On his workshop bench, Thomas Hardin Masterson lines up the woods he has chosen, his old favorites: chocolate brown walnut; ruddy cedar he had cut and cured himself; bleached white cypress, salvaged from the mash tubs at the old distillery and smelling faintly of young whiskey. To these he adds newcomers: gingko, buttery smooth and yellow; wild cherry, deep red, from a tree he`d planted himself, forty years before.
Rose Ella, his wife, is dead. Before himself–who would have thought it?
A year ago she`d helped shovel him into an ambulance, to take him to a Louisville hospital where they`d removed most of his cancerous gut. He`d recovered, to stand half-hollowed out and hear the doctor give him a year to live. Across the next months he and Rose Ella talked very little and thought a great deal about what was to come of her after his death.
Now she has been dead four months, while he stands among the antique tools and stacked woods and power saws of his shop, assembling woods for a lamp for Miss Camilla Perkins, his next-door neighbor and in forty-seven years of marriage the only woman he has kissed besides his wife. ”Forty-seven years and one other woman,” he says to himself. ”And that just a kiss.” He is astonished by his own loyalty. If on his wedding day someone had predicted this, he would have laughed out loud.
Since his wife`s death, he has kept all but one of his children at bay. They have asked to come; he has managed to hold them to weekend visits, not by words–he avoids talking of his illness–but by his plain refusal to be cared for. They have their own lives, and he is careful to remind them of this: his sons have jobs, his daughters have chilren.
But now his youngest son Ravenel pushes open the door, carrying two cups of coffee. At thirty-four, Ravenel is not married, has never had so much as a girlfriend. Instead he brings home men from San Francisco, where he lives–a different man every summer. With those visitors, Rose Ella was civil, even flirtatious. Tom Hardin stayed in the shop.
This time Ravenel has come home alone. He has left a job in San Francisco, God knows what; Tom Hardin keeps Ravenel`s jobs in mind no more than the names of that stream of summertime men. In Tom Hardin`s day jobs were tied to something. You knew who a man was by what he did and what he turned out: furniture, or plumbing, or (in Tom Hardin`s case) bourbon. As far as Tom Hardin could tell, Ravenel turned out paper.
”I brought your coffee, Father.”
”I can see that.” Tom Hardin points with his plane, the old-fashioned kind with the knob and the crossblade, that requires muscle and a good eye.
”Set it there.”
Ravenel sets the coffee down. ”So how are you feeling.”
”Not bad.” How good can a dying man feel? Tom Hardin holds his tongue.
”Mind if I look on?”
”No, not at all.” All through his childhood, Ravenel never set foot in the shop, except under threat of a whipping. Now he wants to look on. It is this, the changing of things, that angers Tom Hardin. For all their lives he and Ravenel have hardly spoken to each other, except to snap and back off. Now Tom Hardin is dying and they are supposed to get along, here is Ravenel asking to be taught in a month what it took Tom Hardin himself a lifetime to learn.
”What kind of wood is that?” Ravenel says, pointing.
”Gingko. Came from the monastery walk. You remember those big trees where you used to be able to park for midnight Mass.”
Ravenel shakes his head. ”I guess that was before my time.”
Tom Hardin put on his glasses and holds the wood to the window. Ravenel flips on the overhead fluorescent. With the board Tom Hardin swats the switch off. ”I need the sun to look at this.” He turns it back and forth in the window`s square of light. Back and forth.
”Well.” Ravenel stands and brushes his jeans of wood shavings. ”You want your coffee? It`s cold.”
”Leave it. I`ll drink it.” Ravenel shuts the door behind him with both hands and a careful click.
The last time Tom Hardin drank coffee his stomach seized up in knots, but he has not said a word of this to anyone except Miss Camilla. When he hears the house door slam, he takes the coffee, opens the door and pours it on the ground.
In 1950, when Camilla Perkins was forty years old, the parish board asked her to teach penmanship and English in the Catholic grade school. Hiring her was a radical step: she was their first lay teacher. Tom Hardin, who was on the parish board, knew they chose her because they believed her safely into spinsterhood, no temptation for the high school boys or the men of the parish. She was tall, thin, arch: curlicues of dyed black hair dangled over her arching forehead, pencilled eyebrows arched over deep-socketed, protruding eyes. In her marriageable years she had been thought plain, Tom Hardin himself had said so.
