Fidelity Page 5

  When the sheriff came back from supper, she was still there on the bench, the Saturday night shoppers and talkers, standers and passers leaving a kind of island around her, as if unwilling to acknowledge the absolute submission they sensed in her. The sheriff knew as soon as he laid eyes on her this time that she was not going to go away. Perhaps he understood that she had no place to go that she could get to before it would be time to come back.

  “Come on with me,” he said, and he did not sound like a sheriff now but only a man.

  She got up and followed him through the hallway of the courthouse, past the locked doors of the offices, out again, and across the little iron-fenced courtyard in front of the jail. The sheriff unlocked a heavy sheet-iron door, opened it, and closed it behind them, and they were in a large room of stone, steel, and concrete, containing several cages, barred from floor to ceiling, the whole interior lighted by one kerosene lamp hanging in the corridor.

  Among the bars gleaming dimly and the shadows of bars thrown back against concrete and stone, she saw her father sitting on the edge of a bunk that was only an iron shelf let down on chains from the wall, with a thin mattress laid on it. He had paid no attention when they entered. He sat still, staring at the wall, one hand pressed against his belly, the other holding to one of the chains that supported the bunk.

  The sheriff opened the cell door and stood aside to let her in. “I’ll come back after while,” he said.

  The door closed and was locked behind her, and she stood still until Thad felt her presence and looked up. When he recognized her, he covered his face with both hands.

  “He put his hands over his face like a man ashamed,” my grandmother said. “But he was like a man, too, who had seen what he couldn’t bear.”

  She sat without speaking a moment, looking at me, for she had much to ask of me.

  “Maybe Thad saw his guilt full and clear then. But what he saw that he couldn’t bear was something else.”

  And again she paused, looking at me. We sat facing each other on either side of the window; my grandfather lay in one of his lengthening sleeps nearby. The old house in that moment seemed filled with a quiet that extended not only out into the whole broad morning but endlessly both ways in time.

  “People sometimes talk of God’s love as if it’s a pleasant thing. But it is terrible, in a way. Think of all it includes. It included Thad Coulter, drunk and mean and foolish, before he killed Mr. Feltner, and it included him afterwards.”

  She reached out then and touched the back of my right hand with her fingers; my hand still bears that touch, invisible and yet indelible as a tattoo.

  “That’s what Thad saw. He saw his guilt. He had killed his friend. He had done what he couldn’t undo; he had destroyed what he couldn’t make. But in the same moment he saw his guilt included in love that stood as near him as Martha Elizabeth and at that moment wore her flesh. It was surely weak and wrong of him to kill himself—to sit in judgment that way over himself. But surely God’s love includes people who can’t bear it.”

  The sheriff took Martha Elizabeth home with him that night; his wife fed her and turned back the bed for her in the spare room. The next day she sat with her father in his cell.

  “All that day,” my grandmother said, “he would hardly take his hands from his face. Martha Elizabeth fed him what little he would eat and raised the cup to his lips for what little he would drink. And he ate and drank only because she asked him to, almost not at all. I don’t know what they said. Maybe nothing.”

  At bedtime again that night Martha Elizabeth went home with the sheriff. When they returned to the courthouse on Monday morning, Thad Coulter was dead by his own hand.

  “It’s a hard story to have to know,” my grandmother said. “The mercy of it was Martha Elizabeth.”

  She still had more to tell, but she paused again, and again she looked at me and touched my hand.

  “If God loves the ones we can’t,” she said, “then finally maybe we can. All these years I’ve thought of him sitting in those shadows, with Martha Elizabeth standing there, and his work-sore old hands over his face.”

  Once the body of Ben Feltner was laid on his bed, the men who had helped Jack to carry him home went quietly out through the kitchen and the back door, as they had come in, muttering or nodding their commiseration in response to Nancy’s “Thank you.” And Jack stayed. He stayed to be within sight or call of his sister when she needed him, and he stayed to keep his eye on Mat. Their struggle in front of Chatham’s store, Jack knew, had changed them both. Because he did not yet know how or how much or if it was complete, it was not yet a change that he was willing, or that he dared, to turn his back on.

  Someone was sent to take word to Rebecca Finley, Margaret’s mother, and to ask her to come for Bess.

  When Rebecca came, Margaret brought Bess down the stairs into the quiet that the women now did their best to disguise. But Bess, who did not know what was wrong and who tactfully allowed the pretense that nothing was, knew nevertheless that the habits of the house were now broken, and she had heard the quiet that she would never forget.

  “Grandma Finley is here to take you home with her,” Margaret said, giving her voice the lilt of cheerfulness. “You’ve been talking about going to stay with her, haven’t you?”

  And Bess said, dutifully supplying the smile she felt her mother wanted, “Yes.”

  “We’re going to bake some cookies just as soon as we get home,” Rebecca said. “Do you want to bake a gingerbread boy?”

  “Yes,” Bess said.

  She removed her hand from her mother’s hand and placed it in her grandmother’s. They went out the door.

