Fidelity Read online

  The life that Hannah had begun to live came to an end when her young husband was killed, and for a while it seemed that she had no life except in the child that she had borne into the world of one death and of many. And then Nathan had called her out of that world into the living world again, and a new life had come to her; she and Nathan had made and shaped it, welcomed its additions and borne its losses together. They moved to this place that Nathan had bought not long before they married. Run-down and thicket-grown as it was, its possibility had beckoned to him and then to her. They had moved into the old house, restored it while they lived in it and while they restored the farm; they had raised their children here. And they were son and daughter both to Margaret and Mat Feltner and to Nathan’s father, whose oldest son, Tom, had also been killed in the war.

  They had raised their children, sent them to college, seen them go away to work in cities, and, though wishing they might have stayed, wished them well. Their children had gone, and over the years, one by one, so had their elders. And each one of these departures had left them with more work to do and, as Hannah sometimes thought, less reason to do it.

  They were in their fifties now, farming three farms simply because there was no one else to do it. In addition to the Feltner Place and their own, they were also farming Nathan’s home place, which he had inherited from his father. Like everybody else still farming, they were spread too thin, and help was hard to find. The Port William neighborhood had as many people, probably, as it had ever had, but it did not have them where it needed them. It had a good many of them now on little city lots carved out of farms, from which they commuted to city jobs. Nathan and Hannah were overburdened, too tired at the end of every day, and with no relief in sight. And yet they did not think of quitting. Nathan worked through his long days steadily and quietly. Some days Hannah worked with him; when she needed help, he helped her. They had two jersey cows for milk and butter; they raised and slaughtered their meat hogs; they kept a flock of hens; they raised a garden. And still, in spite of all, there were quietnesses that they came to, in which they rested and were together and were glad to be.

  And though their loneliness had increased, they were not alone. Of the membership of kin and friends that had held them always, some had died and some had gone, but some remained. There were Lyda and Danny Branch and their children. There were Arthur and Martin Rowanberry. After Elton Penn’s death, his son Jack had continued to farm their place, and Mary Penn was living in Hargrave, still a friend. There were the various Catletts, who, whatever else they were, were still farmers and still of the membership: Bess and Wheeler who were now old, Sarah and Henry and their children, Flora and Andy and theirs.

  When she thought of their neighborhood, Hannah wondered whether or not to count the children. Like the old, the young were leaving. The old were dying without successors, and Hannah was aware how anxiously those who remained had begun to look into the eyes of the children. They were watching not just their own children now but anybody’s children. For as the burden of keeping the land increased for the always fewer who remained, as the difference continued to increase between the price of what they had to sell and the cost of what they had to buy, they knew that they had less and less to offer the children, and fewer arguments to make.

  They held on, she and those others, who might be the last. They held on, and they held out, and they were seeing, perhaps, a little more clearly what they had to hold out against. Every year, it seemed to her, they were living more from what they could do for themselves and each other and less from what they had to buy. Nathan’s refusals to buy things, she had noticed, were becoming firmer as well as more frequent. “No,” he would say, “I guess we can get along without that.” “No. Not at that price.” “No. I reckon the old one will run a while longer.” And though he spoke these answers kindly enough, there was no doubting their finality. Nobody ever asked twice.

  Maybe, she thought, this was Danny’s influence. Danny was eight years younger than Nathan, and it was strange to think that Nathan could have been influenced by him, but maybe he had been. Danny never had belonged much to the modern world, and every year he appeared to belong to it less. Of them all, Danny most clearly saw that world as his enemy—as their enemy—and most forthrightly and cheerfully repudiated it. He reserved his allegiance to his friends and his place.

  Danny was the right one for the rescue that Hannah did not doubt was being accomplished, though she did not know quite how. He had some grace about him that would permit him to accomplish it with joy. She smiled, for she knew, too, that Danny was a true son to Burley, not only in loyalty but in nature—that he had shared fully in that half of Burley’s life that had belonged to the woods and the darkness. Nathan, she thought, had understood that side of Burley and been friendly to it without so much taking part in it. Nathan would hunt or fish with Burley and Danny occasionally and would enjoy it, but he was more completely a farmer than they were, more content to be bound within the cycle of the farmer’s year. You never felt, looking at him, that he had left something somewhere beyond the cleared fields that he would be bound to go back and get. He did not have that air that so often hung about Danny and Burley, suggesting that they might suddenly look back, grin and wave, and disappear among the trees. He was as solid, as frankly and fully present as the doorstep, a man given to work and to quiet—like, she thought, his father.

  They were her study, those Coulter men. Figuring them out was her need, her way of loving them, and sometimes her amusement. The one who most troubled her had been Nathan’s father, Jarrat—a driven, work-brittle, weather-hardened, lonely, and nearly wordless man, who went to his grave without completing his sorrow for his young wife who had died when their sons were small, whom he never mentioned and never forgot. His death had left in Hannah an unused and yearning tenderness.