Then their generation aged. The married women wrinkled and sagged from childbearing. Weighted down with kids, laundry, groceries, they slowed their steps and words and thoughts.
At forty Miss Camilla was plain as ever, but with her years her blanched skin stretched tight. She came to speak and walk with a forward-moving intensity that commanded attention: she was a teacher.
At forty-two, Tom Hardin had too many children and a life that was slipping through his hands. Ravenel, number six, was due that December. Tom Hardin watched Rose Ella swell and his wallet shrink. He felt trapped. When in November friends asked him to go deer hunting in upstate New York, he fled, leaving Rose Ella a three-word note: ”I`ll be back.” In it he folded two crisp one hundred dollar bills.
”Guilt money,” Miss Camilla told him later, on their first drive to High Bridge. She was blunt about this, like everything else; it was another reason Tom Hardin liked her. Women in New Hope were not raised to be blunt. Camilla Perkins had not been raised to be blunt, but she was plain and came to understand this early on. ”What have I to lose,” she`d said to Tom Hardin.
Rose Ella, who was married and not plain, could not bring herself to voice her anger. She took the two hundred dollars, which Tom Hardin left to buy food and Christmas presents for the children, and bought herself a new coat. In 1950 two hundred dollars bought a very nice coat indeed, a scarlet wool knee-length affair with a real mink collar. Miss Camilla learned all this because five days after Tom Hardin left to hunt deer, Rose Ella crossed the yard, swollen with Ravenel and wearing her scarlet knee-length fur-collared coat, to beg for money to buy groceries until Tom Hardin returned. Miss Camilla had just bought a new car and was none too well off herself, and so for the next two weeks the five Masterson children ate supper crammed around Miss Camilla`s walnut gateleg table, with Patsy K., the youngest, perched on a stack of the complete Shakespeare.
Tom Hardin looks up from his workbench, to see Miss Camilla hobbling across the yard. She has had two heart attacks; she has been told she will not survive the third, and that it may come at any time. Weather permitting, she comes over daily to his shop. On this cold December day, weather most certainly should not be permitting, but she is coming, Tom Hardin likes her for that.
He pulls up stools by the stove, pours them both a finger of whiskey in plastic cups. Miss Camilla raises hers to the rafters. ”So the meeting of the Mostly Alive is called to order,” she says gaily. He raises his cup. He touches it to his lips and sets it down with a grimace. ”Forty years of making the stuff and all of a sudden I can`t stand the taste of it.”
”I saw Ravenel leave,” Miss Camilla says. ”I saw you pour out your coffee. You really think it`s important to hide that from him. He`s a grown man, you know, he left a job to be with you.”
”Any job that he can just up and leave can`t be much of a job,” Tom Hardin says.
”Ravenel ran a library in San Francisco. A big library, which you know perfectly well. A fine job, I might add.”
”How do you know what I know,” Tom Hardin says, but he grins at her impertinence.
”Between teaching your children, knowing you for thirty-five years and listening to Rose Ella complain about your faults, I think I have a good idea of what you know. A better idea, I think, than yourself, sometimes.”
Tom Hardin takes up his glue bottle and finds it clogged. He tries to squeeze it open by force of strength, but he cannot squeeze hard enough to clear the spout. He takes out a knife and carves away the dried glue.
”Everything is so goddamn slow,” he says.
Miss Camilla touches her whiskey to her lips.
Live dangerously: he scrabbles among the litter on the workbench until he finds the prime block of his best walnut. To its four sides he glues thin planks of pale gingko. He clamps this work in a vise, then sits heavily, breathing hard. ”You watched through all that. Ravenel would have asked five questions, all of them dumb.”
”And he would know more than I do.”
”He would know the names of things, but he wouldn`t know how to do them. I`ll bet you could come back here tomorrow and do what I just did in the same amount of time and do it good.”
”`Well,”` Miss Camilla says. ”Do it well, and I would do it well, I will be happy to do it well.” She stands and picks up her cane. ”It was good to talk to you. Try to remember: you work well; you do good work.”
