whatever it was that his department had to do with, though there must have been more to it than that. Walt wrote back:
Dear Sir(s):
Drop dead,
regretfully,
walter Sledge
When Will became so old as to begin worrying about reaching thirty he was different than before. He never laughed. His involvements became more elaborate and frequent; his attitude was no longer youthful: he looked tired and was taking some kind of a drug. He rarely looked at you in the eyes, and when he did you were forced to look away. Whenever he talked to one of us he seemed like he was trying to explain something that he didn’t know anything about. The telephone rang all hours of the day and he was caught up in trying to regulate his doings so that he was leaving out the back door as a young (they were all young, then), frightened girl diffidently stepped up on the front steps to knock on the door.
“Is Will here?” asked a tiny voice.
“I’m sorry, but he’s not here,” said Paul. “Can I take a message?”
“He’s not here?” she asked again.
“No. I’m sorry. Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee? Pretty cold out there.”
“Oh . . . no . . . no . . .” (They never came in if Will wasn’t home.) “. . . If he comes back . . . do you know where he went?”
“ Well, no. He’s kind of hard to keep track of,” and Paul laughed. He was a horrible actor.
“Tell him Marsha was here . . . ,” she said, looking around Paul into the kitchen, hoping to see Will — hoping that Paul had been lying.
“Sure . . . Okay. I’ll tell him Marsha was here. Do you want him to call you?”
“No . . . I mean I want to see him — but to call me if he can’t come. But I want to see him.”
“Sure. Okay. I’ll tell him.” And she stayed standing on the steps.
“Sure you don’t want to come in?” asked Paul.
“No . . . I’m going. Tell Will that Marsha was here.” And she’d go away, walking out through the junkyard that was our front yard.
An hour later the phone would ring and Nellie, thinking of Paul, would answer it. “Hello.”
“Is Will there?” a voice too demanding to be real would ask.
“No. He’s not here right now.”
“Who’s this?”
“Nellie.”
“Nellie who?”
“Nellie Sledge, his sister.”
“Oh.”
“Can I take a message?”
“Yes. Tell him Meg called and wants to see him.”
“All right.”
“Tell him to come over tonight if he can.”
“All right.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“No . . . sorry.”
“Well, tell him Meg called.”
“All right.”
“Uh . . . do you know me . . . I mean has he mentioned me, or that I might call?”
“Well, he was in such a hurry that . . .”
“Tell him I called, will you?”
“Yes.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
During these years Father was leaving early and staying late at the depot, working even on weekends, especially. When Will came home (usually with a nervous girl in modern clean clothes whose eyes you could never see clearly because she never took them away from Will), he’d shrug his shoulders and go into his bedroom.
One morning three cars drove into the front yard. Walt and Paul and Nellie and I could hear someone shouting: “Will . . . Will Sledge . . . Will Sledge,” who as usual wasn’t at home.
“Son-of-a-bitches,” said Walt. Paul and I went outside. Walt came behind us and Nellie stood looking from the doorway out at Mr. Edgeway standing in the snow still shouting, “Will Sledge . . .” at the top of his lungs. The sheriff and a couple of city policemen were with him, along with a carload of neighborly reinforcements, because of Walt. Standing near the back fender of Edgeway’s car was a young girl staring down at her feet that were shuffling along in the snow partially hidden from her eyes by a pregnancy. “Will Sledge . . . ,” Edgeway kept yelling, and before he decided to address Paul, Paul had noticed the girl. Paul’s expression passed through two extremes and finally came to rest in an attitude of indifference before he burst into laughter, gradually. “Where’s Will?” yelled Edgeway, but Paul was laughing louder then and that laughter was ringing off the windshields and banging off the car doors in the front yard. And Paul kept laughing; I stood looking at him, not believing . . . and he kept laughing; even after Edgeway’s face burned us all as witches and screamed, “Damn you . . . Damn you, Sledges,” turned around, jerked his thumb toward the car and the girl got into the back seat still looking down at her feet, got in his car, and drove out of the yard, leaving his five neighbors and the two policemen and the sheriff to look at each other and listen to Paul’s laughter and get in their cars and drive down the road. I couldn’t understand that then — not from Paul — Will maybe, or Walt, but not Paul.
But during those chaotic times a plan was percolating within Will’s mind, and as its design trickled down onto the surface of his originally instant consciousness Will took on a larger dimension, his life expanded into an area so immense that the colors of his most bizarre dreams could not fill it. And because he was unable to see to the extremities of his plan it became his dictator, holding the boundaries of him well within it, and the longer he kept his plan hidden in the conceptual stage (it was a long time) the more it twisted and coiled those boundaries closer to him, like constricting the mainspring of a stopwatch. This plan, he once told me, would save him and be like a personal monument. I had never heard Will talk like that before, was a little glad I hadn’t, and because I was accustomed to not taking Will seriously (perhaps I should say this was a “practice” of mine) I continued along in my fool’s paradise, not believing he was capable of more than the at best erratic moments of his life.
Will saw a woman stepping off a bus downtown and followed her to a department store where she bought a half-dozen silver plastic buttons. He thought her to be about twenty-seven, her body unusually firm and voice contemplative and rich. At a shoe repair shop she picked up a pair of fixed shoes, and waited for the 4:15 Middletown bus. Passing quickly by her and capturing a seat two sections back, Will noticed that her hair, which was held around close to her head with a white band, was healthy, showing no signs of color manipulations or extensive shaping processes. He got off the bus and slipped quietly into a small grocery store where he watched her enter a stone house, number 413 High Street, across from