  The quiet returned. From then on, though there was much that had to be done and the house stayed full of kin and neighbors coming and going or staying to help, and though by midafternoon women were already bringing food, the house preserved a quiet against all sound. No voice was raised. No door was slammed. Everybody moved as if in consideration, not of each other, but of the quiet itself—as if the quiet denoted some fragile peacefulness in Ben’s new sleep that should not be intruded upon.

  Jack Beechum was party to that quiet. He made no sound. He said nothing, for his own silence had become wonderful to him and he could not bear to break it. Though Nancy, after the death of their mother, had given Jack much of his upbringing and had been perhaps more his mother than his sister, Ben had never presumed to be a father to him. From the time Jack was eight years old, Ben had been simply his friend—had encouraged, instructed, corrected, helped, and stood by him; had placed a kindly, humorous, forbearing expectation upon him that he could not shed or shirk and had at last lived up to. They had been companions. And yet, through the rest of that day, Jack had his mind more on Mat than on Ben.

  Jack watched Mat as he would have watched a newborn colt weak on its legs that he had helped to stand, that might continue to stand or might not. All afternoon Jack did not sit down because Mat did not. Sometimes there were things to do, and they were busy. Space for the coffin had to be made in the living room. Furniture had to be moved. When the time came, the laden coffin had to be moved into place. But, busy or not, Mat was almost constantly moving, as if seeking his place in a world newly made that day, a world still shaking and doubtful underfoot. And Jack both moved with him and stayed apart from him, watching. When they spoke again, they would speak on different terms.

  There was a newness in the house, a solemnity, a sort of wariness, a restlessness as of a dog uneasy on the scent of some creature undeniably present but unknown. In its quiet, the house seemed to be straining to accommodate Ben’s absence, made undeniable and insistent by the presence of his body lying still under his folded hands.

  Jack would come later to his own reckoning with that loss, the horror and the pity of it, and the grief, the awe and gratitude and love and sorrow and regret, when Ben, newly dead and renewing sorrow for others dead before, would wholly occupy his mind in the night,
and could give no comfort, and would not leave. But now Jack stayed by Mat and helped as he could.

  In the latter part of the afternoon came Della Budge, Miss Della, bearing an iced cake on a stand like a lighted lamp. As she left the kitchen and started for the front door, she laid her eyes on Jack, who was standing in the door between the living room and the hall. She was a large woman, far gone in years. It was a labor for her to walk. She advanced each foot ahead of the other with care, panting, her hand on her hip, rocking from side to side. She wore many clothes, for her blood was thin and she was easily chilled, and she carried a fan, for sometimes she got too warm. Her little dustcap struggled to stay on top of her head. A tiny pair of spectacles perched awry on her nose. She had a face like a shriveled apple, and the creases at the corners of her mouth were stained with snuff. Once, she had been Jack’s teacher. For years they had waged a contest in which she had endeavored to teach him the begats from Abraham to Jesus and he had refused to learn them. He was one of her failures, but she maintained a proprietary interest in him nonetheless. She was the only one left alive who called him “Jackie.”

  As she came up to him he said, “Hello, Miss Della.”

  “Well, Jackie,” she said, lifting and canting her nose to bring her spectacles to bear upon him, “poor Ben has met his time.”

  “Yes, mam,” Jack said. “One of them things.”

  “When your time comes you must go, by the hand of man or the stroke of God.”

  “Yes, mam,” Jack said. He was standing with his hands behind him, leaning back against the doorjamb.

  “It’ll come by surprise,” she said. “It’s a time appointed, but we’ll not be notified.”

  Jack said he knew it. He did know it.

  “So we must always be ready,” she said. “Pray without ceasing.”

  “Yes, mam.”

  “Well, God bless Ben Feltner. He was a good man. God rest his soul.”

  Jack stepped ahead of her to help her out the door and down the porch steps.

  “Why, thank you, Jackie,” she said as she set foot at last on the walk.

  He stood and watched her going away, walking, it seemed to him, a tottering edge between eternity and time.

  Toward evening Margaret laid the table, and the family and several of the neighbor women gathered in the kitchen. Only two or three men had come, and they were sitting in the living room by the coffin. The table was spread with the abundance of food that had been brought in. They were just preparing to sit down when the murmur of voices they had been hearing from the road down in front of the stores seemed to converge and to move in their direction. Those in the kitchen stood and listened a moment, and then Mat started for the front of the house. The others followed him through the hall and out onto the porch.

  The sun was down, the light cool and directionless, so that the colors of the foliage and of the houses and storefronts of the town seemed to glow. Chattering swifts circled and swerved above the chimneys. Nothing else moved except the crowd that made its way at an almost formal pace into the yard. The people standing on the porch were as still as everything else, except for Jack Beechum who quietly made his way forward until he stood behind and a little to the left of Mat, who was standing at the top of the steps.

  The crowd moved up near the porch and stopped. There was a moment of hesitation while it murmured and jostled inside itself.

  “Be quiet, boys,” somebody said. “Let Doc do the talking.”

  They became still, and then Doctor Starns, who stood in the front rank, took a step forward.

  “Mat,” he said, “we’re here as your daddy’s friends. We’ve got word that Thad Coulter’s locked up in the jail at Hargrave. We want you to know that we don’t like what he did.”