  Burley lived in a larger world than his brother had lived in, and not just because, as a hunter and a woods walker, he readily crossed boundaries that had confined Jarrat. Burley was a man freely in love with freedom and with pleasures, who watched the world with an amused, alert eye to see what it would do next, and if the world did not seem inclined to get on very soon to anything of interest, he gave it his help. Hannah’s world had been made dearer to her by Burley’s laughter, his sometimes love of talk (his own and other people’s), and his delight in outrageous behavior (his own as a young man and other people’s). She knew that Burley had his sorrows. She knew he grieved that he had not married Kate Helen Branch, Danny’s mother, and that he regretted his late acknowledgment of Danny as his son. But she knew, too, how little he had halted in grief and regret, how readily and cheerfully he had gone on, however burdened, to whatever had come next. And because he was never completely of her world, she had the measure of his generosity to her and the others. Though gifted for disappearance, he had never entirely disappeared but had been with them to the end.

  And now the thought of him did return to her. As he had grown sicker and weaker, the thought of him had come more and more into her keeping, and she had received it with her love and her thanks as she had received her children when they were newborn.

  She thought it strange and wonderful that she had been given all these to love. She thought it a blessing that she had loved them to the limit of her grief at parting with them, and that grief had only deepened and clarified her love. Since her first grief had brought her fully to birth and wakefulness in this world, an unstinting compassion had moved in her, like a live stream flowing deep underground, by which she knew herself and others and the world. It was her truest self, that stream always astir inside her that was at once pity and love, knowledge and faith, forgiveness, grief, and joy. It made her fearful, and it made her unafraid.

  Like the others, she had mourned her uselessness to Burley in his sickness. Like the others, she had been persuaded and had helped to persuade that they should get help for him. Like the others, once they had given him into the power of the doctors and into the
sterile, hard light of that way and place in which he did not belong, she had wanted him back. And she had held him to her in her thoughts, loving the old, failed flesh and bone of him as never before, as if she could feel, in thought, in nerve, and through all intervening time and distance, the little helpless child that he had been and had become again. Knowing now that he was with Danny, hidden away, somewhere at home, joy shook her and the window blurred in her sight.

  She heard, after a while, the tires of Nathan’s truck on the gravel, and then the truck came into sight, stopped in its usual place, and Nathan got out. She watched him as he walked to the house, not so light-stepping as he used to be. She knew that as he walked, looking alertly around, he would be whistling over and over a barely audible little thread of a tune.

  When he came in and she looked at him from the stove, where she had gone to start their breakfast, he smiled at her. “Don’t ask,” he said.

  She said, “I will only ask one question. Are you worried about Burley?”

  “No,” he said, and he smiled at her again.

  Henry hurried up the steps to the office, knowing that his father would already be there. Wheeler came to the office early, an hour maybe before Henry and the secretary, because, as Henry supposed, he liked to be there by himself. It was a place of haste and sometimes of turmoil, that office, where they worked at one problem knowing that another was waiting and sometimes that several others were waiting. Wheeler would come there in the quiet of the early morning to meet the day on his own terms. He would sit down at his desk covered with opened books, thick folders of papers and letters, ruled yellow pads covered with his impulsive blue script, and with one of those pads on his lap and a pen in his hand he would call the coming day to order in his mind.

  He had been at work there for more than fifty years. In all that time the look of the place had changed more by accretion than by alteration. There were three rooms: Wheeler’s office in the front, overlooking the courthouse square; Henry’s in the back, overlooking an alley and some backyards; and, between the two, a waiting room full of bookcases and chairs where the secretary, Julia Vye, had her desk.

  Wheeler was sitting at his desk with his hat on, his back to the door. He was leaning back in his chair, his right ankle crossed over his left knee, and he was writing in fitful jabs on a yellow pad. Henry tapped on the facing of the door.

  “Come in,” Wheeler said without looking up.

  Henry came in.

  “Sit down,” Wheeler said.

  Henry did not sit down.

  “What you got on your mind?” Wheeler asked.

  “Burley Coulter disappeared from the hospital last night.”

  Wheeler swiveled his chair around and gave Henry a look that it had taken Henry thirty years to meet with composure. “Where’s Danny Branch?”

  Henry grinned. “Danny’s away from home. Lyda said he said something about Indiana.”

  “You’ve talked to the police?”

  “Yes. And a state police detective, Mr. Kyle Bode, has already been to see Lyda.”

  Wheeler wrote Kyle Bode’s name on the yellow pad. “What did you find out?”

  “Somebody went into Burley’s room at some time around two o’clock. Whoever it was disconnected him from the life machines, loaded him onto a gurney, and escaped with him ‘into the night,’ as they say. They found no fingerprints or other evidence. They have found one witness, a nurse, who saw ‘a huge man’ wearing a blue shirt going up on an elevator with an empty gurney and then down with what she thought was a dead person.”

  “We don’t know anybody huge, do we?” Wheeler said. “What about the blue shirt?”