Tom Hardin returned from that upstate New York hunting trip with a magnificent eight-point rack. Ravenel was born a week later. In that week, Rose Ella did not speak a word to him. In the evenings she lay in bed, swollen and waiting, while he went to the shop to mount the antlers on a plaque of worm-eaten chestnut he`d saved for a special occasion.
One by one his sons had earned the right to enter his shop. Excepting his oldest friends, the men of the town stood outside unless invited in. On his second night back from New York, Miss Camilla strode in, refusing him so much as a knock. She planted her squat black pumps on the poplar planks. Burned by the heat of her arching gaze, Tom Hardin saw her for the first time as something other than plain. ”You have abused your wife,” she said. ”You must apologize.”
”Apologize, hell. She`s got her coat.” Fresh from a hunt, an eight-point rack on the bench before him, Tom Hardin was feeling rambunctious. He was sanding the chestnut plaque. He shook it at her, not meaning to threaten, only wanting to make clear who here was boss.
She jerked the wood from his hands and slammed it to the floor. It split along the grain. ”I have no desire to lecture you on things you already know. You know what is good and what is evil. One way to know evil is that those who commit it hide from what they have done. You are hiding, here, from what you have done.” She left, walking sweaterless into the December night. Standing in the light from the doorway, Tom Hardin watched her cross the yard, her pumps leaving dark circles in the frosted grass.
He was at the distillery when Rose Ella went into labor. She did not call him but drove herself to the hospital. When after work he found the house empty, he called Miss Camilla to drive him over. At the hospital, he had her wait, while he bought roses for Rose Ella from the florist in the lobby, the first flowers he`d ever bought. As he left the florist`s shop, he held them extravagantly high: December roses! Miss Camilla gave him not so much as a nod.
Ravenel was a difficult birth. Tom Hardin and Miss Camilla waited four, five, six hours together. In the stuffy hospital heat the roses wilted. Late that night the nurse called his name. He took Miss Camilla`s hand, pulled her along; he wanted her to witness this gift.
Rose Ella lay spent, black circles under her eyes, hollow-cheeked. Ravenel lay in a crook of her arm, unmoving. The last two or three babies had come so easy, Tom Hardin had forgotten that birth could be this hard. He lay the roses on the bed. ”Dead flowers,” Rose Ella said, her face turning to the wall.
These nights Tom Hardin sleeps not at all. How can he sleep, with no guts to anchor his body to its bed? He eats almost nothing but still every trip to the bathroom is a stinking mess. He keeps these bathroom episodes for nighttime, when Ravenel is asleep and Tom Hardin can sit in the fluorescent hum for as long as he needs, with a Reader`s Digest in his lap and no questions asked, no sympathy given.
If his problem were only the pain, he would have no problem. Once at the distillery a two-by-four fell through six racks of barrels to split open his skull. He neither fainted nor cried out, and refused the drugs the hospital doctor pressed on him. A month later, he had Rose Ella remove the stitches with her sewing shears.
But now every day he leaves a little more of his life behind. In the mornings, crossing the flagstone patio (stones he had hoisted and prodded and cursed into place), he is sapped of a half hour`s strength. He sits in the shop, breathing heavy and shallow, until he hears Ravenel open the back door to bring coffee. Then he stands and picks up a piece of wood, or an awl, or an oil can, anything to look busy. ”It`s not like Ravenel would know what goes with wood and what doesn`t,” he grumbles to Miss Camilla, one morning after Ravenel has come and gone.
”`As if,` please, introduces a comparative clause. `It`s not as if Ravenel would know the difference.` Which is to say you`ve scared him away from asking questions?”
”He hangs around. He`s persistent, I`ll give him that much.”
”What he wants is important. Otherwise he could bring himself to ask.”
She takes up the glue. ”How many more layers are you planning to have me stick on this thing?”
”It`s nearly done. The hard part comes next, the turning on the lathe.” He hands over the planks of sweet-scented cedar. ”You still drive,” he says. ”I see you take your car out.”
Miss Camilla glues each plank in place, and sets and clamps the block.
”Just for trips to the store, or to church.”
