“By then the place was filling up and had got pretty noisy. The juke box was playing and two or three couples were dancing, and you had to holler to be heard, so I asked Buddy if he wanted to come back to my place for some supper and a few games of chess. He asked me if I had anything to drink, apologizing as he asked, explaining that he was broke or else he’d have offered to buy the beer. I had plenty of beer in the refrigerator, plus a bottle of scotch I keep around, and I had planned to go on home and cook up a couple of hamburgers for myself anyhow. I hadn’t played any chess in over a year, not since my brother was back East visiting my mother two Thanksgivings ago. Buddy said fine, so I paid, and we left in my car.
“When we got to the trailer, he opened a beer and set up the chessboard in the living room while I cooked hamburgers. He had the television on and was watching it and drinking beer and seemed very relaxed to me. But he seemed sad, too. It’s hard to explain. He probably reminded me of myself somehow, sitting there alone, with the television set on and a chessboard set up in front of him. I walked into the living room to say something to him, I don’t know what, just something that wouldn’t make him seem so sad and alone to me, maybe, and when I passed behind his chair, I lay my hand on his shoulder in a friendly way. You know? Just lay my hand on his shoulder as I passed behind his chair.
“What happened then was … embarrassing. I don’t know why I’m telling this to you, I’ve never told anyone else, but it’s bothered me ever since. He grabbed at my hand as if it were an insect, a spider or something, and threw it off his shoulder. When he stood up and turned to face me, he was red-faced and enraged, sputtering at me, calling me a fairy, all kinds of names. He knocked over the chessboard, made a few wild moves around the room as if he was trying to find a way out without passing me, and finally went by me as if I had some kind of disease he could catch, and slammed the door.”
The Captain was at the refrigerator and had drawn out a pair of beers. He let the door shut on its own and stood facing it. “Well … so he decided you had … unnatural desires, eh?”
“Apparently. Yes, he did. But I didn’t.”
Of course. The Captain was still facing the closed refrigerator door.
“It was just that he had looked so sad and alone there, so pitiful. I can’t describe it. Sometimes you can have a feeling toward a person that makes you want to do that, to place a hand on him and that’s all, just to comfort him, even though he doesn’t know he needs comfort — no, especially because he doesn’t know he needs comfort. But I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I must need comfort and not know it or something,” Leon said, and he laughed lightly, nervously.
The Captain laughed with him and turned and sat back down at the table. Leon, his face pinched in thought, opened the bottle and filled his glass, then studied the glass carefully, watching the bubbles rise inside and the moisture drip down the outside. The Captain filled his pipe from a brown leather pouch and lit it, drawing in the smoke rapidly until he had it going on its own. Then he asked Leon if it was true, was he a fairy?
Leon slowly looked up at the older man, the way you would look at a falling tree if you had got unexpectedly caught beneath it. It was too late to step out of its path. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I am.”
The Captain smiled and revealed that he had always thought so, but Leon was not to worry, because his secret was safe. He understood that sort of thing, it happened all the time in the service. Well, not all the time, but often enough that you had to learn to be tolerant, so long as people kept these things to themselves. He continued talking a few seconds longer, but Leon was already standing and pulling on his jacket, then moving for the door.
At the door, he apologized for having drunk so much of the Captain’s beer, and then stepped outside to the cold night air. It was a clear sky, with falling stars and a crescent moon that looked like a narrow streak against the dark blue sky.
God’s Country
THE REAL ESTATE MAN HAROLD DAME was dying. Doctor Wickshaw gave him one month to six, and when he explained what few remaining services there were available for the real estate man, whether they kept him in the hospital or put him in a nursing home, and the costs of those services, the real estate man’s son and daughter-in-law, who had been running the business alone for nearly a year anyhow, decided to bring him home, to install him in his bedroom on the second floor and to hire a nurse to take care of him for the one month to six he had left. She could administer the drugs he required, she could clean and feed him and take care of his bedding, she could watch after his dying, and when he was dead, she could leave.
Decisions like this are hard, the son of the real estate man explained to his wife, who had reservations about having the old man in the house for one to six months, a living corpse, practically (though out of respect for her husband’s feelings she did not exactly put it that way), a total invalid drugged against pain, helpless and dependent as a newborn infant and daily becoming more so, shrinking into himself, unable to speak coherently or even to recognize who was in the room — it probably meant they wouldn’t be able to go to Florida for the month of January the way they’d planned.
Nonsense, the husband assured her, unless of course the old man happened to die during that particular month, in which case there would be the funeral to take care of, but they could fly back for that, if necessary. All they had to do was be sure that the nurse they hired was honest, competent and pleasant to be around, for after all, they themselves would have to be around her for one to six months, not counting the month of January, when they would be in Florida. The wife wondered if the nurse would have to eat with them. Of course not. She could take the room next to the old man’s, and she could eat there. The son and daughter-in-law would continue living downstairs in their wing of the house, where they had lived ever since the son had been brought into the business, and they would practically never see the woman.
There are several ways to go about hiring a private nurse to provide this kind of care, but when you live in a small town in a rural state like New Hampshire, probably the easiest way is to let your physician take care of it. Harold Dame’s son and daughter-in-law were busy people, especially with the old man so sick and for the last year unable to run the business the way he used to, so they had explained at great length to Doctor Wickshaw, an intelligent and tactful man, precisely what kind of woman they were looking for, and he had proceeded to find them just such a woman.
Doctor Wickshaw was what you might call an artistic man, in that he was the president of the Catamount Drama Club, the coordinator for the annual Suncook Valley Arts Festival, and owned a large collection of works by contemporary New Hampshire painters and sculptors. His wife was a potter and wore smocks and sandals and large gold hoops in her pierced ears. He had a white Vandyke beard, a rosy complexion, and the kind of round belly on a slender body that a man who enjoys exotic food and interesting wine often wears. He was good-natured, affluent (for he had been the only physician in town for over twenty-five years and had invested heavily and wisely in real estate), and somewhat eccentric. In the summer months he frequently wore Bermuda shorts and shortsleeved shirts to the office.