still the shops stayed open, the lights stayed on, the doors stood wide, as if each owner was reluctant to go home, so long as that river out there was flowing and there was the great motion and glint and sound of people and metal and light in a tide they had grown so accustomed to it was hard to believe the river bottom would ever know a dry season.
Charlie lingered on, straying from shop to shop, sipping a chocolate Coke at the malted-milk counter, buying some stationery he couldn’t use from the drugstore under the soft fluttering wood fan that whispered to itself in the ceiling. He loitered like a common criminal, thieving sights. He paused in alleys where, Saturday afternoons, gypsy tie salesmen or kitchenware spielers laid out their suitcase worlds to con the pedestrians. Then, at last he reached the gas station where Pete Britz, deep in the oil pit, was mending the dumb brute underside of a dead and uncomplaining 1947 Ford.
At ten o’clock, as if by some secret but mutual consent, all the shops went dark, all the people walked home, Charlie Moore among them.
He caught up with Hank Summers, whose face was still shining pink from the shave he hadn’t needed. They ambled in silence for a time past houses where it seemed the whole population was sitting out smoking or knitting, rocking in chairs or fanning themselves against a nonexistent hot spell.
Hank laughed suddenly at some private thought. A few paces on, he decided to make it public:
“Yes, we’ll gather at the River.
River, River.
Yes, we’ll gather at the River
That flows by the Throne of God.”
He half-sang it and Charlie nodded.
“First Baptist Church, when I was twelve.”
“The Lord giveth and the Highway Commissioner taketh away,” said Hank, drily. “Funny. Never thought how much a town is people. Doing things, that is. Under the hot towel back there, thought: what’s this place to me? Shaved. I had the answer. Russ Newell banging a carburetor at the Night Owl Garage? Yep. Allie Mae Simpson…”
He swallowed his voice in embarrassment.
Allie Mae Simpson … Charlie took up the count in his own mind … Allie Mae fixing wet curlicues in old ladies’ hair in the bay window of her Vogue Salon … Doc Knight stacking pill bottles in the drug emporium cases … hardware store laid out in the hot noon sun, Clint Simpson middle of it all, running his hands over, sorting out the million blinks and shines of brass and silver and gold, all the nails, hinges, knobs, all the saws, hammers, and snaked up copper wire and stacks of aluminum foil like the junk shaken free of a thousand boys’ pockets in a thousand summers past … and then…
…then there was his own place, warm dark, brown, comfortable, musky as the den of a tobacco smoking bear … thick with the humidor smells of whole families of odd-sized cigars, imported cigarettes, snuffs just waiting to be exploded on the air…
Take all that away, thought Charlie, you got nothing. Buildings, sure. Anyone can raise a frame, paint a sign to say what might go on inside. But it was people that made the damn thing get.
Hank surfaced in his own long thoughts.
“Guess right now I’m sad. Want to send everyone back to open their shops so I can see what they were up to. Why wasn’t I looking closer, all these years? Hell, hell. What’s got into you. Hank Summers. There’s another Oak Lane on up the line or down the line and people there busy as they are here. Wherever I land, next time I’ll look close, swear to God. Good-bye, Charlie.”
“To hell with good-bye.”
“All right, then, good night.”
And Hank was gone and Charlie was home and Clara was waiting at the screen door with a glass of ice water.
“Sit out awhile?”
“Like everyone else? Why not?”
They sat in the dark on the porch in the chain-hung wooden swing and watched the highway flush and drain, flush and drain with arrivals of headlight and departures of angry red fire like the coals from an immense brazier scattered to the fields.
Charlie drank the water slowly and. drinking, thought: In the old days you couldn’t see the roads die. You felt them gradually fade, yes, lying in bed nights, maybe your mind got hold of some hint, some nudge or commotion that warned you it was sinking away. But it took years and years for any one road to give up its dusty ghost and another to stir alive. That’s how things were, slow arriving and slow passing away. That’s how things had always been.
But no more. Now, in a matter of hours.
He paused.
He touched in upon himself to find a new thing.
“Good,” said his wife.
They rocked awhile, two halves of a similar content.
“My God, I was stirred up there for awhile.”
“I remember,” she said.
“But now I figure, well…” he drifted his voice, mostly to himself. “Millions of cars come through every year. Like it or not, the road’s just not big enough, we’re holding up the world, that old road there and this old town. The world says it’s got to move. So now, on that new road, not one but two million will pass just a shotgun blast away, going where they got to go to get things done they say are important, doesn’t matter if they’re important or not, folks think they are, and thinking makes the game. If we’d really seen it coming, thought in on it from every side, we’d have taken a steam-driven sledge and just mashed the town flat and said. ‘Drive through!’ instead of making them lay the damn road over in that next clover patch. This way, the town dies hard, strangled on a piece of butcher string instead of being dropped off a cliff. Well, well.” He lit his pipe and blew great clouds of smoke in which to poke for past mistakes and present revelations. “Us being human, I guess we couldn’t have done but as we did…”
They heard the drugstore clock strike eleven and the Oddfellows Hall clock chime eleven thirty, and at twelve they lay in bed in the dark, each with a ceilingful of thoughts above them.
“Graduation.”
“What?”
“Frank the barber said it and had it right. This whole week feels like the last days of school, years ago. I remember how I felt, how I was afraid, ready to cry, and how I promised myself to live every last moment right up to the time the diploma was in my hand, for God only knew what tomorrow might bring. Unemployment. Depression. War. And then the day arrived, tomorrow did get around to finally coming, and I found myself still alive, by God, and I was still all in one piece and things were starting over, more of the same, and hell, everything turned out okay. So this is another graduation all right. Frank said, and I’m the last to doubt.”
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