”What say you and me take a little spin some sunny afternoon.” From his perch near the stove he tosses her a rag to wipe the glue from the bottle spout. He can see her hesitating; probably she knows where he will want to go. ”A dying man`s last request,” he says. ”That`s a joke.”
”I suppose I owe you something for all this woodworking education,” she says. ”As long as it`s sunny.”
By February, things come to the point where Tom Hardin cannot work at his bench. Something new is happening here–he feels the cancer growing. At night he places his hand on his side, feeling the cancer pulse with a life of its own, its beat a half-beat behind the beat of his own heart. He cannot escape the notion that he is doing this to himself–the cancer is a part of himself, after all, that is killing him, and taking its goddamn sweet time in getting around to it.
He has given over the gluing and clamping to Miss Camilla, in the hope that once this is done he will recover the strenth to mount the layered block on the lathe and turn it into a lamp. He has not told her that it will be a lamp, nor that it will be his gift to her.
These mornings Ravenel still brings coffee, but he cuts short his hanging around to imply questions. Instead he crosses the yard to Miss Camilla`s, where he sometimes stays for more than an hour. This delays her arrival at the shop. Tom Hardin finds himself getting irritated with Ravenel, though he knows he has no reason; it`s not as if Ravenel is holding something up. Miss Camilla will work her way across the yard in her own good time.
”What do you do over there anyway,” Tom Hardin says to Ravenel one snowy morning, when it is clear that Miss Camilla will not make it across the yard.
”Nothing, really. We talk about books, mostly. Miss Camilla taught me English, you know. She doesn`t get much chance to talk about that kind of thing. She doesn`t get much chance to talk about anything. She`s too alone.” ”Do you talk about her heart? How is her heart?”
”She never says. She won`t talk about it.”
”You talk about me?”
Against the window`s glare Tom Hardin sees the outline of his son`s chin, identical to his own: cut with a T-square, nicked at its corners. He watches Ravenel study a cardinal in the barren dogwood branches, a bloody tear against the gray-sheeted sky. ”Once or twice,” Ravenel says.
”You`re hogging her time.” Tom Hardin speaks sharply, then regrets his words: not their sharpness, but the showing forth.
Ravenel picks up both cups, still full. ”I`m here now, dammit. What more do you want.” He kicks open the door and dumps the coffee in the snow. He crosses the yard to Miss Camilla`s, leaving the shop door open. From his seat Tom Hardin watches the brown stain, until the falling snow covers it over.
The snow has not completely melted when Miss Camilla next crosses the yard. Tom Hardin opens the door, but she does not come in. ”Why can`t you acknowledge that he is here?” she asks. ”And what he is here for?”
Tom Hardin turns away to pick up the laminated wood, still clamped. his fingers test its seams. ”It`s trying to warp. That could be a problem.”
”Is it because he used to avoid your shop? He is trying to learn. He wants to learn.”
”In three months. Four months.”
”Do you think he gave up a job and came back only for that? He knows he can`t learn wood in that little time.”
He turns to her then. ”Ravenel hasn`t said a word to me. If he wants something, let him ask.”
”He is too much like you to ask.”
”He is not like me,” Tom Hardin growls. ”Let him get a woman. He`s never had a woman. He`s never even mentioned a girlfriend. He`s not married. He has no family.”
Miss Camilla`s face tightens, bitter and narrow. ”Neither have I, old man.” She turns and stumps across the snow-puddled yard.
A month after Ravenel was born, Tom Hardin drove Miss Camilla in her brand-new DeSoto on their first trip to High Bridge. By then Rose Ella was speaking to him, to ask him to chop more wood or to see to the leaky faucet in the outbuilding where they`d rigged up a bathroom. That was all she was saying; no gossip, no jokes, no flirting.
One February day, snow closed the schools, but by noon the sun emerged and the main roads were clear. Tom Hardin left the distillery to visit Miss Camilla.
He asked her to go for a drive, asked if he could drive the brand-new DeSoto. She must have wondered when he drove on and on without turning back but she said nothing. He was on the Parish Board, after all. He had voted to hire her; Rose Ella had seen fit to remind Miss Camilla of as much, across those ten days of feeding the Masterson children.
