“Certain things. I can see” — she searched for the words — “I can see the picture of a person’s life.”
“You mean like a movie?”
“No,” she said. “More like a huge oil painting, so large and with so much detail that you can’t take it all in at once, but you’re seeing it all at once.”
“That’s hard to imagine.”
“I know.”
He thought about it. “Well,” he said, “somewhere in that picture, whether you can see it or not, there’s me giving Carlene a crack in the mouth. I’m not real proud of that.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I never did it that I hadn’t had a few beers, but I don’t guess that’s any excuse. My father drank beer and whiskey every day of his life and he never laid a hand on my mother.”
“He ever lay a hand on you, Jody?”
“Ha! Wasn’t usually a hand. The strap, more than likely. But I don’t know as I ever got it that I didn’t deserve it.”
“Did Carlene deserve it?”
“A woman never deserves to have a man hit her.”
“Does a child deserve to get hit with a strap?”
“Well, see, I was a pretty bad kid. I did things I shouldn’t oughta have done.”
“Oh?”
He felt something shift deep within his center. “I didn’t deserve it,” he said, his voice like a bell. “He thought he had to hit me but he was wrong. I didn’t need to get hit with no strap.”
“Can you forgive him, Jody?”
“Oh, shit. Oh, oh, shit.”
“Can you forgive yourself for hitting Carlene?”
He hiked his T-shirt out of the waistband of his jeans, used the bottom of it to wipe tears from his eyes. He said, “You know something? She wanted me to hit her. I never knew that until this minute. That’s how we picked each other. She picked me to slap her around and I picked her to have someone to slap. How come I never knew that before?”
“Can you forgive her, Jody? And can you forgive yourself?”
“Look at me, I’m crying. I’m ashamed of myself, carrying on like this.”
“Never be ashamed to cry, Jody.” She put her arms around him. “Can you forgive yourself and everybody else? Can you forgive your father for hitting you and Carlene for wanting to be hit? Can you forgive your mother? Can you forgive the obstetrician for not letting you be born the way you wanted? Can you forgive everybody who ever tried to push you around?”
“Do I have to, ma’am?”
“What do you think?”
“Tell me.”
“No, you tell me, Jody.”
His head was on her shoulder, his big chest heaving with sobs. “Oh, God,” he said. “I forgive… I forgive everybody. Oh, Jesus. Oh, dear Jesus.”
“It’s all right, Jody,” she said. “You’re all right now. Everything’s all right.”
Later he said, “I don’t know what-all happened back there.”
“You let go of some stuff.”
“Is that what I did? I must of been carryin’ it a fair spell.”
“All your life, Jody. How do you feel now?”
“Like a house with the doors and windows open. I don’t know. I guess I feel good.”
“You can trust the feeling.”
“I guess. Ma’am, did you say you were a psychologist?”
“A sort of a psychologist. I had a master’s in social work, I did counseling.”
“What you did just now, is this the sort of thing you used to do?”
“I didn’t do anything just now, Jody. You did it all.”
“Well, I sure never did it before, ma’am, and here I spend an hour holding your hand and damn if I don’t fall apart. Did you used to have this happen in your work?”
She waited a moment before replying. Then she said, “I used to try to have this happen in my work. But it hardly ever did.”
He nodded. He said, “This whole thing that’s happening. The four of us walking. It’s special, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s special.”
Shortly after sunset Guthrie suggested they look for a place to bed down for the night. He wasn’t sure of the distance, but he estimated that they were at least two hours west of Millican, with no guarantee that there would be motel rooms available there. “Besides,” he said, “it’ll be dark before we get there, and I know Sara doesn’t like to walk in the dark.”
“You’re right,” she agreed. “I’m afraid of the dark.”
They found the perfect spot a quarter of a mile down the road in the middle of a small grove of trees. Someone had camped there before, or at least picnicked; there was the residue of a fire in the center of a clearing, with a small supply of firewood and tinder stacked alongside. Guthrie got a fire started and they sat around it and ate the food they’d bought at a store a few miles back. They sang songs, and then Thom suggested that somebody tell a ghost story. Guthrie told one about a dead boy who came back to life, improvising towards the end because he couldn’t remember the original ending. Thom wanted more, but nobody knew any more.
So Sara told the story of how she’d met her husband, not liking him at first and not thinking he was really interested in her anyway. Jody told about his trip to Seattle right after high school graduation, and how he’d got the tattoo; he carefully left out the whorehouse visit that had been a highlight of the trip, but did mention how the three of them, staggering drunk across Pioneer Square, had come upon a pair of lovers on a blanket on the grass, and that one of their party — “And it wasn’t me, I swear to God it wasn’t me” — had unzipped his pants and baptized the passionate pair with urine.
And Thom told about the summer he’d spent a year ago at northern Michigan, and how one of the campers in the next cabin had drowned on a canoe trip. Thom hadn’t gone on the trip, his cabin had another activity scheduled, and that morning he’d said, to the boy who would later drown, “Have a good time on the river, asshole.” “So then he drowned,” he said, “and the last word I said to him was asshole.”
If it was cold that night, no one felt it. In the morning they straightened up the campsite and gathered wood and kindling to replace what they had burned. They were on the road early, and had pancakes and sausage for breakfast in Millican.
After breakfast, Guthrie walked with Sara. Thom and Jody were just a few paces ahead of them at first, but gradually the gap widened.
Guthrie said, “I’m glad we slept out last night.”
“We found a perfect spot.”
“I’d be glad even if we hadn’t. It did something for us as a group.”
“Bonded us.”
“I suppose that’s the word. Evidently we’re supposed to go through this together, whatever it is. So it’d probably be better if we got close with one another.”
“I agree,” she said. “And we don’t have much time.”
“What do you mean? You just got here, lady. You can’t be planning to leave us already.”
“No, hardly that. But it won’t be just the four of us for too much longer.”
“Oh?”
“You sound apprehensive, Guthrie.”
“Well, I didn’t plan on a mob scene.”
“What did you plan on?”
“I didn’t plan, period. I decided to go for a walk.”
“You didn’t just head on down to the corner store for a Coke and the evening paper.”
“No, I knew what I was doing. At least I knew I was walking away from my life and into—”
“Into what?”
“Into something different. I still don’t know what I’m walking into, so I certainly didn’t know then. You know how the idea came to me? I was waiting for a lady to finish having an abortion. It wasn’t my kid.” He frowned. “I don’t know why it’s important to include that last bit of data.”