And surely I knew what was going on around me. Marullo didn’t have to tell me. You can’t live in a town the size of New Baytown and not know. I didn’t think about it much. Judge Dorcas fixed traffic tickets for favors. It wasn’t even secret. And favors call for favors. The Town Manager, who was also Budd Building Supplies, sold equipment to the township at a high price, and some of it not needed. If a new paved street went in, it usually turned out that Mr. Baker and Marullo and half a dozen other business leaders had bought up the lots before the plan was announced. These were just facts of nature, but I had always believed they weren’t facts of my nature. Marullo and Mr. Baker and the drummer and Margie Young-Hunt and Joey Morphy in a concentration had been nudging me and altogether it amounted to a push, so that “I’ve got to put aside a little time to think it out.”
My darling was purring in her sleep, with the archaic smile on her lips, and she had the extra glow of comfort and solace she gets after love, a calm fulfilledness.
I should have been sleepy after wandering around the night before, but I wasn’t. I’ve noticed that I am rarely sleepy if I know I can sleep long in the morning. The red dots were swimming on my eyes, and the street light threw the shadows of naked elm branches on the ceiling, where they made slow and stately cats’ cradles because the spring wind was blowing. The window was open halfway and the white curtains swelled and filled like sails on an anchored boat. Mary must have white curtains and often washed. They give her a sense of decency and security. She pretends a little anger when I tell her it’s her lace-curtain Irish soul.
I felt good and fulfilled too, but whereas Mary dives for sleep, I didn’t want to go to sleep. I wanted to go on fully tasting how good I felt. I wanted to think about the I Love America Essay Contest my offspring were entering. But behind these and others, I wanted to consider what was happening to me and what to do about it, so naturally I got out the last thing first and I found that the dark jury of the deep had already decided for me. There it was, laid out and certain. It was like training for a race and preparing and finally being down at start with your spikes set in their holes. No choice then. You go when the pistol cracks. I found I was ready with my spikes set, waiting only for the shot. And apparently I was the last to know. All day people had remarked that I looked well, by that meaning I looked different, more confident, changed. That drummer had a look of shock in the afternoon. Marullo had inspected me uneasily. And Joey-boy felt the need to apologize for something I had done. Then Margie Young-Hunt—maybe she was the sharpest with her rattlesnake dream. Some way she had penetrated and discovered a certainty about me before I was certain of it. And the symbol was a rattlesnake. I found I was grinning in the dark. And afterward, confused, she used the oldest trick—the threat of infidelity, a bait cast in a flowing tide to find what fish are feeding there. I didn’t remember the secret whisper of her hidden body—no, the picture was of her clawed hands that showed age and nervousness and the cruelty that comes to one when control of a situation is lost.
Sometimes I wish I knew the nature of night thoughts. They’re close kin to dreams. Sometimes I can direct them, and other times they take their head and come rushing over me like strong, unmanaged horses.
Danny Taylor came in. I didn’t want to think about him and be sad but he came anyway. I had to use a trick a tough old sergeant taught me once, and it works. There was a day and a night and a day in the war that was all one piece, one unit of which the parts were just about all the dirty dreadfulness that can happen in that sick business. While it was going on I’m not sure I knew its agony because I was busy and unutterably tired, but afterward that unit of a day and a night and a day came back to me over and over again in my night thoughts until it was like that insanity they call battle fatigue and once named shell-shock. I used every trick I could not to think of it, but it crept back in spite of me. It waited through the day to get at me in the dark. Once mawkish with whisky I told it to my top sergeant, an old pro who had been in wars we have forgotten ever happened. If he had worn his ribbons, there’d have been no room for buttons—Mike Pulaski, a polack from Chicago, no relation to the hero. By good fortune, he was decently drunk or he might have clammed up out of a conditioned conviction about fraternizing with an officer.
Mike heard me out, staring at a spot between my eyes. “Yeah!” he said. “I know about that. Trouble is, a guy tries to shove it out of his head. That don’t work. What you got to do is kind of welcome it.”
“How do you mean, Mike?”
“Take it’s something kind of long—you start at the beginning and remember everything you can, right to the end. Every time it comes back you do that, from the first right through the finish. Pretty soon it’ll get tired and pieces of it will go, and before long the whole thing will go.”
I tried it and it worked. I don’t know whether the headshrinkers know this but they should.
When Danny Taylor came into my night I gave him Sergeant Mike’s treatment.
When we were kids together,[29] same age, same size, same weight, we used to go to the grain and feed store on High Street and get on the scales. One week I’d be half a pound heavier and the next Danny would catch up with me. We used to fish and hunt and swim together and go out with the same girls. Danny’s family was well fixed like most of the old families of New Baytown. The Taylor house is that white one with the tall fluted columns on Porlock Street. Once the Taylors had a country house too—about three miles from town.
The country all around us is rolling hills covered with trees, some scrub pine and some with second-growth oak, and hickory and some cedars. Once, long before I was born, the oaks were monsters, so big that the local-built ships had cut their keels and ribs and planking within a short distance of the shipyards until it was all gone. In this roly-poly country the Taylors once had a house set in the middle of a big meadow, the only level place for miles around. It must once have been a lake bottom because it was flat as a table and surrounded by low hills. Maybe sixty years ago, the Taylor house burned down and was never rebuilt. As kids Danny and I used to ride out there on bicycles. We played in the stone cellar and built a hunting lodge of bricks from the old foundation. The gardens must have been wonderful. We could see avenues of trees and a suggestion of formal hedges and borders among the scrabble of the returned forest. Here and there would be a stretch of stone balustrade, and once we found a bust of Pan on a tapering stand. It had fallen on its face and buried its horns and beard in the sandy loam. We stood it up and cleaned it and celebrated it for a time, but greed and girls got the better of us. We finally carted it into Floodhampton and sold it to a junk man for five dollars. It must have been a good piece, maybe an old one.
Danny and I were friends as all boys must have friends. Then his appointment to the Naval Academy came through. I saw him once in uniform and not again for years. New Baytown was and is a tight, close-made town. Everyone knew Danny was expelled and no one discussed it. Taylors died out, well, just as Hawleys died out. I’m the only one left, and, of course, Allen, my son. Danny didn’t come back until they were all dead, and he came back a drunk. At first I tried to help but he didn’t want me. He didn’t want anybody. But, in spite of it, we were close—very close.
29
When we were kids together: Inserted in this paragraph, later deleted, was this passage: “I don’t know what sadness made a drunk of him and I don’t want to know. It would be a kind of invasion of his privacy. I’ve always felt that a man has a right to kill himself if he wants to. And that’s what Danny was doing but it takes a long time.”