They reached High Bridge at three, with the sun low in the sky. Built over the Kentucky River gorge, it was Andrew Carnegie`s proof that the impossible could be done. At the time he built it, High Bridge was the world`s highest bridge, carrying the Illinois Central south from Lexington to the coal mines of Kentucky and Tennessee. Three years later someone built a higher bridge, and someone else built still higher bridges after that.
Tom Hardin and Miss Camilla walked on the pedestrian catwalk to the middle of the bridge. Tom Hardin stole sips from a half-pint tucked in his coat pocket. Far below, in the long winter shadows, the cornstalk-stubbled bottomland was dusted with white. From a tiny farmhouse a single trail of smoke rose to spread flat, a thin gray tablecloth of haze covering the bottoms.
”Wait,” Miss Camilla said, touching his arm. ”I can feel the bridge shaking. A train must be coming.”
In a moment they heard its whistle, in another moment they saw it round the bend. The engineer blew his horn in short, angry blasts. They were close enough to see him shake his fist. The bridge vibrated and hummed, its webbing of girders swaying in harmony with the train`s speeding mass. Miss Camilla`s eyes narrowed with alarm. He cupped his hand to her ear. ”It`s OK!” he shouted. ”It`s built to do that!”
It seemed natural then to slip his arm around her shoulder and press his mouth against hers. For the long minute of the train`s passing he kissed her. She neither resisted nor kissed him back. Then the caboose passed, sucking up the train`s roar and leaving behind only the jeering shouts of the brakemen.
She pulled away. They stood until the last echoes tangled themselves in the trees` bare limbs. Then she spoke, still looking out over the valley. ”Is this a bribe.” She plunged on, not waiting for his answer. ”I know your kind. You think any flat-chested woman should faint in your arms and be grateful for the chance. I`ve known your kind for years. I`ve fought them for years. Don`t think you`re any different, just because you gave me a job.” She turned away, to step smartly along the catwalk in her neat black pumps. In shame and anger, Tom Hardin trailed behind.
On an indifferently sunny day in late March, the Mostly Alive take their last drive, with Miss Camilla peering through the steering wheel of her 1950 DeSoto. Ravenel waves them off. ”Have a safe trip,” he says. Tom Hardin feels like giving him the finger, but out of deference to Miss Camilla he keeps his hands in his lap.
They are hardly out of the drive before Tom Hardin turns to Miss Camilla. ”How about driving to High Bridge.”
”I kn you would ask that. That`s an hour or more away, and I`ve seen better roads.”
”We`ll go slow. What have we got but time.”
”Why do you want to go back there, of all places.”
”You know why I want to go back there.”
She does not answer, but she turns in the right direction. Tom Hardin settles back in his seat.
It takes two winding hours. They pass landmarks: Saint Joe`s Cathedral, where Dutch Master paintings donated by a grateful Louis Philippe were discovered to be imitations; Perryville Battlefield, where on a hot, drought- ridden September day, 8,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in a fight for a drink from the only running spring.
They reach High Bridge at noon. Miss Camilla parks in the gravel lot, under the historical marker. Hers is the only car. Tom Hardin climbs the small stoop to the bridge catwalk.
”That`s illegal,” Miss Camilla says, pointing to a large orange sign:
KEEP OFF. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. I.C.R.R.
”What are they going to do to us? Sentence us to jail? We won`t live
`til the trial. Besides, it wasn`t illegal when we were here the first time.”
At the top of the steps he stops, wheezing and panting. Under his shirt, his right side hangs heavy, his swollen liver pressing against his belt.
Spring is early. Redbud and white and pink dogwood blossom against the limestone palisades. Below, cars smaller than his thumbnail roll along a black ribbon of bottomland asphalt.
Tom Hardin takes Miss Camilla`s arm. ”I was going to make a lamp from that block of wood.” He chooses his words carefully. He does not want to misspeak now.
”I know.”
”I was going to give it to you.”
”I thought as much.”
”I`ll never finish it. Turning it takes a good eye and a steady hand. I`ve lost that. But I though you would want to know. I was making it for you.”
”You`re very kind.” With her cane she points to the blossoming redbud.
”It`s greener now than it was then,” she says. ”Really, this is a better time of year to come.”
”Miss Camilla.” He is afraid to form the question, his words come out flat and hard. ”Can I kiss you.”