  “Don’t know,” Henry said.

  “Do you know this Detective Bode?”

  “I had a little talk with him once, over in the court room.”

  “You’re expecting him?”

  “Yes.”

  Wheeler spread his hands palm down on his lap, studied them a moment, and then looked up again. “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “Don’t know,” Henry said. “I guess I’ll have to wait to find out. I’ve told Lyda and everybody else concerned to come here as soon as they can. And I think you ought to call Mother and Mary Penn and tell them to come. I don’t want the police to talk to any more of them alone.”

  This time it was Wheeler who grinned. He reached for the phone. “All right, my boy.”

  Working with the spade, Danny cut into the ground the long and narrow outline of the grave. It was hard digging, the gentle rain of the night not having penetrated very far, and there were tree roots and rocks. Danny soon settled into a rhythm in keeping with the length and difficulty of the job. He used the spud bar to loosen the dirt, cut the roots, and pry out the rocks. With the spade he piled the loosened dirt on one side of the grave; with his hands he laid the rocks out on the other side. He worked steadily, stopping only to return to the barn to verify that the sleeper there did not wake. On each visit he stood by Burley only long enough to touch him and to say, “You’re all right. You don’t have to worry about a thing.” Each time, he saw that Burley’s breath came more shallow and more slow.

  And finally, on one of these trips to the barn, he knew as he entered the doorway that the breaths had stopped, and he stopped, and then went soundlessly in where the body lay. It looked unaccountably small. Now of its long life in this place there remained only this small artifact of flesh and bone. In the hospital, Burley’s body had seemed to Danny to be off in another world; he had not been able to rid himself of the feeling that he was looking at it through a lens or a window. Here, the old body seemed to belong to this world absolutely, it was so accepting now of all that had come to it, even its death. Burley had died as he had slept—he had not moved. Danny leaned and picked up the still hands and laid them together.

  He went back to his digging and worked on as before. As he accepted again the burden of the work and measured his thoughts to it, Burley returned to his mind, and he knew him again as he had been when his life was full. He saw again the stance and demeanor of the man, the amused eyes, the lips pressed together while speech waited upon thought, an almost inviolable patience in the set of the shoulders. It was as though Burley stood in full view nearby, at ease and well at home—as though Danny could see him, but only on the condition that he not look.

  When Detective Bode climbed the stairs to the office of Catlett & Catlett, the waiting room was deserted. Through the open door at the rear of the room, he could see Henry with his feet propped on his desk, reading the morning paper. Kyle Bode closed the waiting room door somewhat loudly.

  Henry looked up. “Come in,” he called. He got up to meet his visitor, who shook his hand and then produced a badge.

  “Kyle Bode, state police.”

  Henry gave him a warm and friendly smile. “Sure,” he said. “I remember you. Have a seat. What can I do for you?”

  The detective sat down in the chair that Henry positioned for him. He had not smiled. He waited for Henry, too, to sit down. “I’m here in connection with what I suppose would be called a kidnapping. A man named Burley Coulter, of Port William, was removed from his hospital room without authorization at about two o’clock this morning.”

  “So I heard!” Henry said. “Lyda Branch called me about it. I figured you fellows would have made history of this case by now. You mean you haven’t?”

  “Not yet,” Kyle Bode said. “It’s not all that clear-cut, probably due to the unprecedented nature of the crime.”

  “You show me an unprecedented crime,” Henry said, falling in with the detective’s philosophical tone. “Kidnapping, you said?”

  “It’s a crime involving the new medical technology. I mean, some of this stuff is unheard of. We’re living in the future right now. I figure this crime is partly motivated by anxiety about this new stuff. Like maybe the guy that did it is some kind of religious nut.”

  Henry put his dark-rimmed reading glasses b
ack on and made his face long and solemn, tilting his head back, as he was apt to do when amused in exalted circumstances. “In the past, too,” he said.

  “What?”

  “If we’re living in the future, then surely we’re living in the past, too, and the dead and the unborn are right here in our midst. Wouldn’t you say so?”

  “I guess so,” Kyle Bode said.

  “Well,” Henry said, “do you have any clues as to the possible identity of the perpetrator of this crime?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, we do. We have a good set of fingerprints.”

  Kyle Bode spoke casually, looking at the fingernails of his right hand, which he held in his left. When he looked up to gauge the effect, not the Henry of their recent philosophical exchange but an altogether different Henry, one he had encountered before, was looking at him point-blank, the glasses off.

  “Mr. Bode,” Henry said, “that was a lie you just told. As a matter of fact, you don’t have any evidence. If we are going to get along, you had better assume that I know as much about this case as you do. Now, what do you want?”

  Kyle Bode felt a sort of chill crawl up the back of his neck and over the top of his head, settling for an exquisite moment among his hair roots. He maintained his poise, however, and was pleased to note that he was returning Henry’s look. And the right question came to him.

  “I want to find the victim’s nephew, Danny Branch. Do you know where he is?”