing away the dribs and drabs. Necessary, but tedious.”
And Ian said, as if making a perfectly apt response: “Is there such a thing as the Devil?”
Reverend Emmett glanced over at him.
“I mean,” Ian said, “does someone exist whose purpose is to tempt people into evil? To make them feel torn one way and another so they’re not sure which way is right anymore?”
“What is it you’re tempted to do, Brother Ian?” Reverend Emmett asked.
Ian swallowed. “I’m wasting my life,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
He must have mumbled the words. He raised his chin and said, almost shouting, “I’m wasting the only life I have! I have one single life in this universe and I’m not using it!”
“Well, of course you’re using it,” Reverend Emmett said calmly.
“I am?”
“This is your life,” Reverend Emmett said.
They faced each other at an intersection. A woman swerved around them.
“Lean into it, Ian,” Reverend Emmett said. Not “Brother Ian,” but “Ian.” It made what he said sound more direct, more oracular. He said, “View your burden as a gift. It’s the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that, and lean into it. This is the only life you’ll have.”
Then he clapped Ian on the shoulder, and turned away to cross York Road.
Ian resumed walking. For a while he pondered Reverend Emmett’s message, but he didn’t find it much help. To tell the truth, the man had disappointed him. And besides, he hadn’t answered Ian’s question. The question was: Is there such a thing as the Devil?
Ian had been referring to Jeannie, of course—Jeannie sitting forward compellingly, the hollow deepening at the base of her throat as she tempted him from his path. But the face that came to his mind at this moment was not Jeannie’s. It was Lucy’s. It was the tiny, perfect, heart-shaped face of Lucy Dean.
“Honeybunch has worms,” Agatha told Ian.
“How do you know that?”
“You really want me to say?”
“On second thought, never mind,” Ian said. “So, what? We have to take her to the vet?”
“I made an appointment: tomorrow afternoon at four.”
She and Thomas sat on either side of Ian in the porch swing, enjoying the last of a golden autumn day. Down on the front walk, Daphne was playing hopscotch with the Carter girl and the newlyweds’ five-year-old. “You did step on the line, Tracy. You did,” she said in her raucous little voice.
Ian said, “Maybe Grandpa could drive you. I could leave the car with him tomorrow and take the bus.”
“We like it better when you come,” Agatha said.
“Well, but I have work.”
“Please, Ian,” Thomas said. “Grandpa drove us when we went to get her cat shots and he yelled at her for sitting on his foot.”
“His accelerator foot,” Agatha explained.
“We like it better when you’re there, acting in charge,” Thomas told him.
Ian looked at him a moment. His mind had drifted elsewhere. “Thomas,” he said, “remember that big doll you used to carry around?”
“Oh, well, that was a long time ago,” Thomas said.
“Yes, but I was wondering. How come you named her Dulcimer?”
“I don’t even know where she is anymore. I don’t know why I named her that,” Thomas said.
He seemed embarrassed, rather than secretive. And Agatha wasn’t listening. You’d think she would suspect; she was the one who’d kept that box hidden away. But she stirred the porch swing dreamily with one foot. “Suppose we got bombed,” she said to Ian.
“Pardon?”
He saw the stationery box in his mind: the dust on the lid, the congealed sheaf of papers. She must not have glanced inside for years, he realized. She might even have forgotten it existed.
“Suppose Baltimore got atom-bombed,” she was saying. “Know what I’d do?”
“You wouldn’t do a thing,” Thomas told her. “You’d be dead.”
“No, seriously. I’ve been thinking. I’d break into a supermarket, and I’d settle our family inside. That way we’d have all the supplies we needed. Canned goods and bottled goods, enough to last us forever.”
“Well, not forever,” Thomas said.
“Long enough to get over the radiation, though.”
“Not a chance. Right, Ian?”
Ian said, “Hmm?”
“The radiation would last for years, right?”
“Well, so would the canned goods,” Agatha said. “And if we still had electricity—”
“Electricity! Ha!” Thomas said. “Do you ever live in a dream
world!”
“Well, even without electricity,” Agatha said stubbornly, “we could manage. Nowadays supermarkets sell blankets, even. And socks! And prescription drugs, the bigger places. We could get penicillin and stuff. And some way we’d bring Claudia and them from Pittsburgh, I haven’t figured just how, yet—”
“Forget it, Ag,” Thomas told her. “That’s ten more mouths to feed.”
“But we need a lot of kids. They’re the future generation. And Grandma and Grandpa are the old folks who would teach us how to carry on.”
“How about Ian?” Thomas asked.
“How about him?”
“He’s not old. And he’s not the future generation, either. You have to draw the line somewhere.”
“Gee, thanks,” Ian said, lazily toeing the swing. But Agatha turned a pensive gaze on him.
“No,” she said finally, “Ian comes too. He’s the one who keeps us all together.”
“The cowpoke of the family, so to speak,” Ian told Thomas. But he felt touched. And when his father called from the doorway—“Ian? Telephone”—he rested a palm on Agatha’s thick black hair a second as he rose.
The receiver lay next to the phone on the front hall table. He picked it up and said, “Hello?”
“Brother Ian? Wallah,” a man said from a distance.
“Pardon?”
“This is Eli Everjohn. Wallah, I said.”
“Wallah?”
“Wallah! I found your man.”
“You … what?”
“Except he’s dead,”
Eli said. Ian leaned one shoulder against the wall.
“Appears he didn’t live much past what your sister-in-law did. Hello? Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Maybe this is a shock.”
“No, that’s all right,” Ian said.
The shock was not Tom Dulsimore’s death but the fact that he had lived at all—that someone else in the world had turned up actual evidence of him.
But Eli started breaking the news all over again, this time more delicately. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that Thomas Dulsimore, Senior has passed away,” he said. “Had himself a motorcycle crash back in nineteen sixty-seven.”