Reverend Emmett had said Ian would have to tell them. He’d said that was the only way. Ian had tried to explain how much it would hurt them, but Reverend Emmett had held firm. Sometimes a wound must be scraped out before it can heal, he had said.
Ian said, “I’m the one who caused Danny to die. He drove into that wall on purpose.”
Nobody spoke. His mother’s face was white, almost flinty.
“I told him Lucy was, um, not faithful,” he said.
He had thought there would be questions. He had assumed they would ask for details, pull the single strand he’d handed them till the whole ugly story came tumbling out. But they just sat silent, staring at him.
“I’m sorry!” he cried. “I’m really sorry!”
His mother moved her lips, which seemed unusually wrinkled. No sound emerged.
After a while, he rose awkwardly and left the table. He paused in the dining room doorway, just in case they wanted to call him back. But they didn’t. He crossed the hall and started up the stairs.
For the first time it occurred to him that there was something steely and inhuman to this religion business, Had Reverend Emmett taken fully into account the lonely thud of his sneakers on the steps, the shattered, splintered air he left behind him?
The little lamp on his desk gave off just enough light so it wouldn’t wake Daphne. He leaned over the crib to check on her. She had a feverish smell that reminded him of a sour dishcloth. He straightened her blanket, and then he crossed to the bureau and looked in the mirror that hung above it. Back-lit, he was nothing but a silhouette. He saw himself suddenly as the figure he had feared in his childhood, the intruder who lurked beneath his bed so he had to take a running leap from the doorway every night. He turned aside sharply and picked up the mail his mother had set out for him: a Playboy magazine, an advertisement for a record club, a postcard from his roommate. The magazine and the ad he dropped into the wastebasket. The postcard showed a wild-haired woman barely covered by a white fur dress that hung in strategic zigzags around her thighs. (SHE-WOLVES OF ANTARCTICA! In Vivi-Color! the legend read.) Dear Ian, How do you like my Christmas card? Better late than never. Kind of boring here at home, no Ian and Cicely across the room oh-so-silently hanky-pankying … He winced and dropped the card on top of the magazine. It made a whiskery sound as it landed.
He saw that he was beginning from scratch, from the very ground level, as low as he could get. It was a satisfaction, really.
That night he dreamed he was carrying a cardboard moving carton for Sid ’n’ Ed. It held books or something; it weighed a ton. “Here,” Danny said, “let me help you,” and he took one end and started backing down the steps with it. And all the while he and Ian smiled into each other’s eyes.
It was the last such dream Ian would ever have of Danny, although of course he didn’t know that at the time. At the time he woke clenched and anxious, and all he could think of for comfort was the hymn they had sung in the Church of the Second Chance. “Leaning,” they sang, “leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms …” Gradually he drifted loose, giving himself over to God. He rested all his weight on God, trustfully, serenely, the way his roommate used to rest in his chair that resembled the palm of a hand.
4. Famous Rainbows
Holy Roller, their grandma called it. Holy Roller Bible Camp. She shut a cupboard door and told Thomas, “If you all went to real camp instead of Holy Roller, you wouldn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn every day. And I wouldn’t be standing here half asleep trying to fix you some breakfast.”
But it wasn’t the crack of dawn. Hot yellow bands of sunshine stretched across the linoleum. And she didn’t look half asleep, either. She already had her hair combed, fluffed around her face in a curly gray shower-cap shape. She was wearing the blouse Thomas liked best, the one printed like a newspaper page, and brown knit slacks stretched out in front by the cozy ball of her stomach.
One of the words on her blouse was VICTORY. Another was DISASTER. Thomas hadn’t even started second grade yet but he was able to read nearly every word you showed him.
“If you all went to Camp Cottontail like the Parker children you wouldn’t have to leave till nine A.M.,” his grandma said, inching around the table with a stack of cereal bowls. “An air-conditioned bus would pick you up at the doorstep. But oh, no. Oh, no. That’s too simple for your uncle Ian. Let’s not do it the easy way, your uncle Ian says.”
What Ian had really said was, “Camp Cottontail costs eighty dollars for a two-week session.” Thomas had heard the whole argument. “Eighty dollars per child! Do you realize what that comes to?”
“Maybe Dad could make a bit extra teaching summer school,” their grandma had told him.
“Dream on, Mom. You really think I’d let him do that? Also, Camp Cottontail doesn’t take three-year-olds. Daphne would be home all day with little old you.”
That was what had settled it. Their grandma had the arthritis in her knees and hips and sometimes now in her hands, and chasing after Daphne was too much for her. Daphne just did her in, Grandma always said. Dearly though she loved her.
She shook Cheerios into Thomas’s bowl and then turned toward the stairs. “Agatha!” she called. “Agatha, are you up?”
No answer. She sighed and poured milk on top of the Cheerios. “You get started on these and I’ll go give her a nudge,” she told Thomas. She walked stiffly out of the kitchen, calling, “Rise and shine, Agatha!”
Thomas laid his spoon fiat on top of his cereal and watched it fill with milk and then sink.
Now here came his grandpa and Ian, with Daphne just behind. Ian wore his work clothes — faded jeans and a T-shirt, his white cloth carpenter cap turned around backward like a baseball catcher’s. (Grandma just despaired when her men kept their hats on in the house.) He’d dressed Daphne in her new pink shorts set, and she was pulling the toy plastic lawn mower that made colored balls pop up when the wheels turned.
“The way I figure it,” Ian was saying, “we’d be better off moving the whole operation to someplace where the lumber could be stored in the same building. But Mr. Brant likes the shop where it is. So I’m going to need the car all day unless you …”
Thomas stopped listening and took a mouthful of cereal. He watched Daphne walk around and around Ian’s legs, with the lawn mower bobbling behind her. “This is what I’m bringing to Sharing Hour,” she announced, but Thomas was the only one who heard her. “Ian? This is what I’m—”
“You should bring something fancier,” Thomas told her.
“No! I’m bringing this!”
“Remember yesterday, what Mindy brought?”
Mindy had brought an Egyptian beetle from about a million years ago, pale blue-green like old rain spouts. But Daphne said, “I don’t care.”
“Lots of people have plastic lawn mowers,” Thomas told her.
She pretended not to hear and walked in tighter and tighter circles around Ian’s blue denim legs.
Once Daphne had her mind made up, nothing could change it. Everyone always joked about that. But Thomas worried she would look dumb in front of Bible camp. It was such a small camp that all the children were jumbled together, the three-year-olds in with the seven-year-olds like Thomas and even Agatha’s age, the ten-year-olds; even ten-year-old Dermott Kyle. Dermott Kyle would be sure to laugh at her. Thomas watched her round-nosed white sandals taking tiny steps and he started getting angry at her just thinking about it.