She laughs, short and harsh. ”`May,”` she says. ”May I kiss you. No, you may not.”
His disappointment is too great not to give it voice. ”My God, Camilla, why are you saying no now? What difference does it make?”
”Before, Rose Ella lived, and you took what you wanted. Now she is dead, and suddenly you ask.”
”I couldn`t ask, then.” He forced himself to find and say the words.
”I didn`t know how. Things are different, now. I`m older.”
”Old enough that even I look good.”
”You looked good to me then.”
”Anyone would have looked good to you then. Anything would have looked good to you then. I was available, with a new car and a school holiday.” She plants her cane, covers one mottled hand with another, stares out over the valley. ”Tom Hardin. You seem to think I have never known love.” She speaks in a voice determined to convince. She might be lecturing herself. ”I have known love. I have been lucky in love.”
”Who has loved you.”
For a long moment she says nothing. Then, ”My students.” She pauses again. Her voice falters, uncertain. ”My neighbors. Your son.”
Tom Hardin drops her elbow. ”I should tell that boy to leave.” He walks to the car. Along the catwalk, he listens for her voice. He hears only the rush of the wind through the girders and the chatterings of the swallows.
When finally she reaches the car, he holds the door for her, but does not shut it once she has climbed in.
”Tom Hardin,” Miss Camilla says gently. ”You have been looking in the wrong places.”
He does not move. ”Do you think she ever forgave me?”
She says nothing. He knows she is turning her answer over in her head, an answer she is sure of but uncertain whether to present. ”No,” she says finally. ”No, I don`t think she ever did.”
They arrive home as it is getting dark. Ravenel bounds across the yard, full of noise and concern. Miss Camilla leans across the seat to plant a kiss, her lips cool and paper dry on Tom Hardin`s cheek. ”You`re persistent,” she says. ”I`ll give you that much.” She climbs from the car and shuts the door. That night is a bad one, brought on, Tom Hardin knows, by the sitting and riding, and by Miss Camilla`s words. The next morning he is in the shop before Ravenel is out of bed. He can do no more than sit, now, but he prefers sitting here, among his tools, to sitting in the house, where Rose Ella reigned.
At ten Ravenel comes to the shop. He no longer brings coffee but he comes and sits on the stool near the stove. Some mornings he has sat for a half hour, and they have said nothing.
This morning Tom Hardin waves Ravenel away from the stool. ”I want you to do me a favor.”
”Sir?”
”I want you to take this package over to your friend next door.” He has wrapped the block in brown paper grocery sacks. He waves Ravenel at it. ”Tell her I thought she might use it to fuel her stove.” Ravenel hefts the sack, feels its weight, hesitates. ”Go on!” Tom Hardin says.
He watches his son cross the yard. In Ravenel`s walk he sees his own walk, that bow-legged strut peculiar to the Masterson men.
He sits for no more than a few minutes before Ravenel returns. He comes in without knocking, and places the unwrapped block of wood on Tom Hardin`s workbench. ”She thanks you,” Ravenel says, ”but she insists that it be finished, and says to tell you that she does not want to see it otherwise. She tells me that I am to finish it. You are to teach me how. She says.”
”She does.” Tom Hardin takes the block of wood. Ravenel stands in the doorway, staring out at the newly-greened lawn.
Tom Hardin holds the laminated wood to the light. It is not the best gluing job, even for a beginner. He is not certain that the block will hold up under the stress of the lathe.
But the fragrant cedar remembers for him, recalling more pasts than he would like: a lifetime of Christmas trees; Rose Ella`s hope chest; the cedar- lined closet in the house, where her fur-collared knee-length coat hangs.
From across the yard he hears Miss Camilla`s door open, and he lifts his head. Ravenel steps out and crosses to offer his arm, which she accepts.
Tom Hardin studies her three-legged walk, as she pulls herself forward with the help of her cane. I am too old, he thinks. I have too little time left to change. If that is stupid and narrow, so be it. I have earned that privilege.
Yet he watches Miss Camilla poling across the yard, his son at her side, and he hefts the wood in his hands. He turns it this way and that in the window`s light, his unthinking fingers testing its strength for the turning on the lathe.