  Several voices said, “No!” and “Nosir!”

  “We know it was a thing done out of meanness. We don’t think we can stand for it, or that we ought to, or that we ought to wait on somebody else’s opinion about it. He was seen by a large number of witnesses to do what he did.”

  Somebody said, “That’s right!”

  “We think it’s our business, and we propose to make it our business.”

  “That’s right!” said several voices.

  “It’s only up to you to say the word, and we’ll ride down there tonight and put justice beyond question. We have a rope.”

  And in the now-silent crowd someone held up a coil of rope, a noose already tied.

  The doctor gave a slight bow of his head to Mat and then tipped his hat to Nancy who now stood behind Mat and to his right. And again the crowd murmured and slightly stirred within itself.

  For what seemed to Jack a long time, Mat did not speak or move. The crowd grew quiet again, and again they could hear the swifts chittering in the air. Jack’s right hand ached to reach out to Mat. It seemed to him again that he felt the earth shaking under his feet, as Mat felt it. But though it shook and though they felt it, Mat now stood resolved and calm upon it. Looking at the back of his head, Jack could still see the boy in him, but the head was up. The voice, when it came, was steady:

  “No, gentlemen. I appreciate it. We all do. But I ask you not to do it.”

  And Jack, who had not sat down since morning, stepped back and sat down.

  Nancy, under whose feet the earth was not shaking, if it ever had, stepped up beside her son and took his arm.

  She said to the crowd, “I know you are my husband’s friends. I thank you. I, too, must ask you not to do as you propose. Mat has asked you; I have asked you; if Ben could, he would ask you. Let us make what peace is left for us to make.”

  “If you want to,” Mat said, “come and be with us. We have food, and you all are welcome.”

  He had said, in all, six brief sentences. He was not a forward man. This, I think, was the only public speech of his life.

  “I can see him yet,” my grandmother said, her eyes, full of sudden moisture, again turned to the window. “I wish you could have seen him.”

  And now, after so many years, perhaps I have. I have sought that moment out, or it has sought me, and I see him standing without prop in the deepening twilight, asking his father’s friends to renounce the vengeance that a few hours before he himself had been furious to exact.

  This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time. For that moment on the porch is not a now that was but a now that is and will be, inhabiting all the history of Port William that followed and will follow. I know that in the days after his father’s death—and after Thad Coulter, concurring in the verdict of his would-be jury in Port William, hung himself in the Hargrave jail and so released Martha Elizabeth from her watch—my grandfather renewed and carried on his friendship with the Coulters: with Thad’s widow and daughters, with Dave Coulter and his family, and with another first cousin of Thad’s, Marce Catlett, my grandfather on my father’s side. And when my father asked leave of the Feltners to marry their daughter Bess, my mother, he was made welcome.

  Mat Feltner dealt with Ben’s murder by not talking about it and thus keeping it in the past. In his last years, I liked to get him to tell me about the violent old times of the town, the hard drinking and the fighting. And he would oblige me up to a point, enjoying the outrageous old stories himself, I think. But always there would come a time in the midst of the telling when he would become silent, shake his head, lift one hand and let it fall; and I would know—I know better now than I did then—that he had remembered his father’s death.

  Though Coulters still abound in Port William, no Feltner of the name is left. But the Feltner line continues, joined to the Coulter line, in me, and I am here. I am blood kin to both sides of that moment when Ben Feltner turned to face Thad Coulter in the road and Thad pulled the trigger. The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship and then in marriage. My grandfather made a
peace here that has joined many who would otherwise have been divided. I am the child of his forgiveness.

  After Mat spoke the second time, inviting them in, the crowd loosened and came apart. Some straggled back down into the town; others, as Mat had asked, came into the house, where their wives already were.

  But Jack did not stay with them. As soon as he knew he was free, his thoughts went to other things. His horse had stood a long time, saddled, without water or feed. The evening chores were not yet done. Ruth would be wondering what had happened. In the morning they would come back together, to be of use if they could. And there would be, for Jack as for the others, the long wearing out of grief. But now he could stay no longer.

  As soon as the porch was cleared, he retrieved his hat from the hall tree and walked quietly out across the yard under the maples and the descending night. So as not to be waylaid by talk, he walked rapidly down the middle of the road to where he had tied his horse. Lamps had now been lighted in the stores and the houses. As he approached, his horse nickered to him.

  “I know it,” Jack said.

  As soon as the horse felt the rider’s weight in the stirrup, he started. Soon the lights and noises of the town were behind them, and there were only a few stars, a low red streak in the west, and the horse’s eager footfalls on the road.

  II

  A Jonquil for Mary Penn

  Mary Penn was sick, though she said nothing about it when she heard Elton get up and light the lamp and renew the fires. He dressed and went out with the lantern to milk and feed and harness the team. It was early March, and she could hear the wind blowing, rattling things. She threw the covers off and sat up on the side of the bed, feeling as she did how easy it would be to let her head lean down again onto her knees. But she got up, put on her dress and sweater, and went to the kitchen.